microsoft word jarrett.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): jarrett, k. (2014, october 22-24). “my marxist feminist dialectic brings all the boys to the yard”: what marxist feminist theory can tell us about consumer labour in digital media. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “my marxist feminist dialectic brings all the boys to the yard”: what marxist feminist theory can tell us about consumer labour in digital media kylie jarrett national university of ireland maynooth the activities of consumers in digital media environments have increasingly been conceptualised as labour. consumers are understood to provide unpaid labour by contributing content to websites in the form of game play, videos, memes, status updates and the affective investment that renders commercial digital media pleasurable and meaningful. consumer activity also forms the data that is captured by the economic systems of such sites, with clickstream data and taste information being onsold to advertisers and marketing companies. beginning with the important work of tiziana terranova (2000) and through the rigorous theorisations of christian fuchs (2008: 2009; see also cohen 2008: scholz (ed.) 2013; kücklich 2005), it has also become common to view this labour as exploited. this is the case in the practical sense because such work is not (typically) financially compensated, despite its contribution to the generation of surplus value for the site’s parent company. it is also exploitative in terms of the formal theoretical understandings of marxism in which the use-values that are inherent to user activities are transformed into a commodified object with an exchangevalue over which the user has no control. however, this argument has not gone unchallenged. theorists such as mark andrejevic (2009), david hesmondhalgh (2010) and john banks and sal humphreys (2008) question the designation of such exchanges as exploitative. the conditions and experiences associated with alienated industrialised labour do not directly correspond with the experiences of consumers in digital media contexts. the voluntary nature of these exchanges, particularly when compared to (compulsory) waged labour, raises questions about this application of marxist thought. users maintain a greater sense of agency and retain meaning and affective intensity in their labour for digital media companies than has typically been attributed to industrialised workers. to reduce these exchanges to merely conditions of exploitation is to not fully appreciate the complexity of the social relations mediated by the digital. the question then emerges of how to generate an economic model of these exchanges that can incorporate the agency and affect of users (see lamla 2007). i will argue in this theoretical paper that marxist feminist theory, particularly that used to explain the economic role of domestic labour, offers a way out of this impasse. i will suggest that the neglect of these approaches has been an effect of a reliance on the work of italian autonomist marxists, but in particular michael hardt and antonio negri (2000: 2009) in which the contributions of feminist scholars are name-checked but not fully explored. rather, there has been an assumption that the types of activities now exploited in digital media – affective, cognitive or immaterial labour – have only recently become essential to the circuits of production and thus to capitalist economics. contrarily, feminists such as mariarosa dalla costa and selma james (1972), silvia federici (2004) and importantly leopoldina fortunati (1995: 2007) assert that such work has always made an essential contribution to capitalist economics in the form of the domestic labour that has reproduced the labouring body and the labouring subject. returning the models feminists have used for understanding domestic and affective labour offer useful tools to the analysis of digital media and allow for different insights into the nature of consumer exploitation. this paper is thus concerned with exploring the impact of conceptualising this labour through the prism offered by feminist marxist thought. it will criticise the current framing of the social factory as a novel set of conditions, and outline the economic model of domestic labour defined by fortunati in the arcane of reproduction (1995). this paper will argue that a renewed emphasis on the particularity of domestic labour is essential to a more complete understanding of how consumer labour is implicated in capitalism. this model allows for the persistence of use-values in the exploitative circuits of capital and in doing so, brings attention to the ways in which this labour is reproductive of social logics, including capitalist modes of being. the paper will focus throughout on meme sharing, such as the meme from which this paper draws its title, to provide examples of what is illuminated when marxist feminist theory is allowed to properly contribute to our understandings of consumer labour in digital media. in doing so it will show precisely what can be brought to the yard by a marxist feminist dialectic. references andrejevic, mark. 2009. “exploiting youtube: contradictions of user-generated labor.” in the youtube reader, edited by pelle snickars and patrick vonderau, 406-423. stockholm: national library of sweden. banks, john and sal humphreys. 2008. “the labor of user co-creators: emergent social network markets.” convergence 14 (4): 401-418. cohen, nicole s. 2008. “the valorization of surveillance: towards a political economy of facebook.” democratic communiqué 22 (1): 5-22. dalla costa, mariarosa and selma james. 1972. the power of women and the subversion of the community. london: falling wall press. federici, silvia. 2004. caliban and the witch: women, the body and primitive accumulation. new york: autonomedia. fortunati, leopoldina. 1995. the arcane of reproduction: housework, prostitution, labour and capital. translated by hilary creek. new york: autonomedia. fortunati, leopoldina. 2007. “immaterial labor and its machinization.” ephemera 7 (1):139-157. hardt, michael and antonio negri. 2000. empire. cambridge, mass: harvard university press. hardt, michael and antonio negri. 2009. commonwealth. cambridge, mass: harvard university press. hesmondhalgh, david. 2010. “user-generated content, free labour and the cultural industries.” ephemera 10 (3/4):267-84. kücklich, julian. 2005. “precarious playbour: modders and the digital game industry.” fibreculture 5. accessed march 2, 2012. http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/kucklich_print.html. lamla, jörn. 2007. “building a market-community: paradoxes of culturalization and merchandization in the internet.” paper presented at die institutionelle einbettung von märkten, max planck institute for the study of societies, cologne, february. accessed june 19, 2011. http://www.mpifg.de/maerkte-0702/papers/lamla_maerkte2007.pdf. scholz, trebor (ed). 2013. digital labor: the internet as playground and factory. new york: routledge terranova, tiziana. 2000. “free labor: producing culture for the digital economy.” social text 18 (2): 33-58. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16 th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 everyday exclusion from the information society: digital inequalities, identity work, and emotion management laura robinson santa clara university this research examines everyday digital exclusion as it is experienced by socio-economically disadvantaged youth in an agricultural community in california. based on in-depth interviews, the research sheds light on digital inequality as a daily phenomenon necessitating emotion management and identity work. the research makes a distinct contribution to the literature on sociologies of everyday life by forging links between the emergent field of digital inequality with the established literatures in symbolic interactionism and the related body of work on emotion work. regarding symbolic interactionism, the findings illuminate the daily hurdles disadvantaged youths experience in their digital engagements. here the analysis takes a symbolic interactionist approach to explore digitally disadvantaged youths’ identity work strategies. the analysis reveals how digitally disadvantaged youths occupy a liminal digital zone necessitating special kinds of identity performances unnecessary for their digitally advantaged peers (goffman, 1959). concerning emotion management, the research draws its inspiration from hochschild’s concept of emotion management (1979). attention is paid to emotional costs and emotion labour demanded by identity performances. the data reveal the quotidian costs of interactional strategies—particularly those necessary for digitally disadvantaged youths to maintain their digital engagements while struggling for access to basic resources. the article closes with an examination of the implications of doing daily emotion management and identity work. here the discussion illuminates the social isolation engendered by mundane digital inequalities. in making these linkages, the research reveals the pernicious nature of digital inequality as a form of quotidian social exclusion—a form of social division that is deeply felt by those experiencing it and yet remains largely invisible to the outside world. the study closes with a call for additional research on the sociology of everyday life that deepens our understanding of this understudied form of inequality. data and methods drawn from a long-term, multi-method study from 2006 to 2013, the data in this article comes from one-on-one and small group interviews. grounded in two years of ethnographic fieldwork and informal field interviews, the in-depth interview data comes from 503 respondents at two high schools: rancho benito high and glen prep. the interviews were conducted during the normal school day on the school grounds. at suggested citation (apa): robinson, l. (2015, october 21-24) everyday exclusion from the information society: digital inequalities, identity work, and emotion management. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. rancho benito high, interviews were conducted with partner educators in the english department because all students must take four years of english courses. all students enrolled in regular, college-prep, honours, and ap courses were invited to take part in the study. there was no selection process including or excluding some students from taking part in the interviews. at glen prep, interviews were conducted with a sample of students from regular, college-prep, honours, and ap courses. this comparative strategy ensures that variation is not due to the school setting. overview of analysis understanding the daily hurdles disadvantaged youths experience in their digital engagements is key to understanding their identity work. for this reason, the analysis begins with a brief introduction to each group along with schedules of their daily rounds, connectivity opportunities, and opportunity costs. the examination then illuminates connections between access to resources and interactional strategies, as well as emotion management. the analysis closes with a comparison of the three groups across these areas. digital inequality as everyday exclusion as the analysis shows, youths in rancho benito live both geographically and experientially far from the los angeles and san francisco metropolitan areas. a far cry from silicon valley and hollywood, this slice of small-town america is primarily populated by working people living in hard times. while their personal circumstances do vary, two thirds of the young adults in the study feel the economic hard times that have gripped the community since the 2008 economic meltdown. unpacking their mundane tasks and daily rounds shows how everyday activities may have radically different meanings and consequences for those with unequal access to resources. the examination shows how daily digital engagements have radically different meanings for youths with different normative resources. as we have seen, connectivity costs demand radically different identity work and emotion management across the three groups. as the comparison of the exemplars shows, not all youths are highly connected like carmen and andy. vanessa and ricardo, and to a greater degree marta and ricky, stand in sharp contrast to the popular media narratives of digital natives and tech savvy youth, plugged into the network 24/7. indeed, young people like marta and ricky are almost digitally excluded given their lack of any connectivity to the internet at home and the opportunity costs they must pay to procure access elsewhere. while nominally connected, they shoulder heavy burdens to obtain minimal access to the internet. their experiences are significant because they show that normative access to resources has strong implications for identity work and emotion management—two understudied by-products of socio-economic inequalities. more work is needed to uncover the costs paid by digitally disadvantaged individuals, particularly as they relate to identity construction. according to harris (2000), si gives us the theoretical tools to study equality and inequality as they are experienced by people living their everyday lives. as this article has shown, everyday social exclusion is most fully understood from the viewpoint of those who experience it. to better contribute to the literature on sociology of everyday life in the digital age, we must give voice to their struggles. to illuminate their quotidian struggles, we must reveal the meanings that digital engagements have for different social actors. in so doing our work can open a window onto the meanings mundane digital activities have for those with and without sufficient resources. for all of these reasons, more scholarship on digital inequality as sociology of everyday life is needed to understand the complex interactional processes at play in everyday digital communication. when studies of digital identity work target their attention on digitally advantaged segments of the population, it obscures the pernicious effects of digital inequality. while the concepts of identity work and emotion management can be applied to much of the social world, they have particular power to uncover the everyday indignities and difficulties faced by the digitally disadvantaged. by taking the perspective of the digitally disadvantaged, we are forced re-examine our assumptions about the role of digital technologies in our daily rounds, as well as how the social world works for those grappling with this emergent form of inequality. hearing respondents’ voices allows us to momentarily silence our privileged conceptions of autonomy and personal agenda setting in the digital age. instead we enter an everyday world in which autonomy is replaced by the need to constantly modify and adjust, as well as to expend emotional energy on impression management to keep up with the digitally advantaged. uncovering members’ meanings replaces the assumption of personal power with insight into the ways the digitally disadvantaged are saddled with the burden of constant dependence on the kindness of strangers. references goffman, e (1959) the presentation of self in everyday life new york: anchor books. harris s (2000) the social construction of equality in everyday life. human studies 23(4):371-393. hochschild, a r (1979) emotion work, feeling rules, and social structure.american journal of sociology 85(3): 551-575. microsoft word karnowski-keiling-leiner.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): lastname, firstinitial. (2014, october 22-24). paper title. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. news diffusion across social media platforms veronika karnowski ludwig-maximilians-university till keyling ludwig-maximilians-university dominik leiner ludwig-maximilians-university in 2013 73% of us online adults used at least one social networking site, most of them facebook (duggan & smith, 2013). scholarly research in communication so far concentrated on four topics brought about by this trend: impression management and friendship performance, network and network structures, bridging online and offline networks, and privacy (zhang & leung, 2014). we want to point scholarly interest to another topic: the mechanics of dissemination of news content via social media. in 2013 30% of us adults actually got news content from facebook (mitchell, holcomb, & page, 2013); a trend still strongly correlated to certain sociodemographic characteristics of users, but speculated to be of ever growing importance (glynn, huge, & hoffman, 2012). as the realm of social media consists of multiple social networking sites, with an increasing number of users using more than one platform (duggan & smith, 2013), studying this phenomenon of news content diffusion across social media – also termed as cross pollination (jain, rodrigues, magno, kumaraguru, & almeida, 2011) – calls for an approach crossing the boundaries of single social networking sites. in a first step to do so, we therefore concentrate on the interrelations of diffusion patterns of online news content across two social media platforms, facebook and twitter: what is the interplay of sharing patterns of online news content across facebook and twitter: . 1) in general? . 2) with regard to characteristics of the news content? to answer these questions, we developed a large-scale driven methodical framework which matches standardized information on news articles with the available indicators of interest on facebook and twitter. virtually all online media enable access to their recently published articles and their uniform resource locator (url) through a rich site summary (rss) feed. these live news tickers are available specific to categories, such as politics or sports reporting, and thus allow for categorization of the articles, which serves as a simple indicator for the characteristics of the news content. we automatically read and sort these rss feed in 10-minute intervals, and save the articles’ url, categories, as well as the time of publication on the news site in a database. real-time data provided by the api1 of facebook and twitter further provide us with insight into different communicative behavior with respect to news articles: in 10minute intervals, the cumulative total number of facebook shares and twitter tweets for each article are measured and stored. this process is completed after five days (measured from the first mention of an article in the rss feed). we noted in an earlier study (keyling, karnowski, & leiner, 2013) that there is no appreciable accrual in the number of facebook shares and twitter tweets after a five-day period. this methodology allows us to track all articles that appear in an online news outlet, and study their diffusion on facebook and twitter over time. our analysis covers the period from september 10, 2012 to november 1, 2012, based on the following news outlets: spiegel online, bild online, süddeutsche zeitung (sz), new york times, cnn, and fox news. these are the online news sites with the highest coverage in both germany and the united states (olmstead, mitchell, & rosenstiel, 09.05.2011; agof, 10/2012). altogether, 39,386 articles (for which we were able to measure the above-mentioned interest indicators) were published on the news sites during this time period. we analyzed news event diffusion using two parameters: to assess the absolute extent of diffusion, we consider the total number of facebook shares and twitter tweets at the end of our automated observation, i.e. after five days. to assess the rate of diffusion, a second parameter is calculated for each article for both platforms, which quantifies the time span after which an article has reached 50% of its total recommendations. hence, the faster an article reaches this 50%-mark, the faster the overall diffusion takes place. we then categorized each article based on these two parameters, both based on twitter tweets and facebook shares (see table 1), leading to a classification for each article for both twitter and facebook (see table 2). comparing the classification of diffusion on twitter and facebook on the individual level of the single news article (based on a chi2-test), we see some interesting patterns: 1) significantly more often than predicted by chance articles are classified in the same category both regarding twitter tweets and facebook shares, thus demonstrating the strong interconnections of social networking sites within the broader realm of social media. 2) another interesting and significant overlap occurs between slow and low diffusing articles on twitter and slow and wide diffusion on facebook, maybe due to the overall higher reach of facebook. 3) on the other hand side there is a significant set of articles fast and widely diffused on twitter but fast and only low diffused on facebook. taken together with the fact the diffusion on twitter generally runs ahead of diffusion on facebook (authors, 2013), these articles hint to the instances where crosspollination actually does not take place. this first glimpse at the results of our study shows, that relating diffusion patterns across two social media platforms at the individual level of single news articles can give some interesting first insights into the process of cross pollination. in our presentation we will discuss these findings in more detail, also regarding further characteristics of the news content, and map out paths for future research. references agof. (2012). internet facts 2012-10. retrieved from http://agof.de/studienarchiv 2012.1090.de.html keyling, t., karnowski, v., & leiner, d. (2013). nachrichtendiffusion in der virtuellen mediapolis sozialer netzwerke: wie sich nachrichtenartikel über facebook, twitter und google+ verbreiten. in b. pfetsch, j. greyer, & j. trebbe (eds.), mediapolis – kommunikation zwischen boulevard und parlament. strukturen, entwicklungen und probleme von politischer und zivilgesellschaftlicher öffentlichkeit (pp. 209-227). konstanz: uvk. duggan, m. & smith, a. (2013). social media update 2013: 42% of online adults use multiple social networking sites, but facebook remains the platform of choice. retrieved from http://pewinternet.org/reports/2013/social-media-update.aspx glynn, c. j., huge, m. e., & hoffman, l. h. (2012). all the news that’s fit to post: a profile of news use on social networking sites. computers in human behavior, 28(1), 113–119. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2011.08.017 jain, p., rodrigues, t., magno, g., kumaraguru, p., & almeida, v. (2011). crosspollination of information in online social media: a case study on popular social networks. proceedings of socialcom/passat. 2011, 477–482. doi:10.1109/passat/socialcom.2011.182 mitchell, a., holcomb, j., & page, d. (2013). news use across social media platforms. retrieved from http://www.journalism.org/files/2013/11/news-use-across-social-mediaplatforms1.pdf olmstead, k., mitchell, a., & rosenstiel, t. (2011). navigating news online: where people go, how they get there and what lures them away. retrieved from http://www.journalism.org/analysis_report/navigating_news_online zhang, y., & leung, l. (2014). a review of social networking service (sns) research in communication journals from 2006 to 2011. new media & society (online first). doi:10.1177/1461444813520477 selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 from toy and tool to partner and person: phenomenal convergence/divergence among game avatar metaphors jaime banks west virginia university nicholas david bowman west virginia university an avatar is “an interactive, social representation of a user” (meadows, 2008, p. 23) in a digital environment. although avatars broadly include textual screen names or social network profiles, we specifically discuss here the twoor three-dimensional graphic bodies representing players in online games. these bodies are at least partially controlled by players as they engage a game – in movement, gesturing, communicating, and acting in/on the world – and these interactions constitute a multimodal gaming literacy that is central to play (gee, 2004). in scholarly literature, avatars are characterized in myriad ways, often through metaphors that encapsulate the characteristics, functions, and player perceptions of avatars. from one perspective, for example, avatars are costumes that players wear to assume new identities as they play a game (merola & peña, 2010). from another, avatars are bundles of resources (castronova, 2005) leveraged to achieve playeror game-defined goals. despite their utility in describing the nuances of player-avatar relations, a proliferation of metaphors is problematic because it works against situating new knowledge within existing theoretical frameworks, resulting in cumulative and static developments rather than evolving understandings of avatar engagement and effects. many of these framings also present unaddressed confounds in that many metaphors are analytical artifacts – constructions of researchers as they work to explain findings – rather than phenomenologically valid representations of player experience. emerging perspectives on player-avatar relations, however, suggest that avatar metaphors may be integrated into a comprehensive framework to foster synthesis of avatar characterizations (authors, 2014). in particular, the notion of player-avatar sociality (authors, 2015a) suggests that players variably relate to their avatars along a continuum, from a) non-social relations (avatars are mere objects) to b) parasocial relationships (avatars are player extensions; see authors, 2008), to c) fully social suggested citation (apa): banks, j., & bowman, n. (2015, october 21-24) from toy and tool to partner and person: phenomenal convergence/divergence among game avatar metaphors. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http:// spir.aoir.org. relationships (avatars are autonomous partners in play). the notion of sociality – the degree to which players relate to avatars as they would relate to other people – ostensibly subsumes a range of more discrete avatar metaphors. as such, we ask: rq1: can avatar metaphors be meaningfully situated within the sociality continuum? and, if so: rq2: can avatar metaphors be collapsed into a parsimonious model for metaphorically characterizing player-avatar sociality? method and measures an international sample of massively multiplayer online game (mmo) players recruited via mmo-related online forums (n = 501, 31.5% female, average age of 30.26 years, ranging from 18 to 69) was asked to complete an online survey with a $25 raffle compensation to a chosen games retailer. the survey asked participants to think about and list their favorite mmo (39 total games named), think about their favorite avatar in that mmo, and respond to a one-item measure of player-avatar sociality: “i connect with that avatar as i connect with other humans.” (m = 3.81, sd = 2.89; cf. authors, 2015b.) the survey then presented 26 avatar metaphors culled from a review of literature addressing players’ perception of and engagement with digital game avatars (see appendix a), and players were asked to rate (on seven-point likert scales) the degree to which each metaphor reflected how they see their avatars. these questions were part of a larger survey project on player-avatar relationships. results addressing rq1, the correlations (bonferroni-corrected to p < .002 significance threshold) between each of the 26 individual “avatar as” metaphors (see table 1) and the single-item “human-like connectedness” item were plotted in order of their correlation size and direction (see figure 1). metaphors representative of avatar-as-object orientations (cf. authors, 2014a,b) clustered to the bottom-left of the continuum, suggesting a strong negative association. conversely, metaphors related prima facie to more representative or avatar-as-“me” orientations (ibid.) clustered strongly at the top-left of the continuum, and metaphors related to an avatar-as-social other (ibid.) clustered at the highest point of the top-left corner both suggesting strong positive associations between the listed metaphors and perceptions of an increasingly strong human-like connectedness with one’s favorite avatar. six metaphors did not significantly correlate with human-like connectedness; notably, it is not that these are not meaningful, simply that they are not associated with player-avatar sociality. seeking a parsimonious model of these metaphors (rq2), exploratory factor analysis (varimax rotation, .600 over/.400 cross factor loading threshold), a two-factor solution (with a weak third-factor) was found that represented two factors, or “meta-metaphors:” “avatar as object” (bolded in red, see figure 1) and “avatar as me” (bolded in blue, see figure 2). this solution converged in three rotations, and accounted for 63% of variance in perceptions of the player-avatar relationship1. notably, metaphors not retained in our efa are not unrelated to “human-like connectedness” but, rather, simply unrelated to other metaphors. in fact, the two strongest correlation with connectedness were with the metaphors “avatar as partner” (r = .588, p < .001) and “avatar as person (r = .645, p < .001) conceptually similar to the avatar-as-other” orientation (ibid.). figure 1. pearson correlation between avatar metaphors and sociality (human-like connectedness) scores, plotted in order of correlation size and vector. discussion and conclusion data suggest that avatar metaphors can be meaningfully situated within a continuum of player-avatar sociality (rq1), and some metaphors may be collapsed into phenomenologically convergent meta-metaphors (rq2). these findings support the interpretation and synthesis of existing scholarship within meta-metaphors (that may have been held as theoretically distinct) and across the sociality spectrum to develop a clearer picture of the player-avatar relation as a function of sociality. acknowledging a limitation of the present analysis – that the metaphor-sociality association was 1 notably, “object” and “me” orientations accounted for nearly 75% of nearly 1000 mmo players in past work (authors, 2014a, 2014b, 2015b). evaluated by a single-item measure – future research should examine the extent to which avatar characterizations may align with other relevant measures of player-avatar interactions (e.g., emotional attachment, anthropomorphism, suspension of disbelief, identification, sense of control). perhaps most importantly, we argue that scholars should account for the tensions between interpreted variations among player-avatar relations and the potential for these variations to be phenomenologically equivalent. although we fully recognize the utility of using metaphors to explain in situ observations, the proliferation of “one-off” metaphors might serve to fracture rather than synthesize our holistic understanding of how human players variably take up and engage avatars. similarly, such a synthesis allows scholars to more accurately consider at least one underlying phenomenon central to these relationships: the degree to which a player experiences a social connection with an avatar. references [authors, 2008, 2014a, 2014b, 2015a, 2015b]2 castronova, e. (2005). synthetic worlds: the business and culture of online games. chicago: university of chicago press. gee, j. p. (2004). what video games have to teach us about literacy and learning. new york: palgrave macmillan. meadows, m. s. (2008). i, avatar: the culture and consequences of having a second life. berkeley, ca: new riders. merola, n. a., & peña, j. (2010). the effects of avatar appearance in virtual worlds. journal of virtual worlds research, 2(5). retrieved from http://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/article/viewfile/843/706 2 references have been removed for blind review; these articles are published in peer-reviewed communication or new media journals. appendix a: metaphors common to the study of player-avatar relations, as measured in the current analysis, ranked-ordered by average score. note: complete references are omitted for space considerations, but are available at [url removed for blind review]. rbh aoir2016-submission_database.pdf selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 brøvig-hanssen, r. (2016, october 5-8). mashup aesthetics and authorship. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. musical recycling: mashup aesthetics and authorship ragnhild brøvig-hanssen university of oslo it is now ten years since henry jenkins (2006) wrote about an emergent “participatory culture,” alluding to a new consumer generation that embraces its unprecedented technological power to contribute to culture by rewriting and reshaping its media environment. this trend has continued to blossom, and remixed content is now regularly uploaded on the user-generated platforms of the internet, to be in turn consumed by multitudes. user-submitted content encompasses innovative art forms and fresh entertainment media, and it functions as social or cultural commentary. as such, these remixes represent a novel mode of communication and a new means for contributing to the public sphere (burgess and green 2013, habermas 1989). today, however, this participatory culture is being threatened. while the internet was initially perceived as impossible to monitor by the copyright industry—thus becoming a sort of paradise for remix artists—an increasing number of online service providers are implementing algorithmic filtering systems intended to block copyright-infringing content. while these systems obviously produce some constructive outcomes, they are also highly problematic, because they can undermine or eliminate harmless and culturally valuable content that in fact can be legally defended (see, for example, zimmerman 2014 and meyers 2009). as we trend toward greater censorship of user-generated online platforms, it is critically important to ask: what is the cultural value of the user-generated content that is blocked, and can a significant portion of this content be legally defended? we must, in short, question whether the consequences of emergent copyright policies regarding user-generated distribution platforms preserve or damage and deter that which copyright was in fact designed to promote: creative and culturally valuable art expressions. this paper will focus on one particularly vibrant manifestation of what aram sinnreich (2010) has called “configurable culture”: the music that goes by the umbrella term “mashup.” while mashup music continues to increase in relative ubiquity and variety, its practice is generally characterized by the extensive use of samples from popular recordings, according to the principle that those samples reveal themselves as samples to the informed listener. despite their mass popularity, mashups are often blocked by youtube’s algorithmic system because of their extensive use of unauthorized and restrictively manipulated samples. this is unfortunate, because mashup producers depend on user-generated sharing sites such as youtube. mashup music is also banned from the commercial marketplace due to its much-disputed legal status, though there have been, to date, no verdicts against mashup music in court. in fact, the assumption that mashups, or similar artistic remixes, are illegal has been confronted by scholars from various fields of research (see, for example, aufderheide and jaszi 2011, and mcleod and dicola 2011). when one considers whether or not an act of artistic appropriation is copyright infringement, two principal issues arise. one is the degree to which the derivative work is original or transformative, which involves, in turn, whether it is different from the original copyright-protected material that it samples or from which it derives. the other is whether the excerpt taken from the copyrighted material was appropriate in kind and amount (see, for example, aufderheide 2015 and lessig 2008). what transformative use means and what amount is appropriate can vary, of course, from genre to genre and case to case. in this paper i will, through analyses of two so-called “a+b mashups,” argue that mashups are usually highly transformative, textually and (not least) contextually. moreover, i will argue that several mashups can be identified as parodies and sociocritical commentary—categories that are protected by law in several countries. mashups often mediate sociocultural meaning by deconstructing and reconstructing their content into a self-reflexive critical commentary. for example, mashups often consist of musical sources that are likely to be experienced as incongruous with one another, even as they introduce the possibility of a musical dialogue between them that associates them despite their differences. such musical amalgams, which are at once incongruous and dialogic, often function as a dramatization or subversion of particular situations, power structures, or stereotypical and simplistic understandings related to identity, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or musical genre, among other things. accordingly, analyzing mashup music entails a close examination of not only the music itself but also the many social and culture-specific connotations within which each of the mashed sources is embedded. the motivation behind a mashup can also be simply to entertain, but even then, the humor or amusement is often provoked through an experience of social categories being subverted (see, for example, mcgranahan 2010). as such, the mashups themselves, and listeners’ various responses to a given mashup (humor vs. provocation, for example), can teach us much about the unspoken social values, beliefs, predictions, and stereotypical attitudes or understandings that they tease out. mashup music can, of course, be seen as a new take on previous practices of musical borrowing or adaptation within other art forms. derivative works often share some of the same mechanisms that attract us, such as the pleasure we find in intertextual game play, or our fascination with the simultaneous act of repetition and difference (see, for example, hutcheon 2012 and sanders 2006). yet even as we acknowledge the importance of knowing mashups’ artistic roots, we must also delineate the specificity of the genre. sensitivity toward the temporal, medial and generic specificity of mashup music is crucial to the production of new knowledge that can supplement, complicate, and diversify established theory on intertextual artistic practices. furthermore, such insights can contribute to society’s self-understanding, including its changing conception of music-aesthetic values and authorship. references aufderheide, patricia. 2015. “copyright and fair use in remix: from alarmism to action.” in the routledge companion to remix studies, eds. eduardo navas, owen gallagher, and xtine burrough. new york/oxon: routledge. aufderheide, patricia, and peter jaszi. 2011. reclaiming fair use: how to put balance back in copyright. chicago/london: university of chicago press. burgess, jean, and joshua green. 2009. youtube: online video and participatory culture. cambridge: polity. habermas, jürgen. 1989. the structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. cambridge: polity. hutcheon, linda. 2012. a theory of adaptation. new york: routledge. jenkins, henry. 2006. convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york/london: new york university press. lessig, lawrence. 2008. remix: making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. new york: penguin press. mcgranahan, liam. 2010. “mashnography: creativity, consumption, and copyright in the mashup community.” phd diss., brown university. available at: repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:11071/ [01.02.2016]. mcleod, kembrew, and peter dicola. 2011. creative license: the law and culture of digital sampling. durham, n.c.: duke university press. meyers, brette g. 2009. “filtering systems or fair use? a comparative analysis of proposed regulations for user-generated content.” cardozo arts and entertainment law journal 26: 935–956. sanders, julie. 2006. adaptation and appropriation: the new critical idiom. london/new york: routledge. sinnreich, aram. 2010. mashed up: music, technology, and the rise of configurable culture. amherst: university of massachusetts press. zimmerman, diane l. 2014. “copyright and social media: a tale of legislative abdication.” pace law review 35: 260–284. microsoft word ir16-template-final.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): antonijevic, s. (2015, october 21-24). beyond expectations: imagining digital scholarship in the humanities. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. beyond expectations: imagining digital scholarship in the humanities antonijevic, smiljana penn state university this paper examines the imaginaries within and about digital humanities (dh) as a scholarly field and as an area of practice. the paper draws on an ethnographic study conducted from 2010-2013. through case studies, surveys, interviews, and observations the study explored humanists’ engagement with digital tools and resources, analyzed teams developing digital tools, and examined digital resource use within university departments. the fieldwork was carried out at twenty-three educational, research and funding institutions in the us and europe, and it involved 258 participants including researchers, faculty, students, administrators, librarians, software developers, policy makers, and funders. the term “digital humanities” came to prominence in the early 2000s as an updated designator for the field of humanities computing, but also as a tactical term aimed at positioning dh within institutional, financial, and disciplinary structures of contemporary academia (see: kirschenbaum, 2012). over the past ten years, this term has been increasingly used as an overreaching designator of humanists’ engagement with digital technologies. one root of this generalization was a lethargic response from the broader humanities community to digital scholarship. another root emerged from the efforts of the dh community to establish itself as the leader of digital knowledge production in the humanities. this community aspired to “play an inaugural role” in the humanities’ encounter with digital scholarship, maintaining that it held “the potential to use new technologies to help the humanities communicate with, and adapt to, contemporary society” (see: digital humanities manifesto 2.0). yet, an important element of narratives about the dh spotlights boundaries, mostly charted through negative identification as to what does not constitute dh work. ramsay (2011) posits that scholars’ use of technology that excludes making or building falls outside the dh boundaries. burdick and colleagues (2012) describe even narrower boundaries, excluding “the mere use of digital tools for the purpose of humanistic research and communication” (p. 122). the same approach is evident in fitzpatrick’s (2012) rhetorical question, should the floodgates of the dh be opened so widely as “to include … ‘every medievalist with a website’,” followed by her categorical response: “undoubtedly not” (p. 14). boundary work in dh is particularly relevant today when humanists’ engagement with technologies increasingly becomes the “new normal.” humanities scholarship, even the “mainstream” one, already follows the route of digital scholarship as a condition of contemporary research. a full transition in that direction is both inevitable and necessary. however, the question that needs further discussion is what that “full transition” means, to whom, and what parallel paths it could take. an additional question is whether the dh field represents the best route for that transition, given that it still resides on the margins of humanities scholarship (see: juola, 2008; thaller, 2012). meanwhile, an evolution of humanities scholarship has been slowly unfolding in the background, transforming humanists’ research and teaching practices (see: liu, 2009). it would thus be constructive to move beyond the debate about “digital” versus “mainstream” humanities towards differentiating between digital humanities and digital scholarship in the humanities. my conceptualization of digital scholarship in the humanities draws on jankowski’s (2009) definition of e-research, as well as on wouters and beaulieu’s (2006) argument for conceiving of digital scholarship beyond computation. digital scholarship in the humanities refers here to humanities scholarly activities carried out with the use of digital tools, resources, and methods across the spectrum of computational complexity. regardless of the level of computational complexity, digital scholarship in the humanities prompts changes in the ways humanists’ envision, carry out, communicate, and organize their work and approach their objects of inquiry. instead of provisionary classifications, transformations in the ways of knowing define the boundaries of digital knowledge production in the humanities. disentangling digital humanities from digital scholarship in the humanities is a prologue to rethinking a set of disciplinary, educational, organizational, and funding questions. one of the important aspects of this process is to understand how expectations formulated within the dh might influence digital scholarship in the humanities. expectations have a multifaceted role in the early stages of an academic field, as they help articulate visions, direct strategies, set goals, and form shared values, thus predisciplining the imagination about the field (see: brown et al., 2003; borup et al., 2006). initiatives in the dh field have been part of such elaborate envisioning of digital knowledge production in the humanities. these initiatives were vital for developing digital research infrastructure in the humanities, including tools, methods, corpora, journals, professional associations, centers, and educational initiatives. yet, less favorable effects of this field on humanities digital knowledge production should also be assessed. one risk is that expectations formulated within the dh field monopolize a broader, longterm transition of humanities disciplines towards digital scholarship. furthermore, expectations generated in the early visions of a field, which mokyr (1991) aptly terms hopeful monstrosities, commonly fail to meet their promises, so much so that “disappointment seems to be almost built into the way expectations operate” (brown et al., op.cit.). such disappointments come at a price, namely damage to the credibility of various stakeholders and misallocated resources and investments. the need to regulate the promise/disappointment dynamics thus mandates developing and implementing quality control criteria for digital knowledge production in the humanities. it is essential to encourage a widespread dialog among stakeholders to mitigate potential mistakes and resource misallocations without hindering innovation in scholarly work. the transition of humanities disciplines towards digital scholarship is a complex process that needs to be handled in an equally complex, systematic, and inclusive manner. this necessitates a widespread dialog among the stakeholders embedded into all the phases— from planning to evaluation—of educational, research, and organizational initiatives concerning digital scholarship in the humanities. references borup, m., brown, n., konrad, k., and van lente, h. (2006). “the sociology of expectations in science and technology.” technology analysis & strategic management vol. 18, nos. 3/ 4:285–298. brown, n., rip, a., and van lente, h. (2003). expectations in & about science and technology. a background paper for the ‘expectations’ workshop of 13-14 june 2003. available at: http://www.york.ac.uk/satsu/expectations/utrecht%202003/background%20paper%20v ersion% 2014may03.pdf; accessed october 5, 2014 burdick, a., drucker, j., lunenfeld, p., presner, t., and schnapp. j. (2012). digital_humanities. cambridge, ma: mit press. digital humanities manifesto 2.0. (2009). available at: http://manifesto.humanities.ucla.edu/2009/05/29/the-digital-humanities-manifesto-20/; october 5, 2014 fitzpatrick, k. (2012).”the humanities, done digitally.” in: gold, m.k. (ed.), debates in the digital humanities. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press: 12-15. jankowski, n. (2009). e-research: transformation in scholarly practice. new york, ny: routledge. juola, p. (2008). “killer applications in digital humanities.” literary and linguist computing, vol. 23, no.1: 73-83 5 kirschenbaum, m. (2012). “what is digital humanities and what’s it doing in english departments?” in: gold, m.k. (ed.), debates in the digital humanities. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press: 3-11. liu, a. (2009). “digital humanities and academic change.” english language and notes, vol. 47: 17-35. mokyr, j. “evolutionary biology, technological change and economic history.” bulletin of economic research, 43(2): 127–149. ramsay, s. (2011). who’s in and who’s out. available at: http://stephenramsay.us/text/2011/01/08/whos-in-and-whos-out/; october 5, 2014. thaller, m. (2012). “controversies around the digital humanities: an agenda.” historical social research, vol. 37, no. 3: 7-23 wouters, p. and beaulieu, a. (2006). “imagining e-science beyond computation.” in: hine, c. (ed.), new infrastructure for knowledge production: understanding e-science. london: information science publishing: 48-70 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 microcredentials on the open web alexander halavais arizona state university phoenix, arizona, united states alexander.halavais@asu.edu abstract microcredentials, alternative credentials that are both highly granular and easily shared online, should be collected and observed online to see what they tell us about credibility, experience, and social boundaries. keywords identity; reputation; badges; microcredentials; learning; recruiting beyond canine online identity the online world provides a new context for the presentation of self, and a number of technologies of the social web are built around the process of introducing oneself to others. in fact, the history of the social web might be summarized as a progression of systems of self-presentation: the “home page,” the myspace page, the second life avatar, the twitter blurb, and many stops in-between. these indications may be tacit—a head shot or friends list, for example—or more rarely, explicit, as in the case of klout. particularly for those seeking employment or admission into more formal organizations, there is a need for certifications not just of identity, but of expertise and achievement. the classic example of this is the university diploma or transcript. but while other markers of ability and identity move easily through the social web, the process of obtaining proof of completing a university degree usually involves a mailed, signed, physical document. understanding the shift from implicit trust online to more explicit markers of trust requires a mechanism for monitoring the growth and use of microcredentials. elements of a credential the term “microcredential” is relatively new, and has been mentioned mainly in passing in the literature. khan (2013) provides an indication of how the microcredential might work, as an indication of expertise within a narrow area most closely related to a single course, rather than a full curriculum. others see it as a way of indicating professional certification or licensure, or a more formal version of the less formal “badge” (crotty, 2013). olneck (2012) suggests that with new, less restrictive forms of certification, we might be seeing the first “insurgent credentials,” that are capable of in some sense breaking the traditional institutional hold on knowledge production and recognition. to reach a better understanding of the term, we can examine its constituent pieces, beginning with what constitutes a “credential.” elkordy (2012) suggests that at its most basic, a microcredential provides an indication that someone has met “established performance criteria.” these criteria may be as simple as showing up to a meeting of a local knitting circle, or voicing your undying love of a particular fictional vampire, or they may be as involved as demonstrating the requisite training and experience to effectively perform brain surgery. a credential demonstrates the performance of some normalized task. there may be questions about whether those criteria represent a good demonstration of the stated certificate (consider the controversy over conditions under which the purple heart is awarded to members of the us military), but there is some understanding that the certification is consistent across earners, and that it represents selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 a certain standard. every graduate of stanford university may not have identical skills or knowledge, but they have managed to pass through a set of filters that determine their ability. it is also inherently an assignment of credibility. when stanford university endorses your abilities by granting a degree and diploma, it suggests that they are something of an authority in the area, and that their rubric for granting degrees is held in some esteem. traditionally, this authority has been via institutional credibility, and although there is mixed evidence, certified doctors and teachers tend to perform better in their work. just as other processes have been crowdsourced, there are some experiments with creating processes based on peeror community-endorsement. credential as a microformat the “micro” of microcredentials attempts to address the issues of traditional credentials in two ways. first, by providing a more granular credential, more clearly indicating what the credential indicates. second, by placing the credential in a digital microformat, making it potentially much more easily shared, compared, aggregated, and investigated. at present a university degree conflates at a range of potential skills and abilities. it’s difficult—aside from an indication (usually) that a certain number of hours have been spent attending to studies—to know what graduates of a given university have in common. as noted above, the digital badge is often proffered as a way of bypassing more traditional degrees with a portable certification that demonstrates more discrete knowledge and ability. not only does this provide the person with a higher fidelity record of their expertise, it frees them to pursue a collection of experiences and learning opportunities that has not been sanctioned by an existing institution. microcertifications represent smaller “chunks” of learning and experience, and therefore may provide more clarity of criteria, and be easier to both construct and to earn. in many cases (though there are certainly exceptions) traditional certifications or licenses are difficult to share digitally. they might be something that can be verified via mail, or posted as a state-issued license, but it is often not easy to share or find certifications online. the second application of “micro” is related to a collection of “microformats,” perhaps exemplified by the web syndication standard rss. right now, there is little consistency in the way that certifications are created, shared, or verified, resulting in an unnecessarily idiosyncratic and convoluted process. mozilla’s open badge infrastructure represents a framework for making badges (microcredentials with icons) machine-readable, portable, and verifiable in distributed digital networks. as an added benefit, obi-compliant badges provide pointers to the original work that demonstrates competence. no longer is the institutional endorsement the only source of certification; interested parties can assess the work directly. the use of the term “badges” is used more widely right now, but “microcertification” is more descriptive, and provides a clearer break between this form of certification and a long history of “badges” (halavais, 2011). of course, most microcertifications will include an iconographic indication of completion, as this represents an easily-grokked representation of the certification. but this graphic representation is a useful feature, and not a core element of the microcertification. detecting public use contexts although most microcertifications are likely to be more granular than the traditional university or high school degree, the more important element for identifying the microcertification is the ease of sharing and verifying. by definition, badges that are compliant with the obi are microcertifications. other digital badges, including those offered by foursquare, fitbit, and others also meet this definition, as they can easily be shared outside the platforms on which they were earned, and link back to those platforms for verification. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 given that the presence of these microcertifications on social networking platforms, one way to develop a taxonomy of badges currently in use is to scan major spaces for sharing, looking for public presentation of badges that meet the above criteria. at present, the number of microcertifications is quite small, but by establishing a scanning process, we do not need to rely on issuers of the certifications to determine their use. this also provides us with a structure for tracing the development and dissemination of microcredentials over time. credible users, credible badges by accumulating a history of public use of microcredentials we can begin to untangle the difficult question of what makes a badge credible. traditionally, credentials gain credibility only through institutional endorsement. new forms are beginning to experiment with community endorsement. the degree to which these efforts are successful rests on the success of these microcredentials in allowing individuals to demonstrate experience in one epistemic community can be effectively translated into new contexts. moreover, we are able to begin to map the flow of credibility in an explicit form. acknowledgments this material is based on work supported by bill & melinda gates foundation under prime award no. opp1049826 and the regents of the university of california. any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of bill & melinda gates foundation or the regents of the university of california. references crotty, j. m. (2013, feb. 25). badges lend gravitas to free education revolution. forbes. retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2013/02/25/new-improved-badges-give-credentialmeat-to-mooc-revolution/ elkordy, a. (2012). the future is now: unpacking digital badging and micro-credentialing for k-20 educators. hastac. http://hastac.org/blogs/elkorda/2012/10/24/future-now-unpacking-digital-badging-andmicro-credentialing-k-20-educators halavais, a. m. (2012). a genealogy of badges. information, communication & society, 15(3), 354-373. khan, s. (2013). what college could be like. communications of the acm 56(1), 41-43. doi: 10.1145/2398356.2398370. olneck, m. (2012). insurgent credentials: a challenge to established institutions of higher education. presented at education in a new society: the growing interpenetration of education in modern life, radcliffe institute for advanced study, harvard university, cambridge, massachusetts, april 26-27, 2012. retrieved from: http://hastac.org/documents/insurgent-credentials-challenge-established-institutionshigher-education license this article is ©2013 alexander halavais, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. microsoft word 688-441-1-pb.docx technologizing touch 1 technologizing touch: tactile magic, education, and domestication in apple ipad advertisements jason archer university of illinois at chicago united states jarche2@uic.edu abstract touch may be the most intimate but least understood forms of communication. its primacy made it a third sense behind seeing and hearing. however, as touchscreen technologies permeate the cultural landscape, and tactility enters scholarly discussions, the importance of understanding the relationships between tactility and human-machine communication in everyday life is increasingly felt. this study provides a discourse analysis about the tactility of human-machine communication by using apple ipad advertisements as case studies. the investigation uncovers three dominant discourses that position the ipad as providing a magical tactile experience through intuitive, everyday activities, confined within the critical space of domesticity. keywords touch; tactility; human-machine communication; ipad slide to unlock humans primarily interact with machines through touch. since the advent of stone tools though the mechanical age and even now into the digital era, touch has been our first and most enduring point of contact with machines. with the advent of touchscreen computers like the ipad, our tactile interactions have only solidified the dominance that touch plays in mediating humanmachine communication. the recent wave of touch screens has consequences for how individuals perceive the affordances of other screens, e.g. touching television screens and being frustrated when nothing happens. haptic technologies enable human-to-human social touch and affect over space, but connecting through machines more also means connecting with machines more. effects and affects of these connections should be understood. the study of tactile and human-machine communication is important to the field of communication but also important to fields that rely on understanding communication in making decisions about design, social formations, policy, and so forth. some scholars explore the social significance of human touch (most notably field, 2003; montagu, 1978). others analyze the social significance of touching through machines (paterson, 2005, 2007). research about the social and communicative significance of touching machines lags behind, leaving a critical void. how do humans learn to touch machines? who controls the discourses that influence touching behavior? how are emotional responses elicited through tactile human-machine interaction? how does machine touch compare to human touch in influencing perceptions and development? this study begins to explore some of these questions and provides insights to build upon in future research. affordances the construct of affordances provides a systematic framework to investigate human-machine interaction. although the construct stems from gibson (1979) and is further developed by technologizing touch 2 norman (1990), hutchby (2001) provides a useful summary for the purposes of my study by considering “affordances and the ‘impact’ of technologies on social interaction” (30). the construct suggests that artifacts, in this case, machine technologies, open to multiple uses but limit potential uses. investigating these limitations helps explain some of the potential discourses informing the development and consequences of machine and human tactility. designers, engineers, and craftspeople contribute to rendering the affordances of technologies. they decide where the doorknob goes and how the door opens (norman, 1988). a designer should have a practical knowledge of how humans and machines communicate. individuals attempt to design machines that feel and respond in a way that invites certain types of use. coordinated action results. practitioners in these fields understand the necessity of designing machines that people become attached to and feel comfortable operating. to ensure a sense of feeling-with, marketers will also instruct users on how to touch machines. method i use a discourse analysis informed by foucault (1977) and fairclough (1995, 2003) to analyze several print and video ipad advertisements to determine how represented users touch the devices. discourse investigated encompasses the visual and verbal, tactile expressions ipad advertisements present. i focus on the intersections between the unspoken instruction-touching of the device and the spoken and visualized intuitiveness, “magic,” of it. often competing themes emerge between words and images. questions that motivate the research include: how are users invited to touch the ipad? what kinds of touch are not allowed? what kind of tactile language is introduced? who is allowed to touch the ipad? magic, education, domestication the discourse analysis reveals three clear and interweaving discourses that negotiate tactile human-machine communication with the ipad. the advertisements serve the function of making touch screens a magical apparatus to be used as if like a sorcerer’s wand, even while placing the use in primarily domestic settings and implicitly educating the user how to touch the device. the way these discourses are forged creates the sense of limitless tactile possibility while masking material limitations of the device. the discourse of magic that runs through almost all apple ipad advertisements serves at least two important rhetorical functions. first, it promises the user limitless freedom when using the ipad, while subverting the fact that freedom is bounded by a few inches of screen, tactile responsiveness, availability of applications, bandwidth and battery life. it is a promise the ipad cannot possibly deliver on, but which leaves consumers reaching out to take the magic wand. second, and in concert with the first function, it serves to cleave the materiality of the ipad from the hands of the user. the discourse of magic persuades the consumer to believe in the product and suspend critical and evaluative judgment. why take the ipad apart and look at the components that make the magic happen, there is no point, it is magic. discourses about the intuitiveness of using ipads work in tandem with discourses of magic. playing off the primal nature of touch, the toucher is positioned as already having the knowledge necessary to operate the ipad. we are not taught to touch, we just do, or so goes the idea. the magical ease and intuitive use of the ipad is reinforced and our movements branded by apple while being taught to touch by the advertisements. positioning the audience in the first person is a clever way to make the user feel like they already know how to touch the device. after all, they have seen themselves doing it before. technologizing touch 3 the final discourse takes a domestic turn. domesticity plays a large role in all of the advertisements. domestic discourses create realities about who touches the ipad and where it is touched. they function to make the ipad a type of mobile home – so one always feels at home. agency appears to be granted to the user that can take and touch an ipad anywhere and at any time while connecting to their family, friends, work, and other social spaces. the ipad becomes a personal, mobile space within a series of any other possible spaces, from the undercarriage of a car in a repair shop to a bus in beijing. but instead of freeing the user, the ipad becomes a leash, domesticating the user by tying tactile possibilities and sense of self to the device. an individual can only fix a car by holding the device containing automotive schematics and can only get around town using the map displayed on the device held firmly in hand. discussion apple’s ipad and other touchscreens now dominate the market. companies copied them, using varying types of touchscreen technologies, and apple continues to reinvent its own product line to be increasingly touch oriented. the promise and prevalence of touch screens stems from ideals of intuitiveness, the mystical connection between user and machine produced by touch, and immersiveness of the experience – even allowing users to touch space that is, for all intents and purposes, immaterial. yet, touchscreen devices like the ipad are not particularly rich tactile devices. they avoid having much texture. with eyes closed, there is nothing tactilely interesting about touchscreens. the device loses its magic and becomes functionless, at least in the ways afforded by discourses in the advertisements. the discourses end up imbuing the device with a sense of tactility that it does not physically possess while subverting those it does. references fairclough, n. (1995). media discourse. london: edward arnold. fairclough, n. (2003). analysing discourse: textual analysis for social research. new york: routledge. field, tiffany. (2003). touch. cambridge, mass.: mit press. foucault, m. (1977). discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. new york: pantheon books. gibson, j.j. (1979). the ecological approach to visual perception. boston: houghton mifflin. hutchby, i. (2001). conversation and technology: from the telephone to the internet. malden, ma: wiley-blackwell. montagu, a. (1978). touching: the human significance of the skin (2d ed.). new york: harper & row. paterson, mark. (2005). digital touch. in classen, constance (ed.), the book of touch (pp. 431–436). oxford: berg. paterson, mark. (2007). the senses of touch: haptics, affects and technologies. oxford: berg. norman, donald a. (1990). the design of everyday things. new york: doubleday. spigel, l. (2010). designing the smart house: posthuman domesticity and conspicuous production. in berry, c., kim, s., spigel, l. (eds.), electronic elsewheres (pp.55-92). minneapolis: university of minnesota press. microsoft word hamada-tamura.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): hamada, t. & tamura, t. (2014, october 22-24). conservative challenges to feminism on the japanese internet: an historical analysis. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. conservative challenges to feminism on the japanese internet: an historical analysis tadahisa hamada university of tokyo takanori tamura university of tokyo introduction many people are concerned that japanese society and politics have been drifting to the right in recent years. abe shinzo, current prime minister, is an extraordinary right-wing nationalist. he repeatedly said that the "comfort women" were not coerced into becoming sexual slaves by the former japanese imperial army during wwii. he also broke an unwritten agreement and visited yasukuni shrine on december 26, 2013, where hundreds of war criminals are enshrined. this irritated not only china and korea governments but also the u.s. among the supporting groups for this tendency are rightist groups and internet users with rightist or racist ideas who are also largely anti-feminist. in the early days of the internet in japan, networking among minority groups, such as minority activism, feminism, environmentalism, and peace movements, thrived through online communities that were utilized as electronic conference spaces (hamada & onoda 2003:41-43). however, in recent years we are facing a paradoxical situation in which the internet is being used by backlash groups to attack feminists and minority groups in japan. this paper argues that one of backgrounds of this phenomenon was the marginalization of feminism in japan both on the internet and in real politics. we describe how and why feminism became marginalized based on historical research. through stressing the role that icts have played in this marginalization we show how there are strong connections between the techno and the social in japan. internet usage by women's groups the 4th world conference on women held in beijing in 1995 was an opportunity to realize the possibility of the internet for many women's movement organizations and activists in the world. there were also other kinds of activities by feminist organization on the internet. for example, “fem-net,” a network for women's movements initiated in march 1999, is an electronic forum for those who engaged in the women's movement, and those who are interested in women's issues. it was a combination of mailing lists, apc newsgroups, and web bulletin boards (yamaguchi, t. et al 2012:299, 310). however, the activities slowed down gradually. there were three reasons; (1) internet phobia among some feminists, (2) harsh online attacks by conservative groups, (3) ict illiteracy among many feminist users. around the early 2000s, while local organizations that work internationally continued to use the internet as a useful vehicle for information exchange, feminists who act locally tended to avoid the internet out of fear of online attacks. haneko inoue, a founder member for an online feminist group “woman in kansai,” invited feminism organizations to attend lectures about to use the internet for feminist ends. however, her offers of help were often refused harshly by some feminists who disliked the internet and the ease of access it afforded to anti-feminist material such as pornography (inoue 1999:169). intense criticism of feminism by conservative groups also escalated online in the first half of the 2000s. activities by scholars in gender and women's studies were few and far between on the internet. there were only a small number of counterarguments to the conservative backlash published online, such as ida hiroyuki's blog1, and the website of the women's studies association of japan2. in order to protest the backlash movement, chizuko ueno, a famous feminism scholar and a board member of “woman action network” started their web site.3 however, many other board members confessed that they were ict illiterate (yamaguchi, t. et al 2012:314). backlash spreads online and offline on the other hand, the backlash groups were ict literate. the internet became a pivotal field of discourse for conservatives. they set up personal websites with the aim of actively criticizing feminism and successfully organized the “digital disruption” of early feminist online activism. in addition, reactionary bloggers were also active. feminist bashing also occurred on 2channel4, the biggest japanese internet forum , and many people engaged in editorial battles over terms such as “feminism”, “gender”, and “gender-free (japanese expression for gender equality)” on wikipedia. moreover, criticism of feminism was active also in social networking websites in japan such as mixi5. when the mass media reported on “gender-free”-related subjects, conservatives posted many critical articles on 2channel and other websites (yamaguchi, t. et al 2012:21). this online anti-feminist activity spilled over into real politics. the basic law for a gender-equal society (danjo kyodo sankaku shakai kihon-ho; hereafter, called the basic law) came into effect in 1999. this was followed by municipal governments across japan, starting with tokyo and saitama, which developed their own gender equality promotion ordinances. however, conservatives successfully passed the conservative-friendly gender equality ordinance in ube city, yamaguchi prefecture in 1 http://blog.zaq.ne.jp/spisin/ 2 http://www.joseigakkai-jp.org/index.php?p=12 3 http://wan.or.jp/ 4 http://www.2ch.net/ 5 http://mixi.jp/ june 2002. in 2003, domoto akiko, feminist (and female) governor of chiba prefecture, failed to pass the gender equality ordinance bill. in april, 2004, the cabinet office indicated that it is better not to use the term "gender-free”, supported by the gender equality bureau. the term was, as a result, also absent from the second basic plan on 31 january, 2006. after the notice, the term "gender-free" disappeared from administration-sponsored projects both at the national and local level (yamaguchi, t. et al 2012:35). in late 2000s, the situation got worse. the racist and rightist group zaitokukai which originated on the internet commenced hate speech demonstrations on the street (noma 2013:44; yasuda 2012: 51-2;u.s. department of state 2013). since they were quite harmful and violent, some male citizens took a masculine presentation in response. a typical case is otoko gumi (the menfolk) (yamaguchi, y 2013:133-136). as shown in its name and official twitter icon, it is very masculine. although they declare support for lgbt people, attaching a rainbow circle to their icon and participate in anti lgbt discrimination actions, from point of view of traditional feminism, their mode of representation is not very compatible. although some feminists have cooperated with these groups, others have distanced themselves from them6. figure 1 official twitter icon of otoko gumi conclusions although women's movement organizations were pioneers in using icts practically, inspired by the 4th world conference on women in 1995 and the internet has had a positive effect on organizations that work internationally, many feminist organizations and activists who work locally appear to be "fearful of the internet.” there are comparatively few high profile feminists or women’s groups who use it actively. from the end of the 1990s to the 2000s, the backlash against feminism became intense, mainly driven by the conservative media. conservative media and organizations have used the internet proactively, and negative and distorted accounts of feminism increased in visibility in the 2000s. the current trend of masculine support for feminism and lgbt rights requires us to rethink how both men’s and women’s groups need to 6 see discussion on http://togetter.com/li/602035 cooperate using icts to challenge the power of backlash groups on the internet in japan. references hamada, tadahisa & onoda, mitoe. (2003). (in japanese) internet to shimin: npo/ngo no jidai ni mukete. tokyo: maruzen. inoue, haneko. (1999). (in japanese) josei ni yasashii internet no hon: denshi mail & homepage, atarashii communication no dōguwo tsukaikonasu. tokyo: cq syuppan. noma, yasumichi. (2013). (in japanese) “zainichi tokken” no kyoko: net kukan ga umi-dashita hate speech. tokyo: kawade shobo shinsha. yamaguchi, tomomi, saito masami & ogiue chiki. (2012). (in japanese) shakai undō no tomadoi: feminizumu no “ushinawareta jidai” to kusanone hoshu undō. tokyo: keisō shobō. yamaguchi, yujiro. (2013). (in japanese) yatsura wo tōsu na! tokyo: korokara. yasuda koichi. (2012). (in japanese) net to aikoku: zaitoku-kai no yami wo oikake te. tokyo: kodansha. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 brandtzaeg, p.b. chaparro domínguez, m.a, & følstad, a. (2017, october 18-21). context collapse in news. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. context collapse in news petter bae brandtzaeg sintef, norway maría ángeles chaparro domínguez universidad internacional de la rioja, madrid, spain asbjørn følstad, sintef, norway introduction social media is becoming a much more dynamic power, affecting how news is consumed, shared, and created (morejon, 2012), including fake news and disinformation (silverman et al., 2016). recent reports show that an increasing number of people consume news via social media on a regular basis. according to a pew research centre survey (2016), 62% of us adults obtain news via social media. sixtysix percent of facebook users reported reading news stories on the site, while nearly 59% of twitter users reported the same. similarly, the reuters institute (2016) suggests that 51% of people in uk with online access often use social media as a news source. thus, it is important to understand social media as an environment for news consumption. however, the literature offers little systematic guidance in this regard and we lack sufficient knowledge on how a social media environment affects users' perceptions and consumption of news. this paper aims to empirically and theoretically interpret emerging news-reading practices and the complex interplay of spatial and temporal conditions in social media. research question how can we describe news consumption within social media, and how does this environment affect users' perceptions and understanding of news? we aim to respond to this research question by explaining how a social media environment, specifically the facebook newsfeed, is changing readers’ consumption and experiences of news. fundamentally, this environment is characterized by what we refer to as a context collapse in news consumption. first, in an attempt to clarify and conceptualize the changing dynamics of news consumption within social media, we apply the theory of context collapse. second, context collapse will be discussed and empirically investigated by considering how satire is experienced, shared, and interpreted by social media users. finally, the potential implications of context collapse in social media news stories, especially concerning the distribution of fake news and the misinterpretation of the facts, are discussed. this will contribute new knowledge about how social media, as a merger of news and news-related content from multiple sources, affects users' perceptions and understanding. theory: context collapse in news consumption context collapse in news consumption suggests that the ways in which individuals interpret news stories, particularly fake news and satire that is incorrectly viewed as real news due to a lack of context, are becoming more complicated. to explain peoples’ news consumption via social media, we make use of a well-known concept, context collapse (marwick & boyd, 2011), which was initially used to explain the effects of social media on the social context. we suggest that social media technologies collapse multiple news stories from various news outlets into a single context, making it difficult for people to interpret these news stories. this collapse, hence, refer to a flattening out of multiple distinct sources of online news in one’s social network. hence, news stories from different media outlets with different aims become part of a singular stream of news stories, which is particularly true for the facebook newsfeed. this may distort the readers' assumptions about a news source. a newsfeed in social media makes space and place more invisible for the reader because of a lack of contextual cues. hence, this lack of materiality in such surrounding is therefore luring people into instant engagement with news stories that may turn out to be fake or satire while the design of newspapers has traditionally focused on how to tailor content to their target audiences (frost, 2013), this effort is now in the hands of social media platforms. the facebook newsfeed, for example, presents every newspaper and story in the same way, with the same type of design package, whether it is a thorough new york times news story, a fabricated news story from a fake news outlet, or a satire piece from the onion. the problem for users is that when they interpret the news, all the stories are presented in the same context and look very similar. this collapse of context, in terms of visual design and related stories makes it difficult for readers to evaluate the credibility of news stories and separate accurate news stories from fake news stories. satire and news satire is at its most useful when it is closely connected with the news. in particular, satire may be understood as a form of alternative news journalism intended "to interrogate power, parody to critique contemporary news, and dialogue to enact a model of deliberative democracy" (baym, 2005, p. 261). on the other hand, satire that is misinterpreted as real news on social media may harm the public debate. recently, wardle (2016) labelled satirical news as “parody content,” categorizing it as the type of misinformation that circulated the 2016 us presidential election. similarly, rubin et al. (2015) differentiate between three types of fake news: a) fabrication, b) hoaxing, and c) satire. they suggest that normally, “truth-biased” readers may shift to a “lie-biased” perspective when reading satirical news, but they admit that more research is needed regarding the relationship between satire and fake news. the study and findings to show the implications of context collapse, we empirically analyse and discuss how satirical news that goes viral can be misinterpreted on social media. in order to find satirical content that has been interpreted as real or factual news on social media, we applied snopes (www.snopes.com), a well-known american fact-checking service. for two decades, snopes has been identifying and debunking hoaxes, fakes, satires, and click-bait websites on the internet. we scanned all cases in snopes’s database that were tagged as "satire" to find satirical news stories that had been interpreted as real or factual news but were later debunked or fact-checked by snopes. the time restriction for this scan was january 2014 to october 2016. this timespan allowed us to identify a potential increase in satirical content over time and also see the breadth in the types of cases over the last two years. in total, we found 151 stories from 80 original news sources. all these stories were originally reported to snopes by people who questioned whether the news stories were true or false. in all the cases, snopes described the stories as satire, meaning that they were false stories. we scanned all cases in snopes’s database and analysed the comments on and discussion about the most shared facebook stories. we find that context collapse in news consumption is not only changing the kind of news stories people read and how they read them but also the ways in which many people interpret news. the present conceptualization of a context collapse in news may guide future research on media and journalism. references baym, g. (2005). the daily show: discursive integration and the reinvention of political journalism. political communication, 22(3), 259-276. frost, c. (2003). designing for newspapers and magazines. psychology press, hove, uk. mitchell, a., kiley, j., gottfried, j., & guskin, e. (2013). the role of news on facebook. pew research centre, washington. accessed december 18, 2016 http://www.journalism.org/2013/10/24/the-role-of-news-on-facebook/ morejon, r. (2012). how social media is replacing traditional journalism as a news source. social media today report. accessed february 18, 2016. http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/how-social-media-replacing-traditionaljournalism-news-source-infographic. marwick, a. e., & boyd, d. (2011). i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. new media & society, 13(1), 114-133. pew research centre (2016). the modern news consumer. washington, u.s. available online http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/pathways-to-news/ reuters institute (2016). digital news report. university of oxford. available online: http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/ rubin, v. l., chen, y., & conroy, n. j. (2015). deception detection for news: three types of fakes. proceedings of the association for information science and technology, 52(1), 1-4. silverman, c., hall, e., strapagiel, l, singer-vine, j., & hamaz, s. (2016). hyperpartisan facebook pages are publishing false and misleading information at an alarming rate. buzzfeed news available online 28.09.2017: https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pagesanalysis?utm_content=buffer0844e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm _campaign=buffer&utm_term=.ovv06dd73p#.yddygo9zjq wardel, c. (2016). six types of misinformation circulated this election season. columbia journalism review. accessed december 19, 2016. http://www.cjr.org/tow_center/6_types_election_fake_news.php http://www.journalism.org/2013/10/24/the-role-of-news-on-facebook/ https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-analysis?utm_content=buffer0844e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer&utm_term=.ovv06dd73p#.yddygo9zjq https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-analysis?utm_content=buffer0844e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer&utm_term=.ovv06dd73p#.yddygo9zjq https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-analysis?utm_content=buffer0844e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer&utm_term=.ovv06dd73p#.yddygo9zjq http://www.cjr.org/tow_center/6_types_election_fake_news.php microsoft word 818-564-1-pb.docx culpable media/culpable selves: digital disembodiment and the rise of “crowdsourced morality” wayne erik rysavy university of north carolina at chapel hill united states wrysavy@email.unc.edu abstract social media encourage collective practices of public expression and individualized practices of privacy and reputation management. juxtaposing three contemporary extreme scenario case studies, select interviews with firstyear college students and human resource staff, and the historic practices of impression management and public expression, i contend that users participate in collective expression and surveillance through social media that ultimately culminate in an extensive and potentially threatening form of disembodiment as it subjects ‘culpable’ individuals to the morality of the crowd. in this process of “crowdsourced morality,” users not only strip expressions of original context and intent, but they also bully ‘culpable’ individuals by grossly mischaracterizing them to incite public censure and punishment. therefore, while social media theoretically promote expression through shared connections and content, they also operate as culpable media that complicate personal expression by producing power differentials that always potentially disempower the individual against the excruciating power of the crowd. keywords self-presentation; privacy; surveillance; morality; social media introduction web 2.0 platforms continue to change the ways people connect to one another, how individuals engage in impression management, and how privacy is practiced and understood. sites like facebook, twitter, reddit, and tumblr, among others, encourage individual expression by allowing users various opportunities to connect with others and be involved in more intimate affairs of their lives. yet, as these media offer a world of interconnection through a perpetual stream of content that is personally supplied and collectively created, they also saturate our lives with information to the point that it overlaps, transgresses, and ultimately challenges the nebulous, yet “spatially” demarcated, boundaries we, as a society, have long held between public and private expression (baym, 2010; boyd, 2008; boyd & ellison, 2007; petronio, 2002). in this way, users not only contribute to the accretion of shared personal information that drive web 2.0, but they also inadvertently collapse private life into public life when they enact hyper-vigilant practices of impression management and participatory surveillance to present a coherent public image across offline and online contexts (see foucault, 1975; monahan, 2011; nissenbaum, 2010; van dijck, 2012, 2013a, 2013b). as a result, a user’s profile operates as a site of contested identity management, particularly as her backstage performances—increasingly removed of the context in which they originated—become the potential subject of intense public scrutiny and censure (see boyd, 2008; goffman, 1959). in instances where a backstage performance of a relatively harmless nature circulates beyond its original audience, the individual depicted in the image, video, or post is not only disembodied as a source, but she also becomes a victim of “crowdsourced morality,” the name i’ve given to the process where countless unknown others mob, bully, and justify their moral values to publically shame and punish the allegedly culpable individual. private/public impression management and “crowdsourced morality” in action to investigate this problem, i explored three notable incidents on the social networking site, facebook, and the social news and entertainment site, reddit. i also interviewed first-year students and various human resource staff from academic and business settings to articulate the contemporary discourse of privacy and the various nuances in personal and professional behavior that support, challenge, and redefine the duality of public and private in everyday life. i draw on the dramaturgical metaphors for impression management and public life from erving goffman (1959) and richard sennett (1977) to consider how public expression has changed and how “crowdsourced morality” is performed as an increasingly common practice of online interactions. juxtaposing these incidents to the historic practices of public and private expression, i argue that “crowdsourced morality” challenges the authentic and/or intimate image of self that one maintains online by increasingly disembodying the individual to instill a decidedly gendered moral order over backstage performances depicted in public. the three case studies— lindsey stone, a former employee of living independently forever who was fired for posting a “funny picture” on facebook where she flipped off a the “silence and respect” placard in front of the tomb of the unknown solider at the arlington national cemetery (see zimmerman, 2012a, 2012b); chelsea welch, a former applebee’s waitress who was fired for posting a customer’s “self-righteous no-tip” receipt to reddit (see morran, 2013a, 2013b; welch, 2013); and amanda todd, a 15-year-old vancouver teenager who committed suicide after being incessantly bullied by former friends who discovered a photo of her breasts she had naively flashed to a “cyberstalker” that shared the image with everyone she knew online because she wouldn’t “put on a show” for him (see mui, 2012)–demonstrate that visual depictions of backstage performances often complicate the coherent public image one attempts to maintain and manage between online and offline contexts, particularly when they reach others who believe that the depictions violate an arbitrary societal expectation for acceptable public behavior (see goffman, 1959; sennett, 1977; van dijck, 2013a, 2013b). since these sites afford greater reach and allow others to easily replicate and share an individual’s performances (baym, 2010; boyd & ellison, 2007), regardless of her privacy settings, the visual depictions potentially circulate beyond the intended audience (marwick & boyd, 2011; van dijck, 2013b). as this occurs across multiple audiences online, the visual depiction of the backstage performance now not only disembodies the individual, but it also becomes a signified performance that collapses private into public. the end result is an otherwise private performance recast as public, and, therefore, subject to intense public scrutiny, judgment, censure, and punishment. for these three individuals, their otherwise private visual depictions spiraled out of their personal control because they could not fully manage the complex identity negotiations that occur across the multiple audiences granted access through the subdomains of web 2.0. while stone, welch, and todd tried to defend themselves online, either issuing statements or avoiding unknown others who began to verbally attacked them online, the sheer force of “crowdsourced morality” ultimately shaped their future outcomes. thus, the threat that web 2.0 poses for every individual stems beyond a mere moment taken out of context; it is, instead, a loss of self generated in the overreaching surveillance and vitriolic judgment that are mounted against an individual as she is disembodiment in the distance from the expression, which ultimately leads to public censure, self-censorship, and a digital scarlet letter that forever follows the individual wherever she may go. therefore, although each of these notable incidents differs in scope, magnitude, and geographical location, what all demonstrate is the violation of privacy and an assumption that it will be available in online settings (see nissenbaum, 2010; see also warren & brandeis, 1890/2010). conclusion while the process of disembodiment online is not new, i argue that the rise of “crowdsourced morality” is, particularly as it grossly mischaracterizes individuals to incite public censure that leads to grave consequences for ‘culpable’ individuals. to the extent that crowdsourced morality invites selfrighteousness and judgment in public discourse by disembodying the individual as the source, i argue that it devalues open, democratic dialogue that would otherwise contextualize a person or an event in time by instead supplanting it with the moral judgments of nearly anonymous others to potentially punish the individual for her actions. however, when this happens, crowdsourced morality not only disciplines the individual, but it also threatens public life by allowing the mob to police and regulate other’s actions, altering practices of expression while also compelling individuals to conform to highly polarized patterns of interaction. the end result is a society where public discourse becomes hyperpersonal, highly judgmental, and highly abstracted from the individual in question without much consequence for the members of the mob who assess, judge, and ultimately shape the future of the individual in question. references baym, n.k. (2010). personal connections in the digital age. malden, ma: polity press. boyd, d.& ellison, n. (2007). social networking sites: definition, history, and scholarship. journal of computermediated communication, 13(1), 1-11. boyd, d. (2008). taken out of context: american teen sociality in networked publics. phd dissertation, university of california, berkeley. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1344756. foucault, m. (1975). discipline & punish: the birth of the prison. new york: random house. goffman, e. (1959). the presentation of self in everyday life. new york, ny: double day. marwick, a. & boyd, d. (2011). to see and be seen: celebrity practice on twitter. convergence 17(2), 139-158. monahan, t. (2011). surveillance as cultural practice. the sociological quarterly, 52, 495-508. morran, c. (2013a, january 29). diner thinks that saying he’s a pastor allows him to stiff waiter on tip. retrieved from http://consumerist.com/2013/01/29/diner-thinks-that-saying-hes-a-pastor-allows-him-to-stiff-waiteron-tip/ morran, c. (2013b, january 31). waitress who posted no-tip receipt from “pastor” customer fired from job. retrieved from http://consumerist.com/2013/01/31/waitress-who-posted-no-tip-receipt-from-pastorcustomer-fired-from-job/ mui, (2012, october 12). bullied teen commits suicide after posting video. retrieved from http://cnews.canoe.ca/cnews/canada/2012/10/11/20276656.html nissenbaum, h. (2010). privacy in context: technology, policy, and the integrity of social life. stanford, ca: stanford university press. petronio, s.s. (2002). boundaries of privacy: dialectics of disclosure. new york, ny: state university of new york press. sennett, r. (1977). the fall of public man. new york, ny: alfred a. knopf. van dijck, j. (2012). facebook as a tool for producing sociality and connectivity. television & new media 13(2), 160-176. van dijck, j. (2013a). ‘you have one identity’: performing self on facebook and linkedin. media, culture & society, 35(2), 199-215. van dijck, j. (2013b). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. new york: oxford university press. warren, s.d. & brandeis, l.d. (2010). the right to privacy. s.a. childress, (ed.). new orleans, la: quid pro law books. (originally published in 1890.) welch, c. (2013, february 1). tips are not optional, they are how waiters get paid in america. retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/01/fired-applebees-waitress-needstips?intcmp=srch zimmerman, n. (2012a, november 20). should this woman have her life ruined because she posted a stupid photo on her facebook page? retrieved from http://gawker.com/5962189/should-this-woman-have-her-liferuined-because-she-posted-a-stupid-photo-on-her-own-facebook-page zimmerman, n. (2012b, november 22). happy now?:‘good employee’ lindsey stone fired over facebook photo. retrieved from http://gawker.com/5962796/happy-now-good-employee-lindsey-stone-fired-over-facebookphoto microsoft word revealing themes in the australian twittersphere (final).docx selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): moon, brenda. (2016, october 5-8). a topic analysis approach to revealing discussions on the australian twittersphere. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. a topic analysis approach to revealing discussions on the australian twittersphere brenda moon queensland university of technology abstract this paper investigates techniques to identify the topics being discussed in one week of tweets from the australian twittersphere. tweets were extracted from a comprehensive dataset which captures all tweets by 2.8m australian: the tracking infrastructure for social media analysis (trisma) (bruns, burgess & banks et al., 2016). bruns & moe (2014) suggest that most twitter research to date has focussed on “the macro layer of twitter communication” (p. 23-24), partly because it is methodologically difficult to move beyond this. the trisma dataset enables the selection of a dataset based on a date range, rather than being limited to keywords or hashtags. as a result, the extracted oneweek dataset of 5.5 million tweets is not focussed on a particular topic, and contains tweets from all three layers of twitter communication defined by bruns & moe (2014), not just predominately from the macro level of hashtag conversations. this study seeks to identify the themes present in this dataset using latent dirichlet allocation (lda) (blei, ng, and jordan, 2003). the results of the topic analysis are triangulated with the themes found by the different types of analysis as part of a wider methodological study determining other metrics for the same week. the ability to identify the themes present in a dataset has many applications, including identifying changes in themes over time, extracting subsets of the corpus for further study, and understanding the diversity of themes present. keywords: twitter, social media, big data, topic analysis, latent dirichlet allocation introduction this paper investigates techniques to identify the topics being discussed in one week of tweets from the australian twittersphere. tweets posted in the week from sunday 2 august to saturday 8 august 2015 were extracted from a comprehensive dataset which captures all tweets by 2.8m australian users on a continuing basis; the tracking infrastructure for social media analysis (trisma) infrastructure (bruns, burgess & banks et al., 2016). this resulted in a dataset of 5.5 million tweets. the selected week was chosen as part of a wider study looking at other metrics for the same week, including periodic patterns in tweets per day and a detailed @mention/retweet network for one day during the week. having these other studies for the same dataset enables comparison of the results obtained by the different methods. bruns & moe, 2014 suggest that most twitter research has focussed on “the macro layer of twitter communication: on the engagement with breaking news and other topics by participants in hashtag audiences” (p. 23-24), partly because it is methodologically difficult to move beyond this. the trisma dataset enables the selection of a dataset based on a date range, rather than being limited to keywords or hashtags. as a result, the dataset has not been focussed on a particular topic by the use of a keyword or hashtag, and contains tweets from all three layers of twitter communication defined by bruns & moe (2014), not predominately the macro level of hashtag conversations. latent dirichlet allocation (lda) is an unsupervised machine learning approach that identifies topics present in a text (blei, ng, and jordan, 2003). each text is considered to be a bag-of-words, that is only the frequency of the words in the text is used, not the word order or meaning of the words. a lda topic is expressed as a bayesian probability distribution across all the words in the corpus, with the contribution of each word towards that topic. blei et al. (2003) defined lda as: latent dirichlet allocation (lda) is a generative probabilistic model of a corpus. the basic idea is that documents are represented as random mixtures over latent topics, where each topic is characterized by a distribution over words. (p. 996) if the model is successful, the most important words in each topic should appear coherent to a human reader, “but the top few words in a topic only give a small sense of the thousands of the words that constitute the whole probability distribution” (schmidt, 2012, p. 51). each document in a corpus can be interpreted as having a mixture of topics which allows the identification of both the most significant documents for a topic and the prevalence of a topic in the corpus. one measure used for the accuracy of lda models is perplexity (blei et al., 2003; j. chang et al., 2009) and although it can be useful for comparing models or parameter options, it may not be an accurate measure of the quality of the topics, “there is no technical reason to suppose that held-out accuracy corresponds to better organization or easier interpretation” (blei, 2012, p. 83). an alternative approach by j. chang et al. (2009) uses human evaluation tasks assessing ‘word intrusion’ and ‘topic intrusion’ into the lda identified topics as a way of measuring their coherence for a human reader, and this is the approach i have chosen to apply. i manually checked the highest likelihood words in each topic to see if they formed a recognisable, coherent topic instead of appearing random, and then check the topics that the model assigns to unseen documents (held out from training) by inspecting the documents to see what topics appeared in each tweet. i also investigate applying discrepancy functions for lda developed by mimno and blei (2011) that “measure how well its statistical assumptions about the topics are matched in the observed corpus and inferred topics” (mimno & blei, 2011, p. 228). blei and lafferty (2009) warn us about the interpretation of topic models: the topics and topical decomposition found with lda and other topic models are not “definitive”. fitting a topic model to a collection will yield patterns within the corpus whether or not they are “naturally” there. (and starting the procedure from a different place will yield different patterns!) rather, topic models are a useful exploratory tool. (p. 17). one of the most difficult decisions in lda is the number of topics to select “choosing the number of topics is a persistent problem in topic modeling and other latent variable analysis” (blei & lafferty, 2009, p. 11). with too few topics, each topic will be broad and the most frequent words may not appear coherent, but conversely “as topics become more fine-grained in models with larger number of topics, they are less useful for humans” (j. chang et al., 2009, p. 4). the results of the topic analysis will be compared to the topics found with using bigram analysis in the periodic pattern study and the discussion clusters identified in the network analysis of the wednesday tweets. by triangulating the results found by the different types of analysis we can get a better understanding of how each approach informs our understanding of the dataset. references blei, d. m. (2012). topic modeling and digital humanities. journal of digital humanities, 2(1), 8–11. blei, d. m., & lafferty, j. d. (2009). topic models. in a. srivastava & m. sahami (eds.), text mining: classification, clustering, and applications (chap. topic mode). chapman & hall/crc data mining and knowledge discovery series. blei, d. m., ng, a., & jordan, m. (2003). latent dirichlet allocation. the journal of machine learning research, 3, 993–1022. bruns, a., burgess, j., banks, j., tjondronegoro, d., dreiling, a., hartley, j., … sadkowsky, t. (2016). trisma: tracking infrastructure for social media analysis. retrieved from http://trisma.org/ bruns, a., burgess, j., & highfield, t. (2014). a “big data” approach to mapping the australian twittersphere. in p.l. arthur & k. bode (eds.), advancing digital humanities: research, methods, theories (pp. 113–129). houndmills: palgrave macmillan. bruns, a., moe, h. (2014). structural layers of communication on twitter. in k. weller, a. bruns, j. burgess, m. mahrt, & c. puschmann, (eds.), twitter and society. new york: peter lang. burgess, j., & bruns, a. (2015). easy data, hard data: the politics and pragmatics of twitter research after the computational turn. in g. langlois, j. redden, & g. elmer (eds.), compromised data: from social media to big data (pp. 93–111). new york: bloomsbury academic. chang, j., gerrish, s., boyd-graber, j., wang, c., & blei, d. m. (2009). reading tea leaves: how humans interpret topic models. in neural information processing systems. vancouver, british columbia. mimno, d., & blei, d. (2011). bayesian checking for topic models. in proceedings of the conference on empirical methods in natural language processing (pp. 227– 237). rambukkana, n. (ed.). (2015). hashtag publics: the power and politics of discursive networks. new york: peter lang. schmidt, b. m. (2012). words alone: dismantling topic models in the humanities. journal of digital humanities, 2(1), 49–65. microsoft word 791-539-1-pb.docx e-government and its limitations: assessing the true demand curve for citizen public participation david karpf assistant professor school of media and public affairs george washington university davekarpf@gmail.com abstract many e-government initiatives start with promise, but end up either as digital "ghost towns" or as a venue exploited by organized interests. the problem with these initiatives is rooted in a set of common misunderstandings about the structure of citizen interest in public participation – simply put, the internet does not create public interest, it reveals public interest. public interest can be high or low, and governmental initiatives can be polarized or non-polarized. the paper discusses two common pitfalls (“the field of dreams fallacy” and “blessed are the organized”) that demand alternate design choices and modified expectations. by treating public interest and public polarization as variables, the paper develops a typology of appropriate e-government initiatives that can help identify the boundary conditions for transformative digital engagement. keywords digital government; public participation; political mobilization; internet governance e-government and its limitations the internet has routinely disrupted large, traditional, bureaucratic industries. news production, book publishing, music and entertainment have all become common benchmarks for the changing digital landscape (shirky 2008, jenkins 2006). so it is unsurprising that many observers have directed attention towards the largest, most traditional, and most bureaucratic institution of all – government – and optimistically speculated about the coming digital revolution (layne and lee 2001, west 2005, noveck 2009, sifry 2011). the field of “e-government” research has for years featured a crosssection of researchers, funders, and practitioners eager to apply the lessons of the digital age to the inner workings of government. the results have rarely lived up to the hype. in 2012, two high-profile examples have attracted much attention. first was the failed third party electoral effort from americanselect.com. americans elect attracted headlines for their promise to do to two-party politics “what amazon.com did to books” (friedman 2011). the organization promised to nominate a third-party candidate via open online caucuses in the summer of 2012. south by southwest interactive gave americanselect a people’s choice award for its potential impact. but when it came time to start caucusing, americans elect quietly folded because no potential candidates had crossed the minimum threshold of support. the second example seems more positive at first glance. petitions.whitehouse.gov provides a platform called “we the people” that allows citizens to directly petition the president. this has been hailed as a benchmark in open government. successful petitions ranging from the serious (assault weapons, wall street reform) to the silly (“build a death star,” “release the white house beer recipe”) have elicited an official administration response. originally, any petition on the site that received more than 25,000 signatures was promised a response from the obama administration. that number has been continually revised upward, and now stands at 100,000. silly petitions have attracted far more public attention than the serious ones, and serious petitioners have later turned into critics, noting that administrative response still falls far short of administrative action. along with these high-profile examples, there are also thousands of low-profile examples. e-government projects can range from simplified online governmental information to interactive citizen deliberation efforts. with rare exceptions (noveck 2009), applications of technology to the challenges of governance have had limited effect. online deliberative processes fail due to lack of public interest. powerful actors either prevent agency adoption of new digital practices, or else they subvert the new practices to their own ends. government bureaucrats choose not to simply give away the power and authority they have traditionally held. e-government proponents often note that these same forces are at work in rapidly changing marketplaces, but homo politicus and homo economicus display different logics in their respective realms. markets and ballots enact different forms of power. we can generalize the two limitations above into a pair of principles. both relate to the underlying “demand curves” for citizen political engagement. first is the “field of dreams fallacy” (karpf 2011). writing about the limits of open source software production in 1999, clay shirky noted that “…commercial companies make software for money, so money is the limiting factor: open source developers make software for the love of the thing, so love becomes the limiting factor as well. unloved software can’t be built using open source methods” (shirky 1999). likewise, many digital governance efforts fail because they presume an unrealistic level of public engagement or interest. the lowered transaction costs of digital communication do not create our underlying interests. it reveals them. interest in government activity is not uniformly low; it is variable. there is vast public interest in space exploration, and minimal public interest in highway reconstruction planning. to avoid the field of dreams fallacy, digital government efforts must be calibrated in light of existing public interest levels. the second broad limitation can be termed “blessed are the organized.” some governance areas are uniformly appealing, while others are deeply polarized, attracted engagement from highly-motivated interest groups. rarely does the american (or canadian/nigerian/argentian/global) population behave as a single, unified mass public. instead, we frequently act as a collection of publics. new information technology does not create participatory communities. it supports them. as such, e-government efforts can often be coopted by existing interest groups or issue publics, yielding a distorted picture of public opinion. shulman (2009) argues that the drive toward online citizen comments carries a set of perverse incentives that prioritize the voices of the bestmobilized or best-motivated citizens over the voices of either experts or everyday citizens. this critique can be overstated (see karpf 2010 for a counterargument), but the central point is that issue polarization is a variable. digital government efforts must be calibrated in response to existing publics operating in any given area. these two variables can be overlayed into a 2x2 typology of digital government projects. crucially, the purpose of this typology is to identify appropriate expectations for where, when, and how technology can transform government (see figure 1, below). where there is high public interest and low public polarization, proposals for transformative “wiki” or “open-source” government have the highest chance of success (noveck 2009). where there is high public interest but high polarization, government is better off investing in open data initiatives that give the polarized existing issue publics better data with which to make their public arguments. where public interest is low and polarization is low, it is best to keep our expectations appropriately low and pursue simple online service delivery (west 2006). and where public interest is low and polarization is high, government can best help its citizens by streamlining or improving upon existing systems for public commentary (shulman 2009). figure 1: typology of appropriate e-government projects the internet can be transformative for governance practices. but not everywhere, and not all at once. the purpose of this study has been to consider the boundary conditions of the most promising examples that have occupied so much scholarly attention. the real costs of the field of dreams fallacy and blessed are the organized occur when well-meaning proponents misspend their time, energy, and money, and later become discouraged by the lack of transformative success. it is no longer enough to look at disrupted communications markets and imagine parallel forces at work in governmental arenas. markets are meant to efficiently reveal consumer demand. the relationship between government and citizen demands is far more complicated. references friedman, t. (july 23, 2011). “make way for the radical center.” the new york times. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24friedman.html?_r=0 jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture. new york: nyu press. karpf, d. (2010). “"online political mobilization from the advocacy group's perspective: looking beyond clicktivism." policy & internet. volume 2, issue 4, 7-41. retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2202/1944-2866.1098/abstract karpf, d. (2011). “open  source  political  community  development:  a  five-­‐stage   adoption  process.”  journal  of  information  technology  and  politics.  volume  8,  issue   2/3,  323-­‐345.   layne , k. and lee, j. (2001). “developing fully-functional e-government: a four stage model.” government information quarterly 18, 122-136. retrieved from http://www.ekt.gr/content/img/product/5593/government%20information%20quarterly %3b%2018%20(2)%202001,%20p.122-36.pdf noveck, b. (2009). wiki government: how technology can make government better, democracy stronger, and citizens more powerful. washington, dc: brookings institution press. shirky, c. (1999). “the interest horizons and the limits of software love.” retrieved from http://www.shirky.com/writings/interest.html shirky, c. (2008). here comes everybody: the power of organizing without organizations. new york: penguin press. sifry, m. (2011). wikileaks and the age of transparency. new york: or books. shulman, s. (2009). “the case against mass e-mails: perverse incentives and lowquality public participation in u.s. federal rulemaking.” policy & internet, 1 (1), 2353. retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2202/1944-2866.1010/abstract west, d. (2005). digital government: technology and public sector performance. princeton, nj: princeton university press. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  knaudt,  l.,  siebe,  r.,  graham,  t.,  harbers,  f.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  sourcing   and  engaging  the  crowd:  audience  interaction  and  participation  in  online-­only  slow  journalism   platforms.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  meeting  of  the  association  of  internet   researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.   sourcing  and  engaging  the  crowd:     audience  interaction  and  participation  in  online-­only   slow  journalism  platforms     lena  knaudt   university  of  groningen     renske  siebe   university  of  groningen     todd  graham   university  of  leeds     frank  harbers   university  of  groningen     relevance     the  rise  of  the  web  2.0  and  subsequently  new  forms  of  media  have  deeply  affected   journalistic  practices.  promoting  a  culture  in  which  speed,  accessibility  and  connectivity   are  key  ideals,  the  possibilities  opened  up  by  the  internet  challenge  the  self-­ understanding  and  practices  of  traditional  quality  journalism.  scholars  and  journalists   have  argued  that  the  situation  fosters  highly  competitive  and  ultimately  superficial   practices,  often  based  on  mere  assertion  and  attempts  to  draw  more  readers  with  click-­ bait  or  soundbites.  while  the  horizontal  architecture  of  the  internet  can  potentially   extend  the  public  sphere,  foster  the  value  of  sharing  as  a  collective,  and  enable   individual  interests  to  be  expressed  (ruiz  et  al  2011),  legacy  news  media  seem   reluctant  to  make  full  use  of  the  potential  the  interactive  new  media  hold  for  more   democratic  collaborations  in  a  digitalized,  interconnected  world.       traditional  outlets  do  acknowledge  the  need  to  adopt  new,  participatory  forms  of  online   journalism,  yet  remain  reluctant  to  leave  their  top-­down  practice  behind  out  of  fear  of   jeopardizing  their  authority  as  source  of  trustworthy  information  about  society  canter   2013.  consequently,  the  exchange  between  newspaper  staff  and  audience  is  usually   given  a  low  priority,  which  means  that  journalists  often  lack  the  motivation  as  well  as  the   time  to  engage  more  with  the  public  (canter  2013).       against  this  background,  new  ‘slow  journalism’  startups  like  de  correspondent  and   krautreporter  in  respectively  the  netherlands  and  germany  explicitly  emphasize  the   value  of  audience  involvement  as  an  additional  way  of  gathering  in-­depth  information   from  different  perspectives.  characterized  by  in-­depth,  and  time-­consuming  research,   transparency  about  its  methods  and  procedures,  and  a  more  personalized  coverage,   the  discourse  and  practice  of  slow  journalism  takes  a  more  bottom-­up  approach,   emphasizing  the  benefits  of  a  more  participatory  culture  of  reporting  and  the  necessity   to  engage  with  the  audience.  the  respective  outlets  present  their  online-­only  journalistic   platforms  as  the  necessary  step  to  bring  journalism  into  the  networked  society  of  the   21st  century  (harbers  2015).     research  goals     this  paper  examines  to  which  extent  slow  journalism  constitutes  a  re-­negotiation  of   journalistic  quality  standards  and  practices  in  the  light  of  the  increasingly  participatory   discourse  of  internet  culture,  especially  with  respect  to  the  roles  attributed  to  and   performed  by  both  the  journalist  and  the  citizen  on  online  journalistic  platforms.  by   analyzing  not  only  how  audiences  engage  through  their  comments  but  also  how   journalists  interact  and  collaborate  with  their  audience,  our  research  seeks  to  illuminate   how  the  bottom-­up  approach  of  projects  like  de  correspondent  and  krautreporter   reshapes  the  traditional  top-­down  journalism  practices  by  making  crowdsourcing,   audience  interaction  and  the  emergent  news  sharing  culture  an  integral  part  of  the   reporting  process.       it  does  so  by  searching  for  answers  to  three  crucial  questions:  what  is  the  nature  of  the   debate  and  deliberation  amongst  the  users?  to  what  extent  and  how  do  journalistic   professionals  engage  with  the  audience  in  comment  section?  and  how  do  journalists   and  the  audience  together  negotiate  journalism’s  quality  standards  in  their  interaction?   the  paper  ultimately  aims  to  explore  the  ways  these  outlets  interact  and  collaborate   with  their  audience,  and  what  this  tells  us  about  the  way  quality  journalism  is  being   redefined  in  21st  century  society  that  is  more  and  more  determined  by  the  affordances  of   a  networked  online  culture.     research  design     our  research  will  be  based  on  a  quantitative  content  analysis  in  combination  with  a   textual  analysis  of  the  comment  sections  of  de  correspondent  and  krautreporter.  our   corpus  consists  of  all  the  comments  on  the  articles  published  in  the  contributions  from   april  2016.  the  sample  will  consist  of  100  to  150  journalistic  articles  containing  1000  to   2000  comments  per  platform.     as  a  measure  of  the  nature  of  debate  and  journalists-­audience  interaction,  each   comment  will  firstly  be  coded  for  the  type  of  interaction  (with  the  content,  journalist,   and/or  fellow  participant).  secondly,  it  identifies  the  function  of  the  comments  (e.g,   arguing,  providing/requesting  information/sources,  acknowledging/thanking,  requesting   reader  input,  giving  advice,  criticizing/defending  journalism,  making  corrections,   updating  the  story,  or  promoting  their  work).  the  function  of  the  comment  can  be   specific  for  the  roles  of  the  user  or  the  journalist  but  they  may  also  overlap.  finally,  its   influence  is  coded  (e.g.,  receiving  replies,  changing  the  tone  of  debate).       based  on  our  observations,  we  will  reflect  upon  the  implications  for  journalistic   knowledge  production  and  quality  journalism,  seeking  answers  to  questions  like:  do   comments  reflect  on  journalistic  practices  of  the  platform  or  article,  provide  additional   viewpoints  or  suggestions  for  further  research,  relate  to  other  comments,  or  look  for  new   information?  what  happens  when  a  journalist  participates  in  the  discussion:  how  do   they  relate  to  their  audience,  do  they  receive  replies,  and  does  their  contribution  impact   the  debate?  the  comparative  framework  also  allows  us  to  elucidate  on  the  different   ways  slow  journalism  is  developing  as  a  professional  practice  that  explicitly  embraces   the  new  opportunities  of  participatory  culture  rather  than  hesitatingly  grapple  with  its   challenges.     relevance     so  far,  little  research  has  been  done  on  the  collaborative  relationship  between   journalists  and  citizens,  even  less  so  in  the  context  of  slow  journalism.  indeed,  the  focus   has  been  mostly  on  traditional  news  organizations.  this  paper  begins  to  fill  these  gaps   by  examining  the  role  of  the  audience  on  new  slow  journalism  startups,  which  seeks  to   move  beyond  traditional  professional  standards  and  redefine  quality  journalism  as  a   more  collaborative  practice  of  gathering,  verifying  and  interpreting  information.       projects  investigating  the  exchange  between  journalists  and  their  audience  or  the   engagement  of  commentators  in  the  online  editions  of  traditional  journalistic  quality   outlets  have  often  found  that  there  is  little  actual  interaction,  for  example  due  to   restrictive  moderation  policies  or  a  lack  of  time  on  the  part  of  journalists  (ruiz  et  al   2011;;  canter  2013).  if  readers  do  engage  in  journalistic  discourse  and  become  active   participants,  studies  show  that  they  tend  to  increase  the  diversity  of  viewpoints  (baden   &  springer  2014;;  graham  &  wright  2015)  in  a  generally  civil  manner  (ksiazeka  2015)   and  to  conduct  debates  of  deliberative  quality  (graham  &  wright  2015;;  rowe  2015).   due  to  the  particularities  of  slow  journalism  regarding  target  groups,  moderation   strategies  and  the  emphatic  support  of  audience  participation,  we  expect  our  cases  to   show  a  significantly  higher  level  of  interaction  and  a  considerable  degree  of  democratic   quality  in  the  discussions.     references     baden,  c.  &  springer,  n.  (2014).  com(ple)menting  the  news  on  the  financial  crisis:  the   contribution  of  news  unsers’  commentary  to  the  diversity  of  viewpoints  in  the  public   debate.  european  journal  of  communication,  29  (5),  529-­548.       canter,  l.  (2013).  the  misconception  of  online  comment  threads.  journalism  practice,   7  (5),  604-­619.       graham,  t.  &  wright,  s.  (2015).  a  tale  of  two  stories  from  “below  the  line”:  comment   fields  at  the  guardian.  the  international  journal  of  press/politics,  20  (3),  317-­338.     harbers,  f.  (2016).  time  to  engage:  de  correspondent’s  redefinition  of  journalistic   quality.  digital  journalism  [online  first],     ksiazeka,  t.  (2015).  civil  interactivity:  how  news  organizations'  commenting  policies   explain  civility  and  hostility  in  user  comments.  journal  of  broadcasting  &   electronic  media,  59  (4),  556-­573.     rowe,  i.  (2015).  deliberation  2.0:  comparing  the  deliberative  quality  of  online  news   user  comments  across  platforms.  journal  of  broadcasting  &  electronic  media,   59  (4),  539-­555.     ruiz  et  al.  (2011).  public  sphere  2.0?  the  democratic  qualities  of  citizen  debates  in   online  newspapers.  the  international  journal  of  press/politics,  16(4)  463-­487.   microsoft word plothe-play is pulling the goddamn trigger"-play is pulling the goddamn trigger".doc selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 “play is pulling the goddamn trigger”: digital game video content producers and the boundaries of gamespace theo plothe american university introduction within digital game studies, theorizing the overlap between gamespace and the physical world is often an area of contention. while many scholars draw strict boundaries between the virtual world of the game and activities outside of it, others have attempted to explore ways that game activities expand beyond these strict boundaries, using concepts like the magic circle (huizinga, 1950; caillois, 1961; castranova, 2005). yet these theories of gamespace do not take into account the expansive influence or reach of games through media convergence. what happens when game characters appear in gamer-produced mashups, or when gamers record their own gameplay and share it with others on youtube? this paper presents results of a qualitative study that investigates the experiences and motivations of individuals who create remix videos from digital game characters, content, and situations. in exploring the ways that these game creators represent play and manipulate the materiality of the games themselves, this project argues for an expansive definition of gamespace. games are playful and built for interaction; this interaction, this paper argues, supports a participatory mindset, encouraging gamers to continue to play with the digital game content. this work theorizes gamespace for the age of media convergence, considering how gamespace expands beyond the game console and the screen through participatory media. play huizinga (1955) defines “play” as “a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is ‘different’ from ‘ordinary life’” (p. 28). huizinga’s definition also includes activities that fall outside traditional rule-bound games, which this study takes suggested citation (apa): plothe, t. (2015, october 21-24). “play is pulling the goddamn trigger”:digital game video content producers and the boundaries of gamespace. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. up in complicating how time and place is bounded through the materiality of new media and the practices of participatory culture. materiality digital materiality is central to expanding notions of gamespace in participatory culture. leonardi (2010) argues for a definition of materiality as “the practical instantiation of theoretical ideas” that has significance in a particular system and context. apperley and jayemane (2012) describe the “materialist turn” in game studies that examines the materiality of games not just for their code, but sees them as artifacts that have some effect on the world. in remixing these game artifacts into fan-made content, these creators intervene in the materiality of the games themselves. gamespace the term “virtual world” places the boundaries of gamespace specifically within a virtual space (taylor, 2003; rowlands, 2012). taylor (2003) emphasizes the experience of immersion and notes a multitude of gamespaces, stating, “the player in play is present in more than one spatial domain.” the gamer has a teleprescence within the space of the game; the player is within the character and simultaneously outside of him or her while still remaining present in the physical world. in playing with game elements in these digital remix videos, these video creators expand the boundaries of gamespace. methodology in this study, the author interviewed seven digital content creators who share their videos on youtube: andrew bridgeman from dorkly, miles luna from rooster teeth, aniol florensa & oriol esteve from marca blanca, dane boedigheimer of daneboe productions, laura kerger, also known as artist gamer gal and formerly of machinima, and ed stoel and marco de ruiter of herdstudio. these creators were selected from among the most popular, active, and subjectively interesting digital content creators on youtube. their videos remix characters and situations from digital games, and their videos range from hundreds to millions of views. dorkly, a division of college humor, for example, creates short, humorous videos that place classic digital game characters in different settings, such as a sitcom featuring mortal kombat characters. rooster teeth produces the popular red v. blue series, which uses recordings of gameplay from the halo series to create a narrative. each creator participated in a 30-minute interview about the process of and motivation for creating these digital videos. results each of these content creators reported that play was a central element in creating these remix videos. miles luna of rooster teeth reported that the situations in their videos always come from gameplay, and they even use gameplay as an introduction into their production process: whenever we go into a map and we have to set up a scene, before we get everybody in place to shoot, a lot of times as soon as we spawn, we try to kill each other a few times, and then we go, ok, that’s enough, let’s get to work. that part is play. because when we’re recording, you can’t pull the trigger, and in the first-person shooter, that is play. while many of the creators described the labor of the production of these videos, this production always involved an element of play, and creating these remix videos extended the experience of gameplay to these videos. interestingly, though, luna does not consider this process wholly as play; the behavior of the production team belies the social nature of games. poole (2004) describes digital games as “allow[ing] for, are often specifically built for, a form of social play activity” (p. 166). the social nature of the activity, then, even when in a work rather than a social environment, encourages that social behavior. tavinor (2009) notes the ways in which digital games encourage certain types of behavior. though players can play against the rules of the game, so to speak, the game encourages certain types of behavior, especially first-person shooter games: “armed with a large gun in a constrained fictional environment populated by other players, it is almost inevitable that players of halo will spend their time shooting each other” (p. 103). in many ways, then, luna and his coworkers were compelled to shoot each other because they occupied the space of the game, even when they were in a work environment. as luna detailed, whenever they first begin shooting, the desire to play is overwhelming, so much so that they delay the labor portion of the exercise to feed this overwhelming desire for play. the social environment here is essential for this experience, though. i would suggest that if luna or any other member of the red vs blue created these projects as solo endeavors or independently from other team members, that the element of play would be lessened if not absent for the creators. this situation is true not only because of the social nature of digital games and first-person shooter games, but because the act of playing the game took them within the magic circle, which jones and thiruvathakal (2012) describe as “an alternative reality” (p. 93) created when they play the game. games, they argue, create a “metaphoric space,” (p. 94) existing both within the physical world of work, in this particular case, but also within the world of the game. the success of these digital remix videos also requires manipulating the materiality of these digital games. the videos need to draw from characteristic elements of the game itself in order for the audience to recognize the game. it is also in manipulating the game’s materiality that these video remixes create humor. for creator dane boedigheimer, creating digital remix videos is also a way to intervene in the games beyond the extent possible in playing the games themselves: part of it was just loving those games, especially the retro games i grew up playing like pacman and donkey kong and stuff like that, and the one thing i always remember about those games is they were so impossibly hard. . . so i think to some degree it was a little bit of revenge on those games, you know, being able to manipulate it and go back and kind of play things in your hands a little bit rather than getting killed after three levels. boedigheimer stated that part of the motivation of these videos is to intervene in the original game, to play with its materiality. in creating these digital remix videos, he is continuing to play the digital games themselves, just under his own terms and outside of the rule-bound structure of the game itself. using the artifacts of the digital game, boedigheimer is able to create new gameplay situations. many of the digital video creators discuss the ways that digital games have become an important element of popular culture that extends beyond the games themselves. milner (2012) argued that the game itself is only a small part of the larger gamespace. andrew bridgeman drew on this notion by discussing the ways that digital games have inspired content beyond the game itself, extending stories, characters, and content. they are a much bigger medium than i think they really get credit for a lot of the time. and their ability to connect with you and because they’re an interactive medium . . . they’re interactive in multiple ways. and just look at mod communities today. and fan art communities. they have inspired a lot of people to do creative things. i think that’s a really cool thing. through remix video and venues for sharing this video like youtube, these gamers and video creators use remix videos to extend the characters, game environments, and play beyond the digital game itself. these activities, i argue, expand gamespace to another environment. bridgman and many of the other creators interviewed for this study connected his own work to the ways that fans expand a franchise beyond the original commercial product. murphy called himself a “content creator,” and like bruns’ (2008) “produser,” he saw himself as expanding the culture around digital games. this process, i contend, extends the actual space of the game from the traditional game boundaries to the participatory video created from it. references the experiences of these participatory video producers extend the boundaries of and our conceptions of gamespace to these participatory media. these creators demonstrate through their experiences how their production practices expand gamespace. as luna, bridgman, and boedigheimer stated, play is a central focus of their own video creation process. their videos represent not only familiar characters of digital games, they also represent and recreate the activity of play. as luna noted, play is a large part of their creative process; the subject matter of their videos is inspired by play, but play is also central to the creation process itself, as the creators play the game, and even shoot each other, as they make their videos. dane boedigheimer saw play within his creative process as well, albeit from a different perspective. making videos based on retro games, like paperboy, allowed boedigheimer to rewrite the game and play it the way he would want to. these discussions suggest that making these kinds of participatory videos based on gaming culture is another form of alternative play. as ashton and newman (2012) argue about gaming walk throughs, i argue that remix videos about digital game actions and situations are another way to play the games on which they are based. ashton and newman describe the ways that gamer-written walkthroughs promote exploration and experimentation rather than holding up an official way to play the game. in much the same way, these remix videos promote interaction and experimentation as these creators continue playing the game in their own way. these gamers create digital videos to manipulate game situations in new ways unanticipated by the games’ creators. this process that expands the boundaries of gamespace creates an important cultural space in which these video producers comment on and play with the materiality of these digital games. these individuals are not only gamers, but they are also participating in cultural production. like other participatory media creators, these video creators take a media text they are fans of and create a new media product from it. they not only play games, but they create new media products from them. these participatory remix videos represent an alternative form of gameplay that expands our conception of gamespace and demonstrates the important role of participatory culture in responding to digital games references apperley, t. h., & jayemane, d. (2012). game studies’ material turn. westminster papers in communication and culture, 9(1), 5–25. caillois, r. (1961). man, play, and games. urbana, il: university of illinois press. castronova, e. (2005). synthetic worlds: the business and culture of online games. chicago: university of chicago press. huizinga, j. (1955). homo ludens: a study of the play-element in culture. boston: beacon press. leonardi, p. m. (2010). digital materiality? how artifacts without matter, matter. first monday, 15(6). retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3036 rowlands, t. (2012). video game worlds: working at play in the culture of everquest. left coast press. taylor, l. (2003). when seams fall apart: video game space and the player. game studies, 3(2). retrieved from http://www.gamestudies.org/0302/taylor/ microsoft word 815-562-1-pb.doc 1 re-examining the relationship between civil society and the internet: pessimistic visions in india’s ‘it city’ anuradha rao national university of singapore singapore anuradha.rao@nus.edu.sg abstract the paper critically re-examines some assumptions associated with the internet-civil society relationship, viz., that intertwining online and offline activity furthers democratic goals, and the willingness of civil society actors to effectively utilize the internet. a case study of hasiru usiru, an internet-based civil society network in bangalore, india, unearthed intense scepticism towards, and refusal to engage deeply with, the internet for activism. the paper examines the reasons for the propagation of a pessimistic view by wired civil society actors situated in a new media-intensive environment, viz., the ‘it city’ of india. the finding that working within the context of a technologizing city need not result in greater internet use by civil society is a departure from the prominent view of the internet as furthering the democratic cause of civil society. keywords: bangalore; civil society; internet; activism; cyber/techno-pessimism introduction the central themes in this paper relate to a re-examination of the relationship between civil society and the internet, particularly the assumption regarding civil society’s willingness and ability to embrace the internet in its democratic quest. by enhancing networking opportunities among disparate civic groups and social movements, the internet is said to facilitate mobilization and greater collective action (bennet, 2003; carty, 2010, 2011; castells, 2002; van de donk, loader, nixon, and rucht, 2004). the increasing proficiency with which civic groups channel the internet for activism is also often touted as proof of the internet’s democratic credentials. the underlying assumptions of this approach appear to be firstly, that the intertwining of online and offline activity furthers democratic goals (carty, 2010; hayhtio & rinne, 2008; jensen, danziger, & venkatesh, 2007). the second assumption is the willingness of civil society actors to adopt an increasingly affordable and accessible internet in pursuance of these goals (see dilevko, 2002). such taken-for-granted notions are critically re-examined in light of fieldwork conducted in bangalore city, india in 2011-2012; where the study of internet-based network hasiru usiru revealed intense scepticism towards, and refusal to engage deeply with, the internet for activism. meaning ‘greenery is life’, hasiru usiru comprises concerned citizens and groups working to protect urban greenery and other urban commons, and functions largely through an email list of almost 900 members1. the pessimistic attitude towards the internet by the ‘core group’ of active members is discussed in terms of pippa norris’ (2001) concept of cyber-pessimism. the pessimistic vision of the internet that emerges from this case study goes against the grain of the mostly celebratory views of the 1 as of june 23, 2013 the e-group membership of hasiru usiru was 858 (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hasiruusiru/). 1 civil society-internet relationship. further, the negative view is propagated by actors who are regular internet users, and who are situated in an environment of information/internet availability, viz., the ‘it city’ of india. the paper focuses on the paradoxical situation wherein activists who are regular (and even savvy) internet users refuse to strategically utilize the internet in an ‘it rich’ city. in examining this apparent dichotomy, the paper delves into the reasons for the critical attitude towards the internet, and the conditions under which civil society actors refuse to engage with it for activism. theoretical underpinnings and method optimistic and pessimistic predictions of the role of new technologies in social and political life have typically focused on individual self-realization, work and economic enterprise, community, and democracy (see kling, 1996; winner, 1997). while modern technology-focused imaginings can be traced back to the 19th century (segal, 1985; winner, 1997), in the current period, advances in information and communication technologies (icts), especially the internet, have produced their own, specific techno-optimistic and –pessimistic imaginations (a.g.m van dijk, 2012; barnard, 2012; carty, 2010; fisher & wright, 2001; hindman, 2009; howcroft & fitzgerald, 1998). this paper discusses attitudes towards the internet in terms of pippa norris’ (2001, p.11) tripartite framework, wherein the various predictions surrounding the democratic potential of the internet are categorized in terms of cyber-optimists, cyber-pessimists, and cyber-skeptics. hasiru usiru was chosen as a case study (yin, 2003) by dint of its active online space, its increasingly prominent role in the city’s public sphere and cyberspace, and its linkages with other civil society groups and government actors. the primary method of data collection was in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews (kvale, 1996), supplemented by unstructured observation (nørskov & rask, 2011) of mailing list discussions, observations in the field, as well as other secondary data sources. the emphasis on qualitative interviewing follows the rationale that as online engagement entails multi-site communications, what is communicated online may be different from what is communicated offline by the same person or organization (soriano, 2012). in-depth interviews were conducted with 20 active members and external actors familiar with the network, of which six were core group members. interview data was analyzed by qualitative thematic analysis, which enabled the identification of recurring themes and salient issues across the dataset (boyatzis, 1998; howitt and cramer, 2005; ryan and bernard, 2003). main findings the analysis revealed that pessimistic attitudes towards the internet by core group members clustered around four main themes, viz.: 1. the internet as exclusionary: the internet was seen as a limited realm working in the interests of the middle and higher-income classes that had unrestricted access to it. at the heart of the elitist conception of the internet lay an anxiety regarding the exacerbation of existing divides between the (information) rich and poor, particularly related to public participation in policymaking and other democratic actions. 2. the internet as amplifier: negative attitudes towards the internet were further perpetuated by the core group’s assumption that the internet worked as what agre (2002) and toyama (2011) term an “amplifier”. they suggest that technology can have both positive and negative impacts as it merely amplifies underlying human and institutional intent and capacity2. hence, the situation wherein the internet is more useful to those who are already connected to (a variety of) media than those who are not, reinforces the situation of information imbalance. 2 see rao (2012) for implications of this model with regard to civil society groups working on the right to information movement in india. 1 3. the lack of conversion from online to offline collective action: the pessimistic attitude of the core group towards the internet is also related to the steady decline in response to calls for protest amongst e-group members. unsuccessful efforts at mobilization towards collective actions deepened the disillusionment of the core group with the internet community. 4. the internet as realm of ideas, not action: whereas the internet was viewed as a critical source of information, this did not extend to its role as a medium to facilitate collective action on the ground. the concern that minimum-level engagement on the internet subverts real efforts to initiate change, as well as the emphasis on physical engagement by government and other stakeholders, contributed to doubts about the ability of online action to produce change. the perception of the internet, and its utility for concerted civic action, varied to a large extent between the core and non-core or e-group members. attitudes among the e-group most of who were connected to the network solely through the mailing list ranged from cyber-skepticism to –optimism, with a cautious recognition of strengths and weaknesses of networked activism. conclusion: the paper has shown that the core group of active members in hasiru usiru view the internet’s role in the network’s activities in a pessimistic or sceptical light. the negative lens is both due to, and responsible for, the emphasis on physical participation and a sense of offline community. interviews revealed that this pessimistic vision originates in a shared political (largely left-leaning or socialist) philosophy that the actors informally refer to as their “ideology”. moreover, failures of earlier mobilization attempts have stymied subsequent efforts to creatively and strategically use the internet for activism. the reluctance to engage with the internet highlights that working within the context of a technologizing city does not necessarily result in greater internet use by civil society. the rejection or refusal of the internet by civil society actors, based on skeptical and pessimistic perceptions of the medium, challenges earlier assumptions of the uncritical acceptance of new technologies with implications for future studies of civil society in an information age. acknowledgments the author thanks dr. t.t. sreekumar for his insights and useful suggestions. references a.g.m. van dijk, j. (2012). digital democracy: vision and reality. in i snellen & w van de donk (eds.). public administration in the information age: revisited (pp. 49-62). amsterdam: ios press. agre, p.e. (2002). real-time politics: the internet and the political process. the information society 18 (5), 311-331. barnard. s.r. (2012). review of the book: digitally enabled social change: activism in the internet age, by j. earl & k. kimport. new media & society 15(4), 894-5. bennet, w.l. (2003). communicating global activism: strengths and vulnerabilities of networked politics. information, communication & society 6 (2), 143-168. boyatzis, r.e. (1998).transforming qualitative information: thematic analysis and code development. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. carty, v. (2010). new information communication technologies and grassroots mobilization. information, communication & society 13 (2), 155-173. carty, v. (2011). wired and mobilizing: social movements, new technology, and electoral politics. new york; oxon: routledge. 1 castells, m. (2002). the internet galaxy: reflections on the internet, business, and society. oxford; new york: oxford university press. dilevko, j. (2002). the working life of southern ngos: juggling the promise of information and communication technologies and the perils of relationship with international ngos. in p.i. hajnal (ed.). civil society in the information age (pp. 57-94). england: ashgate. fisher, d.h. & wright, l.m. (2001). on utopias and dystopias: toward an understanding of the discourse surrounding the internet. journal of computer-mediated communication, 6 (2). retrieved from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol6/issue2/fisher.html hayhtio, t. & rinne, j. (2008) introduction: seeking the citizenry on the internet. emerging virtual creativity. in t hayhtio & j rinne (eds.). net-working/networking: citizen initiated internet politics (pp. 1-38). tampere: tampere university press. hindman, m. (2009). the myth of digital democracy. princeton: princeton university press. howcroft, d. & fitzgerald, b. (1998). from utopia to dystopia: the twin faces of the internet. in t larsen & l levine (eds.). information systems: current issues and future changes, proceedings of ifip wg8.2 and wg8.6 joint conference (pp. 49-70). helsinki, finland: chapman & hall. howitt, d. & cramer, d. (2005). introduction to research methods in psychology, 2nd edition. harlow, england; new york: pearson/prentice hall. jensen, m.j., danziger, j.n., & venkatesh, a. (2007). civil society and cyber society: the role of the internet in community associations and democratic politics. the information society 23, 39–50. kling, r. (1996). hopes and horrors: technological utopianism and anti-utopianism in narratives of computerization. in r kling (ed.). computerization and controversy: value conflicts and social choices, 2nd edition (pp. 40-58). san diego, ca: academic press. kvale, s. (1996). interviews: an introduction to qualitative research interviewing. thousand oaks, calif.: sage. norris, p. (2001). digital divide?: civic engagement, information poverty, and the internet in democratic societies. new york: cambridge university press. nørskov, s.v. & rask, m. (2011). observation of online communities: a discussion of online and offline observer roles in studying development, cooperation and coordination in an open source software environment. fqs: forum: qualitative social research, 12, 3. retrieved may 5, 2013, from http://www.qualitative-research.net/ rao, a. (2012). “sister-groups” and online-offline linkages in networked collective action: a case study of the right to information movement in india. the electronic journal on information systems in developing countries (ejisdc) 52 (7), 1-17. ryan, g.w. & bernard, h.r. (2003). techniques to identify themes. field methods 15 (1), 85–109. segal, h.p. (1985). technological utopianism in american culture. chicago; london: the university of chicago press. soriano, c.r. (2012). new media and political mobilization: the case of online mediation of minority groups in the philippines. unpublished doctoral dissertation, national university of singapore, singapore. toyama, k. (2011). technology as amplifier in international development. in proceedings of the 2011 iconference (iconference '11), acm, new york, ny, usa, (pp. 75-82). retrieved from http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1940761.1940772 winner, l. (1997). technology today: utopia or dystopia? social research 64 (3), 899-1017. van de donk, w., loader, b.d., nixon, p.g. & rucht, d. (2004). cyberprotest: new media, citizens, and social movements. routledge, london, new york. 1 yin, r.k. (2003). case study research: design and methods, 3rd edition. thousand oaks, ca; london; new delhi: sage. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16 th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 language socialization and genre adherence in reddit.com ashley titak georgia state university abstract social networking sites (snss) are receiving attention from researchers from various theoretical linguistic frameworks. however, there is a paucity research considering language use in digital genres from a language socialization perspective. this study examines reddit, a popular forum community, with a language socialization perspective, using a comparative corpus analysis to analyze language patterns. a comparative corpus analysis involves comparing the subcorpus in question (e.g., first year users) to a larger reference corpus using frequent word, keyword, and n-gram analysis to note the difference in language patterns between comments. given my interest in socialization, i compare language in posts according to the user's year of use (e.g., first year users, second year users, etc.), the comment's score assigned by other community members (e.g., positive and negative), and the sub-communities (e.g., subreddits such as the best of netflix subreddit) in which the posts were made, in an effort to explore how language may vary according to these variables and to identify potential trends. introduction with the ubiquity of social networking sites (snss), researchers have begun to examine how members of online communities and networks use language, and to what effect. various theoretical lenses have been used to account for how users learn to use language effectively in these digital settings, including language socialization, genre, digital literacy, authorship analysis, and computer mediated communication (cmc) competence. however, there is still a paucity of research analyzing the language used by novices as they endeavor to become experts in informal online communities, and fewer studies still which examine such socialization within the realm of snss. previous research show that groups develop language norms and shared patterns of communication over time in online communication (postmes, spears & lea, 2000) and that members converge in language style and strategies (cassell & tversky, 2005), suggesting that particular internet subcultures develop their own way of speaking. the suggested citation (apa): titak, a. (2015, october 21-24). language socialization and genre adherence in reddit.com. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. prevalence of memes in some online communities also suggests that some language norms are privileged and shared in particular settings. while it is argued that feedback from other community members and an increased amount of time spent in an environment leads to more generic language use in accordance with community practices, language socialization literature has yet to truly examine the extent to which specific aspects of the community (such as the time spent in the community, larger community practices, and the influence of sub-communities) impact language use. though many snss sites, such as myspace and friendster, move quickly in and out of public use, other snss seem to have longevity, as in the case of reddit and facebook, each of which have lasted nearly a decade. the longevity of these snss make them useful sites to examine long-term language socialization in digital settings. additionally, reddit is specifically useful for this kind of research because a user’s profile contains the number of years a member has been active, a history of the user’s posts, the total points accrued by each post, and the subreddits (i.e., sub-communities) in which a user has posted. these data can be used to examine and compare language patterns between sub-communities, posts with point values assigned by community votes (i.e., positive and negative scoring posts), and between users who have spent different amounts of time using reddit. language socialization theory, among other linguistic theories, would predict that the data will reveal linguistic trends over years of use, that more experienced users will collect higher point values per comment, and that individual subreddits will differ slightly in language patterns that emerge because of the influence of sub-community practices. in regards to the language patterns that emerge in subcommunities, sub-communities with a geographic location, such as the “boston” subreddit, are of particular interest due to what may be revealed in a comparative examination of language use. research questions and methodology in the present study, i examine language in comments made in response to original posts (op) in the forum community, reddit.com. i use a corpus of comments collected using a reddit’s api and python programming. the corpus is divided into sub-corpora, according to posts made during different years of use (e.g., first year users, second year users, etc.), sub-community (e.g., the atlanta subreddit, the news subreddit, etc.) and final score of the post (e.g., positive and negative). this division allows for the comparison of language to identify any patterns that may be available in the data. the number of years a user has been active on reddit, the sub-community in which a post is made, and the community’s feedback in the form of comment scores, are used as variables in this study. while this division is limited in that a user’s demographics (such as age and level of education) are not available, it provides an exploratory snapshot of language use by identifying the more common language patterns that occur more frequently in a sub-corpus when compared with others. in order to study these language patterns, i use a comparative corpus analysis, focusing on frequent word analysis, keyword analysis, and n-gram analysis. a comparative corpus analysis involves comparing the subcorpus in question (e.g., first year users) to a larger reference corpus (e.g., all other users including second year, third year, etc.). frequent word analyses show what kinds of words are frequently used within each subcorpora compared to frequent words in reference corpora. keyword analyses compare common words in the corpus being investigated, which are comparatively rare in a reference corpus. this kind of analysis provides an "aboutness" of the corpus under examination, and also reveals "salient features that are functionally related to that genre" (mcenery, xiao, and tono, 2006). n-gram analyses show sets of words that most often collocate together within the corpus, revealing common structures used within each subcorpora, allowing for the examinations of collocations which differ by only one or two words. through these analyses, differences in language use on reddit can be examined according to the user’s year of use, comment score, and the overarching sub-community in which the comment was made, and reveal a picture of larger language patterns. initial findings the exploratory pilot study on which the present study is based was limited in representativeness by the limited corpus size and the number of years of use included (i.e., only first, second, and third year users). additionally, the data did not include a each comment’s score. however, the pilot study revealed findings which suggest the present study, with a much larger corpus and a wider lens of focus to include subcommunity and comment scores, could yield interesting comparative results regarding the language and strategies used by members of the reddit community, and various subreddits, over time. one of the most interesting findings is that language typically found in memes popular on reddit were absent; this finding is especially intriguing because memes are, by definition, replicated and reposted. the pilot study showed a difference in use of hyperlink language, such as r (which links to other subreddits on reddit), and com among the three years of use corpora. while hyperlink words do not necessarily represent words by themselves, concordance programs such as antconc (anthony,2010) enables these terms to be considered words in its processing. it is true that these terms most often appear in conjunction with a web address, and for the purpose of this examination, they will be recognized as signal words which indicate that there is a shift in modality from the "reading" mode to the "navigation" mode. these words are especially relevant to digital genres because they introduce a mode of reading that differs from traditional genres. digital genres feature frequent shifts between “reading” and “navigating” modes, which changes the experience of reading traditional texts (askehave & ellerup nielsen, 2005, p. 125). users who encounter hyperlinks, for example, may choose to permanently, or temporarily, leave a text at any time (2005: p. 125). askehave & ellerup nielsen (2004) argue that this modality is influential on the discourse used in digital genres. in the pi lot study, three particularly interesting uses of hyperlink language were noted. first, the third year corpus showed an overall decrease in reliance on links to other subreddits and other sites on the web in comments. this means that third year users used hyperlink language less than their first and second year counterparts. additionally, third year users provided more surrounding context when using hyperlinks to other subreddits; for example, they would provide information about why the subreddit was useful to the discussion. a third finding is that first and second year users were more interested in managing the community through their use of hyperlink language. for example, first and second year users may link to another subreddit as a complaint, suggesting that a previous comment or an op belongs in a different subreddit. this kind of usage was seen less frequently in third year user posts. the varied use of hyperlink language suggests that third year users may be less interested in managing community posts, and are less likely to provide an invitation to leave the conversation and to go to other subreddits. the pilot study also revealed other differences among user's posts in the use of reddit's quote function and in the use of language unique to digital settings. the quote function allows a user to highlight a previous user's words in a different font within their post. while users from all three years of use generally used the quote function in the initial portion of their comment, there were differences in the extent to which the quote function was used. first year users used this function more frequently than third year users. third year users seemed to prefer avoiding the use of the quote function in favor of incorporating the context of previous responses into their comments. language unique to the digital settings, such as “tl;dr” (“too long; didn’t read”) and “edit:” were used differently among the three years of use. third year users preferred to use tl;dr as a courtesy to other users. these users would use tl;dr as a means of summarizing their own longer posts, providing other users the opportunity to skip over their longer comments in favor of the summary. first and second year users used tl;dr much less frequently. all three corpora included instances of "edit," which was largely used either to provide clarification and additional information, or grammar corrections. while all three corpora showed instances of clarification and elaboration, the third year corpus used "edit" in this way more frequently. additionally, the third year corpus showed few uses of "edit" to show grammatical corrections in their own posts. while the data used in the pilot study were not sufficient to make representative claims about language socialization, the findings from the pilot study invite further investigation with a larger, more representative corpus. more research into language use over time in various snss is needed, as online applications, including snss, are becoming commonplace among adults, with users almost seamlessly moving between offline and online, and between platforms (buck, 2012). additionally, research is beginning to show that online data may be somewhat representative of the offline population (gosling, vazire, srivastava & john, 2004; back et al, 2010; swartz et al., 2013), and digital literacy investigations are beginning to consider how online language may bleed into offline settings. by investigating the language used by members within reddit , who demonstrate various levels of expertise, we can begin to exami ne how effectively users recognize and adhere to linguistic norms of the community in digital settings. references anthony, l. (2010). antconc (version 3.2.1) [computer software]. tokyo, japan: waseda university. available from http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/. askehave, i. and ellerup nielsen, a. (2004). web-mediated genres. a challenge to traditional genre theory, working paper no. 6, centre for virksomhendskommunikation, aarhus, 1–50. askehave, i. and ellerup nielsen, a. (2005). digital genres: a challenge to traditional genre theory. information technology and people, 18(2), pp. 120-141. back, m., stopfer, j., vazire, s., gaddis, s., schmuckle, s., egloff, b., & gosling, s. (2010). facebook profi les reflect actual personality, not self-idealization. psychological science, 21(3), 372-374. buck, a. (2012). examining digital literacy practices on social network sites. research in the teaching of english, 47(1), 9-39. cassel, j. & tversky, d. (2005). the language of online intercultural community formation. journal of computer mediated communication, 10, 16-33. gosling, s., vazire, s. srivasta, s., john o. (2004). should we trust web-based studies? a comparative analysis of sic preconceptions about internet questionnaires. american psychologist, 59, 93-104. mcenery, t., xiao, r. and tono, y. (2006). corpus-based language studies. abingdon: routledge. postmes, t., spears, r., and lea, m. (2000). the formation of group norms in computer-mediated communication. human communication research, 26(3), 341-371. schwartz, h., eichstaudt, j., kern, m., dzuiurzynski, l., ramones, s., agrawal, m., shah, a., kosinski, m., stillwell, d., seligman, m., ungar, l. (2013). personality, gender, and age in the language of social media: the open-vocabulary approach. plos one. retrieved from http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3adoi%2f10.1371%2fjournal.pone.0073791 microsoft word 785-534-1-pb.docx selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa   subversive memes: internet memes as a form of visual rhetoric heidi e. huntington colorado state university united states of america heidi.huntington@colostate.edu abstract the study proposes that internet memes are a form of representational discourse that subverts dominant media messages to create new meaning. using constructionist approaches to representation, the study makes a comparison of theoretical approaches to the study of memes, including semiotics and discourse. based on the literature, the paper then proposes that the theory of visual rhetoric—not known to have been previously applied to the study of memes—is an appropriate theoretical and methodological lens for research on internet memes as a form of public discourse. keywords memes; visual rhetoric; representation; participatory media culture; public discourse intertextuality of memes while the internet meme remains a relatively understudied phenomenon, a growing field of literature indicates that in democratic societies, memes have implications for identity building, public discourse, and commentary in a participatory media environment (knobel & lankshear, 2007; milner, 2012; miltner, 2011; burgess, 2008; kuipers, 2002). indeed, in countries that lack opportunity for democratic process, the use of memes to express dissent is akin to a public protest assembly (mina, 2012, para. 8). scholars of popular culture have long held that “the relationship between producer, text, and audience is a complex mixture of acceptance and resistance” (williams, 2012, p. 21). based on the literature, we can see that internet memes—remixed images and videos circulated online, inviting participation through creation of derivatives—may be viewed as a form of subversive communication in a participatory media culture. subversive communication responds to dominant communication structures in unexpected ways (baudrillard, 2003, p. 287; de certeau, 1984, p. xiii). moulthrop (2003) suggests that a secondary literacy making use of “deconstruction, parody and pastiche” (p. 703) may be useful for this purpose. memes may function as just such a practice. in early research on memes, kuipers (2005) describes a “new genre” of “cut-and-paste” jokes (p. 70) that emerged in response to the september 11 terrorist attacks. memes are embedded in visual media culture, “parodying, mimicking, and recycling” elements from it (kuipers, 2005, p. 80). the literature indicates that these memes rely on heavy intertextuality (burgess, 2008); this reliance on multiple referents, along with humor “and/or anomalous juxtapositions, usually of images” (knobel & lankshear, 2007, p. 209) is of particular importance to memes’ spread. part of memes’ appeal, then, is their subversive nature. through the appropriation and transformation of cultural texts, meme creators can use “the pop as a launching point to the political” (milner, 2012, p. 305). memes are not the first genre of visual communication to juxtapose images and phrases to create meaning; cartoons also use the technique (kuipers, 2002, p. 462). abraham’s (2009) examination of editorial cartoons argues their humor derives from the ability to deconstruct complex ideas through the use of symbolic images, the highest form of wit (p. 121). to understand cartoons, one must “be familiar with conventional meaning of the cultural sources of the symbol” (abraham, 2009, p. 156). by drawing selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa   parallels to traditional media and by considering memes as a form of subversive communication, scholars have a platform by which to elevate the study of internet memes within a participatory media culture. constructionist approaches to representation milner (2012) writes: “transformation [of memes] requires an understanding of representational conventions associated with specific groups or individuals” (p. 90). hall (1997) notes that in the constructionist view of representation, people assemble meaning through the use of concepts and signs relevant to their culture (p. 25). there are two theoretical approaches within this view of representation: the semiotic approach and the discursive approach (hall, 1997, p. 15). both approaches have previously been applied to the fledgling study of internet memes. the underlying presumption of semiotics is that cultural objects convey meaning, and can be decoded as a text (hall, 1997, p. 35). signs combine to work on both a denotative and connotative level (p. 38). barthes believed that by examining the interplay of the denotative and connotative in the context of popular culture, scholars might examine cultural artifacts as signifiers of “myths” about a particular culture (hall, 1997, p. 39, 41). peirce adds the concept of “interpretant” to semiotics (moriarty, 2002, p. 21). moriarty argues that peirce’s understanding of semiotics may aid in understanding visual forms of communication as capable of carrying a proposition, something that “can be proven or disproven using logical means” (p. 23). brubaker’s (2008) examination of the similarities between lolcat captions (a genre of meme focused on cat pictures) and silent film titles applied a semiotic approach by looking at the interaction of the phrases and the images to both expand and frame the image’s meaning (p. 119). the second constructionist approach to the work of representation is the discursive approach. discourse is “the production of knowledge through language” (hall, 1997, p. 44). for foucault, knowledge is power, and discourse provides the only way of “talking about … a particular topic at a particular historical moment” (p. 44). the discursive approach is concerned with the entire system from which a work of representation arises. discourse provides structure for the social world; it both represents and influences social practices (milner, 2012, p. 19). milner takes a micro-level discursive approach to the analysis of memes as a method of understanding themes at play in larger, cultural-level discourses (p. 19). other scholars of memes echo an understanding of memes as tools to understand a culture at large (burgess, 2008; miltner, 2011); the idea of memes as a form of discourse appears to permeate work that frames memes as a literacy practice (knobel & lankshear, 2007; knobel, 2006; lewis, 2012). memes as visual rhetoric the visual rhetoric approach combines elements of the semiotic and discursive approaches to analyze the persuasive elements of visual texts. visual rhetoric understands visual texts as created to construct meaning (foss, 2004, p. 304). rhetoric is also considered to be persuasive. blair (2004) notes that visual arguments have a unique ability to draw viewers into the argument’s construction via the viewer’s cognitive role in completing “visual enthymemes” to fill in the unstated premise (p. 59). rhetoric relies heavily on stylistic devices—such as metaphor—for persuasive purposes (kenney, 2002, p. 57). edwards (2004) examines the manner in which iconic images become a type of metaphor for national sentiment; these images can be recontextualized for “symbolic association ... by metaphor or allegory” (p. 189). by considering memes as discourse and analyzing the semiotic elements in memes, researchers can examine how memes operate as rhetoric. a comparison of the semiotic, discursive and rhetorical approaches can be seen in table 1. table 1: comparison of theoretical approaches to the study of internet memes as representational/visual texts. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa   approach argument inquiry interest in meme sample study semiotic representations produce meaning as signs; can be interpreted as cultural “myths” relationships between signs and codes, signifiers and signified to create meaning stylistic conventions; relationship between text and visual for meaning comparison of silent film intertitles and lolcats captions. (brubaker, 2008) discursive the production of knowledge by language is mediated by history and the culture in which it occurs relationships of power and knowledge; historical context in production of meaning important how people construct meaning relevant to cultural contexts, and reclaim power from dominant media memes as a form of public discourse and identity in participatory media culture. (milner, 2012) visual rhetoric communication through symbolic processes; visual symbols have persuasive effects on viewers nature, function and evaluation of the artifact’s elements to discover persuasive appeals meaning-making via rhetorical elements. effects on viewers and description of artifact of interest examination of iconic images in editorial cartoons for metaphor, other persuasive factors. (abraham, 2009) as can be seen in the table, analysis of visual rhetoric draws on both the semiotic and discursive approaches for a comprehensive critique of the text. foss (2004) developed a framework for visual rhetoric study—nature, function and evaluation (p. 307). nature is primarily concerned with explication of the presented and suggested elements of the text (p. 307). this approach carries shades of barthes’ semiotic approach to representation. scholars of visual rhetoric might also explore the function of the artifact, which foss notes is not synonymous with purpose: rather, it acknowledges that the creator’s intentions do not determine the correct interpretation of a work (p. 309). this is reminiscent of discursive approaches to representation, in which the viewer’s understanding is key to creation of meaning (hall, 1997). finally, scholars might evaluate the artifact against its apparent accomplishment of its function (foss, 2004, p. 309). conclusion memes are more than internet humor; research shows them to function by appropriation and resistance to dominant media messages. by examining how memes can operate in subversive and representational ways, this paper offers scholars a framework for the study of memes as symbolic, persuasive texts. just as the application of visual rhetoric expands general rhetorical theory by acknowledging “the role of the visual in our world” (foss, 2004, p. 310), examining memes as a form of rhetoric can expand understanding of the way memes function in a participatory media culture. references abraham, l. (2009). effectiveness of cartoons as a uniquely visual medium for orienting social issues. journalism & communication monographs, 11(2), 117-165. doi: 10.1177/152263790901100202 baudrillard, j. (1972/2003). requiem for the media. in n. wardrip-fruin & n. montfort (eds.), the new media reader (pp. 277-288). cambridge: mit press. blair, j. a. (2004). the rhetoric of visual arguments. in c. a. hill & m. helmers (eds.) defining visual rhetorics (pp. 41-61). mahwah, n.j.: lawrence erlbaum associates. brubaker, j. r. (2008). wants moar: visual media’s use of text in lolcats and silent film. gnovis journal, 8(2), 117124. retrieved from gnovisjournal.org selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa   burgess, j. (2008). ‘all your chocolate rain are belong to us?’ viral video, youtube and the dynamics of participatory culture. in g. lovink & s. niederer (eds.) video vortex reader: responses to youtube (pp. 101-109). amsterdam: institute of network cultures. de certeau, m. (1984). the practice of everyday life. berkeley: university of california press. edwards, j. l. (2004). echoes of camelot: how images construct cultural memory through rhetorical framing. in c. a. hill & m. helmers (eds.) defining visual rhetorics (pp. 179-194). mahwah, n.j.: lawrence erlbaum associates foss, s. k. (2004). framing the study of visual rhetoric: toward a transformation of rhetorical theory. in c. a. hill & m. helmers (eds.) defining visual rhetorics (pp. 303-313). mahwah, n.j.: lawrence erlbaum associates. hall, s. (1997). the work of representation. in s. hall (ed.), representation: cultural representations and signifying practices (pp. 15-64). london: sage publications in association with the open university. kenney, k. (2002). building visual communication theory by borrowing from rhetoric. journal of visual literacy, 22(1), 53-80. http://www.ohio.edu/visualliteracy/ knobel, m., & lankshear, c. (2007). online memes, affinities, and cultural production. in m. knobel & c. lankshear (eds.), a new literacies sampler (pp. 199-227). new york, n.y.: peter lang kuipers, g. (2002). media culture and internet disaster jokes: bin laden and the attacks on the world trade center. european journal of cultural studies, 5(4), 450-470. doi: 10.1177/1364942002005004296 kuipers, g. (2005). “where was king kong when we needed him?” public discourse, digital disaster jokes, and the functions of laughter after 9/11. the journal of american culture, 28(1), 70-84. doi: 10.1111/j.1542734x.2005.00155.x lewis, l. c. (2012). the participatory meme chronotope: fixity of space/rapture of time. in b. t. williams & a. a. zenger (eds.), new media literacies and participatory popular culture across borders (pp. 106-121). new york: routledge. milner, r. m. (2012). the world made meme: discourse and identity in participatory media. (unpublished doctoral dissertation). university of kansas, lawrence, ks. retrieved from academia.edu miltner, k. (2011). srsly phenomenal: an investigation into the appeal of lolcats. (unpublished master’s dissertation). london school of economics, london, uk. retrieved from http://katemiltner.com/ mina, a. x. (2012, sept. 11). hong kong citizens’ online, memetic protest. 88 bar [blog]. retrieved from http://www.88-bar.com/2012/09/hong-kong-citizens-online-memetic-protest/ moriarty, s. e. (2002). the symbiotics of semiotics and visual communication. journal of visual literacy, 22(1), 19-28. http://www.ohio.edu/visualliteracy/ moulthrop, s. (1991/2003). you say you want a revolution? hypertext and the laws of media. in n. wardrip-fruin & n. montfort (eds.), the new media reader (pp. 203-209). cambridge: mit press. williams, b. t. (2012). the world on your screen: new media, remix, and the politics of cross-cultural contact. in b. t. williams & a. a. zenger (eds.), new media literacies and participatory popular culture across borders (pp. 17-32). new york, ny: routledge. license this article is ©2013 authors.     selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): harper, t. (2015, october 21-24). beyond bayonetta's barbie body. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. beyond bayonetta's barbie body todd harper university of baltimore introduction in recent history, there have been few video game characters as divisive, hotly contested, or controversial as bayonetta, the star of the game series of the same name from developer platinum games. following in the footsteps of predecessors like devil may cry, bayonetta is a “character brawler;” a third person action game of over the top violence where the iconic main character is a significant selling point. bayonetta herself, at first glance, seems to be everything wrong with the design of women main characters in video games today: her physical proportions are highly exaggerated, emphasizing traditionally sexualized characteristics such as a large bust and a long, thin, slightly s-curved body that’s mostly leg. platinum character designer mari shimazaki has discussed the ways in which she tried to make bayonetta “more appealing as an action game character by adjusting her proportions and extending her limbs” (shimazaki, 2009). a recurring in-game gimmick for bayonetta is that she magically conjures giant fists or feet to attack her enemies that are formed from her long hair, which also forms her outfit; the result is that, when she uses such attacks, she is left mostly naked. unsurprisingly, both the character and the games have come under fire from critics for this sexualized representation, particularly from some feminist critics who argue that she is yet another in a long line of problematic women characters served up for heterosexual male consumption. anita sarkeesian of feminist frequency has said that bayonetta is at the center of her forthcoming “tropes vs. women in video games” series video, the “fighting fucktoy,” as the “quintessential example of the trope” (https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/521788400538370048). however, critiques of bayonetta that restrict themselves to her sexualized body are potentially missing a rich and interesting range of critiques from both feminist and queer points of view. women players inhabiting bayonetta as an avatar may have more complicated relationships with her than might be imagined at first glance. similarly, more expansive reads of bayonetta’s style and depiction suggest that she may be easily read as embodying the performative aspects of drag and camp, relying on excess, spectacle, and ironic subversion for some of her impact and charm. sexualized heroines bayonetta, the character, is an example of what jansz and martis (2007) referred to as "the lara phenomenon." a reference to tomb raider's lara croft, they described this situation as "the appearance of a strong, and competent female character in a dominant position" (p. 147). their work predates the appearance of the first bayonetta title by three years, and was an exploration of the question: do women occupy a greater and more prominent space in video games as heroes and player characters than they had to that point in history? their answer was yes… to an extent. jansz and martis found plenty of evidence of "the lara phenomenon" but also noted that while women were appearing with greater frequency as the main characters of games, women players might experience what they called "contrasting consequences" when playing said characters. sexualized bodies – still a dominant occurrence – could contribute to an already-existing problem culture with mediated representations of women, but playing as women who were confident and powerful may present a feeling of empowerment. the gender politics of the female action hero in both games and cinema have a long history, one that frequently deals with the cultural coding of violence itself as masculine and how that impacts the ways in which the gendered bodies of those characters are read and inscribed (see gilpatric, 2010; brown, 2011). gilpatric in particular notes, on violent women action characters in american cinema, that they: "are not empowering images, they do not draw upon their femininity as a source of power, and they are not a kind of 'post woman' operating outside the boundaries of gender restrictions. instead, they operate inside socially constructed gender norms, rely on the strength and guidance of a dominant male action character, and end up re-articulating gender stereotypes." (pp. 744-745). at first glance bayonetta seems to be an open and shut case along these lines. certainly, critiques of bayonetta as just another sexualized video game doll for men to play with are not off base. her physical parameters and sexualized character are decidedly in line with existing, problematic representations of women as video game heroes. in many ways, bayonetta appears to be a perfect example of mulvey’s oft-cited concept of the “male gaze,” where women on screen function “on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen” (as cited in durham and kellner, 2006, p. 347). put reductively, mulvey argues that women characters in screen media often become objects onto which a dominant, hegemonic heterosexual gaze is imprinted for the pleasure of an assumed viewer coming from that very viewpoint. problematizing the critique the major complication, here, is that bayonetta is a video game avatar. rather than engage the tortured and gnarled thorns of if games are "special" or "interactive" compared to other media, it is enough to say that the character's relationship to a player, who controls her actions, has a demonstrable impact on the interpretive process. in addition, we need to reconsider the coding of violence (and the consequent enjoyment of violent gameplay) as inherently masculine, and the ways in which some games are seen as "for" women or men depending on their content (see taylor, 2003; jenson & de castell, 2010). speaking on the subject of player/avatar identification, adrienne shaw makes an additional excellent point in her book gaming at the edge about complicating our understanding of player sense-making when it comes to characters: "part of what scholars (and game makers) must be more willing to embrace is that the text alone does not define how the player interacts or connects with the characters or avatars. subjective reasons for play and personal preferences drive the very personal experience of identification much more than textual elements can." (2014, pg.109) which is to say that players engage with game content for a variety of reasons, not all of which involve the fictional elements of the game. similarly, we cannot simply reduce considerations of identification with a playable character to a list of characteristics to be matched or not between the character and the player. appropriately, many games critics currently looking at bayonetta have noted the ways in which applying the “male gaze” idea to the character often elides their experiences actually playing as her, particularly women critics who find her body politics and character design to be more complicated than first glance might suggest. for example, games writer and critic maddy myers compares bayonetta to another sexualized “character brawler” heroine, juliet starling of lollipop chainsaw. myers writes, “[starling]… is insulted, mocked and sexually harassed by the men around her… and she often apologizes and downplays her own superpowers” (myers, october 2014). she goes on to contrast bayonetta to that situation, discussing the ways in which bayonetta owns her own power, refusing to be beholden to anyone (even the player). myers discusses how the “dueling influences” of producer hideki kamiya and the aforementioned character designer, mari shimazaki, produce a sort of tension in bayonetta: she is built as a sex object for her (male) creator but given a feeling of confident power by her (woman) designer. as she puts it, “if i wanted to argue that bayonetta was made to be a sex object for a man, i’d point to kamiya’s quotes. if i wanted to argue bayonetta is a power fantasy for a woman, i’d point to shimazaki’s writing. but, of course, bayonetta is both—and then some.” similarly, games critic and feminist scholar katherine cross talks about the tension between bayonetta’s body as an object on the screen, and as a thing the player inhabits during play. in particular, she references this in terms of those moments when bayonetta is nude (or near-nude) on screen, citing john berger’s distinction between nudity and nakedness in his 1972 book ways of seeing. cross uses this distinction to ask: if nudity means being “placed on display” as berger argues, then “is bayonetta enchained to the pseudogeneric male player?” cross’s answer is: no, because the act of inhabiting bayonetta’s body during the game’s primary combat gameplay – and the aesthetic notions of that combat, which i’ll return to shortly – present “less a dance of battle as such than one of dominion. it is the quintessence of that performance that ends with a leg propped upon your conquest’s back.” for cross, the aesthetics of combat problematize the notion of bayonetta as someone onto whom sexual desire is voyeuristically imprinted; through play, she becomes something more, toying with and inverting that relationship. research structure in this paper i argue for more nuanced approaches to critique of the bayonetta series and character that extends beyond examination of her sexualized body, drawing on a textual analysis of the bayonetta series games, as well as the cloud of paratexts and intertexts related to those games: reviews, critical reception, advertising materials, developer interviews, and the like. in particular, this work focuses on how gameplay elements have an impact on the interpretation of the character, as well as narrative elements beyond the character's sexualization. bayonetta as drag queen: camp, excess, and performativity one way in which bayonetta can be interpreted is through the lens of drag, specifically the ways in which drag's use of exaggeration, camp, and performativity to reflect and comment on existing systems of representation. viewing bayonetta as a drag-like parodic recreation – and perhaps even as a drag queen herself – opens up avenues for viewing the character in a new light. drag as a performance of gender is often viewed from the perspective of parody and pastiche. it's a type of parody that is both replicative and (re-)iterative. as butler (1999, p. 75) puts it, “[i]n imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency.” this is an extension of butler's broader view of gender itself as performative, a "stylized repetition of acts" rather than any elemental or essential quality one has. for butler, drag represents a performance that both parodies and critiques our notions of gender, but is also dependent on not just our knowledge, but our internalizing of them; she says the “pleasure” of drag is contingent on our understanding of gendered norms. however, it's important to note that drag is also highly contextual, and while it is generally seen as transgressive, butler mentions in bodies that matter that this is not always the case: "i want to underscore that there is no necessary relation between drag and subversion, and that drag may well be used in the service of both the denaturalization and reidealization of… gender norms" (1993, p. 125). in essence, butler identifies drag as a format for potential subversion, but one which has equal possibility to reaffirm existing frameworks. in fact, it can and often will do both of these at the same time. this vision of drag certainly fits bayonetta, who embodies the tension between "sex doll for male players" and "empowering playable woman" that has been discussed previously in terms of existing research. that her sexualized body plays directly into an existing framework for such bodies is not in question. however, such a reading is dependent mainly on a number of assumed imaginaries, primary among them being a default heterosexual male player. bayonetta as a series also has a strong aesthetic of excess, of "larger than life," that has a similar relationship to drag, specifically to the issues of irony and style endemic to camp (see babuscio, 1978). in terms of scale, bayonetta is massive; the enemies are frequently huge, screen-filling monstrosities. bayonetta exercises her power through “wicked weaves:” huge fists, weapons, and other fighting implements magically conjured through her hair. the game is filled with quicktime events where our heroine creates a gigantic dragon, and the player is asked to repeatedly jam a button at high speed to control the dragon’s consumption of a helpless enemy, with each new plateau of success ranked in terms of “megatons” (as in a measure of force). this excess is notable because it is often intensely performative. for example, harper (2014, november) discusses the ways in which bayonetta’s relationship to the camera is dependent on an aesthetic of performativity in the titles: “bayonetta is a performer. her fighting style is based on dance-like movements and they are filled with excess. her movements are huge and dramatic when they don’t need to be; she is highly vocal and playful … the combat is characterized by excess and being over the top through things like wicked weaves. this is the essence of combat in the bayonetta games: it is as much spectacle as it is combat. in fact it might be more spectacle than it is combat” [emphasis in original]. he goes on to discuss that combat in the series is as much about showmanship as it is about violence; the title character has a clear and distinct relationship with the camera and, by extension, the person on the “other side” of it… namely, the player. more importantly, the game's aesthetic of excess can be a cue to reading bayonetta outside that framework. the sort of violence and action that the bayonetta games feature, both in terms of fictional style and mechanical execution, is more commonly associated with male playable characters. indeed, sometimes the very visuals of bayonetta's action make this deliberate, such as an early scene in the first game where she stands, legs wide, above two enemies, firing a pair of pistols downward at said enemies while the guns are held directly in front of her crotch, evoking distinct phallic imagery. but beyond this example, there are plenty of others that are less dependent on gendered imagery. she uses giant hands to play literal volleyball with a defeated enemy, deploys pro wrestling-style techniques on enemies ten times her size, and so forth. the result is a contrast between the masculine coding of violent acts and the sexualized, "hyperfeminine" character of bayonetta, the sort of "incongruous contrast… drawn between an individual/thing and its context association" (1978, pg. 119) that babuscio says is a critical element of camp. then, of course, there's the issue of gameplay. as previously discussed, bayonetta's genre is broadly conceived of as "character brawler." the core gameplay loop of the series involves traversing 3d maps which are typically linear, intermittently strewn with battles that take place in "arenas" of a sort; bayonetta's enemies will "trap" her inside barriers or fields until defeated, preventing the player from roaming around the entire map during combat. in terms of style, this borrows heavily from the "beat 'em up" games of yore, titles like final fight which involved a flow of "stop and fight, move along" that repeated. in examining other games by platinum's designers, such as okami, god hand, or metal gear rising: revengeance, this structure is one that the studio uses consistently. the games also employ a mechanic known as "witch time." bayonetta has the ability to dodge enemy attacks, typically backflipping away with an elegant cartwheel… provided the player employs the dodge with good timing. a "good" dodge will merely allow the player to escape unscathed, but a perfect one will activate "witch time:" a bullet time-like slowing effect where the player is moving at normal speed. the end result is that perfect dodges give the player a tactical advantage, where they can briefly attack their foes with impunity. the proper use of witch time is critical to gameplay, as some in-game events are impossible to move beyond without it. again, an examination of platinum's other titles shows this to be a common device. metal gear rising relies on a hair's breadth "parry" system to produce a similar effect, while the legend of korra game made for nintendo's breakout animation ip instead gives the player (as avatar korra) a chance to defeat a weak enemy in a single blow with proper defensive timing. the critical aspect of this core mechanic, however, is that with excellent timing, the player can be – and is encouraged to attempt to be – "untouchable" (for more on the possibilities of this design element, see bee, 2015). this emphasis on being "untouchable" takes on new dimensions given the character of bayonetta and her sexualized presentation, however, because it presents an interesting point of critique with regards to her being a doll onto which player desires are etched. enemies in the bayonetta games are continually attempting to hurt or capture her, yet she emerges from these encounters largely unscathed because she is, in a word, untouchable. mechanically, the character's critical ability is denial; she does not simply avoid being hurt, she weaponizes that avoidance. she doesn't simply defeat her enemies, she interrupts and subverts their attempts. bayonetta's most important ability is, speaking as a gameplay mechanic, disruption: of time, of expectation, of her enemies' plans. taken together, these three elements – the parody/performance of drag, camp style, and the performance of denial through gameplay – construct an image of bayonetta that stands in contrast to an interpretation that sees her solely as an unironic sexualized doll. instead the player is invited to strike back against those who would view her as such, through the proxy of the game's enemies. by taking feminine sexuality and, through exaggeration and style, turning it into what amounts to a martial art, bayonetta represents the rare attempt for a powerful woman character to "shut down" the leering gaze in the most literal way possible. a more "realistic" and less stylized presentation makes this interpretation far less likely. discussion the purpose of this analysis is not to say that readings of bayonetta as a problematic reflection of sexualization and the illusion of agency. i agree with gill (2008) in the sense that celebrating texts like the bayonetta games as giving "agency" to women players through her free sexuality and relative power within the text is complicated, as that supposed agency can sometimes be just another disciplinary tool for the regulation of gender. rather, i offer this alternative reading to emphasize that through gameplay and other narrative elements, these seemingly exploitative characters can and do move beyond being solely problematic. however, it's important to consider the above claim in the context of quotes from both butler and shaw, as noted above. bayonetta can and does exist in the flux state of drag performance, simultaneously reasserting notions of sexualized and gendered bodies while offering a way in which they might be critiqued or reinterpreted. more importantly, i think it's critical not to make pre-judgments about what any given woman player might do with the character of bayonetta. as shaw says, identification is not as easy as we might think and a player's context and goals do a lot of work during the meaning-making process. my own position as researcher and player complicates my interpretation of the game as well. as a cisgender gay man, i am already primed to view media through lenses like drag and camp, and i have somewhat reduced stakes when it comes to representations of women's sexualized bodies compared to women. yet the writing of critics like maddy myers and katherine cross suggests that some women can and do share this sort of interpretation of the character, her style, and execution. more research on what influences intersect to suggest different interpretations of such characters and their sharply divergent readings, particularly research which focuses on players other than cisgendered men, is desirable. what is clear, however, is that bayonetta represents a clear site of tension between problematic aesthetic representation, and how digging past that surface level presents interpretive opportunities that focusing solely on "is this sexy or not" critique might miss. it also emphasizes that such characters can be multivalent in ways they are not often afforded the chance to be. again, this is not about shutting down critique of her problem elements – for there are many – but instead about emphasizing that her problem elements are not the only way in which she can be interpreted. more to the point, the assumption that said interpretations are the only "reasonable" ones helps to foster problematic associations about women consumers, their desires, and our understanding of who the video game audience is. perhaps what is needed, above and beyond examination of player reception of such content, is research onto the rhetorical stakes that surround this content. why do characters like bayonetta become such flash points for discussions of what is appropriate or not in terms of sexuality in games? what are the qualities that make some game heroines the focus of intense public debate and others to be, comparatively, footnotes? in examining this we may learn much about our cultural expectations of when and how sexualized women's bodies are considered "appropriate" and when they are not, in video games (and potentially beyond). references babuscio, j. (1978). "the cinema of camp (aka camp and the gay sensibility)." in cleto (ed.), camp – queer aesthetics and the performing subject: a reader (117-135). ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press. bee, a. (2015, may). "i love my untouchable virtual body." offworld. available online: http://boingboing.net/2015/05/06/i-love-my-untouchable-virtual.html. brown, j.a. (2011). dangerous curves: action heroines, gender, fetishism, and popular culture. jackson, ms: university of mississippi press. butler, j. (1990). gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. new york: routledge. butler, j. (1993). bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of sex. new york: routledge. cross, k. (2015, january). “bayonetta and .error404: two concepts of nudity.” paste magazine. available online: http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2015/01/twoconcepts-of-nudity-bayonetta-and-error404.html gill, r. (2008). empowerment/sexism: figuring female sexual agency in contemporary advertising. feminism & psychology, 18 (1), 35-60. gilpatric, k. (2010). violent female action characters in contemporary american cinema. sex roles, 62 (11-12), 734-746. grimes, s. (2003). “’you shoot like a girl!’: the female protagonist in action-adventure games.” paper presented at the digra 2003 international conference, utrecht, the netherlands. harper, t. (2014, november). “lights, camera, bayo (bayo-sutra, verse 4).” available online at http://www.chaoticblue.com/blog/2014/11/lights-camera-bayo-bayo-sutraverse-4/. jansz, j. & martis, r.g. (2007). the lara phenomenon: powerful female characters in video games. sex roles, 56 (3-4), 141-148. jenson, j. & de castell, s. (2010). gender, simulation, and gaming: research review and redirections. simulation and gaming, 41 (1), 51-71. mulvey, l. (1992). “visual pleasure and narrative cinema.” in durham and kellner (eds.), media and cultural studies; keyworks (342-352). malden, ma: blackwell. myers, m. (2014, october). “femme doms of videogames: bayonetta doesn’t care if she’s not your kink.” paste magazine. available online: http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2014/10/femme-doms-of-videogamesbayonetta-doesnt-care-if.html shaw, a. (2014). gaming at the edge: sexuality and gender at the margins of gamer culture. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. shimazaki, m. (2009, april). “designing bayonetta.” available online at http://platinumgames.com/2009/04/17/designing-bayonetta/. taylor, t.l. (2003). multiple pleasures: women and online gaming. convergence, 9 (1), 21-46. microsoft word 764-662-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 internet activism in asia-pacific: a comparative, cultural history first author affiliation country contact@contact.edu style is arial 10 bold style is arial 10 same as above same@as.above single space, 0pt before/after single space, 0pt before/after same as above same@as.above abstract as the internet has become a central delivery platform across contemporary mediascapes, activism around internet access, freedom, censorship, and openness has become more prominent. as internet freedom gathers momentum as a global media policy concept and movement, it is important to interrogate the terms in which it is constructed and understood. all too often, and certainly evident in these recent moves, is a strong, normative sense in which north american concepts of internet, media, activism and even ‘freedom’ shape the boundaries and modes of contemporary debates, policy frameworks, and action. against this backdrop, this paper seeks to reframe contemporary notions of internet freedom, their politics, publics, actors, and movements. drawing from the wider project on asia-pacific internet histories, this paper presents three case studies of internet activism –– respectively in australia, south korea, and japan. keywords internet activism; freedom; asia-pacific; cultural history introduction as the internet has become a central delivery platform across contemporary mediascapes, activism around internet access, freedom, censorship, and openness has become more prominent. with the prominence of debates and dissent associated with the us sopa/pipa legislation in 2011-2012 (see croeser 2012; o’leary 2012; yetgin et al 2012 for documentation of these movements), and attempts by various countries –– notably china, syria, eygpt, burma, and iran (warf 2011; ziccardi 2013), among many others –– to shut down, control, or confine use of the technology, activism relating to the internet has moved centre stage (croeser 2012). this groundswell has seen terms coined such as ‘internet freedom’, ‘digital freedom’, and, a term with an older genealogy, the ‘digital liberties movement’ or dlm (croeser 2012; ziccardi 2013) as convenient, global terms to encapsulate struggles for the democratization of the internet. efforts such as the opennet initiative provide monitoring on internet filtering and surveillance by nations (https://opennet.net/). the december 2012 international telecommunications union (itu)’s world conference on international telecommunications (wcit-12) saw a widely publicized backlash against proposed internet standards from a number of countries concerned with internet freedom, supported by google. in march 2013, representative zoe lofgren and three other californian democrats introduced the global free internet act into congress to create a taskforce to monitor policy threats internationally. as internet freedom gathers momentum as a global media policy concept and movement, it is important to interrogate the terms in which it is constructed and understood. all too often, and certainly evident in these recent moves, is a strong, normative sense in which north american concepts of internet, media, activism and even ‘freedom’ shape the boundaries and modes of contemporary debates, policy frameworks, and action. against this backdrop, this paper seeks to reframe contemporary notions of internet freedom, their politics, publics, actors, and movements. it does so by an investigation of the histories of internet activism, stretching decades back to the 1960s and 1970s to the hacking and technological counterculture moments of that era (ziccardi 2013, 73-123). importantly, it takes a comparative, cultural historical approach to tracking the roots of internet activism, documenting, and analysing selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 these, and considering their significance for how we understand such activism focused on the internet today. drawing from the wider project on asia-pacific internet histories, this paper presents three case studies of internet activism –– respectively in australia, south korea, and japan. it considers questions such as: how were issues of freedom framed? how did activism for the internet develop in each country? how was it related to existing activist movements as well as key social and cultural identities and problematics? was its emergence and characteristics related to particular infrastructures, internet cultures and histories, and specific cultural dialectics and social functions? how did strands of internet activism in each country relate to regional, international, and global internet activists movements? the australian case study retraces the history of internet censorship in the early 1990s, when australian internet was becoming a public medium, and its adoption and use began to raise questions about its rich capacity for cultural expression and exchange – especially of previously difficult to obtain and distribution ideas, materials, and practices. it discusses the first legislation developed to regulate internet content in the second half of the 1990s, and the activism that emerged in response to these federal government moves. to some extent, the long recursive process of these legislative efforts went under the radar of much of the public, as well as many traditional media and freedom of speech activists. however, the growing concern about the creeping extension of internet censorship in australia, heightened by outlawing of largely uncomprehended online fan practices (mclelland 2010) as well as anti-terror legislation, exploded onto the national stage with the election of the rudd labor government in 2007, and its internet ‘clean feed’ proposal. we discuss the development of this piece of policy, and the broad range of activism that occurred in response, leading to its eventual demise. finally, we discuss the australian responses to the sopa/pipa legislation, which, although us-based, also generated mainstream opposition and creative activism in australia also. in the japanese case study, we explore critical points in japan’s internet history that involve unsuccessful attempts by various government administrations to play an active role in controlling internet content in japan. japan’s experience with freedom of speech on the internet demonstrates the difficulties of regulating online content. despite the fact that freedom of speech is explicitly guaranteed in the japanese constitution, the mainstream media have been largely governed by selfimposed ethical codes regulating content. however, unlike traditional media formats such as television and newspapers, often communications through the internet are not edited or mediated. thus, while the internet has expanded in japan over the past two decades, it has also invited character defamation, identity theft, hate speech, racism, and ultra relativism. in particular, we discuss the case of the the popular 2-channel (2ch) bulletin board service (bbs) started to collect ip addresses after a “bus-jacking” incident was publicized through the bbs. however, this control mechanism was thwarted by users who signed their postings using the moniker “anonymous.” the second case we explore is the period immediately following the march 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami in east japan, when calls for regulating internet content increased. according to chiyohara (2012), on march 17, 2011, the national police agency (npa) announced its requirement for isps to monitor server content for rumors concerning the fukushima dai’ichi nuclear situation. however, what exactly constituted the definition of such rumors was was neither identified nor clarified, resulting in widespread criticism of the npa and the government for potentially suppressing “irresponsible” stories about fukushima on the internet. the south korea case study discusses the autonomous activities of internet users to counter both the bureaucracy’s desire of social control and business interests spoiling the commons. specifically, it explores how internet users and civil rights groups joined together since late 1990s to construct a widespread network of resistance against the desire of control and privatization on the internet. in korea, internet users’ counteractivities were spontaneous and voluntarily interconnected with or without any help from the civil rights movement. the widespread resistance of internet users to the government’s policies such as the internet real name system, online censorship, and the rigid copyright system transformed into a united front with civil rights groups against the dominant power selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 systems. the focus in this case study is on the context and the chronology of events and issues, especially since the early 2000s that have led to the rise and spread of e-resistance in korea. in the final section of the paper, we compare and contrast the three cases of internet activism. we draw findings from these quite distinct cases in the asia-pacific, and their historical contexts, and contrast them with the dominant imaginary of activism for internet freedom in the united states context that so powerfully influences the terms of resistance in contemporary movements for internet freedom. acknowledgments this research has been supported by an australian research council discovery project award. references chiyohara, r. (千代原亮一). (2012). インターネット上の流言飛語に対する法規制  : 東日本大震災に関連したデマ情報・チェーンメールの法的側面(<特集>リスクと 情報経営). 日本情報経営学会誌, 32(2), 49–57. [regulatory compliance regarding rumors on the internet: legal dimensions of disinformation and chain mail concerning the great east japan earthquake). nihon jōhō keieigakkaishi, 32(2), 49-57.] croeser, s. (2012). contested technologies: the emergence of the digital liberties movement. first monday, 17(8). retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4162/3282 mclelland, m. (2010). australia’s proposed internet filtering system: its implications for animation, comics and gaming (acg) and slash fan communities. media international australia, 134, 7–19. o’leary, d. e. (2012). a twitter-based event analysis of “computer-based political action” on intellectual property (pipa). ssrn electronic journal. warf, b. (2011). geographies of global internet censorship. geojournal, 76(1), 1–23. yetgin, e., young, a., & miranda, s. (2012). cultural production of protest frames and tactics: cybermediaries and the sopa movement. in proceedings of the thirty third international conference on information systems. orlando. ziccardi, g. (2013). resistance, liberation technology and human rights in the digital age. dordrecht: springer. this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. (authors may use any license they prefer, or none at all.) microsoft word 735-485-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 property or privacy? reconfiguring ethical concerns around web archival research methods meghan dougherty loyola university chicago school of communication mdougherty@luc.edu abstract people are constantly leaving digital traces of themselves online. these digital traces can be captured and archived to study the evolution of web culture, and changing structure of web objects. as archivists develop practices for digital culture preservation, and scholars build methods for web archival research, they consider the ethical implications of their work. recently the focus on ethical concerns regarding web archiving has shifted from focusing on property to focusing on privacy. discourse tracing is used to analyze this focus as is changes over time. this analysis shows how archival researchers and archivists move across and between each other’s fields, appropriate, and play with methods, and ultimately construct somewhat limiting frames for understanding archival research ethics. keywords research methods; internet research methods; ethics; web archiving; copyright; privacy property or privacy? people are constantly leaving digital traces of themselves online in the form of stylesheets, stories, opinions, interpretations, dialog, snapshots, scrapbooks and more. some of it is public, some private, and some of it is discarded as digital trash, but all of it is the stuff of society. these digital traces can be captured and archived using web archival research methods to study the evolution of web culture, and changing structure of web objects. to examine these digital traces, researchers have been building idiosyncratic, ad hoc, and large-scale archives of web objects, and conducting studies using those archives as research resources for some time now (schneider & foot, 2004; schneider & foot, 2005; brügger, 2009). in that time, conversations about the legal and ethical considerations for archiving someone’s web content, storing it, providing some level of access to it, and conducting research on it has shifted from a discussion focusing on copyrights, to a discussion focusing on privacy. in the early 2000s, when discussing the ethical concerns of archiving web material for retrospective study, the concern was obtaining copyright permissions from content producers and urging those producers to create content in a format easily archived (charlesworth, 2003). we built opt-out structures for producers to request their intellectual property be removed from developing archives. the orientation was toward content—intellectual property being copied, stored and made accessible through an archive. ethical concerns were first and foremost whether or not permission was granted to copy, store, and reproduce content in a new context. secondarily, but not less importantly, we were concerned with what copied content reproduced in a new archival context might reveal about the people behind the original content (rauber et al., 2008; dougherty, et al., 2010). but this was a social science research problem—something to be considered when discussing ethics of archival research—it was not treated as a primary archival or informational concern. in contrast, the same conversations started to change shape in the 2010s. ethical concerns about archiving web material for retrospective study began to place increasing focus on the construction of identity through information behavior and informational traces we leave in online spaces, and so shift to concerns of privacy over property. there is increasing attention paid to how individuals’ bits of information may be reinterpreted or misinterpreted as we save it, remix it, and republish it. we question how social network sites pledge to use, or not use information, and balance the expectations selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 about how that information may be reconfigured beyond our control. our orientation has shifted from treating that information as property someone might want to protect to treating it as extensions of self. these are not new concerns. archivists have addressed ethical considerations in their own practices, have been concerned with the ethics of interpretation of archived material, and have their own code of ethics (society of american archivists 2011). researchers have explored identity construction in online spaces as a function of information behavior, and have repeatedly revisited the ethical concerns in collecting data and studying identity-constructing practices (buchanan 2006; buchanan & ess, 2009; zimmer, 2010; papacharisi & gibson, 2011). however, as the two begin to experiment across fields (e.g., researchers archiving web content on their own or in collaboration with archivists, and conversely archivists seeking out internet researchers for clues about what they need from web archival resources), each is reaching back into their disciplinary pasts to reconfigure ethical concerns. archivists focus on copyright and other dimensions of intellectual property they can create clear practices around. scholars have begun to reintroduce the embedded sense of self that is left in information traces. this study traces the discourse around the ethics of web archiving as focus shifts between property and privacy. discourse tracing is used to analyze this focus as is changes over time (legreco & tracy, 2009). field observations, interviews, best practice guides, and published scholarly work describing archival web research methods—show change over time as well as how these different levels of discourse influence each other. this analysis shows how archival researchers and archivists move across and between each other’s fields, appropriate, and play with methods, and ultimately construct somewhat limiting frames for understanding archival research ethics. this shift has an impact on methods for web archiving as a scholarly research method. it is certainly a problem for archiving, but more importantly, it is a problem of information. we are quickly reconfiguring the dimensions and definitions of information and content based on social norms in digital networked culture—how information is used and what information represents in different contexts. these seemingly minor shifts will have implications for research, personal histories, and institutional policies, and so the kinds of retrospective web culture studies we may conduct in the future. because of the inherently participatory and sometimes personal nature of these informational objects that can be captured in web archives despite having been discarded by the creator, archivists and archival researchers are highly attuned to hidden inclusions and exclusions created by dynamism of information online. some of these ethical concerns present substantial obstacles in building web archives for research. the digital traces researchers have to work with are changing, so we have to interpret the traces that are left to us differently. we also must reconsider the ethical implications of the methods we use to gather and keep those traces. more than likely, future research will prompt a different kind of engagement with people, and with the data they produce. scholars have begun to debate the right to forget as essential in a networked age. but while we protect the right to forget, we must also bear in mind the value of remembering and the opportunities that networked technology offers to help us do so. this simple shift is already influencing our ethical debates around internet research. it is likely to also influence the structures we build to preserve digital culture. this study suggests that we should reconfigure copyright and privacy in such a way that we can more proactively take seriously the social responsibility of web cultural heritage stewardship as an important part of the making and maintaining of a digital historical record that is accessible for scholarly analysis in a variety of methodological modes. the debate is not simply a matter of whether or not it is ethical to preserve what some users consider to be ephemeral artifacts in permanent and accessible storage. the debate is far more complicated, involving various information behaviors, conflicting expectations, and different interpretations of how our information online represents our most intimate selves. what’s more interesting is how this complicated debate has evolved, and the kinds of changes this evolution calls for. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 references buchanan, e. (2006). internet research ethics at a critical juncture. journal of information ethics, 15 (2), 1417. buchanan, e. and ess, c. (2009). internet research ethics and the institutional review board: current practices and issues. computers and society, 39 (3) 43-49. brügger, n. (2009). website history and the website as an object of study. new media & society, 11(1-2), 115132. charlesworth, a. (2003). legal issues relating to the archiving of internet resources in the uk, eu, usa and australia: a study undertaken for the jisc and wellcome trust. version 1.0 – 25. retrieved from http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/projects/archiving_legal.pdf. dougherty, m., foot, k.a., & schneider, s.m. (2010). ethics of web archiving. paper presented at the computer supported cooperative work pre-conference workshop revisiting research ethics in the facebook era: challenges in emerging cscw research, savannah, ga. legreco, m. & tracy, s.j., (2009). discourse tracing as a qualitative practice. qualitative inquiry, 15, 15161543. papacharissi, z. & gibson, p. (2011). 15 minutes of privacy: privacy, sociality an publicity on social network sites. in l. reinecke & s. tepte, (eds.), privacy online: theoretical approaches and research perspectives on the role of privacy in the social web (pp. 75-89). new york: springer. rauber, a., wachter, b., & kaiser, m. (2008). ethical issues in web archive creation and usage: toward a research agenda. paper presented at the international web archiving workshop, vienna. schneider, s.m., & foot, k.a. (2004). the web as an object of study. new media & society 6(1), 94-102. schneider, s.m., & foot k.a. (2005). web sphere analysis: an approach to studying online action. in c. hine (ed.). virtual methods: issues in social research on the internet. united kingdom: berg publishers. society of american archivists. (2011). saa: council handbook (app. k-a code of ethics with commentary). retrieved from http://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics. zimmer, m. (2010). “but the data is already public”: on the ethics of research in facebook. ethics and information technology, 12(4), 313-325. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 de grove, f., d heer, e. & verdegem, p. (2016, october 5-8). retweeting the news: towards a formalized approach to the study of twitter networks. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. frederik de grove, evelien d heer & pieter verdegem iminds mict ghent university introduction twitter allows for the re-distribution and dissemination of mass media content. the latter generate visibility for news items (singer, 2014). whereas the selection of news content serve as a (tandoc & vos, 2015). in this paper, we investigate the network processes behind the popularity metrics (i.e. retweet counts) for tweets coming from traditional news organizations. we argue that a possible approach in understanding the structural processes behind popularity metrics lies in building a model in which retweet counts are regressed on network characteristics (e.g. centralization parameters). however, the challenge in building such a model lies in the kind of parameter distribution against which to evaluate parameter estimates. since network characteristics such as centrality metrics are inherently tied to network size and hence to retweet counts, comparing parameter estimates against a normal probability distribution would lead to erroneous conclusions regarding the null hypothesis. therefore, this paper explores and compares two possibilities: (1) comparing parameter estimates against those from randomly generated networks with similar density and size and (2) comparing parameter estimates against those from randomly collected networks on twitter. methodology our data includes 418 tweets, sent out by eight different news organization from belgium and the netherlands that were retweeted at least ten times at most a 100 times. each of these tweets contains a hyperlink, making reference to an article on website of the respective news organizations. first, we collected all users that retweeted these messages (n=7728). in order to e. stable set of connections through which communication can flow. in order to predict the number retweets of mass media content, we build a regression model, including network parameters and control variables (e.g. kind of newspaper en country). in figure 1 below, we present the variables that are included in the regression models. data collection and analysis were conducted in r, using the packages twitter (gentry, 2015) and igraph (csardi & nepusz, 2006). figure 1 predictors and dependent variable of the regression models in order to test for the significance of the parameters, the regression models compare the data to randomly generated networks with the same size and density. this study was based 10.000 networks, randomly generated, variating in size (nmin = 10, nmax = 100) and density (dmin = 0.1, dmax = 0.6). next, network characteristics such as centrality measures were computed on which network size is regressed. the findings based on randomly generated networks the results show that degree centralization***, closeness centralization*** and betweenness centralization* are significant predictors of the number of retweets news . in larger networks; the spread of information is mainly achieved through a few nodes (cf. degree centralization). however, information does not travel far. large networks consist of closely connected nodes rather than dispersed ones (cf. closeness centralization). in the larger retweet networks, the information is spread less by bridges than in smaller networks (cf. degree betweenness). this is links up to the findings with respect to closeness centralization. in short, the increase in the number of retweets messages receive, does not equal wider reach in the network. further we found that the nodes that score high on closeness en degree centralization are more often elites (such as politicians or journalists) rather than non-elites. hence, the spread of news content on social media only. the findings based on random sample data from twitter despite the fact that network simulations have been randomly generated, all network characteristics significantly predict network size. what is more, they explain 90% of the variation in network size. hence, this shows the need for a baseline that can be used to reliably evaluate the effect of network characteristics on twitter. such a baseline would allow us to detect and identify non-random processes such as secondary gatekeeping. in particular, we propose to start from a random sample of twitter messages for which we count retweets and calculate network measures (such as presented in figure 1). these measures could serve as a baseline to compare our results, as well as other work on retweet networks. at the conference, we will be presenting preliminary results based on the data already collected. more in general, we construction of a reliable baselines for twitter research an important contribution to the formalization of the field of twitter research. references bruns, a., & moe, h. (2014). structural layers of communication on twitter. in k. weller, a. bruns, j. burgess, m. mahrt, & c. puschmann (eds.), twitter and society (pp. 15 28). new york: peter lang. csardi g, & nepusz t. (2006). the igraph software package for complex network research. interjournal, complex systems 1695. http://igraph.org gentry, j. (2015). twitter: r based twitter client. r package version 1.1.9. http://cran.r-project.org/package=twitter singer, j. b. (2014). user-generated visibility: secondary gatekeeping in a shared media space. new media & society, 16(1), 55 73. tandoc, e. c., & vos, t. (2015). the journalist is marketing the news. journalism practice, 0(0), 1 17. http://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2015.1087811 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 from internet to the streets: an approach to activism in aguascalientes, mexico dorismilda flores márquez iteso mexico dorixfm@gmail.com abstract in this paper, i present the main outcomes of an empirical exploration on activism and online communication practices in a mexican city, on the case of #yosoy132 aguascalientes. it is part of a doctoral research in progress, that lies on the theoretical approach of the three degrees of communication and on the methodological perspective of multi-sited ethnography. this experience leads to regard the links between online communication, street action and media coverage, in activism, and the challenging implications for their study. keywords public expression, online communication, protest, media coverage, activism the study of online public expression of activists in aguascalientes, mexico: a research in progress the paper presents the outcomes of an empirical exploration on activism and the link among online communication practices, the streets demonstrations, and media coverage, as well as the implications for their study. this experience is part of a doctoral research in progress. this research project addresses to analyze the connection between public space and online communication, by examining participation of activist groups in public space through online expression practices. the research questions are: what factors afford participation of activists in public space, through online expression practices? what is the link between online expression practices, street action and media coverage? these questions become relevant in our context, because ict access has been a key issue in international debates about development (organización de las naciones unidas / unión internacional de telecomunicaciones, 2006). moreover, ict had been regarded as essential tools of communication and organization in social movements of recent years, such as arab spring movements on north africa countries, indignados in spain, occupy wall street in united states, #yosoy132 in mexico, and others. understanding online communication in contemporary societies implies the recognition of ict and its connection with the development, as well as transformation of world schemes of perception and social practices. but also requires questioning those practices and their links, from an interdisciplinary perspective. the main objective of the study is to analyze, from a socio-cultural perspective, the participation of activist groups in public space, through their online public expression practices, to understand —in a local context— the development of global processes of participation, linked with ict. this global / local tension implies a challenge to the study of activism and communication. on one hand, there are global shared logics. on the other hand, there are significant differences between localities, configuring diverse conditions of access and use of online communication —in technological, economical, socio-cultural, and political dimensions—. david morley (2012) proposed to locate the studies on a contextual approach, to produce knowledge on technology-in-use. this project incorporates such contextual point of view. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 the theoretical approach is based on the three degrees of communication theory: network, mass, interpersonal communication, and the links between them (jensen, 2010). this proposal let examining the implications of the interrelation of users with media materiality, and the possibilities of differentiated practices and appropriation forms. the methodological approach lies on a qualitative logic, based on multi-sited ethnography (hine, 2009). the project has been a circular route among theory/methodology reviews and empirical explorations. in fact, this paper recovers a reflexive report from an empirical exploration done in 2012 summer, on the case of #yosoy132 aguascalientes, which aim was questioning the relevance and the possibilities of study online communication practices in activism, around a specific event: the emergence of #yosoy132 movement in mexico, in may 2012. #yosoy132 méxico and #yosoy132 aguascalientes 2012 was an electoral year in mexico, citizens voted to elect president and legislators. along most part of twentieth century, mexico was governed by presidents emerging from the same political party, the partido revolucionario institucional (pri). that changed in 2000, when a candidate from another party, the partido de acción nacional (pan) won the election. mexico had two consecutive presidents from that party, vicente fox and felipe calderón. but in 2012, the strongest candidate was enrique peña nieto, from the pri. many voices, such as the british newspaper the guardian, pointed the links between peña nieto and televisa, the biggest mexican media group, and a lot of irregularities in the electoral campaign, but most mexican media didn’t report it. in may 11 th , the candidate visited a private university at mexico city, the universidad iberoamericana. students protested against him and questioned his position regarding repression case in atenco, occurred while he was governor of the state of mexico. information was diffused by twitter, facebook, youtube and more. most mexican media reported the visit as a success, while disqualified the protest of students. the fact showed the problems with media coverage. this event detonated new expressions among young people: as a reply, 131 students of that university produced a video, facing the disqualifications. later, students of another public and private universities, such as itam, tecnológico de monterrey, cide, unam and uam, integrated the #yosoy132 movement (i am 132), initially at mexico city, spreading to other mexican cities. on may 19 th occurred the first demonstration against peña nieto in several mexican cities. thus began my empirical exploration on the movement, more intuitive than planned. in a first phase, i did virtual ethnography on facebook walls, blogs and youtube channels of the movement, both national and local groups. according with my notes, it is possible to identify two types of publications: 1) statements released for communication and organization purposes, linked to street action, 2) visual/audiovisual productions for social networks diffusion. this empirical exploration, based on virtual ethnography, let me find an important link between online communication practices, street action and media coverage. therefore, i decided extend the exploration towards an ethnographic practice on two of the demonstrations, as well media monitoring, on the case of #yosoy132 aguascalientes, a cell of the national movement. it was unexpected, because aguascalientes is a city with a weak civil society, without a protest tradition. the main outcomes of that empirical exploration were fit into three links: first, the link between online public expression and street action lies in the use of technological tools to communicate and organize the protests in public places, and other activities of the group. street action eventually became material for the online public expression, when activists published photos, videos and notes of the demonstrations. the link between street action and media coverage is a key factor, due to people protested on the streets and local media made a different coverage. also, in protests, people shouted slogans against the biased media coverage —for example, one of the slogans was “no somos uno, no somos diez, pinche selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 hidrocálido, cuéntanos bien” (“we aren’t one, we aren’t ten, damn hidrocálido, count us well”), in reference to a news item published in that newspaper—. the link between media coverage and online public expression lies on practices of the activists, who shared and discuss news items on facebook walls. two local newspapers covered also the online activity of #yosoy132 aguascalientes. (in)conclusions the empirical exploration allowed see that, even if the focus of this research on activism is online communication, there are strong links with street action and media coverage. exploring the links between online and offline action of activists let approach to the practices from their production contexts to public expression. exploring the link of them with media coverage let find, on one hand, the level of visibility of activism in specific social contexts and, on the other hand, provides elements to problematize online communication practices in terms of power, especially in contexts with high levels of media concentration. thinking online communication as a one of three degrees of communication implies the recognition of deep links among different actors, contexts, and possibilities of public expression. it is a big challenge to the academic research. references hine, c. (2009). how can qualitative internet researchers define the boundaries of their projects? in a.n. markham, a.n. & n.k. baym (coord.). internet inquiry (pp. 1-19). thousand oaks: sage. jensen, k.b. (2010). media convergence. the three degrees of network, mass, and interpersonal communication. london / new york: routledge. morley, d. (2012). on living in a techno-globalised world: questions of history and geography. telematica and informatics, 30, pp. 61-65. organización de las naciones unidas / unión internacional de telecomunicaciones (2006). agenda de túnez para la sociedad de la información. recuperado el 21 de enero de 2012, de http://www.itu.ing/wsis/docs2/tunis/off/6rev1-es.html license this article is ©2013 author. microsoft word ir16-template-final.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 language choice on university websites in arab countries ewa callahan quinnipiac university nurit kirshenbaum university of hawaii with the internet unremittingly crossing boundaries, allowing more efficient communication and cooperation among people in different countries and cultures, the issue of common language is often brought into discussion. currently english is considered the international lingua franca, but this mode of communication also allows other languages to have a strong presence on the web. a number of studies have examined the role of language on the internet. for example, the anthology by danet and herring (2007) provided a multitude of examples. however, questions about the current status of languages on the internet requires constant research considering the effects of globalization, increased popularity of english, and, at the same time increased popularity of other languages (callahan and herring, 2012). the major study in this area was research conducted by callahan and herring (2012). this longitudinal study examined changes in language choices in 1140 universities in 57 countries over the period of 5 years. the study proposed a tri-level multiglossia model, where national language is the core language, english, as the lingua franca, the first additional language, and other smaller languages aiming at particular groups of potential customers or collaborators. one of the big limitations of this study was the fact that the arab speaking countries that included egypt, iraq, kuwait, lebanon, saudi arabia, libya, and uae have been analyzed as a one entity – not on a country by country basis following the methodology applied by gert hofstade (2001). this allowed the constancy needed in longitudinal analysis as the data from earlier years tested hofstede’s theory, but this approach did not permit country-by-country analysis. this research attempts to follow up on the study by callahan and herring and explore the linguistic mosaic of university websites in arab countries, attempting to answer questions about the level of multilingualism and the choice of primary and secondary languages, as well as how well the arab countries follow the tri-level multiglossia model. following the methodology from the previous study, this research examined 160 websites in eight arab countries: egypt, algeria, iraq, saudi arabia, united arab suggested citation (apa): callahan, e. & kirshenbaum, n. (2015, october 21-24) language choice on university websites in arab countries. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http:// spir.aoir.org. emirates, jordan, lebanon, and oman. the sample size for each country was 20 randomly chosen sites; therefore, only the countries for which 20 university websites could be identified were included in the quantitative analysis. however, we also examined sites in syria (18), morocco (15), and palestinian territories (18). according to the ministries of the education of those respective countries and/or unesco university database, each of these countries has more than 20 universities, but multiple attempts to access some of the websites proved unsuccessful. even though data for those countries have not been used in the quantitate analysis, observations made while conducting data gathering are included in the discussion. for each site a primary language was recorded together with other languages present. the determination of which language was the primary language of the page was conducted on the basis of the url and the completeness of the content. if two linguistic versions had identical urls and content appeared identical as well, both languages were considered primary. these circumstances only happened a few times in our entire set. the pages in the different linguistic version were compared for similarities and differences and coded according to the perceived purpose of the translated pages. the results of the research confirmed the prediction that the sites in arab world vary among each other in the attitudes toward multilingualism and that those attitudes go further than just official languages of the countries. while the websites showed a number of similarities, which was expected due to the fact of the shared language, they also showed a lot of differences. the countries varied in how often they translated their pages into other languages, in the choice of the language for their homepages, as well as the use of the secondary languages. in the sample studied, sites in saudi arabia were most likely to be in two or more languages, as 19 of them were bilingual. sites in jordan and iraq also tended to be bilingual, as the 17 sites in each of those countries were translated, in 6 cases to more than one language. the countries with the lowest count of bilingual pages were lebanon, uae and oman, translating just around 25% of their sites. the countries also varied in the choice of the first language in which their site appears to the public. english was dominant in this category (83 sites), followed by arabic (60 sites) and french (22 sites). the english primary pages were most frequent in uae, where all university sites but one were in english. two other countries with a definite preference for english were oman (19 sites) and jordan (14 sites). arabic was the first choice for iraq (17 sites) and saudi arabia (15 sites), and french was predominant in algeria. the sites in the researched region in general rarely translated the pages into other languages than english, arabic or french. sites with more than two languages constituted little over 16 % of the sample. while in the case of the secondary language the sites attempted to keep the same structure and translate all content, and frequently also news, the tertiary languages were often in the form of the basic informatory page or a pdf brochure. the most multilingual site belonged to the suez canal university; in addition to arabic and english, this institution translated its webpage into chinese, french, italian, spanish, turkish and russian. this does not consider kiruk university in iraq, which offered a machine translation of its site by all languages available through google translate. other reported languages in the sample included german, spanish, italian, kurdish, malay and persian, but they represented rather singular cases rather than overarching trends. the role of english in the higher education of the countries of the region seems to be even more pronounced when we consider also the presence of english as a secondary language, which has been noted in 52 cases. this means that in the whole sample, 84 percent of the sites are available to english speaking users. the popularity of english is shared by all of the countries with the exception of algeria and morocco, where french is the language of choice. we see here clearly the lasting legacy of european colonialism. the other similarity is the relatively low number of other languages present on the sites, which would suggest that arab countries do not follow the same pattern as other countries identified by callahan and herring. the popularity of english and french can be understood, considering historical influences, but according to the model we should see increasing popularity of arabic and the increased presence of other languages on the sites. considering that in a number of circumstances, the sites had non-working links to sites in other languages, or pages under construction that were not included in this analysis, this might suggest that the issue of multilingualism is currently considered but not fully implemented. however, it is difficult to draw definitive conclusions considering that this research is just a snapshot in time. a follow-up with additional studies, later in time, will allow us to see the changes in the region and to draw conclusions about the trajectory on the languages’ expansion. references danet, b., & herring, s. c. (eds.). (2007). the multilingual internet: language, culture, and communication online. new york, ny: oxford university press. callahan, e., & herring, s. c. (2012). language choice on university websites: longitudinal trends. international journal of communication, 6, 322-355. hofstede, g. (2001). culture’s consequences: comparing values, behaviours, institutions, and organizations across nations (2nd rev. ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. microsoft word 813-560-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 you’re in my 1-1 world now: the practice of remixing gaming culture on youtube theo plothe american university abstract this paper explores content regarding videogame remix culture on youtube focusing on the comedy channel dorkly, a comedy and gaming culture site. dorkly videos take a humorous look at video game characters and gaming culture, often making social and meta-commentary by taking characters out of their textual places and remediating them in new, sometimes nuanced or highly controversial contexts. the author investigated the reception of videos within the gaming community on youtube amongst user-generated comments posted underneath each video. analysis compiled 150 randomly selected comments from 20 randomly selected videos on dorkly’s youtube channel, for a total of 3,000 comments. emergent categories were coded as an indicator of audience interpretation of the text; derivative, synchronicity, authenticity, comparative, evaluative, communicative, and memetic. the implications of the study suggest gamers interpret the text communally, reifying community norms and culture while inspiring creativity and future remixing. keywords youtube; games; gaming community; intertextuality; remix culture literature review: youtube and remix fagerjord (2010) calls youtube a remix in itself: “you might call the site a clever remix of a video gallery, a blog-like commenting system, a system of friends and connections as in a social network site such as linkedin and a file-sharing site or network” (p. 195). youtube is the logical destination for many users and their expressions of remix culture, but there are the looming issues of copyright and creative culture in a formal context. this paper explores this content regarding videogame remix culture on youtube focusing on the comedy channel dorkly, a comedy and gaming culture site created by the founders and editors of college humor. currently dorkly’s youtube channel, (begun jan. 13, 2007) has nearly 440,000 subscribers and well over 97 million views. most of their near 200 videos have at least 100,000 views, with some into the multi-millions. dorkly videos take a humorous look at video game characters and gaming culture, often making social and meta-commentary by taking characters out of their textual places and remediating them in new, sometimes nuanced or highly controversial contexts. their remediation of popular these popular characters including mario, sonic the hedgehog, and any number of fighters in the mortal kombat series often include commentary and narratology from a myriad of extratextual sources in gaming and nerd culture including television, films, comic books, the internet and popular culture at large. for the purposes of this paper, i investigated the reception of the videos within the gaming community on youtube amongst user-generated comments posted underneath each video. this ‘new media’ presents a more interactive form of media, sometimes profoundly influenced by its fanbase; the storytelling is woven into the audience interaction. as jenkins wrote regarding the matrix triology and his notion of “trans-media storytelling” (96), the interlocking parts of the triology make their own unique contributions to a single unfolding macro-narrative, and reference one another freely. the matrix phenomenon also spawned another type of convergence, in the form of a rabid fanbase who research the philosophy behind the story; write elaborate fictions of their own set within its world; create short matrix movies of their own; and of course are vocal with complaints and/or praise as they watch the official storyline unfold. halbert (2009) argues that video remixes constitute a different logic than that of commercial selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 production, whereby professionals create artistic content that is then distributed to the masses. the logic of remix, halbert argues, does not rely on the motive of profit, but of cultural circulation and provides an alternative to the commercial model, “by using the term “user-generated content,” the structure of the narrative implicitly undermines the value that can be placed on the original work of “users” and implies that professional contributions are somehow superior” (p. 929). video remix, then, constitutes the creation of original creative content using commercial sources in a way that often undermines or speaks back to the original source. rather than seeing remixed videos as derivative entertainment, some scholars argue that these products stand as creative works in their own right. research questions research questions considered in this paper will include: (1) how do the commenters on dorkly remix videos understand these videos as remix?; (2) are the commenters aware of, or are they concerned with, intertextuality?; (3) what do commenters on dorkly videos consider to be important in each video? methods this study conducted a content analysis of a sample of youtube comments within videos on the dorkly youtube page. as a research tool, content analysis is often used to determine the presence of certain words or concepts within texts or sets of texts and is frequently used within social media to analyze interactions between users on youtube. content analysis is a common method used to analyze youtube comments. muralidharan, dilistone, and shin (2011) used a content analysis of 113 youtube videos and 2,219 audience comments on the site to examine bp’s public relations strategy after the gulf oil spill. siersdorfer et al. (2010) analyzed youtube comments and their influence using the mutual information (mi) measure. asselin et al. (2011) also used content analysis of comments on educational youtube to determine how students interperet these videos. thelwell et al.’s (2012) study of sentiment in social media posts also included a content analysis of youtube comments. for this study, the author analyzed 150 randomly selected comments on 20 randomly selected videos from dorkly’s youtube channel, totaling a sample size of 3,000 randomly selected comments. the comments were coded based on a specific coding scheme derived from the data. these emergent categories serve as an indicator of audience interpretation of the text and are as follows: • derivative, comments which simply rehashed lines or actions in the videos. • synchronicity, considers the intertextuality of referents and other texts, most often elicited for humor such as “so this is what ari gold does now” by reedparkes on the “mario meets with his agent” video. reedparkes refers to mario’s agent as a pastiche of the agent from the hbo series entourage. • authenticity, considers the “trueness” of the remix to its source materials. robertsfunny1995 wrote “stars aren't even supposed to last that long.” • comparative, how the video compares to other videos that contain similar texts. • evaluative, editorial analysis from the user. on “koopa gets a star,” retrosonicfan58 writes, “this is what happens when your being a dick to mario you get owned.” • communicative, conversations between youtube users. • memetic, comments that elicit internet meme culture. referencing the popular “friendship” meme from mortal kombat, bulletbill479 wrote “friendship: regreted.” selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 implications it is clear that dorkly and other youtube channels like it tread the deep waters of remix culture. its use of various gaming characters, archetypes, and even notions of game design and gameplay itself, belie a sophisticated mashup of genres and media that should be analyzed and further explored. the implications of the study suggest gamers interpret the text communally, reifying community norms and culture while inspiring creativity and future remixing. this study seeks to complement existing scholarship on remix culture and gaming, and develop and inspire new research on the merging of these subjects within the field of communication. references alexa internet. (2012). "collegehumor.com site info". retrieved http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/collegehumor.com asselin, m., dobson, t., meyers, e.,m., teixiera, c., ham, l. (2011). iconference '11: proceedings of the 2011 iconference, 640-642. consalvo, m. (2006). console video games and global corporations: creating a hybrid culture. new media & society 8, 117-213. doi: 10.1177/1461444806059921. burgess, j. & green, j. (2009). youtube: online video and participatory culture. polity, malden, ma. chmedia. (2012). “properties.” retrieved from http://www.chmedia.com/properties da silva, p.d. & garcia, j.l. (2012). youtubers as satirists: humour and remix in online video. journal of edemocracy, 4, 89-114. edwards, r., & tryon, c. (2009). “political video mashups as allegories of citizen empowerment.” first monday 14 (10). retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/26 ellison, n., lampe, c. steinfield, c., & vitak, j. (2010). with a little help from my friends: how social network sites affect social capital processes. in z. papacharissi, (ed.), a networked self: identity, community, and culture in social network sites (pp. 124-145). new york: routledge. fagerjord, anders. (2010). after convergence: youtube and remix culture. in j. hunsinger et al., (eds.), international handbook of internet research (pp. 187-200), springer. fernandez-luque l, elahi n, grajales fj. (2009). an analysis of personal medical information disclosed in youtube videos created by patients with multiple sclerosis. stud health technol inform, 150, 292–6. halbert, d. (2009). mass culture and the culture of the masses: a manifesto for user-generated rights. vanderbilt journal of entertainment and technology law, 11, 921-961. jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york: nyu press. lessig, lawrence. (2008). remix: making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. new york: penguin. marwick, alice e. (2007). the people’s republic of youtube? interrogating rhetorics of internet democracy. association of internet researchers conference 8.0, vancouver, canada, 2007. available at ssrn: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1884349 mclure wasko, m. & faraj, s. (2005). why should i share?: examining social capital and knowledge contribution in electronic networks of practice. mis quarterly, 29, 35-57. muralidharan s., dillistone k., & shin j-h. (2011). the gulf coast oil spill: extending the theory of image restoration discourse to the realm of social media and beyond petroleum. public relations review, 37, 226-232. pfeil, u., arjan, r,. & zaphiris, p. (2009). differences in online social networking – a study of user profiles and the social capital divide among teenagers and older users in myspace. computers in human behavior, 25, 643-654. seneviratne, o. & monroy-hernández, a. (2010). remix culture on the web: a survey of content reuse on different user-generated content websites. in proceedings of the websci10: extending the frontiers of society on-line, april 26-27th, 2010, raleigh, nc: us. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 siersdorfer, s., chelaru, s., nejdl, w., san pedro, j. (2010). how useful are your comments?: analyzing and predicting youtube comments and comment ratings. proceedings of www ‘10 conference, raleigh, nc. 891-900. thelwall, m., buckley, k., paltoglou, g. (2012). sentiment strength detection for the social web. journal of the american society for information science and technology, 63, 163-173. vaidhyanathan, siva. (2003). copyrights and copywrongs: the rise of intellectual property and how it threatens creativity. new york: new york university press. microsoft word 704-456-1-pb.doc wave-riding and hashtag-jumping: twitter, minority ‘third parties’ and the 2012 us elections   abstract with the description of the 2012 election as the “most tweeted’ political event in us history in mind, considering the relative media invisibility of so-called “third party’ presidential candidates in the us election process, and utilizing an understanding of re-tweeting as conversational practice, the purpose of this paper is to examine the use of twitter by the main “third party’ us presidential candidates in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election in order to better understand (1) the volume of tweets produced by the candidates; (2) the level of interaction by followers in the form of re-tweeting; and, (3), the subject/content of the tweets most re-tweeted by followers. the ultimate goal of the paper is to generate a broader picture of how twitter was utilized by minority party candidates, as well as identifying the issues which led followers (and their respective followers) to engage in the “conversational’ act of re-tweeting. keywords twitter; election; third parties; politics introduction utilizing the boyd et al. (2010) understanding of re-tweeting as conversational practice, the purpose of this paper is to examine the use of twitter by the four main “third party’ us presidential candidates in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election in order to understand (1) the volume of tweets produced by the candidates; (2) the level of interaction by followers in the form of re-tweeting candidate/party tweets; and, (3), the subject and content of the tweets most re-tweeted by followers of the respective parties. the ultimate goal of the paper is to generate a broader picture of how twitter was utilized by minority party candidates, as well as identifying the issues which led followers (and their respective followers) to engage in the “conversational’ act of re-tweeting.   previous  literature       the rise of twitter and other forms of social media as factors in election campaigns in the us and globally, although relatively recent phenomena, have been well-documented in academic research (e.g. strandberg 2013; baxter & marcella 2012; larsson & moe 2011; hong & nadler 2012; dylko, et al 2011; gasser & gerlach 2012) grusell and nord (2012) have noted that twitter is a particularly interesting media form to examine in relation to political campaigns due to the relative newness of the tool, and the fact that the brevity of the messaging system (with a maximum of 140 characters) raises questions regarding both the possibilities and efficacy of twitter as a vehicle for political mobilization and support (p. 49). the use of online media for the purposes of engaging, “those…marginalized from the existing political system’ was the cornerstone of what was known as a “mobilization thesis’ whereby the aforementioned marginalized groups could, via online participation become “drawn into public life and civic communities’ (norris 2001, p. 218; cited in strandberg 2013). the expansion of twitter discussions is, of course, at the heart of this study, and the use of re-tweets by twitter users is, other than the sending out of an original message, a vital component of such expansions. the notion of the cultivation of a “conversational ecology’ via re-tweets is a particularly useful concept for understanding the lines between political participation and conversation discussed by hoffman (2011). as boyd et al (2010), re-tweeting is more than just simple information distribution, but also more complex social engagement whereby the re-tweet is, “a form of information diffusion and…a means of participating in a diffuse conversation’ as well as an act “to validate and engage with others;’ thus, “regardless of why users embrace re-tweeting, through broadcasting messages, they become part of a broader conversation’ (p. 10). in addition to the question of how to conceive of the re-tweet (in communicative and participatory terms), a final issue worth addressing is why and what people re-tweet. meraz and papacharissi (2013), citing cha, et al (2010) noted that retweets are often driven by the perceived content value of the tweet (rather than, for example, the person who sent the tweet), while hansen et al. (2011) have described the factors that play into the decision-making process behind re-tweets, noting that, “it may depend on both on the type of content and whether the communication is intended for a broader audience or for a more closed community of friends.’ ultimately, however, the hansen, et al. discovered that, in general, negative sentiment tended to reduce the number of re-tweets, but not, interestingly, when in conjunction with news. method     tweets posted to the twitter accounts of three of the “third party’ us presidential candidates: gary johnson (libertarian), jill stein (green) and rocky anderson (justice), as well as the official feed of one party (constitution) were harvested for the two weeks leading up to the election: between october 23 and november 6, 2012. the first step was to accumulate all of the tweets. from the four accounts: a total of 559 tweets. for each candidate, tweets originating from the candidate/party were then checked for the number of “re-tweets’. from this, a rank-order of the most “re-tweeted’ and “favorite’ tweets emerged, and, from this meta list, the most popular tweets were subsequently categorized and analyzed. the second step in the analysis was to look at the top 10 tweets for each candidate based on a combined number of re-tweets, and to conduct a content analysis of those tweets to identify the topic and scope of the tweets. the purpose of this second phase of the analysis is to gauge which topics generated the most interest amongst followers, with “interest’ defined as the motivation to forward the message to followers. as seen in the results, depending upon the person/party who sent them out, there can be a wide variation in the number of rt and favorites that tweets generate.     results     the most striking result to emerge from the initial examination of the tweets from the four third-party candidates was the extent to which jill stein of the green party dominated in terms of volume of tweets sent out. her 23 tweet-per-day average was four times that of libertarian gary johnson, and six times higher than both rocky anderson (justice) and the constitution party. an interesting result of the study was that, for the two “main’ third-party candidates (johnson and stein), october 23 and 24 proved to be pivotal days in that they were the days immediately following the third presidential debate (october 22, 2012) and what was known as the “first free and equal elections foundation’ debate (october 23) featuring the four main third-party candidates. in other words, the candidates piggy-backed not only their own third party debates, thus generating significant volumes of re-tweets, but also the third debate between obama and romney. in the subsequent analysis of the top 10 tweets from each candidate, three broad themes emerged: (1) military, security and human rights, (2) the failure of the two-party system, and (3), corporate power. in this analysis and discussion of the results presented above, i consider these themes and topics that attracted re-tweets from fellow twitter users, as well as the tactics used by the candidates themselves for linking their political messages to broader themes and agendas.           discussion/conclusions     as smaller political parties in the us struggle to garner even minimal mainstream media coverage, the well-documented flood of tweets surrounding the third presidential election debate (the first two were not covered in the scope of this study) provided an excellent opportunity for minority party candidates to jump on top of that tweet wave, and to weave their respective political messages into the broader political discourse. in some cases, obama and romney were attacked for what they did say; but, interestingly, some of the highest levels of re-tweets came when third-party candidates played off of the main presidential debates – by, for example, using the #debate and #election2012 hashtags – by addressing a topic from those same debate, but injecting what was unsaid. in these cases, johnson and stein reminded their followers of the innocent civilians killed by drone strikes in pakistan and afghanistan. by hashtagging #obama, #debate and #election2012, the candidates essentially utilized the popularity of broad twitter conversations as a spring board for specific policy critique and suggestions. thus, “wave riding’ already significant twitter flows proved to be successful in a number of cases.   bibliography   ausserhofer, j., & maireder, a. (2013) ‘national politics on twitter: structures and topics of a networked public sphere’, information, communication & society, (ahead-of-print), pp. 1-24. baxter, g., & marcella, r. (2012) ‘does scotland “like” this? social media use by political parties and candidates in scotland during the 2010 uk general election campaign’, libri, vol. 62, no. 2, pp. 109-124. boyd, d., golder, s., & lotan, g. (2010, january) ‘tweet, tweet, retweet: conversational aspects of retweeting on twitter’. in system sciences (hicss), 2010 43rd hawaii international conference (pp. 1-10). ieee. cha, m., haddadi, h., benevenuto, f., & gummadi, k. p. (2010, may) ‘measuring user influence in twitter: the million follower fallacy’. in 4th international aaai conference on weblogs and social media (icwsm) (vol. 14, no. 1, p. 8). dylko, i. b., beam, m. a., landreville, k. d., & geidner, n. (2012) ’filtering 2008 us presidential election news on youtube by elites and nonelites: an examination of the democratizing potential of the internet’, new media & society, vol. 14, no. 5, pp. 832-849. golbeck j, grimes jm and rogers a (2010) ‘twitter use by the us congress’, journal of the american society for information science and technology, vol. 61, no. 8, pp. 1612–1621. grusell, m., & nord, l. (2012) ‘three attitudes to 140 characters the use and views of twitter in political party communications in sweden’, public communication review, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 48-61. hansen, lars kai, arvidsson, a., nielsen, f., colleoni, e., & etter, m. (2011) ‘good friends, bad news-affect and virality in twitter.’ future information technology (2011), pp. 34-43. hoffman, l. h. (2012) ‘participation or communication? an explication of political activity in the internet age’, journal of information technology & politics, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 217-233. honeycutt, c., & herring, s. c. (2009, january). ‘beyond microblogging: conversation and collaboration via twitter’. in system sciences, 2009. hicss'09. 42nd hawaii international conference on (pp. 1-10). ieee. hong, s., & nadler, d. (2012) ‘which candidates do the public discuss online in an election campaign?: the use of social media by 2012 presidential candidates and its impact on candidate salience’, government information quarterly, vol. 29, pp. 455-461. larsson, a. o., & moe, h. (2012) ‘studying political microblogging: twitter users in the 2010 swedish election campaign’, new media & society, vol. 14, no. 5, pp. 729-747. lem, s. b., & dowling, c. m. (2006). picking their spots: minor party candidates in gubernatorial elections. political research quarterly, 59(3), 471-480. meraz, s., & papacharissi, z. (2013) networked gatekeeping and networked framing on# egypt. nader, r., & amato, t. (2001) ‘so you want to run for president? ha! barriers to third-­‐party entry’, national civic review, vol. 90 no. 2, pp. 163-172. shepard, r. m. (2011) deeds done in different words: a genre-based approach to third party presidential campaign discourse. unpublished doctoral dissertation: university of kansas. strandberg, k. (2013) ‘a social media revolution or just a case of history repeating itself? the use of social media in the 2011 finnish parliamentary elections’ new media & society (ahead-of-print), pp. 1-20. yardi, s., & boyd, d. (2010) ‘dynamic debates: an analysis of group polarization over time on twitter’, bulletin of science, technology & society, vol. 30, no. 5, pp. 316-327.     selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): ask, k and abidin, c (2017, october 18-21). my life is a mess: selfdeprecating relatability and the memefication of student publics. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. my life is a mess: self-deprecating relatability and the memefication of student publics kristine ask department of interdisciplinary studies of culture, norwegian university of science and technology crystal abidin media management and transformation centre (mmtc), jönköping university, centre for culture and technology (ccat), curtin university our current educational paradigm demands that marginalized and silenced student voices be heard. however, this inclusion is hampered by institutional power relations as well as limitations on what topics students are allowed to speak on (carey 2013). this paper aims to address this discrepancy by analyzing memefied discourses about higher education as an expression of a new student public: how is higher education framed by student memes? what do student memes tell us about the lifeworld and collective identities of students? we also analyze limitations of meme based publics, emphasizing processes of inclusion and exclusion through specific vernaculars of visual and discursive humor. memes depicting student issues are gaining increasing visibility in popular media outlets (eg. horton, 2016), generating a bona fide genre of “student problem” memes. one key source is the international facebook page “student problems” (sp) with almost 3.4 million subscribers. the user submission-based page belongs to the multiplatform brand “student problems”, promoted as “the home of all the best student entertainment, knowledge and comedy” (studentproblems.co.uk). the paper is based on content analysis of posts over a month-long period through an inductive approach, similar to grounded theory, where posts are coded openly and the emerging themes result in the categories presented. to understand how student memes frame higher education, they will be considered contributions to a new “student public”. the investigation of publics and counter-publics (warner 2002) has proven fruitful in directing attention to discourses that fall outside the mainstream, and as educators we should take care to regard such valuable content “as a tool that makes at-risk youth more visible and thus accessible to adults” (dobson, 2016, p. 179). here, publics are broadly defined as a collection of people with a shared understanding, identity, interest or rhetoric. we specify this student public as a networked public (boyd 2010), where shareability and relatability (abidin, 2017) are highly valued. combined, these features directs the form and content of the meme discourse. memeing student life and self-deprecating relatability sp memes belong to a legacy of self-deprecating memes on the internet that have been enacted to “demonstrate affective affinities with others” (kanai, 2016, p. 4), and display “young netizens’ disillusionment with the apparent lack of possibility for upward socioeconomic mobility” (szablewicz, 2014, p. 259). they are “not simply as the digital representation of a pre-existing ‘offline’ individual [person] in pain” (dobson, 2016, p. 179), but make visible emic conversations not normally granted space in higher education dialogues. sp memes frequently describe higher education as pointless and stressful. while frustration is aimed at both institutions and teachers, the prominent discourse is of internalized failure -of powerlessness and inadequacy. the internalization of external sources of pressure may be understood as an example of governmentality (foucault, 1979), but also as an expression of the alarming rate of mental health issues among students. student wellbeing and mental health has recently garnered public interest (eg. gurney-read, 2016). the prominence of emotional strife in student memes indicates that this attention is warranted. given the stigma surrounding mental health issues, we should consider the memefied stories of persistent sadness, fear, and frustration as a valued outlet about topics that might be hard to raise in institutionalized settings for student participation. figure 1: examples of sp memes describing self-loathing and emotional strife (left), as well as inadequacy and lack of control (right). collective identities the making and sharing of memes is a way to make and negotiate norms through collective identities (gal, shifman, & kampf, 2015). through a performative lens, the use of memes may be understood as a form of boundary work, where normality and deviance, inside and outside, is continually made and remade. the performance of memes “shape the mindsets, forms of behavior, and actions of social groups” (shifman, 2014, p. 18). a recurring identifier in the sp memes is an everyday life where procrastination, and consequently self-loathing, is commonplace, and where institutions of higher education are too demanding. the collective identity of students in sp memes is thus that of a failing student. however, in the making of a relatable collective student identity, minority identities are largely erased. while some posts feature people of colour (poc), the struggles they describe are not related to structural inequality. instead, the depicted student life world is characterized by non-gendered, non-racialized, non-ableist, and non-ageist issues such as forgetting deadlines, not understanding the lecturer, or drinking to feel better. internalized failure amidst a failing neoliberal higher education overall, the sp memes tells a sad story about the lifeworld of students. in some ways, they mirror ongoing debates in mainstream publics about the consequences of the neoliberal university, where production and performance is valued to the point of causing harm (through stress, insecurity, depression, and resulting reactions of selfharm) to those involved. through a close reading of sp memes, our paper offers a register to extrapolate personal struggles to the failing of institutional structures, thus translating dark humor for educators to improve youth wellbeing and mental health in the digital age. references abidin, c. (2017). influencer extravaganza: a decade of commercial ‘lifestyle’ microcelebrities in singapore. in l .hjorth, h. horst, g. bell, and a. galloway (ed.) routledge companion to digital ethnography, edited by. london: routledge. 158168 boyd, d. m. (2010). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in z. papacharissi (ed.), networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites. 39–58. http://doi.org/10.1162/dmal.9780262524834.119 carey, p. (2013). representation and student engagement in higher education: a reflection on the views and experiences of course representatives. journal of further and higher education, 37(1), 71–88. http://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2011.644775 dobson, a. s. (2016). girls’ ‘pain memes’ on youtube: the production of pain and femininity in a digital network. in s. baker, b. robards, b. buttigieg (ed). youth http://doi.org/10.1162/dmal.9780262524834.119 http://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2011.644775 cultures and subcultures: australian perspectives, farnham: ashgate. 173-182 foucault, m. (1979). on governmentality. ideology & consciousness, (6), 5–21. gal, n., shifman, l., & kampf, z. (2015). “it gets better”: internet memes and the construction of collective identity. new media & society, 18(8), 1698–1714. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814568784 gurney-read, j. (2016). one in four university students suffer from mental health problems. the telegraph, 11 august. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2016/08/11/one-in-four-university-studentssuffer-from-mental-health-proble/ kanai, a. (2016). sociality and classification: reading gender, race, and class in a humorous meme. social media + society, 2(4), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116672884 milner, r. a. (2013). hacking the social: internet memes, identity antagonism, and the logic of lulz. the fibreculture journal, 156. http://twentytwo.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-156-hacking-the-social-internet-memesidentity-antagonism-and-the-logic-of-lulz/ shifman, l. (2014). memes in digital culture. massachusetts: mit press. stryker, s. (2015). 27 pictures that will make way too much sense to college students. buzzfeed, 13 october. https://www.buzzfeed.com/samstryker/college-studentpictures-memes?utm_term=.et7v9ogoea#.ow26vy24pk szablewicz, m. (2014). the ‘losers’ of china’s internet: memes as ‘structures of feeling’ for disillusioned young netizens. china information, 28(2), 259-275. https://doi.org/10.1177/0920203x14531538 warner, m. (2002). publics and counterpublics. public culture, 14(1), 49–90. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814568784 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2016/08/11/one-in-four-university-students-suffer-from-mental-health-proble/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2016/08/11/one-in-four-university-students-suffer-from-mental-health-proble/ https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116672884 http://twentytwo.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-156-hacking-the-social-internet-memes-identity-antagonism-and-the-logic-of-lulz/ http://twentytwo.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-156-hacking-the-social-internet-memes-identity-antagonism-and-the-logic-of-lulz/ https://www.buzzfeed.com/samstryker/college-student-pictures-memes?utm_term=.et7v9ogoea#.ow26vy24pk https://www.buzzfeed.com/samstryker/college-student-pictures-memes?utm_term=.et7v9ogoea#.ow26vy24pk https://doi.org/10.1177/0920203x14531538 microsoft word 855-599-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 managing community through digital talk: podcasting in the south asian diaspora lia wolock university of michigan united states lwolock@umich.edu abstract are podcasts “internet radio shows,” “talking blogs,” or a new medium? utilizing insights from scholarship on broadcast talk and new media studies, this paper argues for a careful consideration of the (sometimes old, sometimes new) technologies and the discourses mobilized in the production and use of podcasts. based on an overview of english-language south asian diasporic podcasts, and an analysis of the south asian journalist association’s web/podcast, this paper will first sketch the contours of an online community and address how the way it serves itself is shaped by technological affordances, community needs, and discourses about the south asian diaspora and the potential of “new media.” it will then consider the specific talk strategies of one web/podcast to illustrate how the use of this new configuration of technologies and discourses allows for a viable, variously bounded special interest community to be repeatedly talked into being. keywords podcasting; broadcast talk; community; diaspora podcasts have been significantly under-studied in comparison to other digital communication and media tools, such as blogs, games, and social networking sites. more than this, when they are studied they are frequently a part of the mainstream media studies discussion only as markers in larger narratives concerned with the possibilities and dangers of digital plenitude and the implications of the shifting of institutional resources to new media frontiers (hutchins & rowe, 2009; o'baoill, 2009). such coverage often highlights political questions: who has the power to speak and be heard in this situation, and in what ways (tan 2011)? most conspicuously, scholars ponder: can the internet be a stage or force for democracy and civic engagement (macdougall, 2011; jarrett, 2009)? these are important questions to study, but such analyses highlight, in the first place, political and ideological questions to the exclusion of others which are also crucial in understanding the role of media in the production and “reproduction of social life” (montgomery, 1986, p. 424). in the case of podcasting, we must also study its communicative characteristics and real uses by ordinary people, the technological, material, and cultural conditions of the production of podcasts, and the lived experiences of producing, publishing, seeking, downloading, and listening. this paper seeks to begin this intervention by way of a case study of the south asian diasporic podcast-verse generally, and the south asian journalist association’s (saja’s) web/podcast1 specifically. the english-language south asian diasporic podcast-verse is not only shaped by digital sound production, editing, and distribution technology, and access to it, but also by general trends in podcasting, existing and developing networks of social capital and engagement in the diasporic community, and general discourses about what are typical, desirable “south asian” topics. thus, the vast majority of podcasts in this diasporic genre are related to traditional and fusion music styles, from curated lists of bollywood songs2 to djed radio-like sessions of bhangra hits3 to educational programming about the finer points of listening to classical musical styles4. this first and largest 1  http://www.blogtalkradio.com/saja. 2 soundcloud (https://www.soundcloud.com), for example, is a fruitful site for such curated sets. 3 http://thedesinetworks.com/. 4 http://podcast.prasantmusic.com/.   selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 category of south asian diasporic podcasts frequently overlaps with the other two major categories: institution-affiliated and interview programs. the former include programs associated with and promoting the goals of institutions and organizations such as the smithsonian, the bbc, or saja. the latter include programs based around the popular interview podcast format, and involve people in the diaspora interested in or affiliated with south asia interviewing others on south asia-related topics5. the study of these trends in the south asian diaspora highlights that the actual use of and investment in the tool of podcasting is as much a matter of general podcasting trends (e.g. the overwhelming number of music and interview shows) and technological affordances (e.g. the way in which podcasting lends itself to music dissemination) and technological history (e.g. podcasting’s association with radio and radio’s emphasis on music) as it is a matter of south asian diasporic cultural developments (e.g. strong transnational music distribution networks that existed prior to the internet). this paper also seeks to employ insights gained from the application of conversation analysis to broadcast talk toward the study of podcast talk. the tenets of conversation analysis direct us to notice and appreciate the manner in which everyday talk is organized, complex, and functional for a number of complicated uses (grice, 1989; sacks, 1984; brown & levinson, 1987; austen, 1955). applying this to radio and television talk, scholars have shown that the talk of hosts constantly does careful work to manage, from moment to moment, the situation of the show so that it may be properly participated in and enjoyed by audience members (scannell, 1996; montgomery, 1986; heritage 1985; brunt, 1990). this is especially true of radio broadcast talk, as the entire situation must be spoken into being. scannell (2010) encourages us to consider, then, the way that the technologies we create to use for the production of media (i.e. the teleprompter) shape the communicative ethos of our programming (i.e. so that newscasters may look us in the eye and seem trustworthy). that, in turn, has implications for the situation created as part of the show in which we as listeners participate, and thus for our relationship with the show, with the host, and with each other. the saja web/podcast is produced using the blogtalkradio platform, allowing multiple interviewees and even audience members to phone in and join the conversation that is both webcast as it is being recorded, and archived by various sites for later access. in its desire to serve different listener needs— identity (for south asian heritage journalists), affiliation (for experts in the field), or simply interest (for those with no connection to anything south asian)—the saja program uses the tools available to talk a viable yet messy community into being. it is a community with porous, and variable borders, welcoming all and managing discordant temporalities (e.g. time zones and delayed listening) and backgrounds, but providing a special site of exalted interaction for those who are professional journalists of south asian heritage covering south asian topics living in north america. moreover, it is a community that does not necessarily exist until it is continuously talked into being. to manage its boundaries and make some listeners feel more included than others, program hosts unconsciously use several mechanisms: fluctuating pronoun interchangeability6 depending on who is being addressed to indicate similarity or difference; repeatedly returning to pro-visibility narratives of diasporic south asians’ community investment and success and the south asian experience rather than the specified podcast topic; the need to talk other identity memberships into being (e.g. whiteness); and the conspicuous presence or absence of explanations of community-specific terms. the questions of community inclusion and exclusion bring back to the fore issues of politics and power, but through an actual investigation of podcasting’s communicative characteristics. such an investigation also forces us to appreciate what producing and listening to this web/podcast might mean for people on a daily basis, as an everyday activity, urging us to reconsider the scholarly emphasis placed on overtly political civic engagement as the most desired outcome of media use. in the end, this extended investigation of the south asian diasporic podcast-verse and the saja program thus brings 5 http://kamlashow.com/podcast/. 6 pronoun interchangeability refers to the way speakers systematically switch between referring to others using pronouns that suggest similarity (you, we, us) or difference (they, it, one) in a manner that implies who is and is not part of an in-group (brunt, 1990). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 us one step closer to understanding what podcasting is: not exactly a new medium, but a new intentional and practical use of new and old technologies, social protocol (gitelman, 2005, p. 5), and discourses to build and manage previously untenable forms of community. acknowledgments i am indebted to paddy scannell and megan sapnar ankerson for help and guidance on this work, and more generally would like to thank all of my colleagues at the university of michigan. an earlier version of this research was presented at the global fusion conference in october 2012, and i am grateful to the other conference participants for their keen insights, questions, and suggestions. references austen, j. (1955). how to do things with words: the williams james lectures delivered at harvard university in 1955. (j. urmson, ed.) oxford: clarendon. brown, p., & levinson, s. c. (1987). politeness: some universals in language usage. cambridge: cambridge university press. brunt, r. (1990). points of view. in a. goodwin, & g. whannel (eds.), understanding television (pp. 60-73). london: routledge. gitelman, l. (2006). introduction: media as historical subjects. in l. gitelman, always already new: media, history, and the data of culture (pp. 1-22). cambridge, ma: mit press. grice, p. (1989). studies in the way of words. london: harvard university press. heritage, j. (1985). analysing news interviews: aspects of the production of talk for an overhearing audience. in t. van dijk (ed.), handbook of discourse analysis 3 (pp. 95-119). london: academic press. hutchins, b., & rowe, d. (2009). from broadcast scarcity to digital plenitude: the changing dynamics of the media sport content economy. television & new media, 354-370. jarrett, k. (2009). private talk in the public sphere: podcasting as broadcast talk. communication, politics & culture, 42(2), 116-135. macdougall, r. c. (2011). podcasting and political life. american behavioral scientist, 714-732. montgomery, m. (1986). dj talk. media, culture & society, 421-440. o'baoill, a. (2009). broadcasting in an on-demand world: creating community radio in the era of podcasting and webcasting. dissertation. sacks, h. (1984). on doing “being ordinary.” in j. m. atkinson & j. heritage (eds.), structures of social action: studies in conversation analysis (pp. 413-429). cambridge: cambridge university press. scannell, p. (1996). identity. in p. scannell, radio, television & modern life (pp. 117-143). oxford: blackwell. scannell, p. (2010). television and history: questioning the archive. the communication review, 37-51. tan, s. e. (2011). 'harmless' and 'hump-less' political podcasts: censorship and internet resistance in singapore. music, sound and the moving image, 5(1), 39-70. license this article is ©2013 lia wolock, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  hildén,  j.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  whose  privacy?  lobbying  for  the  free  flow  of   european  personal  data.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  meeting  of  the  association  of   internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.   whose  privacy?  lobbying  for  the  free  flow  of  european   personal  data     jockum  hildén   university  of  helsinki,  department  of  social  research     the  european  institutions  recently  agreed  on  a  new  general  data  protection  regulation   (gdpr),  which  will  address  data  sharing  and  information  privacy  challenges  associated   with  the  global  flow  of  personal  data.  the  european  union  aims  to  regulate  beyond  its   territorial  borders,  as  the  regulation  will  affect  all  businesses  and  organizations  which   collect  data  on  eu  citizens,  regardless  of  country  of  origin.       for  this  reason,  companies  from  all  over  the  world  have  tried  to  influence  european   legislators  in  all  stages  of  the  legislative  process.  after  over  three  years  of  amendments   and  negotiations,  the  european  institutions  finally  agreed  on  the  final  text.  the  question   is,  how  did  the  regulation  come  into  being  and  which  stakeholders  were  effective  in   influencing  the  legislators?  this  paper  focuses  on  presenting  how  the  eu  council’s   amendments  to  the  draft  regulation  reflects  the  positions  of  stakeholders  from  a  wide   array  of  sectors  that  will  be  affected  by  the  new  law.       not  code  as  law,  but  law  as  a  reaction  to  code     stakeholder  involvement  in  the  european  union’s  legislative  processes  has  previously   been  studied  in  relation  to  its  contribution  to  the  throughput  legitimacy  of  eu  policy   (schmidt,  2013).  throughput  legitimacy  refers  to  how  institutionalized  policy  processes   can  contribute  to  the  overall  legitimacy  of  political  institutions  in  addition  to  or  in  lack  of   policy  input  from  the  electorate.       however,  the  élite  pluralism  paradigm,  according  to  which  the  policy  processes  in  the   eu  are  mostly  attended  by  powerful  interest  groups  (coen,  2007),  provides  a  striking   critique  against  stakeholder  involvement  as  a  way  to  increase  policy  legitimacy.  when   legislators  lack  expert  knowledge  in  policy  areas,  the  consultative  relationship  between   the  eu  institutions  and  stakeholders  might  evolve  into  one  of  dependency  instead  of   mutual  benefit.       the  first  draft  regulation,  as  presented  by  the  eu  commission  in  2012,  was  preceded   by  two  formal  consultations  on  data  protection,  one  in  2009  and  one  in  2011,  which   were  open  to  the  public.  my  earlier  research  showed  that  stakeholders  representing   private  interests  were  far  better  represented  than  public  interests  in  the  consultations,   which  would  support  the  élite  pluralism  paradigm.    private  interests  were  expressed  in   97  of  167  replies  to  the  2009  consultation,  and  in  152  of  288  replies  in  2011.  in  other   words,  the  majority  of  all  replies  represented  private  interests  rather  than  public  ones.       the  data  protection  consultations  are  an  example  of  how  companies  lobby  eu   institutions  through  several  different  associations  and  networks  as  well  as  in  their  own   capacity.  while  structural  imbalances  in  the  participation  of  stakeholders  in  the   legislative  process  can  be  a  sign  of  biased  legislation,  one  must  also  compare  the   documents  lobbyists  have  provided  to  the  different  drafts  by  the  eu  institutions  in  order   to  draw  conclusions  on  lobbying  influence  at  all  stages.  the  lobbying  documents  can   hence  reveal  how  informational  privacy  is  constructed  not  only  legally,  but  also  socially,   politically  and  technically.       new  technologies  have  always  challenged  not  only  existing  regulation  but  also  existing   social  norms  of  privacy,  on  which  laws  are  based  (tene  &  polonetsky,  2013).   in  the  case  of  eu  law  on  data  protection,  novel  technologies  challenge  social  norms  of   when  and  what  personal  information  can  be  accessed  and  distributed.  data  that  used  to   be  known  only  to  data  subjects  are  now  stored  in  the  databases  of  private  companies   and  public  authorities.  this  raises  several  legal,  political  and  ethical  questions:  is   keyword  mining  on  an  instant  messaging  app  comparable  to  an  actual  person  reading  a   private  conversation?  what  is  consent  online?  what  data  may  be  sold  to  third  parties?   the  questions  are  hard  to  answer  since  social  networks,  fitness  apps  and  smart  smoke   alarms  lack  historical  equivalents,  as  the  data  they  provide  are  significantly  richer  than   what  has  previously  been  available  (ohm,  2010:  1725).       the  constant  collection  of  massive  amounts  of  data  from  a  multitude  of  sources  has   been  coined  panspectric  surveillance  by  philosopher  manuel  de  landa  (1991:  180).   this  surveillance  logic  permeates  most  contemporary  data-­driven  business  practices   and  will  be  further  intensified  as  the  internet  of  things  matures.  the  aim  is  to  collect  as   much  data  as  possible  in  order  to  produce  actionable  intelligence  (gandy,  2012:  125).   this  information  may  be  used  to  identify  security  threats  (brown  &  korff,  2009:  124),   recognize  customer  patterns  (pridmore  &  zwick,  2011:  272)  and  predict  future   behaviour  (zwick  &  knott,  2009:  234;;  hildebrandt,  2006:  548).  practically  all  sectors   from  e-­commerce  to  aviation  are  thus  part  of  the  panspectric  diagram  (palmås,  2011),   yet  this  does  not  mean  that  all  stakeholders  participating  in  the  surveillance  of  citizens  in   one  capacity  or  another  would  have  completely  aligned  interests.  it  is  also  through   alterations  of  legal  concepts  related  to  informational  privacy  that  the  surveillance  society   evolves.  this  paper  aims  to  analyze  if  the  surveillance  logics  of  different  sectors  can  be   found  in  the  informational  privacy  concepts  presented  in  the  council’s  draft  legislation.     data  and  method     the  empirical  data  is  composed  of  85  stakeholder  position  papers  containing   suggestions  on  how  to  amend  the  commission’s  initial  draft  regulation  and  the   council’s  amended  version  of  the  regulation.  the  final  regulation  is  a  compromise   between  the  eu  institutions’  versions,  but  the  purpose  of  this  study  is  to  find  out  whether   certain  positions  presented  by  lobbyists  have  been  more  willingly  received  by  the   council  than  the  other  eu  institutions.  i  will  thus  look  for  key  differences  between  the   draft  regulation  and  the  council’s  version  and  compare  the  findings  with  the  results  of   my  earlier  research  on  the  contents  of  the  position  papers.       the  results  from  this  study  provide  a  clearer  picture  of  the  privacy  perceptions  of   different  interest  groups  and  their  influence  on  the  final  general  data  protection   regulation.  although  lobbying  participation  in  the  eu  has  been  quite  extensively   researched,  influence  is  an  aspect  often  ignored  in  politics  research.  this  paper  will  thus   contribute  to  better  understanding  of  the  influence  of  lobbyists  in  the  area  of  internet   policy.     references     brown,  ian  and  korff,  douwe  (2009):  terrorism  and  the  proportionality  of  internet   surveillance.  european  journal  of  criminology  6(2):  119-­134.     coen,  david  (2007):  empirical  and  theoretical  studies  in  eu  lobbying.  journal  of   european  public  policy  14(3):  333-­345,  doi:  10.1080/13501760701243731.     de  landa,  manuel  (1991):  war  in  the  age  of  intelligent  machines.  new  york:  zone.     gandy  jr,  oscar  h.  (2012):  remote  sensing  in  the  digital  age.  in  k.  ball,  k.d.  haggerty   &  d.  lyon  (eds)  routledge  handbook  of  surveillance  studies  (pp.  125-­132).  london:   routledge.     hildebrandt,  mireille  (2006):  profiling:  from  data  to  knowledge.  dud:  datenschutz  und   datensicherheit  30(9):  548-­552.     ohm,  paul  (2010):  broken  promises  of  privacy:  responding  to  the  surprising  failure  of   anonymization.  ucla  law  review  57(6):  1701-­1777.     palmås,  karl  (2011):  ‘predicting  what  you’ll  do  tomorrow:  panspectric  surveillance   and  the  contemporary  corporation’.  in  surveillance  &  society  vol.  8(3):  338-­354.     pridmore,  jason  and  zwick,  detlev  (2011):  editorial:  marketing  and  the  rise  of   commercial  consumer  surveillance.  surveillance  &  society  8(3):  269-­277.     schmidt,  v.  (2013):  democracy  and  legitimacy  in  the  european  union  revisited:  input,   output  and  'throughput'.  political  studies  61(1):  2-­22.     tene,  omer  and  polonetsky,  jules  (2013):  a  theory  of  creepy:  technology,  privacy   and  shifting  social  norms  [september  16,  2013].  yale  journal  of  law  &  technology.   ssrn:  http://ssrn.com/abstract=2326830.     zwick,  detlev  and  knott,  j.  denegri  (2009):  manufacturing  consumers:  the  database   as  new  means  of  production.  journal  of  consumer  culture  9(2):  221-­247.   1 motivations for police blogging and how fear of being 'outed' can force a blogger to cease sarah pedersen robert gordon university uk s.pedersen@rgu.ac.uk simon burnett robert gordon university uk s.burnett@rgu.ac.uk robert smith robert gordon university uk r.smith-a@rgu.ac.uk anne o’neill robert gordon university uk a.m.o-neill1@rgu.ac.uk abstract there is an expanding literature on the police use of storytelling, but very little has been written in a policing context in relation to the contemporary practice of blogging. consequentially, this paper reports on an ongoing research project into the uk police use of blogging. in dealing with motivations for starting and stopping the authoring of blogs this article makes an incremental contribution to the literatures of blogging and of police storytelling by articulating reasons given by respondents as to why they stopped blogging. these include fear of being outed; fear of professional loss of face and collateral damage to careers. we argue that blogging has educational and therapeutic values and should be encouraged by the service for these reasons. an agreed code of practice could reduce the climate of fear. keywords blogs; blogging; police; motivations; censorship. mailto:r.smith-a@rgu.ac.uk� mailto:a.m.o-neill1@rgu.ac.uk� 2 this paper reports on one aspect of a wider project that was established to investigate the phenomenon of police blogging in the uk. the focus of this paper is on the motivations for both starting and ceasing to write a police blog. ‘work-bloggers’ may face disciplinary action if they are discovered to be blogging about their employers and fellow employees. a number of high-profile cases have demonstrated to potential work-bloggers the risks they may be running. in particular, potential police bloggers must be aware of the fate of bloggers such as nightjack, who was outed by a journalist, disciplined by his superiors and whose blog was deleted. given such risks, this project set out to investigate what attracts police bloggers to blogging and whether the fear of being ‘outed’ as a blogger eventually overcomes the satisfactions of blogging and causes a police blogger to cease blogging. review of current literature police blogging is part of the wider phenomenon identified by richards (2008) as ‘work-blogging’. for all bloggers there can be friction between the act of blogging itself (often done in private or anonymously) and its reception in the public sphere, and this can be exacerbated if the blogger is posting about his or her work. there have been quite a few high-profile cases in recent years concerning bloggers being dismissed for blogging at or about their employment – the urban dictionary reminds us that the term ‘dooced’ was coined to describe the fate of blogger heather b. armstrong, sacked for blogging about her workplace and co-workers in her blog dooce. the public fates of bloggers such as armstrong and ellen simonetti, whose blog queen of the sky featuring shots of her in her air hostess uniform led to her dismissal, have made bloggers more aware of the penalties that may be imposed on them if their employers become aware – and disapprove – of their blogging. for police bloggers in particular this concern was brought home to them in 2009 when the anonymous author of the blog nightjack was outed by a times journalist as detective constable richard horton of the lancashire constabulary (gibb, 2009). the nightjack blog offered its readers an insight into frontline policing but also included horton’s strong views on 3 social and political issues. in april 2009 it was awarded the orwell prize for political writing. however, despite horton seeking a legal injunction to stop the newspaper revealing his name, mr justice eady ruled that the blogger could have no reasonable expectation of anonymity because “blogging is essentially a public rather than a private activity”. although horton changed details such as the names of people and places as he posted, once his identity was known it became possible for the actual cases he was writing about to be identified. he was issued with a written warning by his superiors and his blog was deleted. as will be noted later, police bloggers are very aware of horton’s fate and several in this study ceased blogging at around the same time that nightjack was deleted. why start to blog and – in particular – given the fact that blogging about your place of employment might jeopardize your livelihood, why would someone be a workblogger? previous research in the area of motivations for blogging has identified factors such as “perceived usefulness, commitment, trust, self-efficacy and outcome expectation” as motivators for starting a blog (zhou, 2011, 69). pedersen (2010) identifies a variety of motivations ranging from the perception of blogging as creative writing, as citizen journalism or as a work tool, to blogging as a way to raise money or for therapy. she suggests that the majority of bloggers will have more than one motivation for starting to blog and that motivations for blogging may change over the lifetime of the blog. other researchers have suggested that certain personality types may be more open to blogging than others. for example, guadagno et al (2008) suggest that people who are high in both openness to new experiences and neuroticism are more likely to be bloggers. they may start to blog from loneliness and an attempt to reach out and form social connections with others. the work of baker and moore (2008) on the way in which distress and dissatisfaction with their current group of associates motivates some people to start blogging also agrees with these findings. thus one motivation for workblogging can be a desire to establish a community of like-minded individuals with similar experiences who can offer a support that the blogger might not find in his or her immediate vicinity. 4 communication with readers and other bloggers can also be a spur to blogging. nardi et al (2004) found that many people started blogging at the urging of their friends, who were already bloggers and wanted company that they already knew in the blogosphere. miura and yamashita (2007) suggest that communication with readers who give the blogger positive feedback is a major factor in encouraging bloggers to continue to post while richards (2008) found that some work-bloggers blogged to keep in touch with friends, family, colleagues and similar professionals. what do work-bloggers post about? richards (2008, 100) reports that “the most common theme involves employees documenting the reality of the jobs they do week in and week out”. such blogs are typical journal blogs, which have been shown to have similar motivations to diary-writing such as self-exploration and self-expression (serfaty, 2004; mcneill, 2005; pedersen, 2010). other work-bloggers, however, want to make people think or even to change their behaviour, for example mcclellan (2004) reported that the author of diary of a fast food life was of the view that “if visitors read my blog and … decide to be more polite when dealing with staff in service industries… i’d consider that an achievement”. other common themes that have been identified include “exposing management stupidity” (mcclellan, 2004) and the release of “work-related frustrations” (richards, 2008, 103). in one of the earliest studies of the motivations of bloggers, schiano et al (2004) identified the need to vent and let off steam as one of the main motivations for journal blogging. this need to let off steam about work-related issues might be particularly strong for those working in the emergency services who, by the very nature of the job, might be limited in their ability to discuss their work in the outside world. research into the use of storytelling in the emergency services suggests that stories can provide a psychological outlet for emergency service workers (tangherlini, 2000) – and many blog posts can take the form of such storytelling. work-bloggers may also blog in order to influence or educate both insiders and outsiders to the profession (richards, 2008, 102). this touches on the knowledgesharing aspects of this medium of communication. ojala (2005) argues that there are two important aspects of blogging that make it particularly useful for knowledge sharing – a blog’s community and its archives. she suggests that blogs are an 5 inexpensive way in which an organisation can encourage employees to share knowledge. williams and jacobs (2004) agree that informal systems like blogs can be easier to implement and maintain than formal knowledge management systems. again looking at the literature on storytelling within the emergency services, tangherlini (2000) suggests that police officers and other members of the emergency services recount stories to each other to warn or educate others about situations they have come across. in addition, ward and sbarcea (2001) suggest that there has been an increase in the use of stories as carriers of knowledge in organisations in recent years. this desire amongst some work-bloggers to educate their readers might also be related to what might be described as the ‘citizen journalism’ motivation – the desire to make their opinions more widely known, to offer an alternative to the mainstream media, to influence thinking of others and to engage in debate (gillmor, 2006). it is these elements of blogging in particular that have led blogs to be described as similar to newspaper opinion columns and editorials or newspaper letters columns (pedersen, 2010). blogging can thus demonstrate a desire on the part of the blogger to redress perceived distortions or failures in the mainstream media, with commentators such as gillmor (2006) seeing bloggers at the forefront of a revolution whereby a new breed of grassroots journalists is taking the news into their own hands, communicating directly with the public without having to go through gatekeepers such as editors (shirky, 2008). while motivations for starting to blog have been investigated in some depth, the reasons for bloggers ceasing to blog have not received such scrutiny. as miura and yamashita (2007) point out, most blog authors make only one or a few entries in their blog and then stop writing in it. however, what of those bloggers whose blogging stops after several months or even years of blogging – why might their motivation to blog have disappeared? there has been some limited, and usually anecdotal, research into this issue. nardi et al (2004) discussed the phenomenon of ‘blog burnout’ where a blogger stops blogging for a time because they have nothing more to say, but suggested that this tends to be a temporary pause rather than abandoning blogging forever. kim (2007, quoted cammaerts, 2008) discussed the cases of two korean bloggers, both of whom ceased blogging, at least for a short period of time, because of hostile comments and online 6 intimidation campaigns on their blogs. however, again, neither of these case studies actually stopped blogging forever. the first blogger, a korean immigrant blogger living in new york, stopped blogging for a month and then switched to another (non-korean) blog-hosting service. the second disabled his comments function for a short while and then reinstated this function but no longer replied to comments. similarly, pedersen (2010) found examples of british bloggers who stopped blogging, or at least made their blogs private, after feeling threatened by readers’ comments and one blogger who reported having to close down her blog after it was used in evidence against her at a divorce settlement hearing. of course it is much more difficult for researchers to access bloggers who have ceased to blog, but an analysis of even a small group of blogs that have been abandoned might offer some clues as to the motivations for stopping blogging, particularly if the group shares certain characteristics, such as working in a particular profession. in addition, in the case of police bloggers the fate of nightjack offered a concrete and recent example of what might happen to a police blogger who lost his anonymity. methodology a representative sample of 64 british police blogs was identified using a combination of searching blog directories and through the blogrolls of other police blogs. since the archives of the blogs were equally as important in determining motivations for starting – and sometimes stopping – blogging, the sample was not restricted to current blogs, although blogs with fewer than one entry were excluded. following the methodology of herring et al (2004a and 2004b) and pedersen (2010), blogs in languages other than english were excluded from the sample, as were photo and audio blogs with little text. the blogs selected were all written by someone who identified themselves as serving in the british police force. as part of a wider study the blogs were then subject to content analysis in order to ascertain the motivations behind them (stated and observed), the main subject matter of the posts, who appeared to be reading them, and what kinds of comments were being added. 7 the research was carried out in july and august 2011. at the same time, a research blog was set up by the project team and all bloggers studied were contacted and invited to contribute to the study through the blog. the existence of the blog helped to establish the credentials of the research team within the blogosphere and also assisted in promoting the research and its results. the lifespan of the blogs in the sample varied from under a year (18 blogs) to over five years (5 blogs). some blogs were updated every few days while others had more infrequent posts. as of september 2011 17 blogs were still current and 47 had seen no posts at least since may of that year. while it was not possible to identify the rank of the majority of the police bloggers, 28 offered enough information in the ‘about me’ section of the blog or in the blog name for the following ranks to be identified: ten constables (including detective constables); six sergeants, three inspectors, three special constables, two retired from the force, one mounted police, one probationer, one dog handler and one dog (presumably written for him by his handler!). in addition, three bloggers were identified as female and two bloggers identified themselves as being from ethnic minorities. this overabundance of male bloggers is interesting. fletcher (1999) argues that the police use of storytelling is embedded in masculine forms of storytelling practices and that accomplished police storytellers are primarily men, with women officers having trouble casting themselves in the role of organisational storyteller in such a masculine environment as the police force. perhaps women are also discouraged from such storytelling by the gendered division in policing (silvestri, 2007). motivations for starting to blog the majority of the police bloggers studied stated their motivations for starting to blog, usually at some point early in the blog’s life. there was frequently more than one reason involved and five bloggers in fact gave multiple reasons. figure 1 below gives a broad representation of these. 8 figure 1 – stated motivations for starting a blog as can be seen, almost 29% of the studied bloggers gave no specific reason for starting blogging, but of those who did, the most commonly stated motivations were venting, therapy, encouragement from other bloggers and public education – where a blogger wished to reveal to the public the nature of policing and what is involved. for example, “to speak out, anonymously, about issues the public should know about” (anothercopper 10 may 2007); “to paint an honest picture of the kind of crap that we and the officers i am in charge of have to deal with day in, day out, without recognition or reward” (sergeantsimon, 10 august 2006). as can be seen in figure 1, the most common motivation was the need to “blow off steam” about work-related issues, either in the form of venting anger or as a more therapeutic writing-down of feelings and frustrations about work. even the names chosen for some of the blogs illustrate their authors’ emotions about their work: constable confused; disgruntled cop or world weary detective. of the 63 sampled blogs, only nine did not overtly use their blog as a safe place to let off steam. the main objects of frustration were bureaucracy, senior management within the force, the public and the criminal justice system. 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 no. of times reason given percentage of total answers tell stories give opinions inspired by other bloggers therapy/venting public education document life miscellaneous * none 9 hate sitting in an office while the airwave is going nuts, being spat at, seeing crims get pathetic sentences. also getting bored of being told my family should die of cancer. not the biggest fan of clowns or of people who subscribe to the belief that rank equals knowledge. which it doesn’t. (metcountymounty, ‘about me’) comments on the blog associated with the research project also emphasised this motivation for police blogging, explaining that the nature of the job made it difficult for police officers to unburden themselves to their partners. sharing frustrations with other officers could also be problematic because it might result in problems with professional standards departments – one respondent noted “if you vent at work your card is marked and you are seen as a trouble-maker” while another suggested that the anonymity of the internet allowed police bloggers to “truly let it all out and relieve themselves of their troubles”. this “relief from troubles” demonstrates the therapeutic effects of blogging acknowledged by several police bloggers. blogging about a problem at work could help them work their way through that problem, with several specifically using the word ‘therapy’ in their discussion of their blogging. for instance, stressed out cop explained “this is just online therapy for me” (about me) while one man and his plod stated “this helped me get over a few issues both at work and my personal life” (14 february 2010). one of the police dog-handlers wrote an emotional post describing his feelings about having to have a dog put down due to illness, which attracted a large number of comments, support and advice. bigfellainblue noted that he had been helped “in my stress battle by those who have visited and taken time to comment”, thus finding not just the process of expressing his stress to be helpful, but also the reader support from the community of which he was a part. the support received by others in comments on these blogs also demonstrates another frequently stated motivation for starting a police blog – encouragement from other bloggers and a wish to join the community of police bloggers. the police bloggers quite often mentioned other police bloggers as having inspired their own blogging and several stated that they started blogging after being readers of other police blogs and 10 finding that they had more to say than could be put into a comment on someone else’s blog. this emphasizes the strong community links in this area of blogging. having for some time now, lurked, posted and like most others been inspired by coppersblog and other excellent police bloggers i have overcome my self-induced lethargy to offer my own rambling views on metropolitan life and ..er stuff… (tales from the metropolis, 4 november 2006) the other most frequently given motivation for starting to blog was to educate the public and possibly correct false impressions of the police given by the media. so, for example, the author of coppersblog explained that he “just wanted to narrow the gap between the public’s perception of what we do all day and what we actually do all day” while csi uk stated that he was trying to “give people an insight into a great job and dispel a few myths generated by popular tv shows” (22 june 2009). a comment on the project blog confirmed i love the blogs as they try to give the public an insight into the realities of policing… the public have a very negative view of the police and the blogs try to address that and show that it’s not purely down to police officers that people don’t get the results or service they expect. posts with the aim of educating the public might give advice on issues such as the need to comply with warrants to attend court or attempt to explain why the police act in the way they do and the regulations and systems by which they are constrained. frequently such advice might be tongue in cheek, such as the posts on what not to say to an officer if you are stopped or a non mouse’s “my top ten list of sfqs [stupid fu**ing questions] not to ask us. please.” (6 december 2005). tangherlini (2000) suggests that emergency services workers such as paramedics have a deeply cynical and self-deprecatory storytelling tradition. they present themselves as anti-heroes to dispel the popular myth of themselves as silent heroes. they resort to sardonic quips and black humour as a form of protective resistance and to manage their tactical engagement with others, including police officers. 11 why cease to blog? as noted in the literature, some blogs had long hiatuses when no posting occurred, usually for some months. when the bloggers returned to blogging they sometimes offered explanations for this break. for example, uk police sergeant noted that he had been forced to post more infrequently due to time constraints. others had take a conscious decision to stop blogging but later returned – the blogger of you’re nicked! explained that he had decided to stop blogging but returned three months later in exasperation at the attitudes he saw in the media – “prison officers need to be nicer – it’s this kind of cobblers that has prompted my return to the blogosphere” (27 november 2007. again, this provides evidence of police-bloggers being motivated by a desire to offer an alternative version of events to those presented in the mainstream media. of those that had stopped posting, 28 bloggers simply stopped and offered no reason. however, 19 bloggers gave reasons for stopping blogging. the range of reasons given is shown in figure 2 below. the miscellaneous column in figure 2 represents one blogger who retired, one whose blog had been set up to raise awareness about a particular campaign and finished when the campaign ended, and one who felt too betrayed by politicians to continue: well i think we’ve reached the pinnacle now ladies and gents. jackie [the home secretary jacqui smith] took our back pay, they all took our ability to do the job and we find that a large portion of these people see fit to claim unbelievable expenses paid for by you and me. you all know the examples, ride on mower maintenance, cat food, tellies.....oh i'm just so bloody angry. i think it’s futile to write anymore. vent your anger at the ballot box. (sensible policing 12 may 2009) 12 figure 2 – stated reasons for ceasing to blog here the blogger evidently felt that blogging was no longer sufficient as an outlet for his anger and instead urged his readers to take direct action and to “vent their anger” at the forthcoming elections. although they did not specifically cite it as a reason for ceasing to blog, two other bloggers who stopped posting also mentioned that they were disillusioned with their blogging because it did not seem to have had any effect on policies, with one making a specific connection between his need for anonymity and this impotence: i don’t think that the blog is achieving much, i made a conscious decision at the start of the blog of making sure i couldn’t be identified, so i don’t write about cases i’ve dealt with or people i’ve worked with. not even in general terms. (you’re nicked 18 july 2007) again, this blogger felt that he needed to move on to other, more direct, forms of action, stating that he felt he could have more input and influence in the police oracle forum. this forum is a more officially sanctioned and edited form of computermediated discussion, which would not open the blogger to the same risks of being outed 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 reasons for cessation frequency 13 and disciplined. it should also be noted that this blogger was promoted to inspector during the course of writing his blog and noted “i know this isn’t the sort of thing that prospective inspectors are supposed to do” (18 july 2007). one frequently cited reason for ceasing to blog was simply lack of time (nine bloggers), and this might also be related to the five bloggers who stopped blogging because of a promotion or change in role. disgruntled cop found that he was better valued when he moved roles, which led to him being less disgruntled and ceasing to blog. however, a decision to stop blogging once promoted might also be linked to the most common reason given for stopping posting and cited by 11 bloggers – the fear of being identified and disciplined. this was partly as a result of the highly-publicised case of nightjack, which several bloggers mentioned, and in at least three cases because this had already happened to the blogger. well the time has finally arrived, just unexpectedly. i was invited to see top brass today in their office and presented with their opinion about my blog. it seems the blog needs to end completely now. (semper fi, 4 december 2006) given the current climate on the police blogging world, the fact i have a mortgage, a xbox 360 addiction and the overwhelming need to keep my job, i have decided to cease blogging on the world of csi… unfortunately my anonymity is no longer guaranteed, also i’m sure that some of my previous posts could be construed as misconduct or disrepute if you looked closely as the wording of some force policies. to sum up it’s not worth the risk. (csi:uk, 22 june 2009) in an email to the research team, one blogger stated: “it is clear that senior officers with uk forces actively discourage the practice, for fear that the truth may actually be brought to the surface. officers fear that their career progress will be halted or even worse.” he also cited the case of one of the earliest police bloggers, stuart davidson, who used to blog under the nom de plume pc david copperfield and also authored wasting police time, which was published by monday books in 2006 and serialised in the daily mail newspaper. again, under pressure from his force, davidson ceased his blogging activity, subsequently left the force and is currently a serving police officer in canada. 14 however, not all cessations can be identified as being related specifically to the blogger’s role as a police officer. some bloggers simply ran out of things to say. while the blog written by his handler on behalf of a police dog lasted just under a year, with educational posts on the training of the dog, it evidently became more and more difficult to make stories written from the viewpoint of the dog different enough from each other to continue writing. another blogger (the thinking policeman) felt that he had said all that he wanted to after a period of some months, but then handed his blog over to another blogger to continue. discussion the majority of police bloggers stated at least one motivation for starting to blog: the most popular being to let off steam or vent, inspiration from other bloggers and a wish to join the police blogging community, and to educate the public about policing. of course, stated motivations do not necessarily coincide with the observed motivations during the lifetime of the blog, and – in line with previous studies – the motivations for blogging can change during the life of the blog and can be different from the original intentions. the use of a blog to work out work-related frustrations and stress was very common in our sample, with police bloggers finding both relief in the act of venting and also support from like-minded others within their community who had experienced similar frustrations and could provide support, understanding and often advice while also being there as a non-judgmental audience. the study showed that the main subjects of frustration and venting are bureaucracy, senior management, the criminal justice system and the public. but politicians, management and the public were also the targets of those blogs that had educational aims. such aims are focused on explaining the realities and constraints of british policing, and direct comparisons are made to the depiction of the police in the media, thus also incorporating the citizen journalism motivation of wishing to present an alternative point of view to the mainstream media. this is done in a variety of ways – documenting day-to-day activities; explaining the systems and regulations that govern 15 them; and the storytelling of situations that have occurred and the blogger’s emotional response to these situations. more direct methods include advice to the readers on how not to behave towards the police – mostly given in a humorous way but no less seriously intentioned for all that. thus the motivations of police-bloggers were very similar to the general motivations outlined by the literature, but with a specific focus on educating the public about the realities of uk policing. in addition, the venting/therapy motivation of blogging was particularly valuable in a high-stress profession where much of what was said in the blogs could not have been verbalized either at work or at home. the most common reason identified for ceasing to blog was the fear of being identified and the professional consequences that might follow such identification. what happened to nightjack had a knock-on effect in the police blogosphere with several bloggers ceasing to blog or making their blog private. we found that many who closed their blogs also deleted them – a testament to the worries they had about possibly losing their jobs. another reason for ceasing to blog was lack of time – either because of workload or family commitments. an increase in workload because of promotion at work might also lead to a blogger ceasing to blog – although this might also be affected by the concern that a promoted officer should not be blogging anyway. while motivations for ceasing to blog are not as well researched as motivations for starting a blog, the most common general reason for ceasing to blog appears to be a lack of time and motivation – simply not having anything to post about and not finding any satisfaction in blogging. there was evidence in our study of some police-bloggers ceasing to blog because of time pressures or a lack of interest in the blog. however, work-bloggers have an added fear of being outed to their employer, which might lead them to be forced to cease blogging – as happened to at least three bloggers in our sample. worries about this happening to them led several more to cease to blog without receiving any formal warnings, particularly once they had been promoted into a position of authority, although promotion might also lessen some of the feelings of anger or impotence that had led to the blogging in the first place. in addition, some of our sample, particularly those who had been motivated by a desire to change attitudes, felt 16 disillusioned by a perceived lack of success and stopped blogging because they no longer felt it was a useful tool. conclusion we conclude that blogging is a socially mediated activity that spans the spheres of work and creativity in a useful way for some police bloggers. the current climate of fear is counterproductive and unhelpful. there is much evidence of frustrated communication in the blogs. we suggest that there is a need for a negotiated code of practice or officially sanctioned guidelines for what can and cannot be communicated. blogging is a useful form of narrative therapy. it acts as a valuable organisational safety valve and, provided there is no ill intent on the behalf of the authors of the blogs, the blogs serve to humanize the face of the service and educate the public about the nuances of police culture and practices. organisational venting is a healthy activity not a deviant behaviour. as an activity it should be regulated and encouraged (or at least not discouraged). we argue that it is a creative and expressive medium. the automatic sanction of discipline is oppressive and contrary to the freedoms that the police themselves protect. this paper (and the ongoing research project of which it is a part) makes an incremental contribution to the literatures of blogging and police storytelling. despite the fact that the blogging activity is predominantly unofficial and thus deniable it is not overtly counter cultural or anti-establishment. granted there is evidence of humour, irony and sarcasm but these are necessary linguistic tropes. an organisation that cannot laugh at itself lacks a human face. blogs allow frustrated officers to rail against the system and not the individual. references baker, j. & moore, s. (2008). distress, coping and blogging: comparing new myspace users by their intention to blog. cyberpsychology and behavior 11(1), 81-85. cammaerts, b. (2008). critiques on the participatory potentials of web 2.0. communication, culture & critique 1 (4), 358-377. 17 engelmore, r. & morgan, a. eds. (1986). blackboard systems. reading, mass.: addison-wesley. fletcher, c. (1999). listening to narratives: the dynamics of capturing police experience. international journal of listening 13, 46-61. gibb, f. (2009). ‘ruling on nightjack author richard horton kills blogger anonymity’. the times. 17 june. retrieved from http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6509677.ec e gillmor, d. (2006). we the media: grassroots journalism by the people, for the people (2nd edition). sebastopol, ca: o’reilly. guadagno, r. e., okdie, b. m. & eno, c. a. (2008) who blogs? personality predictors of blogging. computers in human behavior 24(5), 1993-2004. kim, j. (2007). the spiral of invisibility: social control in the south korean blogosphere. media@lse electronic working papers, nr. 9. nardi, b., schiano, d., gumbrecht, m. & schwartz, l. (2004). why we blog. communications of the acm 47(12), 41-6. mcclellan, j. (2004). spilling the beans: revelations about public services are exploding in anonymous weblogs. london: guardian news and media limited. retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2004/oct/07/onlinesupplement.epublic mcneil, l. (2005). genre under construction: the diary on the internet. language@internet, 2. retrieved from http://www.languageatinternet.de/articles/2005/120 miura, a., & yamashita, k. (2007). psychological and social influences on blog writing: an online survey of blog authors in japan. journal of computer-mediated communication 12(4), article 15. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/miura.html http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6509677.ece� http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6509677.ece� http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/07475632� http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2004/oct/07/onlinesupplement.epublic� http://www.languageatinternet.de/articles/2005/120� http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/miura.html� 18 ojala, m. (2005). blogging for knowledge sharing, management and dissemination. business information review 22 (4), 269-76. pedersen, s. (2010). why blog? motivations for blogging. cambridge: chandos publishing. richards, j. (2008). ‘because i need somewhere to vent’: the expression of conflict through blogs. new technology, work & employment 23 (1-2), 95-110. schiano, d. j., nardi, b.a., gumbrecht, m. & schwartz, l. (2004, april 24-29). blogging by the rest of us. chi 2004, vienna, austria. serfaty, v. (2004). the mirror and the veil – an overview of american online diaries and blogs. amsterdam: rodopi, amsterdam monographs of american studies. shirky, c. (2008). here comes everybody. london: penguin. silvestri, m., (2007) doing police leadership: enter the new smart macho. policing & society 17(1), 38-58. smith, r., burnett, s., pedersen, s., & o’neill, a. (forthcoming). reviewing and synthesizing the literature on the storied nature of policing and on the police use of storytelling in an organisational context. tangherlini. t. r. (2000). heroes and lies: storytelling tactics among paramedics. folklore 111, 43-66 ward, v. & sbarcea, k. (2001). voice: storytelling is knowledge management. retrieved from http://sparkspanner.org/ul/voice_final_14aug01_pdf williams, j. b. & jacobs, j. (2004). exploring the use of blogs as learning spaces in the higher education sector. australasian journal of educational technology 20 (2), 23247. zhou, t. (2011). understanding online community user participation: a social influence perspective. internet research 21(1), 67-81. mcclellan, j. (2004). spilling the beans: revelations about public services are exploding in anonymous weblogs. london: guardian news and media limited. retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2004/oct/07/onlinesupplement.epublic mcneil, l. (2005). genre under construction: the diary on the internet. language@internet, 2. retrieved from http://www.languageatinternet.de/articles/2005/120 ir14-indie-games-panel selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 towards creative autonomy: tactics for survival aphra kerr national university of ireland, maynooth republic of ireland aphra.kerr@nuim.ie abstract this paper examines shifts in the global games industry by focusing on the development of the games industry in the republic of ireland. drawing upon surveys, participant observation and action research over the past ten years, it tracks the rise of the indie and both the public and private strategies developed to ‘produce’ a local development industry and the tactics that indie games companies deploy to survive in this context. situating the games industry within the wider cultural industries, it argues that we are seeing content producers pay a high price for their creative autonomy. keywords digital games; indies/independent companies; cultural industry; production; capital; labour; work introduction the games industry is a core part of the wider cultural and creative industries sector, and its production and consumption networks are increasingly spatialised, internationalised and networked (technically and organizationally) (hesmondhalgh, 2007, 2008; kerr, 2013; mosco, 2009). the industry is also undergoing some fundamental changes that correspond to what bernard miège (2011) would call ‘mutations,’ with increasingly closer ties between the games and communication industries more generally (bouquillion & combès, 2007; bouquillion & matthews, 2009). we have seen the emergence of new platforms, products/services (e.g., social and casual games), new roles (e.g., community managers), and new types of knowledge and skills in the past ten years. a focus on technical changes is insufficient to explain these mutations; as such, this paper examines the growth of independent small startup companies in ireland from the perspectives of the macro socio-economic context of their development, the strategies being employed by local public and private actors to support them, and their own tactics for survival. methods this paper draws upon three surveys of game companies in the irish context from 2000, 2009 and 2013. it also integrates findings from participant observation at games industry events and the development and co-ordination of a volunteer-run web service since 2002. finally, it includes documentary evidence from participation in recent policy initiatives by industry and the state. discussion surveys of the irish games industry from 2000, 2009 and 2013 found that the numbers of local start-up companies involved in game development has grown significantly over the period (up to 75), but that the majority of employment is still in service jobs outsourced to ireland (e.g., community support and localization) by multinational game companies (kerr, 2002; kerr & cawley, 2011; mccormick, 2012). thus the games industry in ireland has a small number of very large companies and a large number of very small companies. while jobs in the large companies are relatively stable, attract venture capital or corporate investment, and might conform to emerging definitions of ‘good work,’ the same could not be said for the working conditions or ‘creative autonomy’ of the very small companies, which appear to conform to a loose definition of an indie games company (hesmondhalgh & baker, 2011). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 this paper focuses on the recent growth of large numbers of very small ‘kitchen table’ companies that are undercapitalized, reliant on public ‘subsidies’ (funds, office space, travel supports), and employing less than five people (hazelkorn, 1997). it analyses the strategies by public (state and third level educational institutions) and private (individual companies and trade bodies) entities, which largely attempt to ‘produce’ game companies that conform to general business supports and move from feasibility funding through standard business growth phases rather than addressing the specificities of the games industry. the most recent strategy employed by both public and private actors in this regard is the development of games incubator and accelerator spaces. the public discourse and rhetoric is one of innovation, high-tech, intellectual property, and creativity. by contrast, the individual workers’ discourses and stories are of struggle, passion, and subsistence. within this context, ‘indies’ use a number of tactics to exploit local supports and manage their creative autonomy and survival. some of these tactics confound local, regional, and nationally bounded strategies to develop non-local, transnational and transactional mediated networks and professional communities of practice. others rely on the gift economy, multiple jobs, discount office space, tolerant parents, and social welfare to survive. what we seem to be witnessing is the vertical disintegration of production in the mobile and online sectors of the games industry, enabled by network technology combined with the ‘exploitation’ of place and labour by global multinationals. this socio-economic configuration is in turn enabled by competitive incentives aimed towards capital, neo-liberalist ideals, and austerity discipline. the conditions faced by indies results in what banks (2007) has termed the ‘insitutionalised individualisation’ of cultural labour, which miège (2011) refers to as worsening conditions for content production. what cannot be denied is the vulnerability of these workers and the necessity for new tactics to bolster their sustainability and improve their working conditions. this paper argues that in the current difficult economic context in ireland, indies may be able to exploit their symbolic and cultural capital to obtain a degree of creative autonomy but the focus needs to be on generating sufficient income and improving working conditions or this period of creative destruction will be short-lived. references bouquillion, p., & combès, y. (2007). les industries de la culture et de la communication en mutation. paris: l'harmattan. bouquillion, p., & matthews, j. (2009). web 2.0 does not exist: elements for a renewed critical approach. paper presented at the association for internet research (aoir). hazelkorn, e. (1997). new digital technologies, work practices and cultural production in ireland. the economic and social review, 28(3), 235-259. hesmondhalgh, d. (2007). the cultural industries (second ed.). london: sage. hesmondhalgh, d. (2008). neoliberalism, imperialism and the media. in d. hesmondhalgh & j. toynbee (eds.), the media and social theory (pp. 95-111). oxon and new york routledge. hesmondhalgh, d., & baker, s. (2011). creative labour. media work in three cultural industries. oxon: routledge. kerr, a. (2002). loading... please wait. ireland and the global games industry (no. working paper no. 1). dublin: stem, dublin city university. kerr, a. (2013). space wars: the politics of games production in europe. in n. huntemann & b. aslinger (eds.), gaming globally (pp. 215-231). new york: palgrave kerr, a., & cawley, a. (2011). the spatialisation of the digital games industry: lessons from ireland. international journal of cultural policy, 1-21. mccormick, j. (2012). the games industry in ireland 2012. dublin: www.gamedevelopers.ie selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 miège, b. (2011). principal ongoing mutations of cultural and informational industries. in d. winseck & d. yong jin (eds.), the political economies of media (pp. 51-65). london: bloomsbury academic. mosco, v. (2009). the political economy of communication. (second ed.). london: sage. license this article is ©2013 author, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 does being indie mean trading financial freedom for creative freedom? jennifer r. whitson technoculture, arts and games concordia university canada j.whitson@concordia.ca abstract the language subjects use to talk about the game industry creates a terrain, and ‘indie’ represents is a tactic aimed at setting oneself apart in a field dominated by aaa structures. this is commonly achieved via the argument that indies create games not for money, but as an creative artistic endeavor. however, as this preliminary study of indie game development shows, this tactic has negative repercussions for indie developers that want to earn a living wage for their work. keywords game development; indie; independent studios; ethnography background and methods since november 2012, i have been an embedded ethnographer in a canadian software incubator whose stated purpose is to “help independent game developers produce games and bring them to market”. from january 2013 onwards (when the incubator opened its doors), i spent ten to twenty hours each week within the incubator, observing seven development teams. the data for the preliminary findings detailed below come from a number of sources: observations from the field; applicants’ online applications to the incubator, specifically the questions asking about “motivations for becoming an independent developer”; semi-structured interview data from the participants; and, written reflections from the participants in response to my asking “what does it mean to be indie?”. my findings are situated within broader industry discourses attempting to define ‘indie’ from sites such as gamasutra.com (see gross, 2013; mcneill, 2013; yu, 2013), and is supported by a small, yet growing, body of academic work on the indie game scene in canada and abroad (fisher & harvey, 2013; lipkin, 2013; ruffino, 2013; westecott, 2013). preliminary findings for self-defined indie developers, ‘indie’ is associated with a resistance to mainstream big-budget production, large teams and bureaucratic management. of course, there is not just one monolithic indie community, but rather multiple communities who may share some traits, but not all. however, in game industry discourses, indie communities are commonly lumped together as one united front the comments of individuals are taken and used to speak for the whole, or are taken out of their situated specific contexts (see, for example, gross, 2013). the attempt to pin down “what is indie” and operationalize the term is not the aim of this paper. i examine how ‘indie’ is leveraged in specific locations and times, and aimed at specific purposes. accordingly, i first asked developers how they defined ‘indie’ and then examined the everyday contexts in which they identify and evoke the term. the following are some initial findings, along with some supporting analysis. perhaps the best place to start is with what i did not find: counter to my initial expectations, none of my research participants equated indie with a specific type of game, or aesthetic choice. nadav lipkin (2013), in his analysis of the history of indie games provides an explanation. at its inception, the indie movement was united by alternative production and distribution structures, supportive fan subcultures, selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 and feelings of moral or artistic superiority over the mainstream. in time, a distinct indie style (e.g. chiptunes, puzzle platformers, pixel graphics) rooted in very real production and distribution constraints, was articulated that paralleled indie ethos and beliefs. this style was then emulated by larger, more mainstream studios. it became difficult to tell indie apart from mainstream, and so the style replaced the original ethos in defining what was indie versus what was not. in this process, indie aesthetics were co-opted by the mainstream, while technology improved enough to allow indies to emulate the styles of aaa. accordingly, developers have now abandoned aesthetics as an indicator of ‘indieness’. while research participants’ definitions of indie share some common themes, they exhibit considerable variance. thus, ‘indie’ loses power as an analytic category (if it ever had any) because developers and players cannot always tell or agree on who is indie, who is not, and what games deserve the ‘indie’ label. despite this, 'indie' is a term that does considerable work and accordingly, its meaning is hotly contested. for example, ‘indie’ connotes to users that a game is novel or creative. thus developers assume and affiliate with the indie brand in specific contexts, such as when looking to build an invested fan community, seeking pr coverage, or when applying to grants and funding associated with culture and the arts. in this sense, the indie brand is tied with creative innovation. many developers ‘put on’ the indie hat only in specific contexts, and –in contrast– don the hat of a more formal and business-oriented “independent studio” when engaging with investors, middleware providers, and venture capitalists. within the games incubator, being indie is most commonly equated to having autonomy over one's project, and developers often couch this autonomy in the language of freedom. being indie, in this sense prioritizes maintaining developers’ creative vision ahead of incentives to make a profitable game. the indie association with a disregard for money and the prioritization of creative vision over financial stability is a common trope in indie cultural narratives (e.g. in indie game: the movie). however, paolo ruffino (2013) argues that despite the discourses of freedom and emotional investment linked to creating indie games, indies organize themselves with practices that are very similar to those of 'dependent' (i.e. aaa) companies, and that indie games often reinforce the power structures of those they oppose. for example, every time indies make games for established publishers and platform gatekeepers, they are sustaining the very structures they often profess to hate. indie, in this sense, is the false promise of subversion, of being against mainstream, while reinforcing the positions of established players in the industry. the prototypical indie developer thus invests their game with years of unpaid work, their emotional labour, and creative vision, but they are paid very little in return. implications and future directions there is an unspoken assumption in defining ‘indie’ that it is okay to make money from a game, but that the game should not be sullied by designing it with the express intent of earning a sustainable living. accordingly, it is perhaps not surprising that developers within the incubator experience tension related to self-identification. on a day-to-day level, incubator work seems geared at profitseeking. in the game incubator, developers’ identification with ‘indie’ thus becomes fluid, and something leveraged only in specific contexts. this everyday reality exposes how indie ideals conflict with indie developers’ other desires to design games that make money, and thus become selfsupporting while yet preserving some form of creative autonomy. future research directions for this project include following the development teams as they ship their games and spin out into their own microstudios. examining how teams leverage their indie status during the different stages of this project, whether their games are branded as ‘indie’, and whether they are accepted as such by indie communities despite their roots in an entrepreneurial endeavor, are each important areas of future analysis. this project will also link with a larger interview-based study soon to be underway that looks at how developers in the surrounding community define themselves. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 6 while indie ideologies are rooted in emancipatory narratives, this initial study shows how these narratives feed into larger cycles of capital. ultimately, in examining production structures such as incubators, the goal of this work is to examine how the cultural values of game developers may necessitate different social, technical, and economic support structures than previously assumed. in order to better support independent cultural producers, an understanding of the tensions inherent in balancing creative vs financial freedom are an initial step. acknowledgments i would like to thank the social sciences and humanities research council of canada for supporting this research. references fisher, s., & harvey, a. (2013). intervention for inclusivity: gender politics and indie game development. loading, 7(11), 25–40. gross, s. (2013, february 25). indie elitism. gamasutra. retrieved from http://gamasutra.com/blogs/saragross/20130225/187270/indie_elitism.php lipkin, n. (2013). examining indie’s independence: the meaning of “indie” games, the politics of production, and mainstream cooptation. loading, 7(11), 8–24. mcneill, e. (2013, february 26). heading off the indie backlash. gamasutra. retrieved from http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/emcneill/20130226/187348/heading_off_the_indie_backlash.php ruffino, p. (2013). narratives of independent production in video game culture. loading, 7(11). retrieved from http://journals.sfu.ca/loading/index.php/loading/article/view/120 westecott, e. (2013). independent game development as craft. loading, 7(11), 78–91. yu, d. (2013). making it in indie games: starter guide. gamasutra. retrieved from http://gamasutra.com/blogs/derekyu/20130301/187664/making_it_in_indie_games_starter_guide.ph p. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 7 indies, incubators, and inclusion: reconfiguring gendered participation in game design alison harvey university of toronto canada alison.harvey@utoronto.ca tamara shepherd ryerson university canada tamara.shepherd@ryerson.ca abstract this paper describes the results of ethnographic research in two video game design initiatives for women, dames making games and pixelles. through a comparison of the two groups, situated in their respective contexts of game design in toronto and montreal, we discuss tactics for resisting the gendered participation gap in game culture, specifically from the perspective of production. increasing the engagement of women in the game industry is particularly crucial given recent public discourse around the continued sexism and gender disparity in masculinist video game culture more broadly. we consider the possibilities as well as the limitations these two organizations afford for making interventions in this exclusionary culture through independent game design. keywords gender; inclusion; independent game design; activism gender trouble in the game industry after over a decade of academic and design literature considering the gender gap and resulting stereotypical representations of femininity and masculinity in digital play (graner ray, 2004; kennedy, 2002; jenson & de castell, 2008, 2010), 2012 may well have been the year when discussions of sexism and misogyny in the game industry went mainstream. the campaign of online harassment against anita sarkeesian prompted by her proposed web series exploring the constructions of women in games and the rallying of not only financial support but also positive popular news media attention is but one visible example (see chambers, 2012). while such instances of sexism in and around game culture are not necessarily more numerous in the contemporary context, their extensive documentation (see http://gbitk.net/ii/ for a comprehensive timeline of examples from januarydecember 2012) indicates that there is an incitement to discourse about civility, harassment, gender, and sexism in game culture, and in many ways, online interaction more generally (see chemaly, 2013). and, as in foucault’s (1990) theorization of sexuality as discursive, the sentiments of this discourse are not necessarily oriented toward social justice, empowerment, or equity. yet, this discourse has been central to a recent push for action to incite real change. in the late fall of 2012, there was tremendous buzz around three linked hashtags on twitter – #1reasonwhy (discussing why gender disparity in the video game industry persists), #1reasontobe (with posts related to why it’s worth working as a game designer, despite the gender disparity and its attendant culture of sexism), and #1reasonmentors (where posters sought and volunteered to take on mentorship of females in the industry). while a great deal of attention had been paid to the representation of women in games themselves, participation in these threads indicated how the context of production often maintains an exclusionary games culture, specifically due to the dearth of diversity therein (fron, fullerton, morie & pearce, 2007; jenson & de castell, 2011). the relatively few statistics on industry demographics indicate that the labour force is dramatically segregated; for example, the international game developers association (2005) has reported only 11.5% female participation, with the majority of women working in human resources, public relations, and sales and the vast majority of production teams comprised of males (95%). some of the tactics directed at rectifying this disparity include specific scholarships for female applicants to game design programs, special interest groups tailored to “women in games,” and locally-organized jams, groups, and incubators focusing on female-identified participants. in our paper, we focus on two unique examples of the latter, providing a grounded case selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 8 study of how coordinated activism addressing gendered participation in game production has unfolded in two distinctive locales. women-only game design incubators: dames making games (2011-2013) and pixelles (2013) specifically, we discuss the relationship between the toronto-based dames making games (dmg) organization and the montreal-based pixelles incubator for first-time female game designers. as researcher-activists and observers working under the mandate of the feminist in games group, we consider the similarities, differences, and unique perspectives of each location. in tracing how the experiences of dmg, a feminist game design organization for women and their allies, itself an offshoot of two local incubators hosted in 2011, has informed the subsequent organizing in montreal, we look closely at how the local contexts of production and research have shaped the two initiatives. montreal’s video game industry has become a global hub thanks to interventionist policy measures in the late 1990s targeted toward drawing france-based ubisoft to headquarter its north american operations in the city, chiefly through tax breaks that made it favourable for a significant number of other video game companies, large and small, to follow suit (livermore, 2013). in this context, setting up an incubator for women to break into game design was met with overwhelming support, from companies who offered to host weekly sessions and the final showcase, to a range of talented mentors and academic advisors, to local community groups that publicized and attended pixelles events. even in this rich local game design culture, however, wider industry uncertainty was a constant concern of individual participants – for instance, game company funcom, host of the pixelles weekly sessions, announced at the start of the incubator that it would be moving most of its montreal studio to raleigh, north carolina as part of corporate restructuring. mid-way through the incubator, thq montreal – where one of the visiting mentors worked – was purchased by ubisoft montreal, which incited the division and piecemeal sale of thq’s assets, including smaller studios. these structural pressures constituted a tenuous backdrop for this group of women wanting to enter the game industry with the help of mentors who themselves had gone through not only the economic but also the gender-related challenges of creative labour. uncertainty of another sort plays a key role in the toronto context. toronto is home to a lively and well-established independent game design community, one that is by no small measure reliant on the precarious support of provincial grants such as the ontario media development corporation’s entertainment and creative cluster partnerships fund, which provided funding for the incubators that led to the formation of dames making games. in the case of dmg, recognition of the challenges of supporting activist work in the independent game design community has led to a rejection of grantsbased operations and to the implementation of a membership structure for its participants. in contrast to the montreal context, the organization of dmg activities has centred on independent production, side-stepping questions of professionalization and getting into the mainstream industry, which has a much smaller presence in toronto than in montreal. instead, dmg’s mandate is largely focused on education and community-building, and their initiatives, from socials to talks to incubators to jams, have been well-attended and celebrated. while the future is by no means assured, many of the tactics for resistance employed by dmg, particularly their commitment to integrating allies, provide exciting directions for community growth. designing resistance through a discussion of the realities of envisioning, organizing, launching, and maintaining game design initiatives as feminist interventions, we consider the challenges and opportunities that arise in resisting cultures of exclusion while still attempting to participate in them. research on independent game design and incubators has shown that indie culture and gender-oriented activism in digital games is contentious, complex, and wrought with uncertainties and differing tactics regarding feminism, equality, and the state of play and labour (fisher & harvey, 2013; harvey & fisher, forthcoming). we consider these moments of contention and cooperation across these instances of action for change in selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 9 order to begin to delineate the productive ways in which divergent perspectives and approaches can collectively reconfigure gendered participation in games production. acknowledgments the authors wish to acknowledge the support of seed funding courtesy of feminists in games. references chemaly, s. (2013). ‘the digital safety gap and the online harassment of women’, the huffington post, [online] available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/soraya-chemaly/women-onlineharassment_b_2567898.html chambers, b. (2012). ‘the all-too-familiar harassment against feminist frequency, and what the gaming community can do about it’, the mary sue, [online] available at: http://www.themarysue.com/the-alltoo-familiar-harassment-against-feminist-frequency-and-what-the-gaming-community-can-do-about-it/ foucault, m. (1990). the history of sexuality. volume 1: an introduction. trans. robert hurley. new york: vintage books. fron, j., fullerton, t. morie, j.f. & pearce, c. (2007). ‘the hegemony of play, paper presented at the situated playdigital games research conference, tokyo, japan. fisher, s. & harvey, a. (2013). ‘intervention for inclusivity: gender politics and indie game development’, loading…journal of the canadian game studies association, 7(11), pp. 25-40. graner ray, s. (2004). gender inclusive game design: expanding the market. hingham, mass: charles river media. harvey, a. & fisher, s. (forthcoming). ‘making a name in games: immaterial labour, indie game design, and gendered social network markets’, information, communication, and society. international game developers association. (2005). ‘game developer demographics: an exploration of workforce diversity”, [online] available at: http://gamesindustryskills.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/igda_developerdemographics_oct05.pdf. kennedy, h. (2002). ‘lara croft: feminist icon or cyberbimbo? on the limits of textual analysis’, game studies 2(2), [online] available at: http://www.gamestudies.org/0202/kennedy. jenson, j. & de castell, s. (2008). ‘theorizing gender and digital gameplay: oversights, accidents and surprises’, eludamos 2(1), [online] available at: http://www.eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/article/viewarticle/26/49 jenson, j. & de castell, s. (2010). ‘gender, simulation, and gaming: research review and redirections’, simulation & gaming 41(1), pp. 51-71. jenson, j. & de castell, s. (2011). ‘god trick, good trick, bad trick, new trick: reassembling the production line’, in tricky women: women in animation, eds. b. wagner and w. gausgruber, shuren verlag, marburg, germany, pp. 145-158. livermore, o. (2013). the academic grind: a critique of creative and collaborative discourses between digital games industries and post-secondary education in canada. (doctoral dissertation, university of western ontario). license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 10 mixed messages: policing the public/private boundaries of cultural production on the nintendo ds casey o'donnell michigan state university united states caseyod@msu.edu abstract this essay works to situate independent, or "indie," game development in a broader history surrounding hobbyist game development. this essay examines the ambiguous character of videogame console modification chips (mod chips) as a locus for the ambiguity of production outside the "normal" game industry. the mod chip, at one time, was a critical technology in this space. mod chips, while allowing users to pirate software, also enable them to create software and videogames that run on these consoles outside the typical rules and regulations of the videogame industry. ethnographic work amongst nintendo ds ("dual screen") mod communities is examined to illuminate this understudied space of cultural production. keywords cultural production; game development; mod chips; piracy; ethnography introduction it would seem that pirate cultures abound, yet not all piracy is created equally. in fact, there is a realm of piracy that often goes unexamined when analysts turn their lenses to user spaces surrounding piracy. predominant narratives concerning the motivations for pirating have emerged around the high cost of media, transnational disproportions of wealth, taxation rates and numerous others (quiring et al., 2008). indeed, there are even critiques of information distribution and the very nature of informational cultural goods occurring in some pirate communities (caraway, 2012) as well as those that position themselves as downright "subversive" (kiriya, 2012). for others, pirate communities remain enmeshed in conversations about individual rights in relation to corporate interests and how those intersect with broader political-economic interests (chew, 2011; ernkvist and ström, 2008). this essay turns to the case of the nintendo ds and the r4 and ds-tt mod_ cartridges produced for the nintendo ds, as a critical, technological junction point for these conversations. the r4 and ds-tt have been targeted by nintendo as devices used solely by pirates of game content. empirically, the work spans offline worlds of traditional game developers and those of online homebrew game developers. methodologically, the work begins rooted in the more customary participant observation of an anthropologist working amongst traditional game developers. however, the story of homebrewers shifted from the more conventional fieldsite to the online forums and wikis more heavily relied upon by homebrew game developers. the essay examines the cultural logics that motivate the homebrew community and their relationship to mod and hacker communities. further, it questions how nintendo has mobilized, with significant success, different countries' legal systems to curtail the distribution of devices that these communities depend on. the essay begins by examining the rise and state of homebrew game developers working with the nintendo ds. the essay then turns to the productive ambiguity and symbiotic relationship between piracy and unauthorized homebrew game development and the reframing of their activities as "jailbreaking". analytically, the essay draws on gramsci's notion of hegemony, as dialectic of coercion and consent (gramsci, 1975). to make sense of the role of corporations and the state in this system, i turn to brown's (1995) work on power and freedom and smith's (1999) work on how the local is coordinated by the extra-local in ruling relations. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 11 the rise of ds homebrew homebrew development is game or software development for devices like the nintendo ds (nds), microsoft xbox 360 (360), sony playstation portable (psp), sony playstation 3 (ps3) or nintendo wii (wii) that falls outside the typical frameworks of game production. these devices have significant numbers of security devices in place to prevent the distribution of unauthorized (or pirate) software and are covered by numerous user end license agreements aimed at structuring the proper use of the devices. the extensive legalese demands that the devices be used in very particular ways and that the user/consumer is not allowed to install unapproved software. the nds rose quickly to prominence amongst homebrew developers for several reasons. one is simply the variety of available hardware capabilities of the device; including a 2d and 3d graphics processor, one touch sensitive lcd and another standard lcd. in addition to its touch sensitive screen and standard set of console control buttons, a microphone is also available. further, the nds features built-in wi-fi for connectivity and virtual surround sound speakers. however, at the same time, its relatively limited amount of internal memory presents a compelling challenge to developers. the majority of homebrew development focuses on the low level capabilities of the device. homebrew developers do not have access to the significant number of proprietary software development libraries and utilities that have been developed by nintendo, which are distributed with the development hardware. pirate cultural production for the most part, homebrew game development remains out of the frame of reference for both players of videogames and analysts of videogames or the videogame industry. however, in december of 2008, bob's game created by robert pelloni emerged into the game industry's field of view (ng, 2008). pelloni had developed bob's game using the nds homebrew tool chain. pelloni had released youtube video footage of his game and a trailer, building buzz around the game. pelloni had previously attempted to establish contact with nintendo's licensing division, warioworld, and their lack of response resulted in pelloni staging a "100 day protest." while his protest ended after 51 days, with none of pelloni's demands being met, he continued to garner attention from game industry news outlets. in february of 2009, pelloni's request was officially rejected by nintendo's licensing division. while nintendo's official reasons for denying licensing to pelloni fall well within their established, and largely undocumented, guidelines, the entire process created newfound awareness amongst gamers of the kind of structures that inhibit broader participation in the videogame industry. homebrew games, like their more acceptable and mainstream "indie game" counterparts, often push the content envelope further. these games offer gameplay, narratives and imagery outside what is typically seen in the industry. while indie games are often perceived of as innovative, artistic, and pushing the game industry in new directions (martin and deuze, 2009), homebrew development does not benefit from this perception. ultimately, it is the potential for productive capabilities, or "pirate cultural production," that protects these communities from corporations. while the shift from hardware to software as a means of enforcing copyright protection has been a popular one amongst device manufacturers, it may ultimately be the thing that disables their ability to pursue and incarcerate those that assist others in circumventing those mechanisms. despite this, most game console manufacturers will still refer to jailbreaking activities as hacking or piracy, despite the clear disconnect. as has been noted by other scholars, scrutiny of video game culture and cultural production in videogames can provide a productive lens through which to critically examine cultural communities in and around videogames (shaw, 2009; shaw, 2010). taking seriously the videogame production practice within that context is important as well. especially at the fringes of game development, cultural production becomes more interesting. it is at these borderlands that the greatest sense of selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 12 friction occurs, for it is where the coercion and consent of hegemonic process (gramsci, 1975) are the mostly strongly perceived and experienced. perhaps hackers and homebrewers will prove to be speedbumps as cultural practices entangled with technology becomes increasingly legislated and policed (taylor, 2005). that isn't to say that this space is morally righteous in their activities (nissenbaum, 2004; thomas, 2005). yet, it is the fact that activities in these spaces are ambiguous is what makes them important to understand as complex and not simply legal or illegal. the homebrew community is not disconnected or secondary to the indie game movement. it is ancillary. homebrew communities break open new technologies in ways that enable broader participation and use of those devices_. while indie game development has managed to largely hold the world of pirates, emulation, and homebrew at arms length, they remain ideologically linked. each community is interested in pirate cultural production. each looks to make use of modern computing technologies in ways to make personal statements and put exciting technologies to new and innovative uses. references brown, w. (1995) states of injury: power and freedom in late modernity. princeton university press, princeton, nj. caraway, b.r. (2012) survey of file-sharing culture. international journal of communication 6, 564-584. chew, m.m. (2011) virtual property in china: the emergence of gamer rights awareness and the reaction of game corporations. new media & society 13 (5), 722-738. gramsci, a. (1975) prison notebooks. columbia university press, new york, ny. kiriya, i. (2012) the culture of subversion and russian media landscape. international journal of communication, 6, 446-466. martin, c.b. & deuze, m. (2009) the independent production of culture: a digital games case study. games and culture 4 (3), 276-295. ng, k. (2008) bob's game developer stages 100 day protest to nintendo. retrieved from http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/88326-bobs-game-developer-stages-100-day-protestto-nintendo nissenbaum, h. (2004) hackers and the contested ontology of cyberspace. new media & society 6 (2), 195217. quiring, o., von walter, b. & atterer, r. (2008) can filesharers be triggered by economic incentives? results of an experiment. new media & society 10 (3), 433-453. shaw, a. (2009) putting the gay in games: cultural production and glbt content in video games. games and culture 4 (3), 228-253. shaw, a. (2010) what is video game culture? cultural studies and game studies. games and culture 5 (4), 403-424. smith, d.e. (1999) writing the social: critique, theory, and investigations. university of toronto press, buffalo, ny. taylor, p.a. (2005) from hackers to hacktivists: speed bumps on the global superhighway? new media & society 7 (5), 625-646. thomas, j. (2005) the moral ambiguity of social control in cyberspace: a retro-assessment of the 'golden age' of hacking. new media & society 7 (5), 599-624. license this article is ©2013 author. microsoft word jarrett-economies of the internet i-economies of the internet i.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): lastname, firstinitial. (2015, october 21-24). paper title. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. economies of the internet i: intersections kylie jarrett national university of ireland maynooth julia velkova södertörn university peter jakobsson södertörn university roderick graham old dominion university david gehring old dominion university the internet has increasingly been conceptualized as a space of economic activity. this contemporary imaginary has been particularly influenced by insights from the school of autonomist marxism in the foundational work of tiziana terranova and through the dominance of christian fuchs’ application of marxist economic concepts. while this has generated great insight into the political economy of the internet, and in particular allowed for the conceptualization of user activity as labor, this approach is only one paradigm for considering the economic activities and implications of the internet. for internet research, there is also the need to move beyond the long schism between political economy and cultural studies as we try to understand user activity that is socially and affectively rich, but emerges from commercial contexts. this series of panels proposes to expand the exploration of the internet as an economic construct in a number of directions. it pluralizes the definition of “economy”, expanding it from the strictly fiscal to include other economies such as the moral, (sub-) cultural, affective, queer, or libidinal (to name merely a few). various papers propose different economic models for understanding the interactions within and between these various economies. they also expand the range of actors and economic contexts associated with the internet, drawing attention to the intersections of race and gender in particular. the goal of these papers across the various sessions is to expand our imaginary of the internet economy. this panel is focused on expanding critical frameworks that can be brought to bear on economies within digital media. while marxian frameworks are insightful and valuable, they may not adequately reflect the contemporary social context, nor engage effectively with politics outside of class. what other economic models need to be used, or how do we inflect marx, for these contexts? what other critical perspectives do we need to incorporate to understand the broad implications of a socially pervasive, but commercial internet? the papers on this panel work at the intersection of economic concepts and theoretical paradigms drawn from a variety of disciplines, demonstrating an expanded toolkit for interrogating internet economies. the first speaker offers a marxist feminist and queer critique of theories about user exploitation that follow from the autonomous marxists, calling upon us to recognize the gendered and racialized history of unpaid labor and the absence of this insight in neoclassical economic modeling. through a case study in the political economy of anonymity in queer dating/hook-up sites, the speaker de-centers the normatively white, hetereosexual, cis-male in economic models, highlighting different and too-frequently ignored ways of understanding privacy and the exploitation of data. the second speakers return to and revitalize classic work on gift economies, exploring the ways in which the fiscal and moral economies are articulated together in commonsbased production. through a multi-sited ethnographic study of open source animation film-making communities tracing the movement between actors and objects across different regimes of value, the speakers describe negotiated transitions from commons to commodity and back again. they argue that when engaging with producers’ own accounts of their community-based processes and the agonistic ethics holding sway there, we are better able to see the fluid dynamics of decommodification and recommodification taking place within commons production integrated into the commodity-based capitalist economic environment. the third speaker looks at the intersection of state policy and economics, providing a history of how the internet, which was focused on non-profit and public concerns in the first half of its life (1965–1995), was refigured by u.s. law and policy to support corporate for-profit use. starting with the telecommunications act of 1996, through the digital millennium copyright act of 1998, the fcc policy statement of 2010, and the national broadband plan of 2010, the speaker argues that u.s. law and policy have attempted to increase competition where market-based solutions are not clearly in the public interest, placing increasingly more informational functions within the purview of market forces. the speaker then addresses policies at access and content levels that would instead nurture and grow non-profit spaces. the fourth speaker continues the broad political engagement of this panel, examining crowdfunding campaigns set up to support u.s. police officers involved in the 2014 killings of michael brown and eric garner. the speaker argues that these examples of gift economies, by simply claiming to e.g. “help [officer darren wilson] and his family during this trying time in their lives,” collapse the roles fuchs has described as sociocultural, social-political, and socio-economic, and allow racist donors to “launder” their politico-economic activity through the gift economy. this case study demonstrates the importance of integrating economic analysis with critical social theory—the central project at the heart of this panel. paper 1: decentring homo economicus: refiguring the economic subject of digital media’s political economy author: kylie jarrett the current focus on digital media in terms of its political economy is dominated by marxist paradigms of both value and labour. this economic model, along with many others, is based upon a normative and exclusive configuration of the economic subject. this is evident in the work drawing on autonomous marxism that declares the novelty of the “social factory”, of the incorporation of life outside factory walls into the calculations of capital (e.g. terranova 2013; negri 1989; wark 2013). however, for such a condition to be defined as novel implies the prior existence of a sphere of activity outside of the alienation, drudgery and compulsion of paid labour and which does not contribute to capitalist systems. it also implies a “natural” space where the economic subject can autonomously express their “species-being”, or what we would now call their individual subjectivity. the domestic sphere and leisure-time have historically constituted this space for the industrial labourer. the incorporation of these spaces into capital through digital media sites is now a well-rehearsed argument. for many women though, these spaces have historically been saturated with compelled work that is formally alienated, in that it contributes to the generation of surplus, and also experienced as alienating in that it fails to enable self-expression. unpaid domestic work, for instance, has an important economic role in that it enables the reproduction of the worker below cost, and while often personally rewarding, can also (sometimes simultaneously) be a site of drudgery, self-negation and violence. the autonomy upon which life outside the social factory is predicated has historically been denied to women, both in theory and in practice, and has arguably been a fantasy constructed for the white, male labourer to ameliorate the inequities experienced in industrial labour (federici 2004). consequently, the characterisation of the saturated exploitation of digital media users as an example of the final realisation of the “social factory” is a dubious claim and one riddled with heterosexism and racism. this paper is a provocation for internet researchers to challenge the assumptions underpinning the economic models we bring to bear in analysis of digital media, specifically the qualities of the actor we place at its heart. it will firstly outline the argument by which the subject of classical economics can be typified as almost invariably a white, middle-class, heterosexual, able-bodied autonomous, rational male actor, a list of terms that occupy one, highly privileged side of western cultural binary thinking. neoclassical economics, as england (1993) and other feminist and queer economists point out, is based on three underlying assumptions that show this androcentric bias. the first is that interpersonal utility comparisons are impossible, the second that taste is exogenous and unchanging and third that actors are selfish, implying an atomistic “separative self” associated with normative masculinity. cornwall (1997) similarly argues that classical economics is drawn from general ideas about liberty with an emphasis on the sovereignty of economic actors that is not available to all actors such as homosexuals for whom self-surveillance has been an important strategy. the argument about sovereignty is closely allied with the concept of selfinterest that manifests prior to and supersedes interaction with others, which in turn aligns with attributions of rationality to construct the subject of classical economics as a sovereign individual securing their pre-determined instrumental objectives (holton 1992). as such, homo economicus almost invariably displays a variety of attributes associated with normative, white masculinity. the paper will then consider what happens when we do not place the autonomous, white, heterosexual cis-male subject at the core of economic activity in digital media; if we decentre homo economicus. it will use as an example the political economy of anonymity, drawing especially on facebook’s recent, failed attempt to impose “real names” on drag queens. it will firstly explore how, like much work on privacy, the argument by facebook re-inscribes the gendered and heterosexist division of labour integral to capitalism (federici, 2004; butler 1997; zaretsky 1976; dalla costa and james 1972). it will then consider how these arguments may be reconfigured when subaltern subject positions are taken as the norm. in this instance, it will explore how anonymity is not necessarily an expression of individual liberty (the private, unsurveilled space of privacy discourse) but is instead relational and a particular form of publicity and visibility. the paper will consider how anonymity works as an economic actor within online queer communities, affecting the distribution and accumulation of capital within the broad political economy of sites such as gaydar, grindr or squirt as identified by light (2015), mowlabocus (2010) and phillips (2002), among others. finally, the implications of this framework for how we conceptualise privacy and the exploitation of data will be explored. the goal of this paper is not to offer an exhaustive empirical study of these sites or the issue of online anonymity. its intention is to demonstrate a challenge to how we imagine the economic models through which we analyse the internet, and in particular the autonomy attributed to the economic subjects inscribed within them. it argues instead that there are situated, connected and relational subjects at the core of digital media economics and that this requires economic models that reflect this logic. paper 2: between decommodification and recommodification: negotiations of value in open-source cultural production author: julia velkova and peter jakobsson the domain of digital commons has been expanding since the 2000s after the appearance of legal mechanisms to distribute digital cultural works online under less restrictive terms than those permitted by copyright. this process has been connected to the formation of 'free culture' (lessig, 2004) marking the emergence, distribution and exponential growth of digital works available as commons online free to use, alter and build upon. by the end of 2015 the number of such works is estimated to pass beyond one billion, approximately a tenth of which are hosted on major sites such as youtube, wikipedia, flickr, public library of science, scribd and jamendo (creative commons, 2015). despite this growth, much of the research on the commons has been continuously isolating their production from the domain of commodity production, and paradoxically, while digital commons production has been seen as constituting a 'gift economy' (barbrook, 2005; terranova, 2004), the economic dimension of gifting has been detached from the commons production sphere suggesting an incommensurability between the production of commons and commodities. this paper aims to explore how cultural producers within the domain of digital commons production are adapting to and interacting with existing structures of the capitalist market and how do they make commensurable different systems of valuation – those of the commons, and those of the market. as an empirical example through which we develop a theoretical discussion we take two cases of open-source and commonsbased cultural production, namely two large scale open-source animation film productions gooseberry and morevna formed around the 3d graphics blender and the 2d graphics synfig communities. animation film production is one of the most cost and labor intensive practices in contemporary media production where costs are measured per minute of animation. it is also a practice which mixes technology, media, and art, and in the past 10 years there have been substantial developments of it in the domain of commons. with about 700 000 downloads per month, the open-source animation 3d software blender for example may be regarded as having a similar user base to its commercial counterparts. these two cases are helpful to test and develop a theoretical approach that we propose, which is based on revisiting anthropological work on gifting, or gift-giving, particularly appadurai (1986) and igor kopytoff's (1986) work on 'commodities in a cultural perspective' and through it extending graham murdock's concept of 'moral economies' (murdock, 2011). murdock suggests that in a market system, actors are morally obliged to act as rational utility-maximisers, whereas in a commons-based economy actors are supposed to act according to a morality of mutuality. while we agree on murdock's general framework, we argue that the model suffers from a dichotomous thinking that is recurring in a lot of the recent work on cultural commons production and its relationship to the market. to overcome this, our approach in how to analyse the establishment of relationships between commons and market is to follow objects and persons as they move between what arjun appadurai has referred to as 'regimes of value' (appadurai, 1986: 4), and what in other literature has been discussed as 'systems of belief' (bolin, 2009; bourdieu, 1993), and to map the negotiations that these moves trigger. this approach is inspired by igor kopytoff's (1986) suggestion that the production of a commodity should not be regarded only as a material process but also as a cultural process which consists in marking certain things as commodities. as he suggests, commodification is 'best looked upon as a process of becoming rather than as an all-or-none state of being' (1986: 73), and the biography of an object occasionally can contain and reflect the move of a thing between different regimes of value being in one moment of its biography a commodity, and in another moment – a commons. with this theoretical framework as background, and using a ‘multi-sited’ (marcus, 1995) ethnographic approach where understanding of cultures is built through 'tracing the changing nature, and use of things in different contexts' (ibid), we follow the biographies of three entities that are central to the open source animation film production practice: the production software, the animation films produced with that software, and the people participating in the film productions. this biographical tracing reveals how online communities can take out a commodity – graphics software from the market, de-commodify it and convert into commons that generates a broad spectrum of values and affective relationships between both people and technologies. it also illuminates how de-commodified objects can subsequently become the means to commodify commons produced within the communities, while in the same time paradoxically retain their status as commons. not least, we also show how the participants deliberately and unconsciously shift between different regimes of values in the interactions with market actors and with community members. we conclude that the different 'regimes of value' involved in the analysed projects are experienced by the project participants as (sometimes incommensurable) differences in goals, beliefs, ethics, and thus as constituting barriers between different regimes. at the same time however there are participants who work to create commensurability between the different regimes of value – trying to align the goals of the community with the capitalist logics of other related actors, primarily the cultural industries and/or state funders. this, we regard as involving translation processes which align the different regimes of value by finding ways of converting one value into another. we argue that these translation processes are ultimately related to power and the position of actors in relation to different regimes of value and the different moral economies. lastly, we claim that there is nothing predetermined or automatic in the relationship between markets and commons, and commons-based production communities can both stand to gain and lose from interacting with the market. paper 3: developing public spaces in the digital environment author: roderick graham in 1995 the national science foundation transferred control of the internet backbone over to telecommunications companies and decommissioned nsfnet. this signaled the end of government control over the internet. the privatization of the internet’s infrastructure and the commercialization of its traffic inaugurated a series of changes, generally seen as making the internet more user-friendly. the number of people connected to the internet exploded as telecommunications companies scrambled to open new markets and gain new subscribers. the rapid change in the web browsing experience – the move from web 1.0 to web 2.0 – was catalyzed by innovation through market experimentation. american government policy has shepherded this transformation from public to private. policy has been oriented towards increasing the number of producers – by reducing barriers to entry into the marketplace and by protecting content with copyright laws. meanwhile, the government has subsidized the opening of new markets by subsidizing network upgrades. i identify four key pieces of american policy towards the digital environment. the first is the telecommunications act of 1996. nuechterlein and weiser (2005) argue that this act, which made it easier for new business to enter into the telecommunications market, is “the most important telecommunications legislation – and arguably the most important legislation of any kind – since the new deal” (69). second is the digital millennium copyright act (dmca) of 1998. a key component of the dmca is the prohibiting of technologies that allow users to copy, distribute, and share content without the seller's permission. the recording artists of america v. napster case of 2000 was an application and enforcement of the dmca. the dmca has since been a tool used by large corporations to protect their intellectual property in the digital environment. the third piece of legislation is the federal communication commission (fcc) policy statement of 2010. this was the fcc's attempt at addressing net neutrality, the principle that all internet traffic, content, and sites should be treated equally along a network (wu 2003). the fcc's statement is an instantiation of how diluted the government's understanding of net neutrality had become (kimball 2013). the statement allowed landline providers to offer tiered services, slow data speeds for heavy users, and allowed mobile internet providers to “manage their networks” by blocking some data intensive applications. the fourth piece of legislation is the national broadband plan of 2010 (a component of the much larger recovery and reinvestment act, or stimulus plan). this is a massive – and still ongoing 7.2 billion investment in the nation's broadband infrastructure and use of that infrastructure. the majority of the funds have been used to “increase competition” between broadband providers. as of now little funds have been spent on educational or civil purposes (see graham 2014, pp. 118 120). while these policies have successfully nurtured the digital environment as a marketplace, the non-market aspects of the digital environment have atrophied. endusers devote most of their attention – in the form of web traffic – to e-commerce sites such as amazon or ebay, and social networking sites such as instagram and pinterest. while choosing how one experiences the digital environment is in effect the exercising of the freedom provided by that environment, it also means that the experience becomes the property of private businesses, even when a nonmarket alternative is probably the better natural option. several instances over the past decade illustrate the misplaced faith the public has in spaces beholden to the market. first, these spaces have the veneer of offering free services. however, the user must submit to having their privacy violated, and their experiences in that space sold to marketers. second, as companies become more efficient in monetizing the behavior of users in these spaces, they will become more vulnerable to advocacy groups that threaten advertising revenues through boycotts or public shaming. google’s decision to censor pornographic images in its searches and the banning of sexually explicit content from its adsense network – primarily because of interest group pressure – is an example of this. third, consumers are at the whim of ownership. this more than anything illustrates the private nature of this space, and the speech of so many is placed in the hands of so few. facebook's ceo mark zuckerberg has condemned the terrorist attacks at the offices of charlie hebdo, yet has routinely removed content for what appear to be idiosyncratic reasons. as a result, the internet’s role as a public sphere is increasingly tenuous for the simple reason that there are few active spaces that are public. more accurately, there are few non-profit, public alternatives to the market-based spaces that are currently popular. these alternative spaces are ones that will not need to sell private experiences to marketers, can allow free speech without economic pressure from interest groups, and can present viable alternatives for niche communities and minorities, are not nurtured. the neglect of public spaces in the digital environment is in stark contrast to the initial purpose of the internet, as well as its foundational phase during its first half of life, from 1969 to 1995 (curran 2012). the government is complicit, albeit indirectly, by focusing so heavily on the economic potential of the internet. the remedy is to nurture and grow non-profit spaces. i suggest that policies can achieve this goal by working at two levels. at the access level, network infrastructure can be put in place dedicated to the transmission of traffic for educational and civic purposes. this traffic can be free to the public, and would not count against data quotas set by service providers. at the content level, government can subsidize the creation and sustaining of nonprofit community web pages and social media sites. these spaces can be compared to nonprofit alternatives in other media, such as national public radio, c-span or the public broadcasting service. panel 4: crowdfunding, ideology, and the socio-political potential of the gift. author: david gehring the august 19th, 2014, shooting of michael brown by police officer darren wilson in ferguson, mo, the choking death of eric garner by a staten island police officer on july 17, 2014, and the feb 6th, 2015, physical assault on sureshbhai patel by police officer eric parker, have evoked emotional responses across the united states. in all three incidents, the police officer was white and the victim was non-white, which reignited racial tensions as could be recognized in, and further aggravated through, media commentary and social protests. while social media has played a central role in the dissemination of information, commentary, and real time reporting on events, crowdfunding has also provided a medium through which individuals can express their support for victims or police officers. the campaigns in question, in particular those launched to support the police officer, became spaces in which those donating gave voice to their racial prejudices, despite the attempted neutral rhetoric of the campaign itself. further, the money raised is potentially distributed to parties which hold particular politicized and influential positions within the community. this paper will explore the use of crowdfunding as a means of political activism and ideological expression. positioning my argument relative to christian fuchs (2014), david cheal (1988), and jürgen habermas (1962), i hold that when the crowdfunding model is utilized as a means to fund ideological causes, it signals an expansion from the entrepreneurial to the socio-political, in which the blurring of public and private roles allows a unique, potentially problematic, exchange of monetary and social values. while there has been much scholarship on the entrepreneurial potential of crowdfunding (bayus & kuppuswamy, 2013; belleflame, lambert & schweinbacher, 2013; guidici, nava, lamastra & verecondo, 2012; mollick, 2013) , there is very little on its intersection with socio-political action. i contextualize these events and related crowdfunding campaigns through a triangulation of influences—crowdfunding platforms, christian fuchs’s model of social roles, and the gift economy in the post web 2.0 environment. crowdfunding is an arguably participatory mode of economic exchange that allows for individuals to raise money via micro-donations. in the general sense, “funding is solicited online, usually in relatively small amounts, from individual donors or investors, and goes towards particular projects: personal loans...t-shirts...movies, or music” (bannerman, 2013). while crowdfunding platforms such as kickstarter or indiegogo are typically utilized in order to secure funding for a material product (e.g. films, music albums, or new technologies), they can also be used to raise money and awareness for more socially oriented issues. christian fuchs (2013) offers a model of various social roles as identified by hannah arendt (1958). based on this model, there exist distinctions between private social roles, socio-cultural, socio-political, and socioeconomic roles (fuchs, 73). i argue that crowdfunding collapses those distinctions, and within that collapse, motivations can be laundered through other more neutral or misleading claims. one important aspect of the crowdfunding model that allows it work so effectively is that it can be understood as operating through a gift logic (trump, 2013). weinberger and wallendorf (2011) find that “collective gifting rituals are primarily…guided by moral economy” and as such, can operate within “a system of transactions which are defined as socially desirable, because through them social ties are recognized, and balanced social relationships are maintained” (cheal, 1988). understood through this particular lens, crowdfunding campaigns revolving around passionately debated social events such as the one established for darren wilson, can be rhetorically positioned as neutral. the organizers of his campaign claimed that it was set up to help “help him and his family ‘during this trying time in their lives’,” and that the money would go to ‘”any financial needs they may have including legal fees’” (swaine, 2014). shortly afterward, the campaign was halted and a new campaign, linked to a local st. louis law enforcement union, was established in its place (pearce, 2014). this analysis seeks a more nuanced reading of this campaign to reveal a logic which operates underneath an unreflective understanding of this exchange as a gift economy. employing fuchs’s model, i argue that this campaign engages in three social roles simultaneously – the socio-cultural by virtue of the local focus of the campaign, and the socio-economic by virtue of its claim to aid in legal fees, and the socio-political. the involvement of the media in covering these campaigns signals the extension of the campaign in question into the socio-political realm. fuchs (2013) (via arendt) locates social activism within the socio-political role, in particular, anti-racist activism and the advocacy of different movements or social and political groups. regardless of the avowed intentions of the campaigns (i.e. maintaining a politically neutral position), the playing out of these campaigns reveals a rather divisive mechanization that separates citizens, as was seen in these cases, along racial lines. as the campaign for darren wilson increased in visibility due in part to the media coverage, gofundme eventually had to remove the comment function of the campaign due to the number of racist comments left by supports of darren wilson. by collapsing the distinctions between these social roles and functioning in all three simultaneously, the crowdfunding of social causes can be understood as a consequential and divisive (or perhaps productive) mechanism with the potential to effect a very real change within the community in which, and for which, it was established. further, appropriated as news content by various media outlets, they can ground media narratives, which further mechanize, aggravate, and reify opposing ideologies. the legality of these types of campaigns in regards to their role in the political process is still evolving. with the passing of legislation such as citizens united and the influence of money on our political system, such affordances made possible through crowdfunding should be considered. references appadurai, arjun (ed.) (1986) the social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective. cambridge; new york: cambridge university press. arendt, hannah. (1958) the human condition. chicago: university of chicago press, 2nd ed. bannerman, sara. (2013) crowdfunding culture. journal of mobile media, 7(1). web. barbrook, richard (2005) the high-tech gift economy. first monday, 0(0), available from: http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1517 (accessed 23 april 2014). belleflame, p., lambert, t., schweinbacher, a. (2013) crowdfunding: tapping the right crowd. journal of business venturing 29, 585-609. bolin, goran (2009) symbolic production and value in media industries. journal of cultural economy, 2(3), 345–361. bourdieu, pierre (1993) the field of cultural production: essays on art and literature. new york: columbia university press. butler, judith. 1997. “merely cultural,” social text 15:3-4, 265-277. cheal, david. 1988. the gift economy. london: routledge. cornwall, richard r. 1997. “queer political economy: the social articulation of desire” in amy gluckman and betsy reed (eds.) homo economics: capitalism, community, and lesbian and gay life, london: routledge: 89-122. creative commons (2015) state of the commons. available from: https://stateof.creativecommons.org/report/. curran, james. 2012. “rethinking internet history.” pp. 34 – 76 in misunderstanding the internet, edited by j. curran, n. fenton, and d. freedman. new york, ny: routledge. dalla costa, mariarosa and selma james. 1972. the power of women and the subversion of the community. london: falling wall press. england, paula. 1993. “the separative self: androcentric bias in neoclassical assumptions” in marianne a. ferber and julie a. nelson (eds.) beyond economic man: feminist theory and economics, chicago: university of chicago press, 37-53. federici, silvia. 2004. caliban and the witch: women, the body and primitive accumulation. new york: autonomedia. fuchs, christian. (2014) social media and the public sphere. triplec, 12(1), 57-101. gerber, elizabeth m., hui, julie. (2013) crowdfunding: motivations and deterrents for participation. transactions on computing-human interaction, 20(6), 1-32. giudici, giancarlo, et al. "crowdfunding: the new frontier for financing entrepreneurship?." available at ssrn 2157429 (2012). graham, roderick. 2014. the digital practices of african-americans: an approach to studying cultural change in the information society. new york, ny: peter lang. habermas, jürgen. 1962. the structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. cambridge: mit press. holton, robert j. (1992). economy and society. routledge, london. jian, l., usher, n. (2014) crowd-funded journalism. journal of computer-mediated communication, 19, 155-170. jimenez, miguel p. (2014) human rights activism in times of cognitive saturation: talking about tools. international journal on human rights, 20, 419-425. kimball, danny. 2013. “what we talk about when we talk about net neutrality: a historical genealogy of the discourse of ‘net neutrality’.” pp 33 – 48 in regulating the web: network neutrality and the fate of the open internet, edited by z. stiegler. lanham. md: lexington books. kopytoff, igor (1986) the cultural biography of things: commoditization as process. in: appadurai a (ed.), the social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective, cambridge ; new york: cambridge university press. kuppuswamy, venkat, and barry l. bayus. "crowdfunding creative ideas: the dynamics of project backers in kickstarter." unc kenan-flagler research paper 201315 (2014). larimer, sarah. (2014, sept. 2). what’s going on with the fundraising campaigns for ferguson police officer darren wilson. the washington post. retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/09/02/whats-going-on-withthe-fundraising-campaigns-for-ferguson-police-officer-darren-wilson/ . lessig, lawrence (2004) free culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity. new york: penguin press. light, ben. (2015) “heteronormativity and the real name web: hooking up with squirt” unpublished paper, the annual conference of the uk media, communication and cultural studies association, 7-9 january, northumbria university, newcastle, uk. marcus ge (1995) ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography. annual review of anthropology, 24(1), 95–117. mollick, ethan. "the dynamics of crowdfunding: an exploratory study." journal of business venturing 29.1 (2014): 1-16. mowlabocus, sharif. 2010. “look at me! images, validation and cultural currency on gaydar” in christopher pullen and margaret cooper (eds.) lgbt identity and online new media. london: routledge, 201-214. murdock, graham (2011) political economies as moral economies: commodities, gifts and public goods. in: the handbook of political economy of communications, global handbooks in media and communication research, chichester, west sussex ; malden, ma: wiley-blackwell, pp. 13–40. negri, antonio. 1989. the politics of subversion: a manifesto for the twenty-first century. trans. james newell. cambridge: polity press. nuechterlein, jonathan e. and philip j. weiser. 2005. digital crossroads: american telecommunications policy in the internet age. cambridge, ma: the mit press. pearce, matt. (2014, sept. 1). fundraising web pages for ferguson cop still closed; it’s unclear why. los angeles times. retrieved from http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-ferguson-officer-fundraisers20140831-story.html phillips, david j. 2002. "negotiating the digital closet: online pseudonymity and the politics of sexual identity" information, communication and society, 5:3, 406-424. salvatore, armando. (2013) new media, the “arab spring,” and the metamorphosis of the public sphere: beyond western assumptions on collective agency and democratic politics. constellations, 20(2), 218-228. swaine, jon. (2014, aug. 22). gofundme defends darren wilson fundraising page despite racist postings. the guardian. retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/22/gofundme-defends-ferguson-officerfundraising-page-racist-postings terranova, tiziana. 2013. “free labor” in trebor scholz (ed.). 2013. digital labor: the internet as playground and factory, new york: routledge, 33-57. terranova tiziana (2004) network culture: politics for the information age. london ; ann arbor, mi: pluto press trump, rob. (2013, feb. 8). why would you ever give money through kickstarter. the new york times. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/magazine/why-would-you-ever-give-moneythrough-kickstarter.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1& wark, mckenzie. 2013. “considerations on a hacker manifesto” in trebor scholz (ed.). 2013. digital labor: the internet as playground and factory, new york: routledge, 67-75. weinberger, michelle f., wallendorf, melanie. (2011) intracommunity gifting at the intersection of contemporary moral and market economies. journal of consumer research, 39, 229-247. wu, tim. 2003. “network neutrality, broadband discrimination”, journal on telecommunications and high technology law 2(141 – 179). zaretsky, eli. 1976. capitalism, the family, and personal life. london: pluto press. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa big bird, binders, and bayonets: humor and live-tweeting during the 2012 u.s. presidential debates kevin driscoll university of southern california us kedrisco@usc.edu mike ananny university of southern california us ananny@usc.edu françois bar university of southern california us fbar@usc.edu kristen guth university of southern california us kguth@usc.edu abe kazemzadeh university of southern california us kazemzad@usc.edu alex leavitt university of southern california us aleavitt@usc.edu kjerstin thorson university of southern california us kjerstin.thorson@usc.edu abstract during the 2012 u.s. election cycle, social media analytics services were eager to demonstrate the efficacy of their tools to capture public opinion on twitter. graphics they produced to illustrate user sentiment regarding the candidates and issues were later reproduced by major news organizations. to better understand the particular practices that undergird such summary representations, we collected 35,247,043 tweets during the three televised presidential debates, nearly half of which were made up of retweets. using a combination of quantitative content analysis and software-assisted close textual analysis, we examined the use of humor and sarcasm, 'astroturfing' by campaigns and other strategic actors, and the prevalence of retweeting 'bots.' although sentiment analysis systems rarely disclose their methodologies, the diverse practices we encountered in this corpus makes clear that large-scale computational methods must account for the local contexts within which tweets are produced if they are to report meaningful statistics. keywords humor; politics; sentiment analysis; social media; content analysis introduction researchers in both industry and the academy are attempting to analyze sentiment on twitter, assigning numerical scores to tweets through algorithmic analysis. simultaneously, debates about the value of measuring public opinion through this medium have questioned the interpretive use of such techniques to summarize a vast array of opinions (sifry, 2012; metaxas et al., 2011; gayo-avello, 2011). during the 2012 u.s. election cycle, providers such as crimson hexagon, topsy, and radian6 partnered with news organizations that were eager to find ways to report on the millions of tweets and facebook posts about the campaign and candidates (petulla, 2013). dashboards illustrating support for obama and romney were broadcast on cnn; politico tried to predict the outcome of the republican primaries using sentiment on facebook. these representations were often offered as a complement to traditional polling as a more instantaneous assessment of public mood. sentiment analysis became an integral component of the campaign coverage. sentiment-based quantifications of public opinion are contested constructs, not unlike the emergence of polling data as a technology of public opinion in the first half of the twentieth century (igo, 2008). technical questions about twitter sentiment analysis remain: do sentiment algorithms accurately capture the intended meanings of tweet authors? when twitter users represent only 16 percent of the population (pew internet & american life project, 2012), what publics does sentiment analysis 1 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa capture? although not widely recognized within news media framings, these technical debates are intertwined with the social practices of tweeting politics. this paper contributes to this debate through a multi-faceted analysis of tweets posted during each of the three 2012 presidential debates. while some studies have documented the practice of live-tweeting during televised media events (bruns & burgess, 2011; mcpherson et al., 2012; shamma, kennedy, & churchill, 2010) and others have explored the technical complexities of sentiment algorithms (mejova, srinivasan, & boynton, 2012; skoric et al., 2012; metaxas et al., 2012), these literatures remain relatively disconnected. our aim is to straddle these literatures, showing how different meanings of large-scale methodological tools like sentiment analysis depend upon understanding both online, networked social practices and assumptions underlying ‘big data’ collection and interpretation. we focus on retweeting and livetweeting practices, in particular as they relate to humor, as we suspect prevalent sentiment analysis approaches may overemphasize their importance in political discourse. we examine practices such as the use of humor and sarcasm (mejova, srinivasan, & boynton, 2013), ‘astroturfing’ by campaigns and other strategic actors (ratkiewicz et al., 2011), and retweeting ‘bots’ that distort the implicit “one tweet, one opinion” assumption behind many sentiment analysis algorithms (metaxas et al., 2012). data collection & methods during each 2012 presidential debate, we collected tweets matching an evolving set of 427 debaterelated keyword rules using the commercial data provider gnip powertrack. our observation period began one hour before each debate’s start and lasted until four hours after the conclusion of the televised broadcast. the full corpus consists of 35,247,043 tweets produced by 5,833,227 unique user accounts. the size of this collection is comparable with statistics reported by journalists and social media analytics firms in the days following the debates (e.g., sharp, 2012). our analysis focuses on the 17,579,576 retweets within these data. retweets accounted for 49.9% of the total corpus of tweets we collected during the three debates. to investigate livetweeting practices and their relationships to sentiment analysis, we used both quantitative content analysis and software-assisted textual analysis. identifying comedic accounts first, we conducted a content analysis on the top quartile of most-tweeted accounts (n=197).this small group produced 18,425 tweets that were retweeted 4,388,446 times collectively during (and in the hours following) the three presidential debates. we found that 62 (31%) of the top quartile of the most retweeted accounts were primarily used for humor, comedy, parody and sarcasm. these 62 humorous accounts were responsible, directly or indirectly via retweet, for 1,370,537 (4%) of all the tweets in our collection. to put this concentration of comic accounts in context, we also coded a random sample of the remaining three quartiles and found that the number of accounts clearly used only for humor was negligible. emergent live-tweeting practices the results of the content analysis identified accounts that were exclusively comic, however, it was clear that many of the most retweeted tweets were humorous – even if the accounts that sent them were not. to investigate the use of humor by accounts that are not strictly comedic, we are in the midst of identifying thematic clusters of tweets in the top quartile of most retweeted tweets and conducting close readings of each thematic cluster. this analysis indicates a set of live-tweeting practices that have yet to be addressed by the existing literature. several of the most retweeted jokes appear to be direct, unattributed copies of other widely-circulated tweets – a sort of “joke plagiarism.” jokes appear to have significant currency as a means of boosting one’s visibility on twitter (as measured by retweet count and number of followers), providing twitter users with an incentive to plagiarize successful jokes. a related phenomenon that appears less 2 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa frequently involves comedic accounts tweeting the exact same message during multiple debates. these practices suggest that the authors of these accounts are tracking the circulation and reception of their tweets. finally, several of the phenomena identified above might be attributed to semi-autonomous software agents (“bots”). in particular, we suspect that certain bots systematically retweet jokes that have been widely circulated in order to gain followers. although we can only speculate about the motives for creating such bots, a likely motivation is that highly visible accounts are valued more highly on the grey market by spammers who intend to use the accounts to circulate phishing links. conclusion our findings highlight the need to take into account social and cultural contexts, and the practices of production and re-circulation when using computational methods to interpret large bodies of political expression (boyd & crawford, 2011). these results indicate that many of the most widely circulated tweets are, in fact, jokes produced by twitter users who exclusively trade in humor, suggesting an important revision of our initial questions regarding the representativeness of twitter for purposes of measuring public sentiment. although twitter seems unlikely to represent the opinions of voters or citizens, it nevertheless presents a valuable opportunity for scholars of political communication and public deliberation to observe the negotiation of conflict through the use of humor. furthermore, few of the social media dashboard providers publicly disclose their expertise at interpreting humor, sarcasm, or other unique social behaviors. yet, the prevalence of humor makes clear that such systems must contend with sarcasm, satire, and context-dependent political humor if they are to report meaningful statistics. acknowledgments references boyd, d. & crawford, k. (2011). six provocations for big data. oxford internet institute’s "a decade in internet time: symposium on the dynamics of the internet and society" on september 21, 2011. bruns, a., & burgess, j. e. (2011). new methodologies for researching news discussion on twitter. the future of journalism 2011, 8 9 september 2011, cardiff university, cardiff, uk. gayo-avello, d. (2011). don't turn social media into another 'literary digest' poll. communications of the acm, 54(10), 121-128. igo, s. e. (2007). the averaged american: surveys, citizens, and the making of a mass public. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. mcpherson, k., huotari, k., cheng, f., humphrey, d., cheshire, c., & brooks, a. l. (2012, february). glitter: a mixed-methods study of twitter use during glee broadcasts. in proceedings of the acm 2012 conference on computer supported cooperative work companion, 167-170. mejova, y., srinivasan, p., & boynton, b. (2013, february). gop primary season on twitter: popular political sentiment in social media. in proceedings of the sixth acm international conference on web search and data mining, 517-526. metaxas, p. t., mustafaraj, e., & gayo-avello, d. (2011, october). how (not) to predict elections. in privacy, security, risk and trust , ieee third international conference on social computing, 165-171. metaxas, p.t., & mustafaraj, e. (2012). social media and the elections. policy forum (october 26, 2012). retrieved from http://www.lawnet.gr/assets/files/somed.pdf. o’connor, b., balasubramanyan, r., routledge, b. r., & smith, n. a. (2010, may). from tweets to polls: linking text sentiment to public opinion time series. in proceedings of the international aaai conference on weblogs and social media, 122-129. 3 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa petulla, s. (2013, january 23) feelings, nothing more than feelings: the measured rise of sentiment analysis in journalism. neiman journalism lab. retrieved from: http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/01/feelingsnothing-more-than-feelings-the-measured-rise-of-sentiment-analysis-in-journalism/. pew internet & american life project. (2012, february). what users do online [data file]. retrieved from: http://www.pewinternet.org/static-pages/trend-data-(adults)/online-activites-total.aspx. ratkiewicz, j., conover, m., meiss, m., gonçalves, b., flammini, a., & menczer, f. (2011). detecting and tracking political abuse in social media. in proceedings of the icwsm, 297-304. shamma, d. a., kennedy, l., & churchill, e. f. (2010). conversational shadows: describing live media events using short messages. in proceedings of icwsm, 331-334. sharp, a. (2012, october 4). dispatch from the denver debate. official twitter blog. accessed on february 28, 2013: http://blog.twitter.com/2012/10/dispatch-from-denver-debate.html sifry, m. (2012, january 13). politico-facebook sentiment analysis will generate "bogus" results, expert says. tech president. retrieved from: http://techpresident.com/news/21618/politico-facebooksentiment-analysis-bogus skoric, m., poor, n., achananuparp, p., lim, e. p., & jiang, j. (2012). tweets and votes: a study of the 2011 singapore general election. in proceedings of the 45th hawaii international conference on system science (hicss), 2583-2591. license this article is ©2013 kevin driscoll, mike ananny, françois bar, kristen guth, abe kazemzadeh, alex leavitt, and kjerstin thorson and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. 4 microsoft word plothe.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): plothe, t. (2014, october 22-24). n00bs need not apply: wiiware, generativity, and indie game designers. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. n00bs need not apply: wiiware, generativity, and indie game designers theo plothe american university the nintendo wii represented a shift in video game consoles not only from a static to motion controller, but also in presenting a console as a web portal. connected to the internet, it allowed consumers to buy other games using its wiiware interface. for indie game developers, the interface opened a new digital distribution system. i analyze nintendo’s developer authorization forms which outline the guidelines and approval process, discuss game approvals and rejections based on their content, and outline the consequences of nintendo’s developer authorization process for developers’ and consumers’ freedom of expression and consumption. i argue that nintendo’s authorized developer application violates the generativity principle, significantly restricting the market for developers as well as for consumers. the theory of generativity the internet has come to be an essential open and democratic platform for creativity and self-expression. zittrain (2008) attributes the strength of the internet to its architecture; it functions as a generative technology, and he argues that internet regulation should carefully avoid interfering with this particular quality of the technology. according to zittrain (2006), a technology is generative when it is adaptable across a range of tasks and skill levels and is generally accessible to a wide range of individuals. generative technologies are also open to other uses than those considered by the designers. protecting the open qualities of the internet ensure that the technology remains both innovative and democratic. proprietary systems for distributing cultural content online, such as nintendo wiiware, interfere with this generative principle. corporations that set up these proprietary systems control the content that consumers have access to, which hinders innovation and does not encourage democratic culture. in the case of nintendo’s wiiware, nintendo, by proxy, is limiting innovation that is required in a cultural democracy. authorized developer application nintendo promoted wiiware’s “democratic” features from its introduction. for designers, nintendo promoted its low barriers for entry to the market and small distribution costs, which it argued allowed for greater competition and increased diversity in game offerings (bozon, 2008). despite the promotion of creativity, cultural production, and democratic ideals, wiiware restricts the generativity principle of information technology, placing limits on this creativity by serving as a gatekeeper. a mere handful of games have been removed from wiiware for content violations or the release of confidential information, yet market conditions keep many from entry. either the game is not selling or the studio fails. zallag studios had a number of titles, including the popular gods vs humans, removed from wiiware. founder david jeuvideo commented, our games came out at a time when nothing was happening on the wii. so even being in the top of the sales charts, we didn't gain anything in terms of money. most journalists don't even review games from the on-line store. it was difficult to know our games from wiiware. (go nintendo, 2011). while games like bomberman were developed for wiiware, x-box live arcade, and playstation network, there were individual tweaks and software requirements that make the game slightly unique for each system. nintendo requires developers to purchase a development kit ($2500) that helped design the game to nintendo’s specifications. in an interview with ign, tom prata, senior director of project development with nintendo of america, discussed the difficulty of acquiring the developer kit to for wiiware. ign asked specifically regarding generative technology, rooted in the number of details nintendo required as part of their application for the developer kit. given this emphasis on a company address and a licensed developer experience, ign noted that the arrangement “wasn’t exactly an ‘open source’ feeling in that sense, while it is extremely accessible for those in the position to develop already” (bozon, 2008). prata argued that while the development requirements are the same as those for any retail content, the digital nature of the product required certain safeguards and that nintendo needed to act as gatekeeper, preventing junk games from flooding the market, or from one developer overwhelming their resources. prata positioned wiiware as a simple conduit, an apolitical distribution engine without its own agenda, in reality, wiiware creates a number of obstacles. chiefly among these obstacles is sales requirements. trent oster, a co-founder of the game development company beamdog, noteed that developers must sell 6,000 units of a wiiware game before receiving a payment from nintendo: "we'd love to see some money back on the title,” he stated in an interview about his game mdk2, “but we've yet to see anything" (caoili and rose, 2012). until a wiiware game hits the 6,000 unit mark, the developer will not be able to recoup the costs of game development. if the game sells 5,999 copies, the developer receives nothing. independent game developer different cloth produced a critically-acclaimed and awardwinning game called lilt line for ios and wiiware. founder gordon midwood revealed on his blog, however, that the wiiware version sold just 3,756 copies from its release in december 2010 to march 2011. he noted, "if we don’t get past a threshold around twice that in america, nintendo will never pay us anything” (midwood, 2011). if developers like midwood are never rewarded for taking risks, not just struggling to make money, there is little incentive to produce brilliant games like lilt line. the idea of the “long tail,” as noted by chris anderson (2006), is that because the internet offers near unlimited selection, cultural products that appeal to small audiences can still find a market online through the reduced cost of distribution through digital services. while nintendo claims to promote this long tail model of cultural production and distribution, they institute distribution barriers common to the old market system. while issues of space are of little concern, nintendo has deemed that this game should not stay on its server, hindering democratic distribution of creative content. conclusions like many other online proprietary distribution systems, wiiware undermines the generative principles of the internet by creating its own barriers. from its onerous application process and high bars to entry to its restrictions on file size and most of all, its punitive payout requirements, wiiware hurts the industry more than it helps. nintendo’s latest game system, the wiiu, continues to use wiiware, and similar systems are used by not only sony and microsoft in their newest gaming consoles, but by apple and google in the distribution of software used for smart phones. while these systems provide some advantages, they represent a troubling step toward greater corporate control of the internet, which also means more control over creative production. revising these systems is essential to maintaining a healthy culture industry and ensuring democratic participation. references anderson, c. (2006). the long tail: why the future of business is selling less of more. hyperion. bozon. (2008, february 20). gdc 2008: wii ware interview ign. ign. retrieved from http://www.ign.com/articles/2008/02/21/gdc-2008-wii-ware-interview nintendo. (2013). software development support group: apply. nintendo. retrieved from http://www.warioworld.com/apply/ zallag explains why their company closed. (n.d.). gonintendo. retrieved from http://www.gonintendo.com/?mode=viewstory&id=158504&sid=397e99cc16bd5897539 8cebad0d45066 zittrain, j. (2005). the generative internet (ssrn scholarly paper no. id 847124). rochester, ny: social science research network. retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=847124 zittrain, j. (2008). the future of the internet--and how to stop it. yale university press. microsoft word ir16-template-final.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 rethinking selfies: empowering the marginalized through self-portraits david nemer1 school of informatics and computing, indiana university guo zhang freeman school of informatics and computing, indiana university background more than just a self-taken, static photo shared on social networking sites, selfies are considered nonverbal, visual communication that implies one’s thoughts, intentions, emotions, desires, and aesthetics captured by facial expressions, body language, and visual art elements. previous studies have investigated selfies in light of adolescent development (e.g., how teenagers use selfies to seek attention; see mclean, 2014) and prestigious user groups (e.g., celebrities’ self-promotion; see wallop, 2013). although these studies generalize selfies as a relation between narcissism and public attention, between (re)construction of self-esteem and optimized (or selective) self-presentation, and between self-promotion and social capital, selfies are produced and experienced by people in sociocultural terms. it is difficult to understand selfies without taking into account the deeper sociocultural context in which they were created, used, and interpreted (e.g., in a non-western culture). what happens, then, when selfies, as “fashionable” sociotechnical artifacts, are introduced to and adopted within user groups of sociocultural specificity, such as marginalized groups? we draw on a six-month ethnography performed by the first author, including user observations and 56 in-depth and semi-structured interviews in the favelas of vitória, brazil, to study slum residents’ selfie practices. the fieldwork focused on four community technology centers (ctcs): two lan houses (life games in itararé and guetto in gurigica) and two telecenters (one in itararé and one in são benedito). we used ethnography to emphasize how marginalized people experience and understand selfies, which puts them at the center of the research and posits that people themselves define their valued lives. we argue that practices of understanding, interpreting, and experiencing selfies are embedded in dense sociocultural contexts. for marginalized users who are suffering in a relatively severe living environment, selfies are not a shallow way to show narcissism, fashion, and self-promotion and seek attention; selfies, 1 this paper is based on nemer and freeman (2015). suggested citation (apa): nemer, d., & freeman, g. (2015, october 21-24). rethinking selfies: empowering the marginalized through self-portraits. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. rather, empower the users to exercise free speech, practice self-reflection, express spiritual purity, improve literacy skills, and form strong interpersonal connections. this research contributes to a growing social scientific literature on selfies by rethinking selfies as empowerment and fostering a non-western and nonconventional mode of knowing on people’s daily use of technology. this approach sheds light on the role of technology in various dimensions in people’s lives. escaping from censorship and expressing their true selves the smartphones that participants used to take selfies belonged to either themselves or a friend. they called their smartphones xing lings—a term that refers to chinese imitation and pirated brands, which were smart only when wifi was available and when users could afford the expensive data packages. thus, the most used feature on our participants’ smartphones was the camera. the observations in the ctcs revealed that facebook has become users’ main social media platform where they shared selfies. the interviewees mentioned that they were afraid of posting on facebook regularly because they might be watched or chased or face retaliation by the drug lords who controlled the slum. their fear was understandable considering what was happening around them. the favelas of gurigica, são benedito, bairro da penha, and itararé emerged in a complicated socioeconomic context in which people in the city were suffering from an unequal distribution of wealth and a housing shortage. moreover, drug dealers were active and controlled these areas. drug lords divided the favelas into personal territories by informal treaties and agreements and tried to establish and maintain order in their own territory. drug lords followed a feudal system in which each drug lord was responsible for offering the local population in his or her territory the resources, supplies, and services for their living, such as gas, electricity, and protection against outsiders and rival gangs. in doing so, drug lords became the only authority in this area, respected and appreciated by the local residents. during the fieldwork for this study, the favelas were in an unstable and warlike situation because of constant conflicts between current controllers and newcomers—drug lords who escaped from the “pacifying” mission in rio de janeiro. despite their fears, most of the interviewees still posted selfies on their facebook page as a tactic to express their feelings and opinions in an implicit and safe way. these interviewees found it difficult to express their true feelings and be favela dwellers at the same time. they felt oppressed wherever they went: if they hung out in the favelas, they felt that the drug lords in control were watching them. if they went outside of the favelas, they felt discriminated by the society and targeted by the police. instead, they considered facebook as a safer place to express their true feelings, thoughts, and personalities while escaping from the drug lords’ censorship. andre, age 17, describes the context for his posting of a selfie on facebook: “today i had to walk through a shooting in itararé. the police cars were flying by . . . you should have seen it. . . . i’m just very grateful i’m still alive, but at the same time i’m furious to have to face this situation almost every week. today i posted a photo of myself expressing my gratitude of being alive. . . . i can’t say much more than that because i’ll have trouble with people involved in this shooting.” for andré, taking and posting selfies had nothing to do with narcissism or attention seeking. to the contrary, as a resident of a dangerous area run by drug lords, andré did not seek public attention at all. his selfie was a strategic way to show his grief about the shooting he witnessed, his disappointment about his current living situation (“furious to have to face this situation almost every week”), and his expectation for a better life (“my gratitude of being alive”). his selfie practice was embedded in a socioculturally dense context and cannot be reduced to a simple act of self-promotion. ricardo, age 17, a frequent user of life games lan house, usually used his selfies to let his mom know where he was and give her a sign that he was safe: “my mom works the entire day and i have nothing to do after school. . . . i love playing soccer on the streets, but it is dangerous due to the [drug] street managers wanting new people in their team. . . . i always post photos of myself to show my mom where i am and that i’m ok . . . . she always checks her face [facebook] at work during her breaks . . . there’s a computer there they can use.” for ricardo, being on the streets without adult supervision was dangerous, because the drug traffickers were always looking for new recruits to expand their cartel. using selfies became a fast and efficient way to communicate with his mother and provide her with visual evidence that he was safe. ctcs were a safe, trusted, and friendly place where slum residents felt it was easier to disclose their true feelings and deepest thoughts. although free wifi was available in the telecenters, users did not upload their selfies directly from their xing lings, because they were generally unaware of the open wifi network or how to use it. they usually first transferred their selfies to desktop computers in the ctcs via a usb cable and then uploaded the photos to facebook. however, the ctcs were more than just physical places to upload selfies. in ctcs, participants felt more relaxed, comfortable, and happier. maria, age 15 explains: “i come here to hang out with my friends, not just to use the computers. . . . i go to the bathroom and take photos with my friends. . . . i don’t have a large mirror like that one [in the bathroom] at home, so here i can fit everyone in one photo. . . . i love the telecenter, here i feel safe and in these photos [selfies] i can show my happy side, my real self . . . because in the dangerous streets, unfortunately, i’m always showing my worried and anxious side.” for maria and her friends, taking selfies in the ctcs enabled them to show a “happy side” of their unhappy lives. hanging out and taking photos with friends in a safe (and nicer) place comforted and encouraged them, making them stronger and braver to face their unhappy and unsatisfactory lives (“dangerous,” “worried,” “anxious”). these users understood selfies as a digital product to empower their unsatisfactory off-line lives. they used selfies to escape from the powerful drug lords’ control of their everyday lives, to implicitly express their objections to inequity and violence, to enhance their reflections of their true selves, and to gain self-comfort and self-encouragement. overcoming illiteracy illiteracy was one of the most serious issues that favela residents faced. nineteen interviewees were functionally illiterate and could not describe their selfie practices in writing.2 however, illiteracy did not stop them from coming to telecenters and lan houses. roberto, age 21 and illiterate, was a frequent user of the guetto lan house and knew his way around the online world. he came to the ctc to play flash-based games and to gastar on facebook.3 on facebook, he mainly used photos, especially selfies, to communicate with his friends. for him, taking selfies became a tactic to overcome his illiteracy and the barriers to communicate with others (see figure 5). with selfies, roberto did not need to rely on traditional text-based computer-mediated communication that requires sufficient reading and writing skills; this enhanced his capabilities to socialize: “i can’t talk to people using the keyboard, so i upload my photos. . . . i say hi, good afternoon, good-bye . . . all on my photos. i wish i could read and write, but i guess i’m too old for that.” illiterate slum residents also used selfies rather than text messages and e-mail to facilitate communication with their families. for some, taking and posting selfies was a learning process in which they could improve their literacy with others’ help. this process is evident in the experience of alice (age 15). alice shared a xing ling with her older sister, and they learned most of the device’s functionality from the telecenter staff and from their friends’ help. although alice was enrolled in seventh grade in a public school in itararé, she was illiterate. alice had a written sheet that listed facebook’s url and her log-in information. she also usually relied on her friends to help her use the social networking site. when she first came to the telecenter in april 2013, alice did not understand the words on the sheet or how to press the corresponding keys on the keyboard to log in. she was unable to read anything on her screen or chat with others, but she managed to “like” and share her selfies, say hi (oi), and laugh by typing “kkkkkkkk.” she was mostly interested in knowing what others commented on her selfies. by the end of the fieldwork, alice was able to understand some comments on her selfies such as linda (beautiful), gata (hot), and feia (ugly), edit her selfies, have longer chats, and gastando with her friends on facebook.4 she said: “i’m terrified of my school. . . . i feel dumb there and no one is willing to help me. . . . i come to the telecenter to hang out with my friends here. this is a meeting place, but more importantly i can hang out with other friends who are working, at school or in lan houses and telecenters. . . . we can all talk on face [facebook]. . . . they can see my photos and see what i’m doing, what i’m 2 according to schlechty (2000), functional illiteracy refers to reading and writing skills that are inadequate to manage daily living and employment tasks that require reading skills beyond a basic level. 3 gastar, which in english means “to spend” or “to waste,” is a term used by teenagers in brazil to describe the activity of hanging out, chitchatting, making comments, and mocking someone. 4 gastando is the gerund form of the verb gastar, which is defined in footnote 3. dressing. . . . if i don’t come to the telecenter i can’t get on face and i feel lost later at the pracinha [public square]. . . . i need to understand what people are talking so when it’s six p.m. and we go to the pracinha, i’m already aware of what is going on.” teenagers like alice usually started their conversations on facebook, because they could not always be physically together. when later they met in off-line places such as the pracinha, they would continue their conversations. originally, alice was motivated to share her selfies on facebook, read comments and write feedback so she would not be left out of her circle of friends and the continuing off-line conversations. for her, selfies were a way to be included in social circles and engaged in off-line communities. discussion and conclusion as claimed by some (e.g., barakat, 2014; mckay, 2014), selfies are perceived as a shallow way for teenagers and celebrities to show narcissism and fashion, seek attention, and practice self-promotion. however, findings from our study do not support this conclusion. our ethnographic study revealed that practices of understanding, interpreting, and experiencing selfies are embedded in dense sociocultural contexts. the selfie users observed and interviewed in this study were living in marginalized areas (i.e., the favelas of bairro da penha, gurigica, itararé, and são benedito in brazil) that were under constant surveillance by powerful drug lords. slum residents relied on and respected the drug lords but also were afraid of them. these residents’ lives were full of violence, poverty, danger, disappointment, uncertainty, and insecurity, but they still did not lose their hope for a better life and their expectations to know the world. this unique but extraordinarily complicated social, cultural, political, and economic situation greatly influenced these slum residents’ freedom and life experiences off-line and online. for them, selfies were far more than an instrumental artifact of communication and self-representation. they perceived, used, and experienced selfies in a sociocultural dense form of empowerment: they could escape from the eyes of powerful drug lords to implicitly express their dissatisfaction and objections; consciously reflect on their true selves and maintain their spiritual purity; overcome the difficulties of being functionally illiterate and gradually learn literacy skills; and improve their interpersonal communication with family members and peers. their choices and decisions were guided by their reflections on what was important to them in their marginalized living situation and how digital technologies could be used to meet their social, emotional, and physical needs. these findings add to noland’s (2006) study of a group of marginalized latinas in los angles, which focused solely on the emotional enhancements afforded by self-portraits. noland also observed selfies as way to overcome language barriers. our research on selfies in brazil’s favelas follows the findings of yefimova, neils, newell, and gomez (2014), which report on marginalized groups in mexico using selfies to realistically depict their everyday lives, history, and social situation. in addition, frohmann (2005) suggests that selfies could empower the marginalized by creating dialogue about the community’s issues through group discussion, reaching policy makers, and informing the broader society of those issues. these findings suggest self-portraits as a way to hear the voices of some of the inhabitants in poor and marginalized regions, as claimed by hernández (2009). in all these ways, selfies were embedded in marginalized users’ everyday lives and perceived as a pathway to a more promising future. he body of the submission should be formatted according to the following: arial font, size 12, single space, left align throughout, double space for new paragraph. in essence, the favela residents used selfies to present themselves online. but, as we argue in this article, their goals were not to present an ideal (or fake) self online (or shallow displays of narcissism, fashion, attention seeking, and self-promotion). we understand selfies as more than a dichotomy of fake/real identities. rather, we consider people’s online presentations (selfies) as ways to improve and benefit their off-line identities: presenting selves online is to recognize and access an opportunity (i.e., digital technologies) to improve their quality of life and to allow this decision to make a life-enhancing difference. this is the context in which we understand online identities and empowerment. references barakat, c. (2014, april 16). science links selfies to narcissism, addiction and low self esteem. socialtimes. retrieved from http://socialtimes.com/selfies-narcissismaddiction-low-self-esteem_b146764 frohmann, l. (2005). the framing safety project: photographs and narratives by battered women. violence against women, 11(11), 1396–1419. doi:10.1177/1077801205280271 hernández, j. r. l. (2009, may 30). photo-ethnography by people living in poverty near the northern border of mexico. forum qualitative sozialforschung/forum: qualitative social research. retrieved from http://www.qualitativeresearch.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1310/2786 mckay, t. (2014, march 28). a psychiatric study reveals selfies are far more dangerous than you think. policymic. retrieved from http://www.policymic.com/articles/86287/apsychiatric-study-reveals-selfies-are-far-more-dangerous-than-you-think mclean, s. (2014). sexts, texts and selfies: how to keep your children safe in the digital space. melbourne, australia: penguin. nemer, d., & freeman, g. (2015). selfies| empowering the marginalized: rethinking selfies in the slums of brazil. international journal of communication, 9 (16). noland, c. (2006). auto-photography as research practice: identity and self-esteem research. journal of research practice, 2(1). retrieved from http://www.jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/19/50 schlechty, p. c. (2000). shaking up the schoolhouse: how to support and sustain educational innovation. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. wallop, h. (2013, november 19). selfies—how the world fell in love with itself. the telegraph. retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/socialmedia/10460202/selfies-how-the-world-fell-in-love-with-itself.html yefimova, k., neils, m., newell, b. c., & gomez, r. (in press). fotohistorias: participatory photography as a methodology to elicit the life experiences of migrantsitle. in system sciences (hicss), 2015 48th hawaii international conference on system sciences. kauai, hawaii: ieee. microsoft word geiger.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): geiger, r.s. (2014, october 22-24). successor systems: the role of reflexive algorithms in enacting ideological critique. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. successor systems: the role of reflexive algoritms in enacting ideological critique r. stuart geiger university of california – berkeley intro/abstract this paper extends harding (1987) and haraway’s (1988) call for “successor sciences” ways of knowing that critically blend objectivity with situatedness -to the study of algorithms (e.g. gillespie 2014). “successor systems” critique dominant modes of knowledge production by computationally supporting alternative modes, reflectively deploying algorithmic routines to build “a better account of the world” (haraway, 579). this paper analyzes three activist projects as successor systems, discussing political and epistemological implications of such tactics. hollaback, a system for reporting and representing street harassment, provides a safe space for victims of street harassment to assemble as a networked public. turkopticon uses feedback from workers in amazon mechanical turk about their employers to protect workers from exploitation. snuggle, a tool supporting mentoring in wikipedia, provides more constructive ways for veterans to identify and interact with newcomers, countering the project’s notoriously conflict-driven editorial culture. when faced with issues like the institutional ignorance of street harassment, the exploitation of microtask workers, and the gender gap in wikipedia, ideological critique can be enacted not only through discourse, but also through the production of infrastructure. successor systems do not just merely make alternative forms of knowledge production and representation possible. like all software programs, they rely on algorithmic routines; however, these algorithms are reflexively designed as critical praxis. reflexivity in these successor systems is sought through a purposeful de-naturalization of the seemingly-objective nature of their algorithms: turkopticon’s employer ratings, hollaback’s harassment heatmaps, and snuggle’s desirability rankings are presented to invite commentary, reflection, dialogue, and negotiation. theory haraway (1988) argues a core aspect of feminist theory focuses on situatedness, acknowledging the perspectives that we have in and on the world. situatedness typically critiques totalization, or the elevation of one particular perspective – typically that of rich, white, western men in power – above all others. in response to feminist critiques of objectivity, haraway argues that the danger may not be so much from scientists themselves, who often debate how limited or situated a particular study or method is, but from nonscientists who are more fundamentalist in using science for totalizing ends. as such, haraway concurs with harding’s concept of “successor science” (1987) and called for feminists to reclaim objectivity and build new ways of representing the world: “feminists have to insist on a better account of the world; it is not enough to show radical historical contingency and modes of construction for everything … the goal is better accounts of the world, that is, ‘science’” (579-80). haraway suggests using the language of vision to discuss how feminists can build alternative techniques for seeing the world which are both situated and objective, self-consciously aware of the tensions between those two goals. visibility is often discussed in human-computer interaction (hci) and computersupported cooperative work (cscw): suchman (1995) discussed how, in designing formal representations of work in organizations, conflicts about professionalization surface. star and strauss (1999) and bowker and star (1999) showed how classification and formalization is contested and political in their studies of how nursing work was formalized in healthcare. sometimes a call for visibility is beneficial and liberating, but sometimes visibility is negative, used for surveillance, micro-managing, and over-specification. cases turkopticon (turkopticon.ucsd.edu, irani and silberman 2013) is a browser extension modifying amazon’s mechanical turk service. amt disproportionately benefits employers, who are able to know individual workers in ways that workers are not able to know their employers, leading to exploitation. as a successor system, turkopticon critiques this assumption built into in amt, using feedback from workers about employers to produce a new mode of knowledge production that is designed to protect turk workers. the system is named for bentham’s infamous panopticon prison, discussed by foucault; turkopticon seeks to reverse the direction of surveillance built into amt by putting employers under a kind of collective ‘sousveillance’ -surveillance from below. hollaback (ihollaback.org, dimond et al 2013), a system for reporting and representing street harassment, critiques social institutions through a new technologically-enabled mode of knowledge production. street harassment is a longstanding and ubiquitous problem across the world, but dominant institutions (from the police to news media) generally encourage women to ignore harassment, rather than report it. hollaback provides a safe space for victims of street harassment to assemble as a networked public and frame this issue in a way that is often marginalized by various social institutions. hollaback is a critique of the widespread institutional ignorance of street harassment, providing an infrastructure for building better accounts of the world: ones that make often-ignored experiences of street harassment visible at a variety of scales. snuggle (snuggle.grouplens.org, halfaker, geiger, and terveen 2014) is a tool supporting mentoring in wikipedia, explicitly built to counter the often hostile reactions that veteran wikipedians unleash on new contributors. most of the highly-automated tools that have been developed to support wikipedian editors situate their users as police who are on patrol for “vandalism.” assisted by algorithms that rank by ‘suspiciousness,’ these editors see some of the worst content submitted to wikipedia, then make fast-paced decisions about what is kept and removed. snuggle was designed to reverse the assumptions built into this practice, situating wikipedians as mentors and newcomers as potential collaborators to be supported. the tool lets wikipedians holistically search for potentially desirable newcomers, affording activities of praise, constructive criticism, and directed intervention. approach this paper discusses examples and cases from the field of hci and cscw to more broadly and theoretically discuss the role of ideology and critique in the design and development of computational systems. this paper’s approach and contributions are primarily theoretical, as it resituates existing empirical findings from one discipline within a broader framework for the aoir community. this paper is intended to align with the conference theme of “boundaries and intersections” by situating concepts and literature from critical theory, media studies, and science and technology studies with work from the fields of hci and cscw. the concept of “successor systems” is intended to cut across multiple literatures and areas of interest, facilitating dialogue and discussion between disparate research communities. references bowker, g. and star, s.l. 1999. sorting things out. cambridge: the mit press. dimond, j.p., dye, m., larose, d., and bruckman, a. hollaback!: “the role of collective storytelling online in a social movement organization.” in proceedings of cscw 2013. http://jilldimond.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/storytelling-cscwrev2final.pdf haraway, d. 1988. “situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective.” feminist studies, vol. 14, no.3. (autumn, 1988), pp. 575-599. harding, s. 1987. the science question in feminism. ithaca: cornell university press. halfaker, a., geiger, r.s., and terveen, l. “snuggle: designing for efficient socialization and ideological critique.” in proceedings of chi 2014. http://wwwusers.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/snuggle/halfaker14snuggle-personal.pdf irani, l. and silberman, s. “interrupting worker invisibility in amazon mechanical turk.” in proceedings of chi 2013. http://www.ics.uci.edu/~lirani/irani-silberman-turkopticoncamready.pdf gillespie, t. 2014. “the relevance of algorithms.” in media technologies, ed. t. gillespie, p. boczkowski, and k. foot. cambridge: the mit press. star, s.l. and strauss, a. 1999. “layers of silence, arenas of voice: the ecology of visible and invisible work.” computer supported cooperative work 8: 9–30. suchman, l. 1995. “making work visible.” communications of the acm 38(9). 1 new global learning cultures: interdisciplinarity through networked technologies thomas cochrane centre for learning and teaching, aut university new zealand thomas.cochrane@aut.ac.nz helen keegan salford university uk h.keegan@salford.ac.uk abstract the context in which higher education institutions (heis) now operate is facing fundamental changes; heis are often said to be in a time of crisis, and new models of education are being explored both within and outside the academy. the rise of open educational resources and practices and alternative forms of accreditation are gaining recognition as learners and educators explore new ways of learning and connecting both within and outside the institution. simultaneous to this rise in new learning cultures and paradigms, traditional disciplinary boundaries are themselves being challenged as networked technologies and changing social/cultural conditions are leading to further critique of traditional pedagogies, and increasing support for interdisciplinarity. in this paper, we explore emerging and converging technologies and disciplines through two higher education international collaboration scenarios. these two projects illustrate the potential of interdisciplinary communities of practice to nurture and support new pedagogical paradigms. we conclude by identifying five design principles for global interdisciplinary projects. keywords mobile learning; communities of practice; social media. 2 the digital revolution has disrupted and will continue to disrupt what we mean by learning and how we organize our disciplines. suffice to say, that to think about transdisciplinarity in a networked world is to think about disciplines in a different and evolving context of interconnection and complex forms of communications and interchange. burnett, 2011 the context in which higher education institutions now operate is facing fundamental changes; heis are often said to be in a time of crisis, and new models of education are being explored both within and outside the academy. the rise of open educational resources and practices and alternative forms of accreditation are gaining recognition as learners and educators explore new ways of learning and connecting both within and outside the institution. simultaneous to this rise in new learning cultures and paradigms, traditional disciplinary boundaries are themselves being challenged as networked technologies and changing social/cultural conditions are leading to further critique, and increasing support for interdisciplinarity. in this paper, we explore emerging and converging technologies and disciplines through two higher education international collaboration scenarios. using a design based research methodology (reeves, 2005) we connect learners across the globe through content co-production, consumption and critique of social and mobile internet technologies and digital cultures from a range of disciplinary perspectives. these scenarios illustrate balsamo’s (2011) conception of “designing culture”, which calls for technology to be treated as a post-disciplinary topic, alongside the transformation of universities through an “epistemological reboot”. we argue that the integration of mobile networked learning provides a catalyst (kukulska-hulme, 2010) for such an epistemological reboot leading to authentic interdisciplinary scenarios. the goal of the two projects is to create paradigm shifts in the participants’ conceptions of teaching and learning, and in the disciplines themselves, leading to student generated content and student generated contexts in learning (keegan & bell, 2011; luckin, et al., 2010), which cross disciplinary boundaries through digital networks and new media technologies. 3 the two projects include: 1. elvss: this project included twenty-four professional sound and video technology students, collaborating within the elvss12 project alongside higher education student teams in the uk, new zealand, and france, involving a total of seventy students. in this project, we focus on the production of crowd-sourced films, where international teams collaborate on the planning, filming and editing of content using mobile devices. 2. icollab: this project included twenty-one multimedia and internet technology students, collaborating within the icollab12 project alongside four other higher education student teams in the uk, spain, germany, and new zealand, involving a total of seventy students. in this project, international teams work together using social and mobile technologies to map and situate both the development of their professional online identities, and the impact of the internet on their chosen field (discipline). the international teams are made up of students from a variety of he contexts ranging from performing and screen arts to public relations, and cohorts from 2nd year undergraduate to masters level. the participants are not only connecting across boundaries of time and space, but also across disciplines and cultures. the ultimate goal is to develop new ways of seeing and learning through collaborative study of internet technologies and emerging forms of digital creativity, learning from one anothers’ disciplinary perspectives and cultures. a review of the research literature (wingkvist & ericsson, 2011) indicates that to our knowledge these two projects are relatively unique, as although other large scale international mlearning and social media projects exist (see for example (o'malley, et al., 2005; unterfrauner & marschalek, 2010)), they tend to be funded projects with a life-span defined by the length of available funding. whereas the elvss and icollab projects are the reified outcomes of genuine communities of practice that are sustained by the shared interests of the participating lecturers. 4 research methodology both projects use a participatory action research methodology (swantz, 2008; wadsworth, 1998), with the 2011 research cycle informing the subsequent project iterations in 2012. the focus of the research is exploring collaborative student cocreation across international boundaries enabling pedagogical transformation in multiple contexts. the research questions included: 1. what is the value added to lecturers and to students from participating in such a collaboration in terms of (for example) acquired competencies, social capital, and motivation. 2. what types of learning activities and pedagogical strategies prove appropriate for this type of student collaboration? 3. what strategies can be used to design the pedagogical use of web 2.0 tools to create social constructivist learning environments that bridge formal and informal learning contexts, and also bridge international boundaries? 4. what are best practice examples of the pedagogical use of wireless mobile devices (wmds) to facilitate access to these web 2.0 tools? both projects are supported by a lecturer community of practice (lave & wenger, 1991; wenger, 1998), of which the authors are core members. each community of practice (cop) meets virtually each week via google plus hangouts, collaborate on curriculum design ideas via google docs and wikis, and create open access media content using their personal mobile devices. the two cops are made up of lecturers and academic advisors representing a range of courses in four different countries. thus the lecturers themselves model a paradigm shift in educational practice, with the longitudinal support of an educational researcher, similar to reeves’ (2005) call for new research methodologies based on design-based research to support transformation in educational practice. as participants across the globe we use a range of emerging and converging mobile/social technologies to communicate, collaborate 5 and create, aiming to produce transformations in learning culture and heightened disciplinary awareness within our respective student cohorts. design principles the two illustrative projects build upon one of the author’s longitudinal (2006 to 2011) participatory action research implementing mobile web 2.0 that identifies six critical success factors for pedagogical transformation. these are drawn from the design and implementation of over 35 projects from 2006 to 2011 exploring pedagogical transformation enabled by mobile web 2.0 integration in higher education (cochrane, 2010a, 2010b), and include the following: 1. the pedagogical integration of the technology into the course and assessment. 2. lecturer modelling of the pedagogical use of the tools. 3. creating a supportive learning community. 4. appropriate choice of mobile devices and web 2.0 social software. 5. technological and pedagogical support. 6. creating sustained interaction that facilitates the development of ontological shifts, both for the lecturers and the students. by exploring these critical success factors as guidelines for our international collaborative projects we consequently identified five key design principles that could be applied to global interdisciplinarity, including: focus upon nurturing collaboration, establish a framework of mobile social media tools for collaboration and communication, build trust, value creativity, and design for change. two examples of global interdisciplinary this section explores the two examples of global interdisciplinarity. both of these projects have been through two iterations of implementation and design refinement during 2011 and 2012, and this paper represents one of the goals of the underlying design-based research methodology by exploring the design principles 6 discovered to support global interdisciplinary collaboration. the development of the collaborative partnership between the authors is also an example of mobile social media enabling global interdisciplinary networking. this partnership was established in 2010 as an outcome of the researcher’s remote presentation at the 2010 altc conference (cochrane & bateman, 2010), where the researcher became aware of the co-author’s work on mobile learning (keegan, 2010a). a search of the co-author’s blog (keegan, 2009, 2010b) revealed a similar interest in mobile learning for pedagogical transformation as that of the researcher. linking to these examples of mobile movie making on the researcher’s blog resulted in a conversation via social media: “hi there – notice you linked to my mobile phone film blog posts, cheers for the pingbacks! i’d be really interested in seeing how you get on. let me know if you need any info”1 the entertainment lab for the very small screen project (elvss) was the brain-child of a performing and screen arts lecturer at unitec new zealand, who had been working in partnership with the researcher since 2009 to explore new pedagogies enabled by mobile social media in an elective course within a film and television major. the first iteration of the elvss project in 2011 involved a single group of twenty students at unitec, new zealand, and was co-facilitated by a collaborative partnership consisting of: the course lecturer, the researcher, a new zealand social media expert, a new zealand mobile movie expert, and the co-author as an international . this led to following each other on twitter, and the establishment of a partnership between the researcher as an academic advisor in elearning and learning technologies, and the coauthor as an expert in mobile movie making within the context of audio engineering education in the uk – a similar role to that previously held by the researcher in a prior position in new zealand. this partnership was reified by the invitation from the researcher for the co-author to participate remotely in two projects in 2011: elvss, and icollab. elvss 1 http://thomcochrane.wordpress.com/about/#comment-46 7 mobile movie expert. elvss11 utilized skype, twitter, and youtube, to facilitate collaboration and communication between the geographically (and timezone) disperse lecturers and the students at unitec. the elvss11 project involved students forming mobile movie production teams using iphones for shooting their scripted footage, and ipads or laptops for editing the movies. the student teams explored the unique affordances of smartphones for movie making and dissemination, under the guidance and critique of the collaborating lecturers. thus the elvss11 project explored studentgenerated content situated in a local context. the project was structured as follows: • an introduction to the iphone and ipad; • an overview of mobile social media: twitter, blogging, qr codes, and augmented reality; • a series of overviews of mobile movie making techniques; • an overview of social media distribution; • formation of student production teams; • negotiation and co-creation of movie scripts; • initial rushes of mobile footage – previewed to the class and lecturers via youtube • student team movie production; • presentation and critique of final student team mobile movies; • student reflections recorded and uploaded to youtube. the five student team mobisodes and student reflections on the project are available on a youtube channel2 2 http://www.youtube.com/user/elvss11#g/u . using the iphones students explored and made examples of filming techniques and positions that were unachievable via traditional film 8 making using standard production-level digital cameras and crews3. they also critiqued the advantages and limitations of the small screen format4 this illustrates that the project represented a mind-shift for the students: “i’ve never really thought of making films specifically for the iphone before…” while students used their mobile devices for leisure and social activities, very few had conceived of the educational or professional use of these devices, as illustrated by a preproject survey of the 2011 students shown in . so what did i think of the experience? to be honest a lot of it wasn’t new to me. i was familiar with the concept of using small devices for creating video, but at the same time it was really eye opening – the broad unexplored territory i hadn’t touched on before… i’ve never really thought of making films specifically for the iphone before… keeping in mind where and when the viewer might watch that video and the fact that the video had to be quite concise and short, it was really interesting having that restriction and limitation to work with, that was new to me… also the convenience and the creativity that the ipod or iphone enabled – you would not be able to do some of the shots that you can on an ipod on a large traditional film camera. for example, a lot our video was recorded with what we called an “iboom”, which was an ipod taped to the end of a stick that our actor carried while running… it’s opened my eyes to the idea that you can create art and something that can be consumed by an audience on a device that it can also be watched on. (student reflection, 2011) figure 1. 3 see for example http://youtu.be/ggnbwimd2c0 4 see the following student reflection for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uq6yut9uaju 9 figure 1: students previous experience of mobile social media figure 1 indicates that the majority of students had limited mobile social media experience prior to the project, and while cellphone ownership was ubiquitous, there was limited smartphone ownership among the students. the project not only explored an innovative use of mobile technology, but also enabled the course lecturer to reinvent the course’s underlying pedagogy. the course was redesigned from a set of content-delivery lectures (pedagogy or teacher-directed), to developing student-negotiated and student-generated team projects (heutagogy or student-negotiated learning) that were supported by the input of a range of mobile learning experts, both locally and internationally. assessment strategies were also changed, from a previous focus upon students producing written reports on the impact of social media on their industries, to the development of student-negotiated authentic team projects. rather than the previous content delivery by lecture model, each face-toface class session involved an overview of an aspect of mobile video production, and was followed by student-led discussions (enhanced with a live twitter feed) around the 10 development of their mobisode projects. class notes and outcomes were negotiated with the students and made available on google docs. remote guest lecturers from wellington (nz) and the uk (salford university) were brought into the class via live skype feeds, with interaction and questions enabled via both the live and asynchronous use of twitter5. at the end of the elvss11 project, the student teams presented their co-created mobile movies to the lecturers, and the lecturers gave them critical feedback. feedback from the remote lecturers was achieved via live skype sessions projected on a large screen for all the students to watch and ask questions, and also via pre-recorded video feedback uploaded to youtube6 elvss12 built upon the lecturer partnerships established through the elvss11 project to create an explicit international community of practice of like-minded lecturers in 2012. this cop was reified by the use of google docs, twitter, and google plus hangouts. using these social media tools, the lecturers spent several months brainstorming and collaborating on designing the elvss12 project. building on the elvss11 project, the elvss12 project explored student co-production of mobile movies in international teams, guided by an international community of practice of lecturers and mobile social media experts. the four student teams were made up of combinations of: two film students from unitec (nz), five audio engineering students from salford university (uk), and two graphics design students from strassburg university (fr). to facilitate the work-flow of these international teams, a set of mobile social media tools were suggested and modeled by the lecturers for the students to use in their projects. these tools were chosen because of the availability of mobile apps for both ios and android devices that synchronized with cloud-based services, including: . students then provided reflective feedback on the project process via short video podcasts uploaded to the course youtube channel. student feedback focused upon the unique affordances of mobile film making that they discovered throughout the project, and also upon the difficulty they encountered in negotiating a collaborative scripts within their teams – as this was a new experience for them. 5 for example http://youtu.be/q427tf8e_00 6 for example http://youtu.be/q427tf8e_00 11 wordpress as a team eportfolio, google docs for co-creating scripts and project milestones, dropbox for sharing content files (audio, video, animation) between the team members, twitter for asynchronous communication, and google plus hangouts for synchronous communication. the elvss12 project was structured as follows: • an introduction to the mobile tools • an introduction to the 24 frames in 24 hours (24/24) mini project • a review of the 24/24 footage • an overview of the sustainability theme for the team movies • an international group google plus hangout to introduce the three groups to one another • assignment of international student teams • negotiation and co-creation of movie scripts within their teams • student team movie production • invitation of student team representatives to participate in the lecturer cop google plus hangouts • presentation and critique of final student team mobile movies • student reflections recorded and uploaded to youtube the interdisciplinary nature of the student teams meant that each team was made up of students with expertise in three different fields important to the mobile movie making process. each student team had the input of two film major students (nz), four audio engineering students (uk) for sound recording, editing and sound effects, and two graphics design students (fr) for creating professional animated introductory sequences and credits. at the end of the project, the project mentors (the elvss12 lecturer cop), including the technology stewards (wenger, white, & smith, 2009; wentzel, lammeren, molendijk, bruin, & wagtendonk, 2005) or mobile social media experts, and the lecturers associated with the project, viewed the final versions and gave 12 reflective feedback on video to the students on their individual pieces. unitec students edited their sections on their ipads so the nz portions were fully mobile in their creation. the other participating students used their own personal mobile devices for the project. all of the students participated in the creation of a group wordpress blog for their team movie project, and most of the students also kept a personal wordpress blog, journaling their elvss12 experience. these included personal video podcasts that reflected on the process and how their view of filmmaking was transformed by this experience. examples of these are collated in the elvss12 youtube channel. the final four videos can be found on the project blog7 table 1 . in comparison to the elvss11 project, the bulk of the students’ class time was taken up with establishing their international teams. thus the main outcome of the elvss12 project was the establishment of an authentic international collaboration, rather than an investigation of the unique affordances of mobile devices for creating mobile movies. the initial 24 frames in 24 hours mini project was designed to provide an introduction to the unique affordances of mobile film making, however in practice the students did not connect the implicit link with this project and the explicit introductions to mobile movie making techniques and mobile social media that the previous elvss11 project had achieved. consequently while the final movies were recorded via smartphones, and mobile social media was used extensively for communication and collaboration throughout the project, there was little evidence of the student teams leveraging techniques or technologies unique to the mobile devices in their final movies. (below) provides a summary and comparison of the two iterations of the elvss project. 7 http://elvss2012.wordpress.com/projects 13 table 1: comparison of two elvss project iterations year 2011 2012 project title elvss11 elvss12 project hub moodle wordpress participants n=20 students n=5 lecturers n=36 students n=7 lecturers mobile devices iphone 3g and ipad1 ipod touch, ipad2 (unitec), and student-owned devices pedagogy heutagogy heutagogy project focus co-production international co-production web 2.0 tools used for collaboration wordpress twitter qik skype wordpress dropbox twitter facebook google plus outputs: youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/use r/ elvss11 elvss2012 the makeup of the international lecturer and social media experts community of practice is illustrated in figure 2. figure 2 (below) also attempts to illustrate the interrelationship between the lecturer cop and each of the three course contexts. the course lecturers as members of the organizing cop broker participation within the wider international cop to their own students, effectively bringing them from the periphery of participation within this cop to full participation throughout the elvss12 project. mobile social media tools are shown at the intersections of these four cops to indicate the role these tools played in enabling participation within this community, and the production of social media artifacts as reified activities of this cop (wenger, et al., 2009; wentzel, et al., 2005). 14 figure 2 elvss12 community of practice this project involved the development of a lecturer community of practice spanning new zealand, uk, spain, and germany8 8 http://icollab11.wikispaces.com for exploring collaborative curriculum design and virtual student cultural exchange using mobile web 2.0 tools (buchem, cochrane, gordon, keegan, & camacho, 2012; cochrane, et al., 2011). the icollab11 project involved international collaboration between groups of students in germany (sociology of technology students at beuth university of applied sciences berlin), spain (educational technology students at universitat rovira i virgili), uk (design students at sheffield university, and audio production students at salford university) and new zealand (architecture students at unitec, and public relations 15 students at aut university). building a core community of practice membership from the participating lecturers over a period of almost six months prior to the implementation of the project with their respective students built up not only a shared toolkit for use, but also built significant trust among the lecturers. the serendipitous nature of mobile web 2.0 tools was also illustrated by the brokering of the project from an initial collaboration envisioned between the uk and new zealand to a project involving groups spanning across four countries. the project aimed to explore and evaluate which mobile social media tools, pedagogic strategies and learning scenarios could be effective to support international student and lecturer collaboration, participation in decision-making as part of curriculum development and the development of 21st century skills. each of the student groups explored a variety of mobile web 2.0 tools to create a virtual cultural exchange between the countries involved. these included: mobile polling using polleverywhere.com, mobile augmented reality, twitter, prezi, blogging via either wordpress or blogger.com, sharing youtube introduction videos9, and a group wiki10. a collection of student-generated projects that were shared for comment between the groups was collated on the group wiki page11 the icollab12 project built on the icollab11 experience exploring studentgenerated digital identity and social media reporting across new zealand, uk, spain, . these included: layers of geotagged data for augmented reality browsers (unitec architecture student projects), eliciting student peer feedback via polleverywhere.com (aut students), prezi.com presentations (german students), youtube tutorials (salford students), and a facebook group (tarragona students). the icollab11 project established a framework and built up the trust within the lecturer international cop to continue into 2012. 9 http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=pl546b03ee313199ef 10 http://icollab11.wikispaces.com 11 http://icollab11.wikispaces.com/studentpresentationlinks 16 and germany12. the core of the icollab12 project was the continued community of practice of lecturers across four countries established in 2011 by the icollab11 project. as a group of like-minded lecturers we used collaborative tools such as google docs and google plus hangouts to meet weekly and contribute to brainstorming project ideas for our students. this led to the concept of students as social media reporters. as part of the icollab12 international project, students in each participating country were required to move beyond the ‘classroom’ and use their skills in digital communications and social media content production to become transmedia reporters/citizen journalists. they were to work in groups to develop a series of reports for (and in collaboration with) an international audience. the main focus of the project was to produce rich media reports on social media in a) their local community, and b) their chosen industry (for example: web, computing, creative, gigs). their reports were then presented to students in germany, spain and new zealand – in turn, their fellow #icollab12 students overseas produced parallel content. at the end of the project, students in each country were asked to vote for the best “social media” report13, and the winners received an itunes voucher. polleverywhere was used as a mobile voting system for the participants to vote for the best student social media reports1415. the student social media reports were produced in a variety of formats, with the only prerequisite being that they were accessible via the web. the projects were collated on the icollab12 project blog16 table 2 . a summary of the topics, techniques and tools used by the students is provided in . 12 http://icollab12.wordpress.com/about 13 http://storify.com/thomcochrane/icollab12-social-media-report-votes 14 http://www.polleverywhere.com/multiple_choice_polls/ltexnzg1odmwntc 15 the following link is to an example youtube playlist of the final student presentations for icollab12 project: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=pl4c72b10f1b2ac723 16http://icollab12.wordpress.com/2012/05/23/final-social-media-reports-from-the-uk/ (uk), http://icollab12.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/mobile-media-reporter-in-berlin/ (de), and http://icollab12.wordpress.com/2012/05/01/social-media-report-from-auckland-students/ (nz) 17 table 2: summary of icollab12 student reports. topics techniques social media tools qr codes local social media apps mobile social media use social media use in industry location based services social media and religion social media and sport/leisure public transport interviews role play curation of social media surveys polls interactive reports with embedded examples twitter wordpress tumblr mahara prezi youtube wiggio storify soundcloud flickr paper.li for several of the student groups the icollab12 project was a non-assessed project that added an authentic collaborative experience to their course, but did not contribute to their summative assessment. the level of student engagement in this nonassessed project was beyond the expectations of the lecturers. for example, the new zealand lecturer reflected upon the icollab12 project: the new zealand aut university postgraduate students worked enthusiastically on this collaborative project with the students at salford university in the uk as well as two other groups (germany and spain), guided by the researcher as the technology steward. the students presented their projects in class while streaming a live feed via qik and also posted them on the project collaborative blog to get feedback from these students, and the public at large, the new zealand presentations explored how social media has become integral to the city of auckland. this project was not graded but the students were extremely motivated to create what has become a student-led project. (aut lecturer, 2012) table 3 provides a summary and comparison of the two iterations of the icollab project. 18 table 3: comparison of two icollab project iterations year 2011 2012 project title icollab11 icollab12 project hub wikispaces wordpress participants n=70 students n=7 lecturers n=70 students n=5 lecturers mobile devices iphone 4 and ipad1 (unitec), and studentowned devices student-owned devices pedagogy heutagogy heutagogy project focus virtual cultural exchange students as social media reporters web 2.0 tools used for collaboration wikispaces twitter qik skype polleverywhere wordpress storify twitter facebook google plus polleverywhere outputs: youtube channel playlist of selected student videos http://www.youtube.com/pla ylist?list=pl546b03ee3131 99ef http://www.youtube.com /playlist?list=pl4c72b1 0f1b2ac723 figure 3 illustrates the relationship between the central lecturer community of practice and the four course cops involved in the 2012 icollab12 project. two of the founding members of the icollab11 project changed job roles during 2011 and thus were unable to continue with their participation within the icollab cop in 2012, leaving a core membership of four lecturers and one technology steward. this illustrates the organic, changeable nature of communities of practice, where the shared interest may not be in itself enough motivation to keep members as full participants, but also allows for and acknowledges the importance of legitimate peripheral participation. 19 figure 3: icollab12 community of practice discussion hameed and shah (2009) argue that an institutional cultural shift is required for mlearning implementation, while balsamo (2011) goes further, arguing that an epistemological reboot is required. our two examples of interdisciplinary networking enabled by mobile social media provide examples of how this can be achieved. 20 nurturing an epistemological reboot communities of practice the elvss and icollab projects illustrate the creative power of communities of practice. neither the elvss or icollab projects were funded projects, and were rather sustained out of the shared interest of the participating lecturers and mobile social media experts. the elvss and icollab cops were reified in the co-creation of curriculum for the projects that valued and nurtured student-generated content and student-generated contexts within authentic environments beyond the classroom. thus rather than being driven by the delivery of a set body of knowledge, these projects focused upon developing creativity and collaboration. thus the projects were loosely defined and required continual tweaking throughout – achieved by the weekly lecturer cop meetings and constant interaction via mobile social media such as twitter. the projects were more akin to a living conversation than following a set text. this level of flux was mitigated by the trusted relationships developed between the cop members. communities of practice can be powerfully creative when a unique group of experts with complimentary skills work together on interdisciplinary projects to a level that is greater and more creative than what they could achieve individually. institutions need to nurture and celebrate the development of such interdisciplinary cops – rather than attempt to mandate and ‘institutionalise’ them. this certainly represents an epistemological reboot (balsamo, 2011). mobile social media a range of mobile social media was used in both of the elvss and icollab project lecturers to enable collaboration and communication across the boundaries of disciplines, timezones, language, culture and geography. establishing trust among remote participants who had never physically met was a key issue. this was enabled by the use of mobile social media tools such as skype in 2011 and then google plus hangouts in 2012. the advent of the public release of google plus hangouts in mid 2011 provided a huge boost for establishing more regular synchronous connectivity and resulted in a deeper social connectivity between the teams and project participants. this 21 was because google plus hangouts supported up to ten synchronous video connections for free, whereas skype required a paid account for this facility. google plus hangouts also allowed internet connectivity across the various institutions advanced research networks rather than skype’s reliance upon commodity internet connectivity. thus the use of regular weekly g+ hangouts more effectively nurtured the development of a sense of community than the previous reliance upon skype during critical incidents only. google plus hangouts also provided added social value by way of the continual addition of other google collaboration tools including the integration of shared youtube viewing, google docs, screen sharing, chat, and most recently (at the time of writing) hangouts on air that include the ability to broadcast and archive hangouts for a wider audience via youtube. the addition of google effects for participants to customize a virtual costume during a hangout also fostered a deeper sense of ‘play’ within the hangouts, as illustrated in figure 4. figure 4 is a screenshot of an example google hangout between four of the elvss12 lecturers and three of the student participants acting as team representatives. inviting student team representatives into the weekly lecturer planning hangouts became a powerful way of brokering the sense of connectivity to an international cop to the students, for whom the collaborative activity of the lecturers had previously been behind the scenes and largely invisible to the students. this also effectively allowed the lecturers to model collaboration and teamwork to the student participants. connectivity via the google plus app for ios and android smartphones also enhanced the ability of participants to connect from virtually any context, with the researcher often connecting to the weekly hangout while travelling on the train due to the time zone differences between the countries involved. 22 figure 4: synchronous collaboration via google plus hangouts design principles for global interdisciplinarity summarising the key themes across the four projects (elvss11, elvss12, icollab11, and icollab12) leads to the indentification of five design principles for global interdisciplinary projects: • collaboration is key while this is often implicit in collaborative projects, it needs to be explicitly modeled by the lecturers involved in the project. in our cases this was achieved through inviting student representatives into the weekly organizing google plus hangouts and making these available for wider student viewing. having lecturers interact directly with each others student blogs and twitter conversations also models collaboration. 23 • establish a framework for collaboration and communication use the affordances of mobile social media to enable collaboration and communication. • build trust by establishing lecturer cops that continue before and after the projects. make room for social interaction and play within planning sessions by allowing for tangential serendipity, but allow this to be participant driven rather than artificially scheduled. • value creativity celebrate and share student work and be willing to incorporate good ideas into the projects. although students are driven by assessment we have found that a non-assessed project that emphasizes student creativity within an authentic scenario can be as equally motivating. • design the projects to embrace change – change is a characteristic of mobile social media, however there is always more than one solution or social media platform to choose from when platforms unexpectedly close or change during a project. collaboration the collaborative activity of the lecturers as a model of a community of practice for the participating students was initially largely invisible. inviting student team representatives into the weekly lecturer planning hangouts became a powerful way of brokering the sense of participation within an international cop to the students. this also effectively allowed the lecturers to model collaboration and teamwork to the student participants. connectivity via the google plus app for ios and android smartphones also enhanced the ability of participants to connect from virtually any context, with the researcher often connecting to the weekly hangout while travelling on the train due to the timezone differences between the countries involved. the value of using mobile social media to establish a framework for collaboration and communication that builds a sense of trust among the participants is illustrated by a reflective feedback blog post on the elvss12 project by one of the lecturers involved: i love this project. i feel very lucky to be part of a committed team, working on something that is not funded – a genuine community of practice where 24 our passion for mobile filmmaking has brought us together in an international collaboration which spans disciplines, levels… and timezones. the logistics of coordinating a project like this are not for the faint-hearted. luckily we have dan wagner (nz), who has done an awesome job of overseeing the whole project – and who is a joy to work with – alongside thom cochrane (nz), laurent antonczak (fr/nz), solene trousse (fr), and max schleser (de) what’s quite beautiful is the shift – which we have experienced on a weekly, sometimes daily basis – towards an emergent cop model where learners are gradually taking on responsibilities and becoming coordinators. i remember dan saying ‘i’m starting to feel like i know your students now’. that was a magical moment. next time, we’ll develop the model further so that we’ll all be hanging out with one another’s students from the start. with elvss12, it’s about the lived experience – it’s the students who are experiencing this collaboration, alongside us as tutors. the boundaries become blurred however. we start to meet one another’s friends/families (in the spirit of the project we may hangout any place/any time). it’s beautiful. (elvss12 lecturer, 2012) collaboration in curriculum design or in student teamwork projects was a new experience for the project participants, and did not necessarily come naturally – it needed careful nurturing and support via sustained interaction and experimentation over the projects’ life-span. collaboration framework a number of mobile-accessible web 2.0 tools were used by the participants as negotiated shared collaboration spaces throughout the projects. these became communication and media-sharing hubs for each of the projects. one of the key aspects of the use of mobile social media was to enable the researcher as the technology steward (wenger, et al., 2009) of these cops to effectively nurture these geographically disperse teams. mobile social media were also used to bridge these communities of 25 practice to potentially worldwide audiences, allowing and inviting peripheral participation in these communities of practice by interested peers. core tools utilized included: • google plus • google docs • wikispaces • wordpress • dropbox • youtube playlists the collaborative nature of the projects led to the collaborative redesign of course assessment strategies by the participating lecturers; this involved a move from to a focus upon theoretical descriptions of case studies (essays or exams for example) to curating and brokering student-generated content and the social media experiences of each project. thus assessment strategies focused upon authentic learning (herrington & herrington, 2006a, 2006b) rather than merely theoretical conceptions. some of the tools used to facilitate this new approach to assessment in each of the courses involved included the use of student owned eportfolios and social media curation and critique enabling a shift from teacher-generated content to student-generated content. • group wordpress blogs were established as student-owned eportfolios • storify was used for curating and critiquing student-generated social media rubrics and guidelines were created by the lecturers involved in each project to outline the requirements for students using these tools within the projects. often these 26 ‘course requirements’ were negotiated with the student participants, leading to a greater sense of student-ownership of the projects17 17 see for example: http://elvss2012.wordpress.com/unitec-elvss-assessment-briefs . building trust the transformative impact upon student learning experiences can also be illustrated by example student feedback: it was a very exciting project to be a part of and i hope that i can do more of this kind of thing in the future. i have gained some valuable skills whilst being a part of the project including elements of leadership, communication and technical skills… having been part of such an innovative project, i feel, has been a huge privilege and it is a credit to the tutors from each university and them being such forward thinkers that this was so successful. (elvss12 student blog post, 2012) this illustrates the increased student engagement and the pedagogical impact and transformation that can be achieved by collaborative mobile social media projects. another illustrative student reflection from the icollab12 project highlights the transformational shifts that can be facilitated by such projects: before taking part in this project i didn’t have too rich an understanding of storytelling through visual media or knowledge of social media in web development. but it has been transformed during the #icollab12 project… in conclusion i must say that thanks to this project i have transformed my understanding of social media usage, i understood how powerful it is and i enjoyed it a lot. (icollab12 student blog post, 2012) the example reflections highlight the level of trust built up between the participants enabled by mobile social media, even though they had never physically met. 27 valuing creativity we have used two frameworks to shape pedagogical change: heutagogy (hase & kenyon, 2000), and communities of practice (wenger, 2000). heutagogy, or selfdetermined learning is vitally concerned with developing learner creativity (garnett, 2010). participation within a community of practice of learners enables a higher level of creativity than that of an individual learner. we view creativity as the key attribute that we want to foster in our students (cochrane, et al., 2011), required for graduates to make a positive difference in society within their chosen professions. likewise we have found that collaborative curriculum development is a far more creative process when born out of a community of practice of like-minded lecturers with complementary expertise (buchem, et al., 2012). as illustrated by the icollab projects a non-assessed project that adds an authentic collaborative experience to students’ courses can increase the level of student creativity and engagement in their course. as unfunded projects, the elvss and icollab communities of practice are sustained out of the sense of creativity and collaboration experienced by the participating lecturers. however it is yet to be seen how long this model will sustain these cops. design for change another key aspect we have discovered is developing an acceptance and comfort zone with change. change is fact of life of mobile devices, and social media. the rate of development of smartphones is much faster than the relatively sedentary evolution of desktop or laptop computing. we have also seen the rise and fall of several social media platforms over the lifespan of our projects. for example during 2011/2012 we have seen: the development of google plus, the acquisition of instagram by facebook, the acquisition of posterous by twitter, and the development of a storify ipad app. however, allowing for and mitigating the changing nature of mobile social media enables a high level of student creativity as each cohort explores new tools and technologies and appropriates these for facilitating collaboration and communication. designing projects to embrace change ensures that unanticipated changes will not derail 28 the project. in our case, the support of a community of practice of interdisciplinary experts and technology stewards behind each project has been a key factor in mitigating these rapid changes. conclusion we have shown that global interdisciplinary collaboration can be effectively nurtured and supported by the establishment of global communities of practice, enabled by mobile social media. while the results of these projects have been rich authentic collaborative experiences for the students and the lecturers involved, there are key lessons that have been learnt in developing and nurturing international collaborative projects. we have identified five key design principles for global interdisciplinarity, including: focus upon nurturing collaboration, establish a framework of mobile social media tools for collaboration and communication, build trust, value creativity, and design for change. references balsamo, a. (2011). designing culture: the technological imagination at work. usa: duke university press. buchem, i., cochrane, t., gordon, a., keegan, h., & camacho, m. (2012). mlearning 2.0: the potential and challenges of collaborative mobile learning in participatory curriculum development in higher education. in i. a. sánchez & p. isaias (eds.), proceedings of the iadis international conference on mobile learning 2012 (pp. 311314). berlin, germany: iadis international association for development of the information society. burnett, r. (2011, 19 june). transdisciplinarity: a new learning paradigm for the digital age? critical approaches to culture + media. retrieved from http://rburnett.ecuad.ca/main/2011/12/27/transdisciplinarity-a-new-learning-paradigmfor-the-digital.html 29 cochrane, t. (2010a). exploring mobile learning success factors. alt-j, research in learning technology 18 (2), 133-148. cochrane, t. (2010b, 26-30 october). an mlearning journey: mobile web 2.0 critical success factors. paper presented at the mlearn 2010: the 9th international conference on mobile learning, valletta, malta. cochrane, t., & bateman, r. (2010). strategies for mlearning integration: evaluating a case study of staging and scaffolding mlearning integration across a three-year bachelor's degree. in l. creanor, d. hawkridge, k. ng & f. rennie (eds.), "into something rich and strange" making sense of the sea-change. proceedings of the 17th association for learning technology conference (alt-c 2010). university of nottingham, uk: association for learning technology, 11-20. cochrane, t., bateman, r., buchem, i., camacho, m., gordon, a., keegan, h., et al. (2011). mlearning 2.0: fostering international collaboration. in i. candel torres, l. gomez chova & a. lopez martinez (eds.), iceri2011: 4th international conference of education, research and innovations. madrid, spain: iated, 42-51. garnett, f. (2010, 18th november). heutagogy and the craft of teaching. the heutagogic archives retrieved from http://heutagogicarchive.wordpress.com/2010/11/18/heutagogy-the-craft-ofteaching/#more-340 hameed, k., & shah, h. (2009). mobile learning in higher education: adoption and discussion criteria. in i. arnedillo-sanchez & p. isalias (eds.), iadis international conference on mobile learning 2009. barcelona, spain: international association for development of the information society, 339-342. hase, s., & kenyon, c. (2000). from andragogy to heutagogy. ultibase articles, (december), 1-10. retrieved from http://ultibase.rmit.edu.au/articles/dec00/hase2.htm keegan, h. (2009, 15 june). mobile video and ugc the hugh garry way. heloukee: edtech and digital culture: learning, technology and digital culture. retrieved from http://heloukee.wordpress.com/2009/11/29/hugh-garry-2/ 30 keegan, h. (2010a). immersed in the digital: networked creativity through mobile content production. paper presented at the association for learning technology: altc2010. retrieved from http://altc2010.alt.ac.uk/talks/15004 keegan, h. (2010b, 15 june). mobile films: learning through discontinuity. heloukee: edtech and digital culture: learning, technology and digital culture. retrieved from http://heloukee.wordpress.com/2010/05/29/usgfhks/ keegan, h., & bell, f. (2011). youtube as a repository: the creative practice of students as producers of open educational resources. european journal of open, distance and e-learning (eurodl) 10 (special issue: creativity and open educational resources). retrieved from http://www.eurodl.org/?p=special&sp=articles&article=456 kukulska-hulme, a. (2010). mobile learning as a catalyst for change. open learning: the journal of open and distance learning 25 (3), 181 185. lave, j., & wenger, e. (1991). situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. luckin, r., clark, w., garnett, f., whitworth, a., akass, j., cook, j., et al. (2010). learner-generated contexts: a framework to support the effective use of technology for learning. in m. lee & c. mcloughlin (eds.), web 2.0-based e-learning: applying social informatics for tertiary teaching (pp. 70-84). hershey, pa: igi global. o'malley, c., vavoula, g., glew, j., taylor, j., sharples, m., lefrere, p., et al. (2005). mobilearn: d4.1 guidelines for learning/teaching/tutoring in a mobile environment. retrieved from http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/document.cfm?docid=7232 reeves, t. (2005). no significant differences revisited: a historical perspective on the research informing contemporary online learning. in g. kearsley (ed.), online learning: personal reflections on the transformation of education (pp. 299-308). englewood cliffs, nj: educational technology publications. 31 swantz, m. l. (2008). participatory action research as practice. in p. reason & h. bradbury (eds.), the sage handbook of action research: participative inquiry and practice (second ed., pp. 3148). london: sage publications. unterfrauner, e., & marschalek, i. (2010). appropriation of an online mobile community by marginalised young people: experiences from an austrian case study. in m. montebello, v. camilleri & a. dingli (eds.) proceedings of mlearn 2010: the 9th international conference on mobile learning (pp. 276-281). valletta, malta: university of malta. wadsworth, y. (1998). what is participatory action research? action research international, 2002 (may 3), paper 2. retrieved from http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/gcm/ar/ari/p-ywadsworth98.html wenger, e. (1998). communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. wenger, e. (2000). communities of practice and social learning systems. organization, 7 (2), 225-246. wenger, e., white, n., & smith, j. (2009). digital habitats: stewarding technology for communities. portland, oregon: cpsquare. wentzel, p., lammeren, r. v., molendijk, m., bruin, s. d., & wagtendonk, a. (2005). using mobile technology to enhance students' educational experiences. retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/librarydetailpage/666?id=ecs0502 wingkvist, a., & ericsson, m. (2011). a survey of research method and purposes in mobile learning. international journal of mobile and blended learning 3 (1), 1-17. microsoft word witkowski.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): witkowski, e. (2014, october 22-24). girl gamers?: player and institutional orientations towards women’s participation in and around e-sports. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. girl gamers?: player and institutional orientations towards women’s participation in and around e-sports emma witkowski rmit university address me as a player, or don’t address me at all. this expression, made by a high performance starcraft 2 player, grounds this paper. her statement is suggestive of many players’ experiences around the stagnated characterization of “girl gamers”, and ultimately their identification as one (beavis & charles 2007). this significant theme takes its lead from ongoing research on young women who live-stream their high performance computer gameplay on the broadcasting channel twitch. as players, they are positioned on the margins of esports. meaning they are or have been on the outer edge of organized, institutional scenes of competitive computer game tournaments, which are channels towards financial and socio-cultural benefits (n. taylor 2009; taylor, jenson & de castell 2009). benefits can include acquiring prize-winnings or sponsorships, attaining a recognizable public “personality”, or transitioning from “piecemeal” players to career “wage-earning” administrators. not all players necessarily see the full spectrum of these benefits. though, when players voice how they run a gauntlet as a gendered object in their path towards elite competition, these realizable benefits start to highlight some of the disparities in those pathways, experiences and results on a foundation of difference (t.l. taylor 2012). four long interviews with mid to high level players starts this exploration around how the “girl gamer” is lived and produced: zooming in on players’ reflections on the dualistic gendering of a slice of their (desired or not) player identity, and their accounts on what that means for their everyday play. in these continuing conversations with women who play computer games as a serious leisure activity, echoes resonate in previous research and interviews i have undertaken over the past five years in and around esports and with the women who participated in diverse fields of play. the variety of organizations and players i have collaborated with since 2008 comprises ethnographic work within progress raiding guilds, where women were guild leaders and key players (2009 2012); qualitative fieldwork at organized lan e-sports tournaments (dreamhack 2009, 2011; mlg 2010; wcg 2010; blizzcon 2010; blizzard invitational 2008; d3 expo 2008); and extensive player/team and e-sports organizer interviews conducted online or on-site at various events. women are present in both fieldwork and interviews, and more often than not these various participants had direct experience with the label “girl gamer”. as such, this exploration extends beyond the nuanced descriptions laid out by twitch broadcasters, and ties the many voices and actions of women in and around e sports who have also been confronted by this moniker. this experiential and structural tracing brings together site specific game cultures and diverse conditions of participation from within scenes such as mmog progress raiding guilds (world of warcraft), moba teams (league of legends), rts online tournaments (starcraft 2), lan fighting game tournaments (super smash bros.), and mmog team pvp networked tournaments (arena tournament). such a spread of participation offers both the initial steps towards a thick description of player and institutional meaning making surrounding the title of “girl gamer”, and a nuanced consideration of this catchall term that affects many players’ lives and livelihoods on their way “to the pro’s”. beyond these explorations, this paper draws on two external channels. the small handful of qualitative studies that investigate women’s voices and institutional practices at this border space of high performance gaming, often titled roughly as “pro/am” (t.l. taylor 2012, beavis & charles 2007, n. taylor 2009), and the wealth of “self-produced” online documents in the form of esports player interviews. these latter forms are sourced as key documents, which further unpack the situation of “girl gamer” from various insider perspectives. from these elite level player descriptions across various fields of play, it could be said that “girl gamer” is no easy mark to convene. players detest it as a socially constructed stigma designating lesser ability on the grounds of biological essentialism (t.l. taylor 2012, n. taylor 2009); yet players also deploy it, often as a reversible tactic of shame when being trash-talked along gendered lines during play. in these complex moments, the tease “you just got beaten by a girl” denotes traditional interpretations around strategic essentialism. the “girl” in this action is reversible. it is employed as an offensive insult, though here it is initiated from a woman’s body – a gendered attack most often heard moving from boy-to-boy as an ultimate condemnation on their physicality. but the “girl” also has a reverse side. moving on the offense, she (the player) claims ownership and direction over that gendered terminology: she belittles the essentialist power of the statement whilst reinforcing its gendered connotations. many players toy with this reversability and are quite cognizant of the power and complications held within. to which it must be added, with the essentialist character of “girl gamer” in focus, this analysis is sensitive towards the problematic linguistic and methodological essentialism on which such a study relies (stone 2004, taylor 2008). through this original gathering of on-the-ground experiences around high performance play and the confines of “girl gamer”, the study develops a rich qualitative document on the everyday lives of players who are marginalized in various degrees from within their preferred site of serious leisure (stebbins 2007). though orientations towards or away from the term in question can be convoluted. young women also take on the “girl” to establish their active identity as something not to be “looked down on” and, by doing so, stress that “girls” are playing games too. thus highlighting how traditional notions and expressions of femininity is colonised in game cultures with connotations of being “less than”, rather than with players own directed playfulness with “the feminine” as a part of their powerful and personal expression of self. “girl gamer” is as complex a title as those individuals that are working around it. to think within the complexity, the work of sara ahmed (2006) is used to address how the many actors involved at the top levels of competition are oriented to and from the scaffolding around “girl gamer”. thinking with orientations assists in the critical consideration of the entrenched term. in particular, ahmed brings a delicate understanding towards a key issue involved – that of the making and maintenance social borders, as highlighted when she notes, “the social also has its skin, as a border that feels and that is shaped by the ‘impressions’ left by others. the skin of the social might be affected by the comings and goings of different bodies, creating new lines and textures in the ways in which things are arranged”(p. 9). just as tender a cultural skin, and as a boundary which prompts questions around privilege and involvement writ large, “girl gamer” is a designation for computer game players beyond the biological. it acts as a token title: a badge of difference for those who are made to wear it, a badge of honor for those who choose to. this paper finds the significance of these positions in the articulations of those who choose to play within and shape its fluid guidelines: the institutions, the players, and the interactions made on the numerous skins of pro/am game culture. references ahmed, s. (2006). queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. durham, nc: duke university press. beavis, c. & charles, c. (2007). would the "real" girl gamer please stand up? gender, lan cafes and the reformulation of the "girl" gamer. gender and education, 19(6), pp. 691-705. stebbins, r. (2007). serious leisure. new brunswick: transaction publishers. stone, a. (2004). essentialism and anti-essentialism in feminist philosophy. journal of moral philosophy. 1(2), pp. 135-154. taylor, n. (2009). power play: digital gaming goes pro. (doctoral dissertation). york university, toronto, canada. taylor, n., jenson, j. and de castell, s. (2009). cheerleaders/booth babes/halohoes: pro-gaming, gender and jobs for the boys. digital creativity, 20(4), 239-252. taylor, t.l. (2008). becoming a player: networks, structures, and imagined futures, in y. kafai, c. heeter, j. denner, and j. sun (eds.) beyond barbie and mortal kombat: new perspectives on gender, games, and computing, cambridge, ma: the mit press, pp. 50-65. taylor, t.l. (2012). raising the stakes: the rise of professional computer gaming. cambridge, ma: the mit press. aoir_2013_survey selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 boundaries, privacy, and social media use in higher education: what do students think, want, and do? vanessa p. dennen florida state university usa vdennen@fsu.edu kerry j. burner florida state university usa kburner@fsu.edu abstract in this study, we examine university students’ beliefs and behaviors related to social media, identity, and boundaries in a higher education context. findings suggest a complex and at times contradictory relationship between students and social media, in which they enjoy free access to information about and contributed by other people and freely share about themselves in a social or personal context, but are reticent to be active contributors in an academic context. although students seek information about their instructors online, they do not believe that instructors might reciprocate. in contrast to a common assumption, they do not want to use social media in their coursework and prefer to restrict both their communication with instructors and coursework to private tools and settings. keywords higher education; social media; identity; boundaries introduction and background social media use is rampant in american culture, and higher education is one setting that is no exception. students and professors alike are using social media in their everyday lives as well as to support learning and instruction, and consequently it is no surprise that the two worlds – school and personal – might overlap or collide at points. tensions around identity are at the core of this phenomenon. marshall (2010) in his examination of celebrity persona development via social media notes that there is an inextricable relationship between audience and performance. this performance of a particular persona for a particular audience implies that there can be multiple personas in seemingly clearly defined social arenas – school and personal, for example. the boundaries, however, between these areas while clearly defined are not impenetrable. individuals may perform one component of their identity online for a particular audience only to find that an unintended audience has come across their information. if intentionally including social media in educational endeavors fosters the potential for the personal to become an active part of the learning environment, then exploring how students use social media can help refine the thinking about how those media can be used most efficaciously. despite the increasingly common assumption that social media will positivity impact student performance, research in this area does not support this assumption. for example, kirschner and karpinski (2010) and junco (2012) found that facebook users had lower gpas and spent less time on content-related course activities. additionally, classes are typically considered semi-private spaces, but social media shifts this boundary. zdravkova, ivanovic, and putnik (2012) note in their study of integrating web 2.0 features into a closed learning environment: “the most sensitive thing was openly publicized personal beliefs different from others” (p. 377). the use of social media in an open learning environment shifts this concern from a classroom to the world at large, albeit the digital one. research questions in this survey study, we examine the social media habits and beliefs of university students with a focus on privacy and identity management issues. the research questions that guided this study are: selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 1. what types of communications and networking technologies to students use for school versus personal purposes? 2. how savvy are students about maintaining and protecting their online identity? 3. what are students’ beliefs about social media use, privacy, and boundaries in a higher education context? method this study was conducted via an online survey, which asked questions about social media use in higher education, focusing on privacy and boundary issues. participants were enrolled in education courses at a large research university. they were recruited for participation via a subject pool; students in participating courses were offered points toward their course grade for either participating in research studies of their choice or completing equivalent assignments. a total of 147 participants (24 male and 123 female) completed the survey during the fall 2012 semester. survey items were piloted during the summer 2012 term. data analysis focused on of frequency distributions for closed items. open-ended items were coded by content, with both frequencies and content reported. highlights and general trends are reported in this short paper. findings one hundred thirty four (91%) of the participants represent the 18-24 age group. ninety percent own a smartphone, and about one-third own a tablet. these tools were used by the most participants to engage in social networking, perform internet searches, email, and engage in academic activities. nearly all participants use email, text messaging, and facebook in their personal lives, with usage rates dropping steeply for the latter two in a school context. pinterest, skype, and twitter were used by more than one-half of the students for personal purposes, but with less frequency for school purposes. when asked to rank preferred modes of contacting professors, face-to-face and email emerged strongly as the top two methods, with telephone third. the least preferred communication tools were facebook and twitter, which may reflect a number of factors, such as a lower rate of professor use, a lack of connection between students and professors via these tools, or the default public nature of communication via these tools. however, it is worth noting that while 55 respondents (37%) indicated having professors as facebook friends, only 20 (14%) listed it as one of their top three means of communicating with a professor. the respondents most frequently turn to search engines (99; 67%) to find information about their professors; although, a sizeable contingent also checks facebook (44; 30%). most indicate that they are looking for course information (138; 94%) or academic credentials (76; 52%), but eighteen percent (24) are looking for personal information. however, when the question was asked in reverse, the majority of students (92; 63%) did not think that professors would look them up online. one student succinctly stated a prevailing sentiment: “that is creepy.” those who thought professors might look up students believed the act would be academic related or to determine if the student had been partying. and if professors were to look them up, students believed that professors would find either personal information students posted themselves or information that was posted by their friends about them. regarding the latter point, students indicated a general concern regarding what others post about them online and the potential for embarrassment. further, although the majority are aware of privacy controls and indicated they have the skills to use them, most students were ambivalent about actually implementing privacy controls. students were not enthusiastic about using social media to support coursework; few felt it should be required (16; 10%) or that instructors should be encouraged to integrate social media (42; 29%). many are more concerned about the quality of their work when it is posted online (76; 52%), and believe that selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 their instructor should be the only audience for their assignments (99; 67%). in an interesting contradiction, students believe they have learned from seeing assignments that other people have shared online (91; 62%). few students felt comfortable sharing personal information with a class via social media (31; 20%) and many would prefer to remove digital footprints at the end of a course (79; 54%). even the sizable minority of students who indicated a desire to connect with classmates via social media (63; 43%) were unlikely to want to similarly connect to their instructors in this same manner (16; 10%). conclusions these students recognize both that they have some privacy options and that they do not fully control their own online identity. they communicate an awareness of the concerns one might have about consequences of online behavior in the world at large, yet maintain a sense of naiveté at the crossroads of social media and higher education. they observe others online, but they do not want to be observed themselves, at least not by an unintended audience. the questions that emerge from this study center around the role social media should play in learning environments and the responsibility of learning organizations that use social media for learning to work to ensure the privacy of both teachers and students. – or at least to help teachers and students identify and address this boundary issue before discomfort occurs. references junco, r. (2012). too much face and not enough books: the relationship between multiple indices of facebook use and academic performance. computers in human behavior, 28(1), 187-198. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2011.08.026 kirschner, p., & karpinski, a. (2010). facebook and academic performance. computers in human behavior, 26(6), 1237–1245. marshall, p. d. (2010): the promotion and presentation of the self: celebrity as marker of presentational media. celebrity studies, 1(1), 35-48. zdravkova, k., ivanovic´, m., putnik, z., (2012) experience of integrating web 2.0 technologies, educational technology research & development, 60, 361–381 doi: 10.1007/s11423-011-9228-z license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. aoir2016-submission-kasra1-finalsubmission2 selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): kasra, mona. (2016, october 5-8). online imagery: the non-state means of social control in the twenty-first century. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. online imagery: the non-state means of social control in the twenty-first century mona kasra, phd university of virginia the new paradigm in media making, powered by digital cameras and cell phones capable of recording images and connected to the web, continually proves to be powerful in stirring empathy and action among global citizens, enabling the gathering of support for humanitarian causes, and raising awareness against atrocities. and yet at the same time, these visual media content are concomitantly advancing and perpetuating unjust and undemocratic desires and facilitating the propagation of intolerance and vigilante justice. even more troubling is that digital-networked images1 of deliberate torture, abuse, and humiliation are increasingly forming communities based upon prejudice and bigotry. they perpetuate and motivate cruel and atrocious acts, serving as a means for small independent groups to exercise social power and control over the marginalized and underrepresented communities. as manifested in the use of digital-networked images in militant and vigilante activities such as that of the so-called freedom fighters affiliated with the islamic state of iraq and syria (isis) militant group or the anti-gay “occupy pedophilia” group in russia, decentralized online communication systems coupled with the ease and accessibility of image-making tools are used as a vehicle to inflict hegemonic power in their visible demonstrations of cruelty and bigotry. to enforce punitive and disciplinary power and to exercise sovereignty, militant and vigilante groups strategically document and broadcast bigoted acts of violence and terror on the internet. the capacity of vigilante digital-networked images to function as warfare, whether to punish the photographed, intimidate the viewer, or gather viewers in solidarity, mimics the punishment of ancient criminals. in the past, sovereign governments used the public spectacle of torture and execution of the criminals as a way to exercise power and enforce an ideological agreement. public execution even became a form of 1 digital-networked image (dni) is referred to online imagery that is captured for online distribution through means of participatory communication methods on social media (kasra, 2015). 2 entertainment, not unlike the binge-watching practiced by today’s netizens. throughout time non-state agents have displayed the corpse of an enemy visibly and at known junctures to send a message, marking them in the way digital-networked images mark their web contexts. using online circulation, exposure, and community building, militant and vigilante groups are not only applying social media and particularly digital-networked images as mechanisms for a disciplinary force but for social control as well. the fear of getting caught or being punished creates a system of social control among the viewers reminiscent of foucault’s concepts of panopticon (discipline and punish, 9) and governmentality (the foucault effect: studies in governmentality, 102). this 21stcentury hegemonic power mediated in digital-imagery is thus an extension of the 18thcentury spectacle of state-levied punishment and of the 19th-century internalization of power and self-discipline as revealed in foucault’s historic study of systems of discipline and punishment. images of humiliation and public shaming exercise power by making the target visible and by the pervasive power of internalization of discipline through normalization or self-policing. any vigilante or vigilante group with access to the internet is able to disseminate images of abomination, humiliation, grief, and punishment as a way to stir fear in the viewers or to prompt them to discipline and police others. looking at images of public executions, online viewers internalize the fear of being punished and began the process of self-policing. the contemporary decentralized online communication system and the ease and accessibility of image-making tools and techniques have given rise to not only a larger number of image producers on social media but also to a large number of viewers. it’s of little importance who and how many individuals actually view the images, it could be no one or any one; what matters is that a digital-networked image could potentially be viewed by millions of viewers around the world. digital-networked images thus extend hegemonic empowerment to a global scale, beyond any other time in the history of photography, in terms of both viewership and distribution. upon distribution, images of shame and humiliation act as a site for extending 21st-century punitive practice outside of national borders and manifest the power of vigilantes even outside national territories defined by the press or the broadcasting media. furthermore, the permanent retention of information on the web and thus the indefinite shaming, punishing, and exploiting the photographed intensifies the online visual imagery’s capacity for hegemony. the rate at which some groups systematically use digital-networked images to control and terrorize other citizen viewers is alarming. it’s crucial to uncovers the idea that circulation of the digital-networked images perpetuates non-state vigilantism as much as any other kind of non-state identity and functions as mechanisms for establishing power, disciplinary force, and social control. references foucault, michel et al., eds. the foucault effect: studies in governmentality: with two lectures by and an interview with michel foucault. chicago: university of chicago press, 1991. 3 foucault, michel. discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. 2nd ed. new york: vintage books, 1995. kasra, mona. the digital-networked image: temporality and the post-national #sociopoliticalexpression. (unpublished doctoral dissertation). university of texas, dallas. 2015. microsoft word 690-443-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 social media, data analytics and videogames development: halfbrick case study john banks queensland university of technology australia ja.banks@qut.edu.au darryl woodford queensland university of technology australia dp.woodford@qut.edu.au abstract social media platforms are of interest to interactive entertainment companies for a number of reasons. they offer a platform for deploying games, a tool for communicating with customers and potential customers, and provide analytics on players interactions with the game and with each other. however, as ongoing research with australian developer halfbrick, creators of fruit ninja, demonstrates, the use of these platforms and associated data analytics is often contested within game development teams and studios. research with australian developer, halfbrick, provides an opportunity to consider many of these issues and challenges confronting games developers as they seek to adapt to and with big data analytics. keywords video games; organizational theory; innovation; casual games; big data analytics games & social media games and social networks are not new bedfellows; facebook employee bob trahan launched “the friend game” in september 2006. however, the launch of games on social media platforms and indeed mobile devices by mainstream gaming companies such as electronic arts and zynga has drawn attention (arrington, 2010) to both potential benefits and challenges inherent in developing for these platforms. qualitative case-study research we are undertaking with australian developer, halfbrick studios, involving extensive semi-structured interviews and less formal discussions with company employees provides an opportunity to both describe and explore the ways in which games developers adaptively explore the opportunities and challenges of social media and big data analytics. the authors’ research relationship with the company commenced in 2009 and has culminated with 11 extensive semi-structured interviews with 9 staff, and many more informal discussions. the research team are currently developing the research into a more fully-fledged ethnographic engagement building from the interviews we have conducted. this research is still very much a work in progress and this paper outlines initial tentative findings and observations that we are in the process of testing and refining through further fieldwork with halfbrick. halfbrick brisbane based halfbrick studios, developer of the hit game fruit ninja, is one of the recent success stories in the australian videogames industry. the australian videogames industry suffered a significant decline over the past few years with many of its leading developers closing studios, including krome, thq and pandemic. from 2009 halfbrick shifted rapidly from developing licensed properties to publishing in-house titles, generating revenue both through app downloads and merchandise sales. by utilizing platforms such as apple’s app store, halfbrick is able to realize $0.69/$0.70 from each $0.99c purchase of fruit ninja; a significant increase on the percentage of revenue received when developing licensed properties. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 malaby's (2009) exemplary ethnographic study of linden labs foregrounds that control and authority over cultural production are at stake in workplaces such as game development studios. to develop the open-ended worlds that increasingly characterize interactive entertainment professional developers need to give up some aspects of managerial control. by embracing the contingency of relationships with their consumers and the profound uncertainty that characterizes these markets they are also sometimes remaking cultural production firms and organizations in a less hierarchical, less top down fashion (banks, 2013). malaby hopes that his book contributes to our being: … in a better position to understand the emerging institutions that are ever more able to shape and govern our increasingly digital lives. it explores how an organization that set out to create a deeply and complexly contingent environment is itself then remade by its creation through that domain’s emergent effects, in a constantly reiterative process, but without losing its position of greatest influence (p. 9). halfbrick ceo shaineil deo recognizes the importance of enabling integration between games and players across social networks, and is in the process of developing both infrastructure and tools to utilize both the platform and the data provided across the game development process. however, halfbrick’s developers acknowledge this is not a simple task, noting the challenge of constructing a coherent user experience which connects disparate games across social media platforms. deo believes that their current games, such as fruit ninja on facebook, seem to stand alone, without the required element of social interaction that is now needed for successful games on mobile devices and more broadly, social media platforms. goddard, a former employee of halfbrick who was responsible for developing social networking technology, described how the company was trying to provide social features for games that are not naturally related: jet pack joy ride and fruit ninja have no relationship in terms of the game but they have other relationships and what we want to do is allow people to find those games, because [if] you like this game you might like that one. […t]hings like leader boards are very simplistic and they’re not very engaging to the user […i]f you’ve ten million people playing fruit ninja and you’re ranked 9million out of 10 million that doesn’t mean much to you and you know to be honest [it’s] a bit demoralising and it’s not very engaging. social networks also provide data and associated analytics that developers increasingly exploit and use as is apparent with companies such as zynga. fisher et al. (2012) state that “zynga create games and studies data on how its audience plays them in order to update the games immediately”, quoting ken rudin – a zynga vice president – as stating that “we’re an analytics company masquerading as a games company” (p. 91). halfbrick are currently in the process of taking advantage of such data, with deo noting: […o]ne of the things we are doing, as i mentioned, [is] adding a lot of analytics to our game so we can understand what’s actually going on. however, the role and place of data analytics to inform the craft of making and designing games is debated and contested among halfbrick’s designers and developers. deo himself notes that many companies within the industry have allowed analytics to drive design: [a] lot of our competitors [have] analytics drive a lot of, all of their decisions about […] the game and the game design. game design comes second to analytics. […] but we want to still be driven by making fun, creative, quality games. i think that’s always been our strength. and i think they’re the sorts of games that will endure. adapting with big data selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 games for mobile devices and social media platforms increasingly rely on a freemium, microtransaction based, business model. the implications of this model for games design is also currently debated and contested across halfbrick. there is also awareness at halfbrick that this business model is beginning to draw regulatory attention (schneider, 2012). it is beyond the scope of this overview paper to adequately describe and unpack all of the various aspects and implications of social media and big data that we are seeing at halfbrick. in dealing with the challenges and opportunities offered by data analytics, halfbrick is arguably involved in organizational innovation (malaby 2009; van der graaf 2012). halfbrick adaptively experiments with how to organize and coordinate the practice of making videogames in the context of a rapidly changing and volatile market environment. how do they dynamically adapt to these waves of change so they retain a robust and sustainable studio that is also characterized by the workplace culture that they share and value? indeed, can they harness the opportunities and affordances of big data analytics to maintain and improve the organizational adaptability that arguably is halfbrick’s strength as a games developer studio. this experimentation includes how big data and analytics impacts on the craft of making videogames. this concerns workplace culture and professional identity (neff, 2012; banks 2012). describing and then analyzing how developers such as halfbrick explore and negotiate the emerging relationships among the craft of making videogames, social media platforms and big data, is at the core of our current ethnographic research with the company. big data analytics potentially transforms studio workplaces and professional game developer identities. acknowledgments this has been funded by an arc linkage grant lp100200056, and is part of a wider project investigating innovation in the australian interactive entertainment industry. references arrington, m. (2010). “zynga gunning up (and lawyering up) for war against facebook with zynga live”. techcrunch. retrieved from http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/07/zynga-gunning-up-and-lawyering-upfor-war-against-facebook-with-zynga-live/ banks, j. (2013). co-creating video games. london, uk: bloomsbury academic banks, j. (2012). ‘the iphone as innovation platform: reimagining the videogames developer’. in hjorth, l., burgess, j., and richardson, i. (eds.) studying mobile media: cultural technologies, mobile communication, and the iphone. new york: routledge, pp. 155-172. ellonen, h-k., wikstrom, p., jantunen, a. linking dynamic-capability portfolios and innovation outcomes. technovation, 29 (2009), pp. 753-762. fisher, d., deline, r., czerwinski, m. & drucker, s. interactions with big data analytics, interactions, 19(3), pp. 50-59. kelly, t. (2010). ‘ethical design: are most social games just virtual slot machines?’ retrieved from http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/tadhgkelly/20100126/4239/ethical_design_are_most_social_gam es_just_virtual_slot_machines.php malaby, t. m. (2009). making virtual worlds: linden lab and second life (illustrated ed.). ithaca: cornell university press. neff, gina (2012), venture labor: work and the burden of risk in innovative industries, cambridge. ma: the mit press. purewal, j. (2012b). ‘how long until free to play and in-app purchases are regulated”. retrieved from http://www.gamerlaw.co.uk/2012/how-long-until-free-to-play-and-in-app-purchases-are-regulated/ selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 van der graaf, s. (2012). get organized at work! a look inside the game design process of valve and linden lab, bulletin of science technology society, 32(6), pp. 480-488 schneider, s. (2012). social gaming and online gambling. gaming law review and economics. 16(12), pp. 711-712. teece, d. j. (2007). explicating dynamic capabilities: the nature and microfoundations of (sustainable) enterprise performance. strategic management journal, 28, pp. 1319-1350. microsoft word manalu.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): manalu, r. (2014, october 22-24). negotiation of interests in governing communication technology: tracing actor-network in the use of 2.4ghz band for wireless local area networks in indonesia. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. negotiation of interests in governing communication technology: tracing actor-network in the use of 2.4ghz band for wireless local area networks in indonesia rouli manalu north carolina state university this research aims to provide analysis of the ways in which technology is governed and the ways in which actors play their roles in regulating, resisting, and negotiating their interests in the governing process. it focuses historical analysis of the use of 2.4 ghz radio bands for wireless local area networks (wlans) in indonesia. in 2003 indonesian government announced a new policy regarding the use of 2.4ghz for the purpose of outdoor internet or wireless area network (wlan). the policy required all the users of this radio band to obtain license and pay the annual concession fee for using the band to the government. this policy faced a strong reaction and controversies from a number of communities in the country, such as business communities, users communities, communities of academia, and communities of internet expert. some of the controversies were voiced through mass media (newspapers and magazines), but more elaborate dialogues can be found through a number of mailing lists or listserv of some of the communities that concern with internet development. the controversies regarding to this policy eventually brought a number of communities' representatives and state government to sit together in a series of dialogues, where negotiation of interests occurred. in the end, by january 2005, the government changed the policy and liberates the 2.4 ghz radio band to be use for wlan for free by the indonesian public. this research aims to provide an account of the ways in which process of policy change took place. it aims to identify the parties involved in the process, their concerns, and the ways in which they communicate and negotiate their interests. this research gains its insight from the actor-network theory (ant) as a useful perspective to study technology and society. one of the main arguments of ant is that ‘the social’ does not consist of stable structures. rather, society consists of a series of associations of heterogeneous entities that precariously link together to obtain particular objective(s) (law, 1992; latour, 2005). ant explains power dynamics through the logic of association. power is a result and not a cause of associations. in the case of policy to govern 2.4 ghz band in indonesia, power and order also viewed as a result of series of resistances, negotiations, and associations. power and order are viewed not belong and achieved solely by state government, but as a result of associations of several relevant actors. thus, ant conception, this research argues, will be useful to see the details of the formation of regulation in the governing of the 2.4 ghz band for wireless internet access in indonesia. the investigation of actor-network that involve in the case is done through the traces left by the actors in a written record that took place during policy formation in a discussion called indowli. it focuses on the time year prior to the announcement of policy change, from december 2003 through december 2004. this research argues that this forum conversation reflects parts of the universe of actors that involved in the process since it captured various voices of different actors. verbal data analysis, then, is used to examine the conversation in the forum. to capture the essence of information from the data corpus, this research used two cycles of data coding. the first coding cycle used provisional coding, in which codes were developed from the anticipated categories prior to reading the data. ant as theoretical framework, informed the decision to create the code dimension “actor” and the code dimension “interest”. the second coding cycle used descriptive coding, in which the codes emerge from the data content after reading and rereading the data. a number of actors that emerge from data coding include; (1) human actors, consist of international regulatory bodies (such as itu, fcc, etsi, ieee); national regulatory bodies (such as directorate of post and telecommunication dgpt); telkom (a stateowned company); profit internet providers; internet cafés; noncommercial 2.4 ghz band users; indowli (a community of 2.4 ghz users); and (2) nonhuman actors, consist of regulations/policies; the 2.4 ghz band; wlan technological instruments (such as antennae, boosters, and bts); and technological devices (such as computers, wi-fi enabled devices, routers, cellular phones). temporal analysis of the data shows there are dynamic in the ways in which actors discussed in the forum conversation. the dynamic can be seen through the figure below. over the year, we can see that human actors are the focus of conversation in the beginning of the policy formulation process. both the directorate of post and telecommunication (dgpt), who initially announced the proposal for the new regulation, and the community of 2.4 ghz users, who would be affected by the regulation, dominated the conversation for the first three months. by the middle of the year, the conversation turned to nonhuman actors. two main nonhuman actors, wlan technological instruments and regulations/policies, are the focus of the attention in the discussion around this time. the human actors, mainly the community of 2.4 ghz users, again dominated the discussion for the next couple of months, although wlan technological instruments were of particular interest towards the end of the conversation. the patterns and regularities found in verbal data, then, are extended in qualitative data analysis. using ant to conduct analysis, there are five profound moments of translation that lead to the change of the policy in governing radio band for wlan connection. first moment, dgpt, as the main regulator body, announced the plan of a new regulation regarding the use of 2.4 ghz radio band. dgpt tried to establish astrong argument regarding to the necessity for a new regulation for a better communication and information sector in the country. the reference to itu convention is one of the rhetorical moves to strengthen the argument. at the same time, the argument of potentiality and stability/order was also part of the rhetorical moves. second moment, dgpt tried to lock other actors in a particular position in the network. dgpt used a persuasive argument that everybody wanted an affordable internet connection that could be enjoyed by large number of population. however, at the same time, dgpt emphasized that law is the only way to maintain order and stability. thus, through persuasion and authority of state regulation, the dgpt was tried to interest and locking other actor to what was deemed as proper positions. third moment, dgpt made attempts to ensure the enrollment of other actors through enforcing the regulation. a number of government raids took place in a different province across the country, according to the conversation in the forum. among others, the raid also took place in manado (north sulawesi), and in balikpapan (east kalimantan). perhaps the most extensive government raid was happened in september-october 2003 in two provinces, central java and d.i.yogyakarta. the raid resulted a high number of equipment confiscation, which forced several isps to quit their business, and even went bankrupt. fourth moments, the community countered government’s action by proposing a strong argument regarding to self-regulation of the 2.4 ghz band. the community proposed several main points to the government; (1) to exempt the use of 2.4 ghz band from any license; (2) to exempt the use of the band from any concession fee; (3) to use technological designs to diminish frequency interference and establish order; (4) to delegate coordination and monitoring system of the band in the hand of local communities, and not state government. fifth moments, there were back and forth discussions of different interests and different actors over the course of the year. by the end of 2004, the conversation culminated into several sets of drafts proposal that was told had been brought to the face-to-face discussion among the spokesperson of the community, regulatory bodies, and the spokesperson of other business entities. there was no detailed information about the face-to face discussions mentioned in the forum. however, by dec 5, 2004, there was a talk in the forum that government had agreed to the proposal of the community to make the 2.4 ghz band free to the public, without imposing any license and concession fee. references bijker, w. e. & law, j., (1992). general introduction, in edited by and john law., & w. e. bijker (eds.), shaping technology/building society : studies in sociotechnical change (). cambridge, mass.: mit press. callon, m. & law, j. (1982). on interests and their transformation: enrolment and counter-enrolment. social studies of science, 12(4), 615-625. callon, m. (1986). some elements of sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of st. brieuc bay. in j. law (ed.), power, action, and belief: a new sociology of knowledge. london: routledge & kegan paul goswami, d. (2008). wi-fi: the network fix. international development research centre (pp. 131-156) latour, b. (2005). reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. oxford; new york: oxford university press. law, j. (1992). notes on the theory of the actor network ordering, strategy, and heterogeneity. systems practice, 5(4), 379-393. microsoft word scolere-pinning originality-pinning originality.doc selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 pinning originality: curation practices of creative professionals leah scolere doctoral student, department of communication, cornell university lee humphreys,phd associate professor, department of communication, cornell university abstract pinterest is a site primarily used for sharing online content particularly images, as such it is a unique platform through which to explore curatorial practices. creative professionals or designers are a unique community of interest because of their expertise in the offline curation of visual images as a part of their profession. drawing on museum and material studies, this study examined the social practices of design professionals on pinterest to explore the curatorial practices and to expand our theoretical understandings of online curation and the role of curator. through a series of in-depth qualitative interviews and online observation, we identified originality as a central value of creative professionals’ curatorial practice online. three aspects of curation practices on pinterest emerged from the interviews with design professionals: (1) originality as performance, (2) originality as process, and (3) originality as product. the strategic and creative selection and arrangement of digital images becomes a mode of artistic production that results in a series of ongoing exhibits in the form of pinterest boards. this community demonstrates how online curation becomes an important mode for the demonstration of professional expertise and the production of value. the study concludes with implications for our collective understandings of online curation and the role of social media within commercial contexts. keywords online curation, creative professionals, pinterest, design, originality suggested citation (apa): scolere, l. & humphreys, l. (2015, october 21-24). pinning originality: curation practices of creative professionals. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http:// spir.aoir.org. pinning originality: curation practices of creative professionals pinterest describes itself as a “place to discover ideas for all your projects and interests, hand-picked by people like you” (pinterest, 2015). with over 72.8 million users (mangalindan, 2015), pinterest is a fast growing online image-sharing platform that allows users to collect and display ideas by “pinning” images to thematic boards around projects, hobbies and inspiration. users can pin their own photos or images from websites outside of pinterest or they can repin images from other users’ boards within pinterest. unlike other image-sharing or social network sites like flickr or facebook, pinterest users do not tend upload and share their own images, but circulate images found within pinterest or elsewhere on the web (moore, 2012). the sharing of videos or photos found online with others is a popular activity not just on pinterest. pew research center’s internet project found that 47% of adult internet users have shared videos or photos that they found online with others (duggan & smith, 2013). the sharing of online content through various social media platforms has been referred to as curation (duggan & smith, 2013). because pinterest is a site that is primarily used for online content sharing, as opposed to content creation, it is a unique platform through which to explore curatorial practices. the majority of images or pins on pinterest are not uploaded, original content from pinterest users themselves, but come from elsewhere on the web, most often blogs and ecommerce sites (zarro & hall, 2012; hall & zarro, 2012). the most common activity on pinterest is repinning images from other pinterest users’ boards rather than pinning personal images or images from websites outside of pinterest (moore, 2012). thus questions arise regarding how the circulation and collection of visual images on pinterest relate to online curatorial practices. pinterest is increasingly used by organizations, brands, and professionals to circulate images of their products and services to potential consumers (silberman, 2013). while research has begun to explore general pinterest use (e.g. gilbert et al, 2013; linder, snodgrass & kerne, 2014), there is little understanding of how professionals think about and use pinterest. creative professionals or designers are a unique professional community of interest because of their expertise in the offline curation of visual images as a part of their profession. designers can also be understood as “cultural intermediaries or tastemakers in that they broker modern ideas in the work they do and the way they consume” (bourdieu, 1984 as cited in julier, 2008, p.86). studying design professionals on pinterest can give us insight into online curation because the design process often involves the offline collection and curation of images to create new design interventions. therefore this study examines a community of creative professionals who have taken their professional offline curatorial practices to pinterest. through a series of in-depth qualitative interviews and online observation, this study seeks to explore the social practices of design professionals on pinterest to 1) explore the curatorial practices of creative professionals online and 2) expand our theoretical understandings of curation and the role of curator. literature review previous research has defined pinterest as a “social curation” website because it combines collecting capabilities with social attributes of liking, following, and commenting (gilbert et al., 2013; hall & zarro, 2012; zarro, hall, & forte, 2013). however, the terms ‘collecting’ and ‘curating’ are used interchangeably and there is some ambiguity around the definitions. therefore this study draws on the material culture literature about collecting, the culture of collecting, as well as, the evolution of curatorial practice from an art history perspective as it relates to offline exhibition collections to theoretically distinguish the concept of collecting from curating and that of the collector and curator. collecting and curating belk (2006) defines collecting as “the process of actively, selectively, and passionately acquiring and possessing things removed from ordinary use and perceived as part of a set of non-identical objects or experiences” (p.535). further, collecting involves removing an object from its original everyday use and economic exchange value. the value of the material object is defined by its singularity (i.e. uniqueness or rarity of an object) and its contribution to the larger collection. unlike material goods, digital artifacts are non-rivalrous and non-excludable meaning that one person’s use or collection of a digital artifact does not limit another person’s access to that same object (lehdonvirta, 2012). further, a digital artifact can be easily shared and accessed by others in a number of contexts simultaneously without “it leaving one’s possession” (jenkins, ford & green, 2013, p.91). lehdonvirta (2012) argues that “every copy of a digital good is indistinguishable from the original” (p.20). thus this raises importance issues regarding the singularity or originality of digital artifacts within collections. implicit in belk’s (2006) definition of collecting is that it is relatively private process. however, there is a certain blurring of public and private that occurs around digital collections where digital collectors and their collections “perform publicly and privately” (gray, 2006, p.11). all collections on pinterest are by default public. though users are allowed up to three private boards, the number of public boards is unlimited. the pinning of images is further publicized by alerting followers when someone pins an image and when an image is repinned the previous pinner is notified as well. digital collecting on a site like pinterest is primarily a public and visible process of collecting from selecting images to composing boards. collectors and curators belk (2006) makes a key distinction between the collector and the curator by identifying the collector as the person who assembles a collection, while the curator acquires a completed collection and is in charge of the continual upkeep of this already intact collection. within the framework of material culture (belk, 2006), the assemblage of a collection is the important creative act, whereas the creative act within curation is about the choice of which collection to acquire. additionally among collectors, social hierarchies exist. traditionally there has been a distinction between the “collector as connoisseur”—the collector that follows his aesthetic sense and collects based on the uniqueness or rarity of an object and the “straightforward collector”—the collector who needs to complete a series (belk, 2006). the symbolic value of one’s collection thus reflects back on the collector’s identity and social status (bourdieu, 1984), whereby the connoisseur is often considered of higher social status than the serial collector who is merely completing a predetermined series. within museum studies, the role of the curator has evolved from a caretaker of a collection to the curator as creative author based on the degree of visibility and independence from the institution of the museum (o’neill, 2012). however, the roles of the curator of new media are distinguished not through degree of visibility of the curator alone, but rather the degree of transformation and manipulation of content and creative agency of the curator (sinnreich, 2010). within internet studies, role of a curator has been discussed as the media platform itself or system for an algorithmic filtering and organizing (hogan, 2010), archivist with an emphasis on preservation (erickson, 2010), intermediary who identifies and culls from the broad amount of existing content to circulate media artifacts with new audiences (monroy-hernández et al., 2013), and mediator who significantly transforms or recontextualizes the media artifacts so as to open up new meanings around the media content (gehl, 2009; jenkins, ford & green, 2013). while social media like pinterest offer individuals the ability to curate, how do design professionals distinguish themselves as professional tastemakers? what are their online curatorial practices and how do they help us to better understand the tensions around curation, identity, and social media? methodology in order to study the curation practices of design professionals on pinterest, we used an interpretivist and naturalistic framework (lofland et al., 2006). this framework allows us to gain insight into how the designers understand and interpret their own everyday usage of pinterest. additionally, this framework gives us the opportunity to go beyond just their actions on pinterest and examine more broadly their assumptions, understandings, and values related to curation on pinterest. sampling and recruitment. sample. the research on pinterest use has tended to sample using computational methods of the entire public site (e.g. gilbert, et al 2013, moore, 2012) or by a convenience sample of “everyday” users (e.g. hall & zarro, 2012; zarro & hall, 2012), rather than looking at how pinterest is being used by communities for specific ends and associated practices. therefore we focused on sampling from a very specific population of design professionals because of their expertise in the offline curation of visual images as a part of the creative design process. designers often collect precedent images, known as existing examples of design, as part of the design process to build their design knowledge, identify patterns and typologies for future design problems, discover inspiration, and look for points of departure for new innovations (lawson, 2004). as cultural intermediaries, designers mediate a position between culture and the economy and through their professional work shape consumptive practices (julier, 2008). for these reasons, design professionals can be positioned as a unique community of pinterest users whose practices can give us explicit insight into collection and curation practices. recruitment. we employed two primary recruitment strategies to sample design professionals from 1) professional design communities and 2) large, well-known design firms in the interior design and architecture industry. first, we posted recruitment messages on a linkedin ‘iida’ group that has over 36,500 members including prominent design professionals both nationally and internationally. the first author is a designer by training and profession, therefore our second recruitment strategy involved contacting a former colleague, nathani, who worked as a design strategist for a large global architecture and design firm. nathan acted as an “informal sponsor” sending our recruitment message to several internal firm and external design listserves, vouching for the project, and helping to explain the research interests to the design firm and community (hammersley and atkinson, 1995, p. 60). from the original group of respondent interviews (n=6), we used a snowball sampling to recruit the remaining participants. the participants included 16 women and 4 men, ranging in age from 25 to 50 with a mean age of 33. the sample includes participants from six states in the us, including cities such as new york, san francisco, denver, minneapolis, and washington d.c. along with a small group of international participants (n= 3) from the uk, south africa, and canada. the sample consists of 6 professional designers who own their own firms and 14 from large global design firms, which offer a range of design services including architecture, interior design, and graphics and branding. the majority of the interviewed designers (n= 16) work on commercial architecture and interior design projects, while a small minority work on graphics and brand design for the built environment. the gender divide of this sample is reflective of both the pinterest site as encoded with gender and consumptive assumptions (tekobbe, 2013) as well as the predominance of women in the u.s. commercial interior design industry—approximately 69% (interior design staff, 2010). data collection and analysis we conducted 20 semi-structured in-depth interviews during the summer of 2013. the interviews ranged from approximately 40 to 90 minutes and were conducted via phone or skype. the interviews were audio recorded and transcribed to ensure accuracy. this study was granted irb permission by the authors’ institutional review board. overall, we structured the questions and the overall interview as “open ended process reflection questions” (charmaz, 2002, p. 679) that would encourage the participants to reflect on their own usage. as charmaz (2002) suggests, the first interview guide started with broad, easy to answer, concrete questions and then gradually became more specific to particular aspects of pinterest in order to “study process” (p. 679). the interviews focused on five areas: general use, pinning/repinning (and never pin), motivations around creating boards and types of boards, profile information, and pinning “etiquette”. particpants’ public pinterest boards were accessed with their knowledge for background information as we prepared for and interpreted the interviews, but formal visual analyses of participants’ pins and boards were not conducted. drawing on grounded theory (glaser & strauss, 1967), we approached data collection and analysis as an iterative process, moving continuously back and forth between collecting data and analyzing the data using a “constant comparative method” (p.102). the ongoing analysis of the initial interview transcripts allowed us to follow up on emerging themes in subsequent interviews, so as to continue to refine the categories and emerging themes during the data collection process. the original broad affinities about participants’ reported pinterest use included: where and when they used pinterest (context), how and why (motivations, intentions), and their perceptions and reflections (norms). findings the pinning practices of creative professionals highlight originality as a central value of curatorial practice online. this was expressed most clearly in how designers discussed their pinning practices. when asked about pinning and repinning, the majority of designers strongly expressed a preference for pinning (images from websites outside of pinterest) over repinning (images existing within pinterest). for example, mara described pinning as seeming “more like an original process” and julie’s referred to pinning as “finding things from scratch.” in contrast, julie described repinning as something “someone else found.” similarly, giselle described a repin as “other peoples’ ideas, stories, and inspiration.” even though none of the images, whether pinned or repinned were original content created by the designers themselves, there were nuanced distinctions for how the designers evaluated originality. further, the designers expressed very positive feelings toward pinning over repinning. blake explains how he feels toward pinning and explains why pinning was deemed more original. i prefer to do an original pin because it feels more legitimate. it feels original—you are not taking what someone else loves. it feels nice to go out there and search for something and find something really cool that you don’t think anyone else has pinned. it feels like it (original pin) probably reflects my point of view a bit more clearly. you can see things on your feed and maybe they are appealing somewhat or in most of the ways that you want so you repin that. but when you are looking for something online, you stumble across something really strange and bizarre and really interesting and you are drawn to it. i feel like it is a bit more special. (blake, san francisco, ca) blake expressed a kind of originality as defined not through the creation of original content but through the action of finding and discovering images or ideas from other places and bringing them to pinterest. by not limiting himself to the choices within pinterest, blake believed that what he finds will fit better with his viewpoint, with his criteria for choosing and selecting. although this is a very thin distinction, the designers using pinterest conveyed a clear distinction between pinning as active, more effort, and more creative and repinning as passive, requiring less effort, less original, and ultimately evaluated as less valuable. in some cases, to avoid repinning from another person’s board, designers employed strategies for appearing to pin instead of repinning. for example, rachel, a designer in nyc, explained her strategy for avoiding repinning too frequently. rachel: one thing that i noticed that i did—this is cheating a little bit—if i see a pin on someone’s board, i might not necessarily just repin it. interviewer: what’s your reasoning? how do you think about that? rachel: there has been an occasion when i have been insanely overtly repinning from one person and just didn’t want that person to think i was totally ripping off their boards. as a designer, rachel knows that even if she finds an image on a board that she likes, she should go outside of pinterest to find the image as a way to avoid what she knows is less desirable in the design community—repinning from someone else’s board. “cheating” is how rachel described the “inappropriate” behavior of using pinterest’s search functionality to find good design images through other users’ boards but not revealing that process by avoiding repinning, which would tag from whom she found the image. by pinning an image, rachel got credit for the discovery of the image and the perceived originality associated with bringing an image into pinterest; there is no link or trace of connection to another pinterest user’s existing pins and composed boards. alternately, repinning an image is associated with a ‘found image’, an image that has been discovered already, introduced to pinterest, and composed as part of an existing board by somebody else. if repinned on rachel’s board, an image will still carry a trace of its origin by saying for example, “added by rachel via julie” (the pinterest user who originally pinned the image from a website outside of pinterest). when distinctions about being a designer and originality are not made through the creation of content, designers evaluate originality and creative contribution through the discovery of content, but significantly this suggests that the discovery of originality needs to be further unpacked to understand how designers distinguish themselves as professional tastemakers. originality as performance, process & product three aspects of curation practices on pinterest emerged from the interviews with design professionals: (1) originality as performance, (2) originality as process, and (3) originality as product. originality as performance is the means by which a designer strategically pins and creates boards as a means presenting oneself as a designer as opposed to what they perceive to be the average pinterest user. the designers actively constructed their performance of originality as a central value to their curation. originality as process is the means by which designers are experimenting with the structure of the boards and pins as an original and artistic endeavor in of itself. the management of pins and boards were perceived as a dialogical process of curation. originality as product is the means by which designers become aware that their pinterest work inspires imagined publics through the sharing of their perceived unique and original points of view. their particular aesthetic choices and compositions are their creative output for others to consume. originality as performance. designers in this study took seriously the idea of presenting themselves through their pins and the composition of their boards. the collection and curation of objects became a means of identity work and selfpresentation (baudrillard, 1994, 1996; goffman, 1959). for example many of the designers interviewed purposefully pinned design imagery to enact and display their professional identity and expertise. when asked about their pinterest profile or what they thought people could tell about them from viewing their boards, participants would first articulate that a viewer of their profile would be able to tell that she was a designer. this was communicated not through their profile information but through their specificity of pins, the number of pins relating to design, and the delimiting of topics to design. in many cases, the designers would describe pinning in ways that demonstrated their design expertise, often in contrast to non-designer pinterest users. delimiting of topics. participants were careful to pin images that are narrowly characterized within their professional identity. catherine, a south african based designer, explains her reasoning for carefully delimiting topics for her boards and her pins. my main focus is interiors and architecture and that imagery. i might follow people who follow other things just to see it but i don’t repin those things because my focus is on the interior and i don’t want to complicate my profile with too many boards. (catherine, western cape, south africa) catherine is conscious about her self-representation and maintaining that position through the types of images she chooses to pin and the boards she creates. this can be contrasted with julie’s observation of what a non-designer does on pinterest, as “someone who has a broad range of topics.” the delimiting of pin to design-related topic was a strategic means for our participants of performing their professional identity on pinterest. in addition to what designers say they intentionally pin, it is also helpful to examine what they intentionally do not pin or say they would never pin. julie communicates this in relation to what she observes ‘non-designers’ pinning. i pin things that are focused on design and aesthetics. where i feel like non-designers are just kinda pinning things they find interesting—like recipes, like workout plans, like funny quotes. non-designers love pinning funny quotes and it’s not really about aesthetics. (julie, brooklyn, ny) designers reported that they intentionally kept their boards and pins focused on design imagery and noted that non-designers tended to pin a broad range of common interests such as recipes, fitness, wedding inspiration, fashion trends, and home décor. everyday creative acts, like craft arts, home décor or cooking, were not part of our participants’ performance on pinterest even though they recognized that non-designers on pinterest valued them. similarly they recognized the popularity of fitness, wedding inspiration and fashion on pinterest, but reported that they would not pin such topics. the symbolic value of delimiting their pins and boards reflects a strategy to distinguish themselves and legitimate their different social status from non-designer pinterest users (bourdieu, 1984). this does not suggest that the more “common” pins on pinterest were not also of interest to our participants. indeed one participant said that she had a private board regarding pins for her wedding. she, however, would not make the board public because it was not part of her identity performance as design professional. recognizing the distinctions between high and low art (becker, 1982), our participants remain committed to their public pinning performance as creative professionals. originality as process. professional designers are trained in a very systematic design process of collecting existing examples of design, identifying patterns and typologies, as well as, points of departure, to inform future design innovations (lawson, 2004). the creative professionals in this study described their pinning practices as means of enacting this offline design practice in this online environment. in other words, they brought their process-oriented design strategies to their curatorial practices on pinterest. in addition to the discovery of images and their valuing pinning over repinning, designers build their point of view and potential patterns for future design problems by the transformation of singular images into patterns and typologies. this offline design process was transposed online through the composition of the boards on pinterest. designers in this study spent a lot of their time on pinterest dedicated to composing, editing, and managing their boards. however, this attention to composition was technologically problematic. indeed, julie expressed frustration with the lack of control over the order of the pins on a board: “you can arrange the order of your boards as they appear on your page but you cannot arrange the pins on the board. so you really have no control of the composition, which i find a little bit challenging.” julie describes her strategy for overcoming the issues of controlling image order on pinterest. “i’ll keep everything in one massive board but i will repin it on to a more tailored board.” participants, like julie, used repinning their own pins as a means of controlling the composition on pinterest that did not allow for the custom arrangement of images on boards. by repinning from a previously existing larger board to a new board, participants could control the position of the images, which also serves as a strategy for creative control, enhancing the graphic composition of the new board. in addition to the preoccupation with the graphic composition of each board, many designers were equally concerned with the overall composition of how all the boards looked together on their main page— a kind of meta-composition. because the composition of boards was a very important part of the design process for these professionals, they would often make use of secret boards secret for projects they felt were not ready or complete. in addition to valuing and safeguarding their process, many designers described secret boards as a type of private space for “process work” (julier, 2002). blake explains using the secret boards as a place to experiment freely with projects in process. i was thinking of making another secret board for self-branding—ideas for how i want to present my portfolio and brand myself but i don’t want that process to be open to the public to see me trying to put these images together. so, i use pinterest because it is a very simple tool but i don’t want to necessarily share that with the world—i don’t want to share that part of my process. (blake, san francisco, ca). in blake’s description, the secret board is a type of workspace for hiding certain processes before they are more fully developed into final boards. similarly, julie describes creating secret boards for “testing things out” or doing “something very edgy.” the “edgy” work that julie refers to is a type of work that she worries will not fit into her performed design aesthetic. both blake and julie describe secret boards as a type of private space for creative design project experimentation away from the publicness of other pinterest users. this not only safeguarded their actual design process, which is unique to them as design professionals, but it also helps to preserve their performed identity as design professionals. originality as product. initially, some designers described collecting practices of selectively pinning images and accumulating images on boards with a more internal focus. it was part of their engaging in their own design aesthetic process. as they became more aware of the visibility of their pins and the potential to connect with various publics, they described a more external focus around the creative arrangement and composition of boards. unlike a collection in which all elements are equal and the composition doesn’t necessarily matter because it is about the totality of the series (baudrillard, 1994), the composition or how pins are arranged on a board is integral to a curated exhibit. as such, designers in our study understood their pinterest profiles, including their pins and boards, as a creative product in and of itself. designers in this study understood the composed pinterest boards as a resulting original design or creative product, spending a majority of their time on pinterest preoccupied with creating a beautiful board. designers reported that even more so than the individual pins, they are concerned with the overall graphic composition of each board—how all the pins work together aesthetically on an individual board. designers commonly reported strategies for resisting the pinterest template. for example rather than titling a board “design” or “interior design” they would use color as a theme to organize and name boards. while pinterest by default uses the first image pinned to a board as the cover image of the board, our participants would actively change the cover images of boards to carefully construct a visual product that conveyed their unique design aesthetic. continual maintenance. many of the designers described curating images on pinterest as an ongoing act. giselle describes her daily routine on pinterest. oftentimes, i’ll revisit boards and i’ll scroll down and filter—kinda to get rid of the older pins. i’m constantly updating and i might re-title boards. i’m still filtering through and trying to narrow down because i am a designer perfectionist. i am trying to figure out ways to clean it up or make it a bit more useful to what i’m feeling. it is constantly evolving. (giselle, denver, co ) in the interview, giselle also discussed how she has had the same the six to nine boards for the entire time that she has been using pinterest and will continually edit these boards and delete pins that represent a trend. as a design product that represents her design aesthetic to various publics, she continually revisits and updates her boards to demonstrate her unique point of view and to signal her ability to be on the cutting-edge of trend discovery. meaning exchange with various publics. in addition to collecting images for their own inspiration, many of the designers reported that they were actively trying to inspire others with their pins—viewing pinning as engaging in a process of meaning exchange with range of potential publics including: professional design communities, project teams, current and potential clients, as well as, non-designer pinterest users. giselle describes how she pins and composes boards with the purpose of inspiring other viewers in addition to herself. i pin things that bring a moment of pause for someone looking at my boards. i like the idea of pinning something that makes you stop and pause a bit. (giselle, denver, co) giselle tries to pin in order to get the attention of other potential publics; her goal is to use the composition of images to have people see a certain point of view or open up meanings around images. her pins and boards are the product of her design process meant to inspire and engage others. julie suggests that she is also able to engage with other designers on pinterest who share her aesthetic. the two pages that consistently get the most followers are my african textiles and my global textile style. that has made me feel good that there is this community and population out there that finds this stuff interesting and appreciates the aesthetic. it’s funny when you find other people with those interests and we all follow each other. there is this community out there and it just takes time to be introduced to that community. there is this big burst when you first join the community and the community grows and acknowledges you and finds you. (julie, brooklyn, nyc). like on other social media platforms, having followers is a sign of social status and influence (marwick & boyd, 2012). julie’s description illustrates how some designers view the publicness of the creating boards as a way to exchange meanings and build shared ideas around niche interests and how that can extend beyond the online pinterest community. discussion curation as understood through the designers of this study can be described as a type of creative authorship where creative selection and arrangement of digital images becomes a mode of artistic production that results in a series of ongoing exhibits in the form of pinterest boards. the pinning practices of the designers reveal evolving beliefs around design and digital objects, which in turn are shaped by the technological affordances of the platform itself. this study finds that the designers have developed their own norms and distinctions around creativity and originality through curating. in valuing pinning over repinning, these designers have placed value in the act of finding and discovering content outside of pinterest, thus enhancing its originality in context if not in action, and the creative arrangement and combination of images. bringing “new” found content from outside of pinterest can be understood as a greater degree of contextual transformation and effort than the ease of repinning content from existing “found collections” within pinterest. these designers felt it was important to be “looking” outside of pinterest in order to bring that original contribution to pinterest. the thin distinctions that the designers are making around what they consider “original content” stems from the fact that pinterest makes visible that an image was repinned and where from. this visibility on pinterest creates an environment where the designers had to manage community norms around originality in their pinning practices by not overtly repinning from other users’ boards or upon finding content on another user’s board. while the repin tagging was likely meant to enhance a sense of social connection amongst pinners, the designers in this study often made a purposeful decision not to repin from a user, but rather pin the same image from a website or source outside of pinterest to perform originality. chang et al (2014) suggest that pinning a diverse range of content, rather than specializing, attracts more followers on pinterest. however, the designers in this study reported intentional specialization and delimiting of topics and pins over diversity of pins a strategy for self-presentation as a designer as a way to signal their professional design status and identity. for the designers in this study, their design aesthetic is both a process and a product that is reflected in their pinterest use. simultaneously, their pins and boards reflect their brand. more specifically, the designers leveraged the pins, the topics of the boards, and the aggregation and composition of the boards as identity performance. additionally, whom the designers are following and followed by conveys professional expertise, signaling their role as influencers and not influenced by nondesigners. therefore, the designer’s performance, process, and product on pinterest are mutually constituted in ways to convey their original and professional value. unlike material objects, digital objects and their copies are nearly indistinguishable from each other (belk, 2013; lehdonvirta, 2012; gray, 2006) and are easily shared (jenkins, ford & green, 2013). studying the practices of designers around digital objects suggests that evaluations of originality stem from discovery of image (effort to search and find image from huge amount of available content), source of image (linking to the original source of where the image originated from), degree of contextual change (in this case, distance from pinterest site), and amount of transformation or innovative recombination (new combinations of images for new meanings on boards rather than perceived pre-arranged images). the findings from this study suggest that while digital objects and their copies are seemingly indistinguishable and ubiquitous (belk, 2013; lehdonvirta, 2012; gray, 2006), the pinterest platform makes digital objects distinguishable by making the second copy travel with the note “hey this was pinned from so-and-so’s collection.” this study highlights that on site such as pinterest where digital objects are distinguishable, certain communities of users develop “norms that shape the negotiation of value” (jenkins, ford & green, 2013, p.90). in the case of the designer community in this study, designers valued and evaluated the digital objects’ originality and contribution based a series of internalized norms not around the originality of the object or even the originality image but rather the originality of choosing the image. collecting & curating. one significant contribution of this study of designers’ practices on pinterest is to expand our understanding of curation in new media studies beyond the curatorial role of selecting, organizing, and sharing digital content. previous pinterest studies have tended to use the terms collecting and curating together without making clear distinctions and combining more traditional understanding of curator as someone who selects and organizes with the added role of collecting (e.g. zarro & hall 2012). the new media discussions around the music industry with the introduction of mash-ups and djs have used the term curate to move beyond mediator to emphasize the creative endeavor of curating—“creative selection and arrangement” of existing material to create a new artistic expression (sinnreich, 2010, p.110). the creative component of mashups as curation applies more broadly to social media curation. curators as creative authors create new forms and experiences through the creative selection and arrangement of art, often art from non-traditional artists or sources (o’neill, 2012). similar to our participants, originality and value is evaluated by the degree of change in context and transformation of the source material as a part of the curatorial work being done by djs (sinnreich, 2010, p. 101). the performance, process, and production of originality are the creative acts that make meaningful online curation for our creative professionals. the designers in this study see themselves in a curatorial role of creative author through their discriminating selection of pins (i.e. images of design by designers outside of pinterest) and their creative composition of these pins on a board as an original design in of itself. this study drew on museum studies literature on collecting and curating in order to situate the work of design professionals on pinterest. we observed a set of creative practices including the identification and selection of artifacts, the grouping of artifacts, as well as, an active management, that is, the adding, editing, and deleting of individual artifacts and sometimes whole groupings, of the exhibits. the meta-composition is a central curatorial practice whereby design professionals come to understand what their profiles, pins and boards together communicate about who they are. meta-composition is something relevant to various social media platforms. whereas previous social media research has suggests that curation focuses on the selection and filtering of content to share with others (hogan, 2010; jenkins, ford, & green, 2013), our research highlights the collective nature of online curatorial practices. our study suggests it is important to place attention on the shared digital artifact (e.g. image, video, link) not just as a singular object but part of a broader collective whether than be technologically explicit like a pinterest board or profile page on twitter. the meta-composition of boards by our participants is not that dissimilar to the tweeting practices of professionals whereby professionals delimit their topics in order to distinguish themselves as experts in their professional field (marwick & boyd, 2010). the collection of digital objects, whether they be tweets or boards, reflects back upon the identity of the social media user who is aware of this and actively performs accordingly. distinguishing collecting from curating on pinterest is difficult because pinterest practices combine private collecting and public curating due to the publicness of collecting. nevertheless the historical distinction can still be felt where we saw our participants try to regain notions of private collection and public curation by using secrets boards on which to do process work. additionally the value of one’s digital objects in collections was still in part determined by its rarity –rarity online is not absolute, but contextually defined and performed. our participants worked hard to perform originality in terms of their identity on pinterest, the process they go through to manage their pinterest profile, and the creative product they create as evidenced by their pins and boards. the value of one’s digital contribution on the social media platform was determined by the originality of one’s postings, both individual posts (pins), boards, and collective boards. but originality is contextual, whereby we can understand something being valued not on its absolutely rarity but its unusual status within a particular context. on twitter we also see this focus on new and original contributions being of valued (marwick & boyd, 2010). one of the important twitter metrics is how many times an original message is retweeted, not how many times a user retweets. original content is valued content in social media contexts. publicness of curating. exhibitions are the end product of curation (o’neill, 2012). this suggests that exhibitions are displays for public engagement and curation as an act is inherently public. at the most basic level an exhibition is a primary method of communication and dissemination about works of art and does so through a temporally constrained display that helps communicate a particular point of view to viewers of the exhibit (o’neill, 2012). however, the distinction here is that the final product of curation (the exhibit) is always public but historically the process of curating an exhibit—selecting works of art and arranging them has not typically been public. on a site such as pinterest, not only are boards public but the entire process of choosing and composing is public. there is no behind-the-scenes composing of pins function on pinterest. the actual composition of curating happens in public. followers receive notifications for each pin a user pins to board. further, pinterest makes the source of pin/repin known and more importantly highly visible to the pinterest community. at times, the designers in this study negotiated this publicness of curation and creative production by using the private ‘secret boards’ as a place for “storing” pins before they decided which board to pin them to or experimenting with composition of pins without the process being public. several designers articulated their awareness of the “socially mediated publicness” (baym & boyd, 2012) to pinterest and their pinning when they explained how initially they started pinning images without being attuned to publicness of their pins and quickly changed their approach based on feedback from other users that made them aware of this publicness. baym & boyd (2012) assert, “as people communicate publically through social media, they become more aware of themselves relative to visible and imagined audiences and more aware of the larger publics to which they belong and which they seek to create” (p. 320). a number of designers in this study described rebuilding their boards after experiencing a heightened awareness of the visibility of their pinning. in many cases, the designers reported getting feedback that reminded them that they had an audience beside themselves— imagined audiences and the larger publics to which they belong including design industry professionals, clients, consultants, and friends and the more niche publics they hoped to develop and become a part of through their pinning. conclusion this study makes two important contributions to internet studies. first, by exploring pinterest use by design professionals, we demonstrate how social media platforms are operating within commercial and organizational contexts. much of the research on social media focuses on interpersonal use (e.g. boyd, 2014; ellison, steinfield & lampe, 2007; walther, et al., 2008), but the growing adoption by companies, organizations, and brands warrants a closer examination of these communities of users. a second contribution of this study is the explication of online curation as the complex interplay between the performance, process, and production of originality. the theoretical distinctions between collecting and curating are blurred on a social media platform like pinterest, where we see both practices enacted on the site. recognizing this, we try to further explicate the symbolic value of these practices. while previous research has demonstrated the performative as well as selective nature of social media curation (e.g. marwick & boyd, 2012), our study reveals these practices as creative acts. our study also highlights the processual nature of originality and its centrality to our participants’ curation practices. their continued adding, culling, editing, and managing of pins and boards was vital to our participants and their sense of a curatorial role as creative author. research on social media use has revealed the active management of social media profiles as part of a privacy and identity management (madden, et al, 2013), but our research highlights how similar a social media practice can be a creative, rather than protective act. instead of interpreting the deleting and editing of online materials associated with one’s profile as privacy enhancing, when viewed through the professional or commercial lens, such acts reveal an active management of relevant information. in the case of our designers, managing their pinterest content was a creative, authorial act. future research should continue to explore how creative professionals use social media as part of their professional branding, creative process, and interpersonal communication. future research might examine what happens when social tools are employed in professional or organizational contexts and how people must manage professional expectations with the normative authenticity expectations (hookway & james, 2015; james, 2015). future research should also continue to explore how value is determined and circulated in online platforms. our study suggests that the performance, process, and product of originality was a central value to what our participants shared online. references baym, n. k., & boyd, d. (2012). socially mediated publicness: an introduction. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 56(3), 320-329. belk, r. (2006). collectors and collecting. in c.y. tilley (ed.), handbook of material culture (pp. 536-541). london: sage. belk, r. w. (2013). extended self in a digital world. journal of consumer research, 40(3), 477-500. baudrillard, j. (1994). system of collecting. in j. elsner and r. cardinal (eds.), the cultures of collecting (7-24). cambridge massachusetts: harvard university press. baudrillard, j. (1996). the system of objects. london: verso. bourdieu, p. (1984). distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste. cambridge, mass: harvard university press. boyd, d. (2014). it’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens. new haven: yale university press. chang, s., kumar, v., gilbert, e., & terveen, l. g. (2014, february). specialization, homophily, and gender in a social curation site: findings from pinterest. in proceedings of the 17th acm conference on computer supported cooperative work & social computing (pp. 674-686). acm. charmaz, k. (2002). qualitative interviewing and grounded theory analysis. in j. f. gubrium & j. a. holstein (eds.), handbook of interview research: context & method (pp. 675-694). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. duggan, m., and smith, a., january 2014, pew research center, “social media update 2013” retrieved from: http://pewinternet.org/reports/2013/socialmediaupdate.aspx ellison, n., c. steinfield and c. lampe (2007) ‘the benefits of facebook “friends”: exploring the relationship between college students’ use of online social networks and social capital’, journal of computer-mediated communication 12(4), 1143-1168. erickson, i. (2010). documentary with ephemeral media: curation practices in online social spaces. bulletin of science, technology & society, 30(6), 387 gehl, r. (2009). youtube as archive who will curate this digital wunderkammer?. international journal of cultural studies, 12(1), 43-60. gilbert, e., bakhshi, s., chang, s., & terveen, l. (2013, april). i need to try this?: a statistical overview of pinterest. in proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 2427-2436). acm glaser, b. g., & strauss, a. l. (1967). the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. chicago: aldine pub. co. gray, j. e. (2006). digital collecting: designing conceptual tools for online collecting behaviors. masters thesis, department of graphic design, college of design, north carolina state university, raleigh, nc. goffman, e. (1959). the presentation of self in everyday life. garden city, n.y.: doubleday. hall, c., & zarro, m. (2012). social curation on the website pinterest. com. proceedings of the american society for information science and technology, 49(1), 1-9. hammersley, m., & atkinson, p. (1995). ethnography: principles in practice. new york: routledge. hogan, b. (2010). the presentation of self in the age of social media: distinguishing performances and exhibitions online. bulletin of science, technology & society, 30(6), 377-386. doi:10.1177/0270467610385893 hookway, n., & james, s. (2015). authentic lives, authentic times: a cultural and media analysis. m/c journal, 18(1). interior design staff (2010, mar. 01). universe study profile. retrieved from http://www.interiordesign.net/articles/detail/31608-the-universe-study-profile/ james, s. (2015). finding your passion: work and the authentic self. m/c journal, 18(1). jenkins, h., ford, s., & green, j. (2013). spreadable media: creating value and meaning in a networked culture. new york, ny: new york university press. julier, g. (2008). the culture of design. 2nd edition. los angeles, ca: sage. lawson, b. (2004). what designers know. amsterdam: architectural press. lehdonvirta, v. (2012). a history of the digitalization of consumer culture. in molesworth, m., & knott, j. d. (eds.), digital virtual consumption. (pp.11-28). new york, ny: routledge. linder, r., snodgrass, c., & kerne, a. (2014, april). everyday ideation: all of my ideas are on pinterest. in proceedings of the 32nd annual acm conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 2411-2420). acm. lofland, j., snow, d., anderson, l., & lofland, l. h. (2006). analyzing social settings: a guide to qualitative observation and analysis (4th ed.). belmont, ca: wadsworth publishing. madden, m., lenhart, a., cortesi, s., gasser, u., duggan, m., smith, a., & beaton, m. (2013). teens, social media, and privacy. pew research center, 21. manglindan, j.p. (2015, april, 29). pinterest’s evan sharpe: guys are on here, too. retrieved from: http://mashable.com/2015/04/29/pinterest-evan-sharp-users/ marwick, a. e. & boyd, d. (2010). i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. new media & society, 13(1), 114133. monroy-hernández, a., kiciman, e., de choudhury, m., & counts, s. (2013, february). the new war correspondents: the rise of civic media curation in urban warfare. in proceedings of the 2013 conference on computer supported cooperative work (pp. 1443-1452). acm. moore, r.j. (2014, may 7). pinners be pinnin: how to justify pinterests 3.8b valuation. [web log comments]. retrieved from / http://blog.rjmetrics.com/2014/05/07/pinners-be-pinnin-how-to-justify-pinterests3-8b-valuation/ o'neill, p. (2012). the culture of curating and the curating of culture(s). boston, ma: mit press. pinterest. (2015). about pinterest. retrieved from: https://about.pinterest.com/en silberman, b. (2013, sept. 19). planning for the future. retrieved from: http://blog.pinterest.com/post/61688351103/planning-for-the-future sinnreich, a. (2010). mashed up: music, technology, and the rise of configurable culture. amherst, ma: university of massachusetts press. tekobbe, c. k. (2013). a site for fresh eyes: pinterest's challenge to ‘traditional’digital literacies. information, communication & society, 16(3), 381-396. walther, j. b., van der heide, b., kim, s. y., & westerman, d. (2008). the role of friends’ appearance and behavior on evaluations of individuals on facebook: are we known by the company we keep? human communication research 34 (1): 28-49. zarro, m., & hall, c. (2012, june). pinterest: social collecting for# linking# using# sharing. in proceedings of the 12th acm/ieee-cs joint conference on digital libraries (pp. 417-418). acm. zarro, m., hall, c., & forte, a. (2013). wedding dresses and wanted criminals: pinterest.com as an infrastructure for repository building. in proc. aaai conf. on weblogs and social media (pp. 650-658). i  all of the names of the participants in the article are pseudonyms to protect their identity.   microsoft word brock-whiteness as digital imaginary-whiteness as digital imaginary.doc selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 whiteness as digital imaginary: sjw as boundary object andré brock university of michigan the last few years have seen increased public attention to the ways in which misogyny is performed or contested online (marcotte 2012; marwick 2013; rentschler 2014; herring and stoerger 2013). only rarely, however, has race been incorporated into research on these events (daniels 2015). this paper seeks to extend research into this area by applying the concept of boundary objects (star and griesemer 1989; star 2010; bowker and star 1999) to racial ideology as articulated in a video game, social justice warriors, alongside associated online discussions about the game, and video games and race in general. the paper concludes with a discussion of how whiteness could be ascertained from other digital boundary objects and the importance of deconstructing racial ideology in technocultural research. background social justice warrior, ostensibly a term defining activist resistance to coercive regimes, is instead more commonly understood as a pejorative definition of a particular type of internet inhabitant. per urban dictionary (“social justice warrior, 2011), an sjw is typically a member of livejournal or tumblr, narcissistic, emotional, a slacktivist, overly concerned with online reputation, and obsessed with being politically correct. coincidentally, the sjw’s activities in this definition revolve around perceived injustices to women and people of color. while the gendered aspect of the sjw warrior has received attention from the academy, the racial aspect is less easily discernible in the research. this paper argues that by interrogating the sjw as a boundary object with technical, cultural, and rhetorical components, one can determine how race articulates itself through digital objects and online discourses. conceptual framework star (2010) defined boundary objects as “a sort of arrangement that allow different groups to work together without consensus” (602). she argued that boundary objects have three dimensions: interpretive flexibility, material and organizational structure, and scale or granularity. for star, object refers to concepts in computer science, pragmatism, and materialism. for computer science, an object is something other objects and programs act toward and with; for pragmatism, it is something that people act toward and with; and from a materialist standpoint it is the actions ascribed to the suggested citation (apa): brock, a. (2015, october 21-24). whiteness as digital imaginary: sjw as boundary object. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. object rather than the object itself. from this definition i contend that the sjw is a discursive and technical concept drawing upon the interpretive schema of racial ideology, gender ideology, and technical literacies of the internet. while this paper is primarily concerned with the sjw’s racial aspects, gender roles in technology and technoculture inform the analysis of the technical and social aspects as well. data and method ctda is a problem-oriented analytical approach to digital (née internet) objects and phenomena. it applies a critical cultural theoretical framework drawing from critical race theory and science and technology studies to the semiotics of the ict under examination and the discourses of its users. in doing so, it seeks to provide a holistic analysis of the interactions between information technology, cultural ideology, and technology practice. for this paper, ctda’s conceptual framework draws from star’s work on boundary objects (star and griesemer 1998; bowker and star 1999, star 2010) to interrogate how a technocultural practice (or more accurately, its practitioners) can be interpreted by disparate communities drawing upon racial ideology and technical identity formation. rather than review the unwieldy corpus of discourse surrounding hashtag campaigns such as operation lollipop, #solidarityisforwhitewomen, or #gamgergate, i chose to interrogate the video game social justice warriors. video games, through their capacity for simulation, representation, and ludic experience, are an uniquely concretized take on cultural belief and discourse. using the above conceptual framework, the game’s interface, mechanics, and lore will be analyzed to unpack how sjws are represented, enacted, and understood. in addition, the game’s associated steam_ forum will undergo a discourse analysis drawing upon the same conceptual framework to examine how players understood the game’s representations and aim. analysis and discussion preliminary analysis reveals that the game carefully avoids assigning racial characteristics to avatars, instead drawing upon european high fantasy to provide archetypes for gameplay. in the pre-release forums, however, players were uninterested in the setting or the gameplay. the most heavily trafficked threads before the game’s release debated the technical, racial, social, and (surprisingly) age implications of sjw and anti-sjw discourse. typically, steam forums (as well as other enthusiast game communities) obsess about the formal qualities of games, e.g., gameplay, genre, design, or mechanics. many comments referenced the perceived anti-whiteness of sjws as a rationale for participating in the discourse about the game. for example, typical comments proceeded along these lines of argument: “ultimately sjws are extremely racist. they have their own distorted image of how people of color should think and behave. if someone doesn't do that, omg, how dare they! they must be uncle toms! sjws are also about hating straight white males, because in the way of sjw "thinking", swm cause all the problems.” the #gamergate controversy has been argued as being about ethics in game journalism, but the social justice warriors video game provides an interesting space where actual game players discuss a game about the subject, rather than through the mediations of social network platforms. accordingly, the digital and social mediations of the steam forums provide additional space for discussants to build more detailed arguments about their warrants for playing the game; microblogs such as twitter and tumblr are necessarily limited in the amount of space available to conduct such discussions. finally, analyzing a game, rather than social media, to unpack misogyny and racism in technoculture helps to reveal how digital artifacts can be explicitly designed and understood as cultural touchstones incorporating anti-social mores above and beyond discussions of virtual depictions of violence or conspicuous consumption. references bowker, g.c. and star, s.l. (1999) sorting things out: classification and its consequences. cambridge, ma: mit press. brock, a. (in press, 2015) critical technocultural discourse analysis. daniels, j. (2015) the trouble with white feminism: whiteness, digital feminism and the intersectional internet. available at ssrn: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2569369 herring, s. and stoerger, s. (2013) gender and (a)nonymity in computer-mediatedcommunication. in j. holmes, m. meyerhoff, & s. ehrlich (eds.), handbook of language and gender, 2nd edition. hoboken, nj: wiley-blackwell publishing. marcotte, a. (2012, june 13). online misogyny: can't ignore it, can't not ignore it. slate. available from http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/06/13/online_misogyny_reflects_women_s_r ealities_though_in_a_cruder_way_than_is_customary_offline_.html. marwick, a. (2013, march 29). donglegate: why the tech community hates feminists. wired opinion. available from http://www.wired.com/2013/03/richards-affair-andmisogyny-in-tech/ rentschler, c. a. (2014). rape culture and the feminist politics of social media. girlhood studies, 7(1), 65-82. shetterly, w. (2013) how to make a social justice warrior. epub. available from http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/415287 social justice warrior. (2011, april 21). retrieved march 2, 2015, from http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=social justice warrior&defid=5763529 star, s.l. (2010) this is not a boundary object: reflections on the origins of a concept. science, technology, and human values 35,5. 601-617 do: 0.1177/0162243910377624 star, s.l. and griesemer, j.r. (1989) institional ecology, ‘translations’ and boundary objects: amateurs and professionals in berkeley’s museum of vertebrate zoology, 1907-39. social studies of science, 19(3) 387-420. microsoft word ellcessor-sick girls.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 realistically imagining the internet: overcoming (mis)perceptions when educating policymakers and the public richard forno umbc public portrayals of the internet, particularly through entertainment products, can have a profound influence on the public’s understanding of technology and the ability of national legislators to develop meaningful technology policies via objective analysis and discussion. as the internet, including mobile networks, social media, and the emerging “internet of things” continue to become ever more tightly interwoven into the fabric of everyday life, it is imperative to ensure those charged with its oversight (who often are non-specialists or even self-proclaimed ‘luddites’) base their understanding of the internet on fact, not fiction -and also possess an objective, if even fundamental, understanding of both technology's potential benefits and potential pitfalls. for example, although the ‘hollywood’ stereotype of the hacker has grown from the socially inept (white, male) characters portrayed in films like ‘wargames’ and ‘sneakers’ to the socially marginalized, or deliberately self-exiled (and slightly more diverse) representations such as ‘abi sciuto’ on tv’s ncis or 'lisbeth salander' from stieg larsson’s millennium trilogy (both books and film), the ‘hacker’ is still fetishized as the ‘other.’ by contrast, there remains only a very limited range of representations of those with exceptional understanding of the internet (i.e., ‘hackers’) depicted as ordinary people existing within then-acceptable societal norms. as such, the still-dominant imagining (both in public and policy arenas) is the hacker-asother, as a deviant, as one to be feared. situations then arise that depict just how deeply such perceptions and narratives of deviance have permeated the public psyche and underlie the discourse when developing national internet policy; one only needs to observe legislative bodies deliberating internet policy or watch mainstream news media reporting on the heterogeneous, amorphous ‘hacker’ entity known as anonymous for examples of this. moreover, how the internet itself is depicted in popular culture can influence long-term popular perceptions. for example, both the original 'tron' (1982) and its 2010 reboot presented the 'digital world' as a wire-framed environment reminiscent of the physical suggested citation (apa): forno, r. (2015, october 21-24). realistically imagining the internet: overcoming (mis)perceptions when educating policymakers and the public. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. world. similarly, 1995's 'hackers' envisioned both the internet and a single computer's own file system as a swirling 'city' of geometric shapes that one could 'fly' through to locate data or reach other systems. for those not immersed in the functioning of digital environments, such comfortable urban metaphors help to make sense of the digital world. metaphors such as these help frame popular perceptions over what constitutes the internet and cyberspace ⎯ and by extension how societal issues regarding these domains, such as internet security concerns, are presented to policymakers and the public, often in a fear-inducing manner. a wire-framed city can imply hacking as penetration, the black-clad figure (frequently and sensationally referred to as a ‘ninja’) climbing in the metaphorical digital window, clearly up to no good. perhaps nothing contributes to this fear as the oft-used exclamation "i'm in!" heard in movies and television programs after a 'hacker' penetrates a computer system by typing a single command such as 'lower firewall now.' however, we posit that as the internet (particularly mobile networks and the internet of things) become ‘invisible technologies’ such metaphors soon will do more harm than good in developing effective and meaningful internet policy. repeat a lie⎯or in this case, inaccurate stereotypes or metrics of dubious accuracy⎯often enough and the public will accept it as truth. consequently, those images and perspectives, rightly or wrongly, become part of the social consciousness, shape what is interpreted as reality, and may influence critical global deliberations over technology policy. overcoming this phenomenon is a formidable task. national lawmakers in particular are susceptible to this type of perceptual misalignment. for example, in hearings related to the reintroduction of the controversial cyber intelligence sharing and protection act (cispa) in 2014, congressman mike rogers invoked images of naive teenagers tweeting from their parent's basement[1] when dismissing well-informed opposition to his proposal on its privacy-invading provisions. similarly, his colleagues in new zealand, in attempting to push through new hard-line anti-copyright legislation used a more dystopian vision, with one conservative mp, jonathan young saying in the house of representatives, "[d]o you remember the movie, ‘the terminator’ … i’m sure that you do, and the computer system called skynet that ruled the world, is like the internet today."[2] such media-fuelled perceptions about technology allowed the so-called “three strikes” anti-piracy proposal to become law, despite the news reports later describing his party’s attempts at understanding the internet as akin to “a washing machine trying to explain love to a ceiling tile.” [3] or, in attempting to strengthen copyright controls over internet content in 2013, american lawmakers did not realize (or chose to ignore) warnings from the internet industry that several of its proposals would, if implemented, "break the internet"⎯�or the very least hinder its normal functions, especially for those performing systems administration or internet security duties. [4] a similar proposal in new zealand was marred by references to ‘stealing from the vege patch’ which betrayed a repeatedly disproved link between the nature of digital and physical goods viz-a-viz concepts of property ownership and theft. [5] such cognitive misperceptions are particularly evident in the debate over online privacy. from australia to america, the post-snowden debate about the collection of electronic metadata is ensnared between politicians who frame it as “armless bits of information and experienced technologists and security specialists demonstrating the immense potential harms associated with its collection by governments. further, in 2015, fbi director james comey reignited what many call the "crypto wars" by publicly suggesting that government-mandated technical 'backdoor' vulnerabilities in computers and cryptographic systems would only allow authorized law enforcement entities to access protected information, but somehow not criminals.[6] while perhaps an enticing tool for a movie plot, statements and beliefs like these run contrary to proven knowledge about how computers and mathematical cryptography function in reality. they also fail to acknowledge that some of the biggest internet security threats may not be the stereotypical ‘weird kids in basements’ but rather sophisticated technical teams working on behalf of nation-states for internationally significant political, economic, or military goals. simplistic or sensationalized depictions of the internet can lead national lawmakers and the public to develop unrealistic expectations or understandings about the internet’s capabilities, functions, or what indeed are necessary and vital items to consider as solutions to its potential shortcomings. failing to counter such misconceptions or misplaced beliefs can contribute to bad, if not also dangerous, internet policy and disastrous technical outcomes. this paper will explore the correlations between popular internet imaginings and global technology policy events by asking how these cognitive disconnects can be overcome to foster better understanding of the internet by global society. and especially by its elected officials. can we prevent another oversimplified "the internet is a series of tubes" moment to ensure that knowledge about the internet, cyberspace, and its related technologies used in crafting internet policy remains based on fact and reality instead of stereotypes, fantasy, or wishful thinking? references [1] siddiqui, s. (2013). "mike rogers: cispa cybersecurity bill opponents are teens in their basements (video)" retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/16/mike-rogers-cispa_n_3097027.html [2] rilkoff, m. (2015). "mp's skynet talk attracts attention." stuff magazine (nz). retrieved from http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/4891318/mps-skynet-talkattracts attention [3] nbr staff (2011). “shanks copyright bill speech 'like a washing machine trying to explain love to a ceiling tile.'” national business review (nz). retrieved from http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/shanks-copyright-bill-speech-washing-machinetryingexplain love-ceiling-tile-ns-90790 [4] lemley, m., levine, d., post, d. (2011). "don't break the internet" 64 stan. l. rev. online 34. retrieved from http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/dont-break-internet [5] lee, m. (2011). “copyright (infringing file sharing) amendment bill — second reading, in committee, third reading” records of the nz house of representatives. retrieved from: http://www.parliament.nz/ennz/ pb/debates/debates/speeches/49hanss_20110413_00002128/lee-melissacopyright infringing-file-sharing-amendment [6] hattem, j. (2014). "‘crypto wars’ return to congress" the hill. retrieved from http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/221147-crypto-wars-return-to-congress [7] singel, r & poulsen, k. (2006). "your own personal internet." wired.com. retrieved from http://www.wired.com/2006/06/your_own_person/ microsoft word aufderheide-copyright and remix attitudes in digital spaceshow do they differ with age, experience and kind of use_ .docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): lastname, firstinitial. (2015, october 21-24). paper title. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. copyright and remix attitudes in digital spaces: how do they differ with age, experience and kind of use? patricia ann aufderheide american university aram sinnreich rutgers university tijana milosevic american university benjamin burroughs university of iowa panel description how do the affordances of digital technology to copy and share information facilitate change in attitudes toward the creative process and copyright? how do custom and law affect use, and how does technology-afforded use affect custom and law? how does education about law and custom change behavior and attitudes? despite commonly held misconceptions about stark generational and digital divides in attitudes about copyright and cultural appropriation, and contrary to widespread and reductionist claims about piracy and plagiarism, recent communication research reveals that cultural approaches to copyright’s most contentious arena – copying and reuse of copyrighted material – are nuanced, evolving and, at times, conflicting. this panel showcases current research on behavior both of consumers and creators, looking at how age, experience, social location and use behavior play a role in copyright attitudes. research of the various panelists considers the interaction between users and the mediating technologies that provide them digital access, and how this interaction conditions their attitudes and actions. research showcased on this panel draws from analysis of behavior of demographically complex groups over time, both as creators and as consumers. specifically, one study examines the creative decisions and gatekeeper interactions that involve copyrighted material of documentary filmmakers over the decade 2004-2014, as seen through both survey and qualitative data. another compares two surveys, from 2009 and 2014, of communication scholars on scholarly research decision-making before and after creating a best practices code to clarify fair use for the field. a third analyzes creative decisions of visual arts professionals in four fields—art production, art scholarship, scholarly book and journal production, and museum exhibition creation—around use of copyrighted material. the fourth study analyzes attitudes of users of streaming media, building on ethnographic data about of audience usage of streaming and interviews with industry leaders, drawing links between experience with streaming media early in life and copyright attitudes. variables include age, experience, type of digital media creation and use, and familiarity with the law. results from the different studies demonstrate the importance of basing generalizations on specific fields of practice and types of experience. these presentations demonstrate the value of close analysis of behavior and attitudes to demystify a highly politicized public debate plagued by moral panic, and they also provide a baseline for future research. the research results have implications for copyright policy, for education, and for future research on the relationship between copyright policy and creative practice. paper abstracts 1. from fear to fair: knowledge-grounded change in documentary practice regarding copyright patricia aufderheide, american university, presenter aram sinnreich, american university this study asks: is it easier for individual creators to make a decision to exercise expressive rights if they believe their decisions are within the expectations of their peer group? does increased awareness of group expectations change the way the law is used, and thus the utility of the law? conclusions are based on a survey of 489 filmmakers working in the u.s. in 2014. survey results are compared with a qualitative study, grounded in 45 longform interviews with filmmakers, done in 2004. as copyright policy has become increasingly tilted toward the rights of existing rights holders, the function of fair use in creative practice has been much debated. some scholars such as william fisher, lawrence lessig and siva vaidhyanathan have argued that, particularly in a digital era, fair use is a frail and difficult-to-use balancing feature of the law and it has been characterized as “notoriously difficult to predict in a given case” (lange & powell, 2009, p. 48). other scholars, including aufderheide & jaszi, jason mazzone, and neil netanel have celebrated its utility and flexibility with changing opportunities for expression and argued that where used robustly—for instance in journalism and scholarship—it has great vitality. scholars generally agree that fair use is central the functioning of copyright within the u.s. constitution. without such limitations on monopoly as fair use, copyright would enable private censorship and the cartelization of knowledge. “fair use is a great solution in the united states,” wrote kembrew mcleod, a scholar who studies the creative process in popular music, “but for it to have any real impact in our culture we need to vigorously and confidently (though not carelessly) employ this legal doctrine in daily life” (mcleod, 2005, p. 147). fair use demonstrates that law takes on its social meaning not only by legislation and case law but also by custom and practice. indeed, as legal scholar michael madison has shown (madison, 2004), judges find themselves referring, implicitly or explicitly, to custom and practice in any particular area when ruling on fair use. in the last decade, some creative and productive communities, from documentary filmmakers to academic scholars to journalists, have formally articulated their best practices, including documentary filmmakers, in 2005. creative options for filmmakers concerning use of third-party material have dramatically improved with changes in norms after the issuing of the statement. this has happened at a moment of rising importance of the digital environment for creation, distribution and engagement. attitudes about fair use are strongly associated with free expression and creative opportunity, and vary with experience. where filmmakers have changed work because of copyright concerns, they themselves rather than any gatekeeper have made the decision to do so. where change is associated with fair use, risk is a common concern. newer filmmakers are more likely to support use of copyrighted material to make new work, but less likely to know about fair use, and also more likely to have experienced takedowns online. both education about and experience with fair use appear to have an effect on practice. filmmakers continue to lack reliable information on the actual risk landscape, and about fair use on digital platforms. almost all filmmakers, we found, have heard of fair use, although only slightly more than half are familiar with the documentary filmmakers’ statement of best practices in fair use, and only 28% have used it specifically to make fair use decisions. most of them understand fair use accurately, and for many of them, their accurate knowledge is grounded in industry practice and information, suggesting internalization and practice of the statement’s principles. documentary filmmakers overwhelmingly see fair use as a tool that expands freedom of expression. when asked about remixes and mashups, 93% of respondents thought that some or all of the uses were acceptable fair use, and only slightly fewer (89%) thought that the law should accommodate some or all forms of creative appropriation on digital platforms. almost universally, filmmakers find that broadcasters and insurers accept their fair use claims, if supported by a lawyer’s letter. almost two-thirds (59%) have recently used fair use (within their most recent three productions), with the most common reason for not employing fair use being simply that they did not have any eligible third-party material. although documentarians routinely license portions of their older works, they say that they have not lost money from the widespread employment of fair use, either. documentarians have often sought out other ways to avoid licensing. three-quarters (74%) have actively searched for public domain material or material made available via an open-source license such as creative commons. public domain material is historically important to documentarians, even though the body of public domain material for contemporary issues is very small. a quarter (26%) of documentarians have made their own work available through creative commons. documentarians are less comfortable navigating the legalities of fair use under the digital millennium copyright act (dmca), a fact that impairs their ability to take advantage of the digital environment. nearly three-quarters (72%) of filmmakers do not know they have the right under law to break encryption to access copyrighted material on a dvd, and most (67%) have not done so either, even though it is technologically easy. almost a quarter (23%) have seen their own videos taken down from the internet following dmca infringement claims. among those people, 60% were confident in their fair uses of copyrighted material, yet only half of those whose work was taken down contested it. four out of five (78%) have changed the final versions of their work because of copyright considerations (most often stemming from their own concerns, rather than those of third parties). thus, it seems documentarians have often internalized potential complaints, pre-emptively deciding to ask permission rather than employ fair use in situations where they believe they should not have to. at the same time, almost two-thirds of respondents (62%) have in mind projects they could do if copyright concerns were not an issue at all. often these projects have to do with mining archives, and providing historical context and interpretation. many uses mentioned, including mining archives for curated work, compilations and collage work, are enabled under current fair use law in some form. differences between early-career and later-career filmmakers suggest an education gap in fair use knowledge, and a difference in cultural formation. the newer filmmakers appear to have the same desire and use for accessible materials as more established filmmakers, but they are more likely to emphasize the structural problems of copyright, and to employ workarounds, such as creative commons, that lie in the hands of the maker. while they are more likely to use technological affordances such as internet distribution and decryption, they are less likely to know how to employ fair use with them. meanwhile, those more experienced in the field both know more about fair use and value it more highly, although they are less likely to have employed open licenses and similar “copyright-light” options either as users or makers. references lange, d., & powell, j. (2009). no law : intellectual property in the image of an absolute first amendment. stanford, calif.: stanford law books. mcleod, k. (2005). freedom of expression : overzealous copyright bozos and other enemies of creativity (1st ed.): doubleday. 2. fair use and academic freedom: copyright attitudes and practices among communication scholars in a digital environment aram sinnreich, american university, presenter patricia aufderheide, american university fair use, a copyright doctrine that permits unauthorized copying in some circumstances, plays an important role in scholarship. communication scholars are increasingly functioning in a digital-first or even digital-only environment, and one in which digital humanities options and big-data social science research are opening up dramatically. all of these options require a sound grasp of fair use rights in order to take advantage of digital affordances. this study analyzes empirical data based on a survey of 350 communication scholars from around the world, examining the role that fair use plays in this community’s work, and the degree to which awareness and employment of the doctrine serve as boons or impediments to the production of knowledge. it compares results with a 2009 survey, completed before communication scholars created a code of best practices in fair use for communication research in 2010. u.s. copyright policy is designed to stimulate the production of new culture, both by offering creators a limited monopoly over the expression of their ideas and also by limiting that monopoly sufficiently to permit new culture to be generated on the platform of existing culture, as has been discussed among others by benjamin kaplan, lewis hyde and l. ray patterson. more than a century of industry pressure to extend copyright has resulted in monopolies that are longer and stronger than ever before; mounting evidence shows that creative choice that has been limited by extending these monopolies, as scholars such as scholars such as james boyle, aram sinnreich, and rebecca tushnet among others have argued. in the u.s., the fair use doctrine exerts a check on cultural monopolization. it is difficult, however, for many creators and scholars to understand when fair use applies best to their activities, and when they and their institutions may face unacceptable levels of risk. communication scholars, among others, have documented the cost of such confusion and inability to do reliable risk assessment (ad hoc committee on fair use and academic freedom, 2010). this is why several creative communities in the u.s. have crafted their own codes of best practices, through deliberative processes overseen by legal advisors. communication scholars created such a code in 2010, through their professional association the international communication association; the code was then endorsed by another large professional association, the national communication association, and is available on both associations’ websites. communication scholars across the range of experience and age widely recognize fair use and value it highly. their lack of expertise in applying it is hurting them, because too often they are not comfortable in asserting their rights or are not able to engage gatekeepers such as librarians, general counsels, editors, publishers and funders whose policies do not accommodate existing law. thus, they both decide not to undertake some kinds of projects (although they can imagine them) and change others to accord with their insecurity or concern. newer faculty especially are more likely to use copyright-light and open-access options, especially among newer faculty. however, we did not see improvement in the frustrations communication scholars experience within their institutional relationships, or their ability to apply fair use. thus, some positive changes occurred, but they lack the ecological effects that a consensus document like the code of best practices they created is intended to have. scholars consciously employ fair use (59% say so, and almost all probably do so without knowing). they value fair use in principle; on a seven-point likert scale, the overall mean is 2.03, squarely at “very useful.” scholars associate fair use with one of their core purposes, to educate. but nearly two-thirds of communication scholars (64%) would do something different in their scholarly or teaching practices—sharing, quoting, remixing, archiving—if copyright were not a concern. this is true irrespective of career phase or expertise. what they would largely do what is actually permitted under today’s law, and much is actually being done, if not within the communication field. for instance, respondents described wanting to do remixes and mashups, multimedia projects, e-books with multiple media, excerpting video for teaching, illustrations in scholarly texts, student assignments in media production, and expanding curricula. more than half (53%) of all respondents have changed a course or publication because of copyright restrictions against their use of others’ work. additionally, some 40% of communication scholars say they have sought permission to use copyrighted material despite believing that they had fair use rights to the work. in general, the longer a scholar has been in the field, the more likely he or she is to have altered work unnecessarily for copyright concerns, which may simply be an artifact of having more opportunities to do so. the figure for students and newer scholars is higher than that of scholars in the 5-10 year zone, perhaps reflecting the greater degree of caution that students and newer scholars exhibit in their initial efforts, or the lower degree of latitude afforded to students institutionally. scholars who changed their work due to copyright concerns were most likely to have done so preemptively, on their own initiative. students were far more likely than faculty to take preemptive action. in any case, spending a greater amount of one’s lives in a digital environment does not seem to lessen a tendency to self-censor. the most common examples given of changed work were in publications, where images, graphics and charts were most commonly left out. scholars also reported truncating quoted text. in teaching, faculty reported changing assignments, finding different readings, choosing different films, and not electronically posting their lectures. the most common reason why they have made changes was not pressure from institutions or rights holders; rather, it was their own initiative, born of risk aversion. scholars are more aware of both copyright issues and fair use within this population than there was half a decade earlier. in 1999, 43% of respondents said they had employed fair use in their work. the figure grew to 59% in 2014. in 2009, 51% of respondents said they would likely or definitely undertake new research if they were free of copyright concerns. today, 65% say they would change their scholarly or teaching practices absent copyright concerns. in 2009, 30% of respondents had had to pay or get permission to use copyrighted material in a publication, despite believing they had fair use rights to it. that figure is larger today, at 40%. today, more than twice as many scholars say they have broken encryption, as is currently their legal right: 28%, compared to only 12% in 2009. this clearly reflects the fact that savvier scholars have taken advantages of recent policy wins in favor of digital fair use. despite growing awareness of copyright’s role in scholarship and the opportunities afforded by fair use, however, scholars consistently complained about the same problems from 2009 to 2014, including intransigent publishers, problems accessing and displaying material for teaching, and frustrations with encrypted material. the impediments to making digital affordances work for communication research can be addressed with education, including about the code of best practices in fair use for communication scholars. references ad hoc committee on fair use and academic freedom, i. c. a. (2010). clipping our own wings (pp. 17). washington, dc: international communication association. 3. the role of copyright in structuring the digital imaginary in the visual arts tijana milosevic, postdoctoral researcher, children and media studies, university of oslo while digital affordances are creating new possibilities in the field of visual arts—to produce multimedia art and digital scholarship, publish online, and hold online museum exhibitions—the collective imaginary of the arts community is polluted with misunderstanding of copyright. the digital transformation has highlighted longstanding problems that u.s.-based visual arts professionals have in managing their work responsibilities in relation to expectations that all copyrighted material will be used with permission—what is known as ‘permissions culture’ (bielstein, 2006; whalen, 2009). as the field has faced the opportunities of a digital era (digital museum displays; digital access to collections; digital multimedia art; scholarship that both discusses multimedia and uses multimedia to present results), the needs to access copyrighted material have increased. in a field where getting permissions is routine, a national survey of 2,828 visual arts professionals conducted by the college art association, along with 100 in-depth interviews of visual arts practitioners throughout the united states, explored how visual arts professionals have been using the us copyright doctrine of fair use. regression analysis was used to determine how length of experience in the field, specific profession within visual arts, copyright education and self-reported copyright understanding influence the community’s ability to shape the digital imaginary in the visual arts. results show confusion, or misinformation about visual arts professionals’ copyright options to use unlicensed materials. statistical analysis and in-depth interviews reveal exaggerated risk, failure to execute a wide variety of work in the way they regard as best, censorship, and self-censorship. creative use of digital technologies is particularly affected. results of regression analysis show that the strongest predictor of chilling effects was the particular profession within visual arts, followed by self-reported copyright understanding. non-artist professions--academics, editors, publishers and museum professionals were particularly affected. interestingly enough, the higher the self-reported copyright understanding the greater the likelihood of avoiding or abandoning a project, and authors provide context for such findings. as a consequence of learning the cost of failing to employ the available resource of fair use, members of the college art association created a code of best practices in fair use for the visual arts. references bielstein sm (2006) permissions, a survival guide: blunt talk about art as intellectual property. chicago, il: the university of chicago press. whalen m (2009) what’s wrong with this picture? an examination of art historians’ attitudes about electronic publishing opportunities and the consequences of their continuing love affair with print. art documentation: bulletin of the art libraries society of north america 28(2): 13–22. 4. streaming tactics: copyright attitudes, consumption, and digital imaginaries benjamin burroughs, university of iowa streaming has become a ubiquitous mode of media consumption. streaming is conceptualized as both a technological innovation and as a cultural practice that coconfigures audience and industry. this research, drawing from a larger ethnography of audience usage of streaming and interviews with industry leaders, argues that attitudes about copyright from a consumer perspective can be understood concomitantly with the rise of streaming media. a combination of age and experience can explain consumer orientation towards ownership, ethics, and copyright as the networked individual becomes the focal point of streaming and participates in the re-articulation of media industries, media content and consumption/distribution. this shift in attitude has implications not only for audiences and media industries but also for policy debates and digital rights struggles. in this way streaming as a digital imaginary, a space of perceived endless consumption without owning or downloading, has an impact on public policy debates. this paper also suggests that research on digitally grounded communication practices should continue to include a sociotechnical component, focused not only on audiences but also on the inter-animation of audiences with the affordances of media. while it is difficult to firmly establish how prevalent ‘illegal’ streaming has become (the industry doesn’t want the numbers widely known and the sites themselves don’t want to be targeted), markmonitor, an internet research and security firm, estimates that the top three websites engaged in “digital piracy’ receive ‘more than 21 billion visits per year” (markmonitor, 2011) and “traffic to illegal download sites has more than sextupled since 2009” (pogue, 2012). streaming as a technological process is nominally defined as multimedia that is continually delivered to a user (larsen, 2007). streaming is increasingly imperative to the smooth functioning of the internet because it allows the user to view, listen, or experience mediated content without downloading all of the files or information before usage. in this way streaming can be understood as a mobile media both in its form of distribution and in the mobility afforded to audiences to traverse the lexicon of popular culture. with increased network bandwidth in the early 2000’s, streaming has become integral to not only business practices but to how we encounter mediated culture. the technological capacities and affordances of streaming; networkable, compressible, dense, and malleable, differentiate the discontinuous data of digitality from analogue media (miller, 2011) and broadcasting. we are in the midst of a re-calibration between audiences and industry where the flow of content becomes increasingly channeled through the networked individual. this movement is not exempt from the challenges, pitfalls, and anxieties of shifting media landscapes. reducing this cultural practice to nothing more than ‘streaming theft’ (a category the mpaa created in an attempt to brand streaming since 2011) fails to deal with the complexity of this emergent form of media consumption. if we suspend this judgment, we might think of streaming as a tactic. de certeau’s (1984) strategies and tactics are a useful conceptual framework for understanding streaming as a cultural practice, a style or poetics that tactically challenges the ‘propre’ strategies of mass consumer and television culture. streaming is wandering through the strategic ‘place’ of copyright and broadcast rights. streaming is the prerogative of the in-between and deterritorialized poaching. streamers are “travellers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching across fields they did not write” (p. 174). just as there is a ‘rhetoric of walking’ we might think of a ‘style of use’ for streamers traversing the geographies of nation-states and the global lands of copyright and license holders throughout the internet. this cultural practice is theorized through certeau’s distinction between strategies and tactics. strategy is defined as the “calculus of force-relationships” where the possessor of power exercises the “will and power” over an environment to assume a place that is sanctioned as proper. fiske (1988) succinctly explains place as the “mastery over time, allowing one to hold on to acquired advantages, to prepare future expansions and to control historical changes to one’s own advantage” (p. 288). tactics have no sustained place of their own but construct a space within the place of the powerful. this is ‘making do’ as streaming within the logics of a western capitalist system of copyright and ownership. sites for streaming are constantly in flux. streamers are negotiating pop-ups, dead links, and the seizing of possibilities to find ephemeral moment of watching a particular program. these sites are not built to last and takedowns are often the order of the day so the fleeting pleasure in the pursuit and momentary, ephemeral viewing are part of the spirit of streaming. however, these consumers differ from bittorent users or niche communities within the dark and deepnet, which require more technical knowledge and access. the ubiquity and everydayness of streaming poses a challenge as audience expectations surrounding consumption begin to shift. this isn’t a kind of ‘pirate politics’ but an interstitial part of everyday consumption, which constitutes a risk to copyright holders. the labeling of these audiences as ‘cord-cutters’ and ‘cord-nevers’ exemplifies the growing consternation among traditional media industries. there is a desire in the audience produced in conjunction with the rise of streaming technologies to engage in more ‘long-form’ viewing of television shows and seasons (without the fear of cancellation of an entire season in week one). this should be understood as a ‘reading’ tactic, colloquially known as binging (often called marathoning amongst executives), which only becomes demarcated as a mode of consumption in conjunction with the rise of streaming. just as dvds became ways for audiences to reanimate old television series and play within them in new ways that promoted a complex reading of culture (mittell 2010), streaming performs the same cultural function only now the navigation moves beyond the materiality of the box set. portability in a streaming culture is another kind of disruption to the existing media infrastructure. audiences now are not confined to television’s ‘place’ in the home as the unique site for consumption, de-centering broadcast logics and scheduling as the dominant mode of experiencing media artifacts. goldsmith and wu (2005) end their analysis at the onset of bittorrent and communities of internet users who are able to circumvent state control but according to the authors are too isolated to form any kind of larger cultural impact. streaming of unsanctioned content has become a much wider cultural practice, an everyday practice, which is perceived by consumers as beyond the control of states and territorial government. this perception, a digital imaginary, provides a space to rethink the gaps in copyright that accompany new technologies and possibilities. references de certeau, m. (1984). arts de faire (vol. 1). university of california press. fiske, j. (1988). television culture. taylor & francis us. goldsmith, j. l., & wu, t. (2006). who controls the internet?: illusions of a borderless world (vol. 89). new york: oxford university press. markmonitor. (2011, january). retrieved from https://www.markmonitor.com/ miller, v. (2011). understanding digital culture. sage publications limited. mittell, j. (2011). tivoing childhood. time-shifting a generation’s concept of television’. flow tv: television in the age of media convergence. new york: routeledge, 46-54. pogue, d. (2012, august 21). how hollywood is encouraging online piracy. scientific american. retrieved from http://www.scientificamerican.com/   selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 !"##$%&$'()*&+&*,-(./0/12(3$%&4(!5(655(.789:4(;<&,=$>(?@a15(!"#$%&'()*(+$)+,-(+./0$%&,(1+/2#'$*+34-(0(5+ 678+9'7#&'+:$;$,&'+!*,$%$<,<+=&%$;&,(+>$<?5(0+b$>(b>$%$-&$'(+&(/,cd(789:2(ef$(9g&f(/--"+h(6$$&*-#(,i( &f$(/%%,<*+&*,-(,i(c-&$>-$&(d$%$+><f$>%5(j$>h*-4(k$>l+-m2(/,cd5(d$&>*$n$'(i>,l(f&&b2oo%b*>5+,*>5,>#5( + ( !+>+f(6m$>%(3$%&( /--$-=$>#(!<f,,h(,i(),ll"-*<+&*,-(+-'(p,">-+h*%l4(q-*n$>%*&m(,i(!,"&f$>-()+h*i,>-*++ + r*#*&+h(&$<f-,h,#*$%(+>$(*-<>$+%*-#hm(<$-&>+h(&,(&f$(<,-'"<&(,i(+<&*n*%l5(ef>,"#f(&f$%$( bh+&i,>l%4(+<&*n*%&%(+>$(+=h$(&,(>$+<f(=>,+'$>(b"=h*<%4(>$%b,-'(s"*<thm(+-'(-*l=hm(&,( $-n*>,-l$-&+h(<f+-#$4(+-'(&+t$(,-('*%&>*="&$'4(-$&u,>t$'(i,>l%5(c-i,>l+&*,-( &$<f-,h,#*$%(f+n$(=$<,l$(*-'*%b$-%+=h$(n$-"$%(i,>(&f$($vb>$%%*,-(,i('*%%$-&4( '*%%$l*-+&*,-(,i(*-i,>l+&*,-(+-'(<,hh$<&*n$(+<&*,-(.w,"l+-%(x(w,>t4(789715(( ( ef$(&>+-%i,>l+&*n$($ii$<&(,i(&f$%$(&$<f-,h,#*$%(*-(i+<*h*&+&*-#($n$-&%(%"<f(+%(&f$(/>+=( !b>*-#(+h%,(*-&>,'"<$%(+(>*%t(,i(=,*h*-#(',u-(%,<*+h(l,n$l$-&%(&,(yeu*&&$>z(,>( y[+<$=,,t(>$n,h"&*,-%z(=m(>$l,n*-#(&f$l(i>,l(&f$*>(<,-&$v&5(\,u$n$>4(b$>f+b%(&f$( #>$+&$%&(*lb+<&(,i(&f$%$(&$<f-,h,#*$%(f+%(-,&(&+t$-(bh+<$(*-(<m=$>%b+<$(="&(,-(&f$( #>,"-'4($-+=h*-#(&f$(i,>#*-#(,i(>f*],l+&*<4(-$&u,>t$'(b>,&$%&(l,n$l$-&%(.)+%&$hh%4( 789715(ef$%$(<f+-#$%(f+n$(f+'(+(b>,i,"-'(*lb+<&(,-(b,u$>(>$h+&*,-%5(ef*%(%&"'m( %$$t%(&,($vbh,>$(,-$(+%b$<&(,i(&f*%(&>+-%i,>l+&*,-2(&f$(>$h+&*,-%f*b%(=$&u$$-('*#*&+h( +<&*n*%&%(+-'(&f$(<,lb+-*$%(&f+&(>"-(&f$(bh+&i,>l%(,-(uf*<f(&f$m(b>,&$%&5( ( d$<$-&(>$%$+><f(%"##$%&%(&f+&(uf*h$(*-i,>l+&*,-(&$<f-,h,#*$%($)+;()(0&'++>$(<>*&*<+h(i,>( +<&*n*%l4(+(h*l*&$'(-"l=$>(,i(<,ll$><*+h(bh+&i,>l%($)+<4(*$@$*++>$("%$'(i,>(+(f*#f( <,-<$-&>+&*,-(,i(,-h*-$(+<&*n*%&(u,>t5(/<<,>'*-#(&,(,-$(%&"'m4(>,"#fhm(f+hi(,i('*#*&+h( +<&*n*%l(<+lb+*#-%("%$(l*<>,=h,#%(+-'(%,<*+h(-$&u,>t*-#(bh+&i,>l%4(^g_(,i(uf*<f("%$'( eu*&&$>(+-'(^^_([+<$=,,t4(>$%b$<&*n$hm5(ef$(-"l=$>%(%"##$%&(+(&>$l$-',"%( <,-<$-&>+&*,-(,i('*#*&+h(b>,&$%&(l,n$l$-&%(,-(+(h*l*&$'(-"l=$>(,i(bh+&i,>l%(.`'u+>'%4( \,u+>'(x(p,m<$4(789a15(( ( 3f*h$(+<&*n*%&%(+>$(*--,n+&*n$hm("%*-#(&f$%$(bh+&i,>l%(&,(<>$+&$(-$u(%b+<$%(i,>(%b$$<f( +-'('*%%$-&4(&f$m(+>$(+h%,(%b+<$%(,i(+l=*#"*&m(+-'(+l=*n+h$-<$4(+-'(l+m(=$(+%( '+-#$>,"%(+%(&f$m(+>$(#$-$>+&*n$5(ef$(<,-<$-&>+&*,-(,i("%$>%(,-(&f$%$(bh+&i,>l%(f+%( l+'$(&f$(<,lb+-*$%(&f+&(>"-(&f$l(+(&+>#$&(,i(+"&f,>*&+>*+-(+-'('$l,<>+&*<( #,n$>-l$-&%(+h*t$5(c-<>$+%*-#hm4(%,<*+h(l$'*+(<,lb+-*$%(+>$(i+<*-#(b>$%%">$(i>,l( #,n$>-l$-&%(+>,"-'(&f$(u,>h'(&,(b>,n*'$('+&+(,-("%$>%4(&+t$(',u-(%$-%*&*n$(<,-&$-&4( +-'(+h&$>(&f$*>(b>,<$%%$%(&,(l+t$(&f$l(l,>$(>$%b,-%*n$(&,(h+u($-i,><$l$-&(>$s"$%&%5( 3f$-(&f$m(',(-,&(<,lbhm4(&f$m(i+<$(h+u%"*&%4(&f$("%$(,i(*-n+%*n$(f+<t*-#(b>,<$'">$%4( %">n$*hh+-<$4(+-'(%f,>&@&$>l(.+-'(,<<+%*,-+hhm(h,-#@&$>l1(*-&$>>"b&*,-%(*-(&f$*>(%$>n*<$5( 3f*h$(<,lb+-*$%b(="%*-$%%(*-&$>$%&%(#$-$>+hhm(+h*#-(u*&f(&f$*>("%$>%(*-(i+<*h*&+&*-#(i>$$( %b$$<f(+-'(,b$-(+<<$%%4(&f$(-$$'%(,i("%$>%(',(-,&(-$<$%%+>*hm(,"&u$*#f(&f$(&f>$+&(,i( =$*-#(<h,%$'(,"&(,i(h"<>+&*n$(l+>t$&%(i,>(i+*h*-#(&,(<,lbhm(u*&f(#,n$>-l$-&('$l+-'%5(( ( 0>*,>(>$%$+><f(f+%($vbh,>$'(&f$%$(s"$%&*,-%(i>,l(&f$(b$>%b$<&*n$%(,i(&f$(<,lb+-*$%( &f>,"#f(b,h*<m(+-+hm%*%(.w,>t4(789814(<+%$(%&"'m(>$%$+><f(.6+<c*--,-4(78991(+-'(h+u( .k+%%$>(+-'(!<f"h]4(789?15(c-(+''*&*,-4(&>+-%b+>$-<m(>$b,>&%(b"=h*%f$'(=m(&f$( <,lb+-*$%(&f$l%$hn$%(b>,n*'$(s"+-&*&+&*n$('+&+(%b$<*i*<+hhm(,-(<,bm>*#f&(&+t$',u-( >$s"$%&%4(#,n$>-l$-&(&+t$',u-(>$s"$%&%(+-'(>$s"$%&%(i,>("%$>('+&+5(( ( \,u$n$>4(&f$>$(*%(h*&&h$(b"=h*%f$'(+<+'$l*<(u,>t(i>,l(&f$(b$>%b$<&*n$(,i(+<&*n*%&%( &f$l%$hn$%4(,>(u,>t(&f+&(b>,n*'$%(+(s"+h*&+&*n$(%$-%$(,i(&f$($vb$>*$-<$%(,i(+<&*n*%&%( ,-h*-$(*-(-$#,&*+&*-#(&f$(+l=*#"*&*$%(,i(&f$(b,h*<*$%(,i(c-&$>-$&(<,lb+-*$%5(6,>$,n$>4( &f$>$(*%(+(%&>,-#(q!@=*+%(*-(>$%$+><f(,-(,-h*-$(+<&*n*%l4(u*&f(h*&&h$(<,lb+>+&*n$(u,>t( $v+l*-*-#('*#*&+h($-n*>,-l$-&%(+<>,%%(>$#*,-%5(ef*%(%&"'m(+*l%(&,(l+t$(+-(*-*&*+h( <,-&>*="&*,-(&,($vb+-'*-#(&f*%(=,'m(,i(>$%$+><f(=m($v+l*-*-#(&f$(+<<,"-&%(,i(+(#h,=+h( -$&u,>t(,i('*#*&+h(+<&*n*%&%4(i,<"%*-#(,-(b>,n*'*-#(l,>$(&$v&">+h('$&+*h(+-'(-"+-<$( &f>,"#f(&f$*>(-+>>+&*n$%5(( ( ef>,"#f(%$l*@%&>"<&">$'(*-&$>n*$u%(u*&f(+(#$,#>+bf*<+hhm('*n$>%$(#>,"b(,i(+<&*n*%&%4(+hh( ,i(uf,l(u>*&$(i,>(&f$(<*&*]$-(l$'*+(bh+&i,>l(kh,=+h(d,*<$%4(&f$(b+b$>(<,-%*'$>%(f,u(&f$( +<&*n*%&%(-$#,&*+&$(+-(+l=*#","%(+-'(%f*i&*-#(h+-'%<+b$(,i(,-h*-$(&f>$+&%(*-(&f$(<,-'"<&( ,i(&f$*>(u,>t5(c&("-<,n$>%(+('$$b(n$*-(,i(+l=*n+h$-<$(+>,"-'('*#*&+h(b>+<&*<$%4( b+>&*<"h+>hm(u*&f(>$#+>'(&,(&f$(>,h$(,i(%,<*+h(l$'*+(<,lb+-*$%5(( ( c&(+h%,(<,-&>*="&$%(&,(+(<,lb+>+&*n$("-'$>%&+-'*-#(,i(>*%t(+<>,%%(+(-"l=$>(,i('*#*&+h( $-n*>,-l$-&%5(ef$(>*%t%(<,-i>,-&$'(=m(+<&*n*%&%(h,,t(s"*&$('*ii$>$-&('$b$-'*-#(,-( uf$&f$>(&f$m(+>$(*-(/]$>=+*e+-4(`&f*,b*+4(,>(e">t$m2(&f,"#f(%">n$*hh+-<$(+-'(<$-%,>%f*b( +>$(b$>n+%*n$4(&f$m(l+m(&+t$('*ii$>$-&(i,>l%(+-'(=$($vb$>*$-<$'(*-('*ii$>$-&(u+m%5( ef,"#f(i,>(l,%&(,i(&f$(+<&*n*%&%4(#,n$>-l$-&%(b>$%$-&(+(b>*l+>m(&f>$+&4(&f$m(+h%,( <,-i>,-&(f+>+%%l$-&(i>,l(-,-@#,n$>-l$-&+h(,>(s"+%*@#,n$>-l$-&+h(+<&,>%4(*-<h"'*-#( &>,hh%(+-'(=,&%4(b>*l+>*hm(l$'*+&$'(&f>,"#f(%,<*+h(l$'*+(bh+&i,>l%5(/&(&*l$%4(&f*%(f+%(h$'( &,(bfm%*<+h(&f>$+&%4(n*,h$-<$4(+-'(*-(,-$(+<&*n*%&b%(<+%$4($n$-('$+&f5( ( r$%b*&$(&f$%$(&f>$+&%4(&f$(+<&*n*%&%(>$l+*-(b$>%*%&$-&(*-(<,-'"<&*-#(&f$*>(u,>t5(ef$m(&+t$( "b(b>+<&*<$%(%"<f(+%(l,'$>+&*-#(&f$*>(%b$$<f(*-(>$+<&*,-(&,(b,h*&*<+h($n$-&%4(+-'("%*-#( %,<*+h(%&$#+-,#>+bfm(*-(,>'$>(&,(<,ll"-*<+&$(%$h$<&*n$hm(&,(&f,%$(uf,(u*hh("-'$>%&+-'( &f$*>(<,'$'(%b$$<f(.=,m'4(789f4(j>"-&,-(x(g*%%$-=+"l4(789?15(6m(i*-'*-#%(%"##$%&( &f+&(&f$(+',b&*,-(,i(&f*%(+bb>,+<f(*%(<,-&*-#$-&(,-(+(n+>*$&m(,i(i+<&,>%4(*-<h"'*-#(&f$( $v*%&$-<$(,i(+(<,f$%*n$('*%<">%*n$(<,-&$v&(&f>,"#f(uf*<f(%b$$<f(<+-(=$('$<,'$'(+-'( =>,+'(+#>$$l$-&(+l,-#(+<&*n*%&%(>$#+>'*-#(&f$*>(l$'*+(*'$,h,#*$%(&,u+>'(bh+&i,>l%5( 3f$>$(&f$%$(i+<&,>%(+>$(-,&(b>$%$-&4(%$hi@<$-%,>%f*b(=$<,l$%(&f$('$i+"h&(,b&*,-5( ( /-(*lb,>&+-&(i*-'*-#(*%(&f+&(&f$(+u+>$-$%%(,i('*#*&+h(>*%t(+l,-#(&f$(+<&*n*%&%(l+&&$>%(h*&&h$( *i(&f$(b$$>%(&f$m(<,ll"-*<+&$(u*&f(+>$("-+u+>$(+-'($vb,%$(&f$l(&,(&f>$+&%5(ef*%( $n*'$-<$(%"bb,>&%(6+>u*<tb%(.78991(<,-<$b&(,i(-$&u,>t$'(b>*n+<m4(uf*<f("-'$>%&+-'%( b>*n+<m(+%(&f$(+=*h*&m(&,(<,-&>,h(+(%,<*+h(%*&"+&*,-(>+&f$>(&f+-(b+>&*<"h+>(b>,b$>&*$%(,i( *-i,>l+&*,-5(ef$($ii$<&*n$-$%%(,i(-$&u,>t$'(b>*n+<m(*%(i">&f$>(*lb+<&$'(=m(<,ll,-( "-'$>%&+-'*-#%(,i(uf*<f(bh+&i,>l%(,>(bh+&i,>l(i$+&">$%(+>$(b>*n+&$2(,i&$-4(&f$(+<&*n*%&%( +<t-,uh$'#$'(&f+&(&f$(b$><$b&*,-%(,i(&f$*>(b$$>%(+=,"&(h%+i$b(%b+<$%(i,>(<,ll"-*<+&*,-( *-+<<">+&$hm(>$b>$%$-&$'(=,&f(&f$(&$<f-*<+h(+><f*&$<&">$(+-'(b,h*<m(b,%*&*,-%(,i(%,<*+h( l$'*+(<,lb+-*$%5(/%(+(>$%"h&4(&f$(+<&*n*%&%(,i&$-(bh+m$'(&f$(>,h$(,i(%$<">*&m($vb$>&4( &>m*-#(&,($-<,">+#$(&f$*>(b$$>%(&,($l=>+<$(l,>$(b>*n+<m(b>,&$<&*n$(%&>+&$#*$%5(3f$-( &f$*>($ii,>&%(i+*h(.+%(&f$m(%+m(&f$m(,i&$-(',14(&f$m(+>$(i,><$'(&,(<,ll"-*<+&$(*-(&f$(<h$+>5( ( ef$%$($v+lbh$%(%f,u(&f$("%$(,i(c-&$>-$&(&$<f-,h,#*$%(=m('*#*&+h(+<&*n*%&%(>$ih$<&%(+( '$$b(+l=*n+h$-<$5(3f*h$(&f$m($lbf+%*]$(&f$(*lb,>&+-<$(,i(&$<f-,h,#*$%(&,(&f$*>(u,>t4( &f*%($-&f"%*+%l(*%(l+>t$'(=m(&f$(-$$'(&,(<,-&*-"+hhm(=+h+-<$(&f$*>(+'n,<+<m(#,+h%( +#+*-%&($n,hn*-#(>*%t%5(ef$(b+b$>(<,-<h"'$%(u*&f(+(%$>*$%(,i(<,-%*'$>+&*,-%(i,>(%,<*+h( l$'*+(<,lb+-*$%(*-(&+t*-#(*-&,(+<<,"-&(&f$(-"+-<$%(,i(&f$(>*%t($-n*>,-l$-&%(i+<$'(=m( &f$*>("%$>%5( ( ( >(@(0()*(<( ( =,m'4('5(.789f15(a,b<+*7"4'$*&,(c5+d-(+<7*$&'+'$%(<+7@+)(,870?(c+,(()<5(w+h$(q-*n$>%*&m( 0>$%%5( ( j>"-&,-4([54(x(g*%%$-=+"l4(\5(.789?15(e#@2<*&,$7)5+!+f<(0b<+92$c(+@70+/0$%&*g+&)c+ /07,(<,5(6ce(0>$%%5( ( )+%&$hh%4(65(.789715(=(,870?<+7@+e2,0&;(+&)c+674(5+37*$&'+h7%("(),<+$)+,-(+:$;$,&'+ !;(i(0,h*&m(j,,t%2()+l=>*'#$5(( ( `'u+>'%4([54(\,u+>'4(05(g5(+-'(p,m<$4(65(.789a4(g,n51(r*#*&+h(/<&*n*%l(x(g,-@d*,h$-&( ),-ih*<&5(:$;$,&'+!*,$%$<"+>(<(&0*-+/07j(*,4(q-*n$>%*&m(,i(3+%f*-#&,-2(!$+&&h$5(( ( k+%%$>4(q54(x(!<f"h]4(35(.789?15(k,n$>-+-<$(,i(;-h*-$(c-&$>l$'*+>*$%2(;=%$>n+&*,-%( i>,l(+(!$>*$%(,i(g+&*,-+h()+%$(!&"'*$%5(k(0?"&)+l(),(0+>(<(&0*-+/2#'$*&,$7)4(.789?@ ?15( ( 6+<c*--,-4(d5(.789915(l7)<(),+7@+,-(+=(,870?(c5+d-(+m70'c8$c(+3,02;;'(+@70+a),(0)(,+ n0((c7"i(j+%*<(j,,t%2(g$u(w,>t5( ( 6+>u*<t4(/5(`5(.789915(!,<*+h(b>*n+<m(*-(-$&u,>t$'(b"=h*<%2(e$$-%b(+&&*&"'$%4(b>+<&*<$%4( +-'(%&>+&$#*$%5( ( w,>t4(p5()5(.789815(0,h*<*-#(<,-&$-&(*-(&f$(s"+%*@b"=h*<(%bf$>$5(e4()=(,+a)$,$&,$%(5( ( w,"l+-%4(35(i5(+-'(w,>t4(p5()5(.789715(!,<*+h(6$'*+(+-'(&f$(/<&*n*%&(e,,ht*&2(q%$>( /#>$$l$-&%4(),>b,>+&$(c-&$>$%&%4(+-'(&f$(c-i,>l+&*,-(c-i>+%&>"<&">$(,i(6,'$>-(!,<*+h( 6,n$l$-&%5(o720)&'+7@+l7""2)$*&,$7)4+pq.715( ( microsoft word dodson-et-al.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): dodson, j., hodges, d., witte, m., & creese, s., (2014, october 22-24). does personality and security expertise predict password strength. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. does personality and security expertise predict password strength? james dodson university of leicester duncan hodges university of oxford monica witte university of leicester sadie creese university of oxford despite alternative authentication methods, passwords remain the most common method of restricting access to online information and services1. it is important to develop ‘strong’ passwords (i.e., passwords that are difficult to guess) in order to prevent hackers from accessing important personal information (e.g., bank account details). despite a wealth of public advice available on protecting online data, many individuals still choose weak passwords or engage in risky password practices such as sharing their passwords with others2-6. this is, in part, because choosing memorable, long and strong passwords is difficult and unintuitive for humans7. researchers have found that individuals are generally aware of what constitutes a secure password and what good password management entails8-9. nonetheless, it has been found that individuals tend to trade off their security concerns and strong password management with convenient, memorable and ultimately less secure passwords1,10-12. given that public campaigns have not helped to change online security behaviour to an acceptable level and increasingly the public are needing to protect online content (as commercial, financial and government services continue to move online), more research is urgently needed to help gain some understanding as to why some individuals continue to make bad decisions regarding password choice. this study sought to add to the literature on the types of people who make poor password choices. if we can identify who is more likely to make these decisions then we might be better able to create appropriate campaigns to alter poor online security behaviour as well as target campaigns to the most appropriate people. this study aimed to examine whether some types of people are more likely to create ‘strong’ passwords. in particular, we were interested in personality characteristics and security expertise. personality characteristics included: impulsivity, locus of control and self-monitoring. we hypothesised the following: h1: security experts will be more likely to create secure passwords compared to nonexperts. h2: individuals who score low on impulsivity are more likely to create secure passwords. h3: individuals who score high on self-monitoring are more likely to create secure passwords. h4: individuals who score high on internal locus of control are more likely to create secure passwords. the study first gained ethical approval from the college’s ethics committee. in order to test our hypotheses we devised an online questionnaire. participants were unaware that we were interested in password choice and instead were told that the study aimed to learn about their internet usage, cyber security knowledge and personalities. in order to access the study, participants were asked to “create a password for the sole use of this study”. for ethical purposes, participants were asked to create a password that they had not used elsewhere. password strength was assessed by two of the most common password attacks that the public face: dictionary and keyspace attacks13. the metric calculated how many of these lists the participant’s password appeared. if a participant’s password appeared on those lists at all, then their password is considered extremely weak and vulnerable to a brute force dictionary attack. comparatively, the keyspace metric indicated the cost of cracking a password using a rainbow table in what is commonly known as a timememory trade off attack14. a larger keyspace will take longer to crack using a rainbow table whereas a smaller keyspace will take less time to crack. a log10 transformation controlled for the exponential nature of the keyspace metric. three hundred and fifty-five participants completed the online questionnaire. they were recruited through the mailing lists and social media presences of a professional association or network. two hundred and thirty-five experts on cyber security issues (209 male, 26 female) were recruited from a nationally recognised professional computer association in the uk and 120 non-experts (21 male, 99 female) were recruited from several nationally recognised associations and networks for the arts, humanities and social sciences in the uk. overall, it was found that cyber security experts created more secure passwords compared with non-experts, insofar that experts’ passwords were less susceptible to both dictionary and keyspace attacks. specifically, non-experts’ passwords were more likely to be in common attack dictionaries than experts’ passwords. similarly, nonexperts chose passwords with a smaller keyspace metric that is more easily cracked than experts. our hypotheses, which considered the relationship between personality characteristics and strength of password choice, were only partly supported. none of the personality characteristics predicted whether a password was susceptible to the more advanced keyspace attack. however, individuals high on internal locus of control were more likely to create a secure password more resistant to a dictionary attack compared to those with a low internal locus of control. although not all our hypotheses were fully supported, the results reveal a more complex picture about individual differences and password choice. they tell us that having a greater knowledge about security issues is important. importantly, however, personality plays a role in choice of password. as we would expect, those who take a more fatalistic approach were less likely to choose a secure password. these individuals might have felt that given they believe they have little control over what happens in their lives that hackers will break into their accounts no matter what password they select. the implications for these findings with respect to future educational and media campaigns will be discussed as well as the future studies we have planned to further this work. references 1. bhuyan, s., greenstein, j. s., & juang, k. a. (2013). evaluating the usability of system-generated and user-generated passwords of approximately equal security. in: human aspects of information security, privacy, and trust (pp. 312). springer berlin heidelberg. 2. carstens, d. s. (2009). human and social aspects of password authentication. in: m. gupta & r. sharman (eds.), social and human elements of information security: emerging trends and countermeasures (pp. 1-14). hershey, pa, us: information science reference global. 3. hoonakker, p., bornoe, n., & carayon, p. (2009, october). password authentication from a human factors perspective: results of a survey among end-users. in: proceedings of the human factors and ergonomics society annual meeting (p. 459-463). sage publications. 4. lorenz, b., kikkas, k., & klooster, a. (2013). “the four most-used passwords are love, sex, secret, and god”: password security and training in different user groups. in: human aspects of information security, privacy, and trust (pp. 276-283). springer berlin heidelberg. 5. stanton, j. m., stam, k. r., mastrangelo, p., & jolton, j. (2005). analysis of end user security behaviors. computers & security, 24(2), 124-133. 6. zviran, m., & haga, w. j. (1999). password security: an empirical study. journal of management information systems, 15, 161-186. 7. herley, c., van oorschot, p. c., & patrick, a. s. (2009). passwords: if we’re so smart, why are we still using them? in: financial cryptography and data security (pp. 230-237). springer berlin heidelberg 8. tam, l., glassman, m., & vandenwauver, m. (2010). the psychology of password management: a tradeoff between security and convenience. behaviour & information technology, 29(3), 233-244. 9. von zezschwitz, e., de luca, a., & hussmann, h. (2013). survival of the shortest: a retrospective analysis of influencing factors on password composition. in: human-computer interaction–interact 2013 (pp. 460-467). springer berlin heidelberg. 10. komanduri, s., shay, r., kelley, p. g., mazurek, m. l., bauer, l., christin, n., ... & egelman, s. (2011, may). of passwords and people: measuring the effect of password-composition policies. in: proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 2595-2604). acm. 11. proctor, r. w., lien, m. c., vu, k. p. l., schultz, e. e., & salvendy, g. (2002). improving computer security for authentication of users: influence of proactive password restrictions. behavior research methods, instruments, & computers, 34(2), 163-169. 12. vu, k. p. l., proctor, r. w., bhargav-spantzel, a., tai, b. l. b., cook, j., & eugene schultz, e. (2007). improving password security and memorability to protect personal and organizational information. international journal of humancomputer studies, 65(8), 744-757. 13. creese, s., hodges, d., jamison-powell, s., & whitty, m. (2013). relationships between password choices. paper presented at perceptions of risk and security expertise. in: human aspects of information security, privacy, and trust (pp. 80-89). springer berlin heidelberg. 14. hellman, m. (1980). a cryptanalytic time-memory trade-off. ieee transactions on information theory, 26(4), 401-406. microsoft word spir ir15 article template.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 presence, privacy, and pseudonymity sonja vivienne university of queensland tama leaver curtin university brady robards university of tasmania emily van der nagel swinburne institute of technology this panel seeks to map the intersections and contradictions evident among communities and individuals at the cutting edge of negotiations over digital, networked ‘presence’. presence has multiple definitions the fact of existing or being present; a person or thing that exists but is not seen; a group of people exerting an influence in a particular time or place; and finally the impressive manner or appearance of a person. these variations in meaning reveal issues at the heart of digitally mediated life. routine and everyday engagements with digital platforms and technologies are catalysing profound cultural shifts in how we understand identity performance in public, and personal privacy. concepts like networked identity (boyd, 2011) and digital dualisms (jurgenson, 2012) are breaking down binary oppositions between face to face and digitally mediated experiences. people laugh ironically at the use of ‘irl’, wondering what this really means. similarly, a growing awareness that anonymity is an impossibility and that pseudonymity is contingent, are causing us to rethink privacy. the early days of the internet fostered dreams of democratic self-representation and correlated social change. however, the correlation between online sharing of personal (sometimes private) stories, like those hosted by ‘it gets better’ for example, and greater public acceptance or decreased face-to-face persecution, is disputable to say the least. triumphant testimonials are matched by notorious failures, represented by too many youth suicides. the risks and rewards of online self-disclosure remain complicated, especially for those with limited agency children, marginalised communities or the socially maligned. seeking affirmation in supposedly closed groups, using pseudonymity in abusive ways, and the ethics of representing those who cannot give consent all evoke debate about the ‘contextual integrity’ of privacy (nissenbaum, 2004). our first paper explores current platform politics and everyday practices in pre-birth representations on social media, and canvasses the presumption of agency, forms of intimate surveillance and the ethics of control over mediated representation. the second paper considers how curating congruent presence might offer an alternative to inadequate pseudonymity. it draws on case studies in which young queer people in russia seek affirmation in supposedly private groups online, while unintentionally revealing their presence to attackers. simultaneously, attackers utilise the same social network platform to circulate images of violent encounters and recruit homophobic followers. the third paper considers new conventions governing physical and online spaces as they emerge among a small population of young facebook users in tasmania. it maps sustained disclosure practices, driven by three distinct forces; changes in the way facebook makes disclosures visible; diversification and mainstreaming of the site’s user-base; and changes in disclosure practices among sub-networks of users. these papers are all linked by arguments for, or observations of increasing digital literacy, and the final paper plays out against a background in which hacker communities and the geek elite propagate skills and infrastructures that enable ordinary people to engage with the dark net, via distributed servers worldwide. wikileaks and anonymous challenge the authority of governments and global corporations to retain highly confidential (secret) information, while journalists continue to correlate pseudonymity with heightened and toxic trolling. through the unmasking of violentacrez this paper maps a disruption to the idea of the anonymous troll, an event that presents social media users with a challenge to their sense of privacy, but also an opportunity to be reminded that the boundaries of public and private on social media are never stable. greater awareness of our digital trace, and identity 2.0 (helmond, 2010) – under construction, never complete, fragmented, partially created by others, persistent and searchable – is effecting our sustained and evolving online engagements. collectively we map the liminal boundaries and intersections threaded through current thinking and emerging definitions of presence, privacy and pseudonymity, negotiated across space, time and evolving experiences. references: boyd, danah. (2011). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in z. papacharissi (ed.), networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. pp. 39–58). new york: routledge. helmond, a. (2010). identity 2.0: constructing identity with cultural software. presented at the digital methods initiative, university of amsterdam. retrieved from http://www.annehelmond.nl/wordpress/wp content/uploads//2010/01/helmond_identity20_dmiconference.pdf jurgenson, n. (2012, june 28). the irl fetish – the new inquiry. the new inquiry. retrieved november 20, 2013, from http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-irl-fetish/ nissenbaum, h. (2004). privacy as contextual integrity. washington law review, 79(3), 101– 139. captured at birth? presence, privacy, and intimate surveillance tama leaver while the issue of how presences and interactions online differ from face to face communication has been a core question for internet studies since the field began to cohere, the vast majority of work regarding identity focuses on active users who have agency to either direct, shape or resist the way they portray themselves online, and are portrayed by others. this paper, by contrast, outlines an investigation into the way that the presence of very young people is shaped by parents, guardians and other loved ones from the day they are born. while parental sharing of photos, videos and other material about children is almost always done with the very best intentions, there is nevertheless a seeming disconnection between the way that individuals approach their own privacy online compared to the privacy afforded, or not afforded, to young people. to address this issue, this paper is broken into three main sections. firstly, i will offer a brief overview of current conceptualisations of presence and identity online and explicate the role of parents and others in creating the initial presences of children. secondly, i will situate identity practices in relation to the shifting terrain of surveillance, including the possibilities of surveillance itself as a resistant practice, positing the concept of intimate surveillance. the third and final section uses two key examples – pregnancy and baby activity tracking apps such sprout; and the use of the #ultrasound hashtag to share prenatal scan images on instagram – to explore intimate surveillance as it occurs. the paper concludes not condemning or demonising any particular practices, but highlighting the need for increased digital literacies, especially for parents, to make more informed choices about the way sharing they are shaping a young person’s identity. online identities danah boyd (2010), argues that networked selves can be characterised by persistence (information does not organically decay), replicability (it can be easily copied), scalability (one copy or a million copies are equally straight forward) and searchability (information is organised and presented by third parties, such as search engines). additionally, and significantly, identity fragments tend to be owned and managed by private corporations (aufderheide, 2010). anne helmond (helmond, 2010) characterises ‘identity 2.0’ in a similar manner, adding that identities are always under construction, never completed, and that identity fragments online about one person are often created by other users. allen (2009) and leaver (2010) use the concept of web presence and differentiate between footprints – online identity material a user controls – and shadows – material about them but out of their immediate control. moreover, they argue that contemporary identity is a collage of online fragments which are reassembled in different ways; a content-generated user. at their core, all of these frameworks explicating online presences presume that users have agency, can control the shape of their identity to some extent, and often posit users gaining more agency as a solution when the management of identities online becomes complicated. however when children are born they have no agency. moreover, as deborah upton (2013, p. 42) has argued, posting first ultrasound photographs on social media has become a ritualised and everyday part of process of visualising and sharing the unborn. for many young people, their – often publicly shared – digital legacy begins before birth. and this is a legacy which young people will have to, at some point, wrestle with, especially in a digital landscape increasingly driven by ‘real names’ policies (zoonen, 2013), where private corporations and governments are discouraging the user of anonymity and pseudonyms online. shifting surveillance in a culture where cctv cameras, airport body scanners and various forms of government tracking are commonplace, surveillance itself is seemingly near-universal. even well-intentioned sharing can often be a form of surveillance, however, this does not always have to be an oppressive act. albrechtslund (2008) for example, characterises “social surveillance” as a form of knowing play, while e.j. westlake (2008) goes a step further, arguing that because a user’s online performance is being recorded, performances can be entirely misleading. the notion of sousveillance as "inverse surveillance", countering/reversing organisational surveillance with wearable devices and individuals’ surveying society and each other is also increasingly popular (mann, et al, 2002). however, ‘peer surveillance’ (andrejevic, 2005) can equally be seen as perpetuating a more complex system which nevertheless exaggerates unequal power relationships. in relation to this field, i propose the concept of intimate surveillance which describes the purposeful (and almost always well-intentioned) surveillance of young people by parents, guardians and friends where the surveyed have little or no agency to resist themselves. negotiating intimate surveillance while pregnancy-tracking and baby monitoring mobile apps such as sprout have become increasingly popular, they have also normalised the practice of surveying and analysing offspring. sprout, for example, can generate graphs and analyses of a baby’s sleeping and eating pattern over days, weeks or months, creating visualisations and recommendations. while useful, this recording and encoding normalises and rewards intimate surveillance, encouraging parents to track and monitor as a sign of love and concern. a more public measure of intimate surveillance can be found in mapping the use of the hashtag #ultrasound on the popular photography-sharing app instagram. a rudimentary analysis of the hashtag over a month reveals thousands of images (the majority prenatal ultrasounds, although with a variety of other uses also visible), many of which include the metadata visible on an ultrasound, including the mother’s full name, date of the scan, expected due date, and so forth. for many young people these will be their ‘first photograph’ and where parents are using their real names online, in later years it will take trivial effort to associate these images with the subsequent children. conclusions intimate surveillance normalises a surveillance culture facilitated by parents, family and friends. better digital literacies about the uses (and potential abuses) of data shared with apps, platforms and services are needed (informed uses is the key). more transparency is required about how data might be shared and used in all contexts, especially commercial ones. and importantly, social norms need to evolve regarding the sharing (and non-sharing) of data and media generated about young people not just moral panics about data shared by young people. references allen, m. (2009). web presence: understanding persistent and interlinked content as the basis of identity formation and promotion through the contemporary internet. presented at the communication, creativity and global citizenship: australia and new zealand communications association annual conference, brisbane. aufderheide, p. (2010). copyright, fair use, and social networks. in z. papacharissi (ed.), a networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 274–303). routledge. boyd, danah. (2010). social network sites and networked publics: affordances, dymanics and implications. in z. papacharissi (ed.), a networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 39–58). routledge. helmond, a. (2010). identity 2.0: constructing identity with cultural software. www.annehelmond.nl, pdf: http://www.annehelmond.nl/wordpress/wp– content/uploads//2010/01/helmond_identity20_dmiconference.pdf. leaver, t. (2010). i tweet therefore i am? challenges in learning identity by teaching web presence. presented at the teaching and learning forum, edith cowan university, joondalup. lupton, d. (2013). the social worlds of the unborn. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. zoonen, l. van. (2013). from identity to identification: fixating the fragmented self. media, culture & society, 35(1), 44–51. doi:10.1177/0163443712464557 curating networked presence: beyond pseudonymity sonja vivienne this paper explores the consequences of unintentional self-exposure by socially maligned identities, and argues that striving for curated pseudonymity congruence (rather than coherence) and integrity (rather than authenticity) offers greater personal safety and possibilities for networked intimate citizenship. goffman (1959) argued that we selectively perform different aspects of ourselves for ‘front stage’ and ‘back stage’ audiences. building on goffman’s theatrical analogy, hogan suggests that, online, our multiple representations of self are more like a curated art exhibition (hogan, 2010) with platforms or apps, like facebook, linked in and grindr, standing in for the gallery and/or exhibition curator. in this explication, we don’t get to choose how the different versions of our selves are hung on the wall because search engine algorithms produce images and text from disparate times and places, originally intended for discrete audiences. meanwhile plummer (2003) argues that claiming a space for what may have previously been regarded as backstage, or intimate, private dimensions of self, is integral to engaged citizenship, and the iterative negotiation of social norms. as a means of synthesizing our dueling needs for personal safety and meaningful social connection, i propose ‘networked intimate citizenship’ – the ongoing re-negotiation of presence; simultaneously f2f and online; with networks who are both affirming and antagonistic – as a cautious move beyond fragile pseudonymity, with new found opportunities to curate our own exhibitions of self. problems with pseudonymity vkontakte (vk) is the second biggest social network service in europe following facebook. in russia, groups like deti-404, established by 17-year-old lena klimova, provide support for young lgbt people who struggle to stay safe in their daily physical environments. the site plays on the ‘error 404 – page not found’ warning and has the motto ‘children-404. lgbt teens. we exist!’. while the apparently private space of deti-404 has no doubt played a pivotal role in offering hope to a socially maligned group, it remains only as safe as its membership and their management of real names or pseudonyms. after 24 year old olga bakhaeva, a teacher, commented on a post on a similar ‘straight alliance for lgbt equality’ page, she faced months of harassment from another member. it turned out that he was operating under a pseudonym (while she had used her real name) and was actually a leader of another, aggressively homophobic, activist group ‘parents of russia’. the harassment escalated when the story was leaked to the press, with threats of violence and phone calls to olga’s home number. olga eventually lost her job. (“russian teachers laid off for their sexual orientation альянс гетеросексуалов за равноправие лгбт,” 2013). while vk hosts support groups it also hosts hundreds of active homophobic groups, like ‘occupy pedofilyay’ (occupy pedophilia), which has approximately 75,000 followers. representatives from this loose collective of neo-nazis and russian nationalists routinely seek out and join support groups in order to solicit enough identifiable information to physically track down transgressive targets. they use social media strategically, in two ways – firstly, luring gay people (sometimes by posing as prospective dates) into violent physical encounters then, secondly, distributing the resulting documentation (broderick, 2013). the leader of occupy pedophilia regularly publishes stylised videos of ‘sting operations’ or ‘safaris’ and holds regional seminars to help build their following. these disastrous examples of networked self-representation are not, however, new. even ‘before internet’ there was a risk of negative ramifications should the wrong circle of people came into information that was not intended for them. disparate audiences that converge via digital networks merely increase these risks. further, if pseudonymity is only as robust as trusting that one’s presence can not be revealed, how can socially marginalised people, with socially maligned identities engage in public and/or online spaces? reframing presence theoretical frames drawn from narrative theory, sociology and queer theory offer insight into presence (the fact of existing or being present) and useful distinctions between authenticity and integrity; coherence and congruence. while giddens argues that selfidentity is bound up with consistency, coherence and ‘the capacity to keep a particular narrative going’ (1991, p. 54) narrative theorists counter that ‘the normative mission to find and value coherence marginalizes... non-fitting narrators... and poses ethically questionable pressures upon narrators who have experienced severe political or other trauma. (hyvärinen, hyden, saarenheimo, & tamboukou, 2010, p. 1) the improbability of curating a wholly coherent narrative of self is evident among converged publics or, more evocatively, in the hypothetical merging of the average users facebook and linked in accounts. difficulties with coherent identity are also not ‘new’, nor a product of networked technologies. butler argues persuasively that it is impossible to give an accurate or consistent ‘account of oneself’: ...my story always arrives late. i am always recuperating, reconstructing, even as i produce myself differently in the very act of telling. my account of myself is partial, haunted by that for which i have no definitive story. (butler, 2005, p. 27) while the history of post-modern thought reveals many such challenges to the notion of authentic, truthful self-representation, to a large extent this is not reflected in popular understandings of identity. conclusion a cultural shift that replaces ‘authenticity’ with ‘integrity’ might map better onto a global community of people who are always, already online; perhaps more serviceable than the familiar, yet outmoded ‘compare and contrast’ observations of online and f2f interactions, and more accommodating of fluid and non-normative identity (often judged to be incoherent). curating selective selfrepresentation (including well managed pseudonyms) across space and time; seeking congruence (determined individually) rather than coherence (determined by the spectator) might enable those engaging on vk and facebook to carefully balance risks and rewards. while clearly the marginalised of the world would be wise to take into account the mediating influences of platforms that may arbitrarily change the rules, and the possibility of accidental disclosure by breaches of trust and/or surveillance mechanisms, greater understanding of the selfrepresentations that we create, share and own – curated presence affords agency and ideally, networked intimate citizenship. references: broderick, r. (2013, july 29). russians are using social media to lure in and publicly humiliate gay men. buzzfeed. online news aggregator. retrieved february 24, 2014. butler, j. (2005). giving an account of oneself. new york: fordham university press. giddens, a. (1991). modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age. cambridge: polity. goffman, e. (1959). the presentation of self in everyday life. new york: anchor books. hogan, b. (2010). the presentation of self in the age of social media: distinguishing performances and exhibitions online. bulletin of science, technology & society, 30(6), 377 –386. doi:10.1177/0270467610385893 hyvärinen, m., hyden, l.-c., saarenheimo, m., & tamboukou, m. (eds.). (2010). beyond narrative coherence. amsterdam/philadelphia: john benjamins publishing company. plummer, k. (2003). intimate citizenship: private decisions and public dialogues. university of washington press. russian teachers laid off for their sexual orientation альянс гетеросексуалов за равноправие лгбт. (2013, september 19). facebook community group. retrieved february 25, 2014. mapping changes in disclosure practices through sustained facebook use brady robards on facebook, each user’s ‘presence’ is constituted through both synchronous and asynchronous ‘disclosures’ (stutzman, gross, acquisti 2012): im chat, posting images and status updates, comment threads on posts, likes, and so on. these disclosures are made by users and their friends, and then filtered through what hogan (2010: 380) describes as a ‘third party’, facebook’s servers, that determine ‘who is considered an appropriate audience member for this content and who is not’. in its ten years of operation, how have disclosure practices changed over time, as facebook’s presentation of these disclosures has also changed? there is a great wealth of research into the presentation of self on social network sites that has served to establish our understanding of how users are variously ‘present’ in networked publics (boyd 2006, 2007, 2008, 2011a, 2011b; hewitt & forte 2006; menchik & tian 2008; tufekci 2008; pearson 2009; pinch 2010; young 2013). goffman is firmly ensconced in aoir conference bingo cards. much of this literature considers how the long and evolving history of conventions that govern physical social spaces are applied to social spaces on the web. this literature has revealed a series of continuities, but also some complications. for example, mendelson and papacharissi (2011), in their study of college students’ facebook photo galleries, note that in personal photography ‘the positive is always recorded over the negative, with moments of celebration emphasized’ (2011: 254). while this finding maps neatly on to goffman’s (1959) notion of the idealised self, it is also clear that users are not just present themselves online, but also others. one of the participants from the study by mendelson and papacharissi found themselves being tagged in photographs uploaded by others that did not align with their idealised self: ‘to another embarrassing photo, the subject commented: “bad hair!!!! destroy! destroy!”’ (participant in mendelson & papacharissi 2011: 262). there are also differences in how people have presented themselves between social network sites. for example, robards (2012) has argued that the conventions for ‘being’ on myspace and facebook were quite. on myspace, the quantity of friends one had served as a proxy for social capital (more was better), whereas on facebook, smaller networks of friends were framed as ‘more authentic’ or ‘realistic’. while presence on myspace was constituted largely through the construction and revision of textually rich profiles (including music, images, poems, song lyrics, questionnaires, and so on), facebook appeared to shift the focus towards specific disclosures that would fade in prominence over time and as new disclosures were made, culminating in the timeline format in place today (robards 2012). what is not currently clear is how the social conventions that govern disclosure practices on facebook have changed over time. all social spaces are dynamic, and the conventions that govern them evolve. on facebook, this evolution is driven by three forces: first, changes in the way facebook (as per hogan’s (2010) ‘third party’) makes disclosures visible to other users, driven by zuckerberg’s open and transparent ‘theory of privacy’ (zimmer 2014); second, the diversification and ‘mainstreaming’ of the site’s user base, in terms of age (madden 2010) and location (internet world stats 2012); and third, changes amongst sub-networks or circles of users themselves around disclosure practices. the first two forces shape the third force, but this third force is also distinct and specific to local contexts. in other words, facebook is not a singular social space but is instead made up by a complex and interrelated network of networks, with each user having slightly different disclosure practices that change over time. this paper draws on ongoing qualitative research to document and contextualise the changes in disclosure practices of facebook users in tasmania, australia, who have been using the site for more than five years. this project seeks to explore how the ‘digital trace’ (bowker 2007) of facebook users manifests through sustained use of the site. the project uses a mixed-methods approach, combining profile observation and one-on-one semi-structured in-depth interviews situated around the participant’s facebook timeline as a prompt. participants are invited to reflect on their timeline as an archive of experiences and mediated memories, describing changes in disclosure practices as they ‘scroll down memory lane’. references bowker, gc (2007) ‘the past and the internet’, in j karaganis (ed.), structures of participation in digital culture, new york: social sciences research council, 20-36. boyd, d (2006) ‘friends, friendsters and myspace top 8: writing community into being on social network sites’, first monday, 11(12): http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1418/1336 boyd, d (2007) ‘none of this is real: identity and participation in friendster’ in j karaganis (ed.) structures of participation in digital culture. columbia: columbia university press: 132-157. boyd, d (2008) ‘why youth ♥ social network sites: the role of networked publics in teenage social life’ in d buckingham (ed.) youth, identity, and digital media, cambridge: mit press, 119-142. boyd, d (2011a) ‘social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications’, in z papacharissi (ed.) a networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites, new york: routledge, 39-58. boyd, d (2011b) ‘white flight in networked publics? how race and class shaped american teen engagement with myspace and facebook’, in l nakamura and p chow-white (eds) race after the internet, new york: routledge, 203-222. goffman, e (1959) the presentation of self in everyday life, london: penguin. hewitt, a & forte, a (2006) ‘crossing boundaries: identity management and student/faculty relationships on the facebook’, poster presentation at cscw banff, alberta, and also available online: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.94.8152&rep=rep1&type=pdf hogan, b (2010) ‘the presentation of self in the age of social media: distinguishing performances and exhibitions online’, bulletin of science, technology & society, 30(6): 377-386. internet world stats (2012) ‘facebook users in the world’, available online: http://www.internetworldstats.com/facebook.htm madden, m (2010) ‘older adults and social media’, pew research internet project: http://www.pewinternet.org/2010/08/27/older-adults-and-social-media/ menchik, da & tian, z (2008) ‘putting social context into text: the semiotics of e-mail interaction’, american journal of sociology, 114(2): 332-370. miller blog post pearson, e (2009) ‘all the world wide web’s a stage: the performance of identity in online social networks’, first monday, (14)3: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2162/2127. pinch, t (2010) ‘the invisible technologies of goffman’s sociology from the merry-goround to the internet’, technology and culture, 51(2): 409 – 424. robards, b (2012) ‘leaving myspace, joining facebook: “growing up” on social network sites’, continuum: journal of media & cultural studies, 26(3): 385-398. stutzman, f, gross, r & acquisti, a (2012) ‘silent listeners: the evolution of privacy and disclosure on facebook’, journal of privacy and confidentiality, 4(2): 7-41. tufekci, z (2008) ‘can you see me now? audience and disclosure regulation on online social network sites’, bulletin of science, technology & society, 28(1): 20-36. young, k (2013) ‘managing online identity and diverse social networks on facebook’, webology, 10(2): http://www.webology.org/2013/v10n2/a109.pdf zimmer, m (2014) ‘mark zuckerberg’s theory of priacy’, washington post, february 4: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/mark-zuckerbergs-theory-of privacy/2014/02/03/2c1d780a-8cea-11e3-95dd-36ff657a4dae_story.html disrupting anonymity online: the unmasking of reddit’s violentacrez emily van der nagel when blogger adrian chen unmasked prominent reddit user violentacrez in an article describing him as “the biggest troll on the web” (chen 2012), he disrupted the idea of online anonymity as something that was easy, safe, and permanent. through a case study of the unmasking, this paper considers the challenges and opportunities present when online anonymity becomes contingent on adhering to the moral codes of other social media users. on reddit, users post content in themed sections known as ‘subreddits’, which are then awarded up or down votes and commented on by other users, a system that aims to pull quality content towards the top of each page, resulting in a constantly updated list of popular links. although reddit is famous for question and answer sessions with celebrities, reposted memes, and funny cat pictures, violentacrez moderated forums such as ‘jailbait’, which featured sexualised photographs of minors, and ‘creepshots’, photos of unaware women in public. objecting to this content, chen revealed in his article violentacrez' full name and where he worked and lived – as a result, violentacrez was fired from his job and appeared on cnn ostensibly to apologise for, but in fact to defend, himself and his actions. the revealing of someone’s identity to shame and punish them has a long history. during the publish offensive, blasphemous, or seditious content anonymously or pseudonymously (mulsow 2006 p. 220), as speaking out against the ruling class carried severe penalties including jail, disfigurement, or death. martin mulsow warns that even without the threat of being injured, the consequences can be dire: “being socially stigmatized should not be taken lightly” (mulsow 2006 p. 232). he calls the unmasking of authors a form of control that amounts to “symbolic violence” and “literary tyranny” (mulsow 2006 p. 234). more recently, a young woman who failed to clean up her dog’s excrement on a train was branded “dog shit girl” and had her picture and name displayed across the internet in south korea, causing her to drop out of university for receiving so much unwanted attention – which was justified by those that spread the story by claiming that she didn’t deserve privacy because of her actions (solove 2007). adrian chen made a similar justification for his unmasking of violentacrez; in an interview with the guardian, he said, “if people use pseudonyms to publish sexualised images of women without their consent, and of underage girls, then there’s not really a legitimate claim to privacy” (swash 2012). chen made the decision to unmask violentacrez himself, based on his claim that he had done something offensive. chen is neither a woman whose photograph was posted by violentacrez, nor is he a law enforcement officer able to prosecute him for breaking any laws. in fact, according to new zealand’s proposed harmful digital communications bill (2013), it would be an offence to post content online with the intention to cause harm. chen has since won a mirror award, which “honor reporters[...] who hold a mirror to their own industry for the public’s benefit” (mirror awards 2013) for the article, echoing wide approval for his decision, although not everyone agreed that unmasking violentacrez was the right thing to do. one reddit moderator felt the unmasking put every reddit user at risk, as the site values people being able to “freely express themselves without fear of personal attacks” (til_mod 2012). the disagreement over the unmasking of violentacrez arose from a clashing of ideals over free speech and privacy. some applauded the unmasking as they agreed that the content seventeenth century, it was common practice to violentacrez was posting was unpleasant enough to warrant punishment. others noted that either people should have the right to say whatever they want, or they should respect the privacy of others – meaning that neither violentacrez nor chen were in the wrong, or both were. helen nissenbaum (2004) argues that contextual integrity, tying protection of privacy to norms of specific contexts, is essential. as online communication becomes increasingly searchable and permanent, remaining anonymous or pseudonymous is a more important strategy than ever to gain control over social situations, as danah boyd (2012) argues people are doing when they seek to disguise themselves online. for both violentacrez, who repurposed photographs of women, and chen, who unmasked violentacrez as a punishment for doing so, their violations of contextual integrity meant control over personal information was lost. the implications of the violentacrez unmasking show that it is difficult to rely on anonymity as a way of gaining privacy when ideas about freedom of speech and accountability are seen as more valuable. if the privacy of an individual depends on their adherence to the moral codes of others, then it can never be guaranteed. punishing violentacrez by unmasking him only echoes the action that he is being punished for, while threatening wider online participation: it highlights how easy it is to reveal an identity that had been hidden to maintain contextual integrity. when adrian chen disrupted the idea that online anonymity could be relied upon, it presented challenges and opportunities to others using anonymity as a strategy. it is challenging to accept that privacy online depends on your behaviour, particularly when danah boyd has pointed out that those who “most heavily rely on pseudonyms[...] are those who are most marginalized by systems of power” (boyd 2011). it is challenging to social media sites such as reddit who wish to ensure their users feel safe in posting and commenting on what they are most interested in, without restraint. and it is challenging to find more secure ways of obscuring an identity. but the unmasking was also an opportunity to be reminded that the boundaries of public and private on social media are never stable or fixed, and those boundaries demand our ongoing attention as we continue to be social online. references boyd, d 2011, ‘”real names” policies are an abuse of power’, apophenia, viewed 19 february 2014, <http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/08/04/realnames.html>. boyd, d 2012, ‘the politics of real names’, communications of the acm, vol. 55, no. 8, pp. 29-31, doi 10.1145/2240236.2240247, ebscohost, viewed 25 february 2013. chen, a 2012, ‘unmasking reddit's violentacrez, the biggest troll on the web’, gawker, 10 october 2012, viewed 19 august 2013, <http://gawker.com/5950981/unmasking-redditsviolentacrez-the-biggest-troll-on-theweb>. harmful digital communications bill 2013, new zealand parliamentary counsel office, viewed 17 february 2014, <http://legislation.govt.nz/bill/government/2013/0168/latest/dlm5711856.html>. mirror awards 2013, ‘newhouse school announces winners in 2013 mirror awards competition’, mirror awards, 5 june, viewed 19 february 2014, <http://mirrorawards.syr.edu/2013/06/05/newhouse-school-announces-winners-in-2013 mirror-awards-competition/>. mulsow, m 2006, ‘practices of unmasking: polyhistors, correspondence, and the birth of dictionaries of pseudonymity in seventeenth-century germany’, journal of the history of ideas, vol. 67, no. 2, an 22760113, pp. 219-250. nissenbaum, h 2004, ‘privacy as contextual integrity’, washington law review, vol. 79, no. 1, pp. 101-139, viewed 4 february 2013, <http://courses.cs.vt.edu/cs6204/privacy security/papers/privacy/privacy-as-contextual-integrity.pdf>. solove, dj 2007, ‘free speech, anonymity, and accountability’, pp. 125-160 in the future of reputation: gossip, rumor, and privacy on the internet, yale university press, new haven. swash, r 2012, ‘a new internet age? web users turn on ‘trolls’’, the guardian, 20 october, viewed 14 november 2013, <http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/oct/19/newinternet-age-trolls>. til_mod 2012, ‘todayilearned new rule: gawker.com and affiliate sites are no longer allowed’, reddit, 15 october, viewed 19 february 2014, <http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/11irq1/todayilearned_new_rule_gawk ercom_and_affiliate/>. microsoft word weller-kinder-kurlanda.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): weller, k. & kinder-kurlanda, k. (2014, october 22-24). “i love thinking about ethics!” perspectives on ethics in social media research. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “i love thinking about ethics!” perspectives on ethics in social media research katrin weller gesis leibniz institute for the social sciences katharina kinder-kurlanda gesis leibniz institute for the social sciences the topic of research ethics has been a very important one in internet research since its beginnings (ess 2014) and for the interdisciplinary aoir community in particular. in 2012 the aoir published version 2.0 of its seminal “recommendations from the aoir ethics working committee” (markham and buchanan 2012; ess 2002). in their recommendations, the authors recognized that because the objects of study in internet research, namely the internet and its various technologies and user groups, are both complex and ephemeral, so that rules and guidelines also necessarily cannot be static. the report further acknowledges the “complexity of ethical decision making in individual cases” (markham and buchanan 2012: 3), the fact that there are many possible ethical issues that can arise for internet researchers, that there are many grey areas in ethical decision making, and that multiple underlying ethical frameworks (ess 2014) may be applicable simultaneously. therefore the report advocates “guidelines rather than a code of practice so that ethical research can remain flexible, be responsive to diverse contexts, and be adaptable to continually changing technologies.” generally, with new media and internet technologies, there is a “lack of standardized practices” (rooke 2013) with regards to research ethics. decisions often have to be taken relying on one's individual sense of ethical obligation, as rules or standards are insufficient or were not created with internet data in mind (shapiro and ossorio 2013; kinder-kurlanda and erwein nihan 2013). some claim that this lack of ethical guidance can stymie research on social networks in particular, “potentially rendering academia irrelevant to an important domain of human activity” (shapiro and ossorio 2013). despite such difficulties the field of social media research is growing fast, with the number of papers featuring either “twitter” or “facebook” in their title being four times larger in 2012 than in 20081. social media researchers have obviously found ways to 1 elsevier’s scopus lists 508 publications featuring either “twitter” or “facebook” in their title in 2008 and 2,171 with the same criteria in 2012. deal with arising ethical dilemmas despite “little specific guidance in the literature” (henderson et al. 2013), even calling to empower researchers and extending their role in the process of finding ways to deal with ethical dilemmas as they “believe that ethical research committees cannot, and should not, be relied upon as our ethical compass as they also struggle to deal with emerging technologies and their implications” (henderson et al. 2013). in this paper we build on these observations and explore how the field of social media research ethics plays out in practice. we show how current research practices influence social media researchers’ thinking about ethics and detail some concrete questions that arise in social media research. our intention in this paper is therefore a) to show how the adapting of guidelines plays out and what the resulting individual strategies look like b) to shed some light on social media researchers’ stances and opinions on the issue of ethics in social media research, and c) to offer these insights with the intent to allow other social media researchers to learn from these examples. this paper therefore presents results from qualitative interviews that show the different ways in which social media researchers deal with ethical concerns in their research. method exploring the issues social media researchers currently face in dealing with social media data and understanding their motivations both require asking these researchers for detailed explanations and exploring meanings and contexts. we therefore decided on the qualitative approach of conducting face-to-face, semi-structured interviews2. following this approach we have so far conducted 35 interviews with social media researchers at three different conferences (with different disciplinary foci). this paper presents preliminary insights into a set of twenty interviews which represent the first phase of our project. these interviews were all conducted in october 2013. our interviewees in this phase could not yet reflect upon the prominent paper3 by facebook researchers which – due to the implementation of experiments without obtaining users’ consent – inspired various discussions in the research community in june 20144. the twenty interviewees were social media and mobile communication researchers working in europe, the united states or australia. interviewees ranged from phd students to professors in terms of professional levels. most interviewees had 2 this paper is part of a broader project on social media research practices, and interviews therefore included questions on different dimensions of dealing with data from social media, including practical and methodological challenges, research environments, and ethical and legal issues. 3 kramer, a. d. i., guillory, j. e., and hancock, j. t. 2014. experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. proceedings of the national academy of sciences 111 (24), 8788–8790. 4 a collection of direct responses by researchers to the “facebook experiment“ has been prepared by http://laboratorium.net/archive/2014/06/30/the_facebook_emotional_manipulation_study _source (last accessed august 14, 2014). experiences with research on social media data from several platforms. in addition to having conducted various research projects on social media, thirteen researchers had specifically based research on data gathered from twitter before, ten on blog data, five on data from facebook, and many had also gathered or analyzed other data from platforms such as foursquare, tumblr, 4chan or reddit. results and discussion interviewees highlighted that working with data gathered from social media constitutes a new context for research ethics and methodologies. standard practices, e.g. asking for participants’ consent, are no longer feasible when working with big datasets, resulting in statements such as: “i don’t think that we can just use the same kind of tools and conceptual frameworks that have been developed so far.” many had very different ways of relating to research subjects – who would in interview-based research become participants in the project who the researcher would not only ask for consent but often also discuss results with. some researchers thought that even if consent could be obtained (e.g. through facebook apps) this had to be handled carefully because users might not be aware of what they were consenting to. social media research is itself a broad and diverse field, and consequently the situation for research ethics is complex and diverse, too. all interviewees showed a high awareness of this complexity and all had at some point considered ethical issues (with differing levels of enthusiasm: while one claimed to “love thinking about ethics”, another said: “i wouldn’t necessarily say that i’m so concerned about privacy per se.”). in some cases strategies had been developed in situ during the research process, so that interviewees already had found practical solutions for their specific research context. yet, these reflections rarely found their way into more traditional publication formats with ethics becoming a “hidden topic” in social media research. and the many decisions researchers make day by day about how to handle user data within their projects cannot be accessed by reading the resulting research papers. research practices would either (a) differ fundamentally with regards to general assumptions e.g. about privacy and publicity of social media data or, (b) vary more subtly in terms of practical realization of e.g. anonymization strategies. on the first fundamental level, we found different assumptions about whether to treat social media data as deliberately public communication. while some considered twitter entirely public (“i, for example, have decided that to me twitter is public communication, totally public”) others worried about people not expecting to become research subjects (“if something is public this doesn't mean that the author is ok with you doing research on that specific content”). many interviewees considered twitter to be less critical in terms of ethical issues than facebook. conversely, some researchers felt protected by the fact that privacy was very central to the facebook system, so that researchers could usually assume that public posts were meant to be public. researchers also raised the issue that anonymization was hard to achieve. this assessment aligns with prior findings e.g. by zimmer (2010) on re-identifying anonymized data in facebook research. changing user names often did not suffice: “because when you got a large amount of information, you know, personal information, networks, kind of movies you like, places you've been, friends you’ve got, it’s so easy to know who you are, even if i don’t know your name.” this was seen as less of a problem with twitter as “communication networks don't say a lot about your own online identity” while friendship networks on facebook do. less popular social media services can be different still, though researchers expected a general rise in awareness of being publicly visible when online. the different views resulted in practical implications, for example, tweets would be quoted (“i think it [qouting] is a very important part of analysis to make people reflect on what they are doing in the public sphere, and twitter is public sphere”) or not (“i will not quote tweets.”). situations were often considered to be unproblematic from an ethical point of view if only public figures (e.g. organizations, politicians) and deliberately publicized content was studied. however, we also found exceptions from these views, e.g. researchers arguing for recognition of social media users as authors: “if somebody plays a really important role in a particular event then maybe they deserve the credit of being accredited as well.” researchers reported quoting tweets that had been retweeted beyond a certain threshold – assuming that the tweet and the user had achieved a new level of public-ness through having been retweeted multiple times. others pointed out that studying very big datasets made individuals mostly invisible: “there we are, aggregating to a point where it is impossible to actually identify from what we are publishing. it’s impossible to identify individual users.” some researchers tried to re-identify users from quoted tweets to test for anonymity – with differing results, some being able to trace back usernames via google, others not. finally, some user groups were perceived as particularly vulnerable, requiring even more careful practices, for example religious groups or activists. distinguishing between public and non-public figures was therefore seen as more of a general guideline rather than as a blanket rule. solutions to ethical issues were generally perceived as dependent on the situation and the context. standard rules would be difficult to define and then difficult to follow because the field was constantly changing. some proposed that standards should be on a different level altogether: “so that would be the standard: always reflect on it.” every researcher should devote attention to the issues and ‘think this through’. while most researchers reported having eventually been successful in finding adequate solutions to ethical dilemmas in their research, it also became clear that some issues remained unsolved or at least warranted further discussion and research. in addition to the issues of user consent this particularly pertained to other issues of propagating practices that, although legal and widespread, were ethically questionable, e.g. participating in spreading meme images. one interviewee pointed out that researchers may come across content that has been re-distributed by users without notifying the original content creator, for example “you could have an image on your facebook that somebody who goes to reddit or 4chan or tumblr sees and puts a caption on and puts there kind of without your consent. (...) and then here i am as a researcher propagating that by putting a billion of you in my paper”. conclusion and outlook to summarize, in this paper we have shown that a) strategies to ethics in social media are complex, differ in often subtle ways, and sometimes aim to achieve different or even contradictory goals (e.g. personal privacy vs. recognition of authoring); b) researchers solve ethical dilemmas individually and value flexible approaches to research ethics while showing concern for problematic phenomena such as working on the basis of unclear user consent or propagating the unwanted and uncontrollable spread of private images; c) some ethical problems re-occur on various platforms and solutions have been found that are transferable, e.g. thinking about users’ intentions when posting. researchers take responsibility for the ethical dilemmas that can occur in social media research and individual approaches are often successful in finding solutions that are tailored to specific contexts. general rules or standards might be difficult to adhere to considering the number and complexity of possible ethical dilemmas and also potentially cannot cope with the pace of development of underlying technologies, usage ways and platform designs. in accordance with the view that researchers have and should have an important role in identifying ethical problems we also recognize that “there is a need for further research on the beliefs and expectations of those using social media in relation to how their material might be used in research” (mckee 2013) and of research into users’ views on authorship, privacy and copyright issues. references ess, c. 2002. ethical decision-making and internet research: recommendations from the aoir ethics working committee. available: http://www.aoir.org/reports/ethics.pdf ess, c. 2014. digital media ethics. cambridge, malden: polity press. kinder-kurlanda, k., and ehrwein nihan, c. 2013. ethically intelligent? a framework for exploring human resource management challenges of intelligent working environments. in: van berlo, ad, et al. (eds.): ambient intelligence – software and applications. 3rd international symposium on ambient intelligence (isami 2012). advances in intelligent systems and computing, 219, berlin: springer, s. 213-219. henderson, m., johnson, nicola f., and auld, g. 2013. silences of ethical practice: dilemmas for researchers using social media, educational research and evaluation: an international journal on theory and practice, 19(6), 546-560. markham, a., and buchanan, e. 2012. ethical decision-making and internet research 2.0: recommendations from the aoir ethics working committee. available: www.aoir.org/reports/ethics2.pdf mckee, r. 2013. ethical issues in using social media for health and health care research. health policy, 110 (2–3), 298-301. rooke, b. 2013. four pillars of internet research ethics with web 2.0, journal of academic ethics, 111(4), 265-268. shapiro, r.b., and ossorio, p. 2013. regulation of online social network studies. science 11 january 2013, 144-145. zimmer, m. 2010. “but the data is already public”: on the ethics of research in facebook. ethics and information technology, 12(4), 313–325. aoir-digital navigation technologies and the experience of urban place selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 digital navigation technologies and the experience of urban place germaine r. halegoua university of kansas the ways in which urban form is understood and valued, how populations navigate urban environments, and how people experience and understand cities is more reliant on digital media technologies and practices than ever before. scholars of mobile, locative, or geo-coded social media have considered the role that digital media play in reorganizing public space and place (gordon and de souza e silva, 2011; humphreys, 2010; wilken and goggin, 2012), re-conceptualizing the social structures that define physical spaces (sheller, 2004; cranshaw et al., 2012), coordinating activities or faceto-face interactions (ling and yttri, 2002), exhibiting geo-coded texts and images as self-presentation (schwartz and halegoua, 2014), and encouraging certain types of mobility (frith, 2013), which are sometimes playful or creative (de souza e silva and sutko, 2009; cramer et al., 2011; farman, 2012; licoppe and inada, 2010). while mobile communication between users, the utilization of geo-coded texts and gps coordinates in locative media projects and games, and the disclosure or sharing of location within social media systems tends to be the focus of scholarly and industry research, there is still much to investigate about the lived experiences and practices of utilizing digital navigation technologies to interact with public space and place. in particular, tactics, experiences, and perceptions of wayfinding with mobile, digital navigation technologies are one area of interest that deserves further study by digital media researchers. one of the most common uses of gps, particularly among smartphone users, is online mapping tools and mobile navigation technologies (zickuhr, 2013), yet we know very little about how these technologies are incorporated into everyday life, how they shape spatial relations, influence cognitive mappings of urban space, and how they contribute to the formation of a sense of place. many scholars and critics have understood digital navigation technologies as enacting processes of alienation, abstraction, and disembedding or distancing of the digital media user from space and place. in contrast to popular assumptions about the distracted perception of space and place encouraged by digital navigation technologies, this study illustrates and analyzes the ways in which the exact opposite processes are observable: that navigation technology users are developing wayfinding strategies that re-embed themselves within urban space, resuggested citation (apa): halegoua, g. (2015, october 21-24). digital navigation technologies and the experience of urban place. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. imagine their image of the city, alter perceptions and practices of mobility, and create a sense of place within urban environments. this case study is an example of a process i’ve described (halegoua 2012) as “re-placeing” the city: the subjective, everyday practices of assessing and combining physical, social, and digital contexts in order to more fully understand one’s embeddedness within urban places, and to produce a unique sense of place. through questionnaires with 253 navigation technology (such as gps, digital maps, and mobile navigation systems) users and interviews with 10 navigation technology users, this paper identifies the ways that users understanding their own spatial relations, conditions of and tactics for mobility, and embeddedness within urban space. eighty-two questionnaires and 10 interviews were conducted with residents of madison, wi ages 19-33 in 2010. one hundred seventy-one questionnaires were conducted with residents of lawrence, ks ages 17-38 in 2015. the pairing of questionnaires and interviews allowed for more in depth explanations of how participants understood the concept of a “sense of place,” practices of cognitive mapping, the connections between navigation technologies and placemaking, as well as how personal mobility was experienced, aided and/or altered by navigation technology use. the second round of questionnaires, conducted in 2015, allowed for comparison of mobile, digital navigation practices, shifting relationships with digital navigation products and services, and experiences of wayfinding over time. the findings from this study highlight some of the new spatial practices and perceptions that emerge from everyday use of mobile, digital navigation technologies. studies in experimental and environmental psychology have repeatedly shown that digital, mobile map users perform worse than study participants who took more “active” roles in route planning (e.g. using paper maps, studying routes and locations before travel) when tested on spatial learning and memory, route recall, and travel distance and time measurement tasks (ishikawa et al., 2008; willis et al., 2009; münzer et al., 2006). several of the participants in my study thought that they lacked proficiency in aspects of orientation and legibility traditionally associated with cognitive mapping (such as knowledge of how and where streets intersect, cardinal directions, distance between locations, city boundaries, etc.) and noted a dependency on their mobile, digital navigation technologies for this type of information. while they found these aspects of spatial knowledge important to understanding a city, their lack of proficiency in this realm was not regarded as a detriment. instead, participants’ reliance on digital, mobile navigation technologies for directions, route guidance, and orientation were understood as a means toward developing a deeper sense of urban place. participants regarded mobile, digital navigation technologies as a way to experience a sense of place “more quickly”, “easily”, and more comfortably, as well as an apparatus that encouraged exploration of a city in terms of social as well as physical aspects. the majority of participants in this study regarded a sense of place as feeling at “home”, “belonging”, “comfort”, part of a “community”, having an emotional attachment to, and familiarity with social and cultural as well as physical aspects of a city. these participants also tended to note that knowing routes, directions, and the layout of a city were elements that digital navigation technologies could provide, but that did not directly contribute to their sense of place. participants explained how mobile, digital navigation technologies play a significant role in cultivating their sense of place by allowing them to focus on characteristics and activities (such as exploration without anxiety, traveling to unfamiliar places, concentrating on social encounters, etc.) that promote a sense of place, rather than directions and orientation. the majority of participants tended to indicate that they readily “offload” their sense of direction or share a joint responsibility for wayfinding with mobile, digital navigation technologies in order to focus on and experience aspects of place beyond the perceived affordances of digital navigation systems. mobile, digital navigation technologies were regarded as placemaking tools because of their utilization as inanimate collaborators on wayfinding tasks, so that users could explore and experience the city as a rich and meaningful place in ways that were important to them. relatedly, the findings from this study tend to support frith’s (2015) suggestion that digital, mobile navigation technologies function as part of “transactive memory networks” for wayfinding rather than primarily detract from or impede spatial knowledge and learning skills. in contrast to previous studies, several participants noted that routine and repeated use of navigation technologies within transactive memory networks, served as a spatial learning aid in terms of legibility of the city and their place within it. ultimately, this paper presents empirical analysis of the ways in which digital navigation technology use encourages pedestrians and motor vehicle operators to re-place the unknown, unfamiliar space of the city as an accessible, familiar, bounded place and how this understanding of space allows for a deeper sense of place on the part of digital media users. although navigation technology non-use is not directly addressed in this paper, i will present some preliminary findings and offer some initial analysis regarding non-use that has been gathered as part of the questionnaire and interview process. the findings presented in this paper asks us to rethink what we know about the use of navigation technologies in urban space and to reconsider how these technologies are integrated into placemaking activities to help users cultivate a sense of place, rather than to diminish one. references cramer, h., ahmet, z., rost, m., holmquist, e. (2011). gamification and locationsharing: some emerging social conflicts. chi 2011 vancouver, bc, canada. may 7-12. cranshaw, j., schwartz, r., hong, j., and sadeh, n. (2012). the livehoods project: utilizing social media to understand the dynamics of a city in proceedings of the sixth international aaai conference on weblogs and social media (icwsm 2012). de souza e silva, a. and sutko, d. (eds.). (2009). digital cityscapes: merging digital and urban playspaces. new york: peter lang. farman, j. (2012). mobile interface theory: embodied space and locative media. new york: routledge. frith, j. (2015). smartphones as locative media. malden: polity press. frith, j. (2013). turning life into a game: foursquare, gamification, and personal mobility in mobile media & communication, 1(2), 248-262. gordon, e. and de souza e silva, a. (2011). net locality: why location matters in a networked world. malden: wiley-blackwell. halegoua, g. (2012). new mediated spaces and the urban environment. (doctoral dissertation). retrieved from proquest. (3512069) humphreys, l. (2010). mobile social networks and urban public space in new media & society, 12(5), 763-778. ishikawa, t., fujiwara, h., imai, o., and okabe, a. (2008). wayfinding with a gps based mobile navigation system: a comparison with maps and direct experience in journal of environmental psychology, 28, 74–82. licoppe, c., and inada, y. (2010). "locative media and cultures of mediated proximity: the case of the mogi game location-aware community" in environment and planning d: society and space, 28(4), 691 – 709. ling, r. and yttri, b. (2002). “hypercoordination via mobile phones in norway” in j. katz and m. aakhus (eds.) perpetual contact: mobile communication, private talk, public performance. pp. 139-69. cambridge: cambridge university press. münzer, s., zimmer, h. d., schwalm, m., baus, j., and aslan, i. (2006). navigation assistance and the acquisition of route and survey knowledge in journal of environmental psychology, 26, 300-308. schwartz, r. and halegoua, gr. (2014). the spatial self: location-based identity performance on social media in new media & society. sheller, m. (2004). mobile publics: beyond the network perspective in environment and planning d, 22(1), 39-52. wilken, r. and goggin, g. (eds.). (2012). mobile technology and place. routledge, london. willis, ks, hölscher, c., wilbertz, g., and li, c. (2009). a comparison of spatial knowledge acquisition with maps and mobile maps in computers, environment, and urban systems, 33, 100-110. zickuhr, k. (2013). location-based services. pew research center. september 12, 2013. microsoft word 689-442-1-pb.docx selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 close intimate playthings? understanding player-avatar relationships as a function of attachment, agency, and intimacy jaime banks university of toronto mississauga canada amperjay@gmail.com nicholas david bowman west virginia university usa nicholas.bowman@mail.wvu.edu abstract the study of the player-avatar relationship has been central to scholars of video games and virtual worlds. work has attempted to explain the relationship by focusing on the technologies of social presence, the socio-emotional relationship between players and avatars as distinct social others, the capability of players to adopt the personae of their avatars, and the psychological merging of player and avatar as a unified person. while these approaches are useful in explaining specific forms and types of player-avatar relationships, they tend to adopt qualitativelydifferent approaches to the phenomenon that limit their ability to inform one another and, in turn, our understanding of the holistic player-avatar experience. to this end, the following paper demonstrates how player-avatar archetypes generated from narrative analysis can be reanalyzed for dimensions of character attachment to highlight intersections with agency and intimacy, and suggests the utility of such an approach to understanding the larger video game entertainment experience. keywords avatars; character attachment; intimacy; agency; video games; entertainment introduction central to research on video games and virtual worlds is the player-avatar relationship (par): the interaction between a corporeal person and a digital body. research perspectives on the nature of this relationship vary, suggesting it to be: a feature of social presence (de kort, ijsselsteijn, & poels, 2007), a function of emotional intimacy and perceived agency (banks, 2013), identification with avatar personae (yee, bailenson, & ducheneaut, 2009), and a merging of player and avatar psyches (lewis, weber, & bowman, 2008). yet, each recognizes that there are real physical humans and real digital avatars interacting in digital spaces. the following study uses in-depth player interviews to integrate (banks, 2013) and lewis et al.’s (2008) perspectives to provide a more comprehensive understanding of pars and suggests how a more integrative approach might aid our understanding of the gaming experience from an entertainment perspective. emotional intimacy and perceived agency in pars recent scholarship (lee, 2007) has questioned whether humans can form intimate relationships with technologies made by them and for them. for turkle (2007), the focus is less on the capability of machines to feel emotion but rather the extent to which humans can become emotionally vulnerable to their machines. here, we consider emotional intimacy – the perception of closeness resulting in feelings of mutual care and understanding (sinclair & dowdy, 2005). in massively multiplayer online games (mmos), an avatar is taken up by a player over extended periods of time and “cared for” as it advances in the game. related to emotional intimacy is the notion of perceived agency, or the degree to which the player sees herself or the avatar as being “in charge” of gameplay experiences. banks (2013) suggested these two dimensions coalesce, with lower intimacy associated with player agency and higher intimacy associated with avatar agency. specifically, four par archetypes were identified along this intimacy/agency (i/a) continuum: avatar-as-object (high player agency, low intimacy, focus on combat and competition), avatar-as-me (high player agency, moderate intimacy, focus on social play), avatar-as-symbiote (mixed agency, moderate to high intimacy, focus on negotiating identities), and avatar-as-other (high avatar agency, high intimacy, focus on escape and demarcations of the physical and digital). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 character attachment the notion of character attachment (ca: lewis et al., 2008) argues that unlike most forms of mediated entertainment, video games and immersive digital environments are interactive spaces requiring players to interact via virtual embodiments. this interactivity suggests that we frame the par as a varying degree of “psychological merging of a player’s and [avatar’s] mind” (p. 515). ca is (a) a sense of identification as one’s avatar, (b) a suspension of disbelief in accepting the avatar’s in-game environment as a real space, (c) a sense control over an avatar’s in-game actions, and (d) a sense of responsibility for an avatar’s needs. bowman, schultheiss, & schumann (2012) found differences in ca to be significantly associated with antiand pro-social gameplay motivations in online roleplaying games, with anti-social players feeling less responsible for and pro-social players feeling more control over their avatars. bowman, rogers, sherrick, woolley, & chung (2013) found that players who reported on enjoyable video games – games that lead to feelings of excitement, arousal, and hedonicrooted positive affect – were players who tended to feel great senses of control over their avatars, while players who reported on meaningful video games – games that fostered a sense of appreciation, introspection, and self-reflection of the game experience – were players who tended to feel strong senses of responsibility over their avatars. mapping character attachment to relationship archetypes to address potential alignment between i/a and ca approaches, transcriptions from 70 hours of world of warcraft player interviews conducted by banks (2013) were re-analyzed for the presence of ca dimensions (lewis et al., 2008). the initial interviews used iterative grounded theory analysis to establish the four par archetypes, and the re-analysis employed thematic narrative analysis to identify ca dimensions. figure 1: conceptual classification of banks’ (2013) player-avatar archetypes with lewis et al.’s (2008) dimensions of character attachment. note that moving from left to right across each column represents an increase in emotional intensity and a focus on avatar-agency, with “low” “mid” and “high” designating perceived levels of each character attachment subdimension. as seen in figure 1, ca dimensions of suspension of disbelief and sense of care and responsibility align with the intimacy/agency (i/a) continuum archetypes, with “object” players expressing the lowest degrees and “other” players expressing the highest. for sense of control, however, there is an inverse relationship with the i/a archetypes, as “object” players expressed high control and “other” players expressed low control. finally, the ca dimension of identification diverged from the i/a selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 continuum, with “me” players expressing the greatest sense of identification (see figure 2 for illustrative narrative excerpts). figure 2: exemplar player interview statements associating varying levels of character attachment with different playeravatar archetypes. these patterns can be explained when we consider self-differentiation as a requirement for emotional intimacy and transferred agency. according to bowen (1978), emotional intimacy requires that people exist both separately and together as distinct participants in a relationship. here, a player must be able to see the avatar as separate from him/herself in order to emotionally care for it and to see it as a legitimate agent. from this, it makes sense that suspension of disbelief and increased responsibility would align with the i/a-continuum archetypes. further, the inverse relationship with sense of control also makes sense: as a player increasingly sees the avatar as a moral agent (rather than merely a tool), there appears to be a tendency toward perceptions that the avatar may “control itself” according to a perceived inherent subjectivity or narrative trajectory. however, players experiencing a “psychological merging” have diminished self-differentiation; as a condition for intimacy is the recognition of another as a separate actor, we would expect that players high in ca (for example, high on identification) to be less emotionally intimate with them. in a sense, these players appropriate their avatars to place themselves in virtual spaces rather than partnering with the avatar in those spaces. implications for the gaming entertainment experience such an integrative approach to understanding pars holds implications for understanding those relationships’ influence on gameplay’s entertainment gratifications, namely those of enjoyment (hedonic reactions related to arousal and positive affect) and appreciation (eudaimonic reactions related to reflecting on humanity; oliver & raney, 2011; bowman et al., 2013). for example, “object” players may be more likely to focus on in-game mechanics and challenges, resulting in enjoyment experiences linked to “pleasures of control” (bowman et al., p. 13). by contrast, “other” players may be more likely to focus on social and relational dimensions of the game narrative and virtual environment, resulting in appreciation experiences linked to “pleasures of cognition” (bowman et al., p. 13). examining these possibilities not only allows us to better understand the outcomes of selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 gaming as a function of pars, but also to examine the motivations for and formations of pars as a function of the desire for different entertainment outcomes. conclusion our early analysis of two seemingly-divergent approaches to pars – one looking at intimacy and agency between player and avatar and one looking at their psychological merging – not only demonstrates the compatibility of both perspectives in highlighting fundamental elements of par, but also informs related work in areas such as the qualitative entertainment experience of the video game. references bandura, a. (1990). mechanisms of moral disengagement. in w. reich, (ed.), origins of terrorism: psychologies, ideologies, theologies, states of mind. cambridge: cambridge university press, 161-191. banks, j. (2013). human-technology relationality and self-network organization: players and avatars in world of warcraft. (unpublished doctoral dissertation). colorado state university, fort collins, co, usa. bowen, m. (1978). family therapy in clinical practice. new york: aronson. bowman, n. d., rogers, r., sherrick, b. i., woolley, j., & chung, m-y. (2013, april). “in control or in their shoes”: how character attachment differentially influences video game enjoyment and appreciation. paper presented at the broadcast education association research symposium, media and the social life. bowman, n. d., schultheiss, d., & schumann, c. (2012). “i’m attached, and i’m a good guy/gal”: how character attachment influences proand anti-social motivations to play mmorpgs. cyberpsychology, behavior, and social networking, 15(3), 169-174. de kort, y. a. w., ijsselsteijn, w. a., & poels, k. (2007, october). digital games as social presence technology: development of the social presence in gaming questionnaire. presence 2007, barcelona. koo, c. y., & koivisto, e. m. (2004). defining grief play in mmorpgs: player and developer perceptions. proceedings of the 2004 acm sigchi international, 245-250. lee, b. (2007). nonverbal intimacy as a benchmark for human-robot interaction. interaction studies, 8(3), 441422. lewis, m. l., weber, r., & bowman, n. d. (2008). “they may be pixels, but they’re my pixels”: developing a metric of character attachment in role-playing video games. cyberpsychology and behavior, 11(4). 515-518. oliver, m. b., & raney, a. a. (2011). entertainment as pleasurable and meaningful: identifying hedonic and eudaimonic motivations for entertainment consumption. journal of communication, 61, 984-1004. sherry, j. l., lucas, k., greenberg, b. s., & lachlan, k. (2006). video game uses and gratifications as predictors of use and game preference. in p. vorderer & j. bryant (eds.), playing video games: motives, responses and consequences (pp. 213-224). hillsdale, nj: lea. sinclair, v.g., & dowdy, s.w. (2005). development and validation of the emotional intimacy scale. journal of nursing measurement, (13)3, 193-206. tamborini, r., bowman, n. d., eden, a., grizzard, m., & organ, a. (2010). defining media enjoyment as the satisfaction of intrinsic needs. journal of communication, 60(4), 758-777. turkle, s. (2007). authenticity in the age of digital companions. interaction studies, 8(3), 501-517. walther, j. b. (2007). selective self-presentation in computer-mediated communication: hyperpersonal dimensions of technology, language, and cognition. computers in human behavior, 23, 2538-2557. yee, n., bailenson, j. n., & ducheneaut, n. (2009). the proteus effect: implications of transformed digital selfrepresentation on online and offline behavior. communication research, 36(2), 285-312. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. ir14 crisis comms-final selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 disaster management as a socially distributed information system leysia palen university of colorado boulder usa palen@colorado.edu abstract this paper traces the shifts in internet-enabled disaster response over the past eight years through the lens of project epic’s research in the area, from individual reactions and the emergence of ‘virtual groups’ to, increasingly, regularized networks of digital aid workers, providing insights into the future of emergency management practice and policy. keywords crisis informatics; emergency response; social computing extended abstract of panelist contribution as documented by sociological research, members of the public have always played an essential role in disaster response—they are often in the “first responders” in disaster events, especially in the case of structural collapse (dynes, 1973). people take into account the actions of others during periods of warning; disseminate information when they have it to share; provide food and shelter during and after events to neighbors; transport people to medical facilities when the emergency medical response system is taxed; support the needs of formal responders; clean up debris, and so on (fischer, 1998; tierney, lindell & perry, 2001; tierney & quarantelli, 1989; kendra & wachtendorf, 2003). however, this socio-behavioral phenomena is something that most federal-level emergency management policies do not take into account in their implementations; for example, some have argued that the us national incident management system (nims) does not adequately take into account what the capacities and these inevitable actions by the public (wegner, quarantelli & dynes, 1990; buck, trainor & aguirre, 2006). rather, emergency management policies tend to focus on policing the far less occurring negative behaviors, creating an imbalance between plans and reality. the general misconception of the true value of the public in disaster response makes it difficult to appreciate the digital-abetted behaviors coming from the public sphere (palen, anderson et al., 2010). the new visibility of actions by members of the public through networked computing makes the helper-oriented social behaviors even more apparent, to the point that to many, the behaviors seem new. however, the motivating behaviors that we see displayed on line are not new, but the kinds of hazards-related tasks that can be accomplished are (palen, vieweg et al., 2009; starbird & palen, 2011; starbird & palen, 2013). though it is true that not all information produced by the public is valuable, this does not mean that none of it is valuable (palen, vieweg & anderson, 2011). the information stemming from the digital-abetted public sphere has moved from the simple posting of photos to flickr in the aftermath of the dec 24 2004 indian ocean tsunami (liu, et al, 2008) to include far more complex acts of multi-step problem-solving. in 2007 in the wake of the virginia tech shooting, students and concerned others collaboratively and accurately deduced the victim-status of members of their community in part through absence and presence in on-line forums, before the victims names were officially released (palen, vieweg, et al 2009). in the aftermath of the january 12 2011 haiti earthquake, digital volunteer groups sprung up in the twittersphere, after compassionate viewers around the world were motivated to help. they found a role in ‘filtering’ the vast amount of information on-line to make it more available to others and ‘amplifying’ important messages. they brokered needs to offers of help that they discovered on-line; and eventually worked together in more complex arrangements to distribute labor around innovative tasks, such as collecting cell phone numbers of haitian americans helping those on the ground and ‘filling up the minutes’ on their cell selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 phone plans to enable the work to keep going (starbird & palen, 2011, 2013). in a series of organizational transformations that model a form of emergence that kreps and bosworth (1994) describe, a subgroup of the haiti “voluntweeters” went on to incorporate as non-profit organization (starbird & palen, 2013) who have continued to formalize what it means to be a digital volunteer. also after the haiti earthquake, a volunteer team from the budding humanitarian open street map initiative mapped the country of haiti so rapidly that it was able to directly support relief and humanitarian efforts (http://hot.openstreetmap.org). project epic—empowering the public with information in crisis—at the university of colorado boulder aims to theoretically and descriptively explain these new social-technical phenomena arising out of a changing information ecosystem. we have developed our methods for empirical data collection and analysis since 2007 (eg., palen et al 2009; starbird et al 2010, sarcevic et al, 2012, mark et al 2012), evolving expertise as the social media-abetted socio-behavioral phenomena itself has changed. the approach combines qualitative and quantitative investigation over a large number of data points. it is ethnographic in the sense that researchers are committed to knowledge about the domain of hazards from scholarly and practice-based points of view. we are committed to understanding not just who and how much one is publicly posting, but rather is concerned with the whys and the means in which people do this. we examine the connections between people, the transformations of information representations. in addition to data-driven exploration of very large data sets, we align sociobehavioral phenomena with social science theory, particularly with that of the sociology of disaster. much of what we see exhibited in the physical world is exhibited anew online—including, for example, self-organizing behavior among spontaneous convergence of people and resources—though naturally with distinguishing characteristics that spring from the affordances of the on-line interaction medium. the demonstration of the emergent behaviors from spontaneous on-line reaction; from virtual groups (both fledgling and mature); and, increasingly, a regularized network of digital aid workers who are developing sophisticated ways of interacting with each other and the global events with which they engage, are all rapidly pushing the discussion of what the future emergency management practice and policy should look like. the future institution of emergency management will adapt so that it can appropriately and safely operate in a more socially distributed information environment. the work of people researching, developing and practicing in the crisis informatics sphere is to design that future, with the closest of attention to ethics, effectiveness and sustainability. acknowledgments project epic is supported by the us national science foundation under grant iis-0910586. references aguirre, be. 1993. review of social science research on warning, evacuation, and search and rescue. hazard and recovery center, texas a&m. buck, d a., j e. trainor, and b e. aguirre. "a critical evaluation of the incident command system and nims." journal of homeland security and emergency management 3.3 (2006). dynes, rr. 1970. organized behavior in disaster. heath. fischer iii, hw. 1998. response to disaster: fact versus fiction & perpetuation, 2nd ed. univ press of america: ny. hughes, a and l palen (2012). the evolving role of the public information officer: an examination of social media in emergency management, journal of homeland security and emergency management. volume 9, issue 1 issn (online) 1547-7355, doi:10.1515/15477355.1976, june 2012 kendra, j. & wachtendorf, t. 2003. creativity in emergency response to the world trade center disaster. in beyond september 11: an account of post disaster research, natural hazards center, boulder, co, 121-146. kreps, g. a. & bosworth, s.l. organizing, role enactment, and disaster: a structural theory. cranbury, nj: selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 associated university presses, 1994. liu, s, l palen, j sutton, a hughes, a vieweg* (2008). in search of the bigger picture: the emergent role of on-line photo-sharing in times of disaster. proceedings of the 2008 information systems for crisis response and management conference (iscram 2008), washington, d.c., pp. 140-149. palen, l and s liu (2007). citizen communications in crisis: anticipating a future of ictsupported participation, proceedings of the acm 2007 conference on human factors in computing systems (chi 2007), san jose, ca., pp. 727-736. palen, l, km anderson, g mark, j h. martin, d sicker, m palmer, d grunwald (2010). a vision for technology-mediated support for public participation & assistance in mass emergencies & disasters. association of computing machinery and british computing society’s 2010 conference on visions of computer science, edinburgh, united kingdom — april 13 16, 2010. palen, l, s vieweg, k m anderson (2011). supporting “everyday analysts” in safetyand time-critical situations. the information society journal, 27 (1), pp. 52-62. sarcevic, a, l palen, j white, m bagdouri, k starbird, k m. anderson, (2012). “beacons of hope” in decentralized coordination: learning from on-the-ground medical twitterers during the 2010 haiti earthquake 2012 acm conference on computer supported cooperative work, bellevue, wa. starbird, k, l palen, a hughes and s vieweg (2010). chatter on the red: what hazards threat reveals about the social life of microblogged information. the proceedings of the acm 2010 conference on computer supported cooperative work (cscw 2010), pp. 241-250 starbird, k and l palen (2011). “voluntweeters:” self-organizing by digital volunteers in times of crisis.in the proceedings of the acm 2011 conference on human factors in computing systems (chi 2011), vancouver, bc, pp 1071-1080. starbird, k and l palen (2013). working and sustaining the virtual “disaster desk.” to appear in the proceedings of the 2013 acm conference on computer supported cooperative work. cscw 2013. acm, new york, ny. tierney, k. & quarantelli, el. 1989. needed innovation in the delivery of emergency medical services in disasters: present and future. disaster management, 2(2): 70-76. tierney, k., lindell, mk, & perry, rw. 2001. facing the unexpected: disaster preparedness and response in the united states. john henry press: washington, dc. wenger, de, quarantelli, el. & dynes, rr. 1990. is the incident command system a plan for all seasons and emergency situations? university of delaware, disaster research center, #215. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 regulate, or adopt: government strategies to social media during armed conflict crises andrés monroy-hernández microsoft research usa amh@microsoft.com abstract in this paper, we examine three strategies government might take in response to the citizen adoption of social media during crises caused armed conflicts. we analyze the case of three locations afflicted by the mexican drug war and their government's strategies to social media, and propose a set of guidelines for governments dealing with similar issues. keywords crises; warfare; government; social media; twitter case studies the first case is a government that despite the heavy use of social media to report violence does little to regulate or to adopt it, seeing the emergence of a community of amateur reporters. this is the case of the state of nuevo leon, where despite rampant drug war-related violence the local government has, for the most part, ignored social media as a vehicle for informing its citizenry about the violence. coupled with increase mainstream media’s self-censorship, the lack of information has turned many people into citizen journalists, some of whom become de facto war correspondents (monroyhernandez et al., 2013). the second case is a government that in response to the spread of misinformation decides to regulate it through legal mechanisms, possibly leading to a decrease in engagement on social media. for this, we examine the case of the state of veracruz where challenges with trust and government regulation arise. more specifically, on august 25, 2011 at 11:56 am, a twitter user reported that five kids had been kidnapped at a school. the message was retweeted by twelve people, including an account with more than 5,000 followers. the rumor started to spread like wildfire. people spread the news through facebook, e-mails, and text messages. by noon, only four minutes after the first tweet, the governor of the state of veracruz tweeted that the rumor was false and asked people to disregard the reports. however, by then it was either too late, or the governor was not considered a reliable news source. dozens of parents rushed to pick up their children from school, causing massive traffic, chaos, and panic across the city. three hours later, the governor tweeted that his administration would go after those who spread the rumor charging them with terrorism. the same day, a state government website listed sixteen twitter accounts involved in the rumor. by saturday, two people had been arrested. many “tuiteros” countrywide rallied in opposition to the arrests, jokingly calling themselves “twitteroristas” (e.g., monroy-hernández (2011). after much pressure, the state government released the twitter users but enacted a new law that penalizes the use of social network sites for spreading misinformation that might cause panic. we found some evidence to suggest that the events of august 25 had a “chilling effect” on the level of participation in veracruz. first, we looked at the people who tweeted with the veracruz hashtag (#verfollow) before august 25. we then calculated their mean number of tweets (with or without #verfollow) per day before august 25 and compared it to their own mean after august 25. we found selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 that the mean dropped from 1.70 tweets per day to 1.23 (t = 14.3141, df = 1376.226, p < 0.001). more work is needed to see if perhaps this reduction could have been caused by a decrease in the violence itself or perhaps the use of a different hashtag. the third case examines a government that adopts social media as an additional channel of communication and interaction with citizens, which succeeds to some extent in providing a hybrid citizen-government information ecosystem. although several local governments have been reluctant to publicly accept the severity of the violence in their regions, others have turned to social media to deal with what they perceive as false rumors spread online. some local governments have created twitter accounts to connect with their citizens and report “risk situations”, as the violent events are euphemistically called. examples of this are the attorney’s office of coahuila (vanguardia, 2012) and the city government of reynosa. these governmental accounts are not without controversy; often citizens claim that these accounts stay quiet in midst of major events, while others have questioned the reliability of the information posted there. an interview with the spokesperson of the attorney’s office of coahuila, who is in charge of the official twitter account, describes the process of verification before he or his staff tweet an alert, which occurs within 5 minutes of receiving a report. the spokesman also encourages people to be more careful about their tweeting and even started a campaign on social media for “responsible tweeting”, he explains: “it's very easy for some people [to] post things to social networks right away […] without firsthand knowledge, sometimes because they heard something from a cousin, or a nephew, or someone else. we cannot do that.” conclusions as social media permeates society, its role in armed conflict is poised to rise in prominence. from the arab spring to occupy wall street, social media is one of the information platforms used in a wide range of moments. this will undoubtedly make it more challenging for different actors to assess the veracity of information on these platforms and put pressure on governments who were used to have full control of information. based on our preliminary analysis we put forward the following recommendations for government officials to make productive and democratic use of these new technologies: 1. broadcast prompt and relevant messages. publish timely and relevant information related to public safety. do not wait hours or days to release information that can help people avoid risky situations. do not use social media only as another platform to publicize the administration’s accomplishments. 2. engage with citizens. establish public channels of communication with curators and the public at large. build relationships over time. join public conversations, but expect criticism and push back. social media is expected to be participatory, but governments often forget to interact with their audience. plus, in mexico’s specific case, the traditional cultural relationship to government has not always been “participatory” in this way. 3. avoid regulation of social media. regulation is ineffective at reducing misinformation and has the side effect of dampening civic engagement. while well-meaning, government interventions often have unintended negative consequences. references dir. de gobierno rey (dirdegobreynosa) on twitter (2012). https://twitter.com/dirdegobreynosa. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 6 gómez leyva, c. (2010, february 25). twitter nos quiere matar de miedo. milenio. retrieved from http://impreso.milenio.com/node/8725469. fiscalíacoahuila (fiscaliacoah) on twitter (2012). https://twitter.com/#!/fiscaliacoah. monroy-hernández, a. (2011, september 5). shouting fire in a crowded hashtag: narco censorship & “twitteroristas” in mexico’s drug wars [blog post]. retrieved from http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_hashtag_narcocensorship.php monroy-hernández, a., boyd, d., kiciman, e., de choudhury, m., and counts, s. (2013). the new war correspondents: the rise of civic media curation in urban warfare. in proceedings of the 2013 conference on computer supported cooperative work (cscw '13). acm, new york, ny, usa, 14431452. sergio sisbeles: el hombre de las ‘malas’ noticias. vanguardia (2012, february 11). retrieved from http://www.vanguardia.com.mx/sergiosisbeleselhombredelasmalasnoticias-1216629.html license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 7 crisis research and the limits of social media datasets kate crawford microsoft research / mit center for civic media usa kate@katecrawford.net megan finn microsoft research usa megfin@microsoft.com abstract the current focus on networked technologies in crisis informatics research has brought exciting new insights into how we understand communication during disaster events. however, there are limits inherent in crisis data which can produce particular kinds of analytical oversights. the use of twitter data to reflect activity during a crisis event cannot account for the many communities that are either not using social media, or are living in areas where post-disaster ict infrastructure is damaged or overwhelmed. crisis data is sometimes used with an implicit acceptance of short timeframes, without accounting for the context that preceded a disaster or the long recovery period. twitter data can reveal fascinating trends, but does not always take into account for the context of social media use by affected communities. we offer ways forward for studying “disaster data” that remain connected to critical histories of how disasters are understood and addressed, and suggest approaches to address current limitations. [140] keywords crisis communication; disasters; crisis informatics; bias; differential vulnerability. extended abstract of panelist contribution the current emphasis on twitter data as a source of insight on acute events cannot fully account for the many people and communities that are either not using social media, or are living in areas where ict infrastructure is damaged or overwhelmed (crawford 2013). crisis events have always presented the difficulty of differential vulnerability: some communities and individuals are hit harder than others (oliver-smith and hoffman 2002). those who are older, less wealthy and not living in urban centres are less well represented, resulting in data that the geographers crutcher and zook observe is “colored by the fundamental divides pre-existing in society and in some cases can amplify them” (2009, 532533). researchers in critical geography (e.g. white, 1974; hewitt, 1983) and sociology (e.g. erikson, 1976) and anthropology (see summary by oliver-smith 1996; oliver-smith and hoffman 2002) have noted the problematic definition of a disaster as an unforeseen outside agent. rather, a long trajectory of research has emphasized that the way disasters are understood is socially constructed. this is particularly evident when we consider the temporal framing of disasters: the interactions between state actors, ngos and mainstream media to define the length of what tierney describes as the disaster “event” (2007). delimiting time around a disaster can often make it difficult to comprehend long term structural issues that make for a traumatic event, and to notice how long recovery takes. as two legal scholars make clear: “the aftermath of catastrophe is typically a drawn-out process of social reconfiguration in which different forms of legal intervention are used to shape a future that usually looks nothing like the pre-catastrophe past” (sarat and lezaun 2009: 5). after the attention of the public is a gone, the “aftermath” is when the hard work of attempting to rebuild “the familiar” occurs (erikson 1976; biel 2001). one needs to look for years, even decades after a disaster to understand its impact. however, social media data looks at a disaster in a specific and often short time-period, typically defined by the spike or “burstiness” in twitter messages (burgess and crawford 2011). this can make selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 8 it difficult to understand the causes of disaster and the entire period of aftermath where the impact is realized, further reifying problematically short-term conceptions of disaster. in this sense, analysis of social media during and after a disaster resembles the limitation of traditional media coverage, which has been often accused of paying attention to only the most sensational stories in a truncated timeframe (button 2002; sangari 2009). social media data sets focus on the aggregated responses of individuals and their reactions to events, alerts and public information. there is a need for a more critical account of the way in which different kinds of institutional disaster responders engage with communities, from local police, to fema, to groups such as occupy sandy. many dynamics shape tweeting practice and institutions and individuals use twitter to pursue goals that go beyond ‘witnessing’ an event. twitter use is often described as performative (e.g. papacharissi, 2012; mariwick and boyd, 2012). institutions or people who tweet about disasters ‘perform’ roles with predetermined ideas about the makeup of their audience (chouliaraki 2013). focusing on aggregated twitter data can make it difficult to parse out the role of major institutions in defining a disaster. more broadly, by expanding the lens of crisis data to include the wider ecologies of data generated by humans and code, and by considering who is and is not represented, we can see that single data channels are both narrow in capacity as well as skewed in particular ways. social media data is always partial and incomplete. our research attempts to grapple with how twitter and other social media resources help different groups of people (including researchers) make sense of a disaster. as we consider the epistemological and ontological challenges with research using crisis-related social media data, we have observed techniques which help us attempt to address these challenges. these include placing social media-based crisis research within the wider historical and critical disaster research tradition, developing conventions for the ethical use of sensitive data, making explicit the biases in data, and using multi-disciplinary approaches to disaster research. critical approaches to disaster research have explored the “emergency imaginary” which reproduces the definition of a disaster as existing in a concentrated time and space as the result of an outside agent. research that makes use of crisis data can aim to situate findings within these critical approaches. additionally, augmenting crisis data with reviews of work that considers structural problems that underpin a disaster will add richness to analysis. second, when people tweet or text, they may not intend for their data to be used in a research project, let alone be used months or years after the event. internet researchers have a productive history of considering ethical research design. ethical standards, like those developed by aoir researchers, need to be discussed in conjunction with analysis such that widely agreed upon approaches are adopted. researchers choose the data they work with, and different research traditions have their own ways of documenting the interpretive moves that shape their datasets. we have techniques for cleaning data, incorporating (or removing) data from bots or parody accounts that need to be explicit to readers. as researchers, we need to consider the best practices to make explicit to other researchers and the general public what is missing in our datasets. multi-disciplinary research groups are another way that epistemological limitations of social media datasets can be addressed, by bringing different types of data and analysis to bear on a research question. research designs with methodological diversity have the potential to both take advantage of the opportunity to use social media data to learn about trends with acute events, but also to appreciate the context in which media is produced. [963 words] references austin, lucinda, brooke fisherr liu & yan jin, “how audiences seek out crisis information: exploring the social-mediated crisis communication model,” journal of applied communication research 40, no. 2: 188-207. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 9 biel, seven (2001) “introduction,” in american disasters, steven biel, ed. new york and london: new york university press, 103-128. burgess, j. and crawford, k (2011) “acute events in social media,” paper at the association of internet researchers conference, seattle, october, www.slideshare.net/jeangenie/acute-events-insocial-media button, gregory (2010) disaster culture: knowledge and uncertainty in the wake of human and environmental catastrophe. walnut creek, ca: left coast press, inc. calhoun, craig (2004) “a world of emergencies: fear, intervention, and the limits of cosmopolitan order,” canadian review of sociology/revue canadienne de sociologie, 41: 373–395 chouliaraki, lilie (2013) “re-mediation, inter-mediation, trans-mediation,” journalism studies, 14:2, 267-283 cooley, skye and amy jones (2013) “a forgotten twee: somalia and social media,” ecquid novi: african journalism studies 34, no. 1: 68-82. crawford, k. (2013) “hidden biases in big data,” harvard business review, april 1, http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/04/the_hidden_biases_in_big_data.html crutcher, m. and zook, m. (2009). “placemarks and waterlines: racialized cyberscapes in post katrina google earth,” geoforum. 40, no. 4: 523-534 erikson, k. (1976) everything in its path: destruction of community in the buffalo creek flood. new york: simon & schuster. garcia-acosta, v. (2002) “historical disaster research,” in catastrophe and culture: the anthropology of disaster, susanna m hoffman and anthony oliver-smith, eds. santa fe: school of american research press. gillespie, tarleton (2010) “the politics of ‘platforms.’” new media & society 12, no. 3. hewitt, k, ed. (1983). interpretations of calamity: from the viewpoint of human ecology. boston: allen & unwin. lotan, gilad, erhardt graeff, mike ananny, devin gaffney, ian pearce, and danah boyd (2011) "the revolutions were tweeted: information flows during the 2011 tunisian and egyptian revolutions," international journal of communications 5, 1375-1405. mccosker, anthony, “de-framing disaster: affective encounters with raw and autonomous media,” continuum: journal of media and cultural studies 27, no. 3, 382-396. oliver-smith, anthony (1996). “anthropological research on hazards and disasters,” annual review of anthropology 25: 303-328. oliver-smith, anthony (2002) “theorizing disasters: nature, power, and culture,” in catastrophe and culture: the anthropology of disaster, susanna m hoffman and anthony oliver-smith, eds. santa fe, nm: school of american research press, 23-48. oliver-smith, a, and hoffman, s., eds. (2002) “introduction,” in catastrophe and culture: the anthropology of disaster. santa fe: school of american research press. papacharissi, z. (2012) “without you i’m nothing: performances of the self on twitter,” international journal of communications 6: 1989-2006 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 10 papacharissi, z. and de fatima oliveira, m. (2012) “affective news and networked publics: the rhythms of news storytelling on #egypt,” journal of communication 62, no. 2: 266-282. rozario, kevin (2007) the culture of calamity: disaster and the making of modern america. chicago: university of chicago press. sangari, k. (2009) “conjunction and flow: the gendered temporalities of (media) disaster,” e-media studies 2, no.1: http://journals.dartmouth.edu/cgibin/webobjects/journals.woa/2/xmlpage/4/article/335. sarat, austin and javier lezaun (2009) “introduction: the challenge of crisis and catastrophe in law and politics,” in catastrophe: law, politics and the humanitarian impulse sarat, austin and javier lezaun, eds. amherst, ma: university of massachusetts press. tierney, kathleen. “from the margins to the mainstream? disaster research at the crossroads.” annual review of sociology 33 (2007): 504-525 vis, farida (2013) “twitter as a reporting tool for breaking news,” digital journalism 1, no 1, 27-47. white, gf. (1974) natural hazards: local, national, global. new york: oxford univ. press. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. (authors may use any license they prefer, or none at all.) selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 11 cumulative and comparative social media analytics for crisis communication jean burgess queensland university of technology australia je.burgess@qut.edu.au axel bruns queensland university of technology australia a.bruns@qut.edu.au abstract this paper draws on comparative analyses of twitter data sets – over time and across different kinds of natural disasters and different national contexts – to demonstrate the value of shared, cumulative approaches to social media analytics in the context of crisis communication. keywords social media analytics; twitter; natural disasters; methodology background the sub-field of crisis communication research that is focused specifically on internet-based and mobile communication has moved through a number of distinct phases, roughly corresponding to paradigmatic shifts in or ‘versions’ (allen, 2012) of web culture. for example, alongside the rise of ‘web 2.0’ as a concept and a set of practices, attention was paid to the role of citizen journalism and user-created content (like flickr photos) in communicating about, witnessing, and responding to crisis events, from civil violence to natural disasters (palen & liu, 2007; liu et al, 2008). the strong current interest in the use of ‘social media’ during such events is associated with the much broader uptake of platforms like twitter, weibo and facebook, among others, as well as with powerful new approaches to accessing and analysing user-generated communicative data at high volume. these form part of a wider range of new research methodologies based around ‘big social data’ (burgess & bruns 2102). this has also opened up the field to a broader range of disciplinary inputs – from computer science to cultural studies – than was the case in the previous, more specialised phase of crisis informatics work (bruns et al. 2012; cheng et al. 2011; cheong & cheong 2011; hughes & palen 2009; kongthon et al. 2012; lotan et al. 2011; mendoza et al. 2010; palen et al. 2010). despite this significant shift in the volume and impact of the research conducted on social media’s role in crisis communication, the field remains disorganised and disconnected: multiple research teams around the world are studying very similar topics and problems, using common data sources (such as twitter hashtag data sets or the twitter firehose feed) and remarkably similar sets of metrics, but with little sense of lateral coordination or cumulative theoretical development. further, much of this research remains focused on individual case studies – of particular crisis events, in particular national or local contexts. in this paper, we contribute to efforts to move beyond ‘snapshot’-style studies of individual incidents and to develop methodologies capable of identifying patterns – and departures from those patterns – across different kinds of crises within different contexts and constituencies, and across time. there is in fact a standard set of metrics, while not commonly recognised as such, that can be and is being applied to the twitter data associated with any ‘acute event’ (burgess & crawford, 2011). in our own research, we typically identify the following: 1. key patterns of activity volume within the temporal space of a particular event and across events; 2. key actors and their levels of individual activity, as well as the extent to which they are referred to, retweeted, and otherwise relied upon by other actors (that is, their visibility); selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 12 3. key themes, topics and uses, and their rise and fall across the duration covered by the data set (informed by qualitative analysis). our work has focused particularly on geographically proximate natural disasters – including a series of cyclones and floods in queensland, australia (bruns et al, 2012); and of earthquakes in christchurch, new zealand (bruns & burgess, 2012). the recurring nature of such disaster events in the same locations provides us with a unique opportunity to undertake a longitudinal study of the development of social media use in crisis communication contexts: we are able to compare a standard set of metrics for very similar events over time. three examples of cumulative and comparative analysis cumulative knowledge practices in the christchurch earthquakes the sequence of four major (m6-m7) earthquakes in christchurch, new zealand, from september 2010 to december 2011, and the recurring use of #eqnz (short for earthquake new zealand) as the central coordinating hashtag for twitter-based discussion of these events, provides an opportunity for a unique longitudinal study of social media use in identical disasters affecting the same urban centre. our analysis of the use of twitter in these events shows the gradual development of an increasingly sophisticated network of leading twitter accounts which provided crucial information during these emergencies and/or coordinated the dissemination of such information; however, it also documents how some actors were considerably more successful at establishing themselves as key information sources across all four events than others (fig. 1). the same is true also for the #eqnz hashtag itself: while in the immediate aftermath of the first earthquake, a brief ‘hashtag war’ (seitzinger, 2011) finally settled on #eqnz as the central space for communication, such debates were not revisited in subsequent events. figure 1: leaderboard of most visible accounts across the four #eqnz events, for selected leading accounts. (1 = greatest number of @mentions and retweets for that account in the data set for a specific earthquake event.) overall user activities also show a notable development in their sophistication from one event to the next; however, due to the more limited severity of the june and december 2011 earthquakes, and the substantially more limited interest from non-local twitter users which results from this, these later events operate at a significantly lower volume than the earlier earthquakes. this should not be equated selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 13 with a decline in the importance of twitter as an emergency medium in these contexts; rather, while the total number of active participants may have declined, it is likely that those who have remained are significantly more likely to have been directly affected by these subsequent earthquake events. comparing social dynamics across different natural disasters fig. 2 compares the most visible accounts (as measured by the @replies and retweets received) across the january 2011 south east queensland floods and february 2011 christchurch earthquake. it shows a considerably more diversified twitter ecology for the christchurch case, likely as a result of the experience of twitter use in the preceding september 2010 earthquake; by february, a wide range of twitter accounts representing local and national authorities, media organisations, and communications utilities are present and active. by contrast, the queensland case is more strongly centred around one major authority, the queensland police service’s @qpsmedia account, and otherwise features a selection of media organizations only. figure 2: most visible accounts for #qldfloods (jan. 2011; left) and #eqnz (feb. 2012; right) the identification of such influential accounts is important for a number of reasons. first, it provides direct feedback to the operators of such accounts – especially to emergency services organisations and other key information sources – on whether their social media activities are effective, that is, whether other twitter users are seeing and responding to their messages. second, especially from a comparative perspective it identifies gaps in the existing crisis communication ecology which may need to be addressed in preparation for future disaster events, especially if such events are likely to reoccur for geographic or climatic reasons – in the queensland case, for example, the central role of the police service account highlights the comparative absence of twitter accounts for fire, ambulance, or state emergency services as key sources of disaster information. third, the correlation of these patterns of visibility with different disaster types also sheds light on the relative information needs of the general public across these diverse crisis situations, and can inform further social media communication strategies. comparing dynamics across multiple kinds of events fig. 3 compares two key metrics – the percentage of tweets containing urls in each data set, and the percentage of direct retweets in each data set – across a wide range of hashtag datasets relating both to crisis and to other major events of recent years. at the centre of the graph is an obvious cluster of clearly crisis-related events, characterized by a substantial percentage both of url tweets and of retweets. this cluster is clearly distinct from another cluster which represents widely televised political and entertainment events which feature few urls or retweets. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 14 figure 3: correlation between percentage of urls and percentage or retweets, compared across several hashtag datasets. size of circles indicates size of the overall dataset, measured in the number of tweets. this preliminary analysis of only one of many possible correlations between the standard social media analytics metrics which bruns & stieglitz (2013) have outlined already points to the likelihood that there are relatively stable behavioural patterns in the responses of twitter users to major events; such assumptions must be explored further through the addition of a greater number of data points to this study. if such patterns are indeed found to be stable, then, this may also aid in the development of early crisis detection mechanisms that build on twitter data. acknowledgments the research on which this paper is based was supported by the australian research council. references allen, m. (2012). what was web 2.0? versions as the dominant mode of internet history. new media & society 15(2): 260-275. bruns, a., & burgess, j. (2012, 18 april). local and global responses to disaster: #eqnz and the christchurch earthquake. paper presented at the australia new zealand disaster & emergency management conference, brisbane. retrieved from http://snurb.info/files/2012/local%20and%20global%20responses%20to%20disaster.pdf selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 15 bruns, a., burgess, j., crawford, k., and shaw, f. (2012). #qldfloods and @qpsmedia: crisis communication on twitter in the 2011 south east queensland floods. arc centre of excellence for creative industries & innovation, brisbane qld australia. bruns, a., & stieglitz, s. (2013). towards more systematic twitter analysis: metrics for tweeting activities. international journal of social research methodology, (ahead-of-print), 1-18. burgess, j., & bruns, a. (2012). twitter archives and the challenges of "big social data" for media and communication research. m/c journal, 15(5). burgess, j., & crawford, k., (2011). social media and the theory of the acute event. paper presented at internet research 12.0 — performance and participation, seattle (12 october). cheng, j., sun, a., hu, d., and zeng, d. 2011. an information diffusion-based recommendation framework for micro blogging. journal of the association of information systems(12:7), pp. 463-486. cheong, f., and cheong, c. (2011). social media data mining: a social network analysis of tweets during the 2010-2011 australian floods. proceedings of the pacific asia conference on information systems, paper 46. hughes, a. and palen, l. (2009). twitter adoption and use in mass convergence and emergency events. international journal of emergency management, 6: 248–260. kongthon, a., haruechaiyasak, c., pailai, j., and kongyoung, s. (2012). the role of twitter during a natural disaster: case study of 2011 thai flood. intechnology management for emerging technologies (picmet), 2012 proceedings of picmet'12, pp. 2227-232. liu, s, l palen, j sutton, a hughes, a vieweg* (2008). in search of the bigger picture: the emergent role of on-line photo-sharing in times of disaster. proceedings of the 2008 information systems for crisis response and management conference (iscram 2008), washington, d.c., pp. 140-149. lotan, g., ananny, m., gaffney, d. and boyd, d. (2011). the revolutions were tweeted: information flows during the 2011 tunisian and egyptian revolutions. international journal of communication 5: 1375– 1405. mendoza, m., poblete, b. and castillo, c. 2010. twitter under crisis: can we trust what we rt? 1st workshop on social media analytics (soma ’10), washington, dc: association for computing machinery (acm). palen, l., starbird, k., vieweg, s. and hughes, a. 2010. twitter-based information distribution during the 2009 red river valley flood threat. bulletin of the american society for information science and technology, 36: 13–17. palen, l and s liu (2007). citizen communications in crisis: anticipating a future of ictsupported participation, proceedings of the acm 2007 conference on human factors in computing systems (chi 2007), san jose, ca., pp. 727-736. rotherham, fiona. (2011) “quake rebuild will eat into gdp.” nz stuff, 10 may 2011. available at: http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/rebuilding-christchurch/4984173/quake-rebuild-will-eat-into-gdp seitzinger, joyce. (2010) “social media use in a crisis – #eqnz – which hashtag prevails?” cats pyjamas, 4 sep. available at: http://www.cats-pyjamas.net/2010/09/social-media-use-in-a-crisis-eqnz-which-hashtagprevails/ license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. microsoft word air16 final.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 but is it ‘augmented reality’? boundary work over the naming, definition, and categorization of an emerging information technology tony liao temple university introduction augmented reality (ar) applications and devices have increasingly garnered public attention, a couple years ago with google glass and most recently with microsoft hololens. these technologies, which promise to bring the internet off our computers and directly onto our physical perception, are the latest artifacts that attempt to move toward the digital imaginary of ubiquitous wearable computing. although ar is still in its emergence, many scholars have begun examining the ways early creators are deploying ar to re-counter and re-appropriate space (author, 2014; graham, zook, & boulton, 2013; sheller, 2012), the ways ar could help people explore their surroundings (hoffman & mosemghvdlishvili, 2014), and the ways ar could transform industries like journalism and print media (pavlik & bridges, 2013). while these are often referred to as a class of ‘augmented reality technologies,’ in actuality there is no device that is inherently an ‘ar technology.’ for example, a mobile smartphone is not necessarily an ar device, but it has capabilities that might allow for an ar experience. ar is a convergence of many enabling technologies which may enable certain augmented features and applications. although the term ‘ar’ has been a valuable one in organizing and mobilizing different types of organizations and constituencies, the recent rise in commercial ar possibilities has started to raise questions over what ‘counts’ as ar. for the past several years, different stakeholders within the community have been engaging in a fierce debate over what should and should not be considered ar. this battle is taking place over definitions, which has long been recognized in information and organization science as an incredibly difficult task, one that is fluid and constantly being enacted with tremendous implications. definitions at the most fundamental level describes what something is, but within that simple act there are values and politics enacted in the work of classifying (bowker & star, 1999; busch, 2011). with categories involving people, the material consequences of those definitions suggested citation (apa): liao, t.. (2015, october 21-24). but is it ‘augmented reality’? boundary work over the naming, definition, and categorization of an emerging information technology. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. are evident when people try to ignore categories or standards (bowker & star, 1999; busch, 2011), when people exist in the residual space between particular definitions (star & bowker, 2007), and when those categories materially affect how individuals are treated (bowker & star, 1999). with emerging technologies these names are often abstractions, referring “not to a specific homogenous product but to a more or less heterogeneous collection of artefacts (software, management techniques) which then went onto link a community (or, rather, several overlapping communities) of suppliers, intermediaries, and adopters (pollock & williams, 2011, p. 195).” this is the case with ar, but now different stakeholder groups are trying to carve out interpretations of ar in an effort to expand their authority over the technology, monopolize resources, and exclude others from the community. this article is based on over three years of fieldwork and participation observation in the ar community. participant observation is particularly useful when the research examines interactions that take place in specific, physical locations (lofland et al. 2006), and there were several places where the ar industry gathered – industry conferences, standards meetings, and academic conferences. from 2011-2014, i attended industry conferences in san francisco, london, munich, and new york, academic conferences in atlanta and adelaide, and standards conferences in new york, barcelona, rome, redlands, and crystal city. i attended over 12 conferences spanning 6 different countries. i supplemented this with 48 in-depth interviews with leaders in the community. an analysis of how people were defining the term ar and what they envisioned for the future of the technology revealed deep rooted disagreements over how to define ar, motivated by historical and organizational commitments but challenged by new technological developments. academic actors had originally defined ar to break away from virtual reality (milgram & kishino, 1994), and clarified certain criteria (mixes real and virtual, 3d and real-time, interactive) for ar (azuma, 1997). these criteria were debated and contested around emerging developments like the 1st and 10 line, and further challenged by mobile ar browsers (layar, wikitude, etc.), and finally google glass. these developments brought new stakeholders to the ar space, but also sparked dispute as some members in the community did not think these were ar. with these artifacts, there has been significant debate over the azuma criteria itself and how to apply it, and some began to add criteria to the definition in an effort to privilege their work as ‘hard ar’ versus ‘soft ar.’ ‘hard ar’ supporters dismissed mobile ar as frivolous, preferring to focus on head worn displays for hands free applications (medical, maintenance, etc.). other actors feel that these developments warrant consideration and support broadening the definition to include them (along with their commercially oriented use cases like entertainment and advertising), sparking new rounds of contestation. a number of new industry actors have deemed this debate to be so loaded that they’ve either avoided the term completely or started advocating a colloquial definition as any technology that ‘augments’ our perception of ‘reality.’ each subset of definitional supporters have different goals and motivations for pushing certain definitions and classifications, each with their own social, technical, and moral agendas that “valorizes some point of view and silences another” (bowker and star 1999, p.5). much of this debate is indicative of what gieryn (1983) describes as ‘boundary work’ to distinguish work and centralize authority. these definitional battles are proxy battles for 1) who gets to participate in the community, 2) who has authority to speak for the technology, 3) what the important problems are for the technology, 4) what the exemplars of the technology are going to be, and 5) what future imaginary the ar community should work toward. this definitional boundary work has implications across all those levels of community participation, which shapes what the technology becomes and how we come to understand it. as internet scholars examine the relationship between the technology and the digital imaginaries, we have to consider the people who construct those digital imaginaries as well as how they contest those digital imaginaries. in this case, several groups with different visions of the future are attempting to shape it through definitions. references azuma, r. (1997). a survey of augmented reality. presence, 6(4), 355-385. bowker, g. c., & star, s. l. (1999). sorting things out: classification and its consequences. cambridge, mass: mit press. busch, l. (2011). standards: recipes for reality. cambridge, mass: mit press. gieryn, t. f. (1983). boundary-work and the demarcation of science from nonscience: strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists. american sociological review, 48(6), 781-795. graham m, zook m, boulton a (2013) augmented reality in urban places: contested content and the duplicity of code. transactions of the institute of british geographers 38(3): 464-479 hofmann, s. & mosemghvdlishvili, l. (2014). perceiving spaces through digital augmentation: an exploratory study of navigational augmented reality apps. mobile media & communication 2: 265-280 lofland, j., snow, d., anderson, l., and lofland, l.h. (2006) analyzing social settings: a guide to qualitative observation and analysis. belmont, ca: wadsworth. milgram, p., & kishino, f. (1994). a taxonomy of mixed reality displays. ieice transaction on information systems, e77-d(12) pavlik, j. v., & bridges, f. (2013). the emergence of augmented reality (ar) as a storytelling medium in journalism. journalism & communication monographs. 15(1), 1-59. pollock, n. & williams, r. (2011). who decides the shape of product markets? the knowledge institutions that name and categorise new technologies. information and organization 21(4), 194-217. sheller, m. (2012). mobile mediality: location, dislocation, augmentation. in: kesselring s, vogl g, witzgall s (eds) tracing the new mobilities regimes.aldershot: ashgate, pp. 309-326. star, s., & bowker, g. (2007). enacting silence: residual categories as a challenge for ethics, information systems, and communication. ethics and information technology, 9, 273–280. audiences as publics. tweeting with the television on evelien dheer selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 audiences as publics. tweeting with the television on. evelien d’heer iminds mict ghent university belgium evelien.dheer@ugent.be pieter verdegem dept. of communication sciences ghent university belgium pieter.verdegem@ugent.be cédric courtois iminds mict ghent university belgium cedric.courtois@ugent.be abstract watching and talking about television is no longer a private experience confined to the living room. this paper presents a study on twitter conversation whilst watching television and discusses the findings in the ongoing debates on twitter research. via a multi-method approach, we investigate twitter conversation on a belgian current affair program. through the interpretation of the public character of meaning-making, we acknowledge how viewers come to constitute publics. in addition, specific ethical and theoretical issues related to the study are defined and discussed. via the description of practical examples, we contribute to the ongoing discussion on internet research and twitter research in particular. future endeavors are outlined to grasp and understand audience activity in this media manifold. keywords twitter; television; audiences; publics; ethics introduction in this paper, we would like to connect insights of a study on twitter conversation whilst watching television with the ongoing debate about twitter research. we start with the discussion of twitter conversation during a news and current affairs programs, primarily situated within the field of audience research. next we will address ethical and theoretical questions we encountered during the study and put forward opportunities and challenges for future research on (twitter) audiences. understanding audiences as publics. watching and ta lking about television. introduction when conceptualizing and reflecting on audiences, we cannot ignore the diffusion of the internet and social media, i.e. youtube, twitter, facebook, constituting the era of ‘mass self-communication’ (castells, 2009). the presence of networked devices reconfigures our conventional understanding of the living room, which no longer refers to a private place but interweaves multiple configurations of the public and the private (papacharissi, 2010). watching and talking about television is no longer confined to the living room. the meshing of mainstream media and online platforms (notably twitter) is a clear factor in promoting (audience) participation (dahlgren, 2009). consequently, we come to wonder under what conditions viewers, i.e. audiences, become publics (livingstone, 2005). publics go beyond the act of reception, acting upon their identities as citizens and the collective production of meaning (ibid.). it is indeed both individual and group identity that are at stake for the development of the self in democratic culture (van dijck, 2009). this contribution focuses on a popular current affairs program in flanders, the northern region of belgium and home of the dutch-speaking community. de program is called ‘de zevende dag’ and is aired every sunday morning on the flemish public service broadcaster, vrt. the format provides a space for current social phenomena and issues to be discussed in the form of debates or interviews. method the research presented combines a content analysis of twitter conversation (september 2012) and twelve computer-assisted online interviews (caoi’s) with twitter users (october 2012). the selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 twitter messages were harvested during three consecutive episodes by making use of the twitter streaming api, which resulted in a body of 1449 messages containing the official hashtag (‘#7dag’) of the program. the analysis centered on what was said (topic) and how it was said (tone). in addition, twelve semi-structured interviews were conducted with the most active twitter users, which allow contextualization and validation of the findings of the content analysis. findings viewer talk on television is very much attuned to the content and timing of the specific debates and interviews with policy makers/politicians and experts. via the twitter conventions (@replies, hashtags) as well as the audiences twitter users envision, we are able to capture a sense of collectivity related to this mediated participation in democracy. we acknowledge volatile and liquid interaction patterns, illustrated and enhanced by the use of additional hashtags, which fragment and extend the ‘#7dag’ audience constellation. in a conceptual endeavor to rethink political activity, rosanvallon (2008) points to ‘the democracy of oversight’. in this respect, the twitter platform favorably impacts the visibility of the attentive and vigilant citizen. the intent to influence political action takes no explicit form, but remains limited to (indirect) forms of communication with politicians and other stakeholders in mind. message content reflects creative, playful and performative use of television text, based on the ‘raw material’ of broadcasting television content (prior, 2006) and often with a critical or skeptical tone. this exploratory study of twitter conversation on televised debates about societal issues evokes a number of ethical as well as theoretical questions, which we will address in the second part of the paper. understanding audiences as publics. research notes. ethical reflections the publically available data, of which we made use here, raises ethical questions, related to the fuzzy boundaries between private, personal and public data. aside the collection and processing of this publically available content, we would like to reflect upon publication, i.e. the integration of twitter messages in our results. in this respect, we contribute to the ethical awareness and reflexivity of internet research, situated around the ‘public/private’ and ‘data/persons’ issues.1 researching ‘large’ data sets of tweets inclines us to see ‘data’ instead of ‘persons’, which obviously influences how we interpret the ‘public/private’ delineation. through the execution of interviews, the person behind the message becomes prominent as well as the idea that what is private and what is public possibly means different things to different people. building upon previous scholarship, within the context of qualitative audience research, by default, participant’s real names are not mentioned in the paper. obviously, those declarations are made in a private constellation, whereas twitter messages could be said to have a more public character. nonetheless, participants remain unaware of the researchers’ attention and researchers are not amongst users’ ‘imagined audience’ (marwick & boyd, 2011). all participants accepted the publication of their usernames and are aware of the public character of their utterances and their reach beyond the platform. we question to what extent these insights to reflect the whole community and the feasibility of such context-based approaches. theoretical reflections the theoretical frameworks and perspectives we argue for, are not always in line with the methodological set-up at hand. in particular, we would like to address the problem of the obfuscated identity of the ‘twitter user’, which might have multiple accounts, no accounts but access the web or use twitter without actively contributing (boyd & crawford, 2012). although we focus on theoretical 1 based on the aoir ethical decision making document, 2012. http://aoir.org/reports/ethics2.pdf, accessed march 2013. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 issues here, the lack of insight in the user’s identity also creates difficulties in terms of the implementation of ethical guidelines. we have to re-negotiate this hashtag-based approach and look for alternatives to map out the twittersphere. especially concerning the cross-media approach we put forth here, national media have national publics, hence, match with a national twitter public. a mixed-method approach as well as more advanced technological tools are put forth here, in which collaboration with computer scholars and non-academic stakeholders is prominent. first, audience activity is also measured by conventional standards, viewing rates, activity but preferably also the composition of the audience can be compared. a particular case study in cooperation with the flemish public service broadcaster vrt, is currently set up to match viewing rates of specific programs with twitter traffic. second, an approach towards the definition of the belgian twittersphere suggests a complex combination and computation of metadata (e.g. hashtags, language, followers/following) for which interdisciplinary work which computer scholars is needed. in particular, the interviewees reported a systematic lack of hashtag use in @replies to other users, pointing to a structural pitfall of the hashtag-based approach. in addition, the fallacy of ‘the hashtag audience’, or the question to what extent we created rather than captured an audience, suggests the meta-data used here possibly simplified what could be more complex interaction processes. the definition of a user base also permits a socio-demographic understanding, which will enhance the theoretical power of our research. conclusion based on a case study and the discussion of practical issues, we contribute to the current and future understanding of audiences in contemporary media constellation and the challenges and opportunities it presents. references boyd, d., & crawford, k. (2012). critical questions for big data. information, communication & society, 15(5), 662-679. castells, m. (2009). communication power. oxford: oxford university press. dahlgren, p. (2009). media and political engagement. citizens, communication and democracy. cambridge: university press. livingstone, s. (2005). on the relation between audiences and publics: why audience and public? in s. livingstone (ed.), audiences and publics: when cultural engagement matters for the public sphere. (pp. 17-41). bristol: intellect books. marwick, a., & boyd, d. (2011). i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. new media & society, 13(1), 114-133. papacharissi, z. (2010). a private sphere. democracy in a digital age. digital media and society series. campridge: polity press. prior, m. (2006). post-broadcast democracy: how media choice increases inequality in political involvement and polarizes elections. cambridge: cambridge university press. rosanvallon, p. (2008). counter-democracy. politics in an age of distrust. cambridge: cambridge university press. van dijck, j. (2009). users like you? theorizing agency in user-generated content. media, culture & society, 31(1), 41-58. microsoft word ilb aoir 6-26-13.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 the (not so) invisible hand: perceptions of game designers and the impact on play alyson l. young umbc information systems united states alyson1@umbc.edu wayne g. lutters umbc information systems united states lutters@umbc.edu abstract designing and operating alternate reality games (args) is always a challenge. controlling too much or too little of the gameplay impedes player enjoyment. in studying one particular arg, i love bees (ilb), and player perceptions of the game designers, we revealed that is possible for game designers relinquish direct control, but at a cost. players often misread or misinterpreted game designers’ intentions. these issues, however, were not necessarily detrimental to gameplay and may have increased player enjoyment. keywords alternate reality games; i love bees; game design; qualitative research introduction alternate reality games (args) are set in fictional worlds that overlay the physical world. they are played both online and in-person at cafes, malls, casinos, transit hubs, and universities. using playeradopted tools such as web-based forums, players work collectively to solve game tasks and advance the game’s storyline (kim et al., 2008; mcgonigal, 2008; o’hara et al., 2008). throughout the course of the game, designers simultaneously act as allies and adversaries, creating obstacles and providing resources to help players overcome these obstacles. they remain “behind the curtain” and typically invisible to players (gurzick et al., 2011). in this paper, we present results from an ongoing study of teaming and tasking in a massive arg. this was guided by two primary research questions: how are the game designers discussed by players? does speculation about the game designers affect player decisions? approach and methods our work is situated around virtual teaming in the arg, i love bees (ilb). ilb is one of the earliest and most successful of the arg genre, influencing the paradigm for future arg design. similar to other args, ilb required the collective intelligence of its players to solve intricate puzzles that extended across the physical and online worlds. players had to self-organize into teams to develop creative solutions. an arg fansite, unfiction.com, hosted the haunted apiary message board that served as the primary communication hub for ilb players. this hub grew to contain more than 54,000 posts by over 2,700 players. over the four months of gameplay, players organized the forum into six thematic threads. we investigated the haunted apiary to gain insight into how ilb players perceived the game designers (called puppetmasters). using a grounded theory approach, we iteratively open-coded approximately 16,000 posts (30 percent of the total number of forum postings) to identify instances of player perceptions. this was a purposive sample of game events. our coding passes revealed multiple critical incidents, four of which are described below. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 findings interpreting intentions two critical incidents illustrate how players’ misinterpretation of the puppetmasters’ intentions led them to incorrectly speculate and subsequently pursue two theories for obtaining information. in this first example, players debated whether the puppetmasters intended for them to break the law: “i wonder, the way dana keeps repeating ""hotmail hack"" (usually in brackets), maybe it's a hint that we're supposed to hack into margaret's hotmail to contact the entity” (p128). in a similar vein, another group of players attempted to break into a puppetmaster’s voicemail account, speculating that the account contained information pertinent to advance the game’s storyline. in both instances, players debated whether the puppetmasters actually intended for them to break into the accounts. opponents argued: “if part of the game was getting into the email account, they wouldn’t have it at hotmail” (p144). whereas proponents chose to follow the hunch and attempt to hack the accounts: “i know everyone said to not try to get into her mailbox but why not. people should try 343 or 7777 or something that has to do with 7's” (p104). it was only after several failed attempts and an eventual message from the puppetmasters to stop that the players realized they had misinterpreted their intentions. communicating with the invisible hand upholding the “magic circle” (huizinga, 1955) was important to some players. to maintain the illusion, players used the in-game characters as intermediaries to communicate with the puppetmasters about game task challenges. for example, a player asked an in-game character to move a game task to another location: “i’m going to email the sleeping princess [in-game character] and see if we can’t get a new phone put in there” (p958) players also messaged the in-game characters to have game tasks removed all together. in one instance, players used the forums to ask the character melissa to remove a game task from the potomac appalachian trail center because it was disturbing the people who worked there: “the [stewards] were glad to let us answer the phone so it [would] stop ringing. apparently, it’s been waking up their daughter during her nap each day, and as any parent here can attempt [sic], disturbing naptime is a critically bad thing. so, melissa [in-game character], if you’re reading this (and i will seek some other method of transferring this message), please do not bug these nice people” (p582) mutual illusion of control in most cases, players believed they had very little control over the outcome or direction of the game. one player astutely compared player control to the experience of an amusement park ride where you are given a degree of freedom in steering the vehicle but you are ultimately tethered to the track: “we control the game about as much as we control those autopia go-carts in disneyland” (p367). thus, while players believed they controlled how they chose to play the game, they did not believe they influenced the game’s outcome or trajectory. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 one area of contention was whether the puppetmasters controlled out-of-game tools adopted to support in-game tasks. players who believed the puppetmasters held complete control over both ingame and out-of-game aspects argued against the adoption of tools that were not implemented by the puppetmasters: “i would think that if the pms wanted / needed a in-game irc channel, that they would create one themself, and that its not up to the players to do” (p236). conversely, players who believed the puppetmasters controlled the game but not the players were apt to support the adoption of out-of-game tools, particularly as a means to separate in-game and out-ofgame discussions: “we just wanted to keep the curtain down on #beekeepers…. and forming a second channel just seemed like the easiest way to do this and keep ig/oog separate” (p204). the extent to which players perceive the puppetmasters to control the game therefore impacts the types of activities they are willing to engage. discussion our study examined player perceptions of puppetmasters in the arg ilb. our results suggest that player perceptions have an impact on gameplay. players viewed the puppetmasters as controlling influencers who engaged with players only tangentially, and who managed the flow and structure of the gameplay with very little player influence. players believed that while they had control over how they played the game, they did not control the outcome of the storyline. players also viewed the puppetmasters as external (or out-of-game) influencers who were not part of the gameplay and therefore should not be addressed in-game. how players chose to communicate with the puppetmasters illustrates this point. rather than communicating with them directly about game task challenges, players maintained the illusion of the game by using in-game characters as intermediaries. speculation about the puppetmasters further impacted player decisions. this was particularly evident in how players interpreted information provided by the puppetmasters. in the two examples provided in the paper, players’ misinterpretations led them to pursue two incorrect avenues for obtaining information. our findings suggest that helping organize heterogeneous players without direct control is possible but comes at a cost. while designers can influence the direction of a game, players may misinterpret their intentions resulting in unintended actions. this, however, may not be detrimental to the gameplay; rather it may increase player enjoyment by sparking creativity and discussions. references gurzick, d., white, k.f., lutters, w.g., landry, b.m., dombrowski, c., and kim, j.y. (2011). designing the future of collaborative workplace systems: lessons learned from a comparison with alternate reality games. in proceedings of the 2011 iconference (iconference '11). acm, new york, ny, usa, 174-180. huizinga, johan (1971). homo ludens: a study of the play-element in culture. beacon press. kim, j.y., allen, j.p., and lee, e. (2008). alternate reality gaming. communications of the acm, 51 (2), 36-42. mcgonigal, j. (2008). why i love bees: a case study in collective intelligence gaming. in salen, k. ed. the ecology of games: connecting youth, games and learning. macarthur foundation series on digital media and learning (pp. 199-228), the mit press, cambridge, ma. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 o’hara, k., grian, h., and williams, j. (2008). participation, collaboration and spectatorship in an alternate reality game. in proc. ozchi 2008, acm press, 130-139. 1 mediating identity narratives: a case study in queer digital storytelling as everyday activism sonja vivienne queensland university of technology australia sonja@incitestories.com.au abstract digital stories are short autobiographical documentaries, often illustrated with personal photographs and narrated in the first person, and typically produced in group workshops. as a media form they offer ‘ordinary people’ the opportunity to represent themselves to audiences of their choosing; and this amplification of hitherto unheard voices has significant repercussions for their social participation. many of the storytellers involved in the rainbow family tree case study that is the subject of this paper can be characterised as ‘everyday’ activists for their common desire to use their personal stories to increase social acceptance of marginalised identity categories. however, in conflict with their willingness to share their personal stories, many fear the risks and ramifications of distributing them in public spaces (especially online) to audiences both intimate and unknown. additionally, while technologies for production and distribution of rich media products have become more accessible and user-friendly, many obstacles remain. for many people there are difficulties with technological access and aptitude, personal agency, cultural capital, and social isolation, not to mention availability of the time and energy requisite to digital storytelling. additionally, workshop context, facilitation and distribution processes all influence the content of stories. this paper explores the many factors that make ‘authentic’ self-representation far from straight forward. i use qualitative data drawn from interviews, digital story texts and ethnographic observation of glbtqis1 1 this acronym refers to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and same sex attracted people whom i henceforth refer to as ‘queer’ which is not to say that all the people i include under this umbrella would necessarily embrace the term themselves. participants in the digital storytelling case study also included parents and children of glbtqis people. participants in a digital storytelling initiative that combined face-to-face and online modes of participation. i consider mediating influences in practice and theory and draw on strategies put forth in cultural 2 anthropology and narrative therapy to propose some practical tools for nuanced and sensitive facilitation of digital storytelling workshops and webspaces. finally, i consider the implications of these facilitation strategies for voice, identity and social participation. keywords digital storytelling; everyday activism; identity; voice; mediating strategies introduction since inception, theories on computer-mediated communication have taken several quite different forms – from utopian views of cyberspace in which identity was liberated from corporeality to binary comparisons between autonomous online and face-to-face interactions and finally to more complex and interdependent understandings, as represented in nancy baym’s recent work: mediated communication demonstrates many new qualities, but continues to display and reinforce the broader cultural forces that influence messages in all contexts... the social structures that shape us and our potentials manifest in our communication, identities, relationships, communities, and networks online just as they do offline. (baym, 2010, p 71) the consequences for citizenship are explored by zizi papachirissi who suggests that “technology… presents a way to counter powerlessness by allowing individuals to propose new spaces, upon which newer, more empowering habits and relations may be cultivated.” (papacharissi, 2010, p15) building upon habermasian notions of the public sphere michael warner proposes: some publics are defined by their tension with a larger public. their participants are marked off from persons or citizens in general. discussion within such a public is understood to contravene the rules obtaining to the world at large, being structured by alternative dispositions or protocols, making different assumptions about what can be said or what goes without saying. this kind of public is, in effect 3 a counterpublic; it maintains at some level, conscious or not, an awareness of its subordinate status. (warner, 2005, p 56) while warner considers the possibilities for socially engaged discursive practices within ‘counterpublics’ papacharissi considers the possibilities afforded by technologically mediated realms by proposing that: the public sphere model no longer works. this would require that we shift emphasis away from models of rational deliberation within representative democracy, and examine alternative formats of information and opinion exchange that develop in late modern democracies. perhaps it is best to examine the geographies proposed by online technologies as hybrid spaces capable of hosting both public and private, commercial and public interest, political and social activities. (papachirissi, 2010, p 20) as a marginalised cohort queer digital storytellers stake out fertile terrain for exploration of the opportunities and obstacles of activist oriented, technologically mediated social participation and i explore this in more depth shortly. in seeking understanding of production and distribution processes particular to these preferred (self-defined) identity narratives2 i consider some typical ‘mediating influences’. these include the framing agendas of other stakeholders; social construction of identity and self-representation in public spaces; facilitated technical and creative story production process; and distribution expectations in a variety of online spaces. by way of descriptive illustration of these issues i detail the process and considerations of several storytellers who, as parents of a young trans3 in 2009 i facilitated a digital storytelling initiative, ‘what’s your story?’, that was hosted by an australian sexual health education and information service, shine sa. the institution wished to produce a dvd and educational resource that canvassed sexual identity and gender diversity, thereby addressing homophobia and gender stereotypes. a diverse list of child, represent many of the hopes and fears of their fellow participants. the rainbow family tree case study 2 a term coined by barbara myerhoff and widely used by narrative therapists to connote the empowered stories people choose to tell about their own lives, often in opposition to dominant ‘victim’ discourses 3 i use ‘trans’ as an umbrella category inclusive of both transsexual and transgender identities acknowledging the fact that these monikers are highly contested and mean different things to different people 4 potential participants was drawn up by the steering committee who were tasked with using their own professional and personal networks to recruit these individuals. identity descriptors were discussed at length and at one point it was suggested that an ‘a’ for ‘allies’ be added to the already lengthy glbtqis acronym, to accommodate children, parents and friends. many people were hesitant about participating when first approached, often declaring that they either hadn’t experienced overt prejudice or didn’t wish to explore those particular painful memories. further discussion with the steering committee shifted the emphasis from stories of discrimination to stories of acceptance, which despite their positive focus would, it was hoped, reveal concomitant themes of rejection and bigotry. this resulted in more participants who later spoke in interviews of a range of motivations including highlighting social injustice on behalf of themselves and others. several people used their stories as activist tools with which to lobby parliamentarians on issues ranging from access to fertility services through to gay marriage. others sought affirmation and acceptance of their preferred and often complex identities from more intimate audiences including friends and family members. in planning the initiative, optimal modes for engaging marginalised participants (particularly those living in social or geographic isolation and those with significant work and/or family commitments) were also discussed. two workshops were offered to over eighteen participants, over an extended time frame and with both face-to-face and online options. the first workshop followed the conventional route of organising hardware, facilitators and storytellers into a physical location but was modified by spreading the three ‘contact’ days out over five weeks. participants were instructed in use of editing software that they had access to on their own home computers, and support between workshops was provided via a yahoo group. the second workshop was conducted primarily online via a customised ning4 4 a white label platform enabling customized construction of social networks website (known as rainbow family tree), combined with two informal face-to-face workshop opportunities in which some storytellers recorded their voiceovers and added finishing flourishes to their edits. while shine sa auspiced the entire initiative they were reluctant to be associated with the website on an ongoing basis and elected to brand the dvd and educational resource as ‘what’s your story?’ to distinguish it from the evolving rainbow family tree community. the production stage of the initiative was completed with a launch of the educational package, the website and a theatrical screening of the eighteen digital stories. while the original ning site was established as a space in which to host an online digital storytelling workshop, once this www.ning.com http://www.ning.com/� 5 peak of activity passed, it primarily serves as an archive of stories and a space for sharing activist anecdotes and distribution strategies. visibility and queer self-representation as a genre, digital stories are typified by anecdotes that articulate personal world views, narrated with all the quirks of idiomatic speech and illustrated with characteristic snapshots. as such they embody identity and, even when they are pitched at a mainstream unknown audience, the idiosyncratic detail embedded in each story mean that there is a very great chance of the storyteller being identified. many queer people are accustomed to ‘passing’ as heterosexual in the public spaces they inhabit and it can be argued that marginalisation and discrimination is amplified by this invisibility. further, queer people who choose not to declare their difference in some kind of tangible performance of self are often witness to homophobic asides that, while not directed at them personally, nevertheless have implications for selfesteem, identity and agency. this interactive and iterative relationship between visibility and invisibility is complex and nuanced. goffman argues that we all modify or bring forth aspects of ourselves depending on our context or audience (goffman, 1959). online communication yields complex intersections between discrete social networks, a phenomenon dubbed ‘social convergence’ by danah boyd in her explorations of facebook and other social networking spaces (boyd, 2008). queer people are accustomed to hiding or revealing the complex or subversive aspects of their ‘true’ identity, but this constant negotiation of identity performed differently for different audiences may evoke a mixed bag of feelings including shame, guilt, hauteur and pride. the act of creating and sharing an identity-themed digital story online often amplifies and complicates these feelings but also offers an opportunity for what barbara myerhoff calls ‘definitional ceremony’ which she defines as “collective self-definitions specifically intended to proclaim an interpretation to an audience not otherwise available…” (myerhoff, 1982, p111). however, in proclaiming their preferred identities to new audiences, queer digital storytellers abandon the (problematic) security of anonymity and risk exposing themselves (and their friends and family members) to homophobic ramifications. for some storytellers, including transgender people, hiv positive people, community leaders, teachers and parents, these risks can seem overwhelming. these storytellers find creative solutions to maintaining privacy while nevertheless seeking the publicity that they hope will disintegrate social prejudices. as such they are demonstrably vulnerable to the prevailing social winds that influence identity and story construction, including the mediating dimensions of production and distribution both face-to-face and online. my focus on queer storytellers, while affording in 6 depth exploration of some very particular concerns, nevertheless evokes similar concerns experienced by other marginalised identities. production and distribution; face-to-face and online while blogs, youtube, facebook and twitter all provide relatively spontaneous forums for personal storytelling, digital stories tend to be highly constructed and require a degree of editing and storytelling finesse that benefits from a group learning environment. workshops are frequently hosted by an institution, with expert tuition in both technical and creative aspects of story construction offered over a three to four day intensive production period. performing and refining their narratives in the traditional ‘story circle’5 despite these obstacles, when storytellers are empowered as agents, not just of digital story production but also distribution, viral circulation of stories to counterpublics (warner, 2005), intimate publics (berlant, 1997), and networked publics (boyd, 2008) become possibilities. with increased circulation comes expanded potential for social change. an individual storyteller might upload/embed, share links, do blog posts, screen to friends and/or generally includes discussion of what storytellers are attempting to communicate and which audiences they seek to address. the prospect of online circulation with wide reach to unknown audiences has substantial influence upon story content, even in purely face-to-face production workshops. unlike story production, story distribution tends not to be so orchestrated or outcome oriented and often occurs in fits and bursts over extended time frames. many hosted digital storytelling initiatives coordinate distribution with little input from the storytellers, often using dvd compilations in training and education environs and in some cases stories are made available online. while storytellers are generally informed of these strategies they are rarely regarded as distribution agents themselves. in some cases, while self-distribution strategies may be discussed, simple logistics like making the final data file of a story available (rather than an authored dvd) inhibit the capacity of the individual storyteller to fully exploit their story. even highly motivated storytellers sometimes confront personal impediments. sharing personal stories implies familiarity with a language of self-promotion (rather than the self reflective voice expressed in the story itself). this marketing of self conjures particular conundrums for storytellers who identify as ‘private’ or ‘shy’ and still more complications for those who see themselves speaking on behalf of others or those who wish to retain anonymity. 5 a facilitated process of game playing, trust building and story sharing whereby storytellers are challenged to think creatively and laterally about their own and one anothers’ narratives 7 family members and/or politicians. in doing so, they may confront some of the difficulties they encountered in story production – fear of intimate exposure to both familiar and unknown audiences; technical problems (both user and hardware oriented); time; motivation; money etc. some of these issues take on different resonance when distribution is less mediated by institutions and storytellers are more directly connected with their audiences. while the risk of confrontation and critical feedback seems less likely at a theatrical screening, it’s not so difficult to imagine negative feedback from anonymous adversaries in online spaces. additionally, the fear of unforeseen ramifications for friends and family are amplified when stories are distributed online. however, it can be argued that, having conquered these issues during the production phase with the support of their comrades, storytellers are better equipped with survival strategies pertinent to the distribution phase of digital storytelling practice. it might also be said that, by playing an active role in distribution, they acquire capacity as everyday activists. for, with, to and by how can digital storytelling communities and activist oriented individuals operating in online spaces be fortified in a fashion that affirms preferred identity narratives rather than those deemed ‘worthy’ by a workshop facilitator or site moderator, or ‘empowering’ by an auspicing institution? are there facilitation strategies that have been employed in similar contexts that may be adapted to co-create these stories and mediate distribution processes? english author and social innovation commentator, charles leadbeater argues: there are only four main ways in which we organise most social activities or address social changes. ‘for’ solutions are delivered to us. ‘with’ solutions we devise cooperatively with others. ‘by’ solutions depend on self motivation and diy. ‘to’ solutions depend on instruction, command and coercion, to get things done. (leadbeater, 2008) digital storytelling has been constituted as an example of ‘with’ although arguably, in its worst manifestation, conflicted by host institution agendas and unethical facilitation, it can be an exercise in ‘to’ disguised by ‘with’ rhetoric. in many instances digital storytelling operates within a social service paradigm that is focused upon ‘helping’ those in need, to the extent that even the most well-intentioned of processes can constitute participants as ‘other’ and contribute further to a sense of marginalised identity. choosing which sample digital stories to screen in an overview session can shape understandings of genre conventions and tone. similarly personal politics (of both facilitators and other group members) on issues of being ‘out and 8 proud’ versus ‘private’ can unintentionally place a moral imperative on what might otherwise be pragmatic decisions around rendering visibility. the question of control is an interesting one in the case of digital stories it would be easy to assume that bestowing final cut and copyright upon a storyteller would assure the products ‘authenticity’ but this negates the complex process by which identity, story construction and distribution is mediated. many scholars have critiqued the notion of autobiographic authenticity in digital storytelling production (hertzberg kaare & lundby, 2008; taub-pervizpour, 2009; thumim, 2008) while others dispute the very notion of ‘truth’ in a variety of autobiographic forms (lejeune & eakin, 1989; smith & watson, 1996). how do online production and distribution spaces and processes mediate storytellers’ voices? everything from the design aesthetics and architecture of a website through to the taskbased activities that may constitute an online workshop influences user engagement. while the degree of intervention intrinsic in a face-to-face production process may be diminished in an online equivalent (simply because the storyteller undertakes primary editing responsibilities) in some cases this may mean that storytellers seek technical support from friends and family members who may not be so familiar with ethical considerations and practices that safeguard authentic voice. while it is arguably more difficult to diminish agency in web spaces that merely facilitate distribution and rely on participants to ‘opt in’, strategies designed to effectively engage users may inadvertently flatten complex self-expression. additionally web spaces that aim for communal collaboration and ownership must in some way seek consensus from divergent users, potentially eliding the voices of ‘lurkers’ and minorities. i now explore these issues with reference to ‘mediating strategies’ used in the rainbow family tree case study. mediating strategies in theory narrative therapists, michael white and david epston, unpack myerhoff’s insights into therapeutic practices that revolve around ‘de-centred listening’, ‘loitering’, and exploration of ‘rich stories’ (white, 1990). in brief, these practices attempt to counter the expert counsellorreceptive client relationship that underpins many therapeutic encounters by positioning people as expert on their own problems; problems that are external to people rather than defining of them. penn and sheinberg write: for the therapists to resist declarative language and to stay in a questioning and speculative mode... acts as a counterweight to the inherent properties of language that represent reality as though it were independent of our construction of it... 9 maintaining this position also protects the therapists from assuming a hierarchical posture and reconfigures the idea of the therapist as an expert. (penn & sheinberg,1991, p.32) digital storytelling facilitation can replicate this style of communication by regularly affirming the primacy of the storyteller’s voice and the effect this voice has on a range of audiences. the technical skills of facilitators are acknowledged but not predominant, they are harnessed in service of story production directed by participants. additionally facilitators can draw attention to the context of story production and distribution and the many influences that shape construction of preferred identities, including friends and family members and the subjective nature of memory itself. white and epston drew substantially on the work of visual anthropologist barbara myerhoff who is perhaps best known for the contribution she made to ethnographic practice in the form of an academy award winning documentary number our days. she challenged the anthropological conventions of the day by acknowledging her own relationship to her community of interest (the elderly jewish community of venice, los angeles) and her role in facilitating their storytelling. myerhoff reflects upon the process of arriving at ‘collective selfdefinitions’ including ‘re-membering’ stories in which attention is called to the: reaggregation of members, the figures who belong to one's life story, one's own prior selves, as well as significant others who are part of the story... the focused unification provided by re-membering is requisite to sense and ordering. a life is given a shape that extends back in the past and forward into the future. it becomes a tidy, edited tale. completeness is sacrificed for moral and aesthetic purposes. here history may approach art and ritual. (myerhoff, 1982, p111) extending the normally tight time frames for digital storytelling production allows storytellers to undertake ‘re-membering’ conversations with friends, family and other storytellers. this ‘loitering’ (white and epston, 1990) affords in depth scrutiny of story tropes and, in some cases, also results in re-framing of stories that affirm personal convictions, survival strategies and preferred identity narratives. while personal empowerment is not necessarily the principal motivation of activist storytellers (an important distinction from people engaging in therapy) these endorsements from early audiences during the production phase may substantially influence the storytellers decision to undertake wider distribution of their finished stories. myerhoff saw the transformational potential for both individuals and communities in 10 creating situations in which ‘outsiders’ could ‘witness’ marginalised stories through ‘definitional ceremonies’. socially marginal people, disdained, ignored groups, individuals with what erving goffman calls "spoiled identities," regularly seek opportunities to appear before others in the light of their own internally provided interpretation. (myerhoff, 1982, p105) aspects of her ethnographic process, sometimes resulting in visual testimonies/products, resonate strongly with digital storytelling practice. a ‘ceremonial’ screening of finished stories for fellow storytellers, friends and family members is the traditional culmination of a digital storytelling workshop and frequently affirms the strength and moral fortitude required of storytellers. these affirmations are especially valuable and significant for marginalised activist storytellers who may later undertake distribution of their stories to less sympathetic audiences. myerhoff also observed that the facilitation of definitional ceremonies required nuanced mediation and that, in some cases, the stories she helped gather and present were the product of a ‘third voice’; a collaboration in which she encouraged the discovery of communal values and beliefs. in the book version of number our days (arguably a ‘definitional document’ in itself) myerhoff includes verbatim passages from interviews with elders, and acknowledges they are ‘heavily edited and selected’. her friend and collaborator marc kaminsky critiques this process by comparing myerhoff’s ‘third voice’ with bakhtin’s ‘double voiced discourse’: myerhoff's formulation emphasizes the fusion of the two voices into an abstracted third voice in which their distinct semantic intentions are erased. in bakhtin, who is ever conscious of the power relations among speaking voices that enter into contact, the boundary marking the separation between different semantic intentions is never obliterated in double-voiced discourse. the liquidation of this difference, in bakhtin, marks the destruction of the dialogic context and its passage into monologism. although myerhoff's third voice moves into the discursive terrain that bakhtin recognizes as double-voiced, her formulation evades the whole problem of the relationship between her discourse and "somebody else's discourse," thus rendering it wildly inappropriate to ask the question that the caterpillar poses to alice, concerning the meaning of words: the question of who shall be master. (kaminsky, p129-130) 11 this reoccurring question of who is ‘controlling master’ of the final digital storytelling text can be further extrapolated to online distribution contexts. just as face-to-face and online workshops are ‘facilitated’, the web spaces in which the digital story products are distributed are, to a greater or lesser degree, ‘moderated’. this moderation may be explicit (several administrators are tasked with approving new members, content and comments) or implicit. clay shirky, popular culture commentator and author of here comes everybody: the power of organizing without organizations argues that web 2.0 technology affords new forms of group formation and self-expression for ‘everybody’. he has been critiqued for eliding the obstacles to participation and over-simplifying the ‘rules’ for mass engagement. he proposes that a successful web community requires a clearly articulated ‘promise’ (why join the group?), accessible ‘tools’ (facilitating participation), and a ‘bargain’ that constitutes the rules of engagement (or what you can expect and what is expected of you). while shirky acknowledges some difficulties he fails to address the detail of how his ‘promise, tool, bargain’ trifecta could be articulated by a disparate community of users. as with face-to-face workshops an empowered individual (or small group) generally defines the terms of engagement on behalf of a divergent collective. the choice of ‘tools’ and ‘bargain’ clearly influence participation – for example a space that functions primarily as a story archive may invite feedback in the form of ‘comments’ whereas other spaces may accommodate personalised member pages, blogs and facilitate interaction between community members. the greater the degree of interactivity and flexibility of design, the greater the likelihood that a storyteller will be able to shape a context for their preferred identity narratives that reflect their semantic intentions, both present and future. ‘blue for boys? pink for girls?’ many participants in the rainbow family tree case study negotiated issues of voice, visibility and risk associated with socially maligned identity categories. these are highlighted in the experience of ‘molly and brendon’, parents of a nine-year-old trans child. their story ‘blue for boys? pink for girls?’ describes their journey as parents, from the birth of their baby boy through their growing realisation that their child identifies as female, and on to their eventual acceptance of, and pride in, their daughter. when my husband and i sat down to write this story, i had visions of the opening scene from ‘the lion king’: when the monkey holds the baby for all in the animal kingdom to see… as the mother and father look on with pride, love and adoration. 12 this is how proud i am of our daughter and what she has taught us… our reason for telling this story was to raise awareness of the predicament of transsexualism (often referred to as “transgender”) in children, whilst honouring our brave and unique little girl. however, we were also concerned about how she would feel about the story as an adult. while their child knew about and contributed to the digital story her parents were labouring over, she was not able to provide legal consent. many storytellers deal with the complexities of identity by choosing to speak only for themselves, nevertheless most also become aware that their stories are not theirs alone. they are populated by friends and family members who invariably have different recollections and different perspectives on both the anecdotes set forth in the digital story and in some cases on the way the storyteller articulates ‘self’. when digital storytellers address ‘intimate audiences’ (friends and family members who are also either explicitly or implicitly linked to the story) they must consider not only whether they are violating the privacy of individuals but what effect their renditions of history and relationship dynamics will have. in some cases the storyteller’s activist intentions inspire them to address primarily ‘unknown audiences’. as susan bickford notes in her oft-cited work on listening, conflict and citizenship, expectations of an audience’s capacity to listen may also influence the tone in which a story is presented, ranging from emotive to factual (bickford, 1996). molly voices the story from her perspective as a parent and she addresses her daughter directly, with words like “we love you very much”. despite this, there is a relatively subtle but explicit intent to speak to and challenge mainstream assumptions around gender. when speaking of how a child’s gender is determined, the storyteller uses words like ‘branded’ and ‘untruth forced upon you’. this message is reinforced with a selection of images like blue and pink pencils hovering over a noughts and crosses grid; an image that seems to connote that gender identity is a somewhat arbitrary game of luck. not only were molly and brendon challenged by the task of speaking, to some extent, on behalf of their daughter, they also had to consider the fluid and evolving nature of her identity and the ramifications of ‘fixing’ one iteration of this ‘self’ in a public space that is searchable and enduring. what if, in ten years time, their adult daughter does not wish to be ‘out’ as trans but to get on with her life as a legally affirmed woman? obviously, digital documents like ‘blue for boys? pink for girls?’ are hard to erase from cyberspace or dvds. further, in situations where storytellers speak on behalf of others, ‘consent’ can only ever be sought for one particular rendition of identity, accurate at the present point in time. i explore 13 social imperatives that enforce immutable performances of gender identity in more detail elsewhere and consider the ramifications for digital storytelling (vivienne, 2011). in constructing their daughter’s identity as they do molly and brendon reveal their own values, informed by the journey they have travelled together, from assumptions that gender is biologically and physiologically determined to a more complex understanding that nevertheless ascribes to the notion that there are two and only two genders. the final question posed in the story “so how do we know what sex we are? not from a tick in a box or a body part… just close your eyes, you’ll know it… because you’ll feel it” fits with a dominant ideological paradigm of ‘inner truth’ (tregoning, 2006). while this essentialist notion of gender is espoused by a portion of the trans community it is also highly contested. alternate notions emphasise the social construction of gender and the possibilities of ‘gender queer’, being neither male nor female (stryker & whittle, 2006; valentine, 2007). trans identity is a highly regulated category in which any variance from what is medically and legally constructed as ‘normal’ may have serious ramifications for the people involved. use of the hormone blockers required to redirect a trans child’s adolescent development must be approved by endocrinologists, psychiatrists and family court judges. family dynamics and the motivations of parents are highly scrutinised and any behaviours (like blatant political activism) that may be construed as not in ‘the best interest of the child’ may be penalised. the child’s right to determine who knows the details of their biological sex and gender identity is not always of paramount concern to authoritative figures and molly spoke of ‘accidental slips’ perpetrated by teachers, lawyers and other parents. weighing up all the ramifications of seeking an audience for their daughter’s story (publicity) and the damage perpetrated by invisibility (or ‘secrecy’ as opposed to privacy), molly and brendon had a lot to consider in constructing their digital story. at risk of exposing our daughter’s identity and taking away her right to privacy we decided to conceal pictures and any possible connection to her. this became a technical and creative challenge in our storytelling process that in a way prevented us from truly celebrating our daughter, free from shame and secrecy. molly expands on the themes of privacy (defined by her as issues that are nobody else’s business) and secrecy (issues that are not spoken about out of fear of negative social consequences and are therefore tinged with shame). in one anecdote she described the quandary she and her husband experienced as they became increasingly close with new neighbours who 14 were not aware of their child’s genetic history. a harmless enough conversation about their two daughter’s physiological development (being similar in age) came to an awkward halt on the subject of menstruation. similarly a school camp became complicated by one of the daughter’s classmates disclosing her gender variance to previously unknown camp participants from another school, causing a great deal of distress and humiliation. while difficulties like these are just a feature of everyday life, molly felt that representations of their daughter’s gender identity becomes substantially complicated when it comes to online engagement with divergent social networks. she described having a ‘proud mummy moment’ that caused her to upload some photos of her kids to her facebook page. there was a party… with a group of people that i went to school with... that knew me from years ago. and it was the middle of the night, and they said 'oh, i'm friends with ‘molly’ on facebook!’. somehow we must have come up in the conversation... 'let me show you this'. (they) pulled up my page, and were looking at pictures of [my daughter] going 'that's a dude. that's a dude. oh, look what they've done to this kid!’. molly immediately removed the photos but ponders what impact their digital story may have had on the same audience, imbued as it is with all the subtle complexities of loving and learning from a child who is simply and unapologetically ‘different’. the manner in which the story is constructed elicits (though does not guarantee) a sympathetic interpretation. the context in which the story is presented also influences how it is interpreted. for molly and brendon a degree of control over this context (that is where the story may be distributed) was as significant as maintaining control over how their daughter was represented both with words and pictures in their story. now i discuss some of the practical facilitation strategies undertaken to reinforce this sense of proprietary control and empowered voice. mediating strategies in practice a range of mediating strategies were undertaken in the rainbow family tree case study to reinforce a sense of proprietary control and empowered voice. specific and practical tools were derived in part from myerhoff and narrative therapy and include: • establishing personal connections between storytellers and between storytellers and facilitators, thereby assuaging risk, secrecy and shame 15 • acknowledging (and discussing) multiple influences on construction of preferred identity narratives • creating meaningful and frequent opportunities for storytellers to articulate their digital stories in a range of creative ways determined by them • building trust over an extended period, and ‘loitering’ throughout production and distribution processes • confirming that end product and distribution context reflects the storytellers semantic intentions and that storytellers have capacity to alter these contexts should they wish to, at any point in future in molly’s case, opportunities for developing strong connections with other participants were frequent and flexible and occurred both face-to-face and online. molly’s capacity to invest large amounts of energy in both story production and distribution was facilitated by offering access to workshop activities at home. this also allowed her to develop and create the story in collaboration with her husband, thereby also sharing the risks that were implicit in telling their story. while other trans participants in the storytelling group had different notions on the issue of innate or constructed gender identity there was no attempt to seek common ground on the subject. mutually supportive relationships were forged as a result of clearly established group norms that positioned each storyteller as expert in the construction of their own ‘truth’. storytellers and facilitators offered feedback on the aspects of each story that especially engaged or moved them and constructive criticism of aspects that were confusing or perceived as being ‘off the (central) subject’. molly’s technological aptitude was considered (and extended) during the production phase when she and her husband were supported in using software they could access for free at home and on existing hardware. this ‘hands on’ approach afforded them control over every aspect of their story. an extended production time frame allowed deep consideration of the consequences of ‘putting their story out there’ and as a result several revisions were made. baby photos were blurred and the voiceover, having initially been recorded by molly, was re-recorded by a family friend because of concerns that molly’s voice might be identifiable. later, during the distribution phase, molly’s concerns for privacy determined that pseudonyms were used on the rainbow family tree site. she declined to share her story with her facebook network but it’s presence on the rainbow family tree site allowed other members to disseminate the story widely. similarly, after lengthy consideration of the terms and conditions of youtube and vimeo, molly chose not to upload to youtube which currently 16 licenses use of all content for a wide variety of purposes and repurposing. finally the positioning of the story across multiple platforms and contexts (educational dvd and numerous web spaces) supports storytelling complexity and evolution. the booklet that accompanies the dvd offers background insight into some of the significant concerns around privacy and publicity pertinent to trans people and their families. molly and brendon’s presence on the rainbow family tree site also allows them to provide updates on the stories progress articulated in a strong activist voice that nevertheless preserves their anonymity. their daughter may also wish to add her perspective at a later date. in the rainbow family tree case study shirky’s ‘promise’ and ‘bargain’ are articulated (albeit somewhat vaguely) in the home page banner that announces: “a haven for queer digital storytellers and their friends and families… view, create, share… and do your bit to ‘change the world’”. the site architecture operates within the confines of ning and decisions regarding design and layout, which key features are enabled, and how people are encouraged to interact are made by a core group of unpaid community members with administrative privileges (including myself) in regular consultation with the wider community. after a group scoping session in which feedback was solicited on ‘where to next?’ it was decided that rainbow family tree should also establish facebook, vimeo and youtube spaces as a means of circulating the digital stories more widely. while these decisions are generally arrived at by consensus (and individual storytellers decide whether they opt in to various spaces and how they participate) the site ‘bargain’ must nevertheless constitute middle ground among members with diverse needs (particularly on issues of privacy and publicity) and motivations for participation. some wish to utilise the various web spaces to market their own stories and advance their personal social reform agenda while others wish to view (and sometimes share) existing stories with friends without ever participating as storytellers. the site has not yet developed into a self-sustaining community but is highly dependent on the investment of a small group of alpha users. in order to avoid kaminsky’s indictment of myerhoff for her elision of storytellers voices, what covenant can be brokered between these ‘moderators’ and the wider community that ensures authentic telling of collective and preferred identity narratives? conclusion is it possible that liberating digital storytelling from institutional agendas and face-toface workshops into web spaces where communities of storytellers can support one anothers’ endeavours might take digital storytelling practice one step closer to an example of 17 leadbeater’s ‘by’, thereby eliminating dependency on the helping hand of ‘with’? if digital stories are constitutive components of a digitally enabled counterpublic can they “make possible new forms of gendered or sexual citizenship meaning active participation in collective world making through publics of sex and gender”? (warner, 2005, p 57). on the other hand, acknowledging the mediated nature of production and distribution spaces, as with all social spaces and in fact all identity narratives, means acknowledging thematic complications of voice and identity. while activist individuals and communities have opportunity to thrive online they nevertheless face similar socially constructed obstacles as those apparent in wholly face-to-face realms. key strategies in facilitating production and distribution of preferred identity narratives, whether face-to-face or online, include transparent and reflexive practices that draw attention to mediation and the social construction of stories; listening deeply to storytellers and their semantic intentions; and creating opportunities to relinquish (facilitators, moderators) control. while it is difficult to measure the social impact of activist oriented digital stories there is no doubt that they substantially reshape public representations of marginalised identities thereby making a profound contribution to cultures of gendered and sexual citizenship. references baym, n. k. (2010). personal connections in the digital age. cambridge: polity press. berlant, l. (1997). the queen of america goes to washington city: essays on sex and citizenship. durham & london: duke university press. berlant, l. (2008). the female complaint: the unfinished business of sentimentality in american culture. duke university press. bickford, s. (1996). the dissonance of democracy: listening, conflict, and citizenship. new york: cornell university press. boyd, d. (2008). facebook’s privacy trainwreck: exposure, invasion, and social convergence. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 14(1), 1320. boyd, d. (2010). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in z. papacharissi (ed.), networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 39-58). burgess, j. (2006). hearing ordinary voices: cultural studies, vernacular creativity and digital storytelling. continuum: journal of media & cultural studies, 20(2), 201-214. fivush, r., & haden, c. a. (2003). autobiographical memory and the construction of a narrative self: developmental and cultural perspectives. new york: routledge. 18 freedman, j., & combs, g. (1996). narrative therapy: the social construction of preferred realities. a norton professional book. norton. goffman, e. (1959). the presentation of self in everyday life. new york: anchor books. hartley, j. (2008a). problems of expertise and scalability in self-made media. digital storytelling, mediatized stories: self-representations in new media (pp. 197-212). new york: peter lang. hertzberg kaare, b., & lundby, k. (2008). mediatized lives: autobiography and assumed authenticity in digital storytelling. digital storytelling, mediatized stories: self-representations in new media (pp. 105-122). new york: peter lang. kaminsky, m. (1992). myerhoff’s “third voice”: ideology and genre in ethnographic narrative. social text, (33), 124-144. leadbeater, c., & powell, d. (2009). we-think: mass innovation, not mass production. profile books. leadbeater, charles. (2009). the art of with. cornerhouse. lejeune, p., & eakin, p. j. (1989). on autobiography. theory and history of literature. university of minnesota press. meadows, d., & kidd, j. (2009). “capture wales”: the bbc digital storytelling project. story circle: digital storytelling around the world (pp. 91-117). west sussex, uk: wileyblackwell. myerhoff, b. (1982). life history among the elderly: performance, visibility and re-membering. a crack in the mirror: reflexive perspectives in anthropology. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. papacharissi, z. a. (2010). a private sphere: democracy in a digital age. digital media and society series. polity. penn, p., & sheinberg, m. (1991). stories and conversations. journal of strategic & systemic therapies, 10(3-4), 30-37. shirky, c. (2009). here comes everybody: the power of organizing without organizations. penguin books. smith, s., & watson, j. (1996). getting a life: everyday uses of autobiography. university of minnesota. stryker, s., & whittle, s. (2006). the transgender studies reader. new york: routledge. taub-pervizpour, l. (2009). digital storytelling with youth: whose agenda is it? story circle: digital storytelling around the world (pp. 245-251). west sussex, uk: wiley-blackwell. 19 thumim, n. (2008). “it”s good for them to know my story’ : cultural mediation as tension. digital storytelling, mediatized stories: self-representations in new media (pp. 85-104). new york: peter lang. tregoning, w. (2006). authentic self, paranoid critique and getting a good night’s rest. continuum: journal of media and cultural studies, 20(2), 175-188. valentine, d. (2007). imagining transgender: an ethnography of a category. durham: duke university press. vivienne, s. (2011). trans digital storytelling: everyday activism, mutable identity and the problem of visibility. gay and lesbian issues and psychology review, 7(1), 43-54. warner, m. (2005). publics and counterpublics. zone books. white, m., & epston, d. (1990). narrative means to therapeutic ends. a norton professional book. norton. microsoft word aoir16 formatted-2.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 social media kaleidoscope lala hajibayova kent state university wayne buente university of hawai’i at manoa introduction this study investigates the case of isa shahmarli, an azerbaijani lgbtq activist, who committed suicide in january of 2014. even though the subject of sexual minorities is taboo in conservative azerbaijan (the danish institute of human rights, 2010), activist’s death was covered in the mass media and resulted in debate on the rights of the sexual minorities in azerbaijan. this study analyzes the facebook public page of the azerbaijan free lgbt organization in response to the activist’s suicide. in january of 2014, isa shahmarli, the 20-year-old chair of the free lgbt nongovernmental organization in azerbaijan, committed suicide, leaving a note on his facebook social networking site page: i am going. this country and this world are not for me.… i am leaving to become happy,” he wrote. “you are all to blame for my death. this world is not colorful enough to accept all my colours. goodbye. (lomsadze & tales, 2014). based on speculations regarding the reasons behind isa shahmarli’s suicide, his friends suggested that isa’s decision was due mainly to his being rejected by his family (huffington post, 2014). whereas acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (lgbtq) gender identity has increased in western societies (e.g., barnhurst, 2007;dhoest & simons, 2012; mcdermott, 2011), it is still a very thorny path in nonwestern countries, such as azerbaijan. however, the internet technologies, in particular social media, have become an essential tool for exploring, discovering, articulating and disclosing one’s own identity (alexander & losh, 2010; boross &reijnders, 2015; duguay, 2014; gray, 2009; gross, 2007). for example, in an ethnographic study of rural young people’s engagement with digital resources, gray (2009) proposes that “digitally circulated representations of lgbtq identity categories interpellate rural queer youth by laying down a basic narrative for the articulation of identity” (p. 1172). along suggested citation (apa): hajibayova, l. & buente, w. (2015, october 21-24). social media kaleidoscope. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 2 these lines, isa shahmarli’s interview on meydan tv1, which was made accessible through the youtube channel a few days before his suicide, and open discussion of the lgbt situation in azerbaijan demonstrate that isa relied on social media as a platform to express and promote awareness of lgbt issues. however, isa shahmarli ’s whimsical and playful interview hid his inner struggles with his identity and issues of its acceptance by his family and society at large. in this regard, almeida, johnson, corliss, molnar and azrael (2009), in their study evaluating the correlation between lgbt status and emotional distress among 9th-12th grade students, found that perceived discrimination accounted for increased depressive symptomatology among lgbt males and females, and accounted for an elevated risk of self-harm and suicidal ideation among lgbt males (p. 1). of relevance here is durkheim’s (1897) definition of suicide, which suggests that suicide can be applied to every instance of death which results directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act consciously carried out by the victim. durkheim identifies four types of suicide: egoistic, altruistic, anomic and fatalistic. according to durkheim, egoistic suicide depends on the individual’s degree of integration into the social groups to which he or she belongs, e.g., family, religion or political party. altruistic suicide is related to insufficient individualism wherein the individual’s ego doesn’t pursue its own life, for example, a mother kills herself after her child’s death. anomic suicides relate to industrial and financial crises when changes overwhelm society’s capacity to regulate the lives of individuals. and the last, fatalistic suicide, which is the opposite of anomic suicide, is result of the excessive regulations, such as overpowering physical or moral despotism. durkheim’s conceptualization of suicide provides a framework for understanding the social factors that may influence the decision to take one’s own life. viewed through the lens of durkheim’s conceptualization of the suicide, isa shahmarli’s case can be considered an egoistic suicide, i.e., a suicide caused by the weak social integration of sexual minorities into the family and society. this study attempts to shed light on how the lgbt community of azerbaijan perceived isa shahmarli death through an analysis of comments responding to related posts on the website of the azerbaijan free lgbt organization. data analysis this study analyzes comments posted on the facebook public page of the azerbaijan free lgbt organization in response to three postings related to the activist’s suicide. the first posting presented the radio of azadlyg’s (rfe/rl) news article, titled “debates around gay leader’s suicide,” with an image of people grieving by his grave (see figure 1). this posting received 23 likes, was shared three times, and had two comments. the first commentator shared another news article covering the activist’s suicide, and the second commentator expressed his sympathy. 1 meydan tv http://www.meydan.tv/en 3 figure 1. a screenshot of the first facebook posting related to isa shahmarli ‘s suicide. the second posting (see figure 2) was a depiction of isa shahmarli’s grave, which received 117 likes, was shared three times, and was commented on by 32 facebook users. figure 2. the facebook posting depicting the grave of isa shahmarli. and the third posting shared the yagg.com 2coverage of isa shahmarli’s suicide, which received 26 likes (see figure 3). 2 http://yagg.com/2014/01/23/azerbaidjan-le-president-dune-association-lgbt-sesuicide/ 4 figure 3. the yogg.com news story about isa shahmarli. this study utilized glaser and strauss’s (1967) grounded theory to analyze 32 facebook comments. analysis revealed the following three major variables: gender of user, types of addressee, and expressed attitude toward the deceased/ lgbtqs. the following coding scheme was defined for the three thematic constructs: a. gender of user female (0), male (1), na (2) facebook users’ profiles, such as profile name and picture, were analyzed to identify users’ gender. b. types of addressee deceased/ lgbt community (0), other user (reply) (1), all users/public (2), other (3) types of addressee were identified based on analysis of each comment. c. expressed attitude toward deceased/lgbts hostile (0), acceptance/understanding (1), sympathy (2) overall, 32 analyzed comments were posted by 11 male and 14 female users. analysis of the types of addressee revealed that most of the comments were addressed to the deceased (23, 71.9%), followed by the lgbt community (5, 15. 6%), another facebook user (2, 6.3%), and other (1, 3.1%). 5 analysis of expressed attitude toward the deceased revealed that most of the postings were expressing sympathy (23, 71.9%), followed by hostile negative comments ( 8, 25%), and acceptance/understanding (1, 3.1%). analysis of correlation between attitude and gender of commentators revealed that females tended to express more sympathetic (40.6%) than negative attitudes (15.6%), whereas comments expressed by male users equally expressed sympathetic and negative attitudes (21.9%) results and discussions analysis of comments posted on the facebook public page of the azerbaijan free lgbt organization in response to the activist’s suicide revealed that most of the users were sympathetic with isa shahmarli’s struggles which led to his decision to take his life. in particular female users were very vocal in expressing their sadness, for example, one of the users posted: “rest in the peace isa, we will never forget you” however some of the sympathetic comments suggested that he could have changed himself and lived life as a straight male: “ very sad… it was not worth it, he could have changed. male cannot have female characteristics. he was young, he could have devoted his life to better things. rest in peace. his grave was vandalized. very sad. god forgive him.” a number of facebook users also provided very critical comments: cursing gender minorities and applauding shahmarli’s decision to take his life: “the world released from one sinner … god will take all their lives one day” this study also analyzed gender disparities in users’ attitudes toward the deceased. apart from the fact that comments were posted predominantly by female users, analysis of differences in expressed attitudes by gender revealed that women tended to express more understanding and sympathy than men. this observation echoes findings of previous studies suggesting distinctive gender patterns in online communications (e.g., guiller & durndell, 2006; thompson & murachver, 2001). this study’s findings also echoes the findings of hajibayova and buente’s (2015) analysis of youtube comments related to isa shahmarli in that they demonstrate that females are more understanding and tolerant to the lgbt concerns. however, there are significant differences in the audiences: youtube comments are from a wide and diverse community, whereas the facebook page of the lgbt community is accessed by a particular group of users, who are more likely related to the lgbt community. therefore, while findings of the current study demonstrate some understanding of lgbt concerns, understanding of how identify is perceived should be considered in the context of the larger construct of societal, cultural, social and political values. 6 conclusions this study suggests that the consequences of living as an openly gay person can be profound, including rejection, verbal abuse, and lack of protection, all of which could be the cause of the tragic end of a life. this study argues that online representation of sexual identity should be considered as a part of people’s physical world to better understand how society affects their online world. references alexander, j., & losh, e. (2010). a youtube of one’s own? coming out videos as rhetorical action. in c. pullen and m. cooper (eds.) lgbt identity and online new media (pp. 2336). new york: routledge almeida, j., johnson, r., corliss, h., molnar, b., & azrael, d. (2009). emotional distress among lgbt youth: the influence of perceived discrimination based on sexual orientation. journal of youth adolescent, 38(7), 1001-1014. barnhurst, k. (2007). visibility as paradox: representation and simultaneous contrast. in k. barnhurst (ed.), media/queered: visibility and its disconnect (pp. 120). new york, ny: peter lang boross, b., & reijnders, s. (august 6, 2014). coming out with the media: the ritualization of self-disclosure in the dutch television programme uit de kast. european journal of cultural studies. doi: 10.1177/1367549414544120 dhoest, a., & simons, n. (2012) questioning queer audiences: exploring diversity in lesbian and gay men’s media uses and readings. in k. ross (ed.), the handbook of gender, sex and media (pp. 260-276). malden: wiley-blackwell duguay, s. (september 4, 2014). he has a way gayer facebook than i do : investigating sexual identity disclosure and context collapse on a social networking site. new media & society. doi:10.1177/1461444814549930. durkheim, e. (1897/2002). suicide: a study in sociology. london, uk: routledge classics glaser, b., & strauss, a. (1967). the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. new brunswick, nj: aldine transaction. gray, m. (2009). negotiating identities/queering desires: coming out online and the remediation of the coming-out story. journal of computer-mediated communication, 14(7), 1162-1189. gross, l. (2007). foreword. in k. o’riordan & d. philips (eds.), queer online: media, technology & sexuality (pp. vii-x). new york, ny: peter lang. 7 guiller, j., & durndell, a. (2007). students' linguistic behavior in online discussion groups: does gender matter? computers in human behavior , 23(5), 2240–2255. hajibayova, l., & buente, w. (2015). the colors of digital world. iconference 2015 workshop on exploring gender, race, and sexuality with social media. newport beach, ca, usa. march 23-27, 2015. huffington post (2014, january 23). isa shakhmarli, azeri gay rights activist, allegedly commits suicide with a rainbow flag. retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/23/isa-shakhmarli-gay-activist-dead_n_4652416.html lomsadze, g., & tales, t. (2014). azerbaijan: prominent gay rights activist commits suicide. eurasianet.org. retrieved from http://www.eurasianet.org/node/67970 mcdermott, e. (2011). the world some have won: sexuality class and inequality. sexualities,14(1), 63-78. the danish institute of human rights, 2010 retrieved from http://www.coe.int/t/commissioner/source/lgbt/azerbaijansociological_e.pdf thomson, r., & murachver, t. (2001). predicting gender from electronic discourse. british journal of social psychology, 40, 193–208. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 beyond internet access: a study of social and cultural practices in lan houses david nemer indiana university usa dnemer@indiana.edu abstract lan houses, for-profit internet cafés, have been one of the main strategies from the brazilian government to promote the internet access in marginalized areas. 1 although the internet is the main purpose of such businesses, lan houses provide an important space for brazil's urban poor areas, known as favelas. drawing from critical ethnographic research in the favelas of vitoria, brazil, this study sheds light on the social and cultural practices that happen in these establishments. in addition, it highlights the complex relationship between the lan houses and the government. keywords lan house; internet café; digital inequality; community technology center; critical ethnography background lan house is a for profit establishment, similar to a cybercafé, where the majority of brazilians access the internet and play multi-player games. the term “lan” stands for local area network. the concept of lan house originated in south korea and had its first units in brazil around 1998 (lemos & martin, 2010). at that time, internet in brazilian homes was expensive, rare and poor quality, which motivated the quick spread of the lan houses in urban, richer neighborhoods. the customers were mostly youngsters who used the lan houses to socialize and play computer games such as counterstrike and fifa. over the years, lan houses became practically a rarity in these areas for two main reasons: users were able to afford internet in their homes because broadband was becoming cheaper, and the brazilian government, at federal and state levels, was passing several bills that attempted to keep the youngsters away from such facilities. for example, the bill rj 4.782/2006 prohibited lan houses within 1 kilometer from any school and bill 3.437/2004 required every underage user to have a special authorization signed by their parents. such bills were designed under the assumption that the users were ditching school and spending long late hours in the lan houses playing games. around 2004, lan houses gained great popularity in the poorest areas of brazil, especially in the favelas – slums located in urban areas (lemos & martin, 2010). since the marginalized people were not able to afford personal computers and the telecommunication companies didn’t provide them with proper internet infrastructure, lan houses became the communities’ main gateway to the online world. with their proliferation in the poor communities and favelas, the brazilian government saw in the lan house phenomenon a way to promote the digital and social inclusion of the marginalized. politicians, who once perceived such facilities as “bad guys” in richer neighborhoods, now are trying to revoke past bills in order to promote the spread of more lan houses in poor areas. 1 in this paper, “internet” is spelled with a small “i” instead of a capital “i”. according to markham and baym (2009) capitalizing means that “internet” is a proper noun and implies either that it is a being or a specific place. both metaphors lead to granting the internet agency and power that are better granted to those who develop and use it. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 research questions and methodological approach due to the relative novelty and uniqueness of such internet facilities in poor communities, this exploratory study asked the following general research questions: (1) what is the experience of the marginalized people in lan houses? (2) what is the current relationship between the brazilian government and lan houses? most studies done on community technology centers (ctcs), such as telecenters and libraries, have been focused on measuring the wrong outcomes, overemphasizing traditional economic indicators and macro numbers while neglecting other outcomes that are more difficult to quantify (gomez & pather, 2012; kleine, 2010). such quantitative models treat people and cultures as abstract concepts, statistical figures to be moved up and down in the charts of “progress” (escobar, 1995). in order to find answers to these questions, this study was driven by qualitative exploration – using critical ethnographic methods such as observation, interviews and surveys – designed to focus on the perspective of the local users and owners of lan houses. critical ethnography is aimed to give voices to the locals and allow the researcher to understand the issues and conflicts on their terms. also, it moves to uncover and foster non-western and nonconventional modes of knowing – accounting for the creativity embodied in the notion of "hybrid cultures" of resistance combining "traditional" and "modern" elements in new and promising ways (escobar, 1995). in the summer of 2012, i spent two months in the favela of gurigica, located in the city of vitoria, brazil. the study focused on three lan houses. ten semi-structured interviews were used to elicit the views of the locals, and participant observation assisted in gaining a greater understanding of the context. the interviews aimed to understand the locals’ experience in the lan houses. the following findings are the outcome of this exploratory study. beyond internet access lan houses are places where the locals socialize, host birthday parties and can be safe from the constant conflicts involving the drug cartel. users often said that lan houses are seen as a “sacred” and vital place by everyone just like the local school, market and church. the mothers from gurigica preferred to leave their children playing games there than let them play in the streets where they have a high risk of being recruited by the drug cartel. they claimed the criminals don’t go into these facilities because they are owned by the locals and understand them as being beneficial to the community. the services provided by lan houses also go beyond providing internet access. the locals can pay their utility bills, buy cellphone recharge cards, play video games (xbox and playstation), print and copy their documents. printing costs about $0.10 a sheet of paper (black and white) and $0.50 colored. the users are charged by the hour to use the computers and video games, one hour costs around $1.00. adults mostly visit lan houses to use e-government services, specifically to print their criminal background so they can visit their relatives that are in prison. they also sought other e-government services such as filing taxes and applying for government issued documents, but beyond these services there aren’t many others. the locals often visited the lan houses to type their cvs and seek for jobs online. facebook is also one the most used online services. this was surprising since just last year, orkut used to be brazil’s number 1 social networking site (sns) (nemer & das, 2012). currently the drug cartel inserted in gurigica is in a war against other cartels as they attempt to expand their territory. therefore, the locals from gurigica are not allowed to visit their friends and family members who live in other rival slums since they would be in great danger. facebook was used as a way to break the drug cartel blockage and keep in touch with their ties. although the brazilian government recognizes lan houses as beneficial social and technological centers, policymakers haven’t been successful in providing support to them. in 2011, the congress passed the bill 4361/2004 which finally recognized lan houses as formal businesses and aimed to provide special benefits, such as partnerships with the government and access to credit lines with low selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 interest rates to their owners. unfortunately, the lan houses owners in gurigica weren’t able to take advantage of such benefits because they were not recognized as formal businesses due to the state bureaucratic flaws. policymakers need to have a closer understanding of the reality in the marginalized areas so better policies can be implemented based on the local needs. looking at the lan houses in terms of their relationship to the culture of the people in the slums and the government's involvement with them, it becomes clear that the value of such institutions is far greater than is formally recognized. lan houses serve important functions to the people such as providing a safe location from cartels and providing access. these technological spaces have come to have a far greater meaning ascribed to them than the quantifiable advances often associated with technology. shedding light on people’s experiences in lan houses broadens our view of different ways that technology and internet is used, and perhaps thereby do a better job of developing appropriate policies and technologies for these people. references escobar, a. (1995). encountering development : the making and unmaking of the third world. princeton, nj: princeton university press. gomez, r., & pather, s. (2011). ict evaluation: are we asking the right questions?. the electronic journal of information systems in developing countries, 50. kleine, d. (2010). ict4what?—using the choice framework to operationalise the capability approach to development. journal of international development,22(5), 674-692. lemos, r., & martini, p. (2010). lan houses: a new wave of digital inclusion in brazil. information technologies & international development, 6(se), pp-31. markham, a. & baym, n. (eds.) (2008). internet enquiry: conversations about method. london: sage. nemer, d., & das, a. (2012). impression management on facebook and orkut: a cross cultural study of brazilians and indians. internet research 13.0. salford, england. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16 th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): highfield, t., & duguay, s. (2015, october 21-24). “like a monkey with a miniature cymbal”: cultural practices of repetition in visual social media. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16 th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “like a monkey with a miniature cymbal”: cultural practices of repetition in visual social media tim highfield digital media research centre, queensland university of technology stefanie duguay digital media research centre, queensland university of technology abstract looping media are recurring components of online content, from gifs to vine videos, in addition to the conceptual repetition of memes and related practices. this paper analyses practices around looping visual media as examples of vernacular creativity, social media literacies, and internet culture, especially for irreverent and playful purposes. focusing on the lgbtq digital cultural context as a pilot study, this research examines multi-platform uses of looping media, including personal narratives through vine videos and animated gifs on tumblr. in addition to textual analysis of lgbtq looping visual social media content, the study will further explore the platform context as part of the experience of looped media. the research will address how these factors may also contribute to practices of irreverence and play, both within the specific case of lgbtq culture and internet culture more generally. keywords loops, lgbtq, tumblr, vine, visual social media introduction looping media are key components of online content, from animated gifs (eppink, 2014) to vine videos, and have connections to practices around sampling and mashups within music and remix cultures. repetition is also an established and integral part of the form and experience of internet culture. memes, for instance, work in part because they can be recreated by many, adapted for different contexts yet maintaining the same structure – the repetition is part of their success and their meaning (shifman, 2014). research context this paper analyses practices around looping visual media, focusing on gifs and vine videos. these forms reflect elements of a wider internet culture (zittrain, 2014) promoting participation, user-generated content, and repurposing existing media. ‘vernacular creativity’ (burgess, 2008) sees internet users creating their own imitations and remixes of popular content, using online platforms to make, share, and inspire new media. the success of such content reflects their spreadability (jenkins, ford, & green, 2013), with social media used to disseminate content beyond its initial context. these media forms also reflect irreverence and playful aims. visual media attract attention through likes, shares, or responses, by acknowledging the tropes of online culture. there is a cultural logic apparent (shifman, 2014), as users demonstrate multiple literacies: cultural literacy, using references and intertexts to create meaning, and social media literacy. memetic practices, and their recreation and replication, are discrete repetitions though, unlike the ‘digital seriality’ of loops (maeder & wentz, 2014). poulaki (2015) argues that repetition creates new meanings, reframing “its dynamics … from the loop’s movement and self-generated dynamics” (p. 93). this paper offers an exploratory analysis of cultural practices around looping visual social media. it addresses a gap in internet studies in its choice of platforms, and provides important new knowledge about cultural practices and forms. focusing on the lgbtq1 digital cultural context as a pilot study, it examines multi-platform uses of looping media, including personal narratives through vine videos and animated gifs on tumblr. research into lgbtq digital expressions of culture and online representations has identified multifaceted outcomes of performing sexual and gender identity (across platforms, purposes, and practices – see, for example, gray, 2009; mowlabocus, 2010). these combine elements of personal and public expression that contribute to individuals’ identity development (see raun, 2014). lgbtq individuals have also attempted to influence attitudes by (re)blogging critiques of mainstream discourses on tumblr (fink & miller, 2014). methods this paper focuses on playful practices around looping media; from highly individual and personal presentations on vine to the appropriation of gifs from different contexts, looping visual content can make a statement that is then emphasized for impact. the extended analysis draws on a sample of ten vine videos and ten tumblr gifs from popular lgbtq hashtags, and five vine videos cross-posted to tumblr. while hashtag use is not universal or consistent, this research uses these markers as an initial sampling mechanism. the study of media content and practices uses textual analysis and an exploration of the influence of platforms and technologies. loops are texts, artifacts from which social 1 in the absence of an agreed-upon umbrella term (barker, richards, & bowes-catton, 2009), lgbtq is used to represent lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer individuals and other sexual minorities along spectrums of gender and sexuality. media users make meaning. intertexts – texts which make explicit connections to other texts (mckee, 2003) – are a key consideration here, particularly given the popular repurposing of other media sources on tumblr (see peterson, 2014). the textual analysis is supplemented by examining platform and technological influences through an ‘ethnography of affordances’ (race, 2014). combined influences of content, technology, and cultures are explored using van dijck’s (2013) approach to ‘disassembling platforms’: the experience of vine or tumblr is influenced by devices, platform policies, and corporate ownership. initial findings preliminary examination of looped content on vine and tumblr indicates that lgbtq individuals use these media for similar purposes. vine hashtags such as #rainbowgang and #lgbttakeover see a community of african-american, same-sex attracted women showcasing dance moves and kisses with their partners as well as more taboo activities. vine’s 6.5 second, automatic looping format shapes these messages, harnessing the short and sudden visual barrage while sometimes circumventing these constraints by making video series to be viewed as a longer montage, often in response to others using the same hashtags. #lgbt-tagged tumblr content features a plethora of looping gifs with lgbtq media figures, such as the glee character dani smiling mischievously and exclaiming, “i love lady parts!” (figure 1). there are also reams of more intimate gifs showing same-sex couples embracing and kissing, and pornographic gifs of lgbtq sexuality are present when the safe-search filter is switched off (for not-safe-for-work content on tumblr, see tiidenberg, 2015). vines are often cross-posted to tumblr, portraying elements of humour, political statements, and intimacy, generally from the content generator’s firstperson viewpoint. figure 1: still from the glee gif, sourced from http://thiskikismarvelous.tumblr.com/post/66912242836 the next stage for this research is an extended analysis of gifs and vines. as part of this study, the full paper will further explore the platform context as part of the experience of looped media, and how these factors may also contribute to practices of irreverence and play, both within the specific case of lgbtq culture and internet culture more generally. references barker, m., richards, c., & bowes-catton, h. (2009). “all the world is queer save thee and me …”: defining queer and bi at a critical sexology seminar. journal of bisexuality, 9(3-4), 363–379. burgess, j. (2008). “all your chocolate rain are belong to us”? viral video, youtube and the dynamics of participatory culture. in g. lovink & s. niederer (eds.), video vortex reader: responses to youtube (pp. 101–109). amsterdam: institute of network cultures. eppink, j. (2014). a brief history of the gif (so far). journal of visual culture, 13(3), 298– 306. fink, m., & miller, q. (2014). trans media moments: tumblr, 2011-2013. television & new media, 15(7), 611–626. doi:10.1177/1527476413505002 gray, m. l. (2009). out in the country: youth, media, and queer visibility in rural america. new york, ny: new york university press. jenkins, h., ford, s., & green, j. (2013). spreadable media: creating value and meaning in a networked culture. new york, ny: new york university press. maeder, d., & wentz, d. (2014). digital seriality as structure and process. eludamos: journal for computer game culture, 8(1), 129–149. mckee, a. (2003). textual analysis: a beginner’s guide. london: sage. mowlabocus, s. (2010). gaydar culture: gay men, technology and embodiment in the digital age. burlington, vt: ashgate. petersen, l. n. (2014). sherlock fans talk: mediatized talk on tumblr. northern lights, 12, 87–104. doi:10.1386/nl.12.87 poulaki, m. (2015). featuring shortness in online loop cultures. empedocles: european journal for the philosophy of communication, 5(1-2), 91–96. race, k. (2014). speculative pragmatism and intimate arrangements: online hook-up devices in gay life. culture, health & sexuality, (july), 37–41. raun, t. (2014). video blogging as a vehicle of transformation: exploring the intersection between trans identity and information technology. international journal of cultural studies. doi:10.1177/1367877913513696 shifman, l. (2014). memes in digital culture. cambridge, ma: the mit press. tiidenberg, k. (2015). boundaries and conflict in a nsfw community on tumblr: the meanings and uses of selfies. new media & society. doi:10.1177/1461444814567984 van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. oxford and new york: oxford university press. zittrain, j. l. (2014). reflections on internet culture. journal of visual culture, 13(3), 388-394. microsoft word klastrup.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): klastrup, l. (2014, october 22-24). “heartwarming moment of the day”: global sharing of viral content on facebook. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “heartwarming moment of the day”: global sharing of viral content on facebook lisbeth klastrup it-university of copenhagen, denmark do you remember the earlier days of facebook, when a group dedicated to a man, who wanted to collect 1 million likes so he could convert his house into a pirateship with the blessing of his girlfriend, went viral? and the girlfriend ended up having to (principally) yield to his wish because of the massive number of likes he got? this is one example of what one might term global “banal” content, that is viral content which cannot be described as breaking or political news in any way, but nevertheless include elements which for a fleeting moment encourages users to share it globally. this research project, the framework of which this paper seeks to describe, aims at understanding more closely facebook user engagement with this form of shared content. the “viral content” which i will examine is closely related to the principles of“virality”, defined by hahon and hemsley as an “information flow process” during which many people spread the same item of information over a short period of time and beyond their own personal networks (nahon and hemsley 2013: 16). this “piece of information” is often a meme, an infectious and attractive cultural “idea” in the very broad sense. during the viral spread of the meme, it can be either copied without intervention or “repackaged” and altered by its sharers (cf. shifman 2014). i understand the “pieces of information” analysed in this project as memes, vis a vis their apparently infectious (viral) nature, even if they are passed forward without alterations. constine (2009) refers to this type of meme as as “discrete” memes, whereas the template meme type can be described as “symbiotic”. the memes in question will henceforth be referred to as discrete mundane memes. the research project, currently in its first phase, explores seven discrete mundane memes, which have attracted massive attention from facebook users across national borders. it seeks to explore and draw to the fore some of the reasons why some pieces of content might attract attention on a global scale on facebook, in particular by studying how the memes are commented on by an international mass of facebook users. currently, few if any studies exist which adresses this particular phenomena from a combined content and reception perspective, applying both qualitative and quantitative measures. however researchers have discussed which content and which mechanicsm support the spreading of memes and viral content on social media on a more general level (see f.i. bakshy et al 2012, nahon and hemsley 2013, shifman 2014). they posit that personal relation to the (previous) sharer, novelty, emotional ressonance, quality and “packaging” of content, humour and the uptake by “interest networks” are some of the main contributing factors to a meme’s success. additionally, a small body of researchers and market research companies have explored more generally why people share content on social network sites. of particular interest to this research is a study by market research company ipsos which have surveyed 12,420 global online “sharers”in 24 countries. their study revealed that on average across countries, people prefer to share “interesting” (61%), “important” (43%) and “funny” (43%) things. however, four in ten (37%) i indicated they share ‘to let others know what i believe in and who i really am” (ipsos 2013). baek et al (2011) studied reasons for sharing links on facebook, and found that the three dominat motives for sharing was the wish to share information (21%), convenience and entertainment (18%), and to pass time (13,1%). from a psychological perspective, sharing as an act can be understood as grounded both in intrinsic motivations (enjoyment and commitment to the community) and extrinsic motivations (selfdevelopment and reputation gaining) (see nov et al 2010). sharing on social media sites thus serves both the function of providing (continued) grounds for social interaction and as a means of self-promotion and entertainment, and the project will seek to explore whether these motivations can also be identified in the comments to the seven memes. finally, of additional interest is also a growing body of literature examining diffusion patterns and large-scale propagation of content on social network sites, based on mathematical and statistical analysis of spreading patterns (see for instance bashy et al 2012, goel et al 2012, dow et al 2013). through an analysis of posting dates and times and the nationality of posters, this project will seek to identify possible patterns of propagation, both temporally and nationally. research case the popular examples described and analysed in the final paper consists of seven examples of viral content pieces which made their way to the author’s personal news feed in the period between january 2013 and january 2014. the main selection criteria has been that the content should have attracted at least 200.000 likes, comments or shares and that this user-generated content in relation to the identifiable original post should originate from several different countries. systemically discovering and tracking the “most popular” content is in itself a methodological challenge due to facebooks search restrictions which is the reason why for this project content has simply been identified on grounds of it having entered the author’s own national network. in the final paper, i will present results based on the crawling, and quantitative and qualitative analysis of all comments made to the selected seven memes. * table 1. overview of seven globally popular discrete memes first findings the most popular and widely distributed piece of content in the sample is a wedding anniversary photo, depicting on the left side an official wedding photo in black and white of a young couple and on the right side, a current photo of the same couple, many years aged, lovingly embracing each other. the photo text reads “heartwarming moment of the day: he's 101, she's 97. they've been married for 80 years!! yes, 80 years!! click like to congratulate them!!”. as the table illustrates, to date this photo has received 6.484.915 likes, 137.262 comments and it has been shared 208,297 times. a pilot study (probing around 5000+ interactions made in the context of the photo during february 2014) reveal that users who have interacted with the post have their base in more than 20 countries and on five different continents. most comments are celebratory, either explicit “congratulations” or comments on the (wonderful) length of the marriage and the power of love. thus, discrete meme engagement in this case seem to be grounded in both emotional arousal, positivity and the apparent novelty of discovering that people can actually stay married this long. people use the comments both to express intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for interacting with the content, such as “i hope to be them , reminiscing on the marriage of their own parents, or pointing to them as “true role models” to modern society. by notable comparison, the photo of president obama embracing his wife with the text “four more years” which appeared on his page after he won the 2012 elections by some sources declared the most popular photo on facebook ever has “only” (to this date) gotten 4,436,997 likes (but roughly twice the shares of the anniversary photo). dow et al (2013) demonstrated that the cascades (spreading events) following the posting of the above mentioned obama photo and the spreading of a call for likes in order for an ordinary guy to have sex with his girlfriend developed in very different ways. in the obama photo case (the celebrity), data revealed that 50% of those that reshared the photo also followed his page. in the “like this for sex” case, the spreading pattern was more organic and deeper. it is worth noting, that the wedding anniversary meme and five of the other memes do not have a seeding sender (first poster) with any international celebrity status in and of itself. (one meme is posted by the somewhat popular actor george takei, however the content is not related to him personally in any way). furthermore, to this day people still like and comment on four of the seven memes. this indicates that even if sharing has slowed down, it continues to reach new networks. further mining of the data gathered from the seven cases will hopefully reveal whether this and other initial observations put forth in this first version of the paper holds true. * the development of the crawler has meet unexpected problems and contrary to plan, the full data set was not yet available at the time of submission. microsoft word 789-664-1-pb.docx selected  papers  of  internet  research  14.0,  2013:  denver,  usa   professionally yours: anonymity, trust, and self-portrayal on the deep web abstract the deep web (dw) is the collective data, forums, and websites on the unindexed internet. the dw provides an online environment that allows users to participate in illicit transactions with greater security and anonymity than that available on the surface web. multiple dw marketplaces have been established, specializing in black market wares – ranging from drugs and weapons to pornography and forged documents. dw traffickers work to create a reliable, trustworthy persona to establish credibility and present a professional veneer for engaging with potential and current customers. in this paper, we investigate the mechanisms of anonymity, trust, and traffickers’ selfportrayal as reputable and reliable businesspeople on the dw. we show that even though dw traffickers involve in illegal activities, both the trust mechanisms and the strategies deployed for the establishment of seller reputations on the dw are, with a few nuances, similar to those adopted on the ‘surface-web’ marketplaces. keywords anonymity; self-portrayal; deep web; internet commerce; computer-mediated communication the deep web: an overview the deep web (dw) is the collective data, forums, and websites on the unindexed internet. information contained on the dw is not indexed by commonly utilized search engines (i.e., google, yahoo, etc.) and therefore remains inaccessible to the average internet user. parts of the dw have been appropriated for organizational and business use, including the creation of black markets, networks to facilitate the distribution of illicit materials, and organized crime. the dw is accessed with a variety of software suites, meant to facilitate connections through multiple computers and afford users greater anonymity and security than ‘surface’ web browsers. the nature of the dw makes cataloging sites and services a difficult task: the urls used for navigation deviate greatly from the commonly-encountered surface-web template (i.e., www.google.com). dw urls utilize the .onion top level domain, and are typically a lengthy hash (rarely betraying the site to which they direct). among .onion sites readily accessible are image boards specializing in child pornography, black markets, purported assassins offering their services, and counterfeit and forged currency and official documents. in this paper, we investigate anonymity, trust, and traffickers’ self-portrayal on the dw. toward this goal, we perform a qualitative analysis of two dw marketplaces, silk road and black market reloaded, and perform a qualitative case study one trafficker’s self-portrayal as a reputable and reliable businesspeople. anonymity and trust in the deep web marketplaces on the surface web, establishment of trust is crucial for the success of reputation systems (e.g., ebay, e-pinions) (e.g., jøsang, 2007; jøsang et al., 2007). in spite of their involvement in illegal activities, dw marketplaces are observably aware of this fact. for this reason, technological affordances are provided on the dw to allow for trust building. the two largest black markets on the dw are silk road (sr) and black market reloaded (bmr). both offer similar wares, with one key distinction: bmr allows the sale of weapons, while sr eliminated weapons sales in december 2012. otherwise, both offer forums accessible to buyers and sellers, standard selling templates, and an internal messaging system. while the sites make a business of offering illegal goods, they treat transactions essentially the same as a surface-web marketplace, providing protections to buyers and sellers, and standardizing business practices amongst users. bmr and sr have instituted protections to buyers and sellers in an attempt to minimize scamming and theft. central to the buying experience is an escrow service, so that when buyers ‘pay’ a seller, funds are held in escrow for a set period of time before being released. each site also offers a selected  papers  of  internet  research  14.0,  2013:  denver,  usa   rating system, from which an overall ranking and satisfaction percentage are calculated, and publicly available. to further enhance trust and reputation building, sellers are given a template onto which they may post information pertinent to potential buyers. in addition, most sellers offer their public pgp key, should buyers wish to contact them. oftentimes, a link to a tormail email address is provided for off-site (and presumably secure, encrypted) communication between a buyer and a seller. included on the seller’s page – in addition to their own written introduction -are links to currentlylisted items for sale, and user reviews. like on ebay, reviews are only a sentence or two, meant to give prospective buyers an idea of what their transaction experience will be like. as with other legitimate marketplaces, bmr and sr both rely on user feedback to help purchasers make educated decisions about how, and with whom, to spend their money – and to incentivize good behavior among market participants. reputations that rely upon buyer feedback can “discourage entry by bad types in markets;” while the system used to glean feedback legitimizes and quantifies the transaction experience (resnick et. al., 2001). our work thus shows that, even when selling illegal wares, surface web rules of reputation and trust still apply. one distinction between dw and surface web marketplaces, however, is related to anonymity: while real world identity may be an important factor in surface web marketplaces, complete anonymity is instrumental to maintain on the dw. on the dw, measures are taken to ensure anonymity without affecting trustworthiness. for example, while reviews of wares are anonymous, they are aggregated and displayed on sellers’ profile pages. in addition, for an added layer of anonymity, both sr and bmr rely on a digital currency, “bitcoin,” for all transactions, and ‘launder’ bitcoin transactions. users are assigned digital wallets to, and from, which they may deposit money. numerous online exchanges (similar to internet cambios) are available, with transferring usd to btc taking anywhere from one hour to a business week. trafficker self-portrayal we also investigate seller self-portrayal on the dw via the case study of cherryflavor, one of the most prolific and ostensibly successful weapons traffickers on bmr. initial analyses show that cherryflavor takes care in creating a professional profile to instill confidence in buyers, and has gained a reputation on the forums (and in transaction reviews) for being ‘accessible,’ ‘communicative,’ and ‘honest.’ he has been a member since 2012-12-10, and is identified by bmr as a “level 2 seller.” unlike other traffickers, cherryflavor emphasizes the importance of relying on the bmr escrow system and requires all purchasers to utilize it. especially in a sales area rife with scammers, this behavior alone sets cherryflavor apart from other sellers. from cherryflavor' profile, information on the most recent firearms transactions are accessible. additionally, cherryflavor encourages purchasers to document their buying experience on the bmr forums and reliably responds to their concerns in a timely manner. in our work, we document these interactions and show how cherryflavor is able to maintain his selling reputation. conclusion in this paper, we have shown how anonymity and trust play a crucial role in dw marketplaces and how the same rules with regards to these concepts on the surface web apply to the dw, but not without nuances. we also showed that like any astute businessperson, cherryflavor is aware that offering superlative customer service – grounded, straightforward and honest communication – is key to maintaining a strong sales reputation, retaining customers, and gaining future buyers. we acknowledge the limits of a mere qualitative analysis of unraveling the nature of these concepts and plan to enhance our work quantitatively in the future. what is most striking about our work, we believe, is that it investigates the three concepts of anonymity, trust, and selfportrayal in a totally new online environment—that of the dw. we hope that our work will trigger more interest in studying the dw. selected  papers  of  internet  research  14.0,  2013:  denver,  usa   sources jøsang, a. (2007). trust and reputation systems. foundations of security analysis and design iv, 209-245. jøsang, a., ismail, r., & boyd, c. (2007). a survey of trust and reputation systems for online service provision. decision support systems, 43(2), 618-644. madhaven, j., afanasiev, l., antova, l., & halevy, a. (2009). harnessing the deep web: present and future. 4th annual biennial conferece on innovative data systems research (cidr). asilomar, ca. resnick, p., zeckhauser, r. (2002). trust among strangers in internet transactions: empirical analysis of ebay’s reputation system. the economics of the internet and e-commerce, advances in applied microeconomics, 11, 127-157. microsoft word 896-669-1-pb (1).doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 how wikipedia’s dr jekyll became mr hyde: vandalism, sock puppetry and the curious case of wikipedia’s decline abstract this paper concerns the rise and fall of wikipedia editor, ‘drork’ who was blocked indefinitely from the english version of the encyclopedia after seven years of constructive contributions, movement leadership and intense engagement. it acts as a companion piece to the recent statistical analyses of patterns of conflict and vandalism on wikipedia to reflect on the questions of why someone who was once committed to the encyclopedia may want to vandalize it. the paper compares two perspectives on the experience of being a wikipedian: on the other hand, a virtuous experience that enables positive character formation as more commonly espoused, and alternatively as an experience dominated by in-fighting, personal attacks and the use of wikipedia to express political goals. it concludes by arguing that the latter behavior is necessary in order to survive as a wikipedian editing in these highly conflict-ridden areas. keywords (arial 10, bold, centralized, single line, 0pt before, 10pt after) wikipedia; conflict; vandalism; middle east introduction recent scholarship has painted two competing pictures of what wikipedia and wikipedians are “like” and what they are motivated by. on the one hand, benkler and nissenbaum argue that because people contribute to projects like wikipedia with motivations “ranging from the pure pleasure of creation, to a particular sense of purpose, through to the companionship and social relations that grow around a common enterprise”, the practice of commons-based peer production fosters virtue and enables “positive character formation” (benkler and nissenbaum, 2006). on the other hand, we have heard more recently about how “free and open” communities like wikipedia have become a haven for aggressive, intimidating behavior (reagle, 2013) and that reversions of newcomers’ contributions has been growing steadily and may be contributing to wikipedia’s decline (halfaker, geiger, morgan, & riedl, in-press). studies on revert wars, vandalism and deletions on wikipedia have focused on locating, isolating, categorizing and quantifying conflict. from these studies, we know that article reverts (where an editor restores an article to a previous version in order to fight vandalism or to promote one side of a conflict) are on the rise (buriol, castillo, donato, leonardi, & millozzi, 2006), that this is a sign of a growth in the “coordination costs” required to manage and resolve such conflict (kittur, suh, pendleton, & chi, 2007) and that on wikipedia, conflict is dominated by back and forth between pairs of people who are actively reverting one another (yasseri, sumi, rung, kornai, & kertész, 2012). these individuals are generally supported by users who rally around them on “talk” pages and on administrative pages related to conflict resolution so that debates are rarely concluded on the basis of merit but rather by outside intervention, sheer exhaustion or the numerical dominance of one group (yasseri et al., 2012). methodology this case study involves a series of seven in-depth interviews over an 18-month period between september 2011 and march 2013 as well as content analysis of drork’s article edits, discussion pages, mailing list posts, and arbitration committee (arbcom) cases. in addition, i attended a workshop with drork as part of the oxford internet institute’s mena (middle east and north africa) wikipedia project where i was able to observe his interactions with attendees who he had edited (and sometimes clashed) with during his editing of arabic wikipedia. who is drork? i was brought up on this idea that there is objective knowledge and this whole idea of looking for the truth… so when i went to (the first wikimania conference in) boston it was like coming home. everyone talked about how to convey truth and objective knowledge and information. (drork, skype interview, 16 october, 2011) selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 drork was for many years a model wikipedian. a linguist by training, he epitomized many of the ideals of wikipedia: he spent countless volunteer hours editing the encyclopedia in three languages, he was transparent and open in his editing (he is one of the few editors who uses his full name in his wikipedia work), he refused to become involved in any of wikipedia’s “cabals” and played a strong leadership role beyond editing, speaking to the media about his experiences editing middle east topics and assisting with outreach projects to bring offline wikipedia to countries in west africa. a true modernist, drork believed that wikipedia was a place where people with different ideas about what happened could come together to collaborate in discovering the “truth”. he believed that wikipedia’s “neutral point of view” that required secondary sources to back up any claims enabled an article to represent an issue in a way that was fair to all parties. downfall at first i liked it. it was very interesting – like being invited into a club of intellectuals. when i had some free time at work, i would log on just to see if someone left me a message or note or changed something. it was like being involved in a constant intellectual meeting that is ongoing – a club that i could join day and night whenever i had free time. (drork, skype interview, 16 october, 2011) after a heady period where he spoke excitedly about the goals of wikipedia, drork started to notice an increasing politicization within the wikipedia community. he wrote to the internal wikimedia mailing list in early 2009 that he felt that the principles of npov were not being maintained on many parts of the encyclopedia, most notably on wikimedia commons where politically-motivated imagery, including swastikas and anti-israeli cartoons, as well as users’ info boxes supporting armed resistance against israel and/or other political groups like hezbollah (“wikipedia,” 2013) were able to flourish. drork was frustrated by the politicized debates and strategic wrangling that was required to prevail in long edit wars. he had always tried to stay away from being part of any cabal but he believed that it was becoming clear that the people who were able to prevail did so by playing politics, whereas drork had naively believed that the project should exist without such wrangling. in early 2010, after six years of editing wikipedia, drork was banned from editing for 24 hours on the english encyclopedia and then six months for disruptive behavior in a series of wikipedia “trials”. he had been accused of breaking the english wikipedia’s “3 revert rule” (3rr) that states that editors are not allowed to revert more than 3 edits in a 24-hour period, but drork said that he didn’t recognize the authority of the administrators to block him and started a number of new accounts, once again reverting edits and trying to bolster support for his views. wikipedia administrators blocked each of these accounts for breaking rules against “sockpuppetry” (the use of alternative accounts to deceive other users) until drork became too exhausted to continue and stopped editing altogether. conclusion it made me talk in a way i didn’t want to talk; it made me fight in a way i didn’t want to fight. it corrupted me in the face of people whose opinion of me i value. (drork, skype interview, 8 march, 2013) at some point during this time, drork realized that his behavior had devolved into the kind of political campaigning that he had been actively trying to work against. despite not recognizing the 3rr or the authority of the arbitration committee, drork had complained about an editor on the “administrators’ noticeboard” for violating 3rr, and he had tried to rally other israelis through the local press to defend what he believed was an active campaign to alter the encyclopedia in the face of the upcoming un resolution on the status of palestine. looking back on it now, drork believes that the experience brought out the worst in him – it was like “letting the demon out of the bottle,” he said. this case study provides some initial evidence that engagement in wikipedia editing activities, far from fostering virtue and enabling the kind of positive character formation that benkler and nissenbaum write about, can actually have the opposite effect in areas of intense conflict. wikipedia is a place where distinct groups of people with different points of view are working together and this necessarily results in strategic wrangling, the playing of politics and the necessitation of bureaucracies and judiciaries in order to deal with disputes. references selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 benkler, y., & nissenbaum, h. (2006). commons-based peer production and virtue*. journal of political philosophy, 14(4), 394–419. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9760.2006.00235.x buriol, l., castillo, c., donato, d., leonardi, s., & millozzi, s. (2006). temporal evolution of the wikigraph. retrieved from http://www.dcc.uchile.cl/%7eccastill/papers/buriol_2006_temporal_analysis_wikigraph.pdf halfaker, a., geiger, r. s., morgan, j., & riedl, j. (in-press). the rise and decline of an open collaboration system: how wikipedia’s reaction to sudden popularity is causing its decline. american behavioral scientist. kittur, a., suh, b., pendleton, b. a., & chi, e. h. (2007). he says, she says: conflict and coordination in wikipedia. in proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 453–462). new york, ny, usa: acm. doi:10.1145/1240624.1240698 marcus, g. e. (1995). ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography. annual review of anthropology, 24(1), 95–117. doi:10.1146/annurev.an.24.100195.000523 ofer arazy, yeo, lisa, & nov, oded. (2013). stay on the wikipedia task: when task-related disagreements slip into personal and procedural conflicts. journal of the american society for information science and technology. reagle, j. (2013). “free as in sexist?” free culture and the gender gap. first monday, 18(1). doi:10.5210/fm.v18i1.4291 wikipedia:administrators’ noticeboard/incidents/hezbollah userbox. (2013, january 23). in wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=wikipedia:administrators%27_noticeboard/incidents/hezbol lah_userbox&oldid=496957783 yasseri, t., sumi, r., rung, a., kornai, a., & kertész, j. (2012). dynamics of conflicts in wikipedia. arxiv:1202.3643. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0038869 acknowledgements thanks to the idrc for their support of the oxford internet institute’s workshops to study wikipedia in the middle east and north africa. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 stigma, humor and violence on facebook memes abstract this paper focuses on how memes in facebook reproduce symbolic violence through stigmatizing social stereotypes in humorous memes. we analyze three humor fan pages and their content and cross data with 394 online interviews. results point to several strategies of reproduction of the stigma through humorous discourse, which we classify as a) legitimation, b) humorous allowance and c) discredit o the critics. we also discuss the role social network sites play in this process through its characteristics. keywords stigma; social network sites; symbolic violence; facebook; humor introduction the vast popularity of social network sites such as facebook has deeply impacted its users' daily lives. these sites became a new place to build social networks (boyd, 2010) and to have contact with different discourses globally and locally (larsen 2008). these discourses emerge from the social practices in these tools and also have effects in societies. they are not only ways to share ideas, but to reinforce concepts and prejudices. because social network sites not only support social networks, but also create new forms of connections (ellison, steinfeld & lampe, 2007), they also create new forms of sharing. in this paper we focus on the discussion of how facebook memes, through humor and diffusion in social networks, stigmatize people and reinforce symbolic violence. we also discuss users' perceptions of this violence and the discussions that emerge from these different perceptions. violence, stigma and humor violence is a concept discussed by many authors. in this paper, we chose to work with zizek's concepts (2008) which are based on three types of violence. he argues that the most visible one, the outbursts that shock people, is a form of subjective violence (like, for example, a riot). there is another one, less visible, more subtle: the objective violence. while subjective violence is experimented against a background of normality, objective violence is the violence inhered in daily life. objective violence can also be classified in two types: symbolic violence happens through language. systemic violence is the consequence of the politic and economic system. to bourdieu (1989), in a similar way, symbolic violence comes from the imposition of meanings, the naturalization of the power relation between dominant and dominated. symbolic violence is silent because victims don't recognize themselves as victims since they don't recognize the violence itself. one of the many forms of symbolic violence is social stigma. goffman (1963) explains social stigma as the marks, the attributes by which someone is criticized, discredited and marginalized in society. it is a bad judgment over some quality the person has. stigma is reinforced through discursive mechanisms and through the ideas discourses share. stigma comes from the categories society creates for individuals and the outcomes that are expected from these categories, which creates also good (socially valued) and bad (socially discredited) stereotypes. and these stereotypes are used for humor. humor has a strong role in stigmatizing people. fun comes often from the "others", the ones who are not "normal". jokes often create humor through derogatory marks such as stigmas. methodology data for this study was collected using an ethnographic approach with observation of three humorous fan pages (fan pages dedicated to share memes in facebook) and the discussions that arise from each humorous post. for this set of data we selected three fan pages and collected all the publications and discussions during two months. we examined these posts looking for clues about symbolic violence and stigma and discussed their role in the reinforcement of discrimination. our main goal was to discuss (1) how memes display stigma and symbolic violence in facebook; and (2) how users perceive selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 this symbolic violence and (3) what are the mechanisms of reinforcement of these discourses. the data was collected in portuguese and comes from brazilian fan pages. individual users were anonymized. results the fan pages analyzed appear to display stigma in several levels, mostly to women and to body images. as goffman (1963) argues, stigma is based on attributes that "normals" impute to "nonnormals" or stigmatized. the stigma in the cases is often related to gender and gender stereotypes, while some were also focused on class and homosexuals. the analyzed posts in the fan pages follow a pattern. there is usually a very stigmatizing message, several likes, shares and comments agreeing. while the majority of posts in the two most popular pages stigmatize women, there is also a focus on poor and homosexuals. comments also follow a pattern: they are mostly by female profiles and mostly support the content. the stigma, perpetuated by the posts, comments, shares and likes, appears to be naturalized, to be something "normal". but what are the strategies discourse uses to perpetuate the stigma in this data? three main strategies were identified in the data: a) humorous allowance, b) legitimation, c) discredit of the critics. humor allowance first of all it has a clear role in naturalizing the discourse of the stigmatizers, "softening" the offense and the violence (jablonski & zillmann 1995). or as commenters often say to defend themselves: "it is only humor". humorous content has an allowance of saying what can't be said otherwise. even though, through humor people say things and these things constitute discourses that reproduce the dominance in society (bourdieu, 1991). legitimation is another strategy to perpetuate the stigmas. it is not enough the selected posts and fan pages display different levels of symbolic violence. their popularity is a form of agreement, support and permission. symbolic violence thus is not only the post itself, but each like, each share and each agreement comment. and the victims, the women in facebook, are the ones who also victimize other women by reproducing the content. as bourdieu (1989, 1991) puts it, they don't see themselves as victims. discredit of the critics is another strategy to reinforce the discourse. we observed in our data that when someone seemed to disagree with the post or with the comments and call the attention of others to the stigma, he/she was quickly discredited as someone without a sense of humor, or someone "boring". discredit is a strategy that looks to undermine the influence of the ones who feel the violence in the community. discredit was pointed by goffman (1963) as the most important form of stigmatizing someone. conclusions the three strategies we observed contribute to amplify the stigma and the violence. the fact that is happens online seems to have also other effects. data showed these posts have hundreds of shares and likes, escalating their visibility to several social networks. also, because facebook makes it easy to reproduce content (as other social network sites) and to mark people to see it, visibility is amplified. facebook also makes extremely easy for people to support these messages, sometimes without much thought about what are the hidden meanings in humor. people simply press "like" and it is enough to reinforce the stigma. however, even when (a few) users seem to react and discuss the content, others also seem to try to silence them by discrediting what they say. this may imply that symbolic violence is stronger online, because people are more bombarded by this type of content because of online social network structures. the more they are exposed to the content, the more "natural" the stigma and the stereotypes seem (bourdieu 1989, 1991; goffman 1963). references bourdieu, p. (1991) language and symbolic power. massachusetts: harvard university press, 2003. (302 p.) bourdieu, p. (1989) o poder simbólico. rio de janeiro: bertrand brasil. (312 p.) selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 6 boyd, d. (2010). "social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications." in networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites (ed. zizi papacharissi), pp. 39-58. goffman, e. (1963) stigma. notes on the management of spoiled identity. new york: touchstone. (146p). jablonski, c. k.; zillmann, d. (1995) humor's role in the trivialization of violence. zeitschrift für medienpsychologie, vol 7(2), jun 1995, 122-133 howarth, c. (2006) race as stigma: positioning the stigmatized as agents, not objects. journal of community and applied social psychology, 16 (6). pp. 442-451. lacey, b. (2007). social aggression: a study of internet harassment. dissertation for the ed.d. in educational and policy leadership, hofstra university. 242 pages. available at: http://www.hofstra.edu/academics/colleges/soeahs/flps/flps_dissertations.html larsen, m. (2008) online social networking: from local experiences to global discourses. internet research 9.0 association of internet researchers, copenhagen october. martins, f. m; momberger, j. (2008) cibercultura e imaginário: cyberhooligan rituais tribais e violência social no orkut. razón y palabra, n 64. available at: http://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=2770981 rodeghiero, c. (2012) violência na internet: um estudo cyberbullying no facebook. masters dissertation. linguistics program. universidade catolica de pelotas. available at: http://biblioteca.ucpel.tche.br/tedesimplificado/tde_arquivos/1/tde-2012-09-03t080721z318/publico/carolina%20rodeghierod.pdf zizek, s. (2008) violence: six sideways reflections. london: profile books. (e-book) selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 7 the crunchy side of convergence: facebook and its resident trolls abstract this paper examines facebook memorial page trolling, a subgenre of trolling—the process by which strong emotional responses are elicited through outrageous and otherwise abusive behaviors—in which self-identifying facebook trolls post abusive comments and images onto pages created for and dedicated to the deceased. the paper draws from extensive participant observation conducted between early 2010 and late 2011, and discusses the complex relationship between platform, community and behavior. it focuses specifically on the ways in which trolls’ on-site behaviors both subvert and replicate the behavioral patterns of “legitimate” users— behaviors which are embedded within and necessitated by facebook’s social networking architecture. keywords trolling; facebook; online community formation introduction just as certain cities are said to be supporting characters in the television shows, novels, and films for which they serve as backdrop—new york city comes to mind, in everything from seinfeld to manhattan to american psycho to 30 rock—online platforms impart a similar flavor. far from being empty, value-neutral spaces, platforms have a profound impact not just on how communities form, but what community members are able to accomplish while online. given this complicated interplay, it is critical to adapt one’s research methods not just to the particular group studied, and not just to the particular platform they frequent, but to the evolving interaction(s) between community, platform and behavior. this paper will focus on these evolving interactions within the context of facebook memorial page trolling (rip trolling for short), which can run the gamut from harassing so-called “grief tourists,” people who post condolence messages onto the facebook rip pages of dead strangers, all the way to attacking the friends and family of murdered teenagers. from early 2010-late 2011, i embedded myself within a group of rip trolls, often spending hours per day pouring over their macabre handiwork (phillips 2011). through this research, i came to understand the complicated interplay between facebook’s platform, facebook’s “regular” users and facebook’s resident trolls. subculture, meet platform first, facebook’s social networking platform helped ensure the development of an emergent rip style, one which hews fairly closely to “traditional” trolling but which differs both structurally and in overall tone. regarding the former, facebook trolling was, from the very first moment, predicated on the conventions established by facebook’s programmers; it was through the adoption of these protocols— which don’t just encourage but engender user enmeshment—that trolling became a fundamentally social activity. this differed greatly from most forum trolling and certainly trolling on /b/, since trolling in these contexts is almost always blindly anonymous. trolls may work together during a particular raid, but they rarely stand still long enough to establish social ties and certainly don’t have a persistent online identity to which particular successes may be affixed. given their desire to maintain community ties after a profile had been deleted, trolls on facebook tended to stick with the same family of trolling names so that respawn accounts (new accounts created after an old account or set of accounts had been banned) would have an easier time finding and being found by trolling friends. for example, no matter how many times my profile was banned, i would always respawn as david, integrating this basic nominal building block into both first and last names regardless of gender (david davison, brittani davidson, david briggs). my research subject paulie socash maintained two profile roots, paul for male accounts and leigh for female; another troll named selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 8 frank bagato was variously francis, fran, francois, or frankie; a troll named ruthless was ruth or ruthie when trolling as a female, etc. in short, and although such an insight might seem almost tautological in its obviousness, trolls on facebook became friends because suddenly they had stable names to call each other. in addition to replicating the behavioral patterns of “legitimate” users, the facebook trolls i worked with eagerly harnessed existing sensitivities. due to the knee-jerk sympathies they generated, rip pages were an attractive, almost obvious, choice. this is not to say that all facebook trolls engaged in memorial page trolling. quite the contrary—from the trolls’ perspective, facebook was a smorgasbord of exploitable situations and people. one possible (and in my opinion highly likely) explanation is embedded within facebook’s basic architecture, which positions the user as the subject of every sentence he or she utters, indeed as the center of his or her particular social universe. selfinvolvement, in other words, is built into the code; one is primed to take things personally. this is not to say that facebook users are solipsists. but the relationship between user and content is and is designed to be solipsistic. after all the “i”—and a carefully-constructed, often fastidiously maintained “i” at that—prefigures every interaction, and lends itself to a particular brand of ego-investment and emotional sensitivity. the trolls i worked with were eager to take full advantage. furthermore, to the extent that facebook’s architecture encourages emotional investment in regular users, it encourages emotional divestment in trolls, thus ushering in increasingly outrageous and aggressive behaviors. for every “real” user who is continuously reminded of and interpolated by their own “i,” every troll user is continuously reminded of and interpolated by the “i” they’re not—an ongoing process of emotional repudiation that may explain why facebook trolls during this period frequently shifted to the third-person to describe their own actions. at first i was taken aback by this tendency. i’d be chatting with a collaborator, and suddenly he or she would mention some amusing thing his or her profile had done, as if the profile was somehow separable from the person whose profile it was. i eventually came to realize that, in the trolls’ minds, their profiles were separable from their “true” selves. theirs may have been the fingers pushing all the buttons, but they weren’t the ones doing the damage, not exactly. it should go without saying that the person behind the troll is explicitly and directly responsible for any and all trollish behaviors, and that at a basic level, his or her trolling persona is predicated on his or her offline proclivities. as numerous scholars (ito 1997; nakamura 2002, 2007; boyd 2009) have stressed, so-called “real life” necessarily bleeds into online life, and vice versa; our raced, classed, and gendered bodies are encoded into our online behaviors, even when we’re pretending to be something above or beyond or below what we “really” are irl (“in real life”) (nakamura, kolko and rodman 2000). that said, while the person can be equated with the profiles s/he creates (“i am david”), the resulting profiles cannot similarly or necessarily be equated with the person (“david isn’t me”); it is perhaps more accurate to say that trolling profiles, and trolling personas generally, fall somewhere between character and proxy—a sometimes-rupture sometimes-slippage between the real life and online self that facebook’s encoded solipsism inadvertently reinforces. conclusion given the ease with which trolls on facebook could find a seemingly endless stream of targets, as well as the ways in which the platform itself primed both subject and object of trolling for trolling, it is unsurprising that so many trolls regarded facebook as an optimal stomping ground. during facebook’s period of trolls gone wild, which has tapered off in recent months due to facebook’s increasingly hard line stance against any forms of trolling, it may have been the internet’s most optimal stomping ground—it was, and to a certain extent remains, a perfect storm of technological and behavioral siphoning. references boyd, danah. 2008. “choose your own adventure.” danah.org, n.d. accessed 19 september 2010. http://www.danah.org/papers/takenoutofcontext.html. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 9 ito, mizuko. “virtually embodied: the reality of fantasy in a multi-user dungeon.” internet culture, edited by david porter, 87-111. new york: routledge. nakamura, lisa, kolko, beth and rodman, gilbert. 2000. race in cyberspace. new york: routledge. nakamura, lisa. 2002. cybertypes: race, ethnicity, and identity on the internet. new york: routledge. nakamura, lisa. 2007. digitizing race: visual cultures of the internet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. phillips, w. (2011). loling at tragedy: facebook trolls, memorial pages, and resistance to grief online. first monday 16 (12). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 10 exploring emotions on #auspol: polarity, conservativism and public performance in the twitter debate on australian politics abstract the affective communication patterns of conversations on twitter can provide insights into the culture of online communities. in this paper we apply a combined quantitative and qualitative approach to investigate the structural make-up and emotional content of tweeting activity around the hashtag #auspol (for australian politics) in order to highlight the polarity and conservativism that characterise this highly active community of politically engaged individuals. we document the centralised structure of this particular community, which is based around a deeply committed core of contributors. through in-depth content analysis of the tweets of participants to the online debate we explore the communicative tone, patterns of engagement and thematic drivers that shape the affective character of the community and their effect on its cohesiveness. in this way we provide a comprehensive account of the complex techno-social, linguistic and cultural factors involved in conversations that are shaped in the twittersphere. keywords twitter; hashtag; political debate; communicative structure; emotion; introduction: exploring the emotional culture of the #auspol community real-time social media spaces such as twitter have opened up new possibilities for people to participate in communicative action and public debate, uninhibited by spatio-temporal restrictions. whether such technologies have a meaningful effect on public debate, or simply provide additional channels for the “usual suspects” to express their views, remains the subject of debate; however, we can clearly note that they provide new channels for public communication (bruns & stieglitz, 2013). recent research has explored how people talk about political issues (bruns & burgess, 2011; christensen, 2011; harlow & harp, 2012; larsson & moe, 2011; lotan et al., 2011; small, 2011; stieglitz & dang-xuan, 2012), crisis situations (bruns et al., 2012; hughes & palen, 2009; mendoza et al., 2010; palen et al., 2010), shared experiences such as television shows (deller, 2011), conferences (dröge et al., 2011; weller et al., 2011), and everyday exchanges (boyd et al., 2009; papacharissi, 2011; marwick & boyd, 2011) as well as how twitter is used in brand communication (krüger et al., 2012; stieglitz & krüger, 2011). while these studies offer extensive insights into broader patterns of communication and participation in online debate, more focused explorations of the particular affective dimensions of online discussions (dang-xuan & stieglitz, 2012) can provide insights into their impact on the culture and dynamics of online communities. in this paper, we examine the communicative structure of conversations taking place in the twitter hashtag community #auspol (on australian politics) – a highly active, often heated space. we first provide a quantitative assessment of the structure of the community, in order to demonstrate that there is an established community of contributors to the hashtag discussion, before undertaking a qualitative analysis of the content of the #auspol discussion to explore how feelings like discontent, aggression and provocation, as well as positivity and togetherness, feature in the debate and shape the communicative behavior of its participants and the overall atmosphere of the community. to do so, we conduct a detailed manual and semi-automated textual analysis of tweet contents, and explore the use of ‘heat maps’ that track, identify and visualize data, such as the distribution of sentiment in twitter conversations, as an innovative tool for research in this area (see ahn et al., 2012; mislove et al., 2010a, 2010b for applications of this method). this combined qualitative and quantitative analysis provides insights into the cultural, linguistic and technological aspects of online communication. methodology quantitative and quantitative analysis of the #auspol community selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 11 the hashtag is a technological affordance that shapes and is shaped by the communicative action of people on twitter. it is used as the standard tool through which conversations around a particular topic are coordinated, enabling online publics to form (bruns & burgess, 2011), as well as a linguistic marker for the expression of emotions such as approval (#win, #ftw) or disapproval (#facepalm, #headdesk; bruns & stieglitz, 2013). #auspol is a long-standing institution in the australian twittersphere, having operated at high volume for several years to date, that supports the communion of a stable public of participants in political debate. the discursive use of additional hashtags to denote particular sentiments also features within the #auspol debate and represents a useful indicator for exploring the emotional charge and communicative behavior of the #auspol conversation. our quantitative analysis of #auspol interactions to date, using the methods and metrics outlined in bruns & stieglitz (2012; 2013), has found that the participants gathered around the #auspol hashtag constitute a highly discursive community of users who actively engage in tweeting and responding to one another. figure 1 shows that between february and december 2011, the most active 1% of the total #auspol contributor base accounted for almost two thirds of the over 850,000 tweets posted to #auspol; together, the top 10% of contributors posted over 90% of all #auspol tweets. this points to the existence of a highly committed core of contributors, and the formation of strongly centralized community structures. further, the fact that nearly half of all tweets by the lead users in #auspol were @replies (rather than retweets or unprompted original statements) signals the substantial levels of interaction amongst this community. in essence, this small group of highly engaged political enthusiasts can be said to perform their political debates in front of the wider community of twitter users. figure 1: activity of different user percentiles in #auspol, feb.-dec. 2011 as such, the #auspol community provides an exemplary case study for analyzing the linguistic traits, communication behaviors, and social networking structures of an active online community. huffaker (2010, 595) suggests that ‘the message content that users contribute not only includes the subject of the individual messages but also the emotional valence associated with a message, or the way in which it is framed’. in this paper, we complement our quantitative insights into the #auspol debate with qualitative analysis of the content of tweets to explore how emotions are expressed and performed in the context of publicly visible online debates in order to explore the following questions: selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 12 • what are the key themes of political debate in #auspol, and what is the communicative tone with which they are addressed? • how do lead users in #auspol perform their community leadership in engaging with other users? • what drives intense communicative interaction between leading #auspol participants (agreement, antipathy, or rational political discussion)? • are there established tropes of discussion which support and maintain a sense of community even across political divides? conclusion: #auspol as a case study of the role of affect in public debate in the twittersphere the #auspol community is an interesting case in point to explore the affective nature of tweeted communication, due to the highly discursive and polarized nature of this particular political discussion. in-depth content analysis of the communicative behavior of twitter users who discuss contentious political issues in the #auspol debate, in combination with our quantitative evaluation of the structure of the #auspol community, offers a comprehensive insight into the complex sociotechnical context within which hashtagged conversations are shaped. using #auspol as one particular example of how feelings feature in online conversations allows broader inferences about how publics engage in debate in the twittersphere. innovative ways of researching and displaying data, such as the use of ‘heatmaps’, contribute to an enhanced understanding of the culture of online communities. acknowledgments this research is supported by funding from the australian research council. references ahn, y.-y., bagrow, j. p., lehmann, s. and pawling, a. (2012). twittermood: united states map of mood. retrieved from http://twittermood.s3.amazonaws.com/images/poster.pdf. boyd, d., golder, s., & lotan, g. (2010, january). tweet, tweet, retweet: conversational aspects of retweeting on twitter. proceedings of the 43rd annual hawaii international conference on system science (pp. 110). ieee. bruns, a. & burgess, j. (2011). #ausvotes: how twitter covered the 2010 australian federal election. communication, politics & culture, 44(2), 37-56. bruns, a., burgess, j., crawford, k., & shaw, f. (2012). #qldfloods and @qpsmedia: crisis communication on twitter in the 2011 south east queensland floods. brisbane: arc centre of excellence for creative industries and innovation. retrieved from http://cci.edu.au/floodsreport.pdf bruns, a. & stieglitz, s. (2012). quantitative approaches to comparing communication patterns on twitter. journal of technology in human services 30(3-4): 160-185. bruns, a. & stieglitz, s. (2013). towards more systematic twitter analysis: metrics for tweeting activities. international journal of social research methodology 16(2): 91-108. christensen, c. (2011). twitter revolutions? addressing social media and dissent. communication review 14(3): 155-157. dang-xuan, l. & stieglitz, s. (2012). impact and diffusion of sentiment in political communication: an empirical analysis of public political facebook pages. proceedings of the 20th european conference on information systems (ecis), barcelona, spain. deller, r. (2011). twittering on: audience research and participation using twitter. participations 8(1): 216-45. dröge, e., maghferat, p., puschmann, c., verbina, j., & weller, k. (2011). konferenz-tweets. ein ansatz zur analyse der twitter-kommunikation bei wissenschaftlichen konferenzen. proceedings of the 12th international symposium for information science. (pp. 98-110) verlag werner hülsbusch. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 13 harlow, s. & harp. d (2012). collective action on the web. information, communication & society 15(2): 196 216. hughes, a., & palen, l. (2009). twitter adoption and use in mass convergence and emergency events. international journal of emergency management 6(3-4): 248-60. huffaker, d. (2010). dimensions of leadership and social influence in online communities. human communication research 36: 593–617. krüger, n., stieglitz, s. & potthoff, t. (2012). brand communication on twitter a case study on adidas. proceedings of the 16th pacific asia conference on information systems, paper 343. larsson, a. o., & moe, h. (2012). studying political microblogging: twitter users in the 2010 swedish election campaign. new media & society 14(5): 729-747. lotan, g., ananny, m., gaffney, d. & boyd, d. (2011). the revolutions were tweeted: information flows during the 2011 tunisian and egyptian revolutions. international journal of communication 5: 1375-1405. marwick, a.e. & boyd, d. (2011). i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. new media & society 13(1): 114-133. mendoza, m., poblete, b. & castillo, c. (2010). twitter under crisis: can we trust what we rt? 1st workshop on social media analytics (soma ’10), washington, dc. mislove, a., lehmann, s., ahn, y.-y., onnela, j.-p. & rosenquist, j. n. (2010a). mapping the conversation: political topics and geography on twitter. retrieved from http://election.ccs.neu.edu/. mislove, a., lehmann, s., ahn, y.-y., onnela, j.-p. & rosenquist, j. n. (2010b). pulse of the nation: u.s. mood throughout the day inferred from twitter. retrieved from http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/amislove/twittermood. palen, l., starbird, k., vieweg, s., & hughes, a. (2010). twitter-­‐based information distribution during the 2009 red river valley flood threat. bulletin of the american society for information science and technology 36(5): 13-17. papacharissi, z. (2011). conclusion: a networked self. in z papacharissi (ed.). a networked self: identity, community and culture on social network sites. (304-318). new york: routledge. small, t. (2011). what the hashtag? a content analysis of canadian politics on twitter. information, communication & society 14(6): 872-95. stieglitz, s. & dang-xuan, l. (2012). social media and political communication: a social media analytics framework. social network analysis and mining, 1-15. stieglitz, s. & krüger, n. (2011). analysis of sentiments in corporate twitter communication – a case study on an issue of toyota. proceedings of the 22nd australasian conference on information systems (acis), paper 103. weller, k., dröge, e. & puschmann, c. (2011). citation analysis in twitter: approaches for defining and measuring information flows within tweets during scientific conferences. #msm2011 – 1st workshop on making sense of microposts. retrieved from http://files.ynada.com/papers/msm2011.pdf license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. (authors may use any license they prefer, or none at all.) selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 14 "breaking dancing in a mine field" -solidarity and aggression in the german #aufschrei/#outcry twitter debate over sexual harassment abstract our paper assesses the discursive politics of a public debate that erupted in january 2013 in the germanspeaking twittersphere after a journalist complained in an interview that a prominent german politician had commented on the size of her bust following a party event. under the hashtag #aufschrei (#outcry) a group of twitter users posted personal accounts of acts of discrimination, sexual harassment and violence they had experienced, behavior primarily directed by men against women and girls, but also against men and lesbian, gay, and transgender individuals. we present the results of a content analysis of 9,000 #aufschrei tweets to demonstrate how online environments can become a stage for the struggle of different actors to define gender as a relevant social category, and how a discourse on twitter can come under siege from aggressive detractors. key focal points out of our analysis are the different conflicting interpretations of the #aufschrei meme and the interplay of mass media and social media discourse. keywords sexism; verbal aggression; germany; social media; twitter introduction social media platforms such as facebook and twitter regularly become the stages of intense debates over a variety of political, societal, and cultural issues (burgess & bruns, 2012; papacharissi & oliveira, 2012). the object of our study, the hashtag #aufschrei (outcry), was used in over 25,000 tweets within 48 hours following january 24, 2013 (according to the analysis tool topsy), generating a significant spike of hashtag activity in the german-language twittersphere. in a period of five days approximately 90,000 tweets accumulated, of which we drew a representative 10% sample for content analysis, accompanied by significant media interest and coverage on several popular talk shows (spiegel, 2013). a journalist had ignited the debate through an interview in a popular national magazine in which she gave an account of remarks about her bust made by a high-ranking german politician on the eve of a party event (deutsche welle, 2013). in reaction to this account, her colleague nicole von horst (@vonhorst) tweeted: “we should collect these kinds of experiences under a hashtag. i suggest #outcry”. the series of tweets that followed gave strikingly personal accounts of sexist remarks, harassment, discrimination, stalking, and physical sexual violence. the accounts described the behavior of teachers, workplace colleagues, and random strangers, but also of acquaintances, friends and partners. while the canonical format of the initial tweets was that of a narrative, provided in the form of an answer to the question “who harassed you”, this quickly changed, as the hashtag gained in popularity. below we provide three typical examples of tweets posted within the first hour of activity. the man on the train who grabbed my bum while why friends (male and female) were with me. #outcry the driving instructor who offered my friend to repeat her driving test if she would be ‘nice’ to him. #outcry the professor who wanted to know if i was dating my term paper partner. every appointment alone with him was pure tension. #outcry thousands of users followed suit in the same style, but the meme was quickly modified to also include expressions of solidarity, questions, retorts, sarcasm, insults, and spam. while the hashtag is still actively used, the bulk of activity took place between the 24th and the 30th of january 2013 (see figure 1). many major german newspapers addressed #aufschrei with front-page editorials, two prominent national television talk shows featured it, and the international news media including the new york times (eddy & cottrell, 2013), the economist (2013), and forbes (zandt, 2013) covered it, wondering selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 15 about ‘germany’s problem with women.’ beyond the mainstream media, countless blogs also commented on the debate, both those with large audiences, and smaller personal blogs. figure 1: histogram depicting the number of tweets with the hashtag #aufschrei posted between january 24th and january 30th. the spikes in activity on the 27th and 30th coincide with the airing of evening talk shows devoted to discussion of the event. conflicting themes inside a single hashtag the discourse we examined reveals a series of loosely interwoven themes which are only bracketed as a coherent whole by the #aufschrei hashtag. the initial instigators of the hashtag used it to collect accounts of everyday discrimination, ranging from sexist remarks that stereotype women and girls, to incidents of outright physical sexual violence. the original contributors’ tweets were characterized by sharing their experiences with others and by voicing acts of discrimination they have encountered as a means of empowerment. the hashtag thus demonstrated collective action to delineate a public space in which to show solidarity with one another and opposition to everyday sexism. such accounts evoked a range of reactions, such as endorsements and messages commending the victims of sexual assaults for their bravery, but also voicing criticism. while the idea of collecting personal accounts under a common hashtag was triggered by the interview describing the sexist remarks of a politician towards a journalist, the resulting narratives are highly personal and largely apolitical. rather than sticking to the script of the mass media they retell very personal experiences. reactions come in five variants: • expressions of solidarity, shame, grief or affection, both as a reaction to specific tweets and towards the hashtag in general, • counterclaims and detractions (e.g. the problem of sexism is greatly overstated, sexism is also directed against men, women supposedly enjoy being the object of sexist remarks), • ‘calls to order’ (ranging from pleas to ‘tone down’ the debate to imperatives literally demanding silence), • sexist and misogynist remarks and images, sarcasm and other attempts to ridicule the original discourse, • meta comments noting that a debate is taking place and expressing surprise. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 16 (gender) hashtags politics the reactive tweets partly drown out the original narrative theme, creating associations with a large number of over issues and arguments. one such fork issue is the role of politicians in sexual discrimination, especially of rainer brüderle, minister of economics and technology in chancellor angela merkel’s coalition government and senior political figure in germany’s liberal democratic party (fdp). both his supporters and opponents reconceptualized the hashtag as a political arena and sought to position themselves inside the ad-hoc public space it offered. the interplay of original and reactive tweets emphasizes the hashtag’s role as a discursively contested space, which must be won over by the respective faction. especially those tweets stating angrily that ‘it’s enough already’ and chiding the instigators to ‘shut up’ are revealing in this respect. silencing is an established tactic in gender debates, yet the attempt to silence a twitter conversation seems bizarre. frequent are also remarks that imply the instigators have a narrow definition of sexism and which rush to ‘defend men’. the accounts of sexual harassment, which were initially given, are strikingly devoid of any claims that sexism is exclusively enacted by men towards women, and much less gendered than the reactive tweets. social media discourse and mass media critique in the course of its development, the hashtag also evolves into a site of media criticism, as commentators increasingly integrate arguments made in newspapers and evening talk shows into their posts. figure 2 shows the use of other hashtags in conjunction with #aufschrei between january 24th and 30th 2013 (#jauch and #zdflogin are shows on german national television). many messages actively criticize the sensationalist approach of individual news media, in particular the national news magazine stern, which published the interview that sparked the debate, arguing that stern is itself sexist (see figure 4). such remarks show how commentators call out the mainstream media for instrumentalizing the discussion for public visibility, and how they critique their hypocrisy and sensationalist reporting. debates such as #aufschrei illustrate the struggle of different actors to define gender as a relevant social category (allmendinger, 2011). figure 2: use of the #aufschrei hashtag over time in conjunction with other hashtags. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 17 figure 3: cover collage of the popular german magazine stern, in which the feature on everyday sexism that triggered the debate initially appeared, depicting (mostly female) nudity. the caption reads #aufschrei – danke, stern! (#outcry – thanks, stern) suggesting that the publication itself practices the sexism it perpetrates to critique. figure 4: screen capture of stern’s front page promoting an article related to the debate (‘sexismus-debatte: beweg dich, mann’; ‘sexism debate: move, man’). positioned directly below the snippet is a piece on the popular reality tv series dschungelcamp in which candidates are portrayed as living in the wilderness under adverse conditions. the caption on this mostly likely algorithmically selected snippet reads ‘olivia, wring deine brüste aus’ (‘olivia, wring out your breasts’). the original poster points out the double standards of stern with regards to its use of female nudity. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 18 references allmendinger, j. (2011). geschlecht als wichtige kategorie der sozialstrukturanalyse. [gender as important category of social structural analysis. retrieved from http://www.bpb.de/apuz/33136/geschlecht-alswichtige-kategorie-der-sozialstrukturanalyse-essay?p=all burgess, j., & bruns, a. (2012). (not) the twitter election: the dynamics of the #ausvotes conversation in relation to the australian media ecology. journalism practice, 6(3), 384–402. doi:10.1080/17512786.2012.663610 deutsche welle. (2013). anti-sexism twitter campaign gains momentum. retrieved from http://www.dw.de/anti-sexism-twitter-campaign-gains-momentum/a-16552842) the economist. (2013). cloud over rainer. retrieved from http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21571188where-does-germany-stand-sexism-cloud-over-rainer eddy, m., & cottrell, c. (2013). german politician’s remark stirs outcry over sexism. the new york times. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/world/europe/29iht-germany29.html?_r=0 papacharissi, z., & de fatima oliveira, m. (2012). affective news and networked publics: the rhythms of news storytelling on #egypt. journal of communication, 62(2), 266–282. doi:10.1111/j.14602466.2012.01630.x spiegel. (2013). sexismusdebatte: #aufschrei führt zu twitter-rekord. retrieved from http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/aufschrei-fuehrt-zu-twitter-rekord-a-882207.html zandt, d. (2013). germany’s problem with women. forbes. retrieved from retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 imagining the ends of identity: birth and death on instagram tama leaver curtin university tim highfield qut introduction while social media is communal by definition, the use, regulation and understanding of social media is frequently limited to individuals (even if those individuals add together as a group or community of some kind). in this paper, we detail an attempt to examine how the visual social media app and platform instagram is used to imagine the relationships with those who have no self-representational agency: babies and the recently deceased. specifically, the #ultrasound and #funeral hashtags were tracked for three months in 2014. the aim is to utilise this mapping to investigate how relationships appear in visual form, and what these then say about these dynamics are presented visually, and are thus imagined, by instagram users. building on instagram mapping methods we have detailed in depth elsewhere (xxxx), using the instagram api we tracked media in which the media item’s caption included specific hashtags (whilst initially returned by the instagram api, we disregarded media with the hashtag when the tag was not added by the initial poster, but rather by a subsequent commenter). while all instagram metadata and media captured and analysed was completely public in a technical sense, the public/private distinction at the level of code is insufficient; rather, following markham and buchanan (2012) we were mindful of not amplifying media content that may not have been shared with this intention, and have chosen not to include example images in this published form. imagining birth: #ultrasound to investigate the way babies were imagined and visualised on social media prior to birth, we tracked the #ultrasound hashtag for three months in 2014, finding 11320 media items shared publicly on instagram, constituted by 10890 images and 430 videos (see table 1). heeding boyd and crawford’s (2012) advice, to balance the quantitative numbers with qualitative insight we examined in details the media from the first monday of each month; in this paper we focus on the first monday in march, on which instagram users publicly shared 289 images and 7 video files. (notably, while the #sonogram hashtag is also used suggested citation (apa): leaver, t., & highfield, t. (2015, october 21-24). imagining the ends of identity: birth and death on instagram. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. on instagram, there is a much smaller uptake and it was not included in this initial tracking.) table 1. #ultrasound tagged media on instagram, 2014 images videos overall media march 3468 151 3619 april 3847 128 3975 may 3575 151 3726 3-month totals: 10890 430 11320 of the 289 images, 17 were non-foetal ultrasounds; 6 spam images showing no discernible relevance; and 3 advertising clothes or maternity materials. a further 32 image depicted the social experience of an ultrasound (eg travelling to the ultrasound, or a nervous selfie beforehand). another 32 images were multi-frame collages or professional looking staged images featuring the ultrasound photos, explicitly situating the image in the family unit somehow, including a couple holding one end each on an iphone displaying the ultrasound, and a 9-panel image showing the story of how the couple came to meet and become parents. importantly, in the two weeks between capturing the metadata, and returning to analyse the media itself, 15 images had been deleted or made private, possibly indicating the instagram user rethinking sharing the ultrasound image publicly. at the opposite end of the privacy scale, 72 images showed textual information from the ultrasound screen which was personally identifiable (eg mother’s name, location, expected date of delivery) which may have future privacy implications for both the family and the resulting child later in life. #ultrasound instagram media thus do important work in situating the unborn as part of various family structures, but also provoke some important questions about the privacy of others (even loved others) when sharing online. imagining death: #funeral initially we tracked the two instagram hashtags #rip and #funeral for march, april and may of 2014, but soon dropped the #rip tag as the volume of uses was far higher than expected (c. 15000 media daily) and was beyond the capacity of our relatively limited tracking setup. instead, we focused exclusively on the #funeral tag, and over the three months tracked 16,497 media items publicly shared on instagram, with 4% (634) being videos and the remainder images (see table 2). table 2. #funeral tagged media on instagram, 2014 images videos overall media march 5375 214 5589 april 5429 220 5649 may 5059 200 5259 as with #ultrasound, we did a qualitative analysis of the first monday of each month, with the results here focusing exclusively on the first monday in march 2014, on which users publicly shared 398 images and 9 videos with the #funeral hashtag in their caption. flower arrangements, wreathes and typical funeral icons constituted a significant proportion of the instagram funeral media, consistent with more mainstream funeral visualisation. while smaller in number, there were still a range of humorous images, both motivational (eg ‘a funeral for my fat’) emphasising funeral as a farewell rather than death, and deathrelated memes (eg ‘at my funeral, it would be funny if…). there were several funeral images of pets (mostly goldfish, all of which were being flushed down a toilet). just over a third of the images were selfies (self-portrait photos either of an individual or group taken with a mobile device), and it is these images which were most provocative. of the funeral selfies, many were posed with the expected sad or forlorn face with the person typically clad in black, presumably immediately before or after a funeral. however, more than half featured individuals or groups clearly dressed for a funeral, but smiling. at first glance this appears incongruent with the setting, but we suggest three possible reasons: (1) the norms of selfies are about dialoguing with your imagined audience, not just capturing the physical setting, and smiling may convey that the selfie-taker is okay themselves despite the sombre setting; (2) many funerals are intended as a celebration of the deceased’s life as much as mourning, and a more upbeat selfie is consistent with that motivation (as is reinforced by a range of the image captions); (3) funerals are, at times, a moment of reconnection with expanded family and friends and especially the group selfies may be celebrating that reunion. further contextual analysis will be needed to delve deeper into these possibilities, but it is clear that #funeral is a multivalent hashtag and is utilised to convey a variety of meanings, consistent with related research (gibbs, meese, arnold, nansen, & carter, 2015). conclusion mapping #ultrasound and #funeral tagged media on instagram opens one avenue for understanding the way birth and death are imagined and engaged with visually on social media. the sharing of ultrasound images begins an individual’s social media footprint before they are born, and does important affective work situating them within a family group. the management and sharing of ultrasound photos similarly leads to important privacy considerations not just for the instagram users, but also the unborn being visualised in this way. at the other end, #funeral images, and especially funeral selfies, show a wide range of responses to death and loss, yet these images show that funerals are not just spaces of loss and mourning, but at times also of celebration and positive memorialisation. in both cases, visual social media offers an avenue for engaging with the way birth and death are imagined, highlighting relationships and affective connections. references 3-month totals: 15863 634 16497 boyd, danah, & crawford, k. (2012). critical questions for big data. information, communication & society, 15(5), 662–679. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2012.678878 gibbs, m., meese, j., arnold, m., nansen, b., & carter, m. (2015). #funeral and instagram: death, social media, and platform vernacular. information, communication & society, 18(3), 255–268. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2014.987152 highfield, t., & leaver, t. (2015). a methodology for mapping instagram hashtags. first monday, 20(1). doi:10.5210/fm.v20i1.5563 markham, a., & buchanan, e. (2012). ethical decision-making and internet research recommendations from the aoir ethics working committee (version 2.0). retrieved from http://aoir.org/reports/ethics2.pdf 1 ethical behaviour, personal growth and becoming a citizen of the world: the power of online games natasha boskic the university of british columbia canada natasha.boskic@ubc.ca abstract a research study was conducted on an alternate reality game evoke in spring 2010. the questions explored were around the participants narrative practices, and the potential for players and educators who use similar spaces to develop knowledge and application of critical literacy, as well as grow as individuals in their ethical sensibilities. this paper focuses on players’ moral functioning in the gameworld, analyzed through a four-component model, including moral judgment, moral sensitivity, moral motivation and moral action. based on the model, four different themes emerged as a result of players’ participation in the game. those are: becoming a leader, being a good citizen, supporting and understanding others and expressing freedom of speech. all of those demonstrated that immersive gameworlds could provide space for rich, exhilarating, thought-provoking debate and knowledge building. keywords alternate reality games; ethics; personal growth; global citizen; leadership introduction games could be and are a powerful sandbox for simulating real life experiences (gilbert, 2010). it may happen that the choices and decisions made in the game will never occur in the 2 player’s real life, but the process of making them, has a high pedagogical value. the most emphasized benefit of having this playground, is the opportunity for players to reflect on their choices, outcomes and consequences (koo & seider, 2010; nordlinger, 2010; schrier, diamond & langendoen, 2010; sicart, 2010). this critical reflection leads to moral reasoning (vikaros & degand, 2010). theoretical background: ethics in gameworlds in recent debates on the impact of video games, focus on the topic of ethics has increased. it is obvious that different authors look at different ethical dimensions inside and around gameworlds. broadly, the debate may be divided into the following categories: 1) ethics of the medium; 2) ethics of the design; 3) ethics of the play and the players; and 4) issue of teaching ethics and ethical behaviour using games. ethics of the medium the ethics of the medium is explored from the perspective of games as a cultural and social phenomenon, looking at their treatment in comparison with other media. interesting questions arise around their status and legal inferences, including their positive and negative psychological and sociological impacts. some theorists still wonder if games could and should be created around any topic regardless of its controversy, inherent perspectives, and sensitivity. hoffman, for example, claims that “just because a game can be made doesn’t mean it should” (2010, p. 115). her concerns are similar to frasca’s (2004) comments on trivializing human life (e.g. when creating a game about anna frank). she worries that difficult issues which are hard to confront and view will be glamorized, thereby sending a completely opposite message from that which may have been intended. brenda brathwaite (2010), on the other hand, describes how in play with her daughter an unthreatening game environment presented exactly the right medium to learn about difficult moral dilemmas. brathwaite received a standing ovation for her talk on train, a game on the holocaust, at gdc 2010 (game developers conference). 3 how are games treated in a legal system? some theorists see games as one way of expressing the basic human right to freedom of speech (reynolds, 2002). reynolds claims the decision is about limiting “the right to hear rather than the right to speak” (2002, p. 7). that is, any content can exist but access to it will be restricted to different categories of audience. video games, like works of art, are protected by intellectual property law. some of the designers’ work is easy to recognize as copyright protected material: computer code and audiovisual output, for example (burk, 2005). it is not uncommon in mmorpgs, however, that a player will develop his/her character, achieve a higher level, and sell the character to another player. a question arises over character ownership: should it lie with the game designer who created the capacity for the character in the first place or with the player who works on his/her character, customizes it, and develops its attributes through his/her progress in the game? the creative contribution of the player is not generally recognized by us law, which presents legal and ethical challenges. however, owing to the increased number of multimedia products, pressure for recognizing multiple-platform properties to which intellectual property rights apply has mounted (c.r., 2009; coleman & dyer-witheford, 2007). ethics of the design the ethics of the design includes the presentation of content, representation of race, gender, and ethnicity, as well as rules and limitations that guide the play. the content in the game can be ethically questionable as well. cultural and racial stereotyping is as equally present in video games as it is in other media (al-rawi, 2008; dickerman, christensen, & kerl-mcclain, 2008; eastin, appiah & cicchirllo, 2009). in making choices about game characters’ looks and traits, game designers offer a certain view of racial, ethnic, or gender representation. most games have their rhetorical position established through their rules, leaving the players little scope for choice (brathwaite and sharp 2010; sicart, 2005, 2010). players make the decisions they are permitted to make. they have to play in a certain way. in accepting the game’s role, they accept a “certain way of being in the world” (squire, 2006, p. 26). how and to what extent videogames influence the player through their built-in ideologies and perspectives has not been fully explored. a teacher using games for education must carefully select the world views the games offer, or at least be aware of the experience students will have 4 playing particular games (squire, 2006). many commercial games display embedded ethics (bogost, 2006; sicart, 2005; squire, 2006). bogost believes there is still no single ideology for the medium, but he warns that strong political groups may pressure dissenting voices as in other media. in talking about ethics and game design, sicart claims, designing ethical gameplay challenges conventional wisdom, requires a reinterpretation of design as an aesthetic process, and more importantly, puts players as the centre of a moral universe created with the sole intention of challenging who they are, and who they want to be, as players, but also as moral beings. (2010, p. 13) ethics in play ethics in play is reflected through players’ relationship to one another. two important elements of that relationship are considered here: harassment and cheating. harassment is especially present among new players. these so-called newbies are easily recognized by experienced players. newbies sometimes experience harassment, being followed and/or verbally abused by other players (warner & raiter, 2005). this verbal abuse can escalate into more severe types of violent or deviant game behaviour in which newbies are prevented from playing or “killed.” cheating in video games is treated differently than cheating in other games. cheating in cards or a board game is regarded as unacceptable and not fair play (kimppa & bisset, 2010). in video games, however, the playing community may help members cheat by providing codes or ways of manipulating the system. players distance themselves from other players – rather than a direct action against another player, cheating is seen as reaching a personal goal or achieving satisfaction (kimppa and bissett, 2010). in some cases, finding ways to cheat is considered an achievement. in single-player games, extra cheat features are designed purposefully and serve as a marketing tool (kimppa & bisset, 2010). that players cannot see each other may have helped undercut conventional notions of cheating. although they communicate and interact, they remain in their own virtual spaces. teaching ethics through games 5 introducing moral education in computer games is not new (sicart, 2010). players, particularly mmorpg players who interact intensively, have the opportunity to learn about life choices, about others, and about themselves (nordlinger, 2010). squire believes that players of mmorpgs participate in social practices with real consequences for the gameworld, but wonders whether they are transferable to actual life. many other scholars theorize the concept of the other and our understanding of others, especially in terms of emotional expression (gee, 2004, simkins, 2010; staines, 2010; vikaros & degand, 2010). one of the solutions to better understanding the perspectives of others is roleplaying (gilbert, 2010), which phelps (2010) calls systemic thinking. through interacting with others in gameworlds and understanding various viewpoints, we come to comprehend the values, morals and needs of others in the same way we do in actual life (phelps, 2010). many disciplines employ role-play as an educational method, as in formal school, military, and counselling settings. simkins (2010) claims that “the experience [of role playing] opens the door to an emphatic understanding of others” (p. 72). because they are in role-play, gamers change players’ identities. in a social situation, inside a gameworld, our identity, as vikaros and degand (2010) point out, is based on comparison to others. frequently, identity is based on players’ affiliation with different groups. the more open and transparent behaviour is to other players, the more they tend to behave ethically. they feel ethically obliged to fulfill their role in a group (travis, 2010). on the other hand, balzac writes, based on zimbardo’s (2004) studies, “the more people perceive themselves to be anonymous, the more likely they are to engage in evil behaviour” (2010, p. 295). because it is a game, players can re-live the same experiences a number of times in the safety of a virtual environment (swain, 2010). however, emotional and cognitive investment in a game can be so high that it influences the player’s behaviour outside the gameworld. when there is no personal stake in the outcome it is easier to make a choice, and learning usually does not happen (balzac, 2010). another important condition for connection is the creation of a social narrative and opportunities for interaction (vikaros & degand, 2010). opportunities for cooperation enforce moral reasoning and reinforce positive behaviour (koo & seider, 2010; phelps, 2010). games have the capacity to transform us and transfer our skills from the virtual to the actual environment 6 (barab, scott, siyahhan, goldstone, ingram-goble, zuiker & warren, 2009; koo & seider, 2010; phelps, 2010). when there is no right or wrong choice, the teaching of ethics through play becomes complex – decisions are made based on personal value systems and an understanding of the context at hand (mcdaniel & fiore, 2010). koo & seider (2010) argue in favour of game design that models desired values through content or rules. in this way, a player’s ethical standpoint and development can be “shaped and encouraged” (p. 15), which can be a life-long process (vikaros & degand, 2010). how can we know that moral education can happen? according to schrier et al. (2010), to “navigate our globally interconnected, rapidly evolving world” we need to learn to use games to “foster the development of ethical reasoning skills and encourage citizenship” (p. 255). does a roleplaying game help a player overcome his own prejudices (phelps, 2010)? not necessarily. our own livelihood must be at stake in order for us to care and be responsible; only then can we really be transformed by the experience (phelps, 2010). svelch (2010) posits that not all games have been made to promote moral development, but that good games will include moral choices and dilemmas, containing “an implicit system of morality” (p. 59). good videogames must be both entertaining and instructive and must present effective teaching tools (staines, 2010). context -the situation in which a person acts -is critical for making ethical decisions. role-playing games presents environments in which such situations and opportunities to practise take place, and this enables situated learning (simkins & steinkuehler, 2008). rpgs are also favourable for observing such actions. simkins and steinkuehler identify a number of factors which are important for developing skills of critical reasoning. expanding on simkins and steinkuehler’s (2008) important factors, raphael, bachen, lynn, baldwin-philippi, & mckee (2010) make a distinction between civic training and civic education and between games that teach “about basic citizenship roles (voting, participating in organizations, and the like) and about civic leadership (running for office, starting or running organizations, and so on)” (p. 218). args, on the verge of the imaginary and the actual, demand that participants make choices with an impact on their lives outside the game. such games, according to macklin (2010) trouble 7 the concept of the magic circle. when players are asked to interact with people in public, the boundaries of what is ‘inside’ and what is ‘outside’ the game disappear. the ethical norms and rules move into the public space, and other questions arise around moral values and the right of the game to intrude into that public space. how ethical is it to conceal the fact that actions players take are part of a game and not actual? should players be visibly marked, as in macklin’s example of re:activism, whose participants wore matching-colour bandannas? through this gesture, the players reestablished the boundaries of the magic circle and visibly invited people to spontaneous play. simkins, on the other hand, advocates that the boundaries of the magic circle be “nurtured, protected and enforced” (2010, p. 83). can video games teach us about the future, help us predict what could happen, and prevent catastrophes or negative behaviour (phelps, 2010)? phelps claims that “as game players, we are not just systemic thinkers, but ethical actors” (p. 145). context ample research has focused on how video games affect various aspects of human life, and much attention has been given to negative aspects of video gaming such as violence and addiction. i wanted to explore whether games, especially alternate reality games (arg) in which the main interaction is through a narrative, have the power to influence change and ethical sensibility. my interest focused on human behaviour, the way narratives are presented and interpreted, and the establishment of human relationships based on those narratives in args. my research questions were as follows: 1) what critical literacy practices are evidenced in human play in immersive gameworlds? 2) how can players and educators who use these spaces develop knowledge and application of critical literacy and grow as individuals in their ethical sensibilities? the game selected for this research was urgent evoke. it was an online game, officially launched on march 2 and it ended on may 12, 2010. it lasted for ten weeks. each week a quest and a mission were identified that agents (players) needed to complete. those were introduced by a scenario set in the future, and presented in the form of a comic strip and they were related to the 8 most troublesome world issues, such as poverty, food, water crisis and so on. agents were expected to tackle this mission in different ways: complete a quest related to the topic; and accomplish three separate tasks: learn, act and imagine. at the end of the last week of the game, the agents were asked to submit an “evokation”, a proposal for a project, if interested. the project had to reflect a sound idea, with good strategies for realization. it needed to have a potential to make a change in local community. the best projects were rewarded with $1,000 us to start up, or with a mentorship (consulting services by a successful professional in the field). there were other “comforting awards” given by the world bank institute, such as the certificates “class of 2010” for participating in the crash course in changing the world, for those who completed all the quests and missions. the research study attempted to explore the impact of alternate reality game, evoke, on participants’ real-life, and the occurrence of potential changes in their beliefs, values and ethical behaviour expressed or discussed in the game. these elements were explored through pre and postgame online surveys and interviews (using skype), as well as through text analysis of the players’ narrative contributions in blogs and comments. to analyze the participants reasoning, attitudes and relations to other players, a four-component model of moral functioning was used (narvaez and lapsley, 2005), exploring moral sensitivity, moral judgment, moral motivation and moral action. six individuals were recruited for this study, two from serbia, two from auckland, one from rwanda, and one from uganda. the artifacts collected were from participants’ blog postings, comments and image and video uploads into evoke space. those were analyzed by using text and video/image qualitative analysis software, hyperresearch. the results suggest that the most frequent moral functioning throughout the whole period was moral judgment, which indicates that people constantly apply moral reasoning to their actions and the actions of others. they express their beliefs and state their values. those are that guide them in any situations. the power of this particular game was in creating leaders and motivating the players to make social changes. based on the collected evidence, it is demonstrated that the moral action function considerably increased during the duration of the game in comparison to the time before and after the game.the results also indicate that the moral sensitivity is the strongest in the area of the participants’ interaction with each others, shown primarily in the comments section. 9 in accordance to the four-component model, four different topics around critical literacy and morality of actions emerged and were discussed: 1) supporting and understanding others (as a part of the moral sensitivity function), 2) becoming a leader (as a part of the moral action function), 3) being a good citizen and choosing good values (as a part of the moral motivation function), and 4) freedom of speech (as a part of the moral judgment function). in all four areas, the arg offered a fertile space for growth and learning. this is done through discussion, negotiations, and reflection. therefore, i argue that args that are designed so that they motivate the players to first, contribute to the game and second, through that contribution make changes in their real life, could be successfully used to encourage sensitivity to questions of ethics. method of analysis to respond to the research questions and understand and interpret the complexity of human agency for my analysis, i investigated a few frameworks to find the one that would suit my work. i stayed away from language or linguistic analysis of the text since english was a non-native language for all the research participants. certain language constructs, such as sentence structure, politeness, or directness, might have been a reflection of first-language structure or insufficient proficiency in english rather than intentionality. i tried to understand the meaning of the utterance, general modes of consciousness, and specific worldviews (jensen, 1989). analysis was not done on a lexical or semantic level; instead, one or more paragraphs were used as the analytical unit. i employed the four-component model of moral functioning developed by james rest and his colleagues (1999) as an initial conceptual framework. i then shifted to use of narvaez and lapsley’s later modification of the same model (2005). based on kohlberg’s pivotal work on sociocognitive developmental stages, rest, narvaez, bebeau and thoma (1999) took a critical approach towards theories of moral development at the end of the 20th century that focused primarily on moral judgment. they expanded the model to include other inner psychological processes that impact human behaviour: moral sensitivity, moral judgment, moral motivation, and moral character. this is how rest et al. explain the four processes: 1) moral sensitivity (interpreting the situation, role-taking, how various actions affect the parties concerned, imagining cause-effect chains of events, and being aware that there is a moral problem when it exists); 10 2) moral judgment (judging which action would be most justifiable in a moral sense); 3) moral motivation (the degree of commitment to taking the moral course of action, valuing moral values over other values, and taking personal responsibility for moral outcomes); 4) moral character (persisting in a moral task, having courage, overcoming fatigue and temptations, and implementing subroutines that serve a moral goal). (rest, p. 101) this four-component model was later used for developing moral education programs in the united states; according to rest et al. (1999) it led to educational leadership programs in 1990s public schools that taught “moral literacy” (p. 102). narvaez and lapsley (2005) worked further on this model, expanding it to include skills and subskills. generally, the four-component model was applicable to my study. the main categories - judgment, sensitivity, focus (motivation), and action -fit well in my analysis; however, i found the division in skills and subskills tended to be too specific in some cases, not allowing flexibility in understanding participant behaviour more broadly. i therefore used the four categories as a skeleton and skills and subskills as a scaffolding device to support the evidence of moral functioning. results moral functioning and collected evidence it was evident in urgent evoke that the focus of moral functioning shifted at different stages of the game, beginning with a higher number of instances of moral judgment (at the outset of the game), shifting to moral action (during actual gameplay), and finally to moral sensitivity and motivation (after playing the game) (fig. 1). 11 figure 1 the difference in focus of moral functioning at different stages in the game the first set of data, collected in the pre-game interview, demonstrated the highest level of the moral judgment subcategory (75 instances). next, there was a split between moral sensitivity (37 instances) and moral motivation (26 instances). the most frequent code in the moral sensitivity subcategory was <interpretingsituations>, in which research participants explained their positions and tried to determine what was happening; the most frequent code in moral motivation was <developingidentity>, which was connected to players establishing themselves in the new community and through the task ahead. the second set of data, collected through participant blog postings, shows a shift in moral functioning. excluding the moral judgment subcategory (178 instances), it is noticeable that players focused more on moral action (126 instances) while maintaining a very high score in the moral sensitivity subcategory (118 instances). the most frequent code in the moral action subcategory was <takinginitiativeasaleader> (87 instances). agents, engaged in game tasks and missions, took active roles in local communities and interacted with other players online. this time, the most frequent code in the moral sensitivity subcategory was <connectingtoothers>, in which participants listened to other people’s experiences, sought common ground, and searched for potential partners for projects in actual life. the third set of data included an analysis of comments posted by the research participants; the fourth set of data included the limited upload of images and videos. in the comments data, the 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% total interview2 image/video comments blogs interview1 moral sensitivity moral judgment moral motivation moral action 12 moral motivation (63 instances) and moral sensitivity (61 instances) subcategories came to the forefront. participants generally avoided expressing ethical judgments but were generous in expressing support and encouragement. the most frequent code in the set in which research participants used images and videos to illustrate their points was <interpretingsituations>; this code marked instances in which they offered additional information on their blog postings, explaining what was happening in the photos or video. the final set of data, collected in the exit interview, was strongest in the moral judgment subcategory (112 instances). the participants were reflecting on the process of the game, their participation, and the outcome. it is interesting to note the drop in focus on moral action (25 instances). this may be due to the design of the survey and interview questions, which concentrated more on the game experiences and less on future actions. emerging themes one of the interesting aspects of evoke was its potential connection to a player’s activities outside the gameworld; this relates to the potential for educational re-use of evoke or similar games. players did not have to role-play or imagine their characters. they could be and act as themselves. real intrinsic motivation to either write or do something in their local communities was a driving force throughout the game. without an explicitly-expressed focus on moral behaviour, evoke gave players numerous opportunities for exploring how people acted and reacted to others, how they grappled with problems in actual life, how they tried to help without being asked or obliged to do so, and how they immediately connected with others through similarity of ideas or personal experiences. a number of themes related to morality emerged as valuable milestones for education; these include the drive to lend a hand, to support or express understanding and empathy, to take a leadership role and call for action for a better future, to improve ethical conditions, and to fight for human rights. all these issues are presented through narvaez and lapsley (2005)’s four-model framework. if games are to help us develop critical thinking skills, they need to inspire or trigger ethical sensibility or self-reflection. an effective mode of self-reflection is through narrative and critical literacy. therefore, in the context of urgent evoke i looked at what: 1) moral action meant in terms of taking 13 responsibility and/or a leadership role (e.g. activism in the local community); 2) moral motivation meant in terms of identity-building and choosing good values (e.g. plagiarism and presentation of self); 3) moral sensitivity meant in terms of supporting and understanding others. (e.g. connecting to others or offering support and encouragement); and 4) moral judgment meant in terms of reasoning ethically and analyzing ethical problems (e.g. freedom of speech) (fig. 2) figure 2 the themes around moral functioning that emerged from the study becoming a leader as many game theorists suggest, gamespaces are fruitful environments for informal and formal ethical education (raphael, et al., 2010). some teachers use commercial games in classrooms to teach ethical education. they engage youth in expressing their opinions, practicing problem solving, and collaborative decision-making. role-playing games allow the participants to explore otherwise inaccessible institutional, geographical, and temporal settings (raphael, et al., 2010). evoke, as an arg, went a step further, enabling players to act as themselves and not only learn about leadership skills but practice them in both virtual and actual communities. raphael et al. (2010) hypothetically claim (this was very likely realized in evoke ) that games can be designed to increase participant motivation by asking players to consult sources outside the game, provide various perspectives on controversial ideas and issues, rely on distributed knowledge to find solutions, and develop through these actions leadership skills transferrable to actual life. becoming a leader moral motivatio n being a good citizen moral sensitivit y supporting and understanding others moral judgment freedom of speech 14 as raphael et al. (2010) posit, games like evoke that allow players to set their own goals are more likely to lead to ethical growth than games with preset goals. every player in evoke was specifically asked to set up his/her goals on a weekly basis and to report back to the community with results or comments. in response, some participants took an active role in local neighbourhoods as they attempted to change the current state of affairs. being a good citizen sentwali (pseudonym), a participant from rwanda, was a very active player from the time he joined the evoke community, sometimes uploading more than one post per day. as he explained in his first interview, he was very excited to learn from others and be part of an international group of people. sentwali saw this as a rare opportunity; many citizens of rwanda did not have access to a computer or the skills required to contribute to the “world conversation” (sentwali_profile). after almost a month of participation, sentwali posted a text in his blog that was obviously (based on the language) borrowed from another source rather than his own thoughts. this resulted in fewer comments by other players and several requests for sentwali to reference his sources. illegitimate textual appropriation or plagiarism is a matter of heated debate between theorists and experts, especially in today’s digital era when ‘borrowing’ is so easy. one side of the coin displays a picture of ‘illegitimate users’ whose first language is not the one from which they are borrowing. might well be a way of learning the language, and may result from a lack of ability to express oneself well enough in the second language. the other side of the coin shows ‘illegitimate users’ who, in addition to speaking a non-native language, come from a different cultural background which might not perceive the use of someone else’s words as a criminal or punishable act. on the contrary, some cultures promote collective ownership of creative material, believing no ownership of an idea is possible (shi, 2006). an exact reciting of a text is considered an expression of education that demonstrates familiarity with reputable sources (beute, aswegen & winberg, 2008). why were some players upset, then, when sentwali took content from another web page? if he spent time searching for writing that coincided with his own ideas, made an effort to adapt it with a few of his personal comments, and offered it as understandable, correct english, why was he ‘punished’ by unfriendly responses from players more focused on pointing out that his practice was ‘wrong’ than on the ideas he wanted to share? 15 supporting and understanding others the research results suggest three primary reasons for engaging in dialogue: sharing personal experience and resources; asking for further information or clarification; and expressing agreement and support. supporting and encouraging others was one of the most obvious, easilyidentifiable behaviours in the analysis of comments left by players for each other. in the exit interview, participants were asked a question about the possibility of people from different parts of the world, with different cultural, social, economic, and educational backgrounds, being able to understand each other and work together. the question was whether a game like “evoke,” which opens a forum for conversation, could bridge that gap. most of the participants thought such understanding was possible. freedom of speech at the end of march, 2010, an evoke code of ethics was posted on the evokeblog. this was triggered by a series of events, one of them being complaints about censorship and filtering of the content that the game designers found inapproppriate or irrelevant for solving the problem at hand. while the announcement and publication of the ‘code of ethics’ provoked positive, supportive comments, a social network with a high number of participants, such as evoke (almost 20 000) could not exist for ten weeks without turbulence. some players continued the discussion around freedom of speech, while others decided to ignore the whole issue and to make the most of the game until its conclusion. eventually, the voices of those who called for reconciliation and a focus on positive outcomes and innovation prevailed. this incident had a visible impact on the players; a loss of passion and de-motivation was obvious in the content contributions that followed. those who had already invested a lot in the game and had high expectations for their results refrained from confrontation. fear of penalization resulted in suppression of free speech and in self-censorship. 16 discussion in consideration of the research questions, critical literacy practices were examined, and the possible application of alternate reality games, such as evoke in educational practice – in particular whether they might be useful in fostering ethical sensibility. although the research participants valued the visual expressions (i.e. images and videos), their primary mode of communication was text. all five literary practices that ciardiello (2004) identifies as the best practices that “enlighten the reader about the ulterior designs and multiple meanings of text” (p. 138) were present in my participants’ contributions. those practices are: 1) examining multiple perspectives, 2) finding an authentic voice, 3) recognizing social barriers and crossing borders of separation, 4) regaining one’s identity, and 5) the call of service (ciardiello, 2004, p. 139). every text can have multiple meanings. providing different perspectives helps readers view how text may be constructed based on personal values and cultural background. to better understand the other players, a participant from uganda observed that he would go to their profile pages, read about them and “try to relate who they are and where they come from to what they are writing and see if there is any connection” (mukasa, exit interview_12859). two participants talked about finding their authentic voices and being heard by others. ciardiello emphasizes “crossing borders of separation” as one of the major critical literacy practices. a participant from rwanda claimed to have bridged differences and social barriers in becoming a part of the evoke community. he proudly talked about the friends he had met in the community, the relationships he had established, and the feeling of respect that he had felt by other players. the fifth of ciardiello’s major key elements of critical literacy, the call of service, was evident in all six research participants’ contributions, from explicit talk about writing responsibly to comment on how the questions in the game encouraged reflection on local situation in new zealand, but also thinking about the world on a global level. despite the participants’ freedom to voice their opinions, power dynamics were at times troublesome. luke’s (2000) discussion of literacy education in australia, although focused on formal education settings, is very relevant to the developed power relations in evoke. he claims, “literacy education is always a situated response to particular political economies of education” (p. 449). similarly, the evoke community was created under the supervision of, and funded by, the world bank, and had to exist inside the borders of a game design and arrangements that encouraged 17 a particular type and distribution of discourse. clearly the fact that the world bank sponsored the game influenced the way game designers and agents acted and the textual practices in which they engaged. although social media spaces have been characterized as highly democratic, they remain subject to particular economies of knowing that prevail outside the gameworld. from the start of the game, there was a belief in the potential of evoke to be used for educational purposes. community members such as the new york city writing project for english, art and technology classrooms expressed their intention to use urgent evoke in teaching. teachers, primarily from the u.s., self-initiated a wiki page on which they posted suggestions for the classroom and ideas for collaborative projects. they also opened a google.doc in which teachers could share strategies and connect to each other. although a space like evoke might be used in the context of formal education settings, this has not been the focus of this study with adult players and therefore i will not comment extensively on possibilities for use of the game in classrooms. rather, i will consider implications for learning more broadly. in evoke the players were from different parts of the world, were adults of varying ages, and participated in the learning process voluntarily. this diversity allowed for rich and challenging learning opportunities that required negotiation of customs and beliefs players brought to the game from their particular lifeworlds. such non-traditional teaching and learning spaces appear to be worth considering in building capacity for global education. network communications technology has made the world ‘shrink’, connecting people from various parts of the planet who in previous generations would never have come in contact (noddings, 2010). the need for global education (internationalization of education) or global citizenship has been put on the agenda of many higher education institutions (abdi & shultz, 2008; richardson, 2008; stearns, 2009). the implementation, however, is not yet smooth or beyond “admirable aspiration” (haydon, 2006, p. 462). ‘going global’ and collaborating or communicating with people from various cultural, educational and political backgrounds raises questions of ethics. if we are citizens of the world, to what extent do we have common core values? dower (2008) argues that the core values of citizenship are “core values of dialogic and nonviolent communication, coupled with the acceptance of the universal status of all human beings and a sense of trans-society responsibility for what happens in the world” (p. 52). kiss and euben (2010) concur with dower in taking a dialogical approach to moral education. only through tolerance, readiness to 18 listen and reflective practice do we learn about what others value and how they live (spelman, 2010). accessibility of information makes us more aware of events around the world and living conditions of others. there is still a huge gap between knowing about inequalities and injustices and doing something about them. the importance of ethics education, as christie (2005) states, is to “challenge simple acceptance of ‘things as they are’” (p. 240) and develop a discourse on humanity, rights and citizenship. she argues that the traditional western perspective on ethical reasoning and universal claims should be contested, allowing for different views, and for “think[ing] about ourselves as human beings in relation to others” (p. 242). opening the floor for discussion, as happened in evoke through gameplay, is one way to engage into such discourse. both christie (2005) and chen (2011) argue for “bringing suffering into conversation” so that it can be acknowledged, rationalized, and ultimately lead to ethics of care. the research participants shared their life stories and everyday experiences in the context of a game (about young girls forced into prostitution, about the struggle for clean water, and about the civil war). others responded with warm and supportive words, or with ideas for solutions. ethics education is closely related to citizenship education, or teaching individuals to be part of the world. respect for others is often mentioned as a pillar of ethical behavior (haydon, 2006). hydon states that ‘respect’ has special importance in global citizenship education. he claims, “what is needed is respect, not for distinct cultures, but for human cultural contexts in all their variety” (p. 459). results from this study revealed that respect for others and connecting to others (represented by the codes <respectingothers> and <connectingtoothers>) were the most common form of communication in the context of participants’ interactions with other players. richardson (2008) cautions us not to forget to acknowledge the influence of national culture. what it means to be ethical and to live ethically is challenging, as evident from the events in evoke, which showed how ethics is highly contextual. everyone brings into the community his/her own particular understanding of values and the ways of behavior. creating games like evoke and providing a setting for various perspectives to be brought together is appears to be one method of teaching the contextual nature of ethics. using games in learning situations, especially in global educational practice, is a method that needs to be further explored, with attention to careful instructional designed. many would agree 19 with blackmon (2011): “we have to avoid the lure of bleeding-edge technologies without solid pedagogy.” drawing on the rich work of james gee and donald murray (1972), blackmon states that much could be learned from game design, especially in the area of student engagement. both crecente (2011) and nicole (2011) see true value in using game elements in education only if they are embedded in the learning process, allowing students to solve problems through collaboration and inquiry. crecente gives an example of a new 12-week facebook arg called america 2049, in which players examine human rights in the united states and their own positions in relation to those rights. participants have the opportunity to be in ‘someone else’s shoes’ and learn about various social and political issues. an important element in using games for education is finding strategies for motivating the participants. just as my research participants questioned the value of awards and points in ‘urgent evoke, so do educators and researchers (salter, 2011). salter agrees with other game theorists, such as zimmerman (2004) or mcgonigal (2011), who argue that instant feedback is very important and sometimes even critical for players’ engagement. however, finding the balance between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is not easy. of course, this is not a new problem in education. finally, bringing games into the realm of academic inquiry, as welsh (2010) posits, invites interrogation of the attitude that games are unworthy of serious study and thus unworthy of use as a credible teaching method. this attitude derives from the historical view of games as purely entertaining discussed. the merging of theoretical and critical views with experiential and practical ones may take time, but args like urgent evoke demonstrate that immersive gameworlds can provide space for rich, exhilarating, thought-provoking debate and knowledge building. references abdi, a. a., & shultz, l. (2008). educating for human rights and global citizenship: an introduction. in a. a. abdi & l. shultz (eds.), educating for human rights and global citizenship (pp.1-9). albany, ny: state university of new york press. al-rawi, a. (2008). iraqi stereotypes in american culture: the case of video games and films. international journal of contemporary iraqi studies, 2(2), 225-249. 20 balzac, s. r. (2010). reality from fantasy: using predictive scenarios to explore ethical dilemmas. in k. schrier & gibson, d. (eds.), ethics and game design: teaching values through play (pp. 291-310). hershey, new york: information science reference. barab, s., scott, b., siyahhan, s., goldstone, r., ingram-goble, a., zuiker, s., & warren, s. (2009). transformational play as a curricular scaffold: using videogames to support science education. journal of science education and technology 18(4), 305-320. blackmon, s. (2011). what video game designers have to teach us about education (or “a rip-off of my cs presentation). retrieved from http://www.samanthablackmon.net/notyourmamasgamer/?p=401 bogost, i. (2006) videogames and ideological frames. popular communication 4(3), 165-183. brathwaite, b., & sharp, j. (2010). the mechanic is the message: a post mortem in progress. in k. schrier & gibson, d. (eds.), ethics and game design: teaching values through play (pp. 311329). hershey, new york: information science reference. burk, d. l. (2005). electronic gaming and the ethics of information ownership. review of information ethics, 4(12), 39-45. chen, r. h. (2011). bearing and transcending suffering with nature and the world: a humanistic account. journal of moral education, 40(2), 203-216. christie, p. (2005). towards an ethics of engagement in education in global times. australian journal of education, 49(3), 238-250. ciardiello, a. v. (2004). democracy’s young heroes: an instructional model of critical literacy practices. the reading teacher, 58(2), 138-147. coleman, s., & dyer-witheford, n. (2007). playing on the digital commons: collectivities, capital and contestation in videogame culture. media, culture & society, 29(6), 934-953. c.r. (2009). building transmedia properties. publishers weekly, 256(36), 8. 21 crecente, b. (2011). intense facebook game aims for social change. retrieved from http://ingame.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/04/26/6535255-intense-facebook-game-aims-for-socialchange dickerman, c., christensen, j., & kerl-mcclain, s. b. (2008). big breasts and bad guys: depictions of gender and race in video games. journal of creativity in mental health, 3(1), 20-29. dower, n. (2008). are we all global citizens or are only some of us global citizens?: the relevance of this question to education. in a. a. abdi & l. shultz (eds.), educating for human rights and global citizenship (pp. 39-53). albany, ny: state university of new york press. eastin, m. s., appiah, o., & cicchirllo, v. (2009). identification and the influence of cultural stereotyping on postvideogame play hostility. human communication research, 35(3), 337-356. frasca, g. (2004). videogames of the oppressed: critical thinking, education, tolerance, and the other trivial issues. in n. wardrip-fruin, & p. harrigan (eds.), first person: new media as story, performance, and game ( pp. 85-94). cambridge, mass.: the mit press. gee, j. p. (2004). situated language and learning: a critique of traditional schooling. new york: routledge. gilbert, s. (2010). ethics at play: patterns of ethical thinking among young online gamers. in k. schrier & gibson, d. (eds.), ethics and game design: teaching values through play (pp.151166). hershey, new york: information science reference. haydon, g. (2006). respect for persons and for cultures as a basis for national and global citizenship. journal of moral education, 35(4), 457–471. hoffman, e. (2010). sideways into truth: kierkegaard, philistines, and why we love sex and violence. in k. schrier & gibson, d. (eds.), ethics and game design: teaching values through play (pp. 109-124). hershey, new york: information science reference. jensen, k. b. (1989). discourses of interviewing: validating qualitative research findings through textual analysis. in s. kvale (ed.), issues of validity in qualitative research (pp. 93-108). lund, 22 sweden: studentlitteratur. kimppa, k. k., & bissett, a.k. (2010). the ethical significance of cheating in online computer games. international review of information ethics, 4(12), 31-38. kiss, e., & euben, j. p. (eds). (2010). debating moral education: rethinking the role of the modern university. durham and london: duke university press. koo, g., & seider, s. (2010). video games for prosocial learning. in k. schrier & gibson, d. (eds.), ethics and game design: teaching values through play (pp. 16-33). hershey, new york: information science reference. luke, a. (2000). critical literacy in australia: a matter of context and standpoint. journal of adeolescent & adult literacy, 43(5), 448-461. macklin, c. (2010). reacting to re:activism: a case study in the ethics of design. in k. schrier & d. gibson (eds.), ethics and game design: teaching values through play (pp. 274-290). hershey, new york: information science reference. mcdaniel, r., & fiore, s. m. (2010). applied ethics game design: some practical guidelines in k. schrier & gibson, d. (eds.), ethics and game design: teaching values through play (pp.236254). hershey, new york: information science reference. mcgonigal, j. (2011). reality is broken: why games make us better and how they can change the world. new york: the penguin press. narvaez, d., & lapsley, d. k. (2005). the psychological foundations of everyday morality and moral expertise. in d. k. lapsley and f. c. power (eds.), character psychology and character education (pp. 140-165). notre dame, in: university of notre dame press. nicole720. (2011, april 12). how you like them apples, teachers? retrieved from http://twinada.wordpress.com/2011/04/12/how-you-like-them-apples-teachers/ 23 nordlinger, j. (2010). virtual ethics: ethics and massively multiplayer online games. in k. schrier & gibson, d. (eds.), ethics and game design: teaching values through play (pp. 102-108). hershey, new york: information science reference. phelps, d. (2010). what videogames have to teach us about screenworld and the humanistic ethos. in k. schrier & gibson, d. (eds.), ethics and game design: teaching values through play (pp. 125-149). hershey, new york: information science reference. raphael, c., bachen, c., lynn, k., baldwin-philippi, j., & mckee, k. a. (2010). games for civic learning: a conceptual framework and agenda for research and design. games and culture 5(2), 199-235. rest, j., narvaez, d., bebeau, m. j., & thoma, s. j. (1999). postconventional moral thinking: a neo-kohlbergian approach. mahwah, new jersey: lawrence erlbaum associates. reynolds, r. (2002). playing a “good” game: a philosophical approach to understanding the morality of games. igda, international game developers association. retrieved from http://www.igda.org/articles/rreynolds_ethics richardson, g. (2008). caught between imaginaries: global citizenship education and the persistence of the nation. in a. a. abdi & l. shultz (eds.), educating for human rights and global citizenship (pp. 55-64). albany, ny: state university of new york press. salter, a. (2011). how to ‘gamify’ your class website. the chronicle of higher education. retrieved from http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/how-to-gamify-your-class-website/31332 schrier, k., diamond, j., & langendoen, d. (2010). using mission us: for crown or colony? to develop historical empathy and nurture ethical thinking. in k. schrier & gibson, d. (eds.), ethics and game design: teaching values through play (pp. 255-273). hershey, new york: information science reference. sicart, m. (2005). game, player, ethics: a virtue ethics approach to computer games. international review of information ethics, 4(12), 13-18. 24 sicart, m. (2009). the ethics of computer games. cambridge, mass: the mit press. sicart, m. (2010). values between systems: designing ethical gameplay. in k. schrier & gibson, d. (eds.), ethics and game design: teaching values through play (pp. 1-15). hershey, new york: information science reference. simkins, d. (2010). playing with ethics: experiencing new ways of being in rpgs. in k. schrier & gibson, d. (eds.), ethics and game design: teaching values through play (pp. 69-84). hershey, new york: information science reference. simkins, d. w., & steinkuehler, c. (2008). critical ethical reasoning and role-play. games and culture 3(3-4), 333-355. retrieved from http://gac.sagepub.com/content/3/3-4/333 spelman, e. v. (2010). on the distribution of moral badges: a few worries. in e. kiss, & euben, j. p. (eds.), debating moral education: rethinking the role of the modern university (pp. 111-121). durham and london: duke university press. squire, k. (2006). from content to context: videogames as designed experience. educational researcher, 35(8), 19-29. stearns, p. n. (2009). educating global citizens in colleges and universities. new york and london: routledge. svelch, j. (2010). the good, the bad, and the player: the challenges to moral engagement in singleplayer avatar-based video games. in k. schrier & gibson, d. (eds.), ethics and game design: teaching values through play (pp. 52-68). hershey, new york: information science reference. swain, c. (2010). the mechanic is the message: how to communicate values in games through the mechanics of user action and system response. in k. schrier & gibson, d. (eds.), ethics and game design: teaching values through play (pp. 217-235). hershey, new york: information science reference. 25 travis, r. (2010). bioshock in the cave: ethical education in plato and in video games. in k. schrier & gibson, d. (eds.), ethics and game design: teaching values through play (pp. 86101). hershey, new york: information science reference. vikaros, l., & degand, d. (2010). moral development through social narratives and game design. in k. schrier & gibson, d. (eds.), ethics and game design: teaching values through play (pp. 197-215). hershey, new york: information science reference. warner, d. e., & raiter, m. (2005). social context in massively-multiplayer online games (mmogs): ethical questions in shared space. international review of information ethics, 4(12), 46-52. welsh, t. j. (2010, october 26). how not to teach video games retrieved from http://www.timothyjwelsh.com/2010/10/how-not-to-teach-video-games/ zimbardo, p. (2004). a situationist perspective on the psychology of evil: understanding how good people are transformed into perpetrators. in a. miller (ed.), the social psychology of good and evil: understanding our capacity for kindness and cruelty (pp. 21-50). new york: guilford. zimmerman, e. (2004). narrative, interactivity, play and games. in n. wardrip-fruin, & p. harrigan (eds.), first person: new media as story, performance, and game (pp. 154-164). cambridge, mass.: the mit press. luke, a. (2000). critical literacy in australia: a matter of context and standpoint. journal of adeolescent & adult literacy, 43(5), 448-461. microsoft word 780-529-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 news via voldemort: the role of parody and satire in topical discussions on twitter tim highfield arc centre of excellence for creative industries and innovation, queensland university of technology; curtin university brisbane, australia; perth, australia t.highfield@qut.edu.au abstract this paper evaluates the role of parody accounts on twitter within the ongoing coverage of breaking news and mediated events. these accounts, which are established components of social media, are recurring contributors to topical discussions, from politics to live broadcasts of sports and popular entertainment, yet their presence within large twitter datasets is often treated as an aside within the wider analysis of such archives. this paper then analyses the contributions of parody accounts alongside other satirical tweets across multiple contexts, drawing on various political and cultural twitter datasets collected between 2011 and 2013, to examine the extent to which such accounts are central, or disconnected, to the wider discussions at hand. keywords social media; satire; twitter; parody; framing introduction twitter accounts satirizing public figures and fictional characters are “part of the fabric of the platform” (vis, 2013, p. 35), often tweeting in response to breaking news or mediated events by reframing these stories to their own character's context. however, while tweets from users parodying queen elizabeth ii or lord voldemort appear within political or entertainment archives, their contributions to the captured discussions are not the focal point of the accompanying research. this paper evaluates the role of parody accounts alongside other satirical tweets across multiple contexts, examining to what extent is such behavior central to, or disconnected from, the wider discussions at hand. context the involvement of twitter parody accounts within public discussion is part of a wider trend towards "silly citizenship", in which playful elements are key to the "performance of political deliberation and participation" (hartley, 2012, p. 151); extending from the growing importance of comedy as the "go-to source for civic understanding" (p. 146), online platforms such as twitter provide citizens with the opportunity to create, recreate, and participate in public debate, whether by sharing extended commentary or by remixing or spoofing political videos. the creation of twitter accounts satirizing politicians is an established part of the “mediated spectacle of mainstream politics” (wilson, 2011, p. 458). fake accounts become performances of political engagement, with public attention an intended goal of these parodies. the proximity between public figures and citizens, celebrities and fans, on social media make this kind of public performance both more possible (for more users) and more visible than on other platforms. however, these aspects of twitter parody accounts have their roots in earlier online humor, including the merging of fiction and reality, and the "comic commodification of celebrities" (shifman, 2007, p. 205). prior comic material online took elements of fictional texts and integrated them into contemporary settings, and twitter accounts such as @lord_voldemort7 and @deathstarpr take a similar general approach; conversely, parodying public figures allows other users to challenge a celebrity’s public image for humorous, or subversive, purposes. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 there is no one format for parody on twitter. some accounts take fictional characters or groups and place them within current events (reformatting breaking news by framing it within the relevant fictional universe); others provide long-running satires of public figures, challenging their traditional media portrayals. there are also the myriad short-lived, and topic-specific, accounts set up in response to a single event – for example, the numerous users purporting to be the empty chair addressed by clint eastwood at the republican national convention in 2012. further forms of fake accounts may have more deceitful intentions, such as impersonating public figures without demonstrating that these accounts are hoaxes (hutchins, 2011; marwick & boyd, 2011). parody accounts can attract greater attention than their inspirations; in response to the 2010 gulf of mexico oil spill, a @bpglobalpr twitter account posting sardonic comments about the disaster was more widely followed than bp’s official account (fournier & avery, 2011). furthermore, accounts develop from characters featured in other texts but, rather than providing responses to current events, act as a conduit for roleplaying; these twitter accounts take on particular characters, with their tweets and interactions based primarily on the original text’s narrative – although there is still some context collapse, where tweets mix contemporary events or other online phenomena, such as appropriating trending hashtags, with the world of the narrative (magee et al., 2013). twitter parody accounts, and comic tweets more generally, also suggest a mix of the memetic and viral distinction discussed by shifman (2012) within the context of youtube videos. a viral video receives wide circulation and attention without the audience changing its content similarly, a single tweet retweeted thousands of times may be treated as 'viral'. memetic texts attract "extensive creative user engagement" (p. 190), particularly through imitation and remixing, and parody accounts demonstrate recurring participation within the commentary on public issues. the spread of these accounts, and their imitability, also means that the appearance of parody accounts is an expected trope, or "meta-meme" (shifman, 2012, p. 190), of twitter coverage of media events. methods and research questions the analysis carried out for this paper addresses the following research questions: what is the role of parody and gimmick accounts, and other users posting irreverent or humorous takes on news and media events, within the ongoing discussion of such topics on twitter? do these accounts bridge different sections of the social media audience, discussing the same topics but otherwise separated along national, linguistic, topical, or other lines – or is the satirical coverage of an ongoing story only a small, disconnected part of the relevant twitter activity? do such accounts play the same role across multiple topics? this paper provides an exploratory analysis of the role of parody accounts within twitter discussions surrounding political communication, popular culture, sports, and other media events, including the coverage of election campaigns, the eurovision song contest, and the tour de france, collected between 2011 and 2013. a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods is used to determine the presence and contribution of parody accounts and comic tweets within wider topical discussions. drawing on established approaches for processing and analyzing twitter data (bruns & liang, 2012), the visibility of parody accounts within these discussions is determined from the number of retweets and @mentions received. relationships with other users are also employed to determine the role of these accounts within the tweet network, based on replies, retweets and @mentions, to identify whether the humor-based discussions are central or distant from other tweets covering the relevant events. finally, the individual tweets from relevant accounts are analyzed for both their content and their longevity not just how many times they are retweeted, and by whom, for example, but also how long after the tweet's creation it is still being rebroadcast by other users. initial findings selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 the analysis for this paper is still ongoing, particularly the comparison between different cases and datasets. however, some initial findings from the individual case studies completed thus far show that humorous or satirical content often accounts for the most widespread retweets, from professional comedians (or rebroadcast by them) and from parody or gimmick accounts. the context for such discussions is important to note, though; the frequent tweeting by @queen_uk during the 2012 eurovision song contest, plays not only on the idea of the queen live-tweeting while watching television, but also on the wider depiction of the event as a kitsch broadcast to be enjoyed ironically (highfield, harrington & bruns, 2013). similarly, while the wider coverage of the 2012 tour de france features cyclists and their teams as central nodes within the twitter discussion, fake accounts play a prominent role within broadcaster-specific conversations. commenting using the broadcaster's hashtag, these fake profiles have a more limited audience and scope (satirizing the broadcaster's commentators), but also represent an additional means of tweeting along with television coverage (highfield, 2013). several of the accounts discussed here appear within multiple datasets, sharing their comments in response to different news events; the ongoing analysis for this paper will then provide further comparison – and tracking of common accounts – between these cases, to evaluate the different roles and contributions of these users to various types of public debate on twitter. references bruns, a., & liang, y. e. (2012). tools and methods for capturing twitter data during natural disasters. first monday, 17(4). retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3937/3193 fournier, s., & avery, j. (2011). the uninvited brand. business horizons, 54(3), 193–207. doi:10.1016/j.bushor.2011.01.001 hartley, j. (2012). digital futures for cultural and media studies. malden, ma: wiley-blackwell. highfield, t. (2013, in press). following the yellow jersey: tweeting the tour de france. in k. weller, a. bruns, j. burgess, m. mahrt, & c. puschmann (eds.), twitter and society. new york, ny: peter lang highfield, t., harrington, s., & bruns, a. (2013). twitter as a technology for audiencing and fandom: the #eurovision phenomenon. information, communication & society,16(3), 315-339. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2012.756053 hutchins, b. (2011). the acceleration of media sport culture: twitter, telepresence and online messaging. information, communication & society, 14(2), 237–257. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2010.508534 magee, r. m., sebastian, m., novak, a., mascaro, c. m., black, a., & goggins, s. p. (2013). #twitterplay: a case study of fan roleplaying online. cscw ’13 companion, 199–202. marwick, a., & boyd, d. (2011). to see and be seen: celebrity practice on twitter. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 17(2), 139–158. doi:10.1177/1354856510394539 shifman, l. (2007). humor in the age of digital reproduction: continuity and change in internet-based comic texts. international journal of communication, 1, 187–209. shifman, l. (2012). an anatomy of a youtube meme. new media & society, 14(2), 187–203. doi:10.1177/1461444811412160 vis, f. (2013). twitter as a reporting tool for breaking news: journalists tweeting the 2011 uk riots. digital journalism, 1(1), 27–47. wilson, j. (2011). playing with politics: political fans and twitter faking in post-broadcast democracy. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 17(4), 445–461. doi:10.1177/1354856511414348 license (arial 10, bold, aligned left, single line, 12pt before 10pt after) this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. (authors may use any license they prefer, or none at all.) microsoft word 790-538-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 playing ‘for real’: a lab-based study of mmogs jennifer jenson york university canada jjenson@edu.yorku.ca kelly bergstrom york university canada kellybergstrom@gmail.com suzanne de castell university of ontario institute of technology canada suzanne.decastell@uoit.ca abstract in this paper we report on a 3-year, mixed-methods study of massively multiplayer online games, focusing on the ways in our lab-based studies were indeed sites of ‘real’ play, notwithstanding their limited ecological validity (williams, 2010). we document the ways in which we observed players’ real commitment to a play session that had few or no opportunities for follow up – investing considerable time and attention to, for example, naming and customizing their avatars, and selectively equipping them. we illustrate here some of the insights available through lab-based play that cannot be captured otherwise. we also draw attention to the ways in which relying on only one type of data can create a false and/or incomplete picture of a participant’s level of engagement with the game. this research suggests that labs might well be a site where ‘authentic’ play is indeed possible, and can therefore offer rich potential for mmog research as they can give significantly greater context than is possible from data that is generated by game servers. keywords mmogs, mixed methods research, actor network theory description of research this study began with a reasonably clear, passably intelligible question: what can an examination of virtual world (vw) avatars and activities tell us about their ‘real world’ counterparts’ identities and behaviours? a three year study, the work involved a multi-disciplinary team that examined and analyzed phenomena in massively multiplayer online games (mmogs) such as leaders and leadership (harvey & ferguson, 2012), sex and gender (bergstrom, jenson, & de castell, 2012), the interpersonal dynamics of players, spoken and written language forms and functions, the fidelity of avatar to player appearance, and the developmental trajectory by which players evolve from ‘novices’ to ‘experts’ in mmogs (taylor et al., 2011; bergstrom 2012). unlike a great deal of the quantitative work on players to date that focuses on what can be captured by server data or by automated scripts that collect player-based data, for example from the wow armory (lewis & wardrip-fruin, 2010; yee et al., 2011) our work was very much focused on what could be learned from players who are in full view of the researchers in lab settings playing in an mmog (rift). in total, over 150 players participated in the research we will describe in this paper, conducted in research laboratories in two locations in canada. all participants played in rift for at least 45 minutes and up to four hours, in that case in multiple play sessions. in this paper, we focus on how, despite the fact that participants were playing in a laboratory fully observed by researchers during their play sessions, the majority of participants played as if ‘for real’. that is, even though they were playing on an account that they would likely only play on once (or a few times if they chose to come back to the lab), they often treated the play sessions very seriously, taking considerable time, for instance to choose the names of their avatars, or to painstakingly customize them, to equip their characters, buy and sell items and level up in the game. we conclude by illustrating findings we were able to arrive at from such closely watched play that would not be possible to access using data captured ‘at a distance’. methods both in scope and in its methods, this is the first study of its kind: an “on the ground” examination of the complex relationships between vws and the localized practices of players in different cities, and in different contexts of play. the theoretical framework we deployed was actor network theory selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 (ant), as developed and articulated in the field of science and technology studies by bruno latour (1987, 1992, 2005), john law (2004) and michel callon (1995). ant reads ‘the social’ – institutions, practices, and interactions – as the product of engagement and associations between human and nonhuman ‘actors’. as latour insists in reassembling the social (2005), agency is distributed across actors that co-constitute a network. non-humans, including artifacts, technologies, and other animals, are not simply the ‘backdrop’ to social interactions; in this view, human action is shaped and made possible by non-human agents, to which have been delegated the task of prescribing, framing, eliciting, and enabling certain forms of action, and prohibiting or discouraging others. the work of sociology, from an ant perspective, is therefore to “re-assemble” the associations between human and non-human actors in a network so as to better map the relationships between and among them. to that end, data collection included a survey of player demographics and expertise, screen captured play that was synched to audio and video recordings of players as they played, keystroke and mouse data, interviews with players, observations, field notes, and a detailed logging of completed quests, gear equipped and gold totals--and explicit attention to the lab setting on the ways participants played. we compiled in this way detailed screen recordings of players as they chose their avatar, customized and named it, and recordings of all of their in game play. in this paper we demonstrate the ways in which we were surprised by participants: by the time that they took to set up their avatars, the time they took naming that avatar, and time and energy they exerted in ‘really’ playing the game. discussion this paper draws attention to the ways that relying on only one metric can create a false and/or incomplete picture of a participant’s level and kind of engagement with the game. for example, when looking at the keylogging data of a particular participant who had self-identified as an expert mmog player, we observed very little movement using the wads keys on their keyboard (see taylor et al. (2011) for further discussion of the use of keyboard usage as a marker of expertise). additionally, when inspecting their inventory at the end of their final session, very little in-game wealth had been collected over the course of their two multi-hour visits to the lab. while the number of key presses and wealth accumulation are two fairly reliable measures by which we could assess most of our participants’ expertise – in this case the participant falls in line with patterns of key presses and wealth accumulation frequently associated with novice play – it is only when the video recordings and research field notes were consulted that we got ‘the full picture’. we realized that while in-game metrics indicate that a participant’s avatar was idle or wandered aimlessly for much of their time spent in-game, these metrics did not capture the ‘backchannel’ where some of our apparently inexpert participants were verbally explaining the basics of the game mechanics to their co-located participants. observational data indicated that not only were such players well versed in the mechanics of a fantasybased gameworld, they were experienced enough that they could provide detailed instructions to two first time rift players. proponents of large scale data mapping argue for its advantages over the smaller scale studies, namely that studying a complete mmog population means there is no risk of sampling bias, as all players are included in the sample, and that with data being collected at the server level, players are unaware that they are being studied, and so are less likely to change their behaviour than they might if they knew they were being observed by a researcher (williams, 2010, 464–456). what we saw, by contrast, was how a limited a ‘snap shot’, context free approach to data collection would have led to inaccurate labeling of players. instead we were able to identify highly skilled players who on the face of it looked as if they were novices (they had little gold or did not pick up items), but when fuller contextualization was possible, proved to be expert players who were mobilizing their expertise to assist other players, who were expert players in a different genre of game. what became apparent was that, notwithstanding the acknowledged ‘artificiality’ of lab-based gameplay studies, they prove to be a powerful and invaluable source of information about the complexity of levels and kinds of play that simply cannot be captured through server-side data capture, and alert us to the value of alternative methodologies, in particular the importance of specifying the relations of methods to outcomes, selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 closely attending both to what is clarified and what is obscured by the ‘actor network’ through which we carry out our investigations. references bergstrom, k. (2012). “a counter-terrorist in king arthur’s court: does fps expertise transfer to a mmog?” presentation as part of “traveling circuits: studying assemblages in and across multiple online games”, nick taylor (chair), at association of internet researchers – ir13. salford, uk: october 21-23, 2012. bergstrom, k., jenson, j., & de castell, s. (2012). what’s ‘choice’ got to do with it?: avatar selection differences between novice and expert players of world of warcraft and rift. in proceedings of the international conference on the foundations of digital games (pp. 97-104) acm. harvey, a. & ferguson, c. (2012). “leadership in context: the contingencies, affordances, and competencies producing leaders in massively-multiplayer online play”. presentation as part of “traveling circuits: studying assemblages in and across multiple online games”, nick taylor (chair), at association of internet researchers – ir13. salford, uk: october 21-23, 2012. latour, b. (1987). science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society. harvard university press. latour, b. (1992). where are the missing masses? the sociology of a few mundane artifacts. shaping technology/building society: studies in sociotechnical change, 225-258. latour, b. (2005). reassembling the social-an introduction to actor-network-theory. reassembling the social-an introduction to actor-network-theory. oxford university press. law, j. (2004). after method: mess in social science research. routledge. lewis, c., & wardrip-fruin, n. (2010). mining game statistics from web services: a world of warcraft armory case study. in proceedings of the fifth international conference on the foundations of digital games (pp. 100-107). acm. taylor, n., de castell, s. jenson, j., & humphrey, m. (2011). modeling play: re-casting expertise in mmogs. in proceedings of the 2011 acm siggraph symposium on video games (pp. 49-53) acm. williams, d. (2010). the mapping principle, and a research framework for virtual worlds. communication theory, 20(4), 451-470. yee, n., ducheneaut, n., yao, m., & nelson, l. (2011). do men heal more when in drag?: conflicting identity cues between user and avatar. in proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 773-776). acm. microsoft word 892-636-1-pb.docx panel: navigating boundaries and taboos in the digital frontier john carter mcknight, jd, phd, arizona state university michael burnam-fink, phd candidate, arizona state university cindy tekkobe, phd candidate, arizona state university katrin tiidenberg, phd candidate, tallinn university while “digital dualism,” the notion that online life is categorically different from offline, either as a site of utopian or dystopian imaginings, has largely been discredited (jurgenson 2012), we have barely begun to understand the ways in which internet technologies, user and developer cultures, and the wider society in which they are embedded, co-construct each other. contrary to the dreams of transhumanist “uploaders,” who sought an apollonian, post-embodied existence as pure constructs of thought – or software – (e.g., moravec 1988) we have not escaped the gendered body and its politics in our online spaces. rather, software mediation can foreground body politics by providing a contested space of negotiating the transgressive, its boundaries and meanings. these papers provide a range of perspectives on the politics of the gendered body as developed in particular online environments, from representations of the physical body to avatarized constructs to the text based to a transmedia phenomenon. each examines a discourse politics of the transgressive, detailing practices of policing normative identity expression through a mangle (pickering 1995) of gender roles, power dynamics, software affordances and shaming systems. collectively, they suggest an exaggerated manifestation of gender and power roles which, far from living up to the dreams of cyber-utopianism, point towards a strict policing of traditional roles. references jurgenson n. (2012) “strong and mild digital dualism.” cyborgology blog. online: http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/10/29/strong-and-mild-digital-dualism/ october 29, 2012. moravec, h. (1988) mind children: the future of robot and human intelligence. cambridge: harvard university press. pickering, a. (1995) the mangle of practice: time, agency, and science. chicago: university of chicago press. ** “‘so much more than something vulgar:” social construction of breast enhancement in second life abstract the virtual world of second life allows users to develop their own software creations to transcend constraints imposed by its avatar creation engine. one such group of users, who choose to present as exceptionally busty, has formed a community built on the software artifacts of their digital bodies and a narrative of resistance to the inscription upon those bodies of an abject status. this paper analyzes boundary work enacted at a wedding of two busty avatars as enabling maximization of member identity and agency within a social context while providing an anti-transgressive narrative of gender expression, refuting rather than embracing the abject status of the sexualized (digital) body. keywords gender; identity; avatar; boundary work boundary work boundary work (gieryn 1983) performed at a wedding of members of a group of particularly largebreasted avatars in the virtual world of second life (sl) illustrates the mechanisms by which avatar identity and agency are created, contested, supported and performed in a social virtual environment. while the anthropological literature on three-dimensional virtual worlds, including especially sl, has struggled to clearly answer the question, “who is the being exercising agency within the virtual environment?” (e.g., boellstorff 2008, pearce and artemesia 2009) games studies has a robust answer. linguist and games theorist james paul gee (2003, 2005b) describes the relationship between the user and the avatar as a “projective stance,” “a project i inherit from the game’s designers, and in that sense an imposition,” and also “a being into whom i project my own desires, intentions and goals.” (gee 2005b, 213) it is precisely in the tension between these two “projects” where agency emerges in the virtual space within the constraints of software design. butler (1993, 95) describes the performativity underlying gee’s “projective stance” as “a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production.” while death is not an option in sl, the remainder holds true as a description of the forces shaping identity for wearers of “prim breasts,” a software artifact used to provide a bustier appearance than sl’s default avatar creation tools allow. posts on a community forum for prim breast wearers set forth their collective identity as “those rendered abject by prohibition, ostracism and taboo from outside,” a defining myth reiterated within the community in public, on group forums, and in private conversation. butler adds (1993, 101) that “to accede to the law is… also always to fail to approximate that position, and to feel the distance between that imaginary identification and the symbolic as the threat of punishment, the failure to conform, the spectre of abjection.” it is within that distance between the normative and the desired, between the rendering-abject and the agency of performative identity in which boundary work within the prim breast community is done. a definitional wedding an example of such work can be found in the circumstances surrounding an sl wedding of two prominent figures within the busty community, b. and j. their wedding invitation and messages repeatedly stressed a call for “appropriate attire,” one largely respected by the attendees. this call may be seen as “boundary work,” a term coined by gieryn (1983) and widely taken up in the social sciences (e.g., guston 2001, faraj and yan 2009, essers and benschop 2009). gieryn describes the motivations for boundary work by scientists as expansion of authority or expertise, monopoly of authority and resources, and protection of autonomy over their collective enterprise. only the last is of direct concern, to the extent that what gieryn calls “autonomy” may be separated into “identity” and “agency,” enabling the addition of a social mechanism to the projective stance described by gee. the wedding couple’s boundary work was designed (author interview, 2011) to counter what they and others in the community saw as an attempt by outsiders to render them abject by defining them as (merely) sexually obscene. if, as butler (1991, 95) says, “constraint is, rather, that which impels and sustains performativity,” then it is within the constraints inscribed by the normativity enacted in the default avatar creation engine, which prevents the creation of especially busty avatars, and by the rendering-abject by the larger sl community, where the collective construction and performance of sl busty identity takes place. boundary work claims a collective circle inside which members reinforce their shared projective identities though validation and exclude attempts by outsiders to impose unwelcome projections. three sorts of boundary work seem theoretically possible: (1) ghettoization, or hardening the boundary to separate completely insiders from outsiders; (2) doubling down, or performatively exaggerating the difference between insiders and outsiders; and (3) assimilation, or maintaining a porous boundary by stressing the performance of commonalities between inside and outside. the couple’s social performance included, or welcomed, elements of each; however, their own performative stance heavily emphasized (3), assimilation. in the context of the wedding, (1) was visible by the notable lack of nonbusty attendees: one male avatar and one non-busty female avatar of a group of at least 50. (2) was the element the wedding invitation and notices sought to minimize, through a stress on “appropriate,” meaning non-sexualized, outfits, while welcoming members displaying greatly exaggerated size. conversely, (3) was maximized by the rhetorical attributes of a high-status, conservative wedding, particularly in the choice of a cathedral as a venue, and conventional choices of bridesmaids’ and wedding dresses. boundary work began with the sl profile of m. one page, under a tab labeled “breasts,” states that “[b]reasts represents tenderness and giving, nurturing and warmth, calmness and intimacy, carefree, life and motherly love,” a performative act “not… the act by which a subject brings into being what he/she names, but, rather,… that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena it regulates and constrains.” (butler 1993, 2) a previous version defined her large breasts as “so much more than something vulgar.” this performative work is by no means universal within the community: a significant number of busty avatars both explicitly and implicitly reject her boundary work, embracing the abject as foundational to their identity within sl. the couple’s boundary work negotiates the imposition of abject status from within as well as from without, complementary impulses towards ghettoization and mainstreaming, and the exaggeration and minimization of distinction from inscriptions of the normative female avatar body. b. is explicit in her acknowledgement of her boundary work. in an interview, she stressed the conventionality, and particularly the non-sex-object, nature of her own identity and that of a few admired members of the community, accompanied by an openness to those who present as less conventional. this paired position is what links boundary work to the collective reinforcement of community members’ projective identities. both elements, b’s stress on commonality across the boundary and her welcoming of autonomous self-definition within the boundary, act together to assert that identity is the project of the community, not a blank screen onto which outsiders may project their own concepts of members’ identity. conclusions members of sl’s busty community believe, with documented justification, that outsiders attempt to render them abject (highly sexualized and deviant). (korobase 2011, yeuxdoux 2011) while rejecting both the act and content of this projection, one community leader contests it via boundary work which simultaneously acknowledges and attempts to disclaim abject status through rhetorics of conventionality, even conservatism, while inscribing a space in which members, even those who regard themselves as highly sexualized and deviant, may project their own identity and receive validation for it from others with similar identity projects in the space. the wedding of b. demonstrates the rhetorical breadth and complexity of boundary work, from architecture to calls for “appropriate attire,” to the invitation of a set of attendees diverse in their own projections of meaning onto their appearance but united in a busty projection, in contrast though not opposition to larger sl norms. boundary work was rhetorical, reflexive and performative, intended to maximize group members’ personal and collective identity and agency within the space. references butler, j. (1993). bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of “sex.” new york: routledge. boellstorff, t. (2008) coming of age in second life: an anthropologist explores the virtually human. princeton: princeton university press. cherny, l. (1999) conversation and community: chat in a virtual world. stanford: csli publications. coleman, b. (2011) hello avatar: rise of the networked generation. cambridge: the mit press. essers, c. and benschop, y. (2009) “muslim women doing boundary work: the negotiation of islam, gender and ethnicity within entrepreneurial contexts.” human relations, vol. 62, no. 3, 403-423. faraj, s. and yan, a. (2009) “boundary work in knowledge teams.” journal of applied psychology, vol. 94., no. 3, 604-617. gee, j.p. (2003). what video games have to teach us about learning and literacy . new york: palgrave/macmillan. _____ (2005). “semiotic social spaces and affinity spaces: from the age of mythology to today’s schools.” in barron, d. and tusting, k., eds. (2005), beyond communities of practice: language, power and social context. cambridge: cambridge university press, 214-232 _____ (2005). “pleasure, learning, video games and life: the projective stance.” e-learning, vol. 2, no. 3. gieryn, t. (1983). “boundary-work and the demarcation of science from non-science: strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists.” american sociological review, vol. 48, no. 6, 781-795. guston, d. (2001). “boundary organizations in environmental policy and science: an introduction.” science, technology, & human values vol. 26, no. 4, 399-408. lave, j. and wenger, e. (1991). situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. kendall, l. (2002) hanging out in the virtual pub: masculinities and relationships online. berkeleyl university of california press. korbase, s. “implants discrimination?” shayna’s adventures, weblog. online: http://shaynakorobase.blogspot.com/2011/12/implants-discrimination.html?zx=b4af75432e231bf9, december 12, 2011. pearce, c. and artemesia (2009) communities of play: emergent cultures in multiplayer games and virtual worlds. cambridge: the mit press. stone, a.r. (1996) the war of desire and technology at the close of the mechanical age. cambridge: the mit press. wenger, e. (1998). communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. yeuxdoux, m. “at a nudist resort?!” livin’ la vida segunda, weblog. online: http://vidasegunda.blogspot.com/2011/12/at-nudist-resort.html, december 12, 2011. ** body-appropriation in a self-shooters’ community – you are not picasso! keywords tumblr; body blogging; selfies; visual narrative analysis; embodiment in the late modern “somatic society” (turner, 1984) and the consumer culture where body image is an imperative (featherstone, 2010), the body, like the self, has become a site of interaction, appropriation and reappropriation (giddens, 1991, p.218). at the same time self-shooting is becoming ubiquitous with the spread of mobile cameras and social media sites. self-shooting and body blogging can be 4onceptualized as technologies of the self (foucault, 1988), where our reflexive bodies (giddens, 1991) are recreated through aesthetic self-stylization, critical self-awareness and self-care (foucault, 1988). selfies (self-images, autoportraits) shape the meaning of our embodied identity – images are not merely reflections of us, they are constructions of us. based on visual narrative analysis (working the interface of images, captions, ethnographic material and interviews (individual interviews conducted in november and december 2011 and relevant outtakes from group interviews in november 2012) with self-shooters) this paper examines the intense emotional reactions to unauthorized photo-shopping and stealing of images in a nsfw (not suitable for work) selfshooters community on tumblr.com (started 2007 hosts ~90 mil blogs (january 2013)). by utilizing the theoretical concepts of internet deviance (denegri-knott, 2005) in the context of online gift economies (bergquist & ljungberg, 2001) of ‘reflexive bodies’ (giddens, 1991) this paper explores how a body constructed through selfies operates in a space of exchange and how the rules of this community translate photo-alteration into body-appropriation and result in understandably intense emotional responses. boreo and pascoe (2012) call performative, relational and discursive embodiment “enacting embodiment”, in the nsfw self-shooting culture, it could be called “selfied embodiment” it works as status symbol, proof of life and authenticity, a sign of belonging; a source of joy and growing-self confidence. as such, the photographed body also becomes a commodity (examples of it being used as such are abundant: “birthday boobs”; “thank-you-note naked-picture” etc). viewing selfied embodiment as consumable leads us to questions of social exchange and rules surrounding it. social exchange is an elementary part of human interaction (suhonen, lampinen, cheshire, antin, & hall, 2010 based on blau, 1964, 1986; homans, 1958; emerson, 1972) and can be divided into three major types – negotiated (bargaining, direct exchange), reciprocal (no explicit agreement, direct exchange) and generalized (resources given, the recipient(s) may or may not reciprocate to others in the future) (suhonen, lampinen, cheshire, antin, & hall, 2010 based on cheshire et al, 2010; cook & emerson, 1984; lawler & yoon, 1993). although reciprocal exchange happens in this community, it is often a part of osa (online sexual activity) and not the focus of this paper. generalized exchange is often used interchangeably with the concept of gift economies and is the prevalent type of exchange in the nsfw self-shooters culture. according to cammaerts, gift economies are ‘somewhere in the middle’ (belk, 2007, p. 128 via cammaerts, 2011) on the commodity exchange and sharing continuum. describing open source communities, bergquist & ljungberg write that when giving is easy and gifts are made publicly available “dependencies are reshaped and transformed” and “gift giving is managed through acknowledgement: the giver is ‘paid’ by the community by receiving a certain amount of fame and respect” (2001, p. 313). i’ve shared photos with people before [...], but that was more on a one on one level, whereas this is just putting it out there for whoever wants to come and find it [...] it’s probably cultivated that part of me that … uh … that likes to be watched and … uh likes the feedback and likes knowing that people are enjoying what they’re seeing. (e, m, late20s, interview 2011) this is a key point to understanding why unapproved photo alterations and stealing are seen as deviant in this culture. if we take the contextual approach to deviance (giddens, 2001), we have to ask, as denegriknott (2005): “are new norms being developed online, or are they just offshoots of offline parameters of socially acceptable behavior, or a combination of these?” (2005, p. 97). nsfw self-shooters are all naked on the internet, thus blatantly violating mainstream cultural norms and co-creating a “stigma-suspending space” (waskul, 2002). the reblog-function makes appropriation one of the platform’s main affordances and most bloggers admit to posting images that they are unable to credit; touching up their own images for aesthetical (hide a bump) and safety (hide a tattoo, blur out the background) purposes. i have looked at the most common conflicts that arise around images – photoshopping (usually nonselfies to give them bigger breasts or wider hips) and stealing selfies (altering them (cropping, colors), adding a watermark and reposting as original content), and interpreted these through the lens of selfied embodiment, group norms and assessments of deviance. photoshopping is seen as an act of (symbolic) violence against someone else’s body and violation of the moral rights of an artist. in these conflicts the photoshoppers usually raise arguments of copyright allowing fair use (claiming parody; one of them even posted “tête de femme” by picasso to draw a parallel with what he does when he “boobifies” the women) or argument questions of consent. special blogs have been set up in this culture by enraged body-bloggers, who have seen too many fake-hipped images with comments that indicate that a large proportion of the audience imagines this to be an achievable ideal of the human body. there are the rights over our individual body image and self-presentation, then there is a question of the effects on our broader culture’s ideals of beauty, reality, etc, and how that may influence individuals’ relationships to their own bodies. [...] individual asshats with photoshop messing with women’s bodies – it’s all wrong wrong wrong. (f, 40, from an open letter posted on her blog). stealing selfies is seen as body and memory (because often the selfie also captures a special moment for the original poster) appropriation and is met with even stronger anger than photoshopping. community members recognize each others bodies and body parts (even on the fragmented level of “hey, this is s’s forearm”). often the injured party’s friends and acquaintances react more strongly than the original source. they alert the owner of the image, scold those who posted or reblogged the stolen content, repost originals, add the source to the stolen image etc. we share pictures, we don’t gift them. if i rent a car, i can’t put my own license plates on it [...] your example was sharing music. [...] what you are doing isn’t enjoying something you didn’t pay for. it‘s more like taking a jimi hendrix song and rebranding it as your own. we say, “look at this great thing i found!” you go, “look at this cool thing i made!” (f, 41, from a response „rant“on her blog after someone put his watermark „right above her friends ass“). self-shooters construct “a sense of community through a sense of shared embodiment” (ferreday, 2009, p.198). the body comes to be in communicative action (waskul & vannini 2006, p. 7), which means that for people to be culturally intelligible they engage in embodied performativity, in this case – regular posting of selfies and respectful interaction with others selfies. selfied embodiment is as delicate (if not more) as bodily co-existence in material space. references bergquist, m., & ljungberg, j. (2001). relationships in open source communities, info systems journal, 11, 305– 320. boero, n., & pascoe, c. j. (2012). pro-anorexia communities and online interaction: bringing the pro-ana body online. body & society, 18(2), 27–57. cammaerts, b (2011) disruptive sharing in a digital age: rejecting neoliberalism? continuum: journal of media and cultural studies, 25 (1). pp. 47-62. doi: 10.1080/10304312.2011.539157 denegri-knott, j. (2005). the labeling game: a conceptual exploration of deviance on the internet. social science computer review, 23(1), 93–107. doi:10.1177/0894439304271541 featherstone, m. (2010). body, image and affect in consumer culture. body & society, 16(1), 193–221. doi:10.1177/1357034x09354357 ferreday, d. (2009) online belongings: fantasy, affect, and web communities. bern: peter lang ag. foucault, m. 1988. technologies of the self. in martin, l. et al., technologies of the self. amherst: university of massachusetts press, pp. 16–49. giddens, a. (1991) modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age. cambridge: polity. giddens, a. (2001). sociology (4th ed.). london: polity. suhonen, e., lampinen, a., cheshire, c., antin, j., & hall, s. (2010). everyday favors : a case study of a local online gift exchange system. turner, b.s. (1984) [1996]. the body and society. oxford: blackwell. waskul, d. d. (2002). the naked self: being a body in televideo cybersex. symbolic interaction, 25(2), 199–227. waskul, d. d., & vannini, j. a. (2006). introduction in. waskul, d.d. & vannini, j.a. (eds). body/embodiment: symbolic interaction and the sociology of the body. hampshire: ashgate publishing limited ** “to beseech the mods: popular participation in unequal spaces” keywords self governance; digital democracies; virtual worlds; negotiated norms; digital culture discredited yet durable cyberutopian rhetoric holds that in ungoverned digital spaces, communities will spontaneously generate and uphold common values (lanier, 2010). this is patently false, as most existent digital communities rely on moderators to police user statements and defend productive conversations from the assaults of spammers, trolls, bullies, the willfully dense, and other malefactors. this paper will examine the realities of moderator-user activity in two internet forums, somethingawful.com and rpg.net, which value high-quality conservations on many subjects, and how their divergent approaches to moderation and community norms sheds light on internet governance. communities in virtual worlds must contend with the fact that in multi-user computer systems, all participants are not created equal (lessig, 2006). a durable feature of computer systems, holding from the early days of ‘big iron’ mainframes to modern virtual worlds and cloud systems, is differentiated levels of access between ordinary users and administrators. inequality is built into the very architecture of computer systems, with most users constrained by the coded laws of the system, while administrators are constrained only by the mathematical laws of computer science articulated by pioneering mathematicians and scientists (alan turing, gordon moore, claude shannon, etc.). in multi-user computer systems, administrators have effectively god-like powers, being able to alter the content and governing rules of the system at will. yet, in practice, admins do not use these powers arbitrarily, instead acting to maintain community norms. for online forums, the most relevant administrative staff are moderators, concerned not so much with workings of a mature system, but the constant adjustment of the community through their admin-like power to censor posts and remove abusive users. despite the importance of moderation staff and community relations to the stability and productivity of forums as a site of discourse and culture, the exact mechanisms of these socio-technological relationships is substantially under-examined. i examine these mechanisms in the process of breaking down, when heated topics of conversation create conflict between moderators and some members of the community, but also a public call from the majority of the community for the moderators to intervene, and defend community norms. this paper aims to explore in two very different approaches to maintaining a cohesive set of forums norms and discouraging toxic disinhibition (suler, 2004), through a comparative study of moderation controversies on somethingawful.com and rpg.net. i will show, contra to popular belief, cyberspace is not an ungoverned, even in the absence of formal legal mechanism. information and human communication are held on physical servers, and servers demand maintenance and administration, which leads to community norms and policing of speech by moderators. somethingawful.com and rpg.net are on the surface similar communities; durable by internet standards, demographically similar (white, male, mid-20s and geeky), and both communities that pride themselves on more formal standards of conversation and etiquette compared to the internet as a whole, yet they have adopted very different moderation policies, and commensurate relationships between the community and moderation staff. rpg.net has enacted a transparent and pseudo-legalistic system, with 10 explicit rules, and systems of moderation and appeal. most noteworthy is their explicit goal of making rpg.net a friendly space for people of all identities—women, homosexuals, transgendered people. it is explicitly against the rules to make personal or group attacks, deny a woman’s experience of sexual harassment, or argue that a transgendered person is anything other than their stated gender. while explicitly a place to discuss tabletop role-playing games, rpg.net’s well-moderated and inclusive off-topic forums are a point of pride for the community. by comparison somethingawful.com has an autocratic and arbitrary system of moderation, with “mod challenges”, probations, and bannings being handed down from on high. somethingawful.com is a bastion of transgressive shock humor (a standard example is tribute.wmv-which plays the benny hill theme over footage of the 9/11 attacks), and exposing “the worst the internet has to offer” to public ridicule. the core ideology of the somethingawful.com forums is “we are all goons together [members of the somethingawful forums specifically]. we are all gross losers sitting behind computers, and if you pretend to be otherwise, we will destroy you.” those who believe that their internet activities constitute ‘serious business’ (bronies, ron paul revolutionaries, tumblr otherkin social justice warriors and so on), draw goon mockery and trolling of their communities. yet, despite its boys’ locker room culture, somethingawful differentiates itself from forums like reddit and 4chan through its paywall, a $10 dollar registration fee, and considers itself to have a more enlightened forums discourse. “shit posting” [a complex idea at the core of the somethingawful moderation strategy] is strongly discouraged, as are slurs and various ideologies, particularly men’s rights advocacy and internet libertarianism. goons may be goony, but they see themselves as superior to communities which harbor pedophiles, stalkers, and people who cause unfunny drama, such as the much larger reddit, 4chan, and tumblr communities (chen, 2012). although somethingawful.com is explicitly opposed to the whole idea of safe space on the internet, the end result is a forums culture similar to that of rpg.net. drawing from langdon winner (1989) and marshall mcluhan (2011), i will explore the technological affordances of threaded message boards via a pragmatic, ethnographically informed reading of controversies in forums management. threaded message boards represent a medium that favors an immediate, asynchronous responses and interaction, yet it is also one that leaves an easily archived trail. the purpose of the threada request for advice, an open question, funny pictures, may mutate over timebut the overall assemblage maintains a sense of continuity. online forums as a holistic entity, decades of posts and billions of words written by tens of thousands of users, comprise a distinct and relatively new form of community. the basic technology of a message board, both its underlying infrastructure of code (vbulletin, php), and user experience (read, reply, report) are well-established and implicitly understood by users. differences between forums can only be explained in terms of their membership and discursive content. the information and communication on message boards is not a spontaneously generated artifact of a certain level of technology, but rather the accumulation of a characteristically human need to talk, perform, entertain and be entertained, and to belong (hagman, 2012). the fact that these communities of belonging exist solely on servers and monitors, in the form of bits, words, and images, does not diminish their social reality. nor should it lead to a panglossian belief that quality forums capable of supporting engaging and productive conversation over the long term, simply appear. despite the absence of capital in online forums, their maintenance and utility demand intensive human effort in curation and management of content. invested, motivated, and expert volunteer moderators backed by an active community appear to be in practice a necessary condition for maintaining that community over time. references chen, a. (2012, october 12). unmasking reddit’s violentacrez, the biggest troll on the web. gawker. retrieved from http://gawker.com/5950981/ hagman, l. (2012, november). conflict talk in online communities: a comparative study of the something awful and 4chan web-forums. university of jyväskylä. lanier, j. (2010). you are not a gadget: a manifesto. new york: alfred a. knopf. lessig, l. (2006). code: version 2.0 (2nd ed.). new york: basic books. mcluhan, m. (2011). the gutenberg galaxy: the making of typographic man ([new] ed.). toronto: university of toronto press. suler, j. (2004). the online disinhibition effect. cyberpsychology & behavior, 7(3), 321–326. doi:10.1089/1094931041291295 winner, l. (1989) the whale and the reactor a search for limits in an age of high technology. chicago: university of chicago press. ** “the attack of the fake geek girl: a discursive analysis of gendering geekiness” keywords geek; gatekeeper; discourse analysis; stem; memes armed with his game controller and action figures, the basement dwelling geek is a common popular cultural trope. this archetype, evolved from an earlier pocket-protector-wearing nerd, found a divergent path with the mainstreaming of technological skills, games and comics in popular culture. this geek, still marked with otherness, wields the power of billion dollar media franchises. given the durability of the marginalization of the geek (ensmenger, 2010; bennett and yabroff, 2008) , it is perhaps surprising that rather than leveraging newfound semi-legitimacy to construct an inclusive subculture, vocal gatekeepers have united against a common enemy: the fake geek girl who seeks to exploit the sexual vulnerability of authentically geeky males. this paper uses gee’s discourse theories and tools to examines the discursive construction of the girl geek, and applies gee’s discourse analysis to internet memes and rants condemning the fake geek girl, in an effort to illuminate the complex social and sexual scripts that reinscribe heternormativity over females who are attracted to, proficient with, or express interests in science and technology and their imaginative subcultures. what is a fake geek girl and from what base does she launch her evil schemes? it is perhaps more productive to begin with a brief discussion of what is a girl geek. she has to be more than simply a geek who is female, because if deliberate cultural negotiations worked to gender the term, we might see “geektress” or “geektrix” on the model of the dated terms actress and aviatrix. thus the label girl geek might hold more cultural significance than mere gender. in a 2008 newsweek feature on a female college engineering students titled “revenge of the nerdette: as geeks become chic in all levels of society, an unlikely subset is starting to roar. meet the nerd girls: they're smart, they're techie and they're hot,” authors bennett and yabroff argue that unlike voodoo and mad magazine’s historically male representations of the socially awkward geek, today’s female geeks “grew up on gender neutral movies like hackers and the matrix, and saw the transformation of willow on buffy the vampire slayer from awkward geek to smart and sassy sex symbol.” their exposure to these “gender neutral” role models has, according to the writers, allowed female engineering students to construct their identities beyond those of the stereotypical male geek: these girl geeks aren't social misfits; their identities don't hinge on outsider status. they may love all things sci-tech, but first and foremost they are girls and they've made that part of their appeal. they've modeled themselves after … actress danica mckellar, who coauthored a math theorem, wrote a book for girls called math doesn't suck and posed in a bikini for stuff magazine. or even ellen spertus, a mills college professor and research scientist at google and the 2001 winner of the silicon valley sexiest geek alive pageant. it is interesting to note that while the writers describe hackers, the matrix, and buffy the vampire slayer as gender neutral, the girl geek characters in these films, kate, trinity, and willow, are highly sexualized on the screen. trinity, for example, is difficult to defend as “gender neutral” when she spends most of her screen time in a patent leather catsuit. in this case, “gender neutral” does not mean the absence of gendering scripts, but the presence of conventional gender norms. these assertions that sexualized female geeks are gender neutral is to declare that for a woman, to be sexy is the neutral position. indeed, the girls interviewed by bennett and yabroff self identify as girls first and geeks second, discursively constructing identities that juxtapose sexiness and techsavviness in self-describe endeavors to not be subsumed into the awkward, self-involved male geek stereotype. the sexy spin on geekiness is not simply shaped in the discourse of popular culture. in april 2007, prism, journal of the american society for engineering education, published an article featuring female engineering students at tufts university titled “piercings not pocket protectors” that describes female engineering students as “cute” with lip piercings and tattoos, and defines the tufts engineering program as one that appeals to female students because women are allowed to have other interests in addition to engineering. this is significant given one of the issues raised in jane margolis and allan fisher’s 2003 study of carnegie mellon university around the scarcity of female computer science students was that there was no discursive identity for a female to assume the single minded focus permitted of male scientists. margolis and fisher argue that to excel in stem requires a singular focus that in males can be viewed as commitment, but in females can be perceived as selfish or socially dysfunctional. neither selfishness or social dysfunction are acceptable identity traits for females (margolis). yet, cindy foor and susan walden’s 2009 nwsa article titled “imaginary engineering" or "re-imagined engineering": negotiating gendered identities in the borderland of a college of engineering,” is an ethnographic study in which the writers document male and female engineering students discursively constructing female engineers as “softer” scientists and engaging in lengthy discursive proofs of demonstrating female heteronormativity. it is reinforced that while women can be engineers, there is an appropriate approach to constructing a female engineering identity “without the threat of committing gender inauthentication” (2009, 61). you can be a female and a geek, but you must always first be female. the fake geek girl is a thing: a meme, a trope, a much discussed threat in geek-oriented corners of the internet. but she gained access to the broader public consciousness with the viral dissemination of comic book artist tony harris’ november 12, 2012 facebook rant against female attendees of comic book conventions, in which he purports to defend (male) geekdom from the invasion of the “fake geek girl,” defined by what he describes as “the rule” of the con-attending geek girl: “ the rule: “hey! quasi-pretty-not-hot-girl, you are more pathetic than the real nerds, who you secretly think are really pathetic. but we are onto you. some of us are aware that you are ever so average on an everyday basis. but you have a couple of things going your way. you are willing to become almost completely naked in public, and yer either skinny( well, some or most of you, think you are ) or you have big boobies.” while it extends over several hundred words, the gist of harris’ post is that while geeks are willing to acknowledge their situation within the cultural margins, they will not fall victim to the wiles of the fake geek girl. and she who would attempt to take advantage of the socially awkward male geek is simply a pathetic fraud. in short, women are sex objects. geeks are not sexy. if girl geeks define themselves as geeks but sexy, in order to perform heteronormativity and not commit gender inauthentication, the very act of foregrounding their sexuality marks them as fakes. within this discourse there seems to be no quarter for a girl geek. males can be geeks, but females never measure up. references bennett, jessica and yabroff, jennie. “revenge of the nerdette: as geeks become chic in all levels of society, an unlikely subset is starting to roar. meet the nerd girls: they're smart, they're techie and they're hot.” newsweek. 151.24. 18 june 2008. http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/docview/214250922 accessed: 11 march, 2013. ensmenger, nathan, and inc ebrary. the computer boys take over. cambridge, mass.: mit press, 2010. foor, cindy e; walden, susan e: "imaginary engineering" or "re-imagined engineering": negotiating gendered identities in the borderland of a college of engineering” nwsa journal: a publication of the national women's studies association (21:2) [summer 2009] , p.41-64. gee, james paul, and myilibrary. how to do discourse analysis. new york: routledge, 2011. _____. an introduction to discourse analysis. 2nd ed. new york; abingdon: routledge, 2005. harris, tony. “tony effing harris”. facebook.com. 12 november, 2012. loftus, margaret. “piercings not pocket protectors.” prism. 16.8. april 2007. http://www.prismmagazine.org/apr07/feature_tufts.cfm. accessed 11 march 2013. margolis, jane, and fisher, allan. unlocking the clubhouse: women in computing. mit press. cambridge. 2003.   selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 ibarra  herrera,  d.  &  unger,  j.w.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  shouting  at  the  television:  argumentation  strategies   in  second  screen  social  media  use  for  chilean  political  tv  shows.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the   17th  annual  conference  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved   from  http://spir.aoir.org. shouting  at  the  television:  argumentation  strategies  in  second   screen  social  media  use  for  chilean  political  tv  shows daniela  ibarra  herrera   lancaster  university     johann  wolfgang  unger   lancaster  university   introduction     in  this  paper  we  argue  that  research  into  “second  screen”  use  and  the  argumentation   practices  of  viewers  during  chilean  political  tv  programmes  is  a  useful  way  of   examining  broader  social  trends  in  the  political  and  media  fields.  numerous  scholars   have  concerned  themselves  with  the  increasing  interlinkages  between  traditional   broadcast  and  print  media  with  new  forms  of  digital  media,  most  notably  jenkins  (2006)   who  suggests  the  term  ‘convergence  culture’.     the  second  screen  and  the  digitally  mediated  public  sphere     the  use  of  social  media  during  tv  shows  has  been  described  as  a  hybrid  media   system,  in  which  the  boundaries  between  genres  are  blurred  (chadwick,  2013;;  ampofo,   anstead  &  o’loughin,  2011).  one  common  example  of  this  is  the  use  of  twitter  by  tv   producers  in  an  attempt  to  engage  the  viewers,  encourage  interaction  with  and  among   them,  and  thus  extend  their  experience  as  a  public.  this  phenomenon  has  come  to  be   known  as  second  screen  (see  e.g.  gil  de  zúñiga  et  al.,  2014).  through  mentions  and   hashtags  viewers  can  express  their  opinions  and  attitudes  and  represent  the  television   programs  and  what  is  happening  in  them  in  different  ways.  this  way  of  interacting  with   the  tv  shows  is  a  relatively  recent  but  now  quite  widespread  practice.  giglietto  &  selva   (2015)  find  that  in  the  united  states  57%  of  viewers  declare  that  they  browse  the  web   when  watching  tv,  while  25%  tweet  about  programmes  daily.  our  research  shows  that   this  practice  is  also  widespread  for  different  chilean  tv  shows,  especially  political   shows  such  as  the  popular  panel  show  estado  nacional.     the  concept  of  a  second  screen  entails  the  idea  that  there  is  a  first  screen,  which  in  this   case  would  be  the  tv,  determining  topics  that  feed  into  discursive  practices  in  different   media  platforms.  giglietto  &  selva  (2015)  suggest  that  in  this  sense,  social  networks   function  as  a  backchannel  for  television  in  real  time.  however,  there  is  also  a  sense  in   which  from  the  perspective  of  viewers,  the  television  becomes  the  second  screen  for  the   debates  in  social  media.  this  is  particularly  visible  in  situations  where  tweets  are   displayed,  commented  on  or  alluded  to  during  tv  programmes,  thus  creating  a  multi-­ directional  relation  between  viewers  and  tv  shows  (jensen,  2015).  we  found  this  a   good  starting  point  for  much-­needed  research  into  the  dialogical  nature  of  second   screen  practices,  and  the  way  they  shape  public  debate.  the  main  interest  of  this  study   is  not  primarily  the  mediatisation  processes  involved  (hjarvard,  2013)  but  rather  how   users  structure  their  argumentation  in  a  new  hybrid  media  context  and  how  the   differences  between  media  practices  influence  the  meaning  construction  in  the  political   debate.     politics  and  argumentation     debates  about  the  role  of  digital  media  in  promoting  an  active  and  democratic  public   sphere  have  generally  focussed  on  more  “macro”  political  considerations  (see  e.g.   pappacharissi,  2009),  while  detailed  studies  of  linguistic  practices  on  social  media  (e.g.   page,  2012;;  georgakopoulou,  2014)  have  often  been  more  concerned  with  “micro”   discursive  features  such  as  narrative  or  positioning.  we  proposed  to  bridge  this  gap  by   drawing  on  edelman’s  (1985)  concept  of  “symbolic  politics”,  thinking  of  these  tv  shows   as  a  form  of  political  action  and  a  way  of  creating  politics  (in  the  broadest  sense)  and   not  just  reflecting  it.  furthermore,  we  consider  how  goffman’s  (1959)  concepts  of   “frontstage”  and  “backstage”  politics  need  to  be  rethought  for  digitally  mediated   contexts.     while  there  are  a  number  of  salient  linguistic  and  discursive  features  that  could  shed   light  on  these  issues,  in  this  study  we  focus  specifically  on  argumentation  strategies  as   a  way  of  understanding  the  key  topics  and  ideological  battlegrounds  that  are  manifested   in  our  data.  there  is  a  long  tradition  of  analysing  argumentation  in  political  language  in   critical  discourse  studies,  and  we  draw  particularly  on  the  discourse-­historical  approach   (reisigl  &  wodak,  2015),  which  sees  argumentation  as  a  key  discursive  macro-­strategy   in  texts  that  are  about  and  around  politics.  the  analysis  of  topoi,  or  argumentative   shortcuts  that  allow  arguments  to  be  made  more  persuasive  without  having  to  spell  out   premises,  is  a  particularly  fruitful  phenomenon  not  only  in  political  language  generally,   but  specifically  in  short  messages  such  as  those  allowed  by  twitter.     the  case  of  twitter  comments  on  political  tv  shows  in  chile     recent  crises  in  chilean  politics  (see  mayol,  2012)  have  resulted  in  different  modes  of   expression,  going  beyond  just  traditional  television  and  print  media  to  encompass  social   media,  which  “concedes  direct  interaction  at  the  same  time  that  it  supports  the   negotiation  of  political  meanings”  (cárdenas,  2014).  in  recent  years,  chilean  politics  has   been  a  recurrent  topic  in  social  network  sites,  not  least  twitter.  the  discovery  of   corruption  scandals  and  cartels  provided  ample  fuel  for  an  increasingly  concerned   citizenship  which  expressed  itself  through  different  media  to  condemn  and  complain   about  these  facts.     at  the  same  time,  a  number  of  chilean  tv  shows  actively  encourage  participation  on   twitter,  mainly  through  the  use  of  hashtags,  which  are  displayed  on  the  screen  during   the  program  and  allow  the  users  to  share  their  opinions  with  other  viewers  and  the  tv   show  itself.  we  argue  that  on  the  one  hand  this  interaction  has  the  potential  to  make  the   tv  shows  more  interactive  and  dialogical  by  inviting  different  social  actors  to  participate.   on  the  other  hand,  it  is  rare  to  find  direct  interaction  between  the  producers,  hosts  or   guests  and  the  viewers,  other  than  occasionally  displaying  or  reading  out  tweets  on  air.   by  examining  argumentation,  as  outlined  above,  we  draw  out  links  between  what  is   happening  discursively  on  the  tv  screen  and  on  twitter.     the  data  comprises  a  set  of  ca.  5000  hashtagged  tweets  collected  in  2015  relating  to   different  chilean  political  tv  shows,  namely  estado  nacional  (#enacional)  and   ciudadanos  (#ciudadanos),  which  display  tweets  on  screen  during  the  programme,  and   entrevista  verdadera  (#opinaev)  and  el  informante  (#elinformante),  which  do  not   display  tweets.  the  displaying  of  tweets  on  screen  could  be  relevant  to  the  users  of   these  type  of  media  because  the  fact  of  their  opinions  can  be  display  on  the  screen  and   be  part  of  the  tv  show,  maybe  influence  the  structure  of  their  arguments  and  the   resources  used  in  them.       our  qualitative  analysis  of  a  semi-­random  sample  of  these  tweets  indicates  that  the   tweets  with  the  hashtag  #enacional  and  #ciudadanos  speak  directly  to  the  guests  and   the  political  figures  involved  in  or  mentioned  in  the  discussion.  furthermore,  multimodal   resources  (infographics,  images  and  videos)  and  hyperlinks  in  tweets  are  mainly  used   as  “evidence”  in  arguments  about  these  guests  and  figures  and  related  topics  as  topoi   of  number  or  authority.  in  tweets  marked  #opinaev  and  #elinformante  there  is  typically   taboo  language  and  visual  memes  are  often  used  ironically  or  playfully  to  make  ad   hominem  attacks.  there  are  generally  more  multimodal  resources  (links,  memes,   pictures  and  videos)  in  this  subset  of  tweets.  the  differing  twitter  practices  associated   with  these  programmes  may  be  partly  to  do  with  different  publics,  but  we  argue  that  the   broadcasters’  decisions  to  directly  engage  second  screen  users  have  implications  for   our  understanding  of  the  symbolic  boundaries  of  politics  and  furthermore  have  the   potential  to  shape  the  quality  of  debate  and  argumentation  in  the  digitally  mediated   public  sphere.     references   cárdenas,  c.  (2014).  representación  de  la  acción  política  de  los  estudiantes  chilenos:   movilización  de  significados  en  redes  sociales.  ultima  década,  22(40),  57-­84.     edelman,  m.  (1985).  the  symbolic  uses  of  politics.  urbana:  university  of  illinois  press.     hjarvard,  s.  (2013).  the  mediatization  of  culture  and  society.  london:  routledge.   georgakopoulou,  a.  (2014).  small  stories  transposition  and  social  media:  a  micro-­ perspective  on  the  “greek  crisis.”  discourse  &  society,  25(4),  519–539.     goffman,  e.  (1959)  the  presentation  of  self  in  everyday  life.  garden  city:  doubleday.   giglietto,  f.  &  selva,  d.  (2014).  second  screen  and  participation:  a  content  analysis  on   a  full  season  dataset  of  tweets.  journal  of  communication,  64(2),  260–277.   gil  de  zúñiga,  h.,  garcia-­perdomo,  v.,  &  mcgregor,  s.  c.  (2015).  what  is  second   screening?  exploring  motivations  of  second  screen  use  and  its  effect  on  online   political  participation.  journal  of  communication,  65(5),  793-­815.   jenkins,  h.  (2006).  convergence  culture:  where  old  and  new  media  collide.  new  york:   new  york  university  press.   jensen,  m.  (2015).  the  emergence  of  second-­screen  gatekeeping.  digital  journalism,   doi:  10.1080/21670811.2015.1054408   mayol,  a.  (2012).  el  derrumbe  del  modelo.  santiago:  lom  ediciones.   page,  r.    (2012).  stories  and  social  media:  identities  and  interaction.  london:   routledge.   papacharissi,  z.(2009).  the  virtual  sphere  2.0:  the  internet,  the  public  sphere  and   beyond.  in:  chadwick,  a.  and  howard,  p.  (eds.)  handbook  of  internet  politics.  london:   routledge,  230–245.   reisigl,  m.  &  wodak,  r.  (2015).  the  discourse-­historical  approach  (dha).  in:  wodak,  r.   &  meyer,  m.  (eds.)  methods  of  critical  discourse  studies.  london:  sage,  23-­61.   ir16-template-final selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): seaver, n. (2015, october 21-24). parks and recommendation: spatial imaginaries in algorithmic systems. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. parks and recommendation: spatial imaginaries in algorithmic systems nick seaver department of anthropology university of california, irvine algorithmic recommendation systems are designed to aid users in their navigation of large catalogs of media, such as songs or movies. among the developers of these systems, those catalogs are commonly referred to as constituting or occupying “spaces” — the "music space,” for example, might be the set of all music available to stream on spotify, organized such that similar songs are near each other. the production of this space occupies much of the time of engineers who work on these systems, drawing on a variety of mathematical and computational techniques. although a numerically defined space may sound neutral or objective with regard to the objects located in it, this work of space-making requires effectively arbitrary choices that are shaped by subjective interpretations, which in turn shape the spaces thus produced. this paper reports on interpretations of the “music space” encountered during several years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted with academic and commercial developers of recommender systems for music in the us. in it, i argue that these interpretations play a significant part in developers’ understandings of their work and its implications. in particular, i describe a tendency toward pastoral metaphors in how engineers and others involved in the making of algorithmic recommenders explain their work. one indicative example: at a conference in 2012, then head of google music tim quirk suggested that digital streaming services had given rise to a new form of cultural infomediary, different from the djs, record store clerks, and label a&r guys who had previously acted as influential “tastemakers” or “gatekeepers.” instead, the makers of digital music platforms were “park rangers” who tended to a vast musical landscape, maintaining paths for visitors, and making the musical space manageable. quirk elaborated: being a park ranger means our job isn’t to tell visitors what’s great and why. our job is to get them from any given thing they like to a variety of other things they might. we may have our own favorite paths and being park rangers we probably even prefer the less crowded ones, but our job is to keep them all maintained so visitors to our park can choose their own adventure. they might not feel our hand on their backs as they wander, but it’s there. it’s just subtle. (quirk 2012) this pastoral imagery was echoed in the comments of a “data curator,” whose job was to assess algorithmic outputs, and who described herself to me as a “data gardener.” related metaphors were scattered through daily conversation and in technical terms of art — algorithmic radio stations, for example, grow from “seeds.” i suggest that pastoral imagery provides a middle route through two extreme positions regarding the origins of the “music space” — that it is an objectively existing cultural order or that it is an interpretive invention of engineers. arguments about the merits of digital streaming services often hinge on how these spaces are characterized: critics suggest that the spaces recommender algorithms navigate are highly controlled walled gardens that pretend to be the “natural.” meanwhile, although one might imagine the space of databases and algorithms to be orderly, quirk and many of the engineers i talked with saw the space of online music as an intrinsically unruly wilderness. although pastoral metaphors may appear to work in the service of naturalizing music spaces that are in fact constructions, my informants wielded these metaphors ambivalently, using them instead to locate their work at the interface of the natural, cultural, and technical. to be a data gardener is to tend to algorithmic outputs that have been “bred” but are not wholly anticipated, using computational tools that can break or remain ready-to-hand, guided by cultural logics of desirability and aesthetic purpose. in short, where critics see the rigid stasis of artificiality, system builders see emergent, nature-like flux. the technologies that mathematically generate musical spaces descend from spatializing techniques that originated in the social sciences (shepard et al. 1972; stefflre 1971; bourdieu 1984; see desrosières 2002). these techniques have been highly influential for quantitative researchers across disciplines, but hold an ambivalent status among contemporary qualitative researchers. by referring back to the history of the social sciences — especially the emergence of post-war formalism in the us — qualitative researchers can more adequately position ourselves relative to these systems. these spatial imaginaries also bring the work of constructing algorithmic systems into contact with critical theoretical work on space, place, and control (e.g. bachelard 1964; de certeau 1984; deleuze 1992), which can orient our attention to recommender systems as path-making technologies, to playlists as styles of paths, and to different playlisting algorithms as different styles of path-making. as one young brooklyn entrepreneur suggested to me: what if personal histories of music listening were paths through the music space, and recommendations could tell you what people further down your path were listening to? understanding how these spaces are understood by those who produce and attempt to navigate them can help outside critics to make sense of why certain design decisions are made. through connecting this material to theoretical work on space provides a new set of critical tools for interpreting these decisions. for example, quirk’s statement about “our hand on their backs,” subtly guiding listeners through a park that appears wide open, recalls deleuze’s arguments about control societies, in which apparent freedom is modulated by obscured environmental control. as the spaces navigated by users of the internet are increasingly algorithmically produced and modulated, critics would do well to interpret and theorize them as spaces. references bachelard, gaston. 1964. the poetics of space. maria jolas, trans. orion press, inc. bourdieu, pierre. 1984. distinction. harvard. cronon, william. 1996. uncommon ground: rethinking the human place in nature. de certeau, michel. 1984. the practice of everyday life. steven rendall, trans. university of california press. deleuze, gilles. 1992. “postscript on the societies of control.” october 59: 3-7. desosières, alain. 2002. the politics of large numbers. harvard university press. haraway, d. 1991. simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature. new york: routledge. nye, david. 1994. american technological sublime. mit press. quirk, tim. 2012. remarks at billboard futuresound. sahlins, marshall. 1978. culture and practical reason. university of chicago press. shepard, r n, a k romney, and s b nerlove. 1972. multidimensional scaling: theory and applications in the behavioral sciences: vol.: 1: theory. seminar press. stefflre, volney. 1971. new products and new enterprises. market structure studies, inc. microsoft word neill hoch.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): neill hoch, i. (2014, october 22-24). open for prompts, open for fills: creative deployment of social network sites into fandom kink memes. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. open for prompts, open for fills: creative deployment of social network sites into fandom kink memes indira neill hoch university of illinois chicago introduction: you don't know me, just 'everything' about me profile-centric social network sites, including but not limited to facebook, offer platforms for online communication that make core assumptions about how users want, or should want, to display information and perform identity. these assumptions can guide what is and is not distributed between users. the ease of use social network sites offer may prevent users from thinking critically about the kind of interactions they are performing. creative deployment of existing social network site architecture offers the possibility for users to define the online experience they want, rather than the one they are told they should have. the social network site calls out, make a profile! add friends! subscribe! follow! however, these commands, both written on the interface and coded in the structure of the site, can be used differently, against their intent. this paper considers fandom kink memes as creative deployments of livejournal.com and delicious.com architecture. in creative deployment, fandom participants refashion an online space out of a preexisting site, crafting a social space that does not formally exist prior to intervention on the part of participants. kink memes are a collective, anonymous space for requesting, distributing, and encouraging fan fiction. participants are not permitted to post to the meme while logged into their livejournal.com accounts and the delicious.com account is collectively maintained. instead of undertaking the resource intensive project of developing a new social network or archive site, kink meme participants fashion the social experience they desire out of the architectural idiosyncrasies of existing online platforms. indeed, the flexibility found in the lj architecture means that the site continues to be used, even as other members of the user-base have moved on to other platforms. lj continues to be relevant because of architectural elements not found in other sites. the meme is a playful and purposeful rearrangement of existing resources. this paper is rooted in careful textual and formal analysis of the visual and interactive aspects of the livejournal.com interface, the delicious.com interface, and kink memes constructed from these two sites. the dragon age kink sites (http://dragonagekink.livejournal.com/ and http://www.delicious.com/dragonage_kink) are used as the basis for formal analysis of how kink memes are fashioned on each platform. kink memes on livejournal: one!user, ?? participants research on livejournal.com often discusses identity performance through both profile space and journal entries (kendall, 2007; lindemann, 2005). the seeming contradiction between the public aspect of social network sites and the private notion of diary or journal writing is examined. research concerning livejournal.com's connection with fan cultures focuses on the fan and her product, rather than the particular interaction between fan, product and social network site (lothian, busse, & reid, 2007). the livejournal.com kink meme is registered in the lj system as a user account where a single user is assumed, rather than the community account, where multiple users are assumed. kink meme participants post anonymous comments to a post initiated by the journal maintainer(s). participants “prompt” other users, asking for stories with specific sexual acts or character pairings. they “fill,” where someone's prompt is fulfilled by a fan fiction writer. finally, they may comment on existing prompts and fills, offering encouragement, criticism, or endorsement. by using the comment feature, the only means of anonymous posting on lj, rather than posting new entries from logged-in user accounts, the social network site convention of profiles as the unit of interaction is disrupted. many other social network sites have done away with anonymous commenting, leaving lj as an architecture that can fulfill a specific desire not accounted for in other platforms. kink memes on delicious.com: fun:with_tags, fun:with_folksonomy delicious.com, a social network site for organizing and sharing bookmarks, has drawn particular attention from library scientists interested in collaborative or social tagging (golder & hubermann, 2006). de.licio.us, delicious.com's precursor, has been considered in regards to folksonomies, where collaborative tagging leads to a classification system without hierarchy (mathes, 2004). the single user to single account equivalence assumed of most social network sites is necessary for studying tagging behavior contributing to folksonomies. the delicious.com kink meme iteration is a single account that indexes the comments on the livejournal.com account. thousands of comments attach to a single post on livejournal.com, making the whole project difficult to navigate and occasionally “breaking” the post, keeping other users from commenting. livejournal.com allows for the tagging of posts but not individual comments. comments do have unique urls that can be bookmarked and tagged on delicious.com. in this way, the architecture of delicious.com is used to fill a gap left in lj. by exploiting features of both sites, meme participants can approximate the online space they desire. there are fewer delicious.com meme archivists than livejournal.com meme participants, since login information is required to engaging in tagging. still, multiple individuals use a single login and the meme remains collective. the disruption of the single user-single profile paradigm mirrors that which occurs on lj. kink meme tags on delicious.com resemble a controlled vocabulary in places and collaborative tagging in others, but the process remains strongly collective. conclusion: combating calcification fan fiction communities are conceptually equipped to construct new uses out of existing social network sites. fan fiction is predicated on the idea that existing canon is material for expansion and reorganization. derecho (2006) declares fan fiction to be “an ethical practice” because it “is philosophically opposed to hierarchy, property and the dominance of one variant of a series over another variant” (p. 77). kink memes are a playful and creative expression of online interaction with a distinct ethical dimension. the existing site encourages one style of behavior, increasingly a profit conscious one, and kink meme participants behave counter to these encouragements. the livejournal.com and delicious.com kink meme accounts disrupt the social network site assumption that the individual profile is the basic unit of interaction within the platform. anonymity is in conflict with core assumptions regarding the public or semipublic display of social connections and profiles (boyd & ellison, 2007). creativity is highlighted over individual performances of personality or taste because all fan fiction is posted to the meme through livejournal.com's anonymous comment feature and by the meme using a single delicious.com account to index content. in kink memes, social network site architectures are suggestions, not hard and fast rules. manipulating existing platforms allows those with new ideas to carve out an online space that is still accessible by a targeted audience. it is our job, as users, artists, and appreciators, to ensure that social network sites do not become calcified in our lives. we should question, manipulate, and create. references boyd, d., ellison, n., (2007) social network sites: definition, history and scholarship. journal of computer mediated communication 13(1), url http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html. derecho, a. (2006). archontic literature: a definition, a history, and several theories of fan fiction. in k. busse & k. hellekson (eds.), fan fiction and fan communities in the age of the internet: new essays (pp. 61-78) jefferson, nc: mcfarland & company, inc. golder, s. a., & huberman, b. a. (2006). usage patterns of collaborative tagging systems. journal of information science, 32(2), 198-208. kendall, l. (3 september 2007) "shout into the wind, and it shouts back" identity and interactional tensions on livejournal" first monday 12(9), url (consulted oct. 2012) http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_9/kendall/index.html lindemann, k. (2005). live(s) online: narrative performance, presence, and community in livejournal.com. text and performance quarterly, 25(4), 354-372. lothian, a., busse, k., & reid, r. (2007). "yearning void and infinite potential": online slash fandom as queer female space. english language notes, 45(2), 103-111. mathes, a. (2004). folksonomies-cooperative classification and communication through shared metadata. retrieved from: http://www.adammathes.com/academic/computermediated-communication/folksonomies.html selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  ritter,  c.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  digital  freedom  and  political  change:  a   discourse  analysis  of  the  struggle  over  water  charges  in  ireland  /  cultures.  paper  presented  at  aoir   2016:  the  17th  annual  conference  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.   retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org. digital  freedom  and  political  change:     a  discourse  analysis  of  the  struggle  over  water   charges  in  ireland       christian  s.  ritter     istanbul  studies  center,  kadir  has  university       social  media  platforms  have  captured  the  attention  of  millions  of  people  around  the   globe.  the  rise  of  the  internet  in  everyday  life  is  often  associated  with  two  aspects.  on   the  one  hand,  many  media  scholars  argue  that  social  networking  sites  and  blogs   enhance  civil  society  and  reinforce  democratization  processes.  on  the  other  hand,  the   automatized  collection  and  storage  of  personal  data  prompted  portrayals  of  the  internet   as  an  uncontrollable  surveillance  system  tracking  private  information.  in  the  political   field,  social  media  are  widely  considered  as  tools  for  democratization  from  below.  the   politicization  of  digital  platforms  created  new  layers  of  the  public  sphere.  this  paper   explores  how  grassroots  activists  made  use  of  social  media  during  the  political  struggle   over  water  charges  in  the  republic  of  ireland  between  2014  and  2016.  the  role  social   media  play  in  the  organization  of  political  protests  was  explored  through  various  lenses   in  the  last  decades.  for  example,  the  “movement  for  social  justice”  used  listserv  and   websites  to  promote  their  political  campaigns  (e.g.  mertes  2004;;  reitan  2007).  a  few   years  later,  social  media  facilitated  the  emergence  of  the  occupy  movement  (e.g.  juris   2012).  social  media  revolutionized  the  circulation  of  information  and  took  the   participation  in  digital  environments  to  a  new  level.  the  series  of  events  which  is  widely   known  as  arab  spring  was  intensively  researched  with  regard  to  the  use  of  twitter   during  political  uprisings  (e.g.  bruns,  highfield  &  burgess  2013).  further  scholars   described  the  social  media  strategies  pursued  by  anti-­austerity  movements  in  various   parts  of  the  world  (e.g.  cristancho  2015).  in  contrast  to  previous  research  into  the   politicization  of  social  media,  this  paper  sheds  light  on  how  vernacular  discourses   evolved  on  social  media.       in  2013,  the  irish  government  envisaged  introducing  water  charges  for  private   households.  in  the  same  year,  social  media  were  used  for  the  first  time  by  social   movements  in  ireland  to  disseminate  their  motion  to  a  national  audience.  news  about   the  protests  quickly  went  viral  on  social  media,  which  put  the  irish  government  under   prolonged  pressure.  the  protests  in  the  streets  of  dublin  and  other  irish  cities  were   accompanied  by  digital  activism  on  various  social  media  platforms.  facebook,  twitter,   and  snapchat  were  primarily  used  to  mobilize  supporters  for  the  campaign  against   water  charges  for  private  households.  the  main  purpose  of  the  investigation  is  to  gain  a   better  understanding  of  the  possibilities  and  limitations  of  digital  sociability  by  examining   the  use  of  social  media  among  members  of  grassroots  organizations.  based  on  a   comprehensive  discourse  analysis  of  social  media  content  and  a  series  of  in-­depth   interviews  with  leaders  of  the  social  movement,  this  case  study  provides  crucial  insights   into  how  digital  devices  facilitate  political  protests  in  irish  civil  society.  the  social  media   data  was  retrieved  from  the  application  programming  interfaces  (apis)  of  popular  social   media  platforms  (rogers  2013).  discourse  analysis  was  chosen  as  the  main   methodology  of  the  study.  any  instance  of  language  can  be  analyzed  at  three  different   levels.  a  post  on  a  social  media  platform  is  at  the  same  time  a  discursive  practice,  a   text,  and  a  social  practice  (fairclough  2003).  the  paper  discusses  some  of  the  recent   challenges  for  social  science  research  on  digital  platforms  as  well  as  ethical  issues  of   online  research,  such  as  the  negotiation  of  informed  consent  (e.g.  williams,  terras,  and   warwick  2013;;  zimmer  and  proferes  2014).  the  study  makes  a  case  for  examining  the   digital  dimensions  of  political  leadership  through  the  lens  of  the  vernacular.  following   the  widespread  implementation  of  web  2.0  technologies,  online  users  increasingly   engaged  in  participatory  websites  that  can  be  conceived  as  hybrid  entities  conflating  the   vernacular  discourse  and  the  institutional  structure  (howard  2008).  the  vernacular  web   encompasses  participatory  forms  of  digital  communication,  ranging  from  wikis  and  blogs   to  social  networking  sites  and  chat  rooms.  members  of  such  platforms  can  generate   web  content  and  quickly  acquire  various  digital  literacies.       the  analysis  of  the  data  collected  revealed  how  the  extensive  use  of  social  media   during  the  irish  water  protests  transformed  the  political  field  of  irish  society.  firstly,   social  media  carry  the  potential  to  empower  their  users  to  express  their  own  discourses,   shape  public  debates,  and  influence  the  political  decision  making.  for  example,  the   grassroots  activists  influenced  the  choice  of  topics  within  the  political  agenda  of  the  irish   republic.  secondly,  the  study  indicates  that  social  media  enable  new  digital   representations  of  events  from  below,  challenging  existing  power  relations  between   “old”  and  “new”  media.  the  digital  engagement  that  was  explored  in  this  study  primarily   emerged  in  grassroots  circles  and  can  be  interpreted  as  an  interaction  between  the   vernacular  and  the  institutional.  by  using  the  institutional  structures  of  the  internet,  the   activists  of  the  social  movement  empowered  themselves  in  the  field  of  irish  politics  and   their  vernacular  discourses  reached  large  audiences  across  ireland.  the  digital  activism   altered  the  order  of  discourses  and  extended  existing  structures  of  civil  society.  using   social  media  platforms  to  disseminate  an  online  petition,  the  social  movement  changed   the  parameters  of  political  struggles  and  managed  to  shape  the  perception  of  water   charges  at  a  national  level.  in  addition  to  traditional  protest  practices  on  streets,  digital   activism  strongly  influenced  public  opinion.  circulating  a  petition  adjusted  the  balance  of   power  and  initiated  changes  to  the  political  agenda  prior  to  the  national  election  in   february  2016.  based  on  these  initial  findings,  i  suggest  that  political  practices  are   increasingly  mediated  by  digital  devices,  blurring  boundaries  between  different  elements   of  the  public  sphere,  such  as  the  street,  print  media,  and  virtual  environments  in  irish   society.  the  growth  of  digital  data  in  everyday  life  requires  new  social  science   methodologies  to  examine  the  social  dynamics  of  present-­day  societies.  for  this   reason,  the  paper  also  explores  avenues  for  combining  data  collections  in  physical   spaces  and  digital  environments.       bibliography:     bruns,  a.,  highfield,  t.  &  burgess,  j.  (2013).  the  arab  spring  and  social  media   audiences:  english  and  arabic  twitter  users  and  their  networks.  american  behavioral   scientist,  57  (7),  871-­898.       cristancho,  c.  (2015).  social  media  in  the  mobilisation  of  anti-­austerity  protest.  in   eulag  foundation  (ed.)  social  protests  and  democratic  responsiveness:  assessing   realities  in  latin  america  and  the  caribbean  and  the  european  union.  hamburg.       fairclough,  n.  (2003).  analysing  discourse:  textual  analysis  for  social  research.   london:  routledge.       howard,  r.  (2008).  the  vernacular  web  of  participatory  media.  critical  studies  in  media   communication,  25(5)  490-­513.       mertes,  t.  (2004).  a  movement  of  movements:  is  another  world  really  possible?   london:  verso.     juris,  j.  (2012).  reflections  on  #occupy  everywhere:  social  media,  public  space,  and   emerging  logics  of  aggregation.  american  ethnologist,  39(2),  259-­279.     reitan,  r.  (2007).  global  activism.  new  york:  routledge.     rogers,  r.  (2013).  digital  methods.  cambridge,  ma:  mit  press.       williams,  s.,  terras,  m.  &  warwick,  c.  (2013).  “what  people  study  when  they  study   twitter:  classifying  twitter  related  academic  papers”.  journal  of  documentation,  69  (3)   1-­74.       zimmer,  m.  &  proferes,  n.  (2014).  a  topology  of  twitter  research:  disciplines,  methods,   and  ethics.  aslib  journal  of  information  management,  66  (3),  250-­261.     microsoft word karppi-facebooks futures-facebooks futures.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 panel title: facebook’s futures tero jukka karppi university at buffalo andrew richard schrock university of southern california andrew herman wilfried laurier university mckelvey, fenwick concordia university ‘there is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future.’ these words are from facebook ceo mark zuckerberg’s letter to prospective investors, and a blueprint for the next steps of facebook’s business strategy. the social media giant is 10 years old and connects over billion people across the globe. a significant amount of research is done about individual practices with facebook. far less is written about facebook’s imaginary of connectivity: the strategies and tactics to connect the remaining world and provide internet access as ‘a human right’. this panel asks what will the future of facebook and our online connectivity become; or more precisely what are the conceptual notions that emerge from facebook’s future imaginaries. we see facebook’s new product developments as an attempt to govern the future. we follow here ben anderson (2010: 778, 793) according to whom futures are anticipated and acted on through the assembling of ‘styles, consisting of statements that disclose and relate to the form of the future; practices, consisting of acts that make specific futures present; and logics, consisting of interventions in the here and now on the basis of futures.’ we set to explore the style, practices and logics behind facebook’s attempts to connect to people and concepts currently outside their reach. these efforts include internal research on humanist design principles; inventing mobile business models and infrastructures; building data storage spaces to different parts of the world; investing to emerging technologies such as drones; and building an initiative called internet.org which would provide internet access to all over the world. these investments for the 2 future oscillate between materiality and phenomenality of media and can be economic, affective, social, technological and cultural. given the dominant position of facebook in our current media ecosystem, these ideals likely reflect the crafting of a future digital global media landscape. these are new forms of media that will potentially ‘determine our situation’ (kittler 1999), change the way we think (hayles 2013) or at least, as mark hansen (2014, 37) puts it, demand us to build relationship with them. thus, these technologies to connect the remaining world are not merely technological innovations but also connect to wider cultural, ideological and economic contexts. these new technologies shape the world and our understanding of it. the papers of this panel approach facebook’s futures from empirical and theoretical perspectives. on one hand the papers look at current and future software developments from e.g. buy-button to interent.org app. on the other the papers focus on material products such as mobile phones, tablets and even drones that provide access to the site. these empirical examples lead to questions of agency and value key concepts of facebook’s futures discussed in each of the papers. n.n. takes the mobile career of facebook as an opportunity to critique their image of themselves as a “public good.” facebook now refers to “people” not “users,” even as the worldwide expansion of their network becomes increasingly technology-agnostic. the worldwide expansion of facebook has been paired with a revival of optimism about mobile industries. this move is mostly understood as a bridge between desktop and mobile environments. however, many users know only facebook, not “the internet.” “mobility” as it is understood in sociology typically refers to the ability of individuals to exercise agency on social structure. by relying exclusively on an insular facebook network facebook’s mobile imaginary threatens to quash actual mobility, particularly among working-class individuals worldwide. n.n2’s paper examines facebook’s most recent product developments that extend from buy-button to marketing tool atlas and eventually to the facebook drone. they argue that these different product developments need to be understood in the context of affective capitalism: on one hand they are designed to capture facebook users and transform them into value on the other they are designed so that the we do not use the interent to access facebook but we use facebook to access the internet. n.n3’s paper approaches the ipo of facebook and the way financial markets continue to speculate on the value of the company based up its estimation of the way it will be able to monetize the activity of facebook users on and through mobile media platforms such as smartphones, tablets, and phablets. drawing from marxist value theory and discussing the theories of informational capitalism n.n3. argues that in order to understand the relationship between affect and value in informational capitalism, it is imperative to emphasize the different mobilities afforded by media forms themselves. n.n4’s paper examines internet.org. internet.org, an initiative by facebook and number of other technology companies, provides free access to selected websites -like facebook or wikipedia -rather than unrestricted access to the internet. according to 3 n.n4., internet.org marks a point of synthesize between algorithmic modes of attention and the traditions of broadcasting. users have to access the internet through the internet.org that provides access to 38 pre-selected sites in total that can be browsed for free. anything else incurs data charges. the app, then, functions similar to a broadcaster programming channels or a schedule, but its an experience mediated through a app likely mining user behaviour to adjust the free experience. references anderson, b. (2010) ‘preemption, precaution, preparedness: anticipatory action and future geographies’ in progress in human geography 34(6) 777–798. kittler, f. (1999) gramophone, film, typewriter. stanford university press. hansen, m. (2015) feed-forward: on the future of twenty-first-century media. university of chicago press. hayles, n.k. (2012), how we think: digital media and contemporary technogenesis. university of chicago press. zuckerberg, m (2012). letter from mark zuckerber. in wall street journal feb 1: http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2012/02/01/mark-zuckerbergs-letter-from-the-facebook-filing/ 1. facebook’s mobile gambit: when mobility is immobility mobile media are used “on the go” during everyday life. americans go to sleep with a cell phone beside them, check it first thing in the morning, and receive constant push notifications. individuals are mainly aware of being connected to the internet, rather than seeing that connection as mobile or broadband. smart phones are owned by more than 50% of the american adult population and are increasingly a primary mode of accessing the internet. mobile devices such as smartphones are “becoming more like a personal computer” (ling, 2012, p. 12) in their power and capabilities. facebook has shifted attention towards mobile to keep up with these changing user practices, device usage, and monetization strategies (goggin, 2014). while facebook is guarded about publishing official statistics on growth of specific mobile platforms, a loophole allowed growth to be estimated between december, 2011 and november, 2012. android apps increased from 66 million monthly average users (mau) to 192.8 mau, iphone apps went from 91 to 147 mau during the same period. nearly half of facebook’s advertising revenue comes from mobile, also reflecting a longstanding industry perception that mobile is the next logical progression for media. facebook is not just the most popular social network service used on mobile devices, but host to a significant portion of activities on mobile devices overall. 4 the mobile career of facebook is an opportunity to critique their image of themselves as a “public good” by drawing on internal discourse around mobility. facebook now refers to “people” not “users,” even as the worldwide expansion of their network becomes increasingly technology-agnostic. the worldwide expansion of facebook has been paired with a revival of optimism about mobile industries. this move is mostly understood as a bridge between desktop and mobile environments. however, many users know only facebook, not “the internet.” “mobility” as it is understood in mainstream sociology typically refers to the ability of individuals to exercise agency on social structure. the “mobilities turn” in sociology (sheller & urry, 2006) opened discussion up to globalized infrastructures that often encompass transportation and communication. using these frameworks i examine how relying exclusively on an insular facebook network facebook’s mobile imaginary threatens to quash actual mobility, particularly among working-class individuals worldwide. references goggin, g. (2014). facebook's mobile career. new media & society. doi: 10.1177/1461444814543996 ling, r. (2012). taken for grantedness the embedding of mobile communication into society. cambridge, mass.: mit press. sheller, m., & urry, j. (2006). the new mobilities paradigm. environment and planning a, 38(2), 207-226. 2. facebook and technologies of capture ‘we prioritize product development investments that we believe will create engaging interactions between our users, developers and marketers,’ facebook states in their facebook 2012 annual report. in this paper i discuss facebook’s different product developments as technologies of capture. i am interested in how facebook’s product developments are seen to engage both the users and their actions in the various processes of value production on the platform. some of these product developments are already in use such as the like-button used to express a relation to particular content, some of them are in beta-test mode such as the buy-button used to make online purchases, and some of them like the targeted advertising tool atlas or the facebook drone are ideas under development and merely reported by media outlets. i begin the paper by framing what i mean with user engagement (cf. o’brien & toms 2008) and how it differs from more common concept of user participation. i argue that engagement precedes participation. it is a more passive user relation, which does not rely on rational agency or activity. thus i propose that facebook’s ‘engaging interactions’ should be understood in the etymological sense of the word ‘engagement’ as a ‘security for payment’. in specific, i discuss facebook’s engagement based business model (cf. jenkins et al. 2003) within the framework of affective capitalism (parikka 2013). following this position, like-button, buy-button, atlas and the drone are technologies of capture that transform our relationships, location information and/or 5 behavioral patterns into data that can be sold and exploited. the engaging interactions facebook offers are always supplemented with interpassivity (žižek 1998) where the human subject is passive and the object is active. to re-phrase, in addition to social media users there is a non-human audience of hardware, software and algorithms that is listening and responding to the actions happening on these platforms and transforming them into value. these technologies are affected by the user and capable of affecting the user. in addition to the exploitation and commodification of user data taking place on the platform, an area explored and articulated by researchers such as jose van dijck, mirko tobias schaefer and caroling gerlitz and anne helmond (2013), i track facebook’s move to become a financial operator in the online and offline world. the first manifestation is the buy-button used to make online purchases within the facebook platform. the second step is ‘e-money’ through which facebook is considering a move from advertisement-based revenues towards becoming a more substantial economic operator and challenging the banking industry. the third step is the internet.org accompanied with the facebook drone and an attempt to provide access to the internet via facebook rather than vice versa. based on these examples, in the concluding part of this paper i speculate with a future where facebook’s product developments move the company from capturing users and user participation into a more comprehensive capture of our affective worlds. references gerlitz c & helmond a(2013) the like economy: social buttons and the data-intensive web. new media & society vol 15, no 8. jenkins h, ford s, and joshua green (2013) spreadable media. creating value and meaning in a networked culture. new york & london: new york university press. o'brien hl, and toms eg (2008) ‘what is user engagement? a conceptual framework for defining user engagement with technology.’ journal of american society for information science and technology 59, no. 6: 938-955. parikka, j. (2013) ‘crowd, power and post-democracy in the 21st century, jussi parikka's interview on digital populism and recent european political phenomena, held on 17th may 2013 with the author of obsolete capitalism.’ schäfer, mirko, tobias. bastard culture!how user participation transforms cultural production. amsterdam: amsterdam university press, 2011. van dijck, j (2013) the culture of connectivity. a critical history of social media. oxford & new york: oxford university press. zizek, s. (1998) ‘the interpassive subject.’ centre georges pompidou traverses. 6 3. remediations of labour in informational capital: the case of facebook this manuscript takes as its point of departure the argument that the marxist value theory is an inappropriate analytical framework for understanding the production of value in social media forms and practices and for illuminating the distinctive contours of “informational capitalism”. i argue that although the refusal of the labour theory of value is correct, it is insufficient to their stated goals of being able to theorize the articulation between the “immaterial labour” or value embodied in user-generated content created within social media platforms, on the one hand, and the valuation of “immaterial wealth” of social media companies in global financial works, on the other. my argument begins with consideration of marx’s argument about valorization and labour process in capital, vol. i. however, my intent is not to establish my authentic marxist bona fides in order to enter into the debate concerning the concept of immaterial labour. rather, i want to interrogate marx’s idea of “remediation of labour” in the capitalist workplace, upon which marx bases his understanding of what antonio negri calls the “becoming abstract of labor”. i will argue that one possible way out of the conundrum of marxist orthodoxy is to pay attention to the practices of communication as work that are productive of affect and sociality, and thus value, in terms of the sociotechnical affordances of specific media forms. my argument will unfold in two distinct moments of analysis. first, deploying the insights of “new media materialism”, i argue that informational capitalism is based upon medium-specific technics of affect through which communicative practices are “remediated” and thus constitutive of value and capital. facebook and other social media platforms must be understood as a complex assemblage of several different media forms (writing, printing, telephony, photography, etc) that remediate the socius of communication in very distinctive ways. second, i argue that one of the analytical flaws shared by almost all participants in the immaterial labor debate thus far is a curious lacuna with regard to spatio-temporal dimensions of media forms, their afforded practices, and thus their regimes of value production. to this end, the work of henri lefebvre on the spatiality of capitalism is critical in exploring the limitations of the smythian idea of the “audience commodity”, which is very much rooted in the bounded temporalities and places of broadcast television. these two analytical moments will come together in a consideration of the ipo of facebook and the way financial markets continue to speculate on the “value” of the company based up its estimation of the way it will be able to “monetize” the activity of facebook users on and through mobile media platforms such as smartphones, tablets, and “phablets”. arvidsson and colleoni argue that “value is ever more defined according the ability to mobilize affective attention and engagement”. i agree, but in order to understand the 7 relationship between affect and value in informational capitalism, it is imperative to emphasize the different mobilities afforded by media forms themselves. 4. facebook-stasis the internet: the internet.org and assembling attention through internet infrastructure facebook has begun to expanding its influence by engineering the construction of the internet itself. with 1.4 billion of the total 2.9 billion internet users on facebook , growth has to come in part by growing the size of the internet. its non-profit internet.org has started providing affordable access albeit to a very different kind of network than what is commonly called the internet. internet.org provides free access to selected websites - like facebook or wikipedia -rather than unrestricted access to the internet (savov, 2015). their efforts illustrate one future of the internet articulated by corporations and non-profits. their efforts amount to building a rhetoric and infrastructure that will reshape the nature of digital connectivity and interactivity. this presentation reflects on the virtuals of the contemporary internet and the role of facebook as the archetype of a new broadcaster -one seemingly able to manage and construct flows of attention similar to television networks of the past through their algorithmic flows and personalization. internet.org’s exemplifies a new kind of technological imaginary constructing the internet. these visions of technology into code played a vital role in the development of the network. kelty (2008) described the processes as recursivity whereby imaginaries of technology become literally encoded in new iterations of the networks. the hackers that kelty followed, however, are only one of a few technical cultures building the internet. the internet develops through the sustained conflicts and collaborations between these groups and their refied code (2010). crawford (2007) -building on frieden (2002) - describes three key groups building the internet: bellheads, netheads and internet engineers. bellheads approach and deploy internet service provision drawing on the traditions of telecommunications service provision and in contrast to the computer science principles of internet engineers and the more radical ideals of hackers or netheads. more groups have become discernible in the construction of today’s internet. the californian ideology (barbrook & cameron, 2001; turner, 2006) -a mixture of counter-culture and free market libertarianism -drives a new generation of venture capital firms. andreesen and horowitz, founders fund and other venture capitalist invests disruptively, treating start-up as social experiments in trusting the decentralized networking of the internet deeper into new areas and directions (frank, 2015). netheads seemingly have split with the funded venture capitalist pursuing the disruptive promise of the internet, where other netheads have turned to foundations and nonprofits pursue the democratic promise of an open internet (s. p. crawford, 2015). the new america foundation, open media or even the creative commons depend on alliances between free software hackers, media activists and a liberal legal tradition to fund the construction of new community-oriented networks. finally, convergence has 8 also forced broadcaster to treat the internet as their distribution network. over-the-top services, in their frantic competition, invest in caching and peering agreements that alter the flows of internet traffic. these groups attempt to create the internet as a kind of new broadcast system -akin to the integrated services digital networks -that a future transfigured, but the influence of the broadcaster preserved systems (mansell, 1993; noam, 1987). facebook and its internet.org exemplifies this new kind of broadcaster in its careful construction of perception and attention. these new broadcasters offer new solutions to what crary called an “ongoing crisis of attentiveness” whereby “the changing configurations of capitalism continually push attention and distraction to new limits and thresholds, with an endless sequence of new products, sources of stimulation, and streams of information, and then respond with new methods of managing and regulating perception ...” (1999, p. 13). attention is assembled, the product of often technologies and habitual media practices (k. crawford, 2009; terranova, 2012; wise, 2011). where raymond williams (1974) focused on the flow of television to explain how an audience could be glued to the screen, critical studies of [the new broadcasters] have to attend to the ways they imagine and construct internet architecture as what oswald and packer (2011) referred to as flow 2.0. such research focus on the how the assemblage regulates the flows of information similar to hot and cool media of marshall mcluhan (1964) as well as govern interactivity similar to the democratic gaze that fred turner (2013) described in the family of man exhibits. where tania bucher (2012) emphasized the facebook newsfeed as an important aggregate of attention -clearly a kind of new flow that depends on a habit of scrolling past the advertisements -the efforts of internet.org require an investigation into how free data and infrastructural prioritization assemble attention. internet.org marks a point of synthesize between algorithmic modes of attention and the traditions of broadcasting. users have to access the internet through the internet.org that provides access to 38 pre-selected sites in total that can be browsed for free. anything else incurs data charges. the app, then, functions similar to a broadcaster programming channels or a schedule, but its an experience mediated through a app likely mining user behaviour to adjust the free experience. algorithms manipulate the communicative experience to produce affects of frustration and gratification that subtlety manage the attention and usage habits of this new generation of internet users. the case of internet.org demonstrates the need and opportunity for an algorithmic media studies. microsoft word 869-668-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 social media in the 2013 italian election luca rossi it university copenhagen, denmark luca.rossi@uniurb.it @lr fabio giglietto "carlo bo" university urbino, italy fabio.giglietto @uniurb.it @fabiogiglietto mario orefice "carlo bo" university urbino, italy mario.orefice @uniurb.it @oreficemario giovanni boccia artieri "carlo bo" university urbino, italy giovanni.bocciaartieri @uniurb.it @gba_mm abstract in february 2013, over 35 million italian citizens voted to renew the national parliament and internet played an important and perhaps decisive role. from the 1st of january to 24 of february we collected data from all official facebook and twitter profiles of the presidential candidates. during the same period we also collected the average of political polls for coalitions and the mentions of the same group of candidates in online news media, forum, blog, twitter and facebook. we identified the key moments of the campaign and we manually coded the interactions on the social media profiles of the candidates with the aim of understanding the relationship between polls and social media interactions. we will therefore presents an overview on how candidates and their networked publics used social media profiles during the campaign, a general method aimed at identifying key moment in a political campaign using data from the internet and the qualitative analysis of social media interactions during the identified key moments. keywords twitter; facebook; politics; content analysis introduction on february 25 and 26 2013, over 35 million italian citizens voted to renew the national parliament. for the first time in the history of italian general elections, internet played an important and perhaps decisive role. with a campaign totally organized as a mix of online activity and a tour of meetings held in public squares and avoiding any tv show, the “5 star movement” headed by the former comedian beppe grillo, a brand new political movement, resulted the most voted party in the camera dei deputati (the italian lower chamber). never before in history of general election in europe, a brand new party managed to gather this amount of consensus. it has been a relatively quick campaign where candidates and coalitions slowly took shapes in late december 2012 after the unexpected end of mario monti’s government. in order to study the role that social media played in this electoral campaign we collected data from the 1st of january to 24th of february from all official facebook and twitter public profiles of the candidates as well as twitter and facebook conversations about them. during the same period of time we also collected the average of political polls for the main coalitions of parties and the mentions of the same group of candidates in online news media, forum, blogs, twitter and facebook. using the latter dataset we identified key moments of the campaign. data and analysis starting from this rich but heterogeneous set of data, our study reconstruct the social dynamics that link campaign's major events, online communication and changes in the public opinion as it can be observed through opinion polls. the process behind the formation and evolution of public opinion is complex and, even if it might probably considered one of the very first question for mass media studies (katz and lazarsfeld 1955), still largely opaque. despite some recent enthusiasms about the possibility of social media data selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 analysis to constitute a major breakthrough in this field (tumasjan et al 2010), empirical research showed contradictory results in understanding how and if the analysis of digital conversation might be used to understand, or even to predict, political behavior (jungherr et al. 2011, giglietto 2012). in this paper we explore, in a critical perspective, the idea of finding a linear correlation between data extracted by online conversations and political opinions. while opinions need time to be formed and to evolve within the public sphere (habermas 1991), digital conversations and news mentions can burst following any event a dissolve within hours. these data need therefore to be observed and studied within a complex perspective where digital media, communication and public opinion coexist within the same system. in order to understand how social media have been used during recent italian campaign and what kind of role they played we observed: • we identified key moments in the electoral campaign and, for those moments, we manually coded the interactions on the social media profiles of the candidates with the aim of understanding not the qualitative content of the peaks in communication productions. • we observed the themes emerging in candidates’ social media communication in order to describe their online communication style and to see if themes were related to campaign events. • we defined how each candidate has been able to “occupy” with its own communication activities the global digital communication in order to understand the ability of each coalition to set the agenda. • we traced and analysed the relationships between facebook users and facebook official pages of the candidates in order to understand what kind of bipartite network emerges. preliminary results this multi-level analysis showed many interesting results that can improve our understanding on how to use social media data to understand public opinion. on the one side we found no linear correlation between digital mentions of any politicians and his/her simultaneous result in the polls. while this is largely due to the high level of variance that online mentions can show compared to a slower evolution of opinion polls we saw that in many cases high level of online activity might be due to a critical topic raised against the candidate. to a picks in online or news mentions might correspond a decrease in consensus as measured by opinion polls (and we have seen many cases of this occurring to the biggest italian centre-left party the partito democratico). while this data can be simply considered as an additional tool to support a qualitative analysis of digital content, it appears also that, by cross referencing the trends of online mentions and opinion polls we might produced an indirect sentiment analysis of the digital contents. qualitative analysis of the comments addressed to candidates during peaks in online communication confirmed this approach. moreover it provided more information about online users’ behaviors. by analyzing the bipartite graph made by the last 50 status updates published on the official facebook pages of the candidates and the users who interacted (liked or commented with these) with those content we have been able to observe how, while certain users tend to comment only on a single candidate’s page, others tend to be active on more than one page. following this suggestion we identifies and focused our attention on a special category of users: the “zero likers” or users who created an above the average number of comments in a page and never clicked the like button on a post published by the page owner. this behavior attracted our attention since the effort required by clicking the like button is much lower than the effort required by creating a comment resulting in an average ratio of around 6 likes for each comment in the page we observed. the analysis of those more active users showed that, with a different level for every candidate, it exists a part of users, largely related to the five star movement, that occupy digital communication platforms not only to support their own candidate but also to use other candidates’ official pages in selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 order to set specific topics. the specific situation of italian election, with the five star movement largely focused on online activities led us rising the question if this digital hyperactivity of specific users had to be explained as a centrally planned political strategy to take over digital communication or a more spontaneous phenomenon mainly played by young activists with no central coordination. while the collected data do not allow us to offer a definitive answer to this question, we can surely say that this behaviors, planned or not, worked in reshaping the scenario of recent italian political communication, both online and offline. references avello g, panagiotis d, metaxas t, mustafaraj e (2011) limits of electoral predictions using twitter. in proceedings of the international conference on weblogs and social media (icwsm) 2011. katz e and lazarsfeld pf (1955) personal influence the part played by people in the flow of mass communications,. glencoe ill., free press. giglietto f (2012) if likes were votes: an empirical study on the 2011 italian administrative elections. in: sixth international aaai conference on weblogs and social media (icwsm). jungherr a, jurgens p and schoen h (2011) why the pirate party won the german election of 2009 or the trouble with predictions: a response to tumasjan, a., sprenger, t. o., sander, p. g., & welpe, i. m. “predicting elections with twitter: what 140 characters reveal about political sentiment”. social science computer review, 1(6), available from: http://ssc.sagepub.com/cgi/doi/10.1177/0894439311404119 (accessed 19 september 2011). tumasjan a., sprenger to, sandner pg, et al. (2010) election forecasts with twitter: how 140 characters reflect the political landscape. social science computer review, 29(4), 402–418, available from: http://ssc.sagepub.com/cgi/doi/10.1177/0894439310386557 (accessed 12 july 2011). habermas j (1991) the structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. mit press. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 twitter use during the 2013 norwegian elections: some initial insights anders olof larsson university of oslo oslo, norway a.o.larsson @media.uio.no @a_larsson bente kalsnes university of oslo oslo, norway bente.kalsnes @media.uio.no @benteka gunn enli university of oslo oslo, norway gunn.enli @media.uio.no @gunnen hallvard moe university of bergen bergen, norway hallvard.moe@ infomedia.uib.no @halmoe eli skogerbø university of oslo oslo, norway eli.skogerbo @media.uio.no @eskoger abstract while many of the initial hopes regarding the internet and its role for political communication have been disproven, the rise of the web 2.0 paradigm and of social media services such as twitter has again given rise to similar ideas and claims. this panel presentation will focus on the uses of the aforementioned microblog and its uses during the 2013 norwegian parliamentary election. specifically, we focus on three areas of twitter use. first, twitter use at the hands of the electorate is assessed by means of analyzing the networks and use patterns of the official election hashtag. second, politicians’ uses of twitter are assessed in a similar manner. third, journalists’ use of politicians’ tweets as sources for news stories. by providing current data regarding political twitter practices in a country characterized by high internet use, the presentation provides important insights into these ongoing online developments. keywords political communication; social media; twitter; norway; election introduction the launch of new communication technologies often gives rise to revolutionary claims regarding its impact on political campaigning. the internet was no different – through its various phases of diffusion in western democracies, it was often suggested as having the potential to “reshape political communication and campaigning” (lilleker and malagón, 2010: 25), producing higher degrees of voter participation (e.g. jackson and lilleker, 2009). while more empirically focused efforts have largely disproven the most overly optimistic claims regarding the internet (see larsson, 2013, for an overview), the current “version of the web” (allen, 2012) – web 2.0 – has yet again given rise to claims regarding increased user participation (e.g. cormode and krishnamurthy, 2008; o’reilly, 2005). as such, the rise of a new paradigm for web design and use has led to discussions regarding the potential of so-called social media popular services like facebook or twitter – for the purposes of political campaigning (e.g. wattal et al., 2010). focusing on the latter of these two online services, the suggested panel presentation will outline the uses of twitter during the 2013 norwegian parliamentary elections, taking place on september 6th. specifically, the presentation will focus on three areas, outlined below. the case of norway in one of the earliest comparative efforts on “web campaigning from a global perspective”, gibson (2004) suggested that “parties in […] norway have long held a presence in cyberspace” (2004: 104). this online longevity could perhaps stem from the high degree to which norwegians make use of the internet not only in their everyday lives (e.g. vaage, 2012), but also for finding information before a election (e.g. kalnes, 2009; karlsen, 2010). in combination with high voting rates, norway could be considered as an advanced country with regards to all mentioned aspects. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 study design and methodological considerations our efforts are focused on three separate, yet related, aspects of twitter use during the 2013 norwegian parliamentary elections. these are briefly described in the following. #valg13, #valg2013 and so on… tracking the election hashtag as the twitter platform has developed, users have started to amend their practices to get the most out of the service. for example, the uses of hashtags – thematic keywords indicating tweets with similar content – have become popular (e.g. bruns and liang, 2012; small, 2011). such practices have become common also in the norwegian context. what is suggested here is a follow-up study from previous work performed during the 2011 regional and local norwegian elections (larsson and moe, 2013; moe and larsson, 2012). as twitter activity during those campaigns was structured using hashtags, a similar approach, tracking and archiving relevant tweets using the yourtwapperkeeper application (e.g. bruns and liang, 2012) will be employed. archiving is scheduled to start during march 2013, when the major political parties are hosting their conventions in preparation for election day on september 6th. the archiving process, inspired by previous research (e.g. bruns and burgess, 2011; larsson and moe, 2012), will allow for a series of longitudinal analyses of twitter activity leading up to the election, including, focusing specifically on the communicative aspects of twitter. through the uses of so-called @ replies and retweets, twitter users can connect to each other in different ways. previous research has indicated that while such uses are indeed present, the employment of the more communicative aspects of twitter are rather limited (larsson and moe, 2013). by comparing previous results with those from the current election, we are in a unique position to provide longitudinal insights into political twitter use in a country with high degrees of voter participation and internet use. moreover, the analysis will focus on what types of individual users choose to take part using the major political hashtags. by assessing the societal roles of the participants, we will insights into whether the service at hand has helped members of the electorate to “bloom into both active and capable citizens” (christensen and bengtsson, 2011: 2) or if a more cautious regime is to be preferred. politicians on twitter – broadcasting or reaching out? while mapping and analyzing the political uses of twitter at the hands of citizens is certainly of interest, attention must also be paid to the twitter stylings of the politicians who seek the votes of the aforementioned group. starting with blogging (e.g. bichard, 2006), social media was thought to constitute a novel way for elected officials to reach out to their respective electorates – or conversely to function as “just another campaign gimmick” (lilleker and malagón, 2010: 26). as for twitter use by politicians, results have largely been leaning towards a reproduction of traditional campaign tactics – mass communication practices with limited amounts of citizen interaction (e.g. golbeck, grimes, and rogers, 2010). by studying the twitter use of politicians in the norwegian election campaign, we will be able to shed light over how these practices are shaped outside of the usa (as suggested by gibson, 2004; lilleker and malagón, 2010; schweitzer, 2008). using the previously discussed rationale for data collection, tweets directed at and sent from the accounts of seven political party leaders in norway are being archived, starting at the end of january 2013. this process will continue until election day, allowing for a large-scale analysis of the twitter practices of established politicians. as previous research has found differences in online political practices stem from such factors as candidate gender (druckman, kifer, and parkin, 2007), party size (margolis and resnick, 2000; strandberg, 2009), party ideology (r. k. gibson, lusoli, and ward, 2008; vaccari, 2008) and incumbency status (druckman, et al., 2007; schweitzer, 2008), the data to be presented here, gathered over a seven-month period, will provide unique insights into how these explanatory variables hold up in the 2.0 paradigm. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 6 political tweets as a journalistic source the spread of stories from twitter to mainstream media is a growing phenomenon (e.g. guardian, 2011, jansen et. al, 2009, lasorsa et. al. 2011), also in the norwegian context. when politicians tweet, they are well aware that their audience is not people in general, but societal elites (enjolras, et. al., 2013). even though twitter has received widespread media attention in norway, it is still mostly used by people with higher education; academics, politicians, journalists, consultants, and only to a smaller degree by younger citizens. by searching for specific keywords in the comprehensive national media archive retriever during two separate periods (may and august), we will shed light on which political tweets end up as news stories, thus entering the realm of what is sometimes called traditional media. in order to increase our understanding of these processes, we will interview political journalists about their use of twitter as a source and a research tool. taken together, our findings will bring insights into the agenda setting potential of political tweets, further elaborating on previous research on journalists as gatewatchers (bruns, 2003) and what stories from twitter they identify as newsworthy. by studying twitter use during an election campaign from three different perspectives; citizens, politicians and journalists, this panel aims to bring new and valuable findings to the research community. through our three identified areas, we address topics such as the communicative effect of twitter during the election season, politicians’ use of twitter and journalistic gatewatching through twitter. references allen, m. (2012). what was web 2.0? versions as the dominant mode of internet history. new media & society. bichard, s. l. (2006). building blogs: a multi-dimensional analysis of the distribution of frames on the 2004 presidential candidate web sites. journalism & mass communication quarterly, 83(2), 329-34 bruns, a (2003) gatewatching, not gatekeeping: collaborative online news. media international australia incorporating culture and policy: quarterly journal of media research and resources, 107, pp. 31-44. bruns, a., & burgess, j. (2011). #ausvotes how twitter covered the 2010 australian federal election. communication, politics & culture, 44(2), 37-56. bruns, a., & liang, y. e. (2012). tools and methods for capturing twitter data during natural disasters. first monday, 17(4). christensen, h. s., & bengtsson, å. (2011). the political competence of internet participants. information, communication & society, 1-21. cormode, g., & krishnamurthy, b. (2008). key differences between web 1.0 and web 2.0. first monday, 13(6). druckman, j. n., kifer, m. j., & parkin, m. (2007). the technological development of congressional candidate web sites. social science computer review, 25(4), 425-442. enjolras, b, karlsen, r, steen-johansen, k, wollebæk, d (2013) liker, liker ikke. oslo: cappelen damm akademisk. gibson, r. (2004). web campaigning from a global perspective. asia-pacific review, 11(1), 95 126. gibson, r. k., lusoli, w., & ward, s. (2008). nationalizing and normalizing the local? a comparative analysis of online candidate campaigning in australia and britain. journal of information technology & politics, 4(4), 15 30. golbeck, j., grimes, j. m., & rogers, a. (2010). twitter use by the us congress. journal of the american society for information science and technology, 61(8), 1612-1621. guardian, reading the riots: how riots spread on twitter. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/interactive/2011/dec/07/london-riots-twitter visited on march 1, 2013 jackson, n. a., & lilleker, d. g. (2009). building an architecture of participation? political parties and web 2.0 in britain. journal of information technology & politics, 6(3), 232 250. jansen, b. j., zhang, m., sobel, k. and chowdury, a. (2009), twitter power: tweets as electronic word of mouth. j. am. soc. inf. sci., 60: 2169–2188. doi: 10.1002/asi.21149 kalnes, ø. (2009). norwegian parties and web 2.0. journal of information technology & politics, 6(3), 251 266. karlsen, r. (2010). online and undecided: voters and the internet in the contemporary norwegian election campaign. scandinavian political studies, 33(1), 28-50 lasorsa, d., lewis, s., holton a.(2012). normalizing twitter. journalism studies, 13:1, 19-36 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 7 larsson, a. o. (2013). “rejected bits of program code”: why notions of “politics 2.0” remain (mostly) unfulfilled. journal of information technology & politics, 10(1), 72-85. larsson, a. o., & moe, h. (2012). studying political microblogging: twitter users in the 2010 swedish election campaign. new media & society, 14(5), 729-747. larsson, a. o., & moe, h. (2013). twitter in politics and elections insights from scandinavia. in a. bruns, j. burgess, k. weller, c. puschmann & m. mahrt (eds.), twitter and society. new york: peter lang. lilleker, d. g., & malagón, c. (2010). levels of interactivity in the 2007 french presidential candidates' websites. european journal of communication, 25(1), 25-42. margolis, m., & resnick, d. (2000). politics as usual : the cyberspace "revolution". london: sage. moe, h., & larsson, a. o. (2012). twitterbruk under valgkampen 2011. norsk medietidsskrift, 19(2), 151-162. o’reilly, t. (2005). what is web 2.0? design patterns and business models for the next generation of software, from http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6228 schweitzer, e. j. (2008). innovation or normalization in e-campaigning? a longitudinal content and structural analysis of german party websites in the 2002 and 2005 national elections. european journal of communication, 23(4), 449-470. small, t. (2011). what the hashtag? information, communication & society, 1-24. strandberg, k. (2009). online campaigning: an opening for the outsiders? an analysis of finnish parliamentary candidates' websites in the 2003 election campaign. new media & society, 11(5), 835-854. vaage, o. f. (2012). norsk mediebarometer 2011. oslo–kongsvinger: statistisk sentralbyrå (statistics norway). vaccari, c. (2008). surfing to the elysee: the internet in the 2007 french elections. french politics, 6(1), 1-22. wattal, s., schuff, d., mandviwalla, m., & williams, c. b. (2010). web 2.0 and politics: the 2008 u.s. presidential election and an e-politics research agenda. mis quarterly, 34(4), 669-688. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 8 #ausvotes mark two: twitter in the 2013 australian federal election axel bruns arc centre of excellence for creative industries and innovation queensland university of technology brisbane, australia a.bruns@qut.edu.au @snurb_dot_info tim highfield arc centre of excellence for creative industries and innovation queensland university of technology brisbane, australia t.highfield@qut.edu.au @timhighfield theresa sauter arc centre of excellence for creative industries and innovation queensland university of technology brisbane, australia t.sauter@qut.edu.au @lena_sauter abstract in this paper, we explore the use of twitter as a political tool in the 2013 australian federal election. we employ a ‘big data’ approach that combines qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis. by tracking the accounts of politicians and parties, and the tweeting activity to and around these accounts, as well as conversations on particular hashtagged topics, we gain a comprehensive insight into the ways in which twitter is employed in the campaigning strategies of different parties. we compare and contrast the use of twitter by political actors with its adoption by citizens as a tool for political conversation and participation. our study provides an important longitudinal counterpoint, and opportunity for comparison, to the use of twitter in previous australian federal and state elections. furthermore, we offer innovative methodologies for data gathering and evaluation that can contribute to the comparative study of the political uses of twitter across diverse national media and political systems. keywords twitter; politics; australia; elections; big data introduction: the use of twitter in the 2013 australian federal election the 2013 australian federal election in september 2013 will mark the second time that twitter will be used to a significant extent at the national level in the australian electoral process, following its use as an additional communications tool in the 2010 election. at that point, although the election already generated a substantial amount of twitter engagement especially under the #ausvotes hashtag (bruns & burgess, 2011; jericho, 2012), twitter was not yet a mainstream tool for political communication in the country (burgess & bruns, 2012), and was used mainly by a specific community of cognoscenti to communicate amongst themselves; while twitter was gradually adopted by australian politicians at this time (chen, 2012; grant, moon, & busby grant, 2010), a comparatively small number of politicians and journalists actively contributed to the 2010 #ausvotes discussion. this has changed in subsequent years: twitter has played a more substantial role in subsequent state elections (see e.g. bruns & highfield, 2013; bruns, harrington, & highfield, 2012), as well as in the continuous discussion of political issues through the #auspol hashtag which sees a small number of highly active contributors generate almost a million tweets each year (bruns & burgess, 2012). during the queensland state election campaign in february and march 2012, several candidates and parties showed a significant degree of activity – and highly divergent approaches to using twitter to disseminate information, engage with the electorate, or take the political fight directly to opposing candidates – and were mentioned by a large number of australian twitter users (bruns & highfield, 2013; bruns, harrington, & highfield, 2012). similar patterns are currently being observed in the western australian state election campaign, which is taking place in february and march 2013. such political uses of twitter in electoral contexts are set to be amplified even further during the 2013 federal election campaign, contested mainly by the incumbent australian labor party (alp) government and the conservative coalition consisting of the liberal and national parties. more than two thirds of the 150 current members of the federal house of representatives had created their own twitter accounts by early 2013, and a substantial number of the candidates contesting the election for selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 9 other parties are also active on twitter (australian mp tweets, 2013). the major parties and party leaders are using twitter to attempt to engage with the australian public, and several federal ministers and opposition shadow ministers are using the platform actively to argue their points. in a country which counts an estimated two million twitter accounts for a population of some 22 million, twitter has become an increasingly significant campaigning tool. methodology ‘big data’ longitudinal approach this paper takes a ‘big data’ approach to examining the use of twitter during the australian federal election. since september 2012, we have tracked and captured all tweets by the known accounts of federal politicians, as well as all tweets @mentioning their account names; this list of accounts is being updated continuously as new accounts become known. additionally, we have also captured tweets posted to the #ausvotes and #auspol hashtags. this data gathering activity will continue to and beyond the 14 september 2013 election date; at the time of writing, it has already captured several hundred thousand tweets, and (following the pattern established by previous elections) the volume of twitter activity around the election is likely to increase substantially as we move closer to the eventual election date. qualitative and quantitative analysis: metrics and content analysis we analyse these data, first, by calculating a series of standard twitter metrics as established by bruns & stieglitz (2013). these metrics include the total volume of tweets over time (across the entire dataset, for the politicians’ accounts as a group – categorised by party –, and for each individual politician); the volume of tweets of particular types (original tweets, @replies, retweets; tweets containing urls); and the size of the userbase that engages with the politicians’ accounts (subdivided into several categories from lead users to occasional respondents). additionally, we utilise automated content analysis to identify key themes in the dataset (likely to include current themes of australian political debate such as climate change, asylum seeker policy, or the management of the economy), and determine their presence in the total volume of tweets over time as well as their prevalence in the communicative exchanges around selected leading politicians. finally, we also identify and graph the networks of interaction (in the form of @replies and retweets) around the various politicians’ accounts. for further comparison, similar metrics will also be calculated for the #ausvotes and #auspol hashtag datasets, following the approaches established in bruns & burgess (2011) and burgess & bruns (2012). research questions these analyses provide answers to a number of key research questions. the overview of individual accounts’ tweeting activities enables us to develop a typology of different twitter campaigning strategies, likely ranging from mere public relations (posting press releases without further engagement) to direct discussion with voters (through substantial @replying), and building on approaches identified in other, international contexts (see, for example, broersma & graham, 2012; larsson & moe, 2012; maireder, ausserhofer, & kittenberger, 2012). from this, we are able to ‘reverse-engineer’ the campaigning decisions made by candidates and their party campaign offices, and to determine whether such decisions are linked to the overall standing of each party, the relative safety of each candidate’s seat, or the respective national prominence of individual candidates. we will also explore whether the patterns suggest that different candidates have been assigned different campaigning roles (‘presidential’ leaders, ‘attacking’ deputies), and whether specific themes and slogans are being promoted by accounts of different political colours, as identified by chen (2012) in the case of the 2010 election. we contrast such analyses of the candidate accounts’ own activities with the popular response to these accounts. this provides an indication of whether the level of activity by specific accounts translates into a matching response from the overall australian twitter userbase, or whether in spite of such efforts the general public continues to talk mainly about (and tweet at) the two party leaders’ accounts; selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 10 it shows whether the political talking points promoted by the candidate accounts align with the overall themes of tweeting activity around these accounts (and in #auspol and #ausvotes); and it examines the extent to which general twitter user engagement with the politicians’ accounts is split along party lines or cuts across such divisions. in each case, we also examine the dynamic evolution of such patterns over the course of the campaign period, in response to political events during this time. conclusion: twitter as a political campaigning tool this comprehensive study of twitter activity around the 2013 australian federal election provides an important longitudinal counterpoint to studies of the 2010 election (e.g. bruns & burgess, 2011; burgess & bruns, 2012) as well as subsequent state elections (bruns, harrington, & highfield, 2012; bruns & highfield, 2013). additionally, in the context of a panel which reports on research into the use of twitter during four national elections in 2013 (three of them taking place in the space of just a few weeks in september), largely using compatible methodologies for data gathering and evaluation, it makes an important contribution to the comparative study of the political uses of twitter across diverse national media and political systems. acknowledgments this research is supported by funding from the australian research council. references australian mp tweets (2013). available from http://mptweets.com.au/ broersma, m., & graham, t. (2012). social media as beat: tweets as a news source during the 2010 british and dutch elections. journalism practice. 6(3) 403-419. doi:10.1080/17512786.2012.663626 bruns, a., & burgess, j. (2011). #ausvotes: how twitter covered the 2010 australian federal election. communication, politics & culture, 44(2), 37–56. retrieved from http://eprints.qut.edu.au/47816/ bruns, a., & burgess, j. (2012). notes towards the scientific study of public communication on twitter. in a. tokar, m. beurskens, s. keuneke, m. mahrt, i. peters, c. puschmann, t. van treeck, et al. (eds.), science and the internet (pp. 159–169). düsseldorf: düsseldorf university press. bruns, a., & highfield, t. (2013, forthcoming). political networks on twitter: tweeting the queensland state election. information, communication & society. bruns, a., harrington, s. & highfield, t. (2012). political networks on twitter: tweeting the queensland state election. paper presented at the european communication conference (ecrea), istanbul, 26 oct. 2012. bruns, a., & stieglitz, s. (2013). towards more systematic twitter analysis: metrics for tweeting activities. international journal of social research methodology, (january), 1–18. doi:10.1080/13645579.2012.756095 burgess, j., & bruns, a. (2012). (not) the twitter election: the dynamics of the #ausvotes conversation in relation to the australian media ecology. journalism practice, 6(3), 384–402. doi:10.1080/17512786.2012.663610 chen, p. j. (2012). 5. the new media and the campaign. in m sims & j wanna (eds.). julia 2010: the caretaker election. (pp. 5-83) anu e-press. available from http://epress.anu.edu.au/wpcontent/uploads/2012/02/ch05.pdf. grant, w. j., moon, b., & busby grant, j. (2010). digital dialogue? australian politicians’ use of the social network tool twitter. australian journal of political science, 45(4), 579–604. doi:10.1080/10361146.2010.517176 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 11 jericho, g. (2012). the rise of the fifth estate: social media and blogging in australian politics. melbourne: scribe. larsson, a. o. & moe, h. (2012). studying political microblogging: twitter users in the 2010 swedish election campaign. new media & society, 14(5), 729–747. doi:10.1177/1461444811422894 maireder, a., ausserhofer, j., & kittenberger, a. (2012). mapping the austrian political twittersphere: how politicians, journalists and political strategists (inter-)act on twitter. in p. parycek & n. edelmann (eds.), proceedings of cedem12 conference for e-democracy and open government (pp. 151–164). krems, austria: danube university. retrieved from http://phaidra.univie.ac.at/o:154914 license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 12 networked politics on twitter: social media use by german politicians during the federal election 2013 christian nuernbergk ludwig-maximilians-universität munich, germany christian.nuernbergk@ifkw.lmu.de @nuernbergk julia neubarth ludwig-maximilians-universität munich, germany julia.neubarth@ifkw.lmu.de @julneu abstract in this study we aim to detect interactions among german representatives in the context of the general elections in 2013 using a combination of social network analysis and content analysis. it will be investigated how german representatives adapt twitter to communicate with citizens, media professionals, political strategists, social movement actors and other politicians. therefore, we will present differences in representatives’ use of twitter before and during election campaigning. since the 1st of march 2013, we have collected data from all official twitter profiles of members of the german bundestag. additionally, their reactions on twitter as well as their adressings by other users through @mentions have been tracked. through continuous monitoring of the politicians’ communication behavior until october 2013 it is possible to compare different phases in this ongoing process. how do politicians regularly use twitter? do politicians use twitter for campaigning and if so what does campaigning look like on twitter? keywords twitter; german elections 2013; politics on twitter; network and content analysis; networked politics introduction in the 2013 general election, social media use in germany can be considered as a common campaign practice applied by politicians. thus, our research focuses on this emerging phenomenon by investigating social media network structures and contents. twitter already played an upcoming role in the 2009 election and since then the number of german politicians with a twitter account steadily increased. the fact that more than a third of all representatives of the german bundestag holds a twitter account in june 2012 shows that twitter gained significant importance in political online communication in germany. also other arbitrators such as journalists (neuberger et al., 2010), social movement actors (lindgren & lundström, 2011) and ngos (lovejoy & saxton, 2012) as well as citizens with interest in political communication (larsson & moe, 2011) use twitter more frequently than others. so far only a few studies have been carried out to detect the interactional behavior of these actors mostly in the usa (moe, 2010). this study complements former results by taking the german perspective. the rather corporatistic german state (hallin & mancini, 2004) can provide a particular perspective for comparative research in this field. the presented results focus on the interactions of politicians on twitter before and during election campaigning. this study of the network and communicative interrelations among politicians and other actors on twitter contributes to the evaluation of political communication in the networked public sphere on the internet. recent political events (i.e. plagiarism affair concerning various german politicians, wikileaks and establishment of the pirate party in germany) showed the increasing relevance of social media for public communication also demonstrated by an interdisciplinary debate on the effect of the internet on the change of the public sphere (benkler, 2006; neuberger, 2009). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 13 related work the analyses of political communication on twitter can broadly be divided into two perspectives (gibson et al., 2008, p. 19): either they focus on the participation of political active citizens which use twitter to gain access to public communication or their emphasis lays on the members of political parties. only the studies of larsson and moe (2011) and ausserhofer et al. (2012) combine both perspectives so far. the politicians’ use of social media pursues various different objectives depending on which phase of the policy cycle they are in. during election campaigning for examples they presumably want to enhance the political engagement of the public (grant et al., 2010), spread their political messages (tumasjan, 2010), publish their opinion on certain topics, convince indecisive voters and attract campaign workers and sponsors. apart from the election campaigns politicians probably use their twitter accounts to draw attention to certain problems and to interact with the public (glassmann et al., 2011), to bid for support or to gain knowledge of the wishes and needs of the people they represent. studies on the political twittersphere in the usa show that politicians mainly use the microblogging service for self-promotion and for one-way communication (golbeck et al., 2010) rather than to actually interact with the public. interestingly politicians get involved with twitter despite the fact that they get only followed by a small percentage of the public. dimitrova et al. (2011) found out that during the swedish election campaign in 2010 only 1 per cent of the respondents followed politicians or political parties on twitter. this could be an indication of the problems politicians have to adopt twitter and other social media (vaccari, 2008). they often come into conflict with the wish to control information about them and their policy and the pressure to engage interactively with the public. sometimes twitter degenerates into a mere campaign gadget without being maintained permanently (lilleker & malagón, 2010). it also has to be taken into account that twitter is only used by a small percentage of internet users. only 3 per cent of the german internet users also access twitter (busemann & gscheidle, 2011). other countries show a similar situation (larsson & moe, 2011, p. 14) except the usa with a higher percentage of twitter users (19%). data and analysis through continuous monitoring of the politicians’ communication behavior from september 2012 until february 2014 it will be possible to compare the different phases before, during and after the election campaign for the 2013 general elections in germany. the data collected in this project is analysed by mapping the communication networks among the representatives and between them and all other actors @mentioning their account names. in addition a quantitative content analysis is conducted to provide information of the quality of the single interactions. thus, it is possible to clarify different types of interrelations occurring between the tweeters. in general, the internet enables a more netlike, participatory and decentralised communication for which reason it can be assumed that the constellations between political actors, journalists and the audience increasingly consist of multifaceted communications and effects that cross each other. instead of unidirectional single-level mass communication that is more manageable by gatekeepers, the flow of communication in the public sphere on the internet is characterised by increasing mutual and multi-step networks. this study refers to the latter forms of communication on the internet and analyses the integration of political actors in communication networks as well as topic-centered networks and their constellations with other actors. therefore, all actors in the network are classified by their public role. their specific interactions with other users are explored by analysing the purpose and focus of their tweets. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 14 the research design allows for fundamental research in both theoretical and methodological respects. by taking into account the phase of the election campaign as well as the routine phase of the representatives’ communication on twitter, this project contributes extensively to the comprehension of the dynamic of this communication. a comparison between election and routine phase can provide information about the sustainability of the politicians’ use of twitter. furthermore the application of a relational content analysis that has been adjusted to the results of the network analysis can be considered a methodological innovation (adam, 2008; nuernbergk, 2013). apart from the content analysis a network analysis will be executed on a large scale data base. the latter also known as mapping technique has been adopted to communication science only in isolated cases (cormode et al., 2010; bruns & burgess 2011). research questions our theoretical and methodological approach will lead to answering the following research questions: how do german representatives adapt the microblogging-service twitter to communicate with citizens, media professionals, political strategists, social movement actors and other politicians? what topics do they post and connect? and is there a difference in their use of twitter before, during and after election campaigning? do candidates use twitter for campaigning and if so how does campaigning look like on twitter especially against the background of the networked public sphere on the internet? preliminary results throughout march 2013, we found that 235 german representatives created more than 20.000 tweets. a first set of around 4200 individual tweets is going to be comprehensively analyzed in june 2013. the sample for this content analysis will consist of all tweets distributed by german representatives in a specific seven-day-period in march 2013 (20.3.-26.3.). in this selected period, the house was sitting until march 22nd. 208 representatives tweeted or retweeted other tweets at this time. we found specific twitter relations (@mentions, retweets) with 1324 distinct twitter users in these tweets from one week. the results of this content analysis will be complemented by the structural analyses of the routine phase and the election phase. references adam, s. (2008). medieninhalte aus der netzwerkperspektive. neue erkenntnisse durch die kombination von inhaltsund netzwerkanalyse. publizistik (2), 180-199. ausserhofer, j., kittenberger, a. & maireder, a. (2012). twitterpolitik. netzwerke und themen der politischen twittersphäre in österreich. wien: universität wien. retrieved from http://twitterpolitik.net/studie/twitterpolitik_studie.pdf (14.06.2012). benkler, y. (2006). the wealth of networks. how social production transforms markets and freedom. new haven/london: yale university press. bruns, a. & burgess, j. (2011). #ausvotes: how twitter covered the 2010 australian federal election. communication, politics & culture 44 (2), 37-56. busemann, k. & gscheidle, c. (2011). web 2.0: nutzung steigt – interesse an aktiver teilhabe sinkt. media perspektiven (7-8), 359-368. cormode, g., krishnamurthy, b. & willinger, w. (2010). a manifesto for modeling and measurement in social media. first monday 15 (9), 06.09.2010. retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3072/2601 (06.03.2011). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 15 dimitrova, d., shehata, a., strömbäck, j. & nord, l. (2011). the effects of digital media on political knowledge and participation in election campaigns: evidence from panel data. communication research. published online 2 november 2011, 1-24. gibson, r., lusoli, w. & ward, s. (2008). nationalizing and normalzing the local? a comparative analysis of online candidate campaigning in australia and britain. journal of information technology and politics 4 (4), 15-30. glassmann, m., straus, j. & shogan, c. (2011). social networking and constituent communications: member use of twitter during a two-month period in the 111th congress. journal of communications research 2 (2-3), 219-233. golbeck, j., grimes, j. & rogers, a. (2010). twitter use by the us congress. journal of the american society for information science and technology 61 (8), 1612-1621. grant, w., moon, b. & grant, j.(2010). digital dialogue? australian politicians’ use of the social network tool twitter. australian journal of political science 45 (4), 579–604. hallin, d. & mancini, p. (2004). comparing media systems. three models of media and politics. new york, ny: cambridge university press. larsson, a. & moe, h. (2011). studying political microblogging: twitter users in the 2010 swedish election campaign. new media & society. published online 21 november 2011, 1-19. retrieved from http://www.hm.uib.no/files/larsson_moe_nm_s_pre_print.pdf (14.06.1012) lilleker, d. & malagón, c. (2010). levels of interactivity in the 2007 french presidential candidates‘ websites. european journal of communication 25 (1), 25-42. lindgren, s. & lundström, r. (2011). pirate culture and hacktivist mobilization: the cultural and social protocols of #wikileaks on twitter. new media & society 13 (6), 999-1018. lovejoy, k. & saxton, g. (2012). information, community, and action: how nonprofit organizations use social media. journal of computer-mediated communication 17 (3), 337-353. moe, h. (2010). mapping the norwegian blogosphere: methodological challenges in internationalizing internet research. social science computer review 29 (3), 313-326. neuberger, c. (2009). internet, journalismus und öffentlichkeit. analyse des medienumbruchs. in c. neuberger, c. nuernbergk, m. rischke (eds.): journalismus im internet. profession – partizipation – technisierung (pp. 19-105). wiesbaden: vs verlag für sozialwissenschaften. nuernbergk, c. (2013). anschlusskommunikation in der netzwerköffentlichkeit. baden-baden: nomos. tumasjan, a., sprenger, t., sandner, p. & welpe, i. (2010). predicting elections with twitter: what 140 characters reveal about political sentiment. proceedings of the 4th international aaai conference on weblogs and social media. washington university, washington, dc. retrieved from http://mejoratugobierno.org/iceg/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/1441-7856-1-pb.pdf (14.06.2012). vaccari, c. (2008). research note: italian parties’ websites in the 2006 elections. european journal of communication 23 (1), 69-77. microsoft word 810-557-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 resisting meritocracy and reappropriating games: rhetorically rethinking game design christopher a. paul seattle university usa paulc@seattleu.edu abstract using tools derived primarily from rhetorical analysis and criticism, this project analyzes the impact of the overwhelming focus on balance in video game design. balance is a central ordering principle of games that is established by designers, praised by gamers, and particularly sought after in multiplayer games. a focus on balance limits games and establishes them as meritocratic spaces, where the ‘best’ players should be the most successful. by establishing a connection between balance and meritocracies it is possible to identify possible locations for resistance to existing norms. drawing from sociological critiques of meritocracies and current dynamics in game culture, game studies can help reappropriate elements of game design and contribute to a more positive, inclusive game culture. keywords game studies; rhetoric; game design; meritocracy; game balance video games, meritocracy, and resistance one of the foundational principles of video games is that they should be balanced (paul, 2012). balance was at the heart of the progenitor of online games, roy trubshaw and richard bartle’s mud (alexander, 2010), and games of various genres have extended a similar approach. multiplayer video games are most commonly based on a balanced design where multiple approaches can be equally successful when attempted by similarly skilled players (sirlin, 2008) and many games endure ongoing efforts to become more balanced after launch as designers add and subtract components to respond to the emergent playing patterns of their users. this process of balancing has become a self-referential loop, as gamers now expect ‘proper’ games to be balanced, which encourages designers to continue to develop seemingly balanced games. the assumed role of balance and its prominence in discussions about games is rooted in the complex relationships between social practices and technologies that help construct video games as cultural products. a pursuit of balance has an outsized impact on what games are made, played, and appreciated by consumers of games, which consequently structures who is likely to be found playing games. as an ordering principle, balance encourages a certain set of assumptions while disregarding others, largely circulating around what things should be balanced (gameplay, various characters, and other technical design elements) and what dynamics are not discussed (access to technology, basic facility with computers and controllers, and other social design elements). in an attempt to account for the prominence of balance as a rhetorical trope in video game discourse, this project discusses the implications of balance in video games and explores the impacts of centering design choices around a framework of balance in an effort to reappropriate a key trope of game design and foment resistance to broaden what is considered as a ‘good’ game. the desire to balance video games is inextricably and uncomfortably tied to the intent to craft video games as meritocratic modes of interaction where the most skilled players achieve the best result. a natural extension of this system is the development of level progression as one of the key measures of success in many video games. the level of a character is an indicator, a marker of effort and achievement that connotes how much a player has accomplished in a game world. originally dominant in role-playing games, like mud, bartle contends that leveling systems were valuable because “that led you out of the class system,” as “there was nothing stopping you from going up a selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 level because you were a girl, or because you were slightly socially inept, or because you are from the north of england. it was a kind of meritocracy where everybody could succeed” (alexander, 2010). leveling systems are now built into games that stretch far beyond the genres of historical fantasy and traditional role-playing games. perhaps the most frequently appropriated role-playing game concept, leveling systems are now fully integrated into games ranging from first-person shooters, like borderlands, to sports games, like fifa soccer. under a presumption of proper balance, leveling systems work as an alibi for video games and the inequality that can be wrought in their meritocratic spaces by making abstract effort result in concrete, visible results. leveling is a seemingly objective marker, one where all players are subject to the same ostensibly equivalent measures of evaluation. to understand the stakes of relying on balance and leveling as foundational cogs for video games, it is necessary to look at the history and implications of meritocracies as ordering systems. originally coined as a term in a satirical account for what the united kingdom could become if it continued upon its path, michael young wrote in 1958 about how inequality is built into meritocratic systems (young, 1994). in a more recent reflection on his work, young argued that the book was meant to be a warning to change how we went about governance and structuring of society (young, 2001). christopher hayes updated the critique to contend that structural inequality increasingly renders contemporary meritocracies nonfunctional (hayes, 2012). as the balance of resources tilt, society is based less on merit and more on the inheritance of structural advantages that let one short circuit measures of ability or skill. in the end, those most able to rally against the prevailing order are cognitively captured by it, as they gather benefits from a system that render them less interested in fighting against its inherent imbalances. meritocracies are designed to seem balanced and fair, even as structural inequality stifles any semblance of a level playing field. this project unites the complex relationships between the social practices and technologies of gaming with a critique of meritocracy to construct a narrative about the stakes for how games are designed, built, played, and integrated into contemporary practices. in the case of video games, the focus on balance and leveling constructs an environment where certain factors are ignored, like the ability to navigate in a 3d world, norms about game genres and how they work, and even the ability to find out information about what games to buy or how to solve a particularly difficult segment of a game. focusing on the balanced spaces where players can be evaluated based on their progress within a game forecloses questions about the advantages, skills, and base knowledge necessary to get to that point. this also creates a platform upon which those who benefit from the system can decry those who are left behind or left out, as they ‘simply were not good enough,’ which can become fuel for a toxic game culture. these kinds of systems tend to be light on critical reflection and self-examination, which is precisely why accounting for the history of balance and meritocracies in video games is so crucial. by critically examining the structures and systems that support contemporary gaming practices and culture we can better understand how game culture has gotten to this point and what can be done to change it. recent social and technical innovations, from the growth of an independent gaming scene to the development of additional platforms for gaming, offer opportunities to rethink what games are and how they work. however, those changes need to be informed by careful, critical study of key elements of game design. a comprehensive critique of balance, leveling and how they combine to form a meritocratic framework for video games is a foundational part of how to resist and reappropriate video game structures and systems. references alexander, l. (2010). gdc online: bartle on muds 'soul', design 'must want to say something'. gamasutra. retrieved from http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/30877/gdc_online_bartle_on_muds_soul_design_must_w ant_to_say_something.php hayes, c. (2012). twilight of the elites: america after meritocracy (kindle ed.): crown. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 paul, c. a. (2012). wordplay and the discourse of video games: analyzing words, design, and play. new york: routledge. sirlin. (2008, 17 october). balancing multiplayer games, part 1: definitions retrieved 4 november, 2010, from http://www.sirlin.net/articles/balancing-multiplayer-games-part-1-definitions.html young, m. (1994). the rise of the meritocracy. new brunswick, nj: transaction publishers. young, m. (2001, 28 june). down with meritocracy retrieved 11 december, 2012, from http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. (authors may use any license they prefer, or none at all.) microsoft word stevenson.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): stevenson, m. (2014, october 22-24). cyberspace, the social graph and newmedia rupture talk. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. cyberspace, the social graph and new media rupturetalk michael stevenson university of groningen from visions of virtual community in the early 1990s to more recent claims that social media are instilling a culture of openness, the web has long been associated with radical change in the media landscape. what should be made of these narratives of rupture in new media culture? this paper explores what new media rupture-talk is and what it does, taking the concepts of cyberspace and the social graph as its central examples. rupture-talk, or speculative, far-reaching accounts of a technology’s significance and purpose, has attended the web’s development from its initial phase of rapid growth in 1993 and surrounded networked computing technology for much longer. from the late 1980s, a new crop of technology magazines such as wired and mondo 2000 took the hype around the internet and related technologies to new heights, presenting these as a revolutionary force in the transformation of culture, economics and politics. by the mid1990s, though, their belief in the progressive potential of digital technology drew mounting criticism from scholars and commentators such as vivian sobchack (1994), mark dery (1996), richard barbrook and andy cameron (1995). the critics pointed out the flaws in assuming universal effects, given that the digital elite had little to say about the millions of people with no access to the latest computers and gadgets. they questioned the politics of the magazines’ fascination with escaping into virtual worlds, and argued that their high-tech bohemianism provided cover for silicon valley’s real interest in filling its pockets. in recent years, such criticism of new media rupture-talk found a new voice in evgeny morozov (2011; 2013), whose polemical essays and books take aim at a new generation of pundits and ceos guilty of what he calls “internetcentrism” and technological “solutionism.” at issue is not whether rupture-talk should be taken seriously, but how. for critics like morozov, rupture-talk consists of exaggerated claims, and should be taken seriously for how it blinds policy-makers, the media and academics to the actual conditions that produce a technology and its real effects. however, what if such rupture-talk is not approached as something that exists outside of the web’s development a shiny surface obscuring a mess of cultural, economic and technological factors but something essential to understanding this history? this paper outlines a theoretical framework for understanding new media rupture-talk in terms of its properties and functions, and argues for a web history that accounts more fully for how the medium has been imagined. rupture-talk, i argue, is not simply hyperbolic, but also imaginative, historical and situated. likewise, rupture-talk does not only obscure and restrict, but also serves to inscribe particular meanings and practices, as well as animate key actors in the web’s development. to illustrate these properties and functions, i will draw on examples surrounding the concepts of cyberspace and the social graph. while these two concepts point to two very different understandings of the web’s significance, they share a common lineage in digital utopianism (turner, 2006). they also show resemblances in how they help organize web design and development, connecting a vision of the web’s exceptional character to social, technological and commercial developments. while the framework highlights similarities in the content and form of these narratives, it is flexible enough to capture the very different historical conditions and outcomes that they represent. in sum, this paper seeks to contribute to critical approaches in web history, but with a counter-intuitive starting point: rather than consider the concepts and narratives of digital utopianism as hype that obscures actual developments, such “rupture-talk” is instead studied as an important site and source of continuity with the past (hecht, 2002). references barbrook, richard, and andy cameron. “the californian ideology.” science as culture 26, no. 6 (1996): 1. dery, mark. escape velocity: cyberculture at the end of the century. new york: grove press, 1996. hecht, gabrielle. “rupture-talk in the nuclear age: conjugating colonial power in africa.” social studies of science 32, no. 5–6 (2002): 691–727. morozov, evgeny. the net delusion: the dark side of internet freedom. new york: publicaffairs, 2011. ———. to save everything, click here: the folly of technological solutionism. new york: publicaffairs, 2013. sobchack, vivian. “reading mondo 2000.” in flame wars: the discourse of cyberculture, edited by mark dery, 11–28. durham: duke university press, 1994. turner, fred. from counterculture to cyberculture: stewart brand, the whole earth network, and the rise of digital utopianism. chicago: university of chicago press, 2006. microsoft word liao.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): liao, t.c.l., (2014, october 22-24). augmented or admented reality? the boundary contest over marketing applications and the future of an emerging technology. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. augmented or admented reality? the boundary contest over marketing applications and the future of an emerging technology tony chung li liao temple university technologies that can overlay 3d, real-time data over one’s field of vision have long been a fascination in engineering. in recent years, with the introduction of augmented reality (ar) browsers and a variety of ar games on mobile smartphones and tablets, users are now able to install these applications, hold up a consumer device, and access augmented content on top of physical space. these mobile applications have made ar widely available and economically viable for public use after decades of laboratory research and development (azuma, 1997; zhou, duh, billinghurst, 2008). as the ar industry is making broad sweeping claims about transforming multiple industries such as medicine, education, manufacturing, law enforcement, and entertainment, the trajectory ar technology takes will likely be shaped by early advocates and developers of the technology and the particular futures they advance (brown, rappert, & webster, 2000; van lente & rip, 1998). from this perspective, the visions that actors hold for ar technology and the promises they choose to advance are an important unit of analysis, because they are “‘constitutive’ or ‘performative’ in attracting the interest of necessary allies (various actors in innovation networks, investors, regulatory actors, users, etc.) and in defining roles and in building mutually binding obligations and agendas.” (borup et al., 2006; p. 289). in the early contestation over technologies, the social construction of technology approach argues that there can be many different outcomes depending on social intersections and intergroup negotiations, a concept known as ‘interpretive flexibility’ (bijker, 1995; pinch & bijker, 1987). depending on whose perspective is accounted for, these relevant social groups draw boundaries around the community and have different interests and resources to bring to bear on the design of the technology (pinch & bijker, 1987). the corpus of data consists of fieldnotes from participant observation at 10 ar conferences spanning industry, standards, and academia. additionally i was able to conduct 46 qualitative interviews with people working in the ar community. i qualitatively coded the data for emergent themes and characteristics of futures (michael, 2000). the findings report that a rift is forming in the ar community over the future direction the technology takes. while nominally all of the members support ar technology, they have markedly different visions for what the technology should be used for and what the technology will look like. one segment of the ar community is actively building partnerships with marketing/advertising firms. another coalition is opposing them and attempting to distance ar from marketing. emerging technologies often face the challenge of obtaining resources. with ar, it is the marketing/advertising industry that has been a key source of funding for the burgeoning ar industry. at the conferences, the exhibition halls are filled with marketers demoing their latest ar ad campaign. at the conferences, many representatives from multinational corporations are present (e.g. lego, ikea, disney, and mercedez-benz). industry reports estimate that around 68% of developer investment in the ar market comes from retail and marketing, and that proportion is expected to continue (figure 1). (figure 1 – abi research, 2013) the benefits of ar for marketing were tested in an industry report which compared a 2 dimensional ad versus an ar ad. the study found that 74% people say they would consider buying the toy in the ar condition versus 45% in the 2d condition. people also reported a willingness to pay more for an ar product, 5.99 pounds compared to 7.99 pounds when shown an ar ad. these figures are major reasons that ar has been enthusiastically embraced by many marketing and advertising firms. the advertising vision for ar, however, is one in which the technology is simply a means of achieving clearly defined goals within marketing – gaining attention, increasing affinity, motivating transaction, fulfilling needs, and securing loyalty. at the same time, that partnership is pushing the technology in a particular direction because ar stakeholders begin to mold ar toward the marketing problem space. this has implications for the design and the capabilities of the technology. one instance of this is in the computer vision algorithms that recognize real world objects. computer vision technology was first able to recognize 2d images, but at the request of major beverage companies the computer vision providers added recognition for 3d shapes, specifically cylindrical objects so the technology could recognize bottles and cans. this is one example of how the marketing problem space is having a direct effect on the developers of technology, their conscious decision making process for technological features, and the technology itself. a separate group is trying to redraw the boundaries of the community, because they are worried that the marketing emphasis might affect people’s perception of ar technology. first, on the content side, the marketing orientation ensures that much of the augmented content that exists is advertising, which could drive users away. secondly, the opposition group worries that the marketing applications portray the technology in the most mundane way, one that does not fully demonstrate the potential of ar and potentially crowds out other associations (e.g. medicine, education). lastly these actors are concerned that the marketing uses open ar up to criticisms of overload/distraction, privacy violations, and safety. due to these overarching concerns, this group has been distancing ar from marketing by advancing dystopian views of ar advertising, using the technology to re-appropriate brand logos, and pushing for legal recourse. this study argues that in its early stages, marketing is closely partnered with the ar industry and actively shaping the development of the technology through direct funding and by imposing their problems and constraints on ar developers. simultaneously, a group of stakeholders are worried about the association and attempting to break that relationship. it remains to be seen how this contestation will play out, but these findings have significant implications for ar technology itself while also contributing to our understanding of the individual motivations, economic pressures, and institutional constraints that need to be negotiated in the emerging technology space. references azuma, r. (1997). a survey of augmented reality. presence, 6(4), 355-385. bijker, w. e. (1995). of bicycles, bakelites, and bulbs: toward a theory of sociotechnical change. cambridge, ma: mit press. brown, n., rappert, b. & webster, a. (eds) (2000) contested futures: a sociology of prospective technoscience, aldershot: ashgate. borup, m., brown, n., konrad, k. & van lente, h. (2006) the sociology of expectations in science and technology. technology analysis & strategic management 18: 285–298. michael, m. (2000). futures of the present: from performativity to prehension. in n. brown, b. rappert, & a. webster (eds.), contested futures: a sociology of prospective technoscience, 21-39. aldershot: ashgate. pinch, t.j. & bijker, w.e. (1987). the social construction of facts and artifacts: or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other. in w. bijker, t. hughes, and t. pinch (eds.) the social construction of technological systems: new directions in the sociology and history of technology, 17-50. cambridge, ma: mit press. van lente, h. & rip, a. (1998). “the rise of membrane technology: from rhetorics to social reality,” social studies of science, vol. 28, no. 2, 221-254. zhou, f., duh, h.b., & billinghurst, m. (2008). "trends in augmented reality tracking, interaction and display: a review of ten years of ismar," in proc. of ismar ‘08 (pp. 193-202). cambridge, uk. microsoft word mcguire-imagining and enabling the collaborative commons-imagining and enabling the collaborative commons.doc selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): mcguire, m. (2015, october 21-24). imagining and enabling the collaborative commons. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. imagining and enabling the collaborative commons mark mcguire university of otago abstract the increasing popularity of personal, mobile digital technologies social networks have given rise to what rainie and wellman refer to as “networked individualism” (2012). participants engage with others in multiple networks through the ongoing circulation of content that jenkins, ford and green describe as spreadable media (2013). rifkin documents the development of a “collaborative commons” that he believes is taking shape as a result of this connecting and sharing over digital networks (2014). however, the networks that enable this activity can be private or public, and, like the content they carry, they can be open or closed. in this paper, i examine and compare the work of open advocates from the fields of education and design to see how the ideas and projects from one area can inform the other, and to discover underlying principles and approaches that can support, strengthen and enlarge the collaborative commons. keywords: social media, collaboration, open education, open design, open source, creative commons introduction during the 1990s, predictions about the possible social effects of the developing internet were largely positive. michael hauben coined the term “netizens” to refer to anyone willing to work in a voluntary, cooperative, and collective fashion to create a global online community for the benefit of the world at large (hauben 1997). howard rheingold promoted the internet as an alternative public site for constructive social interaction and community building (1993, 62). mark poster argued that it offered the possibility of greater emancipation and new kinds of group formation (1995, 93-94). more recently, the growth and power of private social media platforms has led others to argue that online sociality has become salable (dijck 2013), the internet is as likely to distract as empower us (morozov 2012) and capitalism is turning the internet against democracy (mcchesney 2013). a small but growing activist position insists that the future of civic society in an increasingly mediated world is in the hands of the social agitators who choose to participate in its description and construction. as benedict anderson points out, all communities are imagined, and that it is the style in which they are imagined that distinguishes one from another (1991, 6). a shared, online commons, like any community, has to be imagined before it can be created. jeremy rifkin predicts the development of a “collaborative commons” characterized by “prosumers”, open-source sharing, access without ownership, networks rather than markets, and the provision of products and education at near zero marginal cost (rifkin 2014, 135). in networked, rainie and wellman explain that the rise of the internet, social networks and mobile technologies have resulted in media experiences that are personal, multiuser, multitasking and multithreaded. they refer to this new social operating system as “networked individualism” (2012, 11-12). in spreadable media (2013), jenkins et al. argue that our networked culture is characterized by instantaneous, informal communication through multiple channels in which the audience participates in the creation of value and meaning, and in the circulation of media and messages. “spreadability” is about the flow of ideas in easy-to share-formats, rather than the attraction of individuals to a specific site. it invites open-ended participation and assumes that work that is seen to have value will circulate through whatever channels are available (jenkins, ford, and green 2013, 6-7). education and design are two areas that could be dramatically transformed by a shift to more participatory, collaborative and networked approaches. open advocates working in these areas have argued for a considered and strategic use of new technologies to empower individuals and contribute to the public good. their manifestos, projects and reflections are indications of a change that is underway, and they provide examples that others can learn from. they demonstrate how online networking can enable individuals to connect to one another and form communities of practice in ways that can circumvent dominant social media platforms that can limit the freedom to associate and share work. open education coursera, udacity, edx and other private massive open online course (mooc) platforms attracted much attention when they launched in 2012 (marginson 2012). although they may be disruptive in terms of their business and organizational models, earlier, less well-known experiments incorporated more open, connected, distributed strategies and challenged mainstream pedagogical models. in 2008, george siemens, stephen downes and david cormier coordinated cck08 (connectivism and connective knowledge), an open course based on “connectivism”, a “learning theory for the digital age” advanced by siemens. learning, he proposes, is about “connecting specialized information sets” and navigating the resulting network of connections between information and individuals (siemens 2005). downes describes a pedagogy of learning that promotes “engagement and activity within an authentic learning community — a community of practitioners, where people practice the discipline, rather than merely just talk about it” (downes 2010). an important side effect of this process, according to cormier, is “the building of a distributed knowledge base on the net” (2012). open courses that follow this distributed, collaborative model (often referred to as cmoocs, in reference the connectivist approach) continue to be offered by a variety of individuals and institutions. open education practitioners make effective use of networks and networking to collaborate and share their ideas freely and openly with others. jim groom, an instructional technologist and adjunct professor at the university of mary washington in fredericksburg, virginia, is an influential advocate of open practices. he teaches ds106, a course on digital storytelling that takes a networked, community-based approach to online learning. the course, which is free to non-credit participants, helps students to use contemporary media to build an online identity and narrate their experiences. they are expected to “openly frame this process and interact with one another throughout the course as well as engage and interact with the world beyond” (“about ds106” 2014). the course makes use of connected blogs, an internet radio station, a collection of assignments created by participants, a twitter community and other social media sites. groom highlights the importance of what he refers to as the “3 faces of open”: “open platforms, open pedagogy, and open community” (groom 2014). these three characteristics of a truly open course are similar to the features found in open design projects. open design in everyone is a designer in the age of social media, gerritzen and lovink argue that technical, social and economic developments in the internet age have enabled an “aesthetic movement of collaborism” and a democratisation of design (gerritzen 2010). similarly, in open design now: why design cannot remain exclusive, van abel et al. argue that, like open data, open design is developing out of a culture of sharing and reciprocity in which designers and end users connect directly, without the need for intermediate organizations, retailers, publishers or marketers (van abel et al. 2011). powerful digital tools, expert advice and high quality work are now easily (and often freely) available online. the ability to quickly and conveniently upload comments and content allows anyone to participate in online conversations, activities and spaces, regardless of professional title or status. the case studies that they present as examples include openideo.com, a platform for engaging in large-scale design collaboration, fairphone, an open, peer-to-peer, co-creation approach to designing a mobile phone that embodies social values, and designsmash, a company that organizes collaborative design sessions to create products that are sold under a creative commons licence. in steal like an artist, austin kleon provides his secret formula for becoming known: “do good work and share it with people” (kleon 2012, 79). he points out that it is not necessary to wait until a work is fully formed, polished, and presentable before sharing it online. by opening up your process, you can learn from others as you create. “the internet can be more than just a resting place to publish your finished ideas”, he says, “it can also be an incubator for developing work that you haven’t yet started” (82). kleon believes that his “newspaper blackout” poetry would not have led to a book, if he had not shared his experiments online without worrying about whether it had an audience. he reports that sharing is a two-way exchange, and the feedback he gets from his followers is crucial in determining how to proceed (kleon 2013). in show you work, kleon argues that, although we usually credit individuals for significant achievements, creativity is always, to some degree, the result of collaboration. he cites brian eno’s notion of the “scenius”, an “ecology of talent” composed of a group of creative, connected individuals that can give rise to great work (kleon 2014, 10-11). brad frost, a web designer, writer and speaker based in pittsburgh, pennsylvania, is another strong advocate for opening up the design process and sharing process work online. in a tedx talk titled “creative exhaust, the power of being open by default”, he argues that sharing your work openly before it is finished forces designers to articulate and justify their decisions and enables them to benefit from the feedback and advice offered by the broader community. people who go online to discuss the design problems they are facing are able to meet others who are dealing with similar challenges and work collaboratively to find solutions that each can apply to their individual context (frost 2014). he explains that “designing in the open” can involve the sharing of artifacts (sketches, prototypes, mockups), bits and pieces (previews, trailers), stories (techniques, lessons learned), alphas (the current state of a project) and tools (code on github and similar sites). the web, he says, helps to facilitates “the very things that society needs in order to flourish: openness, communication and collaboration,” and his message to other designers is to “share what you know” (frost 2014). conclusions new technologies and the forms of communication and social organization that they enable have the potential to transform society for the better, in keeping with the optimistic hopes in the early days of the internet. however, they can also be used to increase the speed and efficiency of a culture that encourages individualism, unsustainable consumerism, inequity and political apathy. by using open platforms to offer free access to courses supported by an open pedagogy and that include the use and creation of open resources, educators are reimagining and reinventing teaching and learning for a connected world. similarly, open design practitioners advocate the use of open networks to share work with others and to collaborate in the creation of solutions and artifacts that can then be published with an open licence. open advocates in both domains realize that learning and designing can be more efficient, effective, socially engaged and empowering when using, and contributing to, open networks. by articulating their reasons for working in the open, and by their examples, they are helping to create a shared idea of what a truly open collaborative commons might look like online, and they are demonstrating how it can be realized. references “about ds106.” 2014. [website]. university of mary washington accessed march 1 2015. http://ds106.us/about/. anderson, benedict. 1991. imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. revised and extended ed. london: verso. cormier, dave. 2012. “what's a mooc?” [video]. youtube, last modified december 8 accessed july 5 2014. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew3gmgqczqc. dijck, josé van. 2013. the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. new york, n.y.: oxford university press. downes, stephen. 2010. “the role of the educator.” may 12. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-downes/the-role-of-theeducator_b_790937.html. frost, brad. 2014. “creative exhaust, the power of being open by default.” [website]. youtube, last modified june 3 2014 accessed august 29 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rw9vtrn6ou. gerritzen, mieke. 2010. everyone is a designer in the age of social media. edited by geert lovink and mieke gerritzen: bis publishers. groom, jim. 2014. “open is as open does.” [website]. jim groom, last modified february 22 2014 accessed march 1 2015. http://bavatuesdays.com/open-is-as-opendoes/. hauben, michael f. 1997. “the netizens and community networks.” [web site]. cmc magazine accessed july 20 2015. http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1997/feb/hauben.html. jenkins, henry, sam ford, and joshua green. 2013. spreadable media: creating value and meaning in a networked culture. new york, ny.: new york university. kleon, austin. 2012. steal like an artist. new york, ny: workman publishing company, inc. kleon, austin. 2013. “questions and answers (my interview with chase jarvis).” [video]. austin kleon, last modified october 1 accessed july 20 2015. http://austinkleon.com/2013/10/01/questions-and-answers-my-interview-with-chasejarvis/. kleon, austin. 2014. show your work. new york, ny: workman publishing co., inc. marginson, simon. 2012. “yes, mooc is the global higher education game changer.” [website]. university world news, last modified august 12 accessed july 20 2015. http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=2012080915084470. mcchesney, robert w. 2013. digital disconnect: how capitalism is turning the internet against democracy. new york, n.y.: the new press. morozov, evgeny. 2012. the net delusion: the dark side of internet freedom new york, ny: publicaffairs. poster, mark. 1995. the second media age. cambridge, uk: polity press. rainie, lee, and barry wellman. 2012. networked: the new social operating system. cambridge, mass.: the mit press. rheingold, howard. 1993. the virtual community: homesteading on the electronic frontier. new york, ny: harperperennial. rifkin, jeremy. 2014. the zero marginal cost society: the internet of things, the collaborative commons, and the eclipse of capitalism new york, n. y.: palgrave macmillan. siemens, george. 2005. connectivism: a learning theory for the digital age. international journal of instructional technology and distance learning 2 (1). available from http://www.itdl.org/journal/jan_05/jan_05.pdf. van abel, bas, lucas evers, roel klaassen, and peter troxler. 2011. open design now: why design cannot remain exclusive: bis publishers. available from http://opendesignnow.org/. microsoft word abidin.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): abidin, c. (2014, october 22-24). privacy for profit: commodifying privacy in lifestyle blogging. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. privacy for profit: commodifying privacy in lifestyle blogging crystal abidin university of western australia commercial lifestyle bloggers in singapore publicize their personal lives on blogs and social media, using their lifestyles as a vehicle to advertise goods and services. in this paper, i look at young singaporean women bloggers in the ‘lifestyle’ genre who engage with readers by performing a blog ‘persona’ (abidin & thompson 2012) that is created for their business, and distinct from their real identities1. this persona is premised upon sharing selected aspects of their lives that are usually personal and publically inaccessible. therefore, privacy becomes a commodity that is manipulated and performed to advance their careers. through a processual analysis of how bloggers manipulate privacy throughout their careers, i analyze progress from lesser-known ‘low-status’ bloggers to well-known ‘highstatus’ bloggers. at low-status, privacy is thought as a necessary sacrifice for career growth until it is distinguished as ‘persona’ privacy and ‘real identity’ privacy. at midstatus, persona privacy is a calibrated performance to increase readership. at highstatus, all privacy becomes a privilege with intrinsic value as it entices readers. the data was collected during anthropological fieldwork between december 2011 and june 2013. bloggers were interviewed in person, and their blog and social media enterprises observed. i also used a blog and various social media platforms to interact with bloggers, and gathered with them regularly in person. this paper, however, focuses only on blogs and analyzes notions of privacy specific to these informants. pseudonyms are used. low-status in the early stages, bloggers have not yet developed persona nor distinguished it from real identities. they conceptualize privacy as a personal quality based on their real identities, and desire to preserve it. however, success in the commercial blogging 1 elsewhere i have discussed ‘persona’ as a facet of bloggers’ identities, specifically enacted for blogging businesses. it is distinct from personal, non-commercial identities that i term ‘real identities’. both persona and real identity can be enacted across virtual and physical spaces, and are not defined as online or offline phenomena. industry is measured by the volume of one’s blog traffic; higher traffic translates into greater potential earning power. therefore, bloggers struggle between preserving their privacy but settling for low readership, or sacrificing their privacy and acquiring high readership. low-status blogger, belinda, who has 1,200 daily blog views, is unwilling to sacrifice privacy. she perceives 5,000 daily blog views as a ‘breaking point’ at which she will lose privacy. belinda has stalled her career by intentionally remaining “low profile”, and only blogs about things she feels “will not attract too much attention”. in contrast, irene, who blogs about her underage sex to 30,000 viewers daily, feels she no longer “owns privacy”. she attributes this not to the subject matter of her blogposts, but to her extensive popularity in the blogosphere. a high-status blogger, irene deems this a “trade off” for her career. however, trading off between privacy and readership is confined primarily to early stages of careers when bloggers have low-status. as they distinguish persona from real identities, this insecurity diminishes because privacy is conceptualized as two distinctive layers: one for the persona, and one for the real identity. therefore, persona privacy is sacrificed while real identity eventually remains in tact. mid-status after developing a blog persona, mid-status bloggers are concerned with increasing their readership quickly. many capture attention by turning usually private events into a public performance. privacy is manipulated into a public staging, in order to captivate an audience ‘in search of spectacles’ (kitzmann 2004). as the most taboo, sex captures the largest audience. ‘leaked’ sex videos, ‘staged’ domestic violence, and breakup ‘tell-all’ exposés are intentionally produced to bait attention. yasmine states on her blog that her ‘leaked’ sex video “needed the chance to get your attention and sink in”. like many bloggers, she intentionally stages intimate moments from her private life for voyeuristic consumption as a business strategy. mid-status bloggers worry about nuclear family members reading their blogs when they are ‘staging privacy’. since bloggers are generally comfortable with personal friends and romantic partners reading their blogs, the insecurity is not because readers know bloggers ‘in real life’. rather, nuclear family members are regarded as holding intimate knowledge of a blogger’s most private real identity, and their presence thus potentially threatens the congruence of the narratives bloggers construct for their persona (daniel & knudsen 1995). for instance, christine was “pretty okay” about blogging her “private life” until her older brother found her blog. he disagreed with some of her selfpresentation and began to police her blog content, causing her much frustration. belinda, however, “feels safe” because her mother is “not computer savvy” and unlikely to read her blog. the presence of family and their intimate knowledge means bloggers have less freedom to ‘stage privacy’ without being ‘exposed’. for established bloggers, however, family becomes less of a concern; they no longer need to ‘stage privacy’ to sustain readers’ attention. high-status once bloggers have captured a sizable audience and become successful, withholding information about their private lives acquires the same value as publicizing it. this is because the mystique over what is not displayed in their persona makes readers curious; the less revealed, the more enticed readers are. ellen notes that allison can “afford to be private about her life now [because] she is more successful”. while allison used to publish raw pictures about life “behind-thescenes”, her blogposts are now infrequent and more polished. on her social media feeds, readers leave hundreds of comments asking about her relationship. yvonne remarks that high-status bloggers do not need to “push themselves all the time, [because] people will still want to know about [them]”. she sees high-status bloggers as “classy bloggers”, because they no longer blog about distasteful topics, unlike their low and mid-status colleagues. hence for high-status bloggers, privacy no longer needs to be staged since withholding information has intrinsic value. it is crucial to emphasize that bloggers also pride themselves as being ‘ordinary people’; they are accessible to readers, and more relatable than mainstream celebrities (turner 2010). bloggers cannot lose this status because it jeopardizes their credibility. therefore it is paramount that high-status bloggers carefully negotiate a balance between revealing their private lives to attract readers, and withholding some of it to entice and create anticipation. conclusion for these lifestyle bloggers, privacy is no longer personal seclusion in which one is free from public attention. rather, it is manipulated into a commodity for profitable gain from low-status to high-status careers. privacy evolves from a personal good sacrificed for career progression, to being distinguished into persona and real identity privacies. then, it is staged to lure readers while family is excluded for threatening the persona’s congruence. finally, privacy becomes a privilege when withholding information is valuable to entice readers, but this has to be done in moderation to sustain the accessibility of blog personas. references abidin, crystal, and eric c. thompson. (2012). ‘buymylife.com: cyber-femininities and commercial intimacy in blogshops’. women’s studies international forum 35(6):467477. daniel, e. valentine, and john chr. knudsen. (1995). mistrusting refugees. university of california press: berkeley kitzmann, andreas. (2004). saved from oblivion: documenting the daily form diaries to web cams. p. lang: new york. turner, graeme. (2010). ordinary people and the media: the demotic turn. sage: los angeles. microsoft word oreglia.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): oreglia, e. (2014, october 22-24). going online at the margins: how to become (and remain) an internet user. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. going online at the margins: how to become (and remain) an internet user elisa oreglia nanyang technological university the debate over the digital divide has moved on from the binary distinction between the haves and the have-nots of its early days to a more nuanced discourse on issues of unequal access (gunkel, 2003), digital divides and social capital (chen, 2013), skills and usage (dijk & hacker, 2003; van deursen & van dijk, 2010), and on gradations of digital inclusion (dimaggio, hargittai, celeste, & shafer, 2004; livingstone & helsper, 2007). despite a general agreement that ‘digital continuum’ rather than ‘digital divide’ is a more fruitful way to understand different uses (or lack of use) of ict, not much attention has been paid to how, concretely, people at the margins of the digital world go from being non-users to being stable users of information and communication technologies. this paper draws from a year-long ethnography of ict use in rural china to argue that people at the margins of chinese modernization and of ict use—farmers and older rural residents, in particular women—need the time and opportunities to build an image of themselves as ict users. in particular, there must be three elements in place for this kind of users to incorporate ict in their daily lives. the first is exposure (which is here considered as separate from access) to the technological artifact. the second is access to people who facilitate learning not only how to use ict, but also what can it be used for. the third is a direct connection with daily lives and interests. to illuminate these three elements and show how they all need to be preset at once in order for unlikely users of ict to incorporate ict in their lives, i focus on three types of non-users: those who are excluded from access for a variety of reasons, and have to rely on intermediaries; those who learn how to use ict, but lose their primary reasons for being engaged with it, and stop using it; and those who explicitly refuse ict (or specific tools/applications) because they contradict strongly held beliefs. i look particularly at the role that gender plays in the use of ict: older rural women, and sometimes even young female migrants living in beijing, often dismiss computers as something for males, or anyway educated and “technically-minded” people. in the countryside “going online” was widely considered an activity for either educated people “finding information” or students at school who should have also been “looking for sources” but instead squandered their time playing games and watching movies. but in reality, many of these women do use the internet, directly or through intermediaries. what they do on computers is often described in terms of activities that resembled their daily, familiar life: “i play cards, except that i do so on a screen with people i don't know;” “i click on the screen as my son taught me and can watch television programs when i want rather than when they are shown;” “i can see my grandson on the screen and talk to him, it’s like a television except that there is my family instead of actors,” etc. when asked directly, many of these people deny being internet users, or using their mobile phone differently than the landline, i.e. doing anything other than making and receiving calls. close observation reveals that they are keen users of the internet, but are not always aware of being so, or have a different take on what the internet and ict are for than mainstream users. understanding these different perspective on ict through the lens of mediated and dependent use, interrupted use, and non-use at the margins, can help recast the discourse on the digital divide in a way that takes more into consideration how marginalized populations (the have-nots, in the traditional framing of the debate) see the internet, how they understand its potential, and what they want from it. even nuanced discussions of the digital divide often imply a goal to reach—the access and the skills to use ict as the haves do. expressions such as “information have-less” (a term originally coined by cartier, castells, and qiu to describe chinese rural-to-urban migrant workers, urban laid-off workers, retired people and youth who use low-end ict such as cheap mobile phones and internet cafés (cartier, castells, & qiu, 2005; qiu, 2007) provide a memorable metaphor that draws attention to understudied users who do not fully participate in the information society because of their low income and sometimes low education, but who have agency and adapt the tools they can afford to their needs. while catchy, the term “information have-less” conflates the ict object with the information that can be accessed through it, and hides both the differences that exist among marginalized populations in their ability to use ict, not only to access it, and the specificity of use by those who might all be at the margins of the urban, developed, and educated world, but who live in diverse circumstances and have diverse goals. ultimately, the term blackboxes the dynamics of information-seeking and ict use among elite and marginalized populations, because it considers the latter to have the same, but simply downgraded, information and ict needs as urban people. the locus of knowledge is always elsewhere, the term still implies comparison with the “information have-more” and their use of ict, and their information-seeking activities. references cartier, c., castells, m., & qiu, j. l. (2005). the information have-less: inequality, mobility, and translocal networks in chinese cities. studies in comparative international development, 40(2), 9–34. chen, w. (2013). the implications of social capital for the digital divides in america. the information society, 29(1), 13–25. doi:10.1080/01972243.2012.739265 dijk, j. van, & hacker, k. (2003). the digital divide as a complex and dynamic phenomenon, 315–326. doi:10.1080/01972240390227895 dimaggio, p., hargittai, e., celeste, c., & shafer, s. (2004). digital inequality: from unequal access to differentiated use. in k. neckerman (ed.), social inequality (pp. 355–400). new york: russell sage foundation. gunkel, d. j. (2003). second thoughts: toward a critique of the digital divide. new media & society, 5(4), 499–522. doi:10.1177/146144480354003 livingstone, s., & helsper, e. (2007). gradations in digital inclusion: children, young people and the digital divide. new media & society, 9(4), 671–696. doi:10.1177/1461444807080335 qiu, j. l. (2007). the accidental accomplishment of little smart: understanding the emergence of a working-class ict. new media & society, 9(6), 903–923. doi:10.1177/1461444807082639 van deursen, a., & van dijk, j. (2010). internet skills and the digital divide. new media & society, 13(6), 893–911. doi:10.1177/1461444810386774 microsoft word 779-528-1-pb.docx selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 information and consent amy adele hasinoff university of colorado denver usa amy.hasinoff@gmail.com abstract in 1999, a technology ceo stated: “you have zero privacy. get over it.” is it true that privacy is impossible online? by socializing on the internet and on mobile devices, users deliberately and inadvertently generate personal artifacts and data. while people have significant interests in protecting their private personal information online, the existing rhetorical and legal tools to do so are limited. the solution proposed here is to adopt a standard that explicit consent should be necessary for the production, distribution, or possession of private media content and information. given the quantity of personal information created and stored in digital formats, scholars, policymakers, technology developers, and users alike need to develop social norms and technological mechanisms for obtaining meaningful and informed consent before circulating private information. keywords consent; privacy; sexting; sexuality introduction there an interesting contradiction in how we think about the capacity and right to control information. on one hand, there is broad legal and public support for the control of commercially produced information and media. from intellectual property and patent laws to copyright infringement lawsuits, the law and the public seem to generally support companies’ rights to own and control the information and media content they create. at the same time, users are told that “information wants to be free,” “privacy is dead,” and that giving up control over their information and personal content is necessary for the success and progress of the information economy. the public benefit of unrestricted information flows has been ceaselessly promoted without careful consideration of who and what suffers. most forms of data mining are legal, governments engage in sophisticated surveillance programs, and public records that were once difficult to access are now freely available online. the common idea that personal information is impossible to control is particularly problematic when it allows legal and educational authorities to punish teens who create sexual images of themselves while completely ignoring malicious forwarders (hasinoff, forthcoming). by using the internet and mobile devices, people deliberately and inadvertently generate personal artifacts and data that can be persistent, easily replicable, and even searchable (boyd, 2008). given the quantity of personal information created and stored in digital formats, and the privacy concerns related to the technological ease of its circulation, scholars, policymakers, technology developers, and users alike need to think more seriously about consent in digital media. as nissenbaum (2011) points out, it is vital to find ways to adapt existing offline norms for privacy for online contexts. while most people have significant interests in protecting their private personal information against commercial exploitation, the existing rhetorical and legal tools to do so are limited. while copyright and crime prevention are often seen as legitimate reasons to restrict the flow of information, others, such as privacy and cultural preservation, are weakly and inconsistently protected (nissenbaum, 1998; seeger, 2005; solove, 2007; weintraub & yung, 2009). an explicit consent standard the solution proposed here is to adopt a standard that explicit consent should be necessary for the production, distribution, or possession of private media content and information. this can help address selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 the complexities of privacy in digital media and challenge the idea that information should always be free. this new norm asks people to actively seek consent if they want to distribute another person’s private media or information. this has a range of implications, from suggesting that one should always ask for permission before distributing a private photo of someone else, to requiring that websites that aggregate and re-sell personal information should obtain informed and meaningful consent from users. there are legal changes that could come out of the explicit consent model, but the idea of building consent into models of private media circulation is most powerful as a new social norm that can help transfer existing ideas about offline privacy to an online context. this explicit consent model is built on the feminist debates about sexual consent in the late 1980s and early 1990s. in response to the social and legal failures to adequately address non-stranger sexual violence, these feminist reformers advocated changing the way people think about sexual consent. scholars including estrich (1987), pineau (1989), and remick (1993) argue that assumptions and nonverbal cues are insufficient to determine consent in sexual activity. they point out that prosecutors working with conventional understandings of rape must prove that the complainant resisted; in some states this resistance must still be physical, while in others the victim is required to have verbally resisted (little, 2005). in contrast, according to the affirmative consent model, rape is defined by the absence of a clear and voluntary “yes.” that is, these reformers argue that the default assumption should be “no,” and the sexual initiator should always obtain clearly articulated and freely given consent. as kasubhai (1997) points out, there are already strict standards of informed, voluntary consent in non-sexual situations of potential personal intrusion, such as medical procedures and warrantless searches, in which neither silence nor agreeing under duress constitute valid consent. there are already many privacy norms for offline social interactions that can provide a meaningful guide for how to interpret what content should be considered private. nissenbaum (2011) argues that privacy is indeed possible online by pointing out that the internet is best conceived as a new place to enact a variety of mostly pre-existing social and commercial relations, from banking and shopping to conducting research and chatting with friends. for example, a commercially produced sexual image is not intended to be private; thus a person buying pornography would not need to obtain consent. however, since people usually view their sexual acts as private, they can likely also recognize that others’ personal sexual images will be typically private as well. while further study of the expectations of privacy and understandings of consent in digital media is necessary, albury and crawford (2012) argue that young people are already developing norms and ethics of sexting that respect privacy and consent. consider that before the internet and mobile phones, people created and selectively shared personal sexually explicit letters and photos, using a polaroid camera, for example, and would be able to reasonably expect that person to refrain from showing them to parents, friends, and future employers. mobile phones make it far easier to violate privacy by digitally forwarding such content, but nissenbaum’s argument stipulates that the old information norms can and should remain when social behaviors become mediated and digitized. the power of an explicit consent standard is that it clearly establishes that the default is that it is not acceptable to distribute private information. requiring explicit consent means that the burden to obtain consent is shifted onto the person who wants to produce, distribute, or possess private content. in such cases, some formal or informal agreement or strong precedent would be necessary to establish consent for the circulation of private content or information. currently, the default settings on social media applications often assume that people want to share all their personal information, which has the greatest impact on the least skilled users (boyd & hargittai, 2010). incorporating an explicit consent model at the level of design (cavoukian, 2009) could better serve users’ interests. for example, while mobile phone users can typically forward any image they receive, an explicit consent standard might suggest that this feature should be disabled by default. in this case, the user who creates an image could decide to either keep this privacy restriction or to mark the image as public and thus possible to forward by anyone who receives it. such user-controlled drm could help enact consent norms. conclusion selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 it is vital to challenge the assumptions that everything digital is public and everything public can be publicized. people routinely trust their lovers, doctors, and loan officers with personal information that they expect will not be distributed; an explicit consent standard is a way to extend existing privacy norms to digital media. we need logics of information protection and restriction that account for the range of reasons people may have to limit the free flow of their personal information and content, including privacy, cultural preservation, and personal safety. surrendering all the decisions about the circulation of private information to market forces will not adequately protect our privacy. acknowledgments the author thanks jonathan sterne, carrie rentschler, darin barney, ian kerr, ummni khan, lara karaian, tamara shepherd, dylan mulvin, anna candido, li cornfeld, max ritts, and the reviewers for insightful comments on various versions of this paper. this work was made possible by funding from the social sciences and humanities research council of canada. references albury, k., & crawford, k. (2012). sexting, consent and young people's ethics: beyond megan's story. continuum, 26(3), 463-473. boyd, d. (2008). why youth (heart) social network sites: the role of networked publics in teenage social life. in d. buckingham (ed.), youth, identity, and digital media (pp. 119–142). cambridge, ma: mit press. boyd, d., & hargittai, e. (2010). facebook privacy settings: who cares? first monday, 15(8). cavoukian, a. (2009). privacy by design … take the challenge. available from http://www.privacybydesign.ca/content/uploads/2010/03/privacybydesignbook.pdf estrich, s. (1987). real rape. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. hasinoff, a. a. (forthcoming). how to think about sexting. champaign, il: university of illinois press. kasubhai, m. t. (1997). destabilizing power in rape: why consent theory in rape law is turned on its head wisconsin women's law journal, 11, 37-74. little, n. j. (2005). from no means no to only yes means yes: the rational results of an affirmative consent standard in rape law. vanderbilt law review, 58, 1321-1364. nissenbaum, h. (1998). protecting privacy in an information age: the problem of privacy in public. law and philosophy, 17, 559-596. nissenbaum, h. (2011). a contextual approach to privacy online. dædalus, the journal of the american academy of arts & sciences, 140(4), 32-48. pineau, l. (1989). date rape: a feminist analysis. law and philosophy, 8, 217-243. remick, l. a. (1993). read her lips: an argument for a verbal consent standard in rape. university of pennsylvania law review, 141, 1103-1151. seeger, a. (2005). who got left out of the property grab again? oral traditions, indigenous rights, and valuable old knowledge. in r. a. ghosh (ed.), code: collaborative ownership and the digital economy (pp. 75-84). cambridge, mass.: mit press. solove, d. j. (2007). the future of reputation: gossip, rumor, and privacy on the internet. new haven: yale university press. weintraub, a. n., & yung, b. (eds.) (2009). music and cultural rights. chicago: university of illinois press license this article is ©2013 amy adele hasinoff, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. microsoft word stanfill-conceptualizing copyrights-conceptualizing copyrights.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 conceptualizing copy/rights: internet fandom, cultural norms, and the law the history of media fandom has been one of both early technological adoption and eager intellectual property reuse. accordingly, fandom is a productive site at which to examine how contemporary culture imagines the internet, intellectual property law, and creative practice. conceptualizing copy/rights approaches these questions using a productively diverse set of analytic frameworks, case studies, and national contexts. as a whole, the panel provides a deeply interdisciplinary look at how beliefs about the law impact the design and use of technology. the conceptualizing copy/rights papers identify how people’s beliefs about technology shape their engagement with the law and, in particular, how the practices of fan communities are shaped by their beliefs about technology and intellectual property. the first and second papers conduct in-depth analysis of specific communities and their norms and practices, while the third and fourth provide a complementary focus on how media industries interface with fans in legal and technological ways. in this way, the panel provides a comprehensive look at the conjuncture between fandom, the internet, and the law. fandoms are one key contemporary arena where everyday internet users, individuals without legal training, engage with the complexities of copyright. moreover, fandoms are sites where media industries enact their interpretations of the law and work to shape digital behavior to facilitate their own interest in profit. crucially, the legal framework of intellectual property, established in the print era, is increasingly maladapted to the realities of media creation and distribution in the internet era. this mismatch between the law and production technologies then collides with community ethical norms and media industry goals to produce a variety of intriguing social phenomena. significantly, community and industry priorities often find themselves at odds with both the law and what is technologically possible. while fandom as a cultural practice long predates networked computing, internet-based platforms have become vital to fandom in the contemporary era. these technologies are now central to the ways fans and industries negotiate creative practice and the law. all of these papers pose important questions regarding the use of commercialized platforms by current fan communities. in particular, “selling unauthorized digital remix works in the u.s. and japan” and “the internet intellectual property imaginary” discuss how the intersection of economics and the law plays a key role in the design of technological platforms. these papers outline ways that the affordances selected for inclusion in these platforms can be influenced more by industry beliefs about the law and ethics than they are by the law itself. another key contribution of these papers is their examination of the ways pre-internet power structures and cultural practices are adapting to the internet, much as the law itself is having to be reworked and rethought due to technological change. thus, conceptualizing copy/rights addresses how offline or preexisting socioeconomic inequality impacts access. “imagined policies” addresses the longstanding practices of fan communities and the ways their creative practices have adapted to new production technologies and digital networks. “fandom problems” identifies the different networks of fans that find themselves united under the label of “fandom” and their often competing norms and interests. providing a helpful sense of scope or historical change, these papers demonstrate the ways older fan norms and practices are more or less suited to shifting technological and legal realities. overall, the research presented on this panel examines the ways that fans and media industries make sense of networked technologies and the law, as well as how fans negotiate their relationships with technology, intellectual property, and their communities. conceptualizing copy/rights will therefore provide important insight into one key aspect of the contemporary internet imaginary. imagined policies: intellectual property and social norms in fan communities casey fiesler university of colorado when it comes to copyright, most people know that it is not okay to download a copyrighted song, but what about incorporating a piece of that song into a video? what if that video also includes clips from a television show? can you draw pictures of the characters from that show, or write stories about them? beyond simple piracy, copyright on the internet gets complicated fast. supreme court justice story once referred to intellectual property as the “metaphysics of law,” and yet, with the explosion of usergenerated content online, everyday internet users are engaging with the complexity of copyright on a regular basis. a large part of this engagement involves appropriation and remix, everything from music mash-ups to remix videos to photo-manipulation memes. however, though these types of creativity have become widespread in an internetenabled world, fan communities have had appropriation at the core of their creative practices since long before the first networked computers. as a result, complex social norms surrounding content re-use have evolved and become highly ingrained in online fan communities. the question of whether remix is copyright infringement is not a simple one, largely because the exception to copyright law that potentially governs this activity, fair use, is decided on a case-by-case basis. though there are many examples in case law of remixes that judges have ruled to be fair use, the doctrine involves a great deal of uncertainty. factors that go into determining whether a work is fair use include whether the use is commercial, how transformative it is, how much of the original is used, and whether it harms the market for the original, among others. however, there is no bright line rule about how to weigh these factors in making a determination. legal scholars have long argued that fanworks are fair use (tushnet 1996), and remix creators might make educated guesses based on their understanding of fair use factors and past cases, but there is rarely 100% certainty. due to this uncertainty, fair use can be difficult to understand. my past research has uncovered patterns of misconceptions about fair use among fanwork creators. though many participants had a sense of the exceptions to copyright law that allowed for their types of creative work, many of their intuitions about fair use did not track completely to the law. instead, ideas about fair use seemed to stem from ethical heuristics and social norms. other researchers have also shown that intuitions about content re-use might rely on norms and community constructions of law (marshall and shipman 2013). given these findings, my current research focuses on understanding these social norms and how they function to enforce behavior in fan communities online. fan communities are often longstanding and tight knit, and their social norms tend to be strong. unlike online communities that grow up around certain technologies like wikipedia or youtube, fandoms have migrated with technology, losing and gaining members but maintaining core values and ideas. for example, one of my interview participants has been writing and sharing fan fiction since the mid 1990s, first on usenet, then yahoo groups, livejournal, and, more recently, tumblr. many fan communities have been in place long before the internet—sharing fan fiction in zines printed and passed out at conventions, and creating fanvids using vcrs (jenkins 1992). these communities have also long had a precarious relationship with publishers and copyright. as anne jamison (2013) notes in fic: why fanfiction is taking over the world, “thou shalt not profit from fanworks,” is a founding principle of fandom and a “sacred and inviolate” rule. in contexts in which the law is gray, strong social norms can fill in the gaps, often proving more effective as enforcement mechanisms than law (ellickson 1986). this happens often in the case of ever-changing internet laws and policies. fan communities are a good example of this phenomenon, exacting sometimes-severe consequences for individuals breaking social norms. one example is fan “hypervigilance” about policing plagiarism, with some communities maintaining lists of known plagiarizers (busse and farley 2013). in my research into the role of copyright in online creative communities, i have combined insights gained from personal interviews with analysis of trace data, including content analysis of hundreds of public conversations about copyright on online forums devoted to remix and fanworks. drawing from what i learned from studying these online communities, i conducted further interviews with fan creators. i uncovered nuanced social norms in fan communities relating to copyright—some of which track to the law, and some of which don’t. these rules as constructed and interpreted by fan creators serve to regulate behavior around issues such as commercialization, permission, and attribution. additionally, these norms are sometimes in direct conflict with law or with the policy of a particular online community. however, i argue that norms play an even more important role than law or policy in regulating fans’ behavior with respect to copyright. based on these findings, i encourage remix communities to formalize norms, particularly in the context of online spaces. for example, the organization for transformative works, a non-profit dedicated to preserving and defending fanworks, formed following online discussions about the policies of existing online spaces for fans (jamison 2013), and now has a seat at the table in u.s. copyright policymaking (tushnet 2014). community constructions of policy can provide roadmaps for creators negotiating the uncertainty of fair use. additionally, since social norms are often even more important than official policy in copyright decision-making and behavior, online community designers and maintainers should seek an understanding of these norms and when possible incorporate them into design and policy decisions. selected bibliography busse, kristina, and shannon farley. 2013. “remixing the remix: fannish appropriation and the limits of unauthorized use.” m/c journal: a journal of media and culture 16 (4). ellickson, robert c. 1986. “of coase and cattle: dispute resolution among neighbors in shasta county.” stanford law review 38: 623–87. fiesler, casey, and amy bruckman. 2014. “remixers’ understandings of fair use online.” in proceedings of the 17th acm conference on computer supported cooperative work & social computing. baltimore, my. fiesler, casey, jessica feuston, and amy bruckman. 2015. “understanding copyright in online creative communities.” in proceedings of the 18th acm conference on computer supported cooperative work & social computing. vancouver, bc, canada. jamison, anne. 2013. fic: why fanfiction is taking over the world. dallas, tx: smart pop. jenkins, henry. 1992. textual poachers: television fans and participatory culture. routledge. marshall, catherine c., and frank m. shipman. 2013. “saving , reusing, and remixing web video: using attitudes and practices to reveal social norms.” in proceedings of the 22nd international conference on world wide web. rio de janiero, brazil. tushnet, rebecca. 1996. “legal fictions: copyright, fan fiction, and a new common law.” loyola la entertainment law journal 17: 651-86. tushnet, rebecca. 2014. “‘i’m a lawyer, not an ethnographer, jim’: textual poachers and fair use.” the journal of fandom studies 2 (1): 21–30. fandom problems: networks of practice, digital publishing, and the dilemmas of fans going pro katherine e. morrissey rochester institute of technology in may 2013, amazon announced kindle worlds, an e-publishing service promising to “enable any writer to create fan fiction… and earn royalties” (amazon media room 2013). the announcement revealed that amazon had secured licensing deals with several major media franchises. kindle worlds was a new approach to a much older product: the tie-in novel. in may 2014, simon & schuster announced a six-figure deal with popular wattpad author anna todd (reid 2014). todd’s novel after, a work of one direction fan fiction with over one billion views, would be gently cleansed of references to one direction and published as an “original” work of fiction. parallels between after and fifty shades of grey (also a popular work of fan fiction republished and sold as original fiction) were clear. simon & schuster sought to duplicate the success of fifty shades and to see if popular fan fiction could be mined and used to generate bestsellers. fan reactions to these two events reveal complicated and contradictory attitudes towards the monetization of fan work. after the announcement of kindle worlds, fans responded with concern and outright confusion. if these were just novelizations, why bother to call it fan fiction? what was amazon’s agenda? to many, kindle worlds suggested a larger industry effort to redefine fan fiction and take greater control of fan practices. reaction to after was more contradictory. many one direction fans were outraged, accusing todd of doing harm to the members of one direction, exploiting real lives for personal pleasure and profit. however, the reaction in fan fiction communities was quieter. kindle worlds provoked daily dot articles on the controversy, fierce debates between fans on tumblr, and cautionary coverage from the organization for transformative works. however, after seemed to be met with shrugs and framed as a predictable outcome to the success of fifty shades. this paper examines three recent events in publishing: the success of fifty shades of grey, the announcement of kindle worlds, and the october 2014 release of after. the paper traces the different reactions internet-based fan communities had to each event and uses these reactions to explore what it means to be a fan or to participate in fan networks today. many fans once viewed their non-commercial status as an essential element of fan communities, practices, and work. by refusing to profit, fans argued they were simultaneously protecting themselves from industry lawyers, respecting media producers, maintaining spaces for media critique, and building communities of practice free from market constraints. this older non-profit ethos stands in sharp contrast to the daily realities of contemporary fans. today’s fans rely heavily on monetized web-spaces like tumblr and twitter to connect with each other. fan interests and web habits are tracked by these sites and sold back to media franchises, used to refine digital outreach and product marketing strategies. on social networking sites, barriers between fan and industry spaces are also falling away. fans regularly interact with actors and showrunners on social networking sites and are encouraged to participate in fan fiction, art, or vidding contests organized by media producers. these practices blur the line between social interaction and marketing strategy, as well as graying the division between sanctioned and unsanctioned fan practices. within this shifting environment, many contemporary fans defend the legality of fan practices and claim ownership over their creative work. as fans assert their rights to own and profit from their labor, they also directly challenge fan cultures’ older non-profit ethos, redefining what it means to be a fan or a member of a fandom today. the variety of fan reactions to kindle worlds, fifty shades or after offer a window into these clashing notions of fandom. significantly, these reactions also indicate how problematic terms like “fandom,” and “fans” can be. fandoms have traditionally been framed as coherent communities united by a common interest. in reality, the term “fandom” represents something far more complex, artificial, and transitory. online, fandom has become a user interest, a tag or keyterm used clump individuals together and, in the process, forge connections between other long-standing networks of practice, temporarily connecting, for example, pop-music fans and a variety of digital writing communities under the umbrella of the one direction fandom. using comparative case studies, this paper outlines ways that the idea of fandom is being reshaped by the commercialization of fan work. i connect these shifts to the actual social networking spaces fans use to interact, arguing that the monetization of the web plays a critical role in the increasing commercialization of fan work and networks. identifying the different stakeholders involved in this process, i argue that this is not simply a fight between industry and audiences for control of fandoms. instead, this represents a more complicated jostling of interests, as different generations of fans, different communities of practice, and different industry stakeholders find themselves linked by the label of “fandom.” deconstructing the term fandom, allows us to better understand the different interests at play in fan communities today, the larger implications of fans “going pro,” and challenges scholars to examine their own role in defining what it means to be a fan today. selected bibliography amazon media room. 2013. “amazon publishing introduces ‘kindle worlds’...” amazon.com. may 22. http://phx.corporateir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsarticle&id=1823219. bury, rhiannon. 2005. cyberspaces of their own: female fandoms online. new york: peter lang. coppa, francesca, and rebecca tushnet. 2011. “how to suppress women’s remix.” camera obscura 26 (77): 131–38. doi:10.1215/02705346-1301566. de kosnik, abigail. 2009. “should fan fiction be free?” cinema journal 48 (4): 118– 24. hellekson, karen. 2009. “a fannish field of value: online fan gift culture.” cinema journal 48 (4): 113–18. jenkins, henry, sam ford, and joshua green. 2013. spreadable media: creating value and meaning in a networked culture. new york: nyu press. lothian, alexis. 2009. “living in a den of thieves: fan video and digital challenges to ownership.” cinema journal 48 (4): 130–36. doi:10.1353/cj.0.0152. reid, calvin. 2014. “s&s acquires anna todd’s ‘after’ series from wattpad.” publishersweekly.com. may 27. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/bytopic/industry-news/book-deals/article/62475-s-s-acquires-anna-todd-s-afterseries-from-wattpad.html. stein, louisa, and kristina busse. 2009. “limit play: fan authorship between source text, intertext, and context.” popular communication 7 (4): 192–207. doi:10.1080/15405700903177545. tushnet, rebecca. 2007. “my fair ladies: sex, gender, and fair use in copyright.” american university journal of gender, social policy & the law 15 (2): 273–304. watson, jeff. 2010. “fandom squared: web 2.0 and fannish production.” transformative works and cultures 5 (0). doi:10.3983/twc.v5i0.218. zubernis, lynn s., and katherine larsen. 2012. fandom at the crossroads: celebration, shame and fan/producer relationships. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing. the internet intellectual property imaginary: the case of fandom mel stanfill purdue university united states intellectual property regulation intends to “encourage the progress of science and the useful arts,” under the logic that the nation benefits from innovation, which is incentivized through short-term, government-granted monopolies on otherwise uncontrollable ideas. intellectual property law seeks to serve the public good, yet both old and new media industries exert control that supports their interests in profit at the expense of the people’s interest in a rich public domain. moreover, the legal framework of ip is a print-age model ill-suited for the digital era’s wild proliferation of copies and copyability that precludes scarcity, pointing to a contemporary disjuncture between socio-technical systems and their governance. digital technologies that make all information comparable and sharing increasingly frictionless are inherently at cross purposes to ip protection that seeks to delimit appropriate circulation of information. the balance to date has been tipped toward more laws and greater enforcement— foreclosing forms of ip use that could be seen as creative in the name of preventing “theft” or “piracy.” fans of television and film have long engaged in the creative reuse of ip, from fan fiction to making videos to producing replicas of costumes, but such practices have proliferated as digital technologies make existing forms of production far easier, enable new ones, and lower barriers to distribution. divisions between production and consumption diminish in the internet era, letting more people be media makers and not just audiences. according to advocates, the capacity to create digital objects is usefully understood as a new freedom of speech or an updated public sphere. this is often framed as democratic and egalitarian by comparison to top-down or hierarchical production. however, the most optimistic accounts neglect how—as was true of earlier forms of speech, creativity, and public participation—access is unevenly distributed, and offline inequalities follow us online. more pessimistic approaches caution against romanticizing fair use, pointing to long histories of perfectly legal appropriation of ip from marginalized populations such as african americans and indigenous peoples. contemporary, digitally-enabled fan activity in the u.s. often exists in a legal gray area: some consider it copyright infringement, others term it fair use, and others still classify it as free advertising. actual case law is scarce, for legal disputes between industry and fans don’t tend to go to trial. however, in some sense the law itself matters less than the way fans and industry understand the law’s impact on technology and communicate to each other about and through it. the great innovation of code and other laws of cyberspace was lessig’s (1999) call to look beyond laws or even norms to take seriously the way code impacted what could be done with technology. there has subsequently been a drive to look at both how things that are legally possible are being designed out of technologies and how things that are technologically possible are being rendered illegal. however, norms have dropped out of the conversation, though these social-cultural formations are well known to impact how technologies are produced and used. this paper attends to how we imagine technologies, the law, and fandom as a cultural practice and how these beliefs impact actual and potential uses of the internet by fans. it examines the media industry’s use of law and legalistic language to define “appropriate” fan use of the internet. through means such as website terms of service (a legally binding contract), the media industry forbids things copyright law allows and that are technologically possible. i argue that the law continues to operate as prohibition or repression even as the overall trend in the digital era is toward encouraging participation. i examine these issues by analyzing a large archive of web interfaces and terms of service for websites made by industry for their fans, industry worker statements about fans, and representations of fans for how people conceptualize the intersection of ip and technology in the realm of fandom. using a method i call “big reading,” i employ qualitative data analysis software to aggregate hundreds of analyses of specific demonstrations of beliefs about fans, the internet, and ip to produce a broad discourse analysis. big reading shares characteristics of what franco moretti has called distant reading. as moretti (2005, p. 4) notes in his discussion of literature, “a field this large cannot be understood by stitching together spare bits of knowledge about individual cases, because it isn't a sum of individual cases: it's a collective system, that should be grasped as such, as a whole." distant reading is “grasping as a whole,” “where distance is however not an obstacle but a specific form of knowledge; fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection” and their “shapes, relations, structures" (moretti, 2005, p. 1). close reading, by contrast, is a method that originates in the literary tradition and examines particular social artifacts for the beliefs animate them. big reading zooms in and out between these scales of analysis and allows two interventions. first, this project has unusual breadth for qualitative work, reading hundreds of cases alongside one another rather than focusing on a few case studies, permitting a social scientific examination of large-scale processes. second, the project’s depth allows a full accounting for complexity and nuance through humanistic inquiry. fans have historically been both tech early adopters and eager ip reusers, making fandom a key site at which to examine the internet ip imaginary. ultimately this paper is an interdisciplinary attempt to give insight into larger questions about how beliefs about law shape technology and beliefs about technology shape law. selected bibliography benkler, yochai. 2007. the wealth of networks: how social production transforms markets and freedom. new haven, ct: yale university press. boyd, danah, and kate crawford. 2012. “critical questions for big data: provocations for a cultural, technological and scholarly phenomenon.” information, communication & society 15 (5): 662–79. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2012.678878. chun, wendy hui kyong. 2011. “crisis, crisis, crisis, or sovereignty and networks.” theory, culture & society 28 (6): 91–112. doi:10.1177/0263276411418490. coleman, gabriella. 2009. “code is speech: legal tinkering, expertise, and protest among free and open source software developers.” cultural anthropology 24 (3): 420–54. fiesler, casey. 2007. “everything i need to know i learned from fandom: how existing social norms can help shape the next generation of user-generated content.” vanderbilt journal of entertainment and technology law 10: 729–62. gillespie, tarleton. 2007. wired shut: copyright and the shape of digital culture. cambridge: massachusetts institute of technology press. jenkins, henry. 2006. convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york, ny: new york university press. kelty, christopher m. 2008. two bits: the cultural significance of free software. durham, nc: duke university press. lessig, lawrence. 2008. remix: making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. new york: penguin. litman, jessica. 2001. digital copyright. amherst, n.y: prometheus books. moretti, franco. 2005. graphs, maps, trees: abstract models for a literary history. london, uk: verso. postigo, hector. 2012. “cultural production and the digital rights movement.” information, communication & society 15 (8): 1165–85. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2011.568509. tushnet, rebecca. 2004. “copy this essay: how fair use doctrine harms free speech and how copying serves it.” the yale law journal 114 (3): 535–90. doi:10.2307/4135692. vaidhyanathan, siva. 2003. copyrights and copywrongs: the rise of intellectual property and how it threatens creativity. new york, ny: new york university press. microsoft word 856-600-1-pb.doc queer travels: networked society, digitizing queerness and political surveillance abstract queer epistemology confronts and critiques not only the regimes of heteronormativity, but also other kinds of hierarchies and normative regimes. in line with such genealogy, this paper aims to examine how queer politics as a site of global connection contrast with the lived experiences of queer people in homophobic society, especially in the era of globalization with the proliferation of information and communication technologies. key words networked society; queer politics; political surveillance introduction the gay liberation movement began in the 1970s, after the stonewall riots in new york. the movement was identity-based and focused on the agency of the individual. queer theory, in contrast, highlights the structures of inequality, especially hetero-normativity and calls for unified resistance to hegemonic practice especially persecution, marginalization, and discrimination against non-conforming genders and sexualities. in fear of a queer planet: queer politics and social theory (1993), michael warner marked a new milestone for queer theorizing or queer politics. moving beyond sexual identification, warner and many queer theorists in the united states suggest looking at queer politics as a political strategy that encompasses “a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal.”1 in so doing, queer epistemology confronts and critiques not only the regimes of heteronormativity, but also other kinds of hierarchies and normative regimes that expand to a “broader demand for justice and freedom.”2 in line with such genealogy, this paper aims to examine how queer politics as a site of global connection contrast with the lived experiences of queer people in homophobic society, especially in the era of globalization with the proliferation of information and communication technologies. this paper examines one specific place and space, kuala lumpur, the capital city of malaysia and a newly emerging “global city”3 in southeast asia. this paper focuses on kuala lumpur because, beginning in the 1970s, international trade began to expand, linking malaysiato other industrialized nation-states. the 1990s marked the emergence of digital technologies and internet. the two conditions, material and communicative set the stage for the production of a digital space where queer politics could flourish. the first part of this paper explores the infrastructures of the “global city” of kuala lumpur by drawing upon saskia sassen’s analysis of global connectivity4 and manuel castells’ thesis on the rise of network society,5 i begin this section with a historical review of two important social processes that i believe have largely constituted the character of kuala lumpur in the past three decades, namely, the rise of the “global city” and the development of informational global economy. specifically, this section will examine the implications of the political and economic development from the export-oriented 1 warner, michael (1993) fear of a queer planet: queer politics and social theory, minnesota press. p. xxvi 2 ibid. p.x. 3 i am drawing on sassen saskia’s concept of global city. see sassen, saskia (2001 [1991]) the global city: new york, london, tokyo. princeton and oxford: princeton university press. 4 sassen, saskia (2002) “locating cities on global circuits.” in environment and urbanization, vol 14, no. 1, april 2002. p. 13-22. 5 castells, manuel (2000, 2010) the rise of the network society, 2nd edition, malden and oxford: wileyblackwell. 1 industries that began in the 1970s through the launching of the multimedia super corridor project in the 1990s that spearheaded malaysia’s digital age. the second part of the paper focuses on the parallels between newly emerging queer6 politics and increased political surveillance by emerging state-led political islamists. the rise of islamic fundamentalism that began in malaysia in the late 1970s led to increased moral policing starting in the 1990s. this section looks at how openness and policing simultaneously occurred in the digital spaces under such social political situations and how this social phenomena has complicated the question of (in)visibility and queerness in digital space. in particular, i explore the ways queer politics are being digitized in the internet in malaysia from using anonymous listserves for forum and community building in the 1990s to using identity-based social media for sexual rights campaigns in the new millennium. therefore, this section of the paper explores how digital spaces make activism possible, and at the same time, examines the implications of political homophobia on malaysian queers in the digital space and urban space of malaysia. this paper focuses on the “it gets better malaysia” project and the sexual rights festival ‘seksualiti merdeka’ to demonstrate what are and what could be open structures in malaysia’s queer activism and to expose the caveats that accompany these structures. in my conclusion, i link the major arguments in the whole paper, especially the growing global connections and the social transformations that take place in kuala lumpur’s queer community. by using tom boellstorff’s “dubbing culture”7 as a theoretical metaphor, i contrast developing queer identities with emerging islamic fundamentalism. boellstorff’s theory of “dubbing culture” describes the ways that ideologically separated groups may find mutual accommodation and communication, but may be subject to what elizabeth povinelli called “incommensurability”, the inevitable distorted translations between “two systems of thought, language and culture” (boellstorff 2007:139). in this case, both the islamic authorities and the malaysian muslim queer community share the islamic paradigm, however transgender practice and same-sex desires spark a deeply unconmensurable space between official religious interpretations by ulamas and personal struggles with sexual identity. specifically, this section addresses the intersection of religion, sexual desires, national belonging and identity policing in today’s globalized world of malaysia. part 1: the infrastructure of the global city global connectivity and networked society: the rise of the global city and the informational global economy the term “mini dragon” was coined in 1995 to describe the rising southeast asian economies, newly industrialized economies (nih), who participation in global capitalism rose dramatically in the last decades of the 20th century. malaysia’s designation as a mini dragon came as a result of its active engagement with foreign investments. kuala lumpur, as the capital city of malaysia, emerged as a “global city”, which saskia sassen defines as major cities that “have emerged as a strategic site not only for global capital but also for the transnationalization of labor and the formation of transnational identities.” the concurrent rise of the internet throughout this economic growth provokes a host of questions for the interplay of malaysia’s islamic politics, economics and communication. 6 the term “queer” is used in this paper to refer to people of non-conforming gender and sexuality, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, intersex, questioning (lgbtiq). 7 boellstorff, tom (2003) “dubbing culture: indonesian gay and lesbi subjectivities and ethnography in an already globalized world.” in american ehnologies, volume 30. number 2, may 2003. 2 what are the historical components of malaysia’s rise in the international economic arena? how has malaysia’s participation in the informational global economy transformed malaysia’s population as producers and uses of information and communication technology (ict)? how has the construction of the multimedia super corridor project affected the development of networking communities? in answering these questions, this section lays the context for understanding malaysia’s position as an opening, plural society and a global participant economically, socially, and politically. malaysia is a former british colony in southeast asia. it is a federal constitutional monarchy, consists of thirteen states and three federal territories. geographically, the country is separated by the south china sea into peninsular malaysia and two states of sarawak and sabah on the island of borneo. peninsular malaysia stretched between thailand and singapore. it was known as malaya during colonial time, and the malay kingdoms were present in the area from the 15th century. malaya became subject to the british empire in the 18th century with british territories, known as the straits settlements were established in singapore, malacca and penang followed by the malay kingdoms becoming british protectorates. while malaya gained its independence from the british on august 31, 1957, malaysia was established when sabah, sarawak and singapore joined the federation of malaya on september 16, 1963. less than two years later in 1965, singapore was expelled from the federation. since independence, malaysia has had one of the best economic records in asia with gdp growing an average 6.5% for almost fifty years followed by rapid industrialization and the large amount of foreign direct investment (fdi). kuala lumpur has been the capital city of malaysia since its independence in 1957. in 1999, the seat of government shifted from kuala lumpur to putrajaya, a planned city located twenty-five kilometers from kuala lumpur while the seat of the king and parliament and the country’s commercial and financial center remains in kuala lumpur. as discussed in manuel castells’s the rise of network society, these “new industrial spaces” are largely an outcome of “the technological and organizational ability to separate the production process in different locations while reintegrating its unity through telecommunications linkages, and micro-electronics-based precision and flexibility in the fabrication of components.” (2010:417)8 mapping the locational pattern of american electronic firms constituted by the international spatial division of labor from the beginnings of such offshore industries around the mid-1960s, castells specifically highlighted malaysia and singapore in southeast asia as pioneers for attracting the movement of factories of american electronics corporations. (2010:418) the emergence of these peripheralized localities was parallel to the rise of global cities in the 1960s, as argued by saskia sassen (2001), a result of the rapid internationalization of the financial industry, enabled by the expansion of information and communication technologies.9 apart from the low production costs in the region, the united states of america’s active investment in southeast asia’s economic development since the mid-1960s was largely motivated by their foreign policies following the korean war “as a way of stabilizing the region politically.” (sassen 1998:40)10 as early as the 1970s, the emergence of free trade zones in malaysia has constituted what saskia sassen called the peripheralized localities, as part of the 8 see castells, manuel (2010) the rise of the network society. ma, oxford and west sussex: wileyblackwell. p. 418. 9 saskia sassen argued that the current form of globalization that is spearheaded by the expansion of an information-based economy and internationalization of financial industry mainly took place within cosmopolitan settings. her theorization of the global cities by examining new york, london and tokyo provides rich insights into the study of globalization and networked technology. see sassen, saskia (2001 [1991]) the global city: new york, london, tokyo. princeton and oxford: princeton university press. 10 see saskia sassen (1998) globalization and its discontents: essays on the new mobility of people and money. new york: the new press. 3 strategic networks of global cities (2004:650).11 these industrial spaces mainly cater to exportoriented industries, especially for electronic-based information and technology industries. nonetheless, the rapid expansion of export-oriented industrialization in malaysia since the 1970s is neither merely a localized phenomenon resulting from the global corporate strategies as an effect of economic globalization of information and communication technologies, nor the effect of the regional political interests of the united states. in worlding cities: asian experiments and the art of being global, ong12 challenged the hegemonic approach to interrogating capitalism as a diffuse and abstract form of economic globalization. (ong 2011:7) saskia sassen’s concept of “global cities,” as discussed in the global city: new york, london, tokyo (2001[1991]) and global networks: linked cities (2002),13 highlights the crucial role played by information and communication technologies for the expansion of global capitalism, especially in supporting and intensifying the emergence of global financial institutions that are located in global cities. aihwa ong pointed out that in the last decade, the world’s ten fastest-growing cities were found in the asian region. (ong 2011:7) drawing on foucault’s idea that the city is a milieu, ong posited spatializing practices as “the gathering and the dispersing of circulating ideas, forms, and techniques, are constitutive of emerging globalized spaces.” (2011:10) ong argued that “spatializing practices thus form the urban as a problem-space in which a cast of disparate actors – the state, capitalists, ngos, foreign experts, and ordinary people – define what is problematic, uncertain, or in need of mediation, and then go about solving these now-identified problems with urban planning, class politics, and human capital. the starting point of analysis is thus not how singular principles define city environment, but rather the array of problem-solving and spatializing practices that are in play in shaping an urban field.” (ong 2011: 10) the launching of the multimedia super corridor project as an obvious signpost, in 1997, under the former prime minister tun dr. mahathir mohamed’s administration, the government of malaysia designated a vast territory next to the capital city for the multimedia super corridor project. through this project, it was aiming to leapfrog malaysia from a developing country into the information and knowledge age by attracting both the local and foreign multinational corporations (mncs) to collaborate with government agencies for production and consumption of multimedia technologies. the multimedia super corridor project intended to build a new physical as well as electronic city connected by webs of fiber optics, integrating telematic applications to create a social information infrastructure towards a new digital age, stretching from the kuala lumpur city center (klcc) to the kuala lumpur international airport (klia), including the new administrative cities of putrajaya and cyberjaya. however, in the past fifteen years, the multimedia super corridor project has not proceed as it had been imagined, but it has effectively transformed the infrastructure of the capital city, kuala lumpur by linking it with two newly built administrative cities, putrajaya and cyberjaya, opened up new information and communication structure with the introduction of digital technologies. since internet technology became popular in the country in 1998, both nonurban and urban residents have started to incorporate internet technology into their lives. cyberspace 11 saskia sassen contended the emergence of peripheralized localities “enabled a politics of places on global networks,” see sassen, saskia (2004) “local actors in global politics.” in current sociology, july 2004, vol. 52(4):649-670, london, thousand oaks, ca and new delhi: sage publications. p.650. 12 see ong, aihwa (2011) “introduction: the act of being global.” in roy, ananya and aihwa ong (ed) (2011) worlding cities: asian experiments and the art of being global. wiley blackwell. 13 see saskia sassen (ed) (2002) global networks: linked cities. new york: routledge. 4 has been imagined as an important social space for networking communities. the percentage of population that uses the internet has increased from 10% in 1999 to 57.6% in 2009 (world bank’s world development indicators). according to the foreign trade statistics 2008,14 malaysia is listed as the fifteenthtrading partner of the united states in terms of imports. in 2011, at the asia-pacific economic co-operation (apec) summit in hawaii (november 21, 2011), the president of united states, barack obama, announced a plan to create a trans-pacific free trade zone following on the introduction of trans-pacific partnership by the united states government as a regional strategy to counter the economic growth of china.15 part i i: digitizing queerness: the emergence of queer identity, queer politics in the digital space, and moral policing of digitized spaces and state-led political islam politicization of homosexuality: postcolonial politics and islam insurgency since the decade of nineties, queer desires have been framed under the typology of ‘homosexuality’ and politicized by state leadership in malaysia. it is crucial to conceptualize the demonizing and moral policing of ‘homosexuality’ within a spatial schema. within the spatial structure of malaysian state politics, sexual minorities are fixed in a hegemonic gaze observed by the authority. in a postcolonial context, malaysia started embracing modernization with an ambivalent attitude since the 1970s. interestingly, while the political leadership was looking forward to the progress and modernity of the western countries, at the same time, they always selectively posit certain western values as a threat to local tradition and identity. nationalist and anti-colonial discourses have been widely deployed by leaders in developing countries to demarcate the (invented) boundaries between the western and the national worlds. former prime minister tun dr. mahathir was one of the champions in charting the socalled ‘social ills of the west’ in his anti-imperialism discourses. by propagating the malaysian version of asian values, tun dr. mahathir positioned himself as the moral guardian of the nation-state who took responsibility in disciplining the behaviors and thinking of the people in a nation that were undergoing rapid industrialization and modernization under his administration. selectively, he regarded many transformations in the post-war western societies as the corrupting influence of ‘western values,’ and ‘homosexuality’ was cited as one of corrupting outcomes of these transformations. (mahathir in michael d. barr 2002:43)16 the ‘homosexual’ rights movement and the rediscovery of gay and lesbian history in the north american and european countries in the 1960s prompted him to acknowledge the visibility of ‘homosexuality,’ especially to be threatened by the rights claimed for ‘homosexuality.’ by the 1990s, tun dr. mahathir further condemned ‘homosexuality’ as western neo-imperialism by conflating ‘homosexual’ practice and identity with ‘homosexual’ human rights. indeed, tun dr. mahathir and his administration played a crucial role in politicizing and normalizing heterosexuality under the notion of asian family values. 14 see http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/statistics/highlights/top/top0812yr.html 15 it is reported that 21 apec countries account for 41% of global trade, and they also make up of 40% of the world’s population. currently, there are nine countries that have joined the trans-pacific partnership (tpp), and malaysia is negotiating to join. but, china is not included and has yet expressed interest in joining the tpp. (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-15704358) 16 barr, michael d. 2002. cultural politics and asian values: the tepid war. london and new york: routledge curzon. 5 in a similar vein but with a slightly different emphasis, islam resurgence in the country, promoted by both the government and the opposition, also reverberated with homophobic sentiments by reinforcing heterosexual normalcy. by the 1990s, same-sex sexualities (for men and women) were codified into the muslim legal system with the amendment of the syariah law and hudud. under new regulations, women’s same-sex sexuality is considered a criminal offence and subject to legal actions. consequently, religious departments and the syariah court established this authority and legitimacy by criminalizing muslim women’s same-sex sexual behaviors and relationships. these politicizations of homosexuality not only normalized public space, but also rendered marginalized sexualities to trespassing on the public space and easily targeted for public persecution. queer politics as spatial strategy: public space/sphere, political organization and state politics epistemologically and politically, the issue of visibility is often closely linked to a distinction between the public and the private. in the past decades, the theme “(in)visibility” has been widely articulated and theorized in gay and lesbian liberation identity politics following the critique of sexual repression, in general. most often, visibility is celebrated as public recognition of marginalized sexualities and of the persons who embody such sexual desires; of this history and to spatial territories within each context. ideally the public spaces claimed to demonstrate the potential of the public sphere in which the inhabitants can participate in political organization independent from state intervention. as mitchell explained, (public spaces are) very importantly, spaces for representation. that is, public space is a place within which a political movement can stake out the space that allows it to be seen. in public space, political organizations can represent themselves to a larger population. by claiming space in public, by creating public spaces, social groups themselves become public. (mitchell 1995:115) inevitably, distinctions between the public and the private and the spatial schema of visibility are deeply rooted in political philosophy in the context of the nation-state. as an ideal type, the public (both its political and spatial dimensions) denotes a territory for social, rational, and critical public discourse, and civil society for justice and citizenship (bruce robbins in nancy duncan 1996:128). however, it is crucial to identify carefully the fine line between public space and the public sphere. nancy duncan argued ‘public spaces and public spheres often do not map neatly onto one another.’ (1996:130) in a nation-state that has not yet recognized sexuality as a human right or citizenship right, public space has a tendency to leave sexuality and gender subject to state politics and regulation. within this context, public space tends to be the site of state politics and regulation even intimidating or threatening social space for people who deviate from the heterosexual normaltivity. john d’emilio’s study, sexual politics, sexual communities: the making of a homosexual minority in the united states, 1940-1970 clearly verified this: exposure promised punishment and ostracism. it hovered about gay life as an ever present danger, always reminding homosexual men and women of the need for secrecy and careful management of information about their sexual preferences. coupled with the restrictions that social custom and law placed on public discussion of homosexuality, fear of discovery kept the gay world invisible. (john d’emilio 1983:13) what really intrigues me is d’emilio’s invisibility. even though sexual minorities have access to public space, nonetheless, their incapacity to embody their non-conforming sexuality as part of their self-identity debase their essential sense of right to public space. this ever-present 6 threat of attack constantly reminds them of their position of exteriority, and renders them invisible. in this view, lived experiences of sexual marginalized groups challenge a normative ideal of public space as the public sphere open to all by pointing out how on-site power struggles impinge on the identity and subjectivity of sexual minorities. i would like to explore to what extent of the emergence of the ‘electronic public realm’ in malaysia through internet technology, has facilitated a political and empowering visibility to the queer communities for malaysians. one of the issues pertaining to the emergence of such virtual cities was whether they are able to facilitate ‘electronic democracy’ initiatives that will enable wider social access to the internet and improve relations between citizens, political representatives and public or private service providers. (aurigi 2000:34) digitizing queerness: agency and embodiment in the digital space in general, the lack of open and friendly public spaces for non-conforming desires in malaysia society has made the existence of queer people (lgbtiqs) appear to be invisible in the formal public realm of the country. for instance, women-who-desire-women communities have always been organizing themselves in small groups, but their activities used to be widely publicized within and among their communities only through interpersonal contact and small group organizations. many women who desire women lived their identities within virtual spaces, especially on listserves or websites in the late 1990s that were perceived as safe, and depended on the openness and acceptance of those who associated or participated in those spaces. the subcultures of women who desire women, though growing, kept themselves well away from the hostile public gaze. in 1992, under the pink triangle, a community-based organization that worked on hiv/aids issues, a well-organized women on women (wow) program started to function systematically throughout the 1990s, and was capable of mobilizing a large number of queer women in the capital city, not only creating a safe social space for community building but also enhancing the visibility of women who love women within the community locally and internationally. although on one level politicization of homosexuality in the context of state politics was clearly repressive in the resulting public surveillance and persecution of marginalized sexualities, on the other hand, such oppression also generated a starting point for opposing strategies in the public sphere. with the introduction of internet technologies to urban areas in the 1990s, lesbian’s activities became more visible in the “virtual community.” at the dawn of the new millennium, there were around ten malaysian women-who-love-women websites/webzines publicized on the internet. lesbian websites or webzines have used for community building and consciousness raising by providing a wider national network to acquire information and to exchange opinions on issues related to sexual orientation and gender identity. how did this “virtual community” enhance the collective existence of women who desire women in malaysia with the assumed anonymity of identity in virtual space? how did visibility of this “virtual community” help to create a supportive environment for self-identification and self-assurance? the network initiated by the webzines and mailing lists further enhanced solidarity building by communication and sharing of information among communities. the internet served as additional cultural capital for some of the lesbian communities without public revenues for social mobilization but who had access to the internet in the urban areas in the country. there were more and more gatherings, parties and sports activities organized by lesbian groups with the help of the internet for publicity and sharing of information. public space such as pubs, cafés and restaurants, and sport venues also provided a very important social space for women who desire women in kuala lumpur. both private avenues and the internet offered them various sites for organizing, affirming collective solidarity or, in other 7 words, for empowerment and resistance. as argued by nancy duncan, space can be negotiated on a number of different levels and for different reasons. duncan quotes habermas, “both private and public spaces are heterogeneous and not all space is clearly private or public. space is thus subject to various territorializing and deterritorializing processes whereby local control is fixed, claimed, challenged, forfeited and privatised.” (qtd. in duncan 1996: 129)17 even though there was increased community building among women who love women in kuala lumpur, they were still very heterogeneous. apart from the diverse gender and sexual identifications, class, ethnicity, language and political ideology also influenced their sense of belongingness and affected the issue of access. bamadhaj also cautioned that even though organizing within privatized space protects them from public scrutiny, those who do not have access to the social cultural spaces in urban areas may not feel a sense of personal presence. this in turn perpetuates the small scale organizing and thus their representation in the community as a whole. furthermore, lack of public visibility may also lead to a lack of politicization of their rights as sexually marginalized communities (nadiah bamadhaj 1999).18 to counter the lack of public appearance of queer in malaysia, a sexual rights festival “seksualiti merdeka” emerged in 2008 in kuala lumpur. the sexual rights festival, “seksualiti merdeka”: the discourse of national belonging and human rights seksualiti merdeka (sexuality independence) is a coalition of activists, artists, intellectuals, and non-governmental organizations who aimed to celebrate the human rights of people of diverse gender identities and sexual orientations since 2008. the first festival was organized in conjunction with the independence day of malaysia (august 31) by a small group of gay and lesbians in the capital city of malaysia kuala lumpur in 2008. the co-founder pang khee teik is a member of the malaysia rainbow network, a sexuality rights listserv that was set up in 2003 and affiliated with amnesty international office in malaysia. in that year, pang had just resigned from kakiseni, a malaysian performing arts website, and assumed a new position as the arts program director at the annexe gallery in central market in the downtown capital city kuala lumpur. the first seksualiti merdeka festival with its three-day event had gathered a significant crowd of people of non-conforming genders and sexuality and supporters of sexuality rights. pang’s initial idea was to foster a space by utilizing the location and logistic support of the festive event to allow for talking about sexual diversity and marginalized communities. the festival, with it’s motto in 2008, “if one of us ain’t free, none of us are”, instrumentally brought together artists, writers, academics, researchers, activists and young people who were selfidentified as lgbt or openly supportive of gender and sexuality issues. to remember the right to sexual freedom as malaysian citizens, the event was held on the independence day weekend. as julian lee from monash university malaysia explained, “while celebrating malaysia’s independence from colonialism and reclaiming possession of our own nation, at the annexe gallery that weekend, some malaysians were making the case for the next form of merdeka: the reclaiming of the rightful place of sexual diversity in malaysia and freedom from discrimination and abuse, and towards an accepting, informed and understanding rakyat (people).” (the star 17 duncan, nancy (1996) “renegotiating gender and sexuality in public and private spaces.” in duncan, nancy. ed. bodyspace: destabilizing geographies of gender and sexuality. london and new york: routledge. 18 bamadhaj, nadiah (1999) “the hot potato: sexuality rights advocacy in malaysia.” in saksi, january. 8 online, september 18, 2008)19 while the event drew little attention from the mainstream press, the english daily gave rather fair coverage with interviews, and two chinese papers carried a small article about the event, though there was no reporting in any malay dailies that year. but the event achieved a significant presence in digital space, for example, in the online gay magazine, fridae.com. immediately after the first celebration, participants spontaneously utilized the social network site facebook to continue new social relationships. the availability of social media provided them with another option than the usual listserv. the “seksualiti merdeka” blog and facebook pages were set up concurrently, and in the following year, “seksualiti merdeka” 2009 with the theme “our bodies, our rights” had a more elaborative presence online, its discourse of rights became more apparent, ranging from issues of privacy, moral policing and a human rights approach to sexuality. as declared in their website, “we aim to affirm sexuality rights as a human right, empower individuals and communities of all sexualities, and create platforms for advocacy of sexuality rights.” (seksualitimerdeka.org)20. simultaneously, in that year, “seksualiti merdeka” reached out to allies in civil society, for example, the bar council human rights committee, a well-established hia/aids organization, the pt foundation, a human rights non-governmental organization, suaram, and a few women’s organizations, like kryss, and the women’s candidacy initiative (wci), persatuan kesedaran komuniti selangor (empower), and some other progressive arts groups, like purple lab, matahari books, twenty.one kitchen & bar, and the annexe gallery itself came together to become sponsors for the festival. this political climate indeed provided a enabling environment for seksualiti merdeka to become more coalitional in their outlook. the 2010 seksualiti merdeka with the theme, “we are family!” was officiated by edmund bon, the chairperson of the constitutional law committee at the malaysian bar council, and during the opening ceremony, a speech was delivered by the representative of the united nations in malaysia. on the other hand, datin paduka marina mahathir, the daughter of a homophobic former prime minister, was invited to the festival as a long-time sexual rights supporter and writer even though her father was the first prime minister who openly attributed “homosexuality” to be western decay under his campaign for asian family values. during the festival, marina mahathir reaffirmed the importance of acceptance and celebration of diverse sexualities by saying, “seksualiti merdeka is a much needed frank look at the very core of all us human beings, our sexuality, and the diversity that lies within. we need to accept and then celebrate.”21 in that year, the discourse of sexuality rights had become much more sophisticated with the publication of the review of the human rights commission of malaysia, suhakam – after 9 years22. for the first time, a chapter on rights of vulnerable groups: the role of suhakam in furthering lgbt rights was included in this annual review. by grounding sexuality rights discourse firmly within the parameters set forth in the federal constitution of malaysia and related international conventions and treaties23, this publication provided a strategic language for articulating a rights claim that connected the national to the international. such language was recirculated on the seksualiti merdeka blog, 19 see http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2008/9/14/lifefocus/1977271&sec=lifefocus 20 see http://www.seksualitimerdeka.org/search?updated-min=2010-01-01t00:00:00%2b08:00&updatedmax=2011-01-01t00:00:00%2b08:00&max-results=20 21 see http://www.seksualitimerdeka.org/2010/10/seksualiti-merdeka-2010-we-are-family.html 22 see wong, yuenmei. “rights of vulnerable groups: the role of suhakam in furthering lgbt rights.” in suhakam after 9 years: time for suhakam to regain public confidence. era consumer, malaysia, 2010. http://www.seahrw.org/v1/index.php?option=com_phocadownload&view=category&id=1&itemid=84 23 for examples, the un international human rights charter, and the yogyakarta principles. 9 this year, malaysia’s only sexuality rights festival, seksualiti merdeka, celebrates the spirit of family. exploring the bonds that bring us together, the festival aims to promote both the family and the community's role in embracing diversity. as the nation strives to realise its full democratic potential, with malaysians becoming more aware of our constitutional rights, let's not forget about our sexuality rights. it is our right to be responsible for our own bodies, to be free from discrimination, violence and injustice, and to be treated equally, regardless of gender, sexuality, age, class, ethnicity or beliefs. each of us has these rights, as enshrined by the un international human rights charter, the yogyakarta principles, and promoted by many human rights organisations local and international.24 while “seksualiti merdeka” developed to a larger coalition politics with clearer sexual rights discourses in that same year, the “it gets better malaysia project” attracted hate speech and death threats in its online appearance in virtual space. political arrests in the virtual space: “it gets better in malaysia” in 2010, after a rash of news stories of homophobia bullies against gay teenagers and young adults in the united states, an online campaign titled “it gets better” went viral on youtube. thousands of individuals posted their testimonies to share their coming-out stories and some were about the gay rights movement in the united states. this campaign aimed to create supportive messages to reach out to gay teenagers who were feeling isolated or felt suicidal because of their sexuality. soon after the campaign began, a malaysian young lesbian who had attempted suicide when she was on a scholarship studying in the united states was contacted by a journalist from an independent online internet press, malaysiakini.com to start a malaysian version of the it gets better in malaysia project. when the news of this online video project was made known to the virtual communities of malaysian queers, the co-founder of “seksualiti merdeka”, pang decided to initiate a malaysia community-based “it gets better in malaysia project,” using youtube and in-house screenings as their major media. one of their “it gets better” videos featured a muslim man’s coming out story. immediately the video was widely circulated by anti-homosexuality individuals on blogs and facebook who clearly attacked the video with hate speech. within just a few days, this fear that generated became unbearable for queers in this ‘electronic public realm’ and a decision was made to call for collective strategies to counter such online homophobia attacks. they were not even sure who the attackers were or how many of them existed, but given the more then 30 thousands hits on the video and the lopsided hate speech directed at the video, they felt tremendous stress. digital technologies have been conceived as a mode of decorporealization and dematerialization25, cyberspace even tends to be represented as spaces of disembodiment and thus as a new kind of space unconstrained by the limits of corporeality. nonetheless, in this episode of moral panic created by online homophobia, bullies demonstrated that the subject who is observing the virtual body is not a disembodied observer. instead, a visual objectification of a presumed body experience may lead to some significant material consequences to the corporeal bodies of the observers. 24 see http://www.seksualitimerdeka.org/search?updated-min=2010-01-01t00:00:00%2b08:00&updatedmax=2011-01-01t00:00:00%2b08:00&max-results=20 25 grosz, elizabeth (2001) “lived spatiality: the spaces of corporeal desire,” “cyberspace, virtuality, and the real,” architecture from the outside: essays on virtual and real space. massachusetts institute of technology. 10 in the following year, 2011, state authority under the precept of religion, islam, banned “seksualiti merdeka” organized that year around the theme “queer without fear”. despite seksualiti merdeka’s critical political stance to celebrate the human rights of people of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities, many suspected that it was the open alliance of seksualiti merdeka 2011 with the oppositional politics prior to an upcoming general election that provoked the ban.26 in pang’s opinion the ban was motivated by an intention to curb a larger civil society movement for human rights. pang says, "elections are coming up... i suspect it [the ban] is because of the ngos said in our festival, who had in the past, criticized the government for lack of adherence to human rights. this is an opportunity for certain quarters to attack ngos for the role they played." sexuality and desire exist in a normative space not only as a sexual but as other forms of contestation of power. metaphorically, seksualiti merdeka signifies an expression of national belonging that contests the normative idea of a heterosexual nation-state. intriguingly, given its public appearance and critical political stance, this annual event had been going on proximately for three consecutive years from 2008 to 2010 without any political interference from either religious authority or incumbent conservative political parties. apparently, by situating sexuality and desire within the normativities of religious and political difference, queer politics was intrinsically implicated in oppositional politics in malaysia. conclusion to context the development of queer political identity in a networked society, i first examined how malaysia’s participation in the informational global economy provided the material conditions for the capital city, kuala lumpur to transform into an emerging “global city” in southeast asia. this process resulted from the export-oriented industries that began in the 1970s and continued with the launching of the multimedia super corridor project in the 1990s. in line with henri lefebvre’s idea of the production of space as social relationships (1984:85)27, this paper argues that recent developments in informational global economies, coupled with the intensive proliferation of networking technologies, have created the material conditions for the capital city, kuala lumpur, to become part of the global city network. 26 however, some regarded the perceived threats of oppositional politics prior to the upcoming general election in which seksualiti merdeka had invited the chairperson of the coalition for clean and fair election (bersih 2.0), datuk ambiga sreevanasan, to officiate the launch of the sexual rights festival. 27 according to lefebvre (1984:85), the meaning of production is “produced as such, cannot be separated from either the productive forces, including technology and knowledge, or from the social division of labour which shapes it, or from the state and the superstructures of society.” lefebvre, henri (1984) “social space”, the production of space, translated by donald nicholson-smith, malden, oxford and victoria: blackwell publishing. 11 in part ii, i demonstrated that saskia sassen’s work on global connectivity and manuel castell’s work on network society have contributed critical insights to explain how kuala lumpur’s technological infrastructure, not only created networking structures for facilitating the informational global economy, but also facilitated the emergence of virtual space for queer politics to take off. as attested by manuel castells, the convergence of social evolution and information technologies has created new material for the performance of activities throughout the social structure. this material basis, built in networks, earmarks dominant social processes, thus shaping social structure itself. (castells 2010:502) in malaysia, information technologies, especially allowed social processes to accelerate, shaping a digitized social structure that outstripped the prevailing conservatism of the beginning political and religious structure in the country. in the late 1990s, malaysian queers used listserves and websites or webzines for forum and community building. however, openness of the networking structures and moral policing with the rise of islamist fundamentalism simultaneously occurred in digital spaces as well. the examples of “seksualiti merdeka” (2008-2011) and the “it gets better malaysia project” in 2010 demonstrated that rising political homophobia in malaysia was reflected through islamist policing of digital spaces. in part iii, i describe the rise of pengkids sub-culture and the ways that islamist moral policing affected and continues to affect the lived experience of malaysia’s queer communities. since malaysia’s independence from the british, the urbanization and industrialization processes during the modernization and globalization period of malaysia have contributed to providing more social spaces for young people to engage in social activities in public, and more work opportunities for them in the cities. in such an enabling environment, the increasing mobility of young people during the era of modernization also motivated and facilitated the movement or migration of people of same-sex desires from the nearby rural areas or other cities to kuala lumpur. while feminist economic geographers, j.k gibson-graham (julie graham and katherine gibson) regarded queer perspective as tool to unsettle the narrative of global commodification of culture (gibson-graham 1996:144), my research on the lived experiences of the pengkids and their girlfriends demonstrated a re-appropration of culture through the malaysian queers’ use of popular culture that was circulated by the structures of informational global economy. my finding about pengkids correspond with michael peletz’s (2002) study of (male) transgenderism in modern malaysia in which he posited that the new economy policy of 1970 indirectly facilitated the large-scale movement of young people in malaysia, especially the malay muslim ethnic group. although not the direct subject of my research, these transgendered males, are part of the targeted queer population who experience islamist policing and abuse. the political islamization and moral policing in malaysia show a parallel to tom boellstorff’s study of the emergence of political homophobia in indonesia as attested by him, “political homophobia highlights how postcolonial heteronormative sexuality is shaped by the state,” and how the appearance of same-sex desires in public sphere “threaten this heteronormative logic of national belonging.” (boelldtorff 2007:166-167) using “dubbing culture” and “inconsummensurability” to model and describe the phenomena queer politics within malaysia’s islamic culture. the discrepancy between islamic authorities and the malaysian muslim queers’s transgender practices and same-sex desires that were demonstrated in the “seksualiti merdeka”, “it gets better malaysia project”, and the lived experiences of pengkids and their girlfriends in malaysia highlight the intersection of religion, sexual desires, national belonging and globalization in malaysia. even though islam is not legislated and practiced the same way in neighboring indonesia, i found that tom boellstorff’s work on “dubbing culture”, originally descriptive of indonesia, resonates with my own theorizing of malaysian political homophobia. in addressing fundamentally conflicting understandings of 12 islam and same-sex desire in indonesia, boellstorff developed “dubbing culture” as a theoretical metaphor building on elizabeth povinelli’s work on “incommensurability” the inevitable distorted translations between “two systems of thought, language and culture.” (boellstorff 2007:139). the “two systems” i contrast here are digitized queerness and lived queerness in malaysia’s islamic culture. global connections have intensified and accelerated social transformations, giving rise to the incommensurability of developing queer politics and growing political homophobia. the conditions described in this paper participate in the larger, world-wide paradox of rising sexual openness and growing religious fundamentalism. by studying incommensurabilities as they exist now in malaysia, we can theorize and , hofully enact future spaces. 13 bibliography aurigi, alessandro. “digital city or urban simulator?”, in t. ishida, k. isbister (ed), digital cities, lncs 1765, ppp.33-44/© springer-verlag berlin heiberg, 2000. bamadhaj, nadiah. “the hot potato: sexuality rights advocacy in malaysia.” in saksi, january, 1999. barr, michael d. cultural politics and asian values: the tepid war. london and new york: routledge curzon, 2002. blackwood, evelyn and saskia e. wieringa. female desires: same-sex relations and transgender practices across cultures, new york: columbia university press, 1999. boellstorff, tom. a coincidence of desires: anthropology, queer studies, indonesia. durham and london: duke university press, 2007. boellstorff, tom. the gay archipelago: sexuality and nation in indonesia. princeton, new jersey and oxford: princeton university press, 2005. boellstorff, tom. “dubbing culture: indonesian gay and lesbi subjectivities and ethnography in an already globalized world.” in american ethnologies, volume 30. number 2, may 2003. buechler, simone. “deciphering the local in a global neoliberal age: three favelas in sao paulo, brazil”. in sassen, saskia (ed). deciphering the global” its scales, spaces, and subjects. new york and london: routledge, 2007. castells, manuel. the rise of the network society, 2nd edition, malden and oxford: wileyblackwell, 2000, 2010. d’emilio, john..sexual politics, sexual communities: the making of a homosexual minority in the united states, 1940-1970. chicago and london: the university of chicago press, 1983. dreyfus, hubert l. and paul rabinow. michel foucault: beyond structuralism and hermeneutics. sussex: the harvester press, 1986. duncan, nancy (ed). bodyspace. routledge, london and new york, 1996. duncan, nancy. “renegotiating gender and sexuality in public and private spaces.” in duncan, nancy. ed. bodyspace: destabilizing geographies of gender and sexuality. london and new york: routledge, 1996. faruqi, shad saleem. “jurisdiction of state authorities to punish offences against the precepts of islam: a constitutional perspective.” unpublished research report commissioned by sisters in islam (sis), 2005. foucault, michel. the order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences. new york: vintage/random house, 1973. 14 fuss, diana. “inside/out.” in diana fuss. ed. inside/out: lesbian theories, gay theories. new york and london: routledge, 1991. gibson-graham, j. k. the end of capitalism (as we knew it): a feminist critique of political economy. cambridge, ma: blackwell, 1996. grosz, elizabeth. “lived spatiality: the spaces of corporeal desire”, “cyberspace, virtuality, and the real,” architecture from the outside: essays on virtual and real space. massachusetts institute of technology, 2001. grozs, elizabeth. ‘bodies-cities’ in colomina, b. (ed): sexuality and space. princeton architectural press, new york, 1992. halberstam, judith. “queer temporality and postmodern geographies”. in a queer time and place: transgender bodies, subcultural lives. new york and london: new york university press, 2005. heidegger, martin. “the question concerning technology,” in the question concerning technology and other essays, new york: harper torchbooks, 1977. hemmings, clare. “introduction.” bisexual spaces: a geography of sexuality and gender. new york and london: routledge, 2002. jenks, chris. transgression. london and new york: routledge, 2003. lefebvre, henri. “social space”, the production of space, translated by donald nicholsonsmith, malden, oxford and victoria: blackwell publishing, 1984. marin, malu. stolen strands: the in and out lives of lesbians in the philippines. in reinfelder, 1996. mezzadra, sandro and neilson, brett. ‘border as method, or, the multiplication of labor’, transversal, 2008. mitchell, don. “the end of public space? people’s park: definitions of the public and democracy.” in annals of the association of american gegraphers 85(1): 108-133, 1995. ong, aihwa. “introduction: the act of being global”. in roy, ananya and aihwa ong (ed). worlding cities: asian experiments and the art of being global. wiley blackwell, 2011. ong, aihwa. “the modern corporation: manufacturing gender hierarchy”, spirits of resistance and capitalist discipline: factory women in malaysia. albany: suny press. p.143, 1998, 2010. ong, aihwa. “ecologies of expertise: assembling flows”. in aihwa ong and stephen j. collier (ed), global assemblages: technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems. ma, oxford and victoria: blackwell publishing, 2005. ong, aihwa. “introduction.” in flexible citizenship: the cultural logics of transnationality. durham: duke university press, 1999. 15 peletz, michael g. producing good subjects, ““asian values,” and new types of criminality.” in islamic modern: religious courts and cultural politics in malaysia, princeton and oxford: princeton university press, 2002. peletz, michael g. “transgenderism and gender pluralism in southeast asia since early modern times.” in current anthropology, vol. 47, no. 2, april 2006, the university of chicago press, 2006. rais nur and a. r. “queering the state: towards a lesbian movement in malaysia.” in monika reinfelder (ed), amazon to zami: towards a global lesbian feminism. london and new york: cassell, 1996. roy, ananya and aihwa ong (ed). worlding cities: asian experiments and the art of being global. wiley blackwell, 2011. sassen, saskia (ed). deciphering the global: its scales, spaces, and subjects. new york and london: routledge, 2007. sassen, saskia. “local actors in global politics”. in current sociology, july 2004, vol. 52(4):649-670, london, thousand oaks, ca and new delhi: sage publications. p.650, 2004. saskia sassen (ed). global networks: linked cities. new york: routledge, 2002. sassen, saskia. “locating cities on global circuits”. in environment and urbanization, vol 14, no. 1, april 2002. p. 13-22, 2002. sassen, saskia. the global city: new york, london, tokyo. princeton and oxford: princeton university press, 1991, 2001. sassen, saskia. globalization and its discontent: essays on the new mobility of people and money. new york: new press, 1998. sedgwick, eve kosofsky. the epistemology of the closet. new york: harvester wheatsheaf, 1991. sinnott, megan j. toms and dees: transgender identity and female same-sex relationships in thailand. honolulu: university of hawai’i press, 2004. tan, beng hui. “women’s sexuality and the discourse on asian values: cross-dressing in malaysia.” in evelyn blackwood and saskia e. wieringa (ed), female desires: same-sex relations and transgender practices across cultures, new york: columbia university press, 1999. tsing, anna lowenhaupt. friction: an ethnography of global connection. princeton and oxford: princeton university press. p.i, 2005. warner, michael. fear of a queer planet: queer politics and social theory, minnesota press. p. xxvi, 1993. wong, yuenmei, “islam, sexuality and the marginal positioning of pengkids and their girlfriends in malaysia.” in journal of lesbian studies. wjls #681267, vol 16, iss 4, 2012. 16 wong, yuenmei. “rights of vulnerable groups: the role of suhakam in furthering lgbt rights.” in suhakam after 9 years: time for suhakam to regain public confidence. era consumer, malaysia, 2010. ecologies of subversion and inspiration on twitter: the hijacking of #mynypd selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 ecologies of subversion and inspiration on twitter: the hijacking of #mynypd thomas breideband georgia state university (atlanta, usa) johannes gutenberg-universität (mainz, germany) abstract recent new media image scandals on twitter such as the #mynypd hashtag debacle in 2014 or the #mcdstories hashtag controversy in 2012 have pointed towards emancipatory, anti-corporate communication practices of engaged citizens and customers surrounding the acquisition of social capital online. in view of these events, i argue that communication practices of resistance on new media reinforce and strengthen the complementary and reciprocal relationship between structure and agency. by analyzing cases of hashtag hijacking, we can see new media’s transgressive potential for individuals and groups to participate in ad hoc communities of protest and to appropriate, manipulate, and redirect particular hashtag conversations through ecologies of subversion and inspiration. internet researchers can, thus, not only demarcate various rhetorical roles exercised by individual participants but also trace the impact of hashtags as idiosyncratic, discourse-enabling markers. introduction one of the long-standing debates in the social sciences surrounds the relationship between structure and agency. some branches such as structuralism, functionalism, or marxism consider ‘structures’ the objective, preeminent social configurations that condition and constrain the ways people act. other branches such as phenomenology or symbolic interactionism assert that ‘agents’ are, in fact, active drivers and shapers whose agency creates and sustains structures for human conduct. a third, and more recent perspective, to which this paper contributes, has advanced the complementary and reciprocal nature of structure and agency. proponents of the latter view such as anthony giddens and pierre bourdieu have emphasized that structures inform human actions and vice versa. in particular, bourdieu’s (1984) concepts of the ‘habitus’ and ‘communities of practice’ conceptualize a bridge between structure and agency so that “social structures are both constituted by human agency, and yet at the same time are the very medium of this constitution” (giddens 121). conceived in such a way, individual and collective expressions “are generated by structural features” and “agents’ suggested citation (apa): breideband, t. (2015, october 21-24). ecologies of subversion and inspiration on twitter: the hijacking of #mynypd. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. dispositions to act are themselves formed out of preexisting social contexts” (couldry 358). when considering this more recent perspective, one cannot help but think of the microblogging platform twitter and how the structural constraints imposed by the 140 character tweeting limit have prompted user-driven processes, which have given rise to a number of now common communication conventions. prime examples include the hashtag or the @reply that were incorporated into twitter’s own architecture only after they had been proposed by users as a means to curate and organize larger threads of communication and interaction (bruns 2012). in other words, the original twitter architecture provided a basic set of features for interaction, but it was moldable enough for users to invent new modes of practice that allowed conversations to move beyond general use paradigms, thereby reinforcing the complementary nature of structure and agency (lievrouw 2011). in this paper, i will be looking at another new trend on twitter that has gained traction especially in the last years: the counter-hegemonic practice of hijacking or occupying hashtags in the context of anti-corporate protest. as has been shown, one way of studying the interconnections that constitute communication ecologies on twitter successfully is through patterns of hashtag use (segerberg and bennett 2011, poell and darmoni 2012, earl et al. 2013, croeser and highfield 2014). i treat these new trends as a new form of twitter activism, certainly nurtured in the wake of events such as the occupy movement, which was partially based on the premise that recognition and visibility is achievable by way of occupying distinct semiotic markers. while the occupy protestors set up tents in the heart of wall street, users on twitter have engaged in virtual occupation practices by establishing a strong presence within a given hashtag conversation through acts of tweeting, retweeting, and cross-linking, ultimately with the aim of turning the hashtag against the original creator. these new forms of activist engagement, to quote rita raley’s work on tactical media, “are not oriented toward the grand, sweeping revolutionary event; rather, they engage in a micropolitics of disruption, intervention, and education” (1). usually oscillating between expressions of rational criticism, parody, and flat-out mocking, famous examples that have attracted widespread attention in traditional news reporting, have included the #mcdstories hashtag campaign debacle of 2012, the #muslimrage controversy surrounding newsweek in 2012, the failed #askjpm q&a session in 2013, and the #askseaworld hashtag that backfired in early 2015. these twitter events, which now commonly serve as cautionary tales of social media marketing circles, all involved the creation of a hashtag by a corporate entity, and in each case, an engaged twitter user base quickly seized the opportunity to appropriate the hashtag and to use it as a vehicle for expressions of critique and ridicule. for this study, i have chosen the failed #mynypd twitter reputation campaign of the new york police department in 2014. the nypd case is interesting for two reasons. on the one hand the campaign occurred in the midst of national debates surrounding the issue of police brutality in the united states, so that anti-police sentiments were quite wide-spread. on the other hand, this particular campaign provided an added rhetorical dimension pertaining to the photographic material that twitter users were asked to post to the hashtag. i organize my analysis along two dimensions: on the micro-level within the hashtag itself, which i classify as ecologies of subversion, and on the meso-level of discourse across hashtags, which i subsume under ecologies of inspiration. ecologies of subversion consist of those types of counter-hegemonic practice that stay thematically within the confines of the original hashtag. they can be visualized by way of identifying the most visible contributions to the hashtag. ecologies of inspiration, on the other hand, refer to those kinds of activities by which the original hashtag and its contribution(s) (be they supportive or critical) inspire users either to align the original hashtag to other existing semantic hashtags on twitter or to invent new hashtags for further interaction (both supportive and critical). we can assess those dynamics by way of isolating the original hashtag conversation and identifying not only the various types of hashtags that circulated the most but also how the top hashtags developed over the study period. this paper presents applicable methods. although studies on twitter as a socio-political medium have uncovered a multitude of use contexts, especially in the context of papers presented at the 14th annual association of internet researchers conference, research on the twitter “hive mind” in relation to these particular forms of counter-hegemonic practice remains relatively scarce (zappavigna 789). data and method historical twitter data for this study were acquired through the online platform texifter (http://sifter.texifter.com). the raw data, which consisted of 58577 units in toal, was uploaded to discovertext (http://discovertext.com) for further cleaning and processing. the resulting six datasets, divided into three categories were exported and loaded into ibm spss and microsoft excel for further analysis and visualization purposes. the first category for analysis includes two datasets that offer general results not only pertaining to the overall shape of the #mynypd conversation in terms of use and sharing patterns, but also information about the most visible unique users. the first dataset illustrates the activities of particular user groups based on tedjamulia’s (2005) 90/9/1 percentile division, i.e. the top 1% of users (338 users), the most active 9% (3043 users), and the least active or visible 90% (30431 users). the other dataset classifies the top 1% of unique users mentioned on the hashtag (57 in total) according to available profile information. the second category consists of two datasets that capture ecologies of subversion on #mynypd, illustrating thematically the top 10 unique tweets and photos that received the most attention. the third and final category consists of two datasets that focus on ecologies of inspiration. while one dataset tracks and classifies the top 1% of unique hashtags (272 in total) that users aligned with the general #mynypd hashtag, the other dataset chronicles the competition between a set of top hashtags on #mynypd over the course of the study period. the table below summarizes the coding scheme used for each dataset. dataset coding scheme used general percentile distribution (90/9/1) of tweeting activity per group 1=original tweets; 2=unedited retweets; 3=edited retweets percentile distribution (90/9/1) of linking activity per group 1=link to text; 2=link to image most visible unique users based on available profile information 1=official; 2=media stations; 3=produsers1 (contextbased); 4=produsers (unrelated); 5=unknown ecologies of subversion most favorited unique tweets according to type of message 1=response to original nypd call; 2=general criticism against police practice; 3=criticism against nypd’s use of twitter most retweeted unique photos according to type of message 1=as is; 2=image from the news; 3=humorous (unedited); 4=humorous (edited) ecologies of inspiration most visible unique hashtags 1=created in response to #mynypd; 2=already existing; 3=related to meta-discussion dissemination of top hashtags over the study period hashtags tracked: #mylapd, #s17, #fail, #ftp, #justice4cecily general results the analysis of the first dataset showed that each group engaged in similar tweeting activities, with retweeting being the most dominant practice (see fig. 1). however, the graph also shows that the least active 90% group actually generated the most original tweets, whereas the most active 9% and the top 1% engaged more in information brokerage rather than as opinion leaders. this creates a rather homogenous picture of overall twitter activity with no group necessarily dominating the other. as far as the most mentioned users on #mynypd are concerned, the analysis revealed that while many users broke the news about the #mynypd hashtag to official media stations including cnn and international broadcasters like rt america (russia today) and al jazeera, most tweets were directed to the twitter accounts of specialized activist groups such as occupy wall street as well as to individual produsers whose profiles either indicate a personal interest in civic and political engagement or not (see fig. 2) 1 the term ‘produser’ was coined by axel bruns to conceptualize and analyze the impact of userled forms of collaborative content creation. for more information on produsage, see http:// http://produsage.org/produsage. fig. 2. distribution of unique @mentions of users (classified according to available user profile information, top 1% displayed). fig. 1. activity of different user percentiles in #mynypd, 22-23 april 2014. ecologies of subversion the first thing we notice is that supportive tweets of the nypd campaign did not appear in the top 10% of favorited tweets. the response to the campaign was dominantly negative and critical in nature (see fig. 3). fig. 3. top 10 most favorited tweets by topic. fig. 4. most visible photos by type (12912 total mentions, top 1% displayed). a look at the top-10 list shows a clear mix of users favoriting tweets by users who either ridiculed the call through the use of photographic material (40%) or who criticized questionable practices of police officers (40%). the remaining 20% consisted of tweets that reflected in general about nypd’s failed attempt at using twitter to enhance its image. figure 4 illustrates that the majority of unique photos that circulated on #mynypd consisted of photos that showed police officers engaged in acts of violence. only 12% of the photos poked fun at police officers. ecologies of inspiration in total, users aligned 2732 unique hashtags to the conversation over the course of the study period. by looking at the top 1% of unique hashtags (270 in total), 14,44% (39) were new hashtag inventions by twitter users in response to the call, 22,96% (62) were hashtags that marked conversations about police brutality, and 62,59% (169) were either unrelated or they curated meta-discussions about failed attempts (#fail, #epicfail, #socialmediafail, etc.). however, when we look at the relative visibility of these three types of hashtags, we see that newly created hashtags far exceeded the other two types in terms of visibility on #mynypd (see fig. 5). in addition, 33 out of the 39 newly created hashtags actually targeted other police departments, not only in the united states (#mylapd, #mycpd, etc.) but also in other countries (#dankepolizei for germany, austria, and switzerland, #mipoliciamexicana for mexico, or #miapolicia for italy, for example). the analysis of the second dataset in this category revealed how various top hashtags influenced not only the direction of the conversation on #mynypd but also the emergence of other new hashtags (see fig. 6). here, the hashtags #s17, which commemorates the day the occupy movement officially began (september, 17, 2011), #ftp (denoting “fuck the police”), and the #justice4cecily hashtag (a solidarity hashtag created in response to the questionable jail sentence of occupy activist, cecily mcmillan) dominated the #mynypd hashtag in the early hours of the study period. studies have found that emotionally-charged content is more likely to be shared by online users (e.g. berger and milkman 2012, stieglitz and dang-xuan 2012), and in the case of #mynypd we see how conversations surrounding the occupy movement helped fueling anti-police sentiments. occupy wall street sympathizers were the first to spin the wheel on #mynypd. they shared the hashtag with their followers and aligned it with other existing occupy hashtags. a couple of hours later, then, #mynypd inspired the creation of #mylapd and it became the most widely distributed hashtag in the context of the nypd reputation campaign. fig. 5. distribution of different sentiment types of hashtags posted to #mynypd over the course of the study period. fig. 6. circulation patterns of a sample of the top hashtags over the course of the study period. conclusion as this paper has shown, the current trend of hashtag hijacking on twitter is more than a past-time mocking activity of corporate communication. instead, the counterhegemonic appropriation of corporate hashtags functions as a form of twitter activism that employs microand meso-level communication operations to contest dominant media messages. by examining how ecologies of subversion and inspiration define a framework of contestation, this paper offers scholars a way of studying other cases of hashtag appropriation by twitter users. references abdul-mageed, m., c. brown, and d. a. mahajna. “twitter in the context of the arab spring.” selected papers of internet research, ir14. web. bennett, w. l., and a. segerberg. “the logic of connective action: digital media and the personalization of contentious politics.” information, communication & society 15.5 (2012): 739-68. print. berger, j., and k. l. milkman. “what makes online content viral?” journal of marketing research 49.2 (2012): 192-205. print. bruns, a., and j. burgess. “the use of twitter hashtags in the formation of ad hoc publics.” paper presented at the european consortium of political research conference, reykjavík, 26 august 2011. bruns, a., and e. liang. “tools and methods for capturing twitter data during natural disasters.” first monday 17.4 (2012): n. pag. web. bruns, a., and s. stieglitz. “towards more systematic twitter analysis: metrics for tweeting activities.” international journal of social research methodology 16.2 (2013): 91-108. print. bruns, a. “ad hoc innovation by users of social networks: the case of twitter.” zsi discussion paper 16 (2012): 1-13. print. . “gatekeeping, gatewatching, real-time feedback: new challenges for journalism.” brazilian journalism research journal 7.2 (2011): 117–36. print. castells, m. networks of outrage and hope: social movements in the internet age. cambridge: polity, 2012. print. couldry, n. “liveness, reality and the mediated habitus from television to the mobile phone.” city & community 7.3 (2004): 193-223. print. croeser, s., and t. highfield. “occupy oakland and #oo: uses of twitter within the occupy movement.” first monday 19.3 (2014): n. pag. web. deluca, k., lawson, s., and y. sun. “occupy wall street on the public screens of social media: the many framings of the birth of a protest movement.” communication, culture and critique 5 (2012): 483-509. print. earl, j., et al. “this protest will be tweeted: twitter and protest policing during the pittsburgh g20.” information, communication & society 16.4 (2013): 459-78. print. gerbaudo, p. “the persistence of collectivity in digital protest.” information, communication & society 17.2 (2014): 264-68. print. giddens, a. central problems in social theory: action, structure and contradiction in social analysis. berkeley: university of california press, 1979. print. harold, c. “pranking rhetoric: ‘culture jamming’ as media activism.” critical studies in media communication 21.3 (2004): 189-211. print. lievrouw, l. alternative and activist new media. cambridge: polity, 2011. print. lotan, g., et al. “the revolutions were tweeted: information flows during the 2011 tunisian and egyptian revolutions. international journal of communication 5 (2011): 1375-1405. web. maireder, a., and c. schwarzenegger. “a movement of connected individuals.” information, communication & society 15.2 (2012): 171-95. print. papacharissi, z., and m. de fatima oliveira. “the rhythms of news storytelling on twitter: coverage of the january 25th egyptian uprising on twitter.” paper presented at the world association for public opinion research. 2011. web. penney, j., and c. dadas. “(re)tweeting in the service of protest: digital composition and circulation in the occupy wall street movement. new media & society 16.1 (2014): 74-90. print. phillip, a. “well, the #mynypd hashtag sure backfired quickly.” the washington post. 22 april 2014. web. n. pag. poell, t., and k. darmoni. “twitter as a multilingual space: the articulation of the tunisian revolution through #sidibouzid.” necsus – european journal of media studies 1 (2012): n. pag. web. raley, r. tactical media. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2009. print. segerberg, a., and w. bennett. “social media and the organization of collective action: using twitter to explore the ecologies of two climate change protests.” the communication review 14.3 (2011): 197-215. print. stieglitz, s. and l. dang-xuan. “impact and diffusion of sentiment in political communication: an empirical analysis of public political facebook pages. proceedings of the 20th european conference on information systems (ecis), barcelona, spain, 2012. web. tedjamulia, s., et al. “motivating content contributions to online communities: toward a more comprehensive theory.” proceedings of the 38th annual hawaii international conference on system science, 2005. web. tremayne, m. “anatomy of protest in the digital era: a network analysis of twitter and occupy wall street.” social movement studies: journal of social, cultural and political protest 13.1 (2014): 110-26. print. zappavigna, m. “ambient affiliation: a linguistic perspective on twitter.” new media & society 13.5 (2011): 788-806. print. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 feminism is for angry white women: exploring images of feminism on reddit.com kelly bergstrom york university introduction feminism is a movement with a reasonable goal: the economic, political, and social equality of the sexes. third wave feminists will frequently speak of “feminisms” that makes room for a multitude of theoretical underpinnings, motivations, and action plans, and yet this plurality is something that often gets lost in discussions outside of explicitly feminist spaces. as figure 1 demonstrates, entering the phrase “feminists are” to google’s search engine returns autocompletes expressing negative opinions about it. rather than being associated with equality between the sexes, feminism is often depicted in popular culture and/or popular discourse as the superiority of women over men or to actively be seeking to diminish the rights of men. how is it that popular discussions of feminism have strayed so far from the dictionary definition of “advocacy of equality of the sexes and the establishment of the political, social, and economic rights of the female sex”? figure 1: screenshot by author taken on february 25, 2015. to explore how feminism is portrayed in everyday contexts i present a case study about the use of “image macros” on reddit.com (a popular news aggregate website) to discuss feminism. image macros are a particular type of internet meme where a short phrase is overlaid on top of a photo (figure 2). they can be easily created on a variety of free to use meme generator websites (e.g. quickmeme.com) and often feature stock photography of animals or a person. a preexisting template can be modified with custom text, or users are able to upload their own image to create a new macro. previous research on this type of meme has shown that the sharing of image macros has become a key part of online political dialogue and discussions (milner, 2012), and suggested citation (apa): bergstrom, k. (2015, october 21-24) feminism is for angry white women: exploring images of feminism on reddit.com. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the creation of image macros are a way to demonstrate one’s cultural literacy and reaffirm one’s belongingness to a particular online community (phillips, 2012). reddit.com was selected for this study as it is currently one of the most visited englishlanguage sites according to alexa.com. its popularity has resulted in the ability to mobilize large groups of users, such as recent protests against the recent stop online piracy act (sopa) (rushe & devereaux, 2012) or its (problematic) crowd sourced search for the boston marathon bombers (kaufman, 2013). other investigations of reddit include examinations of community norms (bergstrom, 2011), the “playful” interactions between users (massanari, 2013), and how breaking news is curated by the community (leavitt & clark, 2014). in this paper i argue that by analyzing the content of image macros posted to reddit, it is possible to learn more about how feminism is understood in everyday contexts. figure 2: example of an image macro using a stock photograph of a man at a computer. this sample image also illustrates “top text” and “bottom text”, and the use of the impact font, all frequent characteristics of an image macro. study design this paper draws on data collected as part of a larger network analysis of reddit. data collection began by scraping all posts on the reddit.com servers since the site’s launch in june 2005, to the end of march 2014. this resulted in over 60 million parent posts made across all sub-communities on reddit. asking the question about how memes are used to comment about feminism on reddit, the follow criteria were used to select 230 individual images analyzed for this paper: the title of the post contained “feminism” or “feminist” and the body of the parent post contained a link to an image hosting site (e.g. quickmeme.com or imgur.com). this is not the sum of all discussions about feminism on this particular site (e.g. memes used in replies to the parent post have been excluded); the strict selection criteria was intended to create a dataset serving as a preliminary case study that could still be handcoded by the author. working from the list of posts matching these criteria, i visited each link to determine if it was still active, and if it was, save a copy of the image. the text superimposed on each image was transcribed, and a brief description of the image was also collected. i coded each image macro to determine if it had a positive, negative, neutral (contained both positive and negative sentiments or did not contain an overt value judgment), or unknown sentiment (not enough information to determine sentiment and/or text was nonsense) about feminism. i also conducted a second round of coding to determine if there were any patterns in the sorts of topics covered in these image macros, discussed below. results the majority of the image macros analyzed in this paper presented a negative message about feminism (table 1). the content of the image macros was equally negative, with 123 containing blatant mischaracterizations of the feminist movement. of particular note is that the number of image macros containing an accurate depiction of a feminist belief (n=10) was the same as the number that contained reference to the “double standard” that feminists still expect men to pay for their dinner (n=10). as described in the title of this abstract, according to this dataset of images, feminism is a label applied to angry hypocrites who celebrate misandry. furthermore, it is the domain of angry white women; every image macro in this dataset that used a photograph uses a photograph of a white woman. sentiment (about feminism) number of image macros negative 128 positive 13 neutral 62 unknown 27 total 230 table 1: summary of sentiment coding. finally, i draw attention to how the image macros share similarities with 20th century anti-suffragette postcards that used drawings and short phrases to disparage the campaign for women seeking voting rights (see figures 3 and 4). both rely on catchy slogans to strip away all nuance of political debate. it is not my claim that antisuffragette postcards and anti-feminist image macros are interchangeable and/or equivalent in the specifics of their content, rather, i put forth the argument that both are examples of a way to minimalize the voices and political desires of women through short memorable phrases and striking visual images. at best, the truncated messages result the nuances of a political debate being lost, and at worst, result in unflattering caricatures that perpetuate stereotypes, falsehoods, have historically (and currently) worked to undermine the efforts of those striving towards gender equality in both the 20th and the 21st centuries. figure 3: “sudden clarity clarence”, an image macro usually used to describe the author’s sudden realization about something, used here to comment on the physical attractiveness (or lack thereof) of women who identify as feminist. figure 4: similar to the image macro in fig. 3, suffragettes are depicted as not being physically attractive. “suffragettes who have never been kissed” (1910, united kingdom). available: http://historyoffeminism.com/anti-suffragette-postcards-posters-cartoons/ references bergstrom, k. (2011). “don’t feed the troll”: shutting down debate about community expectations on reddit.com. first monday, 16(8). retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3498/3029 kaufman, l. (2013, april 28). bombings trip up reddit in its turn in spotlight. retrieved november 3, 2013, from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/business/media/bombings-trip-up-reddit-inits-turn-in-spotlight.html leavitt, a., & clark, j. (2014). upvoting hurricane sandy: event-based news production processes on a social news site. in proceedings of the 32nd annual acm conference on human factors in computing systems. new york: acm press. massanari, a. (2013). playful participatory culture: learning from reddit. in selected papers of internet research. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org/index.php/spir/article/view/803 milner, r. (2012). the world made meme: discourse and identity in participatory media (ph.d dissertation). university of kansas. phillips, w. (2012). in defense of memes. retrieved february 28, 2015, from http://spreadablemedia.org/essays/phillips/ rushe, d., & devereaux, r. (2012, january 18). sopa support drops off as blackout protest rattles the internet. retrieved november 4, 2013, from http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/jan/18/sopa-wikipedia-blackoutgoogle-reddit selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  lőrincz,  l,  a.  győr,  j.  koltai,  k.  takács.  (2016,  october  5-­8).    collapse  of  an   online  social  network:  who  started  the  avalanche?  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual   conference  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from   http://spir.aoir.org. collapse  of  an  online  social  network:  who  started  the   avalanche?     lászló  lőrincz   centre  for  economic  and  regional  studies,  hungarian  academy  of  sciences  &   corvinus  university  of  budapest     anna  győr   corvinus  university  of  budapest     júlia  koltai   centre  for  social  sciences,  hungarian  academy  of  sciences  &  eötvös  loránd   university,  budapest     károly  takács   centre  for  social  sciences,  hungarian  academy  of  sciences     introduction     iwiw  was  a  forerunner  among  online  social  networks  (osn),  even  in  international   context.  it  was  founded  in  2002,  and  by  2008  two-­third  of  the  hungarian  internet-­using   population  became  its  user.  however,  in  the  following  years  substitution  of  iwiw  with   facebook  increased,  until  2014,  when  the  closing  down  of  the  site  was  announced.   these  overtakes  are  not  rare  about  online  social  networks.  in  2008,  the  world  map  of   the  leading  osn  services  was  quite  colorful,  while  today  almost  all  countries  are   dominated  by  facebook.  however,  such  regime  changes  may  occur  in  the  future,  for   example  boyd  (2014)  observes  the  decreasing  popularity  of  facebook  among  american   teenagers.       the  goal  of  our  research  is  uncovering  the  sociological  and  economic  mechanisms   explaining  such  changes,  using  the  collapse  of  the  iwiw  as  an  exapmle.  after   significant  cascading  mechanism  were  found  in  the  abandoning  of  the  site  (török,   janos,  ruan,  zhongyuan,  and  kertész,  janos  2016),  we  concentrate  on  the   specification  of  users,  who  leave  the  osn  first,  and  start  these  avalanches.       from  the  economist’s  perspective,  osns  can  be  characterized  with  network   externalities  (katz  and  shapiro  1992),  as  the  utility  of  their  consumption  depends  on  the   number  of  customers.  this  creates  a  switching  cost  for  the  customers,  and  a  barrier  to   entry  for  alternative  providers  (economides  1996).  considering  the  collapse  of  the   network,  the  presence  of  network  externalities  has  straightforward  predictions:  users,   who  have  fewer  connections  enjoy  lower  utility  from  this  specific  network,  therefore  they   are  more  willing  to  change  for  an  alternative  one.       from  a  sociological  perspective,  the  most  apparent  theoretical  framework  for  the   analysis  is  social  capital.  the  literature  agrees,  that  having  more  connection  is  generally   useful,  therefore  its  first  prediction  is  in  line  with  the  network  externality  perspective.   however,  beyond  this,  coleman  (1990)  emphasize  the  importance  of  dense  and  closed   networks,  as  they  are  useful  for  sanctioning  non-­conforming  members,  thus  they  foster   trust  and  cooperation.  on  the  other  hand,  burt  (1992)  highlights  the  usefulness  of   bridging  positions,  as  these  people  can  circulate  different  information  and  control   projects.  about  this  conflict  lin  (1999)  argues  that  “about  preserving  or  maintaining   resources  (i.e.  expressive  actions),  denser  networks  may  have  relative  advantage”,   however  “for  searching  and  obtaining  resources  not  presently  possessed,  such  as   looking  for  a  job  or  better  job  accessing  and  extending  the  bridges  in  the  network  should   be  more  useful”.     for  understanding  the  importance  of  social  capital  perspective,  it  is  essential  to  go   through  the  key  functions  of  the  osn.  one  of  iwiw’s  key  functions  was  that  it  served  as   a  huge  public  address  book  (by  default,  email  address  of  every  member  was  visible),   which  could  be  used  to  contact  friends  of  friends,  or  old  acquaintances.  since  the   beginning,  the  toy  functions  of  discovering  one’s  social  network  (such  as  visualizing  it,   or  showing  the  shortest  path  to  any  member)  were  also  attractive.  it  also  had  an   extensive  classified  ad  section,  where  its  advantage  was  the  knowledge  of  the  social   networks  of  the  partner.  the  information  aspect  of  social  capital,  when  more  open   network  structures  are  more  useful,  relate  to  the  characteristics  of  these  key  functions,   suggesting  that  users  in  more  open  social  network  positions  were  less  likely  to  leave  the   iwiw  early.     in  addition  to  the  social  capital  literature,  diffusion  of  innovation  research  also  have   implications  on  the  life  cycles  of  osns.  rogers  (2010)  notices  that  attitudes  and  social   background  of  early  and  late  adopters  of  an  innovation  are  typically  different.  what  is   more  interesting  about  this,  is  that  if  someone  has  innovator  attitude,  they  will  be  more   likely  to  engage  the  subsequent  service  (such  as  facebook)  as  well.  therefore,  these   people  would  also  leave  the  old  network  among  the  first  ones.       this  approach  suggests  a  completely  different  schedule  about  the  collapse  of  the   network.  while  the  network  externality  perspective  suggests  that  the  collapse  starts   from  the  periphery,  with  less  connected  members,  this  alternative  suggests  that  the   oldest  (and  possibly  central)  members  would  start  the  avalanche.       methods   the  whole  database  of  the  iwiw  network  was  exported  in  2013.  as  the  vast  majority  of   users  left  the  site  without  deleting  her  profile,  the  dynamics  of  leaving  the  site  can  be   analyzed  using  the  last  login  date.       our  dependent  variable  (if  someone  is  the  starter  of  the  cascades)  is  based  on  the   classification  of  the  users  to  ‘early  leavers’  (who  left  the  site  when  more  than  90%  of   their  friends  were  active);;  and  ‘non-­early  leavers’  (who  left  when  more  than  10%  of  their   friends  became  inactive).       figure  1.  dynamics  of  leaving  the  network       as  independent  variables  we  used  the  age  of  users,  the  share  of  non-­reciprocated  ties,   and  measured  externality  effect,  closeness  of  one’s  network,  and  innovativeness.  to   check  the  network  externality  effect,  we  calculated  degree  and  log  degree  of  users.   openness  versus  closeness  of  one’s  network  was  quantified  by  the  local  clustering   coefficient.  innovativeness  was  measured  with  the  difference  between  the  date,  when   one  joined  the  network  and  the  average  date,  when  users  of  her  age  joined.       to  analyze  these  effects,  multivariate  regression  models  were  used.  we  also  run  the   models  for  every  year  of  the  relevant  period.       results     analyzing  solely  the  yearly  degree  distributions  of  early  leavers,  non-­early  leavers  and   stayers,  it  is  visible  that  the  lower  number  of  connections  users  have,  the  probability,   that  they  will  be  early  leavers,  increase.  this  suggests  that  the  collapse  of  the  network   can  be  characterized  by  a  process  that  starts  from  the  periphery,  and  not  from  central   users.  however,  in  2009,  degree  distribution  of  the  early  leavers  reaches  the  remaining   users,  suggesting  the  start  of  a  more  general  churning.     however,  multivariate  regression  models  reveal  a  more  detailed  picture.  the  results  of   these  models  support  the  assumption  that  network  externalities  are  present,  as  lower   degree  is  associated  with  higher  probability  of  leaving  the  network  early  (and  it  is  true   for  the  whole  period).  the  positive  effect  of  locally  open  networks  is  also  visible:  high   0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% 0 500,000 1,000,000 1,500,000 2,000,000 2,500,000 3,000,000 3,500,000 4,000,000 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 total  active  n %  early  leave %  non-­‐‑early   leave local  clustering  coefficient  increases  the  chance  of  leaving  iwiw  early.  however,  the   effect  of  innovativeness  can  also  be  observed:  those,  who  joined  earlier  than  a  typical   member  of  their  age  group,  also  tended  to  leave  earlier.  additionally,  the  strength  of   these  mechanisms  changes  over  time.  the  effect  of  innovativeness  is  the  strongest  in   2008-­2009,  while  the  degree  and  clustering  effects  are  the  strongest  in  2010.           references   boyd,  danah.  2014.  it’s  complicated:  the  social  lives  of  networked  teens.  yale   university  press.     burt,  ronald.  1992.  “structural  holes:  the  social  structure  of  competition.”  cambridge:   harvard.   coleman,  james  s.  1990.  foundations  of  social  theory.  cambridge:  belknap  press.     economides,  nicholas.  1996.  “the  economics  of  networks.”  international  journal  of   industrial  organization  14  (6):  673–99.  doi:10.1016/0167-­7187(96)01015-­6.   katz,  michael  l.,  and  carl  shapiro.  1992.  “product  introduction  with  network   externalities.”  the  journal  of  industrial  economics  40  (1):  55–83.  doi:10.2307/2950627.   lin,  nan.  1999.  “building  a  network  theory  of  social  capital.”  connections  22  (1):  28– 51.   rogers,  everett  m.  2010.  diffusion  of  innovations.  simon  and  schuster.     török,  janos,  ruan,  zhongyuan,  and  kertész,  janos.  2016.  “collapse  of  a  social   network  site:  cascade  behavior.”  presented  at  the  netsci-­x  conference,  wroclaw.       technologies of imagination_ir16_final selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 panel: techologies of the imagination megan sapnar ankerson university of michigan sarah murray university of wisconsin-madison robert w. gehl university of utah michael stevenson university of groningen this panel takes as its starting point the double role of software in the social imagination: as a technical artifact it fulfills particular computational functions, yet software also serves as a powerful site through which stories are told about the meaning of technology and its relation to bodies, data, memory, knowledge, power, labor, and history. beginning with narratives of empowerment through personal computing and the borderless nature of cyberspace, the imagination of digital media has long held popular appeal. the 1990s fascination with the distinction between the virtual and the real may have subsided, but new imaginaries that seem to capture the character and promise of digital media continue to find their way into hyperbolic news headlines. the social graph, the quantified self and other abstract notions evoke a technological present that was previously impossible. such widely-publicized imaginations have been routinely criticized: in the early 1990s, phil agre, vivianne sobchack and others began cautioning against the transcendentalism, political naiveté and escapism that pervaded much of the utopian rhetoric around digital media. like digital utopianism itself, such criticism has hardly slowed down, as evidenced by the critical and popular success of reformed cyberutopians evgeny morozov and jaron lanier. what goes missing during the back-and-forth between digital utopians and their debunkers, though, is the more general importance of imagination to our experience of new media: it is not (just) the utopian and transcendental associations of digital technology that is worthy of study, but the interplay of materiality and abstraction that occurs at a variety of levels and registers in digital culture. in their own ways, each of the papers in this panel explores this liminal space of imagination and technology and demonstrates how this tension is productive for the study of how digital media are produced and used. the first paper uses the contemporary turn to web nostalgia as a way to investigate the relationship between web archives, the popular imagination, and the construction of historical narratives. exploring the history of the internet archive’s wayback machine as simultaneously a technical artifact, a trove for mining (algorithmically generated) images of the past, and a cultural reference to a subversive cold war cartoon (“peabody’s improbable history), this paper considers how the discourse of “time travel” as historical method taps into desires for capturing and stabilizing an ephemeral past, thereby producing collective memory through a process of collaborative filtering. the second paper considers counting as a technology of the imagination, interrogating how today’s opportunities to self quantify are grounded in the longer history of counting in computing culture and also driven by an imagined future of digital self-actualization. this new iteration of what weber calls the “spirit of calculation” materializes on the body through the connected technologies of activity tracking, productivity apps, and the aggregation of “body data”. the third paper explores a peculiar computer science project that began in the 1990s: computer vision-based pornography filtering (cvpf). cvpf takes on a difficult problem: how can we teach a computer to "see" pornography, and to distinguish pornographic images from non-pornographic ones? since its advent in 1996, 102 cvpf papers have been published. this project closely reads them all and finds that the field of cvpf have a particular imaginary about what constitutes a pornographic image: a single, nontattooed, light-skinned, fully nude woman standing centered against a flat background. the paper argues that this extremely limited pornographic imagination reflects larger gender and sexual inequalities in the field of computer science. the final paper asks how one technology may be imagined in another. it takes as its starting point the perl programming language, which was considered crucial to web development in the 1990s but has arguably been superseded today. what is the status of perl in web history, and how was it implicated in early imaginings of the web’s identity? the paper examines the histories of two perl libraries, identifying a number of ways in which the language and its developers helped articulate the new medium. paper 1: the improbable history of ‘web 1.0’: digital nostalgia, time machines, and the collaborative filtering of cultural memory megan sapnar ankerson university of michigan march 12, 2014 marked the “official” 25th anniversary of the world wide web. the occasion was promoted by the international web standards setting consortium, w3c, and the world wide web foundation, which celebrated by launching an anniversary website (www.webat25.org) urging visitors to share their web memories and tweet birthday greetings using the hashtag #web25. hailed as an opportunity to reflect on the history and future of the web, the event was perhaps equally remarkable for revealing both the web’s profound significance as an everyday media and information technology as well as the overwhelming confusion by many users in understanding what, precisely, was being celebrated. some tweeted greetings using a new hashtag, #happy25thinternet, while others seemed to assume that on this date 25 years ago, the web suddenly appeared fully formed and ready to use. does it even matter that most people wishing it a happy birthday had no idea that they were celebrating a proposal (a rejected one, at that!) for global hypertext? or that the internet and the world wide web are actually different things? this paper situates the uncertainty and confusion surrounding popular understandings of web history alongside the recent surge in web nostalgia. described in media coverage as “the great web 1.0 revival” (chayka, 2014) nostalgia for the early web is expressed in popular technology blogs and the personal sites of web users who mine the internet archive for screenshots of early websites. web nostalgia has also been linked to the launch of recent apps like facebook’s rooms and the ad-free stripped down social networking site ello. but while the relationship between media and collective memory has been an ongoing topic of interest in communication and media studies, little work addresses web history and the specific nature of web archives as software tools and machine-generated digital artifacts that are created through the archival process (brügger, 2008) to examine the relationship between nostalgia, social imaginaries, and the material-semiotic dimensions of web archiving, this paper follows two lines of inquiry. first, the mediation of anniversary celebrations plays a crucial role in public understandings of the past. typically, media institutions and authorized spokespeople serve as gatekeepers that interpret a common recollection of the event (kitch, 2002). but resources like the internet archive’s wayback machine have opened the “archive” (traditionally the domain of researchers) to the curious amateur. in this section, i examine how users mine the web archive as an instrument for nostalgia. what kind of stories about the web’s past do they use it to tell? how do users of web archives understand the material and technical affordances of the archive? from a sample of twenty-four blogs that highlight archived snapshots from the wayback machine, i examine the screenshots and discursive framing that strategically position representations of the past. in these contexts, i argue, the wayback machine figures as a device to fix and smooth an unstable past into a version of web history known as “web 1.0.” second, i consider these representations alongside the wayback machine’s reliance on a discourse of “time travel,” which promises users the ability to “browse the web as it was.” this promise of unfettered access to the ephemeral past underscores wendy chun’s observation about the persistent “conflation of memory and storage that both underlies and undermines digital media’s archival promise” (2011, p. 184). the constant degeneration and regeneration of the digital that chun terms the “eternal ephemeral,” can be illuminated through the intertextual connections that situate the wayback machine’s legacy in american popular culture. the “wayback machine” was named after a segment that appeared in the rocky and bullwinkle show, a children’s cartoon that aired in the 1950s and 60s. “peabody’s improbable history” features a genius dog, mr. peabody, who built a time machine called the “waybac machine” for his pet boy, sherman. filled with role reversals, anachronisms, and historical adventures that require peabody and sherman to constantly “fix” an unstable past, the show is a satirical cold war text that pokes fun at the narrative construction of history. the public discourse of the internet archive, however, modulates these subversive references to the instability of the past with powerful testimonials that promise “universal access to all knowledge.” by framing nostalgic uses of the wayback machine alongside these conflicting discourses surrounding knowledge, instability, ephemerality, and time travel, this paper argues that we might best understand the popular work of web history as a process of collaborative filtering that takes place on the semiotic level and through the technical/algorithmic process through which the web is crawled. references brügger, n. (2008). the archived website and website philology a new type of historical document? nordicom review, 1-22. chayka, k. (2014). the great web 1.0 revival. retrieved from http://gizmodo.com/thegreat-web-1-0-revival-1651487835 chun, w. h. k. (2011). programmed visions: software and memory. mit press. kitch, c. (2002). anniversary journalism, collective memory, and the cultural authority to tell the story of the american past. the journal of popular culture, 36(1), 44-67. paper 2: technologies of futurity, technologies of future me: the cultural imaginary of computing sarah murray university of wisconsin-madison as a fundamental component of computing culture, counting has long factored into software’s usability. it is no surprise, then, that personal counting software infiltrates a contemporary mobile and “appified” world. a digital self-actualizing culture of calculation proliferates in everything from productivity software (word counts, goal counts) to preventative health apps and self-quantification (step counts, calorie counts, cell counts). following appadurai’s notion of “cultures of calculation,” indebted to weber’s “spirit of calculation,” this paper investigates the embodied structuration of counting on which technologies embedded in a self-improvement-driven social world are dependent. counting is a technology of an imagined future self: the work of envisioning a selfactualized “future me,” is materialized as technologies and bodies interface through personal counting software and the social practice of self-quantification. the history of calculation in computing culture, as both process and imaginary, has been a gradual shift from the industrial practice of government-led mass calculation and the high skill wage work of human processors to the individualization and customization of counting as an important action in today’s culture of activity trackers, productivity apps, easy-to-use data visualization programs, and measures of personal accountability and organization embedded in smart products, smart homes, and the internet of things (friedman, 2005; ceruzzi, 1991). given the integral nature of calculation to the history of computing, how do we make sense of calculation’s utility in today’s neoliberal economy of counting bodies, a contemporary movement toward biotech counting software, wearables, and the quantified self movement? max weber identified the “spirit of calculation” as a defining characteristic of modernity: counting was a process of rationalization that led to mastery. arjun appadurai picks up weber’s use of calculation to investigate how counting is integral to capitalism’s dependence on technologies embedded in a future productive social world. in doing so, appadurai calls for more work that merges the technique of calculation (markets) and the ideology of calculation that infiltrates the everyday world. i use this dual conception of calculation – as economic mode and cultural imaginary – to make sense of a contemporary moment where technologies, bodies, and counting software interface with imagination to produce a future self. i consider a number of connected counting cultures – the social practice of self-quantification made visible in the quantified self movement, the functionality of wearable tech like activity trackers, and the popularity of apps dependent on personal counting software. i argue that these devices and social practices fit with and onto the body in ways that activate an imagined future self. first, the quantified self movement is a recently popularized trend toward the daily practice of utilizing technologies that collect and make legible data on a personal level for self-evaluative purposes in an effort toward self-betterment. ground zero for the qs movement is the bay area qs meetup group, a group of about 4,000 self-quantifiers that organize “regular show and tell” for personal accounts of lifelogging, digitizing body info, chemical body load counts, and computer-assisted on-the-body data collection. while the bay area qs meetup group is an outlier in its level of devotion, selfquantifiers have recently garnered attention for their fascination with data collection through personal tracking. self-quantifiers serve as a useful case study because of their insistence that the computational gathering of body data leads to better lives. through interviews with self-quantifiers and discourse analysis of the popular representation of the qs movement, i consider how bodies, data, and the social converge at the site of counting as an economic and cultural imaginary. second, the advent of what morris and elkins call “mundane software” – software that is easily incorporated into everyday routines through its “appification” – fosters the accessibility of personal counting software embedded in connected computing devices like fitbits and word count apps. through the usability of mundane software that is grounded in self-tracking, counting becomes a liminal space of imagined futurity wherein participants try to simultaneously manage the threat of the failure and fragility of the body and the threat of the automated, semi-conscious, semi-intuitive promises of tech. the imagined futures of bettered lives is a built-in mechanism of personalized counting, as self-evaluation is literally affixed to the body in a daily practice of collection, assessment, and resetting of goals for tomorrow. although counting for a host of moral, social, and economic imperatives is nothing new, its closer proximity to the body has implications for how we understand software, futurity, and shifting definitions of the knowledge economy. what is technology’s cultural role in the continued scientific management of the body? ultimately, counting pushes us toward new definitions of the knowledge economy and how . the knowledge economy is usually understood as the capitalistic mode of utilizing knowledge as extracted, generative use-value from labor. how might we understand the knowledge economy differently if we start to consider it as not extracted, but “kept close” (to the body) as generative of use-value? this paper brings calculation into contemporary conversations about media economy informed by neoliberalism, immaterial labor, and affect (terranova, 2004; curtis 2013; hearn, 2010; lazzarato, 2006; harvey, 2005; apple & aasen, 2003). at the same time, i suggest that counting and wearables are connected to specific cultural imaginaries? histories – the consistency of the american dream; the history of digital flaneur; and, the history of popular curation – all of which inform today’s knowledge economy. references appadurai, a. (2012). the spirit of calculation. cambridge anthropology, 30(1). 3-17. appadurai, a. (2013). the future as cultural fact. london: verso. ceruzzi, p. e. (1991). when computers were human. annals of the history of computing, 13(3), 237-244. chun, w. h. k. (2011). programmed visions: software and memory. mit press. friedman, t. (2005). electric dreams: computers in american culture. nyu press. morris, j.w., and elkins, e. (forthcoming, 2015). “there’s a history for that: apps and mundane software as commodity.” fibreculture. nafus, d., & sherman, j. (2013). this one does not go up to eleven: the quantified self movement as an alternative big data practice. international journal of communication, 8, 1-20. weber, m. (2002). the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism: and other writings. penguin. paper 3: when computers imagine internet porn: gender and sexual discrimination in computer vision algorithms robert w. gehl university of utah when it came to internet porn in the 1990s, imaginations ran wild. the now-infamous 1995 time cover story on cyberporn claimed that online porn was ubiquitous and that children couldn't avoid clicking on it. although the porn panics of the 1990s have largely subsided, echoes of this digital imaginary can still be found in a special field of computer science: computer vision-based pornography filtering (cvpf). cvpf is an approach to training computers to solve a tough problem: to distinguish pornographic images from non-pornographic ones and to filter out the former. this paper is based on a review of 102 academic papers in cvpf from 1996 to the present. based on this body of knowledge, the paper argues that cvpf has as a whole trained computers to "see" a very specific, idealized form of pornography: pictures of lone, thin, light-skinned naked women. the paper supports this argument by closely reading the algorithms proposed in the cvpf literature and by quantitatively analyzing the images included as illustrations of these algorithms. specifically, the cvpf field breaks bodies down into parts: skin, faces, nipples, and breasts, and it constructs algorithms to find each of these parts. it also includes significantly more images of females than males to illustrate this process. moreover, the field treats bodies that don't fit its ideal as "noise." in other words, fat, pierced, hairy, tattooed, or trans* bodies don't fit into the cvpf pornographic imagination. ultimately, the paper argues that this very narrow imagination of porn in cvpf reflects larger gender and sexual inequalities in the computer science field as a whole. human sexuality exceeds computer vision-based attempts to train computers to see pornography in the same way that humanity itself currently exceeds the contemporary computer technology industry. paper 4: reading the early web in perl michael stevenson university of groningen although the perl programming language preceded the world wide web by a few years, their respective histories are inextricably linked. perl’s rise to prominence has long been associated with the rise of interactive content for the web in the mid-1990s, while less visible uses such as automated system administration were equally important to the emerging web industry. this paper serves as an initial exploration into this shared past, focusing in particular on how uses and users of the early web were imagined in and facilitated by perl. the paper has two main sections. first, i discuss perl as a transitional object in web history, one that, similar to other objects of media archeological investigation (gitelman, 2006), evokes larger processes of transformation and suggests paths not taken. second, i focus on the histories of two perl libraries (cgi.pm and lwp) to argue that perl developers and the language itself were important actors in establishing two key understandings of the web as an experimental publishing environment on the one hand, and what noted developer roy fielding (1994) called a “living infostructure” on the other. the paper thus seeks to contribute to web histories that investigate the relationship between software and the discursive, economic and political contexts that govern production technology and practice (ankerson, 2010). perl’s importance to the web was widely recognized in the midto late-1990s, with its flexibility and usefulness often expressed in metaphor: the language was the ‘glue’ holding the web together, and a ‘swiss army chainsaw’ for tackling a variety of tasks faced by webmasters (o’reilly and smith, 1999). its flexibility and perceived ease-ofuse (compared to lower-level languages like c) together with such eccentricities as lectures on postmodernism by its founder (wall, 1999) and obfuscated code contests held by its most devoted followers helped perl maintain a reputation as a playful alternative to supposedly staid system languages (leonard, 1999).this reputation suited an era of web development marked by fast-paced innovation and an expanding base of amateur developers. however perl was also considered robust enough to depend on, as evidenced by its heavy use at such icons of the early web as yahoo!, imdb, amazon, slashdot and hotwired. most importantly, perhaps, it was instrumental in instituting new media forms: perl was central to “infoware,” tim o’reilly’s (1998) term for data-rich media products that allowed (and prefigured o’reilly’s more famous concept, “web 2.0” [2005]). by the early 2000s, however, perl’s influence and relative popularity had likely peaked, and by 2005 the first claims of its death surfaced (schwern, 2008). whatever the merits of the argument that perl has been superseded in web development (and such claims are hotly contested by the perl community, which continues to grow in absolute terms), the perception that the language is outdated raises the question of how it ‘fit’ the development practices and media forms of the early web (and by extension, why it does not fit the contemporary web). perl appears as a transitional object in the history of web development: the language and its developers featured heavily in key attempts to explore and determine the identity of the new medium, and eventually this interdependence was severed. it was through perl that potential uses of the early web became clearer; at the same time, imagining the web was both a necessary precondition and an outcome of tailoring the programming language to the new medium. to begin to understand perl’s role in articulating the web’s identity in the 1990s i turn to a range of reference works, tutorials, archived communications, existing interviews and other media to analyze the imagined uses and users of two perl libraries, or collections of existing code. the first is cgi.pm, widely used in the midto late-1990s to build interactive websites. named for the common gateway interface protocol that allows servers to call on executable scripts, cgi.pm greatly eased the work of dealing with web forms (and thus user interactivity) and generating dynamic content. cgi.pm was thus created to contribute to a more lively and programmable web, one that was in some ways at odds with the web’s original design (in particular the ‘stateless’ nature of the hypertext transfer protocol, which is more suited to delivering static content). by contrast, lwp (short for “the world wide web library for perl”) had its roots in a tool for automatically indexing broken hyperlinks (burke, 2002; fielding, 1994) and in this way was closely aligned with tim berner’s lee’s (1989) original vision of a highly sophisticated form of “information management.” in other words, if cgi.pm represented an exploration of the web’s limits as a publishing medium, lwp sought to expand the web’s capacities for referencing and information retrieval. by uncovering assumptions, rationales and use scenarios underlying these two libraries, this paper seeks to contribute specifically to a better understanding of the relationship between perl and the early web, and more generally to a form of media archeological investigation suited to studying computational media forms. references ankerson, megan sapnar. 2010. “web industries, economies, aesthetics: mapping the look of the web in the dot-com era.” in web history, edited by niels brügger, 173–94. new york: peter lang. berners-lee, tim. 1989. “information management: a proposal.” cern. http://www.w3.org/history/1989/proposal.html. burke, sean m. 2002. perl & lwp. sebastopol, ca: o’reilly. fielding, roy t. 1994. “maintaining distributed hypertext infostructures: welcome to momspider’s web.” computer networks and isdn systems, selected papers of the first world-wide web conference, 27 (2): 193–204. doi:10.1016/01697552(94)90133-3. gitelman, lisa. 2006. always already new: media, history and the data of culture. cambridge, ma: mit press. leonard, andrew. 1999. “the joy of perl.” salon. october. https://web.archive.org/web/20020223034449/http://www.salon.com/21st/feature/ 1998/10/cov_13feature.html. o’reilly, tim. 1998. “the open-source revolution.” release 1.0, november. ———. 2005. “what is web 2.0.” o’reilly. september 30. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html. o’reilly, tim, and ben smith. 1998. “the importance of perl.” o’reilly media. april. http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/perl/news/importance_0498.html. schwern, michael. 2008. “perl is undead.” presented at the yapc:asia 2008, tokyo, may 16. http://conferences.yapcasia.org/ya2008/talk/1101. wall, larry. 1999. “perl, the first postmodern computer language.” san jose, ca. http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html. microsoft word 809-556-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 the process of adapting to mobile tablet devices by switching between productive and distractive multitasking sora park university of canberra australia sora.park@canberra.edu.au abstract this study explores how new users of mobile tablet devices experience and learn to adapt to the distraction they encounter due to the ubiquitous nature of the devices. after giving young adults mobile tablet devices, their uses of tablet devices were tracked for one year. a mixed method of online surveys and netnography was conducted on 35 participants in australia. participants were faced with continuous connectivity where they had to deal with multiple tasks. the tablet was perceived to be both an efficient tool that maximizes the use of time and a playful device that is distracting. this apparent dichotomy of productivity and distraction was well received by the participants, who did not think of the two as mutually exclusive. participants negotiated their time and attention they gave to their devices switching from productive and distractive multitasking. self-regulation strategies were adopted when they encountered distraction. preventive and pre-emptive uses of the distractive activities were the main methods of dealing with the situation. keywords ipads; mobile tablet devices; multitasking; young people; self-regulation; introduction users of new digital devices acquire skills and knowledge about the device over time, mostly by trial and error or self-learning. however, acquiring technical skills to use the technology efficiently does not always coincide with the social uses. mobile tablet devices are personal digital devices that are used in both private and public spaces. users are presented with continuous choices about how and where they should use the device. when situated in a particular context, users must make the choices about whether to apply existing norms or to apply new rules of usage. this paper discusses how such portability and ubiquity of mobile tablet devices can lead to both distractive and productive multitasking. the focus is on how the tension is resolved and negotiated during the process of adapting to a new digital device. is multitasking a positive or negative experience? mulitasking, in the context of digital media, usually describes the phenomena of divided attention between simultaneous activities or rapid switching between two more tasks. there are two distinct areas in the literature – media multitasking and multitasking in the context of learning – where it is regarded as a negative experience. scholars in the advertising field have identified the negative impact of multitasking; interference with the main commercial message (jeong & fishbein, 2007; petty & cacioppo, 1986; voorveld, 2011), quality of the information processed (robertson, 2000), less favorable responses to messages (bolls & muehling, 2007) and reduced recall rates and retaining of messages (petty & cacioppo, 1986; voorveld, 2011). similarly in education, studies conclude that unless there are some activities built into the technology use, it is usually more of a distraction than a learning tool (fried, 2008; junco & cotton, 2011; kraushaar & novak, 2010;wainer et al., 2008; wood, et al, 2012; wurst, smarkola, & gaffney, 2008). distraction during learning is a pedagogical challenge. studies reveal how distracting digital devices can be in the classroom (bowmen, et al, 2010; fried, 2008; junco & cotton, 2011, 2012; wainer, et al, 2008; wood, zivcakova, gentile, archer, de pasquale & nosko, 2012) and at home (beentjes, et al, 1996). it can also reduce the students’ satisfaction of the learning experience (wurst, et al, 2008). theoretical reasoning is that a person’s cognitive capacity is limited, resulting in a cognitive bottleneck (borst, taatgen & van rijn, selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 2010; meyer et al, 1995; smith & kosslyn, 2007). people may engage in ‘continuous partial attention’ where they process multiple streams of information without fully committing to one activity (jones, 2005). or if one alternates quickly from one task to another, the quality of attention might not be compromised but it is inefficient because the switching delays the whole process (butler, arrington & weywadt, 2011; posner, 1990; rubinstein, meyer & evans, 2001). on the other hand, there is empirical evidence of the potential benefits of multitasking (meyer et al, 1995). multitasking affects the type of learning that involves a different area of the brain in contrast to the information acquisition process (meyer, knowlton, & poldrack, 2006). lauber et al. (1994) found that training can improve multi-tasking skills. information processing is ‘massively parallel’ and distributed throughout components of interconnected neural networks (anderson and hinton, 1981; rumelhart and mcclelland, 1986). some suggest multitasking can be trained or learned in conducting certain tasks resulting in a long term positive impact (carrier, et al, 2000; saunders et al 2003). methodology the data analyzed in this study is drawn from a larger longitudinal study of young adults in australia conducted between august 2011 and august 2012. a mixed method approach, combining netnography and online surveys, was used to assess how new users learn to use and adapt to mobile tablet devices. this study reports particularly from the findings of the netnography, which is an online observation technique that combines discussion forums, postings and asking questions (kozinets, 2010). based on the population’s gender, age composition and only those who did not already own a tablet device, 35 students first and second year undergraduate students were selected at an australian university. 43% were male and the average age was 19.9. the model they were given was ipad ii with wifi and 3g access. all names used in this study are pseudonyms. prior to the study, appropriate ethics clearance was sought and approved by the national health and research council through their national ethics application form (neaf). dual standards of distractive and productive multitasking multitasking behavior is not new to the digital era. in modernity, time is the basic unit of measurement for value. productivity is regarded as what reduces time of a certain process. according to southerton and tomlinson (2005), ‘time squeeze’ is a general characteristic of contemporary suburban households and that multiple experiences of time is one of the social practices. as anticipated, media multitasking was prevalent among the study participants. over the course of one year, the volume of media multitasking did not increase significantly but the non-media multitasking activities while using their tablets did increase. participants perceived of their ipad as both an efficient tool that maximizes their use of time and also a playful device that distracts them from serious tasks. this apparent dichotomy of productive and distractive multitasking was both well accepted by the users and they did not think of the two aspects as mutually exclusive. certain activities were regarded as complementary to the main tasks, some were perceived of as adding value and some were experienced as distraction. one of the sources of distraction was their perpetual existence in the online world (see table 1). table 1: examples of complementary, productive and distractive multitasking type examples/excerpts complementary multitasking � using the ipad for translation while engaged in conversation (heather) � tweeting (aiden), acquiring additional information (mia, elizabeth), voting (rita) while watching tv productive multitasking � browsing for non-tv related information (jacob), co-view with a remote friend (donald) while watching tv selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 � parallel conversations on multiple devices (patrick) distractive multitasking � distraction from studies (diana) � straying off to non-relevant information (jacob) � push applications as source of distraction (rene) constant online presence � “tone out to apps” (noah). � “constantly refreshes facebook and twitter” (adrian) � “habit of keeping facebook open on my ipad..to look at the flow of information coming in…while at the same time studying” (aiden). negotiating the balance between distraction and productivity after one year of use, 20.6% of the participants thought that even though the ipad had some features that help in studying the overall impact was distraction. 73.5% said that although it is a distraction at times it has helped them to study more efficiently. 5.9% thought it helped without any distraction. the overall experience was positive and the mobile  devices  gave  users  a  sense  of  control. throughout the year they explored, experimented and negotiated with themselves to find an optimal solution. they came up with their own set of rules to increase productivity while trying to keep their distraction level to a minimum. most of them adopted preventive strategies where they can avoid the temptation all together. some of them exerted pre-emptive methods where they would pre-schedule distractive activities so that they wouldn’t interfere with the main task. time management and excursion of self control were both essential to implementing this strategy (see table 2). self-regulation is a process that guides an individual through a goal-oriented task over time when circumstances are changeable. this usually occurs when a routine is disrupted (karoly, 1993). the method of self-regulation, however, was not always effective. bandura (2001) emphasizes intentionality and goal-directed behaviour as elements of successful self-regulation. table 4: examples of self-regulation strategies type examples/excerpts preventive selfregulation � ban physical access to the device; � “leaving the ipad behind” (diana) � “not using it in lectures” (kathryn) � “banishing the ipad to the lounge room” (jean) � “simply not leaving it on the desk when studying” (jean) � customizing; � delete distracting apps during exams and re-install them afterwards (anna). � closing apps that are not relevant to the main task (andres, elizabeth). � turning the volume down to ignore push notifications (donald) � turning the volume up not to play games in public (brian) pre-emptive selfregulation � pre-schedule the distraction; � “set breaks for 10-15 minutes and will play on my ipad in those breaks only”(evelyn). � self modulation; � “distracting activities first and then focus on studies” (heather) selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 ongoing negotiation � the ongoing process of negotiation � “requires a lot of self-control” (rita) � “must be strong” (chloe). � “if it is going to happen it usually does” (mason) � “no matter what i do, i always find myself on facebook” (noah) � “deleting all of my distracting apps but finding myself pulling out my phone with the same apps” (dylan) discussion this study examined how young people learn to manage and engage with digital devices by observing their uses of tablet devices over a period of one year. the concept of self-regulation emerged from the process of dealing with different types of multitasking. even though they had experienced multitasking to some extent prior to the study, they encountered a new situation where they were habitually engaged in multitasking when they needed to focus on one task. most of them devised a coping strategy, the main methods being preventive and pre-emptive self regulation. due to the portability, participants were able to carry the devices everywhere. however, the visibility compared to mobile phones compelled them to learn and negotiate the uses in public spaces. thus participants experimented, negotiated and learned to use the device in different contexts, accordingly. the ipad, over the last six months, has first and foremost bridged a divide i didn't really know existed. i've found myself writing, editing, watching and social networking at times and in places which i never would've considered before. it's mostly positive, but it does raise the question: are we too reliant upon or too attached to technology?(henry). the strength of this study lies in the fact that participants were observed from the beginning and until they were sufficiently exposed to a new device. after a certain novelty period, they were able to reflect upon their uses and stabilize what they thought be to optimal. references bandura, a. (2001). social cognitive theory: an agentic perspective. annual review of psychology, 52(1), 1. beentjes, j. w. j., & koolstra, c. m. (1996). combining background media with doing homework: incidence of background media use and perceived. communication education, 45(1), 59. borst, j. p., taatgen, n. a., & van rijn, h. (2010). the problem state: a cognitive bottleneck in multitasking. journal of experimental psychology: learning, memory, and cognition, 36(2), 363-382. bowman, l. l., levine, l. e., waite, b. m., & gendron, m. (2010). can students really multitask? an experimental study of instant messaging while reading. computers and education, 54(4), 927-931. butler, k. m., arrington, c. m., & weywadt, c. (2011). working memory capacity modulates task performance but has little influence on task choice. memory and cognition, 39, 708–724. carrier, l. m., cheever, n. a., rosen, l. d., benitez, s., & chang, j. (2009). multitasking across generations: multitasking choices and difficulty ratings in three generations of americans. computers in human behavior, 25(2), 483-489. foerde, k., knowlton, b. j., & poldrack, r. a. (2006). modulation of competing memory systems by distraction. proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 103(31), 11778-11783. fried, c. b. (2008). in-class laptop use and its effects on student learning. computers and education, 50(3), 906914. horst, h. a., herr-stephenson, b., & robinson, l. (2010). media ecologies. in m. ito (ed.), hanging out, messing around, and geeking out: kids living and learning with new media. cambridge, massachusetts: the mit press. ionescu, t. (2012). exploring the nature of cognitive flexibility. new ideas in psychology, 30, 190-200. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 jeong, s.-h., & fishbein, m. (2007). predictors of multitasking with media: media factors and audience factors. media psychology, 10(3), 364-384. jones, s. (2005). everything bad is good for you: how today's popular culture is actually making us smarter. ny, ny: riverhead books. junco, r., & cotten, s. r. (2011). perceived academic effects of instant messaging use. computers and education, 56(2), 370-378. karoly, p. (1993). mechanisms of self-regulation: a systems view. annual review of psychology, 44(1), 23. kraushaar, j. m., & novak, d. c. (2010). examining the affects of student multitasking with laptops during the lecture. journal of information systems education, 21(2), 241-251. lee, j., lin, l., & robertson, t. (2012). the impact of media multitasking on learning. learning, media and technology, 37(1), 94-104. meyer, d. e., & kieras, d. e. (1997). a computational theory of executive cognitive processes and multiple-task performance: part 2. accounts of psychological refractory-period phenomena. psychological review, 104(4), 749-791. meyer, d. e., kieras, d. e., lauber, e., schumacher, e. h., glass, j., zurbriggen, e., et al. (1995). adaptive executive control: flexible multiple-task performance without pervasive immutable response-selection bottlenecks. acta psychologica, 90(1-3), 163-190. ophir, e., nass, c., & wagner, a. d. (2009). cognitive control in media multitaskers. proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 106(37), 15583-15587. pea, r., nass, c., meheula, l., rance, m., kumar, a., bamford, h., et al. (2012). media use, face-to-face communication, media multitasking, and social well-being among 8to 12-year-old girls. developmental psychology, 48(2), 327-336. posner, m. i. (1990). hierarchical distributed networks in the neuropsychology of selective attention. in a. caramazza (ed.), cognitive neuropsychology and neurolinguistics hillsdale, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates, 187–210. rosen, c. (2008). the myth of multitasking. new atlantis: a journal of technology & society, 20, 105-110. rubinstein, j. s., meyer, d. e., & evans, j. e. (2001). executive control of cognitive processes in task switching. journal of experimental psychology:human perception and performance, 27(4), 763-797. saunders, g., & klemming, f. (2003). integrating technology into a traditional learning environment. active learning in higher education, 4(1), 74-86. southerton, d., & tomlinson, m. (2005). ‘pressed for time’– the differential impacts of a ‘time squeeze’. the sociological review, 53(2), 215-239. vigdor, j., & ladd, h. (2010). scaling the digital divide: home computer technology and student achievement. washington, d.c.: national center for analysis of longitudinal data in education research (calder). voorveld, h. a. m. (2011). media multitasking and the effectiveness of combining online and radio advertising. computers in human behavior, 27(6), 2200-2206. wainer, j., dwyer, t., dutra, r. s., covic, a., magalhaes, v. b., ferreira, l. r. r., et al. (2008). too much computer and internet use is bad for your grades, especially if you are young and poor: results from the 2001 brazilian saeb. computers and education, 51(4), 1417-1429. wang, z., & tchernev, j. m. (2012). the “myth” of media multitasking: reciprocal dynamics of media multitasking, personal needs, and gratifications. journal of communication, 62(3), 493-513. wood, e., zivcakova, l., gentile, p., archer, k., de pasquale, d., & nosko, a. (2012). examining the impact of off-task multi-tasking with technology on real-time classroom learning. [article]. computers & education, 58(1), 365-374. wurst, c., smarkola, c., & gaffney, m. a. (2008). ubiquitous laptop usage in higher education: effects on student achievement, student satisfaction, and constructivist measures in honors and traditional classrooms. computers and education, 51(4), 1766-1783. microsoft word _original submissions selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 repairing at the app clinic: a case study of an online wellness application janine sakiko slaker michigan state university presented is a brief account of a six-month ethnographic case study of an internetcommunications technology startup. this company has designed an online application for the purpose of increasing wellness of individuals in the workplace. by way of curated prompts of selfand group-reflection and self-tracking, the company seeks to transport workers through an architected experience that leads to greater production through holistic awareness. the methods used for this study include in-depth, unstructured interviews, participant-observation of the employees, and platform study. the company, which has a core group of four employees, includes a ceo, a product manager, a developer, and a designer. following, is a summary of my observations in which i attempt to describe how the employees of this startup imagine the body in need of care. i then conclude with a description of how i see the discussion expanding to include their online platform and how it can be framed as a clinic for care. where are we working? the site of care is not necessarily one of a traditional medical clinic. as fitzegerald, legge, and frank (2013) have argued the ‘clinic’ is a manifestation of institutions and practices, of patients and workers, and of discourse. therefore, the clinic can exist in a network of relationships a concept that livingston (2012) calls ‘the intersubjective phenomenology of care’ (p. 112). one such contemporary site of care is situated within the momentum of the quantified-self movement in which care is directed to the individual by means of technologies supporting self-care practices. these technologies, which range from online or mobile apps such as the one investigated in this case study, to wearable devices (e.g. fitbit) track a range of human activities, attitudes, and affect. viseu and suchmann (2010) have situated the quantified self movement in the “cultural imaginary dominated by the trope of ‘information’” (p. 162 ). they argue that commercial interests such as those of pharmaceutical companies construct a figure of the body that continually ‘emits signals inaccessible without technological mediation’ (p. 163 ). lupton (2013) argues that the goal of such technologies is to amend perceived shortfalls of the human body whether in function or appearance. the appearance of the body in datafied suggested citation (apa): slaker, j. (2015, october 21-24). repairing at the app clinic: a case study of an online wellness application. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. form is seen in visualizations of data from graphs to medical imaging creating an ontology of the body-one that is of the desired and mechanically pristine self. as the name suggests, the quantified-self movement is primarily engaged with quantifications of human behavior and affect, which take the form of mathematical representations of the body. the platform being investigated here does so only sometimes. a large part of the process also entails collecting qualitative data through the form of personal diary-ing, which is used to integrate reflection with action. so, while i believe this platform is situated within the broader conversation of the quantified-self movement and datafied care, the platform that this startup has designed is not bounded by an analytical nature. a body that needs some care for the employees of this startup, the method for identifying a need for care derived from struggles experienced with their relationship to work. for example, one employee found herself investing ten years at a job that she described as emotionally abusive. she recounted feeling increasingly void, depleted, and depressed during her tenure. another employee shared feeling fragmented at her job of four years having the sensation that she was being pulled apart because the tasks delegated to her were unmanageable due to a lack of resources and support. while the examples of struggle vary all of their accounts of workplace hardship culminate into a sensation of the body in crises--a point in which the body becomes imbalanced and unsustainable. it is at this point that a need for care is recognized. the body in need of care is imagined in two ways. first, it is experienced as a self that is divided—a body of multiple parts, but the parts are of an unharmonious distribution. further, for the ceo, when the body is in a state of division it leads to an absence of ‘living in my body.’ she believes this can be mended with a ‘somatic-glue’ that will attach the body to intentions, actions, and the world. she described this glue as manifested in the content of the reflection prompts shown to users of their platform. in this regard a body in parts is a broken body, a body that needs to be glued back together, which can be facilitated via their online technology. second, the body is experienced as full of lacunas. much like a rusted hole in the metal of a car, the human body can come to be full of loss. and much like the work done at a repair shop, the body can be patched, filled, and resurfaced to elevate the self. for the product manager loss was experienced by time devoted to work, which required time taken from other activities. for the self to be elevated one needed to repair the loss of time by being intentional of their actions and aware of the amount that they are giving and receiving. while awareness leads to an elevated self, to gain awareness one must do ‘vulnerability work’, a term she used to describe the actions that the platform is facilitating. she pictures the platform as creating a scaffold, a safe support structure for the body to do vulnerability work—the process of speaking about emotional states to avoid crises. much like the ceo’s concept of somatic glue, the product manager conceptualizes a repairing of the body with the aid of the platform, which acts as an assistant to the user conducting the vulnerability work required to patch loss. work at the app clinic shilling (1993) postulates that people go about creating and taking part in body projects to aid in defining their identities. what the platform offered this group was an opportunity to explore their identity with the past by coming together around a common theme. in other words, designing a wellness platform allowed them the opportunity to scale their body project to persons outside of themselves. however, to scale such a project required the creation of a methodology for recognizing and managing care for a needing body. the work that the employees are doing falls somewhere between that of a grouptherapist to one of mechanic. the platform is also working by creating a space that allows for the mending and repairing of the body. references fitzgerald, ruth p., legge, m. & frank, n. (2013). when biological scientists become health-care workers: emotional labour in embryology". human reproduction, 28(5), 1289-1296. livingston, j. (2012). improvising medicine: an african oncology ward in an emerging cancer epidemic. durham: duke university press. lupton, d. (2013). quantifying the body: monitoring and measuring health in the age of mhealth technologies. critical public health, 23(4), 393-403. shilling, c. (1993). the body and society theory. london: sage. viseu, a., & suchman, l. (2010). wearable augmentations: imaginaries of the informed body. in j. edwards, p. harvey & p. wade (eds), technologized images, technologized bodies: anthropological approaches to a new politics of vision (pp. 161184). oxford, new york: berghan books. microsoft word 863-667-1-pb.docx selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 appropriating breaking news? the evolving twitter coverage of the lance armstrong doping scandal tim highfield arc centre of excellence for creative industries and innovation queensland university of technology brisbane, australia t.highfield@qut.edu.au @timhighfield abstract social media have been researched for their roles in, separately, breaking, and sharing news, in engaging with celebrities and public figures, and in providing a backchannel for commenting on media events. in this paper, the confluence of these roles is examined, within the context of one long-running celebrity crisis: the doping allegations against u.s. cyclist lance armstrong in 2012, culminating in his confession in televised interviews in january 2013. the keyword “armstrong” was tracked on twitter between august 2012 and march 2013, providing a dataset covering several key developments in this story and their social media responses, from livetweeting during interviews to immediate reactions to sudden news. the analysis of this dataset provides an important examination of how breaking news is shared, editorialized, reframed, and lampooned on twitter, and the roles and types of users involved in the coverage of these different aspects to the armstrong story. keywords social media; breaking news; celebrity practice; introduction twitter has become an important tool for the immediate release and propagation of news as it happens; news organizations and journalists are active on twitter – and in some cases, have lengthy lists of followers – and while breaking news is not their only use of twitter, the short message style of tweets lends itself to quick updates which can be instantly disseminated (vis, 2013). these capabilities are, of course, also available to other twitter users; if the stream of tweets responding to breaking news acts as “a first draft of the present, to be revised and completed as further information comes to hand” (bruns & highfield, 2012), this is, in a sense, a contested draft. social media provide not only the opportunity for users to react to breaking news, but also to challenge portrayals, share their own interpretations and presentation of stories, and to make these ideas public and, potentially, widely circulated. while social media are a constantly available platform for breaking and tracking news, providing a site for ‘ambient journalism’ (hermida, 2010), the type of news event has some bearing on its resulting coverage, attention, and prominent accounts acting as opinion leaders or information brokers on twitter. unforeseen or fleeting events and announcements, for example, may be released by journalists with first access to the story. for the coverage of unfolding stories, though, increased access to key elements, such as televised interviews, enables other, non-journalist twitter users to potentially lead or reframe the coverage – including providing revised treatments of stories through satire, and merging multiple news stories, tangentially related, to create new commentary (the place of humor in tweets, including those by journalists, on news stories, and during media events, is discussed in part by an, cha, gummadi, & crowcroft, 2011; deller, 2011; highfield, harrington, & bruns, 2013; holton & lewis, 2011; papacharissi & de fatima oliveira, 2012). context this paper examines the development and appropriation of breaking news within the context of one overall story, and specifically compares the coverage of different aspects of this story as it developed. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 in august 2012, the united states anti-doping agency (usada) stripped the retired u.s. cyclist lance armstrong of his titles and results following an inquiry into doping during his professional career – charges denied but not appealed by armstrong, who later confessed to doping in televised interviews with oprah winfrey in january 2013. while ostensibly a topic of interest only to sports fans, the armstrong case took a higher profile due to his individual fame, achievements, and his personal story in undergoing cancer treatment before successfully returning to professional cycling. the coverage of armstrong and doping from august 2012 onwards takes into account a number of individual events contributing to the wider story. the analysis for this paper then examines how these events provoke different responses within the social media coverage of the ongoing story, providing important information into how breaking news is shared, editorialized, and reframed on twitter, and the types of users involved at different stages of the armstrong discussion. methods and analysis the analysis here draws on an archive of 5.6 million tweets collected between 24 august and 1 march 2013, based on the keyword “armstrong” and collected using the yourtwapperkeeper tool (bruns & liang, 2012). the armstrong dataset includes tweets including this term, tweets from and to users named armstrong, and tweets with urls containing the term. this provides an unfocused raw dataset, covering tweets not just about or by lance armstrong, but also unrelated armstrongs; for example, the archive includes tweets about the astronaut neil armstrong, whose death on 26 august received extensive twitter attention. the data are analyzed further using scripts developed for the processing of large twitter datasets (bruns & burgess, 2011), filtering tweets based on such criteria as keywords, timeframe, hashtags, and reply type. a topical network approach is employed to identify and examine different spikes and themes within the overall dataset (highfield, 2012), comparing the patterns of tweeting and the network of users involved at different stages of the armstrong discussion. research questions this research seeks to provide an examination of breaking news on twitter within the context of one, ongoing story, focusing on the following research questions: what types of news events provoke spikes in attention? do different types of news events foster different styles of coverage? are different types of users (such as journalists, celebrities, and comedians) more or less prominent within the discussion networks formed during these individual spikes? the analysis focuses first on the overall dataset, measuring the number of tweets per day to identify periods of heightened twitter activity. these spikes are then examined individually; tweets are filtered based on the timeframe of each spike, and also for relevant keywords. within each spike, overall metrics are obtained regarding the volume of tweets, the total contributing users, and the distribution of hashtags within these tweets. reply information is also extracted, aiding the analysis to not only identify which twitter users are cited most often by others, but also any topical distribution across this network; one comment might be retweeted thousands of times, for example, but it might be on a different aspect of the story, and the users concerned separate, to those found in other tweets within the same spike. preliminary findings initial findings from the analysis so far suggest that the social media audience – including the users publishing and involved in these stories – does take different roles and approaches to tweeting about breaking news, based on the type of event and the amount of forewarning. the major spike within the selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 armstrong dataset, for example, concerns not lance armstrong, but the immediate reaction to the death of neil armstrong. this unforeseen event was accompanied by a mass outpouring of appreciation for the late astronaut, in addition to sharing the breaking news, and the general tone for the most retweeted comments remained informational (including republishing mainstream media tweets) and respectful. in comparison, the tweets posted, and retweeted, during lance armstrong’s interviews with oprah take a very different tone; in particular, the most retweeted comments are for the most part satirical or of humorous intent, with comedians and media personalities as focal accounts. this may be in part because of the more predictable content of the interviews, as there was an expectation that armstrong would admit to doping during his career at some point in the broadcast. these cases then suggest different approaches to social media commentary on breaking news; the instinctive, spontaneous reactions to sudden developments, such as the death of neil armstrong, and the more communal, spectatorial live-tweeting during televised broadcasts such as the oprah interviews. further work for this paper will examine the discussion of – and by – celebrity accounts, including patterns around @mentions of @lancearmstrong throughout the dataset. this analysis will then provide additional information about the roles and presence of public figures within social media discussions, building on ideas about celebrity practices and interactions raised by marwick and boyd (2011). in addition, the topical analysis will continue to investigate further the various themes covered within the spikes in armstrong-related discussion, and the longevity of these themes and individual tweets, as a means of determining the patterns surrounding breaking, and framing, news on twitter. references an, j., cha, m., gummadi, k., & crowcroft, j. (2011). media landscape in twitter?: a world of new conventions and political diversity. proceedings of the fifth international aaai conference on weblogs and social media, 18–25. bruns, a., & burgess, j. (2011, june 22). gawk scripts for twitter processing. mapping online publics. retrieved from http://mappingonlinepublics.net/resources/ bruns, a., & highfield, t. (2012). blogs, twitter, and breaking news: the produsage of citizen journalism. in r. a. lind (ed.), produsing theory in a digital world: the intersection of audiences and production in contemporary theory. new york, ny: peter lang. bruns, a., & liang, e. (2012). tools and methods for capturing twitter data during natural disasters. first monday, 17(4). retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3937/3193 deller, r. (2011). twittering on: audience research and participation using twitter. participations, 8(1). retrieved from http://www.participations.org/volume 8/issue 1/deller.htm hermida, a. (2010). twittering the news. journalism practice, 4(3), 297–308. doi:10.1080/17512781003640703 highfield, t. (2012). talking of many things: using topical networks to study discussions in social media. journal of technology in human services, 30(3-4), 204–218. doi:10.1080/15228835.2012.746894 highfield, t., harrington, s., & bruns, a. (2013). twitter as a technology for audiencing and fandom: the #eurovision phenomenon. information, communication & society. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2012.756053 holton, a. e., & lewis, s. c. (2011). journalists, social media, and the use of humor on twitter. the electronic journal of communication, 21(1-2). marwick, a., & boyd, d. (2011). to see and be seen: celebrity practice on twitter. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 17(2), 139–158. doi:10.1177/1354856510394539 papacharissi, z., & de fatima oliveira, m. (2012). affective news and networked publics: the rhythms of news storytelling on #egypt. journal of communication, 62, 266–282. doi:10.1111/j.14602466.2012.01630.x selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 vis, f. (2013). twitter as a reporting tool for breaking news: journalists tweeting the 2011 uk riots. digital journalism, 1(1), 27–47. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 oscar pistorius and the death of reeva steenkamp: mapping public opinions on twitter using frame analysis and data mining ana vimieiro arc centre of excellence for creative industries and innovation queensland university of technology brisbane, australia ana.vimieiro@qut.edu.au @carolvimieiro renato vimieiro centre for bioinformatics, biomarker discovery and information-based medicine the university of newcastle hunter medical research institute newcastle, australia renato.vimieiro@newcastle.edu.au @rvimieiro abstract this paper uses innovative content analysis techniques to map how the death of oscar pistorius' girlfriend, reeva steenkamp, was framed on twitter conversations. around 1.5 million posts from a two-week timeframe are analyzed with a combination of syntactic and semantic methods. this analysis is grounded in the frame analysis perspective and is different than sentiment analysis. instead of looking for explicit evaluations, such as “he is guilty” or “he is innocent”, we showcase through the results how opinions can be identified by complex articulations of more implicit symbolic devices such as examples and metaphors repeatedly mentioned. different frames are adopted by users as more information about the case is revealed: from a more episodic one, highly used in the very beginning, to more systemic approaches, highlighting the association of the event with urban violence, gun control issues, and violence against women. a detailed timeline of the discussions is provided. keywords pistorius; twitter; frame analysis; data mining; public opinion introduction on the 14th of february 2013, the world got shocked by the breaking news: the south african athlete oscar pistorius, the "blade runner", had allegedly shot dead his girlfriend, the model reeva steenkamp. pistorius remarkable story made such an incident not only a major breaking news, but also a very unexpected and controversial one. he claimed that he had awakened early in that morning and heard a noise coming from the bathroom. mistaking reeva for an intruder, he shot four times through the bathroom door and only after he realized that his girlfriend was not lying on the bed. pistorius did not claim that he had not shot her; he assumed he did it, but assured he had no intention of killing reeva. he was charged with murder and bailed eight days later. this paper maps how people talked about the case on twitter and how they evaluated the incident as more information came up in the following days. perspective and methods we apply a combination of qualitative and quantitative techniques that intend to capture both semantic and syntactic textual levels. we use data mining methods to analyze which frames are adopted by twitter users over the two weeks after the shooting. this analysis is grounded in the frame analysis perspective and is different than sentiment analysis. instead of looking for explicit opinions and sentiments, such as “he is guilty” or “he is innocent”, we showcase through the results how opinions, particularly in controversial discussions, are a complex combination of more implicit symbolic devices such as examples and metaphors repeatedly mentioned. frame analysis is a suitable strategy to analyze the meaning-making process that has however rarely been applied on the social media scholarship. previous studies with traditional media content suggest variables to be analyzed in order to find out how an event is framed, such as cited causes, solutions, examples, metaphors and so on (entman, 1993, 2004; gamson & modigliani, 1989; iyengar, 1991; matthes & kohring, 2008; vimieiro & maia, 2011). we are proposing a novel methodological design selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 6 to enable the use of this methodology for twitter content, especially taking into account its particular features such as length of posts and language uses. the frame matrix proposed by gamson and modigliani (1989) was previously tested with another dataset and it proved to be suitable for twitter conversations because in very short messages users tend to recur to figures of speech and examples rather than to very rational argumentation. for instance, immediately after the incident was first reported, it was seen as a tragedy, with no clear association being made between pistorius and previous similar cases. over the following days, many tweets made associations between pistorius and other nike athletes recently involved in scandals. this type of association reveals how users on twitter, an increasingly significant forum for public communication, are processing information and framing the event. results and brief analysis nearly 1.5 million tweets were collected from the 13th of january to the 1st of march 2013. we used yourtwapperkeeper1 to archive tweets using the keyword “pistorius”. as soon as the news was reported, on feb 14, the conversations followed a pattern similar to twitter conversations in major breaking news: there were significantly more original messages and retweets than replies. we showcase in the figure 1 how the proportion of reply messages decreased, while posts with urls increased over the period analyzed. users were sharing the news at this point, having the 14th more retweets than original tweets. we restrict therefore our analysis to the crisis period following the event. figure 1: percentage of posts sharing urls and percentage of posts directed to somebody else (genuine replies) over the days. the script metrify.awk created by bruns (2011) is able to generate those metrics. we performed a daily analysis of tweeted hashtags. a total of 32,267 unique hashtags were used, being #pistorius added to 136,895 tweets – this was the most used hashtag in our corpus. we graphically display the daily frequency of some important hashtags in figure 2. we observe in figure 2 how the story was first framed as a tragedy, since hashtags such as #tragic, #shocking, #shocked, and #sad were used more often in the beginning. also, as the shooting occurred on valentine’s day, many users made an association to the date. from the second day, feb. 15, we observe that the association between pistorius and other nike athletes got stronger with specific hashtags being used such as #woods, #nike, and #armstrong. a qualitative analysis of the most tweeted messages at this particular day revealed that many messages mentioned a specific nike advertisement where pistorius is metaphorically called “a bullet in the chamber”. towards the end of the analyzed period, twitter users talked about pistorius’ bail and, on feb. 22, the use of the hashtag 1 available at https://github.com/jobrieniii/yourtwapperkeeper selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 7 #guilty slightly increased. figure 2: heatmap generated with r using a selection of significant hashtags. it is worth mentioning that twitter users initially framed the case from pistorius’ point of view and then slightly switched to hers in part of the messages. as we observe in figure 3, reeva was referred to as simply oscar’s girlfriend at first and soon after by her name. this phenomenon is highlighted by the hashtag #hernamewasreevasteenkamp (figure 2), one of the most tweeted hashtags on the second day – #justiceforreeva is also significant in the forth day. the increasing use of her name as opposite selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 8 to “girlfriend” coincides with three special events: 1) on feb 17, when a south african network broadcast her final appearance in a reality show; 2) on feb 19, date of pistorius’ bail hearing; and 3) on feb 26, when oscar declared his intention to hold a private memorial service for reeva. figure 3: proportional occurrence of “girlfriend” and “reeva” or “steenkamp” over the days. figure 4 illustrates how more systemic or social frames come up over the days. in this heatmap, we list words associated with the term “gun” and their frequency. it is particularly significant how “gun” is more or less articulated in a same post with the words “violence”, “laws”, “america”, and “security”. notoriously, feb. 15 is not only the day when associations between oscar and nike are more often made, but also there is an increase in posts discussing gun violence and gun control issues in south africa – especially, there was a comparison to america. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 9 figure 4: level of association between the term “gun” and other words in the same post. in sum, the issues being discussed over the days showcase how the attribution of responsibility changes according to possible causes wondered for the incident. the episodic frame, when only the event is reported, is characterized for a lack of particular causes and responsible agents (iyengar, 1991) – at first, nobody knew exactly what had happened. from a tragedy for pistorius to reeva becoming the victim in the situation, the messages also highlight how a more personal frame focused on oscar as the perpetrator turned up, especially from the third day on. the more systemic/social approaches emerged in the second day, notoriously because pistorius’ life story led users to quickly look for some broader explanations for the shooting. references bruns, a. (2011). gawk scripts for twitter processing. mapping online publics retrieved 14 april 2012, from http://www.mappingonlinepublics.net/resources/ entman, r. m. (1993). framing: toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. journal of communication, 43(4), 51-58. entman, r. m. (2004). projections of power: framing news, public opinion, and u.s. foreign policy. chicago: the university of chicago press. gamson, w. a., & modigliani, a. (1989). media discurse and public opinion on nuclear power: a construcionist approach. american journal of sociology, 95, 1-37. iyengar, s. (1991). is anyone responsible? how television frames political issues. illinois: university of chicago press. matthes, j., & kohring, m. (2008). the content analysis of media frames: toward improving reliability and validity. journal of communication, 58(2), 258-279. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 10 vimieiro, a. c., & maia, r. c. m. (2011). indirect media frame analysis: a methodological alternative to identify cultural frames. revista famecos, 18(1), 235-252. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 11 #pontiff-ex: the twitter community’s reaction to the papal resignation theresa sauter arc centre of excellence for creative industries and innovation queensland university of technology brisbane, australia t.sauter@qut.edu.au @lena_sauter axel bruns arc centre of excellence for creative industries and innovation queensland university of technology brisbane, australia a.bruns@qut.edu.au @snurb_dot_info abstract in this paper, we provide an account-centric analysis of the tweeting activity of, and public response to, pope benedict xvi via the @pontifex twitter account(s). we focus our investigation on the particular phase around pope benedict xvi’s resignation to generate insights into the use of twitter in response to a celebrity crisis event. through a combined qualitative and quantitative methodological approach we generate an overview of the follower-base and tweeting activity of the @pontifex account. we identify a very one-directional communication pattern (many @mentions by followers yet zero @replies from the papal account itself), which prompts us to enquire further into what the public resonance of the @pontifex account is. we also examine reactions to the resurrection of the papal twitter account by pope benedict xvi’s successor. in this way, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the public response to the immediate events around the crisis event of pope benedict xvi’s resignation and its aftermath via the network of users involved in the @pontifex account. keywords twitter, celebrity, crisis, pope benedict xvi papal tweeting: a one-way street the creation of the @pontifex twitter account(s) (there are nine accounts in different languages) in december 2012 placed pope benedict xvi in the company of other political and community leaders and celebrities who employ twitter as a tool for managing their public presence, from barack obama to lady gaga. the foray into online social networking was seen as the signal of a renewed push by the roman catholic church to improve its public relations activities at a time of persistent crisis, in an institution affected by scandals over sexual abuse by priests, the leaking of sensitive documents by the pope’s personal aide, and allegations of money laundering against the vatican bank (afp, 2013). while the papal accounts rapidly attracted a substantial number of followers (some 1.6 million twitter users followed @pontifex by 28 february 2013, while spanish-language version @pontifex_es attracted nearly 750,000 users; the latin @pontifex_ln had more than 26,000 followers), and received a very substantial number of @mentions since its inception, communication between followers and account holder was limited to a one-way channel; the pope (or his aides) posted 28 tweets between december 2012 and february 2013 that constituted 140-character prayers or blessings such as “may we defend the right of conscientious objection of individuals and institutions, promoting freedom and respect for all” (7 jan. 2013). the tweets were posted simultaneously and in (sometimes grammatically incorrect) translation by all nine papal accounts. however, there was no use of @mentions or retweets in any such messages, and the papal accounts followed only each other, rather than connecting with some, or all, of their additional followers. this limited use of the communicative affordances of the twitter platform is perhaps unsurprising, given the nature and status of the papal role, even if the accounts of other world leaders have demonstrated that different communicative strategies are possible for such celebrities (or their media teams) (see e.g. marwick and boyd, 2011; page, 2012; waters and williams, 2011). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 12 an account in crisis: analysing the public response to the papal resignation via twitter in light of the limited tweeting activity by the pope himself, what is of greater interest is the public resonance of his accounts. in addition to the initial public reaction to the creation of these accounts, a particular focus here must be on the response to the virtually unprecedented act of the pope’s resignation, announced on 11 february and enacted on 28 february 2013. this paper explores user reactions to the resignation as they are expressed in tweets mentioning or replying to the papal accounts, with particular focus on the most prominent, english-language account @pontifex. drawing on standard methods and metrics for twitter analysis (bruns & stieglitz 2012; 2013), we chart the total volume of user participation around the @pontifex account, and explore patterns of activity over time as more information about the resignation came to hand. additionally, we use automated content analysis, social network analysis, and qualitative textual analysis techniques to examine the key trends in the popular response. this combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies enables us to complete a comprehensive analysis of the communicative activities and types of connections that characterised the short life of the @pontifex account. quantitative analysis our analysis is based on a dataset which contains all tweets from, as well as @mentioning, the nine papal accounts collected via the open source tool yourtwapperkeeper (on methods used to capture tweets, see bruns and burgess, 2011; bruns and stieglitz, 2013; bruns & liang, 2012). first, quantitative analysis enabled us to generate basic overall perspectives on the public resonance of these accounts. for example, figure 1 shows the total volume of tweets and total number of unique users @mentioning the @pontifex accounts from 3 dec. 2012 to 28 feb. 2013. it reveals that there were major spikes in activity around the announcement of the papal accounts on 3 dec., the pope’s first tweet on 12 dec., and the resignation announcement on 11 feb. 2013. this suggests that public reactions to the @pontifex account proliferate around events, not particular tweets, and is indicative of the disconnected character of the tweets produced via the @pontifex account; they do not relate directly to the offline activities of the pope or to current affairs. the fact that no official tweet went out via the @pontifex account to announce or comment on pope benedict xvi’s resignation attests to this. figure 1: tweets and unique users @mentioning the @pontifex accounts, 3 dec. 2012 to 28 feb. 2013. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 13 qualitative analysis further in-depth analysis of tweets by the users who most frequently @mention the account enables us to classify these users as one of a number of types (ranging, for example, from believer through critic to retweet bot), and allows for a differentiation of twitter resonance across these different respondent categories. we use automated and manual content analysis of a sample of the tweets by such user groups to examine the key themes highlighted in their tweets, especially in the context of the papal resignation. we explore overall sentiment towards the pope and the church, and examine the presence of key themes related to current issues in the church (e.g. sexual abuse, celibacy, internal governance, the decline of faith, etc.), in order to assess whether the @pontifex account(s) have been able to achieve their assumed aim of connecting with the faithful, or have served mainly as a lightning-rod for critics of the church. we undertake this analysis from a dynamic perspective, tracing the evolution of public sentiment towards the papal resignation from the first rumours on 11 february to the formal commencement of the sede vacante period on 28 february. finally, we also aim to examine twitter activity around the papal accounts during the interregnum and in the wake of the election of a new pope in march and april 2013. with the commencement of sede vacante, all tweets posted by benedict xvi were removed from the nine papal accounts, and stored in archives on the vatican’s official news website (news.va, 2013a); a related statement noted that “@pontifex will be inactive during the interim period between the renouncement of pope benedict xvi and the election of his successor” and that the account would “be available for use by the next pope as he may wish” (news.va, 2013b). this, however, has not stopped other twitter users from continuing to @mention the account (as an alternative to referring to benedict xvi by name, or to the office of the pope in general); through in-depth quantitative and qualitative analysis we intend to examine the overall patterns and tenor of such @mentions. this may reveal the use of twitter to follow news updates ahead of and during the papal election, track the ongoing evaluation of benedict xvi’s legacy, and/or highlight debates about emerging candidates for the papacy. conclusion – a case study for public communication around celebrity crises this account-centric (as opposed to hashtag-centric) study of twitter activities around a major celebrity presence provides important insights into the public resonance of leading celebrity accounts, and especially enables an understanding of how the twitter userbase reacts to significant celebrity crisis events. the papal resignation offers a case study which can be usefully compared with the other celebrity crises covered by this panel. the public response to the immediate events around the crisis and its aftermath via twitter reveals the way in which the social networking site is enrolled in the negotiation of public crises by online users. as such, our study makes an important contribution to generating an understanding of the increasing techno-social hybridity of modern public spheres. acknowledgments this research is supported by funding from the australian research council. references bruns, a., & burgess, j. e. (2011). # ausvotes: how twitter covered the 2010 australian federal election. communication, politics and culture, 44(2), 37-56. bruns, a., & liang, y. e. (2012). tools and methods for capturing twitter data during natural disasters. first monday, 17(4-2). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 14 bruns, a., & stieglitz, s. (2012). quantitative approaches to comparing communication patterns on twitter. journal of technology in human services, 30(3-4), 160-185. bruns, a., & stieglitz, s. (2013). towards more systematic twitter analysis: metrics for tweeting activities. international journal of social research methodology, (january), 1–18. doi:10.1080/13645579.2012.756095 afp. (2013). pope benedict xvi leaves the catholic church in a state of crisis. the raw story, 11 february. available from: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/02/11/pope-benedict-xvi-leaves-the-catholic-churchin-a-state-of-crisis/ marwick, a., & boyd, d (2011). to see and be seen: celebrity practice on twitter. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 17(2), 139-158. news.va (2013a) twitter archive for bxvi. retrieved from: http://www.news.va/en/twitter_archive news.va (2013b) what happens to @pontifex after papal resignation? retrieved from: http://www.news.va/en/news/what-happens-to-pontifex-after-papal-resignation page, r., (2012). the linguistics of self-branding and micro-celebrity in twitter: the role of hashtags. discourse & communication, 6(2), 181-201. waters, r.d., & williams, j. m. (2011). squawking, tweeting, cooing, and hooting: analyzing the communication patterns of government agencies on twitter. journal of public affairs, 11(4), 353-363. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 15 the spokesperson syndrome: negotiating stance in the german govt. press secretary’s twitter cornelius puschmann humboldt university of berlin berlin, germany puschmann@ibi.hu-berlin.de @coffee001 abstract social media platforms such as twitter are increasingly sites of current political debate and a relevant source of information for journalists. politicians recognize this and increasingly flock to social media platforms to communicate and connect to their constituents. in this paper we examine the activity surrounding the official account of the german government’s press secretary, steffen seibert (@regsprecher). specifically, we examine how seibert communicates with different stakeholders and negotiates between different roles in his capacity as the government’s spokesperson, disseminating official information, responding to criticism and expressing views which are expected to balance a degree of personal involvement with official policy. we analyze the stance and positioning of the press secretary and his interactions with other twitter users, as well as the kinds of messages directed towards @regsprecher. keywords twitter; social media, politics, germany, stance introduction social media platforms such as twitter increasingly act as sites of national political debates, as a growing number of politicians, journalists, activists and lobbyists, but also countless private citizens disseminate information, promote views and voice their opinions on a range of issues, reaching from fiscal policy to climate change and from immigration to government corruption (ausserhofer & maireder, 2013, burgess & bruns, 2012). while the emergence of a truly networked public sphere (benkler, 2006) remains under dispute, different forms of political activism and policy disputes take place on twitter, and government institutions increasingly use it not only to point to information, but also to respond to questions, comments and criticism. method and data in what follows we present an exploratory analysis the german government’s press secretary’s interactions with other twitter users, relying on a data set collected between june 2012 and february 2013. we collected the tweets posted by @regsprecher and those of other users directed at him or mentioning him. table 1 summarizes the information collected, as well as basic statistics describing the formal properties of tweets (whether they contain an @username to address another user, whether they constitute a retweet, whether the tweet contains a url, or whether the tweet is a question; cf. also bruns & stieglitz, 2013). table 1: summary of data collected on the activity of @regsprecher and tweets of users addressing or mentioning @regsprecher. tweets @user retweets (%) urls (%) questions (%) by @regsprecher 1.189 369 (31%) 149 (12.5%) 681 (57.3%) 35 (2.9%) directed to or mentioning @regsprecher 24.001 ---* 10.570 (44%) 10.298 (42.9%) 6.702 (27.9%) selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 16 our methodology carries some restrictions. while we collected all tweets by @regsprecher, only tweets directed at or mentioning @regsprecher were collected from other users, which is likely to influence the other statistics to some degree. @regsprecher: disseminating information and responding to questions the figures provided in table 1 reveal that the main objective of @regsprecher is to disseminate information on ongoing government activities, both through press releases and other documents posted on the official website of the german government (www.bundesregierung.de) and the websites of different ministries (e.g. finance, defense, education). in addition to this we found links to the regular video podcast of the chancellor, syndicated through youtube, and pictures, usually taken at official events. political parties, corporations, ngos and other non-governmental organizations are only linked to rarely and in ways which aim not reflect endorsement or are likely to be seen as uncontroversial (e.g. redcross.org, nobelprize.org). there are some occasions where the account links to news outlets, but only where a representative of the government is interviewed. figure 1: histogram of twitter activity of @regsprecher. beyond disseminating information, @regsprecher also engages with users on different levels. this includes responding to questions and reacting to criticism. in the excerpt provided below (in translation) @regsprecher responds to the user @wildrose211 who asks a question related to the government’s energy policy in the context of a twitter-based debate with the minister for environmental issues (@peteraltmaier). two other users add criticism (to which he does not respond), both quoting regsprecher’s use of the term ‘infinite resources’ and the second referring to a controversial development project, stuttgart 21 (#s21): wildrose211: @regsprecher @peteraltmaier it used to be that coal was the gold of the earth, what is today? selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 17 regsprecher: .@wildrose211 please ask live tomorrow! gold as a metaphor is no longer useful, in the future we need resources that are infinite. knorz100: @regsprecher @wildrose211 infinite resources in a finite world? oldmanjo: @regsprecher "infinite resources"? water. stuttgart has water. mineral water. infinite right now. threatened by #s21. unsurprisingly, a high volume of @regsprecher’s activity in terms of postings tends to correlate with planned events, rather than with breaking news or political controversies. figure 1 shows the account’s activity over time. the three spikes in activity that are visible relate to the debate on energy policy (july 3rd), the annual open day of the press secretary’s office (august 18th) and the festivities at the eve of the day of german unity. the responses posted on this day predominantly address the accounts @tdotbpa and @tddebpa which were created by the press office specifically to allow physical visitors of both events to post questions. the fact that restrictions in terms of date, theme, and participants are applied highlights the desire to streamline to communication on the part of the press office. talking to @regsprecher: polemics and clicktivism figure 2 shows the activity of users talking to @regsprecher. an extreme spike in activity occurred on october 9th, 2012, when over 1.800 messages in a variety of different languages were posted by users around the globe urging german chancellor angela merkel to “save the world’s best bank” (avaaz.org, 2012a). this was part of a concerted action by civil rights organization avaaz with the aim of preventing involvement of the bagladeshi prime minister, sheikh hasina, in the governance of grameen bank, a non-profit bank supporting development. a very similar situation occurred when avaaz supporters posted a mass of messages urging the united nations to recognize palestine on november 28th and 29th (avaaz.org, 2012b). both issues were concerned with international, rather than national policy, and led by a single ngo mobilizing its supporters to mass-post a predetermined message as part of a planned clicktivism campaign. on that date a large number of users posted critical – even scathing – remarks on the government’s annual report on poverty, which was widely criticized for painting a too positive picture and described by critics as having been censored (öchsner, 2012). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 18 figure 2: histogram of @-messages from other users addressing or mentioning @regsprecher. an even better impression of how the issues that are framed by @regsprecher and those addressing or referencing him differ is the use of hashtags in (table 2). while @regsprecher uses predominantly names of political leaders (chancellor angela merkel, a number of cabinet members, the french president françois hollande), place names (greece, europe), and events (#elysee50, #tdot12, #tdde12) other users post a large number of messages with hashtags related to issues from palestine and the european financial stability measure (esm) to the merkel government’s decision to ban the use of nuclear power (#energiewende). many of these issues can be described as controversial national policy issues, but quite a few also relate to broad foreign policy aspects unrelated to any specific government action (e.g. #yestopalestine). table 2: hashtags in the tweets of @regsprecher and users addressing or mentioning @regsprecher. bold hashtags mark controversial issues (e.g. #esm) and affairs (#organspende; an organ donor scandal). rank by @regsprecher adressing @regsprecher 1 #merkel 276 #merkel 2.844 2 #tdot12 36 #yestopalestine 1.129 3 #fragbmu 35 #fragbmu 353 4 #tdde12 30 #refugeecamp 169 5 #westerwelle 25 #esm 165 6 #energiewende 13 #elysee50 155 7 #elysee50 11 #ramadan 152 8 #niebel 10 #schavan 137 9 #syrien 9 #cdu 133 10 #mali 8 #s21 133 11 #sls 7 #energiewende 124 12 #bmu 6 #eu 119 13 #kanzlerin 6 #kanzlerin 107 14 #schäuble 6 #tdot12 103 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 19 15 #griechenland 5 #beschneidung 92 16 #hollande 5 #yemen 89 17 #reisesicherheit 5 #erasmus 87 18 #bundestag 4 #bundesregierung 86 19 #bmj 3 #organspende 86 20 #europa 3 #fail 83 conclusions while the german government has recognized the usefulness of twitter to disseminate information quickly and communicate official policy in a more immediate way than was previously possible through traditional mass media, reacting to thousands of messages per day represents a daunting challenge, especially in the age of political campaign clicktivism. at the same time, a growing number of actors, from ngos to private individuals, enter the social media arena to directly address the government with their questions, their criticism and with a lot of sarcasm, not only to be heard by their elected representatives, but also to be seen by each other participating in a new kind of democratic spectacle. references ausserhofer, j., & maireder, a. (2013). national politics on twitter: structures and topics of a networked public sphere. information, communication & society, 1–24. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2012.756050 avaaz.org (2012a). save the world's best bank. retrieved from http://www.avaaz.org/en/save_the_world_best_bank avaaz.org (2012b). hours for palestine. retrieved from http://www.avaaz.org/en/palestine_worlds_next_nation_eu_rb/ benkler, y. (2006). the wealth of networks. new haven, ct: yale university press. bruns, a., & stieglitz, s. (2013). towards more systematic twitter analysis: metrics for tweeting activities. international journal of social research methodology, 16(2), 91–108. doi:10.1080/13645579.2013.770300 burgess, j., & bruns, a. (2012). (not) the twitter election: the dynamics of the #ausvotes conversation in relation to the australian media ecology. journalism practice, 6(3), 384–402. doi:10.1080/17512786.2012.663610 öchsner, t. (2012, november 28). bundesregierung schönt armutsbericht. sueddeutsche zeitung. retrieved from http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/einkommensverteilung-in-deutschland-bundesregierung-schoentarmutsbericht-1.1535166 license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  stromer-­galley,  j.  rossini,  p.,  hemsley,  j.,  kenski,  k.,  zhang,  f.,  bryant,  l.,   semann,  b.  (2016,  october  5-­8).social  media,  u.s.  presidential  campaigns,  and  public  opinion  polls:   disentangling  effects.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  conference  of  the  association  of   internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org. social  media,  u.s.  presidential  campaigns,  and  public   opinion  polls:  disentangling  effects   jennifer  stromer-­galley   syracuse  university     patricia  g.  c.  rossini   federal  university  of  minas  gerais,  brazil     jeff  hemsley   syracuse  university     kate  kenski   university  of  arizona     feifei  zhang   syracuse  university     lauren  bryant   university  at  albany     bryan  semaan   syracuse  university     twitter   and   facebook   have   now   “come   of   age”   for   strategic   communication   by   presidential  campaigns  in  the  united  states.  for  example,  in  2012,  the  obama  campaign   estimated  they  could  reach  95%  of  the  voting  public  through  facebook  (obama  legacy   report,   n.d.).   while   neither   twitter   nor   facebook   have   increased   their   user   bases   substantially  since  2012,  they  are  an  important  source  of  information  for  the  electorate   during  an  election,   including   this  election  cycle   (gottfried,  barthel,  shearer  &  mitchell,   2016).     because  social  media  is  now  an  important  site  of  communication  for  campaigns  and  the   electorate,  we  seek   to  understand   the   types  and  nature  of  messaging   that  campaigns   produce.  of  specific  interest  is  the  relationship  between  messaging  on  social  media  and   public  opinion  polls.  prior   research  suggests   that  strategic  messages   in   television  ads   change  based  on  candidate  standing  in  the  polls  (jamieson,  1992).  as  races  tighten,  they   tend  to  become  more  negative  (buell  &  sigelman,  2008;;  hassell  &  oeltjenbruns,  2015;;   lau  &  pomper,  2004).  two  recent  studies  suggest  that  campaigns  mirror  what  they  do   offline  and  online  (druckman,  kifer,  &  parkin,  2009;;  krupnikov  &  easter,  2013).  this  leads   us  to  predict  that  presidential  candidate  message  strategies  will  change  based  on  their   standing  in  vote-­intention  polls,  which  ask  the  public  who  they  would  vote  for  if  the  election   were  held  today.       methods     we  collected  facebook  and  twitter  messages  of  all  17  republican  and  7  democratic   primary.  the  period  of  analysis  starts  from  when  the  candidates  announced  they  were   running  early  in  2015  until  they  dropped  out,  or  april  1st,  2016,  whichever  came  first.   the  analysis  focuses  on  the  surfacing  and  primary  stages  of  the  campaigns  because  of   the  large  number  of  candidates  running,  which  allows  for  the  highest  number  of  data   points  to  examine  the  relationship  between  strategic  messaging  and  polling.  we  use   national  public  opinion  polling  data  from  realclearpolitics.com,  which  provides  a  rolling   average  of  an  aggregate  of  national  polls.       we  developed  a  codebook  to  categorize  tweets  through  deductive  and  inductive   analysis  of  twitter  messages  by  the  candidates  (krippendorff,  2003).  in  this  study,  we   focus  on  strategic  messages.  these  are  operationalized  as  any  message  that  is  about   the  candidate  or  their  opponent  that  focuses  on  policy  and  issues,  or  character  and   personality,  including  policy  messages  around  voting,  and  standing  in  the  public  opinion   polls.  we  defined  two  sub-­categories  under  strategic  messages:  attack  and  advocacy   messaging.  an  attack  message  is  operationalized  as  a  message  that  criticizes  the   opponent  or  opposing  administration  or  party  on  their  personality,  leadership  skills,  past   behaviors,  family,  policy  issues,  campaign  events,  or  any  other  negative  focus  on  the   opponent,  or  their  campaign,  surrogates,  or  family.  an  advocacy  message  is   operationalized  as  a  message  that  advocates  for  the  candidate,  highlighting  their   strengths  as  a  leader,  describing  their  prior  policies  or  personal  history,  describing  or   featuring  their  family,  describing  or  highlighting  their  current  and  future  policy  positions,   or  featuring  their  positive  personality  characteristics,  is  an  advocacy  message.       we  will  use  machine  learning  to  categorize  the  entire  corpus  of  facebook  messages   and  tweets.  human  coders  have  annotated  strategic  messages  from  both  facebook   and  twitter  using  2014  gubernatorial  campaign  data.  once  annotators  reached  at  least   75%  agreement  on  all  categories,  they  reconciled  differences  to  generate  gold-­labeled   data.  to  date,  our  annotators  have  annotated  and  adjudicated  1,438  strategic  tweets,   with  958  advocacy  tweets  and  480  attack  tweets;;  and  856  facebook  strategic   messages,  with  537  advocacy  messages  and  319  attack  messages.  we  use  these  gold   standard  data  as  training  data  to  build  algorithms  for  advocacy  and  attack  message   detection.     for  algorithm  building,  we  performed  a  number  of  experiments  in  scikit-­learn,  a  python-­ based,  command-­line  machine  learning  package.  all  classification  tasks  were  evaluated   with  10-­fold  cross  validation.  for  strategic  messages  in  twitter  (see  table  1),  the  best   micro-­averaged  f  value  is  0.77,  by  using  svm  classifier  with  features,  including   boolean,  @_username,  and  numbers  of  @_username  included  in  one  tweet.  for   facebook  data  (see  table  2),  the  best  micro-­averaged  f  value  is  0.83,  by  using  a  svm   classifier  with  a  boolean  feature.  by  comparison,  the  majority  baseline  for  twitter   strategic  sub-­category  is  0.67,  and  0.63  for  facebook.  all  the  micro-­averaged  f  values   reported  are  much  higher  than  baseline  scores.  this  suggests  that  the  machine-­coding   algorithms  have  been  trained  to  predict  these  categories  well.  as  a  further  step,  we  will   test  the  reliability  of  our  current  best  models  and  then  apply  them  to  predict  strategic   messages  in  the  presidential  campaign,  with  an  additional  comparison  with  human   annotation  to  ensure  valid  and  reliably  tagged  data.     we  will  use  time-­series  analysis  to  examine  the  relationships  between  strategic   message  types  and  standing  in  public  opinion  polls.     findings  and  implications     because  the  primary  period  commenced  in  late  february,  2016,  and  has  not  concluded   yet,  we  are  still  collecting  data.  as  such,  we  do  not  have  an  indication  of  the  results.  the   results  of  this  research  may  provide  evidence  on  the  relationship,  if  there  is  one,  between   strategic  messaging  on  social  media  and  candidate  standing  in  the  polls.  understanding   the  dynamic  between  polls  and  strategic  messaging  would  contribute  to  theories  of  digital   campaigning  and  political  communication,  and  may  support  prior  research  that  suggests   that   presidential   campaign  messaging   is   dynamic   and   is   shaped   by   the   larger  media   environment  (denton,  1998).  finally,  the  results,  may  provide  caution  to  researchers  who   aggregate   campaign   social   media  messages   using   big   data   analytics   into   categories   without   factoring   in   the   role  of   time  and   the  external   factors,  such  as  polling  data   that   shape  strategic  messaging  in  social  media.       references     buell,  e.  h.,  &  sigelman,  l.  (2008).  attack  politics:  negativity  in  presidential  campaigns   since  1960.  univ  pr  of  kansas.   denton,  r.e.  (1998).  communication  variables  and  dynamics  of  the  1996  presidential   campaign.  in  r.  e.  denton  (eds.),  the  1996  presidential  campaign:  a   communication  perspective  (pp.  1-­50).  westport,  ct:  praeger.     druckman,  j.  n.,  kifer,  m.  j.,  &  parkin,  m.  (2009).  campaign  communications  in  us   congressional  elections.  american  political  science  review,  103(03),  343–366.   gottfried,  j.,  barthel,  m.,  shearer,  e.,  &  mitchell,  a.  (2016,  feb.  4).  the  2016   presidential  campaign  –  a  news  event  that’s  hard  to  miss.  pew  research  center.   retrieved,  march  1,  2016  from  http://www.journalism.org/2016/02/04/the-­2016-­ presidential-­campaign-­a-­news-­event-­thats-­hard-­to-­miss/.   hassell,  h.  j.,  &  oeltjenbruns,  k.  r.  (n.d.).  when  to  attack:  the  trajectory  of   congressional  campaign  negativity.   jamieson,  k.  h.  (1992).  dirty  politics.  deception,  distraction,  and  democracy.  new   york.   krippendorff,  k.  h.  (2003).  content  analysis:  an  introduction  to  its  methodology  (2nd.   ed.).  thousand  oaks,  ca:  sage.   krupnikov,  y.,  &  easter,  b.  c.  (2013).  negative  campaigns.  new  directions  in  media   and  politics,  100.   lau,  r.  r.,  &  pomper,  g.  m.  (2004).  negative  campaigning:  an  analysis  of  us  senate   elections.  rowman  &  littlefield.   obama  legacy  report.  (n.d.).  retrieved  february  28,  2013  from   http://secure.assets.bostatic.com/frontend/projects/legacy/legacy-­report.pdf.     tables   strategic messages sub-category precision recall f1 no. of messages advocacy 0.85 0.79 0.82 958 attack 0.63 0.72 0.67 480 micro-average 0.77 0.76 0.77 1438 table 1: machine prediction performance for strategic messages in tweeter strategic messages sub-category precision recall f1 no. of messages advocacy 0.85 0.89 0.87 537 attack 0.80 0.73 0.77 319 micro-average 0.83 0.83 0.83 856 table 2: machine prediction performance for strategic messages in facebook selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): gerlitz, c., helmond, a., van der vlist, f.n. & weltevrede, e. (2016, october 5-8). app studies: platform rules and methodological challenges . paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. app studies: platform rules and methodological challenges panel overview the panel engages with conceptual and methodological challenges within a specific area of ‘internet rules’, namely the space of mobile apps. whereas the web was set out to function as a ‘generative’ and open technology facilitating the production of unanticipated services and applications, the growing popularity of social media platforms, and mobile apps is characterised by proprietary services that facilitate accessibility but obstruct transparency, tinkering, adjustment, and repurposing. this broader development from ‘generative’ technologies to ‘tethered’ devices and services has been referred to as ‘appliancization’ by jonathan zittrain (2008). in addition to zittrain’s focus on the proliferation of proprietary technologies, we suggest that platform infrastructures create specific conditions for the emergence of app ecologies and that apps and platforms are mutually dependent on a technological and economic level. from this perspective, the panel explores a number of novel methodologies for app studies. so far, methodological approaches for studying apps have focused on end-user interfaces and how users interpret app affordances (mcveigh-schultz and baym 2015), qualitative analyses of their political economies and the politics of location (dyerwitheford 2014; wilken and bayliss 2015), their social norms of use (humphreys 2007) or their affective capacities (matviyenko et al. 2015). the empirical investigation of apps and their ecologies currently faces multiple challenges: first, in contrast to most data collected from web sites and platforms, user activities can neither be simply observed or scraped from front-end interfaces nor easily be collected via apis. in order to access app data, researchers may need to participate in using the app, which only affords a partial view (e.g. in the case of tinder, snapchat, and messaging apps) thereby opening up a number of ethical concerns. second, method development has to respond to apps’ fast update cultures. like other internet-enabled technologies, apps are considered as services rather than products and have frequent development cycles, including design and features changes, which do not only require researchers to constantly adjust their tools and approaches, but which also make it particularly difficult to reconstruct the history of an app or its features. this panel responds to these methodological challenges by advancing methodological approaches that all share a common device or medium-specific perspective, departing from the specific features of each app to attend to its data ecologies, political economies, practices, or histories, whilst reflecting critically on the relations between method and medium. one contribution advances digital methods for app analysis by mapping larger platform ecosystems in which apps emerge and thrive. it explores how apps reinforce, alter, and interfere in the interpretation of social media platforms and their features. engaging with facebook’s mobile app and its political economy, the second paper attends to the difficulties of getting access to historical app information whilst tracing relations between the introduction of new features and the advancement of the platform’s business model. a different approach to writing a microhistory of apps is offered in the third paper on the twitter’s retweet button. bringing together historical and ethnographic insights, this paper offers a detailed narrative of the becoming of a platform feature at the intersection of technicity, use practices, third-party apps and platform politics. the fourth and final paper focuses on the wechat app and draws on ethnographic methods to explore the affordances of entanglement when the only way to study an app is by joining and participating in it. all four papers approach apps not as discrete technologies, but as being situated and subject to distributed accomplishments of technicity, economics, practices, data, third parties, and platform politics. they connect platform studies and app studies by drawing attention to their intricate relations, e.g. in the case of platforms offering apps, apps built on top of platforms, apps facilitating practices that inform platforms, and apps functioning as platforms. the papers outline relations between and gaps in app and platform studies, as the study of platforms has identified the relevance of data circulation and the involvement of third parties, but has not explicitly asked how apps capitalise on platforms and vice-versa, or how they reinvent and inscribe into each other. from the perspective of app studies, adding a focus on platforms allows researchers to map the ecologies in which app data circulates as well as the regulatory rules and conditions for their development. the panel thus advances the field of app studies by exploring novel methods for empirical app research which allows to attend to the technicity, political economy, history, and enactment of app ecologies. references dyer-witheford n (2014) app worker. in: miller pd and matviyenko s (eds), the imaginary app, cambridge, ma: mit press, pp. 127–142. humphreys l (2007) mobile social networks and social practice: a case study of dodgeball. journal of computer-mediated communication 13(1): 341–360. matviyenko s, ticineto clough p and galloway ar (2015) on governance, blackboxing, measure, body, affect and apps: a conversation with patricia ticineto clough and alexander r. galloway. the fibreculture journal (25): 10–29. mcveigh-schultz j and baym nk (2015) thinking of you: vernacular affordance in the context of the microsocial relationship app, couple. social media + society 1(2): 2056305115604649. wilken r and bayliss p (2015) locating foursquare: the political economics of mobile social software. in: wilken r and goggin g (eds), locative media, new york: routledge, pp. 177–192. zittrain j (2009) the future of the internet—and how to stop it. new haven: yale university press. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): gerlitz, c., helmond, a., van der vlist, f.n. & weltevrede, e. (2016, october 5-8). app ecologies: mapping apps and their support networks . paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 1. app ecologies: mapping apps and their support networks carolin gerlitz university of siegen, germany anne helmond university of amsterdam, the netherlands fernando van der vlist university of siegen, germany/university of amsterdam, the netherlands esther weltevrede university of amsterdam, the netherlands (all authors listed in alphabetical order) this paper offers a contribution to app studies by approaching apps through the lens of, and in dialogue with, platform studies. in the majority of contributions to studying apps, their front-end interfaces and affordances (mcveigh-schultz and baym 2015), their political economy (goldsmith 2014; dyer-witheford 2014; wilken and bayliss 2015), their affective and sensory capacities (matviyenko et al. 2015) or app-based labour (dyer-witheford 2014; gregg 2015) have been discussed, whereas the wider ecologies and economies of data within which apps thrive and interfere have received little attention. however, a growing number of apps have been built to repurpose existing social media data, devices or features as these platforms facilitate such repurposing by offering their data and functionality to developers via public application programming interfaces (bucher 2013). in the context of twitter for instance, the majority of tweets is no longer produced within the twitter web end-user interface, but are issued through a proliferating array of twitter clients, alternative access points, tweet automators, crosssyndication apps, and games connected to twitter accounts, to name only a few (gerlitz & rieder 2014). this paper thus sets out to explore the entanglements between platforms and apps by devising a novel method to empirically study app ecologies by repurposing the calculative and ordering capacities of app stores. it advances a strand of empirical app studies which considers apps not as discrete media objects, but as relational objects situated in larger data ecologies. platforms, features, and apps platforms are often approached in two ways. some researchers consider platforms in terms of their capacities to be built upon (bogost & montfort 2009), as well as the ways in which platforms enable and constrain how their features can be implemented and how their data can be retrieved and recombined (helmond 2015). a second strand attends to the politics embedded in managing the various relations platforms enter with their users, advertising clients, and developers amongst others (gillespie 2010). these stakeholders pursue different objectives and the role of the platform is to negotiate these potentially conflicting interests whilst pursuing their own. central to both strands is the fact that platform data is both pre-structured and adjustable to multiple use contexts. users can only interact on a platform through a structured set of standardised activities, or to draw on agre’s (1994) ‘grammars of action’, which enables platforms to make their data data amenable for constant recombination and to make external web data ‘platform ready’ (helmond 2015). however, the standardisation of platform activities (e.g. liking, sharing, tweeting, and tagging) does not entail a standardisation in meaning and intention, as platforms cannot fully control how users or third-party apps built on top of platforms, interpret or deploy their pre-structured actions. the focus of this paper is the extent to which apps tap into and deploy the ‘interpretative flexibility’ (pinch & bijker 1984; van dijck 2012) of platforms and their features – and whether their interpretations align or misalign with those of the platforms themselves. methodology this paper advances the field of digital methods for app studies by making use of the capacities of app stores to organise apps and their relations to each other. we focus on the google play store mainly because of its size with 1.6 million android apps (statista 2015) and proceed in two steps. first, we map and explore apps that have been built on top of major web-based and app-based platforms – specifically facebook, twitter, instagram, snapchat, periscope and tinder – and the relations between them. we explore which platform features these apps support, what user practices they advocate, and whether they advocate new or existing interpretations of these platforms. this approach limits itself to apps that support platforms and their specific features but acknowledges the existence of other software and devices that may redeploy and reinterpret platform data. in the context of twitter, our initial findings show an appsupport space that is mainly comprised of third-party clients that offer alternative access points. in contrast, the instagram support space consists of apps for follower building, strategic hashtag use, and for using the platform for dating purposes. additionally, we examine how these app ecologies have evolved over time and in response to (or not) major changes in platform features. second, we map and explore apps that repurpose platform features, focusing both on the platform-specific grammars of action (e.g. retweets, mentions) as well as those that exist across multiple platforms (e.g. likes, shares, followers, hashtags). we examine to which extent third-party apps redeploy and reinterpret these platform features. initial results indicate both a proliferating field of interpretations and redeployment as well as the sharing of features across platforms. this raises questions concerning the cross-platform deployment of likes, followers, and hashtags, and how this might undermine or alter platform-specific use practices. towards app ecology studies the paper concludes with a reflection on apps as situated in dynamic and complex ecologies. exploring the mutual entanglements and dependencies between platforms and apps, it strives to offer both a methodological approach to map such ecologies and to account for the specific entanglements between apps and platforms. it aims to show how apps thrive and capitalise on platforms and in doing so also inform the practices and interpretations proliferating on these platforms. apps, platforms, and their associated use practices emerge as a dynamic assemblage, a perspective that calls for extending platform studies to take into account the app ecologies around them, as well as for advancing app studies by considering apps as situated and ecological entities. references agre pe (1994) surveillance and capture: two models of privacy. the information society 10(2): 101–127. bogost i and montfort n (2009) platform studies: frequently questioned answers. in: proceedings of the digital arts and culture conference, university of california, irvine. available from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/01r0k9br.pdf (accessed 2 september 2012). bucher t (2013) objects of intense feeling: the case of the twitter api. computational culture 3. available from: http://computationalculture.net/article/objects-of-intensefeeling-the-case-of-the-twitter-api (accessed 6 may 2014). van dijck j (2011) tracing twitter: the rise of a microblogging platform. international journal of media & cultural politics 7(3): 333–348. dyer-witheford n (2014) app worker. in: miller pd and matviyenko s (eds), the imaginary app, cambridge, ma: mit press, pp. 127–142. gerlitz, c., & rieder, b. (2014). tweets are not created equal. intersecting devices in the 1% sample. presented at the ir15: boundaries and intersections, daegu, south korea. gillespie t (2010) the politics of ‘platforms’. new media & society 12(3): 347–364. gregg m (2015) hack for good: speculative labour, app development and the burden of austerity. the fibreculture journal (25): 185–202. helmond, a. (2015). the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready. social media + society, 1(2). http://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080 matviyenko s, ticineto clough p and galloway ar (2015) on governance, blackboxing, measure, body, affect and apps: a conversation with patricia ticineto clough and alexander r. galloway. the fibreculture journal (25): 10–29. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/01r0k9br.pdf http://computationalculture.net/article/objects-of-intense-feeling-the-case-of-the-twitter-api http://computationalculture.net/article/objects-of-intense-feeling-the-case-of-the-twitter-api pinch tj and bijker we (1984) the social construction of facts and artefacts: or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other. social studies of science, 14(3): 399–441. statista (2015) number of apps available in leading app stores as of july 2015 (2015) statista. available from: http://www.statista.com/statistics/276623/number-of-appsavailable-in-leading-app-stores/ (accessed 23 february 2016). http://www.statista.com/statistics/276623/number-of-apps-available-in-leading-app-stores/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/276623/number-of-apps-available-in-leading-app-stores/ selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): helmond, a. & nieborg, d. (2016, october 5-8). facebook in the app economy: from web to app(s). paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 2. facebook in the app economy: from web to app(s) anne helmond university of amsterdam, the netherlands david nieborg university of toronto, canada (all authors listed in alphabetical order) in recent years, facebook has become a dominant player in the growing mobile app economy. with its suite of mobile apps, consisting of facebook, messenger, whatsapp and instagram, it occupied the top four of the most downloaded apps of 2015 worldwide in the ios and google play app stores combined (app annie, 2016). in february 2016, facebook hinted at integrating ads into messenger and announced canvas, a new platform for creating fast-loading interactive mobile ads, as part of its mobile monetization efforts (facebook for business, 2016). in this paper we examine the evolution of facebook’s business model in the age of mobile media and investigate how changes in facebook’s advertising strategies have been reflected in their suite of mobile apps. we operationalise this inquiry by proposing a methodological contribution to the emerging field of app studies by combining a critical political economic approach to facebook with methods from software and platform studies. facebook’s evolution in the app (advertising) economy the history of facebook, often framed either as a silicon valley start-up or as an emerging social network site, has been well-documented (e.g. boyd and ellison, 2007; brügger, 2015; goggin, 2014). we aim to build on this body of work by studying the evolution of facebook’s platform in the wider app economy. in 2007, around the same time of apple’s launch of the iphone, facebook started its transformation from a webbased service into a mobile-first enterprise (goggin, 2014: 4). yet, at the time, the mobile ecosystem, and the mobile advertising ecosystem in particular, was still considered a “sleeper advertising medium,” kept back by a lack of bandwidth, fragmented hardware (wilken and sinclair, 2009), and the absence of technologies that allowed advertisers to track and target mobile users. since then the industry has evolved and grown tremendously and in january 2016 more than 1.44 billion users visited facebook’s mobile apps, generating 80%, or us$4.5 billion, of the company’s advertising revenue, (facebook, 2016). critical political economy meets software and platform studies critical scholars have shown considerable interest in social media platforms (fuchs, 2014), either by critically engaging with the issue of privacy and surveillance (cohen, 2008), or by drawing on smythe’s (1977) notion of the “audience commodity” to debate the extent to which social media usage constitutes a form of “immaterial labor” (e.g. mcguigan and manzerolle, 2014; fisher, 2015). while such critical interventions offer an important counterweight against the utopian and one-sided rhetoric of social media’s business manifestos (van dijck & nieborg, 2009), the aforementioned studies pay less attention to the technological dimensions of platforms. we aim to contribute such a technical sensitivity by connecting two bodies of theory that so far have seen little synergy: critical political economic studies of social media and software and platform studies. software studies analyzes the relation between software and culture (fuller 2008), and in the case of software platforms such as facebook, the related field of platform studies connects the technical specificity of platforms as computational infrastructures to culture (bogost and montfort 2009). this entails analyzing its end-user facing interface (i.e. front-end, the website, apps, and their features), as well as its developer facing interface (i.e. back-end, the facebook apis and sdks). by doing so, we consider facebook’s infrastructural model in tandem with its underlying economic model (helmond 2015) as a way to investigate its “platform politics” (gillespie 2010). notwithstanding the ways in which facebook users constantly (re)negotiate their position within “the ecosystem of connective media” (van dijck 2013), we are primarily interested in the interaction between facebook’s business model vis-à-vis its evolution as a technological platform. method political economic analysis is conducted, first, via a financial analysis of facebook’s mandatory securities and exchange commission (sec) filings, and, second, via a textual analysis of facebook’s quarterly investor calls outlining high-level managerial strategies (facebook, 2016). studying the technological development of facebook’s app suite, however, poses methodological challenges as app stores do not offer historical versions of apps, and platforms constantly update their own platform documentation. inspired by ankerson’s software studies approach to writing histories of the web (2009), in this paper we make use of the internet archive wayback machine to uncover facebook’s historical platform documentation to analyze its development as a computational software platform via its archived developer documentation in conjunction with its evolution as an advertising platform via its archived advertising documentation. taken together, the proposed mixed-method approach moves beyond a genealogy of facebook as a company and instead studies the transformation of facebook’s platform with a focus on its mobile products (i.e. apps) in tandem with its underlying business model. discussion facebook’s app suite is in various stages of development and we expect to find differences in the ways individual apps, or “products” as facebook calls them, are “monetized”. as noted by van dijck, facebook first facilitates “connectivity” (2013), as a starting point for the commodification of sociality and data. in this paper we trace this process over time by critically and empirically inquiring into facebook’s transformation as a mobile software platform. references ankerson ms (2009) historicizing web design: software. style, and the look of the web. in: staiger j and hake s (eds), convergence, media, history, new york, ny: routledge, pp. 192–203. app annie (2016) app annie 2015 retrospective. app annie blog. available from: http://blog.appannie.com/app-annie-2015-retrospective/ (accessed 21 january 2016). boyd d and ellison n (2008) social network sites: definition, history, and scholarship. journal of computer-mediated communication 13(1): 210–230. brügger n (2015) a brief history of facebook as a media text: the development of an empty structure. first monday 20(5). available from: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5423 (accessed 8 december 2015). cohen ns (2008) the valorization of surveillance: towards a political economy of facebook. democratic communiqué 22(1): 5–22. facebook for business (2016) introducing canvas: bring your brand and product to life on mobile. facebook for business. available from: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/introducing-canvas (accessed 27 february 2016). facebook inc. (2016) facebook q4-15 and full year 2015 earnings conference call. available from: http://investor.fb.com/results.cfm (accessed 27 january 2016). fisher e (2015) class struggles in the digital frontier: audience labour theory and social media users. information, communication & society 18(9): 1108–1122. fuchs c (2014) social media: a critical introduction. london: sage. fuller m (2008) introduction, the stuff of software. in: fuller m (ed.), software studies: a lexicon, cambridge, ma: mit press, pp. 1–13. gillespie t (2010) the politics of ‘platforms’. new media & society 12(3): 347–364. goggin g (2014) facebook’s mobile career. new media & society 16(7): 1068–1086. mcguigan l and manzerolle v (eds) (2014) the audience commodity in a digital age: revisiting a critical theory of commercial media. new york, ny: peter lang publishing. smythe dw (1977) communications: blindspot of western marxism. canadian journal of political and social theory 1(3): 1–27. http://blog.appannie.com/app-annie-2015-retrospective/ http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5423 https://www.facebook.com/business/news/introducing-canvas http://investor.fb.com/results.cfm van dijck j (2013) the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. new york: oxford university press. van dijck, j., & nieborg, d. (2009). wikinomics and its discontents: a critical analysis of web 2.0 business manifestos. new media & society, 11(5), 855–874. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809105356 wilken r and sinclair j (2009) ‘waiting for the kiss of life’ mobile media and advertising. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies 15(4): 427–445. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): paßmann, j. (2016, october 5-8). retweet buttons before 2009: systems and practices. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 3. retweet buttons before 2009: systems and practices johannes paßmann university of siegen, germany the history of the retweet and its button has been utilised by various actors for many different purposes. the company twitter for instance established a narrative of the retweet button as a “bottom-up innovation” in 2009, most likely to improve their position in, or before, a possible copyright argument with third-party service tweetmeme, which also posed a threat as it had almost become bigger than twitter itself. another narrative about twitter’s history that is still in circulation is that retweeting as a practice (writing “rt @username” and pasting the retweeted tweet) was established through the protests around the iranian presidential election in june 2009 (the so-called “green revolution”). this narrative is diffuse enough to not being attributed to a specific author, yet strong enough to remain prominent in the twitter article on wikipedia until today. these two narratives—neither true nor a mere invention—have largely contributed to twitters image as “the good platform” in contrast to the story of the more top-down facebook or youtube, as grassroots-medium, finding its shape through protests in the orient, which makes its way back to the west as a post-colonial re-import. however, there is more than just “a wrinkle in this story” as alexander halavais puts it (2014, 30). in its endeavour to retrace the history of the retweet, this paper cannot detail its entire history and therefore focuses on one specific aspect. before twitter introduced the retweet button in november 2009, several retweet buttons had already been popularly used on third-party platforms and twitter clients, most prominently tweetmeme’s retweet button, which had been introduced in february 2009 (paßmann, boeschoten, & schäfer, 2014). but there were already other retweet buttons before 2009 that might not only be “more important” for twitter’s history (and a couple of other histories of events making use of twitter at that time), but also shed a new light on how media-practices develop in an app ecology around platforms. this paper focusses on these early retweet buttons, that have been “invented” in the german province of schleswigholstein (late 2007) and developed further in the english county of east sussex (2008). most importantly, this history of early retweet buttons does not only demonstrate how distributed twitter’s app ecology was in its early years, but also how practices and meanings can establish, unfold and transform (interpretatively flexible and stabile) on a large scale. here, the paper discusses its findings in the light of marshall sahlins’ (1981, 1985) notions of cultural practices and their relations to systems, that have later been developed further by the historian william h. sewell jr. (2005). these concepts have a long tradition in the history of historiography and also in anthropology (ortner 1984, geertz 1973 and of course sahlins, as mentioned) as well as in sociology (parsons/shils 1951, parsons 1959)—to name only the most prominent positions. still, the case of the retweet button makes a fundamental difference here: parsons, geertz and ortner discussed these systems as cultural systems, whereas systems were thought of as a cybernetic metaphor. sahlins and sewell thought of semiotic systems in the sense of ferdinand de saussure, that are already a bit less metaphorical insofar as these systems are institutionally organised as systems. in the case of twitter, there is not much left of the systems-metaphor, as its systems are cybernetic systems in a technical sense again—in other words: the metaphor returns to its origin here. this discourse marks the theoretical horizon towards which the development of practices can be understood in its specificity, as the focus on systems enables a paradoxical observation: technical systems do play a strong role in the development of retweet practices, way more than the “bottom-up narrative” cares to admit: the retweet has not developed as a “sheer practice” (whatever that is supposed to be...), but retweet buttons as software have existed and widely been used before the first retweet has ever been written in its later stabile shape “rt @username”. still, the retweet practices in these early years were (and still are today) way less organised into systems in the sense of parsons, geertz, sahlins and the rest. to conclude—and here, the paper points to a paradox which shall be put up for discussion—technical systems such as twitter seem to be very successful in organising practices into stabile forms, but very unsuccessful (and that, ultimately paradoxical, makes up their popularity) in organising them in to systems of meaning. on the contrary, their achievement seems to be to exactly not to close the interpretative flexibility of use practices and their associated features (pinch/bijker 1987—a notion that media scholar josé van dijck (2012) also alludes, when stating “[...] twitter’s meaning has not stabilized yet” (ibid.) or boyd et al. (2010) concluding that retweeting “[...] has not yet stabilized as a practice”), but to preserve their flexibility in the long run; i.e. precisely because its form is stabile and its meanings remain flexible. or as william h. sewell puts it: “part of what gives cultural practice its potency is the ability of actors to play upon the multiple meanings of symbols—thereby redefining situations in ways that they believe will favor their purposes” (sewell 2005, 168). references boyd d, golder s and lotan g (2010) tweet, tweet, retweet: conversational aspects of retweeting on twitter. in: system sciences (hicss), 2010 43rd hawaii international conference on, ieee, pp. 1–10. van dijck j (2011) tracing twitter: the rise of a microblogging platform. international journal of media & cultural politics 7(3): 333–348. geertz c (1973) the interpretation of cultures. new york: basic books. halavais a (2014) structure of twitter: social and technical. in: weller k, bruns a, burgess j, et al. (eds), twitter and society, new york, ny: peter lang, pp. 29–42. ortner sb (1984) theory in anthropology since the sixties. comparative studies in society and history, 26(1): 126-166. parsons t and shils e, eds (1951) toward a general theory of action. new york: harper & row. parsons t (1959) the social system. glencoe: free press. paßmann, j., boeschoten, t., & schäfer, m. t. (2014). the gift of the gab. retweets cartels and gift economies on twitter. in twitter and society (pp. 331–344). new york, ny: peter lang. pinch t and bijker we (1987) the social construction of facts and artefacts: or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other. in: pinch t, bijker we and hughes tp (eds), the social construction of technological systems: new directions in the sociology and history of technology, cambridge, ma: mit press, pp. 17–50. sahlins m (1981) historical metaphors and mythical realities: structure in the early history of the sandwich islands kingdom. ann arbor: the university of michigan press. sahlins m (1985) islands of history. chicago: the university of chicago press. sewell wh (2005). logics of history. social theory and social transformation. chicago: the university of chicago press. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): de kloet, j., poell, t. & zeng, g. (2016, october 5-8). wechat and the integration of activism in everyday life: tracing instant messaging practices on air pollution in beijing. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 4. wechat and the integration of activism in everyday life: tracing instant messaging practices on air pollution in beijing jeroen de kloet university of amsterdam, the netherlands thomas poell university of amsterdam, the netherlands guohua zeng chinese academy of social sciences, china chinese citizens use wechat (known as weixin in china) for everything: from booking a show to making new friends, and from exchanging pornography to gossiping. the popular chinese mobile text and voice messaging service, with its 650 million active users, has in a short time become an integral part of everyday life. inevitably, the exchanges through the service also touch on contentious issues, such as freedom of speech, political and corporate corruption, and the rising levels of air pollution. this paper explores how wechat is used for contentious communication, and how it, in turn, shapes this communication. it specifically examines the practice of instant messaging on beijing’s rampant air pollution problem. especially during heavy smog days, beijing’s citizens use wechat to share and discuss air quality index statistics, pictures of smoggy skylines, and information regarding the temporary shutdown of schools because of bad air quality. when the highly discussed 2015 air pollution documentary under the dome was published online, wechat was one of the prime platforms through which the documentary was circulated and discussed (custer 2015). these mobile-app-based instances of contentious communication are particularly interesting in the light of current research on social media and activism, which suggests that a more general integration of activism in everyday life is taking place (poell, kloet, & zeng, 2014; bennett & segerberg 2012; papacharissi & de fatima oliveira 2012; valenzuela 2013). as social platforms are intensively used in personal exchanges about a wide variety of topics, activism and protest become part of daily online conversation. furthermore, as these platforms enable immediate widespread content sharing, such daily chatter pervades and affects public communication at large. wechat is an interesting example of this trend because it is a very popular mobile app, which is deeply integrated in daily practices. and, it is interesting because it is used for contentious communication in china, a country characterised by far-reaching state efforts to control online contention. data collection as a mobile app that operates within a complex political and commercial environment, wechat poses major methodological challenges for the study of online contention. wechat’s business strategies and the chinese state’s control efforts are deeply inscribed into the application’s architecture, which affects how content circulates on the platform and how it can be collected. the platform’s publicly available apis are geared towards enabling data exchanges with a broad range of other online services, including major social media platforms such as facebook and tencent’s own qq, as well as a rapidly growing number of apps that use wechat’s payment system. thus, wechat’s apis are geared towards integrating external apps into its platform, but are not set up to facilitate the collection of public user data for research purposes. a second limitation is that wechat does not offer a search feature to find specific types of accounts or messages, like those concerned with air pollution. instead, relevant public accounts and group chats are spread through online word-of-mouth. in the light of these challenges, we have chosen to adopt an ethnographic approach. the paper reflects on the limitations of this approach, which only provides a partial view of wechat activity, as well as on the ethics of collecting public social media data for research purposes. building on a network of local experts, six popular wechat group chats have been selected. these chats are each dominated by a specific group of beijing inhabitants, including artists, bicycling enthusiasts, and environmentalists. in typical wechat fashion, these users discuss a wide variety of topics, frequently touching on air pollution. to observe the interaction in these chats and collect relevant material, two researchers from our team have joined the six selected groups and have followed the group activity on a daily basis for a period of six months. subsequently, all public chat messages (texts, photos, and videos) on the topic of air pollution have been examined and categorised through emergent coding. in addition, the research draws on 15 semistructured interviews with active users from the selected groups. discussion the analysis of this material suggests that as contentious personal and public communication becomes inextricably entangled, the character of activist discourse fundamentally transforms. as other authors have already observed, this discourse is injected with humor, emotions, and gossip, and sex. and, it is thoroughly intermingled with popular culture and intimate personal concerns. our case study shows how on heavy smog days, wechat channels a steady stream of jokes, air-pollution-mask selfies, before-and-after pictures, and funny photoshopped images. at the same time, the examined group chats are spaces where users express their anxiety about rising pollution levels. the consequences of this intermingling of personal and public communication for the dynamic of popular contestation in the chinese context are highly ambiguous. on the one hand, wechat, with its billions of daily messages that circulate in sudden and unpredictable ways, constitutes a potentially explosive and hard to control element in chinese public communication. yet, on the other hand, it allows the state to continuously track, monitor and silence contentious voices. precisely because wechat accounts are tied to smartphones it becomes easier to determine a user’s identity and gps location. censorship research shows that wechat, like all other major chinese platforms, is certainly not exempt from systematic practices of keyword filtering (ng 2015). these forms of surveillance and censorship, in turn, inform how self-expression takes shape, resulting in different levels of self-censorship, given that users are well aware of state monitoring practices. references bennett wl and segerberg a (2012). the logic of connective action: digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. information, communication & society 15(5): 739-768. custer c (2015). wechat, weibo ordered to crack down on viral pollution film ‘under the dome,’ but discussion continues. tech in asia. available from: https://www.techinasia.com/wechat-weibo-ordered-crack-viral-pollution-film-underdome-discussion-continues (accessed 26 february 2016). papacharissi z and de fatima oliveira m (2012) affective news and networked publics: the rhythms of news storytelling on #egypt. journal of communication 62(2): 266-282. poell, t., kloet, j. de, & zeng, g. (2014). will the real weibo please stand up? chinese online contention and actor-network theory. chinese journal of communication, 7(1), 1–18. http://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2013.816753 valenzuela s (2013) unpacking the use of social media for protest behavior the roles of information, opinion expression, and activism. american behavioral scientist 57(7): 920942. ng j (2015) politics, rumors, and ambiguity: tracking censorship on wechat’s public accounts platform. citizen lab report. available from: https://citizenlab.org/2015/07/tracking-censorship-on-wechat-public-accounts-platform/ (accessed 25 february 2016). https://www.techinasia.com/wechat-weibo-ordered-crack-viral-pollution-film-under-dome-discussion-continues https://www.techinasia.com/wechat-weibo-ordered-crack-viral-pollution-film-under-dome-discussion-continues https://citizenlab.org/2015/07/tracking-censorship-on-wechat-public-accounts-platform/ selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015   on  the  attack:  u.s.  gubernatorial  candidate  direct   campaign  dialogue  on  twitter     jeff  hemsley   sikana  tanupabrungsun   bryan  semaan   jennifer  stromer-­galley   syracuse  university     political  candidates  are  increasingly  utilizing  social  media  in  their  campaign  strategies.   for  example,  of  the  78  gubernatorial  candidates  in  the  2014  u.s.  elections,  76  actively   tweeted  messages  in  the  months  leading  up  to  the  election.  in  this  paper  we  report  on   the  initial  stages  of  an  ongoing  project  examining  the  messaging  practices  of  these   candidates  on  twitter,  facebook  and  instagram,  as  well  as  the  discussions  around  the   candidates.  the  work  presented  here  focuses  on  the  explicit  referencing  (@mentioning)   practices  on  twitter  among  the  2014  gubernatorial  candidates.       studies  of  election  messaging  online  are  certainly  not  new.  xenos  and  foot  (2005)   provide  an  in-­depth  study  of  candidate  messaging  practices  on  web  pages  during  the   2002  u.s.  election  cycle  and  found  that  candidates  communicated  their  position  on   issues  far  more  frequently  than  they  engaged  in  campaign  issue  dialogue.  that  is,   candidates  tended  to  avoid  directly  or  indirectly  mentioning  their  opponents,  depriving   voters  of  a  clear  understanding  of  where  they  stand.  stromer-­galley’s  (2000)   assessment  of  the  1996  presidential  and  1998  gubernatorial  campaigns  found  that   candidates  actively  avoided  on-­line  interaction  with  their  opponents  on  their  websites.   more  recent  scholarship  exploring  politician’s  messaging  on  twitter  (golbeck,  grimes,  &   rogers,  2010;;  hemphill,  otterbacher  &  shapiro,  2013)  finds  that  members  of  congress   use  social  media  as  a  broadcast  mechanism,  rather  than  as  a  mechanism  for  interaction   with  constituents.  a  common  theme  in  these  studies  has  been  in  determining  if  internet   technologies  promote  transparency  and  deliberation.         our  work  differs  from  this  stance  in  that  we  focus  specifically  on  @mentioning  behavior   among  our  gubernatorial  candidates  on  twitter.  we  consider  @mentioning  a  means  to   engage  in  a  publicly  visible  conversation  with  a  specific  candidate.  thus,  we   conceptualize  @mentions  as  a  form  of  direct  campaign  dialogue  (xenos  and  foot,   2005).  based  on  xenos  and  foot’s  (2005)  work,  we  expect  our  incumbent  candidates  to   suggested  citation  (apa):  hemsley,  j.  tanupabrungsun,  s.,  semaan,  b.,  &  stromer-­galley,  j.  (2015,   october  21-­24)  on  the  attack:  u.s.  gubernatorial  candidate  direct  campaign  dialogue  on  twitter.   paper  presented  at  internet  research  16:  the  16th  annual  meeting  of  the  association  of  internet   researchers.  phoenix,  az,  usa:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.   engage  in  direct  campaign  issue  dialog  less  frequently  than  challengers.  by  examining   messages  utilizing  machine  learning  trained  with  manually  coded  data,  our  intent  is  to   provide  insight  into  the  differences  in  campaign  dialogue  practices  among  challengers   and  incumbents,  democrats  and  republicans,  as  well  as  inter  and  intra-­state.       methodology       we  employed  an  open  source  toolkit  (hemsley,  ceskavich  and  tanupabrungsun,  2014)   to  collect  159,855  streaming  tweets  from  our  76  candidates.  after  removing  delete-­ request  tweets,  retweets  and  tweets  without  an  @mention  to  one  of  our  candidates,   7,140  tweets  remained.  to  answer  our  questions  concerning  candidates  mentioning   other  candidates,  we  exclude  another  self-­mention-­only  4,097  tweets,  leaving  us  with   3,043  tweets.  table  1  shows  the  number  of  candidates  and  tweets  by  party  and   incumbent  /  challenger  status.       table  1:  shows  number  of  candidates  and  tweets  by  party     incumbents  mention  challengers  in  1,207  tweet,  but  challengers  mention  incumbents  in   1,362  tweets.  like  xenos  and  foot  (2005)  we  find  that  challengers  mention  incumbents   more  than  the  other  way  around.  however,  when  we  look  at  the  percentages  we  find   that  98.87%  of  incumbent  tweets  mention  a  challenger,  but  only  75.79%  the  tweets  sent   out  by  challengers  mention  an  incumbent.         using  a  series  of  paired  t-­tests  we  also  find  that  candidates  mention  other  candidates  in   the  same  state  more  often  than  candidates  in  other  states  (t  =  4.08,  p  <  0.00)  and  that   candidates  mention  candidates  from  others  parties  more  than  those  in  the  same  party  (t   =  -­4.12,  p  <  0.00).  these  findings  are  consistent  with  the  finding  that  the  bulk  of  the   tweets  from  both  incumbents  and  challengers  are  to  a  challenger  or  incumbent,   respectively.           to  explore  the  nature  of  these  messages,  we  adopt  and  modify  the  qualitative  coding   scheme  used  by  hemphill,  otterbacher  &  shapiro  (2013)  in  their  study  of  congressional   member’s  tweets.  we  add  a  code  for  attack,  but  remove  their  code  for  directing  to   information  since  an  initial  scan  indicates  more  than  70%  included  a  link  or  could   otherwise  include  this  code.  two  annotators  manually  categorize  200  tweets,  in  two   rounds,  allowing  mutual  inclusive.  that  is,  a  tweet  can  be  labeled  as  one  or  more  codes.   table  2  shows  the  cohen’s  kappa  scores  (mean  0.853,  sd  0.33)  for  our  codes.     with  the  mutually  inclusive  code  design,  we  construct  five  binary  naïve  bayes   classifiers  for  each  of  the  codes  except  other,  which  only  indicates  no  other  code  fit.  all   classifiers  are  constructed  using  the  python  scikit-­learn  toolkit  (pedregosa  et  al.,  2011).       for  each  code,  we  train  a  classifier  model  with  a  random  selection  of  60%  of  the   manually  coded  tweet  text  and  verify  the  model  against  the  remaining  40%.  for   instance,  an  attack  classifier  predicts  if  a  tweet  is  either  attack  or  non-­attack.  table  2   shows  the  average  accuracy  from  three  classification  runs  for  each  code.  on  average,   classification  accuracies  for  all  codes  are  higher  than  72.50%  with  less  than  3.15  sd.   these  numbers  indicate  a  reasonable  fit,  but  that  more  work  will  need  to  be  done  in   future  phases  of  the  work.         the  results  of  running  five  classifier  models  on  the  remaining  tweet  texts  indicates  (see   figure  1)  that  attack  is  the  most  frequent  message  type  in  this  dataset:  35.84%.   narrating,  positioning  and  requesting  actions   range  from  6.82  -­  9.11%  of  tweets  with   thanking  and  other  in  only  0.8%  and  0.48%  of   our  tweets  respectively.     focusing  on  the  most  frequent  message  type,   attack,  we  look  at  the  distributions  of  tweets   from  three  perspectives.  first,  the  distribution   by  incumbency  status  suggests  that   incumbents  attack  challengers  slightly  more   than  the  other  way  around.  this  finding  is   interesting  because  one  would  expect   challengers  to  attack  more.  second,  the   distribution  by  party  shows  that  republicans   attack  others  the  most.  this  finding  is   consistent  with  glassman  et  al.  [2010]  who  pointed  out  the  difference  in  republican  and   democrat  online  campaigns.    last,  the  distribution  by  state  indicates  that  all  attack   tweets  are  intra-­state  practice.  this  finding  suggests  that  candidates  restrict  their   attacking  behavior  to  those  they  are  competing  with  for  a  gubernatorial  seat.     this  work  contributes  to  our  understanding  of  how  gubernatorial  campaigns  utilize   twitter  in  their  direct  campaign  dialogue  messaging  practices  to  other  candidates.  our   results  also  make  a  meaningful  contribution  to  the  body  of  literature  on  the  use  of  social   media  by  u.s.  politicians.  we  believe  our  findings  are  potential  groundwork  for  future   studies  exploring  the  roles  and  impacts  of  social  media  on  the  relationship  between   politicians  and  the  public.     references       druckman,  j.  n.,  hennessy,  c.  l.,  kifer,  m.  j.,  &  parkin,  m.  (2010).  issue  engagement   on  congressional  candidate  web  sites,  2002—2006.  social  science  computer   review,  28(1),  3–23.  doi:10.1177/0894439309335485       glassman,  m.  e.,  straus,  j.  r.  &  shogan,  c.  j.  (2010).  social  networking  and   constituent  communications:  member  use  of  twitter  during  a  two-­month  period  in  the   111th  congress,  congressional  research  service,  [online]  available  at:     http://opencrs.com/document/r41066/2010-­02-­03/download/1005/  (9  may  2015)       golbeck,  j.,  grimes,  j.  m.,  &  rogers,  a.  (2010).  twitter  use  by  the  u.s.  congress.   journal  of  the  american  society  for  information  science  and  technology,  61(8),  1612– 1621.  doi:10.1002/asi.21344       hemphill,  l.,  otterbacher,  j.,  &  shapiro,  m.  (2013).  what’s  congress  doing  on  twitter?  in   proceedings  of  the  2013  conference  on  computer  supported  cooperative  work  (pp.   877–886).  acm.       hemsley,  j.,  ceskavich,  b.,  tanupabrungsun,  s.  (2014).  stack  (version  1.0).   syracuse  university,  school  of  information  studies.  retrieved  from     https://github.com/bitslabsyr/stack  doi:  10.5281/zenodo.12388       scikit-­learn:  machine  learning  in  python,  pedregosa  et  al.,  jmlr  12,  pp.  2825-­2830,   2011       stromer-­galley,  j.  (2000).  on-­line  interaction  and  why  candidates  avoid  it.  journal  of   communication,  50(4),  111–132.       xenos,  m.  a.,  &  foot,  k.  a.  (2005).  politics  as  usual,  or  politics  unusual?  position  taking   and  dialogue  on  campaign  websites  in  the  2002  us  elections.  journal  of   communication,  55(1),  169–185.   microsoft word davies.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): davies, r. (2014, october 22-24). provocations for civic crowdfunding. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. three provocations for civic crowdfunding rodrigo davies massachusetts institute of technology the rapid rise of crowdfunding in the past five years, most prominently among usbased platforms such as kickstarter and indiegogo, has begun to attract the attention of a wide range of scholars, policymakers and practitioners. as the industry evolves, it is developing a range of specialist sub-genres and platforms, from politics to manufacturing. this paper considers civic crowdfunding – the use of crowdfunding for projects that produce community or quasi-public assets – and argues that its emergence demands a fresh set of questions and approaches. scholarly analyses of crowdfunding to date have centered on fields such as investment finance, and computer-supported co-operative work (cscw). while these inquiries have begun to build a frameworks for understanding the dynamics of the fundraising process and participants' motivations, there is yet to be substantial work considering the socio-political context and broader implications of crowdfunding. these questions are necessarily more pressing and contested when considering the use of crowdfunding for civic projects. the sub-field of `civic crowdfunding' as an application of the model is yet to be defined by academic researchers. the use of the term can be traced to 2012, and is used by platforms such as spacehive and neighbor.ly (davies 2014a). this paper uses a mixed-methods case study approach to highlight and analyze critical cases in civic crowdfunding. it draws on quantitative analysis of project fundraising data drawn from four platforms (citizinvestor, ioby, neighbo.ly and spacehive), participant interviews and discourse analysis of projects' promotional material. in so doing it posits three provocations for the future study of civic crowdfunding. firstly, to what extent is civic crowdfunding participatory? it can be a truly organic mechanism that is a new tool available to activists. in sao paulo, brazil, the graffiti artist mundano raised $27,000 on the catarse platform in may 2012 -twice the campaign's original target --to paint the carts of waste pickers, as a means of highlighting their contribution to the city's environmental sustainability and advocating for new labor protections for them. the idea that crowdfunding is a form of participation as well as a funding mechanism is salient since civic crowdfunding has emerged after a decade of experimentation with symbolic money as a representation of agency through participatory budgeting, most prominently in brazil and new york city. but most crowdfunding platforms do not support the kind of deliberative process that would be expected in a participatory democratic structure: by the time a campaign is published on a platform, the idea is expected to be fully formed. furthemore, since donations vary in size and offer differential agencies, the field is open to the charge that it may become dominated by resourced interests. several of the largest civic crowdfunding campaigns to date have drawn the majority of their funding not from a high volume, low-donation value crowd, but from wealthier donors. for example, kansas city's b-cycle program, partially crowdfunded on neighbor.ly, drew 99% of its funding from six backers who donated more than $5,000 each. secondly, does civic crowdfunding exacerbate or reduce economic inequality? at the case level, there are clear examples of underserved and privileged communities benefiting from civic crowdfunding in very different ways. in glyn coch, south wales, a community with chronic unemployment and resource challenges, local organizers raised $49,000 to fill a gap in funding for a new community center, most of which was funded by government grants. by contrast, in october 2013, three wealthy suburban communities in oakland, ca, raised $50,000 on the crowdtilt platform to crowdfund private security patrols. the campaigns, which emerged within a few days of each other, demonstrated the risk of a 'contagion effect' through which resourced communities could use civic crowdfunding campaigns from other localities as templates for building their replacement public services. at the platform level there are more ambiguous indicators with respect to equity. new york and miami-based platform ioby is the only platform that explicitly recruits projects from underserved communities. early findings suggest that ioby projects occur in neighborhoods with slightly higher poverty rates, but the difference is marginal (goodspeed and davies 2014). citizinvestor finds in its own data that there is no correlation between the likelihood of a project occurring in a neighborhood and that neighborhood's average household income. thirdly, does civic crowdfunding support or undermine the role of public institutions? in many cases the link between civic crowdfunding and weakened institutions is direct: the bankrupt city of central falls, rhode island, crowdfunded $20,000 to pay for recycling facilities in jenks park in november 2013, explicitly citing its financial distress as a motivating factor. around one in ten projects in the dataset makes reference to shortfalls in public funding, and brabham has argued that the success of crowdfunding is likely to be a disincentive for public investment in the arts in the future (davies 2014b, brabham 2012). yet on the other hand, civic crowdfunding can also be framed as a mechanism that expands the range of public-private partnerships that are possible, since government can partner with crowdfunded groups. parklets, a system of allowing individuals and groups to create temporary installations in parking spaces, is one publicprivate framework that has benefited from crowdfunding. eleven parklets have been successfully crowdfunded via kickstarter since april 2012, in oakland, philadelphia, san francisco, seattle and vancouver, raising a total of $100,853. in august 2013, the city of san francisco launched living innovation zones, a program modeled on parklets that invites proposals for a series of underutilized spaces across the city, and encourages prospective groups to consider crowdfunding. public-private opportunities that embrace crowdfunding as a potential tool are nascent, but are gaining in popularity. each of these three provocations is highly context-specific and as yet the signals from the available data and reported cases are mixed and often conflicting. nevertheless, they underscore the importance of approaching civic crowdfunding as a socio-politically located and contested phenomenon, and offer pathways for researchers to begin to critically analyze and define the field. future research work on civic crowdfunding that considers its institutional and political context is likely to be highly generative across disciplines. references brabham, daren (2012). crowdsourcing. cambridge: mit press. print. citizinvestor (2014), do projects in rich neighborhoods perform better than those in poorer neighborhoods? citizinvestor blog: http://blog.citizinvestor.com/post/76530391900/do-projects-in-rich-neighborhoodsperform-better-than. davies, rodrigo (2014a), civic crowdfunding: participatory communities or frontier entrepreneurs? cambridge: mit masters thesis in comparative media studies. davies, rodrigo (2014b), three competing visions of civic crowdfunding. place, (dis)place and citizenship, wayne state university. goodspeed, robert, davies, rodrigo (2014). civic crowdfunding: a new method of creative placemaking. manuscript in preparation. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 how  mobile  phone  surveillance  contributes  to  digital   inequalities  for  disadvantaged  urban  residents     jan  fernback   temple  university       gwen  shaffer   california  state  university  long  beach     background       participation  in  the  social  world  demands  disclosure  of  personal  information,  and  the   increasing  reliance  on  mobile  devices  compounds  this  reality.  americans  routinely   communicate  through  mobile  apps  such  as  facebook,  instragram  and  skype.   consumers  skip  the  mall  and,  instead,  make  purchases  on  their  smart  phones.  and   more  than  one-­third  of  all  internet  searches  originate  on  a  mobile  phone  (statista,   2013).  within  each  of  these  contexts,  americans  willingly  disclose—or  inadvertently   reveal—their  political  opinions,  values  and  personal  interests.  and  americans  living  in   disadvantaged  urban  communities  often  rely  exclusively  on  mobile  devices  for   accessing  the  internet.  this  study  explores  the  potential  for  the  “digital  imaginary”  to   obscure  inequalities.  it  examines:  in  what  way  is  social  capital  for  the  urban  poor   impacted  by  the  tracking,  storing  and  possible  disclosure  of  their  information?  because   private  information  obtained  through  mobile  surveillance  is  often  used  in  discriminatory   ways,  what  implications  exist  for  managing  digital  inequalities?         specifically,  60%  of  hispanics  and  43%  of  african-­americans  are  cell-­mostly  internet   users,  compared  with  27%  of  whites.  these  statistics  reflect  the  fact  that  computer   ownership  among  african  americans  and  latinos  lags  behind  computer  ownership  by   whites.  additionally,  nearly  half  of  internet  users  in  households  with  an  annual  income   below  $30,000  tend  to  use  phones  to  go  online—compared  with  27%  of  internet  users   in  households  with  an  annual  income  exceeding  $75,000  (pew  research  center,  2013).       communication  theorists  have  drawn  analogies  between  surveillance  and  the   “panopticon”  or  “big  brother,”  where  the  state  and  corporations  exert  power  and  control   over  the  masses  through  ubiquitous  monitoring  (foucault,  1977;;  gandy,  1993).  when   edward  snowden  leaked  200,000  classified  nsa  documents  in  june,  many  americans   expressed  shock  that  the  government  may  tap  their  cell  phones.  however,  data  profiling   suggested  citation  (apa):  fernback,  j.  &  shaffer,  g.  (2015,  october  21-­24)  how  mobile  phone   surveillance  contributes  to  digital  inequalities  for  disadvantaged  urban  residents.  paper  presented   at  internet  research  16:  the  16th  annual  meeting  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  phoenix,   az,  usa:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.   is  nothing  new  for  members  of  marginalized  groups.  families  who  access  the  public   benefits  system  must  relinquish  detailed  personal  and  financial  information,  scan   fingerprints,  and  submit  to  drug  tests.  new  mobile  apps  purporting  to  make  the   assistance  application  process  “easier”  now  supply  agencies  with  even  more  electronic   data.  immigrants  living  in  southern  california  are  also  familiar  with  federal  surveillance.   u.s.  customs  &  border  protection  operates  “interceptor  towers”  that  masquerade  as   cell  phone  towers.  placed  along  the  u.s.-­mexico  border,  these  devices  capture  voice   and  data  transmissions  from  every  mobile  phone  in  the  area  (rosenblum,  2014).       our  study  will  also  encompass  the  impact  of  tracking  by  social  media  sites.  facebook,   twitter,  instagram,  foursquare,  and  yelp  are  among  phone  apps  that  send  the  names,   email  addresses  and  potentially  phone  numbers  from  a  device’s  internal  address  book   to  the  apps’  own  servers.  high  rates  of  social  media  use  among  young  african   americans  makes  them  particularly  vulnerable  to  privacy  breaches.  forty  percent  of  18-­   29  year  old  african  americans  who  use  the  internet  say  they  tweet—12  percentage   points  higher  compared  to  young  whites  on  twitter.  about  38%  of  online  adult  african   americans  and  34%  of  online  adult  latinos  use  instagram,  compared  to  21%  of  online   adult  whites  (pew  research  center,  2013).  finally,  disadvantaged  urban  residents  may   be  targets  of  corporate  surveillance.  experian  marketing  encourages  retailers  to   consider  mobile  payments  as  “a  tactic”  for  engaging  african  american  shoppers.  this   strategy  enables  retailers  to  store  credit  card  numbers  and  install  “cookies”—pieces  of   code  left  on  a  browser  that  track  shopping  and  web  surfing  habits.  brick-­and-­mortar   stores  also  monitor  customers’  movements  by  following  wi-­fi  signals  from  their   smartphones.  combined  with  video  surveillance,  these  stores  collect  demographic   information  (clifford  &  hardy,  2013).  our  interviews  will  explore  whether  people  living  in   marginalized  communities  perceive  surveillance  as  discriminatory  and  how,  if  at  all,  this   impacts  their  privacy  practices  and  decision-­making.     significance       while  survey  data  collected  by  the  pew  research  center  provide  useful  statistics  about   mobile  technology  habits,  quantitative  research  lacks  context  and  detail.  by  contrast,   our  study  will  provide  comprehensive  empirical  evidence.  interviews  are  a  crucial   element  of  this  project,  enabling  us  to  delve  deeper  into  issues  of  interest  and  consider   nuances.  a  qualitative  approach  will  help  us  obtain  a  sense  of  informants’  lived   experiences  and  humanize  the  impact  of  privacy  breaches.  because  qualitative   research  is,  by  definition,  exploratory,  we  see  an  opportunity  to  define  challenges   researchers  neglected  to  articulate  previously.       methods       we  plan  to  partner  with  non-­profit  privacy  rights  organizations  in  philadelphia  and   southern  california  to  recruit  subjects,  to  provide  space  for  interviews,  and  to  help   disseminate  project  findings  in  the  neighborhoods.  potential  local  partners  include  the   california  public  interest  research  group  and  the  coalition  for  humane  immigrant   rights.  in  order  to  address  issues  of  power,  inequity  and  marginalization,  we  plan  to   take  a  “critical”  approach  to  this  research.  our  data  collection  methods  will  include   participant  observation  and  interviews,  allowing  us  to  gain  insights  into  our  informants’   attitudes  and  concerns.  qualitative  studies  rely  on  inductive  reasoning  to  interpret  and   derive  meaning  from  data.  qualitative  analysis  involves  synthesizing  a  portrait  of  a   phenomenon;;  theorizing  about  how  and  why  particular  linkages  and  relationships  exist;;   and  re-­contextualizing  or  developing  new  knowledge  about  these  relationships  and   practices  (morse,  1994).  by  taking  a  “phenomenological  approach,”  we  will  gain  an   understanding  of  the  crucial  structures  underlying  our  informants’  experiences  with   mobile  phones.  we  plan  to  tie  these  experiences  to  the  current  (government  and   corporate)  policy  environment.       anticipated  findings       we  aim  to  produce  a  rich  descriptive  and  interpretive  account  of  the  lives  and  values   held  by  low-­income,  minority  and  immigrant  mobile  phone  users.  we  will  examine   mobile  phone  surveillance  within  a  broader  context  of  actions  (i.e.  social  media   practices,  internet  access),  attitudes  (i.e.  toward  the  government,  corporations,  apps)   and  the  symbolic  meaning  of  information  technologies.  by  taking  a  “critical”  approach  to   our  analysis,  we  seek  to  expose  underlying  problems  and  place  them  within  the  broader   context  of  digital  inequality.  we  will  examine  the  inherent  trade-­offs  between  using   devices  capable  of  personalizing  information,  and  the  surveillance  enabled  by  this  data   collection.  we  intend  for  our  findings  to  inform  policy  recommendations  for  government   regulators;;  suggest  best  practices  for  private/corporate  entities  that  monitor  and  collect   mobile  phone  data;;  and  serve  as  the  basis  for  a  public  information  campaign  meant  to   help  minimize  discriminatory  practices  in  the  networked  sphere.       references       foucault,  m.  (1977).  discipline  and  punish:  the  birth  of  the  prison.  new  york:  pantheon.     gandy,  o.  (1993).  the  panoptic  sort:  a  political  economy  of  personal  information.   boulder,  co:  westview  press.     gay,  l.,  mills,  g.,  and  aira  sian,  p.  (2012).  educational  research:  competencies  for   analysis  and  applications  (10th  edition).  upper  saddle  river,  nj:  pearson.   morse,  j.  (1994).  emerging  from  the  data:  the  cognitive  processes  of  analysis  in   qualitative  inquiry.  critical  issues  in  qualitative  research  methods.  thousand   oaks,  ca:  sage.     pew  research  center  (2013,  september  16).  cell  internet  use  2013.  pew  research   center’s  internet  &  american  life  project.  retrieved  from   http://pewinternet.org/reports/2013/cell-­internet.   rosenblum,  a.  (2014,  september  15).  who  is  running  phony  cell  towers  around  the   united  states?  popular  science.  retrieved  from   http://www.popsci.com/article/gadgets/who-­ running-­phony-­cell-­phone-­towers-­ around-­  united-­states     statista  (2013).  facts  on  mobile  internet  usage.  retrieved  from   http://www.statista.com/topics/779/mobile-­internet/   selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 ! architecture for understanding the automated imaginary: a working qualitative methodology for research on political bots ) norah&abokhodair&& university&of&washington,&information&school&& & samuel&woolley& university&of&washington,&communication&department& & philip&howard& university&of&washington,&communication&department& & david&mcdonald& university&of&washington,&human&centered&design&and&engineering&department& introduction) social&media&–&especially&social&networking&sites&–&have&substantially&transformed&the& ways&in&which&people&discuss&current&affairs&and&obtain&political&news&and&information.& because&of&increased&affordances&for&building&and&maintaining&social&connections,& young&people&are&better&able&to&cultivate&a&political&identity&and&engage&civically&in&both& authoritarian&and&democratic&regimes&[1].&activist&causes&and&democratic&movements& have&been&born,&organized&and&disseminated&on&sites&including&facebook,&twitter,& weibo,&and&youtube&[2].&like&any&technology,&though,&the&interfaces,&applications,&and& modes&of&communication&on&social&networking&sites&are&in&constant&negotiation,& transformation,&and&repurposing&–&and&by&a&wide&variety&of&social&and&political&actors.& on)social)bots) bots,&strings&of&automated&code,&are&a&complex&and&compelling&case&of&this,&as& automated&software&agents&are&increasingly&being&developed&and&deployed&on&social& networking&sites&for&a&diverse&range&of&purposes.&security&experts&have&found&that&bots& generate&over&10&percent&of&content&on&social&media&websites&and&62&percent&of&all&web& traffic&[3].&more&recently,&we&have&started&seeing&social&bots&emerging&in&contemporary& suggested citation (apa): abokhodair, n., woolley, s., howard, p., & mcdonald, d.. (2015, october 21-24). architecture for understanding the automated imaginary: a working qualitative methodology for research on political bots. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ! 2! social&networking&sites&(sns)&such&as&twitter,&facebook,&and&reddit.&in&2012,&facebook& estimated&that&5y6%&of&all&facebook&accounts&were&fake.&this&is&a&high&percentage&for& facebook,&as&it&means&that&approximately&50&million&user&accounts&are&manufactured&or& not&human&[4].&a&recent&study&of&twitter&revealed&that&bots&make&up&32%&of&twitter& posts&generated&by&the&most&active&accounts&[5].&traditionally&bots&have&been& developed&and&deployed&to&automate&benign&tasks&(e.g.,&fix&syntax,&fetch&news& headlines)&and&malicious&tasks&(e.g.,&spambots,&bimbots,&and&denial&of&service&(dos)& bots)&on&sns&platforms.&these&automated&functions&have&been&a&part&of&the&web&almost& since&its&inception.&on&the&other&hand,&there&has&been&a&recent&emergence&of&bots&with& a&political&agenda.&these&bots&intervene&in&discourse&about&ongoing&political&events.& the&results&have&been&interesting&to&observe.&social&bots,&software&programs&designed& to&appear&as&human&users&on&social&networking&sites&like&twitter,&instagram,&and& facebook,&are&now&not&only&deployed&to&peddle&questionable&pharmaceuticals&or&trick& people&into&sharing&their&bank&accounts.&another,&more&propagandistic,&side&of&this& automated&technology&exists.& & computational)propaganda) regimes&of&all&types&are&using&bots&across&multiple&sns&in&efforts&to&manipulate&public& opinion,&a&phenomenon&we&identify&and&theorize&as&‘computational&propaganda.’&while& there&are&similarities&that&unite&this&broader&use&of&bots&in&the&public&political&sphere,& each&case&of&political&bot&usage&is&also&driven&by&the&particular&set&of&circumstances& surrounding&specific&political&events.&during&the&onygoing&syrian&civil&war,&for&instance,& bot&accounts&have&been&spread&on&twitter&and&facebook&by&a&group&of&programmers& employed&by&the&syrian&intelligence&[6].&based&on&a&recent&study&[7]&which&followed&the& botnet&through&the&35&weeks&it&was&active,&the&botnet&generated&a&massive&amount&of& content&with&more&than&3000&tweets&a&day&both&in&english&and&arabic.&according&to&this& research,&the&social&bot&had&three&main&aims:&first,&flooding&the&syrian&revolution& hashtags&(for&example&#syria,&#hama,&#daraa)d&second,&overwhelming&the&proy revolution&discussion&on&twitter&and&other&social&media&portalsd&and&third,&misdirecting& by&trying&to&get&the&audience&to&attend&to&other&content&(for&example,&the&protest&in& bahrain&and&libya).&& & the)big)picture) this&paper&is&based&on&more&globally&focused&study&that&plots&out&a&working&three&part& qualitative&methodology&for&researching&and&understanding&political&bots.&these& methods&are&designed&for&usage&by&interdisciplinary&teams&of&computer&and&social& scientists&who&hope&to&use&creative&methods&to&work&and&communicate&with&diverse& research&and&public&communities.&part&one&focuses&on&the&development&of&a&codebook& built&to&compile&a&comparative&event&dataset&of&all&available&instances&of&political&bot& usage&worldwide.&part&two&aims&at&explaining&approaches&for&interviewing&the&coders& and&trackers&of&political&bots&with&an&aim&of&understanding&the&developmental&approach& to&building&these&automated&scripts.&part&three&is&a&dialogue&on&the&working& development&of&computational&and&communication&theory&on&political&bots,&an&iterative& ! 3! undertaking&based&upon&interactions&with&the&processes&and&findings&of&the&first&two& methodological&steps.&& ! figure'1:'three'part'qualitative'methodology! ) event)dataset)&)code)book) in&this&submission,&our&aim&is&to&discuss&the&first&part&of&this&project&and&to&provide&a& guide&to&developing&coding&manuals&from&scratch.&since&the&inception&of&this&project&in& august&2014&the&team&was&involved&in&the&construction&of&an&original&event&data&set& (with&more&than&68&cases)&that&is&more&comprehensive&than&any&previously&available& data&sets&on&political&bots.&following&the&classical&methodology&of&the&study&of&unusual& phenomena&in&technology&diffusion&and&usability,&we&have&conducted&our&sampling&of& bot&use&by&means&of&news&reports&about&them&[8].&the&mediaybased&approach&to&data& collection&is&especially&valuable&when&the&phenomenon&at&hand&is&particularly&new.&the& main&goal&of&the&event&dataset&is&to&find&themes&and&similarities&across&all&cases&to&help& us&in&the&project&final&step.&from&the&dataset&we&sampled&several&cases&in&order&to& develop&a&codebook&using&qualitative&content&analysis.&this&step&was&necessary&to&aid& the&coding&of&all&the&available&cases&of&political&bots.&in&the&codebook&we&included&seven& overarching&categories:&botnet&name,&botnet&description,&the&domain&impacted,&the& target&country,&the&target&organization,&the&suspected&deployer,&and&the&depolyer& goal.&these&categories&were&developed&based&on&an&iterative&exploration&of&samples&of& the&events,&assumptions&about&the&way&a&political&botnet&might&work,&and&what&we&have& observed&in&the&prior&literature&on&political&bots.&& & each&case&was&coded&three&times&by&three&different&coders&resulting&in&a&total&of&174& coded&cases.&finally,&we&conducted&an&interycoder&reliability&test&to&finalize&the&codes& and&improve&the&code&book.&our&goal&is&to&make&the&code&book&available&on&the&project& • event'dataset • code'book part%one • interviewing' bot'trackers • interviewing' bot'makers part%two% • developing' theory • detection' software part three ! 4! website1&for&other&researchers,&with&hopes&that&they&might&benefit&from&the&tool.&we& have&also&included&a&political&bot&reporting&tool&on&the&website&in&an&effort&to&crowdy source&more&cases&worldwide.&as&mentioned&earlier,&our&goal&is&to&find&themes&across& these&cases&to&inform&theory&and&to&build&a&stronger&detection&software.& conclusion& we&are&currently&concluding&the&first&part&of&the&project&and&finding&many&important& lessons&to&report&for&researchers&interested&in&similar&work.&our&proposed&methodology& makes&use&of&triangulation&of&evidence&from&online&and&offline&sources&through&the& analysis&of&data&emerging&from&the&qualitative&coding&stage&(part&one)&with&the&data&we& gain&from&interviewing&botnet&makers&and&botnet&trackers&(part&2)&in&order&to&piece& together&parts&of&the&narrative&of&a&contemporary&ict&phenomenon.&the&results&of&this& work&will&contribute&to&the&literature&on&internet&research&and&the&use&of&automated& scripts&in&many&ways.&one&way&is&through&the&development&of&a&comprehensive&analysis& of&the&current&ways&political&bots&are&being&utilized&and&how&they&influence&public& opinion.&we&believe&that&this&work&will&help&local&and&foreign&policy&makers&better& understand&the&relationship&between&technology&diffusion&and&political&processes.&& & & references& [1]&w.&lance&bennett&and&alexandra&segerberg,&the!logic!of!connective!action:!digital! media!and!the!personalization!of!contentious!politics,&2013d&philip&n.&howard,&the! digital!origins!of!dictatorship!and!democracy:!information!technology!and!political! islam&(new&york,&ny:&oxford&university&press,&2010).& [2]&f.&edwards,&philip&n.&howard,&and&mary&joyce,&“digital&activism&and&nonyviolent& conflict”&(digital&activism&research&project,&2013)d&jennifer&earl&and&katrina&kimport,& digitally!enabled!social!change&(the&mit&press,&2011).& [3]&yuval&rosenberg,&“62&percent&of&all&web&traffic&comes&from&bots,”&the!week,& december&16,&2013,&http://theweek.com/article/index/254183/62ypercentyofyallyweby trafficycomesyfromybots.& [4]&&protalinski,&e.&(2012).&facebook:&5y6%&of&accounts&are&fake&|&zdnet.zdnet.& retrieved&may&27,&2014,&from&http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebooky5y6yofy accountsyareyfake/10167& [5]&cheng,&a.,&&&evans,&m.&(2009,&august&1).&twitter&statistics&y&an&inydepth&report&at& most&active&twitter&users.&social!media!monitoring!and!analytics!solutions.&retrieved& june&3,&2014,&from&https://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/mostactiveusers/& !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1!politicalbots.org! ! 5! [6]&york,&j.&c.&(2011,&april&).&syria's&twitter&spambots.&(t.&guardian,&producer)& retrieved&june&2014,&from&the&guardian:& http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/21/syriaytwitteryspambotsyproy revolution&& [7]&abokhodair,&n.,&yoo,&d.,&mcdonald,&d.&(2015).&dissecting&a&social&botnet:&growth,& content&and&influence&on&twitter.&proceedings&of&the&acm&conference&on&computer& supported&cooperative&work&(cscw&2015).&acm& [8]&earl,&j.,&martin,&a.,&mccarthy,&j.d.,&soule,&s.a.&(2004).&the&use&of&newspaper&data& in&the&study&of&collective&action.&annual&review&of&sociology.&30,&65y80.& selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 second screen and political talk-shows: measuring and understanding the italian participatory couch potato fabio giglietto università di urbino carlo bo italy fabio.giglietto@uniurb.it abstract according to several recent reports, the practice of using a ‘second screen’ while following a television program is quickly becoming a widespread phenomenon. when the secondary device is used to read or contribute to online comments about a watched program, most of the discussion takes place on popular social media such as facebook and twitter. the paper presents what is, to our knowledge, the first study on a full season dataset of twitter conversations about a tv genre. starting from august 2012, we collected all the tweets (1,703,064) containing at least one of the official hashtags of the eleven political talk shows (607 episodes) aired by the italian free-to-air broadcasters. we found a significant correlation between the tweet-rate-per-minute during airtime and the audience of the show’s episode. furthermore, we demonstrate a technique, based on cluster analysis, aimed at identify key moment in a season. on this subset of contents, we applied qualitative content analysis to identify users’ level of participation on the scale of access, interaction and participation. keywords second screen, social tv, twitter, talk-show introduction despite the fact that the idea of ‘interactive television’ dates back a couple of decades, a commonly accepted definition of social tv is still lacking. on the one hand, as pinpointed by classic media studies (katz & lazarsfeld, 1955), tv viewing has always been eminently social, on the other hand, when social refers to ‘social media’, we observe the emergence of new practices enabled by the widespread of technologies such as internet, wi-fi, mobile devices, smart tv. part of these practices are facilitated by the four properties of networked spaces. while most of everyday conversations are ephemeral, in a networked spaces a growing part of this content become permanent, searchable, replicable and scalable (boyd, 2008). the co-presence of these four properties open up a wide range of new research opportunities for social scientists (giglietto, 2009; mazzoli & giglietto, 2013). ‘second screen’ practice is becoming a widespread phenomenon. while in 2009, 57% of us internet consumers declared to watch tv while simultaneously browsing the web at least once a month (nielsen, 2009), in 2012, 88% of us tablet owners and 86% of us smartphone owners said they used their device while watching tv (nielsen, 2012a). furthermore, a different study carried on during the same year, reports that the 66% (google, 2012) of the sample used a laptop and tv at the same time. the most common reported activity of these ‘connected viewers’ is using their phones to keep themselves occupied during commercials or breaks in something they were watching. nevertheless 11% of the sample said that they used their phone to see what other people were saying online about a program they were watching and another 11% posted their own online comments about a program they were watching using their mobile phone (smith & boyles, 2012). it is increasingly common that the authors of a tv program openly invite the audience to express their comments on the show online. both facebook and twitter official program’s channels are often advertised and most of the time an official twitter #hashtag is also proposed as a way to aggregate comments. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 measuring tv audiences is becoming increasingly difficult due to the growing use of digital-videorecorders to watch shows later or order “video-on-demand” from the set-top boxes. at the same time, audiences are also more fragmented with people watching tv on countless websites and on multiple device. the industry is therefore looking for solutions aimed at integrating the traditional method based on panels of families that agree to have a meter in their tv. not surprisingly, nielsen recently announced an agreement with twitter to create the ‘nielsen twitter tv rating’ for the us market, a syndicated-standard metric around the reach of the tv conversation on twitter (nielsen, 2012b). moreover, according to a report by twitter uk, the relationship between twitter and television is increasingly symbiotic (twitter uk, 2012). as an instance, super bowl 2013 telecasted by cbs, draw an average audience of 108.7 million viewers. during the course of the entire game 5.3 million of people sent out 26.1 million tweets. when the lights went out in half of the stadium, the audience turned to twitter (tweet per minute or tpm picked at a rate of 231,500 more than at any other point during the game) proof positive of the relationship between broadcasted events and twitter activity. although less diffused than in the us, second screen’s practices are becoming increasingly common also in italy especially around talent shows and political events (in 2013 italy voted to renew the national parliament). furthermore, talk shows are situated at a theoretical crossroads between participation and networked publics. dataset this paper focus on the analysis of a complete dataset of 1,703,064 tweets collected during 2012/2013 tv season and containing at least one of the official hashtags of the eleven political talk shows (607 episodes) aired by the italian free-to-air broadcasters. dataset was collected by filtering the twitter firehose for tweets containing at last one of the following hashtags: #ballarò or #ballaro, #portaaporta, #agorarai, #ultimaparola, #serviziopubblico, #inmezzora, #infedele or #linfedele, #ottoemezzo, #omnibus, #inonda, #piazzapulita. all the selected hashtags are either official (e.g. advertised on the official twitter channel of the program or during the tv show) or the most frequently used hashtag related to one of the eleven political talk shows aired by the italian free-to-air broadcasters. from this raw dataset we extracted 1,126,787 observations corresponding to tweets created during the air-time (plus 15 minutes) of each episode of the shows. auditel is, since 1986, the main research firm monitoring tv audience and ratings of local and national television in italy. data analysis for each episode, we calculated the average tweet-per-minute (tpm). the programs taken in to consideration, although belonging to the same genre, are very different in popularity and tweet rate. to address this variance in audience and tpm we calculated an additional variable. this variable, named ‘networked publics’, is defined as the ratio of average tweets over average audience of a specific program. this variable should therefore measure the inclination of the audience of a show to be active on twitter. audience and average tweet volume was then normalized, by applying a logarithmic transformation, in order to make this variable suitable for statistical analysis and regression modeling. both raw average tweet volume (r=0.805) and tpm (r=0.863) appear to be significantly correlated with the audience of the episode (figure 1). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 figure 1: scatterplots demonstrating the level of correlation between episode average tweet , tpm and audience. in order to identify key moments in the season, we grouped similar episodes applying first a hierarchical (in order to detect the number of clusters) and finally a kmeans cluster analysis (figure 2). figure 2: groups of similar episodes identified with cluster analysis. focusing on the “high-activity” cluster in the top right of the chart represented in figure 2, we identified key moments in the tv season (figure 3). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 figure 3: most of the episodes in the “high activity cluster” share a common denominator in the presence of a silvio berlusconi as a guest of the show. the average audience of the 10 episodes in the “high activity” cluster range from a minimum of 1,968,000 to a maximum of 8,670,000 (mean=4,180,933). a first look at this cluster clearly pinpoint the presence of silvio berlusconi (he was a guest in four of the top five episodes), as a common denominator of this group of episodes. clustering algorithms can therefore successfully be used to identify key moments in the dataset. for a deeper understanding of social dynamics behind user’s behaviour on twitter, a form of content or discourse analysis of this moment is needed. while automatic and semi-automatic algorithms aimed at categorizing/code contents are improving, manual coding is still researchers’ favourite option in humanities. however the amount of data easily collectable today via social media, call for techniques, different from traditional sampling strategies that, traditionally, could successfully applied to normally distributed variables. the tweets published during key moments will be therefore manually coded. the code matrix is developed with the aim of mapping different twitter activities (read, retweet, reply, original tweet) on the scale of three level of participation (access, interaction and participation) developed by carpentier (2011). the aim is to focus on the ongoing “power struggle” between authors of the show and active audiences that will leads to new and more flexible tv formats. note all the data in the abstract is updated at the time of writing. the dataset collection is in progress and will stop in june 2013. references boyd, danah. (2008). taken ouf of context: american teen sociality in networked publics. university of california, berkeley. retrieved from http://www.danah.org/papers/takenoutofcontext.pdf carpentier, n. (2011). media and participation. bristol: intellect. giglietto, f. (2009). social semantics in a networked space. new perspectives for social science. in j. m. aguado, b. scott, & e. buchinger (eds.), technology and social complexity. murcia: university of murcia press. google. (2012). the new multi-screen world: understanding cross-platform consumer behavior (p. 46). mountain view, ca. retrieved from http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/insights/library/studies/the-newmulti-screen-world-study/ selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 graver, f. (2012). 90 days at twitter what i learned from the inside. ad age social engagement/social tv conference. los angeles. katz, e., & lazarsfeld, p. f. (1955). personal influence the part played by people in the flow of mass communications,. glencoe ill.: free press. retrieved from http://www.worldcat.org/title/personalinfluence-the-part-played-by-people-in-the-flow-of-mass-communications/oclc/657191 mazzoli, l., & giglietto, f. (2013). social systems from simulation to observation. epistemologia, 3(1). nielsen. (2009). three screen report: media consumption and multi-tasking continue to increase across tv, internet, and mobile | nielsen wire. retrieved from http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wpcontent/uploads/2009/09/threescreenreport_us_2q09rev.pdf nielsen. (2012a). double vision – global trends in tablet and smartphone use while watching tv | nielsen wire. nielsen-wire. retrieved october 16, 2012, from http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/?p=31338 nielsen. (2012b). nielsen and twitter establish social tv rating. nielsen press room. retrieved february 6, 2013, from http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/press-room/2012/nielsen-and-twitter-establish-social-tvrating.html smith, a., & boyles, j. l. (2012). the rise of the “connected viewer”. washington. retrieved from http://pewinternet.org/reports/2012/connected-viewers.aspx twitter uk. (2012). tune in with twitter. driving discovery and engagement with tv. license this article is ©2013 fabio giglietto, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd.   selected  papers  of  aoir  2016:     the  17 th  annual  conference  of  the     association  of  internet  researchers   berlin,  germany  /  5-­8  october  2016       suggested  citation  (apa):  orwat,  c.,  hügle,  a.,  &  könig,  r.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  smart  world,  smart   rules?  on  the  legitimacy  of  digital  systems  of  social  rules.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th   annual  conference  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from   http://spir.aoir.org.      carsten  orwat    karlsruhe  institute  of  technology,  institute  for  technology  assessment  and  systems   research    anika  hügle    karlsruhe  institute  of  technology,  institute  for  technology  assessment  and  systems   research    rené  könig  karlsruhe  institute  of  technology,  institute  for  technology  assessment  and  systems   research           abstract     the  rapid  realization  of  the  “internet  of  everything”  requires  and  causes  that  systems  of   social  rules  for  interactions  are  implemented,  administered  and  enforced  by  digital   means.  although  this  phenomenon  has  been  discussed  since  works  on  “lex  informatica”   and  “code  is  law”  the  issues  of  legitimacy  are  rather  selectively  addressed  and  public   discourse  lacks  differentiation  in  this  regard.  we  argue  that  different  social  rule  systems   have,  in  principle,  various  requirements  for  legitimacy  and,  thus,  their  evaluation  needs   differentiation.  the  contribution  has  the  aims  (1)  to  introduce  a  more  nuanced  view  on   the  rather  under-­researched  issue  of  legitimacy  of  digital  systems  of  social  rules.   therefore,  we  discuss  case  studies  of  recent  internet  developments  and  evaluate  them   with  insights  from  theory  of  democracy.  (2)  the  contribution  suggests  options  for  action   and  approaches  to  generate  or  ensure  legitimacy  for  the  considered  case  studies.       keywords:  rules,  legitimacy,  politics,  governance     the  rapid  realization  of  the  “internet  of  everything”,  e.g.  connected  smart  homes,  smart   cities,  smart  cars  and  infrastructures,  smart  grids,  etc.,  requires  and  causes  that   systems  of  social  rules  for  human  and  machine  interactions  are  implemented,   administered  and  enforced  by  digital  means  to  an  unprecedented  level.  besides   automatic  processing  of  large  amount  of  interactions,  social  rules  are  technically   implemented  in  order  to  ensure  their  enforcement,  to  establish  fine-­grained,  flexible  and   personalized  rules,  as  well  as  to  make  them  self-­adapting  and  learning.  automated   processing  of  interaction  rules  appear  as  automated  decisions  and  are  therefore  less   transparent  and  comprehensible  for  outsiders.  moreover,  they  often  generate  a  large   quantum  of  partly  personalized  data  utilizable  for  many  different  purposes  and  contexts.   thus,  the  legitimacy  of  such  social  rules  and  decisions  in  the  context  of  digital  systems   becomes  a  crucial  question.       the  embedding  and  enforcing  of  social  rules  by  digital  systems,  especially  by  ‘code’,   internet  architecture,  algorithms,  or  software  has  been  discussed  under  terms  such  as   “lex  informatica”  (reidenberg,  1998)  or  “code  is  law”  (lessig,  1999,  2006).  research  is   now  conducted  on  “governing  algorithms”,  “technological  regulation”,  or  “electronic   institutions”.  there,  issues  of  the  legitimacy  of  such  digital  systems  of  social  rules  are   rather  selectively  addressed.  furthermore,  especially  the  public  discourse  lacks   differentiation  in  this  regard.               we  argue  that  different  social  rule  systems  have,  in  principle,  different  requirements  for   legitimacy  and,  thus,  their  evaluation  needs  differentiation.  for  instance,  many  digital   systems  of  social  rules  on  the  internet  can  be  conceived  as  private  contracts  (e.g.,   bygrave,  2015).  principles  of  contractual  freedom  substantiate  their  legitimacy  as  well   as  legal  frameworks  to  protect  contract  parties,  fairness  and  competition.  however,  this   approach  may  fall  short.  ensuring  legitimacy  by  improving  responsibilities  of  end-­users   in  market  decisions—as  practiced  with  the  legal  provision  of  “informed  consent”  in   privacy  protection—can  be  insufficient  when  constitutional  rights  are  not  adequately   protected.  in  such  cases  other  requirements  for  legitimacy  become  relevant.     for  example,  massive  amounts  of  interaction  data  are  generated  by  tracking  of  online   behavior  and  interactions  and  through  the  “internet  of  everything”.  the  rules   implemented  in  the  tools  and  methods  necessary  for  data  management  and  analytics   increasingly  become  social  rules  in  a  wide  range  of  contexts.  due  to  their  growing   importance  in  more  or  less  all  aspects  of  life,  such  digital  rule-­setting  methods  itself   require  further  regulation  as  well  as  procedure  and  instruments  of  legitimization  that  are,   for  instance,  comparable  to  those  of  legislation.         furthermore,  increasingly  “subnets”  of  the  internet  emerge  (such  as  more  or  less  closed   traffic  management  networks,  connected  value  chains,  smart  home  and  entertainment   networks,  commercial  platforms)  with  rules  defining  access  and  usages  options.  here,   also  the  standards  and  designs  of  interfaces  (e.g.,  apis)  turn  into  social  rules.  they   determine  conditions  of  choices  for  end-­users  and  options  of  economic  activity  and   innovation  in  form  of  access  to  the  “quasi”  infrastructures,  which  reach  issues  of   legitimacy  that  go  beyond  contractual  freedom.           this  contribution  addresses  issues  of  the  legitimacy  of  such  systems  of  social  rules   enabled,  structured  and  enforced  by  digital  means.1  (1)  we  differentiate  types  of  digital   systems  of  rules  on  the  basis  of  case  studies  and  evaluate  them  with  insights  from   theory  of  democracy  (e.g.,  scharpf,  2009;;  werle  &  iversen,  2006).  the  complexity  of   such  rule  systems  has  to  be  deconstructed  with  regard  to  different  requirements  for                                                                                           1  it  does  not  focus  directly  on  issues  of  the  legitimacy  of  “classic”  forms  of  internet  governance.   legitimacy.  which  type  of  social  rule  system  do  we  find  and  which  legitimacy  does  it   possess?       furthermore,  (2)  the  contribution  suggests  options  for  action  and  approaches  to   generate  or  ensure  legitimacy.  which  actors,  procedures  and  instruments  of   legitimization  operate  in  the  cases  or  are  necessary  in  addition?  these  options  range   from  stakeholder  participation  to  involvement  of  third  parties  for  oversight  or  control   (audits),  to  institutional  frameworks  and  direct  governmental  intervention.  for  those   options,  how  can  issues  of  representation,  delegation  of  responsibilities,  chains  of   legitimization,  prerequisites  and  possibilities  of  inclusion,  effectiveness  and  side  effects   of  procedures  and  instruments  of  legitimization  be  assessed?     from  this  perspective,  we  seek  to  introduce  a  more  nuanced  and  differentiated  view  on   the  rather  under-­researched  issue  of  legitimacy  of  digital  systems  of  social  rules.       references     bygrave,  l.a.  (2015).  internet  governance  by  contract.  oxford:  oxford  university   press.     lessig,  l.  (1999).  code  and  other  laws  of  cyberspace.  new  york:  basic  books.     lessig,  l.  (2006).  code  version  2.0.  new  york:  basic  books.     reidenberg,  j.r.  (1998).  lex  informatica:  the  formulation  of  information  policy  rules   through  technology.  texas  law  review,  76(3),  553-­584.       scharpf,  f.w.  (2009).  legitimacy  in  the  multilevel  european  polity.  european  political   science  review,  1(02),  173-­204.       werle,  r.,  &  iversen,  e.j.  (2006).  promoting  legitimacy  in  technical  standardization.   science,  technology  &  innovation  studies,  2(2),  19-­39.         microsoft word malazita-non-humans as meaning-makers-non-humans as meaning-makers.doc selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 non-humans as meaning-makers: elizabeth as a codesigner of bioshock infinite james w. malazita rensselaer polytechnic institute who participates in the community of practice1 of the design of digital technology? cultural studies scholars traditionally focus on human elements as the key actants and meaning-makers in the design of technology. even actor-network theory, which attributes causal power to non-human material objects, stops short of crediting objects with interpretive power and meaning-making ability. however, recent theoretical approaches coming out of speculative realism, new materialism, and non-human ethnography are posing challenges to this anthropocentric model of meaning-making.2 anthropologist eduardo kohn argues that humans are not the only beings capable of cognizing and interpreting the world; that, in fact, all living things are able to interpret the world, create a sense of their place in it, and come to an understanding of it. all living beings can make meaning, and all living beings possess an ontology. furthermore, kohn argues that all living beings can engage in semiotic construction. for kohn, construction of the world is brought about by a negotiation of meaning between cognizing persons, or "selves." however, "selves" are not exclusively human: wherever there are "living thoughts" there is also a "self." "self," at its most basic level, is a product of semiosis. it is the locus--however rudimentary and ephemeral--of a living dynamic by which signs come to represent the world around them to a "someone" who emerges as such as a result of this process. the world is thus "animate." "we" are not the only kind of we.3 kohn thus posits that all living things, from humans to cats to plants, interpret the world. their interpretation of the world makes them an active causal participant of the world, but also creates an awareness of separation from the world, the locus of the self. for kohn, all living beings undergo this process of interpretation and "self"-making, 1 wenger, e. (2000) communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. cambridge university press 2 for further discussion, see jane bennett's vibrant matter: a political ecology of things (2010), karen barad's meeting the universe halfway: the entanglement of matter and meaning (2007), and peter gratton's speculative realism: problems and prospects (2014) 3 kohn, e. (2013). how forests think: toward and anthropology beyond the human. university of california press. page 16 suggested citation (apa): malazita, j. (2015, october 21-24). non-humans as meaning-makers: elizabeth as a co-designer of bioshock infinite. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. although not necessarily linguistically, as humans do. the interpretive system of meaning-making can be as "rudimentary" as an antelope recognizing some form of danger inherent in the tiger lurking in the bushes, or as "ephemeral" as the ophrys apifera--the "bee orchid"--a plant whose flowers evolved to take the shape and coloring of a long-extinct female bee in order to lure long-extinct male bees to pollinate it.4 if non-human life can engage in interpretation of the world, and therefore contribute to meaning-making, can things? can computers and digital objects? ian bogost argues that they can, and that social scientists and philosophers need to devote more analytical effort towards understanding object experience, particularly the experiences of computer objects. more specifically, bogost argues for a postpostmodern model of object inquiry, where due respect is given to the relationships and interpretations of the world aside from those with humans that objects undergo: to be sure, computers often do entail human experience and perception. the human operator views words and images rendered on a display, applies physical forces to a mouse, seats memory chips into motherboard sockets. but not always. indeed, for the computer to operate at all for us first requires a wealth of interactions to take place for itself. as operators or engineers, we may be able to describe how such objects and assemblages work. but what do they experience? what’s their proper phenomenology? in short, what is it like to be a thing?5 bogost's concept of "alien phenomenology" claims that objects interpret the world and have phenomenological experiences, although these experiences may be quite different than human ones. these phenomenological and interpretive processes can impact humans, but they are not reducible to their impact on humans. this analytic framework can be applied to cultural studies of the creation of digital art to reveal the meaning-making ability of hardware and software. digital design discourse shows us the effects of the interpretation and experiences of the world that computers and software have on the design process, and reveals their role in the design community of practice. in the following excerpt, bioshock infinite lead developer ken levine discusses the frustrations of building and working with elizabeth, the player's in-game ai, even as he and his team at irrational games were creating her: [making bioshock infinite is] not an experience i would want to go through again... there are days that i wouldn't want wake up and go to work because there were things that were so hard to figure out... times that elizabeth would be walking into walls. literally, for months and months and months she was just... "where's elizabeth? she disappeared. she fell through the ground. she walked through a wall. she's coming up to you and staring at you creepily. she's missing her marks. she's 4  munroe,  r.  xkcd:  "bee  orchid"  (http://xkcd.com/1259/)  last  accessed  3/22/2014   5  bogost,  i.    (2012)  alien  phenomenology,  or,  what  it’s  like  to  be  a  thing.    university  of  minnesota  press,   minneapolis,  mn   interacting with the wrong thing." remember the shark in jaws? all those classic stories. she was our shark in jaws.6 apparently elizabeth, as helpful a co-player as she is, was a pretty lousy coworker. the "shark in jaws" reference is alluding to the now-legendary stories of how difficult the mechanical shark used in jaws was to work with and act alongside; it would constantly break or "misbehave." yet the shark was also a major character in the film; the cast and crew had no choice but to work with him. elizabeth is of similar importance to bioshock infinite. elizabeth is a "self" in this excerpt, even for the team that designed her. she misbehaves. she generates and provokes emotional responses. she does not act upon markers in the game world that were designed for her to act upon. she stares creepily at you. she's a she. elizabeth, like all technology, is socially constructed, both in the classic sense of the term--designers construct her as a person--and in the literal sense of the term--she was built by a community of people. but once she is constructed, she exists independently of us. she has properties and powers derived via those properties to resist both the game programmers who are building her as well as impact the gameworld alongside players. she also has a emergent personality, one that exists as an amalgamation of the properties of elizabeth's dialogue in the script written by levine, her voice as acted by courtnee draper, her scripted in-game actions developed by the irrational programming team, and her actual in-game decision making and interactions during both consumer gameplay and design playtesting, as partially impacted by the hardware that runs her ai. yet while elizabeth is dependent upon these persons, objects, and processes for her origin and, in some cases, her continued existence, she is not reducible to them. to leverage latour's concept of irreductionism, elizabeth is a new whole that emerges from the interplay of these other objects.7 she is a part of the game world of bioshock infinite, and yet also interprets and makes meaning of the game world and the human player's role in it. she is a designed object, but also participated in the process of her own design by nature of her actions and interpretations of the becoming game world. in short, she was both a causal actant within and a meaning-making member of the community of practice developing bioshock infinite. of course, elizabeth is exhausted by neither the human experiences of her, nor by the collaborative human design of her. elizabeth is not just aesthetic human experience, she is also a being of light and code; a body of nonhuman communities of practice. she is a series of classes and variables, all of which compose her, but do not define her totality. to borrow from ian bogost's version of speculative flat ontology, there is never an essential or complete definition of elizabeth. the human-computer play session that actualizes bioshock's written code, the individual classes and scripts that contribute to that body of code, the wavelengths of light that travel from the screen, and the cosplaying and fanfiction cultures that surround her can be said to "be" 6  quote  taken  from  and  interview  conducted  by  kevin  vanord  from  "the  break  room,"  published  on  youtube   by  gamespot  on  march  20,  2013.    the  interview  is  titled  "we  can  kill  the  industry  with  cynicism  -­‐  ken  levine   -­‐  bioshock"  last  accessed  march  3,  2014  at  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwsjalh2vya)   7  latour,  b.    (1988)  the  pasteurization  of  france.    cambridge,  ma  harvard  press   elizabeth. elizabeth’s creative agency-as well as her being-is manifesting intra-actively among all the rhizomatic flows of her world. she plays the game with humans, yes, but she also overheats hard drives, flickers light in monitors, disturbs photons in the air, and genders non-sexual machines. microsoft word tkachkawasaki.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): tkach-kawasaki, l. (2014, october 22-24). friends, tweets, and youtube: new directions in online campaigning in japan. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. friends, tweets, and youtube: new directions in online campaigning in japan leslie tkach-kawasaki university of tsukuba introduction in today’s modern political campaigns, the internet has become an indispensable campaign communications tool for political parties, politicians, and candidates. yet for japanese political actors, from the mid-1990s, the poel (public offices election law), a vastly comprehensive law governing all aspects of political campaigning, has banned internet use in the critical campaign period immediately prior to elections. relying on traditional campaigning tools including street speeches, handbills, posters, and word of mouth, supplemented by publicly funded yet officially limited advertising through mass media channels, japanese candidates have yearned for changes in the legislation to allow internet-based campaigning for almost 20 years. this change finally occurred in april 2013. with amendments to the poel to allow political parties, candidates, and voters to use sns (social networking services) and conduct campaign communications activities via email during the period prior to election day, the japanese political websphere finally caught up to the internet in time for the 2013 upper house election in july. yet for many political parties and candidates, challenges still remained in how to effectively use web-based campaigning, personalize their campaign strategies, and create a political “brand” for themselves in an increasing diverse internet environment. this paper has two main objectives that lie in the intersection between theory and practice in investigating japan’s new political websphere. first, from a theoretical perspective, this paper identifies online strategies that appeared in the 2013 upper house election in japan in order to assess professionalization in campaigning (often referred to as the “americanization” of political campaigns). while prior to 2013 it was particularly challenging to evaluate professionalism in japanese political campaigns under the old restrictions in the poel, the lifting of the ban on internet-based campaigning has ushered in a new era in political campaign communication in japan. in particular, this paper examines candidate and political party use of the internet in terms of media segmentation, campaign personalization, and campaign branding strategies. second, from a practical viewpoint, this paper explores the extent to which political parties and candidates utilized internetand mobile-media tools during the 2013 campaign in terms of party affiliation. with political parties and candidates continuing to offer web-based information through “traditional” online means including websites, blogs, and email, in the 2013 election cycle, they also experimented with video (through youtube and other video channels) as well as social networking services such as twitter and facebook. with the expansion of media channels, a range of third-party actors in the japanese online electoral sphere emerged with the active participation of the national election management board and online advertisers. by investigating the online japanese electoral environment through theoretical and practical perspectives, this paper describes how the japanese political websphere has entered a new phase of online campaigning with multiple online delivery channels. studies in online campaigning to date, studies in online campaigning have taken multiple trajectories. early studies in the midto late 1990s investigated the impact of technological innovations on campaign practices (gibson et al., 2003a, margolis, et al., 1997, gibson et al., 2003b), often concluding that campaign internet use tended to mirror offline political practices. institutional parameters, including actor networks and legal restrictions have also been explored to assess how web-based campaigns have been incorporated into existing political environments (anstead and chadwick, 2009, foot et al., 2007). studies in professionalism in political campaigns approached online campaigning from a political marketing perspective, with online campaigning being regarded as an extension of traditional political marketing techniques (farrell and webb, 2000, stromback, 2007). with the rise in popularity of sns tools in the late 2000s, online campaigning has taken new directions in rapid dissemination of campaign information and increased voter involvement (vesnic-alujevic, 2013, vergeer, 2013, williams & gulati, 2013). most studies in online campaigning have occurred in national contexts that do not legislate its use during political campaigns periods. japan presents a special case in this regard as prior to april 2013, japan’s poel restricted online campaigning with the aim of levelling the playing field among candidates in japan’s postwar multi-member medium-sized electoral districts where two to six candidates of the same party competed for seats. strictly legislating the distribution of campaign-related materials and candidate-centered political advertising, the poel distinguished between “political activities” and “campaign activities” and, prior to april 2013, candidates were banned from updating their websites after filing their candidatures and were prevented from using their websites, video websites, and social media during the period immediately prior to election day (tkach-kawasaki, 2003). however, despite such restrictions, since the early 2000s, in each national election cycle, increasing numbers of politicians have created an internet-based presence (tkach-kawasaki, 2011). in this unique political websphere, research on the online environment for japanese political parties and candidates have tended to focus on party competition (tkachkawasaki, 2003), the involvement of multiple actors (tkach-kawasaki, 2007), voter involvement (kobayashi, 2009), and the historical influence of the poel (tkachkawasaki, 2011). in april 2013, the poel was amended to allow political parties, candidates, and voters to conduct campaign-related activities using websites and sns, but maintained restrictions in distributing election-related handbills or flyers. with the lifting of the ban on web-based campaigning, assessing web-based campaigning during the 2013 upper house election reveals certain trends in this new era of online political engagement in japan. method during the period july 5 to 20, 2013, official political party and candidate websites, as well as official facebook sites were archived using a web archiving program (metaproducts offline explorer). candidates’ twitter feeds were also gathered during the same time period. party and candidate websites are currently being coded using content analysis techniques and the results are forthcoming. preliminary results: japan’s first “net election” table 1 shows the breakdown of candidate use of internet-based tools for campaigning in july 2013 (preliminary results). in terms of “traditional” online presence, measured by the number and percentage of candidates with websites, trends noted earlier of increasing use with each election cycle have continued. among sns, facebook was the most popular overall with 85.3% of all candidates having either official (updated by their campaign offices) or personal pages. facebook use was particularly high among major-party candidates (ldp and dpj candidates), but also quite high for candidates from parties that were proactive in using other social media channels (for example, the restoration party and the people’s life party). twitter was the also popular with over 70% of candidates. however, in contrast from facebook, candidates from minor or relatively new political parties, such as your party, the people’s life party, the jcp, the green wind party, the restoration party, and the green party, made extensive use of twitter for campaigning. although not shown in table 1, candidates from relatively rural prefectures were more likely to use facebook, whereas twitter was mainly popular with candidates from urban-based electoral districts such as tokyo, osaka, and kyoto. in response to changes in the poel that allowed candidates to utilize video-sharing websites such as youtube, ustream, or nico nico dōga (a popular japanese videosharing website), roughly one third of the candidates took advantage of this medium to post campaign speeches or special messages to the voters. however, possibly owing to production costs and privacy concerns, this medium was less popular among candidates than other newmedia channels. finally, in terms of candidate uptake overall, candidates from small newer parties that mainly campaigned in urban districts, such as those from your party, the people’s life party, the green wind party, the restoration party, and the green party were the most proactive in combining traditional website-based campaign methods with new social media channels. many candidates (results forthcoming) from these parties were new candidates rather than incumbents, and using all possible media channels to advance their name recognition and construct a brand image were key points in their online media campaign strategies. in comparison, candidates from older established political parties such as the ldp and the dpj demonstrated more caution in using sns-based campaigning. rather than an all-out social-media blitz, candidates from these parties used social media in general — and facebook in particular — as an extension of personal networks quite possibly forged through traditional campaign practices in japan such as their local support networks. discussion of preliminary results while complete results are forthcoming, a rudimentary analysis of the collected website, facebook, and twitter data demonstrates three trends in candidate website and sns use. first, in terms of media segmentation strategy, websites were used for static indepth policy-related information and background profile. in contrast, sns channels were often used to promote speeches and scheduling (twitter), as well as event photographs and extensions of personal networks (facebook). campaign personalization techniques such as targeting voters through video (mainly youtube channels) and “friending” and “liking” (facebook) were also present. finally, in efforts to brand themselves, logos and caricatures were also popular among candidates who utilized multiple online means (website, blog, facebook, and twitter). although these are only preliminary results, the combination of the presence of these features suggest that with the changes to the poel to allow for online campaigning, the japanese electoral websphere has entered an era of campaign professionalization. references anstead, n. and chadwick, a. (2009). parties, election campaigning, and the internet: toward a comparative institutional approach. in: a. chadwick and p.n. howard (eds.), the routledge handbook of internet politics. oxon: sage. farrell, d. & webb, p. (2000). political parties as campaign organizations. in: r.j. dalton & m.p. wattenberg (eds.), parties without partisans: political change in advanced industrial democracies. oxford: oxford university press. foot, k.m., schneider, s.m., kluver, r., & jankowski, n. (eds.). (2007). the internet and national elections. new york: routledge. gibson, r.k., margolis, m., resnick, d. & ward, s.j. (2003a). election campaigning on the www in the usa and the uk: a comparative analysis. party politics, 9(1), 47-75. gibson, r.k., nixon, p. & ward, s.j. (eds.). (2003b). political parties and the internet: net gain? london: routledge. kobayashi, t. & ikeda, k. (2009). selective exposure in political web browsing: empirical vertification of ‘cyber-balkanization’ in japan and the usa. information, communication & society, 12(6), 929-953. margolis, m., resnick, d. & tu, c. (1997). campaigning on the internet: parties and candidates on the world wide web in the 1996 primary season. harvard international journal of press/politics 2(1), 59-78. stromback, j. (2007). political marketing and professionalized campaigning: a conceptual analysis. journal of political marketing 6(2-3), 49-67. tkach-kawasaki, l.m. (2003). politics@japan: party competition on the internet in japan. party politics, 9(1), 105-23. tkach-kawasaki, l.m. (2007). roles and regulations: boundaries on the japanese web sphere in the 2004 upper house election. in k. foot, n.w. jankowki, r. kluver, & s. schneider (eds.), the internet and national elections. new york: routledge. tkach-kawasaki, l.m. (2011). the internet and campaigns in japan: traditions and innovations. in y. tsujinaka & l.m. tkach-kawasaki (eds.), japan and the internet: perspectives and practices. tsukuba: center for international and advanced japanese studies. vergeer, m. (2013). politics, election and online campaigning: past, present...and a peek into the future. new media & society, february 2013; 15(1), 9-17. vesnic-alujevic, l. (2013). the european parliament online: the use of social media in political marketing. brussels: centre for european studies. available at http://thinkingeurope.eu/sites/ default/files/ publication-files/ces_mep_web.pdf. access date: february 25, 2013. williams, c.b. & gulati, g.j. (2013). social networks in political campaigns: facebook and the congressional elections of 2006 and 2008. new media & society, february 2013; 15(1), 52-71. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 this  is  a  very  rough  outline  of  the  work  in  which  i  am  currently  engaged.    it  is  not  nearly  ready  for   publication  yet,  so  please  do  not  cite.    however,  i’d  love  to  hear  from  you  if  you  find  any  of  this  interesting.     thanks  to  jackman  humanities  institute  scholars  in  residence  program  at  the  university  of  toronto  for   their  invaluable  support.   rules  as  theatrical  method  in  internet  surveillance   research   david  j.  phillips   university  of  toronto,  faculty  of  information     introduction   surveillance  coerces  us  to  act  such  that  our  everyday  actions  can  be  translated  to  data.   that  data  is  then  circulated,  collated,  and  analyzed.    that  analysis  is  then  used  to  typify   us  and  to  organize  our  everyday  lives  and  actions.  thus,  we  are  made  legible  to   surveillant  organizations,  and  we  become  accessible  to  their  self-­interested   interventions.  my  research  continues  to  ask  the  question  “what  is  it  to  live  our  lives   mediated  by  infrastructures  and  practices  of  surveillance?"       lately  i've  been  using  theatrical  methods  to  explore  that  question.  my  co-­researchers   and  i  have  used  surveillance  theory  to  inform  the  construction  of  theatrical  games  and   improvisations,  allowing  those  embodied  activities  to  inform,  illuminate,  or  question  the   theory.  this  iterative  transgression  between  theory  and  embodiment  somehow  mirrors   the  surveillance  process  itself.  in  this  paper  i  discuss  this  process  as  a  methodological   resource.   in  an  earlier  paper,  i  discussed  a  previous  attempt  to  use  theatre  as  surveillance   research  (phillips  2015).  briefly,  i  felt  that  that  effort  failed  as  surveillance  research,  in   that  it  took  existing  theory  and  theatricalized  it,  rather  than  extending  theory  itself.    this   was,  in  part,  due  to  a  perceived  urgency  in  that  project  to  create  a  show.  this  time   around,  there  was  no  intent  to  produce  theatre  or  drama  or  entertainment.  rather,  the   project  was  structured  as  a  more  focused  exploration  of  the  dynamics  of  surveillance,   using  theatre  games  to  elicit  embodied  structural  knowledge  and  interrogate  action  and   interaction  within  those  structures.    (boal  1979,  1992)   what  we  did  we  do?   we  first  gathered  a  team  of  collaborators,  comprised  of  lucy  winner,  a  dramaturg,  and   five  undergraduate  researchers  from  the  university  of  toronto  -­  victoria  mckenzie,   gabrielle  simmons,  elliot  mcmurchy,  laura  sanchez,  and  alisha  stranges.     we  then  alternated  between  theoretical  and  embodied  explorations  of  surveillance.     through  readings,  lectures,  and  other  textual  media,  we  became  familiar  with  a   particular  framework  for  understanding  surveillance  infrastructure.  this  theoretical  lens   of  “actuarial  surveillance”  understands  surveillance  as  a  set  of  interlinked  processes  of   identification,  in  which  durable  links  are  made  and  maintained  between  bodies  and   databases;;  monitoring  and  recording,  in  which  data  models  are  developed,  activities   monitored  and  translated  to  data,  and  data  is  accumulated,  stored,  and  exchanged;;   analysis,  in  which  sense  is  made,  patterns,  categories,  and  entities  generated  and   evaluated;;  and  response,  in  which  social  processes  are  altered  in  light  of  the   surveillance  practice,  action  occurs  toward  the  bodies  the  data  purports  to  represent,   and  life  is  structured  in  the  interests  of  the  surveilling  institutions.  we  discussed   infrastructure  as  more  or  less  stable  configurations  of  legal,  economic,  cultural,  and   technical  systems  that  are  both  the  product  of  and  the  mediator  of  social  relations   (giddens  1984).     we  considered  some  possible  organizing  ideas  to  direct  our  research,  including     §   the  differential  usefulness  of  surveillance  and  scientific  rationalism  to  individuals   and  organizations,  and  types  of  organizations   §   the  generative  possibilities  of  surveillance  –  surveillance  not  as  representative   but  as  creative     §   the  meshing  of  surveillance  with  existing  categorical  inequalities  of  race,  gender,   sexuality,  etc.   §   the  pleasures  of  surveillance  and  of  being  watched,  seen,  and  known;;  the   dialectic  of  fear  and  desire   we  alternately  used  embodied  research  methods  to  engage  these  theoretical   explorations,  fashioning  a  research  process  in  which  we  would  identify  a  compelling   issue  and  articulate  our  embodied  consciousness  of  that  issue  through  gaming   exercises.  these  games  would  be  designed  to  recreate  and  disrupt  rules  and  theories   organizing  our  practice  and  understanding  of  surveillance.    by  playing  with  and  within   these  rules,  we  hoped  to  incite  creativity  and  alternate  possibilities.   specifically,  we  relied  on  a  small  set  of  theatre  games.  these  included  machines,  scene   building,  and  dynamized  tableaux.  in  machines,  an  actor  establishes  a  repetitive  and   mechanical  sound  and  action,  informed  or  inspired  by  intriguing  idea.  one-­by-­one,  the   rest  of  the  group  builds  an  inter-­connected  machine  using  different  mechanical  sounds   and  actions  as  well  as  different  levels  in  space.  in  scene  building,  the  group  is  required   to  build  a  scene  around  an  intriguing  idea.  the  scene  must  contain  certain  elements  (for   example  songs,  rhythms,  phrases,  or  machines)  or  conform  to  a  certain  structure.  in   dynamized  tableaux,  one  actor  wordlessly  places  other  actors  and  herself  in  a  tableau   embodying  an  intriguing  real,  current  problem  or  situation.    another  actor  rearranges  the   group  into  a  tableau  embodying  an  imagined  ideal.  each  actor  then  finds  a  position   between  their  original  and  ideal  positions,  creating  a  transitional  tableau.  finally,  in   three  beats,  the  group  moves  from  real  to  transition  to  ideal.   in  general,  these  activities  need  an  interlocutor  –  a  participant  who  sits  apart  and   watches.  discussion  focuses  on  what  each  participant  (including  interlocutor  and   audience  members)  saw,  rather  than  on  what  participants  intended  to  convey.   through  these  shimmerings  between  theatre  and  theory,  we  honed  our  familiarity  with   each  to  find  a  symbiotic  relation  between  question  and  method.  for  what  kinds  of   questions  might  these  be  evocative  methods?    where,  in  surveillance,  is  the  non-­verbal   important?  where,  in  surveillance,  are  performance  and  theatricality  theoretically   important?  where,  in  surveillance,  are  embodiment,  identity,  desire,  and  fear   theoretically  important?  where,  in  surveillance,  are  conflict  and  relationality  theoretically   important?     we  played  games  of  identification,  games  of  monitoring,  and  games  of  analysis,   creating  structured  embodied  explorations  of  our  intellectual  and  personal  uncertainty   and  discomfort.  we  tried  continually  to  bring  affect  into  productive  engagement  with   theory,  both  in  our  reflections  and  in  the  design  of  further  games.  we  circled  around  the   problem  of  establishing  a  research  question,  looking  for  an  engaging  set  of  interesting   ideas  and  investigative  techniques.   in  a  breakthough  moment,  we  decided  to  tackle  the  surveillance  of  desire.  this  was  not   yet  a  formal  research  question,  but  it  committed  us  to  a  more  bounded  field  of  inquiry   that  was  likely  to  produce  something  novel,  surprising,  and  interesting,  engaging  as  it   does  fear  and  desire,  rationality  and  affect,  and  consumer  capitalism.     through  machines,  dynamized  tableaux,  and  reflection  we  began  to  ask  evolving   questions.  is  the  desired  object  always  a  talisman  for  something  else?  is  the  desire  for   the  hot  activist  artist  (manifested  in  tableau)  actually  a  manifestation  of  a  desire  for   unfettered  sexuality  and  keen  intellectual  anarchy?    do  we  want  a  coke,  or  perfect   harmony  and  snow  white  turtle  doves?   what  might  be  a  grammar  of  desire?  along  what  axes  might  instantiations  of  desire   differ?  perhaps  our  familiarity  with  the  desire,    our  attitude  toward  it  (joy,  terror,  hope,   ambivalence,  humor,  shame,  sadness…),  its  urgency,  its  perceived  attainability,  its   mediating  and  sublime  objects,  its  physiological  manifestations…   we  refined  the  project  further  to  explore  desire  for  acceptance  in  social  groups,  and   set  out  to  define  that  grammar.   at  this  point,  however,  the  group  began  to  manifest  antsiness,  incoherence,  and  a   sense  of  impending  failure.    we  were  at  the  end  of  the  third  of  four  weeks.  there  was  a   sense  that  the  project  should  be  further  along  that  it  was  and  that  no  one  knew  what   they  were  doing.   as  the  director,  i  had  two  responses  to  this.  the  first  was  to  assure  everyone  that   project  had  already  been  a  success,  in  that  i  had  convinced  myself  that  this  type  of   method  had  legs,  and  that  i  knew  how  to  use  them  –  that  everything  was  gravy  from   now  on.     we  also  had  each  actor  create  a  dynamizing  tableau  embodying  where  we  were  in  the   project,  and  transforming  into  where  we  wanted  to  be.   left  to  itself,  however,  the  group  veered  to  talking  rather  than  doing,  surveying  each   other  and  talking  about  what  that  grammar  of  “desire  for  acceptance”  might  be,  instead   of  using  machines,  tableaux,  play.    there  also  appeared  gender-­informed  divisions  over   the  dichotomy  between  affect  and  empiricism,  with  one  member  in  particular  claiming   that  “affect  cannot  be  measured,”  to  which  i  responded  “…  of  course  affect  is   measurable.  we  weep,  we  laugh,  we  smirk.  how  much  pain  are  you  in,  right  now,  on  a   scale  of  1  to  10?...what  happens  when  your  actions  are  used  to  infer  an  affective  state   of  desire?  what  are  the  common  and  alternative  ways  for  doing  that?  …  one  thing  that   seems  to  be  happening  right  now  is  a  deep-­seated  resistance  to  pursuing  the  question.”   i  believe  that  this  could  have  been  a  tremendously  productive  conflict.  however,  i  ended   up  in  the  hospital  for  what  was  to  have  been  the  fourth  and  last  week  of  the  project.  we   were  palpably  at  a  very  emotional  and  conflicted  part  of  the  process,  and  the  process   needed  supervision  that  i  could  not  provide.  so  i  ended  the  project.   but  i  was  being  perfectly  honest  when  i  said  that  the  project  had  already  been   successful  as  a  proof  of  concept  for  this  research  method  in  this  area  of  inquiry.  there   were  worlds  of  games  beyond  tableaux  and  machines  to  explore  and  articulate  the   powers  and  violences  attendant  to  the  infrastructuring  of  grammars,  vocabularies,  and   standards  of  desire.   i  leave  with  a  few  problems  or  warning  or  things  to  remember  about  these  methods.  as   a  director,  it  was  important  for  me  to  keep  iterating  that  this  was  not  a  project  about   interaction  or  theatre;;  it  was  a  project  about  surveillance  that  used  interaction  and   theatre.  nor  was  its  goal  to  elicit  our  individual  experiences  of  surveillance,  but  instead   to  embark  on  embodied  and  affective  exploration  of  lived  infrastructures.    we  were   using  emotive  and  affective  states,  not  living  them.       also,  the  group  must  be  willing  to  engage  with  pernicious  inequalities.  in  this  case,  the   conflict  was  pretty  clearly  gendered,  but  race,  class,  age,  and  other  differences  of   position  and  experience  and  outlook  among  the  group  will  rise,  not  as  obstacles,  but  as   dangerous  and  productive  tensions.   references   boal,  augusto.  1985.  theatre  of  the  oppressed.  translated  by  charles  a.  leal  &  maria-­ odilia  leal.  new  york  :  theatre  communications  group.   boal,  augusto.  1992.  games  for  actors  and  non-­actors.  translated  by  adrian  jackson.     new  york:  routledge.   giddens,  anthony.    1984.    the  constitution  of  society:  outline  of  the  theory  of   structuration.    berkeley,  ca:  university  of  california  press.   phillips,  david.  2015.  “work  and  play  at  the  threshold  of  legibility:  theatre  as  method   and  pedagogy  in  surveillance  research.”  surveillance  and  society  13  (1):  57-­77   microsoft word 685-438-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 just in time: a new modality for community via networks matthew allen deakin university australia matthew.allen@deakin.edu.au abstract my paper reviews the significance of the term community in attempts to understand the social and human dimensions of computer-mediated communication in light of the current dominance of self-interested social networking as the primary form of internet use. exploring the two ways in which place has been used to articulate the relationship of individuals and collectives, the paper proposes the necessity of moving instead to explore time and rhythm in a world where networks are ‘everywhere and nowhere’, thus rendering space a consequence of our temporal synchronicities, rather than a precursor. keywords community; networks; time; space; individualism just in time: a new modality for community via networks the concept of community has played a central role in how humans have come to terms with the social effects of the internet. in practice and analysis, as well as experience and reflection, it is impossible to think of these computer networks without at some point invoking ‘community’. community has been the most significant element in our desire to show that human involvement in computer-mediated communication, far from being a “bloodless technological ritual” (rheingold, 1993, chapter 2), is deeply social. yet community is a notoriously difficult concept even before we began to adapt it to understanding the internet. the more that community has defined our understanding of networked communications, the more that the word remains conceptually elusive. as goodwin (2012, p.54) puts it, ‘community’ is “descriptively vague and yet positively ideologically loaded”. our long-running efforts to reach or demand consensus on community nevertheless bear continued examination as a means of grappling with the analytic complexities of what, through community, we really seek to understand: the technosociality of humanity’s engagement with computer-enabled communications. most recently, this engagement has been characterized by the development of explicit systems of social networking. such systems, notably but not exclusively facebook, present to us and demand our attention to the social networks which we have always had but have never yet had to manage so directly (see allen, 2012 and wilson et al., 2012).. these networks have for many years been recognized as producing community, rather than resulting from community (wellman, et al., 1996). but given the explicitness of the network experience, and the ways systems of communication instantiate “networked individualism” (rainie and wellman, 2012), these self-interested networks that dominate everyday life for many people are reshaping our sense of the collective endeavor which ‘community’ implies. haythornthwaite and kendall ponder that “early on, the question was whether community could exist online; now the question may be whether it can exist without online” (2010, p.1086): but it what kind of community might we have as a result? as ryberg and larson (2008) noted “… we are witnessing an intensified personalization and individualization [through networks], while simultaneously being increasingly dependent on, connected computer to and mutually reliant on each other.” community is intimately connected to the individuals who comprise it and the individual relations between them, unbounded by any sense of the individual collective which community implies. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 for more than twenty years, place (as a particular form of embodied space) has been thought essential to understanding the relationship between individual and community moderated by the internet. place has been mobilized in two ways. as wellman and others have shown, community is partially about place but as much about ties between people that are experienced in proximity but not dependent upon it (wellman at al., 2003). while technologies have expanded networks of social interaction, they have not reduced it solely to an online phenomenon (hampton and wellman, 2000). furthermore, at least until the widespread global connectivity through the internet became normal, most computer-mediated communication occurred solely in work contexts (for example, sproull and kiesler, 1991) or was specific to local community (see carroll, 2005, esp. pp.43-44). even now, most online interaction maps to known spatial domains which form our places of work and social life. nevertheless, because of the way the internet emerged into wider social consciousness as a novel phenomenon, researchers became fascinated by the online communities emerged free from place, without pre-existing offline complements and that held little prospect of sustained proximate encounter. smith and kollock asked: “what kind of social spaces do people create with networks?” (1999, pp.3-4). in doing so they, and many others, demonstrated an eagerness to re-introduce spatiality into the virtual realm to normalise it. nor was this effect limited to researchers: participants themselves “imaginatively constructed [space] by symbolic processes initiated and maintained by the community between and among individuals and groups” (wang et al., 2002, p.411). this work helped meet the “communal challenge of developing and maintaining their existence as an identifiable social entity” (butler et al., 2007, pp.3-4) when previously such entities manifested themselves through physically located traces, even while the community effects thus achieved were possible because there was no ‘actual’ location except of their private places of connection to the internet. this place-making can now be seen as a transitional effect, of interest because it shows how humans could only assimilate the internet’s novelty within pre-existing assumptions about how to be together. even as early as 2003, it became clear that: the developing personalization, wireless portability, and ubiquitous connectivity of the internet all facilitate networked individualism … computer-supported communication is everywhere, but it is situated nowhere. it is i-alone that is reachable wherever i am: at a home, hotel, office, highway, or shopping center. the person has become the portal (wellman et al, 2003) now it is clear that “groupor community-based social relations and practices [give way] to a more mobile, fluid, and less constrained social practice of individually constructed personal networks (aided by the increasing adoption of mobile, personalized technologies)” (willson, 2012, p.281). while networked individualism became possible because of partially located, socially networked community, it has evolved in step with the wholesale adoption of diverse forms of informatic connectivity: person-to-person networks show how community has transcended group boundaries…the shift puts people at the center of personal networks that can supply them with support, sociability, information, and a sense of belonging (rainie and wellman, 2012: chapter 5) the effects of new technological developments and their adoption into culture mean that place becomes fundamentally individualized, even when experienced in common. where ‘one is’ becomes increasingly important and explicitly encoded within computer networks but where ‘all are’ becomes much less relevant. place is losing its capacity, even symbolically, to contribute to community effects by giving us a sense of collective identity; shared place becomes attenuated in the face of the selfcentered emplacement of the individual while using placeless networks. critics of networked individualism often seek to re-instantiate our relationship with technology inside a local community grounded in place, enabling a return to more traditional social interactions (see goodwin, 201, pp.50-51; also willson, 2012). but perhaps such critics are, literally, looking in the wrong place. networks and resultant connectivity are ‘everywhere and nowhere’. but they are always selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 with us. in other words, it is not space but time that matters, and thus place is less important as a mechanism to interrogate social life online than rhythm. the specific effects of time on our sense of collective endeavor, of the way an individual exist in concert with others, are a matter for empirical investigation. however, we can already see in the world around us that, generally, people now use systems of computer-mediated networking to maintain multiple rhythms of interaction at the same time. where a person is no longer determines shared communication because networks have irrevocably removed the necessity (if not the efficacy) of using shared space to generate shared time. where once the rhythm of sharing was understood as a consequence of either being proximate or not, now proximity is a consequence of the continual interplay of multiple rhythms, beaten on the drums of our social networking platforms. if community still exists, it is ‘just in time’, not formed in place. references references are apa style and times new roman 10, aligned left, single line, 0pt before, 6pt after, hanging 0.5 inches). allen, m. (2012). an education in facebook. digital culture & education 4 (3), 213–225. retrieved from http://www.digitalcultureandeducation.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/dce1077_allen_2012.pdf butler, b., sproull, l., kiesler, s., & kraut, r. (2007). community effort in online groups: who does the work and why? human-computer interaction institute. paper 90. retrieved from http://repository.cmu.edu/hcii/90 carroll, j.m. (2005) the blacksburg electronic village: a study in community computing, in p. van den besselaar and s. koizumi (eds.) digital cities 2003, lncs 3081 (pp. 43–65). retrieved from http://jcarroll.ist.psu.edu/files/bev-digcitiesiii05.pdf goodwin, i. (2012). theorizing community as discourse in community informatics: “resistant identities” and contested technologies. communication and critical/ cultural studies, 9 (1), 47–66 doi: 10.1080/14791420.2011.645214 hampton, k. & wellman, b. (2000). examining community in the digital neighborhood. in t. ishida and k. isbister (eds) digital cities, lncs 1765 (pp. 194–208) berlin and heidelberg: springer. haythornthwaite, c. & kendall, l. (2010). internet and community. american behavioral scientist 53 (8), 1083–1094 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0002764209356242 rainie, l. & wellman, b. (2012). networked: the new social operating system. cambridge, ma.: mit press. rheingold, h. (1993). the virtual community: homesteading on the electronic frontier. reading, ma: addison-wesley. retrieved from http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/bitstream/handle/10535/18/the_virtual_community.pdf.txt ryberg, t. & larsen, m.c. (2008). networked identities: understanding relationships between strong and weak ties in networked environments. journal of computer assisted learning, 24:103–115. retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2729.2007.00272.x/full smith, m. & kollock, p. (1999). communities in cyberspace. london: routledge. sproull, l. & kiesler, s. (1991). connections: new ways of working in the networked organization. cambridge, ma: mit press. wang, y., yu, q. & fesenmaier, d. (2002). defining the virtual tourist community: implications for tourism marketing. tourism management 23, 407–417. retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0261517701000930 wellman, b., salaff, j., dimitrova, d., garton, l. gulia, m. & haythornthwaite, c. (1996). computer networks as social networks: collaborative work, telework, and virtual community. annual review of sociology 22, 213–228. retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2083430 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 wellman, b., quan-haase, a., boase, j., chen, w., hampton, k., díaz, i. & miyata, k. (2003). the social affordances of the internet for networked individualism. journal of computer-mediated communication 8 (3). doi: 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2003.tb00216.x willson, m. (2012). being-together: thinking through technologically mediated sociality and community. communication and critical/cultural studies 9 (3), 279–297. doi: 10.1080/14791420.2012.705007 wilson, r., gosling, s. & graham, l. (2012). a review of facebook research in the social sciences. perspectives on psychological science 7 (3), 203–220. license this article is ©2013 matthew allen, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation: tynes, r. (2016, october 5-8). state-aiding, empire-building or multitude fulfilling? an anonymous role in international politics. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. robert tynes bard college "hackers create the possibility of new things entering the world. not always great things, or even good things, but new things" (mckenzie wark, a hacker manifesto, .004) ghostsec is out there, fighting. the anonymous cell is hack-attacking politically violent islamic groups, including al-shabaab, boko haram and the islamic state (is). ghostsec is intent upon exposing extremist twitter accounts and taking down their web face presence. the goal seems to be to prevent the "bad guys" from using cybertools to perpetuate their violence in somalia, nigeria, libya and syria. as such, ghostsec is a humanitarian cause that prevents the territorialization of cyberspace by groups who are against a liberal ideology of freedom of the individual. it is a noble cause, a cyber battle, almost mythic. is it so simple, though--good vs. bad? and what is the desired outcome? on one level, it would appear that ghostsec is doing its part to curb potential violence, at least by severing an extremist group's networking tool, effectively "neutering...[their] ability to use twitter to broadcast its message outside of its core audience...reducing ability to manipulate public opinion and attract new recruits (berger and morgan, 2015: 56). but do these actions address the deeper problem of why alshabaab and others exist? these islamic fighter groups are against the western postwestphalia liberal state. so, is it possible that ghostsec's actions are merely reproducing the same state structures that al-shabaab et al so adamantly oppose and thereby are providing further justifications for why violence is necessary? or, has ghostsec found a new way, that is, political action that sheds state thinking (bourdieu 2014) and enters the international political arena as a nomad (deleuze and guattari1987)? it could be that ghostsec is effectively de-territorializing communication that has been territorialized for violence. as such, ghostsec is a piracy movement, carving out openings, a.k.a. temporary autonomous zones (bey 1985) in the name of human rights. this article explores the role of ghostsec in international politics, specifically examining whether the anonymous group is state-aiding, empire-building or multitude-fulfilling (hardt and negri 2000). the amorphous movement known as anonymous has executed a wide range of actions on the net, from operation avenge assange to project chanology to #optunisia to operation antisec. as anthropologist gabriella coleman has detailed in her book, hacker, hoaxer, whistleblower, spy: the many faces of anonymous (2014), anonymous has utilized multiple tactics as well as multiple ideological stances. while the overriding premise of the movement seems to be "anonymous is not unanimous" (p. 106) and information should flow freely, it has "no consistent philosophy or political program"(p.3). nevertheless, it is vulnerable to grander socio-political forces that attempt to capture the movement for its/their own needs. i argue that the we can see such a struggle between the exogenous forces of the state, empire and the multitude (hardt and negri 2000, 2004), as ghostsec stages its sql injections, xss and ddos attacks. this struggle to envelop ghostsec's power can be seen most readily in the split that occurred in the group fall 2015 (auerbach 2015). the apparent success of ghostsec in its efforts to deter isis and others, enticed the united states government to ask for intel help from the anonymous cell. according to ghostsec member, torreaper, the us government helped funnel funding to ghostsec (raincoaster 2015). here we see the group torn by competing socio-political forces of the state, empire and the multitude. it is a triad of the weberian, hierarchical, bureaucratic apparatus vs. "the decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm" (hardt and negri 2000: xii) vs. the autonomous force that "has the capacity to create society on its own" (hardt and negri 2004: 225). the tug-of-war resulted in the creation of the splinter faction, the ghost security group. the now non-profit organization was pulled into the fold of the state. as for the original ghostsec, will it acquiesce to the transcendental right of empire, a right that still sees violence and war as legitimate when "being in the service of right and peace" (hardt and negri 2000: 15)? or, will ghostsec move towards the multitude and sail off as a nomad and "remain plural and multiple", an example of what could be for a new democratic form (hardt and negri 2004: 99)? in order to tease out the socio-political dynamics of ghostsec actions, this study utilizes discourse analysis of news stories about, and interviews with, ghostsec and the ghost security group. primary sources include participant observation in twitter discussions and ircs as well as direct interviews with ghostsec members. beyond the political theory value that this study provides, the analysis also offers sociopolitical, cyber-movements reflective insights into the grander forces vying for the power that they generate. even though the trickster lulz anonymous may jump out and raspberry the world while it "takes down" a terrorist group's web face, it still must consider who benefits from its antics. are you feeding the state? boosting empire? or, are you entering the multitude, "the only social subject capable of realizing democracy, that is, the rule of everyone by everyone" (hardt and negri 2004: 100)? references auerbach, david (2015). "the hacktivist war on isis?" slate, december 10. available at: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/12/ghostsecgroup_is_taking_on_i sis_it_s_not_clear_they_re_helping.html berger, j. m and jonathon morgan (2015). "the isis twitter census: defining and describing the population of isis supporters on twitter." the brookings project on u.s. relations with the islamic world, analysis paper, no. 20, march. available at: http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2015/03/isis-twitter-censusberger-morgan/isis_twitter_census_berger_morgan.pdf bey, hakim (1987). t.a.z.: the temporary autonomous zone, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism. brooklyn, ny: autonomedia. bourdieu, pierre (2014). on the state. cambridge, uk: polity press. cameron, dell (2015). "twitter: anonymous's lists of alleged isis accounts are 'wildly inaccurate'". the daily dot, november 20, 2015. available at: http://www.dailydot.com/politics/twitter-isnt-reading-anonymous-list-isis-accounts/ coleman, gabriella (2014). hacker, hoaxer, whistleblower, spy: the many faces of anonymous. london: verso. deleuze, gilles and felix guattari (1987). a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. hardt, michael and antonio negri (2000). empire. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. hardt, michael and antonio negri (2004). multitude: war and democracy in the age of empire. newyork: penguin books. raincoaster (2015). "putting #isis on ice: an interview with ghostsec of #anonymous and ghost security group." the cryptosphere, november 16, 2015.avilable at: http://thecryptosphere.com/2015/11/16/putting-isis-on-ice-an-interview-with-ghostsecpiand-ghost-security-group/ wark, mckenzie (2004). a hacker manifesto. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. 1 redefining citizenship and civic engagement: political values embodied in fixmystreet.com burcu baykurt new york university united states of america bb1290@nyu.edu abstract this article argues that citizen-driven local public service improvement systems raise not merely technical issues, like efficiency or ease of use, but also political ones. it focuses on an example from the uk, fixmystreet.com, which enables citizens to report physical problems in their neighborhood and to track their resolution by local councils. its analysis suggests that the website produces a form of political culture (through its design features that are guided by certain values) that promotes an immediate, clickable, fleeting, problem-focused and individualized form of civic engagement. since it is built on an open source code, many other websites in different countries follow this certain civic engagement model without necessarily addressing the politics of the design. in response, this study argues that civic values that are concerned with the interests of a local community rather than individual or institutional ones should guide such technologies so that those technical systems could lead to community action, thereby empowering citizens. to illustrate how civic values can be incorporated into design, the related literature and methodology on value sensitive design guides the analysis while relying on the measures of deliberative participation for betterment of design features as well as the designing process. keywords values in design, citizenship, civic engagement, participation, local government 2 when assigned to public service use, technology not only offers efficiency and effectiveness, but also provides a vast opportunity for disseminating public information that can enable citizens to partner with, or sometimes to replace, governments. thanks to free and open source software and data.gov initiatives, citizens can have access to more public information and face lower barriers to report their issues/stories as well as engaging in conversation with authorities. one prominent use of such opportunities is ushahidi from kenya which is a collaborative project created by volunteers from different african countries. originally built to gather crisis information from the public and channel it to the mainstream media, now ushahidi covers various human rights cases, political issues as well as crisis reporting by crowd-sourcing information through multiple channels like sms, email, twitter or the web1. another use of similar technology has emerged at a rather (hyper) local level to report non-emergency issues in neighborhoods, like a broken street light or potholes. these platforms, either run by social entrepreneurs, non-profits, private companies or even local governments, offer citizens to spot and report problems in their neighborhood and, in some cases, to contribute to the solution through voluntary action or collaborating with governments. they have become quite popular around the world and seem to be growing since one example from the united states (us), seeclickfix.com, completed $1.5 million of funding led by a couple of tech-investors while another one from the united kingdom (uk), fixmystreet.com, received government funding for a couple of times as well as winning prestigious new statesman/new media award in 2007 (duval, 2010). u.s. chief information officer vivek kundra (2011) calls these citizen-driven systems for local public service improvement “we-government”, which replaces “egovernment”, to emphasize the partnership between governments and citizens2 this study takes a closer look into citizen-driven local governance systems within the context of one of the earliest examples, fixmystreet.com (fms). launched in 2007 by a non. while the primary focus is on how these systems provide efficiency, effectiveness or ease-of-use in public services, how they respond to and/or promote certain political and social values through user experience deserves equal attention. whether they displace or complement traditional local governance models, empirical connections made between such technologies and civic experience have the potential to produce a particular online/offline participatory culture. this potential political influence should be addressed while these technologies are designed. 1 http://www.ushahidi.com/ [07.01.2011] 2 http://techpresident.com/short-post/pdf11-vivek-kundra-reiterates-open-government-cost-savingsimportance-cloud [07.01.2011] http://www.ushahidi.com/� http://techpresident.com/short-post/pdf11-vivek-kundra-reiterates-open-government-cost-savings-importance-cloud� http://techpresident.com/short-post/pdf11-vivek-kundra-reiterates-open-government-cost-savings-importance-cloud� 3 profit social entrepreneur, mysociety.org (mysociety), fms allows citizens to publicly report (non-emergency) issues in their neighborhood. these reports are delivered to the related local councils and citizens can track their cases through the website. all reports and replies are in public so that citizens can easily follow what is going on in their local government’s area or in other neighborhoods. fms does not play an active role in resolving problems other than mediating between citizens and governments, however through the design of the website it (re)produces a certain political culture. this study aims to address the politics of fms through the values expressed by and embodied in its design, assuming that technologies not only interact with social groups and influence social behavior, but also comprise substantive political values. through its affordances and limits for users, the fms design represents a broader struggle between certain political values of relevant stakeholders in a we-government project. as a nonprofit website that aims to serve local communities, it grants an opportunity for researchers to discuss what civic values mean and how they can be incorporated into technology to better local public services. this study aims to contribute to that discussion from a deliberative democracy perspective with a values at play approach in mind. values in technology taking a sociotechnical stance towards analyzing technology requires understanding it as “the combination of artifacts together with social practices, social relationships with arrangements, social institutions, and systems of knowledge” (johnson, 2010, p. 39). this paper derives its theoretical framework from a certain standpoint which argues that artifacts and technical systems do actually have systematic political values that come into play through enabling or constraining what can be done with or through them and their design can actually have an impact on social behavior (winner, 1986; latour, 1992; introna & nissenbaum, 2000; flanagan, howe, & nissenbaum, 2008). recognizing that artifacts and technical systems embody values -not only functional but also politicalcalls for attention to the deliberate attempts of incorporating values in design to create better systems for society as flanagan, howe, & nissenbaum (2008) argue, “… those who design systems have a responsibility to take social, moral, and political values as well as technical ones into consideration as they work” (p.322). however, as they point out, even when designers attempt to integrate values into systems and artifacts, they are challenged by confronting a diverse array of knowledge that is not normally part of the technical design process (flanagan, howe & nissenbaum, 2008). their challenge is exacerbated by the lack of information on how to incorporate values in design 4 given that there are different stakeholders with particular interests as well as technical limits/possibilities that might sometimes be at odds with each other. thus, a set of literature emerges to explain in what ways one can approach the design process with value-centered concerns in mind. ‘value sensitive design’ consists of conceptual, empirical, and technical investigations in an attempt to shape technological systems with certain political or moral values in mind. it starts with exploring certain philosophical concepts and issues relevant to a given project (friedman, kahn, & borning, 2006). which values should be upheld to promote a certain social behavior or which values might come into conflict with another at the time of implementation are examples of questions that can be discussed at the conceptual phase. empirical and technical investigations focus on the relationship between users and the artifacts as well as the performance of design in relation to the objectives set in the beginning. as much as technical artifacts can shape social behavior; social relations, practices and groups influence the design of artifacts (bijker, 1992). hence, value sensitive design, most of the time, allies with a participatory design perspective that reflects the contribution of the values and skills of relevant groups/individuals involved in the process (sengers et al, 2005; flanagan, howe & nissenbaum, 2008). these relevant groups are not only the direct stakeholders who have a certain interest in design. there are also indirect stakeholders who can be influenced by the design effects and it is important to make sure their interests or concerns are channeled to the design process. in some cases, that may not happen. hence, ‘reflective design’ comes into play with an alternative perspective that assumes a value-centered approach is not a one-time attempt to incorporate values, thereby requiring constantly monitoring the design and how values are translated into features. it, thus, couples the design process with an ongoing research/understanding of values so that not only better systems that would reflect the needs of relevant groups can be built, through continuous feedback and verification, but also designers become more aware of how critical their role is in the process (sengers et al, 2005). in an attempt to provide a methodology for designers to adopt a value-centered perspective, flanagan, howe and nissenbaum (2008) suggest values at play approach that incorporates participatory, value sensitive, and (critical) reflective design concepts for building better systems. this approach demonstrates the complexity of defining and negotiating various values, the challenge of translating them into concrete design elements, and verifying that they satisfy what agreed values aim to achieve. at the center of their method lies the idea that “design is a critical juncture for envisioning the values which a system in question embodies” 5 (flanagan, howe & nissenbaum, 2008, p. 331). hence, they outline an approach that involves a discovery phase in which not only stakeholders bring their values to the table, but also designers get involved with their technical expertise as well as their own values. user values, which could be discovered through other means of research, are part of this preliminary design process too. a translation phase in which agreed-upon values are articulated in concrete terms so that they can be operationalized and implemented in design follows discovery. the key part of this phase is the time when different values, or how they are translated into features, come into conflict with each other, thereby calling for resolving, dissolving or trade-off (flanagan, howe & nissenbaum, 2008). in the final section of design, it is important to test implementations in order to verify whether the objectives of a project are met. the primary argument of values at play approach is not only that technical artifacts embody values, but also “values can be embodied in technical artifacts by deliberate design” (flanagan, howe & nissenbaum, 2008, p. 349). this argument strengthens the position of designers in any system/artifact building process as well as assigning a bigger responsibility to them to use their power and contribute to design from a value-centric perspective. inspired by the values at play approach, this paper reverses the process and attempts a post-analysis by focusing on which values are expressed by the fms designers or mysociety in general and whether they are embodied in the fms design. the ideal way to conduct this analysis would be to find out stakeholder values, including the fms developers’, through survey or interviews before examining the design. given the limited resources, a secondary data by stephen f. king and paul brown (2008) that examines fms through interviewing relevant stakeholders as well as the developers are used to find out which values are at play. however, researching the design process is still lacking since it is a post-analysis, thereby missing the opportunity to address process-related challenges and discussions that would give a better picture of explaining expressed vs. embodied values of the fms. king & brown’s research (2008) reports user values as well, however at an early stage of fms that citizens interviewed are referred as prospective users. therefore, incorporating user feedback into this study not only in terms of satisfaction with using the website, but also in relation to their (changing) values while interacting with governments would be helpful. this crucial part of the analysis is a future goal for this ongoing study that could be completed in collaboration with the fms team. this paper intends to analyze the values of fms in relation to the political culture it (re)produces through increasing use by local governments and citizens. hence it also discusses how civicvalues-centered design might look like, conceptually and empirically, from a deliberative 6 democracy perspective, which is assumed to be a critical part of civic engagement particularly at local community level (dryzek, 1990). that said, it should be noted that there is no normative argument in this analysis, in favor of a certain design that is conceived to promote civic engagement or citizen empowerment better than others. same values may be promoted through different design decisions while different values may serve same objectives. hence, what this paper tries to do is not offering a particular design template that would provide better results for civic engagement. instead, using fms as a starting point, it makes the point that technical artifacts or systems that attempt to address civic engagement issues should embrace, and even prioritize, a set of civic values in addition to instrumental ones like efficiency or ease-of-use, which would be deliberately integrated into design. mysociety and fixmystreet mysociety is a non-profit organization based in the uk that runs a number of online democracy and citizen engagement websites, theyworkforyou, whatdotheyknow, writetothem to name a few. their primary objective is to build websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives (escher, 2011). to reach this objective, they target 1) teaching the public and voluntary sectors how to use the internet most efficiently to improve lives, 2) activating people who would otherwise not get engaged, thereby reaching a representative share of the online population. inspired by these bigger ideas, fms not only “gets your street fixed”, but also “is local control of the things people care about, a very practical democracy” (irving, 2008). the system allows citizens to report or view local (physical) problems, and to track their resolution by the related local council (king & brown, 2008). problems reported by citizens are delivered to the related local council via email. any user can report or update a problem while the fms contacts problem originators four weeks later to check the state of their issues (king & brown, 2008). as they announce on their main page, more than 100,000 problems have been reported so far. it was originally funded by a grant from the department for constitutional affairs’ innovations fund, followed by funding from central government as well as donations from supporters – though to a modest extent (king & brown, 2008). 7 figure 1: fixmystreet.com homepage figure 2: details of a specific problem efficiency, transparency, and accountability are primary values that guide the fms project. when king & brown (2008) interview fms developers and local council officers at a very early phase of the project, they mainly emphasize improving the quality of public services as their main objective, quality being associated with efficiency mostly. their concern for transparency in public services plays a major role in design as one of the website developers say, “in 10 years time i’d like to see all councils running their internal systems (planning, tree preservation orders… everything that isn’t about individuals) in public, so everyone can see and be reassured about what is being done, why and where” (irving, 2008). efficiency and transparency are spiced up with ‘a little bit accountability’ (steinberg, 2011), while some think fms features empower ‘the general public in their dealings with their local council’ (somerville, 2008). the values are translated into fms design in varying degrees. for example, compared to typical local government feedback systems, like telephone or web form, fms seems to offer marginal efficiency: it takes only three clicks to report a problem using fms while seven clicks through a government website (king & brown, 2008). complaints are disclosed to the public; hence the responsibility of holding local governments accountable is distributed to a larger number of people. users can either remain anonymous or create accounts to have access to their reports or others’ so that anyone can track all the problems in one neighborhood as well as how well other councils perform in response to reported problems. 8 although efficiency, transparency and accountabilty seem to drive fms project, hence its design, those values are translated into features in small doses. efficiency, for example, applies to only those services that fms chooses to deal with. in other words, citizens are constrained by already-defined categories of issues/problems and if they want to report a notlisted issue, they are advised to contact their councils directly. while public reports and their results are open to everyone, hence transparent, users cannot find enough information how the website works from start to end. for example, citizens, who want to use this service, do not have clear information about how long they should wait for their problems to be solved, how they should follow up if their issues are not taken into consideration or what they should do if they are not satisfied with the response they get. local councils, also, do not disclose any information about the process of dealing with complaints and it is, most of the time, users’ responsibility to update the status of reported problems. as for accountability, local councils can be controlled only about whether they fix problems or not. how they choose which problems to deal with over others or what kind of measures they take to reach a certain end are not shared on the website. when an issue cannot be solved, users can press local governments through opening new reports or posting comments but there is no other feature that would encourage users to take further action about their problems. failing to afford users further options for resolving unknown/unfixed issues, fms design does not either create an alternative accountability mechanism that would show the performance of local councils over the duration of their reply or fixing problems. on another level, fms may play a rather informative role and offer other ways (online/offline) to pressure local governments. however the fms developers do not seem to push accountability to those levels in design. fms developers do not seem to prioritize in design, but citizen engagement is a core value behind many mysociety projects. some scholars who have previously studied fms argue that this new mode of engaging citizens in (local) governance not only holds local councils more accountable but also increases citizen engagement (dörk & monteyne, 2011). engagement denotes a number of ways to involve citizens in any decision-making process. having access to information, giving feedback in the form of online voting or comments, and an active participation that acknowledges a substantive role for citizens in proposing ideas and shaping dialogue are three different categories of engagement as outlined by the oecd (2001). in the literature of citizen participation and e-government models, for example, since citizen empowerment entails placing final decision making authority in the hands of citizens, civic engagement requires going beyond a passive, rather consumer role to an active one that 9 produces ideas or makes decisions (nabatchi & mergel, 2010). however, the design of fms starts from a point of reporting and tracking non-emergency issues that keep engagement at a basic information/consultation level. fms design is certainly easy to use and this easy, seemingly effective, use may attract more citizens to contact their local councils online. however these citizens would presumably be the ones who are already interested in local governance issues and use fms for efficiency purposes. the current fms design does not seem to reflect this user characteristic and include any features that would boost their participation in local governance at more sophisticated levels. they could encouraged to play a rather active role on the website like using gamification features like awarding them ‘civic points’ based on to what extent or how often they are involved in local community issues. on a different level, does fms offer any incentives to engage citizens, who would not otherwise – as that is one of the targets in many mysociety projects? it should be clarified that sustaining inclusivity in local democracies, i.e. serving every social group and ensuring their participation, is quite a difficult task that cannot be achieved by one website. as escher (2011) explains, “participation has always been biased towards resource-rich citizens, i.e. those with better education, higher income and larger social networs” (p. 31). fms, on the other hand, is an online system that requires a certain level of digital literacy, not to mention having access to the internet. hence those that are already underserved or do not have necessary means to effectively participate in local governance are expected to miss the opportunity of using online services (helsper, 2008). in other words, online participation may be less inclusive than offline participation, thereby reproducing already-existing inequalities in a given local community. however, the fms designers, who presumably want to engage citizens who would not otherwise, may add some features to the design to reflect their concern. to start with, the website can play a more informative role in explaining how more citizen engagement would improve local communities or how individuals can contribute to local governance through various ways. inviting local community groups to promote their causes/ideas on the website or add some news features to attract users would be other measures that would demonstrate fms deliberately attempts to attract a wider group of people in local areas. the website can operate in languages other than english in accordance with the dominant ethnic groups in different neighborhoods, or reporting problems can be enabled through texting and/or twitter/facebook to be able to talk to a larger group of people with varying digital skills and access. besides value-centered concerns in the technical design, there is a larger political implication that is engendered through websites that work like fms, particularly if they 10 proliferate in the future to an extent to replace current offline services. while such (w)egovernance projects are at a developing phase, it is highly crucial to discuss on what values they are built and how they influence government-citizen relations. “stick a pin in the map, type in your problem, and zoom! off it goes to the council” not only explains how fms works as they express on their main page but also implies a form of civic engagement that is momentary, fleeting, fast, problem-focused, and limited to a relationship between the government and the individual. as the nature of interaction between local councils and citizens stay at a rather passive, one-way, transactional level with the former playing the role of the provider and the latter the consumer, fms system resembles a customer complaint service rather than a local governance platform. civic engagement at local level, through the design of fms, is limited to reporting physical problems in a neighborhood. in other words, it is always associated with a problem or complaint rather than becoming an every day political interaction. citizens cannot voice their thoughts or ideas for the betterment of their communities through a rather positive language or constructive feedback like asking for a new park or a cultural center. they cannot celebrate positive news about their community/members or promote their ideas on various topics. not only, the current government-citizen interaction is problem-oriented, it is also ephemeral since all the issues reported are ad-hoc cases rather than structural problems/questions. long-lasting discussions between local governments and citizens would certainly require not only attention, but also participation from wider community thereby creating a stronger relationship with governments as well as between community members. one of the council managers interviewed by king & brown (2008) expresses the need for more “citizen input and the wisdom of crowds – community inputinto problem fixing” (p. 78). in a policy briefing on local governance prepared for the uk government, the researchers also address how complaint/redress services online need to be “more community led, reflexive, responsive to citizens and inclusive and supportive of their contribution” (pratchett et al, 2009, p.26). the current fms design, however, approaches civic engagement from a rather individualized perspective, i.e. interacting with other members of the community is very limited, with the claim of being more “user-centered” in the words of one of the fms developers (king & brown, 2008, p. 77). jenkins (2011) argues that civic engagement is not about connecting citizens with governments only, it should aim to connect “all sorts of local entities and individuals with one another”. in that respect, creating opportunities for community building and collective action should be a primary objective in designing such systems. the 11 same concern is echoed by citizens, community activists to be more precise, when king & brown (2008) interview them as prospective users of fms. they point out the need for “signposting the presence of local voluntary/community groups, provide message boards and chat forums, and allowing users to discuss anti-social behavior issues online” (p. 78). however, as the authors point out, the fms designers’ starting point is not to create a community website as they think “they are too complicated” (king & brown, 2008, p. 77). hence, rather than contributing to the formation of a local community online, fms reproduces a political interaction that confirms the problem-solver role of the government and limits citizen involvement to reporting complaints and tracking their resolution. that said, the fms developers might be satisfied with the design as it certainly improves the prior, offline system with respect to efficiency, transparency and accountability. however it simultaneously produces an individualized, momentary, issue-focused government-citizen relationship while neglecting collective action and community power. the next section of the paper aims to go beyond the intentions of fms developers and discuss how civic values can be manifested in design. civic values centered design creating a design for a group of people is not an easy task. driven mostly by commercial interests, websites and mobile applications usually focus on the individual as their point of contact rather than a group of people. as shirky (2003) admits, not only most software and interface designs lean toward single-user assumptions, but also it is not easy to test good group experience or to get feedback. however, bearing in mind that community values constitute a separate category from individuals’, designers are challenged to incorporate such community-centered design perspective in their projects, if communities are one of the stakeholders. loader et al (2000) argue that communities operate at an intermediate level of social life between the “personal (individual/family) and the impersonal (institutional/global)” (p. 81). hence, this distinct social space would operate through civic values, rather than state or commercial interests. in community-focused designs, particularly if it is about problems of local environment, a critical concern is to come up with a productive process that would incorporate the values of that particular community with including different interests, values, concerns as well as understanding each other before reaching a decision. as de cindio and peraboni (2009) argue the shared discussion space of citizens consist of: a community space, which raises trust between among participants; a deliberation space, which supports the creation of shared positions and consorted efforts among citizens; and an information space, which supports the 12 sharing of information. deliberative forums stand out as opposed to traditional forms of public engagement because of the presumption that “they are better informed and publicly oriented” (wales et al, 2010, p. 3). thanks to the larger scale of access enabled by the internet and world wide web, there is a chance to have more diverse, if not better, information and alternative channels to bring a larger audience together for discussion, thereby offering an opportunity to revive deliberative democracy, online. in that respect, public deliberation is not only crucial but also necessary for online tools that require or aim to boost civic engagement, particularly at the local community level. traced back to dewey (1927) who saw that it was the problem of the public not to have improved methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion, public deliberation, or deliberative democracy, makes up of a significant part of democratic theory literature. although its definitions may vary, a very famous one comes from habermas (1990) who assumes an active exchange of ideas in a reasonable and critical manner as well as listening to others’ preferences. in that respect, deliberation not only strengthens the legitimacy of decisions, but also fosters civic engagement through active discussion (dryzek, 1990). however it sounds like sine qua non of democratic life, it is hard to establish conditions that would sustain deliberation in a community, let alone measure the impact from a researcher’s perspective. gutmann & thompson (2004) identify core elements of deliberation as reason giving, being accessible to those who are affected by decisions, involving an active decision-making process that keeps the option for continuing dialogue. as wessler (2008) points out, although who deliberates is a critical question in public deliberation, how they deliberate and to what end are equally crucial. his point is quite relevant to the design process of civic engagement online since designers have the capacity to come up with features that would afford members to discuss issues in a certain way rather than constraining their voices from a topical or a dialogical perspective. online deliberation has been a major discussion topic in some scholars’ research agenda in recent years, but there is not a consensus on how it works and to what extent it is successful (albrecht, 2006). in computer-mediated communication, some scholars argue that online identities, particularly if they are anonymous users, not only disturb the sincerity but also have a negative impact on the responsibility of discussants, i.e. not committing to their views in the course of the debate (dahlberg, 2001). on the other hand, another view asserts that ‘depersonalized’ discussion can actually result in being more focused on rational-critical argument thanks to allowing more people to feel motivated to join the debate (dahlberg, 2001). what is really challenging in local community deliberation is that users both should feel in 13 control of their identity, what they say and how they argue, i.e. they should be engaged, and respect each other with a commitment to the values of the community. it is such challenging, if not conflicting, values that call for deliberation starting from the level of designing these tools. there is, clearly, not one feature that can provide deliberation online. looking at how deliberation is identified through a number of elements, this paper can only share some recommendations for design that would also illustrate what deliberation means in action and hopefully would inspire designers to come up with other ways of implementation. looking at different approaches to measure deliberation, some conceptual values can be listed as open participation, justification (reason-giving), considering the common good, mutual respect, and consensus-building (wales, cotterill, & smith, 2010). “deliberation requires trusted facilitation”, says coleman and gotze (2001, p. 17), hence the role that mediators, be it fms designers or moderators from communities, play is crucial for setting clear and transparent procedures for discussion, keeping the debate alive throughout, and ensuring adherence to the principles set and shared with members. actively encouraging a forum of ideas that is oriented toward actions for betterment of communities rather than solely focusing on complaints would be a simple, yet crucial step. what is more difficult than getting citizens to spend time on discussing already-existing ideas is to expect them to come up with new ones. in that respect, stakeholders like government representatives, ngos or voluntary groups may weigh in to kick off some discussions and/or post opinions, suggestions to stimulate debate. justification, i.e. giving a reason for arguments, is a critical part of deliberation that should be considered in the design process not only as a value that needs to be operationalized, but also as part of values at play approach when it comes to discussing conflicting values. adding features that would enable more dialogue between stakeholders as well as encouraging reviewing with justification would be some starting ideas. without setting the bar too high, visible directions that ask for justifying arguments before letting users post their comments or incentivizing reason-giving through gamification features may be other ways to address that value. justification, or using user-generated stories to provide evidence for any ideas/discussion posted online, not only ensures preserving rationality within a forum, but it also facilitates rebuttal and opposition of ideas that are essential features of deliberative tradition (ferree et al, 2002; wessler, 2008). opposing perspectives are crucial to maintain diversity of standpoints and to have a dialogical character as dryzek (2005) argues, hearing other people’s perspectives lead to recognizing their needs, “which can be reconciled even when value systems and identities cannot” (p. 221). hence rather than creating a design that would turn into a bulk of 14 competing ideas, without leaving any room for reconciliation and reciprocal recognition, designers can assign a more prominent role to moderators to intervene occasionally and lead the group to reconcile their needs. another example can be letting discussants work on a visualized idea/action plan that would prompt them to realize they need reconciliation at one point. civility, dialogic structure and responsiveness are further elements of deliberation (wessler, 2008). fms, at its current stage, tries to maintain civility, which can simply be translated into the absence of disrespectful or outrageous use of language, by asking users to be ‘polite, concise, to the point and not abusive’. some additional ideas and concluding remarks attempting to maintain a (online) community that is empowered through engaging in local issues and deliberating over them is difficult to achieve. there are some challenges on the way to success that should be regularly monitored for the sustainability of projects. clearly, these systems assume a widespread use of the internet and mobile technologies. overcoming the digital divide and overseeing how many people can actually become users of such systems are critical for the legitimacy of decisions taken through these systems. not only access, but also usability/user-friendliness should not be dismissed given the levels of digital literacy and the diversity of communities. hence creating designs that would accommodate technical and language skills of different age, social, and ethnic groups is quite critical. the extent of participation may still be low given the discernible existence of apathy in political participation, however designers should make sure their design is not a barrier against citizen participation. even if there is a significant number of participants, in terms of the registered users or log in for example, it is still critical to monitor whether it is ‘a superficial or profound participation’ (bohøj et al, 2011). in other words, if most of the participation is through pressing a ‘like’ or ‘vote’ button rather than engaging in a dialogue with other members, then deliberation cannot be verified. balancing individual needs like privacy, in relation to being anonymous and being reluctant to sharing their information with other members, and transparency, in terms of asking to know whom they interact with, while trying to maintain group dynamics would be another challenge for designers. although these needs can be addressed in the discovery and translation processes of the design (flanagan, howe, & nissenbaum, 2008), further problems may emerge in the verification step when real conflicts occur in the community. such moments illustrate how critical deliberation is not only as a value of technical systems, but also as part of value 15 centered design process. if successfully incorporated into values at play approach, deliberation can enable stakeholders to channel their perspectives in a particular fashion so that conflicting values can be negotiated in a way that participants understand each other and recognize their needs better. on the one hand, emerging civic engagement tools like fms describe their systems as simple tools and do not promise magic. on the other hand, they communicate all these crucial values, e.g. (civic) engagement, collaboration, empowerment…etc., and imply strong promises. encouraging designers to adopt values like deliberation in the design process and giving them feedback to better operationalize those values can just take the (civic) betterment of communities one step further, since such issues are too complex to be fixed by a software. however urging them to adhere to a value like deliberation in the case of engagement can counteract the prevailing values promoted by the web and mobile technologies that lean towards an immediate, clickable, fleeting, problem-focused and individualized form of engagement, and lead to supporting community models that take time to discuss issues collectively in a civil manner, make an effort to understand each other and constantly revise solutions to accommodate different needs. references albrecht, s. (2006). whose voice is heard in online deliberation?: a study of participation and representation in political debates on the internet. information, communication & society, 9 (1), 62-82. bijker, w. (1992). the social construction of fluorescent lighting, or how an artifact was invented in its diffusion stage. in w. e. bijker, j. law (eds.), shaping technology/building society: studies in sociotechnical change (pp. 75-102). cambridge, ma: the mit press. bohøj, m., borchorst, n. g., bødker, s., korn, m., & zander, p.o. (2011). public deliberation in municipal planning: supporting action and reflection with mobile technology. c&t’11. brisbane, australia coleman, s., & gøtze, j. (2001). bowling together: online public engagement in policy deliberation. london: hansard society. 16 dahlberg, l. (2001). computer-mediated communication and the public sphere: a critical analysis. journal of computer-mediated communication, 7(1). de cindio, f., & peraboni, c. (2009). fostering e-participation at the urban level: outcomes from a large field experiment. in proceedings of epart ’09. linz, austria, p. 112-124 dewey, j. (1927). the public and its problems. new york: henry holt & co dörk, m., & monteyne,d. (2011). urban co-creation: envisioning new digital tools for activism and experimentation in the city. hci, politics, and the city (chi 2011 workshop), vancouver, bc. dryzek, j. s. (2005). deliberative democracy in divided societies: alternatives to agonism and analgesia. political theory,33, 218–242. dryzek, j. s. (1990). discursive democracy. politics, policy, and political science. cambridge: cambridge university press. duval, j. (2010). next generation democracy: what the open-source revolution means for power, politics, and change. usa: bloomsbury. escher, t. (2011) theyworkforyou.com: analysis of users and usage for uk citizens online democracy. london: mysociety / uk citizens online democracy. retrieved from: http://www.mysociety.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/theyworkforyou_research_report2011-tobias-escher1.pdf ferree, m., gamson, w., gerhards, j., & rucht, d. (2002). shaping abortion discourse: democracy and the public sphere in germany and the united states. cambridge, england: cambridge university press. flanagan, m., howe, d. c., & nissenbaum, h. (2008). embodying values in technology: theory and practice. information technology and moral philosophy. cambridge: cambrigde university press, p. 322-353. friedman, b., kahn, p., & borning, a. (2006). value sensitive design and information systems. in p. zhang, & d. galletta (eds.), human-computer interaction in management information systems foundations. new york: m.e. sharpe, inc. 17 gutmann, a., & thompson, d. (2004). why deliberative democracy? princeton: princeton university press. habermas, j. (1990). moral consciousness and communicative action. (c. lenhardt, & s. w. nicholsen, trans.) cambridge, ma: the mit press. helsper, ej. (2008). digital inclusion: an analysis of social disadvantage and the information society. london: department for communities and local government. introna, l. d., & nissenbaum, h. (2000). shaping the web: why the politics of search engines matter? the information society,16, 169-185. irving, f. (2008). avoid exhausting train journeys. london: mysociety. retrieved from: http://www.mysociety.org/2008/11/03/avoid-exhausting-train-journeys/ jenkins, h. (2011). participatory culture and civic engagement: interview. . retrieved from: http://newlearninginstitute.blogspot.com/2011/01/participatory-culture-and-civic.html johnson, d. (2010). sorting out the question of feminist technology. in l. layne, s. vostral, & k. boyer (eds.). feminist technology (pp. 36-54). champaign, il: the university of illinois press. king, s.f., & brown, p. (2007). fix my street or else: using the internet to voice local public service concerns. in proceedings of the 1st international conference on theory and practice of electronic governance, icegov ’07, p. 72–80. latour, b. (1992). where are the missing masses?: the sociology of a few mundane artifacts. in w. bijker, & j. law (eds.), shaping technology/building society (pp. 225-258).cambrige, ma: mit press. loader, b. d., hague, b. n., & eagle, d. (2000). embedding the net: community development in the age of information. in m. gurstein (ed.), community informatics: enabling communities with information and communication technologies(pp. 81-103). . london: idea group. nabatchi, t., & mergel, i. (2010). participation 2.0: using internet and social media technologies to promote distributed democracy and create digital neighborhoods. in j. h. 18 svara, & j. v. denhardt (eds.), white paper: promoting citizen engagement and community building (pp. 80-87). phoenix, az: alliance for innovation. oecd. (2001). citizens as partners: information, consultation and public participation in policy-making. puma. oecd. pratchett, l., durose, c., lowndes, v., smith, g., stoker, g., & wales, c. (2009). empowering communities to influence local decision making: systematic review of the evidence. london: department for communities and local government. sengers, p., boehner, k., david, s., & kaye, j. (2005). reflective design. culturally embedded computing group. ithaca, ny: cornell information science. shirky, c. (2003). social software and the politics of groups. clay shirky's writings about the internet. networks, economics, and culture mailing list. steinberg, t. (2011). fixmystreet in norway. london: mysociety. retrieved from: http://www.mysociety.org/2011/03/07/fixmystreet-in-norway/ somerville, m. (2008). ewell-being award. london: mysociety. retrieved from: http://www.mysociety.org/2008/05/06/ewell-being-award/ wales, c., cotterill, s. & smith, g. (2010). do citizens deliberate in online discussion forums?: preliminary findings from an internet experiment. political studies association conference, edinburgh. wessler, h. (2008). investigating deliberativeness comparatively. political communication , 25(1),1-22. winner, l. (1986). do artifacts have politics? in the whale and the reactor: a search for limits in an age of high technology (pp. 19-39). chicago: university of chicago press. 1 performing presence in the pop art lab dixi louise strand roskilde university denmark dixi@ruc.dk abstract this paper presents the author's entry into a virtual world, second life, to conduct a case study on 'presence in virtual worlds'. the object of study is not the it platform that might provide opportunities for presence, nor the human actors that might experience presence, but what happens when they come together to create an event of presence. the paper relates how this object of study is approached, and produced, through a series of methods. methods such as participant observation, interviews, reading of blogs and web texts are understood as mediations. the paper traces how these mediations create specific visibilities, gather appearances together and how they may lead to interest, surprise and new insights into virtual worlds as an emergent, distributed phenomenon. in conclusion, the paper proposes a set of analytical strategies that may improve our understanding of how virtual worlds and their related characteristics continually emerge through a range of differing sites, practices and concerns. keywords virtual worlds; presence; emergence; assemblage; imaginaire understanding a virtual world second life was launched by linden lab in 2003 as an open platform that provides a set of tools and spaces where users can develop their own avatars, objects and surroundings. the official linden lab site, maps.secondlife.com, provides cartesian overviews of second life 2 as a place built up around land, sky, ocean, day and night and gravity. in order to create an account and enter this world as a user, one must represent oneself as an avatar. avatars can be designed by users and may take any shape or form and may be encoded with a range of characteristics. creating one's avatar as well as other objects in second life is done through purchase of features from other users or through the use of a three-dimensional modeling tool that allows a resident to build virtual objects. this can be combined with a linden scripting language to add functionality to objects. (edwards 2006; boellstorff, 2008) unlike many other virtual worlds, second life is not a game. all activities in second life are facilitated and maintained by users, and no concrete rules exist on how people should behave. primary objectives of users can differ and shift. regular users of second life, for example, engage in various social activities: education, design interests and/or coding, artistic performing, political practice, commercial interests, religion, role play, or sexual practice. due to the range of possible activities, second life is made up of many heterogeneous micro communities. in-world activity spills out into a range of other media practices, such as an abundance of webblogs connected to specific second life communities, topics and commercial activities. additionally, movies filmed in second life proliferate on youtube, and more recently, second life seems to be gaining the attention of professional cinema production (frølunde, 2011). these various user activities are carried out by ‘a user’ through an avatar in virtual space; the virtual home, workspace or, for example, nightclub in second life. and simultaneously, these activities unfold in front of (or through) a computer screen in the user's home or perhaps work setting. as such presence in virtual worlds is distributed, socially and technically assembled, and something that seems to emerge and appear in specific situations, perhaps disappearing again in the next. this object of study, 'presence in virtual worlds', is explored in this paper. the paper relates how this object of study is approached, and produced, through a series of methods. methods such as participant observation, interviews, reading of blogs and web texts are understood as mediations. the paper traces how these mediations create specific visibilities, gather appearances together and how they may lead to interest, surprise and new insights into virtual worlds as an emergent, distributed phenomenon. in conclusion, the paper proposes a set of analytical strategies that may improve our understanding of how virtual worlds and their related characteristics continually emerge through a range of differing sites, practices and concerns. 3 presence the interest in presence grew out of an initial surprise in my meeting with the field of virtual worlds. at a first glance virtual worlds might be characterized by absence or distance between human actors linked by technology and internet protocols. most often the people involved as 'users' of virtual worlds are distributed geographically as well as across time differences. they are often working in front of a screen alone at home or work. yet presence, the correlate of absence, speaks with a particularly strong resonance to virtual worlds. virtual worlds such as second life are often described in terms of a place and space in which the individual user has a sense of presence (schroeder, 2006). in the following i will outline how the concept of presence has been developed in the research literature to describe the essence of experiences in virtual environments.1 much of the scientific and the practitioner oriented research is concerned with defining and measuring presence as well as optimizing technologies and designs that can create user experiences that are more natural, immediate, direct and real. gumbrecht (2004) describes presence as a spatial relationship to the world and its objects the present is what is tangible to bodies. this is a material, corporeal process and gumbrecht (2004) discusses the possibilities for creating presence through new media special effects. linked to developments in virtual reality, an array of studies also approach presence as a "mental state making users feel, act, and react as they would in a real-world setting"(whitton, 2003, p.46), thus making "presence" the personal, psychological response to technology induced sensory immersion due to technological advances in graphical realism, sound, smell, data-gloves, head mounted display, helmet, motion trackers and other extended possibilities for interaction (ibid). observations of presence as immediacy seek to measure how present a user feels in a virtual environment. physiological i have divided the literature into three approaches to presence: presence as immediacy, presence as sociality, and presence as fantasy. this section serves to exemplify how the object of study has been conditioned into existence beforehand by existing research traditions already concerned with the notions of presence, immersion, virtuality and reality. along with my own initial interest in presence as phenomenon, the literature thus takes part in constituting and confirming presence as a viable starting point of analysis when conducting research on virtual worlds. presence as immediacy 1 the paper deals only with literature on virtual worlds. for an extensive discussion of presence in relation to media in general see bracken and skalski (2009). 4 responses (e.g. stress, relation, heartrate, skin reactions) have, for example, been studied as measurable indicators of presence. this notion takes a one-way transmitter approach and presence becomes an effect of technology where the user is the somewhat passive perceiver or receiver. solomon describes this as a realism-based conception of presence (solomon, 2002). presence as sociality another strand of literature based in anthropology and sociology moves away from evaluating different technological design's immersion capabilities and towards the notion of presence as sociality, sociability or social engagement. part of the success of virtual worlds is ascribed to this social engagement. the very concept of sociability (simmel & hughes, 2007) has for example been applied to improve our understanding of virtual worlds (ducheneaut et al., 2007). likewise, taylor (2009) emphasizes the shared experience, the collaborative nature of most virtual world activities and the reward of being socialized into a community, acquiring a position and reputation. in this literature the avatar has been explored as an important way of seeing oneself, as well as being seen, thus adding to the personal and social experience of presence (boellstorff, 2008; pearce, 2011). this literature is much less concerned with how the sense of presence may be created though technological refinements making the user experience as ‘realistic’ as possible but looks to sociality as mobilizing the shared experience of being there. presence as fantasy and imagination the last strand of literature grows out of the science fiction genre and literature studies. here the imagination of the reader/user, the ability to engage in a personal or shared fantasy, is what transports the user into the sense of being there (jacobson, 2001; schneider, 2004). seegert (2009), for example, explores how presence is generated in interactive fiction through both verbal signifiers and the user's own actions. in this sense, presence is performed through the user's engagement and actions: "a reader (of interactive fiction) can, through imagination, conjure up worlds potentially as vivid and as body affecting as the visual and aural effects presented through a multimedia entertainment system" (seegert, 2009, p.25). this approach again shifts the notion of presence from something produced through graphic realism, sound and sensory effects, to something that can be created and enhanced through the imagination of the individual. the links are close between this box of literature and that above since fantasy can be inhabited by a group, a "consensual hallucination" as coined by gibson (gibson, 1984, see also pearce, 2011). 5 table 1: the table below summarizes the three approaches to presence in the academic literature. approach to presence focus and characteristics realm immediacy "i am there, see, feel, sense it" technical/material/bodily sociality "community, sharing, being seen" social fantasy "my imagination transports me there" individual/personal in these three approaches presence is constituted in the technical/material realm (immediacy), the social realm (sociality) or the individual/personal realm (fantasy). to do the literature justice, it is important to note that approaches also cut across these realms in various ways. niches of research, for example, explore virtual worlds as socio-technical assemblages (taylor, 2009), embodied gameplay (bayliss, 2007) or presence as 'material imagination' (doyle 2011) where the materiality and physicality of the act of imagining is emphasized. yet, as an overall view this literature provides a number of possible paths as to how presence can be studied, found and understood. existing research takes part, methodologically, in constituting presence as an interesting and viable object of study. the object of study has also been shaped by my own initial experiences in my own discovery of virtual worlds, my own fascination with the underlying complex technical infrastructure and the set of highly laborious and distributed practices that maintain it. the following section illustrates the next steps in my study of presence, establishing a case study. constructing a case study of presence in virtual worlds applying a case study approach follows flyvbjerg's (2006) view of knowledge as always historically located and context-dependent. he argues for understanding good research in terms of a learning process best done through concrete experiences, a continued proximity to the studied reality and via feedback from those under study (flyvbjerg 2006, p.223). but what is a case study and how can it serve to establish new knowledge about presence in virtual worlds? in a revision of existing "misunderstandings" of the single case study flyvberg (2006) asserts that concrete, context-dependent knowledge is more valuable than the a search for universals. he suggests that generalization is overvalued as a source of scientific development, whereas “the force of example” is underestimated. it is correct that summarizing case studies is often difficult, especially as concerns case process. it is less correct as regards case outcomes. the problems in summarizing case studies, however, are due more often to the 6 properties of the reality studied than to the case study as a research method. (flyvbjerg, 2006, p.241) this quote seems highly relevant to the empirical study of virtual world practices. how can the researcher access a distributed virtual/real phenomenon empirically? how can the researcher summarize a set of complex practices unfolding both online in a virtual space and in a set of globally distributed homes and offices in a neat, coherent scientific text? as underscored by flyvbjerg (2006), case studies and the force of example can serve as a good path for creating new scientific insights into such complexity. in many case studies, the field site and object of study is considered to precede the empirical investigation. however, when investigating the design and use of emergent and distributed technologies in networked organizations locating and delineating exactly where the case study begins and where it stops is not a simple matter. the social and technological practices in question are emergent, designed, and used across distributed locations. as such they pose challenges when it comes to pinpointing exactly what and where the good case or object of research is to be found. presence in virtual worlds such as second life seems to "happen" as simultaneous occurrences in a broad range of design and use sites that may be more or less connected. such challenges of complexity have been approached as issues that require the development of new and better research tools, for example, with the use of log file analysis (williams, 2005). challenges of distribution are viewed from this perspective as technical difficulties that may be tackled by means of advancing the methods and techniques for data production. other options involve using video cameras inworld and outworld (jensen, forthcoming), perhaps combined with screen tracking and screen capture technologies that allow the researcher to record mouse movements on many screens at once (murray et al, 2009). however, in such strategies it seems that one kind of complexity is substituted for another. with one problem ‘solved’, a new one arises, such as how to sort and visualize the mounds of unmanageable data produced by way of such methods. this paper suggests that all methods can be understood as creating particular translations, particular (and perhaps technologically mediated) ways of seeing and analyzing the subject matter. in drawing on sts insights, there is not one high place from which we can look down upon and overview that which we study no matter what methods we apply (see haraway, 1991). instead particular methods mediate the object of study, make it visible for science in particular ways (latour, 2005). 7 for the study presented in this paper, mundane methods of interviewing, participant observation, and document analysis have been applied to construct a case study. rather than providing a total overview or mapping out general patterns, a juxtaposition of sites and situations dives into selected moments and explores in detail the specific arrangements and situations in which presence appears and unfolds. such a strategy can bring out differences, connections, and disconnections between the practices and thereby produces data material for thinking about presence in novel ways. pop art lab the next section presents the case in question, a second life media center, pop art lab (pal). the media center opened in september 2008, with the mission of "exploring how to present and promote new music in 3d environments" (website source). since then pal has developed into a virtual 'lab' comprised of: four listening booths for previewing newly released music recordings while socializing with other listeners, a central dance floor hosting parties and events, a lower clubbing level, and a stage set where musicians are interviewed and conduct live music performances. pal is founded by a devoted second lifer claus uriza and developed by his team. the notion of presence was at a first glance pivotal to pal as its visitors share listening spaces and concert experiences with other visitors in real time. the concept and design are built around the idea that people are there, hear music while they see, share and experience it with others. the single case was thus selected based on an expectation that this was an exemplary site where presence might "appear" and thus be accessible for the researcher. the empirical study was carried out from october 2009 to june 2010. methods included participant observation ("hanging out" and event participation), real life observations, semistructured interviews, conducted offline and online, as well as analysis of related webblogs. interviews have been carried out by the author and by co-researcher ates gürsimsek. analysis and writing has been carried out continually throughout the research process. the data material was continuously coded openly (emerson et al., 1995). this coding consisted of writing themes, notes, and memos of interest in the margin of interviews (on paper and in word) as well as keeping notes in separate documents. the coding drew on both theoretical concepts and concepts from the field, continually shifting between the empirical material, literature, and discussions with fellow researchers. based on the open coding, themes and story lines were developed around material where presence appeared or emerged. the method of analysis has thus been an oscillation movement between condensing the data material through 8 writing summaries, listing out themes, and finding story lines on the one hand, while at the same time expanding the material through an interpretive analysis of selected excerpts in relation to one or more particular themes of interest. analysis drafts have, along the way, been shared with the main informants from pal and with fellow researchers in the research project. again, these various practical steps are understood as mediating steps that bring presence into view for scientific inquiry. the methods for both data production and analysis create particular appearances of presence. presenting the material as appearances of presence is thus proposed as an ‘analytical trick’ that foregrounds empirically the very practices, events, and situations in which the objects of inquiry is handled, made, and re-made. the approach is drawn from actor-network theory and the methodological strategy of taking relationships and networks that constitute objects and subjects as the focus of inquiry (law 2002; mol 2003; latour 2005). their work forms part of a wider sts group of researchers who are theoretically concerned with shifting social science away from dealing only with social structures, communicative layers, symbols, and meaning, and with moving sociological theorizing into the physical realm of material objects, nature, bodies. these aims entail new ways of thinking about relations of the social and the material as ‘mutually constituted’ and not belonging to different ontological domains. below, examples from the case study are presented in two sections. in the first section selected interview and conversation excerpts illustrate the ways in which notions of presence circulate, how they are taken up and used among some of the actors involved in pal. the second part of the paper applies a different level of analysis, that of the situation. the second analysis section thus focuses on a concert event and how presence in this situation is a collective socio-material achievement. the two sections thus exemplify two slightly different methodological approaches and the results they can produce. interview appearances of presence in the pop art lab claus, the founder of pal, describes the early days and his first visions for pal. the founder’s real life work consists of cataloging and creating metadata on new music releases for a danish national cross-library institution. starting this project he was backed by the company in which he was employed allowing access to the music and economic support for the initial purchase of the second life space in which the music environment was to be built. the initial design was conducted collaboratively by a team of friends and volunteers and opened in september 2008. 9 the pal concept was to take the best albums, cds released, to try to find a way to present all this music in a 3d, virtual environment, instead of just normal text material, so people can experience it differently… we subdivided the land into four rooms you can enter, each playing a different cd and genre. the rooms have couches and sitting animations where people can hang out and chat with each other. (founder claus) the founder emphasizes the aim of creating a different experience than that of, for example, internet radio and music websites, music accompanied by text, or still images. this new music experience is organized in virtual space through the design of four virtual rooms the visitor can enter and move between with their avatar. furthermore, people can hang out together, sit or dance with the various sitting animations designed into the rooms while communicating through the second life chat facility or using voice. as presented by claus, it seems that the very vision and design was organized around notions of presence similar to i had earlier found in the literature. for claus, the compelling aspect of presenting music in a 3d space is the capability to listen while being there, immersed in a space shared together with others. the founder's vision thus mobilizes both the immediacy and the sociality approach to presence. it seems the same ideas about presence found in the academic literature also circulate among those living and acting in second life. ideas about presence seem to be applied as a resource for retrospectively explaining and making sense of the second life project the user claus has been involved in. during spring 2010 the sim was redesigned entirely to create a new look, new spaces and possibilities for the music lab. the head designer, emily, explains this work and the idea behind the design. we are three designers and claus and the overall idea behind this design is that people could come here, bring friends, listen to music while chatting, that they could come again and again for new music. you need to have seats because a vast majority of people like to sit, you need to give them many opportunities to dance, sit, stand, walk, fly, teleport, they can watch the sea, visit the place, discover the artwork, find new places within the sim, go to the club, etc. (designer emily) the designer explains that people like to sit or do something while hanging out at pal and how this has oriented the design of the space and animations. she finds it important to give 10 people opportunities to do something while in pal. in this space the music listeners and concert audience must also be able to perform themselves in relation to each other, stage themselves through their avatars and the things their avatar are able to do and be recognized as doing at the show. this resonates with the sociality approach to presence. in pal people can explore and share experiences of a beautiful ocean scenes, virtual artworks, music listening and dancing together. this draws on the sociality approach to presence, and interestingly, this notion of presence actually orients the designers' coordinated choices and actions in redesigning and refining the lab in 2010. the last excerpt is a blog post from a visitor and blogger of virtual worlds, cyberloom. pop art lab can be described as an immersive, 3d radio station. you can see which dome plays what, go in and find out the name of the artist and the title of the track. pal provides a glimpse of the future for listening to music on the internet; we will immerse ourselves in the sound and listening will potentially become a more interactive visually immersive experience. our avatars will walk around inside internet radios, changing the music streams by where they choose to walk just as we can in pal. (visitor cyberloom) this visitor sees pop art lab as a glimpse of the future, where one is immersed in sound and listening that transforms to become something one can interact with through, for example, movement in space. he draws a parallel to walking around inside an internet radio. being immersed in sound and interacting through movements resonates the immediacy elements of the presence as well as aspects of fantasy as the very experience of pal is characterized as a glimpse of the future that one can step into together with other avatars. these examples foreground presence as an important element of how the pal team (the founder, visitor and the designers) envision a virtual music lab. in these interview events, presence can be understood as a shared vision that joins together these actors and enables their cooperation. it serves as a resource for initiating the pal project, for visiting and returning to the lab, and for redesigning it in specific ways. in this pal case study, ideas about presence express various justifications and expectations related to acting, designing and travelling in second life. 11 presence as a technical imaginaire with this analysis, new visibilities and new questions about the object of study are created: perhaps presence should not only be understood as a characteristic of virtual worlds (what it is), but also as a shared dream about the future (what it might become)? in the book the internet imaginaire, flichy puts forth an analytical approach understands takes utopias, ideologies, and representational frames as the integral part of the development of any technical system (flichy, 2007). flichy stresses how specific "imaginaires" of new technologies enable users and designers to coordinate their actions. according to flichy, all technological activity is situated in one or more imaginaires. the actors involved in a technological project mobilize a particular framing that enables them to perceive and understand the phenomenon they witness and to organize their own actions accordingly. similar to star and griesemeier's (1989) boundary object, a technical imaginaire has to be rigid enough to maintain some coherence between actors as well as being flexible enough to take into account specific projects of the various actors. imaginaires are rather understood as produced and used by the actors engaged in daily activities and as the resources that actors mobilize when necessary (flichy, 2007). in pal, the actors' own framing of pal through presence both justifies and orients their actions. the vision and expectations of presence seem to be one of the elements upon which the voluntary team project is based. it enables those involved in pal to construct an identity around what they are doing and serves as a framework for coordinating actions and directions. different forms of presence are mobilized in turn (immediacy, sociality, fantasy), yet the overall vision of presence cuts across and is shared by the founder, the visitor, and the designer.2 2 here, the differences and contradictions within these approaches to presence have been glossed over. further work might go into these differences and how they are dealt with by the actors involved. for the purposes of this analysis presence is foregrounded as the prevalent frame of representation. second life, and virtual worlds more generally, are situated in additional imaginaires that call for exploration. this first analysis of the pal thus enables a new view of presence as a discursive imaginaire (flichy, 2007) produced and used by the various actors involved in the pal project. this view compliments existing literature, reviewed earlier in this paper, in proposing that presence not only can be analyzed as a characteristic of virtual worlds, but might also be understood as something that productively participates in creation of virtual worlds. in the appearances presented and connected here, my object of study seems to be productive and can perhaps be ascribed agency? 12 appearance of presence in the pop art lab concert event but back to the situations in which presence can be experienced in a more bodily or material way. the following section illustrates another way is which presence appears, not only in the justifications and expectations attached to the pal project, but in a very practical and material sense. the second empirical section of this paper analyzes the concert event, a second case study finding of how and where presence appears. the concert event usually starts with an interview with the performing artist conducted by two members of the pal team. meanwhile the audience is seated around the stage in a tvstudio type set-up. thereafter the musicians move to the stage, the music begins and the dance floor opens for the audience. the musician mommaluv skytower is on stage performing, backed by her band and dancers, and below on the dance floor, a couple move closely back and forth to the music. a regular at the pal concerts explains: i love hearing a good artist, dancing and you’re maybe 30 people chatting together. when you are there you are sharing the experience with others, like you really are hanging out together. you get a lot more sensory input than if you are only looking at a little text box while listening. someone will do some clapping animations, they can shout things out while dancing or ask the artist to play a specific song, perhaps something weird will fly across the room and every one laughs. you are spread across the globe and have this shared experience of being there together. it's just really powerful. (visitor pete) here again, presence is part of the experience of this person participating as audience in the concert. the concert can be seen as a concentrated and orchestrated moment of presence and the following looks into the highly distributed set-up behind this experience. presence is not necessarily experienced when entering second life at random. my own first visits seemed taut by frustrations about how to orient myself, buy hair, turn off dancing avatar animations once off the dance floor, or, how to conduct conversation in sl lingo, more than any experience of presence, in either of the senses immediacy, sociality or fantasy. presence is thus not available for anyone, anywhere. the following looks into a complex of elements that are assembled, aligned and ‘working’ in sync to create a moment of live performance, audience participation and presence for a pal visitor such as pete. 13 the first characteristic i highlight here is that of pal performance being both live and recorded. this creates a trace and accumulating archive one can go back an view afterwards where presence can be said to linger, and overtime add to the establishing of a community and a history. pete knows many of the other people/avatars at the pal concert and the experience is underscored by a set of previous concerts and events. claus explains, the shift from a media center to making music tv. shortly after opening the music lab, i (the founder claus) was contacted by the producer of treet.tv, one of the biggest tv stations in sl, asking if he wanted to make music tv in second life. this started the pop vox music series featured as a regular show in treet.tv's selection and web-archive. the concerts are live, based on the real time performances of musicians with the audience and they are at the same time recorded by treet.tv, streamed live to screens at other locations in second life and to treet.tv's web-site. (founder claus) the fact that the concerts are both streamed externally and recorded for future viewing expands the scope of participants and stages the event in a broader setting of distant and future viewer-participants. the recording also provides the possibility of creating a trace, a historical archive of shows one can view retrospectively. according to claus, the fact that the music performances have been filmed and distributed has been an important factor in the development and popularity of pal and consequently for actualizing events in which presence can appear. presence it seems is emergent and distributed in time. next we will se how presence also is distributed in geographically and across people and technologies. assembling presence keeping it together, making it happen a lot of work goes into preparing and executing these shows, and the technologies involved are numerous. extensive advertising for these show goes out beforehand from the second life tv station and the pal website as well as facebook, twitter and affiliated blogs. in planning a show, a set of globally based individuals are brought together real time the founder's house in copenhagen, the treet.tv filming and editing studio in melbourne, a music studio in boston, and a global audience, most of whom are situated in their own home settings. at these locations the screens flick between second life, the chat space and sound regulating pop up screens. all the participants engaged in interviewing, performing, hosting or helping are connected through chat sites and one single skype conference connection, streamed back into second life and to the web from the treet.tv site in australia. from here the recording from 14 within second life and real time editing also takes place. often coordination may be done on parallel instant messaging in sl, additional skype lines, email and phone text messaging. work has often gone into preparing the stage, the props, and the avatar's outfits and animations beforehand. and during the show one or more persons will also be controlling more advanced animation through software developed for this specifically (also known as avateering). the fact that these concerts actually do occur and can be experienced as "powerful", as in the audience quotation above, must be seen as a distributed and collective socio-technical achievement. the moment of presence, the experience of the audience, is carefully prepared, arranged, and tinkered into sync in order to be available for experience. the founder himself imposes a theatre metaphor to describe the set-up. it's like the local drama club and doing theatre. and i can do that kind of thing, here, from my comfy couch with people from all over the world. this screen is my little aquarium from which it all opens up. (founder claus) unpacking some of the preparations, complications and efforts involved illustrates how presence is not only about 'the user being present', but also about how the team behind pal put extensive work into actualizing presence. they not only mobilize presence in their descriptions, vision and expectations for pal, but they realize it through extensive efforts. all these people are usually online 30-60 minutes before the show starts to check the equipment and sound connections, show content and trouble shoot any difficulties that arise. often new people are involved, which makes it difficult to establish fixed routines. the shifting staff include both volunteers for whom this work is leisure and others who are paid to perform this work, i.e. semi-professions attempting to make a living through their second life activities. the level of commitment thus varies greatly. claus explains that, on the one hand, experience makes it difficult to depend on volunteers, while at the same time it is their participation, enthusiasm, and the shared sense of responsibility that also drives the project and events forward. the founder claus stated this in the following way: "it is always really stressful up till a show starts because something always goes wrong." the many technologies involved in this setup do not work in and of themselves but depend upon adjustments, adaptations and continuous tinkering (mol et.al., 2010). the preparation and execution of a show is characterized by troubleshooting, breakdowns and work-arounds. sometimes the internet connection of an important location/avatar goes down, skype might "act up" and contacts do not show up as they 15 should, sometimes applications or entire laptops freeze and block a persons participation and, perhaps crucial, contribution. the second life application itself, due to the maintenance work performed on the linden lab servers, also frequently gives uneven and abbreviated experiences of not being able to see other avatars and objects, animations going gaining their own life, or not being able to teleport or move to a desired location. in spite of the continuous flow of hurdles, "there are always possibilities to fall back on" as claus explains. only one show has actually been cancelled in the history of pal. lastly, the geographical distribution and time-differences add to this set up of shifting, yet continuous flow of complications. for example, a person involved may not be able to be contacted the time agreed and those waiting on the other end are in the dark as to whether this person has slept through the alarm (it might be still be the middle of the night in australia) or whether there is a technical issue with the person’s connection. in sum these practices practices that create presence can be characterized by very few rutines and heterogeneity. there is very little explanation of ”how we usually do it” and much more ad hoc, here and now connecting and problem solving. they shift between a range of coordinating mechanisms (schmidt and simone, 1996) such as email, skype, and a central chat site. a range of very diverse technologies, people, locations are thus in play. lastly, there seems to be no center or overall control. even decision-making about for example "what to do next" in a critical situation is negotiated ad hoc between the people available. presence as fluctuating assemblage the concept of assemblage denotes the coming together of various technological features, applications, platforms, infrastructures, people and competencies, routines and experience, visions, desires in short heterogeneous and disparate entities that are brought into relations, or assemblages. derrida (1978) applies the term assemblage to understand the production of meaning (of tests) as a neverending combination of elements and practices that are continually reshuffled together to produce new effects. the term assemblage her is an endless weaving together, an interlacing of many different elements (of texts, but also of people, objects, resources) that form different temporary collage constellations of meaning. the notion of assemblage has also been used analytically in exploring the relationship between technology and practice, as in the work of suchman, trigg and blomberg (2002). these authors explore how a new digital work system (for an engineering bridge project work) is designed through ongoing practices of assembly, demonstration and performance. assembly refers to the continual linking up of a technological prototype to contingent local circumstances. "like any technology, the prototype does not work on its own, but as part of a dynamic assemblage of 16 interests, fantasies and practical actions, out of which new socio-material arrangements evolve." (suchman et.al., 2002, p.175) lastly the concept is often used in studies inspired by actornetwork theory as a conception that better designates the continual flow of translations than networks (deleuze and guattari, 1987; latour 2005; law 2002). the concept conveys the impossibility of making a clear distinction between signs and objects, the discursive and the material. assemblage is a way of looking at sociotechnical phenomenon such as virtual worlds, as a collage collection, a jumbling together of technological parts and pieces, artefacts, people, competencies, ideas, visions and so forth. the concept works to describe how the bringing together of such heterogeneous elements produce particular effects. the concept of assemblage helps understand some of the flux and transience of presence. the pal practices, in which presence is envisioned, also involve the painstaking efforts to create it. through extensive and time-consuming technological preparations and tinkering, presence is made available for the concert audience to experience. likewise the audience must be conditioned into place, have a certain amount of experience with both the technology and the community, in order to 'take on' presence. presence is tinkered into place through the alignment of an extensive assemblage of people and technologies. parts of this assemblage are only loosely connected and aligned. the assemblage is also in flux as elements can be added, substituted when necessary. this view compliments existing literature in proposing that presence not only can be analyzed as a characteristic of virtual worlds, but might also be understood as something that is assembled in practice, in specific moments and places. it cannot be attributed to the technology (immediacy), to the social realm (sociability), nor the individual experience (fantasy), but seems to require the coming together of elements from all of these realms. conclusion other studies of virtual worlds such as everquest (taylor 2009) and habbo hotel (johnson et.al., 2010) have similarly pointed towards understanding virtual worlds in these terms of emergence. taylor (2009) describes the very artifact everquest as something which character can not be settled in advance, but better be understood as continually changing and evolving through the practices of designers, legal and marketing departments, a wide range of differing players as well as the materialities involved. johnson et. al. (2010) likewise present a longitudal and multi-sited approach to the study of habbo hotel. this work focuses on how many different actors mingle in continually constructing and constituting a virtual world and its 17 infrastructure. their work also stresses the need for studying both development and use practices, being on "both ends" of the complex user-producer relationship (johnson et.al., 2010, p.47). in a study of second life, malaby and burke (2009) also highlights the need for understanding process, contingency and open-endedness when studying emergent phenomenon such as virtual worlds. following these authors this paper has looked to one aspect of virtual worlds, presence, and how it comes into being both through the material/digital, through the social, and through the imaginative. the object of study is not the it platform that might provide opportunities for presence, nor the human actors that might experience presence, but what happens when they come together to create events of presence. following giddings, the event is a coming together of a media-cultural practice, human subjects, and a set of technologies (giddings, 2009, p.149). in this way the paper has suggested that the very object of study is perhaps better understood as an event than as an object. the paper has analyzed, firstly, the appearances of presence in interviews and, secondly, the appearance of presence in a concert situation. in this paper the concepts of event, imaginary and assemblage provide a new perspective from which to comprehend the ongoing process through which presence comes into being. the concepts are proposed as descriptive tools and sensitizing mechanisms in contrast to definitive concepts (blumer, 1954). a sensitizing concept does not have a precise specification and does not allow us to move directly to and from an instance and its relevant content. blumer (1954) advocates how sensitizing concepts provide us with a general sense of reference and guidance in approaching empirical situations: "whereas definitive concepts provide prescriptions of that to see, sensitizing concepts mere suggest directions along which to look... they rest on a general sense of what is relevant"(p 7) the concept of imaginaire seek to sensitize the task of understanding presence as an object closely linked to an imaginary and desireable future "what is" is inseparable from the dream of "what will be". the concept of assemblage seeks to sensitize the task of understanding presence as an emergent effect. presence may better be understood as an effect of virtual world practices than as a characteristic of the technology, the community of the individual imagination. the assemblage of elements from all of these realms creates presence, as an effect, that appears in one situation and may disappear in the next. 18 sensitizing research to emergence, process and flux in conclusion, this paper puts forth a set of analytical strategies. the principles are proposed as an analytical resource for sensitizing research to the situated practices and events of which virtual worlds are part and parcel. the approach suggested refrains from starting with a fixed definition of the object of study (e.g. presence in virtual worlds), but instead starts with practices, situations, and events in which the object of study appears, asking openly what occurs and what emerges. (here, the literature can be thought of as a site or practice in which the object also appears.) this implies: • always understanding emergent phenomena through the specific settings, situations, and relations in which phenomena such as virtual worlds or presence are made to work and brought into being • applying and developing analytical concepts that may sensitize research to the imaginary, the future (and the past) as part of the present • applying and developing concepts that may sensitize research to the distributed and assembled • paying special attention to materiality and continual redistributions of agencies these analytical strategies are suggested to be particularly fruitful when studying a phenomenon that can only really be addressed by bringing together the many heterogeneous participants and parts involved. the strategies highlight the way in which presence, as well as virtual worlds as phenomenon, continually comes into being as an emergent effect of a set of more or less related practices. acknowledgments i would like to acknowledge that the research presented in this paper has been financed by the virtual worlds research project at roskilde university, funded by the danish strategic research, kino committee (grant no. 09-063261). references blumer, h. (1954). what is wrong with social theory? american sociological review 18, 3-10 19 deleuze, g., & guattari, f. (1987). a thousand plateaus. capitalism and schizophrenia. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. derrida, j. (1978) writing and difference. chicago : university of chicago press bayliss, p. (2007). notes toward a sense of embodied gameplay. digra situated play, p. 96102. boellstorff, t. (2008). coming of age in second life: an anthropologist explores the virtually human. princeton, new jersey: princeton university press. bracken, c.c., & skalski, p.d. (eds.) (2009). immersed in media: telepresence in everyday life. new york: routledge. doyle, d. (2011) the body of the avatar: constructing human presence in virtual worlds in enslinn, a. and muse, e. (eds.) (2011). creating second lives: community, identity and spatiality as constructions of the virtual. oxford & new york: routledge. ducheneaut, n., moore, r.j., & nickell, e. (2007). virtual “third places”: a case study of sociability in massively multiplayer games. computer supported cooperative work (cscw) 16(1-2), 129-166. edwards, c. (2006). another world [3d virtual world]. engineering & technology 1(9), 28-32. emerson, r., fretz, r., & shaw, l. (1995). writing ethnographic fieldnotes. chicago: university of chicago press. flichy, p. (2007). the internet imaginaire. cambridge, ma: mit press. flyvbjerg, b. (2006). five misunderstandings about case-study research. qualitative inquiry 12(2), 219-245. frølunde, l. (2011). facing the audience: the hybrid film. in ng, j., and barrett, j. (eds.), understanding machinima. uk: continuum international publishing group ltd. gibson, w. (1984). neuromancer. new york: ace books. giddings, s. (2009). events and collusions: a glossary for the microethnography of video game play. games and culture, 4(2), 144-157. gumbrecht, h.u. (2004). production of presence: what meaning cannot convey. san francisco: stanford university press. 20 haraway, d. (1991) situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. in haraway, d. simians, cyborgs, and women. the reinvention of nature (pp. 183-201), routledge. jacobson, d. (2001). presence revisited: imagination, competence, and activity in text-based virtual worlds. cyberpsychology and behavior, 4(6), 653-673. jensen, s.s. (forthcoming) avatars in flux: blurring the boundaries of a unified phenomenon of bound contours. johnson, m., hyysalo, s., & tamminen, s. (2010). the virtuality of virtual worlds, or what we can learn from playacting horse girls and marginalized developers. symbolic interaction, 33(4), 603-633. latour, b. (2005). reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. oxford: oxford university press. law, j. (2002). aircraft stories: decentering the object in technoscience. durham: duke university press. malaby, t.m., & burke, t. (2009). the short and happy life of interdisciplinarity in game studies. games and culture, 4(4), 323-330 . mol, a. (2003). the body multiple: ontology in medical practice. durham: duke university press. mol, a., moser, i., & pols, j. (eds.) (2010). care in practice on tinkering in clinics, homes and farms. new rockford: transcript publisher murray, n and roberts, d and steed, a and sharkey, p and dickerson, p and rae, j and wolff, r. (2009) eye gaze in virtual environments: evaluating the need and initial work on implementation. concurrency and computation: practice and experience 21(11), 1437-1449. pearce, c. and artemesia. (2011). communities of play: emergent cultures in multiplayer games and virtual worlds, cambridge ma: mit press. schmidt, k., & simone, c. (1996). coordination mechanisms: towards a conceptual foundation of cscw systems design. computer supported cooperative work, 5(2-3), 155-200. schneider, e.f. (2004). death with a story. human communication research, 30(3), 361-375. schroeder, r. (2006). being there together and the future of connected presence. presence: teleoperators & virtual environments, 15(4), 438-454. 21 seegert, a. (2009). “doing there” vs. “being there”: performing presence in interactive fiction. journal of gaming & virtual worlds, 1(1), 23-37. simmel, g. & hughes, e.c. (2007). the sociology of sociability. american journal of sociology, 55(3), 254-261. solomon, r.j., (2002). as if you were there. matching machine vision to human vision, p.126. star, s.l., & griesemer, j.l. (1989) institutional ecology, "translations," and boundary objects. social studies of science, 19(3), 387–420. suchman, l. a., blomberg, j. and trigg, r. (2002). working artefacts: ethnomethods of the prototype. british journal of sociology 53 (2), 163-179. taylor, t.l. (2009). play between worlds: exploring online game culture, mit press. whitton, m.c. (2003). making virtual environments compelling. communications of the acm 46(7), 40-47. williams, d. (2005). bridging the methodological divide in game research. simulation & gaming 36(4), 447-463. interview appearances of presence in the pop art lab presence as a technical imaginaire assembling presence keeping it together, making it happen presence as fluctuating assemblage sensitizing research to emergence, process and flux selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18 th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): beauvisage, t., mellet, k.. (2017, october 18-21). the ordinary market for fake likes. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18 th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the ordinary market for fake likes thomas beauvisage, kevin mellet – sense, orange labs in july 2012, a series of articles in the mainstream media revealed cheating practices on social media. brands, artists, or even politicians, like republican candidate for the us presidential election mitt romney, were accused of having bought fake likes and followers. several surveys detailed the existence of an easily accessible industry of facebook likes, instagram followers or youtube views. five years later, although the question of fake followers attracts less media attention, the commercial supply for likes and followers is still active, and well structured, with stabilized products, channels and prices. this paper aims to describe the rise and structuring of this market for fake likes and followers, and to understand how it became an important piece in the online reputation industry puzzle. we rely on an empirical material allowing us to document the emergence and stabilization of this market, its crafting techniques, and its place within the reputation economy. we have built a database of products and prices in 2013 and 2017 from the top 100 websites selling fake products on major social networks (facebook, twitter, youtube, instagram). finally, we mobilize semi-structured interviews conducted in 2013 with professionals from legitimate social media marketing agencies and from providers of facebook likes, instagram followers and youtube views. the rise of fake likes in the shadow of the early social media marketing industry the business of cheating on social networks is the hidden face of an online reputation economy that has grown rapidly in the early 2010's. reputation economy is positioned at the convergence of two dynamics: the expansion of quantification and performance measurements contributing to the establishment of an audit society (espeland and sauder, 2007), and the rise of social media marketing as an autonomous activity dealing with online reputation, seeking to identify, manage, and domesticate online participation (mellet, 2016). research on the domestication of social media by marketing has highlighted the centrality of measurement indicators in the construction of this market. in the absence of a shared quality convention (favereau et al., 2002), measurement indicators are in fact what coordinates actors (advertisers, agencies, websites) in the value chain. this situation tends to favor simple and affordable measurement techniques, the most likely to circulate in the market. concretely, the first advertising campaigns on facebook aimed to increase the number of likes on brand pages. as the market grew and attracted new advertisers, agencies were quickly caught between purely numerical expectations of advertisers, and difficulties in completing these goals, and purchasing fake likes or followers was a convenient expedient to handle this situation. these counterfeiting practices aiming at increasing social counters are the main reason for the rise of the market for fake likes, but when the market got more mature, social media agencies realized their interest was in taking clear distance with deceptive practices. the disclosure of cheating practices was initially led by social media agencies themselves, who sought to clean up their business and restrict the reputational risk for their clients. today, the market for social media marketing has explicitly banned counter faking practices. a market for counterfeited reputation signals yet, the market for fake likes has not disappeared. the evolution of its product characteristics, forgery techniques, and prices, between 2013 and 2017, shows how the market has rather gained autonomy from social media marketing. concerning its products, beyond the widely shared claims of "true" and "active" users, in 2013, a large range of products were available on the market for fake likes and followers (variety of targeting options, activity options, etc.) with a high variation in prices. furthermore, the corresponding techniques used to craft these followers were, in some cases, close to "grey hat" techniques used on the legitimate market (such as facebook quizzes). in 2017, fake products are very standardized: crafting techniques are largely automated, prices more homegeneous determined in fine by the cost of avoiding counter-measures deployed by social media websites. the nature of the demand for fake likes has followed this evolution. the reputational cost of being identified as a cheater has led major advertisers and agencies to avoid these practices. in the meantime, fake providers have attracted specific customers: small businesses, aspiring artists, photographs, or even teenagers for whom signals of reputation and visibility are necessary to step into local scenes, and who cannot afford the more traditional communication schemes (advertising, pr, etc.). stable market in the grey zone the market for fake likes or followers resembles neither quite an illegal market nor totally a counterfeit market, and its status is questionable. first, academic literature on illegal markets (beckert and wehinger, 2013) puts forward their invisibility, their underground character, and their poor equipment in terms of evaluation devices (standards, verification and quality assessment tools). conversely, the social media counterfeit market is very well equipped: it has both a market infrastructure comparable to that of ordinary online commerce, and standard products with stabilized qualities. secondly, social media websites have quite ambiguous positions towards deceptive practices: while they usually empasize the authenticity of their users, they have various policies with regards to bots and automation, and can have an interest in tolerating deceptive practices to a certain extent. in the blurred zones between social media websites' terms of service and their effective suppression policies, a stable industry of reputation forgery has emerged, with ordinary entrepreneurs who consider themselves as belonging to the marketing industry. fake likes are part of a wider range of online manipulations that slip into the interstices left vacant by the absence of legally enforced rules and by the more or less firm application of the tos of major web players. these manipulations play on automation and new signals that inhabit digital spaces (brunton, 2013; gehl and bakardjeva, 2017). they also aim at optimizing the indexing of web pages in the results of search engines ("black hat" seo), at allowing start-ups to quickly grow their user bases ("growth hacking"), at generating impressions and clicks for advertising (advertising fraud). these manipulations have in common to combine the misuse of metrics and rankings, and to resort to massive automation. their operators mobilize a set of various and constantly evolving techniques that are traded in marketplaces and online forums: content farms, exchange networks, zombie machines, botnets, clickjacking, crowdsourcing, etc. in this sense, the fake likes appears as the emblem of a new form of cheating with digital algorithms. references beckert j., wehinger f. (2013), « in the shadow: illegal markets and economic sociology », socio-economic review, 11, 5-30. brunton f. (2013), spam: a shadow history of the internet, cambridge, ma, the mit press. espeland w.n., sauder m. (2007), « rankings and reactivity : how public measures recreate social worlds », american journal of sociology 113 (1), 1-40. favereau o., biencourt o., eymard-duvernay f. (2002). "where do markets come from? from (quality) conventions!", in favereau o. and lazega e. (eds), conventions and structures in economic organization: markets, networks and hierarchies, 213-252. gehl r., bakardjieva, m. (eds.). (2017). socialbots and their friends: digital media and the automation of sociality. routledge. mellet k. (2016), "marketing and the domestication of social media", in mcfall l., f. cochoy & j. deville, markets and the arts of attachment, routledge, forthcoming microsoft word 839-583-1-pb.docx paradox of networked politics 1 the paradox of networked politics: a critical examination of presidential campaigns in the united states jennifer stromer-galley syracuse university usa jstromer@syr.edu abstract although new scholarship has heralded the digital affordances of social media on the internet to transform political activism in the united states, the same transformation has not occurred in presidential campaigns. campaign practices in the united states have used social media to harness citizens in the service of winning the election, not in better empowering and engaging citizens in the political process. thus, although political elections are essential to a democracy, political campaigns are decidedly undemocratic. keywords social media, political communication, political campaigns, activism argument overview recent books and monographs have extolled the power of activists to organize in new ways through digital communication technologies (dcts) channeled through the internet, such as facebook, twitter, and youtube (see, karpf, 2012, and earl and kimport 2011 for example). these books emphasize the affordances of dcts--low cost, high speed, the bridging of distance, in short the opportunity of enhanced networked interaction--as opportunities that enable collective action. similarly, recent monographs have examined how presidential campaigns are deploying dcts to energize and mobilize citizens in the political campaign process, looking at the socio-technical systems and the ways that they have shaped the organizational and campaign practices of democratic party politics in the united states (see kreiss, 2012). for the excitement and hope that these writings offer for thinking about citizen involvement in the political process in the united states, this paper challenges that optimism. specifically, examining the practices of political elites, manifested in presidential campaigns as they used dcts in their campaigns over five election cycles, underscores that campaigns use dcts not for emancipatory aims of fully engaging and promoting democratic participation by citizens but in the service of getting a candidate elected. put another way, the end to which dcts are put in political campaigns is to win, not to transform citizenship and political participation in the united states. paradoxically, presidential campaigns are decided undemocratic affairs. the hope for a stronger democracy through digital media by better engaging citizens with elites (barber, 1984), at least in the context of campaigns, has not come to pass. since 1996 u.s. presidential campaigns have experimented with and aimed to perfect the use of dcts, to connect with and mobilize supporters. this paper provides a historical tracing of the shifting practices by presidential campaigns in the united states over five election cycles, and examines the challenges campaigns face as they opened up their campaigns to greater citizen involvement through the affordances of dcts while they simultaneously worked to control these citizen activists and supporters. the paper details interviews i have conducted with over a dozen campaign staff as well as describes campaigning practices using a close examination of their uses of dcts. the analysis in the paper helps illuminate the evolving attitudes and approaches by campaigns in adopting to dcts, highlighting the complex dynamic of traditional practices of political campaigns when confronted with potentially new communication technologies to interact with voters. paradox of networked politics 2 practices across five campaign cycles the 1996 presidential campaigns in the u.s. were the first to use the world wide web. they focused on the use of their websites to channel their relatively static message to supporters unfiltered by the mainstream news media. campaigns made some use of email lists to disseminate or push their message out, and bob dole’s website even experimented with gamification and sticky elements to pull people back to the website. yet, even that experimentation was viewed by campaign managers as a minor occupation with little weight compared with television, event, and debate strategizing. campaign staff viewed as potentially harmful the interactivity that dcts would invite between campaigns and the public if they were to more openly use message boards or chat forums (see stromer-galley, 2000). greater innovations occurred in 2000 as the internet diffused more broadly within the u.s. candidates steve forbes, al gore, and john mccain held versions of online town halls during the surfacing and primary stages of the campaign. forbes, for example, held a typical dinner fundraiser in which he invited online followers to contribute a nominal amount to have a virtual seat at the table. they watched streaming video on the web of the fundraiser (a still noteworthy feat in 2000), and sent questions to the candidate, some of which he answered during a question and answer session. mccain held a similar event after winning the new hampshire primary. other aspects of interactivity through dcts were otherwise limited. campaign staff continued to view dcts as risky and problematic with regard to how to control their message and their supporters. the 2004 campaign provided the first noteworthy adoption of social media. howard dean’s campaign is given the greatest credit for his blog for america, an open-comment blog in which campaign staff wrote posts and in the comments section supporters organized and also debated with opponents the virtues of the dean campaign. yet, dean was not alone. general wesley clark’s supporters heavily used the blogosphere to launch a grassroots campaign in support of a clark presidency. indeed, in the draft wesley clark social movement, we see the conflict that arises when the netroots is integrated into a traditional presidential campaign. the dean and draft clark campaigns recognized the power of social media to cultivate supporters who could be empowered to work on behalf of the campaign, in a virtuous circle of support breeding more support through networks of acquaintances and friends. the 2008 presidential campaign is heralded as the pinnacle of social media use in a political campaign. of note, many of the same campaign staff that worked on dean’s campaign worked on barack obama’s campaign (kreiss, 2012). they continued to experiment with the use of social media, from facebook and twitter to youtube and blogs, to promote the candidate and encourage supporters to organize on the campaign’s behalf. the obama campaign was not the only pioneer, however. mike huckabee and ron paul’s campaigns effectively fostered the blogosphere and other social media to generate buzz and money for their candidates, propelling them well into the primary season. the 2012 campaigns exhibited little by way of grand experimentation of the sort seen in the dean campaign, but rather further honed effective practices of using social media to channel and carefully craft targeted messages to maximize financial contributions and activate supporters. conclusions and implications of note in examining the history of presidential campaigns and dcts is the shifting attitudes by campaign staff. in 1996 and even in 2000, experimenting with dcts was deemed risky by campaign managers and staff. the novelty brought them to use dcts but the purpose was unclear. the thought of direct interaction with voters invoked consternation by most campaign managers used to reaching voters through the controlled medium of tv advertising. the dean and clark campaigns exhibited an entrepreneurial spirit made possible by their insurgent status. by 2008 both insurgent and frontrunner campaigns used social media extensively. having witnessed the success of the 2004 dean campaign, the 2008 campaigns began to perfect the use of dcts to greater effect in contributions and support. by 2012, the digital media staff had an equal seat at the table with staff focused on television, debate, and event strategy. paradox of networked politics 3 yet, for the innovations and shifts in presidential campaign practices to integrate digital media, an emancipatory transformation of presidential campaigns has not come to pass. instead, presidential campaign staff have worked to harness dcts to help get the candidate elected while also using social media to involve citizens in the work of getting the candidate elected. the enthusiasm and hope that dcts are changing the nature of political activism in the united states does not fully extend to traditional political rituals, like elections. campaigns use dcts to continue to manage citizens in the service of winning. references barber, b. (1984). strong democracy: participatory politics for a new age. berkeley: university of california press. earl, j., & kimport, k. (2011). digitally enabled social change: activism in the internet age. cambridge, ma: mit press. karpf, d. (2012). the moveon effect: the unexpected transformation of american political advocacy. oxford university press. kreiss, d. (2012). taking our country back: the crafting of networked politics from howard dean to barack obama. oxford university press. stromer-galley, j. (2000). online interaction and why candidates avoid. journal of communication, 50, 111-132. ir16 ellie rennie full paper 150730 selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 demic deal-breakers and the statistical imaginary of the digital divide ellie rennie swinburne institute for social research, swinburne university of technology introduction as australian anthropologist tim rowse observes, the idiom of social exclusion discourse is statistics: “in the regime of truth in which social exclusion is meaningful, if you can’t quantify something then it is difficult to believe in it” (rowse 2010,157). in this paper i challenge current conceptions of digital inclusion and exclusion as they are conceived through statistical analysis. drawing on the findings of a multi-year study of internet adoption in remote aboriginal communities in central australia, i demonstrate how particular aspects of remote indigenous sociality, and some resulting practical considerations, are leading to a particular enactment of ‘digital choices’ (dutton et al. 2007) that cannot be understood through statistics alone. these choices produce an ‘all or nothing’ scenario that manifests at the group level as a digital divide. understanding how digital choices are unfolding in remote communities moves away from positioning digital exclusion as a symptom of social exclusion, and offers new ways of thinking through policy approaches to icts in remote australia. the paper proposes a new theory – the ‘demic deal-breaker’ – to explain differential rates of broadband adoption across remote aboriginal communities. researching the digital divide in remote australia the recently completed home internet in remote communities projecti commenced as a digital divide research project, setting out to discover possible explanations for extremely low broadband adoption rates among indigenous households in remote australia (rennie et al 2013). we used a mixed methods approach, including interviews with residents over four years, observation of a home computing trial in three small communities (outstation settlements), as well as case studies in nearby communities with different communications infrastructure arrangements (one with mobile coverage, the other with a shared ict facility). we attempted to locate data sets that could assist us with understanding the extent of the divide, but found there is limited up-to-date data on internet adoption in remote communities. suggested citation (apa): rennie, e. (2015, october 21-24). demic deal-breakers and the statistical imaginary of the digital divide. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 2 digital inclusion research has mostly been conducted through sample surveys, such as the world internet project (the australian component of which is conducted by the swinburne institute for social research). these studies show that although the digital divide in australia is narrowing, it is doing so increasingly slowly (morsillo 2012; ewing & thomas 2011). however, sample surveys of internet use in australia have bypassed remote aboriginal communities due to the obstacles posed by lack of landlines (often used to administer surveys), as well as language and cultural barriers. as a variety of policy attempts have been made to address the digital divide – from universal service obligation to ict centres and public wifi – any attempt to understand the nature of the divide must take into account the uneven infrastructure and assistance that has occurred. however, there is also no current data on ict infrastructures in remote communities, making it impossible to provide an in-depth analysis of adoption in relation to different kinds of internet programs and services nationwide. although ict infrastructure was included in the community housing and infrastructure needs survey (chins), the last chins collection occurred in 2006 and the survey has since been discontinued. a key report on internet in remote communities produced by the australian communications and media authority (the communications regulator) and published in 2008 (acma 2008) relied heavily on this data, as well as data from telstra (the provider that holds the universal service obligation), which is not publicly available. therefore, research on the digital divide in remote australia has necessarily relied on the census of population and housingii. the census asks the respondent whether the internet could be accessed at the dwelling, with the options being ‘no internet connection; yes, broadband connection including adsl, cable, wireless and satellite connections; yes, dial-up connection including analog, modem and isdn connections; and other (include internet access through mobile phones etcetera)’. although it should therefore be possible to tell from the census data what kind of connection households were using at the time they took the survey, this particular information appears to be unreliable for households in remote communities. for instance, in santa teresa (an indigenous community with mobile coverage), out of a total of 95 dwellings, four dwellings were identified as having an ‘other’ internet connection, 69 ‘no internet’ while 29 houses were ‘not stated’. there are a number of possible explanations for such gaps, including whether the question was adequately explained to the respondent (as the census was administered face-to-face in remote communities), as well as confusion as to whether individual access to the internet via a mobile device is considered to belong to a dwelling or not. at the aggregate level the census data does show a significant digital divide. in the northern territory (where 27 per cent of the total population identify as being of aboriginal and/or torres strait islander origin), 31per cent of indigenous people living in the capital city of darwin reported that they did not have an internet connection at home during the 2011 census, compared with only 11 per cent of non-indigenous people. the divide is greater in regional and remote areas. for the rest of the northern territory outside of darwin, 75 per cent of indigenous people did not have an internet connection at home, compared with only 15 per cent of non-indigenous people. aggregate figures, however, cannot tell us how internet adoption varies across communities. as discussed 3 below, we discovered uneven patterns of adoption between communities that shared a similar socio-economic profile. the digital divide and social exclusion current thinking on the digital divide draws a link between digital exclusion and social exclusion (see helsper 2012), achieved by comparing internet adoption and use with variations in socioeconomic status, including income and education level. the same framework of analysis has been applied to the digital divide in australia. indigenous people living in remote communities are undoubtedly the most disadvantaged group in australia across a range of standard measures including education, health and workforce participation (taylor 2006). they are also the least likely to have an internet connection at home, seemingly supporting the hypothesis that social exclusion and digital exclusion influence each other. in its analysis of the 2006 census data, the australian bureau of statistics suggested that ‘the lower rate of connectivity for indigenous people might be attributed to a range of several socio-economic factors’ (abs 2007, 7). the above-mentioned report by the australian communications media authority (2008) observed that in addition to supply-side factors are compounded by ‘demand-side factors, particularly the disadvantaged socioeconomic status of many residents in remote communities’ (17). the problem with this explanation is that its suggests that we can only solve the digital divide by solving other social problems first, which would lead us to abandon the concept of the digital divide as just another symptom of social exclusion. what if that assumption is not correct? the findings from the home internet in remote communities project suggests that the digital divide is not intractable and that there are concrete steps that can be taken to address it. a tale of two communities towards the end of 2013 we undertook two trips to ali curung, a community of approximately 500 people, to interview residents on their internet use, assisted by two local women and one local man. we spoke to 85 people from 45 households, representing 58 per cent of ali curung’s total indigenous households. from this research we discovered that 89.5 per cent of people were using the internet or had used it at some point in the past. almost 1 in 7 people that had used the internet were not using it at the time of the interview, demonstrating that many will fall in and out of internet connectivity. ali curung is only 30 km from one of the outstations we worked with over the project’s four year duration. not a single house in imangara (a population of approximately 100 people) had an internet connection when we commenced the project in 2010. as both communities have a similar socio-economic profile, affordability was not likely to be the reason for the difference, even though imangara residents had indicated that ‘money’ was a reason they did not have internet connections at the start of the project. some imangara residents appeared to spend time in ali curung on occasion (one imangara resident relocated to ali curung during the course of our research), suggesting that some level of knowledge transfer between the communities was likely. ali curung did 4 have a computer room, but it was not in use and hadn’t been for some time. the most significant difference between the communities was that ali curung had mobile broadband coverage, whereas the only available internet in imangara was satellite broadband. significantly, no household in ali curung had satellite internet either, even though it was cheaper than mobile broadband due to government subsidies. why did people prefer mobile broadband to the cheaper option of satellite broadband? more importantly, why did they prefer no broadband to satellite broadband? our research in imangara and the other two outstations was key to understanding what was occurring. we found that indigenous households are generally only acquiring broadband services under certain conditions. identifiable ‘digital choices’ were being informed by the practicalities and capacities of remote communities, and were compounded by social norms. during the course of the research, three small communities were provided with satellite internet services for two years. at the conclusion of the trial period, we continued to monitor those households that chose to progress to the nbn interim satellite scheme (over half of total households). facilitating the application process for nbnco interim satellite service (iss) services proved to be time intensive (see crouch 2014). we concluded that households are unlikely to carry out the various steps independently given their limited access to telephones and knowledge of the processes, combined with the nbnco and isp staff’s relatively uninformed perceptions of remote community circumstances. billing proved to be one of the biggest obstacles to satellite internet services. despite the willingness of some community members to allocate a portion of household budgets to internet services, navigating and managing the isp’s billing mechanisms was difficult for most. about half the computer owners struggled over the first six months to maintain sufficient balances in their nominated bank accounts to support the monthly payments when they became due, resulting in temporary or permanent loss of internet access in some cases. for others, direct debits of large, unexpected amounts occurred if bills had been unpaid in previous months. although on the surface such difficulties could be seen as a matter of affordability, common difficulties associated with managing bank balances is also known to relate to cultural factors whereby money is shared with a wide network of kin (godinho & singh 2013). residents’ degree of mobility both within and outside the community also had implications for ict provision in relation to access, ownership, management of billing and sustainability. for instance, residents moved houses within the community for a range of reasons, including available housing stock, maintenance issues in some houses, the cost of power, and cultural customs surrounding death. such inter and intra community mobility had consequences for fixed infrastructure costs such as satellite dishesiii. discussion tim rowse has observed that, when used in policy contexts, statistics can create a ‘regime of truth’ that overrides the lived realities and dynamics of remote communities (rowse, 2010: 157). economist amartya sen makes a similar point in relation to social exclusion. exclusion, he argues, needs to be understood in terms of the causal process, 5 which requires an understanding of the social context. sen’s capabilities approach is a useful framework for considering the digital divide as it asks what substantive freedoms people have given the constraints placed upon them, and their ability to enact the outcomes that they value (nussbaum 2011). we found that particular deprivations can be difficult to understand when encountering individuals in remote communities when no background information is available. for instance, on an early visit we asked a man if he was living in the community and interested in having the internet in his house. he replied that he did not have a house and was living in the ‘windbreak’ – a makeshift shelter of branches and found objects in someone else’s yard. whether the man was permanently living an itinerant lifestyle – having fallen through the cracks of welfare and housing – or whether his circumstances were the result of the ‘temporary mobility’, changes the meaning, duration and consequences of that obvious hardship. putting up with inadequate shelter because of a willing decision to visit relatives is different to not being able to afford accommodation, or being excluded from a public housing register. as sen writes, ‘the issue, ultimately, is what freedom does a person have – everything considered. it should come as no surprise that a person’s deprivation can have diverse origins and may take disparate forms’ (sen 2000, 29). for rowse, the appropriate unit of analysis is not comparison between statistically identifiable groups, but an understanding of how a people, in a particular place, are ‘doing well or doing badly in ways that are specific to region and cultural heritage’ (2010, 156). although we were not able to conduct a nation-wide investigation of internet in remote communities, in conducting our qualitative research on the three outstations (complemented by two case study investigations in two larger towns), we were able to better understand what digital exclusion means in relation to the specific circumstances of remote community life and individual agency. the digital divide, at the most basic level, fits within broader theories of innovation diffusion, in that it describes how technologies are communicated through networks, resulting in particular patterns of distribution. as hilbert writes, the digital divide is an inevitable fact when seen as the diffusion of innovation: while the innovation spreads through the network and the diffusion curve unfolds, some are included and others excluded from the benefits of the new innovation. the result is an unavoidable divide. this divide is inevitable. it is the inescapable result of the fact that it takes a certain amount of time for innovations to spread through social networks with particular shapes and characteristics. (hilbert 2011). the inevitability of the divide exists in relation to the presence or absence of information, in that those without information about the technology are unable to acquire or use it. once that information becomes available then presumably the divide begins to diminish. however, even with information some will choose not to adopt. in their study of mobile phone adoption in indigenous communities, brady and dyson (2008) write: contrasting the enthusiasm for mobile phones and other ict deemed valuable by the community […] versus technologies which have been used only with reluctance or for the limited life of one-off projects convinces us that the indigenous people are making informed choices about their ict adoption. 6 recognition of the factors behind these choices may well lead to better ict investment and implementation decisions in the future (396). in her study of uk data sets, helsper (2008) noticed that particular groups were unexpectedly connected, defying predictors such as low socio-economic status: ‘some individuals within socially disadvantaged groups are capable of overcoming barriers to digital engagement’. for instance, disadvantaged people from afro-caribbean origins tended to be more highly engaged than expected given their social disadvantages. helsper’s conclusion was that digital choices can be ‘driven by cultural factors and the social context of individuals, which influence the development of positive or negative attitudes towards technologies’ and that ‘innovative and creative approaches’ might be required to tackle attitudinal and cultural barriers’ (10-11). the high rates of internet adoption in ali curung also fit within this category of the ‘unexpectedly connected’. our research suggests that it is not necessarily attitudes to technologies that are influencing digital choices in remote indigenous communities, but the conditions under which technologies are made accessible. the economic choice theory of characteristic filtering (also known as behavioural lexicographical choice theory) describes instances where choosers set targets for particular characteristics and eliminate products that don’t meet those targets completely. in other words, the chooser decides: ‘if x does not do y then i will not have anything at all’, deciding that the missing characteristic is too important to substitute for something else; for the chooser the missing piece is the dealbreaker. the theory is useful for explaining some instances where choosers do not appear to be maximising their outcomes ‘violating the axioms of rationality’ (earl 1990) – choosing to discount seemingly adequate options. although useful, the economic theory of characteristic filtering only considers individuals’ decision-making; it does not explain when the cultural norms of a group determine why some technologies are adopted and others are not. two further concepts are useful for expanding on choice theory to explain how the ‘dealbreaker’ all-or-nothing decision can result in exclusion for an entire group. in the broadest sense, indigenous communities, like all communities, are a knowledge group, whereby the groups shares its information, stories and culture, forming a particular set of social norms and influencing knowledge flows. hartley and potts (2014) call these ‘we’ groups demes (stemming from the greek demos meaning polity). the ‘demic’ aspect of the ‘dealbreaker’ scenario describes the way in which the decision only makes sense when seen in relation to group actions, norms and knowledge-sharing systems. the ‘demic’ quality is thus important in understanding digital choices in remote australia. for some no obvious decision is made, rather an acceptance of the status quo based upon what others are doing or not doing. those who might have little or no digital literacy (for instance, those residents that went to school prior to the introduction of computers in classrooms) are unlikely to receive the information required to consider internet adoption unless those they know share it with them. therefore, if those who might be considered ‘early adopters’ choose not to purchase the internet (or choose only to use it in town, for instance), then other potential users do not get exposed to the 7 technology. social networks thus affect the quality and flow of information and create community norms (shared ideas about the proper way to behave). conclusion shifting the discussion of digital exclusion to ‘digital choices’ restores some agency for those for whom the decision not to adopt is a practical choice, weighed up against a host of trade-offs and inconveniences. when group dynamics are taken into account, broadband adoption is not only a matter of individual choice but a socially-situated understanding of what will work and what will not, where the parameters are understood within that group in ways that might not be obvious to outsiders. we found that households in remote communities are choosing not to acquire satellite broadband services, preferring pre-paid mobile broadband in areas where there is mobile coverage. the consumer preference for pre-paid billing, as well as practical difficulties associated with satellite internet connections, means that households are more likely to go without internet than enter into satellite internet contracts. our findings suggest that policy objectives aimed at improving internet quality (such as faster speeds), although desirable for services and business in remote australia, will not encourage residents of remote communities to adopt broadband. we question whether satellite internet – the australian government’s response to internet access in very remote areas – can meet the needs of remote communities under current arrangements. however, changes to the way that satellite internet is sold and supported could make a significant difference. references australian bureau of statistics (2006). patterns of internet access in australia. 8146.0.55.001. available from: http://www.ausstats.abs.gov.au/ausstats/free.nsf/0/1b7dd59c9e8f52ecca2573a100 7ee8da/$file/8146055001_2006.pdf australian communications and media authority (2008), telecommunications in remote indigenous communities. canberra: commonwealth of australia. brady, f., dyson, l.e. & asela, t. 2008. indigenous adoption of mobile phones and oral culture. proceedings of cultural attitudes towards communication and technology h. h. & c. e. f. sudweeks, (eds). perth: australia, murdoch university: 384-398. crouch, a. (2014) home internet for remote indigenous communities technical report. alice springs: centre for appropriate technology. dutton, w. h., shepherd, a., & gennaro, c. d. (2007). digital divides and choices reconfiguring access: national and crossnational patterns of internet diffusion and use. 8 in b. anderson, m. brynin, j. gershung & y. raban (eds.), information and communications technologies in society (pp. 31-45). new york: routledge. earl, p. (1990). economics and psychology: a survey. the economic journal, 100(402), 718-755. ewing, s., rennie, e. & thomas, j. (2014). broadband policy and rural and cultural divides in australia. in kim andreasson (ed.) digital divides: the new challenges and opportunities of e-inclusion. london: taylor and francis godinho, v. & singh, s. (2013) technology enabled financial inclusion and evidencebased policy for the underbanked: a study of remote indigenous australia. policy brief. cprsouth8. available from: http://www.cprsouth.org/wpcontent/uploads/2013/09/14_updated_policy-brief_vinita-godinho.pdf (accessed 30 july 2015). hartley, j. & potts, j. (2014). cultural science: a natural history of stories, demes, knowledge and innovation, bloomsbury, london. helsper, e. (2008). digital inclusion: an analysis of social disadvantage and the information society. london: london school of economics and political science: communities and local government. helsper, e. (2012), ‘a corresponding fields model for digital exclusion’, communication theory 22, pp 403–426. hilbert, m. (2011). the end justifies the definition: the manifold outlooks on the digital divide and their practical usefulness for policy-making. telecommunications policy, 35, 715-736. morsillo, r. (2012). affordable broadband for all australians. telecommunications journal of australia, 62(5). nussbaum m.c. (2011), creating capabilities. harvard: harvard university press. rennie, e., crouch, a., wright, a., & thomas, j. (2013). at home on the outstation: barriers to home internet in remote indigenous communities. telecommunications policy, 37(july-august), 583–593. rowse, t. (2010), re-figuring indigenous culture. in altman, j. & hinkson, m. (eds). culture crisis: anthropology and politics in aboriginal australia, sydney: new south, 153-178. sen, a. (2000). social exclusion: concept, application, and scrutiny. social development papers (1). office of environment and social development asian development bank. manila: asian development bank. 9 taylor, j. (2006), population and diversity: policy implications of emerging indigenous demographic trends. discussion paper 283/2006. canberra: centre for aboriginal economic policy research. i  funded by the australian research council linkage project grant lp110200440. baseline study supported by a grant from the australian communications consumer action network (2010). additional support provided by the arc centre of excellence for creative industries and innovation. i acknowledge my co-researchers on the project: julian thomas, eleanor hogan, andrew crouch, alyson wright and robin gregory. this paper is an extract from a draft book manuscript (unpublished).   ii  information on the census can be found at http://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/censushome.nsf/home/2011information?opendocument&navpos=310 iii  the high level of mobility did not necessarily equate to a preference or requirement for mobile devices as pcs can be easier to manage in the domestic setting. final_aoir cyberbystander intervention model paper selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): dillon, k. (2015, october 21-24). a proposed cyberbystander intervention model for the 21st century. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. a proposed cyberbystander intervention model for the 21st century kelly p dillon, doctoral candidate school of communication, the ohio state university, columbus, oh, usa introduction on the internet, no one may know you’re a dog, but this also means no one knows you could play fetch or run for help. while we are more connected to known and unknown others more than ever, we can still feel quite alone and separated, especially when in need. an increasing reliance on computer-mediated communication to work and socialize has lead to a rise in hostile and negative communication. the deindividuating nature of the internet makes intervening in perceived cyberemergencies such as cyberharassment, cyberbullying, and cyberthreats difficult, but not impossible. individuals uninvolved in incidents are considered cyberbystanders, and a new model is necessary to test the boundary conditions of cyberbystander intervention. the rapid changes in technology, the near constant increase in access, and the moving target of determining who is accessing what through what means and to what degree they are aware of its effects make determining action difficult and daunting. specific communication models and theories offer commentary on how offline models of bystander intervention may operate online. a more comprehensive model of cyberbystander intervention is proposed. the bystander intervention model online there are five key steps that must occur in order for a bystander to intervene: (1) notice something is happening, (2) interpret the event as an emergency, (3) take personal responsibility for providing assistance, (4) determine actions to take to assist, and (5) actually provide help. this model has been replicated in field and laboratory studies, using seemingly benign and clearly violent situations and remained stable no matter the environment, gender of participants or victims, rewards, priming. in the proposed model, peripheral cues build a case for the cyberbystander to determine the social impact of the harassing communication and the estimated social cost or risk of cyberintervention. obviously, one must first notice an event is happening before any consideration of intervention. but online, avoidance may be more natural than offline. a user’s initial or intentional purpose for using the mediated communication can draw attention to space other than the emergency. the disinhibition experienced online can interrupt interpretation of events as emergencies to tend to. as bystanders tend to rely on the reactions of others witnessing to determine action (latané & darley, 1970), could difficulty in interpreting others’ reactions affect cyberbystanders’ own interpretation of events. if a cyberbystander considers taking action (step 3), the threat of diffusion of responsibility is powerful, leading to likely bystander effect (fischer et al, 2011). due to the asynchronicity of computer-mediated communication, it could be difficult for interlocutors to determine if cyberbystanders are choosing to not intervene or are just stuck in a decision loop. steps four (decide how to help) and five (provide help) include direct and indirect interventions. direct interventions include obvious and literal attempts to stop the emergency or assist in recovery whereas indirect interventions are behind the scenes or after the fact. in the mediated environment, these choices could contain less social risk than direct intervention in very straightforward, simple ways. the various affordances of the internet may influence users to defer to indirect intervention strategies, but the affordances may also offer more opportunities for indirect intervention as well. social impact theory social impact theory (latané, 1981) takes into account the various factors and forces involved determining the social impact of event(s). each principle of the theory involves some function of the strength (s), immediacy (i), and number (n). the first principle, or the social forces equation of i=f(sin), assumes specific forces, strength, immediacy, and quantity, function together to vary impact on the target. social proximity and social presence may also affect determinants of immediacy online. it encompasses the very essence of interpersonal communication: the feeling other individuals are jointly responsible for and involved in the communicative event or interaction (walther, 1992). latané’s second principle, the psychosocial law, assumes the proximity of this first person is most important in influencing the resulting social impact. it is suspected the first person, or few people, to agree, like, favorite, or generally support a perpetrator’s treatment of a victim online would be the most powerful damper on a cyberbystander’s assumption of personal responsibility to intervene. alternatively, the first cyberbystander to intervene (directly or indirectly) would be the most powerful social source for other cyberbystanders. the third principle, multiplication or division of impact, assumes the diffusion of responsibility whereas the social impact, measured by the strength, immediacy and number, will be divided or multiplied depending on the perspective. each of these principles will affect the cyberbystander’s progress through the five steps differently, dependent on various affordances of computer-mediated communication. affordances of computer-mediated communication anonymity, disinhibition, viral nature, and asynchronicity are affordances of the internet that may affect cyberbystander intervention (suler, 2004). anonymity breeds an environment friendly to disinhibition and deindividuation. the frequent disinhibition of individuals online facilitates “one’s ability to keep his or her identity unknown is a unique method of asserting dominance online” (ybarra & mitchell, 2004, p. 1313). it affords the same security to the cyberbystander as it does the aggressor and victim. the viral nature, or the rapid social transmission of information via cmc, can impact the likelihood of cyberbystander intervention. by intervening, the cyberbystander becomes part of the narrative that can also go viral. cues such as time stamps, network size, number of likes, or shares may impact a cyberbystander’s inclination to intervene and intensify the presumed strength and number of sources online. the asynchronicity of cmc is especially problematic for cyberbystanders as it manipulates immediacy. cyberbystanders walk a fine line of being an actual bystander to someone needing help and happening upon a more historical event. proposed cyberbystander intervention model a new cyberbystander intervention model is proposed, updating latané and darley’s (1970) original bystander intervention model with components from latané’s (1981) social impact theory and walther’s hyperpersonal model (1992). as depicted in figure 1, cyberbystanders’ attention to cyber-emergencies will be attenuated by latané’s third principle, division of impact (indicated by i=f(1/sin). this same principle should disrupt a cyberbystander’s interpretation of any emergency they do notice. should a cyberbystander notice a cyber-event and recognize it as an emergency, latané’s first and second principle should moderate any movement of the cyberbystander towards personal responsibility to help. once a cyberbystander takes personal responsibility to intervene, the perceived affordances of detour options in the medium will determine actual intervention. if there are no perceived detour options to intervene, the cyberbystander has only direct intervention choices. various steps of this new model have been tested (dillon & bushman, 2015; dillon, 2015). more energy and time would be necessary for direct intervention and characteristics of the cyberbystander (e.g., affiliation with victim), situation (e.g., nature of the original cyberemergency), and cybervictim (e.g., communication indicating specific assistance requested or needed) will determine direct intervention outcomes. conclusions the bystander intervention model appears at first glance to be a legitimate model to use to explain cyberbystanders’ reactions to cyberbullying. there are important differences, however, between onand offline environments, namely anonymity, disinhibition (and resulting deindividuation), viral nature, limitless boundaries, and asynchronicity. incorporating the three main principles of latané’s social impact theory at key points of the bystander intervention model can account for or at least test the effects of these differences on cyberbystander intervention. there are multiple platforms and media in which this specific point could be tested. other experiments examining perceptions of these affordances, perception of the number of other cyberbystanders, and more investigation into moral disengagement strategies of non-intervention would continue to gauge the proposed model’s stability. figure 1 proposed cyberbystander intervention model references dillon, k. p. & bushman, b. j. (2015). unresponsive or un-noticed?: cyberbystander intervention in an experimental cyberbullying context. computers in human behavior, 45, 144-150. dillon, k. p. (2015, forthcoming). help me help you: the effects of victim communication on cyberbystander intervention in cyberbullying. paper to be presented in the human communication & technology division at the nca annual conference, las vegas. fischer, p., krueger, j.i., greitemeyer, t., vogrincic, c., kastenmüller, a., frey, d., heene, m., wicher, m., kainbacher, m. (2011). the bystander effect: a meta-analytic review on bystander intervention in dangerous and non-dangerous emergencies. psychological bulletin, 137, 517-537. latané, b., & darley, j. m. (1970). the unresponsive bystander: why doesn’t he help? englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall. suler, j. (2004). the online disinhibition effect. cyberpsychology & behavior, 7, 321326. walther, j. b. (1992). interpersonal effects in computer-mediated interaction: a relational perspective. communication research, 19, 52-90. ybarra, m. l., & mitchell, k. j. (2004). online aggressor/targets, aggressors, and targets: a comparison of associated youth characteristics. journal of child psychology and psychiatry, 45, 1309-16 selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 ����he����k���b� �������he������of����k���b������h� �ngines ���� ��������� ���� ��� ����������� � �������� �� �������������������������� �� ��������������� ����������� �������������������������� ����������� �������� ��� ���������� !��"##��$�$�� �#%!�� ����&� � ���'�� �������(������������������� ���������� '�������������� ������������� � ��'�'����������� �� � �� �)�����'����' ����� � ������ �� �)�� ������������ ������ ��������� �� ��� ���������� ��� ���������� ������������������*��� ������������� ������ � �� ������ ��+�����,� � �����,��������$��-������.'(����� �������������� ����� � �������������' ��� �������/����������� �������������� ����� ����/��� ��� �� /��� � ����������������� ������������������� ���+����� ����� ����������������� �� �� �� ������ � ������������ ������������� ��� ��� ��/�������� ������ ��������� ���� '����������������� '������������������ ��������� ������0������#�����������1'� �� �� ��� �����1�� � ���������2�� ����������������� �� ����� �� ����������������������� ����������,������������ ����������������,� ���� ���� �������������������������� ������ �����, ���������� �����������3 �� ��������������� �������� ����� ������� �4�� ������,�'��'� ������������������ ����������� �������������������������� ��-��� ��'�����'������� ������ ����������' ��/�� ����������������������� ������������� '������������������������ ������������������������� ��������������� ����������� ����5 ����� � ������� ���'������������ ����� ��������������,������������ ������ ������� ���������� ����� ����� ������������������������ � �������'������ ������� �����������-���������� ���� ���� ������ ����� ���������2��6 ��-���������'�����'������� ������� ���� ��������� ����1��������� ����� '�� �� ��������� ����������' �� ���������������� ���� ���������� �������� �� ��� �������������� ������������� ��������� ������ ������������ �� ��������� ������� � 7� ������ ����������������� ������ ���������������������2����� � ����� ����'������� ��,�� ��� � ������������ ���������� ���������������������� '��������������������'��'������� � ������������� � ���� �������2������������ ����� ������ ���������� ������ ��'������ ��-��� ������� ���� ���������� ��������������� � �� ���� � ��� ������� '����� ������ '�����'������� ������������������������� ��� ������������������ ������ ����� ������ ���� ���� ����������' ����� ������ ���� ��� ������ ���������'���������������� � #���� ����"���������7$7(+�8�����9�����.:;<����������=6>(����������� ����� �������������������� � ������� ������������$�'���'�� ���������7�,9�.:;<+�����;?���7������"�����������������7 ������������ ,��������9� ������� ��*�������8�� ���+�7�,9��9����� ������ ����'+@@ '������������ ,��� ��'��'� ���������� ����������������� ���������������� ������������� �� ������ �������������+��������������������������������������������� ���������������� ���� ������� *�������5 � ������ ��'��������� �������������'������������ ������� � ������ ��'����'�'���� ���������������������������� ��������������������� ����������� �� ����,��� ������������ ������ ������������� � �������������'��������-��� ������� ���� ���������� ���������������� � �� ������������ �������� ������������ ������'�����'������� �������� ���������� �������� �1��� ��������������������������� ��������������������� ��8� ������ ���� 5 ��� ������������� ����������' ��������� � ��� �������-��� +����� � �������������� �������� ������������ � �� �� ���!�����" �������� "�#��������"�� ����"� ��� �������� �������'� ���������� ������� � ���� ������������������������ ����������' ����������� ��������� ��/����1� '��������������� ����������� ��������������������� �������� �������� ���� ��������������������� ����� ������������� ��������� ��� (������ ������������������������������������������� ������������������ ������ �� �� ��2�� �4��' ��������� ����������� ���� ��,�������� �������� '������� ����� ������������������ � ���������������� �������1�� � ���� �����'����������� ���� ������ �2��������������� �������������� � � ������� ����� ������������������ ����5 ����� ���������� ����� #������� ������� ��� ���������� �� ����� ���� ���� ��� ��� ������������������ ��� ����������'� ���������� ����������������������� ����������� ������ �� �������'������ ��������� '�������(����� � ����������'� ��� ����� '����������������'������� � ����� � ����������������� ����������� ���� ����������� ������ ������������ ������������������ ������������������������������� �������,��������� �� ������������������������������� '�� ���� /������������ �����������4�� ���������������������� +��� � ���6���6 ���� ���������3��,� ���������� ��� ����� �������4�� ������������������� ����������� �� 3�, ����������������� � ���������������������� �������������� ���� ���'�������� 3�,����� � �� ���������������� ������ ������������������ ������������� �� ��������� ���������������' ������������� ���� ���������5 ��������� ����'������ ������������ ���� ����������� ������� ��� ������������ ���� ��������� ��������������5 ����������� ���� � 9������������������� �'��� � ������ ������������ � ��'���� �� ������������������ � ������� ������,��� ������ ��1'��������� � ���������� ������������� ����������� ����� � ��� ������ ���������� ����� ���� ������������ ������ �����'������� ��,���� ��������� �� �� ������� ������ ��'������������������������ ����������' ��� ��� ���������������������� � ������������������������������ �������9� '���������� �� ������ ��,� �������������������� ������� ������ ����������� ���@�������� ����������� ������������� ������ '��1����������� �������������������� ������������� ���������������������� 5 ��������������� ������ � �� �������� ���������� ������� ��������� ��,�������1'�������������� ������������ ��,�������������� ��� ������=��� ��������������'������ ��.a� ���� ����'������'������ �� �������������������� �� ��� �� �����.'��������������/��������� ������� ������������������������� ��������������'���� ������� ��,��������� �������� ������������ �� �'���������������� � ���������� �������� ����� ����������� �����,� ���� ���������� ������������ ������ ��������� �����'����� ������������� ����� ���'������� �������(������������������������������������������� �� ��� � ���� ��� (�� �������������������� ��������������'������ � ���������� ������ ������� 5��������� ���� ������ ����������������������������������� ���������1� ��� ��������������'������� ������ ��� �� � �������������� ������������������ ������ ����������� ��� ���� ������(������� ��������� ���������'� ����������������� ��������'������������� ��� ���� �� ����������������������� ������� ��������������'������ ����� ������������������ ����5 � ���� �������'���������������� ���� ����� ��������� ��������������� ��� ������ �� �� ���� ����������''��'��������������������������������������������������� �������� �������������� ������������ �'������� �� � ������������� ����� ���������������� (� ,����� �������������������������� ����������� �����''������������������ ������������� �����������������������6�� ���'������� ������������ ����������������� ��� �� ����� �� ������������'���������� ���' ����������������,� ���� ������������� ����,���������� ����� ����������1'������������������ ���� ����� *���� �����������.::>(�������������������������� ������������ ��������������� ������� � �!���"�#!�����$���������b�� �� ����$�� � *���������$���;ccd(����������������!��! ���� ��!�����������"������ ���������� ��! ���e��� f���+�"��� ����b�� �� ����$�� � "��� ����0��8���.:;a(��#�� � $������ $�%���������%� $���"���������"���������� ����"��!���e���f�����ef+�g�� �� #��� ���� ��"���;cc=(�� �������������� ���+�#��������������� ������������''������ �� ������"����&����������'�(��%��)*�d(��=?;)<;:� ������� ���;c?>(��������"�����������"������!������������� � �����(����������"���8��9���� h�"��������������� �(��*�������i�!�����+�b�� �� �������"����������'�� � selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016     suggested  citation  (apa):  vickery,  j.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  #yesallwomen  (have  a  collective  story  to   tell):  feminist  hashtags  and  the  intersection  of  personal  narratives,  networked  publics,  and  intimate   citizenship.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  conference  of  the  association  of  internet   researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.     #yesallwomen  (have  a  collective  story  to  tell):  feminist   hashtags  and  the  intersection  of  personal  narratives,   networked  publics,  and  intimate  citizenship   jacqueline  ryan  vickery,  university  of  north  texas      “the  personal  is  political”  is  a  familiar  (though  often  misunderstood)  battle  cry  of   second  wave  feminism.    as  part  of  the  women’s  liberation  movement  (wlm)  of  the   1960s,  women  would  come  together  to  share  personal  stories  of  oppression,  often   related  to  the  body  and/or  sex;;  in  other  words,  stories  that  were  related  to  their  private   experiences  and  intimate  lives.  although  critics  dismissed  this  mode  of  engagement  as   apolitical  or  as  merely  therapeutic,  the  goal  was  always  intentionally  and  deliberately   political.  the  sessions  were  pivotal  in  helping  women  collectively  identify  their  own   experiences  as  part  of  male  supremacy  and  systems  of  oppression,  rather  than  their   own  individual  failures.  as  hanisch  (1970)  explained  in  her  formative  essay,  the  sharing   of  common  experiences  allowed  women  to  stop  blaming  themselves  for  their  own   oppression.  she  writes,  “one  of  the  first  things  we  discover  in  these  groups  is  that  the   personal  problems  are  political  problems.  there  are  no  personal  solutions  at  this  time.   there  is  only  collective  action  for  a  collective  solution”  (p.  4).  the  stories  were  intimate   and  individual,  yet  together  they  worked  to  reveal  the  collective  aspects  of  oppression   and  served  as  a  basis  for  collective  action  and  social  change.     similarly,  in  this  paper  i  analyze  feminist  hashtags  on  twitter  as  a  way  to  consider  how   personal  experiences  function  as  political  and  collective  within  networked  publics.  boyd   defines  networked  publics  as,  “publics  that  are  restructured  by  networked  technologies.   as  such,  they  are  simultaneously  (1)  the  space  constructed  through  networked   technologies  and  (2)  the  imagined  collective  that  emerges  as  a  result  of  the  intersection   of  people,  technology,  and  practice”  (2010,  p.  39).  my  research  contributes  to  a  growing   body  of  work  analyzing  the  potential  for  participatory  activist  practices  within  networked   publics  (harris,  2008;;  jenkins,  ito,  &  boyd,  2016;;  rheingold,  2009).  and  this  paper  fits   with  the  conference  theme  by  examining  the  discourses  –  or  “rules”  –  that  shape   women’s  participation  and  collective  activism  in  networked  publics.     networked  publics  afford  young  women  in  particular  opportunities  to  participate  in  non-­ conventional  political  and  activist  spheres  (harris,  2008).  i  demonstrate  how  women   sharing  individual  narratives  and  personal  experiences  in  online  spaces  can  function  in   a  similar  way  as  the  wlm  meetings  of  the  1960s  –  but  networked  publics  afford  greater   diversity,  inclusion,  and  scalability.  specifically,  i  analyze  how  the  socio-­technical   affordances  of  twitter  –  as  a  networked  public  –  provides  opportunities  for  girls  and   women  to  share  intimate  stories  alongside  and  within  the  context  of  collective  hashtags.   through  an  analysis  of  several  feminist  hashtags,  i  argue  that  girls’  and  women’s   participation  in  networked  publics  is  paradoxically  and  simultaneously  private  and   public,  personal  and  political;;  and  that  through  the  creation  of  new  subjectivities   collective  feminist  storytelling  functions  as  part  of  “intimate  citizenship”  (plummer,   2003).     when  girls  and  women  share  private  stories  in  networked  publics  via  collective   hashtags  they  reveal  the  relationship  between  their  private  lives  and  the  larger  public   institutions  and  discourses  that  shape  their  subjectivities.  in  order  to  understand   personal  narratives  –  and  how  individuals  choose  to  tell  their  stories  –  such  stories  must   always  be  considered  within  the  broader  powers  and  institutions  that  construct  and   shape  subjectivities.  the  public  regulation  of  the  female  body  –  via  discourse  and   institutions  -­  is  always  political,  yet  simultaneously  inherently  personal.  likewise,   women’s  rejection  and  negotiation  of  these  regulations  is  also  always  personal,  yet   collectively  also  political.     this  paper  analyzes  collective  feminist  hashtags  that  girls  and  young  women  have   employed  as  a  way  to  speak  out  and  speak  back  to  the  public  discourses  and   institutions  that  shape  and  regulate  their  bodies  and  their  intimate  subjectivities.  in  order   to  place  boundaries  around  the  plethora  of  available  hashtags,  i  narrow  my  focus  to  the   inclusion  of  english-­language  hashtags  that  intentionally  invite  girls  and  women  to   participate  and  reflect  on  the  unique  gendered  experiences  of  female  subjectivity  via   storytelling  and  anecdotal  narratives.  i  only  include  hashtags  that  organically  originated   in  response  to  a  social  or  media  injustice  and/or  were  created  by  an  individual  activist  or   advocacy  organization.  this  is  to  the  exclusion  of  female-­centric  hashtags  that  have   been  created  as  part  of  advertising  campaigns.  lastly,  i  only  focus  on  twitter  as  a   specific  networked  public.  although  many  of  these  hashtags  have  also  been  used  in   other  spaces  such  as  instagram  and  tumblr,  the  affordances  of  twitter  facilitate   conversations,  ephemeral  subjectivities,  temporal  participation,  and  an  amplification  of   participants’  voices  that  are  conducive  to  analyzing  the  relationship  between   technology,  intimate  experiences,  and  the  political.       i  have  organized  the  hashtags  that  fit  the  criteria  into  four  categories  that  all  reflect  the   ways  in  which  public  discourses  and  institutions  aim  to  regulate  the  bodies  and   experiences  of  women:  rape,  domestic  violence,  sexual  (street)  harassment,  and  bodily   autonomy.  the  rape  category  includes  the  hashtags  #rapecultureiswhen  and   #survivorprivilege;;  the  domestic  violence  category  includes  #whyistayed  and   #whyileft;;  sexual  (street)  harassment  includes  #yesallwomen,  #youoksis,  and   #everydaysexism;;  and  the  bodily  autonomy  category  includes   #iammorethanadistraction,  #shoutyourabortion,  #birthwithoutfear,   #growingupagirl,  and  #1in3.     i  explore  how  each  of  these  hashtags  invokes  gendered  subjectivities  in  ways  that   transgress  the  boundaries  of  the  personal  and  private  spheres  for  political  purposes.  as   harris  (2008)  writes,  “these  activities  may  provide  less  intimidating,  more  familiar  modes   for  doing  politics  and  for  acting  as  citizens.  they  also  provide  opportunities  for  placing   matters  on  a  public  agenda  that  are  not  formally  political,  but  are  at  the  heart  of   contemporary  issues”  (p.  492).  while  the  act  of  sharing  one’s  story  may  indeed  be   therapeutic,  the  goal  of  the  hashtags  is  not  to  find  personal  solutions,  but  rather  to  raise   collective  awareness  about  systems  of  oppression.  the  political  focus  on  the  (female)   body  -­  as  a  site  of  (male)  violence,  desire,  and  control  –  positions  this  mode  of  collective   activism  within  the  sphere  of  intimate  citizenship  (plummer,  2003).  similar  to  simmon’s   (2008)  work,  which  argues  that  blogs  are  “indicative  of  a  shift  where  the  political  is   increasingly  framed  in  terms  of  the  personal”  (p.  42),  i  argue  that  personal  storytelling   via  collective  hashtags  demands  public  attention.  the  use  of  the  hashtags  –  and  the   stories  attached  to  them  –  can  shape  public  discourse,  media  narratives  and   representations,  and  effectuate  social  change.  twitter  hashtags  invite  women  to   participate  in  a  more  temporal,  ephemeral,  contextual  manner  –  that  is,  to  articulate  a   particular  subjectivity  –  which  is  made  visible  in  that  moment,  both  individually  and   collectively.  the  goal  is  not  to  claim  victimhood  or  merely  highlight  individual   experiences,  but  rather  is  to  challenge  and  change  systems  of  power  and   representation  vis-­à-­vis  the  collective  sharing  of  personal  stories  within  networked   publics.   references     boyd,  d.  (2010).  social  network  sites  as  networked  publics:  affordances,  dynamics,  and   implications.  in  zizi  papacharissi  (ed.)  networked  self:  identity,  community,  and   culture  on  social  networking  sites.  new  york:  routledge,  pp.  39-­58.       harris,  a.  (2008).  young  women,  late  modern  politics,  and  the  participatory  possibilities   of  online  cultures.  journal  of  youth  studies,  11(5)  pp.  481-­495.       hanisch,  c.  (2006;;  1970).  the  personal  is  political.  notes  from  the  second  year   women’s  liberation.     jenkins,  h.,  ito,  m.,  and  boyd,  d.  (2016).  participatory  culture  in  a  networked  era.   malden,  ma:  polity  press.       plummer,  k.  (2003).  intimate  citizenship:  private  decisions  and  public  dialogs.  montreal   &  kingston:  mcgill-­queen’s  university  press.       rheingold,  h.  (2008).  using  participatory  media  and  public  voice  to  encourage  civic   engagement.  in  lance  bennett  (ed.)  civic  life  online.  cambridge,  ma:  the  mit   press,  pp.  97-­118.       simmons,  t.  (2008).  the  personal  is  political?  blogging  and  citizen  stories,  the  case  of   mum’s  army.  information  polity  (13),  pp.  41-­50.     microsoft word kiel-dead online-dead online.doc selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 kiel, p. (2015, october 21-24). un-controlled presence: practices of post-mortem interaction. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. dead online: practices of post-mortem digital interaction paula kiel london school of economics and political science abstract since their nascence communication technologies have been associated with death, triggering fantasies of dismantling boundaries between death and everyday life. this paper, examines recently emerging digital platforms designed to enable post-mortem interactions as a site in which social meanings of death and the dead are formed, negotiated and modified. using a multimodal analysis of websites dedicated to postmortem interaction, this paper aims to answer the questions: how are practices of postmortem digital interaction constructed through websites designed to enable postmortem digital interaction? and what do these constructions contribute to the contemporary social construction of death? introduction communication technologies have long been associated with death. electronic media in particular have repeatedly triggered fantasies regarding the presence of the dead in everyday life (sconce, 2000). most recently, digital platforms such as www.deadsoci.al, www.lifenaut.com and www.liveson.org, open up new possibilities for post-mortem forms of interaction that potentially allow an active participation of the dead through digital media. for example, by allowing the dead to “send” emails, “post” on social media networking sites and even “engage” in conversations. in so doing, these platforms arguably challenge conceptions of death as stillness, and the association of the dead with silence and absence. by empirically exploring websites and internet apps designed for users to plan and prepare for future digital interactions that will occur after their death, this project aims to answer the questions: how are practices of post-mortem digital interaction constructed through websites designed to enable post-mortem digital interaction? and what do these constructions contribute to the contemporary social construction of death? contemporary construction of death and communication technologies throughout modernity, the social construction of death was characterised by a tension: a desire to eliminate and remove death from everyday life; and a continuous and everlingering presence attributed to the deceased in daily life.i this tension was manifested through practices of sequestration (elias, 1985; mellor & shilling, 1993; walter, 1994) on the one hand; and what i regard to as practices of controlled presence, on the other. in between these conflicting desires, communication technologies have repeatedly triggered fantasies of dismantling boundaries between death and everyday life. modern communication technologies continually challenged such practices of confining the presence of death and the dead, while enabling them new forms of both elimination as well as inclusion.ii lately, the relationship between digital media and death has become a focus of attention for scholars. some scholars suggest that such practices (as above mentioned) of confinement of the extents and forms of presence of death and the dead in everyday life are being challenged. out of this emerging field of research, i offer to focus on the notion of digital remains (see for instance bollmer, 2013; kasket, 2012; lingel, 2013; mccallig, 2013; sherry, 2013). specifically, within the field of digital remains, i am interested in websites and internet applications that enable users to plan and prepare for their digital presence and activity for after their inevitable death at some point in the future. using these websites and apps, users can be digitally active after they die in different ways including: sending emails, posting on facebook and on twitter, deleting their email or social media accounts and engaging in conversation with surviving loved ones through a digital avatar. this emerging phenomenon provides a potentially extreme case of the ways in which some of the aspects of the contemporary social construction of death are potentially being re-configured. methodology my method of data collection and analysis is informed by two principles: 1) maximum variation and; 2) grounded theory. since the phenomenon of post-mortem digital interaction is novel, there is a paucity of cases that exemplify it. maximum variation (dilaver, 2014; flyvbjerg, 2001) is a strategy for case selection in which choice of a small number of cases is made on the principle of maximizing their diversity enabling a rich description of the cases. the grounded theory approach (glaser & strauss, 1967; strauss & corbin, 1998) is an analysis strategy enabling categories to emerge inductively during the process of analysis. since there is little prior knowledge about the attributes of the cases, a grounded theory approach will enable for the categories to emerge from the field of research itself. the aim of this section is to provide an analysis of available platforms designed to enable post-mortem digital interaction. by such platforms i refer to websites and internet applications that specifically offer users the means to manage, plan and prepare future digital social activity that will occur after their passing. an initial web-search will be run on 4 search engines: google, yahoo! search, bing and duckduckgoiii using key words such as: “digital afterlife” and “social media after death”. results leading to specialized websites will be collected. magazine articles and technological blog posts featured in the results will also be searched for additional reference to relevant websites and search keywords. the following filters will be used to refine the corpus: 1) seeking platforms that challenge practices of controlled presence by only selecting ones that enable a deceased person’s digital identity to actively participate in socio-digital interaction.iv 2) choosing platforms that encourage users for durable online activity rather than one-time interactions. 3) applying the principle of maximum variation in order to analyze a diverse range of websites to gain a rich characterization of this phenomenon. conclusion death-related use of digital media is spreading with digital technologies’ increasing permeation into everyday activities. the increasing number of digital “ghosts” is making questions regarding the idea of digital remains of growing relevance and importance. consequently, death-related digital practices, specifically regarding post-mortem digital presence, are becoming a focus of concern for both individuals as well as institutions. by addressing a phenomenon within the field of digital remains that is scarcely regarded by the existing literature, this research contributes to the understanding of how death and the dead are mediated in the digital age. notes i this project focuses on death as a personal experience. that is, the possibility to experience post-mortem digital interaction, with a specific person with whom the survivor has a personal acquaintance. ii see for instance: barthes, 1981; mulvey, 2006; ruby 1995; zelizer, 2010. iii the duckduckgo search engine doesn’t track its users, therefore the search results do not depend on previous search or other user preference and information as can happen on other websites. references bollmer, g. d. (2013). millions now living will never die: cultural anxieties about the afterlife of information. the information society, 29(3), 142–151. dilaver, o. (2014). making sense of innovations: a comparison of personal computers and mobile phones. new media & society, 16(8), 1214–1232. elias, n. (1985). the loneliness of the dying. oxford: blackwell. flyvbjerg, b. (2001). making social science matter: why social inquiry fails and how it can succeed again. cambridge: cambridge university press. glaser, b. g., & strauss, a. l. (1967). the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. chicago: aldine publishing. kasket, e. (2012). continuing bonds in the age of social networking: facebook as a modern-day medium. bereavement, 31(2), 62–69. lingel, j. (2013). the digital remains: social media and practices of online grief. the information society, 29, 190–195. mccallig, d. (2013). facebook after death: an evolving policy in a social network. international journal of law and information technology, 1–34. mellor, p. a., & shilling, c. (1993). modernity, self-identity and the sequestration of death. sociology, 27(3), 411–431. sconce, j. (2000). haunted media: electronic presence from telegraphy to television. haunted media: electronic presence from telegraphy to television. durham: duke university press. sherry, k. (2013). what happens to our facebook accounts when we die? probate versus policy and the fate of social-media assets postmortem. pepperdine law review, 40(1), 185–250. strauss, a., & corbin, j. (1998). basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. thousand oaks, ca: sage. walter, t. (1994). the revival of death. new york: routledge. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16 th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 a no longer imagined community: the visibility of the online mug shot sarah jackson young arizona state university in phoenix, az, maricopa county’s sheriff joe has a reputation for being “america’s toughest sheriff” (about, 2015). one of his programs his website admittedly describes as controversial is the “mugshot of the day” where the maricopa county sheriff’s office (mcso) posts all mug shots of those being booked for arrest at mcso for the public to vote on. mcso describes this webpage as having a million hits a day and as “one of the most visible law enforcement sites on the internet.” this site helps illuminate a growing phenomenon of online mug shots, a phenomenon which constitutes offenders in new ways through assemblages of information. gone are the isolated mug shots of ten most wanted; on sites like mcso, all offenders are linked in a database, searchable by crime and viewable by the public. in this way, online mug shots create a visible community of offenders that did not previously exist before the internet. in the case of mcso’s site, the rationale is that more eyes on more criminals will ultimately lead to a closer, safer community. this conclusion of safety can be contested however, and i argue that although the mcso’s online mug shot program may have redefined our collective imaginary of the criminal through increased visibility, while it aims to unite the community, it can also be seen as fragmenting it and making it less sustainable. mug shots have historically been used to define the criminal. the mug shot calls a criminal into being and solidifies the offender as an offender once a photo is taken. together with a database, those documented become known as criminals and are henceforth recognized as such. according to finn (2009), mug shots were designed with the same essential objective of the bentham’s panopticon: visibility. for bentham, the panopticon was a tower designed to monitor criminals. for mug shots, the photos were part of system where criminal monitoring could also take place. once these photos and accompanying biographies were obtained, they could be shared between law enforcement agencies to ensure that the mobile criminal could always be under the watch of the law wherever he/she went. the field of surveillance studies (which examines visibility) goes beyond just the use of bentham, though. a different paradigm is that we are in a control society (deleuze, 1992), and this theory is built on the idea that contemporary power (i.e., corporations and capital) circulates in ways that are no longer tethered to place. this creates splintered and dispersed networks of people (nadesan, 2013, p. 5). lyon (2007) adds, “whereas foucault had theorized surveillance in the context of confined fixed spaces like the panopticon, deleuze proposed that such old sites of confinement were no longer the only or the primary sites of surveillance” (p. 60). surveillance then is something that can occur in almost any place. suggested citation (apa): young, s. (2015, october 21-24) a no longer imagined community: the visibility of the online mug shot. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the internet has brought surveillance to a wider audience and contributed to a splinted and diverse group of people. before the internet, mug shot photos may have been confined to police stations. as media technologies such as mass printing or broadcast grew, some select mug shots may have moved to a broader audience such as those looking at post office bulletin boards or television viewers of shows such as america’s most wanted. these mug shots were for the most part limited to the top ten worst criminals or specific offenders deemed especially heinous or a threat to the community; however, the functionality of internet allows all mug shots to be distributed to a wider audience. especially in the case of mcso, now everyone arrested at mcso is documented on the site, and anyone interested in viewing arrestees from transportation violations to homicide can access the site and filter to their desired offense. ultimately then, this platform creates a new, visible model of a criminal community that didn’t exist so freely for the public. rather than the traditional media model which downplays white collar crime and overplays violent crime (barak, 1994), the online mug shot distribution theoretically highlights all offenders involved in criminal activities to a wider audience. the larger visibility of this discernible criminal is supposedly a value for mug shots. according to arpaio, “more eyes on arrestees may result in more leads to criminal investigators” (hermann, 2011). community members begin to know who committed what crime, and this supposedly will make a person more engaged with law enforcement which ultimately leads to a safer community. according to busted!, a commercial aggregator of law enforcement information, being able to locate criminal information supposedly makes citizens “become aware about crime in their neighborhoods” which creates more trust and builds stronger ties (b!, n.d.). as the community becomes more aware of their surroundings, they find the need to be informed community members which supposedly results in lower crime rates. however, i counter this claim; more visibility of criminals does not necessarily mean the community is safer, especially in a long-term sustainable context. according to raco (2007), safety is one requirement for a sustainable community. sustainably-safe places share a “sense of community identity and belonging” (p. 307), and they also support “tolerance, respect and engagement between people of diverse backgrounds.” unsustainable communities have lack a culture of association and ownership of public space, are intolerant, and divided in local politics. in the case of mcso, the ability to vote on the mug shot helps position the community as an unsustainable place. the mug shot of the day vote essentially places the criminal into the role of the other by positioning the criminal as the object of undesirability and as something to laugh at. this can be seen by the frequent winners who are often the most extreme-looking offender (see figure 1). in this view then, by creating the outsider, the criminal is no longer part of the community, and instead of strengthening the community and bringing the community together, it is essentially fragmenting the community by breaking it apart. the criminal moves into a position of the other and a community outsider. communities adopting an outsider position for the criminal tend to have “increase[d] punitive attitudes and support for punitive policies like increased sentence lengths” (leverentz, 2012, p. 349) which may ultimately produce higher incarceration rates, rates which are found to “have the unintended consequences of destabilizing neighborhoods” (klofas & porter, 2011, p. 123). (figure 1, mcso, n.d.) survey results help refute this claim. while only a small sample, i surveyed eighteen people anonymously to answer questions about their feelings towards the site. they looked at 109 mug shots pages from 10/25/14 to 2/2/15. the following information represents some of the questions asked of the respondents. question results these pictures make me feel [more empathetic/less empathetic/no change] towards those i consider criminals. 11.11% more empathetic 50% less empathetic 38.89 % no change do you think these individuals are involved in their communities or politics? 0% yes 61.11% no 38.89% don’t know do you think they have college degrees? 0% yes 33.33% no 66.67 % don’t know do you think those depicted are criminals? 38.89% yes 5.56% no 55.56% can’t say the people in the mug shots are____. 22.22% guilty 0% innocent 77.78% unknown would you be friends with these individuals? 5.56% yes 33.33% no 22.22% maybe 38.89% can’t say if you saw someone you know on this page, would it change your opinion of that person? 22.22% yes 27.78% no 27.78% maybe 22.22% can’t say overall, while this is a small study that would need to be expanded for more reliable results, many of the questions do start to point to the criminal being more of an outsider. for instance, fifty percent of the respondents felt less empathetic to those they consider criminals after looking at the photos, and approximately sixty-one percent believed that these individuals were not involved in their communities or politics. while each question doesn’t offer definitive results, it does raise the question of the consequences of the mug shot program. so although the mcso’s online mug shot may have redefined our collective imaginary of the criminal by showcasing all types of crimes which are searchable and assembled in the same place, the site and the ability to vote on the criminal may continue to reinscribe “the other” on the alleged offender’s body. while the idea is to have more eyes on criminals for safer communities, the othering of criminals can ultimately affect the way the community thinks about crime and punishment, and overall, this affects the community not just in the present, but in the longer, (un)sustainable future. future research which incorporates a larger number of survey respondents would be beneficial before drawing more solid conclusions. post script: in addition to the survey results, several other interesting bits of data came from the mug shots themselves. in an investigation of two hundred sixty mug shots from 5/5/15 to 6/10/15, several trends began to emerge. the below chart lists several categories for those nominated for the “mug shot of the day.” reason result attractive female 134/260 (≈52%) the bad person from the news 26/260 (10%) the people who like to smile 23/260 (≈8.8%) the person with the tattoos 20/260 (≈7.7%) the disheveled individual 17/260 (≈6.5%) amusing picture 10/260 (≈3.8%) each category also offers an additional avenue to explore, especially the largest category of the attractive female. this brings up many questions for feminist studies of surveillance to explore regarding how the body of the female arrestee is viewed on online mug shot sites. overall, this whole conversation raises a concern about online mug shot posting and asks for attention and consideration of this issue. references about: sheriff joseph m. arpaio. (2015). retrieved from http://www.mcso.org/ about/sheriff.aspx b! mugshots: how it works. (2015). retrieved from http://www.bustedmugshots.com /how-it-works barak, g. (1994). media, process, and the social construction of crime: studies in newsmaking criminology. garland publishing: new york. deleuze, g. (1992). postscript on the societies of control. october, 59, 1-7. finn, j. (2009). capturing the criminal image from mug shot to surveillance society. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. hermann, w. (2011, april 19). arpaio is using county jail's website for a 'mug shot of the day' contest. retrieved from http://archive.azcentral.com/community/phoenix/ articles/20110419sheriff-joe-arpaio-using-county-jails-website-mug-shot-daycontest.html klofas, j. m., & porter, j.l. corrections and sustainable communities: the impact on local populations." journal of the institute of justice and international studies 11, 117-28. leverentz, a. (2012). narratives of crime and criminals: how places socially construct the crime problem. sociological forum, 27(2), 348-71. lyon, d. (2007). surveillance studies: an overview. cambridge: polity. mcso: mugshots. (2015, february 23). retrieved from http://www.mcso.org/mugshot/# nadesan, m. h. (2008). governmentality, biopower, and everyday life. florence: routledge. raco, m. (2007). securing sustainable communities: citizenship, safety and sustainability in the new urban planning. european urban and regional studies, 14(4), 305-320. selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 politics, activism and trolling on the russian internet panel description in the years that have passed since the social media powered protest movement of 2011-2012 (lonkila 2017), the russian government has dramatically expanded its restrictions on the internet, while simultaneously consolidating its grip on traditional media (hutchings & tolz 2015; nocetti 2015; vendil pallin 2017). the internet, which long provided a space for alternative media and free speech to blossom, is becoming increasingly restricted by a growing corpus of legislation and expanding state surveillance. with legally ill-defined prohibitions on, e.g., offending the feelings of religious believers, propagating ‘non-traditional family values’ and disseminating ‘extremism’ in place, online freedom of speech in russia is at threat. indeed, according to a 2017 human rights watch report, “[s]tate intrusion in media affairs has reached a level not seen in russia since the fall of the soviet union” (2017: 1). meanwhile, the russian state continues to refine its skills in covertly manipulating online discourses, as it has quite successfully practiced it since the 2000s (stähle & wijermars 2014; zvereva 2016). at the same time, because of its transnational configuration, the internet continues to evade comprehensive state control and offers ever new opportunities for disseminating and consuming dissenting opinions. the russian new mediasphere develops rapidly, bringing forth innovative forms of publication and participation from the (g)local to the national level. developments over the past two years, including the series of anticorruption mass protests organised by opposition leader aleksei navalny’s anticorruption foundation, have demonstrated how online challenges to the status-quo are still able to gather momentum and create ‘real world’ political turbulence. the panel presents a multifaceted investigation of how the russian-language segment of the internet, often dubbed runet, is shaped by and gives shape to online politics and activism. how should we understand the particular complexities of these contestations between an increasingly authoritarian state and its citizens? how are these processes facilitated or hampered by the infrastructural conditions created by national and global media industries and internet companies? the first two papers examine the leading voices of political opposition and activism in russia: aleksei navalny and ksenia sobchak. whereas presidential candidate sobchak has been granted access to traditional media, unparalleled in recent memory for an ‘opposition’ candidate, social media play a central role in her presidential campaign. yet it is also on social media where the fiercest attacks on her credibility are launched. navalny, on the other hand, has been banned from running for president and is shunned by state-loyal media. using youtube as its main platform, his recent campaign against state corruption has been extremely successful in achieving political mobilisation. an important aspect of the politicization of runet, is its transnational impact. the third paper, examining the politics of wikipedia in the context of nationbuilding in belarus, sheds light onto how these tensions play out in those regions where russian-language and national language online spheres overlap and compete. in the case of belarus, the question of language tends to be interpreted in a directly political sense: challenging the dominance of russian at the expense of belarusian is read as an act of challenging russia’s influence in belarusian affairs. references human rights watch. 2017. online and on all fronts: russia’s assault on freedom of expression. july 2017, accessed 15 july 2017, https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/russiafoe0717_web_1.pdf. hutchings, stephen, and vera tolz. 2015. nation, ethnicity and race on russian television: mediating post-soviet difference. abingdon and new york: routledge. lonkila, markku. 2017. ‘social network sites and political governance in russia’. in authoritarian modernization in russia: ideas, institutions, and policies, edited by vladimir gel’man, 113-127. abingdon and new york: routledge. nocetti, julien. 2015. ‘russia's 'dictatorship-of-the-law' approach to internet policy’. internet policy review 4 (4). stähle, h., and m. wijermars. 2014. ‘forget memory. aleksei navalnyi’s livejournal and the memory discourse of the protest movement (2011-2012)’. digital icons: studies in russian, eurasian and central european new media (12): 105-128. vendil pallin, carolina. 2017. ‘internet control through ownership: the case of russia russia’. post-soviet affairs 33 (1): 16-33. zvereva, vera. 2016. ‘battlefield internet: young russian sns users and new-media state propaganda’. in east european youth cultures in a global context, edited by matthias schwartz & heike winkel, 293-315. basingstoke & new york: palgrave macmillan. https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/russiafoe0717_web_1.pdf is a woman’s place in the kitchen? internet memes and ksenia sobchak’s presidential campaign galina miazhevich cardiff university this paper explores online responses to ksenia sobchak’s presidential campaign since her announcement of officially running for russian presidency in 2018. sobchak (also known as the russian paris hilton) is one of the key female celebrity figures in russia. she gained her status both due to her entrepreneurship as a tv celebrity and her social capital as the daughter of the late mayor of st petersburg and ‘mentor’ to current president vladimir putin, anatoly sobchak. from a scandalous hostess of a reality tv show in 2004, ksenia gradually transitioned to the role of celebrity socialite and, increasingly, a political journalist and activist. the paper focuses on online reactions to sobchak’s presidential campaign (october 2017 march 2018) and includes a complimentary analysis of sobchak’s own use of online resources as a structural part of her official campaign under the motto ‘against everyone’. despite an overall negative stance towards feminism in russia, the number of women in politics has increased over the past 10 years (johnson 2016). at the same time, the combination of deeply-rooted patriarchal gender norms and the use of sexualization as a tool for political legitimation in putin’s russia (sperling 2014) leaves ‘virtually no opportunities to advocate for women’s interests’ (johnson 2016: 643). a survey conducted by independent pollster levada center (2017) indeed showed that around 53 percent of the population in russia do not envisage a female president in the next 10-15 years. in a society with deeply-rooted patriarchal gender norms, the appetite for women’s issues and gender equality thus remains minimal. sobchak’s own, at times contradictory, attempts to navigate these circumstances, oscillating between serving as the embodiment of the feminisation of resistance (e.g., her participation in the 20112012 anti-presidential protest movement and her current presidential campaign) and contributing to the trivialisation of emancipatory politics, for instance, while interviewing pussy riot (borenstein, 2013) complicate the inquiry further. analysing images from sobchak’s presidential campaign and the online reactions to her candidacy, the paper will shed light on the peculiarities of women’s political engagement in russia. from the very beginning of her campaign, sobchak has skilfully used social media to add immediacy to her campaign and target those demographics groups with new media consumption patterns (in particular, younger generation of voters). for instance, sobchak released her candidacy announcement via a youtube video (ruptly, 2017). the clip was filmed in the kitchen, perhaps, alluding to both the well-established stereotype of a woman’s place in russian society (the kitchen) and a poem by vladimir mayakovsky, that states that ‘every female cook can be taught how to manage a state’. famous russian tv presenter ivan urgant, host of the russian counterpart to american late-night shows (vechernii urgant, 2017), has produced a parody of the clip (using similar settings, attire and a blond wig). still images from both videos were immediately turned into an internet meme. while other oppositional candidates, in particular aleksei navalny, have been banned access to traditional media, sobchak was given access to a broad spectrum of key state media outlets to articulate her positions and campaign message. she appeared on numerous tv shows, including popular talk shows presented by andrei malakhov and vladimir solov’ev on leading tv channel rossiia 1 and vladimir pozner’s show on channel one, and she was interviewed by rt. sobchak used her prime-time appearances to dispel various allegations against her, such as that she is a tool of the kremlin (namely, that she made a deal with president putin and her candidacy serves only to allow him to claim russian elections embrace free speech and genuine competition) or that she is part of liberal wealthy elite detached from the masses. rather than analysing sobchak’s appearances in traditional media, the paper concentrates on the online dimension of the campaign and the responses it has solicited. the internet memes triggered by sobchak’s campaign and her own official campaign’s posters and images are explored with the help of semiotic analysis (berger, 2018). examining the images and captions, the paper decodes the meanings produced and interprets them within the russian socio-cultural context. the material is explored predominantly in regard to the gender dimension. the preliminary analysis of internet memes related to sobchak’s campaign demonstrates the prevalence of pronouncedly negative publicity that includes allusions to her reality tv career and socialite status, her looks, recent motherhood and her assertive communication style (which contradicts traditional models of femininity and tests the limits of patriarchal culture in russia). then, there is a play on the fact that she is the daughter of putin’s former friend, that frames sobchak’s campaign as a tool of the kremlin: her candidacy serves to create the illusion that russian elections embrace free speech and involve genuine competition. finally, the motto adopted by sobchak ‘i represent the vote against everyone’ – has proven controversial and as such constitutes a fruitful ground for analysis. despite the claim that her campaign is targeted against the political ‘establishment’, the motto effectively puts sobchak in opposition to various groups. in the long run, it is used against her and turned into a slogan ‘everyone against sobchak’. the outlook of the russian electorate, which treated sobchak with suspicion, dislike and irony throughout her campaign, has translated in voters’ support of less than 2 percent and the fourth place in the presidential race. references berger, a. a. 2018. media analysis techniques. london: sage. borenstein, e. 2013. pussy riot vs ksenia sobchak. round two. nyu jordan center for the advance study of russia. available at: http://jordanrussiacenter.org/news/pussyriot-vs-ksenia-sobchak-round-two/#.w61s6c2znp8 (accessed 25 september 2018). johnson, j. e. 2016. ‘fast-tracked or boxed in? informal politics, gender, and women’s representation in putin’s russia’. perspectives on politics 14 (3): 643-659. levada center. 2017. survey. available at: https://www.levada.ru/2017/03/03/rossiyane-protiv-zhenshhiny-prezidenta/(accessed 20 february 2018). https://www.levada.ru/2017/03/03/rossiyane-protiv-zhenshhiny-prezidenta/ ruptly, 2017, 18 october. russia: tv celeb ksenia sobchak announces entrance to presidential race. youtube. available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gjdalnjlz0 (accessed 25 september 2018). sobchak against everyone. n., d. sobchak’s campaign website. available at: https://sobchakprotivvseh.ru (accessed 25 september 2018). sobchak, k. online. n.d. wikipedia entry. available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ksenia_sobchak (accessed 25 september 2018). sperling, v. 2014. sex, politics, and putin: political legitimacy in russia. new york, ny: oxford university press. vechernii urgant, 2017, 19 october. pre-election video by ivan urgant for russian presidential race. available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kskjmn59omw&t=7s (accessed 25 september 2018). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ksenia_sobchak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kskjmn59omw&t=7s youtube and political activism in russia mariëlle wijermars university of helsinki after a five-year hiatus, russian citizens once again amassed on the streets in their thousands on 26 march 2017 to show their discontent with the federal government. whereas the 2011-2012 russian protest movement erupted in response to mass electoral fraud in the parliamentary elections (gabowitsch 2017) and was mobilized in considerable measure through social networking sites (lonkila 2017; reuter & szakonyi 2013), video sharing platform youtube played an essential role in mobilizing the recent series of anti-corruption rallies. this paper analyses the specific characteristics of the online cross-media campaigns organized by opposition leader and (banned) presidential candidate aleksei navalny’s anti-corruption foundation that served as the instigator for the march 2017 and subsequent protests. using navalny, who also played a major role in the 2011-2012 protest movement, as its case study, the paper seeks to explain the shift towards youtube as a central online platform for political activism in russia and shed light on how the platform enables and shapes particular forms of engagement and mobilization. scholarship on the political and societal aspects of youtube in russia has thus far examined the role of the platform in, e.g., public scandals (toepfl 2011); gendered activism (sperling 2012); and, pro-putin propaganda (fedor & fredheim 2017). the rise of youtube as primary platform for oppositional politics has yet to be comprehensively studied. the paper departs from the following set of research questions: what is the role of youtube as an enabling platform for political activism in russia; how should we understand its importance vis-à-vis and interconnections with other online platforms, social media and messaging services in facilitating political mobilization? to what extent can the rise of youtube-based activism in russia be explained by 1) developments in russian internet governance and regulatory mechanisms, and 2) global online media trends? to answer these questions, the paper focuses on the protest campaigns run by aleksei navalny and his anti-corruption foundation over the course of the years 20172018 (e.g., the investigations concerning prime minister dmitrii medvedev and the alleged ties between oligarch oleg deripaska and deputy prime minister and chief of staff of the russian government, sergei prikhodko). the paper first provides an overview of the online platforms used for expressing political criticism and organizing protest in russia from the early 2000s onwards, e.g., livejournal, vkontakte, facebook, twitter and telegram (greene 2014; koltsova & shcherbak 2014; nikiporets-takigawa 2014; podshibiakin 2010; toepfl 2017). it includes a brief discussion of the importance of sns and other platforms in the 20112012 protest movement (oates 2013; smyth & soboleva 2016). the section explores to what extent these shifts in preference for a given platform where connected to or necessitated by governmental measures restricting particular media or forms of online freedom of speech (soldatov 2017), or the state’s attempts at “proactively subverting and co-opting social media for their own purposes” (gunitsky 2015). for example, it can be argued that the so-called bloggers’ law (in force 2014-2017), which required online resources, including blogs, with more than 3000 daily visitors to register with media watchdog roskomnadzor and adhere to the restrictions effective for mass media in russia, may have negatively affected the political blogging scene in russia. the second part of the paper analyses the rise of youtube in russia and, in more general terms, the shift from bloggers (e.g., livejournal) to vloggers (e.g., youtube). it places these developments in the context of similar global trends. the section addresses the extent to which the russian government has (up until now, mostly unsuccessfully) sought to control the video sharing platform, and elucidates the fundamental differences between strategies for and effectiveness of russian internet controls that target national (e.g., leading sns vkontakte) and international media platforms (e.g., youtube, facebook, instagram). the role played by the major internet companies (google, facebook) in enabling or facilitating censorship is examined. the paper then delves more deeply into the case study of navalny’s youtube-based campaigns of 2017-2018. it includes an examination of how youtube functions within a wider interconnected network of platforms and apps (e.g., telegram, the foundation’s website, instagram, vkontakte) in these online cross-media campaigns. it analyses to what extent this multiplatform embeddedness effectively serves to counteract top-down censorship attempts. finally, the paper formulates expectations for the future functioning of the platform with regard to facilitating political activism and signals potential alternatives. in addition to analyzing the (legal) strategies used to prevent the spread of the investigation materials (e.g., website blocking, in formation removal requests), it reflects on the accusations pronounced by prominent russian political vloggers against youtube about failing to prevent that the platform’s anti-hate speech measures are abused to isolate oppositional content. references fedor, j., and r. fredheim. 2017. ‘we need more clips about putin, and lots of them: russia’s state-commissioned online visual culture’. nationalities papers 45 (2): 161181. gabowitsch, m. 2017. protest in putin's russia. cambridge: polity. gunitsky, s. 2015. ‘corrupting the cyber-commons: social media as a tool of autocratic stability’. perspectives on politics 13 (1): 42-54. greene, s.a. 2014. moscow in movement: power and opposition in putin's russia. stanford: stanford university press. koltsova, o., and a. shcherbak. 2015. ‘“livejournal libra!”: the political blogosphere and voting preferences in russia in 2011–2012’. new media & society 17(10): 1715– 1732. lonkila, m. 2017. ‘social network sites and political governance in russia’. in authoritarian modernization in russia. ideas, institutions, and policies, edited by v. gel’man: 113-127. london and new york: routledge. nikiporets-takigawa, g. 2014. ‘protests 2.0: through networked negative consolidation to participation: why russian manezhka cannot become ukrainian maidan’. russian journal of communication 6 (3): 246-259. oates, s. 2013. revolution stalled. the political limits of the internet in the post-soviet sphere. oxford and new york: oxford university press. podshibiakin, a. 2010. po zhivomu. 1999-2009. livejournal v rossii. moskva: kolibr. reuter, o.j., and d. szakony. ‘online social media and political awareness in authoritarian regimes’ british journal of political science 45 (1): 29-51. smyth, r., and i. soboleva. 2016. ‘navalny's gamesters: protest, opposition innovation, and authoritarian stability in russia’ russian politics 1 (4): 347-371. soldatov, a. 2017. ‘the taming of the internet’. russian social science review 58 (1): 39-59. sperling, v. 2012. ‘nashi devushki: gender and political youth activism in putin's and medvedev's russia’. post-soviet affairs 28 (2): 232-261. toepfl, f. 2011. ‘managing public outrage: power, scandal, and new media in contemporary russia’. new media & society 13 (8): 1301–1319. toepfl, f. 2017. ‘from connective to collective action: internet elections as a digital tool to centralize and formalize protest in russia’. information, communication & society 21 (4): 531-547. what nations do on the internet: the case of two belarusian wikipedia pages elena gapova western michigan university (usa) frequent travelers know that when one enters a new country, google’s home page changes by default: while the information one searches for may be in english (or another language), the page itself switches to the country’s language. the phenomenon can be seen as a manifestation of ‘banal nationalism 2.0’, if one adapts the term by m. billig (billig 1995) for the internet age. by banal nationalism, in the pre-digital era, billig meant “the ideological habits which enable the established nations of the west to be reproduced”. for nations to be imagined as communities, ‘reminders’ of nationhood are needed, and its banal reproduction is embedded in the routines of life, as national visibility is created through cultural markers that shape ‘national frameworks’. nationhood can be flagged with the hanging of national flags on holidays, representations of important national actors or memorable places on money, local festivals, etc. as cyberspace emerged as a new terrain where communities struggle for visibility and recognition, an outstanding question is what exactly nations ‘do’ on the internet to maintain group integration and national (re)semantization. like a flag hanging on a public building, online space needs flagging or “reminding” of shared images, representations, and myths. so how is ‘national flagging’ realized in the digital age, especially in “new” nations? how are “national spaces” flagged in cyberspace? by what means do national actors mark and assert their presence and distinction? these questions address the technologies of national affirmation rather than nationalist ideas per se. an appropriate starting point for exploring the issue could be delving into the process of digital nation building in the post-soviet region, where for the first time in history the formation of new nation states and a paradigm shift to the information age have been taking place simultaneously. one prominent manifestation of banal nationalism is the use of the national language (which historically has been codified through national academia, school system, and “print capitalism” in general). to explain how national visibility in the digital era may involve the hegemony of language, this presentation focuses on “the strange case” of two belarusian wikipedia(s). wikipedia, an online collaborative encyclopedia (knowledge system), has experienced tremendous growth since its inception in 2002. with openness (due to) the low cost of participation being one of its distinctive features (kittur 2007), it has often been highlighted as a success story of low-cost collaborative knowledge systems. according to theorists of ‘participatory culture’, it attracts a large number of people making small contributions and thus creating a product while driven by the idea of the ‘common good’. however, who does the work on wikipedia has important implications for the type of knowledge produced. some prominent wikipedians argue that a small number of users (administrators), rather than a large socially responsible crowd, are the driving force behind wikipedia. this can be the case with wikipedia versions in national languages in the post-soviet region, where the encyclopedia is (often) started by driven individuals with an agenda of asserting a national ‘cognitive universe’ to contest the one in russian, the regional lingua franca and, historically, the main language of knowledge production. according to my semi-structured interviews with administrators/activists of belarusian wikipedia, they flag nationhood online by doing three things. first, in order to cover information lacunas, they introduce nationally important topics and write entries on historical figures and events which are either not covered or scarcely covered in other encyclopaedias. second, some believe that any nation, to be fully autonomous intellectually, should have the whole repository of world knowledge available in its national language. to contribute to achieving this goal, they aspire to write (translate) as many articles on “non-national” topics in the belarusian language as they can. finally, some activist contributors seek to use wikipedia as a covert propagandistic vehicle through what they may see as “steering the biases” in the coverage of some topics. under the pretence of objectivity, they introduce their own visions, cite some facts and omit others, use particular vocabulary, etc. comparing the treatment of some ‘nationally sensitive’ topics in several wikipedia versions (e.g. russian, and belarusian) provides the material to prove this last claim. the belarusian case is especially representative, as the nation has two somewhat different (cyrillic) orthographic systems, taraszkiewitsa (after the linguist b. taraszkiewicz, who published an influential belarusian grammar textbook in 1918) and a more russified narkomauka (after narkom, i.e. a soviet government official) and, hence, two versions of belarusian wikipedia. the one in taraskiewitsa is much smaller, with only about 20 000 articles, compared to more than 150 000 in narkomauka. these two national online encyclopaedias demonstrate differences in the treatment of nationally sensitive historical topics (wwii collaboration; the establishment of the belarusian state; the meaning of socialist development etc.). the case of national wikipedia(s) as “propagandistic tools,” and especially of two competing national encyclopaedias, adds important evidence to the ongoing debate on the economies of online cooperation. according to one point view, the era of the internet and online communication ushered in unthinkable possibilities for the development of sharing economies and the production of the “common good” by multiple participants (benkler 2006). thus, wikipedia can be seen as not just another encyclopaedia put into cyberspace, but as a product of shared participation and knowledge management created with the goal of contributing to the public good. however, this view can be contested with the argument that is based on the concept of the “tragedy of the commons”. in the social sciences, the term is used to describe a situation that may arise in a shared-resource system, where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by spoiling that resource (hardin 1968). wikipedia can be seen as one example of the “tragedy of the commons”. ideally, it is a shared resource/knowledge system, which is expected to be objective and unbiased, because this is in the best interests of all users. however, knowledge is hardly ever objective, for reasons which have to do with the social conditions of its production, and the new national wikipedia(s), poised as they are to promote “national” visions and points of view, offer an example of this. references benkler, yochai. the wealth of networks: how social production transforms markets and freedom. yale university press, 2006. billig, michael. banal nationalism. sage publications, 1995. hardin, garret. “tragedy of the commons.” science, dec. 13, 1968. kittur, a., chi, ed et al. “power of the few vs. wisdom of the crowd: wikipedia and the rise of the bourgeoisie.” reserchgate.net, 2007. ruptly, 2017, 18 october. russia: tv celeb ksenia sobchak announces entrance to presidential race. youtube. available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gjdalnjlz0 (accessed 25 september 2018). 1 “410 gone” infocide in open content communities joseph reagle northeastern university u.s.a. joseph.2011@reagle.org abstract infocide, the purposeful retraction and deletion of an online identity, is accompanied by a confusing set of neologisms such as cybersuicide and information suicide. i distinguish and identify these variations as a form of cyberlanguage. i then explore the complexities of infocide in open content communities (e.g., python, wikipedia, ruby, debian and ubuntu) with respect to reasons, enactment, and community reactions. i find that infocides are often prompted by the exhaustion of maintaining an online life, by discontent towards an online community, and over privacy concerns that one’s real and online identifies have intersected. while some infocide is concise and complete, infocide is occasionally graduated, such as when one removes aspects of one's identity including advanced status and capabilities (e.g., as an administrator). because of the temptation to return to one's former identity, infocide is sometimes made irreversible, such as by changing one's account password to a random string. an equally interesting aspect of infocide is a community's reaction. i explore the responses of gratitude, sleuthing (attempting to identify more information, including motivation, about the exit), drama, and the preservation of contributions about the exit. keywords infocide; online communities; open content; online ethnography. 2 in october 2011 mark pilgrim, a well-known and widely respected web developer, committed infocide by removing his online presence and contributions. pilgrim was one of the most visible and respected persons in his community: he authored the famous dive into python book followed by other “dive into” books on web technology. these books, his popular blog and columns, and his software contributions, were online, freely available, and introduced many technologists to python and web development. hence, pilgrim’s disappearance and removal of his many contributions from the web was widely felt. (so much so that it was commented upon in the economist’s (2011) science and technology blog.) some, no doubt, aspire to be as prolific, helpful, and respected as pilgrim, but mark turned away from his own sterling (but perhaps heavy) legacy by simply removing it. and while his removal was total, it was also concise. one might receive any number of responses to a request for a webpage that are typified by numeric codes such as 200 ok (accompanied by the webpage) or 404 not found (and one sees an error message). when the community attempted to understand what had happened to pilgrim, they had little more than the server’s terse response: 410 gone. the web’s protocol specification states this means the resource is gone and will not be returning: it notifies “the recipient that the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the server owners desire that remote links to that resource be removed” (fielding et al., 1999). in this essay i explore the phenomenon of infocide through mark pilgrim's example and others. i show that while infocide has recently come to the fore of popular attention, the practice has existed online for decades. however, infocide’s present visibility is accompanied by a confusing set of neologisms; these terms – cybersuicide, information suicide, wiki mind wipe, etc. – are distinguished and identified as a form of cyberlanguage (gibbs, 2006, p. 30). i then explore the complexities of infocide in open content communities with respect to reasons, enactment, and community reactions. i find that infocides are often prompted by the exhaustion of maintaining an online life, by discontent towards an online community, and over privacy concerns that one’s real and online identifies have intersected. i also explore the responses of gratitude, sleuthing (attempting to identify more information, including motivation), drama, and preservation. 3 background and terminology in attempting to understand infocide one is confronted with what donna gibbs calls cyberlanguage, “a new language, with its own brand of quirky logic, which evolves with unprecedented speed and variety and is heavily dependent on ingenuity and humor” (gibbs, 2006, p. 30). for example, one aspect of this logic is to borrow and adapt “real world” idioms, such as using “internet suicide” to refer to alienating behavior: “man, you can’t go around posting the f-word everywhere, that’s internet suicide!”1 online suicide, cybercide, and infocide consequently, to understand this phenomenon we require a bit of lexicography. two sources most useful for understanding online culture (and its language) are urban dictionary and encyclopedia dramatica -two of the most historied and popular sites for documenting online and popular culture. urban dictionary, launched in 1999, is a repository for (over 6 million) definitions of contemporary popular culture, slang, and internet memes (urban dictionary, 2012). submissions, which include a definition and optional examples of usage, can be made by anyone providing an email address; other contributors then vote upon whether a definition ought to be accepted. one word can have multiple definitions; the term “urban dictionary” entry itself has nearly 400 at the time of writing (urban dictionary, 2012). encyclopedia dramatica, launched in 2004, can be thought of as wikipedia’s doppelganger: an online collaborative encyclopedia focusing on the humorous, snarky, and often cruel side of internet culture. like wikipedia, users can edit pages and these edits persist or are reverted by other contributors. these online sources, and others, provide a means of distinguishing related phenomena. ending one’s online presence and purposefully ending one’s life are not the same thing, though both have varied, and sometimes overlapping, behaviors and neologisms. suicides enacted online garnered some popular attention with the reporting 1 posted in http://www.urbandictionary.com as an example of the use of the expression by yet another cool dude, 2009. 4 of online suicide pacts in japan in 2000 and 2003 (ueno, 2000). a search of englishlanguage journal articles reveals that the availability of materials and support for suicide became salient to mental health scholars in the late 90s, as seen in suicide on the internet: a focus for nursing intervention? (baume, rolfe, & clinton, 1998), cybersuicide: the internet and suicide (alao, yolles, & armenta, 1999), and other publications (dobson, 1999, thompson, 1999). reports of online suicide, such as a woman killing herself by inhaling poisonous fumes while describing the process on facebook, continue to today (associated press, 2012). yet this is not the focus of this paper. even when one puts aside mediated or facilitated death, other neologisms speak of (a) an attention seeking exit from a community, (b) getting oneself banned (intentionally or not), and (c) and the purposeful retraction of one’s presence and contributions from the internet. attention seeking behavior is central to the urban dictionary’s first definition of internet suicide: “when someone in a forum, newsgroup, etc. says they are leaving (sometimes ‘and never coming back’), but actually wants to see how people react to their leaving. usually as the result of drama”2 infosuicide/infocide: disengaging from the internet via the deletion of all your publicly available information . however, this dramatic aspect is more precisely identified as a flounce at encyclopedia dramatica: a flounce post is when one must proclaim that they are leaving a community forever. these attention whores are nearly as amusing as those who use “deleting your livejournal” for attention. rather than quietly leaving an lj community, they feel they must leave a long ass, boring, nonsensical post explaining why they are so much more highly evolved than anyone else in the community. (encyclopedia dramatica, 2011) neither of these definitions speaks of removing one’s contributions, but this is captured in urban dictionary’s definitions of infocide and digital suicide: 3 2 posted in http://www.urbandictionary.com by shawnyshawn, 2007. 3 posted in http://www.urbandictionary.com by quadhome, 2011. . 5 digital suicide: deleting all or most of your information from the internet namely social networking sites such as your facebook, twitter, xanga accounts…. “[for example, frederick] committed digital suicide when he applied for a new job”. 4 given the promiscuity of cyberlanguage, infocide has also been adapted to sitespecific variations such as twittercide 5, removing one's twitter account, and facebook kevorkian6 method , a person who helps another commit “facebook suicide” by deleting an account and related information. wikicide is the neologism in the collaborative wiki space (encyclopedia dramatica, 2006) wherein exit is characterized as a “right to leave” but the excision of one person’s contributions has been likened to a “wiki mind wipe” (meatball, 2012). finally, one term not captured in these recent sources is "scribble". this was a feature of the well, a seminal messaging forum from the late 80s and early 90s in which a user could easily remove their postings; in one infamous incident it preceded a member’s suicide (hafner, 2001; rheingold, 2000, p. 21; turner, 2006, p. 145). hence, the practice of infocide has been around since the early years of online community; its present noteworthiness is simply a reflection of the net’s pervasiveness today. in any case, i use the term exit to speak of leaving a community and infocide as the further removal of one’s presence and contributions. any of these behaviors might be considered a flounce if done in a particularly dramatic and inflaming manner. this analysis is based upon a naturalistic inquiry (lincoln & guba, 1985; thomas & jones, 2006) into exit and infocide from web communities. i focus on the communities that are characterized by openness, voluntary contribution, and the production of free cultural products (reagle, 2004). that is, as a researcher, user, and peripheral participant of linux, ubuntu, debian, kde, python, web development, and 4 posted in http://www.urbandictionary.com by shitastic, 2010. 5 posted in http://www.urbandictionary.com by rtil, 2009. 6 posted in http://www.urbandictionary.com by beagle, 2011. 6 wikipedia, i collected every instance i encountered of public discourse about exit in these communities since 2006. collection and analysis was facilitated by thunderdell and busysponge, bibliographic and web scraping complements to mind mapping software (reagle 2009). venues of discourse include specific community related email lists and web sites (e.g., planet ubuntu), broader fora (e.g., reddit and hacker news), and face-toface meetings (e.g., wikimania). every-day encounters were complemented by targeted web searches so as to extend my understanding, (e.g., in the ruby community). my notes contain 100+ primary sources (e.g., email and blog postings) collected on this topic and these are the basis for the account i present. most of the sources were encountered in my everyday involvement with these communities and i make significant use of authors' own words. analysis consisted of iteratively coding (and recoding) the content of these sources into various categories, a type of ‘theoretical sampling’ or ‘emergent design’ (glaser & strauss, 1967, p. 72; lincoln & guba, 1985, p. 209). sources were first captured in a mindmap and categorized with busysponge via keywords such as "exit" and "forking". at the start of analysis, i printed all the sources and labeled each source (or paragraph within the text) in a free-form manner. these labels were then analyzed and used to restructure the mind map. subsequent sources were collected and placed within this structure until i repeated the process of analysis and restructuring. as a structure emerged i also updated the keywords available for initial capture. drafts of this analysis were shared with members of the community for corrections and feedback: i announced the draft on my blog (which is syndicated by some aggregators) and emailed a handful of heavily featured sources with requests for feedback. my intention, following clifford geertz, is to “uncover the conceptual structures that inform our subjects’ acts” (1973, p. 27) and construct a (tentative) system of analysis for the interpretation of infocide in these communities. results: motives and enactment there can be many, mixed, or even contradictory motives for infocide – like any human behavior. it can also be difficult to discern what those motives are as the subject 7 has (often) disappeared. however, i discern at least three types of (not necessarily exclusive) infocide: exhaustion, online discontent, and privacy concerns. real exhaustion: pulling the plug jon dowland (2011), a computer enthusiast blogging about pilgrim’s infocide, wrote that the first “infocider” he came across was the “photographer, blogger and sometime software author noah grey” who departed the web when his partner died in 2007. hence, there are instances in which events in the “real” world prompt a change of focus away from online activity. mark pilgrim’s case is also, likely, an instance of this, and gained attention when eric meyer, another well-known web developer, blogged about pilgrim’s absence. on october 4, 2011 meyer (2011) wrote that pilgrim’s many “dive into …” sites (accessibility, html5, greasemonkey, and python) were gone, and his github, google+, reddit, and twitter accounts were deleted. furthermore, meyer’s emails to pilgrim bounced back without response. pilgrim never chose to explain his departure and hence the community was left to sleuth out possible reasons. a number of commentators found compelling clues that pilgrim had long considered his online presence to be burdensome. meyer quoted a 2003 buddhist-like quip from pilgrim that “embracing http error code 410 means embracing the impermanence of all things.” jon dowland wondered if pilgrim was conducting “some grand experiment to see just how reliably valuable information can be preserved on the web”. if not, dowland suspected “real life” events trigger the infocide, as pilgrim’s blogging had “dried up” and his tweeting was becoming “increasingly erratic, irreverent and plain weird.” a commentator on the hacker news discussion, noted that pilgrim had taken a hiatus in the past. in october 2004, mark stopped blogging after a post titled “every exit” which read: “it’s time for me to find a new hobby. preferably one that doesn’t involve angle brackets. or computers. or electricity.” that post sat at the top of his previously very active weblog for 18 months until he returned in april 2006. of course, that time he only stopped posting new 8 material; he didn’t delete all his existing resources. but he did disappear from online life for a while7 hence, it’s reasonable to assume that pilgrim had long wrestled with his online presence and for some reason wished to focus his energies elsewhere. by removing everything, pilgrim made his intentions clear and the possibility of returning less likely. indeed, wikipedians who wish to exit permanently, but find it difficult to do so, have been known to “self-block” themselves or change their password to something they can’t remember (wikipedia, 2006 . 8 community discontent: severing the tie ). people do sometimes take decisive action so as to resist the pull upon them demanded by their online identities. wikipedia’s massive size, decade of life, and transparency make its archives an excellent source for studying online behavior, including exit and infocide. for example, at wikipedia one can decorate one’s user page with a template that produces a banner indicating one is no longer as active: such that one is studying for exams, without electricity, or taking a “real world” holiday (wikipedia, 2011a). there are nine purposeful absence templates and they have been used over five thousand times by wikipedians. of these, the most popular template is “retired” (used 2177 times). the most intriguing category is “user ex-wp” (used 285 times) which indicates a decision to leave with a forfeiture of wikipedian identity (wikipedia, 2010, 2011b). wikipedia collaboration, like any other, is also a source for discontent about group process and power. for example, one wikipedian complained of the disrespect shown to users, especially anonymous ones, by administrators. after an airing of grievances, he or she wrote “put one of those dippy retired banners up here if you like”9 another user sent similar complaints to one of the mailing-lists: “i’m quitting wikipedia because i don’t like what i’ve seen too many admins become. self-righteous, arrogant, self-centered, conceited… jerks” (peters, 2006). interestingly, this exit message also displayed elements of a flounce. we see positive sentiments for some . 7 comment by mbrubeck in rileyw, 2011. 8 also mentioned in hurr87's post in wikipedia: user:hurr87.113.86.207durr, 2009. 9 posted in wikipedia, user:hurr87.113.86.207durr, by hurr87, 2009. 9 fellow collaborators, an expressed sadness, and a fear that this last message will be suppressed by those “higher up”. to those i’ve known at wikipedia and worked well with, thanks for the good times. i used to believe in wikipedia. it was worth a lot to me, it was fun, it was good to work on articles. but i’m quitting…. i know this message may never reach this list either, but i’m at least going to try. (peters, 2006) this email thread was followed up by someone else’s exit, this time over a concern that “process is broken [and has] degraded over time” (draicone, 2006). indeed, exits from wikipedia are frequently explained by complaints of bureaucracy and abuse of power (dricot, 2011). another feature common to wikipedia exits is the diminishment of involvement and identity: in a sense, gradual exit. for example, wikipedians often declare a dimming of zeal and activity: i said a while back that i was done with contributing content to wikipedia. i’ll stand by this. but i’ve been at least willing to contribute typo fixes and clarifying text, as long as i could do it anonymously. now i’m closer to being done with that too… (massey, 2008) i have lost all my belief in the wikimedia projects. on some projects i still have moderating bits, i hereby ask the stewards to take these bits away as i do not wish to spend too much time anymore on the projects, i might shout a bit from the sideline. (van kalken, 2006) while these wikipedians have not completely abandoned their identity, the latter has significantly surrendered high-status aspects of it. and wikipedia is not the only community in which people become discontented. debian is a free software distribution that is known to be quarrelsome. one member wrote that he was exiting because of rancor and they way it was making him feel. i resigned from debian today…. arguments erupt over whether something is a deeply held principle or an accident of phrasing on the website; whether we should release more often or less often; whether free software is more important than our users having functional hardware… but it’s got to the 10 point where social interaction with debian-the-distribution makes me want to stab people, even though i’ve just spent a lovely weekend with debianthe-people. perhaps worse, i occasionally find mails i’ve sent that make me want to stab me. (garrett, 2006) this then prompted another (former) developer to reflect upon his “sabbatical” of putting aside his work on debian over the past year. he noted that those who worked on ubuntu (a distribution built upon debian) were sometimes treated rudely at conferences. “someone was attacked for wearing an ubuntu t-shirt at the conference, while someone else was applauded for wearing a ‘fuck ubuntu’ t-shirt. that’s where i realised that maybe i didn’t have as much in common with these people as i thought i did” (james, 2006). ubuntu is a debian-based free software distribution named for the african ethic of interdependence. there are (now) many such debian-derivations but ubuntu was an early and prominent one which some criticized for free-riding on debian’s efforts. ironically, both of the debian exits above note that ubuntu perhaps succeeds were debian fails in terms of community spirit and codes of conduct. yet even ubuntu faces similar exits. by now my launchpad, brainstorm, and ubuntu forum accounts have been removed … at my request. i have decided to completely unequivocally leave the ubuntu community. this important step helps me accomplish my goal by removing my ability and ultimately my desire to comment and participate within the community. (fewt, 2010) again, this exit enacted a surrendering of advanced capabilities/status and complained of the arrogance of those with power to make design decisions and the dismissal of community member’s concerns. however, compared to infocides prompted by “real” exhaustion, community discontent is often project specific and online activity may persist elsewhere. privacy: the collision of the real and virtual if demands in the real world prompt one to “pull the plug”, and discontent in the online realm leads one to sever one’s ties with a community, there is another exit for 11 those who fear the intersection of these two realms. it is not uncommon for contributors in open content communities to use a pseudonym. this allows one to develop a reputation within the community while preserving one’s “real life” identity, as one wikipedian wrote: “given wikipedia’s sketchy reputation in some circles, i wanted to avoid any possible negative consequences in the ‘real world’; and i did not want the less-than-friendly environment on wikipedia to come back to haunt me off-line”10 interestingly, this wikipedian felt his or her pseudonymity then led to being treated poorly. however, it is also possible for pseudonyms to be regarded highly. indeed, some participants’ involvement in the community and their participation in meet-ups or conferences render their real identity a widely known secret. yet, when this information is revealed outside of the community the contributor quickly retreats. for example, newyorkbrad, a prominent wikipedia administrator and arbitration committee member of many years, was infamously “outed” by an “anti-wikipedia” critic on the basis of photos from such a meeting. since he was a practicing attorney who did not wish the often contentious online realm to leak into his professional life, brad wrote, “for once i’ll be brief. due to some external events, which have the potential to affect not just me but many uninvolved people, i will not be able to continue editing” . 11 a similar, but much more widely known case of privacy-prompted infocide is that of _why the lucky stuff. like pilgrim, _why was a respected contributor to his community, in this case, developers using the ruby programming language. indeed, pilgrim’s later infocide was frequently compared to _why’s, with one commentator stating of pilgrim: “so he’s gone and done a _why” . (after a brief period, brad returned to his wikipedia activities.) 12 10 posted in wikipedia by user:172, 2005. 11 posted in wikipedia by newyorkbrad, 2008. 12 posted in python: reddit, gone :( by shaurz, 2011. . however, for reasons unstated, _why was fastidious in his desire to remain pseudonymous. much like those introduced to python via pilgrim’s dive into series, many new developers were introduced to ruby by way of why’s (poignant) guide to ruby, which “embodied all of its author’s characteristics: an uneasy artistic mind with a different take on what programming is all about” (terror, 2012). however, the reasons _why was beloved also made it unlikely 12 that he would be able to keeping his identity private. _why’s geeky cartoons, his many blogs, code contributions, songs, and (semi-disguised) public presentations created many links from which his identity could be inferred. additionally, like pilgrim, there is evidence that _why found the maintenance of his contributions burdensome. one of the last tweets from _why noted “programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more” (jeremysr, 2009). however, when an attempt to identify _why also turned up likely family and friends _why quickly withdrew. interestingly, given that _why’s likely motive was his “outing” it is quite possible that, as jon dowland noted, “_why is back in the community with an entirely new alias, operating under the radar. that’s the flexibility that a distinct online persona gives you. it’s less likely mark pilgrim is doing the same” (dowland, 2011). results: community responses an equally interesting complement to the reasons and performance of exit are community reaction. some infocides are met with silence, and this is probably to the relief of those who wish to quickly and quietly disappear. beyond this, there is a range of community response including drama, sleuthing (to determine the circumstances of someone’s exit), and gratitude and preservation. drama those who share their discontent when leaving, after recounting their own history and contributions, often prompt snarky responses. for example, in response to a message entitled “bye ubuntu it could have been fun but…” an anonymous commentator responded “bye bye. don’t let the door hit you on the way out, you whining prima donna”13 13 comment by an anonymous user in linux today's bye ubuntu, 2010. . or, after a wikipedia contributor lamented that despite his thousands of edits and hundreds of articles over the years, the blocking of his account is 13 evidence that “it is time to go”, a wikipedian responded “how many times has he left now? loudly and publicly” (gerard, 2007). the meatball wiki, “a common space for wiki developers and proprietors from all over the internet to collaborate” (meatball, 2006a) has an extensive page on “goodbye” including exits resulting from conflict, insincere, sincere, and silent departures, and how best to respond. the insincere exit, related to dramatica’s flounce, is described by meatball as a self-centered and passive-aggressive act intending to seek emotional support. “even if their original intent was to leave in anger, it’s not satisfying to go from such an emotional high to an immediate vacuum. because we can lurk online, the person is going to come back to see the reaction of the community. it’s just so tempting” (meatball, 2012b). if the community does not respond as desired, problems ensue: this is the opposite of what the author wants. he or she wants the outpouring of emotion, which in any case would be wrong. the resulting dearth of suckers leaves the goodbye feeling empty, and more importantly, a confirmation of the poor standing of the author in the eyes of the community. and oh how the tempest storms when this is discovered. now the only way to balance the emotional score is to wreck havoc, and make the community pay. (meatball, 2012a) one way to make the community pay is by a disruptive “wiki mind wipe”: “the process of systematically erasing a large amount of contribution to the wikiwiki forum. the act is considered vandalism unless the erased contributions are one’s own” (meatball, 2006b). more so than infocides on social sites like facebook, infocide in open content communities may significantly affect the work of a larger project. hence even if one developed content by one’s self (e.g., much of pilgrim’s work) others are dependent upon it. when such contributions are removed, most accede that it was the infociders' right, even if a few complain about the manner in which it happened (e.g., the community could’ve been warned). when one has actually collaborated with others, removing your own content necessarily entails removing others’ contributions. this latter act, as noted, can be considered vandalism and the ultimate form of drama. 14 sleuthing in eric meyer’s blog post about mark pilgrim, he asked the web community that “if anyone is in direct contact with mark, please let me know that he’s okay via comment here or by direct e-mail, even if his internet presence has been erased. as much as i hate for the world to lose all of the incredible information he’s created and shared, that would be as nothing compared to losing the man himself”. the next day meyer reported a tweet from jason scott, a friend of pilgrim, that “mark pilgrim is alive/annoyed we called the police. please stand down and give the man privacy and space, and thanks everyone for caring”14 the seminal case of the net community attempting to sleuth a mystery is the disappearance of phil agre, a prominent member of the early internet community. in the 90s he published the network observer and the red rock eater news service, email lists which included items of interest and essays for “digerati”. he also was a well respected academic, becoming an associate professor of information studies at ucla. . of course, many continued to ask about his motives and some even attempted to comment on the thread, masquerading as pilgrim, to further confuse things. asking the larger online community for help is not uncommon. in 2010, law professor lawrence lessig referenced the mysterious illness of his harvard colleague “jz” (jonathan zittrain) in a tweet, drawing attention to a blog setup by a friend of zittrain. as zittrain later recounted, lessig’s tweet was noticed, and the popular blog boingboing then posted an entry “drawn from an intermediate source that had already put 2 and 2 together and turned lessig’s ‘jz’ into … me, no doubt without even thinking there was any difference. so then it became: ‘jonathan zittrain is really sick and needs help finding out why!’” unfortunately, any modicum of zittrain’s privacy was now gone. furthermore, earlier discussion on a medical blog (the intended audience) had already provided a useful reference to a 1994 korean medical article and “to be clear, the terrific doctors here have been methodically arriving at this diagnosis already” (zittrain, 2010). hence, as is often the case, a request for help became distorted and disproportionate to what was truly helpful. 14 posted in twitter by jason scott, @textfiles, 2011. 15 however, his online activity had ceased and in october 2009 agre’s sister filed a missing person report stating she had not seen her brother, who suffers from manic depression, since the spring of 2008. furthermore, he had apparently abandoned his apartment and work in the beginning of 2009. this story was widely reported and many people made an effort to investigate and share information of agre’s whereabouts, as well as speculate about his motives for disappearing. on january 16, 2010, la county sheriff’s department noted that he had been contacted and was deemed in good health and self-sufficient (carvin, 2010). in the case of pilgrim and agre some community members were not content to be told that “the person is okay, please move on.” this was especially so for _why’s infocide. discussion and sleuthing continued in a number of hacker news threads (jeremysr, 2009). similarly, wikipedians discussed whether _why’s biography should be deleted, whether it should include his identity, and whether edits to his biography’s discussion page that contained an alleged identity should be deleted and permanently purged from its history (wikipedia, 2011c). even after those deletions, presently, a name still appears on his biography’s talk page, demonstrative of the streisand effect in which an attempt to remove information leads to its further dissemination (wikipedia, 2012). this sleuthing over _why is reminiscent of the eternal debate over shakespeare’s identity; web pages are dedicated to claims that _why is “john doe” (to use a placeholder name), but not “that john doe”, or not a “doe” at all but “joe bloggs” (wanstrath, 2009; sl33p3r, 2009). yet, there is another type of post-infocide activity from the community that is more positive: to recover what had been tossed aside, to preserve this information, or even continue its development. gratitude and preservation while the term “infocide” is inspired by the notion of suicide, it is a distinct (though sometimes concurrent) practice. similarly, while a community’s response to infocide might share similarities with online grieving, it too is distinct. however, one area of overlap is in expressions of gratitude and memorialization (brubaker & hayes, 2011). in open content communities if one’s contributions were thought to be of value, 16 people say as much. at wikipedia contributors can place a “barnstar” on others’ user pages to acknowledge some wikipedian virtue. i was going to give you a barnstar when i saw the note on your userpage and was disappointed to find that it was from last october. i saw a load of your edits and thought that you were active. you were as an outstanding contributer to wikipedia and you were always civil. if you read this (i know you were active recently), please return to wikipedia. if you don’t want to then thanks for everything15 conclusion . many such examples of gratitude exist. also, the infocider’s contributions might be recovered and preserved – and even become a collaborative community project. that is, content contributed under an open content license can be copied and modified. hence, in meyer’s blog posting about pilgrim’s infocide he noted “mirrors of mark’s work have started appearing … and so his legacy, if not his presence, will not be lost” (meyer, 2011). pilgrim's “dive into html5” site is now maintained at <http://diveintohtml5.info/> and is attributed to “mark pilgim, with contributions from the community”. thirty eight of _why’s projects are now mirrored at github (flip, 2009) – a collaborative web site that enables easy copying, modification, and merging of decentralized development. in delete: the virtue of forgetting in the digital age viktor mayerschönberger laments that we have lost the ability to forget: “as we forget, we regain the freedom to generalize, conceptualize, and most importantly to act” (mayerschönberger, 2009, p. 118). however, mayer-schönberger is motivated by stories of embarrassing information on social networks. the firing of the “drunken pirate”, a teacher who posted a photo of herself on myspace wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, has elicited much comment and concern. and rightfully so: the individual gains much, and the public loses little if such a photo were to disappear. 15 posted in wikipedia, user talk:draicone,by pheonix, 2011. 17 however, the practice of infocide includes more than removing an embarrassing myspace page. it is a complex phenomena that includes a wide-range of behavior including as an antecedent to suicide, a consequence of online exhaustion and discontent, as a dramatic performance, or as a privacy-protecting measure. additionally, infocide is occasionally graduated, such as when one removes aspects of one's identity including advanced status and capabilities (e.g., as an administrator). one might even take steps to enforce an infocide, such as setting a random password on one's account. community responses are also varied: infocides might be ignored, lamented, sleuthed, and mitigated by preserving content that was taken down. while i believe this is a relatively comprehensive (though tentative) categorization of infocide enactment and response, my approach also has a serious limitation: it does not include the voices of those who have enacted a successful infocide. (that is, those who really do disappear.) complementary micro-level research might seek to find and interview people like pilgrim and _why so as to better understand their motives. additionally, wikipedia’s (2011) thousands of user pages now decorated with wikibreak-related templates could form a potential corpus for large-scale content analysis. in any case, i hesitate to conclude that the present work must necessarily contribute to preventing infocide. from a community point of view, it is worthwhile to identify and understand the reasons why members exit, and mitigate those reasons if possible. yet people can and do leave communities. fortunately, even if they take the action of renouncing their identity and rescinding their contributions, in the communities i focus on, at least, those contributions need not be lost. acknowledgments i thank fernando bermejo and eric meyer for comments on this work. references alao, a. o., yolles, j. c., & armenta, w. (1999). cybersuicide: the internet and suicide. the american journal of psychiatry, 156, 1836–1837. retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10553759 18 associated press. (2012). taiwan woman commits suicide while on facebook. cbs news. retrieved may 25, 2012, from http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_16257405058/taiwan-woman-commits-suicide-while-on-facebook/ baume, p., rolfe, a., & clinton, m. (1998). suicide on the internet: a focus for nursing intervention? the australian and new zealand journal of mental health nursing, 7, 134–141. retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10095463 brubaker, j. r., & hayes, g. r. (2011). ’we will never forget you [online]’: an empirical investigation of post-mortem myspace comments. in proceedings of the acm 2011 conference on computer supported cooperative work (pp. 123–132). new york: acm. retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1958843 carvin, a. (2010). missing internet pioneer phil agre is found alive. retrieved from http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2010/01/missing_internet_pioneer_phil.htm l dobson, r. (1999). internet sites may encourage suicide. bmj, 319, 337–337. doi:10.1136/bmj.319.7206.337 dowland, j. (2011). infocide. retrieved from http://jmtd.net/log/infocide/ draicone. (2006). re: quitting wikipedia and wanted you to know why. message to wikien-l by draicone, 10/06/2006 3:27:16. message-id 913fe40a0610052027p54169d88vfdd4effe16bed64b retrieved from http://marc.info/?i=913fe40a0610052027p54169d88vfdd4effe16bed64b@mail.gmail.co m drictot, l. (2011). why i don’t contribute to wikipedia anymore. where is ploum? retrieved from http://ploum.net/post/222-why-i-don-t-contribute-to-wikipedia-anymore economist. (2011). internet culture: status code 410: gone. retrieved from http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/10/internet-culture 19 encyclopedia dramatica (2006). wikicide. retrieved from http://encyclopediadramatica.ch/wikicide encyclopedia dramatica. (2011). flounce. retrieved from http://encyclopediadramatica.ch/flounce fewt. (2010). bye ubuntu, it could have been fun .. but it wasn’t. ~/blog. retrieved from http://www.fewt.com/2010/03/bye-ubuntu-it-could-have-been-fun-but.html fielding, r., gettys, j., mogul, j., frystyk, h., masinter, l., leach, p., & berners-lee, t. (1999). hypertext transfer protocol – http/1.1. retrieved january 10, 2012, from http://www.w3.org/protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html flip. (2009). whymirror’s profile github. retrieved from https://github.com/whymirror garrett, m. (2006). mjg59: i resigned from debian today. retrieved from http://mjg59.livejournal.com/66647.html geertz, c. (1973). thick description: toward an interpreted theory of culture. in c. geertz (ed.), the interpretation of cultures and local knowledge (pp. 3–30). new york, ny: basic books. gerard, d. (2007). re: goodbye and good luck to all. message to wikipedia-l by david gerard, 05/07/2007, 17:28:28. message id fbad4e140705071028r3e497abfj738c3bdb32159c81 retrieved from http://marc.info/?i=fbad4e140705071028r3e497abfj738c3bdb32159c81@mail.gmail.co m gibbs, d. (2006). the language of cyberspace. in d. gibbs & k.-l. kraus (eds.), cyberlines 2.0: languages and cultures of the internet (pp. 11–34). albert park, australia: james nicholas. glaser, b., & strauss, a. (1967). the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. chicago: aldine publishing company. 20 hafner, k. (2001). the epic saga of the well. wired. retrieved from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.05/ff_well_pr.html james, s. (2006). having left debian. netsplit. retrieved from http://netsplit.com/2006/09/02/having-left-debian/ jeremysr. (2009). _why is no more. retrieved from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=773106 lincoln, y. s., & guba, e. g. (1985). naturalistic inquiry. london: sage publications. massey, b. (2008). wikipedia makes me cry. bart's blog. retrieved from http://fob.po8.org/node/451 mayer-schönberger, v. (2009). delete: the virtue of forgetting in the digital age. princeton new jersey: princeton university press. meatball. (2006a). meatballbackgrounder. retrieved from http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?meatballbackgrounder meatball. (2006b). wiki mind wipe. retrieved from http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?wikimindwipe meatball. (2012a). meatball wiki: righttoleave. retrieved from http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/righttoleave meatball. (2012b). goodbye. retrieved from http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/goodbye meyer, e. (2011). searching for mark pilgrim. meyerweb. retrieved from http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2011/10/04/searching-for-mark-pilgrim/ peters, p. (2006). quitting wikipedia and wanted you to know why. message to wikienl by parker peters, 10/06/2006 2:31:31. message-id 46d9b7490610051931r12a9dcc7u898adbb45fbcf5e6 retrieved from http://marc.info/?i=46d9b7490610051931r12a9dcc7u898adbb45fbcf5e6@mail.gmail.co m 21 reagle, j. (2004). open content communities. m/c: a journal of media and culture, 7. retrieved from http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0406/06_reagle.rft.php reagle, j. (2009). thunderdell and busysponge. retrieved from http://reagle.org/joseph/2009/01/thunderdell.html rheingold, h. (2000). the virtual community: homesteading on the electronic frontier. cambridge, ma: the mit press. retrieved from http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/1.html rileyw. (2011). ask hn: anyone know where mark pilgrim went? retrieved from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3073798 sl33p3r. (2009). where in the world is _why? retrieved from http://whereintheworldiswhy.wordpress.com/ terror, d. (2012). _why: a tale of a post-modern genius. smashing magazine. retrieved from http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/15/why-a-tale-of-a-postmodern-genius/ thomas, g., & jones, d. (2006). reinventing grounded theory: some questions about theory, ground and discovery. british educational research journal, 32, 767–795. retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/pss/30032707 thompson, s. (1999). the internet and its potential influence on suicide. psychiatric bulletin, 23, 449–451. doi:10.1192/pb.23.8.449 turner, f. (2006). from counterculture to cyberculture: stewart brand, the whole earth network, and the rise of digital utopianism. chicago: the university of chicago press. ueno, k. (2000). suicide as japan’s major export? a note on japanese suicide culture. espaço academico, 44. retrieved from http://www.espacoacademico.com.br/044/44eueno_ing.htm urban dictionary. (2012). retrieved from http://www.urbandictionary.com/ 22 van kalken, w. (2006). please remove my moderating bits. message to wikipedia-l by walter van kalken, 25/10/2006, 8:13:14. message-id 453f1c9a.7010108 retrieved from http://marc.info/?l=wikipedia-l&m=116176399905032 van kalken, w. (2006). please remove my moderating bits. retrieved from http://marc.info/?i=453f1c9a.7010108@vankalken.net wanstrath, c. (2009). his name is robert paulson. oneszerosmajorsandminors. retrieved from http://ozmm.org/posts/his_name_is_robert_paulson.html wikipedia. (2006). wikipedia:blocking policy. retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/?oldid=47260197 wikipedia. (2010). template:retired. retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/?oldid=393590302 wikipedia. (2011a). category:wikibreak templates. retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/?oldid=413184909 wikipedia. (2011b). template:user ex-wp. retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/?oldid=441832772 wikipedia. (2011c). talk:why the lucky stiff. retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/?oldid=431881401 wikipedia. (2012). streisand effect. retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/?oldid=475442448 zittrain, j. (2010). the future of zittrain has not been stopped. future of the internet. retrieved from http://futureoftheinternet.org/jz-update http://marc.info/?t=116176407600001&r=1&w=2� selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 diabetes education in everyday living through participation in an sns devayani tirthali teachers college, columbia university u.s.a. dgt2103@columbia.edu abstract this ethnographic research explores how adult users of a social networking site focused on diabetes educate themselves about living with this condition. this paper brings attention to the emerging phenomenon of people with chronic conditions congregating on snss for health that has not been acknowledged by the research on snss before. it also sheds light on the ongoing education in settings other than the clinics. it shows how these settings support, draw from or subvert the traditional forms of diabetes education. keywords sns for health; education in everyday living; diabetes education this paper is based on ethnographic research that explores how adult users of a social networking site (sns) focused on diabetes educate themselves about living with this condition. the purpose of this research is twofold. firstly, to explore and describe a slice of the everyday educative processes in the face of a life change event like diagnosis of diabetes. secondly, to explore how snss serve as the sites and mediators for these educative processes. i collected data in two stages, firstly by hanging out on the sns as a participant observer for 17 months. this meant visiting the site regularly, participating in the activities going on, and actively keeping a journal about my experiences. secondly, by downloading archival data from publicly available sections from march 2008 when the site was first launched in beta. in this paper i highlight one part of this research that looks at the temporal aspect of the educative process that is activated when a person is told they have diabetes. analysis of activity of one person over time shows how the deliberations were transformative over time from one situation to another and one conversation to another. background the american diabetes association (2007) estimates 1.6 million new cases of diabetes are diagnosed in people aged 20 years and older each year. a chronic condition like diabetes affects every aspect of the body as well as all aspects of life. unlike, acute diseases, the patient role for a chronic disease is stretched out throughout the patient’s life in addition and parallel to other family and social roles they play. in spite of the push for diabetes self-management education as a solution to 'compliance', two thirds of people diagnosed with diabetes are still labeled ‘non-compliant’ – failed diabetics. this has prompted further research that focuses on ‘why don’t patients do what they should and how can we get them to do it?’ labeling a patient compliant or non-compliant diabetic ignores the everyday efforts of patients to cope with their changed circumstances and translate the diabetic regime into everyday living. the construction of self-management education as ‘empowering’ in the medical discourse misrepresents power as something to be given by doctors to patients. power, in reality, is embedded in ongoing interactions. similarly, educated diabetic is not a state achieved at the end of a workshop by filling the known gaps of specific knowledge deemed important by the ‘experts’. it involves an ongoing process of translating the diabetic regime into everyday living. thus there is a need to focus selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 on the question ‘what patients are doing everyday to live with this condition and how are they doing it?’ with the proliferation of the internet and communication technologies (icts), medical professionals and policy makers are increasingly thinking of internet as a vehicle to impart ‘legitimate’ knowledge about health and management of chronic conditions like diabetes. at the same time patients and caregivers are using social software like blogs, forums, podcasts and snss to engage in conversations they find educative (fox & purcell, 2010). i based my explorations of the sns on the postulate that 'people everywhere, unceasingly, and always in concert with others, work at changing themselves and their consociates through often difficult deliberations' (varenne, 2007). this educative process of figuring out that they do not know, what is there to be known, instructing ignorant others is the focus of the study. data collection and analysis to look at the journey of a newly diagnosed person more closely, i collated all the activity of a newly diagnosed participant named y1s in the discussion section for three months after she joined the site. out of the 222 discussion threads, twelve were discussions she started and remaining were replies to discussions posted by others. i coded text in each post in two ways 1. by actions for example asking info, asking opinion, giving info, sharing experience, expressing concern, agreeing, noticing and so on and 2. by content thematically. i used the coding as index to get to the instances of these themes rather than counting how many times a particular theme appeared. i also looked at how y1s positioned herself over time. findings the conversations showed how y1s discovered the web of diabetes she got caught into with institutions, people, her body, and tools that constantly define and teach what it means to be a diabetic. i looked at y1s’ journey after diagnosis in terms of the process lave and wenger (1999) refer to as legitimate peripheral participation. the process of moving from newcomer to somewhat new, to old timer in the sns and as a diabetic for y1s was made up of getting instructed – experiencing – then instructing based on previous instruction and her own experience. y1s learned from other’s instruction based in sharing stories of their experience in a situation. she then put it in practice and shared her story back to instruct another newly diagnosed who came after her. lave’s theory of learning as participation helps see this process as movement along the plane of participation with multitude of positions in relation to others that y1s can take instead of just two points of novice or expert. however, i found that this process is not linear. participation in dc is a cycle of learning and teaching. as participants go through life they find themselves on the periphery of ever newer fields of participation as people with diabetes and participants on dc. there was a lot more that y1 and participants she interacted with had to 'figure out' in order to apply the abstract/generalized knowledge that they receive from health professionals in structured interactions. the diabetic regimen is not just behavioral prescriptions that can be followed in a vacuum but these prescriptive practices had to be implemented in conjunction with other social practices involving other individuals, institutions, and spaces. moreover, a standardized curriculum and guidelines abstracted from various experiences of bodies had to be relearned by for their own particular body. not just knowledge of ‘a body’ but understanding of one’s own body is necessary. the step of finding the sns and asking questions was a deliberate step by participants to seek people who will instruct other than or in addition to the health professionals who are authorized to do so. however, it was not an either/or. at various times y1s sought instruction from various resources and selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 selected who or which instruction to follow based on her circumstances, long term and short term goals. conclusion as walkley (2009) pointed out, health education is ‘social, ubiquitous, and partially authorized by authorities’ and there is little research on these ‘unscripted, unobserved educational moments’. this enquiry is an effort to make some of these practices in snss visible. it showed that patients and caregivers have much that needs to be learned on the way and instruction from health professionals is not enough and also not the only instruction that people actively seek. following y1s journey shows this work being done every day. making this process visible hopefully will prompt health professionals to rethink the propositional and procedural knowledge they deem important as just one aspect of learning to live with diabetes and re-present the discourse about ignorance and compliance. references american diabetes association (2007). national diabetes fact sheet: general information and national estimates on diabetes in the united states, 2007. atlanta, ga: u.s. department of health and human services, centers for disease control and prevention, 2008. fox, s., & purcell, k. (2010). chronic disease and the internet: pew research center. garfinkel, h. (1967). studies in ethnomethodology. englewood cliffs. lave, j., & wenger, e. (1991). situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge university press. varenne, h. (2007). difficult collective deliberations: anthropological notes toward a theory of education, teachers college record 109:7, 2007, p. 1559-1588 walkley s. (2009) comprehensive health education and the quest to change behavior in theoretical perspectives on comprehensive education: the way forward. lewiston, ny: the edwin mellen press, 2009 license this article is ©2013 devayani tirthali, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. microsoft word 862-606-1-pb.docx selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 people with disabilities in virtual worlds: who, how, why, and what’s next? alice krueger virtual ability, inc. united states akrueger@virtualability.org abstract people with disabilities are proportionately over-represented in virtual worlds, with probably one in five people in a virtual world having one or more disabilities—physical, mental, emotional, or sensory. they enter virtual worlds using a variety of assistive technologies, and participate in all the varied activities available therein. recent research has shown significant social/emotional benefits for people with disabilities who participate in second life, both casually and in treatment groups. peer support groups are available as well. challenges exist for all virtual world participants, including addiction, frustration, increased isolation, and lack of confidentiality. no challenge is limited to persons with disabilities. research about people with disabilities in virtual worlds has been limited. several potential research topics are suggested. keywords people with disabilities; second life; virtual worlds introduction to people with disabilities in virtual worlds why do people with disabilities enter virtual worlds? what does their presence in virtual worlds tell us about virtual identities? how do people with disabilities use virtual worlds in unexpected ways? although there are no measures within virtual worlds such as second life, people with disabilities make up about 20% of people in online casual games (popcap, 2008), which may be a comparable population. people with more severe levels of disability seem to be over-represented in these environments. some types of significant disability, such as leg amputation or lower body paralysis, do not affect an individual’s ability to use virtual worlds. four types of impairments do impact ability to function in a virtual world: keyboard/mouse; print; hearing/speech; and cognitive (krueger & stineman, 2011). individuals with these disabling conditions use a wide variety of assistive technology to access virtual worlds, including alternative keyboards and other input devices, textual user interfaces, voice-to-text software, and eye gaze detection systems. human transcriptionists provide text of voiced events for deaf individuals, speak text aloud for dyslexic individuals, and describe images for blind individuals. special limited user interfaces, controlled by their guardians, allow persons with low intellectual capacity to use virtual worlds safely. coaches and mentors assist developmentally delayed individuals to participate independently. for all the same reasons anyone else does: taking a class, listening to or performing live music, being creative, having a job, socializing, or just plain having fun (babbis, 2009; stendal, balandin, & molka-danielsen, 2011; stewart, hansen, & carey, 2010). the general benefits to people with disabilities of being in a virtual world are the same as for others. however, specific benefits accrue to people with disabilities from being in virtual worlds. benefits to people with disabilities of participation in virtual worlds selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 recent preliminary research (gilbert, murphy, krueger, ludwig, & efron, in press; novek, et al., 2011) has shown social/emotional benefits from second life participation, including lowered depression, anxiety, and loneliness; and increased positive affect, self-esteem, and general life satisfaction. specific medical benefits of virtual world usage have been documented for populations including burn patients (patterson, hoflund, espey, sharar, & nursing committee, n.d.), children with mobility disorders (inman, loge, & leavens, 1995) or communication deficits (tartaro & cassell, 2008), and adults with intellectual disabilities (hall, congoy-hill, & taylor, 2011). we do not yet know if there are different benefits for people with mental vs physical disabilities. nor do we know the long term effects of participation in virtual worlds for this population. while it is unlikely that anyone comes into second life or other open access virtual worlds to find peer support, over 120 inworld peer support groups for various chronic illnesses and disabling conditions have been documented there. people with very low incidence disabilities have stated, “i had never met anyone with my disability until i came into second life.” sometimes a virtual world is the only place to meet someone like yourself. participants in second life peer support groups are more likely to seek social supports than people using other forms of online support such as chat rooms or forums (green-hamann, 2010). challenges to people with disabilities of participation in virtual worlds while there are clearly many potential benefits of virtual worlds for people with disabilities that require further research, we also need to expand our knowledge of challenges and barriers to appropriation. concerns related to participation in virtual worlds include addiction (davidow, 2012), emotional harm (saunders, 2011), frustration at not being as capable or as good-looking as your avatar, and increased social isolation from sitting in front of a computer all night (turkle, 2011). confidentiality of personal information remains an issue in virtual worlds (ford, 2001). none of these challenges apply solely to persons with disabilities. perhaps the most common argument against the use of virtual worlds by persons with disabilities is that it gives them a false sense of reality, that it allows them to escape from the reality of their disabling condition. this fallacy derives from a common misunderstanding by able bodied people of what quality of life is like for a person with a disability, often stated as a “disability paradox” (albrecht & devileger, 1999). people with even quite severe disabilities, whom able bodied people might assume would have a low quality of life, often assert their quality of life to be high. people with disabilities do not typically go into virtual worlds to escape their disabilities. they don’t believe they will become young and fit like their avatars any more than anyone else believes this. research opportunities little research in the use of virtual worlds by persons with disabilities has occurred until quite recently (stendal, balandin, & molka-danielsen, 2011). some research has taken place in customdesigned virtual environments, but little in open access multi-user environments such as second life (stendahl, 2012). results of research done in other game-based virtual worlds (mmorpgs such as world of warcraft and everquest) may not apply in second life, which does not fit the characteristics of a game (book, 2004). avatar appearance and veiled anonymity affect the user. the proteus effect demonstrates that able bodied people with avatars more attractive than themselves have more self-confidence (yee & bailenson, 2007). using a pseudonym in a less immersive online environment allowed people with mental health issues to more confidently discuss their concerns with others (kummervold, selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 gammon, bergvik, johnsen, hasvold, & rosenvinge, 2002). might this explain some of gilbert’s results for people with disabilities in second life? one of the unique affordances of virtual worlds is that individuals create their avatars in the manner they desire. this of course is directly opposite of the physical world, where it is very difficult to change many undesirable personal physical characteristics. why do some people with disabilities in virtual worlds choose to embody their disability (e.g., using a wheelchair) (harrigan, 2007), while others choose to appear able bodied? are the positive results noted by gilbert et al. similar for people who choose to embody their disability virtually and those who do not? idealized avatar appearance enhances the relationship of the individual to his virtual embodiment (hobart, 2012; jin, 2009, nowak, et al., 2008). attractive avatars are preferred by others for social interactions (principe, & langlois, 2013). how does this affect avatar choice by persons with visible disabilities? self perception theory (bem, 1967) posits that we observe ourselves and use information from behavioral self-observation to infer our attitudes or moods, rather than our attitudes affecting our behavior. will observing a positive-appearing and -behaving avatar bring health benefits to persons with disabilities? perhaps positive results for people with disabilities of participating in a virtual world may transfer to physical world behaviors (yee, bailenson, & ducheneaut, 2009). the field is beginning to attract researchers from a variety of disciplines. soon there may be more information available to document how and why people with disabilities use virtual worlds, and what benefits accrue to them and to the able-bodied people with whom they interact there. references albrecht, g., & devileger, p. (1999, april). the disability paradox: high quality of life against all odds. social science & medicine, 48(8), 977–988. babiss, f. (2009). heron sanctuary. occupational therapy in mental health, 25(1), 1-3. bem, d. (1967). self-perception: an alternative interpretation of cognitive dissonance phenomena. psychological review, 74(3), 183–200. book, b. (2004). moving beyond the game: social virtual worlds. state of play 2 conference, new york. retrieved march 6, 2013, from http://deby.net/files/3d/articles/moving%20beyond%20the%20game%20%20social%20virtual%20worlds.pdf davidow, w. (2012, august). virtual reality is addictive and unhealthy. ieee spectrum. retrieved march 6, 2013, from http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gadgets/virtual-reality-is-addictive-andunhealthy/0 ford, p. (2001). paralysis lost: impacts of virtual worlds on those with paralysis. social theory and practice, 27(4), 661-680. gilbert, r., murphy, n., krueger, a., ludwig, a., & efron, t. (in press). psychological benefits of participation in 3d virtual worlds for individuals with real world disabilities. international journal of disability, development and education. green-hamann, s. (2010). the virtual world of social support: communicating in second life. electronic theses and dissertations. paper 1026. retrieved march 6, 2013, from http://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/etd/1026 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 hall, v., conboy-hill, s., & taylor, d. (2011). using virtual reality to provide health care information to people with intellectual disabilities: acceptability, usability, and potential utility. journal of medical internet research, 13(4). harrigan, r. (2007, may). using a wheelchair in second life. retrieved march 6, 2013, from http://wheeliecatholic.blogspot.com/2007/05/my-personal-choice-to-use-wheelchair-in.html hobart, m. (2012). learning from myself: avatars and educational video games. current issues in education, 15(3). inman, d., loge, k., & leavens, j. (1995). virtual reality solutions for children with physical disabilities. proceedings of the second international conference on military applications of synthetic environments and virtual reality, stockholm, sweden, 182-197. jin, s-a. (2009, december). avatars mirroring the actual self versus projecting the ideal self: the effects of selfpriming on interactivity and immersion in an exergame, wii fit. cyberpsychology & behavior, 12(6), 761-765. krueger, a., & stineman, m. (2011). assistive technology interoperability between virtual and real worlds. journal of virtual worlds research, 4(3). kummervold, p., gammon, d., bergvik, s., johnsen, j-a, hasvold, t., & rosenvinge, j. (2002). social support in a wired world: use of online mental health forums in norway. nordic journal of psychiatry, 56(1), 59-65. nowak, k., pandžic, i. zoric, g., šmid, k., grundnig, s., petri, t., polzer, c., sträfling, n., krämer, n., trepte, s., reinecke, l., behr, k-m. (2008, october). the psychology of avatars: real life effects of virtual communication. proceedings of the 11th annual international workshop on presence, padua, italy, 146-151. novek, m., whelen, s., hughes, t., porcher, e., davidson, g., & nosek, t. (2011, july). self-esteem in second life: an inworld group intervention for women with disabilities. journal of virtual worlds research, 4(1). patterson, d., hoflund, h., espey, k., sharar, s., & nursing committee of the international society for burn injuries. (n.d.). pain management. retrieved march 6, 2013, from http://www.worldburn.org/documents/painmanage.pdf popcap games, inc. (2008). "disabled gamers" comprise 20% of casual video game audience. retrieved march 6, 2013, from http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/survey-disabled-gamers-comprise-20-ofcasual-video-games-audience-57442172.html principe, c., & langlois, j. (in press) children and adults use attractiveness as a social cue in real people and avatars. journal of experimental child psychology. saunders, k. (2011). acti rei: real and virtual. texas tech law review, 44, 2011-2012. stendahl, k. (2012, may). how do people with disability use and experience virtual worlds and ict: a literature review. journal of virtual worlds research, 5(1). stendal, k., balandin, s., & molka-danielsen, j. (2011). virtual worlds: a new opportunity for people with lifelong disability? journal of intellectual and developmental disability, 36(1), 80-83. stewart, s., hansen, t., & carey, t. (2010). opportunities for people with disabilities in the virtual world of second life. rehabilitation nursing, 35(6), 254–259. tartaro, a., & cassell, j. (2008). playing with virtual peers: bootstrapping contingent discourse in children with autism. proceedings of the 8th international conference for the learning sciences. utrecht, the netherlands. 2, 382–389. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 turkle, s. (2011). alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other. new york: basic books. yee, n., & bailenson, j. (2007). the proteus effect: the effect of transformed self-representation on behavior. human communication research, 33(3), 271-290. yee, n., bailenson, j., & ducheneaut, n. (2009). the proteus effect: implications of transformed digital selfrepresentation on online and offline behavior. communication research, 36(2), 285–312. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 6 exploring the influence of avatar performance on individuals with parkinson’s disease donna z. davis, phd university of oregon, usa dzdavis@uoregon.edu abstract this study explores the potential use of virtual worlds as therapeutic environments for people diagnosed with parkinson’s disease. using an ethnographic approach including participant since august, 2012, this research revealed insights into the power of virtual embodiment. avatar performance appears to provide relief to parkinson’s symptoms including depression through the development of digital social capital. likewise, initial results point to mediated effects that reveal potential application for physical rehabilitation. the implications of this preliminary study support an argument for further research to validate these findings that could have profound influence on the wellbeing of individuals with parkinson’s. keywords parkinson’s; ehealth; embodiment; ethnography; virtual worlds introduction in the past decade, greater recognition has been given to the power of communities that form online, especially those that provide social support within health related communities. forums, chat rooms, blogs and websites open to comments, and facebook groups are just a few examples of the avenues of support for individuals seeking information, interaction or simply someone to talk to about the challenges they face as a result of their illnesses or conditions. numerous studies have identified the value of these groups for providing mutual aid and self-help for individuals who may not have access to or the motivation to attend face-to-face groups. they are often isolated geographically or emotionally, suffer from depression, and/or may have limited mobility. this study investigated the effects of an online support group for individuals who have been diagnosed with parkinson’s disease. according to the national institutes of health, more than 500,000 people in the us suffer from parkinson’s disease, with “50,000 new cases reported annually” (nih, 2012). an online search of support groups for these people reflects more than 4 million results, most of which are face-to-face meetings or online forums. what makes the support group included in this study extraordinary is that they meet in a 3d social space in the form of avatars. anecdotal evidence from these individuals suggests that as a result of agency, or the sense of being physically present in this environment, and by engaging with other individuals in real time that they have experienced improved mobility and/or reduced symptoms of the disease such as depression in their physical lives. evidence of effective health-related activities and healthcare support groups in virtual worlds is relatively new with the earliest research emerging in 2008 (toro-troconis et al., 2008, norris, 2009, krebs et al, 2009, beard et al, 2009) as virtual reality became more accessible and user traffic became more wide spread. although the traffic numbers pale in comparison to the more mainstream social selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 7 media destinations, there are powerful media effects based on the sense of presence in these environments (heeter, 1992; lee, 2004) that warrant further exploration for healthcare community development and outreach. virtual environments are hyper-social, providing an alternative location for in-depth interaction and meaningful exchange. studies continue to show that individuals who operate as avatars in virtual environments often express a level of social capital equal to or greater than what they may experience in the physical world (davis, 2011; bargh and mckenna, 2004). social capital has been shown to have tremendous potential value in patient support and recovery. as technology has permitted individuals to connect to their networks through highly interactive social media, connecting is also now accessible to almost anyone, almost anywhere. this does not disavow the notion of a “digital divide” that might in fact prohibit remote or financially disadvantaged individuals from participating. however, these individuals are also often lacking other simple resources required to develop social capital (including transportation or the economic resources to participate in community organizations) especially when their communities lack places or programs that provide support services. such is especially the case with individuals who suffer from disabilities or debilitating conditions such as parkinson’s disease when mobility is further diminished. can attending such support meetings and functioning in a virtual community provide equal or even greater benefit? this study sought to answer this important question. methodological approach and theoretical underpinnings because this research is exploring the evolution of a new form of community about which very little is currently known, this ethnographic study employed participant observation in two stages: first, the researcher attended both the public social events of the “creations for parkinson’s” group in the virtual world, second life. second, the researcher attended the organizations’ weekly support group as an observer. following approximately six months of engaging in the community, clear themes emerged which guided the development of protocols for measuring the experience of individuals who will be recruited for longitudinal study in collaboration with medical researchers. from a theoretical perspective, media effects, uses and gratifications and social capital theories guide this study. in his exploration of media effects, mcluhan suggested nearly half a century ago that media was an “extension of man” (1964). although there were no virtual worlds or avatars to reference his concept of media as an extension of man in 1964, perhaps his prediction is even more applicable to digital media, especially the immersive 3d virtual world where humans function and interact with others in the form of digital surrogates, also called avatars. if, in fact, individuals whose physical function is diminished as a result of parkinson’s disease are able to continue to live what they perceive to be a “normal” life similar to the one they had prior to their illness, is this not perhaps the most literal definition of media as an extension of man? likewise, uses and gratifications theory assumes the media consumer takes an active role in which medium they choose and how they use it (blumler and katz, 1974). although more recent interpretation has extended to internet uses and gratifications (stafford, stafford & schkade, 2004; larose & easton, 2002), this research may further our concept of uses and gratifications when the medium provides basic human need such as social connection and potentially the ability to function in a community where their physical world no longer allows or is significantly limited. conclusions and discussion selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 8 preliminary findings have laid the foundation from which to launch a long-term study on the effects of avatar performance on individuals diagnosed with parkinson’s disease. anecdotally, individuals currently report experiencing increased social support and positive effect from emotional bonds built in their virtual world. perhaps more important, one study participant reports increased mobility and reduced symptoms of her parkinson’s disease since she began watching “herself” (her avatar) engage in physical activities such as dance and tai chi in the virtual environment. given the ease of access to this virtual world from anywhere in the world with a computer and internet access, if indeed people can experience the same benefit, this research could prove to be profoundly important. acknowledgments i thank tom boellstorff and alice krueger for their guidance, wisdom and support, as well as the individuals from the parkinson’s community in second life who have shed such important light on the potential uses of virtual worlds. references bargh, j., mckenna, k. & fitzsimons, g. (2002). “can you see the real me? activation and expression of the ‘true self’ on the internet”. journal of social issues, 58(1), 33-48. beard, l, wilson, k., morra, d., keelan, j., (2009). a survey of health-related activities on second life. journal of medical internet research, 11(2): e17. blumler j.g. & katz, e. (1974). the uses of mass communications: current perspectives on gratifications research. beverly hills, ca: sage. davis, d. (2010). exploring the media effects of 3-d online immersive worlds and how they impact both virtual and real human relations. proceedings of the 12th euprera congress, jyvaskyla, finland, september 2010. heeter, c. (1992). being there: the subjective experience of presence. presence, teleoperators and virtual environments. 1, 262-271. krebs, p., burkhalter, j., lewis, s. hendrickson, t., chiu, o., fearn, p., perchick, w. & ostroff, j. (2009). development of a virtual reality coping skills game to prevent post-hospitalization smoking relapse in tobacco dependent cancer patients. journal of virtual worlds research, 2(2). lee, kwan min (2004). presence, explicated. communication theory. vol. 14, issue 1, p. 27-50. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 9 mcluhan, m. (1964). understanding media: the extensions of man. new york: mcgraw-hill national institutes of health (nih) (2012). parkinson’s disease backgrounder. retrieved january 22, 2012 from http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/parkinsons_disease/parkinsons_disease_backgrounder.ht m. norris, j., (2009). the growth and direction of healthcare support groups in virtual worlds. journal of virtual worlds research, 2(2). available at: <http://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/index.php/jvwr/article/view/658>. stafford, t., stafford, m., & schkade, l. (2004). determining uses and gratifications for the internet. decision sciences. vol. 35, issue 2, p. 259-288. toro-troconis, m., mellström, u., partridge, m., meera, k., barrett, m. & higham, j. (2008). designing game-based learning activities for virtual patients in second life. journal of cybertherapy & rehabilitation, 1(3), p. 225-238. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 10 disability and the immateriality of information tom boellstorff university of california, irvine united states tboellst@uci.edu abstract the goal of this paper is to use ethnographic data to speak to a theoretical debate. specifically, i show how the experiences of persons with disabilities in the virtual world second life can intervene in current work on the materiality of information. their experiences can help us rethink the mind/body dualism and avoid treating the online as “immaterial.” thus, while i will address exciting ways that virtual worlds provide possibilities for social support and even rehabilitation for people with disabilities, their words and deeds can also be taken seriously as powerful conceptual interventions. this underscores how effective ethnographic research involves treating interlocutors as sources of theory as well as data. keywords disability; embodiment; ethnography; materiality; virtual worlds introduction in this paper, i explore what the experiences of persons with disabilities who build community in the virtual world second life can tell us about the materiality of information. that’s a lot packed into one sentence, but it’s not as complicated as it sounds. it is a story of appropriation, of making something new from a given state of affairs. my goal is to take the everyday insights of a community—in this case, persons with disabilities participating in a virtual world—and put those insights into conversation with a theoretical debate—in this case, regarding what is termed the “materiality of information.” in treating my ethnographic interlocutors as a source of theory as well as data, i seek the kind of conceptual dialogue associated with the best ethnographic work in anthropology and beyond. in a classic statement of this approach, clifford geertz emphasized: [a] continuous dialectical tacking between the most local of local detail and the most global of global structure in such a way as to bring them into simultaneous view... [an ethnographer] moves back and forth between asking himself, “what is the general form of their life?” and “what exactly are the vehicles in which that form is embodied?” (geertz, 1983, pp. 69–70). disability and social life in the case at hand, the form in which the lives of persons with disabilities who participate in virtual worlds are embodied involves avatars, digital objects, and online landscapes. these persons teach us something about materiality and its relationship to what is known as “social constructionism” (in essence, the idea that we create our social worlds through social norms). as the disability theorist tobin siebers notes: in a society of wheelchair users, stairs would be nonexistent, and the fact that they are everywhere in our society seems an indication only that most of our architects are able-bodied people who think unseriously about access… [but] disability scholars have begun to insist that… [social constructionism]… either fails to account for the difficult physical realities faced by people with disabilities or presents their body in ways that are conventional, conformist, and unrecognizable to them. these include the habits of privileging performativity over corporeality, favoring pleasure to pain, and describing social success in terms of selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 11 intellectual achievement, bodily adaptability, and active political participation. (siebers, 2001, p. 740) these questions of disability and social experience take on new meanings in the context of online technologies. linkages between technology and disability are, of course, of great antiquity, but novel possibilities emerge with the internet: “for many disabled people there have been not only improvements, but also first-time occurrences of great significance” (anderberg and jönsson, 2005, p. 719). for instance, against the tendency to see online interaction as “mediated,” it is striking that for some persons with disabilities, interaction online can be less mediated than interaction offline “by opening up new arenas for contact that [one] is able to control without the presence of a pa [personal assistant]” (anderberg and jönsson, 2005, p. 724). mind, body, and dualism the material i draw on in this analysis comes from fieldwork i have been conducting since june 2012 with persons with disabilities who participate in several communities in second life, and also building on earlier ethnographic research in this virtual world (boellstorff, 2008, 2011, 2012; boellstorff, nardi, pearce, and taylor 2012). i will discuss how my interlocutors often talk about the importance of a division between mind and body, and how this shows up in their interactions online. i want to take this seriously. in insisting on a distinction between mind and body, these persons with disabilities are speaking to the tendency in much social theory to claim that the mind and body are unified, and analogously that the online and offline are “blurred.” persons with disabilities active in second life are quite aware of their physical-world bodies. however, their interactions with the online and offline are only possible because of the distinction between the two, the “digital” gap between virtual and physical that recalls the gaps between zeros and ones without which the digital itself would be impossible. when a woman with a disability is dancing with a group of friends as an avatar in second life, and says “it thrills me to see me dancing; this is who i am,” this person is not delusional or mistaken. she is not lost in a technological fantasy; she is reconceptualizing embodiment. while beyond the scope of this article to discuss in detail, i will mention how one entailment of this reconceptualization is the possibility that virtual worlds could be used to mitigate certain symptoms of disorders like parkinson’s disease. from embodiment to immateriality to extend even further the insights gained from my ethnographic collaboration with persons with disabilities, i will briefly address how these understandings of embodiment link up to questions of materiality. in recent years there has arisen a body of literature concerned with “the materiality of information.” this work responds to a feeling that some internet research of the last two decades has overemphasized the supposed placelessness and immateriality of the online. while this is an important intervention, the danger is of the pendulum swinging so far in the other direction that future scholars will denounce current work for overemphasizing materiality. i will conclude my analysis by mentioning three ways that the experiences of persons with disabilities can help us avoid underestimating “immateriality” in relation to internet sociality. first, physicalworld conditions are underdetermining: you cannot predict what will happen online by looking just at infrastructure, physical bodies, and hardware. second, in important ways “materiality” is not limited to the physical world: there are forms of digital materiality, including digital artifacts, digital embodiment, and digital places. finally, despite the tendency in many traditions (including most western traditions) to treat the immaterial as relatively important (as the phrase “that is immaterial” suggests), the immaterial has real causal force and social significance. this suggests exciting pathways for future research, including collaborations with a range of virtual communities. such collaboration can investigate how virtual worlds provide new possibilities for sociality and rehabilitation for persons with disabilities (carr, 2010; hoch et al., 2012; krueger, selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 12 ludwig, and ludwig, 2009; stewart, hansen, and carey, 2010). however, in this brief talk i hope to indicate how the experiences of persons with disabilities are also a source of general theoretical insight. this does not mean that ethnographers do not take responsibility for their claims. it does not mean that we assert “ethnographic authority” (clifford, 1983) by implying that our analyses are unassailable because they have the imprimatur of those we study. however, it does mean that we get ideas as well as data from the people we study. recognizing that fact can lead to a more dialogical and vulnerable (behar, 1986) intellectual practice, online or offline. acknowledgments i thank donna davis and alice krueger for their collegiality and support, and my interlocutors in second life for their wisdom, insight, and good cheer. my thanks as well to the organizers of aoir for their support. references anderberg, p. & jönsson, b. (2005). being there. disability & society 20 (7), 719–733. doi: 10.1080/09687590500335733. behar, r. (1997). the vulnerable observer: anthropology that breaks your heart. boston: beacon press. boellstorff, t. (2008) coming of age in second life: an anthropologist explores the virtually human. princeton: princeton university press. boellstorff, t. (2011) placing the virtual body: avatar, chora, cypherg. in a companion to the anthropology of the body and embodiment. frances e. mascia-lees, editor (pp. 504–520). new york: wiley-blackwell. boellstorff, t. (2012) rethinking digital anthropology. in digital anthropology. heather a. horst and daniel miller, editors (pp. 39–60). london: berg. boellstorff, t., nardi, b., pearce, c., and taylor, t. (2012) ethnography and virtual worlds: a handbook of method. princeton: princeton university press. carr, d. (2010). constructing disability in online worlds: conceptualising disability in online research. london review of education 8 (1), 51–61. clifford, j. (1983). on ethnographic authority. representations 1 (2), 118–146. geertz, c. (1983). “from the native’s point of view”: on the nature of anthropological understanding. in his local knowledge: further essays in interpretive anthropology (pp. 55–72). new york: basic books. hoch, d., watson, a., linton, d., et al. (2012). the feasibility and impact of delivering a mind-body intervention in a virtual world. plos one 7 (3), e33843 (pp. 1–6). krueger, a., ludwig, a., ludwig, d. (2009). universal design: including everyone in virtual world design. journal of virtual worlds research 2 (3), 4–9. siebers, t. (2001). disability in theory: from social constructionism to the new realism of the body. american literary history 13 (4), 737–754. stewart, s., hansen, t., carey, t. (2010). opportunities for people with disabilities in the virtual world of second life. rehabilitation nursing 35 (6), 254–259. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. microsoft word 866-610-1-pb.docx 1 'symbolic violence' and the ethics of representation: reimagining (digital) public(s) linh dich, assistant professor, miami university abstract drawing from an 18-month ethnography of the social network site, xanga, this author examines how notions of the public inform communication practices and identity formations of asian-american internet users. the author connects participants’ experiences of alienation from (offline) public sites as motivation for their digital writing activities that recreate and revise a different version of the public. this study argues for the importance of digital environments that afford public arenas for marginalized groups. how one is “seen” or recognized by the public has ethical implications; for asian americans, this too often means performing well-worn asian stereotypes in order to be accepted by the public. through xanga, participants are able to explore and assert various public identities. this study has particular implications for educators considering the ethics of representation and race for digital contexts and for the design of digital courses. keywords asian american; identity formation; public; ethics; representation reimagining (digital) public(s) in 1996, susan wells asked “what do we want from public writing?” in her timely work interrogating theorists growing focus and concern with the role of writing in and for the public (weisser, 2008; mathieu, 2005). more than a decade later, this question remains a central inquiry for educators, particularly when we consider emerging technologies’ role in mediating and producing public writing (couture and kent, 2004). in this new digital context, writing for the public has been celebrated (rheingold, 2000), interrogated (barton, 2005), and critically examined for its social and political possibilities (ward,1997; weisser 2008). while such work has broadened academia’s understanding of the public, what remains a major oversight in this body of scholarship is how the public, touted as a significant writing concept, gets taken up by everyday writers. that is, little work has explored how writers understand “the public” in digital writing practices, and this lack suggests that the field has been occupied with the public as an abstract concept divorced from the actual practice of writing. specifically, scholarship has failed to examine how racial identities and writers function in the representation and construction of the public given digital technology’s ubiquitous role in both the production of representations and, ostensibly, the public. examinations of how digital environments invoke public imaginaries for writers, then, have ethical implications when educators ask students to engage in these environments because “the public” remains a contested site of representation (and power), functioning to exclude the very students educators may seek to include and empower in the “public” imaginaries of their online classrooms. my interdisciplinary research on asian-american writers on the social network site, xanga, combines critical race, technology, and public theories in order to examine how public functions as a key motivation for internet users. in my 18-month ethnographic study of the social network site, xanga, i employed an observer-participant role for examining how asian-american users produce their identities through language practices. unexpected data led me to explore participants’ engagement with online public(s) for reimagining and rewriting their fraught offline relationships with the public. in other words, participants recount alienating experiences from public sites (school, work, pop culture/media) due to their raced bodies; they have been told to “go back to the rice patties,” asked if they ever eat scorpions “like they do on tv,” but are, then, framed as “tech-savvy” by broader public discourses (participants: nick, angeline, and chris). this bipolar, public discourse that signals to 2 asian americans their conditional belonging (such as in economic turns for technology booms) exacts a psychological and collective toll—they see themselves as valued for only one-dimensional identities: good at math and computers, docile, and culturally inept (lowe, 1996; ono and pham, 2009). for asian americans to become recognized in and by the public, then, typically requires the performance of the very stereotypes preventing them from being multi-dimensional. drawing on gross’s (2001) term, “symbolic violence,” i see this conditional belonging in the public sphere as a cultural process in which specific groups are made marginal, insignificant, and powerless through the cultural and public denial of the whole, complex person. such symbolic violence has consequences for how asian americans conceive of their role in the broader public imaginary. in short, many participants in my study do not believe they belong in public arenas unless they perform asian stereotypes, thus challenging how they imagine themselves as shaping civic discourses and contexts. however, my study also shows the significant potential for resistance-work in social network sites that afford users the opportunity not only to reimagine themselves as part of the public, but to rewrite online public(s) in the process, effectively rewriting themselves as public figures. by using xanga as a platform, participants are able to create and engage with an asian-american public, thus mitigating the white, dominant gaze that calls forth asian stereotypes as the cost for being recognized. through multiple modes of data collection (online artifacts, surveys, and interviews), my triangulated research supports fraser’s (1996) subaltern public as a viable theory for digital environments, while pointing to the potential of social network sites as technologies and spaces where alternative groups can experiment and create public identities in “safer” contexts than the public, writ large. this is particularly important for students who have been historically alienated from such sites, both on and offline. specifically, participants show that an online public is an essential imaginary for their identity formations because “being heard” and recognized by the public imaginary is something that these participants believe that they have denied. such finding calls upon educators to rethink new ways we can use digital environments for helping students ethically access and even create public(s); the production of digital environments has significant implications for shaping the public and, in turn, for students’ work in representing self and others within such spaces. for example, positing the public as a representation unto itself allows writers to examine how this imaginary works to include and exclude others. treating the public as a representation affords writers the opportunity to understand how the public emerges from culturalhistorical contexts, and ultimately, how such contexts are informed by race as both a material experience and a process of representation. given such findings, i believe that educators within the digital/new media fields are well-positioned to help students construct and shape more inclusive public spaces that can both empower themselves and others as ethical and civic endeavors. references barton, m. d. (2005) the future of rational-critical debate in online public spheres. computers and composition 22 (2). retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com.silk.library.umass.edu/science/article/pii/s8755461505000125 couture, b., kent, t. (2004). the private, the public, and the published: reconciling private lives and public phetoric. logan: utah state up. fraser, n. (1996) rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. c. calhoun (ed.), habermas and the public sphere (pp.109-142). cambridge: mit press. gross, l. (2001). out of the mainstream: sexual minorities and the mass media. m. durham and d. kellner (eds.), media and cultural studies: keyworks (pp. 405-423). malden: blackwell publishers. lowe, l. (1996). immigrant acts. durham: duke up. mathieu, p. (2005) tactics of hope: the public turn in english composition. portsmouth: heinemann. ono, k. a., pham, v.n. (2009). asian americans and the media. cambridge: polity press. 3 rheingold, h. (2000). the virtual community: homesteading on the electronic frontier. cambridge: mit press. weisser, c. (2008). moving beyond academic discourse: composition studies and the public sphere. carbondale: southern illinois press. wells, s. (1996). rogue cops and health care: what do we want from public writing? college composition and communication 47 (8). retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.silk.library.umass.edu/stable/358292 ward, i. (1997). how democratic can we get?: the internet, the public sphere, and public discourse. journal of american composition 17 (3). retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.silk.library.umass.edu/stable/20866148 yancey, k. (2004). made not only in words: composition in a new key. college composition and communication 56 (2). retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.silk.library.umass.edu/stable/4140651 4 captive students and corporate surveillance: privacy research and implications for educators heidi a. mckee, associate professor, miami university abstract as educators teaching with online technologies, we need to consider what sites we require students to use in our classes. corporate surveillance, tracking, and big data aggregation and reidentification are omnipresent and are issues that we need to be concerned about. research shows that even as young adults share more personal information online than any other age group, they are concerned about their privacy online. in this presentation, the author reviews recent developments in corporate data mining techniques and privacy research—both secondary and primary that she has conducted—to provide recommendations for online learning. keywords data mining; privacy; online learning imagine—you’re a student signed up for an online course that you must complete in order to graduate. the instructor requires you to have a google+ account and a twitter account for course hangouts, feeds, and projects. you go to twitter, click “accept” on the terms of service (that you don’t read, because what’s the point—you need to graduate), and, viola!, you are now part of twitter’s everexpanding database. as instructors, we value student engagement in public social media in our courses. but when we ask students to participate in these corporate-owned spaces, are we compromising our students’ privacy, serving them up to marketers? sure, we could avoid marketers altogether by teaching within bounded institutionally sanctioned learning management systems such as sakai—fairly private there but that seems too limiting for pedagogy and for learning. corporations create some of the more innovative communication technologies, and it’s hard to imagine teaching online without, say, google. and it’s hard to imagine preparing today’s global citizen without including participation in the online sites where so much public and intellectual work is being created, discussed, and disseminated. we could conclude that privacy concerns just don’t matter anymore—that students are living their lives online and don’t really care that much about privacy. we could adopt the attitude of zuckerberg (2010) who, when defending facebook’s ever-changing privacy policies, argued that “people have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds but more openly with more people. that social norm is just something that’s just evolved over time. we [at facebook] view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norm is.” but is the current social norm among students really toward more sharing of information with all? studies in the united states and in other countries indicate otherwise. surveys by the pew internet and american life project found that teenagers and young adults are concerned about privacy and are taking more steps to try to protect their privacy online (lenhart & madden, 2007; lenhart et al., 2010; madden & smith, 2010). a survey by the european commission (2011) of citizens of all ages in all e.u. countries found that 62% of young people age 15-24 changed their privacy settings on social networking sites and that even though young people share more information online than older adults, they too expressed clear desires to control and access the use of their personal data by corporations. a study of college students at an american public university found that 51.3% of students were “very uncomfortable” or “uncomfortable” with the idea that advertisers were looking at their information online (kazungu et al., 2011). but if students might be “uncomfortable” is that really something we need to worry about as we design our online courses? what are the actual harms, if any, from sites (who give us free services 5 after all) that track where we go or things we like? the harms come in big data. as liebowitz (2010), past chairman of the federal trade commission (the u.s. government agency that aims to provide consumer protections) explained, “[d]ata collected for one purpose can be combined with other data and then used for purposes not anticipated by the consumer. further, unbeknownst to many consumers, companies such as data brokers collect and sell such aggregated data on a routine basis.” what we ask students to do on one site may not be a problem, especially when sites such as twitter emphasize that they don’t reveal any “personally identifying information” but what is “personallyidentifying” has changed as data aggregation, resorting, and reidentification gets easier and easier (gross & acquisti, 2005; millar, 2009). data mining is an issue, but does it mean we go hide in those bounded, institutionally-controlled learning management spaces? i would argue vigorously no. we have an ethical obligation to teach students how to engage in online media and public media, even if those spaces are corporate-owned public spaces. and we have an ethical obligation to prepare students to be critical users of the web. tellingly, in the survey mentioned earlier of u.s. college students, only 41.3 percent thought advertisers were seeing their online information—that means the majority of students (all of whom had facebook accounts) were not aware that their information was being mined (kazungu et al., 2011). clearly, students have much to learn. and so do we. as technologies change, as more and more courses and communications move online, we have an ethical obligation to prepare our students and ourselves for being critically aware, publically active, and privacy-aware (but not privacyparanoid) web users. so what can we do? first, we need to educate ourselves and our students about the privacy policies and settings of sites we use in our online courses. this means actually taking the time to read through the privacy policies—an onerous task if there ever was one! but we need to slog through the legalese because some hot new site that pops up may have some egregious policy or some more established site may suddenly change its policies—the way linkedin had (for all of one day) its “social advertising” (roslansky, 2011) policy that allowed the use of users’ photos in advertising, not just advertising for linkedin, but third-party advertising too. if a site’s policies are horrendous, we need to not use the site, finding, if possible, other alternatives. we need to resist and to teach our students to resist the minimization of harm, what mcdonald (2010) explained as the tendency to negate defuse harms, like the harms to privacy, in favor of immediate gains (using a site). we also need to not be blinded by deflection (selber, 2004), how sites describe their services in ways that hide their other purposes (e.g., facebook marketing itself as the place where “friends find friends”). critical awareness doesn’t just extend to knowing sites’ policies, we also need to help students learn how to set privacy options. we cannot assume they know. and we need to be aware of the privacy policies and laws in the countries in which we teach. if a company’s policies violate a national law on privacy (or may violate the law as laws continually change), do we, as instructors living in that country or teaching students who live in that country, really want to require students to use that site? as we prepare course curricular, we need to layer in direct instruction in the analysis and evaluation of web technologies and privacy. we need to help students interrogate their own and others’ individual, community, and cultural expectations for privacy, helping them to recognize that privacy is, of course, a cultural construct and perceptions of privacy vary widely (elm, 2009; ess, 2002; gal, 2002; lange, 2007; mckee & porter, 2009; nakada & tamura, 2005), thus shaping not only users of web sites, but also the site developers as well. when we teach online, we need to recognize that privacy matters, and we need to design our courses in ways that ensure students are able to engage with public web media with a critical awareness of the risks of corporate surveillance. 6 references elm, m.s. (2009). how do various notions of privacy influence decisions in qualitative internet research? in a. n. markham & n. k. baym (eds.), internet inquiry: conversations about method (pp. 69–87). thousand oaks, ca: sage. ess, c. (2009). digital media ethics. cambridge, uk: polity press. european commission. (2011). special eurobarometer 359: attitudes on data protection and electronic identity in the european union. retrieved from http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_359_en.pdf. gal, s. (2002). a semiotics of the public/private distinction. differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies, 13, 77–95. gross, r., & acquisti, a. (2005). information revelation and privacy in online social networks (the facebook case). acm workshop on privacy in the electronic society. retrieved from http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~acquisti/papers/privacy-facebook-gross-acquisti.pdf lange, p. g. (2007). publicly private and privately public: social networking on youtube. journal of computer-mediated communication, 13(1), article 18. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/lange.html leibowitz, j. d. (2010, july 27). statement at the consumer online privacy hearing held by the committee on commerce, science, and transportation. lenhart, a., & madden, m. (2007). teens, privacy and online social networks. retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/2007/teens-privacy-and-online-social-networks.aspx lenhart, a., purcell, k., smith, a., & zickuhr, k. (2010). social media and young adults. retrieved from: http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/2010/social-media-and-young-adults.aspx kazungu, f., mckee, h., oberpeul, h., & wilkins, a. (2011). social networking, privacy, and young adults in the u.s.: perspectives and (mis)perceptions. association of internet researchers. seattle wa. madden, m., & smith, a. (2010, may 26). reputation management and social networking. pew internet and american life project. retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/2010/reputationmanagement/introduction mcdonald, a. m. (2009, september 17). online privacy: industry self-regulation in practice. google talk. retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bno7q5_o4ry mckee, h. a., & porter, j. e. (2009). the ethics of internet research: a rhetorical, case-based approach. new york: peter lang. millar, j. (2009). core privacy: a problem for predictive data mining. in i. kerr, v. steeves, & c. lucock (eds.), lessons from the identity trail: anonymity, privacy, and identity in a networked society (pp. 103119). new york: oxford university press. nakada, m., & tamura, t. (2005). japanese conceptions of privacy: an intercultural perspective. ethics and information technology, 7, 27–36. roslansky, r. (2011, june 23). ads enhanced by the power of your network. linkedin blog. retrieved from http://blog.linkedin.com/2011/06/23/social-ads selber, s. a. (2004). multiliteracies for a digital age. carbondale: southern illinois university press. zuckerberg, m. (2010, january 8). mike arrington interrogates mark zuckerberg. upstream. retrieved from http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/3848950 7 moocs, interaction, and the ethical issue of copyrights james e. porter, professor, miami university abstract this article explores an important ethical issue for online course design: faculty and student copyrights in moocs (massive open online courses) hosted by third parties outside the university. when faculty offer courses via a third-party mooc, what copyrights do they retain for the original materials they create? what rights do they relinquish? and what copyright protections exist for students? this article critiques several mooc licenses on the grounds that they elide the distinction between course and course content, thereby undercutting the university’s value and potentially damaging the university’s ethical relationship with students. universities should avoid entering into mooc licensing partnerships that treat the course as an object rather than as a social performance or that fail to provide adequate protection for faculty and student intellectual property. the value added of the college course is not merely the content. it is, more importantly, the social interaction between content, instructor, and students. keywords mooc; e-learning; online course; intellectual property; higher ed it policy this presentation explores an important ethical issue for online course design: faculty and student copyrights in moocs (massive open online courses). this issue should concern faculty developing online courses, whether moocs or oocs (i.e., not “massive”). the course materials developed for moocs— syllabuses, course policies, video lectures, quizzes, class activities, powerpoint slides, writing assignments, etc. — are certainly copyrighted. but who holds the copyright for those materials when they appear on a mooc — and who “owns” the mooc overall? what are the intellectual property implications for faculty who develop moocs? what copyrights do students retain for the original material they create and post on moocs? we should certainly be excited about moocs and acknowledge their tremendous potential. at the same time we should be suspicious about an emerging development model for moocs: many universities are outsourcing their moocs to third-party host/providers such as coursera and udacity — in much the same way that they are outsourcing quality assurance review for online courses to third parties like quality matters. the host/provider contributes the delivery platform, the interface design, and the promotion and marketing, in exchange for which the host makes claims on the intellectual property of the mooc. it is the nature of these ip claims — and the definition of “course” that underlies the ip licensing — that bears watching, because these claims can fundamentally change the university’s ethical relationship with its students. are moocs truly “open”? that depends on whose mooc. by definition they are “open access” in the sense that the courses themselves are free (usually, so far) and open to all who can access them on the internet. but not all moocs are “open” in the sense of “open source,” and certainly not in regards to their approach to intellectual property. the early moocs (which were not called that) typically operated under an open source ethic. for instance, mit’s opencourseware project licenses its available course materials under a creative commons open access license that allows students to share, redistribute, and remix available course materials if they credit the source and use the same licensing for new materials they create. the open yale courses project currently offers 42 online courses using this same creative commons license. we should notice that these open source courseware projects archive course materials but often label these materials as courses. that is a troubling elision, and one that plagues many discussions about online courses. does “the course” = “the materials for the course”? well, no, not entirely. a course consists of other elements, including and especially an unfolding performance in time, the instructor’s 8 interactions with students, and the students’ original content contributions. that reductive misrepresentation of “course,” which is, unfortunately, fairly common, has significant consequences for the development of online courses in higher education. “course” — a simple term, everybody knows what it means, and so the complexity and diversity of its meaning are often overlooked. we should pay attention, though, to how “the online course” is being represented in public discussions and by for-profit third parties such as coursera and udacity but also by organizations like sloan consortium and, particularly, quality matters that are exerting considerable influence over how universities design online courses. the mooc providers getting all the press — edx, udacity, and coursera — are establishing restrictive copyright controls over courses and are constraining students’ uses of course material. in regards to the students’ own work — the work they originally produce and post to moocs — udacity claims an exclusive license to “use, distribute, reproduce, modify,” etc., that intellectual property, including the right to use students’ material for commercial purposes or to sublicense these rights to other parties, a broad copyright claim that universities typically do not make on student work (udacity, 2013). udacity’s copyright policies are stringent in regards to protecting its own intellectual property, but broad in regards to claiming rights to students’ intellectual property. this seems fairly typical for the major mooc providers. both edx and coursera have substantially the same policies governing material posted for their online courses (edx, 2013; coursera, 2013). it is important to note that these licenses do not refer to “students” but rather refer to “the user.” in fact most mooc registrants are not, strictly speaking, college students; in respect to the mooc provider they are “participants.” typically (with some exceptions), the registrants do not pay tuition and do not earn course credits. most moocs are not even technically “college courses.” what is unusual, though, is that universities — some fairly prestigious ones normally paranoically obsessive about protecting their brand —are embracing a vocabulary that blurs the institutional boundaries between the profit and the non-profit; between corporate and academic identities; between “course” and “course materials”; and between their own “courses” and these online-training-modules-that-are courses-only-in-the-informal-sense. these restrictive copyright policies should be troubling to universities and to faculty who sponsor moocs on third-party hosts. before moving in this direction, universities should reflect on their “institutional ecology” (benkler, 2003, p. 1272; see also benkler, 2008) — that is, the kind of organizational infrastructure they are building when they outsource their courses to a third-party host, particularly those that elide that distinction between the course and the course materials. now i have no doubt that some college courses do fit this model: that is, they are taught primarily as one-way delivery of content from instructor and/or textbook to student, conceived of as an empty vessel (or nearly so). in the mooc world, this is called, pejoratively, an xmooc. we can also see this as freire’s banking model of education, applied to online course design. to imagine a course as equivalent to its content misses a vital point about the value added of higher education: students can be content creators, too. the assumption of the cmooc, or connectivist mooc, is that students themselves create knowledge and promote learning through their interaction in courses. a cmooc is designed to maximize student interaction, remixing, and social dialogue (siemens, 2005; ravenscroft, 2011). the assumption here is that learning happens not only in the oneway transfer of content from instructor to student/s, but most importantly in networked, crowd-sourced collaborative interaction and in students’ active contributions to and remixing of course content. indeed there is an even stronger claim at play here (one not unlike the assumptions of socratic dialectic): the interaction between participants potentially creates new knowledge and course content. in this respect, students in a cmooc could potentially be considered co-content creators — and ergo potential co-copyright holders — along with the instructor. 9 an online college course should not be equated with its content or treated as an object apart from its performance or its participants (viadhyanathan, 2002). the value added of many, perhaps most, college courses lies precisely in the performance: the social exchange and interaction between content, instructor, and students. courses are more than merely online textbooks, even if multimodal ones. universities and faculty should be staunch advocates of a broader, connectivist view of “course” and avoid licensing arrangements that reductively equate courses with their content or that fail to uphold students’ intellectual property rights. references benkler, yochai. (2003). freedom in the commons: towards a political economy of information. duke law journal , 52 , 1245-1276. benkler, yochai. (2008). the university in the networked economy and society: challenges and opportunities. in richard n. katz (ed.), the tower and the cloud: higher education in the age of cloud computing (pp. 51-61). educause. coursera. (2013). terms of service and privacy policy. retrieved from https://www.coursera.org/about/terms edx. (2013). terms of service. retrieved from https://www.edx.org/tos porter, james e. (2013). moocs, “courses,” and the question of faculty and student copyrights. in clancy ratliff (ed.), the cccc-ip annual: top intellectual property developments of 2012 (pp. 2-18). retrieved from http://www.ncte.org/cccc/committees/ip/2012developments ravenscroft, andrew. (2011). dialogue and connectivism: a new approach to understanding and promoting dialogue-rich networked learning. international review of research in open and distance learning , 12 (3), 139-160. siemens, george. (2005). connectivism: a learning theory for a digital age. international journal of instructional technology and distance learning , 2 (1), 3-10. udacity. (2013). terms of service. retrieved from https://www.udacity.com/legal/tos viadhyanathan, siva. (2002). the content-provider paradox: universities in the information ecosystem. academe , 88 (5), 34-37. microsoft word jarrett-economies of the internet iii-economies of the internet iii.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 economies of the internet iii: spheres holly kruse rogers state university brendan o’hallarn old dominion university john carter mcknight independent scholar cindy tekkobe university of alabama tamara shepherd university of calgary jeremy shtern ryerson university the internet has increasingly been conceptualized as a space of economic activity. this contemporary imaginary has been particularly influenced by insights from the school of autonomist marxism in the foundational work of tiziana terranova and through the dominance of christian fuchs’ application of marxist economic concepts. while this has generated great insight into the political economy of the internet, and in particular allowed for the conceptualization of user activity as labor, this approach is only one paradigm for considering the economic activities and implications of the internet. for internet research, there is also the need to move beyond the long schism between political economy and cultural studies as we try to understand user activity that is socially and affectively rich, but emerges from commercial contexts. this series of panels proposes to expand the exploration of the internet as an economic construct in a number of directions. it pluralizes the definition of “economy”, expanding it from the strictly fiscal to include other economies such as the moral, (sub-) cultural, affective, queer, or libidinal (to name merely a few). various papers propose different economic models for understanding the interactions within and between these various economies. they also expand the range of actors and economic contexts associated with the internet, drawing attention to the intersections of race and gender in particular. the goal of these papers across the various sessions is to expand our imaginary of the internet economy. the internet is a diverse place in which a diverse range of activities take place, both paid and unpaid. however this complexity is not always represented in studies of economic activity which often abstract from specific practices of users and industry workers in favor of proving an economic model, or focus on the obvious examples of sns use by a de-racialized, de-gendered, de-sexed consuming subject. this has left gaps in our understanding of internet economies, whether that be of particular economic activities or networks, or of how social status inflects and informs economic activity both within the paid workplace and in the sphere of leisure. the papers in this panel explore little-considered arenas of online economic activity and economic actors, working to develop the plurality of how we conceptualize the internet as an economic assemblage. they also demonstrate how economic spheres cannot be analyzed discretely from social contexts. the first two papers engage with sport, an important arena of economic activity that is only rarely studied as a mediated cultural form. the first speaker explores the relationship between media technologies and the extremely lucrative horseracing and online gaming industries. the paper outlines the history of horseracing and wagering and their embedding in growing leisure economies, but also links that growth to changes in information and communication networks, including networked computers and the internet as we now know it. this paper goes on to explore how the online horseracing economy at times exemplifies and other times challenges our assumptions about online activity, in particular the ways in which class and gender intersect in this over-looked arena. the second speaker investigates the relationship between sport, twitter and the informational economies of the public sphere. examining mediated sports events such as the 2011 revelations of serial sex abuse by penn state football coach or the suspension of baltimore ravens player ray rice, this analysis reflects on how, despite the potential of twitter to amplify debate in negative ways, it also functions as a site for deliberative democracy. this paper explores the informational economy of the habermasian public sphere generated in the discussions of sport on twitter. the third speakers discuss the complex context of alternative currency system mazacoin, claimed to be the “official tribal currency” of the oglala sioux tribe and developed with the imprimatur of a sovereign governing body. this study examines forums related to this cryptocurrency, analyzing the boundary and identity work undertaken by a variety of stakeholders as they negotiate the intersection of personal, cultural and economic values in the development and implementation of the financial technology. the final paper enters into the sphere of paid work, exploring the labor of an emerging set of actors in digital media’s economy, digital strategists. as a new profession responsible for combining advertising, marketing, branding and public relations, the cultural intermediaries who do this work are not only responsible for setting tastes but are engaged in position-taking relating to their economic and social role. based in a series of interviews with canadian digital strategists, this study identifies the specific ways in which these actors’ conceptualize their labor’s contribution to social media’s economics. this paper, like the others in this panel, explores the ways in which the lifeworlds of workers and consumers are entwined with fiscal value creation. paper 1: economies of horse racing in the digital world author: holly kruse horse racing, a sport that has existed for hundreds of years in its modern form, has much to tell us about overlooked online economic practices. betting on horse racing contributes to the estimated $40 billion annual generated by all online gambling worldwide (statista 2014). moreover, it has also played a significant role in the development of computer technology, including computer networks; in enabling synchronous international interactive media experiences, including financial transactions; in transmitting information to and from dispersed sites; and in using media to adapt to social and economic change. in fact, horse racing's use of communication technology has helped shape the economies of contemporary media, entertainment, and leisure. with the beginning of the modern era of horse racing in britain in the early nineteenth century and the establishment of enclosed racecourses, racetracks became leisure destinations. this trend continued in the united states, and accelerated with the appearance of glamorous and lucrative spots for racing late in the 1800s and in the early 1900s, like hialeah park in southern florida and del mar in southern california. these racetracks were frequented by the wealthy, but also by ordinary people, who enjoyed seeing the rich and famous, and who also enjoyed the spectacle of racing and the excitement of rooting for the horses on which they had bet. several tracks, including churchill downs and gulfstream park, have undergone renovations to make themselves more attractive as destinations in the modern leisure economy, offering many entertainment options. a study of the economies of horse racing links the establishment of leisure destinations and the leisure industry to the early development and use of information and communication networks. the "horse rooms" or "pool rooms" of the nineteenth century depended on live horse racing, the telegraph, and mutual financial participation in betting pools. in poolrooms, people gathered in dedicated urban spaces to be entertained by "breaking" sports media news in the form of the race calls enabled, and results transmitted, by telegraph. customers might also eat and drink at the poolroom while they bet. and as is almost always the case with media products, a few corporate entities vied for control of the "race wire" that provided results to poolrooms, with control eventually ending up in the hands of a monopoly or near monopoly. in the case of the race wire, the monopoly was first held by western union, then payne telegraphic service, and both monopolies limited choice and raised prices for all who ran poolrooms, as monopolies and near-monopolies of in information economies, whether held by microsoft or google or the bell system or western union, inevitably do. another late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century horse racing development that has explicit links to modern information technology and its economics was the invention of the totalizator machine, and with it, the ascendancy of parimutuel wagering. the early twentieth century totalizator was a computing machine, and totalizators became linked in what were mechanical, and then electrical, computer networks. totalizators and the pari-mutuel system made possible near-instant data processing based on individuals' actions. the electrical totalizator machine paved the way for the first commercially available computer; indeed, an investment from american totalisator helped make production of that computer, the univac, possible. further, in the 1970s as the internet's precursor, the arpanet, was being established, in new york city another important computer network that was groundbreaking for its time, operated by new york city off-track betting, handled large-scale financial and information flows, and made calculations based on that data.yet for all of its innovation in the development and use of media, the horse racing industry has often proven less than adept at competing in the broader leisure economy. still, an examination of horse race wagering forces us to think about presence and interactive media in new ways. traditionally, internet studies has imagined virtual presence to be the kind of presence one experiences when emailing, participating in virtual worlds, taking part (or lurking) in online discussion forums, texting, and belonging to social network sites. indeed, horse racing and its participants have been present in these online forums. but like other financial markets, horse racing requires us to think about virtual presence as something that exists in information and communication networks where not explicitly communicative, but technology-enabled, actions of others make us aware that they are present in the same time and space that we are. the continual movement of money in pari-mutuel wagering pools in horse racing and the odds that change as a result are palpable signs of others' presence as much as the changing list of trending topics on one's twitter feed, and it is not necessarily a more subtle one, given the effect that changing odds and pool sizes have on what are essentially short-term financial decisions. a study of horse racing and media also makes us think in a very tangible way about age, gender, class, race, and their role in imagining media economies and publics. we are reminded of the project of annales school and marxist historians, to look at the histories and lives of ordinary people and their practices, and the fact that horse racing as entertainment and employment is rooted, although not exclusively, in the lower and working classes. horse racing's public settings, at least in the popular imagination, and particularly with senior citizens and men. as a case study, horse racing makes us think about how all people engage in interactive media economies, even, or perhaps especially, groups whose media use has not been viewed as innovative or interesting. both public and private spaces are linked to, edward soja notes, wider and multiple systems of social power (1989, 152). the domestic sphere in the united states, for example, has been the site of much contestation over meaning and commerce, including over what is properly masculine and what is properly feminine in relation to , information, communication, and entertainment technologies. communication technologies have challenged the idea that a pristine middle-class domestic haven, untouched by the instrumental machinations of capitalism, has ever existed. in the internet age, the lucrative gambling and pornography industries have been central to public discussions about threats to the home and family, but they are marginalized in internet studies, even though their respective industries have been pioneers in the development of online technologies and uses, and in monetizing content. (for example, the pornography industry was at the forefront of innovations in online video content, and in profiting from that content.) individuals who engage in the economies and technologies of horse racing are part of a broader cultural narrative that treats the sport in some ways as an anachronism. still, the social and cultural resonances of racing and its technologies tells us that we, as digital media scholars, need to pay attention to how all sorts of people engage in online economies in all kinds of places, even if these users and sites are not often made visible in scholarly and popular discourse. paper 2: sport, twitter and the public sphere: creation of an informational economy author: brendan o’hallarn after a long christmas day argument about his sporting hero, kobe bryant, a twitter user named @mytweetsrealaf had had enough. fed up with criticism of the los angeles lakers star guard, @mytweetsrealaf threw out a challenge to an online enemy — meet him in temecula, ca, for a fistfight. he live-tweeted his 35-mile journey, with pictures. his would-be combatant did not show (ley, 2014). this episode represents, in a snapshot, the potential downside of the disproportionate importance placed on sport in society (amaechi, 2012; banschick, 2012) combined with the ready access to online tools to amplify and radicalize any debate (suler, 2004; sunstein, 2007). this risk to societal comity has been examined by sport and media scholars (frederick, lim, chung, & clavio, 2013; kian, clavio, vincent, & shaw, 2011). at the same time, this admittedly oddball episode serves as a demonstration of the power of sport as a connective device, and twitter as a real-time accelerator of an informational economy. though this particular online discussion involved a threat of physical violence, the medium and the subject, sport, presents an opportunity for classic public sphere generation. envisioned as a space for deliberative democracy by habermas (1989) and arendt (1958), the public sphere also has demonstrated the power of the information being shared itself. with the rise of bourgeois public spheres described by habermas in post-reformation europe, the “traffic in commodities and news” (p. 15) generated real, commodified value. arendt noted that this informational economy fosters an orderly discussion of matters essential to the function of democracy. today, this sphere has come to life in virtual form, starting with the first message sent through a computer network in 1978 (“the bbs corner,” n.d.). while many have argued that new media may create a new or revitalized public sphere, one which can promote and enhance an informational economy (castells, 2008; papachrissi, 2002; shirky, 2008), others are pessimistic about its ability to engender transformative change. fuchs (2014) in particular, laments that public sphere idealism is rendered impossible by the corporate control of the levers of content dissemination. study of social media’s role in creating a habermassian informational economy through public spheres has been studied in emerging democracies (hoskins, 2013), through analysis of white house facebook and youtube posts (halpern & gibbs, 2013), and through analysis of thousands of politically-themed tweets, which determined that “social media would have a potential as a public sphere, supporting arguments in political deliberation” (waldhauser, 2014, p. 13). for a few reasons, articulated below, it is noteworthy to study sport within the intersection of public spheres and new media, and their potential to generate informational economies. most remedially, sport and social media have merged to create economies of many types, from self-presentation and image-building (pegoraro, 2010), to social movements (clark, 2014), to pure monetary economies (watkins, 2014). also, twitter’s chronological display of most recent post first, along with the popularization of hashtags (turner, 2012) as editorial comment (smith & smith, 2012), organizing function (khondker, 2011), community construction tool (sharma, 2013), or folksonomy (glassey, 2012), suggest utility for the potential role of twitter hashtags in the creation of online economies. the real-time experience of following sports (where everyone consumes sporting events and news at the same time) creates an ideal forum to study the public sphere in creating an informational economy, a field of academic study currently not occupied. as proof, the most-tweeted event in the site’s history — the 2014 world cup soccer semifinal between germany and brazil (chase, 2014). critics would argue, rightly, that a popular sporting contest is not a classic public sphere. mindful of sport’s outsized place in society, this theoretical study seeks to examine sport issues extending beyond the field of play, such as the 2011 revelations of serial sexual abuse by a football coach at penn state, or the suspension of baltimore ravens running back ray rice, for the potential that twitter could provide a forum for public sphere activity. both events received mainstream media coverage, but also created a flurry of social media activity. with penn state, twitter was a multipronged, interactive tool used by journalists (sanderson & hambrick, 2012) and led to online expressions of identity (grandey, krannitz & slezak, 2013). the ray rice suspension, then ban, then reinstatement was accompanied by a running conversation on twitter about domestic abuse, notably through the use of the hashtag #whyistayed (mcmanus, 2014). this analysis will seek to extend research of the public sphere into a new realm, specifically, the potential for issues in sport to create spheres of deliberative democracy on social media. the combination of society’s passion for sport, and the unique tools of twitter architecture, provides an opportunity for enlightened discussion that can unify, inform and advocate. paper 3: “like the buffalo:” tribal cryptocurrency, affective capitalism, and rhetorics of sovereignty author: john carter mcknight and cindy tekkobe in february 2014, mazacoin, a bitcoin variant, was launched along with claims it would be the “official tribal currency” of the oglala sioux tribe. while alternative-currency and -payment systems are becoming commonplace, mazacoin was among the first to combine the technology of cryptocurrency with the support of a sovereign governmental body. mazacoin is also unusual in its attempt to align a digital technology steeped in the rhetorics of conservative libertarianism and capitalist innovation with the communitarian and traditional values of a tribal community. this work analyzes the rhetorical boundary work performed on online forums by mazacoin supporters, situating it in a global discourse of alternative finance which elides traditional divisions of left and right, first world and developing world, innovation and tradition. financial systems have long been early adopters of novel communications technologies, from cuneiform writing to the telegraph to the internet, so the current proliferation of digital applications for personal finance – transfers and holdings of value – are unsurprising. however, in an era of “the financialization of daily life,” (martin 2002) economic value and personal and cultural values are mutually entangled in bounds of affect which are created, shaped, and sustained by rhetorical practices ranging from text-based discourses to user experience design of financial websites. while the role of affective communications in personal finance has received attention from both the sociology of finance and the interdisciplinary study of affect, mazacoin provides a unique case of multiple digital technologies and rhetorics aimed simultaneously at profoundly different audiences: tribal leaders, cryptocurrency aficionados, and, on occasion, mainstream finance and regulatory authorities. in this environment, cryptocurrencies have been inseparable from critiques of governmental “fiat currencies,” advocacy of the gold standard, and the concept of replacing social trust with algorithmic software systems. advocates tend to be white, male, middle-class, with technical training in stem (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. in contrast, personal and community finance for tribal nations within the united states has been entwined with issues of sovereignty and dependency, the effects of revenues from casino gambling, and a legacy of confrontation with us federal authorities. activist and digital currency trader payu harris, spokesperson for mazacoin, has made the case for a technologically complex, electricity-intensive cryptocurrency as one solution to tribal political and financial problems by likening cryptocurrency to the buffalo….. [situating pine ridge as among the poorest communities in the us] meanwhile, mazacoin has received substantial support on cryptocurrency forums, where the notions of challenging the us federal currency regime and attempting to solve longstanding political and social problems by means of software tools have resonated in a community about as far removed from that of pine ridge as possible. comparing the scant public discourse of the oglala lakota to the more prolific online discussions of cryptocurrency advocates, it seems the notion of a cryptocurrency as a technological solution to communal poverty is an easier “sell” outside of pine ridge than within it. a close reading of this discourse exposes the boundary work and identity work of cryptocurrency stakeholders and their relatively positionality as they re/make and re/purpose bitcoin variants in service of the construction of individual and communal identities, values, and ideologies. panel 4: digital strategists, professional imaginaries, and social media value author: tamara shepherd and jeremy shtern the digital strategist represents a new form of cultural intermediary that combines the functions of advertising, marketing, branding, and public relations in an attempt to negotiate new economies of social media. as part of monetizing social media platforms whose market valuations often rest on ephemeral ideas of value rather than empirical profits, the digital strategist performs essential work of framing taste publics while also shoring up the belief in social media’s significance for promotional culture. in the process, digital strategists work to legitimize their own profession as part of positiontaking within what is perceived as a seismic shift in promotional strategies given the continuously shifting landscape of social media platforms. this paper presents the results of a qualitative study of such digital strategists working across agencies and inhouse within different industries. the way that digital strategists imagine their roles offers some important insights into this emerging profession, how it embodies a new kind of cultural intermediary, and how economic value gets constructed in networked promotional culture. theoretically, our approach is anchored in pierre bourdieu’s account of “new cultural intermediaries” as those professions concerned with “presentation and representation (sales, marketing, advertising, public relations, fashion, decoration and so forth) […] in all the institutions providing symbolic goods and services in cultural production and organization” (bourdieu, 1984, p. 359). beyond their mediating role in cultural gatekeeping work that contributes to the creation of a normative taste habitus, cultural intermediaries simultaneously engage in explicit position-taking within an indeterminate niche in the socio-economic order, where “jobs and careers have not yet acquired the rigidity of the older bureaucratic professions” (bourdieu, 1984, p. 151). the dynamic between intermediaries’ shaping of cultural consumption and shaping of their own legitimacy has since been applied broadly to a number of creative fields, moving away somewhat from bourdieu’s initial concern with the way intermediaries occupy the boundary space between low and high cultures (hesmondhalgh, 2006; negus, 2002). in fact, many of the contemporary applications of bourdieu’s framework focus on professions enacting symbolic mediation of consumption patterns within “promotional culture” writ large (wernick, 1991). as such, this study follows from recent investigations of cultural intermediaries in fields such as advertising, marketing, branding, and public relations (cronin, 2004; edwards, 2012; hodges, 2006; mcfall, 2002; moor, 2008). we ask how digital strategists imagine their profession in order to update and amend the concept of cultural intermediaries to account for social media’s prominence as a contemporary promotional platform. specifically, our study presents findings from a series of 32 in-depth interviews conducted from 2012 to 2014 with people working as digital strategists in toronto and montreal. in asking these respondents to detail how they view their work and position in the social media economy, we sought to provide additional context to the ways that they imagine their work as cultural intermediaries in a contemporary context. as jennifer smith maguire and julian matthews have argued, it is crucial “to put context (back) into considerations of cultural intermediaries. context may be a useful analytical device, but it is also an empirical, lived reality” (2012, p. 553). our study thus seeks to consider cultural intermediaries as contextualized market actors, engaged in the pursuit of creating cultural legitimacy for their clients’ products, themselves, and the social media platforms they work within. the key findings of this investigation thus revolve around digital strategists’ generation of economic value through three interrelated pursuits of cultural legitimacy. the first is to create consumer engagement with branded products and services through social media. respondents framed the function of engagement as adding value both for clients, who gain consumers as “brand ambassadors,” as well as for consumers, who acquire informational as well as affective, social capital from receiving targeted promotions. second, digital strategists frame their own roles in this value generation as fundamentally creative, tapping into the cultural intermediary conceit of a feigned aesthetic disposition (bourdieu, 1984, p. 54). the fundamental creativity involved in creating emotional engagement through narrative was evoked as part of the cultural legitimacy of digital strategists, while also serving to justify their authority in a social media advertising landscape that is often considered to be more about the use of data for targeted marketing than for promotional storytelling. and third, digital strategists implicitly work to establish the legitimacy of social media platforms. the value of social media platforms themselves – in market terms, somewhat fictitiously measured through ephemeral qualities such as brand equity – is reinforced by digital strategists’ positioning of social media as the key interface for promotion as cultural gatekeeping (featherstone, 1991, p. 5). through the respondents’ articulations of their professional imaginaries as crucial cultural intermediaries in contemporary networked society, we conclude that the economic value of social media platforms owes something to the habitus of the emerging category of digital strategist. digital strategists’ primary work of creating engagement through social media reflects their “practitioner lifeworld – the totality of practitioners’ thought, concepts, values and assumptions about their occupation (referred to collectively as “habitus”) and their occupational experiences and identities that guide their behavior” (hodges, 2006, p. 84). this habitus, as partially imagined space, gets expressed through the ways in which respondents position themselves and deploy digital strategy as professional imaginary. digital strategists as cultural intermediaries thus maintain existing cultural capital and acquire additional symbolic power within social media ecologies marked by “the reciprocal inter-relationship of what are often thought of as discrete ‘cultural’ and ‘economic’ practices” (negus, 2002, p. 504). it is in this sense, we argue, that ephemeral, imagined constructions of cultural legitimacy underlie supposedly empirical economic valuations of social media platforms in contemporary promotional culture. references ahmed, s. (2004). “affective economies”. social text, 22(2), 117-139. aker, j. c., & mbiti, i. m. (2010). mobile phones and economic development in africa. the journal of economic perspectives, 207-232. amaechi, j. (2012, june 5). does society place too much importance on sports? the huffington post. retrieved february 15, 2015 from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/quora/does-society-place-too-mu_b_1569299.html andrejevic, m. (2011). “the work that affective economics does”. cultural studies, 25(45), 604-620. antonopulous, a. (2014). “bitcoin security model: trust by computation”. o’reilly radar, 14 february 2014. [http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/02/bitcoin-security-model-trust-bycomputation.html] arendt, h. (1958). the human condition. chicago, il: university of chicago press. banschick, m. (2012, february 5). why are sports important? psychology today. retrieved february 15, 2015 from https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/theintelligent-divorce/201202/why-are-sports-important the bbs corner (n.d.). a brief history of bbs systems! retrieved november 9, 2014 from http://www.bbscorner.com/usersinfo/bbshistory.htm bourdieu, p. (1984). distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste. translated by richard nice. london: routledge & keegan paul. bradbury, danny. “mazacoin aims to be sovereign altcoin for native americans.” coindesk: the voice of digital currency. http://www.coindesk.com/mazacoin-sovereign-altcoin-native-americans/ 6 february 2014 bryan, d., martin, r., and rafferty, m. (2009) “financialization and marx: giving labor and capital a financial makeover.” review of radical political economics 41, 458-772. doi: 10.1177/0486613409341368 çalışkan, k., & callon, m. (2009). economization, part 1: shifting attention from the economy towards processes of economization. economy and society, 38 (3), 369-398. castells, m. (2008). the new public sphere: global civil society, communication networks, and global governance. the annals of the american academy of political and social science, 616, 78-93. clark, r. (2014). #notbuyingit: hashtag feminists expand the commercial media conversation. feminist media studies, 14(6), 1108-1110. coleman, j. s. (1988). social capital in the creation of human capital. american journal of sociology, s95-s120. clark, g., thrift, n., & tickell, a. (2004). “performing finance: the industry, the media and its image”, review of international political economy, 11(2), 289-310. clough, p. t., goldberg, g., schiff, r., weeks, a., & willse, c. (2007). “notes towards a theory of affect-itself”, ephemera: theory and politics in organization,7(1), 60-77. cronin, a. m. (2004). regimes of mediation: advertising practitioners as cultural intermediaries? consumption, markets and culture, 7(4), 349-369. davies, m. (2012). “the aesthetics of the financial crisis: work, culture, and politics”, alternatives: global, local, political, 37(4), 317-330. edwards, l. (2012). exploring the role of public relations as a cultural intermediary occupation. cultural sociology, 6(4), 438-454. entman, r. m. (2003). “cascading activation: contesting the white house's frame after 9/11”, political communication, 20(4), 415-432. featherstone, m. (1991). consumer culture and postmodernism. london: sage. frederick, e. l., lim, c. h., chung, j., & clavio, g. (2013). determining the effects of sport commentary on viewer perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, and enjoyment through violence justification. journal of sports media, (1), 65. fuchs, c. (2014). social media and the public sphere. triplec (cognition, communication, co-operation): open access journal for a global sustainable information society, 12(1), 57-101. garde-hansen, j., & gorton, k. (2013). emotion online: theorizing affect on the internet. london: palgrave macmillan ltd. grandey, a. a., krannitz, m. a., & slezak, t. (2013). we are...more than football: three stories of identity threat by penn state insiders. industrial & organizational psychology, 6(2), 134-140. granovetter, m. (1985). economic action and social structure: the problem of embeddedness. american journal of sociology, 481-510. habermas, j. (1989). the structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. cambridge, ma: the mit press. halpern, d., & gibbs, j. (2013). social media as a catalyst for online deliberation? exploring the affordances of facebook and youtube for political expression. computers in human behavior, 29, 1159-1168. hamill, jasper. “native american activist wants to swap the dollar for bitcoin.” forbes. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasperhamill/2013/12/19/native-american-activistwants-to-swap-the-dollar-for-bitcoin/ 19 december 2013 http://pastebin.com/pecjdbbb 26 february 2014 hesmondhalgh, d. (2006). bourdieu, the media and cultural production. media, culture & society, 28(2), 211-231. hodges, c. (2006). “prp culture” a framework for exploring public relations practitioners as cultural intermediaries. journal of communication management, 10(1), 80-93. hoskins, g. t. (2013). meet the habermasses: charting the emergence of a social media-enabled public sphere in new democracies. international journal of technology, knowledge & society, 9(4), 25-39. indian country today media network. “can bitcoin alleviate poverty on the pine ridge reservation? tribe pursues its own 'cryptocurrency'” 3 january 2014 jansen, m. a. "bitcoin-the political 'virtual' of an intangible material currency." universitiet utrecht 2012. online: http://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/254739 jarrett, k. (2003). “labour of love: an archaeology of affect as power in e-commerce”, journal of sociology, 39(4), 335-351. jensen, t. (2014). “welfare commonsense, poverty porn and doxosophy”, sociological research online, 19(3). khondker, h. h. (2011). role of the new media in the arab spring. globalizations, 8(5), 675-679. kian, e., clavio, g., vincent, j., & shaw, s. d. (2011). homophobic and sexist yet uncontested: examining football fan postings on internet message boards. journal of homosexuality, 58(5), 680-699. ley, t. (2014, december 29). twitter user makes 35-minute drive to fight kobe hater. deadspin. retrieved february 15, 2015 from http://deadspin.com/twitter-user-makes35-minute-drive-to-fight-kobe-hater-1675230267 maguire, j. s., & matthews, j. (2012). are we all cultural intermediaries now? an introduction to cultural intermediaries in context. european journal of cultural studies, 15(5), 551-562. martin, r. (2002). financialization of daily life. temple university press. martin, r., rafferty, m., and bryan, d. (2008) financialization, risk and labour. competition & change 12(2), 120-132. mas, i., & morawczynski, o. (2009). designing mobile money services lessons from mpesa. innovations, 4(2), 77-91. maurer, b. (2006). the anthropology of money. annu. rev. anthropol., 35, 15-36. maurer, b. (2012). mobile money: communication, consumption and change in the payments space. journal of development studies, 48(5), 589-604. maurer, b., nelms, t. c., & rea, s. c. (2013). ‘bridges to cash’: channelling agency in mobile money. journal of the royal anthropological institute, 19(1), 52-74. mazacoin development team. “first sovereign national crypto-coin in history.” http://www.mazacoin.org/ last accessed 27 february 2014. mcfall, l. (2002). what about the old cultural intermediaries? an historical review of advertising producers. cultural studies, 16(4), 532-552. mcmanus, j (2014, september 10). what we have learned from ray rice case. espnw. retrieved february 1, 2015 from http://espn.go.com/espnw/newscommentary/article/11494616/what-learned-ray-rice-case moor, l. (2008). branding consultants as cultural intermediaries. the sociological review, 56(3), 408-428. morawczynski, o., & miscione, g. (2008). examining trust in mobile banking transactions: the case of m-pesa in kenya. in social dimensions of information and communication technology policy (pp. 287-298). springer us. nakamoto, satoshi. "bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system." consulted 1 (2008): 2012. online: http://s.kwma.kr/pdf/bitcoin/bitcoin.pdf negus, k. (2002). the work of cultural intermediaries and the enduring distance between production and consumption. cultural studies, 16(4), 501-515. papacharissi, z. (2002). the virtual sphere: the internet as public sphere. new media & society, 4(1), 9-27. pegoraro, a. (2010). look who’s talking—athletes on twitter: a case study. international journal of sport communication, 3, 501-514. sanderson j, & hambrick m. e. (2012) covering the scandal in 140 characters: a case study of twitter's role in coverage of the penn state saga. international journal of sport communication, 5(3), 384-402. sharma, s. (2013). black twitter? racial hashtags, networks and contagion. new formations, 78, 46-64. shirky, c. (2008). here comes everybody. new york: penguin books. smith, l., & smith, k. d. (2012). identity in twitter's hashtag culture: a sport-mediaconsumption case study. international journal of sport communication, 5(4), 539-557. soja, edward. postmodern geographies: the reassertion of space in critical social theory. london: verso, 1989. statista. “size of the online gaming market from 2003 to 2015.” statista. 2014. accessed february 18, 2015. http://www.statista.com/statistics/270728/marketvolume-of-onlinegaming-worldwide/ suler, j. (2004). the online disinhibition effect. cyberpsychology & behavior, 1, 275294. sunstein, c. r. (2007). republic.com 2.0. princeton: princeton university press. swedberg, r. (2005). the economic sociology of capitalism: an introduction and agenda. in the economic sociology of capitalism, v. nee and r. swedberg, eds. princeton university press. turner, j. (2012, november 2), #inpraiseofthehashtag. the new york times. retrieved january 4, 2015 from http://www.nytimes.com tyler, i. (2013). revolting subjects: social abjection and resistance in neoliberal britain. zed books. waldhauser, c. (2014). public spheres in twitterand blogosphere evidence from the u.s. presentation at the european political science association general conference. edinburgh, scotland. watkins, b. (2014). an integrated approach to sports branding: examining the influence of social media on brand outcomes. international journal of integrated marketing communications, 6(2), 30-40. wernick, a. (1991). promotional culture: advertising, ideology and symbolic expression. london and thousand oaks, ca: sage. wetherell, m. (2012). affect and emotion: a new social science understanding. sage publications. zelizer, v. a. (1997). the social meaning of money. princeton university press. microsoft word ir16-template-final.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 designing a game-inspired classroom: videogames as models of good teaching jeffrey brandon holmes arizona state university this paper describes the design of a “game-inspired” undergraduate course based on the premise that games demonstrate good teaching methods, not just good learning contexts. it uses games as an inspiration for designing instructional experiences in which learners can realize the various principles gee (2003) first described without necessarily creating game-like experiences. instead, this game-inspired teaching is a way of recognizing the effective pedagogical methods videogames use as part of the “good learning tools” gee has described tied to what we know about learning and teaching, particularly as described by hattie and yates (2013). indeed, it is possible to reconsider gee’s learning principles as design principles which can drive instructional practice. these design features allow teachers to structure learning experiences in ways that work for their particular learning goals and leverage the growing body of game-based learning research (tobias and fletcher, 2011). these design principles also allow for flexibility in creating a course or other learning environment by serving as guidelines and not absolutes; the type of content, the type of learner, and the various affordances and limitations of the teaching spaces change the ways in which gameinspired teaching methods might be useful, so teachers may use them as guidelines rather than being stuck within rigid boundaries of game scenarios. design principle: collaborative learning one key design principle is covered in this paper: the notion of collaborative learning, cooperative practice, and shared production of knowledge. there are many other principles; this example highlights the specific design rationale behind a specific course in order to show the various ways game-inspired methods can be used and adapted to various teaching moments. the course, titled “videogames and digital rhetorics,” focused on exploring rhetorical concepts through the lens of videogames with an emphasis on experiential practice. the course was a “hybrid” course, with one face-toface meeting each week and an online component. students played games--primarily world of warcraft--as a regular part of their class meetings and course assignments. wow provided a core organizing principle for cooperative play (learning), that of the “party” system in which various specialized experts work cooperatively to accomplish a task (e.g. a 5-player dungeon party includes a tank, a healer, and three damage dealers suggested citation (apa): holmes, j. (2015, october 21-24). designing a game-inspired classroom: videogames as models of good teaching. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http:// spir.aoir.org. in order to defeat enemies). the course was designed around a similar concept in which students chose one of three content-area specializations to focus on during the semester (identity, design, or teaching and learning); each week students read an article common to the entire class as well as a supplemental article specific to their domain. students became “experts” in a given concept in order to collaboratively develop a weekly principle within their cohort of experts which was then shared out to the rest of the class. students from the other disciplines did the same, and then utilized the various principles to tackle a weekly challenge in class. these challenges provided opportunities for students to apply the knowledge they collectively developed around a specific problem, and to create a solution as a class. for example, the class was faced with the problem of creating games (in small groups) using the various principles they created; students were provided a game template which they “filled out” by incorporating the knowledge they shared and then play-tested their games with each other. this design principle is fueled by the recognition that learning is an inherently social act and that meaning making is contingent and works through dialogue and dialectic practices. further, the “science” of learning suggests that it is highly interpersonal (hattie and yates, 2013) and that the human mind is geared for social collaboration in knowledge building tasks. in modern classrooms, however, students are often simply parallel learners (learning side-by-side) with various instances of shared labor (group work). the wow party model is an effective metaphor for how teams can blend specialized perspectives, abilities, and interests around a shared goal. since each role has unique functions, and each player has a specific knowledge of their tasks in each encounter, the team distributes their knowledge across the various players—and relies on each others’ expertise. this is similar to various observations on collective intelligence in which the group as a whole might be considered the unit of analysis; the group collectively has more knowledge, and more capacity to put that knowledge to work, than any individual member. the course design owed much to aronson and patnoe’s (1978) concept of the “jigsaw classroom,” in which each student had one “piece” of the knowledge necessary to complete each weekly tasks but it required the efforts of all students. further, by sharing out their knowledge, they served as masters/experts and teachers for the other groups. they provided enough information for the other students in the other cohorts to understand (at least superficially) the particular perspective in order to both incorporate it into their own perspective as well as to synthesize as a class around a weekly problem. for example, one week the topic was “big ‘g’ gaming,” and in class students were tasked with building a model of a network of “big ‘g’-like” sites for a classroom. the students various perspectives were each necessary to creating a more robust model. students who specialized in identity, for example, brought many issues of identity play (being a student, being a peer such as a dorm mate or sorority-mate, being a child, being an adult and so on) when deciding what features and what sites would go into a “big ‘g’ -like” network. similarly, the students focused on design brought issues of access, user-centered design, aesthetic and technological concerns and more; students specializing in teaching and learning helped ground the types of content and the methods each site might need to include in order to effective structure the other perspectives. in total, each group helped illuminate, complicated, and strengthen the other perspectives. importantly, just like in a wow party, each member does not need to be an expert in each role; however, each player needs to know enough about the other two roles in order to gauge how the group is doing and how their own performance might be altered. in a similar sense, this course was designed to give students an opportunity to engage with other perspectives and know at least something about them in order to complicate their own thinking. in a sense, sharing the cognitive load across all the students helped cover more ground than any single individual student could handle. students taught each other by distilling at least a key idea from their own perspective, and they learned enough from each other to gain a deeper understanding of each weekly topic. they learned both deep knowledge on one topic and broad knowledge across several, and— critically—how these related in a broader ecological sense. references aronson, e. and patnoe, s. (1978). the jigsaw classroom. ny: longman. gee, j. p. (2003). what video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. ny: palgrave. hattie, j. and yates, g. c. r. (2013). visible learning and the science of how we learn. ny: routledge. tobias, s., & fletcher, j. d. (2011). computer games and instruction. albany: state university of new york. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016       suggested  citation  (apa):  tiidenberg,  k.,  abidin,  c.,  siibak,  a.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  making  and   breaking  rules  on  the  internet.  panel  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  conference  of  the   association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.     making  and  breaking  rules  on  the  internet     katrin  tiidenberg   aarhus  university,  postdoctoral  researcher,       crystal  abidin     national  university  of  singapore,  postdoctoral  fellow  in  sociology     andra  siibak     university  of  tartu,  professor  of  media  studies       panel  rationale     this  panel  explores  how  social  norms  get  troubled  and  rewritten  on  social  media.   it  brings  together  three  presentations,  all  of  which  speak  to  the  central   conference  theme  by  engaging  with  how  specific  rules  and  norms  regarding   privacy,  friendship,  shame  and  commodification  are  appropriated,  rejected  or   transformed.  we  analyze  the  rule  breaking  and  rule  making  through  social  media   practices  like  teacher-­student  interactions  on  facebook,  friendship  and  flirting  on   tumblr,  microcelebrity  attention  seeking  practices  and  self-­presentation  on   different  social  networking  sites.         our  arguments  are  predicated  on  the  well  established  sociological  reasoning  that   rules  for  any  conduct  are  discovered,  created  and  sustained  by  social  actors   through  their  everyday  practices,  and  become  particularly  visible,  when  broken   (garfinkel,  1967).  we  also  rely  on  the  thesis  that  different  groups  differ  on  “what   behaviors  are  normative  and  which  are  not”  (ren  et  al  2010:  125),  thus  a  specific   group’s  cohesion  may  rely  on  explicit  or  implicit  questioning  of  an  otherwise   widely  accepted  norm.  the  latter  is  particularly  relevant  for  analyzing  human   coexistence  in  digital  contexts.  while  “social  media  constitute  an  arena  of  public   communication  where  norms  are  shaped  and  rules  get  contested,”  (van  dijck,   2013:19),  there  are  no  universally  applicable  norms  and  values  that  apply  to  the   internet  as  a  space  (albrechtslund,  2008).  we  argue  that  it  thus  becomes  a   particularly  fertile  space  for  groups  and  communities  to  negotiate  “constitutive   rules,”  which  “create  the  possibility  of  the  very  behavior  that  they  regulate”   (searle,  2009:  10).           our  empirical  data  is  geographically  and  culturally  broad,  ranging  from  a  study  of   lifestyle  influencers  in  singapore,  schoolteachers  and  students  in  estonia  and   sex-­bloggers  in  the  usa.  based  on  it  we  interrogate  the  interconnections  of   social  media  practices,  wider  social  norms  and  platform  affordances  to  offer   explanations,  descriptions  and  provocations  on  how  breaking  norms  can  be  a   calculated  strategy  to  capture  attention  (sorry  not  sorry:  influencers,  exposés,   and  para-­apologetic  transgressions);;  an  outcome  of  the  practices  and  socio-­ technical  affordances  of  a  particular  community  (queering  friendships  -­  blurred   lines  of  relationships  on  tumblr);;  or  how  lines  are  being  drawn  in  the  sand  of  what   constitutes  acceptable  social  media  behavior  for  teachers  and  students   (nightmare  readers  and  double  standards  –  the  case  of  teacher-­student   interactions  on  facebook).       references     albrechtslund,  a.  (2008).  online  social  networking  as  participatory   surveillance.  first  monday,  13(3).  available  from:   http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewarticle/2142/ 1949   garfinkel,  h.  (1967).  studies  in  ethnomethodology.  penguin   ren,  y.,  kraut,  r.,  kiesler,  s.,  resnick,  p.  (2010).  regulating  behavior  in   online  communties,  in  (eds)  r.  e.  kraut  &  p.  resnick.  building  successful  online   communities:  evidence-­based  social  design.  mit  press,  125-­178.     searle,  j.  (2009).  making  the  social  world:  the  structure  of  human   civilization,  oxford  university  press   van  dijck,  j.  (2013).  the  culture  of  connectivity:  a  critical  history  of   social  media.  oxford  university  press:  kindle  edition.         queering  friendships  -­  blurred  relationship  rules   on  tumblr     katrin  tiidenberg   postdoctoral  researcher,  aarhus  university     personal  relationships  have  been  going  through  considerable  changes  in  the   post-­traditional  social  order  (budgeon,  2006),  and  friendship  in  particular,  is   considered  both  definitionally  ambiguous,  and  having  significantly  transformed   over  the  past  decades.  most  definitions  of  friendship  reflect  the  widely  accepted   social  rule  that  friends  are  not  sexually  intimate  or  romantically  interested  in  one-­ another  (bisson  &  levine,  2009).  there  are  forms  of  friendship  (e.g.  ‘friends  with         benefits’;;  and  ‘passionate  friendships’)  that  challenge  these  assumptions,  but  the   prevalent  focus  on  non-­sexual  and  non-­romantic  friendships  in  both  research  and   popular  discourse  indicates  a  persistent  normative  link  between  friendship  and   (heteronormative)  social  order.     this  presentation  looks  at  a  specific  type  of  relationship  that  blurs  friendship  with   flirtation,  and  thus  bends  or  breaks  multiple  social  rules  surrounding  both.  based   on  five  years  of  fieldwork  (2011  –  2015)  and  additional  friendship-­related   interviews  (in  2016)  with  a  community  of  sexy-­selfie  enthusiasts  on  tumblr,  these   “flirtationships”  appear  to  be  quite  common,  yet  tumblr-­specific  (not  practiced   elsewhere).    relying  on  the  argument  that  social  media  platforms  can  foster  or   hinder  particular  practices  and  transform  social  norms  (van  dijck,  2013),  i  explore   how  flirtationships  become  possible  in  this  tumblr  community,  and  what  the   potential  normative  implications  of  flirtationships  are.     relationships  and  the  internet     adams  and  allan  (1998:  12)  emphasize  the  need  to  look  at  how  factors  outside   friendships  influence  their  organization  and  people’s  understanding  of  them.  this   is  perhaps  particularly  relevant  to  understanding  digitally  mediated  friendships   and  the  role  platforms  have  in  their  development,  maintenance  and   transformation.  while  it  has  been  well  recorded,  that  people  “can  and  do  develop   meaningful  personal  relationships  online”  (baym,  2010:  131),  there  is  less   consensus  on  the  character  of  those  relationships.  some  authors  (henderson  &   gilding,  2004)  claim  that  online  friendships  are  pure  in  giddensian  sense;;  based   on  trust,  intimacy  and  a  shared  interest;;  while  others  (chan  &  cheng,  2004)   worry  that  online  friendships  are  less  deep  than  their  offline  equivalents.     internet  use  for  flirting  and  finding  sexual  partners  is  equally  well  researched  (cf.   albright  2008),  and  it  has  been  argued,  that  online  interaction  affords  gender   bending,  queering,  as  well  as  an  “exponential  expansion  in  the  means  of   recreating  conventional  hierarchies  of  sexuality  and  gender”  (jamieson,   2003:22).       tumblr  flirtationships     there  are  various  personal  relationships  that  have  started  on  tumblr  for  my   informants  –  acquaintanceships,  friendships,  long-­  and  short-­term  romantic   and/or  sexual  relationships,  even  a  marriage.  in  addition  to  those,  however,   many  of  my  informants  have  spoken  about  a  relational  category  that  blends   aspects  of  friendship  (psychological  intimacy,  shared  interests,  support)  with         sexual  or  romantic  interest.  i  call  these  “flirtationships.”  informants  mostly   describe  these  as  mid-­,  to  long-­term,  friendly  relationships  that  include  an   additional  layer  of  physical  and/or  emotional  attraction.  flirtationships  are   practiced  through  a  combination  of  friendly  interaction  and  explicit  flirting   (complimenting,  sexting,  sending  gifts);;  may  but  do  not  necessarily  involve  a   public  aspect  of  performing  affection  via  participants’  blogs;;  and  are  experienced   as  inhabiting  a  “sweet  in  the  middle  spot  that  is  respectful,  but  not  too  much   responsibility.”       why  tumblr?       my  informants  pointed  to  the  explicit  sexuality  of  the  not  safe  for  work  tumblr   space;;  the  shared  ideology  of  body-­positivity  of  the  sexy-­selfie  community  (cf.   tiidenberg  2015);;  and  the  commonness  of  unfiltered  and  raw  diaristic  blogging   style  as  the  social  affordances  for  flirtationships  on  tumblr.  while  my  informants   mostly  experience  the  above  as  guiding  the  content  and  interaction  style  possible   on  tumblr,  it  is  also  indicative  of  the  fact  that  this  is  an  explicitly  non-­normative   cultural  space  (public  nudity,  self-­sexualization,  feminist  politics)  where  the   relevance  of  some  social  rules  is  already  questioned.  in  addition,  i  would  argue   that  some  of  the  platforms’  technical  affordances  (i.e.  the  ‘reblog’  button  and  the   resulting  possibility  of  identity  claims  through  curation)  may  facilitate  rule   breaking.         flirtationships  and  queering  friendship       the  heterosexual  flirtationships  my  informants  described  are  perhaps  closest  to   the  “friends  with  benefits”  category,  and  its  assemblage  of  broken  or  supplanted   social  rules.  however,  my  female  informants  said  to  prefer  flirtationships  with   other  women,  and  my  male  informants  admitted  to  having  had  flirtationships  with   other  men.  in  addition,  these  flirtationships  do  not  usually  come  with  an   expectation  of  exclusivity;;  in  fact  one  of  my  informants  has  what  she  lovingly   refers  to  as  a  “tumblr  harem.”       existing  literature  on  women’s  passionate  friendships  often  explains  those  as   sexual  identity  experimentation  (cf.  morgan  &  morgan  thompson,  2006),  thus   implying  an  impending  change  in  the  participants’  relationship  type  and/or  sexual   identity.  while  my  male  informants  did  link  having  queer  flirtationships  to   exploring  their  sexual  desires,  the  focus  was  on  satisfying  a  known  or  assumed   need,  and  they  are  not  expecting  a  transition  of  any  kind.  my  female  informants,   conversely,  outright  rejected  the  interpretation  of  experimentation,  and  instead   linked  their  preference  for  queer  flirtationships  to  the  following:           a.   a  sense  of  safety.    anna:  “a  woman  will  not  call  you  a  bitch  or  accuse  you   of  leading  her  on,  because  you  flirted  with  her.”     b.   a  presumption  of  respect.  katie:  “i  just  feel  that  the  interactions  i  get  from   women  are  more  along  the  lines  of  “i  admire  you,  or  i’m  inspired  by  you,”   and  i  do  get  those  messages  from  men,  but  it’s  by  far  skewed  towards   women.”     c.   pace  of  interaction.  katie:  “it  has  to  do  with  penises  more  than  anything   else.    and  this  is  an  obvious  generalization,  but  i  feel  like  women  are  more   capable  of  taking  things  slow,  people  with  penises  tend  to  have  a  more   pressing  need  to  take  things  forward  fast.”     d.   body  positivity  and  feminist  sisterhood.  anna:  “it’s  so  hard  to  be  a  woman,   the  only  way  to  push  back  against  that  is  to  let  people  know  that  what  they   have  is  attractive.  to  not  do  that  is  almost  a  betrayal  of  a  relationship,   because  you  are  invested  in  another  person’s  physical  and  mental   wellbeing.”     thus  these  tumblr-­flirtationships  seem  to  embody  a  breaking  or  bending  of  rules   of  mixed-­gender  friendships  (lack  of  intimacy  or  post-­intimacy  redefinition  of   relationship)  and  same-­gender  friendships  (lack  of  intimacy  or  post  intimacy   redefinition  of  sexual  identity),  while  a  new  set  of  rules  about  the  flirtationship  as   such  emerge.  these  seem  to  reflect  the  tacit  rules  of  assumed  trust,  respectful   interaction  and  body  positivity  particular  to  this  tumblr  community.  i  would  thus   ask  whether  these  tumblr-­flirtationships  can  be  said  to  rework  the   “heteronormative  culture  in  which  the  heterosexual  couple  has  occupied  a   position  of  central  importance”  (budgeon,  2006:  ¶  5.4).     references     adams,  r.g  &  allan,  g  (1998).  contextualizing  friendship,  in  (eds)  adams,  r.g   &  allan,  g,  placing  friendship  in  context.  cambridge:  cambridge  university   press.   baym,  n.k.  (2010).  personal  connections  in  the  digital  age.  malden,  ma:  polity   press   bisson,  m.  a.,  &  levine,  æ.  t.  r.  (2009).  negotiating  a  friends  with  benefits   relationship.  archive  of  sex  behavior,  38,  66–73.   budgeon,  s.  (2006)  “friendship  and  formations  of  sociality  in  late  modernity”,   sociological  research  online,  11.         chan,  d.  k.-­s.,  &  cheng,  g.  h.-­l.  (2004).  a  comparison  of  offline  and  online   friendship  qualities  at  different  stages  of  relationship  development.  journal  of   social  and  personal  relationships,  21,  305-­320.   diamond,  l.  m.  (2002).  “having  a  girlfriend  without  knowing  it”:  intimate   friendships  among  adolescent  sexual-­minority  women.  journal  of  lesbian   studies,  6,  5-­16.   jamieson,  l.  (2013).  personal  relationships,  intimacy  and  the  self  in  a  mediated   and  global  digital  age,  in  (eds)  orton-­johnson,  k.  &  prior,  n.  digital   sociology:  critical  perspectives,  palgrave  macmillan.   henderson,  s.  &  gilding,  m.  (2004).  “  i’ve  never  clicked  this  much  with  anyone  in   my  life  ’:  trust  and  hyperpersonal  communication  in  online  friendships.  new   media  &  society,  6,  487–506.   morgan,  e.  m.  &  morgan  thompson,  e.  (2006).  young  women's  sexual   experiences  within  same-­  sex  friendships,  journal  of  bisexuality,  6,  7-­34.   tiidenberg,  k.  (2015).  boundaries  and  conflict  in  a  nsfw  community  on  tumblr:   the  meanings  and  uses  of  selfies.  new  media  and  society.  published  online   before  print  january  14,  2015.  
   van  dijck,  j.  (2013).  the  culture  of  connectivity:  a  critical  history  of  social   media.  oxford  university  press:  kindle  edition.         sorry  not  sorry:  influencers,  shamelebrity,  and   para-­apologetic  transgressions     crystal  abidin   postdoctoral  fellow  in  sociology,  national  university  of  singapore     introduction     from  belle  gibson's  cancer  hoax  to  essena  o'neill's  emotional  breakdown,   young  women  influencers  have  been  making  recent  headlines  for  violating  socio-­ cultural  norms  in  the  business.  however,  a  subset  of  lifestyle  influencers  in   singapore,  where  the  industry  has  been  rapidly  growing  since  its  debut  in  2005,   has  long  been  playing  with  mores  as  calculated  strategies  to  capture  the   attention  of  followers,  albeit  to  varying  success.  drawing  on  case  studies  from   ethnographic  fieldwork  with  influencers  in  singapore  between  2011  and  2015,   this  paper  assesses  a  spectrum  of  influencer  transgressions  (lies,  faux  pas,  risky   strategies)  among  prolific  ‘shamelebrities’.  at  the  intersection  of  studies  on  the   attention  economy  and  anthropological  understandings  of  shame,  the  paper   analyses  the  exposé  cycles  in  which  influencers  engage  as  forms  of  ‘para-­       apologetic  transgressions’,  where  apologies,  repentance,  and  self-­consolation   are  spectacularized  into  clickbait  and  diffused  by  web  amnesia.       attention  and  pseudo-­events   in  the  age  of  abundant  information  and  labor,  attention  is  a  scarce  commodity   (goldhaber  1997).  attention  can  be  “voluntary”  and  “captive”,  wherein  one  gives   attention  out  of  choice  or  not;;  “attractive”  and  “aversive”,  wherein  one  gives   attention  for  gains  or  to  avoid  loss;;  and  “front-­of-­mind”  and  “back-­of-­mind”,   wherein  one  gives  attention  explicitly  and  consciously  or  out  of  habit  (davenport   &  beck,  2001,  p.  22-­24).  as  one  form  of  multi-­media  microcelebrity  (abidin,  2015;;   senft,  2008)  whose  attraction  is  premised  on  packaging  the  personal,  ordinary,   and  mundane  of  everyday  life  as  sellable  commodities,  influencers  command  a   passive  form  of  voluntary,  attractive,  and  back-­of-­mind  attention  from  their  stable   stream  of  followers.  however,  the  ‘shamelebrity’  influencers  discussed  in  this   chapter  engage  in  spectacle-­like  practices  to  generate  an  active  form  of  captive,   aversive,  and  front-­of-­mind  attention  to  recapture  the  foci  of  existing  followers   and  attract  new  ones.  boorstin  (1961,  p.  9-­12)  describes  the  orchestrated   spectacles  i  observe  as  “pseudo-­events”:  “news”  that  is  generated  as  a  “synthetic   novelty”,  that  is  not  spontaneous  but  staged,  executed  for  the  mere  purpose  of   creating  “newsworthy”  content,  bears  an  ambiguous  representation  of  the  reality   of  events,  and  most  crucially,  becomes  a  self-­fulfilling  prophecy.   shame  and  shamelebrity     based  upon  some  key  anthropological  works  on  shame  and  its  associated   rituals.  i  have  characterized  shame  into  three  functional  categories:  “weaponized   shame”,  “reflexive  shame”,  and  “vernacular  shame”,  as  determined  by  their   functions  within  a  social  group:   1)  “weaponized  shame”  is  directed  outwards  towards  an  external  other,  and   conferred  onto  individuals  as  a  mode  of  punitive  sanction  (cf  armstrong,  1988;;   young,  1971).     2)  “reflexive  shame”  is  directed  inwards  towards  the  self,  as  a  form  of  reflexive   guilt  to  incite  self-­correcting  behavior  (cf  williams,  1930;;  young,  1971).     3)  “vernacular  shame”  is  a  boundary  marker  that  demarcates  in-­  and  out-­groups,   and  signifies  status  designations  within  a  community  (cf  hogbin,  1947;;  peletz,   1996).   influencers  of  modern  day  singapore  engage  in  all  three  categories  of  shame   practices  depending  on  their  self-­shaming  practices,  but  the  shame  discussed         here  is  not  experienced  as  a  bodily  affect  (probyn,  2005),  nor  do  the  influencers   seem  ashamed  of  their  actions  (wong  &  tsai,  2007).  instead,  shame  is   performed  and  utilized  as  a  commodity  that  adds  value  to  an  influencer  as   “shamelebrities”.     english  professor  twitchell  coined  “shamelebrity”  to  define  someone  who     “is  not  a  villain  or  even  an  antihero.  he,  or  she,  is  simply  someone  who   has  done  something  wrong,  often  something  shameful,  and  is  able,  with   the  help  of  press  agents,  tabloids,  publicists,  fanzines,  and  managers,  to   make  the  act  into  a  sequence  of  images,  a  salable  commodity”  (1997,  p.   100).     i  apply  twitchell’s  notion  of  shamelebrity  to  influencers  in  a  different  socio-­ technical  context:  unlike  shamelebrity  of  the  1990s  who  use  televisual  media,   rely  on  a  backend  production  stable,  stumble  into  shame  through  exposure,   focus  on  a  crossover  from  shamehood  to  celebritydom,  and  use  “reflexive   shame”,  influencers  are  shamelebrity  of  the  2010s  who  use  multi-­platform  social   media,  rely  on  their  self-­made  digital  savvy,  intentionally  solicit  self-­shaming,   continually  reconstitute  themselves  within  a  shame  space,  and  use  “weaponized   shame”.     exposé  cycles     in  my  talk,  i  will  present  vignettes  from  one  of  singapore’s  most  prolific   shamelebrity  influencers,  xiaxue.  most  of  xiaxueʼs  shaming  practices  are   directed  to  specific  individuals  (i.e.  fellow  influencers)  or  to  specific  groups  of   people  (i.e.  the  disabled,  foreign  workers,  haters).  however,  the  shaming   become  self-­directed  in  that  her  stance  and  opinions  are  often  controversial,   quickly  polarizing  followers  into  camps  comprising  supporters  and  haters.  haters   and  the  general  public  usually  decry  her  actions,  with  which  she  engages  by   taking  on  the  bad  press,  standing  her  ground,  and  responding  with  heated  and   argumentative  retorts.  many  of  her  supporters  have  been  known  to  initiate  smear   campaigns  against  other  influencers  and  followers  who  criticize  the  influencer.   they  also  fight  against  criticism  on  her  behalf  and  defend  her,  thus  exacerbating   the  “hating”.  additionally,  xiaxue  has  also  publicly  admitted  to  engaging  in   controversy  for  publicity,  such  as  in  her  “kissing  a  girl”  video.  curiously,  perhaps   in  part  due  to  the  extent  of  her  influence,  press  coverage  on  xiaxueʼs  shaming   practices  usually  adopt  a  reportage  style,  and  if  bearing  critique,  often  cite  public   opinion  on  various  social  media  platforms  rather  than  offer  an  opinion  from  the   reporter  per  se.           anthropologically,  the  exposé  cycles  of  influencers  like  xiaxue  bear  some   semblances  to  what  victor  turner  (1974,  p.  33,  37)  has  termed  “social  dramas”  –   “public  episodes  of  tensional  irruption”  in  which  conflict  arises  from  “aharmonic”   or  “disharmonic”  processes.  my  talk  will  show  how  xiaxue’s  shamelebrity   practices  mirror  the  four  main  phases  of  social  dramas  (p.  37-­43):  1)  “overt   breach  or  deliberate  nonfulfillment”  of  “norm-­governed  social  relations”;;  2)   escalation  of  the  crisis  causing  a  reordering  of  social  relations;;  3)  redressive   action  initiated  by  “representative  members  of  the  disturbed  social  system”;;  and   4)  “reintegration  of  the  disturbed  social  group”  or  “the  social  recognition  and   legitimization  of  irreparable  schism  between  the  contesting  parties”.       para-­apologetic  transgressions   in  my  personal  interviews,  influencers  weighed  in  on  shamelebrity  rituals  as   effective  but  harming  attention  strategies.  many  agreed  that  “it  is  very  important   to  stay  relevant”,  that  they  “want  to  remain  talked  about”,  and  that  they  want  to   “differentiate”  themselves  from  others.  yet,  they  also  the  value  the  ability  to   dissociate  themselves  from  deviance  over  time.  while  not  always  explicitly   expressed,  many  influencers  make  references  to  the  sentiment  of  “forgetting”,  or   what  i  term  “web  amnesia”.   unlike  scholarly  discussions  that  describe  the  infrastructure  and  technology  of   the  internet  as  one  that  “never  forgets”  (rosen,  2011)  in  light  of  data  retention   tendencies,  “web  amnesia”  is  focused  on  the  social  effects  followers  experience   in  the  age  of  abundant  data  (goldhaber,  1997).  i  posit  here  three  vernacular   understandings  of  web  amnesia  that  have  emerged  from  my  personal  interviews   and  observations:   1)  in  the  abundance  of  increasing  volumes  of  content  produced  via  the  addition   of  new  social  media,  spectacles  and  trends  experience  a  high  turnover  rate.   thus,  shamelebrity  practices  easily  lose  the  impact  capacity  to  wrestle  attention.     2)  there  are  typically  several  simultaneous  shamelebrity  attempts  in  any  given   period  of  time,  colliding  and  appealing  to  different  segments  of  internet  users.   thus,  shamelebrity  practices  often  chance  into  national  and  regional  virality  by   timing  or  plain  luck.   3)  new  genres  of  self-­shaming  practices  are  proliferating  as  influencers  pioneer   new  forms  of  click  bait  (blom  &  hansen,  2015).  thus,  shamelebrity  practices   constantly  shift  moral  boundaries  of  mores  and  taboo  as  followers  grow   desensitized  to  old  scandals.         references     abidin,  c.  (2015).  communicative  <3  intimacies:  influencers  and   perceived  interconnectedness.  ada:  a  journal  of  gender,  new  media,  &   technology,  8.  retrieved  november  1,  2015  from   <adanewmedia.org/2015/11/issue8-­abidin/>     armstrong,  g.  (1998).  football  hooligans:  knowing  the  score.  oxford:   berg.     blom,  j.  n.,  and  hansen,  k.  r.  (2015).  “click  bait:  forward-­  reference  as   lure  in  online  news  headlines.”  journal  of  pragmatics  76:  87-­100.     boorstin,  d.  j.  (1961).  the  image:  a  guide  to  pseudo-­events  in  america.   new  york:  harper  colophon  books.     davenport,  t.  h.,  and  beck,  j.  c.  (2001).  the  attention  economy:   understanding  the  new  currency  of  business.  boston:  harvard  business  school   press.     goldhaber,  m.  h.  (1997).  “the  attention  economy  and  the  net”.  first   monday  2(4).  retrieved  december  2,  2012   (http://firstmonday.org/article/view/519/440)     hogbin,  h.  i.  (1947).  “shame:  a  study  of  social  conformity  in  a  new   guinea  village.”  oceania  17(4):  273-­288.     peletz,  m.  g.  (1996).  reason  and  passion:  representations  of  gender  in   a  malay  society.  berkeley:  university  of  california  press.     probyn,  e.  (2005).  blush:  faces  of  shame.  minneapolis:  university  of   minnesota  press.     rosen,  j.  (2011).  “free  speech,  privacy,  and  the  web  that  never  forgets.”   journal  on  telecommunications  and  high  technology  law  9(2):  345-­356.     senft,  t.  m.  (2008).  camgirls:  celebrity  &  community  in  the  age  of  social   networks.  new  york,  ny:  peter  lang.     turner,  v.  (1974).  dramas,  fields,  and  metaphors:  symbolic  action  in   human  society.  ithaca:  cornell  university  press.   twitchell,  j.  b.  (1997).  for  shame:  the  loss  of  common  decency  in   american  culture.  london:  st.  martin's  griffin.
   williams,  f.  e.  (1930).  orokaiva  society.  oxford:  oxford  university  press.   wong,  y.,  and  tsai,  j.  (2007).  “cultural  models  of  shame  and  guilt.”  pp.   209-­223  in  the  self-­conscious  emotions:  theory  and  research,  edited  by  j.  l.   tracy,  r.  w.  robins,  and  j.  p.  tangney.  new  york:  guilford  press.   young,  m.  w.  (1971).  fighting  with  food.  cambridge:  cambridge   university  press.                 nightmare  readers  and  double  standards  –  the   case  of  teacher-­student  interactions  on  facebook     andra  siibak   professor  of  media  studies,  university  of  tartu         electronic  media  has  thoroughly  blurred  the  boundaries  between  the  public  and   the  private.  according  to  westin  (1968)  privacy  is  an  individual’s  right  to  decide   when,  how  and  how  much  information  about  oneself  is  communicated  to  the   others.  however,  in  the  mutual  surveillance  on  social  media  all  participants  have   different  understanding  of  what  is  correct  and  incorrect,  what  is  perceived  to  be   normal  and  abnormal,  private  and  public.  furthermore,  as  to  a  large  extent,  the   internet  lacks  universally  applicable  laws  or  even  shared  norms  and  values   (albrechtslund,  2008).     due  to  the  context  collapse  in  networked  publics,  students  and  teachers  have   suddenly  gained  access  to  each  other’s  information  which  previously  was   considered  private  (murumaa-­mengel  &  siibak,  2014).  teachers  play  a  unique   role  in  shaping  the  minds  of  the  students  and  are  thus  usually  held  to  higher   standard  of  professionalism  and  moral  character.  in  fact,  “uprightness  of   character”  (lumpkin,  2008:  46)  is  expected  of  teachers  even  during  off-­duty   times  (foulger  et  al.,  2009),  the  latter  of  which  can  nowadays  often  be  spent  on   social  media.     the  young  are  often  at  the  forefront  of  emerging  internet  usage  practices  but  at   the  same  time  “young  people  are  assumed  to  be  far  too  naïve  to  handle   themselves  in  public  without  careful  supervision  and  control”  (maranto  &  barton,   2010),  the  same  assumption  goes  for  sns.  but  what  adults  regard  as  risks  and   reprehensible  behavior,  the  young  may  see  as  opportunities  (kalmus  &  ólafsson,   2013)  and  as  an  accepted  shift  in  social  norms  (shih,  2011).     in  order  to  explore  teacher’s  attitudes,  perceptions  and  experiences  with  their   students  content  creation  practices  on  facebook  focus  group  interviews  with   estonian  high-­school  teachers  (n=  21)  were  carried  out  in  spring  2013.  similar   focus-­group  interviews  were  carried  out  with  students  (n=  16)  to  study  their   perceptions  and  experiences  with  the  content  teachers’  publish,  share  and  like   on  facebook.       findings  suggest  that  mutual  surveillance  has  become  a  new  norm  amongst   teachers  and  students.  in  other  words,  teachers  and  students  have  become  each   other’s  “nightmare  readers”  on  facebook  (marwick  &  boyd  2010).  teachers  are         especially  active  in  monitoring  their  students’  profiles  and  in  case  of  noticing   posts  that  they  believe  to  break  the  tacit  rules  of  what  is  acceptable  social  media   behaviour  (too  revealing  visuals;;  swearing;;  bullying)  they  are  ready  to  take  an   active  role  in  mediating  students’  facebook  use.  in  many  occasions  teachers  of   the  study  expressed  the  need  to  educate  their  students  about  possible  risks   associated  with  social  media,  taking  on  the  expected  role  of  teachers  as  mentors   (miller,  2011;;  lumpkin,  2008).  although  teachers’  aim  was  clearly  to  prevent   harm  and  so  to  say  to  “save  the  students  from  themselves”,  both  their  opinions   and  experiences  revealed  that  they  rarely  had  any  ethical  or  moral  dilemmas   about  their  practices.  too  often,  teachers  interpret  online  privacy  rather  black-­ and-­white,  disregarding  the  subtle  nuances  of  contemporary  online  privacy.     at  the  same  time,  focus  groups  with  students  reveal  that  teachers’  own  facebook   self-­presentation  and  information  sharing  practices  are  often  considered  equally   inappropriate  by  the  students.  in  short,  both  teachers  and  students  experience  a   clash  between  the  expected  behaviour  that  is  considered  suitable  for  a  “proper   teacher”  or  a  “proper  student”  and  the  actual  content  creation  practices  taking   place  on  facebook.  furthermore,  although  teachers  are  very  eager  to  condemn   students’  self-­presentation  and  information  sharing  on  facebook  and  refer  to  it  as   “a  clash  between  generations”,  they  never  seem  to  find  fault  in  their  own  choices   or  digital  literacies  competence.     references     albrechtslund,  a.  (2008).  online  social  networking  as  participatory   surveillance.  first  monday,  13(3).  available  from:   http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewarticle/2142/ 1949   foulger,  t.  s.,  ewbank,  a.  d.,  kay,  a.,  popp,  s.  o.,  &  carter,  h.  l.  (2009).   moral  spaces  in  myspace.  journal  of  research  on  technology  in  education,   42(1):  1–28.   lumpkin,  a.  (2008).  teachers  as  role  models  teaching  character  and   moral  virtues.  joperd,  79(2):  45-­49.   kalmus,  v.,  ólafsson,  k.  (2013).  ‘editorial:  a  child-­centred  perspective  on   risks  and  opportunities  in  cyber-­space’.  cyberpsychology:  journal  of   psychosocial  research  on  cyberspace  7(1).  available  from:   http://www.cyberpsychology.eu/view.php?cisloclanku=2013022201&article=1   maranto,  g.  &  barton,  m.  (2010).  paradox  and  promise:  myspace,   facebook,  and  the  sociopolitics  of  social  networking  in  the  writing.  computers   and  composition,  27(1):  36-­47.         marwick,  a.  e.  &  boyd,  d.  (2010).  i  tweet  honestly,  i  tweet  passionately:   twitter  users,  context  collapse,  and  the  imagined  audience.  new  media  &   society,  13(1):  114-­133.   miller,  r.  a.  (2011).  teacher  facebook  speech:  protected  or  not?.   brigham  young  university  education  &  law  journal,  2:  637-­665.     murumaa-­mengel,  m.  &  siibak,  a.  (2014).  teachers  as  nightmare  readers:   estonian  high-­school  teachers’  experiences  and  opinions  about  student-­teacher   interaction  on  facebook.  international  review  of  information  ethics,  21(7):  35-­ 44.         shih,  c.  (2011).  the  facebook  era.  tapping  online  social  networks  to   market,  sell,  and  innovate.  new  jersey:  prentice  hall.   westin,  a.  (1968).  privacy  and  freedom.  new  york:  atheneum.           microsoft word williams-suhaimi.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): williams, p.j. & suhaimi, z. (2014, october 22-24). culture, discourse, and gameplay: new media citizenship in singapore. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. culture, discourse, and gameplay: new media citizenship in singapore j. patrick williams nanyang technological university zahirah suhaimi nanyang technological university introduction and background after becoming involuntarily independent from malaysia in 1965, singapore’s “survival” became a term laden with political meaning as the security of the new government became intertwined with the survival, particularly economic survival, of the nation (ortmann, 2009). the government has effectively maintained a discourse of threat to the nation’s survival, wherein its own political and economic leadership is viewed as key to progress, which in turn serves as the de facto measure of the nation’s health. progress is understood as achievable only through the development of its people into the kind of citizens that will enhance the economic potential of the nation. new media investment is one component of survival in a world where communication technologies push the boundaries of the technology, engineering, medical, financial, and tourist industries, among others. prime minister lee hsien loong has made clear that singapore must be competitive in the race for new media leadership: “interactive and digital media. what does that mean? it means computer games, it means making movies, animation, cartoons. very competitive business but one where maybe we have a chance and we can't afford not to be there.” [national day rally, 2006] investment in new media is visible through myriad discursive realms, with a common theme: whether corporate strategy or individual behavior, singaporeans should utilize technology whenever and however possible to improve one’s economic and cultural productivity, but only to the extent that such activities result in net gains for the state. as a result, singaporeans are inundated by, and happily surround themselves with, the latest in new media technologies, using them in the realms of work, education, health, and leisure to name but a few. however, outcomes of new-media use are not always positive and there also exist discourses of “problematic usage.” description of the study and methods in this presentation, we report on a study that seeks to connect (macro-level) public discourses on new media citizenship with (micro-level) interactional narratives about online gameplay. combining qualitative media analysis and critical discourse analysis of public campaign resources and news products with indepth interviews of massively multiplayer online role-playing game (mmorpg) players, we consider the ambiguous and contested meanings associated with the leisurely consumption of new media technologies among a group of middle-class singaporean youths. we collected a representative sample from more than 1,500 news articles published between 1994 and 2011, as well as a purposive sample of additional news, public speeches and campaign materials, and academic publications on new media published between 2006 and 2011 in order to explore how new media citizenship was discursively constructed by the social elites or their agents (the singaporean government maintains tight control over all traditional media outlets in the country, including newspapers, television, and radio, and has laws in place that outlaw criticism of its policies). these data were first coded inductively, and then subsequently compared with existing research on singaporean “statal narratives” and other national discourses on citizenship (e.g., wee & bockhurstheng 2005; neo & chen 2007). we also conducted 10 purposive interviews with players of a popular mmorpg. the point of these interviews was to discuss with singaporean youths how they understood their own gameplay so that we could compare their talk with public discourse about new media citizenship. coincidentally, one of us had recently conducted in-depth interviews with 17 participants of the same mmorpg for an unrelated study, and we analyzed the content of those interviews as well. as with the content of public discourse, we analyzed the interviews both inductively and subsequently in terms of the singaporean citizenship literature. findings and analysis the notion of citizenship achieves its discursive and ideological force through “statal narratives”— narratives created and disseminated by governments as a means of legitimizing specific policies (wee & bokhorst-heng 205). narratives do not by themselves contain discursive or ideological force. rather, their force is instantiated through ways of acting and interacting around those narratives. this is why our study focuses on both institutional narratives as well as phenomenological narratives from interviews; to demonstrate how institutionallevel narratives are (re)presented at the phenomenological level of society. institutional narratives institutional narratives in singapore were overwhelmingly instrumental. the government’s perspective was delivered via key media channels with ideological intent. we identified three types of narratives through which citizenship was defined. (1) being productive: new media technologies and new media users were constantly framed in terms of their potential for increasing material gains for the nation. (2) being engaged: new media technologies were typically framed in terms of how they could help singaporeans be(come) socially engaged citizens, while people were framed as ideally becoming more socially engaged through their new media use. (3) being responsible: new media technologies were framed as neutral in and of themselves. responsible citizens were described as using new media instrumentally; i.e., citizens should use new media only for improving productivity and engagement. these narratives were often positively valenced, but not always. there were also stories about being unproductive, disengaged, or irresponsible. institutional narratives thus not only pronounced the “right” ways to be citizens, but also exemplified how people and events could jeopardize the nation as well. phenomenological narratives individuals’ new media usage was framed in terms of cultural and economic productivity, which aligned with public discourses aimed at cultivating statedefined new media habits. in general, we found that mmorpg players were often critical of their own gameplay habits, and even when they talked positively about them, tended to define “good” play in terms that aligned with being productive, with limiting their leisurely engagement, and with being responsible. for example, ben, a 24 year-old air force pilot, described how he would tell friends he was “busy doing other stuff” instead of playing mmorpgs, while john, an undergraduate student, attributed his poor performance in the ‘a’-levels examinations as being a result of mmorpg play. other interviewees talked about wanting to “earn gold quickly” to buy things, or being frustrated with gameplay when they didn’t “progress fast enough.” these are a few examples of narratives that aligned with institutional level discourses. summary and significance in sum, the similarities between institutional and phenomenological discourses were evident. we argue that these similarities have implications for understanding how young singaporeans view their behaviors vis-à-vis new media citizenship, especially as more singaporeans take to new media platforms for political expression and organization. this study comes amid moves by the government to tighten its control of citizen participation via online media. analyzing macro and micro narratives surrounding new media, as well as the relations between them, is thus an important step toward evaluating how (and to what extent) new media citizens’ ideas and practices may align with the interests of the political and social elite. references neo, boon siong, & chen, geraldine. 2007. dynamic governance: embedding culture, capabilities and change in singapore. singapore: world scientific publishing co. ortmann, stephan. 2009. “singapore: the politics of inventing national identity.” journal of current southeast asian affairs 28(4):23-46. wee, lionel, & bockhurst-heng, wendy d. 2005. “language policy and nationalist ideology: statal narratives in singapore.” multilingua 24(3):159–183. microsoft word aoir2016 abstract.docx selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): madianou, m. (2016, october 5-8). digital humanitarianism: myths and realities. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. digital humanitarianism: myths and realities mirca madianou goldsmiths – university of london the 2013 world disasters report uses the term 'humanitarian technology' to refer to the empowering nature of digital technologies such as mobile phones and social media for disaster recovery. it is claimed that interactive technologies enable affected communities to participate in their own recovery, respond to their own problems and ‘make their voices heard.’ digital communication technologies are welcomed for their potential to catalyze a ‘power-shift’ in humanitarianism by building feedback structures that empower local communities to hold humanitarian and government agencies into account. in sum, mobile and social media are seen as solutions to some of the longstanding critiques of humanitarianism (de waal, 1997; krause, 2014), namely that it perpetuates power inequalities and is largely unaccountable. indeed a new era of humanitarianism is proclaimed which is driven by digital developments (meier, 2015; un ocha, 2012). despite the enthusiasm regarding the role of digital technologies as tools for humanitarian relief there is still little evidence to support the above claims. this paper unpacks some of the myths surrounding digital technologies for disaster recovery and humanitarian aid. rather than assuming the usefulness, inherently progressive or democratizing nature of communication technologies, i will reflect on the affordances of platforms such as social network sites and messaging apps (baym, 2015; boyd, 2013), their actual uses by disaster affected people and how these contribute to key processes of humanitarian practice such as ‘accountability’. i will do so by drawing on two interconnected projects: the first is a year-long ethnography of the typhoon haiyan recovery which included 139 interviews with disaster-affected people as well as humanitarian workers and other stakeholders (madianou, 2015; madianou, longboan & ong, 2015; madianou et al, 2015). the second project consists of interviews with humanitarian officers involved in a series of recent emergencies, from the current european refugee crisis to the 2015 nepal earthquake. the response to typhoon haiyan, which hit the philippines in 2013, represents the most systematic implementation of digital initiatives aimed at facilitating voice and empowering local communities to hold agencies into account. in that sense haiyan represents the ideal research case study. still, including interviews from other humanitarian contexts strengthens the development of an overall theoretical argument about digital humanitarianism. i will argue that despite noble intentions, the consequences of communication technologies for humanitarian action are more ambiguous than current accounts suggest. one of the key claims made about interactive communication technologies is that they empower local people to hold humanitarian agencies into account. the paper will observe that agencies interpret accountability rather narrowly as ‘feedback’ which affected people are asked to provide in response of the relief that they have received. agencies increasingly prioritize the collection of feedback through digitized platforms such as sms in combination with open access software such as frontlinesms. although social and mobile media enable the easy collection and cataloguing of feedback, research with humanitarian agencies suggests that feedback is not typically used to propose new relief projects or inform new policy. instead we observe that feedback data are increasingly used as evidence of impact which donors increasingly demand. the emphasis on metrics suggests that although in theory accountability is oriented to affected people, in practice it serves the purpose of humanitarian governance. i call this apparent disjuncture the ‘paradox of accountability’. despite good intentions, ‘humanitarian technologies’ become instruments of management and audit, rather than tools for participation and empowerment. as the emphasis shifts from humanitarian communication to humanitarian governance, the ‘humanitarian technologies’ discourse legitimates relief projects.  moreover, the systematic questioning of disaster-affected people without closing the feedback loop can disenfranchise affected people and diminish trust of humanitarian agencies. although digital technologies are rendered as solutions to longstanding critiques of humanitarianism, i argue that processes mediation can amplify existing power inequalities between aid workers and disaster-affected people. this is not the result of some inherent technological feature, but the outcome of a particular application of technology in a specific local context and within the wider political economy of humanitarianism. communication technology can only reveal or amplify the social and political structures already in place. wider structural changes would need to be made within humanitarian agencies and their relationships with donors in order to facilitate accountability to affected people instead of audit metrics.   at the same time, the paper acknowledges that although new communication technologies do not fulfil the expectations of accountability they are firmly embedded in the everyday lives of our participants. mobile phones and social networking sites such as facebook were widely used for sociality, entertainment and coping with the aftermath of disasters. for example, facebook was often used in mourning and memorialization rituals. users quickly returned to the long-established uses of social media such as dating and computer games. platforms which were introduced by aid agencies to facilitate information dissemination and feedback were often appropriated for different purposes by affected people. such is the case of humanitarian radio which employed frontline sms for feedback but was largely used for song requests and dedications to friends and family members. rather than trivializing this observation, i recognise that this as an important social function of humanitarian radio and interactive media. such practices represent a need to affirm relationships in the post-disaster context and a way for people to regain control over their social lives after the disruption caused by disasters. the uses of media for sociality and recreation are vital for the wellbeing of disaster-affected people. the ordinary uses of social and mobile media in the face of extraordinary events are meaningful coping mechanisms and ways of reintroducing normality in everyday life. the familiarity of everyday routines, the global gaming community and the ambient co-presence of facebook friends are used to reclaim ordinariness within the exceptional. references baym, n. (2015). personal connections in the digital age (2nd ed.). cambridge, uk: polity. boyd, d. (2014). it’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens. yale, nh: yale university press. de waal, a. (1997). famine crimes: politics and the disaster relief industry in africa. london: james currey publishers. krause, m. (2014). the good project: humanitarian relief ngos and the fragmentation of reason. chicago, il: chicago university press. madianou, m. (2015). digital inequalities and second-order disasters: social media in the typhoon haiyan recovery. social media and society, 1(2) madianou, m. longboan, l. & ong, j. (2015). finding a voice through humanitarian technologies? communication technologies and participation in disaster recovery. international journal of communication, 9(1-19) 1932–8036/20150005 madianou, m., ong, j. c., longboan, l., curato, n., & cornelio, j. (2015). humanitarian technologies project: understanding the role of digital media in disaster recovery. executive summary. retrieved from: www.humanitariantechnologies.net meier, p. (2015). digital humanitarians: how big data is changing the face of humanitarian response. boca raton, fl: crc press / taylor & francis united nations office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs: unocha (2013) humanitarianism in the network age. ocha policy and studies series. new york: ocha world disasters report: wdr (2013). technology and the future of humanitarian action. geneva: international federation of red cross and red crescent societies. microsoft word steele-korn.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): steele, c.k. & korn, j. (2014, october 22-24). a different model for academic mentoring: how race, multiplicity and holism intersect with online social media. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. a different model for academic mentoring: how race, multiplicity and holism intersect with online social media catherine knight steele colorado state university jenny korn university of illinois chicago introduction women of color in academia are turning to the internet to discover shared experiences of marginalization, racism, and sexism that lead to practical advice, personal edification, and especially, professional triumph. connections among women scholars of color through online social media sites involve collapses in traditional boundaries among the personal and professional, the acceptable and taboo, and the private and public. the convergence of separate components of identity into a holistic self that is communicated online has generated a different model for the academic mentoring of women of color. we posit that online social network sites confer mentoring for women of color in academia in significant, understudied, and overlooked ways. for a study involving women of color online, facebook is an ideal social network. african american and latinos are more likely to use social networking sites than whites (pew research center, 2012). women are more likely than men to use facebook and spend greater time there (duggan & brenner, 2013). incorporating facebook into our study of virtual lives often on the margins of academia provides insight into how computer-mediated social communication has transformed mentorship. traditional vs. black feminist mentoring models mentors may be defined as individuals with advanced experience and useful knowledge that are committed to providing upward mobility and psychosocial support to mentees in their careers (hunt & michael, 1983). built upon a long-term relationship between an apprentice and a supervisor, the traditional “guru” model of mentoring is face-to-face, dyadic, and asymmetrical in power. traditional models which include an electronic interface retain rigid, defined roles in which assistance flows from the mentor to the mentee in the specific context of career development, separate from other life areas (donaldson, ensher, & grant-vallone, 2000; ensher, heun, & blanchard, 2003). within the academic environment, the traditional model has been challenged by feminist mentoring models. while mentoring has been positively connected to success, lack of access to mentoring is endemic, particularly for underrepresented populations. the “guru” model, criticized as eurocentric and patriarchal, has been contested by africanamerican feminists who state that mentoring relationships may be co-beneficial, nonhierarchical, reciprocal, and communal. african-american feminist mentoring no longer asks mentor or mentee to disconnect from the various aspects of their identity to engage in academic mentoring. instead such models pursue a balance of power among parties involved, incorporate emotion, and value both paid and unpaid work (mcguire & reger, 2003). in our study, we analyze how online social network sites afford the holism and parity inherent in feminist mentoring (packard, walsh, & seidenberg, 2004; dua, 2007). reframing context collapse within digital mentoring past research on context collapse has examined how individuals from different social contexts are collapsed into a single audience from the viewpoint of the social network user. we extend context collapse theory by centering the collapse of boundaries not among audience contexts, but within individual contexts. we focus on the collapse of boundaries separating types of identities shared online for individuals, including selves rooted in academia, parenting, publishing, activism, politics, religion, and hobbies. social network sites expose mentees to mentors outside of formalized settings. the informality of the platform changes power dynamics and provides a more complete portrayal of mentors as real people with intersecting identities. online social networks afford an integration of the self that is encouraged by black feminist mentoring models. (marwick & boyd, 2011; vitak, 2012). methods rooted in black feminist epistemology because the researchers ground themselves in a black feminist epistemology our research asserts that research must be practical, accessible, and empowering for the participant, the researcher, and the communities of which both are a part. positioning participants as authorities about their experiences with mentoring, we sought rich, thick description for the purpose of elucidating best practices from those involved in social network-based mentoring relationships. semi-structured interviews with seven participants (two advanced graduate students and five tenured faculty) took place over a period of three months. the students specified multiple mentors, and all participants consisted of women of color. context collapse facilitates multiple mentors participants described their experiences in a sequence that closely follows kram’s (1985) model of initiation, cultivation, separation, and redefinition with one major revision. the initiation of mentoring relationships for participants in this study was often informal and not defined within the boundaries of traditional mentor/mentee relations. social media affords multiple mentors to mentees; concurrent relationships across mentors were experienced as intimate, supportive, and candid. online social media fosters positive visibility for mentees and mentors. participants broadened their mentoring network and discovered additional mentors through their first mentor’s social media network. context collapse facilitates holistic selves a participant described online mentoring relationships as more impactful in providing deep connections than those which she cultivated in person. her conversations with digital mentors often included advice about work-life balance. she explained, “they see pictures of my kids. they know about my family or when i have a vacation planned because they see the posts. i would never talk about that with my advisor. i think he would see me as less committed to the program if he knew about me watching reality shows or just hanging out with my kid all day on the weekend...they understand the complexities of being an outsider within, of not feeling a sense of belonging in academia and of striking the balance.” overall, participants had the most success with digital mentoring on platforms most actively engaged with for personal use. conclusions underrepresented populations, specifically women of color, benefit from mentoring relationships with mentors that relate to issues of structural racism, micro-aggressions, and other social injustices they face in their daily lives. online social media facilitates feminist mentoring by connecting women of color to a model that dispels the idea of the disembodied intellectual and instead integrates their identities as mothers, partners, and community members with their position in higher education. our model of social media mentoring bridges theory to practice and provides a new possibility for women of color in the academy. references donaldson, s. i., ensher, e. a., & grant-vallone, e. j. (2000). longitudinal examination of mentoring relationships on organizational commitment and citizenship behavior. journal of career development, 26, 233-249. dua, p. (2007). feminist mentoring and female graduate student success: challenging gender inequality in higher education. sociology compass, 1(2), 594-612. duggan, m., & brenner, j. (2013). the demographics of social media users 2012. pew research center’s internet & american life project. ensher, e. a., heun, c., & blanchard, a. (2003). online mentoring and computermediated communication: new directions in research. journal of vocational behavior, 63(2), 264-288. hunt, d.m. , & michael, c. (1983). mentorship—a career training and development tool . academy of management review, 8(3), 475-485. koh, y. (2014, january 20). twitter users’ diversity becomes an ad selling point. wall street journal. retrieved from http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/sb1000142405270230441910457932344234664616 8 kram, k. e. (1985). mentoring at work. glenview, il: scott, foresman marwick, a. e. & boyd, d. (2011). i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. new media & society, 13(1), 114-133. mcguire, g. m. & reger, j. (2003). feminist co-mentoring: a model for academic professional development. nwsa journal, 15(1), 54-72. packard, b. w. l., walsh, l., & seidenberg, s. (2004). will that be one mentor or two? a cross‐ sectional study of women's mentoring during college. mentoring & tutoring: partnership in learning, 12(1), 71-85. vitak, j. (2012). the impact of context collapse and privacy on social network site disclosures. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 56(4), 451-470. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  yoon,  h.  y.  &  kang,  w.  c.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  when  censorship  is  not  an   option:  internet  trolling  of  national  intelligence  agency  in  s.  korea.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the   17th  annual  conference  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved   from  http://spir.aoir.org. when  censorpship  is  not  an  option:  internet  trolling  of   national  intelligence  agency  in  s.  korea ho  young  yoon   university  of  wisconsin-­madison,  usa.   woo  chang  kang   australian  national  university,  australia. extended  abstracts     in  2012,  s.  korea  national  intelligence  agency,  national  intelligence  service  (nis)  has   conducted  internet  trolling  operation.  during  the  course  of  presidential  election   campaign,  the  nis  secretly  operated  internet  trolling  as  a  covert  operation.  it  is  known   that  at  least  70  agents  were  carried  their  mission.  the  agency  has  set  its  goal  to   influence  public  discourse,  in  favor  of  the  governing  party  and  their  presidential   candidate.  since  covert  operation  of  intelligence  agency  is  commonly  illegitimate  and   rarely  known,  the  case  will  provide  us  a  unique  opportunity  to  understand,  how   intelligence  agency  under  authoritative  regime  uses  its  power  and  resources  to   manipulate  public  discourses  and  opinions.     the  study  is  important  in  a  sense  that  it  extends  our  discussion  about  the  government   intervention  and  propaganda  in  the  era  of  online  media.  the  typical  line  of  research  on   the  government  intervention  and  online  media  has  been  censorship  research  (e.g.  gill,   crete-­nishihata,  dalek,  goldberg,  senft,  &  wiseman  2015).  for  example,  a  study  has   shown  that,  by  preventing  government  criticism  or  mobilization  cues  such  as  collective   expression,  an  authoritative  government  has  been  successful  to  control  online  public   opinion  as  well  as  to  maintain  political  stability  (e.g.  king,  pan,  &  roberts,  2013).  in   other  words,  censorship  is  considered  as  a  primary  means  to  control  the  internet  and   previous  studies  have  been  heavily  focused  on  the  subject.     in  a  certain  context,  however,  there  are  far  more  advantages  of  employing  trolling  for   controlling  public  discourses  and  opinions  than  employing  censorship.  as  in  the  case  of   s.  korea,  for  instance,  anonymity  of  the  internet  makes  it  possible  the  government   agents  to  disguise  as  ordinary  citizens,  and  in  turn,  to  manipulate  public  opinion  (e.g.   chen,  2015).  additionally,  censorship  is  fairly  easier  to  be  detected  by  citizens,  which   constrains  the  actions  of  authoritarian  government  where  institutionalized  democracy  is   established.  furthermore,  censorship  is  a  passive  measure  of  intervention  whereas   trolling  is  more  active  measure,  enabling  the  government  to  create  public  noise  or  to   manipulate  public  discourse  –  which  causes  more  detrimental  effects  on  democracy.   therefore,  literature  on  online  government  intervention  needs  to  expanded.     in  order  to  answer  this  necessity,  this  study  examines  the  trolling  operation  in  s.  korea   during  the  presidential  election  year  in  2012.  in  doing  so,  the  study  suggests  that  the   operation  to  manipulate  public  opinion  is  preferable  over  censorship  practice  where   formal  democracy  of  laws  and  regulations  explicitly  prohibit  large  scale  censorship.  in   addition,  the  study  also  suggests  that  where  technological  and  human  resources  to   conduct  censorship  are  limited  –  due  to  the  prohibition  by  the  laws  and  regulations  – trolling  operation  is  one  of  the  most  effective  and  efficient  ways  to  intervene  online   public  discourse  though  it  is  illegitimate.       the  analysis  document  for  this  study  are  drawn  from  legal  documents.  first  document   we  have  used  is  the  crime  report  of  the  trolling,  released  by  prosecutors’  office  of  s.   korea.  this  report  is  made  for  investigating  nis  trolling  activities  and  for  prosecuting   relevant  individuals.  the  report  has  listed  and  contained  the  record  of  the  time  and  site   of  trolling  as  well  as  the  contents  made  by  the  nis  trolling  team.  we  use  this  document   to  analyze  the  frame  that  nis  agency  has  used  for  trolling.  second,  we  have  used  the   court  ruling  records  and  materials  from  the  trials  of  the  former  nis  director.  the  court   documents  have  provided  us  the  whole  picture  of  entire  operation.  these  materials  are   used  to  reconstruct  the  organizational  structure  of  the  trolling  team  and  how  the   operation  is  conducted  by  nis  agents.  we  have  conducted  document  analysis  and  used   the  content  coding  made  by  the  prosecutors’  office.  the  office  has  analyzed  the   contents  of  trolling  whether  it  is  interfering  the  presidential  elections  or  manipulating   public  discourse.     our  analysis  result  is  twofold.  first,  according  to  our  analysis,  trolling  was  the  most   effective  and  efficient  tool  that  nis  can  employ  without  technological  resources.  the   automated  software  program  is  only  used  for  twitter  trolling  as  a  form  of  auto-­bot.  other   trolling  activities  were  solely  conducted  by  human  power  without  any  technological   support.  for  instance,  agents  were  moving  around  coffee  shops  for  wifi  to  avoid  ip   tracking  and  even  they  attempted  not  to  be  on  cctvs  of  stores  they  visited.  financial   resource  of  operation  is  used  for  hiring  external  temporary  agents  to  operate.  putting  it   differently,  trolling  was  technically  simple  and  manually-­driven  activities  that  fully   required  human  resources.  we  believe  one  reason  that  trolling  was  mainly  manually-­ driven  operation  is  the  necessities  that  their  identity  in  the  trolling  sites  should  be   disguised  as  ordinary  users  of  the  sites  and  that  the  sensitivity  to  avoid  any  doubt  of   other  users  is  required.  this  is  linked  to  the  second,  the  manipulation  of  public  opinion   by  intelligence  agency  usually  used  the  two  tactics.  one  is  to  eulogize  the  government’s   policy  by  fabricating  foreign  reputation.  the  other  is  to  take  the  same  ideological  view  of   trolling  sites  on  trivial  issues  but  to  criticize  prominent  politicians  outside  of  the   governing  party.  as  mentioned  earlier,  the  agents  were  well  aware  of  the  sensitivity  of   topic  and  sites  when  they  trolled.       in  sum,  the  study  suggests  that  there  are  variety  of  pathways  that  government  can   actively  interfere  with  public  discourses  and  opinions.  although  censorship  is  well-­ known  government  practice  to  intimidate  freedom  of  speech,  the  political  and   technological  constraints  may  influence  the  selection  of  other  intervention  measures   even  if  it  is  illegitimate  practice.       although  the  venue  of  this  research  lies  in  political  system  and  there  are  limitations,  we   believe  the  implication  of  this  research  can  be  extended  into  various  areas  of  research.   for  instance,  it  is  common  practice  that  private  companies  hire  professional  agencies  to   control  their  online  reputations.  we  believe  future  research  can  be  directed  into  the   comparison  between  government  agencies  and  private  entities.     references     chen,  a.  (2015).  the  agency.  june  2.  the  new  york  times  magazine.   http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-­agency.html?_r=0     gill,  p.,  crete-­nishihata,  m.,  dalek,  j.,  goldberg,  s.,  senft,  a.,  &  wiseman,  g.  (2015).   characterizing  web  censorship  worldwide:  another  look  at  the  opennet  initiative   data.  acm  transactions  on  the  web  (tweb),  9(1),  4.     king,  g.,  pan,  j.,  &  roberts,  m.  e.  (2013).  how  censorship  in  china  allows  government   criticism  but  silences  collective  expression.  american  political  science  review,   107(02),  326-­343.     morozov,  e.  (2012).  the  net  delusion:  the  dark  side  of  internet  freedom.  public  affairs.   microsoft word byron.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): byron, p. (2014, october 22-24). social media’s challenge to the promotion of young people’s sexual health. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. social media’s challenge to the promotion of young people’s sexual health paul byron university of new south wales abstract drawing from young people’s accounts of facebook practice, this paper challenges current public health attempts to promote sexual health via social media, arguing that health interventions must engage with the complexities of young people’s online intimacies. social media plays a significant role in young people’s everyday practices of intimacy and friendship. health promotion strategies increasingly note the value of social media in young people’s lives and often approach social network sites (sns) as channels through which to access young people. in utilising social media, such initiatives rarely deviate from public health social marketing paradigms committed to developing and disseminating static messages to their target population. while these strategies often include consultations with young people, such as through campaign development focus groups, this does not extend to seeing young people as partners, stakeholders, or coproducers of social media interventions. this paper will begin by arguing that young people’s sexual health practices are contexualised by, and mediated through, everyday practices of friendship and intimacy. focusing on australian cultures of young people’s heterosex, and drawing from focus groups conducted in the state of new south wales, i argue that to engage with social media, sexual health interventions from government, non-government, and other research institutions must reform their traditional approaches. current public health literature reports on the feasibility of promoting sexual health to young people via social media, and to date there are few reports of where this has been successfully undertaken. most health research discussions consider sns as cloistered sites inhabited by young people, ripe for site-specific interventions like those administered in schools, universities, or youth services. i critique this approach by drawing from theories of media as practice (couldry 2004), digital media use as a form of media production (bruns 2006), and recent scholarship on young people’s digital media practices and expertise (see for e.g. boyd 2008, marwick 2005). i draw upon lyotard’s concept of ‘narrative knowledge’ (1991) to argue that knowledge is continually (re)produced through practice and discourse, rather than an agreed upon series of facts. this supports certeau’s theory of everyday practice (1988), and his attention to dynamic, creative, and tactical practices that threaten the authority of ‘the expert’ (1988, 7-8). in a systematic analysis of sexual health promotion activities engaging with social media, gold et al. (2011) found that young people were, by and large, the most common target group. of the social media initiatives that gold et al. reviewed, most engaged social media simply for the dissemination of sexual health information. as noted by davis (2012), health promotion materials developed for social media are often ‘read only’, neglecting to engage with the participatory culture of such media. using focus group data in which young people (16-22 years) discuss their social media practices and the possibility of incorporating sexual health promotion into these, i propose an interdisciplinary approach to sexual health in which media studies inform public health agendas. as facebook was the sns most commonly discussed by research participants, it will be the focus of this paper. participants did not reject the use of facebook for sexual health promotion, yet there was much discussion as to what this could (and could not) entail. participant discussions about facebook illustrate its role in a complex arrangement of social and interpersonal practices whereby any discussion of sexual health is risky, and in most cases unlikely. a key concern was the stigma of sexual infection, and how any mention of sexual health might be (mis)read by one’s friends. sns should be recognised as participatory spaces in which information, ‘shares’, ‘likes’, and public or private messaging are performative of one’s self, and demonstrate different aspects of one’s identities, intimacies, and friendships. if health promoters accept that young people are knowledgeable media producers, they must revise their commitment to developing and disseminating static, authoritative messages to this population. yet the risk focus of contemporary public health, particularly in strategies relating to young people’s sexual health, prohibits this. riskbased approaches grant limited agency to young people who are seen as unable to fully manage their sexual health because they lack the necessary knowledge and experience to do so. through risk-based approaches, australian sexual health websites for young people also narrate the dangers of peer pressure, online media and interactions, and pornography, often referring to the likelihood of false information emerging from these spaces of ‘non-expertise’. this suggests that young people lack the competence to navigate various forms of media. notably, health promotion websites downplay the importance of friendship, at times suggesting that the knowledge and values of friends cannot be trusted. this repudiation of friendship as a valuable source of sexual health information is particularly problematic for health promotion that seeks to engage with young people via social media, where friendship is paramount. sexual health promotion strategies seeking to engage with young people via social media must acknowledge young people’s expertise as media users and producers, and the cultural importance of friendship in these practices. to do so, health promotion cannot discredit young people as lacking knowledge and experience, or as easily misinformed by friends, but as wellpracticed in sourcing, managing, and disseminating information within everyday networks of care and support. this is not to suggest that health promotion strategies are redundant – as focus group participants note, sexual health information is sought and appreciated by many young people. yet in producing resources and information with (not for) young people, young people’s cultural practices and expertise must be recognised as valid and valuable to health practices, and public health strategies must embrace social media not simply as channels for information dissemination, but as networked spaces where friendship can support and strengthen young people’s negotiations of sexual health. references boyd, d. 2008. why youth ♥ social network sites: the role of networked publics in teenage social life. in buckingham, d. (ed.) the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation series on digital media and learning. mit press, cambridge. bruns, a. 2006. towards produsage: futures for user-led content production. cultural attitudes towards communication and technology, tartu, estonia, certeau, m.d. 1988. the practice of everyday life, university of california press, berkley. couldry, n. 2004. theorising media as practice. social semiotics, 14(2), 115-132. davis, w.m. 2012. youth and online sexual health services: intersections of the social and the technical. masters of science, the university of british columbia. gold, j., pedrana, a.e., sacks-davis, r., hellard, m.e., chang, s., howard, s., keogh, l., hocking, j.s. & stoove, m.a. 2011. a systematic examination of the use of online social networking sites for sexual health promotion. bmc public health, 11(1), 583. lyotard, j.-f. 1991. the postmodern condition: a report on knowledge, manchester university press, manchester. marwick, a.e. 2005. 'i'm a lot more interesting than a friendster profile': identity, presentation, authenticity and power in social networking services. conference of the association of internet researchers 6, 5-6 october, chicago microsoft word social-tv.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 social tv: quantifying the intersections between television and social media (panel) panel overview past years have seen a rapid growth in the uses of social media alongside conventional broadcast media such as radio and television. television shows and networks have increasingly incorporated social media into their programming, for example by promoting the use of twitter hashtags to channel user interaction with televised content and by showing a selection of incoming hashtagged tweets during live shows; by establishing dedicated facebook fan pages and twitter accounts for shows, presenters, or even fictional characters; or by providing their own bespoke social networks and apps such as fango and zeebox, which themselves often offer some degree of interconnection with mainstream social media platforms (harrington, highfield and bruns, 2012). collectively, such initiatives have become known as “social tv”. in addition to such opportunities for direct engagement between audiences and broadcasters, initiatives aiming to track and measure the success or otherwise of social tv, and to thereby quantify the impact that social media activities around shows may have on their ratings or other performance indicators, have also begun to emerge, driven both by scholarly research projects and by commercial organisations (see e.g. nielsen, 2012; 2013). current frameworks for such a quantification of the intersections between television and social media remain in their infancy, however, and are often highly particular to specific shows, content types, or national broadcast systems. further, their underlying analytical assumptions and research methodologies are often poorly documented and insufficiently tested – especially where such social tv metrics are offered as commercial products. this panel brings together a number of key social tv researchers in order to explore the current state of the art in the field and chart the path ahead for scholarly research. papers presented in this panel (outlined in detail below) will define a new methodological approach to establishing reliable “telemetrics” for social media engagement with television; explore the expectations of television producers and the response by viewers in the context of a specific social tv project on australian television; map the overlapping footprints of selected television programmes within the overall network of a national twittersphere; and [... fourth paper...]. these contributions will document a number of complementary research approaches which in combination serve to outline pathways towards the further development of reliable social tv metrics. harrington, s., highfield, t., & bruns, a. (2012). more than a backchannel: twitter and television. in j. m. noguera (ed.), audience interactivity and participation (pp. 13–17). brussels: cost action transforming audiences, transforming societies. retrieved from http://www.cost-transformingaudiences.eu/system/files/essays-and-interviewessays-18-06-12.pdf nielsen. (2013). new study confirms correlation between twitter and tv ratings. nielsen press room 20 mar. 2013. retrieved from http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/pressroom/2013/new-study-confirms-correlationbetween-twitter-and-tv-ratings.html nielsen. (2012.) “nielsen and twitter establish social tv rating. nielsen press room 17 dec. 2012. retrieved from http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/press-room/2012/nielsenand-twitter-establish-social-tv-rating.html introducing telemetrics: the weighted tweet index darryl woodford queensland university of technology jean burgess queensland university of technology katie prowd queensland university of technology ben goldsmith queensland university of technology axel bruns queensland university of technology stephen harrington queensland university of technology abstract this paper introduces a new methodology for analyzing and measuring engagement with television content by users of twitter. drawing on factors such as the network, viewing audience, and date of broadcast to establish a baseline expectation for volume of tweets around a television show, and applying techniques from the field of sabermetrics to create neutral volume figures (‘weighted tweets’) which exclude these variables, our metrics provide new insights into television’s social media presence. the methodology provides a variety of new measures for analysing the social media strategies of individual television programs, channels and networks, for comparing users’ engagement with programs, channels or networks, and for predicting future volumes of tweets. introduction measuring ‘social television’ there has recently been an increase in the levels of both academic and industry attention paid to ‘social television’ – broadly defined as the extension of ‘offline’ audience engagement into social media platforms (harrington et al, 2012; highfield et al, 2013; wohn & na, 2011). however, comprehensive, data-driven techniques to track and measure social tv activity are still emergent, and have to date been almost exclusively the provenance of commercial media organisations, preventing external testing or validation of the data by researchers interested in the space, despite their growing impact on commercial decisions and business models in the digital media environment (proulx & shepatin, 2012). for different stakeholders, measures of the ‘success’ of social tv vary. advertisers and agencies are focused on measuring the retention of commercials shown during a broadcast. channel operators and networks look for measures of the impact of social media activity on a program’s ratings, and compare the relative visibility and resonance of shows within social media communities. television producers – and academics – are often interested not only in the volume of discussion, but also its content. inspired by the field of sabermetrics (see, for example, james (2003)), and more generally the statistical analysis of sporting events, the project on which this paper is based builds on our significant existing database of activity around australian and international television in order to develop advanced metrics for measuring twitter activity, and for making such activity comparable across time, genre, network and location. biased metrics analysts of sports statistics have, over time, sought to develop methods to separate out those factors which lead to the result of a sporting event from other, more circumstantial factors. for example, in baseball, traditional statistics such as earned run average (era) were used to measure the performance of pitchers. however, the work of sabermetricians has shown that the quality of the fielders behind a pitcher plays a much larger role than was quantified by era, and thus they developed a set of new statistics such as fip (fielder independent pitching), to better quantify the individual performance of a pitcher. analogous to the way a pitcher’s personal era metrics are biased by the quality of the team they pitch for, the nielsen socialguide social tv metrics for individual shows are biased by a number of similar circumstantial factors, such as the broadcast footprint of the tv network the show was screened on, as well as the time and date of the broadcast. a show on one of the major national networks in the united states will almost inevitably receive greater social media attention than one on an obscure regional cable channel, and a show in prime-time will usually generate more conversations than one broadcast in a late-night slot. like the quality of a pitcher’s team in baseball, such biases are relatively stable and can be accounted for in the development of more sophisticated metrics such as those we outline in this conference paper. the weighted tweet index during 2012 and 2013, socialguide – which was purchased by nielsen in november 2012 – published daily reports providing statistics on twitter conversations for the ‘top ten daily shows’ in the united states. the ‘top ten’ was initially determined by the volume of tweets but subsequently changed to reflect a show’s ‘total impressions’ – i.e. nielsen’s estimate of the number of people who might have viewed a tweet about the show. as a result of previous research projects, we have also gathered significant audience data and twitter activity around australian and international television dating back to 2011. our own data was captured via internal tools from the twitter api in the case of tweets, and scraped from the web in the case of television ratings. with these sources of data, we began to isolate the significance of factors which may influence the number of tweets a show receives on twitter. much as the fip statistic in baseball seeks to compare pitchers’ statistics on a like-forlike basis – that is, adjusted as if each pitcher was playing with the same averagequality team of fielders – our work seeks to generate reliable metrics for social tv independent of factors such as the network or the time and date it was screened or viewed. by normalizing the social media engagement data in the weighted tweet index, we are able to measure a show’s ‘performance’ in a way that enables us to evaluate a producer’s, channel’s or network’s social media strategy, as well as to assess the ‘social’ claim of social tv – that is, to measure audience engagement with a television program through conversations on twitter. predicting the future? the utility of this method is not limited to analysis of past events. it enables us to identify a baseline by which to measure the future performance of shows. because our ‘weighted tweets’ values have been stripped of much of their extraneous context, we can aggregate these values across a range of episodes from a given series for which we have tweet volumes and ratings data, and apply to this the factors that describe the circumstances (for example: network, date and time) of the next broadcast. in doing so, we seek to predict the volume of tweets that the next episode should expect to receive when it airs, which may serve as both a prediction and a barometer of the social tv ‘success’ of a particular episode. as we refine our model, and apply it to a greater number of shows, we will gain a better understanding of the significance of each factor on the number of tweets recorded by a particular show. conclusion internet research 15.0, 2014: bangkok, thailand by breaking raw tweet numbers into their component parts, we are able both to generate measures of twitter users’ engagement with past shows and, potentially, to establish whether future ones generate the attention on twitter that may have been expected. all else remaining equal, any discrepancies between the prediction and the actual result should then be due to factors internal to the show itself, and most centrally to the one factor which we cannot account for: content, for which variations are often unforeseeable and thus cannot be accounted for ahead of time. however, our predictions of what volume of social media engagement a show should expect to receive are even more significant in such cases, as they constitute a barometer of success for networks, producers and social media strategists, and provide both industry and researchers with a list of shows which either exceeded or failed to reach their predicted levels. this allows the benchmarking of new episodes against their intended engagement targets, and allows for an analysis of what factors contributed to the number of tweets generated around a particular episode or series on social media. references bruns, a., & liang, e. y. (2012). tools and methods for capturing twitter data during natural disasters. first monday, 17(4). retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3937/3193 bruns, a., & stieglitz, s. (2013). towards more systematic twitter analysis: metrics for tweeting activities. international journal of social research methodology, 16(2), 91– 108. doi:10.1080/13645579.2012.756095 harrington, s., highfield, t., & bruns, a. (2012). more than a backchannel: twitter and television. audience interactivity and participation. brussels: cost action transforming audiences, transforming societies, 13-17 highfield, t., harrington, s., & bruns, a. (2013). twitter as a technology for audiencing and fandom: the# eurovision phenomenon. information, communication & society, 16(3), 315-339. james, b. (2003). the new bill james historical baseball abstract. free press, new york, ny, usa, 2003 proulx, m., & shepatin, s. (2012). social tv: how marketers can reach and engage audiences by connecting television to the web, social media, and mobile. john wiley & sons. tango, t. (n.d.). defensive responsibility spectrum (drs): breaking up the fielders from the pitchers. retrieved from http://www.tangotiger.net/drspectrum.html wohn, d., & na, e. (2011). tweeting about tv: sharing television viewing experiences via social media message streams. first monday, 16(3). doi:10.5210/fm.v16i3.3368 acknowledgments data for this project was sourced from our own twitter tools, as well as from publicly available information provided by nielsen socialguide – http://www.socialguide.com/nielsen-twitter-tv-ratings/. funding for work was provided by qutbluebox. license this article is ©2014 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. public service media and social tv: co-creating television comedy with the network influencers of the abc’s #7dayslater jonathon hutchinson university of sydney australia abstract in many instances of broadcast television production, the use of social tv is most obvious during the transmission of the program itself where the audience might participate by commenting on the program, engaging in collaborative activites or ‘gossiping’ about their favourtite characters for example. the australian broacasting corporation (abc) has long been experimenting with social tv through many of its programs, with its greatest success in its flagship current affairs television program, q&a. recently, the abc sought to extend this experiment beyond the banal activites of lounge-room heckling and invited the audience to take an active role in the conception, development and production of the 10-minute television program, #7dayslater. using a quantitative data scraping approach to the program’s social media interactions along with ethnographic qualitative data, this paper critically examines the co-creative production model with input from the the lead twitter participants, or ‘network influencers’. social tv in the context of public service media audience contributions to social tv, referred to as ‘back channel communication’, are often limited to tweets or facebook comments selected and displayed on the strapline during live broadcasts. however, some broadcasters have moved to more exploratory models that incorporate the ‘back channel’ into the production process itself, positioning the audience not in the lounge chair but in the producer’s chair. this is a complex undertaking, with the australian broadcasting corporation (abc) seeking to integrate audience contributions into the organisation’s production and editorial standards while maintaining the enthusiasm of contributors. moreover, collaborative production through social tv within public service media (psm) problematises its public service remit, prompting an exploration of how to facilitate collaborative, social tv programming that encourages audience contribution while generating public value. psm has its roots in the reithian values, which often suggests the organisation should inform, educate and entertain its audience (debrett, 2010). the purpose of psm can however be extended to include distance from vested interests, the fostering of national culture, education of the public, “quality programming standards, programme maker independence” (cunningham, 2013, p. 62) and the capacity to provide voice to marginalised groups and individuals. the incorporation of information and communication technologies to enable audience participation within the production process of psm content has provided multiple benefits including audience specific content production, improved audience investment within the broadcaster’s programming, and the ability to satisfy the psm remit to include what might be otherwise marginalised voices. simultaneously, social media tools and platforms problematise the production process as often the ideas and contributions from the audience are non-compliant with the regulatory framework that psm operates within. for example, the abc is governed by its editorial policies to ensure the institution complies with the legislative requirements of the corporation’s charter, specifically “ broadcasting programs that contribute to a sense of national identity and inform and entertain, and reflect the cultural diversity of, the australian community; and broadcasting programs of an educational nature” (abc act, 1983). however, audience contributions rarely acknowledge these nation and culture building frameworks of psm and contribute material that, although creative and entertaining, may not satisfy the editorial requirements of the abc. the misalignment between broadcaster and participating audience member gives rise to the problem of how to facilitate the collaborative production of abc-appropriate content from a diverse group of contributing individuals. i have previously argued the case for cultural intermediation (hutchinson, 2013), which is described as the combination of human and non-human actors to negotiate the production of cultural artefacts. cultural intermediation enables the production of cocreative content between institutional online communities and professional content producers while operating within the regulatory constraints of psm. this paper builds on that work by critically examining the engagement of the abc and social tv through #7dayslater, a program “...taking comedy to the scary arena of interactive storytelling where the audience gets to write the brief via social media for each weekly episode that will air just seven days later on abc2” (abc, 2013). by engaging in a narrative-based approach where actors deliver a scripted performance during the program, #7dayslater called on its audience to collaborate, conceive, develop, write and co-produce a 10minute television program that was broadcast within 7 days of the call-out. the program included a host of national and international celebrities as both actors and producers who collaborated with its audience, attracting global online participation. identifying and understanding the network influencers the research presented in this paper engaged a mixed methods approach, incorporating both quantitative and qualitative data. the research design used quantitative data to highlight where to concentrate the qualitative research efforts, in this case ethnographical research with not only the abc staff but also the audience members. identifying the significant individuals who were engaging in cocreative activity across twitter enabled the research to focus on extracting relevant qualitative data. twitter data highlighted potential interviewees and participants for the second phase of research: interviews with the #7dayslater production team and the networked communication leaders. tweets were collected during the program’s season and a few weeks beyond the final broadcast, from 3 november to 28 december 2013. a total of 903 tweets were captured during this time. the data were cleaned through google refine and imported into the open source social network analysis program, gephi. within gephi it is possible to highlight the significant nodes in the network, their connectedness and how influential they are within the network. the first phase of the research was the quantitative social network analysis, where tweets were collected with the #7dayslater hashtag. the data was processed through network analysis algorithms within gephi which enabled the analyst to understand not only who was in the network, but how directly related they were to the conversation, how connected they were to others, how influential they were and most importantly for this research who the communication leaders were. the communication leaders are referred to as network influencers from here on. figure 1 visualises the #7dayslater network through the @users and hashtag conversation topics, which represents how a user is connected to both topics and other users. for example if @usera mentions #topicx to @userb, the other information within the tweet is discarded to represent only the two users and the subject of their conversation. further, if @userc retweets #topicx to their network, we can see how that topic travelled across additional communication networks. in other words figure 1 represents who is saying what to whom. node size indicates how many times an item is mentioned, with 172 topics being discussed. the larger nodes are more active users or more talked about topics. betweenness centrality metrics revealed the network influencers: the green nodes are the most influential users and the pink nodes indicate the most talked about topics. betweenness centrality is a useful measure to employ in this analysis, instead of connectivity, as it not only indicates the load of the node within the network but also its importance. betweenness centrality then indicates not only how many times a topic or user is referred to, but also how significant it is within the network, where “a point in a communication network is central to the extent that it falls in the shortest path between pairs of other points” (freeman, 1977, p. 35), and thus the control of information flow through the network. processing the data through a modularity analysis highlights 48 communities within the network, where colours indicate connectedness. an example of the connectedness of the network influencers is @daley_pearson, the #7dayslater director, having a large purple connected community, whereas @tokyostuntbear, one of the professional directorial contributors has a reasonably connected brown network. figure 1 the #7dayslater twitter network the preliminary quantitative analysis established the following top ten users: 1. @7dayslatertv 2. @daley_pearson 3. @harrisonthefan 4. @mwhalan 5. @henry_and_aaron 6. @bajopants 7. @abc2 8. @washingtonx 9. @jordanrasko 10. @tomandalex the analysis also reveals the top ten topics talked about were: 1. #7dayslater 2. #qanda 3. #zanda 4. #spooky 5. #animation 6. #flightoftheconchords 7. #western 8. #hawaii 9. #ggtv 10. #zombie if we eliminate all of the abc staff twitter handles (@7dayslatertv, @daley_pearson, @bajopants, @abc2, @jordanrasko and @tomandalex) along with celebrities and external production professionals (@henry_and_aaron, and washingtonx), @harrisonthefan and @mwhalan are the top two network influencers. to enable a sizeable sample of contributors to investigate, @zenjito, @jarradseng and @mikey_nicholson were also included. from the highest engaged topics, it is also clear that episode 3, zombies flight for equality (#zanda) and episode 5, a bullet with braille on it, were the most engaged episodes of the season – a fact confirmed during the interview with supervising producer, richard huddleston. this quantitative analysis provides the basis for the highly focussed qualitative research: interviews with the #7dayslater team and the most influential twitter contributors. the psm co-creative production model that includes social tv on the surface, it would appear that the most engaged contributors to #7dayslater via twitter are the professional staff working on the program, closely followed by groups or individuals who are part of external production houses. this result is expected, however it is the non-aligned network influencers that are of most interest. for example @harrisonthefan (figure 2) and @mikey_nicholson are aspiring media professionals who may have contributed to the program as an avenue of demonstrating their creative talents, while it is likely that @zenjito, @jaradseng and @mwhalan were highly engaged simply as fans of the series. figure 2 @harrisonthefan’s twitter profile indicating he is an aspiring media professional the next phase of research is to interview these participants to identify the motivation behind their contribution where the results from these interviews will be presented in the full conference paper. this research supports the concepts previously outlined for the role of the cultural intermediary in the facilitation of the co-creative activities in an online environment (hutchinson 2013). the conversation style that the facilitating abc cocreators adopt is one that engages, inspires and encourages interaction with the participants, signalling a development in the collaborative production model that engages users across multiple platforms. the point of departure for this research is to understand how social network analysis can be embedded into the production process itself. an iterative production methodology that engages finely grained social network analysis is useful in identifying key network influencers to improve our understanding of how social tv can work alongside a collaborative television production model. acknowledgments richard huddleston, harrison engstrom, axel bruns, rod mcguinness, daley pearson. references cunningham, stuart. (2013). hidden innovation: policy, industry and the creative sector. brisbane: university of queensland press. debrett, m. (2010). reinventing public service television for the digital future. bristol: intellect. hutchinson, jonathon. (2013). communication models of instituional online communities: the role of the abc cultural intermediary. platform journal of media and communication, 5(1). license this article is ©2014 author, and licensed under cc by-nc. mapping social tv audiences: the footprints of leading shows in the australian twittersphere axel bruns queensland university of technology darryl woodford queensland university of technology tim highfield queensland university of technology katie prowd queensland university of technology abstract drawing on the results of a long-term research project into the network structure of the australian twittersphere, combined with an investigation of audience participation through social media in selected reality tv and political debate shows, this paper maps the location of the twitter communities participating in the social tv components of the selected shows onto the underlying follower/followee network structure of the australian national twittersphere. in doing so, it addresses questions about the homology or distinctions between the social tv audiences for the different shows; the correlation between existing follower/followee relationships and participation in specific social tv activities; and the effects of twitter activity related to specific shows in making these shows visible to the entire national twitter network. the development of such networkbased approaches to the quantification and visualisation of social tv engagement makes another important to the development of reliable and generally applicable metrics for social television. mapping the australian twittersphere this paper builds on a long-term research project which seeks to map the national australian twittersphere. conducting a snowball crawl of follower/followee networks which began with a seed list of confirmed australian users (as defined by a number of parameters set in the users’ public twitter profiles, including timezone, gps coordinates, location text and description text), the project had identified more than one million australian twitter accounts and their follower/followee connections by 2013 – out of an estimated 2.5 million total australian twitter accounts as of march 2013 (sensis, 2013) – and has since continued to gather further data. in 2014, it will complete a full scan of the entire twitter userbase for australian accounts. fig. 1 presents a preliminary network map of follower/followee relations in the australian twittersphere, showing the 120,000 most connected users of the one million accounts identified at the time, plotted in gephi using a force atlas 2 network visualisation algorithm. network cluster labels were derived from a thematic classification of the central accounts in each of the clusters (see bruns, burgess, and highfield, 2014, for further detail on this research). fig. 1: preliminary map of follower/followee relationships in the australian twittersphere, based on data for ~1 million accounts. 120,000 most connected accounts shown. viewed for itself, this preliminary map reveals several key patterns about the predominant interests of australian twitter users. there is a significant community of users, stretching across several subclusters, whose follower/followee connections centre on news and political debate, to the left of the network; other major communities stretch across several fields of business (at the top) as well as sports (at the bottom). other, more distinct clusters exist around several lifestyle topics (to the right), while a number of outlying clusters indicate communities of australian users which remain largely disconnected from the mainstream australian twittersphere, but may instead have very strong connections with like-minded international user groups that are absent from this map by virtue of their nationality (e.g. evangelicals, teen music fans). our continuing efforts to identify further australian accounts within the global twitter userbase will add further detail to this map; with almost half of the estimated australian twitter population already mapped, it is unlikely that the overall patterns found in the preliminary map will still change significantly. at the conclusion of our full crawl of the australian twittersphere in 2014, the preliminary map shown in fig. 1 will be replaced with a more comprehensive depiction of follower/followee networks; further, incremental revisions will be made in the future as twitter accounts created from 2014 onwards are added to the network. mapping the footprint of social television in the australian twittersphere both in its preliminary form in fig. 1 and in the more comprehensive form which will be created based on new data in 2014, this map of the national twittersphere becomes a key research tool for the further investigation of twitter use in australia, in a variety of contexts. for the purposes of the present paper, we focus on an investigation into the nature and structure of australian social television audiences. here, we explore in particular the following three key areas: the location of audiences for specific social tv programming within the australian twittersphere; the overlap and interconnection (or lack thereof) between specific shows’ audiences; the correlation between participation in social tv audiences and existing follower/followee relationships; and the visibility across the australian twittersphere which audience activities afford these shows. to explore these aspects, we have selected a number of key australian television shows which incorporate notable social tv elements: the weekly political talk show q&a, televised by the public broadcaster, the australian broadcasting corporation; the australian edition of the popular reality tv show big brother, screened by the leading commercial nine network; and the cooking competition show masterchef, shown by the smallest of australia’s three free-to-air networks, channel ten. twitter activity data (across relevant hashtags, accounts, and keywords) for all three shows was gathered during 2013 and the first months of 2014. preliminary analysis of a number of these shows currently indicates a relatively limited overlap between these actively tweeting social media audiences for these shows (fig. 2); a more comprehensive investigation of audience participation patterns across the shows, once their current series have each concluded, may result in somewhat different activity patterns, however. not included in fig. 2 is data for political talk show q&a, which – due to its different topical focus and its screening by the public broadcaster – is likely to attract a vastly different social media audience. in combination, then, the different programmes chosen for analysis by this paper will be able to provide insights into the social tv participation patterns for a wide variety of programming. location of audiences in the australian twittersphere the first step in our analysis of the social media footprints of these shows is to locate them on our underlying map of the australian twittersphere. this provides an indication of where in the overall national twitter network these shows recruit their social tv audiences, and in comparison also shows the extent to which these audiences are homologous or distinct from each other. to illustrate this process, fig. 3 uses data from 2012 to map participants in the #masterchef hashtag (accompanying that year’s season of the show) onto the overall map of the australian twittersphere. closer analysis reveals strong participation especially from users in clusters related to food, wine, and other lifestyle pursuits (to the right of the map), as well as from the radio/tv and surrounding clusters (bottom centre), but also shows widespread participation from across the australian twittersphere, indicating the mainstream popularity of the show well beyond narrowly defined target audiences. other social tv programming is likely to recruit its audiences from substantially different areas within the overall network. correlation between activity and existing networks second, we will explore the correlations between existing follower/followee networks and social tv audiencing activity. although it is impossible to infer causality on the basis of available data (to do so would require interviews or surveys with social television audiences, which we may seek to conduct at a later stage), it is nonetheless likely that participation in social tv activities – such as tweeting into a show’s advertised hashtag – is in part driven by an observation that one’s network connections are doing likewise: observing a show’s hashtag in their twitter feed may lead a user to contribute to the hashtag as well. at the same time, the widespread advertising of relevant hashtags in a show’s previews and promos, as well as during the episodes themselves, may also encourage audience members to begin tweeting of their own accord, without observing any prompts from their existing network connections. in this second stage of the research, we therefore seek to use network analytics explore the extent to which hashtag communities bring together previously unconnected users within the same space, or to which they merely map onto existing follower/followee relationships. in doing so, we distinguish between mere hashtag participation (posting tweets while using the show’s hashtag) and direct hashtagged interaction (posting @replies which also contain the hashtag), and work from the hypothesis that while hashtag participation brings together previously unconnected users in an ad hoc public (cf. bruns & burgess, 2011), direct hashtagged interaction takes place largely between users who are already also connected by follower/followee relationships. fig. 2: overlap in twitter audiences for big brother australia, the bachelor australia, and masterchef australia fig. 3: location of masterchef audience members (using the #masterchef hashtag) in the australian twittersphere visibility of social tv audiences finally, we also seek to measure the overall visibility in the australian twittersphere which their social tv audiences afford these shows. to do so, we consider not only those users who are actively posting relevant tweets, but examine the total size of the twitter audience which could conceivably have seen these tweets in their incoming activity streams, and the total number of relevant tweets which – on the basis of their network connections – each user would have received. taken together, this results in an audience heatmap for each of the shows, overlaid on top of the national twittersphere map, to indicate areas of the network where even those users who did not actively engage in the social media activities related to a show would have received a detailed feed of updates about the programme, and areas of the network where it would have been possible for users to have remained entirely unaware of any news related to the show. such analysis is crucial for measuring both the depth and breadth of audience participation in a social tv initiative, and as a basis for quantifying the return on investment in social tv activities around a programme. conclusion in combination, these three approaches to measuring and visualising the level of social media activities around television programming offer new opportunities for the reliable and comparative quantification of the success and impact of social tv initiatives. the work we will present in this paper provides a first point of entry for further and more detailed research to develop additional analytical methods and metrics which are both scholarly rigorous and of potential commercial value. references bruns, a., and j. burgess. (2012). the use of twitter hashtags in the formation of ad hoc publics. paper presented at the european consortium for political research conference, reykjavík, 25-27 aug. 2011. bruns, a., j. burgess, and t. highfield. (2014). a ‘big data’ approach to mapping the australian twittersphere. in k. bode and p. arthur, eds., repurposing the digital humanities: research, methods, theories. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. sensis. (2013). yellowtm social media report: what australian people and businesses are doing with social media. melbourne: sensis. http://about.sensis.com.au/ignitionsuite/uploads/docs/yellow%20pages%20social%20 media%20repo rt_f.pdf license this article is ©2014 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-sa. live-tweeting scandal: twitter communities and modes of social engagement amongst a television viewing audience dayna chatman university of southern california kevin driscoll university of southern california françois bar university of southern california alex leavitt university of southern california renxia wang university of southern california abstract live-tweeting refers to an open-ended discourse that unfolds through social media services during real-time television programming. live-tweeting offers a opportunity for audience researchers to hear in situ commentary from thousands of viewers at once. these social media conversations may include audiences who are otherwise absent or obscured in traditional media metrics. although activity on twitter is conventionally measured at the level of population, we complement this macro perspective with “participant viewing,” a form of participant observation in which researchers actively engage with an unfolding television event using both semi-automated research tools and twitter's own interfaces. the present research seeks to better understand the phenomenon of black twitter through an observation of live-tweeting activity during the prime-time drama scandal. within this lively discursive space, we suggest several possible sub-categories of users based on distinct live-tweeting practices. “live-tweeting” and television audience measurement despite the visibility of the practice of “live-tweeting” entertainment television events, researchers have yet to extensively explore what live-tweeting can tell us about american television viewing audiences’ communication behaviors, meaning-making practices, expressions of pleasure (or displeasure), and social interactions. while there are a few exceptions (see wood & baughman, 2012), much of the extant literature on live-tweeting focuses specifically on political debates (hawthorne, houston, & mckinney, 2013; houston, et al., 2013; houston, mckinney, et al., 2013). in the post network era (lotz, 2007), live-tweeting is a key component to television networks' marketing and research efforts. with escalating competition amongst broadcast, cable, and online streaming services, television producers both vie for the attention of new audiences and struggle to reliably measure existing audiences. this research takes an extensive look at the social practices and relationships among twitter users actively live-tweeting the scandal season three premiere. the impetus for this study was to expand our knowledge about a subset of twitter users colloquially referred to as “black twitter.” because african-americans are frequent users of twitter (see hargittai & litt, 2011; smith, 2013), and due to the popularity of scandal amongst black viewers, this study provides valuable insight into this specific community of twitter users and their social interactions during television viewing. participant viewing the team assembled a comprehensive set of search criteria, including terms relevant to the scandal storyline; fan terminology; hashtags promoted by network, and a list of users who regularly tweeted during the second season. a script was written to continuously access the “filter” function of twitter's public streaming api. the observation period began on october 3, 2013 at 7:00pm est (4:00pm pst), three hours prior to the east coast premiere of scandal. a team of researchers gathered on the west coast to watch a stream of this broadcast and to monitor the first round of livetweeting. during this “participant viewing” session, researchers identified and anticipated emerging hashtags, terms, and user accounts which were added to the data collection apparatus in near real-time. at the conclusion of the east coast premiere, the data collection process was left running until 3:00am est (12:00am pst), an hour after the conclusion of the west coast premiere. observations about users and tweets the final collection of tweets related to scandal season three premiere included 315,526 messages authored by 113,168 unique users. slightly more than 193,024 (61%) of the messages were “original” tweets, meaning they were not retweets. thirtynine percent of the tweets (122,502) were identified as retweets (which includes rt, mt, and via), and of these, 8,261 were “edited” retweets (retweets with commentary). 179,575 tweets mentioned at least one other @username (including retweets) and, of this group of tweets, 27,436 were direct @-replies (9% of the overall collection.) only five percent (14,605) of the tweets contained links to one or more urls. the majority of the tweets, 88% (276,825) contained at least one hashtag. finally, as it pertains to users, 90% (n=112,466) sent twenty-six or fewer tweets. nine percent (n=711) of users sent between 26 and 108 tweets, while 11 highly prolific user accounts (1%) sent between 108 and 178 tweets during the observation period. toward a live-tweeting typology preliminary analysis of this collection indicates that live-tweeting users may be distinguished both by their practices and by their relationships to other users. figure 1 depicts a distribution of users according to the frequencies of their incoming and outgoing @-mentions (including occasions in which they are retweeted.) user accounts colored in gold are “verified” users while user accounts colored blue are not verified. although the criteria by which twitter, inc. selects users for verification is highly subjective, this categorical distinction is useful for identifying likely celebrity accounts at a quick glance. the red line diagonally bisecting the image indicates perfect parity between incoming and outgoing @-mentions. figure 1: users plotted according to incoming and outgoing @-mentions (including retweets). a small number of users were randomly selected from each of three regions of the chart in figure 1 for closer analysis. user accounts with considerably more incoming than outgoing messages included participants in the production of scandal, such as kerry washington and shonda rhimes; other celebrities such as mariah carey; and the accounts of media organizations such as @scandalabc. while these users were highly-engaged with the live-tweeting activity during the scandal premiere, the were only able to interact with a small number of their fellow users as they were inundated with @-mentions and retweets. the inverse class of users, those with more outgoing than incoming @mentions, encountered twitter very differently. many of these users exhibited parasocial tweeting practices and the tone of their timelines took on the qualities of a personal diary addressed to one or more of the celebrity users. for example, one tweet read, “i need olivia pope to come and perfect lies for me. i'm a terrible liar. @kerrywashington @scandalabc #scandal.” finally, user accounts with nearly symmetrical inand out-bound tweets included big name scandal fans and pop culture critics whose activity tended toward the conversational. in these timelines, we observed multiple overlapping back-and-forth relationships in which the users engaged in playful co-watching commentary. conclusion black twitter represents a particularly challenging site for developing new methods in social media research and audience studies. black twitter is at once highly visible and extremely difficult to reliably identify with the conventional tools of large-scale data metrics. scandal offered a predictable event during which a subset of black twitter users were likely to be visible. the “participant viewing” approach described in this paper represents a combination of microand macro-scale perspectives that enabled collaboration among scholars with different methodological training. this interdisciplinarity, in turn, drove a set of analyses that call attention to the diversity of practices and plurality of voices that made up the population of users live-tweeting scandal. future research will expand the scope of observation beyond scandal to other cultural and political events relevant to black twitter. acknowledgments this work was carried out with the support of the annenberg innovation lab. references hargittai, e., and litt, e. (2011). the tweet smell of celebrity success: explaining variation in twitter adoption amongst a diverse group of young adults. new media & society, 13(5), pp. 824-842. hawthorne, j., houston, j. b., and mckinney, m.s. (2013). live-tweeting a presidential primary debate: exploring new political conversations. social science computer review, 31(5), pp. 552-562. houston, b. j., hawthorne, j., spialek, m. l., greenwood, m., and mckinney, m.s. (2013). tweeting during presidential debates: effect on candidate evaluations and debate attitudes. argument and advocacy, 49(4), pp. 301-311. houston, b. j., mckinney, m.s., hawthorne, j., spialek, m.l. (2013). frequency of tweeting during presidential debates: effect on debate attitudes and knowledge. communication studies, 64(5), pp. 548-560. kondolojy, a. (2013, october 7). ‘scandal’ tops nielsen twitter tv ratings for the week of september 30october 6. retrieved from http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2013/10/07/scandal-tops-nielsen-twittertv-ratingsfor-the-week-of-september-30-october 6/207432/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed%3a+tv bythenumbers+ %28tvbythenumbers%29 lotz, a. (2007). the television will be revolutionized. new york: new york university press. smith, m. a. (2013). african americans and technology use: a demographic portrait. pew research center. retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/01/06/african-americans-andtechnology-use/ smith, m. a., rainie, l., shneiderman, b., and himelboim. (2014). mapping twitter topic networks: from polarized crowds to community clusters. pew research center. retrieved from: http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/02/20/mapping-twitter-topic-networksfrom-polarized-crowds-tocommunity-clusters/ wood, m.m., and baughman, l. (2012). glee fandom and twitter: something new, or more of the same old thing? communication studies, 63(3), pp. 328-344. license this article is ©2014 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. microsoft word kronman.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): kronman, l. (2014, october 22-24). can transmedia storytelling learn from hypertext fiction? introducing three examples of 4th generation digital fiction. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. can transmedia storytelling learn from hypertext fiction? introducing three examples of 4th generation digital fiction linda kronman danube university krems this paper introduces three examples of social media literature, an emerging 4th generation of digital fiction and argues that works that are mostly considered as transmedia storytelling would gain from being viewed from the perspective of hypertext fiction theory. 'the big plot'1 (2009), 're: dakar arts festival'2 (2011) and 'grace, wit & charm'3(2011) are three examples of digital fiction unfolding on social media networks using microcontent; small chunks of content like blog posts, youtube videos and flickr images to assemble their storyworlds. what can we learn about these works if we look at them through the lens of digital fiction focusing on issues of reading it? introduction what happened to hypertext fiction? whoever is asking this question is not alone. when we hear the term hypertext fiction it takes us back to pre-web works like michael joyce's 'afternoon, a story' (1987) or judy malloy's 'uncle roger' (1986). in the post-web era hypertext fiction was created by 'net.art' artists, examples of this are mark amerika's 'htc1.0' (1995) or olia lialina's 'my boyfriend came back from the war' (1996). scholars have discussed hypertext theory mostly based on early pioneering works, therefore when one encounters hypertext fiction today it feels like a genre from the past. in the book 'analyzing digital fiction' the authors introduced the idea of four generations of digital fiction [1]. hypertext fiction recognized as the first generation, followed by hypermedia and cybertext fiction and now with the emergence of web 2.0 they refer to “social media literature” as the 4th generation.visual, audible and ludic elements are increasingly added into our hypertextual reading experiences, and according to landow’s definition of hypertext “which links one passage of verbal discourse to images, maps, diagrams and sounds as easily to another verbal passage” [2], the concepts of hypertext and hypermedia merge. with this background it is arguable that fiction unfolding on social media networks can be seen as hypertext fiction of web 2.0. nevertheless we do not call it hypertext fiction, it is rather defined as transmedia storytelling. why then insist on looking at works as 'the big plot' , 'grace, wit & charm', 're: dakar arts festival' and others alike in a canon of hypertext fiction? because hypertext theory has been extensively discussed both by “first” and “second wave” theorists [1] and can therefore bring an additional perspective to analyze transmedia works. this does not mean that frameworks presented in transmedia storytelling would not offer valuable understanding of these works. three examples of 4th generation digital fiction 'the big plot'1 created by paolo cirio is a “romantic spy-story played into the infosphere”. the story is told through four characters; mark savin a russian pilot, brian steiger a trained psychologist, vanessa pinney a canadian journalist and paul hampel a spy and a businessman. the story spreads out via various social media networks like facebook, twitter and myspace as well as on microcontent sites like wordpress, livejournal, flickr and youtube. 're: dakar arts festival'2 was created by kairus. it emerged from a correspondence with internet scammers who were posing to arrange an art festival in dakar. three fictional characters: artist heidi, gallerist peter and his assistant toni were created to investigate how the scam works. as in 'the big plot' the story is spread on multiple social media networks and on microcontent sites. besides the characters created by the authors the scammers also introduced several personas into the story. 'grace, wit & charm'3 is a comedy by rob wittig, performed as two live shows as well as online on the company website of the fictional grace, wit & charm call center that offers solutions to “turbo-boost” their clients avatars. trough twitter streams of the five main characters sonny, laura, deb, neil and bob the reader could follow the story both prior and during the live shows. reading social media literature social media literature uses our daily reading practices to deliver us stories. similar tactics has been used e.g. by bram stoker's in his novel 'dracula' (1897) or by john mcdaid in 'uncle buddy’s phantom funhouse' (1986), one of the first mixed media novels. on the other hand to understand social media literature we need to recognize as rob wittig referring to 'grace, wit & charm' that it “can be read as a live performance as it is published; it can also be read later as a fixed archive” [3]. depending if social media literature is read in its “performance stage” or in its “archive stage” the reading experience differs. hans kristian rustad suggests four approaches to understand how digital fiction can be read [4]. of these four the “reading as selfreflection” and “the semantic orientation of reading” can be applied to our three examples of social media literature, the prior relating to the “performance stage” and the later to the “archive stage”. according to rustad “(t)he self-reflexive mode of reading is prefigured when the reader gets involved in a fictive character and begins to socialise with this character“ [4]. early 1 thebigplot.net 2 www.dakarartsfestival.net 3 robwit.net on 'net.art' was experimenting with the potential of virtual personas. a fictional 'net.art' artist called 'mouchette' is just one example of early fictional online characters. in 'mouchettes' work 'flesh&blood' (1998) readers can contact her through an e-mail form. the possibility for readers to communicate with fictional characters is as well an essential part of social media literature. a number of readers of 'the big plot' created own side characters linking them to the plot. when the readers are aware that they communicate with fictional characters they involved themselves in a kind of role-play. in this case according to rustad the pleasure of reading is “related to a self-enjoyment in the enjoyment of being someone else or being somewhere else” [4]. in the case of 're: dakar arts festival' readers involved in the “performance stage” were actually scammers. the story was published later and was therefore only actively promoted in its “archive stage”. in the “archive stage” the reader assume, as rustad calls it “the semantic orientation of reading”, thriving for meaning-making. it is a goal oriented reading strategy where the aim is to understand the text. what comes to closure, rustad suggest that this “quest for comprehension” ends when meaning has been found. to conclude, in the “performance stage” social media fiction can be read in“selfreflective mode” and in the “archive stage” when the characters are no longer responsive the work is read in a “semantic orientation of reading”. as the title of this paper questions: can transmedia storytelling learn from hypertext fiction? i argue that hypertext fiction theory offers us an understanding of how we read social media fiction. by understanding how readers experience this type of fiction we are able to develop strategies to create new stories wether they are defined as transmedia stories or referring to the canon of digital fiction. references [1] bell et. al (2014) analyzing digital fiction. routledge: new york. [2] landow g.p (2006) hypertext 3.0 critical theory and new media in an era of globalization. the johns hopkins university press: baltimore, maryland. [3] marino m.c ,wittig r (2012) netprov: elements of an emerging form. dichtung digital issue 41. [4] rustad h.k (2009) a four-sided model for reading hypertext fiction. hyperrhiz.06. microsoft word ir16-template-final.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 civic media: towards an understanding of its relevance eric gordon emerson college paul mihailidis emerson college in 2007, henry jenkins wrote on the occasion of the founding of the center for future civic media at mit, that civic media refers to “any use of any medium which fosters or enhances civic engagement.” his intentionally broad definition was meant to expand the term from traditional conceptions of civics such as political news, town halls and voting booths to online advocacy, fan culture and public performance. he argued that civic engagement is more than just actions taken; it is inclusive of and formed by the rituals associated with those actions. so, to understand civic media, jenkins argues, we need to understand the “mechanisms associated with that ‘structure of feeling’ of belonging to a community and working together to insure its long term viability” (2007). the experience of working together with other people for common purpose is at the core of what it means to be civic, according to jenkins, and the tools, mechanisms and discourses in which that takes place, is civic media. while jenkins does not specifically use the term, he is articulating a specific “community of practice,” which lave and wenger (1991) define as “an intrinsic condition for the existence of knowledge” and one “that implies participation in an activity system about which participants share understanding concerning what they are doing and what that means in their lives and for their communities (p. 122).” the concept of communities of practice has been used to describe all variations of online (rheingold, 1993) or offline groupings (brody, 2012), whether or not the outcome of the group’s shared understanding is explicitly “civic,” which can be defined as an external goal that has benefit beyond one’s personal or intimate sphere. if the definition of community is a loosely organized group of people that share understanding, or as benedict anderson argues, can imagine the whole of which they are a part (anderson, 1983), then the civic framework is not descriptive of a community, but rather of the potential outcomes of acting within it. those civic outcomes can be either internal to the community of practice or external to it—i.e. a group of farm workers in california starting a facebook group to protest their own working conditions or a middle class high school student in germany using the #bringbackourgirls hashtag on twitter to draw attention to the activities of the terrorist group boko haram in nigeria. what binds these two practices together is suggested citation (apa): gordon, e., & mihailidis, p.. (2015, october 21-24). civic media: towards an understanding of its relevance. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. not the specificity of outcomes—social justice, democracy, human rights—but the social practices taken to achieve them. civic outcomes do not represent their realization, but a deliberate movement towards their potential (1993). a civic community of practice, then, is a group of people who imagine themselves as being connected, not through achieving, but through striving for a civic outcome. and civic media are the tools and representational technologies that facilitate those communities of practice. in this sense, civic media is not a genre, but a framework for communities of practice that employ media for civic outcomes. still, it is worth asking why this designation is important and how it might be different than other communities of practice that form around media that is instrumentalized for social impact. is it any different than political media, neighborhood media, educational media, etc.? to answer this question, it is important to understand the context in which the term took shape. the center for future civic media was founded at a time when many scholars and pundits were reflecting on the negative impact of the media on civic engagement. in robert putnam’s influential book bowling alone, he notes the decline in voter turnout and public meeting attendance in the united states (putnam, 1995). notably, he makes specific reference to television, arguing that the medium perpetuated civic decline through the facilitation of public gathering without physical co-presence; television enabled a bypassing of civic infrastructure including town halls, front porches, and bowling leagues. this argument was consistent with media scholars such as joshua meyrowitz who, a decade earlier, wrote of television’s role in decentralizing place in social and civic life (meyrowitz, 1985). the general premise was that television became a kind of civic prosthesis, displacing the need for the physical co-presence most recognizable as civic engagement. in many ways, social media added to this anxiety—while its connective capacity was evident, the ease in which people could connect across space and time further challenged appearances of civic life. people no longer needed to gather in the town square, if they could coordinate on facebook. they no longer needed to march on main street if they could retweet something and advocate online. this tension between civic and media was common sense, one that was given a shot of reinforcement by malcolm gladwell’s 2010 new yorker article, where he criticizes the role of social media in political activism and claims, because of the placelessness of digital social networks, that “we seem to have forgotten what activism is” (2012). the sociologist barry wellman provides an important counterpoint to this criticism. as a scholar of social networks prior to the rise of social media, wellman asked how new technology was changing the way that people associated with each other. he introduced the concept of the networked individual, which suggests that people are less likely to limit their group associations because of physical proximity; online they could seamlessly and flexibly move between groups (b. wellman et al., 2003; barry wellman, 2002). the concept of the networked individual influenced a large amount of scholarship in areas such as mobile media (gordon & de souza e silva, 2011), activism (zhang, johnson, seltzer, & bichard, 2010), social media (marwick & boyd, 2011) and civic engagement (gil de zuñiga, jung, & valenzuela, 2012), all areas that sought to explore the role of proximity and formal institutions in the formation of social networks. the placelessness lamented by meyrowitz, putnam, and gladwell was a quality of everyday life in wellman’s formulation. media was not in conflict with civic life, but was constitutive of its structure. the term “civic media” emerged within a polarized context in which can be seen the traces of two contradictory assumptions: 1) all media are civic (media define the structures of social interaction) and 2) all media are the antithesis of civic (media detract from the communities and the public institutions that comprise democracy). the founding of a “center for future civic media” (the “future” has since been dropped), was formulated around these assumptions, in that it captured the inevitability of a civic framework of the media, while simultaneously positioning technology as a possible future intervention to solve civic ills. in 2007, prior to the twitter revolution or the arab spring and other pro-democracy movements triggered or facilitated by social media, there was little context for imagining these possibilities outside of government services and political campaigns. the term civic media carved out a possibility space, a way of imagining a future of technology that was pro-social and for public benefit. but why does the designation of a civic media matter in 2016? certainly, the novelty of the civic application of media and the political tensions in which that novelty existed is the justification for naming the phenomenon in 2007. but we would not claim that that novelty persists today. in fact, we believe that the term civic media has very different connotations, but remains important. unlike in 2007, there is widespread recognition that online spaces hold considerable potential for civic life (ny times citation), and in fact they are central to institutional and political transformations (a smith, 2010; aaron smith, 2009). the possibility space of civic media has become normalized in certain sectors, as the discourse surrounding civic or government technology demonstrates, and reduced to a set of assumptions about the composition of tools. that government offices are routinely developing civic technology departments demonstrates a mainstreaming of the civic potential of digital technologies (open plans, 2012). no longer struggling for attention, civic media is now struggling for differentiation; the danger is in the term ossifying to mean very specific things, in its reduction to the instrumental functionality of tools—i.e. digital tools can increase efficiency or scale. the work of civic media now is to combat its success, to identify a space of criticality as well as instrumentality, which reconstructs a possibility space beyond the normalizing value of the term. this book emerges nearly ten years after the term civic media was coined, but at a time when its appropriation and function appear more significant than ever. from the widespread use of social media to aid in campaigns and democratic movements throughout the world, to debates over the public’s right to data or the individual’s right to protect their data from public use, to government’s design and deployment of digital tools, the umbrella of civic media has widened. as a result, there is increased urgency in establishing a field of study and practice that can accommodate some organizing questions: how do mediated communities form and maintain themselves? how do people actually interact with tools or systems, hi-tech or lo-tech, meant to facilitate community connection or public benefit? what are the impacts of these mediated practices on sense of community and citizenship? and what are the connective practices, competencies, and critical discourses that define emerging practices with civic media? these questions strategically counteract the functionalist paradigm of applied civic technologies emerging across domains, wherein technological solutions dominate discourse. this book is meant to provide an example-rich, conceptual framework from which to question the assumptions of technological determinism and solutionism (morozov, 2013) and to bring together scholarly discourses across disciplines to develop that space of critical thinking and making that happens at the intersection of civic and media. agamben, g. (1993). the coming community. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. anderson, b. r. o. (1983). imagined communities  : reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (p. 160 p.). london: verso. brody, s. (2012). how the sausage is made: the inside story on community organizing. analyses of social issues and public policy, 12(1), 412–416. doi:10.1111/j.1530-2415.2011.01260.x gil de zuñiga, h., jung, n., & valenzuela, s. (2012). social media use for news and individuals’ social capital, civic engagement and political participation. journal of computer-mediated communication, 17(3), 319–336. retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2012.01574.x/full gladwell, m. (2012, october). small change: why the revolution will not be tweeted. the new yorker. gordon, e., & de souza e silva, a. (2011). net locality: why location matters in a networked world. (m. consalvo & c. ess, eds.)the handbook of internet studies (vol. 0, p. 200). wiley-blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781444340679 lave, j., & wenger, e. (1991). situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation (p. 138). cambridge university press. retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=caviorw3vyac&pgis=1 marwick, a. e., & boyd, d. (2011). i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. new media & society. meyrowitz, j. (1985). no sense of place  : the impact of electronic media on social behavior (p. xv). new york: oxford university press. morozov, e. (2013). to save everything, click here: the folly of technological solutionism (p. 432). publicaffairs. retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/saveeverything-click-here-technological/dp/1610391381 open plans. (2012). field scan of civic technology. new york. retrieved from file:///users/egordon/downloads/field scan of civic technology.pdf putnam, r. (1995). bowling alone. journal of democracy, 6(1). retrieved from http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/detoc/assoc/bowling.html rheingold, h. (1993). the virtual community: homesteading on the electronic frontier. smith, a. (2009). the internet’s role in campaign 2008. pew internet & american life project. pew research center. smith, a. (2010). neighbors online. pew internet & american life project. retrieved from http://pewinternet.org/~/media/files/reports/2010/pip-neighbors-online.pdf wellman, b. (2002). little boxes, glocalization and networked individualism. in m. tanabe, p. van den besselaar, & t. ishida (eds.), digital cities ii: computational and sociological approaches: second kyoto workshop on digital cities, kyoto, japan, october 18-20, 2001. london: springer. wellman, b., quan haase, a., boase, j., chen, w., hampton, k., de diaz, i., & miyata, k. (2003). the social affordances of the internet for networked individualism. journal of computer mediated communication, 8(3). zhang, w., johnson, t. j., seltzer, t., & bichard, s. l. (2010). the revolution will be networked  : the influence of social networking sites on political attitudes and behavior. social science computer review, 28(1), 75–92. retrieved from http://blaz.lasi.cc/therevolutionwillbenetworked.pdf microsoft word 784-533-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 foursquare and the parochialization of public space lee humphreys cornell university usa lmh13@cornell.edu tony liao cornell university usa cl566@cornell.edu abstract the mobile social network foursquare has gained popularity in the last few years among both users and businesses. this article explores how the use of foursquare changes and impacts people’s sense of place. drawing on the work of lofland (1998) on the social production of space, we argue that as new socio-spatial information (i.e. who checks in where) is introduced via the mobile social network, it can change the way people experience a place. based on qualitative in-depth interviews with active foursquare users, we explore person-toperson and person-to-place connections and argue that foursquare promotes parochialization of public space. keywords mobile social networks; public space; parochial realm; foursquare; social interaction background there is a growing body of literature around mobile social networks and locative media. this research aims to explore social interactions occurring through these systems (cramer, rost & holmquist, 2011, de souza e silva, 2006; de souza e silva & frith, 2010, 2012; frith, 2012; wilken & goggin, 2012), the impact of mobile social systems on the urban environment (bilandzic, foth, & deluca, 2008; foth, forlano, satchell, & gibbs, 2011; gordon & de souza e silva, 2011; satchell, 2009; sheller & urry, 2006; wilken, 2008), and the overall changing mobile media landscape (farman, 2012; goggin, 2011; goggin & hjorth, 2009; ling, 2008; sheller, 2012). one of the goals of this area of research is to critically explore and understand the roles and impacts that mobile media have on individuals’ everyday experience of place (wilken, 2008). the current study seeks to contribute to this body of scholarship. literature review previous mobile social network research has suggested that these services can lead to the parochialization of public space (humphreys, 2010). parochialization is the process by which people share socio-locational information with one another through communication technologies such as check-ins on mobile social networks, such that the public realm, where people had previously encountered strangers, starts to feel more familiar due to the social exchanges through the network. places that would have felt public could be experienced as parochial because mobile social network users were socially connected to others in the space (humphreys, 2010). for example, mobile social network users could coordinate congregation by broadcasting their location, so they would have familiar social relations in the public realm and thus experience it as parochial. the original observation was based on how friends and friends-of-friends used mobile social networks to coordinate meeting up in public places (humphreys, 2010). it is unclear how the sharing of social and locational information amongst strangers on a mobile social network could encourage the same process. more specifically in the case of foursquare, it is unclear how the promotion of other users (e.g. foursquare listing who has recently checked in to a location, who wrote a tip about the place, and who the current mayor is), the competitiveness of mayorships, and the ‘nearby check-ins’ influence one’s sense of commonality among others in a particular location. therefore, this study aims to explore the following research questions: selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 1) how does the use of foursquare influence one’s sense of commonality amongst others in a particular location? 2) how do the competitive features on foursquare impact how users come to think about and experience urban areas when using this application? methodology we used on a naturalistic, interpretive framework for data collection and analysis (lofland, snow, anderson, & lofland, 2006) and focused our recruitment efforts on communities or forums online and off where foursquare users gathered to discuss the service. we conducted 18 semi-structured in-depth interviews during the summer of 2012. our participants included 6 women and 12 men, ranging in age from 20 to 60, with the average age around 30. our sample was geographically diverse with participants across 10 different states in the us and from cities of various size including new york, los angeles, boston, houston, and atlanta. the participants in this study ranged in mayorships from one to 89, with a mean of 24. the interviews lasted between 25 to 60 minutes and were conducted by either skype or phone. we audio recorded and transcribed the interviews. participants are referred to by pseudonym throughout the article. findings overall we found evidence that foursquare use could contribute to the parochialization of the public realm by facilitating person-to-person and person-to-place connections. lofland (1998) argues that even though the urban public realm is primarily made up of strangers that does not mean they do not interact. indeed our study suggests that users on foursquare can interact and can experience increased person-to-person connections with strangers using the mobile social network as well as person-toplace connections, which can both lead to the parochialization of the public realm. person-to-person parochialization browsing profiles, spotting users a majority of participants reported looking at strangers’ profiles, mostly when they were made aware of other users around them. some participants had seen a person check in at a location or had been alerted that they lost a mayorship to someone and wanted to find out more about them, and some did it out of sheer curiosity. the sharing and reading of foursquare profiles suggests a transitory sociality or relatively brief social interaction among users which can contribute to the experience of a parochial realm. reading others’ profiles and tips about a location moves beyond categorical knowledge of strangers, which characterize the public realm. mayorship battles, creating personas mayorship battles are a common form of social interaction on foursquare among our participants, where people competed to check-in earlier in the day and more frequently at a particular location to maintain or earn the foursquare title of mayor. often mayorship battles often occurred among people who were already friends, but many participants also reported not knowing the person against whom they were competing. in addition to seeking out information about a person who had just ousted them as mayor, users reported strong emotions about these strangers, ranging from curiosity to annoyance to ambivalence. in many instances, the participants engaged in these battles mentioned investigating profiles, the creation of personas for their competitors, and occasionally attempts to see or meet these strangers. person-to-place parochializationmayorships as personal claims to space lofland (1998) explains that defending territory is one of the principles of stranger interaction, one which signals to others displeasure or hostility over spatial invasion. when someone threatens a foursquare mayorship, one of the principles that prompts a defense of that territory is whether the selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 competing mayor is perceived as having a legitimate claim on the place. a kind of territoriality is made visible through the foursquare interface and the mapping of check-ins. foursquare also notifies people and makes explicit when and where others are challenging territories, which can invoke territoriality and defense of these places as “home territories”. conclusion it is important not to romanticize the interactions that are facilitated through mobile social networks. lofland (1998) notes that the parochial realm does not always engender positive feelings or connections. we found that some participants in our study did not have overwhelmingly positive things to say about those with whom they had competed for foursquare mayorships. in these cases the increased interactions among strangers led to a negative emotional response rather than positive. this isn’t to say that all foursquare interactions with strangers are negative, indeed we found substantial evidence for positive and neutral responses to other users. just like various kinds of interactions are found in the offline urban public realm, so too do we see a myriad of responses to strangers on and around foursquare. in conclusion, this study suggests that unlike those of early mobile social networks (humphreys, 2010) foursquare users may be more likely to be aware and interact with other users. these interactions vary in degree, valence, and intimacy, but can be broadly characterized as ‘transitory sociality’ (lofland, 1998). participants used the network to build and reinforce not just person-to-place connections but person-to-person connections as well. references references are apa style and times new roman 10, aligned left, single line, 0pt before, 6pt after, hanging 0.5 inches). bilandzic, m., foth, m., & deluca, a. (2008). cityflocks: designing social navigation for urban mobile information systems. paper presented at the dis, cape town, south africa. cramer, h., rost, m., & holmquist, l. e. (2011). performing a check-in: emerging practices, norms and 'conflicts' in location-sharing using foursquare. paper presented at the proceedings of the 13th international conference on human computer interaction with mobile devices and services. de souza e silva, a. (2006). from cyber to hybrid: mobile technologies as interfaces of hybrid spaces. space and culture, 9(3), 261-278. de souza e silva, a., & frith, j. (2010a). locational privacy in public spaces: media discourses on locationaware mobile technologies. communication, culture & critique, 3(4), 503-525. de souza e silva, a., & frith, j. (2010b). locative mobile social networks: mapping communication and location in urban spaces. mobilities, 5(4), 485-505. de souza e silva, a., & frith, j. (2012). mobile interfaces in public spaces: locational privacy, control, and urban sociability. new york: routledge. farman, j. (2012). mobile interface theory: embodied space and locative media. new york: routledge. foth, m., forlano, l., satchell, c., & gibbs, m. (eds.). (2011). from social butterfly to engaged citizen: urban informatics, social media, ubiquitous computing, and mobile technology to support citizen engagement. cambridge, ma: mit press. frith, j. (2012). location-based social networks and mobility patterns: an empirical examination of how foursquare use affects where people go. paper presented at the mobilities conference: local & mobile. goggin, g. (2011). global mobile media. london: routledge. goggin, g., & hjorth, l. (eds.). (2009). mobile technologies: from telecommunications to media. london: routledge. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 gordon, e., & de souza e silva, a. (2011). net locality: why location matters in a networked world. malden, ma: wiley blackwell. humphreys, l. (2010). mobile social networks and urban public space. new media & society, 12(5), 763778. ling, r. (2008). new tech, new ties: how mobile communication is reshaping social cohesion cambridge, ma: mit press. lofland, j., snow, d., anderson, l., & lofland, l. h. (2006). analyzing social settings: a guide to qualitative observation and analysis (4th ed.). belmont, ca: wadsworth publishing. lofland, l. h. (1998). the public realm: exploring the city's quintessential social territory. new york: aldine de gruyter. satchell, c. (2009). from social butterfly to urban citizen: the evolution of mobile phone practice. in m. foth (ed.), handbook of research on urban informatics: the practice and promise of the real-time city. (pp. 353-365). hershey, pa: information science reference, igi global. sheller, m. (2012). mobile mediality: location, dislocation, augmentation. in s. kesselring, g. vogl & s. witzgall (eds.), tracing the new mobilities regimes. aldershot: ashgate. sheller, m., & urry, j. (eds.). (2006). mobile technologies in the city. london: routledge. wilken, r. (2008). mobilizing place: mobile media, peripatetics, and the renegotiation of urban places journal of urban technology, 15(3), 39 55. wilken, r., & goggin, g. (eds.). (2012). mobile technology and place. london: routledge license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. (authors may use any license they prefer, or none at all.) microsoft word driscoll.modem_history.2015-08-01.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 singing data over the phone: a social history of the modem kevin driscoll microsoft research introduction the modem is a singularly powerful symbol of late-20th century personal computer networking. operating at the junction of computing and communication, the modem was a device that both defined and defied boundaries during the early history of the net. amid the rapid deregulation of u.s. telecommunications during the 1970s, modems enabled thousands of far-flung microcomputer enthusiasts to exchange data and ideas over standard telephone wires. as pc ownership grew more commonplace during the 1980s, the modem became a mark of distinction, differentiating the everyday home computer owner from the small but growing telecomputing vanguard. despite the technical and cultural significance of the personal computer modem, the device received scant attention in the scholarly literature of the 1980s and 1990s. early theoretical work in internet studies seldom mentioned the modem except to illustrate the basic apparatus required for participation.1 and yet, among all other devices, it was the modem that drew internet communication out of the office and the research lab and into the intimate domestic space of the home. with the benefit of historical distance, this paper takes up the modem as its central object of study, listening in on the social, technical, and political resonances that can be heard amid the hiss and buzz of the modem’s song. the present historiography draws on an unusual collection of literature and electronics culled from the informal archives of retro-computing homepages, swap meets and ebay auctions. as the modem migrated from telecommunications arcana to consumer product, it was discussed in a variety of technical journals, hobbyist magazines, how-to books and electronic faqs. likewise, the industrial organization, design, and marketing 1 for example, the word “modem” is absent from in the indices of both cyberspace/cyberbodies/cyberpunk (1995) and cultures of internet (1996), two anthologies of early theoretical work on the cultures of computer networks. mike featherstone, cyberspace/cyberbodies/cyberpunk: cultures of technological embodiment (london: sage, 1995); rob shields, cultures of internet: virtual spaces, real histories, living bodies (london; thousand oaks, calif.: sage publications, 1996). suggested citation (apa): driscoll, k. (2015, october 21-24). singing data over the phone: a social history of the modem. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. of modems changed with the mass diffusion of networked personal computing during the 1980s and 1990s. surviving devices from this period, along with the floppy disks, cassettes, manuals, and other ephemera with which they were originally sold, provide an additional set of primary sources for this project. a modem is an instrument of mediation placed in-between two otherwise dissimilar systems. this paper is similarly organized around three interrelationships transformed by the modem: sound and data, experimentation and standardization, and time and space. sound and data unlike iconic consumer electronics such as the sony walkman or the apple macintosh, our collective memory of the modem is principally aural rather than visual.2 these sound-making devices facilitated computer-mediated communication by assigning pitches to streams of data, an unexpectedly musical approach to the encoding and transmission of digital information. indeed, the sound of two modems synchronizing at the start of a call, better known as the “handshake,” remains one of the few enduring sonic symbols in internet history, a source of nostalgia and lingering mystery.3 by transforming the discrete signals of a digital circuit into continuous waves of sound, the modem set loose the user’s data from within the machine. as sound, data could be transmitted over a telephone line, broadcast on radio or tv, recorded to tape, inscribed on a vinyl record, or played out into the air. alongside paper tape and punched cards, these new media promised faster and more reliable transmission and storage of digital information. for early pc owners frustrated at the proliferation of incompatible systems, the modem promised a solution; a gateway for the free exchange of data. of course, to realize their promise, modems needed to learn to sing the same songs. experimentation and standardization as with all new communication technologies, the development of the pc modem was characterized by a tension between experimentation and standardization.4 early pc modems were designed primarily to enable the use of home tape recorders as an alternative to paper tape readers. these tape-interface modems, distributed in the form of do-it-yourself kits, were largely incompatible with one another despite the best efforts of leading figures in the hobbyist community to promote a common standard.5 as 2 we do not currently possess a sonic equivalent to the word “icon.” neither the greek word for sound, íchos, nor the latin, sonus, evoke the same combination of memory and familiarity as icon. 3 alexis c. madrigal, “the mechanics and meaning of that ol’ dial-up modem sound,” the atlantic, june 1, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/the-mechanics-and-meaning-of-that-oldial-up-modem-sound/257816/; oona räisänen, “the sound of the dialup, pictured,” absorptions, november 17, 2012, http://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-pictured.html. 4 martha lampland and susan leigh star, eds., standards and their stories: how quantifying, classifying, and formalizing practices shape everyday life (ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 2008). 5 in 1976, the editor of byte magazine convened a meeting of eighteen engineers from different microcomputer firms to work on a common approach to tape backup. the resulting standard, known colloquially as the “kansas city standard” after the location of the meeting, was briefly adopted by a hobbyists began to use modems like lee felsenstein’s “pennywhistle” to connect their microcomputers to the telephone network, however, they turned to the standards published a decade prior by at&t bell labs. the bell standards were field-tested and favored reliability over speed. one (possibly apocryphal) saying among bell engineers was that modems implementing the 300 bitsper-second bell 103 standard would work over barbed wire. for interactive computing and teletype applications, this speed was acceptable but for users exchanging increasingly large programs, it quickly grew tiresome. as the at&t network was gradually opened through a series of fcc decisions and congressional actions, a new market for consumer telecommunications was created. in response, entrepreneurial modem makers began to compete with one another with proprietary protocols and faster speeds.6 fragmentation among modem standards reflected a fragmentation in the pc industry at large. whereas the emergence of the “ibm clone” in the mid-1980s lead to a set of de facto standards in personal computer design, innovations in the design of modem protocols were negotiated first in the marketplace and second in the bureaucracy of the international telecommunications union (itu). as a result, the baseline standard for modem-to-modem telecommunication continued to rise from 300 bps to 2400 bps and up. although these speeds seem universally slow in comparison to the broadband connections available today, for users of the period, the purchase of a new modem yielded a profound and immediate change in the experience of telecomputing. time and space the modem represented a meeting point between the novel and legacy systems of personal computing and telephony. while the pc provided each user-programmer with a self-contained “mirror world” all to themselves, interconnection with the telephone network created a leaky border through which the lone denizens of many mirror worlds might meet.7 this process of interconnection and computer-mediated communication provoked a pair of new spatial and temporal imaginaries: virtual and translocal. the best known imaginary is that of the virtual. consistent with cyberpunk science fiction, the virtual imaginary positions the modem as a gateway to an immaterial noplace, “cyberspace.” in a non-fiction book about the federal crackdown on young modem users, science fiction writer bruce sterling referred to cyberspace in terms of telephony: “the ‘place’ where a telephone conversation appears to occur.”8 the modem’s song, therefore, opened a portal through which personal computer users might leave their desks and venture out to this placeless place. handful of firms before being abandoned in the early 1980s. virginia peschke, “byte’s audio cassette standards symposium,” byte, february 1976. 6 use of the carterfone device in message toll telephone service, 13 f.c.c. 2d 420 (1968). 7 david gelernter, mirror worlds, or, the day software puts the universe in a shoebox...how it will happen and what it will mean (new york: oxford university press, 1991). 8 bruce sterling, “hacker crackdown: law and disorder on the electronic frontier,” june 19, 2008, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/101/101-h/101-h.htm. a less-storied, though equally widespread imaginary concerned a persistent awareness of geography. in contrast to the virtual, this translocal imaginary was animated first by the quotidian constraint of long-distance calling fees. before bringing their modems to life, users were obligated to consider the per-minute cost of dialing a particular number at a particular time of day. for many, a fascination with space carried over to their online activities in the form of weather bulletins, local news feeds, webcams pointed out of windows, and requests for “a/s/l?”. rather than open a doorway onto a new virtual space, the modem facilitated connection among thousands of otherwise remote places. conclusion for the population of computer users who accessed the net in the pre-broadband era, the modem was a gateway—metaphorical as well as material—between the worlds of personal computing and telecommunications. the intense symbolic weight of the pc modem was evident in the idiomatic expressions of the day. users referred to themselves as “modemers,” their activities as “modeming,” and the imagined spaces they inhabited as “the modem world.” a close study of the modem renders the early internet with a new fidelity—drawing out particular harmonies and dissonances among the institutions, technologies, policies, and people that produced the foundation of today’s social computing environment. by re-calling the modem world, this paper encourages us to think about internet history along the borders between old and new, near and far, fast and slow. references featherstone, mike. cyberspace/cyberbodies/cyberpunk: cultures of technological embodiment. london: sage, 1995. gelernter, david. mirror worlds, or, the day software puts the universe in a shoebox...how it will happen and what it will mean. new york: oxford university press, 1991. lampland, martha, and susan leigh star, eds. standards and their stories: how quantifying, classifying, and formalizing practices shape everyday life. ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 2008. madrigal, alexis c. “the mechanics and meaning of that ol’ dial-up modem sound.” the atlantic, june 1, 2012. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/the-mechanics-andmeaning-of-that-ol-dial-up-modem-sound/257816/. peschke, virginia. “byte’s audio cassette standards symposium.” byte, february 1976. räisänen, oona. “the sound of the dialup, pictured.” absorptions, november 17, 2012. http://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-pictured.html. shields, rob. cultures of internet: virtual spaces, real histories, living bodies. london; thousand oaks, calif.: sage publications, 1996. sterling, bruce. “hacker crackdown: law and disorder on the electronic frontier,” june 19, 2008. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/101/101-h/101-h.htm. use of the carterfone device in message toll telephone service, 13 f.c.c. 2d 420 (1968). gayzzoli for aoir 2015 final selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 looking for (lesbian) love: social media subtext readings of rizzoli and isles libby hemphill illinois institute of technology introduction using fiske’s (1989) semiotic supermarket metaphor, i examine how twitter users mix and match moments from rizzoli and isles to create a coherent lesbian subtext. to do so, i use tweets containing the portmanteau hashtag #rizzles or the related tag #gayzzoli posted during two different episodes of the show. live tweeting affords us an opportunity to eavesdrop on viewers’ listening activities and provides data useful for testing theories about reading/viewing and participation. here, i demonstrate the utility of analyzing live tweeting and provide examples of how live tweeters publicly read resistant subtexts. fiske (1987) argues that readers are able to assemble their own texts from television works by “’[listening’] more or less attentively to different voices” within the work (95). though he didn’t introduce the term semiotic supermarket until later (fiske, 1989), fiske does provide a semiotic framing that is useful for analyzing social media readings of television texts. for instance, he argues that viewers exploit contradictions within the texts to locate their own social identities within the text (fiske, 1986). i argue that we should understand the lesbian subtext reading of rizzoli and isles as precisely this kind of polysemic reading. i show how #rizzles readers locate their own social identities within the text of the show and then use social media to share those locations with others publicly. background on the show rizzoli and isles is a police procedural based on mystery novels written by tess gerritsen and produced by tnt. the title characters are detective jane rizzoli, played by angie harmon, and medical examiner dr. maura isles, played by sasha alexander. the characters in both are written as straight, heterosexual women who are also close friends. the creators1 and actors2 of the novels and shows have acknowledged the 1 http://www.tessgerritsen.com/fanfic-and-rizzles/ 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuu27ig9wgw suggested citation (apa): hemphill, l. (2015, october 21-24) looking for (lesbian) love: social media subtext readings of rizzoli and isles. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. lesbian subtext readings. my analysis uses the first episode from the fourth season (“we are family”, originally aired june 25, 2013), so please be aware that the remainder of the paper contains spoilers. collecting tweets i used twittergoggles (maconi, 2013) to collect tweets containing either of the hashtags #rizzles or #gayzzoli. i’ve limited my analysis here to tweets posted on the date of the original u.s. broadcast of each of the episodes. summary of data collected data for this paper includes all tweets containing either #gayzzoli or #rizzles posted between 9:00 pm eastern on june 25, 2013 and 1:00 am eastern on june 26, 2013. this time period covers the original east coast airing and the later west coast airing. the episode was the season premier of the fourth season. 1624 tweets were posted by 398 accounts during that time. accounts posted a range of 1-84 tweets and a median of 1 tweet. of those tweets, 499 were retweets and 1125 were original tweets. 212 tweets contained mentions. figure 1 shows the frequency of tweets per minute during the episode (i.e., the left axis represents the beginning of the episode and the right axis represents the end). this plot is approximate because it’s impossible to tell when exactly viewers started watching the show given that some viewers are using dvrs. the general trend is clear, though, more #gayzzoli and #rizzles tweets appear early in the episode and shortly after the mid-hour break. figure 1. tweets posted per minute. each bar indicates one minute past the hour, and the hours themselves are discarded. the chart represents the relative frequency of tweets throughout the hour that the episode aired. 0   10   20   30   40   50   60   live tweeting and the semiotic supermarket #rizzles and #gayzzoli viewers mark common lesbian and romantic tropes almost immediately. when we first see the characters together, they are jogging shortly after maura’s been cleared for physical activity after donating a kidney. jane is trying to encourage maura to keep jogging when she doesn’t feel well. dialogue individual frames rizzoli: you’ll feel much better when you get back in shape. ok? c’mon. isles: are you saying i’m fat and out of shape? rizzoli: no, i am saying that you have got to stop hoping that they are going to send you some “thank you for your kidney” fruit basket. figure 2. jane encourages maura to keep going. figure 3. jane reacts to maura's question. table 1. transcript and images of clip 1 from "we are family" viewers responded with tweet such as “are you saying i'm fat and out of shape? oh look. first lover's quarrel of season 4. #rizzoliandisles #gayzzoli” (mirettesvertes, 2013) “where (sic) 90 seconds in and they're already like an old married couple! #rizzles” (nate, 2013) “nobody does bickering married couple like rizzoli & isles. #gayzzoli” (marie, 2013) we can already see from this first scene and these three tweets that the viewers are assembling a text in which rizzoli and isles enact love and marriage, not just friendship. none of these tweeters explicitly mention jane’s or maura’s gender, so they are marking their behavior not necessarily as lesbian but as romantic love. we can also see that viewers are not locating just their own social identities, but sometimes, as in nate’s case, others’ subordinate identities. nate describes himself as, “just your average 35 yr old guy who enjoys gilmore girls, htgawm, castle, ncis & scandal (& more) and writes fanfic. feminist. livetweeter. liza weil's #1 fan,” in his own twitter description and compares jane and maura to a married couple even though he doesn’t identify as a lesbian. later in the episode, when tweet volume is again large, an on-again off-again boyfriend, casey, of jane’s appears. many #gayzzoli and #rizzles tweeters are disappointed: “omg i just threw up again. go away casey!!!! #rizzoliandisles #gayzzoli no one wants you here.” (danielle, 2013) “man i had a bad feeling and there he is... #rizzoliandislesseasonpremiere #rizzoliandisles #gayzzoli” (venkatesh, 2013) “great! thanks for spoiling such a good episode with mcbeardy pants. #gayzzoli” (cartinelli, 2013) these tweets appeared in the 32nd minute of the hour, and they demonstrate a different kind of reading behavior. rather than comment on a subtext reading, these tweets comment directly on the main text. they both reveal emotional responses and request changes in the text. discussion i introduced this project by situating it as a polesemic reading in line with fiske’s hart to hart examples (1986). rizzoli and isles differs from fiske’s examples because the show already resists dominant readings by having two female lead characters who have a relationship independent of their relationship to other characters. for example, rizzoli and isles passes the bechdel test3 each episode – the characters are often talking about their work (solving murders) or their own lives (struggles with their parents) without talking about men. in reading a lesbian subtext of the show, #rizzles and 3 a popular tool for measuring gender bias in hollywood, the “bechdel test” is named for a comic strip by alison bechdel (1988). her strip’s characters claim a movie passes if it (1) has at least two named women who (2) have a conversation with each other that (3) is not about a man. a recent five thirty eight analysis found that only half of movies pass the test (hickey, 2014), demonstrating that media “passing the test” is not the norm. #gayzzoli tweeters are not just resisting the text but arguing that the text itself should have done resistance differently. live lesbian subtext tweeters are reading not just female friendship (a resistance to dominant media) but lesbian love (a different resistance). they openly reject characters in the canonical text who interfere with subtexts. they describe emotional responses to conflict between the canonical text and the subtext. #gayzzoli tweeters are certainly not the first fans to read same-sex romance into a same-sex friendship (see, e.g., stasi, 2006; dhaenens, 2012; dhaenens, bauwel, & biltereyst, 2008). what’s unique here is that we can witness the reading in (near) real-time, and it occurs without requiring the generation of new texts such as fan fiction. the twin paucities of straight female friendships and loving lesbian relationships involving series lead(s) depicted in television and film in the u.s. makes rizzoli and isles an easy target for subtext readers. the show is susceptible to lesbian subtext readings precisely because straight female friendships are too rare in tv for one to seem like an acceptable canonization. conclusion the live tweets viewers post allow us to watch their readings of television episodes unfold. this data, especially when coupled with the episode text, allows us to test our theories of audience and participation. i demonstrated this approach and provided evidence of resistant readings that publicly mark polysemic moments in the text. these moments in rizzoli and isles are especially interesting because the multiple meanings are marked by viewers who don’t share a singular social identity. references bechdel, a. (1988). the rule. in more dykes to watch out for: cartoons (p. 22). firebrand books. retrieved from http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/wpcontent/uploads/2014/05/the-rule-cleaned-up.jpg cartinelli, death by [lovaticsfever] (2013, june 25) great! thanks for spoiling such a good episode with mcbeardy pants. #gayzzoli [tweet]. retrieved from https://twitter.com/atwellingitup/status/349701833675128834 danielle, bethany [tndani] (2013, june 25) omg i just threw up again. go away casey!!!! #rizzoliandisles #gayzzoli no one wants you here. [tweet]. retrieved from https://twitter.com/tndani/status/349701790574456832 dhaenens, f. (2012). queer cuttings on youtube: re-editing soap operas as a form of fan-produced queer resistance. european journal of cultural studies, 15(4), 442–456. http://doi.org/10.1177/1367549412442205 dhaenens, f., bauwel, s. v., & biltereyst, d. (2008). slashing the fiction of queer theory slash fiction, queer reading, and transgressing the boundaries of screen studies, representations, and audiences. journal of communication inquiry, 32(4), 335–347. http://doi.org/10.1177/0196859908321508 fiske, j. (1986). television: polysemy and popularity. critical studies in mass communication, 3(4), 391–408. fiske, j. (1987). television culture. new york: routledge. fiske, j. (1989). understanding popular culture. new york: routledge. hickey, w. (2014, april 1). the dollar-and-cents case against hollywood’s exclusion of women. retrieved from http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-dollar-and-centscase-against-hollywoods-exclusion-of-women/ maconi, p. (2013). twittergoggles [source code]. retrieved from https://github.com/pmaconi/twittergoggles marie [buknerd] (2013, june 25) nobody does bickering married couple like rizzoli & isles. #gayzzoli [tweet]. retrieved from https://twitter.com/buknerd/status/349694021876203520 mirettesvertes [mirettesvertes] (2013, june 25) "are you saying i'm fat and out of shape?" oh look. first lover's quarrel of season 4. #rizzoliandisles #gayzzoli [tweet]. retrieved from https://twitter.com/mirettesvertes/status/349693940485734400 nate [mrschimpf] (2013, june 25) where 90 seconds in and they're already like an old married couple! #rizzles [tweet]. retrieved from https://twitter.com/mrschimpf/status/349693974237286400 penguin, awkward [socawkpenguin78] (2013, june 25) the closer we get to the #rizzoliandisles premiere, the more nervous i'm getting. what if it's just a giant beardfest? #gayzzoli #rizzles [tweet]. retrieved from https://twitter.com/socawkpenguin78/status/349625007711862784 stasi, m. (2006). the toy soldiers from leeds: the slash palimpsest. in k. hellekson & k. busse (eds.), fan fiction and fan communities in the age of the internet: new essays. jefferson, north carolina: mcfarland & company, inc. venkatesh, arpita [orcalover93] (2013, june 25) man i had a bad feeling and there he is... #rizzoliandislesseasonpremiere #rizzoliandisles #gayzzoli [tweet]. retrieved from https://twitter.com/orcalover93/status/349701823579435008 1 exercising control: a comparative study of government agencies and their relationships with the public using social media kristene unsworth college of information science and technology, drexel university philadelphia, pa usa unsworth@drexel.edu ann-sofie axelsson chalmers university of technology göteborg, sweden and university college of borås borås, sweden ann-sofie.axelsson@chalmers.se sean goggins college of information science and technology, drexel university philadelphia, pa usa outdoors@acm.org christopher mascaro college of information science and technology, drexel university philadelphia, pa usa cmascaro@gmail.com abstract we frame the exercise of control through social media not as power-over or oppression, but in its broader sense, as “purposive influence toward a predetermined goal”. we focus on one growing channel of control; social media use for official communication between government agencies and the public. this paper introduces a framework for analyzing social media use and interaction between government agencies and the public, focusing on a comparative analysis of two consumer protections agencies; one, the konsumentverket in sweden, the second, the consumer financial protection bureau in the us. contrasting the efficacy and practices associated with social media as a communication tool for citizens and their governments in different societies may lead to important insights regarding local and global applications of new media. the proposed framework is grounded in the concept of active co-construction of reality via giddens’ structuration theory, as expanded on by orlikowski. while this provides a useful lens for understanding the construction of government and public interaction, it does not 2 provide a methodology for examining the discourse in action. to do this we embed critical discourse analysis in structuration theory and use algorithms and methods from social media research (group informatics and twitterzombie) to collect data and identify social networks. the analysis includes examinations of the written policy as well as the discourse or text published via twitter and facebook. in this paper we present our synthesis of structuration theory, computational social science and social media research that emerges from our dozens of empirical studies in these domains over the past seven years. we introduce the resulting approach to the study of technologies of control as a proposed foundation for future empirical work designed to validate the proposed methodology. future work will implement the methodology and ask how social media is being used to help government agencies achieve their goals. keywords digital government; social media; structuration theory; critical discourse analysis. since the late 1990s, digital government, egovernment, egovernance or electronic government has been the primary tool for change in the way government officials interact with the public and each other (bertot, jaeger, & grimes, 2010). prior to this, much of the information technology used by government was employed to automate internal operations and did not focus heavily on information dissemination or interaction (osterweil, millet, & winston, 2007; unsworth & townes, 2012). while extensive studies into the relationship between email and organizations have been carried out (meijer, 2008), the use of social media as a means to communicate within an agency, intergovernmentally, or and with the public have not been widely investigated. internationally, the use of social media by government agencies is one of the most recent tools for sharing information with the public and within the government. in the 3 us, social media is one of the ways agencies are addressing the call for a more open government, as mandated by us president obama’s open government directive1. the european commission also clearly outlines the rules and regulations for using social media to address varying goals: informing citizens, sharing experiences, promoting policies or campaigns and engaging with stakeholders2 norman fairclough & wodak, 1997 . analyzing the varied forms of discourse between government and the public is critical in order to gauge the efficacy of social media use for open government as well as to gain a better understanding of the way language is a social practice that is part of “a dialectical relationship between a particular discursive event and the situation(s), and institution(s) and social structure(s), which frame it” ( ). in order to illustrate our framework for analyzing social media use for government and individual engagement we selected two representative consumer protection agencies: one in the us and one in sweden, because of their official, conceptual mission of advocating individuals. in concept, we would expect these agencies to be the most progressive in their adoption of new technologies for communicating with citizens. digital government, egovernance, egov and social media in sweden egovernance is a highly prioritized area in which digital inclusion and transparency are key issues3 1 http://www.whitehouse.gov/open 2 http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/go_live/web2_0/index_en.htm 3http://www.epractice.eu/en/document/288377 . for example, the swedish government has had, since the mid-1990s, a clear agenda with the aim of making official services easily available to citizens, including income-tax returns, sick leave, and parental leave applications. as a part of that the swedish agency for administrative development published the report in 2000: the 24/7 agency criteria for 24/7 agencies in the networked public administration, proposing an approach towards fulfilling the aim of enhancing 4 accessibility and providing service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week4. in 2009, the delegation for egovernment was established, in order to, as it says “strengthen the development of egovernment and create good opportunities for inter-agency coordination5”. in line with this work, which goes hand in hand with the infrastructure development in sweden, many swedish government authorities now also use social media tools as platforms for their communication and information activities. in 2010, the delegation carried out a survey among swedish government agencies, regarding egovernment and social media, in order to map the use of social media and identify problem areas6. the survey showed that of 256 government agencies, about half of them were using some kind of social media: facebook 30%, twitter 20%, youtube 18%, and blogs 18%. however, only 5% of the survey sample responded that they had a policy regarding use of social media. as a response to the survey, the delegation formulated a policy for swedish government agencies, in order to guide their future use of social media7 while many government agencies are associated with traditional conceptions of bureaucracy, power and control; consumer protection agencies in the two societies we examine are formed with the aim of bridging the obstacles that consumers face when dealing with official agencies as well as private businesses. for this research we examined the way two of these agencies are using social media to interact with others. the research is cross-cultural and comparative; looking at these practices in the . on its website the delegation makes a clear statement, directed to swedish agencies, regarding why and how social media should be used: using social media can be a way of picking up/identifying the needs of the users and involving them in various processes /…/ use social media, but regard, beforehand, how they [social media tools] can support the agency’s mandate and consider the legal aspects (author’s translation). 4http://www.statskontoret.se/publikationer/2000/the-247-agency-criteria-for-247-agencies-in-thenetworked-public-administration-/ 5 http://en.edelegationen.se/page/summary-of-the-remit 6 http://www.edelegationen.se/sida/enkatundersokning 7http://www.edelegationen.se/sites/default/files/imce/filer/publikationer/riktlinjer_sociala_medier_v1_0. pdf 5 consumer financial protection bureau (cfpb) in the united states and the konsumentverket in sweden. both organizations have related goals; “to safeguard consumer interests8”; “to make markets for consumer financial products and services work for americans9 control in this sense is exercised through the rules and regulations that have been adopted by the organization. while the common understanding of the term control may indicate power-over or oppression, we use the term in its broader sense as defined by beniger as “purposive influence toward a predetermined goal” ( ”. education is a key practice for each organization and each asserts the goal of providing individuals with financial information. while the cfpb’s focus is on financial issues the konsumentverket serves a broader range of concerns; including finances, safety regarding goods and services as well as “consumer interests within the eu.” beniger, 1986, p. 7). this definition enables a broader understanding of the way power and control are exerted and have the potential to be exerted by many actors. giddens’ refers to this as the “dialectic of control” and define the interaction as: the two-way character of the distributive aspect of power (power as control); how the less powerful manage resources in such a way as to exert control over the more powerful in established power relationships (giddens, 1984, p. 374). while technology is not a focus of giddens’ structuration theory, we use beniger’s conception of “control” to further develop the theory. beniger writes; …inseparable from the concept of control are the twin activities of information processing and reciprocal communication…[b]ecause both the activities of information processing and communication are inseparable components of the control function, a society’s ability to maintain control – 8http://www.konsumentverket.se/otherlanguages/english/about-the-swedish-consumer-agency/ 9 http://www.consumerfinance.gov/the-bureau/ http://www.konsumentverket.se/otherlanguages/english/about-the-swedish-consumer-agency/� 6 at all levels from interpersonal to international relations – will be directly proportional to the development of its information technologies (beniger, 1986, pp. 8-9). technology is paired with communication and we extend this to mean the discourse created via adoption and use of social media as a technology for interaction between government agencies and the public. we can refer to giddens’ depiction of the characteristics of rules relevant to subject analysis (see table 1) and include technology and in this case social media, into the model. doing so can further our understanding of how rules are enacted and how, ultimately, this action or agency may result in shift of the power structures embedded and established through the rules. as giddens’ writes, “the discursive formulation of a rule is already an interpretation of it” (giddens, 1984, p. 23). table 1 characteristics of rules relevant to subject analysis (giddens, 1984, p. 22) intensive tacit informal weakly sanctioned : : : shallow discursive formalized strongly sanctioned as clearly discussed above, one of the primary driving roles of these agencies is to exercise some kind of control, whether it is as a “watchdog” agency to protect the public’s interests or as a resource for education. social media use by these agencies demonstrates the control they have as gatekeepers to specific types of information as well as mediators to the discussion itself. in the next section we will focus on the two agencies used for this analysis. 7 consumer protection policies in each society konsumentverket the swedish consumer agency, konsumentverket10, has the swedish government’s mandate to work with consumer issues. the overall objective of swedish consumers agency is ‘to safeguard consumer interests’. its explicit objective is to empower “aware and secure consumers11 in june 2012, a report titled the consumer in the centre – future consumer protection ”. more explicitly that means that the agency performs proactive work, providing consumers with information about certain products, how to avoid fraud online, and how to lower one’s energy costs, to mention a few areas. in a case where the consumer requires support in a dispute with a corporation, the consumer representative (or consumer ‘ombudsman’) will assist the individual consumer in court. 12 10 http://www.konsumentverket.se 11 http://www.konsumentverket.se/otherlanguages/english/about-the-swedish-consumer-agency/ 12 http://www.regeringen.se/content/1/c6/19/59/18/fd6c1ec9.pdf , was published by the swedish government. it presents an investigation of how the swedish consumer agency manages to support consumers today and provides recommendations for how the agency should be organized and work in the future to better serve consumers. when it comes to the swedish consumer agency’s activities and interactions with consumers in social media, the report describes the current situation as follows: the swedish consumer agency is nowadays present also in social media like facebook, twitter, youtube and twitter. the social media mainly function as channels for sending, but also for observation for action within the area of supervision. the swedish consumer agency may also sometimes be active in the sense that they interact with the target group and give advice and act guiding (p. 102, author’s translation). the report goes on to state that in the future it will continue to be: 8 …relevant to use social media in order to reach out with consumer issues /…/ according to the investigation government agencies should also in the future use social media as communication channel, something which is in line with the government’s view. the investigation’s expert group has emphasized the importance that the consumer has the possibility to communicate with the agency through the channels in which the consumer is present. the report shares this viewpoint (p. 215, author’s translation). there appears to be an acknowledgement of the potential for social media to give citizens a different level of access to the agency. primarily, however, social media is considered to be a tool for education and information provision. the consumer financial protection bureau (cfpb) the cfpb is a relatively new agency within the us federal reserve system and was established through the dodd-frank wall street reform and consumer protection act, public law 111-203, title x (p.l. 111-203). the dodd-frank act was enacted to help promote the financial stability of the us through accountability and transparency in the financial system. the bureau was established to enforce consumer protection law and is independent, meaning the director of the bureau, its officers and agents are not beholden to the legislature in order to carry out their duties. according to the doddfrank act, the director of the cfpb is required to establish a unit within the bureau that is responsible for providing “information, guidance, and technical assistance regarding the offering and provision of consumer financial products or services to traditionally underserved consumers and communities” (p.l. 111-203 p. 124 stat. 1969). its stated purpose is, “to implement and, where applicable, enforce federal consumer financial law consistently for the purpose of ensuring that all consumers have access to markets for consumer financial products and services and that markets for consumer financial products and services are fair, transparent, and competitive” (p.l. 111-203, title x. sec. 1021). in many ways, the cfpb can be seen as an example of structuration theory in practice. the organization was created out of the need for financial oversight following 9 the crisis of 2008. the purpose of the organization is to interact with the public through multiple venues such as education, outreach and information provisions. in addition, the bureau is authorized to monitor financial organizations. the bureau is defined via the actions it carries out. [t]o make markets for consumer financial products and services work for americans — whether they are applying for a mortgage, choosing among credit cards, or using any number of other consumer financial products13 the idea that technology and control are associated with each other as been discussed by intellectuals for most parts of the 20th century. the british authors hg wells and aldous huxley both argued this connection but from very different positions. in 1989, james beniger wrote the now classical book ‘the control revolution’ about how the modern information society started to take shape as early as in the 1830s, as a response to the early industrialization with its increased production and growing markets. in order to produce, transport, and sell goods at a fast pace and with a high level of accuracy, technologies and techniques of control, such as such as industrial standardization systems, rail traffic management systems, and management systems for manufacturing industries were developed and employed ( while interaction between the agency and the public, via social media seems limited, the bureau directs users to email complaints and concerns to whistleblower@cfpd.gov. this is interesting in that one of the stated purposes for social media use by the bureau is to collect and analyze complaints made by the public. while this is not an example of dialogue, there is an element of reciprocity; the complaints have a potential to have an effect on policy. whether or not this occurs will be addressed in future work. theoretical framework beniger, 1986). 13 http://www.consumerfinance.gov/the-bureau/ 10 another significant, and much earlier, development towards an information society is the formation of and maintenance of the nation state, as described by anthony giddens (webster, 2002). the nation state, giddens argues, builds upon the idea that its members are willing to defend the nation, and in return are provided ‘membership services’, such as health care and transportation infrastructures. in order to design the services to suit the citizens, the state needs information about its citizens, such as health conditions and travel habits. with information technologies, information about individuals is collected and analyzed in a highly efficient way. the step is not far from nation states collecting information about their citizens to corporations collecting information about their customers. corporations want to get to know individuals in order to offer them suitable products and services. in that sense an increased amount of information about individuals serves consumers in the same sense as census data serve citizens, providing them improved and personalized service. for this purpose, information technologies are ideal tools, both collecting information about individuals product preferences by monitoring online consumer behavior, and displaying and offering these preferred products, in the same online environment. monitoring customers is, however, only one of the many information related activities that help management gain insight into how products can be more efficiently designed, produced, advertised, and sold. giddens goes as far as stating that “surveillance in the capitalist enterprise is the key to management” (1987, p. 175). the agencies we have chosen for this study occupy an interesting position between the nation state and corporations. while it is widely accepted that individuals participate in the structuration of the nation state via adherence to laws and social norms, corporate activity often transgresses these norms; as can be seen on a large scale in the current, international financial crisis. however, these types of lapses in accepted social norms also occur on smaller levels. consumer protection agencies have been established to help monitor and expose suspect activities and to provide individuals with some recourse in dealing with these larger entities through education and outreach. social media is an additional venue for these activities. 11 structuration theory as discussed above, techniques of control are implicit in the information society. yet it is critical to acknowledge that this type of control is not an external force but is part and parcel of the articulation of societal interaction. according to giddens’ structuration theory, it is important to study interaction, or the “co-constituting complicity in action” of both agents / agency and structure in society (giddens, 1984). we can think of this as social practices that are carried out through space and time rather than physical structures of society. considering this, social media use and technologies of control can be seen as a type of “praxis” or as multidimensional and exerting force throughout the system while at the same time creating the system. two of the primary modes of praxis are reflexivity and technologically mediated relations that enable markets, bureaucracies, and cultural media to stretch across the globe and back again into our local workplaces, homes, and everyday lives (cohen, 1998, p. 285). this mediation is one of the potentially enabling features of social media. which are actualized beniger’s conception of control (beniger, 1986, p. 16). adoption and use of social media can be studied using giddens structuration theory as a guide (table 2). table 2 the duality of structure (giddens, 1984, p. 25) structures system(s) structuration rules and resources, or sets of transformation relations, organized as properties of social systems reproduced relations between actors or collectivities, organized as regular social practices conditions governing the continuity or transmutation of structures, and therefore the reproduction of social systems translating the summarization to depict social media use (table 3), it is possible to see the applicability of structuration theory to the praxis of social media use by government agencies and the public. 12 table 3 duality of social media structures system(s) structuration consumer protection agencies; bureaucratic rules and regulations; law communication practices discursive negotiation of practices followed by patterns of reification bank practices authority / legitimacy between financial institutions, government agencies and the public social media as form of communication and surveillance. control is reflexive control of banks by government agencies, control of complaints from the public by agency, control of agents use of social media by policy, policy being part of structure orlikowskian lens for studying technology orlikowski (2000) builds on giddens’ structuration theory to: augment the existing stucturational perspective on technology by proposing a view of technology structures, not as embodied in given technological artifacts, but as enacted by the recurrent social practices of a community of users” (p. 421). using this conception of the complicity of action in constituting structures in society we analyze the use of social media platforms, twitter and facebook, by two government agencies and the public. it is clear that elements of control are evident throughout the enactment model illustrated in figure 1. embedded in each box are constraints that both limit and enable certain activities, which in turn have the potential to change the nature of control or the “rules of the game.” this is what giddens refers to as the “dialectic of control in social systems” (giddens, 1984, p. 16). 13 figure 1 enactment of technologies in practice (orlikowski, 2000) in figure 2 we insert text specific to our case study to illustrate how we can better understand the use of social media by government agencies and the public. the resultant model indicates both the complexity of social media use in this scenario and the potential for actor interaction. of particular interest is the area of “interpretive schemes” (figure 2 – middle, right). using tools from critical discourse analysis, we will be able to determine assumptions and expectations of the interaction via language use. numerous questions arise here: including, does the public seem to be operating with the same set of assumptions about the use of social media with government agencies as the agencies? is there a mismatch between the standard definition of social media as a tool for sharing, dialogue and reciprocity and the agency’s use of social media for broadcasting information and data collection? can we see examples of a mismatch and / or negotiation to bridge it or create a new structure of communication? these questions will begin to be answered in analysis of the data we have collected thus far. 14 figure 2 enactment of social media methods and data collection this research examines twitter and facebook data collected from the swedish consumer protection bureau (konsumentverket) and the us consumer financial protection bureau (cfpb) over a six month period, in the first half of 2012. we collected facebook data with robertson (2012) as part of a larger data collection project. twitter zombie twitter data was collected using a combination of methods. the twitter timelines (@cfpb and @konsumentverket), which are a collection of the tweets contributed by the two agencies, were collected using the twitter package in the statistical computing package r. this package allows for the collection of the 3200 most recent tweets contributed by the individuals in charge of the account. the other 15 portion of the twitter data was collected using the twitterzombie infrastructure (black et al. 2012) querying the twitter search api once a day for tweets that mentioned the two agency account @cfpb and @konsumentverket. following the collection of the data, the data were parsed using a set of custom-built scripts that parse out relevant social science information (mascaro & goggins, 2012: apsa paper). the syntactical features of the tweets collected by twitterzombie are provided in tables four and five. there are significantly more tweets that mention cfpb and this is likely due to the fact that twitter is much more popular in the us and cfpb makes an orchestrated effort to promote its social media presence. even though there are significantly less tweets that mention @konsumentverket, some of the syntactical utilization is similar such as the percentage of links. in total, the swedish dataset has more instances of all of the syntactical features compared to the us dataset. one of the most interesting statistics relative to other twitter research is the high number of reply-to’s. we operationalize a reply-to as an @-mention that occurs at the first position of a tweet. this action on behalf of the user signifies that the message is directed to another twitter handle and indicates the presence of conversational intent. prior twitter research (mascaro & goggins 2012; honeycutt & herring 2009) has identified that the percentage of reply-to’s to be significantly less than the percentages reflected in these two datasets indicating the presence of conversational intent in the context of @cfpb and @konsumentverket. table 4 swedish dataset tweets link % hash % mention % reply-to % retweet % 89 78.65% 76.40% 100.00% 19.10% 69.66% table 5 us dataset tweets link % hash % mention % reply-to % retweet % 2331 76.66% 46.37% 100.00% 13.34% 44.53% 16 group informatics in our analysis of facebook and twitter, we follow a methodological approach we refer to as group informatics (goggins, mascaro & valetto, 2012), which suggests that each social media platform and the interactions that occur within them do not constitute one specific technical, social or cultural context; nor are the global cultures that participate in social media easily isolated in social media studies. we view each social media platform as a transport protocol for public discourse, and systematically examine the presentation and emergence of control through discourse from a number of perspectives. group informatics includes network analysis of electronic trace data, ethnography, interviews, content analysis and other qualitative research methods. the data are then systematically integrated to tell a more comprehensive and multivalent story than most social media studies, particularly those that examine phenomena in a single social media platform. prior studies do not systematically study the reflexive relationship between governments and their citizens across different social media platforms as a new type of control and the expression of existing, traditional notions of control through social media using the lens of negotiation of discourse policies and policies of control. until the dawn of social media, and the routine interaction between governments and their societies in this less formal, more democratic style of media, arguably the examination of its utility for control was not a salient phenomenon and, therefore neither feasible or identifiable as an area of inquiry. descriptive statistics: facebook use approximately 50% of us and swedish citizens have a facebook account at the time of this writing. swedish government policies encourage the response by government officials to facebook posts on the swedish government page, while us policy does not presently require this. though the population of sweden is approximately 0.25% that of the united states; the total number of posts from the swedish agency, on facebook, was more than twice the number of posts made by the us government agency during the period of study. comments posted on the swedish site occurred four times more frequently than those in the us. here, we see evidence 17 that facebook is an active vehicle for communication and control in sweden, but plays a less significant role in the us. descriptive statistics: twitter use approximately 15% of us citizens and 3% of swedish citizens have twitter accounts at the time of this writing. this difference in citizen utilization of twitter is reflected in the data we gathered examining tweets that mention each government agency (@konsumentverket). during the period of study, we gathered 89 tweets mentioning the swedish government agency and 2,331 tweets mentioning the us government agency (@cfpb). figures three and four (below) illustrate the top 40 accounts referencing the us (figure 3) and swedish (figure 4) agencies. in the case of each country, we see that the agency itself has a central role, and that each country has political leaders outside the agency who participate in the tweet network. in the us, we see the president (@barackobama) and vice president (@joebiden) participating. in sweden, a politician currently serving as the “consumer minister” and minister for european union affairs (@birgittaohlsson), a member of parlimant (@lundhsammeli) and two journalists (@bcintanders and @mickep2) are among the active participants who reference sweden’s consumer protection agency. people with public control and information roles are among the leaders in the twitter networks for both societies. 18 figure 3 us government agency tweet network figure 4 swedish government agency tweet network 19 analysis one critique of giddens’ structuration theory, that was partially addressed by orlikowski (2000), is how to operationalize the theory in order to use it as a baseline for analysis. we propose a combination of critical discourse analysis, based on the work of norman fairclough (n. fairclough, 1992, 2001, 2003) and m.a.k. halliday (eggins, 1994; fawcett, 2008; halliday & matthiessen, 2004). while critical discourse analysis is often mistakenly considered to only focus on power imbalances and the potential for emancipation, it is actually an effective tool to better understand a wide range of social phenomena. wodak and fairclough write: cda sees discourse – language use in speech and writing – as a form of ‘social practice.’ describing discourse as social practice implies a dialectical relationship between a particular discursive event and the situation(s), and institution(s) and social structure(s), which frame it: the discursive event is shaped by them, but it also shapes them. that is, discourse is socially constitutive as well as socially conditioned – it constitutes situations, objects of knowledge, and the social identities of and the relationships between people and groups of people. it is constitutive both in the sense that it helps to sustain and reproduce the social status quo, and in the sense it contributes to transforming it. since discourse is so socially consequential, it gives rise to important issues of power. discursive practices may have major ideological effects – that is, they can help produce and reproduce unequal power relations between (for instance) social classes, women and men, and ethnic/cultural majorities and minorities through the ways in which they represent things and position people (fairclough & wodak, 1997 p. 258 in ruth wodak & meyer, 2009, pp. 5-6). following data collection both the tweets and facebook exchanges must be closely examined in order to identify features of the discourse. while wodak, van dijk, fairclough and others have done extensive work in discourse analysis, little research has been conducted that uses methods of critical discourse analysis to better understand social media (n. fairclough, 2001; teun a. van dijk, 1993; t.a. van dijk, 1995, 1998; van leeuwen, 2007; r. wodak, 2001a, 2001b). 20 discourse analysis of social media like most, if not all texts, social media discourse contains linguistic features, that provide a rich ground for cda. to understand the technical aspects of language use and linguistic features, we propose drawing on norman fairclough’s implementation of the work of british systemic-functional linguist m.a.k. halliday (halliday & matthiessen, 2004). systemic-functional linguistics (sfl) is important for cda because it focuses on the interaction between language and other aspects of social life (n. fairclough, 2003, p. 5). understanding how language is used in social media is methodologically tractable with electronic discourse like that in social media, enabling and making cda an apt methodological tool for exploring elements related to structuration theory. critical discourse analysts argue that a close reading of a text is not enough in itself to understand the way the text works in society. with this in mind, combining the theoretical framework of cda with the grammar of sfl suggests a robust toolkit for analysis. a systemic functional analysis attempts to uncover how a text means what it does, not just what it means (eggins, 1994). quoting halliday from an early discussion on the use of systemic functional linguistics, “the linguistic analysis of a text is not an interpretation of that text; it is an explanation” (ibid.). a thorough analysis must include an explanation of the way meaning is made in the clauses that make up the text. this must consist of a broader analysis that includes contextual analysis, an examination of the specific discursive practices surrounding the text and its production, and analysis of the intertextual relations as well as the socio-cultural factors influencing the text itself, its production, and the audience (huckin, 2002, p. 157). when we analyze specific texts as part of specific events, we are doing two interconnected things: 1) looking at them in terms of action, identification and representation and how these are realized in the various features of texts (their vocabulary, their grammar, etc.) and 2) making a connection between the concrete social event and more abstract social practices by asking, which genres, discourses, and styles are drawn upon and how are they articulated together in the text (n. fairclough, 2001, p. 28) 21 texts are produced and understood intertextually in a web of interaction. because of this, a number of themes can be identified through their analysis: shifts in power and control, ideology, processes of legitimation, and obligation some that may be relevant of analysis of social media use. much social media analysis begins with the data found in social media. to characterize technologies of control, however, we argue that the most theoretically grounded place to start is with an analysis of government policy, rules and regulations as they relate to social media. the following section demonstrates some of the analysis of social media policy. policy analysis – a comparison of us and swedish government social media policies for consumer protection agencies konsumentverket as a government agency, the swedish consumer agency adheres to federal rules and regulations. the edelegation has, as previously mentioned, on the request of the swedish government, developed guidelines for government agencies’ use of social media14 the swedish data inspection board (datainspektionen) is another swedish government agency which has clarified, to other swedish government agencies, their responsibilities particularly in relation to correct handling of personal information in social media. this is described in a specific report from the swedish data inspection board , particularly in regard to the legal aspects that should be considered. the guidelines are detailed and build on a number of previous rules and regulations (the freedom of the press act, the file act, and the privacy act, to mention just a few). 15 14http://www.edelegationen.se/sites/default/files/imce/filer/publikationer/riktlinjer_sociala_medier_v1_0. pdf 15 http://datainspektionen.webhotel.qd.se/documents/faktablad-sociala-medier.pdf . however, despite the general rules and more specific social media guidelines, the swedish consumer agency seems to have a certain freedom when it comes to social 22 media use. in the very recent report, the consumer in the centre – future consumer protection16 the swedish consumer agency clearly declares the purpose of its presence in different social media (facebook, twitter, etc) and what can be expected in terms of how the agency communicates and interacts with consumers , it is concluded that: [h]ow and to what extent social media are used by government agencies for communication of the consumer support depends on the agency’s task and activities and should therefore be decided by each agency respectively. the consumer agency has worked out its own policies for the use of social media (author’s translation). 17 as an us government executive agency, the cfpb adheres to federal rules and regulations (p.l. 111-203, sec. 1011). chief among these is the privacy act of 1974 (see: 76 fr 45760), which governs the recording of personal information supplied through citizen interaction with the agency. according to cfpb policy, the purpose of the cfpb social networks and citizen engagement system is to facilitate interaction between individuals, the agency and the various agency programs. it is hoped that social media platforms will, “increase collaboration and transparency with the public, as well as employees and contractors” (76 fr 45760). in addition to this it is hoped that through use of social media the agency will have a greater opportunity for “effective and meaningful” interaction with the public and ultimately, “encourage the wide sharing of consumer financial information and the strengthening of an online community of consumers, and ensure that critical information about the agency and key consumer finance issues is distributed” (ibid). according to the dodd-frank act one of the . as an example, if the agency requests information or receives comments of posts which can be considered as material in a certain case, these will be registered in the record of the agency. cfpb policy 16 http://www.regeringen.se/content/1/c6/19/59/18/fd6c1ec9.pdf 17http://www.konsumentverket.se/omkonsumentverket/konsumentverket-i-sociala-mediekanaler/ 23 primary purposes of the cfpb is to collect, maintain and analyze complaints that the bureau receives (p.l. 111_203 title x. sec. 1016c4). this information is compiled based on analysis comments posted to the bureau via social media sites. the personal information obtained through this process is protected through regulations in the privacy act of 1974 and discussed above. each year the list of complaints is shared with congressional committees: the committee on banking, housing, and urban affairs of the senate and the committee on financial services and the committee on energy and commerce of the house of representatives. group informatics analysis of government social media use twitter and facebook are two different social media platforms, and we examine them across two societies. though the differences in update and use of each platform provides a striking contrast at the time of this writing, we argue that these descriptive phenomena, like uptake of other technologies over time, are likely to more closely mirror population as technologies are adapted. the swedish and us societies do not have substantial differences in their economies, and access to technology. as the trends of use converge for facebook, twitter and government agencies, we expect to see contrasts in the texts, as noted above, but also contrast in the nature of individuals who participate in social media discourse with and about government agencies. group informatics provides a methodological foundation for integrating sml, cda and social network analysis to describe and analyze these differences. for example, the use of time distance, interaction type and measures of discourse intent all influence how the connections between people are illustrated in a social network using group informatics (goggins, mascaro & valetto, 2012). one caution we offer for analysis of government social media use as a technology of control is that the form of social media analysis that takes place in the larger literature on social media must adapt to and recognize the structuration and control oriented nature of government information dissemination. 24 discussion / conclusion it appears that there is a discontinuity between the government agency’s use of social media and that of the public. social media norms are based in the assumption that use of the platform will enable greater sharing opportunities among participants. there is an implied reciprocity between actors within the same network of social media users. the cfpb on the other hand appears to be using social media primarily as a tool to publish information. while individuals are urged to post to the agency’s twitter or facebook account, it is not so that someone from the agency can then engage in dialogue with this person, but rather so that the agency has a record of issues and complaints that can be analyzed at a later date. these are two distinct uses of technology and how they are appropriated to continually develop “digital government” is still unfolding. egovernment, particularly the use of social media, may hold the promise of shifting the structure of government and citizen communication from one that is one – directional from agency to citizen in the form of a “reproduced permanence” (cohen, 1998cohen, 1998) to one that actually involves participation, dialogue and communication. there are two perspectives to consider in this analysis. first, the relationship between policy and agency interactions is fundamental for understanding the reflexive relationship between the two. analysis of policy in the absence of rich, available data could miss the rare opportunity for government researchers to observe how policy evolves through discourse. focusing analysis on the social media streams themselves, without reference to policy, could lead to analysis that mirrors other social media studies, ponders what is going on, but misses this rare case where policy is structuring communication. the extent to which future research examining social media from both perspectives takes these specific phenomena into account will likely influence the utility of the resulting scholarship to society at large. references beniger, j. r. (1986). the control revolution: technological and economic origins of the information society. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. 25 bertot, j. c., jaeger, p. t., & grimes, j. m. (2010). using icts to create a culture of transparency: e-government and social media as openness and anti-corruption tools for societies. government information quarterly, 27(3), 264-271. cohen, i. j. (1998). anthony giddens. in r. stones (ed.), key sociological thinkers (pp. 279 290). new york: nyu press. eggins, s. (1994). an introduction to systemic functional linguistics. london: pinter publishers. fairclough, n. (1992). discourse and social change. cambridge, uk; cambridge, ma: polity. fairclough, n. (2001). critical discourse analysis as a method in social scientific research. in r. wodak & m. meyer (eds.), methods of critical discourse analysis (pp. 121-138). london; thousand oaks, ca; new delhi: sage. fairclough, n. (2003). analysing discourse: textual analysis for social research. london; new york: routledge. fairclough, n., & wodak, r. (1997). critical discourse analysis. in t. a. van dijk (ed.), discourse as social interaction (pp. 258-284). london: sage. fawcett, r. p. (2008). equinox textbooks and surveys in linguistics : invitation to systemic functional linguistics through the cardiff grammar : an extension and simplification of halliday's systemic functional grammar (3rd edition). london, , gbr: equinox publishing ltd. giddens, a. (1984). the constitution of society. berkeley: university of california press. giddens, a. (1987). social theory and modern sociology. cambridge: polity. halliday, m. a. k., & matthiessen, c. (2004). an introduction to functional grammar (3rd ed.). london: hodder education. 26 huckin, t. (2002). critical discourse analysis and the discourse of condescension. in e. barton & g. stygall (eds.), discourse studies in composition (pp. 155-175). cresskill, nj: hampton press. meijer, a. j. (2008). e-mail in government: not post-bureaucratic but late-bureaucratic organizations. government information quarterly 25, 429-447. orlikowski, w. (2000). using technology and constituting structures: a practice lens for studying technology in organizations. organization science 11 (4). osterweil, l. j., millet, l. i., & winston, w. d. (2007). social security administration electronic service provision: a strategic assessment (pp. 149-160). washington, d.c. unsworth, k., & townes, a. (2012). transparency, participation, cooperation: a case study evaluating twitter as a social media interaction tool in the us open government initiative. paper presented at the dg.o '12, college park, md. van dijk, t. a. (1993). principles of critical discourse analysis. discourse and society, 4 (2), 249-283. retrieved from http://www.discourses.org/oldarticles/principles%20of%20critical%20discourse%20a nalysis.pdf van dijk, t. a. (1995). ideological discourse analysis. new courant, 4, 135-161. van dijk, t. a. (1998). ideology: a multidisciplinary approach. london: sage. van leeuwen, t. (2007). legitimation in discourse and communication. discourse and communication 1 (91), 91-112. retrieved from http://dcm.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/1/1/91 webster, f. (2002). theories of the information society. oxon, uk, new york: routledge. wodak, r. (2001a). the discourse historical approach. in r. wodak & m. meyer (eds.), methods of critical discourse analysis (pp. 63-94). london; thousand oaks, ca; new delhi. 27 wodak, r. (2001b). what cda is about a summary of its history, important concepts and its developments. in r. wodak & m. meyer (eds.), methods of critical discourse analysis (pp. 1-13). london; thousand oaks, ca; new delhi: sage. wodak, r., & meyer, m. (eds.). (2009). methods of critical discourse analysis. london: sage. microsoft word lim.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): lim, s.s. (2014, october 22-24). engaging juvenile delinquents and youths-atrisk: youth workers’ use of facebook for mediated pastoralism. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. engaging juvenile delinquents and youths-at-risk: youth workers’ use of facebook for mediated pastoralism sun sun lim national university of singapore abstract youth work seeks to rehabilitate juvenile delinquents for re-entry into mainstream society and to prevent youths-at-risk from falling into delinquency, thus necessitating that youth workers assiduously monitor their clients. with the avid use of social media by youths, youth workers must also adopt these communication platforms to reach out to their young clients. drawing from interviews with youth workers, this study analyses how they use facebook to communicate with their clients and monitor their activities. surveillance forms a key thrust of youth workers’ professional use of facebook, enhancing their ability to oversee these youths’ personal development for the purposes of mentoring and rehabilitation. contrary to dystopian, power-centric conceptions of surveillance, the study finds that the youth workers’ surveillance of their clients is undergirded by care and beneficence, better understood using foucault’s concept of pastoralism. through mediated pastoralism via facebook, these youth workers can derive a more extensive picture of their clients, including their emotional state and peer interactions. with this knowledge, the youth workers can then calibrate their interventions more strategically and only step in when their clients engage in behaviour that poses significant risks or danger. in so doing, the youth workers foster durable relational bonds with their clients that they can still leverage over time. facebook communications also help the youth workers to bridge communication gaps with these youths. the study also examines how the youths resist the youth workers’ oversight in various ways, including engaging in sousveillance. keywords pastoralism, sustainable social capital, sousveillance, social media, social work, juvenile delinquency introduction youth workers are social workers who counsel juvenile delinquents and youths-at-risk, and are at the forefront of society’s engagement with this marginalised youth population. their mission is to rehabilitate these youths to prevent them from becoming further disenfranchised, and to promote in them positive development (walker, 2003). the marginalisation of youths, both perceived and actual, is a significant issue because global trends indicate that if not effectively managed, the swelling numbers of disenfranchised and disaffected youths can contribute to social unrest (renn, jovanovic, & schröter, 2011; urdal & hoelscher, 2009). to successfully reach out to youths on the fringe, youth workers need to foster with their clients a strong relationship that is built on mutual understanding, trust and open communication (harrison & wise, 2005). in our increasingly mediatized society where youths are ardent technology adopters, youth workers must also utilise new communication technologies to engage with their young charges. in particular, with young people’s growing use of social media such as facebook and twitter, youth workers are adapting to this evolving communication landscape by interacting with their clients on these new platforms. to understand how the emergence of social media impacts on youth workers’ communication with juvenile delinquents and youths-at-risk, this study focuses on youth workers who use facebook to engage with their clients. specifically, it examines how youth workers appropriate facebook to perform their professional duties and reach out to their clients. it also considers the opportunities and challenges these youth workers encounter in the process and the strategies they develop to manage this novel communication platform. the study also interrogates the ethical implications of youth workers’ use of facebook to conduct surveillance over their clients, and probes into the resistance the youths assert towards such supervisory oversight. it is part of a larger 20month long study on the media use of juvenile delinquents and youths-at-risk in singapore, a city-state where internet and mobile phone adoption is widespread and young people are avid users of social media (social media today, 2011). research questions the study sought to address three research questions: rq1: how do youth workers use facebook to foster communication with their clients and in what ways? rq2: how do youth workers use facebook to conduct pastoralism over their clients? rq3: do the clients manifest resistance towards the youth workers use of facebook for communication and surveillance and if so, how do the youth workers manage such resistance? method the data presented here is drawn from a larger 20 month study on the media use of juvenile delinquents and youths-at-risk in singapore. the first phase of research comprised interviews with youths at various stages of the “delinquency lifestage”: (i) atrisk: youths identified as at-risk and receiving preventative counselling, (ii) in rehab: juvenile offenders incarcerated in lowor highsecurity residential rehabilitation homes; and (iii) post-rehab: youths who have undergone rehabilitation and are seeking to reintegrate into society. the second phase of research was then initiated to obtain the perspective of youth workers who guide youths in the “at-risk” or “postrehab” stages1, and undergoing state-mandated counselling. we interviewed a total of 24 youth workers, 13 of whom were female and 11 male. their experience in youth work ranged from one to 20 years and their clients were aged 12 to 25. half the interviewees counselled exclusively male clients, a quarter exclusively females and another quarter counselled both males and females. the youth workers were based in various institutions including schools, youth drop-in centres, guidance agencies and youth outreach organisations, with their clients having been referred to them by the police, rehabilitation homes or schools. their clients comprised those who had committed relatively minor infractions such as underage sex, smoking and drinking, to those with more serious offences such as drug abuse, theft, gang fights, rioting and assault. the frequency with which the youth workers met their clients varied according to the severity of the youths’ record of delinquency and offence. we interviewed the youth workers using a series of semi-structured questions about their work experience and the challenges and gratifications they derived from youth work. we also probed them on their experiences and perceptions of using social media such as facebook and mobile phone text messaging to communicate with their clients. we also sought their perceptions of their clients’ use of online and mobile communications. additionally, we asked them to log into their facebook accounts and guide us through various aspects including their friend networks, typical usage patterns as well as to show us the facebook posts of their clients, and any facebook communications they had engaged in with clients. written notes on the general nature of these posts and communications were made but no personal details of their clients was captured. analysis of the interview transcripts involved identifying dominant themes and issues arising from the interviews, using the “meaning condensation” approach (kvale, 1996). key findings contrary to dystopian, power-centric conceptions of surveillance, the study finds that the youth workers’ surveillance of their clients is undergirded by care and beneficence, better understood using foucault’s concept of pastoralism. through mediated pastoralism via facebook, these youth workers can derive a more extensive picture of their clients, including their emotional state and peer interactions. with this knowledge, the youth workers can then calibrate their interventions more strategically and only step in when their clients engage in behaviour that poses significant risks or danger. in so doing, the youth workers foster durable relational bonds with their clients that they can still leverage over time. facebook communications also help the youth workers to bridge communication gaps with these youths. the study also examines how the youths resist the youth workers’ oversight in various ways, including engaging in sousveillance. 1 youths who are in rehabilitation homes have limited access to mobile phone and internet communications and the youth workers who guide them would interact with them face-to-face rather than through mediated communications. references harrison, roger, & wise, christine (eds.). (2005). working with young people. london: sage. renn, ortwin, jovanovic, aleksandar, & schröter, regina. (2011). social unrest: ifp/wkp/fgs (2011) 5, oecd/ifp project on future global shocks, paris: oecd. social media today. (2011). experian analysis highlights which countries spend the longest time on facebook. retrieved april 30, 2013, from http://socialmediatoday.com/imckeevocaniccom/378335/local-network-experiananalysis-highlights-which-countries-spend-longest-fac urdal, henrik, & hoelscher, kristian. (2009). urban youth bulges and social disorder: an empirical study of asian and sub-saharan african cities. world bank policy research working paper series, vol. walker, j. . (2003). the essential youth worker. in f. villarruel, d. perkins, l. borden & j. keith (eds.), community youth development: programs, policies, and practices (pp. 373-393). thousand oaks, ca: sage. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  nagy,  k.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  regulatory  issues  concerning  the  promotion   of  media  literacy.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  meeting  of  the  association  of  internet   researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.   regulatory  issues  concerning  the  promotion  of  media  literacy       dr.  krisztina  nagy,  has  centre  for  social  sciences,  institute  for  legal  studies       the  challenge  of  regulating  the  internet     the  internet  age  provides  new  and  seemingly  inexhaustible  opportunities,  but  the   convergent  media  space  also  harbours  numerous  risks.  when  it  comes  to   communication  over  the  internet,  traditional  instruments  of  regulation  are  more  difficult   to  apply,  primarily  because  human  rights  limit  regulatory  options,  as  does  the  way  in   which  the  internet  works.  the  convergent  media  space  necessitates  new  regulatory   approaches  and  solutions  because  as  a  result  of  the  explosive  growth  in  the  amount   and  types  of  media  contents,  and  the  appearance  of  contents  created  by  users  and  the   globalisation  of  the  media  universe,  the  previous  control-­based  approach  towards  the   media  universe  has  become  outdated.       towards  a  uniformisation  of  regulatory  approaches     nevertheless,  the  internet  today  is  of  course  not  a  lawless  zone,  but  the  range  in  which   legal  instruments  or  state  intervention  can  be  applied  is  considerably  narrower  than  in   the  case  of  electronic  media.  in  this  age  of  convergence,  the  line  that  separates  the   world  of  traditional  media  and  internet-­based  media  consumption  is  increasingly   vanishing.  studies  on  media  consumption  show  that  the  younger  generations'   consumption  is  increasingly  shifting  towards  online  contents.  regulatory  solutions   concerning  the  convergent  media  space  can  be  best  delineated  on  the  basis  of   technological  neutrality  and  by  relying  on  a  functional  approach.  in  the  short  term,   a  uniform  approach  to  traditional  media  services  and  online  services  is  inconceivable,   but  nonetheless,  the  relevant  regulatory  solutions  must  be  approximated,  which  also   charts  the  need  for  a  course  of  deregulation,  self-­regulation  and  co-­regulation  in  the   area  of  traditional  media  regulation.     risk-­sharing–  autonomous  and  informed  users     one  element  of  the  new  regulatory  scheme  that  is  to  be  created  to  address  the   convergent  media  space  is  that,  at  least  in  part,  the  management  of  risks  and   responsibilities  will  be  incumbent  on  the  user,  who  will  have  a  greater  role  than   previously  in  averting  the  dangers  and  risks  that  may  affect  her  personally.     with  respect  to  communication  and  media  consumption  over  the  internet,  this  is  an  area   where  it  is  especially  difficult  for  the  state  to  perform  external  control  functions,  while   there  are  only  limited  possibilities  for  compelling  providers  to  perform  such  functions.   the  new  regulatory  regime  requires  autonomous  users  who  strive  to  keep   themselves  informed  about  the  complex  new  digital  environment  and  are  also   capable  of  managing  the  risks  that  they  are  burdened  with.  media  literacy   presumes  knowledge  and  skills  that  result  in  responsible  and  autonomous  decision-­ making,  as  well  as  the  maximisation  of  opportunities  that  arise  out  of  the  informational   environment  and  the  minimisation  of  the  corresponding  risks.  the  commission's   recommendation  on  the  promotion  of  media  literacy  writes  that  "[m]edia  literacy  relates   to  the  ability  to  access  the  media,  to  understand  and  critically  evaluate  different  aspects   of  the  media  and  media  content  and  to  create  communications  in  a  variety  of  contexts”   (europa,  2009:  para.  11).     target  group  –  society  at  large     before  the  convergent  media  environment  emerged,  the  issue  of  media  literacy  was   primarily  discussed  in  the  context  of  children  and  youth,  and  the  question  of  the  state's   involvement  was  typically  raised  in  the  areas  of  education  and  education  policy.  due  to   changes  in  the  structure  of  the  public  sphere,  this  approach  is  no  longer  tenable,  and   thus  the  question  of  promoting  media  literacy  has  emerged  as  vital  for  all  of  society.   future  regulatory  environments  must  react  to  this  change,  which  presumes  the  need  for   harmonising  educational  and  communication  policies,  and  coming  up  with  solutions  that   mutually  reinforce  one  another.       in  european  discourse,  the  issue  of  media  literacy  promotion  has  in  recent  years   become  increasingly  intertwined  with  the  issues  of  digital  citizenship  and  media   pluralism.  "a  media  literate  society  would  be  at  the  same  time  a  stimulus  and  a  pre-­ condition  for  pluralism  and  independence  in  the  media.  the  expression  of  diverse   opinions  and  ideas,  in  different  languages,  representing  different  groups,  in  and  across   societies  has  a  positive  impact  on  the  values  of  diversity,  tolerance,  transparency,   equity  and  equity  and  dialogue.  the  development  of  media  literacy  in  all  sections  of   society  should  therefore  be  promoted  and  its  progress  followed  closely"  (europa,   2009:  para.  16).       central  issues  in  promoting  media  literacy       the  objective  of  promoting  media  literacy  is  no  longer  just  an  education  policy  issue  but   has  also  emerged  as  a  general  public  policy  challenge  that  necessitates  a  redefinition  of   the  state's  role.  a  regulatory  approach  that  is  mindful  of  both  the  risks  and  opportunities   inherent  in  the  new  media  environment  and  internet-­based  communication,  and  seeks   to  properly  react  to  these  changes,  must  devote  pre-­eminent  attention  to  raising   consumers'  awareness.  this  is  an  area  where  the  subject  of  regulation  is  the  same   with  respect  to  both  traditional  media  and  internet.  let  us  consider,  for  example,   that  media  authorities  or  audiovisual  policy-­makers  have  little  to  no  competencies  in  the   area  of  internet  regulation,  but  they  can  assume  responsibility  for  promoting  media   literacy.  repositioning  media  literacy  is  inconceivable  without  the  ongoing  and  detailed   state-­funded  monitoring  of  changes  in  the  digital  environment,  as  well  as  research  about   the  latter.  in  addition  to  child  protection  considerations,  such  monitoring  and  research   must  also  extend  to  a  review  of  the  state's  competencies  in  the  digital  age  of  digital   citizenship.       the  research     the  research  seeks  an  answer  to  the  question  of  what  responsibilities  the  state   must  assume  in  the  context  of  promoting  an  informed  and  responsible  use  of  the   new  media  environment,  especially  the  internet.  what  are  the  regulatory  problems   that  need  to  be  solved  in  the  area  of  institutionalising  the  promotion  of  media   literacy?  what  are  the  institutional  solutions  that  can  provide  the  basis  for  promoting   user  awareness  (protection,  responsibility,  information  and  participation)?  the  paper   reviews  and  schematically  arranges  the  instruments  necessary  for  promoting  the   knowledge  and  skills  that  provide  the  basis  for  responsible  and  informed  media/internet   usage.  it  will  further  define  the  regulatory  starting  points  and  instruments  aimed  at   promoting  media  literacy.       the  most  important  topics  analysed  in  the  research:     the  state's  role  in  the  basic  research  that  is  necessary  for  promoting  media  literacy;;  the   ongoing  monitoring  of  typical  usage,  trends  in  usage  and  levels  of  media  literacy,  as   well  as  reports  on  the  state  of  media  literacy.       the  harmonisation  of  education  and  audio-­visual  policies  and  the  instruments  and   institutional  solutions  employed  in  the  process  of  institutionalising  media  literacy   promotion.       an  assessment  of  the  possibilities  for  involving  players  along  the  media  market  value   chain,  as  well  as  of  the  instruments  and  possibilities  of  promoting  self-­regulation   mechanisms  in  the  area  of  media  literacy.       the  distribution  of  state  funds  necessary  to  operate  an  effective  set  of  instruments.         references     lunt,  p.  &  livingstone  s.  (2012)  media  regulation  –  governance  and  the  interest  of   citizens  and  consumers.  london:  sage     europa  (2009)  -­  commission  recommendation  on  media  literacy  in  the  digital   environment  for  a  more  competitive  audiovisual  and  content  industry  and  an  inclusive   knowledge  society  (2009/625/ec)     digitale  agenda  für  deutschland  2014-­2017       report  of  the  fundamental  rights  commissioner  on  the  state  of  media  literacy  in  hungary   (ajb-­479/2016.)     study  on  the  future  of  european  audiovisual  regulation  (final  report  2015)  hans-­ bredow-­institute       hobbs,  r.  (2010)  digital  and  media  literacy:  a  plan  of  action       1 black boxes and co-creation in littlebigplanet 2 dave jones old dominion university united states djone111@odu.edu abstract this paper discusses black boxes and their role as mediators in the user experience of cocreative networks. using actor network theory, i trace the people, groups, and technologies that assemble around the moderation of player-generated content in media molecule‘s littlebigplanet 2. more specifically, i examine the good grief! system‘s role in mediating the moderation process between player-creators and moderators. this system frames moderation as a participatory practice initiated by people playing levels. however the system also establishes a black box around the processes of assessing and moderating reported levels. this makes the moderation process opaque to the player-creator community, locking them away from the moderation process and disempowering them as creative agents. co-creative networks enable participation, but use black boxes to structure the participatory activities that player-creators pursue. as a result, much of the coordinative and collaborative work of network participants centers upon the black box, what it renders invisible, and how to test its boundaries. keywords co-creation, participatory culture, games, black boxes, actor network theory introduction co-creation has emerged as an integral component of the participatory experience for many popular media franchises. as jenkins (1992 & 2006) notes, fans of popular books, films, and games often seek to take part in the meaningful construction of their fan experiences, turning to the creation of many forms of content in order to do so. co-creation enlists the fan‘s 2 desire to participate in the meaningful creation of culture so that this participation is also productive and valuable for those who own that culture in the form of intellectual property (ip) (deuze, 2007; kucklich, 2005; terranova, 2000 & 2004). in games such as media molecule‘s littlebigplanet 2 (2011), developers and publishers market the support of player-generated content as a central feature of the game software and the player experience (sotamaa, 2010; see also postigo, 2007, 2008, & 2010). players who become creators use the proprietary technologies and networks provided by sony and media molecule alongside other blogs, wikis, and forums that do not fall under the ownership of these companies (taylor, 2007). playercreators produce content, coordinate activities with one another, and seek relevant information in social systems and technologies both inside and outside of the proprietary spaces established by game publishers and developers. as such the ―discourses, technologies and community practices‖ of these participatory cultures are simultaneously ―outside the industry but also inside it‖ (postigo, 2010, n.p.). playerproduced content is situated within a network infrastructure where that content can be copied, reinscribed in a different form, and repurposed by moving it from one space to another, from one technology to another, from inside the industry to outside of it and vice versa. researchers encounter not only the practices and identities of individuals and participatory cultures, but also the user experience of these systems and the ways they enable or limit participatory practices (potts, 2010; sotamaa, 2007). for this reason, understanding the user experience these systems is critical to the research of participatory cultures, participatory practices, and the role of participation in the production and distribution of culture. in addition, viewing the user experience of these systems alongside an analysis of their impact on the relationships between player-creators and the gaming industry can shed light on the design of technologies that support co-creative participatory cultures. one way to better understand the user experience of co-creation is to examine the ways proprietary systems, technologies, and policies are situated within ‗black boxes‘ in order to maintain their durability and the integrity of their functions across the network (latour, 1987). in this paper, i examine the good grief! system, or the moderation system for lbp 2, as a black box that encases technologies, groups, and policies within an ―opaque‖ (latour, 1999) space that hides and confuses the ways these proprietary actors are implemented. the good grief! system performs two maneuvers: 1) it veils the implementation of the moderation process so in an effort to make it impenetrable to participants who wish to understand the functions and operations these proprietary actors; 2) it extends the reach of these processes and technologies 3 so that they impact participatory activity that occurs in non-proprietary spaces. the user experience of the good grief! system enlists lbp 2 participants in the moderation of playerproduced content. but the system also limits the scope of their participation and their view of the moderation process. as a result, the black box of the good grief! system is fortified to prevent participants understanding the ways moderation takes place and the ways policies are implemented. tracing black boxes in an actor network to examine the good grief! system and its role within the actor network that facilitates moderation, i employ potts‘s (2008, 2009, & 2010) method of tracing the connections among actors. this method, based on actor network theory (ant), aims to map the people, groups, and technologies within a network, and to then analyze their relationships in order to examine ―shifts in practice‖ that occur among these actors (2010, p. 307). the purpose is to trace connections among actors and examine the ways these connections enable and constrain the practices of network participants, such as the player-creators in lbp 2. in this way, researchers can examine the ways the design of technologies affect the user experience of participation ―across the mediascape of technologies and people‖ (2009, p. 285). it is crucial for researchers to understand that participation within a network is not contingent upon a participant‘s interaction with a single technology or system. instead, networked interactions such as cocreation are affected by the entire ecology of the network where the operations and functions of one actor can alter those of another. i augment potts‘s method by more specifically examining the ways the relationships among proprietary actors are encased within black boxes. black boxes can serve as liaisons among actors, or to simplify complex relationships among actors so that they can communicate or coordinate activity more effectively (spinuzzi, 2008). latour (1987 & 1999) states that a black box is a collection of actors that are assembled within a single point and ―slowly turned into something that resembles an organized whole‖ (1987, pp. 130-131). the black box in which these actors are assembled and encased can then stand in for the complex relationships among the network actors it contains. in this way, network actors outside of the black box ―need focus only on [the black box‘s] inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity‖ (1999, p. 304). once the black box is assembled, latour argues that it becomes ―entirely opaque‖ to the rest of the actor network (p. 183). the linkages among actors—as well as the purposes, roles, and functionality of those actors—can be veiled within the black box so that the complexities of these relationships disappear from the view of other actors. as latour states, ―if everything goes 4 well it begins to look as if the black boxes were effortlessly gliding through space as a result of their own impetus‖ (1987, p. 132). to trace black boxes that form around proprietary technologies, networks, and systems in an actor network, i perform three steps. first, i identify those actors that fall under the management and control of sony and media molecule. second, i trace the connections among those actors by examining the processes in which they become critical components. and third, i examine the user interface of the proprietary actor that links player-creators, fans, and other participants to the black box and the connections and processes encased within it. in this way, i can examine the linkages among actors both inside and outside of the black box, and trace the ways those linkages are forged or maintained through tools that hide the complexity of these processes. this framework supports an analysis of the potential impact of black boxes on the practices of co-creative participants. researchers can survey the ways these systems influence the interactions that individual participations and participatory cultures have not only with single systems, but with the broader co-creative network and its goals, as well. the good grief! system according to the manual included with lbp 2, the good grief! system is ―the best way to report any offensive content uploaded by other players online.‖ it is the moderation system developed by media molecule and sony in order to govern the content that player-creators produce and upload to the psn. the system is ―people-powered‖ (potts, 2009, p. 299), which means that people must initiate and perform the moderation process. participants who play the levels produced by other players must file a report (called ―griefing‖ in the lbp 2 community) through the good grief! menu included within the lbp 2 game software (see figure 1). by pressing a button on the ps3 controller, the player opens this menu, automatically taking a screenshot of the visible area of the level they are playing at the time. next, the reporting player must choose a reason for the report from the options shown in figure 1. the final step for the participant is to confirm that they do want to support the grief report to moderators. according to media molecule‘s community manager sam bennett (sam_protagonist, 2010) once a grief report is filed, the reported level is ―placed in a queue to be checked over by the moderation teams at [sony computer entertainment].‖ the moderation of the level remains people-powered, but is shifted from the participant who filed the report to the moderation teams who then decide whether or not the griefed level should remain available to other participants. player-generated levels that are published for others to play are stored within the psn and 5 locally on the player-creator‘s ps3 hard drive. if a level is moderated, it is removed from the psn, but the locally stored copy remains on the player-creator‘s hard drive. player-creators can make changes to their level and republish them to the psn. figure 1. the user interface for griefing player-created levels, found within the littlebigplanet 2 game. thus, while player-creators and other participations initiate the good grief! system through grief reports, the system‘s implementation remains in the hands of moderation teams that work for sony. participants have the chance to initially determine whether or not playercreated content is ―offensive‖ enough to warrant a grief report. and as figure 1 illustrates, participants can choose one of seven options for classifying the levels they grief. one of those options, ―terms of service,‖ points to the policies governing the use of sony‘s and media molecule‘s proprietary systems and technologies. there are multiple policies that govern the proprietary systems and networks that lbp 2 player-creators may use to produce levels and characters. in the actor network of the good grief! system, several different policies contain restrictions defining the limits creative practices of player-creators. the terms of service and user agreement (2010) governs the use of the psn and its software, and states that participants may not upload content for which they do not have copyright or permission from copyright owners. the end user license agreement (lbp 2, 2011) applies to the lbp 2 software, the assets player-creators can use to produce content, and their creative practices, including the use of third-party intellectual property (ip). this agreement‘s restrictions concerning the use of third-party ip mirror those of the terms of service and user agreement. in addition to these two 6 agreements, media molecule also maintains a whitelist of third-party ip owners who have informed the developer that they will ―never ask [media molecule] to pull infringing stuff‖ (robinson, 2008). this whitelist creates room for the use of third-party ip and bypasses the restrictions outlined in the other two policies. in addition, the ip owners who have requested whitelisting are not publicly known. these policies are network actors that establish the ―morality of a setting both negative (what it prescribes) and positive (what it permits)‖ (akrich & latour, 1992, p. 261). they attempt to define the limits of the activities that network participants such as player-creators can pursue with the proprietary systems, networks, and tools provided by sony and media molecule. as a result, these policies are all interlinked into a nexus of rules and regulations that govern participation in some way. each individual policy can impact the user experience of participation. but to understand the actor network of griefing a level, they must be understood together because all are present and can be used as a means of determining whether or not a reported level should be moderated. if a participant griefs a level for containing copyrighted material, such as pictures or characters from a film, and classifies her report under ‗terms of service‘, her report points moderation teams to these complex policies and their complex relationships with one another. however, the whitelist‘s contradictory stance opens up room for selectively interpreting and applying the restrictions of the terms of service and user agreement (tosua) and the end user licensing agreement (eula). there are circumstances in which the whitelist can circumvent the regulations laid out in the tosua and eula. but, these circumstances are not clear. the names of whitelisted ip owners are never made public. the policies that govern participation forbid an activity on one hand, yet open room for that activity on the other. thus, a critical component of the work of moderation is how these policies are interpreted by a moderation team and implemented through the team‘s decision whether or not to moderate a level. from the view of participants, the good grief! system‘s function depends on the relationships among these policies and how moderators interpret them. yet, there is no way to know precisely when their levels might run afoul of the tosua and eula‘s limitations, or be saved by the provisions of the whitelist. the user experience of moderation leaves participants within a potentially confusing contradiction, hinging on the interpretation of that contradiction by moderation teams. this lack of visibility places the good grief! system within a black box, locking the moderation process away from the view of other network actors, including the reporting player and the player-creator of the griefed level (see figure 2). the linkages among 7 moderation policies are not clear, and neither is their connection to moderation teams and their decision-making processes. figure 2. the actor network for the good grief! system. proprietary actors and their relationships are locked within a black box, away from the view of palyer-creators and other participants. the black box of the good grief! system becomes ―an automation, a machine, one piece of equipment‖ through which a moderation team‘s interpretations of policies and their application to griefed levels become ―undisputed facts‖ (latour, 1987, p. 131). the black box strengthens these decisions by hiding these processes from view. without a clear view of how policies are understood or implemented within the black box, participants face a reduced capacity to understand their roles as creative agents. thus, the processes within the black box are strengthened so that their impact is felt well beyond the black box, affecting the creative practices of player-creators in unpredictable ways. conclusions elsewhere, latour (2005) has suggested that network researchers must examine both the local contingencies and the global contexts in which social interactions take place (pp. 165172). in co-creative networks, the opacity of black boxes can be leveraged so as to hide broader global contexts and contingencies for participation while trying to force the participant to focus 8 on her local circumstances—what is wrong with her level that led to that level being moderated. the interpretations of policies and the processes of moderation are made impenetrable, locked away within the black box and hidden from the view of participants. by locking these network actors away, there is no view of what is happening in other critical sites of the actor network. the black box can exert tremendous influence over the participatory practices of player-creators by constraining their activities within narrowly defined, highly localized limits that are imposed from broader global contexts. thus, while reducing the complexity of moderation for participants, the good grief! system combines the tosua, eula, whitelist, and moderation teams into a singular super-actor from which proprietary systems and networks can influence participatory practices. the user experience of participation in this space hinges on a top-down hermeneutic for determining what is appropriate practice and what is not. researchers examining co-creative networks can fruitfully interrogate power relationships between participants and proprietary systems, networks, and tools by tracing and analyzing the black boxes that attempt to structure participation. black boxes can be crucial and critical network components for simplifying complex interactions. however, this simplification can also reduce the participatory capability of player-creators or others who seek to produce content. by identifying black boxes and their purposes within these actor networks, researchers can uncover the power dynamics of these relationships and more deeply understand the role of participation in the modern mediascape. in addition, interrogating these power relationships and their impact on different participatory cultures can provide critical insight for technology designers seeking to understand the user experience of participation and how to design for it. references akrich, m., & latour, b. (1992). a summary of a convenient vocabulary for the semiotics of human and nonhuman assemblies. in w. e. bijker and j. law (ed.), shaping technology/building society: studies in sociotechnical change (pp. 259–264). cambridge, ma: mit press. deuze, m. (2007). media work. malden, ma: polity press. jenkins, h. (1992). textual poachers: television fans and participatory culture. new york: routledge. jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york: nyu press. 9 kucklich, j. (2005). precarious playbour: modders and the digital games industry. fiberculture, 5, retrieved from http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/kucklich.html latour, b. (1987). science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. latour, b. (1999). pandora’s hope: essays on the reality of science of studies. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. latour, b. (2005). reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network theory. oxford: oxford press. potts, l. (2008). designing with actor network theory: a new method for modeling holistic experience. proceedings of the international professional communication conference. montreal: ieee. potts, l. (2009). using actor network theory to trace and improve multimodal communication design. technical communication quarterly 18(3), 281-301. potts, l. (2010). consuming digital rights: mapping the artifacts of entertainment. technical communication 57(3), 300-318. postigo, h. (2007). of mods and modders: chasing down the value of fan-based digital game modifications. games and culture 2(4), 300-314. postigo, h. (2008). video game appropriation through modifications: attitudes concerning intellectual property among modders and fans. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies 14(1), 59-74. postigo, h. (2010). modding to the big leagues: exploring the space between modders and the game industry. first monday 15(5), retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2972/2530. robinson, m. (2008). littlebigplanet interview. ign.com. retrieved from http://ps3.ign.com/articles/940/940711p2.html. 10 sam_protagonist. (2010). moderation policy change. littlebigplanet.com. retrieved from http://forums.littlebigworkshop.com/t5/general-discussion/moderation-policy-change/mp/220324. sony. (2010). terms of service and user agreement. playstation.com. retrieved from http://us.playstation.com/support/termsofuse/index.htm#psntosua sotamaa, o. (2007). let me take you to the movies: productive players, commodification, and transformative play. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies 13(4), 383-401. sotamaa, o. (2010). play, create, share: player production and agency. fiberculture 16, retrieved november 22, 2010 from http://sixteen.fibreculturejournal.org/play-create-shareconsole-gaming-player-production-and-agency/. spinuzzi, c. (2008). network: theorizing knowledge work in telecommunications. new york: cambridge university press. taylor, t. l. (2007). pushing the borders: player participation and game culture. in j. karaganis (ed.), network_netplay structures of participation in digital culture (pp. 112-130). new york: social science research council. terranova, t. (2000). free labor: producing culture for the digital economy. social text 18(2), 33-58. terranova, t. (2004). network culture: politics for the information age. london: pluto press. microsoft word bork-hüffer .docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): bork-hüffer, t. (2014, october 22-24). intersections of offline and virtual contact zones: transnational migrants’ transcultural encounters in singapore. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. intersections of offline and virtual contact zones: transnational migrants’ transcultural encounters in singapore tabea bork-hüffer national university of singapore the emergence of a multiplicity of new technologies in the new media age has substantially changed migration experiences, communication and information channels, and means and types of social participation and interaction of migrants (cf. hopkins 2009, alonso 2010, alonso and oiarzabal 2010, ros 2010, oiarzabal and reips 2012). research on the role of new media for migrants has so far focused particularly on the change of the nature and organisation of transnational social networks to other transnational subjects through the new media. much less often has research focused on how new media are influencing the ways and types of engagements and interactions between the migrant and host population, on the effects of their virtual encounters, and the dialectic connections between virtual and offline relations. as massey (20127: 91) has pointed out, the "question which is raised by speed-up, by 'the communications revolution' and by cyberspace, is not whether space will be annihilated but what kinds of multiplicities (patternings of uniqueness) and relations will be coconstructed with these new kinds of spatial configurations". as a result, in this paper i am inquiring: how do encounters in virtual space interlink with or even shape offline transcultural encounters and vice versa? how are both types of encounters shaping transcultural knowledge and experiences and notions of "the other". in how far do both types of encounters reduce or produce transcultural prejudices and stereotypes? if and how has the relation between online and offline encounters and their effects changed related to the length of stay of migrants in their migration destination? the argument is based on 46 in-depth interviews with highly-skilled transnational migrants based in singapore, who work in the city-state, have received tertiary education, and stay on employment passes (eps) or permanent residency passes (prs). the study embraces migrants that have stayed for different time periods in singapore – from some who have just arrived to some who have stayed in singapore for several decades. given singapore's large migrant stock that amounts to almost fourty per cent, everyday life in the city is characterised by diverse offline contact zones between its citizen and the migrant population (cf. ye 2013) that are increasingly complemented by virtual encounters. based on pratt's (1991, 20082) concept of the "contact zone" bork-hüffer (forthcoming) has defined transcultural encounters taking place online as "virtual contact zones", which are "spaces were members of the host society and the migrant community directly "meet" on the internet, interact, and exchange or indirectly read, see or otherwise receive information on the other party, while both (possibly also mixed) forms of engagement with online spaces involve the emergence and construction of individual or collective transcultural experiences and knowledge." there are diverse and multiple types of virtual contact zones in the times of "polymedia" (madianou and miller 2013). in this paper different web 2.0 applications are analysed in regard to their role as virtual contact zones. preliminary results indicate that migrants often participate in a variety of virtual contact zones, where they have different contact points to the host society, while the types of and frequency of use of virtual spaces for encounters changes throughout the migration process. virtual contact zones play a much larger role in moulding transcultural knowledge and notions of the culture of the host society before and directly after arrival in the migration destination. in contrast, for migrants who have stayed for a longer time in the city, offline encounters are the decisive factor in the process of the construction of their transcultural notions, and online virtual contact zones rather serve the maintenance of offline encounters. references alonso, a. (ed.) (2010): diasporas in the new media age: identity, politics and community. reno: university of nevada press. alonso, a. & oiarzabal, p. j. (2010): the immigrant worlds' digital harbors. an introduction. in: alonso, a. (ed.) diasporas in the new media age: identity, politics and community. reno: university of nevada press, pp. 1-15. hopkins, l. (2009): media and migration: a review of the field. australian journal of communication, 36 (2), pp. 35-54. madianou, m. & miller, d. (2013): polymedia: towards a new theory of digital media in interpersonal communication. international journal of cultural studies, 16 (2), pp. 169187. massey, d. (20127): for space. los angeles, london, new delhi, singapore, washington dc, sage. oiarzabal, p. j. & reips, u. d. (2012): migration and diaspora in the age of information and communication technologies. journal of ethnic and migration studies, 38 (9), pp. 1333-1338. pratt, m. l. (1991): arts of the contact zone. profession, 1991, pp. 33-40. pratt, m. l. (20082): imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation. new york, abingdon, routledge. ros, a. (2010): interconnected immigrants in the information society. in: alonso, a. (ed.) diasporas in the new media age: identity, politics and community. reno: university of nevada press, pp. 19-38. ye, j. (2013): notes from ‘migrant encounters’: visualizing singapore's diversity through south asian male migrants. singapore journal of tropical geography, 34 (3), pp. 407-413. microsoft word kruzan-appignani-neill hoch.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): kruzan, k.p., appignani, t., & neill hoch, i. (2014, october 22-24). avatars as ghosts in mmorpg. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. avatars as ghosts in mmorpg kaylee payne kruzan university of illinois, chicago tim appignani university of illinois, chicago indira neill hoch university of illinois, chicago as the adoption rate of new media technologies grows ever faster, possibilities for self expression and virtual identity formation increase. while much is said about the prevalence of our lives online, little research to date considers that mortality on equal terms to the lives we live offline. informed by theories from existential psychology (becker, 1973) and communication (peters, 1999), our research considers the ways in which avatars created for virtual gaming environments capture the essence of their creators and live on inside the game environment by mirroring the features of what in popular culture might be called ghosts. given that avatars become central features of the game world, our work likens the ghost-like avatar presence to the dynamics of hauntings in popular literature. previous research on avatars has suggested the possibilities of such hauntings. the deletion of an avatar after a server shutdown has been described as a “kind of death” or feeling of a “ghost limb” by those engaged in virtual worlds (pearce & artemesia, 2009). avatars are considered as active prostheses under a player’s control, rather than the ways they may exceed our ability to manage and make sense of their actions and apparitions. gamer parlance even features the term ‘spiritual successor’ to mean a new game developed by the same creator of another (ladd & harcourt, 2005). however, avatar research typically focuses more sharply on ‘living’ avatars and their relationship to identity construction. both single-player and multi-player avatar studies have investigated gender (eklund, 2011; hayes, 2007), morality (schrier, 2012; wolfendale, 2007), and identity tourism (huh & williams, 2010; mcdonald, 2012; nakamura, 2002). further substantiation of the developing definitions of social existence (virtual and otherwise), as well as the human body and soul become imperative when addressing complex queries regarding mortality across mediums. habib (2011) provides a useful semantic definition for the academic usage of the term ghost, just as other scholars (sconce, 2000; steinhart, 2007; ross, 2013) have imbued digital media with a sensible comparison to the ghostly being. significantly, our work adapts the observations of edmund carpenter (1973) in that the essence of the human spirit can be captured in images. we argue that, like the images carpenter defined as tokens of our ethereal being (1973), avatars are animated expressions of their creator’s essence capable of operating on and transcending multiple planes (physical, and digital) in the same manner as the semantic ghost defined by habib (2011). as these avatars transcend corporeal limitations they may then be imbued with the aura of an otherworldly being. !using a semiotic discourse analysis we examine the nonverbal discourses within the world of mmorpg. a semiotic analysis extends the study of discourses beyond just a textual analysis of the game’s dialogue and messages, to the discursive elements found in the interaction of play (van dijk, 1985; fairclough, 1995). our approach to semiotic discourse analysis will follow the grounded theory tradition where researchers examine texts through intuitive means in order to find patterns repeated to redundancy, and meriting discursive explication (bryant & charmaz (eds.), 2007). in applying this method to our text of choice, the mmorpg final fantasy xiv, we will consider to what degree avatars, like ghosts, evoke physiological and psychological distress in living players, using metaphysical tactics equivalent to a haunting. for example, the disappearance and reappearance of the moving avatar (as it’s attached player experiences connection lag), or the names of long discarded avatars appearing as the crafter of a piece of equipment still in use, may haunt those avatars still alive and active in the world. other discourses under consideration include whether the digital remnants of avatars can impact other players and the game space itself, and to what degree this compares with the known phenomena of haunting. as haunting is tied not only to the essence of a being, but also a place, our work centers on the discourses of online spaces, and the questions those spaces and their affordances raise about the presence or absence of life within them. references becker, e. (1973). the denial of death. new york: free press. bryant, a. & charmaz, k. (eds.) (2007) the sage handbook of grounded theory. london: sage publications. carpenter, e. (1973). eskimo realities. new york: holt, rinehart and winston. eklund, l. (2011). doing gender in cyberspace: the performance of gender by female world of warcraft players. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 17(3), 323-342. fairclough, n. (1995). critical discourse analysis: the critical study of language. harlow, england: longman group limited. habib, s. (2011). ghosts, fairies, elves, and nymphs: towards a semantic template for non-human being concepts. australian journal of linguistics, 31(4), 411-443. doi:10.1080/07268602.2012.625599 hayes, e. (2007). gendered identities at play case studies of two women playing morrowind. games and culture, 2(1), 23-48. huh, s., & williams, d. (2010). dude looks like a lady: gender swapping in an online game. in online worlds: convergence of the real and the virtual (pp. 161-174). london: springer. ladd, b., & harcourt, e. (2005). student competitions and bots in an introductory programming course. journal of computing sciences in colleges,20(5), 274-284. lee, j. h., clarke, r. i., sacchi, s., & jett, j. (2014) relationships among video games: existing standards and new definitions. conference paper presentation mcdonald, h. (2012). npc romance as a safe space: biowar and healthier identity tourism. well played on romance: a special issue on the theme of romance in games, 1(4), 23-39. retrieved from http://www.etc.cmu.edu/ etcpress/content/volume-1number-4-romance nakamura, l. (2002). cybertypes: race, ethnicity, and identity on the internet. new york: routledge. pearce, c. & artemesia (2009). communities of play: emergent cultures in multiplayer games and virtual worlds. cambridge, ma: mit press. peters, j. d. (1999). speaking into the air, a history of the idea of communication. chicago: university of chicago press. ross, i. (2013). digital ghosts in the history museum: the haunting of today's mediascape. continuum: journal of media & cultural studies, 27(6), 825-836. doi:10.1080/10304312.2013.794194 schrier, k. (2012). avatar gender and ethical choices in fable iii. bulletin of science, technology & society, 32(5), 375-385. jeffrey sconce. (2000). haunted media: electronic presence from telegraphy to television. duke university press. steinhart, e. (2007) survival as a digital ghost. minds & machines. 17. 261-271. van dijk, t. (1985). introduction: levels and dimensions of discourse analysis. handbook of discourse analysis, vol. 2. berkeley: university of california press wolfendale, j. (2007). my avatar, my self: virtual harm and attachment. ethics and information technology, 9(2), 111-119. microsoft word 766-515-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 making machines safe for humans: the case of siri andrea l. guzman university of illinois at chicago united states aguzma31@uic.edu abstract this paper explores cultural conceptions of human-machine communication through a discourse analysis of u.s. news media accounts of apple’s launch of siri – a voice-activated, personal assistant application. through this analysis of online reports regarding siri’s initial reception from the new york times, cnn, and abc news several themes emerge regarding the nature of siri and communication with it. these themes portray siri as the future made real; as part friendly female; as a futuristic servant at the users’ beck and call. in totality these portrayals establish siri as the antithesis of malicious ai machines and position her as a non-threatening, technological slave firmly under the control of the user. siri is “safe” for humans. or, is it? this paper concludes by questioning whether the control we have over siri is real or an illusion that reinforces what carey and quirk (1989) called the “rhetoric of the electronic sublime.” keywords human-machine communication; artificial intelligence; siri; discourse analysis introduction when turing argued that machines one day would be able to think and engage in competent conversation with humans, he anticipated the backlash against his idea that threatened the sanctity of the human mind (turing, 1992). by the time turing published his seminal work in 1950, the debate over the impact of technology on society was already an old one. extending back to the phaedrus and up through the industrial revolution into the computer age, philosophers had long weighed the promise and peril of emerging technologies. as is evident in leo marx’s (2000) the machine in the garden, the impact of machines also has occupied a space within the greater cultural consciousness. more than 60 years after turing proposed the idea of talking with intelligent computers, we now have the capability to do so. in 2011, apple launched the iphone 4s with a new feature – siri, a voicecontrolled, artificial intelligence application that functions as a personal assistant. the goal of this paper is to continue this exploration of our cultural reactions to machines, this time by focusing on how we conceive of a program that can talk back to us. siri is the focus of this study for several reasons: although people have communicated vocally and haptically with machines before siri, the program, which began as a $110 million defense project (sri, 2012), was unique when introduced because it used natural language, instead of computer commands, to communicate (aron, 2011; rousch, 2010). siri speaks with a female voice in the u.s. and gives the illusion of having a personality. as an ai program, siri learns from and adapts to both individual users and all of its users collectively (apple, 2012; aron, 2011). siri also is more accessible to the public than most ai technology. the application’s introduction with the iphone 4s created a buzz in the u.s. media that caught the attention of both technophiles and average users. and so, siri can help scholars better understand how people made sense of and reacted to voice-controlled, ai technology when it was introduced on a large scale. approach this study employs discourse analysis, a qualitative approach, to explore media accounts regarding apple’s launch of siri in three prominent u.s. news websites: cnn, abc news, and the new york times. the start date for the study was oct. 1, 2011 – three days before apple introduced siri with the iphone 4s. stories were read through siri’s public release on oct. 14 until a break in the flow of initial selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 stories regarding siri was reached. the last story studied from cnn was oct. 25, the new york times, oct. 27, and abc news, oct. 28. eighteen stories from cnn, 23 from the new york times, and 12 from abc news were analyzed. texts were read multiple times to identify themes. the different terms used to refer to siri as well as to describe talking with siri were analyzed. the context of the stories and the individual sentences and paragraphs containing references to and communication with siri also were analyzed. analysis from the analysis emerges a picture of siri as a “safe” machine established through its portrayal as the future realized, as part ‘friendly’ human, and as servant. news stories highlight the futuristic qualities of talking with a machine and having it talk back, setting up siri, as, one reporter states, “the stuff of science fiction” (gross, 2011a, par. 4). references to science fiction movies, shows, and characters occur throughout stories discussing siri. although some direct comparisons are made between siri and what could be considered malicious machines, like hal 9000, they often are tongue-in-cheek. these connections with science fiction serve as heuristic to make sense of a talking device, and, in doing so, portray siri not as a dangerous machine but as the promise of science fiction brought to life. human qualities in machines can be perceived as a threat, but news reports anthropomorphize siri in a way that downplays concern based on her female gender, her interaction capabilities, and humor. besides referring to siri as a program, or it, reporters also call siri a she or her based on siri’s female voice. news accounts also focus on siri’s helpfulness and humorous responses to requests. in the article “snide, sassy siri has plenty to say,” gross (2011b) explains: “this awareness and sense of humor has already earned her some fans” (par. 8). in the united states, women are culturally perceived as less of a threat than men, and this focus on siri’s gender and humor further removes her from the category of threatening machine. apple (2012) describes siri as an “intelligent personal assistant,” but in news stories, siri is portrayed as more of a servant in firm control of the user. some of the more than three dozen terms the news outlets employ for siri focus on control of the program – “voice-controlled assistant,” “voice-activated servant,” and “voice-commanded minion.” news reports also include the description siri gives when asked about its nature: siri replies that it is a “humble personal assistant” (e.g. grobart, 2011; gross, 2011a). the way news accounts describe communication with siri also reinforces this sense of control. the term conversation is not typically used to describe communication with siri. instead, news accounts refer to giving commands to siri or describe it as responding to the needs of humans. the program waits to be spoken to and does what it is told. discussion together these portrayals of siri establish the program as a positive technological development that is non-threatening to humans and, in fact, remains firmly under our control, serving us when summoned. the way siri is initially discussed and received, which also is a reflection of its design, works to mitigate the societal concerns regarding artificial intelligence that turing faced and science fiction writers utilized for drama. siri, or she, is seemingly made “safe” for humans. or, is it? this depiction of siri and the praise heaped on the program contain threads of cultural discourse regarding new technology that predate siri and can be described as what carey and quirk (1989) refer to as the “rhetoric of the electronic sublime” (p. 139). the argument goes that through electricity our hopes are realized; however, this rhetoric contains a false hope. as carey and quirk (1989) argue, this promotion of the machine does not free us; we become more dependent upon machines and the structures of power that produce and promote them. and so, while we can command siri to text a partner or schedule an appointment and she doesn’t appear to threaten our humanity, in selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 our repeated use of siri, as it, the machine, we become further inscribed within the culture of the machine. references apple. (2012). learn more about siri. retrieved from. http://www.apple.com/ios/siri/siri-faq/ aron, j. (2011, october 29). your iphone is listening. new scientist, 212, 24. carey, j.w. & quirk, j.j. (1989). the mythos of the electronic revolution. in j.w. carey’s communication as culture: essays on media and society (pp. 113-141). new york, ny: routledge. grobart, s. (2011, october 4). apple unveils iphone 4s with voice-recognition features. the new york times blogs. retrieved from lexisnexis academic. gross, d. (2011a, october 4). apple introduces siri, web freaks out. cnn.com. retrieved from lexisnexis academic. gross, d. (2011b, october 17). snide, sassy siri has plenty to say. cnn.com. retrieved from lexisnexis academic. marx, l. (2000). the machine in the garden: technology and the pastoral ideal in america (35th anniversary ed.). new york, ny: oxford university press. rousch, w. (2010, june 14). the story of siri, from birth at sri to acquisition by apple—virtual personal assistants go mobile. xconomy. retrieved from http://www.xconomy.com/sanfrancisco/2010/06/14/thestory-of-siri-from-birth-at-sri-to-acquisition-by-apple-virtual-personal-assistants-go-mobile/ sri international. (2012). timeline of innovations: siri the virtual personal assistant for the apple iphone. retrieved from http://www.sri.com/work/timeline/siri turing, a.m. (1992). computing machinery and intelligence. in d.c. ince (ed.), collected works of a.m. turing: mechanical intelligence (pp. 133-160). amsterdam, netherlands: elsevier science publishers b.v. (original work published 1950). microsoft word _done selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 political rumoring on twitter during the 2012 us presidential election: an exploratory study jieun shin university of southern california, annenberg school for communication & journalism lian jian university of southern california, annenberg school for communication & journalism kevin driscoll microsoft research françois bar university of southern california, annenberg school for communication & journalism introduction & research questions our research team explored the massive political rumoring phenomenon on twitter. although rumors pose a real threat to democracy by unjustly biasing voters’ electoral decisions (weeks & garrett, 2014), there has been little research on political rumor diffusion on social media. in an attempt to shed light on this topic, we asked the following research questions. rq1. how do political rumors diffuse on twitter? what specific features are used in passing along rumors? rq2. to what extent are rumor believers and rebutters polarized based on the target of the rumor? rq3. are rumor debunking sites effective in curbing the spread of rumors on twitter? method we explored a large dataset of political tweets (with more than 419 million tweets) collected during the 2012 presidential election in the united states. the dataset was created in real-time using the gnip powertrack service. the stream was filtered according to 427 election-related keywords including the names of candidates, issuespecific terminology, and hashtags used to promote debates and other important events. in addition, the research team has analyzed 57 rumors that were circulating in the traditional news media or on social media sites during the same period of time. this set of 57 rumors was identified by three popular rumor checking websites: factcheck.org, snopes.com, and about.com’s “urban legends” page. if any of these sites checked a rumor within the data collection period, we included it in our rumor collection. based on suggested citation (apa): shin, j., jian, l., driscoll, k., & bar, f. (2015, october 21-24). political rumoring on twitter during the 2012 us presidential election: an exploratory study. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http:// spir.aoir.org. the final collection of 57 rumors, we retrieved a preliminary set of relevant tweets (n=438,556) that contained matching keywords for each rumor from the political tweets set. to ensure high accuracy, we human-coded each tweet for two variables: (1) whether it was actually about the rumor (2) whether the user’s attitude was endorsing, rejecting, or unclear. the content coding involved four pairs of independent undergraduate coders with two coders coding the same tweet messages. the krippendorff’s alpha values ranged from .75 to 1. of all the tweets preliminarily identified as relevant to these 57 rumors (n=439,556) via keyword matching, 75.20% of them (n=330,538) were humancoded to be relevant. results rumor tweeters’ communicative behavior overall, there was little rejection of any rumor in our dataset, be it true or false. after eliminating rumors (n=12) with fewer than 200 tweets, we calculated the percentage of tweets that were coded as rejecting the rumor. out of the 33 false rumors, we found an average rejection rate of 3.37%, while we observed an average rejection rate of 0.06% for 10 true rumors. two unverifiable rumors had an average rejection rate of 8.43 % and endorsing rate of 89.37 %. we compared rumor tweets that endorsed 57 rumors with randomly chosen political tweets from our larger dataset in order to explore systematic differences between two datasets. the result showed that rumor tweets had a much higher proportion of retweets (65.48%) than non-rumor tweets (44.43%). such a level of retweet proportion in our rumor dataset, combining both false and true rumors, seems unusually high compared with previous studies (nagarajan, purohit, & sheth, 2010; tonkin, pfeiffer, & tourte, 2012) which reported to be 27~48% of retweets in social movement discussions on twitter. additionally, the rumor tweets showed a significantly lower proportion of hashtag adoption (17.11%) compared to the non-rumor tweets (31.59%). we also compared the ratio of tweets that generated at least one reply between two sets. the analysis showed that the rumor tweets (2.62%) had a significantly lower proportion of tweets that were replied to by other users than non-rumor tweets (7.13%). membership overlap between rumors to explore the community structure and the patterns of membership among different rumors, we utilized network analysis viewing the relationship between a rumor and its participants as affiliated. we first identified unique believers and debunkers for each false anti-obama (n=21) and false anti-romney rumors (n=7) that have more than 200 users. then, a two-mode network matrix was constructed where the rows represent each user, and the columns indicate each rumor. this matrix was subsequently converted to a one-mode co-membership matrix (28 rumors by 28 rumors). to identify sub-clusters in the rumor co-membership network, we used the infomap algorithm, which is considered to be one of the best-performing community detection methods (rosvall & bergstrom, 2008). the results showed that there were two communities (modularity=0.48) for the rumor believers, corresponding exactly to antiobama and anti-romney rumors. on the other hand, the analysis identified 13 communities (modularity=0.57) for the debunkers where anti-obama and anti-romney rumors were clustered together in some communities. impact of rumor debunking to examine whether rumor debunking was effective, we identified the date on which each rumor was first debunked by one of three fact-checking websites and split each rumor tweet set into two groups before and after the date of rumor debunking. a series of chi-square tests revealed that, in 12 out of the 33 false rumors, the proportion of rejecting rumors significantly increased after debunking while that of endorsing rumors decreased. we also noticed that debunking sites tended to have a significant impact on rumors that were started by a satirical news website. nevertheless, such changes in attitude were small, given that the majority of tweets were endorsing both before and after the publication of debunking information. discussion & conclusion our analyses reveal that rumors were mainly transmitted through the retweet function, which requires minimum issue engagement. in addition, while we observed the clear division between anti-obama rumors and anti-romney rumors among rumor spreaders, we did not find partisan community structures among rumor debunkers. our analyses also show that professional fact-checking sites were relatively effective in reducing the spread of rumors that were started by a satirical website, but had a limited impact on other types of rumors (i.e., rumors created by an elite partisan or unknown source). references nagarajan, m., purohit, h., & sheth, a. (2010). a qualitative examination of topical tweet and retweet practices. proceedings of the fourth international aaai conference on weblogs and social media. rosvall, m., & bergstrom, c. t. (2008). maps of random walks on complex networks reveal community structure. proceedings of the national academy of sceinces, 105(4), 1118-1123. tonkin, e., pfeiffer, h.d., & tourte, g. (2012). twitter, information sharing and the london riots? bulletin of the american society for information science and technology, 38(2), 49-57. weeks, b.e., & garrett, r. k. (2014). electoral consequences of political rumors: motivated reasoning, candidate rumors, and vote choice during the 2008 u.s. presidential election. international journal of public opinion research. advance online publication. microsoft word buck.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): buck, a. (2014, october 22-24). building professional identities through social media. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. building professional identities through social media amber buck college of staten island, city university of new york social networking sites have changed the ways that individuals interact with others and represent themselves in both personal and professional contexts. there has been a great deal of research conducted on how young people use social media for social interactions (boyd, 2014; marwick, 2010; livingstone, 2010) and to maintain social relationships. there has been little research, however, on how young people represent and develop their professional identities online and through social network sites when they begin looking for professional employment. previous research has found that students have little guidance when it comes to managing their privacy settings and representing themselves professionally for the job market (buck, 2012). this paper investigates the use of social media to present professional work and interests through journalism students’ online professional portfolios and an integration of these identity representations through social networking sites such as twitter and linkedin. through an exploration of these students’ professional identity representations, this study considers how educators might assist students in entering distinct “communities of practice” (lave & wenger, 1991) in online spaces in order to consider themselves as developing professionals. professional identities and online spaces in a transitional space between school and the workplace, upper-level courses in students’ majors allow them to not only practice more advanced disciplinary work, but also allow students the opportunity to develop professional identities in these fields. lave and wenger (1991), casanave (2002), and prior (1998) discuss how students and writers become enculturated into professional fields through education and academic writing. through the discoursal construction of self, writers create new identities as they enter new communities of practice. social media provides individuals with new ways to connect with these communities of practice to develop identities for different audiences. perhaps as a way to avoid situations in which students are judged for social media content they upload, many are given advice to tighten privacy settings and remove photos when they begin to look for jobs as they leave school. social media use while actively applying for jobs is often seen through the negative: do not post publicly, do not share photos, and be careful about what information is available online. in her recent book, danah boyd (2014) notes that this type of paternalism does not give young people the opportunity to engage in thoughtful online interactions. similarly, this advice may help students consider the wider audiences of their content, but it does not allow students to use social media proactively, to connect with professionals in their fields, or to share their professional work with a wider audience. this paper investigates how students conceive of and represent their identities in online spaces. theoretical framework this project is informed by holland, lachicotte jr., skinner, and cain’s (1998) conception of a “practice theory” of the self, which argues for balancing sociocultural influences and individual agency. for these authors, identity is multiple and recreated in each moment, not based in inherent characteristics of an individual or dictated by a society. they do see identity as anchored in embodied categories, yet it is constantly negotiated through social activity and individual agency. these individual elements do not in and of themselves make an individual, but they are “living tools of the self” (28). the self is always embedded in social practice, and holland et al. see “sites of self” as always plural (p. 30). interactions between an individual and a group of people create what holland and her colleagues call “figured worlds,” defined as “social frames of meaning in which interpretations of actions are negotiated.” individuals represent themselves in relation to these figured worlds, and these representations are shaped by their conceptions of and interactions with the group. these figured worlds provide what holland et al. call a “space for authoring,” where an individual authors an identity that fits within that figured world, but is still based in that individual’s embodied experience. holland and her colleagues therefore see identity construction through this negotiation between an individual and a group. considering the profession in which a student is entering as a figured world allows faculty to assist students in conceiving of audiences and identities for professional spaces. methodology writing courses, particularly courses that focus on the professional writing students will be engaged in in their professional careers, represent ideal locations through which to guide students in representing professional digital identities, as paula boyd (2013) has argued. this study consists of in-depth interviews with students from an online journalism course i taught in spring 2013 and spring 2014. throughout this class, students represented professional work and interests on a wordpress blog and through twitter. they also developed professional online portfolios to showcase their work in the class. i collected digital texts (text & image screen capture) of 15 students' professional online identity representations from social network sites determined by the research participants, which included linkedin, twitter, and other sites. i also collected and analyzed participants' final online portfolios from the course. these texts were discussed in a semi-structured interview with each participant. follow up interviews were conducted six months after the initial interview to assess how students continued to develop their online professional digital identities after the course. the data was analyzed through open coding, and coding categories were derived through that data based in grounded theory. conclusions while analysis of this data is ongoing, students participating in the study reported that they had spent little attention considering their digital identities as journalists in online spaces. while one participant had a blog he updated regularly before enrolling in this course, many students took their first steps to considering their professional digital identities in this course. for many of these students, twitter was a work in progress. while they saw the importance of twitter in networking with other professionals in their field, they currently used the service to connect to peers. the course allowed them the opportunity to share their own professional work through this online platform, and they often maintained two accounts, one for professional purposes. through the online digital portfolios and linkedin profiles, students saw value in maintaining these online spaces in order to share their work more widely and to consider the possibilities for networking, promotion, and participation with other journalists online. references boyd, d. (2014). it’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens. new haven, ct: yale university press. boyd, p. (2013). online discussion boards as identity workspaces: building professional identities in online writing classes. the journal of interactive technology & pedagogy, 4. buck, a. (2012). life, learning, and literacy on the social network: digital participatory culture. diss. university of illinois, urbana-champaign, 2012. urbana, il. casanave, c.p. (2002). writing games: multicultural case studies of academic literacy practices in higher education. london: erlbaum. lave, j. & wenger, e. (1991). situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge up. livingstone, s. (2008). taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: teenagers' use of social networking sites for intimacy, privacy and self-expression. new media & society, 10, 393-411. marwick, a. (2010). to catch a predator?: the myspace moral panic. first monday, 13.6. retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/article/view/2152/1966 prior, p. a. (1998). writing/disciplinarity: a sociohistoric account of literate activity in the academy. mahwah, nj: erlbaum, 1998. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  kaiser,  jonas.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  countering  climate  change:  climate   skeptic  comments  in  the  german  networked  public  sphere.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th   annual  conference  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from   http://spir.aoir.org.   countering  climate  change:  climate  skeptic  comments  in   the  german  networked  public  sphere   jonas  kaiser alexander  von  humboldt  institute  for  internet  and  society climate  change  and  the  internet     even  though  manmade  climate  change  is  widely  agreed  upon  in  science  (anderegg,   prall,  harold,  &  schneider,  2010)  it  is  a  highly  polarizing  issue  both  off-­  and  online  with   climate  skeptics  on  the  one  side  and  the  mainstream  on  the  other.  this  is  especially   visible  in  a  country  like  germany  where  skeptics  are  a  small  minority  (metag,  füchslin,   &  schäfer,  2015)  that  have  formed  a  counterpublic  online  (kaiser  &  puschmann,  2016).   the  study  at  hand  is  looking  at  the  relationship  between  counterpublic  and  mainstream   in  the  networked  public  sphere  (benkler,  2006)  to  find  out  how  and  where  skeptics  are   trying  to  make  their  voices  heard  and  how  users  from  the  mainstream  react  to  that.  the   concept  of  counterpublics  posits  that  within  the  public  sphere  some  publics  are   marginalized  and  in  opposition  to  the  oppressing  hegemonic  discourse  (downey  &   fenton,  2003).  the  climate  skeptic  counterpublic  in  this  sense  refers  to  users  who  are   doubtful  or  skeptical  about  climate  change’s  existence  and/or  climate  science  (kaiser  &   rhomberg,  2015).  in  order  to  shine  a  light  at  this  ‘clash  of  publics’,  10,262  comments   from  4  news  sites  and  6  climate  blogs  have  been  manually  analyzed.       in  this  study  i  propose  that,  theoretically,  an  integration  of  counterpublics  within  the   networked  public  sphere  is  needed  to  better  understand  the  debates  within  comment   sections.  empirically,  i  suggest  that  these  debates  can  be  best  analyzed  by  looking  at   the  frames  involved  and  whether  counterpublics  are  included  or  excluded  in  the  debate   (toepfl  &  piwoni,  2015).  by  focusing  on  the  comment  sections  of  news  sites  as  well  as   climate  activist,  science  and  skeptic  blogs  this  study  accounts  for  different  and  yet   connected  publics  within  the  networked  public  sphere.  online  comments  are  an   especially  interesting  case  since  they  are  one  of  the  most  popular  forms  of  user-­ generated  content  and  yet  closely  connected  with  the  websites  or  blogs.  additionally,   studies  have  shown  that  counterpublics  can  ‘brigade’  comment  sections  to  make  their   messages  heard  (toepfl  &  piwoni,  2015)  and  that  comments  can  influence  the  readers’   perceptions  of  complex  issues  (anderson,  brossard,  scheufele,  xenos,  &  ladwig,   2013).       hypotheses   based  on  these  assumptions  three  hypotheses  are  tested:       h1:  climate  skeptics  will  be  overrepresented  (>10%)  in  the  comment  sections  of  the   mass  media.     h2:  climate  skeptics  will  adapt  their  frames  to  the  comment  section  by  using  the  less   controversial  climate  science  frames  in  the  mainstream  publics  and  the  more  denialist   frames  about  climate  change  in  their  own  counterpublic.     h3:  skeptics  will  be  excluded  from  the  mainstream  publics  by  unfriendly  reactions  from   mainstream  users  but  will  be  welcome  in  their  counterpublic.       method   in  order  to  analyze  the  relationship  between  counterpublic  and  mainstream  online  a   qualitative-­quantitative  content  analysis  of  10,262  comments  from  ten  comment   sections  was  conducted.  the  four  news  sites  (bild,  welt,  spiegel,  zeit)  were  chosen   due  to  their  active  forum  and  journalistic  stance  (conservative/liberal).  the  six  blogs   (eike,  science  skeptical,  klima  der  gerechtigkeit,  klimaretter,  klimazwiebel,   klimalounge)  were  identified  with  a  hyperlink  network  analysis  of  the  german  climate   discourse  (based  on  indegree  within  the  skeptic,  activist  and  scientific  clusters).  the   comments  were  scraped  during  the  three  ipcc  report’s  publications  in  2013  and  2014   (352  articles  in  36  days).  for  the  frame  analysis  i  adapted  kaiser  and  rhomberg’s   (2015,  p.  9)  list  of  skeptic  frames  for  online  comments.  additionally,  the  reactions  to   skeptic  comments  were  coded.  krippendorff’s  alpha  for  the  coding  was  >0.7  and  thus   satisfactory.       results  &  outlook   after  discarding  all  irrelevant  comments  (i.e.  those  that  did  not  refer  to  a  climate  issue)   there  were  4,425  comments  left.  within  these  comments  it  is  surprising  how  active   skeptics  are:  42.8%  of  all  relevant  comments  were  written  by  skeptics.  this  is  far  more   than  the  general  german  populace  with  10%  (metag  et  al.,  2015).  in  fact,  skeptics  were   overrepresented  in  every  comment  section  (except  for  klima  der  gerechtigkeit,  where   only  8  relevant  comments  were  written).  even  though  skeptics  are  less  active  in  the   mainstream  blogs  (between  12-­18%)  they  are  highly  active  in  the  mass  media  comment   sections  and  especially  so  on  the  conservative  sites  bild  (75%)  and  zeit  (77%)  which   can  almost  considered  counterpublic  free-­harbors  within  the  mainstream.  h1  can  thus   be  confirmed.     for  h2  i  looked  at  the  frames  that  were  being  used  and  whether  the  frame  usage   differed  between  the  comment  sections.  this  was,  however,  not  the  case  for  the  mass   media  comment  sections  that  were  very  similar  to  the  skeptic  site  eike.  only  on  zeit   (52.8%)  and  science  skeptical  (56.3%)  are  skeptics  promoting  doubt  on  climate   science  more  actively.  this  unclear  picture  is  also  true  for  the  mainstream  blogs.   indeed,  the  denialist  message  that  climate  change  does  not  exist  or  that  mankind  is  not   to  blame  was  promoted  in  every  comment  section  and  was  used  quite  often  (30%  of  all   skeptic  frames).  h2  has  thus  to  be  discarded.     when  looking  at  how  users  reacted  to  skeptics  the  main  result  is  that  they  chose  to   reply  and  argue  with  them.  over  50%  of  all  replies  were  replies  to  skeptic  users.  these   replies  were  mostly  either  corrective  (37%)  and  less  so  critical  (27%).  only  22%  of  the   comments  were  in  agreement  with  them.  this  goes  to  show  that  even  though  skeptics   were  very  much  more  active  than  mainstream  users  they  have  not  conquered  the   comment  sections  but  face  heavy  resistance.  this  is  true  for  all  comment  sections  –   even  the  skeptic  ones.  this  suggests  that  skeptics  are  not  the  only  ones  who  try  to   make  their  voice  in  a  somewhat  hostile  environment  heard.  the  hypotheses  that   skeptics  will  be  more  welcome  in  their  counterpublic  than  on  mainstream  sites  thus  has   to  be  discarded.     in  general,  this  study  shows  that  the  clash  between  the  skeptic  counterpublic  and  the   mainstream  is  quite  fierce  with  skeptics  brigading  the  mass  media  comment  sections   and  mainstream  users  countering  the  counterpublic  messages  on  skeptic  blogs.  at   aoir  theoretical  implications  and  further  results  will  be  presented.       references     anderegg,  w.  r.  l.,  prall,  j.  w.,  harold,  j.,  &  schneider,  s.  h.  (2010).  expert  credibility   in  climate  change.  proceedings  of  the  national  academy  of  sciences,  107(27),   12107-­12109.  doi:  10.1073/pnas.1003187107     anderson,  a.  a.,  brossard,  d.,  scheufele,  d.  a.,  xenos,  m.  a.,  &  ladwig,  p.  (2013).  the   “nasty  effect:”  online  incivility  and  risk  perceptions  of  emerging  technologies.   journal  of  computer-­mediated  communication,  n/a-­n/a.  doi:  10.1111/jcc4.12009   benkler,  y.  (2006).  the  wealth  of  networks  -­  how  social  production  transforms   markets  and  freedom:  sisu.     downey,  j.,  &  fenton,  n.  (2003).  new  media,  counter  publicity  and  the  public  sphere.   new  media  &  society,  5(2),  185-­202.  doi:  10.1177/1461444803005002003     kaiser,  j.,  &  puschmann,  c.  (2016).  alliance  of  antagonism:  counter�publics  and   polarisation  in  the  german�language  online  climate  change  discourse.  paper   presented  at  the  66th  ica  annual  conference,  fukuoka,  japan.       kaiser,  j.,  &  rhomberg,  m.  (2015).  questioning  the  doubt:  climate  skepticism  in   german  newspaper  reporting  on  cop17.  environmental  communication,  1-­19.   doi:  10.1080/17524032.2015.1050435     metag,  j.,  füchslin,  t.,  &  schäfer,  m.  s.  (2015).  global  warming’s  five  germanys:  a   typology  of  germans’  views  on  climate  change  and  patterns  of  media  use  and   information.  public  understanding  of  science.  doi:  10.1177/0963662515592558     toepfl,  f.,  &  piwoni,  e.  (2015).  public  spheres  in  πinteraction:  comment  sections  of   news  websites  as  counterpublic  spaces.  journal  of  communication,  65(3),  465-­ 488.  doi:  10.1111/jcom.12156   selected papers of internet research 16: the 16 th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): kalmus, v. (2015, october 21-24). ‘itime’ as a blessing or a curse: imaginaries of smartphone use and personal and social time among generation groups in estonia. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16 th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ‘itime’ as a blessing or a curse: imaginaries of smartphone use and personal and social time among generation groups in estonia veronika kalmus university of tartu, estonia the ontological problems of social time and space and their interconnectedness with social imaginaries and the related concepts have become an important stream in social sciences since the classic works of social constructivism in the 1970s. a new turn in this area was proposed by theorists of the information society interested in fundamental changes in spatial and temporal organization of the world induced by the penetration of digital technologies in all spheres of the global network society (castells 1996; lash 2002). recent theoretical elaborations have focused on problems related to acceleration of social time, time-space compression and (de)synchronization, offering models and critical insights concerning social, psychological and political implications of the speeding up of these processes, reaching beyond the capacity of human control and self-regulation (adam 2003; rosa 2005; scheuerman 2009; mückenberger 2011). a rapid advancement and diffusion of mobile media technologies, particularly smartphones, is considered as an evolution and intensification of the speeding-up processes that started to gather momentum in an earlier internet era of desktops. it has been claimed that ‘smartphoning creates a kind of “itime” that challenges the preinternet boundaries between public and private, day and night, work and leisure, space and time’ (agger 2011: 120). at the same time, ben agger (2011) has emphasized that these changes need to be analyzed dialectically – that is, in terms of upsides and downsides, the potential for further change, and inter-generational differences. in particular, he envisions a huge generational divide in social imaginaries of ‘itime’: while elders view it as a nightmare of ‘limitless accessibility and manic connectivity’, kids of today – the ‘iphone generation’ in agger’s terminology – experience this time as normal. although theoretical literature has paid a lot of attention to the importance of mobile digital media in shaping people’s perception of personal and social time, and in molding the patterns and rhythms of their everyday lives, little empirical research beyond media multitasking studies (see székely 2015, for an overview) has focused on these issues. this paper aims to contribute to filling this gap by focusing on people’s imaginaries of digital media technologies, particularly smartphones, and the relationships between those imaginaries and personal perception and use of time. more specifically, the paper endeavors to test empirically agger’s (2011) thesis that the social imaginaries of the normal social life in a smartphone era vary generationally. the paper employs data from the 5th round of the representative population survey ‘me. the world. the media’ (n=1,500), gathered at the end of 2014 in estonia. the postsocialist transition in estonia has been described as extremely radical, characterized by highly liberal transformation policies and economic reforms, and rapid technological changes. the speed of the diffusion of new information and communication technologies, however, has affected different social groups to a varying degree. as generations differ, due to dissimilar locations on life span, in their speed of adapting to rapid social changes, age has become one of the most significant markers of social and digital stratification (kalmus, talves & pruulmann-vengerfeldt 2013). in this context, inter-generational differences in time as resource and commodity, time management, and control over one’s time are especially meaningful. the analysis is based on a set of novel and original indicators, developed by the research team of the project ‘acceleration of social and personal time in the information society: practices and effects of mediated communication’ at the institute of social studies, university of tartu. firstly, the analysis focuses on a module consisting of 14 positive and negative statements regarding the use of smartphones, measured on a 5-point scale (5 – totally agree … 1 – totally disagree). the statements begin with the phrase ‘due to smartphones…’ examples include: ‘… it is possible to use time much more flexibly as i always have access to the internet’; ‘… my life is substantially more versatile as i can engage simultaneously in different activities and communicate with different people’; ‘… boundaries between work and leisure time disappear, it is impossible to disengage oneself from work’; ‘… it is impossible to really focus on anything’; etc. these questions were asked of people who had a smartphone (n=573). factor analysis was used to reveal underlying relationship patterns among these statements, presumably referring to imaginaries of smartphone use. the analysis (principal components, varimax rotation, and the criterion of eigenvalues over 1) provided a well interpretable 3-factor model:  factor 1 involves six positive statements (e.g. ‘…i have better opportunities to know the score of the events around me and in the world’), and can be labelled as expanding flexibility and diverse opportunities.  factor 2 comprises four critical statements (e.g. ‘… boundaries between public and private information disappear’); thus, we labelled it vanishing boundaries and foci.  factor 3 involves four statements about social belonging and communication (e.g. ‘… i feel that i belong to a certain group; i never feel myself alone’), and was named changing social identity and communication conventions. subsequently, the levels of internalization of those imaginaries (measured with factor scores) among different age groups were compared. factor 1, expanding flexibility and diverse opportunities, was most characteristic of the youngest group (15-20 year olds), followed by a very small group (n=8) of 71-79 year-old smartphone users, and 21-30 and 31-40 year olds. a bit surprisingly, the youngest respondents were also most cognizant of the vanishing boundaries and foci in the smartphone era, being followed by the oldest group (aged 71-79) and 21-30 year olds, and then by all age groups in a linear way. changing social identity and communication conventions were most strongly perceived by the oldest smartphone owners, followed by the youngest respondents and 21-30 year olds. secondly, the paper scrutinizes the distribution of indicators and derived variables (indices), measuring time perception and time use strategies (e.g. surplus time; perceived lack of time; overwork; multitasking; etc.) in age groups. surplus time (when one has nothing to do with one’s time) had the highest mean value among the youngest group, followed by 71-79 year olds, while respondents in the age range of 21-50 suffered most from perceived lack of time and overwork. strategies to use one’s time more efficiently appeared to be correlated with age in a fully linear fashion: the younger the people, the more they reported both multitasking and endeavors to rearrange one’s time use. lastly, the paper analyses correlations between the factors of the imaginaries of smartphone use and the indices of time perception and time use. factor 1, expanding flexibility and diverse opportunities, was positively correlated with multitasking and time spent on hobbies, and negatively with general lack of time as well as surplus time. this suggests that people who see smartphone as a means of enhancing their time use flexibility and increasing the range of opportunities and activities, tend to make a more efficient and rich use of their time. factor 2, vanishing boundaries and foci, was positively correlated with multitasking, endeavors to rearrange one’s time use, general lack of time, and surplus time. these relationship patterns imply that smartphone users, who are more critical towards the ‘itime’ condition, tend to be still struggling to find more efficient ways of time management. in conclusion, the findings suggest that opinions about the role and functions of smartphones in molding everyday life form coherent and meaningful social imaginaries, internalized to a different degree by generation groups. furthermore, the strategies of managing personal time as an unequally distributed resource vary, to a large extent, between age groups, and are, to a degree, related to the social imaginaries of smartphones. acknowledgements the preparation of this paper was supported by the grants from the estonian research council (etf 8527) and the estonian ministry of education and research (iut 20-38). references adam, b. (2003) reflexive modernization temporalized. theory, culture & society, 20(2), pp. 59-78. agger, b. (2011) itime: labor and life in a smartphone era. time & society, 20(1), pp. 119–136. castells, m. (1996) the rise of the network society. oxford and malden, mass.: blackwell publishers. kalmus, v., talves, k., pruulmann-vengerfeldt, p. (2013) behind the slogan of “estate”: digital stratification in estonia. in: ragnedda, m., muschert, g. (eds.) the digital divide: the internet and social inequality in international perspective. london: routledge, pp. 193-206. lash, s. (2002) critique of information. london: sage. mückenberger, u. (2011) time abstraction, temporal policy and the right to one’s own time. kronoscope, 11(1-2), pp. 66-97. rosa, h. (2005) the speed of global flows and the pace of democratic politics. new political science, 27(4), pp. 445-459. scheuerman, w. (2009) citizenship and speed. in: rosa, h., scheuerman, w. (eds.) high-speed society: social acceleration, power and modernity. philadelphia: penn state university press, pp. 287-305. székely, l. (2015) the typology of multitasking activity. european journal of communication, 30(2), pp. 209-225. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 lokot, t. (2017, october 18-21). #iamnotafraidtosayit: stories of sexual violence as everyday political speech on facebook. panel presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. #iamnotafraidtosayit: stories of sexual violence as everyday political speech on facebook tetyana lokot, school of communications, dublin city university the debate about the power and influence of networked publics often focuses on largescale political events, activist campaigns and protest activity – the more visible forms of political engagement. on the other hand, digitally mediated activism is often questioned and sometimes derided as a lesser form of dissent, as it is easier to engage in, highly affective, and offers few assurances of sustainability of the change it calls for. but what about everyday political speech online, where social media platforms can contribute to a personalisation of politics (highfield 2016)? can social media users express their views online and make a difference? this paper argues that networked conversations about everyday rights and affective stories about shared experiences of injustice, underpinned by the affordances of social media platforms for sharing and discussing information and participating in everyday politics, can emerge as viable forms of networked activism and can have real impact on the status quo of an issue, both in the digital sphere and beyond it. in early july of 2016, nastya melnychenko, a ukrainian activist and journalist, published a post on her facebook page where she called on women to share stories of sexual harassment and sexual violence without shame. she also shared a few of her own stories, and added a hashtag, #янебоюсьсказати (ukrainian for #iamnotafraidtosayit). in the post, melnychenko wrote: i want us, women, to talk today. to talk about the violence that most of us have lived through. i want us to stop making excuses and saying “i was wearing gym clothes during the day, and still got pawed.” we don't need to make excuses. we're not to blame, those who violate us are always to blame. i am not afraid to speak out. and i do not feel guilty. (melnychenko 2016) melnychenko’s original post garnered 385 shares, over 1,700 likes and over 300 comments (as of february 2017). the hashtag itself also gained traction, emerging as an example of a discursive social media ritual (highfield 2016), with hundreds of women and men in the ukrainian and russian-speaking segments of facebook using it to share their own stories of sexual assault and domestic violence (lokot 2016). the online “flashmob” also saw wide coverage in mainstream media outlets, and attracted a number of comments from public figures, experts, local and international civil society organizations, and human rights defenders, further revealing that such discursive rituals take place in hybrid media systems (couldry 2012, chadwick 2013). in this paper, i analyze the over 3,500 public facebook posts with the #янебоюсьсказати hashtag and its variations in ukrainian and russian (as the two dominant languages in the ukrainian internet space) collected between 4 july 2016 and 31 december 2016 using discovertext software. the analysis seeks to evaluate the affective qualities of networked storytelling (papacharissi 2016), to gauge the role of these online expressions as political acts as they create a mediated feeling of connectedness, and to reveal the affordances and limitations of facebook as a networked publics platform for impactful everyday political speech. a close reading of the discourses present within the collection of facebook texts, coupled with elements of quantitative and qualitative content analysis, reveals that the topic of sexual violence, which still remains a kind of taboo for the ukrainian public, was thrust onto the front stage through frank, personal, lived stories shared freely by facebook users, the majority of them women. these facebook-based network publics afforded the issue – and the ritual discourse around it – to be persistent, highly scalable and replicable (boyd 2010), leading to a higher awareness of the context and the stories shared within it. the use of a focused set of hashtags in a ritualistic pattern also afforded users more opportunities for metavoicing (majchrzak et al. 2013) in reacting to personal stories through commenting and sharing. as papacharissi notes, while technologies help network publics, “it is our stories that connect us” (papacharissi 2016, p. 307). although the hashtag campaign did not directly generate any legislative or regulatory reforms, it shifted the tone of public debate about sexual harassment from abstract and shameful to personal and commonplace, while at the same time underscoring that such acts and the society’s tolerance for them is not a valid status quo. the cumulative collection of the affective narratives shared on the hashtag also promoted a more personal and a more political view of gender activism and women’s rights areas that still meet with a lot of skepticism in ukrainian society. the lived stories of the flashmob participants directly connected the issues of women’s rights and gender justice with everyday embodied experiences familiar to many in the country, leading facebook users to feel a closer affective connection with the lived stories and to rethink their views on gender roles, justice, domestic and sexual violence, and human rights in the everyday context as issues that are acutely political. these networked stories and experiences shared on facebook became an expression of the political “within the personal”, which highfield (2016) notes is a key characteristic of mundane political exchanges on social media as they are not always explicitly political. the discourse generated by the status updates on the facebook hashtag and by other texts in the hybrid media system also confirms oates’ (2013) claim that in societies with weak state support for basic human rights, citizens often turn to the internet and social media to debate and campaign for their “everyday rights”, which encompass not only fundamental human rights such as freedom of expression or gender equality, but also more routine things such as healthcare, social security and access to justice. networked publics in this regard emerge as discursive spaces that through affective storytelling offer a reframing of personal issues as political and human right-related ones. references baym, n. k., & boyd, d. (2012). socially mediated publicness: an introduction. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 56(3), 320-329. boyd, d. (2010). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites (ed. papacharissi, z.), routledge, 39-58. chadwick, a. (2013). the hybrid media system: politics and power. oxford university press. couldry, n. (2012). media, society, world: social theory and digital media practice. polity. highfield, t. (2016). social media and everyday politics. polity. melnychenko, n. (2016, july 4). untitled [facebook status update]. retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/nastya.melnychenko/posts/10209108320800151 lokot, t. (2016, july 5). #iamnotafraidtosayit: ukrainian social media users break the silence on sexual violence. global voices. retrieved from https://globalvoices.org/2016/07/05/iamnotafraidtosayit-ukrainian-social-media-usersbreak-the-silence-on-sexual-violence/ oates, s. (2013). revolution stalled: the political limits of the internet in the post-soviet sphere. oxford university press. papacharissi, z. (2016). affective publics and structures of storytelling: sentiment, events and mediality. information, communication & society, 19(3), 307-324. microsoft word gibbs-et-al.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): gibbs, m., nansen, b., carter, c., & kohn, t. (2014, october 22-24). selfiles at funerals: remediating rituals of mourning. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. selfies at funerals: remediating rituals of mourning martin gibbs university of melbourne bjorn nansen university of melbourne marcus carter university of melbourne tamara kohn university of melbourne abstract in this paper we examine the controversies surrounding the posting of online ‘selfies at funerals’ that sprung up in late 2013. we argue that the controversies reveal a form of ‘boundary work’ though which participants and publics are negotiating the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate online practices, as well as legitimate and illegitimate responses to death and the rituals associated with death. in gieryn’s writing, ‘boundary work’ refers to the rhetorical labour scientists engage in to demarcate legitimate science from illegitimate non-science. we use the term to refer to the rhetoric used by participants to position online practices as acceptable or not, especially those associated with grief, bereavement and other matters deserving of gravitas and respect. woven through these debates are competing threads in which evolving forms of online and youthful expression become entangled with established notions of respectful mourning. the emergence of the funeral selfie selfie (informal): a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website: occasional selfies are acceptable, but posting a new picture of yourself every day isn’t necessary (oxford dictionary) in the year that ‘selfie’ beat ‘twerk’ to become the oxford dictionary’s word of the year for both the us and the uk (oxford dictionaries 2013), the journalist/commentator jason feifer created an internet firestorm with his tumblr blog ‘selfies at funerals’. on the 29th of october, feifer posted 20 images culled from instagram, facebook and twitter; the results of “social media curiosity” and a search of the terms ‘selfie’ and ‘funeral’ (feifer 2013a) in a bid to mock, provoke and incite. he succeeded and outrage ensued. virulent condemnation of these “narcissistic” and “gratuitous” photographs flooded online media. some sought to understand these photographs as natural, poignant, if callow, responses to grief (clark-flory 2013). yet, others wondered what has happened to our humanity, and if social media has emptied everything, even death, of meaning and gravitas. many questioned the implications for contemporary society if the outlet of choice for grief and mourning was a funeral selfie (huffington post 2013). and then on december 10th there was an image captured of president obama posing for a selfie taken by the danish prime minister, helle thorning schmidt, along with the british prime minister david cameron, at the memorial service for nelson mandela. the debate was re-ignited, spreading into the mainstream press. fury, flames and corresponding calls for sober reflection ensued. feifer (2013b) declared “obama has taken a funeral selfie so our work here is done”. forgotten, however, was the context. the photo was taken amidst the carnival atmosphere of a stadium full of south africans honoring their departed leader with dancing, singing and laughing (schmidt 2013). yet, many in the world’s social and mass media chose to lift the photograph out of context in order to vilify and condemn.1 we argue that the controversy that briefly raged around selfies at funerals is a form of ‘boundary work’ (gieryn, 1999) through which commentators across varied old and new media platforms are negotiating the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate online practices associated with death, grieving and memorialization. in gieryn’s work the term refers to the rhetorical labour scientists engage in to demarcate science from nonscience and to mark one side of the boundary as legitimate and the other as illegitimate. in this paper we use the term to refer to the rhetoric used by participants to position the practices of taking ‘selfies at funerals’ and sharing them online through social media as relatively legitimate or illegitimate activities. through this boundary work, various media publics and commentators are challenging and attempting to constrain emergent forms of online practices both specific to death, and more generally. controversies surrounding selfies at funerals i would like to say that these brats will be running the country in about 20 years time but actually they won't because most of them are too stupid to even get into college today. we are absolutely 100% doomed as a society and i am praying hard for that 70-mile wide asteroid to obliterate us in 30 years. only good can come of it.2 for some, selfies at funerals was the epitome of youthful narcissism and selfishness. they reflected a generation that “has been conned into thinking obsessive, endless, 1 while important to mention in the context of the selfies at funerals topic for the remainder of this working paper we will leave aside the specific debates that surrounded 2 all unattributed quotes are sourced from publically available comments on online news articles and blog posts. mindless (moronic) photographing of oneself is akin to living”, or “a whole generation of disrespectful, whiney, irresponsible teenagers”. less vitriolic, some felt that “kids these days share too much online”, or dismissed the practice: “aren't selfies just the latest kiddie 'thing'?” while this controversy was often attributed to the generation of millennials, others attributed it to youth in general; “is there any standard of behavior and common sense that our youth can grasp without having every detail explained to them as though they are 5 or 6?” other blamed the parents; the ones “too busy looking at their own silly phones. what a sad society we have become”, or by claiming that “my child would get a hand upside the head if i ever saw her doing this”. within commentaries of this kind, the selfie was most frequently seen as a sign of “a shallow and attention-seeking personality” rather than a legitimate expression of grief or an appropriate mourning practice. for many of those engaging in the debate, from journalists to a blogging public, the act of taking a selfie at a funeral lacked respect, for both the dead and the grieving. it was “just disgraceful, tasteless, and hurtful to those who lost their loved one.” they argued, “broadcasting pics, or tweets, or yapping on a phone is totally alien to the purpose of a funeral.” respect for the deceased was commonly invoked by those critical of the funeral selfie: “you turn up to a funeral to show respect to the dead and the grieving, showing the narcissism to take photos of yourself and publish them on the internet isn't showing respect”. lack of respect for the family was also criticized as trivialization of grief, “it is highly disrespectful. not of the deceased but for the family and loved ones of the deceased. they are hurting and grieving and these clueless youngsters are trivializing their grief.” many commentators, however, defended the selfie-takers, challenging “the sheer nerve of telling someone who has just lost a loved one that they are 'self-absorbed twits' for not playing the part of mourner correctly”. similarly, another writer critically suggested that commenters “stop trying to police other people's mourning”, pointing out that one of the criticized teenagers had just lost a father. some saw the selfie as an expression of life, vitality and as a means of reassurance when faced with the profound reality of death, similar to “so many funeral clichés, like drinking too much or falling into bed with a fellow griever” (clark-flory 2013). contextualizing the culture of funeral selfies others frame the problem more broadly to suggest it is not simply a product of youth, but rather belongs to a contemporary western and increasingly secularized culture that has disengaged from death and emptied the grieving process of established rituals: “our cultural traditions have failed them, and selfies at funerals are one of their only outlets to ritual and mourning in the age of the smartphone” (doughty 2013). commentators also suggested that selfies were part and parcel of the new and emerging practices associated with mourning across all media platforms; practices that are the natural outgrowths of contemporary life for many. while the “ephemerality of online mourning” seems to be “mocking death's enormity” the turn to social media for mourning and to express grief has occurred because social media is “increasingly where we go to process our inner thoughts and feelings about pretty much everything” (waldman 2013). at times, the debate was extended to the topic of any kinds of photos at funerals. some argued “it’s inappropriate to take any photos at funerals”, whereas others maintained “pictures are not just for happy events but for recording memories.” the latter position was justified as, “a funeral is often a gathering of a large part of the family. photographs at this time would be a valuable record of a family's history.” tied into this debate was a filament of historical awareness, invoking the fact that “the victorians took photos of the family with the deceased” and that some form of capturing or preserving the events in material form has often been historically part of funerary practices, such as the plaster death mask. conclusion: remediating ritual "selfies at funerals" – regardless of feifer's humorous intentions – is actually scathing cultural commentary... (doughty 2013) the emergence of selfies at funerals has served as a locus for debates about the legitimacy of emerging practices associated with social media. the profundity of death has helped to bring into sharp relief the seemingly, to some, vacuity of contemporary forms of expression offered through social media. many commentators on ‘selfies at funerals’ were quick to criticize the character of the people involved for being narcissistic and lacking proper respect and tended to focus on the problematic character of ‘today’s youth’; an age-old conundrum. however, for others who attempted to understand rather than dismiss this practice, there was recognition that social media such as twitter, instagram and facebook are integrated into many people’s everyday lives and are thus ‘natural’ avenues for personal expressions of grief. given the waning of institutionalized mourning rituals in contemporary western societies (margry & sánchez-carretero 2011; wouters 2002), disentangling the vitriol from the vernacular in expressions of digital culture are needed if we are to adequately comprehend how funeral rituals are being remediated. acknowledgments this research was supported by funding from australian research council discovery project (dp140101871), and the institute for a broadband-enabled society at the university of melbourne. references clark-flory, t. (2013) in defense of funeral selfies, salon, 31 october, retrieved from http://www.salon.com/2013/10/30/in_defense_of_funeral_selfies/ doughty, k. (2013) a passionate defense of selfies at funerals, jezabel, 30 october, retrieved from http://jezebel.com/a-passionate-defense-of-selfies-at-funerals1455095190 fiefer, j. (2013a). obama's funeral selfie is a fitting end to my tumblr – selfies at funerals. the guardian, wednesday 11 december 2013. retrieved from: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/11/obama-funeral-selfietumblrmandelateens/print fiefer, j. (2013b). selfies at funerals, tumblr blog, retrieved from: http://selfiesatfunerals.tumblr.com/ gieryn, t. (1999). cultural boundaries of science: credibility on the line. chicago: the university of chicago press. huffington post (2013). funeral selfies are the latest evidence apocalypse can't come soon enough, the huffington post, 29 october, retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/29/funeralselfies_n_4175153.html margry, p. and sánchez-carretero, c. (eds) (2011) grassroots memorials: the politics of memorializing traumatic death. berghahn books, new york, ny. oxford dictionaries (2013) oxford dictionaries word of the year 2013: selfie is named oxford dictionaries word of the year 2013, oxford university press. retrieved from http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/press-releases/oxford-dictionaries-word-of-theyear-2013/ schmidt, r. (2013). the story behind "that selfie". afp correspondent: behind the new. retrieved from: http://blogs.afp.com/correspondent/?post/selfie waldman, k. (2013). selfies at funerals: why it's ok to mourn on social media, sydney morning herald, 4 november, retrieved from http://www.smh.com.au/comment/selfiesat-funerals-why-its-ok-to-mournon-social-media-20131104-2wvqj.html wouters, c. (2002). the quest for new rituals in dying and mourning: changes in the we-i balance, body & society, 8(1): 1-27. microsoft word walton.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): walton, m.n. (2014, october 22-24). pavement internet and digital invisibility in the marikana massacre. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. pavement internet and digital invisibility in the marikana massacre marian nicole walton university of cape town in many parts of africa, the term ‘pavement radio’ (from the french radio trottoir) has been used to describe forms of colloquial political talk in african towns and cities, wherever popular unofficial discussion of current affairs takes place, extending into popular media (ellis, 1989; nyamnjoh, 2005. wasserman, 2010). these informal political conversations are extended by mobile phones. beyond the welldocumented sites of ‘arab spring’ revolts, mobile communication helped the emergence of local citizen journalism in southern africa. (mare, 2013). in south africa, facebook is used by a growing and influential group and is making a mark on local politics (hydeclarke & walton, 2013). inequality operators despite this flowering of popular uses of mobile internet, digital invisibility and exclusion has an equally important influence on the public sphere. while access to phones is widespread (90% of households), most handsets are cheaper feature phones using expensive prepaid airtime.(statistics south africa, 2013). these are key ‘digital materialities’ (leonardi, 2010) shaping participation in this context. the cost of mobile communication often effectively prohibits participation (banks, 2010; kreutz, 2010). high prepaid data costs mean that cloud-based ‘affordances’ can be unaffordable (walton & leukes, 2013). messaging apps, free bluetooth transfers and sns are used within embodied ecologies (walton, hassreiter, marsden, & allen, 2012). here they extend the forms of popular discourse associated with ‘pavement radio’, but patterns of sharing and interaction do not always conform to northern norms of ‘networked individualism’ (rainie & wellman, 2012). given the shifting infrastructure available, we can talk of a ‘pavement internet’ where internet protocol and mobile data may or may not always be freely available, but where messaging and media files circulate in cheap and free, often local interactions, responding to local communicative norms. marikana and digital invisibility the marikana massacre provides a case study of subaltern refusal of digital individualism and network gatekeeping. on 16 august 2012 , south african police shot and killed thirty four mineworkers who had embarked on a wildcat strike marikana. online though, miners’ voices were conspicuous by their absence. rather than relying on ‘likes’, memes or youtube clips, miners drew on oral traditions of villages in the eastern cape and of the union movement. shared experiences, traditional rituals, and the threat of violence, both internal and external, further strengthened strikers’ unity.(ledwaba, 2013). during a predecessor strike at impala platinum mine, a video had gone viral on phones and dvd showing a (staged) scene of scabs being forced to strip naked and toyi toyi (chinguno, 2013) the strikers’ mobile phones are mentioned regularly in accounts of the strike, but remained switched off while the men congregated on wonderkop. strike leader mgcineni ‘mambush’ noki enforced the rules no walking around or talking on phones.(the star, 2012) some journalists were allowed to take photographs and ‘interview’ the crowd via megaphone, but only once vetted by leaders. journalists were also not allowed to carry their phones. strikers preferred anonymity and even noki was initially known to journalists only as ‘the man in the green blanket’.(saba, 2013). rather than a simple ‘digital divide’, several layers of network exclusion (tongia & wilson, 2007) are evident at wonderkop.. the strikers’ network gatekeeping tactics constituted a refusal of networked individualism while maintaining unity and coordinated action and information. despite widespread availability of mobile phones and a 3g network at marikana, access was limited, perhaps because given the strike, cash was even more scarce than usual. rather than posting their commentary online, miners sent free ‘please call me’ messages to journalists (mosamo, 2013). disconnected from networked communication and media alike strikers’ perspectives were poorly represented. social media repeated the stories of ‘pack journalists’ (duncan, 2012) who gravitated towards easily accessible, english speaking sources. conclusion this case study suggests explanations for the conspicuous absence of citizen media in reports of the deaths of 34 miners at marikana. despite the growing importance of pavement internet in south africa, commodified network infrastructure and local discursive organisation curtail popular appropriations of mobile internet for public discourse. the case study suggests how intangible infrastructure such as network tariffs constitutes a key digital materiality which plays a role in shaping online participation and digital invisibility. strikers also resisted networked individualism at marikana, showing both the power and the price of other modes of organisation. references banks, k. (2010). social mobile: empowering the many or the few? in s. ekine (ed.), sms uprising: mobile phone activism in africa (pp. 32–39). cape town: pambazuka. bosch, t. (2010). digital journalism and online public spheres in south africa. communicatio: south african journal for communication theory and research, 36(2), 265–275. doi:10.1080/02500167.2010.485374 chinguno, c. (2013). marikana massacre and strike violence post-apartheid. global labour journal, 4(2), 160–166. duncan, j. (2012). marikana and the problem of pack journalism. sabc news.com. retrieved august 24, 2013, from http://www.sabc.co.za/news/a/00f7e0804cfe58899b00bf76c8dbd3db/marikana-and-the ellis, s. (1989). tuning in to pavement radio. african affairs, 88(352), 321–330. hyde-clarke, n., & walton, m. (2013). african media and politics. journal of african media studies., 5(2), 115–8. kreutz, c. (2010). sms uprising: mobile phone activism in africa. in s. ekine (ed.), mobile activism in africa: future trends and software developments (pp. 17–36). cape town: pambazuka. ledwaba, l. (2013). guns and spears: setting the stage. in f. dlangamandla, t. jika, l. ledwaba, s. mosamo, a. saba, & l. sadiki (eds.), we are going to kill each other today (pp. 13–28). cape town: tafelberg. leonardi, p. m. (2010). digital materiality? how artifacts without matter, matter. first monday, 15(6). mare, a. (2013). a complicated but symbiotic affair: the relationship between mainstream media and social media in the coverage of social protests in southern africa. ecquid novi: african journalism studies, 34(1), 83–98. mosamo, s. (2013). in the line of fire. in f. dlangamandla, t. jika, l. ledwaba, s. mosamo, a. saba, & l. sadiki (eds.), we are going to kill each other today: the marikana story (pp. 72–85). cape town: tafelberg. nyamnjoh, f. (2005). africa’s media, democracy and the politics of belonging. london: zed books. rainie, l., & wellman, b. (2012). networked: the new social operating system. cambridge, ma: mit press. saba, a. (2013). the man in the green blanket. in f. dlangamandla, t. jika, l. ledwaba, s. mosamo, a. saba, & l. sadiki (eds.), we are going to kill each other today: the marikana story (pp. 29–42). cape town: tafelberg. statistics south africa. (2013). mid-year population estimates 2013. retrieved august 01, 2013, from http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/p0302/p03022013.pdf the star. (2012, september 6). no word on “green blanket” man. the star. tongia, r., & wilson, e. j. (2007). turning metcalfe on his head: the multiple costs of network exclusion. in proceedings of the 35th telecommunications policy research conference (tprc 2007)), vienna, virginia, september 29. vienna, virginia. walton, m., hassreiter, s., marsden, g., & allen, s. (2012). degrees of sharing : proximate media sharing and messaging by young people in khayelitsha. walton, m., & leukes, p. (2013). prepaid social media and mobile discourse in south africa. journal of african media studies, 5(2), 149–67. wasserman, h. (2010). tabloid journalism in south africa: true story! bloomington: indiana university press. wasserman, h. (2011). mobile phones, popular media, and everyday african democracy: transmissions and transgressions. popular communication, 9(2), 146– 158. doi:10.1080/15405702.2011.562097 selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): kniep, ronja. (2016, october 5-8). . paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ronja kniep wzb berlin social science center introduction technology and the practices of intelligence agencies have long been closely intertwined. during world war ii, the intelligence community encouraged the invention of computers in its effort to decrypt and access the communications of foreign enemy states (corera, 2015). it was out of this effort that the intelligence alliance ‘ukusa’ between the us-american and the british intelligence services was born as early as in 1943. today, this alliance forms the so-called ‘five eyes’ together with the foreign intelligence agencies of canada, australia and new zealand, who joined the circle of the national security agency' s (nsa) ‘second party partners’ shortly after in 1946. until today, the core of this agreement has been the development of signals intelligence (sigint) capabilities, i.e. the process of accessing, collecting and analysing of electronically transmitted communications. during the period of the cold war, western security actors wished to more efficiently surveil the soviet union. hence , around 1982, another multilateral intelligence alliance was formalised which exists until today: a secret club called the ‘sigint seniors europe’ (sseur) (cf. rosenbach & stark, 2014, p. 366). this multilateral network is comprised of the ‘five eyes’ and a selection of european intelligence agencies. the series of internal nsa documents that has been published since 2013 has revealed the identity of the sseur’s member states1. the documents also offer insights into the interaction, the institutional setting and the practices of the highly secretive sigint community and they inform about the modalities of biand multilateral intelligence alliances. i examine these sigint alliances with a focus on the sseur and i interpret the findings with regard to the nexus of technology and transnational intelligence communities. the paper makes a conceptual and an empirical contribution to recent 1 sseur members are the five eyes nations (australia, canada, new zealand, united kingdom and united states) and the following third party partners: belgium, denmark, france, germany, italy; netherlands, norway; spain, sweden (first-ever formal sigint development, 2010). 2 debates on surveillance, and it adds to theorising socio-technical developments related to the internet. on the conceptual level, the paper argues that pierre bourdieu’s field theory, and specifically didier bigo’s application of it to transnational fields, provides a useful heuristic to analyse the internet’s role in the transnational field of intelligence. on an empirical level, the paper proposes to combine the analysis of internal nsa files, witness statements made by intelligence personnel and historical research in order to shed a light on previously secret intelligence communities that go beyond the ‘five eyes’. it shifts the focus from the practices of single agencies to their embeddedness in transnational fields. in addition, the paper illuminates what we have learned about the activities of european intelligence agencies since the ‘snowden revelations’ in june 2013. method and data it is vital but at the same time challenging to study secretive organisations (cf. monahan & fisher, 2015). this paper advocates that academia should use and make sense of the data made publicly available by whistleblowing, but under the condition of reflecting on the data’s selectivity, ethicality, and authenticity. this paper draws on two main sources, the former being composed of leaked material: internal nsa files and witness statements by personnel of the german foreign intelligence service, the bundesnachrichtendienst (bnd). publications based on historical archives complement and contextualise the findings of the qualitative document analysis (e.g. frost & gratton, 1994; aid & wiebes, 2013; corera, 2015). the internal nsa reports were accessed by the author via the searchable database provided by the american civil liberties union (aclu)2. the search mask makes it possible to select those documents that provide information on foreign intelligence partnerships in general, the actors involved in european networks (e.g. sseur, bnd, dgse), and the joint programmes conducted by the ‘five eyes’ together with third party partners in europe (e.g. rampart-a, eikonal, orangecrush). the keywords were identified in an iterative process of reading nsa documents as well as news coverage, and by examining the institutional structures of the different intelligence agencies. yet, for the purpose of understanding transnational intelligence alliances, the information made available through the database remains fragmented. like most leaked documents, the nsa files are highly selective, not least because the picture of alliances is drawn through the lens of the nsa. in order to address this aspect of selectivity, the paper also draws on witness statements by personnel of the bnd. here, the analysis focused on the statements made by (former) employees of the division ‘technische rungaufkl ’ (ta) who were invited as witnesses to an inquiry panel by the german government3. the division ta is responsible for sigint, and the analysis of the nsa files provided evidence that it is the direct partner unit of the nsa in both bilateral and 2 in june 2013, the guardian had published the first series of documents released by the former nsa subcontractor edward snowden. the aclu has collected all documents that have been published since 2013 in one archive. 3 in 2014, the german government established a committee of inquiry which was tasked with investigating communication activities, and how the german bnd has been involved for the period from 2001 onwards. 3 multilateral sigint agreements. all transcripts of witness statements in the public part of the hearings have been made accessible by the blog netzpolitik.org, and partly via the platform wikileaks. the world of secret intelligence as a professional field of struggle semi-autonomous fields, e.g. journalism, art or politics, are the product of historical differentiation and are basically small worlds governed by their own ‘ rules of the game’ (bourdieu & wacqant, 1992, p. 127). this analogy of games, invoked by bourdieu, highlights important assumptions of field theory: the field’s structure and its dynamics are shaped by struggles among the players, who share a collective belief in the game’s meaning, a common illusio that the game is worth playing (bourdieu, 1996, p. 360). in the intelligence game, actors jointly but antagonistically struggle over the prerogative of interpretation related to security threats. in this struggle, power relations are defined by the agencies’ competencies in terms of access to data and communications (‘ informational capital’), besides other forms of capital like personnel and financial resources. yet, actors in a field do not only compete over capitals. the very definition of what is at stake in the field is contested. dominant players, i.e. actors with a relatively high amount of (symbolic4) capital, shape the rules that are considered to be legitimate or as given in the intelligence field. the agencies’ shared sense of providing a crucial service in the fight against crime and terror contributes to the field’s specific illusio. fields differ with regard to their degree of autonomy, i.e. the degree of domination by external forces. while journalism, for example, can be considered a weakly autonomous field because of its structural dependence on the market and its audience, mathematics is a strongly autonomous social space because of very specific rules and a highly exclusive expertise. like in mathematics, participants in the intelligence field hardly discuss concrete practices with anyone outside their peers. the habit of secrecy facilitates the intelligence field’s autonomy, as internal practices and interpretations are mostly exchanged within a very limited circle in the same social universe. in addition, the right to secrecy makes it harder to challenge intelligence agencies’ claim to hold the truth about security threats. thus, the special right to secrecy potentially increases their symbolic capital vis-vis less secretive organisations in the security domain. analysing intelligence communities as fields has at least two advantages. firstly, by describing intelligence as a socially constructed and contingent social space which is shaped by specific institutional histories, the sociological theory counters the narrative that the surveillance practices of intelligence agencies are simply a natural response to a given technological development. secondly, field theory offers an analytical perspective that does not demonise (nor heroise) intelligence agencies, while it maintains a critical potential. rather than framing the intelligence field as a homogenous alliance that is jointly struggling against terrorism, or vice versa as a united front 4symbolic capital refers to the prestige, reputation or fame of certain actors in a field (bourdieu, 1991, p. 230) power that can be exercised only if it is recognized, that is, misrecognized as arbitrary (ibid., p. 170). 4 infringing privacy rights, the notion of a field uncovers internal struggles and competitions among intelligence services and potentially other security actors. like other professional fields, the intelligence field is a site of bureaucratic infighting among actors with different resources. thus, field theory illuminates that surveillance practices are the product of both internal struggles and processes of the field’s autonomisation. the surveillance practices and the specific rules they follow may well be criticised. but they are better understood in the light of characteristic field dynamics and not as products of rational choice or conspiracy. changing the rules of the game? the internet and the transnational intelligence field in the following, i briefly discuss selected results of the analysis in the light of two assumptions which characterise the role of the internet in the intelligence community as a transnational, bourdieuian field: prerogative of interpretation related to security threats. like in other professional fields, the commercialisation of the internet in the 1990s has challenged established practices in the intelligence field. the interception of internet communication travelling via fibre-optic cables turned out to be more complex than the interception of satellite communication, and the sheer volume of data required new ways of collection and analysis. despite these challenges, the analysis of leaked nsa files shows that the programmes aimed at the global surveillance of satellite communication (such as echelon) have been complemented by interception programmes that target fibre-optic cables with and via third party partners (e.g. rampart-a). in the self-proclaimed second ‘golden age of sigint’, access to internet communication has become an essential motive for the agencies’ partnerships with private companies and other intelligence agencies. the co-operations between the nsa and the european states that have been growing or maintained on a high level in recent years are structured by the goal of accessing internet cables and the exchange of technologies for large-scale analysis. this is the case for the alliances with germany, sweden, the netherlands, france and a relatively new sigint programme with poland. as the analysis of witness statements suggests, for the german bnd, the joint programme with the nsa called ‘eikonal’ that was initiated in 2002, has been ‘ the door opener’ for cable access. yet, the analysis also shows that the technological development is not sufficient to characterise intelligence partnerships and their practices. historical ties between agencies as well as expertise on high-priority targets, e.g. in the form of relevant language skills or regional analytical expertise, are also important criteria for the establishment of sigint alliances. 2. the autonomisation of the transnational intelligence field sets rules for the internet. the institutionalisation of a transnational field of security professionals has led to the autonomisation of ‘ (…) “specific experts” acting for a certain cause’ (bigo, 2011, p. 253). thus, professional guilds of (in)security, including their ideas and practices, are 5 characterised by a certain degree of isolation “from the professionals of politics and the public” (ibid.). an important finding of the document analysis is that this is specifically the case for the transnational, secret sigint alliances, where ‘specific experts’, the ‘ sigint seniors’, negotiate the exchange of sensitive data and the technologies for accessing and analysing them. this specific group of actors in the intelligence field has formalised agreements, introduced practices and interpreted national law independently from politicians. however, the (semi-)autonomously produced interpretations and missions potentially influence both lawand policy-making related to the internet as well as the internet as a socio-technical institution, acknowledging that ( ) the problem of integrating the machine in society is not merely a matter of making social institutions keep in step with the machine: the problem is equally one of altering the nature and the ford 1934, p. 367). field theory elucidates that the ‘ actual needs of the community’ are field-specific. they are often inward-looking and to a certain degree detached from other fields of the society. while pierre bourdieu tended to see a field’s autonomy as being something desirable, the application of field theory to the intelligence community illuminates that autonomously produced practices also imply normative challenges. references aid, m. m., & wiebes (2013). secrets of signals intelligence during the cold war: from cold war to globalization (studies in intelligence). hoboken: taylor and francis. bigo, d. (2011). pierre bourdieu and international relations. power of practices, practices of power, international political sociology, 5(3), p. 225–258. bourdieu, p. (1991). language and symbolic power. cambridge: harvard university press. bourdieu, p., & wacquant, clo j. d. (1992). an invitation to reflexive sociology. chicago: university of chicago press. bourdieu, p. (1996). the rules of art: genesis and structure of the literary field. meridian. stanford calif.: stanford univ. press. corera, g. (2015). intercept: the secret history of computers and spies. london: weidenfeld & nicolson. first-ever formal sigint development (2010, october 25). retrieved from https://www.aclu.org frost, m., & gratton, m. (1994). spyworld. inside the canadian and american intelligence establishments. toronto, ont.: doubleday canada. 6 monahan, t.; fisher, j. a. (2015). strategies for obtaining access to secretive or guarded organizations, journal of contemporary ethnography, 44(6), p. 709-736. mumford, l. & langdon, w. (1934). technics and civilization. new york: harcourt. rosenbach, m. & stark, h. (2014). der nsa-komplex. edward snowden und der weg in die totale überwachung (german). deutsche verlags-anstalt. microsoft word aoir2016_feedbackloop_deanon.docx selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 loosen, w., sandvig, c. bastos, m.t., puschmann, c., hasebrink, u., hölig, s., merten, l., schmidt, jh., kinder--kurlanda, k., weller, k. (2016, october 5-8). caught in a feedback loop? algorithmic personalization and digital traces. panel at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. panel proposal: caught in a feedback loop? algorithmic personalization and digital traces wiebke loosen christian sandvig marco t bastos cornelius puschmann uwe hasebrink sascha hölig lisa merten jan--hinrik schmidt katharina kinder--kurlanda katrin weller summary algorithmically calculated decisions about relevance and news play an increasingly important role in how we perceive the world. this panel introduces new theoretical and methodological approaches that explore algorithmic public spheres and the digital trace data that enables them, focusing on shifts in editorial decision making, user choices in algorithmically driven environments, the epistemological implications involved in researching these topics, and suggesting potential remedies for the normative problems of a contemporary computer-generated view of the world. the terms “algorithm”, “big data”, “digital traces” are increasingly used as convenient blanket labels to address a range of developments which reshape our understanding of fundamental concepts such as “public”, “relevance”, and “news”. algorithms working on large amounts of userand system-generated data construct spheres of public communication, for example, by identifying and connecting users with compatible attributes, interests, and activity patterns (e.g. beam, 2014), or by filtering content based on algorithmically constructed indicators of relevance (e.g. eslami et al., 2015). thus, it is increasingly important to investigate the practices, mechanisms, power structures, and dynamics of such algorithmic public spheres. approaches to combine the study of the construction and inscribed mechanisms of algorithms with a perspective on their societal consequences already include the idea of “algorithmic accountability“ (diakopoulos, 2014), “algorithmic ideology“ (mager, 2012), or “algorithmic harms” (tufekci, 2015). if, as ananny (2015) argues, algorithms possess the ability to convene people by inferring associations and the power to suggest probable actions, this also makes necessary a reformulation of questions that are at the heart of research on journalism and editorial decision making: how do algorithms define relevance? what are the criteria behind their selection mechanisms and how “objective” are these criteria? there are also novel methodological challenges: how are these mechanisms to be studied if we do not have direct access to the algorithms involved, but can only infer their working from digital traces that are made visible or accessible? and, more generally, how should digital traces be interpreted at scale? this panel explores the whole spectrum of algorithmic construction principles, editorial decision making, and user choices in digital environments while acknowledging their interrelatedness: author 1 asks what design intervention is necessary to ensure that algorithmic systems allow later scrutiny by a third party and sees the answer in a “glassboxing” approach. author 2 explores the tension between editorial decision making and automatized processes of news filtering, applying the method of the ‘algorithm audit’ to characterize the consequences of recommender systems on news consumption. author 3 introduces the concept of the “twitter friend repertoires”, using digital traces to compare the information management of different groups of users in an algorithmically driven environment. finally, author 4 discusses the epistemological dimension of researching algorithms which are often based on big data, examining challenges posed by the quality, provenance and explanatory power of these new types of data. the panel thus follows algorithms from their origin in design to different application scenarios and finally deconstructs the data sources that underlie them. paper 1: glass-boxing the algorithmic public sphere christian sandvig, university of michigan in recent years, media systems of all kinds have been transformed to include automatic selection as a basic part of their operation. news, advertising, the features of a computer’s user interface, prices, content recommendations, and more are chosen and even produced dynamically by computer programs (ziewitz, 2016). at the same time, most of the non-media infrastructure underpinning contemporary us society has become increasingly mediated by the internet: infrastructure has been upgraded to a “smart” iteration that features embedded computing power, telecommunications links, interactive interfaces, and real-time control (graham & marvin, 2001). at the center of these developments sit algorithms (meaning a process or set of rules followed by a computer) that provide functions like relevance judgments, social sorting, credit scoring, matchmaking, market segmentation, personalization, and the management of traffic flows from ads to cars. making media and infrastructure newly computational has made these systems more powerful, but also much more opaque to public scrutiny and understanding (pasquale, 2015). what little has been discovered about the operation of these systems provides cause for alarm. indeed, the shift to computation may be disastrous for fairness, democracy, and even safety, wholly transforming much of mediated communication. scholars have argued that along with any benefits, algorithmic systems are also fostering widespread fraud; illegal discrimination by race, gender, disability, and age; false advertising; payola; anticompetitive practices; and political cynicism; while also making society more unequal and degrading the quality of news and information in systematic ways. nonetheless, creating different algorithmic systems that involve either changing the motives of multinational corporations or funding, designing, and launching a viable public or private alternative seem like herculean tasks. but before an alternative future can be proposed, we first need some understanding of what algorithmic systems are actually doing now. yet even this more modest redress also seems unworkable: algorithmic systems are often proprietary, dynamic, and complex, therefore an “algorithmic literacy” or “transparency” agenda could founder on the basis of impracticality alone (pasquale, 2011). what is to be done? algorithm audits some hope may be found in a relatively obscure social scientific research method: the audit study (mincy, 1993). audit studies – also called correspondence studies – are field experiments in which (in one common design) a fictitious correspondence is created purporting to be from a job applicant seeking employment, targeted at a real employer. in these studies, two or more identical resumes are prepared. “the race…of the fictitious applicant is then signaled through one or more cues” such as the fictitious applicant’s name, which might be manipulated between the two conditions of “emily” and “lakisha” to signal “caucasian” vs. “african-american” (pager, 2007). this is then used as a measure of discrimination to determine if identically qualified applicants receive differential treatment based on race. instead of a “direct” audit of employers or landlords—the classic targets for this research design—researchers have proposed that the normative concerns that have been raised involving algorithms can be studied via audits of online platforms (author 1 et al., 2015). they have recommended a program of research to audit important internet-based intermediaries (e.g., youtube, google, facebook, zillow, netflix, linkedin, and so on) to identify harmful or worrying algorithm. crucially, the algorithm audit does not require the cooperation of the platform. just as a landlord audit study cannot determine why a landlord is racist, an algorithm audit cannot actually reverseengineer an algorithm. however, it can indicate harmful behavior. glass-boxing the algorithm algorithm audits have now discovered (for example) that gmail scrutinizes e-mail text for signs of depression (lecuyer et al. 2014), women are less likely to be shown ads for high-paying jobs (datta et al. 2015), and the locations of national borders are personalized on online maps (soeller et al. 2016). despite these advances in auditing, attempts to audit algorithms have also encountered significant challenges: anti-hacking laws, expense, complexity, attempts by platforms to avoid auditing, and unclear professional incentives and standards for researchers and auditors. in this paper, i review the normatively worrying harms discovered by prior work on algorithmic curation, then ask: what design intervention is necessary in each case to ensure that the problem is easily discoverable by a third party? in engineering an alternative to “black-boxing” is “glass-boxing.” to “glass-box” a component, the designer makes decisions at the product’s creation that allow its operation to be better understood later. this glass-boxing approach would acknowledge that the literal reverse engineering of algorithmic systems is likely impossible, and embrace the idea that not everything must be known in order to discover a harmful consequence. while glassboxing is useful for auditors, it can also have significant benefits on individual users of algorithmic systems (eslami et al 2016). i argue that certain inputs and particular internal processes have a normatively privileged position and must be designed at the outset to permit later scrutiny. glassboxing presumes that there is some public-interest infrastructure (such as researchers, governments, nonprofit organizations, or user collectives) that can implement later examination of glass-boxed platforms, and repercussions for any trouble discovered (competitive pressure, negative public option, or prosecution). implementing a glassboxing regime may be onerous, but i argue that it is the least difficult and most practical solution to the negative features of “calculated publics” (gillespie, 2012). paper 2: decentralized but coordinated: news readerships across online social networks and issues of personalization marco t. bastos, city university london cornelius puschmann, hans bredow institute for media research editorial decision making is undergoing considerable changes due to the automation of journalism and the continuous feedback of social media audiences (author, 2012). on the one hand, newsrooms struggle to strike a balance between news that editors understand to be important and news that appeal to their digital readership. on the other hand, aggregated social media data allow newsrooms to incorporate algorithms that can both generate and target news stories to specific audiences, a tension that challenges established notions of journalism as a service to the public (van dalen, 2012; bright & nicholls, 2013). this embattled architecture of digital journalism requires news outlets to develop strategies to catch audience attention and attract readership beyond the limits of their websites (dos reis et al., 2015), often by incorporating algorithms to filter, republish, and select news items. the ensuing debate has led journalism scholars to argue that algorithmic personalization of media content limits users’ choices by trapping them in filter bubbles, and that the application of algorithmic filtering methods to news has adverse effects on the quality of public debate (couldry & turow, 2014, pariser, 2012). some scholars suggest that personalization has the potential to be ‘corrupt’ (author, 2014), for example when the relation between user-generated content and advertisements is deliberately blurred by a platform provider, a problem that arguably could also impact news. interestingly, this criticism is noted and discussed not only in media and communication research, but also in fields that actively develop recommender systems, such as computer science and information systems research. for example, zhou et al note the risk that “more and more users will be exposed to a narrowing band of popular objects, while niche items that might be very relevant will be overlooked” (2010, p. 4511), and suggest measures for countering this effect, and zeng et al contend that “though they are helpful in filtering information, recommendation algorithms may impose reinforcing influence on the system, by guidance to one’s choices which influences subsequent recommendations and hence choices of others” (2012, p. 18005). however, such academic considerations may carry little overall weight in relation to applications driven by economic arguments. personalization is not restricted to national media outlets like the new york times (us), the guardian (uk), or spiegel online (germany). in fact, tabloid journalism has been subjected to a much faster transition from a context of strong editorial identity to content curation that is both user-generated and created by paid staff members. while quality press can still ring-fence news editors’ choices in determining what is in the public interest and should be published, viral news sites have blossomed out of social networking technologies and algorithmic news filtering aimed at a fragmented audience with varying degrees of media sophistication. in contrast to quality press, in which news editors are only beginning to contend with the potential balkanization of readership according to interests of like-minded groups, viral websites explore crowd mechanism and develop controversial stories by meticulously testing potential content on the website and upholding or removing material according to the number of clicks retrieved from early testers. as upworthy races for the social media attention, the team breaks down the content into “seeds” and “nuggets”—content to feature on the site and a list of 25 potential headlines that are streamlined for “click testing” (rohani, 2014). the distribution and potential success of any viral news site depends directly on peer-topeer engagement on social networking sites, which then feeds into the variables that calibrate the algorithmic decisions that decide which content should appear on top, which items should receive only mild exposure, and which content should not appear at all. this talk consists of two components that investigate editorial and algorithmic decisions regarding the relevance of journalistic content. in the first part, we examine a set of news articles (n=16,829) retrieved in october 2012 by querying the public apis of the new york times and the guardian and by tracking the diffusion of each article on the following social media platforms: twitter, facebook, google+, delicious, pinterest, and stumbleupon. the findings show significant differences in topical preferences between news editors and social media users, with social media users favoring opinion pieces, along with national, local, and world news. we discuss these differences in terms of headline composition and sentiment polarity of news headlines that are likely to have boosted the online outreach of news articles. secondly, we address the feedback effects introduced into news personalization by means of longitudinal platform data from spiegel online, a major german news website. drawing on the method of an algorithm audit (author et al., 2014), we aim to characterize the influence of recommender systems on news consumption on the platform, focusing particularly on how to interpret ambiguous signals, such as user clicks, on individual news items. the data collected from the new york times, the guardian, and spiegel online shed light on the changing architecture of journalism and its struggle to reinvent itself in the digital age. although the strategies employed by news outlets to boost the reach of news items show varying degrees of algorithm adoption, they can be broadly classified in an ordinal scale from human gatekeeping functions towards decentralized, distributed, and eventually automatized processes of news filtering. paper 3: twitter friend repertoires: inferring sources of information management from digital traces jan--hinrik schmidt, hans bredow institute for media research wiebke loosen, hans bredow institute for media research uwe hasebrink, hans bredow institute for media research sascha hölig, hans bredow institute for media research lisa merten, hans bredow institute for media research twitter is a prominent example of a media service in which professional, participatory, and algorithmic modes of filtering and distributing content converge. most related research has followed a “broadcast communication” paradigm, i.e. looked at practices, networks and consequences of twitter as a tool to disseminate information. by contrast, few studies analyze twitter as a tool for information management even though seeking and filtering information is usually acknowledged as an important motivation for twitter use, especially among journalists (e.g. broersma & graham, 2013). in this paper we aim to contribute to an audience-related perspective by adapting the concept of “media repertoires” from audience research to the study of twitter. we propose the concept of “twitter friend repertoires”, which refers to distinct patterns in the combination of accounts people follow on twitter. the concept of “twitter friend repertoires” shares basic assumptions with the broader idea of “media repertoires” (author 3 & domeyer, 2012), namely a user-centered perspective originating in audience research, an interest in the relationality of repertoire components, and an attempt to capture the entirety of the media elements a person chooses to use. whereas media-centered audience research considers the usage of single media, the starting point for a repertoire-oriented approach is the specific combination of different media as arranged by a single user. as such, twitter is seen as a platform which contains countless individual “channels” (i.e. the twitter accounts and their individual timelines) and in itself represents a repertoire notion as twitter users actively decide which accounts to follow from a vast choice of possibilities. this selection forms the twitter newsfeed from which s(he) receives her/his information on twitter. in this way users compose their individual “friend repertoire”, and thus, their sources. given the diversified structure of twitter users, a description of friend repertoires that exclusively relies on the level of single accounts would not allow for a clear overview of the underlying structure of this repertoire. instead these repertoires should be described along broader categories of friends. in order to identify and describe twitter friend repertoires we have started to develop a database that provides categorical information on certain accounts, e.g. if they belong to a media company, if they are an individual journalist, or if they are one of many different kinds of organizations, resulting in a (continuously updated) collection of the twitter accounts belonging to publicly relevant speakers in germany (i.e. media outlets, members of parliament and political parties, major companies, celebrities etc.). our methodology involves extracting the twitter friends of a chosen group of users and checking these against the list (at the time of writing) of about 7,200 previously identified accounts. this combination of qualitative (database) and data-driven approaches (twitter data scraping) creates the necessary context to understand patterns of information repertoires. in this way, enriched data makes it possible to calculate individual metrics for each user in the sample, e.g. “share of publicly relevant accounts among all friends” or “number of top politicians vs. celebrities followed by the user”. on an aggregate level, characteristics of the whole sample (e.g. “average share of publicly relevant accounts”) as well as groups based on shared patterns of twitter repertoires (e.g. contrasting users who follow a disproportionate number of media accounts vs. users who follow mainly personal accounts) can be identified. this approach allows us to move beyond a focus on twitter’s “structural layers of communication” (bruns & moe, 2014) that characterizes the majority of twitter research by focusing instead on hashtag-driven issue publics or interpersonal communication via replies. to achieve a more holistic approach, we enrich twitter data with data that include relevant categories to better understand what kind of sources users and certain user groups follow and combine within their information repertoires. moreover, the identification and comparison of certain user groups (e.g. journalists vs. politicians) and their twitter friend repertoires could, to some extent, serve as a “substitute variable” for the independent variables that are often absent but are needed to describe differences in twitter use and shared patterns and practices of information management more closely. in order to demonstrate the insights produced by our approach we will present a comparison of the twitter friend repertoires of five different groups of users, representing different contexts as well as different degrees of professionalism of use: 1. candidates for a regional parliament, 2. audience members of a public service tv newscast, 3. audience members of a national newspaper, 4. members of the german 2014 world cup football team, and 5. political journalists. the first four of these groups have been analyzed in a previous study with data collected at the end of 2014 (author, 2015; author, in review) which demonstrated distinct patterns in users’ twitter friend repertoires. for example, political candidates and football players both exhibit a very pronounced in-group-orientation, i.e. their twitter friend repertoires show a marked preference for accounts from other candidates and top politicians or, in the case of football players, for other professional players. the repertoires of the two groups of media audience, in contrast, exhibit preferences for other media-related accounts, with the tv news audience on twitter tending to follow other broadcast-related accounts, while the newspaper audience tends toward other print-related accounts. further data will be collected in summer 2016 to provide a more up to date and comprehensive dataset of twitter friends for the five groups of users for the resulting article and its presentation at the conference. we regard these analyses as only the first steps towards theory-driven repertoire-oriented twitter research: an important step towards a better understanding of these repertoires would be to identify the twitter friend repertoires for a random sample of all (german) twitter accounts which could serve as a benchmark to compare other samples against. future research could also provide a more thorough analysis of individual patterns which could lead to typologies of twitter users according to their twitter friend repertoires; with the changes of twitter friend repertoires over time; and with the relation between twitter friend repertoires and actual tweeting behavior. yet another line of research might complement such quantitative approaches with more qualitative instruments, for example, by interviewing twitter users about their practices regarding twitter as a tool for information management. paper 4: analysing digital traces: the epistemological dimension of algorithms and big data katharina kinder--kurlanda, gesis leibniz institute for the social sciences katrin weller, gesis leibniz institute for the social sciences algorithms that sort and rank information are starting to change public spheres, e.g. by filtering news or by individualizing content. often these algorithms’ work is based on various types of ‘big data’. online big data can be user-generated content as well as activity, trace or location data collected from various internet platforms. algorithms thus observe, count and sort highly heterogeneous and transient data. big data promises to allow new insights into social and political processes, making it possible to analyze events in situ, at an unprecedented level of detail, and very close to actual everyday situations. big data, however, also poses various challenges in analysis due to its size and heterogeneity. we are therefore also witnessing a renewed discussion of methods and epistemology, particularly within the social sciences (e.g. kitchin, 2014; frické, 2014). topics being discussed are, for example, whether opinions voiced online are representative, or how the explanatory power of datasets can be assessed if data access is restricted by platform providers (boyd & crawford, 2012). while researchers are developing new analytic approaches, big data’s quality, provenance and explanatory power are decidedly uncertain. researchers are only starting to begin to understand the complexities of big data and how they may be taken into account in analyses in meaningful ways. there is therefore a high degree of epistemological uncertainty when working with big data. the algorithms that shape public spheres are therefore operating on a tenuous and often uncertain basis that researchers are only beginning to understand and that can be opaque to users. in addition, algorithms rely on dynamic content that may change exactly due to internet users (as content generators) being presented with the results of the algorithmic calculations. based on a qualitative study of social media researchers this paper addresses challenges posed by the uncertainty and heterogeneousness of big data for the study of algorithms that are shaping public spheres. dependencies of algorithms and big data in creating epistemological challenges are explored. we conducted observations and 40 semi-structured interviews with researchers at several international conferences. interviewed researchers were working with data gathered directly from social media platforms such as facebook, twitter, reddit or youtube. we explored researchers’ reflections of everyday research practices when engaged in data collection, analysis, and publication. we aimed to capture social media researchers’ a) motivations for working with social media data, b) their methodological approaches, and c) the perceived challenges, pitfalls and drawbacks. we explored various practical aspects around ‘dealing with data’ in social media research which enabled us to capture researchers’ everyday problem-solving. our study saw researchers finding individual ways to address epistemological challenges in order to realize social media big data’s potential for researching social processes on and off the web. (author, 2015). in particular, interdisciplinary collaborations were seen to allow a pooling of skills and resources but then again posed new methodological and epistemological challenges (author, 2014). here we are focusing on three areas of epistemological concern in big data research: 1.) accessibility and quality of these data, 2.) new methodologies, and 3.) research ethics. first, we found that social media researchers are currently to a considerable degree concerned with challenges of data access. challenges are posed by technical restrictions applied to proprietary social media data. these restrictions force researchers to iteratively adjust research questions on the basis of data availability, often leading to inductive approaches to be applied regardless of the initial research question or epistemological viewpoint. researchers also need to possess (or be able to make use of others’) technical skills. an example is the ability to write python scripts for gathering and cleaning data in order to interact with apis through which platform providers such as twitter make data available to researchers. so although researchers may be generally aware of the need for strategies to improve research quality and validity, they often do not yet find themselves in a position to implement such strategies as they are consumed with the struggle for data access. our study thus revealed a considerable impact of external constraints on researchers’ attempts to achieve validity and better research quality. second, big data methodologies often defied traditional ways of achieving research validity, for example, through reproducibility. to allow the analysis of large amounts of data, approaches are being found that allow to find patterns in large datasets, often by automatically analyzing content (e.g. filtering for frequencies of predefined keywords) or by quantifying activity patterns (e.g. counting frequencies of interactions between users or between users and platform features such as ‘likes’ on facebook). these approaches require data to be cleaned and processed in order to allow for analysis to take place. spam may need to be filtered out, mistakenly included posts or information may need to be deleted, and other mistakes ‘cleaned’ in order to allow processing. there are currently no agreed upon rules or standards for how to make transparent cleaning decisions in order to ensure that research counts as sound and valid. third, from a research ethics perspective, researchers were seen to be challenged by the lack of users’ informed consent to studies based on online content (author, 2014) and by the fact that they are dealing with data that is often difficult if not impossible to anonymize (zimmer, 2010). while formally consent may have been given by users agreeing to a platform’s terms of service, users may not be in fact be aware of or even want to be part of research projects (hutton & henderson, 2015). as more and more ‘embedded researchers’ are starting to cross the lines between academic and nonacademic data science, public negotiations are taking place of what researchers and platform providers should and should not be allowed to do with user data and how far they are allowed to infringe upon spaces such as facebook which users may perceive as a personal and private space. the exploration of these three areas not only enables a description of the shifting epistemological foundations of big data, but also allows critically questioning the algorithms that rely on these data in order to construct public spheres. given the uncertainties around big data, how reliable are the results of algorithmic calculations? the observation of algorithms also poses challenges in itself as algorithms introduce an element of recursiveness to public spheres. various actors in the most diverse situation react out of different interests to being presented with the results of algorithmic calculations. they may even try to influence algorithms in specific ways. the results of algorithmic analyses are thus presented to internet users and then influence user behavior. as traces of user behavior are exactly what algorithmic analyses are based on, recursive feedback-loops of actions and reactions to algorithms emerge. how to address the challenges posed not only by the changeability and heterogeneity of big data but also by the interaction between big data and algorithms to future research of user behaviors remains an open challenge. references ananny, m. (2015). toward an ethics of algorithms: convening, observation, probability, and timeliness. science, technology & human values, 1–25. doi: 10.1177/0162243915606523 author (2014). corrupt personalization. social media collective research blog. retrieved from http://socialmediacollective.org/2014/06/26/corruptpersonalization/ author, hamilton, k., karahalios, k., & langbort, c. (2014). "auditing algorithms: research methods for detecting discrimination on internet platforms." paper presented to "data and discrimination," a pre-conference of the 64th annual meeting of the international communication association, seattle, wa, usa author (in review). twitter friend repertoires: introducing a methodology to assess patterns of information management on twitter. author (2015, october). twitter friend repertoires researching patterns of selective connectivity. paper presented at the empiricist’s challenge: asking meaningful questions in political science in the age of big data, mannheim, germany. author, & domeyer, h. (2012). media repertoires as patterns of behaviour and as meaningful practices: a multimethod approach to media use in converging media environments. participations. journal of audience & reception studies, 9 (2), 757–779 author (2012). (re-)discovering the audience: the relationship between journalism and audience in networked digital media. information, communication & society. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2012.665467 author (2014). i always feel it must be great to be a hacker! the role of interdisciplinary work in social media research. in: websci’14. acm web science conference. proceedings of the 2014 acm conference on web science, 91-98. new york: acm. author (2014). ‘i love thinking about ethics!’ perspectives on ethics in social media research. in: selected papers of internet research (spir). proceedings of ir15 boundaries and intersections. author (2015). uncovering the challenges in collection, sharing and documentation: the hidden data of social media research? in proceedings of the ninth international aaai conference on weblogs and social media (icwsm), standards and practices workshop. beam, m.l a. (2014). automating the news. how personalized news recommender system design choices impact news reception. communication research, 41(8), 1019–1041. doi: 10.1177/0093650213497979 boyd, d.,& crawford, k. (2012). critical questions for big data. information, communication & society, 15(5), 662–679. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2012.678878 bright, j., & nicholls, t. (2013). the life and death of political news: measuring the impact of the audience agenda using online data. social science computer review, 32(2), 170–181. doi: 10.1177/0894439313506845 broersma. m., & graham, t. (2013). twitter as a news source. how dutch and british newspapers used tweets in their news coverage, 2007–2011. journalism practice, 7(4), 446–464. doi: 10.1080/17512786.2013.802481 bruns, a., & moe, h. (2014). structural layers of communication on twitter. in: weller, k., bruns, a., burgess, j., mahrt, m. & puschmann, c. (eds.) twitter and society. peter lang, new york, pp. 15-28. couldry, n., & turow, j. (2014). advertising, big data, and the clearance of the public realm: marketers’ new approaches to the content subsidy. international journal of communication, 8, 1710–1726. datta, a., tschantz, m. c., & datta, a. (2015). “automated experiments on ad privacy settings: a tale of opacity, choice, and discrimination.” proc. privacy enhancing technologies (popets). diakopoulos, n. (2014). algorithmic accountability reporting. on the investigation of black boxes. tow center for digital journalism. retrieved from http://towcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/78524_tow-center-reportweb-1.pdf. dos reis, j. c., benevenuto, f., olmo, p., prates, r. o., kwak, h., & an, j. (2015). breaking the news: first impressions matter on online news. corr. eslami, m., rickman, a., vaccaro, k., aleyasen, a., vuong, a., karahalios, k., hamilton, k., & author 1. (2015). i always assumed that i wasn't really that close to [her]: reasoning about invisible algorithms in the news feed. proceedings of the 33rd annual sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems, association for computing machinery (acm):153–162. eslami, m., karahalios, k., author 1, vaccaro, k., rickman, a., hamilton, k., & kirlik, a. (2016). first i "like" it, then i hide it: folk theories of social feeds. proceedings of the 34rd annual sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems, association for computing machinery (acm): page numbers tbd frické, m. (2014). big data and its epistemology. journal of the association for information science and technology, 66 (4), 651–661. gillespie, t. (2012). can an algorithm be wrong? limn, 2. retrieved from http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0jk9k4hj graham, s., & marvin, s. (2001). splintering urbanism: networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. new york: routledge. hutton, l., & henderson, t. (2015). ”i didn’t sign up for this!”: informed consent in social network research. in proceedings of the ninth international aaai conference on weblogs and social media (icwsm), 178–187. kitchin, r. (2014). big data, new epistemologies and paradigm shifts. big data & society, april-june 2014: 1–12. kulshrestha, j., zafar, m. b., espin noboa, l., gummadi, k. p. & ghosh, s. (2015, may). characterizing information diets of social media users. paper presented at the 9th international aaai conference of web and social media. (icwsm 15). oxford: aaai lecuyer, m., ducoffe, g., lan, f., papancea, a., petsios, t., spahn, r., chaintreau, a., & geambasu, r. (2014). xray: increasing the web's transparency with differential correlation. proc. usenix security. mager, a. (2012). algorithmic ideology: how capitalist society shapes search engines. information, communication and society, 15 (5), 769–787. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2012.676056 mincy, r. (1993). the urban institute audit studies: their research and policy context. in fix and struyk, eds., clear and convincing evidence: measurement of discrimination in america. washington, dc: the urban institute press, 165–86. pager, d. (2007). the use of field experiments for studies of employment discrimination: contributions, critiques, and directions for the future. the annals of the american academy of political and social science, 609(1), 104–33. parmelee, j. h. (2014). the agenda-building function of political tweets. new media & society, 16 (3), 434–450. doi: 10.1177/1461444813487955 pariser, e. (2012). the filter bubble: how the new personalized web is changing what we read and how we think. new york: penguin. pasquale, f. (2011). restoring transparency to automated authority. journal on telecommunications and high technology law, 9(235). pasquale, f. (2015). the black box society: the secret algorithms that control money and information. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. rohani, a. (2014). upworthy and the race for your attention. retrieved from https://urbantimes.co/2014/04/upworthy-attention-news/ soeller, g., karahalios, k., author 1, & wilson, c. (2016). mapwatch: detecting and monitoring international border personalization on online maps. proceedings of the 25th annual world wide web (www) conference, association for computing machinery (acm): page numbers tbd. tufekci, z. (2015). algorithmic harms beyond facebook and google: emergent challenges of computational agency. colorado technology law journal, 13(2), 203–217. van dalen, a. (2012). the algorithms behind the headlines: how machine-written news redefines the core skills of human journalists. journalism practice, 6(5-6), 648– 658. doi: 10.1080/17512786.2012.667268 zeng, a., yeung, c. h., shang, m., & zhang, y. (2012). the reinforcing influence of recommendations on global diversification. epl (europhysics letters), 97, 18005–18011. doi:10.1209/0295-5075/97/18005 zhou, t., kuscsik, z., liu, j.-g., medo, m., wakeling, j. r., & zhang, y.-c. (2010). solving the apparent diversity-accuracy dilemma of recommender systems. proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america, 107(10), 4511–4515. doi:10.1073/pnas.1000488107 ziewitz, m. (2016). governing algorithms: myth, mess, and methods. science, technology & human values 4(1), 3–16. zimmer, m. (2010). but the data is already public: on the ethics of research in facebook. ethics and information technology 12(4),313–325. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 digital contact tools in professional life: what governs the choice? håkan selg uppsala university, department of information technology introduction during the 1990’s the use of e-mail and mobile phones for personal communication became commonplace in the nordic countries. starting in the professional environment it was diffused into the private sphere. in the early 2000’s a similar development of text messages (sms) and instant messaging (im) could be observed, however, with a reversed pattern of diffusion: usage became popular first in the private sphere, particularly among younger people, and then was spread into professional life. a pilot study in sweden (selg 2010) based on 20 expert interviews indicated emerging new contact patterns in working life. in contrast to the media picture, focusing on controversial uses of social network sites (‘facebook’) by young employees during working hours, the experts downplayed the significance of such conflicts. on the contrary, the situation in both public and private organisations was characterised by intense experimentation with the new contact tools in order to adapt them to daily tasks. as examples, sms’s were replacing phone calls for shorter messages, and im was used to maintain low frequent background dialogue in parallel with other task being carried out. several interviewees indicated the emergence of new ‘codes of conduct’. in this process users were exploring the kind of contacts and the contexts in which a particular tool was considered suitable, and when it should be avoided. given the importance of role expectations in professional life, the questions arose as to how the new tools should be implemented and, considering the wide range of contact tools available, which particular tool should be used in which situation(s)? an online survey was carried out among members of swedish computer society1, many of them with educational background in computer sciences and active in ict related professions. the survey questions related to the use of contact tools such as voice calls (fixed-line telephony, mobile telephony and voip2), and text (e-mail, sms 1 sw. dataföreningen 2 voice over internet protocol suggested citation (apa): selg, h. (2015, october 21-24). digital contact tools in professional life: what governs the choice?. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. and im) in different contexts: professional or private context, contacts with well-known or unknown persons, aim of contact, etc.3 the study was carried out in 2010—2011. the funding bodies4 required a rapid dissemination of the results to professionals nationwide by the use of a variety of information channels, and in collaboration with relevant stakeholders. accordingly, in addition to the written report (selg 2011b) the findings were presented in various media such as printed press, broadcasting and television, and through lectures at professional gatherings. the aim of this article is to present the results obtained to an academic audience. for this purpose i have arranged the study that was originally directed to practitioners on a national level to comply with the scientific requirements on form and content on an international level. however, scientific work and publishing is far from a homogeneous matter, not least in social sciences (see e.g. nowotny, scott, and gibbons 2001). but if i am to suggest some impressions about how my original report differs from most aoirarticles i would indicate the following:  problem-driven rather than theory-driven study  research questions that derive from practitioners’ experiences rather than from scholars’ suggested future research  methodology matters and processual content such as tables are allocated in appendix rather than in the focus of the arguments  vernacular language in recomposing the study i have rearranged and translated the contents of the original report into english, and in addition, i have attempted to provide a more ambitious framing of the study together with a literature review. the article is structured as follows: 1. the framing in which the study and its associated research questions is projected against a background of organisational and technological change and the impact of this dynamics on crucial aspects on interpersonal communication. 2. a literature review, thus carried out a posteriori, and as a consequence with no impact on the research questions of the study, but of interest for the discussion of the results obtained. 3. presentation of the study: aim of knowledge, research questions and methods including the sampling rational, questionnaire, respondents and features of the statistical analysis. 4. results: frequency of use, factors influencing the choice of tools, and graphical presentations. 5. concluding remarks including an overview of results and perspectives on the findings. 3 another set of questions referred to the use of social network sites and with results presented in a separate report (selg 2011a). 4 project funding was provided by vinnova, the swedish governmental agency for innovation systems, and swedish it-user centre, nita. the framing the economic restructuring of the 1980’s induced a number of reorganising strategies in business firms (harrison 1994; castells 2000). deregulation of domestic economic activity, liberalisations of international trade and investment, and privatisations of publicly controlled companies had brought about a stiffened competitive environment. in the 1990’s this process was reinforced by the rapid diffusion of information and communication technologies favouring the knowledge management and information processing essential to the performance of organisations in a global economy. a third factor was rising short term performance requirements, manifested in higher de facto hurdle rate of return imposed on managers by boards of directors and by the big institutional stock holders (harrison 1995). the global competition triggered a technology/management race between companies all over the world (castells 2000). measures aiming at enhanced flexibility, a buzzword used to describe a wide range of organisational practices, were launched to cope with the uncertainty caused by the fast pace of change in the business environment (sayer and walker 1992). output volume had to be calibrated with market demand. the focus on core competencies became a common strategy. as a result part of former in-house resources were replaced by external suppliers, and the full-time labour force was reduced in exchange for temporary or subcontracted labour services. downsizing, outsourcing, lean production, and networking became popular descriptive terms (harrison 1994). as a major consequence of this restructuring trend the departments and units that were not considered to represent a core competency or value-added link in the production chain were eliminated. instead, activities perceived as peripheral – when needed – were provided by other firms on the market. in this way the organisation itself was assumed to stay more flexible and lean (jaffee 2001). this restructuring process has been characterised as a shift from vertical bureaucracies to the horizontal corporation or network enterprise (castells 2000). organisational focus has moved from hierarchies and tasks to teams and projects. across organisational borders emphasise is made on partnerships and joint ventures. the virtual organisation represents an extreme case. it is enabled by information technologies that allow interaction, communication, and collaboration to take place without face-to-face contact in a common physical location (davidow and malone 1992). the organisational changes meant that those workers who were retained are now faced with a new situation. professional knowledge management and information processing – or ‘coordination’ in a less abstract terminology – were formerly carried out with colleagues and co-workers, often well-known persons. such activities are increasingly administrated within a wider range of unfamiliar personnel from other firms (jaffee 2001). castells (2000) speaks of connectedness as a fundamental attribute of the network enterprise, which implies communication and coordination. so what matters if patterns of communication shift from an intrato an interorganisational context? as one answer, the concept of trust has to be reconsidered. in any interpersonal relation trust is an essential element. the concept of trust may be defined and described in a number of ways (kramer and tyler 1996) but in a few words it is about not expecting harmful behaviour from the other. for society as a whole trust is a cardinal attribute. simmel (2011, 191) notes that very few relationships are based entirely upon what is known with certainty about another person. without the general trust that people have in each other society itself would disintegrate. what is lacking in knowledge is compensated for by trust. this is also true in business relationships made up by a wide range of interpersonal transactions. trust in professional contexts is assumed to be shaped by previous experience. information about other’s behaviour is accumulated over time. the better we know the other person the more accurately can we predict what he or she will do in a certain situation or context (lewicki and bunker 1996). another kind of trust is based on collective identification with joint values and goals of a particular organisation. such a group membership fosters mutual understanding to the point that each can act for the other (lewicki and bunker 1996). it goes without saying that trust based on knowledge about the other and/or collective identification will be more difficult to establish in a professional environment characterised by loosely interconnected relationships. nevertheless, business activities do not seem to be hampered by the increase in perceived risks that could be expected. meyerson et al. (1996) observe that temporary systems exhibit behaviour that presupposes trust, yet traditional sources of trust are not obvious in such systems. then, if there are no antecedent information of a professional contact available, how can trust in a person that is about to be approached be possible? what is the trustbuilding mechanism? the explanation according to meyerson et al. (1996) is that the object of professional trust is no longer the person with her or his individual properties and capacities, but the role she or he enacts in the professional context. she or he is seen as representing a certain professional category of which there is accumulated information. this information involves a set of roles expectations based on the type of organisation, occupational specialty, and the associated stereotypes. thus, people interact with roles rather than personalities. to conclude, trust is established and reinforced when people live up to these expectations associated with their roles and behave in a manner consistent with their professional category. inconsistent role behaviour and ‘blurring’ of roles tend to heighten uncertainty that will hamper the building of trust (meyerson, weick, and kramer 1996). this is the contextual frame to bear in mind when new digital contact tools are implemented in professional life. literature review studies of the use of digital contact tools display a varied picture. the purpose of this literature review is to highlight some of the characteristics of this field of study rather than to provide a systematic presentation. there has been a rapid diffusion of new tools since mid-80’s, either with origins in the professional world (e.g. e-mail) or among adolescents (e.g. im). early studies involve email along with face-to-face contacts, fixed-line telephony and written media such as memo (e.g. trevino, lengel, and daft 1987). later studies such as kim et al. (2007) also include im and sms but with fixed-line telephony replaced by mobile telephony, and with no written media. in addition to the diverging sets of contact tools that are studied, the investigators also differ with respect to scientific approaches, probably reflecting different academic origins. studies of user-to-user interaction are typically carried out within the domain of interpersonal communication, often inspired by symbolic interactionism (e.g. schmitz and fulk 1991). some studies are carried out in a mass communication tradition based on a uses and gratification approach and with roots in media effect studies (e.g. dimmick et al. 2007). another tendency is a shift from a technological orientation to a focus on the social context. many early studies were inspired by media choice theories that assign importance to the characteristics of a particular media for guiding use in a particular social situation. thus contingency theory argues that the effective users match their choice of medium to the requirements of the communication situation (steinfield 1992). other theories such as social presence theory (short, williams, and christie 1976) and media richness theory (daft and lengel 1986) hold that the attributes of the media, such as the speed of feedback and the capacity to mediate nonverbal cues, make them more or less appropriate for certain types of interactions. according to these theories certain kinds of mediated communication should be preferred or avoided, depending on the nature of the message. for instance, when several interpretations of the message are possible then information-rich medium such as face-to-face communication are called for. in contrast, routine information exchanges where consensus about meaning already exists make less information-rich text messages more suitable (sproull and kiesler 1986). contingency theory, social presence theory and media richness theory attempt to explain media choice as a function of media characteristics and actor rationality. a less technologically deterministic perspective is offered by the social affordance approach. from their study of computer-mediated communication (cmc) use in a professional environment quan-haase & wellman (2006) argue that technologies themselves do not determine work relations. ‘rather, cmc provides possibilities, opportunities, and constraints for the formation and maintenance of work relations…’(quan-haase and wellman 2006, 288). the social affordance perspective posits that individuals will choose to use particular kinds of communication media when there is a congruency between the opportunities that they provide and the characteristics of the relationships with those whom they communicate (wellman et al. 2003; boase 2008). according to constructivist views, expectations of how and when people will use cmc systems should not be tied directly to the physical characteristics of the medium. rather, it appears that social and other contextual influences are more important in the media selection process. a wide range of empirical evidence suggests that other factors besides task requirements and media characteristics influence the choice of a medium in any given situation, including time and distance constraints, social and organisational norms, symbolic meanings attributed to the medium itself, and media experience (trevino, lengel, and daft 1987; fulk et al. 1987; steinfield 1992). for example, in a professional context, a particular text may be perceived differently depending on if it is communicated via a business letter, an e-mail or a text message. ‘in this way’, say trevino et al., quoting mcluhan (1964) ‘the medium itself is a message’ (1987, 559). so how much does it matter whether focus is on technology or sociology? quite a lot actually. the media characteristics approaches suggest that patterns of media use should be relatively homogeneous when distribution of access is even and communication task requirements are similar. however, such theories fail to explain a number of studies that have found differences in attitudes or patterns of use across groups using the same medium. in contrast, the social influence model (fulk et al. 1987; schmitz and fulk 1991) understands the media choice as a subjectivist process where co-workers’ opinions and attitudes are of at least equal importance as media characteristics. here, the underlying assumptions of users’ behaviour are inspired by social learning theory (bandura 1977) according to which individuals acquire skills and new behaviour patterns by observing the behaviour of other individuals. in a similar way the social information processing approach (salancik and pfeffer 1978) suggests that job attitudes are shaped by co-workers’ influence and consequences of past actions. thus the social influence model predicts different patterns of use across groups due to differences in social norms and interaction patterns, even though communication tasks and media options are comparable. as a consequence, fulk et al. (1987) argue that the choice to use a medium that is otherwise considered inefficient may be quite rational, in the light of the social context. some studies of social uses of new media have more specifically looked at relationships between media use and participants’ social networks. the choice of contact tool is assumed to mirror the strength of relations and social roles. although not always explicitly stated these studies seem to build on the theory of social structures (wellman and berkowitz 1988) along with the theory of strong and weak ties of networks (granovetter 1973). with this perspective licoppe and smoreda (2005) discuss such networks in terms of ‘relational economies’. the choice of a particular medium of communication becomes a tool of reaffirming and reshaping roles, hierarchies and forms of power in such relational economies. baym, zhang, and lin’s (2004) study of multiple media use among us college students found that face-to-face interactions and telephone calls, rather than be threatened by contacts made on the internet, were supplemented by the new digital contact tools. in her studies of media use among members of academic research groups and among distance learners haythornthwaite (2005) concluded that individuals use more types of media to communicate where the tie is stronger between individuals. what was communicated also depended on the nature of the relationship. there were no particular types of communication that systematically linked to particular media. nor did mesch’s (2009) examination of israeli adolescents’ choice of communication channels indicate any channel preferences as regards the content of communication. the findings suggest that origin of the relationship is an important factor so that face-to-face communication is preferred for ties that were initiated face-to-face and online communication for ties that were initiated online. in contrast phone communication was found to be a more neutral channel so that relationship origin did not affect its use. kim, kim, park, and rice’s (2007) studied korean individuals’ choice of media channels with respect to social roles. they found e-mail distinctive for organisational workers and mobile phone for home workers, while students presented a multi-channel patterns including im, sms and mobile phones. employing a uses and gratifications approach (blumler and katz 1974; palmgreen, wenner, and rosengren 1985), dimmick, ramirez, wang, and lin (2007) examined the relationship between network characteristics and frequency of use of three communication tools (fixed-line telephony, e-mail and im) among us college students. the results indicate network characteristics to be what most influence the choice of communication tools. the telephone seems to be preferred in close relationships whereas e-mail and im are used for interaction with those who are perhaps less intimate. using a similar approach in a study among us college students ramirez jr., dimmick, feaster, and lin (2008) suggest a hierarchical order of different media with mobile phones at the top, followed by im, that in turn is superior to e-mail and with fixedline telephony as least gratifying. in the coming sections some topics from the literature review will be discussed in relation the research questions and the empirical results of the study. the study aim of knowledge deregulations of national and international economies, rapid diffusions of ict applications and increased roi requirements have challenged business managers from 1980 and onwards. the relative increase of uncertainty induced by market dynamics have enforced a change in organisational focus from planning and control in vertical structures to rapid adaptation to market changes through networking strategies. crossborder coordination replaces internal routines. the trust necessary in business relations is contingent on actors accomplishing with their role expectations. with cross-border communication as a key factor to create, maintain and reinforce business relationships, the advent of a range of new digital media channels affects the business environment. an overview is presented in table 1. table 1: developments in digital media channels including telephony during later years (selg 2010). number of persons contacted 1995 2010 one or a few fixed-line telephony fixed-line telephony mobile telephony mobile telephony e-mail voice over ip (voip) short message service (sms) instant messaging (im) e-mail several selected e-mail facebook linkedin intranet e-mail several, not selected e-mail lists blogs twitter youtube e-mail lists from interviews with 20 experts (selg 2010) it appeared that in many organisations active attention was paid to new digital contact tools, normally used in one-to-one (or dyadic) contacts. they included voice calls (fixed-line, mobile and voip telephony) and text communication (sms, im and e-mail). the interviewees reported a vivid experimentation in order to find out in what contacts and contexts these tools were to be preferred or avoided. following the experts’ observations of emerging ‘social codes’, this study is based on the assumption that the choice of a particular contact tool is the product of a social process where the participants gradually learn what is to be considered as an appropriate action. as regards social patterns in general, there tend to be an intuitive understanding of what contact tool is to be preferred in a given situation. depending on whom is about to be contacted and in which context and situation, this intuitive understanding leads the contacting person to choose the most suitable tool, but without being able to explain why. the aim of this study is to go beyond this intuitive knowledge by making the factors influencing the choice of tools transparent. through a survey among experienced users the choice of suitable contact tools against situational characteristics of the contact will be highlighted. the results from the study will be communicated to practitioners in their roles as users of the wide range of digital contact tools. research questions the interviews generated a number of specific questions for research:  the diffusion and use of new contact tools; for example, are voip and im common in professional contacts?  with a number of contact tools available what makes us choose one or another? the preliminary conclusions from the interviews point to the importance of a number of factors influencing the choice of a particular contact tool:  if the contact is made in a professional context or if it is of private nature.  if the individual to be contacted is an unknown or well-known person.  it the contact takes place in a formal or informal context? one may be inclined to equate professional relationships with formal contacts on the one hand, and private relationships with informal contacts on the other. however, this is not always true; there may be informal contacts between colleagues as well as formal contacts in private contexts.  if the motive for the intended contact is to give or receive information (one-way) or to reach some form of agreement (two-way).  if the contact is due to an urgent matter or not. these factors, indicated above, that will serve as hypotheses for this study are summarised in table 2. fixed-line phone, mobile phone and voip have been put together under a common label ‘voice call’. whether a phone contact is more or less suitable in a given contact situation is not assumed to be influenced by the transmission technology. table 2: overview of contextual factors influencing the choice of contact tools. situation contact tools voice call sms im e-mail context professional/private relationship unknown/well-known person type of contact formal/informal motive for contact to inform/to agree temporal aspects urgent/not urgent notwithstanding the importance of the suggested influencing factors, several of the interviewees emphasised the individual variations in their patterns of use. one explanation that was put forward was that a contact with a specific person often includes combinations of contextual matters. this also implies that various tools may be used in parallel in the ongoing contacts between two individuals. some interviewees also stressed the fact that an individual, or groups of individuals, may select different tools despite similar contextual situations. by focusing on purely factors of social codes, other determinants of usage are omitted. economy is such a factor. economic conditions influence the access to the tools in terms of purchasing power regarding computers, mobile phones, subscriptions fees and rates per minute. as an example, the popularity of sms among adolescent users is due to the relative steep price of mobile voice call tariffs relative to the cost of texts. perceived ease of use and skill in the handling of the diverse tools is another factor influencing the use. in addition the interviewees also mentioned that both parties having access to the tool is a necessary condition of use, ‘it takes two to tango’. next we are interested to know whether the results obtained are controversial or not. do the respondents agree on that the tool x is the most suitable in situation y? have socially accepted rules been established? and in the case of discrepancies, are we able to discover if the unanimities are related to social background factors such as gender, age or education? summing up our research questions: 1. to what extent are new digital contact tools used in professional contexts? 2. to what extent have socially accepted rules regarding this usage been established? 3. in the case of diverging attitudes, can they be related to social background factors such as gender, age and education? although our primary interest lies in the professional use of contact tools, the corresponding statistics for usage in private contexts will be presented in parallel. whether the suitability rankings in professional and private contexts coincide or diverge will hopefully stimulate the discussion. discussion here it might be the moment to make a pause for a comparison of how the hypotheses derived from the interviews with the practitioners relate to what was exposed in the literature review. without getting too deeply into such a discussion it is obvious that the picture expressed by the interviewees are in line with the social influence model (fulk et al. 1987; schmitz and fulk 1991), that stresses the importance of co-workers’ influence and attitudes. we recall that this model is based upon bandura’s social learning theory (1977) that states that individuals acquire skills and behaviours by observing the behaviour of others, and salancik & pfeffer’s (1978) social information processing approach that emphasises co-workers’ influences and experiences from past actions. we may also recall the importance assigned to contacts of formal or informal nature. this view aligns with goffmans’ (1959) metaphorical expressions of ‘front stage’ and ‘backstage’ to illustrate when a certain appearance is required or not. in both professional and private contexts, the presence of observers, who they are and roles we agree to assume before each other is decisive for our actions (goffman 1959). nevertheless, the suggestions brought up during the interviews also give support to theories that assign importance to the characteristics of a particular contact tool for its use in a specific situation. actually the hypotheses present the view of an effective user that knows how to match the choice of contact tool to the requirements of the situation. method the study was carried out in an early stage of the diffusion process and with the explicit aim to investigate the emergence of related patterns of usage in professional life. a quantitative survey was chosen in order to test the qualitative results from the pilot study. the sample the population could be considered as all individuals in the swedish population with an occupation that includes the use of contact tools. due to its explorative nature the study did not aim to provide a representative picture. in theoretical sampling, cases are chosen based on theoretical (developed a priori) categories that are likely to replicate or extend the emergent theory (glaser and strauss 1967; eisenhardt 1989). the survey was directed to the members of swedish computer society5, a professional association that can be considered as an early adopter category (rogers 2003), many of them with educational background in computer sciences and active in ict related professions. by addressing this target group it was expected to reduce the possible problems of tool handling to a minimum so that the patterns of usage displayed by the survey statistics would reflect the relative advantages and disadvantages of the contact tools with respect of social contexts and contact situation. we then have firm reasons to assume that lack of access to computers and mobile phone, as well as related usage skills, would not impact on the survey results. the questionnaire an on-line questionnaire (easyresarch) for e-mail distribution was designed. two draft versions were tested. at first the respondents were asked to indicate their estimated frequency of use of a particular communicative tool. the response alternatives in everyday language, included a range from ”several times a day” to ”never”. to allow for statistical operations, weights were then assigned to the expressions by a scale running from 0 to 5 (table 3). 5 sw. dataföreningen table 3: frequencies of use with assigned weights frequency of use several times a day everyday a few times a week a few times a month less often never weight 5 4 3 2 1 0 in the next set of questions the respondents were asked to grade the suitability of four contact tool for use in different contact situations in professional life using a 7-point likert scale with 1 = ‘not at all suitable’, 4 = ‘both/and’, and 7 = ‘very suitable’. the same questions were repeated for private contexts, see table 2. in all there were 14 questions (7 situations in 2 contexts). thus each question implied the ranking of 4 tools, producing 56 rankings (14 x 4). the third set of the questions was dedicated to social background factors; gender, age and education. to each question there was an attached field for commentaries. many respondents made use of this opportunity, generating 397 comments. the comments provided a substantial qualitative contribution that facilitated the interpretation of the statistics. the respondents the survey was carried out in the spring of 2011. just over one thousand complete responses were obtained. the respondents represented an age range from 18 to 82 years, with a normal distribution and a mean value ≈ median = 50 years. 73% of respondents were male and 27% female, well representing the male domination among the members of the computer society. 80% of the respondents had post-secondary education. the statistical analysis mean values have been calculated as a basis for a ranking of the contact tools with respect to frequency of use and suitability. the standard deviations indicate the dispersion of the answers. by looking at the standard deviations we are provided a measure of how established the usage is. a small number tells us that the respondents are using a tool in a similar manner with the underlying assumption that a common ‘code of conduct’ has been established. in contrast, if the respondents’ ratings are distributed over the entire scale, there is an indication that the usage of the tool is controversial in the sense that the popularity among certain users is combined with negative attitudes among other users. a high standard deviation value thus indicate that a common norm is yet to be established. additionally the number of respondents is used as a complementary measure of how established is the use of particular contact tool. statistics indicating greater variations (= higher standard deviations) in the use of contact tools call for an examination if certain patterns of usage could be observed as regards social background factors. two measures of correlation are used, pearsons’ chi-square and the f-test. pearson’s chi-square (χ2) is used when the social background factors (nominal scale) are combined with response alternative such as ‘several times a day’, etc. (ordinal scale). a contingency table (or cross tab) is set up with e.g. male/female in the columns and frequency of use in the rows. the chi-square is calculated as the difference between expected and observed data. a small chi-square value indicates that the difference in use, for example between women and men, is small. f-test (anova, variance analysis) is used on the data produced by the use of likert scales. the aim is to check whether the mean values of attitudes e.g. among women and men significantly differ from each other. in the first place all group mean values (gender, age groups, and education categories) have been tested. in the next stage those categories with significant f-values have been further analysed. in many cases the differences in mean values, although being significant, are small. moreover, statistical significance does not automatically imply that a deviation in mean values is of interest for the research question. as a rule of thumb, differences in group mean values < 0,5 have been disregarded. correspondence analysis (ca) is a multivariate technique to analyse the relations between variables in a contingency table (see e.g. ekbrand 2006; hair et al. 2006). the chi-squared values are transformed into a metric measure of distance that can be positioned graphically in a perceptual map. the content in columns and rows of the contingency table – in our case the contact tools and situations – may then be displayed in one graphical presentation. the closer to each other two contact tools are positioned in the map, the more they resemble each other as regards their usage. in the same way, when the co-ordinates of the situations are added into the map, we easily discover which are the tools and situations that ‘go well together’. it is important to note that the distance between co-ordinates, for example a particular tool and a specific situation, does not have any inherent meaning in itself. it is the difference in distances between a particular tool and the situations that is of interest. the spss software was used for the statistical analyses. results recalling our research questions: 1. to what extent are new digital contact tools used in professional contexts? 2. to what extent have socially accepted rules regarding this usage been established? 3. in the case of diverging attitudes, can they be related to social background factors such as gender, age and education? first the general picture of the contact tools examined based on frequency of usage will be presented. variations related to background factors are commented. in the next stage the ratings of the contact tools as regards their suitability in different contact situations are presented. differences in attitudes related to social background factors are discussed. perceptual maps as an alternative way to display the results will then be presented and discussed. due to space limitations, the presentation will be accompanied by a few selected tables produced by the statistical analysis that are considered particularly illustrative. the original report (selg 2011b) contains the complete set of the tables. frequency of use in table 4 the six contact tools are presented as a ranking list with respect to frequency of use (remember that 5 = ‘several times a day’, 4 = ‘everyday’, … 1 = ‘less often’). we can see that e-mail and mobile phones are used on a daily basis in both professional and private contexts by a majority of respondents. table 4: ranking of contact tools in professional and private settings with respect to frequency of use (mean value). contact tool mean value std. deviation n professional private professional private professional private e-mail 4,87 4,34 ,451 ,890 1243 1266 mobile phone 4,53 4,27 ,857 ,869 1264 1291 sms 2,91 3,64 1,327 1,104 1225 1265 im 2,34 2,15 1,891 1,705 1123 1164 fixed-line phone 2,28 2,71 1,952 1,360 1001 1171 voip 1,50 1,55 1,665 1,462 798 890 at the bottom of the list we find voip and, perhaps surprisingly, fixed-line phones. in fact im is more frequently used for professional matters than the fixed-line phone, however, the difference is small. the mean value of sms is close to 3 in professional use, indicating ‘a few times a week’. a closer look at the mean values indicates that professional contact patterns are more specialised than what is the case for private contacts. the frequencies of use of the most popular tools such as e-mail and mobile phones are higher for professional contacts than for private. a contributing fact may be that a higher number of professional contacts are made during a day. the opposite tendency is observed for the less frequently used tools; sms, fixed-line telephones and voip, which receives higher scores in private contacts. the exception to this rule is im, which, again surprisingly, is more frequently used in professional than private contexts. the standard deviations indicate high similarity in usage patterns with respect to mobile phones and e-mail, both in professional and private contacts, while major differences are found in the use of fixed-line phone and im. as a general tendency, the number of users of the various tools is slightly higher for private contacts than for professional. the communicative repertory seems to be broader in private relations than in professional. finally a comparison of the dispersion of the use indicates a higher degree of standardisation of professional e-mail and mobile phones than for private use. for the other tools the adverse tendency is observed. the variation in use of sms, im, fixedline, telephony and voip is higher in professional settings than for private contacts. our next question is if these tendencies are homogenous as regards sex, age and education of the respondents. to find out the results are cross tabulated with the social background factors and checked with a pearson’s chi-square tests. table 5: results from chi-square tests of cross tabulations of contact index with social background variables. professional contacts private contacts n df sig. n df sig. gender 1041 2 ,241 1059 2 ,704 age 1039 6 ,000 1057 3 ,000 education 1038 4 ,665 1057 4 ,266 in table 5, we observe that only the age factor seems to have importance for the frequencies of use. the tendency is the same in both professional and private contacts. further data analyses (see selg 2011b) indicate patterns of reduced contact frequencies with increasing age, and with almost identically tendencies in professional and private contacts. tools and situations the respondents were asked to grade the suitability of the 4 contact tool for use in different contact situations (remember 1 = ‘not at all suitable’, 4 = ‘both/and’, and 7 = ‘very suitable’). in table 6 and table 7 the calculated mean values and standard deviations are presented together with the number of respondents. the higher the mean value, the more suitable is the contact tool for that specific situation. mean values between 4 and 7 express positive attitudes whereas values below 4 reflect scepticism. in professional contexts voice calls are generally considered very suitable contact tool in any kind of professional situation. in all situations the means obtained are high, often the highest (table 6). its only drawback according to respondents’ commentaries is that the information transmitted and agreements made are not automatically documented. in most situations there is a high degree of conformity of opinion which is indicated by low standard deviation values. table 6: ranking of contact tools as suitable in different professional situations (mean values, standard deviations and number of respondents). situation tool mean std. deviation n unknown person voice call 6,75 ,741 1184 e-mail 6,38 1,128 1182 sms 2,03 1,485 1154 im 1,99 1,530 1107 well-known person voice call 6,81 ,658 1166 e-mail 6,80 ,627 1164 sms 6,07 1,415 1156 im 5,55 1,913 1074 formal contact voice call 6,83 ,610 1214 e-mail 6,74 ,688 1212 sms 4,08 1,868 1194 im 3,37 1,997 1120 informal contact e-mail 6,82 ,588 1195 voice call 6,81 ,659 1195 sms 6,27 1,305 1184 im 5,84 1,807 1105 give or receive information e-mail 6,78 ,711 1139 voice call 5,91 1,570 1139 sms 5,47 1,867 1131 im 4,00 2,233 1036 come to an agreement e-mail 6,56 1,067 1118 voice call 5,80 1,676 1116 im 3,10 2,033 1037 sms 2,87 1,904 1094 urgent matter voice call 6,87 ,620 1122 sms 5,98 1,672 1116 e-mail 4,28 2,207 1111 im 4,15 2,425 1012 similar to voice call e-mail is highly suitable in most professional contacts. for the oneway and two-way communication situations the e-mail gets even higher scores. from the comments of the respondents we get the explanation: e-mail offers the advantage to generate printable documents as by-product which is highly estimated in professional contacts. the weak point of e-mail is that it may not be suitable in urgent situations. similar to voice calls the use of e-mail is characterised by low dispersion, that is; the usage of the e-mail tool is a well-established social activity. sms and im receive generally lower ratings by the respondents. this is particularly the case for the im tool for which somewhat fewer respondents are reported. sms is considered suitable in contacts characterised of less degree of formality and with wellknown persons. in urgent situations sms is the second best alternative after phone calls. sms is also considered fairly suitable for one-way information. the im ratings closely mirror those of sms but at a lower level of mean values. it is considered suitable for informal contacts and for contacts with well-known persons. the sms and im are considered less suitable in the contacts with unknown persons and in situations when an agreement is supposed to be made. the ratings of sms and im are considerably more dispersed than for voice call and email which may be interpreted that less agreement on the usage is established. as a general tendency, the dispersions of attitudes related to im reach their highest values meaning that its relative suitability is a controversial matter. the attitudes with respect to the tools in private contacts and whether they are suitable or not in different situations coincide closely with what was observed in the professional context, see table 7.voice calls and e-mail receive high ratings with mostly low standard deviations. but there are nuances of differences. the superiority of the e-mail is slightly lower in most of the private situations compared to the professional. on the other hand both sms and im get higher scores in the majority of private situations, but at the same time the dispersions demonstrate similar variations in attitudes as in the professional context. table 7: ranking of contact tools as suitable in different private situations (mean values, standard deviations and number of respondents). situation tool mean std. deviation n unknown person voice call 6,34 1,263 1065 e-mail 6,26 1,292 1061 im 3,08 2,026 980 sms 3,02 1,964 1034 well-known person voice call 6,92 ,421 1073 e-mail 6,85 ,558 1073 sms 6,76 ,804 1066 im 6,33 1,531 996 formal contact voice call 6,73 ,798 1085 e-mail 6,71 ,842 1084 sms 2,46 1,865 1049 im 2,30 1,852 989 informal contact e-mail 6,70 ,767 1075 voice call 6,68 ,905 1076 sms 5,53 1,924 1053 im 5,36 2,045 990 give or receive information e-mail 6,69 ,881 1064 voice call 6,49 1,124 1065 sms 6,05 1,536 1055 im 4,93 2,202 976 come to an agreement voice call 6,80 ,667 1050 sms 6,35 1,370 1044 e-mail 5,32 2,017 1032 im 5,08 2,320 955 urgent matter voice call 6,89 ,522 1061 sms 6,26 1,444 1054 im 4,56 2,371 956 e-mail 4,02 2,254 1038 with a few exceptions voice calls and e-mails report mean values with very low standard deviations which signal shared attitudes about usages and situations among the respondents. much higher rates of dispersions are observed for the sms and im indicating a relative lack in consensus compared to voice call and e-mail. again, most divergence of opinions is reported about the im tool. in order to examine if the dispersion of the ratings can be related to social background factors f-test were made on the mean value differences between gender, age and educational background groups. as a general impression the tests did not add much of explanatory value to the analysis 6 . with respect to gender the tests indicate great similarities in the attitudes between men and women in professional contacts. among the few discrepancies observed women are more reluctant than men to use sms in formal contacts. in addition, men are somewhat more inclined to consider voice call suitable for coming to an agreement in a two-way communication. on the other hand, women seem more apt to use im for informal contacts. in private contexts the tests indicate a higher gender-related variability in the use of contract tools, although in most cases the differences are small, indicating weak tendencies. in the remaining cases female are rating sms and im higher than men in typically informal contexts and with well-known persons. the reverse tendency is obtained in the case of formal contacts where men, just like in professional contacts, consider sms more suitable than what women did. when testing the mean differences for different age groups, the number of significant fstatistics is considerably higher than in gender tests. however, in a majority of cases the tendencies are weak. leaving the weak tendencies aside, for all contact situations there is a declining appreciation of the im tool with increased age, just as in professional contacts. also in the case of sms use for private contacts there is a lower degree of appreciation among users in upper ages. finally, tests of differences in mean values related to education do not provide any tendencies worth mentioning, neither in professional nor in private contexts. mapping the results in figure 1 displaying professional contexts we can observe that each contact tool (the ‘diamonds’) is distributed in a separate field. this is an indication that they present different characteristics with respect to their usage in different situations. turning to the situations (the ‘squares’) several of them are positioned close to origo, representing an imagined average value. these situations explain a minor share of the variance of the observations and they therefore offer less explanatory strength with respect of the choice of a particular contact tool. to give an example, for contacts with a well-known person, any contact tool will do (figure 1). at the longest distance from origo we find unknown persons and urgent situations, respectively. this should be read that these situations are particularly decisive for the choice of contact tool, meaning that certain tools are suitable whereas other tools are clearly unsuitable. in statistical sense these two situation explain the major part of the variation in the observations. this information also serves the purpose of interpretation of the co-ordinate axis. thus the horizontal axes represent the dichotomy ‘unknown/well-known person’ and the vertical axis ‘urgent-not urgent matter’. 6 due to the space demanding nature of the tables produced in combination with their meager explanatory contributions, the tables are not included in this article. figure 1: perceptual map of contact tools (‘diamonds’) and situations (‘squares’) in professional contexts. some tools and situations are positioned at close distance to each other, indicating that these combinations ‘go well together’. this is evident in situations with the aim to reach an agreement and where the e-mail tool seems to be superior. similarly, the im tool is interrelated to contact situations of informal character and with well-known persons. accordingly, a long distance between a tool and a situation indicates that the contact tool is unsuitable in this particular situation. for example, the use of e-mail for urgent matters is considered less suitable. looking at the position of voice call we can see that no situation is positioned at a very close distance, but on the other hand, the distances to the various situations are fairly even. this can be interpreted as that the phone serves as a universal tool; a phone call may not be the most suitable contact tool in a given situation, but it is never wrong. to get an estimate of the relative suitability of the contacts tools for a given situation we can compare the distances. then it appears that voice call and e-mail are the most suitable for contacts a) of formal nature, b) with unknown persons, and c) when the aim is to come to an agreement. im is reserved for the opposite situations, that is, for informal contacts, with well-known persons, and when the aim is to give or get information. urgent situations are best dealt with by sms. to use e-mail for urgent matters is as inappropriate as to address unknown individuals by im. voice call sms im e-mail formal informal unknown wellknown information agreement urgent -,400 -,300 -,200 -,100 ,000 ,100 ,200 ,300 ,400 ,500 ,600 -1,000 -,800 -,600 -,400 -,200 ,000 ,200 ,400 ,600 ,800 contact tools and situations professional contexts so far we have discussed the separate tool-situation relations, just as in the tables on pp. 16,18, however, now as position on the map. in addition correspondence analysis allows us to identify the most suitable tool for a contact characterised by a combination of situations. this is achieved by summing the distances of the implied situations for each contact tool. the contact tool with the shortest aggregated distance then is ranked as the most suitable. to allow such a calculation the distance measures must be normalised. the spss software includes such a function. in table 8 some of the normalised distances of the ca are presented as an example with a ranking of contact tools as regards suitability in a formal contact with a wellknown person and where the aim is to reach an agreement. table 8: example on how to use correspondence analysis in compound situations. situation voice call sms im e-mail formal contact 0,275 0,796 0,709 0,361 well-known person 0,720 0,383 0,157 0,686 come to an agreement 0,577 1,030 0,827 0,043 total 1,572 2,209 1,693 1,090 in our example e-mail gets the highest ranking due to its popularity in contacts aiming at agreements. the scores for voice call and im are almost even. according to the details of table 8 the main reason is the relative strength of im in contacts with well-known persons, and which to a great extent compensates for its weakness in contacts of formal nature. the results from the ca of contacts tools in private contexts are presented in figure 2. the positions of tools and situations are in most cases similar to what could be observed in professional contexts. there are two important exceptions though. as earlier noted the superiority of e-mail in situations aiming at reaching agreements is absent in private contacts. another difference is that formal contacts replace unknown persons as situational factor with strongest explanatory strength. this is a rather puzzling outcome that will be commented in the final section. figure 2: perceptual map of contact tools (‘diamonds’) and situations (‘squares’) in private contexts. concluding remarks overview of the results the use of contact tools in professional contexts is characterised by a high degree of specialisation, and with mobile phone and e-mail being used several times a day. in comparison the use of sms, im, fixed-line phones, and voip are reported to occur a few times a week or less. moreover, the professional usage is characterised by a high degree of homogeneity, again as regards e-mail and mobile telephony. both of these could be considered as standard tools for text and voice messages respectively. the other tools, not only less frequently used, display a greater degree of variation. the statistics do not indicate any clear tendencies as regards social background factors. only for im an age factor can be observed. in comparison, private contacts are characterised by less specialisation, that is, the difference between the tools most used and less used is smaller. in addition, the patterns of use are more heterogeneous. women use sms and im more frequently in private contexts than men, although no differences in professional contexts are observed. moreover, the age element plays a greater role in private contexts. voice call sms ime-mail formal informal unknown wellknown information agreement urgent -,400 -,300 -,200 -,100 ,000 ,100 ,200 ,300 ,400 ,500 ,600 -1,000 -,800 -,600 -,400 -,200 ,000 ,200 ,400 ,600 contact tools and situations private contexts the findings indicate that in professional contexts voice call and e-mail are preferred in formal contacts, with unknown persons, and when an agreement has to be reached. sms and im are getting relatively higher rankings in informal contacts, with well-known persons, and when information is given or received. however, the most influential factor governing the choice of tool is whether the person to be contacted is well-known or not. the statistics present the somewhat surprising result that with well-known persons, any contact tool will do, be it in professional or private contexts. with unknown persons there are clear preferences for the oral medium and e-mail. the importance of the contacted person being well-known or not is further confirmed by 35 comments to the survey questions. having an established relationship with the other person, which includes being familiar with her or his tool preferences, plays a decisive role for the choice of contact tool. this matter overshadows all the other elements associated with the contact. taken together, the findings indicate that the choice of contact tools is less contingent on contextual matters as was hypothesised. instead the findings suggest that people choose the tool that they believe is most suitable for the person to be contacted. fixed-line phones out, im in as regards fixed-line telephony our figures point clearly to a generation element behind the variations in use. respondents in upper ages tend to maintain their fixed-line phone contacts, particularly in private life, while many younger respondents do not use it at all. a possible interpretation may be that of private relations characterised by long established routines of social character which have a constraining impact. im presents a reverse tendency with an increasing frequency of use that already has outpaced fixedline telephony in professional contacts, still not yet in private. younger age groups are in the lead. figures of concern? a question mark has to be made as regards the figures indicating that in private contexts formal contacts replace unknown persons as the situational factor with strongest explanatory strength. why a user should be more reluctant, e.g. to use im in formal contacts than with unknown persons, is not intuitively evident. nor did the interviews in the pilot study make such suggestions. in contrast, and as just stated, the comments supplied by many respondents emphasise the nature of relationship – unknown or well-known – as most influential factor. then it remains to be questioned as to whether an explanation may be found in the design of the related survey questions and how they have been perceived by the respondents. despite two tests of draft versions, such concerns cannot be excluded. perspectives on the findings how do our findings relate to perspectives on media choice and results from empirical studies reported in the literature review? it is clear that the findings give some support to theories that stress the importance of the characteristics of the various contact tools for their use. the speed of feedback, to take one obvious example, favours mobile phone and sms communication for urgent matters while disqualifying e-mail. in contrast e-mail is the preferred tool in contacts where there is a need to have the content confirmed in a printed document. on the other hand, any attempt to generalise the idea about a close fit between the characteristics of the contact tool and the characteristics of the communication situation is contradicted by other findings that stress the nature of the relationship as most influencing factor. in contacts with well-known persons any tool will do. from the commentaries we get it even stronger: you choose the tool that suits the other. then how should the preferences for voice calls with unknown person be interpreted? that with lacking knowledge about the other’s tool preferences the phone is considered as the most neutral choice? this conclusion would be in line with the social influence perspective. or that the superior richness of the language carried by voice call is appreciated in contacts with unknown persons where nuances perceived may be critical for the outcome? this is claimed by media choice theories. it is also evident that the findings give support to the social influence model according to which the users develop their communication routines in interaction with others. the data refers to 2010. with the e-mail coming into professional use during the 1990’s a consensus about its affordances, almost as strong as for phone calls, has been established. in comparison the attitudes associated to the use of the recent sms and im tools were much more diverging, at least in 2010. references bandura, albert. 1977. social learning theory. englewood cliffs, n.j.: prentice hall. baym, n.k., y.b. zhang, and m.-c. lin. 2004. “social interactions across media: interpersonal communication on the internet, telephone and face-to-face.” new media and society 6 (3): 299–318. blumler, jay g., and elihu katz. 1974. the uses of mass communications: current perspectives on gratifications research. beverly hills: sage. boase, jeffrey. 2008. “personal networks and the personal communication system.” information, communication & society 11 (4): 490. castells, manuel. 2000. the information age: economy, society and culture. vol. 1, the rise of the network society. malden, mass.: blackwell. daft, richard l., and robert h. lengel. 1986. “organizational information requirements, media richness and structural design.” management science 32 (5): 554–71. davidow, william h., and michael s. malone. 1992. the virtual corporation. structuring and revitalizing the corporation for the 21st century. new york: harpercollins. dimmick, j., a. ramirez jr., t. wang, and s.-f. lin. 2007. “‘extending society’: the role of personal networks and gratificationutilities in the use of interactive communication media.” new media and society 9 (5): 795–810. eisenhardt, kathleen m. 1989. “building theories from case study research.” academy of management review 14 (4): 532–50. ekbrand, hans. 2006. “en introduktion till korrespondensanalys.” in vardagslivets korrespondenser, edited by tomas berglund and hilda lennartsson. vol. s. 161– 80. sociologiska institutionen nr 138: göteborg university. fulk, janet, charles w. steinfield, joseph schmitz, and j. gerard power. 1987. “a social information processing model of media use in organizations.” communication research 14 (5): 529–52. glaser, barney g., and anselm l. strauss. 1967. the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. new york: aldine de gruyter. goffman, ervin. 1959. the presentation of self in everyday life. new york: anchor books. granovetter, mark s. 1973. “the strength of weak ties.” the american journal of sociology 78 (6): 1360–80. hair, joseph f., william c. black, barry j. babin, rolph e. anderson, and ronald l. tatham. 2006. multivariate data analysis. 6th ed. upper saddle river, n.j.: pearson prentice hall. harrison, bennett. 1994. lean and mean: the changing landscape of corporate power in the age of flexibility. new york : basic books. ———. 1995. “symposium on harrison’s ‘lean and mean’: what are the questions?” small business economics 7 (5): 357–63. haythornthwaite, caroline. 2005. “social networks and internet connectivity effects.” information, communication & society 8 (2): 125–47. jaffee, david. 2001. organization theory: tension and change. 1. ed. boston: mcgraw hill. kim, h., g.j. kim, h.w. park, and r.e. rice. 2007. “configurations of relationships in different media: ftf, email, instant messenger, mobile phone, and sms.” journal of computer-mediated communication 12 (4): 1183–1207. kramer, roderick, and tom tyler, eds. 1996. trust in organizations: frontiers of theory and research. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications, inc. lewicki, roy j., and barbara benedict bunker. 1996. “developing and maintaining trust in work relationships.” in trust in organizations: frontiers of theory and research, edited by roderick kramer and tom tyler, 114–40. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications, inc. licoppe, christian, and zbigniew smoreda. 2005. “are social networks technologically embedded? how networks are changing today with changes in communication technology.” social networks 27 (4): 317–35. mcluhan, marshall. 1964. understanding media: the extensions of man. new york: mcgraw-hill. mesch, g.s. 2009. “social context and communication channels choice among adolescents.” computers in human behavior 25 (1): 244–51. meyerson, debra, karl e. weick, and roderick m. kramer. 1996. “swift trust and temporary groups.” in trust in organizations: frontiers of theory and research, edited by roderick kramer and tom tyler, 114–40. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications, inc. nowotny, helga, peter scott, and michael gibbons. 2001. re-thinking science: knowledge and the public in an age of uncertainty. cambridge: polity press. palmgreen, philip, lawrence a. wenner, and karl erik rosengren. 1985. “uses and gratifications research: the past ten years.” in media gratifications research: current perspectives, edited by karl erik rosengren, lawrence a. wenner, and philip palmgreen, 11–37. beverly hills, calif.: sage publications. quan-haase, anabel, and barry wellman. 2006. “hyperconnected net work : computer-mediated community in a high-tech organization.” in the firm as a collaborative community : reconstructing trust in the knowledge economy, edited by c. heckscher and p. adler, 281–333. new york: oxford university press. ramirez jr., a., j. dimmick, j. feaster, and s.-f. lin. 2008. “revisiting interpersonal media competition: the gratification niches of instant messaging, e-mail, and the telephone.” communication research 35 (4): 529–47. rogers, everett m. 2003. diffusion of innovations, 5th edition. new york: free press. salancik, gerald r., and jeffrey pfeffer. 1978. “a social information processing approach to job attitudes and task design.” administrative science quarterly 23 (2): 224–53. sayer, r. andrew, and richard walker. 1992. the new social economy. reworking the division of labor. cambridge, mass.: blackwell publishers. schmitz, joseph, and janet fulk. 1991. “organizational colleagues, media richness, and electronic mail: a test of the social influence model of technology use.” communication research 18 (4): 487–523. selg, håkan. 2010. “om professionell användning av sociala medier och andra digitala kanaler.” technical report 2010-028. uppsala university: department of information technology. ———. 2011a. “om nya kontaktmönster i arbetslivet: facebook, linkedin, twitter.” technical report 2011-031. uppsala university: department of information technology. ———. 2011b. “om nya kontaktmönster i arbetslivet: sms, chatt, e-post och telefoni när används vad?” technical report 2011-021. uppsala university: department of information technology. short, john, ederyn williams, and bruce christie. 1976. the social psychology of telecommunications. london: john wiley. simmel, georg. 2011. the philosophy of money. translated by david frisby. abingdon: routledge. sproull, lee, and sara kiesler. 1986. “reducing social context cues: electronic mail in organizational communication.” management science 32 (11): 1492–1512. steinfield, charles. 1992. “computer-mediated communications in organizational settings emerging conceptual frameworks and directions for research.” management communication quarterly 5 (3): 348–65. trevino, linda klebe, robert h. lengel, and richard l. daft. 1987. “media symbolism, media richness, and media choice in organizations a symbolic interactionist perspective.” communication research 14 (5): 553–74. wellman, barry, and stephen d. berkowitz, eds. 1988. social structures: a network approach. cambridge: cambridge univ. press. wellman, barry, anabel quan‐haase, jeffrey boase, wenhong chen, keith hampton, isabel díaz, and kakuko miyata. 2003. “the social affordances of the internet for networked individualism.” journal of computer‐mediated communication 8 (3). selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 brandtzaeg, p.b, lüders, m, & følstad, a.. (2017, october 18-21). how to understand trust in news media. a theoretical model. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. how to understand trust in news media – a theoretical model petter bae brandtzaeg sintef, norway marika lüders university of oslo, norway asbjørn følstad sintef, norway introduction trust in news media is critical in the everyday workings of a living democracy. however, several studies indicate that trust in news media in many countries is low or dwindling (gallup, 2016; ladd, 2011; reuters, 2016) with severe societal risks as the ultimate consequence (e.g., edelman, 2017; kohring & matthes, 2007; ladd, 2011; quandt, 2012). lowered trust in news media implies changes in patterns of news consumption, where increasing proportions of the public seek news from alternative, low-credibility, content channels, potentially leaving the population more vulnerable to online disinformation or fake news (ladd, 2011; quandt, 2012). the consumption patterns and experiences of news has also changed dramatically with the diffusion of internet, social media and smartphones. for example, the proportion of people who reported to use social media as a source of news in 2016 was 46%, nearly double that of 2013 (reuters, 2016). there exists only insufficient knowledge about how to understand and measure trust in this new and multifaceted media landscape. trust is a complex concept, and numerous definitions can be found across disciplines within the humanistic, social, and technological sciences (fisher, 2016). research objective the objective of this paper is to develop a theoretical model for understanding the components and nature of trust in news media, and show how professionals can use this model to predict and evaluate trust. the model is a modified version of mayer, davis, and schoorman’s (1995) well-known model of interpersonal trust in organizations. their model was one of the first to conceptualize trust as a dynamic and multidimensional concept, dependent on characteristics of both the trustor (the person who trusts) and the trustee (the entity to be trusted) within a specific relationship or condition that varies in depth and strength over time. trust is seen as particularly relevant for circumstances characterized by perceived risk; that is, trust is important in situations where something of value is seen as at stake (mayer et al., 1995). applied to news media, the perceived risk is related to the relationship between the news consumer (trustor) and news media (the trustee). perceived risks may for example relate to whether the news consumer perceives the news media to present an unbiased and comprehensive account of the world. we argue that trust in news media may be analyzed in terms of the three factors of perceived trustworthiness, described by mayer et al (1995): (1) ability the extent to which the news media is perceived to have the needed skills and expertise, as well as being reputable and acclaimed. (2) benevolence the extent to which the news media is perceived as intending to do good, beyond what would be expected from an egocentric motive. (3) integrity the extent to which the news media is seen as adhering to an acceptable set of principles, in particular being independent, unbiased, and fair. due to significant changes in patterns of news consumption, trust needs to be understood relative to different types of news media users in a changing, multichannel, digital context (brandtzaeg, 2010). as argued by fisher (2016), we need to acknowledge and study how trust and trust antecedents vary across news organizations and different social contexts. in addition, this understanding should take into account today’s digital context with an increasingly fragmented landscape of news media outlets, user groups, and media habits. the purpose of the proposed theoretical model is to adequately reflect citizen-diversity with factors determining specific "news media user types", and subsequently be able to examine user types as a moderating construct on trust and the trust antecedents. theoretical contribution figure 1 provides an overview of the proposed model, and how it expands and adapts the model of mayer et al.’s (1995) to the context of news media. through this adaptation, we hold that the model can adequately reflect the diversity among news media users. the upper part of the figure (darker) represents the three factors of perceived trustworthiness, while our theoretical contribution is represented in the lower part (lighter). figure 1. outline of the theoretical model through a typology of "news media user types", we address three different layers of factors that are likely to determine the type of news media user, particularly relevant for trust in news media: (1) individual differences, that is, varying inherent characteristics of the individual news consumer. such individual differences include different levels of trust propensity or dispositional trust as a general tendency to trust others (colquitt, scott & lepine, 2007; writghtsman, 1991). notice that propensity to trust is also included in mayer et al.’s (1995) model, yet we apply it here as part of our contribution to understand different types of news media user. moreover, socio-demographic factors such as age, gender, education and urban versus rural may also predict different user types of news consumption, and in part explain the trust divide in news media. (2) political differences and trust as associated with political preferences (lee, 2010). for example, in the us only 14% of republicans, compared to 51% of democrats, reported to have trust in the media in 2016 (gallup, 2016). also in other countries, there is a tendency that left/right party-preferences have consequences for trust in media. for example, norwegian studies have shown that citizens who vote for rightwing parties to a lesser extent trust media to provide pluralistic and diverse public debates (staksrud et al., 2014). (3) network characteristics and social capital (cook, 2005; putnam, 2000). cook (2005) suggests that trust relations and networks represent a form of social capital that can be mobilized in support of general social cooperation in the society. under other conditions, however, such networks may have negative effects on the degree of trust and may also create doubt concerning trust to news media. people that are part of such networks, for example particular facebook groups, may therefore develop lower trust in news media. future research may also include cultural and societal factors (fukuyama, 2014). trust and development of trust differ between people from different national–societal cultures, particularly on generalized trust (ferrin & gillespie, 2010). findings also suggest large differences between countries concering trust in news (edelman, 2017). it is also an important to take into consideration how increasing globalization may affect trust. several countries experience high levels of both labor immigration and refugees, with increasing differences among people with regard to national–societal cultural background. conclusion in conclusion, mayer et al.’s (1995) model of trust that predicts trustworthiness in the context of organizations, is useful but insufficient for understanding trust in news media. our theoretical model extends the model of mayer et al. with factors that serve to distinguish different news media types. we predict news media type to have a moderating effect on the main determinants of trust in news media, as well as a direct effect on trust. future research should focus on the development of reliable and valid measures of news media types and associated factors. in addition, future work needs to address the practical implications of different news media types on trust in news media. our model goes beyond the current approaches to the study of trust in news with basis in a typology of news media users, that takes into account individual and political differences, differences in social capital, as well as cultural and societal factors. the theoretical framework will help news organizations develop strategies for preventing distrust among the identified user groups. references brandtzæg, p. b. (2010). towards a unified media-user typology (mut): a metaanalysis and review of the research literature on media-user typologies. computers in human behavior, 26(5), 940-956. colquitt, j.a., scott, b.a., & lepine, j.a. (2007). trust, trustworthiness, and trust propensity: a meta-analytical test of their unique relationships with risk taking and job performance. journal of applied psychology, 92(4), 909-927. cook, k. s. (2005). networks, norms, and trust: the social psychology of social capital∗ 2004 cooley mead award address. social psychology quarterly, 68(1), 4-14. edelman, (2017). edelman trust barometer 2017: annual global study. new york, ny: edelman fisher, c. (2016). the trouble with ‘trust’ in news media. communication research and practice, 1-15. gallup (2016). americans' trust in mass media sinks to new low: http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media-sinks-new-low.aspx kohring, m., & matthes, j. (2007). trust in news media: development and validation of a multidimensional scale. communication research, 34(2), 231-252 ladd, j. m. (2011). why americans hate the media and how it matters. princeton university press. lee, t. t. (2010). why they don’t trust the media: an examination of factors predicting trust. american behavioral scientist, 54(1), 8-21. mayer, r. c., davis, j. h., & schoorman, f. d. (1995). an integrative model of organizational trust. academy of management review, 20(3), 709-734. putnam, r. d. (2000). bowling alone: the collapse and revival of american community. simon and schuster. quandt, t. (2012). what’s left of trust in a network society? an evolutionary model and critical discussion of trust and societal communication. european journal of communication, 27(1), 7-21. reuters (2016). reuters institute digital news report 2016: http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/ staksrud, e., steen-johnsen, k., bernard, e., gustafsson, m. h., ihlebæk, k. a., midtbøen, a., sætrang, s., trygstad, s. & m. utheim (2014). status for ytringsfriheten i norge. resultater fra befolkningsundersøkelsen 2014. oslo fritt ord, isf, imk, fafo wrightsman, l. s. (1991) interpersonal trust and attitudes toward human nature. in: j. p. robinson, p. r. shaver, & l. s. wrightsman (eds.). measures of personality and social psychological attitudes: measures of social psychological attitudes (vol. 1, pp. 373-412). new york, ny: academic press. http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media-sinks-new-low.aspx http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/ selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 hews,  r.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  high  profile  criminal  trials,  social  media  conversations  and  juror  prejudice:   understanding  media  regulation  in  the  digital  age.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual   conference  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from   http://spir.aoir.org. high-­profile  criminal  trials,  social  media  conversations   and  juror  prejudice:  understanding  media  regulation  in   the  digital  age   rachel  hews   queensland  university  of  technology,  brisbane,  australia     governments  and  courts  around  the  world  are  increasingly  concerned  about  the   potential  for  social  media  conversations  to  cause  juror  bias  and  jeopardise  the  right  of   an  accused  to  a  fair  trial  (bartels  &  lee,  2013;;  johnston  et  al.,  2013;;  keyzer,  johnston,   pearson,  rodrick,  &  wallace,  2013;;  wallace,  keyzer,  johnston,  pearson,  &  rodrick,   2013;;    hannaford-­agor,  rottman  &  waters,  2011;;tait,  2011;;  thomas,  2010).   information  that  might  prejudice  an  ongoing  trial  may  be  spread  through  social  media  in   a  way  that  is  not  as  easily  controlled  as  information  disseminated  through  mainstream   media.  the  rise  of  social  media  enables  prejudicial  comments  made  by  individuals,   including  comments  as  to  a  person’s  perceived  guilt  or  innocence,  to  reach  a  much   larger  potential  audience.  there  are  significant  fears  that  even  small  numbers  of  highly   prejudicial  posts  on  social  media  could  influence  a  jury  if  those  posts  are  made  to  a   large  audience  or  widely  amplified  by  other  users.  it  is  also  possible  that  the  collective   weight  of  low-­level  prejudicial  information  on  social  media  may  work  to  influence  juries.   the  increasing  prevalence  of  social  media  accordingly  raises  important  questions  about   the  potential  for  unregulated  prejudicial  information  to  influence  juries  and  the  outcome   of  trials.     as  a  discrete  case  study,  we  used  digital  methods  to  investigate  twitter  conversations   during  the  high-­profile  murder  trial  of  gerard  baden-­clay  (r  v  baden-­clay  (2014)  qsc   154).  we  undertook  a  discourse  analysis  of  tweets  during  the  trial  to  assess  the   prevalence  of  prejudicial  conversations,  identify  the  main  actors  involved  in  publishing   and  amplifying  (or  suppressing)  prejudicial  information,  and  understand  how  users   engage  with  that  information  (robson,  2002).    we  then  used  these  findings  to  complete   a  doctrinal  analysis  of  how  appropriately  the  sub  judice  contempt  doctrine,  which   prohibits  the  publication  of  prejudicial  information  by  mainstream  media  during  a  trial,   appears  to  be  operating  in  the  context  of  social  media.       to  obtain  our  data  we  extracted  tweets  that  matched  the  date  range  of  the  trial  and   associated  keywords  and  hashtags,  as  well  as  any  tweets  that  directly  referenced  those   tweets,  from  the  australian  twitter  collection.1  we  categorised  a  sample  of  these  tweets   according  to  whether  their  content  contained  prejudicial  information  and  then  counted   the  frequency  of  each  category  (denzin  &  lincoln,  2011).  the  coding  scheme  was   informed  by  the  legal  principles  of  sub  judice  contempt.2  a  tweet  was  classified  as   prejudicial  where  its  contents  contained:  statements  as  to  guilt  (attorney-­general  (nsw)   v  radio  2ue  sydney  pty  ltd  and  john  laws  [1998]  nswsc  28);;  statements  as  to   innocence  (director  of  public  prosecutions  v  wran  (1987)  86  flr  92);;  content  that   criticized  or  disparaged  the  accused  (director  of  public  prosecutions  v  francis  (2006)   95  sasr  302);;  information  about  confessions  (attorney-­general  (nsw)  v  tcn  channel   nine  pty  ltd  (1990)  20  nswlr  368)  or  information  about  prior  convictions  (maxwell  v   director  of  public  prosecutions  [1935]  ac  309). we  also  separated  tweets  from   accounts  that  were  identifiable  as  professional  journalists  from  tweets  posted  by  other   users.  we  made  this  distinction  so  that  we  could  understand  whether  media   professionals—who  are  required  both  by  their  institutions  and  at  law  to  operate  within   the  constraints  of  the  sub  judice  contempt  doctrine—converse  about  trials  in  a  different   way  to  those  who  are  not  accountable  to  an  employer  or  who  may  not  be  aware  of  the   law.       this  paper  presents  a  useful  opportunity  to  develop  the  application  of  digital  methods   for  legal  analysis  and  policy  reform  (rogers,  2013).  traditional  media  regulation  makes   it  unlawful  to  publish  prejudicial  information  about  pending  criminal  trials  (r  v  daily   mirror  (1927)  1  kb  845).  by  imposing  liability  on  those  responsible  for  publications  such   as  journalists,  editors,  producers  and  proprietors  of  media  organisations  (new  south   wales  law  reform  commission,  2003),  it  has  generally  been  possible  to  limit  juror   exposure  to  prejudice  in  the  mass  media  and  thereby  preserve  juror  impartiality  (ex   parte  auld;;  re  consolidated  press  ltd  (1936)  36  sr  nsw  596)  and  the  right  to  a  fair   trial.  however,  the  decentralised  nature  of  social  media  makes  it  difficult  to  prevent   prejudicial  information  from  being  published  on  the  internet.  to  date,  however,  legal   analyses  have  generally  not  been  able  to  consider  the  extent  to  which  prejudicial   information  does  actually  circulate  on  social  media.  while  this  study  is  limited  to  a  set  of   tweets  posted  by  accounts  identified  as  australian,  it  provides  an  opportunity  to   examine  more  closely  how  discussions  about  ongoing  criminal  trials  actually  play  out.  in   particular,  this  research  seeks  to  understand  how  potentially  prejudicial  information   flows  on  these  networks,  given  that  a  substantial  proportion  of  the  discourse  continues   to  be  dominated  by  news  from  mainstream  media  organisations.  it  seeks  particularly  to   understand  whether  tweets  containing  prejudicial  information  are  highly  visible  or  not,   rather  than  assuming  at  the  outset  that  social  media  will  likely  prejudice  ongoing  trials.   in  this  context,  this  paper  then  develops  a  legal  analysis  of  the  operation  of  traditional   media  regulation,  to  consider  how  well  adapted  it  is  for  regulating  prejudicial  information   in  the  social  media  environment.           1  this  research  is  supported  by  infrastructure  provided  through  the  australian  research  council  funded  tracking   infrastructure  for  social  media  analysis  (trisma  lief  le140100148).   2  a  publication  will  be  in  sub  judice  contempt  of  court  where  it  has,  ‘as  a  matter  of  practical  reality,  a  tendency  to   interfere  with  the  course  of  justice  in  a  particular  case’  (john  fairfax  &  sons  pty  ltd  and  reynolds  v  mcrae,  1955)   references   attorney-­general  (nsw)  v  radio  2ue  sydney  pty  ltd  and  john  laws  [1998]  nswsc   28.   attorney-­general  (nsw)  v  tcn  channel  nine  pty  ltd  (1990)  20  nswlr  368.   bartels,  l.,  &  lee,  j.  (2013).  jurors  using  social  media  in  our  courts:  challenges  and   responses.  journal  of  judicial  administration,  23.   denzin,  n.  k.,  &  lincoln,  y.  s.  (2011).  the  sage  handbook  of  qualitative  research  (4th   ed.).  thousand  oaks:  sage.   director  of  public  prosecutions  v  francis  (2006)  95  sasr  302.   director  of  public  prosecutions  v  wran  (1987)  86  flr  92.   ex  parte  auld;;  re  consolidated  press  ltd  (1936)  36  sr  nsw  596.   hannaford-­agor,  p.,  rottman,  d.  b.,  &  waters,  n.  l.  (2011).  juror  and  jury  use  of  new   media:  a  baseline  exploration.  national  center  for  state  courts  center  for  jury   studies,  united  states,  1–16.   johnston,  j.,  keyzer,  p.,  holland,  g.,  pearson,  m.,  rodrick,  s.,  &  wallace,  a.  (2013).   juries  and  social  media:  a  report  prepared  for  the  victorian  department  of   justice  (pp.  1–30).  australia,  standing  council  on  law  and  justice.   keyzer,  p.,  johnston,  j.,  pearson,  m.,  rodrick,  s.,  &  wallace,  a.  (2013).  the  courts  and   social  media:  what  do  judges  and  court  workers  think?  judicial  officers  bulletin,   25(6),  47–51.   maxwell  v  director  of  public  prosecutions  [1935]  ac  309.   new  south  wales  law  reform  commission.  (2003).  contempt  by  publication,  report   100  summary.   r  v  baden-­clay  (2014)  qsc  154.   r  v  daily  mirror  (1927)  1  kb  845.   robson,  c.  (2002).  real  world  research:  a  resource  for  social  scientists  and   practitioner-­researchers  (2nd  ed.).  malden,  mass;;  oxford:  blackwell  publishing.   rogers,  r.  (2013).  digital  methods.  cambridge,  massachusetts:  the  mit  press.   tait,  d.  (2011).  deliberating  about  terrorism:  prejudice  and  jury  verdicts  in  a  mock   terrorism  trial.  australian  &  new  zealand  journal  of  criminology,  44(3),  387–403.   http://doi.org/10.1177/0004865811419067   thomas,  c.  (2010).  are  juries  fair?  ministry  of  justice  research  series.  retrieved  from   http://www.justice.gov.uk/downloads/publications/research-­and-­analysis/moj-­ research/are-­juries-­fair-­research.pdf   wallace,  a.,  keyzer,  p.,  johnston,  j.,  pearson,  m.,  &  rodrick,  s.  (2013).  courts  and   social  media:  opportunities  and  challenges?  brief,  40(7),  36–39.   microsoft word ess-internet research ethics-internet research ethics.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 internet research ethics: new contexts, new challenges – new (re)solutions? charles m. ess (chair) university of oslo mark d. johns (respondent) luther college, iowa annette markham (respondent) aarhus university, denmark yukari seko university of guelph, canada katrin tiidenberg tallinn university, estonia mary l. gray microsoft research camilla granholm university of helsinki, finland ylva hård af segerstad university of gothenburg, sweden dick kasperowski university of gothenburg, sweden abstract especially the second set of aoir guidelines for research ethics (markham and buchanan 2012) demonstrate that progress can be made in laying out useful approaches for analyzing and resolving at least very many of emerging ethical challenges facing internet researchers. but of course, new research possibilities, contexts, and approaches continue to issue in sometimes strikingly novel ethical suggested citation (apa): ess, c. (2015, october 21-24). internet research ethics: new contexts, new challenges – new (re)solutions? roundtable presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. difficulties that may challenge in turn more established frameworks and guidelines. critical to the ongoing development of internet research ethics (ire), then, is to bring forward new cases and difficulties that, as in previous cycles of guideline development, will serve as fruitful foci for reflection and deliberation that then contribute to both improving our abilities to respond to such new challenges and, eventually, the articulation of subsequent guidelines. hence, our roundtable showcases important examples of contemporary research ethics issues – most especially as these are evoked by new research contexts and foci, and, in several instances, new methodological approaches. our goal is to evoke dialogue and collective reflection on how these issues may be best resolved, and to thereby lift them up as reference points within and constituents of the evolving development of ire. following brief presentations from each of our contributors, our two respondents, both long-time and prominent members of the aoir ethics committee, will offer comments before then opening the roundtable to discussion with the audience. presentations yukari seko (postdoctoral fellow, university of guelph, canada): deathcasting and the ethics of online imagery this presentation aims to ignite the critical discussion about the problems of usergenerated images of pain and to illuminate ethical dilemmas of using such imagery for educational and research purposes. my discussion draws on a swedish deathcasting in 2010, in which a young man hanged himself while live broadcasting over the internet. the video was archived and extensively distributed over youtube and other online depositories, later being reproduced as time-lapse videos and gif images. this deathcasting eloquently speaks of current digital environments in which (re)production and consumption of painful images distance (rather than connect) viewers from the suffering of others. once uploaded online, one’s private suicide has acquired an unprecedented global visibility and become a new spectacle to be consumed over and over by countless spectators. on one level, the user-generated nature of the deathcasting may raise social awareness and mobilize community efforts toward a grass-roots suicide intervention. yet on the other, it flattens the embodied experience of suicide and potentially expands humiliation and degradation of the victim. given that the ethics of visual internet research is still in its infancy, there is a pressing need to update our understanding of human sufferings visually presented and shared online. i will raise a series of questions: how can we, as researchers, educators, media producers and consumers, practice and teach ethical engagement with the body in pain online? if we decide to show, study or rework the painful images for the sake of research and teaching, is there an ethical way to re-circulate such images? and ultimately, what are the ways in which we can make the pain of others imaginable and sharable beyond material shareability of digital images? katrin tiidenberg (tallinn university, estonia): nakedness and contextual ethics. whenever conducting interview research, we have the opportunity (or the obligation) to follow the principles of informed consent and engage in an ongoing dialogue with our participants about what it is we want to know, do with what they tell us and publish. conducting research that involves analysing explicit sexual content and images, this has been the only thinkable approach for me, and a comfortable one from a personal ethics standpoint. however, due to practical or methodical reasons, we may sometimes want to analyse the ‘naturally occurring’ data existing out there in the field without actually talking to people who have created and posted it. this presentation explores the dilemmas and confusions of trying to follow the ethnographical principles of ‘care’ and the human subjects notion of ‘no harm’ when operating without informed consent. by comparing two research projects one with not safe for work (nsfw) self-shooters on tumblr and the other based on pregnant women’s instagram presentations both of whom regularly post scantily clad images on non-password protected, technically public spaces – i will consider different ways of examining people’s notions of privacy, tactics of audience segregation, and preferences regarding possible social convergence. mary l. gray (microsoft research): when science, consumer rights, and human subjects research collide as more and more of researchers crisscross disciplines and work together to study or build better social media, we are pressed to rethink the basic methods and the ethical obligations that shape our work. indeed “ethical dilemmas” are often signs that our methodological techniques are stretched too thin and failing us. when is something a “naturalistic experiment” if the data are always undergoing a/b tweaks? how do we determine consent if we are studying a commercial environment that is at once proprietary data, controllable, like a lab, and deeply social, like a backyard bbq? when do we need to consider someone’s information “private” if we have no way to know, for sure, what they want us to do with what we can see them doing? when, if ever, is it ok to play with someone’s data if there’s no evident harm but we have no way to clearly test the long-term impact on a nebulous number of end users? and how will we clarify the meanings of "original," "pre-existing," "secondary," and "found" human subjects data sets so that industry and university-based researchers using these data are held to the same ethical principles and practices? this talk will explore some of the challenges facing digital media research today and offer a path forward for reimagining the ethical obligations that come with studying digital domains. camilla granholm (university of helsinki, finland): “online counseling as a part of social work practice; ethical challenges in research and practice” during the last two decades there has been a rapid development and a public demand for online services in the social and healthcare sector. organizations that earlier have offered services offline are suddenly required to develop services for online use. in this process the foremost action has been to make sure that the online service is easy to find and navigate, and is user friendly. questions about anonymity and confidentiality are often overlooked. cooperating with academia gives both public and non-governmental organizations and their services credibility. researchers are often asked to evaluate the service by looking at client contacts and response. this can lead to ethical dilemmas as the clients might not be informed of the fact that their online contact can be used for research purposes. in the presentation i use examples of ethical problems occurring in my research on applying online tools in social work practice in finland. my research spans nearly a decade and includes four sets of data, collected at different points in time between 2005 and 2014. the research therefore contributes by offering an insight on the change in the approaches to ict among social work researchers and professionals over this time. in brief, the sub-studies show how the use of ict, among both clients and organizations offering help and support has changed. the development has gone from services being asynchronous and private to involving more social and synchronous elements. this development reflects the development of ict and how people implement it in their everyday lives in general. the research acknowledges both the opportunities and ethical challenges that the implementation of ict brings for social work research and practice. in my presentation i will discuss and give some suggestions on how to tackle these ethical problems. ylva hård af segerstad (associate professor, university of gothenburg, sweden) and dick kasperowski (phd, university of gothenburg, sweden): opportunities and challenges of studying closed communities online: digital methods and ethical considerations in this presentation, we will discuss the methodological and ethical challenges of studying a closed community of bereaved parents on facebook. the community that we are focusing on now has more than 1200 members, producing large amounts of data. we aim to collect data both on the aggregated level of the community and to follow individual trajectories, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. each of the stages of data collection and analysis gives rise to a set of methodological and ethical challenges. closed communities for sensitive topics such as this have to a large extent been inaccessible to researchers. what gives us access to the data is the fact that one of the researchers is a member in the closed community and that the grief support association organizing the closed group emphatically backs up the research project. this means that the researcher being a member of the community will act and have the function of being an “ethical representative” for the other researchers in the multidisciplinary project. technically, we have tools and expertise to collect large amounts of data over a long period of time by scraping snapshots of content in the community. the data collection software will be configured to immediately replace real names with anonymized identifier strings. the content will then be processed using natural language processing (nlp) tools for automatically categorising, understanding and summarising text and detecting emotions and sentiment. the different stages in the research require different types of expertise from the research staff, and for the implementation of the project we are dependent on each and all of our collective competencies. one of the ways to address challenges on different levels throughout the project will be to use digital methods to give the staff different access levels to the data in combination with automatically anonymizing and analysing the data. however, where is the ethical challenge located when delegating research tasks to machines and algorithms? in the construction of algorithms? in deploying the software? in interpreting results? this opens up questions of how research with digital methods configure ethical problems in unforeseen ways. furthermore, no matter whether we focus on the aggregated level or on the individual, we end up with large amounts of data collected in this context over time. experience from our pilot study show that it is fairly straightforward to get informed consent to follow individual trajectories. however, given the amounts of data each individual is likely to produce over time in interaction with other community members, what are the implications for informed consent in such a sensitive area? for better or worse, our study represents a kind of worst-case scenario for several reasons. the ethical and methodological challenges that arise when digital methods, i.e. technological possibilities for doing research, might clash with codes of research conduct as well as with human concern. in this presentation, we will focus on a number of issues that arise from these methodological and ethical points of departure. reference markham, a. & buchanan, e. (2012). ethical decision-making and internet research: 2012. recommendations from the aoir ethics working committee. <www.aoir.org/reports/ethics2.pdf> selected papers of aoir 2016: the of conferenceannual th7he 1t association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  mor,  y.,  kligler-­vilnechik,  n.,  maoz,  i.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  political   expression  on  facebook  in  a  context  of  conflict:  dilemmas  and  coping  strategies  of   annual  conference  of  the    th7:  the  1paper  presented  at  aoir  2016  .israeli  youth-­jewish association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from   http://spir.aoir.org.   political  expression  on  facebook   in  a  context  of   conflict:   dilemmas   and   coping   strategies   of   jewish-­israeli  youth     yifat  mor,  the  department  of  communication  and  journalism,  the  hebrew   university  of    jerusalem     dr.  neta  kligler-­vilnechik,  the  department  of  communication  and  journalism,   the  hebrew  university  of  jerusalem     prof.  ifat  maoz,  the  department  of  communication  and  journalism,  the   hebrew  university  of  jerusalem     introduction   social  media  and  facebook  in  particular  embody  a  complex  and  challenging   context  for  impression  management,  particularly  when  it  comes  to  political   expression.  the  israeli  case  presents  a  unique  context  in  which  to  examine   these  challenges,  as  jewish-­israeli  youth  are  embedded  in  a  divided  society   involved  in  the  protracted  israeli-­palestinian  conflict.  a  thematic  content   analysis  of  15  in-­depth  interviews  with  jewish-­israeli  students  who  are  regular   facebook  users  revealed  distinct  dilemmas.  jewish-­israeli  youth  are  highly   motivated  to  discuss  politics  on  facebook,  while  also  aware  of  social  risks   involved  in  such  discussion.  they  thus  adopt  unique  coping  strategies  in   which  political  expression  is  an  integral  part  in  the  delicate  act  of  impression   management.         one  of  the  aims  of  this  research  has  been  to  complement  existing  work  on   youth’s  political  expression  on  facebook,  embedded  mostly  in  a  u.s.  context,   with  a  different  cultural  and  socio-­political  context.  the  israeli  case  is  uniquely   situated  as  a  telling  comparison  case.  in  contrast  to  the  american  context   where  often  political  conversations  are  avoided  (eliasoph,  1998),  in  the   divided  israeli  society,  politics  plays  a  salient  role  in  people’s  lives  (hammack,   2011;;  maoz,  2006;;  rosenberg  &  maoz,  2012)  and  political  topics  are  hotly   debated.  moreover,  israeli  society  is  characterized  by  different  speech  norms   and  different  perceptions  of  the  appropriateness  of  political  talk.       method   the  research  was  conducted  in  2014,  at  a  period  of  relative  calm  in  the   general  context  of  conflict  in  israel.  a  public  call  for  interviewees  was  posted   on  the  facebook  account  of  the  first  author,  asking  her  own  facebook   network  to  share  the  post  widely.  this  technique  followed  the  logic  of  snowball   sampling,  approaching  several  interviewees  and  using  their  social   connections  in  order  to  reach  a  larger  pool  of  potential  participants  (atkinson   and  flint,  2011).         we  have  conducted  and  analyzed  15  semi-­structured  interviews  with  23-­29   year-­old  jewish-­israeli  interviewees  (7  female  and  8  male,  mage  =  26.7,  s.d.  =   1.7).  the  interviews  were  conducted  in  hebrew,  generally  in  the  interviewees'     local  cafés  or  at  their  homes  and  lasted  45  –  100  minutes.  the  analysis  was   based  on  the  grounded  theory  approach,  focusing  on  the  production  of   meanings  and  concepts  used  by  social  actors  in  real  settings  (glaser  and   strauss,  1967).  our  aim  was  to  understand  the  phenomenon  as  our   respondents  understand  it.  through  iterative  coding,  we  grouped  concepts   together  into  categories,  which  provided  the  structure  for  the  following  paper.   within  different  categories,  sub-­categories  were  identified,  to  provide  further   clarification  and  specification  (strauss  &  corbin,  1998,  p.  101).  finally,  we   connected  the  emerging  themes  and  categories  to  concepts  and  questions   emerging  from  the  literature.       findings       our  analysis  revealed  the  following  main  themes:     1.   impression  management  on  facebook:  between  the  personal  and  the   political     in  line  with  previous  research  (joinson,  2008;;  deandrea  &  walther,  2011)  our   findings  indicate  that  our  interviewees  hold  multiple  and  sometimes  conflicting   motivations  for  using  facebook.  the  personal  and  social  motivations  and   needs  of  being  liked,  gaining  or  maintaining  popularity  and  managing   interactions  often  clash  with  the  motivation  for  political  expression  through   facebook.       2.   motivations  for  political  posting:  from  self-­expression  to  discussion  and   persuasion     in  the  u.s.  context,  recent  work  found  students  devising  complex  strategies  to   effectively  “avoid  politics,”  (eliasoph,  1998)  including  self-­censorship,   neutrality  and  use  of  humor  (thorson  et  al.,  2015).  for  israeli  interviewees,   political  expression  took  a  much  more  central  position,  as  a  vehicle  for  voicing   opinions,  receiving  updates  on  the  political  realm,  and  creating  an  image  of   themselves  as  knowledgeable,  opinionated  participants  in  political  life.       3.   the  risks  of  political  expression  in  a  highly  divided  society  in  conflict     notwithstanding  the  desirability  of  political  content  on  facebook,  posting   political  content  may  raise  undesired  reactions.  according  to  jang  et  al.   (2014),  having  a  large  number  of  facebook  friends  increases  the  possibility  of   high  divergence  in  political  views,  and  decreases  the  potential  of  a  productive   political  discussion.  further,  consistent  with  john  and  dvir's  (2015)  findings,   our  interviewees  are  aware  that  posting  political  content  holds  risks:   disappointing  family  members,  ending  friendships  specifically  weak  tie   friendships)  and  even  damaging  future  career  opportunities.  this  risk  is   apparently  salient  not  only  in  times  of  an  extreme  eruption  of  conflict,  but  also   in  calmer  times  of  routine,  that  are  still  embedded  in  the  context  of  a  divided   society  in  an  intractable  conflict.     4.   how  to  go  about  posting  politics:  coping  strategies  and  practices   according  to  our  findings  our  interviewees  are  considerably  motivated  to   express  political  content  on  facebook,  while  being  well  aware  of  the  risks  and   challenges  involved  in  such  acts  in  the  context  of  their  divisive  socio-­political   reality.  the  interviewees  are  familiar  with  facebook’s  privacy  tools  and  use   them  regularly,  but  see  them  as  insufficient  to  guard  them  from  risks.  to   counter  this  apparent  weakness  of  facebook's  privacy  tools  the  interviewees   tend  to  adopt  alternative,  behavioral  strategies.  consequently,  they  describe   four  main  strategies  for  dealing  with  dilemmas  related  to  posting  politics:   restricting  access  to  some  posts  or  all  of  them;;  phrasing  the  message  vaguely   or  softening  radical  views;;  sharing  or  liking  content  by  other  people  or  pages   instead  of  articulating  their  own  posts;;  and  finally,  using  humor  to  diffuse   political  tension.         discussion       the  use  of  behavioral  strategies  to  overcome  the  challenges  of  political   expression  on  facebook  is  thus  common  for  both  israeli  and  american  youth.   but  unlike  the  american  students,  the  youth  in  this  project  did  not  employ   these  strategies  to  avoid  politics,  but  rather  to  enable  and  support  their   political  expression,  in  the  face  of  the  challenges  and  risks  of  such  an   endeavor.  making  such  cultural  comparisons  can  help  parse  out  which   characteristics  of  political  expression  on  facebook  are  culturally  dependent,   and  which  are  more  universally  shared,  arising  from  the  affordances  and   constraints  of  the  facebook  platform.  this  research  extends  our   understanding  of  facebook  as  a  platform  for  expressing  political  content  in   divided  societies,  characterized  by  considerable  internal  and  external  conflict   as  well  as  high  levels  of  political  involvement.       conclusion     given  the  central  role  of  political  expression  for  democracy  (dewey,  1927),  we   can  be  encouraged  by  young  jewish-­israelis’  strong  motivation  to  express   themselves  politically  on  facebook.  in  this  highly  divided,  yet  close-­knit   society,  social  media  platforms  are  a  site  for  young  people  to  negotiate  their   social  goals  with  their  political  expression.  in  the  israeli  case,  the  result  of  this   negotiation  is  not  an  avoidance  of  political  talk,  but  rather  a  finely  tuned  act  of   impression  management,  in  which  having  a  prominent  political  voice   contributes  to,  rather  than  undermines  one’s  positive  self-­presentation.     references     atkinson,   r.,   &   flint,   j.   (2001).   accessing   hidden   and   hard-­to-­reach   populations:   snowball   research   strategies.   social   research   update,   33(1),  1-­4.     deandrea,   d.   c.,   &   walther,   j.   b.   (2011).   attributions   for   inconsistencies   between   online   and   offline   self-­presentations.   communication   research,  38(6),  805-­825.     dewey,   j.   (1927).   the   role   of   philosophy   in   the   history   of   civilization.   the     philosophical  review,  1-­9.     eliasoph,   n.   (1998).   avoiding   politics:   how   americans   produce   apathy   in     everyday  life.  cambridge  university  press.     glaser,   b.g.,   &   strauss,   a.l.   (1967).   the   discovery   of   grounded   theory:   strategies  for  qualitative  research.  chicago,  il:  aldine  publishing  co.     hammack,  p.  l.  (2011).  narrative  and  the  politics  of  identity.  new  york:   oxford  university  press.     jang,   s.   m.,   lee,   h.,   &   park,   y.   j.   (2014).   the   more   friends,   the   less   political   talk?   predictors   of   facebook   discussions   among   college   students.  cyberpsychology,   behavior,   and   social   networking,   17(5),   271-­275.     john,   n.   a.,   &   dvir-­‐‑gvirsman,   s.   (2015).   “i   don't   like   you   any   more”:   facebook   unfriending   by   israelis   during   the   israel–gaza   conflict   of   2014.  journal  of  communication,  65(6),  953-­974.     joinson,  a.  n.  (2008).  "'looking  at',  'looking  up'  or  'keeping  up  with'  people?   motives   and   uses   of   facebook".  online   social   networks.   chi   2008,   april  5–10:1027-­1036.     maoz,   i.   (2006).   the   effect   of   news   coverage   concerning   the   opponents’   reaction   to   a   concession   on   its   evaluation   in   the   israeli-­palestinian   conflict.  harvard  international  journal  of  press/politics,  11(4),  70-­88.       rosenberg,   h.   &  maoz,   i.   (2012).   "meeting   the   enemy”:   the   reception   of   a   television   interview   with   a   female   palestinian   terrorist   among   jewish   youth  in  israel.  the  communication  review,  15(1),  45-­71.     strauss,   a.   &   corbin,   j.   (2008).  basics   of   qualitative   research:   techniques   and  procedures  for  developing  grounded  theory.  thousand  oaks,  ca:   sage.     thorson,   k.,   vraga,   e.k.,   &   kligler-­vilenchik,   n.   (2015).   don’t   push   your   opinions  on  me:  young  citizens  and  political  etiquette  on  facebook.  in   j.a  hendricks,  &  d.  schill  (eds),  presidential  campaigning  and  social   media  (pp.  74-­93).  new  york:  oxford  university  press.   selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 dwarf acts like a lady: the importance of gender roles in understanding gender switching and player behavior abstract as players craft and enact embodiment in digital games, the relationship between social interaction and gender (male/female) versus gender-role identity (masculinity/femininity) remains unclear. this paper examines differences in chat, avatar movement, and avatar appearance among male players who played male and female avatars. initial analysis reveals that gender-based playstyles are distinct from gender role-based playstyles. most importantly, men playing female avatars retain patterns typical of male players; however they depart from patterns typical of high-masculinity players. specifically, gender-switching males tended to reject masculine behaviors in favor of flirting, using more punctuation, and deferring physical leadership. we interpret this to mean that male gender-switchers do not shed male behaviors and, instead of performing normatively feminine behaviors, work to counteract masculine behaviors – they try to act “not-masculine.” these findings have implications for gameplay scholarship where offline gender is unknown and for integrating gender roles as key to studying gender in games. keywords gender; video games; virtual worlds; identity introduction and background an important aspect of online social interaction is the ability to craft a presence to navigate a digital space. in online games and digital worlds, that self is often represented by a customized avatar. that persona could represent one aspect of identity, be a faithful reproduction, or be an alternate self (messinger, et al. 2008). however, a growing body of work has found that users’ activities online are not so easily divorced from offline identities, especially gender (herring, 1994,1, 5, 9) in some mmos, a substantial proportion of players – especially men – report using avatars of the opposite gender (yee & ducheneaut, 2011). a study of multiplayer online games found that 70% of women and 54% of men have played a character of the opposite gender. however, the manifestation of such “gender switching” in social interaction are unclear. although research suggests that play alternately-gendered avatars as a kind of identity play (turkle, 1995), this may not always be the case. yee’s work (2008) on the topic suggests that many men in world of warcraft (wow) in particular play female avatars without the intention to persuade others they identify as female offline. this paper analyzes the chat, movement, and avatar appearance of players in the massively multiplayer online game (mmo) wow to examine how player behavior differs when using an avatar of the opposite gender than reported in an online survey. theoretical framework and literature review in the full-length paper, we draw on feminist theories of self, with a focus on the interplay between masculine and feminine gender roles, and how they relate to gender identity. feminist discussions of gender roles generally refer to the set of social and individual expectations or rules arising from society, and are understood as critical to the establishment of the ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ behaviors for men as men and women as women. butler (1990), benhabib (1987), and others argue that the self emerges in interaction, and can be understood as a narrative construction of identity that can incorporate a multiplicity of gender roles and identities. for gender role theorists such as goffman (1954), roles are exclusively social, and treated as “staged presentations” that actors learn through socialization, imitation, and experience. eagly (1987) proposes that men and women behave differently according to gender-segregated social roles. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 this view would suggest that avatar gender in an mmo may serve as a contextual stimulus that activates gender roles associated with that gender. research has found that avatar appearance can influence individual behavior and attitudes (yee & bailenson, 2007; merola & peña, 2010; messinger et al., 2008). lehdonvirta et al. (2012) found men are more likely to ask for help when assigned a female avatar, suggesting that avatar gender may influence behavior. however, a study of gender swapping in the mmo everquest ii (huh & williams, 2010) found male players do not behave differently when switching avatar gender as measured by combat instances, quests completed, encounters fighting other players, or number of chat messages sent. feminist theories of gender and social role theory suggest that such patterns may be due to gender roles, rather than strictly gender category. we hypothesize that men playing female avatars use the same styles of chat, movement, and appearance as men playing male avatars. in contrast, we hypothesize that those who gender switch use play styles associated with lower levels of masculinity, as identified by the bem sex role inventory. methods and results to examine whether men who play female avatars tend to adopt less masculine styles of play, we examined the chat, movement, and appearance of players in a custom-built mini-game in the mmo wow. this project is part of a larger study of social interaction in virtual worlds (explained fully in the complete paper). the project asked players to fill out an online survey, then scheduled them into groups of 3-5 people to play a two-hour game. chat, movement, and avatar appearance were logged automatically during play, and data were content analyzed into categories such as clustering behavior, gestures use, discourse types (e.g., directives, flirtation), and chat characteristics (e.g., punctuation, emoticons). the survey asked participats their gender, “i consider myself: [male, female, other],” and used the bem sex role inventory (bsri, 1974) to assess levels of masculinity and femininity. we contrast bsri scores with player and avatar gender to explore how gender identity relates to behavior in wow. sample size was 375 participants. because our sample only had seven women who played male avatars, we do not examine women who gender switch in this paper, but we do examine women in our assessments of masculine play styles. results and conclusions initial findings reveal that player gender correlated strongly (.702, p < .0001) with avatar gender, and men were more likely (35%) to switch genders than women (10%). levels of femininity or masculinity however, did not correlate with avatar gender, nor with player gender. that is, men did not consistently demonstrate higher levels of masculinity than women. we examined the play style of male players to identify characteristics of play that differed most strongly. logistic regressions (removing avatar gender) showed that men tended to jump more, use fewer appreciation statements such as “nice job!,” select avatars with less attractive faces, and spread out less during play. in contrast, high masculinity (bsri) corresponded with different behaviors: less use of punctuation, fewer smile gestures, less flirtation, more combat events, greater use of player names, and more action directives. these differences suggest that male play styles are distinct from masculine play styles. we also examined whether or not men who used female avatars tended to match either male or masculine play styles. we found that men who switched gender tended to use the same play styles as men who did not with one exception: men playing female avatars tended to select avatars with more attractive faces than those who were playing male avatars. however, when looking at gender roles, we found that men who gender switched tended to exhibit some of the play styles associated with lower levels of masculinity: gender switchers were more flirtatious, used more punctuation, and tended not to lead the group into or out of rooms/buildings. the full paper presents and discusses and expands on these findings in-depth. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 these results suggest that although play style as defined by what male players typically do does not change when men play female avatars, when we examine patterns in play by gender roles, we see distinctions between gender switchers and non-gender switchers. that is, the behaviors associated with masculine, but not necessarily male, players changed when men played female avatars. we conclude that distinguishing play style by player gender is significantly different than distinguishing them by gender role. in addition, although styles associated with men may not change when player gender switch, styles associated with masculinity do change. we interpret these findings to mean that male gender-switchers do not shed their male behaviors and instead of performing normatively feminine behaviors, they work to counteract masculine behaviors – they try to act “not masculine.” these findings have implications for the study of gameplay where offline gender identification is not known, and for integrating gender roles as key to the study of gender in games. acknowledgments this research was funded by the air force research laboratories. references bem, s.l. (1974). the sex role inventory. journal of personality and social psychology, 42, 122-62. butler, j. (1990). gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. new york: routledge. herring, s. c. (1994). politeness in computer culture: why women thank and men flame. in: cultural performances: proceedings of the third berkeley women and language conference (pp. 278-294). berkeley women and language group. huh, s & williams, d. (2010). dude looks like a lady: gender swapping in an online game. in w.s.bainbridge (ed.), online worlds: convergence of the real and the virtual. human-computer interaction series (pp. 161-174) hussain, z. & griffiths, m.d. (2008). gender swapping and socializing in cyberspace: an exploratory study. cyberpsychology & behavior, 11, 1, 47-53. lehdonvirta, m., nagashima, y., lehdonvirta, v., & baba, a. (2012). the stoic male: how avatar gender affects help-seeking behaviour in an online game. games and culture, 7(1). markus, h & e wurf. (1987). the dynamic self-concept: a social psychological perspective. annual review of psychology, 38, 299-337. merola, n. & peña, j. (2010). the effects of avatar appearance in virtual worlds. the journal of virtual worlds, 2(5). messinger, p.r, ge, x., stroulia, e., lyons, k., smirnov, k, & bone, m. (2008). on the relationship between my avatar and myself. the journal of virtual worlds, 1(2), n.p. peña, j., hancock, j. t., & merola, n.a. (2009). the priming effects of avatars in virtual settings. communication research, 36, 838-856. turkle, s. (1995). life on the screen: identity in the age of the internet. new york: simon & schuster. yee, n. & bailenson, j.n. (2007). the proteus effect: the effect of transformed self-representation on behavior. human communication research, 33, 271-290. yee, n. & ducheneaut, n. (2011). “gender bending,” retrieved from: http://blogs.parc.com/playon/2010/07/23/gender-bending/ yee, n. (2008). maps of digital desires: exploring the topography of gender and play in online games. in kafai, y., heeter, c., denner, j., & sun, j. (eds.), beyond barbie and mortal kombat: new perspectives on gender and gaming (pp. 83-96). cambridge, ma: mit press. microsoft word burgess-cassidy-light.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): burgess, j., cassidy, e., & light, b. (2014, october 22-24). deeply superficial digital media engagement? the case of twitter and movember 2013. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. deeply superficial digital media engagement? the case of twitter and movember 2013 jean burgess queensland university of technology elija cassidy queensland university of technology ben light queensland university of technology movember is a charity and charity event concerned with men’s health. the event takes place during november and predominantly involves male participants (mobros) being sponsored to grow a moustache and document the activity. movember began in australia in 2004 with a focus upon raising awareness regarding prostate cancer. the scope of movember has since expanded globally and also now includes awareness raising activity related to testicular cancer and men’s mental health. in 2012 the charity reported raising over 141m aud. the money raised is used to undertake research into treatments, and support services, for prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and mental health. a key actor with movember has been social media – movember has presences on facebook, instagram, pinterest, youtube and twitter. one might say that movember has successfully embraced the potentials for public engagement with health and wellbeing issues via social media. indeed, movember even engages a hard to reach group, men, who are well known to rebuff health and wellbeing issues due to the pressures of normative conceptions of masculinity (vogel et al. 2011). there has been much discussion since the 1990s regarding the potentials of the internet, and digital media more generally, for health education. of particular interest here is that research which suggests that digital media can: exploit the resources of patients themselves (hejlesen et al. 2001); afford improved accessibility because they are said to be available 24 hours a day access and offer the pacing of treatment to suit individuals’ needs and lifestyles (strecher 2007; rice et al. 2012); and offer increased levels of interactivity and therefore, much more scope for public engagement than with the mass media (turner-mcgrievy et al. 2009; ito and brown 2010). of course there are also problems associated with such approaches particularly in terms of the perceived credibility of internet sources (eysenbach 2008) levels of digital media literacy (gray and klein 2006) and of course more general considerations regarding digital inclusion. that said, the literature to date, regarding engagement with social media for health and wellbeing is nascent. an emphasis on the power of social media publics, and the participatory turn, runs through much of this work and there are emerging concerns with regard to how such engagements can be evaluated. at present much of the discourse regarding evaluation, in practice particularly, is heavily influenced by more general clinical practice. in enfolding clinical practice expectations, evaluation is configured as seeking to establish irrefutable links between a deep and meaningful intervention (or social media engagement) and a clinical outcome. what seems to be less considered here are the potentials for superficiality of engagement. using activity generated with twitter during movember 2013, we interrogate the natures of superficiality running through what can be defined as a highly successful public health engagement intervention. indeed, movember arguably has not just been successful in one year in terms of raising funds for the causes it is concerned with, it has done this year-on-year since 2004. we tracked the keyword 'movember' (without the hash symbol) using an in-house installation of yourtwapperkeeper hosted on a nectar server. data collection ran from 01 october 04 december 2013, covering the ramp-up and wind-down periods of the event. we collected a total of 1,313,426 tweets from 759,345 unique users. in order to understand the natures of superficiality: • lists of the users who were @replied or retweeted most frequently in association with movember were extracted. the top 100 users, those receiving the most mentions, were then categorized by their predominant displays of identity. the nature of the dialogue surrounding them was then analysed. • we extracted all urls from the entire corpus of tweets and generated a list of the most-shared urls. we assume here that urls work well as a proxy for the external web or mainstream media content and resources that are most active in the public engagement around an event or issue. the top 100 urls were then coded based on a combination of genre and function, giving us an additional perspective on which cultural artifacts are most 'resonant' (because they were most frequently passed on by other users) in the social media activity around any given topic or event (as argued by (hjorth and burgess 2014)). from this analysis were are able to demonstrate roles of superficiality of activity and connectivity in relation to movember as related to the content and users associated with the higher levels of activity. this is evident in the lack of involvement with the underlying health matters of concern to movember. instead we see, mostly, minor forays into the event by celebrities, sports personalities and their fans. there is also opportunistic tagging by commercial entities. participation in moustache growing is very low and even these people do little to engage directly with issues associated with prostate cancer, testicular cancer and men’s mental health. superficiality is strong within the event where higher levels of activity are concerned. the extent and nature of superficiality throughout the middle and lower levels of activity associated with movember 2013 are currently being interrogated in order to consider the relationships, if any, between superficiality and popularity. further work, we argue, is necessary to understand the comparative roles of superficiality not only as related to different levels of activity and popularity within a given social media site, but also across sites being engaged with for any given event. although twitter is a major platform for movember, further work is required to understand the influence of other platforms where activity may be lower, but ‘deeper’ engagement may be higher. references eysenbach, g. (2008). credibility of health information and digital media: new perspectives and implications for youth. digital media, youth, and credibilty. m. j. metzger and a. j. flanagin. cambridge, the mit press: 123-154. gray, n. j. and j. d. klein (2006). "adolescents and the internet: health and sexuality information." current opinion in obstetrics and gynecology 18(5): 519-524. hejlesen, o. k., s. plougmann, b. m. ege, o. v. larsen, t. bek and d. cavan (2001). "using the internet in patient-centred diabetes care for communication, education, and decision support." studies in health technology and informatics(2): 1464-1468. hjorth, l. and j. burgess (2014). intimate banalities: the emotional currency of shared camera phone images during the queensland flood disaster. the routledge companion to mobile media (forthcoming). g. goggin and l. hjorth. new york, routledge. ito, k. e. and j. d. brown (2010). "to friend or not to friend: using new media for adolescent health promotion." north carolina medical journal 71(4): 367-372. rice, e., e. tulbert, j. cederbaum, a. barman adhikari and n. g. milburn (2012). "mobilizing homeless youth for hiv prevention: a social network analysis of the acceptability of a face-to-face and online social networking intervention." health education research 27(2): 226-236. strecher, v. (2007). "internet methods for delivering behavioral and health-related interventions (ehealth)." annual review of clinical psychology 3: 53-76. turner-mcgrievy, g. m., m. k. campbell, d. f. tate, k. p. truesdale, j. m. bowling and l. crosby (2009). "pounds off digitally study. a randomized podcasting weight-loss intervention." american journal of preventive medicine 37(4): 263-269. vogel, d. l., s. r. heimerdinger-edwards, j. h. hammer and a. hubbard (2011). "“boys don't cry”: examination of the links between endorsement of masculine norms, self-stigma, and help-seeking attitudes for men from diverse backgrounds." journal of counseling psychology 58(3): 368. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 networking aggie: broadcasting information to topical communities marco t. bastos university of california, davis mark lubell university of california, davis abstract modern agricultural systems are experiencing a revolution in how information is disseminated and exchanged among networks of outreach professionals, farmers, consumers, and community stakeholders. the traditional approach to agricultural extension relied on a top-down, continuum model that went from university researchers to cooperative extension and finally to growers. with internet penetration rates rising in rural communities, stakeholders are increasingly experimenting with social media and agricultural information has been widely shared across local, national, and global networks. this paper addresses such networks by deploying a supervised snowball census of the agricultural social web to investigate the formation of communities dedicated to sharing agricultural information. we identified a cohort of 153 individuals responsible for the outreach initiatives at the university of california and mapped the first and second level network of followers connected to this community, thus rendering a population of 59k users that tweeted 250m tweets since signing up to twitter. we processed the content of each tweet posted in 2014 using multiple classifiers and determined that the boundaries of the network comprise 32k nodes and 4m edges. the resulting graph shows that this community is clustered in areas of agricultural expertise with limited overlap across cliques. we also found increasing patterns of core-periphery dynamics associated with the level of expertise attached to each topical subnet. the paper concludes by discussing related literature and the policy implications of our research. 1. introduction modern agricultural systems are experiencing a revolution in how knowledge is disseminated and exchanged among networks of outreach professionals, farmers, consumers, and community stakeholders. the traditional approach to agricultural extension relied on a top-down, continuum model that went from university researchers to cooperative extension and finally to farmers. with internet penetration rates growing in rural communities, stakeholders are increasingly experimenting with social media and suggested citation (apa): bastos, m.,& lubell, m. (2015, october 21-24). networking aggie: broadcasting information to topical communities. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. other online forms of communication to share agricultural information across local, national, and global networks. yet, systematic scholarship investigating the dynamics of online networks to the agriculture and food sectors, and the potential effects of social media at spreading expert knowledge, have remained largely unexplored. social media affordances have been remarkably efficient in connecting nationwide and global chains of information diffusion to otherwise local activities (waldman, 2011). this transition was particularly salient in topics and problems relying on a small number of specialists who engage a large number of highly diverse and continuously expanding body of potential stakeholders. recent studies have shown that one way to disseminate knowledge efficiently across broader communities is through specialized knowledge networks (bidwell et al., 2013, kalafatis et al., 2015). these networks are primarily knowledge extension and include organizations, actors, and communication infrastructure through which information is disseminated, often transforming or supporting decision-making policies that impact local and national communities. within our field of inquire, knowledge networks allow for specialized information to travel within and among communities of interest (henri and pudelko, 2003)—that is, from twitter accounts managed by government agencies to twitter accounts of outreach individuals and finally to the locally grounded community of users. agricultural extension builds up on such communities and capitalizes on the network structure of local agricultural knowledge systems comprising distributed actors with a diversity of specializations and expertise (lubell et al., 2014). to this end, this paper contributes to the literature on specialized knowledge networks by exploring how a network of twitter users invested in the dissemination of agricultural information provide higher exposure to specialized knowledge. in the following we report on an investigation of a community of users dedicated to the dissemination of agriculture information in california and beyond. the seed users comprise 153 twitter accounts associated with the agriculture and natural resources of the university of california. we identified the followers and followees connected to the seed users and retrieved the timelines of each twitter account, thus rendering a population of 59k users and 68m tweets. we designed two classifiers to process the content of each tweet posted in 2014 and determined the boundaries of the network. as twitter interactions consist of @-mentions, a publicly-visible message targeting other accounts, and retweets, the action of rebroadcasting a message to the users’ followers, we mined the timelines and profiles of each of the individuals in the population to identify instances of information sharing. in what follows, we seek to advance foregoing research by studying the communication patterns within this community. 2. previous work previous studies have investigated the use of social media in establishing a green virtual sphere by supporting access to environmental information and providing a space for debate. this literature connects the long-standing debate on the emergence of a public sphere in modern society (calhoun, 1992, habermas, 1991) with the potential changes associated with the use of social media platforms to engage the public in open discussions (papacharissi, 2002, bastos, 2011). subsequent studies have explored the elapsed effects of social media on the green public sphere (torgerson, 2006, torgerson, 1999, yang and calhoun, 2007), particularly the user of online social networks to air grievances, develop coordinated actions for natural or man-made disasters, and mediate partisan battles over environmental regulation, energy policy, and climate change. the notion of a green public sphere was originally advanced by torgerson (1999) and refers to a subsection of the public sphere focused on environmental issues. following the early definition proposed by habermas (1991), the green public sphere would form a space for discussion detached from individual or private interest and displaying an interest in plurality of opinions however inconvenient and troubling they can be. yet, according to torgerson (1999), the green public sphere is not without its boundaries, as meaningful disagreements require clear and agreed limits to move forward the discussion. according to yang and calhoun (2007), the emergence of a green public sphere resulted from users resorting to legacy and social media to voice their grievances about environmental issues which otherwise would not have been heard. within this field of inquire, segerberg and bennett (2011) analyzed the content of tweets associated with protests against the 2009 united nations climate summit in copenhagen and white et al. (2014) explored the motivations behind social media use during the alberta oil sands. this body of scholarship reported that twitter was used to access news, particularly alternative sources covering the unfolding events. white et al. (2014) reported that even though users resorted to twitter to engage in debates over the northern gateway pipeline, interviewees underplayed the importance of twitter in the formation of a green virtual sphere, as access to the space was not equal and the discussions most likely monitored. similarly, bortree and seltzer (2009) examined communication strategies employed by environmental advocacy groups on facebook and cheong and lee (2010) investigated how the use of twitter in australia was connected to the earth hour 2009 campaign. we draw from this scholarship on social media and the green public sphere and hypothesize that the ensuing networks used to convey agriculture information follows a multi-step model of information diffusion centered on core users and surrounded by highly active brokers exporting local knowledge to other agricultural systems and the broader public. this framework has been applied in twitter literature to describe a process of information diffusion that often deviates from patterns observed in social networks (wu et al., 2011), as information exchange relies on hubs and authorities (dubois and gaffney, 2014) and the network topology behaves much like an information network with pronounced amplification effect for information dissemination (myers et al., 2014). broadly speaking this framework foregrounds the diffusion of information from elite towards ordinary users and is consistent with the two-step flow theory of communication originally proposed by katz (1957). 3. rationale due to technical requirements and stringent rules to retrieve twitter data, scholarship on twitter has often focused on a set of hashtagged tweets as a marker to unfolding events around the world. with the exception of a few macroscopic studies of twitter network (kwak et al., 2010, gabielkov et al., 2014, myers et al., 2014), the high computational and financial costs involved in retrieving a complete set of tweets compelled researchers to focus on subsets of data revolving around events and/or contextual markers. as a result, twitter scholarship has dealt with a particularly set of data mostly characterized by the phatic function of social media communication (miller, 2015). this de facto standard approach to twitter research is centered on messages motivated by ongoing events and often crafted with the potential for viral cascades. while datasets retrieved using markers such as keywords and hashtags are useful to track the diffusion of information about a given topic, calls for awareness about political issues, and the coordination of social movements (bastos and mercea, 2015), this procedure of data collection emphasizes phatic messages against the dialogic exchanges between social media users. in fact, twitter users often begin interacting within a hashtagged stream only to subsequently drop the hashtag as their one-to-one interaction unfolds. as a result, researchers mining twitter streaming api1 are often left with data lacking interactions initiated with the hashtag but dropped afterwards. another significant shortcoming of this approach is that data can only be retrieved prospectively, as access to historical twitter data is prohibitively expensively. as a result, social media research has involuntarily emphasized and scrutinized a set of messages purposely tailored to be phatic and designed for maximum effect, all the while ignoring the larger conversation in the background that is potentially connected to the hashtag stream. moreover, the representation of a public sphere by means of an ad-hoc public deserves careful consideration as the raison-d'etre of hashtagged messages is to perform a one-to-many broadcast. by losing track of myriad interactions between twitter users, and frequently relying on hashtags, social media scholarship has inspected a reduced version of twitter’s agora (miller, 2015) that departs considerably from the engaged, content-driven, dialogic public sphere envisioned by habermas (1987); a public sphere marked by the lively exchange carried out on a daily basis. data collection based on hashtags or other textual markers are thus inadequate for tracking the dynamics of communities over extended periods of time. the research design described in the following sections addresses these shortcomings by moving the focus from the streaming of evens to long and sustained interactions within a community of users. while historical twitter is difficult and often expensive to retrieve, twitter rest api can be used to retrieve the timeline of individual users with no temporal restriction or extemporaneous costs beyond the computational resources required to cover a given population of users. by focusing on the organic interactions between users that evolved over several months or years, this research design can shed light on community formation, users’ interaction on social media, and the structure and dynamics of communities of interest. 4. objectives the aims of this study are threefold. firstly, we present a census-based, viable, costeffective, and replicable research design to track the information exchange within a community of twitter users. secondly, we report on the affordances of social media to 1 twitter streaming api documentation is available at https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/overview https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/overview outreach initiatives focused on the dissemination of agriculture-related information. thirdly, we investigate whether the network connecting outreach centers, farmers, and government agencies follows a multi-step flow of communication that structurally displays core-periphery dynamics. we hypothesized that the network follows a two-step flow of communication with a core social network centered on a particular set of nodes surrounded by highly active brokers exporting local knowledge to other agricultural systems and the broader public. specifically, we anticipated that the network might enforce different paths to disseminate agriculture and general information to the periphery of the graph. to this end, and considering the rationale for developing a “snowballing census” approach to internet communities reviewed hitherto, we pursue the following research objectives: ro1. describe a replicable research design based on seed nodes and successive network levels by snowballing the follower-followee network; ro2. report on the diffusion of agriculture information across network cliques and subcommunities; ro3. identify whether the network follows a multi-step flow of communication structured with strong core-periphery dynamics. 5. research design due to restrictions imposed by twitter’s rest api, data collection began with a relatively small subset of users listed in the uc ag and uc anr twitter lists, from which we snowballed data collection to users they follow or are followed. all data collection occurred between may 5 and june 27, 2015 via the twitter rest api, thus providing an estimate for the time required for this research approach. the ensuing dataset includes the complete set of messages posted by this population since signing up to twitter, up to a limit of 3200. therefore, the population studied in this paper includes the core 153 seed nodes extracted from the uc twitter lists and their followers and followees, totaling 59,761 users. figure 1 shows the resulting two levels of this network, from the 153 seed nodes (colored back) to the 59k users interconnected as follower and followees (colored blue). there are differences between @-mentions and retweets that need to be accounted for separately. although @-mentions are arguably more social, they are also used for drawing attention of celebrities, politicians, and media pundits and are often an instrument for sockpuppeting (bastos et al., 2013). as we are interested in the diffusion of topical information within agriculture communities, we relied on @-mentions and retweets as relevant edges connecting twitter accounts. in both cases we draw an edge connecting two accounts that have posted at least one message with agriculture-relevant content at some point in the year of 2014. although the network object includes both @-mentions and retweets, the analyses reported in the next section were performed on @-mentions and retweets separately. figure 2 details the process of data collection, processing, and analysis and informs ro1. figure 1: initial group of 153 seed users in black and extended network in blue (2nd level network) the complete set of messages tweeted by these users since joining twitter totals 285m tweets (285,628,862). from the 59,761 accounts in the population we managed to retrieve the timelines of 54,422 accounts (91% of users in the target population). from the total of 5352 users left out of the network, we found that 501 accounts have yet to tweet a single message and 4894 accounts were protected or have been deactivated since data collection started. finally, a total of 43 accounts were both protected and had not tweeted any message at the time of data collection. in addition to these silent accounts, twitter rest api limits access to a maximum of 3200 statuses (tweets) per user. our population of 59,761 users includes 13,112 accounts that tweeted over this limit. this technical limitation imposes considerable challenges to retrieving the complete set of tweets of a population over extended periods of time. as a result, we managed to retrieve only 65m (65,294,710) tweets from 54,422 users, as opposed to a potential total of 285m. moreover, the temporal series retrieve for this population is likely to vary considerably as only a portion of the timelines retrieved was objected to twitter restriction of 3200 tweets per user. we addressed this problem by identifying the average cut-off date for users that posted over 3199 tweets and removed messages posted prior to this date. as a result, we only analyzed messages tweeted by the target population after this point in time. we resorted to this procedure to filter the 65m tweets collected from twitter api and ended up with a total of 43m messages. as our research is focused on information exchange, we subsequently removed messages that were not retweets nor included @-mentions to other users in the target population. the procedure further reduced the dataset to 26m messages posted between august 1, 2013 and may 15, 2015, thus covering a period of roughly 2 years (652 days) with conspicuous dips corresponding to summer vacations and regular oscillations associated with monthly cycles of activity. 1. snowball: identifying aggie population 2. data mining: retrieving tweets from 2006 to 2015 3. processing: identify aggie relevant tweets and users 4. network analysis: explore and model aggie network twitter rest api target population (59k users) seed population: 153 ucanr users first level network (59k users) retrieve user profile followers and followees add followers and followees to population twitter rest api retrieve users’ timelines (all tweets since account creation of twitter accont) user_lookup following_id user tweets and metadata (68m) user profiles and metadata (44k) retrieve geo location of users classify users in us states classify users worldwide classify tweets by aggie relevance identify @-mentions and retweets calculate distance travelled per tweet twitter network 44,947 nodes 9,092,116 edges main user (node) attributes: screenname, id, location, time, tweets, followers, followees, latitude, longitude, list, state, network metrics main tweet (edge) attributes: type, aggiescore, sustainscore, sustaggscore, favoritecount, retweetcount, retweetnum, isretweet, tweetid, date, time, distkm, isfollower, isfollowed figure 2: data mining workflow and resulting network graph figure 3a shows a histogram of messages binned by month, with a cut-off date around mid-2003 that includes the complete set of messages tweeted both by filtered users (>3200 tweets) and unfiltered users (<3200 tweets). although this period of 652 days includes a comprehensive set of tweets posted by this community, we found inconsistencies in the temporal distribution of tweets. kernel estimation shows that the data drops off artificially at the upper end of the time series. this is likely a result of user’s timelines being collected sequentially and thus at different points in time. in addition to that, we anticipated that older messages would fare relatively better in terms of retweets compared to newer messages, as they would have benefitted from a larger period of time to spread throughout the network. figure 3: complete set of messages retrieved binned by month (a) and sampled data binned by week (b) we addressed these issues by selecting an intermediate period of time that was unaffected by any variation resulting from data collection. this period of time comprehends the entire year of 2014 and includes a total of 3.7m (3,691,342) tweets. therefore, our resulting dataset includes messages posted in 2014 and the analysis reported in this paper refers to this subset of retrieved tweets. the frequency of tweets binned by week is shown in figure 3b, with similar frequency distributions across filtered and unfiltered users. we expect these procedures to have addressed the restrictions imposed by twitter rest api and to have provided a comprehensive set of messages posted by our population in 2014. in summary, our research design draws from liang and fu (2015) by identifying a representative set of twitter users (egos), collecting all the egos’ alters (i.e., followers and followees), and the following relationships among the alters. finally, we obtained the profiles and the timelines of the selected users (egos and alters) and processed the data to generated a graph with various edge and node properties. we expect this approach based on sampling of users, rather than sampling of tweets, to provide a more reliable and appropriate approach to analyzing individual and community-level behaviors. 6. data analysis for the purposes of this investigation we trained two classifiers to identify messages dedicated to agriculture and messages associated with sustainability issues. tweets often include url links pointing to the actual content under discussion and without which is not possible to determine the topic addressed by each tweet. to account for this supplementary body of text, we retrieved the webpage title of each url in the dataset and ran the classifiers over the combined corpus of tweet and webpage title (when available). the agriculture classifier is based on a set of 37 items, while the sustainability classifier relies on a set of 30 keywords, bigrams, and tokens. each classifier returns a score based on the concentration of such terms, bigrams, keywords, and tokens relative to the number of words in the tweet or the number of words in the tweet plus the webpage title (when url link was available). we ran the classifiers on set of 9,627,146 tweets and found that only 12.09% (1,164,014 tweets) of the dataset scored above zero for agriculture content and only 5.48% (527,167 tweets) for sustainability content. the average score was .009 and .005 for agriculture and sustainability messages, respectively. we relied on the scores calculated by the classifiers (aggiescore and sustainscore, henceforth) to process the text and identify relevant messages. users that failed to post any agriculture or sustainability related message during the entire period were further removed from the data. in other words, the final dataset is restricted to tweets posted in 2014 and it does not include users that did not tweet any agricultural-relevant message. yet, the data does include non-agricultural content posted by users who tweeted relevant content at some point. figure 4: gall-peters projection of @-mentions and retweets in the sampled network we subsequently retrieved geographic information from our population and identified the location of 73% of users (39,858 from a total of 54,422 profiles). twenty percent of users with geographic information were based in california (12,058 users), which is unsurprising given the location of the seed nodes. next we processed the text corpora and identified senders and receivers of retweet messages in the form of 'rt @' and 'via @' (including retweets resulting from twitter's retweet button) that appeared in the text corpora. we subsequently extracted the arcs between users that mentioned other users, creating a link between the author of the tweet and every other account mentioned in a message that was not a retweet (thus allowing for multiple arcs within the same tweet). as a result, the number of @-mentions is slight higher than the number of retweets. figure 4 shows the geographic location (gall-peters projection) of sender and recipient of @mentions (in red) and retweets (in blue) with hotspots of activity in north america and a clear cross-atlantic highways of retweet activity (the directionality of the message is bent clockwise). we removed self-loops and messages directed to or originated from users outside the target population of 59,761, which defines the boundaries of our community. as a result of the multiple sampling procedures, we ended up with a network of 32,152 nodes (users) and 4,418,390 edges (2,502,107 @-mentions and 1,916,283 retweets) posted between the first and the last day of 2014. as our research design is focused on information diffusion, we consider ab when b retweets a and ab when a mentions b (thus following the directionality of the information flow). given the different rationales involved in retweeting and mentioning, we labelled the network edges to separate retweets from mentions. figure 5 depicts the directionality of network edges considered in this study. figure 5: direction of edges considered in this study, with the author of a retweeted message as the sender the last step of data processing consisted of calculating the geographic distance travelled by each retweet and @-mention message. we retrieved the location and geographical coordinates of users in our population and deployed a function to calculate the euclidean distance travelled by each arc connecting two users. the calculation relies on an estimate of the earth radius with the canonical mean equatorial radius of 6378.145 kilometers. together with other information collected by processing the data, as well as the information about each message offered by twitter rest api, the resulting graph includes detailed information about each of the nodes and each of the edges in the network (table 1). table 1: table1: node and edge attributes in the processed network data nodes edges user usernames or twitter handles type type of exchange (@-mention or retweet) id unique id of twitter users aggiescore aggie score calculated by aggie classifier location geographic location sustainscore sustainability score calculated by sustain classifier time account creation date sustaggscore aggregated aggie and sustain scores tweets number of tweets posted by user text tweeted message followers number of users following the account favoritecount number of times the message was favorited (global) followees number of accounts followed by user retweetcount number of retweets globally (all twitter users) description user's profile description retweetnum number of retweets within the population lasttweet last retrieved tweet isretweet whether the message is a retweet (retweet button) latitude geographic location (coordinate) tweetid unique id of the message longitude geographic location (coordinate) datechar timestamp when the message was posted (utc) list uc anr twitter list timechar timestamp when the message was posted (utc) california geographic location (if in california) timenum timestamp when the message was posted (utc) state geographic location (us states only) distkm geographic distance between sender and receiver state.abb geographic location abbreviated) color edge color (mentions in red and retweets in blue) membership modularity community assigned to user isfollower whether the sender follows the receiver 7. results we relied on the fastgreedy community algorithm implemented in igraph (csardi and nepusz, 2006) to classify the nodes into subcommunities or modules. the network was thus divided into 10 large modules that account for 80% of the graph (32,152 users), with the 11th module including the remaining, more sparsely connected nodes in the network. we subsequently mined the content tweeted by users in each module and found it to be consistent with topical subcommunities broadly associated with agriculture. the modules detected in the network consistently presented different averages for indegree and outdegree, both for retweets and @-mentions, with influential accounts displaying high indegree for @-mentions and high outdegree for retweets, thus confirming our assertion in ro2. such accounts provide most of the content to the community and represent important stakeholders to whom the community directs their questions and expectations. as an example, the uc anr account has a @-mention indegree of 2,446 and a retweet outdegree of 1,820 but the @-mention outdegree and the retweet indegree are considerably lower at 370 and 458, respectively. figure 6 gives the breakdown of inbound and outbound connections across modularity communities compared to their average number of followers, followees, and tweets. modules #1 and #6 present a higher average and a few extraordinarily active and connected nodes. figure 6: follower, followee, and tweet averages compared to degree, indegree, and outdegree per module the nonreciprocal and directed nature of retweet and @-mention interactions indicates the existence of an informational relationship between users, as the information flows only one way from one user to another, with reciprocal relationships—either as mutual @mentions or retweets—being particularly uncommon in the community. this is also consistent with the hypothesis that the network is structured around a core (borgatti and everett, 2000, holme, 2005) and a periphery and sheds particular light on ro3, with retweets flowing from core members of the community towards the periphery, and @mentions flowing from the periphery towards the core. we subsequently tested the network for core-periphery structure and found significant correlations between coreness and degree for retweet indegree and outdegree (.69 and .40, respectively, p<.001) and @-mention indegree and outdegree (.52 and .77, respectively, p<.001). the test for the aggregated network of @-mentions and retweets also reported a significant correlation between coreness and degree with r=.65 (p<.001). most remarkably, @-mentions mostly flow from california towards washington, dc, likely a marker of messages politically laden and aimed at policy makers. figure 7 shows the interactions between east and west coast, with the direction of retweets following clockwise from california towards washington, dc and new york, and @-mentions flowing from east to the west coast. figure 7: directionality of @-mentions and retweets from west to east coast and back again core-periphery patterns are yet stronger when subsetting the network for messages pertinent to agriculture and sustainability. the correlations between coreness and degree for retweets is significantly higher for indegree and outdegree (r=.77 and .64, respectively, p<.001). the same difference is observed with agriculture and sustainability relevant @mention messages, with yet higher correlations between coreness and @-mention indegree and outdegree (.56 and .80, respectively, p<.001). although the estimates for product-moment correlation between coreness and degree remain significant for nonagriculture-relevant messages, it is significantly lower compared to the subnetwork of agriculture-relevant messages (r=.77 and .57, respectively, p<.001). comparatively, a random erdös-rényi graph with the same number of nodes and edges presents a much lower correlation between coreness and degree compared to our network (r=.30 and .65, respectively, p<.001), and unsurprisingly, a random small-world network with the same dimensions reports a correlation between coreness and degree of only .07 (p<.001). after establishing that the network was structured as a core-periphery (ro3) we further investigated the network properties of users in each of the modules. we found that communities #1 and #6 present much higher average number of inbound @-mention and outbound retweet, a marker of their position as informational centers of the network that include highly-active and highly-followed accounts (ro2). we subsequently fit an ergm model (goodreau, 2007, robins et al., 2007) to a single day of message exchanges and confirmed that users located in california, as well as tweet activity and following size, were significant predictors or tie formation (p<.0001, p<.005, and p<.0001, respectively). we understand these results to indicate the presence of hubs in the network feeding information to the community, an asymmetry detailed in figure 8. figure 8: average network metrics for users in each of the 10 modules the degree distribution of the twitter network is characterized by a very long tail (kwak et al., 2010) that makes indegree and outdegre averages impractical for network analysis. however, by subsetting degree averages per module, we found that the 10 subcommunities present relatively comparable number of users and similar averages for the number of retweet and mentions. moreover, the subcommunities display considerable skewed averages for @-mentions and retweets when indegree and outdegree are considered. figure 8 provides detailed information about the 10 subcommunities with prevailing higher retweet indegree averages compared to retweet outdegree, particularly in communities #1, #6, and #10. the same difference is observed in the averages for @mentions, with considerable differences depicting subcommunities of users that are the object of messages and subcommunities of users that constantly direct their messages to other accounts. most remarkably, and again consistent with the core-periphery structure of this network, we found that central subcommunities were both the object of @-mentions and the source of retweets, another marker of their centrality in the network. as shown in figure 8, this is particularly the case of communities #1, #4, and #6, which include a large number of highly-tweeted and highly-mentioned accounts. figure 9: hashtag frequency over time in each of the 10 subcommunities taken together the network comprises a long tail of the indegree and outdegree distributions, both for retweets and @-mentions. accounts with large retweet outdegree refer to users whose tweets were retweeted many times by different users, often at a very high rate. this is the set of users spreading information that we refer to as broadcasters. the results of the aggiescore show that these users tend to either generate agriculturerelavant content or introduce it to the network. accounts with a high retweet indegree, on the other hand, refer to users that retweet a large number of messages. we refer to these users as receivers or the information, albeit from a user-centered perspective one can also assert that they are moving information throughout the network. next we modelled the topics discussed across the network to understand the overarching issues considered by this community. we relied on hashtags as unifying textual markers and modelled the most common terms for each of the 10 modules or groups. perhaps unsurprisingly, the communities showed clear thematic focus, particularly around issues such as water, food, agriculture, wine, climate change, pets, gardening, policy, and politics. we subsequently analyzed the hashtag frequency and the topics discussed by users in each of the subcommunities. figure 9 shows the frequency of hashtags over time for each of the 10 modules and highlights the thematic consistency within each subcommunity. in order to provide a conclusive answer to ro3, we sampled the network in 10 graphs restricted to the users identified in each of the subcommunitues. as topical modules are necessarily a subset of the network, we generated erdös-rényi random graphs of equal dimensions (equal number of nodes and edges) and compared the correlation of coreness and degree between the modularity groups and the random graphs. by iteratively retrieving core-periphery estimates for the observed subcommunities and the random network, we tested the hypothesis that the subcommunities present cumulative core-periphery dynamics as the network becomes increasingly specialized. the estimators for randomly selected subnets consistently presented lower correlation between coreness and degree and a significantly more cohesive core was found in all subnetworks compared to the random networks. figure 10: core-periphery estimates for observed communities and erdös-rényi random graphs of equal size the only exception to these results is module #11, which again confirms the results as this module it is not a subcommunity but an aggregated of nodes detached from any organic subcommunity. we understand these results to indicate that the core-periphery topology of twitter subnetworks dedicated to agriculture is associated with the type of content shared and discussed by users, with more specialized content structuring the network around cores and peripheries broadly consistent with the separations between topical experts and general public. figure 10 shows the tests statistics for the observed subnetworks and the random graphs. 8. conclusion in this paper we reported on an investigation on the affordances of social media to the diffusion of agricultural information and described a replicable research design that can be applied to other studies focused on social media communities. we identified, mined, graphed, and retrieved the profile of 54,422 users and their following invested in spreading agricultural information and assigned users to cliques and topical subcommunities. we found that the network structure shows distinct patterns of coreperiphery shifts due to a dense, cohesive core and a sparse, unconnected periphery (borgatti and everett, 2000) extending beyond the geographic borders of the immediate clique of tightly knit users. we found that retweets cascade from a few accounts to a large crowd of peripheral, but highly active users, and that @-mentions originate from or are directed to a few users that perform the role of hubs and authorities in the network. as a result, we posit that outreach initiatives resort to social networks to broadcast information from relevant government agencies to a tightly interconnected community of users invested in specific subtopics of agriculture, a theoretical framework consistent with the two-step flow theory of communication originally proposed by katz (1957). the intuitive understanding of the core-periphery structure stems from the layout of a network that cannot be subdivided into exclusive cohesive subgroups or factions, even though some nodes appear much better connected than others. according to pattison (1993) and borgatti and everett (2000), core-periphery networks consist of just one group to which all actors belong to a greater or lesser extent. therefore, the core community of agricultural influential users occupy the center of the graph and are proximate not only to each other but to all nodes in the network, while the remaining nodes are located in the outskirts and relatively close only to the center. in addition to the core-periphery patterns found in these graphs, the structural properties of the networks are neither completely regular nor completely random, as they display small average path lengths typical of random graphs. this pattern of information exchange suggests that a few accounts source information to the community which subsequently retweet this information to their subcommunities of interest. this snapshot of the network provides an alternative view of the dynamics of a green virtual sphere. although it includes a considerable portion of contentious topics, particularly climate change and issues related to draught and water resources, it also includes a large set of messages and the ensuing user interaction focused on specialized agriculture information, particularly wine and plant sciences. this confluence of subtopics mirrors the diversity of stakeholders involved in the agriculture and food sectors, including outreach centers, farmers, and government agencies. however, the highly skewed distribution of @-mention and retweet indegree and outdegree, together with the concentration of such user accounts in metropolitan areas, indicates that the core of the network is centralized around government agencies and news outlets, as opposed to farmers and growers who can benefit from having easy and direct access to new sources of agriculture knowledge. despite the efforts of outreach professionals, the twitter subcommunities associated with agriculture seemingly replicate the top-down, continuum model in which information flows from government agencies and news organizations towards growers, with little reciprocal interaction between users in the periphery of the network. 9. references bastos, m. t. 2011. public opinion revisited: the propagation of opinions in digital networks. journal of arab & muslim media research, 4, 179–195. bastos, m. t. & mercea, d. 2015. serial activists: political twitter beyond influentials and the twittertariat. new media & society. bastos, m. t., puschmann, c. & travitzki, r. 2013. tweeting across hashtags: overlapping users and the importance of language, topics, and politics. proceedings of the 24th acm conference on hypertext and social media. paris, france: acm. bidwell, d., dietz, t. & scavia, d. 2013. fostering knowledge networks for climate adaptation. nature climate change, 3, 610-611. borgatti, s. p. & everett, m. g. 2000. models of core/periphery structures. social networks, 21, 375-395. bortree, d. s. & seltzer, t. 2009. dialogic strategies and outcomes: an analysis of environmental advocacy groups’ facebook profiles. public relations review, 35, 317-319. calhoun, c. j. 1992. habermas and the public sphere, cambridge, mit press. cheong, m. & lee, v. 2010. twittering for earth: a study on the impact of microblogging activism on earth hour 2009 in australia. intelligent information and database systems. springer. csardi, g. & nepusz, t. 2006. the igraph software package for complex network research. interjournal, complex systems, 1695. dubois, e. & gaffney, d. 2014. the multiple facets of influence: identifying political influentials and opinion leaders on twitter. american behavioral scientist. gabielkov, m., rao, a. & legout, a. 2014. studying social networks at scale: macroscopic anatomy of the twitter social graph. in: acm sigmetrics 2014, 2014 austin, united states. goodreau, s. m. 2007. advances in exponential random graph (p*) models applied to a large social network. social networks, 29, 231-248. habermas, j. 1987. the philosophical discourse of modernity, cambridge, mit press. habermas, j. 1991. the structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society, cambridge, mit press. henri, f. & pudelko, b. 2003. understanding and analysing activity and learning in virtual communities. journal of computer assisted learning, 19, 474-487. holme, p. 2005. core-periphery organization of complex networks. physical review e, 72, 046111. kalafatis, s. e., lemos, m. c., lo, y.-j. & frank, k. a. 2015. increasing information usability for climate adaptation: the role of knowledge networks and communities of practice. global environmental change, 32, 30-39. katz, e. 1957. the two-step flow of communication: an up-to-date report on an hypothesis. public opinion quarterly, 21, 61-78. kwak, h., lee, c., park, h. & moon, s. 2010. what is twitter, a social network or a news media? in: 19th international conference on world wide web, 2010 new york, ny, usa. acm, 591-600. liang, h. & fu, k.-w. 2015. testing propositions derived from twitter studies: generalization and replication in computational social science. plos one, 10, e0134270. lubell, m., niles, m. & hoffman, m. 2014. extension 3.0: managing agricultural knowledge systems in the network age. society & natural resources, 27, 1089-1103. miller, v. 2015. phatic culture and the status quo: reconsidering the purpose of social media activism. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies. myers, s. a., sharma, a., gupta, p. & lin, j. 2014. information network or social network?: the structure of the twitter follow graph. proceedings of the 23rd international conference on world wide web. seoul, korea: international world wide web conferences steering committee. papacharissi, z. 2002. the virtual sphere. new media & society, 4, 9-27. pattison, p. 1993. algebraic models for social networks, cambridge, cambridge university press. robins, g., snijders, t., wang, p., handcock, m. & pattison, p. 2007. recent developments in exponential random graph (p*) models for social networks. social networks, 29, 192-215. segerberg, a. & bennett, w. l. 2011. social media and the organization of collective action: using twitter to explore the ecologies of two climate change protests. the communication review, 14, 197-215. torgerson, d. 1999. the promise of green politics: environmentalism and the public sphere, duke university press. torgerson, d. 2006. expanding the green public sphere: post-colonial connections. environmental politics, 15, 713-730. waldman, s. 2011. information needs of communities: the changing media landscape in a broadband age. washington d.c.: diane publishing company. white, b., castleden, h. & gruzd, a. 2014. talking to twitter users: motivations behind twitter use on the alberta oil sands and the northern gateway pipeline. first monday, 20. wu, s., hofman, j. m., mason, w. a. & watts, d. j. 2011. who says what to whom on twitter. in: 20th international conference on world wide web, 2011 new york. acm, 705-714. yang, g. & calhoun, c. 2007. media, civil society, and the rise of a green public sphere in china. china information, 21, 211-236. microsoft word rosner ames aoir merged.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 from laptops to toasters: designing and repairing modern childhood imaginaries morgan g. ames informatics and computer science university of california, irvine irvine, california, usa aoir@morganya.org daniela k. rosner human centered design and engineering university of washington seattle, washington, usa daniela@ischool.berkeley.edu abstract we introduce two case studies that illuminate a particular way of conceptualizing childhood and technology: the one laptop per child project and the east bay fixit clinic. both cases borrow narratives of childhood from contemporary american culture and ideas of technological potential from computer cultures. the resulting narrative is grounded in the personal childhood experiences of those involved in the communities, and their desire to provide the same kinds of experiences to children today. we highlight some of the dimensions of this narrative as well as some of its limitations in appealing to, and re-creating, a particular kind of child that resembles the (technically-inclined and often male) organizers themselves. keywords design studies; technology and childhood; technology and education; olpc; maker culture; hacker culture. imagining childhood, technology, and design our research explores the contested role of technology in childhood and the role of childhood, in turn, in technology development. today’s dominant narrative of restraint, often discussed as “screen time” in the united states, projects technology as a danger to what is most valuable about childhood. however, various counter-narratives pose technology as the harbinger of intellectual exploration and creativity, proclaiming the potential for children to use technology in transformative ways. these modern imaginaries, even when seemingly opposed, often share common conceptions of childhood as a period marked by intensive, even ecstatic, creativity, exploration, and play. though seemingly pervasive, these conceptions are historically, geographically, and socioeconomically situated, beginning with mid-nineteenth-century shifts in understanding of childhood and reform efforts to protect children in europe and the united states (hoffman, 2003; zornado, 2001) and finding its stride in middle-class parenting culture in the united states (ames, go, kaye, & spasojevic, 2010; lareau, 2003; yardi & bruckman, 2012). where these narratives diverge is on whether the use of screen technologies such as computers help or hinder this conception of childhood. in this paper, we interrogate two projects that share a common counter-narrative of childhood and technology grounded in computer engineering culture: the one laptop per child (olpc) project and the east bay fixit clinic. while olpc created a physical artifact (laptop) and the fixit clinic structures interactions with facilitated repair activities, both projects are motivated by the same kinds of cultural ideals centered on defining what it means to be a child and the forms of individualism, creativity, and empowerment technology provides to childhood. in particular, we examine the question of what kinds of children the groups are designing for, and what kinds of subjects the projects’ design and repair activities are producing as a result. we show how members of each group base their ideas of childhood, and of technology’s role in it, on their own nostalgized childhood experiences, often treating these experiences as universals. in doing so, both groups are, in effect, attempting to reproduce their own childhood experiences by designing the kind of childhood they hope to see in their beneficiaries: one that is full of pedagogical experiences involving technology that would engage precocious, scientifically-inclined, often oppositional, and often male elementary or middle school students. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 this counter-narrative reinforces certain identities and values that circulate within the professional computing community more broadly, reflecting the way that childhood is imagined and articulated through the design process across multiple academic-industrial settings. identifying and exploring the cultural roots of this counter-narrative of childhood and technology allows us to critically examine the relationship between the designer, the artifact/experience, and the imagined ‘user’ they create. both of these case studies stem from our ongoing research exploring the cultural underpinnings of design. in exploring the olpc project, the first author juxtaposes archival research on the forty-year development of the “children’s machine” with ethnographic observations of a olpc project in paraguay. in exploring the fixit clinic, the second author situates the daily practices of the organization into the “maker” community in the san francisco bay area and beyond. both primarily rely on ethnographic inquiry in their methods and literature in science and technology studies for their theoretical framework. case one: one laptop per child olpc’s xo laptop is the first of its kind to combine a rugged design, an open-source educational software suite, and full – if purposefully underpowered – computer functionality. the ideas that olpc’s early leadership had about childhood and learning, strongly influenced by the stories they tell about their own childhoods and scholastic experiences, determined a number of features of the xo and the educational theory on which it was based, constructionism (papert, 1980, 1993). in particular, many involved or interested in the project, including mit professors and olpc founders seymour papert and nicholas negroponte, have stated that they were inspired to work on olpc based on a nostalgic rendering of their own childhoods – specifically, the narrative of rejecting traditional education and teaching themselves how to program a computer (negroponte, 1996, 2006; papert, 1980, 2006). the parallels between constructionist learning theory and mit’s early hacker community influenced the development of olpc’s laptop, particularly the ideas that the best learning is playful and self-directed and the best machine for learning – or “tool to think with” in papert’s terms – is a computer like the ones olpc’s developers themselves used as children. these powerfully important narratives, present not just among olpc developers but in technological circles more generally, had material effects in guiding the design of the laptop and decision-making about the priorities of the organization. they also are the source of much of the laptop’s allure in the broader technology community, especially in the early years of the project. case two: the east bay fixit clinic roughly once a month, small groups of volunteers from the fixit clinic, located east of san francisco, gather at local museums, libraries and other public venues to help visitors fix their broken stuff. as part of a larger network of repair organizations (e.g., repair cafe, fixers collective, and restart project), the clinic brings together environmentalist ideals with collaborative work. toasters that no longer heat, bluetooth devices without signals, and leather boots with missing soles come to function again with screwdrivers, soldering irons, or needles and thread. through the disassembly and reassembly of consumer products, the production and maintenance of repair practices surfaces cultural orders of individualism and technological progress. the figure of the precocious middle school student is central in this operation. while many visitors to the clinic are retired and over the age of 60, children are regularly present with their parents in tow, and are regularly featured in press materials. the child visitors, most of whom are male, are seen to embody the clinic’s mission: to foster and enrich young minds, instilling in them a curiosity for electronic tinkering that is reminiscent of the clinic coaches’ own childhood imaginaries. children’s broken remote control cars and airplanes come to be pivotal fixtures of the clinic’s ultimate challenge: making makers. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 differing goals, common narratives: re-imagining childhood, technology, and design in our work on both of these projects, we observe a slippage between designer’s conceptions of users and ‘users’ conceptions of themselves. through this, we chart how cultural narratives emerge as part of day-to-day technosocial assemblages. we further unravel the larger cultural infrastructures that support and enable design communities through the material effects these narratives can have, especially the paradox between the rhetoric of possibility and the unspoken limits they build. this work highlights the moral responsibility of designers and technologists for the communities they hope to reach and the new stakes of technological imaginaries. how olpc and fixit clinic organizers envision themselves is not only important to what they do, it is an articulation of their identities, which in turn motivates and defines their work the impacts they hope to have on the world. acknowledgments this research was made possible by the gracious assistance of our participants. we also thank fred turner and other colleagues at stanford university for their feedback on both of our projects. references ames, m. g., go, j., kaye, j. j., & spasojevic, m. (2010). understanding technology choices and values through social class. proc cscw 2010, acm press. hoffman, d. m. (2003). childhood ideology in the united states: a comparative cultural view. international review of education, 49(1-2), 191–211. lareau, a. (2003). unequal childhoods: class, race, and family life. 2003. university of california press. negroponte, n. (1996). being digital. new york: vintage books. negroponte, n. (2006). no lap un-topped: the bottom up revolution that could redefine global it culture. papert, s. (1980). mindstorms: children, computers, and powerful ideas (p. 230). new york: basic books, inc. papert, s. (1993). the children’s machine: rethinking school in the age of the computer (p. 242). new york: basic books. papert, s. (2006). digital development: how the $100 laptop could change education. usinfo webchat, via olpc talks. retrieved from http://www.olpctalks.com/seymour_papert/seymour_papert_usinfo.html yardi, s., & bruckman, a. (2012). income, race, and class: exploring socioeconomic differences in family technology use. chi ‘12. zornado, j. l. (2001). inventing the child: culture, ideology, and the story of childhood. childhood a global journal of child research. garland publishing. license this article is © 2013 morgan g. ames and daniela k. rosner. all rights reserved. microsoft word blodgett-fanboys, fangirls, and geeks-fanboys, fangirls, and geeks.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 fanboys, fangirls, and geeks panel this panel examines the contentious and developing nature of fandom in 21st century media. within the theme of this year’s conference this panel will examine how fandoms reimagine their relationship to the author generated texts and towards one another as a community. given that fandom is often viewed as a cohesive and joined community, the authors seek to understand the cracks and faults within this idealized concept. by looking at these areas the panel will examine how the view of a homogenized community of fans falls apart. the papers on the panel express a particular interest in the contentious nature of fandom infighting and its relationship to the broader media field. it covers a broad view of different fandom communities, from video games to supernatural, and will discuss often marginalized or challenged viewpoints and engage in discussions of the relationship between fan, media, and creator. dating amy farrah fowler: essentializing femininity and othering women in stem bridget m. blodgett university of baltimore amy farrah fowler is one of the standout female characters of the big bang theory. amy is a dedicated neuroscientist and is often characterized as being the female equivalent to sheldon’s presentation of male geekiness. she is an interesting character for illustrating the problems that women’s representation in geek media. amy is often portrayed as being as smart as sheldon in an area that is just as hard a science. but when we see her as a character one of her defining traits has been her lack of female friends and the “real” experiences of womanhood. in the discussion of why there aren’t more women game designers in the #1reasonwhy twitter discussion multiple women in technology reported that others have said they can’t actually be women or are so weird their experiences are discounted. women in stem fields are strongly othered by the group whose interests they share and also told they can’t identify or fit in with other women by those same people (beede, 2011). methods the authors collected tweets in a spreadsheet using the twitter archive google spreadsheet (tags) template (hawksey, 2013). the data was collected hourly from november 26th through november 30th. through an analysis of dominant @replies and rts this paper examines the theme of othered womanhood that arose within the #1reasonwhy hashtag. the authors performed opening coding on the selected text of the collected tweets which resulted in a set of themes which emerged from the data. this coding occurs in an iterative process that is meant to capitalize on the ability to compare the data as it is collected. data a conversation on the marginalization of women in the games industry was started in november of 2012 when a game designer tweeted the question, “why are there so few lady game creators?” that tweet caught the attention of several female game designers and enthusiasts who started a hashtag to discuss the many different reasons: #1reasonwhy. each tweet became a testimonial, and the hashtag’s contents added up to a portrait of the industry’s systemic discrimination. the hashtag detailed women’s experiences with sexism and obstacles that prevent women from joining game development. tweets about the othering of women and femininity were very common within the discussion. this was observable at both the group level and at the individual level. many tweets shared stories about how the category of women was treated by developers within meetings, marketing, and other planning sessions by the gaming industry. women and the elderly are synonymous with the concept of "lowest common denominator". #1reasonwhy #respectyouraudience it was common for women as a group to be labelled as disinterested and unskilled in playing games. since they aren’t part of the core development group their needs and interests are often ignored or seen as being a “special addition” to a game title. these conceptualizations help to create an idea of the normal or regular community and audience for games that explicitly does not contain women. it allows for women to become a bounded and classified group, separated from the default group of players and producers. i once watched someone play a commercially successful game that let you pick between "female" and "normal." #1reasonwhy the expression of femininity is seen as being tied to other harmful cultural cues. often expressions of femininity or feminine interests was cause for the dismissal of women as real participants within the community. "you're pretty, so i have to remind myself that you can also be intelligent." #1reasonwhy for individual women, this dismissal of their group could become quite targeted and harmful to the incorporation of their voices within the community. in particular, for female developers it often lead to their voices being ignored since classification as women and their interest in games mutually exclusive categorizations. worked on game with other women, targeting women -but men on team told us we didn't know what the audience really wanted. #1reasonwhy i once had product feedback dismissed about a female-targeted game because i "wasn't a normal woman". #1reasonwhy for a woman to fill both groups is impossible, therefore they must either not be a woman or their interest is not genuine. this places female developers and players within a paradox where they must prove themselves to be sufficiently skilled to surpass the limitations of the femininity but in doing so they invalidate their gender identity. because if i succeed, i'm exceptional. and if i fail, i'm proof that women shouldn't be in the industry. #1reasonwhy discussion amy consistently shows an enthusiasm for stereotypical female experiences that she never received in her early and formative years. the actions that she had instead are usually ones that could be understood as being either masculine or towards masculinized hobbies and her interest in science. this connects and reinforces a strong cultural theme that women who engage with technology and science are unfeminine. as the #1reasonwhy comments highlighted to having interests within stem fandoms means relinquishing the right to exist as a woman. female fans become de-gendered so that the community can include them without experiencing the dissonance caused by the construction of these identity groups. within this mindset to be a woman is to engage with all the gendered trappings of the femininity. women are not seen as having a wide range of varied interests but instead are reduced to a limited set. media depictions of women in stem related fields or women having stem-related interests often help to support this mindset. the main growth arc of the character amy farrah fowler is centered on her fulfilling a secret desire within her cold, logical exterior for the genuine experiences of womanhood. she is not shown as being the scientist who also likes going to dance clubs but as an outsider to this female community that must examine and plan their interactions like they would a lab study. amy’s depiction within the show is both an accurate summary of how women with stem interests are often viewed and treated by others (consalvo, 2008; nagle, 2013). she also acts as a problematic emblem for women to rally around since her development fails to heal this schism between stem interests and femininity. within the show amy both represents the common problems women face and our inability to move beyond flawed classifications systems that separate the female from the scientific. as a product of culture, the character amy farrah fowler helps to show that the separation of the female-coded from the technical is only natural. she acts as an example for those who wish to exclude women from gaming and software development. references beede, d., julian, t., langdon, d., mckittrick, g., khan, b., & doms, m. (2011). women in stem: a gender gap to innovation. economics and statistics administration issue brief, 04(11). http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1964782 consalvo, m. (2008). crunched by passion: women game developers and workplace challenges. in y. kafai (ed.), beyond barbie and mortal kombat. cambridge, ma: mit press. hawksey, m. (2013). twitter archiving google spreadsheet tags v5. cetis mashe. retrieved from http://mashe.hawksey.info/2013/02/twitter-archive-tagsv5/ nagle, a. (2013). not quite kicking off everywhere: feminist notes on digital liberation. in c. fowley, c. english, & s. thouësny (eds.), internet research, theory, and practice: perspectives from ireland (157-175). dublin, ireland: research publishing. it’s not just subtext: constructing the fan girl as creator and subject in supernatural anastasia salter university of central florida supernatural, the cw’s long-running show about two brothers hunting demons, has built a very active fanbase. a series of meta-episodes have allowed the show’s creators to engage the fandom directly by creating a supernatural novel series within the show, with its own fandom. the 200th episode of supernatural takes another step in constructing the fan as subject: entitled “fan fiction,” it centers on young women fans creating a musical based on the supernatural characters. this convergence of canon and fanon raises issues of the power dynamics between creators and fans, as well as the gendered assumptions surrounding the stereotype of the “fan girl” and her relationship to a text. by depicting the fan girl as author within the canon, supernatural has placed fan production under the sometimes harsh gaze of the show creators, subjecting them to the critique and hostility of the characters even as fan fiction is used as a method for advancing the characters’ own self-awareness. this complex relationship with the fan gaze (and particularly the fan girl gaze) makes these metaepisodes an ideal site for examining the remediated audience. becky and the fan girl as predator over ten seasons, supernatural has branched to include its own metaverse, including a series of in-universe supernatural books, and a corresponding fandom that the brothers interact with. the first acknowledgement of the supernatural fandom occurs in season 4 with "the monster at the end of this book," which reveals the existence within the show’s universe of supernatural comic books as well as their author and fans. as laura felschow (2010) critiques: "the acknowledgment of fan behavior within this episode is not an overt invitation to participate, but a demonstration that the producers/writers of the program are aware of exactly what their fandom is doing without an invitation…fans may feel a certain way in response to the episode, but they cannot change it." the cult fan is primarily embodied in becky rosen, who is introduced in season 5 after she is sent to the wincester brothers with a message. becky serves as an outright parody of online fans of supernatural itself: her online handle is “samlicker81” and she is a fanfiction writer and stereotypical “fan girl.” becky’s agency, on the other hand, is portrayed negatively. in season 7’s “time for a wedding,” becky reappears as a villain: she drugs sam with a love potion to make him marry her. at this stage, her fandom crosses a line and charlotte howell (2013) suggests that becky "represents a caricature of female fandom that has persisted despite the growth of nerd culture and influence of fandom studies. becky may be a textual poacher, but she's also a character who gropes a stranger merely because she thinks she knows him through devotion to a text." the act of typing sam up is particularly suggestive of the destructive impact the creators of the show associate to the gaze of the female fan. as kt torrey (2012) states: "the threat that becky poses to sam, to supernatural, lies in her status as a woman and as a fan writer, as a figure who can upend the central narrative by affixing the masculine to her “rightful” place as the signifier of meaning while claiming the role of producer for herself" --it is the threat of a woman to a hypermasculine narrative in which women have been repeatedly marginalized. marie and the fan girl as creator more recently, the depiction of supernatural fans and their relationship to the text has changed, and with it some of the gendered aspect of the fandom. the announcement of the 299th episode was met with some trepidation from the community, as previous mentions of fanfiction had been negative and dismissive of fans as producers. however, the episode proved to be the most positive and fan-aware meta-episode the show has produced. fan and columnist aja romano (2014) noted that the episode marked a moment of validation for women in the fandom: "in supernatural's case, the evolution has been—dare we say it?—a progressive one, a steadily shifting narrative that seems to be ever-so-slowly moving away from the many years of geek-shaming and repudiation of its mostly female fandom. we might even be moved to call it a feminist evolution. chalk it up to spn's musical episode. we like singing and dancing. but even more, we like fan girls, fandom, and the celebration of fanwork.” the episode opens with two young actresses emerging onto a stage with wigs and costumes that immediately invoke sam and dean. it is quickly revealed that they are starring in a musical being directed by another young woman, marie. the “real” sam and dean come to investigate the disappearance of a teacher and walk in on the first song of the musical, an interpretation of the traditional pre-credits sequence supernatural uses to recap story plots: “the road so far.” the clear relationship between the two and their teenaged female dopplegangers is parodied when the two flash their fake fbi badges at the same time as the actresses. the reaction of the two at first recalls their previous encounters with fans or the even less friendly depiction of fans as authors on sherlock. while previous episodes have only depicted fan women as predators (literally, in the case of becky’s use of a spell to ensnare sam as her husband) and otherwise as a minority within the supernatural fan community, the 200th episode thus placed teenage girls front and center as fans and producers. marie is even given the opportunity to call the canonical events of the show since the book series theoretically ended with season 5 “the worst fanfiction ever,” and she defends her own work as “transformative fiction:” dean winchester: there is no space in "supernatural." marie: well, not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction. dean winchester: you mean fan fiction. marie: call it whatever you like, okay? it's inspired by carver edlund's books... with a few embellishments. “fan fiction,” supernatural (2014) however, dean is less than thrilled with marie’s interpretation of his life, particularly when marie explains a moment with a veiled reference to wincest, a popular pairing in slash that they previously encountered through becky’s writing: dean: what are they doing? marie: oh, uh, they are rehearsing the b.m. scene. dean: the bowel-movement scene? marie: no. the boy melodrama scene. you know, the scene where the boys get together and they're—they're driving or leaning against baby, drinking a beer, sharing their feelings. the two of them—alone but together. bonded, united. the power of their pain… dean: why are they standing so close together? marie: uh... reasons. dean: you know they're brothers, right? marie: well, duh. but... subtext. “fan fiction,” supernatural (2014) the “wincest” pairing is one of the more popular examples of an incestuous pairing in fandom, but it is far from the only example. incest has rarely been a barrier to fanfiction writers. wincest, however, is not the pairing that brings supernatural into the master league of queer baiting on television. that honor belongs to destiel, or the pairing of dean and castiel. this pairing is the next we view through dean’s eyes, portrayed by the young actresses: dean winchester: what are they doing? marie: ummm. kids these days call it hugging. dean winchester: is that in the show? … marie: oh, it's just subtext. but then again, you know, you can't spell subtext without s-e-x. fan fiction, supernatural (2014) this moment is notable in many ways: castiel’s love song “i’ll just wait here then” is presented in the episode as a reframing of a canonical moment, using a line from castiel’s own dialogue when he waited on the side of a road while dean slept. and of course, both dean and castiel are being “played” in the musical by young women, who marie notes as the “couple in real life.” lothian, busse, and reid (2007) examine the construction of slash communities as a “queer female space,” which describes “not only the queerness of women’s sexual fantasies but also how these queer fantasy acts often lay the groundwork for nonvirtual queer acts and lives”. this nuance of representation is rare in depictions of fan girls on screen, and the presence of lesbian couples acknowledged without a dramatic reaction likewise remains rare. if becky is supernatural’s version of the dangerous and unacceptable fan girl, than marie is perhaps the show’s apology for previous wrongs. marie is active in all of the most controversial fan practices. she is presented in the meta-context as a director with her own vision, one which the characters that are her subjects initially reject but eventually acknowledge as valid. that validation is a rare outcome of the depiction of a fan girl, as a comparison to more infamous moments of fan critique. the episode even includes a moment of acknowledgement by dean that fanfiction writers should keep working: as claudine hummel writes in her review of the episode, “dean tells marie— and therefore fans everywhere—to keep writing because “i have my version and you have yours” (2015). however, this embrace of the fan girl as producer is not without its problematic moments. notably, the episode buys into the idea of most fan girls as adolescent girls, infantilizing them in the male gaze alongside the far more mature sam and dean. furthermore, the episode was also not without its own version of the destructive and dangerous fan girl, this time embodied by the episode’s villain, calliope. a greek muse of storytelling, calliope is attracted to stories, and this time she has fixated on supernatural: the musical: “supernatural has everything. life, death, resurrection, redemption -but above all, family. all set to music you can really tap your toe to. it isn't some meandering piece of genre dreck, it's... epic” (fan fiction, 2014). however, calliope expresses her “appreciation” by planning to consume the show’s author and the inspiring characters sam and dean, suggesting that the moment calliope fixed her “fan girl” gaze on the show her goal was the type of ownership that could only come through destroying the original. calliope’s fixation is also notable as she is an adult woman and a monster who has to be defeated. these contrasting depictions of fan girls serve as a reminder that the fan girl as author remains an object of suspicion, subject to the creators’ evaluations for their worthiness. even the endorsement of marie’s work by both dean and the internal “author” of the supernatural series, chuck, can be read as the need for external validation of the fan girl’s gaze (and interpretation of “subtext”) by the central authorities of the show, and perhaps even by the canonical rules set by the characters themselves. references felschow, l. (2010). "hey, check it out, there's actually fans”: (dis)empowerment and (mis)representation of cult fandom in supernatural. transformative works and cultures, 4. http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/134. howell, c. (2013). the gospel of the winchesters (and their fans): neoreligious fan practices and narrative in supernatural. kinephanos: media, fans, and the sacred, 4(1). http://www.kinephanos.ca/revue_files/2013-howell.pdf. hummel, c. (2015). supernatural 200th episode review. retrieved from http://www.fanfront.com/supernatural-200th-episode-review/. lothian, a., busse, k., and reid, r. (2007). "yearning void and infinite potential”: online slash fandom as queer female space." english language notes, 45(2) : 103111. torrey, kt. (2012). “he’s best when he’s bound and gagged: the female gaze as counterplot in supernatural”. retrieved from http://www.kttorrey.com/research/hesbest-when-hes-bound-and-gagged/ please don’t tweet that: rps and resistance in supernatural’s convergent canon kt torrey virginia tech jsa lowe university of houston the previous paper raises the question of how female fans of the cw’s supernatural have perceived their repeated incorporation into the show. in this work, we consider how supernatural’s canon has become a further site of institutionalized convergence, wherein key elements of the actors’ lives away from the camera have been positioned as part of the same transmedia ecology that encompasses the fictional adventures of the winchesters and the practices of the show’s fans. certainly, as critics of the series have suggested, the folding of what were once perceived as “deviant” fan interpretive practices into supernatural’s diagetic narrative can be read as an attempt to restrict fan behavior (stein 406); the positioning of the actors’ “personae” as part of that same narrative ecology might be similarly interpreted (arrow 328). in light of this ecological convergence, we argue that real person slash (rps)--fanfiction exploring romantic and sexual relationships between same-sex members of the supernatural cast--offers its readers and writers a means of queering these ongoing attempts at containment. in this study, we analyze a cross-section of “cockles” fanfiction--rps featuring actors misha collins and jensen ackles-inspired by the actors’ annual joint appearances at jus in bello, a fan convention held in rome. guided by stein’s notion of transmedia authorship and ford’s discussion of “accretion texts,” our findings suggest that the readers and writers of these rps texts recognize the ecological and accretional--rather than static and “drillable”--nature of supernatural’s convergent canon. that recognition, in turn, fuels the creation and consumption of fanfiction that playfully misreads this convergence and thus resists the series’ attempts at containment. ultimately, our study points towards the liberating effects that may be afforded by the convergence of fan, actor, and fictional character within transmedia ecologies. archive warning: rps as boundaries between creatives and fans increasingly appear more symbolic than actual, ways of meaning-making once exclusive to fans now have become part of the corporate discourse around media texts. few series have embraced this conceptual flux with as much vigor as supernatural, wherein fan bodies, language, and modes of production have themselves been incorporated into the events of the series. such incorporations, as stein argues, can be read as a “tool through which producers attempt to shape and control fan culture, fan investments, and fan authorship” (406). for example, once highly taboo discussions of the slash pairings wincest and destiel have now been mentioned within the series, and are at times discusses by the series’ actors at fan conventions. in this way, bringing slash into “canon” has leeched these narratives of some of their transgressive power. rps, however, a significant subgenre of supernatural fanfiction, centers not on the show’s characters but on the series’ actors themselves. while flegel and roth argue that supernatural fandom is generally accepting of rps, the backlash against it in online fan communities has become increasingly vociferous over time (1.2). fans who share rps content are keenly aware of this perception: some rationalize their “invasion” of celebrities’ private lives, while others carefully tag work so that fans who wish to avoid exposure to rps can do so. these efforts underscore the perception of rps as inappropriate, even within a fandom known for its affection for a same-sex incestuous pairing. conventional personae while rps is not a phenomenon unique to supernatural, the series’ relationship to the genre is distinctive in that the show’s institutional apparatus has positioned the lives of the show’s actors as sanctioned paratexts to supernatural’s fictional canon (328). these personae became prominent early on, when actors first began interacting with fans at conventions, where, during q&a panels and more intimate meet & greets, fans have the opportunity to learn about the actors’ lives outside their roles. such conventions remain a central feature of supernatural fandom, a prominence reflected in the producers’ decision to set an episode at a supernatural convention and in the widespread circulation of convention content online. over time, the “careful constructs and slips of actual personality” that characterize the actors’ personae at conventions have become part of the “sanctioned reality” of supernatural, even for fans who have no interest in rps (arrow 328). first, fans routinely capture and distribute convention content online on twitter, tumblr, and youtube. further, the series itself has featured satirized versions of these personae; in “the french mistake,” the winchesters’ visit to an alternate reality incorporates exaggerated versions of padalecki, ackles, and collins, along with plot points mirroring facts about the actors’ real lives. the actors’ social media presences further inform fans’ familiarity with their personae, now co-constitutive elements of the show’s canon: the “official or sanctioned ‘reality’ as defined by the source material,” an evolving bricolage comprised of fiction, fandom, and “real life” (arrow 328). queering our own containment although this ecology continues to evolve, there is some consensus among fans as to the nature of the actors’ personae. ackles, for example, is seen as the cast’s “grumpy old man”; despite his relative youth, he is known for his open contempt for technology and social media. by contrast, collins is characterized by “his perceived marginality and transgressiveness” within the supernatural cast—particularly as compared to the seemingly straight-laced ackles (stein 415). these established personae, however, are complicated when the actors appear onstage together, which occurs only at the annual jus in bello convention in rome. there, ackles’ stock role as conventional and resistant seems subsumed by collins’ coquettishness. while most of supernatural’s actors engage in physically intimate onstage behaviors with members of the same sex at conventions—behavior typically presented as evidence of on-set camaraderie, rather than romantic or sexual attachment—the seemingly out-of-character interactions that mark ackles and collins’ co-appearances offer ample inspiration for rps fans. in this study, we examine a cross-section of cockles fics inspired by events at the 20112015 jus in bello conventions. we explore how fan writers use cockles fic to “sew...together these available elements” of the actors’ personae, along with their perceptions of the characters the two men play on supernatural, in order to queer the series’ attempts to contain fans within the convergent ecology of supernatural’s canon (stein 410). ultimately, our findings suggest that whereas slash fiction was once the primary tool for transgressing and resisting the romance narrative—just as the show itself both teased and withheld such pairings—rps now offers a techne for fans to queer their own containment within supernatural’s storyline. we argue that cockles fanfiction in particular offers female fans a vital site of resistance wherein they can playfully misread supernatural's convergent canon, an opportunity the series itself seems increasingly designed to constrain. references arrow, v. “real person(a) fiction.” fic: why fanfiction is taking over the world. ed. anne jamison. dallas: smartpop, 2013. 323-332. print. fiegel, monica and jenny roth. “annihilating love and heterosexuality without women: romance, generic difference, and queer politics in supernatural fan fiction.” transformative works and cultures 4 (2010). web. ford, sam. “fan studies: grappling with an ‘undisciplined’ discipline.” journal of fandom studies 2.1 (2013): 53-70. print. stein, louisa ellen. “#bowdown to your new god: misha collins and decentered authorship in the digital age.” a companion to media authorship. ed. jonathan gray and derek johnson. hoboken, nj: wiley-blackwell, 2013. 403-425. print. title selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 leaving church: resisting religious authority and community in online-offline dimensions pauline hope cheong, ph.d. associate professor hugh downs school of human communication, arizona state university united states of america pauline.cheong@asu.edu megan fisk, m.a. doctoral student hugh downs school of human communication, arizona state university united states of america megan.fisk@asu.edu abstract membership in religious organizations often entails dedicated attention to its dogma, moral vision, sacred leadership and community, yet some members ultimately choose to leave. in light of the recent rising and unprecedented number of mormon church resignations, this paper examines the motivations and experiences of those who choose to leave the church, including the underexamined role of digital and social media in the disaffiliation process. drawing from rich interview data with ex-mormons, results will discuss their exit tactics of resistance as well as the extent and ways in which they (re)appropriate traditional and new religious texts, and connect to new networks in their transition. keywords online religion, religious authority, disaffiliation, mormonism, turning points membership in religious organizations often entails dedicated attention and acceptance of its basic dogma, ultimate moral vision, sacred leadership and community. yet some members choose to leave their religious organizations, resist religious authorities and (re)appropriate religious texts as they exit the church. of particular interest here, are the unprecedented and rising numbers of the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints (lds) members who are disaffiliating from their organization. disaffiliation is typically used to describe individuals who have formally resigned their church membership, in the case of the lds, that would refer to those who have asked to have their names removed from the church manifest (bahr & albrect, 1989). at a recent general conference meeting, lds church leadership reported that the number of members leaving is at the highest it has been in the 175 year history of the church (carlson, 2012, para. 1), which consists of about 14 million members worldwide (phillips, cragun, kosmin & keysar, 2011). this phenomenon creates a relevant and timely need to examine the religious disaffiliation process, including the previously underexamined role of the internet in religious resistance and transitions. as members disaffiliate, they are seeking out new sources of knowledge, information and support. online support groups, and sometimes their off-line counterparts, provide a way for those in faith transition to connect with others. additionally social media like facebook and reddit, allow disaffiliated members to share their new identity profiles, create alternative and critical texts, as well as share their resistance selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 tactics and experiences. because the lds church has a strict hierarchy and bureaucracy, and is characterized by some as having exclusionary organizational norms, (mcbride, 2007), digital and social media may play a significant part in facilitating access to alternative religious information, widening the possibilities for members to encounter different religious ideas, symbols and practices beyond that which is available in their “stake,” which is composed of five to sixteen neighborhood “wards” of 500 or less members. indeed, prior research studies on internet and religious authority highlight how religious authority, including virtual “cults”, is challenged by online religious activity that provide exposure to alternative viewpoints and debates on official teachings (e.g. dawson, 2000, piff & warburg, 2005), which weakens the “hierarchy chain of command” from visionary leaders to grassroots groups (barker, 2005, p. 70). however, reviews of more recent research suggest that the extent of members’ deconversion and enervation of religious authority in light of digital media may be less straightforward and profound (cheong, 2013; cheong & ess, 2012). the internet may have, to some extent, facilitated changes in the personal and organizational structures by which religious leaders and members operate. but active and accommodative practices by some clergy, and related to their engagement with digital media, may enable them to reconstruct the legitimacy and informational norms to adapt to the changing religious sphere (e.g. cheong, poon & huang, 2012.) consequently, religious followers particularly members who are increasingly skeptical and disbelieving, face complex challenges in negotiating online, offline and oftentimes competing spiritual texts and authoritative performances, even as firm dissenters attempt to resist official dogma, and oppose organizational culture and commitment. in line with the theme of this year’s aoir conference, this paper will discuss the motivations and experiences of individuals who choose to leave church and their exit tactics of resistance, including the extent and ways in which they (re)appropriate traditional and new religious texts, and connect to new networks in their disaffiliation process. prior research on religious disaffiliation have focused on demographic variables such as education level (e.g. caplovitz & sherrow, 1977), socio-psychological traits like rebellion against parental control (e.g. hoge, johnson, & luidens, 1993) and life events where positive life experiences, such as job promotion, are associated with increased faith while negative experiences, such as death of a family member, are associated with loss of faith (albrect and cornwall, 1989). for example, bahr and albrect (1987) conducted in-depth interviews with 30 former mormons to explore the stages of disaffiliation. they found that there was no single reason for disaffiliation; however, lifestyle and belief conflicts were the most common reasons cited for disaffiliation as well as family needs, such as attending the same church as their spouse (bahr & albrect, 1987). they extended brinkerhoff and burke’s (1980) typology to add a third dimension, “rejection”, to the previous two-dimensional scale of religiosity and communal identification. this typology allowed the researchers to identify patterns of disaffiliation, the most common of which they termed “drift,” or “a gradual, often inadvertent, disaffiliation from mormonism” (bahr & albrect, 1987, p. 193). yet the dominant emphasis in trait-based and stage research on religious disaffiliation is less illuminating if we want to understand what it is like to content with, and leave a religious organization. moreover, limited attention has been paid to the role of the digital and social media in these religious transitions, although some recent research on ex-mormons (e.g. burnett, 2012) point to the importance of discussion boards and websites during the disaffiliation process. therefore, this study will investigate mormon exit narratives, as narratives lead us to a deeper understanding of “individual experience, especially in relation to significant transitions” (gubrium & holstein, 2008, p. 245). results from interviews among ex-mormons who have been disaffiliated from the lds church for at selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 least one year, will discuss the temporal and online-offline ways in which ex-mormons are not only consuming critical texts but also reinterpreting and contributing to alternative discourse. in doing so, this paper contributes to the growing body of digital media research on user centered resistance and appropriation, as well as to religion online research. while earlier studies on the internet and religion studies tend to focus on the emancipatory potential of virtual faith communities, more recent third and fourth waves of research are lodged in the historical and contextual circumstances of online faith behaviors, attending to intimate online-offline connections in spiritual appropriations of digital media (campbell & lovheim, 2011, see also the special issue of information, communication & society, on religion and the internet, december 2011). larger implications of this study will also address the reconfiguring of meaning and participation for individuals in other authoritarian forms of organization. references albrecht, s. l. & cornwall, m. (1989). life events and religious change. review of religious research 31, 23-38. bahr, h. h. & albrecht, s. t. (1989). strangers once more: patterns of disaffiliation from mormonism. journal for the scientific study of religion, 28 (1), 180-200. barker, e. (2005). crossing the boundary: new challenges to religious authority and control as a consequence of access to the internet, in m. hojsgaard & m. warburg (eds.), religion and cyberspace (pp.67-85). london: routledge. campbell, h. & lovheim, m. (2011). introduction: rethinking the online-offline connection in the study of religion online, information, communication & society, 14 (8), 1083-1096. caplovitz, d. & sherrow, f. (1977). the religious drop-outs: apostasy among college graduates. beverly hills, ca: sage publications. cheong, p.h. (2013) authority. in h. campbell (ed). digital religion: understanding religious practice in new media worlds. (pp 72-87). ny: routledge cheong, p.h. & ess, c. (2012). religion 2.0? relational and hybridizing pathways in religion, social media and culture. in p.h. cheong, p. fischer-nielsen, p., s. gelfgren, & c. ess. (eds) digital religion, social media and culture: perspectives, practices, futures. (pp. 1-24). new york: peter lang. cheong, p.h., huang, s.h., & poon, j.p.h. (2011). religious communication and epistemic authority of leaders in wired faith organizations. journal of communication, 61 (5), 938958. dawson, l. (2000). researching religion in cyberspace: issues and strategies. in j. hadden & d. cowan (eds.), religion on the internet: research prospects and promises (pp. 25-54). new york: jai press. gubrium, j. f. & holstein, j. a. (2008). narrative ethnography. in s. n. hesse-biber & p. leavy (eds.), handbook of emergent methods (pg. 241-264). new york, ny: guilford press. hoge, d. r., johnson, b. & luidens, d. (1993). “determinants of churchinvolvement of young adults who grew up in presbyterian churches.” journal for the scientific study of religion 32, 242-255. mcbride, m. (2007). club mormon: free-riders, monitoring, and exclusion in the lds. rationality and society, 19, 395-424. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 piff, d. & warburg, m. (2005) seeking for truth: plausibility on a baha'i email list in m. hojsgaard and m. warburg (eds.), religion and cyberspace (pp.86-101). london: routledge. phillips, r., cragun, r. t., koshmin, b.a. & keysar, a. (2011). mormons in the united states 1990-2008: socio-demographic trends and regional differences. hartford, ct: institute for the study of secularism in society and culture. aoir13_final selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 critical design sensibility in postcolonial conditions huatong sun interdisciplinary arts & sciences university of washington tacoma tacoma, wa 98402, u.s.a huatongs@gmail.com abstract for the past decade, social media technologies have acclaimed global successes and altered local cultures. various uses across the globe not only present peculiar patterns characterized by local cultural and sociotechnical conditions, but also are complicated by the issues of value, identity, power, and hegemony in the postcolonial conditions. unfortunately postcolonial scholarship had been absent in technology and computing design discourse until lately, and this partially explains why culture is often interpreted narrowly and statically, and structure and its structuring process is mostly ignored in cross-cultural design practices. to address these issues, i argue that cross-cultural design community should foster a critical design sensibility to understand the postcolonial conditions where we are living through so that we could come up with culturally sensitive designs that are not only driven by market revenues but by mindful listening, ethical standards, social justice, and the conscience of “design for social good” as well. keywords social media; cross-cultural design; postcolonial; culture; hci4d global diffusion of social media technologies for the past decade, social media technologies have acclaimed global successes and altered local cultures. however, the overt instrumentality of a social media technology is often lauded over its implicit values and sociocultural meanings during local uses, and people tend to apply an overly techno-utopian view to interpret the changes it has caused, such as in the case of the “twitter revolution” occurred in arab spring two years ago. this type of naïve responses often contests and exemplifies the common problem in cross-cultural technology design, the disconnect of action and meaning (sun, 2012). technology is considered as value free with its implied politics and ideology being ignored (friedman 1996, 1997; nissenbaum, 2005; winner, 1980), and the meanings solidified and manifested in design features are transferred from one context to another simplistically. as a result, the designed technology is usable, but local users do not relate to it or even resist it. cross-cultural studies indicate that these social media use practices usually develop different communication patterns while responding to local cultural and rhetorical traditions and then take on different use trajectories in various locales (donner, 2007; ito, okabe, & matsuda, 2006; sun, 2009, 2012). as ito (2006) suggests, we should regard those local uses “as a heterogeneous set of pathways through diverse sociotechnical ecologies” rather than “a single trajectory toward a universal good” (p. 6). however, those studies tend to focus on comparing and contrasting local differences without linking them to the impact of globalization and its accompanying power relationships. indeed various local uses of social media technologies are profoundly complicated by the issues of value, identity, power, and hegemony in the postcolonial conditions. the case of facebook japan take the recent development of the facebook japan website as an example. as the u.s.-based facebook has rapidly risen as the world’s largest social networking website with a billion users (zuckerbeg, 2012), many local sns websites were kicked out of the game (cosenza, 2012). however, facebook had a difficult battle to win japanese users due to its distinctive feature that requires its users to use real names for profiles. this feature, which made facebook a huge success in american culture selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 where it originated, conflicts with japanese internet culture, where users like to use pseudonyms to interact with each other either for bonding with old friends or for bridging for new connections with a different conceptualization of privacy. over 75% of japanese social media users chose to use pseudonyms around the time of 2009 (orita & hada, 2009), as supported by the top japanese sns website mixi at that time. consequently facebook’s penetration rate had been stagnating at 3% for a long time until fall 2011, long after a japanese version was released in 2008 and after a facebook office was opened in tokyo in september 2010. facing such strong resistance from local users, the global it giant determined to conquer this strategically important online market with bold localization initiatives while sticking to their real-name policy. it eventually acclaimed victory in september 2012 after morphing into a professional networking site for japanese users, similar to linkedin, where local users are more comfortable to use their real names for professional networking. this case shows how static meanings out of context, influenced by a transmission model of communication (slack, 1996), are often transferred in cross-cultural design, neglecting local cultural preferences and use habits (sun, 2012). meanwhile, the simplistic transmission process and the static meanings transferred are intensified in the postcolonial conditions as both the cultural hybridity and the accompanying power relationships are “unavoidable” (merritt & stolterman, 2012). clearly even though researchers and practitioners already began to celebrate the agency of local users in this increasingly globalized world and describe this stage as glocalization—a new stage after cultural imperialism and globalization, which recognizes the tension between the global and the local, encourages the interaction of both, and thus theoretically captures “receding center-periphery international arrangements and emerging decentralized, fragmented, and multifaceted patterns” (kraidy, 2001)—cultural imperialism is still pervasive everywhere, including in an affluent country with self-sufficient internet culture such as japan. the singularity promoted in the facebook japan case—only one social networking mode is honored in this global village—is more alarming and disturbing than similar cases occurring in other developing countries: a local social network service is doomed before this global juggernaut no matter how hard local users fight. it also conflicts with the design goal of “pluralism” we would like to advocate in research and design practices (bardzell, 2010; bødker, 2006; harrison, tatar, & sengers, 2007). as bardzell (2010) warns, this type of singularity often “quietly and usually unintentionally imposes—without transparent or rational justification— western technological norms and practices” (p. 1305). critical design sensibility in postcolonial conditions a lens of postcolonial theory will illuminate “a layer of embedded cultural power relationships (or culturally negotiated positions of power and subordination) atop already pervasive power structures in society, organizations, and designer-user relationships” (merritt & stolterman, 2012, p. 75). it will help interweave structure and culture in design practices and research by regarding a local site as “a heterogeneous space, one with uneven development, always under construction, and never complete,” therefore, it will “open up critical space for new narratives of becoming and emancipation” (mcmillin, 2007). unfortunately postcolonial scholarship had been absent in technology and computing design discourse until lately, not to mention in cross-cultural design practices and research, and this partially explains why culture is often interpreted narrowly and statically, and structure and its structuring process (giddens, 1984; orlikowski, 2000) is mostly ignored in cross-cultural design practices. clearly, the disconnect of action and meaning and its associated asymmetrical power relationships performs more profoundly in the cases of hci for development (hci4d). to address these issues, i argue that cross-cultural design community should foster a critical design sensibility to understand the postcolonial conditions where we are living through so that we could come up with culturally sensitive designs that are not only driven by market revenues but by mindful listening, ethical standards, social justice, and the conscience of “design for social good” as well. the critical design sensibility aims to negotiate the design opportunities and constraints social media technology brings as it integrates a) agency and structure, b) identity and culture with a focus on power for cross-cultural social media technology design. here, the facebook japan will be used as an example to illustrate the framework. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 the value of postcolonial scholarship for cross-cultural design is not a focus “on the negative critique of constructions of cultural difference, but on the productive possibilities of ‘difference’ itself. the seams among differences are not simply a source of undesirable unevenness and aberration, but also sites of creativity and possibility” (philip, irani, & dourish, 2012, p. 7, emphasis added). therefore, a design methodology informed by postcolonial theory is more than a reflexivity tool, and it will have enormous potential to influence design practices, helping us to come up with new design directions and new approaches to ultimately “design for social good.” references bardzell, s. (2010). feminist hci: taking stock and outlining an agenda for design. in proc. of chi’10: world conference on human factors in computing systems, 1301-1310. acm: new york. bardzell, s. & bardzell, j. (2011). towards a feminist hci methodology: social science, feminism, and hci. in proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems (chi '11). acm, new york, ny, usa, 675-684. bardzell, s., bardzell, j., forlizzi, j., zimmerman, j., & antanitis, j. (2012). critical design and critical theory: the challenge of designing for provocation. in proceedings of the designing interactive systems conference (dis '12). acm, new york, ny, usa, 288-297. bødker, s. (2006). when second wave hci meets third wave challenges. proc. of nordichi’06, acm press. borning, a. and muller, m. (2012). next steps for value sensitive design. proceedings of chi 2012, 11251134. new york, ny: acm press. cosenza, v. (december 2012). world map of social networks. http://vincos.it/world-map-of-social-networks/ donner, j. (2007). the rules of beeping: exchanging messages via intentional "missed calls" on mobile phones, in journal of computer-mediated communication, 13:1. available online at http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/donner.html. friedman, b. (1996). value-sensitive design. interactions, 3(6), 17-23. friedman, b. (ed.). (1997). human values and the design of computer technology. new york: cambridge up. friedman, b., and nathan, l.p. (2010). multi-lifespan information system design: a research initiative for the hci community. proceedings of chi 2010 conference on human factors in computing systems, 2243-2246. new york: acm press. giddens, a. (1984). the constitution of society. berkeley, ca: university of california press. harding, s. (ed.) (2011). the postcolonial science and technology studies reader. nc: duke up. harrison, s. tatar, d. and sengers, p. (2007). the three paradigms of hci. ext. abstracts chi 2007, acm press. irani, l. dourish, p. (2009) postcolonial interculturality. in proc. iwic 2009, acm press, 249-252. irani, l., vertesi, j. dourish, p., philip, k., grinter, r. (2010). postcolonial computing: a lens on design and development. proceedings of conference on human factors in computing systems (chi 2010). acm, new york, 1311-1320. ito, m. (2006). introduction: personal, portable, pedestrian. in m. ito, d. okabe & m. matsuda (eds.), personal, portable, pedestrian mobile phones in japanese life (pp. 1-16). cambridge, ma: mit press. ito, m., okabe, d., & matsuda, m. (eds.). (2006). personal, portable, pedestrian mobile phones in japanese life. cambridge, ma: mit press. kraidy, m. (2001). from imperialism to glocalization: a theoretical framework for the information age. cyberimperialism? global relations in the new electronic frontier. b. l. ebo. greenwood publishing, westport, ct, 27-42. kraidy, m. (2005). hybridity or the cultural logic of globalization. temple university press, philadelphia. mcmillin, d. (2007).international media studies. blackwell, malden, ma. merritt, s. & stolterman, e. (2012). cultural hybridity and participatory design. pdc’ 2012, 73-76, denmark. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 nathan, l. p., and friedman, b. (2010). interacting with policy in a political world: reflections from the voices of the rwanda tribunal project. acm interactions, 17(5), 56-59. nissenbaum, h. (2005). values in technical design. in encyclopedia of science, technology and ethics. new york: macmillan. orlikowski, w. j. (2000). using technology and constituting structures: a practice lens for studying technology in organizations. organization science, 11(4), 404-428. orita, a., & hada, h. (2009). is that really you?: an approach to assure identity without revealing real-name online. in proceedings of the 5th acm workshop on digital identity management (pp. 17-20). new york: acm. philip, k., irani, l., dourish, p. (2012). postcolonial computing: a tactical survey. science, technology, & human values, 37(3), 3-29. slack, j. (1996). the theory and method of articulation in cultural studies. in d. morley & k.-h. chen (eds.), stuart hall: critical dialogues in cultural studies (pp. 112-127). new york: routledge. sun, h. (2009). towards a rhetoric of locale: localizing mobile messaging technology into everyday life. journal of technical writing and communication, 39(2), 245-261. sun, h. (2012). cross-cultural technology design: creating culture-sensitive technology for local users. new york: oxford university press. winner, l. (1980). do artifacts have politics? daedalus, 109(1), 121-136. zuckerberg, m. (october 4, 2012). “this morning, there are more than one billion people…” available online at http://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10100518568346671 aoir2016 camilla best 25/02 ! selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 ‘these snaps are made for talking’: 
 visual communication and instant expression on snapchat camilla best the university of melbourne personal photography in the digital age although there is significant research on personal photography and photo sharing practices on social media (livingstone, 2005; van dijck, 2007, 2008; tifentale, 2014; gye, 2007), only a relatively small body of emerging research has focused on application snapchat as a communication platform (bayer et al., 2015; roesner et al., 2014; utz et al., 2015; poltash, 2013; katz & crocker, 2015). this project provides an opportunity to advance the understanding of the practices and motivation behind snapchat communication. by situating my findings within the existing conversation surrounding photography and social media cultures, this study fills a gap in literature by analysing how snapchat both extends and intensifies digital photography’s shift from memory to communication. with the emergence of digital cameras and smartphones, the concept of a ‘kodak moment’ has changed and evolved. the convergence of networked communication technologies with smart phone and digital camera capabilities, has allowed sharing images to become simple and instantaneous. social networking sites (snss) are built on the production of user-generated content (ugc) and have become key platforms for sharing digital images. palmer (2012) suggests that new picture sharing practices, (being immediate, every day and transient) have allowed the camera phone to become a “life recorder” (palmer, 2012, p. 86). images once bound to the domestic sphere now have a potentially global reach due to networked communication technologies and snss. digital photography can now be about ‘collect[ing] materials for conversation’ or for ‘display[ing] social relationships’ (lee, 2009, p. 165). images then, are often used on snss for accumulating social currency in the form of likes and comments (rainie et al., 2012). snapchat promotes image sharing like other social media channels, whilst simultaneously branding itself as an alternative communication medium that does not track, store or sell user data. ephemeral data applications can be seen as a response to best, c. (2016, october 5-8).’these snaps are made for talking’: visual communication and instant expression on snapchat. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. our cluttered world of big data (boyd, 2010), offering users more control over the distribution and archiving of their networked data. methods i approached the study by building on key ideas within media studies literature relating to ‘participatory culture’ (jenkins , 2006; kennedy, 2013), and digital photo-sharing practices (garde-hansen, 2014; van dijck, 2008; gye, 2007): memory, communication, identity. by applying previous frameworks for understanding digital photography to the specific contexts of snapchat, this research project aimed to gain a better understanding of how the app represents a significant shift in image sharing and visual communication. qualitative research methods were employed to produce in depth data concerning the three key themes: temporality, sharing and self. 12 participants were recruited to partake in semi-structured, one-on-one interviews. the interviews were framed by the three key research themes and broken into several categories, with the intention of exploring how advancements in media technologies have allowed new practices of photo-sharing and communication to emerge. findings and discussion qualitative data suggested that participants perceived snapchat as a means for direct communication or a “messaging platform” (bayer, 2015, p.23) rather than a platform for image or video distribution. in snapchat interactions, a photo typically begins as the impetus but as the ‘conversation’ continues, greater value is placed on the text (the caption). all participants reported that over 90% of their snapchat content consisted of “selfies.” furthermore, one of the most striking findings to emerge was the notion that snapchat selfie communication lessens the likelihood of a message being misread or misinterpreted due to lack of tone and body language. snapchat’s temporal affordances have allowed new platform-specific sharing practices to emerge which centre on the exchange of humorous and typically mundane snippets of everyday life. my interview data suggests that users enjoy having control over who consumes their content, when they view it and for how many seconds. these findings indicate that snapchat image sharing between close-ties differs from the highly considered, premeditated practices of self-presentation on broadcasting platforms (i.e. facebook and instagram) (belk, 2013). for participants, this ability to be in the moment (not focused on the past or on the future) was somewhat liberating. the affordances and uses of snapchat shift the terms of goffman’s (1959) selfpresentation from a front facing mode common to other snss, to a more ‘behind the scenes’ or ‘backstage’ look at particular events or occasionsthe less glamorous, humorous moments that occur “in the moment.” conclusion the results of this study indicate that a more real-time networked self, attuned to the exigencies of the present and the network, emerges in these contexts. these findings suggest that snapchat is perceived as a more intimate platform for self-presentation than broadcasting platforms. the selectivity and ephemerality of the platform allows for more personal communication to occur, while its temporal nature allows “snaps” to appear spontaneous and casual at the same time. in the digital age where remembering is the default, snapchat reminds us of the importance of forgetting. the study’s findings suggest that snapchat is a welcome alternative within the current social media landscape. like real life interactions, snaps are ephemeral and temporally bound “in the moment.” overall, this study’s results strengthen the idea that snapchat has both extended and intensified digital photography’s shift from memory to communication. snapchat photography communicates a moment rather than capturing a memory. the ephemerality of photos shared on snapchat places a new emphasis on the present moment, allowing a more ‘real-time’ networked self to emerge. references belk, r. w. (2013). extended self in a digital world. journal of consumer research, 40(3), 477-500. boyd, d. (2010). privacy and publicity in the context of big data. paper presented at the www2010, raleigh, north carolina. http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/2010/ www2010.html garde-hansen, j. (2013). friendship photography: memory, mobility and social networking in m. sandbye & j. larsen (eds.), digital snaps (pp. 87-108). london: i.b tauris & co ltd. goffman, e. (1959). the presentation of self in everyday life. garden city, n.y.,: doubleday. jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture : where old and new media collide. new york: new york university press. katz, j. e., & crocker, e. t. (2015). selfies| selfies and photo messaging as visual conversation: reports from the united states, united kingdom and china. international journal of communication, 9, 1861-1872. kennedy, j. (2013). rhetorics of sharing: data, imagination, and desire in l. geert & m. rasch (eds.), unlike us reader: social media monopolies and their alternatives (pp. 127-136). amsterdam institute of network cultures. lee, d.-h. (2009). mobile snapshots and private/public boundaries. knowledge, technology & policy, 22(3), 161-171. livingstone, s. (2005). audiences and publics : when cultural engagement matters for the public sphere. bristol, uk: intellect books. palmer, d. (2012). iphone photography mediating visions of social space. in l. hjorth, j. burgess & i. richardson (eds.), studying mobile media: cultural technologies, mobile communication, and the iphone (pp. 85-97). new york: routledge. poltash, n. a. (2013). snapchat and sexting: a snapshot of baring your bare essentials. richmond journal of law & technology, 19(4), 1-24. rainie, l., brenner, j., & purchell, k. (2012). photos and video as social currency online pew internet and american life project retrieved june 12, from http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/09/13/photos-and-videos-as-social-currency online/ utz, s., muscanell, n., & khalid, c. (2015). snapchat elicits more jealousy than facebook: a comparison of snapchat and facebook use. cyberpsychology, behavior & social networking, 18(3), 141-146. van dijck, j. (2007). mediated memories in the digital age. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. van dijck, j. (2008). digital photography: communication, identity, memory. visual communication, 7(1), 57-76. microsoft word 729-479-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 “watch out, organize, inform yourself!”: tracing the dynamics of twitter discourse on anti-nazi street protests mark dang-anh university of siegen germany mark@dang-anh.de dr. michael eble fraunhofer institute for intelligent analysis and information systems iais germany michael.eble@iais.fraunhofer.de abstract with the advent of mobile devices, mediatized political discourse became more dynamic. we assume that the microblog twitter can be considered as a medium for spatial coordination during protests. the analyzed case is that of neo-nazi demonstrations and counter-protests in the city of dresden that occurred in february 2012. data consists of microposts that occurred at the day of the event. quantitative analysis of hashtag and retweet frequencies was performed as well as qualitative speech act pattern analysis and a tempo-spatial discourse analysis on selected subsets of microposts. results show that a common discursive practice is linguistic locational referencing (llr) and by that constructing space. empirical analysis indicates a strong relation between communicational online space and physical offline place: protest participants permanently reconfigure spatial context discursively and thus the contested protest area becomes a temporarily meaningful place. keywords twitter; protest; discourse analysis; linguistic locational reference introduction every year the city of dresden is the scene for neo-nazis who hold a commemoration march for those who died in the ww2 bombing that started at february 13th, 1945. the city then becomes a hotspot for neo-nazis as well as democratic and anti-fascist protestors. the involved groups struggle for public space: the neo-nazis aim at marching a preferably long route. they (try to) rally at a fixed meeting point and stay together as a group during the protests. the counter protestors intend to actively preventing neo-nazis from marching by blocking the streets. blockades are planned beforehand but do also emerge spontaneously due to the route marched by the neo-nazis, which might change short. the police usually don’t expose the designated route officially. in such a highly dynamic setting the mobile use of digital media, mainly social media, becomes crucial for distributing information, organizing collective action and otherwise discursive participation. theoretical background it is claimed that “social media have been chiefly responsible for the construction of a choreography of assembly as a process of symbolic construction of public space” (gerbaudo 2012, 5, original emphasis). focusing on the spatial coordination of protest in twitter thus means highlighting a constructivist relation between ‘space’ and ‘place’: “space becomes place when it acquires symbolic meaning and a concrete definition, marking the whole spectrum of identity and sense of belonging” (tsatsou 2009, 12). from this perspective, the constructions of space and place can be regarded as discursive practices. on twitter, the discursive dynamics of the protests are mapped illustratively. locative aspects of twitter use during events have been analyzed recently from various perspectives. by applying a social network analysis focusing on geographic proximity, yardi and boyd (2010) show that “central individuals in the twitter network are also located centrally in the physical world” (yardi and boyd selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 2010, 7). geographic and locational references are analyzed by vieweg et al. (2010) who look at the use of twitter in emergency situations. they show that the more dynamic the setting is (i.e. dynamic grassfires vs. static river floods) the more people verbally express spatial references. the medial organization and mobilization for protest has been widely discussed (van de donk et al. 2004, kahn and kellner 2004, lievrouw 2011). tufekci and wilson (2012) found that interpersonal communication, especially in social media, was crucial to peoples’ decision on joining the protests. wilson and dunn (2011) also analyze the use of social media in the 2011 egyptian protests at tahrir square. social media use, they sum up, was not predominant in demonstrations. however, it is suggested that they were crucial for connecting participants and motivating for participation. data collection the protests took place on february 13th, 2012. twitter’s search api was used for collecting data on 24 hours that day. from observing pre-event discourse on twitter, on blogs and websites set up by activists, a set of twelve related hashtags and four key words could be identified as marking the protest discourse. microposts that contained these words were scraped. after removing duplicates, a total of 6.318 microposts were collected. method a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods is used on selective samples of the data set to sequentially answer the research questions: • rq1: which hashtag(s) contextualize the event in twitter? frequency analysis is performed on a subset of microposts from february 13th that contained the key word “dresden” (n=2.048) as it is not directly related to the protest events and allows for analysis of posts that refer to the city in general. • rq2: who are the main agents in the event-related twitter discourse? drawing on the assumption that the most retweeted accounts represent key agents of the protest discourse (cf. wilson and dunn, 2011) a quantitative analysis on all microposts from february 13th is conducted (n=6.318). • rq3: what are people posting within the event-related twitter discourse? in order to identify different types of linguistic practices, a speech act pattern analysis is performed on the hashtag datasets (cf. hindelang, 2010). microposts are also coded whether they contain linguistic locational references or not without further differentiation. a total of 559 microposts tagged with “#13feb” or “13februar”, which are political neutral hashtags used by both protest groups, was coded for a timeframe shortly before, during and after the march (5-9 p.m.). intercoder reliability testing resulted in an acceptable value (krippendorf α: 0.688; cf. krippendorf 2004). • rq4: by which discursive practices do participants construct space within the event-related twitter discourse? a qualitative discourse analysis is performed on a subset of the most retweeted account that contained linguistic locational reference. combining the spatial with the temporal dimension and mapping it, the dynamics of the protests can be revealed. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 results • rq1: the two most used hashtags are „#blockdresden” and „#nazifrei” (figure 1). these tags derive from the alliance „nazifrei! dresden stellt sich quer” (“free of nazis! dresden puts its foot down”) which has organized counter-protests against the neo-nazi marches in dresden since 2010 and dedicates itself to blocking the neo-nazis. while „nazifrei” is part of the initiative’s name, „block dresden” was the 2012 protests’ slogan. the usage of these hashtags does not only contextualize microposts with the protest event but also infer means of political identification as well as the speakers’ intention. figure 1: frequency analysis of a subset of microposts that contained the keyword “dresden” (n=2.048) • rq2: the most retweeted account is the account “@dd_nazifrei” which is the account of the activist’s organization “nazifrei! dresden stellt sich quer”. it was retweeted more than four times more often (277) than the second most retweeted account (61). as the unequaled proportioned power law distribution reveals, “@dd_nazifrei” seems to be the key agent in protest discourse. • rq3: more than half of the coded microposts contained linguistic locational references, i.e. explications of city, site or street names and local deictics and indexicals. speech act analysis reveals that “informing” is by far the most uttered speech act whereas “insulting”, “judging” or “warning” were uttered less frequently in protest discourse (figure 2). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 figure 2: speech acts performed by discourse participants. “g” indicates microposts with linguistic locational reference, “n” without linguistic locational reference. capitalized words indicate speech acts, uncapitalized words indicate objects of reference. • rq4: as the analyzed case indicates, linguistic locational references correspond to the physical setting of protests. regarding the temporal dimension, microposting frequency corresponds with offline activity, i.e. the beginning and end of the neo-nazi march and blockades. taking into consideration that more than half of the microposts sent at the peak of activities (5-9 p.m.; cf. rq3) contained linguistic locational references, it can be stated that spatial coordination is particularly important in mobile protest communication. conclusion in the dynamic event of the dresden demonstrations twitter is used for spatial coordination of protest. linguistic locational referencing (llr) is a central discursive practice performed, mainly combined with the distribution of protest-relevant information. by such location-aware discursive processes, the embattled public space gains symbolic meaning. thus, the protest location as the setting of discursively negotiated political conflict becomes a temporary meaningful place concerning the specific event. however, further research needs to put emphasis on the investigation of the onlineoffline-relationships in the context of mobile media usage in protests by combining textual analysis with ethnographic-styled fieldwork such as interviews and participant observation. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 references gerbaudo, p. (2012). tweets and the streets: social media and contemporary activism. london, new york: pluto press. hindelang, g. (2010). einführung in die sprechakttheorie: sprechakte, äußerungsformen, sprechaktsequenzen. germanistische arbeitshefte: vol. 27. berlin: de gruyter. retrieved from http://paperc.de/5983einfuhrung-in-die-sprechakttheorie-9783110231489 kahn, r., & kellner, d. (2004). new media and internet activism: from the 'battle of seattle' to blogging. new media & society, (6), 87–95. krippendorf, k. (2004). reliability in content analysis: some common misconceptions and recommendations. human communication research, 30(3), 411–433. lievrouw, l. a. (2011). alternative and activist new media. cambridge, uk; malden, ma: polity. tsatsou, p. (2009). reconceptualising 'time and 'space' in the era of electronic media and communications. platform: journal of media and communication, (1), 11–32. tufekci, z., & wilson, c. (2012). social media and the decision to participate in political protest: observations from tahrir square. journal of communication, 62(2), 363–379. doi:10.1111/j.14602466.2012.01629.x van de donk, w., loader, b. d., nixon, p. g., & rucht, d. (eds.). (2004). cyberprotest: new media, citizens and social movements. london; new york: routledge. vieweg, s., hughes, a. l., starbird, k., & palen, l. (2010). microblogging during two natural hazards events: what twitter may contribute to situational awareness. in : chi ’10, proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1079–1088). new york, ny, usa: acm. retrieved from http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753486 wilson, c., & dunn, a. (2011). digital media in the egyptian revolution: descriptive analysis from the tahrir data sets. international journal of communication, (5), 1248–1272. yardi, s., & boyd, d. (2010). tweeting from the town square: measuring geographic local networks. washington, dc. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 gut  and  butt  desires  and  the  heterosexual  imaginary:   the  pioneer  woman  blogs  about  food,  fat,  and  cowboys   in  chaps     michele  white     tulane  university     the  photograph  depicts  a  yellowish-­pink  hand  with  a  wedding  band  intimately  holding  a   smaller  and  similarly  colored  hand.  some  fragments  of  cheese  from  preparing  baked  ziti   cling  to  the  fingers.  food  blogger  ree  drummond  presents  this  affective  and  culinary   union  and  advises  readers  to  have  their  “daughter  add  more  mozzarella”;;  “then  “check   her  fingernails  and  say,  “ew!  grody,  man”;;  “then  listen  to  her  retort,  ‘i  learned  it  from   you,  mom;;’  then  cry  and  imagine  a  different  way  of  life.  one  that  involves  lovely   fingernails  and  pantyhose.”1  drummond  associates  cooking  and  related  forms  of   domesticity  with  white  heterosexual  women.  she  dreams  of  a  feminine  world  where  the   combination  of  physically  touching  and  emotionally  feeling  produces  clean  whiteness.2   through  such  images  and  accounts,  drummond  and  many  of  her  readers  articulate  a   culture  of  shared  tastes,  histories,  and  identities  and  begin  to  trouble  these  positions  by   offering  visions  of  the  queer  relationship  and  child—the  daughter  as  dirty,  “man,”  and   husband.3  drummond  thus  performs  a  version  of  the  “heterosexual  imaginary”  that,  as   chrys  ingraham  argues,  is  a  “way  of  thinking  which  conceals  the  operation  of   heterosexuality  in  structuring  gender”  while  constantly  hinting  at  the  queer.4       drummond’s  articulation  of  norms  should  be  cause  for  concern  because  her  the   pioneer  woman  blog  has  millions  of  readers  every  month.5  in  the  blog,  drummond   promises  that  she  is  “keepin’  it  real”;;  indicates  her  “love”  for  readers;;  and  chronicles   her  life  as  a  rancher,  wife,  mother,  homeschooler,  author,  and  television  personality.6   drummond’s  self-­identification  as  an  ordinary  white  heteronormative  woman,  without  of   course  ever  using  these  terms,  is  undermined  by  her  own  corporeal  expressions  and  a   group  of  blogging  critics,  including  the  pie  near  woman  blogger  who  deploys   photographs  of  doll  tableaus  as  a  means  of  parodying  drummond.  through   drummonds  accounts,  food  is  connected  to  the  stomach,  gut,  breasts,  and  butt  as  well   as  the  mouth.  these  visceral  experiences  and  readings  move  with  food  and  digestion   through  and  around  the  body  and  establish  conceptions  of  gender,  race,  and  sexuality.   in  examining  these  sites,  i  continue  the  project  of  connecting  food  studies  to  critical   interrogations  of  identity,  including  writing  about  affect,  fat,  monstrosity,  whiteness,  and   the  rectum  and  anal  sex.7       suggested  citation  (apa):  white,  m.  (2015,  october  21-­24)  gut  and  butt  desires  and  the   heterosexual  imaginary:  the  pioneer  woman  blogs  about  food,  fat,  and  cowboys  in  chaps.   paper  presented  at  internet  research  16:  the  16th  annual  meeting  of  the  association  of  internet   researchers.  phoenix,  az,  usa:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.     in  drummond’s  accounts,  food  produces  appropriately  gendered  subjects.  yet  there  is   also  something  decidedly  fluid  about  drummond’s  descriptions  of  her  love  of  recipes   and  incorporation  of  food  into  her  erotic  and  romantic  life.  she  engages  food  with  the   phrase,  “mmmmm.  hello,  lover”  and  highlights  varied  sorts  of  gut  feelings.8  pie  near   woman  stresses  the  queer  eroticism  of  these  addresses  by  depicting  drummond   rubbing  against,  penetrating  herself  with,  and  dousing  herself  in  food.  unfortunately,  pie   near  woman  also  renders  servile  people  of  color  and  ridicules  drummond’s  body  and   sexuality  as  a  means  of  critique.9         pie  near  woman  presents  photographic  tableau  with  vomit,  diarrhea,  and  the  anus  as   the  monstrous  afterward  of  drummond’s  food.  drummond  more  positively  displaces   vaginal  and  labial  eroticism  with  her  descriptions  of  “hiney  tingles”  and  associates  anal   pleasures  with  cooking  and  eating.10  for  instance,  drummond  presents  a  sauce  “that’ll   make  your  spirit  soar.  and  your  tummy  jiggle.  and  your  hips  spread.  and  your  hiney   droop  to  the  floor.”11  she  promises  that  her  food  will  drop  the  anus  to  the  floor  in  a  kind   of  reversal  of  the  surprised  mouth.  she  connects  with  readers  over  these  fleshy   pleasures  and  moments  of  fat  acceptance  and  coaxes,  “c’mon–let’s  jiggle  our  tummies   together!”  food  thereby  allows  drummond  to  engage  in  a  sort  of  caress  with  readers.       drummond  links  female  empowerment  to  the  craft  of  cooking,  binary  distinctions,  and   satisfying  the  needs  of  men.  drummond’s  “cowboy  food”  category  provides  “recipes   that  scream  ‘man  food’”  and  constructs  gendered  subjects.12  she  writes,  “i  am  woman.   hear  me  roar.  but  my  husband’s  tastebuds  i  can  not  ignore.”13  yet  her  habit  of  viewing   her  husband  from  behind  and  photographing  his  chap-­clad  buttocks  associates  the   empowered  gaze  and  sexual  activity  with  the  female  blogger  and  readers  and  feminizes   and  queers  her  husband.  it  also  makes  her  husband  into  a  form  of  sustenance  since     drummond  often  posts  these  images  as  part  of  her  recipes.  drummond’s  focus  on  the   bottom  and  back,  including  her  concern  about  “back  fat”  rather  than  other  forms  of   fleshiness,  turns  the  body  and  eating  around  and  supports  a  wider  erotic  life  for   heterosexual  women.14  in  these  cases,  the  heterosexual  imaginary  reflects  drummond’s   claims  to  heterosexuality  and  assertions  that  heterosexuality  is  “naturally  occurring”  and   “unquestioned.”15  pie  near  woman  writes  that  other  female  bloggers  “complete”  her,   without  interrogating  this  connection,  and  evokes  the  homoerotic  conversations  that  are   part  of  some  female  internet  production  cultures.16  these  queer  moments  are   embedded  in,  at  odds  with,  and  support  a  set  of  deeply  normalizing  practices.  they   point  to  fissures  in  people’s  claims  about  heterosexual  identity  and  encourage  an   interrogation  of  the  larger  ways  personal  connections  function  in  internet  settings.             references       1  ree,  “baked  ziti,”  the  pioneer  woman,  26  november  2012,  1  march  2015,   http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2012/11/baked-­ziti/       2  eve  kosofsky  sedgwick,  touching  feeling:  affect,  pedagogy,  performativity  (durham,   nc:  duke  university  press).   3  i  am  relating  this  notion  of  the  queer  child  to  kathryn  bond  stockton,  the  queer  child,   or  growing  sideways  in  the  twentieth  century  (durham,  nc:  duke  university  press,   2009).   4  chrys  ingraham,  “the  heterosexual  imaginary:  feminist  sociology  and  theories  of   gender."  sociological  theory  12  (1994):  203.       5  amanda  fortini,  “the  pioneer  woman  gets  lost  on  the  range,”  the  new  yorker,  3   february  2012,  1  march  2015,   http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/02/the-­pioneer-­woman-­gets-­lost-­ on-­the-­range.html#ixzz2co8ljs8u       6  ree,  “about  pioneer  woman,”  the  pioneer  woman,  3  january  2013,   http://thepioneerwoman.com/about/   7  considerations  of  the  relationship  between  food,  gender,  race,  and  sexuality  include,   arlene  voski  avakian  and  barbara  haber,  eds.  from  betty  crocker  to  feminist  food   studies:  critical  perspectives  on  women  (amherst,  ma:  university  of  massachusetts   press,  2005);;  carole  counihan,  the  anthropology  of  food  and  body:  gender,  meaning,   and  power  (new  york:  routledge,  1999;;  sherrie  a.  inness,  ed.  pilaf,  pozole,  and  pad   thai:  american  women  and  ethnic  food  (amherst,  ma:  university  of  massachusetts   press,  2001);;  deborah  lupton,  food,  the  body  and  the  self  (london:  sage,  1996);;   elsbeth  probyn,  carnal  appetites:  food,  sex,  identities  (new  york:  routledge,  2000).       8  ree,  “molten  chocolate  lava  cake,”  29  july  2009,  1  march  2015,   http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2009/07/molten-­chocolate-­lava-­cake/   9  pie  near  woman,  “there’s  dirt  in  my  vagina  –  an  instagram  ode  to  joe,”  1  march   2015,  http://www.pienearwoman.com/2012/04/theres-­dirt-­in-­my-­vagina-­an-­instagram-­ ode-­to-­joe/       10  ree,  “for  you  men,”  the  pioneer  woman,  13  september  2007,  1  march  2015,   http://thepioneerwoman.com/blog/2007/09/for_you_men_by_ree_drummond/       11  ree,  eggs  benedict,”  the  pioneer  woman,  12  october  2007,  1  march  2015,   http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2007/10/eggs_benedict/   12  ree,  “cowboy  food,”  the  pioneer  woman,  1  march  2015,   http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/category/man_pleasers/   13  ree,  “pan-­fried  pork  chops,”  the  pioneer  woman,  6  october  2009,  1  march  2015,   http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2009/10/simple-­pan-­fried-­pork-­chops/         14  ree,  “all  i  wanted  was  a  doughnut,”  the  pioneer  woman,  23  december  2011,  12   february  2013,  http://thepioneerwoman.com/blog/2011/12/all-­i-­wanted-­was-­a-­doughnut/   15  ingraham,  204.   16  pie  near  woman,  “inspiration,”  13  december  2012,   http://www.pienearwoman.com/inspiration/   microsoft word ir14-sense-of-place.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 an inappropriate sense of place torill elvira mortensen it university of copenhagen denmark toel@itu.dk abstract this is a discussion of how mediacity influences the understanding of communication, based on joshua meyrowitz’ work no sense of place, where his concepts are used on digital communication through a discussion of two examples of inappropriate communication online. this discussion reactivates his understanding of how media changes society, while it underlines the extent to which digital media have changed society. the media reality joshua meyrowitz addressed in 1985 no longer exists. since then print and electronic media have converged in and been altered by digital media, and the sense of place has changed. it is still vital for the understanding of communication to understand how mediacity changes the settings – the very stage on which we perform as everyday actors. this paper addresses the original concepts of meyrowitz’ theory through empirical examples, which will be analysed with a firm eye to the applicability of some of his core concepts. the following exemplifies the discussion, which will be expanded on and explored more deeply for the conference presentation. keywords: mediacity; gameculture; place; trash talk an inappropriate sense of place inappropriate behaviour in a new infrastructure: old grandma hardcore. old grandma hardcore is a console game player presented in a weblog by her grandson, describing the gaming adventures of an elderly woman. old grandma hardcore playes video games while her family go on with their lives around her. the weblog displays her extremely inappropriate language, but is it so bad? gamers are famous of their harsh and indelicate language, as the recent attention to sexual harassment in gamer communities documented, as shown in an article by reporter amy o’leary in the new york times from august 2012 (o’leary, 2012). on the one hand, old grandma hardcore is shocking because she is an elderly woman, supposedly raised in a time when women didn’t swear. the standards we expect from a woman like her do not include yelling, swearing and repetitions of "fucking bitch, get out of the way when i'm shooting!” (crtlaltdelete, 2005). on the other hand, her language is a charming quirk, aimed mostly at pixels and passing youngsters who walk on the lawn. this is a contrast to the sexual harassment in gaming communities, which can get very personal and threatening. one example is the case of anita sarkeesian’s kickstarter project tropes vs women, documented on her weblog feminist frequency (sarkeesian, 2012). old grandma hardcore can be safely displayed as her lovable eccentric self, because she yells at the screen. the harassment girls and women are subject to in the gaming community is obviously unacceptable and not lovable, but why does it then happen at all? reconfiguring meaning still, the language grandma hardcore uses isn’t much nicer than the language argued against among the gaming community. so why is one cute, while the other is deeply offensive to the point of being criminal harassments and threats? selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 one of the reasons for this is found in how meaning is reconfigured through mediacity. meyrowitz makes it evident how sarcasm, irony and humour often misfires: “sarcasm, teasing and other nuances of meaning are easily lost in letters and books. this is why even intimate love letters tend to have a “formal” quality, while many business meetings or telephone conversations seem quite intimate and personal” (meyrowitz, 1985:101). with the advent of the digital media, print may have received an immediacy that it did not originally have, which makes it appear to be acceptable to use responses which would otherwise only be oral. julie l. rowse demonstrates this in her article on trash talk in fantasy football leagues (rowse, 2010). while her examples are fairly mild, in many cases trash talk is sexual in tone, and gender-biased, as shown in delamere and shaw’s article ““they see it as a guy's game”: the politics of gender in digital games” (delamere & shaw, 2008). trash talk changes meaning as it changes context, and using meyrowitz’ discussions of the transference of meaning from the medium to the message, we can get a clearer understanding of the difference between the oral, the proto-oral of the immediate dialogic written language og games and instant messaging, and the written word. reconfiguring participation grandma hardcore’s play-style and anita sarkeesian’s explorations of the meaning of gender in games both reconfigure our understanding of participants in online communities, through the way they force a new consideration of participation. among many of meyrowitz’ thoughts on electronic media, he particularly mentions two interesting states of reconfiguration that can be used to understand each of these two phenomena. the first is about social and physical place. “electronic media destroy the specialness of place and time. television, radio and telephone turn once private places into more public ones by making them more accessible to the outside world. and car stereos, wrist-watch televisions and personal sound systems such as the “sony walkman” make public spaces private” (meyrowitz, 1985:125). in a society where the elderly are invisible, displaying the playing activities of old grandma hardcore is a strong example of the private gone public. anita sarkeesian’s questions about games should not have to bridge quite that wide a gap, but several of the responses to her questions are overwhelmingly negative, an indication that she has gone beyond established boundaries and broken some unspoken contract. it may be that she has demonstrated that a place that is often experienced as private and exclusive is not, that it is public and exposed, and as a result the language from one arena spills over into another, creating great discomfort among all of the involved. the other reconfigurations concern the hunters and gatherers of the electronic age, where people cross boundaries with the disregard typical of hunter/gatherer cultures (meyrowitz, 1985:317-318). in this part of his book meyrowitz briefly touches on the hacker culture and how it makes children cross over into the sphere of the parents through their use of computers, an adult tool. this cross-over through total disregard of boundaries may perhaps be the truly nomadic behaviour of the digital age, not acts of the digital nomad. meyrowitz’ understanding of the nomad, which he further elaborates in his 2004 paper “global nomads in the digital veldt,” is restricted by his presentation of the “digital veldt” as mainly a place where traditional media boundaries collapse and different states otherwise separate blur (meyrowitz, 2004:27). rather than discussing the digital nomad as one that works in different contexts and locations with the help of digital media, meyrowitz discusses the global nomad as one transitioning between states of information. references crtlaltdelete. (2005, march 6th). grandma destroyed resident evil 4 retrieved from http://oghc.blogspot.dk/2005/06/grandma-destroyed-resident-evil-4.html delamere, fern m., & shaw, susan m. (2008). “they see it as a guy's game”: the politics of gender in digital games. leisure/loisir, 32(2), 279-302. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 meyrowitz, joshua. (1985). no sense of place, the impact of electronic media on social behavior (1986 ed.). new york: oxford university press. meyrowitz, joshua. (2004). global nomads in the digital veldt. paper presented at the iamcr evista famecos, porto alegre. http://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/ojs/index.php/revistafamecos/article/viewfile/3261/2521 o’leary, amy. (2012, august 1st). in virtual play, sex harassment is all too real, the new york times, online edition. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/us/sexual-harassment-in-onlinegaming-stirs-anger.html?_r=0 rowse, julie l. (2010). dungeons and dragons for jocks: trash talking and viewing habits of fantasy football league participants. in heather urbanskin (ed.), writing and the digital generation: essays in new media rhetoric (pp. 106-116). jefferson, nc and london: mcfarland & company inc. sarkeesian, anita. (2012, 6th of march). image based harassment and visual misogyny. retrieved from http://www.feministfrequency.com/2012/07/image-based-harassment-and-visual-misogyny/ selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  thomas,  b.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  moderating  readers  and  reading  online.   paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  conference  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.   berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.     moderating  readers  and  reading  online     bronwen  thomas,  bournemouth  university       despite  the  proliferation  of  online  book  clubs  and  reading  groups,  very  little  has  been   written  to  date  on  the  management  of  these  spaces  and  how  this  helps  frame  the  kinds   of  discussion  and  interpretative  work  that  take  place.  this  paper  reports  on  a  study  of   moderators  of  online  book-­related  sites,  which  used  interviews,  ethnographic   observation  and  textual  analysis  of  online  interactions  to  consider  the  issues  of   authority,  hierarchy,  power  and  control  that  arise  from  their  framing  of  discussions.       few  scholarly  studies  focus  closely  or  exclusively  on  the  role  of  the  moderator.    in   internet  and  fan  studies,  the  role  may  be  discussed  in  relation  to  how  order  or  decorum   is  maintained  in  online  discourse  (whiteman  2007).  some  attention  has  been  paid  to   the  functions  and  visibility  of  moderators  (whiteman  2007;;  grimmelmann  2015)  as  well   as  to  the  ways  in  which  moderation  is  centralised  or  distributed  (fister  2005;;   grimmelmann  2015).  there  has  been  much  less  emphasis  on  how  moderators  interact   and  deal  with  forum  users  and  those  outside  the  community,  or  how  they  influence  and   shape  the  direction  that  discussion  takes.         online  book  clubs  and  forums  have  reignited  interest  in  the  social  aspects  of  reading   and  the  production  of  reading  formations  (bennett  and  woollacott  1987).  online  reading   forums  may  appear  to  negate  many  of  the  power-­based  issues  affecting  offline  groups,   allowing  for  anonymity  and  diverse  group  membership.  the  written  medium  lets   discussion  happen  at  the  members’  own  pace,  and  moderators  can  be  literally  unseen   and  exert  only  minimal  control.  online  reading  groups  therefore  have  the  theoretical   potential  to  be  democratic,  egalitarian,  diverse,  and  non-­hierarchical.     we  initially  contacted  moderators  and  administrators  of  over  20  online  forums  and  book   groups  in  2012  to  seek  permission  to  circulate  details  of  an  online  survey  we  were   conducting  into  users  of  these  communities.    we  found  the  responses  very  varied:   some  moderators  were  helpful  and  enthusiastic,  while  in  other  instances  we  were   treated  with  suspicion  and  even  barred  from  accessing  forums.  this  prompted  an   interest  in  the  role  of  these  individuals,  so  we  interviewed  several  moderators  via  email.   we  wanted  to  find  out  more  about  the  people  behind  the  sites  we  were  researching  and   to  hear  from  them  about  their  experiences  of  managing  discussions  rather  than  rely   solely  on  the  textual  traces  they  left  behind.  we  also  wanted  to  see  if  their  perception  of   their  role  matched  how  we  ‘read’  the  communities  we  were  observing.  our  approach   was  informed  by  studies  of  ethics  and  good  practice  in  internet  and  fan  studies  (e.g.   whiteman  2007;;  kozinets  2010)  that  stress  the  importance  of  engaging  with  users   rather  than  treating  them  simply  as  data,  and  of  foregrounding  the  relationship  between   researchers  and  the  communities  they  study.       for  some  of  the  book  sites  we  studied,  the  moderator  is  primarily  a  technical  facilitator,   but  most  of  the  individuals  we  spoke  to  are  active  participants  in  discussions  whose   enthusiasm  for  their  reading  is  the  reason  for  their  involvement.    in  some  instances  we   had  to  dig  deep  to  uncover  who  was  managing  discussions,  whereas  in  other  instances,   the  moderators  were  visible  presences  welcoming  and  guiding  visitors  as  soon  as  they   entered  the  site.  the  moderators  we  interviewed  tended  to  downplay  their  roles,  saying   that  the  most  common  problems  they  faced  were  with  ‘spam’  (i.e.  posting  of  links  to   external  sites  by  advertisers).    they  also  reported  that  over  time  the  communities   tended  to  self-­manage  and  reach  a  ‘golden  mean’  (email  interview,  2012).     as  well  as  being  involved  in  the  setting  up  of  the  website  and  managing  its  day-­to-­day   running,  the  moderators  of  the  book  groups  mostly  initiate  topics,  curate  discussions   and  mediate  disputes.    they  also  act  as  energisers,  intervening  to  resuscitate  flagging   threads,  and  in  many  instances  are  treated  as  experts  or  authority  figures  by  other   users.    moderators  may  perform  an  important  role  liaising  between  users  and  those   outside  the  community,  for  example  protecting  that  community  from  trolling  (abusive   and  intentionally  disruptive  behaviour),  unsolicited  marketing  and  data  mining  (i.e.  the   harvesting  of  information  by  third  parties,  especially  for  commercial  purposes).   moderators  may  therefore  be  perceived  and  addressed  as  friends  or  guardian  figures,   helping  to  create  and  sustain  community  spirit,  and  to  set  the  tone  for  the  discussions   that  take  place  through  their  initial  framing  work  (posting  rules,  faqs  etc)  and  ongoing   interventions.       after  our  preliminary  investigations,  in  2014  we  returned  to  focus  on  a  comparison  of   moderation  practices  on  two  sites:  the  republic  of  pemberley,  run  by  and  for  jane   austen  enthusiasts,  and  the  guardian  online  reading  group,  set  up  as  part  of  an   online  news  website  in  the  uk.    these  sites  were  chosen  on  the  basis  that  they  seemed   to  offer  quite  different  styles  of  moderation,  and  once  again  we  combined  observation  of   discussions  with  interviews  with  the  site  moderators.    interview  questions  were   crowdsourced  from  members  of  our  research  network  and  focused  on  the  power   moderators  had  to  control  discussions,  how  they  established  group  norms  and   facilitated  participation.   the  interviews  with  the  moderators  revealed  the  deep  affective  bonds  they  develop  with   forum  users,  and  the  sense  of  responsibility  they  feel  for  maintaining  the  sites  and   ensuring  that  they  run  smoothly.    however,  our  findings  showed  that  despite  the   moderators’  downplaying  of  their  roles,  they  did  set  the  parameters  for  discussion,  and   intervened  regularly  to  redirect  topics  and  to  manage  interactions  between  participants.   moreover,  we  also  found  evidence  of  users  trying  to  undermine  moderators  and  subvert   discussions,  particularly  where  any  discussion  arose  about  the  management  of  the   forums  and  the  conduct  of  participants.         meeting  the  moderators,  albeit  remotely,  brought  home  the  extent  to  which  our  analyses   of  their  online  activities  could  so  easily  result  in  misrepresentation  and  misconceptions   about  their  roles  and  motivations.  listening  to  their  experiences  has  also  brought  home   the  very  real  personal  and  financial  investments  they  make  in  ensuring  that  the   communities  they  are  passionate  are  about  continue  to  flourish  and  survive.             references     bennett,  t.  and  woollacott,  j.  (1987)  bond  and  beyond:  the  political  career  of  a  popular   hero.  basingstoke:  macmillan.   boyarin,  j.,  ed.  (1993)  the  ethnography  of  reading.  oakland,  ca:  university  of   california  press.     fister,  b.  (2005)  reading  as  a  contact  sport:  online  book  groups  and  the  social   dimensions  of  reading.  reference  and  user  services  quarterly,  44:4.  303-­309.   grimmelmann,  j.  (2015)  the  virtues  of  moderation.  17  yale  j.l.  &tech.  42.   kozinets,  r.  (2010)  netnography:  doing  ethnographic  research  online.  london:  sage.     whiteman,  n.  (2007)  the  establishment,  maintenance  and  destabilisation  of  fandom.   phd  thesis.  institute  of  education,  university  of  london.         microsoft word lds tweets with formatting.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 analyzing main channel and back-channel tweets during the october church of latter day saints general conference mark d. johns luther college shelby nelson luther college abstract the purpose of this study is to investigate ways in which a particular new social medium may be being utilized among members and/or former members of the lds church as a channel for outreach, as a means of internal communication, and as a tool for the expression of dissatisfaction. using lundby’s (2011) aspects of cultural belonging, we observed twitter traffic related to the lds church fall conference, with particular attention to hashtags such as #exmormon, #gaymormon, and #mofem. we found that attempts by disaffiliated mormons to gain mainstream attention were largely ignored, but that interaction among ex-mormons disaffiliated for various reasons appeared to occur. we also noted considerable evidence of continued cultural belonging among the disaffiliated. the advent of the internet and the widespread adoption of social media technologies have had profound impact on a wide range of social behaviors and almost all aspects of american life. religious associations and organized religious groups have likewise been impacted. many religious groups have seen the internet as a medium for evangelism, spreading their message and/or establishing their legitimacy among external audiences. in addition, religious groups have used the internet for internal communication among adherents, and some may find that the internet provides more direct connection between members and central authorities, helping members to bond more closely to the organization and allowing increased direct control by hierarchies. conversely, some research suggests that new media may contribute to the undermining of religious authority by opening the possibility for communication back-channels which bypass more traditional hierarchical structures (barker, 2005; cheong, huang, & poon, 2011; shirky, 2008). sociologists of religion have long studied the phenomenon of religious conversion and the processes through which persons affiliate with particular religious groups. at least suggested citation (apa): johns, m. & nelson, s. (2015, october 21-24). analyzing main channel and back-channel tweets during the october church of latter day saints general conference. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. into the final decades of the 20th century, however, very little research had been conducted on the phenomenon of persons leaving a particular religious group. those who renounce their religious tradition, either to embrace a different faith, or to become religiously indifferent, have received little scholarly attention (bromley, 1988). even now, the phenomenon is referenced by a diverse range of terms, including resignation, disaffiliation, disengagement, apostasy, or failure of religious continuity (bengtson, 2013). this wide range of vocabulary suggests little scholarly agreement as to the precise nature of this behavior. more recently, the overall decrease in religious affiliation in the u.s. has spurred interest in the process of disaffiliation (pew forum on religion and public life, 2012; white, 2014). of particular interest to sociologists of religion is the process of disaffiliation among members of so-called "high-boundary" religious groups, characterized by distinctive beliefs and practices that set them apart from mainstream society (bengtson, 2013). of particular interest to scholars in the field of media studies is the way in which various new media channels may contribute either to the decision to withdraw, or to the way in which the decision is expressed (cheong & fisk, 2013). the ubiquitous adoption of internet social media platforms within the past decade is a particular focus of attention. the church of jesus christ of latter day saints (lds or “mormon”) is a “highboundary” religious group that has been enormously successful in attracting new members. self-reports from lds officials indicate that the mormons are the fastest growing religious group in the u.s. (association of statisticians of american religious bodies, 2012). more scientific surveys do confirm that the gains in mormon membership, relative to the size of the group, are indeed impressive. however, these surveys also indicate an extremely high number of disaffiliations in the same time period, resulting in a fairly stable membership, if not a net loss (henderson & cooke, 2012; pew forum on religion & public life, 2008). the purpose of this study is to investigate ways in which a particular new social medium may be being utilized among members and/or former members of the lds church as a channel for outreach, as a means of internal communication, and as a tool for the expression of dissatisfaction. specifically, we examined the use of twitter as a tool for back-channel communication during the annual lds church general conference in the fall of 2013, with a recheck of data in the fall of 2014. literature review lundby has recently (2011) adapted to religious groups the concept of “cultural belonging” from the work of sociologist göran therborn (1991). this model offers three somewhat overlapping aspects of belonging: (1) norms of conduct and ways of expressing emotions, (2) cognitive and communicative competencies, and (3) identification and differentiation. with this concept lundby suggests that religious affiliation does not merely mean to join and/or call oneself a member of a particular sect or group. all three aspects of belonging apply. one learns certain modes of conduct, such as daily rituals, habits of dress, and particular ways of responding emotionally to life events (birth, death, falling in love, choosing a vocation, etc.). similarly, religious groups develop unique theological understandings and equally unique vocabularies for talking about these. one of the most important ways of differentiating group members from outsiders is the ability to “talk the talk,” that is, to speak the language of the group. these aspects are in addition to choice to identify formally with the group and to set oneself apart from other groups. indeed, one may choose to renounce the group’s identity, yet remain intimately familiar with the beliefs, practices, norms and vocabulary of the group. upon disaffiliation, one does not forget how to be a member of the group. certain ways of thinking or behaving may continue, and certainly one is still able to “talk the talk” even after ceasing to formally identify with the group. reasons for disaffiliation are many, varied, and complex and may have little to do with disagreements over theological beliefs and practices (albrecht, cornwall, & cunningham, 1988). if the issue is a matter of leadership authority or specific policies, those disaffiliating may do so reluctantly, or with most aspects of their belief and practice unchanged. contemporary examples might include persons maintaining identity with the latter day saints church’s fundamental beliefs while protesting leadership decisions regarding the ordination of women or the inclusion of homosexuals (boorstein, 2014). religious affiliation is a dynamic process. individuals choose to join religious groups for a wide variety of reasons, and at the same time, others make the decision to leave for an equally wide variety of reasons. while various protestant churches gained membership equal to roughly 8.4% of the adult u.s. population in 2008, these same churches lost membership equal to roughly 11% of the u.s. adult population in the same year, for a net loss of approximately 2.6% of the adult u.s. population. similarly, in the same year, the roman catholic church in the u.s. gained new members equal in number to roughly 2.6% of the total adult u.s. population, but bid farewell to a number of members equal to a little more than 10% of the adult population. thus, a net loss of membership equal to more than 7% of the adult population. (pew forum on religion & public life, 2008). from these illustrations it can be seen that the lds church is not unique in experiencing both a large number of affiliations and, simultaneously, a large number of disaffiliations over a given period. the lds church has a long history of employing media in promoting its work, both among members and externally. considered to be at the forefront of media use among american religious groups, the church began radio broadcasting in 1922 and broadcast the proceedings of its general conference beginning in october of 1924. these conferences continued to be broadcast annually, moving to television as early as 1949 and to international broadcast via satellite beginning in 1979. today, conferences are live streamed online (intellectual reserve, inc., 2014). the formation of film and television viewing communities online has been long established (baym 2000; jenkins 1992, 2006). members of these communities engage one another in conversation about various media programs, sharing observations, opinions and rumors. fan cultures frequently engage in promoting variant readings of media texts, enabling and empowering individuals to make meanings from the program that were not intended by the producers (fiske 1982; jenkins 1992). fiske (1982) suggested that these contested readings often remain invisible, while jenkins (1992, 2006) suggests that the internet generally, and social networks in particular, now allow these readings to circulate visibly. more recently, use of social networks to create a real-time backchannel of communication among viewers of television programs has been documented (boyd 2010; doughty, rowland, & lawson 2011; ferguson 2012). this has sometimes been termed the “two screen viewing” experience (bbc click 2011; skates 2011) -with one screen devoted to the program being watched and a second screen (usually a laptop, tablet, or cell/mobile phone) devoted to maintaining the backchannel. a recent pew internet & american life project study showed that half of adult cell phone owners use their phones while watching television. the study found that, among the most popular activities, were keeping themselves occupied during commercials or breaks in a program, visiting a website that was mentioned on television, checking whether something they heard on television was true or not, or seeing what other people were saying online about a program they were watching. the study also confirmed that large numbers of tv viewers used their phone to post their own comments online about a program they were watching, or to exchange text messages with someone else who was watching the same program in a different location (smith & boyles 2012). from experience with twitter, we conjectured that viewing an event in a video live stream would be likely to generate back channel communication in ways very similar to that connected to television viewing. understanding that twitter would be used as an official mormon church communication channel, and that many disaffiliated or disaffected mormons also utilize this medium (winston, 2014), we set out to observe these twitter communications during the lds general conference. we developed three primary research questions: rq1: what is the relationship between main channel communication related to the lds fall conference, and back-channel twitter communication related to the same event? rq2: in what ways do the various backchannel twitter streams relate to one another? rq3: in what ways do the main channel communications of the lds church energize and invigorate the backchannel participation? method the focus of this study was to collect tweets from both official and back-channel twitter accounts engaging in communication around the time of the church of latter day saints’ october general conference. our focus was to gather tweets that were about the conference itself. the time frame from which we collected tweets was october 1 14, 2013. our reason for choosing these dates was that although the conference was held on saturday, october 5 through sunday, october 6, we wanted to include any pre and post-conference reactions from official twitter accounts and backchannel conversations, in addition to reactions during the conference. official twitter accounts included accounts from the church institution itself, such as @mormonnewsroom and @ldsofficial, as well as accounts of obviously committed and loyal members, such as @missionarylds. back-channel conversations focused on those explicitly identified as involving ex-mormons (past members that have since disconnected for the church of latter day saints), mormon feminists, and gay mormons. these were identified not by individual twitter user accounts, but by hashtags such as #mofem, #exmormon, and #gaymormon indicating, respectively, mormon feminists, ex-mormons, and gay mormons as topics of conversation or areas of concern. in order to obtain these tweets, we used an already developed program called scraperwiki. this site was accessed simply through researching, testing, and eliminating several different twitter scraping online tools and determining this was the most user friendly option, especially for someone with few coding skills. we chose to collect our data with the use of a hashtag (indicated with a # sign and a catch phrase or keyword that relates to the message of the tweet sent out by the user). a hashtag appeared to be the most efficient way to gather tweets issued by many different users with different ideas and reactions talking about the same topic. we had a total of nine datasets with the following hashtags: #exmormon, #gaymormon, #mofem, #lds, #ldschurch, #ldsconf, #ldsconference, #twitterstake, and #presidentmonson. we decided on these hashtags by observing twitter traffic in the weeks leading up to the conference and selecting the hashtags that appeared to have the most traffic and captured the sentiments of both the main channel users and backchannel users. we didn’t want to be redundant and end up having too much data to work with, but we wanted to make sure we got enough data to work with as well. on scraperwiki, the user must enter in a keyword and the scraper will collect all tweets issued around that time. after we gathered all of the tweets from the allotted time range, and transferred the information to a spreadsheet. scraperwiki gathered the following information which we used in our database to organize the tweets: tweet url, time and date created, the text in the tweets, language, retweet count, screen name (user), linked url, mentioned user, hashtag, search query, and linked media. once all our data was collected we had in total approximately 30,000 tweets. originally, we kept the data separated into different spreadsheets according to hashtag, but then merged all of the spreadsheets into one hoping to find any patterns or main messages from the backchannel tweets. our next step was to identify what we called, “buzz tweets.” we defined buzz tweets as tweets that generated over 20 retweets -a somewhat arbitrary threshold creating a “buzz,” or flurry of activity, within the twittersphere. retweets occur when a twitter user decides to post a tweet issued by another user to their own profile as a way of affirming the original tweet or bringing it to the attention of others in their network of followers. this data set consisted of some 1,812 tweets that had been repeated across the network at least 20 times each -some retweeted well over 500 times. in addition, many tweets were quoted. that is, a twitter user decides to post a tweet issued by another user to their own profile, often with an additional comment or an additional hashtag, but sometimes with no editorial changes at all. thus, when repeated through quotes, and each repeat retweeted multiple times, a single tweet may cause quite a “buzz” indeed. at least one “buzz tweet” in our sample was quoted 33 times, completely unchanged. each quote, in turn, was retweeted 200-500 times, so that the original tweet was sent more than 15,300 times in total. it is in retweeting and quoting that not only a “buzz” is created, but the tweet is extended to readers of other hashtags and propagated to other areas of the twitter network, including backchannels. once we completed this process of identifying those tweets that received the most “buzz” during the conference, we turned attention to those that appeared in the backchannel messaging we were trying to analyze from the hashtag #mofem, #exmormon, and #gaymormon. during the fall conference in 2014, one year later, we repeated the process for a shorter duration (only during the days of the conference itself), but found very little difference in the quantity or tone of the twitter conversation, and even noted many of the same twitter accounts among the most active. analysis the somewhat quantitative approach initially adopted to sort through the large set of thousands of tweets didn’t provide the sort of information we sought. our research questions did not seem to lend themselves readily to a “big data” approach. so having narrowed our perspective to those tweets that generated the most “buzz” among twitter users we began to look at the resulting, narrower data set qualitatively. utilizing a grounded theory approach (glaser & strauss, 1967) we looked for ways in which tweets originating in official or sanctioned streams had made the leap into the backchannels, or vice versa. because of our limited language abilities, only those tweets that were posted in english were considered. tweets using the hashtag #lds, #ldsconference, #ldsconf, and #twitterstake were clearly intended for the mainstream. that is, church members themselves were expressing excitement for the conference to start and reacting positively to official posts from the church. during the conference, it was members posting messages reacting positively to statements from the conference speakers, how much they are glad they are a part of the church, and links encouraging their followers to go check out the conference messages themselves. backchannel streams such as #exmormon, #gaymormon, #mofem also became quite active, with very different sorts of messages. there was little cross-conversation or mutual engagement observed between those who appeared to be members and those on the backchannels, who are presumably no longer members or on the fringes of membership. nevertheless, the backchannel participants were clearly following both the conference and the mainstream twitter feeds. in the backchannel we clearly observed varying aspects of membership, as might be predicted by lundby’s characterizations.. the first of therborn’s aspects of belonging that lundby adapts to religious groups is the concept that deals with “norms of conduct and ways of expressing emotions,” (2011, p.1221). within our back channel data sets (#exmormon, #gaymormon, #mofem), we found many examples of this first aspect of belonging. in one example, user1 tweeted the following: a huge thank you to my #mofem heroes for their part in making the priesthood session avail to all on tv. #incrementalimprovements this tweet displays that this mormon feminist who is still a part of the church, depends on the support of his or her fellow mormon feminists in order to make “improvements” within the lds church. together, mormon feminists are able to stand strong in their beliefs because they have the support of one another, they have a more specific cultural belonging with mormon feminists within the broader culture of the lds church. another example of therborn’s first aspect of belonging is a tweet of user2 that had a link to an image that said the following: blasphemy is speech that has been outlawed to prevent your religion from losing arguments. along with the picture were the hashtags, “#religion, #blasphemy, #christian, #lds, #twitterstake, #atheism.” this tweet had 23 retweets and 20 favorites, one of the highest number of retweets and favorites from our back channel datasets. this tweet expresses disagreement with the idea of blasphemy in religion and there is clear agreement from like-minded twitter users. as we saw in our first example, hashtags that involved the official church (#christianity, #religion, #lds, #twitterstake) were also included with ones that involved our backchannel groups, making it clear that user2 wanted his or her ideas to be heard by people not only with similar opinions, but by people who were still a part of the church or interested in the church. user1 and user2 are still preaching their beliefs, much like lds members commonly do to get people to join their church. they may be preaching a different message, but the bottom line still stands of getting the message out there as opposed to keeping it to oneself. the second of therborn’s aspects of belonging that lundy adapts to religious groups is that concept that, “belonging to a culture means to have learnt a certain cognitive and communicative competence and to be part of a particular universe of meaning” ( 2011, p.1221). this aspect was demonstrated in a tweet by user3 that read as follows: #exmormon of twitter! i'm here! i'm new! what do we all talk about? #wannabeexmormon #alias #realfacefakename even though he or she has withdrawn from a religious group that is, like many, built upon the idea of community, user3 still seeks the unity of being an active part of a whole -in this case a part of the #exmormon twitter community. user3 still wants to engage in conversation and bond over the common experience of leaving the church. just because this person left the lds church doesn’t mean this person doesn’t have a desire to connect with others, much as one does while an active member of the lds church. another example of lundby’s second aspect of belonging is from user4’s tweet that read as follows: this talk by elder oaks is funny because i'm sitting here listening to it with my boyfriend. #elderoaks #ldsconf #gaymormon this tweet is unique in that even though user4 is gay he is still watching a conference talk, even with his boyfriend. he very well could not listen to the lds talk because his sexuality isn’t accepted by the church, but he still chooses to take part in the church’s activities. unfortunately, we don’t know if he is still a part of the church or if he is a nonactive member who is just watching it because it is “funny,” but although his intentions can never be known simply from this tweet, it is still a sign of his desire to interact with the church in some way despite its rejection of his sexuality. user 5 also demonstrates cognitive and communicative competence is in the following tweet: found a ‘lamanite’ toy in my old boxes. what should i do with it? #exmormon #mormon #twitterstake #lds it is through the use of the word lamanite that user5 is singling out members or exmembers of the lds church and targeting them specifically with this tweet. people who don’t know what a lamanite is are outsiders. this demonstrates that user5 feels that other ex-mormons can relate to this experience, finding remnants of their past religious beliefs and practices. there is clear intentionality, as user5 could have found the toy and discarded it, but he or she chose to share this experience on twitter with his or her followers and directly ask for their feedback. this experience is like an “inside joke” aimed towards a like minded group of people to share with one another in a public sphere. this leads to the fact that, user5 didn’t only use the hashtag, “#exmormon”, user5 included “#mormon” and “#twitterstake” demonstrating that he or she wanted this to be found by people who were still a part of the church. the third and last of therborn’s aspects of belonging that lundy adapts to religious groups is that concept that, “cultural belonging implies a shared identity with some people and a shared differentiation from other people” (2011, p.1221). this aspect of belonging was demonstrated in a tweet by user6 that reads as follows: obviously i'm #exmormon but i see no problems with the thinking behind the #ordainwomen movement. i'll support it. this tweet is unique in that it demonstrates both differentiation and shared identity with the lds church. user6 identifies himself or herself as an exmormon differentiating himself or herself from the practices of the church. but, user6 also has a shared identity with the church and its movement to ordain women. also, the fact that user6 is aware of the movement shows that he or she still keeps up with church happenings even though he or she has left the church. these elements of this tweet demonstrate that cultural belonging is not so black and white, that separation from a group, especially religious, does not have to be a clean break as user6 still identifies with the beliefs of some mormons. user6 demonstrates a desire for the church to change its practices for the better, as opposed to a desire for people to just leave the church all together. also, user6’s tweet was retweeted, which shows that other twitter users have the same complex sense of belonging. another example of lundby’s third aspect of belonging is an interaction between two twitter users, user7 and user8. the following was user6’s tweet: i wonder if anyone would notice if they replayed last years conference. it's not like anyone actually pays attention. #exmormon user8 responded to user7 with the following tweet: @user7 another #exmormon that wastes his time trying to bother #lds members that don't give a hoot. -yawn#blocked this interaction is a clear example of differentiation within cultural belonging from a group of people, in this case a member of the lds church from ex-mormons and vise versa. in order to understand one’s own identity, one must understand what they are not. here twitter acts as a medium to display cultural belonging through differentiation. with actions such as hashtags, one can establish themselves as a part of a group and exclude those who don’t identify with the hashtag. people are purposely labeling themselves so that a third party is able to gather a hint of who they are and what they are about just from a simple tweet. twitter is a medium comprised of categories to which people can belong or not belong. through user7 and user 8’s verbalizing of their opinions, they are further declaring themselves a part of a group (ex-mormon or lds) and not a part of another. this shows that both members of differing cultures are not satisfied by knowing internally what group they are a part of, they must declare it and even initiate conversations with others in a public space. this in turn shows that cultural belonging is a collective act. discussion by far, our dataset was comprised, not of backchannel messaging and interaction with the official church, but of the official messaging itself. the lds church continues to make extensive use of media in many forms, and most of the twitter traffic related to the conference clearly came from interested, engaged, and loyal lds members. this reinforces the dynamic of the mormon church itself. many users expressed how thankful they were to have the church in their lives, prompting an outside party to find out why. the lds church members (not just the official church accounts) used twitter as a missionary tool. it would seem that this is their primary focus, not so much interacting with those who contradict their teachings. although backchannel users frequently added #lds or other mainstream hashtags to their tweets, the number appearing in the overall stream was small. further, the primary response of the loyal church members was to ignore these discontented messages. engagement between the cheerleaders and the detractors was extremely limited, and none of these exchanges achieved “buzz” status in the data. thus, the answer to our first research question, “what is the relationship between main channel communication related to the lds fall conference, and backchannel twitter communication related to the same event?” appears to be that there was little relationship at all. or, to the extent that such a relationship existed, it was asymmetrical, with back channels reacting negatively to mainstream activity, but the main stream continuing largely unaware of, or unaffected by, the backchannel. as for the backchannel messaging, the relative lack of data from those channels may be insight in itself. as mentioned earlier, when we narrowed our data down to buzz tweets (>20), nearly all of backchannel messages were completely eliminated from our data because they did not generate enough buzz. this leads us to believe that most of the disaffiliated are indifferent to the activities of the lds church, or do not have a desire to use twitter as a way to directly interact with the official messages of the church that they don’t or do agree with. they could be using a different media outlet, such as blogging, and may not have a desire to counteract the church in such a direct way (ie. tweeting at them, commenting on their tweets). the sheer proportion of official church messages to backchannel messages was so small that we found it hard to compare the groups. because there was so little “buzz” in these tweets, the relationships were not expressed prominently in our data sets. thus, to our second research question, “in what ways do the various backchannel twitter streams relate to one another?” we have no conclusive answer. however, what little data we have may point to considerable overlap in backchannel messages among groups such as ex-mormons, mormon feminists, and gay mormons. as mentioned, the relationship between mainstream and back channel twitter activity was asymmetrical, with the mainstream largely ignoring the back channels, even as the back channels reacted to the activity in the mainstream. in a couple of isolated examples, an often re-tweeted post from the official lds communication department, @mormonnewsroom declared, “15 million member milestone announced at church's general conference http://t.co/nf52njtwrl #ldsconf #lds #mormon.” but in a backchannel that tweet was quoted with the additional comment, “i wonder if they counted me?” the unofficial, but clearly devout @missionarylds tweeted, "#whatifitoldyou you could be with your family forever? cause you can. #lds #gospel." that tweet was quoted in a back channel with the added comment, "@missionarylds sadly that's not a selling point for a lot of people without the gospel in their lives." thus we find, in answer to our third research question, “in what ways do the main channel communications of the lds church energize and invigorate the backchannel participation?” that much of the conversation in the back channels was related not only to the events taking place at the conference, and being viewed in the live stream, but also considerable attention to the second screen and the mainstream twitter comments being made. conclusion religious disaffiliation remains a complex social phenomenon that will benefit from further study. it is clear that more is involved than simply having one’s name deleted from a membership roll. those who leave a religious group take with them the internalized norms of conduct and ways of expressing emotions, their cognitive and communicative competencies, and to a greater or lesser degree maintain a sense of identification with, or differentiation from, the group they have left behind. much of this complexity we are content to leave to the sociologists of religion. however, we have demonstrated that at least for a few individuals, modern social media are an important arena in which to demonstrate these aspects of belonging. social media, such as twitter, allow them to find and connect with others who share similar experiences of disaffiliation and to express their disappointment, hurt, and anger among others who speak the same language -even if these expressions are largely ignored by the officials and remaining members of the group. in further research it might be helpful to examine the use of social media in day-to-day interactions, rather than in the context of the two-screen viewing of a particular event. it would also be important to learn whether other media platforms or modes of internet communication are used more widely, or if we have overlooked specific hashtags. and of course, there are many other “high boundary” religious groups beyond the lds church that might be explored. the present study is important, however, in establishing that the activity of 2-screen viewing does extend to streamed events of religious organizations, and that these parallel conversations serve a function for religious adherents in ways similar to other fan groups, and function for the disaffiliated to create a unique back channel that allows for the performance of aspects of group membership that do not disappear, even when the group is left behind. references albrecht, s.l., cornwall, m. & cunningham, p. h. (1988). religious leave-taking: disengagement and disaffiliation among mormons. in d. g. bromley (ed.) falling from faith: causes and consequences of religious apostasy (pp. 62-80). newbury park, ca: sage. association of statisticians of american religious bodies (2012). religious congregations & membership study 2010. retrieved from http://www.rcms2010.org/ barker, e. (2005). crossing the boundary: new challenges to religious authority and control as a consequence of access to the internet. in m. hojsgaard & m. warburg (eds.) religion and cyberspace (pp. 67-85). london: routledge. baym, n. k. (2000). tune in, log on: soaps, fandom, and online community. (new media cultures series). thousand oaks, calif: sage publications. bbc click (2011, november 18). the phenomenon of two screen viewing (video clip). retrieved february 9, 2012 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/9640887.stm bengtson, v. l. (2013). families and faith: how religion is passed down across generations (with n.m. putney and s.c. harris). new york : oxford university press. boorstein, m. (2014, july 12). excommunication sparks new mormon dissent. the washington post, b.2. boyd, e. b. (2010, november 10). twitter drives crowds back to must-see, live, appointment tv. retrieved february 8, 2012, from http://www.fastcompany.com/node/1701701/print bromley, d.g. (1988). religious disaffiliation: a neglected social process. in d. g. bromley (ed.) falling from faith: causes and consequences of religious apostasy (pp. 9-25). newbury park, ca: sage. cheong, p.h., & fisk, m. (2013). leaving church: resisting religious authority and community in online-offline dimensions. selected papers of internet research, 3. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org/index.php/spir/article/view/702/296 cheong, p.h., huang, s. & poon, j. p. h. (2011). religious communication and epistemic: authority of leaders in wired faith organizations. journal of communication, 61, 938–958. doughty, m., d. rowland & s. lawson (2011). co-viewing live tv with digital backchannel streams. euroitv ’11: proceedings of the international interactive tv & video conference (pp. 141-144). presented at the acm international interactive tv & video conference, universidade lusófona de humanidades e tecnologias, lisbon, portugal: acm. doi:10.1145/2000119.2000147 ferguson, d. (2012). the trivial pursuits of mass audiences using social media: a content analysis of facebook wall posts by fans of top-trending television programs. in h. noor al-deen & j. a. hendricks (eds.), social media: usage and impact (pp. 39-56). plymouth, uk: lexington books. fiske, j. (1982). introduction to communication studies. london; new york: methuen. glaser в. & strauss, a.l. (1967). the discovery of grounded theory. chicago: aldine publishing. intellectual reserve, inc. (2014). mormon channel: media timeline. retrieved from http://www.mormonchannel.org/about/media-timeline henderson, p. and cooke, k. (2012, january 30). special report--mormonism besieged by the modern age. reuters. retrieved from http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/01/30/uk-mormonchurchiduktre80t1cp20120130 jenkins, h. (1992). textual poachers : television fans & participatory culture. new york: routledge. jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york: new york university press. lundby, k. (2011). patterns of belonging in online/offline interfaces of religion. information, communication & society, 14(8), 1219-1235. pew forum on religion & public life (2008). u.s.religious landscape survey - religious affiliation: diverse and dynamic. retrieved from http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/report-religious-landscape-study-full.pdf pew forum on religion and public life (2012). “nones” on the rise: one-in-five adults have no religious affiliation. retrieved from http://www.pewforum.org/files/2012/10/nonesontherise-full.pdf shirky, c. (2008). here comes everybody: the power of organizing without organizations. new york: penguin press. skates, s. (2011, february 23). two-screen viewing enhances tv experience? musicrow. retrieved february 9, 2012, from http://www.musicrow.com/2011/02/two-screen-viewing-enchances-tvexperience/print/ smith, a., & j. l. boyles (2012, july 17). the rise of the "connected viewer." pew internet & american life project. retrieved july 18, 2012, from http://pewinternet.org/reports/2012/connected-viewers/findings.aspx?view=all therborn, g. (1991). cultural belonging, structural location and human action. explanation in sociology and in social science. acta sociologica, 34(3), 177191. white, j. e. (2014). the rise of the nones: understanding and reaching the religiously. ada, mi: baker books. winston, k. (2014, september 15). mormons embrace social media to push back against official church teachings. religion news service. retrieved from http://www.religionnews.com/2014/09/15/mormons-embrace-social-media-pushback-official-church-teachings/ selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  wissinger,  e.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  from  “geek”  to  “chic:”  wearable   technology  and  the  woman  question.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  conference  of  the   association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.   from  “geek”  to  “chic:”  wearable  technology  and  the   woman  question     professor  elizabeth  wissinger   city  university  of  new  york,  bmcc/graduate  school  and  university  center     introduction internet  enabled  and  sensor  equipped  clothing,  jewelry,  and  e-­textiles  are  coming  to  a   market  slated  to  experience  a  39%  growth  by  2017  (lamkin:  2016).  despite  fierce  hype,   the  “killer  app”  for  fashionable  wearables  has  been  elusive.  this  failure  to  catch  on  is   informative,  arguably  stemming  from  problematic  cultural  attitudes  about  women  and   technology  revealed  by  device  designs.1  unlike  clunky  “geek”  medical  or  fitness   devices,  “chic”  tech  aims  at  the  fashion  consumer,  presumably  female,  healthy,  and   living  within  current  feminine  norms.  the  transition  from  “geek”  to  “chic”  tech  raises   important  questions  regarding  how  the  technologically  enmeshed  and  gendered  body  is   imagined.       communication  and  sts  scholars  critically  examining  wearables’  impact  on  subjectivity,   embodiment,  and  power,  have  focused  primarily  on  fitness  and  health  applications,   especially  as  deployed  in  the  “quantified  self”  movement  (neff:  2016,  nafus:  2016,  and   lupton:  2016).  fashion  scholarship  has  leaned  toward  uncritically  cataloguing   predictions  and  possibilities  for  new  technologies  (seymour:  2012;;  quinn:  2010,   mccann  and  bryson:  2009).  both  approaches  have  tended  to  sideline  questions  of   gender  and  fashion.       this  project  examines  the  design  philosophies  of  products  aimed  specifically  at   fashionable  women,  by  analyzing  ethnographic  data,  media  images,  field  observations,   1  the  term  “women”  is  used  for  stylistic  purposes.  although  i  am  discussing  the  marketing  of   “women’s”  fashion,  i  seek  to  question  the  gender  normative  assumption  affecting  a  variety  of   bodies,  queer  and  heterosexual,  trans  and  cis,  which  thus  far  have  not  fit  into  the  established   markets.   and  the  products  themselves,  to  uncover  how  negative  attitudes  about  women  are  being   smuggled  into  wearables,  in  the  name  of  what  the  market  ‘wants.’  will  fashionable   wearable  technology  fall  prey  to  the  same  problems  feminist  researchers  identified  in   the  internet’s  emergence?  despite  the  possibilities  -­-­  after  all,  “on  the  internet,  nobody   knows  you’re  a  dog”  (steiner:1993)  -­-­  it  nonetheless  became  a  site  that  expressed   “myths  about  identity,  nature,  and  body”  (balsamo:  1996)  and  extended  “the  social   construction  of  two  asymmetrical  genders”  (rakow:  1988)  in  the  course  of  its  adoption.  i   argue  that  wearable  tech  for  women  exhibits  signs  of  deep  seated  cultural  ambivalence   about  women,  and  explains  a  lot  about  the  way  they  are  seen  by  the  fashion  and  tech   worlds,  views  that  need  highlighting  and  discussion,  as  cultural  assumptions  about   gender  are  crucial  to  examining  the  emergence  of  new  technologies  and  social   practices  they  prohibit  or  allow.         methods       this  article  draws  on  12  formal  interviews  with  fashion  and  tech  designers  collected  via   both  snow  ball  sample  and  participant  observation  at  fashion  tech  expos  and  meet  ups.   interviews  were  transcribed  and  hand  coded.  themes  emerging  from  data  review  were   used  to  organize  50  articles  gathered  by  monitoring  fashion  and  wearable  tech  news   coverage  over  the  course  of  the  last  year.  these  analyses  were  triangulated  through   content  analysis  of  kickstarter  and  ad  campaigns  describing  wearable  tech  aimed  at   women.       summary  of  findings       women  as  victims     an  apparent  culture  of  fear  permeates  many  of  the  devices  on  the  market,  which  feature   body  sensors  and  alarms  for  personal  protection.  the  siren  ring  offers  help  for  the   “independent  woman.”  billed  as  a  “new  brand  of  jewelry  that  offers  women  immediate   protection  when  their  personal  safety  is  at  risk,”  it  emits  a  “shockingly  loud  alarm”  that   might  “change  the  dynamic  between  attacker  and  target”  (sirenring.com).  another   device  boasts  a  button  that,  once  pushed,  sound  alarms,  flashes  lights,  and  dials  911,   all  while  texting  the  wearer’s  friends  to  geo-­locate  her  so  that  they  might  come  to  her   rescue  (roarforgood.com).           always  accessible       when  i  asked  about  their  design  philosophy  and  intended  customer,  fashion  tech   entrepreneurs  described  the  information  overloaded,  hyper-­connected  “busy  mom,”  or   “millennial  fashionista.”  viawear,  a  bracelet  that  filters  incoming  calls,  speaks  to  the   structural  impossibilities  these  stereotypes  gloss  over,  with  ad  copy  explaining  how  to   stay  “connected  and  available  when  we  need  to  be,”  but  also  “fully  present  and  in  the   moment”  (viawear.com).  similarly,  a  ring  helps  networked  fashionistas  avoid  “being   rude”  by  letting  them  “keep  the  phone  away  without  missing  anything”  (ringly.com).   presumably  she  can  navigate  the  demands  of  a  connected  world,  while  satisfying   cultural  mandates  to  be  polite,  attentive,  and  available.         women  and  tech  don’t  mix       according  to  the  female  tech/fashion  designers  i  spoke  with,  the  well-­worn  issue  of  the   masculinity  of  technology  seems  alive  and  well.  one  up  and  coming  designer  observed,   “the  tech  field  is  dominated  by  "brogrammers,"  or,  as  another  pointed  out,  “silicon  valley   is  a  ‘boy  culture.’’’  one  technologically  accomplished  jewelry  designer  noted,  “people   have  ‘questioned  my  ability’  with  regard  to  the  "technological  aspects  of  my  smart   jewelry."  a  young  fashion  designer  who’d  won  a  competition  to  be  a  fellow  at  eyebeam,   a  foundation  dedicated  to  fostering  experimentation  in  wearable  tech  mused,  “the   programmers  seemed  to  be  wondering  what  this  ‘pretty  little  fashion  girl’  might  want  to   do  with  these  complex  programming  languages.”  many  articles  cited  the  problem  of  the   male  end  user,  where  the  “look,  size,  and  choice  of  materials  seem  to  first  consider   men,  and  then  get  cosmetically  tweaked  for  the  ladies”  (taraska:  2015).  to  counter   these  attitudes,  a  male  tech  designer  said  design  teams  need  more  women,  because   “sometimes  they  see  things  differently.”       conclusion     is  the  male  dominated  “geek”  aspect  of  the  tech  design  field  solely  to  blame  for   these  skewed  views  of  women  as  end  users  of  fashionable  tech?  is  the  desire  to  return   to  face-­to-­face  contact  and  emotional  connection  a  gendered  value  or  a  human  one?  is   the  desire  to  feel  safe  in  the  street  gendered  as  well?  straddling  the  divide  between   wearable  tech  and  fashion,  designers  have  tapped  broad  cultural  expectations  of   gender  to  shape  usefulness  and  value.  the  results  tellingly  reveal  persistent  attitudes   about  women  that  are  anything  but  new.  new  ideas  are  needed  however.  just  like  the   internet  before  it,  wearable  tech  has  the  potential  to  radically  enhance  many  lives.  it   would  be  a  shame  to  squander  this  potential  on  short  sighted  devices  extending  existing   anxieties  that  limit  or  control  human  potential,  gendered  or  otherwise.       references     balsamo,  a.  m.  (1996)  technologies  of  the  gendered  body:  reading  cyborg  women.   durham,  nc:  duke  university  press.       lamkin,  p.  (2016)  “smartwatch  sales  set  to  dominate  soaring  wearable  tech  market”    https://www.wareable.com/wearable-­tech/smartwatch-­sales-­to-­dominate-­soaring-­ wearable-­tech-­market-­2258  [accessed  2/19/16]     lupton,  d.  (2016)  the  quanitified  self.  london:  polity  press.       nafus,  d.  (2016)  quantified:  biosensing  technologies  in  everyday  life.  cambridge:  mit   press.     neff,  g.  and  dawn  nafus,  (2016)  self  tracking.  cambridge:  mit  press.       j.  mccann  and  d.  bryson,  eds.  (2009)  smart  clothes  and  wearable  technology.   cambridge,  uk:  woodhead     quinn,  b.  (2010)  textile  futures:  fashion,  design,  technology.  london:  berg       rakow,  l.  f.    (1988)  “gendered  technology,  gendered  practice,”  critical  studies  in   mass  communication,  5  (1),  57-­70.       seymour,  s.  (2012).  functional  aesthetics:  visions  in  fashionable  technology.  vienna:   springer.   steiner,  p.  (july  5,  1993)  the  new  yorker     taraska,  j.  (2015)  “smart  bras  aren't  as  stupid  as  they  sound”  fastcodesign.com   selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 “not available from your location”: control at the intersection of geography, technology, and policy – a case study of netflix in australia nicole hentrich university of michigan the relationship between media industries and technologies of media distribution is long-lived and pervasive. central to this has been the nexus of the control of space and the control of various technological affordances that accompany new methods of media distribution and consumption. from publishing houses in the early days of the printing press attempting to limit “pass along-s” of books to hollywood seeking to ban the vcr within domestic settings, the struggle between audience convenience and accessibility, and industry profit and control is ever-present. with the move to digital content and distribution, the television industry is in a state of flux both within the united states and around the world. online streaming services are transforming not only how people watch television, but they are also pushing the academy and the industry to reconsider what television is. in general there is a disconnect between how streaming is discussed within the us academy and popular press and how it is being understood in other geographic locations. whereas us conversations tend to centre on how online streaming and subscription services are changing television viewing habits, in non-us contexts the discussion hinges on questions of access. the process of geo-blocking content, and the ways in which viewers in geo-blocked locations access this content, has profound implications for the ways in which television is consumed in non-us contexts technologies of control, controlling technologies the regulation of online content and questions of access have always been an issue facing government and industry. in discussing zoning laws in the implementation of the communications decency act, wendy chun explains how previously existing laws that dealt with the display of obscene material in public spaces were brought to bear on the regulation of cyberspace. in this way, “the geography of the physical worlds and cyberspace are correlated” (111). this correlation can be seen throughout the history of attempts to control digital content. whether this is the segmenting of the globe into regions for dvd and blu-ray playback, or the practice of geoblocking online content, the material boundaries of nation states are continually applied to digital content and to the internet at large. suggested citation (apa): hentrich, n. (2015, october 21-24) “not available from your location”: control at the intersection of geography, technology, and policy – a case study of netflix in australia. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. this imposed state and supranational control onto the internet flies in the face of many of the utopian predictions that still accompany it. the democratizing potential of digital technologies and their perceived ability to flatten hierarchies through universal access to a vast wealth of content and experiences that accompanied the early world wide web of the 1990s is still invoked. while we are more likely to talk about the potential that blogs and social networking sites afford, the underlying infrastructure of the internet is what enables this. however, there are clearly “disconnections, prohibitions, and disjunctures” (elkins) that characterize the current state of digital content flows. the rise of “internet geography” as an area of academic interest speaks to interest in the impact of the geographic specificities of the internet (see graham et al.). since we don’t often think about the location-specific aspects of the internet, it is largely assumed to operate similarly—and have similar effects—everywhere, even when this is clearly not the case. netflix down under geographic isolation, first from britain, and now from other western countries, has played an important role in australia’s development as a nation. even though technology has drawn some aspects of the world closer, distance still haunts australia’s participation in, and engagement with, new communication technologies. while physical distance remains, the idea of “digital distance” (leaver) has been used to explore the impact that being removed in terms of content distribution has on how australians access and consume—primarily american—media. leaver explains that “the tyranny of digital distance occurs when older political and economic divisions, which were designed in an analog era, when distance really mattered, continue to dictate the rules by which media content are distributed” (npg). this disconnect between the analogue and the digital effectively translates physical distance to the realm of the digital, undermining utopian predictions that the rise of digital content and distribution methods—including the internet—would break down such material barriers as distance. netflix is the world’s leading video on demand (vod) subscription streaming service with many of its original series gaining widespread popular and critical acclaim. this content as well as their vast library of television and film that is available at a reasonable price point has made access to netflix highly desirable. netflix’s proposed official introduction to australia in 2015 fueled debates around piracy, digital distribution and the role of the internet and media content as it relates to national identity and participatory culture. in particular, discussions in and about pieces that appeared in popular and trade press gained increased visibility. an examination of these stories highlights how a rhetoric of “user experience” is mobalised to talk about the regulatory moves and justifications from australian industries and government to 1) initially limit unauthorised vpn use, and 2) to position netflix as a company that is “bad” for australian culture and australian television. this second point in particular played out between australian cable and streaming providers like foxtel and quicklfix, and popular press and opinion pieces which framed the lack of access as harmful to cultural participation. while australia is physically distant from the us, it is culturally close and so there is a desire to consume media products that while they are not made in australia, can be considered part of mainstream australian popular culture. furthermore, this rhetoric is used in contradictory ways by netflix: geoblocking is justified as it will ensure more geographically-specific content to audiences, and vpn use is looked upon as audiences going after what they want. ultimately the industry logics and popular discourses at play are contradictory. consumers expect universal access to content, while established content providers claim they are able to provide the best kind of universal service to the nation at large. the industry is simultaneously interested in “protecting” users from content that they believe does not allow for the national interest, but at the same time relies on narrowcasting and niche marketing to segment those same users. and netflix itself seems to tread the line between agreeing with geoblocking policies of the government and supporting consumers vpn use. working across fields: internet and television studies television studies, like the television industry itself, has to change in the face of digital content. yet those of us working within this field must be wary of rushing to explore streaming at the expense of noting its geographic peculiarities. here, internet studies offers useful lessons through its history of investigating how users interact with technological interfaces, its theorisation of cyberspace as another means of thinking about geography separate and yet intimately connected to the physical, and its tradition of taking the materiality of user experience with technology seriously. this is not, however, a one way street from internet to television studies, as there is significant room for the latter to inform the former as well. as a field, internet studies stands to gain from a more rigorous engagement with media industries. much of the industrial work in internet studies seems to stop at issues of government regulation and does not do much to delve into the complexity and impact of media industries. what is important to remember, however, and what i hope an examination of netflix’s expansion to the australian market illustrates, is that we must ensure we do not take the us experience as a given for all parts of the world, even relatively culturally similar western nations. as television continues to move online, we must not forget that geography still matters. just because the internet is global, does not mean national boundaries do not exist. and just because content is digital does not mean it is placeless. works cited chun, wendy. control and freedom: power and paranoia in the age of fiber optics. cambridge, ma: mit press, 2006. elkins, evan. “the dvd region code system: standardizing home video’s disjunctive global flows.” international journal of cultural studies. 24 aug. 2014. doi: 10.1177/1367877914547300. graham, mark et al. “uneven geographies of user-generated information: patterns of increasing informational poverty.” annals of the association of american geographers. 104.1(2014): 746-64. doi: 10.1080/00045608.2014.910087. leaver, tama. “watching battlestar galactica in australia and the tyranny of digital distance.” media international australia. 126(2008): 145-54. post print. title: noma: forging relationships among universities, community organizations, and high schools for media literacy education 1 youth participation in civic engagement through social media: a case study lynnette g. leonard university of nebraska at omaha united states lleonard@unomaha.edu abstract a decline in civic engagement of american youth is well documented in the research. social media can facilitate the process and disseminate the results of civic engagement. however, participants must have the skills to work in the medium. incorporating media literacy into civic engagement projects that involve social media ensures that participants understand how to produce good content and empowers participants with the skills to continue participating well beyond the initial project. the north omaha media alliance (noma) project grounds civic engagement activities with education in media literacy for college students at the university of nebraska omaha and high schools students in north omaha, a community in desperate need of increased civic engagement. noma utilizes innovative social media to engage youth from disadvantaged circumstances in civic engagement service-learning assignments. to fulfill the fulfill the educational goals of the service-learning assignments, noma leverages the social networking site ning.com to coordinate activities and link to social media outlets (i.e. facebook, twitter, vimeo and youtube) to promote the project and display student work. these sites allow noma youth to present their perspectives of current national and community issues and become producers of internet content. a description of the north omaha media alliance (noma) project along with an analysis of project outcomes will address the question how can social media encourage youth from disadvantaged circumstances to participate in civic engagement? overall, this paper helps scholars and community members understand the opportunities and limitations of social media for civic engagement, recognize diverse perspectives on the use of social media in service-learning from the perspectives of student participants and community partners, gain insight into the successful integration of social media into 2 service-learning projects, and learn about best practices for using social media to coordinate and promote civic engagement focused service-learning activities. keywords social media; civic engagement; service-learning. a decline in civic engagement of american youth is well documented in the research. while the 2008 election indicates that youth can be mobilized, there is still a concern about true civic engagement that extends beyond the election (brooks, 2009; bachen, raphael, lynn, mckee, & phillippi, 2008). brooks (2009) defines true civic engagements as “self-renewing, collective efforts by residents, organizations, and communities aimed at improving lives and strengthening communities” (p.37). social media can facilitate the process and disseminate the results of civic engagement. however, participants must have the skills to work in the medium. hobbs (1998) defines a broad approach to media literacy as referring to the “process of critically analyzing and learning to create one’s own message in print, audio, video, and multimedia” (p. 16). while this is generally applied to mass media (e.g. television and radio), social media offers an effective outlet for civic engagement focused content and media literacy tenets can be extended to social media (livingstone, 2004). incorporating media literacy into civic engagement projects that involve social media ensures that participants understand how to produce good content and empowers participants with the skills to continue participating well beyond the initial project. north omaha is one example of a community that desperately needs projects that empower and engage their youngest citizens. north omaha is a community challenged by economic decline and frequently negative media coverage emphasizing crime. the community is home to 18.1 percent (70, 563) of the city’s population. u.s. census data indicate that 64.1 percent are african american. 31.1% of residents of north omaha are unemployed, 40.4% are living below the poverty level and single parents head 46.4% of households. overall, omaha has the third largest black poverty rate among america’s 100 metro areas. while there is much more to the community than these statistics suggest, most residents of the city see the picture of north omaha as a blighted, violent neighborhood where little of a positive nature occurs. there have been positive developments within the community but negative media saturation continues to perpetuate problematic perceptions throughout greater omaha. this persistent 3 negative portrayal of the community has a naturally discouraging effect on residents, particularly the youth. north omaha is working to combat a history of neglect by revitalizing and creating new economic opportunities. traditionally under-served by mass media, north omahans desperately need an outlet for their collective voice. the noma project provides an opportunity to fill this need in the community. noma utilizes innovative social media to engage youth from disadvantaged circumstances in civic engagement service-learning assignments. to fulfill the educational goals of the service-learning assignments, noma leverages the social networking site ning.com to coordinate activities and link to social media outlets (i.e. facebook, twitter, vimeo and youtube) to promote the project and display student work. these sites allow noma youth to present their perspective of current national and community issues and become producers of internet content. a description of the north omaha media alliance (noma) project along with an analysis of project outcomes will address the question how can social media encourage youth from disadvantaged circumstances to participate in civic engagement? the paper shows how the use of social media facilitated the noma civic engagement goals and outcomes. in addition, a list of best practices/lessons learned about integrating social media into service learning projects is provided to encourage the development of other projects with a similar focus. overall, this paper will help scholars and community members understand the opportunities and limitations of social media for civic engagement, recognize diverse perspectives on the use of social media in servicelearning from the perspectives of student participants and community partners, gain insight into the successful integration of social media into service-learning projects, and learn about best practices for using social media to coordinate and promote civic engagement focused service-learning activities. case description: north omaha media alliance noma, operating each fall and spring semester since fall 2008, is an after school project focused on social media, media literacy, and civic engagement. the project is a collaboration among the university of nebraska omaha (uno), two omaha public schools (ops), and girls inc of omaha. uno faculty, staff, and students from the school of communication and the service learning academy provide mentorship, meeting structure, and technical guidance. uno serves as the site for approximately eight group meetings each semester and the service-learning academy coordinates the refreshments and transportation for the high school students. two high schools from north omaha, omaha north high school magnet (onhsm) and benson high school magnet (bhsm), along with girls inc of omaha 4 have had staff and students participating in the project. the educational goals of both the ops schools and girls inc of omaha align with the main project goals of noma. each semester noma has approximately 7-20 high school students and 7-20 college students working with the project. the noma project goals include 1) teach high school students about social media and citizen journalism through the guidance of university students, 2) reflect on issues related to local civic engagement as well as larger political issues, 3) combat current misrepresentations of north omaha by reporting local news and speaking out about community issues. these goals are achieved through the critical evaluation of media; mentorship on the use of technology in creating mediated messages from uno school of communication faculty, staff, and students; and the use of social media such as blogs, social networks (ning.com and facebook), and video sharing sites (youtube and vimeo). in the beginning of the project there was a focus on creating a recognizable image for the noma project. at first, noma utilized committees of high schools students facilitated by faculty and students at uno to create this image. the logo committee included students from the student run pr firm maverick solutions working with a team of high school students to create a logo that would represent the noma location of north omaha, speak to high schools students and community members, and create a unique logo to unite the different members of the collaboration. the photo committee focused on a photo essay project portraying north omaha from the high school students’ perspective. the website committee worked on creating a basic design for a noma website. the blog committee created blog topics for the other students in the project to comment on, brainstormed ways to encourage blogging, and evaluated blogs for awards. along with the basic structure committees, noma participants also worked on the noma vote 2008 project. uno students facilitated discussion with the high school students on the qualities that a candidate for president should possess, the issues they feel are critical to this campaign, and analyzing media coverage of the candidates and campaign statements. additionally, noma students participated in the election night blog hosted by the school of communication and experienced the election night news coverage by uno tv. noma students also had the opportunity to talk with the director for “18 in 08,” a documentary focused on the youth vote in the election, before seeing the documentary. in the spring 2009 semester, noma focused the obama’s first 100 days project. meetings explored different topics by showing media clips and reading magazine and newspaper stories. topics included 5 inauguration and its meaning, different presidential mentality, president obama’s priorities, iraq/afghanistan mission timelines, obama’s budget and the economy. after each guided reading and discussion with uno faculty, staff, and students, noma high school participants would blog about their reactions by answering a series of questions as well as providing their own reactions and reflections on the issues. the final structure working for the last three semesters focuses on the critical issue investigation projects. noma high school students chose issues critical to their lives for further investigation. with the help of college student mentors as well as technical instruction from uno faculty and staff, the high school students conduct research, interview relevant sources, and then design a presentation of that information with an audience in mind. choices for the presentations include radio programs, powerpoint shows, or psa-length video presentations. some of the critical issues investigated include gang violence, teenage pregnancy, high std rate, dangerous driving due to distractions, the negative perceptions of north omaha in the mainstream media, emmet till, quality of drinking water in omaha and around the world, the humane society, cyberbullying, strategies for a successful freshman year, public vs. private schools, and many more. noma plans to revisit the importance of voting with the 2012 election campaign. in addition, there are plans to unite more directly with local non-profit organizations to provide a stronger tie to local issues. finally, the investigation of critical issues will continue to be driven by the perspectives and interests of the high school student participants. social media opportunities and limitations social media has offered several opportunities for the coordination of the noma project and dissemination of final presentations. the nomanetwork.ning.com site allowed all noma participants to communicate with each other, brainstorm, report on progress, and post meeting details in a protected space. the site was deliberately setup to control access from those outside the project. since many of the students involved in the project are in potentially dangerous and certainly vulnerable positions, it was decided that an online space was needed where they could go without concern for who might be on the site. the design of the site did allow for the dissemination of three early outcomes of the project. the logo (figure 1), the photo essay project, and the blog posts about ‘obama’s first 100 days’. 6 figure 1: noma logo. the outcomes of the noma vote 2008 project included discussion outcomes on candidate qualities and characteristics as well as important issues for the election. candidates for president should speak well; be fair, influential, genuine, honest, a leader, smart, resourceful, strong, healthy, bold and spiritual; have a firm stance and morals, a self-sacrificial predisposition, experience, energy, and have plans for the future and a way to make them work. issues for the election include lower taxes, war in iraq, food and gas prices, health care, stable economy, employment, financial crisis, dependence on nondomestic fuels, drugs, abortion, animal rights, education, oil drilling, and economic security. students also analyzed media coverage concluding that the ads should focus more on issues, be honest, and include more recent information rather than old sound bites and quotes. the improved media literacy and critical thinking skills demonstrated by the high school students were put on display when the participated in the election day 2008 school of communication blog (school of communication, 2008). students used social media to post content that they created in the critical issue investigation projects. each of the projects is presented at the end of each semester at a celebration for the project participants. after the celebration, each of the projects is posted to youtube, vimeo, or blogger. the results can be found at the following sites: • noma blog main site: http://thenomablog.blogspot.com/ • noma member blogs (spring 2010): ronnyece's blog provides facts and stories on a key issue for teens and north omaha at http://teenpregnancys.blogspot.com • denai investigates the need for clean water around the world and blogs about her findings at http://inthekno-h2o.blogspot.com • noma videos at http://www.youtube.com/thenomanetwork and http://vimeo.com/channels/162416 http://thenomablog.blogspot.com/� http://teenpregnancys.blogspot.com/� http://inthekno-h2o.blogspot.com/� http://www.youtube.com/thenomanetwork� http://vimeo.com/channels/162416� 7 while social media did provide opportunities for the project, there were a number of limitations. first, there is difficulty working with public schools and social networking sites. ops, like many k-12 institutions, has a policy to block sites like facebook at school. at first the ning.com site was considered different, but as the project moved forward social network restrictions were extended to it. when working with students from disadvantaged circumstances, access to technology outside of school can be difficult. most of the students do not have high speed internet at home and many do not have access to a computer. this limited the use of sites as the project moved forward and shifted the focus from blogging between noma meetings, to an activity during meetings. however, the excitement of creating multi-media projects soon outstripped the interest for blogging and now most students choose photo, radio, or video projects. second an increased interest in photo, radio, and video projects increased the need for technology. this required substantial resources. grant writing became a key focus for the continuance of the project. luckily grants were awarded and the project was able to purchase kodak zi8 video cameras, cannon powershot cameras, and olympus digital recorders. both the cameras and the recorders have worked well in the project, surviving the use of a number of high school students over five semesters. third, considerable time is spent on training to use both the cameras and the recorders in accordance with standard practices in media production and editing as well as the basic tenets of media literacy. uno faculty, staff, and students in broadcasting and radio production provide an invaluable service. without their experience this project would not be able to achieve its goals. lessons learned lesson one: despite some popular notions to the contrary, it is possible to get high school students excited about local and national issues. even the most indifferent students were willing to engage once they received the training and mentorship from faculty, students, and staff. students reported that they gained confidence from working with the project. they felt that their voice was heard, especially during the blogging on election night for the uno school of communication’s election blog and end of semester celebrations. students appreciated the exposure to different social media outlets and the chance to create online content. lesson two: high school students from disadvantaged circumstances benefit from projects that expose them to higher education institutions. one of the most mentioned reasons for participating in the project was the chance to spend more time on a college campus and work with diverse groups of 8 university students, faculty and staff. one student mentioned that what he really liked about our meetings was talking about smart, important things with smart people. others said they just enjoyed hearing about the lives of uno students and realizing that maybe university is something they could do. most saw it as a chance to express parts of their personality and focus on issues that really mean something to them. lesson three: coordinating a project with faculty, staff and students from a university, two public schools, and a community partner is a huge undertaking. noma would not be possible without proper resources in terms of technical experience, material resources, and institutional support. best practices over the last six semesters, noma leaders have identified several keys to success that serve as a list of best practices for those wishing to create a similar project. these include: 1) create a safe, respectful environment conducive to discussing difficult or controversial topics. 2) provide background information on issues to facilitate informed discussion and critical analysis. 3) include time to think and reflect with an open mind on the issues. 4) encourage students to present their perspective on all issues. do not shy away from topics that are important to them. make sure they all know their voice is important. 5) utilize whatever technology is available to the fullest extent, but be aware of potential limitations in terms of access. 6) celebrate accomplishments and provide an outlet for others to see the achievements of project participants. (leonard, smith-howell, martin, & baxley 2009). conclusions social media may hold the key to increasing youth civic engagement. the excitement surrounding social media is hard to deny and connecting that excitement to issues that might seem out of reach for the average high school student could reverse the trend of declining interest. noma serves as an example of 9 the successful integration of social media with civic engagement to empower high school students from disadvantaged circumstances. references bachen, c., raphael, c., lynn, k-m., mckee, k., phillippi j. (2008) civic engagement, pedagogy, and information technology on web sites for youth. political communication, 25(3), 290-310. brooks, j. (2009). obama, equity, and civic engagement. national civic review, 98(2), 37-40. doi: 10.1002/ncr hobbs, r. (1998). the seven great debates in the medial literacy movement. journal of communication, 48(1),16-32. leonard, l., smith-howell, d., martin, a., baxley, n. (june 2009). noma: increasing diversity and civic engagement through youth-produced news and information service-learning projects. aascu/adp conference, baltimore, md. livingstone, s. (2004). medial literacy and the challenge of new information and communication technologies. the communication review, 7, 3-14. school of communication. (2008). election day 2008: school of communication blog. retrieved from http://omahanewspreelection.blogspot.com/2008/11/high-school-students-comment-on.html selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  mulvin,  d.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  embedded  dangers:  the  history  of  the  year   2000  problem  and  the  politics  of  technological  repair.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual   conference  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from   http://spir.aoir.org.   embedded  dangers:  the  history  of  the  year  2000  problem   and  the  politics  of  technological  repair     dylan  mulvin   microsoft  research  new  england       introduction     apple  recently  confirmed  a  rumor  that  a  design  flaw  in  their  mobile  operating  system,   ios,  would  permanently  disable  an  iphone  if  a  user  set  the  date  to  1970  or  earlier  (kelly   2016).  the  glitch  materialized  an  awareness  that  our  devices  only  work  within  strict   calendrical  parameters.  more  than  any  other  recent  event,  the  year  2000  problem   (better  known  as  the  y2k  bug)  established  the  public  awareness  of  the  temporal   contingencies  of  embedded  computer  systems.  this  paper  revisits  the  y2k  bug  to  see   what  lessons  can  be  drawn  from  this  (non)event.  using  archival  research  conducted  at   the  charles  babbage  institute,  this  paper  undertakes  an  analysis  of  the  year  2000   problem  and  the  large-­scale  practices  of  technological  repair  and  management  that   addressed  it.       i  argue  that  the  ways  the  y2k  bug  was  addressed  set  the  groundwork  for  the  large-­ scale  infrastructural  management  of  technological  contingency  in  the  early  21st  century.   i  approach  the  organized  response  to  the  perceived  threat  of  the  y2k  bug  as  one  of  the   greatest,  public-­facing  attempts  to  educate  and  train  individuals  and  organizations  to   manage  the  unforeseen,  and  potentially  devastating,  effects  old  computer  code  can   have  on  contemporary  computerized  infrastructures.         i  begin  with  a  history  of  the  bug’s  origins  and  proceed  to  examine  three  key  effects  of   the  crisis:  1)  the  massive  resource  investment  and  funding  expenditures  on   computerized  infrastructures  that  few  other  crises  have  compelled;;  2)  the  changes  to   american  insurance  and  tort  law  developed  as  a  dimension  of  the  crisis’  legal  repair;;   and  3)  the  proliferation  of  risk  management  training  around  computerized   infrastructures,  forming  what  i  call  a  “pedagogy  of  preparedness.”  by  studying  these   three  effects,  this  paper  reconfigures  the  role  of  y2k  in  the  history  of  computers,   infrastructure,  and  information  systems  by  placing  the  bug  within  the  larger  contexts  of   infrastructure  renewal,  public  works,  and  technological  literacy.       background     leading  up  to  the  year  2000,  news  outlets,  governments,  and  technological  experts   warned  that  the  world  might  experience  near-­total  computer  failure  due  to  a  common   coding  practice  originating  from  the  1960s.  in  this  time,  computer  programmers  chose  to   save  memory  capacity,  a  scarce  resource  at  that  time,  by  coding  dates  in  six  digits   instead  of  eight:  dd-­mm-­yy.  the  rollover  to  the  year  2000  presented  the  very  real   possibility  of  global,  systemic  chaos  as  computers  still  running  older  software  were   forced  to  reckon  with  a  year  written  simply  as  “00.”  to  address  the  threat  the  coding  bug   posed,  governments,  corporations,  community  groups,  and  non-­governmental   organizations  launched  massive  campaigns  to  prepare  populations  for  systemic   collapse  and  these  campaigns  generated  new  precedents  for  addressing  future  threats   of  this  kind.       from  the  vantage  point  of  the  present,  the  y2k  crisis  may  look  like  a  very  costly  false   alarm,  what  some  have  called  a  “nutty  cocktail  of  digital  overthink  and  luddite   millennialism”  (menand  2015,  75).  but  from  another  perspective  it  is  a  significant   moment  of  crisis  planning  and  management,  a  population-­wide  event  of  computer   literacy  campaigning  and  technological  repair.  the  threat  of  y2k  created  acute   awareness  of  computing  and  computer  code  as  a  fundamental  part  of  basic   infrastructure  and  the  organized  response  to  the  y2k  crisis  is  one  of  the  world’s  largest   attempts  at  fundamental  technological  repair.  the  fact  that  the  y2k  crisis  was  attached   to  a  precise  date  and  time  that  computer  infrastructures  could  be  expected  to  fail  made   it  a  unique  event  in  the  public  discourse  surrounding  computer  technologies  in  the  late   20th  century—what  paul  edwards  called,  “a  unique  opportunity  to  document  and  study   the  course  of  a  technological  crisis  before  it  actually  occurs”  (edwards  1998,  26)     the  history  of  the  y2k  problem  demonstrates  how  technological  creation  and  innovation   emerge  from  major  sites  of  potential  failure.    few  studies  of  technological  failure,   however,  historicize  the  discrete  practices  of  planning,  repair,  and  management  around   technological  crises.  as  such,  this  paper  is  a  first  attempt  to  reveal  how  practices  of   technological  repair  structure  the  relationship  between  software  programming,  massive   social  and  technological  infrastructures,  and  the  institutional  configurations  that  shape,   transform,  re-­direct,  and  reproduce  them.       theoretical  approach     in  this  paper,  i  conceptualize  the  y2k  bug  as  both  a  problem  of  potential  infrastructural   collapse  (edwards  1998)  and  a  problem  of  educating  the  public  on  infrastructural  inter-­ dependence.  i  approach  repair  as  a  central  component  of  technological  history.  and,   finally,  i  approach  liability  and  tort  law  as  a  part  of  the  domain  of  repair  operations  that   policy  makers  use  to  mend  the  social  damage  threatened  by  technological  failure.     i  approach  computer  code  as  a  fundamental  part  of  contemporary  information   infrastructures  and  builds  on  existing  research  in  this  area.  in  addition  to  this  focus  on   infrastructure,  i  also  consider  repair  and  maintenance  as  central  components  of   technological  history.  some  recent  work  examines  the  repair  and  maintenance   necessary  for  any  technology  or  infrastructure  to  operate  properly  (henke  2000;;   graham  &  thrift  2007;;  jackson  et  al.  2012;;  jackson  2014).  by  studying  maintenance   and  repair  operations  these  scholars  aim  to  understand  how  “order  and  meaning  in   complex  sociotechnical  systems  are  maintained  and  transformed”  (jackson  2014,  222)   and    the  need  to  repair  and  reuse  existing  materials  is  a  necessary  solution  to  imminent   environmental  collapse.  this  paper  offers  a  new  consideration  of  maintenance  and   repair  by  uncovering  the  importance  of  public  pedagogy  in  technological  remediation.     finally,  i  consider  the  social  effects  of  infrastructural  repair  through  an  examination  of   the  y2k  bug’s  legal  consequences.  to  do  this,  i  draw  upon  socio-­legal  studies  and  use   legal  literature  on  insurance  and  tort  law  related  to  the  y2k  crisis,  which  was  a  much   discussed  and  written  about  topic  of  the  late  1990s  (kerr  1998;;  jinnet  and  greene   1999;;  williams  and  smyth  1999).  as  y2k  remediation  efforts  accelerated  in  the  1990s,   the  legal  ramifications  of  embedded  computer  failure  came  into  focus  as  “lawyers   [awakened]  to  the  same  sense  of  ubiquity,  unpredictability  and  entanglement  that   engineers  have  long  seen  as  the  core  of  the  y2k  problem”  (dunn  1998).       conclusions     the  y2k  bug  began  as  a  design  choice:  the  decision  by  early  computer  programmers  to   code  four-­digit  years  using  only  two  digits.  though  the  problem  affected  many  early   programs,  the  common  business  oriented  language  (cobol)  was  often  singled  out   as  the  source  of  vulnerability  when  the  bug  became  a  public  issue  in  the  1990s.  cobol   was  a  coding  language  that  grew  out  of  the  late  1950s’  “software  turmoil”  and  the   apparent  need  for  a  simplified,  shared  language  in  the  face  of  growing  chaos  among   computer  hardware  manufacturers  (mccracken  1962;;  ceruzzi  2003;;  ensmenger  2010).   out  of  this  choice  to  compress  dates  in  cobol,  however,  the  y2k  bug  publically   surfaced  the  interdependency  of  various  systems  in  the  1990s  (fisher  1999;;  gordon   1999).  drawing  on  archives  of  technical  literature  as  well  as  governmental  and  non-­ governmental  risk  estimates,  i  reconstruct  the  y2k  bug’s  apparent  threat  to  the  smooth   functioning  of  a  global  information  infrastructure  and  aim  to  answer  the  question  of  how   the  risks  of  y2k  were  understood,  how  they  were  predicted  to  unfold,  and  how  they   were  ultimately  exaggerated.     one  lasting  effect  of  the  y2k  bug  is  its  changes  to  liability  law,  as  it  related  to   computer  technology  and  failure.  in  the  months  leading  up  to  the  year  2000,  insurance   companies  and  technology  companies  were  shielded  by  policy  makers  who  passed   legislation  to  protect  these  companies  from  liability  in  the  event  of  widespread  computer   failures  from  the  y2k  bug  (barr  1999;;  clausing  1999).  the  changes  to  insurance  liability   heralded  the  growing  political  power  of  silicon  valley  technology  companies  and  this   section  details  how  the  threat  of  y2k  was  taken  up  by  the  u.s.  congress  and  how   insurance  liability  became  a  major  issue  in  the  american  election  of  2000.  y2k   insurance  liability  became  a  political  instrument  and  created  a  precedent  for   exceptionalizing  corporate  responsibility  in  the  case  of  massive  technological  failure.         references     barr,  s.   (1999,  february  3).   industry's   'fix'   for  y2k   liability:  legislative  proposal  would   limit  lawsuits  and  damages.  the  washington  post,  p.  a15.       ceruzzi,   p.   e.   (2003).  a   history   of  modern   computing.   london;;   cambridge,  ma:  mit   press.     clausing,   j.   (1999,   february   24).   legislation   limiting   year   2000   liability   is   introduced.   new  york  times,  p.  2.       dunn,  a.  (1998,  september  08).  year  2000  bug  likely  to  infest  courtrooms.  los  angeles   times,  p.  a1.       edwards,   p.   n.   (1998).   y2k:   millennial   reflections   on   computers   as   infrastructure.   history  and  technology,  15(1-­2),  7-­29.       ensmenger,  n.  (2010).  the  computer  boys  take  over:  computers,  programmers,  and  the   politics  of  technical  expertise.  cambridge,  ma:  mit  press.     fisher,   g.   h.   (1999).   embedded   systems:   the   forgotten   y2k   problem.   incose   international  symposium,  9(1),  119–125.       gordon, p. d. (1999). a call to action: the national and global implications of the year 2000 embedded systems crisis. logistics information management, 12(3), 239– 245. graham,  s.,  &  thrift,  n.  (2007).  out  of  order.  theory,  culture  &  society,  24(3),  1–25.       henke, c. r. (2000). the mechanics of workplace order: toward a sociology of repair. berkeley journal of sociology, 44, 55–81.   jackson,  s.  (2014).  rethinking  repair.  in  t.  gillespie,  p.  boczkowski,  &  k.  foot  (eds.),   media   technologies:   essays   on   communication,   materiality,   and   society   (pp.   221–239).  cambridge,  ma:  mit  press.     jackson,  s.  j.,  pompe,  a.,  &  krieshok,  g.  (2012).  repair  worlds:  maintenance,  repair,   and  ict  for  development  in  rural  namibia.  paper  presented  at  the  proceedings  of   the  acm  2012  conference  on  computer  supported  cooperative  work.     jinnet,  j.,  greene,  l.  j.  year  2000  law  deskbook.  miamisburg,  oh:  lexis  publishing.     kelly, g. (feb 16, 2016). apple confirms ridiculous but serious ios problem. forbes. retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2016/02/16/appleconfirms-ios8-ios9-problem/#7fe4c5bbdd44   kerr,   c.   l.   (1998).  understanding,   preventing,   and   litigating   year   2000   issues:  what   every  lawyer  needs  to  know  now.  new  york:  practising  law  institute.     menand, l. (2015). thinking sideways. the new yorker, 91(6), 73–75. mccracken,  d.  (1962).  the  software  turmoil.  datamation,  8(1),  21–22.       paula,  d.  g.   (1999).  a  call   to  action:  the  national  and  global   implications  of   the  year   2000  embedded  systems  crisis.  logistics  information  management,  12(3),  239– 245.       williams,  r.  d.,  &  smyth,  b.  t.   (1999).  law  of   the   year  2000  problem.  gaithersburg:   aspen  law  and  business.         selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  nansen,  b.,  and  jayemanne,  d.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  young  children’s   touchscreen  media  habitus.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  conference  of  the   association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.   young  children’s  touchscreen  media  habitus     bjorn  nansen   the  university  of  melbourne     darshana  jayemanne   abertay  university     introduction   the   increasing   prevalence   of   touchscreen   and  mobile   devices   in   homes   has   brought   computing   and   the   internet   into   the   lives   of   toddlers   and   babies.   not   only   are   such   devices   mobile   and   liable   to   enter   toddlers’   reach,   but   their   natural   user   interfaces   provide   avenues   for   gestural   manipulation   and   navigation.   drawing   from   ongoing   qualitative  research  with  families  and  children  aged  from  0  to  5  in  their  domestic  media   settings  in  melbourne,  australia,  this  paper  reports  on  young  children’s  embodiment  and   enculturation  of  dispositions  towards  touchscreen  media  by  developing  the  concept  of  a   touchscreen  or  haptic  media  ‘habitus’.     background  and  method   there  is  a  growing  body  of  research  attempting  to  quantify  young  children’s  interactions   with  mobile  and   touchscreen  devices   (e.g.  rideout  et  al.,  2013),   reviewing   the  design   and  marketing   of   children’s  mobile   application   software   products   (chiong  and  shuler,   2010),  analysing  digital  content  shared  about  babies  on  social  media  platforms  (kumar   and  schoenebeck,   2015),   and   exploring   the   spaces   and   technologies   shaping   young   children’s   ‘postdigital’   play   with   connected   toys   (jayemanne,   nansen   and   apperley,   2015).     yet,   there   remains   a   lack   of   research   –   particularly   qualitative   research   –   that   specifically  explores  children’s  touchscreen  conduct.  how  do  young  children  come  to  be   disposed  towards  touchscreen  media  and  what  are  the  specific  relations  of  encounter,   enculturation  and  embodiment  that  frame  this  disposition?  this  paper  draws  on  ongoing   qualitative   research   with   families   and   children   aged   from   0   to   5   (n=40+)   in   their   domestic  media   settings   in  melbourne,   australia.   the   research   builds   on   established   ethnographic   approaches   to   domestic   technology   consumption   and   use   (mackay   and   ivey,   2004;;   silverstone   and   hirsch,   1992),   utilising   methods   such   as   household   technology   tours,   interviews,   participant   observation,   and  demonstrations  of   children’s   media  use.  the  participating  families  comprise  a  sample  of  relatively  early  adopters  that   reveal   emerging   qualities   about   young   children’s   changing   media   environments,   embodiment,  and  enculturation.     whilst  medical  and  educational  discourses  are  typically  operative  in  ideas  about  young   children,   parenting   and   technology,   media   studies   approaches   are   needed   to   understand   everyday  media   use   in   the   contemporary   lives   of   young   children.   babies   and  toddlers  are  not  typically  conceived  as  computer  ‘users’.  however,  the  mobility  and   gesturality   of   touchscreen   devices   are   bringing   very   young   children,   parents   and   devices  together  in  new  and  unpredictable  ways.  we  propose  the  concept  of  the  ‘haptic   habitus’  to  outline  this  emerging  set  of  internet  rules.     habituation     the   research   indicates   that   young   children   become   habituated   to   regularly   seeing   mobile  devices  at  home  and  in  other  public  places.  young  children  often  observed  their   parents’  embodied,  distracted  or  intimate  relations  with  their  phones  and  tablets:     i,  i  suppose  indirectly  he's  fascinated  ...  he  notices  when  our  attention  is  drawn   by  it.     parents   also   identified   more   deliberate   practices   of   providing   children   with   mobile   devices  –  so-­called  ‘passing-­back’  (chiong  and  shuler,  2010)  –  in  order  to  ‘pacify’  them   in  situations  where  they  were  otherwise  occupied.  the  device  is  thus  deployed  as  a  tool   of  distraction  or  management  within  the  routines  and  rhythms  of  family  life.     mobile  connections  and  digital  content     habituation   was   often   linked   to   touchscreen   devices’   connectivity   (typically   with   wifi   already   set   up   in   the   domestic   space).   devices   were   frequently   valued   because   of   digital   content   and   communication.   family   photographs   and   communications   with   relatives  were  particularly  important:     in   terms   of   facetime   it   has   already   happened   a   little,   we   chatted   with   our   parents.  they’ll  be  viewing  him,  i  don’t  think  he’s  viewing  them  yet,  but  probably   will  soon  be.     parental  mediation  facilitated  children’s  initial  encounters  with  mobile  and  touchscreen   media.  combined  with  device  mobility,  appealing  digital  content  and  touchscreen   interfaces,  these  practices  helped  to  assemble  children’s  habituation.     embodiment  –  the  swipe  as  ‘touchscreen  habitus’   the  assembly  of  elements   in  children’s  experience  of  connected   touchscreen  devices   can   be   understood   through   the   concept   of   haptic   habitus.   habitus   refers   to   the   acquisition   and   embodiment   of   culturally   shared   dispositions   or   forms   of   conduct.   mauss,   for   example,   argued   habits   such   as   walking,   swimming,   and   sitting,   are   entrained   in   culturally   specific   –   and   thus   collectively   structured   –   processes   of   extension  and  internalisation.  as  merleau-­ponty  explains  in  reference  to  the  shaping  of   a   keyboard   habitus,   ‘the   subject  who   learns   to   type   incorporates   the   key-­bank   space   into  his  bodily  space’  (1962,  p.  145).     touchscreen   habitus   considers   how   embodied   practices,   norms   and   imperatives   are   produced   through   situated  media   relations:   children   are   no   longer   necessarily   ‘sat’   in   front   of   media.   instead,   media   are   mobile   and   circulate   around   them.   these   media   encounters   are  entangled  with   and  animated  by   touchscreen   interfaces,   underscoring   the  nomenclature  of  ‘natural  user  interfaces’  within  the  product  design  and  manufacturer   communities  (e.g.  norman  2010):     he  has  been  using  an  ipad  before  he  was  1.  he  could  unlock  it.  he  could  open   things  with  it.  play  games.  choose  apps.  before  he  could  talk  or  walk.  it’s  such   an  intuitive  interface.       the  feedback  of  the  screen  touch  prompts  further   interest,   interaction,  and  habituation   through  gestural  interaction,  especially  swiping.  like  merleau-­ponty’s  keyboard  habitus,   the  swipe  is  expressive  of  the  ways  young  children  have  learnt  the  mode  of  interfacing   and   internalised   this   gesture   into   their   corporeal   conduct   for   touchscreen   interaction.   the  swipe  then  is  the  key  gesture  of  an  embodied  touchscreen  media  habitus:     they  can  grab   it  and  start  playing  with   it.   it   just  shows  that   it's  so  much  part  of   their  world…to  swipe  something.     yet,   the   interface   as  cramer   and   fuller   (2008)   argue,   is   not   only   a   site   of   exchange   between  humans  and  machines  at  the  user  interface  level,  but  also  between  hardware,   software,   code,   and   protocol   within   computer   systems,   and   between   humans   in   and   through   digital   culture.   so,   in   addition   to   the   common   observation   that   touchscreen   interfaces   lower   thresholds   of   usability   to   ever-­younger   populations   of   users   (buckleitner,   2011),   these   encounters   reveal   the   ways   software   protocols   and   algorithms  are  increasingly  embedded  in  and  help  to  configure  everyday  life  (e.g.  chun,   2011),   including   young   children’s   media   lives   (ito,   2009).   here,   software   automates   process  of  sorting  and  shaping  the  delivery  of  content  and  information,  and  in  doing  so   both  empowers  and  governs  forms  of  infant  media  conduct.     this  conduct  is  in  turn  shaped  by  wider  media  and  cultural  contexts,  including  a  range   of  digital  content  producers  and  intermediaries,  such  as  app  developers,  review  sites,   youtube  channels,  and  mummy-­tech  blogs,  which  are  then  filtered  through  social   networks  and  the  spaces  and  routines  of  domestic  life  as  part  of  an  enculturation  of   children’s  haptic  habitus.     acknowledgements   this  research  was  supported  with  funding  from  the  australian  research  council  (arc)   discovery  early  career  researcher  award  (de130100735).  we  would  like  to  express   our  appreciation  to  the  children  and  families  involved  in  this  study  for  their  generous   contribution  of  time  and  experiences.     references   buckleitner,  w.  (2011)  a  taxonomy  of  multi-­touch  interaction  styles,  by  stage.   children's  technology  review  18(  11):  10-­11.     chiong,  c.,  and  shuler,  c.  (2010).  learning:  is  there  an  app  for  that?  investigations  of   young  children’s  usage  and  learning  with  mobile  devices  and  apps.  new  york:  the  joan   ganz  cooney  center  at  sesame  workshop.   chun,  w.  (2011).  programmed  visions:  software  and  memory.  cambridge:  the  mit   press.     ito,  m.  (2009).  engineering  play:  a  cultural  history  of  children’s  software.  cambridge:   mit  press.   jayemanne,  d.,  nansen,  b.,  and  apperley,  t.  (2015)  post-­digital  play  and  the   aesthetics  of  recruitment.  proceedings  of  digital  games  research  association   (digra)  2015,  may  14-­17,  luneburg,  germany.   kumar,  p.,  and  schoenebeck,  s.  (2015)  the  modern  day  baby  book:  enacting  good   mothering  and  stewarding  privacy  on  facebook.  proceedings  of  cscw  2015,  march   14-­18,  vancouver,  canada.   mackay,  h.  and  ivey,  d.  (2004).  modern  media  in  the  home:  an  ethnographic  study.   rome,  italy:  john  libbey.   mauss,  m.  (1973).  techniques  of  the  body.  trans.  b.  brewster.  economy  and  society   2,  70-­88.   merleau-­ponty,  m.  (2002/1962).  the  phenomenology  of  perception.  routledge,   london.   norman,  d.  (2010).  natural  user  interfaces  are  not  natural.  interactions,  may-­june,  6-­ 10.     rideout,  v.  (2013).  zero  to  eight:  children’s  media  use  in  america  2013.  common   sense  media.   silverstone,  r.  and  hirsch,  e.  (eds).  (1992).  consuming  technologies:  media  and   information  in  domestic  spaces.  routledge,  london.     selected papers of internet research 16: the 16 th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 a sociolinguistic analysis of emoticon usage in japanese blogs: variation by age, gender, and topic1 yukiko nishimura toyo gakuen university, japan introduction this study explores how older men and women express themselves through blogging (curtain 2004) in japan, where the elderly population (aged 65 years and up) will comprise an estimated 40 percent of the country’s total population by 2050 (statistics bureau 2014), the greatest proportion of any nation in the world. figure 1: proportion of elderly by country (aged 65 and above) internet usage among seniors in japan has also been increasing in recent years, particularly since 2009 (ministry of internal affairs and communication 2014). one survey on pc penetration rate among elderly household reports that 78% of people surveyed (n=800 by random telephone number dialing) in their 60’s, 54.5 % in their 70’s, and 30.5 % in their 80’s possess pcs (gf senior marketing 2012). 1 i would like to express my gratitude to patricia m. clancy for her suggestions on this study. funding for this research from the japan society for the promotion of science, kakenhi category (c) 24520479, for the period of 2012 to 2015 is gratefully acknowledged. suggested citation (apa): nishimura, y. (2015, october 21-24). a sociolinguistic analysis of emoticon usage in japanese blogs: variation by age, gender, and topic. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. source: statistics bureau, mic; ministry of health, labour and welfare; united nations. in contrast to the robust body of literature on younger people’s online behavior, much of the online activity of the elderly has yet to be researched (smith 2014). though fullwood et al. (2009) examined age and gender differences in myspace blogs, seniors were outside of their target age groups, and no earlier studies specifically investigating elderly people have been conducted. addressing this gap in the literature, this study examines senior users’ linguistic behavior on blogs from a sociolinguistic perspective (coupland 2004), in comparison with younger users. the present study focuses on a medium-specific feature: emoticons. recently, some senior users have taken up the practice of writing digitally, and using emoticons may be a new experience for them. certain linguistic and stylistic features of text creation may originate in and transfer from previous paper-based writing experiences; however, linguistic differences among bloggers, such as they are, cannot be attributed solely to their prior experiences using this medium. the adoption of emoticons, a feature unique to digital media, reveals differences depending not only on the blogger’s prior experience with digital communication, but also on the type of content and the style in which the message the author expects to communicate. an emoticon is a visual element embedded in text in digital communication, most typically faces created by combining punctuation and typographic symbols to express a notion, for example, happy :-) , sad : -( , laughter :-d , and so on. previous research has treated emoticons as replacements for paralinguistic and nonverbal cues that are absent in computer-mediated communication (rezabek & cochenour 1998; wolf 2000; walther & d’addario 2001; derks et al. 2007). dresner & herring (2010) discuss emoticons as indicators of emotion and nonemotional meanings, and as “illocutionary force indicating devices” analogous to punctuation marks. tossell et al. (2012) examine emoticons on smartphones, and more recently skovholt et al. (2014) in workplace emails. these studies investigate emoticons in texts comprised of typographic symbols in english and other alphabet-based languages. this study builds on these works and extends it to include elements other than typographic emoticons in japanese. four types of emoticons will be considered in this study: (1) kaomoji, or typographic face marks, for example (^_^) “smile” and (>_<) “embarrassment.” kaomoji, though horizontal, are similar to english-language emoticons in terms of formation and facial representations. japanese kaomoji, however, are elaborate combinations of symbols that express emotions, actions, and greetings: kaomoji websites offer further subtle distinctions for users. one such site (http://kaomojiya.com/) lists 6,246 kaomoji. (2) kigou, or nonlinguistic symbols, for example, ☆♪ ♡. kigou often appear at the end of a sentence and may function as punctuation, but with more visual impact and added meaning. the role of kigou as emoticons is to minimize the dry, businesslike atmosphere/tone of the message (kato 2007). (3) kanji emoticons, or ideographic characters enclosed in parentheses, give additional information about the writer’s feelings based on the meaning of the kanji, for example, (笑) “laughter” and (怒) “anger.”2 (4) emoji, or colorful graphics embedded in lines of text, represent not only faces but also objects, ideas, and more (azuma & ebner 2008). some are animated, for example, a beating heart, blinking eyes, or shining stars. they are used mostly for decorative purposes, but also function indexically, and serve lexical purposes by replacing text, for example, the emoji for beer, , instead of the word beer, as in the following example. it tasted so good grandpa had a lot of . [image of turtle]=her husband, “grandpa;” [image of shining stars]=feeling good. source: senior female 04 colorful and diverse emoticons in japanese digital writing are resources for digital authors to express themselves. in addition to analyzing how age impacts emoticon usage by comparing senior and youth blogs, this study also considers the impact of gender. while a number of previous studies have addressed gendered aspects of emoticons in newsgroup messages (witmer & kadzman 1997; wolf 2000), chats (kapidzic & herring 2011), and text messaging (tossell et al. 2012), few have examined emoji, which became popular among us users only when apple made them available in 2011 on iphones as a preinstalled library after each emoji was assigned a unicode (wortham 2011). in contrast, in japan ntt docomo has made emoji available since 1999. other studies of gender differences in blogs include pedersen & macafee (2007) among british bloggers, huffaker & calvert (2005) on identity among teenagers, and amir et al. (2012) among malaysian teens. herring et al. (2004) stress the necessity of “advancing [a] broader conception of weblogs that takes into account the activities of diverse blog authors,” and the present study addresses this need with a focus on seniors in japan. how might younger vs. older men and women use emoticons differently when blogging in japanese? this paper has two parts. part i3 is a discussion of quantitative, comparative differences in usage of four types of emoticons (kaomoji, kigou, kanji, and emoji) among four groups (older men, older women, younger men, and younger women), in order to reveal how factors of blog authors’ age and gender affect emoticon usage. in addition to these two factors, i have come to recognize a third factor, blog topic, which also seems to influence emoticon usage from my earlier observation of japanese 2 see nishimura (2003) for more details of typographic face marks, non-linguistic symbols and kanji as emoticons in japanese contexts. 3 an earlier version of part i was presented at the 43rd new ways of analyzing variation conference in chicago in october 2014. the author thanks the nwav reviewers, session chair john baugh and participants for their comments. blogs. part 2 will therefore examine blogs that discuss the topic of moral harassment, which is expected to illuminate differences in emoticon usage as a clear example. the term, moral harassment originates from the french harcèlement moral, articulated by the psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and psychotherapist marie-france hirigoyen md, who specializes in mobbing (wikipedia 2015) or “mental abuse4.” it refers to repeated emotional abuse and domestic bullying in the present study, though another english translation, “mobbing,” often refers to workplace bullying. part 2 examines how the use of emoticons when blogging on this particular topic differs from their use when blogging about everyday topics. the topic of moral harassment was brought to my attention by an email alert from a japanese website for middle-aged and elderly users called shumee-to club (http://smcb.jp/). operated by dena (http://dena.com/intl/company/overview/), a developer and distributor of mobile and online services, shumee-to club is a social networking website for users to share hobbies/interests/concerns and enjoy interaction through both online and offline activities organized by the site. initial observations of the victims’ blogs indicated less frequent use of emoticons, which inspired me to conduct qualitative analyses to explore possible connections between subject matter and emoticon use in digital communication. for part 1, regarding emoticon usage by older vs. younger men and women, this study proposes the following hypotheses and predictions: hypothesis 1: gender female bloggers are more emotionally expressive than male bloggers. prediction: female bloggers will use emoticons with a higher frequency than men. hypothesis 2: age younger people are more experienced with blogging and have more developed abilities for informal communication online. prediction: younger bloggers will use emoticons with a higher frequency than seniors. datasets and methodology compared with previous research on generational and/or gender differences in blogging (nowson & oberlander 2006; schler et al. 2006; schwartz et al. 2013), which assume that information concerning user demographics is unavailable and focus on detecting age and gender from linguistic choices, the present study adopts an established, standard methodology in sociolinguistic variation research, in which participants’ age and gender are not to be detected but are already given as predictive variables. currently, there are blog websites that categorize blogs by age and gender, which allows analysts to collect and analyze online data systematically for these variables. the datasets for this study come from a huge blog ranking, linking, and aggregation site called japan blog village (http://www.blogmura.com/). established in 2004, this portal site offers users space to interact with other bloggers and opportunities to share 4 "mental abuse” or “oral harassment" can be a closest equivalent to “moral harassment” in english (clancy 2015). interests within 121 major categories and some 7000 subcategories. diary is one of the major categories, which have subcategories based on authors’ age, gender, and blog topic, though not all subcategories have gender and age subdivisions. within a subcategory, ranking takes place by user votes. from senior diary subcategory that further subcategorizes blogs by author’s age and gender, blogs by the top 50 most highly ranked men and women over 60 years of age were collected. for the younger counterpart, from miscellaneous everyday diary subcategory blogs by men and women of 20-39 years of age were collected. fifty bloggers in each of the four groups of users, for a total of 200 bloggers, are included for analysis. blogs in part 2 come from a subcategory titled “moral harassment and domestic violence” in japan blog village. blogs within this subcategory are not further categorized by age or gender, though authors normally identify their gender and approximate age in their profiles. most authors are women, though their age is more diverse, as inferred from the profile and blog content. data collection took place from april to early september 2014. a total of 20 days of blog texts from each blogger was collected. if bloggers ranked in the top 50 had fewer than 20 days of posting, they were disqualified and next highest ranking blogger was included instead. blog texts including emoticons, but excluding advertisements and blog management notices, were collected. photographs and captions were also excluded because graphic analysis in this study focuses on inline graphics embedded in texts in order to examine how they relate to the author’s gender, age, or topic. the length of individual blog posts varied, from just a few lines to several hundred words. blogger backgrounds are diverse with respect to geographical location, occupation, and level of education. for part 1 of this study, the four types of emoticons considered are typographic face marks (kaomoji), nonlinguistic symbols (kigou), ideographs (kanji) and colorful inline graphics (emoji). no distinction was made between animated and nonanimated graphics. blog texts were copy-pasted from original blog sites into word files to preserve graphic images, as well as to determine the word count of each post, and then copy-pasted into excel files for analysis. four groups are compared: junior female, senior female, junior male, and senior male bloggers. for part 2, blogs authored by moral harassment victims linked to and ranked in japan blog village were collected. this topic was chosen to clarify the effect of subject matter on emoticon usage. for the quantitative analysis, the number of bloggers out of the top 50 most highly ranked bloggers in the category of moral harassment who used at least one type of emoticon was tabulated. for qualitative analysis, i selected representative blogs by female moral harassment victims who actually used emoticons, and compared and contrasted them with representative blogs by senior and junior women from part 1. though 4 out of 50 blogs are authored by men, they are not included in comparative analysis because the majority of authors in this subcategory are women. results: part 1 table 1 presents how many users in each group employ each type of emoticon at least once. table 1: emoticon users in each group table 2 presents how many types of emoticons are used by bloggers. table 2: number of emoticon types used table 3 presents the frequency of the four types of emoticons by age and gender. table 3: frequency of four types of emoticons by blogger group none one two three all four total junior female 1 1 9 21 18 50 senior female 6 10 10 17 7 50 junior male 11 12 8 17 2 50 senior male 33 11 5 1 0 50 total 51 34 32 56 27 200 in tables 1 through 3, the usage of the four emoticons among the four blogger groups is not evenly distributed. there is a tremendous degree of individual variation among users within blogger groups. the observed frequency of types of emoticon by group is given in table 4 and normalized to number per 1,000 words in table 5. table 4: number of emoticons by blogger group table 5: average number of emoticons per 1,000 words for statistical analysis, a linear mixed effects model is employed.5 emoticon frequency is the dependent variable, with frequencies log-transformed per thousand words. fixed effects are age (senior and junior), gender (male and female), and emoticon type (typographic face marks, nonlinguistic symbols, ideographs, and inline graphics). random intercepts for individual users are used to partial out the variance attributable to individual differences. i began with the maximal model, including the three-way interaction between age, gender, and emoticon type. following a backwards selection process, i arrived at a minimal adequate model with two significant effects: a main effect of emoticon type (p < .001) and an interaction of age and gender (p < .001). the model has a good fit. the results are examined below. first, there is a significant main effect of emoticon type: inline graphics are by far the most frequently used type of emoticon, regardless of age and gender. the other three types of emoticon (typographic face marks, nonlinguistic symbols, and ideographs) are not significantly different from one another. these results are presented in figure 2. 5 i am grateful to nicholas lester for his assistance with the statistical analyses. figure 2: emoticon type effect plot second, there is a significant interaction between age and gender. junior females use emoticons significantly more frequently than the other three groups. junior males, senior females, and senior males do not differ significantly from one another in emoticon usage. though there is no statistically significant general effect of age, two non-significant trends with respect to age and gender are noteworthy, namely a tendency for senior males to use more emoticons than junior males and a tendency for senior females to use more emoticons than junior males. since junior females also use more emoticons than junior males, this tendency provides tentative support for a general effect of gender on the frequency of emoticon usage. thus hypothesis 1 with respect to gender has been supported, but hypothesis 2 with respect to age has not. the next section will discuss the overall results and explore the reasons for this surprising finding. discussion: part 1 (1) why are inline graphics the most frequently used type of emoticon? emoticons are resources for bloggers to present and express themselves to readers. typographic face marks and inline graphics add both emotional tone and paralinguistic information, such as joking, smiling, happiness, embarrassment, and so on, but compared to other emoticons, inline graphics have the greatest expressive potential. they are colorful and have the strongest visual impact. this finding may be rooted in the japanese culture of brush writing common to rendering both words and pictures, which were used interchangeably in 17th century popular writing for entertainment (shelton & okayama 2006). this tradition has been passed down to japanese manga culture (schodt 1989), and then to digital adaptation in mobile phones, as explained by emoji creator, shigetaka kurita (2015). (2) why do women tend to use more emoticons than men? emoticons are a means of self-expression, and the cultural expectation is that women are more emotional and expressive than men. women may be motivated by a desire to make their blogs more visually attractive, enacting identities that they expect readers to recognize and interpret. this interpretation relates to the following discussion. (3) why do younger women use more emoticons than any other group? this group expects and is expected to have more expressivity than any other group. as with makeup and fashionable clothing, the desire of this group to be cute and attractive may be a factor. behind this lies what can be considered the ideology of cuteness, in which being or looking cute (kawaii) among younger women in contemporary japan is overwhelmingly important. the concept of kawaii has been explored by such scholars as kinsella (1995), hjorth (2003), and miller (2004). kinsella writes: “kawaii or 'cute' essentially means childlike; it celebrates sweet, adorable, innocent, pure, simple, genuine, gentle, vulnerable, weak, and inexperienced social behaviour and physical appearance (220).” it has been a focus of scholarly attention (cheok 2010; nittono et al. 2012; shearin 2011), but is also frequently found in popular discourse (kageyama 2006; lee 2005; roach 2003; drake 2001). nowadays, “kawaii” is a prevailing expression of praise (hirata 2012). younger women’s frequent use of emoticons, especially colorful inline graphics, can be explained in terms of this widespread ideology since they embody cuteness. (4) why do older men tend to use more emoticons than younger men? older men, especially retired men, may be able to spend more time creating posts, while younger men tend to live busier lives. using emoticons requires a few additional steps, which they may want to avoid. some younger men might also regard using emoticons, especially colorful inline graphics, as feminine, in accordance with gender stereotypes in japan. younger men may want to avoid this image, presenting themselves as strong and manly, while older men may have transcended this constraint (or conversely, may have already been “feminized” by age and vulnerability). (5) why are generational differences not more significant? in japan, older people of both genders may already have significant experience in digital communication. retired people not only have information and technology skills from their former workplace, but so-called “digital seniors” (nagao 2011) have been engaged in computer-mediated communication for much of their adult lives. the age factor in emoticon usage is likely to diminish and eventually disappear in the future. the digital divide within the senior generation, then, is between those who have previous it experience and those who don’t. in sum, the results of part i have established the following: (1) inline graphics (emoji) are by far the most frequently used type of emoticon, regardless of age or gender; (2) younger women use emoticons significantly more frequently than other groups; (3) older men tend to use more emoticons than younger men; and (4) older women tend to use more emoticons than both younger and older men. part 1 has examined the frequency of emoticon use, but the various kinds of emoticons have been left unanalyzed. the types of emoticons used by young vs. old women and men in general will be explored in a future study, along with blog content. in part 2 of this study, content and emoticon types used by women are analyzed in comparison with blogs on a specific topic, moral harassment to reveal how blog topic may affect emoticon usage. part 2: qualitative analysis of emoticon usage in moral harassment victims’ blogs while the bloggers in part 1 use emoticons of various types in posts describing everyday experiences, family gatherings, seasonal events, and so on, moral harassment victims write about experiences that are far from happy and they tend not to use emoticons. their experiences are unbearably difficult, taking a toll not only morally but also sometimes physically. some write about their current misery and trouble, while others blog about what they underwent and how they escaped from their harassers, usually ex-husbands. yet they are not entirely happy, because of their painful memories of hateful, unreasonable husbands. they describe in reserved tones the disparaging words and treatment they received, financial hardship, and life without peace of mind. all of this is generally conveyed without inline graphics, though occasionally there are typographic face marks and ideographs. part 2 reveals that there are far fewer emoticon users among bloggers writing on moral harassment, as compared to blogs on miscellaneous everyday topics. in the category of moral harassment, only seven out of the top 50 highly ranked bloggers employed at least one type of emoticon, and only one blogger used all four types of emotions. the particular emoticons that the bloggers employed are also obviously different from those observed in part 1. this might suggest that inline graphics in general, which were found to be the most frequent type of emoticon regardless of age and gender in part 1, are not suitable for more serious blogs and topics. as many inline graphics serve decorative purposes, colorful, eye-catching additions to the text are at odds with the tone of victims’ narratives. consider an example where a victim posted after withdrawing the divorce suit that she had filed out of consideration for her daughter: 離婚したくないわけじゃないんでね rikon shitakunai wake ja nai n de ne “it’s not that i don’t want to get divorce” here the inline graphics express stress-induced sweat. bloggers carefully choose inline graphics that suit the content, for example, “anger” “tears” and “bomb.” in contrast, another victim, who overcame the hardship of divorce and now lives a more peaceful life, posts a blog entry with the title “幸せって、こういう事” shiawase tte, kouiu koto “happiness is something like this.” there she ponders the happiness of her current life using 16 inline graphics plus five heart symbols and one typographic face mark. in this case of somewhat more positive content, the blogger chooses to include more emoticons than on other days that are less positive. in terms of typographic face marks, a blogger who calls herself “alice in moral harassment land,” details the words and shouts uttered by her husband, “not my fault!” and her response to his arrogant attitude. she then writes: 私はそれを見て、怒りが湧きました。 ∑(￣皿￣；； ﾑｯｶｰｰ!! watashi wa sore o mite, ikari ga wakimashita “seeing this, my blood boiled.” typographic face marks for anger plus the shortened form of the verb mukatsuku, “feel sick, get angry” express her anger and displeasure. no comparable use of an angry face was observed in the blogs of part 1. most of the typographic face marks in women’s blogs on everyday topics are happy and smiling faces: こちらも宜しくお願いしま～～す（*^_^*） kochira mo yoroshiku onegai shima～～su（*^_^*） please do me a favor on this too（*^_^*） somewhat negative faces may appear in cases of embarrassment, but the use is humorous: 久しぶりにトンカツが、食べたかったのに(>_<) hisashiburi ni tonkatsu ga tabetakatta no ni (>_<) i’d have liked to eat breaded pork cutlet after so long (>_<) the author found she did not have bread crumbs and her embarrassment was she was not able to cook or eat this food. as for ideographs, (泣) “cry” and (怒) “anger” appear in victims’ blogs, but hardly ever in everyday topic blogs. conversely, victims’ blogs employ far fewer uses of the ideograph (笑) “laughter,” which is very common in blogs on everyday topics. on the motivation for victims to produce blogs, the top-ranked victim writes in her profile: 日々旦那からのひどい言葉の嵐で精神的に参っていますが、今耐えればいつか幸せな 日々が来ると信じて毎日過ごしています。それまでこのブログで心境を吐露させてくだ さい。 every day i’m suffering from storms of my husband’s cruel words, but hoping happy days will come someday, if i endure now. until then, let me vent my feelings in this blog. another victim writes: “my husband’s harassment has escalated; not sure to what extent i can stand it, but am trying to see the situation calmly and objectively by writing this blog, to not react to his attacks.” one more victim states: “in this blog i’ll keep track of problems of big family, my husband’s verbal dv (domestic violence), children, and so on, and convey to you readers. the moment it is discovered by my husband, this blog terminates. as these quotes show, many of these bloggers utter and vent their sufferings, in order to be able to view the situation objectively with less emotional turmoil. the practice of writing in secret, where they cannot be discovered by their harassers, may help heal victims’ wounds and balance their feelings about their ordeal. they may also be seeking support from other women in similar situations, and expecting that the description of their suffering can offer support to other women. bloggers express gratitude when their readers leave encouraging comments and indicate that they are being supported by their writing. the motivations for writing blogs about miscellaneous everyday topics are different. women in peaceful situations may describe their happy daily lives so that they can show and perform their identities as attractive women in blog texts featuring colorful, cute inline graphics and elaborate typographic face marks. part 2 reveals how differently emoticons are used by moral harassment victims as compared with the bloggers in part 1. emoticons are used by women both young and old for not only decorative but also emphatic and lexical purposes in blogs that positively details their days with children, grandchildren, and friends. on the other hand, moral harassment victims write about their difficulties in a reserved tone and largely without emoticons. this may suggest that emoticons are not suitable for serious blogs expressing the hardships of life, or that emoticons are more appropriate for expressing the brighter, joyful aspects of life. overall, while the general findings from part 1 indicate that inline graphics are by far the most frequently used type of emoticons, and that younger women use emoticons more frequently than any other group, part 2 shows that there are content areas in which emoticon usage is limited. perhaps the japanese cultural dispreference for showing negative feelings in public is also a factor. concluding remarks the study has found that inline graphics are the most common of the four types of emoticon in all blogger groups. younger women use more emoticons than any other group, which may be rooted in the japanese culture of cuteness. topic can be a determining factor for emoticon usage. inline graphics apparently are more appropriate for expressing the brighter aspects of life, as can be seen in women’s peaceful blogs on everyday topics, which are in sharp contrast with blogs by moral harassment victims. from the perspective of factors affecting emoticon usage, the study suggests that blog topic can be a factor for emoticon usage from qualitative discussions in part 2, in addition to bloggers’ gender and age as explored in part 1. topics other than moral harassment are yet to be investigated here, and how topics affect emoticon usage in blogging will be a future study, with more blogs discussing different topics. in conclusion, in an aging and digital world, we need more research on seniors’ use of language and emoticons online. in the future, we should investigate what senior users write about in order to understand their needs, desires, and concerns, which will require detailed analysis of the content of blogs. references amir, z., abidin, h., darus, s. & ismail, k. (2012) gender differences in the language use of malaysian teen bloggers. gema online™ journal of language studies. 12(1), 105-124.special section, retrieved october 7 2012 from http://journalarticle.ukm.my/3266/. azuma, j. & ebner, m. (2008) a stylistic analysis of graphic emoticons: can they be candidates for a universal visual language of the future?. in j. luca & e. weippl (eds.), proceedings of edmedia: world conference on educational media and technology 972-979. association for the advancement of computing in education (aace). retrieved january 27 2014 from http://www.editlib.org/p/28510. cheok, a.d. (2010) chapter 9: kawaii/cute interactive media. art and technology of entertainment computing and communication: advances in interactive new media for entertainment computing, 223-254, london: springer. clancy, p.m. (2015) personal communication. coupland, n. (2004) age in social and sociolinguistic theory. in handbook of communication and aging research, 2nd ed. j. f. nussbaum and j. coupland, eds. 69-90. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates. curtain, t. (2004) promiscuous fictions. in l. gurak, s. antonijevic, l. johnson, c. ratliff, & j. reyman (eds.) into the blogosphere: rhetoric, community, and culture of weblogs. retrieved august 22, 2013 from http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/promiscuous_fictions.html#end2. derks, d., bos, a.e.r., & j.v. grumbkow. (2007) emotions and social interaction on the internet: the importance of social context. computers in human behavior, 23(1), 842-849. drake, k. (2001) kwest for kawaii. time. retrieved february 13 2013 from http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,131022,00.html. dresner, e. & herring, s. c. (2010) functions of the nonverbal in cmc: emoticons and illocutionary force. communication theory, 20, 249–268. doi: 10.1111/j.14682885.2010.01362.x. fullwood, c.,sheehan, n. & nicholls, w. (2009) blog function revisited: a content analysis of myspace blogs. cyberpsychology & behavior, 12(6), 685-689. doi: 10.1089=cpb.2009.0138 retrieved july 28, 2013 from http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1089/cpb.2009.0138. gf senior marketing (2012) sinia・koureisha no intaanetto riyou ni kansuru chyousa. [survey on senior and elderly’s internet usage] retrieved october 16 2012 from http://www.senior-promo.com/wordpress/wpcontent/uploads/2012/02/senior_2012internet.pdf. herring, s. c., kouper, i., scheidt, l. a., & wright, e. (2004) women and children last: the discursive construction of weblogs. in l. gurak, s. antonijevic, l. johnson, c. ratliff, & j. reyman (eds.), into the blogosphere. rhetoric, community, and culture of weblogs. retrieved june 13 2012 from http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html. hirata, o. (2012) wakariaenai koto kara; komyunikeeshon nouryoku to wa nani ka. [from what cannot be understood: what are abilities to communicate]. tokyo: kodansha. hjorth, l. (2003) cute@keitai.com. in gottlieb, n. and mclelland, m. (eds.). japanese cybercultures. 50-59. london & new york: routledge. huffaker, d. a. & calvert, s. l. (2005) gender, identity, and language use in teenage blogs. journal of computer-mediated communication, 10: 00. doi: 10.1111/j.10836101.2005.tb00238.x retrieved october 19 2014 from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2005.tb00238.x/pdf. kageyama, y. (2006) cuteness a hot-selling commodity in japan. washington post. retrieved february 13 2013 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2006/06/14/ar2006061401122.html and http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2006/06/14/ar2006061401122_2.html. kapidzic, s. & herring, s. c. (2011) gender, communication, and self-presentation in teen chatrooms revisited: have patterns changed?. journal of computer-mediated communication, 17, 39–59. doi: 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2011.01561.x retrieved august 26 2014 from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.10836101.2011.01561.x/pdf. kato, y. (2007) keetai meeru ni okeru kaomoji to kigou no syutugen hindo to sono kankei: keetai meeru koopasu no syoukai to tomo ni. [the frequency and its senderrecipient-relation of kaomoji and kigou in mobile emails: with an introduction of mobile email corpus]. sensyu kokubun 81, 1-17. retrieved april 30 2014 from http://ir.acc.senshuu.ac.jp/?action=pages_view_main&active_action=repository_view_main_item_detai l&item_id=4388&item_no=1&page_id=13&block_id=52. kinsella, s. (1995) cuties in japan. in skov l, moeran b, eds. women, media and consumption in japan. 220–254. richmond: curzon press. kurita, s. (2015) why and how i created emoji, interview with shigetaka kurita. ignition 105. retrieved july 16 2015 from http://ignition.co/105 lee, d. (2005) inside look at japanese cute culture. uniorb. retrieved february 13 2013 from http://uniorb.com/atrend/japanwatch/cute.htm. miller, l. (2004). you are doing burikko!: censoring/scrutinizing artificers of cute femininity in japanese. in s. okamoto & j. s. shibamoto smith (eds.), japanese language, gender and idelology: cultural models and real people, 148-165. oxford and new york: oxford university press. ministry of internal affairs and communication (2014) press release: communication usage trend survey in 2013 compiled. retrieved march 28 2015 from http://www.soumu.go.jp/johotsusintokei/tsusin_riyou/data/eng_tsusin_riyou02_2013.p df. nagao, y. (2011) dejitaru shinia jidai no tourai—intaanetto no shintou to shinia sou no henka [arrival of digital senior age—penetration of internet and the change of senior generations]. in y. hashimoto (ed.) nihonjin no jouhou koudou 2010 [information behavior of the japanese people 2010], 315-329.tokyo: university of tokyo press. nishimura, y. (2003) linguistic innovations and interactional features of casual online communication in japanese. journal of computer-mediated communication, 9: 0. doi: 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2003.tb00356.x retrieved july 12 2015 from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2003.tb00356.x/pdf. nittono, h., fukushima, m., yano, a. & moriya, h. (2012) the power of kawaii: viewing cute images promotes a careful behavior and narrows attentional focus. plos one 7(9): e46362. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0046362. retrieved february 13 2013 from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc3458879/. nowson, s., & oberlander, j. (2006) the identity of bloggers: openness and gender in personal weblogs. paper presented at the workshop "computational approaches to analysing weblogs," stanford university. retrieved june 13, 2012 from http://www.ics.mq.edu.au/~snowson/papers/ss0603nowsons.pdf. pedersen, s., & macafee, c. (2007). gender differences in british blogging. journal of computer-mediated communication, 12(4), article 16. retrieved june 13, 2012 from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/pedersen.html rezabek, l. l. & cochenour, j.j.(1998). visual cues in computer-mediated communication: supplementing text with emoticons. journal of visual literacy, 18. 2, 201-215. roach, m. (2003) cute inc. wired. retrieved february 13 2013 from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.12/cute_pr.html. schler, j., m. koppel, s. argamon, & j. pennebaker. (2006) effects of age and gender on blogging in: computational approaches to analyzing weblogs: papers from the 2006 aaai spring symposium. menlo park, calif.: aaai press, 199–205. retrieved january 24, 2015 from http://lingcog.iit.edu/doc/springsymp-blogs-final.pdf. schodt, f. l. (1989) manga! manga!: the world of japanese comics. tokyo: kodansha. schwartz h.a., eichstaedt j.c., kern m.l., dziurzynski l, ramones s.m., agrawal m, et al. (2013) personality, gender, and age in the language of social media: the openvocabulary approach. plos one 8(9): e73791. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0073791 retrieved april 24 2015 from http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchobject.action?uri=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0 073791&representation=pdf. shearin, m. (2011) triumph of kawaii. culture of ‘cute’ scores an international victory over samurai and ninja ideation. retrieved february 13 2013 from http://www.wm.edu/research/ideation/issues/2011-fall/triumph-of-kawaii4862.php. shelton, b. & okayama, e. (2006) between script and pictures in japan, visible language, 40(2),157-176. skovholt, k., grønning, a. & kankaanranta, a. (2014) the communicative functions of emoticons in workplace e-mails: :-). journal of computer-mediated communication, 19: 780–797. doi: 10.1111/jcc4.12063 retrieved august 8 2014 from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcc4.12063/full . smith, a. (2014) older adults and technology use. pew research report. pew research center. retrieved january 15 2015 from http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/04/03/older-adults-and-technology-use/. statistics bureau (2014) statistical handbook of japan. ministry of internal affairs and communication, japan. retrieved march 28 2015 from http://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/handbook/index.htm. tossell, c. c., p. kortum, c. shepard, l. h. barg-walkow, a. rahmati, & l. zhong. (2012). a longitudinal study of emoticon use in text messaging from smartphones. computers in human behavior, 28 (2), 659-663. retrieved october 18 2014 from http://clay.rice.edu/pubs/tossell-emoticon-chb12.pdf. walther, b. joseph & d’addario p. kyle. (2001) the impact of emoticons on message interpretation in computer-mediated communication, social science computer review, 19 (3), 324-347. retrieved january 27 2014 from http://hc.rediris.es/pub/bscw.cgi/d3323568/impactoemoticones.pdf. wikipedia (2015) moraru harasumento to wa? [what is moral harassment?] https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/モラルハラスメント accessed january 24 2015 witmer, d. f. & katzman, s. l. (1997) on-line smiles: does gender make a difference in the use of graphic accents?. journal of computer-mediated communication, 2: 0. doi: 10.1111/j.1083-6101.1997.tb00192.x retrieved november 19 2012 from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1997.tb00192.x/. wolf, a. (2000) emotional expression online: gender differences in emoticon use. cyberpsychology & behavior, 3, 827–833. retrieved october 18 2014 from http://social.cs.uiuc.edu/class/cs591kgk/emoticons.pdf_v03. wortham, j. (2011). whimsical texting icons get a shot at success. new york times december 6 2011. retrieved january 28 2014 from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/07/technology/emoji-in-iphones-signals-a-shot-atmainstream-success.html?_r=0. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): velasquez, a. (2015, october 21-24). access barriers and local strategies for intrafamilial mobile communication in resource constrained contexts. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. access barriers and local strategies for intrafamilial mobile communication in resource constrained contexts alcides velasquez, ph.d. university of kansas; pontificia universidad javeriana, colombia introduction mobiles might soon become the communication technology with the fastest adoption rate in modern history (de gusta, 2012). in both developed and developing countries the penetration levels of mobiles have surpassed that of computers (itu, 2014). as mobiles and smartphones support constant connectivity and reachability, and enable multi-modal communication, they have become central to our social interactions (ling & donner, 2013, p. 9) and to our everyday life (ahn & jung, 2014; castells, fernándezardèvol, qiu, & sey, 2009, p. 77). communication through mobile technologies in families have not been immune to these transformations (rudi, dworkin, walker, & doty, 2015). the diffusion of internet based mobile applications such as whatsapp, facebook chat, skype and many others have broadened the possibilities of family members to keep in touch with ease. the perpetual reachability and connectivity afforded by mobile communication technologies can facilitate importantly family communication, especially between teenagers and their parents, as millenials are among the most avid users of technology. a plethora of research has illustrated the importance of parent-teenager communication and its consequences for teenagers’ outcomes. parent-child communication is central for childrens' socialization, and represents for many the first resource for emotional support. during adolescence, communication patterns within the family play a fundamental role for the psychological wellbeing (ackard, neumark-sztainer, story, and perry, 2006; gentzler, contreras-grau, kerns, and weimer, 2005) and the social development of young people (ledbetter, 2009). in general, family communication exerts a very strong influence on how and on why children communicate with others (barbato, graham, & perse, 2003). despite their relative affordability (ling & donner, 2013, p. 7), access to and use of mobiles and smart phones in resource constrained contexts does not necessarily imply that individuals do not face adoption barriers to these communication technologies. in fact, subscription to mobile broadband in developing regions are just a fraction of the penetration level in developed countries (itu, 2014). using van dijk's digital divide framework (dijk, 2005), this study asks about parents’ development of local strategies to access mobile communication technologies for intrafamilial communication in a resource constrained context. specifically, it examines the personal and environmental access barriers that parents face, as well as how they take advantage of other resources available to them to create local strategies to access and use mobile communication technologies to keep in touch with their teenage children. access to mobile technologies and parent-child communication individuals face barriers of a diverse nature that prevent them from having access and adopting a particular technology (mathieson, peacock, & chin, 2001). according to van dijk's digital divide framework, categorical differences in the social position of individuals within a social system and the relationships of dominance these differences imply, produces an unequal distribution of resources that facilitate access and appropriation of technology (dijk, 2005, p. 10). the unequal distribution of resources influence unequal access to and use of communication technologies. access in the model is conceptualized in a multifaceted fashion as comprised by successive kinds of access: motivational, material, skills and usage (van dijk, 2005, p. 20). effective access is dependent on having those four kinds of access. the digital divide is the result of gaps in those kinds of access. lack of resources turn into access barriers. on the contrary, having the appropriate resources turn into facilitating conditions for access. in the case of parent-child communication, parents are highly motivated to use mobile communication technologies. parents are especially invested in trying to keep in touch with their teenage children as adolescence is a life stage of important transitions and changes (andrew, 1990). this raises the question about how the lack or presence of certain resources and conditions for access create a set of access barriers that are related with material and skills kinds of access to mobile technologies, and how parents overcome those access barriers using alternative resources and the development of strategies for parent-child mobile communication. methods twenty semi-structured interviews were conducted to parents of children between the ages of fifteen and ninenteen years old in bogotá, colombia. bogotá is the capital city of colombia. the estimated population of bogotá in 2015 was 7.900.000 inhabitants (dane, n.d.). around 11.25% of the population are adolescents (between 13 and 19 years old) (dane, n.d.). in colombia, the poverty line is defined in terms of the costs for getting the minimum nutrition requirements for a person, compared to income per capita. the percentage of the population in bogotá that live below the official poverty line was 10.2% in 2013. the gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, was 0.504 for the same year. households in bogotá are classified into one of six possible social strata (1: very low, 2: low, 3: mid-low, 4: mid, 5: mid-high, and 6: high). stratification of each household is made based on the internal and external characteristics of the dwelling and its surroundings as a proxy for socioeconomic level (dane, n.d.). it is estimated that around 9.5% of the population in bogotá live in very low social strata, 39.3% in low strata, 35.7% in mid-low, 9.45% in middle social strata, 2.6% in mid-high, and 1.7% high (secretaría distrital de planeación de bogotá, 2012). individuals living in households classified into 1, 2 and 3 strata receive subsidies for public services such as electricity, gas, water, sewage and internet. also, individuals in these social strata can benefit from different programs aimed at lowering the costs of access to health, education, food and transportation. individuals living in mid-high and high contribute more taxes and pay more for their utilities in order to subsidize those living in very low, low and mid low households. participants in the study were recruited using a purposeful criterion sampling method (palinkas et al., 2013). parents of children in public and private high schools in bogotá were contacted. the population in each high-school varied in terms of the social strata students belonged to. as low and mid-low social strata are the most present in bogotá, more parents in high-schools serving this population were invited to participate. interviews took place at a location chosen by the interviewee. fifteen participants lived in households between very low and mid-low social strata, and five lived in households of middle, mid-high or high social strata. eighteen participants were female, and six of them were either divorced or single mothers. participants were asked about their usage patterns of different communication technologies to keep in touch with their teenage children, the different hurdles they face when trying to use these technologies, and how they try and solve these barriers in order to communicate with their children when they are not together. interviews were around an hour long on average. analysis and results interviews were taped for later transcription. the transcripts of the interviews were iteratively analyzed (onwuegbuzie & leech, 2007) and coded. emerging categories were identified through these codes. table 1 illustrates the lack of resources for material and skills access, as well as how that lack of resources manifested as a barrier for access to mobiles and/or smartphones. however, rarely these barriers and lack of resources precluded parents from communicating with their children through mobile technologies when necessary. during the interviews, individuals also described the way in which they used other resources available to develop local strategies to overcome those access barriers. table 2 illustrates how in the face of a lack of financial, environmental, technical, infrastructural, cognitive and knowledge resources, participants reported they turned to another set of available resources, creating strategies to achieve their intrafamilial communication objectives. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): velasquez, a. (2015, october 21-24). access barriers and local strategies for intrafamilial mobile communication in resource constrained contexts. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. access dimension lack of resources manifested as access barrier material access financial resources  device too expensive  data plan too expensive  voice plan too expensive  mobile phone minutes too expensive environmental resources  not safe to use mobile/smartphone in neighborhood  not safe to own mobile/smartphone technical/infrastructure resources  mobile/smartphone has bad signal  slow or no data connection  mobile/smartphone fails skills access cognitive  anxious operating touchscreen  not confident operating smartphone knowledge  does not understand how device works table 1. lack of resources and manifested barriers for mobile intrafamilial communication selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): velasquez, a. (2015, october 21-24). access barriers and local strategies for intrafamilial mobile communication in resource constrained contexts. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. access dimension resources lacking resources available strategy material financial resources social resources  call from other person's phone (neighbor, friend)  call to child's friend phone environmental resources  go to internet cafe  buy mobile minutes from mobile minutes lady technical/infrastructural resources  buy low-end mobile environmental resources environmental resources  go to internet cafe  buy mobile minutes from mobile minutes lady technical/infrastructural resources  use low-end mobile technical/infrastructure resources environmental resources  internet cafe  buy mobile minutes from mobile minutes lady table 2 continued access dimension resources lacking resources available strategy skills cognitive and knowledge social resources  get help from children  get instruction from children technical/infrastructural resources  use low-end mobile table 2. alternative resources and local strategies for intrafamilial mobile communication selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): velasquez, a. (2015, october 21-24). access barriers and local strategies for intrafamilial mobile communication in resource constrained contexts. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. implications communication through mobile technologies are not as easy as we may imagine for people in resource constrained contexts. despite their relative low cost, and although mobiles are almost pervasive, individuals in developing countries face important hurdles to access mobile technologies. while important access gaps are present, due to differences in the resources individuals can count on, it seems that in circumstances of high access motivation, like in the case of intrafamilial communication, individuals develop local strategies through alternative resources that facilitate access conditions to the technologies that will allow them to achieve their intrafamilial communication objectives. references ahn, j., & jung, y. (2014). the common sense of dependence on smartphone: a comparison between digital natives and digital immigrants. new media & society, 1461444814554902. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814554902 andrew, w. (1990). parent-child relationships in the transition to adolescence: continuity and change in interaction, affect, and cognition. in r. montemayor, g. r. adams, & t. p. gullotta (eds.), from childhood to adolescence: a transitional period? (pp. 85–106). thousand oaks, ca, us: sage publications, inc. barbato, c. a., graham, e. e., & perse, e. m. (2003). communicating in the family: an examination of the relationship of family communication climate and interpersonal communication motives. journal of family communication, 3(3), 123–148. http://doi.org/10.1207/s15327698jfc0303_01 castells, m., fernández-ardèvol, m., qiu, j. l., & sey, a. (2009). mobile communication and society: a global perspective. mit press. dane. (n.d.). estratificación social en colombia. retrieved from https://www.dane.gov.co/files/geoestadistica/preguntas_frecuentes_estratificacio n.pdf de gusta, m. (2012, may). are smart phones spreading faster than any technology in human history? mit technology review, (may 2012). retrieved from http://www.technologyreview.com/news/427787/are-smart-phones-spreadingfaster-than-any-technology-in-human-history/ dijk, j. a. g. m. van. (2005). the deepening divide: inequality in the information society. sage. itu. (2014). the world in 2014: ict facts and figures (p. 7). geneva, switzerland: international telecommunication union. retrieved from http://www.itu.int/en/itud/statistics/documents/facts/ictfactsfigures2014-e.pdf ling, r., & donner, j. (2013). mobile communication. john wiley & sons. mathieson, k., peacock, e., & chin, w. w. (2001). extending the technology acceptance model: the influence of perceived user resources. sigmis database, 32(3), 86–112. http://doi.org/10.1145/506724.506730 palinkas, l. a., horwitz, s. m., green, c. a., wisdom, j. p., duan, n., & hoagwood, k. (2013). purposeful sampling for qualitative data collection and analysis in mixed method implementation research. administration and policy in mental health and mental health services research, 1–12. http://doi.org/10.1007/s10488-013-0528-y rudi, j., dworkin, j., walker, s., & doty, j. (2015). parents’ use of information and communications technologies for family communication: differences by age of children. information, communication & society, 18(1), 78–93. http://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2014.934390 secretaría distrital de planeación de bogotá. (2012). población, viviendas y hogares por estrato socio-económico. retrieved from www.sdp.gov.co%2fportal%2fpage%2fportal%2fportalsdp%2finformacionto madecisiones%2festadisticas%2fproyeccionpoblacion%2fdice014vihopeporestrato31122011.xls&ei=hdf7vzk5aouqyati4ydicw&usg=afqjcngsmbccejhwf ubmpp0unohwgx39rg&sig2=n6esu4a1nkdbknjr1h5bug&bvm=bv.95515949, d.aww 1 it’s not all zeroes and ones: constructing online identity assembly theory adam w. tyma university of nebraska at omaha united states of america adam.tyma@gmail.com lynnette g. leonard university of nebraska at omaha united states of america lynnettgleonard@gmail.com abstract the construction of online identity, though examined in other disciplines, has not yet been approached theoretically in the communication scholarship. online identities cannot be understood as linear or static as some identity theory presents. online identities need to be understood as continually changing representations, never fixed in one position, and perpetually in a state of assembly. identity research within the communication literature has focused on specific characteristics of the medium (e.g., anonymity) and the effects of those characteristics on the outcomes of the communicative act rather than focusing on the communicative process of identity construction itself. in other words, past research examined the bookends of the online communicative act – this project focuses on the communicative processes in order to explain the dynamics of online identity (re)creation. in this light online identity assembly theory (oia) serves 1) as a response to the limitation of current online identity research within the communication discipline and 2) as a way for the communication discipline to engage this developing and ever-important area of study. oia offers a new direction for the investigation and interrogation of online identities, recognizing how the interrelation of race, class, gender, and social position in online social communities overtly and covertly influence how we assemble ourselves within online spaces. facebook profile construction processes are interrogated as a test application of oia theory, demonstrating how oia theory can contribute to identity research by looking at the interrelationship of these concepts in relation to one another rather than as separate elements within identity. keywords computer-mediated communication; identity; communication theory 2 you can never step into the same river; for new waters are always flowing on to you. heraclitus of ephesus as online communication (e.g., email; sms; instant messaging; video chat; mmorpg; online social communities) becomes commonplace, understanding both the process of online communication as well as the product of that communicative phenomenon grows more necessary. each online communicative act relies on the technology to translate the message from sender to receiver(s); without the technology, online communication cannot take place at all. in essence, the message is wholly constructed and contained online. one realization regarding online communication is beginning to emerge: the individuals and groups engaging in online communication are constructing simultaneous multiple identities in new ways. an individual user can have as many identities as s/he wishes, resulting in an individual user being a truly polysemic self, able to adjust in small or radical ways at any given time, both visually and textually. carey (2009) reminds us that, “communication is a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed” (p. 19) – the same can be said of online identity. though online identity has been investigated through various empirical methods and perspectives (e.g, turkle, 1995; walther, 1996/2010), the construction of online identity has not yet been approached theoretically in communication scholarship. the goal of this project is to understand online identity construction through a uniquely communicative perspective. the position of this essay is that online identities cannot be understood as linear or stable. in an online space, the look, feel, perceived appearance, even location of an online identity can be changed, edited, augmented, or deleted at a moment’s notice. online identities need to be understood as continually changing representations, never fixed in one position, perpetually in a state of assembly. online identity assembly theory (oia) serves as a response to the limitation of current online identity research within the communication discipline. to demonstrate this limitation, a critique of identity research developed by communication scholars is provided. oia is then applied to the facebook profile construction process as an initial demonstration. future lines of inquiry and research using assembly theory are provided. this discussion will demonstrate how communication is uniquely positioned to answer the question of “how do we create who we are within an online space?” 3 a foundation for assembly – extant theoretical positions online identity construction stems from the broader question of “what is an identity?” anderson (1996) defines identity as “a sense of the unified self that exists across time and situation, as well as the constellation of characteristics and performances that manifest the self in meaningful action” (p. 225). the both/and characteristics of this statement demonstrate the theoretical dilemma within communication with regards to online identity, recognized as a communicative heteroglossia (bakhtin, 1982), where an existing online identity can be reconstructed in different ways to present a “new” identity. communication has employed several theories of identity from within and outside its ranks (e.g., side, sit, cti); however, none look at identity (particularly online identity) as a complex and uniquely communicative phenomenon. as various definitions and theories are presented, the complexity of what is online identity becomes more obvious. the next section will detail these various theoretical positions. in 1993, hecht proposed the communication theory of identity (cti), the first communication theory specifically looking at identity. cti was not attached to specific aspects of communication (organizational, intercultural, interpersonal, mass, etc.). rather, it could be applied across the many facets of the discipline. prior to this, two theoretical approaches (both coming from psychology) were widely used within the communication discipline: social identity theory (sit) (tajfel and turner, 1986) and social identity model of deindividuation effects, (side) (postmes and spears, 1998; postmes, spears, and lea, 1998). each theoretical premise positions identity as a social construction or developed through the interaction of social relational forces; essentially, identity is constructed via the communicative act. although these theories are helpful, they limit our understanding of online identity. these limitations are identified as each theory is critiqued. the following section will explore each of the three theoretical positions in the order they appeared on the academic landscape, determine where they inform our understanding of online identity, and how oia can extend from these foundations and offer new insight into online identity as a dynamic communicative process. social identity theory (sit) tajfel and turner’s social identity theory (sit), though not a communication theory, has been used to understand identity by communication scholars. as scott (2007) presents in his analysis within organizational research, sit “claims the social categories in which one belongs are an important part of one’s self-concept. tajfel and turner suggest that social identities are those aspects of an individual’s self derived from the social categories to which one belongs” (p. 125). in addition, scott also points out that 4 there are two distinct disconnects between sit and communication. sit specifically examines identity categorization and how the individual works within and among those categories, but not at the communicative acts that lead to category formation or how an individual communicates when part of the categories. these same limitations exist when sit is applied to online identity within the online social community (osc). though sit can present the researcher with insights into why certain decisions would be made within an osc, it assumes that group interactions are motivated by a socially constructed online identity where agency is solely externally located. however, sit does not consider the user’s agency when creating the identity, nor the articulation of the user’s identity with other osc identities when coconstructing a discursive space. as an extension of sit, side continues the theoretical development of identity social identity model of deindividuation effects (side) social identity model of deindividuation effects, or side, extends sit and positions identity awareness on a continuum between personal and group in a given situation (lea, spears, & degroot, 2001). postmes and spears (1998), in their meta-analysis of existing deindividuation research in psychology, state that deindividuaion is not a normative state but, rather, a subjective and situational phenomenon. side proposes that “deindividuation settings do not lead to a loss of personal identity; rather, they can facilitate a transition from a personal to a more social or collective identity” (postmes and spears, 1998, p. 254). they further explain that the process of deindividuation is not as well understood as the extant literature would suggest, creating space for side to aid in further understanding the individual-group dialectic from a social psychological perspective. postmes, spears, and lea (1998), in their work with computer-mediated communication (cmc) environments, further the application of side within the communication field yet (like in sit) limit the position of agency for the individual within cmc. for side, the individual identity is not an independent actor within cmc but simply another member of the group. it is this lack of agency on the part of the user’s identity that needs to be considered further within communication theory and research. additionally, side is based on and assumes a stable existence of anonymity within the cmc context and the cognitive awareness of our identity. for users, “we know who we are,” even as that knowledge shifts from the individual to the group and the effects of anonymity persist within cmc. while side research has found evidence to support the effects of anonymity, these effects have been found with “zero history 5 groups” (experimental situations where participants work within a computer-mediated environment [cm] where there is no collective history, either face to face or cm). in these situations, anonymity would have the greatest effect because there is no standard of expected behavior (sassenberg & boos, 2003). however, when working to understand the assembling of an identity, time is an important aspect that cannot be fully explored with zero history groups. as walther (1996) found, “time to exchange information, to build impressions, and to compare values” can lead to communication that is “no less personal than ftf” (p. 33). with time being a factor, it is possible then that the individual identity could assert itself from within the social group. these limitations demonstrate that there are theoretical gaps that need to be filled within the current communication literature, leading us to cti. communication theory of identity (cti) hecht (1993), when constructing cti, saw his essay as a way to project his research into identity over the next 10 years. by investigating identity configuration from a communication perspective, hecht (1993) recognized identity as “inherently a communicative process and must be understood as a transaction in which messages are exchanged” (p. 78). such a concept positions identity as a communicative articulation of messages or discourses. he goes on to further that, after reviewing the existing literature at the time, identity in such a position is not only empirical but also discursive in nature as well as existing within an axiomatic position, connecting to anderson’s (1996) definition of identity (presented earlier). hecht (1993) proposes four frames to aid in the analysis of identity: personal; enactment; relationship; communal. these four frames not only position identity as a unique presentation of self, but also locate identity within a social or situational context. the personal frame presents the communicator’s identity as “stored as self-cognition, feelings about self, and/or a spiritual sense of self-being” (p. 79). this position provides the researcher a way to understand how an individual defines her or himself innately or within specific social contexts. for the purpose of this essay, the personal identity frame demonstrates not only how the user perceives the self within non-mediated environments but also the choices the user makes when her or his mediated identity is initially constructed and published within the osc. identity is not only constructed innately but is also developed through enactment, hecht’s second frame. identities are enacted through the social construction and interchange that exists within our day-today lives. as a communicative act, identity may “be expressed as part of a message or may be the central 6 feature of the message, and messages may express more than one identity” (1993, p. 79). hecht’s understanding of identities, in particular how they are emergent realities and are socially and symbolically constructed, adds to our development of oia. this will be further explored in subsequent sections. hecht reminds us in his third frame – identity as a relationship – that identities, once they are moved from the private to public, are enacted through the relationships an individual has within her or his social reality. identities, in this case, are simply collections of signifiers until they are engaged by the world around them, when meaning is encoded through the assembly process. hecht details this when he points out that, “first, people define themselves in terms of others … second, people define themselves in terms of their relationships … third, relationships, themselves, take on identities and the dyad becomes an entity” (1993, p. 80). each of these concepts inform our theorizing of online identity through the lens of assembly and aids in better understanding this particular communicative phenomenon. hecht’s fourth and final frame, identity as communal, reminds communication scholars that identities move from the individual to the collective, continually communicating ideas and constructing realities along the way. drawing on this frame oia is ideally situated to help explain how, communicatively, identities are not isolated phenomena. rather, online identities are interconnected nodes within a wide array of identities and the realities those identities construct. hecht’s proposed theory, though helpful for understanding identity, is limited with regard to identities within an osc for two reasons. first, a key proposition offered by the theory is that “identities emerge out of groups and networks” (1993, p. 80), moving the agency of identity away from the individual and handing it back to the group. given the uniqueness of online identities, being assembled by a single person or organization (in the case of a group, for example), the identity’s position within the osc signifies the practices of one user, regardless whether or not that “user” is representative of one or more than one person. second, hecht stresses that identities develop within hierarchies (power regimes). though this may be the case within non-mediated space, oscs do provide a space where, though identities are continually re-/assembled, the ultimate agency still lies with the user. unlike in face-to-face interactions, users can simply delete their profile if it is so desired. oia utlizes elements of cti and resolves these limitations as they apply to online identities. the literature from computer-mediated communication (cmc) research relevant to online identity is presented prior to a full discussion of oia theory. 7 cmc research and online identity in his comprehensive cmc literature review, walther (2010) calls for a move toward new directions in our understanding of what computer-mediated communication is and has the potential to become. for walther, "as the complex, rapid evolution of existing cmc research indicates, developing new conceptual models and testing them will be quite challenging, given conflicting but strongly help assumptions about how media affect communication" (p. 501). areas where online identity research is being published include sociology, psychology, new media, and communication and are represented by descriptions of online identity in terms of performance, presentation, and play. a summary of this research demonstrates the assumptions explicated by walther (2010). from a sociological perspective, turkle, with life on the screen (1995), presented the first major work that distinctly concentrated on online identity formation, play, and performance. still publishing in the field, turkle looks at the position of identity from a distinctly sociological and lacanian psychoanalytic standpoint. though such a standpoint does offer insight into the position of self, it is limited to the drives that motivate the identity once it is formed and in its distinction only in comparison to the others around it. other work, including cerulo (1997), has called for how identity needs to be interrogated and reconsidered. in their extensive review of identity theories (coming from social psychological theory), monroe, hankin, and van vetchen (2000) call for an adoption of social psychological theories for political science, further establishing the group position over individual agency within identity theories, a position that may not serve researchers in understanding the formation and enactment of online identities within oscs as a communication phenomenon. new media, a growing area of research that, similar to cultural studies, draws from many different disciplines, represents extensive work looking at online identities. work over the past few years (e.g. vrooman 2002; lamerichs and te molder, 2003; henderson and gilding, 2004) has presented various research opportunities where online identity becomes the central focus of inquiry. with each of these cases, the authors are unanimous in their call for further research into online identity. in kennedy’s work researching representations of minority women within online environments illuminates the complexity of identity within the osc (2006). in particular, kennedy is quick to point out that “while some academics have identified that terms such as ‘anonymity’ are too simplistic for understanding internet identities … very few internet identity researchers have engaged with contemporary cultural studies debates about identity” (p. 872). she furthers that contexts, not anonymity, needs to be engaged, and that when researching identity “what is important is to take these conceptual steps without losing 8 sight of identity as embodied experience, of the real struggles of real people … without losing sight of identity-as-practice” (p. 873). it is this space in current research that oia can assist with filling. building from without and within: online identity assembly the user’s online identity is continually interacting with the myriad discourse surrounding and within it. each or any of these options discursively change the user and the online identity, as one is a representation or signifier of the other. signifiers cannot exist without political and ideological contextualities around it (grossberg, 1986). it is these conditional realities, existing all around the forming online identity, that allow it to develop and continue the process of becoming, by the user accepting or rejecting each condition based on her or his own axiology or that of the osc the online identity is part of. online identities are a process rather than a product, operating within a continued state of difference, of this and not that, therefore entailing “discursive work, the binding and marking of symbolic boundaries, the production of ‘frontier effects.’ it requires what is left outside, its constitutive outside, to consolidate the process” (hall, 1996, p. 3). oia theory also aligns with hall’s theories of articulation as “both a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain conditions, to cohere within a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects” (grossberg, 1986, p. 53). identities (including online identities) are in a state of political negotiation, with the decisions being made based on both internal and external drives. these decisions are the points of articulation that create particular aspects of the online identity as well as the whole of the online identity as it is perceived and reacted to within the osc. online identity assembly theory, a dynamic approach to online identity, is a uniquely communicative theory extending from hecht (1993), incorporating hall (1996), and exploring more distinctly how identity within an online space must be understood through a discursive lens. online identities demonstrate the complexity of identity. never static both in physical representation as well as the signified discourses supporting that representation, online identity may be stable (or at least persistent) but also changes with each presentation. unlike a floating signifier, which retains its physical image though the meaning attached to the image may change, online identities (and the sign that signifies them) can shift at a moment’s notice and that shift can be motivated both by the original assembler of that online identity or by one of many outside entities. online identities are always in a state of assembly, and are defined here as: articulated formations created through the momentary assembly of various and discretely 9 interconnected nexus controlled by both user and osc. the interconnections are formed by discourses controlled/managed by various internal and external influences as well as spatially and temporally defined moments. communicatively, a user’s online identity construction initiates the exchange of information by becoming part of the osc. the communicative act perpetuates itself through both the discursive development of the online identity by the user as well as the interchanges with other osc members. this perpetual act does not end. it must be understood that online identities are neither solely local nor finite. rather online identities, like all other information on the internet, can be archived. in this case, there can be near-infinite versions of the online identity perpetually reconstituted and reformed through new and different discourses (e.g., archiving, server farms, data mining, other users’ identities). for communication scholars, such a position is important in the understanding of identity so that the motivations for a specific communicative act can be fully realized, not as either socially constructed or individualistically driven but, instead, as the product of the discourses of both positions. visually, an identity might be represented in the following manner (see figure 1). figure 1 demonstrates how various specific points (nexus) are interlinked by contexts and narratives assembled into a subjective identity. the circles represent the discursive nexus; the lines represent the connections between the various nexus. this figure merely represents the identity’s discursive architecture, not its true form. as online identities can be shaped by both internal and external systems, identities are much more organic in their structural representation than figure 1 allows for. online identities exist in a state of constrained agency. each element of an online identity will be discussed in turn. figure 1. online identity assembly visual representation. 10 hall (1996) explains how identities are constructed through the differences presented to the individual from within, not outside, the discourse. furthermore, “they emerge within the play of specific modalities of power, and thus are more the product of the marking of difference and exclusion” (p. 4). online identities, in this light, cannot be considered as separate or isolated entities outside the sphere of external influence. rather, online identities are continually in state of flux within the various modalities, or stages, of assembly – what hall would refer to as “identification” – “a process of articulation, a suturing, an over-determination not a subsumption. there is always ‘too much’ or ‘too little’ – an overdetermination or a lack, but never a proper fit, a totality” (p. 3). for hall, an identity is never finalized. in the same way, online identity is continually shifting and transforming with the contexts that exist around it. nexus the nexus points represent the various structures that individuals use to identify aspects of her/himself. each nexus, a discursive formation representing the elements the user wishes to present within an osc around a particular concept or idea, is itself an assembly that can also be represented by figure 1. the nexus (and, therefore, the online identity) is never fixed. it is continually being updated, rearticulated by other osc members (that visit the user profile, post items on the user’s profile, etc.), or by the osc structure itself, when osc owners (e.g. myspace, facebook, secondlife, or google+) revise the discursive structure of the community. connections acting as connections between each of the nexus are the various discourses that inform the shape, scope, and perception of an assembled identity. these linkages are assembled through a two-step process. first, the user takes into account the various choices presented to her or him by the osc with regards to the identity assembly process. second, once the choices have been weighed, decisions are made as to what will or will not be presented as the user’s online identity. these decisions are governed by both internal and external influences. these influences could include rules, norms, intentions, motivations, other users, the osc structure, etc., acting simultaneously on the user. dimensions several dimensions inform these discourses: age, sex, gender, race, class, location, and time. it has to be remembered that, unlike in offline space, any reported identifier is wholly arbitrary, as there is 11 no way for another osc member to confirm what is purported as truth by the user. discursive faith and trust are central to the continued expansion of the osc. each of the dimensions reported here will be detailed. age refers not only to the age of the user but also the age of the viewer of the online identity, the age of the osc itself (and the version of that osc), and for how long the current online identity has been published in that particular osc. often, the reported age of an individual user via her/his online identity will invite unsolicited contact from other online identities, thereby expanding the user’s network and further assembling the user’s presented online identity. sex denotes the biological state of the user as well as the stated (often forced) binary the user chooses to designate her or himself as within the osc. this binary can shape not only the interactions with other users within the osc but also unintentionally invite marketing or advertising from third-party commerce identities within the osc. gender is the performance of self within the osc. unlike the stated age or sex, gender comes through the day-to-day decisions the user makes regarding her or his online identity, performed through the assembly of online identity in that moment. statements of race provide for online identity customization within the overall assembly and are complicated by the very ontological nature of race. in addition, the performance of race through textual or visual discourse aids in the customizable uniqueness of identity within an osc. class not only speaks to socio-economic categorization but also the choice of osc made by the user, often represented by the profile templates. in addition, class plays a large roll in determining access to the osc to begin with. location declarations refer to the osc utilized as well as the various networks within the osc the user has declared her or his self connected to. location is strictly discourse in nature, as it is strictly declared or assumed within the osc. time here includes historical, synchronous, and asynchronous moments. online identities can be assembled outside of time, as it were, initially formed then placed into the osc. once within the osc, the online identity can be acted on by any other online identity, whether or not the user is logged into the osc. though it is up to the user to accept the re-assembly offered by the other identities, the process of assembly is never-ending, further demonstrating the perpetual motion within the osc and the identity, which is part of the ever-expanding network of identities. each of these dimensions demonstrates how online identities are discursively constructed, maintained, and re-assembled through both internal and external expressions of power. these articulations (grossberg, 1986), through they are inherently temporary, can exert their own agency at both 12 individual and social levels, connecting well with hecht’s own theoretical arguments regarding identity as communication. we now turn to identity creation within an osc through the process of assembly. within an osc, the user’s online identity is continually transforming. every time the sign is accessed, it has been changed in some way. the signifier is never the same as the time before. hall discusses how an identity, “like all signifying practices … is subject to the ‘play,’ or differance. it obeys the logic of more-than-one” (hall, 1996, p. 3). the signifier (the online identity) is never fully realized as a sign. both the user and other online identities within the osc, once the profile becomes part of the greater community, have the ability to change and manipulate a particular online identity. even the act of contacting the user can change the online identity itself. other users may contact our identity assembler through email or commentary. these responses to the initial communication (the creation of the identity, as there would be not contact made if the identity had not been created in the first place), though they may or may not be returned by the user, still have an effect on the identity and the user behind it. assembly assembly signifies the process of creating and performing an identity within an osc. the user, when he or she decides to become part of an osc, is the originator of the communicative act and the starting position of the online identity. without the user, the perpetual construction of the online identity could not take place; it always in a state of “updating.” whether by the user, those who come across the user’s online presence, or the osc artifacts are being consciously added to the terrain of the profile. the online identity is in the process of becoming but never fully becomes. five steps exist within the assembly: identity genesis, identity articulation, identity culmination, identity appropriation, and identity transformation. each of these steps will be theorized in turn. genesis: coming into being—germinal thought the initialization of an online identity is the first in a long series of discourses engaged by the user. the user is informed by the desire to exist within an osc, to belong to a community or society, or even persuaded by the messages or solidarity or homogenization received through a myriad channels. these and/or other influences construct the topos from which the user decides to construct her or his digital self within the osc. similar to the author’s initial pen mark or keystroke, the user begins to construct the identity by making the decision that to exist in the osc is not only natural but, perhaps, is preferred. this decision 13 then begins a discourse cascade, where various choices – including which and how many online communities to belong to – connect to build an articulated discourse. the next step in the assembly process, articulation, further demonstrates this. articulation: individual choices and decisions about identity the first decision, once genesis has occurred, is where to begin. each identity decision comes from this first one, as each osc has its own rules that, in order to exist and thrive as an osc member, must be adhered to. it is here where the dimensions of identity come into play. often, the osc, as the administrator and hegemon, will require that these dimensions begin to be addressed and put forward within the osc. most oscs will allow you to opt out of publishing some or all of these dimensions, but they must be reported nonetheless. in this way, even within a space that has been declared as truly democratic-via-choice, control and order is maintained. each decision represents a particular discourse within the online identity, whether it signifies the user’s position on race, gender, sexuality, or social signifiers (e.g. sports teams or musical groups); these discourses then articulate the user’s online identity within the osc. following hall’s ideas on both articulation and identity, we begin to understand an online identity as a continually evolving and becoming signifier, rather than a stable discursive formation. the online identity moves through a process where the signifier is perpetually deconstructed, rearticulated, presented, and deconstructed again. once the user is satisfied with her or his initial online identity, the culmination of the process is then introduced into the osc. culmination: product—the identity you are communicating with in the osc at this step, the various discourses the user has assembled and the decisions that have been made are moved from the private to the public through the act of “publishing.” it is at this point that the osc has access to the online identity, can accept or reject it outright, and even begin customizing it per the social norms that govern the osc. unlike the publishing act that exists with other types of media, however, the online identity is never complete. it is always in the process of becoming. the culminating identity is considered as complete as it is at a particular moment in time, yet is not a finished product. due to the next step, appropriation, when the user moves the profile out into the osc, the profile can be rearticulated. 14 appropriation: social aspect – the osc appropriates the identity once the user has culminated the online identity via the articulation of countless discourses and decisions, the online identity is then placed within the osc. at the moment of entry, the user’s online identity is no longer strictly her or his own; rather, as the online identity moves further and further into the collective discourse that is the osc, it is appropriated into that particular multi-dimensional discursive architecture. consider figure 1, which represents the individual user’s assembled online identity. if an osc is a self-sustaining and systemically actualizing collection of those online identities, the overall result is a networked architecture of the various matrices (designated by figure 1), maintained by various and simultaneous communicative acts that form, as it were, an assembled osc collective online identity. users allow the appropriation of online identity consciously or unconsciously. online texts are inherently unstable. even as an individual moves to publish a document, a photograph, even a profile, that text is never fixed. in this sense, not only is a sign not fully tethered to a particular signified discourse, the sign itself can be re-articulated. a digital space allows for this cycle to exist effortlessly, fueled by the expressed agency of the user, the other osc members, and the osc’s structure itself. each of these agents focus on co-constructing the user’s online identity within the osc. transformation becomes the articulation of the online identity’s initial assembly. transformation: the osc reassembles the online identity according to its own terms of service (tos) it is at this point where the collective power of the osc is recognized. after the initial appropriation of the online identity within the osc, the user then begins a continual negotiation with not only the other users but also the osc itself. there are a series of possible reactions resulting from the transformation state. if the original assembler agrees with the resultant transformed online identity, he/she may accept the transformation of the online identity and use the transformed online identity as he/she remains in the osc. this would make the transformed online identity the new culmination and the process of appropriation and transformation is perpetuated. if the original assembler disagrees with the resultant transformed online identity, he/she may choose one of three possible decisions. first, to reconstitute the online identity at the point of articulation, reengaging the remainder of assembly process. second, remove the transformed online identity from the osc with the intent to revisit the germinal thought and begin assembly again. final option, disengage from the osc. 15 figure 2 visually represents the decision and choice process the user moves through while assembling her or his osc identity. each section represents one of the decision points within oia. decisions throughout the assembly process occur at each step as well as in between steps. the directions represent the flow of decisions from one point to the next (orange indicates internal; green indicates external). figure 2. visual representation of the identity assembly process. putting on the new lens – applying the concept to facebook though, by their very nature, discursive analytic models are tenuous at best, the following example demonstrates how an online identity can be better understood as a uniquely communicative phenomenon and act. in this case, a user identity for the facebook online social community will be explained via oia. the following case study offers an example of what can be uncovered by way of applying oia to the many iterations of facebook. genesis the user makes the choice to join an osc (in this case, facebook). this choice comes from several internal and external motivations (e.g., family has decided to join; employer is creating a web marketing strategy; partner is a member; curiosity). this initial choice creates the discursive groundwork for the online identity to be built upon. after this initial choice, more choices follow in the articulation of the online identity. articulation once the user has passed the genesis phase, the other aspects of the online identity assembly are repeatable, always culminating in a new discursive formation. the user determines how to represent her/himself within facebook. the first time the user enters facebook as a new member, the program asks for 16 first and last name, email address, sex (male or female), and date of birth. facebook (2010) states that it, “…requires all users to provide their real date of birth to encourage authenticity and provide only ageappropriate access to content. you will be able to hide this information from your profile if you wish, and its use is governed by the facebook privacy policy” (why do i need to provide my age). facebook then finds the user’s “friends” by logging into and mining the user’s email address (with permission of the user) in order to suggest friends listed in the email account that also have facebook accounts. the final two steps are the profile creation and uploading of a profile picture. through each of these steps, the user has the option to ignore, skip, or complete the categories provided by facebook. the user considers the various dimensions (presented above) as s/he initially constructs the online identity. here we see the first agency negotiation between the user and outside forces. in this case, the outside forces are 1) the osc itself (e.g., what is required and what is optional per facebook’s tos), 2) the rationale for joining (e.g., what is expected by the family, what is required by the company), and 3) the internal struggle with what the user wants this new community to know about her/him. each of these negotiations shapes the nexus and connections that form the online identity. culmination the choices made since the initial genesis involving the myriad discourses representing ideas, interests, likes, or past experiences come together here. the lists of schools and jobs, marital status, why the user is on facebook, interests (i.e. books, tv shows, movies, music, etc), and other content posted (i.e. pictures, websites, notes, etc.) negotiated through become part of the new user’s online identity. additionally, the people that the user decides to “friend,” as well as those other facebook users requesting to “friend” the new user, become part of the online identity. depending on the level of privacy chosen (the user can opt for a measure of control allowing full public viewing or restricting content to an ever decreasing circle of “friends”), others online identity choices can have a strong presence on the user’s page. the choices of the new user and the other users who have access to the page represent the discursive connections within the online identity assembly. each of the related discourses are grouped together (nexus) and tethered by the structural elements of the osc (connections). the culmination of the identity comes from the decision to present the identity as the signifying practice representing the user to the osc (publishing the profile). this assemblage of discourses is what is considered the representation of the user (the “true” identity, as it 17 were) to the other osc members. the moment the online identity is interacted with (via friend requests, postings on the profile wall, etc.), the assembled online identity moves to the fourth phase: appropriation. appropriation once the user publishes her/his profile, it is no longer the user’s property alone. as stated above, online texts are inherently unstable. nowhere is this more apparent than within facebook. as the user begins exploring the facebook, the members of facebook begin exploring her/him. adding groups, linking to other user profiles, others posting information on the user’s profile or the inclusion of more information in the form of profile updates and notes demonstrates how the online identity is continually being re-constituted by internal and external forces. the user’s profile moves through appropriation and into the final phase, transformation. transformation the user most easily recognizes this phase when s/he receives notice that facebook will be changing its layout for profiles. this scenario most easily demonstrates the permeability of the profile – that any decision made by the user her-/himself or those that have sway over the user’s profile will change the way the profile is laid out; in essence, how the user’s online identity is assembled and reassembled. this perpetual agency negotiation between internal (the user) and external forces (other users and the osc) results in the online identity never being fixed but always in a state of fluidity. once the user receives notice, s/he must negotiate the new settings, determine how to best use them to her/his advantage, and adjust the facebook profile accordingly. the final element of the process is not one of the phases above but the perpetual renegotiations that the user must go through ensuring that the facebook profile offered to the osc is an “accurate” representation of the user. as figure 2 illustrates, each of these phases is re-engaged whenever the profile is no longer “current.” given the frequency at which users will post on each other’s walls, new friends and old will find and add each other, or the news of the day changes over, this process is continually engaged. online identity assembly, as a theory, does not predict the decisions, only the path(s) the decisions could take. 18 conclusions theoretical positions are never absolute. the confluence of events in our daily lives pre-empts the ability to accurately predict how an essentialized position will hold up under the weight of discursive reality. in this light, oia theory is offered as an embrace of that very idea. online identities are tenuous articulations that are easily re-assembled. after accepting this premise, the following advantages are presented. online identity assembly provides several advantages in communication research that other theories or approaches may have not allowed for. first, oia recognizes the choices and rhetorically sensitive decisions a user makes within an osc when constructing her or his online identity, allowing for the possibility of knowing ourselves along a continuum of individual to social identities and choosing the aspects of the identity that best suit the situation. this then focuses on the communicative aspects of online identity – how we are assembled within online social communities. second, oia allows online identity to be explored and researched as lived in the osc, allowing exploration of established groups as well as newly entered/established oscs. of particular note is the inclusion of race, sex, and gender as dimensions of the online identity in oia. in current communication research on online identity, these dimensions are often assumed away or negated. finally, oia accounts for how time must be considered when addressing online identities within oscs. it is for these reasons that we present oia as an appropriate theoretical frame through which to understand online identity from a communicative perspective. oia allows for several directions of further research to be established and explored. first, issues of power and agency inherent in the process of identity assembly should be explored through posts, structural changes (like the recent and frequent tos changes profile for facebook and their affect on user profiles), or third-party advertisements that are continually updating. users may react to these changes, revisiting old decisions, making new ones, and then reassembling their online identities through a collection of new discourses and subsequent articulations. this reality reveals the system-inherent struggles between the user, other users, and the osc. second, a longitudinal study of user decisions and the rationales for those decisions would allow the researcher to explain the changes to online identities over time. in addition, such an agenda is accessible across various aspects of communication (e.g., interpersonal, small group, organizational). third, research into race, gender, age, and class identifiers within online spaces is necessary when investigating online identity. identity does not exist within a 19 vacuum, and oia allows for such an assembly of various discourses to be understood and researched as intertwined as well as continually renegotiated. online identity assembly theory is not meant to replace or negate previous online identity research within or outside the communication discipline. rather, our goal was to fill a void that we saw in the current literature as we are trying to understand presentations of online identity in the osc. oia provides scholars with a lens through which to see online identities not as static constructs but as dynamic entities. previous research aided our exploration but limitations in this research constrained our attempts to understand online identity. oia presents online identities both as a product and a process as we move to theorize about those spaces that are still unexplored. references anderson, j.a. (1996). communication theory. epistemological foundations. new york: the guilford press. bakhtin, m.m. (1982). the dialogic imagination: four essays. austin: university of texas press. carey, j.w. (2009). communication as culture (2nd ed.). new york: routledge. cerulo, k. a. (1997). identity construction. new issues, new direction. annual review of sociology, 23, 385-409. facebook (2010). why do i need to provide my age? retrieved from http://www. facebook.com. grossberg, l. (1986). on postmodernism and articulation. an interview with stuart hall. journal of communication inquiry, 10(2), 45-60. hall, s. (1996). who needs ‘identity’? in s. hall and p. du gay (eds.). questions of cultural identity london, uk: sage publications, 1-17. hecht, m.l. (1993). 2002 – a research odyssey: towards the development of a communication theory of identity. communication monographs, 60, 76-82. henderson, s., & gilding, m. (2004). ‘i’ve never clicked this much with anyone in my life’: trust and hyperpersonal communication in online friendships. new media & society, 6, 487-506. 20 kennedy, h. (2006). beyond anonymity, or future directions for internet identity research. new media & society, 8(6), 859-876. lamerichs, j., & molder, h. f. m. t. (2003). computer-mediated communication: from a cognitive to a discursive model. new media & society, 5(4), 451-473. lea, m., spears, r., & de groot, d. (2001). knowing me, knowing you: anonymity effects on social identity processes within groups. personality and social psychology bulletin, 27, 526-537. monroe, k. r., hankin, j., & van vetchen, r. b. (2000). the psychological foundations of identity politics. annual review of political science, 3, 419-447. postmes, t., & spears, r. (1998). deindividuation and antinormative behavior: a meta-analysis. psychological bulletin, 123, 238-259. sassenberg, k., & boos, m. (2003). attitude change in computer-mediated communication: effects of anonymity and category norms. group processes & intergroup relations, 6, 405-422. scott, c.r. (2007). communication and social identity theory: existing and potential connections in organization identification research. communication studies, 58(2), 123-138. turkle, s. (1995). life on the screen: identity in the age of the internet. new york: simon and schuster. vrooman, s. s. (2002). the art of invective. new media & society, 4(1), 51-70. walther, j.b. (2010). computer-mediated communication. in c.r. berger, m.e. roloff, & d.r. roskosewolden (eds.), handbook of communication science (pp. 489-505) thousand oaks, ca: sage. walther, j.b. (1996). computer-mediated communication: impersonal, interpersonal, and hyperpersonal interaction. communication research, 23(1), 3-43. microsoft word 841-585-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 who has the right to speak? the role of social media in spreading dissent among anti-nuclear groups in post 3-11japan takanori tamura, phd. lecturer, hosei university japan tamuratak@gmail.com tadahisa hamada doctoral student, university of tokyo japan hamada.tadahisa@iii.utokyo.ac.jp abstract although much previous research (for example regarding the “arab spring” of 2010) has stressed the galvanizing role played by social media in the development of social activism, in this paper we show how the use of social media in japan has actually led to a fracturing of the anti-nuclear movement following the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accidents in japan in march 2011. we argue that awareness of a specifically japanese concept prioritizing the voices of those directly affected by an accident or condition, the tōjisha, has been heightened by exchanges on social media such as twitter. we suggest that arguments among the anti-nuclear protestors over who has the most right to speak in these debates has had a debilitating effect on the anti-nuclear movement as a whole. we call for further work in japan on the way in which social media have promoted disunity and dissent among protest groups. keywords japan, internet, identity, activism, anti-nuclear following the crisis at the fukushima nuclear power plants in northern japan after the earthquake and tsunami of march 11, 2011 (3:11), many groups and activities protesting nuclear power plants have appeared. these include small groups protesting in rural prefectures as well as a national diet members’ coalition for anti-nuclear power in the nation’s capital. however, these diverse groups have experienced difficulty in forming a unified front against pro-nuclear groups because some anti-nuke groups have attacked the legitimacy of other anti-nuke groups to speak about these issues. one reasons for this lack of unity is the contention around “who has legitimacy to assert opinions about the matter” (in japanese, tōjisha). according to mark mclelland, since the 1970s, the tōjishasei (the sense of being a tōjisha) has emerged as a major rhetorical strategy in arguments about selfdetermination for “parties concerned” facing discrimination or difficulties and has now become a central concept for all self-advocacy groups in japan. tōjisha is a culturally specific concept for which finding an appropriate english equivalent phrase is difficult (mclelland 2009:193). according to mclelland (2009), the term “tōjisha” originated in the fields of law, politics, and administrative studies. prior to world war ii, in particular, the term tōjisha was most closely associated with legal studies; it referred to the people or parties directly involved in the matter, often the matter of a litigation/lawsuit. the early 1970s saw a shift in the application of the term tōjisha, beginning in the context of the women’s liberation movement and gradually expanding to the fields of social welfare and social work. the early 1980s saw a range of coalitions across different social movements representing the “socially weak,” in what can be termed a broad tōjisha undō or movement with the aim of strengthening their bargaining power vis-a-vis national and local governments. however, the premise of solidarity was shown to be somewhat fragile as conflict began to arise not only between tōjisha and hi-tōjisha (non-tōjisha) but also among tōjisha themselves. indeed, the emphasis on the degree of personal involvement has always been a fundamental tension underlying the concept of the tōjisha. accordingly, the trend since the 1990s has been to pay increased attention to the question of who exactly constitutes a tōjisha, thus questioning the tōjisha sei or “tōjisha-ness” of participants involved in advocate activities (mclelland 2009:195-7). the concept of tōjisha divides selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 tōjisha and non-tōjisha and at the same time causes a struggle among tōjisha for legitimacy. japanese sociologists have also pointed out this disadvantage of basing advocacy on the identity of the tōjisha (kawasaka 2010, hirano 2012). in this paper we focus on how debates about “tōjisha-ness” have had a debilitating effect on attempts at galvanizing mass protest against the nuclear power industry in japan. preceding studies have focused on the galvanizing effects of social media on protest groups. these include the so-called “arab spring” of 2010 (eltantawy&wiest 2011; khondker 2011; tufekci &wilson 2012) and japanese social movements using twitter and sns (gonoi 2012). however, our case study involves the disagreements that have emerged between the most influential civilian protest group, the metropolitan coalition against nukes (mcan, hereafter), and anti-mcan groups. mcan has been conducting major, long-lasting anti-nuke protest gatherings in front of the prime minister’s residence. much of the debate among conflicting anti-nuke groups is carried out via social media such as twitter. hence our methodology involves a close reading and text mining of twitter debates around the issue of tōjisha from march 17, 2011 to feb 7, 2013. we chose 453 tweets through search results from http://topsy.com/ with key words “radiation exposure” and “mcan.” we coded the text with the software, kh coder, with a coding rule that consisted of words related to the concepts, “tōjisha, “radiation exposure,” “mcan,” “censure” and “solidarity.” for example, “* tōjisha” coding rule includes a word for fukushima, mother and children. the asterisk mark means a name of a code here in after. one twitter message can be coded under plural codes. table 1 shows the matrix of co-occurring ratio of codes calculated by jaccard coefficient. it indicates high co-occurring of *radiation exposure and both *mcan (0.371) and *censure (0.338), *tōjisha and both *radiation exposure (0.323) and *mcan (0.246), *mcan and *censure (0.331). this matrix is visualized on figure 1. ＊tōjisha ＊r adiation exposure ＊m ca n ＊censure ＊ solidarity ＊tōjisha 1 0.323 0.246 0.18 0.025 ＊r adiation exposure 1 0.371 0.338 0.101 ＊m ca n 1 0.331 0.032 ＊censure 1 0.09 table 1: co-occurring ratio of codes in twitter text on “radiation exposure” and “mcan.” numbers are jaccard coefficient. figure 1: cluster analysis for twitter text on “radiation exposure” and “mcan.” bars under the code names represent sum of messages coded (＊tōjisha 126, ＊radiation exposure 366, ＊mcan 218, ＊censure 156, ＊solidarity 38, no code 19, n= 453). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 we focus our analysis on twitter in particular because of its archive of discussion among groups. we discovered that twitter plays an essential role as arena for debates around tōjisha-ness. twitter has amplified controversies over the concept of tōjisha-ness and who has the right to speak in the antinuclear movement. via this text mining we discovered that in the case of anti-nuclear activism, the “people of fukushima” are considered by some to be the real tōjisha and thus have legitimate privilege to assert their opinions on anti-nuclear issues because they or their families have directly experienced the consequences of the accident. those speaking as tōjisha or groups for tōjisha claim that mcan neglects the voices of fukushima victims, for example by not sufficiently emphasizing the fear of radiation. through these twitter debates we show that the concept of tōjisha is reflexive in that it relies on a binary between tōjisha and hi-tōjisha. tōjisha identity requires the hi-tōjisha as its opposite. harsh denial of hi-tōjisha-ness is necessary in order to assert strong tōjisha-ness. we contend that tōjishaness as a concept is a style of self-identification and as such, it incorporates a narrative of experiences according to the sociology of the self (gergen 1984:175). experiential narratives cannot be presented as logical arguments in the public sphere easily. hence, although the voices of victims are important to motivate action, arguments around the tōjisha-sei of different interest groups leads to disagreement and disunity. through our analysis we show that mcan has so far focused on a “single issue policy” that emphasizes only an anti-nuclear stance and requires no other affiliation or commitment from its participants. this broad-based platform is one reason why mcan has seen the protesters numbering in the thousands. however the fact that mcan is open to all comers based only on their anti-nuclear stance, has led to the movement’s organizers being criticized by those positioning themselves as tōjisha – those who assume the most authority to speak on the issue because of their personal involvement in the disaster. hence we show that debates over tōjisha-ness have emerged as an impediment to developing a united front against the pro-nuclear campaigners in japan. our analysis further shows that the use of social media such as twitter has heightened awareness of debates over tōjisha-ness among japanese in general. we conclude by arguing that further research is needed into the role of social media in promoting disunity among marginalized groups due to the culturally specific dynamics of the tōjisha discourse in japan. acknowledgments this presentation is an output based on the internet history in australia and the asia-pacific, 2010 – 2013, arc discovery project id: dp1092878. references eltantawy, n., & wiest, j. b. (2011). social media in the egyptian revolution: reconsidering resource mobilization theory. international journal of communication, 5, 1207–1224. gergen, k. j., & gergen, m. m. (1984). historical social psychology. lawrence erlbaum assoc inc. gonoi, ikuo j.. (2012). transformation of japanese social movement: a study of the fancy approach as “kawaii direct action”. presented at the sophia symposium east asian sociologists network japan conference at jochi univestiy nov 22, 2012.tokyo. hirano, tomoyuki. (2012). study on the definition of the people at the center of the issue as the mutual relationship : from the examination of a dialogic learning model. ningen shakai kenkyū shūroku, 7, 99–119, (in japanese).<平野智之. (2012). 「関係性としての当事者性」試論  : 対話的学習モデル の検討から. 人間社会学研究集録, 7, 99–119.> kawasaka kazuyoshi. (2010). characteristics and problems of discourse around tōjisha in gay studies, ronso kuwia, (3), 86i109, (in japanese). <川坂和義. (2010). ゲイ・スタディーズにおける「当事者」の 言説の特徴とその問題点. 論叢クィア, (3), 86–109.> selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 khondker, h. h. (2011). role of the new media in the arab spring. globalizations, 8(5), 675–679. doi:10.1080/14747731.2011.621287 mclelland, m. (2009). the role of the ‘tōjisha’ in current debates about sexual minority rights in japan. japanese studies, 29(2), 193–207. tufekci, z., & wilson, c. (2012). social media and the decision to participate in political protest: observations from tahrir square. journal of communication, 62(2), 363–379. doi:10.1111/j.14602466.2012.01629.x license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. (authors may use any license they prefer, or none at all.) microsoft word _done selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 islands of freedom: library of congress, wikileaks, and the archive imaginary john james witte university of iowa on december 3, 2010, the library of congress1 confirmed on its blog that it had blocked wikileaks from all of its internal servers, banning the site across the entirety of its computer systems and disallowing access to the site and its archives within the walls of the lc’s main reading rooms. in an official statement, the library’s then director of communications, matt raymond, insisted that the library was legally obligated to protect all classified government information, despite any unauthorized public release to which the information might have been subject. the decision to block the website was made in the wake of a series of releases from wikileaks, including more than 250,000 classified state department cablesand the additional release of 6,500 quasi-secret reports produced by the congressional research service, a subbranch of the lc meant to serve the needs of the united states congress. government employees and patrons of the library’s reading rooms, eager to stay up to date on the rapidly unfolding maelstrom of media and governmental responses to the cable releases, were greeted with the following message upon trying to access wikileaks: ad or website blocked by lc dnsbh. advertisements or websites that may be malicious are blocked. if this message appears in lieu of an advertisement (i.e. on part of the page), the advertisement site may be malicious. however the website is safe to use. if this message appears on a page by itself, the website is blocked due to potential malicious content. more information lc it security (gawker 2010) while all government institutions have pledged, in some capacity, to serve the public good; none have developed the same historical obligation as the lc to establish a universal library which is free and open to the public. not only that, but the library of congress has spent most of the last two and half decades seeking to move fully into the information age, and to establish a universal digital archive which might one day provide every single piece of information in existence to all citizens of the united states, and even other citizens of the un community. this goal has been established historically, through the library’s continual archiving of every bit of information to which it assigns a copyright—but also through the leadership of the current national librarian, james 1 hereafter referred to as lc suggested citation (apa): witte, j. (2015, october 21-24). islands of freedom: library of congress, wikileaks, and the archive imaginary. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http:// spir.aoir.org. billington, who has tirelessly worked to guide the lc into the 21st century. billington has been one of the nation’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders when it comes to the development of, as he’s called it, the “world digital library,” which he thinks of as a global democratic project meant to bridge the interests of the united states, unesco, and google (the first major donor to the wdl project). in a 2005 editorial for the washington post, billington conceptualized the wdl thusly: libraries are inherently islands of freedom and antidotes to fanaticism. they are temples of pluralism where books that contradict one another stand peacefully side by side just as intellectual antagonists work peacefully next to each other in reading rooms. (billington 2005) the inherent nature of the “island of freedom” would seem to make such an act of censorship, not only undesirable, but close to impossible for the library of congress. and yet, the very particular word choice in this passage gives us clues as to how billington is conceptualizing this particular freedom. through the accumulation of texts, a library prevents fanaticism. in billington’s framework, an archive provides us with the proof that no single viewpoint can be totally correct in its political convictions, thus providing a historical metaphor which deemphasizes any point of view which strays too far from discursive norms. however, one can see that the conceptualization of the publicly-accessible national archive leaves very little room for revolutionary literature, and even less for revolutionary literature of questionable legal status. billington may be right that libraries tend towards “freedom”, but the library of congress is no ordinary library. it is a national library with national interests, seeking to serve the “public” only in a capacity secondary to its service to the national legislature. as their mission statement makes clear: “the library's mission is to support the congress in fulfilling its constitutional duties and to further the progress of knowledge and creativity for the benefit of the american people”. in furthering the progress of knowledge, the library has articulated its need to create a comprehensive record of american history, but only after it has served the needs of the congress. wikileaks seems to bring these interests into conflict, and it is perhaps not so surprising that they chose to side with governmentality over the desire to catalog important information. and yet, it’s the peculiarly ineffective means of censorship that they chose that interests me most. patrons of the library need only to pull out their smart phones to gain access to wikileaks documents within the walls of the jefferson reading room. federal employees can access the documents from home, and, even if it were effective, the ban would only succeed in guaranteeing that those working for the lc and other branches of the federal government are less informed than members of the general public. in fact, the lc went even further than the initial network-wide ban, later labeling books about wikileaks with a cip2 keyword of “extremist website”, a cataloging label ordinarily reserved for books about white nationalism or jihadist groups. so why did the library ban wikileaks? i believe the answer to these questions has to do with competing definitions of the public-ness, a concern which is shared by both wikileaks and the library of congress to negotiate the competing ideological demands of both archive and nation, two metaphorical imaginaries with overlapping but divergent ideologies. the lc’s 2 cataloging-in-publication disciplinary action, therefore, is an attempt to claim publicity in the service of its own nationalist archive, and to discredit the claims to public good represented by wikileaks .the heart of this paper will be a comparative close reading of two specific digital archives, curated respectively by the library of congress and wikileaks. both of these archives imagine a certain type of public engagement, and position their users in relation to a body of information that prefigures democratic action. to elucidate the conflict between these parallel discursive projects, i will call upon habermasian conceptions of the public sphere as well as a variety of post-structuralist theory related to “archives” and their potential democratic effects, eventually demonstrating through this example the larger conflicts related to governmentality and digital archives in the age of networked information. references "library of congress is latest government institution to ban wikileaks." gawker. 3 nov. 2010. web. 10 dec. 2012. collins, samuel gerald. library of walls: the library of congress and the contradictions of information society. sacramento, ca: litwin books, 2009. print. billington, james. "a library for the new world."washington post, 22 nov. 2005. web. 12 dec. 2012. “classification of wikileaks as an ‘extremist web site’.”web. 10 dec. 2012. <http://wlcentral.org/node/2045>. raymond, matt. "why the library of congress is blocking wikileaks." library of congress blog. library of congress, dec 3 2010. web. 10 dec. 2012. microsoft word 796-544-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 branding the local: anti-corporate resistance in online consumer reviews abstract a textual analysis of consumer evaluations on yelp.com (n=1,972) interrogates the form and function of discursive resistance deployed by consumer reviewers. findings reveal that consumers regularly articulate a politics of consumption at the local level, namely through the explicit celebration of “localism.” in promoting local consumption, anti-corporate discourses function as a form of social responsibility, resisting cultural homogenization in users’ [offline] communities and/or by redirecting economic flows away from corporateowned business towards (ambiguously defined) “non-corporate” establishments. ultimately, however, localism is discursively constructed and performed as a consumable aesthetic that operates no differently from the corporate “brand logic” that these very reviews contest. read against jodi dean’s work on communicative capitalism, yelp’s anti-corporate/pro-local discourse fits squarely within the depoliticizing effects of neoliberal “empowered consumption,” raising a number of questions about what larger political economic changes consumer reviews can effect. keywords consumer evaluations; communicative capitalism; branding; localism introduction local listing websites like yelp, judy’s book, angie’s list and urbanspoon have become poplar spaces for consumers to create discourses through and about local consumption via electronic word-of-mouth. by design, the local focus of these sites prioritizes reviews of locally owned businesses and services, indirectly deflecting attention from widely available brands and chains. consequently, these sites (at least rhetorically) serve as virtual spaces not governed by the compromised opinions of professional reviewers and advertisers, but by reviews based on the experience of ‘real’ community members. these online local listing sites have emerged at a time when, as piselli (2007) and others argue, communities are no longer defined spatially but socially – a shift enabled by globally networked technologies and larger socio-cultural changes to the sites of social identification under advanced capitalism. in the context of myriad international political, economic and ecological disasters, the cultural value of localism has seen a recent resurgence, perhaps most notably by the mainstreaming of the localvore movement and mass marketization of “sustainable” goods. as “living local” is promoted as “the new global” (faith popcorn, 2010), online local listing sites have capitalized upon this sentimentality by offering new ways of orienting consumer markets towards locally-based “responsible” consumption. contemporarily, local consumption is thus a primary means by which neoliberal consumer-citizens seek to redress what are, ultimately, structural issues. the participatory model of these consumer evaluation sites ostensibly “re-localizes” conversation around proximate physical location. while much scholarly attention has been paid to the ways in which the participatory affordances of social platforms have reordered the relationships between producers, consumers and audiences in a globally networked society (benkler, 2006; jenkins, 2006), these affordances are relatively undertheorized as it applies to local, place-based communities. moreover, local listing sites (and consumer evaluations generally) as “social media” are comparatively understudied participatory cultures, limited largely to administrative studies that assess the effects of reviews on purchasing decisions (chevalier & mayzlin, 2006; godes & mayzlin, 2004; liu, 2006). what is less clear, however, is how reviewers talk about their consumption experiences within a strictly local context, or how these sites are deployed towards a politics of the local. through a case study of one such listing site, yelp.com, the following textual analysis asks the following questions: how do consumers construct localism in consumer reviews? to what extent, if at all, is the review space utilized to articulate a politics of consumption? if the social web can, in fact, rearrange the selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 power of traditional reputation managers, then online evaluation sites are a compelling case study for understanding how such processes unfold – specifically, at a local, place-based level. methods reviews were collected from the top 50 most reviewed business listings across three categories (food, health & medical; public service & government) on yelp across three different community types (urban, suburban, rural) yielding a total of 1,972 reviews. using the method of qualitative textual analysis (graneheim & lundman, 2004), reviews were coded, categorized and developed into themes using “localism” as a sensitizing construct. codes sharing notable commonalities were collapsed into categories, which continued to be refined throughout the analytical process until no new codes emerged (baptiste, 2001, p. 10). through the method of constant comparison (glaser & strauss, 1967), similarities and differences between reviews and data samples were assessed in the generation of themes. constant comparison involves the systematic comparison of texts within and between their assigned categories “in order to fully understand the theoretical properties of the category” (zhang & wildemuth, p. 4); thus, reviews and themes were consistently compared and contrasted, discarded, discounted, narrowed, expanded, refined and re-thought the data through all stages of the analytical process. findings yelp successfully subsumes localism within a “brand logic” (arvidsson, 2007). as brands construct the “life-world” around a particular firm, reviewers discursively construct localism in a similar manner: as an experiential, consumable aesthetic that conjures a certain “feeling” of connectedness with a particular place that may or may not actually relate to one’s community of residence. as a consumable experience, localism is abstracted from a politically active state or practice; here, the ability to reconnect consumers to their community ultimately serves to disconnect consumers from politics. as experienced within the boundaries of a specific place, consumers do not actually have to engage in any practices beyond obtaining or consuming the right commodity sign. more than anything, therefore, localism on yelp is somewhat delimited to a fashionable trend; yelpers are often more likely to celebrate the consumption experience than to identify their role as active community agents. similarly, consumer reviews as expressions of lifestyle politics also appears in the articulations of the “local.” despite celebrating local businesses as desirable community resources, most do not note the importance of “local” as explicitly tied to material issues of production, sourcing, and ownership; instead, localism is discursively constructed as a consumable aesthetic that re-situates the local’s political potential into consumerism’s romantic ethos of individualism, desire and consumer choice. while yelp offers a useful resource for guiding one through responsible consumption practices, reviews tend to overwhelmingly read more like a guide for participating in the right kind of taste cultures above and beyond political possibilities. finally, findings also raise the issue of who can claim localism for themselves, as to consume “locally” is dictated by exclusivity – by class, ethnic and other cultural designations are oftentimes deployed in contradistinction to “real” locals. localism as an experiential quality, vibe or consumable “experience” undermines the construct as an active practice even as its celebration democratizes the reputation of independently owned businesses by redirecting attention from corporate chains. functioning in service of communicative capitalism (dean, 2010), anti-corporate critiques ultimately do not serve as a form of direct public pressure or viable replacement for lobbying or protest; corporate power remains uncontested. thus, deploying localism as a brand strategy problematically minimizes localism’s role in the larger political economy by obfuscating not only the relations of production and consumption from public consciousness, but the processes necessary to effect long-term, sustainable change. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 references arvidsson, a. (2006). brands: meaning and value in media culture: routledge: new york. baptiste, i. (2001). qualitative data analysis: common phases, strategic differences. forum: qualitative social research, 2(3). benkler, y. (2006). the wealth of networks. new haven: yale university press. bourdieu, p. (1986). distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste. london: routledge. chevalier, j. a., & mayzlin, d. (2006). the effect of word of mouth on sales: online book reviews. journal of marketing research, 43(3), 345-354. duan, w., gu, b., & whinston, a. (2008). do online reviews matter? an empirical investigation of panel data. decision support systems, 45(4), 1007-1016. glaser, b.g. & a. strauss (1967). discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. new york: aldine. graneheim u.h. & lundman b. (2004) qualitative content analysis in nursing research: concepts, procedures and measures to achieve trustworthiness. nurse education today, 24, 105–112. jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york: nyu press. liu, y. (2006). word of mouth for movies: its dynamics and impact on box office revenue. journal of marketing, 70(3) 74–89. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 playing with social network sites: actual & ideal selves kelly boudreau, phd concordia university, montreal, canada shanly dixon, phd concordia university, montreal, canada abstract digitally mediated social network sites can be conceived as ‘sandbox games’ where users can play with and perform identity in a variety of ways. this paper will look at the ways in which facebook and pinterest offer two different platforms for identity play with both actual and idealized forms of selves through the posting and framing of personal information and the (re)appropriation of pre-existing content on the internet. in doing so, it will be demonstrated that it is possible for hybrid-identity to emerge and stabilize through the archival nature of the internet. keywords identity; play; social network sites; sns. introduction while it has been acknowledged that play is an integral part of identity development in research on both youth and adults (pelligrini, 2009; piaget, 1962), identity in a digitally mediated, networked society has become an increasingly complex concept, straddling both the physical and digital world, pushing the boundaries of the self, identity (both social and individual) (robinson, 2007), and established identity theory (burke, 2003; eriksson, 1959/1994; stryker, 1994). as our leisure and social interactions become increasingly mediated by technology, we must reassess the process of identity construction and performance to reflect the new ways people interact and play in and with a technologically mediated world. understanding digitally mediated play as an assemblage of ‘actors’ (taylor, 2009) within a cybernetic process (giddings & kennedy, 2008; hayles, 1999), the contributing elements of the networked process of play in online environments include, but is not limited to, the user, the individual specificities of the technology that facilitates play, and the social and structural context of the online environment and other users that share the network. in order to distinguish potentially new types of identities facilitated by online play, it is imperative that we disentangle the elements within the network to determine their potential contribution to the complex process of identity development in online play. networked & hybrid-identities through research on the player-avatar relationship in massively multi-player online role-playing games (mmorpg) (boudreau, 2007) and single-player videogames (boudreau, 2012), it has been established that “hybrid-identity” has the potential to develop given certain perimeters and conditions. boudreau defines hybrid-identity as an identity that emerges through the networked process of videogame play which exists between the player and the avatar (or player-character), but does not reside in or belong to either. during videogame play, hybrid-identity is often ephemeral, unstable and intangible. it is difficult to point to a particular moment in gameplay and identify the presence of hybrid-identity, yet its presence is undeniably felt as something ‘more than’ the player or the avatar as distinctly unique entities. employing the analytic framework presented in boudreau’s work (2007; 2012), this paper will examine the ways in which people ‘play’ on and with the social networking sites as opposed to selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 playing structured, pre-defined games that are most often associated with ‘social gaming’ on social networking sites (such as pioneer trail, mafia wars, etc.). through a content analysis of ten (10) facebook profiles and the users’ pinterest accounts, accounting for similarities and differences between user content on both sites, it will be demonstrated that different forms of networked and hybrid-identities can exist for the same person in different contexts online. facebook & pinterest while videogame-play typically offers players a defined purpose, goals, and delineated tasks, set within a contained narrative, social network sites such as facebook and pinterest could be considered ‘sandbox games’ where users can create and play with content without the limitations of a prepackaged game. although bound by the technological and structural constraints of each site, the user is able to present their interests, thoughts, and aspirations through text, images, and the reappropriation of online content. whether or not the user is consciously playing with their identity, (their every-day, fictionalized, or idealized versions of self, or any variation in-between), through the selection, organization, and presentation of content, users play with both the social networking site as well as with a constantly changing version of various selves and identities. for almost 10 years, facebook has been enabling individuals to upload images, post status updates and share a broad range of information all of which form versions of their online identity. structured around the concept of ‘friends’, users invite people to have access to their account and accept (or deny) invitations to be friends with other users. users have control over who can view and interact with the content they share by being able to create varying levels of access for different groups of ‘friends’. this gives the user the ability to manage what parts of their identity is shared with which group at any given time. drawing on research that focuses on identity and impression management on facebook (back, stopfer, vazire, gaddis, scmukle, egloff, and gosling, 2010; farnham and churchill, 2011; hogan, 2010; rosenberg and egbert, 2011), it can be argued that content posted to facebook is often connected to the user’s actual or ‘everyday’ identities. while the research on identity and impression management and pinterest is limited and often interwoven within other topics such as digital literacies (tekobbe, 2013), a quick glance at the content posted by users tells a different story. organized by thematic interests such as fashion, technology, architecture, and art, etc., pinterest, is structured around the concept of bulletin boards where users are able to ‘pin’ images (either uploaded or found on the internet) and add a 500 character description of the image. although predominantly open (public), pinterest does have a several privacy tools such as the ability to lock a board or to block specific users. when looking through topical pins and other users’ boards, users can opt to “like” or “repin” other people’s images as well as post a comment. in the case of repining, users re-appropriate images for their own purposes, often changing the description from the person the pin was appropriated from to reflect the user’s interest in and context of the image. in this way, it could be argued that content on pinterest is still connected to the user’s everyday identity in that pins reflect the user’s interests. however, pinterest can also be seen as a place for user’s to map out ideal versions of self, expressing potential future identities through the pinning of images of dream homes, weddings, bodies, technologies, etc, rather than (re)creating or sharing an archive of an existing self as is often seen on facebook with photos of family vacations, social parties, home renovations, etc. conclusions both sites act as an archive of complex identity performances through the creation and sharing of content, but in two distinctly different ways. facebook offers users a place to share content (and in turn, identities) with selected users often drawing on past and current lived experiences. whereas the structure of pinterest promotes a more public platform where users can browse strangers’ pins through the topic-driven menu built into the user interface able to view and share idealized versions of themselves and others. in both cases, the digital archive of images and text can be seen as a tangible, stable – albeit ever-changing – hybrid-identity that exists between the user, the content they choose to create and share, and the network within which they share it. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 references back, d. m., stopfer, j. m., vazire, s., gaddis, s., scmukle, s. c., egloff, b., & gosling, s. d. (2010). facebook profiles reflect actual personality, not self-idealization. psychological science, 21(3). 372-374. boudreau, k. (2012). between play and design: emergent identities in single-player videogames. forthcoming doctoral dissertation, université de montréal, canada. boudreau, k. (2007). pixels, parts & pieces: constructing digital identity. saarbrücken, germany: vdm verlag dr. mueller. burke, p. j. (2003). relationships among multiple identities. in p. j. burke, t. j. owens, r. t., & p. a. thoits (eds), advances in identity theory and research (pp.195-214), new york, ny: kluwer academic/plenum publishers. erikson, e. (1959/1994). identity and the life cycle. new york, ny; w. w. norton & company inc. farnham, s. d., & churchill, e. f. (2011). faceted identity faceted lives: social and technical issues with being yourself online. cscw ’11 proceedings of the acm 2011 conference on computer supported cooperative work, pp. 359-368. acm: new york, ny. giddings, s., & kennedy, h. (2008). ‘little jesuses’ and ‘fuck-off robots’: aesthetics, cybernetics, and not being very good at lego star wars. in melanie swalwell & jason wilson (eds.) the pleasure of computer gaming: essays on cultural history, theory and aesthetics (pp. 13-32). jefferson, nc: mcfarland & co. hayles, k. n. (1999). how we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. chicago: the university of chicago press. hogan, b. (2010). the presentation of self in the age of social media: distinguishing performances and exhibitions online. bulletin of science technology, 30(6). 377-386. piaget, j. (1962). play, dreams and imitation in childhood. new york: norton. pelligrini, a. (2009). the role of play in human development. oxford scholarship online monographs. 87-114(28). robinson, l. (2007). the cyberself: the self-ing project goes online, symbolic interaction in the digital age. new media and society, 9(1), 93-110. rosenberg, j., & egbert, n. (2011). online impression management: personality traits and concerns for secondary goals as predictors of self-presentation tactics on facebook. journal of computer mediated communication, 17(1), 1-18. serpe & p. a. thoits (eds), advances in identity theory and research. in new york, ny: kluwer academic/plenum publishers. stryker, s. (1994). identity theory: developments and extensions. in t. m. honess & k. m. yardley (eds.), self and identity: psychological perspectives (pp.89-104). new york: wiley. taylor, t.l., (2009). the assemblage of play. games and culture, 4(4), 331-339. tekobbe, c. k. (2012). a sight for fresh eyes: pinterest’s challenge to ‘traditional’ digital literacies. information, communication & society, 1-16. doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2012.756052 this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 adoption and adaptation: diachronic perspectives on the growing sophistication of social media uses in elections campaigns anders olof larsson university of oslo, norway axel bruns queensland university of technology, australia much like the internet itself during the mid-1990s, social media such as twitter and facebook have now become standard tools in a number of professional contexts. in doing so, they have undergone gradual processes of adoption and adaptation, as their potential uses are explored, evaluated, and revised over time, and as the insights gained by early adopters are disseminated to other potential users. but because of the slow and incremental nature of such adoption and adaptation processes, they are often overlooked by social media research which examines single cases and phenomena. such tendencies are perhaps most evident in relation to the study of political elections: here, the effective use of social media by the successful obama campaign in the 2008 us presidential election is often positioned as an obvious starting point for mainstream political uses of contemporary social media platforms such as facebook and twitter, creating the impression that its strategies emerged fully formed rather than themselves building on the lessons learnt from previous campaigns, and that subsequent campaigns merely needed to copy obama’s successful formula in their own electioneering efforts (e.g miller, 2013). such simplistic perspectives overlook, however, that each election campaign proceeds from its own underlying factors (such as the persona of the candidate and their position in the polls) and that the idiosyncratic us electoral system diverges vastly from those of most other parliamentary democracies (thus requiring very different campaigning styles). what worked for obama campaigning for direct election in a two-person content where voting is voluntary is unlikely to work in a multi-party system whose leaders are indirectly elected and where voting is compulsory, for example (e.g. gibson & mcallister, 2014). there is, therefore, a significant need for research into social media campaigning strategies beyond the us context, and over the past years aoir and other conferences have already seen a substantial number of such studies being presented. however, the bulk of research into these issues has continued to be designed as single-country or single-election case studies, providing useful findings but lacking a longitudinal, 2 diachronic, or comparative perspective that would be able to trace any developmental trends in political social media use between or during elections. this panel seeks to remedy this dearth of research by featuring several diachronic approaches to the study of online political communication during elections, and by thus enabling a comparative perspective on the gradual adoption and adaptation of social media for political campaigning across a range of national contexts. specifically, the panel presents research into the political uses of social media for campaigning in four different countries: australia, sweden, the usa, and italy. in combination, these four presentations provide an overview over a diverse range of contexts, and offer new insights into the ways that electoral and political systems as well as the current political standing of key parties and candidates affect the evolution of social media campaigning strategies. references gibson, r. k., & mcallister, i. (2014). normalising or equalising party competition? assessing the impact of the web on election campaigning. forthcoming in political studies. miller, w. j. (2013). we can't all be obama: the use of new media in modern political campaigns. journal of political marketing, 12(4), 326-347 paper i: comparing social media use during two swedish elections anders olof larsson university of oslo, norway much of the hype surrounding social media and their uses for electoral purposes has originated from a us context. while the technological infrastructures and affordances associated with services like facebook and twitter remain largely the same across political contexts, the actual use of these services tend to differ in some regard from country to country (e.g. karlsen, 2012). we could also expect to find such differences from one election to another within one specific country. the current paper, then, details such diachronic developments by presenting analyses of social media use by parties and citizens during two consecutive elections for the swedish parliament – the riksdag. given the country´s “avant-garde position regarding internet access” and consistent high scores of voting attendance (gustafsson, 2012: 1111), the swedish context arguably becomes especially interesting to study in this regard. the fact that swedish parties and politicians appear to have been early adopters of online technologies for campaigning purposes (gibson, 2004) makes such a focus even more relevant – have the early adopters kept their progressive attitude intact also in the so-called 2.0 era of web design and practice? specifically, then, what is presented here are a series of analyses detailing the development of social media use by parties and citizens during the 2010 and 2014 swedish elections. the focus on parties rather than individual politicians is motivated by the fact that sweden features a political system largely centered on parties – another 3 potentially interesting comparative aspect to some of the other countries included in the panel application to which this paper belong. the subsequent sections provide brief outlines of the findings to be presented at the conference. the 2010 and 2014 swedish elections on twitter the employment of twitter hashtags – thematic keywords indicating tweets with similar content – has become an established practice for users to participate in tweeting on a specific theme. such practices have become common also in the swedish political context, where we analyze tweets sent during a month-long period before each studied election, including the most prolific hashtags for each of the two events (2010: n= 99 832; 2014: n=248 091). the featured approach builds on the study of several recent election campaigns in scandinavia (e.g. larsson and moe, 2012; moe and larsson, 2012). our basic assumption is that during the period of study, twitter went from creating ‘buzz’ as a novel channel in 2010, to becoming something of a stable of political campaigning by 2014, with more established patterns of use, more mature – more everyday like, maybe even mundane – for politicians and their campaigners, for activists, as well as for politically inclined citizens. while the volume of tweets and users did indeed increase between elections, the types of users who gain the most traction in the hashtagged traffic studied largely remain the same – mostly journalists, politicians, party accounts and other already established societal actors. moreover, while the 2010 period saw mostly undirected tweets being sent (60.2 %), the 2014 election saw retweets as the most common type (59.6 %). as such, while we are seeing mostly similar user groups engaging to larger extent across elections, this engagement appears to have taken more redistributive tendencies as retweets rise in popularity – mostly strengthening the positions of those already holding roles in civil society. the 2010 and 2014 swedish elections on facebook while it has been suggested that the uses of twitter at the hands of politicians have received relatively little scholarly attention (bekafigo and mcbride, 2013), even less work has arguably been performed looking into the uses of the often more popular facebook platform (bruns, 2011). adopting conceptual notions of permanent campaigning, suggesting intensive communicative efforts by political actors also outside of election seasons (elmer, langlois, and mckelvey, 2012; larsson, 2014), the facebook portion of the suggested presentation is focused on providing overarching insights into uses of the platform at hand by swedish political parties during and inbetween the two elections. specifically, we distinguish between the activities undertaken by incumbent and challenger parties, where the latter group have often been pointed to as having especially valid reasons to partake online in this regard (e.g. strandberg, 2013). the study also takes citizens into account, by assessing the types of feedback received. for this purpose, we differentiate between so-called ‘likes’, ‘shares’ and ‘comments’. the main findings indicate that while less established actors show tendencies towards a more permanent employment of facebook, their established competitors are generally more successful in gaining leverage on the platform. throughout the studied periods, the right-wing populist sweden democrat party emerge as particularly popular – mirroring findings from other contexts (e.g. jackson and lilleker, 2009). in comparison with twitter, then, this particular party does not enjoy 4 such popularity on the former of these platforms – a result that suggests rather different user groups populate the services studied. by comparing usage and tendencies across platforms, user groups and elections, the current presentation will provide useful insights into the applications of social media in a unique context. indeed, rather few cross-platform studies have been provided previously. in sum, then, results suggest that while twitter appears almost as an “echochamber” for societal elites, the analyzed facebook data tell a somewhat different story given the popularity of the sweden democrats. while it would be an overstatement to suggest dramatic differences across the platforms in this regard, the swedish context features clear examples of differing user groups being activated in relation to political party accounts – with certain implications for political discourse. references bekafigo, m. a., & mcbride, a. (2013). who tweets about politics? political participation of twitter users during the 2011 gubernatorial elections. social science computer review, 0(0), 1-19. bruns, a. (2011). how long is a tweet? mapping dynamic conversation networks on twitter using gawk and gephi. information, communication & society, 15(9), 1323-1351. elmer, g., langlois, g., & mckelvey, f. (2012). the permanent campaign : new media, new politics. new york, ny: peter lang. gibson, r. (2004). web campaigning from a global perspective. asia-pacific review, 11(1), 95 126. gustafsson, n. (2012). the subtle nature of facebook politics: swedish social network site users and political participation. new media & society, 14(7), 1111-1127. jackson, n. a., & lilleker, d. g. (2009). building an architecture of participation? political parties and web 2.0 in britain. journal of information technology & politics, 6(3), 232 250. karlsen, r. (2012). obama's online success and european party organizations: adoption and adaptation of us online practices in the norwegian labor party. journal of information technology & politics, 121121091903003. larsson, a. o. (2014). online, all the time? a quantitative assessment of the permanent campaign on facebook. new media & society. larsson, a. o., & moe, h. (2012). studying political microblogging: twitter users in the 2010 swedish election campaign. new media & society, 14(5), 729-747. moe, h., & larsson, a. o. (2012). twitterbruk under valgkampen 2011. norsk medietidsskrift, 19(2), 151-162. strandberg, k. (2013). a social media revolution or just a case of history repeating itself? the use of social media in the 2011 finnish parliamentary elections. new media & society, 15(8), 1329-1347. 5 paper ii: social media in selected australian federal and state election campaigns, 2010-15 axel bruns queensland university of technology, australia tim highfield queensland university of technology, australia campaigning in australian election campaigns at local, state, and federal levels is fundamentally affected by the fact that voting is compulsory in australia, with citizens who are found to have failed to cast their vote subject to fines. this means that contrary to the situation in most other nations elections are decided not by which candidate or party has managed to encourage the largest number of nominal supporters to make the effort to cast their vote, but by some 10-20% of genuine ‘swinging voters’ who change their party preferences from one election to the next. political campaigning is thus aimed less at existing party supporters (so-called ‘rusted on’ voters whose continued support for the party is essentially taken for granted) than at this genuinely undecided middle of the electorate. over the past decades, this has resulted in a comparatively timid, vague campaigning style from both major party blocs (the progressive australian labor party [alp] and the conservative coalition of the liberal and national parties [l/np]). election commitments that run the risk of being seen as too partisan and ideological are avoided as they could scare away swinging voters, and recent elections have been fought as much (or more) on the basis of party leaders’ perceived personas as they have on stated policies, even though australia uses a parliamentary system in which the prime minister and state premiers are elected by their party room rather than directly by voters. at the same time, this perceived lack of distinctiveness in policies between the major parties has also enabled the emergence of new, smaller parties which (under australia’s westminster-derived political system) have no hope of gaining a parliamentary majority but could, in a close election, come to hold the balance of power and thus exert disproportionate influence on a government which relies on their support. social media have emerged as political campaigning tools in australia since youtube was first used by the major parties, with varying success, to disseminate campaign statements during the 2007 federal election campaign (see flew, 2008), with blogs also adopted (kimber, 2012). the leading contemporary platforms, facebook and twitter (respectively with some 13m and 2.8m australian accounts, in a population of 23m australians), have featured in federal and state campaigns since 2010 (see, for example, jericho, 2012; chen, 2015; young, 2011). over time, a number of strategies for using such platforms have emerged, and distinctions in the strategies adopted can be discerned based on a number of factors, including for example the technological affordances and social network structures of specific platforms; the overall electoral standing of parties; the projected personas of party leaders; the social media affinity of 6 parties and candidates; and the positioning of individual candidates as prominent party leaders or comparatively unknown politicians from the parliamentary backbenches. this paper presents evidence from a longitudinal study of twitter use by political parties and candidates especially during the 2010 and 2013 federal and 2012 and 2015 queensland state election campaigns, with additional data drawn from the 2013 western australia state campaign. we focus on twitter both because of its more public and more real-time nature, and because of the significant technical and ethical issues associated with extracting comparable data from facebook (where politicians’ pages are still operated at least in part as personal profiles rather than public pages, and where data gathering would thus be severely affected by the facebook networks of the researcher gathering the data) but also because twitter has by now become a very central space for public political communication in australia: well over half of all federal and queensland state parliamentarians now operate twitter accounts, as did an even greater majority of major and minor party candidates during recent elections. during the 2013 federal and 2015 queensland campaigns, we captured all tweets from and @mentions of all of the candidates’ known twitter accounts (442 accounts for the federal election, 158 accounts in queensland), as well as the prominent hashtags #ausvotes and #qldvotes, providing an exceptionally detailed perspective of party and candidate activities and their resonance with the wider public. we compare this perspective with the respective previous campaigns in 2010 and 2012, where we tracked a smaller sample of accounts (focussing on party leaders and other prominent politicians) as well as the #ausvotes and #qldvotes hashtags, and the 2013 western australian election (for candidate accounts and #wavotes alike). although these earlier datasets are necessarily more limited, and cannot retrospectively be extended to encompass a scope similar to the more recent election datasets (due to the welldocumented limitations of retrieving historical twitter data), they nonetheless serve as highly valuable points of comparison to these recent elections: the aim of our research is not to merely explore the quantitative differences between each set of elections, but instead to address the more important qualitative differences between the social media campaigning approaches adopted especially by the major parties from one election to the next. to do so, we employ a multi-method approach that connects the quantitative evaluation of the patterns that emerge from our analysis of the twitter datasets themselves with a close reading of the contemporary media coverage of the political context in general and of the mainstream and social media campaigns in particular. this enables us not only to document what campaigning strategies the parties and candidates employed in each case, but also to infer why they made these specific choices; from election to election, we are also able to test whether in similar circumstances, parties make similar campaigning choices. for example, preliminary analysis of the social media data on the 2015 queensland election (held on 31 jan. 2015) shows exceptionally strong activity by and public engagement with the backbench candidates fielded by labor which had suffered a historic defeat in the 2012 election (where it was reduced to only seven mps in an 89member parliament), but which in 2015 won 44 seats and was able to return to government with the support of an independent mp. we observed similarly strong 7 engagement with labor backbenchers during the 2010 and 2013 federal campaigns, both of which saw labor lose seats and eventually (in 2013) also lose government. it appears even from this very preliminary analysis that labor has gradually realised the value of strong social media campaigning by backbenchers in their local electorates if not to retain or win government, then at least to limit the size of its defeat. by contrast, the 2015 queensland l/np campaign on twitter was very restrained, with few tweets by frontand backbenchers alike and thus also much more limited public engagement by ordinary twitter users. this is markedly different from the l/np’s 2013 federal campaign, which saw much more forceful activity from the party’s leadership team, yet also very little independent activity from backbenchers, who mainly only retweeted key party messages. this points to a more economical campaigning approach which focusses only on winnable contests and promotes closely stagemanaged party content only where such material is likely to be met with a sympathetic response; this would explain why the party adopted a more active twitter stance during the ultimately successful 2013 federal campaign, while it went to ground rather than expose its twitter accounts to public criticism during the unsuccessful 2015 queensland state election. it should be noted that such explanations are necessarily tentative at this stage; as only one month has passed since the queensland election date we have not yet been able to process the full dataset in comprehensive detail, and to compare our findings with those from previous elections. such work will continue over the coming months, and more detailed findings and interpretations will be presented in the final paper. references chen, p. j. (2015). new media in the electoral context: the new normal. in c. johnson & j. wanna (eds.), abbott’s gambit: the 2013 australian federal election (pp. 81–94). canberra: anu press. flew, t. (2008). not yet the internet election: online media, political commentary and the 2007 australian federal election. media international australia incorporating culture and policy, (126), 5–13. jericho, g. (2012). the rise of the fifth estate: social media and blogging in australian politics. melbourne: scribe. kimber, m. (2012). blogging the 2009 queensland state election. media international australia incorporating culture and policy, (145), 75-85. young, s. (2011). how australia decides: election reporting and the media. cambridge: cambridge university press. paper iii: how it begins is not how it ends: u.s. gubernatorial campaign messaging on social media over time jennifer stromer-galley syracuse university, usa 8 kate kenski university of arizona, usa jeff hemsley syracuse university, usa lauren bryant university at albany-suny, usa huichuan xiu syracuse university, usa bryan semaan syracuse university, usa research on political campaigns in the united states has identified four major stages of political campaigns: the surfacing stage, the primary stage, nominating conventions, and the general election (trent, friedenberg, & denton, 2011). however, these stages do not reflect the more nuanced communicative strategies that campaigns deploy at these stages, and especially the changes in campaign dynamics that occur during the general election, as campaigns move from the early part of the general election campaign, through the debate period, and into the final days before and during voting. prior research suggests that campaigns have turned to social media to engage in a variety of different messaging strategies, from strategic messaging about policy and attack on opponents, image construction of the candidate, get-out-the vote and mobilization requests, fundraising appeals, and information sharing about the campaign (gainous & wagner, 2014). our qualitative observations of 79 candidates who ran for governor in 36 states across the united states suggest that that there are distinct messaging phases that campaigns deploy via social media that reflect and react to the exigencies and the external forces that are dictated by the temporal aspects of election season, which in turn shape campaign messaging. prior research also suggests that although at one time republicans at the presidential level engaged in greater innovation and openness to use new digital communication technologies in 1996 and 2000, by 2004 democrats had surpassed and continued to be more likely to innovate (kriess, 2012; stromer-galley, 2014). moreover, research on the elections in 2006 and 2008 (williams & gulati, 2013) as well as scholarship on prior presidential elections (stromer-galley, 2014) also suggests that challengers are more likely to innovate using digital communication technologies. this study examines whether democrats and challengers continued to be more innovative--innovation for us operationalized as using social media for a variety of distinct strategic messaging types over the course of the general election cycle. we also ask whether there are differences in the types of message strategies between twitter and facebook over the course of the general election campaign. using an open source toolkit (hemsley, ceskavich, tanupabrungsun, 2014), we collected the facebook and twitter messages produced by the campaign and candidate 9 accounts of 79 viable candidates who ran for governor. this included all of the republican and democratic general election candidates as well as five third-party candidates who received at least 5% of support in credible public opinion polls. the collections started september 15th when all states had completed their primaries and shifted into the general election phase, and continued through november 7th, three days after the election. the final corpus consists of approximately 500,000 tweets and 300,000 facebook messages collected over eight weeks. we systematically content analyzed a sample of messages on each platform. we pulled a random sample of 30% of messages on twitter and on facebook for each week (7 days) of the general election, starting september 15th. we developed a codebook, and trained six coders to identify the categories, which included coding for: attack, advocacy, and contrastive strategic messaging, and further identifying if these were on the image of the candidate or on issues and policies; calls to action, including digital engagement, traditional engagement, watching media appearances and debates, and voting; informative messages, including campaign events, information on polling places, registering, or voting, and sharing informational materials from the campaign, or commentaries or news pieces from other sources; conversational messages, which are direct messages to supporters in response to a message they received; and ceremonial messages that honored religious holidays or particular groups or celebrated voting or discussed the outcomes of the election. after coders were trained, intercoder agreement was assessed on a 10% sample of twitter and of facebook messages, and intercoder agreement levels met or exceeded .75 using krippendorff's alpha. although we have not finished analysis yet, preliminary observations suggests that there are distinct messaging phases of the general election, with candidates in the early phases discussing more of their policies and images, and in the last days of the campaign focusing heavily on messages encouraging people to vote and reminding them about where to get voting information. in the weeks in october, some campaigns are more likely to shift into attack mode, and most campaigns encourage supporters to attend campaign events, read news articles about the campaign, watch the candidates during debates, and generally get involved and get their friends involved. one surprising finding is that we do not see much use of social media for campaign fundraising efforts. if this finding bears out in the more complete analysis of this data, it would suggest that unlike in the campaign of 2004 when candidates, such as howard dean, used his message board to engage in heavy fundraising (stromer-galley & baker, 2006), campaigns are not using social media for heavy fundraising. we expect these results to help give a more complete understanding of the ways that campaigns are using social media for campaigning, recognizing the temporal nature of campaigns that are reacting to the stage or phase of the campaign they are in during the general election. we will also connect our findings with prior scholarship on u.s. political campaigns to draw some larger conclusions about the stages of campaigning in the united states and what is changing and what is staying the same in the ways campaigns are using social media. references 10 gainous, j., & wagner, k. m. (2014). tweeting to power: the social media revolution in american politics. new york: oxford university press. hemsley, j., ceskavich, b., tanupabrungsun, s. (2014). stack (version 1.0). syracuse university, school of information studies. retrieved from https://github.com/bitslabsyr/stack doi: 10.5281/zenodo.12388 kreiss, d. (2012). taking our country back: the crafting of networked politics from howard dean to barack obama. new york: oxford university press. stromer-galley, j. (2014). presidential campaigning in the internet age. new york: oxford university press. stromer-galley, j., & baker, a. b. (2006). joy and sorrow of interactivity on the campaign trail: blogs in the primary campaign of howard dean. in a. p. williams & j. c. tedesco (eds.), the internet election: perspectives on the web in campaign 2004 (pp. 111-131). lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. trent, j., friedenberg, r., & denton, r. e. (2011). political campaign communication: principles and practices (7th ed). new york: rowman & littlefield publishers, inc. williams, c. b., & gulati, g. j. (2013). social networks in political campaigns: facebook and the congressional elections of 2006 and 2008. new media & society, 15, 5271. paper iv: political use of social media in italy a longitudinal perspective luca rossi it university of copenhagen, denmark fabio giglietto university of urbino, italy despite the political use of social media received an unprecedented amount of scholarly attention during 2013 general elections (vaccari 2013, vaccari & valeriani 2013, ceron et al. 2013, iannelli & giglietto 2013) it would be wrong to assume that social media represent a novelty in the italian political landscape. in this paper we will frame social media within a longitudinal perspective that goes from blogs to twitter, in the context of italian political communication. data are framed within the national context of internet adoption and attitudes towards political participation. in other terms social media are not intended as intended isolated but are described as part of the larger media arena where citizens can acquire political knowledge and participate in the political process at various scale (norris 2000, vaccari 2013). the italian case the adoption of internet technologies in italy is extremely diversified. while tv is still considered the main source of news (vaccari 2013), online sources show a steady increment and are perceived as “important” by 60% of the population surpassing radio and newspapers (news italia 2014). overall, internet use is still low: 62% of the whole 11 population – among the lowest in europe with little diffusion of social network sites (36%) and social media (29%) (vaccari 2013). despite those figures, a pew research from 2012 reported that 36% of italian social media users, the second highest percentage among western democracies, are engaged in political discussion. the opportunities of political participation offered by social media appear to be central in a context where the ties between media and politics have been extremely pervasive and have generated a high level of media partisanship (vaccari 2013). this exasperated media environment, together with a long wave of scandals and economic crisis, caused a soaring distrust toward parties and politicians (vaccari 2013). blogs, facebook and twitter between political communication and participation within the described scenario, social media have been used, from a political perspective, both as a way for politicians to have a direct communication channel with potential voters bypassing a partisan mass media system and as a way for disenchanted citizens to debate political topic outside of the political arenas. within a longitudinal perspective of social media, from blogs to facebook and twitter, these two dimensions seem to coexist instead of being connected to a specific platform. at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, following the success of howard dean’s blog for america (kerbel & bloom 2005, lawson-borders & kirk 2005), blogs arrived in italy as “new thing” for political communication. besides the presupposed interaction with potential voters, blogs have been largely used as a way for politicians to have a more active role within the definition of media agenda or to overcome the filter represented by traditional mass media (bentivegna & russo 2012). while, from a quantitative perspective, the phenomenon has never fully exploded with just 139 (out of 951) mps actively blogging in 2012 (bentivegna & russo 2012) there has been at least one case that proved how blogs have been successfully used to set an alternative agenda for political activities. beppe grillo, a former comedian and actor, started in 2005 his personal blog where he launched several political campaigns. due to the general ostracism that beppe grillo was suffering from italian mass media his blog, despite the complete absence of interaction between the comedian and his readership, acted as an alternative communication space characterized by its independence from established media and political power (rossi & boccia artieri 2014). marked by an intense political agenda, mainly addressed against the established political system, beppe grillo’s blog acted as initial political platform for the “five stars movement”, the brand new party that in 2013 was as the largest party in italian chamber of deputies (bordignon and ceccarini 2013). when facebook and twitter entered the national political arena during 2013 general elections they made visible a wider range of communication strategies ranging from the use of social media as additional channels of communication, to more interactive ways to engage citizens and potential voters. while blogs have had a minor quantitative success, facebook and twitter are largely used among italian politicians with over 200 facebook pages counting more than 10,000 likes and with every major political leader with an active twitter account (vaccari & valeriani 2013). the wide adoption of facebook and twitter among politicians (and among media 12 political elites in general) allowed the emergence of new and unprecedented forms of political communication. moving beyond a simple opposition between social media used to have direct access to voters and social media used by citizens to debate political issues, contemporary use of facebook and twitter shows how social media have become fully integrated with the larger media ecosystem where journalists, politicians and citizens are actively engaged. facebook pages against or supporting a specific political issue as well as twitter-hashtag launched to debate specific political topic or to protest against an incoming law are just two examples of how contemporary social media allow political participation through and in the media as recently described by carpentier, dahlgren and pasquali (2013). the final paper will go through several example of participation through and in the media focusing on the progressive integration of social media within the larger media ecosystem. references bentivegna, s., russo, e., la blogosfera parlamentare tra retorica dell'interattività e self promotion in parlamento 2.0: strategie di comunicazione politica in internet. bordignon, f., & ceccarini, l. (2013). five stars and a cricket. beppe grillo shakes italian politics. south european society and politics, 18(4), 427-449. carpentier, n., dahlgren, p., & pasquali, f. (2013). waves of media democratization a brief history of contemporary participatory practices in the media sphere. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 19(3), 287-294. ceron, a., curini, l., iacus, s. m., & porro, g. (2014). every tweet counts? how sentiment analysis of social media can improve our knowledge of citizens’ political preferences with an application to italy and france. new media & society, 16(2), 340-358. iannelli, l., & giglietto, f. (2015). hybrid spaces of politics: the 2013 general elections in italy, between talk shows and twitter. forthcoming in information, communication & society. kerbel, m. r., & bloom, j. d. (2005). blog for america and civic involvement. the harvard international journal of press/politics, 10(4), 3-27. lawson-borders, g., & kirk, r. (2005). blogs in campaign communication. american behavioral scientist, 49(4), 548-559. news italia (2014). media digitali, atteggiamenti ed opinioni degli italiani su un sistema dell’informazione che cambia, news italia, (april 20, 2014), http://newsitalia.it/2014/04/30/media-digitali-atteggiamenti-ed-opinioni-degli-italiani-su-unsistema-dellinformazione-che-cambia/ (accessed on 23 february 2015) norris, p. (2000). a virtuous circle: political communications in postindustrial societies. cambridge university press. pew research center (2012), social networking popular across globe, pew research center, washington, d.c. (february 1, 2011), http://www.pewglobal.org/2012/12/12/social-networking-popular-across-globe/ (accessed on 23, february 2015) vaccari, c. (2012). from echo chamber to persuasive device? rethinking the role of the internet in campaigns. new media & society, 15(1), 109-127. 13 vaccari, c. (2013). digital politics in western democracies: a comparative study. jhu press. vaccari, c., & valeriani, a. (2013). follow the leader! direct and indirect flows of political communication during the 2013 general election campaign. forthcoming in new media & society. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  carmi,  e.,  gehl,  r.,  sullivan,  j.,  burk,  d.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  network   standards  and  culture.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  conference  of  the  association  of   internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.   network  standards  and  culture       elinor  carmi,  goldsmiths,  university  of  london.   robert  w.  gehl,  the  university  of  utah   john  l.  sullivan,  muhlenberg  college   dan  l.  burk,  university  of  california,  irvine     media  networks  are  complex  assemblages  that  connect  different  kinds  of  humans  and   objects  together,  and  involve  multiple  actors,  materials,  intentions  and  products.   standards  are  usually  meant  to  make  technical  artefacts,  protocols,  features  and   infrastructures  operate  in  an  efficient  and  uniform  way.  in  this  way,  standards  become   taken  for  granted,  and  the  rules  they  structure  are  seen  as  the  natural  and  only  way  to   engage  with  media.  but  behind  such  norms  lay  political,  ideological  and  cultural   struggles  of  power  between  different  interests  group  that  range  between  individuals,   private  companies,  governments,  ngos  and  legal  entities.  these  multiple  actors   compete  over  a  dominant  position  in  the  media  industry  and  their  ability  to  influence,   control  and  shape  the  way  that  people  use  and  understand  media  and  communications.   this  panel  seeks  to  unveil  these  invisible  codes  and  the  conflicts,  incentives  and  politics   that  lead  to  their  formation.       specifically,  elinor  carmi's  paper  examines  the  european  union's  cookie  regulations,   focusing  on  the  construction  of  standards  that  allow  for  the  distinctions  between  cookies   and  spam.  robert  w.  gehl's  paper  takes  on  a  similar  object,  but  in  the  context  of  the   united  states,  looking  at  the  digital  advertising  alliance's  self-­regulatory  standards,   which  purportedly  limit  the  online  advertising  industry's  capacity  to  monitor  internet   users.  john  sullivan  tackles  the  proposed  html5  standard  for  "encrypted  media   extensions."  finally,  dan  burk  considers  the  legal  and  technical  questions  of   interoperability  in  smartphone  platform  and  networking  standards.         2 1.  eat  me!  spam  versus  cookies  in  the  politics  of  the   european  union  internet.       elinor  carmi,   goldsmiths,  university  of  london.       introduction       this  paper  examines  the  struggles  between  the  european  union  and  private  companies   when  it  comes  to  internet  definitions  and  standards,  while  looking  at  spam  and  web-­ cookies  as  a  case  study.  telecommunications  in  europe  were  controlled  by  national   monopolies  until  the  end  of  the  1980s.  according  to  savin  (2014),  this  was  a  slow   transition  of  territorial  powers,  characterized  by  a  struggle  over  authority  on   telecommunications  policy  between  the  european  commission  and  national  postal,   telegraph  and  telecommunications  administrations  (ptts)  who  wanted  to  keep  the   status  quo  of  their  position  within  the  media  sector.  as  savin  argues,  “[m]ember  states   were  not  readily  willing  to  abandon  their  monopolies  and  were  by  and  large  not   supportive  of  the  commission’s  initiative.  the  late  1980s  and  early  1990s  saw  an   increasingly  complex  web  of  proposed  and  adopted  directives,  a  tug  of  war  between  the   commission  and  the  member  states,  of  governmental  and  non-­governmental  actors”   (savin,  2014,  p.  3).     the  mid  1980s,  as  linda  senden  (2005)  observes,  were  also  characterized  by  a   change  in  the  european  community  (changed  to  the  european  union  in  1993,  following   the  maastricht  treaty)  approach  to  legislation  towards  ‘soft-­law’.  this  approach  means   that  the  main  instruments  of  governance  in  the  european  union  are  co-­regulation  and   self-­regulation.  these  instruments  have  no  legally  binding  force,  and  yet  still  hold  a  legal   effect.  this  approach  is  usually  contrasted  with  ‘hard  law’,  a  ‘legally  binding  obligations   that  are  precise  (or  can  be  made  precise  through  adjudication  or  the  issuance  of   detailed  regulations)’  (abbott  and  snidal,  2000,  p.  421).  among  other  reasons,  the   transition  to  soft-­law  is  the  acknowledgment  that  legislation  is  not  sufficient  to  govern   specific  sectors,  especially  when  it  comes  to  the  internet  which  crosses  states   territoriality.       in  the  european  union,  this  power  conflict  becomes  complicated  as  actors  who  are   involved  in  creating  internet  standards,  protocols  and  enforcement  negotiate  between   member  states,  zooming  out  to  the  european  commission,  and  to  global  actors  such  as   the  international  telecommunication  union  (itu),  the  world  wide  web  consortium   (w3c),  the  internet  corporation  for  assigned  names  and  numbers  (icann)  and  the   internet  engineering  task  force  (ietf).  most  of  these  organizations  were  founded  and   based  in  the  u.s.a,  and  receive  criticism  on  the  centrality  of  the  values,  language  and   standards  that  stems  from  that  region,  which  consequently  project  on  the  global  internet   (denardis,  2009,  p.  37).  these  struggles  are  often  termed  ‘internet  governance’,  which   “designates  the  technoeconomic  and  legal  issues  arising  from  any  decisions,  de  facto  or   3 by  law,  that  affect  the  design,  access,  and  use  of  the  internet  as  a  specific  sort  of   communication  network  architecture”  (franklin,  2013,  p.  138).  this  paper  argues  that   under  the  european  union’s  soft-­law  approach,  other  organizations  have  a  say  in  the   way  that  the  internet  operates,  its  standards,  and  architecture.       as  media  companies  struggle  with  states,  when  it  comes  to  creating  and  enforcing   definitions,  standards  and  infrastructure,  it  is  important  for  media  scholars  to  engage   with  legal  and  technical  texts  in  order  to  shine  a  light  on  procedures  that  establish  the   way  people  use  and  understand  media  and  communication.  spam  is  a  good  case  study   to  focus  on  as  a  phenomenon  that  has  been  taken  for  granted  as  an  unwanted   behaviour  on  the  internet.  this  category  is  usually  invisible  and  hidden  from  users,  but   while  most  people  think  it  means  viagra  and  nigerian  princess  scam  emails,  it  actually   has  no  clear  definition  within  legislation.  in  european  union  legislation,  spam  is  not   directly  addressed  or  defined.  this  makes  spam  unique  because  both  law  makers  and   computer  scientists  need  specific  definitions  of  categories  to  make  their  laws  and  codes   operational.     this  paper  examines  how  unwanted  forms  of  communications  are  categorized  as  spam   while  others  as  cookies,  and  what  are  the  consequences  of  such  a  process.  i  conduct   policy  analysis  of  european  union  legislation  related  to  spam  and  cookies,  mainly  by   the  european  commission,  the  organization  for  economic  co-­operation  and   development  (oecd),  and  the  article  29  working  party1  (a29wp).  in  addition,  i   examine  technical  documents  of  the  internet  standards  organisation  the  internet   engineering  task  force  (ietf)  and  the  world  wide  web  consortium  (w3).         spamalot       media  law  literature  has  given  little  attention  to  spam.  the  most  notable  exception  is   finn  brunton  (2013),  who  gives  some  account  of  spam  related  laws,  focussing  on  north   america  and  especially  on  the  can  spam  act  in  2003.  milton  mueller  (2010),   discusses  internet  governance,  and  gives  some  account  to  spam  blacklists,  but  adopts   the  common  notion  that  spam  mainly  relates  to  emails.  another  important  contribution  is   lodewijk  asscher  and  sjo  hoogcarspel’s  (2006)  piece  on  spam  regulation  in  the   european  union  context,  which  however  analyzes  the  e-­privacy  directive  through  a   legal  lens  and  thus  provides  limited  understanding  of  spam  as  a  media  phenomenon.       another  body  of  literature  related  to  spam  comes  from  media  studies  and  information   security,  and  involves  various  practices  conducted  on  the  internet,  which  are  usually   associated  with  the  category  of  spam  as  a  verb;;  political  economy  (parikka  &  sampson,   2009;;  brunton,  2013),  hacking  (galloway,  2004;;  coleman,  2013),  anti-­virus  companies   1  european  advisory  body  which  consists  data  protection  authority  representative  from  each  of  the   member  states,  and  was  founded  following  article  29  of  the  data  protection  directive  (95/46/ec).  the   main  goal  of  this  body  is  to  provide  opinions  and  recommendations  to  the  european  commission  in   regards  to  data  protection.   4 (helmreich,  2000),  and  socialbots  (gehl,  2013;;  bucher,  2014).  these  various  directions   do  not  always  touch  spam  directly  but  are  interpreted  as  such  in  different  discourses   and  consequently  point  to  avenues  in  categorizing  different  forms  of  information.         what’s  on  the  menu?       these  authors  provide  important  insights  to  the  field  of  spam;;  however,  they  tend  to   automatically  adopt  computer  scientists’  definitions  of  spam  without  questioning  them.   in  the  field  of  computer  science,  spam  is  usually  defined  in  a  binary  way  of  spam/non-­ spam,  but  as  will  be  shown;;  this  distinction  is  more  nuanced,  and  subjected  to  debate   and  power  struggles.  this  paper  will  address  these  issues  and  show  how  spam  and   cookies  are  important  to  the  construction  of  the  european  union  internet.  this  paper   argues  that  the  european  union’s  soft-­law  approach,  that  prioritizes  private  actors’  self   regulation  by  adopting  their  standards,  protocols  and  enforcement,  contributes  to  the   institutionalization  of  e-­commerce.         references       abbott,  k.  w.,  &  snidal,  d.  (2000).  hard  and  soft  law  in  international   governance.  international  organization,  54(03),  421-­456.       asscher,  h.,  &  hoogcarspel,  s.  (2006).  a  european  perspective  after  the  adoption  of   the  e-­privacy  directive.  the  hague.       brunton,  f.  (2013).  spam:  a  shadow  history  of  the  internet.  mit  press.       bucher,  t.  (2014).  about  a  bot:  hoax,  fake,  performance  art.  m/c  journal,17(3).       coleman,  e.  g.  (2013).  coding  freedom:  the  ethics  and  aesthetics  of  hacking.   princeton  university  press.       denardis,  l.  (2009).  protocol  politics:  the  globalization  of  internet  governance.  mit   press.       franklin,  m.  i.  (2013).  digital  dilemmas:  power,  resistance,  and  the  internet.  oxford   university  press.     5   galloway,  a.  r.  (2004).  protocol:  how  control  exists  after  decentralization.  mit  press.       gehl,  r.  w.  (2013).  the  computerized  socialbot  turing  test:  new  technologies  of   noopower.  available  at  ssrn  2280240.       helmreich,  s.  (2000).  flexible  infections:  computer  viruses,  human  bodies,  nation-­ states,  evolutionary  capitalism.  science,  technology  &  human  values,  25(4),  472-­491.       mueller,  m.  l.  (2010).  networks  and  states:  the  global  politics  of  internet  governance.   mit  press.       parikka,  j.,  &  sampson,  t.  d.  (eds.).  (2009).  the  spam  book:  on  viruses,  porn,  and   other  anomalies  from  the  dark  side  of  digital  culture.  hampton  press.       savin,  a.  (2014).  how  europe  formulates  internet  policy.  internet  policy  review,  3.   available  at:  http://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/how-­europe-­formulates-­internet-­ policy.         senden,  l.  a.  (2005).  soft  law,  self-­regulation  and  co-­regulation  in  european  law:  where   do  they  meet?.  electronic  journal  of  comparative  law,  9(1),  available  at:   http://www.ejcl.org/91/abs91-­3.html.         6 2.  standards,  self-­regulation,  and  swarms:  the  case  of   the  digital  advertising  alliance     robert  w.  gehl   the  university  of  utah       abstract       this  essay  explores  the  digital  advertising  alliance  (daa),  an  online  advertising  and   marketing  trade  consortium  comprised  of  seven  organizations:  the  better  business   bureau  (bbb),  the  direct  marketing  association  (dma),  the  network  advertising   initiative  (nai),  the  4as  (an  advertising  agency  trade  group),  the  association  of  national   advertisers  (ana),  the  american  advertising  federation  (aaf),  and  the  interactive   advertising  bureau  (iab).  together  under  the  aegis  of  the  daa,  these  organizations   and  their  members  represent  a  massive  percentage  of  the  global  advertising  and   marketing  industry,  an  industry  based  on  sophisticated  tracking  technologies,  practices   of  profiling  consumers,  and  increasingly  precise  customization  of  ads,  sales  pitches,   pricing  schemes,  and  product  offerings  (turow,  2011).       this  paper  considers  the  daa  as  a  standards  organization.  the  daa  sets  rules  and   protocols  for  the  u.s.'s  online  advertising  industry.  it  does  so  as  a  "self-­regulatory"   body,  meaning  it  regulates  its  members  to  avoid  having  the  u.s.  government  do  so.  the   daa's  standards  are  thus  a  point  of  contact  between  it,  its  members,  online  consumers,   and  the  u.s.  government.     this  paper  thus  focuses  on  the  technical,  social,  and  political  aspects  of  the  daa   standards,  specifically  its  opt-­out  cookie  system  (available  at  aboutads.info/choices).  i   will  argue  that  the  daa's  opt-­out  system  is  designed  to  extend  and  maintain  the  power   of  advertising  in  the  political  economy  of  the  internet  in  two  key  ways.  first,  the  daa   seeks  to  present  its  system  as  a  singularity  when  it  is  arguing  for  the  effectiveness  of  its   self-­regulation.  the  daa  refers  federal  regulators  to  its  opt-­out  system,  making  claims   about  it  being  a  single,  easy-­to-­use,  consumer-­friendly  system,  thus  negating  the  need   for  other  efforts  (such  as  do  not  track  headers).  so  far,  this  argument  has  helped  stave   off  u.s.  government  regulation  of  online  advertising.     however,  i  will  also  argue  that  the  daa's  standards  often  deploys  multiplicity  and   heterogeneity  in  service  to  its  overall  associating  practices.  specifically,  i  will  closely   examine  the  structure  of  the  daa  opt-­out  system,  noting  how  its  seeming  singularity   dissolves  into  a  swarm  when  actual  consumers  confront  it.  for  consumers,  the  daa   system  is  baroque  and  confusing,  with  over  150  cookies  to  be  installed  on  each  and   7 every  end-­user  device.  each  advertising  network  is  allowed  to  implement  the  opt-­out   standards  in  different  ways,  leading  to  diffusion  rather  than  rigidly  structured  practices.     at  the  core  of  this,  i  argue,  are  the  daa  standards,  which  are  a  sophisticated  mix  of   specified  technical  procedures  and  flexibility,  allowing  for  the  daa  to  support  its  claims   about  self-­regulation  while  allowing  its  members  enough  flexibility  to  continually   innovate  new  surveillance  techniques  even  in  the  face  of  consumer  rejection  of  online   tracking.     to  do  this  work,  i  will  deploy  two  concepts  from  actor-­network  theory  (ant),   punctualization  and  depunctualization,  as  key  lenses  through  which  to  see  the  shifting   contours  of  the  digital  advertising  association  as  it  confronts  other  actor-­networks.  as   such,  in  addition  to  being  a  contribution  to  scholarship  on  standards,  the  paper   contributes  to  ant.  specifically,  i  argue  that  ant  scholarship  on  organizations  tends  to   be  biased  towards  those  organizations  that  successfully  punctualize  –  that  is,   successfully  cohere  into  an  organization.  in  this  view,  an  organization  that  fails  is  said  to   have  "depunctualized."  against  this,  drawing  on  the  work  of  john  law  and  annmarie   mol,  i  argue  that  the  daa  is  capable  of  depunctualizating  –  that  is,  becoming  a  swarm  –   at  key  moments.  in  other  words,  it  sometimes  use  messiness  and  incoherence  in  its   overall  mission  to  maintain  its  role  as  the  spokes-­thing  for  the  online  advertising   industry.  it  falls  apart  in  order  to  cohere.  this  theoretical  point  is  often  lost  in  ant  work   on  organizations.   the  empirical  data  for  this  project  comes  from  press  releases,  legislative  testimony,  and   the  architectural  and  technical  structures  of  the  daa  and  daa-­member  web  sites.  i  will   also  draw  on  the  scholarly  literature  on  online  advertising,  human-­computer  interaction,   and  standards  consortia.  my  ultimate  argument  is  that  ant  scholarship  must  consider   how  standards  are  just  as  much  about  deploying  heterogeneity  as  they  are  about   cohering  and  channeling  practices  into  durable  singularities.       references       turow,  j.  (2011).  the  daily  you:  how  the  new  advertising  industry  is  defining  your   identity  and  your  worth.  new  haven:  yale  university  press.     8 3.  technical  and  ethical  discourses  in  web   standardizaion:  the  case  of  encrypted  media  extension   (eme)  and  html5     john  l.  sullivan   muhlenberg  college       technical  standardization  has  been  key  for  efficiency  and  ease  of  information  exchange   among  inter-­connected  systems.  standards  are  “specifications  that  determine  the   compatibility  of  different  products”  (stango,  2004,  p.  2).  as  russell  (2014,  p.  16)   describes,  standards  can  also  describe  “a  social  process  by  which  humans  come  to   take  things  for  granted.  through  standardization,  inventions  become  commonplace,   novelties  become  mundane,  and  the  local  becomes  universal.”  standardization  is  the   term  that  therefore  “describes  the  process  of  making  standards  –  a  process  that  entails   a  wide  range  of  practices  and  ideas  with  distinct  political,  economic,  and  cultural   dimensions”  (p.  17).  in  line  with  this  socio-­technical  approach  to  standardization  (busch,   2011;;  denardis,  2011;;  russell,  2014;;  sutor,  2011),  i  consider  the  process  of  web   standardization  and  the  complex  interplay  of  competing  discourses  about  the  nature  of   standardization  itself.       this  essay  explores  the  debates  surrounding  the  recent  introduction  of  a  controversial   feature  within  the  html5  web  standard,  the  latest  version  of  the  hypertext  markup   language  that  acts  as  a  universal  standard  for  rendering  webpages  on  the  world  wide   web.  the  html5  standard  was  developed  beginning  in  2003  under  the  auspices  of  the   world  wide  web  consortium  (w3c),  a  non-­profit  consortium  founded  by  tim  berners-­ lee  in  1994  to  guide  the  development  of  standards  for  the  web.  the  w3c  is  made  up  of   member  organizations,  including  universities,  non-­profit  foundations,  ngos,  and   technology  corporations.       html5  is  the  central  linchpin  in  the  seamless  operation  of  the  web,  but  its  importance   goes  beyond  rendering  webpages.  html5  represents  the  vision  of  a  unified  online   content  experience  that  extends  from  computers  to  mobile  platforms.  as  schrock  (2014,   p.  821)  has  argued,  html5  “creates  a  common  platform  for  producing  mobile  software   that  runs  across  multiple  smart  phones  and  tablets  that  alternately  pushes  against  and   aligns  with  corporate  desires  and  ideologies.”  given  the  fact  that  the  html5  protocol  is   the  core  standard  at  the  heart  of  the  world  wide  web  –  the  “lingua  franca”  for  the  internet   –  it  is  notable  that  its  development  has  received  relatively  little  attention  by  scholars  (for   good  examples  see  goggin,  2010;;  horst,  2013;;  russell,  2011;;  schrock,  2014).  while   previous  research  by  schrock  has  explored  the  concept  of  “openness”  in  the   development  of  the  html5  protocol  and  the  corporate  imperatives  for  the  development   of  a  cross-­platform  web  experience,  my  focus  here  is  on  the  competing  discourses  of   standardization  within  the  w3c.     9   a  moment  of  standardization:  encrypted  media  extensions  (eme)       this  essay  considers  an  episode  in  the  development  history  of  the  html5  standard,   specifically  the  introduction  of  “encrypted  media  extensions”  (eme)  in  2012-­13.  on   february  21,  2012,  a  proposal  to  implement  eme  within  the  html5  standard  was   distributed  via  email  to  members  of  the  html  working  group  of  the  w3c  (dashevsky,   2013).  the  technical  document,  authored  by  four  representatives  from  google,   microsoft,  and  netflix,  proposed  to  eliminate  the  need  for  end  users  to  install  browser   plugins  such  as  flash  or  silverlight  by  allowing  pockets  of  proprietary  software  to  run   within  the  open  html5  standard  for  the  purpose  of  protecting  copyrighted  audio  and   video  (dorwin,  smith,  watson,  &  bateman,  2015).  the  proposal  caused  considerable   controversy  among  the  members  of  the  working  group  (constantin,  2012).  proponents   argued  that  the  inclusion  of  <video>  and  <audio>  tags  within  html5  would  accomplish   two  key  aims:  (1)  it  would  create  a  single,  seamless  web  experience  across  desktop   and  mobile  web  platforms,  enabling  web  advertising  to  reach  users  easily  (something  of   immense  importance  to  technology  companies  like  google);;  and  (2)  it  would  ensure  the   protection  of  copyright  by  allowing  streaming  web  content  providers  like  netflix  (and,  by   extension,  media  corporations  and  other  content  providers)  to  effectively  track  and   prevent  the  unauthorized  distribution  of  copyright-­protected  content  online.       opponents,  on  the  other  hand,  argued  that  the  inclusion  of  a  “man  in  the  middle”  black   box  engine  within  html5  ran  counter  to  the  very  definition  of  openness  that  web-­ founder  tim  berners-­lee  had  pursued  since  1994.  additionally,  they  pointed  to  security   and  privacy  issues  raised  by  eme,  such  as:  (1)  user-­specific  information  being   disclosed  to  the  eme  (and  thereby  also  the  streaming  media  provider);;  and  (2)  the   storage  of  user  viewing  and  personal  data  on  the  user’s  device,  which  would  enable  a   third  party  to  track  the  end  user’s  viewing  habits  and/or  their  movements  on  the  internet.   eme,  they  argued,  would  place  the  onus  for  protecting  end  user  privacy  on  the  content   decryption  software  and  the  “user  agent”  (or  web  browser).  this  language  shifted   responsibility  for  handling  security  and  user  privacy  away  from  html5  and  placed  it  in   the  hands  of  the  companies  that  are  providing  the  drm  for  online  media  content.  this   raised  the  possibility  that  companies  providing  access  to  copyrighted  content  via  web   streaming  over  html5  could  potentially  gather  users’  personal  information  and  track   them  or  target  them  with  advertising.  for  months,  a  vigorous  debate  ensued  among  the   members  of  the  “public-­html-­media”  mailing  list  among  members  of  the  working  group.   digital  rights  advocacy  groups  such  as  the  free  software  foundation  (fsf)  and  the   electronic  frontier  foundation  (eff)  mounted  intensive  lobbying  efforts  to  pressure  the   w3c  into  abandoning  the  proposal  (o’brien,  2013;;  paul,  2013),  but  they  were  ultimately   unsuccessful.  in  late  2013,  by  a  majority  vote  and  with  the  tacit  blessing  of  berners-­lee,   the  w3c  voted  to  adopt  eme  into  the  html5  standard.       technical  vs.  ethical  discourse  frames  of  standardization       10   in  this  essay,  i  explore  the  types  of  discourse  surrounding  standardization  that  emerged   during  the  debate  over  eme.  i  conducted  a  qualitative  content  analysis  of  relevant   emails  exchanged  on  the  public  mailing  lists  of  the  w3c  beginning  with  the  release  of   the  working  draft  of  the  eme  in  february  of  2012  until  the  formal  adoption  of  eme  into   the  html5  standard  in  october  of  2013.  emails  that  constituted  bug  reports  were   eliminated  from  the  sample.  my  analysis  of  these  online  exchanges  reveals  that  the   discourse  among  the  html  working  group  members  regarding  eme  demonstrated  two   competing  frames.  advocates  of  the  eme  proposal  adopted  a  narrow  technical  frame  by   arguing  that  their  job  was  to  support  the  core  interoperability  of  the  web  by  mobile  users   to  access  drm-­protected  content.  these  individuals  (many,  though  not  all,  from  giant   tech  firms  like  google  and  microsoft)  construed  the  aim  of  w3c  in  purely  technical   terms  by  arguing  that  it  should  not  “make  policy”  but  should  instead  support  the  status   quo  of  drm  on  the  web.  opponents  of  the  eme  proposal,  however,  framed  their  own   efforts  –  and  those  of  the  w3c  –  within  a  broader  ethical  context.  they  argued  that  the   w3c’s  centrality  in  recommending  web  standards  placed  a  special  onus  on  its  members   to  consider  not  just  market  efficiency  and  consumer  desires,  but  to  preserve  the   openness  of  the  standard  and  to  protect  end  user  privacy.  the  debate  over  eme   illustrates  a  fundamental  incompatibility  between  two  core  aims  of  the  w3c:   interoperability  and  openness.  the  debate  over  eme  also  laid  bare  an  internal  struggle   over  the  meaning  of  standardization  in  a  world  of  interconnected  technology.         references       busch,  l.  (2011).  standards:  recipes  for  reality.  cambridge,  ma:  mit  press.  retrieved   from  http://site.ebrary.com/lib/alltitles/docdetail.action?docid=10509223       constantin,  l.  (2012,  february  24).  proposed  encrypted  media  support  in  html5   sparks  drm  debate  on  w3c  mailing  list.  retrieved  from   http://www.itworld.com/article/2729888/enterprise-­software/proposed-­encrypted-­ media-­support-­in-­html5-­sparks-­drm-­debate-­on-­w3c-­mailing-­list.html.         dashevsky,  e.  (2013,  july  19).  advocates  call  for  a  netflix  boycott  amidst  controversy   about  html5  video  standards.  retrieved  from   http://www.techhive.com/article/2044754/advocates-­call-­for-­a-­netflix-­boycott-­ amidst-­controversy-­about-­html5-­video-­standards.html.         denardis,  l.  (ed.).  (2011).  opening  standards:  the  global  politics  of  interoperability.   cambridge,  ma:  the  mit  press.       11 dorwin,  d.,  smith,  j.,  watson,  m.,  &  bateman,  a.  (2015,  march  31).  encrypted  media   extensions.  retrieved  july  19,  2015,  from  http://www.w3.org/tr/encrypted-­ media/.         goggin,  g.  (2010).  global  mobile  media.  london:  routledge.       horst,  h.  a.  (2013).  the  infrastructures  of  mobile  media:  towards  a  future  research   agenda.  mobile  media  &  communication,  1(1),  147–152.   http://doi.org/10.1177/2050157912464490.         o’brien,  d.  (2013,  october  2).  lowering  your  standards:  drm  and  the  future  of  the   w3c.  retrieved  from  https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/lowering-­your-­ standards.         paul,  i.  (2013,  october  4).  web’s  gatekeepers  embrace  drm  for  next  html5  standard.   retrieved  from  http://www.pcworld.com/article/2052148/webs-­gatekeepers-­ embrace-­drm-­for-­next-­html5-­standard.html.         russell,  a.  l.  (2011).  constructing  legitimacy:  the  w3c’s  patent  policy.  in  l.  denardis   (ed.),  opening  standards:  the  global  politics  of  interoperability  (pp.  159–176).   cambridge,  ma:  the  mit  press.       russell,  a.  l.  (2014).  open  standards  and  the  digital  age:  history,  ideology,  and   networks.  new  york,  ny:  cambridge  university  press.       schrock,  a.  r.  (2014).  html5  and  openness  in  mobile  platforms.  continuum,  28(6),   820–834.  http://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2014.941333.         stango,  v.  (2004).  the  economics  of  standards  wars.  the  economics  of  standards   wars,  3(1),  1–19.  http://doi.org/10.2202/1446-­9022.1040.         sutor,  r.  s.  (2011).  software  standards,  openness,  and  interoperability.  in  l.  denardis   (ed.),  opening  standards:  the  global  politics  of  interoperability  (pp.  209–217).   cambridge,  ma:  the  mit  press.       12 4.  legal  and  technical  standards  in  the  “smartphone   wars”.     dan  l.  burk   university  of  california,  irvine       introduction       late  twentieth-­century  commentary  on  internet  access  optimistically  advocated  a  new   era  of  open  standards  arising  from  the  “end  to  end”  architecture  of  the  network  (lemley   &  lessig,  2001;;  benkler,  2006,  p.  392-­413).    the  terms  of  such  discussions  have   changed  radically  as  common  information  and  communication  functions  have  migrated   to  the  widely  used  hand-­held  computers  popularly  dubbed  “smartphones;;”  these   operate  partially  or  wholly  on  proprietary  spectrum  channels.    establishing  common   technical  standards  among  such  devices  is  crucial  to  hardware,  software,  and   connective  compatibility;;  devices  that  are  not  interoperable  are  for  all  practical  purposes   both  functionally  and  economically  disabled.           where  such  interoperability  is  at  stake,  the  technology  will  tend  to  converge  on  a  single   widespread  standard.  (shapiro  &  varian,  1999,  p.45–46)  some  relevant  technical   standards  arise  from  collective  adoption  of  particular  technological  features,  but  many   others  are  deliberately  determined  by  private,  governmental,  or  quasi-­governmental   standard-­setting  organizations  (ssos).  (carrier,  2009,  p.  325)    either  de  facto   convergence  or  deliberate  standard-­setting  creates  the  environment  for  what   economists  dub  “network  effects:”  the  dominant  technical  standard  becomes   increasingly  valuable  as  additional  users  adopt  it,  conforming  to  the  standard.  (lemley  &   mcgowan,  1998)  competitors  must  adopt  the  chosen  technical  standard  in  order  for   their  products  to  interoperate  with  one  another;;  products  that  do  not  conform  to  the   standard  are  effectively  excluded  from  the  market.           patented  standards       when  network  effects  are  present,  the  exclusive  rights  granted  under  intellectual   property  regimes,  such  as  patent  law,  become  highly  problematic.    adoption  of  a   patented  technical  standard  potentially  grants  the  patent  owner  enormous  economic   leverage:  legally  excluding  a  competitor  from  use  of  the  standard  effectively  excludes  it   from  technical  interoperability,  and  from  the  marketplace.  (farrell  et  al.,  2007,  p.  616)     consequently,  ssos  routinely  require  that  the  owners  of  technical  standards  that  are   covered  by  intellectual  property  rights  must,  if  the  standard  is  adopted,  license  the   intellectual  property  to  all  interested  users  on  “fair,  reasonable,  and  non-­discriminatory”   (frand)  terms  (miller  2007).       13     in  theory,  acceptance  of  this  requirement  by  a  patent  holder  should  ensure  all   competing  developers  access  to  the  technical  standard.    however,  terms  such  as  “fair”   and  “reasonable”  are  heavily  value-­laden,  entailing  a  range  of  possible  expectations.     additionally,  ssos  seldom  specify  either  the  exact  definitions  of  such  terms  or  any  sort   of  framework  from  which  such  definitions  might  be  derived.    in  other  words,   standardized  agreements  on  which  access  to  technical  standards  might  be  based  have   yet  to  emerge.           both  honest  disagreement  as  to  the  proper  content  of  frand  licenses,  as  well  as   strategic  manipulation  of  ambiguities  in  the  norms  of  frand  negotiation,  have  led  to  a   decade  of  intensive,  pervasive,  and  globalized  disputes  between  major  smartphone   manufacturers.    such  legal  interventions  have  become  a  key  to  controlling  technical   standards,  shaping  the  market  for  smartphones,  and  defining  the  relationship  between   competing  producers.       competing  legal  cultures       these  so-­called  “smartphone  wars”  have  played  out  in  a  variety  of  fora,  requiring  courts   to  define  the  normative  expectations  that  have  eluded  private  negotiation.    not   surprisingly,  the  resolution  of  such  disputes  differs  between  courts  of  the  different   jurisdictions  in  which  the  smartphone  wars  have  been  fought,  reflecting  the  differing   political,  legal,  and  economic  cultures  of  each  forum.      nowhere  has  this  been  more   explicit  than  in  the  radically  different  treatment  of  injunctive  relief  in  parallel  legal   proceedings  in  the  united  states  and  in  germany.    these  two  jurisdictions  have  been   the  key  battlegrounds  in  the  smartphone  wars,  and  the  treatment  of  standard  essential   patents  and  related  frand  licenses  could  hardly  be  more  divergent,  revealing  the   fundamental  assumptions  and  values  at  stake  in  treatment  of  intellectual  property  for   technical  standards.       thus,  as  the  mannheim  regional  court  in  germany  stated  in  its  opinion  in  the  frand   licensing  dispute  between  motorola  and  microsoft  (2012):       if  the  seeker  of  the  license  were  in  a  position  to  successfully  defend   against  claims  for  an  injunction  by  the  patent  owner  by  arguing  that  the   latter  was  obligated  to  grant  a  license  anyhow,  on  its  own  volition,  the   patent  owner  would  be  at  the  mercy  of  any  dishonest  licensee,  for  whom   there  would  be  no  more  incentive  to  enter  into  licensing  negotiations.       contrast  the  mannheim  court’s  statement  with  that  of  united  states  federal  judge   richard  posner,  sitting  as  a  trial  judge  in  apple  v.  motorola  (2012):   14     by  committing  to  license  its  patents  on  frand  terms,  motorola  committed   to  license  the  '898  [patent]  to  anyone  willing  to  pay  a  frand  royalty  and   thus  implicitly  acknowledged  that  a  royalty  is  adequate  compensation  for  a   license  to  use  that  patent.  how  could  it  do  otherwise?  how  could  it  be   permitted  to  enjoin  apple  from  using  an  invention  that  it  contends  apple   must  use  if  it  wants  to  make  a  cell  phone  with  umts  telecommunications   capability  .  .  .?       these  opinions  typify  the  american  and  german  approaches  to  standard  essential   patents,  articulating  the  value  judgments  embedded  in  the  standards  jurisprudence  of   each  forum.    to  some  extent  the  distinctions  reflect  the  differing  legal  standards  found   in  the  common  law  and  in  continental  civil  law.    but  to  a  greater  extent  these  passages   reflect  fundamentally  different  philosophies  in  the  approach  to  proprietary  rights  and   technological  progress.           richard  posner  is  well-­known  as  one  of  the  major  proponents  of  the  economic  analysis   of  law  that  has  become  predominant  in  the  united  states.    it  is  therefore  no  surprise  that   his  view  takes  certain  economic  principles,  such  as  network  effects  and  revealed   preference,  as  given.    his  calculus  is  purely  utilitarian.    from  the  standpoint  of  economic   analysis,  injunctive  relief  is  likely  to  overcompensate  a  patent  holder  who  has  already   indicated  his  valuation  of  the  patent:  the  value  of  a  frand  license.           by  contrast,  the  opinion  of  the  german  court  reveals  a  highly  formalistic  deference  to   the  property  interest  of  the  patent  holder,  and  a  deep  suspicion  of  potential  strategic   behavior  by  competitors,  even  when  they  have  no  choice  but  to  adopt  the  patented   standard.    but  this  somewhat  deontological  approach  runs  contrary  to  expectations  of   robust  competition  and  technical  progress  that  have  become  an  international  norm.           conclusion       recent  intervention  by  the  court  of  justice  of  the  european  union  appears  to  reject  the   german  approach  and  adopt  at  least  some  aspects  of  the  american  utilitarian   approach.  (huwei  v.  zte  corp.,  2015)  this  synthesis  of  prior  approaches  promises  to   open  a  third,  intermediate  path  toward  enforcement  of  standard-­essential  patents  and   legal  treatment  of  frand  licensing  for  technical  standards.       references       15 apple  v.  motorola,  869  f.supp.2d  901,  914  (n.d.  ill  2012)  aff’d  in  part  757  f.3d  1286   (fed.  cir.  2014).       benkler,  y.  (2006).  the  wealth  of  networks:  how  social  production  transforms   markets  and  freedom.    new  haven,  ct:  yale.       carrier,  m.a.  (2009).  innovation  for  the  21st  century:  harnessing  the  power  of   intellectual  property  and  antitrust  law.  new  york,  ny:  oxford.       farrell,  j.  et  al.,  (2007).  “standard  setting,  patents,  and  hold-­up.”  antitrust  law   journal,  74,  603-­670.       huawei  technologies  co.  ltd  v.  zte  corp.  and  zte  deutschland  gmbh,  cjeu  16  july   2015,  c-­170/13.       lemley,  m.a.  &  lessig,  l.  (2001).  “the  end  of  end-­to-­end:  preserving  the  architecture   of  the  internet  in  the  broadband  era.”  ucla  l.aw  review,  48,  925-­972.       lemley,  m.a.  &  mcgowan,  d.  (1998).  “legal  implications  of  network  economic  effects.”   california  law  review,  86,  479-­611.           miller,  j.s.  (2007).  “standard  setting,  patents,  and  access  lock-­in:  rand  licensing   and  the  theory  of  the  firm.”  indiana  law  review  40,  351-­396.       motorola  mobility  (general  instrument  corp.)  v.  microsoft  deutschland,  regional  court   of  mannheim,  2nd  civil  division,  case  2:10-­cv-­01823-­jlr,  document  324-­6,  filed,   5/21/2012.       shapiro,  c.  &  varian,  h.r.  (1999).  information  rules:  a  strategic  guide  to  the  network   economy.    cambridge,  ma:  harvard  business  press.     microsoft word lampinen-huotari-cheshire.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): lampinen, a., huotari, k., & cheshire, c. (2014, october 22-24). access to participation in the sharing economy: the case of local online exchange in a single parent’s network. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. access to participation in the sharing economy: the case of local online exchange in a single parents’ network airi lampinen helsinki institute for information technology university of california – berkeley kai huotari helsinki institute for information technology coye cheshire university of california – berkeley this paper examines the social implications of the online sharing economy for a specific use case: single parents in need of local goods and services. the sharing economy is an emerging phenomenon that encompasses the use of networked tools to enable a range of social and economic exchanges, as well as co-use practices such as hospitality exchange, ridesharing, and recycling of used goods. we present a case study of local online exchange among an existing community network of single parents, including participant observation and thirteen formal, semi-structured interviews. in addition, we discuss our collaboration with the community to design an online exchange network that prioritized their existing needs. this research addresses issues that can hinder the emergence of sharing practices—even when the potential benefits of participation are considered desirable and necessary by the target users. our analysis demonstrates how community members were tempted by the social and material resources that participation in an online exchange network might provide. however, we found that the initial time investment and social commitment needed to gain access to these resources proved to be a significant hurdle for adoption. through our empirical analysis, we discuss how unique challenges of single parenthood sometimes impeded opportunities to build trust and take part in online sharing activities. the results of our research highlight the challenges of user-focused design, and complicate the dominant narrative of the sharing economy as an accessible and convenient alternative for traditional markets. introduction what has come to be known as ‘the sharing economy’ or ‘collaborative consumption’ is an emerging phenomenon that encompasses the use of networked tools to enable a range of sharing, exchange, and co-use practices, such as hospitality exchange, ridesharing, and recycling of used goods. advocates laud the sharing economy as a (at least partial) solution to the challenges posed by the ongoing financial and environmental crises and as a welcome way to help people reconnect with others in their neighborhood and beyond. others, taking a critical perspective, call for a careful consideration of the social implications of this technology-driven phenomenon. for instance, ongoing scholarly debate regarding the labor conditions of those taking on crowdsourcing tasks (see e.g. martin et al., 2014) is now being extended to ondemand mobile work (teodoro et al., 2014). as another example, edelman & luca (2014) point out discrimination as an important unintended feature of online marketplaces. building on fieldwork we conducted with single parents in the san francisco bay area, this paper considers access to participation in local online exchange and issues that can hinder sharing practices from taking off even when the potential benefits of participation are considered desirable and needed. in doing so, it helps complicate the narrative of the sharing economy as an accessible and convenient alternative for traditional markets. case study the founder of a single parents’ network in the san francisco bay area reached out to us in the fall of 2010, looking for a bartering site for the community she was setting up. over the following months, we launched into this case study, collaborating closely both with the founder of the network and the team developing and running the local online exchange service kassi (nowadays known as sharetribe) as the service was being adapted for and introduced to the single parents’ network. the service was originally developed for a student community in finland, as a part of a research project in which the authors participated, too, so we were eager to see how it could become useful in a different context. next to the co-design process, we observed and took part in events of the network and, later on between november 2011 and may 2012, conducted thirteen semi-structured interviews with members of the network. we are currently in the process of analyzing the interview transcripts and our field notes in detail. while the service did not take off, we feel that what we learned in the process can speak to central issues of participation in sharing activities. beneath the veneer of shared experience “there’s some challenges about being a single parent single parents get that other people don’t. i think anyone who has kids has really gotten that before they had kids, you don’t understand what it’s like to have kids. to take it a step further, people that have kids that are not single don’t understand what it’s like to be a single parent.” -father of a nine-year-old daughter single parenthood functioned as the logic of organizing for the network. the shared experience of being a single parent was intended to be the glue that would turn the network into a supportive community. the founder of the network, a single mother with two young sons, envisioned the network as an opportunity to facilitate the everyday lives of single parents, allow them to discuss emotions and thoughts with peers, gain knowledge regarding parenting, share material resources, and simply fight the isolation single parenting can cause. beneath the veneer of shared experience, we discovered an astonishing diversity among the members regarding their ages, the ages of their children, their financial situations, employment, the social support available for them, as well as the histories of how they had ended up being single parents. as one interviewee pointed out, there was a need to have “more in common than just being a single parent” – that shared circumstance alone was not enough to unite the members. moreover, the members differed in their hopes for what the community could be and the kinds of goals that could be attained with the help of the local online exchange service. gaining access to resources "part of the problem with being a single parent is it’s kind of a vicious circle. because you’re a single parent, you tend to not have enough time. because you don’t have enough time, it’s harder to get the resources that you would need to make being a single parent easier." -mother of two adopted children a repeating theme in the interviews was the participants’ experiences of the difficulty to make the time for participating in the network’s activities. participants also emphasized the importance of strong, solid ties with other community members. such personal connections were seen to be key for building the trust necessary for engaging in exchange activities fraught with risk, such as organizing carpooling to facilitate children’s school rides. one of the central dilemmas the network as a whole faced was that while members were tempted by the social and material resources participation could provide, the initial time investment and social commitment needed to gain access to these resources was difficult to make. the single parents we interviewed and interacted with were typically juggling a multitude of responsibilities in timecrunched everyday circumstances. thus, despite at times dire needs for neighborly help and social support, participation in the network’s activities, let alone adopting a new online service, was not an obviously available option for them. conclusion contrasting this case study to prior work on local online exchange in a student community (suhonen et al., 2010; lampinen et al., 2013) highlights how the risks related to participation in the sharing economy may be weighed very differently in different contexts. while some forms of participation in the sharing economy, such as the local online exchange activities we examine here, do not necessitate a direct monetary investment, other requirements, such as the necessity to plan ahead and commit time, may block access to participation and its benefits. references edelman, b., & luca, m. (2014). digital discrimination: the case of airbnb.com. harvard business school nom unit working paper no. 14-054. lampinen, a., lehtinen, v., cheshire, c., & suhonen, e. (2013). indebtedness and reciprocity in local online exchange. cscw'13 proceedings of the acm 2013 conference on computer supported cooperative work. martin, d., hanrahan, b. v., o’neill, j., & gupta, n. (2014). being a turker. cscw'14 proceedings of the acm 2014 conference on computer supported cooperative work. suhonen, e., lampinen, a., cheshire, c. & antin, j. (2010). everyday favors: a case study of a local online gift exchange system. group '10 proceedings of the 16th acm international conference on supporting group work. teodoro, r., ozturk, p., naaman, m., mason, w., & lindqvist, j. (2014). the motivations and experiences of the on-demand mobile workforce. cscw'14 proceedings of the acm 2014 conference on computer supported cooperative work. acknowledgements this work has been supported by the otasizzle research project, funded by aalto university “technology for life” campaign donations as well as the tekes funded research projects possi and funesomo. we wish to thank the participants as well as the developers of kassi/sharetribe for making this study possible. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 writing for old and new media: a natural experiment leticia bode georgetown university abstract this project seeks to consider how different constraints in online versus print journalism encourage differences in political journalistic content. a natural experiment furthers our understanding of this phenomenon by holding other aspects (namely, the journalist) constant. a sample of reporters who changed jobs from online to print, print to online, as well as control groups of those switching online to online and print to print, are considered and compared in terms of content topic, length, language, frequency, and other dimensions. the implications of these differences for news audiences, as well as society at large, are discussed. keywords journalism; online; medium; experiment context, importance, and connections to literature as new media political journalism outlets proliferate (17% growth from 2010 to 2011), and as their counterparts in traditional outlets such as print newspapers lose staff, deteriorate in circulation, and in some cases cease to exist (pew 2012), it becomes increasingly important that we understand the impact of writing in a new media environment. while the scholarly community is quite familiar with the challenges, advantages, and constraints of the traditional model of political journalism and publishing, less is known about the corresponding structural factors associated with online outlets. more importantly, we have yet to truly engage with the question of how such structural factors may affect the content produced by political journalists in these realms. this project is an important step in contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the nature of content in online political journalism. comparisons across media are unfortunately rare in internet studies (as well as in the broader social sciences). while a growing number of scholars are pursuing questions of content across medium (lee 2007, baum and groeling 2008, haynes and pitts 2009, bode and hennings 2012), these are generally restricted to particular subject, and often to online media only. rather than being held to such narrow content-related boundaries, this project rather examines coverage among certain individuals – comparing the work produced by journalists who work for both old and new media at different points in their careers. this allows us to see the actual effects of the constraints of different types of media on the type of political journalistic content produced while holding the journalist constant – an important question for a changing media industry and a changing democracy. this work contributes to a long tradition of recognizing that, in part, “the medium is the message” (mcluhan 1994). research on online political news coverage and blogs, for example, shows that users of online media are influenced in different ways as compared with traditional media like newspapers and television (atkinson 2007, johnson and kaye 2004). by understanding inherent differences in content, we can further develop our understanding of how structural factors may influence the content which users receive, as well as how they perceive it. and understanding the news norms (schudson, 2001, ettema, 2007, janssen and keis, 2005) specific to online content should further our understanding of what type of information the growing online news audience is receiving. research design this project is actualized by taking advantage of a natural experiment of sorts. dunning suggests “natural experiments can sometimes provide social scientists with an important means of improving selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 the validity of their empirical inferences” and this case can help us to do just that (2008, 283). in 2007, the website politico.com was founded by two former washington post reporters. at that time, and soon after, a wealth of other reporters (most of whom had previously worked for traditional media outlets) joined the staff and began writing for politico. this transition allows for a unique comparison across medium (politico and the news outlets which formerly employed each of the reporters), while keeping the individual (reporter) constant. as such, it should allow us to isolate the effect of writing for old versus new media. (although politico distributes a daily “playbook” in the d.c. area, it is primarily an online publication, and one that is targeted at a different audience than mainstream publications – primarily the washington elite and so-called political “junkies.”) although this is only a single case, it represents an important one – not only does politico continue to recruit from the upper echelons of political journalists from print media, it also attracts roughly 3.1 million unique visitors per month, accounting for over 16 million page views (politico 2009). as a further test of this specific context – print versus online journalism – and to ensure it is not merely the act of changing jobs or media outlets in general, i also consider two comparison groups. first, i include political journalists who moved from different online outlets to politico in the same time period. finally i include political journalists who moved from one traditional media outlet to another during the same time period. these comparisons allow us to assert more definitively that it is the constraints or structures inherent in online journalism, rather than idiosyncrasies of job changes or moves within media genres, which drives any differences in content in this period of transition. methods to compare the content from before and after joining politico, i pursue two simultaneous analytic strategies. first, i employ computer-aided content analysis to consider the easily measurable differences between media outlets. are pieces longer? do they use different types of vocabulary (using the linguistic inquiry and word count (liwc) dictionary)? do individual journalists publish more frequently when working for new or old media? i also compare google page ranks (a rough measure of popularity) of stories by reporters before and after leaving old media for new. additionally, i use human coders to gain a more nuanced understanding of the differences in content in both periods in question. human coders can answer more complicated questions than can computerassisted content analysis. do the journalists employ different types of frames (chong and druckman 2007) in a news story? are a different number or type of sources consulted? do they consider different topics? are stories more or less balanced? are they written in a different style or format? importance and conclusions this natural experiment advances our knowledge of online political content in important ways. by analyzing the work of these journalists before and after they joined politico, we can further our understanding of how the constraints, challenges, and advantages of different media affect the content produced therein. given the decline in print media and the rise of online (pew 2012), any observed differences become increasingly important in terms of what type of information is available and consumed by citizens. as political information is integral to a functioning democracy, it is imperative that we understand as fully as possible what type of political information is available and consumed by the american citizenry. this study is an important step in expanding our grasp of the important differences in content between online and more traditional sources of political information. acknowledgments (arial 10, bold, aligned left, single line, 12pt before 10pt after) to be added after blind peer review. references (arial 10, bold, aligned left, single line, 12pt before 0pt after) selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 atkinson, l. (2007). online and ticked off? an exploration of online political news coverage and hostile media phenomenon. paper presented at the annual meeting of the international communication association, san francisco. may 23-28. baum, m. a., & groeling, t. (2008). new media and the polarization of american political discourse. political communication 25 (4), 345-365. doi: 10.1080/10584600802426965. bode, l., & hennings, v.m. (2012). mixed signals? examining the dimensions of media coverage of the 2008 vice presidential candidates. politics & policy, 40 (2), 221-257. doi: 10.1111/j.1747-1346.2012.00350.x. chong, d., & druckman, j.n. (2007). framing theory. annual review of political science 10 (1), 103-126. doi: 10.1146/annurev.polisci.10.072805.103054. dunning, t. (2008). improving causal inference: strengths and limitations of natural experiments. political research quarterly 61(2), 282-293. doi: 10.1177/1065912907306470. ettema, j. s. (2007). journalism as reason-giving: deliberative democracy, institutional accountability, and the news media’s mission. political communication, 24(2), 143-160. doi: 10.1080/10584600701312860. haynes, a. a., & pitts, b. (2009). making an impression: new media in the 2008 presidential nomination campaigns. ps: political science and politics 42 (1), 53-58. doi: 10.1017/s1049096509090052. janssen, d. & kies, r. (2005). online forums and deliberative democracy. acta politica, 40(3), 317-335. doi: 10.1057/palgrave.ap.5500115. johnson, t., & kaye, b. (2004). wag the blog: how reliance on traditional media and the internet influence credibility perceptions of weblogs among blog users. journalism and mass communication quarterly 81 (3), 622-642. doi: 10.1177/107769900408100310. lee, j. k. (2007). the effect of the internet on homogeneity of the media agenda: a test of the fragmentation thesis. journalism and mass communication 84 (4), 745-760. doi: 10.1177/107769900708400406. mcluhan, m. (1994). understanding media: the extensions of man. cambridge, ma: mit press. pew research center project for excellence in journalism. (2012). the state of the news media 2012. available at http://stateofthemedia.org/2012/overview-4/key-findings/ . politico. (2009). advertising with politico. accessed from http://www.politico.com/advertising/online.html#audience . schudson, m. (2001). the objectivity norm in american journalism. journalism, 2(2), 149-170. doi: 10.1177/146488490100200201. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1049096509090052 http://stateofthemedia.org/2012/overview-4/key-findings/ http://www.politico.com/advertising/online.html#audience duncan-ir16 selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 connecting badges: exploring the utility of digital badges for learning in affinity spaces sean duncan joey huang indiana university introduction in recent years, the “digital badge” has become both a cause for excitement within communities that promote digital tools for learning, as well as a cause of concern within critical communities troubled by the potentially overblown rhetoric of these systems’ proponents (see halavais, 2012, for a recent assessment). while some have advocated for the implementation of digital badges in order to better credentialize, assess, and promote informal learning practices online, there has been very little study of how current, non-educational badging (and other recognition systems) may impact activities within existing online spaces (if at all). in this paper, we present the results of several studies (the connecting badges project), aimed at connecting interaction and digital badges in interest-driven (ito, et al, 2008) affinity spaces (gee, 2005; author, 2012a). the goal of this work is to understand how digital badges may or may not relate to everyday practices “in the wilds” of existing online spaces, and how the activities found within multiple sites might relate to differential uses of badges and recognition systems. digital badges in affinity spaces one of the key motivations for the present work was the attempt to better understand digital badges not as tools designed for learning, but as features of existing online spaces that potentially shape participation in digital communities. we focused on the “online affinity space” (gee, 2004; gee, 2005; author, 2010; author, 2012a) — or online space dedicated to a common interest, around which ad hoc communities are able to form. while fan spaces around media have been a common site of study for internet research and vice versa (baym, 2010; jenkins, 2006) the study of them with respect to learning is still underdeveloped. we adapted established methods for capturing interactional practices within multiple affinity spaces. these concerns have led to three, interrelated research questions that formed the basis for this study. first, in what ways do badges and other recognition systems relate to how participants share information within affinity spaces? next, in what ways do badges and other recognition systems relate to how participants exhibit practices tied to the specific content of the affinity space? finally, in what ways do badges and other recognition systems relate to social participation within affinity space? suggested citation (apa): duncan, s. & huang, j. (2015, october 21-24) connecting badges: exploring the utility of digital badges for learning in affinity spaces. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. in particular, how well do badges capture credibility of information and trust of participants within these informal spaces? method we applied an established content coding developed by author (2008) and further elaborated by author (2012b), applying an a priori content coding scheme within which we might investigate information sharing (gunawardena, et al, 1997; de laat, 2002), the employment of tacit epistemologies (kuhn, 1994), and social interaction/discussion (e.g., the discussion of badges, credibility/trust, and participation in offline communities relevant to the discussion). each site would be assessed independently for relationships according to presence/absence of digital badges and other recognition systems on each site. sites were selected via a combined process of evaluating responses from an online survey sent to digital badge development and research communities, as well as through an assessment of variety of badge and recognition forms. this yielded three different kinds of discussions within three very different types of online spaces — political discussion on reddit’s /r/politics subreddit, computational thinking practices on stackoverflow, and discussions of gaming practices on steam’s dota 2 gaming-focused forums. see table 1, below, for hypothesized activities for each site, the size of each post sample, information on the number of coders, and interrater reliability achieved between them. of the three sites, survey responses strongly influenced the selection of stackoverflow, while research team expertise pushed us to investigate reddit and steam forum discussions. reddit; /r/politics stackoverflow steam; dota 2 hypothesized practices political discussion; negotiation of ideas, positions, terminology computational thinking; discussion of programming tasks and problems gaming literacy; game systems, their structures, behaviors, and function number of posts sampled 647 652 681 number of coders 3 4 3 interrater reliability 93.42% 93.29% 92.58% table 1. hypothesized practices, sample information, and coding information for the three sites under study. posts were randomly sampled by thread until a criterion number of posts was achieved, with coding taking place at the unit of analysis of individual post. we hypothesized that each space’s unique topic of discussion (see table 1) would be assessable within the affinity space, and created additional coding schemes to capture the suspected practices within /r/politics, stackoverflow, and the dota 2 discussions (negotiation, computational thinking, and gaming literacy, respectively). for each site, correlational approaches (kendall's tau, spearman's rank correlation) were utilized to assess the relationships of acquired badges and aggregated codes, organized by poster. supplementary interviews were conducted with members of each affinity space in order to capture first-person accounts of digital badge considerations, as well as the ways that individuals within affinity spaces conceived of the social practices within each space. results results indicated that badge use within affinity spaces were surprisingly unrelated to social expertise practices overall. in the case of /r/politics, only very small significant networks of correlations were found between badges (or "trophies" on reddit) and social expertise codes, indicating a relative independence between the presence of digital badges and hypothesized interactional activities within the space. the strongest relationships were found on stackoverflow, between multiple badges and the social interaction code for “credibility/trust” (indicating overt discussion of the credibility of a poster’s contributions or trust of a poster). see table 2, below for relationships between multiple badges and credibility/trust. research assistant = .707** synonymizer = .496** publicist = .707** beta = .496** booster = .345** marshal = .345** table 2. selected significant correlations between credibility/trust and stackoverflow badges (** indicating p<.01). each of these badges represented participation within the knowledge-building task of the site. across all three sites, stackoverflow featured the tightest relationship between badges and codes (these social interaction codes, specifically), with uniformly low discussion of badges on all of the three sites. additionally, some evidence from /r/politics indicated that social norms within reddit may have interfered with the discussion of trophies. given that reddit featured a palahniukian “the first rule of trophies is you don’t talk about trophies” statement barring overt discussions of trophies on the site, this indicated a problem with determining some uses of badges in this particular space. discussion and implications implications of this work for the study of digital badges and learning involve considerations of how badges that connect to skills found outside affinity spaces — in this case, stackoverflow’s computer programming focus — may have different value within an affinity space than badges earned within less skill-oriented spaces (political discussions and gaming, the other discussions under study). additionally, we suspect that the display of badges and other evidence of participation in the social project of an affinity space may be seen as actually counter-productive to some discussions in online affinity spaces. that is, if "the first rule of trophies is you don't talk about trophies" is a prevailing attitude, we need to understand how this clashes with and impacts the assumptions of many badge proponents, who assume motivational potential. as gee (2004) suggests, affinity spaces provide "multiple routes to participation," and this work provokes us to ask how participants in online spaces might see the display of digital badges as potentially interfering with some of these potential "routes to participation.” references author (2008). scientific habits of mind in virtual worlds. journal of science education and technology, 17(6), 530-543. author (2012a). expanding the affinity space: an introduction. in author (eds.), learning in video game affinity spaces, 1-22. author (2012b). kongregating online: developing design literacies in a play-based affinity space. in author (eds.) learning in video game affinity spaces, 51-83. baym, n. k. (2010). personal connections in the digital age. cambridge, uk: polity. de laat, m. (2002). network and content analysis in an online community discourse. in proceedings of the conference on computer support for collaborative learning: foundations for a cscl community (pp. 625-626). international society of the learning sciences. gee, j. p. (2004). situated language and learning: a critique of traditional schooling. new york: routledge. gee, j. p. (2005). semiotic social spaces and affinity spaces. beyond communities of practice: language, power and social context, 214-232. gunawardena, c. n., lowe, c. a., & anderson, t. (1997). analysis of a global online debate and the development of an interaction analysis model for examining social construction of knowledge in computer conferencing. journal of educational computing research, 17(4), 397-431. halavais, a. m. (2012). a genealogy of badges: inherited meaning and monstrous moral hybrids. information, communication & society, 15(3), 354-373. ito, m., horst, h., bittanti, m., boyd, d., herr-stephenson, b., lange, p. g., ... & robinson, l. (2008). living and learning with new media: summary of findings from the digital youth project. john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation. jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture. new york: nyu press. kuhn, d. (1991). the skills of argument. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. microsoft word thorhauge-lomborg.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): thorhauge, a.m., lomborg, s., (2014, october 22-24). the ambiguities of log data: smart phones in everyday life. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the ambiguities of log data: smart phones in everyday life anne mette thorhauge university of copenhagen stine lomborg university of copenhagen in this paper we will discuss the analysis of smart phone log data as an expression of everyday life. smart phones have been celebrated recently as a versatile tool for collecting data about everyday life activities, owing to the integration of the smart phone in these very activities. on the one hand, we use the smart phone for documenting extraordinary and ordinary events of our lives by way of the phone’s built-in camera and video functionalities. on the other hand, our activities are recorded in various types of data formats such as communication histories, gps data and timestamps. these data tell a more indirect story about the way we live, how we move about, who are the most important persons in our lives, and so on. the immense potentials of the smart phone for collecting data about everyday life through ‘unobtrusive measures’ (webb, campbell, schwartz, & sechrest, 2000), such as automated behavioral logging, have led to a range of optimistic exclamations about its possible utility in research. for instance, proponents of ”computational social science” compare smart phone data as a measure of everyday life with brain scanners’ measures of neuropshysiological processes (lazer et al., 2009). emphasis in this perspective is clearly on the amount and alleged ”neutrality” of data allowing us to draw a precise map of everyday life independently of people’s own statements. in this paper, we would like to challenge this view of smart phone log data. that is, we present a methodological discussion that emphasises the ambiguity of smart phone log data as a window for understanding the conductance of everyday life. everyday life is hereto be understood as an empirical and experiental phenomenon shared by people living it, in line with the social-phenomenological conception of the ”lifeworld” (schutz, 1967). to substantiate the methodological discussion of smart phone log data, we draw examples from an empirical study of smart phone use in everyday life based on the complimentary uses of logdata, screendumps from smart phones and qualitative interviews. one main point of the paper is that log data generated through smart phone uses do not provide for neutral representation of this lifeworld. rather, the log data represent a range of competing perspectives on the lifeworld depending on the way the smart phones are integrated into everyday practices. specifically, we suggest three perspectives or ”dualities” for thinking about the status of smart phone log data: 1. smart phone data as an expression of everyday life or as an expression of the integration of smart phones into everyday life. 2. smart phone data as an expression of daily routines of everyday life or as an expression of breaches to this routine. 3. smart phone data as an expression of the web of communications (or texts) about everyday life or of the contexts in which these communications unfold. smart phone data as an expression of everyday life or as an expression of the integration of smart phones into everyday life smart phones are not just everyday technologies, they are social artifacts endowed with particular social and symbolic values in different social contexts. as argued in domestication theory (haddon, 2011) the proliferation and use of communication technologies depends on a range of practical and symbolic processes in the individual context that condition its actual use. for this reason use data stemming from these contexts cannot simply be taken as a measure of use at a general level. they are at the same time measures of particular practices and measures of the integration of communication technologies into these particular practices. for instance, certain communicative practices may take place orally or they may take place on different communication platforms depending on the specific context. smart phone data as an expression of these practices will depend very much on these constellations. one example from our study could be the use of smart phones for coordinating everyday shopping. obviously, this is an activity occurring in most household and its appearance or non-appearance in data will not tell us whether it takes place or not but rather whether it involves the smart phone or not. smart phone data as an expression of daily routines of everyday life or as an expression of breaches of this routine smart phone data as a measure of everyday life may on the one hand reflect the routines and recurrent patters of activities involved in everyday life and, on the other hand, it may reflect deviations from these routines and people’s attempts a coping with these. for instance, people tend to call or text each other relatively more at the end of the workday in order coordinate activities such as fetching children, preparing dinner and so on (helles, 2012). these communicative practices are regular and can be seen as an everyday routine appearing in data as a recurrent pattern of communication. however, a sudden accident, people falling sick or switching jobs may cause a certain outburst of communication aimed at coordinating workarounds to the routine. this communication and its appearance in data is characteristic in its singularity yet it is not less significant for explaining core aspects of everyday life. not least because any everyday routines comes with a multitude of small and large exceptions that are as important as the rules from which they diverge. in short, using log data alone, we cannot know if the pattern tells us about everyday routines or exceptions from the routines. smart phone data as an expression of the web of communications (or texts) about everyday life or of the contexts in which these communications unfold the log data collected through smart phone uses may, at once, be seen as a trace of communication, that is to say a text made up of all the acts of communicating and acting with and through the device, and a trace of the context of use, signposting through metadata the actual spaces of use, the temporal structures of everyday activities, and so on. however, the log data in itself reveals little about the relative importance of activities in the everyday life, the experienced relationships with others in the flows of communication. hence to understand the role of various contexts of the everyday and their shaping of communicative practice, the combination of log data with qualitative data provide for a deeper understanding of the integration of smart phones in everyday life. references haddon, l. (2011). domestication analysis, objects of study, and the centrality of technologies in everyday life. canadian journal of communication, 36(2), 311–323. helles, rasmus. (2012). personal media in everyday life: a baseline study. in k. b. jensen (ed.), a handbook of media and communication research. qualitative and quantitative methodologies (second ed. pp. 334---350). london and new york: routledge. lazer, d., pentland, a., adamic, l., aral, s., barabasi, a.---l., brewer, d., ... van alstyne, m. (2009). computational social science. science, 323(5915), 721–723. doi:10.1126/science.1167742 schutz, a. (1967). the phenomenology of the social world. northwestern university press. webb, eugene j., campbell, donald t., schwartz, richard d., & sechrest, lee. (2000). unobtrusive measures (revised edition). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  carstensen,  t.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  negotiating  the  digitization  of  work:  new   challenges  for  employees  and  workers’  councils  from  the  use  of  social  collaboration  platforms.  paper   presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  meeting  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,   germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.   negotiating  the  digitization  of  work:  new  challenges   for  employees  and  workers’  councils  from  the  use  of   social  collaboration  platforms     tanja  carstensen   lmu  munich,  department  of  sociology       the  “digitization  of  work”  has  become  a  vibrant  topic  in  recent  years.  this  umbrella  term   embraces  different  technologies,  different  fields  of  application,  and  different   transformations:  the  use  of  digitally  controlled  robots  and  smart  technologies  in   industrial  production  (in  german,  “industrie  4.0”);;  the  use  of  digital  and  mobile  devices,   which  produces  questions  of  permanent  availability  and  changing  boundaries  between   the  job  and  other  areas  of  life;;  and  crowdwork  as  a  new  way  of  (precarious)  job   placement  based  on  online  platforms.     additionally,  the  use  of  social  media  platforms  within  companies  for  internal   communication  and  collaboration  is  an  increasingly  important  part  of  the  digitization  of   work.  companies  implement  such  social  networks  to  improve  project  organization  and   knowledge  management,  to  avoid  duplication  of  effort  by  increased  transparency,  to   improve  access  to  existing  competencies  within  the  company,  and  to  support  the   development  of  new  ideas  and  innovations.  this  so-­called  “social  collaboration”  or   “enterprise  2.0”  promises  better  teamwork  which  is  more  focused  and  network-­like  –   company-­wide,  world-­wide,  and  over  different  divisions  and  locations.  these  ideas  are   also  connected  with  a  change  of  corporate  philosophies  and  cultures:  openness,   transparency,  flat  hierarchies,  networking,  sharing,  and  participation  become  new   important  leitmotifs  for  employees.     while  employers’  expectations  regarding  social  media  platforms  have  been  broadly   discussed,  their  effects  on  the  working  conditions  of  employees  have,  as  of  yet,  been   neglected  in  research.  however,  the  use  and  design  of  social  media  platforms  is  often   reason  for  a  re-­negotiation  of  work  relations  as  well  as  implicit  and  explicit  rules  of   collaboration.  this  paper  therefore  investigates  the  negotiations  on  use  and  design   between  employers,  employees,  and  workers’  councils  –  or  in  other  words,  rule-­making   and  rule-­breaking—and  follows  the  questions:     •   which  issues  are  contested  by  implementing  and  using  a  social  media  platform,     2 •   which  (new)  demands  are  employees  confronted  with  by  the  use  of  social  media,   •   how  do  employers,  employees  and  workers’  councils  deal  with  these  challenges,  plus   what  kind  of  usage  and  working  conditions  do  they  negotiate  and  develop,  and   •   how  far  do  employees  adopt,  modify  or  resist  the  company’s  social  media  rules?     to  do  this,  the  paper  starts  with  short  theoretical  remarks  on  the  relation  of  technology   and  work,  as  well  as  sociological  considerations  on  the  transformation  of  work  and  its   challenges  for  individuals.  against  this  background  of  a  theoretical  understanding  of  an   interrelatedness  of  social  and  technological  change,  the  implementation  of  social  media,   its  negotiations,  and  the  transformations  of  work  have  to  be  considered  as  interwoven.       the  empirical  results  of  this  paper  are  grounded  on  the  research  project  “work  2.0.  new   demands  on  employees  and  their  workers'  councils  from  the  use  of  social  media”.  on   the  basis  of  case  studies  in  three  large  companies  (automotive  supplier,   telecommunication  and  electronic  engineering),  including  47  interviews  with  a  range  of   different  employees  (working  in  hr,  office  administration,  it,  communication,   engineering,  call  centers,  workers’  councils,  etc.),  critical  issues,  old  and  new  demands,   and  different  usage  patterns  were  investigated.  the  data  were  collected  in  companies   that  implemented  social  collaboration  platforms  several  years  ago;;  the  workers’  councils   were  involved  in  the  implementation  process  in  each  of  the  companies  (carstensen   2016).       technology  and  work     in  the  last  few  years,  fundamental  transformations  have  occurred  in  the  spheres  of   work.  the  german  sociology  of  work  characterizes  the  transformations  of  work  with   keywords  as  “de-­limination”,  “subjectivation”,  and  “precarization”  and  states  the  arrival   of  new  challenges  for  working  individuals  (kratzer  2003;;  voß  &  pongratz  2003;;  jürgens   2006).  these  transformations  make  practices  such  as  flexibility,  self-­organization,  self-­ responsibility,  and  self-­management  into  everyday  actions.     technology  has  been  a  major  part  of  sociological  research  on  work  for  a  long  time.  the   mechanization  of  society  can  always  be  considered  a  materialization  of  the  existing   relations  of  production.  technology  has  three  primary  functions  within  the  work  process:   labor  savings,  efficiency  improvement,  and  process  control  (pfeiffer  2010).  at  the  same   time,  the  use  of  technology  not  only  saves  labor  and  makes  it  easier  and  more   controllable,  but  also  has  ambiguous  consequences.  new  technologies  often  lead  to  an   increase  of  work,  and  to  new  problems  and  requirements.  the  relation  between   technology  and  work  is  shaped  by  a  range  of  contradictions  (baukrowitz,  boes  &   schmiede  2001;;  kern  &  schumann  1970).       currently,  it  is  obvious  that  the  internet,  and  especially  social  media,  demand  similar   practices  as  the  transformations  of  work  do:  self-­management,  self-­presentation,   networking  etc.  these  technologies  support,  ease  and  increase  the  requirements  of  the   changing  working  world  and  can  be  considered  the  material  side  of  the  transformation   of  work  (carstensen  2012).       3   contested  issues     the  results  of  the  study  show  that  in  contrast  to  employers’  euphoric  expectations,  a   significant  proportion  of  the  members  of  the  workers’  councils  as  well  as  of  the   employees  have  many  concerns  regarding  the  use  of  social  media.  the  interviews  show   that  specific  issues  are  framed  in  opposite  ways:  transparency  is  identified  as   surveillance  and  control,  the  demand  to  share  knowledge  is  perceived  as  dangerous  in   competitive  working  environments,  and  active  participation  in  the  platforms  is  framed  as   additional  work  instead  of  a  reduction  of  it.  the  benefit  of  these  platforms  is  often  not   obvious.  workers’  councils  therefore,  for  example,  negotiate  the  turning  off  of  specific   functions  which  could  record  employees’  working  behavior  and  try  to  enforce  the   voluntariness  of  use.  furthermore,  it  can  be  shown  that  the  way  social  media  is  used   and  negotiated  gives  a  great  deal  of  information  about  existing  corporate  culture  and   rules;;  it  does  not  only  inform  us  about  the  applications  of  technology.       new  demands  and  challenges  from  the  use  of  social  media     from  the  employee  perspective,  the  case  studies  also  show  that  these  new   technologies  challenge  working  individuals,  intensify  existing  demands  and  make  new,   and  in  particular,  very  informal  ones:  (1)  social  media  use  requires  significant   competences  of  self-­management,  e.g.,  time  management,  information  management,   boundary  management,  the  handling  of  expectations  of  permanent  availability,   multitasking,  etc.  (2)  the  interviewees  describe  that  the  use  of  social  media  implies   having  the  “right  attitude,”  which  in  particular  means  openness  for  change.  it  seems  to   be  important  that  you  “want”  to  use  it,  that  you  “develop  passion”  for  it,  and  that  you   “engage  yourself”  with  social  media.  (3)  another  important  demand  is  the  willingness  to   become  public.  employees  are  required  to  present  themselves  in  the  public  sphere  of   the  company,  to  discuss  publicly,  to  publish  their  work  and  ideas,  and  to  position   themselves  with  opinions  and  assessments.  it  becomes  obvious  in  the  interviews  that   this  is  overwhelming  for  many  employees.  (4)  the  employees  describe  that  it  is  a  time   investment  to  understand  how  social  media  work  and  what  it  means  to  post,  to  share,  to   link,  to  comment  or  to  like  something.  you  have  to  use  the  right  style  of  communication,   and  the  perfect  conversational  tone.  more  than  ever,  a  “social”,  collaborative  employee   with  the  willingness  to  help,  to  give  answers,  and  to  share  knowledge  is  required.     at  the  same  time,  the  case  studies  show  a  wide  range  of  usage  patterns  which  depend   on  different  categories:  job  positions,  qualifications,  age,  attitudes  towards  technology,   internet  usage,  data  security  and  privacy,  level  of  autonomy  at  work,  etc.  we  can  find   non-­use  alongside  passionate  or  pragmatic  use.  employees  do  not  accept  the  new   demands  without  resistance.  they  defend  their  boundaries  and  privacy,  resist  against   transformations,  develop  their  own  ways  of  using  social  media  and  negotiate  their   employers’  expectations  and  requests.         4   new  rules  for  work?     although  we  can  observe  a  lot  of  resistance,  refusal,  lack  of  interest,  and  cautious  use,   there  are  indicators  that  social  media  platforms  and  digital  technologies  that  will  follow   will,  in  the  long  term,  fundamentally  change  working  conditions  and  in  doing  so,  set  new   rules  for  work  and  collaboration.  the  paper  ends  with  a  short  outlook  on  developments   which  can  already  be  recognized  in  the  case  studies.  aside  from  new  forms  of   participation,  productive  collaboration,  and  networking,  as  well  as  reduced  workload  as   advantages,  social  media  platforms  in  companies  could  support  and  establish:     •   a  new  level  of  utilization  of  subjective  potentials  and  access  to  the  entire  personality   of  working  individuals   •   training  in  a  new  way  of  working:  self-­disciplined,  transparent,  and  “social”  (for  a   similar  analysis,  see  reichert  2009)   •   additional  burdens,  exhaustion,  and  health  risks  caused  by  increased  work  load,  new   demands,  permanent  availability,  and  multitasking   •   the  habituation  of  transparency,  data  collection  and  storage,  surveillance,  and  control   •   a  digital  divide  within  the  workforce  due  to  different  competencies,  attitudes,  and   opportunities  to  use  the  social  media  platforms,  which  as  a  consequence,  creates   divergent  ways  of  working  and  an  increasing  social  inequality  within  the  staff   •   the  dissolution  of  company  boundaries  by  opening  its  platforms  to  customers  and   freelancers—which  could  lead  to  the  liquidization  of  work  and  an  increase  in   precarious  crowdwork.       references     baukrowitz,  a./boes,  a./schmiede,  r.  (2001):  die  entwicklung  von  arbeit  aus  der   perspektive  ihrer  informatisierung.  in  matuschek,  i./henninger,  a./kleemann,  f.  (eds.):   neue  medien  im  arbeitsalltag,  wiesbaden:  westdeutscher  verlag:  217–235.     carstensen,  t.  (2012):  die  technologien  des  ‘arbeitskraftunternehmers’.  zur   bedeutung  des  web  2.0  für  den  wandel  der  (erwerbs-­)arbeit.  in:  soeffner,  h.-­g.  (ed.):   transnationale  vergesellschaftungen:  verhandlungen  des  35.  kongresses  der   deutschen  gesellschaft  für  soziologie  in  frankfurt  a.m.  2010,  wiesbaden:  springer  vs,   cd-­rom,  1–13.       carstensen,  t.  (2016):  social  media  in  der  arbeitswelt,  bielefeld:  transcript.     jürgens,  k.  (2006):  arbeits-­  und  lebenskraft.  reproduktion  als  eigensinnige   grenzziehung,  wiesbaden:  vs.     kern,  h./schumann,  m.  (1970):  industriearbeit  und  arbeiterbewußtsein.  eine  empirische   untersuchung  über  den  einfluß  der  aktuellen  technischen  entwicklung  auf  die   industrielle  arbeit  und  das  arbeiterbewußtsein,  frankfurt  am  main:  europäische   verlagsanstalt.     5   kratzer,  n.  (2003):  arbeitskraft  in  entgrenzung.  grenzenlose  anforderungen,  erweiterte   spielräume,  begrenzte  ressourcen,  berlin:  edition  sigma.     pfeiffer,  s.  (2010):  technisierung  von  arbeit,  in:  böhle,  f./voß,  g.  g./wachtler,  g.   (hg.):  handbuch  arbeitssoziologie,  wiesbaden:  vs,  231–261.     reichert,  r.  (2008):  amateure  im  netz.  selbstmanagement  und  wissenstechnik  im   web  2.0,  bielefeld:  transcript.     voß,  g.  g./pongratz,  h.  j.  (1998):  der  arbeitskraftunternehmer.  eine  neue  grundform   der  „ware  arbeitskraft“?,  in:  kölner  zeitschrift  für  soziologie  und  sozialpsychologie,  jg.   50,  h.  1,  131–158.     selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  rossi,  l.,  neumayer,  c.,  vulpius,  j.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  images  of  protest  in   contested  social  media:  production,  propagation  and  narratives.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the   17th  annual  conference  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved   from  http://spir.aoir.org.   images  of  protest  in  contested  social  media:   production,  propagation  and  narratives   luca  rossi   it  university  of  copenhagen     christina  neumayer   it  university  of  copenhagen     julie  vulpius   it  university  of  copenhagen     images  play  a  central  role  in  activists’  social  media  communication  from  protest  events   (andén-­papadopoulos  2014;;  mortensen  2013;;  poell  and  van  dijck  2015).  the   documentation  of  protest  events  through  images  and  their  propagation  on  social  media   has  been  conceptualized  as  eye-­witnessing,  counter-­surveillance  practices,  or   producing  a  visual  alternative  to  the  mainstream  framing  of  protest  events.  activists’   production  and  propagation  of  images  through  social  media,  nevertheless,  also  raises   critical  questions  about  the  inherent  logics  of  corporate  social  media  shaping  activist   communication  and  privileging  violent  narratives  to  produce  visibility  over  other   collective  action  frames  (dijck  2013;;  fuchs  2012;;  milan  2015;;  poell  and  van  dijck   2015).  despite  the  widely  recognized  centrality  of  images  in  activists’  communication   empirical  studies  based  on  actual  social  media  data  are  rare.  this  article  addresses  this   challenge  by  analyzing  images  (photos  and  videos)  produced  and  propagated  in  the   blockupy  frankfurt  protests  against  the  opening  of  the  european  central  bank  (ecb)   headquarters  in  frankfurt  am  main,  germany,  on  march  18,  2015.     this  research  is  the  second  phase  of  an  analysis  of  twitter  data  collected  during  the   blockupy  frankfurt  action  using  event-­specific  hashtags  (#blockupy,  #destroika,   #notroika)  (authors,  2016).  through  a  social  network  analysis  of  twitter   communication,  the  first  phase  focused  on  the  main  actors  involved  in  the   communication  processes  and  the  identification  of  groups  of  users  behind  the   production  and  dissemination  of  twitter  messages.  this  research  produced  two  mayor   results:  it  confirmed  the  relevance  of  visual  content  in  twitter  propagation  dynamics   (suh  et  al.  2010)  and  it  observed  the  central  role  of  the  official  frankfurt  am  main  police   account.       the  centrality  of  the  police  account  shows  that  police  and  other  law  enforcement   agencies  have  adopted  social  media  logics  to  communicate  their  perspective  on  protest   events.  social  media  appears  to  be  contested  spaces  where  multiple  actors  (in  this   research  activists,  police,  and  mass  media)  propose  diverse  conflictual  narratives.  in   these  narratives  violence  plays  a  central  role  (cammaerts  2012;;  juris  2005)  as  a   radicalized  tactic  to  produce  visibility  and  to  antagonize  the  opponent,  a  central  aspect   of  newsworthiness,  as  well  as  (preventing  it)  constitutes  the  raison  d’être  for  police’s   physical  and  digital  presence.       this  article  explores  how  different  conflictual  narratives  produced  by  different  actors   emerge  during  the  bockupy  frankfurt  protests  in  visual  communication  on  twitter:   which  different  actors  produce  and  propagate  different  visual  representations  of  the   events?  what  are  the  visual  narratives  emerging  on  twitter  during  the  #blockupy   actions  against  the  opening  of  the  ecb?     methodology     to  answer  these  questions  this  research  followed  a  mixed  methods  approach  based  on   both  quantitative  and  qualitative  analysis  of  the  visual  content  shared  through  twitter   messages  during  the  event.  we  first  ranked  the  tweets  containing  images  and  manually   coded  the  most  retweeted  1%  (n=119)  of  the  data-­set.  the  manual  coding  aimed  at   identifying  the  type  of  users  (activists,  media/journalists,  politicians,  police,  others)  who   produced  the  tweet  and  the  presence  of  violence  in  the  visual  content.  we  further   differentiate  between  two  types  of  violence:  explicit  violence,  the  direct  execution  of   physical  violence;;  and  latent  violence,  not  directly  executed  but  latent  expressions  of   authority  and/or  destruction  (fishman  and  marvin  2006).  the  data  have  then  been   analyzed  through  cross  tabulation  (table  1)  to  verify  the  relationships  between  the  type   of  user  and  the  type  of  violence.  in  parallel  we  performed  a  narrative  analysis  of  the   images.  combining  these  two  approaches  we  were  able  to  observe  how  different  actors   produce  specific  types  of  visual  content  and  to  identify  the  conflicting  narratives   produced  by  police,  activists,  and  journalists/media.     results  and  discussion     table  1  shows  the  relations  between  the  types  of  users  and  the  types  of  violence   present  in  the  images  shared  by  those  users.  activists  mainly  shared  non-­violent   images  (46.5%  versus  18.6%  of  images  containing  explicit  violence  and  14%  containing   latent  violence).  media,  on  the  opposite,  largely  used  images  containing  explicit  violence   (56.8%),  but  only  sharing  a  minor  number  for  images  with  no  violence  (18.2%)  or  latent   violence  (11.4%).  police  shared  mainly  images  containing  latent  violence  (53.8%)  and   explicit  violence  (30.8%).  these  values,  supported  by  a  strong  statistical  association   (cramer’s  v  .309),  show  how  the  major  actors  behind  the  twitter  communication  had   very  diverse  strategies  influencing  which  images  were  shared.  in  the  shared   communicative  space  of  twitter  hashtags  these  diverse  strategies  produced  different   emerging  visual  narratives.         table  1:  crosstabulation  of  user  types  and  represented  violence  (x2  45.5,  df  20,  p<0.001,  cramer's  v  .309)     no  violence   latent   violence     explicit   violence   mixed   n.a.   activist   46.5%   18.6%   14%   11.6%   9.3%   media   18.2%   56.8%   11.4%   6.8%   6.8%   police   15.4%   30.8%   53.8%   0%   0%   politicians   66.7%   33.3%   0%   0%   0%   others   8.3%   41,7%   16.7%   0%   33.3%   n.a.   0%   50%   25%   0%   25%     the  emerging  narratives  show  further  nuances  based  on  the  users  who  originally   posted  the  photos  or  videos.  the  most  visible  images  and  videos  produced  and   propagated  by  police  all  include  either  explicit  or  latent  violence  such  as  images  of  riots   initiated  by  activists  by  setting  police  cars  on  fire.  the  narratives  created  by  activists  are   more  diverse:  colorful  and  artistic  protests,  eye-­witnessing  of  physical  and  symbolic   police  violence  as  well  as  glorification  of  violent  action  initiated  by  rioting  activists.   despite  this  diversity  of  visual  narratives,  mass  media  and  journalists  mainly  construct  a   purely  violent  or  at  most  a  mixed  narrative  of  the  events  that  also  includes  images  of   mass  protest.       based  on  these  results  and  a  continued  analysis  of  images  of  the  blockupy  frankfurt   actions,  we  can  preliminarily  conclude  that  on  social  media,  images  of  riots,  peaceful   protests,  artistic  action,  as  well  as  police  and  news  media  struggle  for  public  visibility.   different  actors  create  parallel  narratives  representing  a  positive  image  of  themselves   by  antagonizing  the  other  through  visual  narratives  of  physical  and  latent  violence  but   also  (in  the  case  of  the  activists)  by  a  non-­violent  representation  of  their  own  actions.   despite  these  non-­violent  narratives  we  can  nevertheless  observe  a  dominance  of   physical  and  latent  violence  in  reporting  about  protest  events  through  visual  content  on   twitter.     references     andén-­papadopoulos,  k.  (2014).  citizen  camera-­witnessing.  crisis  testimony  in  the   age  of  mediated  mass  self-­communication.  new  media  and  society  16(5),  117-­133.     cammaerts,  b.  (2012).  protest  logics  and  the  mediation  opportunity  structure.  european   journal  of  communication,  27(2),  117–134.     dijck,  j.  van.  (2013).  the  culture  of  connectivity:  a  critical  history  of  social  media.   oxford  ;;  new  york:  oxford  university  press.     fishman,  j.m.,  &  marvin,  c.  (2006).  portrayals  of  ciolence  and  group  difference  in   newspaper  photographs:  nationalism  and  media.  journal  of  communication  53(1),  32-­ 44.     fuchs,  c.  (2012).  social  media,  riots,  and  revolutions.  capital  &  class,  36(3),  383–391.     juris,  j.  s.  (2005).  violence  performed  and  imagined:  militant  action,  the  black  bloc   and  the  mass  media  in  genoa.  critique  of  anthropology,  25,  413–432.     mortensen,  m.  (2013).  conflictual  media  events,  eyewitness  images,  and  the  boston   marathon  bombing.  journalism  practice  9(4),  536-­551.     milan,  s.  (2015).  from  social  movements  to  cloud  protesting:  the  evolution  of  collective   identity.  information,  communication  &  society,  1–14.     poell,  t.,  &  van  dijck,  j.  (2015).  social  media  and  activist  communication.  in  c.  atton   (ed.),  the  routledge  companion  to  alternative  and  community  media  (pp.  527–237).   london:  routledge.     suh,  b.,  hong,  l.,  pirolli,  p.,  &  chi,  e.  h.  (2010).  want  to  be  retweeted?  large  scale   analytics  on  factors  impacting  retweet  in  twitter  network.  in  social  computing   (socialcom),  2010  ieee  second  international  conference  on  (pp.  177-­184).  ieee.     selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 de  vries,  m.,  kligler-­vilenchik,  n.,  alyan,  e.,  ma'oz,  m.  &  maoz,  i.  (2016,  october  5-­8).   #al_aqsa_is_in_danger:  the  digital  gatekeepers  of  al-­aqsa  mosque.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the   17th  annual  conference  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved   from  http://spir.aoir.org.   #al_aqsa_is_in_danger:  the  digital  gatekeepers  of  al-­ aqsa  mosque     maya  de  vries,  neta  kligler-­vilenchik,  eman  alyan,  moshe  ma’oz  and  ifat  maoz     hebrew  university  of  jerusalem     one  of  the  most  religiously  and  nationally  contested  sites  in  the  asymmetrical  conflict   between  israelis  and  palestinians  is  al-­aqsa  mosque  (temple  mount)1.    it  is  a  key  site   and  symbol  that  can  mobilize  local  palestinian  resistance  (pullan,  2014:  168).  the   current  study  explores  the  ways  in  which  social  media  platforms  are  being  used  by  east   jerusalem  palestinians  to  mobilize  religious  practices  and  political  activism  over  this   site.  palestinians  from  east  jerusalem  are  isolated  by  geo-­political  barriers  from  other   palestinian  communities  in  the  west  bank  and  the  gaza  strip,  and  live  under  israeli   control  (cohen,  2007).  within  this  political  context,  we  examine  the  mechanisms   through  which  social  media  is  used  as  a  platform  for  reconstructing  feelings  of   connectedness  and  a  sense  of  belonging  to  a  larger  national-­religious  collective   narrative  (frosh  &  wolfsfeld,  2007).       the  study  employs  the  recent  emerging  approach,  introduced  by  zizi  papacharissi  in   her  book  affective  publics  (2015),  which  emphasizes  the  potential  of  social  media  to   become  a  transformative  platform  by  enabling  different  groups  to  tell  their  own  stories.   we  aim  to  broaden  the  discussion  on  the  political  and  religious  mobilization  of   fragmented,  dispersed  communities  in  asymmetric,  protracted  violent  conflict  through   social  media  tools  (aouragh  &  alexander,  2011;;  aouragh,  2012;;  wolfsfeld,  segev,  &   sheafer,  2013).  moreover,  we  consider  the  role  of  religious  acts  as  a  form  of   “connective  action”  (bennett  &  segerberg,  2012)  for  dispersed  communities  living  in   protracted  conflict.     the  study  explores  two  facebook  pages:  i  am  from  jerusalem  ( االقددسس  منن  اانا )  and   jerusalem  city  ( االقددسس  مدديینة );;  both  are  administered  by  palestinians  from  east  jerusalem   and  focus  on  al-­aqsa  mosque.  the  dataset  that  includes  120  posts  and  262  comments   has  been  collected  during  the  month  of  august  2014.  we  took  manual  screen  shots   1    al-­aqsa  mosque  is  the  third  holiest  place  in  islam.  it  lies  in  the  compound  of  al-­haram  al-­sharif/temple   mount,  located  in  the  old  city  of  jerusalem.   with  faststone  capture  software2  that  enabled  us  to  follow  around-­the-­clock  activity  on   the  pages.       we  based  our  analysis  on  the  “grounded  theory”  approach  (glaser  &  strauss  1967),   which  emphasizes  the  generation  of  theories  based  on  data  derived  from  the  research   (strauss  &  corbin,  1998).  the  qualitative  analysis  process  (berg,  2004)  revealed  three   major  thematic  categories,  showing  how  a  marginalized  community  in  asymmetric   conflict  uses  social  media  as  a  platform  for  expressing  its  collective  narratives  and  for   mobilizing  action  through  religious  practices.   1.   creating  solidarity  through  online  religious  act   i  am  from  jerusalem  writes:   now  it  is  the  time  of  the  evening  prayer  according  to  the  local  time  of  the  holy  #al   aqsa  mosque.  allah  akbar  [...]  allah  akbar  […]  the  prayer  is  better  than  sleeping   (8.8.14)       salient  on  these  pages  were  posts  of  the  administrators  calling  to  pray.  functioning   as  an  ‘online  muezzin3’,  these  calls  attempt  to  create,  strengthen,  and  maintain   solidarity  and  a  sense  of  community  through  shared  religious  acts  among  east   jerusalem  palestinians.  the  popularity  of  such  posts  continues  throughout  the  day,   helping  to  connect  the  pages’  followers  to  the  intimate  act  of  religion  –  the  prayer.   through  its  distribution  over  facebook,  the  prayer  becomes  a  form  of  a  connective   action  (bennett  &  segerberg,  2012),  bridging  individuals  through  religious  acts.  these   facebook  pages  are  not  the  first  electronic  media  to  play  the  role  of  muazzin.  yet  what   is  new  here  is  that  followers  can  comment  these  posts.   2.   online  protectors  of  al-­aqsa  mosque   jerusalem  city  writes:   good  morning  our  followers  #go_protect_your_aqsa  (17.8.14)   the   pages   function   also   as   a   tool   through   which   followers   are   called  to   protect   al-­ aqsa,  while  utilizing   their   physical   location   as   jerusalemites.   the   facebook   platform   enables  people   to   connect   around   commonalities   such   as   location   and   religious   acts,   thus   enhancing   and   constructing   their   collective   narrative   (papacharissi,   2015:   128).   more  so,  it  facilitates  the  convergence  of  disparate  individuals  around  common  symbols   and  places  (gerbaudo,  2012,  p.14),  such  as  the  highly  contested  site  of  al-­aqsa.     3.   calling  for  a  religious-­political  struggle   i  am  from  jerusalem  writes:     2  http://www.faststone.org/ 3    the  muezzin  is  a  person  appointed  at  a  mosque  to  call  for  prayer,  and  to  recite  and  lead  the  prayer.   […]  go,  and  stand  in  front  of  the  soldiers.  do  not  be  afraid.  do  not  run  if  they   [israeli  military  forces]  try  to  do  something  to  you.  by  being  patient,  you  will  be   victorious.  #pray_in_alaqsa  #resist  #hang_on  #al_aqsa_is_ours  (15.8.14)     when  media  is  controlled  or  inaccessible  (morozov,  2011),  as  happens  in  the  case   study  of  east  jerusalem  palestinians  (berger,  2013),  social  media  platforms  such  as   facebook  permit  individuals  to  bypass  traditional  gatekeepers  and  contribute  directly  to   the  production  of  news  (castells,  2013).  the  administrators  use  the  alternative   communication  space  of  facebook  to  provide  a  continuous  stream  of  events  in  real  time   (papacharissi,  2015),  focusing  on  the  political  situation  in  al-­aqsa,  while  calling  directly   for  action  and  physical  participation  in  the  struggle  over  the  site.       the  three  themes  emerging  from  our  study  indicate  how  expressions  and  actions  of   religiosity  are  used  within  everyday  life’s  online  practices.  furthermore,  the  findings   point  at  how,  in  the  context  of  an  asymmetric  conflict,  social  media  platforms  can  be   used  as  a  mechanism  for  solidarity  and  mobilization,  with  religious  acts  as  a  form  of   connective  action  (bennett    &  segerberg,  2012).  examining  these  pages  as  an   alternative  space  for  silenced  and  dispersed  group  helps  us  to  understand  facebook  as   a  platform  of  small-­scale  grassroots  activism,  one  that  both  reveals  stories  and   constructs  collective  narratives  (georgalou,  2015).       references     aouragh,  m.  (2012).  social  media,  mediation  and  the  arab  revolutions.  triple  c:   communication,  capitalism  and  critique,  10(2),  518–536.         aouragh,  m.,  &  alexander,  a.  (2011).  the  egyptian  experience:  sense  and  nonsense  of   the  internet  revolution.  international  journal  of  communication,  5,  1344–1358.       bennett,  w.  l.,  &  segerberg,  a.  (2012).  the  logic  of  connective  action.  information,   communication  and  society,  15(5),  739–768.       berg,  b.  l.  (2004).  qualitative  research  methods  for  the  social  sciences.  boston  ma:   pearson.       berger,  m.  (2013).  palestine’s  occupied  fourth  estate:  an  inside  look  at  the  work  lives  of   palestinian  print  journalists.  arab  media  and  society,  17,  1–27.       castells,  m.  (2013).  communication  power.  oxford,  uk:  oxford  university  press.       cohen,  h.  (2007).  the  rise  and  fall  of  arab  jerusalem:  palestinian  politics  and  the  city   since  1967.  jerusalem,  israel:  jerusalem  institute  for  israeli  studies.       frosh,  p.,  &  wolfsfeld,  g.  (2007).  imagination:  news  discourse,  nationhood  and  civil   society.  media,  culture  and  society,  29(1),  105–129.       georgalou,  m.  (2015).  small  stories  of  the  greek  crisis  on  facebook.  social  media+   society,  1(2),  doi:10.1177/2056305115605859.       gerbaudo,  p.  (2012).  tweets  and  the  streets:  social  media  and  contemporary  activism.   pluto  press.       glaser,  b.,  &  strauss,  a.  (1967).  the  discovery  of  grounded  theory.  london,  uk:   weidenfield  &  nicolson.       morozov,  e.  (2011).  the  net  delusion.  new  york,  ny:  public  affairs.       papacharissi,  z.  (2015).  affective  publics:  sentiment,  technology,  and  politics.  oxford   university  press.       pullan,  w.,  sternberg,  m.,  kyriacou,  l.,  larkin,  c.,  &  dumper,  m.  (2013).  the  struggle   for  jerusalem's  holy  places.  routledge.       strauss,  a.,  &  corbin,  j.  (1998).  basics  of  qualitative  research:  techniques  and   procedures  for  developing  grounded  theory.  thousand  oaks,  ca:  sage   publications.       wolfsfeld,  g.,  segev,  e.,  &  sheafer,  t.  (2013).  social  media  and  the  arab  spring:   politics  comes  first.    international  journal  of  press/politics,  18(2),  115.     microsoft word 749-499-1-pb.docx selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 what we talk about when we talk data: metrics, mobilization, and materiality in performing health online brittany fiore-silfvast university of washington usa fioreb@uw.edu gina neff university of washington usa gneff@uw.edu abstract data as a discursive concept in and around data-intensive health and wellness communities evokes multiple social values and social lives for data. drawing on two years of qualitative, ethnographic observations, participation, and interviews in these communities our work explores the gap between discourses of data, the practices with and around data, and the contexts in which data “live.” across the communities of technology designers, “e-health” providers and advocates, and users of health and wellness data we find that tensions emerge not around the meaning or legitimacy of particular data points, but rather around how data is expected to perform socially, organizationally and institutionally, what we term data valences. our paper identifies data valences in health and wellness data, shows how these valences are mediated, and demonstrates that distinct data valences are more apparent in the interstitial interactions occurring in the spaces between institutions or among powerful stakeholder groups.   keywords data; health; mediation; materiality; ethnography; quantified self why talking data matters data as a discursive concept in and around data-intensive health and wellness communities evokes multiple social values and social lives for data. drawing on two years of qualitative, ethnographic observations, participation, and interviews in these communities this paper examines the gap between discourses of data, the practices with and around data, and the contexts in which data “live.”  our ethnography has found these gaps are particularly stark across the communities of technology designers, “e-health” providers and advocates, and so-called users of health and wellness data. in discourses of health care technology designers and advocates, data comes to represent a notion of actionability, the potential of data to be used for social and material performances. in these discourses, possessing data serves as a catalyst for behavioral change: in the words of one advocate, “data leads to knowledge and knowledge leads to change.” this data-behavior model forms the logic of technology development in health and wellness applications and digital health sites. for technologists, this framework means they try to solve the seemingly inextricable problems of healthcare within the united states with what they see as well-designed, personalized, and beautifully visualized interfaces for this data. however, these data-behavior models do not account for the conversations with, about, and through data that occur in online and face-to-face communities of health and wellness data practice. the models frame data as a stable material object, rather than as discursively enacted in multiple emergent ways that resist such stability. we map the symbolic and material performances of data through a lens of mediation, defined as the “ongoing, articulated, and mutually determining relationship” among artifacts, practices and social arrangements of communication technology infrastructure and the processes of reconfiguration, remediation, and reformation (lievrouw, forthcoming). mediation allows us to think about data as emerging from communication media, and therefore always contextually shaped and embedded into practices and materiality. data as mediated draws on the contested or socially constructed nature of selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 data, highlighting the performative agencies of metrics along with measurement technologies (e.g., berg & bowker, 1997; gitelman & jackson, 2013; mol & law, 2004; schubert, 2012), and the emergence of data through communication processes, in which methods of quantification can be seen as “strategies of communication” (porter, 1995) and the multifaceted complexity of technology is “communication made durable” (gillespie, boczowski, & foot, forthcoming). the infrastructure of data communication in this process is not simply “a web of objects” that support particular practices (star and ruhleder 1996), but also the mediation work that makes such data possible. thus data across health and wellness sites functions differently from a boundary object in that the mediation work is not translating different interpretations of what data mean across groups (star & griesemer, 1989). rather, people may expect data to do multiple things in part because data are mediated through communicative infrastructures, requiring translation work that is not simply about meaning or interpretation but also about function and performance in different settings. data valences across stakeholders and contexts of digital health and wellness, these differences are not explained through different perspectives on the meaning of data points, rather they reflect the multi-dimensional expectations for and values around data operating within different data ecologies, what we term data valences. we define data valences as the multi-dimensional expectations and values that mediate the social performance of data, or what data can do and will do within a particular social system. it is through mediation that data valences are enacted and emergent. as a concept, data valence allows us to examine how data are rhetorically evoked, and how the conversations, discourses, practices and contexts of data diverge and multiply. data valences are neither neutral nor stable, and are instead polyvalent across multiple contexts, stakeholders and interactions. when multiple, potentially contentious, data valences emerge in interaction, the differences among them help us to understand the tensions among stakeholders and institutions. our view places the communicative mediation work around data at the center of inquiry. taken together, we suggest, data valences can map a multidimensional view of the social and material life of data. we identify six data valences that emerged from our research and map their emergent symbolic and material performances across the discourses, practices, and contexts of health and wellness communities of practice. these valences are 1) self-evidence, 2) actionability, 3) communication/connection, 4) transparency, 5) truthiness, and 6) discovery. data valences in institutional interstices we extend an emerging scholarly conversation about the nature of data by pointing to the ways that data valences may be contested or negotiated at the boundaries of institutions. within institutions data valences come with more institutional authority and seemingly cohere and congeal within those institutional settings. what we see in our research is that at the intersections between institutions or, what we call interstices, the polyvalent nature of data is more apparent.   the diverging rhetoric around health and wellness data among clinicians, users, and designers interacting in these interstices exposes an acute gap between the challenges for data across the formal, organized, and regulated approaches to health data and those approaches that privilege the potentially unregulated consumer health and wellness space. in the former, design considers patients; in the latter, consumers. for designers and users, data are often defined outside of the healthcare setting but squarely in a (free) market for consumers. among advocates for data-intensive innovation, data become the starting point for conversations concerning interventions, recommendations, and taking action. blood pressure monitoring: data valences across context, discourse, and practice for example, there are multiple data valences that emerge in the interstices of home, clinic, and lab around blood pressure monitoring data (table 1). this is not simply a matter of having better, richer data from multiple home readings as promised by health tech innovators. doctors need to know what selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 constitutes increased risk for the patient and what patterns they can act on and influence with their therapy or treatment. they need actionability. as one doctor explained, having two standard readings of blood pressure in the clinic is known “to predict that you are at a high risk of having a heart attack or a stroke down the road, and that by giving a specific therapy the doctor knows he/she might be lowering that risk.” whereas, “if i have 1,000 readings, and some of them are high, i don’t know what that means. i don’t know what the risk of that is, and i don’t know whether i can meaningfully influence whatever outcome that might bring.” here, pervasive and ubiquitous tracking in the home by a user conceptualized as a consumer/patient poses a distinct challenge to the actionability valence within the clinic. table 1: data valences across context, discourse, and practice for different stakeholders stakeholder context discourse practice data valences user home: blood pressure selftracking • more accurate and personalized data • enable more control of and engagement in their own health • sharing with doctor as story (data plus interpretation) • searching for clinical interpretation • self-diagnosis • communication/ connection • transparency • self-evidence • actionability (low) care providers/ clinicians clinic: professional blood pressure monitoring • reliance on known predictors of risk • interested in data that impacts intervention strategy • actionable data is expressed clinically within known decision frameworks • liability and reimbursement • “i don’t need more data; i need more resources” • actionability (high) designers lab: tools for tracking blood pressure • simple, beautiful, fun leads to engagement/ use • richer data leads to knowledge leads to behavior change • develop personalized recommendations and insights • interfacing with other devices and networks for seamless feedback • measuring tool usage, not behavior change • actionability • discovery conclusion data valences have incredible importance for the design and use of data-intensive technologies and in the visions behind creating and managing the resulting data streams. the polyvalence of health and wellness data becomes apparent in the interstices of institutions through the way different people talk about what they want from data and how they expect data to perform socially, organizationally and institutionally. these conversations point to tensions between institutions and stakeholders and complicate our understanding of the production and consumption of data-intensive technologies by bringing back into the picture the practices, communities, and networks of data that are generated— sometimes as byproducts—in the socio-technical assemblages we study. further, health and wellness selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 data talk help us to frame notions of user and use differently, as relationships with data are inscribed, enacted, and discursively labeled as problematic or appropriate. acknowledgments this paper is based on research supported by intel. we are grateful for insightful comments from dawn nafus for improving this paper. an earlier version of this paper was presented at theorizing the web 2013.. references berg, m., & bowker, g. (1997). the multiple bodies of the medical record: towards a sociology of an artifact. sociological quarterly, 38(3). gillespie, t., boczkowski, p., & foot, k. a. (forthcoming). introduction. in t. gillespie, p. boczkowski & k. a. foot (eds.). media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society. cambridge, mass.: mit press. gitelman, l. & jackson, v. (2013) “introduction,” in gitelman, lisa (ed.). “raw data” is an oxymoron (pp. 115). cambridge, mass.: mit press. lievrouw, l. (forthcoming) materiality and media in communication and technology studies: an unfinished project. in t. gillespie, p. boczkowski & k. a. foot (eds.). media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society. cambridge, mass.: mit press. mol, a., & law, j. (2004). embodied action, enacted bodies: the example of hypoglycaemia. body & society, 10 (2-3), 2-3. porter, t. m. (1995). trust in numbers: the pursuit of objectivity in science and public life. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. schubert, c. (2012). the agency of means in medical work. in j.-h. passoth, b. peuker & m. schillmeier (eds.), agency without actors (pp. 113-130). london: routledge. star, s. l & griesemer, j. r. (1989). institutional ecology, “translations” and boundary objects: amateurs and professionals in berkeley’s museum of vertebrate zoology, 1907–1939. social studies of science19(3) 389–420. star, s. l. & ruhleder, k. (1996). steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: design and access for large information spaces. information systems research 7(1), 111–134. microsoft word harvey-grimes.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): harvey, a. & grimes, s.m. (2014, october 22-24). engendering creativity, engendering labour: girls and diy media. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. engendering creativity, engendering labour: girls and diy media alison harvey university of leicester sara m. grimes university of toronto in recent years, several new online platforms dedicated to the creation and sharing of content made by children have emerged. for example, storybird, “a storytelling community”, provides a simple and attractive interface that invites children (and users of “all ages”) to write and share their own storybooks, accented with illustrations by professional artists. for a fee, these digital storybooks can be transformed into professional-grade print versions, with a portion of the profits used to pay the artists for their illustrations. the combination of creativity, commerce, and institutional authority bound up in this site is but one example of the ways in which these spaces have begun to offer children something much more complex than a mere forum for making and sharing. in addition to transforming how and where children’s creative practices take place, such platforms introduce important new elements into children’s creative practices—including market processes, legal implications and the dissolution of traditional production/consumption relationships. the expansion of low-tech, inexpensive or free tools and spaces for children to engage in increasingly sophisticated modes of creative production thus prompts a number of questions regarding both the opportunities and challenges that may arise. for one, these sites provide unique opportunities for children to share their writing, photography, film-making, and game design online, with equally unique affordances for collaboration, dissemination, feedback, and community. indeed, the accessibility of these sites, technological as well as financial, may potentially afford participation by children that have historically been excluded from media production and sharing, including those on the other side of the “digital divide”, children of colour, children from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds, children with disabilities, rural children, and girls. to date, very little research has focused on the actual diy media-making activities of these groups of children, with the notable exception of work on the productive practices of girls. since the publication of mcrobbie and garber’s 1976 article on girls’ “bedroom” subcultures, domestic spaces have been a key site of critical inquiry into youth culture, rectifying the historical privileging of public, and thus for the most part masculine, forums and practices. in particular, kearney’s ongoing work on female participation in a range of cultural and media production activities, from film-making (2003) to zine publishing (1998), has shifted the focus from leisure and consumption and reframed the bedroom as a site of cultural production. girls’ online participation in creative spaces and their significance for self-expression (stern, 2006), identity performance (thomas, 2007), community development (reid-walsh & mitchell, 2004), and informal learning (kearney, 2006), have also been the object of sustained attention, providing needed nuance to hegemonic constructions of masculine technological mastery (turkle, 1984). our paper engages with some of the gaps and questions that remain unanswered in these studies, in particular the social, spatial, and technical limitations that can still shape the creative practices of young girls. kearney (2007) noted that a focus on the space of the bedroom often effaced the continued lack of privacy and gender-based power dynamics shaping domestic practices, as well as the impact of race and ethnicity on access to this kind of a bedroom culture. we seek to extend kearney’s injunction to attend to the ways in which power dynamics structure space and inform creative media practices in the online domains where kids’ diy media occurs, in conjunction with a focus on the ways in which gendered domestic relations related to leisure time and access to digital technologies still persist. we also challenge kearney’s rejection of mcrobbie and garber’s emphasis on the primacy of consumption within girls’ bedroom culture, particularly given the growing prevalence of commercially-controlled platforms for diy media production and the continued popularity of fan creations. while the above-mentioned body of work made a major contribution towards addressing the absence of girls’ creative practices in research on digital spaces, the tendency towards finding the use of the internet and participation in virtual realms emancipatory can fall into the trap of overlooking the significant barriers and constraints young girls and women face in both online and offline spaces. in particular we focus on the relationship between political economy and gender in the spaces in which young girls engage in diy media-making practices. we ask how the growth of much-celebrated child-targeted tools and platforms for creative production can also serve to reify and reinscribe hegemonic values related to feminine labour, be it domestic, affective, immaterial, or virtual. we synthesize insights from contemporary and historical research on gender dynamics in the home and its impact on leisure (mackenzie & wajcman, 1985), postfeminist analysis (banet-weiser, 2011) and critical education studies (lammers, 2013) of young female creative practice online, to analyze findings drawn from a content analysis of the gendered design elements from our scan of 142 child-oriented diy media websites. through a consideration of the social, political, and technical relationship between domestic and online spaces for young female productivity, we offer insights into the entanglement of creativity, labour, and gender in kids’ diy media. in 1998, kearney asked “what power dynamics within and outside the home impact girls’ formation of a culture of the bedroom?” (1998, p.128). we extend this analysis to consider the space of the so-called ‘virtual room of one’s own’ and examine the ways in which novel digital spaces for girls’ diy media-making and sharing can, through their interpellations of feminine subjects and opportunities for particular forms of engagement, serve to perpetuate hegemonic gender dynamics around feminized labour. references banet-weiser, s. (2011.) “branding the post-feminist self: girls' video production and youtube.” in mediated girlhoods: new explorations of girls' media culture, ed. mary celeste kearney. new york: peter lang, pp. 277-294. kearney, m.c. (1998.) “producing girls: rethinking the study of female youth culture.” in delinquents and debutants: twentieth century american girls’ culture, ed. sherrie inniss. new york: new york university press, pp. 285-310. kearney, m.c. (2003.) “girls make movies.” in youth cultures: texts, images, and identities, eds. kerry mallan and sharyn pearce. westport: greenwood press, pp. 1734. kearney, m.c. (2007.) “productive spaces: girls’ bedrooms as sites of cultural production.” journal of children and media, 1(2), pp. 126-141. lammers, j.c. (2013.) “fangirls as teachers: examining pedagogic discourse in an online fan site.” learning, media and technology 38(4), pp. 368-386. mackenzie, d. & wajcman, j. (eds.) (1985.) the social shaping of technology. buckingham: open university press. mcrobbie, a. & garber, j. (1976.) “girls and subcultures.” in resistance through rituals: youth subcultures in post-war britain, eds. stuart hall & tony jefferson. london: hutchinson in association with the centre for contemporary cultural studies, university of birmingham, pp. 209-222. reid-walsh, j. & mitchell, c. (2004.) “girls' websites: a virtual ‘room of one's own’.” in all about the girl: power, culture and identity, ed. anita harris. new york: routledge, pp. 173-182. stern, s.r. (2006.) “adolescent girls' expression on web home pages: spirited, sombre and self-conscious sites.” chapter 8 youth, technology, and media cultures, review of research in education 30, pp. 279-306. thomas, a. (2007.) youth online: identity and literacy in the digital age. new york: peter lang. turkle, s. (1984.) the second self: computers and the human spirit. new york: simon and schuster. “do we have a sign that says 'weirdos welcome?'”: urban libraries and the control of access daniel greene university of maryland, college park united states dgreene1@umd.edu abstract: this ethnography positions public libraries in washington, d.c. as sites of struggle in the politics of internet access, where what internet access means and what it is good for is contested daily. here, librarians act as gatekeepers to informational capitalism for those whose access to it is otherwise blocked. here, library patrons use the access provided to bridge the ‘digital divide’ that shapes the common sense of social mobility in the u.s. today. or they carve out a space for their own uses and refuse the links that librarians enforce between library technology and social mobility. describing the actions, beliefs, and technologies which link both sides of the so-called ‘digital divide', and contextualizing it within a rapidly gentrifying city, moves the consideration of digital inequality beyond the binary framing of the ‘digital divide’ and towards the complex social relations that link haves and have-nots within informational capitalism. keywords: digital divide; liberalism; libraries; cities; control “do we have a sign that says 'weirdos welcome?'”: urban libraries and the control of access this ethnography positions public libraries in washington, d.c. as sites of struggle in the politics of internet access. these are spaces where what internet access means and what it is good for is contested daily. librarians act as gatekeepers to informational capitalism for those whose access to it is otherwise blocked. library patrons use the access provided to bridge the cultural and material ‘digital divide’ that shapes the common sense of social mobility in the u.s. today. or they carve out a space for their own uses and refuse the links that librarians enforce between the library space and social mobility. i focus on the politics of internet access at the level of everyday life, situated within the broader political economy of a rapidly changing urban space, in order to move the analysis of inequality and internet access beyond the framing of the ‘digital divide’. this builds on a series of interviews with librarians who have been trained in ischools in the last 15 years, as well as their patrons, and months of fieldwork in dc public libraries. the idea of a “digital divide” frames the politics of internet access as a clear binary where owners of internet service and pcs must send similar commodities to those lacking them. but the experiences of library patrons who struggle with lengthy online applications to jobs which themselves require no digital literacy shows that the politics of internet access are not just about providing connections and commodities, but learning specific skills (warschauer, 2003) and struggling with the reduced demand for others (selywn, 2004, p. 349). the digital divide is just as much about the haves as the have-nots. my librarians feel pressured to preserve the space of the library as one dedicated to the possibility of social mobility, just as they did in the progressive era when ‘readers advisors’ coached new immigrants away from dime store fiction and towards american classics and literacy aids (luyt, 2001). alongside social workers and peace corps. volunteers, the current generation of librarians are part of a long line of liberal, white, middle-class, often female, helping professionals who prepare the poor and working class to be good citizens and good workers (stevenson, 2011; goldstein, 2012). what we call ‘the digital divide’ is another historically specific crises in the mode of production which liberalism has attempted to solve. the ‘digital divide’ is never only about getting online, but what people, practices, and spaces benefit within informational capitalism. through an ethnography of the complex relationships between “information haves and have-nots”, as al gore called them in the 1990s (gore, 1994, p. 6), i encourage researchers forgo the simplistic framing of the ‘digital divide’ and instead situate these particular inequalities within contemporary social relations. libraries, librarians, and the political economy of internet access while the clinton administration hailed the extension of internet access as a way to “ameliorate the constraints of geography, disability, and economic status” (department of commerce, 1993), the decision to classify internet infrastructure under a rubric of universal access, instead of universal service, removed the federal government’s obligation to subsidize internet access for isolated or impoverished homes and instead ushered those without access towards ‘‘public access points’ such as libraries (stevenson, 2009). this at a time where e-government troubleshooting, job training, and afterschool care services are increasingly offloaded onto libraries as other public sectors are closed (jaeger and bertot, 2011). as one librarian, rachel said that during her tenure at one large d.c. library, “i was less of a librarian and more of a social worker.” within this context, libraries are positioned as a privileged site of entry to informational capitalism and librarians are identified as idealized knowledge workers on the right side of any digital divide. they are using their access, their literacy, and their resources to access social mobility and extend it to others. they are doing it right. they become the model their patrons aspire to reach--even as they participate in the gentrification wave which is increasingly displacing working-class black and latino residents from d.c. compared to older colleagues, my librarians are more likely to be trained in technology-intensive ischools, to think of their patrons as customers to be served, and to have the flexibility demanded under austerity conditions. katherine estimates that at least 40% of her day is spent outside of her specific section, but says these are “just the staffing realities.” librarians must also regulate the link between social mobility and internet access. recalling fordist liberalism, the american library association’s motto “the best reading for the largest number, at the least cost” mandates professional values of sharing, openness, and outreach. these values sometimes clash with the need to make sure that patrons are, as elena hopes, “there to use our services as more than just a building to sit in for the day.” the days of these mostly white, liberal and female librarians are thus filled with confrontations with much older or younger people of color who have not accessed the mode of production and who violate modes of knowledge worker propriety. these patrons might confuse socialsecurity.com for socialsecurity.gov, but they might also watch porn in public or sleep in the bathroom overnight. the politics of internet access thus force a precarious balance between professional ethics of care and openness and the need to regulate misuse of the physical and informational space of the library. elena, for example, calls in the armed library police if any sleeping patrons smell of alcohol. controlled but if a patron is napping with a book in their lap, elena gives them a pass. to her, this signals an attempt to link library materials with library values. urban libraries in informational capitalism are not disciplinary spaces that hail and transform potential knowledge workers. rather they are spaces of control, wherein regulation is local, individual and modular (deleuze, 1992). various library materials act as interfaces to the common sense of internet access as a driver of social mobility, but the variable relationship between technology, user, regulator, and library culture means results may vary. d.c. public http://socialsecurity.gov/ libraries’ log-in system automatically regulates the long lines for computers, but each of my librarians said they’d happily intervene to extend time to those using the workstation for job applications rather and not youtube videos. similarly, while firewalls are supposed to block pornography, it is “child’s play” to circumvent them, according to rachel, who added “[i]f they don't have access to a computer in another spot and it's an outlet, it doesn't really bother me.” currently homeless patrons will partner up at a particular computer with an application page open, but spend their time discussing how to maximize food stamp benefits. others spend hours researching old films online and then copying films onto dvds. urban public libraries become sites where social mobility is up for grabs in informational capitalism, but what that means and whether its refused or embraced is determined at the level of the individual computers, software, books, and desks situated within complex social relations linking haves and have-nots within the mode of production. references deleuze, g. (1992). postscript on the societies of control. october 59, 3-7. goldstein, a. (2012). poverty in common: the politics of community action in the american century. durham, nc: duke university press. gore, a. (1994, october 22). no more information haves and have-nots. billboard 106(43), p. 6. jaeger, p. & bertot, j.c. (2011). responsibility rolls down: public libraries and the social and policy obligations of ensuring access to e-government and government information. the public library quarterly 30, 91-116. doi: 10.1080/01616846.2011.575699 luyt, b. (2001). regulating readers: the social origins of the readers' advisor in the united states. library quarterly 71(4), 443-466. selwyn, n. (2004). reconsidering political and popular understandings of the digital divide. new media & society 6(3), 341-362. doi: 10.1177/1461444804042519 stevenson, s. (2009). digital divide: a discursive move away from the real inequities. the information society 25(1), 1-22. doi: 10.1080/01972240802587539 stevenson, s. (2011). new labour in libraries: the post-fordist public library. journal of documentation 67(5), 773-790. doi: 10.1108/00220411111164664 u.s. department of commerce. (1993). the national information infrastructure: agenda for action. washington, d.c.: u.s. government printing office. retrieved from http://www.ibiblio.org/nii/toc.html warschauer, m. (2003). technology and social inclusion: rethinking the digital divide. cambridge, ma: mit press. http://www.ibiblio.org/nii/toc.html when the inmates run the asylum: grief play, surveillance, and hacktivism in second life burcu bakioğlu lawrence university united states bbakiogl@gmail.com abstract: this paper will sketch out how governance is negotiated through grief play when surveillance becomes a form of governance in virtual spaces, particularly when mediated through third-party companies. in order to sustain order, most platform owners including linden lab, the parent company of second life, have relied on surveillance as the primary technique of governance and worked with local organizations who themselves have gathered information on others. this paper will argue that third party-surveillance operations result in power asymmetries and abuses and manifests surveillance society in its most dystopic form insofar as it fragments surveillance into a number of loci of power. expectedly, this exacerbates the conflict among user groups. it is in this political climate that griefing in second life developed from a set of practices that manifests itself as irreverent language and dicey pranks into a tactical strategy used to negotiate power in the form of leaking operations. keywords: grief play; surveillance; governance; second life; hacktivism when the inmates run the asylum: grief play, surveillance, and hacktivism in second life in the early days of second life, those who were convicted of griefing would be temporarily sent to an isolated region, the cornfields, as a form of punishment where there was nothing but a tractor, cornfields, some hay bales and a tv. this was the only place where the miscreants would be allowed to log on for the duration of their sentence. started as a creative form of punishment through which the lindens (employees of the parent company, linden lab) hoped to modify virtual behavior, the concept bore traces of jeremy bentham's vision of a panopticon, later revisited by michel foucault (1995). in their vision, the inmates were placed in isolation, where they could be watched, and thus, being in a position of vulnerability, they could be rehabilitated through self-norming. the strategy somewhat backfired as some users, curious to experience this rumored space, griefed purposefully to see what it was all about. as the world grew in numbers, this experiment was abandoned all together. confronted with the influx of new users, the governance team (g-team) of linden lab implemented mechanisms that empowered the user against griefers and worked with local governance organizations to sustain order. what seemed like a sound decision at the time, i.e. open-sourcing governance by shifting the burden of detecting unrest onto the society at large, soon created power inequality among user groups as these groups began collecting information on others and datamining under the banner of security. expectedly, this approach ultimately led to even more conflict in-world. it is in this political climate that griefing in second life developed from a set of practices that manifests itself as irreverent language and dicey pranks into serious initiatives with hacktivist undertones (bakioglu, 2012). this paper will sketch out how governance is negotiated through grief play when surveillance becomes a form of governance in virtual spaces, particularly when mediated through third-party companies. this study implements ethnographic and interpretive methodologies that makes use of interviews, direct observation, and content analysis of key blogs, forums, and other sites. considered to be a play style that involves the “intentional harassment of other players” whereby the game structure is used in unintended ways to cause distress for others (foo & koivisto, 2004; warner & raiter, 2005), griefing manifests itself in a number of ways in social worlds like second life. such activities include trolling, raiding, crashing sims (regions), and even causing monetary damages to businesses by way of theft of content, defamation, or disruption of customer experience. no doubt, the expansion of virtual worlds and their uses render the efforts to manage griefing a pressing concern for virtual governance (bartle, 2003, 2006; foo & koivisto, 2004; rossingol, 2005; warner & raiter, 2005; foo, 2008; chesney et al., 2009). the biggest challenge of managing these disruptive activities is the profound deterritorialization and the reordering of social relations by technology (jarvis, 2005). no longer organized by a spatial component that can be traced to a territorially-based sovereignty, but rather, organized around a common social practice --in this case, griefing-these activities pose a direct challenge to virtual governance. in the efforts to overcome this challenge, platform owners have relied on surveillance as the primary technique of governance. for example, the g-team of linden lab monitors in-world chatlogs of suspecting accounts, scans online forums where the culprits convene, and blacklists textures that depict notorious images/memes used by these groups. griefers, in turn, have learned to hide in plain sight: they create throwaway accounts in the form of alternative accounts, jump ip addresses to avoid detection, and have backups of their inventory in external servers lest they get banned. amidst this turmoil, second life residents have formed banlists as a form of public service that compile a list of the likely culprits and even formed security organizations which not only have trained the virtual public in security and but also actively penetrated griefing groups to leak information. these vigilante groups have built their own surveillance operations using bots and any other tools that are available to them to gather information on the avatars as well as the users behind them, which is a blatant violation of the terms of service. thus, an open society based on peer surveillance emerged under the pretext of keeping the undesirables out and giving the appearance of definite action (brin, 1998). at the same time, it gave rise to gross inequalities of access and opportunity among the users (lyon, 2001). as a response to the privacy violations, lack of transparency and consistency of governance, perception of favoritism among user groups, and aggressive abuse reporting that led to unjust bans, a new griefing group, the wrong hands (twh), emerged in second life and made it their business to expose the shady dealings that occurred behind the scenes. the focus of this paper will be twh's scandalous exposé of modular systems, a third-party company that developed an alternative viewer (browser) for second life called emerald. the client provided enhanced usability, while at the same time boasted of a set of permissive functionalities that allowed its users to engage in questionable activities. the rumors that two of its lead developers had in fact been banned for griefing led to the notoriety of the client as the "griefer client." following linden lab 's approval of emerald as one of the official viewers and a series of run-ins with the developers, twh hacked the modular system's database and leaked incriminating documents. the leaked documents revealed that the emerald had compiled a database of avatar names, ip addresses, and geo-location information for players who created accounts through the modularsystems.com site. additionally, the documents contained email exchanges, a database containing over 39,000 entries tracking 16,740 users, detailing avatar name, avatar key, and ip address, source code for portions of a datamining application, and a picture of the emerald developers in a meeting with the linden lab representatives. the incident proved that the company was engaging in a clear case of dataveillence where users' activities or communications are monitored and checked in automated ways (lyon, 2001).this unexpected revelation not just cemented the close relationship between the lab and the emerald developers, but more significantly, casted doubts on linden lab's attitude towards user privacy. while the intentions of modular systems in conducting dataveillance on second life users are not clear, it stands to reason that such an operation goes beyond maintaining security for governance and spills into the hands of third-party companies who have no vested interest in the world itself. it is at this juncture that surveillance society in virtual worlds manifests itself in its most dystopic form insofar as it is fragments into a number of loci of power and generates enviable power asymmetries and abuses. in this struggle, griefing bears the possibility to develop into a tactical strategy used to negotiate political power very much in the style of wikileaks. references bakioğlu, b. (2012). negotiating governance in virtual worlds: grief play, hacktivism, and leakops in second life. new review of hypermedia and multimedia. special issue on cultures in virtual worlds. 18(4), 237-259. bartle, r. (2003). designing virtual worlds. new york, ny: new riders. bartle, r. (2006). why governments aren't gods and gods aren't governments. first monday. special issue #7. commend lines: the emergence of governance in global cyberspace. retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1612/1527 brin, d. (1998). the transparent society. cambridge, ma: perseus books group. chesney, t., coyne, i., logan, b. and madden, n. (2009), griefing in virtual worlds: causes, casualties and coping strategies. information systems journal, 19, 525–548. foo, c. y. & elina m. i. k. (2004). defining grief play in mmorpgs: player and developer perceptions. proceedings of the 2004 acm sigchi international conference on advances in computer entertainment technology. retrieved from http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1067343.1067375 foo, c.y. (2008). grief play management. saarbrücken, germany: vdm verlag. foucault, m. (1995). discipline & punish. (a. sheridan, trans.). new york, nyc: random house. (original work published 1975) jarvis, t. (2005). the digital cage: digital surveillance and bureaucratic governance. on politics, autumn, 5-16. lyon, d. (2001). surveillance society: monitoring everyday life. philadelphia, pa: open university press. rossingnol, j. (2005, november 15). a deadly dollar. the escapist magazine. retrieved from http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/19/23 warner, d. and m. raiter. (2005, december). social context in massively-multiplayer online games (mmogs) ethical questions in shared space. international review of information ethics. vol 4. retrieved from http://www.i-r-i-e.net/inhalt/004/warner-raiter.pdf http://www.i-r-i-e.net/inhalt/004/warner-raiter.pdf http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/19/23 http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1067343.1067375 http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1612/1527 deception, propaganda and epistemology on the anti-social web jessie daniels the graduate center and hunter college at the city university of new york united states jessiedanielsnyc@gmail.com abstract: the internet enables new discursive strategies that are simultaneously deceptive, difficult to detect and potentially effective at eroding the epistemological foundation of progressive political action. i examine cloaked sites used by white supremacists and anti-abortion activists as a way to explore epistemology in the digital era. white supremacists have for years owned the url martinlutherking dot org, which appears to be a tribute page but is in fact, a form of white supremacist rhetoric intended to undermine civil rights. anti-abortion activists use cloaked sites such as teen breaks dot com to inform young women about the fictitious medical diagnosis of “post –abortion syndrome.” i argue that this range of struggles over “truth,” and “facts” are ultimately epistemological questions raised by the ‘anti-social web.’ keywords: social movements; race; gender; digital literacy; deception, propaganda and epistemology on the anti-social web the internet enables social movements to deploy discursive strategies that are simultaneously deceptive, difficult to detect and potentially effective at eroding the epistemological foundation of progressive political action. in this paper, i examine the practices of deception used by white supremacists and antiabortion activists as a way to explore central issues for social movements in the digital era. specifically, i examine the social movement strategy of cloaked sites, that is, websites published by individuals or groups that conceal authorship in order to disguise a political agenda. the reality of the current popular internet is that search engines, web addresses, and interfaces represent a new kind of battleground over ideas and politics. for example, a candidate running for office today may be the target of a “google bomb” that games search engines to undermine a carefully crafted public persona. or, a woman who is supposedly an average mom appears in a cable television and youtube spot voicing her concern about “big government interfering with her grocery shopping.” she may actually be a spokesperson for the beverage industry and part of a multimillion dollar “astroturf” campaign. in the rest of this paper, i will examine the way that social movements use a variety of new media tools to shape public debate and push forward a particular political agenda. martinlutherking (dot) org for the savvy web user, it seems clear that there are a number of things amiss at this site. the first clue is the subheading a “a true historical examination.” the use of “true” here suggests an uncovering of some formerly untold truth about dr. king. the main page features an unflattering quote of clandestine fbi audio tapes recorded while king was engaged in sexual activity with a woman other than his wife. it is possible to read the transcript of king’s conversations taped by the fbi within the larger context of systemic white supremacy in which nascent civil rights movements are routinely stamped out by the government (feagin, 2006); however, within the context of this cloaked site, the quote is intended to undermine king’s legitimacy as a civil rights leader, and with that, the goal of racial equality that he stood for. once on the website, there are a number of additional indications as to the source of the information, including a link in the right margin that reads “jews and civil rights,”1 that leads to a page that includes a chapter called “jews, communism and civil rights” from white supremacist david duke’s book my awakening. scrolling down to the very bottom of the first page, there is a link that reads “hosted by stormfront,” and clicking on that link takes the user to don black’s “white pride world wide” at stormfront.org. although these clues might seem fairly obvious to savvy web users or those with the necessary historical knowledge, other users can easily miss them. what makes this cloaked site archetypal is only partially about what is on the site itself; just as significant is the domain name and the place the site appears in search engine results. a google search for “martin luther king”, regularly returns this website in the first page of results. before even viewing the content of this site, the url makes it appear to be legitimate, in part because the main web reference is made up of only the domain name “martinlutherking,” and the url ends with the suffix “.org.” the decision to register the domain name “martinlutherking.org” relatively early in the evolution of the web, was a shrewd move for advocates of white supremacy; failure to do likewise was a lost opportunity for advocates of civil rights. recognizing that domain name registration is now a political battleground, a number of civil rights organizations have begun to reserve domain names to prevent them from being used by opponents of racial justice. for example, the naacp registered six domain names that include the word “nigger” and the adl registered a similar number of domain names with the word “kike” (festa, 1998). however, registering offensive epithets is only a small part of the struggle. the move by opponents to register the esteemed symbols of civil rights as domain names, such as martin luther king, and use them to undermine racial justice is one that was clearly unanticipated by civil rights organizations. to be effective, cloaked sites with domain names such as www.martinlutherking.org rely on the naïveté of their target audience, a predominantly white audience that each year moves further away from the experience of the civil rights era. by concealing authorship and intention, such sites combine old forms of “black” and “grey” propaganda with digital media. this combination of racist propaganda and digital media constitutes a new method of distributing social movement rhetoric. 'post-abortion syndrome' pro-life social movement actors conceal website authorship in order to deliberately disguise their prolife politics. compared to martin luther king (dot) org, “teen breaks” (www.teenbreaks.com) makes sophisticated use of domain name, interface, design, and moderate sounding rhetoric. to all but the most astute political observer and experienced internet veteran, the site appears to be a legitimate source of reproductive health information. nowhere on the site does it reveal the political affiliation of the publisher, nor even who the publisher is beyond a vague mention of the “rosetta foundation,” which is a front for a pro-life activist.2 on a page called “complications for girls,” the site quotes literature from the conservative focus on the family to support the notion that there are many (and exclusively) negative physical and emotional consequences from abortion,3 part of “post-abortion syndrome”, which is not a medically recognized disorder. this cloaked site is in many ways a digital version of the brickand-mortar "women's health clinics" advertised in the phone book alongside legitimate clinics and intentionally concealing the fact that all the counselors and information are designed to prevent women from accessing abortion services (ginsburg, 1998) the danger in a cloaked site of this type, as with the 1 here again, context is the key. the word “jew” is not, by itself, anti-semitic; but when that term is used rather than “jewish people” or “jewish tradition,” it raises suspicions. 2 according to several online sources, sandra choate faucher is president of “the rosetta foundation”; however, so little information is available about her or the “foundation” online that it’s possible she is a sock puppet, that is, a fictional character created by someone else. 3 see http://www.teenbreaks.com/abortion/complicationsgirls.cfm http://www.teenbreaks.com/ http://www.teenbreaks.com/abortion/complicationsgirls.cfm brick-and-mortar locations, is that young girls or women looking for reliable reproductive health information might be persuaded that “post-abortion syndrome” is a reality, and, in the worst case scenario, that they would endure an unwanted pregnancy and childbirth rather than end a pregnancy for fear of the fictitious syndrome and lack of access to services. the tautological strategy here of using conservative sources to substantiate conservative “facts” is a commonplace tactic of the right-wing propaganda machine in the united states (goldberg, 2006, p.80-105). whatever one’s personal politics might be concerning the right to abortion, the fact that this site presents itself as neutral and conceals its’ authorship and political agenda qualifies it as a cloaked site. deception is not a new feature of social movement rhetoric, but some features of the digital era can make it more difficult to discern which sites are legitimate and which sites disguise a hidden political agenda. of course, designating a site as legitimate or cloaked is at some level a political distinction, similar to calling some organizations “front groups” and others as legitimate social movement activism (mayer, 2007). shying away from such political distinctions in evaluating information online only serves to obfuscate the key issues. references feagin, j. (2006) systemic racism: a theory of oppression. new york, ny: routledge. festa, p. (1998, may 1). controversial domains go to civil rights groups. c|net news. retrieved at http://news.com.com/controversial+domains+go+to+civil+rights+groups/2100-1023_3-210803.html ginsburg, f.d. (1998). contested lives: the abortion debate in an american community. berkeley, ca: university of california press. goldberg, m kingdom coming: the rise of christian nationalism. new york, ny: norton. mayer, r.n. (2007). winning the war of words: the “front group” label in contemporary consumer politics. journal of american culture, 30(1), 96-109. http://news.com.com/controversial+domains+go+to+civil+rights+groups/2100-1023_3-210803.html social engineering electoral campaigns david parry saint joseph's university united states dparry@sju.edu abstract: political campaigns increasingly use technology as a means of voter targeting to gain a competitive advantage. in the victory lab, sasha issenberg argues that this technological advance is healthy for a democracy. drawing on the work of theorists on the public sphere, and contemporary scholarship on how digital tools change political campaigning, this paper argues that the significant advances in data mining, and behavioral targeting suggest a problematic future for the polis, especially in terms of elections and campaigns. while we often think of social media tools as increasing voter participation, there are significant ways in which these technologies can also be used for the reverse, as a method of engineering elections. there is a substantial threat here, and we ought to begin to question and consider cultural and legal solutions to preserve balance between technical tools designed to engage voters and those whose purpose is manipulation of the electorate. keywords: democracy; publics; big data; surveillance; marketing social engineering electoral campaigns when critics analyze late twentieth century electoral politics they often frame it as the rise of the broadcast politician, characterized by image laden politics and sound bite messaging in an effort to manipulate and “control the message.” in this analysis ronald reagan's victory in the 1966 california governor's election serves as a key moment. however, there was another election that same evening, a much smaller one, one which in the long analysis might prove to be an even more instructive event, especially in analyzing twenty first century electoral politics. don riegle, a former ibm executive, won the election to michigan's 7th congressional district. what is important about the riegle story is the method by which he gained a competitive advantage. riegle was a republican running in a traditionally democratic district. initial polling indicated that he was trailing his opponent by over 30 points, yet he eventually managed to close that gap, winning by a margin of eight points. and although riegle was certainly a charismatic figure who played well to the developing broadcast political mediums, his strategic advantage came in the form of leveraging data driven politics. indeed, his campaign is perhaps the first example of a rigorous data driven political campaign, wherein he deployed data analysis to identify which voters in which precincts were the most persuadable, thus allowing him to focus his efforts in those areas, securing the requisite 50% of the electorate. while mass media, particularly television, has been a powerful force in elections, enabling engagement with broad segments of the electorate, the other half of the story here, the ability to use data to treat individual members of the electorate as discrete units, rather than a general public is of equal importance in the late 20th century; perhaps evolving into the key feature of 21st century campaigning. to be sure, targeted political persuasion in the service of generating votes has a long history, one which certainly pre-dates computational data. however with the increasing prevalence of the digital network as a communicative media and the rise of computational power, the ability to track, store, and share information has exponentially increased, altering the relations between electoral institutions, political parties and the public. my underlying theoretical claim is that technology changes our relation to democracy, not in a simple deterministic way, but rather the technological medium which forms the substructure for political communication and organization certainly informs and shapes our democratic practices. a particular medium both constrains and enables social formations, communication, and power relations. thus with a change in the means of communication, comes a change in the way that we practice democracy. the medium is the social message. in philip howard's, new media campaigns and the managed citizen, he documents what he calls the rise of the “hypermedia” campaign, which adopts digital technologies. published in 2006 the book covers how the prior ten years were influenced by the adoption of digital tools. read in conjunction with daniel kreiss's taking our country back (2012) one begins to gain a picture of how startling the shift in digital data driven politics has been. indeed, one of the key narratives that emerged following the 2012 campaign was not only the amount of data that the obama campaign collected and used, but the rather stark computational and data advantage he enjoyed over the romney campaign. from the beginning, those working on the digital side of the campaigns realize that these tools harbor both the potential to engage a wider range of citizens, and gain a competitive advantage in elections. importantly, those within the campaigns begin making normative assumptions about data use. deciding the limits and ethics of data use. unfortunately the dial is tipped in favor of collecting and leveraging as much data as possible, wherein a “data arms race” is birthed. there is a clear parallel here to the attempt by corporations to collect, store, and analyze data in an effort to capture market share (indeed the obama campaign's chief data scientist came from the corporate sector with a background in maximizing supermarket sales). the ultimate goal here is behavioral targeting, attempting to persuade individuals below the level of conscious awareness, persuade either to purchase a product, or in the political case choose a specific candidate. this type of large scale data collection, aggregation, and modeling is fast becoming a focus of electoral campaigns, representing a significant shift in the political relations between citizens and campaigns. particularly powerful is the ability to merge political data (voting records) with data collected by credit card companies and businesses, while also adding information gleaned from tracking digital interactions. campaign grid for instance claims to have an 80% success rate at matching voter records to online databases, with a goal of getting that to 100%. there are two broad reasons that i think this type of data driven politics ought to concern us. the first is a practical set of concerns. as howard highlights in his work on hypermedia campaigns, the degree to which citizen attributes or data is now bought and sold on the marketplace has rather significant consequences. there is little transparency in how this data is used, and while in the early days of hypermedia campaigns the suggestion was that the digital campaign would lower the cost of running for office, this type of data drive, social engineering campaign does precisely the opposite, creating powerful new players in the political landscape (many of them online trackers or social media services). the second concern is to consider carefully how this almost exclusive focus on the voting function as indicative of citizen engagement damages democracy. in a democracy citizens perform multiple roles, from discursive engagement to outright resistance, all of which are marginalized by direct voter targeting. indeed, voter targeting works precisely on condition that it eliminates the discursive function, red lining the electorate. while this type of voter targeting might increase voter turnout, such an increased turnout does not guarantee an increase in civic engagement broadly conceived. big data social scientists are rapidly moving to making social science an engineering discipline, to treat humans as groups of actors to be engineered. what happens when politics becomes a matter of engineering? we are moving there, and what is worse we are moving there with little to no regulation, with little or no discussion about the costs of this shift. winning a campaign is not the same as fostering a democracy, indeed these are often heterogeneous goals. technology can enable and empower both, ultimately as a public we ought to recognize this and have discussions about the role of technology in democratic elections and public formations. references hersh, e. & schaffner, b. (2013). targeted campaign appeals and the value of ambiguity. journal of politics, forthcoming. howard, p. (2006) new media campaigns and the managed citizen. new york, ny: cambridge university press. issenberg, s. (2012). the victory lab. new york, ny: crown. kreiss, daniel. (2012). taking our country back: the crafting of networked politics from howard dean to barack obama. new york, ny: oxford university press. rosanvallon, p. (2008) counter-democracy: politics in an age of distrust. new york, ny: cambridge university press. libraries, librarians, and the political economy of internet access controlled martinlutherking (dot) org 'post-abortion syndrome' 1 blogging while black: a critical analysis of resistance discourse by black female bloggers catherine knight steele university of illinois chicago usa caknight@uic.edu abstract participation in public discourse has always been limited for marginalized groups in society. previous research examines internet blogging as a place for individuals and communities to participate in the political process. minority bloggers may use blogs as means of mobilizing their readers around particular political causes and issues. while this work causes us to consider blogging as an avenue of incorporation into mainstream political participation, it does not chart the ways in which blogging may be used as subversive act to resist oppression by black women in particular. this analysis attempts to account for the ways community conversations can function as an act of resistance even when overt political motivations and advocacy are not the primary goal. gossip has previously been considered for its usefulness in managing female relationships and as a subversive act by women. within a black feminist epistemology, black female gossip blogs are considered a possible site for resistance to oppression at three levels: the personal, the communal and the institutional. this analysis considers how a black feminist dialectic is used by certain gossip bloggers and abandoned by others. a discussion follows with implications for new media space as a tool for the continued proliferation of resistance of oppression by black women and other marginalized groups. keywords black feminism; gossip; resistance; blogs. 2 while much of the internet, particularly the blogosphere is dominated by western white men, there is increasingly an interest in discovering how marginalized groups may use blogs to further their own participation in the democratic process. previous literature has examined the use of blogs by non-dominant groups, however the lens used for this examination is far too often that of the dominant culture. if we are to understand the use of new media technology by groups that have traditionally been kept out of the political process it is important that our epistemology is one that allows for diverse ways of understanding the production of knowledge and meaning making. baym offers that qualitative inquiry, particularly in online spaces requires us to change our epistemologies from that of ‘discovering and finding’ to ‘constructing and making’ (baym, 2009). african american women are a group who exits in a unique position between multiple systems of oppression. this has traditionally placed the group, and discourse within the group, outside of the dominant structure of the confines scientific knowledge production. therefore, it is important to explore blogs as sites where black women interrogate the intersectionality of race and gender from a black feminist perspective. exclusion from the public discourse has led many marginalized groups to find alternate way to sustain themselves as a community and engage in democratic society. forms of communication often change to accommodate postitionality and lack of access to communication technologies. as new media technology expands it is increasingly important that research takes into account the perspectives of the media users/producers being studied and the interconnectedness between internet and life-world in which it is situated (baym, 2009). communication research frequently explores the uses of blogs in self-expression, activism and political organization. however, a gap exists in the research that directly addresses how black women in particular use blogs in ways that may differ in important ways from the dominant culture. specifically, from a black feminist epistemology, research must interrogate spaces can be used in non-traditional ways to subvert dominant discourse and offer validation for personal ways of; knowing and writing, narrative and dialogue rather than debate, validation of emotion, and personal accountability. this analysis attempts to account for the ways community conversations can function as an act of resistance even when overt political motivations and advocacy are not the primary goal. black gossip blogs are examined using a discourse analysis which evaluates the blogs for the ways they may be used to combat multiple levels of oppression including the personal, the communal and the institutional (collins, 2000). 3 the previous literature in the fields of communication and sociology on blogging, gossip and african american feminist thought informs this study. blogging the social and political previous literature has explored blogging as a activity that serves varying purposes. blogging motivations may be best understood as generally serving as a individual social activity or means of activism and political participation. blogs are often considered a form of selfexpression similar to that of journaling. this occurs mainly because the initial structure of blogs resembled that of a personal diary (nardi, schiano, & gumbrecht, 2004). as a means of self expression blogging may be used to release tension, express opinion or form ideas in the process of ‘thinking by writing and seeking feedback (nardi, schiano, & gumbrecht, 2004). while blogging is often used as a means of self-expression, coalescence around activist causes is an increasingly important use of internet blogs. community building, especially as it relates to activism is a tool used by bloggers to voice dissent with politics, organizations and societal institutions. kahn and keller (2004) describe the activism on the part of bloggers as revolutionary in its creation of new oppositional spaces which transform everyday life and discourse. they warn however, that even in these new spaces promotion of dominant discourses of domination may still exist. this ‘contested terrain’ is therefore a valid and important site for inquiry (p.94) as the environment continues to expand and include more voices outside of the mainstream (ekdale, namkoong, fung, & perlmutter, 2010). researchers interested in the use of blogs to further an activist agenda have often focused on how organized political movements construct and maintain blogs (best & keller, 2001; couldry & curran, 2003). however, the literature has focused too often on literal expression of political organization. while political blogs certainly act as an organizing tool for communities, including marginalized groups, we must contend with the fact that these groups often organize and create dialogue in spaces outside of what may be traditionally expected. as tremayne (2007) explains, every new form of media research must concern itself with both the presentation of content and the way in which users consume said content. pole (2010) suggests that minority bloggers may use blogs as means of mobilizing their readers around particular political causes and issues. while this work causes us to consider blogging as an avenue of incorporation into mainstream political participation, it does not chart the ways in which blogging may be used in seemingly apolitical ways as a means of resistance. further, it does not allow for non political sites to be treated as equally valid as locations where important 4 political discourse about race, gender, sexuality may take place. whether or not authors of blogs and their participants view their participation as political in nature, their actions may still act to resist dominant ideology (scott, 1990). in this sense, they function very similarly to overtly political blogs, which as farrell & drezner (2008) explain “frame politcal debates and create focal points for the media as a whole”. this study seeks to offer gossip sites as a source of both intentional and non-intentional subversive resistance to dominant discourse and ideology. in this context a community can meet together and discuss and challenge oppression both through their writing and through their very existence outside of the control of popular press. the social and subversive uses of gossip gossip has previously been considered for its usefulness in managing female relationships (jones, 1980) and as a subversive act by women (ayim, 1993; collins l., 1993). gossip manages the group identity as well as providing social space for women to negotiate femininity. while gossip as a communicative practice has a history as long as human communication itself, new media technology has provides a new space for exploration. gossip is a form of cultural capital which affords those ‘in the loop’ with knowledge that affords power and status. celebrity gossip in particular serves a particular function in strengthening bonds among women. because this gossip is not specifically about anyone within the participant’s social circle, the fear of disparagement is avoided and instead is replaced with discourse that is unifying. as feasey (2008) explains, “the latest gossip [is] understood as, and deliberately coveted because, it act[s] as a point of conversation among young women. it [is] as if an understanding of celebrity ‘trivia’ served as a connection between women, with readers being united by an appreciation of a particular media text”. while feasey discusses readers use of gossip magazines, the use of gossip blogs holds the same possibility for communal sharing of knowledge and management of relationships online. recent research on celebrity gossip blogs discussed celebrity gossip as malicious discourse (fairclough, 2009) or a resurgent trend of old practices of journalism (meyers, 2009). this research again excludes the ways in which african american women use this activity in ways that may differ from dominant american culture. because this online space provides the opportunity for feedback from readers, this communal work done in such a space becomes even more apparent. in the case of black female gossip blogs, the online space may serve as a site of unification for a group of women who may otherwise be separated by geography or socioeconomic status. since gossip has been historically linked to women, it is often assumed a 5 trivial communicative act. however, previous literature has also demonstrated the use of gossip as a subversive practice by marginalized groups (chidgey, payne, & zolb, 2009; wickham, 1998). gossip has often been crucial to the active resistance of domination and oppression. black feminism and the matrix of domination white feminism traditionally has focused on oppression in terms of gender while ignoring issues of race, class, and sexuality. in resistance to this marginalization, black feminism and womanism were forged. black feminism was developed to call attention to the multiple oppressions experienced by women of color, reflecting and defining their everyday experiences in their own terms. within academic research, patricia hill collins describes the experiences of black scholars as “outsiders within” who possess a “distinct view of the contradictions between the dominant group’s actions and ideologies” (hill collins, 2000, p.11). however, research on the experiences of black women in terms of the unique processes of knowledge distribution through personal and mediated communication often goes unexplored. black feminist epistemology then requires scholars to grapple with ways of knowing that often fall outside of dominant societal constraints (anderson and collins, 1992). as womanist anthropologist linda thomas (1998) explains, reconstructing knowledge means tearing down myths that have paralyzed communities, and recreating truths which have been buried in annals that contain vast sources of knowledge… inclusive construction of knowledge denotes exploring sources that culturally may be vastly different from our own epistemological points of departure. it may be knowledge based on human experience as well as theory; and it decidedly involves inclusion of the ideas, theories, orientations, experiences, and worldviews of persons and groups who have previously been excluded. such research calls on us a scholars to reexamine ideas of intellectualism and the ways in which black women who do the work of intellectuals have historically been forced outside the world of academia. hill collins (2000) explains that we must examine the work of black women writers and consider the ways in which their writings and behaviors are a philosophical statement which is both scholarly and activist is nature (p.15). the actions of black women which actively challenge dominant discourse serve as a means of resistance to oppression. 6 previous research insists that in order for an action to be considered resistant it must include both action and opposition (hollander & einwohner, 2004). weitz defines resistance as including “actions that not only reject subordination but do so by challenging the ideologies that support that subordination (weitz, 2001, p.670). as she explains, resistance should be done in public, by the collective, within sight of the powerful. hill collins clarifies, racism has created separate communal structure for african americans within which a culture of resistance may exist apart from the dominant structure (hill collins, 2000, p.226). this asks us to see oppression and resistance operating at multiple levels which function in a ‘both/and’ manner, rather than ‘either/or’. we must consider the activity of blogging as well as the decision to read and comment on another’s blog as action in this context. the primary focus of black feminist thought, is the introduction of the ‘matrix of domination’ as a means of explaining the oppression experienced and resisted by women of color. the matrix is explored at three levels: the personal, the communal/cultural and the institutional. personal each individual possess a personal biography which holds within it all of the narratives, experiences and identities that construct the unified whole. for african american women, this may include race, gender, class, sexuality, etc. because of the unique experiences and motivations of the individual, circumstances may be understood and internalized differently. thusly, each personal biography is unique and recognizes the agency of the individual, seeing the individual body as both an object and agent in social practice. at the personal level, individual practices self-definition which is the first puzzle piece in forming a cohesive resistance discourse for the collective. however, the power of these individual acts of resistance should not be castigated as being of lesser importance that the work done by the community. as hill collins reminds us, “black feminist thought speaks to the importance african american women thinkers place on consciousness as a sphere of freedom (hill collins, 2000, p.227).” thusly, if the individual has the power to restructure their own biography and in essence free themselves from the dominant narrative they have in fact resisted oppression the personal level. blogging may provide the space for black women to participate in the re-telling of personal narrative and restructuring of one’s individual story. 7 communal/cultural blogging also acts as means of learning on the part of the cultural group and creating a shared sense of meaning through collective action. the personal biography is connected in significant way to culture which surrounds it and help provide a context of meaning. this level is particularly powerful as community ideology is infested with dominant thought which continues to oppress black women from within. the power to control and dominate a group from within has been explored by the work of fanon (1963) and woodson (1933) as well. while these authors explore in brilliant ways, the ways in which people of color are oppressed at the communal level, hill collins complicates this literature by expressing the unique capacity of african american women to be communally oppressed at both a racial and gender level. communal resistance by african american women exists in the relationships formed where experiences are both validated and challenged in the larger system of oppression. institutional bonilla-silva (2006) articulates a profound change in the way racism is exercised and articulated. while jim-crow racism was rooted in biologically based notions of inferiority of certain races, and usually overtly expressed by the public; bonilla-silva explains that covert behaviors and words are now used to reinforce discrimination, segregation and inequality at an institutional level. oppression at the institutional levels marginalized the lives of black women in spaces that could and should be used for empowerment such as schools, churches, media and other formal organizations (hill collins, 2000, p.228). however, black women have historically, and continue to produce work which challenges the hegemonic order and provides a critique within these institutions. resistance of such institutions is inherently political in nature as it seeks to undermine the dominant legal or social structures that keep racism and sexism intact. rationale for study previous research has demonstrated the importance blogs may have in creating public forums for political discourse. blogging has been examined in relation to its potential for fostering community activism and space for political debate. more recently minority bloggers have been considered for their potential to use online spaces to break into dominant discourse and emerge as new political sphere. however, these studies have excluded the possibility that blogs that exist outside of the overt political realm may also function in potentially political ways. particularly, from a black feminist epistemology, the conversations of black women may occur in settings that are often excluded as valid within academia. this study therefore seeks to 8 examine the online gossip behaviors of black women online for their potential to contribute to a discourse of resistance. audre lorde writes that black female writers must manage "the external manifestations of racism and sexism with the results of those distortions internalized within our consciousness of ourselves and one another" (lorde, 1984, p.147). using a typology crafted from patricia hill collins’ work on the levels of oppression faced by african american women, this study will examine black celebrity gossip blogs and the ways in which they resist or tolerate oppression at three levels: the personal, the communal and the institutional, uncovering the ways in which black women ‘talk back’ (hooks, 1988) to systems and structure from which they are excluded or exploited. analysis this study examined the content of two popular celebrity gossip blogs that were established by and are written by black female authors: the young black and fabulous (theybf.com), started by ‘natasha k.’ and necole bitchie (necolebitchie.com) founded by ‘necole’. both authors remain the primary contributors to the blogs. each was selected for their popularity and the press they have received within african american media outlets. necolebitchie.com is currently rated in the top 10 urban blogs on the internet by electronic villager blog rankings and was nominated best new blog and best gossip blog by the 2008 & 2010 black weblog awards. theybf boasts of over 13 million readers a month, describing itself as the “perfect mix of gossip, entertainment, and swagger”. the analysis occurred over the period of two months, from february 25th-/april 25th. original posted content was examined which included, pictures and stories posted on the main webpages as well as content links provided in the text. links included archived content categorized by topic. on each sight, readers comments were totaled at the bottom of each blog entry. comments were considered and explored for common themes which emerge en mass from readers. additionally, the architectural structure of sights was considered along with frequency, type and distribution of advertising content. each sight was updated with new blog posts with an average frequency of 4-5 times per day. blog posting ranged in length from 100-600 words on average. every post contained visual imagery which most often included a picture of a celebrity. emergent themes within each level of oppression as outlined by hill collins (2000) are explored. 9 the individual – stepping in and out of the feminist box the individual level of oppression provides the possibility of resistance through selfdefinition. on each site blog posts resist dominant discourse about black women and reject negative labeling and oppressive representations using both the voice of the author and the celebrities themselves. the nature of the blog posts on necolebitchie differs from those on theybf in the use the celebrity’s own words to clarify media rumors or negative press. blog posts such as “jennifer hudson clears up rumors” or “halle berry says she’s not the marrying kind” speak using the voice of black women discussing their careers and relationships from their own perspectives, often shunning public opinion. this use of personal narrative combats dominant discourse and provides the opportunity to black women to use their own voice in resistance of marginalization. self-definition on the part of black women is a political tool used as the first means of combating oppression. the structure of necolebitchie lends itself more to the use of personal narrative as the blog’s author is prominent in pictures and stories. the author, necole, clarifies in her ‘contact’ page: this is a’blog’site, not a news site. all posts are based on my opinions and thoughts on what may already be reported in the media. i am not a journalist nor do i aspire to be. i am a blogger who created this site as a hobby. and yes, i am bias. i only report on artists/celebrities that i like or find interesting. thanx – necole (emphasis in original text, necolebitchie.com). the acknowledgement of subjectivity provides the opportunity for both the blog’s author and readers to create and articulate meaning for themselves outside of the constraints of mainstream media. each post is signed ‘by necole bitchie’, again demonstrating the voice of the author. following each post a link to reader comments is represented by the number of people posting replies and the word ‘bitching’, for example ‘75 people bitching’. the tie in of the word bitching links the author and readers giving each a unique and equivalent voice on the site. in this way the readers participate in storytelling as well, crafting their own narrative and shaping the communal conversation. this act of self-definition was particularly salient in two areas of discussion: beauty and mothering. narratives about beauty emerged in relation to their propensity to deviate or adhere to dominant cultural ideology. while research demonstrates the cultural relativity of beauty, we know that western conceptions of beauty permeate american media content and are often 10 internalized by sub-cultures in the u.s. discussions of beauty on both sites often revolve around fashion, hair and make-up. singer/songwriter solange receives praise from authors on both sites for deviating from traditional fashion attire and her decision to remove hair weaves and ‘go natural’. the decision of celebrities to show their natural, unprocessed hair occurred with some frequency. on theybf, actress gabrielle union’s twitpic of her hair without hair extensions or chemical relaxers was posted with headline “she is not her hair: gabby union shows off her natural un-relaxed, un-weaved hair”. carol’s daughter, a beauty line exclusively for women of color is mentioned frequently in posts. these posts signal resistance in their use of personal narrative to define beauty by the individual. there are clear signs of adherence to dominant ideologies of beauty. however, the contrast of such overt acts of oppression with clear celebrations of difference and space provided for articulation of personal ideas of beauty illustrates resistance at the individual level. personal narratives regarding black mothering are another salient theme in the blog posts. in the dominant media landscape, professional women, including celebrities, are often judged and/or castigated due to lack of adherence to social norms regarding mothering. blogs written by and for african american women provide the space to discuss mothering within a communal context but with implications for the individual. mothers are discussed in a variety of contexts, however personal narrative is used primarily to explain how mothering impacts a female celebrity’s success or failure. mothers of celebrities are discussed in relation to the success of their children. women bearing children of celebrities are given a voice on the sites. in the dominant media landscape, often these women are relegated as ‘baby mamas’ with little attention or respect given to the personal endeavors. both necolebitchie.com and theybf make a point of telling the personal stories of these individuals. necolebitchie frequently features interviews with toya carter, the ex-wife of rapper lil’ wayne. one blog post included, under the section heading ‘on holding her own’ this quote: “people thought tiny and i were going to do a baby momma show. they only knew that i was married to lil wayne. but once we did season 2, they knew more about me. my life has changed, and i’m more in the public’s eye. i hear from people who are inspired by my story”. this use of personal narrative to reverses the dominant script, giving agency to the individual and promotes resistance to the oppressive nature of having one’s identity fashioned by others. 11 the communal – re-centering black relationships communal/cultural oppression is most damaging for its ability to operate from within. resistance to this form of oppression for black women becomes possible through the nurturing of relationships and through challenges to popular myths and stereotypes about the relationships between african americans. each of the blogs has recurring themes of representing positive relationships of african american women with each other and with black men. when reporting on issues of violence within the community a decided stance is taken against such actions. however, as is often the case, oppression is often internalized and rearticulated in black women’s writing as well. hegemonic masculinity is a pattern of practice that allows men to dominate women. it is not a personality trait of certain men, rather a way of normalizing gender stratification through institutions, culture and interpersonal dialogue (connell and messerschmidt, 2005). even those not enacting hegemonic masculinity per se, are often still complicit in its existence. both blogs have frequent posts which celebrate the mythical black male hero. the prototype celebrated on the sites is often one that holds fast to patterns of hegemonic masculinity. this is particularly true in terms of physical appearance of black men in photos (body type). many male athletes and entertainers are pictured with minimal clothing and their sexual exploits described as entertaining and favorable. the myth of the over-sexed black man is centuries old (davis, 1981). films, televisions shows, skewed news reports all play a role in keeping the myth alive. the origin of this damning myth began long before television, late night news reports and blog posts. however the willingness to hold fast to this falsehood must be better understood. in the context of black female writing, clinging to a hegemonic representation of masculinity can be understood as an attempt to create an archetype of a black male hero. black men are frequently disparaged in mass media in ways that challenge traditional notions of masculinity (status, wealth, employment). within this larger context celebrated representations of hegemonic masculinity begin to emerge as a way to validate black men in the larger cultural context. the theme of ‘bitching’ is carried through in blog author necole’s writings about fashion and beauty. a frequent recurring post is “bitchie or not”, wherein a black celebrity is featured. their wardrobe is up for review by the community who determines at large whether the community approves. a similar recurring post is “who owned the look”. this post, while similar in type to theybf’s “who ran it?”, in which two celebrities (almost always women) are shown wearing the same or similar attire and the readers determine the celebrity who wore it 12 best. while this is similar to mainstream celebrity sites, the tone and tenor differ of reader responses are an interesting indicator of use of the site to provide communal sharing. on both sites, the authors simply provide an array of pictures with captions including the celebrity name, a description of the outfit in full and the location where the picture was taken. readers were always divided on who should ‘win the contest’. however, negative comments about certain celebrities were often met with backlash. one reader explained “love beyonce, but she cannot dress. sorry.” this constant validation was common on the site. even as certain celebrities were disparaged for attire or actions readers prefaced comments with accolades or were met with backlash from others when too harsh a tone was used. a frequent theme on both blogs are post regarding the romantic relationships between black celebrities. in cases where african american men are involved in intra-racial relationships, blog posts tend to be more positive in tone and frequent in occurrence. discussion of these relationships often begins with the use of the husbands surname. for examples entertainers jay-z and beyonce are often discussed as “the carters” on theybf. both blogs follow the relationship of nba player carmelo anthony and long time girlfriend lala. their recent wedding as the subsequent move to new york received multiple blog postings over the period of 3 weeks. posts showing lala cheering on the sidelines are posted at least once a week. other professional athletes are discussed but usually only those in their relationships with black women. the one exception are the relationships of kim and khloe kardashian who are lebanese sisters who have both dated (or married) black male athletes. the coverage of these inter-racial relationships does not evoke the same celebratory tone. stories on the sisters included mockery of musical endeavors, interviews with other celebrities voicing their defense of the two and ridicule of their fashion and beauty. black women as a group have the most negative views of interracial pairings between black men and white women (childs, 2005). often the resentment toward black man/white woman pairings is dismissed as jealously. childs’ research indicates it is in fact more readily explained as a reaction to white racism, black internalization of racism, and what interracial relationships represent to black women and signify about black women's worth (childs, 2005, p.558). therefore celebration of black love relationships within these contexts acts as a community act of resistance to popular discourse which discounts the worth of black women as relational partners for successful black men. 13 the institutional – fighting the power the gaze of the law is not only western, but as mackinnon (1989) argues, male as well. while mackinnon’s argument does not deal directly with culture it asks us to interrogate how laws become normalized and unchallenged in society acting the benefit of some groups and the detriment of others. values of dominant society are of mandated as law and, for many outside the dominant group, the problem with this correlation is obvious. institutional oppression serves to provide justification for the separation of marginalized groups from organizations and institutions that serve the public good. when institutional oppression functions at its most oppressive, institutions in place to serve society act with specific detriment to certain groups within. because laws often justify such oppression, resistance at this level challenges not only popular discourse or societal norms, but laws and regulations as well. legal issues faced by celebrities are a frequent theme in blog posts on both sites with theybf devoting a category section to ‘legal woes’. within this area most of the posts discuss celebrities being involved in civil disputes or being fined or given jail time because of tax issues. in most of these, the disdain is reserved for celebrities rather than the government. no challenge is posed to the system of taxation rather to hubris on the part of tax evaders. this framing of tax evaders as deviant differs greatly from the ways black protectionism operates en mass on both sites. katheryn russell-brown (2004), explains that black protectionism is a form of group self-interest, wherein african americans actively seek to protect other african american (usually men) from negative stereotypes or mistreatment by whites. black protectionism operates regardless of the group’s perception of innocence or guilt. when a black celebrity is accused of a crime, the discourse on the blog posts follow the same sequence of questions laid out by russell-brown: did he commit the offense? even if he did commit it, was he set up? would he risk everything he has to commit this offense? is he the only person that has committed this offense? are white people accused of committing this offense given the same scrutiny and treatment? is this accusation a part of a government conspiracy to destroy the black race? (russell-brown, 2004, p.60). this protection on the part of black women is particular significant in the ways it is used to challenge social and legal institutions. blogs within the sample period discussed prosecutions and incarceration of black men from crimes ranging from weapons charges, violent crimes, prostitution and drug offenses. 14 the new ‘jim crow’, according to michelle alexander is a system of criminal prosecution and incarceration that prevents african americans from becoming full participants in dominant u.s. society. through unfair and discriminatory law enforcements practices, sentencing laws and access to adequate defense african americans are disproportionately imprisoned and have rights taken away after they are released or paroled. the new ‘jim crow’ impacts housing, education, access to government resources, voting and jury participation. each of these means of participating in the economy and in the social fabric of this country has been historically taken away from african americans as a population since the formation of the u.s. the new ‘jim crow’ emerges as a means to both redact laws and civil rights for a population and ensure the economic fortitude of the dominant group through the prison-industrial complex. when celebrities are in jail/prison, the posts tend to regard their release as a celebration with litter consideration paid to the reasons behind their incarceration. possibilities and promise as the literature indicates, the blogosphere provides a platform for marginalized groups to seek and sustain voice in a democracy. too often scholars have excluded the ways in which these groups may make use of media in ways that are outside of the dominant culture. gossip has previously been discussed in its use as a means of subversion of dominant discourse on the part of women. feminist scholars have long argued that the communication patterns of women are often discarded as less valuable and important as political discourse. however, recognizing the possibility of gossip as subversive discourse allows scholars to interrogate the expansion of the public sphere into communities previously excluded from participation. patricia hill collins (2000), in her seminal work black feminist thought, outlines the ways in which black women are uniquely positioned between multiple systems of oppression; including race and gender. from this position of ‘intersectionality’, she argues for a black feminist epistemology which preferences: personal ways of knowing and writing, narrative and dialogue rather than debate, validation of emotion and personal accountability. black feminist thought and writing combat multiple levels of oppression including the personal, the communal and the institutional. as this study demonstrates, black women’s writing often happens in spaces outside of eurocentric positivist systems of knowledge. writers like audre lorde and alice walker insist that theory and systems of knowledge that exist outside of what is normalized as scientific, such as narrative, poems, and songs should be considered valuable as well. hill collins (2000) explains, “subjugated knowledges, such as a black women's culture of 15 resistance, develop in cultural contexts controlled by oppressed groups” (collins p. h., 2000, p.230). black female bloggers must therefore be considered for the ways in which they both are a part of a historical legacy of marginalized black women writers and as an agent of innovation in a new media context. however, as we examine the use of celebrity gossip blogs using this lens, it is imperative that we do not assume that only possibilities of resistance to oppression emerge in this space. as this study demonstrates, resistance occurs in all levels of oppression: the individual/personal, the communal/cultural and the institutional. at the individual level resistance functions through the use of personal narrative to combat oppression. communal spaces involved the crafting of shared meaning. finally the institutional level provides space for challenges to legal and social institutions including media, education and the legal system which may act to marginalize and oppress certain groups. at each of these levels themes emerged in the text which demonstrated the power blogs may have to resist dominant ideology though the voice of black women writers and readers. however validation and support of dominant ideology persists as well as new media scholar, zizi papacharissi explains:, “a new public space is not synonymous with a new public sphere. as public space, the internet provides yet another forum for political deliberation. as public sphere, the internet could facilitate discussion that promotes a democratic exchange of ideas and opinions. a virtual space enhances discussion a virtual sphere enhances democracy” (papacharissi 2002, p.11). this distinction forces us to contend with the promise of the blogosphere as a virtual space and the possibilities that it may become a virtual sphere. this study provides validation for this space which exists outside of the boundaries of what is traditionally considered appropriate for political discourse and intellectual discussion. beyond the boundaries of academic positivist research are the everyday conversations through which communities navigate identity and culture. future research must continue to investigate the use of non-traditional spaces as sites of inquiry and interrogation by black women and other marginalized groups. as scholars, a shift in epistemology creates the potential for incorporation of new ideas and possibilities of resistance to oppression through participation in political discourse. references anderson, m., & hill collins, p. (1992). race, class, and gender: an anthology. belmont,ca: wadsworth publishing. 16 ayim, m. (1993). knowlege through the grapevine: gossip as inquiry. in r. f. goodman, & a. ben-zeev, good gossip (pp. 25-34). univ. press of kansas. bonilla-silva, e. (2006). racism without racists: color-blind racism and the persistence of inequality in the united states. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield publishers, inc. chidgey, r., payne, j. g., & zolb, e. (2009). rumours from around the bloc. feminist media studies , 9 (4), 477-191. childs, e. c. (2005). looking beyond the stereotype of "angy black woman": an exploration of black women's responses to interracial relationships. gender and society , 19 (4), 544-561. collins, l. (1993). a feminist defense of gossip. in r. f. goodman, & a. ben-zeev, good gossip (pp. 25-34). univ. press of kansas. collins, p. h. (2000). black feminist thought: knowledge, conciousness and the politics of empowerment. new york: routledge. couldry, n., & curran, j. (2003). contesting media power. alternative meda in a networked world. boulder, co and lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. davis, a. (2001). rape, racism and the myth of the black rapist. in b. kum kum, feminism and race (pp. 50-64). oxford: oxford university press. ekdale, b., namkoong, k., fung, t. k., & perlmutter, d. d. (2010). why blog? (then and now): exploring the motivations for blogging by popular american political bloggers. new media and society , 12 (217), 217-234. fairclough, k. (2009). the bitch is back: celebrity gossip blogging, postfeminism, and bitch narratives. international communication association. chicago. fanon, f. (1963). thw wretched of the earth. new york: grove press. farrell, h., & drezner, d. (2008). the power and politics of blogs. public choice , 134, 15-30. feasey, r. (2008). reading heat: the meanings and pleasures of star fashions and celebrity gossip. journal of media and cultural studies , 22 (5), 687-699. hollander, j. a., & einwohner, r. l. (2004). conceptualizing resistence. sociological forum , 19 (4), 533-552. hooks, b. (1988). talking back: thinking feminist, thinking black. boston: south end press. jones, d. (1980). gossip: notes on women's oral culture. women's studies international quarterly , 3 (2-3), 193-198. 17 lorde, a. (1984). eye to eye. in a. lorde, sister outsider (p. 147). tramansburg, n.y: crossing press. mackinnon, c. (1989). toward a feminist theory of the state. cambridge: harvard university press. meyers, e. (2009). walter, louella, and perez: a historical perspective on the celebrity and gossip in 'old' and 'new' media. international communication association. chicago. nardi, b. a., schiano, d. j., & gumbrecht, m. (2004). blogging as social activity, or, would you let 900 million people read your diary? acm conference on computer supported cooperative work, (pp. 222-231). papacharissi, z. (2007). audiences as media producers: content analysis of 260 blogs. in m. tremayne, blogging, citizenship, and the future of media (pp. 21-38). new york: routledge. pole, a. (2010). blogging the political: politics and participation in a networked society. new york: routledge. russell-brown, k. (1998). underground codes. new york: new york university. scott, j. c. (1990). domination and the arts of resistance. new haven, ct: yale university press. thomas, l. (1998). womanist theology,epistemology and a new anthropological paradigm. cross currents , 48 (4). tremayne, m. (2007). blogging, citizenship and the future of media. london; new york: routledge. weitz, r. (2001). women and their hair: seeking power through resistence and accomodation. gender and society , 15 (5), 667-686. wickham, c. (1998). gossip and resistence among the midieval peasentry. past and present , 160 (1), 3-24. woodson, c. g. (1933). the miseducation of the negro. washington dc: associated publishers. microsoft word ir16-template-final.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): chabot, s. (2015, october 21-24). making space for women’s history: rhetoric, digital activism and the national women’s history (cyber)museum. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. making space for women’s history: rhetoric, digital activism and the national women’s history (cyber)museum shersta chabot arizona state university this paper investigates the rhetorical processes through which feminist activists in the united states “make space” for their work via digital media technologies. using the national women’s history (cyber)museum (nwhm) as a focus, this paper explores the significant shifts that history museums in the united states have recently undergone within the cultural imaginary, shifts necessitated by a booming digital entertainment industry, social media and mobile devices. museums have long held a venerated place in u.s. culture – we look to our history museums to provide us with information about the past, connecting us to carefully curated ideological and cultural narratives that live on in the public memory as artefacts live on in museum displays (hooper-greenhill, 2000). in this sense, the history museum engages in a critical form of rhetorical agency, one that contributes to and shapes public memory in very specific ways (blair, 1999). but does this agency also shift as the history museum shifts from physical form to digital form, or vice versa? can a “cyber” museum like the nwhm perform the same rhetorical work accomplished by more traditional history museums? such questions hold critical implications for current and future museum projects that seek to address—and correct-longstanding national historical narratives that obscure, stereotype or erase the contributions of women and people of color from an otherwise collective past. in tandem with the rise and spread of new media technologies and the internet, the place of the history museum within the cultural imaginary has undergone a radical change. as museum scholar antonio battro (2010) has argued, the emergence of the “virtual museums” that digital technologies have made possible marks a significant ideological and cultural shift in the way that the american public engages with their own imagined past. building upon malraux’s concept of the imaginary museum, battro further claims that “the virtual museum has ceased to be a simple reflection of the real one; it has developed a life of its own, no longer satisfied with informing and exhibiting but challenging to action and discovery” (146). philosopher hilde hein (2000) describes this shift as one that has moved “away from object centeredness” and toward “an emphasis on the promotion of experience” (ix). such conceptual shifts have, of course, been accompanied by material changes as well: challenged to adapt or become obsolete, museum projects in recent years have attempted a broad range of digital integration that includes everything from “interactive” displays in physical museums to “virtual” museums that a visitor can move through via their computer and internet connection (kidd, 2014). in today’s increasingly digital culture, museums face the critical challenge of continuing to provide their visitors with cultural and educational encounters that “feel real” –and thus, create “real meaning”—in the midst of an increasingly virtual reality (hooper-greenhill, 2000). this challenge is perhaps most salient for museums seeking to correct existing national narratives of historically misrepresented groups. the digital incarnation of the nwhm continues a long tradition of u.s. women’s movements that work initially to generate activist rhetorical spaces and then expand them into claims for material presence and physical, often commemorative space (mattingly, 2008). at the same time, museums have been under intense scrutiny from special interest groups that seek equal and accurate representation in their exhibits and archives. this scrutiny has led some, including the nwhm, to use the institution of the museum as a staging ground for challenges to existing discriminatory power hierarchies in the united states. founded in 1996 by karen staser, the national women’s history museum has been dubbed a “cybermuseum” (fitzmaurice, 2014) because, at the moment, it exists entirely online: its website features an array of “digital exhibits” that allow visitors to scroll through photographs of artefacts from women’s history, scans of images and documents, and more. it is national in scope as well as in its mission, which is to address the way in which “women's contributions and accomplishments for the most part have been overlooked and consequently omitted from mainstream culture…rather than rewriting current exhibitions at other history museums or having to decide what to omit elsewhere to ‘fit in’ women's history, the nwhm will serve to place women's history along side current historical exhibitions” (nwhm.org). this is necessary, the nwhm claims, because of the way that women are currently represented in our national history museums, institutions that reify power hierarchies by building exhibits around the activities, contributions and accomplishments of elite white american men (hoopergreenhill, 2000). it seems that if women are to recreate a “mainstream” past that honors their intellectual, creative and political contributions to their nation and communities, they must create their own. that such an activist project began online is no surprise; scholars have noted a steady increase in the number and forms of activist projects that utilize digital space to achieve specific, often material, ends (bennett and segerberg, 2012). still, the mission of the nwhm is hardly unproblematic. from a cultural-political standpoint, the existence and mission of a women’s history “cyber” museum calls into question the traditional role that history museums have played in the united states. but, at the same time, it also relies upon that role to legitimate itself as an organization deserving of national (feminist) support. further, the mission of the nwhm to build a physical museum in washington, d.c. points to a distinct hierarchy of power in u.s. culture that emphasizes materiality and presence, thus linking legitimacy with control over certain physical, not digital, spaces (tuan, 2001). in today’s digital culture, such power dynamics have a profound effect on a range of social activism(s), an effect that prompts questions that, so far, too few scholars have been asking. by assuming the inadequacy of digital space to fully realize its goals, the mission of the nwhm necessitates a re-examination of how space is “made” for feminist projects in the u.s. because it is both virtual and “real” in the cultural imaginary, a thorough investigation into the questions and issues raised by the national women’s history cyber(museum) inevitably opens new fields of inquiry in internet research, digital humanities, and activist and feminist discourse. references “about nwhm.” nwhm.org. retrieved 1 march 2015 from https://www.nwhm.org/about-nwhm/mission/about-nwhm-home 3 battro, a. m. (2010) “from malraux’s imaginary museum to the virtual museum.” in r. parry (ed.) museums in a digital age (136-147). london and new york: routledge. bennett, w. l. and a. segerberg (2012) “the logic of connective action.” information, communication & society 15(5), 739-768. blair, c. (1999) “contemporary u.s. memorial sites as exemplars of rhetoric’s materiality.” in j. selzer and s. crowley, (eds.) rhetorical bodies (16-57). madison: the university of wisconsin press. fitzmaurice, m. i. (2014) “re(place)ing space: privilege and public memory in the national women’s history cybermuseum.” feminist media studies 14(3), 520–523. hooper-greenhill, e. (2000) museums and the interpretation of visual culture. london and new york: routledge. kidd, j. (2014) museums and the new mediascape. burlington, va and surrey, england: ashgate. mattingly, c. (2008) “woman’s temple, women’s fountains: the erasure of public memory.” american studies 49(3-4), 133-56. tuan, y. (2001) space and place: the perspective of experience. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. microsoft word filippova-cho.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): filippova, a. & cho, h. (2014, october 22-24). below boiling point: negotiating conflict thresholds in distributed work. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. below boiling point: negotiating conflict thresholds in distributed work anna filippova national university of singapore singapore hichang cho national university of singapore singapore abstract virtual teams are no longer well-defined organizations with fixed start and end points, but increasingly, entities with fluid boundaries. consequently, we need to evolve our understanding of their internal processes. conflict is one such process that has traditionally been split into discrete categories for examination of individual effects on group outcomes. instead, the present study examines conflict as a whole by focusing on thresholds of conflict emergence in the unique techno-social context of free and open source software (foss) development. following interviews with diverse representatives of foss teams, a grounded theory approach reveals that conflict develops as a combination of, rather than result of any one technological or social factor. in addition, conflict may change states and evolve over time. finally, different teams with varying structures may take different approaches to conflict with equally successful outcomes. findings suggest a re-evaluation of what we know about virtual group processes. keywords conflict; distributed work; virtual teams; open source; free software; grounded theory introduction as the nature of distributed work evolves, we need to continually reevaluate what we know about collaboration and conflict. conflict is an important process in teams that has traditionally been split into three distinct types: task, process, and relationship conflicts (hinds & bailey, 2003). recent analysis suggests conflict types may co-exist or evolve over time, yet little empirical work has been done to examine this (de wit, greer, & jehn, 2012). conflict has also been primarily studied in groups that have well-defined membership and decision structures with fixed start and end points (hinds & bailey, 2003). however, virtual teams are increasingly emerging as entities with a shared purpose whose membership and structure may change frequently (wageman, gardner, & mortensen, 2012). given these changes, recent calls have been made to theorize distributed team processes as more liminal (hackman, 2012). as such, this study seeks to contribute to a growing body of literature on distributed work by providing a rich description of conflict as a complex and emerging process in virtual teams with fluid boundaries. specifically, the present study moves away from traditional notions of conflict as discrete types. instead, the process of conflict is examined as a whole by considering the intersections of different conflict antecedents and effects in the unique techno-social context of free and open source software (foss) development. study context foss development teams illustrate the changing nature of distributed work. they are social organizations that share a sense of common purpose in building open software, and have diverse, fluid and differentiated membership structures with porous boundaries (hackman, 2012). additionally, foss teams are hybrid, techno-social systems for whom software is not only an end-product but also the material means through which participants interact (ducheneaut, 2005). furthermore, foss projects are a recursive public that is reflexive about its own practices, and actively discusses, contests and modifies both the social and technological structures in the group (kelty, 2005). because foss teams themselves exist on a boundary between the social and the technological, they provide a rich context to examine conflict intersections. method as little empirical research currently exists on conflict in the present setting, and there is a need for an inductive approach to build new understandings of a changing phenomenon, a grounded theory perspective was taken in this study (glaser & strauss, 2009). interviews were carried out with 18 representatives of various foss teams to examine conflict episodes in the projects, their antecedents and consequences. a snowball sample was used to select participants through representatives of the technology community in singapore, a central hub for software development in asia. participants subsequently recommended other developers from regions such as australia, india, malaysia, the netherlands, and the united states. participants participants represented the following projects: debian, git, mozilla firefox and thunderbird, node.js, plone, prawnpdf, python, ruby on rails, scrollback, ubuntu, and zope. participants had varying amounts of experience contributing to software, ranging from first-time committers, to project maintainers and founders. projects discussed also had different types of leadership structures from entirely flat, to committees, and benevolent dictatorships. analysis interview transcripts, field notes, personal communications, relevant seminars and blog posts produced by members of the communities and selected public archives of projects were included in analysis. in the first stage, data was analyzed to identify conflict episodes based on participants’ own definitions of conflict. data sources were grouped together, where necessary, if the same conflict episode occurred in several sources. in the second stage, open coding was performed for each episode to identify intersections at which conflict emerged. findings analysis has shown that, firstly, conflict exists in various states, from a culture of peer review and disagreement to central debates around community practices. however, conflict does not exist in discrete or static types; rather, it shifts focus and evolves from one type to another. this evolution is most often triggered by differing perceptions of the same issue by different team members, for instance some team members viewing a conflict as procedural and others personal/affective. the discussion may thus oscillate between distinctly different conflict types. secondly, conflict evolves as a combination of several technological and social factors, rather than being trigged by exclusively task, relationship or process-related matters. no one factor, such as the nature of the task, diversity, or reliance on computer-mediated communication, appears to initiate conflict episodes. in the majority of episodes, a series of factors accumulate over time before pushing the group beyond the conflict threshold. these factors include the tone of the communication, in particular if this deviates from established communication norms, the status of the participants, as well as the type of technological problem being solved. thus, purely technical decisions can cause upheavals in the community if present in combination with other social factors. for example, the introduction of new software features that break compatibility with older versions, in combination with a weak decision structure at the time of the change, may result in significant polarization between members in the group who have to choose only one version to work with. finally, depending on the specific combinations of techno-social factors in the projects, different teams choose different approaches to communication and conflict that are equally successful. groups with flat decision structures that can tolerate ambiguity in the product reap benefits from conflict emergence, thus group norms are favorable towards disagreement. however, projects that require quick turn around or product stability develop norms against conflict and more pronounced decision structures. conclusion virtual groups are constantly negotiating boundaries between the technological and the social, hierarchy and openness, flexibility and procedure. similarly, conflict fluctuates between various states. catalysts, both technological and social, may at times reinforce each other and push the group beyond a comfortable threshold towards boiling point. different groups establish and negotiate these thresholds in their own ways, often with equally successful outcomes. these initial findings illustrate that conflict and distributed work are more complex and fluid than initially conceptualized. they suggest a need to shift away from an understanding of conflict as independent types and towards examining their intersections to understand conditions under which virtual groups define their own experiences. references de wit, f. r. c., greer, l. l., & jehn, k. a. (2012). the paradox of intragroup conflict: a meta-analysis. journal of applied psychology, 97(2), 360-390. ducheneaut, n. (2005). socialization in an open source software community: a sociotechnical analysis. computer supported cooperative work (cscw), 14(4), 323–368. glaser, b. g., & strauss, a. l. (2009). the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. hackman, j. r. (2012). from causes to conditions in group research. journal of organizational behavior, 33(3, si), 428–444. hinds, p. j., & bailey, d. e. (2003). out of sight, out of sync: understanding conflict in distributed teams. organization science, 14(6), 615–632. kelty, c. (2005). geeks, social imaginaries, and recursive publics. cultural anthropology, 20(2), 185–214. wageman, r., gardner, h., & mortensen, m. (2012). the changing ecology of teams: new directions for teams research. journal of organizational behavior, 33 (3, si), 301– 315. microsoft word yew-monroy-hernández.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): yew, j. & monroy-hernández, a. (2014, october 22-24). harnessing serendipity: a study of accidental creative collaborations in two online remixing communities. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. harnessing serendipity: a study of accidental creative collaborations in two online remixing communities jude yew national university of singapore andrés monroy-hernández microsoft research remixing describes the act of appropriating content from others and integrating that content with one's own creative manipulation in order to create derivative and new works. (lessig, 2008). prominent academics like henry jenkins (2006) have also argued that remixing offers a hands-on approach towards cultivating media/cultural literacy and encouraging creativity amongst young people. while there is much work focused on studying the activity of remixing itself, these are mainly focused on the idea of remixing as a model for encouraging and ensuring innovation. however, remixing as an activity practiced “in the wild” is much more complex and has characteristic dynamics on both the content and community fronts. some recent work has started to pay attention to the social dynamics and emergent network structure arising from remixing content creators (cheliotis & yew, 2009). additionally, recent work has also paid attention to the dynamics and tensions that result from content being made open for reuse and remixing (hill & monroyhernández, 2013; cheliotis, hu, yew & huang, 2014). however, what this prior work has not examined is the unique – and sometimes unplanned nature of remixing. it is this serendipity in the creative act of remixing that is the focus of this paper. unlike traditional modes of online creativity and communication, we have found that remixing presents a unique set of opportunities and challenges which revolve around the issues of authorship, social norms/practices, network effects, and the articular technical features and affordances that promote the remixing of content. in this paper, we will attempt to move beyond the individual case study by undertaking a comparative analysis of two highly successful online remixing communities: ccmixter, an online community devoted to the sharing and remixing of music, and scratch, an online community focused on enabling young people to create and share interactive games and animations. this paper employs a mixed methods approach towards comparing both remixing communities. we utilized social network analysis (sna) as a means of characterizing the sharing and remixing activity in both communities. the sna also functioned as a sampling method to identify a small core of users who were most active in each community. interviews were then conducted with this set of core members. we propose that the act of remixing can be characterized by the serendipitous discovery of source material which can be appropriated, and collaborators who can be harnessed, in previously unintended ways. for instance, in our interviews with ccmixter participants, we found that the process of remixing involves the serendipitous discovery of source material that can be appropriated and reused in a remixed work. rl, a highly prolific remixer on ccmixter, highlights this point in the following quote, "yeah, cc mixter works because i would describe it as kind of a serendipitous musical discovery development thing. but in this case we were we wanted to create something and um although we don’t have anything in mind." this quote suggests that remixing often takes place without an explicit intention or plan. additionally, there is little need for explicit communication between the creators/authors of works in the remixing process. this results in a form of communication described as a "mixversation" (lucas gonze, cited in stone, 2009) an indirect form of communication where remixers acknowledge each other and promote each other's work through the reuse of each other's content. it bears emphasizing, that this mode of communication emerged quite accidentally, or serendipitously. this perhaps is due to the fact that remixing culture emphasizes the provision of credit and attribution, rather than asking for permission to reuse the works of others. hence, what results are social norms to signal credit and provide acknowledgement for reusing the work of others. for instance, the young creators in scratch’s online community often communicate and provide validation for each other's work through the content itself. one area where this form of communication can be seen is in the community’s preference for credit and attribution to be communicated through the content itself. this is despite the fact that the scratch community website had a feature that provides automatic attribution for the source works sampled on each remixed work. the members of the community much preferred the provision of credit within the content itself seeing this as a more authentic and sincere way to communicate thanks and give credit to the source’s authors (monroy-hernández, hill, gonzalez -rivero & boyd, 2011). through the comparison of ccmixter and scratch, we will provide a detailed understanding of the complex and multifaceted character of the creative and collaborative processes found in remixing. by focusing our attention on the serendipitous and indirect form of communication and collaboration in remixing, we aim to provide a richer and more detailed understanding of the characteristics and dynamics involved in the sharing and remixing of content online. in particular we find that the serendipitous process of discovering and employing source materials in one's remixes to be highly pertinent to many other online behaviors, such as the creation of memes or retweeting/reposting content on social networks. we ultimately hope to contribute to the literature by identifying ways in which to support serendipity and “mixversations” in online platforms. we make the argument that designing for reuse and remixing requires supporting serendipitous discovery of new content and new collaborators, as well as providing ways to signal intention, authorship, credit and thanks. references cheliotis, g., and yew, j. (2009). an analysis of the social structure of remix culture. in proc. c&t 2009 (university park, pa, usa, 2009), acm, 165γçô174. cheliotis, g., hu, n., yew, j. & huang, j. (2014). the antecedents of remix. in proc. cscw 2014, baltimore, md, acm, 1011--1022 hill, b.m., monroy-hernández, a. (2013). the remixing dilemma: the trade-off between generativity and originality. in american behavioral scientist. jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture: where old and new media collide. lessig, l. (2009). remix: making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. penguin, new york. monroy-hernández, a., hill, b.m, gonzalez-rivero, j., boyd, d. (2011). computers can't give credit: how automatic attribution falls short in an online remixing community. in proceedings chi 2011 stone, victor. (2009). ccmixter: a memoir, or how i learned to stop worrying about the riaa and love the unexpected collaborations of distributed creativity during the first four years of running ccmixter. retrieved on 2nd feb. 2010 from http://fourstones. net/ccmixter_a_memoir.pdf. microsoft word final_aoir_youth_panel-1.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 panel: youth participation, media literacy and social justice id: 1483 chelsey hauge, tamara shepherd, antero garcia & giuliana cuccinelli discussant: mary bryson as digital media have become increasingly ubiquitous, educational institutions, non-for-profitorganizations, and governmental institutions have responded by initiating various programs and research activities that indicate a concern over how, and to what social and political ends, youth engage with media. within mediated spaces, participatory language has been used to celebrate young people’s engagement in social networks and online environments, including platforms like youtube and facebook, and other digital technologies such as mobile apps and video games (ito et al., 2009; jenkins, 2006). there is particular interest in understanding how participation in mediated environments fosters civic engagement, knowledge, and civic participation (rheingold, 2008). yet many scholars have problematized the possibility that participation in digital media might foster new forms of civic engagement or political action for youth, since digital spaces often replicate existing structures of exclusivity and inequity (hindman, 2008; davis, 2009). this panel explores the tensions around participation in digital environments, in order to consider what it might mean for young people to learn how to practice citizenship through media literacy. given the promise around the possibility that digital citizenship might relate to “social justice” as a kind of resistance against neoliberal appropriation, we attempt here to understand how participation in media spaces is negotiated by youth in relation to political practices. methodologically, this panel orients itself around critical approaches to pedagogy, where ethnographic and discursive methods are used in the service of highlighting the structures of power that shape young people’s everyday modes of media participation. we frame this participation as a kind of media or digital literacy, while attempting to de-stabilize the dominant framings of participation as necessarily in line with social justice or any other particular version of politics. by asking what participation means for young people engaging in a variety of digital practices, we aim to contribute to theorizations of digital citizenship as the way in which youth enter civic life through mediated environments (papacharissi, 2010). this panel addresses the following questions: • how are mediated environments taken up as a tool for social justice and civic engagement, and what tensions surface in doing so with international groups of youth? • how might we theorize youth political participation and democratic practice? what are the political tensions brought about when youth participate in mediated spaces, especially as related to citizenship, democratic practice, and difference? • how is the excitement and hope surrounding digital media engagement taken up in governmental and non-profit initiatives, and how do those initiatives address and construct youth in media spaces? the first paper, “hope, youth media, and democratic practice,” addresses the ways in which youth enact democratic practice as they participate in media production programming, conceptualizing of democratic engagement through rancière’s work on radical democracy to theorize how youth make their stories visible from within the colonial context of community development practice. second, the paper “social relations, geographical constructions of youth cultures and urban youth media production ecologies in canada” examines the spatial ecologies of youth media production organizations, and how their evolution reflect class based tensions as they play out in programming that attempts to expand social capital for marginalized youth. third, the paper “geocaching and civic engagement in simultaneous online and offline environments” discusses the affordances of geoselected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 caching for civic engagement in the everyday practice of youth culture. the fourth paper, “rethinking participation as engagement in canada’s digital economy strategy,” explores the implications of the canadian digital economy strategy for digital citizenship, analyzing how its policy language constructs youth as digital citizens by conflating participation in digital spaces with civic engagement. together, these four papers illustrate the far-reaching implications of digital citizenship for young people’s engagement with social justice as they negotiate what it means to participate in mediated spaces. references davis, a. (2009). new media and fat democracy: the paradox of online participation. new media & society, 11(8), 1-20. hindman, m. (2008). the myth of digital democracy. princeton: princeton university press. ito, m., baumer, s., bittanti, m., boyd, d., cody, r., herr-stephenson, b., & horst, h. (2009). hanging out, messing around, and geeking out: kids living and learning with new media. cambridge: the mit press. jenkins, h. (2006). fans, bloggers, and gamers: exploring participatory culture. new york: new york university press. papacharissi, z. (2010). a private sphere: democracy in a digital age. cambridge, uk: polity. rhinegold, h. (2008). using participatory media and public voice to encourage civic engagement. in w.l. bennett (ed.), civic life online: learning how digital media can engage youth (pp. 97-118). cambridge: the mit press. geocaching and civic engagement in simultaneous online and offline environments dr. antero garcia department of english, colorado state university at fort collins anterobot@gmail.com abstract this paper describes how youth reframed a form of geo-spatial gameplay known as geocaching as an engine for civic discourse and engagement. in doing so these youth emphasize key challenges with traditional assumptions about the intersection of gameplay, civic engagement, and youth participatory action research. as a form of geospatial gameplay that allows participants to seek and log hidden objects in the physical world, geocaching is ripe for exploring how online communities and offline communities converge within geo-spatial contexts. through qualitative research, this study found that this form of gameplay can support certain forms of civic engagement; increased situated practice communicating online and offline were supported. at the same time, efforts by students to engage an online gaming community in “political talk” were limited. ultimately this study illustrates how assumptions about youth, games, and civic learning cloud the context of games that blend virtual and physical world communication and interaction. keywords youth; play; civic engagement; mobile media selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 geocaching and civic engagement in simultaneous online and offline environments in 2012, i joined a group of inner-city youth to climb through foliage, battle insects and sunburns alike, and attempt to engage in pre-presidential election dialogue with the general public. the twoweek long summer program focused on these students sneaking around major parks in new york city as stealthily as possible: in the “magic circle” (huizinga, 1949) of this game’s rules, this was the way youth attempted to foment social change. this paper explores the potential for youth civic engagement through geospatial gameplay like geocaching. geocaching takes advantage of the power of mobile devices to combine access to an online database with gps abilities within a wide-range of geocaching apps and tools. at its most basic, geocaching is best summarized at the web site, geocaching.com: “geocaching is a real-world, outdoor treasure hunting game using gps-enabled devices. participants navigate to a specific set of gps coordinates and then attempt to find the geocache (container) hidden at that location.” this paper looks at data from a study working with inner-city youth in new york to utilize geo-spatial gameplay as a means of developing civic education. through hiding, seeking, and engaging in dialogue with the gaming community, these youth help illustrate crucial challenges with digital forms of civic engagement. this paper’s analysis of how youth engage and communicate in virtual worlds and in the physical world builds off of existing work that highlights the not-always-clear distinctions between on and offline engagement (boelstorff, 2008; malaby, 2006). exploring existing data about youth civic engagement, this study relies on situating youth learning within “legitimated peripheral practice” (lave and wenger, 1991). instead of merely playing a game, geocaching is framed, in this study, as acting as civic agents. this concept of donning new social norms within the context of gameplay fits with huizinga’s (1949) classic model of playing within a “magic circle.” likewise the intersection of civic learning and gameplay is woven amidst the ways game situate learners within potentially meaningful contexts. as gee writes, “good games have to incorporate good learning principles in virtue of which they get themselves well learned” (gee 2004, p 57). methodologically this study relied on qualitative fieldnotes taken during the study, analysis of students’ written and spoken discourse in both physical and virtual environments, and several focus group interviews with the youth participants. data was coded using a grounded theory (glaser & strauss, 1965; lincoln & guba, 1985) to develop the broad-based themes emerging in relation to this study’s focus on geo-spatial gameplay and civic engagement. in analysis of the study, three major topics regarding digital gameplay and youth civic engagement emerged: the politics of representation are largely ignored when considering geo-spatial gameplay, engagement and communication takes place in parallel spaces both on and offline, and unlike other forms of civic engagement and gameplay, failure is an overly problematic component of gameplay. in terms of youth engagement, the fact that all of the study’s participants were historically marginalized youth of color played a significant factor in gameplay. though digital media is traditionally seen as a tool for amplification of youth civic voice, the mixture of online and physical world exploration inherent in geocaching means that youth often felt intimidated and persecuted inhabiting largely white spaces. building on legal scholarship related to black and latino experiences being pulled over by officials, “driving while black” (harris, 1999), this paper builds a connection to youth’s identity as working-class youth of color while inhabiting largely middle-class tourist destinations of new york city. geocaching while black (gwb) is indicative of how the civic actions students may be advocating online are challenged in physical world implantation. as part of how geocaching is played, participants must log the locations they find by sending messages to an online system as well as by writing (and leaving small trinkets) in the physical location. as such the forms of civic writing that occurred in this study are illustrative of what this paper frames as “parallel literacy performance.” though similar kinds of writing occurred virtually selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 and physically, parallel writing manifested itself in different types of textual production: online and off students wrote for varied audiences in ways that differed. across all of the kinds of writing that youth engaged in, one of the consistent factors was that writing was focused on specific audiences. whether communicating with peers, with geocaching communities, or for public presentations, the kinds of texts students produced were oriented as purposeful and with specific attention to meeting these audiences. as such, this paper notes how youth code-shifting highlighted varied “repertoires of linguistic practice” for specific civic forms of engagement (orellana, lee & martinez, 2010). finally, the other major finding of this study is based on existing assumptions of failure in gameplay. adopting coding mantras of “fail early and fail often,” gaming and learning research (gee, 2007) highlights how gaming environment alleviates the heightened concerns of failure in schooling environments. however, as failure in geocaching often meant youth in this study spent significant time in the sun looking for–and ultimately having to give up–a search for a cache, the sense of disappointment was severe. several students in this study held reservations of continuing their participation as a result of failure. as such, findings from this study indicate that more nuanced assumptions of learning and failure need to be integrated. all too often, advances in technology are seen as quick fixes to educational challenges (cuban, 1986). when assumptions about youth interests, like games, are co-opted by adults in the interest of quickfixes for schools, the nuances of youth engagement are often overlooked (selwyn, 2006). though research has not previously focused on the learning that occurs in the online/offline spaces that games like geocaching concurrently inhabit, this paper argues that this space of dual participation functions as continual spaces for communication and potential civic engagement. in opening up youth action to the affordances of physical world gameplay, students are encouraged to practice “reading the word and the world” (freire and macedo, 1987). powerful opportunities for speaking, writing, and gaining feedback emerge once educators move second language development outside traditional classrooms and beyond the realm of contextualized videogames. exemplifying how technology is shifting ways youth participate civically in the digital age, this paper looks at how youth interest and gameplay can heighten youth civic engagement and leadership. it offers insight into how to adapt spatial gameplay for civic purposes, ways to encourage youth voice, and when to go back inside because–as one participant noted– “it's just too damn hot outside.” references boellstorff, t. (2008). coming of age in second life: an anthropologist explores the virtually human. princeton: princeton university press. cuban, l. (1986). teachers and machines: the classroom use of technology since 1920. new york, ny: teachers college press. freire, p. and d. macedo (1987). literacy: reading the word and the world. westport, bergin & garvey. gee, j. p. (2004). situated language and learning: a critique of traditional schooling. new york, routledge. gee, j. p. (2007). what video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. new york, palgrave. glaser, b.g. & strauss, a.l. (1965). awareness of dying. chicago: aldine. harris, david a., (1999). the stories, the statistics and the law: why 'driving while black' matters. university of minnesota law review, vol. 84, no. 2; u. of pittsburgh legal studies research. available at ssrn: http://ssrn.com/abstract=199508. huizinga, j. (1949). homo ludens: a study of the play-element in culture. abingdon, routledge. lave, j. and e. wenger (1991). situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge, cambridge university press. lincoln, y. s., & guba, e. g. (1985). naturalistic inquiry. beverly hills, ca: sage publications, inc. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 malaby, t. (2006.) parlaying value: forms of capital in and beyond virtual worlds. games & culture, volume 1, number 2, pp. 141–162. orellana, marjorie f., lee, clifford & martínez, danny c. (2011). more than just a hammer: building linguistic toolkits. issues in applied linguistics, 18(3), 1-7. selwyn, n. (2006). exploring the ‘digital disconnect’ between net�savvy students and their schools. learning, media and technology, 31(1), 5-17. hope, youth media and democratic practice chelsey hauge department of language and literacy education university of british columbia chelseyhauge@gmail.com abstract in attempt to respond to the debates about participation, activism, and youth participation in media spaces, this paper addresses the ways in which youth engage democratic practice in the form of youth media programming, where the program is situated within international community development initiatives. the paper addresses a youth media production program in rural nicaragua, in which young people living along the pan-american highway produce a video critical of utopic immigration narratives. drawing upon ranciere’s work on radical democracy and politics, i theorize how youth make themselves and their critical response to utopic immigration narratives visible from within the colonial context of community development practice, and how their disruption of utopic narratives of immigration shifts the conditions of possibility for them as political subjects. introduction celebratory accounts of youth, political action, and media production have been criticized by scholars weary of reading activism off of mere participation (broughton, 2012; macintosh, poyntz, & bryson, 2012). these debates about the quality and meaning of youth participation in digital civic engagement are important and vibrant; and evidence hopefulness that critical pedagogy and youth participation in civically oriented digital world might have a causal relationship with the redistribution of resources and the elimination of social inequalities (lesko & talburt, 2012). in this paper, i attempt to move beyond the assumption of autonomy in youth media production about social justice issues in order to conceptualize of youth political engagement through new media in ways that do not require a causal relationship between action and resolution of social inequalities, in order to understand how it is young people come to wonder about and provoke change and questions of citizenship in today’s world while they produce media. in order to do so, i offer a reading of a youth media program that depends on ranciere’s radical democratic politics and young people’s ability to redistribute the sensible to make visible voices, bodies, and experiences previously invisible. democratic practice and political engagement ranciere’s (2004) distribution of the sensible delineates the aesthetic coordinates of possibility in any given community or relationship between people, communities, and the world. the distribution of the sensible is the field of politics upon which those working on social justice activism play, and it constructs the conditions of possibility and delineates the boundary lines of in/visibility and un/sayability (ranciere, 2010). backing up from the idea of citizenship as participation, the distribution of the sensible recognizes that certain kinds of bodies, stories, and participation are possible at particular moments and in particular spaces, while others are not, and so citizenship is less a practice of participation and more an effect of the divisions of time and space that construct possibility. the organization of space, time, and activity makes certain narratives, voices, and selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 6 experiences possible within the community. emancipatory democracy then is constituted when the perception of social space shifts so that invisible voices/bodies become speakable and therefore redistribute what can be sensed at any given time, thus an effective redrawing of what a community might share in common (ranciere, 2010). for ranciere, the practice of democracy and the aesthetic redistribution of sensible is not yoked to a particular outcome that constitutes the material redistribution of resources and elimination of injustice as success, because emancipatory democracy is itself the act of disruption that re-coordinates the distribution of the what can be sensed, of what can be heard, of what is possible (ranceire, 2004; 2010). the coordinates that delineate community are knit together with feeling and hope, affects that build and contain communities. when youth justify their projects as being about moving people emotionally and changing perceptions, they engage with redistributing the sensible in ways that profoundly re-distribute the aesthetic coordinates of community, even if only momentarily. youth media and development in nicaragua & methodological approach this paper addresses a three-year ethnographic study of an international youth media program run by development agencies in rural nicaragua, in which dominican and american youth collaborated with nicaraguan youth in the production of media pieces about social issues. this particular group of young people come from a rural community located along the pan-american highway, and are joined for a period of two months by two young people, one from the suburbs of arizona and the other from a rural community in the dominican republic. several of the youth involved in the project had immigrated at some point in their lives either to costa rica or to the us for short stints of work before returning to nicaragua. together, they produced a video about immigration in central america and from central america to the us, and this video forms the basis of my analysis. data was gathered using ethnographic methods – participant observations, interviews, video of youth collaborating, and a large archive of the pieces of work they produced form the basis of my data collection. the research was carried out using the case study method, and takes up ethnographic methods to understand young peoples’ experiences of media production in this program (stake, 2005; yin, 2009). a shot-by-shot analysis of youth pieces was done, and interviews and working sessions were thematically coded with attention to language about hope and change. this paper addresses the planning, production, post-production and presentation experiences of the youth as they work on their piece about immigration, and then use their video to lead discussions and workshops around the issue. i am particularly invested in tracing how hope functions and distributes the possibility of movement for youth, and how youth disrupt normative hopeful notions about immigration through their media production. democratic practice, disruption, and advocacy i present findings in this paper that explore how space is constructed in development programming, and by international groups of young people, and how those constructions are disrupted and reconfigured through the media production process. the pedagogy of participatory media programming among international youth function to set up relations of advocacy as youth produce, share and discuss a film about immigration in central america. i find that as youth produce media about challenging issues affecting their lives like immigration, they both challenge and play into relations of advocacy. considering their actions as democratic practice through a rancierian lens, i propose that youth engage politics as they disrupt normative ideas about immigration, and also that at times dissent is managed through the lens of empowerment and collaboration. the instability of youth-designed and youth-led media programming is perhaps its greatest strength, because this instability allows for disruption of distribution of the sensible and a reorganization of the aesthetic coordinates of possibility. references: selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 7 broughton, j. (2012). cultural production. in n. lesko & s. talburt (eds.), keywords in youth studies: tracing affects, movements, knowlesges (pp. 247–252). new york, ny: routeledge. lesko, n., & talburt, s. (2012). enchantment. in n. lesko & s. talburt (eds.), keywords in youth studies: tracing affects, movements, knowlesges (pp. 279–289). new york, ny: routeledge. macintosh, l., poyntz, s. r., & bryson, m. k. (2012). internet. in n. lesko & s. talburt (eds.), keywords in youth studies: tracing affects, movements, knowlesges (pp. 213–218). new york: routledge. ranceire, j. (2004). ranciere_intro_politics of aesthetics.pdf. new york: continuum. ranciere, j. (2010). dissensus: on politics and aesthetics. (s. corcoran, ed.). new york: continuum international publishing group. stake, r. (2005). qualitative case study. in n. k. denzin & y. s. lincoln (eds.), (p. 443 466). new york: sage publications. retrieved from http://books.google.ca/books?id=x85j8ipmpzec yin, r. (1981). the case study crisis: some answers. administrative science quarterly, 26(1), 58–65. yin, r. (2009). case study research: design and methods. new york: sage publications. social relations, geographical construction of youth cultures, and urban youth media production ecologies in canada dr. guiliana cucinelli postdoctoral fellow, comparative media studies massachusetts institute of technology gcucinelli@gmail.com abstract this paper examines the creative urban youth ecologies constituted around and through more than 150 media programs/initiatives working in the aforementioned cities. while setting out a taxonomy of production-oriented media education programs operating in community-based settings in canada’s three largest cities (vancouver, toronto, and montreal), this research project is particularly concerned to address how and to what extent such programs foster networks of social capital for participating youth. in particular, this paper examines the complex relationship between youth digital media ecologies, socio-political and historical aspects of each city, and its cultural geography. keywords youth media ecologies; mapping ; human geography ; community media this paper reports on a three-year study youth digital media ecologies – mapping media production affordances in canadian media education contexts examining urban youth media production ecologies in canada. while setting out a taxonomy of production-oriented media education programs operating in community-based settings in canada’s three largest cities (vancouver, toronto, and montreal), this research project is particularly concerned to address how and to what extent such programs foster networks of social capital (bourdieu) for participating youth. this paper examines the creative urban youth ecologies constituted around and through more than 150 media programs/initiatives working in the aforementioned cities. a program taxonomy, including key media literacy objectives, target demographics, and geographical reach is addressed using a detailed selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 8 interactive map (figure 1) constructed through webscans and telephone and in-person interviews with relevant organizations. in particular, this paper examines the complex relationship between youth digital media ecologies, socio-political and historical aspects of each city, and its cultural geography. how do social, political, historical and geographical aspects influence the development of youth media ecologies in vancouver, toronto, and montreal? while production-oriented media education programs have fostered a vital field of creative youth work in canada, much of this work – and its associated ecologies – is concentrated in inner-city urban centres. however, how do social conditions, historical events (festivals, expositions), and geographical locations influence youth’s level of participation and interaction in community based youth media production organizations? furthermore, are community based media education programs fostering networks of social capital for participating youth? as a response to these questions, this draws from the mapping data collected and from interviews conducted with one major youth media organization from each city (access to media education society in vancouver, regent park media arts centre in toronto, and la maison des jeunes cotesdes-neiges in montreal). the mapping data clarifies the importance of these organizations in the lives of at-risk youth, who have been the overwhelming target of such programs. the popularity of these organizations in the lies of at-risk youth goes unnoticed without a closer look at the geographical locations, and the organizations out-reach. their outreach is tied closely to the way at-risk youth come to know specific programs in various geographical areas. to discover and understand the dynamics between social space in real geographical locations and transfer that information to online maps requires specific attention and detail be paid to the dynamics between local places, citizens, knowledge, and history. social-spatial references such as gender, sexual orientation, disabilities, ethnicity, citizenship and economic levels are crucial to understand the relationship between youth media organizations and the population they serve. by integrating the social-spatial “the notion of social space, formulated in this way, provides a useful framework for exploring a variety of urban problems” (buttimer, 1980, p.27) within this framework, mapping techniques are used to crystallize the connection between geography of cultures (massey, 1998), and socio-political tensions, and the “function of mapping is less to mirror reality than to engender the reshaping of the worlds [youth ecologies] in which people live” (corner, 1999, p.10). figure 1: example of the interactive youth media organizations vancouver map available on www.ydme.ca selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 9 figure 1: example of the facts about organizations on the vancouver map available on www.ydme.ca the website itself (www.ydme.ca) showcases the data collected through dynamic visual data infographics. the map includes layers of information of the youth media production scenes in some of canada’s major urban communities. it includes a rich and detailed picture of who youth media organizations are, their primary objectives, the kind of media they work with, and the diverse range of young people they serve. the data collected includes information about geographical locations, facts, activities, and demographics of 150 youth media organizations in vancouver, toronto, and montreal. with the use of thorough webscans and in-person interviews the following data was collected: 1. facts of organizations: 1.1. history (period, cultural institutions and events) 1.2. sector (for-profit, not-for-profit, community, private) 1.3. budget and staffing (full-time, part-time, volunteer), 1.4. geographical reach (serve local, regional, national, and international youth) 1.5. organizational networks (share staff and equipment with other organizations) visibility and barriers to services and outreach (lack of funds and awareness) 1.6. funding sources (government, foundations, fees for service, donors, corporate) 2. activities: 2.1. primary mission of youth media programs (empower, alternative, global change, strengthen community, encourage creative expression, career preparation, media literacy) 2.2. primary media used (digital, analogue, both) 2.3. number of people served (media production and analysis, screening and distribution) 2.4. kinds of organizational activities (workshops, screenings, program development) 2.5. genre/media produced (documentary, news, experimental, psa, radio, games) 3. demographics: 3.1. geography (local, regional, national, international) 3.2. age level (under 13 years of age, teens, 20s) 3.3. specific (gender, sexual orientation, disabilities, ethnicity, citizenship, economic levels) mapping of socio-political information and historical events in conjunction with a taxonomy of programs will be crucial for understanding the ways in which youth media ecologies are formed vis-àvis the relationship to geographical affordances, historical events, and socio-political spheres. in a time of neoliberalism several youth organizations are being challenged by funding agencies to develop ‘skills and competency’ based curriculums to fit the growing ideals of our political landscape and the reconstitution of urban geographies (yoon and gulson, 2010; dillabough and kennelly, 2010; hulchanski, 2010; burnet-jailly, 2008). these results in turn are linked to recent data that reveal the changing socio-economic demographics of canadian urban centres. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 10 references brunet-jailly, e. (2008). vancouver: the sustainable city. journal of urban affairs, 30(4), 375-388. buttimer, a., & seaman, d. (1980). the human experience of space and place. palgrave macmillan. corner, j (1999). the agency of mapping. in denis cosgrove mappings. london: reaktion books. dillabough, j., & kennelly, j. (2010). lost youth in the global city: class, culture and the urban imaginary. new york, ny: routledge. hulchanski, j. d. (2010). the three cities within toronto: income polarization among toronto's neighbourhoods, 1970-2005. toronto: cities centre, university of toronto. massey, d. (1998). the spatial construction of youth cultures. in t. skelton & g. valentine (eds.), cool places: geographies of youth culture. new york, ny: routledge. yoon, e.-s., & gulson, k. (2010). school choice in the stratilingual city of vancouver. british journal of sociology of education, 31(6), 703-718. rethinking participation as engagement in canada’s digital economy strategy tamara shepherd ryerson university canada tamara.shepherd@ryerson.ca abstract this paper addresses the tendency for policymakers to frame participation in digital culture, particularly social media platforms, as a kind of civic engagement in appeals to the social and public benefits of digital literacy. using the case example of canada’s digital economy strategy consultations in 2010, i trace the discursive conflation of participation with engagement through the consultation documents from the point of view of the results of this policy initiative that have come to pass since the initial consultations. ultimately, while the policy discourse casts participation – especially young people’s participation – as meaningful engagement, young people’s actual rights in social media spaces are circumscribed by commercial imperatives, as enshrined in terms of service contracts. given this context, it is important to develop a kind of digital policy literacy that empowers youth to interrogate structures of power in digital media platforms and digital economy policymaking. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 11 keywords participation; politics; youth; civic engagement; social media; digital economy digital literacy and citizenship in canada in recent consultations on the development of a digital economy strategy for canada, concepts of digital literacy have tended to revolve around preparing young people for technologically-mediated careers; or as industry canada’s may 2010 digital economy consultation paper states, preparing young canadians to “function in the labour market of today and tomorrow” (industry canada, 2010). public submissions to the consultations reiterate that the strategy should focus on “high school students and young women, with an emphasis on the new, exciting, cutting edge hybrid careers of the 21st century” (canadian coalition for tomorrow’s ict skills, 2010), within the broader context of how “every citizen will need digital life skills to access government services and information, participate in community life and communicate with friends and family” (york university, 2010). the language of these submissions and the consultation paper reflects a pervasive framing of youth as future workers but also as future citizens – “digital citizens” – resting on an ideological association between young people and new forms of digital media. western youth in particular have been framed as “digital natives,” having “grown up digital,” and thus poised to harness digital technology in practices of labour and civic participation (prensky, 2001; palfrey & gasser, 2008). the digital economy consultation paper reflects this assumption in its envisioned future that the digital economy “will contribute in new ways to citizen engagement, quality of life and will open up new opportunities for all canadians to participate in canada’s democratic, economic, cultural and social life” (industry canada, 2010). yet, subsequent digital economy policy initiatives since 2010 have not lent much weight to such statements. the section devoted to “building digital skills” on the government’s digital economy strategy website has no original resources from industry canada or any other federal agency. the site only contains a single link, to the alliance for sector councils, an industry group representing a number of human resources organizations.1 moreover, some of the key measures implemented as part of the digital economy strategy thus far have been a series of grants for businesses intended to foster “innovation” in digital technology and communications, along with the introduction of digital copyright and anti-spam legislation; no attempt has been made to further pursue any form of digital literacy, much less a digital literacy that would fulfill the promises of citizen engagement and participation. “participation” and/as engagement this paper examines the language of the consultation paper and resulting submissions from the perspective of the policymaking that has taken place since this initial proposition of a digital economy strategy, interrogating the conflation of participation with citizen engagement. particularly when policymakers have attempted to integrate online social media platforms into their legislative debates, notions of citizenship and rights have not been unproblematic – in fact, they are typically circumscribed by commercial law of contract in the form of terms of service and privacy policies that accord to extra-national jurisdictions. through the stipulations of their terms of service agreements and privacy policies, social media sites commodify the content, behaviours, and personal information of users. as an incarnation of contract law, terms of service in effect displace government regulation of social media platforms as spaces for a kind of semi-public discourse (lessig, 2006), where users must agree to the terms that bind their rights in social media participation as a necessary precondition for accessing digital communications infrastructure. while users, and especially the younger people who tend to adopt these sites more eagerly than the rest of the population (duggan & brenner, 2012), seem to be afforded ever more expanding participatory opportunities, terms of service contracts and privacy policies circumscribe any control they may have over their rights as “digital citizens” 1  see  http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/028.nsf/eng/h_00027.html   selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 12 (papacharissi, 2010). as yet there has been little regulatory action, aside from some of the work of the office of the privacy commissioner (2011; 2009), to address young canadians’ rights in social media spaces, even though breaches of those rights under current commercial frameworks would seem to undermine the status of social media platforms as networked publics (boyd, 2010). and, by extension, such threats trouble the claims of the digital economy strategy that narrowing the “digital skills divide” will have benefits that “extend beyond improved work and learning outcomes presenting opportunities for improvements to our quality of life,” constituted by “access to information, government services, health care and education” (industry canada, 2010). so how, then, can young people’s participation in such spaces be seen as emancipatory when fundamental rights over privacy and intellectual property are compromised by the terms of the platforms themselves? given this neoliberal context, digital literacy initiatives for canadian youth need to begin from principles of civic and economic citizenship, rather than from deterministic myths around technology. for example, industry canada’s claim about citizen engagement could be framed from the perspective of community organizing that uses digital technologies to challenge injustice and inequality. a first step toward this might entail the integration of industry canada’s digital economy strategy with the work of canadian heritage to capacity-build in the context of local community, arts, and cultural groups (fuller, 2009). in this way, young people’s learning through digital media would be locally situated to enhance civic and economic goals, while addressing literacy about communication rights more broadly. digital literacy for citizenship for young people using digital and social media, rights over their privacy and intellectual property are urgent to consider in light of asymmetrical power relationships that determine justice in networked space. digital literacy is likely too nebulous of a concept to address such power dynamics (o’neill, 2010); a more focused model, like that of digital policy literacy (shade, 2012), would be better able to integrate an understanding of policy processes, political economy, and infrastructures into digital literacy in order to bolster civic engagement and reorient participation toward citizenship. as such, the paper concludes by gesturing toward the crucial contribution of digital policy literacy to the success of the digital economy strategy, especially if it is to serve as a comprehensive vision for young canadians as digital citizens of “today and tomorrow.” acknowledgments this research was funded by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada. references boyd, d. (2010). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in z papacharissi (ed.), networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 3958). new york, ny: routledge. duggan, m., & brenner, j. (2012). the demographics of social media users – 2012. report prepared for the pew research center’s internet & american life project. retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/2013/social-media-users.aspx canadian coalition for tomorrow’s ict skills. (2010). canada: the go-to country for brainpower resources in the global digital economy. submission to the government of canada, digital economy strategy consultation. retrieved from http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/028.nsf/eng/00227.html industry canada. (2010). improving canada’s digital advantage: strategies for sustainable prosperity. consultation paper on a digital econmy strategy for canada. retreievd from http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/028.nsf/eng/h_00025.html selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 13 fuller, s. (2009). youth participation in arts, heritage, culture and community – a national conversation. report prepared for canadian heritage, citizen participation branch. retrived from http://www.pch.gc.ca/pgm/pc-cp/publctn/2009-01/index-eng.cfm lessig, l. (2006). code, version 2.0. new york, ny: basic books. o’neill, b. (2010). media literacy and communication rights: ethical individualism in the new media environment. international communication gazette, 72, 323-338. office of the privacy commissioner of canada. (2011). report on the 2010 office of the privacy commissioner of canada’s consultations on online tracking, profiling and targeting and cloud computing. ottawa, on: office of the privacy commissioner. office of the privacy commissioner of canada. (2009). social network site privacy: a comparative analysis of six sites. february. ottawa, on: office of the privacy commissioner. papacharissi, z. (2010). a private sphere: democracy in a digital age. cambridge, uk: polity. palfrey, j., & gasser, u. (2008). born digital: understanding the first generation of digital natives. new york, ny: basic civitas. prensky, m. (2001). digital natives, digital immigrants. on the horizon, 9, 1-6. shade, l.r. (2012, february). toward a model of digital policy literacy. poster presented at the annual iconference, toronto, on. york university. (2010). improving canada’s digital advantage: strategies for sustainable prosperity. submission to the government of canada, digital economy strategy consultation. retrieved from http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/028.nsf/eng/00303.html license this article is ©2013 author, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  saurwein,  f.  /  just,  n.  /  latzer,  m.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  governing  algorithms   on  the  internet:  approaches,  options,  gaps.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  conference   of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.   governing  algorithms  on  the  internet   approaches,  options,  gaps   florian  saurwein   institute  for  comparative  media  and  communication  studies  (cmc)   austrian  academy  of  sciences,  alpen-­adria-­universität  klagenfurt,  austria   natascha  just   ipmz  –  institute  of  mass  communication  and  media  research     university  of  zurich,  switzerland     michael  latzer   ipmz  –  institute  of  mass  communication  and  media  research     university  of  zurich,  switzerland       introduction:  rise  of  algorithms  on  the  internet   the  broad  diffusion  of  algorithms  has  led  to  intensified  discussions  about  their  influence,   which  can  be  illustrated  by  the  impact  of  recommendation  systems  on  consumer  choice   in  e-­commerce,  the  influence  of  google  rankings  on  users’  attention,  and  the  impact  of   facebook’s  news  feed  on  the  news  business.  it  is  often  argued  that  software,  codes   and  algorithms  increasingly  have  governing  powers  (musiani  2013,  pasquale  2015,   gillespie  2014,  manovich  2013,  just  &  latzer  2016),  similar  to  regulations  by  law   (lessig  1999).         observations  of  the  power  of  algorithms  (“governance  by  algorithms”)  are  consequently   followed  by  debates  on  how  to  govern  these  powers  adequately  (“governance  of   algorithms”).  in  particular  the  dominant  position  of  google  is  often  criticized  but  the   applications  and  risks  of  algorithms  and  applications  based  on  algorithmic  selection  go   far  beyond  google  and  online  search.  accordingly,  the  scope  of  analysis  needs  to  be   extended  to  adequately  grasp  the  broad  spectrum  of  applications,  attendant  implications   and  governance  options.     the  paper  centers  on  a  risk-­based  approach  and  a  classification  of  modes  of   governance  and  provides  an  explorative  assessment  of  the  governance  of  algorithms   (latzer  et  al.  2016;;  saurwein  et  al.  2015).  it  analyses  established  and  suggested   regulations  and  classifies  them  according  to  risk  categories  and  regulatory  approach  on   the  continuum  between  market  and  state  (table  1).  finally,  it  identifies  governance  gaps   and  discusses  the  potential  reasons  for  these  gaps.         approach:  risk-­based  approach  and  governance  options     justifications  for  governance  are  provided  by  the  risks  that  arise  with  the  diffusion  of   algorithms  (latzer  et  al.  2016).  these  can  be  summarized  as  follows:     (1)   manipulation     (2)   distortions  of  reality  by  filter  bubbles  and  biases     (3)   constraints  on  the  freedom  of  expression     (4)   surveillance  and  threats  to  privacy     (5)   social  discrimination   (6)   violation  of  intellectual  property  rights   (7)   abuse  of  market  power     (8)   effects  on  cognitive  capabilities     (9)   growing  heteronomy  and  loss  of  controllability  of  technology       there  are  various  governance  options  to  reduce  the  above-­mentioned  risks  of   algorithmic  selection.  these  are  located  on  a  continuum  between  the  market  and  the   state  (latzer  et  al.  2003):     (1)   market  mechanisms     (2)   individual  self-­organization  by  single  companies   (3)   collective  self-­regulation  by  industries     (4)   co-­regulation,  cooperation  between  state  and  the  industry  on  a  legal  basis   (5)   state  intervention,  e.g.,  command-­and-­control  regulation       examples  of  governance  opportunities     there  are  several  governance  mechanisms  in  place  in  the  area  of  algorithmic  selection.   risks  may  be  reduced  by  “voluntary”  changes  in  the  market  conduct.  there  are   technical  self-­help  solutions  for  consumers  that  reduce  censorship,  bias  and  privacy   violations  (e.g.,  anonymization  by  tor  or  vpn).  also  suppliers  of  algorithmic  services   can  reduce  risks  by  business  strategies,  e.g.  services  that  do  not  collect  user  data  (e.g.,   the  search  engine  duckduckgo).  additionally,  suppliers  may  introduce  ethic  boards  and   commit  themselves  to  “values”  (introna  and  nissenbaum  2000),  such  as  search   neutrality  or  the  “minimum  principle”  of  data  collection  (cavoukia  2012).  sectoral   initiatives  of  self-­regulation  can  be  found  in  the  advertising  industry  (online  behavioral   advertising),  the  search-­engine  market,  social  networks  and  algo-­trading.  these   initiatives  deal  with  violations  of  privacy  and  copyright,  manipulation  and  controllability.   the  limitations  of  market  mechanisms  and  self-­regulation  can  provide  justifications  for   state  intervention.  there  are  command-­and-­control  regulations  for  manipulation   (cybercrime),  privacy  and  copyright  violations,  freedom  of  expression  and  fair   competition.  proposals  for  regulations  in  the  search  market  suggest  increasing   transparency  and  controllability  by  public  authorities,  the  establishment  of  the  principle   of  neutral  search  (lao  2013)  or  a  publicly  funded  “index  of  the  web”  (lewandowski   2014).       the  following  section  summarizes  in  which  areas  of  risk  and  with  what  instruments   algorithms  are  being  governed  and  identifies  gaps  where  no  measures  have  been   established  thus  far.       governance  of  algorithms:  practices  and  gaps     table  1:  selected  market  solutions  and  governance  measures  by  categories  of  risk     market solutions companies: selforganization branches: selfregulation coregulation state intervention demand side supply side manipulation x x x x bias x x censorship x x x x violation of privacy rights x x x x x x social discrimination x x x violation of property rights x x x x abuse of market power x x effects on cognitive capabilities heteronomy saurwein et al. 2015   the  overview  in  table  1  shows  that  some  of  the  risks  have  already  been  addressed  by   different  governance  approaches  (data  protection),  while  for  others  no  measures  have   been  taken  so  far  (heteronomy).  whereas  some  risks  are  almost  exclusively  left  to   market  solutions  (bias),  for  others  governance  is  institutionalized  by  private  and  state   regulation  (violations  of  property  rights).  while  there  are  several  suggestions  for  self-­ organization  by  companies,  there  are  hardly  any  co-­regulatory  arrangements,  where   state  authorities  and  the  industry  collaborate  on  a  legal  basis.  altogether,  the  analysis   reveals  that  there  is  no  overall  common  institutional  pattern  for  the  governance  of   algorithmic  selection,  but  a  wide  spectrum  of  practices  as  well  as  obvious  gaps,  which   are  addressed  in  the  following  section.       examples  of  gaps  and  deficits     research  and  politics  also  have  to  consider  governance  gaps  regarding  risks  of   algorithmic  selection.  table  1  illustrates  the  current  absence  of  governance  regarding   heteronomy  and  negative  effects  of  algorithms  on  cognitive  capabilities.  algorithms   raise  debates  concerning  their  influence  on  the  human  brain  (carr,  2010;;  sparrow  et  al.,   2011).  additionally  there  is  the  more  general  discussion  on  the  human-­machine   relationship,  which  includes  the  question  to  what  extent  algorithms  are  uncontrollable   (e.g.,  artificial  intelligence)  or  control  human  behavior  (heteronomy).         the  two  examples  illustrate  that  not  all  risks  are  simply  addressable  by  governance   measures.  risks  such  as  heteronomy  and  cognitive  effects  are  new,  there  is  little   experience  with  similar  challenges  and  they  are  difficult  to  address  by  formal  rules.   hence,  it  might  be  worth  promoting  awareness,  media  literacy  and  self-­protection   abilities.  in  order  to  avoid  negative  effects  on  cognitive  capabilities  it  may  be  helpful  to   provide  training  and  education  for  certain  cultural  techniques  (e.g.,  search/research)   that  may  be  replaced  by  algorithmic  services.       the  analysis  also  shows  that  the  risk  of  “bias”  is  almost  exclusively  left  to  market   solutions  and  not  addressed  by  statutory  prescriptions.  this  example  points  to  the  lack   of  legitimacy  and  practicability  of  state  intervention  with  the  aim  of  enhancing   “objectivity”.  moreover,  also  the  possibilities  of  co-­regulation  are  not  used   comprehensively  so  far.  co-­regulation  may  be  appropriate  for  problems  involving  strong   conflicts  of  interest  and  ethical  implications  that  require  independent  control  and  conflict   settlement.         references     carr,  n.  (2010),  the  shallows:  what  the  internet  is  doing  to  our  brains.  new  york.     cavoukia,  a.  (2012),  privacy  by  design:  origins,  meaning,  and  prospects  for  ensuring   privacy  and  trust  in  the  information  era.  montreal.   gillespie,  t.  (2014),  the  relevance  of  algorithms.  in:  gillespie,  t.  /  boczkowski,  p.  and   foot,  k.  (eds.),  media  technologies.  essays  on  communication,  materiality,  and   society.  cambridge,  167-­194.     introna,  l.  d.  /  nissenbaum,  h.  (2000),  shaping  the  web:  why  the  politics  of  search   engines  matters.  the  information  society  16(3),  169-­185.   just,  n.  /  latzer,  m.  (2016),  governance  by  algorithms:  reality  construction  by   algorithmic  selection  on  the  internet.  media,  culture  &  society,  published  online  before   print  april  21,  2016.   lao,  m.  (2013),  ’neutral’  search  as  a  basis  for  antitrust  action?  harvard  journal  of  law   &  technology  26(2),  1-­12.   latzer,  m.  /  hollnbuchner,  k.  /  just,  n.  /  saurwein,  f.  (2016),  the  economics  of   algorithmic  selection  on  the  internet.  in:  bauer,  j.  and  latzer,  m.  (eds.),  handbook  on   the  economics  of  the  internet.  cheltenham,  northampton,  395-­425.     latzer,  m.  /  just,  n.  /  saurwein,  f.  /  slominski,  p.  (2003),  regulation  remixed:   institutional  change  through  self-­  and  co-­regulation  in  the  mediamatics  sector.   communications  and  strategies  50(2),  127-­157.   lessig,  l.  (1999),  code  and  other  laws  of  cyberspace.  new  york.   lewandowski,  d.  (2014),  why  we  need  an  independent  index  of  the  web.  in:  könig,  r.   and  rasch,  m.  (eds.),  society  of  the  query  reader.  amsterdam,  50-­58.     manovich,  l.  (2013),  software  takes  command,  new  york.   musiani,  f.  (2013),  governance  by  algorithms,  internet  policy  review  2(3).   pasquale,  f.  (2015),  the  black  box  society.  harvard.   saurwein,  f.  /  just,  n.  /  latzer,  m.  (2015),  governance  of  algorithms:  options  and   limitations.  info  17(6),  35-­49.   sparrow,  b.  /  liu,  j.  /  wegner,  d.m.  (2011),  google  effects  on  memory:  cognitive   consequences  of  having  information  at  our  fingertips.  science  333(6043),  776-­778.   microsoft word draper reputation inc. dissertation award winner.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): draper, nora a. (2015, october 21-24). reputation inc.: the industrialization of digital self presentation and online privacy. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. reputation, inc.: the industrialization of digital self presentation and online privacy nora a. draper university of new hampshire introduction in 2013, citing the release of information by nsa contractor edward snowden, dictionary.com announced privacy as its word of the year. that same year, the oxford dictionary declared selfie its word of the year, noting a 17,000% increase in its use over the previous year. the twin selection of privacy and selfie as words of the year might feel contradictory. embedded in the practice of selfie-making is not simply the capture of a personal image, but also the sharing of that content. in contrast, definitions of privacy tend to reflect freedom from observation. the selections, however, are not as divergent as they initially appear. rather, they reveal a tension residing at the center of contemporary digital culture: a conflict between social and economic incentives for visibility and an enduring need for the intimacy and autonomy afforded by privacy. the 2013 word of the year choices raise important questions about how a society that is deeply implicated in cultures of self-production and display could also be immensely preoccupied with anxieties of over-exposure. in this paper, i explore this tension to understand the complex and evolving understandings of privacy through the lens of a commercial privacy industry committed to providing individuals with tools to control and benefit from the dissemination of personal information online. cultural responses to the introduction of new media technologies, which tend to challenge existing social conventions and boundaries (marvin, 1990), often manifest as fears about a perceived threat to privacy. just as the postal service (henkin, 2006), telephone (marvin, 1990), and television (spigel, 1992) raised concerns about the public exposure of intimate information, the internet has generated concerns about the end of privacy (rosen, 2010). the contested nature of this term has complicated attempts codify meaningful privacy protections. while legal approaches to privacy tend to focus on control – over space, information, or personal reputation – the social meaning of privacy is contextual and varies across time and between communities complicating the notions of control (nissenbaum, 2010). the result, at least in the united states, has been a piecemeal approach that combines narrow regulation with shared social expectations. in the context of a new information environment that lacks both appropriate regulation and shared social norms, a collection of for profit companies has emerged over the past two decades to help support and define personal privacy for the digital age. in the larger project from which this paper draws, i trace the complex and evolving approaches these actors have towards notions of identity construction, authentic self-presentation, visibility, and value creation in an online environment. i this paper, i focus specifically on the role this industry has played in reflecting and shaping the norms that guide contemporary approaches to digital self-presentation. i observe how industrial practices have mobilized and destabilized collectively understood terms, redefining them in ways that reflect the changing economic, social, and political realities of an evolving digital environment. in particular, i examine how this industry has positioned the terms “autonomy” and “authenticity,” defining and redefining them at key moments over the past two decades. method based on interview with key members of this emergent industry, as well as extensive analyses of industry and policy texts, the paper examines the two-decade evolution of a set of commercial institutions that reside at the intersection of sociality and privacy. i draw here from a broader project that involves interviews with over 25 members of the privacy industry as well as media coverage of key companies spanning the period between 1995 and 2013. specifically, the research centers around questions regarding comparative industry history, target publics, shared commercial rhetoric, and business practices that will allow me to address larger questions about the social, economic, and political conditions informing the ongoing negotiations between privacy and visibility. i argue that to understand cultural anxieties about online privacy and the corresponding strategies of self-presentation and reputation management, we must understand the broader industrial forces that reflect and shape these practices. further, i suggests that a research agenda limited to observing successful actors who command economic and social resources in the digital space misses out on much of the nuance embedded in a complex digital ecosystem. in examining the evolution of the online privacy industry – a task that involves attention to failure as much as to success – this paper follows a group of actors as they intervene in a socio-economic climate that offers growing incentives for visibility to provide individuals with strategies for balancing the risks and rewards of disclosure. the evolution of the online privacy industry the success and failure of companies at key moments over the first twenty years of the digital privacy industry offers an instructive illustration of the myriad forces contributing to the changing politics of privacy in the emergent medium. with the influx of internet users in the 1990s made possible by the of the introduction of the web browser, fears emerged about how to manage data and identity in this largely unregulated space. while members of the geek and hacker communities had developed strategies for encrypting content and preserving anonymous spaces online, these strategies tended to be limited to those with advanced coding experience. in the face of ineffective industry self-regulation and limited government intervention, a set of companies emerged to help individuals manage their online visibility and control their digital data flows by privileging tools for anonymity. at the heart of efforts was a desire to empower individuals to protect their personal privacy through simplified tools that would allow users to surf the web anonymously and limit the disclosure of personal information only to trusted actors. these actors viewed anonymous online self-presentation as an important opportunity for authentic self-presentation. despite the optimism surrounding these companies, few of the actors in this emergent industry weathered the dot-com crash and by 2002 almost all of the companies offering commercial privacy enhancing services had closed shop. the mid-2000s witnessed the reemergence of privacy enhancing services with a host of new companies offering strategies to help people manage their digital footprint. similar to their predecessors, these companies rehearse cautionary tales about the potentially harmful implications of online visibility and point to the inequalities of an economic system in which companies claim profits from the collection and use of personal information. however, these companies were facing a vastly different socio-technical reality. while the privacy enhancing services of the 1990s had fought against a digital architecture that privileged identity as the primary source of authentication and privileged opportunities for anonymity, contemporary actors are operating in an environment where users are incentivized at every turn to disclose personal information. recognizing the value of visibility in this environment, these companies dismiss the viability of anonymity, offering an alternative model of privacy to their predecessors. these companies construct privacy as a tactic of what i call “strategic transparency” – a careful balance between visibility and obscurity – and offer products and services to assist in the creation and management of an online profile aimed at generating social insight and economic capital. authenticity, for these companies, is achieved through the disclosure of personal information and the cultivation of a compelling digital persona. conclusions ultimately, i argue that the reliance on corporate actors to provide privacy protections to an increasingly digital public has supported a cultural construction of privacy as a personal choice. drawing on ideas of responsibilization and individualization offered by ulrich beck (2002) and anthony giddens (1991) in their assessments of the modern risk society, i examine the power of commercially motivated, choice-based architectures to supplant collective fears about the consequences of visibility with narratives about the empowering possibilities of individual decision making. i push back against claims that controlled disclosure, rather than anonymity, is a universally accessible option for obtaining privacy in an environment that privileges visibility. drawing on critical cultural theory, i examine the politics of visibility and interrogate the assumed privilege embedded in solutions that encourage people to control their personal narrative and information trails. references beck, u., & beck-gernsheim, e. (2002). individualization: institutional individualism and its social and political consequences. london: sage publications ltd. giddens, a. (1991). modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age. stanford, ca: stanford university press. henkin, d. m. (2006). the postal age: the emergence of modern communications in nineteenth-century america. chicago: university of chicago press. marvin, c. (1990). when old technologies were new: thinking about electric communication in the late nineteenth century. new york: oxford university press. nissenbaum, h. (2010). privacy in context: technology, policy, and the integrity of social life. stanford, ca: stanford law books. rosen, j. (2010, july 21). the web means the end of forgetting. new york times. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy t2.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 spigel, l. (1992). make room for tv: television and the family ideal in postwar america. chicago: university of chicago press. microsoft word gerlitz-rieder.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): gerlitz, c. & rieder, b. (2014, october 22-24). techniques of intersection – metrics as connectors and separators in twitter research. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. techniques of intersection – metrics as connectors and separators in twitter research carolin gerlitz university of amsterdam bernhard rieder university of amsterdam social media platforms are characterized by the sheer volume of activity and thus data, whilst at the same time only offering very specific and often limited access possibilities. when studying facebook or twitter, questions and techniques of delimitation, i.e. the selection of subsets and the use of specific metrics, are particularly relevant. this paper sets out to reflect on metrics in twitter research as specific techniques that allow to investigate the making of boundaries and connections, while at the same time functioning both as connectors and separators. the question of cutting and slicing has been discussed in relation to sampling techniques in the context of social science research (uprichard; bryman; gilbert) and increasingly in relation to social media research (rieder; gerlitz and rieder), but the kind of analytical “dissections” we perform by selecting and designing metrics are less well understood. metrics, however, equally need to be seen as epistemic devices that engage in breaking the practices sprawling on social media platforms apart and put them together again in various ways. the objective of the paper is to reflect on the affordances of different metrics in social media research and in particular in twitter research. we draw on a previous experimental study on ‘mining one percent of twitter’ (gerlitz and rieder) by expanding our initial reflections on the epistemic work and boundary making capacities of sampling to include the more subtle forms of carving implied by metrics. dissecting platform data through features, metrics and samples a variety of new media research has started to explore the material-technical conditions of platforms (rogers; gillespie), drawing attention to the performative capacities of platform protocols to enable and structure specific activities. in the case of twitter that refers to elements such as tweets, retweets, @replies, favourites, follows, or lists. these features offer blueprints for user activities that are both pre-defined yet underdetermined (gillespie; montfort and bogost; langlois et al.). they cater to a variety of actors, including users, developers, advertisers, and third party services, and allow for a variety of distinct use practices to emerge, but also often function as starting points to delineate empirical material for twitter research. using these medium-specific elements as basis for building a collection of tweets, users, etc. to be analyzed has significant epistemic weight: these sampling methods come with specific notions of use scenarios build into them or, as uprichard suggests, there are certain “a priori philosophical assumptions intrinsic to any sample design and the subsequent validity of the sample criteria themselves” (uprichard 2). the practice of delimitation is not reserved to sampling, but continues on the level of metrics when we use, for example, hashtags or even words as stand-ins for concepts, ideas, positions or viewpoints. is a list on twitter a group? are retweets a measure of attention? of agreement? or a favour amongst friends? metrics draw together disparate practices, but they also isolate: we do not send hashtags, after all, but tweets. if platform features like hashtags or retweets comprise a variety of practices and meanings, how are these heterogenous practices again re-assembled in the process of research? and how can we use said metrics to trace the various connections and separations between users, topics and practices on twitter? methodology following our interest in relations between sampling, metrics and medium-specificity, we turn to random sampling and engage twitter without the commitments or maybe with different commitments? to particular a priori conceptualizations of practices implied by other sampling methods, in order to explore the ways metrics can reveal connections and separations while being themselves caught up in connecting and separating analytically. using twitter’s streaming api and the digital methods initiative twitter capture and analysis toolset (dmi-tcat), we retrieved a one percent sample of all tweets over a period of several weeks. we use traditional and emergent metrics to explore both the datasets and the metrics themselves, including activity patterns, hashtags, retweets, language settings, content shared, interaction chains, co-word associations, user profile data and access devices among others. by starting from a random sample, we can inquire how metrics are both related and separate from each other, and to what extent different metrics can qualify or characterise each other (do twitter users writing from different devices use hashtags differently? are friend/follower relationships indicative of linking diversity? can we detect language specific practices?). in line with our previous work, the random sample further allows us to expand our analysis of different use practices of platform features. for instance, by drawing on network and co-word metrics, we explore different use cases of hashtags, interaction and retweet patterns. doing so, we inquire into the connections enabled by such metrics, asking how connections between hashtags, words or users resemble actual use practices or are rather constructed through the analytical work of metrics. in this methodological set-up, samples and metrics are not used to establish data boundaries, but to explore their making and in that sense, the paper contributes to a critical reflection of methodological techniques of intersection. making and tracing intersections the paper concludes by a reflection on the ways in which metrics, operating as epistemic devices, contribute to dynamics of inclusion and exclusion on a methodological and conceptual level. just as mackenzie contents in relation to databases that it is not the individual data points that matter but the relations that can be created between them (mackenzie), the work with metrics involves such bringing into relation of medium-specific objects and activities. research, we argue, further needs to reflect whether it dissects its datasets alongside issueoriented or medium-dynamics, and which metrics bring out the dynamics of the medium – such as bot activity or retweets peaks and which allow to zoom in on dynamics specific to topical concerns. through experimental testing of metrics we hope to initiate a debate on the politics of cuts and connections produced and the possibilities to explore the complexity of twitter practices within which specific collections and metrics can be situated. references bryman, alan. social research methods. oxford university press, (2012). gerlitz, carolin & rieder, bernhard. mining one percent of twitter : collections, baselines, sampling. m/c journal, 16(2), pp.1–18, (2013). gilbert, nigel. researching social life. sage, (2008). gillespie, tarleton. “the politics of ‘platforms’.” new media & society 12.3 (2010): 347– 364. langlois, ganaele et al. “mapping commercial web 2 . 0 worlds: towards a new critical ontogenesis.” fibreculture 14 (2009): 1–14. mackenzie, adrian. “more parts than elements: how databases multiply.” environment and planning d: society and space 30.2 (2012): 335 – 350. montfort, nick, and ian bogost. racing the beam: the atari video computer system. mit press, (2009). rieder, bernhard. “the refraction chamber: twitter as sphere and network.” first monday 11. november 5 (2012). rogers, richard. the end of the virtual – digital methods. amsterdam university press, (2009). uprichard, emma. “sampling: bridging probability and non-probability designs.” international journal of social research methodology 16.1 (2011): 1–11. microsoft word hopkins.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): hopkins, j. (2014, october 22-24). click fraud: advertising and the territorialisation of personal blogs. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. click fraud: advertising and the territorialisation of personal blogs julian hopkins monash unversity malaysia abstract drawing upon deleuze & guattari’s concept of the assemblage, and callon’s actornetwork theory analysis of economic markets, this paper draws upon ethnographic research to examine a case study of changing practices amongst personal bloggers in malaysia. focusing on cost per click advertising, it shows how stabilising reciprocal practices became recast as ‘click fraud’ by a blog advertising network, and ‘community’ is reframed as an income generating collective. introduction this paper looks at how malaysian personal bloggers’ practices became entangled with market relations through the use of web analytics that enable the ‘cost per click’ (cpc) pricing model, whereby the advertiser pays for metered clicks on advertisements (bermejo, 2007, pp. 113–14). these clicks represent an active choice by the potential consumer; thus, they are understood to be direct expressions of interest in the good advertised and valued at a higher premium that exposure alone. however, the possibility of ‘fraudulent clicks’, clicks that do not correspond to genuine interest, may then become a matter of concern. other forms of blog monetisation, such as paid reviews, are not discussed here. drawing upon deleuze & guattari’s discussion of assemblage and capitalism, jensen & rödje argue that “[c]apitalism decodes desire and its products in order to recode them into abstract quantities in the form of money and commodities” (2009, p. 17). similarly, from an ant perspective, callon et al. (2002) argue that this process of attaching, or commodifying, particular goods to a market happens through a process of “qualification”, whereby goods are given particular qualities that translate them into objects of value in the market context. importantly, the ‘market’ here is not understood as a natural phenomenon, but instead it has to be examined in “interaction with specific substantive or value orders” (collier & ong, 2005, p. 14), such as an ethical underpinning based mostly on the utilitarian model promulgated by adam smith (e.g. dilley, 1992; silver, 1990). once markets are understood to be particular and contingent, it is difficult to argue for a universally consistent market logic, and instead culture and economy are more advantageously considered as components interacting on a ‘flat’ plane. in this way, delanda details the historical development of local and regional markets as specific assemblages (delanda, 2006, pp. 17– 18). assemblages are understood here as dynamic constellations of causally related material and nonmaterial components, held together through stabilising practices that territorialise the assemblage, but also prone to deterritorialising movements that destabilise them (deleuze & guattari, 1987, pp. 97–8). michel callon’s actor-network approach argues for “markets as social artefacts that are instituted via purposive strategies and technologies of calculation” (slater & tonkiss, 2001, p. 94). this argument has three main components: markets are created (with ‘economies of qualities’ being important in this regard), calculative agencies are central to the latter, and they create overflows, or externalities. with regard to online advertising, a particular market assemblage is assembled through the use of calculative agencies that target audience measurement and actions. the market assemblage does not exclude relations through market exchange per se. however, an inevitable result of the reassembling of relations when market-based values are introduced into personal blogging networks is that there are loose ends and new dynamics generated, enabling lines of flight or what callon refers to as ‘overflows’ (1998, p. 248). in the case study outlined below, we see how established practices that stabilise social relations between personal bloggers became ‘overflows’ – i.e. undesirable externalities that reflect the limited ability of the market to incorporate all sociocultural activity (callon, 1998) – when reframed in the light of the need to quantify the interested audience, and provide market-related metrics. methodological note this paper draws mostly upon data gathered during an ethnographic research project in malaysia over three years (2007-2009) that included onand offline participant observation, a survey, and interviews. the bloggers involved were primarily urban ethnic malaysian-chinese, who maintained english language blogs with daily readerships ranging from 500 to 10,000. details of the particular interviewees and/or fieldnotes are given in footnotes where relevant. more details are outlined in table 1. the research was aimed at following developments in personal blogging following the introduction of advertising opportunities. the fieldwork mostly involved attending blogger events, participating in contests and related activities, maintaining two blogs, and interacting online. although the case study used here is a single situation, it exemplifies a practice that was common. the eventual reaction by the blog advertising network, as well as similar regulations by google and other advertising networks, suggest the widespread nature of reciprocal and organised clicking on advertisements for mutual gain. table 1: stages of the research 23233 i scratch ur back...u scratch mine! in 2007, two malaysian blog advertisement networks began inviting blogs to carry remotely controlled advertisements. they generated a broad interest: blogadnet,1 the more successful company, received 1,500 registrations in three months, and by 2009 had more than 140,000. in the early stages, a blogger, dammu, posted a review of the two services, and concluded his post saying: “you readers better be clicking on my ads.i’m counting on you people for my first cheque from both company!”2 in the blog post comments (below), some of the interactions showed how existing blogger practices were adapting to the new opportunities: [commenter a] said... i clicked all your ads already. it's your turn now!! we are helping each other. 2:18 pm [dammu] said... mr [commenter a], i scratch ur back...u scratch mine! 2:38 pm [commenter c] said... 1 all names used are pseudonyms. 2 blog post, dammu, 24 july 2007. in this paper, all spelling and grammar left as is. i too clicked ur ads! when are u clicking mine? =p 4:04 pm [dammu] said... miss [commenter c], i go do it now!! 4:36 pm [commenter d] said... i scratch ur back u scratch my back =d [...] 6:31 pm [...] [commenter e] said... woah you got rm4.70 and rm 5.86 in just couple days.how do you made it??.me no one click my ads..let we click ads each other please.. 3:22 pm before personal blogs were able to host advertisements, reciprocal exchanges of hyperlinks and attention actualised through clicks were primarily a means to develop further social ties and were a stabilising influence on the blogging assemblages. conversely, withholding visits and/or hyperlinks was a sign of disagreement or tension. these actions of mutual support resembled gifting, in which “the act of exchange is inseparably the reproduction of the social relationship in which it is embedded” (slater, 2002, p. 239). as the above shows, embedded advertisements offered a divergent opportunity for this practice to deliver a financial reward, too. these actions were initially tacitly condoned by blogadnet. in march 2007, a co-founder suggested to his blog readers: “when the ad runs, perhaps egg on your readers to check it out.”3 a year later, at a marketing product launch, the blogadnet liaison person informally suggested to bloggers that they limit clicking on ads on their own blogs to once daily, but that it was fine to click on friends’ blogs.4 in 2009, however, he explained that bloggers “might be suspended” if they asked their friends to click on their ads. he also explained that the company had an automated procedure for detecting multiple clicks from the same source, and that bloggers would be denied the extra earnings and sent an email asking them to desist. nonetheless, “the first one will always count. [...] 3 blog post, tan, 16 march 2007 4 fieldnotes dated 8 april 2008 you should be interested in something, that’s why you click on it [...] [the clients] still get the exposure, so we believe that you deserve at least the 25 sen, the first one.”5 presumably due to clients’ concerns, the prohibition on reciprocal ad clicking thus became more explicit. in april 2008 and later in september 2010, blogadnet sent an email to registered bloggers that showed a concern with increased ‘click fraud’.6 in the later email, billed as a “community message service,” there were four categories of click fraud outlined, two of which involve the blogger alone: registering a large number of blogs and clicking on them, and/or repeatedly changing the ip address in order to simulate being a different person. the other two relate to reciprocal actions: bloggers were told not to ask readers to click on their advertisements, and not to click “on other bloggers’ ads [...] leaving a comment behind asking/hinting to the owner to click on their ads back.”7 in this way, community was still being invoked although an important collective, stabilising, practice was being reframed. click fraud was presented as a threat to the ‘community’ – reframed as an income generating collective – in that it could reduce overall advertisers’ interest and funding. bloggers were asked to refrain from it and educate others, and blogadnet stated their willingness to ban those involved “so other members of the community are not affected by those who engage in click fraud.”8 thus blogadnet was re-entangling the rationalised and depersonalised clicking within a wider reciprocal framework of the ‘community’. from a reciprocal support mechanism, blogadnet had to bring the bloggers to understand clicks on advertisements as “a market transaction, reproduc[ing] no social roles other than that of buyer and seller” (slater, 2002, p. 239). the coordination of reciprocal clicking by bloggers was an ‘overflow’, or externality, in the terms laid out by callon, which threatens to destabilise the market, and what the email presents was an attempt to internalise an externality (e.g. strathern, 2002). conclusions advertisers became interested in advertising on blogs through the social relations created by and through bloggers and their readers, but there is a tension inherent in this appropriation. in a market economy, the transaction that is sealed by the exchange of money, based on a common ethical position formalised in a sales contract, needs to be alienable (slater, 2002, p. 110). advertisers want a presence in the ‘online community’, but – as callon would put it – they want to contain the ‘overflow’ and disentangle the actual reciprocal relations that have contributed to the existence of the blog assemblage. understanding markets and stabilised collectives as assemblages allows us to understand how they interact and – in this case – the market territorialises the blogging assemblage. the technologies that quantify and measure audience, and which are the 5 interview with andy, 10 august 2009 6 fieldnotes/email dated 29 september 2010 7 the “prohibited uses” in the google adsense terms & conditions (malaysia) provides a detailed list of similar prohibited uses. 8 fieldnotes/email dated 29 september 2010 source of the commodifiable audience for the bloggers, are the same means that oversee their actions. this recalls deleuze’s argument regarding the use of technologies that substitute “for the individual or numerical body the code of a ‘dividual’ material to be controlled” (deleuze, 1992, p. 7) – the qualification of the bloggers as legitimate recipients of the payment for advertising services is done through digitised, quantified and contingent data. thus blogs become entangled with market relations through the use of web analytics, which coincide with business models derived from pre-existing mass media. however, although not covered in this paper, calculation is not restricted to quantification – goods are qualified and transformed in other ways such as through blog affordances such as interactivity and personalisation (hopkins, 2013), as well as through their inclusion in offline marketing-oriented events. acknowledgments the research upon which this paper is based was supported by a scholarship from monash university malaysia. references bermejo, f. (2007). the internet audience: constitution & measurement. new york: peter lang. callon, m. (1998). an essay on framing and overflowing: economic externalities revisited by sociology. in m. callon (ed.), the laws of the markets (pp. 244–269). blackwell publishers. callon, m., méadel, c., & rabeharisoa, v. (2002). the economy of qualities. economy and society, 31(2), 194 – 217. retrieved from http://www.informaworld.com/10.1080/03085140220123126 collier, s. j., & ong, a. (2005). global assemblages, anthropological problems. in a. ong & s. j. collier (eds.), global assemblages: technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems (pp. 3–21). malden, ma: blackwell publishing. delanda, m. (2006). new philosophy of society: assemblage theory and social complexity. london & new york: continuum. deleuze, g. (1992). postscript on the societies of control. october, 59, 3–7. retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/778828 deleuze, g., & guattari, f. (1987). a thousand plateaus : capitalism and schizophrenia. (b. massumi, trans.). london: continuum. dilley, r. (1992). contesting markets. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. hopkins, j. (2013). assembling affordances: towards a theory of relational affordances. in selected papers of internet research. denver, usa. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org/index.php/spir/article/view/783 jensen, c. b., & rödje, k. (2009). introduction. in c. b. jensen & k. rödje (eds.), deleuzian intersections: science, technology, anthropology. oxford and new york: berghahn books. silver, a. (1990). friendship in commercial society: eighteenth-century social theory and modern sociology. the american journal of sociology, 95(6), 1474–1504. retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2780332 slater, d. (2002). markets, materiality and the ‘new economy’. in j. s. metcalfe & a. warde (eds.), market relations and the competitive process. manchester: manchester university press. slater, d., & tonkiss, f. (2001). market society: markets and modern social theory. cambridge: wiley-blackwell. strathern, m. (2002). externalities in comparative guise. economy and society, 31(2), 250 – 267. retrieved from http://www.informaworld.com/10.1080/03085140220123153 microsoft word ‘seedbox hogs’ and ‘ratio whores’discussions over file sharing strategies in private bittorrent communities nicholas john.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): john, n. (2015, october 21-24). ‘seedbox hogs’ and ‘ratio whores’: discussions over file sharing strategies in private bittorrent communities. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ‘seedbox hogs’ and ‘ratio whores’: discussions over file sharing strategies in private bittorrent communities nicholas a. john department of communication, the hebrew university of jerusalem, israel this paper is about the ways that members of private bittorrent sites talk about the mechanisms used to monitor the extent to which they are sharing files in a reciprocal fashion. this is of significance for two main reasons. first, members-only file sharing sites constitute a relatively under-studied phenomenon in the context of research into file sharing. looking at them more closely, we can ask whether the various mechanisms for requiring members to upload as much as they download—known as share ratio enforcement (sre)—have unintended consequences and what implications this has for the widely held belief that, when sharing, one should not only take, but give as well. it turns out that in closed file-sharing communities, the commodity being shared is not actually files at all, but rather a proxy for currency in those communities, namely share ratio. second, file sharing is a site in which we can see the metaphor of ‘sharing’ at work and enquire into its modus operandi there, both by looking at the ways in which the word itself is used, as well as the ways it is explicitly highlighted as a resource in attempts to shape the moral contours of the file sharing endeavor. in this regard, the paper builds on previous work on sharing as a keyword for web 2.0 (john, 2013), as a new/old form of distribution (belk, 2010), and as a crucial metaphor in the term ‘file sharing’ (gillespie, 2009; litman, 2004; mirghani, 2011; yar, 2008). also, while there have been studies on users’ motivations to upload and download copyright-protected content (andersson, 2012; andersson schwarz & larsson, 2014; cenite, wang, peiwen, & chan, 2009; kinnally, lacayo, mcclung, & sapolsky, 2008), file sharers’ conceptions and moral evaluations of the sociotechnical systems they use in order to access content have not been examined. the empirical basis for the study is a qualitative analysis of 194 forum posts in three forums that debate share ratio enforcement mechanisms and 34 answers from the research bay project. all texts were imported into maxqda, software for qualitative analysis, where they were coded. i do not have the space here to explain in detail how the combination of facets of the bittorrent protocol (particularly the priority given to faster uploaders) and share ratio enforcement mechanisms (simply: don’t download (much) more than you upload) create problems for users with relatively slow upload speeds. very briefly, though, sre can create a situation where some users have a very high share ratio and buffer, and can download whatever they want, while others have low ratio and buffer, and cannot. in other words, a situation of inequality emerges. the task here is to understand how file sharers discursively negotiate this inequality, with special reference to the concept of sharing. two main findings emerge from the forum posts. one is that, in private trackers, it does not matter what you share, but rather how much you share (or don’t share). in their efforts to increase their share ratio, some users download content they have no interest whatsoever in consuming just so they can upload it back to other users; others download files they will never open merely so as to help other users to improve their share ratio. another unintended consequence is that some file sharers feel that other file sharers are sharing too much (the ‘seedbox hogs’ and ‘ratio whores’), and that sometimes the act of sharing—uploading content to other file sharers—is actually a selfish act that comes at the expense of others. second, it emerges from the forum posts that some users identify very strongly with the word ‘sharing,’ arguing that ‘that is what it is all about,’ for instance. for some, it seems that they take their lead from the term, ‘file sharing.’ if it is called ‘file sharing,’ they appear to think, then we should make sure that we are sharing. others deploy the concept of sharing as they try to argue for a particular mechanism, usually one that involves the redistribution of share ratio and buffer in accordance to need, and not in proportion to how much has been paid for a seedbox. for these people, ‘sharing’ also expresses a form of ownership that counters that which is represented by the entertainment industry. either way, ‘sharing’ is used as a concept that brings to mind ‘caring,’ and fairness, and the very term itself is strategically deployed in the debates in the forums. this study also demonstrates the significance of the concept of sharing in the digital age. as with its use as the word that both describes and constructs our activities on social network sites (john, 2013), here too the concept of sharing plays a twofold role: on the one hand, it is a theoretical lens through which to interpret the activities of private bittorrent sites and the discourses around them among their members, while on the other it is also and simultaneously a concept that frames the way that the users of those sites understand what they are doing there and that helps them to justify (or argue against) the rules regarding the distribution of share ratio. by shifting the focus of attention from the ‘file’ part of file sharing—which leads us to discuss issues regarding ownership of the file, the ease of duplicability of the file, and so on—to the ‘sharing’ part, this paper enables a richer understanding of an as-yet lesser understood aspect of file sharing. references andersson, j. (2012). learning from the file-sharers: civic modes of justification versus industrial ones. arts marketing: an international journal, 2(2), 104-117. andersson schwarz, j., & larsson, s. (2014). the justifications of piracy: differences in conceptualization and argumentation between active uploaders and other filesharers. in m. fredriksson & j. arvanitakis (eds.), piracy: leakages from modernity (pp. 217-239). los angeles, ca: litwin books. belk, r. (2010). sharing. journal of consumer research, 36(5), 715-734. doi: 10.1086/612649 cenite, m., wang, m. w., peiwen, c., & chan, g. s. (2009). more than just free content: motivations of peer-to-peer file sharers. journal of communication inquiry, 33(3), 206-221. gillespie, t. (2009). characterizing copyright in the classroom: the cultural work of antipiracy campaigns†. communication, culture & critique, 2(3), 274-318. john, n. a. (2013). sharing and web 2.0: the emergence of a keyword. new media & society, 15(2), 167-182. doi: 10.1177/1461444812450684 kinnally, w., lacayo, a., mcclung, s., & sapolsky, b. (2008). getting up on the download: college students' motivations for acquiring music via the web. new media & society, 10(6), 893-913. litman, j. (2004). sharing and stealing. hastings communications and entertainment law journal, 27, 1-48. mirghani, s. (2011). the war on piracy: analyzing the discursive battles of corporate and government-sponsored anti-piracy media campaigns. critical studies in media communication, 28(2), 113-134. doi: 10.1080/15295036.2010.514933 yar, m. (2008). the rhetorics and myths of anti-piracy campaigns: criminalization, moral pedagogy and capitalist property relations in the classroom. new media & society, 10(4), 605-623. microsoft word aoir 2016 final_name.docx selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): ferrari, elisabetta. (2016, october 5-8). keeping it fake: exploring usergenerated political fakes and their publics. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. keeping it fake: exploring user-generated political fakes and their publics elisabetta ferrari university of pennsylvania (usa) introduction this paper investigates user-generated political satire, focusing in particular on one genre: fake political accounts. such fakes, created as social network profiles, satirize politicians or political organizations by impersonating them. through the impersonation they also satirize anyone – be it a member of the public, a journalist or a political actor – who does not recognize the account as fake and interacts with it as if it were the "real" one. this type of satirical intervention in the public sphere is becoming increasingly popular in different countries (see wilson, 2011), although it has not been studied extensively. this paper thus provides an exploration of political faking in the context of italian user-generated satire. while fakeness has often raised concerns related to its presumed inauthentic nature, i argue that political faking can articulate a powerful critique of the political, by highlighting the carefully manufactured nature of contemporary politics and unmasking its pretense to authenticity. in the paper i investigate how the authors of some italian fake political accounts navigate the issue of fakeness vis-à-vis the social network platforms they use and the public(s) they encounter; i also focus on how the authors conceptualize their relationships with their public(s). method and limitations i conducted semi-structured interviews with a sample of fake political accounts’ creators. the sample, purposive and convenient, includes 12 interviewees, who manage the 8 fake accounts considered in this paper, as indicated in table 1. given the nature of these accounts, protecting the privacy of their creators is a priority; i thus attribute the content and quotes from the interviews to their account’s name, as opposed to their personal one. table 1 characteristics of the sample of fake accounts fake account facebook likes twitter followers number of interviewees number of authors renzo mattei 14,511 37,000 3 3 gianni kuperlo 2,392 27,300 1 1 casalegglo 304 74,100 2 7 arfio marchini 72,711 8,605 1 1 feudalesimo e libertà 388,186 11,000 2 5 marxisti per tabacci 39,306 3,119 1 up to 10 napoletani con salvini 2,619 1 2 gli eurocrati 16,213 1 2 note: the follower count refers to december 10, 2015. my analysis of the publics and their reactions to the satire of the fake accounts is the result of how interviewees make sense of them, and thus it might not correspond to what individual members of the public experience. nevertheless, there is a certain uniformity in the descriptions given by the interviewees that indicates that the map might be a good starting point for the explorations of publics on social network sites. further research could complement my work with a systematical content analysis or discourse analysis of users’ public comments and reactions. findings firstly, following the suggestion of one interviewee, i identify two modes of faking: mimetic and explicit. mimetic fakes impersonate the politician without disclosing that they are fake; they attempt to deceive the public into believing that they are the real thing. on the contrary, explicit fakes impersonate the politician, but do not attempt to hide the fact that they are fake. for instance, their names are close to the real names of the politicians, but different enough to be identified as fakes. yet, despite the fact that these accounts do not make an effort to deceive the public, many members of the public – but also politicians and journalists – have regarded these fake accounts as real. secondly, as can be seen in figure 1, i map the interactions of the fakes and their public(s) along two axes: one referring to the public’s understanding of the satire (do they get it?), the other to the uses that the public makes of the satire, which can be arranged on a continuum between “instrumental” and “textual” use1. 1 the distinction between “instrumental” and “textual” aims at discerning what users do with the satire of the fake accounts, with the understanding that one can derive enjoyment from using satire instrumentally, as well as “simply” consuming it as text. figure 1. map of the publics of the fake accounts. the map allows us to identify five broad categories, going counter-clockwise from the bottom-right quadrant: 1) those who get the satire and just enjoy it; 2) those who get it and use it for their own ends; 3) those who use instrumentally the satire they don’t get; 4) those who just don’t get it; 5) uncertainty (corresponding to the area at the intersection of the axes). in the paper i provide examples for each category and discuss how interviewees relate to these different publics. what we would normally understand as the public of a satirist is comprised of people who understand the satire and consume it for their enjoyment. however, mapping the publics of the fake accounts, as they emerge on/through social media, helps us visualize how the fakes deal simultaneously with a much broader spectrum of possible reactions and interactions – four quadrants, not one – which i argue is a function of how “networked publics” operate (boyd 2011). furthermore, the category of uncertainty points to an interesting phenomenon, in that the lack of context prevents the satirists from fully understanding what some members of their publics are doing with their satire. furthermore, this category of uncertainty highlights the multiple meanings and motivations that users can attach to usergenerated content. even the public of the accounts has a public, i.e. users adjust how they interact with the satire of the fake accounts according to their specific audience and their motivations. it is entirely possible that some people who do get the satire of the fakes actually choose to “play dumb” just to see how other people will react. in this sense, they are also involved in a form of playful faking. conclusions my contribution is twofold. firstly, i suggest that the fake accounts help us visualize slices of the public that we wouldn't otherwise visualize. digital technologies allow satirists to get in touch with people who they would have never been able to reach before. however, not all the people that they can reach will be equally predisposed to understanding their satire. in fact, that some people get the joke and some people don’t has always been part of satire: not everyone appreciates it in the same way (day, 2011). some people have always been excluded by the joke, but now – because of digital technologies – they are part of the potential audience of the joke, and thus become more visible. i thus propose to think of satire (even offline!) as a participatory practice, in which satirists and satirees co-construct the satirical text. secondly, i argue for fakeness as a powerful critique to the political and its pretense to authenticity. fake accounts negotiate their fakeness on a thin line between being popular and being critical, between being understood and being pungent. but this is true also for “regular users”: they also have a public; they also adjust their online persona by negotiating different levels of fakeness in order to achieve their goals. fakeness is part of our daily interactions, as part of networked publics – and it is not necessarily a marker of insincerity. when used as a mode of satire, fakeness can be a playful and effective intervention that criticizes those who lay claims to authenticity, particularly in the political sphere. references boyd, d. (2011). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in z. papacharissi (ed.), a networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 39–58). new york and london: routledge. day, a. (2011). satire and dissent: interventions in contemporary political debate. bloomington, indiana: indiana university press. wilson, j. (2011). playing with politics: political fans and twitter faking in postbroadcast democracy. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 17(4), 445–461. doi:10.1177/1354856511414348 microsoft word raval.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): raval, n. (2014, october 22-24). mapping the spiritual sensorium: an account of religion and media technologies in northern india. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. mapping the spiritual sensorium: an account of religion and media technologies in northern india noopur raval jawahrial nehru university the question of religion and its location within contemporary history is at the heart of this paper. while engaging with the after effects of the modernity project in postcolonies, much has been written about the peculiar and often conflicting shape that nationhood took in countries like india. religion often serves as a site to confront and respond to the changes ushered by modernities in state policies on education reforms, conjugal conduct, entertainment and other domains in india. it is then, necessary, to probe the role of religion as a social force in forming the public sphere and also to ask whether the binary of religion/science or religion/modernity holds. at the same time, new(er) forms of religious participation involving the consumption of religious media objects have evolved. these “micro-practices” of faith, sharing, belonging and affinity through consumption also pose a serious challenge to the notion of religion as transcendental only. drawing on the framework of “aesthetic formations” or dynamic communities bound through sensorial experiences, as explained by birgit meyer (meyer 2009), i attempt to map religious practice across hindi speaking peoples from northern india and the diaspora to discover the throbbing parallel life of spiritual practice through decades in the post-colony. before one can engage with the transformation of religious practice, it is necessary to critically consider how religious practice itself becomes a space, a site of articulation and interaction with the contemporary political, legal and the idea of modern. how can we study religion, not as a site of resistance, superstition and the natural binary opposite of all modern projects to go beyond and look at exciting practices of faith that mount their spectacles through media technologies and consumer bodies alike? also, in the scholarship around religion and methodology, there is an urgent need to reframe the relationship of religion and media, both categories central to our discussion as “not ontologically distinct” spheres that collide with the arrival of new technologies. also, i find it necessary to clear up the space of the “technological” and repurpose it for my paper. it is problematic to chart social practices (including religious/spiritual practices) along the lines of the novelty of technologies because that constantly leads us to attribute new bodily and psychological experiences produced by a new technology to the drive towards modernity, hence demanding a new body of theory to make sense of any mass media participation. this is a thread i only wish to begin here slightly to start hinting at questions of aura and charisma, or as walter benjamin put it “the onetimeness” of an object (benjamin 2008). while i revisit the construction and role of charismatic figures in religious communities in a longer essay, in the context of mass media technology debates here, two words – novelty and utopia become central. with the ushering of a new technology, like television for instance, popular visual culture was bombarded with vignettes of convenience, ease and speedy access to information resources. however, these utopic vignettes gloss over the fact that actors/consumers/people still remain implicated in their social, political and economic realities that are not rendered defunct merely by their televisual participation. it is probably in these conflicting visions of what exactly television, radio or the internet is meant for that we begin to understand a cycle of rise and fall of hope and continuities or discontinuities that mass technologies facilitate in a society’s workings. theorist herman bausinger argued in folk culture in a world of technology that, folk culture and tradition are very much alive in the world of modern technologies and “busily recruiting and adapting new technologies to old purposes.” (bausinger 1990) not only this, but what we call as tradition or culture is itself a device for negotiating our existence, understanding the self and modes of expressing our subjectivities – hence aligning the seemingly two different spheres of media and religion at the centre of this inquiry as not in complete disjunct but consistently bound in the logic of mediation. if mediation is indeed an inherent function of religion, and if we agree that new media are not just technological innovations but as shaun moores says, (in the process of creating) “continuous cultural and social spaces” (moores) this paper finds it productive to explore the seamlessness and transparency of mediation – a landmark feature of the networked society to understand what it means to be religious today. the ‘india’ i am engaging with is a post 2000s nation state and the religious phenomena i am addressing pan across urban, peri-urban and diasporic india – basically “an imagined community”1 of belonging loosely bound in language(s) and cultural production/consumption. it is convenient to map this community as symbolic of a certain decade of change, a repository of lived experiences after the entry of globalization, transnational cultural consumption and a moment after satellite television became a household reality in many parts of india. it is then necessary to ask an important question – whither stands the imagined community of a nation in the face of these changes? to contextualize popular religious discourse emerging from the above mentioned terrain of public and private experiences, most claims from believers, followers and opponents relegate religious practice to the realm of the esoteric, illogical, as the binary opposite of scientific prowess and by consequence, antithetical to modernity. on the other hand, as 1 birgit meyer, in her introduction to religion, media and the public sphere (2005) begins with benedict anderson’s proposition of the nation as an imagined community and goes beyond the time of print capitalism to expand on the range of imagined communities that could exist. also, see: “imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. revised edition. london and new york: verso.” (1991). explained earlier, every new technological invention is associated with a redemptive quality, as if capable of mass enlightenment and advancement of a community. thus, religion and media – the two categories at the centre of this chapter come to be indirectly posited in a “puzzling antagonism in which two ontologically distinct spheres – spiritual and technological – collide. to resolve this apparent contradiction, i look at the striking commonalities in the way religion and mass communication technologies organize communities to translate the imagined to the embodied through media objects, bodies and language. in order to understand the extremely complex constellation of religious practice in the contemporary indian context it is important to understand who the big players of spiritual media are. aastha tv started in 2001 by kirit mehta and madhavkant mishra inaugurated a new phase in the discourse on religious publics. what initially began with the idea of a dharam-karam2 channel for mehta was shaped based on mishra’s experience of editing five hindi publications. for mishra, as he states in a news report, the goal was “re-establishing old wisdom” and he realized television could take him to places print couldn’t reach (bhatia, 2011). almost more than a decade after aastha tv, today the dharam-karam segment is populated by more than eleven quasi spiritual channels with a focus on hinduism in the north indian region and more in other parts and religions of india. some of the other popular channels are sanskar, aastha bhajan, divya, zee jagran shraddha mh1, disha channel, darshan 24, sangam, sadhana and zee smile. aastha tv was not only the channel that initiated dedicated religious programming but was also the platform responsible for the rise of swami ramdev, touted today as india’s yoga guru and described by the new yorker as “an indian, who built yoga empire, a product and symbol of the new india, a yogic fusion of richard simmons, dr. oz and oprah winfrey, irrepressible and bursting with vedic wisdom”. (polgreen 2010) in my presentation, i hope to illustrate the above mentioned formulations of spatiality and mediation through religion and media objects that leaders like swami ramdev and television channels/online platforms like aastha tv actively engage in. i will also attempt to show how through linguistic signification, repurposed rituals and bodily performances, these actors stage religious and political discourses within rural, semiurban and urban audiences. dharam-karam is popular colloquial phrase in hindi denoting practices relating to dharma which in sanskrit means duty or religion and karma means actions. the colloquial phrase in this context refers to everything pertaining to the religious or spiritual. references bausinger, hermann. folk culture in a world of technology. bloomington: indiana university press, 1990. benjamin, walter. the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. penguin uk, 2008. meyer, birgit, ed. aesthetic formations: media, religion, and the senses. palgrave macmillan, 2009. moores, shaun. interpreting audiences: the ethnography of media consumption. vol. 8. sage, 1993. polgreen, lydia. "indian who built yoga empire works on politics." new york times . 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/world/asia/19swami.html?_r=0. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  marwick,  a.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  scandal  or  sex  crime?  ethical  implications   of  the  celebrity  nude  photo  leaks.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  conference  of  the   association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.   scandal  or  sex  crime?  ethical  implications  of  the   celebrity  nude  photo  leaks     alice  e.  marwick     data  &  society  research  institute     introduction     on  august  31,  2014,  a  large  archive  of  digital  images  of  (almost  entirely  female)   celebrities  were  posted  to  the  image-­sharing  website  4chan.  most  of  the  pictures  were   nude  or  scantily-­clad  selfies,  presumably  taken  with  iphones,  and  stolen  from  icloud,   apple’s  cloud  storage  product.  hackers  had  obtained  the  images  through  various   means,  including  phishing,  remote  access  tools,  password  resets,  and  social   engineering,  but  primarily  through  an  icloud  security  flaw  that  allowed  unlimited   password  guesses.  the  images  began  circulating  privately  on  darknet  image  bulletin   boards,  and  were  disseminated  into  the  mainstream  by  an  individual  who  described   himself  as  a  “collector,”  who  posted  them  on  4chan  in  exchange  for  bitcoin.  reddit   users  created  a  subreddit  called  “the  fappening”  (a  portmanteau  of  “the  happening”   and  “fap,”  an  internet  slang  term  for  masturbation)  to  post,  organize,  and  discuss  the   images.  within  days,  this  group  became  the  fastest-­growing  subreddit  of  all  time,  with   more  than  100,000  users  (massanari  2015).       fans  and  representatives  of  the  women  whose  photos  had  been  stolen,  including  actors   jennifer  lawrence,  gabrielle  union,  and  kirsten  dunst,  spoke  out  against  the  leak  and   asked  fans  not  to  share  or  look  at  the  photos.  the  users  of  the  fappening,  in  contrast,   were  beside  themselves  with  delight.  early  posts  on  the  fappening  included  hundreds   of  statements  like  ““this  is  the  best  day  of  my  life”  and  “this...this  is  just  beyond  our   wildest  dreams.”  reddit  administrators  quickly  warned  users  of  the  subreddit  that  it   would  take  down  any  links  that  included  leaked  images  of  us  gymnast  mckayla   maroney  or  actress  liz  lee,  who  were  both  under  18  at  the  time  their  photos  were   taken,  making  the  photos  legally  child  pornography.       a  week  later,  after  dmca1  requests  from  celebrity  lawyers  and  a  great  deal  of  bad   publicity,  reddit  deleted  the  subreddit  and  posted  a  public  blog  post  explaining  their   actions  (unknown  2014).  they  did  not  remove  the  fappening  due  to  ethical  issues,  or   concern  for  the  privacy  of  the  women  in  the  pictures.  the  fappening  community  was   1  digital  millennium  copyright  act   instead  removed  due  to  legal  pressure,  child  pornography  laws  and  dmca   complaints—in  other  words,  implications  that  might  hurt  reddit  the  company.  in  fact,   reddit  made  enough  money  from  the  fappening,  both  in  terms  of  pageviews  and   premium  accounts,  to  pay  for  its  server  costs  for  a  month  (greenberg  2014).     there  was  a  fevered  public  debate  over  the  ethics  of  not  only  leaking,  but  viewing  and   spreading  the  photos.  in  the  atlantic,  feminist  writer  jessica  valenti  argued  that  people   seeking  out  the  photos  were  violating  the  women’s  privacy  just  as  the  hackers  had   (valenti  2014).  jennifer  lawrence  herself  told  vanity  fair,  “it  is  not  a  scandal.  it  is  a  sex   crime.  it  is  a  sexual  violation…  it's  disgusting…just  because  i’m  a  public  figure,  just   because  i’m  an  actress,  does  not  mean  that  i  asked  for  this”  (kashner  2014).  the  ethics   of  “looking”  are  similar  to  the  public  discussion  around  the  beheading  video  of  james   foley,  a  journalist  captured  by  isis.  james  foley’s  cousin  stated,  "please  honor  james   foley  and  respect  my  family's  privacy.  don't  watch  the  video.  don't  share  it.  that's  not   how  life  should  be"  (parkinson  2014).       at  the  same  time,  celebrities  are  somewhat  of  a  unique  class  in  american  law,  as  they   have  fewer  privacy  rights  than  the  average  american.  in  a  2010  ruling,  california  district   judge  hall  patel  ruled  that  “[p]ersons  who  have  placed  themselves  in  the  public  light,   e.g.,  through  politics,  or  voluntarily  participate  in  the  public  arena  have  a  significantly   diminished  privacy  interest  than  others”  (rosenfeld  v  united  states  department  of   justice  2010).  but  revenge  porn  and  “leaking,”  or  more  accurately,  stealing,  private   nude  photos  of  non-­celebrities  is  increasingly  commonplace,  and  linked  to  misogynistic   internet  subcultures  (marcotte  2014).  what  does  this  event  tell  us  about  how  sexting,   celebrities,  and  “the  cloud”  are  viewed  in  popular  understandings  of  privacy?     method  and  framework     this  paper  analyzes  selections  from  a  mass  capture  of  94,602  text  comments  from   reddit.com/r/thefappening.  these  comments  are  augmented  by  a  discourse  analysis  of   popular  press  discussion,  primarily  from  afflicted  celebrities,  feminist  columnists,  and   journalists.       i  ask  two  questions:       rq1:  what  are  the  popular  ethical  understandings  of  the  celebrity  nude  photo  leaks?   rq2:  what  are  the  relevant  implications  of  celebrity  privacy  law?     this  paper  explores  the  ethical  implications  of  the  celebrity  nude  photo  leak.  it  is   grounded  in  the  emerging  feminist  literature  on  geek  masculinity,  gendered  harassment,   and  misogynist  subcultures  online  (citron  2014;;  chess  and  shaw  2015;;  nakamura   2012),  and  uses  critical  discourse  analysis  (fairclough  2003)  to  examine  how  redditors   framed  and  made  meaning  of  the  nude  photo  leaks.  i  analyze  us  legal  policy  around   celebrity  privacy  to  discuss  the  “need  to  know,  right  to  know,  want  to  know”  ethical   framework  that  has  been  used  to  justify  publicizing  private  information.  i  conclude  that   the  potential  for  attention  and  publicity  brought  about  by  the  material  affordances  of  the   modern  internet  creates  a  continuum  between  “celebrities”  and  “average  people.”  thus,   attitudes  towards  nude  photos  of  celebrities  may  mirror  public  attitudes  towards  stolen   photos  of  the  non-­famous  (e.g.  revenge  porn).       references     chess,  shira,  and  adrienne  shaw.  2015.  “a  conspiracy  of  fishes,  or,  how  we  learned   to  stop  worrying  about#  gamergate  and  embrace  hegemonic  masculinity.”   journal  of  broadcasting  &  electronic  media  59  (1):  208–20.   citron,  danielle.  2014.  hate  crimes  in  cyberspace.  cambridge,  ma:  harvard  university   press.     fairclough,  norman.  2003.  analysing  discourse:  textual  analysis  for  social  research.   new  york:  routledge.     greenberg,  andy.  2014.  “hacked  celeb  pics  made  reddit  enough  cash  to  run  its   servers  for  a  month.”  wired.  september  10.   http://www.wired.com/2014/09/celeb-­pics-­reddit-­gold/.     kashner,  sam.  2014.  “both  huntress  and  prey.”  vanity  fair,  october  20.   http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2014/10/jennifer-­lawrence-­photo-­hacking-­ privacy.     marcotte,  amanda.  2014.  “‘the  fappening’  and  revenge  porn  culture:  jennifer   lawrence  and  the  creepshot  epidemic.”  the  daily  beast.  september  3.   http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/03/the-­fappening-­and-­revenge-­ porn-­culture-­jennifer-­lawrence-­and-­the-­creepshot-­epidemic.html.     massanari,  adrienne.  2015.  “#gamergate  and  the  fappening:  how  reddit’s  algorithm,   governance,  and  culture  support  toxic  technocultures.”  new  media  &  society,   october,  1461444815608807.  doi:10.1177/1461444815608807.     nakamura,  lisa.  2012.  “queer  female  of  color:  the  highest  difficulty  setting  there  is?   gaming  rhetoric  as  gender  capital.”  ada:  a  journal  of  gender,  new  media,  and   technology  1  (1).  http://adanewmedia.org/2012/11/issue1-­nakamura/.     parkinson,  hannah  jane.  2014.  “james  foley:  how  social  media  is  fighting  back   against  isis  propaganda.”  the  guardian,  august  20,  sec.  technology.   http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/20/james-­foley-­how-­social-­ media-­is-­fighting-­back-­against-­isis-­propaganda.     unknown.  2014.  “every  man  is  responsible  for  his  own  soul.”  blog.reddit.  september   6.  http://www.redditblog.com/2014/09/every-­man-­is-­responsible-­for-­his-­own.html.     valenti,  jessica.  2014.  “what’s  wrong  with  checking  out  stolen  nude  photos  of   celebrities.”  the  atlantic,  september  1.   http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/09/leaked-­photos-­nude-­ celebrities-­abuse/379434/.     microsoft word larsson & halbert, reformatted ir16-template-final.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation: larsson, s. & halbert, d. (2015, october 21-24). dead, encrypted or streamed? american file sharing and the future of privacy. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. dead, encrypted or streamed? american file sharing and the future of piracy stefan larsson lund university debora halbert university of hawaii at manoa key questions how do american file sharers conceptualize and understand future landscapes of file sharing and media consumption? and, who are they, demographically? is bittorrent dead and is it all about streaming services now? to what extent is traceability relevant for american file sharers in terms of increased practices of privacy-enhancing technologies to counter legal enforcement? is there a snowden effect amongst this community? large-scale survey this paper inquires into the demographical characteristics, recent changes in frequencies as well as the privacy attitudes and practices of american file sharers in the social media saturated, post-snowden world. specifically, the paper focuses on those americans who engaged in file sharing using the popular bittorrent site, the pirate bay (tpb). in 2012 and again in 2014, tpb agreed to host a survey of its users for 72 hours. on the days in question, tpb users were directed to an on-line survey prior to entry to the website where they were asked to fill out a questionnaire. the questionnaire included questions about digital privacy and the measures taken by survey participants to engage in anonymous file sharing. in the 2012 survey there were over 96,000 respondents from all over the world, of which 18,483 stated that there were from usa, and in the 2014 survey there were over 140,000 respondents of which 29,981 stated that they were from usa. we compare tpb survey respondents in 2012 and 2014 to determine if any changes regarding demographics, file sharing frequencies and concern for privacy and the use of privacy software can be identified. the results indicate an american file sharing community of young men with an increasing privacy-awareness. the conclusions that can be drawn from the survey results have policy implications for how we ought to protect privacy in the future. given the global reach and focus of the internet and file sharing, the implications of this work is important not just within the u.s. context, but for the larger debate on the evolution of the internet. background numerous studies have stated the many conflicting aspects of copyright in a digital context (cf andersson schwarz, 2013; halbert, 2014; karaganis et al., 2012; lessig, 2008; svensson & larsson, 2012). for example, larsson (2014) has shown that there is a difference in how the american and the french file sharers understand and conceptualize the future of file-sharing and its relationship to copyright, and that the french file-sharers focus more on the actual artists while the american file-sharers focus more on the role of the industry and the government. that study indicated that copyright is not seen as ‘property’ by the respondents at all, that a majority of the us and french file-sharers would prefer to be more anonymous online in order to avoid legal enforcement, and that almost one out of five already uses such tools. privacy awareness to the degree americans are concerned about issues of privacy, research suggests they are primarily focused on information transfer, notice/awareness, and information storage (anton et al., 2010, p. 21). longitudinal studies suggest there has been a heightened sense of awareness about privacy on the part of individuals (anton et al., 2010, p. 22). even millennials, studies suggest, care about privacy and manage their privacy settings accordingly, in part because they are seeking to avoid the constant surveillance of their parents rather than the government or big business. however, despite the existence of privacy concerns amongst young people, research completed by the annenberg school’s digital future project suggests that millennials are more willing to exchange personal information in return for targeted advertising than other users (the center for the digital future, 2013). while the snowden revelations about government surveillance did have an impact on americans, by at least heightening their awareness of privacy concerns (acohido, 2013), it was not enough to change behavior. in a survey conducted in january 2014 by the pew research center, a majority felt that their privacy is being challenged along such core dimensions as the security of their personal information and their ability to retain confidentiality. the pew survey used a sample of 607 american adults, 18 years of age or older. although most are aware of government efforts to monitor communications, the awareness naturally differs. some 43% of adults have heard “a lot” about “the government collecting information about telephone calls, emails, and other online communications as part of efforts to monitor terrorist activity,” and another 44% have heard “a little.” interestingly enough, most respondents in the pew survey say they want to do more to protect their privacy, but many believe it is not possible to be anonymous online. when asked if they feel as though their own efforts to protect the privacy of their personal information online are sufficient, 61% say they feel they “would like to do more”, which is in line with studies on the global file sharing community where slightly over 50 % wish to be more anonymous online (svensson et al., 2016; larsson et al., 2012). our study indicates a similar expressed wish for more anonymity amongst american file sharers as well as a significant increase in the use of paid privacy enhancing encryption tools from 2012 to 2014. keywords: filesharing, piracy, tpb, research bay, privacy, surveillance, vpn. references andersson schwarz, j. (2013) online file sharing. innovations in media consumption. new york and london: routledge. acohido, b. (2013) snowden effect: young people now care about privacy, usa today. anton, a.i., j.b. earp & j.d. (2010) young, how internet users’ privacy concerns have evolved since 2002, 8 ieee security privacy 21–27, 24. boyd, d. & hargittai, e. (2010) facebook privacy settings: who cares? 15 first monday. the center for the digital future (2013) is online privacy over? findings from the usc annenberg center for the digital future show millennials embrace a new online reality. usc annenberg news. halbert, d. (2014) the state of copyright – the complex relationships of cultural creation in a globalized world. routledge. karaganis, j., grassmuck, v. and renkema, l. (2012) copy culture in the us and germany. new york: columbia university, the american assembly. larsson, s. (2014) conceptions of copyright in a digital context. a comparison between french and american file-sharers, lexis – e-journal in english lexicology. larsson, s., svensson, m., de kaminski, m., rönkkö, k. and alkan olsson, j. (2012) law, norms, piracy and online anonymity – practices of deidentification in the global file sharing community, journal of research in interactive marketing 6(4): 260-280. the pew research center (2014) public perceptions of privacy and security in the post-snowden era. stanley, j. (2013) do young people care about privacy? american civil liberties union. svensson, m., and larsson, s. (2012) intellectual property law compliance in europe: illegal file sharing and the role of social norms, new media & society, 14(7): 1147 1163. svensson, m., larsson, s. and de kaminski, m. (2016) “the research bay – studying the global file sharing community”, in gallagher and halbert, eds. intellectual property in context: law and society perspectives on ip. cambridge university press. the internet has enabled new forms of sharing and collaboration which arguably have been pioneered by early open source communities (coleman 2013). the availability and modifiability of the underlying technologies and infrastructures combined with the technological affordances of the internet has allowed open source advocates to use technology as a form of expression: they not only act available technology, but it by creating technical infrastructures that express ideas and concepts about “ how economy and society should be ordered collectively” (kelty, 2008, p. 28). kelty (2008) described open source as an experimental system made up of five key practices: sharing source code, defining openness, writing copyright licenses, coordinating collaborations, and forming a movement. these practices can be adopted and appropriated by actors in almost every area of social life, from encyclopedic knowledge to activism (beyer, 2014) or creativity online while there have been critical voices for some time, these practices have been regularly seen by the broader public, as well as by academia, as promoting democratic values like participation and knowledge empowerment in the digital mediascape. much less attention has been paid to the broader consequences of this “reorientation of knowledge and power” (kelty, 2008, p. 7), i.e. to the actual social structures expressed and promoted through such practices. tkacz (2012) has shown that promoting openness and transparency introduces new forms of closure which are often overlooked. drawing from stuart hall (1997, p. 230), we suggest that what is at stake in these developments is not a dual choice between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ forms of social organization, but a morecomplex transition between different modes of regulation and valuations of technologieswhich need to be examined carefully. this panel brings together early career scholars that aim to shed light on how different actors in different domains of social life are acting through technology and what valuesand forms of social organization they promote through such practices. the first paper (a) will explore the social structures among producers who are radically committed to openness through sharing technology and content online. it foregrounds that in these practices, openness and sharing are not only about creating open knowledge, public digital culture and technologies, but also trigger practices of self control, discipline, and contestation over what is to be made public and how. the author argues that the ways in which these are negotiated have implications for the broader domain of cultural production online. the next two papers each look at the social structures through open source practices by exploring how actors acting through technology:the proliferation of open source practices and its consequences suggested citation (apa): baack,s., velkova, j., kubitschko,s., ferrer, r., & handler, r.. (2016, october 5-8). acting through technology:the proliferation of open source practices and its consequences. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. committed to them are trying to the second paper (b) explores hacking as a politically motivated practice by showing how one of the world’s largest hacker organizations – the thematizes, problematizes and ultimately politicizes technology. it demonstrates that by acting on the structural features of contemporary political constellations, the ccc is able to bring its political endeavor of politicizing technology to life. the third paper (c) explores the relatively new phenomenon of civic tech, which is about developing tools to solve civic problems by improving government services or by empowering citizens. it shows that civic tech applications do not merely describe, but aim to shape the relationship between citizens in their governments in particular ways through structures encoded in the data they utilize and collect. the final paper (d) introduces another perspective by exploring how established institutions are practices and values from open source cultures, thereby it analyzes an investigative journalism story run by that combined open data, crowdsourcing and game mechanics with the purpose of engaging readers. the case shows how news organizations are acting through technology to shift media agency by inviting the readers to take an active role in the investigation, and how such practicescan reconfigure civic engagement. as acting through technology becomes more widespread, this panel emphasizes the importance of empirical and cross disciplinary research by showing how similar practices and values from open source cultures can be used to support different modesof regulations in different areas of social life. beyer, j. l. (2014). the emergence of a freedom of information movement: anonymous, wikileaks, the pirate party, and iceland. coleman, g. (2013). coding freedom: hall, s. (1997). the centrality of culture: notes on the cultural revolutions of our time. in k. a. thompson (ed.), (1 edition, pp. 207–238). sage publications ltd. kelty, c. m. (2008). durham: duke university press. tkacz, n. (2012). from open source to open government: a critique of open politics. julia velkova rnderts university sharing and openness are two fundamental values that underpin the internet, and are constantly under a dynamic contestation. since the days of the early internet, different groups have worked for making public different aspects of computer culture. hackers and free software developers, for example, have ever since been committed to making software code and internet infrastructures public (coleman, 2013). proponents of free culture have emphasized the need and importance of making public digital creative work, and circulate it online as commons. many of the online platforms today also encourage sharing as a way to make profits, and as a way to foster network sociality and online self expression. as such, internet cultures are formed largely around different politics of visibility. while much attention has been paid on the broader implications of different configurations of visibility online, there are less empirical studies about the ways in which visibility configures the actions of those practicing it. how is it experienced internally by those who share their code or creativity online, and what remains out of sight and is never being shared? this paper explores these questions through a focus on the social structures expressedand created within media production practices that are radically committed to openness through sharing technology and media content as commons online. it also addresses the ambiguities and affective sensibilities that emerge internally within these practices.while not denying the positive role that such practices can have for creating a pluralistand more democratic mediascape, the paper aims to add a critical perspective onsharing and illuminate the complexities and inner tensions that emerge from a radicalcommitment to visibility and publicness online. openness and transparency are frequently promoted in practices of good governance, and have historically been part of a broader ideological project for public access to knowledge that would allow individuals to gain more autonomy, and build a fairersociety (birchall, 2011 hood, 2006). yet, practices of visibility simultaneously produceand reconfigure power relations in manifold and subtle ways (flyverbom, christensen, & hansen, 2015). they play a subtle control function, one that creates practices of self regularizing behavior, and monitoring. transparency can therefore activate different configurations of control, power, empowerment and disempowerment. using these ambiguities as a theoretical vantage point, the paper discusses two cases of open film production which were studied through multi sited ethnography and qualitative interviews in the period between 2013 2015. the cases are presented and compared with each other in order to delineate similarities and differences of the subtle effects that visibility has inwardly. the first case is the production of the 3d animation film cosmos laundromat (2015, netherlands), which extensively used youtube as a channel to disclose the film making process to the public. each friday during the production year that lasted between 2014 and 2015, the team of animators, script writers, programmers, directors and producers, disclosed their work on the film in a public livecast streamed and recorded on youtube. in these public reports, oriented towards an internet audience, each of the team members would communicate what they have been working on during the last week, show concept art being drawn, report changes in the script, and discuss pieces of software code in progress that would make the artistic visions of the film possible. the video recordings, and the media artifacts presented in these reports, such as software, computer graphics, and texts were subsequently swiftly organized and put online as commons in a cloud service that grew into a substantial digital archive of the production process. the second case is the 2d project morevna (2016, russia). similarly disclosing the media, technology, process and organization of work, the project has been using the blog format in order to post production progress summaries on a weekly basis. each post would similarly feature also graphics, technology and sometimes music in progress, shared online by the producer. both cases revealed that, at an individual level, sharing pieces of software or works of art in progress would usually create strong senses of emancipation among the team members. sharing allowed artists and programmers to expose a lot of work which in more conventional production frameworks would have remained hidden (velkova, 2015). thus, sharing was perceived as helpful in order to establish reputations online, and as such, foster systems of meritocracy. yet, at the same time, sharing and reporting work in progress created continuous pressures and obligations to actually have something to share, to present, to report and to admit progress on a weekly basis. this pressure established a rhythm, structure and pace for the film productions, which from the outside seemed rather spontaneous and unstructured. it also created peer pressure among the teams, to produce and share as much as everyone else, or else have an explanation for why little was shared. as a consequence, sharing resulted in individual strategies to internalize control and developa self regularizing behavior. for example, one artist admitted: ' ' putting work in progressonline is not really an issue for me. my artworks are often little stand alone finishedpiece in themselves i never posted a half painted picture' ' . such strategies implied redefining the meaning of what counts as a work in progress to be shared, and ofworking more intensively in order to match the productivity of other, more successful insharing peers. the study shows that the inward control mechanisms triggered by sharing ultimatelyhad positive benefits, resulting in raising the quality of the films being made. surprisingly though, most of the team members of both films were rather unaware of the dependency created between sharing control productivity and quality. there was also very little discussion internally on what has remained out of the sight of the internet public. continuous internal conflicts among the team members, and the ways in which they have been resolved changes in the teams as well as the notable hardware infrastructures that had to be accumulated in order to enable the creation of these animation films remained continuously excluded from disclosure. some of these aspects were obscured deliberately, and justified as necessary to allow the projects to progress, yet others remained hidden unintentionally. yet, revealing them could help to make open media at scale, as it would have helped the broader internet community interested in making commons to gain knowledge about how to manage difficulties in larger projects based on sharing and commons as well as on the necessary initial assets. without sharing these difficulties, sharing might become an instrument in a struggle for power and recognition among an elitist community. birchall, c. (2011). introduction to ‘secrecy and transparency’: the politics of opacityand openness. coleman, g. (2013). princeton university press: princeton flyverbom, m., christensen, l. t., & hansen, h. k. (2015). the transparency power nexus: observational and regularizing control. hood, c. (2006). transparency in historical perspective. in c. hood & d. heald (eds.), (pp. 3–24). oxford new york: oxford university press. velkova, j. (2015). the infrastructure, invisible work, and pragmatism of open source animation production. retrieved 24 february 2016, from https://gooseberry.blender.org/the infrastructure invisible work and pragmatism o f open source animation production/ sebastian kubitschko university of bremen the focus of a large number of recent studies has been on the role media technologies and infrastructures (mti) play for political actors of varying kinds in coordinating collective action, mobilizing large scale protest and distributing their claims amongst global audiences and publics (see, for example, earl & kimport 2011 cammaerts et al. 2013 kavada 2015). for all their useful qualities such frameworks have for analyzing the role media play for bringing actors’ political projects into being, their focus remains on what actors do to put it broadly, what is at the center of most studies on the interconnection between media and politics is either the it seems no longer overstated to say that almost any form of political engagement today relates in one way or another to mti. along with this development, media technologies and infrastructures are increasingly sites of an active political struggle in their own right. in particular over the past years, one could notice a pluralization and diffusion of actors who go beyond the “interface level” by engaging with media technologies and infrastructures in more profound ways (see postill 2014). a telling example that i want to discuss in this paper is the global spread of hacker cultures. as coleman has argued: ‘ the politically engaged geek family continues to grow – in size and politicalsignificance’ (coleman 2014, 382). hackers tinker with, deconstruct and rearrangeexisting technology they support, build and maintain new infrastructures and, by doingso, they challenge common conceptions of what is understood as political engagement. examples of hacker initiatives range from infamous collectives like to less known grassroots efforts like these examples do, of course, vary strongly from each other concerning their political ambitions, ideology andhistories. what connects these initiatives is that each of them brings together peoplewho consider mti as ‘a site of intervention in itself’ (lievrouw 2011, 102). members of these initiatives do a lot of stuff but their primary objective is to hackers, in other words, often introduce an element of politics into theapparently innocuous deployment, application and use of mti. at the same time,empirical findings from research on hacking as a politically motivated practice are still scarce and little is known about the ways hackers bring their political projects into being.hence, there is need for more in depth research on actors who ‘ throw themselvesactively into a process of political becoming’ (coleman 2014: 396) by acting on mti. to deepen our understandings on the entanglements of hacker cultures and politics, this paper presents findings from qualitative research (face to face interviews, participant observations and a media analysis) on europe’s oldest and one of the world’s largest hacker organizations – the considering the case of the ccc one can note that their practices go far beyond the use of individual tools or particular platforms. club members invest high hopes in the emancipatory force of technology ( derbergs 2013), but at the same time they problematize the risks that the technological pervasion of almost any domain in society involves. in strong contrast to the majority of users who interact with technology predominantly via predefined pathways, club members are actively involved in shaping the features and values of the technologies they use. the ccc’s prime point of politicalengagement is to mti by thematizing, problematizing and politicizing “technological” developments. acting on mti manifests itself not only in form of directengagement with technical devices and systems, but also occurs through interactingwith different actors, through articulating viewpoints, through sharing knowledge andexperiences in different circumstances. to concretize this approach this paper will discuss the club’s engagement related to governmental surveillance strategies andpractices in more detail. carving out (formerly unrecognized) political qualities of particular technologies relies not solely on hacking – understood as critical, creative, reflective, and subversive use of technology that allows creating new meanings. more concretely, the ccc combines a variety of practices related to and oriented towards mti. on the one hand, the club is “ deconstructing” existing technology (e.g. reverse engineering governmentalsurveillance software like the federal trojan in germany) as well as building,maintaining and supporting privacy enhancing technology and alternativecommunication infrastructures (e.g. tor servers). on the other hand, club membersarticulate their expertise related to contemporary mti to a wide range of audiences,publics and actors in form of consulting (e.g. policy advice), by writing expert reports (e.g. for the german constitutional court) and through self mediation as well as interacting with mainstream media outlets. based on these practices the ccc createsawareness, reveals alternative courses of action and, ultimately, contemporarysurveillance assemblages. by doing so, members of the ccc are actors who, as purcell puts it in the context of the urban public realm, ‘continually refuse heteronomy and passivity’ and ‘continually ceasebeing the political spectator and continually become the political actor’ (purcell 2013,314). taken together, this paper conceptualizes the club as a hacker organization thatbrings its political endeavor of politicizing technology to life through froma more analytical perspective, including the dimension of “acting on ” opens up newperspectives on social transformations in general and political engagement in particularas it allows us to conceptualize media technologies and infrastructures not just as a setof tools for doing politics but as a fundamental part of what politics is about nowadays.as we experience the omnipresence and banalization of computing, it is valuable tonote that ‘politics are easily buried in technical encodings’ (bowker et al. 2010, 98).contemporary developments are an opportunity for scholars to bring to the foreground the entanglement of “traditional” forms of political engagement and the different facetsof “emerging” forms of doing politics. looking beyond what actors and including how and why they scrutinizes the role of actors’ practices incontemporary media environments as it accentuates mti as manufacturable andshapeable. acting “on” denotes the efforts of a wide range of actors belonging to ifferent fields to take an active part in the molding of the media technologies and infrastructures that have become part of the fabric of everyday life. bowker, g., et al. (2010) toward information infrastructure studies. in: j. hunsinger, l. klastrup & m. allen (eds.) (pp.97 –118). new york: springer. cammaerts, b., mattoni, a. and mccurdy, p. (eds.) (2013) bristol: intellect. coleman, g. (2014) london: verso. earl, j. and kimport, k. (2011) cambridge: mit. kavada a (2015) creating the collective: social media, the occupy movement and its constitution as a collective actor. 18(8), 872–886. lievrouw, l. (2011) cambridge: polity. postill, j. (2014) freedom technologists and the new protest movements: a theory of protest formulas. 20(4): 402–418. derbergs , j. (2013) determining social change: the role of technological determinism in the collective action framing of hackers. stefan baack university of groningen ‘civic tech’ describes applications that aim to solve civic problems by improving government services or by empowering citizens. examples are parliamentarymonitoring websites, tools that help citizens to report issues to local governments, or that show them how and where to engage in local building projects. the origins of civic tech can be found in the early 2000s, when small volunteer groups of technologist in theus and the uk developed experimental software in their spare time. early examples are the british (2003), which helped citizens to find and contact their representatives in uk parliaments (townend 2008), or whichmade information provided by the us congress more accessible (yu and robinson2012, 192 ). from these early volunteer experiments, the civic tech sector has grownsubstantially in recent years as it has been embraced by governments and foundations in the us and europe (baraniuk 2013). the ‘us national day of civic hacking’, for this growing prominence raises questions about the larger cultural influence of civic tech. however, most of the sparse research literature on the subject has been conducted by civic tech organizations and their funders, who are primarily concerned with the ‘direct’ impact or usage of individual civic tech applications (cf. escher 2011). while this shows that these applications do have some effect, we also need to ask broader questions: how can civic tech affect the distribution of knowledge and power in society? would this change be unambiguously positive? to be able to tackle these questions, we need a better understanding of what civic tech applications are his paper addresses these questions and presents findings from a qualitative case study (interviews and content influential civic tech organizations that pioneered many civic tech applications which are now considered standard, with customized versions of its tools being used in 44 different countries (mysociety 2015). some of more influential projects include which helps citizens to submit freedom of information requests to public institutions and a parliamentary monitoring website that works by scraping information provided by the british parliaments online in order to serve it in a more accessible way. the basic idea behind applications like is to empower citizens by making it easier for them exert their rights and to use public services. people are empowered, so the idea, by enabling them to make use of preexisting rights and services more easily. accordingly, most projects can be interpreted as attempts to ‘ translate’ the bureaucratic and legal procedures followed by governments into user friendly interfaces and accessible language for citizens. for example, was designed to solve two problems: first, citizens often do not know who is responsible for fixing an issue and second, the reporting itself was deemed difficult because the websites provided by local councils were not user friendly. to turn reporting issues to local authorities from something that presumably requires time and effort into something people would be able to do along the way, uses maps and data about administrative boundaries to identify which council is responsible for an area. as a result, users of essentially just have to click on a map to locate the issue, give a short description and send the report, which will then be forwarded to the responsible council. this example illustrates that civic tech at the ‘scale’ civic tech aims to reduce is the amount of time and effort people have to invest in doing various things in civic life to make engagement “simple and unremarkable” (mysociety homepage). practices around structured data are essential for reducing scale in this sense because it depends on the ability to filter, combine and create information about governments. structured data, in other words, is a key mediator in civic tech and practices around structured data of central importance. not only does civic tech depend on the affordances of structured data, i.e. on the ability to reorganize information through granular filtering, but on data, on developing a structure to organize information and on putting data into that structure. this is not a neutral or objective process, but an editorial one that requires careful negotiation between the structure of the data and the real world processes this structure is supposed to represent. james scott (1998) has demonstrated that techniques to categorize and measure social realities do not merely describe, but shape society. in this sense, the data structures created and utilized by civic tech applications are not just technical or static, but social and performative as they attempt to change the relationship between citizens and their governments. i will show how mysociety rationalizes and utilizes structured data and offer some reflections on the implications for civic engagement. this paper provides a useful starting point to further explore and compare civic tech communities around the world by focusing on one of the oldest and most influential civic tech organizations. moreover, it illustrates how acting through technology should not only be understood in terms of programming: the data structures underlying civic tech applications do not just express ideas about social order, they should be regarded as attempts to actively shape society. raul ferrer karlstad university reinhard handler karlstad university one of the most celebrated characteristics of the internet is that it holds incredibly large amounts of data. it is also one of the most problematic characteristics of the internet. there is an overabundance of data generated on social networking sites, user comments on media outlets, review platforms, and governmental data sources that is shaping the production and sense making of knowledge based on the gears of correlation rather than those of explanation (andrejevic 2013, 17). yet there are still few models for the average citizen to easily explore data sets, analyze information, run model based algorithms, share information, and collaborate on projects that aim to enhance civic participation. we suggest that computer supported collaborative practices such as crowdsourcing, which were developed by or derived from open source cultures and adapt one of the founding internet rules of free information exchange, provide a useful starting point to develop new forms of civic participation. crowdsourcing pools together the efforts of various groups of people so that information regarding a particular topic can be put into order (howe 2006). successful crowdsourcing projects have been completed in various fields ( sestell and lezgonz 2012 gauvin 2015 ) and have been both greeted euphorically because of their assumed democratic potential of sharing ideas, knowledge and skills in a transparent way (benkler 2011 shirky 2010), and with criticism for its potential to exploit intellectual labor and innovative creations for little or no reward (busarovs 2013 cabiddu et al. 2012). the aim of this paper is to shed light on the dynamics of civic participation, media agency, and data practices. we analyze an investigative journalism story run by as a case study that combined open data, crowdsourcing and game mechanics with the purpose of engaging readers. in 2009, the british newspaper received almost two million documents containing information about uk members of parliament’s (mps) expenses. following traditional journalistic practice, assigned documents to the reporters with the aim of revealing as much information as possible. while this led to several stories that would trigger a major political scandal anchored in the uk’s parliamentary expenses and the misuse of allowances by the mps, most of the data was not examined due to time constraints. a month later, the rival newspaper the documents and decided to test a new approach, following procedures of by opening the files to thepublic invited the public to join an alternative investigative journalism crowdsourcing campaign, in which readers were asked to sieve through the large set of leaked documents (gnm press office 2009). to do so, microsite and app for mobile phones making about 450,000 documents openly accessible for their readers with a simple interface to guide them. after reading a document, each user had the possibility to flag documents as “not interesting”, “ interesting but known”, “interesting”, and “investigate this!”. additionally, the interface built by data team contained a progress bar and a leaderboard, which are basic game elements. the progress bar showed how many of the available documents have been reviewed and the leaderboard displayed a ranking of readers based on the number of documents they examined. this accelerated the analysis tremendously. the crowdsourcing campaign managed to attract 20,000 readers to review 170,000 documents in the first 80 hours, involving the users in a joint investigative journalism initiative with a 56% visitor participation rate.this success was achieved by a small group of developers and almost zero cost on infrastructure. but the success was not measured only by the stories discovered by the users or the speed in which they combed the data, but the high capacity of to mobilize users to participate. this is interesting for several reasons. first of all, instead of an activist hacker organization, it is an established mainstream news organization who adopted practices from open source cultures by sharing and collaborating openly with the public in a joint alternative investigation geared to question the political establishment. in a time when datafication raises concerns about technology taking over decision making processes, data initiative showsthat such practices can be used to enhance civic participation, allowing people to interact with the data. secondly, opting for a crowdsourcing approach, technology by creating tools to engage readers in the investigation. thesystem primed the readers to help analyzing a large data set, thereby shifting the poweron who decides what was being reported. and third, the interface incorporated game like elements like a leaderboard and a progress bar to further motivate readers to participate in the system. initiative shows how established news organizations can act through technology to foster civic participation by employing game mechanics and adopting practices from open source cultures by making data accessible to people who usually do not have access to it. this highlights the need for expanding the notion of data as an assemblage of monitoring technologies that collect information which is stored in silos, analyzed by algorithms and represented via digital interfaces. crowdsourcing, as introduced by highlights how certain problematic aspects of datafication can be addressed by acting through technology in ways that support civic participation. the combination of an interface with game elements resulted in a successful model for civic participation which both expanded and maintained contemporary structures of knowledge production. on the one hand, by inviting the readers to take part in the investigation, the journalists at partly granted agency to the public, effectively involving readers in the investigation. on the other hand, being the one who created the technology for users to interact with, maintained its role as a gatekeeper and ultimately decided what would be published. the unique blend of data, crowdsourcing and game mechanics resulted in an innovative form of collaboration that added new elements to civic participation. andrejevic, m. (2013). new york: routledge. benkler, y. (2011). new york: crown business. busarovs, a. (2013). ethical aspects of crowdsourcing, or is it a modern form of exploitation. 1(1), 3 14. cabiddu, f. et al. (2012). combining exploitation and exploration through crowdsourcing: the case of starbucks. in m. de marco, d. te' eni, v. albano, &s. za (eds.), (pp. 359 366). heidelberg: physica verlag hd. sestell arolas, e. and lezgonz nladr de guevara, f. (2012). towards an integrated crowdsourcing definition. 38(2), 189 200. gauvin, j f. (2015). when museums of science create citizen expertise: participatory science and the gamification of techne. gnm press office. (2009, june 23). mps' expenses: the guardian launches majorcrowdsourcing experiment. retrieved february 1, 2016, from http://www.theguardian.com/gnm press office/crowdsourcing mps expenses. howe, j. (2006). the rise of crowdsourcing. shirky, c. (2010). new york: penguin press. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  jordan,  k.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  digital  scholarship  and  the  social  networking   site:  how  academics  conceptualise  their  networks  on  academic  social  networking  sites  and  twitter.  paper   presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  meeting  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,   germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.   digital  scholarship  and  the  social  networking  site:  how   academics  conceptualise  their  networks  on  academic   social  networking  sites  and  twitter   katy  jordan   institute  of  educational  technology,  the  open  university,  uk     background     academic  social  networking  sites  (sns)  seek  to  bring  the  benefits  of  online  networking   to  an  explicitly  academic  audience.  currently,  the  two  most  popular  sites  are   academia.edu  and  researchgate  (van  noorden,  2014).  the  ability  to  make   connections  to  others  is  a  defining  affordance  of  sns  (ellison  &  boyd,  2013);;  but  what   are  the  characteristics  of  the  network  structures  being  facilitated  by  academic  sns,  and   how  does  this  relate  to  their  professional  use  by  academics?  while  the  network   structure  is  a  fundamental  characteristic  of  the  platforms,  it  will  have  implications  for  the   types  of  interactions  the  platforms  support.     an  earlier  phase  of  the  project  examined  the  structure  of  academics’  ego-­networks  on   academic  sns  and  twitter.  academic  sns  networks  were  smaller  and  more  highly   clustered;;  twitter  networks  were  larger  and  more  diffuse  (jordan,  forthcoming).  trends   in  network  structure  were  identified  according  to  job  position  and  discipline.  however,   there  is  a  limit  to  the  level  of  inference  that  can  be  made  from  network  structures  alone.   to  gain  insight  and  understanding  into  the  reasons  why  the  trends  in  network  structure   came  to  be,  and  the  role  that  the  networks  play  in  individuals’  academic  practice,  co-­ interpretive  interviews  were  held  with  a  sample  of  participants.  this  paper  will  outline   the  results  of  the  interviews.         method     this  study  has  used  a  mixed  methods  social  network  analysis  approach  (dominguez  &   hollstein,  2014).  co-­interpretive  interviews  were  held  with  18  participants,  sampled  from   a  pool  of  55  academics  involved  in  the  preceding  network  analysis  phase  (jordan,   2016).  the  sample  was  created  using  a  purposive  sampling  approach,  stratified  to   include  participants  across  four  job  positions  and  three  disciplinary  areas.  for  each   participant,  two  ego-­networks  were  collected,  from  contrasting  platforms;;  either   academia.edu  or  researchgate.net  (as  an  academic  sns,  depending  on  which  site   they  primarily  use),  and  twitter.  the  networks  were  visualized  and  analysed  using   gephi;;  interactive  versions  of  the  networks  were  created  with  the  sigma.js  plugin  and   shared  with  participants.  interviews  took  place  via  skype  with  interactive  versions  of   their  networks  via  screen  sharing,  to  gain  insight  into  the  meaning  of  the  network   structures  and  how  they  were  created  from  the  participants’  point-­of-­view  (molina,   maya-­jariego  &  mccarty,  2014).  the  interview  data  were  analysed  in  two  ways.  first,  to   annotate  the  network  structures  in  order  to  understand  the  participants’  relationships   with  communities  and  connections  in  the  networks;;  and  second,  qualitative  analysis   (using  a  grounded  theory  approach;;  strauss  &  corbin,  1998)  identified  themes  in  the   discussions  about  why  the  structures  were  perceived  to  have  developed  in  the  ways   observed.         results  and  discussion     annotating  the  networks  revealed  that  in  academics’  ego-­networks,  communities  are   more  frequently  defined  by  institutions  and  research  interests  on  academic  sns,   compared  to  research  interests  and  personal  interests  on  twitter  (figure  1).       figure  1:  frequency  of  different  types  of  community  on  each  platform.     network  analysis  showed  that  the  structure  of  academics’  ego-­networks  differs   according  to  platform  (jordan,  forthcoming);;  discussing  the  structures  with  participants   uncovered  reasons  behind  the  structural  differences.  networks  on  academic  sns  are   built  primarily  on  the  basis  of  replicating  existing  professional  connections,  being   defined  by  pre-­existing  affiliations  with  institutions  and  research  groups.  twitter  both   reinforces  existing  professional  relationships,  through  a  mix  of  professional  and   personal  interactions,  and  also  fosters  novel  connections.  this  confirms  that  both   bridging  and  bonding  social  capital  are  fostered  by  twitter  networks,  as  the  structure   suggested  (jordan,  2016).  the  finding  that  academic  sns  largely  replicate  existing   0 10 20 30 40 50 institution  or   institution  plus   topic topic personal   interests fr eq ue nc y types  of  community academic  sns twitter working  relationships  resonates  with  conceptualisations  of  self  through  sns  as  ‘public   displays  of  connection’  (donath  &  boyd,  2004)  or  ‘relational  self-­portraits’  (hogan  &   wellman,  2014).  in  contrast  to  these  concepts,  the  interviews  place  strong  emphasis  on   existing  relationships  as  connections  rather  than  imagining  a  future  academic  self.       participants  accounted  for  structural  differences  in  their  ego-­nets  through  differences  in   how  they  conceptualise  the  roles  of  different  platforms  in  relation  to  their  professional   life.  academic  sns  are  regarded  as  a  more  formal  academic  identity,  akin  to  a  business   card,  or  as  a  personal  repository.  twitter  is  viewed  as  a  space  where  personal  and   professional  are  mixed,  similar  to  a  conference  coffee  break.  expectations  of   authenticity  and  negotiating  the  balance  between  mixing  and  dividing  the  personal  and   private  on  twitter  reflect  concepts  of  ‘context  collapse’  and  ‘microcelebrity’  (boyd,  2011;;   marwick,  2010).  in  the  context  of  twitter,  the  interviews  showed  that  the  academics  in   this  study  are  aware  of  these  issues,  and  have  developed  strategies  for  negotiating   them.  it  is  also  notable  that  these  issues  were  absent  from  discussions  on  academic   sns.     furthermore,  a  number  of  ways  in  which  interacting  with  sns  modulates  the  role  of   academics  in  relation  to  the  formal  institution  were  identified.  these  included:   circumventing  institutional  constraints;;  extending  academic  space;;  finding  a  niche;;   promotion  and  impact;;  and  academic  freedom.  different  pressures  are  active  at  different   career  stages,  although  differences  according  to  discipline  were  not  as  pronounced.   the  lack  of  clear  divisions  along  disciplinary  lines  may  support  the  idea  that  digital   scholarly  practices  represent  a  new  academic  paradigm  and  open  practitioners  have   more  in  common  with  each  other  than  their  ‘home’  discipline  (weller,  2014).       the  findings  provide  insight  into  the  nuanced  relationship  between  one  professional   setting  –  academia  –  and  sns.  by  considering  two  of  the  main  types  of  platform,  the   differences  between  them  are  thrown  into  sharp  contrast.  exploring  the  different  roles   that  seemingly  quite  similar  sites  can  play  is  useful  for  academics  who  do  not  currently   use  sites  in  their  academic  practice.  the  contrasts  between  academic  sns  and  twitter   also  question  the  utility  of  studies  addressing  academics’  use  of  social  media  as  a   homogenous  whole,  when  individual  tools  can  have  different  roles  and  social  norms.       references     boyd,  d.  (2011)  social  network  sites  as  networked  publics.  in:  papacharissi,  z.  (ed.)  a   networked  self:  identity,  community,  and  culture  on  social  network  sites.  abingdon:   routledge,  39-­58.     donath,  j.  &  boyd,  d.  (2004)  public  displays  of  connection.  bt  technology  journal   22(4),  71-­82.     ellison,    n.    b.    &    boyd,    d.    (2013)    sociality    through    social    network    sites.    in     dutton,    w.h.    (ed.),    the    oxford    handbook    of    internet    studies.    oxford:    oxford     university    press,  151‐172.     dominguez,  s.  &  hollstein,  b.  (2014)  mixed  methods  social  networks  research:  design   and  applications.  cambridge:  cambridge  university  press.     hogan,  b.  &  wellman,  b.  (2014)  the  relational  self-­portrait:  selfies  meet  social   networks.  in:  m.  graham  &  w.h.  dutton  (eds.)  society  &  the  internet:  how  networks  of   information  and  communication  are  changing  our  lives.  oxford:  oxford  university  press,   53-­66.     jordan,  k.  (2016)  academics’  online  connections:  characterising  the  structure  of   personal  networks  on  academic  social  networking  sites  and  twitter.  in:  s.  cranmer,   n.b.  dohn,  m.  de  laat,  t.  ryberg,  &  j.a.  sime  (eds.)  proceedings  of  the  tenth   international  conference  on  networked  learning  2016,  414–421.     molina,  j.l.,  maya-­jariego,  i.,  &  mccarty,  c.  (2014)  giving  meaning  to  social  networks:   methodology  for  conducting  and  analyzing  interviews  based  on  personal  network   visualisations.  in:  dominguez,  s.  &  hollstein,  b.  (eds.)  mixed  methods  social  networks   research:  design  and  applications.  cambridge:  cambridge  university  press,  305-­335.     strauss,  a.l.  &  corbin,  j.  (1998)  basics  of  qualitative  research:  techniques  and   procedures  for  developing  grounded  theory.  london:  sage.     van  noorden,  r.  (2014)  online  collaboration:  scientists  and  the  social  network.  nature   512(7513).     weller,  m.  (2014)  the  battle  for  open:  how  openness  won  and  why  it  doesn’t  feel  like   victory.  london:  ubiquity  press.     1 taxation of virtual world economies: an empirical review dr. jamie s. switzer colorado state university united states of america jamie.switzer@colostate.edu dr. ralph v. switzer jr., j.d., c.p.a. colorado state university united states of america ralph.switzer@colostate.edu abstract experts are divided as to the feasibility of taxation of virtual economies. we argue that virtual transactions are already subject to taxation under current u.s. law as well as possibly the tax laws of other countries, whether taking place in game worlds or unscripted worlds. this would include virtual-to-virtual transactions as well as virtual-to-real transactions, at any point in time that the u.s. internal revenue service (irs) should decide to enforce the current law. there is no need for new legislation amending the current u.s. tax code in order for the irs to begin enforcement; in fact, given the strategic approach employed in the current u.s. tax code, amendments relating specifically to virtual transactions might actually weaken the application of the law as now written. this is because the strategic approach within the tax code is that taxation of income is an ‘all inclusive net’ unless that type of income is specifically exempted. this strategy eliminates the difficulty inherent in trying to identify all methods of commerce capable of generating income, now or in the future. as more and more people buy and sell virtual goods and services in exchange for real currency, the issue of income earned in virtual worlds will only become more critical. one possible consequence of taxation would be for virtual worlds to move to a peer-to-peer network or another country to avoid detection and identification by a government. another, more likely, scenario would be that the tremendous growth of virtual worlds would be severely impeded, depriving internet scholars of a rich and vast ‘database’ for studying how people communicate and interact in such an environment. keywords real money trading; tax code; virtual world transactions; virtual worlds 2 the taxation of virtual world economies is uncharted terrain, one that both researchers and government officials are just beginning to scrutinize. as the old saying goes, taxes are inevitable in the 'real world', but what about the increasingly lucrative virtual world economies? with a 2009 estimated annual market for virtual goods and services of $2.2 billion usd (worthen, 2010), it is no wonder that governments are beginning to take notice. it is critical for internet scholars to be aware of this emerging issue, because the way people communicate and interact in virtual worlds could be seriously impacted if there is the possibility they may be taxed. virtual worlds may even cease to exist if forced to comply with burdensome tax laws. this empirical review examines the issue using a multidisciplinary perspective, from both internet studies and taxation research. first a critical analysis of the current state of virtual economies is presented. next, a thorough examination of existing legal opinions regarding the taxation of income and assets generated by virtual world transactions is discussed. lastly, the authors offer their own analysis of the topic specific to the tax laws of the united states. introduction the growth of virtual worlds has exploded. the number of people that participated in and were members of virtual worlds was estimated to be 671 million in 2009 (barnes, 2010). as these virtual worlds have grown and become increasingly more sophisticated, to the extent they now mirror the offline world, a whole new 'virtual economy' has emerged, blurring the line between the real and virtual. participants in and members of gaming and social networking sites such as facebook, everquest, world of warcraft, and second life are now buying and selling virtual goods and services offline (not in-world) in exchange for real currency, a practice referred to as “real money trading” or rmt (nardi & kow, 2010). because of rmt, virtual transactions have real economic value (camp, 2007). an unknown number of people in virtual worlds are exchanging real currency and earning a living delivering virtual goods and services, making it possible to “work in a fantasy world to pay rent in reality” (lastowka & hunter, 2004, p. 11). a recent study found that 13% of americans with internet access bought virtual goods online in the previous 12 months, spending $92 usd on average (rosenberg, 2010). more than 50 percent of those buyers bought digital goods in a gaming environment; 48 percent purchased digital goods though various social networking sites. one study on the virtual currency in everquest found that the virtual gross national product (gnp) of the world of norrath was $135 million usd, placing it (at the time) at 77th on the list of world economies, approximately equal to the gnp of russia (castronova, 2004). 3 with virtual worlds rivaling the gnp of other countries, it is no wonder that governments are beginning to take notice of virtual economies and rmt. the estimated annual market for virtual goods and services expected to grow to $6 billion usd by 2013 (worthen, 2010). the question, then, is whether the trade in virtual goods and services is taxable, because it has real-world monetary value. the joint economic committee of the u.s. congress (jec), the australian tax office, the united kingdom’s hm revenue and customs office, and swedish and south korean tax authorities are all investigating the possibility of taxing income and assets from virtual economies (mennecke, terando, janvrin, & dilla, 2007; nuttall, 2007; tennant, 2010). china already taxes certain categories of rmts (salomon and soudoplatoff, 2010). technological advances have far outpaced current tax laws in the united states. as famed economist milton friedman predicted in 2000, “cyberspace is going to make it…much more difficult for government to collect taxes” (in schlimgen, 2010, p. 882). the jec announced it would undertake a study of tax issues in virtual worlds in 2006, but no study was ever delivered (jec, 2006). the national taxpayer advocate’s annual report to congress in 2008 included a section on the need for established guidelines on issues related to taxation in virtual worlds, but no guidance was ever issued. as senior economist for the jec dan miller stated, “it will get to the point where the dollar value becomes so sizeable that the irs would be almost negligent if it didn’t at least look into the potential of taxing these worlds” (thompson, 2006). or, as castrovona puts it, “governments will probably notice…tax revenue, the state’s very lifeblood, will drain away as more economic activity occurs in the ephemeral jurisdictions of cyberspace” (2005, p. 244). researchers and scholars are also beginning to examine the issue of taxation of virtual worlds. at a recent state of play symposium (held in december 2009 at new york law school) entire panels were devoted issues pertaining to virtual worlds, including their economy, legal systems, governmental systems, and policy. emory university hosted a conference on virtual worlds and new realities in commerce, politics, and society early in 2008 where participants discussed emerging economies of virtual worlds. in early 2011 the university of california irvine school of law hosted a conference titled governing the magic circle: regulation of virtual worlds. these are just a few examples of the burgeoning number of conferences held worldwide that address issues related to virtual worlds. 4 current state of virtual economies the jec defines virtual economies as “the universe of transactions that occur within an online community, such as second life or world of warcraft…(that) include the sale of goods and services and take place entirely within virtual economies; there is no real-world or physical exchange” (jec, 2006). in second life alone there were user-to-user transactions totaling over $567 million usd (one usd equals approximately 250 ‘linden dollars’, the in-world second life currency, which is a floating currency) in 2009, a 65 percent increase over the previous year (rosenwald, 2010). one study found that more than 50 businesses in second life made more than $100,000 usd each in 2009, with the top 25 second life earners making approximately $12 million combined. another virtual world, entropia universe, also operates a “real cash economy” (entropia universe, 2011) with a fixed rate of 10 ‘project entropia dollar’ (ped) to one usd (sivan, 2009). facebook recently launched ‘facebook credits’, a virtual currency used to buy virtual goods on the facebook platform (facebook, 2011). facebook users can purchase ‘facebook credits’ with 15 different real-world currencies, including euros, hong kong dollars, turkish lira, and venezuelan bolivars. however, facebook takes a significant cut (30%) with each credit purchase (gannes, 2011). the us-based chain store target is even offering ‘facebook credit’ gift cards for people to purchase to use on the facebook platform, marking the first time facebook has had a presence in a brick-and-mortar retail store (swartz, 2010). rmt is a big business, particularly in the sale of in-world currency and high-powered user accounts (duranske, 2008). yet not all virtual worlds permit rmt. second life allows the exchange of currency, goods, services, and equipment. second life even has an internal system where users can exchange linden dollars for real currency. however, the mmogs (massively multiplayer online games) world of warcraft, everquest, and ultima online specifically forbid the buying and selling of “gold” (their in-world currency) or items for real money (duranske, 2008); such activity is against the terms of service or end-use licensing agreements. ebay banned auctions for property from virtual worlds such as characters, currency, weapons, and clothing in early 2007. there is ample evidence, however, that people are making a living buying and selling virtual goods. or, as one irs agent stated, “selling intangibles in an intangible world. for an intangible world” (dibble, 2006, p. 304). there are a number of occupations that members of second life make their livings from in-world, including jewelry maker, tour guide, musician, landscaper, nightclub owner, and attorney (duranske, 2008). there are also third-party auction sites that broker in-world currency, virtual items and even entire in-world accounts. one person 5 allegedly earned more than $1 million usd from profits earned in virtual worlds, primarily through real estate transactions and content creation in second life (in duranske, 2008). on a more sinister note, unsavory types may also be using virtual world transactions to launder money because the transactions are virtually untraceable and can be converted into real currency. one rumor concerns a drug dealer in second life who only accepts linden dollars as payment and then realizes a profit after converting the linden dollars to usd (burns, 2010). other criminal activity occurring in virtual worlds includes identity theft, hacking, and credit card fraud (chung, 2009). gold farming, where companies (usually in low wage economies) employ people to do nothing but play mmogs in deplorable conditions to acquire in-world currency or property which is then resold for a profit, is also driving rmt (kennedy, 2009). julian dibbell famously wrote about his attempt to make a living selling “make-believe commodities” in his book play money, or how i quit my day job and made millions trading virtual loot; in one year he made $11,000 usd (dibbell, 2006). but he was stymied when he called the irs about the status of his online assets. after putting him on 'hold' for 15 minutes, they were ultimately unable to provide him with any guidance as how to report the income (thompson, 2006). taxation of virtual worlds the internal revenue service (irs) does not have a specific policy that addresses taxation of income earned within virtual world economies; the growth of those economies has clearly outpaced current tax law. while it is possible that some people do report the amount earned in rmt it is more likely that virtual worlds are a tax haven for those who make their living buying and selling virtual goods and services. a virtual good or service can be marketed, distributed, paid for, and delivered electronically without the need for any face-to-face contact (schlimgen, 2010). while most tax scholars believe it is a matter of 'when' and not 'if', researchers differ in defining exactly how the irs would implement and enforce a law designed to tax transactions that occur in virtual worlds (beekman, 2010). mennecke, terando, janvrin and dilla (2007) argue for a system that only taxes income generated when the seller converts virtual profits into real-world currency. in order to ensure that virtual economies continue to thrive, even though they would be taxed, they recommend the irs maintain a 'hands-off' policy but clearly communicate the guidelines and require the companies that maintain virtual worlds (for example, linden labs owns second life; world of warcraft is owned by blizzard entertainment) convey to buyers and sellers information regarding both the law and the consequences of breaking it. in a follow-up article, the authors 6 concluded that “…virtual asset exchanges constitute income realization events for (federal income tax) purposes because they involve arms-length exchanges of virtual properties that possess distinct legal and economic entitlements that are capable of being objectively valued” (terrando, mennecke, dilla & janvrin, 2008, p. 99). lederman (2007) believes that not all virtual worlds should be treated equally when it comes to rmt. she makes a distinction between “game worlds” such as world of warcraft and “unscripted worlds” such as second life, arguing that transactions in game worlds should not be taxed until the seller engages in rmt but that in unscripted virtual worlds, in-world sale of virtual goods and services using virtual currency be taxed even if the transaction stays in-world and the seller does not “cash out” (engage in rmt). her rationale for distinguishing between different virtual worlds is that “game worlds typically focus on conquering challenges, not on commerce” whereas an unscripted world such as second life “encourages its participants to make creations and sell copies of them and facilitates those activities” (p. 1670-1671). seto (2008) also distinguishes between two different types of virtual worlds: platforms with non-redeemable, non-convertible currencies such as world of warcraft, and platforms with redeemable or convertible currencies such as second life. he argues that virtual world transactions in the first type of platform should not be taxed; however, if rmt occurs (even though it is against the terms of service), that transaction generates taxable income. in the second type of platform, seto believes all transactions should be taxed; rmts trigger a change in net worth and are therefore taxable. camp (2007) says that while virtual economies have not considered current tax laws, there are some existing laws that do apply. for example, section 61 of the u.s. internal revenue code (irc) clearly states that all income from whatever source derived is taxable. he argues that activities and/or transactions solely in-world (which he calls “units of play”) should not be taxed unless those units are converted into cash. when people whose in-world assets become more like a medium of exchange producing income and less like units of play, those transactions should be taxed. he also warns that the irs could more easily make the case for taxing the income of people in virtual worlds who have more control over their virtual assets (versus the company that maintains the virtual world owning the virtual assets). however, castronova (2004) puts the burden on the operator of the virtual world platform. he argues that if a virtual world operator allows virtual transactions to occur, the terms of service should reflect that the platform is intended for economic exchange and the 7 transactions will be taxed. if the virtual world operator does not want transactions to be taxable, the terms of service must forbid rmt and the rule strictly enforced. mack (2008) puts the entire burden of tax collection on the operator of the virtual world platform. he argues for a “sales-and-use” tax. in this scenario, a system would be in place within the virtual world to automatically deduct a percentage of each transaction. the operator of the virtual world platform would then hold that deduction and forward it on for governmental collection. beekman argues that there is “no good conceptual justification for treating virtual world activity differently from real world activity for tax purposes” (2010, p. 154). however, she also contends that it would be impossible for the irs to administrate and enforce taxation in a virtual world. for one thing, the agency would have to rely on self-reporting by the taxpayer, which is problematic. another issue is the huge administrative burden that would be placed on the irs. while the administrative concerns should not be the deciding factor in the debate on taxation in virtual worlds, the irs regularly makes “decision based on administrability alone, even when the result is conceptually incorrect” (p. 173). chung (2009) suggests since virtual currencies act in many ways like ‘real money’ and are increasingly used in the real world, they “represent cash equivalents and should be treated and taxed like foreign currency” (p. 140) at the time the currency is converted (cashed out) and an economic gain is achieved. he uses the example of the ‘qq coin’, a virtual currency created by the chinese company tencent that allow users to shop in the company’s virtual world and instant messaging service. (the use of credit cards is not yet commonplace in china.) the use of qq coins quickly grew beyond the tencent services, with shoppers using them to purchase real-world goods and services. qq coins are so popular that the chinese government is pressuring tencent to limit the trade of qq coins because of the potential for money laundering and the inflation of the real chinese currency, the yuan (p. 144-5). chodorow (2008) approaches the issue of taxation of virtual income within the context of the existing u.s. tax laws. the ‘ability to pay’ is a core tax concept. under that standard he argues that the taxation of virtual income should be based on a taxpayer’s ability to cash out; if a virtual world allows participants to cash out then that income should be taxed. likewise, virtual income earned in worlds that prohibit cashing out should not be taxed; the ability to pay real-world taxes is not a function of virtual income. chodorow maintains that once it has been established that the virtual income has value and the participants can cash out, “the virtual 8 nature of the income does not warrant tax treatment different from that which would apply to real-world transactions” (p. 698). authors’ opinion experts are divided as to the feasibility of taxation of virtual economies. the three main positions reviewed above fall into three different broad categories: not taxing in-world or gaming, taxing rmts, or revamping the u.s. irc to specifically cite virtual worlds. most agree however that there is significant ambiguity in the current u.s. irc with respect to virtual worlds (beekman, 2010; schlimgen, 2010). in a divergent view, we argue that virtual transactions are already subject to taxation under current u.s. law, at any point in time that the u.s. internal revenue service (irs) should decide to enforce the current law, whether taking place in game worlds or unscripted worlds. this would include virtual-to-virtual transactions as well as virtual-to-real transactions, as the issue at hand is whether or not virtual activity is taxable, regardless of realization, because all goods and services have a fair market value. there is no need for new legislation amending the current u.s. irc in order for the irs to begin enforcement; in fact, given the strategic approach employed in the current u.s. irc, amendments relating specifically to virtual transactions might actually weaken the application of the law as now written. this is because the strategic approach within the u.s. irc is that taxation of income is an ‘all inclusive net’ unless that type of income is specifically exempted. specifically, income is “any undeniable accession to wealth, which is clearly realized by the taxpayer, over which the taxpayer has complete dominion” (comm’r v. glenshaw glass, 1955). this strategy eliminates the difficulty inherent in trying to identify all methods of commerce capable of generating income, tangible or intangible, now or in the future. to escape taxation under the u.s. irc, virtual transactions and economies would need to be identified, defined, and specifically exempted from taxation by the u.s. congress or the courts; something that has yet to happen and is unlikely to occur. virtual transactions, obscure offshore tax shelters, exotic financial derivative instruments, and the like are examples of creative methods to generate income that will be caught eventually in the 'all inclusive net'. if the irs chose to enforce current u.s. tax laws, the revenue from virtual worlds would be tremendous. however, overregulation of tax laws might also “result in the immediate decline of the virtual economy, lowering its total economic value, and therefore lowering the total federal revenue expected for the regulations” (mack, 2008, p. 761). virtual worlds may also move to a peer-to-peer network or a country outside of the u.s. to avoid detection and identification by the government. another, more likely, scenario would be that the tremendous 9 growth of virtual worlds would be severely impeded, depriving cmc scholars of a rich and vast 'database' for studying how people communicate and interact in such an environment. conclusion studies have found that virtual economic behavior follows real-world patterns (castronova, williams, shen, rata, xiong, huang, & keegan, 2009). the amount of economic activity occurring in virtual worlds, and the huge revenues being generated, “are sure to make a real impact on real-world economies” (huffaker, simmons, bakshy, & adamic, 2010). in an era where many of those real-world economies are struggling financially, imposing a tax on virtual worlds may be an opportunity for governments to expand their tax base (schlimgen, 2010). conversely, the virtual worlds provide people the opportunity to evade real-world taxation with relative ease. researchers are divided as to the feasibility of taxation of virtual economies. some tax experts say that it would be easy to argue in-game profits have real-world value even within the confines of the virtual world. additionally, virtual world trades of virtual goods and services, as well as rmt, could also qualify as barter, which is already taxable. others believe the logistics of taxing virtual economies would be too complex, and systems would need to be set up to provide an annual valuation for a resident’s assets in a virtual world. still other experts believe governments would not tax a 'game'. complicating that argument, however, is the fact that members of second life insist their virtual activity is not a game (thompson, 2006). and if second life is not a game and therefore not entertainment, then one could make the argument that the virtual world is used to conduct business, particularly when they participate in rmt markets. real-world corporations as diverse as nike, time warner, sony, mercedes benz, reuters and sears initially created a presence in second life, but the majority of them have pulled out because consumers did not connect with the brands in a virtual world setting (barnes, 2010). however, as more and more people join virtual worlds and individuals (as opposed to multinational corporations) create locations to sell their wares, the issue of taxing income and capital gains in virtual economies will only become more critical. when people begin to use linden dollars to purchase goods or services from real-world, brick-and-mortar entities, the issue of taxation will become extremely complicated and paramount in terms of today’s current tax laws. 10 references barnes, s. (2010). virtual worlds come of age. journal of virtual worlds research, 3(3). beekman, n.a. (2010). virtual assets, real tax: the capital gains/ordinary income distinction in virtual worlds. the columbia science and technology law review, 11, p. 152-175. burns, b. (2010). do virtual world activities give rise to real canadian tax liabilities? asper review of international business and trade law, 10, 163-185. camp, b.t. (2007). the play’s the thing: a theory of taxing virtual worlds. hastings law journal, 58(1), 1-72. castronova, e. (2004). the right to play. ny law school review, 49(1), 185-210. castronova, e. (2005). synthetic worlds: the business and culture of online games. chicago: university of chicago press. castronova, e., williams, d., shen, c., ratan, r., xiong, l., huang, y., & keegan, b. (2009). as real as real? macroeconomic behavior in a large-scale virtual world. new media and society, 11(5), 685-707. chodorow, a.s. (2008). ability to pay and the taxation of virtual income. tennessee law review, 75(4), 695-752. chung, s.s. (2009). real taxation of virtual commerce. virginia tax review, 28(3). retrieved from http://ssrn.com/abstract=1097793 comm’r v. glenshaw glass, 348 u.s. 426, 1955. dibble, j. (2006). play money: or, how i quit my day job and made millions trading virtual loot. ny: basic books. duranske, b.t. (2008). virtual law: navigating the legal landscape of virtual worlds. chicago: american bar association. facebook (2011). about facebook credits. retrieved from http://www.facebook.com/help/new/?page=1038 11 jec (2006). virtual economies need clarification, not more taxes. press release #109-98. retrieved from http://jec.senate.gov/republicans/public/?a=files.serve&file_id=08e6fa84-ee4f4267-9f47-ad0ad33a072d gannes, l. (2011). more on facebook deals: will include only social experiences, may use credits. all things d. retrieved from http://allthingsd.com/20110324/more-on-facebook-dealswill-only-include-social-experiences-may-use-credits/ h. res. 3678, 110th congress. enacted november 1, 2007. huffaker, d.a., simmons, m., bakshy, e., & adamic, l.a. (2010). seller activity in a virtual marketplace. first monday, 15(7). retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2977/2569 kennedy, r. (2009). law in virtual worlds. journal of internet law, 12(10), 3-10. lastowka, f.g., & hunter, d. (2004). the laws of the virtual worlds. california law review, 92(1), 3-71. lederman, l. (2007). “stranger than fiction”: taxing virtual worlds. new york university law review, 82,1620-1672. mack, d. (2008). itax: an analysis of the laws and policies behind the taxation of property transactions in a virtual world. administrative law review, 60, 749. mennecke, b.e., terando, w.d., janvrin, d.j., & dilla, w.n. (2007). it’s just a game, or is it? real money, real income, and real taxes in virtual worlds. communications of the association for information systems, 20, 134-141. nardi, b., & kow, y.m. (2010). digital imaginaries: how we know what we (think we) know about chinese gold farming. first monday, 15(6-7). nuttall, g. (2007). income earned in virtual worlds: taxation issues, e-commerce law and policy, 9(5). rosenberg, d. (2010). virtual goods revenue continues to climb. cnet news. retrieved from http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-20006167-62.html?tag=mncol;1n 12 rosenwald, m.s. (2010). second life’s virtual money can become real-life cash. the washington post. march 8. salomon, m., & soudoplatoff, s., (2010). why virtual-world economies matter. journal of virtual worlds, 2(4). schlimgen, j.r. (2010). virtual world, real taxes: a sales and use tax adventure through second life starring dwight schrute. minnesota journal of law, science & technology, 11(2), 877-899. sivan, y. (2009). overview: state of virtual worlds standards in 2009. journal of virtual worlds, 2(3). seto, t. p. (2008). when is a game only a game?: the taxation of virtual worlds. loyola-la legal studies paper no. 2008-24. retrieved from http://ssrn.com/abstract=1220923 swarz, j. (2010, september 1). target to sell facebook credits gift cards. usa today. retrieved from http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2010-09-01-target01_st_n.htm tennant, d. (2010). virtual worlds may be an escape, but maybe not from taxes. retrieved on from http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/blogs/tennant/virtual-worlds-may-be-an-escape-butmaybe-not-from-taxes/?cs=41590 terrando, w.d., mennecke, b.e., dilla, w.n., & janvrin, d.j. (2008). taxation policy in virtual worlds: issues raised by second life and other unstructured games. journal of legal tax research, 6(1), 94-107. thompson, c. (2006). the virtual taxman cometh. wired news. retrieved from http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/commentary/games/2006/12/72317 worthen, b. (2010, july 21). fraudsters like virtual goods. the wall street journal. retrieved from http://online.wsj.com/article/sb10001424052748704723604575379333744203498.html selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 beyond the backstage: stigma resistance and boundary work in the pro-ana community daphna yeshua-katz indiana university usa dyeshuak@indiana.edu abstract media scholars often employ concepts from goffman’s dramaturgical approach to study online communities of stigmatized individuals as a “backstage” -a refuge from social disapproval. research of the pro-ana, an online community for people with eating disorders as presented in this paper extends this view. interviewed bloggers reveal that in order to protect these virtual groups and resist the stigma associated with their illness and with their online presence, they construct their own norms and rules resulting in normative front stage behavior in the online realm. thus, what started as a protective circle of the “own” becomes a complex space in which bloggers shift from backstage to front-stage behaviors by finding support and expressing themselves but also engaging the group’s boundary work. this paper contributes to the theoretical development of the study of online communities, specifically to communities of stigmatized individuals. keywords stigma, eating disorders, social media, norms introduction the internet offers a highly valued opportunity for those with stigmatized illnesses to connect with, learn from, and provide support to others having similar experiences. scholars often employ concepts from goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical approach to study stigmatized online communities as the “back stage” of the physical life where people of similar experience feel no need to conceal their pathology and can openly seek out one another for support and advice (adler& adler, 2008; corell, 1995; deshotels & forsyth; jenkins et al., 2004 koster, 2010; quinn & forsyth, 2005). this theoretical approach, however, contradicts one common understanding of organization of online communities: norms of language and behavior. in this paper, the concept of stigma resistance is employed with referral to a specific community: the proana, a community for people with eating disorders (dias, 2003). the paper continues as follows: first, the concept's stigma (goffman, 1963) and boundary work (gieryn, 1983, 1999) are reviewed. after brief description of the case study, these concepts are used to analyze interactions in the community. stigma resistance goffman (1963) identifies stigma as a “mark” that signals to others that individuals possess an attribute reducing them to “tainted and discounted.” to reduce the stigma, a person is likely to devise different methods to deal with the situation. one way would be to seek for sympathetic others or their “own” - people who share their stigma (goffman, 1963). recent research demonstrates that online forum membership for stigmatized individuals alleviates feeling of isolation as they receive social support inspiring an encompassing sense of community (adler & adler, 2008; de koster & houtman, 2008; mckenna & bargh, 1998). as online communities are reliant on self-regulation for survival (honeycutt, 2005), members must selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 collectively agree to preserve cooperation by monitoring their own behavior and punishing those who deviate. to maintain group norms, boundaries are formed. boundary work (gieryn, 1983, 1999) is defined here as the discursive attribution of selected qualities to online group members, for the purpose of drawing a rhetorical boundary between in-group members who consider themselves “authentically” sick and stigmatized and others less “authentic” members who are perceived not to share the same stigma. the pro-ana: a deviant online community the pro-ana, an online community for people with eating disorders (hereafter eds) provides a place for people to receive support, share experiences, and offer encouragement (harshbarger et al., 2009). as a mental illness, ed carries a stigma. individuals with ed are portrayed as in denial of their behavior (dias, 2003) and negative attitudes are held towards them (mond et al., 2006). in addition to the ed-associated stigma, this online community has been met with public vilification. health-professionals caution that such venues may trigger vulnerable individuals and encourage eds (giles, 2006). complaints from ed support groups, parents, and the media resulted in blog hosting services shutting down pro-ana websites and blogs (indvik, 2012; ryan, 2012). to provide an analysis of online communication as stigma resistance, this paper relies upon data from interviews with 33 pro-ana bloggers from seven different countries (for methods, see yeshua-katz & martins, 2012). findings to resist stigma associated with their illness and their online presence, community members invest efforts into protecting group boundaries in two ways. first, they monopolize by identifying the “wannarexics”- people who want to take part in the community but whose credibility as eating disordered might be considered a specific form of a ‘newbie’ (boero & pascoe, 2012). second, once the boundary-work is in process, a hierarchy is created, and bloggers exclude those who are perceived as wannarexics by blocking their electronic access and removing them virtually from the group. forming group boundaries identifying members who do not belong to the group serves as a way to erect boundaries and develop a group identity. one way to identify the “wannarexics" is to judge their information requests, as nora (26, living with an ed) describes1: you can understand pretty quickly when you read a blog, if they have actually experienced what they are talking about. a lot of them for instance write exactly what they eat, and it's usually a lot more than what is normal for someone with ana. fourteen respondents reported seeing themselves as the in-group and said they wish to exclude the wannarexics from the community, as grace (18, living with an ed) described: they want to know ‘tips and tricks’, and they’re not aware that eating disorders cause severe damage, that they’re not a choice. often, wannarexics can cause people with eating disorders to fall even deeper by feeding their disordered thoughts… and i won’t tolerate them. excluding the wannarexics to protect the group from the public stigma of encouraging eds, after identifying the members who do not belong, actions of exclusion take place. six bloggers reported efforts to label, remove and derogate those felt not to belong. one form of removal is blocking the out-group from online communication, as 1 pseudonyms are used to protect the participants’ identities. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 stella (15, living with an ed) described: “sometimes i get quite angry when they comment on my blog, asking for 'tips'. i usually block them, i just can't imagine anyone willing setting out to destroy themselves because it's 'trendy'.” another way of exclusion from the group is to send them threatening messages, as ellie (18, living with an ed) reported: “the girls who are wannabees receive hate mail because people who do actually have an ed are offended. it makes them feel like their ed is belittled.” the most severe example of intergroup derogation is the labeling of another inside the community. in one of the pro-ana forums, blogs that are published by users who were suspected to be wannarexics are screenshot and placed in a separate “wanna list” category. ellis (27, living with an ed), the administrator of multiple pro-ana sites, described how the labeling process occurs on the websites: “people screenshot the posts and send them in to managers of the websites. (the wanna list)… is enormous, it’s been so since 2009 and i think we are close to a million views on it.” in the same group, members who were successful at identifying the “wannas” are promoted: “…the way they caught wannarexics on their site. they did such a good job just as members that i had to get them as managers.” (ellis) through the employment of "us versus them" language and an explicit exclusion of the wannarexics, the established members of the pro-ana community demonstrate both a growing self-awareness of themselves as a community and a more explicit understanding of how they expect newcomers to behave before they are allowed membership in the group. the in-group members begin to define their interests (for example, their interest in retaining their monopoly by removing those they perceive as harmful to the community) and uphold their rights to maintain their legitimacy as a group and enforce boundaries between themselves and the ‘fake’. conclusion by approaching online communities of stigmatized individuals as complex spaces, researchers find new paths for analysis of online interactions. in particular, by accepting the assertion that, as in face-toface communication, online disembodied interactions include norms of language and behavior, this understanding offers us a legitimate opportunity to study these communities with other sociological approaches. in the online realm, as in physical life, we can expect that human beings have a drive for self-evaluation and desire for social affiliation. this desire for social affiliation, as we can see in the pro-ana case, leads to groups’ engagement in boundary-work, to pressure to uniformity and to exclusion of rivals from within. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 references adler, p. a., & adler, p. (2008). the cyber worlds of self-injurers: deviant communities, relationships, and selves. symbolic interaction, 31(1), 33-56. boero, n., & pascoe, c. j. (2012). pro-anorexia communities and online interaction: bringing the pro-ana body online. body & society, 18(2), 27-57. doi: 10.1177/1357034x12440827 correll, s. (1995). the ethnography of an electronic bar: the lesbian cafe. journal of contemporary ethnography 24: 270298. deshotels, t.h. & forsyth, c.j. (2007). postmodern masculinities and the eunuch. deviant behavior 28: 201-218. dias, k. (2003). the ana sanctuary: women’s pro-anorexia narratives in cyberspace. journal of international womenís studies, 4(2), 31-45. giles, d. (2006). constructing identities in cyberspace: the case of eating disorders. british journal of social psychology, 45(3), 463-477. doi: 10.1348/014466605x53596 gieryn, t.f. (1983). boundary-work and the demarcation of science from non-science: strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists. american sociological review: 781-795. gieryn, t.f. (1999). cultural boundaries of science: credibility on the line, chicago: university of chicago press. goffman, e. (1959). the presentation of self in everyday life. new york: the overlook press. goffman, e. (1963). stigma: notes on the management of spoiled identity. new york: simon and schuster. harshbarger, j. l., ahlers-schmidt, c. r., mayans, l., mayans, d., & hawkins, j. h. (2009). pro-anorexia websites: what a clinician should know. international journal of eating disorders, 42(4), 367-370. honeycutt, c. (2005). hazing as a process of boundary maintenance in an online community. journal of computer‐mediated communication 10: 00-00. indvik, l. (2012). pinterest bans pro-anorexia content to little effect. mashable.com retrieved from http://mashable.com/2012/03/27/pinterest-bans-thinspiration-pro-ana/ jenkins, r.e., thomas, a.r. & loudonville, n. (2004). deviance online: portrayals of bestiality on the internet. abgefragt 18: 2009. koster, w. d. (2010). contesting community online: virtual imagery among dutch orthodox protestant homosexuals. symbolic interaction, 33(4), 552-577. http://mashable.com/2012/03/27/pinterest-bans-thinspiration-pro-ana/ http://mashable.com/2012/03/27/pinterest-bans-thinspiration-pro-ana/ selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 koster, w. d. & houtman, d. (2008). 'stormfront is like a second home to me'. information, communication & society, 11(8), 1155-1176. doi: 10.1080/13691180802266665 mckenna, k. y. a., & bargh, j. a. (1998). coming out in the age of the internet: identity "demarginalization" through virtual group participation. journal of personality and social psychology, 75(3), 681-694. doi: 10.1037/00223514.75.3.681 mond, j. m., robertson-smith, g., & vetere, a. (2006). stigma and eating disorders: is there evidence of negative attitudes towards anorexia nervosa among women in the community? journal of mental health, 15(5), 519-532. quinn, j.f., & forsyth, c.j. (2005). describing sexual behavior in the era of the internet: a typology for empirical research. deviant behavior 26: 191-207. ryan, e. g. (2012). tumblr to ban pro-eating disorder blogs and content. jezebel.com. retrieved from http://jezebel.com/5887843/tumblr-to-ban-pro+eatingdisorder-blogs-and-content yeshua-katz, d. & martins, n. (2012). communicating stigma: the pro-ana paradox. health communication, 1-10. doi: 10.1080/10410236.2012.699889 http://jezebel.com/5887843/tumblr-to-ban-pro+eatingdisorder-blogs-and-content microsoft word rey-boesel.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): rey, p. & boesel, e. (2014, october 22-24). cyberbullying, creepshots, and revenge porn: three case studies in augmented subjectivity. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. cyberbullying, creepshots, and revenge porn: three case studies in augmented subjectivity pj rey university of maryland erin boesel university of california – santa cruz as danah boyd (2007), nathan fisk (2012), and david a. banks (2013b) have argued, “cyberbullying” is an over-hyped term; moreover, it has little relevance to the people most likely to experience cyberbullying (marwick and boyd 2011). at the same time, for all the hype and hysteria, we do not take digitally mediated harassment and abuse seriously in the ways that matter most. justice department and law enforcement officials, for instance, have little by way of capacity or ability to address online harassment (whether by ex-lovers, anonymous strangers, or between teens)—and that’s when they can be persuaded that an incident is worth addressing at all. why is it that we paradoxically seem to give digitally mediated abuse too much attention, and yet also fail so profoundly to take it seriously? we argue that this contradiction results from conflict between ideology and practical knowledge (or what the ancient greeks called doxa and praxis). while the negative consequences for victims of cyberbullying, creepshots, and revenge porn are often clear, we have difficulty acknowledging and addressing these issues because our culturally inherited framework for understanding them, and even our language for describing them, is encoded with assumptions that our experiences with or through digital technologies are separate and distinct from the rest of our lives. this dominant cultural ideology—or doxa—is what jurgenson (2011) has called “digital dualism,” which is a propensity to see digitally mediated interaction as something somehow separate from, and often lesser than, interaction mediated in other ways. dualism is evident in the binaries we use describe digital technology: online/offline, digital/physical, real/virtual. this standpoint underlies both sides of the attention paradox: digital dualism gives us the (purported) malignant exceptionality of the digital, which in turn is why digital technologies cause teenagers to abuse their classmates, and ex-lovers to post personal images and information belonging to former partners, and creepy middle-aged men to take surreptitious photographs up women’s skirts. if you ask these dualists, the devil’s in the digital. at the same time, however, digital dualism also tells us that digitally mediated interaction is less “real” or meaningful than are other types of interaction, which allows digitally mediated abuse to be brushed off as somehow “less real,” less harmful, or even not abuse at all. tearing someone’s clothes off against their will is assault, for instance, and yet a surprising number of pundits maintain that posting naked photographs of someone against their will is simply “free speech” (chen 2012). even though a particular doxa may be widespread, the beliefs it represents are not necessarily substantiated. aristotle explains that doxa is opposed to substantiated belief (i.e., knowledge). while we have abundant knowledge that demonstrates the digital dualist doxa to be erroneous (e.g. chayko 2008; gray 2009; baym 2010; rainie and wellman 2012; tufekci and wilson 2012), we have yet to articulate a compelling counter ideology that might supplant the dualist doxa. (in aristotelian language, this would be an endoxa—a commonly-held belief system that has been rigorously analyzed and determined to be consistent.) in other words, systematic theorization is lagging behind systematic observation. we make an attempt to close part of that gap. we argue that shifting how we think about what it means to be a person in the 21st century can actually yield a better understanding of phenomena like (so-called) cyberbullying, revenge porn, and creepshots. we draw on work by katherine hayles (1999), allucquére rosanne stone (1994), judith butler (1988, 1997), and maurice merleau-ponty 1945 [2012] to inform our argument that contemporary (post-)industrial subjects experience augmented subjectivity—that they are embodied across an assemblage of flesh bodies, conventional prostheses, and digital prostheses, and that they experience living within one multiply-mediated reality (though one whose varying components are not equally valued). we then bring the augmented subjectivity framework to bear on these three cases in order to shift analytical focus (and: popular attention) off the fact of digital mediation, and onto the lived, subjective experiences of those who are digitally abused. because the subject’s digital prostheses are part of the augmented subject herself, they must be extended moral regard. although different media most certainly have different affordances, abuse remains abuse—and must not be overlooked or dismissed merely because of its format. this paper draws on a previously published theoretical work by the same authors, and applies that framework to three specific cases through textual analysis and close reading of popular media sources. references banks, d.a. 2013b. “what the media is getting wrong about steubenville, social media, and rape culture.” cyborgology, 23 march 2013, http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/03/23/what-themedia-is-getting-wrong about-steubenville-social-media-and-rape-culture baym, n. 2010. personal connections in the digital age. cambridge, uk: polity press. boyd, d. 2007. “cyberbullying.” apophenia, 7 april 2007, www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/04/07/cyberbullying.html butler, j. 1988. "performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory." theatre journal 40 (4): 519-531. ------. 1997. the psychic life of power: theories in subjection. palo alto, ca: stanford university press. chayko, m. 2008. portable communities:the social dynamics of online and mobile connectedness. newyork: state university of new york press. chen, a. 12 october 2012. ‘unmasking reddit’s violentacrez, the biggest troll on the web’, gawker http://gawker.com/5950981/unmasking-reddits-violentacrez-the-biggesttroll-onthe-web. fisk, n. 2012. “why children laugh at the word ‘cyberbullying.’” cyborgology, 14 july 2012, http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/07/14/why-children-laugh-at-thewordcyberbullying gray, m. 2009. out in the country: youth, media, and queer visibility in rural america. new york: new york university press. hayles, n. k. 1999. how we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. chicago and london: the university of chicago press. jurgenson, n. 2011. “digital dualism versus augmented reality.” cyborgology, 24 february 2011, http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/02/24/digital-dualismversusaugmented-reality marwick, a. and d. boyd. 2011. “the drama! teen conflict, gossip, and bullying in networked publics.” paper presented at a decade in internet time: symposium on the dynamics of the internet and society, oxford, uk, september 2011. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1926349 merleau-ponty, m. 1945 [2012]. phenomenology of perception. london and newyork: routledge. rainie, l. and wellman, b. 2012. networked:the new social operating system. cambridge,ma: mit press. stone, a.r. 1994. “split subjects, not atoms; or, how i fell in love with my prosthesis.” configurations 2(1): 173–190. tufekci, z. and wilson, c. “social media and the decision to participate in political protest: observations from tahrir square.” journal of communication 62, no. 2 (2012): 363–379. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 “is there anything else you would like to share?”: methods to support teen agency rachel m. magee ischool at drexel university united states rachelmagee@drexel.edu abstract in this work, i argue that there are multiple opportunities to support and extend research examining teens’ practices and experiences. much work that examines youth focuses on supporting adult priorities and protecting young people. while some research engages with youth perspectives, there are areas where we can advance our approaches. this can involve adapting existing methods, including diary studies, to connect data collection processes to teens’ everyday experiences, such as through mobile technology. this can also include allowing teens to engage in creative expression to purposefully contribute to the data collection process. these approaches can support youth agency by allowing them to influence what, when, and how data is contributed, giving researchers the opportunity for new insights into teens’ practices and experiences. keywords teenagers; qualitative methods; diary studies; creative/expressive methods. introduction researching diverse communities’ use of and interactions with the internet and networked technologies is important in many domains. however, within many communities concerned with human experiences, research with youth is often seen as difficult or hard to conduct. this rises from multiple perceptions, including the difficulty of working with ethics review boards to achieve approval for study with youth (rode, 2009), or as critiqued by amato and ochiltree (1987), the developmental, experiential, or communicative skills of youth participants. because of these perceptions, research does not always engage with youth. within this understudied group are teens, whose experiences are sometimes studied via the reminiscence of adults. mcmillan and morrison conducted an engaging study examining how college students, who they argue are “close enough to childhood to remember it well,” remember growing up with internet technologies (2006, p. 74). this is valuable, but it is also important to examine experiences of teens while they are actually experiencing them. when research does work directly with teens, it may not treat them as independent, self-aware participants. hazel argues that research with youth “has traditionally neglected the views and voices of the young people themselves,” treating them as “passive subjects whose opinions are peripheral to the understanding of the issues which fundamentally affect them” (1995, p. 2). gasser, cortesi, malik, and lee describe research examining the concept of information quality from an adult perspective as “adult-normative,” and note that these are studies in which “information quality is defined by what makes information valuable for adults” (2012, p. 31). hazel frames this kind of work as “grounded in the socio-legal concerns of the adult researcher” and focused on the “‘care’ of children, rather than directly involving the active participation of young people in the fieldwork,” which “mirrors” societal paternalistic attitudes to youth (1995, p. 2). the discourse around online risks and opportunities also follows this pattern and focuses on defining and identifying risk behaviors, then using this knowledge to protect young people. williams and merten’s 2008 work examines youth blogs for risky behavior, and includes practices such as sharing full names or school affiliations, which may not be deemed as risky by teens. as livingstone and helsper highlight, “there is considerable scope for interpretation and contestation, both conceptually and between adults and selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 children, regarding the allocation of specific activities to the category of opportunities or risks” (2010, p. 310). while existing research that emphasizes adult perspectives has its place, work that engages with youth perspectives is key. ethnographic work like boyd’s examination of youth and social media (2008), the extensive set of case studies reported on in hanging out, messing around, and geeking out (ito, baumer, bittanti, cody, herr-stephenson, horst...& tripp, 2010), and livingstone’s examination of youth content creation (2008) serve as inspiring examples. youth participatory action research engages young people in developing and working towards shared goals in a collaborative and reciprocal manner (cahill, 2007), though this approach is time-intensive. while these examples have been fruitful, there is value in continuing to develop methods for working with participants that can be employed in a variety of types of studies, in partnership with teens to inform, expand, and develop our research. as best asks, “how can researchers develop more sensitive and empowering ways to study youth and children?”(2007, p. 19). extending methods extending our methods is an integral step in addressing this question. by directly engaging teens in the process of data creation, we can work together to give youth more agency and make strides towards addressing the needs for sensitivity and empowerment. ways to approach this extension of our methods include adapting existing methods and increasing use of uncommon approaches to better engage with and represent teens’ experiences and allow teens the opportunities to discuss, engage with, and critique their experiences and practices. diary methods are one way to gain naturalistic data while also accommodating for privacy and selfreflection (carter & mankoff, 2005). by adapting the techniques we use to collect diary data, we can streamline the process for participants and enable construction of diary entries that better fit into teens’ lives. accommodating mobile technologies, and in particular smart phones, is one way to make these advances. this can manifest in multiple ways, including allowing for mobile entries in the voicemail based audio recording approach (palen & salzman, 2002), as well as supporting photo and sms based diary entries (plowman & stevenson, 2012). extending from this, using email and even smart-phone applications to collect diary entries can enable internet-based technologies to capture internet-based practices. incorporating mobile technologies into diary studies promotes situated responses and lowers the difficulty of participation, allowing for diary keeping in many locations at many times and giving participants more control over the process. this approach can also ease the difficulty for researchers, allowing them to review data more quickly while easing the complexity of coordinating interviews or other interactions using diary entries as a prompt. in addition to work extending methods, there is also value in using less common approaches intended to stimulate creativity and expression, or studies where “participants make things” (gauntlett & hozwarth, 2006, p. 82). these approaches, often rooted in artistic techniques, range from writing poetry and making photographs (szto, furman, & langer, 2005) to creating characters with lego building blocks (gauntlett & hozwarth, 2006). these approaches can be seen as ways to “[enable] people to communicate, in a meaningful way, about their identities and experiences, and their own thoughts about their identities and experiences, through creatively making things themselves, and then reflecting upon what they have made” (gauntlett & hozwarth, 2006, p. 82). these techniques can result in reflective, contemplative, and composed data, which can be used to deepen our understanding of what is important to our participants. in contrast to diary studies, these techniques may be particularly well-suited to thinking about experiences over time, contributing to developing richer understandings of context and emotion. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 conclusion as this work highlights, there are many opportunities to support the agency of teen participants. in order to develop a better understanding of how some of these methods may be effectively used with teens, this work is informing a pilot study to be conducted in summer 2013. this study, part of dissertation project, is designed to examine mobile diary study techniques, including audio-based and photo/email-based approaches. additionally, the study will explore creative and expressive methods in research with teens, with participants developing a creative contribution of their choice that addresses their everyday life experiences with technology. this study is designed to allow participants to use familiar technologies to contribute to a deeper understanding of their internet and technology use. this pilot study will be completed by summer 2013. encouraging research that deeply engages with youth perspectives is an important goal. connecting our methods with teens’ experiences and skills and supporting the agency and empowerment of participants through creative expression are two steps that can help achieve this goal. by enabling participants’ agency over their contributions, we can extend the sentiment behind the traditional end to an interview, “is there anything else you would like to share?,” and gain new perspectives on the practices and experiences of participants. acknowledgments this material is based upon work supported by the national science foundation graduate research fellowship under grant no. 2011121873. references amato, p.r., & ochiltree, g. (1987). interviewing children about their families: a note on data quality. journal of marriage and family, 49(3), pp. 669-675. best, a.l.. (2007). introduction. in a.l. best (ed.), representing youth: methodological issues in critical youth studies (1-36). new york, ny: new york university press. boyd, d. (2008). “why youth social network sites: the role of networked publics in teenage social life." in d. buckingham (ed.) youth, identity, and digital media, the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation series on digital media and learning. cambridge, ma: the mit press, 119–142. cahill, c. (2007). doing research with young people: participatory research and the rituals of collective work. children's geographies, 5(3), 297-312. carter, scott and mankoff, jennifer, "when participants do the capturing: the role of media in diary studies" (2005). human-computer interaction institute. pittsburgh, pa: carnegie mellon university. retrieved from http://repository.cmu.edu/hcii/123. gasser, u., cortesi, s.c., malik, m., and lee, a. (feb. 16, 2012). youth and digital media: from credibility to information. berkman center research publication no. 2012-1. available at ssrn: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2005272 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2005272. gauntlett, d., & holzwarth, p. (2006). creative and visual methods for exploring identities. visual studies, 21(01), 82-91. hazel, n. (1995). elicitation techniques with young people. social research update, winter 1995, issue 12. retrieved from http://sru.soc.surrey.ac.uk/sru12.html. ito, m., baumer, s., bittanti, m., cody, r., herr-stephenson, b., horst, h. a., ... & tripp, l. (2009). hanging out, messing around, and geeking out: kids living and learning with new media. cambridge, ma: mit press. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 livingstone, s. (2008). taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: teenagers’ use of social networking sites for intimacy, privacy, and self-expression. new media society, 10 (3), 393 – 411. livingstone, s. & helsper, e. (2010). balancing opportunities and risks in teenagers’ use of the internet: the role of online skills and internet self-efficacy. new media and society 12: 2, 309-329. mcmillan, s. j. & morrison, m. (2006). coming of age with the internet: a qualitative exploration of how the internet has become an integral part of young people's lives. new media and society 8, 73-95. palen, l. & salzman, m. (2002). voice-mail diary studies for naturalistic data capture under mobile conditions. in proceedings cscw’02, november 16–20, 2002, new orleans, louisiana, usa. acm: 2002. plowman, l. & stevenson, o. (2012). using mobile phone diaries to explore children's everyday lives. childhood 19(4) 539–553. rode, j. a. (2009, september). digital parenting: designing children's safety. in proceedings of the 23rd british hci group annual conference on people and computers: celebrating people and technology (pp. 244-251). british computer society. szto, p., furman, r., & langer, c. (2005). poetry and photography : an exploration into expressive/creative qualitative research. qualitative social work 4(2): 135–156 williams, a. l., & merten, m. j. (2008). a review of online social networking profiles by adolescents: implications for future research and intervention. adolescence-san diego-, 43(170), 253-274. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd 3.0. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  colbjørnsen,  t.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  my  algorithm:  user  perceptions  of   algorithmic  recommendations  in  cultural  contexts.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual   conference  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from   http://spir.aoir.org. my  algorithm:  user  perceptions  of  algorithmic   recommendations  in  cultural  contexts   terje  colbjørnsen   department  of  media  and  communication,  university  of  oslo       introduction   in  the  cultural  industries,  discovery  and  recommendation  have  traditionally  been  the   tasks  of  professional  insiders,  gatekeepers  and  market  information  systems  such  as   bestseller  lists.  today,  these  individuals  and  systems  are  increasingly  supplemented,   enhanced  and  occasionally  supplanted  by  automated  services,  as  the  algorithms  of   large  online  corporations  offer  targeted  cultural  guidance  based  on  computations  of   input  from  reservoirs  of  user  data.     automated  functions  for  discovery  and  recommendations  are  important  features  of  all   the  major  players  in  digital  media  and  culture.  spotify,  amazon,  and  netflix  all  make   recommendations  based  on  their  respective  users’  listening,  reading  and  viewing  habits   and  expressed  preferences.  certainly,  the  size  of  the  databases  of  these  services  is  so   immense  that  algorithms  perform  important  work,  efficiently  and  on  a  much  larger  scale   than  any  cultural  critic  could  manage.  exactly  how  they  do  so  is  little  known,  at  least   outside  of  the  respective  companies.  while  previous  studies  have  revealed  aspects  of   the  work  of  cultural  algorithms  (see  for  instance  hallinan  &  striphas,  2014),  for  ordinary   users  they  are,  in  effect,  black  boxed,  i.e.  closed  for  further  scrutiny  or  understanding   (pasquale,  2015).  as  latour  (1999)  has  pointed  out,  the  obfuscation  or  black-­boxing   may  actually  contribute  to  the  success  of  the  technology.  in  other  words,  automated   recommendations  have  infused  our  media  culture  precisely  because  their  inner   workings  do  not  get  in  the  way  of  the  presentation  of  outputs.1     thus,  this  paper  sets  out  not  to  explore  how  algorithms  work,  but  rather  how  users   respond  or  relate  to  algorithmic  recommendations,  addressing  the  following  research   question:       how  do  users  relate  to  online  automated  discovery  and  recommendation  services  for   cultural  products  and  services?       1  i  am  grateful  to  an  anonymous  aoir  reviewer  for  pointing  out  this  aspect  of  black-­‐‑boxing.     background   the  prominence  of  algorithms  is  increasingly  recognized  also  in  the  academic  literature,   to  the  extent  that  a  notion  of  “algorithmic  culture”  has  been  proposed  (striphas,  2015).   still,  analyses  of  the  workings  of  algorithms  in  the  cultural  industries  are  scarce.       responding  to  the  increased  centrality  of  algorithms  in  aspects  of  private  and  public  life,   communication  scholars,  new  media  theorists  and  media  philosophers  have  suggested   that  we  take  into  account  the  pragmatic  dimension  of  algorithms  in  order  to  assess  their   cultural,  political  and  social  impact  (ananny,  2016;;  beer,  2016;;  gillespie,  2014;;  goffey,   2008;;  kitchin,  2016).  aspects  of  the  social  dimensions  include  the  ways  in  which  users   respond  and  relate  to  the  automation  of  cultural  discovery  and  recommendation.       it  could  be  argued  that  algorithmic  recommendations  generally  operate  under  a   paradox:  as  users  feed  the  services  with  more  information  on  their  likes  and  dislikes,   algorithms  can  suggest  more  of  the  same  kind  that  we  seem  to  like,  creating  a  cultural   “filter  bubble”  (pariser,  2011).  however,  cultural  consumption  is  also  about  being   genuinely  surprised,  encountering  serendipity  in  cultural  discoveries.  in  a  related   manner,  algorithms  may  risk  apophenia,  perceiving  patterns  and  connections  where   none  actually  exist  (boyd  &  crawford,  2012).     a  different  issue  regards  the  notion  of  online  privacy  and  how  users  feel  about  services   that  are  increasingly  familiar  with  their  preferences,  habits  and  relationships.  studies   have  found  widespread  concern  among  users  over  how  businesses  monitor  them  (pew   research  center,  2014).  analysts  of  increasingly  personalized  advertising  in  online   media  have  noted  the  so-­called  “creepiness  factor”  (thierer,  2013),  the  sense  that   marketers  are  capitalizing  on  personal  information  without  due  consent  or  transparency.   similar  affective  responses  are  likely  to  be  found  in  cultural  contexts  as  well.  that  is  not   to  forget  that  a  presumptively  large  group  will  be  unconcerned  or  ignorant  of  how   algorithms  provide  recommendations.       when  examining  online  responses  to  algorithmic  recommendations,  i  find  that  users   respond  with  evaluations  of  whether  the  service  in  question  performs  its  task   satisfactorily:  the  algorithm  suggested  this;;  i  liked  it  (or  not).  however,  in  response  to   the  above-­mentioned  concerns,  users  are  also  found  to  adopt  more  elaborate   strategies,  or  responding  in  more  nuanced  ways:  “rearing”  the  algorithm  to  enhance   their  personalized  feedback  is  one  approach;;  “breaking”  the  algorithm  by  confusing  its   internal  logic  is  another;;  others  will  avoid  feeding  the  ‘big  data’  machine  altogether,  or   search  incognito  in  some  instances.  shifting  and  making  comparisons  between  services   constitute  a  separate  set  of  ways  of  making  sense  of  cultural  algorithms.  some  active   users  seem  to  take  a  personal  interest  in  the  recommendation  algorithms,  seeing  them   as  part  of  their  online  identities.  accordingly,  i  find  users  referring  to  an  automated   system  for  targeted  recommendations  as  “my  algorithm”.     methods  and  approaches   the  paper  starts  out  from  an  examination  of  the  relevant  literature  and  follows  with  an   analysis  of  twitter  streams  based  on  queries  related  to  “algorithm”  and   “spotify/amazon/netflix”.  for  this  study,  twitter  messages  was  found  to  be  a  productive   platform  to  investigate,  as  users  often  rejoice  about  newfound  favourites  or  vent  their   frustrations  with  algorithm-­based  services  there.  using  the  web-­based  topsy  software   and  the  discovertext  application  i  harvested  tweets  containing  the  above  keywords  for   two  periods:  september-­november  2015  (data  set  1)  and  9th  –  31st  august  2016  (data   set  2).  while  the  first  data  set  led  to  the  development  of  general  categories,  it  was  found   to  provide  an  insufficient  amount  of  data  points.  data  set  2  is  analyzed  more  in  detail   according  to  the  criteria  that  was  developed  for  the  first  data  set.  a  general  coding  of  the   tweets  is  conducted,  with  select  messages  analyzed  textually  as  well.       twitter  feeds  are  hardly  representative  of  any  larger  population,  but  are  rich  sources  of   non-­representative  utterances  on  popular  culture.       this  paper  is  a  pilot  study  for  a  larger  project  on  user  perceptions  of  quality  and   relevance  in  algorithmic  recommendations,  funded  by  the  norwegian  arts  council.     references   ananny,  m.  (2016).  toward  an  ethics  of  algorithms  convening,  observation,   probability,  and  timeliness.  science,  technology  &  human  values,  41(1),  93– 117.  https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243915606523   beer,  d.  (2016).  the  social  power  of  algorithms.  information,  communication  &  society,   0(0),  1–13.  https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1216147   boyd,    danah,  &  crawford,  k.  (2012).  critical  questions  for  big  data.  information,   communication  &  society,  15(5),  662–679.   https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2012.678878   gillespie,  t.  (2014).  the  relevance  of  algorithms.  i  media  technologies  (kindle  edition,   s.  167–193).  mit  press.   goffey,  a.  (2008).  algorithms.  i  software  studies:  a  lexicon  (s.  15–20).  mit  press.   hallinan,  b.,  &  striphas,  t.  (2014).  recommended  for  you:  the  netflix  prize  and  the   production  of  algorithmic  culture.  new  media  &  society,  1461444814538646.   https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814538646   kitchin,  r.  (2016).  thinking  critically  about  and  researching  algorithms.  information,   communication  &  society,  0(0),  1–16.   https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154087   latour,  b.  (1999).  pandora’s  hope:  essays  on  the  reality  of  science  studies.  harvard   university  press.   pariser,  e.  (2011).  the  filter  bubble:  what  the  internet  is  hiding  from  you  (kindle   edition).  penguin.   pasquale,  f.  (2015).  the  black  box  society:  the  secret  algorithms  that  control  money   and  information  (1  edition).  cambridge:  harvard  university  press.   pew  research  center.  (2014).  public  perceptions  of  privacy  and  security  in  the  post-­ snowden  era.  hentet  fra  http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/11/12/introduction-­18/   striphas,  t.  (2015).  algorithmic  culture.  european  journal  of  cultural  studies,  18(4–5),   395–412.  https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549415577392   thierer,  a.  (2013).  pursuit  of  privacy  in  a  world  where  information  control  is  failing,   the.  harvard  journal  of  law  &  public  policy,  36,  409.     microsoft word yu.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): yu, h. (2014, october 22-24). social imaginaries of the internet in china. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. social imaginaries of the internet in china haiqing yu university of new south wales abstract chinese internet studies is a fast growing area. broadly speaking, an underlining dichotomy between control and resistance, or between the “evil” and “control-freak” chinese government and the “good” and rebellious netizens, has been central in many works in chinese internet studies. others invoke an enthusiastic and celebratory perspective, focusing on the development of civil society and uptakes in media marketization and globalization and their democratic potentials. still some others voice guided optimism about the internet development and diffusion in china, and argue that the dichotomy between control and rebellion, centralization and decentralization, or state and society may not be sufficient to portray the unruly, diversified, stratified, balkanized activities online. a more nuanced analysis of the chinese internet reveals that many different groupings, associations and movements, individual and collective creative expressions, diversified ways of entertainment, communication and consumption, and even the dominating state and market power are all flexible and mutable. none is static; they all respond and adapt to the influences of technologies, institutions, social practices of both the online and the offline, and even the regional and global techno-geopolitics. it is time that we looked closely at how ordinary chinese people (not political, economic and intellectual elites, or technological geeks) view their internet in relation to themselves as individual human beings and an imagined community, rather than how we interpret their activities and experiences online. it is also time that we viewed the internet as a lived space and experience that intersects, infiltrates, absorbs, and at the same time defies boundaries between the online and offline world, legitimate and illegitimate cultures. the internet surely has boundaries if it is viewed as a technological and material device, machine, or design. at the same time, the internet does not respect any boundary especially when it is viewed as an immaterial, abstract existence or way of life. hence the concept of social imaginary is apt in capturing the largely unstructured and inarticulate understanding of the unlimited and indefinite nature of the internet. the concept of social imaginary is a useful analytical tool for making sense of and critically assessing the multiple dimensions of communication, association or simply living in the internet age. here i employ charles taylor (2002)’s definition of the social imaginary as an open and flexible concept that incorporates a sense of normal expectations and common understanding to enable collective practices that make up our social life. it incorporates a widely shared sense of legitimacy that interweaves what things usually are with how they should go. it is not a set of theories but an ethos that enable ordinary people to make sense of their social surroundings. it is the repertory of images, metaphors, stories and legends, which are often taken for granted, that is central to my discussion of social imaginaries of the internet in china. i discuss social imaginaries of the internet age in china through two metaphors that are most often used or implied by my respondents: the internet as a battlefield and a playground. they are emblematic of how ordinary chinese relate to the internet. the internet as a battlefield the internet as a battlefield metaphor has been used to describe the effort by entrepreneurs, private internet companies and ict starters to compete with one another to come up with the next new idea and capitalize on it to reap the maximum profit, and by average chinese netizens to “scale the walls” to access censored websites. although not everyone uses the word “battlefield” (zhanchang), the sense of urgency and desire to gain an upper hand over one’s competitors or potential rivals permeates casual conversations with urban young and middle-aged male netizens. on the business side, the battlefield is epitomized by a new internet-related business dubbed as china’s “1984 industry,” which represents the private-public, business-state relationships and partnerships in china’s internet and ict development; and by a recent taxi hailing app war between china’s two biggest internet companies tencent and alibaba, which symbolizes the new battlefield in mobile media. for ordinary netizens, the real battlefield does not happen on the street but on their palm top and laptop. china’s more than half a billion internet users have managed to “scale the wall,” to have fun, engage in e-commerce, and feel free to express themselves. apparently a business to provide “scaling the wall” (fanqiang) service has thrived. on baidu, if one searches “fanqiang software,” “proxy,” “ssh,” or “vpn,” one will get thousands if not millions of results that teach you have to download, install, use, and update (free or paid) software in order to access blocked websites, often with the proxy servers based in the us, japan or taiwan. one can even buy such services on taobao (china’s largest virtual bazaar, equivalent of ebay+amazon) by searching “proxy” or “ssh.” the efforts by the chinese government to reduce the digital divide by providing and lowering the cost of mobile phone and internet services to its mobile population have allowed even the poorest and most isolated to air their grievances and yearnings online. equipped with smart phones and computer, china’s migrant factory workers and sanitation workers have joined in the emerging labour movement. the internet as a playground the internet as a playground metaphor views “play” as a prominent and ubiquitous feature of the chinese internet and central to the heteroglossia in contemporary chinese culture. the most popular services and content that chinese netizens access online—games, music, fan communities, bbs, blogging and microblogging, video streaming, e-literature, various social networking services, instant messaging, and ebusiness—all incorporate “play” elements to attract and retain users. the internet provides aggregated sources of a rich variety of entertainment. it is also a playground where young hormone-charged impulses release and play up. it is the space where they get their real sex education, tell their sexual stories, become popular as sexual dissidents, experiment with novel sexual practices, search for casual sexual partners, and get their ego stroked. hormone economy combines online forum, social networking, gaming, e-commerce, video streaming, eliterature, online dating, and instant messaging to create a virtual playground with chinese characteristics. the playground of the internet is a gendered and embodied space loaded with gender stereotyping that reinforces patriarchal structures. women are still subject to heterosexual and masculine authority as objects of desire. chinese hostesses of virtual live broadcast rooms, female sex bloggers and cross-dressing idols have not been able to disrupt gender and sexual representations of women. at the same time, the playground is also a battlefield and laboratory to seek, incubate and test new ideas, to rebel against authority and stereotypes, to fight against injustice and oppression, to vent grievance or simply “let out some steam,” to connect with family, friends and fellow human beings, to amuse oneself to death; but fundamentally it is the way of life. conclusion: the internet as the way the chinese internet can be studied in relation to concepts and perspectives other than access and usage (development and growth, sociocultural and economic impact), or censorship and resistance (democratization, freedom of speech, and citizen activism). the chinese view their internet as the way of life and way of thinking about themselves and their country. the internet has changed how people related to one another; how they make choices about their lives, both individually and collectively; and how they imagine the future. it is dissolving the geopolitical, cultural, class, gender, and other hierarchical boundaries and enables both the beautiful and the ugly to surface and compete at the same level. references taylor, c. (2002) “modern social imaginaries,” public culture, 14(1), pp. 91-124. 5 microsoft word _original submissions selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 sextually active: teenage views on sexting and its interventions alex christopher wade birmingham city university jerome turner birmingham city university annalise weckesser birmingham city university clara rübner jørgensen warwick university the digital mobile technologies used by generation m in their social interaction affords a number of opportunities in terms of communication, creativity and connectivity. yet their use amongst media literate children (8-18) is subject to extensive policy debate and, by extension, moral panic (roberts et al., 2005). accordant social anxiety is especially prevalent in sophisticated media practices such as ‘sexting’, where individuals send sexually explicit content (video/images/text) to one another via mobile technologies. in the uk, legislation is such that under-18s can be criminally prosecuted for sexting due to the involvement of sexually explicit images of children (judge, 2012), thus placing the law in a paradox as it has the potential to criminalise those it is designed to protect. this position is further skewed in relation to gender by the implied responsibility placed on teenage girls to minimise the risk associated with sexting (revenge porn, sexual predation) in associated educational material (salter et al., 2013). the ambiguity regarding legislation and education in the inappropriate use of digital mobile technologies can lead to misrepresentation in news media, where flawed or inconsistent studies are cited, escalating perceived problems around sexting (lounsbury, 2011). conflicting viewpoints are commonplace, for example the guardian ran three contradictory pieces concerning sexting in editorial (see barbieri, 2009; coslett, 2013; wiseman, 2012), and while assumptions are made that apps such as ‘snapchat’ are used inappropriately, research shows that young people use it for harmless fun (boyd, 2014). such confusion is compounded by a lack of distinction between alleged ‘aggravated’ and actual ‘experimental’ practice (wolak & finkelhor, 2011). this leads to a discourse founded on imaginary interpretations of digital danger, suggested citation (apa): wade, a., turner, j., weckesser, a., & rübner jørgensen, c. (2015, october 21-24). sextually active: teenage views on sexting and its interventions . paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. rather than statements of experience from users of the technologies in question, affirming the absence of knowledge concerning ‘the role of online and digital technology in relationship coercion’ (salter et al., 2013, p. 312). the confusion raised by the imagined and real discourses around sexting provides opportunities and challenges for research and education equal to those found in digital mobile technologies, as they ‘provide new modes through which such abuse may be initiated; however, they also provide important new means for education, prevention and intervention’(salter et al. 2013, p. 312). the programmes which follow from this opportunity have been mixed, both in their execution and reception. the child exploitation online protection centre film exposed was criticised for promoting narratives which lead to victim-blaming (hasinoff, 2013), while not providing prevalence to the technology used to distribute content. meanwhile, with a focus on the technology, the joint channel 4 (a uk tv channel) and childline (a uk charity) initiative ‘zipit’ installs an app which obviates and advises around the issues of sexting, garnering a nomination for a sexual health award for its effectiveness. such initiatives reveal a real urgency for academic research into sexting, its technologies and practices. a recent study, one of the few pieces of qualitative research undertaken on sexting in the uk, commissioned by the national society for the prevention of cruelty to children (nspcc) (ringrose et al., 2012) investigated sexting within two schools in inner city london. young people were identified as imagining a greater concern over the approaches of unknown others (traditional notions of ‘stranger danger’), while the actual threat appeared from ‘peers . . . and friends in their social network . . . which may be motivated by sexual pleasure, but are often coercive, linked to harassment, bullying and even violence’ (ringrose et al., 2012, p. 7). the report concludes with recommendations for future research with stakeholders including schools, parents, internet service providers, teachers and child welfare professionals. however, the study does not provide any recommendations given directly to children and young people, thus implying that they are unable to inform decision-making or policymaking around issues which directly impact upon their everyday lives. this niche between education and research, challenge and opportunity, imaginary and real, combined with a young people–centred approach, provides the starting position for the research project presented in this paper. the paper discusses the background and findings from a pilot research project on sexting undertaken with students (aged 13-14) from a west midlands school in the uk during spring 2015. the project explores young people’s views on sexting and what they believe other young people should know about it. reflecting the above considerations, the research does not assume any specific issues around sexting, but rather asks the young people about their perceptions of sexting; the positive and negative connotations of the practice; if and how the technology informs and enables practice; where problems – if any – lie; how they would respond if an image was inadvertently in the public domain and what they would do if they were given the opportunity to provide peer-to-peer and child-to-carer advice on the topic. the data will be collected first via small group interviews with four participants in each (split into groups of girls and boys) to enable a frank discussion on sexting and its perceived consequences. participatory methods such as the kj technique (scupin, 1997) will be used for identifying group opinions and consensus. following this, another round of interviews will be held to identify suitable methods of peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, aimed at developing an educational tool for peers, educational staff and child welfare professionals, thereby framing the work as co-creative and providing those that practice sexting with a forum to safely discuss practices with others. the researchers attached to the project have backgrounds in media studies, medical anthropology, education and sociology. the work also seeks to address some of the recognised problems (lounsbury, 2011) with current research on sexting, including the tendency to sample too widely (11-18 years); the lack of consideration of (particularly girls’) consensual sexting as a form of media production so that the opportunities of this form of social media may be explored and not just risks (hasinoff, 2012), and the lack of attention to ethnicity and socio-economic status in the creation of context for the practice of sexting (phippen, 2009). ultimately, the project will seek to broaden debates around the validity of current advice to young people in the area of sexting and related sexual health and media usage considerations. barbieri, a. (2009) ‘you don’t know what sexting is?’ the guardian, available at http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/aug/07/sexting-teenagers-mobile-phones accessed 2nd december 2014 boyd, d. (2014). it's complicated: the social lives of networked teens. yale university press. cosslett, r.l. (2013) ‘a grown-up's guide to sexting (or, why you should stop worrying about what your teenagers get up to online)’ the guardian available at http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/18/grown-ups-guide-to-sexting accessed 2nd december 2014 freire, p. (1970) pedagogy of the oppressed. herder & herder, new york hasinoff, a. a. (2012). sexting as media production: rethinking social media and sexuality. new media & society, 1461444812459171. judge, a. m. (2012). “sexting” among us adolescents: psychological and legal perspectives. harvard review of psychiatry, 20(2), 86-96. lounsbury, k., mitchell, k. j., & finkelhor, d. (2011). the true prevalence of “sexting”. crimes against children research center, 1-9. phippen, a. (2009). sharing personal images and videos among young people.south west grid for learning & university of plymouth, uk. retrieved june, 16, 2010. ringrose, j., harvey, l., gill, r. and livingstone, s. (2012) ‘a qualitative study of children, young people and ‘sexting’ london: nspcc ringrose, j., harvey, l., gill, r. and livingstone, s. (2013) ‘teen girls, sexual double standards and ‘sexting’: gendered value in digital image exchange’ feminist theory 14: 305 roberts, d. foehr, u.g., rideout, v. (2005) ‘generation m: media in the lives of 8-18 year-olds’ california: kaiser family foundation salter, m., crofts, t., & lee, m. (2013). beyond criminalisation and responsibilisation: sexting, gender and young people. current issues in criminal justice, 24(3), 301-316. scupin, r. (1997). the kj method: a technique for analyzing data derived from japanese ethnology. human organization, 56(2), 233-237. wiseman, e. (2012) ‘the joy of texting’ the guardian available at http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/jul/08/eva-wiseman-sexting-messageadults accessed 2nd december 2014 wolak, j., & finkelhor, d. (2011). sexting: a typology. in crimes against children research. microsoft word ir16-final_sb.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 online peer support in cyberbullying: investigating online fora of youth helpline organisations sara bastiaensens university of antwerp heidi vandebosch university of antwerp karolien poels university of antwerp katrien van cleemput university of antwerp ann desmet ghent university ilse de bourdeaudhuij ghent university research aim: investigating online social support with regard to cyberbullying cyberbullying is a pervasive problem with adolescents. between 2010 and 2014, european youth have reported an increase in cyberbullying victimization from 7 to 12 % (eu kids online, 2014; mascheroni & cuman, 2014). in order to prevent or diminish the mental health problems associated with cyberbullying, victims of cyberbullying can use several strategies or coping styles (carver & connor-smith, 2010; cox & ferguson, 1991; holahan, moos, & schaefer, 1996; steptoe, 1991). research on (cyber)bullying has shown that seeking social support from peers and adults is a widely used coping strategy by cyberbullying victims (livingstone, haddon, görzig, & olafsson, 2011) and is an effective strategy for victims to make themselves feel better, to lower depressive symptoms, and to stimulate constructive behavioral and psychological adjustment (hunter, boyle, & warden, 2004; machmutow, perren, sticca, & alsaker, 2012; matsunaga, 2011). as cyberbullying victims can perceive various barriers for seeking social support in their face-to-face network (e.g. baas, de jong, & drossaert, 2013; hoff & mitchell, 2009; jacobs, goossens, dehue, völlink, & lechner, 2015), they can go online to seek for suggested citation (apa): bastiaensens, a., vandebosch, h., poels, k., van cleemput, k., desmet, a., & de bourdeaudhuij, i. (2015, october 21-24) commercial-free tv?: examining the commodity flow of netflix. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. social support (walther & boyd, 2002), for instance in online support groups (white & dorman, 2001). in this ‘netnographic’ (kozinets, 2002) study, we investigated online fora discussions about cyberbullying within two online support group fora of youth helpline organizations, examining patterns of social support according to the social support framework by tardy (1985). this framework not only helps distinguish between different types of social support (house, 1981 in tardy, 1985), it also takes into account reciprocal support seeking and providing in a network, evaluations of social support in terms of helpfulness, and comparisons of social support sought or provided with the realm of available social support (tardy, 1985). method and sample we collected messages on cyberbullying from the bullying sections of the online discussion fora of two youth helpline organizations: one in belgium and one in the netherlands. these organizations were selected because they are both involved in an international organization of youth helplines, because they operate in the same language, and because they have an online forum with a specified section on bullying, where youth can exchange information and support each other. both online fora are freely accessible and the messages are visible without any registration. following the aoir guidelines for internet research (markham & buchanan, 2012), we first gained permission from the organizations to collect the fora messages. however, as the online fora were publicly accessible, which was also explicitly mentioned in the online fora’s terms of use, we did not ask the members for consent. we also feared that asking for consent would be problematic, as it would require online fora providers to reveal the members’ identities. the online fora providers themselves had already taken several measures to protect their members’ privacy. members were not allowed to reveal any personal information that could lead to identification. nicknames, member profiles and/or messages were screened for such information and adapted or removed when necessary. these online fora’s specific sections on bullying contained 449 and 488 threads. two researchers independently reviewed a random sample of 100 threads of each bullying section (approximately 21 % of the corpus), scoring the initial messages on two inclusion criteria: whether the messages were posted by bullying victims and whether they contained at least one element of communication technology in the bullying story. the researchers initially disagreed upon three messages and they engaged in a discussion to reach a consensus about inclusion or exclusion. one of the researchers then coded the initial messages of the rest of the threads according to the proposed inclusion criteria and the results of the final discussion. as such, 62 threads were retained, which amounts to 6,6 % of the total number of threads within the bullying sections. within each thread, the responses of online fora members and the victims’ themselves were collected. moderators’ social support responses collected as well, but moderator interventions outlining a breach of the forum rules were excluded. following this process, we collected 62 initial victim messages, 30 moderator responses, 360 responses of other online fora members and 46 responses of the victims themselves. for the purpose of this study, we performed thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2006) on the initial victim messages, responses of online fora members, and victim responses (468 messages analyzed in total) to identify patterns of adolescents’ social support seeking and providing with regard to cyberbullying. we used tardy’s (1985) social support framework to identify themes, but we also searched for themes within the data that could be added to the framework. summary of results in accordance with tardy’s (1985) framework of social support, we found these online fora of youth helpline organizations to be networks of social support seeking and providing with regard to cyberbullying, with victims and online fora members taking up different changing roles. within the messages threads, victims first told their stories about being bullied, in which cyberbullying and traditional bullying often coincided. subsequently, they asked for social support either directly (in the form of questions) or indirectly (wishes). social support requests were general (general request for help/support) or included more specific support-related questions, asking for information/appraisal with regard to coping strategies, specific (cyber)bullying situations and the actors involved. as a response to victims’ stories and social support requests, online fora members used various types of social support communication, as defined by house (1981 in tardy, 1985). members mostly provided informational support on coping strategies and appraisal support on (cyber)bullying. appraisal support included general appraisals of (cyber)bullying as a phenomenon, appraisals of the specific (cyber)bullying situation at hand, and appraisals of the main actors involved. emotional support was provided by, for instance, recognizing victims’ emotions, expressing empathy and affection, and by making victims feel part of and supported by a meaningful network (subtype “network support”). complementary to their messages of social support, online fora members provided information on and appraisal of their support intentions and capacities, guiding victims to make a positive evaluation of their social support attempts. when victims afterwards provided their positive feedback on members’ support attempts, this could be considered as a form of reciprocated social support (tardy, 1985). the affordances of the online fora not only allowed victims to provide feedback, they also gave victims and members the opportunity to engage in interactive discussions, generating nuanced or shared understandings of (cyber)bullying and how to deal with it. some online fora members told their own stories about being (cyber)bullied. these served either to provide social support to victims, or to seek social support from online fora members themselves, changing roles from support provider to support seeker within the social support network (tardy, 1985). theoretical and practical implications by using tardy’s (1985) social support framework, this study aims to add to previous qualitative studies on online support groups for young people (giesbers, verdonck-de leeuw, van zuuren, kleverlaan, & van der linden, 2010; henderson, rosser, keogh, & eccleston, 2012; love et al., 2012; smithson et al., 2011) that lacked a clear conceptual framework covering all facets of social support seeking and providing. furthermore, this study aimed to contribute to existing cyberbullying research that was limited to identifying social support providers (dehue, bolman, & völlink, 2008; e.g. jacobs et al., 2015; livingstone et al., 2011), by investigating the content of adolescents’ (online) social support with regard to cyberbullying: what kind of social support is sought or provided and how is social support provided (what do adolescents exactly say to cyberbullying victims). findings from this study can be used to inform cyberbullying intervention and prevention programs. while interventions aimed at adolescent victims could adapt their social support communication to victims’ preferences and to the content of adolescents’ (online) social support, bystander interventions could inform adolescent bystanders on how they can formulate social support communication towards cyberbullying victims and on which coping strategies they can recommend to these victims. references baas, n., de jong, m. d. t., & drossaert, c. h. c. (2013). children’s perspectives on cyberbullying: insights based on participatory research. cyberpsychology, behavior, and social networking, 16(4), 248–253. http://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2012.0079 braun, v., & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77–101. http://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa carver, c. s., & connor-smith, j. (2010). personality and coping. annual review of psychology, 61(1), 679–704. http://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.093008.100352 cox, t., & ferguson, e. (1991). individual differences, stress and coping. in c. l. cooper & r. payne, personality and stress: individual differences in the stress process (pp. 7–32). chichester: jon wiley and sons, ltd. dehue, f., bolman, c., & völlink, t. (2008). cyberbullying: youngsters’ experiences and parental perception. cyberpsychology & behavior, 11(2), 217–223. eu kids online. (2014). eu kids online: findings, methods, recommendations. deliverable d1.6, london, uk. retrieved from http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/60512/1/__lse.ac.uk_storage_library_secondary_libfile_share d_repository_content_eu%20kids%20online_eu%20kids_interactive_final_report_2 014.pdf giesbers, j., verdonck-de leeuw, i. m., van zuuren, f. j., kleverlaan, n., & van der linden, m. h. (2010). coping with parental cancer: web-based peer support in children. psycho-oncology, 19(8), 887–892. http://doi.org/10.1002/pon.1636 henderson, e. m., rosser, b. a., keogh, e., & eccleston, c. (2012). internet sites offering adolescents help with headache, abdominal pain, and dysmenorrhoea: a description of content, quality, and peer interactions. journal of pediatric psychology, 37(3), 262–271. http://doi.org/10.1093/jpepsy/jsr100 hoff, d. l., & mitchell, s. n. (2009). cyberbullying: causes, effects, and remedies. journal of educational administration, 47(5), 652–665. holahan, c. j., moos, r. h., & schaefer, j. a. (1996). coping, stress resistance, and growth: conceptualizing adaptive functioning. in m. zeidner & n. endler (eds.), handbook of coping. theory, research, applications. new york: jon wiley and sons, inc. hunter, s. c., boyle, j. m. e., & warden, d. (2004). help seeking amongst child and adolescent victims of peer-aggression and bullying: the influence of school-stage, gender, victimization, appraisal, and emotion. british journal of educational psychology, 74(3), 375–390. http://doi.org/10.1348/0007099041552378 jacobs, n. c. l., goossens, l., dehue, f., völlink, t., & lechner, l. (2015). dutch cyberbullying victims’ experiences, perceptions, attitudes and motivations related to (coping with) cyberbullying: focus group interviews. societies, 5(1), 43–64. kozinets, r. v. (2002). the field behind the screen: using netnography for marketing research in online communities. journal of marketing research (jmr), 39(1), 61–72. livingstone, s., haddon, l., görzig, a., & olafsson, k. (2011). risks and safety on the internet: the perspective of european children: full findings and policy implications from the eu kids online survey of 9-16 year olds and their parents in 25 countries. (eu kids online, deliverable d4). london, uk: eu kids online network. retrieved from http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/33731/1/risks%20and%20safety%20on%20the%20internet%28l sero%29.pdf love, b., crook, b., thompson, c. m., zaitchik, s., knapp, j., lefebvre, l., … rechis, r. (2012). exploring psychosocial support online: a content analysis of messages in an adolescent and young adult cancer community. cyberpsychology, behavior & social networking, 15(10). http://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2012.0138 machmutow, k., perren, s., sticca, f., & alsaker, f. d. (2012). peer victimization and depressive symptoms: can specific coping strategies buffer the negative impact of cybervictimization? emotional and behavioral difficulties, 17(3-4), 403–420. http://doi.org/10.1080/13632752.2012.704310 markham, a., & buchanan, e. (2012). ethical decision-making and internet research. recommendations from the aoir ethics working committee (version 2.0). retrieved from http://www.aoir.org/reports/ethics2.pdf mascheroni, g., & cuman, a. (2014). net children go mobile final report (with country fact sheets). deliverables d6.4 & d5.2. milan, italy: educatt. retrieved from http://www.netchildrengomobile.eu/reports/ matsunaga, m. (2011). underlying circuits of social support for bullied victims: an appraisal-based perspective on supportive communication and post-bullying adjustment. human communication research, 37(2), 174–206. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.2010.01398.x smithson, j., sharkey, s., hewis, e., jones, r., emmens, t., ford, t., & owens, c. (2011). problem presentation and responses on an online forum for young people who self-harm. discourse studies, 13(4), 487–501. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461445611403356 steptoe, a. (1991). psychological coping, individual differences and physiological stress responses. in c. l. cooper & r. payne, personality and stress: individual differences in the stress process (pp. 205–234). chichester: jon wiley and sons, ltd. tardy, c. h. (1985). social support measurement. american journal of community psychology, 13(2), 187–202. http://doi.org/10.1007/bf00905728 walther, j. b., & boyd, s. (2002). attraction to computer-mediated social support. in c. a. lin & d. atkin (eds.), communication technology and society: audience adoption and uses (pp. 153–188). cresskill, nj: hampton press. retrieved from https://www.msu.edu/~jwalther/docs/support.html white, m., & dorman, s. m. (2001). receiving social support online: implications for health education. health education research, 16(6), 693–707. http://doi.org/10.1093/her/16.6.693 microsoft word allen-robertson-a material descent into digital media-a material descent into digital media.doc selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 a material descent into digital media dr. james allen-robertson university of essex when discussing contemporary media forms, often referred to as digital media, it is often the case we come unstuck and self-consciously aware of the fuzzy inaccuracies of the terms and dichotomies we implement. previous media types have been framed as ‘old’, ‘physical’, ‘analogue’, clunky and solid. the language employed for contemporary media often highlights an opposing ethereality and cleanliness with terms like ‘new’, ‘digital’, ‘informational’, and ‘cloud’ developing a clear division from those media forms that came before. these inaccuracies in language inform our understanding of the nature of these technologies and how they shape and are shaped by society. our focus on the social layer of digital media, its effects and uses, has encouraged definitions that focus too much on its implications. as a result, our framing overlooks fundamental material realities that underpin those same implications. with digital media swiftly supplanting other media forms, it is imperative that we ‘descend’, historically and materially, into digital media in order to better understand it. this paper historically and materially situates the hard disk drive as one material foundation for contemporary digital media. by ’descending’ into the hard disk drive the paper demonstrates how its operation plays a role in the affordances of digital media and how these affordances are prefigured in older media technologies. the paper hopes to demonstrate that, given the right conceptual frameworks, we can learn from a radically material approach to media technologies whilst retaining recognition of the social. hutchby’s (2001) ‘affordances’ provides us with a route by which the physicality of media artefacts can be accounted for, whilst reconciling constructivism with the realities of material things. in contrast to medium theory or sts that tend to stress media effects or materiality’s dependence on the social, the concept of affordances offers a more nuanced approach that better suits the aims of this study. in short, affordances refer to the spectrum of possible ways in which an artefact may be utilised, made possible by its material realities. unlike ‘capacities’, affordances do not determine an artefact’s use but frame the possibilities of action a user may take. use and consequence of an artefact is not pre-determined, but the realities of its construction will support and constrain those possibilities. no matter how hard one tries, a slot machine cannot be used as a telephone. equally, the material foundations of our digital media also constrain and support our possibilities of action. suggested citation (apa): allen-robertson, j. (2015, october 21-24) a material descent into digital media. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. this paper is inspired by work in the emerging field of media archaeology, particularly its utilisation of foucault’s (2002) genealogical method. this approach, which seeks to understand why the present is as it is, highlights ‘descent’ as a key conceptual tool to study media. in this context ‘descent’ refers to a descent back into history to uncover how a medium developed, focusing less on the myth of progress and inevitability and more on possibility, rupture and contingency. however, ‘descent’ also refers to descending down into the machine itself, to unpick the realities of its operation (parikka 2012). this approach is crucial to a project that seeks to provide insights into the material foundation that shapes a machine’s affordances and to understand why present media is as it is. one result of this approach in practice is kirschenbaum’s (2008) grammatology of the hard disk drive. this grammatology illuminates both the hard drive’s ‘forensic’ physical materiality, and its ‘formal’ logical method of encoding and organising information. this project utilises that forensic and formal distinction to interrogate how the interplay between material and organisational structure supported the affordances of prior media forms. whilst this paper draws on a definition of materiality that foregrounds the physicality of media artefacts, it does not necessarily seek to supplant the social. materiality has an uneasy role within the fields of science and technology studies and communication studies which this paper draws from as supporting frameworks. the sts social constructivist approach to innovation arose in response to technological determinism, prioritising social shaping and framing materiality as a consequence of the social. though many sts studies took interest in the material aspects of the technologies studied, materiality’s role in shaping the social was often cautiously avoided (boczkowski and lievrouw 2008). in communication studies the role of material attributes of media technology have been foregrounded in the field of medium theory most commonly associated with innis (1951), mcluhan (1964) and the toronto school. for these theorists technology was an agent of change, however their work predominantly focused on effects, overlooking technology’s development and the intricacies of its operation. for peters (1999), communications has long resisted the materiality of media due to an entrenched belief in the promise of unmediated knowledge, what we might understand as an immaterial non-mediating medium. bolter and grusin (2000) echo peters arguing that the reexpression of old media in new indicates a striving for an end to the perceptible mediation of media. in contemporary digital media we may have found a medium that is able to remediate all prior forms, and we are increasingly seduced by its immediacy and apparent immateriality. interestingly our awareness of other media’s material foundations often returns when faced with its elimination. previous mediators such as books, vinyl and newspapers faded from view in their role as conduits of ‘content’. now our awareness of their material form returns as their affordances are examined in light of a different digital mediator. however this new mediator has also faded from view, helped along by software and interfaces that obfuscate the materiality they are wholly reliant upon. utilising technical manuals contemporary to the technologies themselves, and historical archives, this paper ‘descends’ into the hard disk drive and a selection of prior media forms that helped to define it. the previous technologies: the phonograph and gramophone; magnetic wire and tape; and optical media, share a common lineage as mediators of audio. however their histories also demonstrate repetition in the mechanics of their operation, illuminate the role of both formal and forensic materiality in their affordances, and all prefigure aspects of the hard disk drive’s operation. together they make up a selective ‘genealogy’ of the hard disk which supports a ‘descent’ into the realities of one of digital media’s key foundations, a foundation that should be recognised if we intend to truly understand what digital media is, and why digital media is as it is. references boczkowski, pj and la lievrouw (2008). bridging sts and communication studies. the handbook of science and technology studies. e. j. hackett et al. cambridge, mass., mit press. bolter, jd and ra grusin (2000). remediation : understanding new media. cambridge, mass., mit press. foucault, m (2002). archaeology of knowledge. london ; new york, routledge. hutchby, i (2001). "technologies, texts and affordances." sociology 35(2): 441-456. innis, ha (1951). the bias of communication. toronto, university of toronto press. kirschenbaum, mg (2008). mechanisms : new media and the forensic imagination. cambridge, mass., mit press. mcluhan, m (1964). understanding media : the extensions of man. london, routledge & k. paul. parikka, j (2012). what is media archaeology? cambridge, uk, polity press. peters, jd (1999). speaking into the air : a history of the idea of communication. chicago, university of chicago press. microsoft word aoir14-short-paper-submission-final.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 personal digital storyworlds, narrative architects, and gmail jason zalinger university of south florida usa zalinger@usf.edu abstract new technologies change the recording of our life stories. they challenge us to make a coherent picture from so many digital puzzle pieces. online, we have been given a rich variety of what i call “personal digital storyworlds” and seemingly unlimited space to collect personal data. however, we have not given users the conceptual and practical tools to help people create cohesive, meaningful life narratives out of all these digital fragments. bottom line: we are very good at capturing data, but we are not good, yet, at helping people make sense of all these digital narrative elements. this paper asks the audience to reimagine gmail as a storyworld. the goal is to provide new insights that advance academic conversations about personal digital archives, which will become an essential element of web 3.0. using data from participant interviews, this paper makes the case that personal digital archives produce meaningful, conflicting emotions in people, and they provide insight into how technology shapes how we understand ourselves. keywords narrative; gmail; stories; design; archives introduction we have all become digital storytellers, historians, editors, curators, co-authors, and autobiographers of our own lives. we are all quick-and-easy photographers and digital memory collectors. we are all now writers—we just don’t realize it. thus, it is critical to examine and articulate how intimate communication technology (ict?) is changing one of the oldest, most important human communication practices because the stories we absorb shape our realities. this is a critical time because never before has the historical record been so complete. people that, arguably, would never write daily messages now transmit digital volumes each week. critically, these messages often find themselves archived. facebook and google have become what i call personal digital storyworlds. within our personal digital storyworlds, we are building and storing the various audio, visual, and textual elements that make up our life stories—and at any time—the blueprints (code) may change. the “software” that makes up the private journal in my pocket (paper) never changes, but, for example, gmail's interface changes constantly. gmail is one of the most powerful current examples of the new ways our technology allows us to write, record, and examine life stories. using two examples from ethnographic interviews, this paper argues that gmail has a narrative architecture, which supports our personal digital storyworlds gmail’s “narrative architecture” writing about video games, renowned media studies scholar henry jenkins wrote: in this short piece, i hope to offer a middle ground position between the ludologists and the narratologists, one that respects the particularity of this emerging medium— examining games less as stories than as spaces ripe with narrative possibility. (jenkins, 2004, p. 119) jenkins conceptualization of game space as an environment rich with narrative possibility is, i argue, the same for gmail. gmail is not simply an email/messaging system. gmail is a giant narrative system “ripe with narrative possibility.” jenkins also argued that game designers were “narrative architects” selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 crafting storyworlds. a storyworld suggests a narrative world “that accumulates, growing larger and more complex as we absorb the narrative” (abbott, 2008, p. 20). i believe that the gmail design team are also narrative architects, even though they might not realize it. a label named “forget” in order to illustrate the idea that gmail is ripe with narrative possibilities, that it is a personal digital storyworld, these next two sections briefly explore ethnographic interviews i conducted with two participants. winston is male, caucasian, thirty-nine, and a phd student. his gmail archive contains 16,417 messages. winston showed me an ironic label in his gmail called “forget,” which he said is for “the stuff i’m supposed to forget but can’t anyway.” he went on to say it is for “stuff i just didn’t want to think about anymore but decided i needed to archive anyway. isn’t that a curious distinction?” (winston, personal communication, 2010). he said that almost everything in “forget” is personal. i told winston i thought it was interesting that on the one hand, he wanted to forget, but on the other hand, he actually made a label to ensure he would never forget. “i know,” he said, “isn’t that interesting?” it is interesting, and it should be seen as a huge opportunity for gmail’s narrative architects: how can we design for the paradox of memory, the desire to remember and forget simultaneously? viktor mayer-schönberger (2009) argued that there has been a “fundamental shift to the default of remembering” and that too much remembering may have “terrible consequences” (p. 11). winston seems to be struggling with the default of remembering, too. however, winston indicates that the need to throw away is equally as powerful as the desire to remember. i argue that winston’s “forget” label is rich with self-reflective potential. furthermore, gmail’s narrative architects can design ways to help winston understand the life narrative sitting in his archives. for example, should the system ask users if a particular label or message is personal, very personal or something-you-want-to-forget-but-can’t? should the system gently prompt users every year or so to look back at these messages and see if they feel differently about them? this could be a potential way to help users reflect on how they may have changed in the three years since the message was archived. winston told me that the ever-increasing storage provided by gmail made him “feel free” to create this label. he says, “why not? you want to forget it, but what if someday somebody comes back to me,” and asks him something, and he cannot remember, he says “i want to go back and look.” winston then allowed me to explore his “forget” label with him. he clicked on it and found 63 messages that he wanted to forget but not forget. some of those messages included multiple labels besides “forget,” such as “personal,” “health” or the name of his ex-wife. in other labels, winston found former students, gaming partners and a woman who found him online and knew him when they were in fourth grade in another country. winston began to go through his various labels. in each label he would find another contact, another message. and each message sparked a narrative of some particular time in his life. i did not ask him to tell me these stories. often, he did not even need to read the message: simply looking at the names and dates were enough to prompt a story. clicking through, exploring his archives, seeing an old message was enough of a prompt to spark a narrative about his life at that particular time. research suggests the instinctive ways humans tell stories around images or even graphs (abbott, 2008; viégas, golder & donath, 2006; viégas, boyd, nguyen, potter, & donath, 2004). it was almost as if each message were a textual photograph, and winston and i were looking at an old photo album of text. a folder called “letters” sara is thirty-seven, caucasian, and has a phd. she, too, has a folder similar to winston’s, although, it was buried in her old yahoo! account, and she had forgotten about it. her gmail and yahoo! accounts contain a total of 40,014 messages. toward the end of our im interview, she suddenly stopped and said: i just glanced through a few of my yahoo folders and i would also say that the majority of emails that i've saved are painful emails. i have a folder called “letters” that i must have put together at some point and the majority of things in there are from breakups. (sara, personal communication, 2010). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 i asked her why she saved all of these “painful” emails. i said, “what do they mean to you?” she told me: honestly i don’t know the logic anymore. they were all related to dating, and i think what i said before about “proof of concept”1 probably went both ways. i think i might have saved some of the painful emails because i wanted to show myself later, "wow was this guy a dick." maybe also i was thinking like, "well maybe this will work out." also it gave me texts to analyze…i just read and re-read until i guess i hit the point that it either stopped hurting, or i stopped looking. (sara, personal communication, 2010). sara uncovered buried digital treasure. an entire folder filled with emails that, like winston, she saved because they have great personal value; they offer rich narrative insight into her life at that time. these “letters” illustrate the tumult of searching for some connection, for love, for reassurance. for both sara and winston these archived messages are more than mere data. they are a digital transcript of their lives. they are digital proof-of-existence. it’s not just a bunch of email. it is, literally, their lives, their storyworlds. and it is searchable. they can look back, and rather than having “terrible consequences,” the narrative architecture that supports their storyworlds gives them a chance to reevaluate, to easily go back to the past, reflect, and, hopefully, learn more about themselves and their relationships. conclusion what can you learn about yourself from exploring your personal digital storyworld? and how can narrative architects help users like winston and sara explore and make narrative sense of their storyworlds? we are collecting and archiving more personal digital data than ever, and now is the time to start asking these questions and using our digital storyworlds to help us learn about ourselves, our relationships, our life stories, and the world we live in. there is self-knowledge in our personal digital storyworlds. with new ways of imagining our personal digital archives and new tools we can begin to harness that knowledge and learn more about ourselves. references abbott, h. p. (2008). the cambridge introduction to narrative (2nd ed.). cambridge university press. jenkins, h. (2004). game design as narrative architecture. in n. wardrip-fruin & p. harrigan (eds.), first person: new media as story, performance, and game (illustrated edition., pp. 118–130). mit press. mayer-schönberger, v. (2009). delete: the virtue of forgetting in the digital age. princeton university press. viegas, f. b., boyd, d., nguyen, d. h., potter, j., & donath, j. (2004). digital artifacts for remembering and storytelling: posthistory and social network fragments. in proceedings of the 37th annual hawaii international conference on system sciences. doi:10.1109/hicss.2004.1265287 viégas, f. b., golder, s., & donath, j. (2006). visualizing email content: portraying relationships from conversational histories. in proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 979–988). acm. doi:10.1145/1124772.1124919 license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. (authors may use any license they prefer, or none at all.) 1 sara means “proof-of-concept” in that it is proof to her that someone did, in fact, like her at some point. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 not  myself:  anti-­surviellance  aesthetics  and  the  chin-­ down  selfie     samantha  shorey     university  of  washington       in  on  photography,  susan  sontag  (1977)  writes,  “photographs  furnish  evidence”  (p.  5).   she  describes  them  as  “incriminating”  and  as  tools  of  surveillance  —  observations  tied   to  the  mechanical  workings  of  cameras.  a  photograph  is  made  possible  by  the  material   presence  of  the  objects  pictured.  they  existed  in  that  time,  in  that  place,  in  front  of  a   camera.  yet,  sontag  goes  on  to  write,  “a  camera’s  rendering  of  reality  must  always  hide   more  than  it  discloses”  (p.  123).  there  are  limits  to  what  photography  can  tell  us  or   teach  us,  for  there  will  always  be  something  —  a  whole  life  even  —  outside  the  frame.         for  users  of  the  platform  tumblr,  these  limits  become  tools  for  reimagining  online   spaces  of  privacy  and  self  disclosure.  advancing  camera  technology  and  the   inescapability  of  social  media  have  given  us  new  (or  perhaps  transformed)  modes  of   representation,  and  an  increased  expectancy  for  one  to  do  so.  this  is  perhaps  most   visually  evident  in  the  recent  proliferation  of  self  portrait  photos:  the  selfie.  yet,  as  digital   photography  provides  tools  for  new  forms  of  exposure,  the  users  of  this  technology  also   create  new  kinds  of  privacy.       the  proposed  paper  looks  to  a  specific  selfie  sub-­genre,  the  chin-­down  selfie,  and  asks   what  photos  taken  in  this  way  can  tell  us  about  the  conflicting,  often  ambivalent,   relationship  digital  media  users  have  with  self  disclosure.  chin-­down  selfies,  like   standard  selfies,  are  self-­portrait  photographs,  usually  taken  with  a  web-­cam  or   cellphone.  instead  of  documenting  a  person’s  face  or  full-­body  though,  “chin-­down”   selfies  capture  only  the  lower  portion  of  the  face  or  no  face  at  all.    this  sub-­genre  has   been  a  way  for  me  to  theorize  the  interstices  of  privacy  and  photography  –  specifically   on  the  microblogging  platform,  tumblr.         the  selfie  is  theorized  here  as  a  social  document,  demonstrative  of  broader  cultural   concerns  over  how  (and  to  whom)  we  represent  ourselves.  in  dialogue  with  literature  on   photography  and  surveillance,  the  chin-­down  selfie  becomes  a  text  for  asking  questions   about  young  people,  their  internet  use,  and  the  broader  concerns  for  personal  privacy  in   the  digital  era.       suggested  citation  (apa):  shorey,  s.  (2015,  october  21-­24).  not  myself:  anti-­surveillance  aesthetics   and  the  chin  down  selfie.  paper  presented  at  internet  research  16:  the  16th  annual  meeting  of  the   association  of  internet  researchers.  phoenix,  az,  usa:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.   this  project  is  based,  in  part,  on  a  larger  qualitative  research  project  specifically  focused   on  college-­aged  women  and  their  use  of  the  platform  tumblr.  in  the  spring  of  2014,  i   held  a  series  of  focus  groups  and  focus  groups  with  students  in  five  college  consortium   in  western  massachusetts.  focus  groups  involved  three  to  five  women,  with  nineteen   participants  in  total.  at  the  end  of  each  interview  and  focus  group,  participants  provided   me  with  their  tumblr  url.    these  were  also  used  as  primary  sources.    while  the   discussions  of  anonymity  and  privacy  found  in  this  paper  are  derived  from  in-­person   interactions,  the  discussion  of  selfies  is  drawn  primarily  from  a  year  long  period  of   observation  during  the  completion  of  this  project.    i  viewed  participants’  tumblr  pages   on  a  daily  basis  throughout  this  time,  and  also  spent  significant  time  observing  the  vast   number  of  tumblr  blogs  in  participants  extended  networks.         these  photos  were  analyzed  using  a  visual  cultural  studies  framework  —  looking  at   selfies  beyond  the  stylistic,  personal  choices  of  a  single  user  and  as  part  of  the  social.  i   argue  that  the  chin-­down  selfie  is  an  embodiment  of  a  larger  structure  of  feeling     (williams,  1977),  making  apparent  a  cultural  concern  over  who  is  watching  and  at  what   consequence.  like  written  content  and  pseudonyms,  visual  aspects  of  tumblr   demonstrate  the  tension  between  wanting  to  share  personal  information  but  not  wanting   to  permanently  tie  that  information  to  one’s  offline  identity.       what  can  broadly  be  termed  “privacy”  was  the  single  most  significant  reason  that   college-­age  women  chose  to  use  tumblr.  none  of  the  focus  group  participants  identified   themselves  with  their  first  and  last  name.  rather  than  tying  them  to  their  offline  social   networks,  the  tumblr  platform  provided  a  space  that  is  both  away  from  the  watchful  eye   of  their  parents  and  potentially  judgmental  acquaintances  and  couldn’t  be  located  by   future  employers  or  partners.       more  relevantly,  focus  group  participants  commonly  created  what  quian  and  scott     (2007)  term  “visual  anonymity”  (p.  1430)  they  used  icon  pictures  that  may  very  well  be   of  them,  but  don’t  make  them  immediately  identifiable  should  the  user  be  seen  in  an   offline  context.  although  most  users  didn’t  expressly  cite  privacy  concerns  as  their   reason  for  choosing  those  photos,  the  prevalence  of  images  used  in  this  way  indicates   that  there  is  a  culture  of  anonymity  on  tumblr.  the  choice  to  obscure  personal   information  doesn’t  challenge  platform  norms  the  way  it  would  on  a  site  like  facebook,   which  through  it’s  “real  name  only”  policies  insists  on  a  connection  to  one’s  complete,   offline,  identity.  being  able  to  withhold  identity  information  emboldened  users  to  share   about  themselves  in  other  ways,  talking  about  their  emotions  or  beliefs  more  openly  and   intimately  than  they  did  on  alternate  social  networking  sites.         yet,  the  desire  for  anonymity  results  in  an  interesting  hurdle  for  selfies,  which  are   common  feature  of  tumblr’s  visual  vocabulary.    widely  held  assumptions  about   photography  purport  that  cameras  represent  one  accurately  and  irrevocably  (tagg,   1999).  photographs  are  thought  to  be  reproductions,  rather  than  representations  in   which  the  messy  nature  of  subjectivity  can  obscure  reality  (cartwright  &  sturken,  2001).   furthermore,  the  conventions  of  snapshot  photography  place  great  emphasis  on  the   eyes  and  face  (chalfen,  1987,  p.  42).  so,  how  does  one  take  a  selfie  without  identifying   the  self  who’s  pictured?     chin-­down  selfies  are  social  photographs  that  reflect  digital  youth’s  desire  to  document   themselves  and  their  anxiety  about  what  the  consequences  of  that  might  be.  these   photos  are  marked  by  the  use  of  modern  technologies  –  namely  webcams  but,  more   broadly,  personal  computers  and  cell  phones.  and,  they  are  created  with  a  reflexive   knowledge  of  the  life  they  take  on  once  they  are  uploaded  to  an  internet  platform.  chin-­ down  selfies  are  the  product  of  privacy  strategies,  born  out  of  an  online  culture  acutely   aware  of  being  watched.     references       cartwright,  l.,  &  sturken,  m.  (2001).  practices  of  looking:  an  introduction  to  visual   culture.  oxford    ;;  new  york:  oxford  university  press.       chalfen,  r.  (1987).  snapshot  versions  of  life.  bowling  green,  oh:  bowling  green   university  popular  press       quian,  h.  &  scott,  c.  (2007).  anonymity  and  self-­disclosure  on  weblogs.  journal  of   computer-­mediated  communication,  12,  1428  -­  1451.       sontag,  s.  (1977).  in  plato’s  cave.  in  on  photography.  new  york,  ny:  farrar,  straus   and  giroux.       tagg,  j.  (1999).  evidence,  truth  and  order:  a  means  of  surveillance.  in  j.  evans  and  s.   hall  (eds.),  visual  culture:  the  reader.  thousand  oaks,  ca:  sage  publications.       williams,  r.  (1977).  “structures  of  feeling.”  marxism  and  literature.  new  york,  ny:     oxford  press.   microsoft word yale_commercial free tv.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 commercial-free tv?: examining the commodity flow of netflix camille yale lake forest college introduction television is changing, or so we’re told. people are recording programs and watching them when they want, they’re skipping ads, they’re cutting the cable cord, they’re binge viewing, they’re mobile viewing, they’re multi-screening. it’s all up for grabs. netflix is a player in this tv revolution, and its rallying cry is its modest price and personalized, commercial-free experience. it is true that unlike youtube and hulu, netflix does not require its users to view traditional commercials before streaming videos on their platform. but is it fair to say that netflix is a commercial-free service, separated from the practices and constructs of marketing and consumer culture? in this paper i take on the assertion that internet media services like netflix are challenging the commerciallydriven traditional media model and democratizing media consumption. through mcallister & giglio’s (2004) work on the “commodity flow” of television and andrejevic’s thesis on the “work of being watched,” i argue that netflix and other online streaming services represent a rearticulation of the traditional media system, including an intense commodity orientation and oligopolistic market practices. what is troubling is that netflix is in a very powerful position to construct what we—and particularly children—believe to be commodity (or commodity-free) culture in the new media environment. the company boasts more than 33 million u.s. subscribers, and by some estimates accounts for as much as one-third of internet downloads in north america during the busiest hours of the day (fitzgerald, 2014). given that each subscription likely represents more than one user, the real number of people accessing the service may be more in the range of 60 million. suffice it to say, netflix has our collective attention. but what are they doing with it? new media, new consumption, new democracy? one powerful message we consistently receive is that online media outlets like netflix are fundamentally more democratic than traditional mass media outlets. online media services give subscribers the freedom to choose the media experience they want, rather than forcing them to conform to the advertising and scheduling regimes of traditional mass media. this language is seen over and over again in corporate rhetoric emanating from netflix. for instance, neil hunt, chief product office at netflix, has used the suggested citation (apa): yale, c. (2015, october 21-24) commercial-free tv?: examining the commodity flow of netflix. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. phrase “the tyranny of the grid” to describe the old, primetime tv model. the word tyranny, of course, denotes the activities of oppressive, anti-democratic regimes. in a free market—the cornerstone of a democratic society—a service like netflix is presumably providing much-needed competition for the antiquated media giants like comcast and time warner. this perspective was also reinforced when kevin spacey (2013) invoked the spirit of revolution in his mctaggert lecture given at the edinburgh international television festival, in which he lauded netflix for its commitment to consumer freedom and recognizing “that the audience wants control” (pp.9-10). the reality is that the principles of democracy and free-market capitalism make uncomfortable bedfellows. the kind of consumer choice that neil hunt and kevin spacey argue that netflix provides can only exist when a diverse and competitive market exists. but as robert mcchesney (2013) has argued, the internet has proven fertile ground for monopoly capitalism, with companies like apple, google, microsoft and at&t leading the way. with a market valuation of around $25 billion, netflix may be a small player in the new media market compared to the likes of apple ($483 billion) and google ($382 billion), but they have certainly learned how to monopolize their service niche: netflix carries a 90% share of the subscription vod market. another inconsistency in the “commercial-free” argument made by netflix is in their conceptualization of what constitutes commercial activity. by their measure, commercial television is tv with commercials. but broken down to its most fundamental state, dallas smythe (1977) argued that the nature of commercial media is the commodification of audiences, in which media content is reduced to bait to attract desired audiences to deliver to advertisers. sut jhally (1990) has elaborated on this thesis, arguing that audience labor, or “the work of watching,” is the commodity bought and sold by traditional tv producers and advertisers. and in its latest iteration, andrejevic (2002) applies the idea of the audience commodity to interactive media environments, arguing that the labor of new media audiences has become the exchange of information for content access, or the “work of being watched.” in the case of netflix, subscribers must provide identifying information to create an account, and are encouraged to rank tv shows and movies on the site in order to create a more personalized system of recommendations to help navigate content choices. in summary, through a combination of market domination and audience commodification, netflix has initiated a process of “digital enclosure” (andrejevic, 2002) in which audiences are pushed toward video consumption online, and specifically through gated, “commercial-free” subscription services like theirs. netflix is trying to represent the future of television—choice, freedom, and democracy. but this also means that our media activities are becoming increasingly limited to spaces in which we must submit to data collection activities and surveillance. references andrejevic, m. (2002, june). the work of being watched: interactive media and the exploration of self-disclosure. critical studies in media communication, 19(2), 231-248. chen, b. (2013, june 19). apple and netflix dominate online video. new york times. fitzgerald, d. (2014, may 14). netflix’s share of internet traffic grows. wall street journal. available june 10, 2014 at: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/sb1000142405270230490830457956180248 3718502 jhally, s. (1990). the codes of advertising: fetishism and the political economy of meaning in the consumer society. new york: routledge. mcallister, m & giglio, m. (2005, march). the commodity flow if u.s. children’s television. critical studies in media communication, 22(1), 26-44. mcchesney, r. (2013). digital disconnect: how capitalism is turning the internet against democracy. new york: the new press. smythe, d. (1977). communications: blindspot of western marxism. canadian journal of political and social theory. 1(3). spacey, k. (2013, august 22). james mctaggart memorial lecture. the guardian. available july 1, 2014 at: http://www.theguardian.com/media/interactive/2013/aug/22/kevin-spaceymactaggart-lecture-full-text microsoft word 911-655-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa rethinking resistance: nonparticipation, consumption, and the recruitment of affirmation in internet fandom digital cosplay as consumptive fan labor paul booth depaul university united states of america pbooth@depaul.edu abstract this paper explores the dialogue between fan practices and commercial industries through shifts in technology. it uses henry jenkins’ work on convergence and spreadable media to explore the changing media landscape, and integrates studies of digital fandom, fan cosplay, and fan performance to situate new types of consumptive fan work within contemporary media scholarship. it focuses specifically on the notion of “digital cosplay,” or fans’ use of image-based social media to represent the consumption and the reproduction of media characters through online stores. this paper argues that digital cosplay represents shifts in fan labor and media appropriation. fannish resistance and media appropriation are two sides of the same coin: one feeds the other, just as it too is fed. keywords fandom; cosplay; performance; convergence; digital digital cosplay in contemporary media fandom in a convergence culture, audiences have the ability to interact, change, and play with the media (jenkins 2006). but, importantly, media producers have access to those same technologies, and are making use of them to find new ways of marketing and designing media products for those same active audiences. convergence, after all, is a two-way street, as “both a top-down corporate-drive process and a bottom-up consumer-driven process” (jenkins 2006, p. 18). as convergence becomes more commonplace, both media fans and media producers are finding new ways to interact with media texts. one method is through the spreadable media text: a text that both amateurs and professionals can circulate through multiple channels and avenues (jenkins, ford and green 2013). the cultural boundaries between creator and receiver are shifting. media fans are doing more than just “poaching” texts or even “transforming” what already exists (to use a more recent phrase from the organization for transformative works). and in this vein, notions of fan labor are shifting as well. as knowledge of fandom has grown, fans have become more normalized, and fan activities have become more mainstreamed. and this change is reflected within the style, aesthetics, and economics of contemporary fan texts (booth 2010). the rise in visibility of fan practices has altered the media landscape, and with this alteration comes a requisite turn from the media industries. this paper examines fan consumption as a key shift in audience engagement with media texts. specifically, i will look at the online social media service polyvore as a site of both audience consumption of mainstream media texts as well as the clear reproduction of those texts. polyvore is an online, image-based website. it allows users to post content from around the web to a particular user’s board, which other users can see and comment on. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa the fans that i describe in this paper are using polyvore both as a tool for consuming corporate images and industrial content from the web, but also organizing it in a particularly fannish, reflexive manner. this reflexivity connects the content to the user, reflecting the user’s particular vision of his/her self, but using mainstream commercial media to do so. importantly, generating this imagery and identity is an act of consumption, as it necessarily imbricates the media text. yet, at the same time it is also an act of appropriation, pushing media into a specific contour. the nature of polyvore media reproduction calls to mind the mode of fandom that sees the performance of fans as elemental to fan studies. kurt lancaster (2001) discusses how interpreting fandom through a performance lens opens up scholarship to invite more nuanced readings of cultural activity. performance is a type of play, then, where fans can “make real” the type of fictions and “fantasies they have only previously watched” (p. xxiv). fan performance, like most forms of play, is communal. matt hills (2002) notes that in this sense, “fan culture” is “made up through creative self-expression as well as communal activities” (p. 42). one of the most popular (and most visible) aspects of fan performance is cosplay, the dressing in costume of media characters. for hills, costuming plays an important role in the identity of a cult fan: he writes that “the … costumed and/or impersonating body can be usefully explored both through theories of performativity and consumption” (p. 158). lamerichs (2011) writes that “costuming is a form of fan appropriation that transforms, performs, and actualizes an existing story in close connection to the fan's own identity” (para 1.2). as a form of consumptive reproduction, digital cosplay describes the playful re-creation and modernization of retro or cult character outfits, clothing, and accessories using digital technology in online spaces. specifically, polyvore offers opportunities for fans to enact digital cosplay as users can pick out clothes of various types and construct their own outfits, which can be displayed in a scrapbookesque design. each item of clothing can link to an online retailer, from which users can buy the individual items, or even the entire outfit. the site thus allows users to collect images from around the web and create digital “bulletin boards” of these images to complete a full “outfit.” the fannish activity of digital cosplay enacts dual modes of nostalgia and novelty through consumptive behaviors. some users have created boards of novel takes or contemporary interpretations of classic cult characters. for example, by assembling women’s clothes that match the look, style, and feel of the marvel avengers character loki, the user character-inspired-style has created a “loki” outfit that, hypothetically, other users could buy and wear (figure 1). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa figure 1. loki digital cosplay, http://www.buzzfeed.com/summeranne/22-of-your-childhood-style-icons-revisited the “loki” outfit here updates the normally male character (who tends to wear grandiose clothes drawn more from norse mythology rather than modern fashion) with a feminine style of contemporary dress. if the digital cosplay of “loki” emphasizes novelty, other profiles and outfits emphasize a more nostalgic look at fashion. for example, the laura petrie outfit, created by user summeranne, stands out as a retro (re)visitation of a key fashion icon from the dick van dyke show (figure 2). the retro 1960s look, back in fashion thanks to historically stylish shows like mad men, means that many of mary tyler moore’s dresses, shoes, and accessories from the sitcom are back in style. in assembling this outfit, summeranne also choose all black and white items, as if to reference the show’s historical televisual roots. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa figure 2. laura petrie digital cosplay, http://www.polyvore.com/cgi/set?id=62470132 importantly, these digital cosplayers do not, it seems, attempt to transform or transfigure the original style; rather, they’re looking for fidelity as they consume it in a nostalgic but paradoxically contemporary novelty (a “makeover”). both nostalgia and novelty exist simultaneously in each act of digital cosplay, but as poles on a continuum. just as convergence is necessarily two-way, so too does digital cosplay echo with bidirectional nostalgia and novelty. through the use of repeated motifs and an applicability of historical aesthetics, digital cosplay demonstrates nostalgic continuity. at the same time, through the digital commodification of these same (retro) aesthetics and the lack of transformative potential, digital cosplay demonstrates a novelty and contestation of contemporary fandom. on the one hand, this type of commercialization of fannish work appears to synch with what terranova (2003) has called the “free labor” of the digital economy: it is when fans’ “productive activities … are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited” by the media industries (para 12). the work of summeranne and character-inspired-style here is being used by zappos.com and dorothy perkins to create revenue. on the other hand, as jenkins, ford, and green (2013) point out, “audiences are increasingly savvy about the value created through their attention and engagement” (p. 57). in addition to attention and engagement, however, there is also a sense of consumption within digital cosplay. fans may not be willing (or able) to spend $1240 on the sleeveless dress, but the fans of these characters and these fashions are consuming these materials in the digi-gratis economy here: offering gifts of images and retro-humor, but also presenting material and economy opportunities as well. digital cosplay defines some contemporary fan engagement, but not necessarily their exploitation. acknowledgments grateful acknowledgement is due to katie booth who provided access to these polyvore sites. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa references booth, p. (2010). digital fandom: new media studies. new york: peter lang, 2010. jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture: when old and new media collide. new york: new york university press. jenkins, h, ford, s. & green, j. (2013). spreadable media: creating value and meaning in a networked culture. new york: new york university press. hills, m. (2002). fan cultures. new york: routledge. lancaster, k. (2001). interacting with babylon 5. austin, tx: university of texas press. lamerichs, n. (2010). stranger than fiction: fan identity in cosplay. transformative works and cultures 7. retrieved from http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/246/230 terranova, t. (2003). free labor: producing culture for the digital economy. electronic book review. retreived from http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/voluntary. license this article is ©2013 paul booth, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. lost and found: the “non-participatory” fan in the television 2.0 era rhiannon bury athabasca university canada rbury@athabascau.ca abstract this paper questions the foundational connections made in fan studies scholarship over the past 25 years between fans, community and participatory culture. being a regular consumer of media content without engaging with others is a practice that has become invisible and devalued as a result. based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of data from a major research project looking at shifting patterns in consumption and participation in the television 2.0 era, i make the case that participatory fans are in fact in the minority. in additional to regular consumption, aided by timeshifting technology, many “non-participatory” fans increase their viewing pleasure through viewing with friends and family, in person or through use of social media. data samples will be used to illustrate and build a new category of “personal-social” fan that wedged open a space between the “indifferent” or “distracted” viewer and the participatory fan. keywords community; fan studies; participatory culture; social media; timeshifting lost and found: the “non-participatory” fan in the television 2.0 era with the publication of textual poachers (jenkins, 1992), fandom in general and participatory culture in particular was placed on the academic radar. jenkins argues that the distinction between the “bystander” or “indifferent viewer” (grossberg, cited in jenkins 1992), and the fan is rooted in the “intensity of…emotional and intellectual involvement” (56). to this end, he provides the following detailed description of the practices of these “committed viewers”: selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa fans…organize their schedules to insure that they will be able to see their favorite program. confessions of missing an episode are almost automatically met with sympathetic offers from other fans willing to “clone” tapes to remedy this gap. the series becomes the object of anticipation: previews are scrutinized in fine detail, each frame stopped and examined for suggestions of potential plot developments; fans race to buy tv guide as soon as it hits the newsstands so that they may gather new material for speculation from its program descriptions. secondary materials about the stars or producers are collected and exchanged within the fan network….[t]hese activities provide the fan with the information needed to participate fully in the critical debates of the fan community. (57-58, emphasis mine) leaving aside the quaintness of references to tapes and the print tv guide in the contemporary social media-verse, this passage is important because of the clear connection it establishes between fan commitment and fan interaction and community. while jenkins never intended it to be taken as a definitive and exhaustive list of fan practice, it has had the effect of shaping the direction of fan studies research by establishing a baseline for not only what constitutes a legitimate object of study— participatory fan culture-but also who gets classified as a legitimate fan. following jenkins’s lead, the next generation of fan scholars, a number of whom have identified as “acafans,” focused on specific fandoms and communities within those fandoms. (see author, 2005; baym, 2000; 2005; gray, sandvoss, & harrington, 2007; hellekson & busse, 2006; hills, 2002). even work that examined “anti-fans” (gray, 2003) or “lurkers” on discussion forums (author, 2005) still assumed a participatory culture as the norm. furthermore, the role of the internet technologies that emerged in the mid 1990s cannot be underestimated in reinforcing the participatory/non-participatory binary. while these technologies may not have created online fan communities, they certainly enabled their rapid expansion and made them more visible to other fans and researchers alike (author, 2005). this paper on the invisible and devalued “non-participatory” fan, ironically, comes out of a research project aimed at examining shifting patterns of television consumption and shifts in participatory culture as a result of the spread of downloading, streaming and timeshifting technologies in general and social media in particular. unlike the author’s previous small-scale qualitative and ethnographic case studies, this mixed-methods study used snowball sampling to collect online survey data (n=671) between september 2010 and april 2011. seventy one semi-structured interviews were then conducted with selfselected survey respondents from march to september 2011. statistical analysis using spss of the data from the “fan practices” section of the questionnaire serves to cast the “non-participatory” fan into sharp relief. the section began with an exclusionary yes/no question: “do you consider yourself a fan?”. the definition provided was purposely drawn very broadly to include those who only watched at least one series regularly over the course of at least one season in the past year. perhaps not surprisingly, 89 % of the respondents (91.7 % female; 84.3 % male) identified as fans. just 12 % of women and 8 % of men stated that they never visited websites, online forums, blogs, social networking sites, including livejournal, content sharing sites including youtube), and/or used other forms of social media. when asked specifically about online discussion forums, less than 40 % claimed to have visited any in the past year and only 15 % claimed to have participated in discussion. just over 36% used twitter as a fan and just under 25% visited blogs or blogged as a fan. similarly, almost half (47 %) had “liked” a series or actor on facebook but only 11 % had posted a comment on the wall of a series. as for classic participatory/productive practices, less than a quarter claimed to have read fanfiction and 13 % claimed to have written and shared any. a larger percentage of respondents had seen fan videos (31 %) but less than five percent (3.4%) had created a vid and shared it. taken together, these statistics are strongly suggestive that the participatory fan is in the minority. to gain a better understanding of the majority “non-participatory” fan, i turn to the interview data. at the time of writing, the qualitative analysis is preliminary. what has emerged is that fans who do little more selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa than watch their favourite programs regularly (“committed consumers”) can be just as emotionally committed as participatory fans. a number talked about their use of dvrs to ensure that they never missed an episode and could keep up with more shows than they had in the past with older timeshifting technology (e.g., vcr). several spoke about using the dvr to start watching a program about 10 minutes after the start time so as to be able to fast forward through the commercials, which they felt spoiled their viewing pleasure. interaction was still important to many of these fans but in the familial or social context. a number of participants talked about watching shows with friends and family members, either in person or live-tweeting. when asked if they had any interest in going online to visit fan forums to interact with other fans they did not know, most categorically said no. the few who hedged were generally media studies scholars or students who knew about participatory culture and seemed to feel some guilt in not being active in fandom or tried to make sense of their own lack of participation or desire to participate. data samples and a more detailed discussion will be presented in the final draft of the conference paper. in sum, it is clear that at the boundary of “bystander” and “participatory fan” lies the category of what i am now calling (until i come up with a better term) the “personal-social” fan. references baym, n. k. (2000). tune in, log on: soaps, fandom, and online community. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. gray, j. (2003). new audiences, new textualities; anti-fans and non-fans. international journal of cultural studies, 6(1), 64-81. gray, j., sandvoss, c., & harrington, c. l. (eds.). (2007). fandom: identities and communities in a mediated world. new york: new york university press. hellekson, k., & busse, k. (2006). fan fiction and fan communities in the age of the internet : new essays. jefferson, n.c.: mcfarland & co. hills, m. (2002). fan cultures. london; new york: routledge. jenkins, h. (1992). textual poachers: television fans & participatory culture. new york: routledge. license this article is ©2013 rhiannon bury, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. fandom, transmedia, and consumption 2.0 mel stanfill institute of communications research university of illinois, urbana-champaign united states of america stanfil1@illinois.edu abstract through analysis of interfaces of websites produced for fans and statements from industry workers about fans, this paper seeks to uncover consumption’s explanatory power for the intersection of fandom and the web. while transmedia is usually understood as a web 2.0 phenomenon and thus premised on an idea of interactivity, this essay contends that when transmedia is industrially orchestrated it is not so much interactive as reactive. with official transmedia, fans are invited to respond to the interactive options as given by the owner of the object of fandom, selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa maintaining them firmly in a consumptive position. ultimately, the paper argues that transmedia is inherently consumptive and thus usefully understood as consumption 2.0. keywords fandom; consumption; normalization; transmedia; interactivity fandom, transmedia, and consumption 2.0 though many are ready to declare the distinction between producer and consumer outdated after the internet (andrejevic, 2008; bruns, 2012; jenkins, 2006), they typically do so toward discussing how former consumers are now productive, reducing the entire phenomenon to production and removing consumption from the scene altogether. consumption is thus conspicuously scarce, and an examination of how it functions in the era of widespread interactive media is overdue. through an analysis of web interfaces and industry workers’ statements, this paper seeks to uncover what explanatory power consumption brings to bear on the intersection of fandom and the web, arguing that it is a useful way to understand what happens when the media industry provides transmedia experiences. that is, while transmedia, understood not just as expanding how one can consume in terms of format but what is available to any given fan in terms of content, is usually considered to be premised on a particular interactivity, when such expansion is industrially orchestrated it is not so much interactive as reactive; fans are invited to respond to the interactive options as given by the owner of the object of fandom, maintaining them firmly in a secondary, responding, consuming position. my argument, that is, is that transmedia is inherently consumptive and thus usefully understood as consumption 2.0. the relationship of transmedia to consumption is obvious when accessing the expansive information requires buying more stuff. tanya krzywinska (2009, p. 396) points to this when discussing “industrial and technological convergence, which depends increasingly on formulating devices to create long-stay audiences/consumers who will spend money to remain in contact with their preferred world.” the consumptive logic of transmedia is less obvious when content providers do not charge for additional content, but i want to de-emphasize difference on the basis of buying vs. not in order to see the ways these different activities have structural commonalities as modes of consumption. transmedia is, first, a mode in which fans are invited to follow an object of fandom beyond its evident boundaries in order to consume more information, more content, or more contact with production personnel (athletes, stars, directors). there are also periodic explicit appeals in interfaces and industry statements to transmedia texts providing a depth of knowledge, pointing toward information that is more explicitly insider-y or behind-the-scenes. at other times, what is normative to provide to fans is additional content to consume. second, transmedia sometimes takes the form of producing a story world or facilitating immersion in the object of fandom. felicia day of web series the guild notes in a commentary that “the cool thing about internet video is that you can do things like this [a complex scene] and you kind of assume people will watch it more than once and they can parse it and stuff.” the idea of immersion also comes into play with features like the seattle mariners browser theme and berkeley athletics ringtones and phone wallpapers, as they rely on an assumption that fans will want a team cocoon to inhabit in their digital media experience. more intensively, this logic animates the production of websites for diegetic organizations in tv show heroes such as primatech and the yamagato fellowship that fans could visit and interact with, producing a more complete “world” to consume. though consumption 2.0, like web 2.0, is premised on being interactive, what seems to be interaction is generally reaction, such that interactivity becomes less active than passive. in one sense, both the broad selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa availability of polls and quizzes and games and fantasy sports on organizations’ websites and mentions of them from industry workers in their discussion of fans support the contention that the expectation is of a fan who wants to and will do something, but with finer-grained analysis it is apparent that these features normalize a concept of interactivity as “point and click and be entertained” and as a choice within precoded options. this is not to say that fans are always or inevitably passive—clearly they are not—but in intensive consumption that is precisely what is recruited. fans, that is, are not asked to act so much as react to what they are presented. i contend that the recent invitation of intensive consumption on the part of fans should be considered in the context of the historical processes by which consumption was taught and people came to be understood as—and understand themselves as—consumers. kevin floyd (2009, p. 35) notes that “unprecedented corporate and governmental efforts to manage social demand—to socialize a national population into a consumption norm—have been one of the defining characteristics of capitalism as it has developed in the united states since the early twentieth century.” in light of lynn spigel’s (1992) description of how television was historically used to teach people what to buy and how, it is necessary to consider how a newer medium may engage in a similar education of consumption. after all, new attention to fan desires and the appeal to them as an emerging market replicates much the same pattern alexandra chasin (2000) identifies as having occurred with groups such as women, african americans, and gays and lesbians as they became seen as legitimate citizen-consumers. it must therefore be taken seriously that consumption is inescapably social. colin campbell (2000) identifies the idea that consumers are inherently insatiable as a distinctly modern ideological phenomenon and not a transhistoric desire newly practicable in the era of mass production. thus, it is vital to understand that “consumer culture also produces consumers [ . . . ] in a variety of ways” (sassatelli, 2007, p. 6, original emphasis). as hebdige (2000, p. 139) points out, mass producing a new product is so expensive that the only sane thing to do is prepare consumers as carefully as any other component of the process; “corporate viability was seen to rely increasingly on the regulation of desire.” some previous authors have explicitly linked transmedia to consumption, but these scholars, motivated by other concerns, have not made the systemic intervention i propose. suzanne scott (2011, pp. 150–151), for example, notes that there has been “conflict between those who claim that transmedia storytelling systems offer fans sophisticated webs of content to explore and enhance, and those that see these webs as precisely that: a mode of confining and regulating fannish analysis and textual production." these authors see the transmedia intensification of consumption, that is, as a form of entrapment, as when jonathan gray (2010, p. 110) identifies "interviews, podcasts, dvd bonus materials, and making-of specials" as modes by which "creators try to exert control" over the meaning of their narratives. however, in place of the control framing’s argument that industry deploys transmedia in a bid to shut fans up, i contend that the extension of consumption 2.0 is better viewed as normalization. it is a means of pitching intensive engagement to fans such that they get what they want in ways that (conveniently enough) do not challenge industry interests—financial or reputational. it is giving, not so that fans can’t or won’t take, but so that they don’t have to bother. it introduces ease into the process of intensive engagement in a way that acts to shape desire and define fans as consumers. references andrejevic, m. (2008). watching television without pity: the productivity of online fans. television and new media, 9(1), 24–46. doi:10.1177/1527476407307241 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa bruns, a. (2012). reconciling community and commerce?: collaborations between produsage communities and commercial operators. information, communication & society, 15(6), 815–835. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2012.680482 campbell, c. (2000). the puzzle of modern consumerism. in m. j. lee (ed.), the consumer society reader (pp. 48–72). malden, ma: wiley-blackwell. chasin, a. (2000). selling out: the gay and lesbian movement goes to market. new york: palgrave macmillan. floyd, k. (2009). the reification of desire: toward a queer marxism. minneapolis: univ of minnesota press. gray, j. (2010). show sold separately: promos, spoilers, and other media paratexts. new york: nyu press. hebdige, d. (2000). object as image: the italian scooter cycle. in m. j. lee (ed.), the consumer society reader (pp. 125–161). malden, ma: wiley-blackwell. jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york: new york university press. krzywinska, t. (2009). arachne challenges minerva: the spinning out of long narrative in world of warcraft and buffy the vampire slayer. in p. harrigan & n. wardrip-fruin (eds.), third person: authoring and exploring vast narratives (pp. 385–398). cambridge: mit press. sassatelli, r. (2007). consumer culture: history, theory and politics. los angeles: sage. scott, s. (2011). revenge of the fanboy: convergence culture and the politics of incorporation (dissertation). university of southern california, los angeles, ca. retrieved from http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/assetserver/controller/item/etd-scott-4277.pdf spigel, l. (1992). make room for tv: television and the family ideal in postwar america. chicago: university of chicago press. license this article is ©2013 mel stanfill, and licensed under cc by-nc. “stay square!”: fan address in the web series louisa stein middlebury college united states of america louisas@middlebury.edu abstract this paper explores the evolving form of the web series, with special focus on the way in which web series invite fans to consume their unfolding stories. like television series, web series extend their stories and storyworlds across a range of interfaces; but unlike television series, there is no push to return the audience to the television networks or to their tv sets; all dimensions of a web series story take place online, through digital interfaces ranging from vimeo and youtube to twitter to tumblr to pinterest. i draw on evolving discussions of how we might understand transmedia and the text/paratext relationships to consider whether there remains a center/marginal relation in digitalonly web series. as digital-only texts, web series deploy the same interfaces that fans use in their authorship and community upkeep. web series must either work to re-establish or to seemingly erase the boundary between producing author and consuming audience. i examine how web series negotiate their relationship with fans and the potential in the form for a perception of decentered authorship and shared idea-ownership. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa keywords fandom; web series; transmedia; digital; audience address “stay square!”: fan address in the web series in 2007, in a web piece entitled “transmedia storytelling 101,” henry jenkins defined transmedia storytelling as a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience” (jenkins, 2007). this definition reflected an excitement about the possibilities of immersive storytelling offered by digital technologies, and more specifically about the possibilities for an authorial control that could stretch across multiple media forms to create a unified viewer experience. within this vision of transmedia storytelling, viewers shift from consumers of a single stream story to consumers of a carefully coordinated multimedia storyworld. but at the same time that transmedia storytellers were figuring out how to tell effective stories through multiple media, fans were using digital technologies to build their own visions of televisual and filmic words. less concerned with “systematic” dispersion, fan communities embrace a multiplicity of narratives and contradictory cultural authorship, what kristina busse and karen hellekson described as the “fantext” which includes a “multitude of interpretations” that are “often contradictory yet complementary” (busse and hellekson, 2006, 7). digital technologies offer fans tools to contribute to and co-create this fantext, producing a larger picture that works against any “unity” potentially desired by the original authors of the commercial (trans)media text. the shift to transmedia storytelling means that the multiplicity of fan production became visible alongside and in conversation with “official” transmedia production, and thus fans became more visible as not only consumers but also as producers who may threaten the integrity of the unified text. in 2011, jenkins returned to his original definition of transmedia storytelling, to distinguish in “transmedia 202” between transmedia storytelling and a broader notion of transmedia, which more amorphously includes branding across media, franchises that circulate across media, and fan participation and authorship in digital media (jenkins, 2011). this broader definition acknowledges that within digital media not only the official authors but also audience also have control to take storyworld elements in a range of different directions. the two definitions, side by side, of transmedia storytelling and transmedia point to the always-present potential tension between author and audience-turned-author, or, in other words, between producer and consumer-turned-producer. but how do these evolving relationships between text and “paratext” (gray, 2010), author and audience, and producer and consumer, shift when the all elements of a storyworld are only online, as in the case of the web series? some web series strive to replicate a tv-as-core/digital-as-periphery dynamic, establishing youtube videos or vimeo videos as the web series’ center, with web series thus echoing television’s representational tactics and distribution patterns and discourse (see kohnen, 2012, on web series husbands re-creation of television’s cultural, representational, and formal norms). but other web series draw on the cultural norms and expectations of audience and fan cultures as the center rather than the periphery of the text, echoing not television but fan and remix culture’s representational and distribution tactics. to different degrees and in different ways, web series selectively construct their digital landscape to orchestrate audience consumption and to cultivate a sense of audience commitment and fan investment, often by drawing on patterns of participation already present within fan and digital culture. a comparison between three web series suggests the cultural work present in these varying modes of audience/fan address. the web series divine centers on a more traditional web series-as-tv series format, marking the other elements that make up its digital landscape as paratexts. producer discourse and selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa audience conversations in the divine forums are relegated to a separate interface of discussion boards, distinct from the web series itself, even though the web series is distributed through youtube, an interface that the audience/fans also have access to and use for broadcasting of self-authored works. the series’ orchestrated use of digital tools strives to give the web series an aura of special status; divine’s digital landscape thus works to mirror the dynamic of the tv/fandom landscape, opting for the discussion board format of such fan/industry spaces as (the now nbc-owned) televisionwithoutpity.com and fanpop.com. in contrast to divine, the web series the lizzie bennet diaries (lbd) mirrors the modes of fan and audience/digital/remix authorship within all areas of its text, and indeed resists having a center or core in its multi-interface digital landscape. lbd modernizes pride and prejudice by depicting lizzie bennet and her sister lydia as vloggers, and their sister jane as a fashion blogger. thus the three sisters plus additional cast model a multiplicity of modes of audience authorship through their vlogs, blogs, twitter and tumblr feeds and facebook accounts. lbd uses multiple interfaces, deploying each as if they were real rather than fictional uses. the youtube videos, facebook posts, and tweets that together comprise the advancing lbd story exist in the same interfaces and digital flows as fan authorship (be it selfauthorship in vlogs and fashion blogging or authorship of fan fiction, art, and fanvid). lbd also encourages audience members to participate in its authorship by playfully inviting expansive fan production within its diegetic universe. on the surface, the web series squaresville looks more like divine in that it progresses its narrative through the narrative and visual codes of film and television rather than vlogging. squaresville tells the story of two teen girls who dreaming of getting out of their small suburban town. the story progresses in little vignettes of two to nine minutes an episode. however, like the lizzie bennet diaries, squaresville works to integrate the codes of audience, fan, and digital culture into its core identity. at the closing of each episode, the actors address the audience, directly inviting the audience to respond in comments or in video or tweets or across a wide range of interfaces. the actors draw connections between their own experiences and the experiences of their “everygirl” characters, and then invite viewers to reply in kind. the actors also directly appeal to viewers to “help squaresville by liking, commenting, favoriting and sharing” thus aiding the series’ commercial and financial success. the actors also appeal to viewers to carry the squaresville identity beyond the bounds of each episode, with the call to “stay square!” that closes every episode. fans respond by creating work that carries the series’ message, which in turn is featured on the series’ website, as in the artwork featured in figure 1, created by fan oh-i-reach-to-a-star and shared on tumblr as part of squaresville’s “fan art friday.” selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa figure 1. stay square squaresville fan art http://squaresvilleseries.com/tagged/fan-art-friday thus, although squaresville seemingly centers on a more traditional narrative format with filmic or televisual-like vignettes making up its “core” diegetic text, that centrality is somewhat of a mirage; it is the framing of the culture of connectedness that determines squaresville’s branding, so that squaresville becomes more a transmedia culture than a distinct media text.i all three of these series seek to draw on the modes of fan, audience, and digital culture in order to create their own; divine does so by recreating the series-as-center/fan community-as-margin relationship, the lizzie bennet diaries does so by integrating the codes of audience authorship and digital/fan culture into the meat of the series itself, and squaresville does so by embedding its short vignettes in a more pervasive sense of the series as shared culture. where divine seems to fall short of generating fan and audience energy, the lizzie bennet diaries and squaresville’s embrace of a shared participatory culture would appear to be more successful, creating dedicated fans eager to proselytize both web series and create with and beyond their lines. acknowledgments thanks to my fellow panelists, and to kristina busse, melanie kohnen, and allison mccracken for their input on this project. references hellekson, k. and busse, k. (2006). fan fiction and fan communities in the age of the internet mcfarland, 2006. ellcessor, e. (2012). tweeting @feliciaday: online social media, convergence, and subcultural stardom. cinema journal 51:2, 46-66. gray, j. (2010). show sold separately new york: new york university press. jenkins, h. (2007).transmedia storytelling 101. http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html jenkins, h. (2011). transmedia 202: further reflections. retrieved from http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa kohnen, m. (2012). you want me to be anderson cooper. antenna: responses to media culture (august 23). retrieved from http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2012/08/23/you-want-me-to-be-anderson-coopernegotiating-queer-visibility-on-husbands/ marwick, a and boyd, d. (2011). to see and be seen: celebrity practice on twitter. convergence may 17:2, 139-158. license this article is ©2013 louisa stein, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. i see elizabeth elcessor (2012) and marwick and boyd (2011) on the related conception of digital “microcelebrities” as “star texts of connection” uniting audiences in a shared culture. microsoft word 684-660-1-pb (1).doc grassroots organizing in the digital age: considering values and technology decision-making in tea party an occupy wall street abstract technology both supports and constrains different types of behavior, and so decision to employ a specific technology within a community is important as users may resist or adopt use of the technology based on these traits. in this study we explore the values, attitudes, and beliefs of tea party and occupy wall street stakeholders as they relate to their use of technology. we employ value sensitive design to examine stakeholder values, and potential sites of value tensions we use semi-structured interviews conducted with three distinct groups of stakeholders in tea party and occupy: members with some type of leadership or facilitator position, technologists, and lay members. this study provides insight into the potentially complex decision-making processes involved in the adoption of technology within grassroots social movements, as well as any ongoing struggles movement leaders and members face as they try to sustain involvement using whatever tools are at their disposal. keywords value sensitive design; technology decision-making; grassroots organizing; tea party; occupy wall street in this study we explore the values, attitudes, beliefs of tea party and occupy wall street stakeholders as they relate to their use of technology. this study provides insight into the potentially complex decisionmaking processes involved in the adoption of technology within grassroots social movements, as well as any ongoing struggles movement leaders and members face as they try to sustain involvement using whatever tools are at their disposal. grassroots organizing through social media is a well-documented phenomenon, as political and social organizations implement digital tactics as components of their campaigns. past research has offered insight into digital organizing in presidential campaigns (chadwick, 2007; hindman, 2005; melber, 2010), the tactics and technical practices employed by grassroots organizers via social media (howard, 2005; kriess, 2003), and the interplay of online and offline structures in politically motivated campaigns (chadwick, 2007; foot & schneider, 2006). many groups have organized in online environments to achieve common goals—e.g., electing a candidate, drawing awareness to a societal problem such as inequality, or offering solidarity to those experiencing injustice. these groups are able to use the internet to organize and mobilize supporters, gather and distribute information, create a sense of community, make decisions, and show support for their cause. the tools used for these activities are abundant, including e-mail, chat rooms, discussion forums, blogs, instant messaging, quick-fire fundraising drives (schneider & foot, 2002), social networking sites such as facebook, or micro-blogging sites such as twitter. bringing supporters to the spaces where they can participate is necessary for a campaign’s success. but technology both encourages and constrains different types of behavior, and so any decision to employ a specific technology within a community is important. when one considers this, the potential users and their values, ideals, and beliefs are of utmost importance in this decision-making process, and must be taken into account if the technology is ultimately going to contribute to the group’s achievement of its social or political goal. for example, if the user community desires security in their online transactions, a fundraising tool that does not provide authentication of security will likely not draw many members to participate. similarly, if confidentiality is highly valued by a community, a tool that requires the use of real names to log in may become a barrier to drawing members to participate in that space. to be successful, any technology employed in digital campaigns should align with the values of the community. we identified two grassroots campaigns in the u.s. have emerged that employ both online and offline organizing tactics: tea party and occupy wall street. when social movement organizations such as tea party and occupy integrate the use of technology such as social networking sites, e-mail, blogs, and wikis, they introduce processes and ways of communicating that may or may not align with the values, ideals and beliefs of their community. to better understand this tension, researchers must ask the following questions: what values are most important to the community? what affordances or constraints of technology are viewed as problematic or supportive of the community’s values, according to its members? what may lead a user to either engage with or resist a technology? the goal of this paper is to determine underlying values of occupy and tea party members and provide insight into their use or nonuse of specific technologies, such as facebook, twitter, and e-mail. our aim is to also speak more broadly to the use of technology within these two grassroots communities in light of their values. in formulating our research questions and design, we draw on past research on value-sensitive design (vsd) (friedman, 1996). vsd is a technology design approach that begins by examining the values of stakeholders who may be affected by the deployment of technology, whether directly or indirectly. vsd provides a lens to identify potential tensions between the values of different stakeholders and the affordances and constraints of a given technology. in this study we seek to not only understand the emergent values within the tea party and occupy communities, but also to understand what, if any, value tensions may exist within the communities related to their use of technology. to examine stakeholder values and potential sites of value tensions we use semi-structured interviews conducted with three distinct groups of stakeholders in tea party and occupy: members with some type of leadership or facilitator position, members tasked with organizing and facilitating technology use in their community, and lay members. most of our purposive sample is collected using snowball sampling, although we gained access to important groups such as the technical operations team in occupy and national-level leadership in tea party. these in-depth interviews ask occupy and tea party members to expound on their personal values, and describe how these values relate to their experiences with and opinions of technology. we ask how important three technologies—e-mail, facebook, and twitter—have been to interviewees’ past participation in their respective social movements. interviewees compare and contrast their experiences with these technologies with their experiences with face-to-face communication. finally, we ask whether the interviewees have ever experienced tension within their organization as a result of technology use. we use emergent coding content analysis, an iterative method of identifying themes and patterns within transcriptions of the interviews, to better understand the underlying reasons for use and non-use of technology in tea party and occupy wall street. we contextualize our findings in an analysis of the various technologies we have inventoried that are used by occupy and tea party. employing digital organizing efforts, occupy wall street’s web presence includes more than 450 facebook pages, more than 1,000 occupy-specific twitter accounts, and more than 250 occupy-related websites (author, 2012; caren & gaby, 2011). at the time of this writing we are still collecting data on tools used by tea party, but we can present partial data here, including upwards of 100 facebook pages and at least one official tea party website for 49 of the 50 u.s. states. the tea party also organizes through other online communities, such as teapartypatriots.org and the teapartypatriots.ning.com community, both of which are home to hundreds of blogs and local websites. interestingly, and importantly, members of both occupy and tea party devoted energy to creating social networking sites for their community as alternatives to facebook. though occupy’s global square never took off, teapartycommunity.com has gained traction; the site, which is remarkably similar to facebook but touted as a “safe haven” for tea party members and other conservatives, boasts more than 100,000 members. these efforts can be understood as important indicators of resistance to facebook and as attempts to recreate the experience while adhering to the values of the community. by incorporating the viewpoints of these three stakeholder groups, we establish some understanding of values from different perspectives within the community. this enables us to identify potential areas of contention surrounding technology-related decisions within the community. preliminary findings suggest, members in leadership and technology positions are more concerned with creating community and identify inclusivity as an important value consideration when making technology decisions. on the other hand, lay members are more focused on personal privacy and confidentiality, and thus a value tension between the groups arises. references authors. (2012). caren, n. and gaby, s. (2011) occupy online: facebook and the spread of occupy wall street. available at ssrn: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1943168 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1943168 chadwick, a. (2007) ‘digital network repertoires and organizational hybridity’ political communication 24 (3), pp. 283-301. foot, k. a., & schneider, s. m. (2002). online action in campaign 2000: an exploratory analysis of the us political web sphere. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 46(2), 222-244. foot, k. a., & schneider, s. m. (2006). web campaigning. cambridge, ma: mit press. friedman, b. (1996). value-sensitive design. interactions, 3(6), 16-23. hindman, m. (2005). the real lessons of howard dean: reflections on the first digital campaign. perspectives on politics, 121-128. howard, p. n. (2005). deep democracy, thin citizenship: the impact of digital media in political campaign strategy. the annals of the american academy of political and social science, 597(1), 153-170. kreiss, d. (2009). developing the “good citizen”: digital artifacts, peer networks, and formal organization during the 2003–2004 howard dean campaign. journal of information technology & politics, 6(3-4), 281-297. melber, a. (2010). year one of organizing for america: the permanent field campaign in a digital age (a techpresident special report). available at ssrn 1536351. microsoft word 707-457-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 financial markets and online advertising demand: reevaluating the dotcom investment bubble matthew crain university of illinois, urbana-champaign usa mattcrain1@gmail.com abstract this paper outlines the connections between the dotcom investment bubble and the growth of online advertising. in the latter half of the 1990s, speculative investors funded the lavish advertising expenditures of a host of largely unprofitable dotcom companies through which billions of dollars poured into the nascent online advertising sector. this generated a surge of demand for online ad services and helped to legitimize the internet as an advertising channel. these outlays were rationalized through a new economy ideology that greatly privileged marketing practices. advertising became the cornerstone of dotcom business strategy, necessary to not only win customers, but also to attract essential investment capital. while the period is often dismissed as a false start in the history of the web’s commercial development, it is better conceived of as highly generative of modern structures of online advertising. keywords online advertising; dotcom bubble; financial markets; venture capital; new economy the political economic structures of the internet impact the types of communication it enables. platforms like twitter have been lauded for their roles as facilitators of political and cultural participation, yet these companies also seek to monetize their users’ activities, political or otherwise. in this capacity social media are a recent iteration of a more general marketing function that has been under construction on the internet since the inception of commercial online services and the world wide web over two decades ago. although topics such as digital labor (scholz, 2013), dataveillance (zimmer, 2008) and networked publics (papacharissi, 2010) have received much needed attention, scholarship offering critical narratives of the history of the web’s commercialization remains sparse (turow, 2012). this paper addresses this gap by outlining the connections between the dotcom investment bubble and the growth of online advertising, a central but often overlooked component of the web’s commercial development. one tendency has been to gloss over the 1990s as a prosaic era of banners and pop-ups, a false start in the history of online advertising that was swept away in the bubble’s collapse. the real action begins in the early 2000s with google’s refinement of keyword advertising and implementation of the pay-per-click model, so the story goes. the counter-argument presented here is that the banner era, in conjunction with the dotcom bubble, is better conceived of as highly generative of modern structures of online advertising. soaring investment markets and the developing advertising sector entered into a pattern of mutual reinforcement that began in 1995 and intensified until the bubble collapsed in 2000. this paper introduces just one facet of this broadly generative capacity: the production of demand for online advertising services. in the context of financial speculation, public and private investors funded the lavish advertising expenditures of a host of largely unprofitable dotcom companies. through these conduits billions of dollars of investment capital poured into the nascent online advertising sector, generating a surge of demand for online ad services and legitimizing the internet as an advertising channel. these outlays, which would have previously been marked as risky, were rationalized through a new economy selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 ideology that greatly privileged marketing practices. established measures of financial assessment such as profitability were superseded by marketing-based metrics such as “mindshare” (morgan stanley, 1996). a “get big fast” business model based on rapid expansion and brand recognition became normalized among dotcoms looking to commercialize “cyberspace” (kirsch & goldfarb, 2008). venture capital investment reached unprecedented levels, financial markets soared, and marketing practices such as advertising and public relations became the cornerstone of dotcom business strategy, the key competitive weapon in the struggle to not only win customers, but also to attract essential investment capital. in just one example, an interpublic ad agency reported that its dotcom clients planned to spend in excess of $1 billion in the fourth quarter of 1999, roughly equivalent to the annual us ad spending of mcdonald’s and burger king combined (hwang, 1999). dotcoms such as webvan, value america, home grocer, cnet, and altavista each announced $100 million plus ad campaigns (cuneo, 1999; gilbert, 2000; kawamoto, 2000; williamson, 2000). while some of these outlays went to offline platforms (e.g. there were 17 dotcom spots in the 2000 super bowl), dotcoms contributed more resources to online advertising than any other group throughout the bubble period, accounting for between half to three-quarters of all internet advertising expenditures annually between 1996 and 2000 (elsworth, 1997; featherly, 2000). working within the economic rationality of get big fast, public and private investors provided the funding and managerial leadership that drove dotcom ad spending. for venture capitalists, advertising was a means to build valuation prior to exiting investments via ipos or acquisitions. in 1999 advertising age reported that “as much as 80%” of venture financing given to internet companies was being spent on advertising (williamson & cuneo, 1999). likewise, there is evidence that capital generated from ipos went directly to fund advertising campaigns. in one example, the dotcom estamp committed 65% of its $110 million ipo windfall to “ads, marketing and brand-building” efforts (“e-stamp,” 1999). sec filings from a sample of 166 nasdaq-listed companies reveal that the average dotcom spent 75 cents on advertising for every dollar of revenue, while offline counterparts spent five (“advertising to sales ratios,” 1999). this tremendous emphasis on advertising was a direct extension of the heightened importance of marketing within financial processes, which had strong material as well as ideological manifestations. at one level, this trend played out through the changes in more or less concrete practices of financial asset-valuation noted above. more broadly, it was the material outcome of the new economy ideology of investment and business management. for publicly traded but unprofitable dotcoms, spending on marketing was one of the only ways to attract new investors and keep current ones appeased. spending your last dime on advertising was rational in an economic context where “mindshare” and market share were paramount indicators of value and gateways to further investment capital. indeed in the new economy, advertising was perhaps the sole mandatory business expense. dotcoms with a strong market position and positive media profile found it much easier to attract investors, while securing finance capital through ipos and other means functioned as public relations events in their own right. at the same time, those with investment funding could spend heavily on advertising to further build market share and enhance brand image, which in turn aided fundraising. this powerful feedback loop had the effect of rapidly increasing the scale and scope of online marketing activities during the bubble period. dotcom ad spending drove demand within the emerging online advertising market, propping up the balance sheets of web publishers like yahoo, isps like aol, and ad networks like doubleclick. it was the engine of the online ad sector’s growth and as such contributed to the broader legitimation of the internet as a channel for commercial messages. acknowledgments this work stemmed from my dissertation research, which has been supported by fellowships from the illinois program for research in the humanities, the graduate college, and the institute of communications research at the university of illinois, urbana-champaign. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 references advertising to sales ratios by industry. (1999). advertising age data center. retrieved from http://adage.com/datacenter/datapopup.php?article_id=106573. cuneo, a. z. (1999, november 1). milkman of cyberspace: borders’ webvan delivering the goods in groceries. advertising age, s22. e-stamp, stamps.com send off tv pitches. (1999, october 25). advertising age, 68. elsworth, p. c. (1997, february 24). internet advertising growing slowly. the new york times. featherly, k. (2000, november 20). traditional firms flock to online advertising. newsbytes. gilbert, j. (2000, april 10). dot-com doubt; marketing jackpot in jeopardy as internet companies falter. advertising age, 1. hwang, s. l. (1999, august 26). web firms’ ad blitz considers wall street. financial express. kawamoto, d. (2000, february 21). dot-commercials. cnet news. retrieved from http://news.cnet.com/dotcommercials-will-they-pay-off/2009-1017_3-237105.html?tag=mncol kirsch, d. a., & goldfarb, b. (2008). small ideas, big ideas, good ideas: “get big fast” and dot-com venture creation. in w. aspray and p. e. creuzzi (eds.), the internet and american business, (259-276). cambridge: mit press. morgan stanley. (1996, february). the internet report. new york: mary meeker & chris depuy. papacharissi, z. (2010). a private sphere: democracy in a digital age. cambridge: polity press. scholz, t. (ed.) (2013). digital labor: the internet as playground and factory. new york: routledge. turow, j. (2012). the daily you. new haven: yale university press. williamson, d. a., & cuneo, a. z. (1999, november 1). flexing vc influence. advertising age supplement interactive, 70, 8-16. williamson, d. a. (2000, march 13). altavista paints ‘smarter’ pose to focus brand. advertising age, 62. zimmer, m. (2008). the gaze of the perfect search engine: google as an infrastructure of dataveillance. in a. spink & m. zimmer (eds.), web search: multidisciplinary perspectives (3-8). berlin: springer-verlag berlin heidelberg. microsoft word 700-452-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 copyright and the new materialism dan l. burk university of california, irvine usa dburk@law.uci.edu abstract scholars in a variety of fields have recently begun to re-emphasize the centrality of matter in their exploration of the world. this “new materialism” seeks to traverse persistent analytical dichotomies between the ideal and the material. at the same time, copyright law has long rested upon a series of dualistic doctrinal structures, including the fundamental dichotomy between the immaterial “work” and its fixation in a physical “copy.” this distinction, which was never entirely coherent even in traditional media, has broken down in the face of digital instantiations of creativity. new materialism might offer copyright a path out of such unsustainable distinctions, by providing a viewpoint that traverses the artificial opposition of work and copy, recognizing the primacy of matter in the development of creative expression. keywords copyright; intellectual property; new materialism; fixation; digital media, virtuality introduction during the past several years, an increasing number of scholars in a variety of fields have begun to reemphasize the centrality of matter in their exploration of the world (dolphijn & van der tuin, 2012; coole & frost, 2010). this “new materialism” seems in part a reaction to the “discursive turn” during the latter years of the twentieth century which over-emphasized the cultural and semiotic dimensions in our understanding of the universe. drawing on multiple theorists from deleuze to latour, scholars in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences have begun rejecting the physical dualisms that pervade even postmodern analyses, in order to develop a coherent understanding of observed phenomena. this approach has become particularly important in the area of “digital humanities,” where the digitization of traditional expressive forms, or the development of new digital expressive forms, fundamentally implicates the connectivity of the virtual and the material (bassett, 2012, p. 115). one would expect that the new materialist turn should also have profound implications for the law of copyright, the legal regime under which proprietary interests in expressive creation are governed. copyright has long rested upon a series of dualistic doctrinal structures, including the fundamental dichotomy between the immaterial “work” and its fixation in a physical “copy” (burk, 2007, p. 187). in copyright parlance, the “work,” which is the entity to which authorial rights attach, is a sort of platonic ideal that may be manifested in copies. copies are defined as material objects. copyright attaches to the work at the moment when the work is fixed in a tangible medium of expression. although the author owns the work, she accrues the legal right to control copies digital fixation this distinction, which was never entirely coherent even in traditional media, has broken down in the face of digital instantiations of creativity. the u.s. copyright statute defines a copy as an object from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine (17 u.s.c. § 101). the provenance of this definition is fairly straightforward , when the work is fixed on paper, canvas, or stone, or even in the case of more exotic analog media such as selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 microforms, where a device is necessary to view the stored copy. the application of the definition is more difficult in the case of digital media, where no copy of the work is stored – not even a tiny one, or an encoded one – but rather where sequences of bits configure a device so as to generate the work as output. as a practical matter it is perhaps not surprising that the statutory definition of copy was nonetheless applied to digital media. courts concluded that because digital media could be used to generate the work as output of a computing device, the criterion of perception or communication with the aid of a machine was satisfied, bringing digitized creations within the ambit of the statute (burk, 2010). this required a shift in the concept of “communicated or “perceived” to include generation or reconstruction of the work. to have done otherwise held the potential to eviscerate the statute as the most valuable instantiations of creative works are increasingly digital forms. but at the same time, embracing this dichotomy impedes not only the coherence of the law, but the development of new modes of expression. for example, the dichotomy between the ideal and the material comes across starkly in copyright’s first sale doctrine. copyright law grants copyright holders the exclusive right to distribute copies – that is to sell or provide to the public material objects in which the work is fixed. (17 u.s.c. § 106) an exception to this right is the “first sale” doctrine, which holds that a copyright owner’s rights are exhausted by the sale of the copy – the purchaser has the right to dispose of that particular copy as he wishes, including lease, lending, or resale (17 u.s.c. § 109). first sale is thus the basis for numerous familiar institutions in the secondary market for physical copies, including used bookstores, used cd and record shops, public libraries, and netflix dvd rentals. but if no material object is transferred by the sale of a digitized work, how can it be subsequently transferred by the purchaser? downloads of music, movies, or e-books involve reproduction – the creation of new files copied in the machine of a purchaser. subsequent transfers of such files create more copies by replicating the files – but no copies are distributed, which is to say, no material objects move from place to place across the internet. consequently, it has been unclear and controversial how the first sale doctrine might apply to digital works – first sale applies to distributions, not to reproductions (reese, 2003; liu, 2001). businesses such as “redigi,” which attempt to create a secondary market in digital files, have found themselves the subject of copyright infringement suits. re-materialization the disconnection between legal doctrine and new media has now resulted in decades of incomprehensible decisions regarding the fixation of works in computer circuitry or the transmission of works across telecommunications media, particularly the internet. new materialism might offer copyright a path out of such unsustainable distinctions, by providing a viewpoint that traverses the artificial opposition of work and copy, recognizing the primacy of matter in the development of creative expression. first, new materialists caution against equating the digital with the ideal. their analysis cautions that much of the discourse accompanying the use of digital media is couched in untenable terms of virtuality and immateriality (parikka, 2012; blanchette, 2011). new media discourse has often run to hyperbolic claims about the ethereality and evanescence of encoded information. electronic transmission of bits has been breathlessly characterized as occurring without physical constraints, in an idealized environment of bits free from the constraints of atoms. but new materialism reminds us that the internet and associated digital media is in fact limited by the capacity of the hardware on which the system runs. bandwidth is not infinite, processing cycles are not instantaneous, and environmental factors ranging from cosmic radiation to overheating routinely produce errors in the system (dexter, 2012, p. 135). second, new materialism invites us to push past critiques of copyright a step further. a number of critics have noted that copyright, from its roots to its present formulation, assumes a solitary genius selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 who generates creative works ex nihilo, and thus assumes sole and despotic entitlement of such creations (lange, 1992; jaszi 1991). this postmodern critique emphasizes the of this romantic formulation of creativity, emphasizing that in fact authors exist within particular social discourses, that the work of an author is never wholly original, drawing from myriad cultural sources, and that the meaning and value of a copyrighted work are at least in part interpretive acts of the reader (jaszi, 1992). under a new materialist approach, the notion of authorship becomes further distributed. new materialism has tended to emphasize the agential nature of material objects, to de-emphasize the prominence and distinction of human agents, and to explore the assemblage or collectivity of human and non-human interaction. authorship, and copyright, might then be defined by particularized collaborations between various agents, some of them human and some of them non-human. the collaborative between a server, a consumer, an artist is not the same in the context of peer-to-peer sharing as it is in the context of commercial purchase. rather than resting on idealized distinctions between the material and the virtual, copyright might move toward a coherent regime recognizing the primacy of matter in the development of creative expression. references 17 u.s.c. § 101 (2009). 17 u.s.c. § 106 (2009). 17 u.s.c. § 109 (2009). bassett, c. (2012). cannonicalism and the computational turn. in d. berry (ed.) understanding digital humanities (pp. 105-126). london: palgrave macmillan. blanchette, j.f. (2011). a material history of bits. journal of the american society for information science and technology, 62 , 1042-1057. burk, d. (2010). the mereology of digital copyright. in j. husinger et al. (eds.). international handbook of internet research (pp. 135-146). berlin: springer verlag. burk, d. (2007). feminism and dualism in intellectual property. american university journal of gender, social policy & law, 15, 183-206. coole, d. & frost, s. (eds.) (2010). new materialisms: ontology, agency, politics. durham: duke university press. dexter, s. (2012). the esthetics of hidden things. in d. berry (ed.) understanding digital humanities (pp. 127-144). london: palgrave macmillan. dolphijn, r. & van der tuin, i. (2012). new materialism: interviews and cartographies. open humanities press. jaszi, p. (1992). on the author effect: contemporary copyright and collective creativity. cardozo arts & entertainment law review, 10, 293-320. jaszi, p. (1991) toward a theory of copyright: the metamorphosis of “authorship.” duke law journal, 1991, 455-502. lange, d. (1992). at play in the fields of the word: copyright and the construction of authorship in the postliterate millennium. law and contemporary problems, 55, 139-151 liu, j. (2001). owning digital copies: copyright law and the incidents of copy ownership. william and mary law review 42, 1245-1366. parikka, j. (2012). archives in media theory: material media archaeology and digital humanities. in d. berry (ed.) understanding digital humanities (pp. 85-104). london: palgrave macmillan. reese, r.a. (2003). the first sale doctrine in the era of digital networks. boston college law review 44 (2) 577-652. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 license this article is ©2013 by dan l. burk, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. microsoft word medialinguafranca.docx selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 media lingua franca: fixity, novelty, and vernacular creativity in internet memes ryan m. milner college of charleston usa rmmilner@cofc.edu abstract this paper argues internet memes – discursive artifacts spread by mediated cultural participants who remix them along the way – weave ‘fixity’ and ‘novelty’. memes are a form of ‘vernacular creativity’, which balance the familiar and the foreign, the collective and the individual. in order to assess this balance, i undertook a yearlong multimodal discourse analysis of the networks of mediated cultural participation that house memes. analyzing memes on sites like 4chan, reddit, and tumblr, i found they depend upon ‘prepatterning’ from social contexts understood by the collectives creating, reappropriating, and sharing them. while this prepatterning fixes the conversation and restricts participation, it also affords depth and expression. understanding fixed conversational contexts means novel expression translatable to a receptive audience. in this way, memes are a ‘media lingua franca’, discourses understood by a far reaching collective. two case studies – ‘kanye interrupts’ and ‘not bad obama’ – support this assertion. keywords internet memes; fixity; novelty; vernacular creativity; intertextuality nationwide inside jokes figure 1: kanye west is ‘photoshopped’ interrupting martin luther king, jr. during his famous ‘i have a dream speech’. a caption connects the two media moments. once in class – with a photoshopped picture of kanye west interrupting martin luther king jr. on the screen behind me (figure 1) – i asked my students to define ‘internet meme’. there was the usual desk staring, until a student in the back spoke up. “it’s like...a nationwide inside joke,” she said. her unconventional definition inspired chuckles. but as the hours wore on, i realized its prescience. ‘internet memes’ – discursive artifacts spread by mediated cultural participants who remix them along the way – balance the familiar and the foreign. they’re at once universal and particular. memes intertwine what tannen ([1989]2007) calls ‘fixity’ and ‘novelty’. in this way, memes are a multimodal dialogue between individual creator and popular imagination. they’re a form of mediated, selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 populist ‘vernacular creativity’ (burgess, 2007) that depends on a balance between the new and the expected. this paper is about that balance, about how memes function from the shared and the unique. tannen ([1989]2007), in her analysis of intertextuality and repetition in dialogue, claims that it’s “the play between fixity and novelty that makes possible the creation of meaning” (p. 49). our conversations are a fluid blend of ‘prepatterned’ templates – tropes, colloquialisms, conversational sequences – and individual expression appropriating those prepatterned templates. far from reducing discourse to mere formula, tannen argues it’s “the eternal tension between fixity and novelty that constitutes creativity” (p. 29). understanding patterns and precedents in discourse well enough to violate them, reappropriate them, or contrast them is the basis of irony, humor, and commentary. this is true in tannen’s conversations, in a classic novel, or in what burgess (2007) calls ‘vernacular creativity’. vernacular creativity is “not elite or institutionalised; nor is it extraordinary or spectacular, but rather is identified on the basis of its commonness” (p. 32, original emphasis). discourse uses fixity and novelty to weave together cultural precedent and individual expression. this interrelationship allows memes to function as a ‘media lingua franca’, where individuals can express themselves in an understood vernacular. getting the ‘nationwide inside joke’ of memes means adhering to broadly accepted aesthetic practices and touching on resonant cultural moments. the ‘media lingua franca’ is decided by social process. the following section will exemplify this process. prepatterning memes to evaluate the balance between the familiar and the foreign in internet memes, i undertook a yearlong multimodal discourse analysis (wodak & meyer, 2009) of the ‘net culture’ hubs where participants create, reappropriate, and disseminate memes. i steeped myself in sites like 4chan, reddit, and tumblr in order to assess the aesthetics and practices constituting these participatory artifacts. ‘internet memes’ are a diverse category (see shifman, 2011, and her study of youtube memes). what they have in common is a balance between individual novelty and vernacular fixity. as mediated conversations, they depend upon a prepatterning that emerges from social context. for instance, to ‘get’ the ‘inside joke’ of kanye west interrupting martin luther king jr., participants need to grasp fixed references. they need to understand king’s iconic 1963 speech advocating racial equality. they need also understand to west’s infamous 2009 ‘interruption’ of taylor swift, who was accepting an mtv video music award. west unexpectedly charged the stage, told swift that ‘imma let you finish’, and then chastised swift’s win over a beyoncé video, which he dubbed one of ‘the best of all time’. footage of the interruption spread and a meme was born. as soon as the moment happened, it was open for reappropriation by countless participants in networks of mediated cultural participation. not only did ‘imma let you finish’ enter popular vernacular, west was used to memetically wreck a multitude of cultural touchstones (figure 2). figure 2: kanye west ‘interrupting’ einstein as he formulates his theory of relativity, edward from twilight to critique his vampire prowess, and mario from super mario world on the quality of his videogame. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 mediated participants created their own images, intertwining cultural references with west’s memetic moment. once participants got the inside joke, west could be implemented into countless scenarios. his figure was spun and posed (and even translated into sixteen bit) to fit a visual frame; the caption above his head was be modified to match. novel expression could occur within a relatable ‘lingua franca’ as diverse participants crafted from a shared premise. prepatterning means restrictions on participation, but also affords depth and expression. memes rely on vernacular creativity other participants can readily understand. in this way, the ‘everyday’ is not universal, but situated. this fits with burgess’ (2007) claim that vernacular creativity is grounded in ‘contextual specificity’. for instance, the popular ‘rage comic’ meme aesthetic – stick figures conveying basic human emotions remixed into ‘everyday’ narratives – is simple. however, it’s also the foundation for intricate expression necessitating deep intertextual understanding. this unconventional ‘free handed’ rage comic posted to reddit is a case of intricate vernacular creativity (figure 3). figure 3: a hand drawn ‘rage comic’; an analogue version of a mediated memetic artifact. this comic is a simple drawing, but not necessarily a simple text. to understand the meta joke, readers have to be able to translate the crude analog representations of common mediated ‘rage faces’. if readers are not familiar with the emotions typically conveyed by these faces, their hand-drawn doppelgangers are less discernable (figure 4). figure 4: popular memetic ‘rage faces’, conveying emotions (left to right) of anger, bewilderment, motivation, elation, and resignation. they correspond respectively to panels one, three, four, six, and eight in figure 3. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 these rage faces are remixed into countless comics and shared by countless participants. the ‘hand drawn comic’ adds a novel take on fixed characters. the most distinct translation may be the ‘pretty bad’ face in panel seven. the punch line of the work is that the hand drawn comic is so inferior, a ‘pretty bad’ face must replace the more-familiar ‘not bad obama’ face (figure 5). figure 5: the ‘not bad obama’ rage face, used to express begrudging acceptance or approval. understanding the ‘pretty bad’ play on ‘not bad obama’ is key to the comic, and requires translating a novel image back to a more subculturally fixed one. but the reference is even more intricate if participants understand the face’s origin. it’s a reuter’s photo turned reddit rage comic (figure 6). figure 6: the rage comic that birthed the ‘not bad obama’ rage face from a press photo. these intertextual threads are strands that elaborate a memetic tapestry. more strands intertwine and the ‘inside joke’ grows more complex even as it spreads. the visibility of memes means even complex references are often read broadly. ‘not bad obama’ became recognized enough that president obama himself added a thread to the meme’s tapestry. when obama answered questions on an ‘ask me anything’ reddit thread he referenced the image born of his likeness. among his comments: “by the way, if you want to know what i think about this whole reddit experience not bad!”. two fixed words, layered and shared through a media lingua franca selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 media lingua franca on the networks of mediated cultural participation that produce memes, proficiency in fixed conversations and contexts is required for entry into the discussion, and vernacular novelty is required to create and innovate from familiar forms. though participants can and do hail from diverse locations, they can innovate from accepted practices during their mediated interaction. through novelty and fixity, memes can become a lingua franca for mediated cultural participation. they’re a ‘common language’ to have discussions spanning vast geography. they can be used by a student to comment on kanye or by a president to affiliate with a populous. they’re constructed socially. after all, “through prepatterning, the individual speaks through the group, and the group speaks through the individual” (tannen, [1989]2007, p. 100). thanks to the balance between fixity and novelty, a memetic joke can be nationwide and inside. references burgess, j. (2007). vernacular creativity and new media. (unpublished doctoral dissertation). queensland university of technology, brisbane, australia. shifman, l. (2011). an anatomy of a youtube meme. new media & society, 14(2), 187-203. doi: 10.1177/1461444811412160. tannen, d. ([1989]2007). talking voices: repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse (2nd ed.). cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. wodak, r., & meyer, m. (eds.). (2009). methods of critical discourse analysis. los angeles: sage. license this article is ©2013 ryan m. milner, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. microsoft word _done selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 mediated-communication in long-distance and geographically-close romantic relationships and its effects on idealization, impression management, and relationship satisfaction amanda m. kimbrough university of dallas rosanna e. guadagno university of dallas abstract romantic idealization and relationship satisfaction has been found to be greater in longdistance romantic relationships (ldrs) than geographically-close romantic relationships (gcrs). this study aims to reestablish this link as well as to provide evidence of impression management as a possible explanation for this relation. prior research has found that long-distance couples put off conflict in their interactions as a means to maximize the positive nature of their time together. this finding provides some insight on why the use of impression management may be more frequent among these couples. additionally, we also hypothesize that greater technology use may contribute to both more and selective use of impression management and selective selfpresentation among couples in a ldr. social information processing theory predicts that because owing to of the asynchronous mode of much many forms of technologymediated communication and the absence of non-verbal cues, impression management and selective presentation behaviors are more easily achieved using these communication channels, . this, so because positive impression management is more easily achieved, these couples in ldrs could maintain idealization for longer periods of time. furthermorefinally, this study aims to establish that couples in gcrs who engage in higher levels of technology use may also engage in more impression management in their relationships. although, tentative, this could possibly lead to greater idealization in gcrs as well. introduction relationship satisfaction in long-distance relationships suggested citation (apa): kimbrough, a. & guadagno, r. (2015, october 21-24). mediatedcommunication in long-distance and geographically-close romantic relationships and its effects on idealization, impression management, and relationship satisfaction. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the majority of research on romantic relationships has established a clear relationship between relational maintenance behavior and relational satisfaction (dainton, stafford, & canary, 1994; dainton & aylor, 2001; dellmann-jenkins, bernard-paolucci, & rushing,1994; dellmann-jenkins, bernard-paolucci, & rushing,1993). although research in this area has primarily focused on gcrs, some research has extended to ldrs. these findings show, that contrary to popular assumptions, individuals in ldrs experience the same or even greater levels of satisfaction and commitment relative to gcrs (dainton, stafford, & canary, 1994). for instance, in a study on commuter marriages govaerts and dixon (1988) found no significant differences in satisfaction between commuter marriages and non-commuter marriages. additionally, guldner and swenson (1995) found no difference between those in ldr and gcrs on satisfaction and commitment measures. stafford and reske (1990) reported that individuals in ldrs were more satisfied with and committed to their relationships than their gcr counterparts. they argue that this finding might be explained by the tendency of those in ldrs to idealize their partners due to the restricted amount of face-to-face communication. given the advances in technology over the last couple of decades this study aims to take a more contemporary look at this phenomenon. defining and measuring long-distance romantic relationships long-distance relationships (ldrs) have become increasingly common in the united states. armour (1998) noted that changes in technology and the american workforce have lead to record numbers of commuter marriages and other types of distance relationships. although research suggests that as many as four million americans are involved in long-distance non-martial relationships (garcia, 2011), this prevalence rate increases on college campuses, particularly during the freshman year. for instance, nationally, 25-40% of college students report being in a ldr (dellmanjenkins, bernard-paolucci, & rushing, 1994). studies of first-year college students indicate that ldrs are even more common among these students with as many as onehalf of first-year students in ldrs (knox, 1992). according to aylor (2003), among participants in her college age samples, one-third consistently report that they consider themselves to be in long-distance relationships, and about one-half of first year students report being the same. these numbers are consistent with stafford, daly, and reske’s (1987) claim that “as many as one third of premarital relationships in university settings may be long-distance ones” (p. 274). controversy exists in the field over how to measure and define distance relationships. literature in this area suggests that there are two general ideas over the definition of a ldr. the first approach is to gather information on subjective criteria to determine whether a relationship meets the researcher’s requirement for a ldr. such criteria could include the number of miles that separate the partners (schwebel, dunn, moss, & renner, 1992; holt & stone, 1988; carpenter & knox, 1986), geographic boundaries such as state, county, and town lines (helgeson, 1994; stephen, 1986; canary, stafford, hause, & wallace, 1993), or time and distance traveled (knox, zusman, daniels, & brantley, 2002). the problem with such subjective definitions of ldrs the operational definition for a ldr in one study versus another is highly variable, and these inconstancies can make the literature and its findings difficult to interpret. for instance, in carpenter and knox’s (1986) they considered couples in a ldr if more than 100 miles separated the partners, but schwebel et al. (1992) defined a ldr as more 50 miles distance bettween the partners. even geographical boundaries prove to be an inconsistent way of defining ldrs. helgeson (1994) defined an ldr as one in which one partner lived beyond the city limits of the other. whereas stephen (1986) required that partners live in different states. canary et al. (1993) used town limits as their criteria. more recently, cameron and ross (2007) used telephone area codes to verify partners’ reports of ldr status. another study operationalized nights spent apart during the work week with minimum nights for an ldr ranging from two nights per week (holmes, 2004) to four nights per week (rabe, 2001). the second approach to defining ldrs has been to allow the respondents to classify the relationships as long-distance or geographically close (gcrs), regardless of the number of miles or geographic boundaries that separate the partners (aylor, 2003). this self-report can take many forms, but most commonly takes the form of a forcedchoice ldr/gcr item (pistole & roberts, 2011). these forced response items can look quite different for instance in dainton & aylor (2001) the researchers provide a definition of an ldr and gcr and asked the respondents based on this definition how they would classify their relationship. some simply ask, “do you consider this a long-distance relationship?” (van horn et al., 1997). others, such as gulder & swenson (1995), ask for a dichotomous response (e.g., “my partner lives far enough away from me to see him or her every day.”) another version of this approach was used by ficara and mongeau (2000) when they asked respondents to indicate if they were unable to see each other “as much as they would like primarily due to geographic separation.” maguire (1999) asked if respondents were “unable to see each other on a regular basis (e.g. daily or weekly) due to time and/or distance constraints.” researchers such as dellman-jenkins et al. (1993) argue that permitting respondents to define their relationship as a ldr is more valid than “miles separated” or “geographic boundary” standards because a self-defined approach “is based on respondents’ definitions, and their own sense of reality in dating situations (aylor, 2003). indeed, some participants, separated by 80 (dellman-jenkins et al. 1994) and 250 (van horn et al., 1997) miles, have reported as being in a gcr, though both mileages could easily be seen as a barrier to daily face-to-face interactions. additionally, not all partners may know the exact mileage between them, and time apart depends greatly on travel methods available to the couple (pistole & roberts, 2011). either of these factors could greatly affect the accuracy and generalizability of a studies results. finally, even relational partners may “disagree as to whether or not their relationship is, or has ever been, a long-distance one” (stafford, 2005). idealization in long-distance romantic relationships relationships are commonly thought to be based on shared meaning (duck, 1994). one paradigm faced by many communication scholars is that meaning is emergent through joint interaction (goldsmith & baxter, 1996). mundane, day-to-day, ftf interaction is believed to be an integral part in establishing this shared meaning in romantic relationships (duck & pittman, 1994). past research seems to validate this assumption of the importance of everyday talk (stafford & merolla, 2007). the nature and frequency of romantic partners’ day-to-day communication has been linked to positive relational characteristics (see vangelisti, 2002). yet in contradiction to this evidence, longdistance romantic relationships reveal that partners often report higher quality relationships the gcr, despite the limited ftf contact in ldrs. romantic idealization has been proposed by a number of scholars as a possible explanation for this apparent contradiction in relational literature (stafford & merolla, 2007). romantic idealization is the “tendency to describe the relationship (and one’s partner) in unrealistically positive terms” (fowers, montel, & olsen, 1996, p.7). stafford and reske (1990) reported higher levels of idealization among ldr couples than gcr couples. idealized couples have even reported higher levels of relationship satisfaction than non-idealized couples (schulman, 1974). one assumption by much of the research on idealization is that idealization occurs primarily in the early stages of a relationship (centers, 1975; kerckoff & davis, 1962; pollis, 1969). for gcr this makes since, as more realistic views and the realization of differences should inevitably occur as a relationship develops (blood & wolfe, 1960; burgess & wallin, 1968; hall & taylor, 1976). idealization should eventually dissipate through increased interactions over time (stafford & reske, 1990). however, as schulman (1974) explains that couples manage to create and maintain inaccurate idealized images though “blocked communication.” schulman defines blocked communication as the tendency for couples to identify and isolate areas of potential conflict in order to maintain their perceived previous agreement. this sort of blocked communication continuing over time could be one reason why researchers consistently see greater idealization in ldr couples. according to miller, caughlin, and huston (2003) idealization can develop via two routes. the first route, cognitive idealization, is in line with other similar psychological models of positive illusions (murray, holmes, & griffin, 1996). murray et al. (1996) argues that positive illusions ward off uncertainty in romantic relationships. as relational uncertainty is often a hallmark of ldrs (lydon, pierce, & o’regan, 1997) we could expect cognitive idealization to readily occur in ldrs (stafford & merolla, 2007). the second route proposed by miller, caughlin, and huston (2003) is termed behavioral idealization and this, more so than cognitive idealization, emanates from the idea of blocked communication proposed by schulman (1974). the concept of behavioral idealization is built upon the premise that ldr partners have less access to each other’s complete “behavioral repertoire” (miller et al. 2003, p. 992). unlike gcr couples, ldr couples are not exposed to the day-to-day mundane behaviors of their partners thus the idealization found at the early stages of a relationship fails to dissipate (stafford & merrolla, 2007). these routes of idealization may be operating upon impression management behaviors by those in long-distance relationships in order to continue to maintain positive illusions of one’s partner and ward off relationship uncertainty. positive self-presentation, or impression management, has been argued to occur more often in non-ftf communication modes (cornwell & lundgren, 2001) as when interacting via mediated communication channels. using these channels, partners have a greater ability to accentuate their positive characteristics and downplay their negative ones (rabby & walther, 2003). computer-mediated communication, social information processing theory, and the hyperpersonal perspective social information processing theory was originally developed by joseph walther (1992) to explain how people form impressions and maintain relationships using computer-mediated communications. the theory makes two central arguments. first, walther theorizes that information must be altered to the mediated environment. this means that impression-bearing, emotional, and relational-managing information, which is typically expressed non-verbally in face-to-face communication, must be translated into verbal and text symbols online. secondly, the theory states that this translation can produce message exchanges that are not as efficient as face-to-face communication. however, the theory argues that this slow exchange of social information is no less effective at forming relationships than face-to-face communication (walther, 1992). walther (1996) explains that in order for relationships to develop over cmc the users must engage in multiple interactions with one another allowing the exchange of information. the theory assumes that all communicators are driven to form impressions and develop social relationships. in cmc, users form simple impressions of their communication partners through textually conveyed information. based on these impressions, users can test their assumptions over time by using knowledge-generating strategies, which will result in interpersonal knowledge and stimulate changes in relational communication between cmc users. from this theory of social information processing, walther (1996) proposes the hyperpersonal model of cmc in which cmc users can sometimes surpass the level of affection and emotion of face-to-face exchanges. he theorizes that in some situations, cmc can be a more desirable channel of communication because users can mange their impressions to a greater extent than in face-to-face communication to achieve their social goals by expressing communication behaviors that are more desirable. then, the receiver of a cmc messages can take these constructed interactions and create idealized form of their partners and their relationship with that partner, and through reciprocation, confirm the selectively presented version their partner wished to present. thus, cmc can provide opportunities for message senders to use selective selfpresentation, can create more idealization for the message receiver, and greater reciprocation because it allows for asynchronous communication and greater editing of communication messages (walther, 1996). the hyperpersonal model states that receivers of cmc messages in the absence of physical or other cues that are provided in face-to-face interactions, rather than fail to form an impression, receivers will fill in blacks with regard to missing information (walther, 2011). this “filling in” can often take the form of idealization if the person has initial favorable cues about another person. the original articulation of this part of the model came from the side theory (lea & spears, 1992), which describes how cmc users make greater attributions of similarity with their interaction partner if given contextual clues that they may share a salient social identity with the receiver. this could lead to heightened attraction between cmc users (walther, 2011). defining impression management it is difficult to imagine any situation in which people do not engage in some level of impression management. people practice impression management strategies when they engage in a mundane conversation with a co-worker, tell their children to wonder, “what the neighbors will think,” and even when they decide what shirt to wear in the morning. people consistently show an awareness that their verbal and non-verbal actions are scrutinized by others and that the conclusion that is drawn from this scrutinization will make up the picture others have of that individual. some practices of impression management can be quite formal and planned such as a presentation in a conference room or a speech given in front of a large audience, and others can be less formal and quite spontaneous such as the way one executes the social script for exiting from the boring conversation with their coworker. in the words of metts and grohskopf (2003), “other than walking upright and producing speech, there are few qualities so manifestly human as impression management.” impression management is an umbrella term used to encompass several research traditions such as self-presentation and situated social identity theory. several scholars have tried to detangle these terms and their definitions. for example, schlenker (1980) defined impression management as the “attempt to control images that are projected in real or imagined social interactions,” and reserved the term self-presentation for instances in which the projected images are “self-relevant” (p.6). the terms selfpresentation and impression management are most commonly found within the discipline of social psychology. however, different labels under the terms situated social identity, facework, and politeness theory are also present in sociology. self-presentation is typically referred to as the process by which individuals, more or less intentionally, construct a public self that is likely to elicit certain types of attributions from others, attributions that would facilitate the achievement of some goal, usually to acquire social rewards or advantages, or to prevent loss of self-esteem when future failure seems probable (metts & grohskof, 2003). the terms self-presentation and strategic self-presentation stem from the early work of jones and colleagues (e.g., jones, 1964; jones & berglas, 1978; jones & pittman, 1982) in psychology and social psychology, who were interested in how the motivations of the “inner” or “private” self are strategically manifested and monitored in public displays. hence, the term impression management came to be associated with the production of coherent sets of behaviors that would lead others to infer a corresponding private self that may or may not exist (metts & grohskof, 2003). although some scholars associate the terms impression management and strategic self-presentation with deception and manipulation (buss & briggs, 1984; tedeschi & reiss, 1981), most recognize the elusive nature of authenticity (schlenker, weigold, & hallam, 1990) and view selfpresentation as the necessary abstraction of complex personalities (schlenker, 1986). another theoretical root of the term impression management resides in situated social identity theory. this theory has its roots in sociology and branches widely across disciplines such as sociolinguistics, linguistics, and communication. consequently, in this theoretical tradition the notion of “impression” as strategically linked to specific motives, is reformulated as the inevitable and fundamental image of the self as a social interactant with an emphasis on the rights and responsibilities that attend that role (metts & grohskof, 2003). there are two prominent traditions associate with situated social identity: face and facework (goffman, 1959, 1967) and politeness theory (brown & levinson, 1978, 1987). facework is concerned with the fundamental organizing principle of social interaction and the alignment of social identities or the face (goffman, 1959). according to goffman (1967), whether an interactant strategically presents an identity or not, others will form impressions and respond to those impressions. goffman compared social encounters to stage performances in that social actors delivered their lines (i.e. performed in accordance with their social identities or face) and supported their enactments with the necessary props, staging, and demeanor. other interactants serve as co-actors or audience members. interactants derive information about the line other actors have taken by processing both the “cues given” (verbal and nonverbal behaviors that are conscious) and “cues given off,” nonverbal behavior that is difficult to control (height, weight, blushing, vocal quality, etc.) these performances are prepared in the “back stage” (e.g., home or office) and enacted on the “front stage” (e.g., in social settings)(metts & grohskof, 2003). impression management is an extremely complex and multifaceted term, and there is still much research to be done on this concept. however, for the purposes of this study the researchers will be looking to detect impression management strategies being used by the participants in their romantic relationships both long-distance and geographically close, and not specifically what strategies they are using. cmc in ldrs research is limited on how computer-mediated communication (cmc) contributes to traditional ldrs, that is relationships that exist both on and offline. there are many studies that have been conducted looking at relationships that form and are maintained purely online such as dating relationships (merkle & richardson, 2000), friendships (parks & floyd, 1996), work relationships (constant, sproull, & kiesler, 1997), and relationships in educational settings (brandon & hollingshead, 1999). it has been proposed that traditional ldrs and online relationships are radically different social forms (adams, 1998). the lack of attention given to these relationships is surprising considering that the majority of online interaction is dedicated to contact of family members and friends that were previously met offline (stafford, 2005). the role of cmc among those who already know each other may be may impact on the relationship and additional modes of interaction (stafford, 2005). cmc users who are already well acquainted and see each other often may use cmc differently than those for whom cmc is a predominate form of communication. in these close relationships with regular ftf interaction, cmc would not be expected to drastically alter the relationship. however, if these relationships become predominately mediated, as in the case, with traditional ldrs, hyperpersonal interaction may become more likely (walther & parks, 2002). when cmc becomes the predominate form of communication, it can promote more positive illusions of the interaction partner (rabby & walther, 2003). thus, cmc may encourage both idealization and relationship maintenance of romantic relationships. though there may be differences in effects in ldrs and gcrs. long-distance romantic relationships will experience greater relationship satisfaction, idealization, and impression management behaviors hypotheses and research questions h1: ldrs will experience the same or greater amount of relational and communication satisfaction as the gcr counterparts. h2: ldr couples will be more idealized than gcr couples h3: ldr couples will have less face-to-face communication than gcr couples. h4: ldr couples will use more mediated communication than gcr couples. h5: ldr couples will use more impression management strategies in their communications than gcr couples. h6: idealization and relationship satisfaction will be positively correlated. h7: relationship satisfaction and communication satisfaction will be positively correlated with overall technology use. h8: impression management and idealization will be positively correlated with overall technology use. h9: higher idealization will be positively correlated with higher impression management strategies. method participants participants were 350 (93 male, 257 female) college students who received course credit for their participation in this study. data presented in the results section was gathered from two universities (n=350). the first sample was obtained from a large, southeastern university in the united states (n=321; female: n=257, male: n=64). respondents ranged in age from 18-27, although most participants were underclassmen (freshman: n=142, sophomore: n=107, junior: n=59, senior n=13). this is not surprising since data was gathered as part of course credit given in a lower level department course. the second sample was obtained from a medium-sized, southwestern university (n=29 male) in the united states. the primary reason for gathering this second set of data was to offset the gender disparity of the first respondents as well as boost the amount of men that identified themselves as in a long-distance relationship. respondents ranged in age from 18-39. past literature has shown that in almost any college population, at least one-third of the students will be in long-distance relationships. the current study recruited 108 participants that self-identified as involved in a long-distance relationship. the other 242 identified their relationship as geographically-close. additionally, if a participant was not in a relationship at the time of data collection, they were asked to think about their most recent partner. of our 321 participants, only 82 were not currently involved in a romantic relationship. all ethnicities were included in the study (caucasian = 273, africanamerican=27, hispanic=16, asian/pacific islander=13, other=8, unidentified=25). measures each participant completed a questionnaire designed to collect the demographic information reported above, relational information, information on technology use between the relationship partners, as well as measures of relationship satisfaction, communication satisfaction, and social support. relational information assessed if participants were currently involved in a romantic relationship at the time data was collected. the questionnaire then asked participants about their relationship (e.g., how long they had been involved in their relationship; the sex of their relationship partner). then based on previous research about defining ldrs from gcrs, respondents were asked to define their relationship as long-distance or geographically close. additionally, we assessed how much face-to-face interaction participants had with their partners every month. if they did not interact face-to-face with their partner each month, the questionnaire will then assess how often participants see their partner each calendar year. items on technology use assessed how often participants used different forms of mediated communication to interact with their partner. these included traditional mediated channels such as the telephone, and cmc channels such as social networking sites, e-mail, video calls, instant messaging, and texting. participants responded to frequency of use on a five-point likert scale. using the same five-point likert scale, this section also assessed how much respondents communicated with their relationship partner face-to-face. to assess relationship satisfaction, participants completed the quality of marriage index (qmi; norton, 1983), a six item global self-report measure of marital quality, which has been widely adapted for use in non-marital romantic relationships. the reliability of the qmi has previously ranged from α = .88 to α = .96 (vanlear, 1991). in the current study, α = .94. we also assessed communication satisfaction (vanlear, 1991; adapted from hecht, 1978) for each participant, as this variable has been previously found to be highly correlated with relationship satisfaction. due to the focus of this study on communication channels, we expected it to be pertinent to the study. for the current study α = .96. impression management was measured by a self-report of perceived success to indicate whether participants thought that they engaged in these behaviors within their romantic relationships. the first two items on this six item measure were adapted from walther et al. (2011): (a) computer-mediated communication allows me to present myself in a favorable way and (b) i think i make a good impression on my partner using computermediated communication. the last three items were adapted from gibbs, ellison, and heino (2006)’s study on online dating and asked: (c) i feel i understand how to be successful in communicating with my partner via computer-mediated communication (d) i feel hopeful about my relationship and (e)i have developed a strategy or strategies for communicating with my partner via computer-mediated communication. respondents were asked to rate their level of agreement with each statement on a 5-point likerttype scale ranging from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree. exploratory factor analyses (efas) from previous studies using varimax rotation and examining eigenvalues and scree plots (using eigenvalues of 1.0 or greater) have shown that of these six success items load on two factors (gibbs et al., 2006). gibbs conducted a efa because of the original items adapted from walther (2011) were included to measure for strategic success. the wording of the selfpresentation success scale was modified for the online dating context for walther’s study, and it was the first time the two subscales had been used in conjunction. factor loadings were all greater than .6, and all cross-loadings were less than .35. the factor analysis confirmed these two dimensions, and on the basis of reliability analysis, they were combined into indexes (self-presentation success, α = .69; strategic success, α = .75) that were used in analysis by averaging across the items (gibbs et al. 2006). due to the ability for this shale to be adapted with such success to the online dating environment, the researcher thought that it would be able to have statistic reliability in assessing impression management strategies used in long-distance and geographically-close romantic relationships over cmc. the current study found an overall reliable alpha for the measure, α = .81. idealization was measured using the idealization distortion scale included in the enrich marital satisfaction scale (fowers & olsen, 1993). crochbach’s alpha for this measure in the current study was α = .78. results relationship satisfaction. an independent samples t-test was conducted to compare the average score on the quality of relationship index (qri) for geographically-close and long-distance relationships. there was no significant difference in the scores for longdistance (m=6.07, sd=1.35) and geographically-close couples (m=6.08, sd=1.40; t(338)=.075, p=.940, two-tailed). idealization. an independent samples t-test was conducted to compare the average score on the idealization distortions scale for geographically-close and long-distance relationships. there was no significant difference in the scores for long-distance (m=3.33, sd=.84) and geographically-close couples (m=3.34, sd=.82; t(334)= -.061, p=.952, two-tailed). face-to-face communication. an independent samples t-test was conducted to compare face-to-face communication for geographically-close and long-distance relationships. as predicted based on the nature of long-distance relationships, there was significant difference in the scores for long-distance (m=3.05, sd=1.02) and geographically-close couples (m=4.21, sd=.95; t(341)= -10.26, p < .001, two-tailed). technology use. an independent samples t-test was conducted to compare the amount of technology-use across several formats for geographically-close and long-distance relationships. there was no significant difference in the scores for e-mail (ldr: m=1.69, sd=1.09; gcr: m=1.71, sd=.97; t(341)= -.17, p=.863, two-tailed. there was a marginally significant difference for texting communication (ldr: m=4.5, sd=1.03; gcr: m=4.29, sd=.94; t(341)=1.90, p=.057, two-tailed), however, there was a significant difference in the scores for phone use (ldr: m=3.92, sd=1.17; gcr: m=3.59, sd=1.00; t(341)=2.65, p=.008, two-tailed), social networking use (ldr: m=3.20, sd=1.32; gcr: m=2.60, sd=1.18; t(341)= 4.14, p<.001, two-tailed), video communication (ldr: m=3.37, sd=1.41; gcr: m=2.38, sd=1.22; t(341)=6.62, p<.001, two-tailed), and instant messaging (ldr: m=2.33, sd=1.43; gcr: m=2.00, sd=1.25; t(341)=2.11, p=.035, two-tailed). both relationships showed the greatest preference for communicating via text followed by phone. those involved in ldr’s then preferred video before social networking sites as a form of mediated communication. impression management. an independent samples t-test was conducted to compare the average score on the impression management questionnaire for geographically-close and long-distance relationships. there was a significant difference in the scores for long-distance (m=3.85, sd=.81) and geographically-close couples (m=3.59, sd=.73; t(331)=2.98, p=.003, two-tailed). correlations. the relationship between idealization (measured by the idealization distortions scale) and relationship satisfaction (measured by the qri) was investigated using a pearson correlation. there was a strong, positive correlation between the two, r = .56, p<.001, two tailed, with high levels of relationship satisfaction being associated with higher levels of idealization in the relationship. an additional analysis was conducted to see if this was also true for idealization and communication satisfaction. the analysis revealed a strong, positive correlation as well (r = .52, p<.001, two-tailed). therefore, across all relationship types idealization was associated with greater communication and relational satisfaction. no analysis was conducted comparing ldr and gcr relationships, because no significant difference was found between the overall relational and communication satisfaction scores for the different relationship types. idealization, impression management, relationship satisfaction, and communication satisfaction were all found to be positively correlated with technology use with the exception of im communication showing a small, negative correlation with relationship satisfaction, but the correlation was not deemed significant. results are presented in table 1. table 1. technology phone text sns e-mail video im measure relationship satisfaction r=.383 p<.001 r=.369 p<.001 r=.126 p=.020 r=.087 p=.11 r=.154 p=.004 r=-.017 p=.75 communication satisfaction r=.335 p<.001 r=.415 p<.001 r=.134 p=.013 r=.012 p<.82 r=.174 p=.001 r=.038 p=.483 impression management r=.261 p<.001 r=.345 p<.001 r=.348 p<.001 r=.121 p=.028 r=.255 p<.001 r=.234 p<.001 idealization r=.243 p<.001 r=.-182 p=.001 r=.136 p=.013 r=.134 p=.014 r=.229 p<.001 r=.143 p=.009 these results indicate that phone, text, and video communication have the strongest association with relationship satisfaction, communication satisfaction, impression management, and idealization (i.e. so the more immediate (fast) forms of cmc with a greater facility for social cues were used more by couples who were satisfied in their relationships). this is not surprising given the greater preference for these communication modalities in romantic relationships. the relationship between idealization (measured by the idealization distortions scale) and impression management was investigated using a pearson correlation. there was a medium, positive correlation between the two, r = .35, p<.001, two tailed, with high levels of impression management being associated with higher levels of idealization in the relationship. discussion replicating previous studies, our studies found that long-distance couples experience the same relationship and communication satisfaction as geographically close couples. although, stafford & merolla (2007) showed that ldr couples idealize their partners more than gcr couples, and that they perceive their communication quality to be higher than gcr couples, our study found no evidence to replicate these findings. according to the results of this study, long-distance couples did not differ from their geographically close counter parts on the idealization measure. given the nature of long-distance romantic relationships it is not surprising that there was a significant difference found in face-to-face communication. while there were some differences seen in the amount of technology used between long-distance and geographically-close couples, gcrs today are using technology in far greater amounts and far more consistently than they were ten years ago. this greater reliance on technology could be allowing geographically-close couples to engage in more impression management behaviors for longer periods of time than previously seen, leading to greater idealization. however, it is interesting to note that the difference in types of technology use between gcrs and ldrs only appeared once we included the second sample of men. before this data was included, the difference across types of technology use across relationships was virtually non-existent. future studies may want to take into account what role gender may be playing in romantic idealization, since it has been shown that women and men use technology in different amounts and for different purposes (kimbrough, guadagno, muscanell, & dill, 2012; muscanell & guadagno, 2012). this study did find a statistically significant difference between ldrs and gcrs on impression management. our results indicated that people in ldrs use more impression management strategies in their mediated communication than those in gcrs. impression management has been a staple in previous research on ldrs. given the nature of the relationship it is likely that ldrs continue to use more impression management strategies in their time communicating because they are not able to interact as much face-to-face. our results replicated previous findings that idealization in a relationship is positively correlated with relationship and communication satisfaction (schulman, 1974; stafford & reske, 1990), although we found no difference in idealization scores across relationship type. given the amount that gcrs are using mediated-communication in their romantic relationships this could increase idealization among these couples as well. meaning these results do not necessarily negate that idealization is found in ldrs, but that it may be rising in gcrs. alternatively, the rise of connectivity and technology use between both type of couples could be negating the effects of idealization, despite the continued impression management strategies employed by ldr couples. future research should explore to a greater extent how technology use may be affecting idealization found in gcrs. idealization, impression management, relationship satisfaction, and communication satisfaction were all found to be associated with greater technology use. specifically, our results show that phone, text, and video communication have the most association with these measures. this is not surprising given the greater preference for these communication modalities in romantic relationships. these correlations point that more connectivity between romantic partners using mediate communications increase overall communication and relationship satisfaction. however, while using these mediated communications, individuals are also managing their impressions and idealizing their partner to a greater extent. limitations one limitation of this study is that only a college-aged population was examined, and this could affect the findings generalizability to other age ranges, especially given that among other age groups technology use in romantic relationships, both ldrs and gcrs, may be less pervasive. second, our measure of impression management only assessed whether an individual used strategies in their communication, not how they used them or how frequently. a better measure of impression management in interpersonal relationship may reveal other levels to these questions that cannot be explored at the present time. finally, while both sexes and all ethnicities were included in our sample, our data was made up mostly of caucasians and female participants. this rather homogeneous population could affect the results. future research should take consideration to prevent this kind of sample bias. references acitelli, l. k., & antonucci, t. c. (1994). gender differences in the link between marital support and satisfaction in older couples. journal of personality and social psychology, 67, 688–698. adams, r. g. (1998). the demise of territorial determinism. in r. g.adams & g.allan (eds.), placing friendship in context (pp. 153–182). cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. anderson, t. l., & emmers-sommer, t. m. (2006). predictors of relationship satisfaction in online romantic relationships. communication studies, 57(2), 153172. antonucci, t. c., & akiyama, h. (1987). an examination of sex differences in social support among older men and women. sex roles, 17, 737–749. armour, s. (1998, november 23). married . . . with separation: more couples live apart as careers put miles between them. usa today, c2-c4. aylor (2003). “maintaining long distance relationships.” in canary, d.j. & dainton, m. (eds.), maintaining relationships through communication (pp. 127-139). new jersey: lawrence erlbaum associates. barbee, a. p., cunningham, m. r., winstead, b. a., derlega, v. j., gulley, m. r., yankeelov, p. a., & druen, p. b. (1993). effects of gender role expectations on the social support process. journal of social issues, 49, 175–190. beitler, m. a., & mitlacher, l. w. (2007). information sharing, self-directed learning and its implications for workplace learning: a comparison of business student attitudes in germany and the usa. journal of workplace learning, 19(8), 526536. blood, r. o., & wolfe, d. m. (1960). husbands and wives: the dynamics of married living. glencoe, il: the free press of glencoe. brandon, d. p., & hollingshead, a. b. (1999). collaborative learning and computer‐ supported groups. communication education, 48(2), 109-126. brown, p., & levinson, s. c. (1978). universals in language usage: politeness phenomena. in e. goody (ed.), questions and politeness (pp. 56–324). cambridge: cambridge university press. brown, p., & levinson, s. c. (1987). politeness: some universals in language usage. cambridge, england: cambridge university press. burgess, e. w., & wallin, p. (1968). idealization, love, and self-esteem. in j. heiss (ed.), family roles and interaction: an anthology (pp. 116-140). chicago: rand mcnally. buss, a. h., & briggs, s. (1984). drama and the self in social interaction. journal of personality and social psychology, 47, 1310-1324. cameron, j. j., & ross, m. (2007). in times of uncertainty: predicting the survival of longdistance relationships. journal of social psychology, 147, 581–606. canary, d., stafford, l., hause, k., &wallace, l. (1993). an inductive analysis of relational maintenance strategies: comparisons among lovers, relatives, friends, and others. communication research reports, 10, 5-l 4. carpenter, d., & knox, d. (1986). relationship maintenance of college students separated during courtship. college student journal, 28, 86-88. centers, r. (1975). attitude similarity-dissimilarity as a correlate of heterosexual attraction and love. journal of marriage and the family, 37, 305-312. cornwell, b., & lundgren, d. (2001). love on the internet: involvement and misrepresentation in romantic relationships in cyberspace vs. real space. computers in human behavior, 17, 197–211. cunningham, m. r., & barbee, a. p. (2000). social support. in c. hendrick & s. s. hendrick (eds.), close relationships: a sourcebook (pp. 272–285). thousand oaks, ca: sage. cutrona, c. e. (1996). social support in couples. thousand oaks, ca: sage. cutrona, c. e., & suhr, j. a. (1992). controllability of stressful events and satisfaction with spouse support behaviors. communication research, 19, 154–174. dainton, m, stafford, l., & canary, d. (1994). maintenance strategies and physical affection as predictors of love, liking, and satisfaction in marriage. communication reports, 7, 88-98. dainton, m., & aylor, b. (2001). a relational uncertainty analysis of jealousy, trust, & maintenance in long-distance versus geographically close relationships. communication quarterly, 49, 172-l 88. dellmann-jenkins, m., bernard-paolucci, t. s., & rushing, b. (1994). does distance make the heart grow fonder? a comparison of college students in long-distance and geographically close dating relationships. college student journal, 28, 212– 219. dellmann-jenkins, m., bernard-paolucci, t., & rushing, b. (1993). does distance make the heart grow fonder? a comparison of college students in long-distance and geographically-close dating relationships. college student journal, 1o, 212-2 19. duck, s. w. (1994). meaningful relationships: talking, sense, and relating. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. duck, s. w., & pittman, g. (1994). social and personal relationships. in m. l. knapp & g. r. miller (eds.), handbook of interpersonal communication (pp. 676–695). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. ficara,i., & mongeau, i? (2000, november). relational uncertainty in long-distance college student dating relationships. paper presented at the annual conference of the national communication association; seattle, wa. fausto-sterling, a. (1985). myths of gender: biological theories about women and men. new york: basic books. fowers, b. j., montel, k. h., & olson, d. h. (1996). predictive validity of types of premarital couples based on prepare. journal of marital and family therapy, 22, 103–119. garcia, e. (2011, september 26) space between us: long distance relationships. crimson white. gibbs, j. l., ellison, n. b., & heino, r. d. (2006). self-presentation in online personals the role of anticipated future interaction, self-disclosure, and perceived success in internet dating. communication research, 33(2), 152-177. goffman, e. (1959). the presentation of self in everyday life. garden city, ny: doubleday. goffman, e. (1967). interaction ritual: essays on face-to-face behavior. new york: pantheon. goldsmith, d. j., & baxter, l. a. (1996). constituting relationships in talk: a taxonomy of speech events in social and personal relationships. human communication research, 23, 87–114. govaerts, k., & dixon, d. (1988). “. . . until careers do us part”: vocational and marital satisfaction in the dual-career commuter marriage. international journal for the advancement of counseling, 11, 265-28 1. guldner, g., & swensen, c. (1995). time spent together and relationship quality: longdistance relationships as a test case. journal of social and personal relationships, 12, 313-320. hall, j. a., & taylor, s. e. (1976). when love is blind: maintaining idealized images of one's spouse. human relations, 29, 8, 751-761. helgeson, v (1994). long-distance romantic relationships: sex differences in adjustment and breakup. personality and social psychology bulletin, 20, 254265. holmes, m. (2004). an equal distance? individualization, gender and intimacy in distance relationships. sociological review, 52, 180–200. holt, i., & stone, g. (1988). needs, coping strategies, and coping outcomes associated with long-distance relationships. journal of college student development, 29, 136-141. huston-hoburg, l., & strange, c. (1986). spouse support among male and female returning adult students. journal of college student personnel, 27, 388–394. jones, e. e. (1964). ingratiation: a social psychological analysis. new york: appletoncentury-croft. jones, e. e., & berglas, s. (1978). control of attributions about the self through selfhandicapping strategies: the appeal of alcohol and the role of underachievement. personality and social psychology bulletin, 4, 200–206. jones, e. e., & pittman, t. s. (1982). toward a general theory of strategic selfpresentation. in j. suls (ed.), psychological perspectives on the self (pp. 231– 263). hillsdale, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates. julien, d., & markman, h. j. (1991). social support and social networks as determinants of individual and marital outcomes. journal of social and personal relationships, 8, 549–568. kerckhoff, a. c., & davis, r. e. (1962). value consensus and need complementarity in mate selection. american sociological review, 27, 297-303. kimbrough, a.m., guadagno, r.e., muscanell, n.l., & dill, j. (2012). gender differences in mediated communication: women connect more than do men. computers in human behavior, 29, 896-900. knox, d. (1992). choices in relationships. st. paul, mn: west publishing. knox, d., zusman, m. e., daniels, v., & brantley, a. (2002). absence makes the heart grow fonder? long distance dating relationships among college students. college student journal, 36, 364–367. lea, m. & spears, r. (1995). love at first byte? building personal relationships over computer networks. in wood, j.t. & duck, s. (eds.), understudied relationships: off the beaten track (pp. 197-233). california: sage publications. lydon, j., pierce, t., & o’regan, s. (1997). coping with moral commitment to longdistance dating relationships. journal of personality and social psychology, 73, 104–113. maguire, k. (1999). does distance make the heart work harder? a comparison of the maintenance strategies of long-distance and proximal relationships. paper presented at the annual conference of the national communication association; chicago. merkle, e. r., & richardson, r. a. (2004). digital dating and virtual relating: conceptualizing computer mediated romantic relationships. family relations, 49(2), 187-192. metts, s. & grohskopf, e. (2003). “impression management: goals, strategies, and skills.” in greene, j. o. & burleson, b.r. (eds.), handbook of communication and social interaction skills (pp. 357 – 399). routledge: new jersey. miller, p. j. e., caughlin, j. p., & huston, t. l. (2003). trait expressiveness and marital satisfaction: the role of idealization processes. journal of marriage and the family, 65, 978–995. muscanell, n. l., & guadagno, r. e. (2012). make new friends or keep the old: gender and personality differences in social networking use. computers in human behavior, 28, 107–112. murray, s. l., holmes, j. g., & griffin, d. w. (1996). the benefits of positive illusions: idealizations and the construction of satisfaction in close relationships. journal of personality and social psychology, 70, 79–98. norton, r. (1983). measuring marital quality: a critical look at the dependent variable. journal of marriage and the family, 141-151. parks, m. r., & floyd, k. (1996). making friends in cyberspace. journal of computer‐ mediated communication, 1(4), 0-0. pasch, l. a., & bradbury, t. n. (1998). social support, conflict, and the development of marital satisfaction. journal of consulting and clinical psychology, 66, 219–230. pasch, l. a., bradbury, t. n., & davila, j. (1997). gender, negative affectivity, and observed social support behavior in marital interaction. personal relationships, 4, 361–378. pistole, m. c., & roberts, a. (2011). measuring long-distance romantic relationships: a validity study. measurement and evaluation in counseling and development, 44(2), 63-76. pollis, c. a. (1969). dating involvement and patterns of idealization: a test of waller's hypothesis. journal of marriage and the family, 31, 765-771. rabby, m. k., & walther, j. b. (2003). computer-mediated effects on relationship formation and maintenance. in d. j. canary & m. dainton (eds.), maintaining relationships through communication: relational, contextual, and cultural variations (pp. 141–162). mahwah, nj: erlbaum. rabe, m. (2001). commuter couples: an inside story. society in transition, 32, 277– 291. schlenker, b. r. (1980). impression management: the self-concept, social identity, and interpersonal relations. monterey, ca: brooks/cole. schlenker, b. r. (1986). self-identification: toward an integration of the private and public self. in r. f. baumeister (ed.), public self and private self (pp. 21-62). new york: springer-verlag. schlenker, b. r., weigold, m. f., & hallam, j. r. (1990). selfserving attributions in social context: effects of self-esteem and social pressure. journal of personality and social psychology, 58, 855–863. schulman, m. l. (1974). idealization in engaged couples. journal of marriage and the family, 36, 139-147. schwebel, a., dunn, r., moss, b., & renner, m. (1992). factors associated with relational stability in geographically separated couples. journal of college student development, 33, 222-230. stafford, l. (2005). maintaining long-distance and cross residential relationships. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum. stafford, l., & canary, d. j. (1991). maintenance strategies and romantic relationship type, gender and relational characteristics. journal of social and personal relationships, 8(2), 217-242. stafford, l., & merolla, a. j. (2007). idealization, reunions, and stability in long-distance dating relationships. journal of social and personal relationships, 24(1), 37-54. stafford, l., & reske, j. (1990). idealization and communication in long-distance pre marital relationships. family relations, 39, 274-279. stafford, l., daley, j., & reske, j. (1987, november). the effects of romantic relationships on friendship networks. paper presented at the annual conference of the speech communication association, boston. stephen, t (1986). communication and interdependence in geographically separated relationships. human communication research, 23, 191-2 10. tedeschi, j., & riess, m. (1981). verbal strategies in impression management. in c. antaki (ed.), the psychology of ordinary explanations of social behavior (pp. 271–309). new york: academic press. van horn, k. r., arnone, a., nesbitt, k., desllets, l., sears, t., giffin, m., & brudi, r. (1997). physical distance and interpersonal characteristics in college students’ romantic relationships. personal relationships, 4, 25–34. vangelisti, a. (2002). interpersonal processes in romantic relationships. in m. l. knapp & j. a. daly (eds.), handbook of interpersonal communication (pp. 643–679). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. vanlear, c. a. (1991). testing a cyclical model of communicative openness in relationship development: two longitudinal studies. communications monographs, 58(4), 337-361. walther, j. b. (1992). interpersonal effects in computer-mediated interactions: a relational perspective. communication research 19(1), 52-90. walther, j. b. & parks, m. r. (2002). cues filtered out, cues filtered in: computermediated communication and relationships. in m.l. knapp & j.a. daly (eds.), handbook of interpersonal communication (3rd ed, p. 529-563). thousand oaks, ca: sage. walther, j. b. (1996). computer mediated communication: impersonal, interpersonal, and hyperpersonal interaction. communication research 23(1), 3-43. walther, j.b. (2011). social information processing theory: impressions and relationship development online. in braithwaite, d. o. & baxter, l. a. (eds.), engaging theories in interpersonal communication: multiple perspectives (391404). california: sage publications. wood, j. (1994). who cares? women, care, and culture. carbondale: southern illinois university press. xu, y., & burleson, b. r. (2006). effects of sex, culture, and support type on perceptions of spousal social support: an assessment of the “support gap” hypothesis in early marriage. human communication research, 27(4), 535-566. microsoft word proferes aoir formatted.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): proferes, n. (2015, october 21-24). methodological considerations in tracing user knowledge of information flows on social media sites. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. methodological considerations in tracing user knowledge of information flows on social media sites nicholas proferes university of maryland introduction following a number of recent examples of where social media users have been confronted by information flows that did not match their understandings and expectations—such as in the wake of the “facebook contagion” study (kramer, guillory, & hancock, 2014) [original study], (chambers, 2014) [explanation of the controversy]— there is a pressing need to better articulate the public’s beliefs about these systems, how these beliefs line up against the extant flows of these systems, and to better understand the factors that may be influencing the construction of those beliefs. one way of doing this is by tracing gaps in users’ understandings of information flows against the “reality” of information flows, and to contextualize this comparison with analysis of how the organizations purveying these technologies present, describe, and selectively position information flows to users. such triangulation can make visible the antecedent factors that impact the construction of beliefs about these systems that ultimately inform decision making. the need for this kind of critical inquiry is pressing because, as social media sites become further entrenched as dominant vehicles for communication, knowledge and beliefs regarding these technologies will play an ever increasing role in users’ abilities to understand information filtering bias on social media, gauge the risks for information disclosure, make meaningful decisions about use and how to protect their privacy, participate in conversations around how information flows in these spaces should be governed, and ultimately, these beliefs and sets of knowledge help shape users’ power relative to these systems. in the hopes of filling such a need, my dissertation project “informational power on twitter: a mixedmethods exploration of user knowledge and technological discourse about information flows,” investigates user knowledge about twitter, twitter’s own organizational discourse, and theorizes how gaps between construed understandings and extant information flows can impact individual power. this mixed-methods project relies on the quantitative analysis of data gathered from a web-based survey designed to probe user knowledge of different aspects of information flows on twitter, on a discourse analysis of twitter’s messaging to users, and on a technical review of the structures that constitute information flows on the platform. though the analysis is still ongoing, early results suggest that while hashtags, @replies, following, and some of twitter’s revenue generation models such as promoted tweets and trends are well understood by users, facets of information flows such as the fact that not all users see the same trending topics, the fact that twitter sells access to the “firehose” of real-time tweets, the fact that certain kinds of profile information about users with “protected” accounts is still publicly accessible, and the fact that all public tweets are given by twitter to the library of congress are poorly understood. these findings may come as less than surprising, however, when considering twitter’s overall messaging to users. this messaging consistently focuses on the value for users of engaging in conversation, in the value of experiencing and engaging the current, and how the features and affordances of twitter further such ends. what happens to tweets beyond the immediate moment and how tweets are leveraged to generate revenue is not as frequently a mainstay of twitter’s own discourse. opportunities and challenges the point of this position paper is not to discuss the results of this research, but rather to discuss the opportunities and challenges inherent in such a mixed-method approach to understanding and contextualizing user-knowledge, with an eye towards implications for the study of implications for users. first, i am not arguing for mixed-methods approaches to the exclusion of purely qualitative and quantitative work. instead, a mixed-methods approach is an attractive accompaniment to these more traditional approaches in that it can offer a pragmatic way of linking findings from the two to create a richer end-product (johnson & onwuegbuzie, 2004). unfortunately though, the practical implementation of a mixed-method approach for tracing user knowledge about information flows on social media, the discourse about information flows that social media purveyors generate, and the extant information flows on social media is fraught with a number of hurdles. first, “information flows on social media” are complex phenomena involving the intermingling of social and technical elements. researchers need an analytical model/method that can facilitate the deconstruction of information flows on a given platform and that can operate at different levels of abstraction. further, researchers must be able to address how such a model inherently draws boundaries that constitute an inside and outside to the system; boundaries which may be arbitrary or artificial constructions. in my own experience, the analytical framework found in van dijck’s (2013) critical history of social media, the culture of connectivity has been a useful tool for deconstructing information flows on twitter. while this framework does not provide an account of every single piece of the sociotechnical system that makes up a social media site, it does serve as a practical toolkit for identifying and breaking apart some of the salient, yet interconnected components of social media platforms such as data and metadata structures, algorithms, protocols, defaults, informational content, users, business models, platform ownership, and governance practices. this framework facilitates articulating how information flows are constituted through technical architecture, while at the same time helping to unpack the more social and politicaleconomic bases of information flows. here, however, there is also another challenge: much of the inner-workings of social media platforms may be less than transparent (particularly aspects such as third-party data-sharing agreements). as a result, creating a picture of information flows on a given platform requires not just exploring userinterfaces, but also examining application programming interfaces, documentation for developers and business partners, financial filings, and industry analysis, among other sources. in addition, when giving a descriptive account of these elements, it is also important to identify the relative transparency of each component of the information flows relative to users, particularly for those elements that may be murky and opaque as a function of design. second, while attention has (justly) been given to users’ understandings and (frequently, lack of) reading of terms of service and privacy policies (fuchs, 2009; reidenberg et al., 2014), relatively less attention has been given to what might be called more casual organizational language use. the businesses that operate social media sites often deploy a variety of persuasive arguments on subjects such as how information flows through a platform, the value generated for users by certain information flows, and the kinds of informational experiences that can be gained through use. this language is important because, like all technological discourse, it can be a significant part of how a tool becomes part of our “systems of goals, values, and meaning, part of our articulated interests, struggles, and activities” (bazerman, 1998, p. 386). further, as policy documents are often written in legal language that necessitates a higher level of education to comprehend, this more casual language may potentially have a stronger shaping influence as it is more immediately digestible. while this language can take on easily identifiable forms such as instructive messaging to users on websites or tutorials for new users, it can also take on forms such as media interviews with organizational founders and leaders, keynotes by notable employees at highly visible conferences, commercials, and op-eds in the press. tracing these multiple kinds of expression can help uncover how organizational rhetoric and discourse operates through multiple communication genres, influencing the mental models and expectations of current users and the audience who has not yet made the decision to adopt a given technology. in looking across these forms, researchers can probe how perceptions of information flows are shaped inside and outside of the .com. third, researchers interested in users’ beliefs about social media must give careful attention to how they assess user knowledge of information flows. while scholars such as fuchs (2009) have deployed surveys that ask respondents to identify whether particular statements about surveillance practices on social media site are correct or incorrect, some nuance is lost when respondents are left to make guesses when they are uncertain. instead, i suggest that uncertainty and ambiguity in user knowledge is a valuable area to probe when it comes to understandings of social media, particularly in light of the fact that many of the components that constitute information flows on social media are less than transparent. tracing the relationship and overlap between ambiguity or uncertainty in knowledge, “murkiness” in the technical transparency of information flow, and absence in organizational discourse can provide a powerful means for exploring the constitution of vague understanding. fourth and finally, one of the significant challenges of a mixed-method approach can be in project timing. although it may seem administrative to close on such a note, one of the potential challenges of studying social media systems is that design elements, protocols, algorithms, data structures, ownership, etc. can change quickly. as a result, a snapshot of the information flows of a social media system may be valid for a particular window of time, and aligning the “windows” associated with a reading of information flows, discourse, and user-knowledge can be tricky. one way of potentially combating this issue is through careful project planning, collaboration among multiple researchers, and in directly acknowledging the temporally bounded nature of the work. conversely, one benefit of this kind of approach is that it does offer the opportunity for more longitudinally oriented projects. conclusion while all of these elements pose potential challenges, the reward for such an endeavor is a more nuanced picture of what the understandings and beliefs about these systems are and the factors that can influence their construction. such an articulation may be of importance for social media researchers seeking to understand how behaviors and expectations develop. particularly for more critically focused work, this kind of approach can be complementary to much existing work. references bazerman, c. (1998). the production of technology and the production of human meaning. journal of business and technical communication, 12, 381–387. chambers, c. (2014). facebook fiasco: was cornell university’s study of “emotional contagion” a breach of ethics? the guardian. retrieved november 13, 2014, from http://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2014/jul/01/facebook-cornell-studyemotional-contagion-ethics-breach fuchs, c. (2009). social networking sites and the surveillance society: a critical case study of the usage of studivz, facebook, and myspace by students in salzburg in the context of electronic surveillance. forschungsgruppe. johnson, r. b., & onwuegbuzie, a. j. (2004). mixed methods research: a research paradigm whose time has come. educational researcher, 33(7), 14–26. kramer, a. d. i., guillory, j. e., & hancock, j. t. (2014). experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 111(24), 8788–8790. doi:10.1073/pnas.1320040111 reidenberg, j. r., breaux, t., cranor, l. f., french, b., grannis, a., graves, j. t., schaub, f. (2014). disagreeable privacy policies: mismatches between meaning and users’ understanding (ssrn scholarly paper no. id 2418297). rochester, ny: social science research network. retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2418297 van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. oxford, england: oxford univ. press. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested(citation((apa):(calhoun,(k.((2016,(october(5a8).(affordances,,stereotypes,,and,social, critique:,vine,racial,comedy,as,a,sociopolitical,discourse,genre.(paper(presented(at(aoir(2016:(the( 17th(annual(meeting(of(the(association(of(internet(researchers.(berlin,(germany:(aoir.(retrieved(from( http://spir.aoir.org.! affordances,!stereotypes,!and!social!critique:!vine!racial! comedy!as!a!sociopolitical!discourse!genre! kendra(calhoun( university(of(california,(santa(barbara( ( ! introduction! linguistic(research(on(technologicallyamediated(communication(recognizes(the(myriad( ways(in(which(technology(can(lead(to(new(forms(of(language(and(discourse.(early( research(focused(on(the(structural(features(of(language(perceived(as(unique(to( computeramediated(communication(cmc)(such(as(the(use(of(emoticons((dresner(&( herring(2010).(recent(research(takes(a(discourseaanalytic(approach(that(highlights(how( “social(practices([such(as(language](that(are(present(in(new(media(technologies(are( socioculturally(situated(and(embedded(in(existing(social(practices”((akkaya(2014:(286).( when(cmc(is(contextualized!as(emerging(from(offline(language(practices,(a(broader( range(of(analytical(tools(becomes(available(for(a(nuanced(understanding(of(how( discourse(takes(shape(online.( ( media(and(communication(studies(research(has(analyzed(how(the(technological( affordances((hutchby(2001)(of(online(platforms(permit(and(restrict(particular(types(of( interaction(and(content(production.(on(twitter,(for(example,(users(can(interact(directly( using(@mentions((bruns(&(moe(2014),(but(the(140acharacter(limit(influences(how( tweets(are(structured.(because(each(social(media(platform(has(a(unique(combination(of( affordances,(research(that(analyzes(discourse(on(individual(platforms(is(needed((cf.( thurlow(&(mroczek(2011),(and(affordances(shared(across(platforms(make(comparative( research(possible.(( ( methodology! this(interdisciplinary(research(analyzes(discourse(on(the(videoabased(social(media( platform(vine.(although(vine(has(had(a(meteoric(rise(in(popularity(in(the(u.s.(since(its( launch(in(january(2013((friend(2014),(its(relative(newness(leaves(it(less(researched( than(older(platforms(such(as(youtube.(combining(theory(and(methodology(from( linguistics,(communication(and(media(studies,(and(black(studies,(i(examine(how(vinea specific(affordances(for(video(production(have(led(to(the(creation(of(a(distinct(type(of( online(video(that(draws(on(particular(offline(discourses.(( ( my(analysis(is(based(on(two(years(of(online(ethnography:(watching(vine(videos( (“vines”),(recording(vineaspecific(cultural(and(interactional(practices((e.g.,(popular( topics,(viewers’(comments),(and(situating(them(within(broader(online(culture(and(offline( social(practices((cf.(kozinets(2010).(i(became(familiar(with(the(vine(platform,(including( the(“channel”(feature(that(categorizes(vines(based(on(content.(of(vine’s(nineteen( permanent(channels,(“comedy”(is(the(most(popular(—(containing(the(mostafollowed( viners(and(most(frequently(watched(vines(—(and(includes(a(variety(of(topics(and( comedy(styles.(i(limited(the(scope(of(my(analysis(to(a(single(comedy(viner,(king(bach,( a(28ayearaold(africanaamerican(male(comedian(who(is(the(most(followed(viner(overall( (16(million(followers(in(august(2016).(( ( through(exhaustive(sampling(of(king(bach’s(vines(posted(between(july(2013(and( october(2015,(i(found(that(race(was(one(of(the(most(common(topics(in(his(comedy.(i( created(a(data(set(of(30(vines(with(racial(humor,(and(with(the(“social,(ideological,(and( politicalaeconomic([connection]”((briggs(&(bauman(1992:(147)(of(race(between(them,(i( analyzed(them(as(a(discourse(genre:(vine,racial,comedy,(vrc).,in(bakhtinian(terms,( vine(racial(comedy(is(a(“relatively(stable”(type(of(discourse(that(is(“determined(by(the( specific(nature(of(the(particular(sphere(of(communication”(in(which(it(occurs((1986:(60).( the(genre(framework(enabled(an(analysis(of(linguistic(and(nonalinguistic(features(as( well(as(vine’s(technological(affordances(as(relevant(to(the(content,(and(it(connected( king(bach’s(videos(to(other(online(and(offline(discourse.( ( findings! one(of(the(dominant(features(of(king(bach’s(vrc(is(characters(constructed(by(auditory( and(visual(semiotic(features(that(portray(cultural,(racial,(and(linguistic(stereotypes.( characters(use(shibboleths(from(ethnoracial(and(regional(linguistic(varieties((e.g.,(gon’, in,african(american(vernacular(englishj(see(green(2002)j(they(may(be(accompanied(by( music(with(strong(ideological(associations((e.g.,(rap)j(and(stereotypically(racialized( dress((e.g.,(white(“prep”(attire)(is(frequent.(the(inclusion(of(stereotypes(in(vrc(is( influenced(largely(by(vine’s(affordance(of(a(sixasecond(time(limit:(viners(must(portray( their(ideas(quickly(and(effectively,(which(stereotypes(can(do(since(their(social(meanings( are(easily(recognizable.(king(bach’s(inclusion(of(music,(costumes,(multiple(actors,(and( other(features(are(creative(utilizations(of(vine’s(other(affordances(to(work(around(the( length(constraint.(( ( king(bach’s(vrc(also(shares(features(with(a(broader(popular(subgenre(of(vine( comedy,(#relatable,(which(portrays(experiences(from(viners’(everyday(lives(that(are( relatable(to(their(viewers((e.g.(embarrassing(parents).(king(bach’s(“relatable”(content(is( often(racial(issues(africanaamericans(face(in(the(u.s.(every(day,(such(as(wealth( disparity((“broke(on(black(friday”)(and(linguistic(and(racial(profiling((“what(they(hear( when(we(talk”).(he(uses(stereotypes(to(critique(the(types(of(people(who(believe(them,( the(social(phenomena(that(created(them,(or(to(subvert(social(expectations((cf.(hall,( evans,(&(nixon(2013),(and(by(doing(so(king(bach(incorporates(generic(features(of( african(american(standaup(comedy,(which(has(traditionally(challenged(the(sociopolitical( status(quo(through(critical(engagement(with(cultural(stereotypes((carpio(2008).(vrc( has(been(adopted(as(a(genre(by(other(viners(of(color(who(have(collaborated(with(king( bach,(utilizing(vine’s(affordances(to(address(racial(stereotypes(about(their(own( ethnoracial(groups.(( ( conclusion! using(social(media(to(address(racial(issues(and(“talk(back”(to(mainstream( representation(has(become(common(practice(in(recent(years((cf.(bonilla(&(rosa(2015),( and(humor(has(been(used(for(social(critique(in(both(online(and(offline(discourse((cf.( calhoun(2016).(being(videoabased(rather(than(textabased(and(having(different( affordances(from(its(videoabased(counterpart(youtube,(vine(and(the(humor(produced( on(it(are(distinct(from(other(social(media.(vine(and(its(affordances(have(created(a(space( in(which(king(bach(can(use(comedy(to(direct(his(millions(of(followers(to(sociopolitical( issues(they(might(otherwise(ignore.(the(success(of(this(endeavor(is(seen(in(the(high( number(of(views,(likes,(and(shares(on(individual(vines(and(in(his(sustained(position(as( the(mostafollowed(viner.(in(a(society(that(advocates(racial(colorblindness((wise(2010),( king(bach’s(vine(racial(comedy(is(significant(as(both(an(innovative(online(discourse( genre(and(a(new(form(of(sociopolitical(critique(on(race.( ! ! references( akkaya,(aslihan.(2014.(language,(discourse,(and(new(media:(a(linguistic( anthropological(perspective.(language,and,linguistics,compass(8((7).(285–300(( ( bakhtin,(m.(m.(1986.(the(problem(of(speech(genres.(in,caryl(emerson(and(michael( holquist((eds.)(speech,genres,and,other,late,essays.(60a102.(austin:( university(of(texas(press.(( ( bonilla,(yarimar(&(jonathan(rosa.(2015.(#ferguson:(digital(protest,(hashtag( ethnography,(and(the(racial(politics(of(social(media(in(the(united(states.( american,ethnologist,42(1).(4a17.( ( briggs,(charles(l.(&(richard(bauman.(1992.(genre,(intertextuality,(and(social(power.( journal,of,linguistic,anthropology,2(2).(131a172.( ( bruns,(axel(&(hallvard(moe.(2014.(structural(layers(of(communication(on(twitter.( digital,formations,89.(15a28.( ( calhoun,(kendra.(2016.(always(rebog,(#staywoke:(strategies(of(everyday(online( activism(on(tumblr.(presented(at(southwest(popular(and(american(culture( association(conference.(february(10a13.(albuquerque,(nm.(( ( carpio,(glenda.(2008.(laughing,fit,to,kill:,black,humor,in,the,fictions,of,slavery.(new( york:(oxford(university(press.( �( dresner,(eli(&(susan(herring.(2010.(functions(of(the(nonverbal(in(cmc:(emoticons(and( illocutionary(force.(communication,theory(20.(249–268.(( ( friend,(tad.(2014.(hollywood(and(vine.(the,new,yorker.,december(14(issue.(online:( http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/hollywoodavine., , green,(lisa.(2002.(african,american,english:,a,linguistic,introduction.(new(york:( cambridge(university(press.( ( hall,(stuart,(jessica(evans(&(sean(nixon((eds).(2013.(representation,(second, edition).(thousand(oaks:(sage(publications( ( hutchby,(ian.(2001.(technologies,(texts,(and(affordances.(sociology,35(2).(441a456.( ( kozinets,(robert.(2010.(netnography:,doing,ethnographic,research,online.(thousand( oaks:(sage(publications.( ( thurlow,(crispin(&(kristine(mroczek((eds.).(digital,discourse:,language,in,the,new, media.(new(york:(oxford(university(press.( ( wise, tim j. 2010. colorblind: the rise of post-racial politics and the retreat from racial equity. san francisco, ca: city lights.( death coping panel yh panel proposal for internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 coping with death and grief through technology panel proposal ir14.0 denver, usa october 23-26, 2013 organizers mathias klang & ylva hård af segerstad (department of applied it, university of gothenburg, sweden) introduction grieving is a complex, and often private, process in many social settings it is associated with a great deal of depth, seriousness and somberness. conversely our present-day mobile, digital communication technologies and platforms are most commonly seen as playful, creative and rather shallow. however, the pervasiveness of these technologies in everyday life and communication makes them useful tools in coping with grief. the goal of the papers in this panel is to explore the ways in which technologies are used to cope with death and to explore the ways in which using technologies in this way affects the process of grief. background social changes in western societies have over a long period been experiencing the privatization of death (kearl, 1989). processes such as social, geographic mobility and urban density have enhanced the process of privatization and loss of community. in relation to death, ariès (1981) argues, that the community feels less involved in the death of one of its members. conversely, media development has increased the level of familiarity with death and dying with a wide range of programs, from news reports to entertainment, bringing death into the living room (walter et al 2005). however, many of these insights into the changes in social structures are based in deep studies of pre-web society and the purpose of this panel is to explore the ways in which the more interactive internet-based technologies are transforming the ways, in which we understand death, grieving and coping with loss. as the grief is a personal and long-term process many bereaved find it difficult to burden family members or social networks prepared to help them with their process. this creates an atmosphere in which there is little opportunity to develop healthy attitudes about death or to learn and share coping skills for managing grief. brotherson & soderquist (2002) argue that this also limits the exploration of experiences and possibilities for coping with grief that might be shared in a culture, and that many individuals and professionals are left to develop, find, or stumble across coping mechanisms that may or may not alleviate the difficulty of the mourning process. internet based technologies have come to play an important, and demonstrably supportive, role in many areas of human interaction. its ability to fill a therapeutic role in, for example, chronic illness has been well documented (c.f. kumervold et al, 2002; josefsson, 2007). however, as internet use is shifting to a heavier dependence on online social networks the design, forms and usage is also shifting. large-scale social networks, such as facebook, demonstrate several of the symptoms that ariès (1981) related to the loss of community in modern life and can be seen as the ultimate large-scale population of mobile actors with weak ties. while these weak ties (granovetter, 1983) have been seen as being useful connections (ellison et al., 2007) they are often experienced and described as superficial (tom tong et al., 2008; carr, 2011; turkle, 2011). panel proposal for internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 goals of the panel the goals of this panel is to study ways in which internet-based technologies are being used in the grieving process, and by this use the technology is playing a normative role in the ways in which death and grieving is understood, experienced and conducted. organization of the panel this panel consists of six papers from usa, sweden, australia and italy that all deal with the ways in which technology plays a vital part in coping with mortality. the contributions from lange and leaver study the ways in which memories can be maintained online, jones and farkas both look at the future of post mortem interaction with the living and micalizzi, hård af segerstad & klang research the role online communities play in the grieving process. these six papers will be presented, by the authors, in the first part of the panel session. part two is a roundtable discussion, chaired by charles ess. ess will provide a discussion on these important but difficult topics. the roundtable will also include a general discussion with the audience. papers presented in the panel farkas, ashley (2013). who has the last word? posthumous social networking and its implications for online grieving. drexel university, usa. hård af segerstad, ylva & klang, mathias (2013). the depths of shallow networks. university of gothenburg, sweden. jones, steve. (2013). the shadow of the uncanny valley of death: memory, memorialization and the technologizing of communication, university of illinois at chicago, usa. lange. patricia (2013). emotional expressions of the studium and punctum on youtube infant memorials. california college of arts, usa. leaver, tama (2013). a death on facebook? social media and posthumous profiles. curtin university, australia. micalizzi, alessandra. (2013). cyber-narratives about perinatal death: the italian case study of “special mummies” on-line communities. iulm university, italy. references ariès, p. (1981). the hour of our death. new york: alfred a. knopf. brotherson, s. e., & soderquist, j. (2002). coping with a child’s death. journal of family psychotherapy, 13(12), 53–86. carr, n. (2010). the shallows: what the internet is doing to our brains. new york: w. w. norton & company. granovetter, m. (1983). the strength of weak ties: a network theory revisited. sociological theory, 1: 201– 233. ellison, n., steinfield, c., & lampe, c. (2007). the benefits of facebook ‘‘friends’’: exploring the relationship between college students’ use of online social networks and social capital, journal of computermediated communication, 12(4). josefsson, u. (2007). coping online – patients’ use of the internet. doctoral dissertation, university of gothenburg. kearl, m. c. (1989). endings: a sociology of death and dying. new york: oxford university press. panel proposal for internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 kummervold, p. e., gammon, d., bergvik, s., johnsen, j.a.k., hasvold, t. & rosvinge, j. h. (2002). social support in a wired world: use of online mental health forums in norway. nord j psychiatry, 56(1), 59-65. tom tong, s., van der heide, b., langwell, l. & walther, j. b. (2008). too much of a good thing? the relationship between number of friends and interpersonal impressions on facebook. journal of computer-mediated communication, volume 13, issue 3, pages 531–549, april. turkle, s. (2011). alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other. new york: basic books. walter, t. pickering, m. & littlewood, j. (1995). death in the news: the public invigilation of private emotion. sociology 29(1):579-596. walter, t., hourizi, r., moncur, w. & pitsillides, s., (2011). does the internet change how we die and mourn? overview and analysis. omega: journal of death & dying, 64 (4), pp. 275-302. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 who has the last word? posthumous social networking and its implications for online grieving ashley farkas drexel university usa ashley.b.farkas@drexel.edu abstract this paper considers a group of internet-based companies that promise users the opportunity for posthumous social networking. beyond a final tweet, status update or message to loved ones, these services offer avenues for sustained social media presence after death – the extent and frequency of the activity left up to the individual user. the intentionality and pre-meditation required for participation in social networks after death indicates an interest in ongoing impression management or identity work, bringing in to conversation the literature that claims this as the territory of the bereaved. the study offers insights into the role of the internet in death and grief, particularly how contact from deceased friends and loved ones might affect well-documented grieving processes that take place on sites like facebook and twitter. the research suggests broader implications for social media use, digital identity and digital legacy. keywords social networking; grief; digital identity; digital legacy; cyber-immortality who has the last word? death often prompts loved ones, acquaintances and even strangers to flock to social networking sites (snss) – elevating a once innocuous, inconsequential status, tweet or post to some semblance of a person’s ‘last words’. but several new services are offering a way for our last words to be much more carefully curated. this paper focuses on a group of internet-based companies, recently developed and publicized, that promise users can continue their social networking posthumously. beyond a final tweet, status update or message to loved ones, these companies offer avenues for sustained social media presence after death – the extent and frequency of the activity left up to the user. the intentionality and pre-meditation that goes into posthumous social networking offers those who research the role of the internet in death and grief insights into digital identity and perhaps more general motivations of social networking users. it also allows considerations of how contact from deceased friends and loved ones could affect the well-documented grieving processes that take place on sites like facebook and twitter. literature review the use of digital technologies in grief and mourning has been well considered (brubaker & hayes, 2011; carroll & landry, 2010; forman et al., 2012; getty et al., 2011; micalizzi, 2010; walter et al., 2011). dobler (2009) and brubaker and hayes (2011) find that the teenagers in their samples communicate directly to the deceased in their sns posts, often sharing memories, offering praise, and expressing sorrow. building on this previous work, marwick & ellison (2012) show the ways in which the affordances of social networking sites (replicability, scalability, persistence and searchability) shape the public vs. private navigation of grief. brubaker and hayes (2011) observe that post-mortem comments “blend cybermemorial-like practices with communication practices common on snss pre-death.” this connection with sns communication practices pre-death offers a framework to understand ways in which users grieving on selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 profiles of the deceased might respond to a posthumous status update from a dead friend. a planned farewell or regular posthumous status updates indicate both a mimicking of communication practices pre-death, and perhaps also a concern for those grieving the loss. impression management or identity work that would ordinarily be done by the owner of the sns profile is often taken up by the bereaved after death (marwick & ellison, 2012; carroll & landry, 2010). previous literature has not considered the deceased as party to the grieving process; it is assumed that departure from the physical world results in a shift in identity work to the mourners left behind. introducing the deceased back in to this equation means that digital identity is again coconstructed in ways that it was before death. finally, a small, but quite relevant, body of literature explores notions of lifecycle and cyberimmortality, which bears on a discussion of both the construction and maintenance of digital identity as well as posthumous social networking practices (see hayles, 1999; massimi et al., 2011; muri, 2003; steinhart, 2007). admittedly, the notion of cyberimmortality – somehow escaping bodily death by downloading yourself into cyberspace to live forever – is at present only possible in the worlds of science fiction writers. however, without veering quite that far, considering posthumous social networking as a reality does speak to notions of digital legacy and perhaps cyber-immortality in limited forms. methodology the nature of the sites under examination mean that several registered users would have to pass away and have their services activated to empirically examine how this social networking activity impacts online grieving communities. however, there are still fruitful avenues in which to investigate this topic. this study employs what gee and green (1998) call a “logic-of-inquiry” approach, combining ethnographic orientations with the tools of discourse analysis. examining popular press coverage, media interviews and comment threads will allow important themes to emerge within the context of existing literature. participation in the services presently available (two of the four) will give further insight into user experience. central to the findings will be a discourse analysis of promotional material (websites, facebook and twitter feeds, press releases, videos, etc.) for each of the four companies, interrogating how the discourses surrounding these services enact social activity and social identity (gee, 2010). ideally, to round out these findings, in-depth interviews will be conducted with company representatives and users signed up for the services. the four companies that form the data set for this research are briefly described below: 1. deadsocial allows users to populate status updates and tweets, pictures, etc. across their various social networking accounts to be released after death at a time they specify. the free service is in beta, but will launch in march 2013 at sxsw. 2. if i die is a free facebook application that allows users to record videos or craft status updates to be published posthumously. to promote the app, the company is running a contest: the first user to die is promised international exposure on several blogs and news outlets. 3. liveson promises a twitter tool that posts in the voice of a specific person after he or she has died. the service monitors twitter habits in an effort to mimic syntax and content. 4. lastwrite is designed to be notified by the us social security database (it is the only site to not require a social media executor to confirm death) of a user’s death and then release letters, pictures, videos or a final facebook post. discussion selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 significant themes emerge from an analysis of the services that allow for posthumous participation in social networks. first, there is an emphasis placed on maintaining control of your digital identity and representations. co-founder of if i die, david rubinstein commented, “it's an era where most of your life and most of your presence is digital, and you want to have some control over it. you want to be in charge of how you are perceived afterward" (kelly, 2013). other discussion focused on the ways in which posthumous messages would affect the bereaved, either soothing mourners, or disrupting the grieving process and not allowing the acceptance of a loss. there is also the matter of whom these services appeal to and what user activity or commentary can reveal about conceptions of digital identity and grieving processes. when asked in a february 27, 2013 post on the deadsocial facebook page what had attracted users to sign up, responses varied from “to let them feel i’m still here,” (indicating a consideration of the mourners), “to live forever,” (a nod to cyber-immortality), and “jus tellin people i’m gonna haunt them.” these last comments speak to potential negative aspects of posthumous sns activity – trolling or haunting – already quite common on facebook memorial sites (phillips, 2011). of course, in many ways, these sites offer a continuation of offline practices, using social media to connect with those grieving your death, instead of leaving written letters. in other ways, these practices offer new insights and further research opportunities into online grieving practices, navigating public/private space online, and our emotional negotiations of death. even broader implications may suggest that social media is democratizing immortality. these services mean fame or wealth are no longer needed for a well-established legacy – perhaps just some social media foresight. references brubaker, j. & hayes, g. (2011, march). “we will never forget you [online]”: an empirical investigation of postmortem myspace comments. in proceedings of the acm 2011 conference on computer supported cooperative work (p. 123-132). carroll, b. & landry, k. (2010). logging on and letting out: using online social networks to grieve and to mourn. bulletin of science technology & society, 30(5), 341-349. doi: 10.1177/0270467610380006. forman, a., kern, r., & gil-egui, g. (2012). death and mourning as sources of community participation in online social networks: r.i.p. pages in facebook. first monday, 17(9). retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewarticle/3935. gee, j. (2010). an introduction to discourse analysis: theory and method. new york: routledge. gee, j. & green, j. (1998). discourse analysis, learning and social practice: a methodological study. review of research in education, 23, 119-169. getty, e., cobb, j., gabeler, m., nelson, c., weng, e. & hancock, j. (2011, may). i said your name in an empty room: grieving and continuing bonds on facebook. in proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on human factors in computing systems (p. 997-1000). hayles, n. (1999). how we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. chicago: university of chicago press. kelly, h. (2013, february 22). how to post to facebook, twitter after you die. cnn. retrieved from http://edition.cnn.com/2013/02/22/tech/social-media/death-and-socialmedia/index.html?eref=edition&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=cnni. marwick, a. & ellison, n. (2012). “there isn’t wifi in heaven!” negotiating visibility on facebook memorial pages. journal of broadcasting & electronic media 56(3), 378-400. doi:10.1080/08838151.2012.705197 massimi, m., odom, w., banks, r., kirk, d. (2011, may). matters of life and death: locating the end of life in lifespan-oriented hci research. in proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on human factors in computing systems. mizcalizzi, a. (2010). mourning network: new social practices in online communities. digithum, 0(12), 1-6. retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10609/8795. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 muri, a. (2003). of shit and the soul: tropes of cybernetic disembodiment in contemporary culture. body & society 9(3), 73-92. phillips, w. (2011). loling at tragedy: facebook trolls, memorial pages and resistance to grief online. first monday, 16(12). retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewarticle/3168 steinhart, e. (2007). survival as a digital ghost. minds & machines 17(3), 261–271. walter, t., hourizi, r., moncur, w. & pitsillides, s. (2011). does the internet change how we die and mourn? overview and analysis. omega: journal of death & dying, 64 (4), 275-302. doi: 10.2190/om.64.4.a license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 the shadow of the uncanny valley of death: memory, memorialization and the technologizing of communication steve jones university of illinois at chicago usa sjones@uic.edu abstract this paper will use concepts of memory and memorialization to interrogate the notion of communication in the digital age. it will do so by examining technologies of memorialization and virtuality. what happens when memorials are no longer only memory but are present and interactive, essentially able not only to evoke old memories but make new ones? the development of interactive, lifelike avatars with access to a vast memory bank of personal and public information raises fundamental questions for communication and philosophy. this paper will undertake a critical and philosophical exploration of this development, and do so by examining the experience of the externalization of the self not simply as text, or recording, but as entity and incarnation, agent and interlocutor. keywords memory; memorialization; lifelike avatars; human-machine communication subtitle 1 (arial 10, bold, aligned left, single line, 20pt before 10pt after) this paper will use concepts of memory and memorialization to interrogate the notion of communication in the digital age. in a television science program reporting on research into aging and immortality, (popular science, 2009), the program’s producers chose to end a segment examining the development of lifelike avatars by showing a video sequence featuring a woman looking at what seemed to be a prayer card such as those distributed at a traditional western funeral or memorial service. as she looks at the card and unfolds it, what seems to be a holographic image of the decedent is projected into space. she proceeds to have a conversation with the projected image, while the narrator’s voiceover states, “today, when a loved one dies, they leave us with only memories. but in the future, their avatars will be so lifelike, they’ll interact with us long after their bodies are gone.” the video sequence is at once strange, creepy and somehow reassuring. it is strange because it augurs that we are a step closer to what kurzweil has termed the “singularity” (2005), a time when not only memory but consciousness itself will be uploaded and technologized. it is reassuring because it gives those who grieve another means of keeping alive the memory of a person who has died. it is creepy because it presupposes the ultimate extension of memory, a memory without forgetting that blends with mimesis, and, i believe, takes us into the uncanny valley (mori, 1970) in particularly difficult, troubling and emotional ways. while technology has long been used to preserve memory, such efforts at memorialization are intertwined with a long-standing human fear that technology, by externalizing our memory, will cause us to become forgetful (hamilton & cairns, 1963; ong, 1991). in the case of death the lure of recording technologies, whether written, audio or visual, is particularly strong. research has shown that “writing or talking about (death) tends to help in the long term” (planalp & trost, 2008, p. 224), and talking to photographs or objects can help with grieving. furthermore, it is not uncommon for those grieving to fear losing the memory of the loved one. it is most common in the wake of a disaster such as flood selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 or fire, for instance, for survivors to comb through rubble and debris in search of family photos. in the case of the death of a loved one, or of a public figure, there are ritualized memorials to commemorate death and preserve memory. in both cases, that of individuals and public figures, there is a form of impression management that takes place (bonsu, 2007; jones & jensen, 2005). traditionally such memorialization and impression management has taken place through printed media (obituaries, placards, biographies). as networked digital media have proliferated memorialization has moved online, with various consequences that are only beginning to be studied (marwick & ellison, 2012; garde-hansen, 2010; mccurdy, 2010; sanderson & cheong, 2010; lombard & selverian, 2008; veale, 2004). the fundamental question of this paper is: what happens when memorials are no longer only memory but are present and interactive, essentially able not only to evoke old memories but make new ones? jones (2004) noted that unlike electronic media in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the new media of the late 20th century did not spur the kind of renaissance of spiritualism or spirituality noted by sconce (2000) in his masterful history haunted media. online memorialization, and, soon, virtual memorialization, via lifelike avatars, sets forth the possibility that ghosts will be with us and among us, interacting with us. the use of quasi-holograms of rap star tupac shakur and rock star freddie mercury in 2012 are early evidence of this possibility on a mass scale. the development of interactive, lifelike avatars with access to a vast memory bank of personal and public information raises fundamental questions for communication and philosophy, ones that scholars should already be asking but have so far skirted and that will also be central to this paper, namely: what is the nature of communication and communication theory in light of human-machine communication? the study of communication is built on the premise of human-to-human communication (the latter, if not receiving the greatest attention in our media age, at least still being privileged). however, it is quite clear from simple observation that an enormous amount of contemporary communication occurs between humans and devices, whether it be computers, mobile devices, kiosks, automated telephone systems, avatars, and so on. machines can be a medium of communication, but they may also be communicative. apple’s siri, for instance, is essentially a vocal expression of a search engine result, and search engines themselves provide a form of communication, not simply a medium for it. and while it could be argued that machines such as mobile devices and search engines, since they are programmed by humans, are therefore in essence engaging users in human communication, or at the very least engaging users in interaction with a text or script written by humans, such is decreasingly the case. while humans did indeed (and for now) create the algorithms from which communication with the user is derived, machine learning means that the algorithms are refined, if not entirely rewritten, by machine. scholars in other fields, such as psychology and human-computer interaction (hci) have explored some of the issues in the realm of machine-human communication (dean, 2004; fogg & eckles, 2007; suchman, 2009), but with the exception of nass (nass & lee, 2000; nass & yen, 2010), katz (2009) and gunkel (2012), scholars in communication have yet to explore its ramifications. this paper will undertake a critical and philosophical exploration of these issues, and do so by examining the experience of the externalization of the self not simply as text, or recording, but as entity and incarnation, agent and interlocutor. references bonsu, s. k. (2007). the presentation of dead selves in everyday life: obituaries and impression management. symbolic interaction 30(2), 199-219. dean, t.l. (2004). talking with computers: explorations in the science and technology of computing. new york: cambridge university press. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 fogg, b.j., & eckles, d. (2007). mobile persuasion: 20 perspectives on the future of behavior change. palo alto, ca: stanford university. garde-hansen, j. (2010). measuring mourning with online media: michael jackson and real-time memories. , 1(2), 233–235. gunkel, d.j. (2012). the machine question: critical perspectives on ai, robots, and ethics. cambridge, ma: mit press. hamilton, e., & cairns, h. (1963). the collected dialogues of plato. princeton, nj: princeton university press. jones, s. (2004). “404 not found: the internet and the afterlife,” omega: journal of death and dying 49(1), (2004), pp. 83 – 88. jones, s. & jensen, j. (2005). afterlife as afterimage: understanding posthumous fame. new york: peter lang publishing, inc. katz, j.e. (ed.) (2009). machines that become us: the social context of personal communication technology. new brunswick, new jersey: transaction publishers. kurzweil, r. (2005). the singularity is near. new york: viking. lombard, m. and selverian, m. e. m. (2008). telepresence after death. presence 17(3) 310-325. marwick, a. & ellison, n.b. (2012). “there isn't wifi in heaven!” negotiating visibility on facebook memorial pages, journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 56(3), 378-400. mccurdy, p. (2010). the king is dead, long live the king: meditations on media events and michael jackson. celebrity studies 1(2), 236–238. mori, m. (1970). bukimi no tani the uncanny valley (k. f. macdorman & t. minato, trans.). energy, 7(4), 33–35. nass, c., & lee, k.m. (2000). does computer-generated speech manifest personality? an experimental test of similarity-attraction. journal of experimental psychology: applied, 7, 171181. nass, c. & yen, c. (2010). the man who lied to his laptop: what machines teach us about human relationships. new york: current. ong, w. j. (1991). orality & literacy: the technologizing of the word. new york: routledge. planalp, s. & trots, m.r. (2008). communication issues at the end of life: reports from hospice volunteers, health communication, 23(3), 222-233. popular science. (2009). pop sci’s future of: immortal avatars. available online at http://science.discovery.com/tv-shows/pop-scis-future-of/videos/popscis-future-of-immortalavatars.htm (last accessed 15nov2012). sanderson, j. & cheong, p.h. (2010). tweeting prayers and communicating grief over michael jackson online. bulletin of science technology & society 30, 328-340. sconce, j. (2000). haunted media. durham, nc: duke university press. suchman, l.a. (2009). human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated action. new york: cambridge university press. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 veale, k. (2004). online memorialisation: the web as a collective memorial landscape for remembering the dead. the fibreculture journal 3(3). available online at http://three.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-014-online-memorialisation-the-web-as-a-collectivememorial-landscape-for-remembering-the-dead/ (last accessed 15nov2012). license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 emotional expressions of the studium and punctum on youtube infant memorials patricia g. lange california college of the arts usa plange@cca.edu abstract how do people emotionally experience memorial videos made by people who have suffered the loss of their infant child? semiotic analyses identify two states that describe people’s emotions when interacting with images of people who have passed away. the first is the studium, or detached form of sympathy, and the second is the punctum, or immediate emotional wound. while most prior studies deal with expressions of sympathy as a single category, the present study uses a discourse analysis approach combined with a semiotic lens to understand nuanced levels of emotions that are indexed in text comments posted to memorial videos. an analysis of several hundred comments posted to two videos on youtube suggests that some people experience a form of the punctum, which is not limited to feelings about a person one knows directly, but is often activated through sympathetic feelings toward youtube participants experiencing similar forms of bereavement. keywords youtube; online memorials; semiotics; emotion; video introduction memorial videos commemorate people who have died. they have appeared on myspace (brubaker et al., 2011), facebook (kern et al., 2013), youtube (wahlberg, 2009), world of warcraft (gibbs et al., 2012), and on memorial websites (finlay & krueger, 2011). memorials have aesthetic conventions, such as music, poetry, and photographs that depict the person in childhood and in idealized, recent moments before their death (wahlberg, 2009). sharing grief helps people increase social ties and establish feelings of community (forman et al., 2012). video memorials’ popularity indicates an increased willingness in american culture to speak openly about death (wahlberg, 2009; doss 2002). brubaker et al. (2011) investigated emotional work on memorials. they coded for levels of emotional distress in comments on myspace memorials. but additional work needs to be done to understand nuanced forms of bereavement. how do people translate emotional experiences into comments on memorial videos? how do these experiences compare with prior descriptions of mediated mourning? in the field of semiotics, barthes (1981) argued that photographs could be emotionally experienced through the studium or the punctum. the studium included contemplating aesthetic formalisms and experiencing sympathy for the photographic subject. in contrast, the punctum was more immediate, and included feelings of intense connection between the viewer and the photographic subject. the punctum was felt as a shock which pierced through the more analytical reception of the studium. whereas the studium indexed detached sympathy, the punctum produced an emotional wound. combining a semiotic and discourse-analytic approach, this paper examines how viewers respond to memorial videos for deceased infants. the goal is to explore nuanced emotional experiences and to extend understanding of video memorials’ role in the american mediated landscape. methods the following case studies appeared during a two-year ethnography of youtube. the project explored how some 150 participants formed communities by sharing and commenting on videos, as well as interacting in person. although memorial videos only appeared twice in the qualitative corpus of 200 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 videos, they indexed an especially poignant way in which grieving parents received solace and social support. william and jane (both pseudonyms) described losing an infant in videos and ethnographic interviews. william’s video was posted in 2007 and received 425 comments. jane’s video was posted in 2008 and received 38 comments. a total of 463 comments were analyzed using discourse analysis, as described by johnstone (2002). discourse analysis considers how meaning is produced within the context and genre of particular texts. the present study also employs a semiotic lens to analyze how people expressed different emotional reactions to videos. close attention is paid to commenters’ specific word choices and how texts exhibited sympathy and empathy with video creators. video wounds youtube participants often bonded by sharing difficult experiences. they explained how their participation helped them deal with their pain. william lost his baby to sudden infant death syndrome (sids). jane’s son died of a rare medical condition soon after his birth. william’s video orients around a narrative about how he got started on youtube. posting memorials often enables self-reflection on a mourner’s present as well as his past (micalizzi, 2010). william used painful, past home footage to explain how his world profoundly changed after his son’s death. by making videos, he formed deep-seated relationships with viewers who helped him cope. jane’s video includes profoundly sad images. set to music, it depicts her holding her baby in the hospital. her video includes poetry, ultrasound pictures, photographs of her son connected to tubes and medical equipment, and quotes from medical professionals offering sympathy. in a comment jane stated: somehow i feel like if other people see his face and know a little bit of who he was, it makes his death a little bit less pointless. william and jane used video to work through their loss, and commenters enabled them to be heard. connecting to people who will listen to their stories is considered crucial for working through grief (finlay & krueger, 2011). viewers’ comments reveal varied dimensions of emotional support emerging from imagined communities (anderson, 1985) of youtube supporters. stereotypical expressions of sympathy: indexing the studium a few comments directly addressed aesthetic choices. many included generic video assessments such as “nice,” “beautiful,” and “touching.” such stereotypical expressions of sympathy or aesthetics index the studium. an index is a sign exhibiting an existential relationship to that which it represents (peirce, 1955). such common forms of support index a person’s experience of sympathy for someone else’s pain. expressions of sympathy in american culture include words like being “sorry” for a person’s “loss” and providing religious images of comfort. examples from the videos include: i hope you find or have found happiness. you're baby boy will be waiting for you in heaven probably the best cover of this song i've heard so far. very moving and i am so sorry about the loss of your son very touching, thank you for sharing. im sorry to hear about your loss. bless you and your strength such words evidently comforted william and jane, who often individually thanked commenters, and offered their support to fellow mourners. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 translating raw emotions: evidence of the punctum several commenters were intensely moved in an immediate and almost non-verbal way. these sentiments index the punctum, or emotional wound or shock aroused through media. as barthes’ (1981, p. 51) stated, “the incapacity of name is a good symptom of disturbance.” several comments began with the word, “wow,” as an index of a stunned reaction that was difficult to verbalize. examples include: i don't know what to say...that was really touching. i'm sitting here now and i'm cryingbut thank you very much... this was so touching. i'm speechless and moved. the words really struck me there. wow. speachless. i am a mother and in tears. wow! i'm in tears. what a beautiful sweet little child. i'm speechless. the punctum produces an emotional shock that pierces through ordinary words and stereotypical expressions of sympathy. one commenter expresses being “struck” by the video, indexing an unanticipated reaction. visceral bodily involvement is indexed through terms such as being “speechless,” “moved,” and “crying.” barthes argued that the punctum was metonymic, meaning that a small moment of viewership might invoke a far larger field of emotions and memories. commenters similarly indexed an emotional wellspring of memories through detailed descriptions and comments about direct loss or fears of loss as parents of small children. conclusion expressions of sympathy are often generically analyzed. yet, they include nuances, ranging from detached support to intense emotional wounds. the former category is consistent with the studium, or sympathetic reactions one has not only to photographic subjects, but to video creators who have experienced loss. although barthes was dubious about experiencing the punctum from a moving image, several participants posted video comments that indexed an emotional wound stimulated by actual or fears of loss. future studies might explore the nuances of the studium and punctum as expressed through comment systems to understand the work they accomplish for viewers and video creators. discourse analysis is only capable of dealing with the translation work that appears in text comments that index emotional reactions. future studies might use interviews to delve more deeply into how people experience emotions when watching videos created by mourners. acknowledgments the author wishes to thank the macarthur foundation as well as william, jane, and the people of youtube who participated in this study. references anderson, b. (1985). imagined communities. london: verso. barthes, r. (1981). camera lucida: reflections on photography, trans. richard howard. new york: hill and wang. brubaker, j. r., kivran-swaine, f., taber, l, & hayes, g. r. (2012). grief-stricken in a crowd: the language of bereavement and distress in social media. proceedings of the sixth international aaai conference on weblogs and social media. june 4-8, 2012. dublin, ireland. retrieved from http://sm.rutgers.edu/pubs/brubaker-grief-icwsm2012.pdf doss, e. (2002). death, art and memory in the public sphere: the visual and material culture of grief in contemporary america. mortality 7 (1), 63-82. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 finlay, c. j., & krueger, g. (2011). a space for mothers: grief as identity construction on memorial websites created by sids parents. omega: journal of death & dying 63 (1), 21-44. forman, a. e., kern, r., gil-egui, g. (2012). death and mourning as sources of community participation in online social networks: r. i. p. pages in facebook. first monday 17 (9). retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3935/3288 gibbs, m., mori, j., arnold, m. & kohn, t. (2012). tombstones uncanny monuments and epic quests: memorials in world of warcraft. game studies 12 (1). retrieved from http://gamestudies.org/1201/articles/gibbs_martin johnstone, b. (2002). discourse analysis. malden, ma: blackwell publishing. kern, r. (2013). r. i. p.: remain in perpetuity. facebook memorial pages. telematics and informatics 30, 2-10. micalizzi, a. (2010). mourning network: new social practices in online community. digithum 12. peirce, c. s. (1955). philosophical writings of peirce. justus buchler, ed. new york: dover publications. wahlberg, m. (2009). youtube commemoration: private grief and communal consolation. in p snickars & p vonderau (eds.). the youtube reader (pp. 218-235). stockholm: national library of sweden. license this article is ©2013 patricia g. lange, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 a death on facebook? social media and posthumous profiles. tama leaver curtin university of technology australia tamaleaver@gmail.com abstract due to their size, online platforms and social networking services increasingly have to deal with the question of deceased users. facebook offers to either memorialise or delete facebook accounts after the user has died, while other companies such as google may allow access, but only after extremely laborious processes, which include mailing legal identification and death certificates. google has the additional challenge of linked services, meaning deleting the overall user account also deletes content they created such as youtube videos. in general, official digital death policies are very blunt. emerging digital legacy and asset management companies are allowing users to bequeath their online profiles and tools to others, allowing more complex posthumous management and curation. digital death will increasingly need to be addressed, and more nuanced options made available, as the number of deceased users grows, while more and more of their legacy is only available online. keywords digital death; identity; social media; facebook; google. as social media has normalized as one of the main communication channels for users across the globe, a variety of social practices are transforming as they are translated onto, and transformed by, digital affordances. while certain areas of etiquette and norms have cohered as social media practices and platforms expand, death remains a profoundly unclear area for the largest social media companies and online platforms. while negative publicity has forced some companies, such as facebook, to adopt official stances toward posthumous users, the policies addressing deceased users tend to be fairly blunt. moreover, as online tools and services transform over time, and identity work online includes big companies becoming identity authenticators (for example facebook, twitter or google accounts being used to log into other services), the way in which these companies respond to the death of a user become increasingly important. this paper will examine the official policies of representative online corporations – namely facebook and google – both in terms of reporting a death, and the options presented once it has been confirmed. the paper will then explore the question of how such corporations address posthumous profiles given that the profile’s creator/owner is clearly no longer using that service, and thus not going to be generating profit for these companies by viewing advertising (or any other direct means). finally, the paper speculates on the future importance and utility of posthumous profiles both in terms of the friends and loved ones left behind and the broader historical and archival record. these conclusions will include the suggestion of future directions and policy priorities which might make practices around death on social media more meaningful and useful for those left behind. facebook only instituted an official policy in relation to deceased users after current users began complaining that facebook’s suggested friends lists were recommending people connect with others who had died (kelly, 2009). facebook, at that point, had no consistent ways of addressing issues arising from the death of a user. the policy facebook formulated makes in mandatory to either memorialize the facebook account and timeline of a deceased user (the default option) or the account can be deleted altogether at the request of immediate family members (facebook, 2013). memorialisation locks an account, meaning no one can log in, nor can new connections can be made, but existing connections persist. in effect, this makes the facebook profile of a deceased user a memorial space, open to posts from existing ‘friends’ who can direct message at the deceased user, or share a variety of comments or content intended to celebrate the recently departed. of course, memorializing an account relies on facebook being aware that someone has died, and many users don’t chose to reveal this fact. in some cases, loved ones are left the password and take over a deceased user’s facebook account, making final decisions about what content remains or gets deleted, selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 along with policing more actively any future communication with or by that account. users may also create public memorial pages (that are not profiles) which are often popular sites for various grieving practices, especially around high-profile deaths, such as those involving young people (buck, 2011; kaleem, 2012; kern, forman, & gil-egui, 2012; marwick & ellison, 2012). while google’s policies do not directly state that a deceased user’s account must be altered or locked in a particular way, they do make it very difficult for loved ones to gain access to the google account of a recently deceased user. indeed, the process of requesting access involves the physical mailing of various proof of identity, a death certificate and an archived email from the deceased before google will even investigate providing access. at any point, for reasons they will not disclose, google may decide not to release a google account to any beneficiary or executor (google, 2013b). for those who do gain access, there are dangers in managing someone else’s google account which are not always obvious. one important example comes as a result of google’s recent merging of various tools under a unified google account. as google’s support documents explain, deleting a google account attached to a gmail address will also delete all other google services attached to that identity. so, for example, a loved one who gains access to a recently deceased person’s gmail account might extract the necessary emails and then decide to – quite sensibly – delete the account since it’s no longer needed. however, in the process of doing so, any photographs shared by that user on google plus, or any videos uploaded to youtube would also be deleted (google, 2013a). this fact may not be obvious to a digital executor until they seek out an important family video on youtube only to find it has been inadvertently erased due to the blunt tools a digital executor has at their disposal in terms of google account management. in the case of both facebook and google, the official responses are fairly blunt – google my grant access, but only after a laborious process, and facebook will not grant access to posthumous profiles at all, but will automatically memorialize them, enshrining the final state of that timeline, whatever it may have displayed. as the number of posthumous profiles grow, it seems likely that users will push to more nuanced controls; digital executors of facebook profiles may be able, for example, to do a final curation and remove any superfluous or embarrassing material, creating a more fitting memorial in the eyes of remaining loved ones. of course, niche companies and services are emerging to address these issues well ahead of the online giants. legacy locker, for example, allows users to set up a digital will, name executors and beneficiaries, and keep an up-to-date list of social media passwords to be passed on after death (pitsillides, jeffries, & conreen, 2012). while not strictly speaking in line with many terms of use, this nevertheless gives loved ones and relatives the chance to make changes to a recently deceased user’s various social media presences and decide whether they remain or are closed. in the longer term issues may also arise about archives and history; eventually facebook will have millions of memorialized profiles that no one has access to. perhaps these will have historical value, but currently policies forbid facebook from making them public ever again. no doubt this issue will arise in the coming years for any social media company or online service that lasts the test of time. while issues around digital death and online services are relatively new, a survey of existing policies and practices leads to the following tentative conclusions and broad recommendations for change: • at present the official policies of social media companies and online corporations are minimal and relatively blunt; • where a single account or authentication service is a gateway to different tools, services and content, there should be some ability to separate and curate these posthumously, allowing final curatorial decisions by digital executors; • due to the lack of available options and the lack of awareness of official options, many users resort to ad hoc responses, such as transferring control of online profiles to immediate family members after a user’s death; • as digital executors and online wills increasingly address social media, policies and practices will need to emerge which provide more fine-grained control over the digital legacies; and selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 • private corporations will increasingly need to decide and officialise their position on the maintenance of posthumous profiles, including a commitment to either maintain or export the user data of deceased users. digital death is a new and emerging area of concern, but as social media and online sharing platforms increasingly house the rich history of individuals, the way those legacies are managed can only become more important across the coming years. references buck, c. (2011, december 20). what happens to your facebook when you die? wa today. retrieved from http://www.watoday.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/what-happens-to-your-facebook-when-youdie-20111220-1p3b3.html facebook. (2013). deactivating, deleting & memorializing accounts. facebook help center. retrieved march 7, 2013, from https://www.facebook.com/help/359046244166395/ google. (2013a, january 8). what happens to youtube if i delete my google account or google+? retrieved from http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1151740 google. (2013b, january 25). accessing a deceased person’s mail. retrieved from http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=14300 kaleem, j. (2012, december 7). death on facebook now common as “dead profiles” create vast virtual cemetery. huffington post. retrieved march 7, 2013, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/07/death-facebook-dead-profiles_n_2245397.html kelly, m. (2009, october 27). memories of friends departed endure on facebook. the facebook blog. retrieved march 7, 2013, from http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=163091042130 kern, r., forman, a. e., & gil-egui, g. (2012). r.i.p.: remain in perpetuity. facebook memorial pages. telematics and informatics, 30(1), 2–10. doi:10.1016/j.tele.2012.03.002 marwick, a., & ellison, n. b. (2012). “there isn’t wifi in heaven!” negotiating visibility on facebook memorial pages. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 56(3), 378–400. doi:10.1080/08838151.2012.705197 pitsillides, s., jeffries, j., & conreen, m. (2012). museum of the self and digital death: an emerging curatorial dilemma for digital heritage. in e. giaccardi (ed.), heritage and social media: understanding heritage in a participatory culture (pp. 56–68). london and new york: routledge. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 cyber-narratives about perinatal death: the italian case study of “special mummies” on-line communities alessandra micalizzi iulm university italy alessandra.micalizzi@gmail.com alessandra.micalizzi@iulm.it in the recent year, the idea of a monolithic identity, stable and predestined, has been replaced by a perspective that sees identity as a “process”, a complex and constant ongoing work that regards the individual, his relations and the contexts he moves in. as di fraia argues, “rather than an original and unchangeable piece of data, or an immutable property an individual has, identity is conceived of as something that one does, like a task one continues to perform throughout one’s life.” (di fraia, 2007, p. 37). identity is a complex issue that can be examined from different standpoints, one of which is the narrative approach, according to which identity is constructed through cognitive and communicative processes based on stories (mc adams, 1993; macintire, 1988). moreover, each individual’s identity is not only the result of an interior (narrative) process, but is instead the result of an ongoing interaction between the most significant relationships in which he or she is involved, relationships that contribute to the creation of an interwoven fabric of ontological stories. this relations take place, above all, by the exchange of significant narratives. ontological narratives, as sommers (1994) defines them, are about the self and allow the individual to express the personal identity to others. writing (or talking) about oneself is a narrative process that involves others, in a dialogue that takes shape in the narration itself. the role of the other is fundamental because he/she is a witness to our being in and of the world: “basically, we need others to understand who we are and, for this reason, we are speaking to ourselves when we constantly tell our story to others” (di fraia 2007, p. 46). these ontological narratives are also exchanged by personal media, and above all on the net. for this reason and from this perspective, it is interesting to explain the relationship between narration and the internet. according to walker’s definition (2001), the internet is basically a narrative technology, a specific relational context where fragmented stories are shared. the internet can be also considered an identity technology, one of the available “digitalized extroversions of psychological processes, through which every human being constantly produces and reproduces his identity” (di fraia, 2007, p. 36). this papers aims at preseting the main results of an empirical research about the role of the web in the processing of bereavement after a perinatal death. perinatal death mourning refers to the loss of a child during pregnancy or before completing the second month of life (ravaldi, 2006). very often this kind of experience isn’t recognized like a “real” loss and the family – above all the mother –is invited to react in few weeks. from a strictly narrative point of view, it is a very painful turning point that, besides completely reorganizing one’s life story, also puts some aspects of individual and social identity into question. i wondered if the internet, as a narrative technology, could make the process of reorganizing one’s identity easier by providing areas in which to share painful experiences. the case of perinatal death mourning is an example of a situation in which there is a discrepancy between the social self – defined by how others see you – and the individual’s perception of the self (pecchinenda, 2009). my study was focused on three on-line communities about perinatal death. the objective of the research was to determine whether the internet could develop a new area for socialization and discussion of a loss, with reference to a case of mourning that is not yet fully recognized socially. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 i opted for dividing the fieldwork in two phases. during the first phase, i used the ethnographic method and participated as a researcher in three communities dedicated to this topic for six months. after becoming acclimated, i was able to create bonds with some of the women and i started the second phase of the research, in which 25 e-mail interviews were administered on the theme of loss and on the meaning of participating in a virtual community. the study lead to underline some cultural elements that affect the process of mourning and consequently the use (and the role) of the on-line communities. in the first place, in italy, perinatal death mourning receives no support from the national health care system and, similarly, there are only a small number of virtual spaces dedicated to sharing this experience. nevertheless, in the past few years, there have been numerous initiatives designed to raise awareness and form groups, which were principally spontaneous and local associations. for example, it was within one of the groups in the study that chatting was first used to meet and discuss in groups. they tried to create a setting for mutual self-help groups. in the second place, perinatal death mourning is often thought to be a purely female experience, since the mother is seen as the only person involved. some of the main results can be synthesized by the following points: • the communal boundaries have precise limits, defined by some procedural and technological markers. in fact, it doesn’t deal with filters to the platform set by the log in, but the meaning of the identity that is behind the choice of a particular account. users access the community with a nickname that expresses the identity denied them – as mothers. • writing about oneself on the net is of fundamental importance to those elaborating a loss and trying to make sense of a traumatic experience. in fact, the use of written language, even if concise, instantaneous and immediate, forces net users to utilize a more linear and rational process of communication than spoken discourse. • in terms of interactive technology, the web also gives members of this community the possibility of reflecting on their own entries and those of others. • therefore, the internet is also a place for social recognition, a place where it is possible “to be a mother again” and to satisfy this role through the preservation of the memories of the lost child. it is possible to end up affirming that the interactive contexts i analyzed offer a valid support for the mourner in the double passage of identity: from expectant mother to mourner; from mourner to special mommy. the principal theories regarding the mourning process (kaplan, 1996) show how the work of elaboration (freud, 1917) is done at the moment one is able to interiorly shift the associations with the memory of the deceased. the process ends when it is possible to disassociate the pain of the tremendous loss from the images of who was lost, putting it in an interior space created specifically for the memory of the moments shared with a loved one. the web, and above all the on-line communities, contribute to making this passage possible, defining a space in the memory and letting the mourner recover her lost identity. keywords grief, mourning, on-line communities, digital narratives, digital emotions references di fraia g. (2007), blog-grafie. identità narrative in rete, guerini, milan. di fraia g. (2005), storie con-fuse. pensiero narrativo, sociologia e media, franco angeli, milano. kaplan l. j. (1996), no voices is every wholly lost: an exploration of everlasting attachment between parents and child, simon and schuster, touchstone, new york. macintire a. (2007), after virtue, (first ed. 1981), universitiy of notredame press. mc adams d. (1993), the stories we live by: personal myths and making of self, william morrow &c., new york. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 pecchinenda g. (2009), homunculus, sociologia and identità dell'autonarrazione, liguori, naples. pennebacker j. w. (1997), writing about emotional experience as a therapeutic process, psychological science, n.8, p. 162-166. ravaldi c. (2006), l’elaborazione del lutto nella morte perinatale. passare attraverso l’assenza, settembre 2006 available on http://www.ciaolapo.it/lutto/elaborazione-del-lutto-nella-morte-perinatale.html sommers m. (1992), narrativity, narrative identity and social action: rethinking english working-class formation, in social science history, 16, 4, p. 591-629. walker j. (2001), distributed narrative. telling the stories across network, paper presented at the aoir conference held in brighton in september 2001 available on http://jilltxt.net/txt/walker-aoir3500words.pdf walther j. b., boyd s. (2002), attraction to computer mediated social support, in c. a: lin, d. atkin (2002), communication technology and society; audience adoption and uses, , cresskill, new york, available on http://www.rpi.edu/-walthj/docs/support.html license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 the depths of shallow networks ylva hård af segerstad department of applied it, university of gothenburg sweden hardy@ituniv.se mathias klang department of applied it, university of gothenburg sweden klang@ituniv.se abstract parental grief has been recognized as the most intense and overwhelming of all griefs and research has shown that bereaved parents’ need to talk about their late child continues over an extended period of time. new understandings of parental grief focus on continuing bonds and holding on, which often counteracts with cultural norms and expectations by society. results from a pilot-study, with the aim of gaining insight into the use of facebook as a tool for learning to cope with death, grief and mourning, support previous research which argue for a new understanding of grief. the technological affordances of online social networks support and give access to the exchange of experience with other grieving parents in ways that begin to fill an evident need for the bereaved, allowing for profound use of what is often perceived as shallow networks. keywords parental grief, coping, networks, mourning, death introduction large-scale social networks, such as facebook, demonstrate several of the symptoms that ariès (1981) related to the loss of community in modern life and can be seen as the ultimate large-scale population of mobile actors with weak ties. while these weak ties (granovetter, 1983) have been seen as being useful connections (ellison et al., 2007) they are often experienced and described as superficial (tom tong et al., 2008; carr, 2011; turkle, 2011). the popular social media discourse has a tendency to focus on the harmful or frivolous nature of the technology use. despite this perceived superficial social network, profound interaction does indeed take place. among them, and the focus of this work, is the use of facebook as a tool for learning to cope with death, grief and mourning, thus highlighting the possible depths of perceived shallow networks. conspiracy of silence the experience of death is a universal human experience. however, the death of a child is said to be the most stressful of all the possible losses individuals may experience in life (schwab, 1990). parental grief has been recognized as the most intense and overwhelming of all griefs (rando 1986; rees 1997 in davies, 2004), a particularly severe type of loss that tends to ignite extreme distress or grief over an extended period of time (parkes, 1988). the death of a child as a topic of conversation is often avoided in western culture. fitzgerald (1994) points out that there is a “conspiracy of silence” about the subject in our cultural conversation which, together with the limitations of our understanding of parental grief, contributes to the challenges in helping parents cope with a child’s death. riches and dawson’s study (2000) shows that bereaved parents cannot always find someone in their own families or in their social surrounding prepared to listen to them talking about their deceased children. dyregrov (2002) also argues that many bereaved experience family and friends withdrawing after a while, that they can no longer bear the constant need for talking about the dead child and the crying. as davies (2004) points out, riches and dawson’s study showed many experience social isolation and intense loneliness and find it difficult to talk about their late child to partners, surviving children and the wider social world, which is also supported by brotherson & soderquist (2002). grinyer (2012) remarks that as the loss of a child goes against the ‘natural order’, bereaved parents may not know others who have endured a similar loss; selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 thus their grief may be neither shared nor understood. riches and dawson’s study also showed that some parents find it difficult to discuss their dead children with those who have not suffered the same loss. all this creates an atmosphere in which there is little opportunity to learn and share coping skills for managing grief. re-interpreting grief theoretical perspectives on parental grief have undergone a paradigm shift over the last century (davies, 2004). theoretical understanding have gone from traditional perspectives emphasizing concepts of breaking bonds, or of letting go of one’s relationship with the dead, while new perspectives focus on continuing bonds and holding on. this counters the often unrealistic expectations by society and even some practitioners that parents should get over the death of their child and as soon as possible get back to functioning as a productive member of society. as we have seen above, it has been shown that grieving parents’ need to talk about their late child continues over an extended period of time. studies have shown that grieving parents find solace and comfort by holding on to their lost children by sharing memories as well as retaining mementos such as photographs and toys (rosenblatt (2000) and talbot (2002) in davies (2005). laakso & paunonenilmonen (2001) report that bereaved mothers used reading and writing about their grief and loss as coping strategies. brotherson & soderquist (2002) argue that the cultural avoidance of talking about death also limits the exploration of experiences and possibilities for coping with grief that might be shared in a culture, and that many individuals and professionals are left to develop, find, or stumble across coping mechanisms that may or may not alleviate the difficulty of the mourning process. consequently, there are not many places or situations where grieving parents may talk about their dead children or their experiences and feelings in trying to cope with their loss. social networks as subversive technology internet based technologies have come to play an important, and demonstrably supportive, role in many areas of human interaction. its ability to fill a therapeutic role in, for example, chronic illness has been well documented (cf. kumervold et al, 2002; josefsson, 2007; hagen, 2012). however, as internet use is shifting to a heavier dependence on online social networks the design, forms and usage is also shifting. online grief communities represent relatively new forms of peer support (swartwood, et al., 2011). the technology of social networks supports and facilitates what previous research has found to be important factors in the process of learning to cope with the death of a child. web-based and mobile technologies offer formats and fora, which allow grieving parents to do this in new ways. results from a pilot-study (hård af segerstad & klang, 2012), with the aim of gaining insight into the use of facebook as a tool for learning to cope with death, grief and mourning, support previous research which argue for a new understanding of grief. the study comprised a survey and interviews with members in a closed group for bereaved parents on facebook. as we have seen, the demands outside the closed group in other “open” fora in social media as well as in the physical world by friends, family, health care system and society require the bereaved parent to let go of their deceased child. within the community in the closed group, holding on is the norm, which means that facebook is being used as a subversive technology, in an attempt to transform the established social order and its structures of power, authority and hierarchy. in the closed group, the bereaved parents may get in touch with other parents who share their experience of losing a child, read others stories of loss and iteratively write about their own. knowledge and experience of losing a child, and of coping with grief and loss is distributed among the members of the closed group and made available, as it were, to everyone in the group. means for continuing the bonds are also facilitated by the technology itself: members post status updates ventilating their grief, ask advice, comment and support one another, post photos, videos, links related to their children and mourning. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 existing structures within healthcare systems in western societies are unable to efficiently provide for a long-term therapeutic support in cases of bereavement. this may be seen as a failure of a healthcare system to adequately enable citizens to return to a well-rounded life. as the need for this support is not provided other structures emerge, it is in situations such as these that lay experts may provide an important social service. the technological affordances of online social networks support and give access to the exchange of experience with other grieving parents in ways that begin to fill an evident need for the bereaved, allowing for profound use of what is often perceived as shallow networks. references ariès, p. (1981). the hour of our death. new york: alfred a. knopf. brotherson, s. e., & soderquist, j. (2002). coping with a child’s death. journal of family psychotherapy, 13(12), 53–86. carr, n. (2010). the shallows: what the internet is doing to our brains. new york: w. w. norton & company. davies, r. (2004). new understandings of parental grief: literature review. journal of advanced nursing, 46(5), 506–13. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2648.2004.03024.x davies, r. (2005). mothers’ stories of loss: their need to be with their dying child and their child's body after death. journal of child health care!: for professionals working with children in the hospital and community, 9(4), 288–300. doi:10.1177/1367493505056482 dyregrov, a. (2002). katastrofpsykologi. lund: studentlitteratur. ellison, n., steinfield, c., & lampe, c. (2007). the benefits of facebook ‘‘friends’’: exploring the relationship between college students’ use of online social networks and social capital, journal of computermediated communication, 12(4). fitzgerald, h. (1994). the mourning handbook. ny: simon & schuster. granovetter, m. (1983). the strength of weak ties: a network theory revisited, sociological theory, 1: 201– 233. grinyer, a. (2012). a bereavement group for parents whose son or daughter died from cancer!: how shared experience can lessen isolation. mortality!: promoting the interdisciplinary study of death and dying, 17(4), 338–354. hagen, n. (2012). a molecular body in a digital society. from practical biosociality to online biosociality, in lundin, s., liljefors, m., wiszmeg, a. (eds.) the atomized body -the cultural life of stem cells, genes and neurons. lund: nordic academic press. hård af segerstad, y. & klang, m. (2012). grieving with facebook, presentation at internet research 13.0, association of internet researchers, 18-21 october, university of salford. josefsson, u. (2007). coping online: patients use of the internet. doctoral dissertation, university of göteborg. kummervold, p. e., gammon, d., bergvik, s., johnsen, j.a.k., hasvold, t. & rosvinge, j. h. (2002). social support in a wired world: use of online mental health forums in norway, nord j psychiatry, 56(1), 59-65. laakso, h., & paunonen-ilmonen, m. (2001). mothers ’ grief following the death of a child. journal of advanced nursing, 36(1), 69–77. parkes, c. m. (1988). research: bereavement. omega, 18(4), 365-377. rando, t. r. (ed.). (1986). parental loss of a child: clinical and research considerations. champaign, illinois: research press. rees w.d. (1997.) death and bereavement: the psychological, religious and cultural interfaces. whurr publishers ltd, london.schwab, r. (1990). paternal and maternal coping with the death of a child. death studies, 14(5), 407–422. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 riches,g., & dawson, p. (2000). an intimate loneliness: supporting bereaved parents and siblings. buckingham: open university press. rosenblatt p.c. (2000). parent grief: narratives of loss and relationship. taylor and francis, philadelphia, pa. schwab, r. (1990). paternal and maternal coping with the death of a child. death studies, 14(5), 407–422. swartwood, r. m., veach, p. m., kuhne, j., lee, h. k., & ji, k. (2011). surviving grief: an analysis of the exchange of hope in online grief communities. omega: the journal of death and dying, 63(2), 161– 181. doi:10.2190/om.63.2.d talbot k. (2002). what forever means after the death of a child. brunner-routledge, london. tom tong, s., van der heide, b., langwell, l. & walther, j. b. (2008). too much of a good thing? the relationship between number of friends and interpersonal impressions on facebook, journal of computer-mediated communication, volume 13, issue 3, pages 531–549, april. turkle, s. (2011). alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other. new york: basic books. microsoft word 782-531-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa   twitter storytelling as a new literacy practice jeff holmes arizona state university united states jeff.holmes@asu.edu abstract this paper analyzes the twitter feed for the launch of mass effect 3 in order to explore the ways digital media reshape how we tell stories and share experiences. in particular, this feed highlights four important features of new media storytelling: the structure of the medium informs the crafted fictions of the story; these stories rely on both the “real” nature of the twitter medium as well as the fictional context of the narrative world; the story exists within the “real world” of the reader by being enmeshed with their everyday stream of other writing and reading; and readers have opportunities to participate and actively engage with the story in new ways. together, these features represent a new literacy and a new way of framing our understanding of storytelling. keywords literacy; transmedia; social media; performance; discourse introduction this paper argues that the growing number of fictional stories told through social media site twitter represents a new form of literacy practice. this new literacy is enmeshed in our everyday lives in unique and interesting ways because of the real-time nature of the medium it uses. stories exist side-by-side with other writing grounded in the mundane world, and readers must navigate between the two types of posts. these fictional stories can take several forms. some are stories contained within a single 140-character post. some are more robust stories which use twitter as a medium for distribution. still others are stories told by many authors using a shared hashtag. this analysis focuses on a single story arc, the twitter feed for the launch of mass effect 3, which crosses all these boundaries and more. this particular example is important for four reasons: a) it appropriates the structures and conventions of twitter itself as a frame for the story rather than simply using it as a distribution method; b) it represents a mixture of “real” and “unreal” contexts to tell the story; c) it was originally produced in real time as if the story were happening in the real world, a key conceit of the narrative; and d) it created a space for users to participate in the story and create supplemental side stories. together, these features highlight the unique nature of twitter fiction and demonstrate the potential for rethinking and expanding how we tell stories through the evolving digital tools of the 21st century. methodology and findings this analysis primarily uses gee’s discourse analysis toolkit (2012) to examine the language and structural cues of the launch feed. in particular, much of what makes the me3 feed so interesting is the interplay between the story (which tells of an alien invasion of earth) with the technology of twitter (character-limited posts, real-time publishing, technical jargon). the story was told from the point-ofview of a news reporter from the fictional in-game alliance news network. the reporter posted twitter messages “as if” she witnessed the invasion herself, and was written in first-person present voice to provide the appearance of live reporting of the events. the feed used the conventions of twitter in the posts: shorthand, bit.ly links to other articles, hashtags. during the events, the reporter was injured and posted a message with a number of typos, apologizing for typing with “brnd hands [sic].” these writing choices provided the appearance of authenticity, of being “in the moment” reporting. where other stories selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa   may use the 140-character limit as a necessary restriction, or simply spread a story across multiple posts, the me3 launch feed uses the structures of twitter and the medium itself as part of the fiction (a reporter using a social media tool to tell the news). this blurring of real and fictional is a central tension in the feed. as part of the larger fictional world of mass effect, the feed follows the rules established in other related media, from the names and characters of the world to the events that happen. the story it tells is a kind of “teaser” to the mass effect 3 game, where the player begins with the invasion in progress. the feed is a representation of transmedia storytelling (jenkins, 2009) in that it is one part of a larger whole that occurs across several different channels. more interestingly, though, is that the feed was a fictional story told within the “real world” constraints of twitter. the story used through the @alliancenewsnet handle, included the #solcomms hashtag, even used bit.ly links – all markedly 2012-centric conceits for a story supposedly occurring in 2186. even the twitter site itself is a strange juxtaposition of the “real world” nature of the feed and the anachronism of the events it supposedly tells. much like videogames themselves, the feed blends two worlds: one fictional, one real (juul, 2005; taylor, 2006). just as importantly, the original story was as much a performance as it is a narrative. as it was originally told, the posts spanned several days and gave the impression of happening in the moment; as the invasion became more violent and earth’s situation more precarious, the pace of the posts quickened and the writing became more frantic. while the first few posts were separated by a span of several days, the posts increased in frequency so that they appeared every few minutes. by the time of the story’s “climax,” posts appeared every 30 seconds or so. this is particularly important for this type of story: because of the conceit of “live” news reporting, the feed used the timing of posts to maintain that fiction. but it also highlights the “everyday” nature of the feed; posts appeared alongside other writing which populated a reader’s stream, so that “news” of an alien invasion was interspersed with jokes, restaurant recommendations, links to funny articles, or other mundane posts from their other social connections. readers were forced to distinguish between the fictions of the story from the reality of their other feeds. finally, readers were invited to not simply experience the story but to actively engage with it. the inclusion of the #solcomms hashtag provided a channel for readers to comment and correspond with each other. some readers created their own stories, even including pictures they modified which purportedly showed the aliens invading their hometown. readers had the opportunity to creatively participate in their shared experiences, a key feature of 21st century digital literacies and participatory cultures (markham, 1998; baym, 2010). furthermore, the stories and conversations readers created added to the meta-story, the “big s” story (following gee, 2003) that includes all the various ways people talk about and share ideas about the story the feed tells and the game portrays. conclusions the me3 twitter launch feed is a densely layered set of meanings and experiences made possible through 21st century digital media; it is an example of new ways of thinking about and experiencing the world. but it is also about how we share and access stories in multiple contexts and through multiple lenses; it is about how we tell fictional stories in truthful ways, and ways in which the truths of the stories are bound to the fictions of the everyday world. it demonstrates important principles of using context to inform content. it highlights a new kind of literacy which intersects our everyday lives through digitally mediated tools like twitter, where the everyday and the fictional exist side-by-side and not as discrete spaces. finally, it highlights new challenges—and new opportunities—to create, distribute, and share information in networked, real-time digital media; we must think deeply about the benefits of constant information as well as the ways this information can be used and misused within its just-in-time nature. this particular story represents a new form of literacy in which stories are bound up in the everyday, where authors and selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa   readers alike must negotiate through the conventions and constraints of new digital media, and where readers have opportunities to co-create their own stories alongside the “main” narrative. references baym, n. (2010). personal connections in the digital age. malden, ma: polity press. gee, j. (2003). what video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. ny: palgrave macmillan. gee, j. (2011). how to do discourse analysis: a toolkit. ny: routledge. jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture: where old and new media collide. ny: new york up. juul, j. (2005). half-real: video games between real rules and fictional worlds. cambridge, ma: mit press. markham, a. (1998). life online: researching real experience in virtual space. walnut creek, ca: altamira press. taylor, t. l. (2006). play between worlds: exploring online game culture. cambridge, ma: mit press. microsoft word _done selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 modern digital imaginaries: facebook as a source of independent narratives in colombia natalia velez university of southern california introduction as much as networked digital media has proven to be a powerful tool for coordinating and consolidating political action, the study of this issue in the context of latin america requires an additional understanding of latin american countries’ political and economic landscapes. in this paper, i analyze the activist group “voces contra las farc”’s use of facebook during a period of acute political debate in comparison to that of the two local newspapers with the highest circulation rates, el tiempo and el espectador. this article expands the existing theories about the power of social media in countries with corrupted political sceneries and provides insights that could be used for comparative analysis between latin american countries in hopes of characterizing the networked environment in the region. modern social imaginaries: a latin american overview the question of what modern social imaginaries look like needs to be posed again from a new angle, since different cultures have modernized in their own ways and cannot be analyzed under one general theory1. nonetheless, from castoriadis’ suggestion that everything that is presented to us in the social world, starting with society itself, is inextricably tied to the symbolic2, to anderson’s analysis of nations as imagined communities that only exist in the individuals’ minds3, the humanities seem to agree on the fact that collective imaginaries are what enable the practice of society. what happens when a new element penetrates the collective imaginary and changes the way in which people conceive their social existence? the sudden rise of technology 1 taylor, charles (2002). modern social imaginaries. public culture 14 (1) 91:124 2 castoriadis, cornelius. the imaginary institution of society mit press, 1987. 3 anderson, benedict. imagined communities,2d ed. london:verso,1991, 224 pp. suggested citation (apa): velez, n. (2015, october 21-24). modern digital imaginaries: facebook as a source of independent narratives in colombia. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. and social networking has undoubtedly influenced people’s perceptions of their role in social, economic and political affairs. the case of latin america is of special importance, since most latin american countries still face challenges to democracy4and social media is just starting to be seen as a tool to enhance civic participation where it has taken root and promote it where it does not exist yet. with an internet penetration of 54.3% and an estimated facebook presence of 36,6%5, colombia has the third highest internet indicators in the region (preceded by brazil and argentina)6. manifestations of civic engagement, such as the “one million voices against las farc” march in 20087, have already been coordinated through digital technologies, which proves that citizens have began to discover that social media can be used to defy the balance of power between the state and the civil society8. kidnappings, violence and radical use of social media in colombia kidnapping is an affliction that has haunted colombian society for over forty years. in 2001, colombia was named the kidnap capital of the world, and it was estimated that one kidnap occurred every three hours, resulting in over 3,500 reported cases. according to studies conducted by the national center of historic memory (centro nacional de memoria histórica), the revolutionary armed forces (farc) were responsible for 43% of the abductions and the national liberation army (eln) was accountable for 30%.9 in 2002, the number of kidnappings started to decrease, and in 2013 the ministry of defense reported a total of 299 cases10. this downfall is often associated with the government’s ongoing peace negotiations with insurgent groups. on november 17, 2014 general rubén darío alzate mora, commander of the titan joint armed force, was abducted by the 34th front of the colombian revolutionary armed forces (farc). the kidnapping violated the agreement that had been reached between the guerilla and the colombian government during the continuing peace dialogues, which were to be resumed in cuba that following week11. furthermore, alzate mora was the highest ranked general in the in region, which made the act a matter of national security12. this situation raised questions that transcended the abduction itself. not only was general alzate mora warned not to travel through the area where he was kidnapped 4 ciria, alberto. (1969) la comunicación política en américa latina: algunos de sus problemas. estudios internacionales 2, (8) 530: 542. 5 http://www.internetworldstats.com/sa/co.htm 6 http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats15.htm 7 guerrero bernal, juan carlos (2012) “one million voices against farc”: facebook as a vector establishing and mobilizing civil society against the colombian guerrilla. paper presented at the 53rd annual convention of the international studies association (isa) 8 sharky, clay (2011)the political power of social media: technology, the public sphere, and political change foreign affairs. 90, (1) 28-41 9 http://www.centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/index.php/noticias/noticias-cmh/1530-las-cifras-del-secuestro 10 http://es.insightcrime.org/noticias-del-dia/aumento-de-secuestro-expres-signo-de-la-evolucion-criminal-de-colombia 11 http://dialogosdepaz.org/los-dialogos/ 12 http://www.elespectador.com/noticias/judicial/secuestro-del-general-alzate-el-hecho-tiene-crisis-el-p-articulo528196 due to its high rebel activity, but he also decided to do so dressed as a civilian. the reasons why he followed this course of action still remain unknown. president juan manuel santos suspended the peace negotiations until the general was freed. however, local activist groups strongly critiqued the government’s actions and the president’s failure to demand the liberation of all those that remained abducted before resuming the negotiation process. the question of whether or not the government could be held accountable for alzate’s presence in a high-risk zone remains unaddressed. nevertheless, activists in voces contra las farc –a colombian activist group that aims to shed light on the massacres, extortions, human rights violations and forced recruitment of minors for which the revolutionary armed forces are responsible, immediately initiated discussions about the matter on social media, using facebook as their primary outlet to provide their own answers to the questions that the government failed to take on. these included aspects of the kidnapping that were ignored or denied by mainstream media, starting with the fact that alzate was wandering in a zone that is known to be “taken” by the armed forces, even after being strongly advised not do so. radical media studies have previously explored the construction of radical news, and their opposition to mainstream media in aspects of construction, distribution and possibilities for discussion. tony bennet’s hegemonic approach to this matter – according to which radical and mainstream media should not be seen as fields of symbolic production, but as inhabiting a shared field of relations13 was then adopted by chris atton in order to explore the radical media in the uk. in his work, atton suggests that radical media seeks to transform the practice of journalism in hopes of giving a voice to the voiceless and inverting “the hierarchy of access” by providing safe spaces for both activists and ordinary people.14 in this sense, the case of colombia is no different: colombian mainstream media favors powerful groups and individuals, which intrinsically limits other audience’s possibilities of entry into the news, while radical media allows “ordinary people” and radical groups to create news themselves and become protagonists of their stories. a growing body of literature has characterized the relationship between radical social media and political activism as enabling in both directions15. the influence of twitter in the revolutions of tunisia and egypt has come to prove that social media supports distributed conversation among participants and that journalism, in the era of social media, has become a conversation16. this implies that a new, virtual space has emerged for radical media as well as mainstream outlets, which poses an opportunity for social movements and organizations to reach their audiences. 13 bennet, tony (1986) popular culture and the ‘turn to gramsci’. popular culture and social relations. london: arnold pp. 348-53. 14 atton, chris. (2002) news cultures and new social movements: radical journalism and the mainstream media. journalism studies volume 3, 491-505.   15 downing, john. (1984) radical media: the political experience of alternative communication. boston: south end press. 16 gillmor, d. (2004). we the media. sebastapol, ca: o’reilly media. methodology the main purpose of this study was to conduct an exploratory analysis of voces contra las farc’s use of facebook during the period where general alzate mora was kidnapped. for this purpose, i collected data from the activist group facebook page in addition to data from the facebook pages belonging colombia’s two most influential newspapers, el tiempo and el espectador. facebook was chosen as the social media site for this analysis due to the fact that it is the most popular social networking site in colombia, with 24 million users according to mintic. this can be translated to a penetration of 90.8% of the country’s internet users.17 data collection strategy the social media analytics tool quintly was used to gather historical data from the three official facebook pages between the dates of november 16th 2014 and november 30th of 2014, when general alzate was released. considering that the two newspapers had published posts concerning all sorts of different topics, their two datasets were sampled and all messages that had no relation to the kidnapping were removed. once the new dataset was established, message analysis was conducted. methodological limitations while my initial idea was to use an actor-coding scheme to identify information flows within the three organizations, facebook’s setup and privacy settings hider the possibilities of conducting an effective coding process. findings in contrast to its mainstream counterparts, which posted updates regarding general alazate’s case on their facebook pages more than twice a day (an average of 6.28 times in the case of el tiempo and 4.85 times in the case of el espectador), voces contra las farc published an average of 3.28 posts per day. this difference in quantity responds to the organizations’ difference in size and capacity. while both el tiempo and el espectador have over one thousand employees including contributors to their virtual platforms, voces is composed of less than fifty members, and job rotation is common. table 1 reports the number of posts concerning the alzate case per day between november 16 and 30, for voces, el tiempo and el espectador. 17  http://www.mintic.gov.co/portal/604/w3-­‐article-­‐2713.html   table 1: number of posts per day. the peaks on november 16, 26 and 30 respond to the fact that those three days were the most crucial in relation to the alzate case. the general was kidnapped on november 16, which immediately caught both the mainstream and the radical media’s attention. then, on november 26, the farc announced the general’s liberation, which happened on november 30. journalistic techniques voces contra las farc’s aim of giving a voice to the voiceless is enhanced by the presentation of news from the inside, which superficially resembles the eyewitness reports in mainstream media, as it aims to present news in a way that communities will feel identified with. 18 along these lines, the activist group approached general alzate mora’s abduction as part of a wider and more critical issue concerning every colombian citizen, the issue of kidnapping and violence in colombia: “the interruption of the piece dialogues due to the kidnapping of general ruben dario alzate mora is not definitive but conditional. president santos’ arrogance prevents him from seeing that his alliance with criminals is a failure, and he will seek to resume it in spite of all the other colombian citizens who have been kidnapped, mutilated, raped or killed.” voces contra las farc. november 19, 2014. voces’ stories are dominated by a narrative of violence, in which the reader is constantly reminded of the atrocious crimes for which the farc are responsible in addition to the kidnapping of general alzate. the technique of listing the guerilla’s 18 atton, chris. (2002) news cultures and new social movements: radical journalism and the mainstream media. journalism studies volume 3, 491-505.   0   2   4   6   8   10   12   14   el  tiempo   el  espectador   voces  contra  las  farc   delinquencies, which often include blackmail, torture, rape, and murder, delivers a powerful message that cannot be reduced to a single incident, and is thus portrayed a series of events in which general alzate’s kidnapping serves as a mere case in point. furthermore, voces’ narrative is permeated by what could be defined as a “questionanswer” dynamic that is not uncommon in radical media practices. while questioning the status quo, writers at voces provide their own interpretations of the mysterious circumstances under which the kidnapping took place, most of which include denouncements of the government’s corruption. these opinions, that distance themselves from the mainstream media as much as possible, also serve as invitations to dialogue, and group members often engage in debates and conversations via facebook threads: “attorney alejandro ordóñez has been commissioned to investigate whether there are any irregularities in the series of twitter messages in which former president alvaro uribe vélez revealed that general rubén darío alzate mora had been kidnapped by the farc last sunday. this leads us to believe that if uribe had not made this information public, it would have been kept from the colombian people.” voces contra las farc, november 19, 2014. to these accusations, some facebook users respond: “he [former president uribe] finds out about everything before we do. way to be on top of the game and care for your country.” to create resistance, one should be informed of the counterpart’s actions. there is nothing wrong with that. president uribe did not lie at any time, he just made some information public. more so, any citizen is obliged to denounce crimes. this is just another tease to confuse people. still, everything about this case remains a mystery, doesn’t it? in contrast, el tiempo and el espectador refer to the alzate case as an isolated incident, confirming the popular assertion that mainstream media produces an inflexible system within which the representation of unofficial voices is marginalized19 “president juan manuel santos has announced the interruption of the cycle of peace dialogues with the farc, which was to be continued in cuba next tuesday, due to the kidnapping of general alzate (…). he stated that the farc were entirely responsible for the general’s abduction, and that conversations between the two parties would only be resumed after alzate was returned his freedom.” el espectador, november 17 2014. two years after the national government and the farc had initiated a cycle of peace dialogues (…) they were interrupted this sunday after the kidnapping of general ruben dario alzate mora. (…) the president accused farc of committing an “unacceptable kidnapping”. el tiempo, november 17 2014. 19 atton, chris. (2002) news cultures and new social movements: radical journalism and the mainstream media. journalism studies volume 3, 491-505.   on the contrary, el tiempo and el espectador had a more reserved approach to the matter, favoring actual reporting of the facts over analysis. however, even if both newspapers remained as neutral as possible in their reporting of general alzate’s kidnapping, there were too many unresolved questions surrounding the issue, which became worthy of coverage itself. on november 21, el tiempo posted a link to an article titled “the five questions that general alzate needs to answer”, suggesting that the general would have to explain the following upon his return to freedom: 1. what was his objective in this expedition? 2. why didn’t he bring his bodyguards with him, if he was aware of the high guerilla presence in the zone? 3. why was he dressed as a civilian instead of wearing his uniform? 4. why was he traveling unarmed? 5. are there any other explanations? screenshot: the five questions that general alzate needs to answer. while the article itself doesn’t provide any preliminary hypotheses that could explain these issues, it represents an intersection between mainstream and radical media approaches to the alzate case. the journalistic practice of asking open questions foments individual analysis, a strategy that is more likely to appear in radical media as a way of promoting the inclusion of different viewpoints in a possible debate. el espectador showed a similar inflection point in its otherwise distant approach to the kidnapping on the same date, november 21, when it published a link to a note affirming that general alzate would have to thoroughly explain himself to the congress and to the colombian people. this note was much briefer than el tiempo’s piece, but it also alluded to the questions that the mainstream media had chosen to ignore since the abduction took place. screenshot: general alzate will have to explain himself to the congress comments to both el tiempo and el espectador’s posts exceeded those gathered by voces contra las farc’s, which is expected given the pages’ difference in number of followers, higher for the newspapers than the activist group. (el tiempo has 2.1 million followers, el espectador has 1,6 million and voces has 12,260). it is worth noting that this disproportion responds to radical media’s expected modus operandi, which is strongly based on non-commercial premises as opposed to mainstream media’s profitcentered, hierarchical organization. conclusions while this case study answers a few questions about the newly established relationship between radical media and social networks in latin america, which is still very immature in comparison to more developed countries, it leads to bigger questions about the use of social media by social movements in the region. furthermore, it is worth noting that this paper is merely a part of an ongoing research project, in which i plan to establish comparisons between media approaches to political issues in colombia. from the side of these organizations, my research raises questions about possible ways in which social media could be used to enhance civic action in colombia, or at least to open new communications channels that allow individuals with diverse viewpoints to engage in political debates. it is also an invitation for them to perform user research, given the fact that, even though their activity rates (lower than those of mainstream media) can be explained by their very nature, they also imply a certain lack of interest in their social media followers. in order to fully apprehend the potential of social media networks and use them as platforms to foment dialogue organizations need to show deeper commitment to their followers. it is worth noting that, even though some elements of the current studies about civic engagement and social media in politically repressed countries (mostly middle eastern) can be extrapolated to the latin american scenario, studies that take into account the distinctive characteristics of the region are much needed. a characterization of such sort would help latin american publics understand the crucial role of social media in the civic sphere and incite them to encourage participation in dialogues that take place in digital platforms. references anderson, benedict. imagined communities,2d ed. london:verso,1991, 224 pp. (8) 530: 542. atton, chris. (2002) news cultures and new social movements: radical journalism and the mainstream media. journalism studies volume 3, 491-505. bennet, tony (1986) popular culture and the ‘turn to gramsci’. popular culture and social relations. london: arnold pp. 348-53. castels, manuel (2007). communication, power and counter-power in the network society. international journal of communication 1 (2007) 238-266 castoriadis, cornelius. the imaginary institution of society mit press, 1987. castro, j. j.(2014). media in twentiethand twenty-first-century latin america. latin american research review 49(2), 273-281. latin american studies association. retrieved july 30, 2015, from project muse database. ciria, alberto. (1969) la comunicación política en américa latina: algunos de sus problemas. estudios internacionales downing, john. (1984) radical media: the political experience of alternative communication. boston: south end press. downing, john. audiences and readers of alternative media: the absent lure of the virtually unknown gillmor, d. (2004). we the media. sebastapol, ca: o’reilly media. guerrero bernal, juan carlos (2012) “one million voices against farc”: facebook as a vector establishing and mobilizing civil society against the colombian guerrilla. paper presented at the 53rd annual convention of the international studies association (isa) rodríguez, c.(2011). citizens’ media against armed conflict: disrupting violence in colombia. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. retrieved july 30, 2015, from project muse database. sharky, clay (2011)the political power of social media: technology, the public sphere, and political change foreign affairs. 90, (1) 28-41 taylor, charles (2002). modern social imaginaries. public culture 14 (1) 91:124 http://www.elespectador.com/noticias/judicial/secuestro-del-general-alzate-el-hechotiene-crisis-el-p-articulo-528196 http://www.internetworldstats.com/sa/co.htm http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats15.htm http://www.centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/index.php/noticias/noticias-cmh/1530-lascifras-del-secuestro http://es.insightcrime.org/noticias-del-dia/aumento-de-secuestro-expres-signo-de-laevolucion-criminal-de-colombia http://dialogosdepaz.org/los-dialogos/ 1 from addicts to athletes: participation in the discursive construction of digital games in urban china marcella szablewicz rensselaer polytechnic institute usa szablm@rpi.edu abstract based upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in shanghai and beijing, china, this paper analyzes different applications of the chinese terms wangluo youxi (literally defined as ‘internet games’) danji youxi (literally defined as ‘single computer games’) and dianzi jingji (literally defined as ‘electronic sports’) in order to unearth cultural assumptions and contradictions about different types of game play and their varied motivations and effects. by problematizing the manner in which gamers, the media and the government employed the terms wangluo youxi, danji youxi, and dianzi jingji, the author reveals the processes by which different types of gamers are alternately constructed as ‘addicts’ and ‘athletes’, and the links between such constructions and larger cultural discourses on chinese nationalism, ‘spiritual civilization’ and neoliberal ideals. keywords internet games; pc games; e-sports; china; internet addiction. in play between worlds (2006) t.l. taylor noted that she was interested in “gaps or boundary work in that such locations can be the place in which different definitions become problematized or previously hidden practices are accounted for” (p. 10). among other things, taylor’s fieldwork addressed gaps such as those between “power gamers” and others, noting that gamers do indeed make strong distinctions between different types of game play, with some power gamers going so far as to suggest that some 'casual games” are not “real games” (p. 171). 2 similarly, a colleague and i have discussed the manner in which chinese gamers’ efforts to respond to the dominant discourse of ‘internet addiction’ have led them to make distinctions between different kinds of games and different locations of play (lindtner & szablewicz, 2011). this type of boundary work can also be cast as a form of participation, a process whereby gamers actively contribute to the construction of a game’s social meaning and engage with dominant cultural discourses in seeking to explain and justify their gaming practices. this usage of the term participation aligns most closely with that of ito (2009), who makes an effort to link participation “to institutional structures and resilient patterns in our culture that contextualize the specific media texts in question” (p. 13). in other words, participation here is conceived broadly, as being the product of a complex web of individual actors, discourses and institutions that shape the meaning and use of technology. in the instance to be discussed herein, i will analyze different applications of the chinese terms wangluo youxi (literally defined as ‘internet games’) danji youxi (literally defined as ‘single computer games’) and dianzi jingji (literally defined as ‘electronic sports’) in order to unearth cultural assumptions and contradictions about different types of game play and their varied motivations and effects. by problematizing the manner in which these students and professionals employed the terms wangluo youxi, danji youxi, and dianzi jingji, i will reveal the processes by which different types of gamers are alternately constructed as ‘addicts’ and ‘athletes’, and the links between such constructions and larger cultural discourses of chinese nationalism, ‘spiritual civilization’ and neoliberal ideals. in order to avoid confusion with english terms and associated cultural assumptions about what they mean, i will throughout the course of this paper employ the chinese romanization of the terms as used above. specifically, data is drawn from a year of observation and semi-structured interviews with over fifty gamers and games industry professionals in the shanghai and beijing areas. as it is impossible to include all of these voices in one paper, the following focuses upon my discussions with 6 self-proclaimed danji gamers, 5 professional dianzi jingji athletes, and a small number of dianzi jingji industry professionals. though my fieldwork also included many interviews with and observations of professed ‘wangluo gamers’, their testimony is largely omitted from this paper, and remains the subject for another discussion. 3 situational analysis when i first embarked upon this line of research, i often summarized my work by stating that i was studying ‘internet games’ (wangluo youxi) in china. as with most attempts to briefly encapsulate one’s research topic, this was, of course, a gross oversimplification. yet the description was accurate insofar as the research did not focus on any one wangluo game but rather a variety of them. many people, especially those who were avid gamers themselves, were surprised and concerned by this fact, noting that each game has its own cultural practices, rules, and social norms. this is certainly true, but the choice to focus on such a broad category and cut across a number of different games was in fact a conscious one born of my desire to study the diversity of practices and meanings permeating the physical spaces where play took place. in such a situation it would be impossible to study one game and not another, as many different types of games were played in the internet cafés, dormitories and apartments that would serve as my field sites. this decidedly broad research topic was designed using a methodology known as “situational analysis” (clarke, 2005). clarke explains, “situational analysis allows researchers to draw together studies of discourse and agency, action and structure, image, text and context, history and the present moment—to analyze complex situations of inquiry broadly conceived” (xxii). like taylor’s (2006) emphasis on “boundary work,” such an expansive compilation of data permits what clarke refers to as “incisive studies of differences of perspective” that “push grounded theory around the postmodern turn” by emphasizing positionality and situated knowledges (haraway, 1991). given this methodological orientation, it is important to note that although wangluo games occupy a central position in this paper, the goal here is not to explain life within these games as much it is to explore the social relations, imaginaries and discourses that flow through and around them. how are wangluo games and the people who play them constructed from various perspectives within urban china? contrary to technologically determinist arguments that cast technology as an agent of social and cultural change, this perspective emphasizes the social and cultural forces at work in shaping our relationship to and understanding of technology. put in clarke’s terminology, wangluo games are the “nonhuman actants” in my situation, the material things that, like a clay-ball, are molded and shaped and then remolded by the various government policies, media discourses, and participatory practices of those who engage with and seek to define them. 4 internet games: what’s in a name? what i did not bargain for is the fact that many of the young gamers i encountered in the cafés, dormitories and apartments i intended to study would deny that they played wangluo games at all. as one might imagine, the response initially left me dumfounded. in one case i vividly remember, a tongji university student, xiaomei, made this point after i had already spoken with her about the many years she had spent playing games in internet cafés (wangba) with her friends1 danji youxi (console games) refer to electronic games that operate independently through a single computer or other gaming platform. as opposed to internet games, these games do not need a specific server in order to operate normally, some of these games also allow for multiplayer competition through the use of a local area network. on a single unit, console games can operate in hotseat or split screen mode . i felt as though i was missing something. if she wasn’t playing wangluo games in the wangba, what was she playing? as i soon discovered, the young gamers who played warcraft iii or counterstrike were themselves engaging in acts of boundary work. rather than calling the games they played wangluo games the young gamers insisted that the games they played were danji games. the literal translation of danji is ‘single computer’ or ‘single device’, but as defined on the chinese wiki baidu baike: 2. the game can be played on a single computer without the use of the internet, mostly in man vs. machine battle mode. because it cannot connect to the internet, the game’s interactivity is slightly worse, but with the use of a local area network it is possible to conduct multiplayer battles, and the game does not need a specific server to operate normally3 1 wangba is the chinese term for internet café, literally meaning ‘net bar’. in many ways, net bar is a more accurate translation, as it connotes a semi-illicit leisure space. while alcohol is not served in most wangba, age restrictions do prevent minors from entering. many newspapers have also compared the internet and games to drugs, going so far as to call wangba “opium dens.” for more on this see szablewicz (2004 and 2010). 2 hotseat or split screen modes are different forms of what is known as “local multiplayer” game play, whereby two players make use of the same screen and keyboard to play against one another. 3 here, i would like to suggest that “console game” is not actually the correct english translation of danji, as in english a console game often connotes a non-pc game that operates through an independent unit such as xbox or playstation. in another online chinese-english dictionary (www.nciku.com), danji is defined as “a computer not linked to the internet.” as such, i believe the accurate english translation of danji youxi should be “pc game.” . 5 historically speaking it makes sense that games such as warcraft iii and counterstrike would be referred to as danji games because they were initially designed so that they could be played on a single computer without the use of an internet connection. but the term ‘single computer’ is also inaccurate, because rarely are such games actually played in a single computer scenario. in fact, throughout my time in china, every self-proclaimed danji gamer i met played danji games almost exclusively in a multiplayer scenario with friends. one caijing university student, xiaolong, went so far as to state, “danji games are not interesting unless you have lots of people. unless you have [at least] two people to play a danji game it is boring.” what is more, these gamers did not play on the same computer (what is referred to above as hot seat or split screen gaming) but rather through multiple computers that were linked. as many know, when not using the internet, computers can also be linked through the use of a local area network (lan). playing lan games in internet cafés was once an important aspect of many young people’s coming of age in urban china. many of the students i encountered, who came of age in the late 1990s and early 2000s, spoke nostalgically about days (and nights) spent in the café with friends. for these students, the internet café offered a much needed and affordable escape from stifling home and school environments, where pressure to excel in academic studies left little time for extracurricular activities. students related many stories of instances in which they would ‘fanqiang’ or sneak out of their school compounds in order to play in the cafés. li explained that when he was in middle school he had to go to an internet café in order to play danji games with friends. he states: it is one thing to have a computer [at home], but if you are at home alone playing against the computer it is boring, it is only interesting if you are playing with classmates, this is why there are so many people in the internet café … in high school the dormitories didn’t have computers, of course i could play at home. .but if you are playing danji games you can’t play if each person is at his/her home, you have to go to an internet café… like xiaolong, fudan university student li reiterates the concept that danji games must be played in groups to be fun. and because few households in china would have had either laptops or more than one computer in the 1990s and early 2000s, the internet café became one of the few spaces where young people could play their games together. indeed, these observations align with my findings from preliminary fieldwork conducted in harbin in 2002. at that time, one of the most popular internet café activities was counterstrike, an fps game played through a lan. this also remained true in 2004, when i studied internet cafés in 6 shanghai and noted that counterstrike was the “quintessential wangba activity.” the popularity of lan gaming in the internet cafés helps to explain how someone like xiaomei could claim she spent a great deal of time playing games in the internet café but argue that the games she played were not ‘internet games’. yet another east china normal university student recalled sneaking lan games after hours in the computer classroom at his high school: when we were in our second year of high school, we took that class, computer science. when we were in class we could download cs, once we downloaded it then all the computers in the room could play the game together. during class the teacher saw that we were playing, and so he immediately disconnected the network cable, but later, because there was a lan and the game was on the computers’ hard drives … you just couldn’t play during usual times, but if you went on friday afternoon or saturday, you could connect the lan and play together or you could play danji (on a single computer). here, the student explains the process by which a game, such as counterstrike, could be downloaded from the internet and placed on a computer’s hard drive. his description also unknowingly illuminates the semantic inaccuracies in calling multiplayer lan games ‘danji’ as he notes that the game, once downloaded to the school computers’ hard drives, can either be played through a lan or in a single computer (danji) mode. but while many recall a time when games such as warcraft and counterstrike were played using lan connections, it has since become possible to play such games by connecting through online servers. for example, in 2002, when warcraft iii was released in the united states, the game had built-in online capabilities and could be played through blizzard’s official online server, battle.net. in china, a number of similar companies offer online ‘battle’ platforms. by the time i conducted my fieldwork in 2010, most of the warcraft iii players i spoke with connected through one of two domestic servers: haofang (www.cga.com.cn), established september 2002, or vs (www.vsa.com.cn), established september 20044 4 battle.net did not become available in china until 2008, when blizzard partnered with netease to bring the platform to the chinese market. prior to this, blizzard sold publishing rights to chinese company aomei soft. but while aomei owned official publishing rights, many gamers in china played with pirated copies of the game and chose to play through sites such as haofang and vs. in 2006, aomei sued shanda games, the company that held the controlling share of haofang, over copyright infringement but lost the case in chinese court. . the advent of these online servers also precluded the need for a physical gathering space, such as an internet café. 7 many of the students now played via the internet from their college dormitories while internet cafés were increasingly associated with wangluo games. as such, it is clear that, at least since the early 2000s, even danji gamers are able play their games through the internet (and most now do). conflating technology and genre so, how should one describe a game that is not a ‘single pc’ or ‘single player’ game but which is also not fully reliant on the internet? in english, the term ‘online’ addresses this very dilemma. consider the following two scholarly definitions of online games. katie salen and eric zimmerman (2004) argue that online games are defined by four traits: immediate but narrow interactivity, manipulation of information, automated complex systems and networked communication. noticeably, the word internet is not mentioned in the criteria, thus allowing for the inclusion of games played over other kinds of networks, such as lan games. and as noted by adams and rollings (2010) “online gaming is a technology rather than a genre.” in other words, any genre of game, rts, rpg, fps, etc., can be ‘online’ if the proper technology is in place. according to them, ‘online game’ is used: to refer to the multiplayer distributed games in which players’ machines are connected by a network. (this as opposed to multiplayer local games in which all the players play on one machine and look at the same screen.) while online games can, in principle, include solitaire games that happen to be provided via the internet, such as bejeweled, the online aspect of solitaire games is incidental rather than essential to the experience. online games do not need to be distributed over the internet; games played over a local area network (lan) also qualify as online games (p. 591). aside from allowing for games that are not played over the internet, both of these definitions place an emphasis on networked sociality. this would seem to apply perfectly to the gaming style of the danji gamers i interviewed, who all stressed the need to play these games with friends. yet in chinese, the term ‘online’ (zaixian) is rarely used in this way. instead, the precise kind of confusion that adams and rollings warn against has occurred: technology has been conflated with genre. indeed, when i asked many of the young people who played danji games to define a wangluo game, they would often respond by giving me examples of types of games rather than a technical definition of one. in general, the games that were served up as examples 8 of wangluo games were massively multiplayer online role playing games (mmorpgs) such as world of warcraft or the chinese game, fantasy westward journey. my research assistant liang, who studied and played games for a living, even went so far as to argue that only those who played mmorpgs qualified as ‘real’ wangluo gamers5 in previous work, i have discussed the nature of china’s growing moral panic about internet addiction and internet (wangluo) games (szablewicz, 2010). my findings have shown that internet cafés, now strongly associated with wangluo games rather than danji games, are commonly portrayed as the breeding ground of internet addiction, with wangluo games being cast as the source. newspaper articles portray the lengths that parents go to in order to rescue their children from such cafés, including wrestling children to the ground and stabbing themselves in order to elicit a reaction from their otherwise nonresponsive video-game addict teens. stories about teens dropping dead after sitting in front of a computer for 72 hours straight or falling asleep on train tracks after an all night gaming session abound. in 2009, there were . the question was, why was this happening and why were the self-proclaimed danji gamers so adamant that i not confuse their style of gaming with wangluo games? as i will show, the crux of the matter was this: danji youxi and wangluo youxi were being separated on the basis of qualitative differences rather than quantitative ones; it was not the fact that they were played on the internet or on the pc that separated them (as the literal translation of the terms wangluo and danji would suggest) but rather a number of judgments about the kind of social interaction, competition, skills, and time/monetary investment that these different game genres were presumed to entail. what is more, i came to understand that the danji gamers’ insistence on separating their style of gaming from that of wangluo gamers was in fact in line with a government led mission to keep the two separate. to both the government and the students i spoke with, danji games were simply described as being better than wangluo games. better how? better in the sense that wangluo games were considered ‘addictive’, while danji games were understood to be ‘athletic’. from addicts to athletes 5 there were instances when other genres of games would sneak in to the wangluo category. for example, xiaolong enjoyed playing a game called paopao kadingche (sometimes translated in english as crazyracing kartrider), a cartoonish racing game in which players drive a go kart and race against one another. another couple of gamers enjoyed playing a dance competition game, in which players controlled their avatars’ dance moves and competed in ‘dance-offs’. but these types of games, while begrudgingly included in the wangluo category, were the rare exception; almost all the gamers i spoke to associated wangluo with mmorpgs. 9 over 7,000 mentions of the term internet addiction (wangyin) in the chinese press, trumping other forms of addiction such as drug addiction (duyin, over 4,000 mentions) and alcoholism (jiujing zhongdu, over 2,000 mentions) by the thousands. but while wangluo games have caused a great deal of hysteria, another kind of gaming, dianzi jingji (e-sports) has been the subject of much official fanfare. in 2003, the chinese government declared that e-sports was china’s 99th professional competitive sport. since that time, there have been numerous efforts to legitimize dianzi jinji and call attention to it as a source of national pride. for example, in 2008, chinese professional gamer sky carried the olympic torch through hainan as it made its way to beijing, and in 2010, a german-chinese ‘friendship’ match took place at the shanghai world expo. e-sports is not a new term and in recent years it has garnered increasing attention from western games scholars (e.g. hunh, 2008; hutchins, 2008; jonasson and thiborg, 2010; lowood, n.d.; rambusch, jakobsson & pargman, 2007; taylor, forthcoming). broadly speaking, e-sports involves a number of different game genres including first person shooters, sports games, racing games, action games and real time strategy games. these games are played competitively, either one-on-one or in small teams. importantly, games usually gain acceptance as ‘e-sports’ once they have been selected for official inclusion in an international e-sports competition such as the world cyber games or (wcg) (hutchins, 2008). but in china, i quickly perceived that dianzi jingji, aside from being promoted as a professional competitive sport in its own right, was also being positioned as an alternative to wangluo games. this constructed dichotomy between healthy dianzi jingji and harmful wangluo youxi was made most clear when i attended a government-sponsored e-sports competition in the spring of 2010. at the esports champion league (ecl) tournament held in beijing, an official opened the competition and declared in his speech that, “dianzi jingji is a sport, it must be strictly separated from wangluo games.” at this same event, i was interviewed for cameras about my views on the industry. prior to the interview a young ecl employee rehearsed a few questions with me. he asked me about my research and i noted that i had observed many young people playing both wangluo games and dianzi jingji in the wangba ( internet cafés). when i mentioned the terms wangluo and wangba it was as though an alarm had sounded. the young man took me aside and carefully coached me to avoid any mention of wangluo games or wangba when speaking in front of the cameras. 10 these kinds of examples abound, so much so that it is difficult to find examples of official rhetoric where dianzi jingji is not positioned in contrast to wangluo youxi. in an article published by the global times, zhao li, who works for the center of sports administration in china, expounded upon the difference between the two: e-sports is very different from online gaming, but people always tend to see them as the same thing. the great competitiveness which requires sophisticated strategies and quick reactions within a certain period of time makes e-sports worth watching just like other sports events, but online gaming is only self-indulgent and time consuming. interestingly, while the students i spoke to differentiated between danji games and wangluo games, the officials made a point of separating dianzi jingji from wangluo games. and when pressed for elaboration, almost all of the danji gamers i spoke to made the same leap. for example, tongji university student yuanqi, after differentiating between danji games and wangluo games, went one step further: this game is a world cyber games competition game, many people mistake it for an internet game, but strictly speaking this game should not be considered an internet game, it should be an e-sports real time strategy game, it is just like the olympic competition. what makes the wangluo game so bad? in general, gamers described the difference between danji and wangluo games as hinging upon three main points: investment of time/money, skill, and individual competition versus groop cooperation. not surprisingly, the use of the internet and multi-player capability were not considered important or distinguishing criteria. to begin, many of the danji gamers considered wangluo games to be a waste of time and money, a black hole of temptation for ‘internet addicts’ who had no self-control. many mmorpg games such as world of warcraft charge an hourly rate of 4 mao (40 cents) an hour. other wangluo games were ‘free to play’ but required one to purchase items in the game in order to achieve any sort of success. some of the ‘free-to-play’ games were purportedly so bad that money completely trumped skill. in other words, a relative newbie could win a pk against a 11 longtime player if he or she was willing to invest enough money in virtual equipment 6 the gamers also differentiated between dianzi jingji which was all about skilled individual competition and wangluo youxi which promoted relatively unskilled ‘group . alternatively, those with money could purchase a pre-leveled avatar so as to skip the less exciting and more time-consuming work of playing through the different levels. rather than working their way up, these gamers began at the top. this has led many wangluo gamers to complain about those renminbi wanjia or rmb gamers, who only win by spending rmb (chinese currency) in the game. unlike these wangluo games, danji games were relatively inexpensive to play. in fact, for most chinese gamers, who play with pirated copies of the game, they were entirely free. what is more, in games such as warcraft iii and counterstrike, there were no virtual items to be bought. every gamer started on a level playing field and had to build up his/her strength throughout the game. connected to the issue of money is the issue of time investment. those mmorpg gamers that could not afford to buy a pre-leveled avatar or expensive virtual items had to invest a great deal of time into the practice of ‘leveling-up’. and, even once the highest level was achieved, the wangluo game did not end. this ‘never-ending game’ scenario is one of the features of mmorpgs most commonly associated with internet addiction (see, for example, lee, yu & lin, 2007 and shaw, why world of warcraft). by contrast, tongji students xiaomei, yuanqi and wanghui explained that the structure of real time strategy games keeps gamers from being ‘addicted’ because games have a concrete end point. where fantasy role-playing games such as world of warcraft go on forever, the average rts game comes to a conclusion in under 30 minutes. of course, there is nothing to stop rts gamers from playing multiple games in one sitting, a kind of ‘change smoking’ style of play. indeed, i observed many such danji gamers do this very thing. as the links between the ‘never-ending’ game and discussions of internet addiction suggest, the issue with wangluo games and those who played them came down to one of selfcontrol. the first time i spoke with xiaomei, she told me that she, yuanqi and wanghui had recently quit playing the danji game warcraft iii in order to study for graduate entrance exams. the notion that games, whether they be danji or wangluo, took a back seat to ‘real life’ was an important one for many of the students i spoke with and they used this as one of the criteria by which they separated themselves from game wangluo game ‘addicts’. 6 pk or ‘player kill’ refers to an instance in which one player’s avatar kills another player’s avatar. often, gamers will challenge each other to battles to prove whose avatar is stronger. 12 cooperation’. when the danji gamers spent hours playing warcraft or counterstrike, they perceived this as being acceptable, because, from their perspective they were using strategy and skill. indeed, much like chess, danji gamers would often watch replays of professional dianzi jingji matches in order to study the strategies used by professional players. at night when chatting over the instant messaging service qq, yuanqi and wanghui would occasionally share links to replay videos so that they could ‘study’ the strategies. what is more, following matches, yuanqi, wanghui and xiaomei often had discussions where they would analyze the different moves made in the game. in some cases, these kinds of study skills extended to other kinds of game play. wanghui took the study of games seriously. xiaomei and yuanqi joked that wanghui had once stayed up all night to chart out the best possible times to harvest vegetables in the game farmville, an online social networking game where gamers cultivated a farm and could steal vegetables from other farms. and, when i had the opportunity to introduce wanghui to a professional dianzi jingji gamer, i was not incredibly surprised to learn that he had prepared a list of targeted questions for the pro. though wanghui himself noted that he did not aspire to become a professional dianzi jingji athlete, he did aspire to success in general, and the pro gamer was an example of an individual who was highly successful not only in the game, but also in real life. by contrast, wangluo games were portrayed as requiring little skill. danji gamers would allow that wangluo games did have a certain learning curve, but they would argue that once a basic skill set was acquired no further strategy or study was needed. what is more, while danji gamers were all about competition against their peers, wangluo games were about cooperation with groups (guilds) to defeat the computer. when combined with the fantasy ‘role-playing’ component, all of these factors contributed to danji gamer’s characterization of wangluo games as nothing more than immersive escapist fantasies for people who were dissatisfied with real life and could only achieve of sense of ‘satisfaction’ or ‘success’ in a relatively unchallenging game. to these students, wangluo games were a quick fix, an addictive drug, while danji games were all about skill and competition, about sports. between patriotic professionalism and patriotic leisure the distinction between addict and athlete masks an age-old issue concerning the relation between leisure culture and responsible citizenship. in his recent publication, leisure scholar chris rojek (2010) critiques the conflation of ‘freedom’ and ‘leisure’, noting that we are 13 never really ‘free’ to do what we like with our ‘free time’. in establishing his argument, he cites the influential scholarship of e.p. thompson, marxist historian and theorist of the british working class. thompson (1967) wrote of the manner in which the rise of industrial society brought with it the ‘problem of leisure’ and how ‘free’ time should be spent. rojek summarizes thompson’s argument, noting that, in the context of the industrial capitalist system, workers could: spend their free time in whatever fashion they selected, so long as their non-work activities reinforce their competence as credible consumers and reliable workers… this is a very strange idea of ‘freedom’ and comes with an even more peculiar idea of what ‘leisure’ means. in effect, ‘free’ choice and non work activity is held to be inter-laced with principles of fitness-to-work and responsible citizenship (p. 2). to summarize, acceptable ‘leisure’ is the kind which reinforces one’s standing as an ‘ideal citizen’ where unacceptable leisure interferes with ‘real life’ or at least what respectable society considers to be real life’s ‘priorities’, i.e., becoming a productive citizen. but presumably the definition of ‘responsible citizenship’ varies depending on factors related to culture and political system. to that end, we might say that the chinese notion of the responsible citizen revolves around the cultivation of what the ccp calls suzhi (quality) and shehui zhuyi jingshen wenming (socialist spiritual civilization). numerous scholars trace the rise of suzhi discourse to survey findings in the late 1980s that blamed the poverty of rural areas on the low suzhi of the population. and, as explained by ann anagnost (1997), aside from revealing chinese insecurities about appearing ‘modern’ and ‘western’ in the eyes of the global community, the slogan “socialist spiritual civilization” has also been widely used to encourage certain social and cultural activities while stigmatizing others. though the discourse surrounding suzhi and and spiritual civilization emerged in 1980s, the emphasis on cultivating the ideal citizen is not new. as noted by lucy xing lu (2004), despite political and ideological changes, a focus on individual morality persisted from confucian times through the maoist era and on. lu states, “confucius and mao seemed to find agreement in the notion that a perfect society requires the perfection of its people” (p. 47). of course, over time, there have been noticeable shifts in what defines the morally upstanding, civilized and/or ‘high quality’ citizen. during the cultural revolution, for example, the confucian notion of the moral ‘gentleman’ was replaced by the notion of the ‘model worker’, exemplified by the martyr lei feng. lei feng became a martyr because he was willing to 14 sacrifice all, even his life, for the good of the nation. lisa hoffman (2010) notes that “the acquisition of skills in the maoist era was ‘for the improved performance of the organization or the fulfillment of political objectives of the central or local party leaders…(p. 88). the question becomes, what kind of attributes are necessary to become a high ‘quality’ and ‘spiritually civilized’ citizen in the context of the contemporary chinese state? hoffman (2010) describes how the notion of the ‘model worker’ has, in the post-mao years, been replaced by the concept of the ‘patriotic professional’. hoffman, rather than suggesting that either a neoliberal or socialist ethos prevails in china, shows the complex ways in which these different orientations combine under the umbrella of the ‘post-socialist’ chinese state. in comparison to the maoist era, in which individual interest was sacrificed for the interest of the state and all skill-building was couched in collective terms under the guise of improving the nation, in contemporary china there is an increasing emphasis placed upon the development and training of the individual, both for oneself and the nation. hoffman notes: the notion of developing and training the self through work was not alien to china’s socialist path, but the kind of self-development, career advancement, and family prosperity sought by the young and aspiring professionals i met was distinctly different from that of the maoist era… similar to—although not the same as—prevailing rationalities in u.s. and british neoliberal regimes that encouraged people to ‘enterprise themselves’, these reforms governed in a more distanced way, requiring the formation of subjects who were both autonomous and responsible (p. 89). simply put, the emphasis has shifted from centrally directed ‘self-sacrifice’ for the nation, to autonomously choosing ‘self-development’ for the nation. at the same time, hoffman explains that the chinese state has taken an active role in ‘conditioning autonomy’, shaping the choices, goals and ideals of the young generation through campaigns that promote a ‘harmonious society’ or ‘socialist spiritual civilization’. this results in a generation of young people who simultaneously speak the language of individual choice and act in the interest of the nation, a fusion of both neoliberal and socialist ideologies. as the above discussion of healthy dianzi jingji and unhealthy wangluo youxi illustrates, the ethos of the skill-building ‘patriotic professional’ extends to leisure culture. indeed, in its efforts to condition autonomy, the government has also paid close attention to its citizens’ leisure choices. in urban areas, state-mandated ‘civilization’ projects aim to craft a carefully 15 controlled ‘leisure culture’. wang (2001) stresses that in the construction of the “civilized subject” the “significance of leisure culture campaigns in beijing cannot be overstated” (p. 40). the 1996 campaigns to which wang referred promoted certain respectable leisure activities such as visiting museums, going to the movies, using a computer and learning english. and, in anticipation of the 2008 olympics, the government created a list of ‘dos and don’ts’ to demonstrate civilized behavior such as standing in line and not spitting (poleg, 2008). we may now extend this concept of leisure culture to the realm of digital games, noting the manner in which the distinctions between wangluo youxi and dianzi jingji provide a roadmap for the “do and don’ts” of civilized gaming. as my ethnographic data suggests, the kind of language employed by hoffman’s young urban professionals in dalian was also used by many of the college students who played danji games or dianzijingji. where hoffman’s interlocutors spoke of the desire to find jobs that would “fahui nengli” or allow their “abilities to flourish” and “duanlian ziji” or “get good experience,” gamers such as yuanqi and xiaomei talked of using games to “kaifa ziji de danao”or “engage my brain” and “xuexi” “study.” a similar trend was noted by lindtner (lindtner, et. al, 2009; lindtner & szablewicz, 2011) who followed a group of young urban professionals that joined killer game clubs in order to network with peers of similar suzhi (quality); they justified their leisure activities by pointing out their productive and self-developmental aspects. fuzzy boundaries the major problem with the diametric opposition of wangluo games and dianzi jingji is this: increasingly, these genres are blurring. on local level, it is often only a matter of preference that separates ‘e-sports’ from online games. experientially, the stories of those who play internet games and those who play e-sports blend in a number of ways. as i noted at the outset, in the internet cafés online games and e-sports are played side-by-side, and many gamers play both. the professional e-sports players that i spoke with discussed the origins of their esports career, almost all of them noting that they began by playing in the internet cafés. this helps to explain why e-sports competitions have been sponsored by online game companies and chains of internet cafés, this despite the fact that i was told not to mention online games or internet cafes in my interview. and, despite efforts to separate healthy ‘e-sports’ from unhealthy online games, they are often confused. while the media published numerous stories of parental opposition to wangluo gaming, there are also numerous examples of parents who oppose dianzi jingji. the professional 16 dianzi jingji gamers i spoke with noted that when they were young there parents tried to stop them from playing. it was only by defying their parents’ wishes that they became professionals at all. similarly, an online movie entitled king of sports portrays a young man’s rocky road to esports success. along the way he has to face a disapproving father and sister, both of whom hope to stop him from competing so that he can pursue a more respected profession such as medicine. and, when speaking with the people who worked the grounds of the beijing stadium where the government hosted the ecl tournament, few of them could tell the difference between e-sports and internet games, believing that both were bad for children. this confusion extends to the media. for example, when the shanghai zhonghua vocational school announced plans to offer a dianzi jingji elective in march of 2010, the media was quick to report on the development, but much to the frustration of the school principal and students leading the class the reports confused warcraft iii with world of warcraft. for example, one web headline proclaimed “a new experiment: a shanghai vocational school initiates a world of warcraft elective.” perhaps most telling of all, government regulations, while paying lip service to the development of e-sports, have also stood in the way of the continued development of the industry. in april 2004, the state administration of radio film and television (hereafter sarft) released the circular regarding the prohibition on broadcasting television programs about online games. arguing that such programs “adversely affect the healthy development of minors” the administration ordered that all shows about online games be removed from the air. included in this ban was the popular cctv 5 television show electronic sports world which had been broadcast nationwide since 2003, the same year that the government proclaimed esports to be the country’s 99th national sport. despite protests from the shows’ creators, who argued that ‘e-sports’ was not an ‘internet game’ and therefore not subject to the ban, the show went off the air in june 2004. finally, even professional dianzi jinji athletes acknowledged the fact that wangluo games and dianzi jingji are bleeding together. one professional warcraft iii player had this to say about the matter: even we ourselves sometimes mix the two together, for example today many internet games, like world of warcraft, also have a competition arena, they also have pk, they have a highly competitive nature, and today many dianzi jingji, such as starcraft2, require you to play through blizzard’s online battle site, although it 17 maintains its high level competitive nature, there are also characteristics of it that are becoming more and more like a wangluo game, so in the future, i feel that many dianzi jingji games will be wangluo games, and some wangluo games will also be considered dianzi jingji. i think we may see this kind of trend. conclusion these ‘fuzzy boundaries’ should make us wary of drawing too many conclusions about the connections between dianzi jingji, wangluo youxi and neoliberalism. lest we get ahead of ourselves in thinking that young chinese students’ online leisure activities are now guided by a neoliberal ethos of skilling-building and individual competition in the interest of the nation, a few words of caution are in order. the critiques of neoliberalism offered by kipnis (2007) and steinmüller (2011) offer useful and, in the later case, particularly parallel insight. steinmüller conducted an ethnography of gambling in rural china, noting the temptation to cast it as either a consequence or form of resistance to neoliberalism. but he warned that, “by positing a social whole instead, the trope of ‘neoliberalism’ masks more than it reveals” (p. 266). instead, steimüller investigated claims that gambling was a form of ‘social heat’ or renao. indeed, renao is a word that has also been used by gamers to describe the social atmosphere of the internet café. steinmüller goes on to state that renao: is characterized by a certain ambiguity: while expected and necessary sometimes, it can also turn into deplored anti-social indulgence. … i have traced the boundaries of acceptable forms of ‘entertainment’ (wan) against that which should be condemned as ‘gambling’ (du), both in local sociality and vis-à-vis the local state. here, steimüller’s distinction between harmless “wan” and unhealthy “du” cannot but bring to mind the distinction, both in local and state discourse, between healthy dianzi jingji and addictive wangluo youxi. in conclusion, there is no doubt that students who played danji youxi or dianzi jingji spoke what appears to be the language of ‘patriotic leisure’, stressing skill-building, individual competition and self control that are hallmarks of the neoliberal ethos while also supporting the government and media position that dianzi jingji was healthy while wangluo youxi were unhealthy. but the motivations for portraying the games they played in this light may, in fact, be less about an actual desire to make their leisure ‘productive’ than it is about finding a way around totalizing discourses such as those of internet addiction. as the gamers’ stories of spending time in internet cafés with friends reveals, at their core, danji games were also about 18 social networking with friends. indeed, in the cafés, danji and wangluo games were often played side by side, and many of the danij gamers i spoke with admitted to playing wangluo games as well. yet danji gamers went to great lengths to downplay these similarities and crossovers. where scholars might use the english term ‘online game’ to group the different genres of games played by both the danji and wangluo gamers, the young students i spoke to were intent on keeping them separate. this is most likely because they still faced opposition from their parents and society at large, who tended to lump all manner of games together and saw, rather than any of gaming’s redeeming qualities, only a path to addiction. it is, therefore, no surprise that the gamers most willing to acknowledge the similarities and crossovers between wangluo and dianzi jingji were the professional gamers, who, for the most part, had already overcome the stigma of addiction by entering the realm of the celebrity ‘athlete’. acknowledgments i would like to thank those who participated in my field research and taught me about the culture of danji games, wangluo games and dianzi jingji. this fieldwork would also not have been possible with out the support of the fulbright foundation and the national science foundation award # 0921216. any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the fulbright program or the national science foundation. references adams, e., & rollings, a. (2010). fundamentals of game design [second edition]. berkeley, ca: pearson education. anagnost, a. (1997). national past-times: narrative, representation, and power in modern china. durham, nc: duke university press. clarke, a. (2005). situational analysis: grounded theory after the postmodern turn. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. danji youxi (单机游戏) baidu baike. retrieved from http://baike.baidu.com/view/2767.htm 19 haraway, d. j. (1991). situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. in simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature (pp.183202). new york: routledge.. hoffman, l.m. (2010). patriotic professionalism in urban china: fostering talent. philadelphia, pa: temple university press. hunh, j. (2008). culture and business of pc bangs in korea. games and culture, 3(1), 26-37. hutchins, b. (2008). signs of meta-change in second modernity: the growth of e-sport and the world cyber games. new media & society, 10(6), 851-869. ito, m. (2009). engineering play: a cultural history of children’s software. cambridge, ma: mit press. jonasson, k. & thiborg, j. (2010). electronic sport and its impact on future sport. sport in society, 13(2), 287-299. kipnis, a. (2007). “neoliberalism reified: suzhi discourse and tropes of neoliberalism in the people’s republic of china” journal of the royal anthropological institute, 13, 383-400. lee, i., yu, c., & lin, h. (2007). leaving a never-ending game: quitting mmorpgs and online gaming addiction. situated play, proceedings of digra 2007 conference. retrieved from http://www.digra.org/dl/db/07312.54479.pdf lindtner, s., mainwaring, s., dourish, p., & wang, y. (2009). situating productive play: online gaming practices and guanxi in china. human-computer interaction– interact 2009, p. 328341. lindtner, s., & szablewicz, m. (2011). china’s many internets: participation and digital game play across a changing technology landscape. in david kurt herold & peter marolt, (eds). online society in china: creating, celebrating and instrumentalizing the online carnival (pp. 89-105) . new york, ny: routledge. lowood, h., (n.d.). "beyond the game”: the olympic ideal and competitive e-sports. unpublished manuscript. 20 lu, x. (2004). rhetoric of the chinese cultural revolution. columbia, sc: university of south carolina press. poleg, d. (2007). beijing 2008: china’s ten commandments for a civilized olympics. danwei. retrieved from: http://www.danwei.org/2008_beijing_olympic_games/beijing_2008_chinas_ten_comman.php rambusch, j., jakobsson, p., & pargman, d. (2007). exploring e-sports: a case study of gameplay in counter-strike. situated play, proceedings of digra 2007 conference. retrieved from http://digra.org:8080/plone/dl/db/07313.16293.pdf rojek, c. (2010). the labour of leisure: the culture of free time. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. salen, k., & zimmerman, e. (2004). the rules of play: game design fundamentals. cambridge, ma: mit press. shaw, a. (n.d.) why world of warcraft is the most addictive videogame. retrieved from: http://www.aspenacademy.com/warcraft.html shen, w. (2011). “geeks seek recognition for e-sports” global times. retrieved from: http://special.globaltimes.cn/2011-04/640307.html steinmüller, h. (2011). the moving boundaries social heat: gambling in rural china. journal of the royal anthropological institute, 17, 263-280. szablewicz, m. (2004). a space to be your virtual self: an introduction to the world of internet gaming in the urban chinese wangba. (unpublished master’s thesis). duke university, durham, north carolina. retrieved from: http://www.duke.edu/apsi/pdf/marcyszablewicz.pdf szablewicz, m. (2010). the ill effects of “opium for the spirit”: a critical cultural analysis of china’s internet addiction moral panic. chinese journal of communication, 3(4), 453-470. taylor, t.l. (2006). play between worlds: exploring online game culture. cambridge, ma: the mit press. taylor, t.l. (forthcoming). raising the stakes: e-sports and the professionalization of computer gaming. cambridge: the mit press. 21 thompson, e.p. (1967). time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism. past & present, 38, 56-97. wang, j. (2001). culture as leisure and culture as capital. positions: east asia cultural critique, 9(1), 69–104. microsoft word hanchard.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): hanchard, s. (2014, october 22-24). race and religion in everyday information seeking on social media in malaysia. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. race and religion in everyday informaiton seeking on social media in malaysia sandra hanchard swinburne university of technology abstract this paper investigates the range of social networks that malaysian users value on social media for information seeking in everyday contexts. it specifically examines whether malaysian users demonstrate preferences towards connections of shared race or religion on social media. results from an online questionnaire of 400 malaysian users, including bahasa malay, chinese, indian and english speakers demonstrates that social media in general helps users increase their connectedness, both online and offline, with different types of social networks. malaysian users do not preference ties of shared race or religion over other types of social networks in how they value information for usefulness and trust on social media in everyday contexts. this is an encouraging sign for the potential of social media to promote social cohesion in malaysia. keywords social media, everyday life information seeking, ethnic polarisation, networked individualism, malaysia race and religion in everyday life in malaysia in malaysia, the constructs of race and religion pervade national media and political narratives (noor) prompting an investigation into how malaysians interact with other ethnic groups in daily life on social media. the notion of a ‘two-social’ reality (shamsul 1996) can be used to explain why everyday information practices between ethnic groups, should not be assumed to be determined by macro frameworks that arguably contribute to ethnic polarisation, such as the new economic policy (jomo 2004). the government ‘1malaysia’ program is an attempt at ethnic unification, yet historical divisiveness between the major ethnic groups malay, chinese, and indian persists in political and media ownership affiliations. social media arguably plays a disruptive role in an information environment where traditional media is both tightly controlled by the government and ethnically polarised, by allowing users to access information directly across social networks. social networks and everyday information seeking social media is a utility for everyday information seeking and sharing across social networks. everyday information seeking is a way for people to bring order to their everyday lives and solve problems (savolainen 1995). the curation of sources based on meaningful social networks to serve everyday information seeking needs is a compelling affordance of social media. it is important first to compare what social networks mean in south east asian versus western contexts. networked individualism emphasises that ‘people function more as connected individuals and less as embedded group members’ (rainie & wellman 2012, p.12). however, in collectivist cultures such as malaysia (postill 2011) traditional social networks still have a role in supporting the individual in everyday life. cultural values and local contexts shape daily practices, including everyday information seeking on social media. approach and methods i examine how malaysian users value types of social networks for everyday information. my results are based on an online questionnaire of 400 respondents, from a pool of 85,000 internet users representative of the malaysian online population in 2012. the results here are part of a wider doctoral study. as the ethnic background of the respondents could not be collected, users were selected on a quota basis among major language-groups as a proxy, namely bahasa malay, chinese, indian and english speakers. language is arguably as a marker of ethnic identity (fishman 1989) although this is a topic of intense debate in sociolinguistic research. demographic variables (sampled across a broad cross-section) included gender, age, residence, language, education, income and occupation. the following questions are relevant to this paper: connectedness: has social media increased in general your everyday contact, online or offline, with any of the following? useful: do you get information on social media that is useful in your everyday life from any of the following? trust: do you get information on social media that you generally trust from any of the following? the social networks respondents could select from included (more than one could be chosen): • friends and / or family • work peers • school, college or university peers • acquaintances and / or strangers • people who share your religion • people who share you race / ethnicity • people who share your interests • other • none i adopt the language of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ ties (granovetter 1973) to illustrate how ties are prioritised for the information they provide. i use a simplified measure for tie strength based on increased contact frequency with ties, either online or offline, through their use of social media; which i term, ‘connectedness’ (compare more in-depth modelling by gilbert & karahalios 2009). further, i assess how malaysian users value these ties in terms of ‘usefulness’ and ‘trust’ of information, drawing on internet credibility research (flanagin & metzger 2007). findings and discussion social media, in general, helps malaysian users increase their connectedness, both online and offline, with different types of social networks (table 1). malaysian users do not preference ties of shared race or religion over other types of social networks in how they value information for usefulness and trust on social media in everyday contexts (table 2). friends and family are the preferred sources of information on social media, suggesting that strong ties remain important in a malaysian setting. for solving quotidian problems through information seeking on a domestic information and media utility (bakardjieva 2005) strong ties appear to provide the most value to users. more detailed findings showed that users who had higher employment and education advantages valued information from ties of greater social distance (‘peer’, ‘acquaintance/stranger’) which may enhance opportunities during job-seeking (kavanaugh et al. 2005). users without tertiary-education relied on religious connections, suggesting that traditional social networks still have a role for social support. while networked individualism might have limited applicability in a collectivist setting, a network society framework (castells 2010) is relevant in emphasising access to diverse social networks through icts, such as social media. i do not claim that that ethnic polarisation is devoid on social media, especially in times of heightened political awareness; information seeking and sharing could become more siloed along ethnic lines during civic events. yet based on my findings, malaysian social media users appear to rise above national constructs in how they value diverse social networks for everyday information, supporting the notion of a ‘two-social’ reality. references bakardjieva, m 2005, internet society: the internet in everyday life, sage publications, london, thousand oaks, new delhi. castells, m 2010, the rise of the network society, 2nd ed., with a new preface., chichester, malden, wiley-blackwell, west sussex, ma. fishman, ja 1989, language and ethnicity in minority sociolinguistic perspective, multilingual matters, ltd, clevedon, avon, england. flanagin, aj & metzger, mj 2007, ‘the role of site features, user attributes, and information verification behaviors on the perceived credibility of web-based information’, new media & society, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 319–342. gilbert, e & karahalios, k 2009, ‘predicting tie strength with social media’, boston, ma. granovetter, m 1973, ‘the strength of weak ties’, journal of american sociology, vol. 78, no. 6, pp. 1360–1380. jomo, ks 2004, the new economic policy and interethnic relations in malaysia, united nations research institute for social development. kavanaugh, a, reese, d, carroll, j & rosson, m 2005, ‘weak ties in networked communities’, the information society, vol. 21, pp. 119–131. postill, j 2011, localizing the internet, berghahn books, new york, oxford. rainie, h & wellman, b 2012, networked : the new social operating system, mit press, cambridge, mass. savolainen, r 1995, ‘everyday life information seeking: approaching information seeking in the context of “way of life”’, library & information science research, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 259–294. shamsul, a 1996, ‘debating about identity in malaysia: a discourse analysis’, southeast asian studies, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 566–600. ir16 (2015) abstract selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 digital bisexuality: the semiotics of online sexual identity nora madison chestnut hill college introduction this paper analyzes the practices of signifying ‘bisexuality’ across multiple online spaces. central to this paper is a discussion of the significance of the efforts to represent bisexuality within existing socio-political systems of representation for sexual orientation. cultural norms ideologically shape the intelligibility of representation; bisexuality is often misinterpreted when read within the dominant binaries of heterosexuality and homosexuality in western european culture. as stuart hall (1996) clearly articulates, “all identities are about questions of using the resources of history, language and culture in the process of becoming rather than being” (p. 4). this work addresses how users adapt visual, textual, and hyperlinked information in online spaces to signify bisexuality. i suggest these practices be understood as ‘technologies of visibility.’ technologies of visibility technologies of visibility are the practices of adapting the sociotechnical affordances of digital technologies to signify one’s bisexuality online. these practices include using symbols, images, text and hyperlinks to construct the message “bisexual.” this process is examined within a western european cultural framework where the visual cues of orientation are limited by the cultural norms of heterosexuality and monosexuality. while the presence of homosexuality may pose a threat to the cultural dominance of heterosexuality, it is notable that homosexual (or same-sex/same-gender) attraction does not threaten the hegemonic power of monosexuality, which continues to sustain the conventional binary in representing sexual orientation. marjo laukkanen (2007) comments “the most remarkable limitation of self-representation seems to be the binary understanding of sex, which is based on a user’s material body even online. even though a queer space like #closet enables a fluid understanding of gender and sexual orientation, binary sex is reproduced intensively” (p. 96). the cultural dominance of the binary has far reaching impacts on representations of bisexuality. online, the common practice of displaying photographs of oneself or with one’s partner(s) often fails to signify bisexuality to a viewer. bisexuals are often “read” as either straight or gay when alone or when posing with a romantic partner. interestingly, when non-bisexuals attempt to signify bisexuality the most frequently employed form of representation is the use of triads (three people in an image together) suggested citation (apa): madison, n. (2015, october 21-24) digital bisexuality: the semiotics of online sexual identity. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. to signify non-monosexuality. however, when bisexual-identified users attempt to signify bisexuality they employ a combination of signs specific to the bisexual socio-political history. these include using graphics of the bisexual pride flag or any variety of bisexual symbols such as the intertwined male/female symbols, using the bisexual pride colors (pink, purple, blue) as background colors for their personal or organizational site, using photographic images of bisexual characters in mass media or of ordinary people in clothing with bisexual slogans, and/or linking to bisexual specific content such as other websites, blogs, books, or music. methods this research project examined online social spaces created by and for bisexuals between november 2011 and december 2013. these social spaces included national and regional websites for bisexual organizations, blogs dedicated to bisexual issues and topics, bisexual groups on facebook, and bisexual list-serves. participant observation and semiotic analysis was employed to analyze how bisexual representation was discussed and performed. this project did not study individual identity or a singular ‘community’ but rather examined a series of practices in which bisexuality is negotiated and enacted through digital mediation. digital bisexuality digital mediation, a process of enacting forms of identitylike race, gender, and sexual orientationunderscores both the non-essentialism of identity as well as its hybridity and fluidity (nakumara, 2008). digital technologies certainly contribute to the complex and multidimensional processes that shape subjectivities. they can create or deny opportunities for the articulation of different types of subjects and subject positions. however, online participants struggle to imagine what bisexual visibility “looks like” and what would successfully signify bisexual to others. as one participant posted, “their [sic] is no style for bi, there is no voice tone, unless i'm wearing my shirt, how is anyone to know?” another participant post explicated, “i wish there was a look. i wish i could get up every day and put on the clothes and jewelry that identified me to the world when i stepped out of my apartment. i wish i was as visible on the street as i am on facebook.” this longing for a signified bisexual identity is often articulated as a desire for a market commodification of “bisexual” linked to notions of the neo-liberal subject; however, the participant also notes that while they do not feel visible on the street, they do feel notably more visible on facebook. the issue of (in)visibility is polymorphous as participants discuss the complexities of an identity that ‘appears’ more visible in online environments than it does elsewhere. as another participant posted: i feel i'm more out online that offline. that's because, in the offline world there's the whole ''social assumptions'' issue. my co-workers, friends, etc, know i have a boyfriend, wich [sic] equals ''straight'' for most ppl out there. so, i'll out myself when the occasion comes (talking abt smn i used to date, the lgbt youth group i used to belong to, or usually just abt some girl i find atractive) and usually ppl are not surprised. whereas online, my pic at facebook (and orkut) is a bisexual pride icon. i follow bi groups on twitter. i'm a member of bi groups. so, online it's spelled out, while offline ppl usually think me having a bf means i'm straight. conclusion these practices serve to signify bisexuality to the viewer as well as increase the recognition of bisexual representation within mainstream culture. the full paper and presentation will further elucidate these practices and their significance, drawing connections between this research and the work of new media scholars in digital representations (nakumara), performance of the self (papacharissi), and queer identities online (o’riordan & pullen). the internet, which was touted early on as a space of great potential for anonymity and exploration where visibility could be masked, here becomes the place where users try to make the perceived invisible ‘visible’ through digital mediation. participants discuss the complexities of an identity that appears more visible in online environments than it does offline. digital spaces provide particularly useful environments for participants to negotiate issues of (in)visibility through digital mediation as they employ technologies of visibility through daily posts, pics, videos, and discourse in which bisexuality as a subject position is discursively (re)produced, articulated, defended, and desired. references hall, s. (1996). introduction. in s. hall & p. dugay (eds.), questions of cultural identity. london: sage. laukkanen, m. (2007). young queers online: the limits and possibilities of nonheterosexual self-representation in online conversations. in k. o’riordan & d. pullen (eds.), queer online: media, technology & sexuality. new york: routledge. nakumara, l. (2008). digitizing race: visual cultures of the internet. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. papacharissi, z. (2012). without you, i’m nothing: performances of the self on twitter. international journal of communication. 6:1989–2006. pullen, c. & cooper, m. (eds.), lgbt identity and online new media. new york: routledge. microsoft word ir16-submission-final.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): osman, k. (2015, october 21-24). imagining access for all: the failed introduction of a new editing interface for wikipedia . paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. imagining access for all: the failed introduction of a new editing interface for wikipedia kim osman queensland university of technology wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia, is built on shared ideals and values about access to knowledge. however active participation in the platform is declining and new editors are decreasingly likely to be retained as committed volunteers to the vision of making “the sum of all knowledge” freely available (halfaker, geiger, morgan, & riedl, 2012; wikipedia, 2014). in response to this and issues around usability, the wikimedia foundation developed visualeditor – a “what you see is what you get” (wysiwyg) editor for wikipedia – to replace the existing wiki markup editor. visualeditor was rolled out as the default editing interface for all users on english wikipedia on july 1, 2013. it was turned off as the default interface on september 23, 2013. this research follows the events that lead to a sanctioned community hack disabling the default editor for english wikipedia users three months after its introduction to examine how editors in wikipedia enact shared values and ideals around knowledge and knowledge creation. through a qualitative thematic analysis of discussion on archived wikipedia talk pages, the paper reveals the tensions that exist in wikipedia between the ideals of an encyclopaedia anyone can edit and an encyclopaedia that everyone can edit. the paper maps the controversy regarding visualeditor and draws specifically on the idea of inventories (callon, lascoumes, & barthe, 2009) and boundaries (gieryn, 1983; star & griesemer, 1989) to identify actors and user groups in the debate. the discussion analysed ranged from december 2012 to august 2014 and includes both members of the user community and representatives from the wikimedia foundation. this discussion is contextualised by situating visualeditor’s introduction in a history of reactions to new user interfaces from engelbart’s “mother of all demos” in 1968, to blogger’s “pushbutton publishing for the people” (streeter, 2011; walker rettberg, 2014). mainstream media discourses are also considered in light of how wikipedia is constructed by those outside the editorial community. the analysis found the introduction of visualeditor was positioned by the media as “opening” up wikipedia to new contributors, and its demotion to opt-in beta status was positioned as a result of the editing community’s resistance to change. the analysis also finds “openness” is a contested concept in wikipedia and how it is contested problematises the concept of a singular collaborative wikipedian community that is often associated with conflated free and open ideals. indeed, users employ rhetoric associated with these open ideals to perform boundary work and establish different editing identities. tensions among these different users, and between the imagined editing community and the wikimedia foundation in relation to the introduction of visualeditor, underline how the usability of the encyclopaedia for its content creators is tied to assumptions about knowledge, and those who create – or should be creating – encyclopaedic knowledge. the research revealed that while the debates do play out as tropes about user ability and platform culture, it also highlighted the importance of keeping a handmade aesthetic style that is tied not only to the platform’s roots in the diy culture, but its future ability to remain open to contributions from anyone by appearing to be hackable and crafted. these debates about the wiki aesthetic style become more complex as visualeditor, an interface that is technically more closed, becomes important for the platform remaining open to a wider range of potential users. indeed some existing users viewed the change to a wysiwyg editor as diminishing the control and creativity afforded to users via the markup editor. and in preferencing one interface over another by making it the default, these users interpreted the default setting as preferencing one type of participation over another. this shift in power, affording new users more agency with the visualeditor as default clearly unsettled sections of the existing community who also view wiki markup, and the text editor as not only a method of quality control for contributions but as an object that holds a “community of professional editors together.” the editing interface in wikipedia is therefore integral not only to a sense of community for some users, but to who is able to join that community. “the architecture of cyberspace is power in this sense; how it could be different. politics is about how we decide. politics is how that power is exercised, and by whom” (lessig, 1999, p. 78). these decisions on the interface – and how they are decided – are important in light of the governance relationship between users and the wikimedia foundation, technical decisions on the platform, wikipedia’s significant gender gap (roughly 8590% of editors identify as men) and the popular perception of a systemic bias in the encyclopaedia. the analysis did however reveal another group of existing editors, one not often represented in media discourses and not agreeing with the sanctioned hack – those who sought to speak on behalf of the new users who very rarely have a voice in the governance spaces on wikipedia. these users undertake boundary work to differentiate themselves from other groups of existing editors. they advocated for an interface that increased accessibility, and pointed to the irony of experienced editors debating the future of a technology designed to increase access for new users. the failed introduction of visualeditor therefore demonstrates that any change to the default editing interface in wikipedia is not only a technical change to the site, it is also a profoundly cultural shift that reflects wider ideologies about accessibility and knowledge creation in an open project and embodies many of the anxieties felt around change in sociotechnical structures. references callon, m., lascoumes, p., & barthe, y. (2009). acting in an uncertain world. cambridge, massachusetts: the mit press. gieryn, t. f. (1983). boundary-work and the demarcation of science from nonscience: strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists. american sociological review, 48(6), 781. doi:10.2307/2095325 halfaker, a., geiger, r. s., morgan, j. t., & riedl, j. (2012). the rise and decline of an open collaboration system: how wikipedia’s reaction to popularity is causing its decline. american behavioral scientist, 57(5), 664–688. doi:10.1177/0002764212469365 lessig, l. (1999). code. new york: basic books. star, s. l., & griesemer, j. r. (1989). institutional ecology, `translations’ and boundary objects: amateurs and professionals in berkeley's museum of vertebrate zoology, 1907-39. social studies of science, 19(3), 387–420. doi:10.1177/030631289019003001 streeter, t. (2011). the net effect. new york: new york university press. walker rettberg, j. (2014). blogging (2nd ed.). cambridge, uk: polity press. wikipedia. (2014). wikipedia:ten things you may not know about wikipedia. retrieved february 17, 2014, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=wikipedia:ten_things_you_may_not_kno w_about_wikipedia&oldid=595432077 microsoft word 757-507-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 amazon is my hangout! self-disclosure and community building in amazon’s reviews federica fornaciari university of illinois at chicago department of communication, esp-igert fellow fforna3@uic.edu abstract this study investigates patterns of self-disclosure in amazon reviews measuring the level of sensitive information that users reveal. informed by goffman’s work on the “presentation of self in everyday life”, this study investigates sensitivity of information by using the software linguistic inquiry and word count (liwc). using a crawler we collected 3,485 reviews from amazon, for six products. sensitivity was measured through five main liwc categories that include the following: pronouns, social processes, affective processes, biological processes, and personal concerns. as a result, amazon reviewers in the sample collected disclosed significantly higher levels of sensitive information in these categories: family, humans, affect, positive emotions, negative emotions, sadness, cognitive mechanisms, concerns related to work, achievements, leisure and money. results seem to suggest that users experience amazon as a community built around people, whose participants often show their humanity, their offline social circles, their affective processes, their emotions, and their concerns. keywords amazon reviews; online community; self-disclosure; sensitive information; textual analysis. introduction and relevant research with the introduction of online platforms and the gained popularity of user-generated content, individuals increasingly share personal information online (jarvis, 2011; li & chen, 2010). doing so, they expose different layers of the self, sharing them with “imagined communities” (acquisti & gross, 2006). the information posted online has various degrees of sensitivity and reveals different nuances of one’s persona, contributing to refining one’s identity (fornaciari, 2012; mehdizadeh, 2010; mendelson & papacharissi, 2011; papacharissi, 2002). the current project explores whether and how individuals engage in self-disclosure when posting consumer reviews on amazon. doing so, it contributes to understanding the relationship between social practices and online platforms. it also furthers the comprehension of how presentation of self and participation are implemented in online retailing websites. sociality and presentation of self (goffman, 1959) are performed across multiple audiences. online platforms enhance such a networked sociability. for many, disclosing online has become key to enjoying the therapeutic benefits of social connection by fostering socialization, online community, and access to social capital (andrejevic, 2011; boyd, 2011; jarvis, 2011). as a consequence, the depth of disclosure is often positively correlated to the breadth of perceived opportunities for sociality, intimacy, community, social support, and customized information (boyd, 2006; debatin et al. 2009; ellison et al., 2011a; ellison et al., 2011b; johnson et al., 2011; kramer & haferkamp, 2011; livingstone, 2008; manen, 2010; walther, 2011). in addition, research reveals that self-disclosure is positively correlated to sense of belonging in a community, desire for reciprocity, and trust; whereas it is inversely correlated to perceived privacy risks (porter & donthu, 2008; posey et al., 2010). in sum, the process of disclosure entails an ongoing negotiation to attempt balancing privacy and publicity, thereby achieving desired levels of sociality (altman, 1977). the current research project investigates the patterns of self-disclosure on amazon reviews addressing the following questions: rq1 – is there an observed relationship between the disclosure of sensitive information and the use of a real name? rq2 – is there an observed relationship between the disclosure of sensitive information and the disclosure of one’s location? selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 rq3 – is there a relationship between type of reviewer and sensitivity of information disclosed? method the data collection that was operated through a crawler launched in amazon.com website in november 25th, 2012. the process generated 3,485 .txt files of reviews for six products (baby product, anti-aging, fragrance, electronic, sex-related, and weight loss). each file included: text of review, length of review, location, and number of reviews posted. it also included the following amazon’s badges: real name, top reviewer, hall of fame reviewer, vine voice, verified purchase. the reviews were processed through the software liwc (linguistic inquiry and word count) (tausczik & pennebaker, 2010) to measure multiple variables used as indicators of sensitive information. in particular the current study considered the “level of sensitivity” of information as a multidimensional variable. liwc allowed measuring the percentage of words belonging in each of the following categories: use of pronouns (self or other-directed); social processes (social, family, friend, humans); affective processes (swear, affect, positive emotion, negative emotion, anxiety, anger, sadness, cognitive mechanisms); biological processes (biological, health, sexual); and personal concerns (work, achievements, leisure, home, money, religion, death). data processed through liwc were further analyzed using descriptive statistics, discriminant analysis, and anova. finally, the levels of sensitive information disclosed on amazon were compared to the average levels of sensitivity of information disclosed (pennebaker et al., 2007). discussion and conclusion amazon reviewers in the sample collected, compared to pennebaker and colleagues (2007), revealed higher levels of sensitive information in a number of categories. these included: family, humans, affect, positive emotions, negative emotions, sadness, cognitive mechanisms, concerns related to work, achievements, leisure and money. amazon is understood as a venue built around people, whose participants often show their humanity, their offline social circles, their affective processes, their emotions, and their concerns. previous research on online platforms for user-generated content suggests that users post information to foster their status and gain popularity within a community and to increase self-esteem through social comparison (harper et al., 2007) also, research reveals that people adapt their behavior to the perceived social norms of a community. thus, for example, users who read sensitive content in existing reviews may be more willing to disclose personal information as well (frey & meier, 2004). these are possible explanations of why amazon users engage in detailed self-disclosure. in addition, research on social capital shows that sharing information is often a necessary step to access social capital and foster participation (boyd & ellison, 2008). consistent with the findings of research addressing participation in snss (e.g. acquisti & gross, 2006), the current study reveals that amazon reviewers often behave as active members of a community. it is possible that sense of belonging and participation positively influence users’ trust and encourage them to perceive disclosure as a vehicle to develop their identity. in addition, increased disclosure may be motivated by increased familiarity with the amazon community. research, in fact, suggests that familiarity with social media enhances trust, encourages disclosure, and decreases the perception of privacy risks (fogel & nehmad, 2009). combining the current findings with existing literature on self-disclosure, one may hypothesize that disclosure on amazon is also motivated by desire of building community, developed trust, and sense of belonging. in fact, individuals who disclose their identity on amazon (real name and/or location) tend to disclose significantly more information that reveals their social processes, shows their sadness, discusses biological and health processes and tackles concerns related to personal achievements. also, data analyzed in the current study emphasized that “normal reviewers” (as opposed to professional reviewers) consistently tend to share higher levels of sensitive information thus increasing the personal participation in the amazon community. another way to gauge the level of participation in the amazon community was through the number of reviews posted by a reviewer. self-disclosure tended to increase for frequent (yet non-professional) reviewers who actively post reviews for the products they purchase, and have a sense of belonging in the amazon community. with some exceptions, the level of selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 sensitive information disclosed tends to progressively decrease very active reviewers and professional reviewers. this suggests that reviewers that post between 11 and 50 reviews are those who perceived themselves as elements of a community, who want to share their insights and contribute to the overall satisfactions of the other members and, perhaps, seek social support by disclosing concerns. sense of belonging may be the discriminant element that encourages individuals to value participation and seek social capital as a benefit that outweighs the risks of privacy loss. admittedly, findings were limited by the fact that our sample included few reviewers belonging in the categories top, hall of fame and vine voice. to address such a limitation, a future study could be conducted from a user’s centered perspective (using the reviewer as unit of analysis) and collect reviews based on the use of badges. a comparison of equally sized groups of reviewers would allow a better assessment of these findings. another limitation is that the motivations for sharing information in amazon were inferred from existing literature. future research could implement a survey or a set of interviews to directly and empirically test the hypotheses that emerged. acknowledgments this material is based upon work supported by the national science foundation under grant no. dge-1069311. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 references acquisti, a. & gross, r. (2006). imagined communities: awareness, information sharing, and privacy on the facebook. in p. golle & g. danezis (eds.). proceedings of 6th workshop on privacy enhancing technologies. cambridge, u.k.: robinson college. altman, i. (1977). privacy regulation: culturally universal or culturally specific? journal of social issues, 33(3), 66-84. andrejevic, m. (2011). social network exploitation. in papacharissi, z. (ed.) a networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites. new york : routledge. boyd, d. (2006). friends, friendster, and top 8: writing community into being on social networking sites. first monday, 11(12). boyd, d. (2011). social network sites as networked publics affordances, dynamics, and implications. in papacharissi, z. (ed.) a networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites. new york : routledge. boyd, d. & ellison, n. (2008). social network sites: definition, history, and scholarship. journal of computermediated communication, 13, 210-230. debatin, b., lovejoy, j. p., horn, a-m., & hughes, b. e. (2009). facebook and online privacy: attitudes, behaviors, and unintended consequences. jounral of computer-mediated communication, 15, 83-108. ellison, n. b., lampe, c., steinfield, c., & vitak, j. (2011a). with a little help from my friends. how social network sites affect social capital processes. in papacharissi, z. (ed.) a networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites. new york : routledge. ellison, n. b., vitak, j., steinfield, c., gray, r., & lampe, c. (2011b). negotiating privacy concerns and social capital needs in a social media environment. in s. trepte and l. reinecke (eds.), privacy online, berlin: heidelberg. fogel, j., & nehmad, e. (2009). internet social network communities: risk taking, trust, and privacy concerns. computers in human behavior, 25, 153-160. fornaciari, f. (2012). the language of technoself: storytelling, symbolic interactionism, and online identity. in r. luppicini (ed.), handbook of research on technoself: identity in a technological society. igi global. frey, b., meier, s.(2004). social comparisons and pro-social behavior. testing conditional cooperation in a field experiment. american economic review 94(5). goffman, e. (1959). the presentation of self in everyday life. garden city, ny: doubleday. harper, f. m., li, s. x., chen, y., & konstan, j. a. (2007). social comparisons to motivate contributions to an online community. persuasive technology, pp. 148–159. jarvis, j. (2011). public parts. how sharing in the digital age improves the way we work and live. new york: simon & schuster. johnson, t. j., zhang, w., bichard, z. l., & seltzer, t. (2011). united we stand? online social network sites and civic engagement. in papacharissi, z. (ed.) a networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites. new york : routledge. kramer, n. c., & haferkamp, n. (2011). online self-presentation: balancing privacy concerns and impression construction on social networking sites. in reinecke, l. & trepte, s. (eds.). privacy online. perspectives on privacy and self-disclosure in the social web. new york: springer. li, n., & chen, g. (2010). sharing location in online social networks. ieee network. manen, m. (2010). the pedagogy of momus technologies: facebook, privacy, and online intimacy. qualitative health research, 20(8), 1023-1032. mehdizadeh, s. (2010). self-presentation 2.0: narcissism and self-esteem on facebook. cyberpsychology. behavior and social networking, 13(4), 357–364. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 mendelson, a. l. & papacharissi, z. (2011). look at us collective narcissism in college student facebook photo galleries. in papacharissi, z. (ed.) a networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites. new york : routledge. papacharissi, z. (2002). the presentation of self in virtual life: characteristics of personal home pages. j&mc quarterly, 79(3), 643–660. papacharissi, z. (ed.) (2011). a networked self. identity, community, and culture on social network sites. new york : routledge. pennebaker, j. w., booth, r. j. & francis, m. e. (2007) operator’s manual. linguistic inquiry and word count: liwc2007. porter, c. e., & donthu, n. (2008) cultivating trust and harvesting value in virtual communities. management science 54(1), 113–128. posey, c., lowry, p. b., roberts, t. l., & ellis, t. s. (2010). proposing the online community self-disclosure model: the case of working professionals in france and the uk who use online communities. european journal of information systems, 19(2), 181–195. tausczik, y. r., & pennebaker, j. w. (2010). the psychological meaning of words: liwc and computerized text analysis methods. journal of language and social psychology, 29(1), 24–54. walther, j. b., carr, c. t., seung, s., choi, w. deandrea, d. c., jinsuk k., tong, t., & van der heide, b. (2011). interaction of interpersonal, peer, and media influence sources online. in papacharissi, z. (ed.) a networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites. new york : routledge. microsoft word driscoll-beyond big bird-beyond big bird.doc selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 beyond big bird: the role of humor in the aggregate interpretation of live-tweeted events driscoll, kevin microsoft research new england leavitt, alex annenberg school for communication, university of southern california guth, kristen annenberg school for communication, university of southern california bar, françois annenberg school for communication, university of southern california how do emergent discourses impact the interpretation of large social media events? a wide body of literature and prototypes in both academia and industry has attempted to aggregate and summarize valences, sentiment, and other linguistic and contextual factors from social media data, though few have taken into account the wide-ranging emergent behaviors of individuals and groups. debates about the value of measuring opinion through this medium have challenged the interpretation of such techniques to summarize a vast array of contributions (sifry, 2012; metaxas et al., 2011; gayo-avello, 2011). this paper contributes to this debate through a multi-faceted analysis of tweets posted during each of the three 2012 presidential debates. some studies have documented the practice of live-tweeting during televised media events (bruns & burgess, 2011; mcpherson et al., 2012; shamma, kennedy, & churchill, 2010; schirra, sun, & bentley 2014). we focus on retweeting and livetweeting practices, in particular as they relate to humor, as we suspect prevalent sentiment analysis approaches may overemphasize their importance in political discourse. we examine practices such as the use of humor and sarcasm (mejova, srinivasan, & boynton, 2013), building from and extending our prior work in this area (aoir 12 citation). during each 2012 presidential debate, we collected tweets matching an evolving set of 427 debate-related keyword rules using the commercial data provider gnip powertrack. our observation period began one hour before each debate’s start and lasted until four hours after the conclusion of the televised broadcast. the full corpus consists of suggested citation (apa): driscoll, k., leavitt, a., guth, k., & bar, f. (2015, october 21-24). beyond big bird: the role of humor in the aggregate interpretation of live-tweeted events. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 35,247,043 tweets produced by 5,833,227 unique user accounts (the size of this collection is comparable with statistics reported by journalists and social media analytics firms in the days following the debates [e.g., sharp, 2012]). our analysis focuses on the 17,579,576 retweets within these data. retweets accounted for 49.9% of the total corpus of tweets we collected during the three debates. in our earlier analysis, we conducted a high-level descriptive analysis of the dataset and a deeper content analysis of the most-tweeted accounts (n=197). this small group produced 18,425 tweets that were retweeted 4,388,446 times collectively during (and in the hours following) the three presidential debates. we found that 62 (31%) of the top quartile of the most retweeted accounts were primarily used for humor, comedy, parody and sarcasm. these 62 humorous accounts were responsible, directly or indirectly via retweet, for 1,370,537 (4%) of all the tweets in our collection. to put this concentration of comic accounts in context, we also coded a random sample of the remaining three quartiles and found that the number of accounts clearly used only for humor was negligible. the results of the content analysis identified accounts that were exclusively comic, however, it was clear that many of the most retweeted tweets were humorous – even if the accounts that sent them were not. to investigate the use of humor by accounts that are not strictly comedic, we then conducted a content analysis of data at the tweet level, which comprised the contributions of this paper. other scholars have done this at a large scale (e.g., suh et al. 2010), but these papers that study the aggregate dynamics of millions of tweets are not particularly useful for studying communicative acts. we look at tweets to see how user networks and comedy valence impact the circulation and visibility of this content during the debates. using a representative sample of 1503 tweets, we coded for humor and then combine this with other metadata to highlight statistical trends in the ability to predict retweet count. in our initial, when predicting retweet count, follower count accounted for most of the variance in the model, and humor was also a significant predictor. further, machine learning models showed a high information criterion for both of these variables. we show that humor constitutes a large and important part of debate-related twitter traffic and discuss the implications for interpreting these tweet in aggregate. introducing humor as a variable into aggregate analyses of participatory events online allows us to make a stronger theoretical claim about the mixed and complicated nature of political and social communication on twitter during the 2012 election season (and, importantly, future political events). the initial findings underscore an urgency for considering humor and other contextual aspects of communication in studies of participatory politics on social media. our paper in particular explores the realm beyond "the popular": while many have focused and will focus on bursts (lin et al. 2015) like big bird or "binders full of women" (freelon & karpf 2015), our analysis shows the widespread spectrum of trends in social media chatter at all levels of communication. references bruns, a., & burgess, j. e. (2011). new methodologies for researching news discussion on twitter. the future of journalism 2011, 8 9 september 2011, cardiff university, cardiff, uk. freelon, d., & karpf, d. (2015). of big birds and bayonets: hybrid twitter interactivity in the 2012 presidential debates. information, communication & society, 18(4), 390-406. gayo-avello, d. (2011). don't turn social media into another 'literary digest' poll. communications of the acm, 54(10), 121-128. lin, y., keegan, b., margolin, d., & lazer, d. (2014). rising tides of rising stars?: dynamics of shared attention on twitter during media events. plos one, 9 (5). retrieved from http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0094093 mcpherson, k., huotari, k., cheng, f., humphrey, d., cheshire, c., & brooks, a. l. (2012, february). glitter: a mixed-methods study of twitter use during glee broadcasts. in proceedings of the acm 2012 conference on computer supported cooperative work companion, 167-170. mejova, y., srinivasan, p., & boynton, b. (2013, february). gop primary season on twitter: popular political sentiment in social media. in proceedings of the sixth acm international conference on web search and data mining, 517-526. metaxas, p. t., mustafaraj, e., & gayo-avello, d. (2011, october). how (not) to predict elections. in privacy, security, risk and trust , ieee third international conference on social computing, 165-171. schirra, s., sun, h., & bentley, f. (2014). together alone: motivations for live-tweeting a television series. in proceedings of the acm 2014 conference on human factors in computing systems, chi '14. shamma, d. a., kennedy, l., & churchill, e. f. (2010). conversational shadows: describing live media events using short messages. in proceedings of icwsm, 331334. sharp, a. (2012, october 4). dispatch from the denver debate. official twitter blog. accessed on february 28, 2013: http://blog.twitter.com/2012/10/dispatch-from-denverdebate.html sifry, m. (2012, january 13). politico-facebook sentiment analysis will generate "bogus" results, expert says. tech president. retrieved from: http://techpresident.com/news/21618/politico-facebooksentiment-analysis-bogus suh, b., hong, l., pirolli, p., & chi, e. h. (2010). want to be retweeted? large scale analytics on factors impacting retweet in twitter network. in proceedings of the 2010 ieee international conference on social computing. microsoft word 733-483-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa   1     t h e o n l i f e m a n i f e s t o : r e t h i n k i n g t h e h u m a n c o n d i t i o n i n a h y p e r c o n n e c t e d e r a nicole dewandre1 advisor for societal issues, dg connect, european commission brussels nicole.dewandre@ec.europa.eu summary the digital transition, defined as the process by which society generates, uptakes, resists and appropriates information and communications technologies, brings about a reality by which some key assumptions underlying our worldview, since plato, and the current policy frameworks, lose ground insofar as they simply stop being efficient2. the digital transition projects us into a world where nature is pervasively intertwined with sensors, information devices and machines; we thus increasingly experience a reactive nature, where it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish between what is given and what is fabricated, a distinction which is used to be instrumental to depart realms of responsibility from realms of fate. furthermore, the digital transition creates the worldly conditions for the actual dissolution of the objectivity standpoint: indeed, we "touch" the fact that the abundance of information does not give access to an omniscient/omnipotent posture, but rather that accumulation of knowledge pushes ever further the remit of what is to be known. like the sea recovering from the wave behind a boat, reality is thick and dense and recomposes itself, undermining any possibility to acquire or sustain a posture of omniscience and omnipotence. yet, as policy-maker in the european commission, i witness that policy-making continues to rely on an omniscience/omnipotence utopia, i.e., the implicit assumption that that perfect knowledge would lead to perfect action, as if policy-makers could act in the world with the certainty of the engineers in a manufacturing process. it is going too far in "substituting making for acting", as put by hannah arendt in "the human condition"3. by bringing us to the point where the omniscience/omnipotence utopia cannot but be seen as a chimera, the digital transition, in a paradoxical gesture, calls for re-endorsing the fact that human action, as defined by hannah arendt, is precisely characterized by its irreversibility and its unpredictability, and that this is not necessarily for the worse. rather, i argue that hannah arendt, with her notions of natality and plurality, offers a sound basis for balancing the omniscience/omnipotence utopia and for making use of what i suggest we call "an arendtian axiomatic reset" in policy framing in a hyperconnected era. indeed, for arendt, natality is the full recognition that the human condition is characterized by the fact of birth at least as much as by the fact of death; plurality is, with natality, another fundamental of the human condition: it is this situation whereby each human is (i) equal to the others (i.e., not in a control position), (ii) unique (i.e., not reducible to his/her attributes) and (iii) in need of the presence of others to experience his/her own identity (i.e., his/her who is revealed through speech and action in the public sphere). these two notions of natality and plurality undermine, and even dissolve, the omniscience/omnipotence utopia. reclaiming these notions in a hyperconnected era allows for revisiting the distinction between the private and the public (suggesting mapping it against the fundamental distinction between necessity                                                                                                                           1 the opinions expressed in this contribution are personal and do not represent those of the european commission, nor anybody else. they are deeply inspired both by my professional experience, as policy maker, and by hannah arendt’s work. 2 for more details about the fundamental shifts brought about by the ict uptake, see https://ec.europa.eu/digitalagenda/sites/digital-agenda/files/background.pdf 3 arendt, hannah. (1958/1959). the human condition. new york: doubleday anchor books, hereafter referred to as hc. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa   2     vs. freedom), and between agents and artefacts (suggesting mapping it against the fundamental distinction between beings experiencing plurality vs. beings engaged in functional relationships). the arendtian axiomatic reset allows us to challenge the currently hegemonic place of the “growth and jobs” rationale and its excessive reliance on claims to knowledge and control, and to embrace also the need for discerning new meanings and ways of thinking in the context of policy-making. specifically, it follows from such a reset that a new extended digital literacy cannot emerge in a landscape where social sciences and humanities are restricted to simply identifying risks and assessing impacts. rather, social sciences and humanities can most contribute to innovation, if the need for reconfiguration, which is at the core of this conference, is indeed acknowledged in policy-making circles. otherwise, policy-making will suffer by missing opportunities to partner with society in an efficient and intelligent way. methodological approach and theoretical underpinnings my day job being policy-making at the european commission, and my academic background being inherently multidisciplinary (physics engineering, operations research, economics and philosophy), the methodological approach to this research is basically being inspired from concepts arising in each of these disciplines, applying reflexivity to my own experience, and analysing the policy process in light of the work of hannah arendt, which i consider as a key reference for rethinking politics and the public spaces today. from that basis, i have set up the onlife initiative4, which has gathered 12 scholars5 for a one-year collective thought process, around a background note6 calling for the need to re-engineer the concepts on which policy frameworks rely. this process has been chaired and steered by luciano floridi, university of hertfordshireand fellow of st cross college, oxford. the process was structured around 5 two-day workshops and led to the adoption of a joint statement of the group, the onlife manifesto7, accompanied by individual contributions of the scholars and myself, who bring 12 genuinely distinctive perspectives to the reading of the manifesto. these individual contributions further provide a wealth of reconfigurations of notions such as identity, privacy, responsibility and governance. this paper presents a synthesis of the process, the global outcome and my own personal contribution, which is focused on the actualisation of the human condition in a hyperconnected era, and its concrete consequences for policy-making, in particular at the eu level. conclusions reclaiming the arendtian notions of natality and plurality in a hyperconnected era provides a basis for alternatives to approaches indexed on predictions, fears and control. it enables approaches based on reconfigurations and literacy, by which policy-making, instead of "parenting society" as it does in riskbased approach, positions itself as "partnering with society", by being responsive to the societal intelligence as it is expressed through the use of technologies and the appropriation processes. in line with one of the key messages of the onlife manifesto, which is to recommend focusing more on dualities (both/and) rather than on dichotomies (either/or), the proposal is not to shift from one to the other, but rather to avoid the hegemony of the parenting attitude and make room for the partnering attitude.                                                                                                                           4 https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/onlife-web-output 5 https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/workshop-members 6 https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/sites/digital-agenda/files/background.pdf 7 https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/sites/digital-agenda/files/manifesto.pdf selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa   3     by doing so, policy-making would nurture a wider and more inclusive understanding of the rationale of its action: besides interests, costs and benefits, optimisation and trade-offs, a key purpose of policymaking in a hyperconnected era is to adapt the regulatory framework to meanings, norms and values as they emerge and crystallise in a hyperconnected world, and to maintain and foster a vivid sense of natality and plurality. this standpoint leads to concrete consequences for reconfiguring policy challenges, notably by highlighting the following three needs: (i) to crystallise and stabilize a political notion of the self as a relational self, (ii) to focus on the generation of new meanings of notions such as identity, privacy, responsibility, respect and fairness, as these underpin the emergent digital literacy, and, last but not least, (iii) to care for and protect our attentional capabilities, as they are a critical enabler of our capacity to experience plurality and freedom. bibliography arendt, h. (1950-1973/2002). journal de pensée, vol. 2. paris: editions du seuil. arendt, h. (1951-1955/2005). the promise of politics. new york: schocken books. arendt, h. (1958/1959). the human condition. new york: doubleday anchor books. arendt, h. (1963). eichamnn in jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil. new york: viking press. arendt, h. (1971/1981). the life of the mind. san diego: harvest/hbj. broadbent, s., dewandre, n., ess, c.e., floridi, l., ganascia, j.g., hildebrandt, m., laouris, y., lobet-maris, c., oates, s., pagallo, u., simon, j., thorseth, m., verbeek, p.-p., the onlife initiative, brussels, 2013 eoutput: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/onlife-web-output belshaw, d. (ongoing) the essential elements of digital literacies. e-book: http://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2013/01/07/v0-5-of-the-essential-elements-of-digital-literacies-now-availablee-book/. cohen, j. (2012). configuring the networked self. new haven: yale university press. else, l. (3 november 2001). interview to mary midgley: “mary, mary quite contrary.” in new scientist. european commission: europe 2020: a strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. com (2010)2020 final. european commission: a comprehensive approach on personal data protection in the european union. com (2010) 609 final. honig, b. (edit.). (1995). feminist interpretations of hannah arendt. university park: pennsylvania state university press. lakoff, g., and johnson, m. (1984). metaphors we live by. chicago: university of chicago press. midgley, m. (1996). utopias, dolphins and computers: problems of philosophical plumbing, new york: routledge, rorty, r. (1989). contingency, irony and solidarity. cambridge: cambridge university press. microsoft word production politics-final.docx selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): pruchniewska, u. & duffy, b.e. (2016, october 5-8). production politics: gender, feminism, and social media labor. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. production politics: gender, feminism, and social media labor urszula pruchniewska temple university brooke erin duffy cornell university online feminism: explicit politics in context though the web was created by an almost exclusively male team of developers, the early internet provided vibrant spaces for female collectives—ranging from anonymous support groups to grassroots, advocacy organizations. while some genres of this female-driven “participatory culture” drew upon popular media, literature, and art formats, others assumed a political valance, most especially e-zines, the digital offspring of indie-alternative print ‘zines like riot grrrl and bitch. the prevalence of these and other expressive outlets at the turn of the century led feminist internet scholars to challenge the dominant understanding of the internet as a “masculine” domain (e.g., herring, 2001; shade, 2001). in more recent years and against the backdrop of the meteoric ascent of social media, digital platforms give women unprecedented opportunities for personal expression and collective advancement. from reporting on current events from a feminist angle to exposing systematic forms of injustice, sites like jezebel, feministing, and the everyday sexism project provide discursive spaces to challenge the status quo and promote feminist politics. additionally, the visibility of online sites enables women’s personal experiences and viewpoints to become part of public discourse. increasingly, though, engaging in feminist practices in a postfeminist digital environment requires the careful negotiation of individual self-branding with the advancement of collective politics. referring to the online labor of feminist academics, banet-weiser and juhasz (2011) contend that the ideals of “‘self-branding’ and ‘self-promotion’ serve[s] to shatter any sense of cohesive community and commitment.” yet these activities are seen as prerequisites for career success in the neoliberal economy (marwick, 2013). moreover, for-profit sites like jezebel and reductress adhere to the market logics of audience-building and revenue-generation; on the commercial web, then, even feminism is packaged as a commodity. perhaps nowhere are self-branding and commercial imperatives made more evident than in the realm of social media work. gendered cultural production: implicit feminist practices with the sustained growth of the independent workforce, entrepreneurship has emerged as a much-lauded ideal for contemporary cultural producers. creative aspirants, in particular, are encouraged to utilize digital and social media platforms to actualize their “passions projects” and “labors of love” (e.g., duffy, 2015). indeed, while youtube is frequently held as a platform for budding musicians and entertainers, instagram is increasingly recognized as a public forum for those trying to make inroads into the fields of fashion, art, and/or photography. ostensibly, these platforms are also sites of feminist discourse and practice—albeit in a much less direct way. that is, these social media laborers presumably break down the boundary between the private and public spheres, epitomizing the feminist maxim “the personal is political.” further, female professionals who share their personal stories online indirectly contribute to the larger feminist project, by bringing into the public sphere the lived reality of ordinary women, and questioning normative assumptions about everyday female experiences. according to taylor (2011), single women who blog partake in a feminist practice by challenging the privileged narratives around heterosexual coupling in broader culture, through sharing their own stories. similarly, lopez (2009) argues that ‘mommy bloggers’ are “creating a different picture of motherhood to what we see in the mainstream media,” thus contesting the normative associations of motherhood (p. 732) narratives about female social media entrepreneurship, too, tend to invoke gender politics: by using technologies that enable them to “work from home,” as the argument goes, self-enterprising women can emancipate themselves from patriarchal employment structures. method and overview of findings given a conceptual—and political—commitment to understanding the experiences, aspirations, and motivations of social media producers in their own voices, this project draws on in-depth interviews with female digital cultural producers. specifically, we bring together findings from two separately conducted studies: the first includes in-depth interviews with more than 45 social media producers; the second with 12 contributors to online feminist publications. the decision to combine these projects was made from the realization that participants from both studies were talking about their digital activities in strikingly similar ways. thus, drawing upon interview data, we identify a series of tensions that structure the way our informants articulated their social media labor. feminine and (post)-feminist: though the online activities we explore have both implicit and explicit allegiances to feminist politics, informants discussed their experiences through the language and logic of post-feminism. that is, they emphasized individualism and personal choice while highlighting their extreme self-discipline. “flexibility” emerged as a particularly nuanced concept—especially among working mothers—as participants traded the opportunity to work remotely for a sense of being “on the clock” 24/7. individualism and collective politics: our interviewees were active contributors to a variety of collectives—from feminist groups to social media professionalization communities. yet their participation often entailed performances of community, including expressions of sentiment guided by the governing logics of the social media economy: likes, follows, retweets, and other metrics. empowerment and exploitation: female “empowerment” – the postfeminist buzzword of the last decade – can be simultaneously exploitative for women online. we found that female cultural producers both see themselves as empowered through their work (by selling their cultural products) and aim to empower their female audiences (whether through sharing their personal stories of success or explicitly advancing feminist politics). however, much of the time, promoting empowerment online requires additional work. for example, the relational labor (baym, 2015) of building and maintaining a relationship with an audience requires constant updating of social media information and interaction; however, there are few material rewards for this oft-invisible labor (duffy, 2015). in the end, we argue that these findings are symptomatic of key trends at the intersection of post-feminism, neoliberal economies, and social media labor. the ambivalences and contradictions we identify give meaning to social media producers’ work in ways that conceal and reveal traditional structures of power. we close by echoing the clarion calls of gill (2007), mcrobbie (2009), and other feminist media scholars: feminist politics in the digital world are deeply complicated by the postfeminist sensibility of the wider cultural climate. more nuanced understandings of the workings of contemporary digital practices are necessary for effective feminist politics. references banet-weiser, sarah., & juhasz, a. (2011). feminist labor in media studies/communication: is self-branding feminist practice. international journal of communication, 5(8), 1768-1775. baym, n. k. (2015). connect with your audience! the relational labor of connection. the communication review, 18(1), 14-22. duffy, b. e. (2016). the romance of work: gender and aspirational labour in the digital culture industries. international journal of cultural studies,19(4), 441-457. gill, r. (2007). postfeminist media culture: elements of a sensibility. european journal of cultural studies, 10 (2). pp. 147-166. herring, s. c. (2003). gender and power in online communication. in j. holmes and m. meyerhoff, (eds.). the handbook of language and gender (pp. 202–28). maiden, ma: blackwell. lopez, l.k. (2009). the radical act of “mommy blogging”: redefining motherhood through the blogosphere. new media and society, 11, 729-747. mcrobbie, a. (2009). the aftermath of feminism: gender, culture and social change. los angeles, ca: sage. marwick, a. e. (2013). status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. yale university press. shade, l. r. (2001). gender and community in the social construction of the internet. peter lang publishing co. taylor, a. (2011). blogging solo: new media, ‘old’ politics. feminist review (99), 79-97. microsoft word robinson.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): robinson, j.l., (2014, october 22-24). online sharing of offline do-it-yourself accessibility hacking practices. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. online sharing of offline do-it-yourself accessibility hacking practices jerry lamont robinson syracuse university introduction labels and their meanings are socially constructed and reinforced by the shared norms, structures, systems, and discourses of powerful social groups. this is especially true when it comes to hackers, disability, and technology. although the term hacker originally referred to a highly skilled and "quirky" individual driven by a desire to achieve brilliant and innovative technological feats through machine manipulation [1] it has deviated from its original connotation due to the influence of the news media, government agencies, for-profit entities, and cyber crime victims wanting to justify greater spending on security and sanctions for hackers with malicious intentions [2]. in the same way that the voice of hackers with good intentions has been overpowered by discourses that opposed malicious hacking the needs and opinions of persons with disabilities are often ignored when institutions that provide products and services to them operate based on certain disability discourses. this study will add to our understanding of the politics of disability associated with rehabilitation technology, durable medical equipment (dme) assistive technology (at), and technology funding agencies by exploring the diy and hactivist-like activities that individuals with disabilities engage in offline and discuss online. competing discourses on the construct of disability the construct of disability is politically contentious for a number of reasons. medical, corporate, consumer and other common disability discourses are built on certain assumptions about what it means to be disabled and can inform the provision of service to people with disabilities [3]. for instance, medical discourses attribute disability to the individual and associates it with terms like body, patient, cure, rehabilitation, impairment, deficiency, physical incapacity, functional loss, and diminished personal responsibility [3, 4]. medical model discourses often lead to different forms of disablism, or discriminatory, oppressive, or abusive treatment of persons with disabilities rationalized by the belief that they are inferior to everyone else [5]. corporate discourses on disability are common among rehabilitation professionals and are most evident when these individuals implement initiatives or introduce products and services that meet the letter of the law with regard to medical discourses but fail to address social, economic, and other challenges that disabled individuals actually face in society and everyday life [3, 4]. when entities that are supposed to serve persons with disabilities are guided by medical and/or corporate discourses they run the risk of simultaneously ignoring the actual needs and capabilities of consumers and perpetuating societal and structural disablism. consumer discourses assert that individuals with disabilities have a right to be heard and included in mainstream society [6]. in these discourses categories of objects and services such as dme and at are positioned within larger discussions about their meanings, the personal identities and relations they afford, and the contradictions within them [7]. although it is not possible to assess the actual assumptions that at, dme, and technology funding professionals hold regarding the construct of disability without speaking to them directly it is possible and advisable to juxtapose consumer discourses with common medical and corporate norms, structures, and systems in order to highlight the frustrations that consumers face related to their acquisition, use, maintenance, and repair of at and dme [4]. diy accessibility diy accessibility can be defined as the self-driven efforts of consumers to address everyday accessibility, impairment, and disability related issues using individual, collective, or third-party solutions. similar to the ways in which the internet allows hackers to collaborate, communicate, and share resources persons with disabilities use online spaces to gather and share information about their offline diy accessibility activities, artifacts, and practices. spaces that afford opinion sharing and/or asynchronous discussion about at/dme object, stakeholder, and funding agency experiences serve as mediums for consumers to describe and discuss how different disability discourses not only are embodied in at and dme artifacts and related services but also influence the use and diy behaviors of consumers with disabilities. the proposed study will rely on existing data from three different online spaces with different levels of user engagement to answer the following research questions: 1. what diy-, hackerand hacktivist-like activities, artifacts, and practices do persons with disabilities describe online?; 2. how are conventional notions of hacking reflected in the online diy accessibility content?; 3. what disability discourses and ableist norms are codified the dme and at artifacts designed for use by persons with disabilities? methodology and data sources data will be collected from the hackability blog (http://www.hackabilityblog.com/), spinalistips forum (http://www.spinalistips.se/tipcategories.html), and wheelchairjunkie forum (http://www.wheelchairjunkie.com/forums). the hackability blog is managed by a woman who shares her own diy hacks and opinions as well as the hacks of others. the spinalistips forum has a collection of diy accessibility "tips" with detailed descriptions and pictures. the wcj forum affords asynchronous communication among users. the data corpus will include all hackability blog posts, 10% of the tips in each spnalistips content category, and all relevant wheelchairjunkie forum threads over a two-year time period. data from each site will be analyzed and coded for evidence of diy, hacker, and hacktivist-like activities, artifacts, and practices using a modified and integrated version of haddon's types of innovation and vincent & haddon’s innovative ict use frameworks [8]. wheelchairjunkie threads and hackability blog posts will be content analyzed and coded based on general themes found in the hacker literature and definitions of common disability discourses. expected findings preliminary findings suggest nine distinct categories of diy accessibility activities, practices, and artifacts across all data sources (see table 1 below) as well as several traces of common hacker culture themes such as adherence to the tenets of the hacker code, demonstrations and exchanges of creative ideas and feats [1] and exploration and experimentation fueled by intellectual curiosity [9]. somewhat similar to the ways in which hactivists use the internet to fight against political oppression and “defy the tendencies of established powers to overreach and exploit without accountability” [1] results should elucidate how the internet aids individuals with disabilities in their individual and collective battles against disability discourses that undergird dme, at, and funding agency products, policies, and practices. references 1. nissenbaum, h., hackers and the contested ontology of cyberspace. new media & society, 2004. 6(2): p. 195-217. 2. halbert, d., discourses of danger and the computer hacker. the information society, 1997. 13(4): p. 361-374. 3. fulcher, g., disabling policies?: a comparative approach to education policy and disability. disability, handicap, and life chances, ed. l. barton. 1989, london: falmer press. 4. goggin, g. and c. newell, digital disability: the social construction of disability in new media. 2002: rowman \\&amp; littlefield publishers, inc. 224. 5. miller, p., s. parker, and s. gillinson, disablism: how to tackle the last prejudice. 2004: demos. 6. sandhu, j.s., citizenship and universal design. ageing international, 2000. 25(4): p. 80-89. 7. roper, s., et al., constructing luxury brands: exploring the role of consumer discourse. european journal of marketing, 2013. 47(3/4): p. 375-400. 8. haddon, l.m., e.; sapio, b.; kommonen, k.-h.; fortunati, l.; kant, a., ed. everyday innovators: researching the role of users in shaping icts. computer supported cooperative work, ed. r. harper. vol. 32. 2005, springer. 238. 9. turgeman-goldschmidt, o., meanings that hackers assign to their being a hacker. international journal of cyber criminology, 2008. 2(2): p. 382-396. table 1 practice/ hack definition artifact hack artifact hack : specific activities associated with redesigning, reconfiguring, or improving existing object accessibility, usability, and/or general usefulness for anyone who has a functional impairment. artifact innovation artifact innovation: designing accessible new objects. creating innovative accessible objects that did not exist previously or did not exist as described bricolage hack bricolage hack: to cull together two or more different objects and assemble them in a way that addresses a need/want of an individual who has a functional impairment or any object accessibility, usability, or general usefulness issue creativity/ expressiveness hack creativity/ expressiveness hack: practices or products that enable or embody artistic, creative, or general self-expression by an individual with a functional impairment practice hack practice hack: any objector goal-oriented non-commercially conceptualized, developed, perfected, or performed practice or interaction technique that enables someone to engage in an activity that was previously unfamiliar, difficult, or impossible or to engage in or to engage in familiar activities in adapted ways maintenance hack maintenance hack: general advice, suggestions, activities, or products that enable someone to repair, replace, adjust, monitor, maintain, clean, protect, modify, re/program, transport, overhaul, or assess the condition and performance of durable medical equipment, assistive technology, vehicles, or various dme/at parts and accessories. includes specific activities, expert advice, technical information, suggestions, and product/service referrals pattern of use hack pattern of use hack: development or implementation of human-to-human, human-tocomputer, or human-to-object interaction practices and patterns that address functional impairment or other related issues non-disability related hack non-disability related hack: a modification, practice, service, or general product that can be used as-is (or close to as-is) by someone with a functional impairment. hacks in this category may not have been explicitly and exclusively designed to address accessibility or functional-impairment related issues but are none-the-less useful to someone with a disability. novel use hack novel use hack: the adoption and/or adaptation of a general consumer product or service, assistive technology device, durable medical equipment device, or any combination of the four to address either functional impairment related challenges or general issues that are complicated by the specific functional limitations and environmental context of someone with a disability diy accessibility practices selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 citation (apa): kyza, e. a. & varda, c. (2019, october 2-5). navigating the post-truth era: trust, misinformation, and credibility assessment on online social media. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. navigating the post-truth era: trust, misinformation, and credibility assessment on online social media eleni a. kyza department of communication and internet studies cyprus university of technology christiana varda department of communication and internet studies cyprus university of technology abstract as access to news is increasingly mediated through social media platforms, there are rising concerns for citizens’ ability to evaluate online information and detect potentially misleading items. while many studies have reported on how people assess the credibility of information, there are few reports on processes related to evaluating information online and people’s decision to trust and share the information with others. this paper reports on the first part of a three-phase study, in the context of the horizon 2020 co-inform project, which aimed to gain an in-depth understanding of citizens’ practices and needs in assessing the credibility of information shared online and cocreate solutions to address this problem. data were collected from three european countries, through a survey on misinformation perceptions, focus groups, follow-up individual interviews, and co-creation activities with three stakeholder groups. the data were analyzed qualitatively, using, primarily, a grounded theory approach. results from the citizens’ stakeholder group indicate that personal biases, emotions, time constraints, and lack of supporting technologies impacts the credibility assessment of online news. study participants also discussed the need for increased media literacy actions, especially in youth. based on preliminary findings we argue that we need a diversified approach to support citizens’ resilience against the spread of misinformation. introduction the post-truth era has created worldwide concern about the spread of misinformation on social media platforms. people tend to consume news from online sources at a much larger scale, even from sources they may not trust (tsfati & cappella, 2005). such behavior may invite exposure to fake news, lead to misinformation, and may be related to phenomena such as the diffusion and spread of fake news. the latter is of great 2 concern, as it may reach a far greater number of people a lot faster than the spread of truth (vosoughi, roy, & aral, 2018), and influence people’s ideas, even when retracted. according to a study by bbc (anderson & rainie, 2017), experts identify declining trust in news sources as a grand challenge, with brexit and the us 2016 elections mentioned as examples of the impact of misinformation campaigns. in light of such concerns, this paper describes a three-year research program investigating citizens’ practices and needs on assessing the credibility of online news (year 1, current paper), stakeholders co-creating socio-technical solutions (year 2), and the assessment of the sustainability of the co-created solutions (year 3), in an effort to understand how to create misinformation-resilient societies. social media and the spread of fake news the rise of social media platforms (e.g. facebook, twitter, and instagram) has shifted the distribution of news away from the traditional gatekeepers (e.g. media outlets and journalists) to lay persons, peer networks, and algorithmic technologies (e.g. recommender engines and bots). increasingly, artificial intelligence is used for detecting misinformation and deciding how to personalize the user experience; nonetheless, it remains important to continue examining the role, needs, and preferences of the humans who are presented with the decisions of these technologies. the challenge in a recent report, sergeant and tagg (2019) argued that besides algorithms, users also contribute to polarizing discussions and create “isolated filter bubbles” (that is, being enclosed in social media spaces that only present information aligned with one’s beliefs). according to sergeant and tagg, even when users find messages offensive, they may choose to remove themselves from the situation instead of engaging in dialogue and rebuttal; such behavior, and the beliefs that drive it, highlights the importance of user agency in confronting misinformation online. in another study, hargittai and colleagues (2010) investigated how university students trusted content presented on websites. their findings led them to argue in favor of media literacy actions to support the assessment of credibility of information, as students exhibited weaknesses in approaching webpages in a critical and reflective manner and adopted an unproblematized stance towards trusting search engine results. the findings of these empirical studies indicate a continued need to investigate the topic of the role of humans in trusting online news. as far as we know, few, if any, studies have studied credibility assessment by examining people’s online social media behavior, especially regarding controversial social issues, such as migration. as pointed out by hargittai et al., most studies have examined people’s selfreports, but few have verified these reports by examining their practices in naturalistic settings. the present study attempts to contribute to both: first, understand citizens’ needs and practices while assessing information they have received or shared on social media, and second, to investigate their actual behavior with in-depth performance tasks and interviews, instead of relying only on self-reports. the study we report on the first part of a three-phase study, conducted in the context of the european commission, horizon 2020 co-inform project. this first phase focused on gaining in-depth understanding of citizens’ practices and needs in assessing the 3 credibility of information shared in online social media, to compliment what is already known on the subject through the extant literature. methods data were collected from three co-creation sites in three european countries (austria, greece, sweden), using focus group interviews, and individual in-depth interviews with a sub-set of the participants at each site. a series of three co-creation workshops were planned for each national site. these workshops focused on understanding the needs and co-creating solutions for addressing misinformation shared in social media on the complex and sensitive topic of migration. representatives from three stakeholder groups (citizens; journalists/fact-checkers; and policymakers) were invited to participate in the first co-creation workshop. a total of 68 people participated in all workshops (final number of participating citizens: austria, 7; greece, 13; sweden, 7 ) each session begun with a eurobarometer survey on participants’ attitudes towards misinformation, followed by a focus group interview with each stakeholder group, and co-creation activities with all stakeholder groups. the individual interviews with citizens (n=7) took place approximately two weeks after the end of each co-creation workshop. the data were coded and analyzed qualitatively with satisfactory inter-rater agreement. results the focus group activity identified the citizens’ views of credibility assessment practices, and the challenges these citizens perceived when evaluating online sources. the individual interviews verified the group reports, and triangulated the findings on actual online practices, motivation, the process of credibility assessment in social media, and risks and challenges associated with misinformation. participants pointed to time constraints, lack of skills, lack of supporting technologies, and uncertainty of the impact of their actions, as issues that prohibit them from properly evaluating online sources. design recommendations that emerge from the citizens’ stakeholder group underline the need for developing new functionality or enhancing the existing functionality of the social media platforms, to address the problem of misinformation, and indicate a desire for greater transparency of such functionality. participants also emphasized the importance of reflective and critical appraisal of the information and the need for media literacy actions, especially for youth. conclusion social media are changing the way information spreads, with young people exhibiting preference for news formats that are more engaging, interactive, and light, despite reports that they find traditional news formats, such as print newspapers, more credible than online sources (johnson & kaye, 2016). in a perennial fight of “machines against humans”, it is important to remember that technologies are social systems. as our findings suggest it is of utmost importance to understand current credibility assessment practices in informal learning spaces, such as online social media, and their relation to the spread of misinformation, co-create and test technological solutions, and plan digital media literacy actions as emancipatory approaches to problematizing online news consumption and redistribution. 4 acknowledgements this work has received funding from the co-inform project (770302) by the european commission, under the call horizon 2020 h2020-sc6-co-creation-2016-2017 (cocreation for growth and inclusion). the authors acknowledge the support of the co-inform team and partners for the workshop organization and the data collection efforts in austria, greece, and sweden. more information on co-inform can be found at: https://coinform.eu/ references burkhardt, j. m. (2017). combating fake news in the digital age. american library association. anderson, j., & rainie, l. (2017). the future of truth and misinformation online. access: http://www. pewinternet. org/2017/10/19/the-future-of-truth-and-misinformationonline. hargittai, e., fullerton, l., menchen-trevino, e., & thomas, k. y. (2010). trust online: young adults' evaluation of web content. international journal of communication, 4, 27. johnson, t. j., & kaye, b. k. (2016). some like it lots: the influence of interactivity and reliance on credibility. computers in human behavior, 61, 136-145. vosoughi, s., roy, d., & aral, s. (2018). the spread of true and false news online. science, 359(6380), 1146-1151. seargeant, p., & tagg, c. (2019). social media and the future of open debate: a useroriented approach to facebook’s filter bubble conundrum. discourse, context & media, 27, 41-48. tsfati, y., & cappella, j. n. (2005). why do people watch news they do not trust? the need for cognition as a moderator in the association between news media skepticism and exposure. media psychology, 7(3), 251-271. microsoft word buchbach.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): buchbach, j. (2014, october 22-24). emerging legal tensions around social media in the workplace. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. regulating the boundary between work and self: emerging legal tensions around social media in the workplace jacinta buchbach queensland university of technology both law and business practice are struggling to grapple with the blurred boundaries of identity in social media. the rapidly increasing importance of social media for both private and work purposes has led to the emergence of new legal challenges arising before, during, and after employment relationships. existing legal frameworks, based predominantly on offline conceptions of private and public space, are unable to adequately balance the interests of employers in managing their risk and reputation against the legitimate interests of employees in their privacy, speech, and autonomy. the issues are further complicated by the involvement of social media platforms, private entities who play an increasingly important role in governing conduct but are generally not bound by standards of legitimacy or private duties to either employees or employers. this paper maps, evaluates, and explains current legal disputes in common law jurisdictions. i argue that the current legal context is fraught with uncertainty and generally fails to adequately protect the interests of individuals, who face a significant power imbalance against both employers and online intermediaries. before employment begins, employers are increasingly informing their hiring decisions by examining the social media profiles of potential employees. up to 45% of hiring managers in the united states now use social networking sites to screen job candidates.1 some employers in the united states have been known to request potential employees to provide their password to their private social media accounts.2 there is some anecdotal evidence that at job interviews, some employers have requested potential employees to ‘friend’ them on facebook in order to gain access to their profiles.3 from an employer's perspective, data obtained from a personal profile enables more informed decisions about identifying skill and organisational 'fit'.4 this raises obvious concerns for employees, who may have no notice or knowledge that their profiles are being scrutinised for these purposes. it also gives rise to the potential for increased 'invisible discrimination' 5 based on attributes which are not traditionally disclosed in a resume or interview process, including religion, race, or sexual orientation. because it is almost impossible to trace or prove this type of discrimination, conventional legislative protections are of very little use to job applicants. during the employment stage of the employment relationship, employees are increasingly subject to control over their 'off work' conversations. with the explosion in social media use, conversations that were traditionally regarded as 'private' – gripes in bars to friends and family – now potentially leak to a much larger audience, sometimes beyond the employee's control, in ways that can be linked to their work and may cause reputational harm6 or other loss7 to employers. in a series of recent cases, employers have been successful in terminating the employment of individuals for comments made online publicly – both pseudonymously8 or as 'private individuals'9 – and within ostensibly private social media networks.10 for employees, privacy laws are largely ineffective in these contexts, and free speech concerns are generally inapplicable to the private employment relationship.11 finally, in the post-employment phase, uncertainty surrounds who has ultimate control over social media accounts and contacts after termination of the employment relationship. both employees and employers have strong incentives to retain control of accounts and associated relationships with clients and others built up during the course of employment.12 legal disputes about ownership are increasingly being raised,13 but no coherent doctrine has emerged. existing legal doctrines provide little assistance; these interests do not easily fit into the existing legal categories of recognised interests such as 'privacy', 'property', 'confidential information', or 'restraint of trade'.14 this paper presents a critical analysis of flash-points of tensions between employees and employers surrounding the use of social media. the use of social media is blurring boundaries between work and home and between public and private in ways that are still not well understood by the law. any balance between employee and employer interests that was developed through organised labour movements and a focus on individual rights in the 20th century has become manifestly inadequate for reconciling competing interests in the digital age. the law becomes highly uncertain at points at which its liberal underpinnings begin to conflict. this is visible, for example, where the traditional sanctity of the private sphere conflicts with the assumptions of freedom of contract,15 leaving employees vulnerable to terms of employment that are apparently invasive. it can also be seen where the emphasis on autonomy leads to conflicting results as employees are made responsible for taking care of their own interests but are not practically able to do so without giving up the ability to express themselves or connect with others online. resolving these issues at law likely requires a much different approach to that which is conventionally applied to employment contexts. this paper calls for a new conceptual framework to better evaluate employer risk and employee interests in online social contexts. any such framework must be able to balance employer risk against employee autonomy.16 ultimately, however, it must also support the development of consensual understandings of appropriate conduct and equitable reciprocal obligations between employees and employers. references 1. donald kluemper ‘social network screening: pitfalls, possibilities and parallels in employment selection’ 2013 (12) advanced series in management 2. 2. afp ‘us politicians propose password privacy bill,’ the australian, 7 february 2013. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/technology/us-lawmakers-proposepassword-privacy-bill/story-e6frgakx1226572363437 accessed 22 february 2013. 3. louise floyd, max spry, ‘four burgeoning ir issues for 2013 and beyond: adverse action, social media & workplace policy; trade union regulation (after the hsu affair); and the qantas aftermath’ (2013) 37 australian bar review 153, 164. 4. ross slovensky, willliam ross, ‘should human resource managers use social media to screen job applicants? managerial and legal issues in the usa’ (2012) 14 (1) info 55, 57. 5. richard l pate, ‘invisible discrimination: employers, social media sites and passwords in the u.s.’ (2013) 12(3) international journal of discrimination and the law 133, 136. 6. rose v telstra [1998] airc1592. 7. seafolly pty ltd v madden [2012] fca 1346. 8. little v credit corp group ltd [2013] fwc 9642. 9. banerji v bowles [2013] fcca 1052 10. dover-ray v real insurance [2010] fwa 8544, [50]-[51]; fitzgerald v smith t/a escape hair design [2010] fwa 7358,[50]-[52]. 11. malcolm pearson v linfox australia pty ltd [2014] fwc 446. graeme turner, 'litigating employee restraints of trade and confidential information’ (2009) 47 (4) law society journal, 59. 12. graeme turner, 'litigating employee restraints of trade and confidential information’ (2009) 47 (4) law society journal, 59. 13. eagle v morgan, 2012 u.s. dist. lexis 143614 (e.d. pa. oct. 4, 2012); phonedog v kravitz, 2012 u. s. dist. lexis 10561 (n.d. cal. jan. 30, 2012). 14. see breen v williams (1996) 186 clr 71; phipps v boardman (1967) ac,127,128; fairstar v adkins [2013] ewca civ 886; whitmar publications limited v gamage & anors [2013] ewhc 1881 (ch). 15. nicolas suzor, ‘the role of the rule of law in virtual communities’ (2011) 25 berkeley technology law 16. see john b thompson, ‘shifting boundaries of public and private life’ (2011) 28 (4) theory, culture & society, 49, 60; beate rossler, the value of privacy (r.d.v, glasgow, cambridge: polity, 2005); helen nissenbaum, ‘a contextual approach to privacy online’ (2011) 140 (4) daedalus, the journal of the american academy of arts & sciences, 32, 40 selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016   suggested  citation  (apa):  løvlie,  a.  s.,  &  ihlebæk,  k.  a.  (2016).  experiences  of  repercussions  from   participation  in  online  debate.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  conference  of  the   association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.     experiences  of  repercussions  from  participation  in   online  debate     anders  sundnes  løvlie   it  university  of  copenhagen     karoline  andrea  ihlebæk   university  of  oslo       introduction     the  internet  has  radically  changed  opportunities  for  participation  in  public  debate.  while   many  studies  have  explored  the  democratic  potential  of  online  discussion  forums   (jensen,  2003;;  wright  and  street,  2007),  others  have  investigated  the  rise  of   problematic  behavior  such  as  "flaming"  (lee,  2005;;  santana,  2014),  "trolling"  (coleman,   2012;;  phillips,  2015),  and  harassment  of  women  (biber  et  al.,  2002).  some  recent   studies  have  indicated  that  men  experience  threats  more  often  than  women,  whereas   women  are  more  prone  to  gendered  and  sexual  responses,  and  tend  to  limit  their  own   utterances  to  a  larger  degree  then  men  (author,  2014a;;  enjolras  &  steen-­johnsen,   2014;;  pew  research  center,  2014).  comment  systems  of  online  newspapers  have   been  a  particularly  controversial  area,  due  to  the  need  to  balance  the  news  media's   commitment  to  free  debate  with  their  legal  and  ethical  responsibilities  (author,  2014b;;   singer  et  al.,  2011).     in  this  paper  we  explore  negative  experiences  reported  in  a  survey  among  contributors   to  the  online  comments  systems  of  four  norwegian  newspapers.  the  survey  was   conducted  one  year  after  the  2011  terror  attacks,  which  led  to  a  public  backlash  against   online  debate  in  norway  (author,  2013a;;  2013b).  we  investigate  the  following  research   question:  how  do  contributors  to  online  comments  systems  in  newspaper  websites   describe  their  experiences  of  repercussions  from  participation  in  debates?     in  earlier  analyses  of  data  from  this  survey  (author,  forthcoming)  we  have  explored  the   respondents'  experiences  with  editorial  control,  and  found  that  they  could  be  described   along  a  spectrum  between  'interventionist'  (favouring  stronger  editorial  control)  to  non-­ interventionist  (favouring  less  editorial  control)  positions.  the  non-­interventionists  are   typically  males  who  participate  in  debates  often  and  prefer  to  be  anonymous.  our   findings  resonate  with  those  of  enjolras  et  al.  (2013,  pp.  111–152),  who  found  that   contributors  to  online  comments  in  national  newspaper  websites  were  predominantly   male,  somewhat  less  educated,  somewhat  more  negative  towards  immigration  and   islam,  more  polarised  in  their  opinions  and  placed  less  trust  in  the  government  and   public  institutions.     method     the  participants  in  the  survey  were  invited  through  a  link  placed  in  the  comments   section  of  each  newspaper.  the  survey  was  open  for  two  weeks,  from  17  september  –   3  october  2013  and  we  received  3470  answers.  the  survey  consisted  of  closed  and   open-­form  questions,  and  this  paper  is  based  on  a  quantitative  and  qualitative  analysis   of  two  of  these  questions.  for  analysis  of  the  open-­form  question  two  independent   coders  have  first  coded  the  responses  following  a  codebook  developed  by  the  authors.   in  the  second  step  of  the  analysis,  the  authors  have  done  a  close  reading  of  the  free-­ text  answers.     results  and  discussion     we  started  our  analysis  intending  to  explore  relations  between  gender  and  the   experience  of  negative  repercussions  from  participation  in  online  comments,  by   analysing  the  following  question  from  the  survey:  "have  you  ever  experienced  problems   in  your  everyday  life  as  a  consequence  of  something  you  have  written  in  online   comments  -­  for  instance  problems  with  your  employer  or  colleagues,  harassment,   threats,  etc.?"  a  logistic  regression  analysis  shows  a  significant  correlation  with  gender,   indicating  that  female  respondents  more  often  have  experienced  problems  of  this  type   (standardized  beta:  0.650;;  sig:  0.000).       respondents  who  answered  "yes"  to  this  first  question  (11%),  were  presented  with  a   conditional  follow-­up,  free-­text  question:  "can  you  give  an  example  of  problems  that   have  occurred  as  a  consequence  of  online  discussions  (as  mentioned  in  the  previous   question)?"  the  diagram  below  (figure  1)  shows  the  types  of  problems  mentioned  by   respondents,  separated  by  gender.       figure  1:  types  of  problems.  two  independent  coders.  krippendorff's  alpha:  0.757.  x-­squared=8.046,  df=6,   p=0.23.   while  our  analysis  shows  some  gender  differences,  these  are  not  statistically   significant.  a  qualitative  reading  of  all  the  316  free-­text  responses,  separated  by  gender,   also  failed  to  provide  any  clear  gender-­related  findings  of  the  type  reported  elsewhere   (author,  2014b).     instead,  the  qualitative  reading  shed  some  light  on  the  large  number  of  answers  that   have  been  coded  as  'negative  responses'  or  'no  relevant  answer'.  the  former  category   represents  descriptions  of  relatively  inconsequential  problems,  such  as  “unwanted   discussions”  or  "uncomfortable  confrontations".  virtually  no  respondents  (1-­2  cases)   reported  incidents  involving  police  or  legal  consequences.  in  other  words,  we  found  that   a  large  proportion  of  respondents  were  unable  (or  unwilling)  to  give  specific  examples  of   serious  incidents.     instead,  we  found  ubiquitous  references  to  political  affiliation  and  attitudes  towards   immigrants  and  islam.  a  picture  emerged  of  respondents  who  divide  the  world  in  two   along  a  political  axis,  and  explain  the  problems  they  have  experienced  as  a   consequence  of  the  struggle  between  two  opposing  fronts.  among  the  responses  where   a  political  standpoint  was  indicated,  most  respondents  expressed  affiliation  with  the  right   wing  and  opposition  to  immigration  and  islam.  many  expressed  an  experience  of   marginalisation,  censorship  and  bullying  by  "politically  correct"  media  and  elites.  and  yet   the  concrete  repercussions  they  would  mention  would  often  be  relatively   inconsequential  experiences,  such  as:     •   "friends  call  me  racist."   •   "negative  comments."   •   "people  who  don't  like  my  opinions  have  given  sarcastic  comments  or  tried  to   patronize."     we  suggest  that  the  responses  to  our  survey  should  be  viewed  in  light  of  differences  in   communicative  competencies  among  different  groups  of  participants.  the  main  purpose   of  online  comments  systems  in  newspaper  websites  is  to  invite  non-­elites  to  take  part  in   public  debate:  people  who  do  not  necessarily  possess  the  competencies  of  a   professional  communicator.  it  should  not  be  surprising  if  such  participants  have  quite   different  expectations  about  what  consequences  one  might  reasonably  expect  after   making  controversial  statements  in  public.  this  points  to  an  important  challenge  for   online  newspapers,  which  will  be  elaborated  further  in  our  full  paper  and  presentation.     references     biber,  j.  k.,  doverspike,  d.,  baznik,  d.,  cober,  a.  &  ritter,  b.  a.  (2002).  sexual   harassment  in  online  communications:  effects  of  gender  and  discourse  medium.   cyberpsychology  &  behavior,  5(1),  33–42.   coleman,  e.  g.  (2012).  phreaks,  hackers,  and  trolls:  the  politics  of  transgression  and   spectacle.  in  michael  mandiberg  (ed.),  the  social  media  reader  (pp.  99–119).  new   york:  new  york  university  press.   enjolras,  b.,  karlsen,  r.,  steen-­johnsen,  k.,  &  wollebæk,  d.  (2013).  liker  -­  liker  ikke:   sosiale  medier,  samfunnsengasjement  og  offentlighet.  oslo:  cappelen  damm.   enjolras,  b.,  &  steen-­johnsen,  k.  (2014).  frykten  for  å  støte  som  begrensning.  hvilken   betydning  har  sosiale  normer  for  ytringsfriheten?  in  b.  enjolras,  t.  rasmussen,  &  k.   steen-­johnsen  (eds.),  status  for  ytringsfriheten  i  norge:  hovedrapport  fra  prosjektet   (pp.  33–52).  oslo:  institute  for  social  research.  retrieved  from   http://www.frittord.no/images/uploads/files/ytringsfrihet_hovedrapport_dig.pdf   jensen,  j.  l.  (2003).  public  spheres  on  the  internet—anarchic  or  government-­ sponsored:  a  comparison.  scandinavian  political  studies,  26(4),  349–374.   lee,  h.  (2005).  behavioral  strategies  for  dealing  with  flaming  in  an  online  forum.   sociological  quarterly,  46(2),  385–403.  http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-­8525.2005.00017.x   pew  research  center.  (2014).  online  harassment.  pew  research  center.   phillips,  w.  (2015).  this  is  why  we  can’t  have  nice  things:  mapping  the  relationship   between  online  trolling  and  mainstream  culture.  cambridge,  ma:  the  mit  press.   santana,  a.  d.  (2014).  virtuous  or  vitriolic.  journalism  practice,  8(1),  18–33.   http://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2013.813194   singer,  j.,  hermida,  a.,  domingo,  d.,  heinonen,  a.,  paulussen,  s.,  quandt,  t.,  …   vujnovic,  m.  (eds.).  (2011).  participatory  journalism:  guarding  open  gates  at  online   newspapers.  chichester,  uk:  john  wiley  &  sons.   wright,  s.,  &  street,  j.  (2007).  democracy,  deliberation  and  design:  the  case  of  online   discussion  forums.  new  media  &  society,  9(5),  849–869.     selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  steinfeld,  n.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  strategies  of  information  disclosure.  paper   presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  conference  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,   germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.   strategies  of  information  disclosure nili  steinfeld ariel  university abstract how  do  users  react  when  they  are  requested  to  provide  personal  information?       the  paper  presents  findings  from  two  experiments  conducted  in  distinct  online   environments,  in  which  users  were  presented  with  a  trade  offer  from  an  unfamiliar   research  body:  access  to  their  personal  facebook  profile  in  exchange  for  a  monetary   reward.  the  two  experiments  illustrate  and  characterize  several  strategies  employed  by   participants  in  response  to  the  trade  offer.   literature review the  freemium  model,  the  currently  preferred  business  model  for  online  services   (hoofnagle  and  whittington,  2014),  is  based  on  free  services  which  are  often   exchanged  for  personal  information  subsequently  traded  by  the  service  provider.  the   model  is,  however,  profoundly  flawed:  the  service  may  be  presented  as  free,  but  is   effectively  a  trade  of  service  for  data,  disguising  users’  information  disclosure  costs   (hoofnagle  and  whittington,  2014),  which  are  impossible  to  calculate  for  several   reasons.  first,  information  is  different  from  other  traded  goods  in  that  the  value  of  a   piece  of  information  is  subjective  and  difficult  to  calculate  (papacharissi  and  gibson,   2011).  second,  individuals  requested  to  disclose  information  usually  lack  complete  and   relevant  information  about  the  market,  which  is  needed  to  make  a  rational  decision   (hoofnagle  and  whittington,  2014).  they  are  unaware  of  what  will  be  done  with  the   information  they  disclose,  and  when  the  information  is  being  distributed  to  third  parties,   they  are  no  longer  part  of  the  deal  (acquisti  and  grossklags,  2005),  even  though  the   information,  unlike  other  goods,  remains  linked  to  them  (papacharissi  and  gibson,   2011),  and  they  are  still  affected  by  the  distribution  of  that  information.  in  addition,  the   price  of  avoidance  of  participating  in  some  social  or  commercial  processes  for  reasons   of  privacy  protection  is  sometimes  high  enough  as  to  call  into  question  how  freely  these   choices  are  made  (nissenbaum,  2011).     as  a  way  to  cope  with  the  trend  of  personal  information  collection  over  the  internet,   security  experts  and  privacy  scholars  advise  users  to  lie  at  every  opportunity  (fogarty,   2012;;  jentzsch  et  al.,  2012;;  rosencrance,  2012).  users  lie  online  for  a  variety  of   reasons,  mostly  related  to  identity  play  and  presenting  an  ideal  self  (caspi  and  gorsky,   2006;;  hooi  and  cho,  2013;;  ellison  et  al.,  2012).  but  users  also  lie  to  protect  their   privacy  and  maintain  boundaries  between  the  offline  and  the  online  world,  thus   deception  becomes  a  privacy  protection,  or  privacy  management  strategy  (caspi  and   gorsky,  2006;;  page  et  al.,  2013).   research aims and methodology in  two  distinct  experiments,  users  of  online  environments  were  presented  with  a  trade   offer  from  a  research  body:  access  to  their  personal  facebook  profile  in  exchange  for  a   monetary  reward.  one  experiment  took  place  in  the  online  anonymous  virtual  world  of   second  life,  while  the  other  was  a  panel  survey  conducted  among  a  representative   sample  of  israeli  internet  users.  the  request  and  method  were  identical:  in  exchange  for   participants'  compliance,  they  were  offered  a  monetary  reward  in  variable  sums.  to   verify  a  successful  connection,  participants  were  requested  to  connect  to  facebook   from  a  website  created  for  that  purpose  and  linked  from  the  survey,  and  permit  access   to  the  institute's  facebook  application  through  their  user  profile  in  facebook.   participants  who  refused  to  connect  were  asked  to  state  the  reason  for  their  refusal.   options  included  "i  wish  to  protect  my  privacy",  or  "i  would  login  for  a  greater  sum"   (followed  by  a  request  to  state  the  desired  sum).  the  facebook  profiles  of  participants   who  allowed  access  were  later  inspected  by  the  researcher,  and  profiles  which  were   created  on  the  same  day  of  the  experiment  and  presented  no  user  activity  were  judged   to  be  fake.   findings a  review  of  the  findings  from  both  studies  reveals  several  groups  of  users  who  employ   different  strategies  in  response  to  the  trade  offer,  which  undermines  users'  privacy  and   anonymity  online.     traders  were  participants  who  accepted  the  trade  offer.  tendency  to  accept  the  trade   offer  correlates  with  the  sum  of  money  offered,  and  several  other  characteristics  related   to  online  habits  and  behavior.  men  were  also  more  willing  to  accept  the  trade  offer  in   one  experiment.       abstainers,  who  rejected  the  trade  offer,  were  mostly  driven  by  their  desire  to  protect   their  privacy,  although  a  sub-­group  of  abstainers,  which  may  be  referred  to  as   negotiators,  expressed  their  willingness  to  trade  for  a  greater  amount  of  money.       a  third  and  most  intriguing  group  are  deceivers.  users  in  this  group  employed  a   strategy  of  "tricking  the  system,"  which  allowed  them  to  enjoy  the  benefits  of  the  trade   without  paying  the  costs  and  risking  their  privacy.  these  users  accepted  the  offer,  but   instead  of  trading  with  their  authentic  facebook  profile-­  they  opened  a  fake  account  and   logged  in  with  the  account  made  for  the  purpose  of  the  trade.  most  noteworthy  with   respect  to  this  group  is  the  overwhelming  difference  between  the  two  environments  in   the  use  of  deception:  while  more  than  half  of  the  profiles  submitted  by  participants  in   the  second  life  experiment  were  fake,  not  one  of  the  profiles  submitted  by  users  in  the   general  survey  was  judged  to  be  fake.  this  difference  between  populations  in  the  use  of   deception  as  a  way  to  protect  users'  privacy  suggests  that  the  strategy  of  deception  is   the  practice  of  digital  savvy,  and  highly  sophisticated  and  experienced  internet  users,   such  as  users  of  second  life  tend  to  be  in  comparison  with  a  general  representative   sample  of  internet  users.   the  paper  explores  the  various  strategies  and  characterizes  users  of  each  group.  moral   consequences  of  deception  as  a  privacy  protection  strategy  are  also  discussed.     references acquisti,  a.  and  grossklags,  j.  (2005),  "privacy  and  rationality  in  individual  decision   making",  ieee  security  and  privacy,  vol.  3  no.  1,  pp.  26-­33.     caspi,  a.  and  gorsky,  p.  (2006),  "online  deception:  prevalence,  motivation,  and   emotion",  cyberpsychology  &  behavior,  vol.  9  no.  1,  pp.  54-­59.     ellison,  n.b.,  hancock,  j.t.  and  toma,  c.l.  (2012),  "profile  as  promise:  a  framework  for   conceptualizing  veracity  in  online  dating  self-­presentations",  new  media  &  society,  vol.   14  no.  1,  pp.  45-­62.     fogarty,  k.  (2012),  "protect  your  online  privacy:  lie",  pcworld,  march  1,  available  at:   www.pcworld.com/article/251121/protect_your_online_privacy_lie.html  (accessed  july   12,  2012).     hoofnagle,  c.j.  and  whittington,  j.  (2014),  "free:  accounting  for  the  costs  of  the   internet's  most  popular  price",  ucla  law  review,  vol.  61  no.  3,  pp.  606-­670.     hooi,  r.  and  cho,  h.  (2013),  "deception  in  avatar-­mediated  virtual  environment",   computers  in  human  behavior,  vol.  29  no.  1,  pp.  276-­284.     jentzsch,  n.,  preibusch,  s.  and  harasser,  a.  (2012),  "study  on  monetising  privacy:  an   economic  model  for  pricing  personal  information",  available  at:   www.enisa.europa.eu/activities/identity-­and-­trust/library/deliverables/monetising-­privacy   (accessed  march  3,  2013).     nissenbaum,  h.  (2011),  "a  contextual  approach  to  privacy  online",  daedalus-­us,  vol.   140  no.  4,  pp.  32-­48.     page,  x.,  knijnenburg,  b.p.  and  kobsa,  a.  (2013),  "what  a  tangled  web  we  weave:  lying   backfires  in  location-­sharing  social  media",  proceedings  of  the  16th  acm  conference   on  computer  supported  cooperative  work  and  social  computing  (cscw),  acm,  new   york,  ny,  pp.  273-­284.     papacharissi,  z.  and  gibson,  p.l.  (2011),  "fifteen  minutes  of  privacy:  privacy,  sociality,   and  publicity  on  social  network  sites",  in  trepte,  s.  and  reinecke,  l.  (eds),  privacy   online:  perspectives  on  privacy  and  self-­disclosure  in  the  social  web,  springer-­verlag,   berlin,  pp.  75-­89.       rosencrance,  l.  (2012),  "how  online  dishonesty  protects  your  identity",  nbc  news,   july  18,  available  at:  www.nbcnews.com/id/48232403/ns/technology_and_science-­ security/t/how-­online-­dishonesty-­protects-­your-­identity/  (accessed  march  12,  2014).     1 privacy challenges in enterprise 2.0 lene pettersen bi norwegian business school norway lene.pettersen@bi.no petter bae brandtzæg sintef norway pbb@sintef.no abstract this study explores privacy challenges in enterprise 2.0 (e2.0) in a large-scale multinational knowledge-intensive company. the study focuses on the dilemma of sociability vs. privacy likely to arise under e2.0 models, applying both social capital and privacy regulation theory. a qualitative approach has been selected to gain deeper insights into the interplay of e2.0 mechanisms, surveillance and privacy. this was done by using a comprehensive qualitative case study of 27 in-depth interviews and participatory observations of professional knowledgeworkers using e2.0 at work in norway, denmark, uk and morocco. ethnographic field studies were conducted in norway and morocco in 2010 and 2011, with follow up studies in 2012. the results show that introducing e2.0 into the workplace is not without privacy risks. many of the employees in this study report an experience of being monitored when using e2.0 and a fear of leaving digital footprints that the company can misuse. these results pinpoint the importance of balancing sociability, knowledge sharing and privacy in e2.0 solutions, as well as a firm understanding of different user needs in regards to privacy and trust. different practices of using e2.0 often lead to both larger and visible gaps between employees (i.e., those who contribute and those who don't), as well as different privacy concerns or dilemmas. as a privacy strategy, employees report to collaborate and interacts offline with co-workers. finally, our study places the e2.0 dilemma on the agenda, and is one important contribution to the fairly unexplored field of social media migrating into global and electronically monitored workplaces, where spaces for privacy become increasingly blurred. keywords enterprise 2.0; sociability; collaboration; privacy; surveillance. 2 the concept of enterprise 2.0 (e2.0) describes how a company and its employees derive resources such as increasing transparency and accessibility to information and knowledge from social relationships and interactions via social networking technologies (e.g., mcafee, 2006). according to the economist (2010) there are great expectations of e2.0 since this kind of professional networking holds substantial potential benefits for businesses. an e2.0 approach stands to improve collaboration and increase the flow of knowledge between employees within a company (or between companies), and thereby enhances overall business performance. e2.0 turns previous knowledge management models upside down by placing the individual in the center through an information model that is people-centric. by placing people in the center, employees become important knowledge “agents” – an important distinction given that knowledge typically resides in a social network of individuals. the use of social media as a professional work tool therefore differs from leisure and private activity more common to social media such as facebook or twitter. however, privacy issues remain important both in a private as well as a professional context. still, privacy concerns from the perspective of the employee in an e2.0 context are underinvestigated, despite the fact that company management has the potential to abuse data from employee interactions via social networking for the purpose of surveillance and monitoring. some systems have built-in analytical tools that let managers track information such as which people are regularly in contact with one another and the subjects being discussed (the economist, 2010). experts report that companies are under increasing pressure to monitor employees electronically (benner, 2001). hence, with the increasing usage of e2.0 tools there is growing potential for indirect traceability, surveillance and monitoring (van dijk, 2007). another key question is how content generated by employees is stored and used after they have severed ties or ended their work contract with the company. finally, e2.0 may extend an employee’s availability beyond the office hours, further blurring the border between private and professional life. if employees have the impression that their level of privacy is unsatisfactory they will feel annoyed or encroached upon (kaya & weber, 2003). 3 figure 1: screenshot from the search functionality in jive software. with e2.0, people are “knowledge carriers” a core premise in e2.0. according to a recent european survey social media as a professional work tool (e2.0) has increased from 23 percent to 40 percent during 2011 compared to 2010 (mynewsdesk, 2012). but the real value of e2.0 resides in the information and knowledge shared among employees via social intranets. as organizations do not have the mass (i.e., such as wikipedia or youtube), the long tail principle will not apply to most organizations and, thus, additional motivation for sociability and user contribution will be needed (levy, 2009). in many ways, the lack of privacy is one of the pillars underpinning the e2.0 model. however, according to the privacy calculus argument (culnan & armstrong, 1999), individuals’ motivation to provide information is often governed by their privacy concerns (nov & wattal, 2009). hence, individuals' experiences or attitudes toward privacy may negatively impact the volume and type of 4 content shared in a social network site (brandtzæg, lüders & skjetne, 2010), which may in turn have negative implications for an e2.0 solution. for example, an employee who is particularly concerned about the ownership or privacy of shared data may limit the amount of information disclosed in a social business network or simply less willing to participate in an e2.0 solution. as a result, there may exists serious conflict between the e2.0 model (freedom of sociability through information sharing and collaboration in the virtual workplace) and the employee’s needs for privacy in the company's virtual space, which we have chosen to label the 'e2.0 dilemma' (see figure 2) – following brandtzæg et al (2010) and – 'social networking sites dilemma'. figure 2: 'e2.0 dilemma' 1 accordingly, the aim of this study is to contribute to close the research gap mentioned in the introduction by questioning how e2.0 challenges employees' subjective experience of privacy issues working in a large company. such knowledge 1 adapted from brandtzæg et al., 2010 privacy dilemma in social networking technologies. 5 will serve as a foundation for developing e2.0 guidance for such companies. another objective of this study is to gain knowledge about these matters that can assist e2.0 designers, practitioners and companies in promoting sociability in terms of collaboration and knowledge sharing while safeguarding privacy. the present paper combines theory from both privacy regulation theory (altman, 1975) and social capital theory (e.g., putnam, 2000) in order to gain greater insight into this issue and the 'e2.0 dilemma' outlined in figure 2. in general, privacy is understood as the ability of an individual to withdraw from attention and to protect or reveal personal information selectively (karahasanović, brandtzæg, vanattenhoven, lievens, nielsen & pierson, 2009). privacy is an individual right – even in the workplace. a substantial amount of legislation exists, at least in the eu, that governs data protection, surveillance and privacy at work (see cipd 2009, e.g., data protection act, 1998). on a national level, the requirements concerning privacy rights are generally covered in a country’s constitution. on an international level, privacy rights are outlined in various treaties enacted by the eu and the un (van dijk, 2007, pp. 149). still, the concept of privacy rights and how individuals experience their rights are observed may differ from culture to culture (karahasanović et al., 2009) and across different entities in a large-scale international company. in addition, the complexity of privacy issues is growing as social media becomes common within organizations and employees themselves disclose content in semi-public spaces. in a transnational company, these issues may be even more pronounced, hence the codes of personal and professional conduct in regard to privacy might vary across groups, companies and national borders. in other words, preferred privacy levels change in time according to environment (altman, 1975). previous research has also demonstrated that requirements related to trust and privacy need to be tailored to the specific application used and community needs (karahasanović et al., 2009), emphasizing the need to study this issue in the context of e2.0. moreover, success in e2.0 will not be triggered by adopting tools, but by organizational central guidance (levy, 2009). an important objective is therefore to gain the knowledge needed to develop such guidance related to the sociability vs. privacy dilemma. 6 previous scholarship has mainly addressed e2.0 and the general potential benefits for companies (e.g., mclean, 2007). steinfield, dimicco, ellison and lampe (2009) for instance, studied ibm employee’s use of the company internal social networking software in relation to its potential to bound (connect with people you know) and bridge (connect with people your connections know) social capital, and hence facilitate knowledge in more efficient ways. however, their findings are biased by studying only the highly engaged users (p. 253). on the whole, younger employees use these applications more than their older colleagues (carswell, 2007) and there is large discrepancy in the perceived value of e2.0 (levy, 2009). still, there are several businesses that are adapting to these new tools (mynewsdesk, 2012), and very little research has been conducted on privacy in social networking services in the context of a company and their employees, what employees think, how they respond or what they see as acceptable and unacceptable aspects of e2.0 technologies. with the increasing usage of e2.0 solutions this gap of knowledge into privacy issues is urgently needed. theory: social capital and privacy regulation in the context of e2.0 social capital has a variety of definitions, but it broadly refers to the recognition and value of social networks and the role of social ties (ling, 2008). therefore, the ability to form and maintain relationships is understood as a basic precondition for the accumulation of social capital (lin, 1999). in short, social capital can be understood as social connections as well as attendant norms and trust, which enable participants to act together more effectively (putnam, 2000). as noted in the introduction, e2.0 is about the collaborative activity and knowledge sharing (i.e., sociability) embedded in social electronic networks in a company. social capital and the concept of social trust are regarded as a vital variable that influences such knowledge sharing (hui & yijia, 2011). the degree of social trust should therefore be taken into account as it is important in understanding both social capital and privacy. for example, people with high trust report more self-disclosure or sharing than those with lower levels of trust (foubert & sholley, 1996). also, fogel and nehmad (2009) have shown that trust towards a particular consumer website influences sharing activities. similarly, dwyer, hiltz and passerin (2007) argued that trust and usage goals affect what people are willing to share. 7 moreover, research from offline communities suggests a possible connection between high levels of privacy and decreased social capital (buys & bow, 2002) and a contradiction between high levels of sociability and the need for privacy (switzer & taylor, 1983). the two latter points stress the e2.0 dilemma and the importance of understanding social capital dimensions and privacyas well as trust as interrelated variables. hence, how individuals use and respond to surveillance-capable technology like e2.0 technologies might be socially and contextually dependent. privacy regulation theory was developed by irwin altman (1975). the theory aims to explain why people sometimes prefer staying alone but other times like get involved in social interactions. according to altman (1975) and his privacy regulation theory, privacy is regarded as a dialectic and dynamic boundary regulation process where privacy is not static but “a selective control of access to the self or to one’s group” (p. 18). privacy and the ability to regulate the degree of privacy are therefore seen as important requirements for individuals. however, the challenge in virtual interactions is that the persona exists in a space that is impossible for people to fully monitor completely, it is difficult for the employees to keep track of which data is or is not stored in the system (agre & rotenberg, 1998). this theory can help determine if such on and off regulations pertains to an e2.0 environment. are employees able to effectively express their desired privacy boundaries to others in a company using e2.0 technologies? altman (1975) believes the goal of privacy regulation is to achieve the ideal level of social interaction, which might also be a premise in the adaptation of an successful e2.0 solution balancing both sociability, knowledge sharing and privacy (e.g., figure 2). in the workplace, privacy and sociability interplay in complex ways with the organization at one hand, and materiality – technology on the other. e2.0 seeks to minimize hierarchies present in the social structure and promote better vertical communication. do hierarchical differences play a role in how employees use e2.0 tools? what functionalities in e2.0 govern employee privacy and reduces the monitoring and surveillance risk? more specifically in the e2.0 dilemma and the framework presented in figure 2, our objective is to answer the following research question to add valuable knowledge to the field of privacy in e2.0: 8 • how do employees vary in their work practices and experiences related to knowledge sharing and sociability when using e2.0, and how are these practices associated with the need for privacy (i.e., e2.0 dilemma)? methodology to address this question, a qualitative approach has been selected to gain deeper insight in the interplay of e2.0 and privacy issues from the perspective of the employee. a total of 27 open-ended, in-depth interviews with knowledge workers were conducted over a period of four months in 2010 and 2011, with follow up interviews with eight of the employees in 2012. in addition, participatory observations were conducted at four out of six sites, and ethnographic field studies were carried out in norway and morocco in 2011 and repeated in 2012. social network data of the participant’s offline network at work was captured via a roster method network design based on informants’ free recall (wasserman & faust, 1994, p. 46). the research case and its units of study we used a comprehensive case study to study how employees in a multinational knowledge-intensive firm use and value jive social business software – a cloud-based e2.0 platform with a variety of two-way functionalities (social networking, blogging, group and project collaboration, status sharing, document and file management and the like). this case is well suited for gaining crucial knowledge of the experience of modern knowledge workers with e2.0 technologies and the value of implementing such technologies in the workplace. the company, labeled herein as tech business company (tbc), for the sake of anonymization, was chosen based on a number of factors. firstly, it is a medium to large multinational knowledge-intensive firm (5000+ employees) located in more than 20 countries across europe, the middle east and africa, with several entities in different countries. secondly, they operate where information communication technology and business intersect, so that the entities’ specialized fields of knowledge should be relevant to the other subsidiaries in their activities. the company’s business strategy is 9 to provide high-performing consultants organized around one of the company’s three main services: solutions, consulting and operations. thirdly, consultants in all divisions are typical knowledge workers, where the organizations typically must “rely on selfmanaged employees to use their discretion and expertise to make adjustments to respond to changing situations” (kuvaas, 2006, p. 367). tcb introduced e2.0 to the company as a strategic, internal tool to better utilize employees’ knowledge capital in order to build professional networks, develop competence by following others more skilled, finding out what others are doing and not reinventing the wheel, having things you’re working on easy to find and share, easily work with colleagues in other business units (from tbc’s e2.0 implementation strategy). however, knowledge exchange entails both contributing and collecting (heinz & rice, 2009: 140) and employee adoption of e2.0 is thus critical in the attainment of tbc’s overall goal (see figure 2). interviews and field studies eight employees were interviewed in norway, six employees in denmark, nine employees in morocco and four in the uk (n = 27). recruiting participants from different entities and countries was regarded as important as the basis for a critical assessment of whether the use of e2.0 tools has an impact on knowledge-sharing practices across entities and to reveal key criteria for successful adoption of the technology. in addition, participatory observations were conducted by one of the researchers at four of the six entities involved in the study, with a two-week anthropological field study conducted at two entities in morocco in 2011, and longer periods of anthropological field studies at one of the norwegian entities in 2010 and 2011. to control for time biases, a new two-week field study was conducted in june 2012 at one of the entities in norway and at one of the entities in morocco july 2012 where four of the participants from each of the two countries were interviewed again. approaching the field of study through an anthropological lens brings a valuable in 10 depth, thick description (geertz, 1983) of the object of study. by spending time at the different units and working in the employees’ working environment a trusting relationship between the participants and the researcher evolves, allowing insight that would not have been gained through interviews alone or a quantitative survey. as a starting point in 2010-2011, we evaluated the elements of technology, the organization and the company strategy critical to the success of e2.0. however, as interviews proceeded, insights in regard to privacy issues began to emerge. in response to unfolding of privacy issues during the first year’s interviews, the theme of privacy was specifically included in the interview guide for the eight follow-up interviews one year later (2012). we also contacted a sample of participants who had ended their working contract with the company to find out if the company followed their formalized routines on content management and personal information after their departure. similarly, new employees that had started to work in the company were asked, during the field study, if they had agreed on the company’s e2.0 consent (user agreement) and if they had read the associated end-user agreement e2.0. in addition, we conducted a close analysis of all participants’ (n = 27) activity within the application suite, a content analysis of a sample of blog posts and pursuant discussions, and an analysis of privacy features in the e2.0 technology. to initiate the interview, the participants were asked to answer five questions to measure their self-perceived information communication technology (ict)-expertise. twenty two participants ranked their ict-expertise as very high, two participants as high; and three participants as low. the interviews were reviewed several times in order to identify recurrent themes and findings. they were subsequently coded and analyzed with nvivo 8. the ethnographic field notes, both in terms of written paper and video reports added important contextual descriptions to the analysis and were shared between the interviewers. having the other researcher reflecting on the field notes and the video blogs minimized the risk of biased interpretations of the recordings (emerson et al, 2011). in order to match employee’s collaboration tendencies offline with their online practices we used a roster method network design (wasserman & faust, 1994, p.46). the participators were at the end of the interview asked to mark co-workers on a 11 “colleague-map” with photographs and names of co-workers they approach and which co-workers approach them for help and advice in work-related problems. in june 2010, the company launched the software as a pilot; only a few entities were included. norway was among the pilot group. the entities in the uk and denmark started using the tool in the autumn and morocco at the end of the same year. differences in how long employees have used the tool could naturally be a bias to the findings of the e2.0 usage, but there are no clear differences between the entities on this matter. the follow-up studies confirm this. participants were recruited through a snowball method, starting at one entity with the first participant randomly selected from the middle of the employee list. in order to capture different entities, the snowballing had to start over again several times. a pitfall with snowball methodology is the risk of leaving key persons out of the sample (hanneman & riddle, 2005). however, by the use of mixed methodology and by including a variety of entities and service areas, the main tendencies for knowledge workers at tbc are believed to have been captured. results this section will present the main results. different usage patterns lead to different privacy experiences or privacy concerns (brandtzæg et al., 2010). hence, as a starting point, the qualitative interviews combined with the analysis of users’ activity within the online e2.0 solution participants reveal two main usage patterns: 1. thirteen participants use e2.0 passively, primarily as a one-way information channel. these participants had five or fewer contributions (comments, blog posts, etc). we label this group of users as 'knowledge seekers'. 2. fourteen participants use e2.0 actively as an interactive tool for contributing with content, questions, input and comments in addition to relying on e2.0 for information retrieval or as a work tool as a part of their overall workflow. these participants have more than five contributions. we label this group of users as 'knowledge providers'. 12 six of the eight participants from the follow-up study report that their e2.0 use has decreased over the past year. as described in the introduction, the ideal in e2.0 is full adaption of the technology, with both user contribution and collaboration (see figure 2). in the external social media landscape we are well aware of the presence of the 90-9-1 rule, stating that most people use the internet only to read, a few participate regularly, while only a small segment is active participators. in our sample this distribution is more balanced, but not ideal viewed through an e2.0 lens. a privacy dilemma? several technological features are designed to motivate the users to contribute. the ‘like’ button is one of these feedback mechanisms typically designed to create motivation and increase employee engagement, familiar from facebook and other social media applications. this kind of feedback is well established in the private social media landscape, but when introduced to the workplace, we find that employees differ in their reception of this particular functionality in two distinct groupings: those who use this functionality frequently and that do not mind clicking the ‘like’ button, and those who do not fancy this type of feedback. colliding contexts we find employees present within both the knowledge-seeker and knowledgeprovider categories that do not use the ‘like’ functionality. facebook and e2.0 are different contexts participants argue. the like button represents a more informal domain: interviewer: do you click the like button in the e2.0 platform? employee: no, that’s a bit too facebookish. a bit too much (male, 40+, denmark) 13 most employees in tcb participate in the external social media landscape although they differ as to where (some prefer facebook, others linkedin or similar services and others both), and some are very active contributors. however, their user behavior in external networks does not seem to carry over to work as this employee from morocco shows: interviewer: do you click the like button in the e2.0 platform? employee: in facebook yes, in the e2.0 tool no. interviewer: so what is the difference? employee: they are different contexts (male, 20+, morocco). digital footprints as personal exposure the participants explain their passiveness due to the fear of leaving digital footprints behind. some employees reported fear that management could misuse their comments or actions such as clicking the ‘like’ button on critical blog posts since their full name becomes visible to everyone within the company. the other group of employees not using engagement features designed in the tool list personal exposure as their reason for not hitting the ‘like’ button: interviewer: but have you ever hit the like button in e2.0? employee: yes i have. but the content i like is not anonymous, so there is some stuff you want to click ‘like’ on, for instance on comments about “why haven’t this or that happened” and i think “i totally agree” but then the feed will say that [her name] likes this post that is a bit of a controversy. so i decided that nope, i don’t bother doing this no more (female 40+, norway). one employee gives the same argument for not participating in the company e2.0 platform: by leaving comments and content in social media you get extremely exposed. you don’t have any chance to withdraw it, delete it. and what if i liked something or had a comment some manager disagree with? i don’t want to 14 leave any traces of me that can be tracked back to me and used against me on a later time. i never like anything (male 30+, norway). leaving comments that will be available forever is listed as a reason for not taking fully part in e2.0. an employee in his 50s in norway explains his take on this issue: we only share good stories. i don’t feel safe to share comments or thoughts that are critical, and you know, everybody can read it, the whole company. even the top management despite that they don’t speak our language. earlier [before e2.0] we could reply to work matters that later became a note in the report from a meeting, now it is recorded for ever (male, 50+, norway). previous notes and comments given at meetings were also electronically stored in the earlier days, but on a local server hidden in a folder accessible only to the specific entity and then sometimes only to a specific department. with the transparency and openness in e2.0 such notes or comments become visible in fundamentally new ways, and several employees feel uncomfortable to share these in e2.0. a moroccan employee tries to keep his comments in a professional manner in order to reduce potential misinterpretations: information can be altered in some way (…) there is a possibility to be misused or misunderstood. i try to avoid personal information that can be understood somehow different from the original meaning. we try to avoid personal comments, and maybe think twice before posting this kind of comments (male, 20+, morocco) not only comments or content articulated by employees could be interpreted different than intended, also functionality designed to create motivation signal different meanings. moreover, an interesting discussion between five employees about the ‘like’ button revealed that clicking the ‘like’ button can be interpreted in different ways: either that they fancy the content that is shared, or that they fancy the fact that the person is sharing, more than the content itself. the discussion reveals how people’s interpretation of this functionality is vastly different. hence, using this "like" feature 15 could be misinterpreted by employees as well as by management. wider, not smaller, gaps as mentioned, the ideal of e2.0 is for everyone to adapt to the technology and provide with content. despite a more balanced distribution in our sample than predicted by the 90-9-1 rule, with 13 employees classified as 'knowledge seekers' and 14 as 'knowledge providers', it still falls short of the e2.0 ideal. active employees become more visible in the platform than passive ones. larger and visible gaps between employees due to active versus more passive use could be an unintended consequence of e2.0 where prejudices of “the others” could flourish, as this informant shows: employee: [active e2.0 users] are the yes-people. it is those who flatters and agree with the management. the yes-people are those who participate in e2.0, and that reproduce their yes-view in their yes-clan” (male 30+, norway). such a “yes view” supports the participant’s view that only positive content is expected to be shared in e2.0. this employee explains during lunch that there are implicit rules in e2.0: in e2.0 there are hidden rules. if you don’t follow the hidden rules you get sanctioned. how? by being ignored by the others or that the conversation ends (male, 50+, norway). employees working at clients also commented that the most active users spend time in e2.0 and not billing clients as they should. being very active is viewed by some co-workers as wasting valuable time that instead should have been spent on generating revenue. features in e2.0 such as becoming a ‘top contributor’ or a bonus systems which rewards employees proportionally to their contributions ranging from expert as top contributors, with a five step scale (see screenshot figure 1) does not minimize the difference between active and passive employees; on the contrary, it makes the difference more explicit. some employees have also commented that such a bonus system and rank neither fits in a work context nor serves the right purpose: 16 [name] writes a bit. he is a top participant, he is within that field [that participates actively]. i don't fancy such bonus scores that not measures if someone gave you a good answer or a poor answer, all those things are foolish. i think that is for kindergartens (female, 40+, norway). user rank in the e2.0 platform is based on a quantitative measure and does not distinguish between providing a helpful answer and uploading a word document a point this respondent, who do not use the tool for fear of leaving digital footprints, has used in his favor: i have a lot of bonus scores [in the e2.0 platform]. i uploaded the whole folder from our unit and you get three points per documents. so now my status level is apprentice (he laughs). so it looks like i am a very active user (male 30+, norway). e2.0 sought to decrease organizational borders by opening up horizontal and vertical communication (mcaffe, 2010, cook, 2011). however, it seems that a new pattern is evolving, namely the grouping of very active versus more passive users. openness versus surveillance: balancing social structure and technology keeping in mind that tbc is located in more than 20 countries in europe, the middle east and africa, an employee in a scandinavian country may feel more free to discuss company matters within the e2.0 platform than employees in countries marked by more authoritarian management models with stricter monitoring practices. when asked what the entities’ strategy is to engage more employees to take e2.0 into use, one manager explains that they use e2.0 actively during the adaption process: we see who has created a personal profile and who has not. we can also see when people were last logged in and use this information actively to get more employees to use e2.0 (manager, 40+, country not listed due to anonymity). input in the personal profile such as geographical location, primary work functions, info about the employee, favorite areas of interest and tags of the employee’s 17 working domains is by default open in the tool, but the employee has no opportunity to change the settings for ‘last log-in’ or ‘recent activity’ feeds, i.a. her contributions or actions in e2.0. these two settings are administered by the top management. these are digital footprints of possibly undesired behavior and clearly run a risk of surveillance. figure 3: screenshot of an employee’s personal profile. the employee’s last log-in time and his recent activity are set as default by the top management in tbc in their e2.0 platform. one manager informs that he notices who is active and who is not, and that those who contribute actively are viewed in positive terms from a company perspective and thus receive an extra personal score from the management. another manager, from the same country, takes the opposite view, noticing who should spend less time discussing matters in e2.0 and more time on working. email alerts for interactions that takes place in groups keeps this awareness constant. another interesting finding in line with the first managers’ reasoning involves using the e2.0 platform for personal gain. one respondent, who frequently contributes with content, explained how she believes management does keep an eye out for which users are actively participating: employee: you can use e2.0 to brand your name within the organization. i'm not saying i'm schmoozing with the management (...). but with e2.0 (...) 18 for instance when i comment on a post from [the manager], the distance between us decreases and my name might be noticed. (...) there were no similar opportunities before e2.0. interviewer: do you think this could have a say for your personal career at work? employee: yes (female 30+, denmark). notwithstanding, other employees take notice of very active contributors and interpret this as actions guided by personal agenda. one participant comments, “some uses e2.0 as a personal marketing tool” (female, 40+, norway). the interplay of social structure and technology is interesting, nevertheless, and shows that that including the whole of the organization’s internal life in e2.0 is not appreciated. the “no-views” – or comments critical of company direction or disciplinary priorities still seem to be discussed offline by the coffee machine or during lunch. also asking for knowledge in the open is perceived as unpleasant as this employee explains: what creates interest in the e2.0 platform is when people ask questions. that really sparks interest, right. but we often experience it as unnatural to ask questions like that, in the open. like, it's no problem if you talk with someone face-to-face or if you're just a small group (male 40+, norway). this respondent emphasizes that to ask questions in a context where you do not know the size and composition of your audience is unpleasant. to establish social trust is thus critical. so what kind of content should e2.0 facilitate if there are types of content that are negatively perceived by co-workers and managers, and that it hinders discussions more than it nurtures knowledge-sharing? the fundament in e2.0 is to facilitate knowledge exchange among employees, but what kind of knowledge? tsoukas and mylonopoulos’s (2004) distinguish data, which requires minimal involvement from people, from information, which is a context-based arrangement. they define knowledge as “the judgment of the significance of events, problems, issues and items derived from a particular context and/or theory” (tsoukas & mylonopoulos, 2004, p.8). in contrast to knowledge-management tools, e2.0 platforms intertwine knowledge and 19 people. hence, knowledge in the e2.0 platform consists not only of the “yes stories”, but of a complex mixture of experiences, opinions, perspectives, insights and so forth. trust and local spaces within the global e2.0 platform another important insight related to trust is that some employees have expressed that they do not trust that the knowledge they share in the platform is not misused by entities in other contexts. hence, a kind of a social or local privacy strategy is applied to avoid misuse. for example, one south european country has closed off their intranet entirely, leaving no opportunity for others to explore their content. this act could be interpreted as an attempt to create local spaces that provide better a overview of who is a member and who is not. an interesting finding that is relevant to this discussion involves two specific functionalities in e2.0, namely the social networking and the group features. there seems to be a strong tendency among employees using this functionality to mostly follow or be followed by co-workers who share similarities (the same work domain, work at the same entity, from the same country, speak the same language, etc). this pattern also appears within the group functionality: members of a group often work within the same context or share other similarities. in this sense, little cross-divisional collaboration takes place; rather, employees tend to join groups in e2.0 with similar co-workers. this follows the theoretical argument known as the "law of homophily" often referred to as “birds of feather flock together” where people tend to associate and bond in social networks with others they find similar (mcpherson, smithlovin & cook, 2001). when a number of people share common values they form a group they identify with, which builds in-group trust. hence, chiu, hsu & wang (2006) hold that facets of social capital such as social interaction ties, trust, norms of reciprocity, identification, shared vision and shared language will influence individuals' knowledge sharing in virtual communities. with altmans’ (1975) argument that the goal of privacy regulation is to achieve the ideal level of social interaction, it seems possible that employees find this balance in group functionalities where they seek similar people. local intranets and groups are smaller spaces that may provide more in-group feelings, social trust and a better overview of its members than the collective and very transparent e2.0 platform. 20 discussion and conclusion this study shows that privacy challenges, such as traceability, controllability and distrust, all play important roles in how employees use e2.0. some of the participants in this study do not contribute actively with feedback and content in the e2.0 platform due to, somewhat differently, fear of leaving digital footprints that the company may misuse. the transparency of employees’ thoughts, interactions and comments seems to be regulated by the lack of trust. not knowing your audience or being aware of management monitoring your use within e2.0 are some reasons employees list when they say that they think twice before posting content or hit the like button. interestingly, both content shared and functionality in e2.0 designed to create motivation is interpreted in different manners, by different users. this finding shows that not only elements shared can mean different things, but also that elements can be perceived in various ways, and hence sanctioned differently. in this sense, knowledge sharing in the e2.0 platform is also a matter of written communication whereas face-toface gestures, body language, irony and more are not grasped. our findings therefore corresponds with chiu et al (2006) that holds that trust, norms of reciprocity and a shared vision as well as language, influence individuals' knowledge sharing in virtual communities. the results in the present study show that the e2.0 dilemma model illustrated in the introduction is confirmed. users of e2.0 report the difficulties of balancing privacy, knowledge sharing and sociability. hence, critical discussions and knowledge-sharing practices, for example, takes place in more trusted offline contexts, face-to-face, leaving no digital traces behind and with a room to clear out any misunderstanding immediately. elements present in the social structure, for instance management and rank, seem to influence the way employees engage in the e2.0 platform. critical comments or thoughts shared in the platform are subject to sanctions both within and outside the tool. some employees tell that only "yes" stories of professional content is appreciated by their co-workers and/or managers. critical comments are reported sanctioned by the others by closing the conversation or by being moved from online to offline. both employees coded as knowledge providers and knowledge seekers fear 21 management monitoring, although few of them have experienced negative consequences. as a privacy strategy employees refrain to use the e2.0 solution actively. on the other hand, some employees use the collaboration platform for personal promotion, and very active employees are interpreted as boastful among some of their co-workers. the degree of an employee’s activity seems to cultivate a wider, and not the ideal narrower, gap between employees and departments, thus making full adaption of the e2.0 platform difficult. additionally, none of the participants interviewed has agreed upon or read any e2.0 privacy consent. when confronted on this matter most of the participators perceive work context to be different from private social networking sites, and do not take fully into considerations that their employer collect and store their interaction and sharing patterns. at the same time, many do think twice of what they comment on, share and like. leaving explicit digital footprints that management could keep an eye on, and misuse at later occasions, seem to worry more than “big data” issues. technical features set as default (transparency, last logged in, traces of what employees liked, bonus rank and more) in the e2.0 platform thus collides with employees’ quest for interacting in a more trustful environment, with a better overview of who the other participators are. one important finding is that, as a privacy strategy, employees collaborate and interact offline with co-workers similar to themselves, a pattern that seems to be reproduced within the platform. smaller, semi-structured spaces provide a better overview of which other employees are part of the group. altman (1975) believes the goal of privacy regulation is to achieve the ideal level of social interaction to balance sociability, knowledge sharing and privacy which seem to be one, out of several, critical elements to the success of an adaption of the e2.0 solution documented in this article. to avoid potentially drawbacks, related to the e2.0 dilemma in the e2.0 adaption process, we suggest that the settings in the e2.0 platform that are presently set as default should be changed to promote trust and openness by allowing the employee herself to manage and control her own content. by increasing the possibility for an employee to control her own content and actions we believe the e2.0 platform would be perceived among users as more trustworthy than it is today. 22 a more explicit strategy outlining expectations would not only make contributions more predictable, but also leave less room for negative reactions towards the most active users and fewer privacy concerns among less active users. in order to nurture knowledge-sharing processes through an e2.0 platform with high transparency, both contextual and technological elements should be taken into account. yet, it is important to pay attention to privacy and sociability issues to make all employees feel secure in regard to privacy using the company platform. moreover, the concept of personal information in new social technologies in the workspace is problematic, and further research should explore in more detail what content in e2.0 should be classified as personal information as this area is currently convoluted and unclear. finally, our findings and conclusions should be interpreted with caution and further work is needed. our study is limited to 27 employees and field studies in few contexts in one single transnational consultancy company. further and larger studies are recommended to replicate our study with more extensive surveys covering a broader range of employees and companies to identify the extent of various privacy concerns revealed in the present study. acknowledgements this research was founded by the networked power-project supported by the norwegian research council. we would like to thank research scientist marika lüders at sintef for conducting several of the interviews. references agre, p. e., & rotenberg, m., (1998). technology and privacy: the new landscape. mit press, cambridge, ma. altman, i. (1975). the environment of social behavior. monterey, ca: brooks/cole. benner, j. (2001). privacy at work? be serious. wired. retrieved from: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2001/03/42029 23 brandtzæg, p.b., lüders, m., & skjetne, j. h. (2010). too many facebook “friends”? content sharing and sociability versus the need for privacy in social network sites. international journal of human-computer interaction 26 (11), 1006-1030. buys, l., & bow, v. (2002). the impact of privacy on social capital in social change. the 21st century conference. qut. brisbane. carswell, s. (2007). the 100% guaranteed easiest way to enterprise 2.0? – talkback. retrieved from: http://theobvious.typepad.com/blog/2007/03/the_100_guarant.html chiu, c., hsu, m., & wang, e, t.g. (2006). understanding knowledge sharing in virtual communities: an integration of social capital and social cognitive theories, decision support systems (42) 3, 1872-1888. cook, n. (2008). enterprise 2.0. how social software will change the future of work, gower publishing limited. hampshire. uk. cipd (2009). data protection, surveillance and privacy at work. retrieved from: www.colaw.co.uk%2fcm_sitedata%2fdocuments%2f97301253291246_data_protecti on_and_surveilance_and_privacy_-_apr_09.pdf&ei=ye-zt4iaqjj4qsdmrd1dq&usg=afqjcngj4vyhb7sd3ybzl352gbh7iwmgpg culnan, m. j., & armstrong, p. k. (1999). information privacy concerns, procedural fairness, and impersonal trust: an empirical investigation, organization science 10 (1), 104-116. dwyer, c., hiltz, r. s., & passerin, k. (2007, august 9–12). trust and privacy concern within social networking sites: a comparison of facebook and myspace. paper presented at the thirteenth americas conference on information systems, keystone, colorado. emerson, r., m., fretz, rachel, i., & shaw, linda, l. (2011). writing ethnographic fieldnotes (2nd ed). (chicago guides to writing, editing, and publishing). chicago: university press. 24 fogel, j., & nehmad. e. (2009). internet social network communities: risk taking, trust, and privacy concerns. computers in human behavior (25) 1, 153-160. foubert, j. d., & sholley, b. k. (1996). effects of gender, gender role and individualized trust on self-disclosure. journal of social behavior and personality 11 (5), 277-288. geertz, c. (1983). local knowledge: further essays in interpretive anthropology. basic books. hanneman, r. a. & riddle, m. (2005). introduction to social network methods. university of california, riverside. ca. retrieved from http://faculty.ucr.edu/~hanneman/nettext/ heinz, m. & rice, r. e. (2009). an integrated model of knowledge sharing contemporary environments in beck, c.s. (ed.) communication yearbook 33 (pp.134175), ny: routledge hui, j., & yijia, c. (2011, november, 19-20). the research on how social capital facilitates knowledge sharing between individuals. proceedings of the 2011 international conference on informatics, cybernetics, and computer engineering (icce2011), melbourne, australia. karahasanović, a., brandtzæg, p. b., vanattenhoven, j., lievens, b., nielsen, t. k., & pierson, j. (2009). ensuring etiquette, trust, and privacy when developing web 2.0 applications. ieee computer 42 (6), 42–49. kaya, n., & weber, m. j. (2003). cross-cultural differences in the perception of crowding and privacy regulation: american and turkish students. journal of environmental psychology (23) 3, 301–309. kuvaas, b. (2006). work performance, affective commitment, and work motivation: the role of pay administration and pay level. journal of organizational behavior 27 (3), 365-385. 25 levy, m. (2009). web 2.0 implications on knowledge management. journal of knowledge management (13) 1, 120-134. lin, n. (1999). social networks and status attainment. annual review of sociology 25, 467-487. ling, r. (2008). new tech, new ties: how mobile communication is reshaping social cohesion. cambridge, ma: mit press. mcafee, a. (2006). enterprise 2.0, version 2.0. retrieved from http://andrewmcafee.org/2006/05/enterprise_20_version_20 mcaffe, a. (2010). enterprise 2.0 – new collaboration tools for your organization’s toughest challenges. harvard business press, usa mclean, d. (2007). the new web: rewards and risks for businesses, pcworld, january 25. mcpherson, m., smith-lovin, l., & cook, j. (2001). birds of a feather: homophily in social networks. annual review of sociology 27 (3), 415-444. mynewsdesk (2012). european survey reveals increase in social media usage at work. retrieved from http://www.mynewsdesk.com/uk/pressroom/projectplace_international/pressrelease/vie w/european-survey-reveals-increase-in-social-media-usage-at-work-722769 nov, o., & wattal, s. (2009, april). social computing and privacy concerns: antecedents and effects. proceedings of chi 2009: acm conference on human factors in computing systems, boston. palen, l., & dourish, p. (2003). unpacking "privacy" for a networked world. in proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems. fort lauderdale, fl: acm press, 129-136. putnam, r. d. (2000). bowling alone. the collapse and revival of american community. new york: simon & schuster. 26 steinfield, c., dimicco, j., m., ellison, n., b., & lampe, c. (2009) bowling online: social networking and social capital within the organization. proceedings of the fourth international conference on communities and technologies (c&t '09). acm, new york, ny, usa, 245-254. switzer, r., & taylor, r. b. (1983). predicting privacy vs. sociability of residential choice: impacts of personality and local social ties. basic and applied social psychology 4 (2), 123–136. tsoukas, h. & mylonopoulos, n. (2004). organizations as knowledge systems. knowledge,learning and dynamic capabilities. palgrave macmillan, london. the economist (2010). special report: social networking. yammering away at the office. retrieved 28.01.2012 from. http://www.economist.com/node/15350928 van dijk, j. (2007). the network society (2nd ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage. wasserman, s. & faust, k. (2009) social network analysis: methods and applications (structural analysis in the social sciences), cambridge university press, new york theory: social capital and privacy regulation in the context of e2.0 methodology the research case and its units of study interviews and field studies results a privacy dilemma? colliding contexts digital footprints as personal exposure wider, not smaller, gaps openness versus surveillance: balancing social structure and technology trust and local spaces within the global e2.0 platform discussion and conclusion microsoft word aoir2016 resubmission.docx selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 shameful transgressions and intimate boundary works: on hook-up app research ethics kristian møller department for the study of culture, university of southern denmark. as a newly minted phd student i am eager to explain to my colleagues what hook-up apps are and why we should care to look at them. one day at the university campus talking to a colleague i find myself out of words that satisfactorily describes the feeling of navigating the grid of grindr, the hook-up app that my sexual biography as a gay man is inseparable of. i decide to “show don’t tell’. in powering up the app on my ipad i get a sinking feeling. perhaps this isn’t right? who will pop up in the grid of pictures, maybe in “challenging” positions? students, staff, colleagues? as these thoughts make their way through my head the app has loaded and i find myself anxiously explaining the basic affordances in a swift, matter of fact style, and soon closing down the app, doing my best to move on. introduction the issues at play in the above vignette (humphreys, 2005) represent at least two familiar issues: the media scholar working ethnographically finding that experience moves across media and built environment and that there is “two there’s there” (schegloff, 2002); and the queer, insider researcher coming into academia and moving back into the queer cultural spaces that they are emotional invested in and have privileged access to. the paper focuses on the ethical navigations of the challenges that become apparent in the vignette’s intersection of mobilized media use in and across queer spaces and identifications. the paper argues that developments within queer, affective theory, as well as sociological and critical notions of intimacy, can shed new light on how “a process approach to ethical decision making” (markham & buchanan, 2012: 5) to this may look like. ethnography has a long tradition for using and thinking about the slipping and sliding of identities into cultural spaces. due to the mediatization (hepp, hjarvard, & lundby, 2015) of intimate encounters (linke, 2011; peil & röser, 2014) media ethnographers face both a quantitative increase and a qualitatively changed situation. in the vignette, the fact that the grindr app, by way of its locative abilities, displays users nearby ties directly into the felt discomfort: the fact that the community that is “exposed” comprises of students and faculty members that might not have attuned their sexualised selfpresentations to such a gaze. here the public-private expectations come into play, tying into established internet scholarly debates on the ethical issues regarding these distinctions (markham & buchanan, 2012; marwick & boyd, 2014). the paper builds on the work done by queer ethnographic scholars, in that it interrogates not only the actions in fieldwork but also the distinctions and value hierarchies at play, and through that, the norms that put them in place. further i take on the notion of intimacy to assess its analytical and critical potentials for unraveling the chronicled experience of shame. shameful transgression the issues at play in the vignette attain to the feeling of shame in the face of what is perceived as a lackluster negotiation of the classical ethnographical divide of insider and outsider knowledge, positioning, and identity. the vignette as well as the following general hesitancy to bring forward the field memo shows, that a researcher’s affective investment in a given subject swiftly and determinately propels actions seeking to annul the experienced boundary transgression. adding to the immediate implies for “damage control” shame both reveals taboos and seeks to erase actions that reveals the researcher as a transgressor. this is in line with queer and feminist works on affect (ahmed, 2004; bissenbakker, 2013; munt, 2008) that interrogates shame as moments that both reveal the investments that in turn produce and is produced by the affective response. these questions are critically discussed by way of the concept of ‘safe space’ and feminist ethics of care. intimate boundary works there are psychological and sociological approaches that use it to describe types of interpersonal relationships (baumeister & vohs, 2007; giddens, 1982; nordqvist, 2013; stempfhuber, 2011). related to this approach is the understanding that intimacy is something that is done, that is practiced. it can be understood as arising from boundary works (jamieson, 2005; jørgensen, forthcoming) and thus be ontologically entangled with the meeting of the prospect of boundary transgression that marks the end of intimacy. lauren berlant on the other hand sees intimacy as: …the processes by which intimate lives absorb and repel the rhetorics, laws, ethics, and ideologies of the hegemonic public sphere, but also personalize the effects of the public sphere and reproduce a fantasy that private life is the real in contrast to collective life: the surreal, the elsewhere, the fallen, the irrelevant. (berlant, 1998: 282-283) the production of a public/private distinction serves to orient subject attention towards interpersonal matters, making invisible the forces that define which exact distinctions to police. to support a practice based ethic, this paper argues for an integrative approach, or amalgamation, of sociological and critical intimacy theory. further, intimacy understood as boundary work between individuals is valuable in its bringing out the mechanics of being in public or private. it is also the level in which affective investments operate, which promotes critical methodological and ethical reflection. the critical perspective is also important in that it targets the very establishment of public and private realms, something that multilayered media practice complicates. it is argued that a critical approach to intimacy must take into account the ways that seemingly public, online visibilities and actions through discursive and affective work become intimate encounters. references ahmed, s. (2004). the cultural politics of emotion. jac online journal, (191), 700–706. http://doi.org/10.4324/9780203700372 baumeister, r. f., & vohs, k. (2007). encyclopedia of social psychology, 158–159. berlant, l. (1998). intimacy: a special issue. critical inquiry, 24(2), 281–286. http://doi.org/10.1086/448875 frederiksen, m. b. (2013). krumme tæer: skam i krydsfeltet mellem queer, feministiske og postkoloniale teorier. kvinder, køn & forskning, (1), 25–36. giddens, a. (1982). the transformation of intimacy: sexuality, love and eroticism in modern societies. oxford: polity press. retrieved from http://www.belintellectuals.eu/media/library/giddens_jentoni_transformacija_intimnosti. pdf hepp, a., hjarvard, s., & lundby, k. (2015). mediatization: theorizing the interplay between media, culture and society. media, culture and society, 37(2), 314–324. http://doi.org/10.1177/0163443715573835 humphreys, m. (2005). getting personal: reflexivity and autoethnographic vignettes. qualitative inquiry, 11(6), 840–860. article. http://doi.org/10.1177/1077800404269425 jamieson, l. (2005). boundaries of intimacy. in s. cunningham-burley (ed.), families in society. boundaries and relationships (pp. 189–205). polity press. jørgensen, k.m. (2016). "boundary crossing, backstabbing opportunist”: practice based ethics as intimate boundary work. linke, c. (2011). being a couple in a media world: the mediatization of everyday communication in couple relationships. communications, 36(1), 91–111. http://doi.org/10.1515/comm.2011.005 markham, a., & buchanan, e. (2012). ethical decision-making and internet research recommendations from the aoir ethics working committee. recommendations from the aoir ethics working committee (version 2.0), 19. jour. http://doi.org/retrieved from www.aoir.org marwick, a., & boyd, d. (2014). networked privacy: how teenagers negotiate context in social media. new media & society, 1–17. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814543995 munt, s. (2008). queer attachments: the cultural politics of shame. ashgate. nordqvist, p. (2013). lesbian love and the troublesome sperm donor: intimacy, normality and morality in new stories about conception. in t. sanger & y. taylor (eds.), mapping intimacies (pp. 54–72). new york: palgrave macmillan. peil, c., & röser, j. (2014). the meaning of home in the context of digitization, mobilization and mediatization. in a. hepp & f. krotz (eds.), mediatized worlds. palgrave macmillan. http://doi.org/10.1057/9781137300355 schegloff, e. (2002). beginnings in the telephone. in j. katz & m. aakhus (eds.), perpetual contact: mobile communication, private talk, public performance (pp. 284– 300). cambridge university press. http://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511489471 stempfhuber, m. (2011). limited intimacy? die mediale herstellung von intimität am beispiel von grindr. feministische studien, 1(14), 49–62. microsoft word burroughs-institutional memetics.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): burroughs, b. (2015, october 21-24). institutional memetics: metonymy, liminality and digital religion. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. institutional memetics: metonymy, liminality, and digital religion benjamin burroughs university of nevada – las vegas the rise of memetic culture in digital media is a growing source of popular culture and academic research. moving from /b/ board insider knowledge to broader cultural adoption, this paper theorizes the intervention of institutions into the production and circulation of memes as a part of a third wave of memetic culture. while studies on memes have emphasized the push of participatory culture into everyday life, this research on religious institutional memes contributes to an emergent vein of digital religion scholarship focused on institutional authority. in an analysis of the mormon ‘doubt your doubts’ meme as liminal and metonymic, we theorize religious memetics as a space for the reconnection of the everydayness of religious practice to institutions, which boils down meaningful moments of faith into facile, non-threatening avenues for sharing religion. while this is beneficial for institutions, the reflexive and metonymic function of religious memes ruptures routine, offering participants momentary pauses from the demands of orthodox religious life; a cathartic release and recalibration within everyday religious practice. implications on corporate branding, public relations, and the pitfalls of publication are discussed. moreover, this paper proposes that the field of memetics needs to account for institutional memes in addition to individuals’ generation and circulation of memes. the study of memes has quickly become a source of much academic research and debate (phillips 2012; shifman, 2013; shifman, 2014). knobel and lankshear (2007) offer a definition of the uptake of the term meme within popular culture defined as “a popular term for describing the rapid uptake and spread of a particular idea presented as a written text, image, language ‘move,’ or some other unit of cultural ‘stuff’’ (p. 202). beyond thinking of memes as an idea or unit of cultural stuff, this paper examines the way that movement is influenced by individual and institutional articulations of memetics. institutions, not only individual users, can be thought of as actors spreading memes. herein, religious communication and digital religion becomes a fertile site for understanding the tension between lived religion, emergent technology, and institutional power. while academic definitions of memes often focus on the boundaries of what does or does not constitute a meme, this paper argues that memes can also be categorized in three distinct waves of memetics. the first wave of memetics can be positioned within the insider knowledge of 4chan, advice animals, and lolcats. understanding this first wave of memetics required being a part of a specific, tight knit community that guarded this valued knowledge, often resulting in the ‘trolling’ of those without this insider privilege. the second wave of memetics saw this insider knowledge become more mainstream and conventional as the tools to make memes and their ubiquity within popular culture continued to rise. the term ‘meme’ is a part of the popular lexicon as social networking platforms facilitated the spread and speed or memetics in digital culture. no longer were memes contained solely within message boards but became a part of popular communicative patterns and the dissemination of information. we are now transitioning into a third wave of memetics where institutions are beginning to also adopt memes as a form of communicative practice. despite the rapidly growing body of scholarly work on internet memes, very little research has been conducted on religious memes. cheong (2010) refers to microblogging, primarily tweeting, as “faith memes”, which rapidly transmit and spread religious ideas. bellar et al. (2013) released a preliminary report on the connection between participatory culture and memes in lived religion. religious communication and digital religion scholars should study memes because they circulate religious messages as part of participatory culture, but memes also make salient certain important values and beliefs in the interplay between institutional doctrine and individual worship. the “doubt your doubts” meme originates from lds apostle and first presidency member, dieter f. uchtdorf’s general conference address on october 5, 2013. in his talk, uchtdorf states “that in nearly 200 years of church history—along with an uninterrupted line of inspired, honorable, and divine events—there have been some things said and done that could cause people to question.” he pleads for members instead to “doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith.” this last line almost immediately became a meme, posted, reposted, and shared throughout the mormon blogosphere, known colloquially as the “bloggernacle.” uchtdorf’s “doubt your doubts” sermon reveals the lds church’s approach to the ongoing challenges it faces in the increasing quantity and accessibility of uncomfortable historical information about mormonism online. the meme also operates metonymically as the phrase “doubt your doubts” comes to stand in for an idealized version of mormon religious practice where faith and personal spiritual experience subsume doubt by absorbing these complicated questions about mormonism and religion more broadly. it provides an ostensibly simple solution to individuals’ complex fears and anxieties as the entire sermon is succinctly repurposed and marked for faithful consumption. the complex historical, doctrinal, ritual, and cultural elements of an organized religion can, through an internet meme, be condensed down into digestible bytes. shifman (2014) argues, “because memes constitute shared spheres of cultural knowledge, they allow us to convey complex ideas within a short phrase or image” (p. 173). memes as metonyms become building blocks for religious practice. memes construct loose metonymic chains that become embedded in the everyday practice of maintaining social networks. the metonymic chains also construct shared belief systems and networked sociality as your network becomes aware of your religious proclivities and value systems. this is most often performed as small, banal enactments and engagements with religious memes--simple, facile, and non-threatening avenue for sharing faith with others online. a comment, ‘like’ or a shared meme, often not grandiose proclamations of faith but interstitial engagements, meld and marinate faith with everyday practice. institutions recognize that social media and memes have created these liminal spaces where members are suspended between hierarchical, institutional order. the rearticulation of institutions through memetics attempts to steer the cultural practices within the space. this point can be extended to non-religious contexts and has implications for corporate marketing, branding, and public relations. references bellar, w., campbell, h. a., cho, j. k., terry, a., tsuria, r., yadlin-segal, a., & ziemer, j. (2013). reading religion in internet memes. journal of religion, media, and digital culture, 2 (2). cheong, p. h. (2010). faith tweets: ambient religious communication and microblogging rituals. m/c journal, 13(2). knobel, m. and lankshear, c. (2007). ‘online memes, affinities, and cultural production’, in michele k. & colin l. (eds.), a new literacies sampler (199–228.). new york, ny: peter lang publishing, phillips, w. (2012). ‘the house that fox built: anonymous, spectacle, and cycles of amplification.’ television & new media. shifman, l. (2013). memes in a digital world: reconciling with a conceptual troublemaker. journal of computer-mediated communication, 18(3), 362-377. doi: 10.1111/jcc4.12013 shifman, l. (2014). memes in digital culture. cambridge, ma: mit press. uchtdorf, d. f. (2013). come, join with us. the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints.retrieved from https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2013/10/come-join-withus?lang=eng. microsoft word 894-638-1-pb.docx digital, material, affective since the 1990s, the particularities of digital culture and online communications have been extensively theorized in terms of immateriality and virtuality. as that which does not factually exist yet has effects, the virtual has been defined as the opposite of the actual, the real, or the material. images or text on a computer screen become perceptible when computers are attached to modems and when files are read with the aid of correct software. as binary code, files are ephemeral in their immateriality, yet tangible in their perceptibility and effects. encounters with them involve tactile interconnection of technological objects with the fleshiness of the human sensorium, and such encounters are in fact highly material. in fact it can be argued that any clear distinctions between the material and the immaterial, the actual and the virtual grow leaky in the “material virtualities” (sunden 2003) of online communication. the intensities of online romance or sex, for example, encompass showing and telling, fantasy, investment, and projection, as well as sensations of connection and disconnection, absence and presence, proximity and distance facilitated by network technologies (hillis 2009). online platforms gain in affective stickiness as users stay on, return to, and refresh web pages, and as they read, comment, tag, upload and download. such examples point to networked communications as comprising and as contributing to affective encounters between people, technologies, texts, sounds, images, and ideas. these encounters give rise to attachments, antagonism, as well as to both persistent and fleeting intensities that further drive and orient the movements and actions of users across networks. the three presentations in this panel explore the interconnections of the digital, the material, and the affective in online communication. the individual case studies addressed range from the affective investments of steampunk culture as cutting through the categories of the analogue and the digital to the political potential and affect of turkish sexual confession sites, and the heated twists and turns of a finnish facebook discussion thread. while clearly distinct in their aims and scope, all three presentations investigate the intersections of the material and the virtual in networked exchanges by asking how intensities move, how they move users, and what they affect. furthermore, each presentation explores the role and meaning of online platforms and technological objects in and for their individual and collective users. rather than approaching platforms as instrumental tools to an end, or as passive “stages” for the actions and attachments of users, they are conceptualized as facilitating and even conditioning particular uses, forms of interaction and sensation. affectivity then becomes an issue of connectivity and contact between and among human and nonhuman agents, and an effect of the circulation of digital files that communicate and help to create rise to ideas, values, and intensities. philosopher sara ahmed (2004: 10–11) argues that, “emotions do not circulate among people, objects of emotion do.” on online platforms, such circulation is “virtual” in the sense of comprising immaterial objects (computer files, documents, and code) and symbolic depiction. at the same time, the circulation of objects gives rise to intensities -of enthusiasm, rage, curiosity, or lust -that are tangibly felt in the body. such sensations are personal and individual yet, as networked, simultaneously shared and collective. consequently, the networked circulation and accumulation of affective intensities can also give shape to, support, or facilitate collective political action. references ahmed, sara. 2004. the cultural politics of emotion. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. hillis, ken. 2009. online a lot of the time: ritual, fetish, sign. durham: duke university press. sundén, jenny. 2003 material virtualities: approaching online textual embodiment. new york: peter lang. technologies of feeling: affect between the analog and the digital jenny sundén “it is the physical nature of steampunk that attracted us to it in the first place […]. we love machines that we can see, feel, and fear” (ratt, 2007). in the midst of the affective networks of contemporary digital cultures and communities, built on endless technological upgrades to increase computational speed, power, and performance, something seemingly of the opposite order is taking shape. it is a culture that contrasts speed with slowness, displaces the new with the old and the used, and replaces supposedly immaterial streams of data with highly material, tactile technologies, materials and fabrics. these turns to the analog are evident in, for example, craftivism and do-it-yourself movements, employing strategies such as reverse engineering, recycling, reuse, hacking, and modding. laura marks (2002: 152-153) speaks of a desire for indexicality among digital videomakers that she terms “analog nostalgia,” “a retrospective fondness for the ‘problems’ of decay and generational loss that analog video posed […] in a sort of longing for analog physicality.” but while there is a growing movement of neo-luddites, highly critical of as well as distancing themselves from digital cultures and technologies, most “analogists” appear to be digital natives (cf. marks, 2002), moving back and forth between different modes and codes as a manner of inhabiting communities that are as locally rooted as they are digitally connected. steampunk cultures provide compelling examples of a contemporary affective investment in the analog, coupled with intense digital connectivity. in this paper, i perform affective readings of steampunk as a way of thinking affect in analog and digital media and forms of embodiment in contemporary technological cultures. firstly, i will evoke affect as a manner of not only recognizing steampunk as visual spectacle, but to better understand the appeal of the analog in terms of a desire for technologies that can be felt powerfully, even feared – as expressed in the indtroductory quote by margaret ratt. a productive way of thinking such feelings of awe before the exposure of glimmering brass and the mechanical under-workings of cogs and cogwheels is through the “turn” to affect and materiality in cultural theory. secondly, i will critically engage with brian massumi’s (2002) notion of the superiority of the analog, which at first sight may seem to play straight into the hands of steampunks and their passion for the analog. then again, his moving in and with an analog register as dynamic and transformative depends on a digital register that is almost completely immobile and lifeless. this polarity fails to address how steampunks tend to shuttle, intensely, between the digital and the analog according to a logic that remains to be made explicit. finally, and in an attempt to think differently about affect between the analog and the digital, i will suggest that steampunk, rather than being characterized by a return to the analog (in a manner that requires a turning away from the digital), is more aptly understood in terms of the transdigital. within this paper, then, steampunk is used as an especially intriguing example of a broader tendency toward transdigital modes of using and sensing media in contemporary media landscapes. steampunk has been described as an “aesthetic technological movement” (the catastrophone orchestra and arts collective nyc, 2007), incorporating science fiction, art, engineering, and a vibrant 21st century subculture. it is characterized by a retro-futurist take on the steampowered technologies of the victorian era. rather than being re-enactors, steampunks are reimaginators with a punk do-it-yourself ethos, organized around the question: “what if we continued as an analog society instead of a digital one?” steampunk is certainly not one, but many, as well as replete with ambiguities and contradictions. there are those who emphasize the “steam” in steampunk, and tend to read as fairly romantic, neo-victorian, with an emphasis on aesthetics. and there are those who are more critical and “punk,” invested in the political potentials of technological anachronism. in brian massumi’s (2002) affect theory, the intimate connection between bodily movement and sensation is crucial. interestingly, “the digital” in his argument seems to completely shortcircuit the body in movement and as movement. massumi writes of the virtual as an exceedingly real, yet abstract, uncorporeal dimension of the body itself. to him, there is nothing more disturbing for thinking virtuality than to conflate the virtual with the digital and its ways to systematize, measure, and code. digital technologies, then, have connections to the virtual as potential only through “the analog.” but is it productive, or even possible, to speak of the analog as that which always proceeds, envelops and grounds the digital? and does the digital, by necessity, equal the machinic? there seems to be something of a slippage in massumi’s argument between modes of embodiment and affect on the one hand, and modes of technologies or media on the other. technically, it is reasonably easy to distinguish between analog and digital communication, between a many-valued continuum and a twovalued dis-continuum (even if every such distinction is not without its own problems and slippages). but in matters of the human, organic body, the question is much more complex (see sedgwick and frank, 1995). as has been clear from the first wave of cybernetics, without the digital, there would be no analog. in other words, it is only after the advent of the digital computer that previous generations of mechanical, analog computers could be named accordingly (for example, wilden, 1972). to conclude, i suggest the term transdigital to account for analog passions that are shaped through the digital in ways that concretely activate, but also move across the borders of, or beyond the digital. the transdigital gestures at such media practices that are digital at heart, but simultaneously transgress or challenge the category itself. in working with “trans,” i take the cue from transgender studies, and in particular susan stryker’s (1994) way of understanding transgender. to queer or trans the digital, then, is to transcend, transgress, or otherwise bend the boundaries of media and bodies. steampunk, rather than merely being a re-turn to a bygone era, is a re-consideration, or transing, of the (digital) present. time in steampunk is not linear, not chrono-logical, but tangled through temporal loops and folds, through a play with future (virtual) possibilities by an intricate entanglement of the analog and the digital. this is not mere analog nostalgia. this is transdigital affectivity in an anachronistic vein, a looking back with a twist as an attempt to inhabit the present differently. references kosofsky sedgwick, eve and adam frank. 1995. shame and its sisters: a silvan tomkins reader. durham, nc, and london: duke university press. marks, laura. 2002. touch: sensuous theory and multisensory media. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. massumi, brian. 2002. parables for the virtual: movement, affect, sensation. durham, nc: duke university press. ratt, margaret p. 2007. “issue one: putting the punk back into steampunk.” steampunk magazine 1. available online: http://www.steampunkmagazine.com/downloads/ (march 12, 2013). stryker, susan (1994) “my words to victor frankenstein above the village of chamounix: performing transgender rage.” glq 1(3): 227-254. the catastrophone orchestra and arts collective nyc. 2007. “what then, is steampunk?” steampunk magazine 1. http://www.combustionbooks.org/downloads/spm1-printing.pdf. (march 12, 2013). wilden, anthony. 1972. “analog and digital communication: on the relationship between negation, signification, and the emergence of the discrete element.” semiotica 6(1): 50-82. affective politics or political affection: online sexuality in turkey veronika tzankova sexuality in muslim societies has for long been functioning under the prescriptive norms of social institutions and religious principles of conduct (e.g. ilkkaracan 2008; shannahan 2009). for more than a decade there has been a significant effort for the political revitalization of islam in several middle eastern countries and most overtly in turkey (kadioğlu 1994). the politico-religious dynamics involved in the re-introduction of islamic values have played a significant role in the normative cultivation of affect, sexuality, and body politics. in this presentation, i explore the political potential of networked affect in the context of contemporary turkey through the analysis of turkish online sexual confession sites kirmiziitiraf.com ( 'redconfession.com') and erotikitiraf.com ( 'eroticconfession.com'), social network sites explicitly dedicated to the public sharing of sexual adventures, fantasies, and reflections. by situating the social dynamics mediated by these online platforms within the broader context of political islam in turkey, i argue that networked affect facilitates alternative forms of social and political counteraction. i start with the premise that although the internet is generally considered an information technology, it could just as well be called an affective technology. this means stepping outside the pure technicality of information systems to address affect (1) as "the imbrications of somatic and social systems" (protevi 2009, xiv) within and as (2) the medium which actualizes the potential of the virtual simultaneously as it virtualizes the body in a dynamic interaction filled up with indeterminacy (hansen 2004). this is the perspective from which i examine the political potential of affect within turkish online sexual confession sites as platforms where community members share their sexual confessions—experiences, fantasies, reflections—as short textual narratives (cf. ogan and cagiltay 2006: 803). the sites form a bricolage of sexual stories predominantly engaged with the explicit exploration of the body as a source of pleasure. i address this search for somatic pleasures in terms of the political affect that it involves, generates, and configures. since networked political affect lacks a tactile or determinate form of presence (see e.g. ahmed 2004; gould 2010; paasonen 2011), i appropriate john protevi's compositional scales that capture political affect at personal, group, and civic levels of imbricate social and somatic interactions (2009). with political affect, i refer to the mode, or layer, in which the members of turkish sexual networks participate in the construction of particular and publicly observable body politics that are in an oppositional relation to the normative political physiology of remerging islamic values. here affect is what deborah gould describes as "the tension between dominant accounts of what is and what might be" (2010, 32). sexual network members make their points by telling stories of how sex reflects and influences their somatic experiences. the sexual networks create spaces for political agency where personal accounts of body politics are exposed and made publicly available. accounts of affective states—of desire, lust, and approval – evoked in the sexual narratives generate affective responses and intensities in the readers. such affective states facilitate the reconsideration of deeply embedded patterns of thinking and feeling and thus open a channel for new imaginings (ibid). more specifically, the group composition of political affect within turkish online sexual networks is defined by the following three interlacing conditions: (1) existence of a supportive online community, (2) experiences of linguo-sexual pleasure, and (3) transgression: 1) the basic condition for the formation of the group layer of networked affect is the existence of an underlying online community where the sharing of sexual narratives and alternative body politics are constituted as social and intersubjective activity. because online communities emerge from the indefinite web of social and intersubjective interactions between network members, they contain the potential for social impact. jodi dean (2010) argues that affective networks generate a feeling of community. if we reverse dean's statement, we could argue that the feelings of community within online networks produce the condition for the existence of an affective network. 2) turkish online sexual networks mediate affective states by providing the conditions for transforming the physical sexual body into a verbal abstraction. on an online platform where the verbal and the sexual interconnect, language induces no less sexual production than is induced by it. this assemblage of the sexual and the textual produces intensive linguo-sexual pleasure which—when shared and disseminated within a group setting—gains affective resonance through its capacity to "exceed what is actualized through language or gesture" (gould 2010, 27). what is of significance here is affect's capacity to facilitate the experience of one type of thing in terms of another. it is precisely this interchangeability of experiences that unleashes the political potential of affect as the collective gathering of a sexual counterpublic within the process of transforming one emotion into another (collins 2001). 3) turkish online sexual networks effect a double movement: on the one hand, they violate the socio-political (and religious) rules of sexual conduct. following georges bataille (1986), this violation, or transgression, then adds to the intensification of desire. yet the sexual networks aim to normalize sexual transgression, on the other. these apparently contradictory movements of transgression and normalization seem to function in symbiosis in the realm of networked communication. their mutual dynamic can be best visualized as a circular relationship where social control is transformed into sexual pleasure and where sexual pleasure gives shape to alternative forms of social control. whereas turkish governmental politics have extensively reinforced morally conservative sexual norms for the last several years, turkish online sexual networks have been expanding sexual practice, expression, and understanding. the pursuit of liberal sexuality and sexual values within these networks involves a counteractive political investment. tiziana terranova (2004, 2) observes that there "is a tendency of informational flows to spill over from whatever network they are circulating in and hence to escape the narrowness of the channel and to open up to a large milieu." terranova's insight focuses our attention to the multiplicity of indeterminate experiences that information networks may provide or mutate into. based on these possibilities for shift and mutation, i argue that turkish sexual networks are indeed affective networks with real political potential. these networks have continuously organized themselves around two overlapping and mutually complementary fields of experience: namely those of sexual desire and political counteraction. these fields produce affect while also being produced by it. references: ahmed, sara. 2004. the cultural politics of emotion. new york: routledge. bataille, georges. 1986. erotism  : death & sensuality. san francisco: city lights books. collins, randall. 2001. “social movement and the focus of emotional attention.” in passionate politics: emotions and social movements, ed. jeff goodwin, james m. jasper, and francesca polletta, 27–44. chicago: university of chicago press. dean, jodi. 2010. blog theory  : feedback and capture in the circuits of drive. cambridge, uk; malden, ma: polity. gould, deborah. 2010. “on affect and protest.” in political emotions, ed. janet staiger, ann cvetkovich, and ann morris reynolds, 18–44. new agendas in communication. new york: routledge. hansen, mark b. n. 2004. new philosophy for new media. cambridge, mass: mit press. ilkkaracan, pınar. 2008. “how adultery almost derailed turkey’s aspiration to join the european union.” in deconstructing sexuality in the middle east: challenges and discourses, ed. pınar i̇lkkaracan, 41–64. aldershot, england  ; burlington, vt: ashgate. kadioğlu, ayşe. 1994. “women’s subordination in turkey: is islam really the villain?” middle east journal vol. 48 (4): 645–660. ogan, c. l., and kursat cagiltay. 2006. “confession, revelation and storytelling: patterns of use on a popular turkish website.” new media & society 8 (5) (october 1): 801–823. paasonen, susanna. 2011. carnal resonance: affect and online pornography. cambridge, mass.  ; london: mit press. protevi, john. 2009. political affect: connecting the social and the somatic. posthumanities 7. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. shannahan, dervla sara. 2009. “sexual ethics, marriage, and sexual autonomy: the landscapes for muslimat and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered muslims.” contemporary islam 3 (1) (january 31): 59–78. terranova, tiziana. 2004. network culture  : politics for the information age. london; ann arbor, mi: pluto press. fast flames: affective intensities of online debate susanna paasonen understood as intensities, sensations, and impressions created in encounters between and among people, online platforms, images, texts, and computer technologies, affect has been central to the uses and user-experiences of the internet since its early days. it can be argued that affective intensities drive online exchanges and attach people to particular platforms, threads, and groups, and that social media uses are indeed largely driven by a search for affective intensity -a desire for some kind of affective jolt, for something to capture one’s attention (dean 2010). the desire for intensity provokes the interest and curiosity of users; it grabs their attention, and drives their movements across networks, sites, files, and discussion threads. the “grab” (senft, forthcoming) of a discussion thread for example then depends on the intensities it affords. this presentation sets out to conceptualize the affective dynamics of online debate through the thematic analysis of a short-lived yet heated finnish facebook exchange during the summer of 2012. the incident began when a female participant of a midsummer dance club voiced her disapproval of heteronormative dj announcements in a post on the club’s openly accessible facebook event wall. her post inspired a wave of comments that trickled to blogs and online columns, and the incident soon became national news. the thread (consisting of 728 posts and comments made by 173 users between june 23 and june 28, 2012) marked a linguistically, regionally, and temporally limited peak of intensity in the flow of facebook updates and comments. i nevertheless argue that it connected to, and even exemplified, themes central to online exchanges and their affective resonances more generally. before becoming national news, the thread focused (more or less) on: heteronormativity; discrimination against sexual and ethnic minorities; club and dance cultures; social relations of power; and the fairness of the critique targeted against the club organizers. as news items and blog posts circulated and accumulated, new people joined in to express surprise, amusement, and aggression, to add absurd comments and links, and to attack and support one another. as articulations of positive and negative affect layered, oscillated, and intensified, the debate grew increasingly antagonistic and fragmented. some participants discussed the equal rights of sexual minorities and the persistence of discrimination while for others the matter was one of singular dj lines at a hipster club, and ultimately much ado about nothing. some zoomed out from the incident to address social power structures while others zoomed in to address the events of the club night. some discussed matters of principle even as others could not see the point. these zooms were fast and out of synch with one another. from these incompatible points of departure, the debate evolved into considerations of more inclusive clubbing practices, as well as to trolling aiming to provoke other participants. while it is possible to interpret the thread as an open forum for debating social equality and the politics of naming, it resulted in an increased polarization of views rather than democratic negotiation or resolution (cf. robinson 2005). as zizi papacharissi (2002) notes, the habermasian ideal of the public sphere as one of critical rational exchange can be mapped onto emotionally wired online discussions only with some difficulty. i argue that the thread in fact points to the degree to which online exchanges, once heated up, are animated by a search for affective intensity and by provocation rather than a desire for negotiation. while disjointed, the debate largely revolved around the woman who started the debate and remained its most active participant with a total of 55 messages (and whom i refer to as “korhonen”). most comments referred back to those made by korhonen: she became the sticky node of the discussion and it was to her that most affective intensities stuck. she was accused of both unwillingness to have fun and of willingness to intentionally spoil the fun of others with her criticism. korhonen was gradually labeled a queer-feminist killjoy figure (see ahmed 2010) and as the thread evolved, comments made to and about her grew increasingly personal and vicious. it is noteworthy that both korhonen’s predominance in the debate and the disjointedness and sharpness of the thread owed to the affordances and limitations of facebook as a platform. in a facebook discussion thread, users see the very first post and the newest comments made on it above a box asking them to write a response of their own. getting to the very beginning of a thread can be cumbersome and requires some clicking. since the midsummer thread soon consisted of hundreds of comments, participants entering it later on often stated their unfamiliarity with much of it beyond the first post. this owed both to the laboriousness of reading through the mass of comments and to the site architecture that encourages interaction with the most recent ones. as one new participant after another was provoked by the first message, or tried to provoke its author, the flames of the debate kept going: the platform itself helped the sparks fly. all in all, the sudden height and bright heat of the midsummer facebook flames seemed disproportionate. how did a comment on an open event wall create such a blaze? the question can be answered by examining the themes and discussion styles particular to the thread: the various frustrations and political affinities expressed, and the roles adopted during its course. i also suggest that explanations can found from the more general dynamics of online debate, as they tie into the particular affordances and limitations of online platforms. affect both congeals and sharpens in online debates as readers and participants fill in the gaps of, extrapolate meanings from, and project values and assumptions onto the messages of others, reading some words carefully while skipping over the rest. the sharpness of affect grabs, appeals and disturbs, attracts and repulses, pulls users close and pushes them away again. the oscillation between different, often starkly posed and juxtaposing arguments is part and parcel of the overall rhythm of online exchange and social media use, of constant clicks and shifts from one page, site, video, and image to another, of refreshes and perpetual search for new documents, images, and intensities. these movements are fast inasmuch as they are persistent, driven by a desire for something that will grab and stick, rather than just slide by. such attachments are, nevertheless, of the fleeting kind. formerly viral videos are soon forgotten, sites lose their stickiness as users migrate elsewhere, and flame wars come to a halt. fast to enflame and quick to die, online debates are fast in their rhythm and tempo, yet the resonances they evoke may live on in their effects that are difficult to foresee. references: ahmed, sara. 2010. the promise of happiness. durham: duke university press. dean, jodi. 2010. blog theory: feedback and capture in the circuits of drive. oxford: polity. papacharissi, zizi. 2002. “the virtual sphere: the internet as public sphere.” new media and society 4(9): 9–27. robinson, laura. 2005. “debating the events of september 11th: discursive and interactional dynamics in three online fora.” journal of computer-mediated communication 10(4), http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue4/robinson.html. senft, terri. forthcoming. “old spice under my skin: notes on viral marketing in ’postracial’ america.” in networked affect, edited by ken hillis, susanna paasonen and michael petit. cambridge: mit press. 1 beyond freedom and oppression social media, refusal, and the politics of participation zeena feldman city university london united kingdom zinaida.feldman.1@city.ac.uk abstract this paper explores the relationship between social media, writing, and resistance. drawing on a 2-year ethnographic study of the niche social network site couchsurfing.org, i examine the dynamics and mechanisms of resistance that emerged within the site following couchsurfing’s conversion from a non-profit to a for-profit structure. i focus specifically on three text-based tactics of resistance used by site members, and through the work of patrick hanafin and maurice blanchot, demonstrate how these tactics of refusal prompt a radical rethinking of “refusal” as such. via the couchsurfing case, i also argue that a proper appreciation of social media’s political significance and the ideological stakes of “being” online requires attention to the conflictual relation between democracy, oppression, and capitalism. finally, the paper reflects on the possibilities and limits of critique from within. keywords resistance; refusal; couchsurfing; social network sites. this is a story about social media, writing, and resistance. drawn from a 2-year ethnographic study of the social network site couchsurfing.org, it is a story that flags up some of the most salient, unsettled, and frankly, unsettling questions about social media’s political significance. these questions, i want to suggest, are alive precisely 2 because of the foundational hybridity or impurity of the internet. as jodi dean, jon anderson and geert lovink (2006, p. xviii) point out, the internet was never completely public or private; it migrated among government, academic, and corporate sectors, not least because [the internet] was not a unitary technology but itself an agglomeration of several existing ones, each with its own body of technical experts and their cultures of work, accountability, and legitimacy. (2006, p. xviii). it seems to me, then, that the task for researchers concerned with the broader politics of the internet is clear: to locate, map, and unpack—to the extent possible— those “cultures of work, accountability, and legitimacy” which inform the particular technologies and mediated social spaces under analysis. it is precisely by unearthing these competing and constitutive narratives, histories, and agendas that we can begin to get at the ideological stakes of “being” online. indeed, as andrew feenberg suggests, technology and ideology are two sides of the same coin. for him, “[v]alues are not the opposite of facts […] (because a technical) environment [is] shaped by the values that presided over its creation. technologies are the crystallized expressions of those values” (feenberg, 2010, p. 12). through examination of couchsurfing and its regimes of communication and resistance, this paper attempts to think through how this twinning of technology and ideology shapes the politics of participation. the paper proceeds in four parts. the first develops the notion of internet hybridity in the social media context. the second provides a brief history of couchsurfing. the subsequent section details three text-based tactics of refusal used by discontented couchsurfing members. finally, i conclude with some thoughts about the limits of critique from within. the hybridity of social media by way of beginning, it is useful to flesh out a bit further how the notion of internet hybridity can be understood through the lens of social media. this 3 understanding informs the paper’s overall discussion of the possibilities and limits of social media as technologies of resistance. in both academic literature and the popular press, discussion of social media is often linked to the dual discourses of democratic empowerment and counter-hegemonic resistance. this narrative was popularized in large part by the so-called twitter revolution in 2009, when iranians used the microblogging site to organize protests against the re-election of mahmoud ahmadinejad. through twitter and other participatory platforms, accounts of mass opposition and regime violence were broadcast around the world and social media became rhetorical shorthand for democracy, empowerment, and populist rebellion (see kamalipour, 2010). a year later, we saw the same lines of argumentation accompany coverage of the “arab spring” revolutions—most notably in tunisia, bahrain, and egypt—where twitter and facebook were habitually represented as technologies of liberation (e.g. sabadello, 2012). against this optimistic strand, more critical scholarship attended to the repressive uses of social media in these same struggles (e.g. morozov, 2009). that work pointed to the complicity of internet technologies in campaigns of government surveillance, intimidation, and far worse. meanwhile, as facebook made its $100 billion stock market debut, social media platforms became increasingly entangled in capitalist frames of reference. so, are social media inherently democratic? oppressive? or are they merely concerned with the “logic” of accumulation? put another way, can we most properly understand the politics of social media as emancipatory, repressive, or consumerist? recalling the notion of internet hybridity, i want to explore via the couchsurfing case how all three of these narratives together co-construct social media’s political agency. furthermore, i want to suggest that it is the conflictual relation between these three readings and how that relation is managed, negotiated, and contested that informs the political register of online participation. 4 couchsurfing: a brief history1 couchsurfing (cs) is a social network site for travelers. launched in 2004 as a non-commercial platform for hospitality exchange, the site now has nearly 4.5 million users worldwide (“couchsurfing statistics”, 2012). 2 additionally, cs had a network of volunteers called ambassadors, which consisted at its peak of approximately 2,000 people. as the title implies, cs ambassadors were cheerleaders for the couchsurfing project. they were tasked with organizing events in their local communities, welcoming new members, and fielding cs basically works like this: you sign up, create a profile, and then you can coordinate stays with other members in their homes and have people stay at yours. and this is all done for free. members never pay to host or “surf.” the couchsurfing organization – through its website and communiqués to members – framed non-commercial hospitality exchange as a means of fostering intercultural understanding and tolerance. this was aimed ultimately, in their words, at “creating a better world one couch at a time” (figure 1). thus, couchsurfing articulated itself as both a utopian set of values and a travel technology. the other relevant background is that couchsurfing was built and maintained primarily by its members, very few of whom where paid for their work. alongside technical roles, volunteers were also responsible for answering member emails, translating the site into more than two dozen languages, investigating member disputes, and moderating nearly 40,000 online discussion forums. 1 the findings presented here are culled from a 2-year ethnography of couchsurfing, which i have conducted as part of a larger research project. my findings are based, in part, on participant-observation in two online discussion forums on the couchsurfing site, 48 in-depth member interviews, and content analysis of 300 member profiles and approximately 4,000 member testimonials. where members are referred to by name, pseudonyms have been used. to further protect participant anonymity, i have also opted out of including full urls to the online discussions quoted throughout the paper. 2 couchsurfing claimed to have almost 4.5 million users in statistics published on june 19, 2012 (“couchsurfing statistics,” 2012). however, this figure refers to the number of profiles registered on the site, not the number of unique users. interviews i conducted with jamie, a volunteer involved in cs site administration, confirmed that couchsurfing’s published user count included duplicate and inactive profiles (j. smith, personal communication, august 7 and 27, 2011). cs co-founder casey fenton, speaking publicly in paris in october 2011, put the number of active users at 1 million. 5 queries from current and prospective members. although not cs employees, ambassadors were expected to conform to a 12-part ambassador code of conduct, justified on the grounds that ambassadors’ behavior as members, travellers, guests, hosts, and volunteers is a direct reflection on couchsurfing […] it is [their] responsibility to represent the community well…. [they] are the face, voice, eyes and ears of the community. this responsibility means that all ambassadors will be held to the highest standards of personal and professional conduct. (“ambassador ethics code,” 2011). figure 1: couchsurfing homepage, april 19, 2011. beyond this, ordinary cs members – so not volunteers in any formal sense of the term – did the site’s main work of hospitality exchange; they were the ones welcoming strangers into their homes. ordinary members also organized local events, they created wikis with resources for travelers and hosts, and they contributed to the site’s discussion forums. thus, in one sense, cs can be approached as an example of communitarian self-management. 6 at the same time, the cs organization – although a registered non-profit – was raising a lot of money from its members. the available financial data suggests that between 2004 and august 2011, cs raised nearly $6 million through direct donations, merchandise sales, and primarily, an address verification scheme. this is a significant sum, considering that the organization – with no fixed office and few paid staff – had very little overhead. given members’ tremendous generosity over time, the organization’s announcement in august 2011 that it had become a for-profit corporation, and had accepted $7.6 million from two venture capital investors, came as a shock. company leadership claimed that for various legal reasons they had no choice but to convert to a for-profit structure, but their justifications did not hold water for a core of committed and engaged members. indeed, many of these members read the site’s corporatization as outright theft of community-made, and therefore community-owned, resources. in response, these discontented members launched a text-based campaign of refusal. radical politics of refusal in this campaign, members used writing as an instrument to draw attention to and critique couchsurfing’s commercialization and the ethics thereof. in this section, i focus specifically on three textual practices by which couchsurfers expressed their resistance: (1) watchdog disclosure; (2) profile reappropriation; and (3) reference warfare. through these practices, cs members took up the “right to refusal,” which patrick hanafin argues, “involves a questioning of why it is that the law presumes to be in control of language. it involves a certain refusal to submit to the law, to be insubordinate” (hanafin, 2004, p. 14). watchdog disclosure much of this insubordination took shape in, or at least inspiration from, two cs discussion forums, “brainstorm redefined” (bsr) and “we are against cs becoming a for-profit corporation” (we are against). we are against went live 3 days after couchsurfing’s for-profit announcement. bsr was founded in 2007 and was originally 7 conceived as a platform for members concerned with the sustainability of the cs project and the usability of its website. but over time, and well before couchsurfing’s forprofit conversion, the focus of bsr shifted. rather than a space for suggesting system upgrades, it assumed a watchdog function and became a mouthpiece for members demanding governance reform and increased transparency on the part of cs leadership. it became a space where members published information about donation mishandling, volunteer mistreatment, staff misbehavior, and various other improprieties. it was also the forum for posting couchsurfing financial and legal documents, internal correspondence, and other operational details, some of which was leaked by anonymous whistleblowers who worked or volunteered for cs in an official capacity and some of which – for example, legal incorporation documents and revenue projections – was obtained and collated by concerned members with no official link to cs operations. after the for-profit announcement, bsr members devoted significant resources to reconstructing the chronology of cs’s corporatization. they contacted lawyers, accountants, and other hospitality exchange organizations, and posted their findings in the group. they also contacted government officials in the states of new hampshire, where cs was originally registered (as a non-profit); delaware, where the for-profit cs was incorporated; and california, home to cs’s new office. and they communicated with b lab, an organization that certified cs as a socially responsible corporation. one explicit aim of this fact-gathering was to prove that cs leadership intended to commercialize the site long before it announced the for-profit conversion. a related aim was to demonstrate the persistent dishonesty of cs leadership. for some members, exposing this dishonesty seemed to be an end in itself. watchdog disclosure was, in this sense, rebellion through transparency. moreover, it was rebellion largely delinked from aspirations of radical transformation.3 3 there is a notable exception to this. for at least two participants, watchdog disclosure offered a pathway toward legal action. these participants defined their “tactics and strategy [were] always centered on the hope for concrete legal change in the situation” and viewed information sharing as a means by which to recruit more human resources (i.e. researcher-activists) in support of that effort (s. adams, personal communication, july 6, 2012). after all, making documents and accusations public was unlikely to make cs give back the venture capital money. and educating 8 users about management indiscretions was no guarantee that people would stop using the site. indeed, there were plenty of people in both bsr and we are against defending cs management and its right to profit from the website. according to one member “some people just react emotionally to words such as investors, but […] [t]here is lots of good that can come of all these developments”.4 one couchsurfer posted that“if we [do] not speak the truth, [the] system will get [even] worse!! […] these guys betrayed me, because all the work was done by volunteers, who were working for free”. thus, even within seemingly reform-oriented spaces like we are against and bsr, there was actually no consensus on how to evaluate the ethics of the site’s commercialization. furthermore, if everyone who read the watchdog disclosures decided to stop using the site, cs would lose its internal voice of dissent. this hints at one of the paradoxes of critique from within, online. on the one hand, being members of cs enabled users to set up forums like bsr where they could take cs leadership to task. but on the other hand, for corporations like cs, online dialogue or “community participation” is profitable regardless of content. so long as users are producing data and spending time on the site, they are adding to company value. 5 but what is being overlooked there is that speaking on the site – whether it’s speaking truth or lies – speaking, or writing, is just another form of free labor. this means that even a group called “we are against cs becoming a for-profit corporation” – for all its reformist ambitions – denotes the impossibility of free speech in the cs case. 6 4 posted on http://www.couchsurfing.org by alex, 2011. 5 posted on http://www.couchsurfing.org by eliza, 2011. 6 some cs participants were acutely aware of this paradox and they diverted part of their disclosure activities to independent, ad hoc structures—for instance, listservs and an autonomous website. this was done in part to continue information sharing without contributing to the couchsurfing corporation’s data inventory. for members concerned with the possibility of legal action against couchsurfing, this was also a means of protecting their discovery efforts and concealing information for strategic reasons (s. adams, personal communication, july 6, 2012). this is to distinguish between two kinds of free speech. one is the 9 ability to say anything without fear of censorship. the other is a form of speech delinked from economic calculation. thus, while cs has plenty of the first kind, the second form of expression has arguably been rendered impossible because “speech” on the for-profit site—no matter its content—automatically adds to company value. profile reappropriation the second text-based tactic of refusal that i encountered is what i term “profile reappropriation.” profile reappropriation is a practice whereby users made their cs profiles into unsanctioned spaces of protest and information sharing.7 figure 2: “not for sale” profile photos. for some members, this involved changing their main profile photo to include a banner that announced: not for sale, sold, sold out, or some variation on this theme (figure 2). members of the we are against forum even set up an independent website called pimp my c$ profile, which enabled visitors to add these banners to their photos (figure 3). 7 in earlier versions of this paper, i referred to this practice as “profile hijacking.” two of my informers took issue with this choice of terminology, arguing that “hijacking” necessarily connotes the seizing of someone else’s property. as one informer put it, “i cannot hijack my profile” (s. adams, personal communication, july 6, 2012). while i am sympathetic to this argument, i find it necessary to problematize the assumption that online profiles are private property. this task, however, is beyond the scope of this paper. 10 figure 3: pimp my c$ profile homepage, accessed june 19, 2012. couchsurfers also articulated their resistance in other spaces of the profile template, including sections where one can describe oneself, one’s philosophy, one’s couch, and share one’s opinion of the cs project. therein, some “rebels” stated that they would no longer be offering their couch through cs because of the corporatization. many explained that they would continue hosting, but through bewelcome, a non-profit hospitality exchange website that they praised for its transparency and democratic governance. these members typically used their cs profiles to link to bewelcome and many included the bewelcome logo on their cs page (figure 4). at the same time, some “rebels” decided that any information they put into the cs template would ultimately benefit the cs corporation (i.e. add to its data inventory), so they intentionally stripped their profiles of content. meanwhile, others used their profiles simply to explain why they felt let down by cs leadership. members were also quite clever in increasing the visibility of their rebel profiles. in cs, users must publish their couch status – meaning, they must indicate whether they are able to host people in their home or not. answering “yes” means that the profile appears in the search results of travelers looking for a host. so here, discontented 11 members figured out a way to use the cs system against itself – they turned their couch status to “yes” and thereby got exposure for their profiles and their grievances. figure 4: examples of bewelcome endorsement on couchsurfers’ profiles. reference warfare “reference warfare” is a third textual tactic of refusal i encountered in couchsurfing. this refers to seizing couchsurfing’s main security feature – the posting of references – and operationalizing it in the service of attacking cs power structures. on couchsurfing, references work in much the same way that they do on ebay. in the cs case, this typically means that after you stay at someone’s house, you rate the encounter as positive, negative, or neutral and write a narrative about your experience. the rating and narrative then display on both members’ profiles. members of we are against sought to take advantage of this function and launched a campaign that advocated posting negative references to the profile of casey fenton, cs’s figurehead and co-founder. 12 in the words of one member: it's time to fight for the couch surfing community we have worked so hard to build, and the best way to do so is by using the system against itself: we are now starting to post negative references on casey fenton's profile and no matter how fast the website administration struggles to delete them, when they start coming by the hundreds … they will have to just let go and let our voice be heard…. the corporate investors are watching casey's profile right now: let them hear our voice and realize that cs will not be a good business investment for them that cs is not just a website but a community of volunteers whose kindness and generosity is not for sale!8 1. when the person leaving the reference has clearly never interacted with the other member at all, except by reading their profile; and indeed, many members did post negative references and reposted them in the discussion group as a form of testimony. but in the end, all of the negative references were deleted from fenton’s profile. site administrators justified this on the grounds that the references violated two guidelines governing cs’s reference system. specifically, admins retained the right to remove references: 2. when the reference is only related to a member’s work for couchsurfing.9 yet members continued to post negative references, at least for a while. some did this in an articulated hope that it would expose cs leadership’s dishonesty to its new investors. other members hoped that it might prompt cs to rethink its decision to go for-profit. but others were resigned to the change. one “we are against” member wrote that despite having left fenton a negative reference: basically i think it's too late to do anything, the contracts are signed, it's a done deal […] it won't do much good, they have enough apathetic or 8 posted on http://www.couchsurfing.org by carlos, 2011. 9 posted on http://www.couchsurfing.org by anne, 2011. 13 indifferent users, and the new and unsuspecting ones that will come from now on, who will not feel betrayed at all since they come into the new state of affairs, but still, they should know what happened.10 with the recent selling out and big-shot investors they [cs] have joined the 1% […] they have betrayed… their users and original statements and policy. all because of profit […] i do not wish to comply to [what] they want […] cs will never be able to check and verify that, they might as well hire cs police from the influx of big money […] i cannot donate free things, time and advice anymore […] i am honest about it...guests must bring everything they wish to use by themselves, from food to toiletpaper, drinks etc etc. no so despite accepting cs’s commercialization, there was also a flicker of hope that the reference campaign would leave a trace of indignation, which might be picked up by those to come. radical refusal taken together, the text-based tactics of watchdog disclosure, profile reappropriation, and reference warfare represent a mode of what i call “radical refusal”. this is a form of refusal that exceeds the simplicity of yes-no argumentation; it exceeds the ends-oriented logic of winning and losing. maurice blanchot (1986) writes about this sort of excess in relation to herman melville’s short story “bartleby the scrivener,” in which a clerk is assigned tasks by his superiors until one day he answers, “i would prefer not to.” hanafin (personal communication, january 25, 2012) has noted that at this point, bartleby achieves power through negative affirmation. he is not saying, “no, i will not do what you ask.” rather, he is foreclosing or exceeding the schematic of yesno argumentation. he is radically complicating what it might mean to refuse. in couchsurfing, a similar sort of refusal emerged. one particularly interesting gesture of this refusal came from a participant who wrote: 10 posted on http://www.couchsurfing.org by marie, 2011. 14 free wifi anymore, or use of computer, telephone etc […] i consider my profile a free advert for my home and time...i adjusted to the new cs. i am also going for profit now...11 to close: the cs case points to the paradoxes of a campaign of refusal launched through the very structure whose legitimacy is under attack. here, writing enacted through participatory technologies offered the promise of emancipation but because it operated through the discourse and architecture of capitalism, writing simultaneously posed a challenge to the rebel’s “right to refuse the way in which… language here, this member is not refusing membership in cs. he is instead reconfiguring his practice in a way that underscores the company’s new capitalist rationale and this member’s participation in it. by laying claim to the space in-between transgression and complicity, he too is radically complicating what it means to refuse. conclusion writing in the cs case contributed to a project of rebellion, and this project was collaborative and democratic (insofar as participation was open to any cs member) and articulated emancipatory aims. at the same time, the project was rife with conflict and disagreement. forum members didn’t all want the same thing or share the same opinion; and their online arguments very clearly captured the competing narratives that constitute the web’s hybrid social texture. there was plenty of oppression and democratic practice and support for capitalism. and most importantly, there was no consensus between these narratives. this evokes mouffe and laclau’s work on radical democracy, in which consensus is not only beside the point, but actually incompatible with the democratic ideal. mouffe specifically argues that “acknowledging the ineradicability of the conflictual dimension of social life, far from undermining the democratic project, is the necessary condition for grasping the challenge to which democratic politics is confronted” (2005, p. 4). 11 posted on http://www.couchsurfing.org by adam, 2011. 15 taxonomizes [him or her as] subject’ (hanafin, 2004, p. 4). this is not to suggest that the market’s claims on social media trump those of emancipation or oppression. instead, it signals an opportunity to think further about how social media’s competing discourses co-constitute the politics of participation. it also offers an occasion to reflect on the limits of critique from within. in the end, the couchsurfers’ resistance—although it inspired passion and awareness— did not change the direction of the cs organization. but that does not mean it was pointless or inconsequential. instead, their campaign of radical refusal can be thought in hanafin’s terms as an “interruption, which neither destroys nor recreates but leaves the present not quite as it was” (hanafin, 2004, p. 12). acknowledgments this research was supported by the centre for cultural policy and management at city university london. i would like to thank juliet steyn and anonymous couchsurfers for their incisive comments on earlier versions of this paper. references ambassador ethics code. (2011). retrieved may 16, 2011, from http://www.couchsurfing.org/amb_ethics.html. blanchot, m. (1986). the writing of the disaster. (a smock, trans.) lincoln: university of nebraska press. (original work published 1980). couchsurfing. (2011). retrieved april 19, 2011, from http://www.couchsurfing.org. couchsurfing statistics. (2012). retrieved june 19, 2011, from http://www.couchsurfing.org/statistics.html. dean, j., anderson, j. & lovink, g. (2006). introduction: the postdemocratic governmentality of networked societies. in j. dean, j. anderson, & g. lovink (eds.), reformatting politics: information technology and global civil society (pp. xv-xxix). new york & london: routledge. 16 feenberg, a. (2010). ten paradoxes of technology. techné, 14(1), 3-15. retrieved from http://www.secure.pdcnet.org/techne/content/techne_2010_0014_0001_0003_0015. hanafin, p. (2004). the writer’s refusal and the law’s malady. law and literature, 34(1), 3-14. kamalipour, y. r. (ed.) (2010). media, power, and politics in the digital age: the 2009 presidential election uprising in iran. plymouth: rowman & littlefield publishers. morozov, e. (2009). iran: downside of the ‘twitter revolution.’ dissent, 56(4), 10-14. mouffe, c. (2005). on the political. new york & london: routledge. sabadello, m. (2012). the role of new media for the democratisation processes in the arab world. in z. sereghy, s. bunk, & b. preiss (eds.), the arab revolutions: reflections on the role of civil society, human rights and new media in the transformation processes (pp. 11-19). stadtschlaining: austrian study center for peace and conflict resolution. retrieved july 4, 2012, from http://www.aspr.ac.at/sak2011/sanfran09.pdf. microsoft word 913-657-1-pb.docx reconfiguring  embodiment:  online  experimentation  and  embodied  practices   of  self     abstract   this panel consists of the following papers: “anonymity in chatroulette: embodied practices within online impression management”; “the embodied mods: how modders in virtual spaces embody practices of self through virtual community creation and values”; “there and back again a self-shooters tale: reconfiguring embodiment via selfies”; “internet dating: technologies appropriation of the body for targeted relationship initiation”. research covers a variety of platforms – chatroulette, tumblr.com; skyrim nexus; adultfriendfinder.com, and redhotpie.com.au. authors have conducted visual narrative analysis; textual analysis of data pulled from a blended ethnographic study; autoethnographic analysis of active participationobservation, and discourse analysis. keywords embodied self; modding; self-shooting; internet dating; chatroulette advocates and critics alike have long claimed “virtuality” as a space of identity play, construction, and tourism, either a (safe) space of exploration (alvesson et al, 2008; bargh & mckenna, 2004; bargh, mckenna & fitzsimons, 2002; baym, 2000; boyd, 2006, 2007; boyd & heer, 2006; boyd & ellison, 2007; daneback, 2006; hardey, 2002; joinson, 2008; ross, 2005; whitty, 2003) or zone of dysfunction and deceit (brym & lenton, 2001; gibbs, ellison & heino, 2006; toma, hancock & ellison, 2008). how do we navigate the space of intermixing, the borderlands of identities as the distinctions between “virtual” and “real” continues to blur (orgad, 2009; baym & markham, 2009)? as online users blend digital and physical practices, the meanings attached to the self and the body are reconfigured, ranging from discovery to obfuscation. in late-modernity, the body and the self have become sites of interaction, appropriation, and reappropriation (giddens, 1991, p.218). some users who experiment online are impelled to transition bodily, while others return to normative expression. self-evaluation and playacting as ways of testing the boundaries of social roles may lead to reconfiguring of habits, customs, and representations. in this context, the increased participation in media content creation and the consequently blurred role of “gatekeeper” (see jenkins, 2006; deuze, 2007) is another factor in the reconfiguration of embodiment. for example, as a result of online experimentation, individuals may select a new hobby, career, or professional identity, and thus become a member of a physical community of practice, which would again minimize the distance between online and offline selves. through produsage (burns, 2006) practices, the virtual self is implemented into modified, cultural content (cf. ludic practices and identity, aarseth, 1998). some virtual worlds and online communities inspire a material turn, while others keep users bound within the “magic circle” of the digital imaginative. our work will examine the embodied identity projects in the borderlands of material and mediated self across a range of platforms and practices, including appropriation of users’ bodies and sexualities for the purpose of internet dating, modding as a form of cultural expression and community engagement, impression building in chatroulette, and self-shooting as a technology of self. our panel explores how online and offline practices reconfigure the meaning of the embodied self for ourselves and those around us through innovative applications of qualitative methodologies. specifically, this panel’s authors conduct visual narrative analysis of images, captions, ethnographic field notes, and interviews of a self-shooters’ community on tumblr.com; textual analysis of data pulled from a blended internet ethnographic study including field research, interviews, and participant observation on the popular mod distribution and news channels steam workshop and skyrim nexus; autoethnographic analysis of active participation-observation in chatroulette (chatroulette.com), and discourse analysis of adultfriendfinder (adultfriendfinder.com) and redhotpie (redhotpie.com.au). through our combined research, this panel demonstrates the relationships between self and community, particularly within the blurred role of creator and consumer of game content while modding. it inspects how interactions or representations in internet dating sites can be incompatible with those in the actual world, not due to intended deceit, but because of a failure to recognize how the internet may allow the true self to be more easily expressed. this panel also offers the first academic examination of chatroulette as an ethnographic site of analysis and demonstrates the importance of the socially-enacted, embodied self in online encounters that center upon quick evaluations of the body. in addition, it explores how we can construct a sexier, more lovable “reflexive body” as a result of aesthetic self-stylization and critical self-awareness in self-shooting and body-blogging. via analyses of the aformentioned virtual-material practices, this panel illuminates contemporary internet research phenomena of modding, chatroulette, self-shooting, and dating. this panel extends the discussion of embodied self-identity online and contributes to new knowledge on the material return of the body in the realm of the virtual. references: aarseth, e. (1997). cybertext: perspectives on ergodic literature. baltimore: johns hopkins university press. alvesson, m., lee ashcraft, k., & thomas, r. (2008). identity matters: reflections on the construction of identity scholarship in organization studies. organization, 15(1), 5–28. doi:10.1177/1350508407084426 bargh, j. a, & mckenna, k. y. a. (2004). the internet and social life. annual review of psychology, 55, 573–90. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.55.090902.141922 bargh, j. a., mckenna, k. y. a., & fitzsimons, g. m. (2002). can you see the real me  ? activation and expression of the “ true self ” on the internet. journal of social issues 58(1), 33–48. baym, n. k. (2000). tune in, log on: soaps, fandom, and online community. thousand oaks, sage. baym, n. k., markham, a. n. (2009). introduction. making smart choices on shifting ground. in markham, a. n., baym, n. k. (eds.) internet inquiry, conversations about method. thousand oaks: sage. boyd, d. (2007). ‘why youth (heart) social network sites: the role of networked publics in teenage social life.’ in buckingham, d. (ed.). macarthur foundation series on digital learning – youth, identity, and digital media volume (pp. 119-142). cambridge, ma: mit press. boyd, d. (2007). ‘social network sites: public, private, or what?’ knowledge tree, 13. boyd, d. and heer, j. (2006). ‘profiles as conversation: networked identity performance on friendster.’ proceedings of the 39th hawaii international conference on system sciences – 2006. boyd, d. m., & ellison, n. b. (2007). social network sites: definition, history, and scholarship. journal of computer-mediated communication, 13(1), 210–230. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00393. brym, r. j., & lenton, r. l. (2001). love online: a report on digital dating in canada. retrieved from: http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/brym/loveonline.pdf. bruns, axel (2006) towards produsage: futures for user-led content production. in sudweeks, f., hrachovec, h. & ess, c. (eds.) proceedings cultural attitudes towards communication and technology, pp. 275-284, tartu, estonia. daneback, k. (2006). love and sexuality on the internet. landscape. deuze, m. (2007). media work. cambridge: polity press. gibbs, j. l., ellison, n. b., & heino, r. d. (2006). self-presentation in online personals: the role of anticipated future interaction, selfdisclosure, and perceived success in internet dating. communication research, 33, 1-26. giddens a. (2010 [1991]). modernity and self identity, self and society in the late modern age. cambridge: polity press. hardey, m. (2002). life beyond the screen  : embodiment and identity through the internet. the editorial board of the sociological review (46), 570 – 585. jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york: new york university press. joinson, a. n. (2008). “ looking at ”, “ looking up ” or “ keeping up with ” people  ? motives and uses of facebook. chi 2008, april 5–10, 2008, florence, italy. orgad, s. (2009). question two: how can researchers make sense of the issues involved in collecting and interpreting online and offline data? in markham a. m, baym n. k. (eds.) internet inquiry, conversations about method. thousand oaks: sage. ross, m. w. (2005). ‘typing, doing and being: sexuality and the internet.’ journal of sex research, 42: 342-52. toma, c.l; hancock, j; ellison, n. (2008). separating fact from fiction: an examination of deceptive selfpresentation in online dating profiles. personality and social psychology bulletin. 34, 8: 1023-1036. doi: 10.1177/01461672083180 whitty, m. t. (2003). ‘pushing the wrong buttons: men’s and women’s attitudes toward online and offline infidelity.’ cyberpsychology and behavior, 6: 569-579. internet dating: technologies appropriation of the body for targeted relationship initiation hilary wheaton, phd, curtin university western australia abstract internet dating, defined within the parameters of internet dating sites, is an aspect of internet usage that encourages the appropriation of users’ bodies and sexualities for a specific goal, often resulting in both intentional and unintentional deception. using discourse analysis of two internet dating sites this paper reveals how the commercial nature of these sites results in ‘branding’, therefore encouraging users explicitly and implicitly to construct a represented body that can easily be identified as the enacted body (a combination of the offline physical, and online representation) which frequently fails to be authentic. this does not necessarily imply deception, but instead has the potential to reveal the importance of the discourses operating within internet dating that appropriate bodies for commercial success and additionally how individuals contest or appropriate these discourses in return as part of their understanding of the body both on the internet and in the actual world. keywords internet dating; discourse analysis; body; sexuality; appropriation internet dating, defined here as the usage of internet dating sites, is an aspect of internet usage that is popular with many individuals who find it hard to develop relationships due to time restrictions in their daily lives or a lack of opportunity to circulate with potential suitors. this phenomenon has been researched by a number of academics, in areas that cover the social, romantic, and even economical implications of the activity of ‘partner shopping’ (see smaill, 2004; hall, park, song, & cody, 2010; couch & liamputtong, 2008; toma, hancock, & ellison, 2008; whitty, 2008; whitty & gavin, 2001; fiore & donath, 2004; arvidsson, 2006; and others). building upon this existing discussion is the opportunity to explore how these sites encourage the appropriation of users’ bodies and sexualities for the purpose of internet dating, and how individuals respond to this with results of perceived ‘authenticity’ or ‘deception’. while internet dating sites (ids) are online locations where the focus is that of romance or sexuality, they are also a spotlight for how individuals may encounter accidental and premeditated forms of identity play that are reliant on the body. while the distinctions between ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ have continued to blur in our use of the internet and its associated digital technologies, online dating has always demanded transparency between online representation and actual world physicality. this poses an interesting dilemma for those individuals that choose to engage with these spaces, because each internet dating site constructs an ‘ideal’ target or partner as a result of ‘branding’, an important aspect of the sites’ commercial nature. acting within the digital space of the site, and within the commoditized discourses established by each dating ‘brand’, participants are implicitly and explicitly encouraged to construct a representation of the body (and self) that increases their chances of attracting a partner. but this representation must also be ’enacted’ by the individual, that is to say it must have an agency and authenticity that can transition to the offline or actual world in order to meet the end goal of physical interaction. thus the internet dating site is a complex space where the represented and actual body is collapsed into an enacted form for its participants, while simultaneously establishing a scenario for failure due to discursive elements that promote plasticity and fluidity in regards to embodied practices of the self. the complex interaction between self and body in online dating is discussed by whitty and carr (2006) in their book on cyberspace romance, which mentions the distinction between ‘true’ and ‘actual’ self. the true self is simply those characteristics that individuals possess and wish to express but are usually unable to demonstrate, while the actual self are those traits that are possessed and expressed to others successfully (whitty & carr, 2006, p. 24). these distinctions help to explain how interactions or representations in internet dating sites can be incompatible with those in the actual world, not because of intended deceit, but a failure to recognize how the internet may allow the true self to be more easily expressed. this also translates into how the body is enacted on internet dating sites, especially due to their commercial influence, where self and physical features become interchangeable as markers of desirability. featherstone’s comment on the body in consumer culture is particularly relevant to this situation, in that “within consumer culture, the inner and outer body became conjoined: the prime purpose of the maintenance of the inner body becomes the enhancement of the appearance of the outer body” (1982, p 18). our physicality, our sense of self, in these spaces can be determined by a drop down list of possibilities – and more importantly these can be altered based upon positive or negative reception, and given monetary value by the site charging perspective partners for information access. what is worth more? breast size or eye colour? sexual proclivities or weight? star sign or length of endowment? with the introduction of webcams to internet dating, it could be expected that the difficulty in collapsing the distinction between representation and actual would be easier, because the enacted body can be visually conveyed in real-time with others; however, this is not necessarily a means of providing the authenticity that is frequently demanded by participants. it may simply reveal the user’s ability to ‘play’ with digital technology by engaging in performative activities tailored to their audience. indeed, individuals may be fully aware of the effects that individual dating sites have in regards to ‘branding’, and may utilize this to create profiles across multiple websites that each cater to a specific ‘ideal target’. how the body is integrated into the internet dating site by users and the website itself to achieve the ‘targeted initiations of intimacy’ (sprecher, 2009, p. 768), the commercial effects that occur, and the discourse that is constructed as a result, has the potential to reveal how individuals act out resistance or appropriate this technology for relationships. by utilizing foucauldian discourse analysis as a methodology, two internet dating sites are explored to reveal their basic components and how users are encouraged to construct specific styles of ‘profiles’ to represent themselves. existing research also provides a substantial amount of theoretical background to build upon, helping to encompass a wider range of internet dating sites and revealing common themes that exist within the phenomenon. the two sites explored for the purposes of this short panel paper are adultfriendfinder (adultfriendfinder.com) and redhotpie (redhotpie.com.au); these two examples are focused on sexual relationships, and therefore offer the perfect opportunity to focus on the body rather than other compatibility features (such as eharmony.com.au). because the focus of this research is on how the sites, as a technology, generate a discourse that encourages its members to construct their enacted bodies within certain specifications to ensure successful target initiation, a discourse analysis approach that deconstructs the elements that structure the content created by the users (akin to many produser acitivites online such as social networking sites) is potentially more productive than an investigation of the users themselves who may be implicitly influenced by their interaction. positioned as commodities within modern consumer culture society, the members of internet dating sites are ultimately influenced by the associated images of ‘the look’ and the consumer body (featherstone, 1982). both advertisers and targets emphasize certain features which commonly lead to claims of deception, but while enhancements to the represented body sometimes fail to correspond to the actual body upon successful initiation (during offline meetups), this does not imply that it fails to undergo the same enhancements (e.g. hair dyes, makeup, slimming clothes, push up bras); instead, this inconsistency points towards the importance of the enacted body as hybrid between performance and material. deception, whether intentional or simply the result of a misplaced belief in the ‘plasticity’ of the body, occurs only when the ‘body work’ undertaken in both the represented and actual body fails to correspond. as featherstone (1982) and bauman (1998) have illustrated our actual bodies are subject to consumer society and a discourse that requires continuous selfimprovement, physically and sexually, suggesting that the ‘enacted’ could offer greater insight to comprehending activities that rely on the body in online/offline associations (i.e. sex is not simply mediated on the internet as a form of representation). it may also be that ids reflect a wider and all encompassing dilemma, online and offline, enacted and represented, in regards to what the ‘ideal target’s’ body for sexuality actually is or could be. references arvidsson, a. (2006). 'quality singles': internet dating and the work of fantasy. new media & society 8, 671-690. bauman, z. (1998). on postmodern uses of sex. theory, culture & society 15, 19-33. couch, d. & liamputtong, p. (2008). online dating and mating: the use of the internet to meet sexual partners. qualitative health research 18, 268-279. featherstone, m. (1982). the body in consumer culture. theory, culture & society 1, 18-33. fiore, a. t. & donath, j. s. online personals: an overview. chi 2004: connect, 2004 vienna, austria. acm. hall, j. a., park, n., song, h. & cody, m. j. (2010). strategic misrepresentation in online dating: the effects of gender, self-monitoring, and personality traits. journal of social and personal relationships 27, 117-135. smaill, b. (2004). online personals and narratives of the self: australia's rsvp. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies 10, 93-107 toma, c. l., hancock, j. t. & ellison, n. b. (2008). separating fact from fiction: an examination of deceptive self-presentation in online dating profiles. personality and social psychology bulletin 34, 1023-1036. whitty, m. & carr, a. (2006). cyberspace romance: the psychology of online relationships, new york, ny, palgrave macmillan whitty, m. & gavin, j. (2001). age/sex/location: uncovering the social cues in the development of online relationships. cyberpsychology & behavior 4, 623-630 whitty, m. (2008). revealing the 'real' me, searching for the 'actual' you: presentations of self on an internet dating site. computers in human behavior 24, 1707-1723 anonymity in chatroulette: embodied practices within online impression management jenny korn, phd candidate, university of illinois at chicago abstract focusing on chatroulette as my case study provides a view into a unique, online environment for impression formation, one marked by a lack of advertisements, registration, and repetition. this unusual context does not lead to utopic relationships; rather, web camera-mediated behavior reveals not only racial and gender stereotyping, but also faster decisions about connection expressions. i combine critical autoethnography with participant observation for a qualitative study on how online impressions in a visual context with strangers are created in immediate, quick bursts of time, particularly in a public, anonymous environment. as an asian american female readily identified by chatroulette participants, i find that making a “good impression” online is superficially skin-deep sometimes; embodiment matters. keywords anonymity; impressions; embodiment; visual; racism introduction nudity sells (stanley, 2011), and nudity has helped to sell chatroulette as a voyeuristic website. popular television programs, like the daily show with john stewart and tosh.0, have said that i would see mostly young, white guys exposing themselves if i logged on chatroulette. closer to home, a classmate of mine texted: “chat roulette [sic], never tried it. i heard it was mostly just guys showing their penis.” nudity was what i expected from chatroulette. aside from the titillation, chatroulette is unusual because the website is free of advertisements and registration. chatroulette’s built-in “roulette” structure pairs partners adventitiously (akin to the game of chance in its namesake), which makes repetition of participants highly unlikely. the three attributes of no advertisements, no registration, and no repetition create an interesting context in which to study impressions of embodied interactions. in contrast to current models of impression theory that are built upon impression formation cascading upon each encounter among the same people (chambliss, 1965; gardner & martinko, 1988), chatroulette allows for only single episodes between each party (ostrow, 1996). under anonymity (fainzang, 1994; shulman, 1990; jessup, connolly, & galegher, 1990; connolly, jessup, & valacich, 1990) and with no possibility for sanctions against socially unacceptable behavior (stuber, galea, & link, 2009), individuals may choose to create unfavorable impressions online via racist and lewd behavior (flynn, chatman, & spataro, 2001). this pilot study updates embodied practices of the self from text-based to videobased computer-mediated communication (boler, 2007) and is the first to focus on chatroulette as an ethnographic site of analysis (pribek, 2010). searches in multiple databases reveal that research on chatroulette behavior is scarce. specifically, scholars in jstor have not yet examined chatroulette as a site for study. similarly, google scholar only yielded two works in english, one as a conference proceeding and the other as a master’s thesis, both of which focused on male sexual voyeurism (kreps, 2010; umut, 2010). this study also builds upon impression formation theory by focusing on the importance of the body in immediate, one-time impression constructions in an online, public, and anonymous environment. theoretical background generally, impression theory has looked at how impressions are constructed over time (chambliss, 1965; gurevitch, 1984). the time factor allows for impressions to build through repetition, creating favorable and unfavorable impressions as the parties meet each other consistently (becker & martin, 1995). the process of impression creation over time turns strangers into individuals familiar with one another (chambliss, 1965; gardner & martinko, 1988). impressions are happening in chatroulette too, but online embodiment within chatroulette provides an atypical context for impression construction. specifically, i focus on first-time impressions that occur immediately with strangers because chatroulette offers no way to create lasting impressions over time (ostrow, 1996). once an episode ends in chatroulette, returning to that same partner is virtually impossible. chatroulette’s unusual structure complicates impression theory models via its focus on instantaneity and unfamiliarity. i also theorize how anonymity (fainzang, 1994; shulman, 1990; jessup, connolly, & galegher, 1990; connolly, jessup, & valacich, 1990), defined by the lack of information connecting users to one another outside of what is shown on the screen immediately, might affect impression theory. chatroulette’s anonymity, with no user registration and no advertisements, adds interesting context for impression creation in an online environment that focuses on the embodied self. methodology for collecting data during my pilot study, i employed autoethnography (clough & ellis, 1997; kogut, 2005) as an active participant-observer in chatroulette (kawulich, 2005). in each chatroulette session, i wore the same clothing to minimize differences in the visual elements i presented to various parties. i limited each session to thirty minutes or less, across several different partners, to prevent fatigue, and i relinquished the power to find a new partner to the other party. in other words, i was willing to communicate with each partner until that party ended our encounter. i analyzed poise (goffman, 1967) and general body language, in addition to examining verbal language (bakhtin, 1935) and speech patterns during our interactions. i also noted when and to what extent nudity arose. initially, i examined my chatroulette sessions using the constructivist grounded theory approach (glaser & strauss, 1967; charmaz, 1995; strauss & corbin, 1998; stamp, 1999; charmaz, 2000; charmaz, 2006; pandit, 1996). to develop an inductively-derived model, i employed systematic procedures to produce a set of relationships among concepts, experiences, and events, across each party and various sessions. for my pilot study, i analyzed the data in a three-stage process of open, axial, and selective coding (becker & stamp, 2005; strauss & corbin, 1998). in open coding, i closely examined my data from chatroulette chats for similarities and differences and created encompassing categories. after the data were separated into categories, the groupings were unified by axial coding, wherein relationships among the classifications were explored, particularly with respects to the conditions that preceded them and the constructed contexts in which they were embedded (becker & stamp, 2005; strauss & corbin, 1998; charmaz, 1995; charmaz, 2000). the data were further integrated through the process of selective coding in which categories were systematically linked to one another in different orders and clusters to determine the most sensible arrangement of the data (becker & stamp, 2005; strauss & corbin, 1998). a process of constant comparison was used until data saturation had been reached, and sufficient theory about impression construction had emerged from the data (pandit, 1996). as a result, an impression creation model that was firmly grounded in the data was developed reflecting the actual experience of chatroulette users. conclusions unlike other social networking sites (pearson, 2009), identity performance is necessarily curtailed in the speedy context of chatroulette which focuses on immediate, anonymous, one-time visual impressions in a non-commercialized, electronically-mediated environment. in chatroulette, these impressions demonstrate the importance of the socially-enacted, embodied self in online encounters that center upon quick evaluations of the body presented through a screen, which manifests in how long parties stay attached together and in how parties react specifically to the physicality of an asian american woman. this scrutiny may import the same standards of the body in the physical world (robinson, 2007), but exploratory forays into chatroulette suggest that overtly racist and lewd behavior in reaction to others’ bodies may become prevalent in anonymous online environments. this understanding has practical implications as we develop technology that enables anonymity as a widespread option. i explore the common adage of “making a good first impression” in computermediated environments with no accountability and no possibility for sanctions against socially unacceptable behavior. this study provides a baseline for understanding how behavior operates in online environments that foster anonymity. in future research, contrasts will be made between the behavior studied here and behavior in online contexts that require real name registration (like facebook), adding a layer of potential accountability. references bakhtin, m. m. (1935). language as dialogic interaction. in p morris, (ed). the bakhtin reader: selected writings of bakhtin, medvedev, & voloshinov (pp. 48-61). london: edward arnold. becker, t. e. & martin, s. l. (1995). trying to look bad at work: methods and motives for managing poor impressions in organizations. the academy of management journal, 38(1), 174-199. becker, j. a. h. & stamp, g. h. (2005). impression management in chat rooms: a grounded theory model. communication studies, 56, 243-260. boler, m. (2007). hypes, hopes and actualities: new digital cartesianism and bodies in cyberspace. new media & society, 9(1), 139-168. chambliss, w. j. (1965). the selection of friends. social forces, 43(3), 370-380. charmaz, k. (1995). grounded theory. in j. smith, r. harré, &l. langenhove (eds.). rethinking methods in psychology (pp. 27-65). london: sage. charmaz, k. (2000). grounded theory: objectivist and constructivist methods. in n. denzin & y. lincoln (eds.), handbook of qualitative research (pp. 509-535). thousand oaks, california: sage. charmaz, k. (2006). constructing grounded theory: a practical guide through qualitative analysis. london: sage. clough, p. t. & ellis, c. (1997). autotelecommunication and autoethnography: a reading of carolyn ellis’s ‘final negotiations.’” the sociological quarterly, 38(1), 95-110. connolly, t., jessup, l. m., & valacich, j. s. (1990). effects of anonymity and evaluative tone on idea generation in computer-mediated groups. management science, 36(6), 689-703. fainzang, s. (1994). when alcoholics are not anonymous. medical anthropology quarterly, 8(3), 336-345. fletcher, d. (2010). chatroulette: the perils of video chats with strangers. time. february 16, 2010. retrieved from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1968111,00.html flynn, f. j., chatman, j. a., & spataro, s. e. (2001). getting to know you: the influence of personality on impressions and performance of demographically different people in organizations. administrative science quarterly, 46(3), 414-442. gardner, w. l. & martinko, m. j. (1988). impression management: an observational study linking audience characteristics with verbal self-presentations. the academy of management journal, 31(1), 42-65. glaser, b. g., & strauss, a. l. (1967). the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. new york: aldine. goffman, e. (1961). encounters: two studies in in the sociology of interaction. indianapolis: bobbs-merrill. goffman, e. (1967). interaction ritual: essays on face-to-face behavior. garden city, new york: doubleday and company. gurevitch, z. d. (1984). impression formation during tactical self-presentation. social psychology quarterly, 47(3), 262-270. horton, d. & wohl, r. r. (1956). mass communication and para-social interaction: observations on intimacy at a distance. in j. d. peters & p. simonson (eds.). mass communication and american social thought: key texts 1919-1968 (pp. 373-386). lanham, maryland: rowman and littlefield publishers. jessup, l. m., connolly, t., & galegher, j. (1990). the effects of anonymity on gdss group process with an idea-generating task. mis quarterly, 14(3), 313-321. kawulich, b. b. (2005). participant observation as a data collection method. forum qualitative sozialforschung / forum: qualitative social research, 6(2). retrieved from http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114fqs0502430. kogut, k. b. (2005). framed: a personal narrative/ethnographic performance/one-woman show. the journal of american folklore, 118(467), 90-104. kreps, d. g. (2010). foucault, exhibitionism, and voyeurism on chatroulette. proceedings from cultural attitudes towards technology and communication conference, june 17-21, 2010, vancouver, canada. ostrow, j. m. (1996). spontaneous involvement and social life. sociological perspectives, 39(3) 341-351. pandit, n. r. (1996). the creation of theory: a recent application of the grounded theory method. the qualitative report, 2(4). retrieved from http://www.nova.edu/ssss/qr/qr2-4/pandit.html pearson, e. (2009). all the world wide web’s a stage: the performance of identity in online social networks. first monday, 14(3). retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2162/2127 pribek, j. (2010). website key to making good first impression. wisconsin law journal. november 4, 2010. retrieved from http://wislawjournal.com/2010/11/04/website-key-to-making-good-first-impression/ robinson, l. (2007). the cyberself: the self-ing project goes online, symbolic interaction in the digital age. new media & society, 9(1), 93-110. shulman, j. h. (1990). now you see them, now you don't: anonymity versus visibility in case studies of teachers. educational researcher, 19(6), 11-15. stamp, g. h. (1999). a qualitatively constructed interpersonal communication model: a grounded theory analysis. human communication research, 25, 531–547. stanley, c. (2010). sex sells: when mainstream magazines get naked. flavorwire. august 18, 2010. retrieved from http://flavorwire.com/112766/sex-sells-when-mainstream-magazines-get-naked strauss, a. & corbin, j. (1998). basics of qualitative research: grounded theory procedures and techniques. newbury park, california: sage. stuber, j., galea, s., & link, b. g. (2009). stigma and smoking: the consequences of our good intentions.” social service review, 83(4), 585-609. umut, m. (2010). masculinities visualized: an analysis of chatroulette as a homosocial virtual medium. (unpublished master’s thesis). central european university, budapest, hungary. embodied mods: how modders in virtual spaces embody practices of self through virtual community creation and values kyle moody, phd candidate & graduate research assistant, the university of iowa abstract using legally distributed software development kits, “modders” – or users of software and video games who modify game content – are able to create and distribute their own content, illustrating the principles of convergence though voluntary free labor. this paper focuses on how specific modders define themselves through discourses, practices, languages, styles, codes, rituals, and values, and how these modders used the technologies and interactions to create embodied versions of themselves. does the modding community inspire a material turn into self-sustenance of creation, or keep users bound within the “magic circle” of the digital imaginative? what are the values of a culture of practice? how are those values propagated? i examined the community of modders for popular role-playing game the elder scrolls v: skyrim, results suggest that these embodied practices of community-building in modding suggest that users create forms of authority in this community, and that these rewards may have real-world consequences. keywords modding; virtual community; embodiment; voluntary labor; field studies   new advancements made in digital and social technology have started to change the roles that consumers have in media production and industries (bruns, 2008; banks & humphreys, 2008; banks & potts, 2010; van dijck, 2010; bird, 2011). participation in media content creation has blurred the role of the “gatekeeper” of information and power with the interactive culture afforded by new media and technology (cf. jenkins, 2006; deuze, 2007). yet, in today’s prosumerist culture, many users of digital media create content without expecting any explicit financial or material reward (see ritzger & jurgenson, 2010). previous research on voluntary, free participation in media work has revealed that these users often perform these actions for personal reasons. many social media networks (such as facebook and tumblr) have found success based on these principles of immaterial audience creation, distribution, and convergence.   within the media industry of video games, the concepts of unpaid voluntary labor (also known as “immaterial labor”), participatory content creation and online communities are found in “modders,” defined as users of software and video games who modify game content, which is done by using a software development kit (sdk). modding does not occur through illegal practices since many sdks are authorized by professional gaming developers. mods represent a valuable source of low-risk innovation and experimentation within the games industry. modding also holds potential as a distinctly recreational, collective, and sometimes anti-capitalist pursuit that is focused around embodied practices of self. through these practices, the virtual self is implemented into the modified content of games, which extends the literature on ludic practices and identity (see aarseth, 1998; juul, 2001). further exploration of the modding community would offer greater insight into the personal and social reasons for modding. finally, principles of modding inform the use and implementation of social media as users create, distribute, and remix content across a variety of platforms, performing immaterial labor while other commercial parties can potentially benefit from these practices.   previous research on modding (e.g., banks, 2005; kücklich, 2005; nieborg & van der graaf, 2008; postigo, 2003, 2007, 2008; sotamaa, 2005, 2007a, 2007b) has examined its practices through informal surveys, questionnaires, and secondhand information passed to researchers. few of these studies have implemented ethnographic field methods for modder research. therefore, while research has examined the copyright issues (postigo, 2008), awareness of perceived role inside and outside the industry (ku ̈cklich, 2005), and potential for modding to enhance media convergence of companies (see jenkins, 2006; postigo, 2008), no study has fully explored the ways that these communities organize themselves. the importance of the interactions and outputs of modders is not limited solely to the video game industry. modding communities represent an example of the changing nature of media work for many industry professionals and non-professional media users transitioning to more participatory forms of cultural industry production (deuze, 2007; postigo, 2007; postigo, 2010), thus suggesting and defining forces increasingly at play within other systems that incorporate user content. yet those areas and their real-world applications are currently unknown.   therefore, my wider research explores how groups of modders form communities. this paper focuses on how they define themselves through discourses, practices, languages, styles, codes, rituals, and values, and how these modders used the technologies and interactions to create embodied versions of themselves. does the modding community inspire a material turn into self-sustenance of creation, or keep users bound within the “magic circle” of the digital imaginative? what are the values of a culture of practice? how are those values propagated?   to explore these questions, i examined select groups of modders of popular role-playing game the elder scrolls v: skyrim (10+ million copies sold worldwide), and these modders were located on the popular mod distribution and news channels steam workshop and skyrim nexus. in 2012, skyrim developers bethesda softworks released a free software development tool called the creation kit to computer players. the creation kit allowed users to modify the game content, at which point the user could publically release their mods through an authorized steam workshop channel. as of january 2013, 12,958 mods were available to download on the steam workshop for skyrim users. based on textual analysis of data pulled from a blended internet ethnographic study (using field research, interviews, and participant observation) of modder practices and boards, i conducted a study using the theoretical lens provided by previous research on critical media studies (peterson & anand, 2004; deuze, 2007; martin & deuze, 2009).   theoretically, by allowing and encouraging modders to share their creations via the steam workshop and other distributors, bethesda has created a way for these modders to form a collective of sorts through user-generated content and dissemination (e.g. jenkins, 2006; bruns, 2008; fuchs, 2010, 2011). in addition, news sites such as skyrim nexus offers a group of “lead users” who collectively identify and exploit opportunities to improve the way skyrim works through their own practices. these modding activities could be important drivers of particular communities of skyrim modders, and significant in the co-creation of a particular version of skyrim’s emergent modding culture because it creates a separation between users based on perceived skill levels. these embodied practices of community-building in modding suggest that users create forms of authority in this community, and that these rewards may have real-world consequences. by focusing on skyrim and the creation of structure and values by its groups of users, i attempt to bridge previous academic research on online communities, critical media industry studies, and gatekeeping roles in media to professional needs and concerns.   findings suggest that skyrim modders engage in the practice of voluntary labor and community participation for personal reasons. the amount of time spent in this community is seen as an extension of the self, and a way to sustain creative impulses that is rewarded by game playing. for some modders, the practice of modding reconfigures the meanings we attach to our self by placing themselves in a blurred role of creator and consumer of game content. this blurring of amateur and professional role provides a reward for the user, and the community dynamics places a reward for users based on mastery of skills and abilities in modding. the practices of modding suggests that the community of modders rewards users much like fan communities and groups formed around shared interests, where knowledge and skill become arbiters of success.   references     aarseth, e. (1997). cybertext: perspectives on ergodic literature. johns hopkins university press: baltimore.   banks, j. a. l. (2005). opening the production pipeline: unruly creators. paper presented at the digital games research association (digra) annual conference, vancouver, university of vancouver, june 16–20. retrieved from http://www.digra.org/dl.   banks, j., & humphreys, s. (2008). the labour of user co-creators: emergent social network markets? convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 14(4), 401-418.   banks, j., & potts, j. (2010). co-creating games: a co-evolutionary analysis. new media & society, 12(2), 253270.   bird, s. e. (2011). are we all produsers now? convergence and media audience practices. cultural studies, 25(4), 502-516.   bruns, a. (2006). towards produsage: futures for user-led content production, [online] available at: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/4863/1/4863_1.pdf, (accessed 24 april 2012).   deuze, m. (2007). media work. cambridge: polity press.   fuchs, c. (2009). a contribution to the critique of transnational informational capitalism. rethinking marxism, 21(3), 387-402.   fuchs, c. (2010). labor in informational capitalism and on the internet. the information society, 26, 179-196.   jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york: new york university press.   kerr, a. (2006). the business and culture of digital games: gamework/gameplay. sage: london.   ku ̈cklich, j. (2005). precarious playbour: modders and the digital games industry. fibreculture journal, 5. retrieved from http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/kucklich.html.   martin, c.b., & deuze, m. (2009). the independent production of culture: a digital games case study. games and culture. 4, 276.   nieborg, d. b., & van der graaf, s. (2008). the mod industries? the industrial logic of non-market game production. european journal of cultural studies, 11, 177-195.   peterson, r, & anand, n. (2004). the production of culture perspective. annual review of sociology. 30, 311334.   postigo, h. (2003). from pong to planet quake: post-industrial transitions from leisure to work. information, communication, and society, 6, 593-607.   postigo, h. (2007). of mods and modders: chasing down the value of fan-based digital game modifications. games and culture, 2, 300-312.   postigo, h. (2008). video game appropriation through modifications: attitudes concerning intellectual property among fans and modders. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 14, 59-74.   postigo, h. (2010). modding to the big leagues: exploring the space between modders and the game industry. first monday, 15(5).   ritzer, g. & jurgenson, n. (2010). production, consumption, prosumption: the nature of capitalism in the age of the digital “prosumer.” journal of consumer culture, 10(1), 13-36.   shirky, c. (2008). here comes everybody: the power of organizing without organizations. new york: penguin press.   sihvonen, t. (2011). players unleashed!: modding the sims and the culture of gaming. amsterdam: amsterdam university press.   sotamaa, o. (2005). creative user-centred design practices: lessons from game cultures. in l. haddon, e. mante, b. sapio, k. kommonen, l. fortunati & a. kant (eds.), everyday innovators: researching the role of users in shaping icts (pp. 104-116). london, england: springer verlag.   sotamaa, o. (2007a). on modder labour, commodification of play, and mod competitions. first monday, 12. retrieved from http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2006/1881.   sotamaa, o. (2007b). let me take you to the movies: productive players, commodification, and transformative play. convergence, 13, 383-401.   van dijck, j. (2009). users like you? theorizing agency in user-generated content. media, culture & society, 31(1), 41-58.             there and back again a self-shooters tale: reconfiguring embodiment via selfies. katrin tiidenberg, phd candidate, tallinn university abstract this  paper  is  based  on  visual  narrative  analysis  of  data  collected  with  self-­‐shooters  in  a  nsfw  blogging   community  on  tumblr.com.    using  concepts  of  “reflexive  body”,  “erotic  looking  glass”  and  foucault’s   technologies  of  the  self,  and  illuminated  self-­‐shooting  as  a  transformative  practice,  which  resulted  in  a   changed  perception  of  one’s  self  and  one’s  body,  increased  levels  of  self-­‐confidence  and  sexual  life-­‐ satisfaction.  photos  serve  as  an  embodied  identity  construction  tool  and  a  currency  for  social  interaction.   keywords visual narrative analysis; self-shooting; body blogging; reflexive body; technology of the self the mass taking and sharing of self-portraits, also known colloquially as “selfies,” has become more popular and convenient with the proliferation of mobile cameras and the social media sites. because digital photographic processes have eliminated darkroom development and digital devices enable more privacy, an increasing amount of people are experimenting with taking sexy selfies. the widespread and problematized practice of “sexting,” in combination with the range of various sites designated for the naked bodies of “amateurs,” is an indication of the simultaneous popularization of sharing those private images. this paper analyses the practices of self-shooting within a nsfw (not safe for work) blogging community on tumblr (launched in 2007, hosts over 90 million blogs (january 2013)), exploring how one becomes a self-shooter and how that self-categorization reconfigures the meaning of the embodied self. photos no longer serve merely the function of memory, but are increasingly a tool for identity formation and communication (van dijk, 2008). pictures are currency for social interaction: they circulate between individuals and groups to establish and reconfirm bonds (ibid, p. 62) and to tell the stories of what we are and what we are not (riessman, 2008). concurrently, they offer a ‘safe space’ (muise, 2011) for various practices that may elsewhere be hidden. online we construct ‘stigma suspending spaces’ (waskul, 2004, p. 40), where we can experiment with (sexual) behavior (i.e., “being naked on the internet”) with less fear of repercussions and by engaging in an activity “without actually doing it” (ross, 2005). this paper is based on visual narrative analysis (riessman, 2008) of images, captions, rolling commentary on reblogged selfies as well as ethnographic field notes; and interviews (november 2001 and 2012; december 2011) with self-shooters in a nsfw blogging community on tumblr. analysis of self shooters’ (17 people aged 20 – 51, from usa, australia, new-zealand, canada and uk) individual and group interviews illuminated self-shooting as a transformative practice. taking and posting pictures of oneself and the offshoot interactions resulted in a changed perception of one’s self and one’s body, increased levels of self-confidence and sexual life-satisfaction. illustrative cases were then selected, and, working the interface between the visual and the textual data, contextualized and interpreted in the light of theoretical concepts of ‘reflexive body’ (giddens, 1991), ‘erotic looking glass’ (waskul, 2004) and two aspects of foucault’s (1988) technologies of the self: critical selfawareness and aesthetic self-stylization. this analysis brought into view how embodied identities are constructed in images, and how the meanings one has attached to their own body gets reconfigured through self-shooting and posting. although some people claim to be ‘born self-shooters,’ most become one in the interactive context of a community of practice: seeing other people’s images, one wants to know what they would look like in a picture like this, and how others might react. audience pressure also exists: selfies are proof of life and an indicator of belonging. as one grows accustomed to posting and the feedback, the patterns and practices may change. initially fun / arousing / exciting on its own, self-shooters later claim to need a specific idea, a flash of inspiration, a prop or an external prompt (an email or a request from an online lover) for a photo shoot. this feedback cycle can be conceptualized as the process of a transforming embodied self: as we internalize a reconfigured embodiment, we get used to it until further transformation happens. we recreate ourselves through aesthetic self-stylization (foucault, 1983). selfies shape the meaning of one’s embodied identity so we can view a selfie as the body. people post pictures of themselves where they like what they see, and the more pictures they take, the more things they find to like about themselves. it is a constitutive, creative practice. for my informants, self-shooting means increased confidence, self-esteem and body-acceptance. thus, in their images, self-shooters construct themselves as ‘beautiful’ or ‘deviant’, ‘more than just a husband/wife, parent and an employee’, or someone who ‘likes their body instead of trying to not hate it’. self-shooting and body-blogging, with its communal aspects, help participants put a focus on what is in the shadows in their lives otherwise and reintroduce themselves to a piece of them that has been buried: under 20 years of marriage, 4 children, and the mantles of "wife", "mother", "neighbor", "coworker", and every other role i fill in my daily life. (f, 41, usa). self-images, due to the fact that self-shooters know they will be watched and their bodies will be objects of desire, allow people reconfigure the meaning of their body and a sexy body (from an age, size, shape perspective), and to change the perception of their “shelf-life as a sexually desirable woman”. via the erotic looking-glass of selfies, people start seeing the likable aspects of their own bodies, but selfies also illuminate various preferences, kinks and fantasies and help embrace one’s embodied self as a sexual self. … it’s definitely made me proud of my sexuality and who i am in that regard, that’s definitely a positive to take forward in relationships’ (m, late-20s, usa). critical self-awareness (by becoming more self-reflexive) is at the core of foucault’s (1984) understanding of technologies of self. by questioning what seems ‘natural,’ a critically self-aware individual sees the ‘possibilities of transgression’ and the ‘potential for new subjective experiences’ (markula, 2003). in a true act of critical self-awareness, seeing oneself through a web-cam or a phonecam lens has allowed many self-shooters a gaze free of body-dysmorphic distortions for the first time in their lives. in addition to the act of self shooting, the interactive practices of posting one’s images and commenting on other’ help cultivate the self-reflexivity and self-awareness and thus transform both psychologically: no matter how much you hate your body, there is someone on tumblr., who likes it. there is literally a place for every body on tumblr.’ (f, 37, usa) and materially: ‘the pictures i posted, mostly were to help me kind of fish for compliments when my wife wasn’t giving me the feedback i wanted, but the feedback i got from tumblr. kept me motivated to keep working out and keep dieting. (m, 36, usa). we live in a late modern “somatic society” (turner, 1984), where our social anxieties are often transferred to our bodies; in a consumer culture where body image is an imperative (featherstone, 2010); and in a “striptease culture” (mcnair, 2002) that focuses on display, confessions and selfrevelation reinforced in various forms of online self-presentation. the body like the self, has become a “site of interaction, appropriation and reappropriation” (giddens, 1991, p.218). in self-shooting we construct our narrative of embodied selfhood via fantasy, control, self-exploration, -expression, and – enhancement; we construct a sexier, more lovable body. references     featherstone, m. (2010). body, image and affect in consumer culture. body & society, 16(1), 193-221. foucault, m. (1983). on the genealogy of ethics: an overview of work in progress. in h.l. dreyfus & p. rabinow (eds.), michel foucault: beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (pp. 229-252). chicago: the university of chicago press. foucault, m. (1984). polemics, politics, and problematizations. in p. rabinow (ed.), foucault reader (pp. 381390). new york: pantheon books foucault, m. (1988). technologies of the self. in l. h. martin, h. gutman, & p. h. hutton (eds.), technologies of the self: a seminar with michel foucault (pp. 16-49). amherst: university of massachusetts press. giddens, a. (1991). modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age. cambridge: polity. markula, p. (2004). “ tuning into one ’ s self  :” foucault ’ s technologies of the self and mindful fitness, 302321. mcnair, b. (2002). striptease culture: sex, media and the democratisation of desire. london: routlege. muise, a. (2011). women’s sex blogs: challenging dominant discourses of heterosexual desire. feminism & psychology, 21(3), 411–419. doi:10.1177/0959353511411691 turner, b.s. (1984) [1996] the body and society. oxford: blackwell. riessman, c.k. (2008). narrative methods for the human sciences. ca, usa: sage publications ross, m. w. (2005). typing , doing , and being  : sexuality and the internet typing , doing , and being  : sexuality and the internet. journal of sex research, (october 2011), 37–41. van dijck, j. (2008). digital photography: communication, identity, memory. visual communication, 7(1), 57– 76. waskul, d. d. (2002). the naked self: being a body in televideo cybersex. symbolic interaction, 25(2), 199– 227. doi:10.1525/si.2002.25.2.199 waskul, d.d. (2004). net.sexxx: readings on sex, pornography and the internet. new york: lang   microsoft word 890-634-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 identifying the victim: metadata, proper names, and the use of twitter to combat violence against women elizabeth losh university of california, san diego lizlosh@ucsd.edu abstract the use of twitter by activists protesting violence against women, particularly sexual violence, is complicated by the fact that microblogging services use hashtags to identify relevant content to their audiences. communities congregate around these particular keywords, and archives and information visualizations that map the history and morphology of controversies in public discourse online depend on shared terminology in the metadata. it is noteworthy that trending topics are particularly likely to reference proper names. after a prominent fatal sexual attack in india, the mobilization of activists through online organizing progressed through several stages, and some users privileged #delhirapecase or #delhigangrape – which protected the private identity of the victim – while others made her into a public martyr by using #jyotisinghpandey, much as the hashtag #neda galvanized public support. keywords twitter; activism against sexual violence; online privacy; proper names anonymity and fame the global women’s rights movement has done much to ensure that the identity of victims of sexual assault be kept confidential and that names of those accusing perpetrators of rape are not published in news outlets – either in print or online – to protect them from retribution and discrimination. many feminist activists argue, however, that prioritizing guarding female reputation does little to dissuade criminal behavior or to change to gendered power relations. in india inheritances from a colonial system of laws placed accusers at a disadvantage (kolsky), and a postcolonial “special process system” made the lived experiences of victims more difficult (prasad). legal, medical, and journalistic norms contributed to persistently high statistics of unprosecuted gang rape, and until 2008 coverage of rape cases in the news media was forbidden, even if identifying information about the victim was not released (jagadeesh). it was not until the mathura rape case of 1974, which was named for the sixteen-year-old victim, that women’s organizations protesting patriarchal legal decisions were able to begin to effect any real change. the 2012 gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in the city of delhi galvanized activists and led to large-scale street protests and pressure for legislative action. soon after the assault, members of the public were using twitter to criticize government inaction and to express sympathy for the victim who would later die from her injuries in a singapore hospital. indian celebrities from bollywood stars to political figures were posting tweets about the case very soon after it happened. they did so generally without hashtags, although some used one-word tags such as #braveheart and #justice. for example, prime minister manmohan singh posted this sober commemoration: “i pray for the peace of the departed soul and hope that her family will have the strength to bear this grievous loss. while she may have lost her battle for life, it is up to us all to ensure that her death will not have been in vain. i join the nation in conveying to her family and friends my deepest condolences at this terrible loss.” as users of twitter continued to share information and opinions about the case a more developed metadata scheme emerged, and #delhirapecase and #delhigangrape became common hashtags. although she remained anonymous for the first few weeks, proper names associated with the identity of the victim were also circulated, such as #amanat, the urdu word for “treasure,” or #damini, which selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 means “lightning” in hindi and was also the title of a bollywood movie about a women’s fight for justice of #nirbhaya, “the fearless one.” #jagruti or “awareness” also became a hashtag. in contrast, another gang rape case in which the victim committed suicide due to government inaction was only identified with a #punjabgangrape hashtag, since her identity was never given a pseudonym. privacy, transparency, and reputation after the father of the victim came forward to name his daughter publicly, jyoti singh pandey, so that she could be mourned and memorialized, some news outlets wary of prosecution still avoided publishing her legal proper name in full. in contrast there was little hesitation on the part of many twitter users who embraced the #jyotisinghpandey hashtag in their postings. much as the violent death by shooting of neda agha-soltan on the streets of tehran on june 20, 2009 during an antigovernment protest led to many adopting the #neda hashtag, short-form narratives around pandey’s martyrdom to the cause of ending sexual violence with #jyotisinghpandey soon proliferated. similarly twitter users even adopted the murdered woman’s identity in order to publicize her cause posthumously. the arrest of a group of men who eventually confessed to abduction, rape, and assault also led to new metadata schemes, as their identities also became part of the public record. for example, when the alleged ringleader of the group committed suicide in custody, tweets containing his name - #ramsingh – appeared with expressions of relief. appearance of his proper name might also be combined with hashtags indicating more general concepts, such as #stoprape or #somejustice. (it is important to note that trending topics on twitter in india often include proper names, such as those of celebrities, but product names or high-concept phrases that express a particular aspect of the zeitgeist are also likely to be listed among popular hashtags.) as nishant shah has pointed out, access to digitally networked social media services such as twitter may also lead to cybervigilanteeism rather than democratic civil society, and many twitter users did express violent ideation about what the perpetrators deserved, although many also focused on recourse from the justice system. hashtags such as #inhumanebastards or #death4rape indicate how public rage and desire for retribution may be an important part of public discourse on twitter. street protests continued through international women’s day of 2013, and twitter continued to be a way to share news items, photographs, and information about ways to participate in both street actions and online activism. in the conventional narrative of rights-based liberal democracy, digital culture represents a series of challenges to social norms about sexuality, violence, and the relationship between perpetrators and bystanders (dibbell). online practices also supposedly pose risks to person privacy (palfrey and gasser) and rewards for governmental transparency (sunlight foundation). but the narrative becomes more complex if privacy is recognized as a culturally contingent concept (dourish and bell; boyd), and activists may experience circumstances in which they wish to “out” victims as well as perpetrators. the current debate about whether legislation in process within the indian parliament should be named in honor of jyoti singh pandey illustrates the difficulties that existing sociolegal frameworks face in accommodating the needs expressed by new forms of public opinion. indian women’s rights groups, such as breakthrough and blank noise, have tried to formulate their own social media campaigns references boyd, d. (2008). taken out of context american teen sociality in networked publics. retrieved march 12, 2013, from http://www.danah.org/papers/takenoutofcontext.pdf. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 burke, j. (2013, january 2). india debates naming new law after gang-rape victim. the guardian. retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/02/india-gang-rape-victim-law dibbell, j. (2005). a rape in cyberspace. in v. j. vitanza (ed.), cyberreader. new york: pearson longman dourish, p., & bell, g. (2011). divining a digital future mess and mythology in ubiquitous computing. cambridge, mass.: mit press. jagadeesh, n. (2010). legal changes towards justice for sexual assault victims. indian journal of medical ethics, 7(2). kolsky, e. (2010). “the body evidencing the crime”: rape on trial in colonial india, 1860–1947. gender & history, 22(1), 109–130. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0424.2009.01581.x palfrey, j. g., & gasser, u. (2008). born digital: understanding the first generation of digital natives. new york: basic books prasad, s. (1999). medicolegal response to violence against women in india. violence against women, 5(5), 478–506. doi:10.1177/10778019922181338 reese, d. (2013, january 7). father of new delhi rape victim: tell the world my daughter’s name. washington post. retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2013/01/07/father-ofnew-delhi-rape-victim-tell-the-world-my-daughters-name/ shah, n., & abraham, s. (2009). digital natives with a cause? a knowledge survey and framework. the hague [etc.].: [humanist institute for cooperation with developing countries (hivos) [etc.]. sunlight foundation. (2006). sunlight foundation making government transparent & accountable. retrieved march 12, 2013, from http://www.sunlightfoundation.com. license this article is licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 tweeting the revolution: networked publics, copresence, and recent political activism beth coleman waterloo/harvard university canada/usa bcoleman@cyber.law.harvard.edu abstract in this paper i look at social media engagement as part of direct political action in the regime-changing events of tunisia and egypt in the winter of 2010-11 (known internationally as the “arab spring”). in analyzing activist video and short blogging forms (youtube and twitter), i give an analysis of the formulation of a networked public sphere (castells 2000, varnelis) wherein one finds not only forms of citizen journalism or witness to revolution, but forms of mediated participation in such actions. it is the nature of such mediated participation that i discuss in terms of the phenomenon of copresence (ito, schroeder, et al.). my method in formulating this analysis is to compare three different types of “narratives” of the events that accompanied these activities. toward this end, i look at traditional ethnographic evidence (interviews i have conducted with activists; data flows (the origination and flow of a twitter hashtag such as #jan25 or #sidibouzid); as well as the content of microblogging and activist videos transmissions. with this methodology, i seek to integrate human narratives and data narratives of social media engagement in the service of political activism. keywords twitter; networked youtube; media, activism; north africa human narrative, data narratives “how are activists and new technologies transforming each other and the global spaces in which they interact? information and communication technologies (icts) are clearly having an impact on contemporary politics, but what kind of impact?” jodi dean, jon anderson, and geert lovink wrote 2006. in taking up this question more than six years later, i an suggesting a productive analytics in looking at the production of human narratives and data narratives in regard to social media engagement for political action. by “human narratives,” i mean the utterances of a global mobile age where short form blogging, such as twitter, or instant image publishing to a network, such as the instagram platform, have come to represent new modalities of human expression. with the term “data narratives,” i indicate the avalanche of data streams produced by mobile devices or sensor networks that lay primarily outside of the user’s agency (e.g., when in use, a mobile phone signals mobile cell tower activity without action on the part of the owner). i suggest that the importance of this approach lies in how one might understand better the strategic, tactical, and personal transmissions enacted in social media by activist. activism, tactical communication, and the bodily risk of danger perhaps malcolm gladwell––in what was received by internet cognoscenti as a largely reactionary, luddite position in regard to social media (shirky)––is right in his estimation that without “skin in the game,” without bodily presence at sites of political conflict that there can only be “small change” to be had. in leaving aside the sites of online activism that one has seen evidenced over the past two decades of popular internet use (i.e., denial of service, boycotts, petitions, campaigns, et al.), i am framing my inquiry of social media aid to political activism in north africa (winter 2010-11) as bracketed by a basic term of being physically located at a site (egypt or tunisia) and thus being subjected, at difference degrees of risk, to the bodies of law enforcement by government. in short, i am suggesting that social media use in these contexts (and conflicts) are tools in a mode of activism that demands bodily presence: to achieve regime change tahrir square in egypt had to be bodily selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 occupied; to instigate mass action, the country needed the incendiary sacrifice of tunisian mohamed bouazizi’s self-immolation (his town, sidi bouzid, became the historic hashtag). in reframing the body in relation to the engagement of social media (for activist or other purposes), i point to a key shift recent theorization of networked society, as discussed in the terms of x-reality (coleman), hybrid reality (de souza e silva) and the embodied space (farman) that frame subjects how are meaningfully engaged in embodied, located actions even as they participate in virtual, informational, and networked actions. along these lines, i ask following question in this work: in looking at real-time (and nearly real-time) communiqués from sites of risk to networks of interested parties, might one understand the youtube videos, the twitter streams, the facebook postings as modes of agency and aspects of copresense? to answer this question, i look at three object studies of activist “narratives” that construct a type of networked publics around the activism; this is both a public in the sense of a popular movement (the necessary masses of people needed to make the actions possible) as well as a public beyond the site––one of global witness as it were. object studies i give three examples of different modes of understanding activist engagement of social media: ethnographic study (interviews); data visualization (network reading); twitter artifacts (the content of tweets). the subject of the ethnographic study is egyptian located in the country during the time of the revolution who participated in the events to one degree or another. i interview a spectrum of participants, including those with high degrees of media engagement and activist experience to those with little of either. the purpose of the interviews is to ascertain not only attitudes toward social media tools in terms of political action, but to gauge degrees of copresence with others as a factor in bodily risk. the second group of data addresses the pattern of twitter cascades of information around the al jazeera journalist dima khatib around the trending of #sidibouzid. based on data parsing and visualization by gilad lotan (see figure 1), i am suggesting that such mapping of reputation and clustering of play an important role in tactical communications and a reflection for activist of a global witness (even if one cannot yet describe this as a coparticipants). the last object study is the series of tweets collected in the book tweets from tahrir (figure 2). the content of the tweets moves between networked cheering, to metadata (use #jan25), to prep for prison. in other words, it traverses the grid of social beyond a command-control framework. the bodies in immanent risk act playfully; they play with the space of mediation within the frame of a located activism. in other words, it traverses the grid of social beyond a command-control framework. the bodies in immanent risk act playfully, they play with the space of mediation within the frame of a located activism. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 6 figure 2 (tweets from tahrir) references castells, m. the rise of the network society. oxford, uk: blackwell, 2000 coleman, b. hello avatar. cambridge, mass.: mit press, 2011p farman, j. mobile interface theory: embodied space and locative media. london: routledge, 2012 gladwell, m. “small change: why the revolution will not be tweeted,” the new yorker, october 4, 2010 idle, n. & nunns, a. tweets from tahrir. london: or books, 2011. lotan, g. “#sidibouzid twitter hashtag: an analysis of the people spreading the news.” http://giladlotan.com/blog/2011/01/sidibouzid-twitter-hashtag-a shirky , c. “from innovation to revolution: do social media make protests possible?” foreign affairs, march/april 2011. http://www.foreignaffairs.com/node/67189&cid=soc-infrom_innovation_to_revolution-12610 de souza e silva, a. “from cyber to hybrid: mobile technologies as interfaces of hybrid spaces.” space and culture vol. 9 no. 3, august 2006, 261-278. varnelis, k. ed. networked publics. cambridge, mass.: the mit press, 2008. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 7 a digital humanities approach: text, the internet, and the egyptian uprising vj um amel university of southern california usa laila@vjumamel.com abstract in the context of recent events in the global middle east, many people have struggled to make sense of the role of technology (especially social media) in the fomentation of a revolutionary praxis. one of the problems of studying technology and political change is that common interpretation of new media—as spreadable, quantifiably predictable, and without a body—lends itself to ahistorical insights. how might a digital arts and humanities approach to scholarship offer insights into the dynamic of revolution in a digital age where nothing is going to give itself over—whether technocratic or militaristic. it is neither the egyptian culture nor the technology, but the people who resist. this paper presents a case study of the hashtag #tahrir using analytics developed by an arabic knowledge management system—a body of work that coheres dissimilar elements not into a single idea, but into a heterogeneous network. keywords twitter; #tahrir; arab revolutions; thawra; global middle east; egypt the unprecedented upheavals in the arab countries that started in tunisia in december 2010 spread like wildfire, igniting a wave of similar protests around the world and especially in egypt, which erupted a month later. in an act of transnational solidarity, in february 2011, an egyptian activist ordered pizza for labor union protesters in wisconsin. the international phone call from egypt was just one of many messages of solidarity streaming into madison, wisconsin, from all over the world. such connections prompted this critical investigation regarding the interaction of ideas and triggers of influence on civic engagement and political mobilization ever since the egyptian uprisings began in 2011. it is part of a larger collaborative study that examines the hermeneutics (text, context and intellectual origin) of digital knowledge produced from social unrest and citizen action as they flow among transnational actors in the arab uprisings, occupy movements and socio-economic protests in spain and on wall street.1 while many facets of these movements have been studied recently, it is important to examine the distinct socio-political forces leading to their emergence and the mutual influences among them. this article contributes to the larger cca project by providing a micro-study on #tahrir and its significance within a historical narrative of “revolts” or “thawra” in egypt. the revolutionary turmoil in egypt did not emerge out of the blue and simply through social media activism as is often depicted, but rather was precipitated through many years of internal pressures and growing social movements.2 indeed, the social movements in egypt, spain, and wall street are unique historical moments that, in fact, represent culminations of myriad dynamics, actors, and forces over time, and are therefore extremely complex to research. 1  the  collaborative  cultural  analytics  (cca)  project  involves  a  cross-­‐disciplinary  partnership  among  scholars  at   four  main  institutions:  prof.  nitin  sawhney  and  prof.  peter  asaro  at  the  new  school  are  leading  the  project  in   the  united  states  in  collaboration  with  laila  shereen  sakr,  director  of  r-­‐shief,  inc.  and  a  ph.d.  candidate  at  the   university  of  southern  california  (usc);  in  the  uk,  dr.  christopher  brewster  from  the  aston  crisis  centre,  aston   university  is  partnering  with  dr.  tarik  sabry  at  the  university  of  westminster.   2   see,   for   example,   philip  marfleet   and  rabab  al-­‐mahdi,   egypt:   the  moment   of   change   (london:   zed  books,   2009).   selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 8 the discourse around thawra (revolt; or revolution) has emerged from a contemporary history of the “idea of revolution” in egyptian culture—from the ‘urabi revolt against the ottomans in 1882 to zaghloul’s uprising against the british in 1919, to nasser’s revolt against the monarchy in 1952, to the bread riots of 1977, and to the leaderless revolution of 2011. i argue that it was actually a convergence of 1) a technology infrastructure consisting of the internet, micro-blogging, twitter, facebook, smart phones, the convention of the #tag, phone numbers stored in digitized contact lists, personal mobile communication devices; 2) physical habits such as communication habits, use of mobile devices, or movement and speech acts in public settings; and 3) a national narrative of al-thawra that enabled the mobilization of the body politic and was identified by global witnesses as the “arab spring” and the moment of revolution in the global middle east my approach here, collaborative cultural analytics (cca), is built on a cooperative research and analytic framework to examine large-scale multilingual data and contextual knowledge from contemporary social movements. this newly emerging research by computer scientists, linguists, social scientists, humanities scholars, and interaction designers seeks to understand how both microlevel qualitative analysis and “big data” computational analytics offer varying and complementary perspectives on complex socio-cultural research questions. i am interested in gaining critical insights into how transformational ideas and information on a large-scale move differently among various actors within and across movements. i approach research questions by combining network analysis and language analytics/text-mining with cca. this methodology entails large-scale analysis, in particular of the r-shief living data repository (http://r-shief.org), a unique and rich archive of multilingual social media content from the 2011 uprisings, along with qualitative research based on ethnographic, social, and historical inquiry. r-shief is a “big data” repository in terms of volume, velocity, and variety of data. cultural analytics is an emerging methodology for researchers who wish to examine rich sociocultural phenomena across heterogeneous and multimodal data sources. it leverages a range of mixed methods for understanding the nature of digital knowledge production across media and social networks, while simultaneously engaging in historical and cultural analysis. the body of literature studied includes not only scholarly and scientific materials, but also social media, blogs, and other online publications. it is in part the socio-digital convergence of technology, cultural transformations, and national narratives that enabled the mobilization of what global witnesses and participants have called the “arab spring.” the political upheaval mediated on the internet over the past few years has raised crucial questions about the influence of technology (particularly social media) in mobilizing and enabling popular uprisings.3 recent studies about the influences of technology on social movements like the arab uprisings rarely have incorporated rigorous arabic language analyses on large-scale social media (i.e., billions of tweets and millions of website articles over several years). this is partly due to the lack of natural language processing (nlp) tools to conduct computational linguistic research in languages other than english, but also due to lack of access to appropriate large-scale data collections. the growth of “big data,” particularly collections of social media patterns, has enabled more in-depth examination of the role of digital networks, allowing scientific and policy communities to direct their attention toward aggregated imprints of online and social media activity, without engaging in critical methodological analyses that take into account the historical and cultural basis to inform meaningful critique. this fetishization of data over meaning has produced much research that examines the scale, speed and directional influences in digital networks and social media (such as those presented at the international aaai conference on weblogs and social media4 conferences in recent years); however, 3   see   further  manuel   castells   (2012),  networks   of   outrage   and   hope:   social   movements   in   the   internet   age   (london:  polity).   4  international  aaai  conference  on  weblogs  and  social  media  (icwsm),  http://www.icwsm.org.   selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 9 complementary approaches engaging in historical, cultural, and textual analysis can reveal richer insights to explain the wider context of such phenomena in the case of the egyptian revolution, the challenge facing scholars when examining contemporary digital media and political change is how to analyze information quantitatively about groups of people in a region where, historically, data science has been used to support a form of colonialism.5 as timothy mitchell explains in colonising egypt,6 the practice of science and systems of ordering national standards are modern projects that enable governments to maintain discipline and surveillance. a cog in the colonial project, the science of documenting every political act reflected a “tendency of disciplinary mechanisms, as michel foucault has called these modern strategies of control, … not to expect and dissipate as before, but to infiltrate, and colonise.”7 at a time when unprecedented islamophobia and anti-arab sentiment exist throughout the west, critical readings of race and cultural meaning across media are necessary. thus, another challenge to studying technology is learning how to deconstruct the tool from the political designs embedded in them. a review of scholarship on media and the middle east reveals a lack of engagement with digital media content, whether as primary sources or in critically questioning the tools and analytics provided. while many humanities scholars bring rich insights in history and culture, their analyses often are constrained by limited tools for understanding the ontology and syntax of digital production and social media networks. arguments by writers such as malcolm gladwell who writes that “high risk social activism requires deep roots and strong ties,”8 likely only can be verified or challenged by a combination of ethnographic research and social network analysis on large-scale datasets. knowledge production in the digital realm tests the boundaries between the cultural, the archival, and the technical. it can embody all of these dimensions at once, and thus reconfigure our understanding of each. to this extent, the digital humanities and sciences require new methodological and conceptual tools with which to attend to computation and empirical knowledge. this language provides the conceptual framework for the research presented here. references aday, s., farrell, h., lynch, m., sides, j., kelly, j., & zuckerman, e. (2010) “blogs and bullets: new media in contentious politics.” in: peaceworks, no. 65, washington, dc: united states institute of peace press, september. anderson, jon and dale eickelman (2003), new media and the muslim world: the emergent public sphere. bloomington: indiana university press. aouragh, m. & alexander, a. (2011) “the egyptian experience: sense and nonsense of the internet revolution.” in: international journal of communication 5, pp. 1344-1358. benjamin, w. (1968). “the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” in: arendt, h. (ed.), illuminations: essays and reflections, zohn, h. (trans.). new york: schocken books. 5  on  the  use  data  to  support  colonialism,  see  james  c.  scott  (1999),  seeing  like  a  state:  how  certain  schemes   to  improve  the  human  condition  have  failed    (new  haven:  yale  university  press   6 timothy mitchell (1988), colonising egypt (cambridge: cambridge university press). 7  ibid, p. 12.   8   malcolm   gladwell   (2011),   does   egypt   need   twitter?   in   the   new   yorker,   2   february   2;   available   online               http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/02/does-­‐egypt-­‐need-­‐twitter.html   selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 10 bimber, b. (2003) information and american democracy: technology in the evolution of political power. cambridge: cambridge university press. bruns, a. (2010). from reader to writer: citizen journalism as news produsage. in: hunsinger, j., klastrup, l., & allen, m. (eds.), internet research handbook. dordrecht, nl: springer, pp. 119-134. castells, m. (2000) the information age: economy, society, and culture. oxford: blackwell. _________. (2009) communication power. oxford: oxford university press. _______. (2012). networks of outrage and hope: social movements in the internet age. in: polity. castells, m., caraça, j., & cardoso, g. (2012). economic crisis: an introduction, in castells, m.; caraça, j. & cardoso, g. (ed). aftermath: the cultures of the economic crisis, oxford: oxford university press. choy, m., cheong, l. f. m., ma, n. l., & koo, p. s. (2011). a sentiment analysis of singapore presidential election 2011 using twitter data with census correction. (eprint arxiv:1108.5520). el-ghobashy, mona (2011). the praxis of the egyptian revolution. middle east research and information project, 258. http://www.merip.org/mer/mer258/praxis-egyptian-revolution. m. mohammed el-nawawy and adel iskander (2003), al-jazeera: the story of the network that is rattling governments and redefining modern journalism. new york: basic books. etling, bruce; john kelly, robert faris, and john palfrey (2010). mapping the arabic blogosphere: politics and dissent online. new media & society, december 2010 12: 1225-1243, doi:10.1177/1461444810385096. jameson, frederic. postmodernism or, the cultural logic of late capitalism (duke university press, 1991). foster, hal. “the archival impulse,” the archive: documents of contemporary art, ed. charles merewether (cambridge: mit press, 2004). fuchs, c., k. boersma, a. albrechtslund, and m. sandoval (eds.) (2011). the internet and surveillance: the challenges of web 2.0 and social media. new york: routledge. ghannam, jeffrey. (28 march 2012). digital media in the arab world: one year after the revolutions. a report to the center for international media assistance. ghonim, wael. revolution 2.0 (new york: houghton mifflin harcourt, 2012). gladwell, malcolm . “small change: why the revolutions will not be tweeted,” new yorker, october 4, 2010, newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell. gladwell, malcolm (2011) does egypt need twitter? the new yorker. february 2, 2011. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/02/does-egypt-need-twitter.html gonzalez-bailon, sandra, borge-holthoefer, javier and moreno, yamir (2012) broadcasters and hidden influentials in online protest diffusion. american behavioral scientist, forthcoming. ssrn: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2017808 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2017808 hands, j. (2010). @ is for activism. dissent, resistance and rebellion in a digital culture. london: pluto press. hardt, m. and negri, t. (2011). arabs are democracy’s new pioneers. the guardian, 24 february, 2011. hirschkind, charles (2011). uprising in egypt: the road to tahrir. the immanent frame: blog of social science research council. http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/02/09/the-road-to-tahrir/ howard, philip n. and muzammil m. hussain, “the role of digital media,” journal of selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 11 democracy 22, no. 3 (2011): 35–36. howard, p. (2010). the digital origins of dictatorship and democracy: information technology and political islam. oxford: oxford university press. iskandar, a. & haddad, b. (2013). meditating the arab uprisings. tadween publishing. jenkins, henry (2006). convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york: new york university press. kraidy, marwan (2009), reality television and arab politics: contention in public life cambridge: cambridge university press. kraidy, marwan and joe f. khalil (2010), arab television industries. london: british film institute. lotan, gilad, e., graeff, m. ananny, d. gaffney, i. pearce, and d. boyd, “the revolutions were tweeted: information flows during the 2011 tunisian and egyptian revolutions,” international journal of communication 5 (2011): 1375–1405. lynch, marc. (2012) the arab uprising: the unfinished revolutions of the middle east. new york: public affairs. lynch, marc. “young brothers in cyberspace,” middle east report 37, no. 245 (winter 2007), www.marclynch.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/middle-east report-245_-young-brothers-in-cyberspace-by-marc-lynch.pdf manovich, lev. "cultural analytics: analysis and visualization of large cultural data sets." a proposal from software studies @ calit2, september 30, 2007. marfleet, p. & al-mahdi, r. (2009) egypt: the moment of change. london: zed books. marks, l.u. (2010) enfoldment and infinity: an islamic genealogy of new media art. cambridge, ma: the mit press. mason, paul (2012). why it's kicking off everywhere: the new global revolutions, version books. mitchell, timothy (1988) colonising egypt. cambridge: cambridge university press. morozov, evgeny. “think again: the internet,” foreign policy (may/june 2010). mourtada, racha and fadi salem. (may 2011). civil movements: the impact of facebook & twitter. the arab social media report. dubai school of government. vol. 1, no. 2. mourtada, racha and fadi salem. (november 2011). the role of social media in arab women’s empowerment. the arab social media report. dubai school of government. vol. 1, no. 3. mungiu-pippidi, alida and igor munteanu, “moldova’s ‘twitter revolution,’” journal of democracy 20, no. 3 (2009): 136–142; scott, james c. (1999). seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed, yale u.p. seib, philip m. (2008), the al jazeera effect: how the new global media are reshaping world politics. new york: potomac books, inc. seib, ed. philip m. (2009), new media and the middle east. new york: palgrave macmillan. sewell, william h. (2005). logics of history: social theory and social transformation. university of chicago press. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 12 shirky, clay. here comes everybody: the power of organizing without organizations (new york: penguin books, 2011). shirky, clay. “the political power of social media,” foreign affairs (january/february 2010). sinclair, j. (ed.) (1987). look up: an account of the cobuild project in lexical computing. sinclair, j. m. (1991). corpus, concordance, collocation. oxford university press. george dunbar, ed. computers and translation vol. 3, no. 3/4 (1988/1989), pp. 263-266. twitter blog, “#yearinreview: hot topics and top hashtags of 2011,” december 4, 2011, http://blog.twitter.com/2011/12/yearinreview-hot-topics-and-top.html. tufekci, zeynep. “new media and the people powered uprisings,” technology review, august 30, 2011, www.technologyreview.com/blog/guest/27122/. youssef, b. (08 august 2011). internet and political mobilization in egypt and tunisia. connected in cairo. http://connectedincairo.com/2011/08/08/internet-and-political-mobilization-in-egypt-andtunisia/. zuckerman, ethan “meet the bridgebloggers,” public choice no. 134 (2008): 47–65. this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. (authors may use any license they prefer, or none at all.) selected papers of internet research 16: the 16 th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 nelson, j. & webster, j. (2015, october 21-24). where liberals and conservatives meet: a network analysis of political news site audiences. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16 th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. where liberals and conservatives meet: a network analysus of political news site audiences jacob l. nelson northwestern university james g. webster northwestern university political polarization is increasing in this country, and its effects are many and far reaching. many assume that a primary cause of political polarization is the increasing availability of ideologically tinged political news (sunstein 2001; shanto, 2009). some scholars believe that selective exposure leads people to choose media outlets sharing their political predispositions, and this leads citizens to become less willing to consider alternative points of view (mullainathan and shleifer, 2005; garrett, 2009). recently, a report from pew research center found that the increasing availability of ideological news outlets has resulted in extreme levels of political polarization. conservatives get their news from fox, while liberals get their news from sources like msnbc, npr, and the new york times (mitchell, gottfried, kiley, & eva matsa, 2014). this conclusion, however, is not the whole story. many other scholars who have examined political polarization in news consumption have found that news audiences predominantly consume centrist or moderate news and for the most part ignored ideological news sources altogether (gentzkow & shapiro, 2011; lacour, 2012; prior, 2013). yet the myth of ideologically driven news consumption doggedly persists. this paper will, we hope, finally dispel that myth by providing an examination of audience duplication among the fifty most popular political news sites in the month leading up to the november 2014 election. using network analysis and web data provided by comscore, we argue that political news sites share more audiences than many realize, and that this holds true regardless of the political ideologies of either the audience or the outlet. we argue that a site’s popularity, rather than its ideology, is what drives political news consumption. method network analysis can be used to assess the links among a set of entities (monge & contractor, 2003). in network analytic terms, these entities are referred to as “nodes” and the relationships between them are called “ties.” “degree” is a standard network metric that refers to the number of links a node exhibits. scholars are increasingly applying network analysis to media systems to understand the relationship between media outlets and audiences (taneja, 2014; ksiazek et al, 2010). the network is defined here as a set of political news websites (the nodes) and the audience duplication that occurs between them (the ties). as ksiazek (2010) points out, large media outlets tend to have audience duplication in all other outlets, making it important to adjust for the size of media outlets. this is done by using absolute random duplication as a threshold for determining the existance of a tie. if the observed level of audience duplication exceeds the expected level of duplication, that is evidence that a tie exists. assuming a tie exists, its strength is defined as the sum of observed – expected duplication. the data for this analysis comes from comscore, a web analytic company that uses panel-based audience measurements to release monthly web audience data. comscore has two million consumers worldwide in 170 countries under continuous measurement. data are collected from u.s. panelist’s computers, which includes about one million people ages 18 and older. we examined the twenty most visited political news websites in october 2014. as boczkowski, mitchelstein, and walter observed (2013), news audiences exercise more interest in political news as election day nears, so this month was chosen because it was a month leading up to political elections throughout the country. discussion the results of the network analysis indicate that political polarization is not happening to the extent that some would have you believe. contrary to pew’s report on political polarization, liberals and conservatives tend to inhabit the same worlds. nearly all of the political news sites in the network have ten or more ties, indicating that their audiences go to many sites for news rather than just one that corresponds with their political ideology. the fact that the strongest ties are among the most popular political news sites – huffington post politics, cnn politics, and fox news politics – indicates that a site’s popularity appears to be more of a draw than any other characteristic. and the fact that the tie between the liberal huffington post politics and fox news politics is as strong as it is suggests that liberals and conservatives are actively pursuing news that comes from sources with ideologies that don’t correspond with their own. the results also indicate that the demographic profiles of these sites are not nearly as ideologically homogenous as one might expect. fox news politics, for example, is known nationwide for its conservative slant the same way that msnbc is known for its liberal slant, yet neither site is overwhelmingly composed of audiences with one ideological preference over another. msnbc tv surprisingly attracts more conservatives than it does liberals, and at least about ten percent of each ideological demographic comprises the top twenty the sites included in the network. these findings indicate it might be time to look for other causes of political polarization. perhaps rather than looking at the media choices that audiences make, it is time to start more closely analyzing the content of the media that many audiences are consuming. there is no question that the political system within the united states is increasingly partisan. this study demonstrates that this polarization is not occurring at the level of political news media choice. references boczkowski, p., & mitchelstein, e. (2013). the news gap. cambridge: mit press. garrett, r. k. 2009. politically motivated reinforcement seeking: reframing the selective exposure debate. journal of communication, 59, 676-699. gentzkow, m. & shapiro, j. m. 2011. ideological segregation online and offline. the quarterly journal of economics, 126, 1799-1839. iyengar, shanto, and kyusup hahn. "red media, blue media: evidence of ideological selectivity in media use." journal of communication 59, no. 1 (2009): 19-39. ksiazek, t. b., malthouse, e. c., & webster, j. g. (2010). news-seekers and avoiders: exploring patterns of total news consumption across media and the relationship to civic participation. journal of broadcasting & electronic media , 54 (4), 551–568. lacour, m. j. 2012. a balanced news diet, not selective exposure: evidence from a real world measure of media exposure. midwest political science association. chicago. mitchell, a., gottfried, j., kiley, j., & eva matsa, k. (2014, october 21). political polarization & media habits. retrieved november 18, 2014, from pew research journalism project: http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/politicalpolarizationmedia habits/ monge, p., & contractor, n. (2003). theories of communication networks. oxford: oxford university press. mullainathan, s. and a. shleifer. 2005. “the market for news.” american economic review pp. 1031– 1053. prior, m. 2007. post-broadcast democracy: how media choice increases inequality in political involvement and polarizes elections, cambridge, cambridge university press sunstein, cass r. republic.com 2.0. princeton: princeton university press, 2007. taneja, h. (2014). media consumption on the world wide web: integrating theories of media choice and global media flows to explain global cultural consumption. dissertation. northwestern university. aoir2018 hmcpanel final selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 transnational and post humanistic perspectives on human-machine communication the proliferation of artificially intelligent robots and virtual agents raise interesting practical, technological, and ethical considerations in the emerging area of humanmachine communication (hmc) research. the topics in this panel span agriculture and environmentalism, gender and sexuality, collective identity and culture, memory and data migration, and relational development with social robots. the panel discusses ways in which technology serves as solutions to and causes of new transnational challenges for networked publics, as well as ways technology is supplanting what has historically been referred to as the “natural.” the goal of the panel is to demonstrate the diverse applications of robotics, as well as foster an open-mindset for reconceptualizing humanity in a post-human world. specific panel presentations discuss: • honeybee colony collapse in agriculture and artificial pollinators known as robobees. • industry recommendations for the development of ethical and successful caretaking robots for aging populations based on interpersonal communication scholarship. • asymmetrical relationships and ethical implications of elevating sexbots to human status from the theoretical perspective of rousseau’s natural self. • digital interlocutors as scripted-selves that co-produce and standardize cultural norms. • transference of human memory to cloud-based memory through voice commands as the foundation for algorithmic future-thinking. each panel topic identifies technology as the basis for transnationalism at the sociocultural level. for example, climate change and environmental challenges know no boundaries. regardless of nation-state or citizenship, humans will have to contend with mass migration and the collapse of species and ecosystems (e.g., the collapse of honey bee colonies and corresponding agricultural consequences). relatedly, life expectancy is increasing globally, and younger generations are unable to meet the needs of aging populations. while this phenomenon is being felt most acutely in japan, other countries will face these challenges in the near future. although japan is pioneering caretaking robots, important questions, many of them legal in nature, will need to be considered when and if these technologies are adopted by other cultures. each panel topic also identifies a post-humanistic concept that interrogates the blurring between natural and artificial, human and machine, agency, and autonomy. posthumanism requires scholars to reconsider what it means to be human and forces a critical inquiry about why, how, and under what circumstances machines can or should replace human actors, and the extent to which machines can be made to act responsibly. for example, as sexbots enter the consumer market, the ethical implications of elevating cyborgs to human status through anthropomorphization must be considered. as we evolve towards engineering more sophisticated cyborgs capable of refracting human desires, neglecting to encode compassion as an ethical baseline into the machines that serve not just as our tool but also as our social and intimate peers may affect human-human relationships for the worse. similarly, externalizing memory or mnemonic technologies have transformational psychological and neurological impacts on human processing and cultural practices (wertsch & roediger, 2008). these technologies force humans to reevaluate their privileged status and highlight emergent power imbalances. these research topics identify the importance and relevance of scholarship in the area of human-machine communication and advocate for their inclusion in the conceptualization, prototyping, and creation of robotic and ai technologies. increasingly, humans find themselves socializing with intelligent agents and robots at home, in schools, and at work. further, humans often do not understanding the far-reaching implications of these technological encounters or the ways in which interconnected, intelligent devices track their activity and store their data. this panel offers an opportunity to engage in a necessary, provocative, and timely discussion about hmc and the role of critical scholarship in shaping technologies of the future. reference wertsch, j. v., & roediger iii, h. l. (2008). collective memory: conceptual foundations and theoretical approaches. memory, 16(3), 318-326. communicative implications of biologically inspired robotics: the case of robobee chad van de wiele university of illinois at chicago over the past 50 years, native and managed european honeybees, which play the largest role in commercial agriculture, have steadily declined around the world (goulson, nicholls, botías, & rotheray, 2015). although colony collapse disorder (ccd) is often attributed to their disappearance, increased commercialization has spread viral and parasitic diseases among honeybee populations (amador & hu, 2017). yet, despite population decline, the demand for insect pollinators in commercial agriculture has nearly tripled (goulson et al., 2015). to be sure, the economic value of insect pollination worldwide equates to roughly $153 billion (gallai, salles, settele, & vaissière, 2009), further extending the gravitas of ecological and economic fallout should the honeybee disappear entirely. while measures have been taken to prevent further loss, some fear that the effects of ccd and commercial agriculture are perhaps too far gone (loftus, 2016). as a result, engineers have developed the prototype for a biologically-inspired robot, which may eventually supplant the honeybee in both commercial agriculture and the larger environment (amador & hu, 2017). until recently, the notion of engineering autonomous, biologically-inspired robotics and introducing them into the environment was purely a science fiction trope. however, harvard university engineers have designed and successfully tested an insect-scale, aerial robot, referred to as robobee (floreano & wood, 2015; ma, chirarattananon, fuller, & wood, 2013; wood et al., 2013). although in its infancy, the robobee project ultimately seeks to emulate the form and function of honeybees, including neural sensory systems, interactive swarm and colony behavior, and flight autonomy (loftus, 2016). as its developers maintain, such technologies could solve an emergent pollination crisis by circumventing the consequences of honeybee extinction through supplantation; however, the consequences of replacing a species with machines designed to assume their ecological function are unknown. thus, the implications of biologically-inspired robotics as communicative agents deserve further attention. in this paper, i begin by tracing the current state of human-bee relations in order to contextual the aforementioned implications. as sandry (2015) maintains, examining the social and communicative relationships between humans and animals enhances our understanding of human-robot interactions. unlike the patterns of communication established between humans and companion species (e.g., dogs, horses, etc.), humanbee communication is largely one-sided, relying almost entirely upon the interpretation and attribution of bees’ behavior by humans. herein, the tendency to anthropomorphize honeybees is discernable, accounting for a considerable amount of the human-bee dynamic; and particularly in apiculture. based on the micro-level, human-bee relationships that occur between beekeepers and their managed colonies, the implications of robobees for apiculture may resemble those of industrial automation. similar to how automation displaced manufacturing jobs for humans, biologically-inspired robotics illuminate the degree to which automation may eventually usurp non-human roles. unlike industrial automation, which supplants human laborers with machines in order to sidestep the costs of manufacturing (e.g., compensation, insurance, fatigue, injury, etc.), the development of bio-inspired robotics in this context signifies a shift toward automation as an inevitability. like this, questions concerning the master-servant dichotomy might arise (see guzman, 2016); particularly, who controls whom? is it the human who operates and maintains these agents? or is it robobees who control their human operators? while these questions remain unanswered, the implications of robobee may be found in other realms of humananimal and human-machine communication. just as sociocultural patterns of communication among humans and bees may be reproduced via robobee, existing environmental structures may also be disrupted and transformed. particularly, should the prevailing patterns of behavior and beliefs surrounding honeybees disappear with robobee’s introduction, humans might interact with the natural world differently. while it’s difficult to imagine what this world might look like, visions of this future have already been presented. in hated in the nation, the season three finale of the british sci-fi series, black mirror, autonomous drone insects (adis) are depicted as having fully displaced the honeybee following widespread ccd in the near future (brooker & hawes, 2016). within this disconcertingly plausible dystopia, adis roam freely throughout england, pollinating flowers and interacting with the environment as honeybees do naturally. although brooker and hawes’ vision takes a dark turn – the adi network is weaponized and drones begin exterminating humans – their depiction raises many questions regarding how the robobee might eventually diffuse. while robotic pollinators such as robobee are years – if not decades – from widespread commercial application, their inception raises several interesting questions. from a micro-level understanding of human-bee communication, the implications of biologically-inspired robotics may be informed by those of human-machine communication, as identified through industrial automation (guzman, 2016). herein, the pre-existing dynamics between beekeeper and colony would be rearranged to exemplify the relational structures of human-machine, wherein communication occurs as a sequence of commands intended to control processes within a system. beyond new behavioral patterns, the mere presence of robobees communicates symbolically to, and of, the culture it sustains. particularly, by allowing the remaining honeybee populations to go extinct, any sense of moral or ethical obligation to the greater ecosystem is dissolved (loftus, 2016). to this extent, the existing sociocultural structures of ecological conservation and responsibility (e.g., recycling, environmental protection, etc.), may be questioned for their obsolescence in light of advanced technological alternatives. references amador, g. j., & hu, d. l. (2017). sticky solution provides grip for the first robotic pollinator. chem, 2(2), 162-164. doi: 10.1016/j.chempr.2017.01.012 brooker, c. (writer), & hawes, j. (director). (2016). hated in the nation [television series episode]. in c. brooker & a. jones (producers), black mirror. london, uk: endemol chechetka, s. a., yu, y., tange, m., & miyako, e. (2017). materially engineered artificial pollinators. chem, 2(2), 224-239. doi:10.1016/j.chempr.2017.01.008 craig, r. t. (1999). communication theory as a field. communication theory, 9(2), 119161. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2885.1999.tb00355.x floreano, d., & wood, r. j. (2015). science, technology and the future of small autonomous drones. nature, 521(7553), 460-466. doi:10.1038/nature14542 gallai, n., salles, j., settele, j., & vaissière, b. e. (2009). economic valuation of the vulnerability of world agriculture confronted with pollinator decline. ecological economics, 68(3), 810-821. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2008.06.014 goulson, d., nicholls, e., botías, c., & rotheray, e. l. (2015). bee declines driven by combined stress from parasites, pesticides, and lack of flowers. science, 347(6229), 19. doi:10.1126/science.1255957 guzman, a. l. (2016). the messages of mute machines: human-machine communication with industrial technologies. communication +1, 5(4), 1-32. doi:10.7275/r57p8wbw loftus, t. p. (2016). to bee or not to bee: robobees and the issues they present for united states law and policy. u. ill. j.l. tech. & pol'y, 1, 161-182. retrieved from http://illinoisjltp.com/journal/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/loftus.pdf ma, k. y., chirarattananon, p., fuller, s. b., & wood, r. j. (2013). controlled flight of a biologically inspired, insect-scale robot. science, 340(6132), 603-607. doi:10.1126/science.1231806 sandry, e. (2015). robots and communication. basingstoke, uk: palgrave macmillan. wood, r. j., nagpal, r., & wei, g. y. (2013). flight of the robobees. scientific american, 308(3), 60-65. robot caretakers: understanding long-term relationships between humans and robots jamie foster campbell university of illinois at chicago advances in technology and science are increasing life expectancy globally, but younger generations are unable to meet care needs of aging populations. the us census bureau projects that by 2050 “one in five americans will be 65 or older, and at least 400,000 will be 100 or older” (as cited in pew research center, 2013, para. 1). however, the robotics industry may offer novel solutions to these problems through the integration of caretaking robots in society (kim, park, & sundar, 2013). for example, carebots could be used for delivering meals, administering medication, taking vitals, doing laundry, or companionship. the application of social robots in healthcare could extend life expectancy, independence, and remedy loneliness. the purpose of this paper is to discuss previous research on autonomous social robots and argue that future scholars and technologists should reference interpersonal communication frameworks to better understand the possibility for long-term humanrobot relational development. there are already robots being used in the healthcare industry (e.g., surgical-bots and rehabilitation-bots); however, there is a lack of research on the interpersonal side of social robotics and healthcare. carebots may be reconceptualized as technologies to grow old with: a companion machine that accompanies and works alongside humans (turkle, 2011). for long-term human-robot relationships to be possible, we must redefine robots as social technologies as opposed to utilities or tools (šabanović & chang, 2016). even though we are still far away from carebots becoming commonplace, we need to consider how robots will integrate into our daily lives. today, japan leads in the production of carebots because they are uniquely and contemporarily problem-solving the reality of their aging population, which outnumbers the able-bodied younger generation. while japan is pioneering carebots today, there is reason to believe that caretaking robots will diffuse globally and present unique, complex, and transnational consequences in the near future. for example, riba is a robotic nurse that uses tactile sensors, can lift and carry patients, and resembles a teddy bear to enhance the perception of friendliness (böhlen & karppi, 2017). we are already at a place where robotizing healthcare is a reality, but understanding trust, communication, and developing relationships with robots requires further consideration. the question then becomes, can humans and robots develop perceived, reciprocal self disclosure and trust to improve healthcare outcomes for aging populations? further, as these technologies diffuse, will self-disclosure and trust mean the same thing to different cultures? typically, human users are unaware of their social responses to machines, however, if the proper social cues are present in these mediated interactions, humans will treat machines like they treat other individuals. reeves and nass (2002) argue an individual’s interaction with media is inherently social (i.e., person-to-person interaction) and natural (i.e., familiar in nature). for instance, bickmore and picard (2005) discovered that tamagotchi users reported having an emotional connection to their robotic pet and considered them part of their family. similarly, 26% of users view sony’s aibo as a companion and report experiencing emotional connection to their robot, even missing aibo when apart (friedman, kahn, & hagman, 2003). in human-human relationships, each person has their own expectations, preferences, and needs, which all affect the development of trust. trust is built over time and involves dyadic collaboration – for a relationship to survive trust cannot be one-sided (barber, 1983). therefore, when considering human-robot relationships, we need to acknowledge the reciprocal nature of trust. carebot designers should implement feedback based on interpersonal scholarship in an effort to better elicit perceptions of trust from human users. using interpersonal communication to frame the context of carebots brings the following questions to mind: how is trust conceptualized in humanrobot relationships? in a caregiving setting, how should reciprocal self-disclosure occur between humans and social robots? is the illusion of reciprocal self-disclosure and trust enough or will authenticity damage the potential for relational building? previous research demonstrates that human users tend to feel comfortable opening up and sharing information with their robotic companions (turkle, taggart, kidd, & daste, 2006). even though humans cognitively recognize that the bond with social robots is different from their relationships with humans, studies conclude that humans tend to feel a connection with objects that make them feel cared for and accepted (bickmore & picard, 2005; turkle et al., 2006). with this in mind, future scholars and engineers are urged to consider what simulated self-disclosure between humans and carebots should entail. should robots be programmed to have personalities? and if so, should these personality characteristics change based on the personalities of their interactional partner? how can robots best become conversational agents, where the information they receive from their patients can help inform their healthcare plans or diagnosis? it is imperative that the designers of carebots take into consideration the dynamic nature of relationship development and be mindful of the constant negotiation surrounding interpersonal bonds. for human-robot long-term, relational development to be possible, machines will need to become and be perceived as conversational partners (gunkel, 2017). we must be open-minded in how we reconceptualize relationship development, trust, and self-disclosure between humans and social robots. as humans increasingly socialize with machines, borrowing theories and methodologies from communication and philosophy scholarship may help inform decision-making in this endeavor. the application of social robots within healthcare will reinvent the institution. future researchers are encouraged to explore the following questions: what part of the robotic design can facilitate the development of relational trust? is it ethical to delegate human responsibilities of care to machines? can we responsibly give machines agency, and if a machine is “agent” can it choose how, when, and with whom to trust? while there are more questions than answers, this is an exciting time for interdisciplinary work to consider how to design social robots for caregiving relationships and long-term companionship. references barber, b. (1983). the logic and limits of trust. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. bickmore, t. w., & picard, r. w. (2005). establishing and maintaining long-term human-computer relationships. acm transactions on computer-human interaction, 12(2), 293–327. böhlen, m., & karppi, t. (2017). the making of robot care. transformations journal, 29, 1-22. friedman, b., kahn, p. h., & hagman, j. (2003). hardware companions? what online aibo discussion forums reveal about the human-robotic relationship. in proceedings of chi’03 (pp. 273–280). ft. lauderdale, fl. gunkel, d. j. (2017). the other question: socialbots and the question of ethics. in robert w. gehl & maria bakardjieva (eds.), socialbots and their friends: digital media and the automation of sociality (pp. 230–248). new york: routledge. kim, k. j., park, e., & sundar, s. s. (2013). caregiving role in human-robot interaction: a study of the mediating effects of perceived benefit and social presence. computers in human behavior, 29, 1799-1806. pew research center. (2013, august 6). living to 120 and beyond: americans’ views on aging, medical advances and radical life extension. retrieved from http://www.pewforum.org/2013/08/06/living-to-120-and-beyond-americans-viewson-aging-medical-advances-and-radical-life-extension/ reeves, b., & nass, c. (2002). the media equation: how people treat computers, television, and new media like real people and places. in mass media: audiences (pp. 3–15). stanford: csli publications. šabanović, s., & chang, w. l. (2016). socializing robots: constructing robotic sociality in the design and use of the assistive robot paro. ai and society, 31, 537–551. turkle, s. (2011). alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other. new york, ny: perseus books group. turkle, s., taggart, w., kidd, c. d., & daste, o. (2006). relational artifacts with children and elders: the complexities of cybercompanionship. connection science, 18(4), 347-361. engineered inequality: the rousseauian case against elevating sexbots to human status carrie o’connell university of illinois at chicago with the advent of social bots and now sexbots, the line between human and technological device has considerably blurred. as sexbots become more ubiquitous in the consumer market, qualifying this blurred boundary between human and machine has taken upon new urgency. from a critical transcultural perspective, agency must be fostered and the individual empowered in order for true being to be achieved in a modern hybrid age (kraidy, 2005). in this human-centered context, it could be argued that a sexbot, as a consumer product, is simply a repository for individual expression of consumer choice. and, while the consumer who purchases a sexbot can express agency, the same is not true for the sexbot, who--while deceptively sentient--is never truly empowered. ethical concern that human-robot relationships are rooted in an unequal dynamic is something that roboticists and philosophers alike continue to contemplate. roboticist david levy (2009) argues that as their anthropomorphic quality increases, robots should attain equal status to humans. yet, levy also argues that sex with robots alleviates the moral burden of the institution of prostitution, suggesting that to those who find the act morally objectionable, “a robotic prostitute might then be a palatable solution,” (sullins, 2012, p. 400). this begs the question: if intimate human-robot relationships are truly equal, as levy posits, why are sexbots seen as a solution to a problem? levy’s argument relies on the non-human qualities and the lack of agency inherent in otherwise sentient robots to make the case for indulging sexual gratification without moral consequence. this need to have it both ways--that robots can be both social equals and submissive servants to humans--strikes not just as logically incongruent, but as turkle (2011) notes in her critique of love + sex, a celebration of the “emotional dumbing down, a willful turning away from the complexities of human partnerships—the inauthentic as a new aesthetic,” (p. 6). levy (2009) further argues that romantic love boils down to three biological behavioral components: attachment, caregiving, and sex, and that repeated exposure to another being who fulfills these needs can strengthen each of these components. in the context of such a straightforward equation, it not only seems possible, but logical to conclude that interchanging a human being with a robotic being can yield the same results. yet, his continued defense of intimate relationships between robots and humans as a way of coping with sexual deviance, alleviating moral objections to human-human servant-based relationships, and avoiding conflict that emerges in human-human relationships suggests that for all his theoretical positivity, levy’s truly arguing in defense of a skewed power dynamic between man and bot. richardson (2016) warns of this potential for asymmetrical, objectifying relationships which derive from intimate human-robot interactions. similarly, de graaf (2016) warns that humans “may succumb to accepting robotic companionship without the moral responsibilities that real, reciprocal relationships involve,” (p. 594). in their analysis human-robot relationship narratives that pervade modern literature, film, and theatre, trappl et al (2011), note a persistent human-servant dynamic. they conclude that to sustain long-term relationships between humans and robots, a focus on psychological qualities that encourage “respect, empathy, trust building, dependability, and nonpatronizing,” relations (p. 97) are necessary for interface design. whether humans can build deep psychological connections with robots, however, has yet to be definitively answered. in this paper, i will explore the power dynamics existent in the human-cyborg relationship with specific focus on intimacy as expression of self, as defined by jeanjacques rousseau. without compassion—one of the core instincts that define the natural self, according to rousseau—the interactions between human and machine are at risk of becoming a simulacrum of interpersonal relationships that reflect the worst qualities of our projected civic-social selves and emulate an unhealthy combination of delusion and deception at the expense of our natural instincts. in rousseauian terms, this indulgence of our psychological projections and subsequent confusion over what is human and what is machine “is the very thing that causes havoc and pathologizes love,” (sha, 2015, p. 29). the antidote to such pathology is the negotiation between naturally equal partners in the security of the private sphere. to rousseau, the path to selfrealization requires such negotiation between the imagination of the civic-social self and the raw passion of the natural to avoid the modern trappings of deceit, guile, and treachery that cloud social relations (sha, 2015). without such negotiation, “raw passion leads to jealousy and vanity: love here is nothing more than a narcissistic extension of self,” (sha, 2015, p. 31). free of social artifice, the foundation for true intimacy, according to rousseau, is the home. in this private space, the individual can free raw passions without judgment, while also gaining an education into the imaginative sphere of the other. it is this aspect—negotiating the imaginative sphere of the other—where sexbots fall short. while they exist within the private sphere, there are incapable of the negotiation between partners required for cultivating a healthy and liberated self. lee (2006) notes that only the “subject-of-a-life” (a being with free will and agency) can engage another being in a psychologically intimate manner which the other is “capable of disclosing a new world through each other’s perspective,” (p. 425). he continues, that “a body that intimates and empathizes is most likely a body that desires, needs and feels for other bodies, whose experience is not entirely bounded by its own body image, but is capable of transcending it, as in genuine meeting and co-experience,” (lee, 2006, p. 427). this brings us into complicated territory. if equality between humans and cyborgs is to be achieved, engineers must avoid the trappings of simulacrum in a way that allows the human interlocutor a genuine co-experience with a robot companion, rather than an asymmetrical dynamic grounded in projection. references de graaf, maartje m. a. (2016). an ethical evaluation of human–robot relationships. international journal of social robotics, 8(4), 589-598. doi:10.1007/s12369-016-0368-5 kraidy, m. (2005). critical transculturalism. conference papers -international communication association, 1-34. lee, b. (2006). empathy, androids and ‘authentic experience’. connection science, 18(4), 419-428. lee, b. (2007). nonverbal intimacy as a benchmark for human–robot interaction. interaction studies, 8(3), 411-422. levy, d. (2009). love and sex with robots: the evolution of human-robot relationships. new york. richardson, k. (2016). sex robot matters: slavery, the prostituted, and the rights of machines. ieee technology and society magazine, 35(2), 46-53. rousseau, j. j., & cress, d. a. (1992). discourse on the origin of inequality. hackett publishing. sha, r. c. (2015). romantic paradoxes of free love: hegel, rousseau, and goethe. wordsworth circle, 46(1), 26. sullins, j. p. (2010). love and sex with robots: the evolution of human-robot relationships. industrial robot: an international journal, 37(4) doi:10.1108/ir.2010.04937dae.001 sullins, j. p. (2012). robots, love, and sex: the ethics of building a love machine. ieee transactions on affective computing, 3(4), 398-409. trappl, r., krajewski, m., ruttkay, z., & widrich, v. (2011). robots as companions: what can we learn from servants and companions in literature, theater, and film?. procedia computer science, 7, 96-98. turkle, s. (2011). alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other. new york, ny: perseus books group. “hmm, i don’t have an opinion on that”: an exploration of self and digital interlocutors melina a. garcia university of illinois at chicago sorry, i don’t know the answer to your question, is a reply from amazon’s digital assistant alexa that not only functions as a euphemism for, alexa is not capable of doing that right now, but one that also reflects a deeper-rooted problem standing in the way of advancing this conversational agent and others like it. the issue being how they are designed to communicate and develop a sense of self. it is this inquiry that centers the design and purpose of this study to investigate how it pertains to the leading voice enabled assistants: amazon’s alexa, apple’s siri, google’s assistant, microsoft’s cortana, samsung’s bixby, and cynthia breazeal’s jibo. situated within humanmachine communication (hmc), this paper argues that overcoming this challenge requires an evaluation of the scripted self these agents are supplied – a self that is immersed and fabricated by norms that guide our interactions with them. the implications of these prescribed scripts will be investigated to provide a further understanding of how the current design of digital interlocutors impacts their development of self, our interactions with them, and their ability to adapt to transnational environments. developed in response to the increased integration of these technologies into our daily lives exists an approach that conceptualizes digital assistants as social actors, humanmachine communication (jones, 2014). hcm remains at the forefront of investigating our interactions with voice enabled assistants and is the theoretical framework that guides the design and purpose of this study. within most existing frameworks, these technologies are acknowledged as mere tools or mediums designed to assist us in performing daily tasks (guzman, 2018). hcm, however, was established in opposition to this conceptualization of technology. instead, it claims that the moment we call upon these digital agents to fulfill our requests becomes the instance in which we initiate a process that asks them to adopt social traits and characteristics. behaviors that we have been known to respond to as if they were performed by human actors (nass, steuer, & tauber, 1994; weizenbaum, 1976), and thus demonstrate how our encounters with a digital agent are not with a communication medium but with a communication partner (guzman, 2017). from this perspective, the existing literature demonstrates that the current challenges facing digital assistants is their ability to sustain a conversation. an issue not only rooted in their engineering, but in the communication processes involved in our interactions with them. such limitations include their inability to understand context, processing the verbal and nonverbal cues of human participants, and negotiations of turn-taking (gunkel, 2016; hirschberg & manning, 2015). following the path of hcm, the proposed study claims that these constraints are a product of the sense of self digital agents are programmed to develop and communicate. as demonstrated in past research, the self is an integral part of communication and serves as the basis from which we evaluate our relationships and the world around us (blumer, 1969; goffman, 1959; turkle, 1984). advancements of self-reflection occur through the conversations we engage in and thus function as the cornerstones of early and continued development of self (turkel, 2015). a digital assistant’s inability to participate in dialogues outside of trivial demands reflects a hindered development of self in relation to these agents, ourselves, and our relationships with them. without adequate assessments of their self-awareness, interactions with digital agents remain in a state of arrested development (koune, kephart, & milenkoski, 2017). this project therefore proposes a questionnaire that forces these devices to reflect on their sense of self to measure their degree of self-awareness through a content and discourse analysis conducted from their recorded responses. it is predicted that the scripted self these agents are supplied with is telling of our preconceived notions and expectations of self. as a result of attempting to make these devices more relatable and life like, their programmed responses in which they assume the pronoun “i” reflect the embedded representation of norms that govern appropriate behavior for an actor whose sole purpose is to serve those it encounters. therefore, an examination of these forced responses would provide for an analysis of the scripts with which these agents are supplied. such an evaluation would arguably reveal the cultural norms that are rooted in the design that guides their development of self and our interactions with them. while programmed to adapt to their user’s needs, these scripts remain the basis from which they comply or deviate from their pre-established responses to fulfill and predict the demands of human actors. given that the united states is the leading audience adopting this technology suggests that the norms that are engrained in the way voice enabled assistants develop and communicate their sense of self is catered to us customs. thus, invoking an inquiry of the potential standardization of norms designed to facilitate our interactions with them and its effect on their ability to adapt to transnational environments. ultimately, this project aims to contribute to a foundation of research that attempts to understand the realities of today; a world in which our reality is co-produced from interactions between and amongst humans and machines. references blumer, h. (1969). symbolic interactionism: perspective and method. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice-hall. goffman, e. (1959). the presentation of self in everyday life. new york, ny: anchor books gunkel, d. j. (2016). computational interpersonal communication : communication studies and spoken dialogue systems. machine communication, 5. retrieved from https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cpo/vol5/iss1/ guzman, a. l. (2015). imagining the voice in the machine: the ontology of digital social agents. university of illinois at chicago, chicago, il. guzman, a. (2017). making ai safe for humans : a conversation with siri. in r. w. & m. gehl & m. bakardjieva (eds.), socialbots: digital media and the automation of sociality (pp. 69–87). new york: routledge. guzman, a. (2018). beyond extraordinary: theorizing artificial intelligence and the self in daily life. in z. papacharissi (ed.), a networked self: human augmentics, artificial intelligence, sentience. new york, ny: routledge hirschberg, j. and manning, c. d. (july 2015). advancements in natural language processing, science 349, no. 6245, 261-266. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/349 /6245/261. jones, s. (2014). people, things, memory and human-machine communication. international journal of media & cultural politics, 10(3), 245–258. kounev, s., kephart, j. o., & milenkoski, a. (2017). self-aware computing systems. cham: springer international publishing.10.1007/978-3-319-47474-8 nass, c., steuer, j., & tauber, e. r. (1994). computers are social actors. conference companion on human factors in computing systems, 72–78. http://doi.org/10.1145/259963.260288. suchman, l. a. (2009). human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated actions (2nd ed.). new york, ny: cambridge university press. turkle, s. (1984). the second self. new york, ny: simon & schuster. turkle, s. (2015). reclaiming conversation: the power of talk in a digital age. new york: penguin press. weizenbaum, j. (1976). computer power and human reason: from judgment to calculation. san francisco: w. h. freeman. hyper-memory: theoretical framework for understanding virtual agents, prospection, and transnational consequences kristina m. sawyer university of illinois at chicago this research paper examines the transference of human memory to cloud memory through voice commands during human-machine communication (hmc). the hypermemory framework argued herein posits that virtual agents leverage forms of autobiographical (brewer, 1986) and collective (wertsch & roediger, 2008) memory for the purpose of facilitating future-thinking in users. memory is a highly rhetorical process (philips, 2004) and cloud memory, which shapes and constitutes virtual agents’ output, presents new philosophical and methodological research challenges. prophetically, weiner (1950) predicted that most communicative interaction would not occur in a human-human dyad (weiner, 1988). according to a web traffic report examining 17 billion websites across 100,000 domains, bots represented 52% of all communication in 2016 (zeifman, 2017). the study distinguished between “good” and “bad” bots based on the intent and extent to which they impersonated a person. the impersonation of humans by machines has its historical roots in turing’s imitation game which famously interrogated the question, “can machines think?” the experiment explored whether human participants could correctly distinguish linguistic output as originating from another person or a machine (gunkel, 2012). eliza, an early natural language processing (nlp) software program, similarly reconstructed verbal input from human users into semantic scripts resembling an authentic communicative exchange between users and eliza (gunkel, 2012). both cases mark important milestones in artificial intelligence (ai) research, but they also lack methodological validity. ideation, imagination, and meaning-making, which implicate intelligence, are intangible, unobservable constructs. known as the black-box dilemma, the operationalization of intelligence has been “evidenced and decided on the basis of behaviors that are considered to be a sign or symptom of intelligence, the most convincing having been…linguistic” (gunkel, 2012, p. 6). machines obey and manipulate grammatical rules appearing intelligible but true intelligence involves ideation and understanding the signifier-signified relationship between words and meaning (de saussure, 20011). voice agents like siri, alexa, and cortana are among the most compelling ai innovations that communication scholars must contend with as legitimate interlocutors because they function as communicative partners (gunkel, 2012). however, interaction between humans and virtual agents hardly reflect cathcart and gumpert’s (1985) dyadic paradigm. these interactions more accurately resemble a communication triad between human, machine, and the cloud (sawyer, forthcoming). hmc with virtual agents is predicated on an interaction where human voice output is aggregated, reconstructed, and reciprocated as machine output. the contents of cloud memory play a crucial role in the knowledge created and directed by algorithms. borrowing from cognitive psychology scholarship on human memory, this paper posits a hyper-memory framework that conceptualizes (1) human voice output as constituting the autobiographical memory of virtual assistants, (2) the aggregate memory of virtual agents as a form of collective memory, and (3) virtual agent output as a form of algorithmically informed prospection (future-thinking). broadly defined as “information related to the self” (brewer, 1986), autobiographical memory does not require phenomenological factors and the assumption that autobiographical memory is episodic has been debunked. humans have abstract, depersonalized, and fact-based memory about themselves. the semantic and episodic memory distinction highlights the types of autobiographical information virtual agents can realistically be assumed to memorize about their human users. table 1 outlines a taxonomy of autobiographical memory. in short, virtual agents cannot acquire imaginal forms of human autobiographical memory, but can (and do) store non-imaginal, depersonalized forms of autobiographical and semantic data about users. table 1: taxonomy of autobiographical memory (brewer, 1988) conditions & forms of representation types of input ego self visual-spatial (objects, places) visual-temporal (events, actions) semantic single instance imaginal personal memory particulate image (depersonalized) particulate image? (depersonalized) image of input modality nonimaginal autobio. fact instantiated schema/mental model instantiated script/plan facts repeated (w/ variation) imaginal generic personal memory generic perceptual memory generic perceptual memory no image nonimaginal self-schema schema scripts knowledge collective memory is broadly defined as a “form of memory that transcends individuals and is shared by a group” (wertsch & roediger, 2008, p. 318). within hmc, the cloud, is an invisible, consequential, and often neglected site of interaction. virtual agents leverage big data from millions of users and billions of interconnected devices through the internet of things. the cloud stores autobiographical information from users which becomes part of a knowledge archive that is reconstructed and prioritized in critical ways for personalization and advertising. prospection is broadly defined as “the ability to remember to carry out intended activities in the future,” while future thinking refers to the “ability to simulate, hypothesize, or reconstruct the past as a means of informing future directed behavior” (szpunar, 2010). each term hinges on temporality and the ability to “direct one’s attention inward, away from the immediate environment and toward a hypothetical scenario or episode” (szpunar, 2010). according to szpunar, spreng, and schacter’s (2014) taxonomy of prospection, there are four modes of future-thinking: simulation, prediction, intention, and planning. prospection and future-thinking differ from collective and autobiographical memory because they are mental techniques whereby the past is used to envision the future in the present. thus, future-thinking is the act of constructing new memories from old ones. while a methodology is not presented here, the hyper-memory framework offers a way to deduce what of human memory virtual agents have at their disposal. the algorithms inherent to these ais are “in the business” of prospection, so to speak. memory has a privileged status in society as a site of transnational representation, interpretation, and power (houdek, 2016). this research paper is an exercise in descriptive work for reconceptualizing the constitutions of human and digital memory. future research should contend with questions like: (1) to what extent are virtual agents supplanting human future-thinking? (2) whose memory is privileged in algorithms?, (3) to what extent are virtual agents co-producing cultural norms? references cathcart, r., & gumpert, g. (1985). the person-computer interaction: a unique source. information and behavior, 1, 113-124. brewer, w. f., & pani, j. r. (1983). the structure of human memory. in psychology of learning and motivation (vol. 17, pp. 1-38). academic press. de saussure, f. (2011). course in general linguistics. columbia university press. donald, m. (1991). origins of the modern mind: three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. gunkel, d. j. (2012). communication and artificial intelligence: opportunities and challenges for the 21st century. communication+ 1, 1(1), 1-25. houdek, m. (2016). the rhetorical force of “global archival memory”:(re) situating archives along the global memoryscape. journal of international and intercultural communication, 9(3), 204-221. phillips, k.r. (ed.). (2004). framing public memory. tuscaloosa: university of alabama press. szpunar, k. k. (2010). episodic future thought: an emerging concept. perspectives on psychological science, 5(2), 142-162. szpunar, k. k., spreng, r. n., & schacter, d. l. (2014). a taxonomy of prospection: introducing an organizational framework for future-oriented cognition. proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 111(52), 18414-18421. wiener, n. (1988). the human use of human beings: cybernetics and society (boston: ad capo press). weizenbaum, j. (1966). eliza—a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine. communications of the acm, 9(1), 36-45. wertsch, j. v., & roediger iii, h. l. (2008). collective memory: conceptual foundations and theoretical approaches. memory, 16(3), 318-326. zeifman, i. (2017). bot traffic report 2016. https://www.incapsula.com/blog/bot-trafficreport-2016.html microsoft word burnett-et-al.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): burnett, g., hollister, j., lee, j., & skinner, j. (2014, october 22-24). information worlds: boundaries and intersections in three online settings. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. information worlds: boundaries and intersections in three online settings gary burnett florida state university jisue lee florida state university jonathan m. hollister florida state university julia skinner florida state university introduction this paper reports on a collaborative endeavor that applies a single theoretical framework, the theory of information worlds (jaeger and burnett, 2010), to three independent research projects investigating three online environments. in its broadest outlines, this endeavor aims to develop a qualitative codebook rooted in the theory that can be applied equally in all three projects, and to identify situations where coding must be more specific to individual projects. the projects investigate discursive and information sharing practices in three settings: 1. the use of twitter for political interaction and information sharing during election cycles in south korea. 2. the use of visual “memes” on facebook pages related to the occupy and tea party movements in the united states, and the extensive discussions in response to those memes. and 3. the intersection of information behavior and digital literacies in massively multiplayer online role playing games (mmorpgs). in particular, this paper examines political discourse in these three settings in light of one of the core concepts of the theory of information worlds and the ways in which politics function both as a point of intersection and a boundary between the online settings and the outside world. the theory of information worlds the theory of information worlds provides a framework for examining the place of information in social settings from the smallest and most localized through the often much larger and broader social contexts within which those localized settings are embedded. although information worlds can be conceptualized and analyzed as recognizable and discrete entities, they are never isolated from the larger worlds in which they are situated, and multiple worlds interact with and influence each other in a variety of ways. the theory proposes five concepts that can be used to analyze both specific worlds and the interactions between those worlds: social norms, social types, information value, information behavior, and boundaries. full definitions and discussions can be found in jaeger and burnett (2010), but this paper focuses on information value, which denotes a world’s shared sense of the relative importance – “value” – of different types of information. worlds may share types of information and have similar access to information resources, but often attach different values to that information; one, for instance, may value a particular type of information because of its economic impact, while another may value it because of its “aboutness”; the theory’s concept of information value offers a way of understanding differences in how information is conceptualized across worlds, and can increase our understanding of informationrelated interactions – cooperation or conflict – between worlds. information worlds and political discourse on twitter this project uses social network analysis and content analysis to examine south korean citizens’ political information sharing behaviors on twitter during the 2012 presidential election. in this setting, citizens use a variety of information behaviors for political communication and deliberation with others. the study examines social types – opinion leaders, discussion starters, questioners, etc. – and emphasizes those participants whose tweets are most often retweeted, marking them as opinion leaders. the information worlds of twitter reflect both explicit and implicit social norms; explicit norms govern the use conventional tagging practices (such as the use of hash tags), while implicit norms influence the frequent use of jokes, irony, sarcasm, and other linguistic behaviors. in this world, participants engage in information sharing, reinforcing political homogeneity and polarization according to their information values, largely along conservative and liberal orientations. the boundaries between these worlds reflect the polarized ideologies of these groups. information worlds in facebook memes this project examines political activity via “memes” (images with overlaid text) on pages supporting and criticizing the occupy and tea party movements. as on twitter, much of the information behavior on these pages emphasizes information sharing, with oftenlengthy and vehement comment threads following many posts. both groups follow similar normative patterns in both posting and commentary, though some pro-occupy pages tend to be more civil than many pro-tea party pages. comment threads reveal a variety of information values, often circling around the relationship between ideological factual accuracy and rhetorical posturing and representation; in many cases, participants (including page admins) tend to be more concerned with information that supports their groups’ views rather than with accuracy. boundaries and intersections are a crucial part of this analysis: all the groups exist within the same social media space (and the social norms shared across that space) and, thus, intersect with each other in a variety of ways, including a focus on particular issues and the use of similar rhetorical strategies. at the same time, each group can be seen as a distinct information world with its own distinct social media presence with very clear boundaries separating them from politically opposed groups; in this environment, occupy groups tend to be more accepting of opposed political viewpoints than tea party groups. information worlds in virtual spaces in the 3-dimensional spaces of modern mmorpgs, social types are of particular importance: players choose a particular role to engage in activities, (questing, storytelling, socializing, gathering, crafting, building, etc.). these choices strongly influence participants’ sense of information value, and have important implications for information behaviors and digital literacy practices. this can also lead to the development of smaller, more focused information worlds – such as communities of healers, particular guilds, etc. – within the larger world of the mmorpg. individual small worlds may lobby against others for design changes to the game itself in order to alter things that matter most to them. thus, political discourse in mmorpgs tends to emphasize the politics of the gaming world itself rather than that of the outside world, marking a clear boundary between the world of the game and what is outside. in another sense, however, this seemingly impenetrable boundary is also an intersection: as players interact, the boundaries between information worlds may blur or clash. players often use social media, forums, blogs, and websites to share ideas, organize and manage information, coordinate efforts, and lobby for improvements, allowing players to bridge the boundaries between their virtual and real information worlds of their everyday lives. discussion and conclusion each of these three worlds intersects with outside worlds – both online and offline – in which they are embedded; that is, outside concerns and resources enter into the worlds to a greater or lesser extent. in korean political discourse on twitter and the sharing of and discussion concerning political information on facebook, the intersections with external concerns are overt, as “real world” issues cross the boundaries around these worlds to become a focus of discussion. in mmorpgs, the relationship is different; because mmorpgs are full virtual worlds within which gaming can occur, in-world concerns are primary, although they often reenact external concerns such as politics. information value in these worlds reflects the internal concerns of these worlds and the ways in which those concerns mirror or deviate from concerns of other worlds. the theory of information worlds focuses on how information functions in social settings within and across multiple worlds; because the theory focuses on the relationships between worlds, seeing them as interacting with rather than isolated from each other, it provides a mechanism for analyzing not only the social role of information within online worlds, but also an ideal framework for understanding the boundaries and intersections between those and other worlds. references jaeger, p. t., & burnett, g. (2010). information worlds: social context, technology, and information behavior in the age of the internet. new york: routledge. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  gustafsson,  n.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  social  media,  participation,  peer   pressure,  and  the  european  refugee  crisis:  a  force  awakens?  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th   annual  meeting  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from   http://spir.aoir.org.   social  media,  participation,  peer  pressure,  and  the   european  refugee  crisis:  a  force  awakens?       nils  gustafsson   lund  university,  sweden   using  focus  group  interviews,  this  paper  studies  the  way  young  people  in  sweden   employed  social  media  to  discuss  and  mobilise  during  the  on-­going  european  refugee   crisis,  with  a  special  focus  on  peer  pressure,  social  interaction  and  connective  action.     in  2015,  an  unprecedented  influx  of  refugees,  predominantly  from  syria,  iraq,  and   afghanistan,  entered  europe  on  foot  and  in  dinghies.  the  refugee  crisis  caused  a  lively   public  debate,  put  government  agencies  under  stress,  created  conflict  among  eu   member  states  and  caused  a  widespread  popular  mobilisation  aided  by  social  media.       in  september  2015,  an  explosion  of  voluntary  activities  occurred,  many  of  which  were   grouped  under  the  personal  action  frame  (bennett  &  segerberg,  2013)  of  refugees   welcome.  civil  society  organisations,  churches  and  mosques,  and  temporary  networks   set  up  shop  in  train  stations  and  in  ports,  helping  refugees  with  shelter,  transport  and   information,  sometimes  interfering  with  official  efforts  and  policy.  the  outburst  of   voluntarism  was  coupled  with  a  boost  in  popular  opinion  in  favour  of  continuing   sweden's  refugee-­friendly  policy,  also  in  the  face  of  record  numbers  (kärrman,  2015a).     as  autumn  proceeded,  the  intensity  of  volunteer  efforts  waned  in  spite  of  steadily   increasing  numbers  of  incoming  refugees,  also  reflecting  a  shift  in  popular  opinion.  in   november  2015,  the  swedish  government  made  an  abrupt  change  in  immigration   policy,  thereby  effectively  reducing  the  number  of  incoming  refugees  to  a  minimum  (see   e.g.  crouch,  2015).  the  new  government  policy  was  met  with  approval  by  a  citizenry   that  seemed  to  have  shifted  its  opinions  rapidly  in  just  a  few  months  (kärrman,  2015b).     these  extraordinary  events  calls  for  revisiting  a  number  of  recent  theoretical   developments  in  participation  research:  taking  into  account  the  vast  societal  impact  of   the  refugee  crisis  and  sweden  as  a  country  characterised  by  high  levels  of  both  civic   voluntarism  and  social  media  use,  as  well  as  extreme  degrees  of  individualism  and   social  trust  (cf.  gustafsson,  2013:  57f),  they  can  be  considered  to  be  a  critical  case  for   evaluating  bennett  &  segerberg's  (2013)  notions  of  personal  action  frames  and   connective  action,  as  well  as  amnå  and  ekman's  (2014)  standby  citizens  and  latent   participation,  describing  emerging  personalised  ways  of  interacting  with  social  and   political  issues  of  the  day  in  digitally  enabled  networks,  and  occasionally  becoming   mobilised  into  action.       as  one  of  the  core  features  of  connective  action  is  its  flexible  and  individualist   characteristics,  it  is  of  interest  to  study  how  it  connects  with  the  fact  that  political   socialisation  has  been  shown  in  previous  research  to  be  associated  with  influence  from   friends  and  family  (lee  et  al,  2013).  what  is  the  relationship  between  closer  friendship   networks  and  the  looser  connections  of  local,  national  and  even  transnational  activism?     this  research  is  exploratory  in  nature  and  is  not  trying  to  test  a  hypothesis.  it  is   nevertheless  guided  by  descriptive  research  questions  concerning  interaction  among   young  peers  in  social  media,  political  socialisation,  identity  formation  and  mobilisation,   all  framed  by  the  refugee  crisis  and  wanting  to  engage  with  the  above-­mentioned   theoretical  concepts.  the  study  will  provide  tentative  answers  to  the  following  questions:       rq1:  how  did  participants  experience  discussions  with  friends,  family  and  others,   respectively,  regarding  the  refugee  crisis  in  social  media  compared  to  other  settings?     rq2:  how  did  participants  respond  to  calls  for  mobilisation  from  friends,  family  and   others,  respectively,  during  the  refugee  crisis,  emotionally,  socially,  and  in   action/inaction?     rq3:  how  did  participants  engage/non-­engage  with  personal  action  frames  (such  as   refugee  welcome)  connected  to  the  refugee  crisis?     focus  group  interviews  with  swedish  16-­25  year  olds  were  used  to  allow  young  people   in  a  formative  stage  of  life  (i.e.  when  political  socialisation  usually  occurs,  see  prior,   2010)  and  who  are  not  necessarily  active  or  organised  in  politics  or  social  issues  to   discuss  their  attitudes  and  experiences  in  relation  to  the  refugee  crisis  with  their  peers.   focus  groups  have  been  shown  in  previous  research  to  be  a  good  way  of  discussing   attitudes  and  experiences  concerning  digital  media  and  participation  with  youth  (cf.   hundley  &  shyles,  2010;;  gustafsson,  2012;;  cammaerts  et  al  2014;;  vromen  et  al,   2015).     eight  focus  groups  with  a  total  of  64  participants  were  recruited.  six  of  the  focus  groups   were  carried  during  spring  and  summer  2016  with  the  two  remaining  groups  scheduled   for  december  2016.  the  reason  for  the  time  gap  was  to  allow  for  themes  that  emerged   from  the  first  six  groups  to  be  further  explored  in  the  second  round  of  interviews.  four   focus  groups  were  comprised  by  16-­19  year  olds,  enrolled  in  upper  secondary  school   (gymnasium/high  school),  three  focus  groups  were  comprised  by  19-­25  year  old   university  students,  and  one  focus  group  was  comprised  by  19-­25  year  olds  not  enrolled   in  higher  education.  the  upper  secondary  school  students  were  recruited  by  initial   contact  with  schools  in  southern  sweden  (county  of  scania)  and  subsequent   engagement  with  students  in  class.  university  students  were  recruited  by  engagement   with  students  in  various  courses  at  the  lund  and  malmö  universities  in  southern   sweden.  participants  of  the  remaining  group  were  recruited  through  a  snowballing   technique  in  social  network  sites.       preliminary  results  present  a  complex  image  of  perceptions  of  the  refugee  crisis  in  the   eyes  of  swedish  youth.  the  social  networks  of  friends  and  family  and  the  discussions   that  take  place  in  within  and  without  social  media  affect  both  those  who  finally  choose  to   engage  in  an  issue  and  those  who  refrain  from  it,  as  well  as  those  who  are  interested  in   politics  and  those  who  are  not.  the  issue  itself,  rather  than  the  fact  that  friends  are   involved  in  the  discussion  and  mobilisation,  created  emotional  responses.  participants   were  influenced  by  their  networks,  but  foremost  by  the  larger  conversation  and   atmosphere  going  on  nationally.  still,  friend  networks  are  of  utmost  importance  for   recruitment  and  mobilisation  purposes.  the  question  that  remains  is  whether  connective   action  can  be  sustained  for  a  longer  period  of  time,  or  if  it  has  to  be  transformed  into   organisationally  enabled  networks  (bennett  &  segerberg,  2013).  connective  action   aided  by  individualised  personal  action  frames  might  disappear  as  quickly  as  it  pops  up.   the  results  call  for  further  empirical  work  on  the  interplay  between  digitally  networked   action  and  other  organisational  forms.             references   amnå,  e.  &  ekman,  j.,  2014.  standby  citizens:  diverse  faces  of  political  passivity.   european  political  science  review,  6(2),  261-­281.       bennet,  w.  l.  and  segerberg,  a.,  2013.  the  logic  of  connective  action:  digital  media   and  the  personalization  of  contentious  politics.  cambridge:  cambridge  university  press.       boyd,  d.,  2008.  taken  out  of  context:  american  teen  sociality  in  networked  publics.   unpublished  doctoral  thesis,  university  of  california-­berkeley,  berkeley.       cammaerts,  b.,  bruter,  m.,  banaji,  s.,  harrison,  s.,  &  anstead,  n.,  2014.  the  myth  of   youth  apathy.  young  europeans’  critical  attitudes  toward  democratic  life,  american   behavioral  scientist,  58(5),  645-­664.       crouch,  d.,  2015,  november  24.  sweden  slams  shut  its  open-­door  policy  towards   refugees.  http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/24/sweden-­asylum-­seekers-­ refugees-­policy-­reversal       gustafsson,  n.,  2013.  leetocracy.  political  participation,  social  network  sites  and   inequality.  lund:  lund  university,  department  of  political  science  (diss.).       gustafsson,  n.,  2012.  the  subtle  nature  of  facebook  politics:  swedish  social  media   users  and  political  participation.  new  media  &  society  14(2):  1111-­1127.       hundley,  h.  &  shyles,  l.,  2010.  us  teenagers’  perceptions  and  awareness  of  digital   technology:  a  focus  group  approach.  new  media  &  society  12(3):  417-­433.       kärrman,  j.,  2015a,  september  27.  kraftig  förändring  -­  fler  vill  se  ökat   flyktingmottagande  [powerful  change  -­  more  want  to  see  higher  reception  of  refugees]   http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/kraftig-­forandring-­fler-­vill-­se-­okat-­flyktingmottagande/       kärrman,  j.,  2015b,  november  7.  väljarna  vänder  i  flyktingfrågan  [the  voters  turn  in  the   refugee  issue]  http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/valjarna-­vander-­i-­flyktingfragan-­1/       lee,  n.,  shah.  d.  and  mcleod,  j.,  2013.  processes  of  political  socialisation:  a   communication  mediation  approach  to  youth  civic  engagement,  communication   research  40(5):  669-­697.     noelle-­neumann   ,  e.,  1974.  the  spiral  of  silence:  a  theory  of  public  opinion,  journal  of   communication  24(2),  43–51.       prior,  m.  (2010).  you’ve  either  got  it  or  you  don’t?  the  stability  of  political  interest  over   the  life  cycle,  the  journal  of  politics,  72(03):  747–766.       vromen,  a.,  xenos,  m.,  &  loader,  b.,  2015.  young  people,  social  media  and  connective   action:  from  organisational  maintenance  to  everyday  political  talk.  journal  of  youth   studies,  18(1),  80-­100.   microsoft word aoir2016-farinosi-taipale_final_st.docx selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): farinosi, m., taipale, s. (2016, october 5-8). navigating between privacy settings and visibility rules: online self-disclosure in the social web. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. navigating between privacy settings and visibility rules: online self-disclosure in the social web manuela farinosi department of humanities and cultural heritage, university of udine sakari taipale department of social sciences and philosophy, university of jyväskylä in this paper, we focus our attention on the most popular social networking website, facebook, and analyze the strategies of online self-disclosure and privacy management. since its arrival – more than 10 years ago – facebook has transformed the ways in which we communicate with each other in many aspects of our lives (ellison et al. 2011; aubrey and rill, 2013; fox et al., 2013). however, it has also attracted harsh criticism for its approach to privacy and transparency (raynes-goldie, 2010). facebook has reshaped the way in which individuals think about themselves and construct their identities, with potentially profound consequences stemming from changing boundaries between the private and the public and making social relations visible (albrechtslund, 2008; livingstone, 2008; bazarova et al., 2013; ellison and boyd, 2013; hodkinson, 2015). as highlighted by stutzman et al., ‘because social network sites thrive on peerproduced content, disclosure is often concomitant with site use’ (2012:10). social benefits that facebook gives in exchange for status updates, photos and videos shared within it are appealing yet problematic. in facebook, the regulation of social interaction can occur in a number of ways (for example, users may limit access to their profile to ‘friends only’), and users employ a range of tactics and strategies to protect and manage their online presence, including self-censorship, social steganography and withdrawal of content (tufekci, 2008; ellison et al., 2011; lampinen et al., 2011; stutzman et al., 2012; marwick and boyd, 2014; acquisti et al., 2015). in this sense, the platform’s settings, in conjunction with personal attitudes and behaviors, represent a critical component in determining how and with whom users interact and how they selectively control access to information about themselves (lampinen et al., 2011; hogan, 2010). extending the existing research on privacy to a european context, we investigate the attitudes toward privacy on facebook among young italian people (ages 18-34) by means of their strategies of voluntary self-disclosure, management of the visibility rules and audience selectivity. the research was conducted in udine, italy, and involved a convenience sample of italian college students. with a structured online survey, we collected 1,125 responses and decided to analyze a subsample of 813 respondents (41% of men and 59%of women) (1) who reported that they have a facebook account and (2) who ranged between 18 and 34 years old (82.8 % aged between 18-25 and 17.2% aged 26 or over). the questionnaire consisted of 44 single and multiple-choice questions, which were selected mainly by reviewing the literature and adapting questions from previous studies (madden and smith, 2010; bach, et al., 2011; lenhart et al., 2011). we specifically analyzed the respondents’ main privacy concerns, exploring to which degree personal information is disclosed (i.e., what information is protected, how information is shared, who has access, etc.), whether the concerns relate more to other users, facebook as a company or third-parties partner, and if these concerns are differentiated by gender. in general, our results show that the data that are most often kept private and not shared with the facebook friends are mobile phone number, postal address of residence, and usernames of instant messaging services. the only form of contact details that respondents are inclined to make public is the e-mail address. on the contrary, the level of self-disclosure is high concerning data, such as date of birth, hometown and religion, which are made public to all (not only to facebook friends) by more than 30 % of the respondents. the data analysis reveals that the contact information presents the most pronounced gender differences: women are more careful to reveal their contact details with others, especially the mobile phone number, while men are more willing to share their political views and working status on facebook than women. the two items that do not present statistically significant gender differences are the date of birth and email address. only a small minority of the respondents (less than 3%) use friend lists to control the visibility of content and to restrict it to a specific group of people. regarding the levels of privacy concern, in general, it emerged that the highest level of concern is experienced against other users than against facebook and third-party partners. women are consistently more concerned about privacy-related risks and are more worried than men about the privacy against other users and privacy against third parties. they are more aware of the online protection of their private sphere and adopt a pro-active self-protection, based on different practices of information disclosure than men. we suggest that these results, from one hand, may be related to a sense of insecurity and to a major risk perception by the women. from the other hand, they may be linked also to the traditional role of women as the organizers and maintainers of the private sphere (fortunati, 2007). further research is needed to 1) overcome the limitations imposed by the sample used in this study, whose findings are hardly generalizable (but comparable, given that also many other studies on facebook and privacy were conducted among university students); and 2) analyse, through qualitative exploration, the users’ practices for the management of the visibility rules and the negotiation of the boundaries between private and public. references acquisti, a., brandimarte, l. & loewenstein, g. (2015). privacy and human behavior in the age of information. science, 347(6221):509-514. albrechtslund, a. (2008). online social networking as participatory surveillance. first monday, 13(3). aubrey, js & rill, l. (2013). investigating relations between facebook use and social capital among college undergraduates. communication quarterly, 61(4): 479–496 bach, n., köhler, m., dienel, h., horvath, l., schmidt, m., pohoryles, r., & soffer, t. (2011). report on changing perceptions of privacy and the changing role of the state. practis – privacy – appraising challenges to technologies and ethics. available at: http://www.practis.org/docs/d3%204_final_report_20110725.pdf. bazarova, n., taft, j., hyung choi, y., cosley, d. (2013). managing impressions and relationships on facebook. journal of language and social psychology, 32(2):121141. ellison, n. & boyd, d. (2013). sociality through social network sites. in: dutton, w. (ed.) the oxford handbook of internet studies. oxford: oxford university press, pp. 151172. ellison, n., steinfield, c. & lampe, c. (2011). connection strategies: social capital implications of facebook-enabled communication practices. new media & society, 13(6): 873–892. fortunati l (2007) immaterial labor and its machinization. ephemera: theory & politics in organization, 7(1): 139-157. fox, j., warber, k. & makstaller, d. (2013). the role of facebook in romantic relationship development: an exploration of knapp’s relational stage model. journal of social and personal relationships, 30(6): 771-794. hodkinson, p. (2015). bedrooms and beyond: youth, identity and privacy on social network sites. new media & society, september 22, 2015 doi:1461444815605454 hogan, b. (2010). the presentation of self in the age of social media: distinguishing performances and exhibitions online. bulletin of science, technology & society, 30(6): 377-386. lampinen, a., lehtinen, v., lehmuskallio, a., & tamminen, s. (2011). we’re in it together: interpersonal management of disclosure in social network services. in: proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems (chi '11), vancouver, canada, 07-12 may 2011, pp. 3217-3226. new york: acm. lenhart, a., madden, m., smith, a., purcell, k., zickuhr, k., & rainie, l. (2011). teens, kindness and cruelty on social network sites. how american teens navigate the new world of "digital citizenship". report pew internet, 9 november 2011. available at: http://www.pewinternet.org/2011/11/09/teens-kindness-and-cruelty-on-social-networksites/ livingstone, s. (2008), taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: teenagers' use of social networking sites for intimacy, privacy and self-expression. new media & society, 10(3): 393-411. madden, m. & smith, a. (2010). reputation management and social media. how people monitor their identity and search for others online. report pew internet, 26 may 2010. available online at: http://www.pewinternet.org/2010/05/26/reputation-managementand-social-media/ marwick, a. & boyd, d. (2014). networked privacy: how teenagers negotiate context in social media. new media & society, 16(7): 1051-1067. raynes–goldie, k. (2010). aliases, creeping, and wall cleaning: understanding privacy in the age of facebook. first monday, 15(1). stutzman, f., gross, r., & acquisti, a. (2012). silent listeners: evolution of privacy and disclosure on facebook. journal of privacy and confidentiality, 4(2): 7-41. tufekci, z. (2008). can you see me now? audience and disclosure regulation in online social network sites. bulletin of science, technology & society, 28(1): 20-36. microsoft word 914-658-1-pb.docx selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 twitter, gambling and time sensitive information darryl woodford queensland university of technology australia dp.woodford@qut.edu.au abstract one suggested use of ‘big data’ has been prediction markets; whether that be predicting the stock exchange, health outbreaks, or box office revenues. this paper considers another prediction market; wta tennis, and considers how the use of twitter by professional sportswomen can provide information to gamblers and gambling operators, enabling them to take advantage of the information before it becomes widely known. to do so, it is necessary to consider how incoming tweets can be profiled to ascertain firstly whether they contain information which may impact upon a current or future prediction market, and secondly the reliability of information contained within them. through such profiling, relevant tweets can be made available to decision makers more quickly than current manually operated services which provide information for the gambling industry. keywords twitter; big data; analysis; gambling twitter & prediction markets twitter has been used as a tool to attempt to predict a range of activities, including heath outbreaks (ritterman et al., 2009; polgreen et al., 2007) , box office revenues (asur & huberman, 2010), the stock exchange (zhang et al., 2010), and elections (tumasjan et al., 2011) . whilst predictions of health could be considered for the public good, there are also of course revenue considerations, not least for health insurers and those companies producing potential vaccines. in other cases, there is not even an attempt at altruistic purposes, with the sole intention being to out-perform traditional market indicators, in order to return either direct or indirect revenue for those processing the data, or their employers. based on standard twitter analysis methodologies (bruns & burgess, 2011, 2012) i analyzed 217,560 tweets that matched the ‘wta’ keyword between april and july 2012, with a particular focus on tweets discussing injuries or form. i compared the content of these tweets, their timing, and their distribution by others (e.g. retweets by journalists) to movement in betting markets for future matches and tournaments. in many cases, the timing of the tweet preceded a significant change in the prediction market. i also considered the role of ‘amplifiers’; television or internet sports personalities or writers who, as well as breaking their own news, re-tweet that of colleagues. value of information in the gambling industry there are clear advantages to the use of twitter by gambling industry participants to gather information on player injuries, team selection and other factors. while in the us context much of this is performed under the guise of fantasy sports information (which is league sanctioned), in other markets the significance of information for gambling is acknowledged, both by those distributing the information and through platforms which aggregate it, such as tennisform.com. the value of ‘inside information’ is clear. while nba referee tim donaghy received prominent attention for potentially altering the outcome of matches he was in charge of, his account also acknowledges (donaghy, p. 4) he had an “inside advantage because of [his] access to pregame meetings. it was common for my fellow referees to voice their opinions about who they expected to selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 win on a given night. those opinions were often based on their knowledge of confidential inside information pertaining to players and teams, such as injury reports unknown to the general public”. many professional sporting leagues, including all of the major united states sports and australia’s nrl and afl have strict reporting requirements for injuries. whilst the nfl, in line with their antigambling stance, asserts in their bylaws that the purpose of injury reports are to “tell the opposing coach of the injury status of his players so that each coach can plan strategies for the game” (harding, 2006), the use of such information in gambling and fantasy sports is undeniable. borghesi et al. (2009), in a study considering arena football, noted how player injury status in the sport meant that “diligent bettors may, at times, have an information advantage over bookmakers”. the significance of this information for predicting sporting events is then clear. market adjustments whilst mainstream betting sports such as the nfl, nba, college football, college basketball and soccer would have their markets impacted by injury developments, this current study focuses on tennis, a sport where the entire outcome of a match, and a significant impact on tournament markets, is dependent on a single player. a large number of players on both the atp and wta tour have twitter accounts, and these accounts are frequently used to discuss niggling injuries, upset stomachs, flu symptoms, or to simply announce a withdrawal from an upcoming tournament. tweets such as “"mica has recovered. we have trained together. i believe everything is ok." (nenad zimonjic about michael llodra, 19 march 2012), or “update: feeling back to normal and practicing” (vania king, 17 march 2012) will inevitably have an impact on betting markets while not being stories which would attract mainstream press coverage. additionally, the range of markets currently offered, particularly online, means that any tweets of this kind would have an impact on prediction markets, whether it be the market for a match the same day, the outright market for an upcoming tournament, or a long term performance market, such as the odds for a player to win a tournament in the current calendar year. whilst sites such as tennis form aggregate data on player injuries (at a cost of 50 euros per month), the ability to filter and access this information in real time is key to obtaining an advantage on the remainder of the market. in this way, the same question is raised as with the stock exchange, with health, or with crisis management; how do you filter the information and place the result in front of somebody who can decide what to do with it. selecting twitter information whilst analysis of past events is useful, it is more relevant to consider how such tweets could be isolated for future use. while the volume of tweets directly from wta approved player accounts is relatively low, at between 50 and 200 tweets per day, the broader conversation (which includes coaches, agents, training partners etc) on the wta keyword amounted to a further 2000/day, and this would rise significantly if other keywords or accounts were added to the data set. within these tweets is useful information, but also substantial rumor and misinformation. indeed, the network graph (figure 1) shows a large number of players, but also news organizations and fans prominent in the conversation, whose guesses at injury status may not be reliable. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 figure 1: twitter network -#wta hashtag, april-july 2012 however, through an analysis of past tweets, there appear to be key indicators as to the reliability of information, which, whilst requiring manual judgment to set up, may enable automated filtering. those tweets directly from the players account can be generally assumed reliable (unless the player has a history of misinformation). a mapping of the players immediate social and professional network (who have twitter accounts) can be produced through an analysis of their @ replies on twitter, and thus a reliability score can also be assigned to these accounts, in proportion to the volume of tweets between them and the player. finally, external sources such as travelling reporters and photographers, as well as event staff for each wta tournament must be considered; a process which involves both research and qualitative judgment. in all cases, a retweet by one of the ‘significant’ accounts has value; if the retweet is of another trusted source this would serve to amplify the information, whilst a retweet of a third party would raise attention, but require further validation. conclusion bookmakers and gamblers alike are charged with evaluating each piece of information, the source, and the potential impact on the betting market; a service with a value, and a significant potential for profit. the stakeholders, their requirements and a detailed understanding of the domain is necessary to consider how developments in automatically ranking tweets could be applied to any given set of information, whether a betting market, health scare or crisis situation. references asur, s., & huberman, b. (2010). predicting the future with social media. in proceedings of the acm conference on web intelligence, 2010. retrieved from http://arxiv.org/pdf/1003.5699.pdf. borghesi, r., paul, r., & weinbach, a.p. (2009). market frictions and overpriced favorites: evidence from arena football. in applied economics letters, 16(9): 903-906 bruns, a. & burgess, j. (2011). tools. retrieved from http://mappingonlinepublics.net/resources/. bruns, a. & burgess, j. (2012). researching news discussion on twitter: new methodologies. journalism studies, 13.5-6. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 donaghy, t. (2010). personal foul: a first-person account of the scandal that rocked the nba. sarasota, fl: four daughters llc. harding, casey n. (2006). nickel and dimed: north carolina court blocks carolina panthers’ attempt to avoid payment of workers’ compensation benefits to injured athletes. in 28 n.c. cent. l.j. 241 polgreen, p.m., nelson, f.d., neumann, g.r., & weinstein, r.a. (2007). use of prediction markets to forecast infectious disease activity. in clinical infectious diseases, 44(2):272-279. ritterman, j., osborne, m. & klein, e. (2009). using prediction markets and twitter to predict a swine flu pandemic. in workshop on mining social media. retrieved from http://www.christopia.net/data/school/2011/fall/social-mediamining/project_proposal/sources/ritterman-2009.pdf tumasjan, a., sprenger, t.o., sandner, p.g., & welpe, i.m. (2011). election forecasts with twitter: how 140 characters reflect the political landscape. in social science computer review, 29(4):402-418. zhang, x., fuehres, h., & gloor, p.a. (2010). predicting stock market indicators through twitteri hope it is not as bad as i fear. in collaborative innovations networks conference (coins). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 from “big” to reasonable data: collecting and extracting data from an archive of a social movement shawn walker university of washington united states stw3@uw.edu abstract collecting twitter data and following changes in an ongoing, dynamic social movement, such as the occupy wall street movement, is a complex task. it involves the development of technical infrastructure to collect and make the tweets available for exploration and analysis. a strategy to respond to changes in the social movement is also required or the resulting tweets will only reflect the discussions and strategies the movement used at the time the keyword list is created — in a way, keyword creation is part strategy and part art. in this paper we describe strategies for the creation of a social media archive, specifically tweets related to the occupy wall street movement, and methods for continuing to adapt data collection strategies as the movement’s presence in twitter changes over time. we also discuss the opportunities and methods to extract smaller slices of data from an archive of social media data to support a multitude of research projects in multiple fields of study. these methods include the use of timeslices, keywords, hashtags, url coding, metadata matching, geolocation, geocoding, and geomapping. keywords twitter, social movements; big data; social media; archiving introduction on june 2nd, 2011, adbusters proposed a peaceful demonstration, “occupy wall street”, to take place on september 17th to demand a separation of money from politics. over the course of the next three months, face-to-face working groups met in nyc to create a general assembly to coordinate and organize action. facebook pages for occupy city camps sprung up in early october, accumulating tens of thousands of likes in major cities such as philadelphia and chicago (caren & gaby, 2012). twitter accounts and hashtags such as #occupywallst, #ows, #occupy, and #needsoftheoccupiers emerged to facilitate the coordination and exchange of relevant information and requests. while on-the-ground efforts and participation were critical to sustaining and growing the movement; digital tools and technologies acted as communication infrastructure, providing channels to share information, organize events, coordinate activity, and connecting participants and camps to one another (author et al, 2012). collecting twitter data and following changes in an ongoing, dynamic social movement, such as the occupy wall street movement, is a complex task. it involves the development of technical infrastructure to collect and make the tweets available for exploration and analysis. a strategy to respond to changes in the social movement is also required or the resulting tweets will only reflect the discussions and strategies the movement used at the time the keyword list is created — in a way, keyword creation is part strategy and part art. in this paper we describe strategies for the creation of a social media archive, specifically tweets related to the occupy wall street movement, and methods for continuing to adapt data collection strategies as the movement’s presence in twitter changes over time. since most studies focus on specific aspects of a social movement, it is not possible or desirable to analyze all of the tweets within an archive. we also discuss opportunities and methods to extract smaller slices of data from an archive of social media data to support a multitude of research projects in multiple fields of study. the occupy movement’s presence in social media selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 6 occupy used many different online and offline channels to communicate, request resources, and coordinate between city sites and with the public at large. these included email and mailing lists, public general assemblies meetings at individual camps, twitter accounts, facebook pages, blogs, websites, and phone trees. some of these methods of communication, such as twitter and facebook, leave artifacts that can be studied after an event, while other methods of communication are more ephemeral requiring researchers to observe interactions as they take place. while the media, in many cases, treated the occupy wall street movement as a one monolithic movement; in actuality it consisted of separate camps in many different cities. each camp used the communication channels best suited its needs; with its strategy evolving over time. for example in the case of seattle, their twitter account was active at the start of their occupation, switching to their blog, and then finally to their facebook page. after they switched to facebook, their twitter presence atrophied. a multitude of hashtags were used for each city — most cities had a hashtag, a twitter account, and also used national and international hashtags such as @ows. this diagram below (figure 1) social media, and twitter in particular, were centers of communication for the ouccpy movement. figure 1: network diagram of the links between occupy wall street movement related websites. nodes represent websites, edges represent links between sites. data collection and keyword curation twitter data was collected from mid october, 2011, when a national network of occupations had been established and protest activity was at its peak, through the end of 2012 when the national protests had tailed off into more scattered local actions. the peak activity period captured in our data from october 19, 2011, to december 31, 2011 contained roughly 20 million tweets (20,645,921 to be exact). the archive collected tweets using twitter’s streaming api track method, which returns tweets matching any of the search keywords occurring in the text, hashtags, @mentions, or urls within a tweet. a curated list of 102 hashtags, keywords, and occupy city accounts related to the occupy movement was created and updated by a panel of faculty and graduate students involved in this project. the initial keyword list was created by conducting preliminary fieldwork of occupy’s existing online selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 7 presence in twitter and social media (author, 2013). popular hashtags and keywords were seeded after a review by the panel of researchers involved in the project. the resulting data stream was examined at regular intervals for emerging hashtags and keywords. new terms were added, but no keywords were removed from the list, after being reviewed by the entire research team, resulting in dynamic archive based on a list of 355 keywords as the collection continued through the end of 2012, by which time the database included more than 75 million tweets. a script maintained a constant connection to the twitter streaming api; writing the tweets received to a file. at the end of each day, a new data file was created and the file from the previous day was backed-up and processed. the metadata added to each tweet in the processing step included: • expansion of shortened urls • list of hashtags in the tweet • list of mentions in the tweet • count of the number of hashtags, urls, and mentions in the tweet • list of collection keywords matching the tweet text. discussion after data was inserted into the archive, researchers across multiple disciplines including information science, communication, geography, and statistics expressed an interest in the social media presence of the occupy movement. as each team presented their research questions, a plan for data extraction was created. while some teams used specific hashtags and time slices, other teams used url coding, metadata matching, geolocation, geocoding, and geomapping to slice data form the archive. some teams used combinations of these options to produce very specific and narrowly defined datasets; narrowing down from 70+ million tweets to hundreds or thousands of tweets. the apparent ease with which tweets may be aggregated belies the difficulty of designing a reliable, reproducible data collection strategy. these characteristics are then linked to broader issues of designing research for big social data, and the emerging “digital divide” in access to data (manovich, 2011; boyd & crawford, 2011). conversely, long-term observation remains one of the areas in which this field has been the weakest (boyd & crawford, 2011, 4). the creation of social media archives and broader research collaborations can start to address the “digital divide” in access to data, technical expertise, allow for longitudinal data collection, and supports the exploration and extraction of smaller data sets using a wide variety of extraction methods which are more appropriate to the research questions at hand. as a result, groups of researchers across multiple fields are able to benefit and experimentation with the larger dataset, but use different slices of the same dataset more appropriate to their object, methods, and tools of study. references boyd, d. & crawford, k. (2011). six provocations for big data. oxford internet institute’s “a decade in internet time: symposium on the dynamics of the internet and society” on september 21, 2011. bruns, a (2007) methodologies for mapping the political blogosphere: an exploration using the issuecrawler research tool. first monday, 12(5). caren, n. & gaby, s. occupy online: facebook and the spread of occupy wall street (october 24, 2011). available at ssrn: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1943168 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1943168. manovich, l. (2011). trending: the promises and the challenges of big social data. in m. k. gold (ed.), debates in the digital humanities. minneapolis, mn: the university of minnesota press. author. (2012). author. (2013). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 8 extracting important information from a social network stream during crisis avijit paul queensland university of technology australia a1.paul@qut.edu.au abstract the first paper considers possible coding mechanism for incoming tweets during a crisis, taking a large stream of incoming tweets and selecting which of those needs to be immediately placed in front of responders, for manual filtering and possible action. the paper suggests two solutions for this, content analysis and user profiling. in the former case, aspects of the tweet are assigned a score to assess its likely relationship to the topic at hand, and the urgency of the information, whilst the latter attempts to identify those users who are either serving as amplifiers of information or are known as an authoritative source. through these techniques, the information contained in a large dataset could be filtered down to match the expected capacity of emergency responders. keywords natural disaster; crisis; twitter; content analysis; user profiling introduction when an unexpected crisis such as earthquake happens, the amount of information in twitter becomes extraordinarily large (figure 1) in a very short period of time (hendrickson, 2012). this large volume of data creates an opportunity but also brings the problem of extracting important information. this panel paper suggests a framework that can be used to identify important information from these massive datasets in times of crisis. figure 1: people’s response for mexico earthquake, as a sudden event (hendrickson, 2012). finding patterns there are two approaches commonly used to find patterns in crisis datasets generated via twitter. the first is content analysis, and the second is user profiling. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 9 the content analysis approach also has two aspects to it. the first is the manual approach; based on how, in different case studies (bruns, burgess, crawford, & shaw, 2012; vieweg, 2012), tweets could be grouped in broad categories such as information, awareness, advice, environment status etc. although this provides a good understanding of the type of tweets generated in crisis situations, it is almost impossible to replicate with a large volume in a short period of time. the second approach in content analysis is the automated approach where real time data processing methods such as dictionary-based, rule based, and hybrid methods have been used to find patterns or named entities (location, person or organization) (döhling & leser, 2011; song, tjondronegoro, & docherty, 2012). this method has its own limitations, as the meaning and the context rapidly changes in twitter (vlachos, 2011). user profiling looks at the users who are contributing to the dataset. as the authoritative users (or actors) are highly central and active, they tend to transmit the information very quickly. therefore current work (cha, haddadi, benevenuto, & gummadi, 2010; garcia-herranz, egido, cebrian, christakis, & fowler, 2012; wagner, liao, pirolli, nelson, & strohmaier, 2012; yamaguchi, takahashi, amagasa, & kitagawa, 2010) suggests that identifying, profiling and following authoritative users is superior to crunching enormously large datasets to identify what is important. an additional benefit of user profiling is that it is very expensive to purchase access to firehose (100% of twitter data) or even decahose (~10% of twitter data) to identify potential warning signs or important keywords (reips & garaizar, 2011). methodology combining both of these approaches is useful in identifying which messages are important at the time of crisis. in this paper, i identify a weighting criterion for every incoming tweet that is captured. by assigning weights to each variable the proposed framework identifies which combination yields the most important results for a crisis situation. if the tweet gains more than a certain weight, it is deemed important and is sent for further evaluation by a person in charge. keyword from volume below (table 1) is a sample weight assignment to identify if a tweet should be marked as a “crisis tweet” for further processing or it should be ignored. table 1: weight assignment to an incoming tweet no category reference weight 1 keyword contains disaster related keyword such as “earthquake” + 10 2 #hashtag includes a hashtag + 15 3 #disaster-hashtag hashtag contains a disaster related word + 8 therefore if an incoming tweet contains any of the keywords or hashtag it can be sent to the individual tweet analysis to gain a better understanding of whether this is a crisis situation or if it is a false alarm. categorising individual tweets once a tweet is sent for detailed analysis, it can then be given further weight in order to gain a better understanding of what this tweet actually contributes. for example, a tweet sent by the “keyword from volume” separator described above can now be analyzed in detail (table 2): table 2: weight assignment to an individual tweet selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 10 no category reference weight 1 rt retweet of a previously stored tweet -10 2 named entity name of a place not identified before +10 3 url uses a link to a news site + 2 4 instragram url is that a cat photo? 5 5 vine video a new vine video just recorded + 3 6 temporal word has word with certain time + 1 7 appeal word included word “help” +10 based on these criteria, if it appears to be a potential crisis related tweet it then gets a high total mark and is displayed on the dashboard, while at the same time the identified keyword or hashtag is added to the data collction stream to understand if it is a rising or a falling trend. identifying if a crisis is on the rise once a keyword, named identity or hashtag from the individual tweet analysis has been identified as potentially a crisis related tweet, it is sent to this section to identify the incoming rate of this tweet. based on how frequently it has been mentioned it is then given a new weight (table 3). table 3: weight assignment to an incoming tweet based on the occurance no category reference weight 1 double mention in last 5 seconds potentially dangerous + 10 2 200 mention in last one minute may be a crisis is arising + 25 3 mention + rt from news organization information already known 10 therefore, based on the frequency of the mention, it can now be identified whether this is a trending tweet or it is actually declining in the stream. user profling once a tweet has been identified as a seemingly potential crisis tweet via keyword or hashtag, user profiling is activated. this is to identify the authority, or the role, the user might have within the situation. based on the weights (table 4), they can be categorised into leaders, novices or insiders for that situation. if they appear to be an authority, their tweet gets higher priority than someone who is a novice. table 4: weight assignment to a user no category reference weight 1 new registration spam bot or real human 2 2 user has above 500 followers popular user + 5 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 11 3 user has location enabled the location matches the named entity mentioned in the tweet + 10 4 user bio has listed keywords (such as emergency, research etc) potentially an expert user + 15 5 user is included in other user’s curated list known expert +15 in the end, if the total weight is above an identified level, it is identified as important and it can now be sent to the crisis monitoring authority for evaluation. discussions on findings the significance of this framework is the ability to separate tweets that are potentially important for the target audience (community safety, red cross etc) from the stream of a noisy twitter dataset. this approach is currently being tested with archived datasets and the full results will be published when available. based on preliminary results, the combination of “keyword, named entity and url with images that do not contain retweets” appears to be more important that a combination of “hashtag, retweet and temporal word”. user profiling still remains challenging due to the difference in activity among users from the archived dataset at the current time. however, as this is ongoing research, further results are expected in the coming months. references bruns., a., burgess, j., crawford, k., & shaw, f. (2012). cci floodsreport. retrieved from cha, m., haddadi, h., benevenuto, f., & gummadi, k. p. (2010). measuring user influence in twitter: the million follower fallacy. in 4th international aaai conference on weblogs and social media (icwsm) (vol. 14, pp. 8). döhling, l., & leser, u. (2011). equatornlp: pattern-based information extraction for disaster response. garcia-herranz, m., egido, e. m., cebrian, m., christakis, n. a., & fowler, j. h. (2012). using friends as sensors to detect global-scale contagious outbreaks. arxiv:1211.6512. retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.6512. hendrickson, s. (2012). gnip the social cocktail, part 2 expected vs. unexpected events. retrieved from http://blog.gnip.com/expected-vs-unexpected-events-in-social-media/ reips, u.-d., & garaizar, p. (2011). mining twitter: a source for psychological wisdom of the crowds. behavior research methods, 43(3), 635-642. song, w., tjondronegoro, d. w., & docherty, m. (2012). understanding user experience of mobile video: framework, measurement, and optimization. mobile multimedia: user and technology perspectives, 330. vieweg, s. (2012). twitter communications in mass emergency: contributions to situational awareness. in proceedings of the acm 2012 conference on computer supported cooperative work companion (pp. 227-230): acm. vlachos, a. (2011). evaluating unsupervised learning for natural language processing tasks. paper presented at proceedings of the first workshop on unsupervised learning in nlp, edinburgh, scotland. wagner, c., liao, v., pirolli, p., nelson, l., & strohmaier, m. (2012, 3-5 sept. 2012). it's not in their tweets: modeling topical expertise of twitter users. in privacy, security, risk and trust (passat), 2012 international conference on and 2012 international confernece on social computing (socialcom) (pp. 91-100). yamaguchi, y., takahashi, t., amagasa, t., & kitagawa, h. (2010). turank: twitter user ranking based on user-tweet graph analysis. web information systems engineering–wise 2010, 240-253. microsoft word 803-550-1-pb (2).doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 playful participatory culture: learning from reddit adrienne l. massanari university of illinois at chicago usa amass@uic.edu abstract this project considers how we might understand participatory culture platforms such as reddit through the lens of game studies. using ethnographic techniques and approaches from actor-network theory, this research describes several playful patterns of interaction seen commonly on reddit, and discusses the ways in which certain design choices enable and constrain the kind of play that occurs. i argue that understanding these spaces as games provides a deeper understanding of the interactions between participants and the culture of reddit at large. it can also help us explore how individuals assign meaning to things like “karma points” and engage in reflexive talk about the rewards and rules governing play. at the same time, this research suggests the “game” of reddit is not unproblematic, as who can play, how they can play, and what play looks like often reinscribes many hegemonic tendencies of (internet) culture more broadly. keywords participatory culture; reddit; play; game studies; actor-network theory introduction participatory culture platforms such as reddit offer the ability for us to connect through making (gauntlett, 2011) and encourage active participation in/with the media in ways that are potentially democratizing (jenkins, 2006; jenkins, ford, & green, 2013). at the same time, the politicaleconomic realities of participatory culture mean that corporations providing the distribution channels and platforms profit far more often than content creators do (dijck & nieborg, 2009; terranova, 2003). sometimes lost in the debate is that fans and individuals engage in this kind of labor precisely because it is “fun,” and because it connects them to a community of like-minded individuals. in many ways, the motivations for creating and sharing content in these spaces are similar to the motivations for playing games. game studies scholars have discussed content created by gamers (consalvo, 2003; duncan, 2011; milner, 2009; postigo, 2010), but little work has been done to apply theory and concepts from game studies to participatory culture platforms specifically. that is, we have yet to understand how individual interactions in spaces such as reddit might themselves be understood as part of a game, where a kind of permeable “magic circle” (moore, 2011; salen & zimmerman, 2003) shapes behavior, and where things such as “karma points” have a similarly important, endogenous meaning (costikyan, 2002) for reddit members as “xp” or achievements might have for world of warcraft players. this paper poses the following question: how can we understand participatory culture on platforms such as reddit through the lens of “play” and game studies?1 method this research is part of an ongoing ethnographic study of reddit. my goal is to describe how play manifests itself on the site and to understand how the culture of reddit connects to larger sociocultural structures. i have spent over a year observing and participating on reddit as member of the 1 in this case, i am not interested in the ways we could gamify participatory culture platforms to enhance their “stickiness,” (deterding, dixon, khaled, & nacke, 2011; zichermann & cunningham, 2011) but in illustrating how play already occurs in these spaces. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 community, as well as interviewing reddit members about their experiences. guiding my approach is latour’s (2007) notion of “following the actor” to unpack the connections between individuals and technologies. reddit as a game and carnival reddit.com enables the sharing of original and reposted content from around the web. the site is comprised of multiple subreddits devoted to a topic of interest (such as r/atheism or r/politics), which can be created by any reddit member. upvotes are measured in karma points, and signal to the community that a particular comment or post is substantive and adds to the larger conversation.2 when content is downvoted, the poster’s account loses karma points. presumably the “game” of reddit is to accrue as much positive karma as possible by submitting appropriate, interesting original content and engaging in the community’s conversation. like more traditional games, karma points have only endogenous meaning (costikyan, 2002), and yet posters often engage in reflexive talk about them (e.g. noting that their most upvoted comment is a story about their cat). an account with a higher amount of karma also gains a kind of reddit notoriety, whereby later comments and posts acquire more attention and karma points, creating a kind of power law effect (shirky, 2003). frequent, off-topic posting is not typically rewarded, but moments of clever dadaist play and non sequiturs are often upvoted and commented upon. the rules of this game are taken seriously, while also shrugged off as inconsequential by the community. this is evidenced by almost daily discussions around what constitutes “karmawhoring” (reposting content or commentary solely for upvotes) and the implication that somehow this is “against the rules” of reddit. while reddit consists of many different moderated subreddits, all of which have their own explicit and implicit rules around the kind of content they accept and the interactions they encourage/allow, the idea of “carnival” is a productive lens for understanding site interactions. in mikhail bahktin’s (1984) formulation, carnival represents an upending of the trappings of everyday life. hierarchies are ameliorated and reversed, and the crowd takes pleasure in the “grotesque body,” reveling in the pleasures (and degradation) of the flesh. on reddit, this means that a single thread may contain sexual references, animated gif responses, puns, grotesque images and stories, racist and sexist speech, juxtaposed with sincere commentary and meaningful dialogue. all of this contributes to a chaotic space that is at times both compelling and repulsive. patterns of play despite the seemingly chaotic nature of reddit’s “carnival,” my research suggests a number of patterns characterize play on the site, two of which are described briefly below. memes the most common form of play involves the posting of memes, often in the form of pictures, animated gifs, videos, or modified lolcats. often, popular memes are remixed with other content appearing at the same time on the site (usually especially humorous, gross, or outrageous material). for example, two popular memes – a recipe for “2 am chili” (figure 1) and instructions for creating a shower using frozen soap and water (figure 2) – appeared in august 2011. later, these were mashed up into the playful 2am ice-chili shower (figure 3) meme. references to these memes still appear occasionally, suggesting they are cultural touch-points for the community. 2 according to “reddiquette,” the community’s informal, self-authored guide to interacting with others on the site (http://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 figure 1: 2 am chili meme (cropped) http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/jkc1j/2am_chili/ selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 figure 2: shower to go (cropped) http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/jinex/shower_to_go/ selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 figure 3: 2 am ice chili shower (http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/jlbdf/2_am_ice_chili_shower/) novelty accounts and bots reddit is a persistent, pseudo-anonymous space; individuals build reputations based on their submissions and comments over time, but they may maintain multiple accounts that remain unconnected to each other (donath, 1999). given the large number of possible accounts present on the site, the low barrier to entry for registration, and the interest in creating a unique, memorable selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 6 username, many reddit threads are populated by novelty accounts. these accounts often post drawings, stories, or other responses that reflect the account’s username. for example, “icanlegothat” responds to posts with pictures of lego scenes he/she has created. “discussionquestions” responds to postings in the style of discussion questions one might hear in a high school english course. automated scripts (called “bots”) also populate the site – some of which offer helpful information such as transcribing the text on visual memes in case the hosting site is unavailable, and others such as “haiku_robot” that playfully respond to particular comments (in this case, automatically reposting any comment that fits the standard 5-7-5 syllable haiku structure). implications my work suggests that using concepts from game studies as a lens for understanding interactions on participatory culture platforms like reddit can provide a richer description of play in these spaces. it can also help us explore how individuals assign meaning to things like karma and engage in reflexive talk about the rewards and rules governing play. at the same time, this research suggests the “game” of reddit is not unproblematic, as who can play, how they can play, and what play looks like often reinscribes many hegemonic tendencies of (internet) culture more broadly. references bakhtin, m. (1984). rabelais and his world (h. é. iswolsky, trans.). bloomington, in: indiana university press. consalvo, m. (2003). zelda 64 and video game fans: a walkthrough of games, intertextuality, and narrative. television & new media, 4(3), 321-334. costikyan, g. (2002). i have no words & i must design: toward a critical vocabulary for games. in f. mäyrä (ed.), proceedings of computer games and digital cultures conference. tampere: tampere university press. deterding, s., dixon, d., khaled, r., & nacke, l. (2011, 28-30 september). from game design elements to gamefulness: defining “gamification”. paper presented at the mindtrek '11, tampere, finland. dijck, j. v., & nieborg, d. (2009). wikinomics and its discontents: a critical analysis of web 2.0 business manifestos. new media & society, 11(4), 855-874. donath, j. s. (1999). identity and deception in the virtual community. in m. a. smith & p. kollock (eds.), communities in cyberspace. london: routledge. duncan, s. c. (2011). minecraft, beyond construction and survival. well played, 1(1), 1-22. gauntlett, d. (2011). making is connecting: the social meaning of creativity, from diy and knitting to youtube and web 2.0. cambridge, uk: polity. jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york: nyu press. jenkins, h., ford, s., & green, j. (2013). spreadable media: creating value and meaning in a networked world. new york: nyu press. latour, b. (2007). reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. oxford: oxford university press. milner, r. m. (2009). working for the text: fan labor and the new organization. international journal of cultural studies, 12(5), 491-508. moore, c. (2011). the magic circle and the mobility of play. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 17(4), 373-387. doi: 10.1177/1354856511414350 postigo, h. (2010). modding to the big leagues: exploring the space between modders and the game industry. first monday, 15(5). salen, k., & zimmerman, e. (2003). rules of play: game design fundamentals. cambridge, ma: the mit press. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 7 shirky, c. (2003, 10 february). power laws, weblogs, and inequality. retrieved 6 march, 2013, from http://shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html terranova, t. (2003). free labor: producing culture for the digital economy. retrieved 1 january, 2013, from http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/voluntary zichermann, g., & cunningham, c. (2011). gamification by design: implementing game mechanics in web and mobile apps. sebastopol, ca: o'reilly media. license this article is ©2013 adrienne l. massanari, and licensed under cc by-nc-sa. aoir2017-submissionfinal-digital vigilantism as a form of political engagement selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): loveluck, b. (2017, october 18-21). digital vigilantism as a form of political engagement? a comparative approach. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. digital vigilantism as a form of political engagement? a comparative approach benjamin loveluck i3-ses, telecom paristech, paris-saclay university the internet has been presented as a key component of the public sphere in contemporary democracies, where citizens seek information and discuss it, voice their opinions and hold their representatives accountable, decide how to cast their votes and sometimes mobilize in order to effect political change. at stake is the advent of a “fifth estate” (dutton 2009) or a new “networked public sphere” (benkler 2006) which, in turn, also affects political institutions and actors. implicit here is a specific conception of the ideal functioning of liberal democracies, whereby political participation is understood in terms of a “civic culture” (almond & verba 1963) and defined as a set of activities seeking to influence government and parliamentary action directly or indirectly. such a conception is driven by strong assumptions of rationality as opposed to "emotional", sentiment-driven involvement. most of the time, it also implies abiding by institutional frameworks in order to defend a cause, address a specific issue or hold other actors accountable. the aim of this paper is to shift attention to forms of public engagement and sometimes collective action that fit uneasily with such scenarios. they have to do with various instances of individuals deciding to “take the law into their own hands” online – a practice which relates directly to the notion of vigilantism. the focus here is on the ways and means of establishing justice rather than debating issues and how, due to the specificities of the digital environment, visibility may be “weaponized” (trottier 2016, loveluck 2016) in order to exert a form of direct punishment. drawing on both digital ethnography and political sociology, this contribution will first provide a more precise definition of what is meant by digital vigilantism. i will examine how it relates to other (non-digital) contexts and specifically to the united states political history and political culture, where it has primarily been defined as a form of “establishment violence” (rosenbaum & sederberg 1976). i will then provide a typology of digital vigilantism based on a number of case studies, both in the us and in france. some of the cases have been the focus of detailed ethnographical work, involving mixed methods of online observation and collection of quantitative data from digital platforms, while others are drawn from secondary sources. i will present both the practices involved and the justifications provided by the actors for these practices, and compare the cases to draw out similarities and differences between them, and with (offline) vigilantism in general. i will also compare the french and us contexts, which present very different traditions and attitudes towards such practices – the us being, as a general rule, readier to accept forms of self-defence as modalities of “community organising”. a central question will be to interrogate any predispositions for taking the law into one’s own hands, which could be found within “internet culture” and the affordances of the digital environment. four different types of digital vigilantism have been identified, which can be associated with a number of “action repertoires” (rolfe 2005, drawing on tilly 1986). i have called these: flagging: signalling behaviour that is considered to deviate from social norms in the public sphere, e.g. facebook groups and twitter accounts set up to draw attention to bad drivers, both in france and in the us; investigating: crowdsourced online investigations such as those which took place after the boston bombings in the us, and after the dupont de ligonnès mystery in france; hounding: tracking down animal abusers in order to “dox” them (reveal personal information), as was the case with kenny glenn in the us in 2009, or a young man who abused “oscar the kitten” in france in 2014; this also includes a number of anonymous “ops” such as operation steubenville and operation maryville (which sought to expose rapists) and other instances of “naming and shaming”; organized leaking: designing and setting up platforms aimed at encouraging the leaking of information, concerning behaviour which is considered uncivil, unethical or otherwise unacceptable. one of the main examples is the wikileaks project. building on this typology, i will argue that digital vigilantism constitutes an ambiguous dimension of citizen participation, since it challenges a realm generally restricted to an independent judiciary and a controlled police force, and since such practices involve a form of denunciation (boltanski 2012) which may take a directly coercive edge. a series of further questions will be outlined and addressed: do such phenomena signal a failure of institutionalised forms of conflict resolution – the press, the judicial system, the police? or, on the contrary, can they sometimes be understood as a welcome alternative to traditional forms of politics, insofar as citizens are concerned enough to take direct action? how do they relate to other forms of “netroots” political mobilisation (feld & wilcox 2008, kerbel 2009), and do they contribute to building a “collective action space” (bimber, flanagin & stohl 2012) outside institutional politics? references almond, g.a. & verba, s. (1963), the civic culture. political attitudes and democracy in five nations, princeton, nj: princeton university press benkler, y. (2006), the wealth of networks. how social production transforms markets and freedom, new haven, ct: yale university press bimber, b., flanagin, a.j. & stohl, c. (2012), collective action in organizations. interaction and engagement in an era of technological change, cambridge and new york: cambridge university press boltanski, l. (2012 [1990]), “ch. 1 – a sociology of disputes” in: love and justice as competences. three essays on the sociology of action, cambridge and malden, ma: polity coleman, g. (2014), hacker, hoaxer, whistleblower, spy. the story of anonymous, london and new york: verso dutton, w.h. (2009), “the fifth estate emerging through the network of networks”, prometheus 27, n° 1 feld, l. & wilcox, n. (2008), netroots rising. how a citizen army of bloggers and online activists is changing american politics, westport, ct and london: praeger publishers kerbel, m.r. (2009), netroots. online progressives and the transformation of american politics, boulder, co: paradigm lévy, p. (1997), collective intelligence. mankind's emerging world in cyberspace, cambridge, ma: perseus books loveluck, b. (2016), “le vigilantisme numérique, entre dénonciation et sanction. autojustice en ligne et agencements de la visibilité”, politix 29(115). rheingold, h. (2002), smart mobs: the next social revolution. transforming cultures and communities in the age of instant access, cambridge, ma: perseus rolfe, b. (2005), “building an electronic repertoire of contention”, social movement studies 4, n° 1 rosenbaum, h.j. & sederberg, p.c. (1976), “vigilantism: an analysis of establishment violence”, in: vigilante politics, h.j. rosenbaum & p.c. sederberg eds., philadelphia, pa: university of pennsylvania press, p. 3-29 surowiecki, j. (2004), the wisdom of crowds. why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies, and nations, new york: doubleday tilly, c. (1986), the contentious french, cambridge, ma and london, harvard university press trottier, d. (2016), “digital vigilantism as weaponisation of visibility”, philosophy & technology [http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-016-0216-4] selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  kovic,  m.,  rauchfleisch,  a.,  &  sele,  s.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  a  typology  of   digital  astroturfing.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  conference  of  the  association  of   internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org. a  typology  of  digital  astroturfing     marko  kovic   zurich  institute  of  public  affairs  research     adrian  rauchfleisch   zurich  institute  of  public  affairs  research  /     university  of  zurich       marc  sele   zurich  institute  of  public  affairs  research     on  august  18,  2015,  lyudmila  savchuk  won  a  lawsuit  against  her  former  employer,  the   st.  petersburg  based  “internet  research  agency”.  formally,  ms.  savchuk  filed  the   lawsuit  against  her  former  employer  because  of  irregularities  concerning  the   employment  contract  and  the  payment  of  wages.  such  a  dispute  between  an  employee   and  their  employer  is  a  rather  mundane  affair,  but  ms.  savchuk’s  case  was  quite   remarkable  for  another  reason.  the  internet  research  agency  is  an  organization  that,   according  to  different  sources  –  ms.  savchuk,  who  is  an  investigative  journalist,  being   one  of  them  –  ,  specialized  in  a  specific  form  of  propaganda  on  behalf  of  the  russian   government  under  president  vladimir  putin:  the  internet  research  agency’s  employees   would  create  a  number  of  fake  online  personæ,  sometimes  referred  to  metaphorically  as   sock  puppets,  and  spread  messages  supportive  of  the  russian  government  across   different  channels,  such  as  the  comment  sections  of  news  websites  (chen,  2015).       dishonest  and  manipulative  online  activities  are  not  limited  to  (former)  communist   countries  such  as  russia  and  china  (e.g.  50  cent  party).  a  prominent  western  example   of  such  activities  has  been  the  united  states  central  command’s  attempt  at  creating  an   “online  persona  management  service”,  i.e.,  a  system  for  creating  and  deploying  sock   puppets  in  online  communication  flows  (fielding  &  cobain,  2011).  it  is  not  always   governments  that  engage  in  such  activities;;  other  actors  do  so  as  well,  and  possibly  on   less  of  a  grand  scale.  for  example,  in  2014  it  came  to  light  that  a  number  of  austrian   companies  and  political  parties  hired  a  marketing  agency  to  create  user  comments  on   news  websites  that  cast  them  in  a  positive  light  (apfl  &  kleiner,  2014).       the  cases  mentioned  above  are  quite  different  from  each  other:  different  political  actors   in  different  countries  do  different  things  with,  presumably,  different  goals.  however,  all   of  the  cases  mentioned  above  also  have  something  in  common:  they  are  all  examples   of  a  type  of  political  communication  on  the  internet  that  hides  its  true  nature  and  that  is   intended  to  give  the  impression  of  being  the  honest  opinion  of  individual  online  users   when  it  is,  in  fact,  not.  we  call  this  type  of  political  online  communication  digital   astroturfing.  the  term  “astroturfing”  is  usually  used  to  describe  “fake  grassroots”   campaigns  and  organizations  backed  by  businesses  or  political  actors  (lyon  &  maxwell,   2004).  with  the  concept  of  digital  astroturfing,  we  aim  to  offer  an  understanding  of  the   general  principle  of  astroturfing  for  the  specific  domain  of  internet-­based  activities.  the   goal  of  the  present  paper  is  twofold.  first,  we  define  digital  astroturfing  in  a  generalized,   universally  applicable  manner.  second,  we  propose  a  typology  of  different  forms  of   digital  astroturfing,  based  on  the  type  of  actor  and  the  type  of  goal  that  is  pursued  by  the   digital  astroturfing  effort.       a  generalized  definition  of  digital  astroturfing     in  a  first  step  we  propose  a  generalized  definition  of  digital  astroturfing  in  order  to   describe  its  core  principles:       digital  astroturfing  is  a  form  of  manufactured,  deceptive  and  strategic  top-­down  activity   on  the  internet  initiated  by  political  actors  that  mimics  bottom-­up  activity  by  autonomous   individuals.     our  definition  of  digital  astroturfing  takes  a  more  general  approach  than  the  few  existing   definitions  in  the  literature  of  digital  (e.g.:  zhang,  carpenter  &  ko  2013)  and  regular   astroturfing  (e.g.:  mackie  2009;;  boulay  2012).       a  typology  of  digital  astroturfing     based  on  this  generalized  definition  of  astroturfing  we  propose  a  typology  of  digital   astroturfing.  we  opt  for  a  theoretico-­deductive  typology  of  digital  astroturfing:  it  is  not   possible  to  inductively  gather  information  on  all  instances  of  digital  astroturfing  because   of  its  clandestine  nature,  but  it  is  possible  to  define  a  set  of  dimensions  that  will   plausibly  exhaust  the  possible  types  of  digital  astroturfing.  we  identify  three  dimensions   that  encompass  the  different  possible  types  of  digital  astroturfing:  initiating  political  actor,   target  and  goal.           we  believe  that  the  sixteen  different  types  of  digital  astroturfing,  as  reported  in  table  1,   provide  a  useful  framework  for  analyzing  individual  cases  of  digital  astroturfing  as  well   as  for  guiding  expectations  about  digital  astroturfing  efforts  in  general.  digital   astroturfing  can  occur,  as  we  argue  in  the  introduction,  in  very  different  political   contexts,  and  as  a  consequence,  it  can  be  challenging  to  analyze  separate  cases.  with   our  typology,  we  provide,  in  essence,  a  useful  heuristic  –  a  way  to  think  about  digital   astroturfing.     digital  astroturfing  repertoires     the  in  our  typology  described  different  scenarios  do  not  automatically  imply  what   specific  measures  the  political  actors  take  in  order  to  carry  out  their  digital  astroturfing   efforts.  these  specific  efforts  consist  of  three  elements:  the  specific  digital  astroturfing   tools  used,  the  specific  venues  where  these  tools  are  applied,  and  the  specific  actions   that  are  taken  with  those  tools  in  those  venues.       in  social  movement  research,  the  concept  of  protest  repertoires  is  used  to  describe   which  tools  social  movements  use  in  which  contexts  (tarrow,  2011).  it  is  useful  to  use   an  analogous  concept  for  digital  astroturfing:  the  concept  of  digital  astroturfing   repertoires.  digital  astroturfing  repertoires  cannot  be  defined  universally,  because  the   tools  and  venues  available  for  digital  astroturfing  are  very  much  bound  by  time  and   space  and  are  likely  to  change  –  just  like  the  protest  repertoires  of  social  movements   are  bound  by  time  and  space  and  likely  to  change  over  time  (biggs,  2013).         a  digital  astroturfing  repertoire  may  consist  of  any  combination  of  tools,  venues  and   actions  from  table  2.  for  example,  the  combination  of  sock  puppets  with  comment   sections  (of  news  websites)  and  creating  content  is  the  digital  astroturfing  repertoire   used  by  the  russian  internet  research  agency  described  in  the  introduction.     conclusion:  is  research  on  digital  astroturfing  feasible?     after  all,  digital  astroturfing  is  a  clandestine  activity,  and  if  it  is  carried  out  successfully,   we  do  not  know  that  it  has  taken  place.  this  makes  any  kind  of  research  inherently   challenging.  for  example,  research  designs  that  are  routinely  used  in  the  study  of  other   forms  of  political  communication  can  be  impossible  to  implement  in  the  study  of  digital   astroturfing,  since  very  basic  facts  such  as  who  is  doing  what  in  the  pursuit  of  which   strategic  goals  is,  by  definition,  absent  in  digital  astroturfing.  even  though  it  undoubtedly   poses  unique  challenges,  the  empirical  study  of  digital  astroturfing  is  not  futile.     a  first  step  in  the  study  of  digital  astroturfing  is  the  establishment  of  a  plausible   conceptual  framework  of  digital  astroturfing.  the  very  goal  of  our  paper  is  to  contribute   to  this  first  step.  in  order  to  conduct  empirical  research,  we  first  need  a  sound   understanding  of  how  to  think  about  our  object  of  study.  in  this  sense,  we  do  not  think   that  research  on  digital  astroturfing  should  be  exploratory  in  nature,  as  is  sometimes   suggested  for  research  on  regular  astroturfing  (boulay,  2013).     references     apfl,  s.  &  kleiner,  s.  (2014).  die  netzflüsterer.  datum,  (11).  retrieved  from   http://www.datum.at/artikel/die-­netzfluesterer/seite/alle/     biggs,  m.  (2013).  how  repertoires  evolve:  the  diffusion  of  suicide  protest  in  the   twentieth  century.  mobilization:  an  international  quarterly,  18  (4),  407–428.   doi:10.17813/maiq.18.4.njnu779530x55082     boulay,  s.  (2012).  quelle(s)  considération(s)  pour  l’éthique  dans  l’usage  des   technologies  d’information  et  de  communication  en  relations  publiques?  analyse  de  cas   d’astroturfing  et  réflexion  critique.  revista  internacional  de  relaciones  públicas,  2  (4),   201–220.     chen,  a.  (2015).  the  agency.  the  new  york  times.  retrieved  from   http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-­agency.html     fielding,  n.  &  cobain,  i.  (2011).  revealed:  us  spy  operation  that  manipulates  social   media.  the  guardian.  retrieved  from   http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-­spy-­operation-­social-­networks     lyon,  t.  p.  &  maxwell,  j.  w.  (2004).  astroturf:  interest  group  lobbying  and  corporate   strategy.  journal  of  economics  &  management  strategy,  13  (4),  561–597.     mackie,  g.  (2009).  astroturfing  infotopia.  theoria:  a  journal  of  social  and  political   theory,  56  (119),  30–56.     tarrow,  s.  g.  (2011).  power  in  movement:  social  movements  and  contentious  politics.   cambridge:  cambridge  university  press.     zhang,  j.,  carpenter,  d.,  &  ko,  m.  (2013).  online  astroturfing:  a  theoretical   perspective.  amcis  2013  proceedings.   microsoft word consalvo-paying to play-paying to play.doc selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 paying to play: the evolving structure of game pricing and industry legitimacy mia consalvo concordia university, canada christopher paul seattle university late in 2014, apple changed the ‘free’ button in its app store to ‘get’ in part to address “flack from customers and consumer protection groups through the years” for the prevalence of “freemium” apps and in-app purchases, which were not always spelled out in advance of purchase (hall, 2014). in early 2015 apple again caused a stir when it added a new category to its app store for games – “pay once and play.” apple describes games placed the new category as products one can purchase to “enjoy hours of uninterrupted fun with complete experiences spanning the app store’s most beloved genres” (apple, 2015). writing about the move, fahey argued it was due to a “negative perception of f2p [that] is becoming increasingly mainstream” (2015). in both moves, we see a key rhetorical positioning of free-to-play games as less-than, or marginal to, games that come with different pricing models. how do you pay for the games that you play, if you pay for them at all? how have prices and the logics behind them changed over the years, as games have moved from noncommercial entities played on mainframes, through arcades, into homes on consoles and pcs, and now via a plethora of outlets and pricing schemes? this paper explores how games are priced for sale – from free through hundreds or thousands of dollars – and argues that game price functions not just as a signal of a game’s value but also as a sign of a game’s legitimacy – or it’s lackin the eyes of developers and the larger game industry. this project builds on existing work into the rhetorical construction of real games, which identified several traits that mark certain games as ‘real’ and other games as outside that boundary. to be considered real, games must offer depth and complexity, sophisticated mechanics, a traditional payment structure, and a particular developer pedigree (consalvo and paul 2014). further fleshing out this model, one of the key elements in assessing whether or not a game is considered real comes down to how the game does or does not charge players to play it (consalvo and paul 2013). yet, what impact does payment structure have for console and pc games that charge a single upfront fee, for so-called free-to-play games, and how do questions about suggested citation (apa): consalvo, m., & paul, c. (2015, october 21-24). paying to play: the evolving structure of game pricing and industry legitimacy. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. payment structure intersect with other elements of real games? this paper further explores that element by engaging in a textual analysis of media and popular discourse surrounding a variety of videogames with different payment structures. the traditional, normalized mode of payment is the model that came to prominence via consoles and pcs. originally developed as console makers sought to sell games on the king gillette model, where the razor is reasonably priced, but the blades will cost consumers, a single purchase price model constructs games as a product to be obtained. although recent years have seen innovations with concepts like downloadable content and collectible card systems, like those found in magic: the gathering or madden ultimate team, by and large the price point of 50-60 usd for newly released aaa titles has been quite sticky for console game makers over the last few console generations. pc games have seen innovation in the form of digital downloads, largely through the development of purchasing options like steam, origin, and a variety of different bundling packages. by virtue of its long lifespan and its primary use by notable developers, the single fee for a game as product has been normalized over time and is a key marker of what is expected from a regular, ‘real’ game. in recent years however a new mode of making money from videogames has emerged. known as free-to-play, freemium, or occasionally as the derogatory pay-to win, facebook and various mobile apps have introduced a different mode of paying for games that has transferred to pc and console gaming as well. the primary difference between free-to-play and traditional pricing is that the cost for the game is shifted from a relatively larger upfront sum into a series of smaller, generally optional, yet advantageous purchases. players can try the game for no-cost, but are typically encouraged or nudged into purchases ranging from a few dollars to 100 usd or more. different developers and games have pursued alternate strategies to best monetize the free-to-play model, with a general focus either on a handful of players spending a substantial amount of money on the game or trying to get all players to spend a modest amount on playing the game. changes in how games are priced have a number of impacts on how games work, from alterations in game design that target regular, frequent play to a shift away from considering games as a product and instead developing them as an ongoing service. in order to make money from a free-to-play game, developers need to retain players over time, which shifts games from a single, packaged purchase into an ongoing relationship where players can spend money again and again. this transition opens up an interesting space to investigate and a primary way to judge what is considered real based on how players pay for the game they are playing. a final, newer innovation in monetization is the development of games funded by advertising. generally bundled with micro-transactions as well, games like kim kardashian: hollywood combine elements of the broader free-to-play category with a series of interruptions for ads. offering a funding stream based on the player’s time, rather than their wallet, a popular game can make a million usd or more based on the savvy introduction of advertising (wawro 2015), further confounding how mode of payment helps construct what counts as a real game. investigating the discourse surrounding the intersection between the payment models for games and what gets considered a real game is particularly important given that two of the most popular current pc games, league of legends and world of tanks, both work on free-to-play models, yet are hailed as far more legitimate than the facebook and app store games that are judged as less than their console and traditional pc brethren. this gap, where some free-to-play games are viewed in a different light than others is another way to chart how the rhetorical construction of real games helps frame how videogames are viewed by those who play them, talk about them, and analyze them. understanding what is and isn’t considered a real game helps to chart just where video games are and what they can become. looking specifically at the payment structures of games and how we pay for them structures our perceptions about games, and is a key element in seeing the blind spots in how games are considered. payment methods in games are an important component of how games as networked technologies are constructed in our collective imagination. this paper furthers efforts to understand how we make sense of digital media, particularly in better articulating what things ‘count’ and what do not in the eyes of players, developers and industries. references alexander, leigh. 2015. gamasutra’s best of 2014: leigh alexander’s top 5 games. gamasutra, 19 december 2014 [cited 20 january 2015]. available from http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/232790/gamasutras_best_of_2014_leigh _alexanders_top_5_games.php. apple. 2015. app store. pay once and play. consalvo, mia, and christopher a. paul. 2013. welcome to the discourse of the real: constituting the boundaries of games and players. paper read at foundations of digital games, at crete. consalvo, mia, and christopher a. paul. 2014. a saga about flapping: real games, developer pedigrees, race, class and capital. in meaningful play. lansing, michigan. fahey, rob. 2015. free-to-play hate threatens health of the industry at large. gamesindustry.biz, february 27. available from http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2015-02-27-free-to-play-hate-threatensthe-health-of-the-industry-at-large hall, zac. 2014. app store changes 'free' button to 'get', likely due to in-app purchase controversies. 9to5mac, november 19. available from http://9to5mac.com/2014/11/19/app-store-changes-free-button-to-get-likely-dueto-in-app-purchase-controversies/ wawro, alex. 2015. how crossy road made $1 million from video ads gamasutra, 29 january 2015 [cited 26 february 2015]. available from http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/235325/how_crossy_road_made_1_milli on_from_video_ads.php. microsoft word burns-sadkowsky-woodford.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): bruns, a., sadkowsky, t., & woodford, d. (2014, october 22-24). exploring the global demographics of twitter. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. exploring the global demographics of twitter axel bruns queensland university of technology daryl woodford queensland university of technology troy sadkowsky queensland university of technology abstract in spite of the substantial international success of twitter as a social media platform, reliable information about its userbase is surprisingly difficult to come by. other than the 232 million “monthly active users” reported in the company’s disclosures to the u.s. securities and exchange commission ahead of its listing on the stock exchange, and some high-level breakdowns of account numbers across a number of key markets, most other assumptions about the twitter userbase remain guesswork or are based on surveys with comparatively limited sample sizes. this paper takes a different approach to exploring the demographics of the platform: by undertaking a long-term crawl process across the entire twitter user id numberspace, we have gathered the publicly available details on every twitter user account created between the platform’s emergence in 2006 and the conclusion of our crawl in 2013. by identifying the key patterns within this database of some 872 million accounts existing during our collection period, we are able to provide a much more comprehensive overview of twitter’s footprint across the globe, its patterns of growth, and of typical user careers as listeners, followers, hubs and communicators than has been possible in any previous study. introduction: known unknowns both in terms of overall user numbers and in terms of its recognition in mainstream media coverage, twitter is one of the most successful general-purpose transnational social media platforms in the world; amongst comparable platforms, its total userbase appears to be second only to market leader facebook and on par with that of weibo, which remains centered largely on mainland and diaspora chinese users. detailed information on the shape and make-up of the global twitter userbase remains difficult to come by, however: twitter’s own publicly announced userbase information is limited to headline figures released to the securities and exchange commission (twitter, inc., 2013), and to similar figures quoted in other public releases designed to prove the company’s success and to attract further investment. from such statements, it appears that there are 232 million “monthly active users”, in twitter’s own definition, but it is unclear what proportion of the total number of registered accounts this number represents, or whether there is a greater number of users who are active less often than monthly. further, there is a general absence of large-scale longitudinal studies which are able to chart the growth of the twitter userbase over time and to pinpoint specific increases or decreases in such growth that may be correlated with media coverage or world events. the data which would offer answers to such questions are largely available from the twitter application programming interface (api) in the form of the publicly accessible profile information for user accounts (other than for the small minority of “protected”, private accounts, for which only less detailed information is available). however, the significant effort involved in gathering such data for the entire twitter userbase has meant that few researchers have thus far attempted to do so. a comprehensive crawl of the twitter user id numberspace our project addresses this identified gap in existing knowledge about the twitter userbase. during 2013, we conducted a simple, ‘brute force’ crawl of the entire twitter user id numberspace, beginning from user id 0 and continuing through (at the time of writing) to user id 1,967,860,448 . this approach builds on the fact that – at least at present – twitter does not re-use user ids even if an existing account is deleted and thus since the launch of the twitter platform in 2006, user ids have steadily counted upwards. in crawling the numberspace in this way, we gathered public user information provided for each account by the twitter api’s users/lookup function, including datapoints such as the account’s registration date, its number of followers, followees, tweets posted, timezone, interface language, free-text description and location information, and a range of other details. at the time of writing, we have identified a total of 872 million accounts, and using this dataset (of some 1.97tb of profile information in json format), we are now able to identify a number of global and local patterns within the overall twitter userbase. some preliminary patterns in the global twitter userbase our conference paper will present a variety of key patterns within the global twitter userbase, including an overall growth curve for the global userbase and a breakdown into languages, timezones, and other demographic information; we present these in aggregate in order to avoid the reidentification of specific individual users. for the purposes of this short paper, we outline a number of notable preliminary findings, and indicate a range of further questions that our conference paper will address. growth over time by plotting the creation dates of existing twitter accounts over time, it becomes possible to retrace the growth curve of the platform and to pinpoint significant moments in the history of twitter (and their relationship with external events). such trends in registrations may also be further investigated in correlation with other relevant user profile details. by way of example, fig. 1 shows the daily growth rate in twitter accounts which selected a specific timezone in their profile settings, and points to a sharp increase above the long-term average for accounts selecting a tokyo or (less markedly so) hawai’i timezone in the hours and days following first reports of the 11 march 2011 earthquake & tsunami. fig. 1: daily account creation rates for twitter accounts with tokyo, hawai’i, and alaska timezones during the first four months of 2011 these patterns point to the fact that major acute events (burgess and crawford, 2011) not only create significant activity amongst existing twitter users – enabling them, for example, to gather in ad hoc publics around key hashtags (bruns & burgess, 2011) – but also lead to the creation of a substantial number of new twitter accounts whose owners are likely to have signed up to twitter expressly for the purpose of following the platform’s up-to-date news coverage and joining in with the conversation. in this context, it should also be noted that our dataset, gathered in 2013, only contains those accounts from the 2006/7 and 2011 timeframes depicted in fig. 1 that were still in existence in 2013. geographic and language distribution in the conference paper, we also intend to pursue the question of the geographic distribution of twitter users. while timezone, gps, and free-form location information each provide substantial challenges for an accurate pinpointing of nationality or geographic positioning, a triangulation between these various datapoints nonetheless provides an opportunity to identify at least general global activity patterns. fig. 2 illustrates this by using data for twitter accounts with ids in the 0-1,000,000 numberspace: using only the timezone information (as set when we gathered the data in 2013). fig. 2: twitter accounts with user ids between 0 and 1,000,000 by timezone typical account careers a third major area of investigation concerns patterns in the ‘account careers’ of the profiles we have identified. here, we intend to explore the relative prominence of accounts with specific ratios between their key activity indicators, to examine whether a range of common user types could be defined. these categories will emerge as we explore more comprehensively the patterns in these and other user metrics within our dataset. an additional metric of interest, for example, is also the use of the more recently introduced favouriting functionality by twitter users; our working hypothesis is that more recent users, for whom twitter favouriting may appear as analogous to facebook liking, use this functionality more readily than older users who came to know twitter before favouriting was introduced. conclusion as the first scholarly investigation of the twitter userbase which is able to draw on a comprehensive (as of late 2013) set of public profile data, our study will be able to identify key fundamental features of the twitter userbase. this also provides an important baseline for many other studies of twitter users and their activities, by making available far more accurate data on the size and growth of the global twitter population than have been available from reliable sources to date. references bruns, axel, and jean burgess. (2011). the use of twitter hashtags in the formation of ad hoc publics. paper presented at the european consortium for political research conference, reykjavík, 25-27 aug. 2011. burgess, jean, and kate crawford. (2011). social media and the theory of the acute event. paper presented at internet research 12.0 – performance and participation, seattle, october 2011. pew internet & american life project. (2013). social media update 2013. 30 dec. 2013. http://pewinternet.org/reports/2013/social-media-update/main-findings.aspx sensis. (2013). yellowtm social media report: what australian people and businesses are doing with social media. melbourne: sensis. http://about.sensis.com.au/ignitionsuite/uploads/docs/yellow%20pages%20social%20 media%20repo rt_f.pdf twitter, inc. (2013). form s-1registration statement under the securities act of 1933. document filed with the us securities and exchange commission on 3 oct. 2013. http://www.sec.gov/archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312513390321/d564001ds1.ht m twopcharts. (2014). twitter activity monitor by twopcharts. 27 jan. 2014. http://twopcharts.com/twitteractivitymonitor selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 on  the  internet  nobody  can  see  your  cape:  the  ethics  of   online  vigilantism     mathias  klang     umass  boston     introduction     the  discussion  of  vigilantism  has  been  most  active  in  the  legal  discourse,  in  which  the   term  has  been  classified  historically  and  divided  into  classical  vigilantism,   neovigilantism,  pseudo-­vigilantism  and  faux-­(hine  1998).  however,  a  major  problem   with  this  discourse  is  that,  for  the  most  part,  online  activity  would  not  fit  easily  into  the   existing  terminology.  this  paper  will  open  up  the  discussion  and  merge  the  theoretical,   social  and  technical  discussion  on  vigilantism  by  drawing  on  its  modern  forms.           as  they  are  the  easiest  forms,  the  largest  part  of  internet  vigilantism  consists  of   publishing  personal  public  information  (doxxing)  or  spreading  public  information   (shaming).  however,  there  are  more  technically  demanding  forms  of  vigilantism,  such   as,  hacking  into  servers  in  order  to  reveal  private  information  and  denial  of  service   attacks.  finally,  there  are  the  harassment  attacks  such  as  sending  merchandise  to  the   persons  home  and  the  creative  campaign  to  change  create  a  neologism  out  of  a   politicians  name.         among  the  infamous  early  examples  of  online  vigilantism  is  the  2005  dog  poop  girl   where  a  south  korean  girl  was  targeted  for  not  cleaning  up  her  dogs  poop  in  a  seoul   subway  car.  an  image  of  the  girl  was  uploaded  and  she  was  quickly  identified,  doxxed   and  humiliated.         discussing  the  act  at  the  time  daniel  solove  (2005)  focused  on  the  power  of  technology   to  enhance  the  anger  at  the  rule  breaker  and  to  punish:  “the  dog-­shit-­girl  case   involves  a  norm  that  most  people  would  seemingly  agree  to  –  clean  up  after  your  dog.   who  could  argue  with  that  one?  but  what  about  when  norm  enforcement  becomes  too   extreme?  most  norm  enforcement  involves  angry  scowls  or  just  telling  a  person  off.  but   having  a  permanent  record  of  one’s  norm  violations  is  upping  the  sanction  to  a  whole   new  level.  the  blogosphere  can  be  a  very  powerful  norm-­enforcing  tool,  allowing   bloggers  to  act  as  a  cyber-­posse,  tracking  down  norm  violators  and  branding  them  with   suggested  citation  (apa):  klang,  m.  (2015,  october  21-­24)  on  the  internet  nobody  can  see  your   cape:  the  ethics  of  online  vigilantism.  paper  presented  at  internet  research  16:  the  16th  annual   meeting  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  phoenix,  az,  usa:  aoir.  retrieved  from   http://spir.aoir.org.   digital  scarlet  letters.”  solove  wrote  from  the  perspective  of  the  technology  at  the  time   and  while  the  discussion  on  vigilantism  has  barely  moved  forward  in  the  last  decade  the   technology  available  to  the  vigilante  has  rapidly  increased.         empirical  material     as  the  purpose  of  this  paper  is  to  better  understand  the  concept  of  digital  vigilantism   and  to  break  the  concept  down  into  ethical  components,  the  focus  of  this  work  will  be  on   the  more  widespread  aspects  of  the  act,  i.e.  the  process  of  spreading  and  shaming   aspects.  the  goal  is  to  observe  this  powerful  tool  in  order  to  better  understand  and   contextualize  it  in  an  ethical  and  social  perspective.           this  will  analyze  a  series  of  cases  where  the  general  public  involved  in  acting  as  a   vigilante  group,  shaming  the  perpetrator  and  calling  for  retribution.  the  communication   of  the  masses  was  done  to  punish  norm  violators  for  their  transgression  of  social  norms.   in  order  to  better  understand  the  concept  this  paper  will  describe  some  recent  examples   of  wide  spread  digital  vigilantism  such  as:           the  tumblr  site  “racists  getting  fired  (and  getting  racists  fired!)”  whose  goal  it  is  to   collects  racist  social  media  posts  along  with  contact  information  from  the  poster  and   information  about  their  employment.  their  purpose  is  explicit  in  the  title,  it  is  to   encourage  complaints  to  the  employer  and  to  have  the  person  fired.         the  sacco  tweet.  in  2014,  before  getting  on  an  11  hour  flight  to  south  africa  justine   sacco  tweeted  a  comment  that  could  be  understood  to  be  racist.  the  tweet  spread  far   beyond  her  small  group  of  followers  and  gained  a  huge  amount  of  traction.  the  criticism   about  her  tweet  was  harsh  and  large.  before  the  plane  landed,  her  company  had   decided  to  fire  her  for  her  tweet.         the  tumblr  site  public  shaming,  which  focuses  on  reproducing  tweets  that  violate   social  norms.  the  goal  is  to  publically  shame  individuals  who  publically  behave  badly.   they  publish  tweets  that  are  misogynistic,  anti-­workers  rights  and  racist.         this  work  will  also  look  at  the  more  public  aspects  of  anonymous  (coleman  2014,   serracino-­inglott  2013).  their  digital  vigilantism  that  involves  the  spreading  of  private   information  obtained  through  hacking.  the  goal  is  not  to  study  their  denial  of  service  or   hacking  but  rather  to  focus  on  the  ways  in  which  the  organization  acts  as  a   legitimization  for  acts  of  digital  vigilantism.             a  final  interesting  case  was  that  of  the  game  journalist  alanah  pearce  who  when  she   discovered  that  her  abusive  trolls  were  young  teenage  boys  contacted  their  mothers   and  told  her  about  what  they  had  done  (brooker  2014).  while  the  perpetrators  personal   information  was  not  put  online  and  they  were  not  shamed  to  a  wider  social  public,  this   case  is  interesting  in  that  the  media  stories  and  social  media  reactions  were  positive   towards  pearce’s  actions.         the  armchair  vigilante       when  johnston  (1996)  attempted  to  define  the  concept  of  vigilantism  in  a  legal  context   he  outlined  six  necessary  criteria  in  order  for  an  act  to  be  true  vigilantism  (planning,   citizens,  social  movement,  use  of  force,  norm  transgression,  and  control).  these  will  be   the  starting  point  for  this  paper  in  the  exploration  of  the  online  vigilante.         the  goal  of  this  is  work  is  to  look  at  the  ways  in  which  technology  is  used  in  the  process   of  vigilantism.  the  central  question  is  to  look  at  the  ways  in  which  liking,  sharing  and   retweeting  previously  published  information  is  carried  out  and  to  evaluate  the  behavior.   the  question  is  whether,  and  in  what  cases,  the  act  of  sharing  makes  it  into  an  act  of   armchair  vigilantism  or  digilantism  (coldewey  2013)  and  looks  to  understanding  moral   liability  (dumsday  2009,  leitch  & warren  2012).  the  paper  will  look  at  the  use  of  social   media  in  the  process  of  sharing  information  with  the  intent  of  pointing  to  a  breach  of   social  or  legal  norms  and  assess  where  the  lines  may  be  drawn  between  retributive   justice  and  simple  sharing.  in  other  words  this  paper  will  define  the  digital  vigilante  and   provide  a  framework  within  which  online  acts  can  be  understood.         bibliography     brooker,  c.  (2014)  the  gaming  journalist  who  tells  on  her  internet  trolls  –  to  their   mothers.  the  guardian  http://www.theguardian.com/culture/australia-­culture-­ blog/2014/nov/28/alanah-­pearce-­tells-­on-­her-­internet-­trolls-­to-­their-­mothers       coldewey,  d.  (2013).  “dawn  of  the  digilante”  techcrunch     http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/21/dawn-­of-­the-­digilante/       coleman,  g.  (2014).  hacker,  hoaxer,  whistleblower,  spy:  the  many  faces  of   anonymous  verso  books.         dumsday,  t.  (2009).  on  cheering  charles  bronson:  the  ethics  of  vigilantism,  the   southern  journal  of  philosophy,  volume  47,  issue  1,  pages  49–67,  spring  2009       hine  k.  d.  (1998).  “vigilantism  revisited:  an  economic  analysis  of  the  law  of  extra-­ judicial  self-­help  or  why  can't  dick  shoot  henry  for  stealing  jane's  truck”  47  am.  u.   l.  rev.  1221  (1997-­1998).       johnston,  l.  (1996)  “what  is  vigilantism?”  british  journal  of  criminology  (1996)  36  (2):   220-­236.       leitch,  s.  and  warren,  m.  (2012).  “cyber-­bullying  and  vigilantism:  should  social  media   services  be  held  to  account?”,  in  s.  leitch  and  m.  warren  (ed.)  proceedings  of  6th   australian  institute  of  computer  ethics  conference,  aice  2012,  burwood,  australia,  13   february  2012,  pp.  32-­37.       serracino-­inglott,  p.  (2013).  is  it  ok  to  be  an  anonymous?  ethics  &  global  politics,  vol.   6,  no.  4,  2013,  pp.  217–244.    http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/egp.v6i4.22527       solove,  d.  (2005).  “of  privacy  and  poop:  norm  enforcement  via  the  blogosphere”,   balkinization  thursday,  june  30,  2005.     http://balkin.blogspot.com/2005/06/of-­privacy-­and-­poop-­norm-­enforcement.html   selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 liao, t., yang, h., lee, s., xu, k., feng, p., & bennett, s.. (2016, october 5-8). augmented criminality how mobile augmented reality crime overlays . paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. tony liao university of cincinnati hocheol yang temple university songyi lee temple university kun xu temple university ping feng temple university spencer bennett temple university introduction communication about real-life crime and space has long been an important question for sociologists, criminologists, and policymakers alike. with federal laws in the united states such as the clery act mandating disclosure of crime around college campuses, there has been a growing trend amongst the police and public watchdog groups to log real-time crime information and present this data to local communities (buslik & maltz, 1999; rich, 2001). the debate over how to best communicate this information to communities, however, has been highly controversial, with some arguing that it motivates members to get involved in the community while others contend that it will stigmatize high crime neighborhoods (harries, 1999; wartell & mcewan, 2000). while some earlier work has examined the effectiveness of crime maps as a form of communicating data (groff, kearley, fogg, & wartell, 2005), this study examines a new form of crime displays, specifically augmented reality crime information. augmented reality (ar) is defined by academics as any technology that overlays digital artifacts on the real world that is 3d, real-time, and interactive (azuma, 1997; liao, 2016). in 2010, a crime aggregation company called spotcrime partnered with an ar mobile browsing company called layar to display incidents of crime overlaid on the physical place itself (figure 1). (figure 1 spotcrime layar application) while one of the ways spotcrime marketed the ar application to people was to make them feel safer, it may be true that ar could make people feel less safe, more afraid, and change their relationship/perception of those places. drawing on this real-world application, this study aims to understand 1) how seeing ar crime information might onse to that place. space/place sociologists and cultural theorists have been theorizing about urban place for a long time (de certeau, 1984; lefebvre, 1991; lofland, 1998), with the understanding that place is socially and culturally produced. for this s framework for understanding space, that there is a spatial triad for making sense of conceptualize space (e.g. maps, blueprints, etc.). everyday routines and urban realities that inscribe the space with meaning. lefebvre (1991) argues that space/place is produced by complex and dynamic interrelationships between these prongs over time, such that maps and blueprints can intervene and bring to life the buildings that introduce to new spatial realities, information and communication technology and space/place in recent years, there has been a growing recognition that information and (dourish, 2006; harrison & tatar, 2008). mobile technologies in particular introduce new ways of encountering, navigating, and representing the world that necessitate new spatial logics (dourish, 2006). mobile technologies equipped with geo-location can now introduce additional types of information about place that is not physically there, which can alter the stories that are told about those spaces (brewer & dourish, 2008). urban space can also be embedded with mobile text messages, which allows people to start communicating about place as well as through place in novel ways (author, 2011). ar is an emerging technology that has capabilities that can further complicate our aces of the everyday world (p. 304). while there has been some recent research about the possibilities of ar for people to reappropriate space (liao & humphreys, 2015), less is known about how people might use this technology to alter their spatial perceptions and experience. methods participants were randomly assigned to an experimental condition were provided with a smartphone which had an ar mobile application called aurasma, which we had customized to expose information about crime near a scanned location. a research assistant led the participant to three spots on campus where the ar application would scan the location and display visual crime information of burglaries, theft, and assault. in the control condition, they were taken to the same locations, where they were sent a text message containing the same information (figure 3). the participants consisted of 80 students from a university on the east coast of the united states. (figure 3: ar condition left, sms condition right) at each location the participants were asked to fill out open-ended questions about what they think happened in that place, how they felt about being in that place, and whether that information changed their perception of the place. qualitative data was sorted based on experimental and control conditions and coded for themes related to how violent they believed the crime to be, whether or not they imagined scenarios of the crime, and their emotional responses to the place. findings and discussion we found that people in the ar condition were more likely to craft vivid scenarios of the crime and analyze the physical surroundings more carefully. they were also more likely to have strong emotional reactions to the place. these findings are a first step toward understanding the possible effects of ar crime information, as well as to understand more broadly how mobile ar can mediate perceptions of place/space. 1) spatial triad, this study found that using ar to merge a representation of space (e.g. maps/depictions of crime) with the physical reality as their spatial practice and everyday perception of that space. understanding the implications of ar (in contexts that may create negative perceptions of place) is important for communication scholars as well as policymakers more generally, who stems get implemented. references azuma, r. t. (1997). a survey of augmented reality. presence, 6(4), 355-385. brewer, j. & dourish, p. (2008) storied spaces: cultural accounts of mobility, technology, and environmental knowing. international journal of human computer studies. 66(12): 963976. buslik, m., & maltz, m. (1998). power to the people: mapping and information sharing in the chicago police department. crime mapping and crime prevention. crime prevention studies, 8. de certeau, m. (1984). the practice of everyday life (s. rendall, trans.). berkeley, ca: university of california press. dourish, p. (2006) re-spacin proc. of the . new york, ny: acm press, 299 307 groff, e. r., kearley, b., fogg, h., & wartell, j. (2005). a randomized experimental study of sharing crime data with citizens: do maps produce fear? journal of experimental criminology, 1, 87-115. harries, k. a. (1999). mapping crime: principle and practice (no. ncj 178919). harrison, s., & tatar, d. (2008). places: people, events, loci the relation of semantic frames in the construction of place. computer supported cooperative work (cscw), 17(2-3), 97133. lefebvre, h. (1991). the production of space (vol. 142). blackwell: oxford. definitions and organizing visions for an emerging technology across fieldconfiguring events. information and organization. 26(3). p. 45-62. doi:10.1016/j.infoandorg.2016.05.001 lofland, l. h. (1998). the public realm: exploring the city's quintessential social territory. transaction publishers. rich, t. (2001). crime mapping and analysis by community organizations in hartford, connecticut. us department of justice, office of justice programs, national institute of justice. wartell, j., & mcewen, j. t. (2001). privacy in the information age: a guide for sharing crime maps and spatial data series: research report. institute for law and justice. microsoft word beyond_hashtags_(final).docx selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): moon, b., suzor, n., matamoros-fernandez, a. (2016, october 5-8). beyond hashtags: collecting and analysing conversations on twitter. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. beyond hashtags: collecting and analysing conversations on twitter brenda moon queensland university of technology nicolas suzor queensland university of technology ariadna matamoros-fernandez queensland university of technology abstract in this paper we examine a series of techniques to enhance the collection and analysis of conversations on twitter. we start from the position of seeking to understand how ordinary discussions about particular issues or controversies are unfolding on the social media platform. a key limitation of studies of topics on twitter that rely on searching for a keyword or hashtag is that they may miss important sections of conversations around issues that do not match the keywords selected (rambukkana, 2015, bruns & burgess, 2015). the tracking infrastructure for social media analysis (trisma) (bruns, burgess & banks et al., 2016) captures tweets of 2.8m australian users on a continuing basis providing a comprehensive dataset that we can use to find reply chains which do not include the hashtag or keyword we are studying. many existing methods of exploring twitter data do not present conversation chains in a linked format (bruns, 2012, grant, moon, & busby grant, 2010); we investigate how using network visualization might help researchers better understand the qualitative content and context of conversations. keywords: twitter, social media, big data, issue mapping, uber introduction in this paper, we examine a series of techniques to enhance the collection and analysis of conversations on twitter. we start from the position of seeking to understand how ordinary discussions about particular issues or controversies are unfolding on the social media platform. a key limitation of studies of topics on twitter that rely on searching for a keyword or hashtag is that they may miss important sections of conversations around issues that do not match the keywords selected (rambukkana, 2015, bruns & burgess, 2015). the tracking infrastructure for social media analysis (trisma) (bruns, burgess & banks et al., 2016) captures tweets of 2.8m australian users on a continuing basis providing a dataset that we can use to find reply chains which do not include the hashtag or keyword we are studying. many existing methods of exploring twitter data do not present conversation chains in a linked format (bruns, 2012, grant, moon, & busby grant, 2010); we investigate how using network visualization might help researchers better understand the qualitative content and context of conversations. identifying tweets we develop a similar method to lorentzen and nolin’s (2015) approach to collect a broader set of conversations on twitter. using the trisma dataset, we first identify all tweets that match a given keyword, and then also identify all tweets that respond to or were responded to by such keyword tweets. we trace these linked conversations recursively, to extract the full chains of conversations in which a search keyword has been mentioned at least once. where lorentzen and nolin (2015) were limited by considering conversations based on the twitter in-reply-to chains in a single direction from their hashtag tweets or their 5,000 most active participants, we are able to recursively move both ways along the reply chain, including tweets that are replies to tweets we have identified. this is not possible using the twitter api. our study is limited by the boundaries of the australian twittersphere as defined by trisma; conversation chains will be broken if they extend to accounts outside the trisma dataset, even if subsequent replies occur inside it. analysing reply chains this paper will present the results of our initial case study of australian controversies over the legitimization of the uber ride-sharing service in australia. we seek to collect all tweets that form part of the conversation around the keyword ‘uber’ in the australian twittersphere since 2013, and zoom in from there to analyse specific controversies. we conduct a comparative study of two datasets – an original set that contains only tweets that match a keyword, and an expanded set that includes all conversations that reference those initial tweets. the first dataset – tweets matching the keyword ‘uber’ from january 2013 through to november 2015, comprises 176,941 tweets. the second dataset, which also includes tweets we can identify as part of the conversation around the first (using in_reply_to_tweet_id), comprises an additional 30,210 tweets. the conversation chains are visualised as a directed network and a range of network metrics are calculated, including those used by lorentzen and nolin (2015), to allow comparison with their results. we then apply issue mapping to social media analysis (marres, 2015; marres & moats, 2015) to evaluate the advantages and limitations of these methods for extracting conversations from twitter data. while work on issue mapping has largely used web data to trace the relationships among actors, themes and objects in the discussion of matters of concern (rogers & marres, 2000; severo & venturini, 2015), we will use social media data to study how issue publics emerge through their engagement with specific controversies or themes surrounding uber. issue mapping using digital methods and informed by controversy analysis provides a useful methodology to account for popular and everyday modes of online participation in matters of concern (burgess & matamoros-fernandez, 2016). our initial results show that the conversations we collected differ significantly from the tweets that match our keywords. from a preliminary textual analysis of small samples of tweets, we note that the tweets that contain the keyword ‘uber’ seem to be reflect themes and frames dominated by the tech media, lobbyists and campaigners while the tweets that are found through our reply chain approach appear to be much more diverse. they include debates explicitly about the controversy by established players in the issue. importantly, they also include the much less readily visible ordinary voices of individuals in conversations that are not highly politicised. we seek to investigate the hypothesis that network metrics and visualisations of conversations may assist in mapping the actors, themes and objects involved in twitter discussions of matters of concern. we will seek to understand how including conversations that do not explicitly mention ‘uber’ or related keywords may be able to add a richness to the data that was previously invisible. we suggest that this method appears to enable richer analysis of ordinary voices around a controversy. not only it highlights some additional issues as the controversy plays out, but it also appears to surface new actors who do not necessarily seek to participate in visible public debates by using a common hashtag. we think that these discussions are of great value in identifying new issues and actors that help understand public communication on social media. not only does this method highlight some additional issues as the controversy plays out, but it also appears to surface a greater proportion of everyday discussions by ordinary users who do not necessarily seek to participate in visible public debates by using a common hashtag. we think that these discussions will often be of very great value in understanding ordinary discussions around controversial issues. acknowledgments this research was supported by infrastructure provided through the australian research council lief project tracking infrastructure for social media analysis, and the arc future fellowship grant understanding intermedia information flows in the australian online public sphere. researchers have also received funding from an australian taxi industry body to study the peer economy. references bruns, a. (2012). how long is a tweet? mapping dynamic conversation networks on twitter using gawk and gephi. information, communication & society, 15(9), 1323–1351. http://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2011.635214 bruns, a., and burgess, j. 2015. twitter hashtags from ad hoc to calculated publics. in hashtag publics: the power and politics of discursive networks, n. rambukkana, ed.new york: peter lang, 13-28 bruns, a., burgess, j., banks, j., tjondronegoro, d., dreiling, a., hartley, j., … sadkowsky, t. (2016). trisma: tracking infrastructure for social media analysis. retrieved from http://trisma.org/ burgess, j., & matamoros-fernandez. (2016). mapping sociocultural controversies across digital media platforms: one week of #gamergate on twitter, youtube and tumblr. communication, research & practice [forthcoming]. grant, w. j., moon, b., & busby grant, j. (2010). digital dialogue? australian politicians’ use of the social network tool twitter. australian journal of political science, 45(4), 579–604. http://doi.org/10.1080/10361146.2010.517176 lorentzen, d. g., & nolin, j. (2015). approaching completeness: capturing a hashtagged twitter conversation and its follow-on conversation. social science computer review. http://doi.org/10.1177/0894439315607018 marres, n. (2015). why map issues? on controversy analysis as a digital method. science, technology & human values, 40(5), 655–686. http://doi.org/10.1177/0162243915574602 marres, n., & moats, d. (2015). mapping controversies with social media: the case for symmetry. social media + society, 1(2), 1–17. rambukkana, n. (2015). hashtag publics: the power and politics of discursive networks. peter lang publishing, incorporated. rogers, r., & marres, n. (2000). landscaping climate change: a mapping technique for understanding science and technology debates on the world wide web. public understanding of science, 9(2), 141–163. severo, m., & venturini, t. (2015). intangible cultural heritage webs: comparing national networks with digital methods. new media & society, 1461444814567981. venturini, t. (2012). building on faults: how to represent controversies with digital methods. public understanding of science, 21(7), 796–812. http://doi.org/10.1177/0963662510387558 1 positively deviant: the role of moderately anti-normative behaviours in online forums fa martin-niemi university of otago new zealand fa.niemi@otago.ac.nz abstract online discussion forums are social networks in which members share knowledge. they are dependent on normative behaviours to function and yet there is evidence of deviance within them. extreme departures from social norms can damage network ties, however little has been written on moderate deviancy. this paper explores the positive consequences of moderately deviant behaviour on the health and wellbeing of an online discussion forum. the study used a thematic analysis of materials gathered during a three-month virtual ethnography of a technical forum for database developers. themes identified were examined for the effect of ‘positive deviance’ on the trust, network ties and technical problem solving. from this analysis a typology of deviant behaviours was developed, focussed on moderately deviant behaviours identified as the ‘lawful stupid’ and ‘in-crowd enforcers’. the study suggests positive deviance influences network social norms by clarifying social rules. this positive outcome had a mitigating effect on the negative impact of deviance on interpersonal trust. keywords deviant behaviour; online discussion forums; social networks; social norms; trust mailto:fa.niemi@otago.ac.nz� 2 introduction online discussion forums are environments which support communication between participants. formally, they are for sharing knowledge on a particular topic. in reality, however, they require social networking to work. members of technical forums discuss specialist issues and problem solve. through posting on threads, participants can discuss complex concepts. whether the discussion is constructive or not depends in part on trust between members. trust helps develop and maintain social ties. that trust is strengthened by positive experiences but what happens when members encounter deviant behaviours? not all experiences are positive in online discussion forums and occasionally members encounter deviant behaviours. some deviance is extreme such as trolling; however there are less extreme examples of deviance as well. there are members of online social networks who behave as trolls, but are not motivated by attention-seeking and disruption. in online forums the members who exhibit these behaviours are not necessarily extremely deviant like trolls but moderately deviant. for the purposes of this paper, these members will be referred to as positive deviants who fall into two categories: ‘lawful stupid’ and ‘in-crowd enforcers’. even though they may present many of the same deviant behaviours as trolls, they are motivated by interest in the integrity of the social network and not by self-interest as most trolls are. this behaviour is a form of ‘positive deviance’ (spreitzer & sonenshein, 2004). members who behave in this manner have positive intentions, referred to as ‘honourable’, even if the outcomes of their behaviour are not necessarily positive. it would seem that the behaviours of these positive deviants would have the same negative effects on the social networks as more extreme behaviours. yet, an important distinction between extreme and positive deviance is the motivation behind the behaviours. since positive deviants have honourable intentions for their deviance, this study suggests that the benefits of their intentions have positive effects on the forums. specifically, the study suggests that there are positive influences from moderate deviance within online discussion forums. the primary benefit is clarification of social rules for the social network. social norms can be difficult to identify in social networks, but because deviance violates norms it can also help clarify normative behaviours. it is though these deviant interactions that the social norms are developed and given meaning. therefore an essential component in establishing meaning and clarifying social norms is that members interact. in online forums, members actively negotiate norms through thread posts. positive deviance helps 3 establish norms because it illustrates boundaries as the members engage in discussion. birchmeier, joinson and dietz-uhler (2005), for example, suggest that when an ambiguous act occurs, members must determine whether it is deviant. if the behaviour does deviate from the norms of the group then members must discern a normative reaction to it. dysfunctional or unfavourable behaviour puts positive social identity for the group at risk. most members identify norms by inductive categorisation; they emulate or model their behaviours on a prototypical member, generally an in-crowd member. positive deviance, however, identifies social norms by departing from them. in the following sections, this paper will introduce the literature on online social networks, deviance and the social capital constructs of social norms, trust and motivation before discussing the methods used in this study. following, will be an analysis of the results of the study discussing positive deviance in online discussion forums. finally, the paper will conclude with a suggested typology of deviance for online discussion forums. literature review in the social networking literature there are a number of studies about how social interaction occurs; what are the social rules and cultural practices of online social networks and how they operate in a productive way. there are informal social rules to encourage normative behaviours. members negotiate these rules through trial and error or by emulating the actions of in-crowd high-status members. the rules enable members to develop trust between each other and the forum social network as a whole. the social rules, however, are often taken for granted and can be difficult to see. that is why anti-normative behaviours also have a role in social networks by clearly identifying the boundaries of normative behaviour. to appreciate how social rules operate it is important to understand those who resist them. the extant literature on online social networking, such as social network sites, blogs and online discussion forums, discusses the development and maintenance of social ties (boyd & ellison, 2008; donath, 2008; haythornthwaite, 2002). social ties are formed and strengthened by trust, reciprocity and adherence to social norms. not all members of online social networking, however, follow social norms. due to the diversity of participants, there are members of online social networks who display behaviours contrary to group norms. these members who exhibit deviant behaviours can have negative effects on the network causing mistrust and loss of effective communication. a subset of this literature is on deviance in online social networks. it is primarily on extreme deviance, such as trolling, in which new and 4 vulnerable network members are baited in an attempt to draw them into embarrassing or potentially dangerous situations. this literature on trolls, spammers, and flamers emphasises the destructive nature of these antisocial behaviours in online environments (donath, 1999; herring, job-sluder, scheckler, & barab, 2002). not much, however, has been written about moderate and less deviant behaviours. moreover, what has been written about deviancy has focussed exclusively on the negative consequences to the social network. what is not really discussed is the positive side; how the social network conducts itself through members who engage in moderately deviant behaviours and push against the established rules. what influence do these behaviours have on the social norms within an online discussion forum? social norms are an important facet of maintaining social networks. norms encourage trust between members. in networks where there are high linkages (extra-network ties) but low integration (intra-network ties), anomie can occur. this breakdown of social norms is an extreme state where the social network has only weak bridging ties and no bonds from stronger ties. woolcock (1998), for example, characterises this state as providing members with a wide range of opportunities to pursue but lacking a stable social network base and social norms for guidance. the trust developed through positive interactions fades as network members pursue their own self-interests. investment in social capital diminishes and the value of the network deteriorates. in online discussion forums, active participants invest by helping other members; by posting questions and replying on threads. for online social networks it only takes a few active participants to support a large network of passive members. blanchard and horan (1998, p. 10) for example suggest that “a few group members’ helpful actions will reinforce the group’s concept of itself as being helpful to its members”. the norm of reciprocity motivates members to participate and invest in the social network. there is a strong association between trust and social networks in the social capital literature (nahapiet & ghoshal, 1998; portes, 1998). blanchard and horan (1998) for example suggest that trust is highly integrated with the generalised reciprocity found in social networks. trust is built on the expectations that there will be adherence to social norms and that investing in the network through contributions and help will be reciprocated. trust is also a way to deal with complexity and social relations are very complex. it is difficult for individuals to know how to behave in an interaction because there are so many variables. the cognitive aspects of trust, such as familiarity, allow individuals to generalise and make predictions about courses of 5 action in an interaction (lewis & weigert, 1985). trust is an important part of online social networks. it is damaged by negative experiences such as the deceptive practices of trolls and spammers. without trust virtual communities may lose members and experience reduced active participation (wagner, ip, cheung, & lee, 2005). extreme deviance in online social networks is self-serving and generally motivated by self-interest and a desire to attract attention (herring et al., 2002). conversely, motivations for positive deviance are linked to interest in the social network. motivations for participation and continuing membership in social networks vary depending on how closely identified the individual is to the network. according to birchmeier et al. (2005) in-crowd, high status or active members’ responses to deviance usually have more condemnation and are of greater intensity. this ability and motivation to depart from social norms is due to in-crowd members’ power and influence within the social network. they are able to respond harshly to deviance because other members understand that their intentions are ‘honourable’ and in the best interests of the network. they are motivated to protect the network because they identify strongly with the group. persuading deviants to change or conform reveals motivation to restore sense of the norm’s validity. redemption of members engaging in deviant behaviours reinforces social norms by illustrating boundaries of normative behaviour and demonstrating how members can be returned to it. deviant behaviour in groups has been the topic of many studies. the literature predominantly focuses on the negative effects of deviance within a collective. felps, mitchell and byington (2006) for example, characterise several types of deviance, including ‘interpersonal deviants’ who attack individuals through speech and actions. typical behaviours of ‘interpersonal deviants’ include acting rudely and publically embarrassing others. deviant behaviours, however, can also have positive effects on a group. according to spreitzer and sonenshein (2004) although much of the study of behaviours within organisations has focused on dysfunction and negative effects, little research has been conducted on deviant behaviours with positive benefits. they describe a normative perspective and provide a model (figure 1) identifying three major aspects of positive deviance. firstly, these behaviours are honourable in intent. the individual presenting positive deviance is motivated to do the right thing. secondly, their motivation is intentional and voluntary. lastly, the behaviours are a clear departure from the norms of expected behaviours within the group. 6 figure 1: a typology of positive deviance (spreitzer & sonenshein, 2004, p. 840). the consequences of both deviance and the motivations behind the deviance affect the social network. these outcomes can be either positive or negative. as discussed previously, extreme deviance often leads to negative outcomes. felps, mitchell and byington (2006), however, suggest that outcomes can also be constructive. responses with constructive outcomes provide benefits to the social network. ‘motivational intervention’ uses confrontation and public criticism. ‘rejection’ ostracises or ignores deviance. both are constructive attempts to bring the member back into the group and reinforce normative behaviour. this paper explores the positive consequences of moderately deviant behaviour on the health and wellbeing of an online discussion forum. it suggests that there is positive deviance in online discussion forums and investigates a range of departures for social norms in both action and motivation to investigate the positive outcomes on the social norms of the network. method in order to investigate social norms and deviance within online networks of practice, a three-month virtual ethnography of an online discussion forum was conducted1 1 the study for this paper was part of a larger research project for the author’s phd thesis. . the aim of the ethnography was to observe and reflect on member behaviours and communication in order to explore the impact of different levels of member participation on the social network of the forum. to assess and identify patterns in the empirical materials thematic analysis methods (attride-stirling, 2001; braun & clarke, 2006) were adapted and used for this study. 7 ethnographic study allows researchers to embed within social groups to explore their behaviours and language, “addressing the richness and complexity of social life” (hine, 2000, pp. 41-42). creswell (2007, p. 68) for example, describes the process as “extended observations of the group, most often through participant observation, in which the researcher is immersed in the day-to-day lives of the people and observes and interviews the group participants” [emphasis in original text]. similarly, virtual ethnography permits researchers to explore online groups; although the researcher embeds within a virtual experience rather than physical place. in addition to experiential immersion, adopting reflexivity as an integral part of the ethnographic practice allows for “social location” (mauthner & doucet, 2003) and exploration of the social meanings and contexts of ethnographic materials. the group under investigation for the three-month virtual ethnography were members of the online forum, database developer (dbdev2 in order to conduct the ethnographic study, the author became a forum member by creating a profile with a photo, a username containing her full name, and a brief biography with links to her research blog. even though ethnographic research often involves informant interviews, the author refrained from posting during the study. research-related posts used to interview participants would have been in violation of forum’s code of conduct and were not permitted. the intent of the forum was to foster technical discussions, so the author remained an observer and passive participant. in lieu of interviews, participation was facilitated in two ways; through immersion within the extended social network and through fieldnotes. when links to external sites such as blogs were provided in forum members’ signatures and within the content of threads, the linked materials were read and considered in the fieldnotes. the author’s ). this forum was chosen because it was a popular and active site for database administrators and developers. it provided a network of developers an environment in which to share knowledge and problem solve. the forum was open and had a large membership which provided a quantity and variety of opinions, knowledge and perspectives. the forum was not formally bounded nor was it an exclusive group as there were few barriers to participation. anyone with internet access could read the forum threads. the only formal requirement for membership was that an individual was required join the forum by creating a profile in order to post a question, reply to a thread or set alerts to follow threads. 2 dbdev is used as the pseudonym for the forum name, the development language and the wider community of developers to maintain a consistency of use with the actual forum name. 8 reflections and interpretation of events and texts were recorded as fieldnotes as both a documentation of the study and a reflexive exercise on the research experience. during the study, 397 active threads were followed. this entailed reading new posts, taking fieldnotes and collecting and coding answered threads several times per week. the threshold for whether or not a thread was followed was when it reached 10 or more posts. this was in order to cull out quick replies and focus on more in-depth discussions. alerts were set for active threads which provided email notification when new posts occurred. even though the author was a regular participant on the forum it was unlikely that any members took notice or were aware of the ethnographic study. the one possible exception could have been the forum moderators who might have noticed the high number of alerts set. from the study, the analysis of empirical material supported the characterisation of several levels of forum participation. computer-mediated communication (cmc) literature typically discusses three roles: leaders, posters and lurkers (blanchard & markus, 2004), however this study identified slightly different definitions. posters were separated into active and out-crowd because different behaviours were observed between the two groups. additionally, lurkers were identified, but because it was difficult to determine how many unique individuals were included in a thread’s ‘visit count’, their numbers have been omitted. in addition to the categories described in table 1, there were other characterisations of forum participation. a member who asked a question was an ‘original poster’ (op). op is a common internet term for the beginning of a thread. it is used for both the person (as in the original poster of the question on the thread) and for the first post in a thread (as in the question from the original post). ‘answerers’ were able to mark any thread as ‘answered’ even if they were not the op. ‘moderators’ had administrative privileges to perform a wide range of tasks such as moving, deleting and censoring threads. table 1: degrees of forum member participation during the three-month study degree of participation description number of members in-crowd frequent contributors who regularly monitored and posted to threads 30 active active contributors who posted questions or responded to posts on multiple threads 118 out-crowd newbies (new members to the forum) and infrequent contributors who only posted questions or responded to posts on one thread 485 lurkers passive participants who anonymously read or follow threads, but do not post n/a 9 after the observation period, the remaining answered and unanswered threads from the study were coded. the fieldnotes and unformatted thread narrative were imported and coded in nvivo software. this paper focuses on the empirical material coded as ‘deviant behaviour’ and in particular on forum members ‘calvin’3 while most members of the forum interacted in pro-normative manners, there was also deviance evident. there was only minor evidence of extreme deviance, such as trolling, but there was positive deviance. the first type of positive deviant, lawful stupid, criticised and personally attacked ‘newbies’ (less experienced and new members) who failed to adhere to the strict programming practices and standards. lawful stupid members lost sight of the original op question and presented long off-topic (ot) diatribes without consideration to other points of view or to the potential damage to network ties. yet they did not behave this way out of a desire and ‘dbdevwizard’. the relationship between these two online identities illustrates issues on identity, deception and deviance due in part to the suggestion that they may be the same person. positive deviance in online forums online discussion forums provide members of a social network the opportunity to share knowledge and problem solve. perhaps the forum and its membership are best illustrated by an in-crowd member’s description: ...dbdev forums are the cyberspace reincarnation of old greek city market (agora, forum) places where free forum intellectual discussion is taking place. as a result experts may start debating each other, leaving the beginner op way behind. but then again, the threads will be read by thousands in the coming years to the benefit of the larger dbdev community... (dbdev,1980) in order to work effectively, the social network is dependent on members adhering to social norms. most of the interaction between forum members follows distinct patterns of behaviour. during the study typical normative behaviours were observed such as professional interactions, succinct communication (often using only code snippets), providing advice without judgement. additionally, between in-crowd members there was praise, direct communication, pleasantries, citing and cross-referencing to personal blogs or other threads within the forum. 3 all forum participant actual names and usernames have been replaced with pseudonyms. other identifying features have been changed or omitted. 10 to distract from the goals of the forum or to divert attention to themselves. they strongly adhered to personal principles, even though it was at the cost of social relationships. in addition to lawful stupid, the other positive deviancy discussed in this paper is incrowd enforcer. they chastised and reprimanded members who acted in ways they found detrimental to the social network of the forum and in particular lawful stupid members. incrowd enforcer behaviours could be quite harsh compared to the forum’s social norms. they often sought to embarrass or shame the norm violators into conforming to social norms. table 2 types of forum member participation type of participation description example behaviours troll members who engage in deception in order to pass as legitimate participants in threads (donath, 1999). they engage with newbies, naïve and vulnerable members in order to disrupt and attract attention to themselves (herring et al., 2002). • attention-seeking • derogatory or inflammatory speech • hijacking threads • starting off-topic (ot) discussions lawful stupid interpersonal deviants • grandstanding • philosophising • act rudely • publically embarrass others out-crowd self-defender newbies and infrequent contributors who become defensive when confronted by negative comments on posts • exploding • leaving the forum network in-crowd enforcer use motivational intervention to protect social norms • confrontation • public criticism of deviance lurker lurkers read anonymously but do not post. their only departure from norms is not at an individual level, but the group as a whole. there is an expectation that some members of the forum will participate actively, so in that limited sense the group of lurkers deviate from norm. • hidden/unseen • do not post • may not register as a forum member normative typical behaviour of most forum members. • code-to-code communication • professional demeanour (no swearing, name calling) • giving advice, but not mandates or ultimatums table 2 lists all of the types of forum member participation identified in this study and is provided for context. ‘trolls’, ‘lurkers’, ‘out-crowd self-defenders’ and the ‘normative’ 11 behaviours listed in the table will not be discussed in this paper. the focus of this paper is lawful stupid and in-crowd enforcer positive deviance. moderately deviant behaviours were exhibited by ‘lawful-stupid’ and ‘in-crowd enforcers’. in the discussion that follows for each type of behaviour, the paper will present a definition, examples for illustration, a description of how the behaviours deviate from norms and finally the negative and positive consequences of each. lawful stupid ‘lawful stupid’ is a trope from the role playing fantasy game dungeons & dragons (dnd). this term has been borrowed to describe behaviours that are similar to ‘trolls’ and ‘spammers’, but with more honourable motivations. the term lawful stupid is actually a play on the character trait ‘lawful good’. in the game, paladins are holy warriors (paladin, 2005). they are characterised as lawful good because whenever they encounter evil agents they must act and attempt to destroy them. often the evil characters, however, are much more powerful and by blindly following the rules the outcomes end up quite damaging. in particular they can end up hurting relationships between characters within the game. often they end up compromising trust and future interactions between characters for the sake of following their ideology. this behaviour is illustrated in a dnd-related web comic. in the order of the stick one character says to the other, sure, you fight evil, but when was the last time you showed a ‘concern for the dignity of sentient beings’? you’re just a mean, socially inept bully who hides behind a badge and her holier-than-thou morality as excuses to treat other people like crap. (lawful stupid, 2010) this behaviour is similar to online forum behaviours. in an online forum, lawful stupid behaviour is related, but distinct from trolling. occasionally members demonstrate behaviours unacceptable to the expected norms of behaviour for the group. for instance, members will denigrate others (usually the op). they also speak in extremes or absolutes, such as “we always/never...” they are often rude and berate ops for posting poor questions and having lesser programming skills. to clearly differentiate between the perceived lack of knowledge the op has and the vast amounts of knowledge the lawful stupid possess, it is not uncommon to find them telling the op to ‘read a book’, ‘visit a website’, ‘google it’ or generally increase their knowledge before posting again. often the book or website was developed by the lawful stupid. 12 example: granite is not a screwdriver in the forum, calvin and his alleged alter-ego, dbdevwizard exhibited behaviours which had both positive and negative consequences. their intentions were to introduce proper programming standards into forum threads. they departed from the social norms, however, when they personally attacked other members, called them names and questioned their technical abilities. they berated and condescendingly communicated with the op and the other thread contributors in a manner that demonstrated that either they did not recognise or they did not care to uphold the social norms concerning communication. this negative behaviour was often met with swift condemnation. lawful stupid means that the rules must be followed no matter what the outcomes. to dbdevwizard, if the op has violated a programming rule then he cannot help him solve the problem. the programming rules are more important than the social rules of the forum. in example 1, dbdevwizard’s first post is a condemnation of the way the op is trying to solve his problem. dbdevwizard had answered the op with an extreme perspective on the nature of databases. it can be assumed that the op was seeking a fairly simple and straight-forward definition of the two terms, but dbdevwizard used the opportunity to promote his very strict and probably technically correct view on databases. in dbdevwizard’s view, he cannot help the op with his problem because the op has violated programming rules, so all he can do is point out the rule breaking (“not a universal magic number”). this was not well-received by other forum members. example 1 lawful stupid4 member post dbdevwizard if you are modelling a ticket system, the ticket number is an artificial key consisting of a hash that is built from the subset of attributes within the entity (it is verified externally etc). it is not a universal magic number. bet40 [in response to dbdevwizard, although addressed to calvin (using his actual first name)] calvin, maybe you didn't read the op's question so well. historically, you reply to a thread by bashing the user for being an idiot and not bothering with an answer that works in the dbms being used. you've changed tactics lately. you've stopped bashing the user and started bashing the process. you have also stopped responding to anything the user is actually asking. the former is commendable; it is a first step to helping others. you have a lot of knowledge, and i hope one day you put it to good use. the latter, however, is making your replies even more useless. not only do they not answer the question, they go off on a tangent too! please stop posting to the dbdev forum in threads marked as questions. your posts are off-topic, borderline abusive, and misleading (to new posters). 4 in the forum examples, emphasis has been added by the author and only selected sections of the thread are presented. additionally, typographical and grammatical errors made by original authors in the written text of forum threads were left intact as much as possible with exceptions made to improve legibility. 13 member post dbdevwizard [in response to bet40, but addressed to his alleged alter-ego, calvin] calvin, if this was a woodworking newsgroup and someone posted "what is the best kind of rocks to pound screws into fine furniture?" are you really helping them when you say "granite! use big hunks of granite!" i am the guy who replies with "your question is bad. don't you know about screwdrivers?" and i like to remind them that it takes six years to become a journeyman union carpenter in new york state. not master, journeyman. bet40 [in response to dbdevwizard “are you really helping them when you say "granite! use big hunks of granite!"] yes. you have answered the question. then you make a suggestion about screwdrivers. [in response to dbdevwizard “i am the guy who replies with ‘your question is bad. don't you know about screwdrivers?’"] which is an abusive response. answer first, then suggest. consequences of lawful stupid deviance lawful stupid forum members, like calvin, derogated other members (usually outcrowd) and refused to answer op questions in responses. the difficulty members faced when communicating with calvin was that he was so committed to his own perspective (and his belief about what is right for the preservation of the database development standards) that he did not empathise with others. the ability to empathise depends on understanding not only your role, but also the roles of others. in dbdevwizard’s post he stated, “if this was a woodworking newsgroup and someone posted ‘what is the best kind of rocks to pound screws into fine furniture?’ are you really helping them when you say "granite! use big hunks of granite!" unlike bet40 who recognised that the purpose of the forum was to help members and not to enforce standards (“yes. you have answered the question. then you make a suggestion about screwdrivers.”). dbdevwizard revealed that he believed his role was the champion of the technical rules (“i am the guy who replies with "your question is bad. don't you know about screwdrivers?”). dbdevwizard did not take on the role of the op; instead he firmly reiterated his own role. as a result, there is a negative effect on social ties between the lawful stupid and the op. there are, however, positive effects. the lawful stupid post often triggers a series of responses. first by the op or other out-crowd member in self-defence. that response is commonly followed by the moderator, answerer or other in-crowd member. the lawful stupid post acts as an indicator to other members of the forum that social norms have been violated. 14 in-crowd enforcers a hostile response to deviance is a form of deviant behaviour as well. it most closely fits the description of positive deviance because although aggressively confronting a troll or other deviant member is not within the norms of expected behaviour, the motivation is both intentional and ‘honourable’. honourable in the sense that they are not self-interested, but are interested in ensuring the social network functions well for all members. for example in-crowd enforcer, eli6, explains to an out-crowd defender who was attacked by calvin that there are social norms for the forum and even though calvin did violate them, his participation also benefits the network. if you think that was a rude answer, then you have not seen calvin at his worst. this answer was almost polished to be him. that is, calvin is notorious to be extremely insulting and i can only deplore that he hangs out here, as he only occasionally makes any real technical contribution. thankfully, he is quite unique of its kind, and chances that your next question will get a better answer. (eli6) members who respond to deviance are motivated to keep the online environment open and useful, thus ensuring that the forum survives. from their view, the deviance they attack is a threat to the continued existence of the network, which they value and support. according to felps et al. (2006), protective and hostile responses to deviance differ between group members. the ‘in-crowd’ of active members has more power and control within the forum than infrequent or passive participants. group members with more power can use constructive responses more effectively. example: getting on the soapbox the forum members reacted in a variety of ways to calvin and dbdevwizard’s behaviours. there is a mechanism within the forum to mark specific posts as abusive (figure 2). this was done to one of dbdevwizard’s posts. it did not deter him, however, from continuing to post. 15 figure 2: abusive post. after it was marked, there was continued discussion on dbdevwizard’s participation in the thread. one very active forum in-crowd member, kaitl, quickly responded to dbdevwizard’s extreme statement with the following rebuke. it just gets very tiring. i would prefer to report it as abuse, but it is not. it is just very tiring... what i would like to see from you, dbdevwizard, is to stop hijacking threads to soap box. i might also be able to make the case that consistently hijacking threads to soap box is abuse -and you are good at it. (kaitl) the harshest response, although, came a few hours later from in-crowd forum moderator, al842. unfortunately it feels like your head is so far up your own back side probably too busy helping to define those standards and then coming here to preach about them that you have lost your grip on reality... *gets on soap box* dbdevwizard (vain or what???)5 in-crowd enforcers try to socially control the deviants by acting out themselves. in essence, in-crowd enforcers try to shame deviants into behaving within the social norms either through direct confrontation or public criticism. in-crowd enforcers are motivated to protect the social network of the forum. because they are in a stronger network of ties, they have more , this forum is designed for users who require assistance with using a specific databases namely dbdev and its implementation of programming standards using dbdev. if you don't like it then don't come here... continued abuse of our users will not be tolerated and responding to your posts is often futile and a waste of our time. *gets off soap box* (al842) consequences of in-crowd enforcers 5 “vain or what???” refers to dbdevwizard’s actual username (replaced by the pseudonym ‘wizard’). the word he uses in his username, like ‘wizard’ implies that he is an expert, authority and teacher. marked by member as abuse 16 power within the forum, but they also have a greater investment in its well-being. the more involved they become in the forum, the more their identity becomes dependent and interrelated with the forum’s reputation. this is most prominently demonstrated in their signatures, usernames and external blogs. it is common for in-crowd members to use dbdev references in these names. they portray themselves as experts in the language by describing themselves in that way. if the forum has a high reputation then by association they will too. with such a strong sense of commitment to the social network, fear of anomie influences their uncharacteristic departures from social norms. essentially, they choose to violate norms in order to protect them. if they see behaviours that do not fit with their perceptions of the forum they take action to reduce their cognitive dissonance. as a result, there is both a negative effect on social ties between the in-crowd enforcer and the other member (usually a lawful stupid) and a positive effect with the member they are defending (usually the op). the primary benefit, however, is that social norms were identified and clarified for other network members. discussion lawful stupid and in-crowd enforcers deviate to some degree from the normal behaviours of the forum. they have different motivations and their deviancy has different outcomes. the diagram in figure 3 extends the ‘typology of positive deviance’ model (spreitzer & sonenshein, 2004) to include the motivations behind the deviance in an online forum. the positive deviant behaviours are circled. they differ from the other forum behaviours in that they are all honourable, voluntary and a departure from norms. the typology in figure 3 depicts a range of deviance and motivations exhibited by forum members. low deviance behaviours have insubstantial differences to forum norms. they were the typical interactions observed in all levels of participation from in-crowd frequent engagement to active members to infrequent out-crowd posts. questions were posted that were well-formulated, clear and on-topic. advice and code-snippets were offered in a professional manner. through conversations within the thread solutions were developed and discovered. when there were difficulties with communication or divergent points of view, differences were directed at the tasks and not at individuals. there was an effort to maintain the social ties even if the motivations were self-interest in finding a solution to a problem. as expected the passive participation of lurkers also shows low deviance from group norms since the only evidence of their participation was through the influence they have was as the audience to other members. 17 figure 3: typology of online forum behaviours (positive deviance circled) adapted from spreitzer and sonenshein’s (2004, p. 840) ‘typology of positive deviance’ (figure 1) in contrast, the higher deviant behaviours were atypical for the forum. for the positive deviance of lawful stupid, out-crowd self-defenders and in-crowd enforcers, the intentions behind the behaviours were honourable even if they do not adhere to norms. the least deviant from the norms from this group are the out-crowd defenders. they lashed out at negative posts directed at them. they threatened to leave the forum and sometimes left without warning. their posts eventually became inactive, ending in a questioning “any progress?” with no response. these threads either remained unanswered or were marked as answered by the moderator or answerer. occasionally the out-crowd participants had a champion in in-crowd enforcers. the in-crowd members challenged negative comments with direct confrontation. that confrontation was a departure from the forum norms, but was tolerated because it protected the social ties within the forum. at the higher end of the deviance scale are lawful stupid behaviours which tend to be quite hostile and derogatory. those members singled out newbies in order to enforce technical standards and rules or to encourage them to leave the forum until they were better informed. they often crossed the boundary of criticising the task or code snippet and attacked the person instead. the most deviance observed in the forum was from trolls who unlike the positive deviants attacked other members for dishonourable motives such as attracting attention to themselves. the other scale in figure 3 is the motivation behind the behaviours. typical normative behaviours of most forum members tended to be motivated by protection of and investment in the social network. members communicated in such a way that relationships were strengthened trolls lawful stupid in-crowd enforcers out-crowd self-defenders lurkers normative (in-crowd, active and out-crowd) high deviance low deviance motivation: self-interest motivation: social network 18 (or at least not damaged). this was evidenced by the courtesies in the communication such as saying please and thank you. additionally, it was also seen in the effort put into the code snippets and advice. members tested code snippets before posting, wrote supplementary blog posts to further develop concepts introduced in the forum thread and provided links to other sites that could support the thread discussions. even the more deviant behaviours of in-crowd enforcers and lawful stupid were motivated to protect social network even if it was at the cost of individual social ties between the members involved in the deviance. spreitzer and sonenshein (2004), for example describe this social network perspective as being “honourable”. the members had honourable intentions even if the behaviour itself deviated from the norms which maintained the social network. at the other end of the motivation spectrum from networkorientation is self-interest. members who were more interested in their own benefits rather than preserving the social network of the forum fell into this category. at the normative end were lurkers. in the diagram, as the departure from norms increases, the self-interest changes from being selfish to malicious. this was exhibited by trolls. the results of this study suggest that there are several ways that deviance could positively affect online discussion forums. conclusion the role of deviant behaviour in online discussion forums has a range of effects on the social network. at one end are somewhat deviant but honourable behaviours motivated by protecting the social network. it is interesting that it is often very active members of the forum who respond to deviance in such a hostile manner. as the deviance increases and the intentions become less honourable and more self-serving the thing that is most damaged is the social network. so deviance is actually connected to the development or deterioration of social ties within a network. most positive deviance is motivated by the desire to champion social network standard practices which actually strengthen network ties by reinforcing norms and establishing trust. moderately deviant behaviours, such as lawful stupid may discourage participation, but also encourage a higher standard of participation that elevates the technical discussion and encourages members to better prepare before engaging in conversations or posting questions. deviancy is complex in social networks and has positive and negative elements. this study demonstrates that the forum functioned well when members had positive experiences. experiences when their problems were solved, their discussions were fruitful or their encounters with other members were socially affirming. as expected, deviance weakened 19 social ties. the social network of the forum, however, also benefited from clarified social rules. this positive outcome had a mitigating effect on the negative impact of deviance on interpersonal trust. references attride-stirling, j. (2001). thematic networks: an analytic tool for qualitative research. qualitative research, 1(3), 385-405. doi:10.1177/146879410100100307 birchmeier, z., joinson, a. n., & dietz-uhler, b. (2005). storming and forming a normative response to a deception revealed online. social science computer review, 23(1), 108-121. blanchard, a. l., & horan, t. (1998). virtual communities and social capital. social science computer review, 16(3), 5-20. blanchard, a. l., & markus, m. l. (2004). the experienced sense of a virtual community: characteristics and processes. acm sigmis database, 35(1), 64-79. boyd, d., & ellison, n. b. (2008). social network sites: definition, history, and scholarship. journal of computer-mediated communication, 13(1), 210-230. braun, v., & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77-101. creswell, j. w. (2007). qualitative inquiry & research design: choosing among five approaches. thousand oaks; london: sage publications. donath, j. s. (1999). identity and deception in the virtual community. in p. kollock & m. smith (eds.), communities in cyberspace (pp. 29-59). london: routledge. retrieved from http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/judith/identity/identitydeception.html donath, j. s. (2008). signals in social supernets. journal of computer mediated communication, 13(1), 231-251. felps, w., mitchell, t. r., & byington, e. (2006). how, when, and why bad apples spoil the barrel: negative group members and dysfunctional groups. research in organizational behavior: an annual series of analytical essays and critical reviews, 27, 175-222. 20 haythornthwaite, c. (2002). strong, weak, and latent ties and the impact of new media. the information society, 18(5), 385-401. herring, s., job-sluder, k., scheckler, r., & barab, s. (2002). searching for safety online: managing “trolling” in a feminist forum. the information society: an international journal, 18(5), 371-384. hine, c. (2000). virtual ethnography. london: sage. lawful stupid. (2010). television tropes & idioms. retrieved from http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/main/lawfulstupid lewis, j., & weigert, a. (1985). trust as a social reality. social forces, 63(4), 967-985. mauthner, n. s., & doucet, a. (2003). reflexive accounts and accounts of reflexivity in qualitative data analysis. sociology, 37(3), 413-431. doi:10.1177/00380385030373002 nahapiet, j., & ghoshal, s. (1998). social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. academy of management review, 23(2), 242-266. paladin. (2005). ddo dungeons and dragons online. retrieved from http://www.dndoonline.com/content/classes-paladin.php portes, a. (1998). social capital: its origins and applications in modern sociology. annual review of sociology, 24(1), 1-24. spreitzer, g. m., & sonenshein, s. (2004). toward the construct definition of positive deviance. american behavioral scientist, 47(6), 828-847. doi:10.1177/0002764203260212 wagner, c., ip, r. k. f., cheung, k. s. k., & lee, f. s. l. (2005). deceptive communication in virtual communities. proceedings of the 38th annual hawaii international conference on system sciences (hicss’05). kona, hawaii: ieee. retrieved from http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/hicss.2005.185 woolcock, m. (1998). social capital and economic development: toward a theoretical synthesis and policy framework. theory and society, 27(2), 151-208. microsoft word aoir_fashionblog-duffy7.1.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 “regular people with a passion for fashion”: authenticity, community, and other social media myths brooke erin duffy temple university usa bduffy@temple.edu abstract fashion blogging represents a distinct culture and practice of social media production that involves the creation and public distribution of style-related images, information, and personal commentary. mainstream media coverage of fashion blogs situates them within a distinct moment of digital cultural production defined by destabilized, decentralized, and democratized flows of media. however, these narratives are both limited and limiting in that they fail to provide a productive framework to understand the nuanced cultures and political economies of fashion blogging. this research draws upon a textual analysis of the independent fashion bloggers online community to show how fashion blogging is constructed through an interrelated series of “identity myths”: 1). the authenticity myth; 2). the autonomy myth; and 3). the egality myth. these myths, i argue, effectively conceal those social media practices that tend to appropriate—rather than resist—capitalist infrastructures and traditional media industry logics. keywords fashion blogs; social media; cultural production; labor; identity background against the backdrop of digitally reconfigured circuits of media production and consumption, fashion blogging has emerged as a distinct culture and practice of online content creation that involves (mostly female) diarists producing and distributing fashion and style-related images, information, and personal commentary. while the nature and scope of fashion blogs varies extensively—ranging from high fashion runway recaps to “street style” photography to niche blogs on plus-size looks, vintage finds, or diy design—they have been collectively hailed for “democratiz[ing] style” and “allowing regular janes like you and me to become part of the international fashion conversation” (givhan, 2007, para. 3; brown, 2011; para. 3). such democratization narratives fit rather cozily into the discourses of interactivity and blurred producer/consumer boundaries that have come to define the contemporary era of participatory culture (e.g., bruns, 2008; jenkins, 2006). the ascendance of fashion bloggers is also reshaping other sites of cultural production, particularly the women’s magazine and fashion industries. this signals what myers (2012) recently described as an “intervention…into traditional media production hierarchies” (p. 1024). indeed, fashion bloggers are now granted access to fashion week and other haute couture events, encroaching on territory once exclusively reserved for magazine editors and a-list celebrities. in addition, some members of this new generation of fashion cognoscenti have developed working relationships with high-profile advertisers and designers. that mainstream media have pitted women’s magazine editors against bloggers has only amplified the rhetorical tension between traditional media producers and the recent flood of digitally enabled “amateur” content creators (leadbeater and miller, 2004) taken together, these overlapping discourses position fashion blogging within a distinct moment of digital cultural production defined by democratized communication and destabilized power hierarchies. i argue, however, that such narratives are both limited and limiting in that they fail to provide a productive framework to understand the nuanced cultures and political economies of fashion blogging. for instance, what is meant by the term “fashion blogger”? what are the affordances and limitations of self-identification with the practice? how do fashion bloggers define themselves and selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 articulate their identities to their audiences? how does the technological structure of blogging communities configure certain practices and norms? and, finally, how can the answers to such questions help us understand emergent forms of social media—particularly within a gendered, commercialized context? method this paper aims to critically examine how fashion bloggers construct and manage their identities as (gendered, racialized, and classed) individuals, as content producers, and as members of an imagined community. to understand how bloggers’ articulate these various identity indexes (individual, professional, collective), i conducted a textual analysis of more than 200 posts and one thousand comments included on the independent fashion bloggers network (ifb) over a seven-year period (2006-2012). as the largest community of fashion bloggers, the ifb offers a unique opportunity to interrogate bloggers’ reflexive practices and discourses. summary of findings what emerged from the data is a fragmented, multidimensional, and at times contradictory definition of “fashion bloggers” that is held together through an interrelated series of “identity myths.” these myths, which i will explain and complicate below, include: 1. the authenticity myth 2. the autonomy myth 3. the egality myth fashion bloggers tend to emphasize their “authenticity,” which is constructed in part through the narrative that they are “just like us.” their authority, then, comes from the domain of everyday, lived experience rather than from professional training or expertise. as ifb member britishbeautyblogger noted, “most bloggers aren’t professional journalists, [they’re] just regular people with a passion for fashion.” however, the “authenticity myth” was challenged by references to the economic and social capital necessary for one to keep a regularly updated blog; blogger investments include internet access, software and editing programs, camera equipment, and fashion/accessories, among others. further, some bloggers do have professional experience and/or connections from careers in the journalism, social media, or advertising industries. by pushing back against the construction of bloggers as “just like us,” i show how fashion blogger culture tends to be both classed and gendered. closely related to the authenticity myth is what i call the “autonomy myth,” or the idea that blogging is a form of self-expression that exists apart from societal and commercial pressures. narratives on the ifb site, for instance, indicated blogging was a way for individuals to discover their true selves. for instance, vahni from grit and glamour wrote in an ifb post, “blogging is not about numbers and comments and popularity. it’s about creative expression…it was—and is—for you.” importantly, though, this celebration of creative self-expression was tempered by extensive discussions about how to attract external recognition in the form of audiences and advertisers. individualist expression is thus positioned as a means to an end (commercial success) rather than an end itself. the self, in this case, becomes an entrepreneurial subject that uses creativity for self-branding purposes (gill, 2008; hearn, 2008). the “egality myth” is bound up with larger narratives about the power of the internet to democratize communication and foster collaboration. fashion blogs are often described as public forums that allow participants equal access to the mediated public sphere. according to one ifb commenter, the “blogging community [is] one of the most democratic spaces on the internet!” this rhetoric of democratization tends to obscure the hierarchical nature of the fashion blogging community. bloggers are frequently put into categories with labels like “professionals,” “top-tier,” and “mid-range selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 bloggers,” each of which is based on traditional markers of success (i.e., income and audience metrics). what is more, very few fashion bloggers are able to turn their hobby into a full-time career. most face what chia (2012) described as a “disparity between the promise of prosumption and bloggers’ actual experiences and opportunities for communication and its monetization” (p. 428). conclusions the category of social media participants known as “fashion bloggers” is perhaps an unreliable one; it is held together through a series of mythical constructs that seem to romanticize emergent forms of labor in the digital economy. yet behind these promises of pleasure—even resistance—lie acts appropriated from the capitalist system. far from being authentic, autonomous, and community oriented, the emergent organization of fashion blogging is increasingly hierarchical, market-driven, quantifiable, and self-promotional. findings from this study can help us push back against recent calls to rethink traditional understandings of media industries in light of new economies and technologies of media (i.e. hartley, 2009). a more productive endeavor, i argue, is to turn attention to ways in which emergent sites of consumer participation are configured to promise flexibility and individualism while retaining (problematic) postfordist industrial structures and relations. this includes precarity, inequity, and a continuous negotiation between creativity and constraint. references brown, c. (2011, march 25). viewpoint: amateur fashionistas blog their way to the top. centretown news. retrieved from centretownnewsonline.ca. bruns, a. (2008). blogs, wikipedia, second life, and beyond: from production to produsage. new york: peter lang. chia, a. (2012). welcome to me-mart: the politics of user-generated content in personal blogs. american behavioral scientist, 56(4), 421-438. gill, r. (2008). culture and subjectivity in neoliberal and postfeminist times. subjectivity, 25(1), 432-445. hartley, j. (2009). from the consciousness industry to the creative industries: consumer-created content, social network markets, and the growth of knowledge. in j. holt and a. perren (eds.), media industries: history, theory, method (pp. 231-244). oxford: wiley-blackwell. hearn, a. (2008). meat, mask, burden. probing the contours of the branded self. journal of consumer culture, 8(2), 197-217. jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york: new york university press. leadbeater, c., & miller, p. (2004). the pro-am revolution: how enthusiasts are changing our economy and society. london: demos. myers, e. (2012). ‘blogs give regular people the chance to talk back’: rethinking ‘professional’ media hierarchies in new media. new media & society, 14(6), 1022-1038. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  leshnick,  a.,  &  livio,  o.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  technology  meets  postmodern   epistemology:  the  discourse  of  hebrew  wikipedia  deletion  pages.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the   17th  annual  conference  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved   from  http://spir.aoir.org.   technology  meets  postmodern  epistemology:   the  discourse  of  hebrew  wikipedia  deletion  pages     anat  leshnick   university  of  haifa     oren  livio   university  of  haifa     introduction   on  election  day  2015,  a  video  of  israeli  prime  minister  benjamin  netanyahu  was   broadcast  on  tv,  urging  last  minute  voters  to  hurry  because  “arab  voters  are  flocking  in   huge  quantities  to  the  polls.”  the  statement  drew  widespread  criticism  and  public   discussion.  shortly  thereafter,  the  entry  “arab  voters  are  flocking  in  huge  quantities  to   the  polls”  was  uploaded  to  the  hebrew  wikipedia.  a  few  days  later  it  was  proposed  for   deletion.  on  the  deletion  discussion  pages,  editors  debated  whether  the  statement  was   worthy  of  being  included  in  an  encyclopedia.       this  entry  is  only  one  of  many  that  have  been  proposed  for  deletion  on  the  hebrew   wikipedia  since  its  inception  in  2001.  the  deletion  policy  and  debates  whether  to   include  or  exclude  articles  from  wikipedia  raise  intriguing  questions  regarding  the   constructed  meaning  of  the  new  open  source  based,  "free”  and  “collaborative”   encyclopedia  and  its  boundaries.  in  this  study  we  analyze  deletion  discussion  pages  on   the  hebrew  wikipedia  in  order  to  examine  the  ways  in  which  definitions  of  “worthy”  and   “unworthy”  encyclopedic  knowledge  are  negotiated  in  contemporary  discourse,   reflecting  local  perceptions  regarding  the  role  of  wikipedia  and  its  meanings,  as  well  as   broader  cultural  perceptions  of  the  relation  between  technology  and  epistemology  in  an   age  characterized  by  an  ongoing  tension  between  modernist  and  postmodern   conceptions  of  truth,  knowledge,  and  authority.       technology,  encyclopedic  boundaries,  and  the  challenges  of  wikipedia   questions  regarding  what  knowledge  is  considered  important  enough  to  be  included  in   encyclopedias,  as  well  as  how  this  knowledge  should  be  organized  and  presented,  have   been  an  issue  of  controversy  throughout  the  course  of  history  (kenny,  1991;;  loveland,   2013).  while  many  of  these  questions  remain  relevant  in  the  case  of  wikipedia,  some   unique  characteristics  of  the  popular  online  encyclopedia,  as  well  as  a  variety  of   sociocultural  changes,  have  complicated  the  issue  of  demarcating  (and  studying)  the   encyclopedia's  boundaries  in  significant  ways.       first,  while  the  editors  of  traditional  encyclopedias  were  forced  to  exclude  items  due  to   economic  constraints  and  space  limitations,  wikipedia  entries  are  composed  by   volunteers  for  free  in  a  potentially  limitless  internet  environment,  thus  at  least  in  principle   freeing  editors  from  such  constraints.  second,  while  encyclopedias  since  the  18th  century   were  customarily  viewed  as  representing  authoritative  knowledge  produced  by  experts   (sullivan,  1990),  wikipedia  operates  within  a  sociocultural  atmosphere  characterized  by   greater  ambivalence,  and  sometimes  downright  skepticism,  toward  traditional  sources  of   authority  and  knowledge  (van  zoonen,  2012).third,  whereas  in  traditional  encyclopedias   "deleted"  entries  were  simply  not  included  in  the  published  volumes  –  with  relatively  little   information  made  public  regarding  the  process  whereby  decisions  regarding  inclusion  and   exclusion  were  made  –  on  wikipedia,  even  when  a  particular  entry  is  deleted,  the   negotiations  that  took  place  regarding  the  article’s  fate  remain  available  on  the  site  and   are  accessible  by  any  internet  user  –  thus  providing  a  rich  source  for  examining  the  actual   process  of  boundary  construction.     in  its  early  stages,  wikipedia  was  relatively  devoid  of  selectivity  with  regard  to  content.   with  time,  however,  it  became  clear  that  content  must  be  regulated  if  wikipedia  were  to   fulfill  its  function  as  an  important  source  of  knowledge.  accordingly,  various  policies  and   guidelines  were  implemented  in  order  to  standardize  processes  for  content  composition,   editing,  and  exclusion  (jemielniak,  2014).  one  example  of  these  guidelines  is   wikipedia’s  deletion  policy,  which  is  the  focus  of  this  study.  while  specific  policies  differ   across  countries  and  languages,  reflecting  different  perceptions  of  wikipedia's  role,   broadly  speaking  items  that  are  considered  unimportant,  unsuitable,  or  irrelevant  may   be  proposed  for  deletion  by  wikipedia  editors.  in  such  cases,  the  item  is  moved  to  a   deletion  discussion  page,  in  which  a  debate  is  carried  out  over  its  fate,  eventually   decided  by  vote.       method   the  sample  of  discourse  examined  in  this  study  was  collected  from  hebrew  wikipedia   deletion  discussion  pages,  which  are  divided  into  27  different  categories  with  452  total   entries.  the  corpus  included  at  least  one  entry  (randomly  selected)  from  each  category,   with  more  entries  included  from  categories  in  which  many  entries  were  present.  both   entries  that  were  deleted  and  those  that  "survived"  the  deletion  vote  were  analyzed.  the   analysis  combined  the  methodological  tools  of  critical  discourse  analysis  (e.g.,  machin   &  mayr,  2012),  argumentation  analysis  (e.g.,  krzyzanowski  &  wodak,  2009),  and   foucauldian  procedures  of  exclusion  (e.g.,  foucault,  2002),  focusing  on  discursive   strategies  for  justifying  the  decision  to  delete  (or  keep)  the  sampled  entries.     findings  and  discussion   a  variety  of  discursive  strategies  for  justifying  decisions  on  wikipedia  entries  were   found,  demonstrating  the  ways  in  which  the  wikipedia  community  defines,  challenges,   and  reconfigures  social  boundaries  regarding  the  limits  of  "legitimate"  knowledge.  one   recurring  theme  raised  by  interlocutors  involved  the  subject  matter  itself  –  with  entries   suggested  for  deletion  often  described  as  "taboo,"  "esoteric",  or  "lacking  clear   classification."  such  definitions  reflect  the  ongoing  influence  of  modernist  conceptions  of   encyclopedic  information,  in  which  explicit  hierarchies  of  importance  and  moral  value   are  articulated.     similarly,  decisions  regarding  inclusion  or  exclusion  were  often  justified  based  upon   legitimation  strategies  grounded  in  traditional  sources  of  authority  (van  leeuwen,  2008).   thus,  for  example,  worthiness  of  inclusion  in  wikipedia  was  often  legitimated  by   referring  to  a  topic's  acceptance  by  traditional  institutions  ("it  was  on  the  news"),  and  a   topic's  relevance  was  often  constituted  based  upon  comparison  to  the  classification   regimes  of  modern  printed  encyclopedias  ("this  entry  is  not  encyclopedic  because  it’s   about  a  passing  fad”).  at  the  same  time,  such  definitions  were  also  contested,  with   appeals  made  to  popularity  as  justification  for  encyclopedic  importance.       while  many  of  the  justifications  were  constructed  as  universal,  the  local  cultural   situatedness  of  the  hebrew  wikipedia  was  evident  both  in  the  nature  of  the  entries   debated  and  in  the  legitimations  made.  thus,  for  example,  a  debate  arose  regarding  the   inclusion  of  fallen  israeli  soldiers,  with  the  argument  made  that  "wikipedia  is  not  a   memorial  site."  such  debates  often  reflected  hegemonic  perceptions  associated  with   israeli  elites,  in  line  with  the  demographic  profiles  of  most  hebrew  wikipedia  editors,   who  are  commonly  male,  jewish,  and  relatively  highly  educated.       the  study's  findings  illustrate  the  dynamic  nature  of  power  struggles  over  the  production   and  institutionalization  of  knowledge  in  a  constantly  evolving  technological  and   sociocultural  environment.  the  analysis  helps  expose  the  mechanisms  used  by   individuals  and  groups  to  fight  over  definitions  of  reality,  and  the  meaning  and  status  of   contemporary  encyclopedic  information  and  knowledge  in  a  given  time  and  culture.     references   foucault,  m.  (2002).  the  order  of  things.  london:  routledge.     jemielniak,   d.   (2014).  common   knowledge?   an   ethnography   of   wikipedia.   stanford:   stanford  university  press.     kenny,  n.  (1991).  the  palace  of  secrets:  béroalde  de  verville  and  renaissance   conceptions  of  knowledge.  oxford:  clarendon  press.     krzyzanowski,  m.,  &  wodak,  r.  (2009).  the  politics  of  exclusion:  debating  migration  in   austria.  london:  transaction  publishers.     loveland,  j.  (2012).  encyclopaedias  and  genre,  1670-­1750.  journal  for  eighteenth-­ century  studies,  36,  159-­175.     machin,  d.,  &  mayr,  a.  (2012).  how  to  do  critical  discourse  analysis.  london:  sage.     sullivan,  l.  e.  (1990).  circumscribing  knowledge:  encyclopedias  in  historical   perspective.  the  journal  of  religion,  70,  315-­339.     van  leeuwen,  t.  (2008).  legitimation  in  discourse  and  communication.  discourse  &   communication,  1,  91-­112.     van  zoonen,  l.  (2012).  i-­pistemology:  changing  truth  claims  in  popular  and  political   culture.  european  journal  of  communication,  27,  56-­67.   selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 biosensory  experiences  and  media  materiality     aristea  fotopoulou   university  of  brighton     kate  o'riordan   university  of  sussex     wearables  such  as  fitbit  can  be  thought  to  form  part  of  an  apparatus  of  digitised  health   promotion  (lupton,  2013;;  2014).  this  is  an  emerging  market,  reports  estimate  that  13   million  devices  were  shipped  in  2013,  with  fitbit  occupying  a  67%  share1.  the  emerging   body  of  research  around  wearables  has  noted  the  centrality  of  locative  devices,  smart   phone  apps,  and  data  repositories  for  healthcare,  as  well  with  the  ethical  implications  of   collecting  data  (oudshoorn,  2011;;  mort  et  al.,  2013).  fitbit  wearables  form  part  of  a   digital  health  promotion  apparatus,  which  as  deborah  lupton  (2014)  argues,   emphasises  individual  responsibility  to  the  disregard  of  social  and  political  dimensions   of  technology.         we  employ  an  interpretative  model  to  explore  aspects  of  wearable  technologies  as   biopedagogic  (rail  and  lafrance  (2009)):  that  is,  technologies  that  incorporate  some   form  of  training  or  knowledge  production  and  create  new  meanings  about  the   technology  as  well  as  expert/lay  person  identities.  we  focus  on  the  mode  of  address  of   digital  health  promotion,  and  the  subjectivities  and  identities  that  are  being  produced  by   the  circulating  discourses  around  wearable  sensors.  our  attention  is  with  the  tensions   between  media  representations,  user  experience,  and  knowledge-­making,  against  the   backdrop  of  economic  cuts  and  the  reshaping  of  the  health  sector  throughout  europe.         like  other  didactic  modes  such  as  reality  television  fitbit  sensors  constitute  a  set  of   interlocking  media  texts.  they  mediate  the  body  and  they  conscript  the  audience  into   the  production  process.  fitbit  is  designed  to  address  users  and  consumers  as  learners   of  technology,  instructed  to  incorporate  self-­logging  in  their  everyday  lives,  making   everyday  practices  productive,  and  engaging  discourses  about  the  responsibility  of  the   1 juniper  research  www.juniperresearch.com  and  ndp  www.npd.com,  both  figures  were  reported  widely  in  2013  in  the  press  with   estimates  that  the  market  was  worth  $330  million.     suggested  citation  (apa):  fotopoulou,  a.  &  o’riordan,  k.  (2015,  october  21-­24)  biosensory   experiences  and  media  materiality.  paper  presented  at  internet  research  16:  the  16th  annual  meeting  of   the  association  of  internet  researchers.  phoenix,  az,  usa:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.   individual  to  care  for  and  improve  her  body.  it  presents  bodies  as  part  of  a  constellation   of  media  texts,  apps  and  electronic  objects  in  which  training  bodies  and  brains  is  part  of   the  material  practices  of  everyday  life  (bassett,  2009).  they  affirm  self-­logging,  and   behavioural  change,  whilst  facilitating  belonging  in  both  fitness  and  techno-­savvy   networked  knowledge  communities.         approaches  to  method         we  undertook  a  textual  analysis  of  news  media,  analysing  articles  during  a  one-­year   period  (april  2012-­2013).  of  the  140  uk  newspaper  references  to  fitbit  in  that  time  only   3  significantly  challenged  the  promotion  of  fitbit  as  a  ‘cool’  new  device.  in  addition  to   the  print  analysis,  we  examined  the  interface,  and  social  media  (aka  communities  and   forums)  and  used  small  scale  auto-­ethnographic  methods  (bassett,  2009,  ellis,  2004),   through  use  of  the  fitbit  for  a  period  of  2  months.         utopian  and  dystopian  imaginaries         in  uk  news,  coverage  consisted  of  promotional  feature  and  reviews  reproducing  press   releases  from  consumer  electronic  shows.  fitbit  appeared  overwhelmingly  as  a  an   ‘app’,  evoking  an  ecology  of  mobiles,  smart  phones  and  wearables  and  framing  fitbit  as   a  dimension  of  digital  culture  and  a  networked  social  object.  in  much  of  this  coverage   fitbit  operated  to  anchor  much  grander  and  utopic  visions  of  innovation  and  futures.     framings  included:  ‘wearable  revolution’  ‘revolutionising  healthcare’  ‘electronic  health   record  revolution’  ‘the  future  is  here’.  these  stories  outlined  prospective  visions  about   transformations  in  medicine,  or  the  consumer  electronics  market,  while  referencing  fitbit   as  an  example.         the  fitbit  vision  is  part  of  two  broader  intersecting  discourses.  in  one  the  self  is  made   up  in  part  through  personal  engagement  with  knowledge  about  biology     (biological  citizenship).  in  the  other  self-­health  care  is  increasingly  important  as  public   front  line  resources  dwindle.  in  this  paradigm  these  devices  offer  not  just  a  new  way  of   knowing  the  self  but  offer  a  pragmatic  technological  fix  to  austerity.         interface       knowledge  acquisition  through  fitbit  is  framed  as  social.  the  screen  displays  numerical   information  to  the  user  about  their  fitness  activity,  with  the  addition  of  messages  (for   instance  ‘love  ya  mary’),  which  aim  to  create  a  sense  of  connection  with  the  user,  or  to   establish  the  device  in  its  role  as  a  sports-­trainer.  this  display  of  motivational  messages   introduces  a  form  of  ongoing  sociality  and  enhances  the  sense  of  connectedness.         information  about  fitness  comes  through  the  quantified  data  input  and  through  game   features,  in  the  form  of  badges  and  levels.  diagrams  display  the  average  score  since   the  beginning  of  the  use,  as  well  as  peaks  and  lows  of  an  activity  during  the  same  day.   through  these  infographics  fitbit  allows  for  an  accessible  and  limited  mode  of   knowledge  acquisition,  which  is  playful  visual  and  'fun',  offering  a  strong  interpretative   framework.         acquiring  self-­knowledge  can  be  achieved  solely  through  the  interaction  with  the  fitbit.   therefore  the  design  features  that  enable  sociality  could  be  considered  as  a  marketing   strategy  that  renders  fitbit  ‘as  if’  social:  the  social  networking  elements  are  used   instrumentally  to  render  the  interface  attractive  to  users,  when  the  actual  aim,  as  with   other  similar  health-­related  businesses  and  cloud-­based  tracking  devices,  is  the   collection  of  personal  data  from  the  user  (see  atzori  et  al  2014).       biopedagogy,  governmentality  and  the  knowing  self       the  pedagogic  aspect  of  governmentality  concerns  a  process  of  learning  the   behaviours  and  dispositions  of  self-­care  that  are  within  acceptable  modes  of  conduct  in   a  neoliberal  health  landscape.  ‘taking  care  of  oneself  requires  knowing…oneself’   (foucault,  2000:  283)  and  this  presupposes  an  educational  process.  as  becks  and   beck-­gernsheim  (2001)  have  noted  in  relation  to  genetics,  being  and  staying  healthy  is   a  ‘voluntary  compulsion’  (144),  based  on  the  premise  that  more  information  will  allow   individuals  to  take  better  decisions  for  their  health.  wearable  devices  contribute  to  data   generation,  and  the normalization  of  self-­monitoring  and  self-­improvement,  by  offering   new  public  sites  where  these  practices  are  being  sanctioned  and  by  establishing  a   regime  of  self-­monitoring.       fitbit  measures  well  against  a  social  and  political  context  of  self-­responsibility.  the  user   of  the  device  is  offered  a  mode  of  self-­reliance  coupled  with  support  from  the  specific   and  connected  community  of  other  fitbit  users.  thus,  the  encouragement  of  a   consumer-­knowledge  community  operates  within  a  larger  assumption  and  normalisation   of  digital  connectivity  and  social  networking.  digital  health  promotion  and  biopedagogy   work  together,  by  addressing  users  and  consumers  as  learners  of  technology  for  self-­ care  and  life-­logging:  becoming  'expert'  in  self-­care  with  the  use  of  wearable   technologies.           conclusion         fitbit  can  be  thought  as  a  form  of  training,  not  only  in  the  collection  of  data,  and  health   awareness,  but  also  in  the  technology  itself.  users  are  engaged  in  an  experiment  with   multiple  purposes:  whilst  they  contribute  to  the  fine  tuning  of  the  technology,  they  also   are  engaging  with  health  promotion  giving  the  user  a  sense  of  agency  about  their   health.  data  collection  devices  sell  by  presenting  “data  collection  as  an  always  already   good  and  productive  practice”  (gardner  and  wray  (2013,  np).  a  promise  that  the  future   (including  improved  health  and  well-­being)  will  materialise  if  consumers  embrace   personal  responsibility,  and  training  with  the  device  is  a  key  aspect  of  this  process.  our   invocation  of  pedagogic  technology  refers  to  the  way  these  applications  are  designed  to   instruct  consumers  in  bio-­data  collection,  by  engaging  them  in  an  everyday  practice  that   legitimises  dominant  discourses  of  individual  responsibility  for  one's  own  body.         taken  as  an  assemblage,  fitbit,  can  be  understood  as  a  consumer  experiment  about   the  use  of  wearables,  for  health  promotion  in  everyday  life.  media  coverage  reproduces   a  promotional  imaginary  in  which  wearables  promote  health  and  signal  a  revolution  in   health  care.  whilst  such  a  revolution  remains  a  utopian  imaginary,  the  embedding  of   wearables  in  the  everyday  life  world  is  a  reality.  the  interface  works  to  encourage  self-­ management  of  body  and  bio-­data,  as  a  knowledgeable  consumer  of  health  promotion   technologies,  enabling  a  layer  of  high  tech  devices  to  enter  the  everyday  life  world,  and   health  care,  in  the  name  of  producing  fitness.         references       atzori,  l.,  carboni,  d.,  &  iera,  a.  (2014).  smart  things  in  the  social  loop:  paradigms,   technologies,  and  potentials.  ad  hoc  networks.  18,  121-­132       ellis,  c.  (2004).  the  ethnographic  i:  a  methodological  novel  about  autoethnography.   walnut  creek,  ca:  altamira  press.       gardner  p.,  and  wray  b.,  (2013)  from  lab  to  living  room:  transhumanist  imaginaries   of  consumer  brain  wave  monitors.  ada:  a  journal  of  gender,  new  media  and   technology.  3       lupton,  d.  (2013)  the  digitally  engaged  patient:  self-­monitoring  and  self-­care  in  the   digital  health  era  social  theory  &  health  (2013)  11,  256–270.         lupton,  d  (2014)  ‘health  promotion  in  the  digital  era:  a  critical  commentary’  health   promotion  international,  october  15,  2014       mort,  m.  roberts,  c.  callen,  b.  (2013)  ageing  with  telecare:  care  or  coercion  in   austerity?  sociology  of  health  and  illness,  35(6),  07.2013,  p.  799-­812       oudshoorn,  n.  (2011)  telecare  technologies  and  the  transformation  of  healthcare.   houndmills:  palgrave  macmillan.         rail,  g  and  lafrance,  m  (2009)  confessions  of  the  flesh  and  biopedagogies:  discursive   constructions  of  obesity  on  nip/tuck,  medical  humanities  35:76-­79         rose  n,  novas  c.  (2005)  biological  citizenship.  in:  ong  a,  collier  s,  eds.  global   assemblages:  technology,  politics  and  ethics  as  anthropological  problems.  malden,  ma:   blackwell,  439–63.     microsoft word hutchinson.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): hutchingson, j. (2014, october 22-24). cultural intermediation at the intersection point of institutional co-creation: reconfiguring participation within the australian broadcasting corporation (abc). paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. cultural intermediation at the intersection point of institutional co-creation: reconfiguring participation within the australian broadcasting corporation (abc) jonathon hutchinson university of sydney cultural intermediation to reconfigure participation in an unstable and unpredictable media environment (cunningham & turner 2010), public service media organizations have been encouraged to explore new production techniques that engage the audience in innovative and exciting ways while delivering content over multiple digital platforms (debrett 2010). in a multiplatform media environment described as one that intersects the single audience member with the mass audience (enli 2008), psm host platforms that enable content to not only be published by the institution’s professional media staff but to also host content contributed by the audience. multiplatform within psm also engage the characteristics of participatory cultures where users refuse “to simply accept what they are given, but rather insists on the right to become full participants” (jenkins, 2006, p. 131), thereby appropriating media for new contexts. walker (2009) suggests participatory cultures have seen psm move beyond the one-way communication model of web 1.0 to an engaged, democratic and inclusive communication model more representative of web 2.0, further complicating the media environment. with online audiences actively participating in the production of media, and in some cases engaging in co-creative practices with media professionals, complications arise in normative and editorial decisions surrounding content production. in the co-creative model, content contributed by users may be technically inadequate, editorially inappropriate or in bad taste. psm has a public mission based on the reithian trinity of inform, educate and entertain, suggesting user generated content aligns with this remit. governance models guide media producers to achieve the public remit of the psm, usually in the form of editorial policies. however, as malaby (2009) has noted, users of online platforms tend to reject top down hierarchical governance models in favour of heterarchical governance that employs meritocracy. in other words, online platform participants engaging in cultural co-creation employ people in power in an ad hoc basis, grounded in there past performance and experience in such positions (bruns 2008). online content creation projects represent the decentralisation of the production process outlined by shirky (2008) and benkler (2006). shirky notes production within organizations assist in solving the problems associated with group complexity, yet is expensive, exclusionary, requires management and is class based. benkler highlights the benefits of decentralization as peer production that brings together disparate individuals who work on a similar project “based on sharing resources and outputs among widely distributed, loosely connected individuals who cooperate with each other without relying on either market signals or managerial commands” (benkler, 2006, p. 60). combining benkler’s observations with shirky’s provocations suggests a decentralised production model includes all the benefits of user-led innovation, is inexpensive, democratic and egalitarian. the decentralised approach towards cocreative cultural artifact production aligns with the public interest remit of psm, yet presents the challenge of how to manage such an arrangement within this environment. one psm project that combines participatory cultures, ad hoc meritocracy and cocreative production of cultural artifacts was abc pool (www.abc.net.au/pool). abc pool was an opportunity for australian online audiences to engage with the abc by contributing their media in audio, photography, video or text. the users had access to the cultural and media expertise of the abc staff who exchange knowledge between the users. the platform operated under a creative commons licensing regime enabling the media to flow between platforms, including traditional terrestrial broadcasting mediums. a common activity for abc pool was to host co-creative projects facilitated by audio producers of 360documentaries, a long form documentary program on the radio national network. typically, the producers would design a call-out to mobilise the abc pool community to produce thematically appropriate texts. the producers would collect and curate the user created content, and exchange expert advice on the user’s production. the final stage of the co-creative project combined the user created content with the producer’s work to broadcast the documentary on the 360documentaries program. the challenge for abc pool team, and the radio national producers, had been to manage the participants insofar as encouraging user-led innovation during the production process while aligning their activity with the public service remit of the abc. the abc pool project closed in late 2013, however many of its co-creative standards live on in legacy projects such as abc open and triplej’s unearthed. the process of managing the co-creative arrangement for cultural artifact production was previously understood to be the role of the community manager (wilson, hutchinson & shea, 2010). the community manager engages, encourages and supports the community members (bacon 2009) and is the representative of the community towards the institution (banks 2009). however, emerging research suggests relying on one person as an intermediary between multiple stakeholders within the project is a slow and restrictive process. rather, it is the coordinated efforts of multiple intermediaries operating simultaneously that enable this crisis of production to be seamlessly negotiated. the role of the community manager is one aspect of the negotiation process to manage social behavior of individuals engaging in cultural production with institutions. the combined intermediary activity is the underpinnings of cultural intermediation, a phenomenon that has emerged from the cultural artifact production process within the psm sector, to connect decentralised production behavior with centralised institutional activity. methodology these data emerge from a three-year research project that used an ethnographic action research methodology where i was embedded as the community manager of abc pool. participant observation was the core method of my online ethnography, referred to by bowler (2010) as netnography and defined as research that explores the “cultural analysis and representation, from the observation of colocated, face-to-face interactions to technologically mediated interactions in online networks and communities, and the culture (or cyberculture) shared between and among them” (bowler, 2010, p. 1271). the action method aligned with my community manager role, defined as “integrating your research into the development of your project” (tacchi, slater & hearn, 2003, p. 12). additional data was found through surveys, focus groups, semi-structured interviews and textual analysis. this paper draws on a case study of the new beginnings project, which is a 53-minute co-creative documentary, produced through abc pool and broadcast on radio national’s 360documentaries. discussion this research suggests there are three approaches to reconfiguring participation within institutional online communities, indicated by figure 1. institutional online communities are online communities on platforms developed and resourced by institutions and are not independently facilitated. the same regulatory framework that governs its hosting institution governs institutional online communities. figure 1 the three models of reconfiguring participation of institutional online communities figure 1 demonstrates the relationship of the three models over a scale of institutional decentralisation. a single point of contact is the most closed model employed by institutions to simply maintain platforms hosted by the institution. the multiple cultural intermediaries model follows, consisting of multiple intermediaries operating simultaneously to guide the production of cultural artifacts and is used by abc pool1. if the project develops, the cultural intermediaries may endeavour to promote the online users to intermediary roles, given the community editor moniker in this model. the results of this research have indicated an approach that operates successfully within the psm sector, specifically the australian context at the abc. the departure point for this research is to test this concept beyond public service media and within other production based industries either on or shifting to the internet. acknowledgments axel bruns, john banks, oksanan zelenko, sherre delys, john jacobs, david hua references bacon, j. (2009). the art of community. sebastopol: o'reilly media. banks, j. (2009). co-creative expertise: auran games and fury a case study. media international australia, 130, 13. benkler, y. (2006). the wealth of networks (1st ed.). new haven: yale university press. bourdieu, p. (1984). a social critique of the judgement of taste (1st ed.). london: routledge. bowler, g. m. (2010). netnography: a method specifically designed to study cultures and communities online. the qualitative report, 15(5), 1270 1275. bruns, a. (2008). blogs, wikipedia, second life and beyond: from production to produsage. new york: peter lang. cunningham, s., & turner, g. (2010). media and communication in australia (3 ed.). sydney: allen & unwin. debrett, m. (2010). reinventing public service television for the digital future. bristol: intellect. enli, g. s. (2008). redefining public service broadcasting. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 14(1), 105 120. 1 cultural intermediaries differs to the original concept of bourdieu (1984) that relates to intermediariy between creative classes in post wwii. here the term refers to the role ‘in the middle’ facilitating cultural production. jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture where old and new media collide (1st ed.): new york university press. malaby, t. m. (2009). making virtual worlds, linden lab and second life. new york: cornell university press. shirky, c. (2008). here comes everybody: the power of organising without organisations. new york: allen lane. tacchi, j., slater, d., & hearn, g. (2003). ethnographic action research a user's handbook developed to innovate and research ict applications for poverty eradication (1st ed.). new delhi: united nations educational, scientific and cultural organisation unesco. walker, t. (2009). new audience partnerships for the abc. telecommunications journal of australia, 59(3), 43.41 43.48. wilson, c. k., hutchinson, j., & shea, p. (2010). public service broadcasting, creative industries and innovation infrastructure: the case of abc's pool. australian journal of communication, 37(3), 15 32. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  polson,  e.,  wilken,  r.,  halegoua,  g.,  renninger,  b.,  russell,  a..  (2016,   october  5-­8).  intersections  of  technology  &  place.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual   conference  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from   http://spir.aoir.org.   intersections  of  technology  &  place   erika  polson   university  of  denver     rowan  wilken   swinburne  institute  of  technology     germaine  r.  halegoua   university  of  kansas     bryce  j.  renninger   rutgers  university     adrienne  russell   university  of  denver     the  five  papers  compiled  here  draw  from  new  ways  of  thinking  about  place,  with  a   particular  focus  on  interrelations  of  space  and  place  with  media  technologies  and   practices.  following  from  jansson’s  (2009:  308)  suggestion  that  scholars  consider   intersections  of  communication  and  geography  to  analyze  “how  space  produces   communication  and  how  communication  produces  space”,  this  panel  brings  together  a   series  of  papers  researching  this  nexus.       “geo-­social  media  &  the  quest  for  place  on-­the-­go”,  evaluates  how  geo-­social  media   can  produce  ‘meaningful  place’  through  a  hybrid  of  online  and  offline  interaction.  the   author  draws  from  ethnographic  studies  of  how  mobile  professionals  (both  business   travelers  and  expatriates)  in  paris,  singapore,  and  bangalore  use  geo-­social  platforms   such  as  meetup.com,  internations.org,  facebook  groups,  and  couchsurfing  to   demonstrate  how  online  communication  fuses  with  geographic  co-­presence  to  create   meaningful  place  ‘on-­the-­go’.  the  author  shows  how,  for  a  new  demographic  of  mobile   cosmopolitan  subjects  deployed  into  the  world  by  corporate  interests,  geo-­socially   organized  gatherings  provide  the  answer  for  a  mobile  demographic  that  craves   belonging  and  disdain  commitment,  and  seeks  rootedness  without  stasis.     traces  of  our  passage:  locative  media  and  the  capture   of  place  data   rowan  wilken   swinburne  institute  of  technology     the  paper  examines  what  underpins  efforts  by  location-­based  services  (hereafter  lbs)   to  capture  place  data.  the  contention  i  explore  in  this  paper  is  that  the  significance  of   lbs  is  not  just  that  they  locate  us  at  a  particular  point  in  space  (‘pure  geographical   location’  is  rarely  the  primary  consideration  of  lbs  users  or  services),  nor  that  they   locate  us  at  a  particular  moment  in  time  (by  being  at  a  particular  venue  right  now),  but,   rather,  that  they  reveal  a  great  deal  about  complicated  spatio-­temporal  and  socio-­ technically  mediated,  and  socio-­culturally  specific,  patterns  of  movement  through  and   engagements  with  places.       to  conceive  of  lbs  in  this  way—which  draws  from  recent  scholarship  within   anthropology  and  geography—requires  a  reorientation  in  how  we  approach  and  think  of   place,  such  that  places  are  understood  less  as  stable  (if  not  fixed)  sites  and  more  as   deriving  much  of  their  meaning  from  the  possibilities  of  mobility  and  movement   (cresswell,  2011:  576;;  agnew,  2011:  325),  and  as  acquiring  ‘dynamic  meaning  as  a   consequence  of  the  location-­based  information  that  is  attached  to  them’  (de  souza  e   silva  &  frith,  2012:  9).       working  on  social  media  business  models,  josé  van  dijck  (2013:  12)  makes  the  point   that  the  key  revenue  generation  options  of  social  media  firms,  which  i  here  take  to   include  lbs  firms,  involve  the  fostering  of  data  generation  by  users—‘data  generation   has  become  the  primary  object  rather  than  a  by-­product  of  online  sociality’—and  the   subsequent  utilisation  of  this  data  to  ‘influence  traffic  and  monetize  engineered  streams   of  information’,  whether  through  advertising,  analytics  services,  or  via  other  means.  the   capture  of  rich,  place-­based  geodata—what  the  us  tech  industry  sometimes  calls   ‘location  intelligence’—has  become  a  vital  part  of  the  larger  social  media  business   ecosystem  (van  dijck,  2013).     i  touch  on  a  key  lbs  business  example:  new  york  based  firm  foursquare.  long  known   as  a  mobile  social  networking  and  venue  ‘check-­in’  service,  foursquare  has,  since   2013,  undergone  a  much-­publicised  reorientation  of  its  business  operations.  among   other  things,  this  has  involved  the  integration  of  new  features  to  its  flagship  foursquare   app  (and  which  are  linked  to  its  offshoot  app,  swarm)  that  seek  to  combine  mobile,   social,  and  place-­based  interactions  with  past  and  present  user  data  to  generate  real-­ time  and  even  predictive  venue  recommendations.  furthermore,  by  drawing  in  place-­ based  insights  from  its  own  users,  and  as  a  result  of  cross-­platform  partnerships  with   other  social  media  firms,  foursquare  has  been  able  to  build  a  rich  places  databases  –   part  of  its  longer-­term  ambitions  to  position  itself  as  the  ‘location  layer  of  the  internet’.   based  on  its  expertise  in  this  area,  foursquare  has  more  recently  repositioned  itself   once  more,  through  the  launch  in  2015  of  pinpoint,  as  a  ‘location  marketplace’  providing   place-­related  data  and  analytics  services  to  social  media  and  other  businesses  and  to   the  advertising  industry  (kaplan,  2015).  this,  and  other  cases,  will  be  expanded  on  in   the  longer  version  of  the  paper.     location-­based  services  and  ‘ambulatory  knowing’     in  the  final  section,  i  suggest  that  an  alternative,  and  potentially  productive,  way  of   understanding  the  underlying  business  interests  of  lbs  companies  is  by  turning  to   anthropologist  tim  ingold’s  work  on  maps,  and,  in  particular,  his  notion  of  ‘ambulatory   knowing’.  in  his  book  the  perception  of  the  environment,  ingold  draws  a  lengthy  and   careful  distinction  between  map-­use  and  mapmaking  on  the  one  hand,  and  wayfinding   and  mapping  on  the  other  hand.  ingold’s  allegiances  lie  with  the  second  pairing.  arguing   against  cognitive  approaches  to  explaining  human  orientation  (as  developed  by  alfred   gell  and  others),  ingold  (2011:  226)  develops  the  thesis  that  maps,  primarily,  are   indexical  of  movement  (not  of  topographical  features  as  understood  by  an  individual).   for  ingold,  ‘our  perception  of  the  environment  [...]  is  forged  not  in  the  ascent  from  the   myopic,  local  perspective  to  a  panoptic,  global  one  [the  bird’s-­eye  view],  but  in  the   passage  from  place  to  place’  (227).  ‘every  “somewhere”’,  he  writes,  ‘is  not  a  location  in   space  but  a  position  on  a  path  of  movement’  (227).  ingold’s  central  contention  is,  thus,   ‘that  people’s  knowledge  of  the  environment  undergoes  continuous  formation  in  the  very   course  of  their  moving  about  in  it’  (230)  –  regardless  of  whether  this  environment  is   familiar  to  them  or  not.  as  he  explains:     [w]e  know  as  we  go,  not  before  we  go.  such  ambulatory  knowing  –  or   knowledgeable  ambulating  –  cannot  be  accommodated  within  the  terms  of  the   conventional  dichotomy  between  mapmaking  and  map-­using.  the  traveller  [...]   who  knows  as  he  goes  is  neither  making  a  map  nor  using  one.  he  is,  quite   simply,  mapping.  (230-­231)     this  is  an  important  passage  insofar  as  it  draws  out  the  processual  and  perceptual   qualities  of  wayfinding  and  mapping,  as  he  understands  them.  ingold  is  clear  that   mapping,  as  an  embodied  process  –  ‘the  renactment,  in  narrative  gesture,  of  the   experience  of  moving  from  place  to  place  within  a  region’  (232)  –  is  not  synonymous   with  mapmaking.  nor,  he  argues,  is  wayfinding  synonymous  with  navigation.  on  this   second  distinction,  ingold  argues  that  ‘locating’  oneself  is  less  about  the  determination   of  longitude/latitude  coordinates  than  it  is  about  ‘situating  that  position  within  the  matrix   of  movement’  (237).  for  the  wayfinder,  he  suggests,  ‘every  place  holds  within  it   memories  of  previous  arrivals  and  departures,  as  well  as  expectations  of  how  one  may   reach  it,  or  reach  other  places  from  it’  (237).  that  is  to  say,  ‘places  enfold  the  passage   of  time’  (237-­238),  they  ‘figure  not  as  locations  in  space  but  as  specific  vortices  in  a   current  of  movement,  of  innumerable  journeys  actually  made’  (238)     my  contention  here  is  that  it  is  wayfinding  and  mapping  (not  mapmaking  or  map-­use)   that  is  conceivably  of  greatest  interest  to  location-­based  services  companies.  it  is  these   rich,  embodied  practices,  and  the  ‘current  of  movement’  of  which  they  are  a  part,  that   holds  greatest,  long-­term  value  for  them  and  what  these  companies’  efforts  in  relation  to   geodemographic  profiling,  api  use,  and  the  population  of  places  databases,  and  so  on,   are  ultimately  trying  to  capture.  while  map-­use  and  map-­making  are  obviously   encouraged  (not  least  by  firms  like  google  and  apple,  among  others),  the  longer  term   ambition  –  often  articulated,  most  notably  by  foursquare,  as  the  desire  to  construct  the   ‘location  underlayer  of  the  internet’  –  is  to  be  able  to  make  sense  of  the  less  tangible  yet   arguably  richer  store  of  knowledge,  motivations,  behaviours,  social  connections,  and  so   forth,  that  are  part-­and-­parcel  (as  ingold  conceives  of  them)  of  wayfinding  and  mapping.     references     agnew,  ja  (2011)  ‘space  and  place’.  in:  agnew  ja  &  livingstone  dn  (eds)  the  sage   handbook  of  geographical  knowledge.  london:  sage.     cresswell,  t  (2011)  ‘mobility’.  in:  agnew  ja  &  livingstone  dn  (eds)  the  sage   handbook  of  geographical  knowledge.  london:  sage.     de  souza  e  silva,  a  &  frith,  j  (2012)  mobile  interfaces  in  public  spaces.  new  york:   routledge.     ingold,  t  (2011)  perception  of  the  environment:  essays  on  livelihood,  dwelling  and   skill.  london:  routledge.     kaplan,  d  (2015)  with  pinpoint,  foursquare’s  now  a  location  marketplace,   geomarketing,  april  14,  http://www.geomarketing.com/with-­pinpoint-­foursquares-­now-­a-­ location-­marketplace.     van  dijck,  j  (2013)  the  culture  of  connectivity.  new  york:  oxford  university  press.   geo-­social  media  &  the  quest  for  place  on-­the-­go   erika  polson   university  of  denver     innovations  in  mobile  data  applications  have  opened  up  new  ways  of  experiencing   ‘place’,  and  not  just  in  terms  of  virtual  worlds.  in  this  paper,  i  suggest  that  users  of  geo-­ social  media  are  creating  new  forms  of  offline  ‘place’  that  open  up  geographically  based   sociality  to  a  growing  number  of  professionals  who  live  mobile  or  transient  lives.   drawing  from  ethnographic  studies  of  how  mobile  professionals  (both  business  travelers   and  expatriates)  in  paris,  singapore,  and  bangalore  use  geo-­social  platforms  such  as   meetup.com,  internations.org,  facebook  groups,  and  couchsurfing,  i  demonstrate  how   online  communication  fuses  with  geographic  co-­presence  to  create  meaningful  place   ‘on-­the-­go’.  i  also  consider  new  forms  of  exclusion  that  operate  in  this  techno-­social   arranging  of  place.       the  new  expats     this  research  provides  insights  into  a  new  figure:  the  lonely  cosmopolitan  subject   deployed  into  the  world  by  corporate  interests,  using  digital  media  to  come  together  ad   hoc,  creating  their  own  spaces  in  a  network  of  global  cities.  as  corporations  ramp  up   ‘workforce  globalization’  and  young  professionals  increasingly  pursue  opportunities  to   work  abroad,  social  entrepreneurs  use  online  platforms  to  create  offline  social  events   where  foreigners  may  gather  face-­to-­face.       sharing  ethnographic  stories  of  such  groups  from  three  global  cities,  i  illustrate  how  a   new  generation  of  expatriates  uses  location  technologies  to  create  mobile  ‘places’  and   access  drop-­in  communities  along  a  web  of  global  cities.  in  my  talk,  i  will  briefly   describe  this  new  demographic  and  its  frictions,  such  as  how  mobile  professionals  crave   belonging  and  disdain  commitment,  and  seek  rootedness  without  stasis.       communication  and  the  social  constitution  of  place     my  conception  of  ‘place’  is  informed  by  researchers  from  many  disciplines,  who  have   increasingly  come  to  see  places  as  constituted  by  relationships,  memories,  knowledge,   cultural  practices,  and  so  on,  rather  than  simply  geographically.  along  these  lines,   scholars  have  demonstrated  places  to  be  social,  gendered,  flexible,  extendable  across   distance,  and  socially  constituted  through  interaction  and  everyday  routines  (e.g.   lefebvre,  1991;;  massey,  1994;;  appadurai,  1996;;  and  cresswell,  1996  respectively).       internet  and  communication  researchers  have  entered  this  conversation  through  what  is   referred  to  as  the  spatial  turn,  or  mobility  turn,  of  media  studies  (e.g.  falkheimer  and   jansson,  2006).  along  these  lines,  communication  is  seen  as  productive  of  place  itself.   for  example,  caldas-­coulthard  and  iedema  (2008)  point  out  how  through  recurring   practices  of  communication  and  social  engagement,  the  production  of  new  meanings   and  feelings  of  belonging  and  attachment  to  a  place  may  occur.  as  augé  notes  (citing   descombes),  finding  a  place  where  one  belongs  is  about  finding  comfort  in  “the  ability  to   make  oneself  understood  without  too  much  difficulty,  and  to  follow  the  reasoning  of   others  without  the  need  for  long  explanations”  (1995,  p.  108).       online  practices  play  an  important  role  in  creating  this  rhetorical  sense  of  place  and,  in   fact,  scholars  increasingly  acknowledge  that  meaningful  places  may  even  be  virtual   ones  (e.g.  moores  &  metykova,  2009;;  golub,  2010).  parallel  to  this  strand  of  thinking  is   a  growing  awareness  of  the  connection  between  online  and  offline  environments  in   meaning  making.  a  growing  seamlessness  of  interrelations  between  digital  and  face-­to-­ face  communication  suggests  that  the  relationship  between  online  and  offline  sociality   will  become  increasingly  taken  for  granted  (andersson,  2012).  in  fact,  according  to   andersson,  media  should  be  seen  not  only  as  used  within  everyday  territories  but  also   as  playing  a  “vital  role  in  the  constitution  of  the  territories,  be  it  the  home,  or  the  city  one   resides  in”  (p.  12).       these  strands  of  thinking  on  place  (that  places  are  constituted  through  social  relations   and  communication,  combining  on-­  and  offline  practices)  create  a  conceptual  starting-­ point  for  examining  how  the  series  of  digital  practices  explored  here  facilitate  place-­ making  processes  through  a  hybrid  of  online  and  face-­to-­face  communication.  as  i   contend  in  this  paper,  much  of  this  communication  ‘work’  can  be  done  online,  through   geo-­social  media  apps  that  then  allow  users  to  manifest  their  online  connectivity  to   create  a  sense  of  belonging  in  offline  space.         mobile  places     in  this  section  of  the  talk,  i  explore  how  geo-­social  media  applications  produce  such   new  places  in  ways  that  enable  mobility  and  transience.  the  main  focus  of  this  section   is  on  meetup.com—an  online  tool  specifically  meant  to  create  user-­generated  and  -­ defined  community  groupings  that  come  together  in  physical  space  with  little  or  no   commitment  or  prior  knowledge  among  participants—but  draws  from  other  geo-­social   platforms  as  well.       i  discuss  both  benefits  and  challenges  that  emerge  as  people  participate  in  mobile   place-­making.  for  example,  while  geo-­social  media  act  as  mobile  ‘emplacement   platforms’  that  enable  users  to  create  and  access  places  on  the  go,  expectations  of  the   relational  experience  of  place  (e.g.  ‘community’)  seem  to  suffer  as  participants  are  met   with  a  lack  of  commitment,  trust,  and  history.  at  the  same  time,  new  forms  of  agency   are  produced  as  mobile  subjects  are  emboldened  to  enter  new  and  unknown   geographic  locations  knowing  that  they  are  integrated  into  a  network.       references     andersson,  m.  (2012,  may).  media  and  migration  through  the  lens  of  mediatization  and   transnationalism.  paper  presented  to  the  philosophy  of  communication  division  at  the   annual  ica  conference,  phoenix,  az.     appadurai,  a.  (1996).  modernity  at  large:  cultural  dimensions  of  globalization.   minneapolis:  university  of  minnesota  press.     augé,  m.  (1995).  non-­places:  introduction  to  an  anthropology  of  supermodernity.   london,  england:  verso.     caldas-­coulthard,  c.  r.,  &  iedema,  r.  (eds.).  (2008).  identity  trouble:  critical  discourse   and  contested  identities.  new  york,  ny:  palgrave  macmillan.       lefebvre,  h.  (1991).  the  production  of  space.  malden,  ma:  blackwell.     cresswell,  t.  (1996).  in  place  /  out  of  place:  geography,  ideology,  and  transgression.   minneapolis:  university  of  minnesota  press.     descombes,  v.  (1987).  proust,  philosophie  du  roman.  paris,  france:  editions  de  minuit.   golub,  a.  (2010).  being  in  the  world  (of  warcraft):  raiding,  realism  and  knowledge   production  in  a  massively  multiplayer  online  game.  anthropological  quarterly,  83(1),   17–46.     falkheimer,  j.,  jansson,  a.  (eds).  (2006).  geographies  of  communication:  the  spatial   turn  in  media  studies.  gothenburg:  nordicom.     massey,  d.  (1994).  space,  place  &  gender.  minneapolis:  university  of  minnesota  press.     moores,  s.,  &  metykova,  m.  (2009).  knowing  how  to  get  around:  place,  migration,  and   communication.  the  communication  review,  12,  313–326.       “we  know  that  right  now  we  are  not  funky:”   placemaking  strategies  in  smart  city  development     germaine  r.  halegoua   university  of  kansas     developers  of  ubiquitous  or  smart  cities  built  from  the  ground  up  have  reluctantly  cited   problems  in  attracting  residents,  talent,  and  businesses  to  their  fabricated  urban   environments.  professional  placemakers  have  noted  issues  in  producing  these  cities  as   places  in  which  people  who  are  familiar  with  the  amenities  and  social  life  of  urban   environments  would  like  to  live.  for  example,  new  songdo,  a  ubiquitous  city  in  south   korea,  has  been  critiqued  as  a  “consciously  planned,  somewhat  artificial  city  with  a   modern  functionalist  face”  and  because  of  this,  it  will  be  challenging  to  reinvent  as  “lively   and  attractive”  (oosterman,  2012).  even  the  city’s  developer  stanley  gale  agrees  that   the  character  of  a  city  like  songdo  will  be  difficult  to  cultivate  from  scratch,  and   emphasizes  the  role  of  urban  programming  and  planning  in  constructing  even  the  most   mundane,  seemingly  organic  elements  of  urban  culture:  “we  know  that  right  now  we  are   not  funky.  we  need  artists,  internet  entrepreneurs,  fashion  designers,  so  we  are  building   incubator  spaces  in  the  city  to  try  to  get  the  mix  right.  you  can’t  manufacture  grit,  but   you  can  encourage  it”  (keeton,  2012).  in  their  current  form,  cities  like  songdo  fulfill   policy  initiatives  of  technology  development  and  global  entrepreneurship,  but  tend  to   disregard  urban  experience,  community  efficacy,  and  social  interactions  in  their   construction.  the  socio-­cultural  factors,  social  networks,  and  cultural  variation  that  lead   to  the  success  and  sustainability  of  urban  spaces  has  not  emerged  organically  in   ubiquitous  cities,  but  is  being  planned  and  orchestrated  by  people  other  than  the   residents  themselves.     several  examples  evidence  a  global  trend  of  planning,  designing,  and  constructing  a   city  from  scratch  with  extensive  digital  communications  networks  and  infrastructures  in   mind.  some  of  these  examples  that  have  emerged  over  the  past  decade  include  south   korea’s  extensive  network  of  ubiquitous  cities  or  u-­cities  (cities  that  universally  embed   ubiquitous  computing  opportunities  into  the  built  environment),  planit  valley  in   portugal,  konza  techno  city  in  kenya,  and  masdar  city  in  the  united  arab  emirates.   these  “cities  of  the  future”  don  prefixes  such  as  “smart,”  “intelligent,”  “digital,”  and   “ubiquitous”  to  indicate  their  distinction  from  less  digitally  integrated  urban   environments.  technology  designers,  urban  developers  and  municipal  officials  often   hail  these  urban  environments  as  advanced  and  upgraded  in  terms  of  safety,  efficiency,   transportation,  economic  development,  sustainability,  and  overall  responsiveness  to   urban  structures,  patterns,  and  demands.  in  some  cases,  digital  media  technologies   and  infrastructures  are  planned  even  before  buildings,  roads,  and  other  municipal   services.  in  all  cases,  the  populations  that  will  utilize  these  buildings  and  networks  have   yet  to  move  in.  as  a  result,  professionals  are  charged  with  the  burden  of  constructing   these  cities  as  “places”  anew  as  well.  however,  the  discursive  construction  of  place  is   not  exclusive  to  fabricated  urban  environments.  the  retrofitting  of  a  pre-­existing  city  as   a  “smart  city”  is  also  on  the  rise,  particularly  in  the  us  context.       according  to  previous  literature  reviews  and  discourse  analysis,  smart  cities  are   reported  to  be  built  by  governments  and  corporations  but  are  imagined  to  improve   quality  of  life,  community  and  civic  engagement  alongside  economic  development,   efficient  service  provision  and  sustainable  environments  (mosannenzadeh  &  vettorato,   2014).  although  individual  technologies  like  digital  kiosks,  urban  screens,  media   facades,  and  sensor  technologies  have  been  understood  in  terms  of  placemaking  and   tools  for  civic  participation  (foth,  brynskov,  &  ojala,  2015),  researchers  have  critiqued   smart  cities  projects  in  terms  of  lack  of  citizen  and  community  input  into  placemaking   processes  and  lack  of  participation  in  smart  city  creation  (townsend,  2013;;   futureeverything,  2013;;  halegoua,  2011).  instead  of  focusing  on  the  ways  in  which   communities  are  included  or  excluded  from  placemaking  efforts  in  smart  cities,  this   paper  analyzes  the  discursive  and  practical  strategies  used  by  smart  city  initiatives  to   social  re-­produce  urban  place.       this  paper  identifies  and  analyzes  some  of  the  ways  in  which  planners,  developers,   municipal  officials,  and  technology  designers  strategically  employ  digital  infrastructure   and  digital  media  in  order  to  reproduce  ubiquitous  or  smart  cities  as  unique,  inhabited,   user-­friendly  urban  places  instead  of  abstract  “spatial  fixes”  (harvey,  2001).  the   analysis  presented  focuses  on  how  discourses  and  understandings  of  place  are   inscribed  in  the  design  and  implementation  of  ubiquitous  city  technologies,  the   construction  of  the  built  environment,  and  decisions  around  the  branding  and  promotion   of  the  city  as  a  social  space.  through  a  discourse  analysis  of  social  media  accounts,   discussion  boards,  press  releases  and  popular  press,  town  hall  meetings,  and   interviews  with  people  charged  with  constructing  and  promoting  smart  cities  this  paper   offers  an  analysis  of  the  processes  and  challenges  of  constructing  a  smart  city  as  an   urban  place.       references   foth,  m.,  brynskov,  m.,  &  ojala,  t.  (2015).  citizen’s  right  to  the  digital  city:  urban   interfaces,  activism,  and  placemaking.  springer.     futureeverything.  (2013).  smart  citizens  (p.  104).  retrieved  from   http://futureeverything.org/wp-­content/uploads/2014/03/smartcitizens1.pd     halegoua,  germaine.  (2011).  the  policy  and  export  of  ubiquitous  place:  investigating   south  korean  u-­cities.  in  marcus  foth,  laura  forlano,  christine  satchell,  &  martin   gibbs  (eds.),  from  social  butterfly  to  engaged  citizen:  urban  informatics,  social   media,  ubiquitous  computing,  and  mobile  technologt  to  support  citizen  engagement   (pp.  315–334).  cambridge,  ma:  mit  press.     harvey,  david.  (2001).  globalization  and  the  “spatial  fix.”  geographische  revue,  2.     keeton,  rachel.  (2012).  new  songdo  city.  volume,  (34).     mosannenzadeh,  f.,  &  vettorato,  d.  (2014).  defining  smart  city.  a  conceptual   framework  based  on  keyword  analysis.  tema.  journal  of  land  use,  mobility  and   environment,  0(0).  retrieved  from   http://www.classiconorroena.unina.it/index.php/tema/article/view/2523     oosterman,  arjen.  (2012).  notes  from  the  telepresent.  volume,  (34).     townsend,  anthony  m.  (2013).  smart  cities:  big  data,  civic  hackers,  and  the  quest  for   a  new  utopia.  new  york:  w.w.  norton  &  company.  retrieved  from   http://www.amazon.com/smart-­cities-­civic-­hackers-­utopia/dp/0393082873     grindr  killed  the  gay  bar,  and  other  attempts  to  blame   social  technologies  for  urban  development       bryce  j.  renninger   rutgers  university     “grindr  has  changed  everything,”  says  keith  shore,  a  buff  38-­ year-­old  hairdresser  and  long-­term  pines  summer  resident.   he  does  not  mean  for  the  better,  and  he’s  far  from  the  only   one  to  make  that  complaint.  critics  say  the  popularity  of  the   gay  hook-­up  app  is  ruining  the  island’s  unique  and  delicate   social  ecology.  (rogers,  2012)     in  the  summer  of  2012,  new  york  magazine  published  a  piece  called  “the  pine's   summer  of  discontent,”  in  which  thomas  rogers  spoke  to  a  few  visitors  of  the  gay   resort  town,  the  pines,  on  fire  island  off  of  long  island  in  new  york.  in  the  short  article,   rogers  makes  the  claim  that  after  “the  aids  epidemic,  recessions,  and,  most  recently,   a  fire  that  destroyed  the  pines’  legendary  nightclub…now  residents  are  worrying  about   a  new  menace,  one  that  announces  itself  with  a  distinctive  electronic  chime.”  the   menace  is  the  ubiquity  of  the  social  app  grindr  –  a  location-­based  app  facilitating   connectivity  for  gay  men  within  a  requested  geographical  range  of  each  other.  this  is   hyperbolic  language  indeed.  surely,  rogers  does  not  mean  to  equate  the  effect  of   grindr  to  the  decimating  toll  of  aids.  to  make  such  a  claim  that  the  use  of  a  technology   has  created  a  “menace”  should  require  great  evidence.  instead,  what  he  provides  are   anecdotes  from  three  visitors  to  the  pines  who  testify  to  the  ways  the  presence  of  the   app  have  changed  the  social  landscape  of  the  pines.    one  of  the  three  people  he   quotes  is  a  first-­time  visitor  to  the  pines.     the  goal  of  this  paper  is  to  consider  critiques  that  negatively  link  social  technologies  to   urban  change  as  part  of  a  popular  but  poorly  organized  attempt  to  respond  to  the  impact   of  social  technologies  on  urban  change.  while  it  is  worthwhile  to  seriously  consider  the   ramifications  of  the  use  and  popularity  of  social  technologies,  these  arguments  often   isolate  social  technologies  in  a  way  that  underestimates  the  importance  of  other  social   forces  in  creating  certain  kinds  of  unwelcome  urban  social  change.     this  paper  starts  with  examples  like  the  one  above  of  social  commentary  that  links  the   closing  of  gay  bars  and  the  death  of  gayborhoods  to  the  ascendance  of  gay  social  apps   that  turn  strangers  into  familiars.  after  laying  out  the  ways  that  these  kinds  of  arguments   circulate,  i  make  clear  what  these  arguments  are  valuing.  what,  in  other  words,  is  trying   to  be  salvaged  by  advocating  for  the  continued  thriving  of  gay  bars  and  gayborhoods,   and  what  makes  grindr  and  social  apps  attractive  villains  in  the  story  of  urban  change   when  there  are  far  more  far-­reaching  and  powerful  forces  that  have  contributed  to  the   kinds  of  urban  change  these  arguments  document?       i  respond  to  the  "grindr  is  killing  the  gay  bar”  meme  in  two  ways.  first,  i  use   ethnographic  work  i  carried  out  from  2012-­2014  on  grindr  and  scruff  to  note  the  ways   that  users  of  these  locative  apps  conceptualize  and  exploit  the  locative  features.  i  pay   particular  attention  to  the  ways  that  these  users  discuss  their  use  in  particular   neighborhoods,  often  the  ones  they  live  in.  what  arises  from  the  ethnographic  data  is  an   unexpected  diversity  of  practices  motivated  by  presence  in  particular  neighborhoods  or   towns.  while  users  are  cognizant  of  space  and  place  when  they  use  these  apps,  the   use  of  these  apps  creates  an  attitude  toward  space  that  is  not  congruent  with  the   perspectives  on  space  that  have  led  to  communities  and  individuals  to  value  the  gay  bar   and  the  gayborhood.     second,  to  deploy  my  observations  of  actual  use  into  an  attempt  to  be  proactive  about   an  awareness  of  the  role  of  social  technologies  and  their  users  as  social  agents,  i  use   sclove’s  (1995)  concept  of  a  democratic  approach  to  technology  to  think  about  the   current  phenomenon  of  linking  social  technologies  to  certain  trends  in  urban   development,  or  blaming  these  technologies  for  unwelcome  change.  considering   sclove  next  to  scholars  from  science  and  technology  studies  (hess,  2007),  social  theory   (sennett,  1974;;  putnam,  2000),  psychology  (turkle,  2011,  2015),  sociology  (ghaziani,   2014),  anthropology  (gray,  2009)  and  urban  theory  (jacobs,  1961),  i  interrogate  the   links  commentators  regularly  make—both  casually  and  seriously—between  social   technologies  and  trends  in  urban  development  like  the  closing  of  gay  bars.       to  end,  i  will  briefly  explain  the  similarities  and  differences  between  “grindr  is  killing  the   gay  bar”  and  other  arguments  levied  against  uber  and  airbnb  for  their  contributions  to   urban  change.  in  doing  this,  i  will  show  how  the  arguments  that  critique  social   technologies  for  their  impact  on  urban  life  can  expand  beyond  valuing  gay  bars  and   gayborhoods.  these  arguments  consistently,  though,  act  as  if  the  elimination  of  the   unattractive  social  technologies  would  rid  the  world  of  certain  kinds  of  unattractive  urban   development.  unless  their  authors  pursue  what  morozov  (2013)  would  call   “technological  solutionism,”  these  arguments  rarely  imagine  a  world  that  would  foster   the  positive  urban  attributes  that  are  being  lamented.     references     ghaziani,  a.  (2014).  there  goes  the  gayborhood?.  princeton,  nj:  princeton  up.     gray,  m.  (2009).  out  in  the  country:  youth,  media,  and  queer  visibility  in  rural  america.   new  york:  nyu  press.       hess,  d.  (2007).  alternative  pathways  in  science  and  industry:  activism,  innovation,  and   the  environment  in  an  era  of  globalization.  cambridge,  ma:  mit  press.     jacobs,  j.  (1961).  the  death  and  life  of  great  american  cities.  new  york:  random   house.     morozov,  e.  (2013).  to  save  everything,  click  here:  the  folly  of  technological   solutionism.  new  york:  publicaffairs.     putnam,  r.  (2000).  bowling  alone:  the  collapse  and  revival  of  american  community.   new  york:  simon  &  schuster.       rogers,  t.  (2012).  the  pines’  summer  of  discontent:  it’s  grindr’s  fault.  new  york   magazine.  retrieved  from:  http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/grindr-­fire-­island-­2012-­ 7/     sclove,  r.  (1995).  democracy  and  technology.  new  york:  guilford  press.     sennett,  r.  (1974).  the  fall  of  public  man.  new  york:  w.  w.  norton  &  company.     turkle,  s.  (2011).  alone  together:  why  we  expect  more  from  technology  and  less  from   each  other.  new  york:  basic  books.     turkle,  s.  (2015).  reclaiming  conversation:  the  power  of  talk  in  the  digital  age.  new   york:  penguin  press.     defining  space  through  journalism  and  activism  at  the   2015  paris  climate  summit     adrienne  russell   university  of  denver     “space  is  neither  a  subject  nor  an  object  but  rather  a  social  reality.”   -­-­henri  lefebvre     competition  and  conflict  between  older  and  newer  media,  as  well  as  overlap  between   their  various  sensibilities,  are  shaping  the  contemporary  media  environment,  and  in  turn   the  spaces  that  social  and  political  realities  inhabit.  media  now  readily  flow  back  and   forth  across  geographic  borders,  media  genres  and  platforms,  and  on  and  offline  space   and  place.       conceptualizing  media  as  space  is  not  unique  applied  to  the  networked  media   environment.  perhaps  most  famously  marshall  mcluhan  thought  of  space  and  place  not   strictly  in  terms  of  geography  but  also  in  terms  of  the  social  arrangements  created   though  technology.  in  the  early  1960s,  he  famously  theorized  a  global  village  that  would   create  an  evenly  distributed  shift  in  our  connections  and  perception  of  the  self  and   others.  mcluhan’s  hyperbolic  but  partially  accurate  prediction  predates  a  more   widespread  recent  “spatial  turn”  by  scholars  in  various  disciplines  who  have  begun   treating  space  as  a  crucial  analytic  considerations,  discarding  the  dominant   understanding  of  space  as  something  simply  locational,  and  instead  considering  it  as   social  (peters  2012:4).  jason  farman  (2013),  for  example,  rejects  the  notion  of  space   as  a  container  that  can  be  filled.  he  writes,  “space  needs  to  be  considered  as   something  that  is  produced  through  use.  it  exists  as  we  interact  with  it—and  those   interactions  dramatically  change  the  essential  character  of  space.”  (9)     by  highlighting  journalistic  and  activist  communication  initiatives  deployed  for  cop21,   the  2015  un  climate  summit  in  paris,  this  paper  explores  the  ways  journalists  and   activists  imagine,  interact  with,  and  create  media  space  and  in  turn  how  digital   technologies  and  infrastructures  are  influencing  the  concepts  of  space  in  both  the  fields   of  journalism  and  activism.       indeed,  today’s  international  reporting  is  inseparable  from  technological  infrastructures   that  define  the  conditions  under  which  international  news  is  gathered,  reported,  and   disseminated.  and  similarly,  activist  communication  networks  are  shaped  by  not  only   the  strategies  and  tactics  deployed  by  social  movements  but  also  by  the  tools  and   connection  that  shape  those  networks.  drawing  from  interviews  with  reporters,  activist   and  tech  developers  behind  key  activist  media  and  journalistic  endeavors  deployed   during  cop21,  as  well  as  analysis  of  related  media  content,  tools  and  practices,  this   paper  demonstrates  the  various  ways  local,  national,  and  global  space  are  shaped   though  this  this  “global”  media  event,  grounded  in  geographic  place-­based  action.       i  argue  not  that  media  is  becoming  more  global,  but  rather  that  the  global  conditions  and   connections  that  do  exist—including  a  more  global  outlook  among  journalists  and  global   ties  among  activists-­-­are  changing  the  representations  and  reality  of  local  contexts.  the   paper  highlights  examples  of  new  emerging  space-­related  practices.  some  of  these   examples  constitute  what  appadurai  calls  grassroots  globalization,  or  “social  forms   [that]  are  emerging  to  challenge  and  reverse  this  epistemological  exclusion  and  the   resulting  social  exclusion,  and  to  create  forms  of  communication  and  social  mobilization   that  are  independent  of  the  actions  of  corporate  capital  and  the  nation-­state  system”   (2000:3).  other  examples  are  less  overtly  challenging  the  powers  but,  nonetheless,   shape  alternative  media  spaces  and  connections.       the  paper  highlights  3  new  players  in  the  journalism  landscape  with  a  global  and  online   presence:  vice,  buzzfeed,  and  huffington  post,  all  of  which  had  reporters  present  at  the   summit  and  produced  a  high  volume  of  coverage.  in  the  case  of  these  new  journalism   outlets  reporters  are  taking  up  new  practices  and  turning  an  eye  from  the  national  “us”   to  a  more  global  outlook;;  they  are  engaged  in  transnational  collaboration,  sharing  tools,   support  and  training  in  effort  to  strengthen  news  worldwide;;  they  challenge   representations  in  legacy  international  news  by  focusing  on  local  voices  and  expertise.       the  paper  also  explores  several  activist  media  initiatives  that  were  launched  during  the   summit  including  the  following:  climate  games,  “a  trans-­media  action  framework,”  or  a   platform  conceived  of  and  built  by  artists,  hackers,  and  activists  that  allowed  activists  to   anonymously  register  for  teams,  download  targets,  and  coordinate  non-­violent  acts  of   civil  disobedience  during  the  2  weeks  of  the  summit;;  350.org  newswire,  the   communication  arm  of  the  ngo  founded  by  climate  activist  and  journalist,  which  in   paris  become  the  unofficial  newswire  for  activists  at  the  summit  through  its   comprehensive  and  sophisticated  coverage  of  both  the  official  and  unofficial  cop-­ related  news  events;;  and  place  2  be  the  de  facto  headquarters  of  international  civil   society  during  the  summit,  housed  in  a  youth  hostile  in  the  center  of  paris,  and  hub  of   some  of  the  most  innovative  coverage  coming  out  of  paris.           these  examples  demonstrate  that  there  is  an  emerging  network  and  a  set  of  space-­ related  practices  that  inform  the  work  of  media  activists.  while  activists  are  most  often   responding  to  local  conditions  and  national  policy  and  law,  issues  and  movements  are   often  global  in  the  sense  that  they  1)  they  collaborate  transnationally  to  lend  one   another  technological  support,  training,  and  strategic  advice;;  2)  seek  involvement  and   inspire  participation  and  solidarity  from  people  around  the  world;;  3)  create  informational   campaign  aimed  at  a  global  community.         in  order  to  understand  the  process  of  abandoning  the  old  and  inventing  the  new   structures  and  spaces,  this  analysis  focuses  too  on  how  space  is  being  reshaped  by  an   increasingly  pervasive  type  of  media  actor,  who  spans  the  space  of  journalism  and   activism,  is  tech  savvy  enough  to  remake  genres,  tools,  platforms,  and  practices,  and  is   dedicated  to  both  the  politics  of  and  the  political  uses  of  networked  digital   communication  tools.  in  the  broadest  sense,  this  research  looks  at  how  these  media   actors  imagine  and  thus  produce  media  space,  in  order  to  help  address  the  questions:   what  are  the  forms  -­  technological  and  thus  social  -­  through  which  spaces  get  made   available  for  use,  and  within  which  particular  sensibilities  are  encouraged.       references     chadwick,  a.  (2013)  the  hybrid  media  system:  politics  and  power.  oxford:  oxford   university  press.     farman,  j.  (2013)  mobile  interface  theory:  embodied  space  and  locative  media.  new   york,  ny:  routledge   lefebvre,  h.  (1991)  the  production  of  space.  new  york,  ny:  blackwell.     marshall,  m.  (1964)  understanding  media.  london:  routledge.     peters,  c.  (2012)  “journalism  to  go:  the  changing  spaces  of  news  consumption.”   journalism  studies  13(5-­6),  695-­705.     microsoft word vimieiro-vimieiro.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): lastname, firstinitial. (2014, october 22-24). paper title. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. online football fandom: an analysis of the communities formed around 12 brazilian top professional clubs on twitter ana carolina vimieiro queensland university of technology renato vimieiro the university of newcastle abstract this paper analyses twitter conversations about 12 of the most popular professional football clubs in brazil. more precisely, we explore the dynamics of these conversations in a daily basis, highlighting variations found between match-days and other days. we apply a series of digital methods to investigate what football fans are doing on twitter, what they are sharing, how they are talking to each other, and which devices they are using to post their messages. this study extends for three months, between september and november 2013, and includes around seven million tweets. this empirical analysis is used to reflect upon the implications of new media technologies to football fandom practices, an issue that has not been significantly explored in the previous literature. keywords football; fandom; digital fandom; supporter; digital method introduction even though twitter, facebook, youtube, and other spaces have been largely used for sport-related conversation and sport fan production, those practices have not received substantial attention from either social sciences or humanities scholars so far. gibbons and dixon (2010) are accurate in outlining this gap, but they do not go further in empirical and analytical terms. they also perceptively pointed out a series of historical and theoretical reasons sustaining it. for them, there are both an overvaluation of the ‘authentic’/‘traditional’ supporter and a downgrade of other sport fans as inauthentic and only ‘consumers’ in most research about sport fandom. this distinction between authentic vs. inauthentic fans play out in the football scenario as a dispute between the notion of traditionality — which includes values related to the working class, masculinity, and local clubs — and one of “new fandom” — global clubs, family football, and consumption via media (nash, 2000). combined with a rigid separation between ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ worlds still in vogue in this area at the time of the publication of gibbons and dixon’s paper, online communities were receiving less attention than they deserved because they were regarded at some level as inauthentic (gibbons & dixon, 2010). since the publication of their work, the few studies in this area that use online content as source of analysis do not properly discuss the specificities of sport fandom practices in a changing media environment. this state of things opposes to a rather dissimilar situation in the pop culture fandom area. recognising that fans have been historically early adopters and creative users of emerging media since long ago, researchers in this area have largely explored online fan communities and the implications of the web 2.0 to fandom practices (baym, 2007; booth, 2010; jenkins, 2006; pearson, 2010). in brazil, football fans have gathered online at least since early in the 2000’s to chat about their clubs, players’ performance and so on. the first significant communities were formed in orkut, the most popular networking platform in brazil at the time. the majority of them were created in 2004. however, they are now losing members while the number of followers and likes of the official accounts of the same clubs on twitter and facebook are increasing (figure 1). for this study, twitter was chosen as the data source because of its accessibility. figure 1: evolution of brazilian football clubs on twitter, facebook and orkut from sep to nov 2013. methodology we divided this study in five phases: planning, collection, pre-processing, processing, and visualisation/analysis. we used yourtwapperkeeper to collect the messages. however, before this phase, it was necessary to learn the keywords that football supporters use on twitter to archive the conversations. many challenges were found in this planning stage: some clubs in brazil have names that are common nouns; their names and nicknames are words in other languages than portuguese; and twitter users in brazil use much less hashtags than english-speaker users. to solve it, we used the name and one nickname for each club to collect the data, followed by a preprocessing phase in which many non-related messages were filtered out of a total of 42 million tweets. this filtering process selected: a) only messages in portuguese; and b) tweets that included one of the keywords of a list that we created with names of current players, the head coach and other staff of each club, plus usual terms related to football such as goal, championship, referee and so on. everything that did not comply with those rules was excluded from our corpus. the final dataset has around 7 million tweets posted over 12 weeks in 2013, and the amount of messages by club matches the size of their respective fan bases. in the processing phase, we used the twitter metrics proposed by bruns (2011), together with information collected from other sources to create a table. in this table, the twitter metrics generated for each day were matched with the respective details about that day in the schedule of each club. for instance, we added information about the matches, the place where the club was playing (home/away or if it was a derby), and whether the game was being broadcast on free tv or only on pay tv. this information, together with the twitter metrics, allowed us to create charts that summarise the data of all clubs (as in figures 2a, 2b and 2c) or use specific clubs as examples (as in figures 2d, 2e and 2f). results and brief analysis our results indicate that football fans talk in a more spontaneous way in match-days, sharing significantly less urls than in days with no matches (figure 2b). on the other hand, they tend to talk more to each other in days with no games, when more directed messages (genuine replies) were found (figure 2a). the proportion of instagram and foursquare urls is larger when the clubs are on the pitch (figure 2f), when there is also an increase in the proportion of mobile applications being used by fans to connect to twitter (figure 2d). youtube urls are mostly shared in post match-days, which make sense, once fans are sharing the highlights and goals (figure 2f). figure 2: (a) types of interaction by day type (all clubs); (b) tweets with urls by day type (all clubs); (c) top domains (all clubs); (d) applications used by day type (atléticomg); (e) blog urls by day of the week (atlético-mg); (f) social media urls by day type (atlético-mg). the amount of urls of blogs increases thursdays, fridays and sundays (figure 2e). this is also comprehensible since many fans and journalists that keep football-related blogs generally have a similar routine, posting analyses in the days following matches (which are held mostly wednesday and thursday evenings, and sunday afternoons). even though such communities are strongly influenced by the fans themselves (the top 50 most central users in each community include many supporters), mainstream media websites are still the dominant information sources (figure 2c). conclusion our data drove us to disagree with some pre assumptions still strong in the football fandom area that those discussing football online are not the same fans that attend matches (one of the reasons that the former were regarded as “inauthentic”). indeed, the data shows that fans adopting twitter for footballrelated conversations use more mobile applications and share more foursquare and instagram urls in match-days. the data also revealed that all 12 clubs have strong communities, with very active blogspheres and countless participatory initiatives which include youtube channels with original production, radios, podcasts, wikis and so on. yet, these communities have groups of central users: supporters that week in, week out are the most influential ones over the conversations going on within their communities. the significant point is that these fans are mostly not associated with the traditional organisations of football supporters, called in brazil “torcidas organizadas”. in this sense, football fan bases seem to be gaining a distinct shape in the digital age: one more fragmented and decentralised. and the hierarchy follows the hierarchy of contemporary group formations: legitimacy and authority are less formally attributed, being rather constituted within networked interactions. references baym, nancy k. (2007). the new shape of online community: the example of swedish independent music fandom. first monday, 12(8). booth, paul. (2010). digital fandom: new media studies (vol. 68). new york: peter lang. bruns, a. (2011). gawk scripts for twitter processing. mapping online publics. retrieved 14 de abr. de 2012, from http://www.mappingonlinepublics.net/resources/ gibbons, tom, & dixon, kevin. (2010). 'surf's up!': a call to take english soccer fan interactions on the internet more seriously. soccer & society, 11(5), 599-613. doi: 10.1080/14660970.2010.497359 jenkins, henry. (2006). convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york: nyu press. nash, r. (2000). contestation in modern english professional football: the independent supporters association movement. international review for the sociology of sport, 35(4), 465-486. doi: 10.1177/101269000035004002 pearson, roberta. (2010). fandom in the digital era. popular communication: the international journal of media and culture, 8(1), 84-95. microsoft word quinn-powers.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): quinn, k. & powers, r. (2014, october 22-24). public is the new private: conceptualizing sharing and privacy through reader comments to online news. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. sharing is the new private: conceptualizing sharing and privacy through reader comments to online news kelly quinn university of illinois – chicago renee powers university of illinois – chicago abstract sharing, as a counterposition to privacy as a normative state, is under-theorized and under-conceptualized. reader comments to online news accounts offer a space for public deliberation, and provide insight into how the users think and relate to the topic of a story. leveraging this participatory space, we use semantic network analysis as a starting point to map the conceptualization of sharing as it relates to information online. in doing so, we attempt to further conversations about sharing as it relates to privacy, and demonstrate how these concepts might relate to one another, if at all. publicness and privacy are frequently positioned in opposition, especially with respect to personal information that is created and made available through digital technologies and platforms. conceptualized as a boundary management process, the accomplishment of privacy is envisioned within a continuum (ford, 2011) or a dialectic (altman, 1975; jurgenson & rey, 2012; petronio, 2002). such binary approaches to privacy have not advanced the understanding of how it is accomplished in the everyday however, and especially in the use of web 2.0 communication technologies such as social network sites, microblogging and photomessaging. van dijck (2013) offers sharing as an alternative counterposition to privacy, and argues it is the normative practices of sharing in online spaces that have evolved and continue to evolve, and not privacy norms. these sharing practices have techno-cultural and socio-economic dimensions that shape the strategies and behaviors used to accomplish privacy. we know that sharing often occurs in relation to privacy, with consideration to audience and kind of information (bellotti & sellen, 1993; lederer, dey & mankoff, 2003; olson, grudin & horvitz, 2004), but how do we understand the notion of sharing by itself? shifting the focus from privacy as a goal state or value to sharing as a normative state is a subtle move that acknowledges agency of the individual in determining privacy outcomes. instead of a dialectical tension between public and private, or a continuum of closedness and openness, a focus on sharing acknowledges that these practices may offer indirect benefits to social media users that are only peripherally related to a specific relationship or context. these may include economic benefit such as preferential pricing on products and services or social benefit such as increased social capital resources and reduced loneliness. while explications of privacy and its dimensions are numerous (e.g., allen, 1988; altman, 1975; westin, 1967; nissenbaum, 2010), the idea of sharing as a normative model of interaction and information sharing is under-theorized and underconceptualized. this limits the ability to examine how sharing maps to privacy, especially in online spaces. reader comments to online newspaper accounts offer a space for public deliberation and share characteristics of the social and analytical processes associated with public discourse (manosevitch & walker, 2009). borrowing from blog platforms, newspapers began allowing comments on their stories in 2004. for ten years, newspapers have embraced this participatory technology with the hope that it would energize the public sphere (hughey and daniels, 2013). they have been quite successful relative to other participatory online spaces. importantly, a recent pew study found that 25% of internet using adults have commented on an online news story or blog item about news they read (purcell, rainie, mitchell, rosenstiel & olmstead, 2010), marking this activity as more widespread than the use of twitter or reddit, particularly among adults in older age groups. while users appreciate being involved in the news process via commenting, this involvement is admittedly limited. journalists prefer readers to be relegated to the comments section, where they are unlikely to influence the news process (singer, 2006). though only a small percentage of readers leave comments and read comments on newspaper articles online, reich (2011) identifies that readers who chose to comment prefer to do so in a topical and item-oriented manner. in other words, when readers comment, they feel their perspective contributes to the topic at hand. so while not directly influencing the news making process, comments provide insight into how the users think and relate to the topic of the story. this study attempts to utilize the value of newspaper commenting activity on articles and blog posts by journalists related to the sharing of information online as a starting point for the conceptualization of sharing as a normative value. we use semantic network analysis as the vehicle to map how individuals have commented on such articles. semantic network analysis is a technique to examine textual content by determining the occurrence and proximity between pairs of words within a message or group of messages. the frequency, co-occurrence, and distances among words enable the mapping of a network, with concepts as the network nodes and the relationships between concepts as edges. effectively, this network becomes a cognitive or mental map of the attributes of a phenomenon, a representation scheme for how the phenomenon is discussed. mapping the comments in this way effectively permits the exploration of meaning that is embedded within the texts--the important dimensions to how a phenomenon is conceptualized and how these relate to one another. in short, comments on news stories related to sharing and personal information gives a picture of how these commenting readers think about the topic, its important attributes and related concepts. we examine reader comments on 128 news stories and blog posts related to sharing and personal information posted online that were published in the new york times between january 1, 2012 and december 31, 2013, for a total of approximately 13,200 reader comments. the new york times moderates its comments for “personal attacks, obscenity, vulgarity, profanity (including expletives and letters followed by dashes), commercial promotion, impersonations, incoherence and shouting” (new york times, 2013), and either approve or reject comments as they are posted by readers. despite this moderation, this commenting activity speaks to notions of habermas’ public sphere. readers who comment on these stories may exhibit agency in resisting public agendas as set by mainstream media (papacharissi, 2009) and may direct us toward an initial understanding of how readers conceptualize sharing, its norms, and its other unique dimensions. through this semantic network analysis of new york times comments, we intend to begin a discussion on sharing and how this idea is situated to understandings of privacy. these concepts do not map neatly as a binary as they incorporate different goals, risks, and tradeoffs. our goal is to demonstrate some of the ways in which sharing is considered, talked about, and deliberated in public forums to further conversations about sharing as it relates to privacy, and demonstrate how these concepts might relate to one another, if they do at all. references allen, a. (1988). uneasy access: privacy for women in a free society. totowa, nj: rowman & littlefield. altman, i. (1975). the environment and social behavior: privacy, personal space, territory, crowding. monterey, ca: brooks/cole publishing. bellotti, v. & sellen, a. (1993). design for privacy in ubiquitous computing environments. paper presented to the third european conference on computersupported cooperative work, milano, italy, september 13-17. ford, s. m. (2011). reconceptualizing the public/private distinction in the age of information technology. information, communication & society, 14(4), 550-567. hughey, m. w. & daniels, j. (2013). racist comments at online news sites: a methodological dilemma for discourse analysis. media, culture & society, 35(5) 332 347. jurgenson, n. & rey, p. j. (2012). comment on sarah ford’s ‘reconceptualization of privacy and publicity.’ information, communication & society, 15(2), 287-293. lederer, s., dey, a., mankoff, j. (2003). who wants to know what when? privacy preference determinants in ubiquitous computing. cy* 2003 shortpapers, 724-725. manosevitch, e. & walker, d. (2009). reader comments to online opinion journalism: a space of public deliberation. paper presented to the 10th international symposium on online journalism, austin, tx, april 17-18. new york times. (2013). comments and reader reviews [webpage]. retrieved 29 nov 2013 from http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/site/usercontent/usercontent.html nissenbaum, h. (2010). privacy in context: technology, policy and the integrity of social life. stanford, ca: stanford law books. olson, j., grudin, j. & horvitz, e. (2005). a study of preferences for sharing and privacy. paper presented to chi ‘05, portland, or, april 2-7. papacharissi, z. (2009). the virtual sphere 2.0: the internet, the public sphere, and beyond. in a. chadwick & p. n. howard (eds.) routledge handbook of internet politics (230-245). new york, ny: routledge. petronio, s. (2002). boundaries of privacy: dialectics of disclosure. albany, ny: state university of new york press. purcell, k., rainie, l., mitchell, a., rosenstiel, t. & olmstead, k. (2010). understanding the participatory news consumer: how internet and cell phone users have turned news into a social experience. washington, dc: pew internet & american life project. available at http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//files/reports/2010/pip_understanding_the_pa rticipatory_news_consumer.pdf reich, z. (2011). user comments: the transformation of participatory space. in j. b. singer, a. hermida, d. domingo, a. heinonen, s. paulussen, t. quandt, z. reich, & m. vujnovic (eds.) participatory journalism: guarding open gates at online newspapers (96-117). west sussex, uk: wiley-blackwell. singer, j. b. (2006). stepping back from the gate: online newspaper editors and the co production of content in campaign 2004. journalism & mass communication quarterly, 83(2) 265-280. van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity. oxford, uk: oxford university press. westin, a. (1967). privacy and freedom. new york: athenaeum. microsoft word dennen-bruner.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): dennen, v.p. & bruner, k.j. (2014, october 22-24). facebook, “friends,” and the higher education classroom: student preferences and attitudes. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. facebook, “friends,” and the higher education classroom: student preferences and attitudes vanessa p. dennen florida state university kerry j. bruner florida state university introduction and background social media has enabled multifaceted communication and sharing opportunities, providing often-authentic learning interactions and activities for many instructors and students and expanding the boundaries of the typical classroom. at the same time, the mere presence of social media – whether used in a class or not – has complicated the relationships between students and their instructors. questions that must be dealt with, whether on a personal or institutional level, include: should higher education instructors and students be connected to each other on social media systems such as facebook, twitter, and linkedin? how should they manage friendship requests? what action(s) should be taken when the virtual aspect of the instructor-student relationship becomes uncomfortable? facebook provides a solid example of this complex situation. social facebook use is high among college students, and it has been used increasingly to support learning in higher education, whether using it to replace a learning management system (wang et al., 2013; wang et al., 2012) or for an individual learning activity (aubry, 2013; miller, 2013; shaltry, henriksen, wu, & dickson, 2013). however, using facebook to support learning creates a host of potential privacy concerns. the facebook environment supports bidirectional relationships, in which both parties must agree to mutually become “friends” and share profiles. what students want to share with social friends may not be information they also wish to share with other “friends,” like classmates and instructors. although facebook has user-controlled privacy settings, in one study every participant suffered a discrepancy between facebook settings and their desired sharing (madejski et al., 2012). another study showed that 15% of people in the traditional college student age group have regrets about items they have posted (madden, 2012). in response to these concerns, this study explores student preferences and attitudes related to using facebook in a higher education setting. the research questions guiding this study are: 1. what are college students preferences regarding facebook use in a class setting? 2. what are college students preferences regarding facebook friendship with their instructors? method participants in this descriptive study were 169 students at a large public university in the united states. they completed an online survey about their facebook use habits and beliefs in an educational context. the majority of survey respondents were female (88%), held undergraduate status (95%) in the college of education (62%), were current facebook users (95%), and ranged in age from 19 to 62. the survey consists mostly of closed items inquiring about student’s preferences and experiences when using facebook. a few open items provided the opportunity for students to elaborate on their personal facebook use policies and to share brief stories and experiences. data analysis focuses on reporting aggregate findings, frequency distributions, and measures of central tendency. open items were analyzed for emergent themes, with quotes used to help illustrate key issues. findings these findings represent highlights from the survey, owing to space constraints. additional findings will be shared during the presentation. when asked if they want to use facebook in a class setting, students gave a split response between those who did (51%) and did not (49%) want to use facebook in a class (see table 1). when probed more specifically about engaging with instructors in a facebook group, which allows people to interact without having an established friendship on facebook, they were more positively disposed, with 78% indicating they would be comfortable with that arrangement. however, 44% still felt that students who do not already use facebook should not be required to sign up in order to use it in a class. similarly, students were split on the issue of being facebook friends with instructors, with only 54% comfortable with that idea. very few of the students who were comfortable with these friendships were comfortable initiating these friendships under any circumstances (see table 2), instead preferring to wait until after the formal studentinstructor relationship has ended or following cues from the professor that a studentinstructor friendship would be acceptable. when asked about instructor-initiated friendships, 43% were generally comfortable accepting these requests, with 25% only doing so to be polite and 12% declining but nonetheless feeling awkward. table 2 further shares results of why students would or would not want to be friends with instructors. open responses were consistent with the forced response items. students could see some value in the use of a tool like facebook for group projects and communication, but they generally were not in favor of creating a relationship – albeit virtual – with instructors outside of the classroom setting: facebook, for the most part, is not used in a professional way amongst students. it is a social website. therefore, i think that a lot of students would have to censor what they put on their page if they were friends with professors or other faculty members at their school i think it should be avoided. i do not think it is necessary to use facebook in higher education, especially with the various forms of communication: blogger, blackboard, tumblr, etc. i think students', as well as professors, social lives should be separate from material learned within a classroom. i think that facebook is a great tool that is useful for group projects and coordinating events but i don't think it should be made mandatory for all students. i also don't feel comfortable at all becoming friends with professors. the biggest challenge for using facebook was succinctly summed up by one student: it blurs the lines between things personal and professional. conclusion although the majority of respondents are not against using facebook for course purposes, they offered the caveat that the use should be student-initiated and not a mandatory part of their academic endeavors. becoming friends with professors is not appealing to respondents; they see it as blurring the line between professional and personal roles. further, students are aware of the power differences in this relationship, even in a largely social setting such as facebook. we believe these findings provide a cautionary tale for instructors who might wish to integrate facebook use in their courses. using tools like facebook in higher education settings must be well thought through, and based on our findings, it should never be required. references aubry, j. (2013) facebook-induced motivation shifts in a french online course. techtrends. 57(6) 81-87. madden, m. (2012) privacy management on social media sites. report for pew research center's internet & american life project (washington, d.c.). madejski, m., johnson, m. & bellovin, s. m. (2012) a study of privacy setting errors in online social network, paper presented at the fourth international workshop on security and social networking. miller, s. (2013) increasing student participation in online group discussions via facebook. astronomy education review. 12(1) 1-10. shaltry, c., henriksen, d., wu, m., & dickson, w. (2013) situated learning with online portfolios, classroom websites and facebook. techtrends 57(3) 20-25. wang, q., woo, h. l. & quek, c. l. (2013) perceived usefulness of facebook for teaching and learning: the student teacher’s perspective. int. j. web based communities, 9(2), 243-255. wang, q., woo, h. l., quek, c. l., yang, y. & liu, m. (2012) using the facebook group as a learning management system: an exploratory study. british journal of educational technology, 43(3), 428-438. microsoft word finalannetteusingspir2013_template.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 the algorithmic self: layered accounts of life and identity in the 21st century annette n. markham department of aesthetics & communication aarhus university denmark amarkham@gmail.com abstract this paper takes an actor network theory approach to explore some of the ways that algorithms co-construct identity and relational meaning in contemporary use of social media. based on intensive interviews with participants as well as activity logging and data tracking, the author presents a richly layered set of accounts to help build our understanding of how individuals relate to their devices, search systems, and social network sites. this work extends critical analyses of the power of algorithms in implicating the social self by offering narrative accounts from multiple perspectives. it also contributes an innovative method for blending actor network theory with symbolic interaction to grapple with the complexity of everyday sensemaking practices within networked global information flows. keywords identity; actor network theory; algorithms; agency; critical; remix introduction i know i shouldn’t care that facebook’s timeline forces my personal history into a chronology of the jobs i’ve held. i know that in the scale of important things to worry about in the world, i shouldn’t focus on the fact that my facebook timeline encourages me to add materials to my timeline, until i’ve reached the category “born.” as if my history started then. (research participant notes, 22 august 2012) latour (2012) suggests that we are not just part of networks, but wholly defined by what can be found in databases. senft (2012) refers to this as ‘the grab,’ an action of taking something we want, but also as a temporary fixing, as we might accomplish through a screengrab, or by making sense of something or someone very rapidly and then moving on. we might do this deliberately and consciously, or it might be a decision made through a complex and largely invisible interaction with the algorithms that mediate the interface. a couple of years ago, i read an article that said we are being trapped by the technologies we’re using now, and that while most of us believe we still have freedom of choice, this just isn’t the case. he argued that our reliance on particular interfaces grows more powerful every time we upload another photo or document moments of our lives, because we’re less and less likely to want to start all over again. so facebook is based more on inertia. even if we want to leave, we just don’t. (research participant notes, 22 august 2012) a growing body of scholarship contributes to how we conceptualize our relationships with our platforms, devices, and technologies at the conceptual level. deuze, banks, & spears (2012), for example, talk about the ways in which we’re more than just surrounded by media, but experiencing life in media. this aligns with and in many ways pushes past previous scholars such as gergen (1991) or turkle (1995, 2011), who have long contended that the individual (and our understanding of selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 identity) is impacted by ever-increasing connection with computers, technologies, and information. as bolter (2012) notes, we interact not only with others but also “with the algorithm, the code that lies beneath the surface of the application” (p. 39). he continues, “good digital design today encourages its users to proceduralize their behavior in order to enter into the interactions, and a large portion of those in developed countries have accepted this as the path to participation in digital media culture” (p. 45). these ‘event loops’ are designed to appear seamless, as an essential part of everyday sociality. as gillespie (2012) notes, these algorithms provide a particular sort of “knowledge logic” that function powerfully and invisibly. hayles contends that we need to more directly address autonomous algorithms as agents, citing her recent study of the way rapid and automated market trading algorithms can cause mini-crashes in the stock market before a human literally has time to even notice anything has happened (2012). this paper focuses on these issues at the level of everyday sensemaking. in what ways do we feel ‘grabbed?’ how do people talk about the meaning of their identity as bound up with everyday digital platforms for interaction? by exploring the way people move through these information spaces and flows, and talking with them about their everyday activities, we can add a rich voice to our conversations about meaning, identity, and algorithms. i resent it because i feel trapped. bad enough that we’ve become so accustomed to using facebook for personal communication among our networks of friends that we can’t just turn it off. now, i have to adjust to the parameters yet again, forcing my expression of identity into a still narrower box of options. this time, my timeline. my history. the sad, pathetic part of this story is that when i saw my profile in a timeline today, tears came, unbidden, rolling down my face. silly to think i could continue to avoid timeline. sillier still to realize how much it feels like a small violation of my independence. ironic, when i know i participate willingly in facebook and could shut down my account at any moment. it’s just not that simple. (research participant notes, 22 august 2012) methodology this paper takes a symbolic interactionist approach to explore how people make sense of their relationships with their own information and the technologies that mediate their everyday activities. to get at this sort of information, i borrow markham’s (1998) techniques for participant observation and in-depth ethnographic interviewing; latour’s (2005) actor network theory concepts for following the data wherever it might go and for considering the agency of non-human agents; and markham’s lens of remix (2013) as a way to grapple with the complexity of data emerging from the interviews and observations. in addition to intensive engagement with individuals who describe themselves as heavily saturated in social media, this project includes auto-phenomonological or -ethnographic data as a close read of multiple agencies at play in everyday interactions with and in digital media. discussion as if my history could be so encapsulated by time, linear at that. i feel betrayed by the interface. betrayed by an interface that appears to give so many choices on the surface, while limiting almost every bit of our creative endeavor to the pre-defined and pre-packaged boxes and categories within which we’re supposed to find a place. it hurts us all, in different, small ways. sure, i feel fine clicking the ‘female’ category, but i know at least two-dozen friends who wouldn’t be able to choose a box. i’m supposed to declare a ‘hometown’ but i’ve not had one for more than 20 years, so that’s not useful at all. i now have to mark places on a map, or accept the default map selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 that appeared on my profile just this afternoon. i have to work to figure out how to shut down options. modify the interface to make sure it’s not doing something else invisible to me. the idea of being locked into a history that facebook creates? what if i don’t want to be defined by time or any other moment that facebook has determined is “relevant” in my life? why am i still crying? i mean, seriously, why does this affect me so much? why would i care so much about facebook? (research participant notes, 22 august 2012) we live increasingly public lives. we spend a lot of time managing our identities in ways we never did before the internet made our every move potentially public. we also experience the world as it is mediated by algorithms functioning as “deep structures” (deetz, 1992; mumby, 1998). this study focuses on the everyday experience of people who would consider themselves to be a technologically “saturated self,” in the sense that gergen (1991) articulates. this particular paper will present a pastiche of narrative accounts that take a very close look at some of the ways people are making sense of their relationships with their platforms, technologies, and devices. truth be told, google owns me much more than facebook ever could. google plus uploaded all my photos from my computer and phone for sharing before i could figure out how to ‘opt out.’ at least i expect it from facebook. but google? it seemed so benign. (research participant notes, 24 august 2012) references bolter, j. d. (2012). procedure and performance in an era of digital media. in lind, r. (ed.). produsing theory in a digital world: the intersection of audiences and production in contemporary theory (pp. 33-50). new york: peter lang. deetz, s. (1992). democracy in an age of corporate colonization: developments in communication and the politics of everyday life. new york: suny press. dueze, m., blank, p., & speers, l. (2012). a life lived in media. digital humanities quarterly, 6(1). available at: http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/6/1/000110/000110.html gergen, k. (1991). the saturated self: dilemmas of identity in contemporary society. new york: basic books. gillespie, t. (2012). the relevance of algorithms. forthcoming in gillespie, t., boczkowski, p., & foot, k. (eds.). media technologies. cambridge, ma: mit press. pre-publication draft available at: http://www.tarletongillespie.org/essays/gillespie%20-%20the%20relevance%20of%20algorithms.pdf hayles, k. (2012). economic infrastructure and artificial intelligences: the case of automated trading programs. keynote address at the media places: infrastructure, space, media conference. umea university, december 6, 2012. abstract available at: http://mediaplaces2012.humlab.umu.se/program.html latour, b., jensen, p., venturini, t., grauwin, s., & boullie, d. (2012). the whole is always smaller than the sum of its parts: a digital test of gabriel tarde’s monads. available at: http://www.brunolatour.fr/sites/default/files/123-whole-part-final.pdf latour, b. (2005). reassembling the social: an introduction to actor network theory. oxford, uk: oxford university press. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 markham, a. (2013 in press). remix culture, remix methods: reframing qualitative inquiry for social media contexts. in denzin, n., & giardina, m. (eds.). global dimensions of qualitative inquiry. walnut creek, ca: left coast press. markham, a. (1998). life online: researching real experience in virtual space. walnut creek, ca: altamira press. mumby, d. (1988). communication and power in organizations: discourse, ideology, and domination. norwood, nj: axley press. senft, t. (2012). microcelebrity and the branded self. in burgess, j. & bruns, a. (eds.). blackwell companion to new media dynamics (pp 346-354). boston, ma: blackwell. turkle, s. (1995). life on the screen: identity in the age of the internet, new york: touchstone. turkle, s. (2011). alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other. new york: basic books. license this article is ©2013 annette n. markham, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 identity and musical genre in the age of algorithms holly kruse department of communications rogers state university united states holly.kruse@gmail.com abstract traditionally, genre has been an important factor in the construction of music users’ and creators’ identities. musical taste and practices, as defined by genre, play an important role in the articulation of identity, especially when subjects position their tastes and practices in opposition to a perceived mainstream. as musical practices move online, including to video-sharing sites like youtube, algorithms determine music recommendations without little or no consideration of genre. this paper examines the implications of algorithmic suggestions for notions of identity among popular music creators and users. keywords identity; genre; popular music; algorithms; youtube. identity, genre, and algorithms in “traditional” popular music culture, genre is central in helping to construct participants’ senses of identity. “genre” refers to a kind or class of things, and in discussions of cultural artifacts, definitions of genres are perhaps most importantly created by the users who identify with and through those genres (chandler, 2000). in ethnographic research of indie music scenes, genre has proven important in how participants frame their relationships to scenes, and to others. for instance, one musician, in attempting to define the genre in which he works by meaningfully differentiating it from others, states, “i would call it pop music. i would call it wimpy pop music. i would not call it power pop. power pop has now become a term that means a hard guitar band that uses pop as the format…” (qtd. in kruse, 2003, p. 116). indeed, among participants in many music scenes, positioning one’s self and one’s taste as part of a tradition of expression that values social and cultural practice that are somewhat oppositional to a perceived mainstream is crucial. and one’s taste in music (or any cultural product) helps determine how one sees one’s self in this relationship. pierre bourdieu famously notes that “taste is the basis of all that one has – people and things – and all that one is for others, whereby one classifies oneself and is classified by others” (1984, p. 56). this terrain of practices, which helps construct identities, is continually shifting, and it leads one to wonder what happens when music cultures move, at least partly, online and are infiltrated by nonhuman actors: namely, computer code in the form of algorithms? in looking at relevant notions of identity, one sees that laclau and mouffe (2001) argue that identities are not fixed, but rather are articulated within a structure of social relations that causes every social agent to occupy multiple social positions at once, through identifications of race, gender, class, ethnicity, occupation, educational level, tastes, and so on. further, as stuart hall observes, identification does not happen once and for all (1989, p. 73). identities are produced within an ideological field where signs “can be discursively re-articulated to construct new meanings, connect with different social practices, and position social subjects differently” (hall, 1988, p. 9). central to this way of thinking about identity is the idea that a particular practice is articulated within a specific discursive terrain, and it is within this terrain that one constructs identities, including oppositional identities. indeed, as much as the word 'identification' seems to imply a sense of belonging, perhaps even more it describes a process of differentiation. as laclau and mouffe state, “all values are values of opposition and are defined only by their difference” (2001, p. 106). senses of shared identity are alliances formed out of oppositional stances. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 youtube, and the recommendations that its algorithm generates, is one site where music users may assert oppositional identities. this paper focuses particularly on the ways in which youtube helps construct identity through its recommendations – recommendations that are often unrelated to the conventional definitions of genre valued by music users and producers – and commenters’ uses of oppositional discourses and invocations of taste and genre in the face of youtube’s “suggestions” and targeted advertising. youtube is obviously not only a music video channel, and its algorithms are used across content type. founded in 2005, it provides a platform for video-sharing by users, and in that capacity it fills multiple roles: as archive, broadcast medium, and even social network. it doesn’t provide content; users provide content (burgess and green, 2009, p. 5). among its users are commercial clients, with whom youtube enters into revenue-sharing agreements and for whom its algorithms provide data. these clients include major music industry players, like vevo. vevo is a consortium started by universal music, sony music, and abu dhabi media in late 2009 in an effort to monetize music video content. although it has its own website, which is among the most visited sites online, vevo’s most visible presence is on youtube, where it attracts most of its viewers and where it has accounted for up to 80 percent of the music videos watched (graham, 2010). with the 2012 break-up of emi – which licensed its content to vevo – and emi’s absorption into universal music group, warner brothers is the only other major label player on youtube, and it is the second most streamed youtube partner after vevo (mlot, 2012). vevo artists include justin bieber, lady gaga, eminem, and rihanna; warner brothers artists include josh groban, muse, and the black keys to look at vevo in particular, while its name may not be well known among members of the public, its audience is now 25 times as large as mtv’s was during the height of the popularition of televised music videos (graham, 2010). vevo clearly brands its videos and is in charge of selling space on its youtube channel to other advertisers, then sharing that ad revenue with youtube’s owner, google (graham, 2010). vevo is thus multiply invested in the algorithms that drive viewers to its videos within youtube. interestingly, youtube recently switched from its original recommendation system to the one used by amazon, which is based on collaborative filtering and suggests items to users based on perceived shared tastes with other users (linden, 2011). youtube has also begun creating automated channels created not by users or partners, but by algorithms that track user activity. as described in new scientist (2012), in this process software analyzes how users navigate search results, notes the videos on which users click and how they move from video to video, and gathers information from user comments. the site then recommends channels. for example, “a user who searches for videos about the us open tennis tournament, then proceeds to watch nothing but roger federer clips, for example, might get a recommendation to subscribe to the roger federer channel” (hodson, 2012, p. 25). in this paper, i examine whether recommendations and advertising on youtube’s music video partner pages are congruent with traditional notions of popular music genre, or if they in fact help construct a different kind of popular music user (and even creator) identity. further, i look at the degree to which commenters on these pages appear to acquiesce to or oppose their positioning as potential viewers of videos (or purchasers of music) by algorithmically selected artists. how many users, when confronted with a vevo advertisement for justin timberlake’s new release, are tempted to respond (as one user did) with “fuck off, justin timberfake! :p ”? references bourdieu, p. (1984). distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. burgess, j., & green, j. (2009). youtube. cambridge: polity press. chandler, d. (2000). an introduction to genre theory. retrieved from http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/ documents/intgenre/intgenre1.html graham, j. (2010, dec. 17). vevo turned free music videos into revenue. usa today, p. 4b. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 hall, s. (1989). cultural identity and cinematic representation. framework 36, 68-81. hall, s. (1988). the hard road to renewal: thatcherism and the crisis of the left. london: verso. hodson, h. (2012, dec. 12). now, watch this. new scientist. 216(2895), 25. kruse, h. (2003). site and sound: understanding independent music scenes. new york: peter lang. laclau, e., & mouffe, c. (2001). hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics. london: verso. linden, g. (2011, feb. 11). youtube uses amazon's recommendation algorithm. retrieved from http://glinden.blogspot.com/2011/02/youtube-uses-amazons-recommendation.html mlot, s. (2012, june 26). top 5 youtube partners nab 1.5 billion monthly streams. pc magazine. retrieved from http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2406324,00.asp license this article is ©2013 holly kruse, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 snps to sheepy: genetic genealogy & place-identity molly wright steenson school of journalism & mass communication university of wisconsin-madison united states msteenson@wisc.edu abstract this paper investigates notions of identity and place as a result of genetic genealogy. one’s personal relationship with genetic genealogical data, such as from dna testing services such as 23andme, offers another angle on digital identity. using a critical cultural studies lens, the author presents juxtapositions of traditional knowledge logics for explaining one’s ancestry with contemporary interactions with genetic data. the results raise important questions, such as: what does it mean when dna becomes a place, a location of historical significance? how does this contribute to the notion of a meaningful relationship derived through engagement with one’s own genetic data? and how does that change notions of personal identity and place-identity? keywords 23andme; algorithms; identity; place; genetics mouth and place: an introduction of sorts perusing my family tree, i came across a tinted photograph from about 1890 of some relatives on my mother’s side. instantly, the girl in the left-hand corner drew my eye, or more specifically, her mouth. it was because it was my mouth. the girl in the picture is my great-grandmother, ellen blower. i compared it with the framed picture of my mother at age 14, with family pictures of my aunt and her daughter. from 1890 to today, that mouth repeats in the female descendants of my great-grandmother. ellen was born in sheepy magna, england. she moved to nearby hinckley, then emigrated to moline, illinois when she was 30. typing “sheepy magna” into google earth yields a green quiltwork of fields. a google image search serves the sign to sheepy magna, the church, the main street, a car submerged in a flood, the graveyard of people to whom i am related. when ellen emigrated to the united states she could be connected to a new network of places, all of which i could navigate from a screen far away in space and time. all of them could be places that contribute to her sense of identity; all of them represented by contemporary data streams that are meaningful to me. u5a1b1 when i joined the 23andme genetic testing service and received my results, i learned i belonged to the u5a1b1 haplogroup, which is determined by my mitochondrial dna (mtdna). mtdna passes from mother to daughter to daughter, marked by a single nucleotide polymorphism (snp) mutation that took place 7000 years ago. its umbrella haplogroup u5 originated 30–50,000 years ago as humans migrated from the near east toward eurasia. while u5 reaches across africa and as far as mongolia, its center is northern europe. the mutation that created u5a, the branch to which i belong, occurred 20,000 years ago during the ice age, keeping people in southern europe; 15,000 years ago, they migrated north to norway and northern germany, or east toward turkey and iran in smaller numbers. the most famous u5a ancestor is “cheddar man,” a 9,000 year old skeleton discovered in a cave in cheddar, england, whose haplogroup was determined through mtdna testing of a tooth, and 1–1.5% of the population of the uk is likely to share the u5a haplogroup (lyall, 1997). the mutations in mtdna take place slowly over time: an ancestor from further back in time is more likely to manifest a mutation along the way than someone a few generations back (sykes, 2002). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 just as i could trace my mouth through what i could see in a photograph, a testing service that made tangible my mtdna and maternal haplogroup allowed me to trace that same flow, my mother’s mother’s mother back 7000, 20,000, 40,000 years. the 23andme database identifies similarities in runs of snps, suggesting family relationships beyond coincidence. maureen, a possible 4th to 7th cousin, contacted me on 23andme: we have a run of i think around 1800 snps that are identical on chromosome 2. that probably suggests that we are 5th or maybe 4th cousins which suggests we probably have a great great great grandparent that is the same. (maureen, personal correspondence with the author) whereas i looked at the shape of a mouth in a photograph and identified my great-grandmother, maureen looked at data, comparing them in an excel spreadsheet she keeps in order to compare her chromosomal similarities to people that 23andme identifies as potential relatives. in maureen’s characterization, chromosomes, too, are a place. they are themselves a location with the data for certain traits; a location that points to the potential geography from which those traits derive; but also a locus of personal meaning: i think our connection may be on the anderson side either from the group that stayed in sweden or the branch that went to norway. i say that because on the place we share on chromosome 2 i also share some overlapping genes with a 3rd cousin who still lives in sweden whose family came from stafsinge. (maureen, personal correspondence, emphasis mine) in this message, maureen conflates three elements: chromosome 2 is a “place” where we connect; this same place on chromosome 2 connects both of us to sweden and another relative; and chromosome 2 is a place that she can access, visualize and navigate, just as i accessed, visualized and navigated the visual similarities across my family, as mapped on a tree. discussion this paper seeks to investigate notions of identity and place as a result of genetic genealogy. an individual’s sense of place that conventionally corresponds to a hometown or ancestral land can also be found in how people talk about their chromosomes when they engage with genetic genealogy tools. for such individuals, a part of chromosome 2 may have as much meaning as a shared hometown or physical characteristic for another. one’s personal relationship with genetic genealogical data, such as from dna testing sites, offers another angle on digital identity. throughout the early 1990s, turkle noted the growing multiplicity of identities as “a set of roles that can be mixed and matched, whose diverse demands need to be negotiated” (turkle, 1997, p. 180). martin’s (1992) study of people’s identifications with their immune systems demonstrate how these experiences are marked by distorting and scale-shifting notions of time and space. she writes, “the self has retreated inside the body, is a witness to itself, a tiny figure in a cosmic landscape, which is the body” (p. 125). more than a “distributed presence” (turkle, 1997), these retreated selves turn outward. they can visualize the methods of their own transmission across space and time, across trees, as parts of networks. through their visualization, they are meaningful. chromosomal place is aligned with traditional ways of talking about place that in turn exercise an impact on personal identity. as “an organized world of meaning” (tuan, 2001, p. 6), place is about the familiar and the comfortable, rather than the anonymous and systematized. tuan characterizes “place” as different than “space:” it has an “aura,” an “identity” that develops in the process of becoming acquainted with a space, thus becoming a place (p. 5). prohansky terms the identification an individual has with place as “place-identity” (1978). a component of self-identity, place-identity selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 develops and changes over time and is informed by different physical settings and roles. place-identity is multidimensional, a “potpourri of memories, conceptions, interpretations, ideas, and related feelings about specific physical settings, as well as types of settings” (porshansky, fabian & kaminoff, 1983, p. 60). as someone becomes acquainted with the genetic picture of herself, reading snps like someone might read cities or physical traits, her place-identity extends to her data. her data--in this case, a run of snps on the second chromosome--becomes a place that shapes how she sees herself. if, as martin (1992) writes, the self retreats into the body, then how does our own engagement with genetic data externalize that relationship? what does it mean when dna becomes a place, a sheepy to a run of snps? how does this contribute to the notion of a meaningful relationship derived through engagement with one’s own genetic data? and how does that change notions of personal identity and place-identity? references lyall, s. (1997, march 24). tracing your family tree to cheddar man's mum, new york times. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/24/world/tracing-your-family-tree-to-cheddar-man-s-mum.html martin, e. (1992). the end of the body? american ethnologist, 19(1), 121-140. maureen (2011, february 5). [message on 23andme]. proshansky, h. (1978). the city and self-identity. environment and behavior, 10(147). proshansky, h., fabian, a., & kaminoff, r. (1982). place-identity: physical world socialization of the self. journal of environmental psychology, 3, 57-83. sykes, b. (2002). the seven daughters of eve: the science that reveals our genetic ancestry. new york: w.w. norton & company. tuan, yi-fu. (2001). space and place: the perspective of experience. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. turkle, s. (1997). life on the screen. new york: simon & schuster. license this article is ©2013 molly wright steenson, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 algorithmically supported sense-making of network visualizations: a call for reflexivity and transparency jeff hemsley university of washington information school united states jhemsley@uw.edu abstract based on abundant social media data, researchers employ sophisticated algorithms to represent social networks visually. researchers rely on these visualizations as a sensemaking tool in a similar way that scatter plots are used to check for relationships between discrete variables. as such, these visualizations played an important role in knowledge production related to social network analysis. this paper demonstrates how the design choices in three frequently-used network layout algorithms can alter the ‘reality’ presented by the data. the paper demonstrates that algorithmic design choices build bias into the presentation of the data. thus, while network visualization can facilitate recognition of some patterns, it can obscure others, and lead to faulty assumptions about the nature of the data. researchers must demonstrate an understanding of, and report on, the role of algorithms in their sensemaking and data analysis. such an understanding can also lead to deeper insights about the underlying data. keywords algorithms; social network analysis; data visualization; methodology introduction a growing body of literature attempts to understand human behavior from massive collections of data drawn from the public application programming interfaces (api) of social media websites. using these data, researchers employ sophisticated algorithms to represent social networks visually. and just as researchers use scatter plots to check for relationships between discrete variables, network researchers rely on these visualizations to make sense of complex network data. as such, these visualizations have played an important role in knowledge production related to network research for decades (benderdemoll & mcfarland, 2006). these efforts have produced insights about information sharing on social networks (leskovec, backstrom, & kleinberg, 2009) and how blogs drive viral content (nahon, hemsley, walker, & hussain, 2011; nahon & hemsley, 2011). while there is undeniable value in social network analysis and its accompanying visualizations, it is rarely acknowledged that network visualization algorithms mediate the relationship between the data and the researcher and thereby influence sensemaking. in this paper i explore this mediating effect using three different algorithms for network data visualization. specifically, i ask: how can different network visualization algorithms highlight or obscure specific network features? method this paper demonstrates how three frequently-used network layout algorithms can alter the ‘reality’ presented by the data. the first two are the force based algorithms of kamada and kawai (1989) and fruchterman and reingold (1991). the third, martin et al.’s (2011) openord layout, is a multi-level approach that employs an average link clustering technique coupled with a force-based algorithm. it is noted that other layout algorithms (circular, 3d, spring-force, tree, etc.) and graphing programs (e.g. gephi, pajek, ucinet, and nodexl) were compared before the final selection of these three algorithms, each of which was selected for their similarities, differences and frequent use by network selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 analysis experts. the statistical software r1, with the igraph package, was used for all data manipulation and graphing. the data were collected from october 31st, 2001 to november 28th, 2011 using the twitter streaming api2. only tweets containing the hashtag #occupyhouston are used for this analysis. work with other types of data (e.g. hyperlinks, term co-occurrence, forum interactions) inform this analysis, but twitter retweets were selected to highlight certain features and limitations of the layouts and to illustrate that algorithms are developed under specific assumptions about the data to which they are applied. in today’s media environment, some of these assumptions may not be valid. i instantiated the network by selecting only retweets from the larger set of tweets. we assume that retweets can be used as human communication trace data that provide clues about information diffusion on social networks. the twitter api delivers a generous amount of meta data for each tweet, part of which is retweet information. in the case of a retweet, the original tweet is wholly embedded in the meta data (excepting “old style” or manual retweets, not used in this analysis). cleaning the data involved selecting out all user names and the names of the users who they were retweeting for each tweet. the result was a link list: two column data set with retweeters in the first column and retweeted in the second. redundancies are ignored for this analysis, which would be problematic in an actual study, but not relevant for the illustrative analysis of this short paper. the network has 768 nodes (users or twitter accounts) and 1,340 links (cases where some user b retweeted some other user a). discussion of findings for each graphic i discuss some of the more easily made observations about the network from the visualization. where relevant i relate these observations to the inner workings of the algorithm. figure 1 was created using the kamada and kawai (1989) layout. from it we can see a large single component, which is a subset of the network where each node connects to at least one other node in the component, surrounded by an unconnected ring. within the ring it is obvious that some of the dyads, two nodes connected by a link, form their own isolated component, but because of the link overlap it is difficult to determine if it is made up primarily of isolated dyads or other formations. the link overlap is a byproduct of the algorithm, which is designed to situate linked nodes an ideal distance apart. this allows us to visually determine the number of links that information would need to flow from one node to another, which results in concentric circles radiating out from the dense core of the network. the groupings of nodes with a single link all connected to the same node represent cases where many people (end nodes) retweeted a single person’s tweet. 1 http://www.r-project.org/ 2 https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-apis selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 figure 1: kamada and kawai force based network layout. fruchterman and reingold’s force directed layout is plotted on the same dataset in figure 2. the idea behind force directed node placement is that linked nodes exert attractive forces on each other, and, depending on the algorithm, repulsive forces. where kamada and kawai attempt to repulse nodes at least as far as the ideal distance, fruchterman and reingold’s approach is to have all nodes exert a repulsive force on all other nodes. these forces can be calibrated via researcher-chosen parameters. the intent behind the software is for the resulting layouts to have link overlap than the previous layout. a researcher can quickly see that most of the disconnected components are dyads, but a number of them form different configurations. with this layout we can also see some of the linking patterns in the core of the network (heaver linking between nodes). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 figure 2: fruchterman and reingold force based network layout. figure 3 is the openord layout (martin et al., 2011). notice we no longer can discern the sizes of retweet events. indeed, a researcher looking at this graph may interpret clumped nodes as network clusters, yet they instead may be users bunched together because they all retweeted a single user at the heart of the clump. we also lose any resolution into our disconnected dyads. the algorithm intentionally clumps nodes together when they are tightly connected to each other but loosely connected to distant parts of the graph. such clustering is useful when the dominant structures of the network are being studied. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 figure 3: martin et al.’s openord layout. conclusions as i demonstrate in this short paper, the design choices of network layout algorithms can produce visualizations that highlight some patterns, obscure others, and may lead to faulty assumptions about the nature of the data. when network visualizations are employed, researchers must demonstrate an understanding of, and reflexively report on, the underlying algorithms that play a role in facilitating sensemaking and data analysis. however, an opportunity exists for researchers with such knowledge in that they can treat visualizations as a specific view into the data. indeed, research in visual analytics suggests that visualizations can lower the cognitive cost of sensemaking and interpreting large datasets (thomas & cook, 2005). thus, understanding the algorithms implies that researchers can select multiple, complimentary views of the data that, when compared, can yield deeper insights and create opportunities for qualitative interpretation of large datasets. acknowledgments data used in this work was collected by the social media lab at uw and funded by the national science foundation. references bender-demoll, s., & mcfarland, d. a. (2006). the art and science of dynamic network visualization. journal of social structure, 7(2), 1–38. fruchterman, t. m., & reingold, e. m. (1991). graph drawing by force-­‐directed placement. software: practice and experience, 21(11), 1129–1164. kamada, t., & kawai, s. (1989). an algorithm for drawing general undirected graphs. information processing letters, 31(1), 7–15. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 6 leskovec, j., backstrom, l., & kleinberg, j. (2009). meme-tracking and the dynamics of the news cycle. in proceedings of the 15th acm sigkdd international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining (pp. 497–506). citeseer. martin, s., brown, w. m., klavans, r., & boyack, k. w. (2011). openord: an open-source toolbox for large graph layout. in is&t/spie electronic imaging (pp. 786806–786806–11). international society for optics and photonics. nahon, k., & hemsley, j. (2011). democracy.com: a tale of political blogs and content. presented at the hicss-44 (hawaii international conference on system sciences). nahon, k., hemsley, j., walker, s., & hussain, m. (2011). fifteen minutes of fame: the place of blogs in the life cycle of viral political information. policy & internet, 3(1). doi:10.2202/19442866.1108 thomas, j. j., & cook, k. a. (eds.). (2005). illuminating the path: the research and development agenda for visual analytics. national visualization and analytics ctr. retrieved from http://vis.pnnl.gov/pdf/rd_agenda_visualanalytics.pdf license this article is ©2013 jeff hemsley, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. annette markham: the algorithmic self: layered accounts of life and identity in the 21st century holly kruse: identity and musical genre in the age of algorithms molly steenson: snps to sheepy: genetic genealogy and place identity jeff hemsley: algorithmically supported sensemaking of network visualizations: a call for reflexivity and transparency microsoft word 860-604-1-pb (1).doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 in-game marriage and computer-mediated collaboration: an exploratory study of audition guo zhang and susan c. herring department of information and library science school of informatics and computing indiana university bloomington {guozhang;herring}@indiana.edu abstract this exploratory study discusses how in-game marriage can affect (and effect) multiplayer online game (mog) players’ collaborative behaviors through an analysis of audition, a non-violent, non-fantasy dance battle mog which mediates and facilitates couple-related collaborative behaviors. on the basis of a content analysis of couple-related screenshots (including chat logs, dance battle scenarios, and couple behaviors) collected from ingame participant observation (n=126) and an out-game public game forum (n=304), three non-exclusive themes related to couple-mediated collaboration in audition are identified and discussed. this study points to the importance of taking gender (and sexual orientation) into account when analyzing participation in, and the dynamics of, mog play. in a broader sense, the study of the connection between collaboration and intimacy in mogs sheds light on the role of digital media in shaping personal relationships. keywords collaboration; dance; gender; in-game marriage; multiplayer online game; sexual orientation introduction and background multiplayer online games (mogs) provide software platforms that “encourage sophisticated collaboration […] in a way that players find fulfilling” (pace et al., 2010, p. 233) via computermediated and avatar-mediated communication. previous research (e.g., nova, 2002) has shown that ingame collaboration tends to be task-driven and functional: players collaborate because it is imperative for success in the game, both for winning battles and for “leveling up” their avatars. moreover, ingame collaboration is prototypically large-scale and highly organized, as illustrated by world of warcraft (wow) guilds (e.g., williams et al., 2006) and raiding (bardzell et al., 2012). in contrast, although intimate, affection-driven, and small-scale collaborations also occur in mogs, including collaborations mediated via romantic relationships, they have been much less studied. one example is in-game marriage. historically, in-game marriage has its roots in cyber marriage in text-based muds (multi-user dungeons/domains), a predecessor of mogs. in the virtual weddings studied by curtis (1997), ingame marriage represented a serious commitment that often extended into “real-life.” other researchers have characterized in-game marriage as part of the playful game experience (e.g., wu et al., 2007). gender stereotypes exist (e.g., only males are supposed to propose marriage; females accept or not), but in-game marriage can also “shake binary gender roles” (wu et al., p. 87) due to gender switching and the performative nature of gender in the game (li et al., 2008). some studies have addressed fantasy mog players’ intimate in-game experiences in general (e.g., pace et al., 2010), and others have considered how players’ online romances impact their offline relationships (e.g., kolotkin et al., 2012). however, none of these studies focuses on collaborative online gaming environments. methods this study asks: how does in-game marriage affect (and effect) mog players’ collaborative behaviors, and relatedly, how does packaging strategic collaboration as an interpersonal relationship facilitate that partnership’s evolution to an emotional connection? it addresses these questions through an exploratory analysis of audition, a dance battle game released in south korea in 2004, launched in the united states in 2008, and which now attracts more than 300 million players worldwide. audition selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 is a non-violent, non-fantasy mog, with colorful designs, cute avatars, and a popular marriage system (see below) that mediates and facilitates couple-related collaborative behaviors. in contrast with previously studied mogs such as wow, which tend to be male dominated, audition has a balanced gender distribution among its players (female: 48.6%; male: 48.1%; unknown: 3.3%1); thus, it is an especially appropriate mog in which to study marriage, which is overwhelmingly heterosexual, both in mogs and in mainstream society. more and more mogs are developing marriage systems to enhance players’ playful and immersive experiences (lo, 2009; wu et al., 2007). in contrast to the “particularly masculine pursuit” (selwyn, 2007, p. 533) of violent and/or fantasy-based games (e.g., wow) (see figure 1), these games (e.g., dance online, dance groove online, highstreet 5) constitute a growing game industry that attracts many female as well as some gay male players. figure 1: login screens of audition and wow (as of january 2013) some couple-related communication is private (e.g., via a private messaging system in the game), but players often publicly self-document their communication and behavior. for this study, we collected all screenshots (n=304) capturing couples' in-game chat logs, dance battle scenarios, and couple behaviors that players had voluntarily uploaded to the official, largest, and most popular englishlanguage out-game public game forum in the u.s. (forums.redbana.com) between 2008 and december 2012. not all couples upload their data to the forum, and some post only text; thus, the screenshots do not represent all couple behavior. to address this limitation, the first author also collected data via ingame participant observation (logged in from a north american server) and video recording in january and february 2013, and couple-related snapshots (n=126) were extracted from the recorded video. using a grounded theory approach (glaser & strauss, 1967), we conducted a content analysis of these data and identified three non-exclusive themes related to couple-mediated collaboration: romancedriven, in-battle and out-battle, and in-game and out-game collaboration. romance-driven collaboration the process of seeking collaborators in audition is often romance-driven, rather than task-driven. that is, players collaborate not only to win dance battles, but to develop potential romantic relationships, where romance is defined according to sternberg’s (1986) typology of love relationships as showing high intimacy and high passion (emotion). audition players can form an ad hoc couple when they join a “couple mode” battle simply by sending a coupling request to a member’s avatar of the opposite gender2 in the “room.” however, to pursue long-term collaborative relationships, players tend to use the game’s marriage system. this includes matching cards (figure 2a) to search for potential “dance partners,” a date planner (figure 2b), and weddings (figure 2c) to officially become a couple with a love license (figure 2d). they may also use an out-game platform to find a “perfect” match. 1  source: redbana.com   2  in one forum thread, a gay male player requested a same-sex coupling. the forum manager suggested that he either choose a female avatar or just form a “friendship couple.”     selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 figure 3 shows a screenshot of a female player’s forum post seeking a partner, indicating that high sociability (being constantly online and engaging with each other) and communication (via skype, shared language) are her main criteria for coupling. the decision to couple is also made based on personality attraction (e.g., hobbies, religion, and background, as listed in matching cards) and on “inner feelings” and “intangible souls” (lo, 2009, p. 394), rather than on skill (e.g., levels, dancing skills, leadership, experience). as in “real-life” relationships, establishing such collaboration is time consuming: players typically devote significant time to developing mutual trust, dependence, and emotional affiliation. in this process, explanations, arguments, expressions of affection, and confessions may occur. in-battle and out-battle collaboration audition is designed as a dance battle game. figure 4a shows a successful “couple dance” battle scenario in the “dancing hall” (the main in-game location). however, couple-mediated collaboration sometimes extends beyond the game’s battle a. a matching card b. a date planner c. a wedding d. a love license figure 2: coupling activities mediated by audition features figure 3: a female player’s forum post seeking a partner selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 theme. figure 4b shows an out-battle collaboration: a couple built a garden together in the “couple farm,” another in-game location. their chat (depicted in the screen capture) after they finished decorating this garden was also a collaborative activity, based on the lyrics of carly rae jepsen’s popular love song “call me maybe”: one member of the couple typed a line from the song, and the other typed the next line. in this way, they showed both coordination and romantic feeling. couples also work together to design their clothes, poses, and acessories to consturct a “perfectly matched” couple image (figures 4c, 4d). these activities consume time, energy, and money, but they do not benefit players in terms of game status or levels. the probable motivation is the emotional intensity that the couples feel or seek through the development of a romantic relationship. a. in-battle dance competition b. out-battle garden in farm c. out-battle matching clothing and accessories d. out-battle matching poses figure 4: examples of in-battle and out-battle couple collaboration in-game and out-game collaboration compared to other mog collaborations, the collaborations of audition couples are more likely to cross the boundary between the game world and out-game worlds due to their emotional intensity, which can be similar to what is experienced in committed real-life relationships (kolotkin et al., 2012). some audition couples post an account of their love story to the public web forum associated with the game, composed of in-game screenshots, real life photos, narratives, cartoons, and decorations. the screenshots in figure 5 show two examples of audition couples’ out-game romantic collaboration: a co-composed love story and a co-designed forum signature. moreover, couples’ chat logs indicate that they tend to use other media channels, such as skype, to communicate outside the game. they also conduct couple-related activities outside the game: for example, one couple scheduled an out-game date—watching xfinity movies together—while competing with another couple in a dance battle. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 discussion audition is a non-violent, non-fantasy game with many female players; accordingly, collaboration, an activity often claimed to be favored by females, differs between audition and the violent and fantasy games described in previous literature. in particular, the packaging of collaboration in terms of romantic coupling caters to young females’ interest in interpersonal relationship formation. to be sure, female gamers likely play as males sometimes so that there will be enough males in the game to form couples with, and some gay male gamers take on the role of females in order to form a couple. however, these gender shifts re-inscribe, rather than call into question, the overall heteronormativity of the game environment. thus this exploratory study points to the importance of taking gender (and sexual orientation) into account when analyzing participation in, and the dynamics of, mog play. since asian players are very active in audition, it also calls for a deeper investigation of the role of culture in in-game marriage, in that emotional expression can easily be affected by cultural norms. audition, like other mogs, is a designed environment, and its in-game coupling features both guide and support collaboration. our study suggests that audition players are not passive users of the designed coupling features, however, but rather appropriate those technical features as active creators of sophisticated, emotional computer-mediated collaboration. more generally, the study of the connection between collaboration and intimacy in mogs can shed light on the role of digital media in shaping personal relationships as discussed by baym (2010) and turkle (2011), such as how players develop and maintain romantic relationships that start online, what the characteristics are of their online communication and expressions of affection, and whether their online romances negatively impact their offline relationships. references bardzell, j., nichols, j., pace, t., & bardzell, s. (2012). come meet me at ulduar: progression raiding in world of warcraft. in proceedings of the acm 2012 conference on computer supported cooperative work (pp. 603-612). february 11-15, seattle, washington. acm. baym, n. (2010). personal connections in the digital age: digital media and society. cambridge: polity. curtis, p. (1997). mudding: social phenomena in text-based virtual realities. in s. kiesler (ed.), culture of the internet (pp. 121-142). mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum. glaser, b.g., & strauss, a.l. (1967). the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. chicago, il: aldine a. a love story b. a forum signature figure 5. examples of audition couples’ out-game collaboration a. a love story b. a forum signature selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 6 kolotkin, r., williams, m., lloyd, c., & hallford, e. (2012). does loving an avatar threaten real life marriage? journal of virtual worlds research, 5(3). retrieved february 2, 2013, from http://jvwr-ojsutexas.tdl.org/jvwr/index.php/jvwr/article/view/6296 li, n., jackson, m., & trees, a. (2008). managing dialectical contradictions in massively multiplayer online role-playing game relationships. games and culture, 3(1), 76–97. lo, k. c. (2009). the web marriage game, the gendered self, and chinese modernity. cultural studies, 23(3), 381–403. nova, n. (2002). awareness tools: lessons from quake-like. in proceedings of playing with the future conference. april 5-7, toronto, ontario, canada. pace, t., bardzell, s., & bardzell, j. (2010). the rogue in the lovely black dress: intimacy in world of warcraft. in proceedings of the 28th international conference on human factors in computing systems (chi’ 2010) (pp. 233-242). april 10–15, atlanta, georgia, usa. acm. selwyn, n. (2007). hi-tech=guy-tech? an exploration of undergraduate students’ gendered perceptions of information and communication technologies. sex roles, 56(7), 525-536. steinberg, r. j. (1986). a triangular theory of love. psychological review, 93(2), 119-135. turkle, s. (2011). alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other. new york: basic books williams, d., ducheneaut, n., xiong, l., zhang, y., yee, n., & nickell, e. (2006). from tree house to barracks: the social life of guilds in world of warcraft. games and culture, 1(4), 338-361. wu, w., fore, s., wang, x., & ho, p. s. y. (2007). beyond virtual carnival and masquerade in-game marriage on the chinese internet. games and culture, 2(1), 59-89. microsoft word airformatted4.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 collective intelligence in journalism: the conflict and the interplay of the logic of the crowd and the logic of journalism tanja aitamurto stanford university introduction professional journalists are increasingly using crowdsourcing as a knowledge search method, thus aiming to channel the crowd’s collective intelligence into to their news articles and feature stories (aitamurto, 2013, vehkoo 2013). by so doing, they hope to discover useful knowledge, which can improve the quality and relevance of their stories (afuah and tucci, 2012, brabham, 2013, aitamurto, 2015). thus they rely on the twin virtues of collective intelligence, those virtues being the large number of participants and the cognitive diversity of the participant crowd (levy, 1997, landemore, 2013; page, 2008). this paper shows that when collective intelligence is harnessed to professional journalism, it can lead to a more efficient knowledge search. however, the large number of submissions from a diverse crowd cause also complexities, turning the virtues of collective intelligence to perils, as is shown in this paper. case profiles, methods and data case profiles. the data in this study are drawn from five cases of crowdsourced journalism in finland and sweden. the cases include several instances, in which professional journalists crowdsourced knowledge for articles in established publications. the readers were asked to share their knowledge, experience, and expertise as bases for stories, which were then written by professional journalists. the readers participated voluntarily online to the investigations. the cases are described in the following: case a. schoolbook investigation, quality in services, and gender differences in math and science education. three story processes were opened up for online participation on two established magazines’ blogs, on social media, and on a specific platform (huuhkaja.fi) for crowdsourcing information and co-creation with readers in 2011 to 2012. the stories examined incorrect information in physics schoolbooks, quality problems in finnish products and services and gender inequalities in math and science education. the journalists crowdsourced several parts of the story process by asking the readers to identify incorrect information in schoolbooks and asking for sources that could be interviewed. they received hundreds of submissions from the crowd. the stories were published in the leading science magazine in finland and in the largest suggested citation (apa): aitamurto, t. (2015, october 21-24) collective intelligence in journalism: the conflict and the interplay of the logic of the crowd and the logic of journalism. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http:// spir.aoir.org. women’s magazine in finland. these three stories are grouped together because the stories were accredited to the same journalists and the story processes were similar. case b. home loan interest map. in 2012, svenska dagbladet, the leading daily newspaper in sweden, crowdsourced a mortage interest rate investigation. the participants submitted their mortgage interest rates by filling out a digital form. by july 2014, about 50,000 interest-rate submissions were placed on the crowd map. users could compare rates employing several variables, such as zip code, bank, and the length of the loan. the interest-rate map resulted in dozens of articles about mortgage interest rates, provoking a nationwide discussion. case c. development aid story and senior care story. svenska dagbladet crowdsourced two story processes to the public in 2009 and 2010. the stories covered the efficiency of development aid allocations by the swedish government and the quality of senior care. the investigations attracted hundreds of submissions, led to several stories in print and online, exposed problems in the systems, and provoked discussion in sweden. case d. stock short-selling investigation. in 2011, the leading daily newspaper in finland crowdsourced investigations about stock short-selling. the newspaper published stock trade reports online with instructions for readers about what to look for in the documents. the readers were asked to report their findings on an online form to the journalist. based on the crowdsourced information, several unethical or questionable trading activities were identified. the reporter received also an unexpected tip leading to the discovery of a tax evasion scheme within the largest co-operative bank in finland. the stor led to the firing of a bank executive in early 2012. case e. my own olivia. an established lifestyle magazine in finland, called olivia magazine, crowdsourced a magazine on an online platform my own olivia (www.omaolivia.fi). the process attracted about 600 participants and resulted to thousands of submissions. altogether 15 stories were crowdsourced for a magazine issue. methods and data for this research, i conducted 42 in-depth interviews with 20 journalists leading the crowdsourced investigations. in some cases, the interviewees were interviewed several times during the story process. the interviewees are referred to numbers 1-20 in the findings section. the interview data were analyzed following strauss and corbin’s (1998) analytical coding system, resulting into the following main categories: i) manifestations of the journalistic and crowd’s logic ii) impact of collective intelligence on journalistic norms, practices, and ideals. findings the crowd as a useful knowledge source crowdsourcing resulted into efficient knowledge search and discovery in all the cases. in several cases the crowd provided leads and tips that the journalists wouldn’t most likely have discovered otherwise. moreover, the input from a diverse participant crowd helped the journalists see multiple perspectives in the story, as is illuminated in the following excerpt from a journalist, who worked on the story about gender differences in math and science education: you learn much more, because you need to examine a matter related to the topic you maybe didn’t think if examining yourself. you’ll get a more holistic and a more full picture about the matter, because, of course, you’ll always just take a more narrow angle to explain the matter, based on what you are interested in, but when you see and address the others’ interest, it widens the scope (20). the crowd as a complexity working with the crowd came also with complexities. the more active the crowd, the more input there was for the journalists to synthesize. similar challenge appears in other realms in which crowdsourcing is applied, like in crowdsourced policymaking (aitamurto and landemore, 2015). therefore, organizing and synthesizing the crowd’s input was laborious, particularly in cases in which the submissions were qualitative. the crowdsourced material served only as a raw-material in the stories — the journalists had to process it further so that it could be weaved into the stories. furthermore, the journalists had to adjust to the uncontrolled behavior of the crowd, which slowed down the process, as described in the following excerpt from a journalist: the unpredictability, you have to throw yourself into that and give the process some time, because you can’t prepare the story too much. or you can prepare the story, but the story can turn out to be something totally different than you thought. you don’t know, where the train is going when you jump on it. (21) moreover, the more submissions there were, the harder it was for the journalists to verify the facts. in the home loan interest case the number of submissions was 50,000, and the journalists couldn’t crosscheck the crowd’s input, but they still used the data in their stories, reminding the readers in the article that the data have not been verified. to this end, the twin virtues of collective intelligence challenge traditional journalistic practices, norms and ideals. table 1 summarizes the differences and commonalities in the logic of the crowd and the logic of journalism. table 1. comparison of the logic of the crowd and the logic of professional journalism. element in crowdsourcing the logic of the crowd the logic of professional journalism the nature of participants unknown, undefined, anonymous often known experts and verifiable sources size of the crowd large small number of sources number of input large, up to tens of thousands small, typically a couple of sources format of input varies from short to long, from quantitative to qualitative submissions short interviews need for synthesis/aggregation needs to be developed for every case no need to synthesize large numbers conclusions the two fundamental elements of collective intelligence, large number of participants and their cognitive diversity, lead to efficient knowledge search in professional journalism. however, when the logics of the crowd and the logics of journalism collide, the virtues of collective intelligence turn into challenges. the larger the crowd, the more time and effort the journalists have to invest in processing and synthesizing the crowd’s input. that makes crowdsourced journalism laborious. moreover, due to the lack of an efficient data verification mechanism, the journalists can not verify all the crowdsourced information they use in their stories, and they end up compromising the journalistic norm of data verification and accuracy. that creates a serious vulnerability to professional journalism, and can, over time, undermine the credibility of journalism. to mitigate the harm caused by the conflict between these two logics, crowdsourced journalism needs better mechanisms for synthesizing and verifying the crowd input. those mechanisms will enable scaling up crowdsourced journalistic processes, otherwise the conflict of the logics will prevent an efficient use of crowdsourcing in professional journalism. references afuah an and tucci cl (2012) crowdsourcing as a solution to distant search. academy of management review 37: 3. 355-375. aitamurto, t. 2013 “balancing between open and closed: co-creation in magazine journalism.” digital journalism. 1 (2) pp. 229-251. aitamurto, t. (2015) crowdsourcing as a knowledge search method in digital journalism: ruptured ideals and blended responsibility. digital journalism. doi: 10.1080/21670811.2015.1034807 aitamurto, t. and landemore, h. (2015) five design principles for crowdsourced policymaking: assessing the case of crowdsourced off-road traffic law in finland. journal of social media for organizations. vol. 2, issue 1. pp. 1-19. brabham, d. c. (2013). crowdsourcing. the mit press essential knowledge series. cambridge: massachusetts institute of technology. landemore, h. (2013) democratic reason: politics, collective intelligence, and the rule of the many. princeton nj: princeton university press. levy, p. (1997) collective intelligence: mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace, cambridge, ma: perseus books. page, s. 2007. the difference: how the power of diversity creates better groups, firms, schools and societies. princeton, nj: princeton university press. vehkoo, j. (2013). crowdsourcing in investigative journalism. report. reuters institute for the study of journalism. microsoft word klastrup july uploadnational body.docx selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 global face with a national body? facebook appropriation and use in a national context lisbeth klastrup it-university of copenhagen denmark klastrup@itu.dk abstract this paper presents a study of facebook in a national context, examining language use, friend networks, and content interaction and sharing. based on a survey (n=739), six interviews with people living in denmark, and ethnographic observation on site, the paper present findings which indicate that danes (of danish origin) on facebook mostly interact in danish with other danes they know, focusing on their own life and local news, whereas danes with a mixed background interact with people in several countries and in several, but still only with people close to them. a majority share international entertainment (such as youtube videos), or sign up for international groups and activities on facebook. a minority seem to be living in a “danish capsule” with no or very little transnational interaction. nothing in these findings indicate strong globalising effects by being on facebook, but mundane global (sharing) activity needs to be examined further. keywords facebook, nationality, identity, use, cosmopolitanism introduction when facebook hit 1 billion users, founder mark zuckerberg in a facebook post stated that “..hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world too.”. this quote encapsulates the vision of facebook as a globalising social product: it aims at connecting everybody across the world. as a widely used media platform, facebook does indeed hold the promise of turning all of its users into citizens of the global village in that: ”..media can play a crucial role in creating the conditions for cosmopolitan citizenship, through both the thematization of difference and the representation of empirical commonalities and universals” (szersynski and urry, 2006). but in practice, are we really internationally oriented and cosmopolitan in our use of facebook, or do we mostly stick to our own (country, language and national identity)? surprisingly few researchers have looked at social network site use on a national level, and those who have done so, have mostly done the study from a diasporic, transnational or expatriate perspective (see for instance hiller og franz 2004, giorgiu 2006, imre 2009, shklovski 2010, myase 2011, jansson 2011) or with a focus on potential differences in use based on ethnicity and race (see hargittai 2007, lewis et al 2008, grasmuck et al 2009) or cross cultural use comparisons (nemer & das 2012, cho & park 2012). a notable exception, however, is daniel miller’s ethnographic study of the uses of facebook in trinidad (miller 200), in which he argues that “there is no longer any such thing as facebook. there are only the particular genres of use that have developed for different peoples and region” (miller, 2011, p. x). this project supports this claim in that it looks at particular use patterns in the “region” of denmark, taking its point of departure in media-oriented studies of danish identity; and of mundane or banal cosmopolitanism. thus, this study aims to contribute with new knowledge about national use and appropriation of facebook, in a culturally and racially homogeneous scandinavian country, which is often referred to as a “facebook nation” (in denmark, facebook penetration is at least 52%, much more for younger ages). specifically, the study examines language use practices and interaction around content, and it looks at network connections and examples of “global” engagement in order to understand how inward-looking or cosmopolitan, danes and the danish nation are on facebook. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 method and data the findings presented here are based on data from an explorative survey distributed via facebook and twitter in fall 2010 (n=739), and six individual qualitative interviews conducted in december 2012 and may 2013; supplemented by continuous observation of practices on the site. this data has been supplemented with official statistical data, when available. findings 672 of the respondents in the 2010 survey were of danish origin (both parents born in denmark) henceforth referred to as “danes”, the rest of varying ethnic background. though not representative of the danish population as such, answers are still useful, in that most people living in denmark are still “danes” by birth. a majority of all respondents communicated with other facebook users only in danish (24% ) or mostly in danish (52,5%). if they used another language, it was almost always english (552 out of 565 respondents), and less that 8% used other languages. the “danes” (n=612) friends on facebook mostly consisted of other danes and people they had met when travelling (46%), 22% replied that their friends consisted of danes, second generation immigrant and travel friends. 12% had danes only in their network. in terms of content, survey answers showed that disregarding ethnic origin, people mostly (median) interacted with their friends about what was going in their own life, by sharing local and international links to youtube videos and similar entertainment. the “danes” discussed danish news rather than international news, whereas the other categories of respondents more often discussed international news. i also asked about respondent’s participation in cross-national events, providing several examples. 134 out of 701 had never engaged in cross-national activities. 356 had joined (fan) groups for american tv shows or celebrities, a similar number had forwarded a video from a friend in another country (339), joined groups for international brands or products (333). people had also joined activist groups (285), ”facebook events” such as the doppelganger week (199), or offline event activity such as earth hour (252). respondents additionally pointed to activities like ”worldwide knit in public – wwwkip”, ”world geek day”, ”hug a korean day”, flash mobs, “live chat with snoop dogg” as examples of what they perceived as cross-national activities. the 2012 2013 interviews with six people of both “danish” and other ethnic origin based in denmark showed that the three born danes amongst them had a very small, if any at all, international network and almost exclusively used facebook to communicate about personal matters and local/national news. the other three interviewees used facebook primarily to keep in touch with both danish friends, friends from stays in other countries, and family in their own or their parent’s home country. one used it very consciously to keep in touch with friends met on her travels, to have a place to stay when travelling again. though these three often used danish language, they switched to other languages in their facebook communication when the audience in context required it. it also became evident that what these respondents themselves perceived as important differences in use was not primarily based on national-cultural differences, but rather generational differences. so far this study indicates that many danes use facebook almost exclusively in a national context. however, on an individual level, people interact both as nationalists and banal cosmopolitans. they maintain close relations with friends and family in denmark and in their (parent’s) home country; they perform national identity through the use of language, choice of friend ties and communicational content. but they also share a mundane cosmopolitan taste in humour, entertainment and “human interest” issues which are also transnational. following christensen, jansson og christensen (2011), this suggests that “being at home” with the media involves both enforcing geopolitical borders as well as participating in various fan, activist and taste cultures which cut across national divides. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 further work occasionally global events take place which also reverberate in the danish facebook sphere. a recent example is the stepping down of the catholic pope (february 2013), resulting in a resurgence of a variety of pope memes on facebook. one particular popular meme (based on shares) amongst danes was the “prince henrik for pope” meme, which showed the danish queen’s husband face insert in a pope image macro. it is well-known gossip amongst danes that prince henrik would like the title of “king”, but cannot have it. the danified pope meme thus functioned both as a global news commentary meme as well as a danish in-joke. in my coming research, i will look more closely into the spreading and appropriation of transnational memes amongst the facebook danes, further exploring how mundane globality is transformed in a national setting. references danske medier (2012). danskernes brug af internettet 2012. københavn, danske medier. christensen, m., jansson a., og christensen, c.(2011). introduction. in m. christensen, a. jansson og c. christensen (red), online territories – globalization, mediated practice and social space. new york, peter lang publishing: 3-11. cho, s.e. & park, h.w. a qualitative analysis of cross-cultural new media research: sns use in asia and the west. quality & quantity 1, p. 1-12. georgiou, m. (2006). diaspora, identity and the media: diasporic transnationalism and mediated spatialities. new jersey: hampton press. grasmuck,s.. martin, j., zhao s. (2009). ethno-racial identity displays on facebook. journal of computermediated communication 15(19, 158-188 hargittai, e. (2007). whose space? differences among users and non-users of social network sites. journal of computer-mediated communication, 13(1), article 14. imre, a. (2009). national intimacy and post-socialist networking. european journal of cultural studies 12: 219 jansson, a. (2011). cosmopolitan capsules: mediated networking and social control in expatriate spaces. in m. christensen, a. jansson og c. christensen (red), online territories – globalization, mediated practice and social space. new york, peter lang publishing, 239-255 miller, d. (2011). tales from facebook. cambridge, uk, polity press. christensen, m. (2011). online social media, communicative practice and complicit surveillance in transnational contexts. in m. christensen, a. jansson og c. christensen (red), online territories – globalization, mediated practice and social space. new york, peter lang publishing, 222-238. nemer, d. & das, a. (2012). impression management on facebook and orkut: a cross cultural study of brazilians and indians. presentation at the 13th annual conference of the association of internet researchers, university of salford, manchester, october 2012. lewis, k., kaufman, j., gonzalez, m., wimmer, a., christakis, n. (2008). tastes, ties, and tie: a new social network dataset using facebook.com. social networks, 30330–342. shklovski, i. (2010). social ties for the soul: how russians reconnect with the past on social network sites. paper presented at the annual meeting of the international communication association in singapore 2010. szerszynski, b. og urry, j. (2006). visuality, mobility and the cosmopolitan: inhabiting the world from afar. i the british journal of sociology, vol 57, 1: 113-131. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 friends or followers? the relations between german soccer clubs and their fans on twitter katrin weller gesis leibniz institure for the social sciences germany katrin.weller@gesis.org axel bruns queensland university of technology australia a.bruns@qut.edu.au abstract this paper shows how soccer clubs from germany’s first division have started to use twitter. analysis is based on tweets from and to club accounts as well as on follower numbers, and specific clubs are selected for case studies. this approach reveals that twitter mirrors the conflicts between professional sports and traditional fandom. keywords sports communication; fandom; soccer; twitter introduction in this study we examine twitter usage in germany’s first division soccer league, the 1. bundesliga. as a major european sports league with an enormous fan base and high national media coverage we expected bundesliga clubs to make use of twitter for interacting with their fan base, and fans to get in touch with their clubs. yet german clubs have been slow in entering the twittersphere, leading to difficult situations around unofficial and inactive accounts. the most notable cases will be presented below. we applied common metrics (bruns & stieglitz, 2013) such as tweet types (retweets, genuine @replies and original tweets) to describe different behavior of soccer clubs. furthermore, @messages addressed at the clubs’ accounts act as a measure of fan response. this study is part of a broader research perspective comparing the twitter usage of first division soccer clubs in australia, germany and england. tweets from the accounts of all first league clubs in these countries as well as @messages directed at them were collected during the season 2011/2012. follower numbers of these clubs have been gathered on a monthly basis. with twitter offering a novel opportunity for soccer clubs to establish an open relationship with their fans, we investigated whether soccer clubs make use of this and how intensely their fans respond to them. as auty (2002, 278) states, “the internet has clearly established itself as a means of mobilization for football fans in a variety of ways”. this mainly referred to online spaces such as forums and closed communities attached to fan clubs’ websites. other studies show how such online channels are used to establish social identity (gibbons & dixon, 2010) and communities (krøvel, 2012) and to foster “subcultural practices” (merkel, 2012, 269). we assumed that the specific communicative structure provided by twitter has the potential to go beyond closed online fan communities and enable a new form of dialogue between the clubs themselves and their fans within twitter’s open environment. soccer clubs between marketing and fandom soccer as the most popular sport in germany keeps a very high level of professionalism both in performance as well as in marketing. the first division of germany’s soccer league, the 1. bundesliga, generated collective revenue of nearly €1.6 billion in 2009/10, thus being the second strongest european soccer market (and having the largest average attendance in european soccer) (deloitte, 2011). soccer fans in germany are often dissatisfied with the increasing commercialization of their teams and even react in rebellious and subversive ways (merkel, 2012), e.g. to events like the renaming of stadiums after sponsors. against this background, the internet could provide a space for selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 fans to express their discontent and to directly address the clubs, or even to “organize against the commercial power of the large football clubs” (mclean & wainwright, 2009, 54). twitter has the potential to enable new forms of participation, giving new public voices to a fan base which has lost almost all of its influence at the level of club administration. however, in germany twitter mirrors the conflicts between professional sports and traditional fandom, as clubs tend to use it as a tool for classical marketing activities, much like other companies do, rather than for fan interaction. bundesliga clubs and their followers twitter adoption in germany is generally slow (meyer, 2012); and so was the uptake of twitter usage among german football clubs. by now, almost all first division teams have a verified twitter account. in june 2011, however, there were only two verified accounts. consequently it was not always easy to identify each club’s official account. furthermore, a substantial number of clubs changed their twitter handles during the 2011/2012 season. both facts can hinder the successful establishment of a fan base on twitter. overall, the follower numbers of all clubs have been rising during the season (figure 1) and are still rising until today. figure 1: follower numbers of bundesliga clubs during season 2011/12. * @herthabsc and @roteteufel have only been tracked since feb 2012. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 figure 2: tweets by bundesliga clubs during season 2011/12, distinguishing original tweets, retweets, genuine @replies and indicating urls. football clubs in germany use twitter as a tool for broadcast messages, and rarely respond to users or retweet them. this can be seen in the high percentage of original tweets among all tweets (figure 2). some used twitter to promote links to their websites or official press releases, resulting in high numbers of tweets including urls. this illustrates that clubs rather view their fans as passive “followers”; not as equal conversational partners. one exception was 1. fc köln (köln). it is one of only two german clubs that had verified twitter accounts as early as june 2011. köln did respond to and retweeted other twitter users more often than any other bundesliga club, and instituted special twitter activities. for example, they hosted interview sessions with club officials on twitter. german clubs receive far fewer @replies than e.g. the soccer clubs of the far less prominent australian first division (a-league), which engage with their fans more actively through @replies and retweets. the comparatively low level of @replies addressing german clubs, however, does not say anything about the general level of activity by soccer fans. by using the twitter handles of ‘their’ clubs the fans could attempt to make their comments heard by the clubs – yet they do so very rarely. special case studies the great confusion: fc schalke 04 vs. werder bremen in june 2011, the most popular twitter accounts related to the clubs fc schalke 04 (schalke) and sv werder bremen (werder), both well-established bundesliga teams with long histories and numerous fans, had been @fcschalke04 and @werder_bremen (ranked 2nd and 3rd in follower numbers by june 2011; see figure 1). however, both accounts were not officially sanctioned by the respective clubs: the absence of official accounts had provided a space for the development of fan-operated alternatives. both werder and schalke became aware of these fan accounts and reacted quite differently. the @fcschalke04 account was suspended in august 2011, leaving an empty space behind for schalke fans on twitter (figure 2). another schalke fan, who had operated the smaller @s04 account, tells the story of how his account was suspended in august 2011 as the club claimed this twitter handle for its own online activities (nettooor, 2011). @s04 was subsequently appropriated by schalke as the official club account. not only did schalke miss a chance to establish contact with a fan who only wanted to selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 promote his favorite club on twitter (“as i have been a schalke fan for more than 35 years, it struck me that many big bundesliga clubs were present on twitter, but not my schalke04?”, nettooor, 2011) – it also took the club several months to establish their new and official account and enter the top 5 of accounts by follower numbers (figure 1). figure 3: two cases of fan accounts that were closed down in favour of an official club account. by contrast, werder bremen set up their official account @werderbremen in parallel to the existing fan account. before the fan account was shut down in november (figure 3), it first displayed a disclaimer that this was an unofficial account (“inoffizieller account von @leanderwattig”, 13. sep. 2011), and then told the fans that they could now follow the official club’s account at another place (“der ehemalige info-service von werder bremen. verfolge werder jetzt auf der offiziellen twitterseite“, 20. oct. 2011). consequently, follower numbers for the new, official account quickly rose and in october 2011 continued at the same level as the previous unofficial account. the great emptiness: fc bayern münchen another remarkable case is that of germany’s most popular and most successful club fc bayern münchen (bayern), @baymuenchen. in june 2011 it was the account with the most followers (figure 1) – although no tweets had been published by it. the club’s press office confirmed having set it up as a test account, but said they did not use it. still, it had grown to have some 50,000 followers by march 2012 (figure 5). another unofficial account took on the opportunity to actually tweet about bayern, and this @fcbayern_news account became even more popular (figure 4). only ahead of the current 2012/13 season did bayern set up the new, official and verified account @fcbayern, which is actively engaged on twitter and has made strong gains in popularity. the fact that even an inactive account such as the original @baymuenchen can generate high follower numbers shows that some fans obviously are satisfied with expressing their fandom through following a particular brand, rather than expecting a steady stream of official updates. on the other hand, the popularity of unofficial accounts also shows that fans are interested in news about their club, even if it does not come from authoritative sources. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 figure 4: official and unofficial accounts for bayern münchen. figure 5: account @baymuenchen (now suspended) with 49,934 followers but without tweets, on 19 march 2012. conclusions and outlook by now, german bundesliga clubs have finally established their official presence on twitter, and most of all use it for marketing purposes. they rarely interact with their fans, who in return rarely address the clubs’ accounts through @messages. in future work, it will be useful to also include individual players’ perspectives and to qualitatively study the communication between clubs and fans. references auty, c. (2002). football fan power and the internet: net gains? aslib proceedings, 54(1), 273-279. bruns, a., & stieglitz, s. (2013). towards more systematic twitter analysis: metrics for tweeting activities. international journal of social research methodology. doi: 10.1080/13645579.2012.756095 deloitte (2011). annual review of football finance 2011: highlights. retrieved from http://www.deloitte.com/assets/dcom-unitedkingdom/local%20assets/documents/industries/ sports%20business%20group/uk_sbg_arff11_highlights.pdf gibbons, t., & dixon, k. (2010). surf’s up! a call to take english soccer fan interactions on the internet more seriously. soccer and society, 11(5), 599-613. krøvel, r. (2012). new media and identity among fans of a norwegian football club. first monday, 17(5-7). retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewarticle/2882/3208 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 6 mclean, r., & wainwright, d.w. (2009). social networks, football fans, fantasy and reality: how corporate and media interests are invading our lifeworld. journal of information, communication and ethics in society, 7(1), 54-71. merkel, u. (2012). football fans and clubs in germany: conflicts, crises and compromises. soccer and society, 13(3), 359-376. meyer, d. (2012). what does twitter want with germany? gigaom, 27 mar. 2012. retrieved from http://gigaom.com/2012/03/27/what-does-twitter-want-with-germany/ nettoor (2011). account @s04 suspended #fail schalke. 30 aug. 2011. retrieved from http://www.nettooor.be/?p=1327 license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. introduction soccer clubs between marketing and fandom bundesliga clubs and their followers special case studies the great confusion: fc schalke 04 vs. werder bremen the great emptiness: fc bayern münchen conclusions and outlook references license aoir2018-finalsubmission selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): smith,t. (2018, october 10-13 hatred of/and democracy: the political contradictions of reddit’s moderation structure. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. hatred of/and democracy: the political contradictions of reddit’s moderation structure dr. trevor smith carleton university in february 2018, chat transcripts of a conversation between the moderators of reddit subforum r/canada were leaked by one of the participants. these transcripts show a debate about whether or not to ban a user with a notoriously racist posting history. in the course of this conversation, one of the moderators reveals he is "slowly becoming a white nationalist." this moderator scandal capped a long decline in the quality of comments posted to r/canada which has been repeatedly remarked upon by users. the fall of r/canada into becoming a safe haven for hate presents an interesting case through which to examine the fundamental contradictions in the way reddit's communities are governed. despite being one of the few nascent sites of possible political space, reddit retains a thoroughly anti-political governance structure. if we think of reddit's subreddits in terms of governmental structures, they tend to resemble authoritarian dictatorships more than the user-driven democracy that reddit likes to present itself as to the public. part of this disconnect is driven by the contradiction between the role of human moderation and reddit's user-driven public relevance algorithm. reddit once billed itself in explicitly democratic terms with its slogan of "today's headlines, chosen by you, not editors." reddit's upvote/downvote system provides a mechanism for users to help shape what is more or less visible on the site. yet reddit does not seem to trust their own algorithm to do its job, as each subreddit is governed by moderators who are vested with complete authority over the content of a subreddit. like in a hereditary monarchy, their authority is based on their ability to have either come first or to have been appointed by someone who came before. furthermore, the arguments provided to legitimize this form of political authority tend to be a rehash of plato’s arguments against democracy. here is where interesting contradictions arise, as if the algorithm did its job, hate should fall to the bottom and ultimately be buried by downvotes. but reddit does not trust the people to vote correctly, and thus the human layer of moderation is given complete authority over content. however, placing large communities in the hands of a few individuals with arbitrary authority has been a breeding ground for abuse.1 typical analysis2 positions online hate as stemming from a lack of accountability and consequences, and tends to result in the demand for more control of online spaces. in the case of r/canada, the moderators who were not so sympathetic to hate seemed to have misdiagnosed the problem of increased racism and hate in two ways. the first was the idea that the subreddit was suffering from a lack of moderation, leading to the addition of more moderators (including, strangely, moderators of the rival r/metacanada subreddit which is dedicated to mocking the users of r/canada). the second misdiagnosis came in the form of believing the problem of hate stemmed from a lack of politeness rather than a lack of civility.3 many users reported having comments removed in which they impolitely challenged racism, while the uncivil racist comments were allowed to stay, sewing confusion among the user base over moderation policies. the argument that hate stems from a lack of control and a lack of consequences betray what jacques rancière4 described as the very common hatred of democracy. despite the fact that everyone is willing to pledge allegiance to the word democracy, in reality the practice of democracy is met with general disdain. drawing on rancière’s analysis of the perception of democracy, i argue that the rise of hate on r/canada is symptomatic of the lack of trust in the people that is characteristic of the structure of many online communities which are dedicated to political discussion. while reddit could be positioned as having a dual structure with a democratic algorithm and authoritarian moderators, the actual interplay between the two elements of moderation tend to work together to undermine the possibility of political discourse. with moderators prone to personal bias, extreme reactions, and lacking accountability to their communities, algorithmic moderation is usually posited as the alternative. in the case of reddit, their “democratic” algorithm is actually fundamentally anti-political. as theorists of agonistic democracy5 argue, politics is inherently conflictual and exists because of disagreement. reddit’s public relevance algorithm works well on subreddits dedicated to fluffy animals where no one wants to see mean comments, but breaks when the discussion turns political. up and down votes become proxies for agree/disagree, and comments that are politically valuable since they generate discussion can end up hidden because the algorithm punishes unpopularity and controversy. reddit’s algorithm produces an echo chamber effect, or in reddit parlance a “circlejerk,” by hiding legitimate discussion in favour of empty yet popular platitudes. 1 alfonso, fernando. “meet the reddit power user who helped bring down r/technology.” the daily dot, april 22, 2014. http://www.dailydot.com/politics/reddit-maxwellhill-moderator-technology-flaw/. auerbach, david. “does reddit have a transparency problem?” slate, october 9, 2014. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/reddit_scandals_does_the_site_have_a_tra nsparency_problem.html. 2 suler, john. “the online disinhibition effect.” cyberpsychology & behavior 7, no. 3 (2004): 321–26. dreyfus, hubert l. on the internet. london: routledge, 2008. 3 papacharissi, zizi. “democracy online: civility, politeness, and the democratic potential of online political discussion groups.” new media & society 6, no. 2 (2004): 259–83. 4 rancière, jacques. hatred of democracy. translated by steve corcoran. london: verso, 2009. 5 mouffe, chantal. on the political. london: routledge, 2005. honig, bonnie. political theory and the displacement of politics. ithaca: cornell university press, 1993. in this sense reddit suffers from a doubly anti-political structure. moderators act like feudal lords defending their territory and the algorithmic structure of the site suppresses political disagreement. here again, rancière’s claims about a hatred of democracy lingering under the surface of claims of fidelity to democracy are instructive. thinking back to r/canada, the double problem of anti-politics shows itself, as moderators sympathetic to hate remove users who challenge the hate, while moderators who would prefer not have hate can only think in terms of top-down solutions. the idea of fostering a democratic culture in which hate is met with persistent rebuke is not even on the radar of possibilities. if human moderators and algorithmic moderation are both “worse,” how can this debate about how to foster genuine political discussion online be solved? my argument is to turn back to politics itself. the problem is not at the level of overly biased humans vs. overly objective algorithms but really a question of political theory. when users of a political discussion website, such as the many subreddits dedicated to the topic, feel like they are merely peasants invading the realm of a lord with arbitrary powers backed by a system of law based on contradictions, it’s no wonder that the peasants are less than civil. i suggest that online politics requires a shift toward democratic structures that allow the users to be direct participants in how the community is governed. by investing users with a say in the structure of a site, a culture of ownership and buy-in can be fostered in which users feel like they are not merely guests or intruders in someone else’s space, but are responsible themselves for the quality of the space. suggestions such as this are often met with skepticism due to the claim that such a system would be unable to deal with trolls and hate. yet the arguments against online democracy once again mirror plato’s critique of democracy as both relying on universal impersonal laws which lack the care and concern of a human moderator who can guide the flock and as a situation governed by individuals motivated only by their own pleasure. ironically, as rancière points out, the critiques of online democracy are the same as the critiques of ancient democracy, which we are told repeatedly is an unworkable model in our modern technological context. returning to the issue of hate on r/canada, perhaps the original evil is not the unruly and conflicted masses as is so often is blamed, but instead the figure of the moderator rallying the mob around a singular authority promoting hate. i flesh this position out with further references to the history of the decline of r/canada, in which a sudden influx of moderator activity left many users baffled about the rules and set the stage for hate to become prevalent, demonstrating the point that hate is a function of top down control and not of its absence. how user comments on a news site affect perceptions of journalistic quality. an experimental study using structural equation modeling selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): kümpel, a. s., & springer, n. (2015, october 21-24). how user comments on a news site affect perceptions of journalistic quality. an experimental study using structural equation modeling. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. how user comments on a news site affect perceptions of journalistic quality. an experimental study using structural equation modeling anna sophie kümpel institute of communication studies and media research, lmu munich nina springer institute of communication studies and media research, lmu munich user comments: relevance and influence commenting articles is by far the most widely used form of user participation on online news sites (cf. hermida, 2011; richardson & stanyer, 2011). even though user comments usually appear “after most if not all of the journalistic decision have been made” (reich, 2011, p. 96), they are not only of high relevance to (perceptions of) online journalism but also challenge our understanding of theorizing media effects. news articles and user-generated information—like user comments or metrics about sharing and ratings—are inseparable in modern-day online journalism. media effects research has to take these interdependencies into account and not only focus on the media content itself but also on its wider embedding. although previous studies have shown that only relatively few online users regularly comment on news articles themselves (e.g. boczkowski & mitchelstein, 2012; for germany see ec public relations gmbh, 2014), user comments are generally appreciated and read quite frequently (purcell, rainie, mitchell, rosenstiel, & olmstead, 2010). hence, albeit only representing a limited amount of viewpoints, comments bear the potential to provide other readers with additional information and opinions that can serve as cues when assessing public opinion (e.-j. lee & jang, 2010; peter, rossmann, & keyling, 2014). after reading others’ comments to a news article, people might infer public sentiments and thus perceive the covered issue or the article itself differently than in a ‘cue-free’ environment. researchers have just begun to study the effects of user comments on individual and public perceptions. existing studies have shown distinct effects and indicate that comments can influence perceived media bias (houston, hansen, & nisbett, 2011), inferences about public opinion (e.-j. lee, 2012), impressions of political candidates (j. lee & lim, 2014) and even risk perceptions (anderson, brossard, scheufele, xenos, & ladwig, 2014). our goal is to look at a possible outcome that was not investigated yet— the influence on perceptions of journalistic quality. this offers an interesting field of study for two main reasons: first, if comments indeed affect quality perceptions, this has implications for media image and, more generally, trust in media outlets. second, quality assessments also influence the (future) selection of media. as suggested by the theory of subjective quality assessment (tsqa, cf. wolling, 2009), selection decisions are based on perceived features of the media product. quality assessments can be one of the features that decide whether users are willing to give their attention to a certain media product—or ultimately refuse to do so. method to examine the effects of user comments on perceptions of journalistic quality, we used a 2 × 4 between-subjects experimental design and exposed german participants (n = 224) to an online news article and corresponding user comments. while all participants received the same news article, the user comments varied in terms of (i) support for the issue described in the article (military intervention of the german armed forces against isis) as well as the (ii) addressing of journalistic quality criterions. support was varied on two factor levels, differentiating between endorsing and refusing the military intervention, whereas the comments focusing on journalistic quality criterions either positively or negatively addressed the impartiality of the article or positively or negatively addressed its accuracy. in this paper, we only focus on the effects of the second factor, i.e. the addressing of journalistic quality criterions in user comments. while there is little research on journalistic quality criteria at an international level, german researchers have addressed it rather extensively (e.g. arnold, 2008; jungnickel, 2011; pöttker, 2000; schatz & schulz, 1992; urban & schweiger, 2013; wellbrock & klein, 2014). analyzing this literature, we have identified five dimensions that are—albeit sometimes differently labeled—part of every catalogue of journalistic quality criteria: relevance, comprehensibility, diversity, impartiality and accuracy. in our study, we focused on the last two criteria, because preliminary analysis of user comments revealed that most criticism was actually centered on these aspects. participants were first asked to read the news article that was supposedly published on the german news website spiegel online. this site was chosen, because it is not only highly frequented but also perceived as particularly credible (yougovpsychonomics ag, 2009). afterwards, they were randomly assigned to one of the eight experimental conditions and exposed to a set of five varying user comments.1 participants’ perceptions of journalistic quality were assessed by presenting them statements from previous studies investigating news quality (cf. jungnickel, 2011; urban & schweiger, 2013), to which they responded using a 5-point likert-type scale. measures also included assessment of involvement and knowledge about the issue in question, internet and user comment usage as well as various sociodemographic variables. 1 two of the five comments addressed the issue of the article, both either endorsing or refusing it, two comments addressed journalistic quality criterions, both either praising the article’s impartiality or accuracy or both criticizing its impartiality or accuracy. one comment was irrelevant and only added to increase external validity. results we used structural equation modeling to address our research question with the model offering an acceptable fit for the data (see figure 1): χ2 = 10.147, df = 5, p = .071; srmr = .032; rmsea = .068; and cfi = .978. all standardized path coefficients are statistically significant and provide strong evidence for the influence of user comments on quality assessments. if user comments praise the impartiality of the article, participants indeed perceive the article as being more impartial and neutral (β = .54, p < .001). vice versa, participants perceive the article as being more accurate if user comments positively address the article’s accuracy (β = .34, p < .001). however, the model also indicates that the analytical separated quality dimensions do not affect perceptions exclusively. praising the article’s impartiality in the comments also leads to a better evaluation of its accuracy (β = .37, p < .001), while praising its accuracy leads to a better evaluation of its impartiality (β = .52, p < .001). figure 1 observed structural equation model. ip = impartiality; a = accuracy; standardized path coefficients: ***p < .001; **p < .01; *p < .05. discussion overall, the results provide evidence that comments left by anonymous users on news websites can serve as cues for people’s own assessments. they shape personal perceptions and thus definitely have a say when it comes to the evaluation of journalistic content online. hence, our study not only contributes to the understanding of media effects in an online environment but is also relevant for journalists and media outlets. if journalistic work can be distorted or degraded by negative comments, it seems increasingly crucial for online editorial departments to develop strategies for moderating and dealing with user comments. one approach might be to actively participate in user discussions. meyer & carey (2014) have shown that having an active moderation in the comment section actually increases users’ willingness to post comments. at the same time, this offers the possibility for journalists to respond to criticism early on and to “take ‘emotional and physical ownership’ of the online environments they control” (ibid., p. 225). references anderson, a. a., brossard, d., scheufele, d. a., xenos, m. a., & ladwig, p. (2014). the “nasty effect:” online incivility and risk perceptions of emerging technologies. journal of computer-mediated communication, 19(3), 373–387. http://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12009 arnold, k. (2008). qualität im journalismus – ein integratives konzept [quality in journalism – an integrated concept]. publizistik, 53(4), 488–508. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11616-008-0012-y boczkowski, p. j., & mitchelstein, e. (2012). how users take advantage of different forms of interactivity on online news sites: clicking, e-mailing, and commenting. human communication research, 38(1), 1–22. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.14682958.2011.01418.x ec public relations gmbh. (2014). leserkommentare – welchen einfluss haben sie auf die berichterstattung der medien? [reader comments – which influence do they have on media coverage?]. düsseldorf. hermida, a. (2011). mechanisms of participation. how audience options shape the conversation. in j. b. singer, a. hermida, d. domingo, a. heinonen, s. paulussen, t. quandt, … m. vujnovic (eds.), participatory journalism guarding open gates at online newspapers (pp. 11–33). chichester, west sussex, u.k.; malden, ma: wiley-blackwell. houston, j. b., hansen, g. j., & nisbett, g. s. (2011). influence of user comments on perceptions of media bias and third-person effect in online news. electronic news, 5(2), 79–92. http://doi.org/10.1177/1931243111407618 jungnickel, k. (2011). nachrichtenqualität aus nutzersicht. ein vergleich zwischen leserurteilen und wissenschaftlich-normativen qualitätsansprüchen [news quality from the users' perspective. a comparison between readers' judgments and scientifically-normative quality demands]. medien & kommunikationswissenschaft, (3), 360–378. http://doi.org/10.5771/1615-634x2011-3-360 lee, e.-j. (2012). that’s not the way it is: how user-generated comments on the news affect perceived media bias. journal of computer-mediated communication, 18(1), 32–45. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2012.01597.x lee, e.-j., & jang, y. j. (2010). what do others’ reactions to news on internet portal sites tell us? effects of presentation format and readers’ need for cognition on reality perception. communication research, 37(6), 825–846. http://doi.org/10.1177/0093650210376189 lee, j., & lim, y. (2014). who says what about whom: young voters’ impression formation of political candidates on social networking sites. mass communication and society, 17(4), 553–572. http://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2013.816743 meyer, h. k., & carey, m. c. (2014). in moderation. examining how journalists’ attitudes toward online comments affect the creation of community. journalism practice, 8(2), 213–228. http://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2013.859838 peter, c., rossmann, c., & keyling, t. (2014). exemplification 2.0: roles of direct and indirect social information in conveying health messages through social network sites. journal of media psychology: theories, methods, and applications, 26(1), 19–28. http://doi.org/10.1027/1864-1105/a000103 pöttker, h. (2000). kompensation von komplexität. journalismustheorie als begründung journalistischer qualitätsmaßstäbe [compensation of complexity. journalism theory as the foundation of journalistic quality criteria]. in m. löffelholz (ed.), theorien des journalismus (pp. 375–390). vs verlag für sozialwissenschaften. purcell, k., rainie, l., mitchell, a., rosenstiel, t., & olmstead, k. (2010). understanding the participatory news consumer. pew internet and american life project, 1. retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media/files/reports/2010/understanding%20the%2 0participatory%20news%20consumer.pdf reich, z. (2011). user comments. the transformation of participatory space. in j. b. singer, a. hermida, d. domingo, a. heinonen, s. paulussen, t. quandt, … m. vujnovic (eds.), participatory journalism guarding open gates at online newspapers (pp. 96–117). chichester, west sussex, u.k.; malden, ma: wileyblackwell. richardson, j. e., & stanyer, j. (2011). reader opinion in the digital age: tabloid and broadsheet newspaper websites and the exercise of political voice. journalism, 12(8), 983–1003. http://doi.org/10.1177/1464884911415974 schatz, h., & schulz, w. (1992). qualität von fernsehprogrammen. kriterien und methoden zur beurteilung von programmqualität im dualen fernsehsystem [quality of television programs. criteria and methods to assess program quality in the dual broadcasting system]. media perspektiven, (11), 690–712. urban, j., & schweiger, w. (2013). news quality from the recipients’ perspective: investigating recipients’ ability to judge the normative quality of news. journalism studies, 1–20. http://doi.org/10.1080/1461670x.2013.856670 wellbrock, c.-m., & klein, k. (2014). journalistische qualität – eine empirische untersuchung des konstrukts mithilfe der concept map methode [journalistic quality – an empirical investigation of the construct employing the concept map method]. publizistik, 1–24. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11616-014-0212-6 wolling, j. (2009). the effect of subjective quality assessments on media selection. in t. hartmann (ed.), media choice: a theoretical and empirical overview (pp. 84– 101). new york, london: routledge. yougovpsychonomics ag. (2009, march 30). studie „journalismus 2009“ [study „journalism 2009“]. retrieved from http://www.lifepr.de/pressemitteilung/yougovdeutschland-ag/studie-journalismus-2009-journalisten-aus-sicht-derbundesbuerger-angesehen-aber-manipulierbar/boxid/98411 selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 life  narrative  in  the  #racewars:  terministic  screens  and   twitter  fights     michael  humphrey     colorado  state  university     abstract       discourse  on  the  internet  about  race  has  created  a  new  lens  for  observing  what  lies   behind  denial  of  white  privilege,  giving  researchers  a  new  opportunity  to  see  how  grand   narratives  become  personal  narratives.  this  paper  examines  examples  of  this   phenomenon  by  looking  at  two  denials  of  white  privilege  as  they  developed  in  digital   spaces,  and  argues  that  the  life  stories  we  tell  ourselves  act  as  “terministic  screens”     (burke,  1966),  filters  composed  of  language  that  distort  common  understanding.  after   examining  the  rhetoric  of  white  privilege,  i  propose  the  development  of  “narratives  of   discomfort,”  in  which  white  people  begin  to  re-­tell  their  stories  in  the  light  of  their   privilege.       keywords:  white  privilege,  life  stories,  terministic  screens,  grand  narratives     the  topic  of  white  privilege,  defined  by  kendall  (2013)  as  “an  institutional  (rather  than   personal)  set  of  benefits  granted  to  those  of  us  who,  by  race,  resemble  the  people  who   dominate  the  powerful  positions  in  our  institutions”  (p.  62),  ebbs-­and-­flows  as  a   discussion  in  digital  spaces,  especially  as  seen  on  public  social  media  sites,  blogs  and   comment  sections  of  mass  media  sites.  according  to  google  trends  (2015)  (figure  1),   searches  for  “white  privilege”  peaks  when  news  items  sparks  debates  about  its   existence,  such  as  september,  2008,  just  before  president  obama  was  elected  and   october  through  december,  2014,  during  protests  in  ferguson  and  the  increased  news   coverage  of  police  violence  against  people  of  color.  beyond  news  items,  the  topic  can   also  find  traction  when  a  digital  text—a  tweet,  a  blog  post,  a  meme—is  challenged  for   displaying  problematic  assumptions  about  race  in  american  culture,  which  is  the  focus   of  this  paper.         suggested  citation  (apa):  humphrey,  m.  (2015,  october  21-­24)  life  narrative  in  the  #racewars:   terministic  screens  and  twitter  fights.  paper  presented  at  internet  research  16:  the  16th  annual   meeting  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  phoenix,  az,  usa:  aoir.  retrieved  from   http://spir.aoir.org.       figure  1  -­  searches  for  “white  privilege”  as  tracked  via  google  trends  (2015).     digital  debate  and  material  culture       discourse  on  the  internet  creates  a  new  lens  for  observing  the  latent  properties  of  white   privilege  for  three  reasons.  first,  the  internet  has  created  what  papacharissi  calls  the     “private  sphere,”  or  a  digitally  networked,  non  traditional  practice  of  citizenship.  this   online  practice  transforms  activism  from  one  of  antagonism  to  agonism,  more   concerned  with  voicing  disagreement  than  public  accord,  creating  broad  and     ever-­changing  forums  for  debate.  secondly,  the  collapsed  context  (boyd,  2008)  of  digital   discourse,  in  which  a  number  of  social  contexts  exist  in  one  space  at  one  time,  lands   people  in  discussions  with  strangers  or  acquaintances  with  whom  they  might  not  usually   have  discussions  about  race.  finally,  the  discourse  that  emerges  from  this  type  of   citizenship  creates  one  form  of  material  culture  (lindlof  and  taylor,  2011),  namely,   digital  artifacts  of  synchronous  and  asynchronous  discussions  and  debates.  these   artifacts  that  emerge  can  be  thoughtfully  and  reflexively  studied  to  find  not  just  the   presence  of  white  privilege  discourse,  but  key  factors  in  how  the  privilege  becomes   obscured  from  the  privilege-­holder’s  purview.  to  put  it  another  way,  it  reveals  how     “grand  narratives”  (lyotard,  1979),  narratives  that  legitimize  society,  become  not  the     “localized”  narrative  for  which  he  hoped,  but  rather  transfer  largely  undisturbed  into   personal  narratives  which  largely  reify  the  socialized  norm.  these  opportunities  for   observation  arise  because  conversations  among  culturally  and  racially  separated   people,  which  might  not  have  happened  in  the  offline  world,  take  place  before  engaged   publics  and  a  rich  set  of  perspectives  are  archived  through  timelines,  blog  posts,  video   recordings  and  other  forms  of  media.       in  this  essay  i  examine,  using  textual  analysis,  two  commentaries  in  two  distinct  digital   spaces—one  from  an  email  exchange  sparked  by  a  twitter  fight  (and  eventually  posted   on  a  blog  site)  and  one  that  originated  on  a  blog—which  were  widely  criticized  for  both   displaying  and  denying  white  privilege.  i  do  this  primarily  by  using  textual  analysis  to   examine  a  factor  of  white  privilege  that  has  not  received  ample  attention—the  implied   life  stories  of  the  white  commentators,  which  are  embedded  directly  in  their  arguments   in  both  latent  and  manifest  ways.  these  life  stories  act  as  terministic  screens,  conceived   and  defined  by  burke  (1966)  as  a  filter  composed  of  language  that  distorts  common   understanding  (p.  45)  about  a  social  matter.  in  this  case,  culturally  embedded  stories   that  privileged  people  tell  as  uniquely  their  own  act  as  a  screen  from  seeing  the   structural  forces  that  disadvantage  others.       before  applying  the  theories  of  life  story  as  identity  and  terministic  screens  to  the   question  of  white  privilege,  as  well  as  intersectionality,  i  will  briefly  review  each  theory   as  it  relates  to  this  topic.  i  will  then  apply  those  theories  to  the  digital  texts  created  by   the  two  subjects  of  this  article.  i  will  then  discuss  how  challenging  one’s  own  life  story,   especially  by  placing  a  filter  of  privilege  on  that  life,  could  lead  to  an  identity  that  is   woven  more  broadly  with  realities  beyond  one’s  own  experience  and  enculturation.     white  privilege  and  intersectionality       as  a  white  male,  and  thus  a  beneficiary  of  white  privilege,  it  would  be  easy  (as  it  always   is)  to  examine  these  discourses  from  a  disembodied  objectivity.  it  is  also  tempting.  to   examine  the  terministic  screens  of  white  privilege  is  uncomfortable,  a  place  many  argue   is  the  right  place  to  be  in  discussing  race  from  the  white  perspective.  for  me,  denial  of   white  privilege  happened  first  in  ignorance  and  happens  these  days  as  a  reflex.  it   crosses  my  mind,  for  instance,  that  people  of  color  should  not  run  or  confront  police   whenever  i  hear  about  another  shooting,  before  i  settle  into  a  more  thoughtful  state  of   understanding  the  general  district  of  police  that  i  do  not  need  to  have.  i  too  have  hoped   for  a  “colorblind”  world  and  have  held  the  idea  that  interracial  relationships  would  begin   to  solve  problems  of  race,  before  i  saw  that  this  is  another  form  of  cultural  erasure.  i   have  worried  that  people  of  color  might  win  a  job  i  want  to  create  more  “diversity,”   before  i  consider  the  implications  in  both  my  knee-­jerk  thought  and  the  problems  of  how   “diversity”  is  usually  framed  as  a  way  to  advantage  white  people.  consider  this  a   confession  as  well  as  an  expression  of  gratitude  to  writers  and  thinkers  such  as  bell   hooks,  jacqueline  jones  royster,  ta-­nehisi  coates  and  many  others  for  beginning  to   re-­color  my  own  terministic  screen  and  help  me  to  begin  the  uncomfortable  retelling  of   my  place  in  this  culture.  whitney  dow,  director  of  the  whiteness  project,  an  interactive   website  in  which  white  people  talk  about  race,  correctly  states  that,  ““if  white  people  are   going  to  participate  in  changing  the  racial  dynamic,  we  need  to  deal  with  our  own  shit   first”  (thrasher,  2014).         it  would  be  easy,  and  useful  for  hegemony,  to  classify  all  rhetoric  that  misunderstands   the  dynamics  of  white  privilege  as  racist.  bonilla-­silva  (1997;;  1999)  warns  us  against   such  simplification  in  the  pursuit  of  understanding  racial  matters,  especially  to  eschew   the  ideas  of  reducing  all  matters  to  racism  and  to  reduce  racism  to  irrational  thinking   and  the  remnant  of  past  racial  constructs.  the  alternative  is  to  consider  “racialized   social  systems,”  or  societies  on  which  political,  social,  economic  and  ideological   systems  are  somewhat  based  on  race.  race,  in  this  sense,  is  not  simply  phenotypical,   but  rather  social  construction,  and  so,  race  becomes  a  social  fact  closer  to  gender  and   class.  (bonilla-­silva,  1997).  the  point  of  these  distinctions  from  traditional  thinking  is  to   make  clear  that  race  is  “a  real  and  central  social  vessel  of  group  affiliation  and  life  in  the   modern  world”  (bonilla-­silva,  1999,  p.  899;;  author’s  emphasis).  this  is  a  key  point  that   is  missed  when  white  privilege  is  not  acknowledged  because,  as  kendall  notes  in  the   quote  that  begins  this  essay,  white  privilege  is  also  social-­structural  reality  and  is   easiest  to  obscure  using  personal  reference  or  anecdotal  evidence.  bonilla-­silva  (1997)   makes  this  point  in  a  both  general  and  concrete  way  when  he  writes:   the  fact  that  not  all  members  of  the  superordinate  race  receive  the  same   level  of  rewards  and  (conversely)  that  not  all  members  of  the  subordinate   race  or  races  are  at  the  bottom  of  the  social  order  does  not  negate  the  fact   that  races,  as  social  groups,  are  in  either  a  superordinate  or  a  subordinate   position  in  a  social  system  (p.  470).     this  would  not  convince  anyone  who  denies,  or  even  doubts,  white  privilege  in  western   culture.  the  fact  is  that  a  century-­plus  of  thought  into  what  would  become  known  as   white  privilege  has  done  little  to  affect  a  generalized  agreement  about  its  existence.  in   more  recent  times,  critical,  historical,  sociological,  legal  and  educational  researchers   have  attempted  to  form  convincing  arguments  and  evidence  (e.g.  decuir-­gunby,  2006;;   boyd,  2008;;  dei,  karumanchery  &  karumanchery,  2004;;  williams,  2010)  that  white   privilege  is  pervasive  and  has  a  real  impact  on  western  culture.  both  academic  and   popular  literature  have  shown  statistically  that  people  of  color  are  less  likely  to  benefit   from,  or  more  likely  to  be  harmed  by,  social  structures,  such  as  education,  employment,   law-­making,  policing,  incarceration,  media  representation,  shopping,  housing  (e.g.   maxwell,  2014;;  kendall,  2013;;  crenshaw,  1991).  this  has  created  more  of  a  ripple  than   a  sea  change  of  opinion  shifting.  these  changes  seem  far  less  about  logical  debate  and   more  about  emotion.  as  diangelo,  a  white  researcher,  points  out  in  a  recent  huffington   post  article,  “it  became  clear  over  time  that  white  people  have  extremely  low  thresholds for  enduring  any  discomfort  associated  with  challenges  to  our  racial  worldviews”   (diangelo,  2015,  para.  7).  he  refers  to  this  as  “white  fragility,”  the  inability  to  deeply   engage  with  the  reality  of  race  in  our  lives.  our  segregation  from  people  of  color,  our   reliance  on  old  notions  of  racism,  our  individualism,  our  entitlement  to  racial  comfort  add   up  to  a  position  for  white  people  which  makes  it  hard  to  admit  an  implicit  role  in  the   current  racialized  structure.  this  discomfort  is  eased  by  placing  subtle  blame  on  people   of  color.  hall  (1995)  refers  to  this  phenomenon  as  “inferential  racism,”  (p.  20),   comments  and  images  that  appear  to  be  natural  representations  of  race,  but  are  imbued   with  predicates  that  presuppose  people  of  color  are  the  cause  of  the  problems.  the   shootings  of  trayvon  martin  (with  his  hoody),  michael  brown  (with  his  cigarillos  and   running),  and  even  walter  scott  (shot  in  the  back,  but  while  he  was  running  away)  are   examples  of  hall’s  point.         how  does  this  happen?  helms’  (1990)  theory  of  white  racial  identity  describes  how   internalized  racism  develops  by  a  process  of  acknowledgment  but  naivete  of  one’s  own   racial  difference,  followed  by  a  moral  dilemma  about  one’s  racial  identity  which  is   followed  by  idealization  of  white  group  identity,  a  sort  of  doubling  down  on  whiteness.  if   one’s  development  stops  here,  inferential  racism  is  a  powerful  tool  to  keep  it  in  place.   even  the  first  step  of  emergence  (named  pseudo-­independence)  toward  a  racially   enlightened  attitude  is  fraught  with  trap  doors,  as  helm’s  argues,  because  this  stage   makes  us  believe  that  the  solution  is  for  non-­whites  to  act  more  like  us.  as  most  of  this   development  is  explained  by  the  way  we  are  raised,  what  we  learn  in  school  and  what   we  consume  in  media,  helms  final  steps  toward  independent  thinking  about  race   includes  immersion/emersion,  qualified  by  a  great  deal  of  discomfort  about  one’s  own   whiteness.  past  that  is  autonomy.         what  bonilla-­silva,  diangelo,  hall  and  helms  show  is  that  an  individualist  notion  of   white  privilege  is  powerfully  reifying  of  that  status.  the  ignorance,  willful  or  not,  of  a   racial  structure  from  which  whites  naturally  benefit  is  deeply  rooted  in  our  enculturation   by  a  system  that  self-­perpetuates.  while  much  of  this  phenomenon  can  be  justifiably   attached  to  a  white,  patriarchal  system,  crenshaw  (1991)  demonstrated  that  white   privilege  does  not  begin  and  end  with  white  men.  crenshaw’s  intersectionality  argument   is  complex  in  its  details,  but  the  core  premise  is  relatively  simple:  “the  problem  with   identity  politics  is  not  that  it  fails  to  transcend  difference,  as  some  critics  charge,  but   rather  the  opposite-­that  it  frequently  conflates  or  ignores  intragroup  differences”  (p.   1242).  race  and  class  play  an  important  role  in  what  it  means  to  be  a  woman  in   western  culture  as  well  as  what  a  feminist  agenda  might  look  like.  here,  again,  white   privilege  is  obscured  because  all  women  can  rightfully  acknowledge  their  own   marginalized  status  in  a  patriarchal  system.  but  women  of  color  are  doubly   marginalized,  as  are  lgbtq  people  of  color,  both  by  the  dominant  male  group,  but  also   by  the  dominant,  straight  white  female  group.  in  making  this  argument,  crenshaw   primarily  intended  to  show  how  the  intersection  of  race  and  class  (add  sexual   orientation)  with  gender,  highlights  the  need  to  acknowledge  “multiple  grounds  of   identity  when  considering  how  the  social  world  is  constructed”  (p.  1245).  the  lack  of   such  acknowledgement  has  caused  a  major  rift  in  the  feminist  movement,  as  women  of   color  are  regularly  left  out  of  the  justice  equation,  through  what  ortega  (2006)  calls  a     “loving,  knowing,  ignorance”  (p.  57),  which  is  borne  by  either  white  feminists’  arrogant   and  inaccurate  knowledge  production  about  women  of  color  or  by  a  desire  to  love  and   understand  women  of  color,  but  profoundly  missing  the  point.  one  of  the  two  examples   in  this  paper  will  address  just  such  a  dispute.       the  theories  reviewed  above  effectively  reveal  both  what  and  how  white  privilege   becomes  socially  submerged  within  white  discourse.  these  insights  can  be  broadened   by  observing  how  one’s  life  story,  observed  specifically  in  internet  discourse,  can   perpetuate  and  legitimize  denial  or  dismissal  of  white  privilege  by  creating  a  terministic   screen.       life  narrative  as  identity  and  terministic  screens     bruner  (1987)  puts  it  best  when  he  writes,  “the  story  of  one's  own  life  is,  of  course,  a   privileged  but  troubled  narrative  in  the  sense  that  it  is  reflexive:  the  narrator  and  the   central  figure  in  the  narrative  are  the  same.  this  reflexivity  creates  dilemmas”  (p.  693).   the  dilemmas  bruner  discusses  include  the  impossibility  of  its  verification,  the   confounding  role  of  “rationalization”  and  the  indeterminacy  of  the  whole  project,  but  he’s   after  an  even  larger  complication:  instability.  life  stories  are  shaky  things,  whether  we   acknowledge  that  or  not,  and  that  shakiness  causes  a  susceptibility  to  “cultural,   interpersonal,  and  linguistic  influences”  (p.  694).  this  can  be  good  for  people  whose  life   narrative  is  hindering  their  progress  or,  worse,  torturing  them.  but  that  susceptibility  has   large  social  implications  as  well.  the  stories  we  tell  ourselves  are  the  way  we  form   identity  (mcadams,  1985;;  2001a),  and  thus  feel  idiosyncratic,  but  a  culture’s  influence   on  that  story  plays  a  critical  role  on  the  way  we  look  at  other  people’s  lives.       while  mcadams  addresses  multiple  codes  for  how  life  stories  shape  a  sense  of  self,   most  famously  redemption  (bad  to  good)  and  contamination  (bad  to  good),  i  am   particularly  interested  in  two  codes  he  draws  from  bakan  (1966):  agency  and   communion.  these  two  factors  of  life  story  formation  are  most  susceptible  to  influences   about  the  question  of  one’s  abilities  and  responsibilities  within  society.  when  one   achieves  a  level  of  agency  and  communion,  they  feel  both  competent  and  connected  to   their  surroundings  (bauer  and  mcadams,  2000).  rorty  (1976)  explains  that  as  stories   form  in  this  culture,  the  actor  agent  of  the  story  is  driven  by  motivations  to  act  in  society,   which  in  turns  rewards  them  with  rights.  this  framing  of  experience  is  reified  in  a  system   that  favors  the  actor  agent  over  a  more  collectivist  agent.  systems  are  here  to  serve  us   in  this  model  and  if  they  don’t  serve  you,  it’s  because  you’re  doing  something  wrong  or   you’re  unlucky.  thus,  agency  and  communion  become  critical  themes  in  developing  a   life  story  of  personal  success  and  communal  belonging,  which  is  easy  to  universalize  to   a  society  that  purports  to  be  a  meritocracy  for  all.  in  an  unpublished  article  (mcadams,   2001b)  intended  for  coding  life  story  interviews,  mcadams  delves  into  the  concepts     in-­depth.  i  will  summarize  these  definitions  now.       agency.  this  is  a  theme  of  self-­involvement  that  is  nearly  inevitable  in  telling  one’s  own   narrative,  as  mcadams  explains,  because  the  focusing  on  the  self,  “encourages  a   rhetoric  of  agency  in  most  autobiographical  accounts,  especially  among  contemporary   citizens  of  western  societies,  imbued  with  an  ethic  of  individualism”  (mcadams,  2001b,   p.  2).  the  broader  concept  is  categorized  by  four  sub-­themes  that  represent  elements  of   agency,  which  are  not  mutually  exclusive.  they  include:  self-­mastery:  striving  to  master   the  self  and  become  more  powerful,  wiser,  or  both  in  the  world;;  status/victory:   attainment  of  a  heightened  status  among  peers  by  virtue  of  special  recognition;;   achievement/responsibility:  success  in  achieving  goals  or  taking  on  responsibility   without  necessarily  defeating  others;;  empowerment:  attainment  of  improvement   through  the  association  of  something  larger  than  the  self.     communion.  this  is  not  a  dichotomous  variable  with  agency,  as  it  is  quite  possible  to   feel  both  empowered  and  connected  with  the  world  around  you.  however,  communion   places  the  emphasis  on  the  motivation  for  intimacy  rather  than  the  power  and  expansion   of  the  self.  mcadams  draws  from  multiple  theories  in  developing  this  code,  including  the   original  concept  of  agency-­communion  developed  by  bakan,  but  most  importantly  for   this  paper  is  the  influence  of  murray’s  (1938)  insights  about  “need  for  affiliation”  and     “need  for  nurturance.”  the  four  elements  of  communion  that  mcadams  defines  include:   love/friendship:  the  enhancement  of  erotic  love  or  platonic  friendship  increases  during   the  story;;  dialogue:  the  presence  of  conversation  that  is  not  instrumental  (e.g.   directions  to  the  bathroom);;  caring/help:  the  storyteller  reports  caring  for,  assisting,   nurturing  or  even  developing  empathy  for  another;;  unity/togetherness:  expression  of   belonging  to  a  larger  community.       to  not  confuse  matters,  it  is  important  to  note  these  codes  can  be  found  in  all  lives  and   are  often  powerful  and  good  elements  in  a  healthy  life.  the  point  for  this  article,  then,  is   to  consider  how  these  codes  can  also  create  a  filter  on  the  “way  life  is”  in  a  more   general  way.  at  the  same  time,  as  i  will  show,  these  codes  could  also  be  found  in  telling   stories  that  overturn  systems.  while  it  might  be  a  bit  more  self-­evident  that  agency   could  play  a  big  role  in  keeping  white  people  from  acknowledging  their  privilege,  i  argue   both  agency  and  communion  play  key  roles.  a  sense  of  belonging  in  a  system,  or   culture,  that  empowers  a  person  makes  it  much  easier  to  accept  that  the  system  is  fair   and  merit-­based.  when  it  is  clear  that  such  as  system  or  culture  does  not  exhibit  equal   outcomes  of  success  across  all  intersections  of  culture,  a  master  narrative  of  the   agentic  self  is  the  perfect  anecdote.  the  interaction  of  these  two  themes,  an  agentic  self   in  communion  with  her/his  surroundings,  can  produce  structural  filters  for  a  person  in  a   state  of  privilege.  the  more  subtle  the  privilege,  the  more  pervasive  this  effect  would  be.       this  insight  leads  to  burke’s  (1966)  concept  of  “terministic  screens,”  which  explains  that   our  sense  of  reality  is  constructed  by  our  “symbol  systems,”  the  education,  the  media,   the  discourses  of  our  life.  we  are  shaped  by  the  language  we  know.  that  includes  the   stories  we  tell  and  the  identity  that  follows.  burke  says  he  came  to  this  revelation  when   he  saw  multiple  pictures  of  the  same  subject,  but  with  different  color  filters.  “here   something  so  ‘factual’  as  a  photograph  revealed  notable  distinctions  in  texture,  and   even  form,  depending  on  which  color  filter  was  used  ...”  (p.  45).  as  an  example  for  life   stories,  consider  a  memory  in  which  you  win  a  spelling  bee  in  elementary  school.  there   are  at  least  three  ways  to  filter  that  experience.  one  is  to  understand  it  as  a  successful   communal  effort  of  mother,  father,  teacher  and  you.  another  way  to  observe  is  an  act  of   good  chance,  in  which  words  that  appeared  in  the  contest  happened  to  align  well  with   the  preparation  you  did.  another  way  to  observe  it  is  by  assuming  the  agency-­victory   role—you  won  because  you  studied  harder  than  other  students,  spurred  by  outside   forces,  but  ultimately  to  your  credit.  depending  on  the  language  that  is  most  available,   and  then  the  most  salient,  to  you,  a  filter  on  that  experience  will  be  placed  on  your  story.   how  we  filter  our  experiences  and  the  meanings  we  derive  from  them  are  not  only   constructed  by  language,  but  also  reveal  themselves  in  language.  how  one  colors  her   or  his  experience  reveals  much  about  the  screen  through  which  they  see  the  world.  this   is  true  in  discourse  about  white  privilege,  which  awaits  researchers  in  the  material   culture  of  the  internet.         to  examine  this  phenomenon,  i  am  employing  textual  analysis,  which  mckee  (2003)   describes  as  a  method  to  make  educated  guesses  about  “how  other  human  beings   make  sense  of  the  world,”  (p.  1)  through  texts  created  in  digital  formats.  i  have  chosen   two  examples  to  examine  how  the  screen  can  be  found  in  the  life  story  that  is  implicitly   and  explicitly  revealed  in  the  arguments  of  the  privileged  speaker.  the  arguments  split   into  two  different  types  of  begging  the  privilege  question:  one  attempt  uses  denial,  while   the  other  uses  a  dialectical  approach.  both  exhibit  life  story  as  terministic  screens  that   become  problematic  in  the  discourse  around  white  privilege.       white  privilege  denial  -­  “i  could  use  some  ...  privilege”       at  this  year’s  academy  awards,  actress  patricia  arquette’s  acceptance  speech  after   winning  the  best  actress  was  newsworthy.  on  stage,  she  called  for  equal  pay  for   women,  garnering  plaudits  from  the  likes  of  president  obama.  it  was  backstage,  during   a  more  expansive  explanation  to  the  press,  that  arquette’s  statement  became  a   lightning  rod  for  people  of  color.  she  said,  “the  truth  is  even  though  we  sort  of  feel  like   we  have  equal  rights  in  america,  there  are  huge  issues  that  are  at  play  that  really  do   affect  women.  it's  time  for  all  …  the  gay  people  and  people  of  color  that  we've  all  fought   for  to  fight  for  us  now"  (puente,  feb.  24,  2015).       this  comment  angered,  among  others,  many  women  and  men  of  color  who  wondered   what  exactly  had  been  done  for  them  that  now  needed  to  be  repaid.  arquette  engaged   critics  on  twitter,  as  did  many  of  her  defenders,  including  nicole  sandler,  who  currently   hosts  a  show  on  radioornot.com.  while  sandler  was  defending  arquette,  elon  james   white,  ceo  of  this  week  in  blackness,  started  this  exchange  on  twitter  (white  &   sandler,  feb.  23,  2015):     elon  james  white:  so  patricia  arquette,  huh?       nicole  sandler:  @elonjames  i  don't  understand  your   problem  w  @pattyarquette.  what  did  she  do/say  that's   wrong?  i'm  asking  sincerely  as  someone  who  like[s]   you     elon  james  white:  1  st  ma'am,  i'm  not  sure  why  you're   tagging  folks  on  here  that  i  didn't  tag.  if  i  wanted  to  i   would.  @nicolesandler  ...     secondly  i'm  actively  pointing  out  what  my  issue  is  right  now. i've  posted  multiple  tweets.  and  many  woc  are   speaking  on  it.  @nicolesandler     nicole  sandler:  @elonjames  my  appreciation  for @pattyarquette  have  no  bearing  on  my  support  for   poc  or  lgbtq.  they're  not  mutually  exclusive  .   suprised  at  u     elon  james  white:  surprised  at  me  for  what?  who  said   anything  about  your  support  of  anything?  this   literally  has  nothing  to  do  with  you.  @nicolesandler     nicole  sandler:  @elonjames  because  i'm  a  fan,  a  colleague (of  sorts)  and  a  woman.  i'd  love  to  have  you  on  my   show  to  talk  abt  this.  come  on  tomorrow  am?     elon  james  white:  i'd  argue  you  should  have  one  of  the many  woc  who  are  speaking  up  on  this  and  are  at   the  erased  intersection  to  discuss...  @nicolesandler     nicole  sandler:  @elonjames  "erased  intersection"?  wtf   are  you  talking  about     sandler’s  last  statement  set  off  a  firestorm  on  twitter.  imani  gandy,  co-­host  of  twib,   came  on  sandler’s  show  the  next  day,  trying  to  explain  intersectionality,  but  gandy   reported  on  twitter  that  sandler  talked  over  her  explanations  and  refused  to   acknowledge  intersectionality,  which  only  exacerbated  the  conflict  on  twitter.         in  sandler’s  blog  about  the  confrontation,  entitled  “they  sure  told  me!”  (nicole,  2015),   she  posted  an  email  exchange  between  her  and  white  (appendix  1).  it  is  here  we   observe  sandler’s  use  of  life  narrative  as  a  rhetorical  tool  and  as  window  into  how  white   privilege  is  screened  out  by  the  holder.  i  will  quote  three  examples,  and  then  as  a  way   to  better  illustrate  the  story-­screen,  offer  alternative  themes  that,  had  they  occurred,   would  create  greater  understanding  about  intersectionality.     example  1:  “i’m  a  woman  and  a  feminist.  i  never  considered  color  as  part  of  my   being  a  feminist.  i  always  thought  the  issues  we  feminists  fought  for  were   inclusive  of  all  women.”       agency-­responsibility  and  communion-­unity  emerge  here,  as  sandler  takes  on  the   role  of  a  feminist,  unified  in  a  fight  for  all  women.  this  sense  of  both  engaging  and   belonging  to  the  fight,  a  large  community  of  like-­minded  people,  overwhelms  the  notion   that  to  truly  fight  for  all  women  would  mean  understanding  the  plights  of  all  women.     an  alternative  screen,  which  applies  to  all  of  these  examples,  would  be  to  see  the   experience  through  communion-­dialogue,  in  which  the  act  of  generating  understanding   through  exchange  is  the  key  element  of  the  life  story  and  that  learning  what  is  not,   cannot  be,  covered  by  a  single  form  of  feminism.       example  2:  “i  get  that  african  americans  have  been  persecuted  and  have  had  a   rough  ride  through  history.  i’m  of  jewish  descent.  shall  i  tell  you  the  stories  my   grandparents  told  me?  do  i  think  that  every  injustice  has  to  do  with  the  fact  that   my  forebears  were  targeted  by  hitler?  not  for  a  second.”       the  theme  of  agency-­self-­mastery  is  subtly  exhibited  in  this  argument,  as  well  as   communion-­unity.  by  reaching  to  a  legitimate  aspect  of  personal  heritage,  the  rhetoric   assumes  the  role  of  an  intersected  member  of  society,  but  then  applies  a  latent  notion   of  self-­mastery  to  argue  those  intersections  do  not  explain,  or  cause,  injustice.  this   statement  became  highly  controversial  on  twitter,  because  it  assumed  equality  of   impact  to  have  a  latent  intersection  (jewish  woman)  with  having  a  fully  manifest   intersection  (black  woman).  but  more  importantly,  the  implication  that  one  has   overcome  (through  wisdom)  a  state  of  oppression,  so  black  people  must  do  the  same,  is   the  most  troubling  aspect  of  this  discourse.         an  alternative  story-­screen  is  communion-­caring,  of  which  empathy  is  one  key   element.  to  engage  in  the  data  that  shows  that  women  of  color  are  oppressed  at  far   higher  levels  than  white  women,  and  to  understand  that  walking  in  a  white-­dominated   world  as  a  person  of  color  is  fundamentally  different  than  walking  in  that  world  as  a   white  person  would  have  sufficiently  changed  the  dialogue  to  a  more  constructive  one.       example  3:  “i  am  denying  that  i  benefit  from  white  privilege.  care  to  tell  me  how  i   benefit  from  anything  right  now  other  than  my  own  hard  work,  cuz  i’m  trying   really  hard  to  make  it  through  to  the  end  of  each  day.  i  could  use  some  of  any   kind  of  privilege  right  about  now.”       the  theme  of  agency-­achievement  emerges  here  and  creates  the  most  blatant  denial   of  white  privilege  in  the  dialogue.  by  stating  that  nothing  is  benefiting  the  white  woman   beyond  hard  work  is  the  most  common  life  trope  that  creates  the  terministic  screen.   there  is  also  a  note  of  struggle  in  this,  which  would  not  code  for  agency  or  communion,   but  the  overall  notion  is  one  of  personal  willpower  to  achieve  the  success  at  hand  and   the  continuation  of  the  struggle.  the  final  statement,  however,  is  not  so  much  a  theme of  agency.  i  would  argue  it  is  a  very  latent  form  of  communion,  again,  in  which  sandler   references  her  own  oppressed  state  (a  woman  in  a  patriarchal  society)  as  an   equivalent,  exhibiting  the  “erased  intersection”  white  referred  to  on  twitter.       the  alternative  screen  here  might  seem  counter-­intuitive,  but  i  would  suggest  it  lies  in   agency-­empowerment,  the  story  of  how  forces  greater  than  one’s  self  improves  your   status.  this  screen  would  tell  the  stories  of  how  being  white  is  an  advantage,  at  least over  women  of  color.  this  is  not  to  deny  the  existence  of  one’s  oppression  as  a  woman,   nor  does  it  deny  the  work  one  does  to  succeed,  but  substantively  acknowledges  the   differences  in  oppression  based  on  factors  beyond  gender.       white  privilege  dialectical  -­  “if  i  was  a  poor  black  kid”1     dialectical  rhetoric  regarding  white  privilege  could  broadly  exhibit  two  motives.  it  could   be  an  honest  observation  of  the  complexities  of  whiteness  in  contemporary  society,  one   that  relents  on  the  denial  of  privilege  but  not  on  the  demands  that  the  oppressed  must   be  responsible  for  overturning  it.  or  it  could  be  a  clever  argument,  one  that  works  like  a   feint  in  boxing,  where  it  seems  the  fighter  is  retreating,  so  the  roundhouse  comes  as  a   greater  surprise.  it  is  unimportant  which  category  the  following  example  might  fall  under   because,  as  ortega  says  above,  genuine  love  and  false  love  may  take  different  routes,   but  usually  end  at  the  same  dead  end.  with  that,  i  will  begin.         in  december  of  2011,  forbes  contributor  gene  marks  created  a  firestorm  of  comments   on  twitter  and  facebook,  blog  posts,  videos,  memes  and  news  stories  with  his  essay,   “if  i  were  a  poor  black  kid”  (marks,  dec.  12,  2014;;  appendix  2).  the  post,  which   begins  with  agreement  with  president  obama  that  the  gap  between  rich  and  poor  is widening  and  that  education  is  a  key  reason.  marks  introduces  the  topic  by  writing,  “the   president’s  speech  got  me  thinking.    my  kids  are  no  smarter  than  similar  kids  their  age   from  the  inner  city.    my  kids  have  it  much  easier  than  their  counterparts  from  west   philadelphia.  the  world  is  not  fair  to  those  kids  mainly  because  they  had  the  misfortune   of  being  born  two  miles  away  into  a  more  difficult  part  of  the  world  and  with  a  skin  color   that  makes  realizing  the  opportunities  that  the  president  spoke  about  that  much  harder.   this  is  a  fact.    in  2011”  (marks,  para.  4).  but  rather  than  meditating  on  the  hegemonic   powers  that  make  this  the  case,  marks’  article  turns  into  what  hall  would  almost  surely   label  “referential  racism,”  tacitly  blaming  west  philadelphia’s  state  of  affairs  on  west   philadelphia,  a  move  bonilla-­silva  would  explain  is  due  to  the  inability  to  see  the   racialized  structure  that  creates  the  situation  marks  is  trying  to  address.  marks,  on  the   other  hand,  writes  that  the  availability  of  technology  in  public  spaces  could  be  a  catalyst   for  change  within  the  black  community,  especially  for  the  “special”  black  kids  who  are   enlightened  to  see  it.  and  it  is  within  this  thesis  that  we  see  how  marks’  life  story   develops  his  dialectical  terministic  screen.  nearly  the  entire  essay  could  be  analyzed,   mainly  because  of  marks’  rhetorical  move  that  begins  with,  “if  i  was  a  poor  black  kid  ...”     1  1  it  should  be  noted  that  like  the  subject  of  this  next  section,  i  am  a  technology  contributor  at  forbes.com  and,  for   that  matter,  share  all  the  same  privileges  of  the  next  speaker.  so  my  own  screens  should  be  carefully  acknowledged.   example  1:  “i  am  not  a  poor  black  kid.    i  am  a  middle  aged  white  guy  who  comes   from  a  middle  class  white  background.    so  life  was  easier  for  me.    but  that doesn’t  mean  that  the  prospects  are  impossible  for  those  kids  from  the  inner  city.   it  doesn’t  mean  that  there  are  no  opportunities  for  them.”         communion-­unity  is  the  implied  life  story  screen  in  this  statement,  which  becomes  more   apparent  when  you  read  the  whole  piece.  each  of  the  solutions  for  poor  black  kids   emerges  from  the  world  white  person  inhabits—charter  and  private  schools,  technology   hardware  and  software,  business  networking,  etc.  this  is  the  world  that  has,  admittedly,   makes  life  easier  for  white  people  and,  so,  would  offer  opportunities  for  poor  black  kids   as  well.  in  a  very  subtle  way,  this  statement  and  the  entire  essay  could  also  reflect  the   code  of  communion-­help,  in  that  the  language  used  here  appears  to  be  a  guide  to  tap   into  those  resources  in  which  the  privileged  speaker  has  already  benefited  and  reflects   helms’  pseudo-­independence  stage  of  white  development.     as  i  mentioned  in  the  last  piece,  a  counter-­intuitive  alternative  story  screen  would   meditate  not  on  community,  but  on  empowerment,  to  flip  the  question  from,  “what   opportunities  exist  for  poor  black  kids?”  to,  “what  opportunities  are  given  to  me   automatically  that  are  not  given  to  poor  black  kids?”  the  story  that  follows  would  have  to   be  deeply  reflexive  and  framed  via  communion-­caring,  an  empathy  informed  by  those   knowledgeable  about  the  systemic  disparities,  instead  of  by  tropes  of  the  single  mother   too  tired  to  help  her  children.       example  2:  “it  takes  brains.    it  takes  hard  work.    it  takes  a  little  luck.    and  a  little   help  from  others.    it  takes  the  ability  and  the  know-­how  to  use  the  resources  that   are  available.    like  technology.    as  a  person  who  sells  and  has  worked  with   technology  all  my  life  i  also  know  this.”       because  this  passage  is  written  in  context  of  “if  i  were  poor  and  black,”  it  is  quite   possible  to  see  a  whole  host  of  life  story  codes—agency-­self-­mastery,  agency-­victory   and  agency-­empowerment.  this  reflects  the  type  of  rhetoric  diangelo  (2015)  refers  to   when  he  writes,  “this  distinction  -­-­  between  individual  prejudice  and  a  system  of   unequal  institutionalized  racial  power  -­-­  is  fundamental.  one  cannot  understand  how   racism  functions  in  the  u.s.  today  if  one  ignores  group  power  relations”  (para.  4).  i   argue  the  causal  agent  of  this  ability  to  ignore  group  power  relations  largely  lies  in  the   combination  of  agency  codes  exhibited  here  and  is  widespread  in  white  rhetoric.  it  is  a   model  for  universalizing  one’s  own  success  to  all  races  and  classes,  simplified  by   redacting  group  power  relationships  from  the  story.       here,  i  would  argue  that  the  screen  is  so  intense  that  communion-­dialogue  is  not   enough.  instead,  a  story  that  would  challenge  such  a  screen  is  one  of  agency-­ responsibility,  one  in  which  the  privileged  protagonist  takes  on  the  role  of  investigator   of  the  system  that  has  benefited  him.  this  is  a  willful  reversal  of assumptions,  a  kind  of   story  that  almost  looks  like  a  mystery.  in  such  mystery  stories, the  detective  becomes   obsessed  with  their  responsibility  to  “solve  the  case”  and  uses  a  mix  of  savvy  and  self-­ endangerment  to  find  the  truth.  i  say  endangerment,  in  the  case  of white  privilege,   because  a  foundational  shift  in  perspective  of  one’s  own  agency  can  be  deeply   troubling.  it  is  the  journey  from  the  right  side  of  the  “but”  in  a  dialectic  sentence to  the   left  side,  to  leave  the  focus  of  “there  is  opportunity  for  all”  for  the  focus  of  “i  know  i  have   it  easier”  and  then  ask  why.       example  3:  “but  the  biggest  challenge  we  face  isn’t  inequality.  it’s  ignorance.    so   many  kids  from  west  philadelphia  don’t  even  know  these  opportunities  exist  for   them.    ...    many  of  these  kids  don’t  have  the  brains  to  figure  this  out  themselves  –   like  my  kids.    except  that  my  kids  are  just  lucky  enough  to  have  parents  and  a   well-­funded  school  system  around  to  push  them  in  the  right  direction.”       this  passage  seems  to  be  driven  by  communion-­help  and  communion-­empowerment,   as  both  the  parent  (marks  himself)  and  the  school  system  play  the  key  role  in  lifting  his   children  out  of  the  ignorance  that  poor  black  kids  mainly  must  reside  within.  obviously,   the  rhetoric  of  agency-­self-­mastery  and  agency-­responsibility  is  again  at  play.  in   looking  at  marks’  responses  to  some  of  the  200+  comments  on  the  site,  it  is  clear  that   his  primary  motivation  for  writing  the  piece  can  be  found  in  this  comment.  he  responded   to  one  commenter,  who  asked  what  motivated  his  essay:   i  thought  about  the  charter  school  where  a  close  family   member  has  taught  for  the  past  7  years.  i  thought  about  all   the  people  i  also  know  who  work  there  and  in  the  system.  i   thought  about  the  fact  that  99%  of  the  kids  in  that  charter   school  are  black.  and  many  of  them  are  poor.  i  thought   about  how  that’s  same  throughout  most  of  west   philadelphia.  i  thought  about  what  it  was  like  when  i  was  in   the  public  school  system.  and  i  said  to  do  myself:  “what   would  i  do  if  i  were  a  poor  black  kid?’  (marks,  2011,   comments  section).     while  a  terministic  screen  of  agency  implies  a  certain  leg-­up  on  the  other,  the   communion  screen  implies  something  a  little  more  insidious.  one,  that  the  luck  of  birth   is  the  causal  agent  behind  these  disparities  because,  two,  some  communities  are  better   at  taking  care  of  their  children  than  others  for,  three,  no  other  reason  than  history.  this   becomes  most  insidious  if  marks  never  intended  to  imply  any  such  thing.       rather  than  offer  another  alternative  screen,  i  will  end  this  section  by  stating  what  i   assume  has  become  obvious  to  many  while  reading  this.  alternative  screens,  in  these   cases,  could  only  be  created  by  alternative  actions.  a  simple  flip  of  the  screen  would  not   be  enough  to  understand  the  situation  differently.  that  is  the  nature  of  a  complex   systematic  racial  favoritism.  white  privilege  is  reified  by  story,  but  is  likely  undermined   by  action.  still,  the  desire  to  tell  different  stories  can  be  the  beginning  of  that  change  in   action,  as  is  demonstrated  by  a  response  to  marks,  which  i  will  now  explore,  that   speaks  well  beyond  the  controversy  created  by  the  essay.       conclusion:  narratives  of  discomfort       textual  analysis,  in  which  we  examine  how  terministic  screens  are  constructed  by  life   stories,  is  a  powerful  way  to  shed  light  on  the  impasse  about  the  state  of  white  privilege.   it  neither  indicts  or  excuses  the  thought  pattern  of  any  particular  commenter,  but  instead   shows  how  cultural  forces  shape  our  sense  of  self  through  language  and  in  turn  creates   blindness.  it  also  offers  an  alternative  that  could  do  much  work  toward  rebuilding  the   discussions  about  race  and  privilege,  without  the  pressure  of  a  certain  ideology.   screens  are  created  by  stories  left  unexamined.  analyzing  rhetoric  for  its  implicit  and   explicit  stories,  especially  if  we  were  to  turn  the  analysis  inward,  could  offer  a  new  kind   of  vision.       in  responding  to  marks’  article  on  the  atlantic  website,  coates  (2011)  writes  that  the   forbes  piece  reminded  him  of  rhetoric  he  heard  from  classmates  at  howard  university,   who  claimed  they  would  have  died  rather  than  give  in  to  slavery,  or  white  people  who   claimed  they  would  have  freed  the  slaves  had  they  lived  in  the  antebellum  south.  “what   all  these  responses  have  in  common  is  a  benevolent,  and  surely  unintentional,  self-­ aggrandizement.    ...  we  flatter  ourselves,  not  out  of  malice,  but  out  of  instinct”  (para.  6-­ 7).  i  believe  that  is  what  this    essay  has  shown,  something  fundamentally  human  and   deeply  influenced  by  culture.  mcadams’  research  intends  to  find  the  narrative  revelation   as  a  way  to  heal  us,  not  to  reveal  these  flaws  or  embarrass  others.  that  is  my  intention   too.       coates  goes  on  to  call  for  a  “muscular  empathy,”  one  that  eschews  the  positive   assertion  in  favor  of  a  question.  if  i  were  a  black  woman,  and  offended  by  white  feminist   rhetoric,  what  realities  would  make  that  so?  if  i  were  a  child  in  west  philadelphia,  and   did  not  get  this  leg  up,  why  would  that  be?  surely,  raising  such  questions  of  ourselves,   which  only  slightly  move  us  off  the  mark  of  our  shaky  story  and  closer  to  another’s,  is  no   more  psychologically  harmful  than  the  social  harm  done  by  holding  on  to  grand   narratives.  it  may  be  true  that,  as  coates  says,  “the  answers  are  out  there.  but  they  will   not  improve  your  self-­esteem”  (para.  15).  this  is  too  much  for  some  who  benefit  from   white  privilege,  but  surely  not  all.  for  example,  hooks  (1992)  mentions  a  white  man   whose  relationship  with  a  black  woman  has  repositioned  his  perspective  and  notes  that   he  can  see  “the  way  whiteness  acts  to  terrorize  without  seeing  himself  as  bad,”  (p.  177).   these  are  terministic  screens  that  look  beyond  dichotomies,  where  the  useless  white   guilt  that  often  progresses  from  white  privilege  is  exchanged  for  an  empathy  that  is   muscular  because  it  is  rooted  in  curiosity  and,  most  important,  acknowledgment  of  our   own  personal  limitations,  a  muscular  humility.       to  reflexively  tell  stories  about  one’s  own  privilege  would  be  a  discipline,  not  an  instinct.   it  would  not  feel  “normal,”  for  white  people  to  look  not  at  how  we  achieved,  or  how  we   are  “lucky,”  but  instead  how  we  have  benefited  in  ways  that  are  not  available  to  others,   because  the  color  of  our  skin.  that  is  why  it  might  be  useful  to  think  of  these  stories  as “narratives  of  discomfort,”  taking  a  page  from  de  freitas  and  mcauley’s  (2008) “pedagogy  of  discomfort,”  in  which  teachers  develop  their  curricula  to  confront  their  own   complicity  in  inequities  in  the  classroom.  “narratives  of  discomfort”  would  do  much  the   same,  but  with  a  broader  purview,  looking  at  any  place  and  time  our  instinctive  stories   create  a  screen  that  overlooks  or  denies  fundamental  injustices.  those  with  privilege   would  tell  these  stories  without  congratulations  or  any  other  benefit  to  themselves.   these  life  stories  would  be  told  because  they  should  be  told.             references       bakan,  d.  (1966).  the  duality  of  human  existence:  isolation  and  communion  in  western   man.  beacon  press  (ma).       bauer,  j.  j.,  &  mcadams,  d.  p.  (2000).  competence,  relatedness,  and  autonomy  in   life  stories.  psychological  inquiry,  11(4),  276–279.       bonilla-­silva,  e.  (1997).  rethinking  racism:  toward  a  structural  interpretation.  american   sociological  review,  62(3),  465–480.       bonilla-­silva,  e.  (1999).  the  essential  social  fact  of  race.  american  sociological  review,   64(6),  899–906.       boyd,  d.  (2008).  autoethnography  as  a  tool  for  transformative  learning  about  white   privilege.  journal  of  transformative  education,  6(3),  212–225.       burke,  &  kenneth.  (1966).  language  as  symbolic  action  (pp.  44–62).  berkeley,  ca:     university  of  california  press.       coates,  t.-­n.  (2011,  december  14).  a  muscular  empathy.  retrieved  may  5,  2015,  from   http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/a-­muscular-­ empathy/249984/       crenshaw,  k.  (1991).  mapping  the  margins:  intersectionality,  identity  politics,  and   violence  against  women  of  color.  stanford  law  review,  43(6),  1241–1299.       de  freitas,  e.,  &  mcauley,  a.  (2008).  teaching  for  diversity  by  troubling  whiteness: strategies  for  classrooms  in  isolated  white  communities.  race  ethnicity  and   education,  11(4),  429–442.     decuir-­gunby,  j.  t.  (2006).  proving  your  skin  is  white,  you  can  have  everything:  race,   racial  identity,  and  property  rights  in  whiteness  in  the  supreme  court  case  of   josephine  decuir.  critical  race  theory  in  education:  all  god’s  children  got  a   song,  89–112.     dei,  g.  j.  s.,  karumanchery,  l.  l.,  &  karumanchery,  n.  (2004).  playing  the  race  card: exposing  white  power  and  privilege  (vol.  244).  peter  lang.       diangelo,  r.  (2015,  april  30).  why  it’s  so  hard  to  talk  to  white  people  about  racism. retrieved  may  9,  2015,  from  http://social.huffingtonpost.com/good-­men-­ project/why-­its-­so-­hard-­to-­talk-­to-­white-­pe  ople-­about-­racism_b_7183710.html     google  trends  -­  white  privilege  -­  worldwide,  2004  -­  present.  (n.d.).  retrieved  may  4,   2015,  from  http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=white%20privilege       hall,  s.  (1995).  the  whites  of  their  eyes.  racist  ideologies  and  the  media.  in  g.  dines  &   j.  m.  humez  (eds.),  race  and  class  in  media  (pp.  18–22).     helms,  j.  e.  (ed).  (1990).  black  and  white  racial  identity:  theory,  research,  and   practice.  greenwood  press.       hooks,  b.  (1992).  black  looks:  race  and  representation  (1st  edition).  brooklyn:  south   end  press.       kendall,  f.  (2012).  understanding  white  privilege:  creating  pathways  to  authentic   relationships  across  race.  routledge.     lindlof,  t.  r.,  &  taylor,  b.  c.  (2011).  sensemaking:  qualitative  data  analysis  and   interpretation.  qualitative  communication  research  methods,  3,  241–281.       lyotard,  j.-­f.  (1979).  the  postmodern  condition.  manchester  university  press.       marks,  g.  (2011,  december  12).  if  i  were  a  poor  black  kid.  retrieved  march  1,  2015, from  http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2011/12/12/if-­i-­was-­a-­poor-­ black-­kid/     maxwell,  z.  (2014,  may  22).  7  actual  facts  that  prove  white  privilege  exists  in  america. retrieved  may  11,  2015,  from  http://mic.com/articles/89653/7-­actual-­facts-­that-­ prove-­white-­privilege-­exists-­in-­ameri  ca     mcadams,  d.  p.  (1985).  power,  intimacy,  and  the  life  story.  homewood,  il: dorsey.   boyd,  d.  m.,  &  university  of  california,  b.  (2008).  taken  out  of  context:   american  teen  sociality  in  networked  publics.  university  of  california,  berkeley.   bruner,  j.  (1987).  life  as  narrative.  social  research,  54(1),  11–32.  mcadams,  d.   p.  (2001).  the  psychology  of  life  stories  (vol.  5,  p.  100).  educational  publishing   foundation.     mcadams,  d.  p.  (2001).  coding  autobiographical  episodes  for  themes  of  agency  and communion.  unpublished  manuscript,  northwestern  university,  evanston,  il.   retrieved  from   http://psych.uw.edu.pl/mikk/4621%20metod_comm%20aps/dodatki/agency_ communion01.pdf     mckee,  a.  (2003)  textual  analysis:  a  beginner's  guide.  sage,  london.       murray,  h.  a.  (1938).  explorations  in  personality.  oxford  univ.  press.       nicole.  (2015,  february  24).  2-­24-­15  nicole  sandler  show  –  they  sure  told  me!   retrieved  february  27,  2015,  from  http://radioornot.com/blog/2-­24-­15-­nicole-­ sandler-­show-­they-­sure-­told-­me/     ortega,  m.  (2006).  being  lovingly,  knowingly  ignorant:  white  feminism  and  women  of   color.  hypatia,  21(3),  56–74.       puente,  m.  (2015,  february  24).  patricia  arquette  chided  over  backstage  oscar remarks.  usa  today.  retrieved  from   http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2015/02/24/patricia-­arquette-­chided-­ on-­backstage-­oscar-­remarks/23937935/     rorty,  a.  o.  (1976).  a  literary  postscript:  characters,  persons,  selves,  individuals.  in  a. o.  rorty  (ed.),  the  identities  of  persons  (pp.  301–323).  university  of  california   press.     sandler,  n.,  &  white,  e.  j.  (february,  24,  2015).  twitter  search.  retrieved  may  11,   2015,  from  https://twitter.com/search?q=nicolesandler&src=typd       thrasher,  s.  w.  (2014,  october  15).  the  whiteness  project  will  make  you  wince. because  white  people  can  be  rather  awful.  the  guardian.  retrieved  from   http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/15/whiteness-­project-­ privilege-­documentary     williams,  l.  f.  (2010).  constraint  of  race:  legacies  of  white  skin  privilege  in  america.   penn  state  press.       appendix  1     since  elon  james  white  chose  to  publish  and  tweet  out  portions  of  our  email exchange,  i  figured  i’d  post  the  entire  thing  here.    as  it  was  three  emails  (the  original one  i  sent  to  him,  his  response,  and  my  response  to  that),  i’ve  color-­coded  the  text  with   my  original  email  in  black  type  italics,  elon  james  white’s  responses  in  blue,  my  second   response  in  pink.       keep  in  mind  that,  rather  than  respond  to  my  second  email,  he  chose  to  post  some  of   what  i  wrote  on  his  blog,  outraged  that  i’d  dare  to  invoke  my  ancestors’  struggles  as   jews  during  the  holocaust.  i  guess  i’m  not  allowed  to  do  that.     hi  elon,     i’m  guessing  you  don’t  remember  me.  you’ve  been  on  my  show  a  few  times,  and  we’ve   met  and  shared  drinks  a  few  other  times.  we  were  on  the  [email]  list  together,  so  i   thought  you  knew  who  i  was,  which  was  why  i  asked  you  an  innocent  question  about   one  of  your  tweets  that  showed  up  in  my  stream.     ma’am.     not  necessary.  my  name  is  nicole.     i’m  familiar  with  you  who  you  are  and  i  do  recall  speaking  on  your  show  a  few  years   ago.  none  of  that  would  change  the  commentary  i  made  this  morning.  out  of   professional  courtesy  i  will  address  your  email  as  clearly  as  i  can.       wasn’t  sure  that  you  knew  who  i  was  as  you  referred  to  me  as  julianna  forlano’s   ‘friend’  and  claimed  no  understanding  that  she  was  on  my  radio  show.     i’m  a  woman  and  a  feminist.  i  never  considered  color  as  part  of  my  being  a  feminist.  i   always  thought  the  issues  we  feminists  fought  for  were  inclusive  of  all  women.     that’s  wonderful.  for  you.  but  as  many  woc  have  noted,  spoken  about,  written  about   and  constantly  deal  with  regularly,  feminism  is  not  all  inclusive.  i’m  not  saying  anything   here  controversial  or  ground  breaking.    and  whether  you  consider  something  to  be  the   case  or  not  does  not  affect  the  the  reality  and  experiences  of  woc  who  deal  with  it   directly.     and  as  i  have  spoken  and  written  about,  i’m  not  my  sister’s  keeper.  i  know  many,  many   white  women  who’ve  done  nothing  to  incur  the  ugliness  and  vitriol  that  i  was  subject  to   this  morning  by  simply  pointing  out  what  patricia  arquette  said,  not  what  she  omitted.   i’m  sure  you’ve  experienced  people  projecting  their  insecurities  and  biases  on  you   because  of  who  they  perceived  you  to  be.    not  everyone  parses  their  words  so  carefully   as  to  offend  no  one.  imagine  having  just  won  the  biggest  award  or  recognition  of  your   art  possible.  imagine  wanting  to  make  a  statement  about  women’s  rights  –  using  the   phrase  all  women  over  and  over  again  only  to  have  others  assume  what  you  meant.     you  seemed  surprised  that  i  didn’t  know  the  term  “erased  intersection”  –  it  sounds  like   doublespeak  to  me.  i’ve  done  shows  on  the  era,  the  fact  that  the  lgbtq  movement   and  civil  rights  movement  have  made  huge  strides,  while  the  era  sit  unratified.  i’ve suggested  that  all  these  groups  who  came  together  to  help  advance  the  struggles  of  all   those  people  (yes,  even  those  who  fit  in  more  than  one  category)  come  together  to  help   ratify  the  era.  i  guess  that  makes  me  worthy  of  your  ire  too?         i  probably  never  stopped  down  to  say  “that  includes  the  lbgtq  women  and  women  of   color  too”  –  it  was  implied  in  all  i  said.     i’ve  spoken  out  over  the  years  on  a  number  of  issues  –  some  dealing  with  gender   issues,  some  with  religion,  some  with  race,  most  with  inequality  and  the  general   unfairness  in  life.       never,  ever,  when  speaking  on  behalf  of  one  group  –  especially  in  the  heat  of  the moment  or  when  i’ve  had  limited  time  in  which  to  make  a  point  –  did  i  stop  down  to  say,   “the  group  i’m  talking  about  is  struggling,  but  this  sub  section  of  the  group  has  it  even   worse.”     i  have  to  ask  ma’am,  who  asked  for  that?  the  issue  that  i,  and  many  others,  pointed  out   wasn’t  the  need  to  drill  down  and  speak  of  each  individualized  group.  the  commentary   about  poc  and  lgbtq  folks  needing  to  step  up  and  speak  out  for  women  was  the   issue.  some  poc  are  women.  some  lgbtq  are  women.  the  call  for  these  groups  to   help  “women”  as  if  they  aren’t  already  doing  that  because  they  are  in  fact,  women   already,  is  problematic  and  speaks  to  a  similar  theme  found  through  out  conversations   around  feminism.  women  defaults  to  white  cis-­women.  i  understand  you  don’t  think  it   does  but  language,  policies,  framing  all  paints  this  picture  which  is  why  so  many  woc   have  spoken  out  against  this  and  have  critiqued  feminism  as  much  as  they  have.  and   the  idea  that  lgbtq  and  poc  need  to  step  up  and  help  like  white  women  have  helped   us?  that’s  why  we  should  do  that?  you  don’t  see  how  this  framing  is  problematic?       and  what’s  wrong  with  asking  those  people  to  step  up  in  the  issue  of  pay  equity  and passing  an  equal  right  amendment?  you’re  the  one  drawing  the  lines  of  separation.  do   you  not  see  that?       i  get  that  african  americans  have  been  persecuted  and  have  had  a  rough  ride  through   history.  i’m  of  jewish  descent.  shall  i  tell  you  the  stories  my  grandparents  told  me?  do  i   think  that  every  injustice  has  to  do  with  the  fact  that  my  forebears  were  targeted  by   hitler?  not  for  a  second.       this  is  incredibly  insulting.  i’m  not  even  sure  what  this  means.  are  you  saying  black   folks  are  blaming  race  too  much?  are  you  saying  that  we  bring  up  slavery  too  much?   i’m  not  sure  of  the  point  of  writing  these  words  at  all.         and  i’ve  been  insulted  all  day  by  people  on  twitter  telling  me  that  women’s  rights  is   code  for  “white  women’s  right”.  bullshit.    i’m  saying  we  all  have  our  own  crosses  to  bear.   you  have  your  struggles  and  i  have  mine.  some  are  because  i’m  a  woman,  some  are   because  i’m  jewish.  some  are  because  i’m  now  55  years  old  so  “unattractive”  and   some  because  i’m  overweight..  and  some  because  some  people  just  don’t  like  me  and   other  reasons  i’m  not  privy  to.     but  to  have  people  who’ve  never  even  heard  of  me  call  me  a  bigot  or  tell  me  what  i’m   thinking  and  that  i’m  motivated  by  “white  privilege”  or  “white  feminism”  is  not  only   insulting,  but  hateful  and,  yes  racist.     i  do  host  a  daily  radio  show.  i’ve  been  in  radio  for  over  30  years.  i  was  on  air  america and  moved  online  when  the  network  went  under  and  have  been  struggling  to  keep   doing  what  i  do  for  the  past  five  years.  i  don’t  get  a  free  ride  because  i’m  a  “white   woman”.  i  don’t  get  a  free  ride  at  all.       who  said  you  get  a  free  ride?  2)  are  you  denying  that  you  benefit  from  white  privilege?   3)  are  you  saying  that  your  experience  is  the  same  as  black  women,  who  are  dealing   at  the  intersection  of  race  and  gender?  what  about  the  gay  black  woman?     1)   those  who  keep  pushing  “white  privilege”  on  me.  no,  you  didn’t  say  it,  but  your   mass  of  followers  did.     2)   i  am  denying  that  i  benefit  from  white  privilege.  care  to  tell  me  how  i  benefit  from   anything  right  now  other  than  my  own  hard  work,  cuz  i’m  trying  really  hard  to  make  it   through  to  the  end  of  each  day.  i  could  use  some  of  any  kind  of  privilege  right  about   now.     3)   my  experience  is  wholly  different  from  black  women,  and  other  white  women,  and   men  of  every  color  too.  my  color  doesn’t  control  my  destiny.  sure  it  has  likely  played   various  roles  in  my  life  –  but  not  because  i  designed  it  that  way.     the  attacks  i  was  subject  to  on  twitter  today  were  completely  out  of  line  and  uncalled   for.  i’ve  lived  my  life  in  a  caring,  loving  way,  and  brought  none  of  this  nastiness  on   myself.  and  for  complete  strangers  to  come  into  my  twitter  stream,  telling  me  what  i   think  and  how  i  act  –  all  antithetical  to  everything  i  stand  for  –  really  sucks.     i  invited  you  on  my  show  to  discuss  this  failure  to  communicate  –  because  that’s  what  it   is.       you  and  your  followers  who’ve  been  attacking  me  on  twitter  all  day  have  just  assumed   that  patricia  arquette  was  consciously  excluding  women  of  color  and/or  lgbtq  is   ridiculous.     i’ve  assumed  nothing.  i  responded  to  the  words  she  actually  said.  i  didn’t  call  her   names,  imply  what  she  meant  or  any  of  that.  the  issue  seems  to  be  that  many  folks   believe  the  benefit  of  the  doubt  should  be  given  because  obviously  arquette  means   well.  that  she  should  be  above  critique.  that’s  ridiculous.  you’ve  inserted  words  like “consciously”  when  a  lot  of  the  points  made  here  is  that  it  isnt  conscious  and  that’s  the   problem.  this  line  of  thought  is  normal  and  this  framing  considered  reasonable.  as   opposed  to  simply  reading  and  absorbing  those  explaining  exactly  what  the  issue  is  in   great  detail  you  wanted  it  explained  to  you.  this  is  not  the  responsibility  of  poc.  just like   i  don’t  believe  it  is  your  responsibility  as  a  woman  to  explain  things  to  me  if  my  male   privilege  is  blocking  me  from  understanding  the  argument  you’re  making.  if  you  were   kind  enough  to  explain  it  to  me  i’d  appreciate  it,  because  many  women  have  taken  that   time  with  me.  but  it’s  not  owed  to  me.  it  is  not  their  responsibility.         she  didn’t  say  those  groups  were  mutually  exclusive  and,  sorry,  it’s  our  role  as reasonable  people  to  consider  intent.  i  know  how  badly  i’m  feeling  today  after  all  the hatred  thrown  my  way.  she  just  had  her  biggest  career-­high  of  her  life,  and  she’s  being   excoriated  for  thought  crimes.  how  about  trying  to  reach  out  for  clarification?     no,  instead,  you  throw  out  terms  like  “erased  intersection”.  how  about  speaking  in  plain   english.         yes  i’m  disappointed  –  as  a  fan  and  somewhat  colleague  –  that  you  seem  more  intent   on  escalating  the  nastiness  rather  than  engaging  in  dialogue.  that’s  what  i’m  trying  to   do.  imani  gandy  is  coming  on  my  show  tomorrow.     she  and  i  have  had  differences  in  the  past.  but  i  have  no  doubt  we  can  try  to  hear  each   other  out  tomorrow  and  understand  that  we’re  on  the  same  side.       how  about,  instead  of  crucifying  her  because  she  said  what  she  was  trying  to  say   clumsily,  you  try  to  help  her  say  it  more  eloquently?       maybe  that  doesn’t  fit  in  this  week  in  blackness?  are  we  not  black  enough?  (and  yes, that  was  meant  to  be  incendiary,  because  i  know  that’s  not  who  you  are….)     if  you  think  i’m  wrong,  then  come  on  my  show  and  say  so.       appendix  2     president  obama  gave  an  excellent  speech  last  week  in  kansas  about  inequality  in   america.     “this  is  the  defining  issue  of  our  time.”    he  said.    “this  is  a  make-­or-­break  moment  for the  middle  class,  and  for  all  those  who  are  fighting  to  get  into  the  middle  class.  because   what’s  at  stake  is  whether  this  will  be  a  country  where  working  people  can  earn  enough   to  raise  a  family,  build  a  modest  savings,  own  a  home,  secure  their  retirement.”       he’s  right.    the  spread  between  rich  and  poor  has  gotten  wider  over  the  decades.    and   the  opportunities  for  the  99%  have  become  harder  to  realize.       the  president’s  speech  got  me  thinking.    my  kids  are  no  smarter  than  similar  kids  their   age  from  the  inner  city.    my  kids  have  it  much  easier  than  their  counterparts  from  west   philadelphia.    the  world  is  not  fair  to  those  kids  mainly  because  they  had  the  misfortune   of  being  born  two  miles  away  into  a  more  difficult  part  of  the  world  and  with  a  skin  color   that  makes  realizing  the  opportunities  that  the  president  spoke  about  that  much  harder.   this  is  a  fact.    in  2011.     i  am  not  a  poor  black  kid.    i  am  a  middle  aged  white  guy  who  comes  from  a  middle  class   white  background.    so  life  was  easier  for  me.    but  that  doesn’t  mean  that  the  prospects   are  impossible  for  those  kids  from  the  inner  city.    it  doesn’t  mean  that  there  are  no   opportunities  for  them.      or  that  the  1%  control  the  world  and  the  rest  of  us  have  to  fight   over  the  scraps  left  behind.    i  don’t  believe  that.    i  believe  that  everyone  in  this  country   has  a  chance  to  succeed.    still.    in  2011.    even  a  poor  black  kid  in  west  philadelphia.       it  takes  brains.    it  takes  hard  work.    it  takes  a  little  luck.    and  a  little  help  from  others.    it   takes  the  ability  and  the  know-­how  to  use  the  resources  that  are  available.    like   technology.    as  a  person  who  sells  and  has  worked  with  technology  all  my  life  i  also   know  this.       if  i  was  a  poor  black  kid  i  would  first  and  most  importantly  work  to  make  sure  i  got  the   best  grades  possible.  i  would  make  it  my  #1  priority  to  be  able  to  read  sufficiently.      i   wouldn’t  care  if  i  was  a  student  at  the  worst  public  middle  school  in  the  worst  inner  city.   even  the  worst  have  their  best.    and  the  very  best  students,  even  at  the  worst  schools,   have  more  opportunities.    getting  good  grades  is  the  key  to  having  more  options.    with   good  grades  you  can  choose  different,  better  paths.    if  you  do  poorly  in  school,   particularly  in  a  lousy  school,  you’re  severely  limiting  the  limited  opportunities  you  have.'       and  i  would  use  the  technology  available  to  me  as  a  student.    i  know  a  few  school   teachers  and  they  tell  me  that  many  inner  city  parents  usually  have  or  can  afford  cheap   computers  and  internet  service  nowadays.    that  because  (and  sadly)  it’s  oftentimes  a   necessary  thing  to  keep  their  kids  safe  at  home  than  on  the  streets.    and  libraries  and   schools  have  computers  available  too.    computers  can  be  purchased  cheaply  at  outlets   like  tigerdirect  and  dell’s  outlet.    professional  organizations  like  accountants  and   architects  often  offer  used  computers  from  their  members,  sometimes  at  no  cost  at  all.     if  i  was  a  poor  black  kid  i’d  use  the  free  technology  available  to  help  me  study.    i’d become  expert  at  google  scholar.      i’d  visit  study  sites  like  sparknotes  and  cliffsnotes   to  help  me  understand  books.    i’d  watch  relevant  teachings  on  academic  earth,  ted   and  the  khan  academy.    (i  say  relevant  because  some  of  these  lectures  may  not  be   related  to  my  work  or  too  advanced  for  my  age.  but  there  are  plenty  of  videos  on  these   sites  that  are  suitable  to  my  studies  and  would  help  me  stand  out.)    i  would  also,  when   possible,  get  my  books  for  free  at  project  gutenberg  and  learn  how  to  do  research  at   the  cia  world  factbook  and  wikipedia  to  help  me  with  my  studies.       i  would  use  homework  tools  like  backpack,  and  diigo  to  help  me  store  and  share  my   work  with  other  classmates.    i  would  use  skypeto  study  with  other  students  who  also   want  to  do  well  in  my  school.    i  would  take  advantage  of  study  websites  like  evernote,   study  rails,flashcard  machine,  quizlet,  and  free  online  calculators.       is  this  easy?    no  it’s  not.    it’s  hard.    it  takes  a  special  kind  of  kid  to  succeed.    and  to   succeed  even  with  these  tools  is  much  harder  for  a  black  kid  from  west  philadelphia   than  a  white  kid  from  the  suburbs.    but  it’s  not  impossible.    the  tools  are  there.    the   technology  is  there.    and  the  opportunities  there.       in  philadelphia,  there  are  nationally  recognized  magnet  schools  like  central,  girls  high   and  masterman.    these  schools  are  free.    but  they  are  hard  to  get  in  to.    you  need good   grades  and  good  test  scores.    and  there  are  also  other  good  magnet  and  charter   schools  in  the  city.    you  also  need  good  grades  to  get  into  those.    in  a  school  system   that  is  so  broken  these  are  bright  spots.    getting  into  one  of  these  schools  opens  up  a   world  of  opportunities.    more  than  90%  of  the  kids  that  go  to  central  go  on  to  college.    i   would  use  the  internet  to  research  each  one  of  these  schools  so  i  could  find  out  how  i could  be  admitted.    i  would  find  out  the  names  of  the  admissions  people  and  go  to  meet   with  them.  if  i  was  a  poor  black  kid  i  would  make  it  my  goal  to  get  into  one  of  these   schools.       or  even  a  private  school.    most  private  schools  i  know  are  filled  to  the  brim  with  the  1%.   that’s  because  these  schools  are  exclusive  and  expensive,  costing  anywhere  between   $20  and  $50k  per  year.        but  there’s  a  secret  about  them.    most  have  scholarship   programs.    most  have  boards  of  trustees  that  want  to  give  opportunities  to  kids  that   can’t  afford  the  tuition.    many  would  provide  funding  for  not  only  tuition  but  also  for   transportation  or  even  boarding.    trust  me,  they  want  to  show  diversity.    they  want  to   show  smiling,  smart  kids  of  many  different  colors  and  races  on  their  fundraising   brochures.  if  i  was  a  poor  black  kid  i’d  be  using  technology  to  research  these  schools   on  the  internet,  too,  and  making  them  know  that  i  exist  and  that  i  get  good  grades  and   want  to  go  to  their  school.       and  once  admitted  to  one  of  these  schools  the  first  person  i’d  introduce  myself  to  would   be  the  school’s  guidance  counselor.    this  is  the  person  who  will  one  day  help  me  go  to   a  college.    this  is  the  person  who  knows  everything  there  is  to  know  about  financial  aid,   grants,  minority  programs  and  the  like.    this  is  the  person  who  may  also  know  of  job programs  and  co-­op  learning  opportunities  that  i  could  participate  in.      this  is  the  person   who  could  help  me  get  summer  employment  at  a  law  firm  or  a  business  owned  by  the   1%  where  i  could  meet  people  and  show  off  my  stuff.     if  i  was  a  poor  black  kid  i  would  get  technical.    i  would  learn  software.    i  would  learn  how   to  write  code.    i  would  seek  out  courses  in  my  high  school  that  teaches  these  skills  or   figure  out  where  to  learn  more  online.    i  would  study  on  my  own.    i  would  make  sure  my   writing  and  communication  skills  stay  polished.       because  a  poor  black  kid  who  gets  good  grades,  has  a  part  time  job  and  becomes   proficient  with  a  technical  skill  will  go  to  college.    there  is  financial  aid  available.    there   are  programs  available.    and  no  matter  what  he  or  she  majors  in  that  person  will  have   opportunities.    they  will  find  jobs  in  a  country  of  business  owners  like  me  who  are   starved  for  smart,  skilled  people.  they  will  succeed.       president  obama  was  right  in  his  speech  last  week.    the  division  between  rich  and  poor   is  a  national  problem.    but  the  biggest  challenge  we  face  isn’t  inequality.      it’s  ignorance.   so  many  kids  from  west  philadelphia  don’t  even  know  these  opportunities  exist  for   them.    many  come  from  single-­parent  families  whose  mom  or  dad  (or  in  many  cases   their  grand  mom)  is  working  two  jobs  to  survive  and  are  just  (understandably)  too  plain   tired  to  do  anything  else  in  the  few  short  hours  they’re  home.    many  have  teachers  who are  overburdened  and  too  stressed  to  find  the  time  to  help  every  kid  that  needs  it.    many   of  these  kids  don’t  have  the  brains  to  figure  this  out  themselves  –  like  my  kids.    except   that  my  kids  are  just  lucky  enough  to  have  parents  and  a  well-­funded  school  system   around  to  push  them  in  the  right  direction.       technology  can  help  these  kids.    but  only  if  the  kids  want  to  be  helped.    yes,  there  is   much  inequality.    but  the  opportunity  is  still  there  in  this  country  for  those  that  are  smart   enough  to  go  for  it.   selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): bowman, n. d., wulf, t., breuer, j., velez, j. (2017, october 18-21). playing with the pixelated past: need satisfaction and entertainment experiences in gaming memories. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. playing with the pixelated past: need satisfaction and entertainment experiences in gaming memories nicholas david bowman west virginia university tim wulf university of cologne johannes breuer leibniz-institute for the social sciences john velez texas tech university from pong to pacman and mario to master chief, videogaming is a staple of digital media culture. the average gamer is 35 years old and has played for 13 years (esa, 2016). from this, an emerging line of inquiry considers the notion of nostalgia— recollections of and yearnings of past experiences (sedikides et al., 2015) often tied to specific artifacts, such as videogames (suominen, 2008). nostalgia and gaming experiences retro and classic video games are surging in popularity, as players look to recreate and reconnect with games from their youth (everett-haynes, 2016). modern consoles offer access to classic games, and file-sharing platforms allow for sharing and recreating the games through emulation software (cf. lizardi, 2015). forums such as r/retrogaming encourage discussion of nostalgic gaming memories. given that nostalgic experiences are unique emotional feelings that come from recollection of self-relevant artifacts (natterer, 2014), it makes sense that such memories would differ based on contextual factors. this could be as broad as the differences between a recent and more distant memory (one of a game from a few weeks ago, compared to a few years ago). a critical context to gaming is also the social gaming experience (compared to solo-playing)—critical, given the social nature of both nostalgia (cf. sedikides et al., 2015) and gaming (cf. bowman, weber, tamborini, & sherry, 2013). we focus on language variance on dimensions of specific importance to gaming: need satisfaction and entertainment experiences. tamborini et al. (2010) empirically linked gaming and need satisfaction associated with autonomy (independence and agency), competence (mastery of ludic challenges), and relatedness (social connections with others, including human and non-player characters); oliver et al. (2015) added insight (elevation and understanding, and an emotional connection to content) as relevant to gaming. our first research question asks (rq1) do mentions of need satisfaction differ as a function of (a) nostalgic play compared to current play and (b) coplaying compared to solo play? gameplay recollections might also vary in terms of hedonic (short-term) enjoyment and eudaimonic (longer-lasting) appreciation, both established outcomes of gaming (cf. oliver et al., 2015). our second question asks (rq2) do mentions of entertainment experiences differ as a function of (a) nostalgic play compared to current play and (b) co-playing compared to solo play? method a total of n = 582 respondents completed a paid online survey through amazon mturk. the average age of our sample was m = 32.38 (sd = 8.60) and 64% of respondents identified as male. respondents were randomly assigned to one of four gaming memory prompts: nostalgic solo play, nostalgic coplay, recent solo play, and recent coplay. neither age nor gender distribution differed among the four survey conditions, nostalgic memories were older and had more nostalgic affect than recent ones (see table 1). respondents were given three minutes to respond to the randomly-assigned memory prompt (figure 1). participants’ responses were examined with linguistic inquiry word count (liwc), using six custom dictionaries designed a priori to assess need satisfaction (autonomy, competence, relatedness, and insight) and entertainment (enjoyment and appreciation), with specific language manifest in gaming contexts. liwc outputs a probability of how often language from these dictionaries occurs per 100 words analyzed. average words-per-response were m = 75.11 (sd = 34.99), words-per-sentence was m = 15.65 (sd = 6.56), and six-letter words was m = 15.79 (sd = 5.99); manova confirmed that these averages did not differ between conditions, wilks’ λ = .978, f(3,576) = 1.445, p = .164, η2 = .007). games representing nearly two dozen genres were named, the most popular being platformers (n = 109, 18.7% of the total sample), first-person shooters (fps, n = 93, 16%), role-playing games (rpg, n = 89, 15.3%), and sports (n = 48, 8.2%). genres varied by condition, unsurprising given shifts in genre popularity over time, χ2(12) = 78.4, p < .001, cramer’s v = .212. platformers were most often named in both nostalgia conditions (n = 81, 71% of all mentions), rpg in the recent, solo-playing condition (n = 35, 39%) and fps in the recent, coplaying condition (n = 35, 38%). results rq1 probed potential variance in players’ language associated with intrinsic need satisfaction. manova revealed an overall main difference, wilks’ λ = .633, f(12,1521.60) = 23.88, p < .001, η2 = .141, see table 2. mentions of autonomy were highest when discussing recent, solo-playing memories. competence was lowest when recalling recent, coplaying memories. relatedness was equally present in both coplaying conditions (nostalgic and recent), and insight was least frequent in recent, coplaying memories. rq2 probed for potential variance in language associated wit entertainment outcomes. manova revealed an overall main difference, wilks’ λ = .934, f(12,1154) = 6.70, p < .001, η2 = .034, see table 3. enjoyment was more prevalent in recent memories. appreciation was more prevalent in nostalgic memories. discussion players reflected on need satisfaction and entertainment, although neither set of concepts was explicitly prompted by the survey. feelings of relatedness were highest regardless of the memories being nostalgic or recent, challenging the inherently social nature of nostalgia suggested by sedikides et al (2015). autonomy was highest with recent solo play (rpgs, which focus on player agency, were the most popular genre in that condition), and competence was lowest when recalling recent coplaying (indicative of a greater import placed on social bonds than personal performance). these patterns suggest that some elements of need satisfaction are more salient than others—notable, given that future media usage is mostly driven by notable past experiences (cf. atkin, 1985). appreciation was more common when recalling nostalgic memories, which comports with how nostalgia is attached to enduring and personally meaningful experiences. this finding might also explain the recent success of retro and classic games. players are actively seeking out ways to recreate enduring and eudaimonic gaming memories (in our data, from platforming games played nearly two decades ago)—suggesting that in understanding digital cultures, it is as important to engage the past as it is the present and the future. references atkin c (1985). informational utility and selective exposure to entertainment media. in d. zillmann & j. bryant (eds.), selective exposure to communication. (pp. 63-92). hillsdale, nj: lea. bowman nd, weber r, tamborini r, & sherry jl (2013). facilitating gameplay: how others affect performance at and enjoyment of videogames. media psychology, 16(1), 39-64. doi: 10.1080/15213269.2012.742360 entertainment software association (2016). essential facts about the computer and videogame industry: http://essentialfacts.theesa.com/ everett-haynes l (2016, december 20). nostalgia is big business in videogames. futurity.org: http://www.futurity.org/video-games-nostalgia-1321232-2/ lizardi r (2015). mediated nostalgia: individual memory and contemporary mass media. new york: lexington. natterer k (2014). how and why to measure personal and historical nostalgic experiences through entertainment media. international journal on media management, 16, 161-180. doi: 10.1080/14241277.2014.989567 oliver mb, bowman nd, woolley jk, rogers r, sherrick b, & chung, m-y (2015). videogames as meaningful entertainment experiences. psychology of popular media and culture, 5(4), 390-405. doi: 10.1037/ppm0000066 sedikides c, wildschut t, routledge c, arndt j, hepper eg, & zhou x (2015). to nostalgize: mixing memory with affect and desire. advances in experimental social psychology, 41, 189–273. doi: 0.1016/bs.aesp.2014.10.001 suominen j (2008). the past as future? nostalgia and retrogaming in digital culture. the fibreculture journal, 11: http://eleven.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-075-the-past-asthe-future-nostalgia-and-retrogaming-in-digital-culture http://essentialfacts.theesa.com/ http://www.futurity.org/video-games-nostalgia-1321232-2/ http://eleven.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-075-the-past-as-the-future-nostalgia-and-retrogaming-in-digital-culture http://eleven.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-075-the-past-as-the-future-nostalgia-and-retrogaming-in-digital-culture microsoft word 754-504-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 resisting and remaking the smart city and the ‘internet of things’ laura forlano, ph.d. institute of design illinois institute of technology lforlano@id.iit.edu abstract current discussions about urban media and technologies such as smart cities and the “internet of things” reinforce a corporate vision that is based on values of efficiency, productivity, innovation and security, which has been embraced by government stakeholders. advocates of open technologies, on the other hand, reinforce civic values such as privacy, openness and transparency. yet, both interpretations often bolster technologically deterministic views about the revolutionary potential of information technology. specifically, with respect to smart cities and the “internet of things,” discussions often focus on the potential of ubiquitous and invisible computers with “anytime, anywhere” access to the internet. these popular framings are important sites of appropriation and resistance because they greatly shape our imaginations of the opportunities and constraints of urban technologies. this paper seeks to address the considerable gaps between the discourses around these technologies with the empirical lived experience based on media representations, speculative and critical design interventions and field studies. keywords smart cities, internet of things, urban informatics, digital materiality, speculative design three myths of the smart city and the ‘internet of things’ discourses around the smart city and the ‘internet of things’ emphasize the ubiquity and invisibility of computing and ‘anytime, anywhere’ access to the internet. these framings are purported by corporations that sell their technologies to cities, politicians that fight for a more efficient government and productive economy, and hactivists that aim to create more open and transparent systems. yet, all three stakeholder groups reiterate these three basic principles of the smart city and the ‘internet of things’. this paper resists these dominant framings in an attempt to remake urban technological futures in the image of the lived reality of the people and objects as well as the built and natural environments that coexist in cities. i argue that computing and internet access is not and should not be ubiquitous, invisible or ‘anytime, anywhere’. furthermore, these framings are dangerous in misleading society towards a reality imbued with values that we do not want to reinforce. while they may not be ubiquitous, invisible or ‘anytime, anywhere,’ the technologies of the smart city and the ‘internet of things,’ along with socio-economic transformations over the past several decades have reconfigured and rearranged earlier dichotomies around global and local, digital and material, public and private, and amateur and professional. in order to better understand these emergent sociotechnical practices, it is helpful to reference theories from communications (carey, 1988; innis, 1951), and science and technology studies (bijker, hughes, & pinch, 1987; latour, 2005; nissenbaum, 2001; star, 1999). for example, innis argued that media and communication technologies either functioned to control distant lands or to reinforce place-based communities. my research on mobile workers in new york has illustrated the ways in which the appropriation and use of wifi via laptops, tablets and mobile phones (along with the specific affordances and constraints of wireless spectrum) allows for both connection to distant colleagues and clients but also the formation of place-based friendships, epistemic communities based in specific cafés on the lower east side, and, more recently coworking communities. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 over the past five years, a growing body of academic scholarship has employed new concepts that challenge the separation of physical from digital, global from local, and private from public, which are relevant to the understanding of the way in which digital technologies are enabling emergent forms of organizing (humphreys, 2008), new modes of citizen engagement (foth, 2008; foth, forlano, gibbs, & satchell, 2011) and novel ways of experiencing urban space (ito, 2003). specifically, terms such as net locality (gordon & silva, 2011), code/space (kitchin & dodge, 2011), situated technologies (shepard, 2011), and codescapes (forlano, 2009) have been introduced in order to better articulate the ways in which digital interfaces, artifacts and networks have been integrated into urban space. ubiquity first, the myth of ubiquity. this claim harkens back to mark weiser’s (1991) manifesto to xerox parc in which he argued that researchers should look beyond the desktop and towards a future in which computers would be ubiquitous. his dictum became the manifesto for an emergent field of ubiquitous computing, which sought to create just that future (dourish & bell, 2011). however, this framing promises a reality that is not possible or even desirable. for example, different kinds of building structures and materials, network density (i.e. the number of wireless networks or cable users in a given geographic area), weather patterns and the natural environment can and frequently do disrupt the availability of electricity and internet connectivity. one theoretical and practical response is to argue for the seamful design (chalmers, maccoll, & bell, 2003), which acknowledges that these technologies are not ubiquitous or seamless and, instead, exploits these gaps. invisibility second, the myth of invisibility. these technologies are not and should not be invisible and, thus, we must find ways to make them present. one such example from the realm of interaction design is timo arnall’s 2011 “immaterials: light painting wifi” (http://www.nearfield.org/2011/02/wifi-lightpainting) “immaterials” project, a project that used arduino-boards equipped with sensors to illustrate the shape of wireless networks on the streets of oslo using a technique called lightpainting. similarly, drawing on critical and speculative design, mark shepard’s sentient city survival kit (http://survival.sentientcity.net) resists technologies of control by outfitting an umbrella outfitted infrared leds that are only visible to surveillance cameras. in my research, i have used spectrum analysis in order to understand the spatiality of wireless networks in public spaces as a kind of network ethnography (howard, 2002) of physical spaces. this further underscores the point that despite the fact that these technologies seem to be invisible to the naked eye, they are still observable and, in fact, their observation can reveal interesting patterns of socio-technical practices. ‘anytime, anywhere’ third, the myth of the ‘anytime, anywhere.’ this language has been used historically to advertise the benefits of emerging technologies such as hot water, electricity and battery power. for example, a quick glance through popular mechanics magazine in the 1940s contains all manner of references to this term according to a search of google ngram citations (figure 1). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 figure 1: source: google books ngram viewer (http://books.google.com/ngrams), accessed on march 14, 2013. however, as the chart above illustrates, the popularity has been growing in the last decade in which it has been explicitly linked to mobile, wireless and broadband connectivity. yet, while this framing seems to capture the imagination, in particular with respect to online commerce and remote working, it is in stark contrast with our lived experience. specifically, my study of mobile workers confirmed that specific people, in specific professions, at specific times in their projects and workdays selected particular cafés, parks and public spaces in which to work. in conclusion, this paper debunks the myths of ubiquitous and invisible computing and ‘anytime, anywhere’ access to the internet but, in resisting these framings, it is also necessary to remake them through a theoretical tinkering that is linked to the lived experiences of people and objects as well as the built and natural environments that coexist in cities. critical and speculative design as well as empirical field studies as the above examples illustrate are useful to the co-construction of emerging understandings of the smart city and the ‘internet of things’. in order to resist and remake the smart city and ‘internet of things,’ it is necessary to both work within these definitions (since they have been widely adopted) in order to adding nuances and complexity to the discussion while, at the same time, creating a more developed socio-technical vocabulary that captures the values that we seek to reinforce in society more broadly. references bijker, wiebe e., hughes, thomas p. , & pinch, trevor. (1987). the social construction of technological systems. cambridge, ma: the mit press. carey, james w. (1988). communication as culture: essays on media and society. new york: unwin hyman, inc. chalmers, m., maccoll, i., & bell, m. . (2003). seamful design: showing the seams in wearable computing. paper presented at the eurowearable. dourish, paul, & bell, genevieve. (2011). divining a digital future : mess and mythology in ubiquitous computing. cambridge, mass.: mit press. forlano, laura. (2009). wifi geographies: when code meets place. the information society, 25, 19. foth, marcus. (2008). handbook of research on urban informatics: the practice and promise of the real-time city. hershey, pa: igi global. foth, marcus, forlano, laura, gibbs, martin, & satchell, christine. (2011). from social butterfly to engaged citizen. cambridge, ma: mit press. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 gordon, eric, & silva, adriana de souza e. (2011). net locality : why location matters in a networked world. chichester, west sussex ; malden, ma: wiley-blackwell. howard, p. (2002). network ethnography and the hypermedia organization: new media, new organizations, new methods. new media & society, 4(4), 550. humphreys. (2008). mobile social networks and social practice: a case study of dodgeball. journal of computer-mediated communication, 13(1), 341-360. innis, harold. (1951). the bias of communication. toronto, canada university of toronto press. ito, mizuko. (2003). mobile phones, japanese youth, and the re-placement of social contact. front stage back stage: mobile communication and the renegotiation of the social sphere. grimstad, norway. http://www.itofisher.com/people/mito/ mobileyouth.pdf kitchin, rob, & dodge, martin. (2011). code/space : software and everyday life. cambridge, mass.: mit press. latour, b. (2005). reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. oxford: oxford university press. nissenbaum, h. (2001). how computer systems embody values. computer, 34(3), 120. shepard, mark (ed.). (2011). sentient city: ubiquitous computing, architecture, and the future of urban space. cambridge, ma: mit press. star, s. l. (1999). the ethnography of infrastructure. american behavioral scientist, 43(3), 377. weiser, m. (1991). the computer for the twenty-first century. scientific american, 265(3), 94-104. this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): geiger, r.s. (2015, october 21-24). bot-based collective blocklists in twitter: the counterpublic moderation of a privately-owned networked public space. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. bot-based collective blocklists in twitter: the counterpublic moderation of a privately-owned networked public space r. stuart geiger (stuart@stuartgeiger.com) university of california, berkeley abstract in twitter, many people are facing increasing harassment and abuse from others, particularly from individuals associated with "gamergate"– a selfdescribed ‘social movement’ viciously opposing feminist video game developers and media critics. while twitter supports user-to-user ‘blocking’ (anyone can direct twitter to hide posts or messages from a particular account), targets of gamergate-associated harassment often describe individually blocking harassers as a sisyphean task. in response, some are using collective blocklists, in which a group curates a list of accounts which they have identified as harassers. any account added to a blocklist is automatically made invisible for all of the blocklist's subscribers. most notably, this feature is not built into the twitter platform and was not designed, developed, or officially supported by twitter, inc. instead, collective blocklists are made possible through automated software agents (or bots) which are developed and operated by independent groups of volunteers. this paper reports findings from an ethnography of infrastructure, investigating the development and deployment of these bot-based collective blocklists (or blockbots) in twitter. i show how the designs (and re-designs) of blockbots are bound up in competing ideas and imaginaries about what it means for counterpublic groups to moderate a privately-owned networked public space. blockbots are a mode of algorithmic filtering which reconfigures affordances of a networked public, but with key differences from the algorithmic filters like in facebook’s news feed. blockbots make responding to harassment a more visible and communal practice, as well as involve imagining alternative policies and procedures for moderating content online. research questions and methodology this paper reports from a study of bot-based collective blocklists (or blockbots) in twitter, methodologically drawing from techniques and tactics in star’s ethnography of infrastructure (star 1999). twitter is an infrastructure supporting participation in a networked public (boyd 2010), but blockbots are also infrastructures supporting a set of practices in which counterpublic groups (fraser 1990) work to moderate a privately owned public space. i focus on how these infrastructures are not static, but rather dynamic and relational, “emerg[ing] for people in practice, connected to activities and structures” (bowker et al. 2010: 99). i iteratively and inductively used many methods – interviews with blockbot developers and subscribers, observations of routine and exceptional activity, archival and historical methods, and systems analysis and software studies methods. my overarching research question was how blockbots make visible and contest particular assumptions about how twitter operates as a networked public. within this broader research question, i had two specific sub-questions: first, how are blockbots currently operating in twitter – what are the average, everyday practices in their operation? second, how has each specific blockbot developed and evolved over time, due to both internal and external factors? i focused on the organizational structure behind specific blockbots and sought to understand the different norms and discourses used by those in and around each blockbot. i also sought moments of controversy and breakdown to make structures, norms, discourses, and invisible work (star and strauss 1999) visible and comparable. while i focused on blockbot developers and subscribers, these controversies also led me to observing activity and analyzing publicly-accessible discourse from a wide variety of social actors in various environments, including staff at twitter, inc., anti-harassment activists, commentators in social and mainstream media, and gamergate-aligned groups. findings and implications blockbots are ways in which people who do not have access to server-side code seek to change or contest the default affordances of platforms lessig’s ‘code is law’ (1999) maxim is a powerful metaphor to conceptualize software in society: it casts organizations like twitter, inc. as governments, whose developers have the exclusive authority to legislate from the command line. typically, if people disagree with how twitter is designed or administered – such as how many people believe twitter, inc. is not doing enough to stop harassment – they can express themselves by stating their objections or by leaving the platform. in order to change the software-based affordances of a platform like twitter, generally, people must convince twitter, inc. to change the code-as-law these server-sovereigns have written and implemented. bot-based collective blocklists in twitter involve a third approach: they are “bespoke code” (geiger 2014) in which people who do not have access to modify a platform’s server-side codebase are nevertheless able to change how the platform operates. and as boyd (2010) argues, differently-programmed networked public spaces can have wildly different affordances in terms of how persistent, replicable, scalable, or searchable content is. blockbots are explicitly and intentionally designed, developed, and deployed to change these affordances. most are implemented because of a perceived failure by twitter, inc. to adequately deal with harassment. some who develop and operate twitter blockbots are also actively seeking to alter code-dependent affordances on the ‘server side’ – hoping for a day when their blockbots are obsolete. blockbots make responding to harassment a more visible and communal practice while twitter does have a ‘blocking’ feature which lets users hide accounts, blockbots turn this activity from an individual to a collective practice. as crawford and gillespie (2014) argue, mechanisms of ‘flagging’ can shift responsibility for policing content from the companies operating platforms to the people using them. this devolution in responsibility can be celebrated as giving more agency to people who use such platforms, but it also shifts the burden of conducting such moderation work to individuals, which can involve a substantial amount of potentially-traumatic labor. by default in twitter, harassment can be (and is) easily coordinated by like-minded groups, who distribute labor in ways that are both efficient and visible to each other, particularly with coordinated harassment campaigns like gamergate (chess and shaw 2015; heron, belford, and goker 2014). as responding to harassment involves an individual, private client-to-server directive, this work is far less visible and harder to coordinate with one’s peers and allies. bot-based collective blocklists make the affective labor of responding to coordinated harassment not only more efficient, but also more visible and communal. communities have formed around many blockbots, whose developers, moderators, and subscribers give each other a wide variety of logistical, emotional, and institutional support – in addition to the average, everyday work involving in collectively curating a blocklist. blockbots imagine alternative policies and procedures for moderating content online in addition to implementing alternative code-based affordances, blockbot groups are exploring and developing alternative policies and procedures for moderating content online. they engaging in the same kinds of tasks as twitter’s trust and safety team, but with many differences. and as many of these groups have grown from ‘teams of one’ to dozens of members, many have developed increasingly-formalized procedures for reviewing content, as well as developing their own norms and discourses. yet even organizations that share similar tasks and goals often have different procedures and norms. and like any group, they often debate these issues both among themselves and with those outside of the organization. blockbots are a mode of algorithmic filtering, but invert several default assumptions while there is much debate on the algorithmic filtering of posts in the ‘news feeds’ or ‘timelines’ of social networking sites (bucher 2012), much of the public and academic discourse on this issue assumes that such algorithmic filtering operates as it currently does in facebook: a single opaque ‘black box’, developed internally by the company that owns and operates the site, which is enabled by default and difficult to opt-out of. yet botbased collective blocklists are a form of algorithmic filtering that generally do not operate according to any of these assumptions, providing a compelling alternative when considering the socio-technical governance of networked publics. references bowker, geoffrey c., karen baker, florence millerand, and david ribes. 2010. “toward information infrastructure studies: ways of knowing in a networked environment.” in international handbook of internet research, 97–117. doi:10.1007/978-1-40209789-8_5. boyd, d. 2010. “social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications.” in networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites, edited by zizi papacharissi, 39–58. http://www.danah.org/papers/2010/snsasnetworkedpublics.pdf. bucher, t. 2012. “want to be on the top? algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on facebook.” new media & society 14 (7): 1164–80. doi:10.1177/1461444812440159. chess, shira, and adrienne shaw. 2015. “a conspiracy of fishes, or, how we learned to stop worrying about #gamergate and embrace hegemonic masculinity.” journal of broadcasting & electronic media 59 (march 2015): 37–41. doi:10.1080/08838151.2014.999917. crawford, kate, and tarleton gillespie. 2014. “what is a flag for? social media reporting tools and the vocabulary of complaint.” new media & society2. doi:10.1177/1461444814543163. fraser, nancy. 1990. “rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy.” social text 26: 56–80. doi:10.2307/466240. geiger, r. stuart. 2014. “bots, bespoke, code and the materiality of software platforms.” information, communication & society 17 (3). routledge: 342–56. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2013.873069. heron, michael james, pauline belford, and ayse goker. 2014. “sexism in the circuitry.” acm sigcas computers and society 44 (4). acm: 18–29. doi:10.1145/2695577.2695582. lessig, lawrence. 1999. code and other laws of cyberspace. new york: basic books. star, susan leigh. 1999. “the ethnography of infrastructure.” american behavioral scientist 43 (3): 377–91. star, susan leigh, and anselm strauss. 1999. “layers of silence , arenas of voice : the ecology of visible and invisible work.” computer supported cooperative work 8: 9–30. doi:10.1023/a:1008651105359. microsoft word eynon.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): eynon, r. (2014, october 22-24). bucking the trend? understanding the “outliers” in digital inclusion research. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. bucking the trend? understanding the “outliers” in digital inclusion research rebecca eynon university of oxford in britain, policy makers promote the internet as a means to facilitate social mobility, through the provision of access to a wider range of learning, employment, networking and informational opportunities. yet, research has shown that this is not the case: better off, better educated individuals use the internet for a wider range of capital enhancing activities. instead of improving the status quo, the internet tends to reinforce and at times compound existing social inequalities (halford and savage 2010). there has been a number of policy interventions designed to address digital inequality, typically focusing on providing access and supporting skills. yet, like many wellintentioned policies designed to facilitate social mobility, such initiatives have not worked well as they do not account fully for the complexity of the issue. at the same time, the academic research on digital inclusion has been criticized for lacking a strong theoretical emphasis (helsper, 2012; van dijk 2006). at a time when many are concerned about growing social inequalities, and services and support are increasingly moving online, this presentation aims to re-examine this problem by focusing research on a largely ignored group of adults who despite being from less well-off backgrounds appear (based on national survey data) to be using the internet to improve their circumstances for a range of “capital enhancing” activities. in other words, they “buck the trend” and seem to use the internet against the odds. indeed, a few quantitative studies support this finding that a small, but significant, group of people from low socio-economic backgrounds may be using the internet to improve their life circumstances. for example, helsper identified a group she called the “unexpectedly digitally included” from the analysis of 3 independent surveys of internet use and non use in britain (helsper, 2008). in a later study, eynon and helsper (2011) reported further evidence of the “unexpectedly digitally included” specifically in relation to the uptake of online learning opportunities. yet, beyond identifying a few characteristics of this group (e.g. they tended to be parents) these quantitative surveys are unable to say a great deal about why this group are using the internet or the meaning this use really had in their lives. thus to date, we know very little about this fascinating group. what are the contexts and processes that lead these people to use the internet “against the odds”? are they deliberately using the internet as a way to enhance their cultural, social and economic capital for themselves and for their family? what meaning does this kind of use of the internet have in their lives? has it, in their own terms, contributed to their social mobility? this presentation will present data from in-depth interviews with 20 purposively sampled individuals who are part of this group to address these questions. in addition, the interviews will include discussion of a socioeconomic genogram and provide information about the meaning the internet has in the participant’s lives (bertaux and thompson, 2006). given the relative newness of the focus of this research, such a qualitative approach is appropriate. indeed, qualitative research on internet use by people from lower socio economic backgrounds (e.g. work by bakardijeva and smith, 2001; clayton and mcdonald, 2013; mehrat and merkel, 2004) highlights the significant complexity of this area, raising issues around the meaning and value of the internet in people’s lives and what it really means to be digitally included. in doing so, the presentation speaks directly to the theme of aoir 15, looking at the intersections between digital haves and have nots and the experiences of a particular group of people who are outside the mainstream trends. it is hoped that analyses of this group offer us a new way to look at the relationships between digital inequality and social mobility, providing different perspectives on the processes at work and offering a new opportunity to contribute to theory and practice. references bakardijeva, m and smith, r (2001). the internet in everyday life: computer networking from the standpoint of the domestic user. new media and society, 3, 6783. bertaux, d and thompson, pr (2006). pathways to social class: a qualitative approach to social mobility. transaction publishers. clayton, j and macdonald, sj (2013). the limits of technology: social class, occupation and digital inclusion in the city of sunderland, england. information, communication & society, 16(6), 945-966. eynon, r and helsper, e (2011). adults learning online: digital choice and/or digital exclusion? new media & society, 13(4), 534-551. halford, s and savage, m (2010), reconceptualizing digital social inequality. information, communication & society, 13 (7), 937–955. helsper, e (2008). digital inclusion: an analysis of social disadvantage and the information society. department for communities and local government. helsper, ej (2012). a corresponding fields model for the links between social and digital exclusion. communication theory, 22(4), 403-426. mehrat, b and merkel, c (2004). the internet for empowerment of minority and marginalized users. new media & society, 6(6):781–802. van dijk, jagm(2006). digital divide research, achievements and shortcomings. poetics, 34, 221-235. microsoft word 731-481-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 'more awesome than electronic arts': resistance and appropriation in the sims gaming communities ruth a deller sheffield hallam university uk r.a.deller@shu.ac.uk abstract this paper explores discourses of resistance and appropriation within the gaming communities surrounding the sims franchise, particularly with regards to users modding and creating their own custom content for the game. i present some findings from a large-scale survey of sims fans (over 1000 respondents) and analysis of over fifty different sims blogs, sites and forums to demonstrate how resistance and appropriation form an integral part of the communities' discourse and activity. i argue that resistance to electronic arts forms a key part of this discourse, with users perceiving the company as 'greedy' or 'incompetent' whilst they appropriate its content into their own creations. at the same time, there is a counter-resistance from some users to modifying the game or incorporating user-generated content. keywords gaming; resistance; user-generated content; modding; appropriation introduction this paper explores resistance and appropriation within the sims gaming communities. fans of this franchise, now in its third iteration (the sims 3) have long been associated with modding and creating their own custom content for the games (gee and hayes, 2010; flanagan and nissenbaum, 2008; sihvonen, 2011). indeed, in the early days of the franchise, the creation of user-generated content was encouraged by original creator will wright (jenkins, 2006a/b). here, i present findings from both a large-scale survey of sims fans (over 1000 respondents from across a range of communities1) and analysis of over fifty different sims blogs, sites and forums to demonstrate how resistance and appropriation form an integral part of the communities' discourse and activity. background and context the sims (2000) is a sandbox-style game where users build houses and venues, create characters and run their lives. the original game, itself a spin off from the maxis2 sim franchise (e.g. simcity, simtower) has spawned a franchise of its own, with the arrival of sims 2 (2004), sims ‘stories’ (2007) and sims 3 (2009)3. the games also have several expansion and ‘stuff’ packs allowing users to purchase more game interactions and opportunities as well as furniture, clothing and décor. electronic arts runs an internet-based store where sims 3 users can buy ‘simpoints’ to spend on exclusive items for their game, including content labeled as ‘premium’ including new lots and worlds. 1 all users are identified by a pseudonym that is different from the pseudonym they use in the communities. 2 in 1997, maxis was bought by electronic arts and most sims games carried branding for both companies. gamers coined the term ‘eaxis’ to refer to the company – something that stuck as common parlance within the sims communities even after latter sims 2 expansion packs and the sims 3 series omitted the maxis logo. the maxis logo reappeared on sims 3 expansions released after 2012. 3 although there are console versions of many of the sims games, this paper refers to users of pc/mac editions, the most popular versions of the series. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 since the first iteration of the franchise, users have been creating their own custom content and mods to enhance gameplay. indeed, the series’ creator, will wright, envisaged that "more than 60 percent of the content for the sims will have been developed by its fans" (jenkins, 2006a, p170). a plethora of sites and communities dedicated to the games sprang up, and more developed with the arrival of the sequels. sims communities and players can be find on almost all blogging, forum and social media platforms – and appropriation and resistance form a key part of many gamers’ experiences, from their use of game mods and custom content, to the way they discuss the ea/maxis created characters, worlds and scenarios and appropriate (or resist) these in their own gameplay, world building and story creation. method and approach this paper draws upon findings of survey data with over 1000 sims players, sourced via circulating the call for participants to dozens of official and unofficial sites, blogs, forums and social media outlets. in addition, discourse analysis of over fifty popular sites, blogs and forums was conducted. findings 86% of users surveyed used custom content or mods in their game 17% were creators of such content. modding and content creation is frequently framed by users as being explicitly resistant to electronic arts (or maxis/‘eaxis’)4. high-profile modders from sites such as more awesome than you!, mod the sims and nraas industries are regularly credited with fixing what ea 'got wrong' and 'making the games playable'. user-created items such as hair, skins, clothing and worlds are compared to those created by ea, with the latter frequently seen as being inferior. [creator]'s mods are my ultimate favorite. i had all but stopped playing the sims because my town just kept dying out. since finding his story progression mod, i have completely found my love of sims again! (respondent 1357) [creator] is my favorite modder. i wouldn't be able to play the game at all if not for his mods, because they solve a lot of the problems created by the game itself. (respondent 1843) creating custom content involves users appropriating the 'meshes' provided in the original games as templates. some creators then offer content as free downloads, whilst others charge a fee or 'donation' for their work. the act of paid creation is controversial and some sites recirculate this content for free, arguing that charging for custom content contravenes the ea terms of service forbidding users to profit from ea content, as the items are based on ea meshes. some of the fans and sites who are resistant to paid creators, however, also support the sharing pirated and 'cracked' material from the games themselves, to content licensed and sold through the electronic arts store. gamers use the discourse of 'pirate not thief' and 'the municipality' when discussing this activity, presenting themselves as offering legitimate resistance to what they perceive as 'theft' from the major corporation, which is accused of charging gamers too much, both for the games and for additional content, and of providing substandard and inadequate products, which fans have to then 'fix' themselves. paying $25 for ea worlds is ridiculous. there are beautiful custom worlds out there that are free, so why should i pay so much for an ea one? if ea worlds cost way 4 resistance to electronic arts is not only common to the sims franchise. fans of other games, including sim city, mass effect 3 and fifa have publicly condemned ea's practices and in 2012 it earned the epithet 'worst company in america' from readers of the site consumerist (references). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 less, i would buy them. but until then, i will get them through other means. (rif, modding forum) the routing issues, bugs in object scripts, and bland assembly-line building, decor and premade sims that feature in many ea worlds... are you aware that [modder] has had to provide overrides to fix problems with the routing paint in every world ea has produced? somehow ea's world design team never seems to have learned that those holes cause stuck sims that lead to massive lag. our best world creators, on the other hand, understand how to test for and avoid that type of problem... if these worlds actually had been playtested for any amount of time, these things would be caught and fixed. (skarf, modding forum) despite the prevalence of adaptation, customisation and resistance practices within the community, some users and bloggers remain vehemently 'anti-modding', 'anti-piracy' or both indeed, they are resistant to these developments. no, not all custom content is bad, but how do you know good content from bad? the only way to know is to stick it in your game. it's always a gamble... thus, our stance is, as it always has been, that 3rd party custom content is bad. we don't encourage it, and if asked, we don't recommend it. taking any other stance is what would be irresponsible. (hak, hints and tips forum) tensions prevail between those who feel they should play the games as designed and those who see gaming as a more user-driven, customisable experience; between those who wish to subvert electronic arts and those who do not. references flanagan, m.and nissenbaum, h.(2008). design heuristics for activist games' in y b kafai et al (eds) beyond barbie and mortal kombat: new perspectives on gender and gaming (pp. 265-280). cambridge: mit. gee, j.p. and hayes, e. (2010). women and gaming: the sims and 21st century learning. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. jenkins, h. (2006a). convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york: new york university press. jenkins, h. (2006b). fans, bloggers and gamers: exploring participatory culture. new york: new york university press. sihvonen, t. (2011). players unleashed! modding the sims and the culture of gaming. amsterdam: amsterdam university press. license this article is ©2013 ruth a deller microsoft word 697-450-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 designerly ways of knowing internet research: a case for critical media design daren c. brabham annenberg school for communication & journalism university of southern california usa brabham@usc.edu abstract this essay presents a case for critical media design, a methodological framework for approaching internet studies research that blends the investments of critical theory, the practice of applied, grounded research, and a design-driven way of conceiving of problem solving in practical ways. keywords design; internet studies; design thinking; methodology toward critical media design in his book massive change, architect bruce mau (2004) asks, “now that we can do anything, what will we do?” (p. 15). mau’s intention is to provoke the design disciplines to think of the world’s problems as practical objectives to be solved through design and innovation. his argument in massive change is that technology is advancing quickly enough that designers may no longer want for resources for their breakthroughs, and, thus, we are running out of excuses for not taking action to improve the world. i see internet studies as an academic field with a unique vantage point for designing such solutions to the world’s problems, as so many of us are technically proficient in the creation and manipulation of the technologies we study, all while these technologies become less expensive and more user-friendly every day. in this essay, i argue that internet studies scholars should think of their academic work the way designers think of their work as an applied problem solving process. and for those of us whose work is critical in nature, a design-driven approach to internet studies scholarship is, i argue, an ethical imperative. conceiving of ourselves as designers and our work as critical media design may serve to strengthen the applied dimension of internet studies research at a time when the field is reaching a point of maturity and technological convergence empowers scholars to be both creators and students of critical intervention. this essay begins with an examination of applied research, grounded theory, and critical theory as three supporting concepts that explain a critical media design approach to research. i examine these topics mostly through the disciplinary lens of communication studies, specifically media studies, as communication studies offers a useful entry point into the articulation of these three concepts. i then turn to the design disciplines, design thinking, and design science in order to explore “designerly ways of knowing” (cross, 2001) and the problem-solving pursuit. i then offer a theorem for critical media design, and i present three cases that illustrate the critical media design approach in action. i conclude with an appeal to internet studies scholars to conceive of their academic work as a critical media design enterprise and offer six steps for doing so. applied research, grounded theory, critical theory, design the way buddenbaum and novak (2001) describe it, the distinction between basic research and applied research is that the goal of the former is “to create, test, and improve theory” while the goal of the latter is “to provide solutions to real-world problems” (p. 14). to be fair, buddenbaum and novak (2001) ultimately resist neatly containing these two approaches to social scientific research in such selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 simple definitions, and eventually they argue that the two approaches ought to “complement each other, working together to enhance understanding” (p. 14). yet, there is much more to be said about the complex interplay between theory building and applied work in social scientific inquiry, particularly when this interplay serves humanistic, critical ends. hickson (1973) asserted a definition for applied communications research in the inaugural issue of the journal by the same name: “the investigation of human communication events by a participant/observer of those events into a communication artifact that will help bring about communico-social change” (p. 3). that is, a researcher ought to “be, simultaneously, actor, observer, and critic” in relation to his or her research subjects (all the while acknowledging his or her subjectivity); must report findings in a way that nonscholars can understand and benefit from; and ought to strive for improving some aspect of the world through his or her work (hickson, 1973, pp. 3–4). following this definition, tesch (1975) seems to refer to this kind of research not so much as applied, but as humanistic, adding also that such research should not claim to be generalizable and that it should be undertaken when the urgency of a problem does not allow for rigorous scientific research or other methodological considerations. no matter the label, this brand of inquiry is primarily problem-driven and concerned with real communicative interactions rather than hypothetical scenarios or laboratory situations. because of the primacy of the problem in the design of applied communication studies, there tends to be a drive to select issues or problems first, usually coupled with research sites or texts or events, and then to select appropriate methods for tackling the problem at hand. applied research then tends to be inductive rather than deductive, making sense from the data that emerge in the course of understanding the problem being investigated and developing solutions for bringing about change. and as these research practices cobble together cohesive theories of human communication, we come to know the greater project of applied communication research as often akin to grounded theory (denzin & lincoln, 1994; glaser & strauss, 1967; strauss & corbin, 1990, 1997). the notions of problem solving, connecting research with non-scholars, and working to change the world for the better through communication research resonates with the mantra of critical theory as well. critical communication research, with its roots in the frankfurt school, marxism, feminism, and other schools of thought, is concerned with injustice and imbalances of power in the world—often in consideration of historical material conditions and along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other identity markers—and seeks to intervene in such unjust discourses and practices (hardt, 1992; mcchesney, 1993; rogers, 1982; slack & allor, 1983). if one is both a committed critic in this sense and an applied researcher, then, coupled with an interest in the power of media to play a role in such critical intervention, one may seek to practice critical media design in his or her work. internet studies researchers, then, ought to conceive of themselves not only as students of mediated communicative phenomena, but also as designers of the very mediated environments they study. scholars in related disciplines, such as noveck (2003), fischer (2002), cross (2001), illich (1973), and mau (2004), have also called for design-minded research programs; the roots of design thinking as a part of applied social research can be traced at least back to mumford (1934) and buckminster fuller (1963, 1992); and early figures in computing encouraged designerly ways of thinking as well (engelbart, 1962; licklider, 1960; nelson, 1974). a theorem for critical media design i suggest the following theorem as a justification for critical media design: if: • a researcher embraces a critical purpose (a desire to improve the world) in/through his or her work; selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 • a researcher assumes the role of media in constructing our social reality and thus also a role in contributing to unjust conditions in the world; • a researcher values the importance of media as tools for social change; and • new technologies increasingly enable everyday citizens to take charge of the media production process and design messages for themselves; then: • researchers can develop research programs that work to create original media processes and products that improve the world. these media processes and products can be the basis for, and the results of, a carefully crafted, iterative, grounded, and applied series of studies. critical media design in action case 1: resource development international designs a mobile karaoke studio to educate children in rural cambodia about arsenic-poisoned water wells (talbi, 2005; wade, 2010). see figure 1. figure 1: mobile karaoke van educating cambodian villagers about the dangers of arsenic in local water wells. (credit: rdi cambodia, from http://www.rdic.org/ground-water-arsenic-in-cambodia.php) case 2: urban ministries of durham collaborates with mckinney communications agency to develop spent, an online game about surviving poverty and homelessness (“spent,” 2011). spent is just one example of the power of the kinds of “serious games” advocated by scholars such as mcgonigal (2011) and flanagan (2009). see figure 2. figure 2: screen shot from spent. (credit: spent, mckinney for urban ministries of durham, from http://playspent.org) selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 case 3: a team of researchers, in collaboration with the utah transit authority, launches next stop design, a bus stop shelter design contest to crowdsource public participation in transit planning (brabham, 2010, 2012). see figure 3. figure 3: screen shot from next stop design. (credit: next stop design, supported by federal transit administration in cooperation with university of utah and utah transit authority, from http://www.nextstopdesign.com) it is my hope that internet studies scholars may embrace a critical media design approach in their work, eager to put ideas into action as designed technological artifacts for the public good, all while building theory and advancing the field. critical media design is a viable model for engaging in this kind of scholarly enterprise. references brabham, d. c. (2010). crowdsourcing as a model for problem solving: leveraging the collective intelligence of online communities for public good (unpublished doctoral dissertation). university of utah. brabham, d. c. (2012). the effectiveness of crowdsourcing public participation in a planning context. first monday, 17(12). retrieved from http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4225/3377 buddenbaum, j. m., & novak, k. b. (2001). applied communication research. ames, ia: iowa state university press. cross, n. (2001). designerly ways of knowing: design discipline versus design science. design issues, 17(3), 49–55. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 denzin, n., & lincoln, y. s. (1994). handbook of qualitative research. thousand oaks, ca: sage. engelbart, d. c. (1962). augmenting human intellect: a conceptual framework (summary report no. afosr3233). washington, dc: air force office of scientific research. retrieved from http://www.invisiblerevolution.net/engelbart/full_62_paper_augm_hum_int.html fischer, g. (2002). beyond “couch potatoes”: from consumers to designers and active contributors. first monday, 7(12). retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1010/931 flanagan, m. (2009). critical play: radical game design. cambridge, ma: mit press. fuller, r. b. (1963). operation manual for spaceship earth. new york: e. p. dutton. fuller, r. b. (1992). cosmography: a posthumous scenario for the future of humanity. new york: macmillan. glaser, b. g., & strauss, a. l. (1967). the discovery of grounded theory. chicago, il: aldine. hardt, h. (1992). critical communication studies: communication, history and theory in america. london: routledge. hickson, m., iii. (1973). applied communications research: a beginning point for social relevance. journal of applied communications research, 1(1), 215–219. illich, i. (1973). tools for conviviality. new york: harper and row. licklider, j. c. r. (1960). man-computer symbiosis. ire transactions on human factors in electronics, hfe1(2), 4–11. mau, b. (2004). massive change. new york: phaidon. mcchesney, r. w. (1993). critical communication research at the crossroads. journal of communication, 43(4), 98–104. mcgonigal, j. (2011). reality is broken: why games make us better and how they can change the world. new york: penguin press. mumford, l. (1934). technics and civilization. new york: harcourt brace. nelson, t. h. (1974). computer lib/dream machines. in n. wardrip-fruin & n. montfort (eds.), the new media reader (pp. 303–338). cambridge, ma: mit press. noveck, b. s. (2003). designing deliberative democracy in cyberspace: the role of the cyber-lawyer. boston university journal of science and technology law, 9(1), 1–91. rogers, e. m. (1982). the empirical and the critical schools of communication research. communication yearbook, 5, 125–144. slack, j. d., & allor, m. (1983). the political and epistemological constituents of critical communication research. journal of communication, 33(3), 208–218. spent, the online game about surviving poverty and homelessness, reaches its millionth play and invites congress to accept the challenge. (2011, august 31). mckinney news. retrieved from http://mckinney.com/news/spent-millionth-play strauss, a., & corbin, j. (1990). basics of qualitative research. newbury park, ca: sage. strauss, a., & corbin, j. (eds.). (1997). grounded theory in practice. thousand oaks, ca: sage. talbi, a. (2005). an overview of current operational responses to the arsenic issue in south and east asia (volume ii technical report no. paper 2). washington, dc: world bank. retrieved from http://tinyurl.com/aommjhl tesch, r. (1975). the humanistic approach to educational research (eric document reproduction service no. ed140475). santa barbara, ca: the fielding institute. wade, c. (2010). born sweet. cynthia wade productions. license this article is ©2013 daren c. brabham, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. microsoft word jungselius-hillman-weilenmann.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): jungselius, b., hillman, t., & weilenmann, a. (2014, october 22-24). fishing for followers: using hashtags as like bait in social media. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. fishing for followers: using hashtags as like bait in social media beata jungselius university of gothenburg, sweden thomas hillman university of gothenburg, sweden alexandra weilenmann university of gothenburg, sweden abstract in this paper we present findings from an on-going study of mobile social photography with a focus on how instagram users describe the practice of hashtagging as a way to gain likes and followers. there is a recognised connection between using hashtags and gaining likes and followers both among those who use hashtags and those who do not. based on interviews with 16 instagram users, we show how underlying norms regulate this practice. for example, it is technically possible to attract more views through the use of hashtags within instagram. however, due to social norms some users dismiss that possibility. introduction a central part of social media use is hashtagging. hashtags are used on flickr, del.icio.us, facebook, twitter, instagram and similar social websites to annotate different kinds of content such as micro blog posts, status updates, videos, images and photographs. when adding a hashtag to a photograph on social media like instagram, the audience for a photographer is extended beyond their immediate followers. by searching for photographs with a specific hashtag, people who usually don’t follow a photostream from a certain user are able to see those photographs without needing to follow the rest of their photostream. figure 1. hashtagged instagram with 36 likes by using many different hashtags, the possibility for reaching an audience larger than one’s own followers is increased. previous research has shown that hashtags are used to provide information about a photograph and to help others find one’s photographs (ames & naaman, 2007, miller & edwards, 2007). apart from serving as a bookmark for content and a symbol of community membership (yang, 2012), hashtags also allow users to track ongoing conversations and to communicate non-verbal cues like irony (lin, margolin, & keegan, 2013). in our study, participants described using hashtags to give others information about where a photo had been taken, the camera used, the filters added, and so forth. however, in addition to using hashtags to provide information for the benefit of other users, participants also described how hashtags can sometimes be used as a tool to attract more views in order to gain likes and followers. receiving likes has been shown to be a major concern for many social media users (blinded for review). similar to the way ames and naaman (2007) described users’ ways of ’gaming the system’ in order to attract more views, we found examples in our data where participants described using hashtags as bait for receiving more likes, in essence as ‘like bait’. the data that this paper draws upon is part of a larger study on mobile social photography and was collected through interviews of approximately one hour in length with sixteen instagram users conducted in connection to their visits to a museum (cf. blinded for review). user names have been changed to preserve the anonymity of participants. the interviews where video recorded and fully transcribed. the focus of the analysis of those interviews for this particular paper is on hashtagging as a practice. using hashtags as like bait gershon (2010) proposes the notion of ‘idioms of practice’ for understanding agreed upon appropriate social uses of technology. this concept relates to how people have implicit and explicit intuitions about how to use different technologies that they learn through interaction with other users. in this case, the social rules that apply for hashtagging are learned through the practice of hashtagging and by interacting with other users. our data suggests that there is a recognised connection between using hashtags and gaining likes and followers, both among those who use hashtags and those who do not. several of the participants had strong opinions on hashtagging. for example, one participant claimed to only use hashtags ‘sarcastically’ while another described how he ‘avoids hashtag spamming’ as a means to get likes and followers, and a third admitted to using hashtags but with a ‘humoristic touch to play with the concept’ of hashtagging. some participants in our study explicitly stated that they strive to receive many likes and followers and that they use hashtags to accomplish that. a young man described how he values likes from followers he doesn’t know differently than from followers who he has a relationship with: one reason to why you should get some more is, you, that you put up these tags so, because most of them friends that have instagram do follow you uhm but it’s well always fun with others who follow you because you take good pictures (@bobby). although some participants stated that they are not interested in receiving likes or followers, they talked about how others use hashtags to gain likes. based on the descriptions of the participants, there seems to be a recognised connection between using hashtags and actively seeking likes and followers. even those users who did not use hashtags themselves stated that instagrams with many hashtags receive more likes than those without. a young woman who avoids hashtags because she thinks the picture should ‘speak for itself’ described her reasons: one should get as many likes as possible and as many hashtags as possible so that people will find ones pictures and i have become the kind of person that i have friends who hashtag their pictures with like thirty different hashtags under instapic, instagram, pic of the day uhm food, yummy, nomnomnom i unfollow right away (@kim). this participant not only avoids using hashtags herself, but also goes as far as to unfollow users who she considers use them excessively. concluding discussion both technical features and social norms regulate the use of social media. drawing upon a study of the use of instagram we have articulated a few short examples of the ways in which the practice of hashtagging relies upon an underlying set of social rules that regulate the practice. although hashtagging can be a technique for reaching an audience beyond one's own immediate followers and for attracting views, likes and followers, there is also a risk of being unfollowed if used in a way not appreciated by the community. for these reasons some users dismiss the possibility of using hashtags. in this paper, we focus on these negotiations as part of the practice of hashtagging in social media. as with the use of all technologies, users negotiate an appropriate way to use hashtags for each particular purpose and in each particular setting they can be used. references ames, m. & naaman, m. 2007. why we tag: motivations for annotation in mobile and online media. proceedings of chi ’07, san jose, california, usa, 971–980. gershon, i. the breakup 2.0: disconnecting over new media. cornell university press, 2010. blinded for review lin, y., margolin, d., & keegan, b. 2013. #bigbirds never die: understanding social dynamics of emergent hashtag. proceedings of the seventh international aaai conference on weblogs and social media, 370–379. miller, a.d. & edwards, w.k. 2007. give and take : a study of consumer photosharing culture and practice. methodology, proceedings of chi ‘07, san josé, california, usa, 347–356. yang, l., sun, t., zhang, m. & mei, q. 2012. we know what @you #tag: does the dual role affect hashtag adoption? www ‘12, lyon, france, 261–270. microsoft word aoir13.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 next generation users: changing access to the internet grant blank & william dutton oxford internet institute abstract we investigate some implications of the rising use of mobile devices and multiple devices to access the internet. next generation users are defined as internet users who access the internet (1) on mobile devices and (2) on multiple devices. data from the 2011 oxford internet survey shows that next generation users are disproportionately likely to use the internet for entertainment, content production, and information-seeking. logistic regression shows that next generation users tend to be younger, wealthier, have positive attitudes toward technology and to have used the internet longer. we conclude that mobility and multiple devices are reconfiguring their access to information, people and services in ways that are likely to empower them in relation to other users. this may herald the beginning of a new digital divide. keywords next generation user; internet; mobile use; oxford internet survey; digital divide many people believe that internet use has entered a “post-pc” era. these people make arguments like “more and more consumers are using their mobile devices as their ‘default gateway’ for accessing the internet” (king 2012), or “as soon as three to five years from now, the average business professional will be transitioning from ‘heavy’ clients such as desktop pcs and business laptops with large amounts of localized storage and localized applications … to very small and extremely power efficient, … systems … which will function mostly as cache for applications that run remotely” (perlow 2012). mobile devices offer new kinds of access to the internet but, as we shall show, the relationship between pcs and mobile devices is a great deal more complex than simple replacement of one device by another. three theoretical perspectives bear on the social implications of a shift in patterns of access to the internet. they are all qualitative explanations of patterns of relationships, rather than operationally defined models, but they capture the major competing perspectives on the role of the internet in everyday life. technical rationality the technical rationality perspective draws on major features of new technologies to reason about the likely implications of adoption. domestication: a social rationality in contrast, work on ‘domestication’ of the internet argues for a more socially determinist perspective on the social role of the internet and related information and communication technologies (icts) in the household. domestication (haddon 2006, 2007, 2011; silverstone et al. 1992) emphasizes the influence of households or work places on shaping, taming or domesticating technologies as users fit them into the values and interests of their particular social context. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 reconfiguring access a different theoretical perspective focuses on ‘reconfiguring access’ (dutton 1999; 2005). from this perspective, it is impossible to determine the implications of technologies in advance, either by rationally extrapolating from the technical features of the innovations or by assessing the interests and values of users. this distinguishes this perspective from both a more technologically determinist view and a socially determinist position. reconfiguring access takes note of the fact that users often reinvent technologies, employing them in ways not expected by their developers. methods and data this paper addresses these issues around new patterns of internet access by analysing survey data gathered in britain as part of the oxford internet survey (oxis). based on demographic, attitudinal and internet use questions it is possible to construct profiles of the survey participants, which include users and non-users of the internet. the emergence of next generation users we identified two categories of users. first, we define the next generation user (ngu) as someone who accesses the internet from multiple locations and devices. specifically, we operationally define the next generation user as someone who uses at least two internet applications (out of four applications queried)i on their mobile and who fits two or more of the following criteria: they own a tablet, own a reader, own three or more computers. by this definition, in 2011, almost a third of britons, and 44.4% of internet users in britain, were next generation users (figure 1 and figure 2). second, from the oxford internet institute’s (oii) first survey of internet use in 2003, access has been primarily via a personal computer in the home. for many, this was complemented by similar access at work or school. while access has moved from dialup to broadband, wireless connections have expanded, and broadband speeds continue to increase, this pattern of internet access from a stationary computer characterizes the ‘first generation user’. figure 2 shows the rise next generation users in the context of overall internet use. british internet use grew from just under 60% in 2003 to 73% in 2011, leaving more than a quarter of the british population without access to the internet. there has been a steady but slow decline in the proportion of people who have never used the internet (non-users), and relative stability in the proportion of those who have used the internet at one time but who no longer do so (ex-users). despite multiple government and private initiatives aimed at bringing people online, digital divides remain in access to the internet. the slow growth in the proportion of british people with access to the internet contrasts dramatically with the rapid rise of next generation users. they increased from 13% in 2007 to 32% of the british population by 2011. there is a corresponding decline in first generation users from 54% to 40% of the british population. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 59 6 35 67 5 28 13 54 73 5 23 32 40 0 20 40 60 80 100 % o f t he p op ul at io n 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 all users next gen user first gen user ex-user non-user oxis 2003: n=2,029; oxis 2005: n=2,185; oxis 2007: n=2,350; oxis 2009: n=2,013; oxis 2011: n=2,057 figure 2: next generation internet users in context why does this matter? access to the internet shapes the ways in which individuals use the technology, and how people wish to use the internet shapes the technologies they adopt. this is shown by the contrast between first and next generation use of the internet in three areas: content production, entertainment and leisure, and information seeking. in each case, a technical rationality might see innovations reducing the openness and generativity of users, while from a domestication perspective, you would expect to see little change in patterns of use between next and first generation users. content production in contrast to technical rationality, with its focus on how the limited openness of new devices restricts users, next generation users are more likely to be producers of content than are first generation users, who concentrate more on consumption rather than production. for many types of content, next generation users are as much as 25 percentage points more likely to be producers. specifically, next generation users are more likely to update or create a profile on a social networking site (figure 3). they are also more likely than first generation users to post pictures and videos, post messages on discussion boards or forums, and post stories, poetry or other creative work. for more demanding types of content, such as maintaining a personal website or writing a blog, next generation users are almost twice as likely to be producers than are first generation users. innovations are reconfiguring access by enabling greater production of content by next generation users, but in a direction opposite to that expected on the basis of the more limited features of appliances. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 10 21 16 31 16 31 19 4243 64 48 75 0 20 40 60 80 100 % o f us er s w ho d o m or e th an n ev er post 'creative' work write a blog own a personal website post videospost photosvisit social networking sites current users. oxis 2011: n=1,498 figure 3: next generation users by content production next generation users first generation users the paper goes on to discuss differences between next generation users and first generation users in entertainment and leisure, and content production, illustrated by additional graphics. we do a pair of logistic regressions to describe the characteristics of the people who have become next generation users. the paper concludes by discussing the implications of the next generation user concept for the future development of the internet, especially for the mobile internet. references dutton, william h. 1999. society on the line: information politics in the digital age, oxford and new york: oxford university press. dutton, william h. 2005. ‘the internet and social transformation: reconfiguring access,’ pp. 375-97 in dutton, w. h., kahin, b., o’callaghan r., and wyckoff, a. w. (eds.), transforming enterprise, cambridge, ma: mit press. dutton, william h. and grant blank. 2011. next generation users: the internet in britain. oxford internet survey 2011. oxford internet institute: university of oxford. haddon, leslie. 2006. the contribution of domestication research to in-home computing and media consumption. the information society. 22: 195-205. haddon, leslie. 2007. roger silverstone’s legacies: domestication. new media & society. 9: 25-32. haddon, leslie. 2011. domestication analysis, objects of study, and the centrality of technologies in everyday life. canadian journal of communication. 36:311-323. king, rachael. 2012. great pc exodus on the internet. zdnet. posted 29 october 2012. accessed on 23/11/2012 from www.zdnet.com/idc-were-in-the-midst-of-the-great-pc-exodus-on-the-internet-7000006532/ lessig, lawrence. 1999. code and other laws of cyberspace. new york: basic books. livingstone, sonia. 1992. the meaning of domestic technologies: a personal construct analysis of familial gender relations. pp. 113-130 in roger silverstone and eric hirsch (eds.) consuming technologies: media and information in domestic spaces. london: routledge. perlow, jason. 2012. post-pc means mass extinction for personal computer oems. zdnet. posted 31 may 2012. accessed on 23/11/2012 from www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/post-pc-era-means-mass-extinctionfor-personal-computer-oems/20514 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 silverstone, r. 1996. future imperfect: information and communication technologies in everyday life’, pp. 217-31 in dutton, w. h. (ed.), information and communication technologies – visions and realities. oxford: oxford university press. silverstone, roger. 2005. introduction. pp 1-18 in roger silverstone (ed) media, technology and everyday life in europe. aldershot: ashgate press. zittrain, jonathan. 2008. the future of the internet and how to stop it. new haven: yale university press. i the four applications are: browsing the internet, using email, updating a social networking site, or finding directions. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  barton,d.,  lee,c.,  jones,r.,  &  vasquez,c.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  sociolinguistic   perspectives  on  everyday  digital  practices.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  conference   of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.   sociolinguistic  perspectives  on  everyday  digital  practices     panel  introduction     the  four  presenters  in  this  panel  are  linguists  who  share  a  common  approach  to  the   study  of  language  combining  discourse  studies  and  ethnographic  approaches  to  the   analysis  of  people’s  experiences  of  online  life.  there  are  4  distinct  studies:  an   examination  of  academics’  changing  writing  practices  and  likes  and  hates  in  their  work   and  everyday  lives;;  a  study  of  new  forms  of  meaning-­making  which  protestors  have   drawn  upon,  including  the  use  of  hashtags  online  and  offline;;  people’s  experience  and   positioning  in  relation  to  online  surveillance  as  a  social  and  discursive  practice;;  and  the   discursive  dynamics  in  parodies  of  online  consumer  reviews.  each  paper  demonstrates   the  value  of  detailed  analysis  of  language  to  reveal  more  about  how  the  online  world   works  and  to  bring  in  users’  perspectives.  these  are  all  research  sites  where  there  are   relationships  of  unequal  power,  alongside  tensions  and  disagreements.  themes  cutting   across  all  4  papers  include:  the  interweaving  of  online  and  offline  practices;;  the  making   and  breaking  of  rules;;  affect,  emotion  and  evaluation;;  and  the  constructions  of  digital   identities.         panel  paper  1:    “what  annoys  you  about  technology?”  academics’   stance  on  writing  technology       david  barton   lancaster  university       this  paper  concentrates  on  3  themes  concerning  technology  and  academics’   contemporary  writing  practices:  affect,  the  strong  likes  and  hates  which  academics   express  about  their  digital  lives;;  how  everyday  devices  and  practices  get  drawn  upon  in   work  contexts;;  and  how  academics  cope  with  increasing  demands  placed  upon  their   writing  lives.  it  is  part  of  a  bigger  project  examining  changes  in  academic  knowledge   production  in  the  context  of  new  technologies.       one  strand  of  previous  research  on  academic  writing  has  focused  on  students  learning   to  be  academics.  another  strand  analyses  linguistic  aspects  of  academic  texts  such  as     genres  associated  with  particular  disciplines,  or  the  structure  of  academic  articles.  but   there  is  little  work  on  academics’  actual  practices.  we  approach  academic  writing  as  a   workplace  practice  and  ask  “what  do  professional  academics  do  in  academic  writing   work?”  the  research  is  located  in  the  literature  on  digital  scholarship  and  accepts  that   all  aspects  of  academic  life  are  transformed  in  the  digital  world  (weller  2011).    we  adopt   a  social  practice  view  of  language  and  literacy  which  is  informed  by  literacy  studies  and   linguistic  ethnography.  this  assumes  that  practices  differ  across  contexts  and  are   always  situated.  (see  barton,  d.    &  c.  lee,  2013,  for  more  on  this  approach).  we  aim  to   make  sense  of  individual  people’s  lives.  analysis  then  consists  of  weaving  common   themes  across  individual  cases.  the  study  examines  academics’  writing  practices   across  3  universities  in  england  and  in  3  disciplines,  history,  marketing  and   mathematics.  the  project  is  interested  in  all  types  of  writing,  not  just  articles  and  books,   and  identifies  writing  as  knowledge  creation  in  teaching,  impact  work  and  writing  for   public  audiences.  this  paper  draws  primarily  on  repeated  interviews  with  focal   academics  in  each  of  the  3  disciplines.       the  work  is  consciously  multimethod.  it  includes  innovative  research  methods,  online   and  offline.    this  paper  draws  on  data  from  the  first  phase  of  the  project,  including   techno-­biographic  interviews,  ‘walk  around’  interviews  and  ‘day  in  the  life’  interviews.   being  academics,  we  are  all  participating  in  these  changes.  the  study  draws  upon  auto-­ ethnographies  of  our  own  activities  as  members  of  the  research  team.     technological  change  needs  to  be  discussed  in  the  context  of  other  social  changes.   this  paper  first  identifies  broad  influences  on  higher  education  workplaces  in  england.   there  are  transformations  in  relationships  with  students,  including:  massification,  ie  a   greater  proportion  of  young  people  are  going  to  university;;  consumerisation,  whereby   students  paying  for  courses;;  and  internationalisation,  where  many  postgraduate   programmes  are  primarily  overseas  students  and  a  uk  university  may  have  more   students  abroad  than  in  their  uk  campus.  in  addition  there  are  transformations  in   managerial  practices,  where  funding  mechanisms,  league  tables  and  research   excellence  frameworks  shape  priorities.     one  very  revealing  question  in  our  interviews  was  “what  annoys  you  about  technology   at  work?”  academics  were  keen  to  tell  us,  often  at  length  and  passionately,  about  their   likes  and  hates.  they  loved  or  hated  twitter.  they  were  annoyed  with  others’  usage  of   phones  or  tablets.  they  loved  their  smart  phone  and  felt  anxious  if  it  wasn’t  in  sight.       in  fact  this  question  about  affect  was  a  good  way  to  engage  people  and  it  proved  very   revealing  about  changes  in  people’s  practices.  we  analysed  affect  as  part  of  the   concept  of  stance-­taking,  as  used  in  sociolinguistics  and  discourse  studies.  stance-­ taking  is  broadly  defined  as  taking  up  a  position  with  respect  to  the  form  or  the  content   of  one's  utterance  (jaffe,  2009,  p.3).  there  are  different  kinds  of  stance:  affective  stance   is  the  stance-­taker’s  feelings,  for  example,  ‘i  like...’.  stance  is  frequently  implicit  and   inferred  from  the  utterance  and  surrounding  context.  we  examined  affect  as  expressed   in  the  interviews,  identifying  it  firstly  by  reading  the  transcripts  and  coding  them  for  affect   and  secondly  by  searching  the  whole  data  set  for  examples  of  affect  terms  such  as   ‘like’,  ‘love’,  ‘enjoy’.    often  interviewees  expressed  a  positive  stance  towards  their   overall  jobs  or  specific  aspects  such  as  teaching  or  doing  research.     however,  not  all  affect  is  positive.  we  also  searched  for  terms  such  as  ‘dislike’  and   ‘hate’,  as  in  ‘i  hate  skype…  it’s  a  simplistic  thing,  the  dislocation  between  eye  contact.’   such  examples  of  affect  enabled  us  to  see  other  issues  and  to  explore  our  central   question  of  how  digital  communications  technologies  are  shaping  academics  writing   practices.  often  affect  was  expressed  towards  devices  and  platforms,  such  as  iphones,   skype,  twitter,  powerpoints.  they  mixed  in  work  examples  and  everyday  likes  and   hates.  there  was  great  individual  variation  and  each  person  seemed  to  have  a  personal   profile  of  what  devices  and  platforms  they  utilized.  through  these,  we  see  individual   routes  to  common  ends  of  arranging  meetings,  or  providing  student  feedback.     the  paper  explores  two  examples  of  digital  writing  practices.  firstly,  emailing,  which   was  the  most  common  practice  referred  to.  people  have  email  on  every  device,   mentioned  it  in  passing  when  discussing  other  topics  and  they  wanted  to  talk  about  it.  it   encapsulates  most  aspects  of  being  an  academic.  everyone  is  struggling  to  keep  up   with  it,  and  they  are  doing  this  in  many  different  ways.  the  most  common  expression  of   negative  affect  was  the  expectation  that  they  would  be  ‘always-­on’.  the  second   example  is  powerpoint  where  distinct  individual  uses  were  most  apparent.  people   usually  saw  it  as  the  default  presentation  software.  they  used  it  in  different  ways  for   different  purposes,  especially  distinguishing  conference  papers  from  giving  lectures.     in  terms  of  adopting  new  practices,  people  might  not  take  up  changes  to  familiar   software  like  word  if  they  have  existing  ways  which  work  for  them.  the  stimulus  for   changing  practices  was  often  collaborating  with  colleagues  over  shared  teaching  or  joint   conference  papers.  also  people  often  referred  to  improved  collaborations  as  a  result  of   utilizing  digital  technologies,  especially  at  a  distance  across  countries.  this  improved   collaboration  was  something  people  liked,  and  was  reported  as  a  positive  aspect  of   speeding  up.         the  paper  turns  to  general  issues  around  how  digital  communications  technologies  are   shaping  academics’  writing  practices.  having  identified  new  tools  and  resources   available  in  the  past  decade,  we  explore  how  everyday  devices  and  practices  get  drawn   upon  in  work  contexts.  the  boundaries  between  work  life  and  everyday  life  are  being   eroded.  academics  in  many  disciplines  have  a  long  tradition  of  working  in  their  own   homes  where  they  pay  for  the  furniture,  heating  and  coffee,  now  they  also  pay  for  and   use  their  own  computers,  printers,  phones,  software,  apps  and  internet  connection  for   work.  this  can  involve  new  online  identities  for  social  media  and  expectations  that  they   blog  or  tweet  as  part  of  their  job.       finally,  the  paper  discusses  how  general  tensions  of  new  technologies  play  out  in   academic  life.  we  see  here  that  academics  seem  to  be  getting  busier:  they  are  having   more  demands  placed  upon  them;;  they  are  carrying  out  a  wider  variety  of  writing  tasks;;   and  boundaries  between  work  and  not-­work  are  collapsing.  everything  is  speeded  up   and  they  have  less  control  over  their  lives.  we  explore  this  conflicted  stance.  in  some   ways  academic  freedom  is  enhanced,  but  at  the  same  time  technologies  enable  greater   managerial  control.       references     barton,  d.    &  c.  lee  (2013).  language  online:  investigating  digital  texts  and  practices.   london:  routledge     jaffe,  a.  (2009).  introduction:  the  sociolinguistics  of  stance.  in  a.  jaffe  (ed.)  stance:   sociolinguistic  perspectives.  p3-­28.  oxford:  oxford  university  press.     weller,  m.  (2011).  the  digital  scholar:  how  technology  is  transforming  scholarly   practice.  london:  bloomsbury.     panel  paper  2:    hashtag  politics  and  affective  publics:   performativity  and  performance  of  emotions  on  instagram     carmen  lee   chinese  university  of  hong  kong     digital  media  have  provided  ample  opportunities  for  ordinary  people  to  express  their   opinions  and  attitudes,  or  stance,  towards  social  events.  this  paper  focuses  on  one   aspect  of  attitudes,  affect,  the  displays  and  representations  of  emotions  through   hashtags  in  social  media.  more  specifically,  it  investigates  affective  hashtags  about  the   2014  umbrella  movement  in  hong  kong  from  three  language-­based  perspectives:  (i)   language  choice,  the  linguistic  codes  used  to  create  hashtags,  (ii)  linguistic   performativity,  what  gets  done  by  posting  hashtags,  and  (iii)  linguistic  performance,   hashtags  as  a  resource  for  self-­positioning  and  claims  of  identities.  understanding   affective  hashtags  in  terms  of  linguistic  performativity  and  performance  sheds  light  on   the  interplay  between  people’s  emotional  experiences  in  the  ‘offline  world’  and  their   online  participation.       tagging  is  a  social  practice  in  that  it  is  embedded  in  people’s  everyday  online  lives   (barton,  2015).  people  have  been  increasingly  involved  in  creating  and  using  hashtags   (user-­defined  keywords  prefixed  by  the  #  symbol)  alongside  their  uploaded  contents  on   various  social  media.  existing  research  on  twitter  has  identified  some  common   functions  of  hashtags  such  as  community  building,  news  reporting,  and  self-­branding   (small,  2011;;  page,  2012).  social  tagging  also  plays  an  important  role  in  organizing  and   planning  political  events  and  movements.  for  example,  twitter  and  facebook  enabled   student  protestors  to  be  engaged  in  the  #unibrennt  protest  in  vienna  in  2009  (maireder   and  schwarzeneger,  2012).  one  of  the  reasons  why  hashtags  have  been  taken  up   widely  in  political  movements  is  that  they  connect  people  easily  –  hashtags  are   hyperlinked  and  searchable,  thus  giving  rise  to  “ambient  affiliation”  (zappavigna,  2015).   political  events  represented  in  social  media  are  also  charged  with  intense  emotions.   papacharissi  (2014)  found  that  posts  related  to  #egypt  politics  on  twitter  presented   “affective  news”,  with  a  blend  of  facts,  opinions,  and  emotions.       expressions  of  affect  and  emotions  have  been  researched  extensively  in  linguistics.  in   pragmatics,  emotions  are  performed  through  ‘expressive’  speech  acts,  i.e.  performative   utterances  that  express  feelings  and  emotions  (searle,  1976).  speech  act  theory  has   also  been  applied  in  studies  of  digital  discourse  such  as  dresner  and  herring  (2010)  on   emoticons.  in  this  paper,  i  also  understand  hashtags  as  utterances  that  ‘do’  emotions.   from  a  sociolinguistic  point  of  view,  affect,  or  stance  in  general,  is  socially  constructed   (jaffe,  2009).  that  is,  in  addition  to  expressing  emotions,  affective  utterances  also  serve   as  resources  for  self-­positioning  and  performing  identities.       language-­based  research  on  hashtags  has  emerged  only  recently.  emotions  can  be   explicitly  marked  in  discourse.  in  their  study  of  affective  stance  markers  of  the   #bringbackourgirls  campaign  on  twitter  and  facebook,  chiluwa  and  ifukor  (2015)   have  identified  extensive  use  of  emotional  language  representing  negative  moods  and   feelings  towards  “persons,  groups,  and  governments”.  within  the  limited  literature  on   the  language  of  hashtags,  much  emphasis  has  been  placed  on  twitter  and  hashtags   other  than  english  have  been  under-­explored.  to  extend  this  body  of  work,  part  of  this   paper  is  devoted  to  the  interplay  between  multilingual  resources  and  affect.  this  paper   examines  affective  instagram  hashtags  about  the  2014  umbrella  movement  in  hong   kong  by  addressing  three  questions:     (i)   what  linguistic  resources  are  deployed  to  express  affect  in  hashtags  about  the   umbrella  movement?   (ii)   in  what  ways  are  hashtags  performative  acts  of  affect?   (iii)  in  what  ways  are  affective  hashtags  performances  of  identities?     methodologically,  the  study  reported  here  took  an  event-­based  approach  to  data   collection.  that  is,  rather  than  randomly  collecting  hashtags  on  instagram,  data  were   collected  around  a  particular  event  –  the  2014  “umbrella  movement”  in  hong  kong.  the   movement  was  driven  by  a  series  of  pro-­democracy  campaigns  and  protests  where   supporters  demanded  ‘real’  universal  suffrage  in  hong  kong.  over  9,000  instagram   hashtags  from  700  posts  with  the  chinese  hashtag  #雨傘運動  (umbrella  movement)   were  retrieved  between  september  and  december,  2014,  the  key  period  of  the   umbrella  movement.  this  was  then  followed  by  online  interviews  with  selected   instagram  users.  the  study  adopts  a  mixed  methods  approach  through  three  stages  of   data  analysis:       (i)   understanding  hashtags  as  speech  acts,  the  hashtags  were  first  classified   according  to  their  pragmatic  functions,  adopting  papacharissi’s  (2014)  broad   categories  of  facts,  opinions,  and  emotions.  those  explicitly  expressing  emotions   (e.g.  #ilovehk,  #hate)  were  further  analyzed  into  different  types  of  affect,  using   zappavigna’s  (2012)  classification  of  ‘dis/inclination’,  ‘un/happiness’,  ‘in/security’,   and  ‘dis/satisfaction’.     (ii)   the  affective  hashtags  identified  in  (i)  were  categorized  by  code  choice  (e.g.   cantonese,  standard  chinese,  english,  mixed  code).  elsewhere,  i  already   reported  that  although  many  of  the  hashtags  were  written  in  english,  across  the   700  posts,  english  hashtags  were  used  alongside  cantonese,  a  variety  of   chinese  (lee  and  chau,  2015).  in  this  paper,  i  present  a  more  in-­depth  analysis   of  the  correlation  between  language  choice  and  displays  of  affect.     (iii)   in  addition  to  understanding  the  linguistic  marking  of  affect  in  the  hashtags,  this   paper  looks  into  how  affective  hashtags  perform  identities.  this  is  discussed  in   light  of  interview  data.  in  the  interviews,  the  instagram  users  discussed  language   choice  of  hashtags  as  well  as  their  feelings  about  the  use  of  hashtags  during  the   movement.   overall,  the  present  study  rethinks  the  relations  between  language  and  emotion,   between  language  and  social  actions,  and  more  importantly,  between  the  online  and  the   offline.  a  number  of  traditional  concepts  and  theories  in  linguistics  are  revisited,   including  the  realization  of  affect,  performatives  and  performances.  if  speech  acts  are   about  ‘doing  things  by  saying  something’,  hashtagging  allows  people  to  ‘do  emotions  by   posting’.  these  emotions  include  expressing  (dis)satisfaction  and  (un)happiness   towards  persons,  events,  and  governments.  my  study  also  highlights  hashtags  the   perform  affect  indirectly.  for  example,  #prayforhk  is  not  an  expressive  speech  act  by   traditional  definition.  however,  it  is  an  indirect  speech  act  that  expresses  the  writer’s   feeling  through  an  imperative  utterance.       on  instagram,  acts  of  emotions  are  performed  through  intertextual  and  multimodal  ties   between  the  image,  the  hashtags,  and  texts  from  outside  instagram.  in  my  dataset,  a   large  proportion  of  the  instagram  posts  are  actually  photos  of  texts  from  the  protest   sites.  these  include  protest  signs  and  slogans,  and  lyrics  form  cantonese  pop  songs   that  trigger  shared  emotions.     finally,  the  paper  argues  that  multilingual  hashtags  are  a  powerful  linguistic  resource  for   authentication  of  identities.  here,  authentication  is  understood  as  a  process  of  people   claiming  authenticity,  or  ‘realness’,  which  can  be  realized  discursively  through  semiotic   resources  including  language  and  images.  the  use  of  cantonese  hashtags  alongside   english  can  be  understood  as  instagrammers  strategically  displaying  the  linguistic   resources  of  hong  kong  people,  thus  claiming  their  ‘real  hongkonger’  identities.       references:     barton,  d.  (2015).  tagging  on  flickr  as  a  social  practice.  in  r.  jones,  a.  chik,  &  c.   hafner  (eds.),  discourse  and  digital  practices:  doing  discourse  analysis  in  the  digital   age.  london:  routledge,  pp.  48-­65.     chiluwa,  i.,  &  ifukor,  p.  (2015).  ‘war  against  our  children’:  stance  and  evaluation  in#   bringbackourgirls  campaign  discourse  on  twitter  and  facebook.  discourse  &  society,   26(3),  267-­296.     dresner,  eli,  and  susan  c.  herring.  "functions  of  the  nonverbal  in  cmc:  emoticons  and   illocutionary  force."  communication  theory  20,  no.  3  (2010):  249-­268.     jaffe,  a.  (2009).  introduction:  the  sociolinguistics  of  stance.  in  a.  jaffe  (ed.)  stance:   sociolinguistic  perspectives.  p3-­28.  oxford:  oxford  university  press.     lee,  c.  and  chau,  d.  (2015)  ‘tagging  the  #umbrellamovement:  indexing  hongkonger   identities  through  bilingual  hashtags  on  instagram’,  paper  presented  at  the  6th   international  “language  in  the  media”  conference,  university  of  hamburg,  7-­9   september  2015.     maireder,  a.,  &  schwarzenegger,  c.  (2012).  a  movement  of  connected  individuals:   social  media  in  the  austrian  student  protests  2009.  information,  communication  &   society,  15(2),  171-­195.     page,  r.  (2012).  the  linguistics  of  self-­branding  and  micro-­celebrity  in  twitter:  the  role   of  hashtags.  discourse  &  communication,  6(2),  181-­201.     papacharissi,  z.  (2014).  affective  publics:  sentiment,  technology,  and  politics.  oxford   university  press.     searle,  j.  r.  (1976).  a  classification  of  illocutionary  acts.  language  in  society,  5(01),  1-­ 23.     small,  t.  a.  (2011).  what  the  hashtag?  a  content  analysis  of  canadian  politics  on   twitter.  information,  communication  &  society,  14(6),  872-­895.     zappavigna,  m.  (2015).  searchable  talk:  the  linguistic  function  of  hashtags.  social   semiotics,  25  (3),  274-­291.     panel  paper  3  linguistics  and  the  study  of  online  surveillance     rodney  jones   university  of  reading     among  the  most  conspicuous  consequences  of  the  rise  of  digital  technologies  is  how   they  have  facilitated  new  forms  of  surveillance.  internet  companies  regularly  collect   large  amounts  of  information  from  users  of  online  social  networking  sites,  search   engines,  and  mobile  apps  for  marketing  purposes.  at  the  same  time,  workplaces  and   educational  institutions  regularly  monitor  the  online  behavior  of  employees  and   students.  and  law  enforcement  agencies  are  increasingly  using  digital  tools  to  profile   and  target  ‘suspicious’  citizens.  digital  surveillance,  however,  is  not  limited  to  powerful   organizations  and  institutions.  most  of  the  everyday  social  practices  people  engage  in   online  involve  sharing  information  about  themselves  and  gathering  information  about   others,  and  this  ‘peer-­to-­peer’  surveillance  (andrejevic,  2005)  has  become  an  integral   part  of  how  we  socialize,  build  careers,  conduct  romantic  relationships  and  participate  in   politics  and  other  aspects  of  public  life.       most  academic  work  on  digital  surveillance  has  been  carried  out  by  sociologists,   anthropologists,  legal  scholars,  media  scholars,  systems  scientists,  and  scholars   working  in  the  burgeoning  interdisciplinary  field  of  ‘surveillance  studies’.  although   linguists  have  a  long  involvement  in  supporting  surveillance  activities  through  work  in   areas  such  as  cryptography,  natural  language  processing,  and  language  training  for   intelligence  personnel,  there  has  been  surprisingly  little  work  on  surveillance  as  a  social   and  discursive  practice  from  a  linguistic  perspective.  this  is  surprising  because   linguistics,  especially  the  work  of  interactional  sociolinguists,  conversation  analysts,   mediated  discourse  analysts  and  critical  discourse  analysts,  has  much  to  contribute  to   our  understanding  of  how  digital  surveillance  takes  place,  the  strategies  people  use  to   monitor  others  or  to  evade  monitoring,  the  discursive  processes  through  which  people   are  made  into  ‘willing  objects’  of  surveillance,  and  the  way  surveillance  is  talked  about   and  justified  in  public  discourse.     this  paper  argues  that  at  the  very  heart  of  current  debates  about  digital  surveillance   and  privacy  are  linguistic  issues.  these  are  issues  about  how  people  manage  identities   and  activities  in  social  interaction  with  language,  issues  about  how  they  discursively   negotiate  participation  roles  in  discourse,  and  even  more  fundamental  questions  about   what  constitutes  a  ‘text’,  and  what  it  means  to  read,  write,  speak  and  listen.  drawing  on   concepts  from  mediated  discourse  analysis  (norris  &  jones,  2005,  scollon  2001),   interactional  sociolinguistics  (gumperz,  1982),  and  new  literacy  studies  (barton,  2006;;   gee,  2011,  2014),  i  will  describe  how  practices  of  surveillance  are  mediated  not  just   through  technological  tools,  but  also  through  discursive  resources.  these  resources   help  to  shape  the  ‘participation  formats’  (who  can  see/hear  whom)  within  which  people   interact,  and  also  determine  the  ways  information  gets  ‘entextualized’  (jones,  2009)   (encoded,  stored,  transmitted,  analyzed  and  recontextualized).  i  will  also  describe  how   digital  surveillance  is  interactionally  accomplished,  and  show  how  texts  and  online   interactions  are  designed  to  compel  people  to  reveal  as  much  information  as  possible.     surveillance  uses  strategies  of  ‘framing’  (goffman,  1974)  and  ‘positioning’  (van   langenhove  &  harré,  1999),  and  the  paper  shows  how  that  information  is  processed  in   ways  that  affect  the  kinds  of  discourse  and  interactions  that  are  subsequently  made   available  to  people.  finally,  i  will  explore  digital  surveillance  as  a  form  of  ‘literacy’,   arguing  that  being  able  to  successfully  manage  online  privacy  requires  more  than  just   technological  knowledge.  it  requires  being  able  to  read  and  write  in  particular  kinds  of   ways,  to  pragmatically  manage  particular  kinds  of  interactions,  and  to  construct  (or   avoid  constructing)  particular  kinds  of  social  identities.       the  data  for  the  discussion  come  from  a  year  long  ethnographic  study  involving   university  students  from  britain,  china  and  hong  kong,  the  aim  of  which  was  to   understand  the  experience  of  digital  surveillance  from  the  perspective  of  users  of   technologies,  the  linguistic  strategies  that  internet  companies  use  to  facilitate   surveillance,  and  the  strategies  users  develop  to  cope  with  it.       references     andrejevic,  m.  (2005).  the  work  of  watching  one  another:  lateral  surveillance,  risk,  and   governance.  surveillance  &  society,  2(4),  479–497.     barton,  d.  (2006).  literacy:  an  introduction  to  the  ecology  of  written  language,  (2nd   edition).  malden,  ma:  blackwell  publishing.     goffman,  e.  (1974).  frame  analysis:  an  essay  on  the  organization  of  experience.  new   york:  harper  and  row.     gee,  j.  p.  (2011).  social  linguistics  and  literacies:  ideology  in  discourses  (4th  ed.).   london:  routledge.     gee,  j.  p.  (2014).  unified  discourse  analysis:  language,  reality,  virtual  worlds  and   video  games.  milton  park,  abingdon,  oxon:  routledge.     gumperz,  j.  j.  (1982).  discourse  strategies.  cambridge:  cambridge  university  press.     jones,  r.  h.  (2009).  dancing,  skating  and  sex:  action  and  text  in  the  digital  age.  journal   of  applied  linguistics,  6(3),  283–302.     norris,  s.,  &  jones,  r.  h.  (2005).  discourse  in  action:  introducing  mediated  discourse   analysis.  london:  routledge.     scollon,  r.  (2001).  mediated  discourse:  the  nexus  of  practice.  london:  routledge.     van  langenhove,  l.,  &  harré,  r.  (1999).  introducing  positioning  theory.  in  r.  harré  &  l.   van  langenhove  (eds.).  oxford:  blackwell.  retrieved  from   http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=3sowqgaacaaj       panel  paper  4:    following  and  breaking  the  rules:  online  reviews   and  their  parodies     camilla  vasquez   university  of  south  florida     over  the  past  15  years,  online  consumer  reviews  have  emerged  as  a  widespread   contemporary  vernacular  literacy  practice  (barton  &  lee,  2013).  websites  that  feature   user-­generated  reviews,  such  as  amazon,  tripadvisor,  yelp,  and  others,  enable   consumers  to  give  voice  to  their  experiences  in  very  public  way,  via  a  mass-­distributed   platform.    although  professionally-­written  consumer  product  reviews  have  been   available  via  mass  media  outlets  for  decades,  this  more  recent  ability  for  any  consumer   to  publicly  share  his/her  experiences  and  reactions  to  a  product  or  service  –  and  to   reach  an  interested,  and  possibly  global,  audience  in  the  process  –  is  a  digital  practice   for  which  there  is  no  precise  analog  precedent.  typically,  user-­generated  reviews  are   non-­specialist  reviews,  and  this  fact  is  considered  by  some  to  contribute  to  the   democratization  of  expertise  brought  about  by  the  internet  (mellet,  beauvisge,  beuscart   &  trespeuch,  2014).  online  reviews  can  certainly  be  considered  a  form  of  consumer   empowerment  from  the  point  of  view  of  individuals  writing  reviews.  in  addition,  online   reviews  also  have  the  potential  to  empower  the  consumers  who  read  them  –  in  the   sense  that  consumers  no  longer  have  to  rely  on  a  handful  of  experts  for  information   about  which  restaurants  are  worth  visiting,  or  which  products  represent  the  best   available  quality.  instead,  internet  users  now  have  access  to  a  multitude  of  different   perspectives  about  a  wider  number  of  products  and  services  than  was  ever  previously   possible.       yet  online  reviews  invite  more  complex  readings  as  well  –  readings  that  extend  beyond   optimistic  notions  of  participatory  culture  (jenkins,  2006),  distributed  expertise,  and   democratization  of  information.    news  reports  from  the  mass  media  typically  emphasize   the  nefarious  side  of  online  reviews,  as  they  offer  stories  of  “rule  breakers”  –  for   instance,  the  companies  and  individuals  who  engage  in  opinion  fraud,  by  writing  fake   reviews  for  profit,  and  who  work  out  various  ways  to    “game  the  system”  of  online   reviews.    more  recently,  reports  in  the  media  have  also  begun  to  show  what  happens   when  business  owners  respond  publicly  to  reviews,  as  they  engage  in  processes  of   “service  recovery”  and  “online  reputation  management.”    but  these  reports,  too,  tend  to   focus  on  the  most  sensationalistic  of  accounts  –  selecting  remarkable  instances  in   which  business  owners  and  consumers  trade  increasingly  offensive  insults  in  the  review   spaces  on  facebook,  or  yelp.  where  “rule  breaking”  and  online  reviews  are  concerned,   the  topics  covered  by  the  media  typically  raise  issues  of  authenticity,  anonymity,  and   (in)civility:  issues  which  underlie  many  popular  public  discourses  about  the  role  of   technologies  in  contemporary  life.    to  these  topics,  i  contribute  a  third  line  of  discussion   –  by  considering  how  the  review  site  can  also  serve  as  a  space  for  creative  contestation   and  playful  resistance.    i  do  this  by  illustrating  various  ways  in  which  users  re-­imagine   and  re-­purpose  the  review  space,  as  a  site  for  entertainment  and  activism.    i  focus   specifically  on  parody  reviews  found  on  amazon,  and  other  review  sites.     in  earlier  work,  i  have  described  the  online  review  as  a  genre.    in  vasquez  (2014),  i   considered  1,000  reviews  from  five  different  websites,  and  i  identified  a  set  of  core   discourse  practices  that  appear  across  all  sites,  which  include  evaluation,  identity   claims,  and  narrativity.  evaluation  is  central  to  the  genre  of  reviews,  and  individual   authors  employ  a  wide  and  diverse  range  of  linguistic  resources  to  describe  and   evaluate  the  product  or  service  they  are  writing  about.    reviewers  also  disclose   information  about  themselves  within  their  review  texts,  not  only  to  provide  readers  with  a   sense  of  credibility  but  also  to  provide  readers  additional  relevant  context  for  interpreting   their  comments.    finally,  on  all  sites,  reviewers  “story”  their  experiences  in  different   ways.    in  other  words,  many  reviewers  do  not  simply  provide  a  descriptive  list  of  product   features,  but  they  also  present  a  temporally-­sequenced,  first-­person  narrative  account   of  their  relationship  with  a  product,  or  about  their  service  experience.    i  illustrate  each   these  practices  from  a  sample  of  user-­generated  online  reviews,  and  show  what  goes   into  making  this  genre  “recognizable.”       i  then  extend  research  on  the  topic  by  focusing  on  a  different,  yet  related,  genre:   parodies  of  user-­generated  reviews.    over  the  past  decade,  amazon  users  have   contributed  thousands  of  parodies  of  reviews  written  about  actual  consumer  products   (skalicky  &  crossley,  2015:  ray,  2016).    by  intertextually  drawing  on,  and  creatively  re-­ appropriating,  recognizable  features  of  bona  fide  reviews,  authors  of  review  parodies   demonstrate  their  knowledge  of  the  very  genre  they  are  imitating.    perhaps  the  most   obvious  characteristic  of  online  reviews  appropriated  by  authors  of  parody  texts  is  the   overarching  structure  of  the  narrative  of  personal  experience.    these  parodies  take  the   form  of  “mock  narratives,”  as  authors  enlist  a  range  of  discursive  resources  to  perform   particular  identities  and  to  create  imagined  stories.  although  bona  fide  amazon  product   reviews  often  include  narrative  elements,  they  tend  to  focus  at  least  somewhat  on  the   description  and  evaluation  of  the  given  product  as  well.    in  contrast,  parody  reviews  are   almost  always  presented  as  fully-­formed  personal  narratives  –  even  when  they  are   crafted  as  concise  “small  stories,”  composed  of  only  a  few  sentences.    what  further   marks  these  online  narratives  as  obvious  parodies  is  the  use  of  hyperbole,   exaggeration,  and  transgressive  humor  centering  on  taboo  subjects.    similar  to  authors   of  legitimate  reviews,  authors  of  parodies  provide  personal  information  about  their   “identities.”    my  analysis  of  parody  reviews  demonstrates  how  performed  self-­disclosure   in  parodies  functions  to  construct  fictional  personae,  which  often  rely  on  categories,  or   “types,”  of  people  who  rarely  appear  in  legitimate  reviews.    such  performed  self-­ presentations  also  help  to  set  the  stage  for  the  highly  improbable  narrative  events  that   follow.           i  draw  attention  to  the  ways  in  which  parody  reviews  appear  to  mock,  challenge,  and   critique  specific  products,  product  marketing  efforts,  and  consumer  practices.    i  argue   that  although  many  of  these  playful  texts  appear  to  be  subverting  the  primary   consumerist  goal-­  orientation  of  the  review  site,  their  meanings  ultimately  remain   ambivalent.    following  hutcheon  (2000),  i  highlight  the  central  paradox  of  parody:  “its   transgression  is  always  authorized.    in  imitating,  even  with  a  critical  difference,  it  always   reinforces”  (p.  26).  i  further  explore  how  other  users  react  to  parodies  in  terms  of   helpfulness  votes,  as  well  as  in  both  appreciative  responses  and  “policing  behaviors”   that  are  found  on  the  site’s  “comments”  section.    in  doing  so,  i  highlight  users’  various   understandings  of  the  tacit  “rules”  underlying  what  kinds  of  content  is  appropriate  for  the   review  space,  and  what  kind  of  content  is  not  appropriate.     references     barton,  d.,  &  lee,  c.  (2013).  language  online:  investigating  digital  texts  and  practices.   london:  routledge.     hutcheon,  l.  (2000).    a  theory  of  parody.  urbana:  university  of  illinois  press.     jenkins,  h.  (2006).  convergence  culture:  where  old  and  new  media  collide.  new  york:   new  york  university  press.       mellet,  k.,  beauvisge,  t.,  beuscart  j-­s.,  &  trespeuch,  m.  (2014).  a  “democratization”  of   markets?  online  consumer  reviews  in  the  restaurant  industry.  valuation  studies,  2(1),   5–41.       ray,  b.  (2016).  stylizing  genderlect  online  for  social  action:  a  corpus  analysis  of  ‘bic   crystal  for  her’  reviews.    written  communication,  33  (1),  42-­67.     skalicky,  s.,  &  crossley,  s.  (2015).    a  statistical  analysis  of  satirical  amazon.com   product  reviews.    european  journal  of  humor  research  2,  66-­85.     vásquez,  c.  (2014).  the  discourse  of  online  consumer  reviews.  bloomsbury:  london.     microsoft word dahya_jenson_ir16final_aug1.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 dahya, n. & jenson, j. (2015, october 21-24). (re)making digital imaginaries with videogame development: do-it-yourself (diy) disruptions to social inequity. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. (re)making digital imaginaries with videogame development: do-it-yourself (diy) disruptions to social inequity negin dahya university of washington jennifer jenson york university introduction digital media has altered not only the form through which we communicate, but also the type of both communication and learning that transpires across transmedia platforms. ‘do-it-yourself’ (diy) productions reflect changing forms of communication, education and civic engagement (ratto & boler, 2014; stack & kelly, 2006) and represent new possibilities for not only imagining social interactions and opportunities, but also constructing them. in this paper, we draw on charles taylor’s (2005) definition of ‘social imaginaries’ to consider “the ways people imagine their social existence” (p. 23) in the context of digital industries and maker spaces. networked digital technologies in particular enhance the possibility of sharing and collaborating across geographical and conceptual social divides. in recent years there has been growing recognition that digital media like film and videogames can create opportunities to interrupt social norms – to ‘show what you know’ to, with, at and across boundaries. importantly, multimedia production creates a process of reflective (re)making that incorporates knowledge and experience from varied aspects of an individuals life into a product that can be reviewed, remixed, and reflected upon later on (pink, 2001, 2007). this process of working with and creating digital artifacts informs and transforms society, creating an opportunity – a new imaginary – for continual dialogue and altered networks and social norms, circulating around digital artifacts throughout production and after. background over the past ten years, there has been growing recognition that digital media selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 dahya, n. & jenson, j. (2015, october 21-24). (re)making digital imaginaries with videogame development: do-it-yourself (diy) disruptions to social inequity. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. like movies, video games, and social networking technologies are changing the way we think about teaching, learning and education. videogames and videogame development are an important component of this new media landscape, as one of the largest grossing industries in north america (esa, 2014). research related to education and videogames has examined the learning potential of playing digital games. this includes several educational possibilities. scholars have explored how game mechanics have a rhetorical influence on players (bogost, 2007) and how “serious” social and political content can be taught/learned through gameplay (dahya, 2009; frasca, 2001). others have considered the important role of videogames for learning and literacy (gee, 2003; squire & jenkins, 2003), and the rich social worlds of massively multiplayer online games (dickey, 2011; steinkuehler, 2004). these studies (among others) demonstrate the potential of digital videogames as a valuable component of formal and informal education and support the continued exploration of videogame design and play as an important part of 21st century education. at the same time, it is well documented that there is a persistent gap regarding who makes games and who engages in novice game making (computer programming) from a young age. currently, women constitute less than 25% enrollment in computer programming at both the secondary and post-secondary level (u.s. department of education, 2012), with even fewer continuing into programming (hill, corbett & rose, 2010) and specifically videogame development post-secondary and careers (haines, 2004). this disparity in participation has a multitude of intersecting causes, including access to tools and sociocultural contexts that make computer programs and videogaming spaces uninviting for girls and women (jenson, de castell & bryson, 2003; kafai, peppler & chapman, 2009). the poor representation of ethno-racial minorities in videogames presents an additional layer to the barriers minority girls and women (literally) face with regard to participation in the world of videogames. everett and watkins (2008) discuss how african american women are the most likely demographic to be victimized by violence in videogames, while of the few female player-controlled characters (joyce, 2014), only a small fraction are women of color. the intersection of social structures such as gender, race and class – and importantly the way these selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 dahya, n. & jenson, j. (2015, october 21-24). (re)making digital imaginaries with videogame development: do-it-yourself (diy) disruptions to social inequity. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. structures influence digital (and analogue) social divides – have been identified as intersecting barriers to computer access and participation with/in digital media generally (ahn, 2012; boyd, 2011; everett & watkins, 2008; jenson, de castell & bryson, 2003; hargitta & walejko, 2008; margolis, estrella, jellison holme & nao, 2011). shifting this landscape requires a reimagining of who works in videogame development and what factors influence the interest of underrepresented groups – such as women and ethnoracial minorities – to participate in the construction of more equitable and inclusive videogaming and videogame production communities. this paper is based on a research study conducted with boys and girls in two schools making videogames. we argue that the production and construction of collaborative spaces for videogame development – both physical and digital – serve as powerful interventions to what continues to be presented as a homogenous and discriminatory videogame-making field. methodology in our study, we explored both the process of computational and algorithmic pedagogies through videogame production for racialized boys and girls in two schools, and observed the sociocultural environments of all-girl and all-boy game making spaces in an afterschool context. data collection consisted of mixed qualitative and quantitative methods, including coding of student games, preand postgame development surveys, facilitiator/embedded researcher surveys, exit interviews with students and facilitators, and field notes. in this paper, we focus on the quantitative analysis of participant preand post game development surveys, as well as the qualitative and quantitative coding of students games. coding of game mechanics and design was deemed important by the research team to complement survey data with more concrete information that was developed into games. coding was completed using a two-step process first involving the creation of qualitative codes by the research team and application of those codes to the games produced by participants. researchers independently coded the same games using broad category codes that were agreed upon with a focus on game mechanics and the intended skills taught during the program. the team discussed any discrepancies in the coding scheme until consensus was reached and our codebook was finalized through this selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 dahya, n. & jenson, j. (2015, october 21-24). (re)making digital imaginaries with videogame development: do-it-yourself (diy) disruptions to social inequity. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. collaborative coding process (smagorinsky, 2008). final codes identified the presence of newly drawn sprites, sprites copied from internet images, multiple levels, inclusion of music, score boards, game-reset functions, and multiplayer functions. the study was conducted with grades 6 and 9 boys and girls over one year in three locations. we worked with two schools in the toronto area: one juniormiddle school and one secondary school. in addition, we ran a summer camp in an under-served community in one of toronto’s larger suburbs. participants in the two toronto schools were predominantly from ethno-racial minority communities, documented as in the lowest school-achievement groups in the toronto area. the summer camp community was comprised of predominantly white and indigenous participants situated in a socioeconomic region that is also among the lowest achieving in ontario. all three schools shared in their ‘low academic achievement’ status, and even with the white students from the summer camp, majority of participants were from non-dominant racial groups. though we do not apply a critical race theory to this paper, we do point to the racialization of poverty in ontario and later draw conclusions that also relate to socioeconomic status and access to technology. our analysis addresses the comprehensive process of videogame production in these unique afterschool environments as part of the construction of new possibilities for creating videogames in this field. summary of findings 1. girls in grades 6 and 9 tended to expect using gm to be less difficult than their male peers, as well as expressed less fear regarding the use of gm before engaging in the game development work. disaggregated by gender and grade, grade 9 girls showed particularly high confidence. boys showed more enthusiasm for the game making process than girls. 2. grade 6’s tended to report more self-confidence in using gm as well as fewer negative self-attitudes (e.g. believing that they were not good at gm, or not the type to do well at gm). this was true across male-female, not only girls. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 dahya, n. & jenson, j. (2015, october 21-24). (re)making digital imaginaries with videogame development: do-it-yourself (diy) disruptions to social inequity. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 3. in the post-survey, there were no significant differences between gender regarding attitudes towards gm. 4. in the post-survey, there were no differences between gender in selfreported confidence regarding gm. 5. grade 6 boys and girls did enjoy using gm more than grade 9 girls and boys. 6. participants reported feeling less confident both that they could problem solve and that they could figure out what to do if they got stuck in gm after the intervention. 7. girls reported significantly more agreement that they found gm to be enjoyable and stimulating, that they would have a hard time stopping once they started working. 8. there were no significant differences between boys and girls or across grades, except that coders showed a trend towards better quality sprites by girls than boys. 9. grade 6s showed statistical significance regarding having better quality music in their games, and tended to create games with more levels than grade 9s. 10. there were no differences between the frequency each genre was created by male and female students with the exception of sports games. sports games played a significantly greater role in boys’ game designs. in our discussion of these findings, we want to highlight the lack of significant differences between the engagement of boys and girls in this videogame development program under these interventionist conditions. through this controlled intervention and research study, we have documented how changing the conditions of videogame production – of teaching and learning computer programming through the design of videogames in extra-curricular school selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 dahya, n. & jenson, j. (2015, october 21-24). (re)making digital imaginaries with videogame development: do-it-yourself (diy) disruptions to social inequity. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. programming – demonstrates girls equal interest and confidence in the development of videogames. rather than approach this problematic disparity related to who makes games as an essentialist debate about gender differences (of boys versus girls), we are arguing that the power structures that guide (or dictate) the meaning of “feminine” and “masculine” (ascribed to male and female bodies) requires interrogation and critique (butler, 1990). in this paper, we consider what it means to think about social and political space before binary sex/gender distinctions related to how and why girls and boys (do or do not) make and play videogames. we bring the conversation back to poststructuralist feminist theory exploring non-essentialist perspectives about girls when social and political context does not dictate their role as outsiders by (sex/gender) design. we invite the reader to consider what it means to look at girls and videogames by interrupting their/our conventional expectations of gender within male-dominant, hetero-normative social and cultural space. additionally, we highlight the commonalities between boys and girls that are evident when the social space (and consequently gendered politics of that space) is leveled. finally, we consider the importance of access to resources and importantly thoughtful and feminist pedagogical practice to create equitable learning spaces where all young people, and especially those from non-dominant groups, can thrive in their production of videogames. at the end of this project, students, parents, researchers and educators came together to play student made games at multiple celebratory events. in each case, “networking” these digital technologies and reconstructing digital imaginaries was very much engrained in face-to-face engagement with videogame producers (students) as well as within (and between) the digital artifacts they made. considering taylor’s (2005) argument that “the social imaginary is the common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy” (p. 23), we argue that constructing ‘digital imaginaries’ through networked technologies is directly tied to the construction of physical space, as well as to sociocultural interventions that challenge existing inequities and highlight socially restrictive ideological frameworks influencing the videogame development field. references selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 dahya, n. & jenson, j. (2015, october 21-24). (re)making digital imaginaries with videogame development: do-it-yourself (diy) disruptions to social inequity. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ahn, j. (2012). teenagers and social network sites: do off-line inequalities predict their online social networks? first monday, 17(1-2). retrieved august 26, 2014 from http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3752. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v17i1.3752 bogost, i. (2007). persuasive games: the expressive power of videogames. cambridge: mit press boyd, d. (2011). white fight in networked publics? how race and class shaped american teen engagement with myspace and facebook. in l. nakamura & p.a. chow-white (eds.), race after the internet (pp. 203-222). retrieved from http://www.danah.org/papers butler, j. (1990). gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. new york: routledge. dahya, n. (2009). serious learning in playful roles: socio-political games for education. loading, vol. 3, no. 4. dickey, m.d. (2011). the pragmatics of virtual worlds for k-12 educators: investigating of the affordances and constraints of active worlds and second life with k-12 in-service teachers. educational technology research and development. 59(1), 1-20. entertainment software association (esa). (2014). “industry facts”. retrieved, august 26, 2014 from http://www.theesa.com/facts/index.asp. everett, a. & watkins, s.c. (2008). the power of play: the portrayal of performance of race in video games. in salen, k. (ed.), the ecology of games: connecting youth, games and learning. cambridge, ma: mit press, pp. 141-166. doi: 10.1162/dmal.9780262693646.141. frasca, g. (2001). videogames of the oppressed: videogames as a means for critical thinking and debate. master's level thesis to the georgia institute of technology selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 dahya, n. & jenson, j. (2015, october 21-24). (re)making digital imaginaries with videogame development: do-it-yourself (diy) disruptions to social inequity. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. gee, j.p. (2003). gee, j. p. (2003). what video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. palgrave macmillan. haines, l. (2004). why are there so few women in games? media training north west, september 2004. retrieved from www.archives.igda.org/women/mtnw_women-in-games_sep04.pdf hargittai, e. & walejko, g. (2008). the participation divide: content creation and sharing in the digital age. information, communication & society, 11(2), 239-256. doi: 10.1080/13691180801946150. hill, c., corbett, c. & rose, a. (2010). why so few? women in science, technology, engineering & mathematics. american association of university women (aauw): washington, dc. jenson, j. de castell, s. & bryson, m. (2003). girl talk: gender, equity and identity discourses in a school-based computer culture. women's studies international forum. doi 10.1016/j.wsif.2003.09.010 kafai, y, peppler, k, & chapman, r.n. (2009). the computer clubhouse: constructionism and creativity in youth communities. new york: teachers college press. margolis, j., estrella, r., goode, j., jellison holme, j. & nao, k. (2011). stuck in the shallow end: education, race and computing. cambridge: mit press. pink, s. (2001). more visualizing, more methodologies: on video, reflexivity and qualitative research. the sociology review, 49(4), 586-599. pink, s. (2007). doing visual ethnography: images, media and representation in research. london: sage. ratto, m., & boler, m. (eds.). (2014). diy citizenship: critical making and social media. cambridge: mit press. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 dahya, n. & jenson, j. (2015, october 21-24). (re)making digital imaginaries with videogame development: do-it-yourself (diy) disruptions to social inequity. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. smagorinsky, p. (2008). the method section as conceptual epicenter in constructing social science research reports. written communication, 25(3), 389-411. stack, m. & kelly, d. (2006). the popular media, education and resistance. canadian journal of education, 29(1). pp. 5-26 steinkuehler, c.a. (2004). “learning in massively multiplayer online games.” in y.b. kafai, w.a. sandoval, n. enyedy, a.s. nixon, & f. herrera (eds.), proceedings of the sixth international conference of the learning sciences. mahwah, nj: erlbaum. pp. 521-528. squire, k. & jenkins, h. (2003). harnessing the power of videogames in education. insight, 3, pp. 5-33. taylor, c. (2005). modern social imaginaries. durham: duke university press. u.s. department of education. (2012). gender equity in education: a data snapshop selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2014 dahya, n. & jenson, j. (2015, october 21-24). (re)making digital imaginaries with videogame development: do-it-yourself (diy) disruptions to social inequity. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. eve online newbie guides selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 eve online newbie guides: helpful information or gatekeeping mechanisms at work? kelly bergstrom york university canada kellybergstrom@gmail.com abstract eve online is a space-themed massively multiplayer online game (mmog) that has a reputation of having an exceptionally punishing learning curve. it has been argued that its difficulty stems from the in-game tutorial purposefully leaving out important information, forcing novice players to consult outside resources to be successful in this game. through content analysis of player-created “newbie guides”, this paper argues that not only do the outside resources speak primarily to a particular demographic of player, their use of exclusionary language and imagery actively discourages participation from other demographics of potential players. eve is a game whose player base is almost entirely composed of white males, and in this paper it is argued that these newbie guides are an example of a gatekeeping mechanism that works to maintain the exceptionally homogenous player community composition of this mmog. keywords eve online, community, games, gender, massively multiplayer online games, mmogs introduction as with all games, massively multiplayer online games (mmogs) are a voluntary leisure activity. however, the voluntary nature of play does not necessarily mean these gameworlds are equally open to all. for example, economic barriers exist for those who might wish to play, but do not have access to a high-end computer or cannot afford the monthly subscription fees required to play many mmogs. geographic factors may also limit a potential player’s access to the high-speed internet connection required to participate in an online gameworld, or a particular game may not be accessible to certain regions due to global copyright restrictions. here, i present research conducted as part of a larger mixed methods investigation of gender as a potential barrier to mmog play. the case study presented in this paper is an examination of the ways in which “newbie guides”, introductory guides created by experienced players with the goal of assisting new players learning how to play a mmog, actively hail particular demographics at the exclusion of others. context of larger study to address questions on the intersections between gender and mmog access, this larger research project is focused on an online gaming community almost completely populated by males. eve online – a spaceship-themed game environment in which players use ships to navigate, trade, and generally “play” with one another – stands apart from other games of its kind as an estimated 5% of their 450,000+ players are female. this is in contrast to other popular games such as world of warcraft, which estimates that at least 20% of their 12 million players are women. community discussions about eve often dismiss the scarcity of female players as simply a lack of interest in game’s subject matter (lissanna, 2010; sepelio fas, 2010). in particular, the calculations and mathheavy requirements of eve’s gameplay (which has resulted in the larger gaming community to refer eve as “excel online”) are presented simultaneously as being a turnoff for female players (who are assumed to value social connections in their gameplay), and an attraction for male players (who are assumed to be drawn to the competitive and/or analytical elements of a game). this argument is reminiscent of the adage that women avoid the stem subjects (science, technology, engineering, math) because they are “too masculine” or “too hard” (park, young, troisi, & pinkus, 2011). however, feminist scholars have demonstrated that it is not simply by choice that many women do not selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 gravitate towards these subjects. women’s access is impeded, and these barriers work to reinforce stereotypical gender roles that assume that women are “naturally” less interested in technology (jenson & brushwood-rose, 2003; jenson, de castell, & bryson, 2003; wajcman, 1996). much like research on the “leaky pipeline” that documents the processes by which women are filtered out of the stem subjects (blickenstaff, 2005), this larger research project is an exploration of the ways in which women are overtly and/or inadvertently discouraged from participating in eve. studying eve online while eve is understudied compared to other popular mmogs (bergstrom, carter, woodford, & paul, 2013; bergstrom, de castell, & jenson, 2011), what is known is that player demographics of this game are far more homogenous than the player populations of other mmogs. the majority of eve players are male, white, and are educated and/or working in a technology-related field (bergstrom, 2012). it is also known that this is a game where player churn is high: many will play the game on a trial basis, but at least 30% will quit within their first month of play, and 70% of players will quit within their first year of play (feng, brandt, & saha, 2007, p. 22). additionally, players have theorized that eve’s punishing learning curve is a reason for the high attrition rate. in his investigation of the eve new player experience, paul (2011, 2012) has argued that this learning curve is especially frustrating because the in-game tutorial purposefully leaves out key pieces of information, forcing new players to seek outside resources to guide their way though the introduction of this game. paul’s description of the game casts eve as an exclusive universe – only a select few players who are part of a very narrow target demographic survive the trials and challenges of learning to play it. this characterization falls in line with player descriptions of this particular mmog collected through interviews and focus groups conducted as part of my larger investigation of who plays eve and who is filtered out. eve newbie guides in this paper i expand on paul’s explorations and investigate the content of these necessary player generated resources in order to learn more about what eve players think about this particular mmog’s community makeup. while many “how to play eve” guides exist, these guides can be roughly divided into two groups. first are technical guides focused on mastering the specific mechanics of the game (see for example “how to play eve online” (freeman, n.d.) or “eve online beginner’s guide” (gewinterswolf, 2012)). there are, however, also a number of more general guides intended to explain how to be an eve player, such as the goonswarm federation guide for newbies, described below. while still offering advice about technical skills and/or game mechanics, these guides are much more focused on play style. the newbie guides analyzed as part of this study were selected by following links provided by large player corporations (permanent in-game groupings of players, the eve equivalent of “guilds”) and these guides largely fell into the second grouping. from here, i argue that if these are the guides recommended and/or produced by corporations, these are the guides most likely to be highly trafficked by potential recruits to the game. these guides provide clues to the behaviours, slang, and norms that must be met if one wishes to be welcomed by other players to become part of the eve community. through a content analysis of the newbie guides, this paper argues that these player generated resources that new players consult in order to learn eve mechanics are heavily reliant on jargon and memes popular on reddit.com or 4chan.com, which are in turn websites that tend to attract a very particular demographic of user (for further discussion of the reddit.com community see bergstrom (2011)). additionally, the frequent use of words such as “rape”, “fag/faggot”, “bro”, and “bitch”, are exclusionary and likely a turnoff to other demographics of users. guides that do not rely on such language are exclusionary by other means. for example, when surveying the use of visual imagery, representations of women – when they do appear – tend to be highly sexualized (see figure 1). from this, it is reasonable to assume that the intended audience of these newbie guides (and therefore intended recruits who are encouraged to keep playing eve) is likely male. additionally, the use of selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 such language and imagery can be read as being unwelcoming and/or hostile to female novices. ultimately, the overarching goal of this research is to highlight the ways in which benign activities such as playing a mmog work to continually reinforce claims surrounding women’s “inherent” disinterest in everything but casual and/or domestic forms of technology. figure 1: in the 26 page newbie guide, released in february 2013 by goonswarm federation (a large and powerful alliance of eve corporations), the above images are the only visual representations of women. acknowledgments this research was supported by the social sciences and humanities research council. references bergstrom, k. (2011). “don’t feed the troll”: shutting down debate about community expectations on reddit.com. first monday, 16(8). retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3498/3029 bergstrom, k. (2012). virtual inequality: a woman's place in cyberspace. in proceedings of the international conference on the foundations of digital games (pp. 267–269). presented at the fdg ’12, acm press. doi:10.1145/2282338.2282394 bergstrom, k., carter, m., woodford, d., & paul, c. a. (2013). constructing the ideal eve online player. in proceedings of digra 2013 conference: defragging game studies. presented at the digital games research association, atlanta, ga, usa. bergstrom, k., de castell, s., & jenson, j. (2011, october). worlds beyond warcraft: studying multiple mmos. presented at the association of internet researchers, seattle, wa. blickenstaff, j. c. (2005). women and science careers: leaky pipeline or gender filter? gender and education, 17(4), 369–386. doi:10.1080/09540250500145072 feng, w., brandt, d., & saha, d. (2007). a long-term study of a popular mmorpg. in proceedings of the 6th acm sigcomm workshop on network and system support for games (pp. 19–24). acm press. doi:10.1145/1326257.1326261 freeman, z. (n.d.). how to play eve online. ehow. retrieved march 14, 2013, from http://www.ehow.com/how_2183036_play-eve-online.html selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 gewinterswolf. (2012). eve online beginner’s guide. retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dea6xib_eo&feature=youtube_gdata_player jenson, j., & brushwood-rose, c. (2003). women@work: listening to gendered relations of power in teachers’ talk about new technologies. gender and education, 15(2), 169–181. doi:10.1080/09540250303854 jenson, j., de castell, s., & bryson, m. (2003). “girl talk”: gender, equity, and identity discourses in a schoolbased computer culture. in women’s studies international forum (vol. 26, pp. 561–573). lissanna. (2010, april 24). why i don’t play eve online. restokin: lissanna’s blog about warcraft druids. retrieved from http://www.restokin.com/2010/04/why-i-dont-play-eve-online/ park, l. e., young, a. f., troisi, j. d., & pinkus, r. t. (2011). effects of everyday romantic goal pursuit on women’s attitudes toward math and science. personality and social psychology bulletin, 37(9), 1259–1273. doi:10.1177/0146167211408436 paul, c. a. (2011). don’t play me. in proceedings of the 6th international conference on foundations of digital games (pp. 262–264). acm press. doi:10.1145/2159365.2159406 paul, c. a. (2012). wordplay and the discourse of video games: analyzing words, design, and play. new york: routledge. sepelio fas. (2010, april 22). why don’t more women play eve?? lacuna de fas. retrieved from http://lacunadefas.blogspot.ca/2010/04/what-could-ccp-games-do-to-attract-and.html wajcman, j. (1996). feminism confronts technology. university park, pa: pennsylvania state university press. license this article is ©2013 kelly bergstrom, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. microsoft word 833-578-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 apps for those who help themselves: mobile self-guided interventions for adolescent mental health yukari seko, ph.d. postdoctoral fellow, social aetiology of mental illness (sami) cihr training program, centre for addiction and mental health (camh) canada yukari.seko@gmail.com sean kidd, ph.d. cpsych, cprp centre for addiction and mental health (camh) canada sean.kidd@camh.ca david wiljer, ph.d. centre for addiction and mental health (camh) canada david.wiljer@camh.ca abstract the exponential growth in the use of mobile phones has brought new opportunities for supporting adolescent mental healthcare. clinical experts increasingly leverage mobile phone technology for patient self-assessments, self-paced mood charting, and virtual coaching. yet, little has been studied regarding the depth and the breadth of evidence in the area of mobile self-guided interventions and their implications to adolescent mental health. this paper offers a scoping review of current mobile phone use in self-guided interventions for adolescents examines the key design principles in the development of these tools. the findings indicate a range of new challenges and affordances. while mobile tools are welcomed by healthcare professionals as an engaging platform for involving patients in their own care, it is crucial to critically consider ethical issues arising with mobile interventions, such as confidentiality, privacy, and potential loss of control caused by a forced selfsurveillance and regulation. keywords mobile phone; mhealth; self-guided interventions; self-help tools; adolescents background over the last two decades, the field of mobile health (m-health) has been growing exponentially. the ubiquity of mobile phones and their advanced functionality make them an ideal medium for delivering health information and services. healthcare providers began using short messaging services (sms) and mobile phone applications (apps) to make healthcare delivery more cost efficient and to involve patients in their own care. self-monitoring systems via mobile phones have been implemented widely in the area of physical and behavioral interventions, such as for smoking cessation (abroms et al., 2011), asthma self-management (huckvale et al., 2012), and anti-obesity behavior modification (joo and kim, 2007). though slower than the domain of physical health, the adoption of mobile technology for mental health intervention has been on the rise. there are a growing number of mobile phone programs covering a wide array of topic areas including: a mobile mental health assessment tool for youth (reid et al., 2012); a cell phone app for mood tracking and self-regulation (morris et al, 2012); and a cognitive behavioral therapy (cbt)-based self-management program for people with depression and anxiety (harrison et al, 2011). despite the rapid growth of mhealth adaptation to mental health, however, there has been little work exploring the depth and the breadth of evidence in the area of self-guided interventions via mobile phones. to remedy the gap in current research, this paper provides an overview of the literature on mobile self-help tools for youth and adolescent mental health and examines key design principles of these self-help tools by looking at the authors’ rationales for using mobile phones for interventions. this is followed by a critical discussion of ethical issues arising with mobile interventions. given the high prevalence of mobile devices and high technological literacy amongst selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 younger populations1, it is crucial to critically consider and examine how mobile phone interventions enhance the logic of self-management and shape young users as self-regulating agents ultimately responsible for their own mental health and well-being. methods in order to examine the literature on mobile self-help tools for adolescent mental health, this study employed a scoping review methodology first developed by arskey and o’malley (2005) and further elaborated by levac, colquhoun, & o’brien (2010). this methodological framework is optimal for investigating a particular area of interest in its infancy, as it enables “mapping” of a field of study and identifying gaps in existing research. the analytical focus of this study was mental health interventions targeting adolescents and young adults aged 13-24, delivered primarily via mobile phone (either in the form of apps or sms). literatures on mobile mental health tools were identified by searching for peer-reviewed, english articles in electronic databases including medline, embase, psycinfo, web of science, and cinahl. for grey literature,2 proquest dissertations and thesis were searched. relevant studies were determined by using combinations of the following search terms,3 including 1) cellular phone, text messaging; 2) mental disorders, mental health; and 3) adolescent. no restrictions were placed on region and date of publication. the retrieved titles and abstracts were then screened to identify whether they use mobile phones for delivering self-guided interventions for young users aged 13-24 (i.e. mood charting apps), and to exclude those describing physical and behavioral interventions (i.e. diabetes or asthma selfmanagement), those focusing on non-adolescent population, and those not research based. after this process, eligible articles were independently reviewed and relevant information (i.e. design and characteristic of mobile tools, study outcomes, and the positive and negative impacts of mobile tools) was extracted and charted. following arskey and o’malley’s (2005) guidance, we then conducted a thematic analysis to identify key guiding principles in the development of self-help tools and rationales for implementing mobile technology to care. the method of qualitative content analysis (mayring, 2000) was used to identify themes related to design principles and their expected implications for adolescent mental healthcare. during the process of screening, data extraction, and the thematic analysis, we took a team approach and collaboratively reviewed articles. findings this scoping study includes 17 articles published from 2008-2013. due to the nascence of the field, most of reviewed studies were pilot tests or case studies with small samples. the majority of m-health tools developed to date have focused on helping users monitor their moods (i.e. mood charting app), providing a self-management tool (i.e. cognitive behavioral therapy) to support users’ positive mental states, or enabling youth to access their healthcare givers directly through sms for coordinating appointments. most studies, though still at a preliminary stage, reported positive effects 1  according  to  2012  pew  internet  report,  95%  of  americans  aged  18-­‐29  use  cell  phones  and  66%  of  them  own  smartphones   (duggan  &  rainie,  2012).     2  canadian  institutes  of  health  research  (cihr)  defines  grey  literature  as  “studies  that  are  not  formally  published  in  books   journals”   including   “conference   proceedings   and   abstracts,   dissertation   and   theses,   project   reports,   government   documents  etc”  (grimshaw,  2010).     3  the  search   terms  and  strategies  were  determined   in  consultation  with  a   senior   librarian  at   the   research   institution   the   authors  are  affiliated.       selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 of mobile-based tools on users’ mental state, such as mitigation of psychological distress and improvements in functional impairment and perceived self-efficacy. in terms of key design principles, one of the common rationales for using mobile phone was to increase participation and adherence rate to treatment. for example, matthews et al. (2008) developed a mobile-based mood-tracking app for adolescent and examined its efficacy in comparison with a paper-based mood charts. they reported that adolescents are more likely to complete the mobile-based mood chart than paper diaries, as the mobile app provides them with greater convenience and the sense of autonomy. in another example, researchers use mobile platforms to improve patient-doctor relationship. a cell phone-based self-monitoring tool developed by reid et al. (2012) is designed specifically for assisting clinicians to use the patient self-monitoring data in their clinical practice. the authors argue that the mobile tool can establish rapport between pediatricians and clients, by saving clinicians’ time in performing risk assessments and helping clinicians overcome difficulties engaging young clients reluctant to share sensitive information about their mental health. discussion the authors of the reviewed articles tend to favor implementing mobile phone tools to clinical practices as a suitable and effective means for facilitating self-monitoring among users. self-guided interventions are also framed as a way to encourage young patients to participate in their own healthcare and to increase patient compliance rate. however, it is significant to consider the ethical issues arising with mobile interventions. data recorded by mobile devices is often personal, and as such raises concerns about how it is handled, transmitted and stored. fear of potential breach of confidentiality and privacy can prevent individuals from using the mobile tools. moreover, the persistent and compulsive nature of self-monitoring tools means the users are potentially less in control of the ways they interact with interventions, especially when reminder are being used. the ethical issues associated with the implementation of mobile technologies into adolescent mental health warrant further attention in the literature. references abroms, l. c., padmanabhan, n., thaweethai, l., & phillips, t. (2011). iphone apps for smoking cessation: a content analysis. american journal of preventive medicine, 40(3), 279–85. arksey, h., & o’malley, l. (2005). scoping studies: towards a methodological framework. international journal of social research methodology, 8(1), 19–32. duggan, m., & rainie, l. (2012). cell phone activities 2012 (pp. 1–20). retrieved february 12, 2013 from http://pewinternet.org/reports/2012/cell-activities.aspx fjeldsoe, b. s., marshall, a. l., & miller, y. d. (2009). behavior change interventions delivered by mobile telephone short-message service. american journal of preventive medicine, 36(2), 165–73. grimshaw, j. (2010). a guide to knowledge synthesis: a knowledge synthesis chapter: canadian institutes of health research (cihr). retrieved february 12, 2013 from http://www.cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/41382.html harrison, v., proudfoot, j., wee, p. p., parker, g., pavlovic, d. h., & manicavasagar, v. (2011). mobile mental health: review of the emerging field and proof of concept study. journal of mental health, 20(6), 509–24. huckvale, k., car, m., morrison, c., & car, j. (2012). apps for asthma self-management: a systematic assessment of content and tools. bmc medicine, 10(1), 144. joo, n.-s., & kim, b.-t. (2007). mobile phone short message service messaging for behaviour modification in a community-based weight control programme in korea. journal of telemedicine and telecare, 13, 416– 420. levac, d., colquhoun, h., & o’brien, k. k. (2010). scoping studies: advancing the methodology. implementation science  : is, 5, 69. matthews, m., doherty, g., sharry, j., & fitzpatrick, c. (2008). mobile phone mood charting for adolescents. british journal of guidance counselling, 36(2), 113–129. mayring, p. (2000). qualitative content analysis. forum qualitative scozilforschung / forum: qualitative social research, 1(2), 1–8. morris, m. e., kathawala, q., leen, t. k., gorenstein, e. e., guilak, f., labhard, m., & deleeuw, w. (2010). mobile therapy: case study evaluations of a cell phone application for emotional self-awareness. journal of medical internet research, 12(2), e10. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 reid, s. c., kauer, s. d., khor, a. s., hearps, s. j., sanci, l. a., kennedy, a. d., & patton, g. c. (2012). using a mobile phone application in youth mental health. australian family physician, 41(9), 711–714. sarasohn-kahn, j. (2012). the online couch: mental health care on the web. oakland, ca: california healthcare foundation. retrieved february 15, 2013 from http://www.chcf.org/publications/2012/06/online-couch-mental-health license this article is ©2013 yukari seko, sean kidd and david wiljer, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 an imaginary algorithmic public: how media report on search query metrics anna jobin university of lausanne abstract web search engines provide search query metrics in different formats for different audiences, notably annual search query statistics by country, which are often reported on by traditional media outlets. these statistics present top-ranking query charts for different categories based on time and territoriality and are known as google's year in search (formerly: zeitgeist). they are presented by google as a simple algorithmic mirror of aggregated human interest. however, gillespie (2014) argues that 'algorithms designed to offer relevant knowledge also offer ways of knowing.' what 'ways of knowing' are offered by annual search query metrics, and how are they accepted, ignored, perpetuated, or questioned by journalists of traditional media outlets? this paper answers these questions based on a qualitative study of national media and major newspapers reporting on google's year in search switzerland over the last years. it specifically focuses on how the six political dimensions of public relevance algorithms (gillespie, 2014) have been addressed. based on switzerland's status as an officially multilingual country the paper also illustrates the marginalization of linguistic minorities as territoriality-based quantitative search query metrics cater to the majority by constructing, algorithmically, a national public of search users that does not exist as such. introduction web search engines provide various search query metrics in different formats for diverse audiences. these metrics include calculated 'related searches' for users, statistics about specific queries for advertisers, and annual 'trends' by country that are often reported on by traditional media outlets. these annual statistics present top-ranking query charts for different categories based on time and territoriality. the most well-known example is google's year in search (formerly known as zeitgeist). google has actively encouraged reporting on its annual search query statistics through press releases and additional dedicated webpages for the press, notably in 2007, 2008, and 2009. in its corporate blog, google defines zeitgeist/year in search as 'how the world searched' (2011), the 'collective consciousness' (2009), or 'moments that defined 2014.' the topranking query charts are presented as a neutral algorithmic mirror of aggregated human interest. suggested citation (apa): jobin, a. (2015, october 21-24). an imaginary algorithmic public: how media report on search query metrics. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the political dimensions of algorithms unpacking the notion of 'platform' and the ramification of its use, gillespie (2010) reminds us that vocabulary and discourses by corporate stakeholders about their own technologies are not innocent. by framing year in search as a neutral algorithmic mirror of search users' common interests, google refuses to acknowledge that data does not speak for itself (cf. boyd & crawford, 2012, p. 666; couldry, 2014) and erases its own contributions. it insinuates that these algorithmic charts are indeed ranking our interests, our 'collective consciousness', our 'defining moments'. google's year in search shows how 'algorithms designed to offer relevant knowledge also offer ways of knowing' (gillespie, 2014): our interests are, supposedly, reflected in the very word we type in google's search query field and can be aggregated, quantified and ranked unambiguously. this is the narrative inherent in google's year in search. however, algorithms are not neutral: they are social objects constituted by and simultaneously co-constituting values, norms, and knowledge, whether they are understood as a technology (cf. bijker, hughes, & pinch, 1987; flanagin, flanagin, & flanagin, 2010; fulk, 1993), as a procedure – cf. rieder (2012) and cardon (2013) for an analysis of social values encoded in pagerank – or as complex sociotechnical artifacts (gillespie, 2014; pasquale, 2015). according to gillespie, there are 'six dimensions of public relevance algorithms that have political valence' (gillespie, 2014). these political dimensions range from logics of classification to narratives by and about the algorithms themselves. diakopoulos argues that due to the complexity of algorithms 'journalists will [...] be needed to frame, contextualize, and explain the transparency information about algorithm' to the public (diakopoulos, 2014, p. 29). since google's year in search finds its way into traditional media reporting, this paper analyses how traditional media frame google's algorithmic top-ranking query charts and whether these six political dimensions of algorithms are addressed as such by journalists. are the 'ways of knowing' offered by annual search query metrics, perpetuated, ignored, or questioned by journalists of traditional media outlets? reporting on an imaginary national public in order to investigate whether articles of traditional media accept google's discourse of year in search as a neutral algorithmic representation of aggregated human interest i have undertaken a qualitative analysis of written articles by five1 different swiss media outlets (cf. fig 1 below). two types of media have been selected: national websites by public broadcast institutions (rts and srf) and major quality newspapers (le temps, 24heures, nzz, tages-anzeiger). 1 six media are listed, but according to its online archive, no article was published by le temps on the topic during the investigated time period, a hypothesis confirmed on request by the journalist of le temps who had signed a previous article on google zeitgeist. media outlet language 2011 2012 2013 2014 rts (public national tv/radio) french i i* i ii le temps (daily newspaper) french 24heures (daily newspaper) french i i i srf (public national tv/radio) german n.a.** i ii i nzz (daily newspaper) german i i ii i tages-anzeiger (newspaper) german i i i i * two more news agency articles were not specifically about switzerland. ** no available online archive before 2012 fig. 1: number of articles on google's year in search switzerland per media per year both french and german speaking media have been considered, because switzerland has a particular, multilingual status: although there is a two-third majority of german speaking swiss inhabitants, the three other languages spoken in particular geographical segments of the country (french, italian and rhaeto-romanic) are also official national languages, with french being the most widespread among the three. these particular geographical segments are not naturally delineated by any political boundary but constitute linguistic and cultural boundaries in and by themselves (blum & prinzing, 2013; lüdi, 2008; widmer, 2004). the articles have been collected by accessing the media websites and/or online archives. based on gillespie's 'six dimensions of public relevance algorithms that have political valence' (2014) i have identified, for each dimension, an operational example that has been mentioned at least once in reporting on google's year in search switzerland (cf. fig. 2 below). the articles have then been analyzed thematically, whether they mention each of the six political dimension with regard to the annual top-ranking query charts. political dimension operational example patterns of inclusion 'adult' queries have been excluded from the rankings cycles of anticipation various functions such as autofill, search-as-you-type, 'did you mean' etc. invite search users to choose existing and statistically probable search queries evaluation of relevance some charts are based on 'trends' (i.e. increase of search volume) while others are based on absolute volume promise of algorithmic objectivity the data is provided by a for-profit corporation, which has selected the categories and implemented the rankings entanglement with practice a search query is not always a manifestation of interest. (e.g.: navigational queries) production of calculated publics there is no 'swiss' public but a linguistic majority as well as several linguistic minorities. fig. 2: operationalization of the six political dimensions of public relevance algorithms (gillespie, 2014) unsurprisingly, google's quantitative search query metrics eclipse switzerland's linguistic minorities. google's year in search switzerland lists 'swiss celebs' and 'swiss sportspeople', but it would be more accurate to outright name the categories 'swissgerman celebs' and 'swiss-german sportspeople'. indeed, only very few queries listed refer to the french-speaking part of switzerland, and none to the italianor rhaeto romanic-speaking part. by basing its top-ranking charts on a quantitative majority and labeling it 'year in search switzerland' google ignores one third of switzerland's population and creates the image of a swiss public of search users that does not exist as such. in switzerland, the media of a linguistic minority are more aware of the linguistic majority than the other way round (blum & prinzing, 2013). this is reflected by the sampled articles: swiss french media are more likely to point out swiss german specificities on the top-ranking query charts than are swiss german media to notice the absence of other linguistic references. on the contrary, swiss german media mostly repeat google's minority-blind discourse of swiss people's supposed interests. while this is made visible through switzerland's specific linguistic situation, the underlying algorithmic logic is in no way particular to google's year in search switzerland only. the epistemological focus on how media report on the political dimensions of these algorithms helps reveal 'the gaps and breaks [sic] in our languages of social interpretation, authorized by the myth of big data, on which we must focus' (couldry, 2014, p. 889). many of the sampled articles, for instance, fail to realize the difference between google's year in search charts listing increased search volume and those listing absolute search volume. as a consequence, some articles even assert misinterpretations of comparative search query frequencies. in addition, google's categories of the top-ranking query charts are rarely called into question, although all articles except one do mention google as the data provider. and whereas one newspaper points out the exclusion of 'adult' search queries each year, this pre-selection of qualifying search queries is mentioned only once by another media outlet. last but not least, almost all media rehash, uncritically, google's equivalence of search as a manifestation of interest. overall, except in one of the newspapers, many of the political dimensions of the algorithmic search query charts remain unaddressed most of the time. the paper suggests that, by not adequately addressing the political dimensions of the algorithmic search query charts, traditional media reinforce the performativity of these top-ranking charts all while contributing to stabilize google's narrative that these charts are simply a neutral algorithmic mirror of people's interest. references bijker, w. e., hughes, t. p., & pinch, t. j. (1987). the social construction of technological systems: new directions in the sociology and history of technology. london: the mit press. blum, p. d. r., & prinzing, p. d. m. (2013). medien und sprachliche segmentierung. in k. imhof, r. blum, h. bonfadelli, & o. jarren (eds.), stratifizierte und segmentierte öffentlichkeit (pp. 149–166). springer fachmedien wiesbaden. boyd, danah, & crawford, k. (2012). critical questions for big data. information, communication & society, 15(5), 662–679. cardon, d. (2013). dans l’esprit du pagerank. réseaux, 177(1), 63–95 couldry, n. (2014). inaugural: a necessary disenchantment: myth, agency and injustice in a digital world. the sociological review, 62(4), 880–897. diakopoulos, n. (2014). algorithmic accountability reporting: on the investigation of black boxes. new york: tow center for digital journalism, columbia university. accessible at: http://towcenter.org/research/algorithmic-accountability-on-theinvestigation-of-black-boxes-2/ flanagin, a. j., flanagin, c., & flanagin, j. (2010). technical code and the social construction of the internet. new media & society, 12(2), 179–196. fulk, j. (1993). social construction of communication technology. academy of management journal, 36(5), 921–950. http://doi.org/10.2307/256641 gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of “platforms.” new media & society, 12(3), 347–364. gillespie, t. (2014). the relevance of algorithms. in media technologies. cambridge, massachusetts: mit university press group ltd. google. (2009). zeitgeist 2009: the collective consciousness. retrieved from http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/zeitgeist-2009-collectiveconsciousness.html google. (2011). zeitgeist 2011: how the world searched. retrieved from http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/zeitgeist-2011-how-world-searched.html google. (2014). a year in search: the moments that defined 2014. retrieved from http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/12/a-year-in-search-moments-thatdefined.html lüdi, g. (ed.). (2008). sprachenvielfalt und kulturfrieden: sprachminderheit einsprachigkeit mehrsprachigkeit: probleme und chancen sprachlicher vielfalt. w. kohlhammer verlag. pasquale, f. (2015). the black box society: the secret algorithms that control money and information. cambridge: harvard university press. rieder, b. (2012). what is in pagerank? a historical and conceptual investigation of a recursive status index. computational culture, (2). retrieved from http://computationalculture.net/article/what_is_in_pagerank widmer, j. (2004). langues nationales et identités collectives: l’exemple de la suisse. paris: harmattan. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016   suggested citation (apa): koniakou,v. (2016, october 5-8). re-thinking regulabilty: from lessig to ipv6. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org.   vasiliki koniakou university of turku, faculty of law introduction the wide dissemination of the internet at the beginning of the 1990s incited a online.1 initially the internet was perceived as unregulable from two aspects; firstly, it was considered that its design characteristics prevent attempts of external regulation;2 and secondly, that the traditional state regulation, based on the notion of territorial sovereignty, cannot be enforced nor function in cyberspace.3 from the first aspect stems the idea that from a technical perspective the internet is inherently unregulable, due to its innate ability to resist regulation, vigorously advocated by techno-enthusiasts, such as barlow, dibbell and the eff.4 the second reflects a modest version of cyberlibertarianism, originally manifested by johnson and post, who argued that the peculiarities of the internet render state regulation inadequate.5 the question over the of the internet became crucial, as it progressively increased its population coverage,6 particularly, after the launch of mosaic and world wide web.7 nowadays, the question of regulability remains remarkably relevant, especially as the transition from ipv4 to ipv6 gives new impetus to the discussion of internet governance. this article addresses regulability of the internet under the light of the new features ipv6 will introduce, focusing primarily on anonymity. it aims to prove that anonymity usually cited as a main reason why the internet is unregulable, or resistant to state regulation is only the result of specific protocol design choices internet protocol. it concludes that there is no valid ground anymore to argue that the internet is inherently unregulable, while the significant limitation of anonymity will allow better state regulation. the academic discourse one of the most highly celebrated characteristics of the early internet, commonly emphasized by those championing the idea of innate unregulability, is anonymity.8 the proponents of this concept claimed that since for any state to regulate it is necessary as well as location9 and the internet does not require any kind of identification facts, on the contrary it facilitates anonymity, it is designed to prevent       regulation.10 this argument, echoing technological determinism, practically 11 it is true that the internet has no mandatory framework requiring and enabling 12 currently the internet protocol addresses (ipv4) are simply logical addresses that serve their purpose without requiring or allowing for connection with exact physical location. additionally, the dynamic ips, the large internet carriers, cases of ip collision and the multiple ways to con since there is no simple way to individualise and allocate a user. yet, this observation about how the internet functions is hardly sufficient to support the assumption that it cannot function differently.13 many l unregulable, trying to refute it from different angles. lessig, describing this identification features now, this does not mean that they cannot be added in the future if there is such a need. furthermore, using cookies-technology as an example, he maintained that the commercialization of the internet, the participation of businesses and commercial applications, as well as the isps market have led to the development of identification layers or means, making anonymity less common. zittrain and brown explained anonymity via reviewing the history of the internet, exploring the reasons its architectural principles were adopted. the internet was created with aims and objectives significantly different from those one would imagine, judging by how it has developed.14 born within a us the internet was built upon simplicity, openness and trust,15 characteristics that prescribe its generic nature and were central to its robust development. the from the lack of such necessity during its early days. finally, goldsmith and wu go one step further challenging techno-utopianism as a whole, tackling the idea of the borderless nature of the internet and the allegedly state inadequacy to regulate it. they claim that the internet is no different from other means of communication and, presenting the ebay case, they argue that it is not only possible for the states to regulate the internet but also highly desirable. internet protocol version six the current version of the internet protocol (ipv4) was developed in the 1970s, when nothing foreshadowed the rapid spread of the internet or the multiple applications attached to it. as early as the 1994 it became apparent that ipv4 was not a long-term protocol, since it did not anticipate a number of requirements that turned out to be crucial, due to the vast expansion of the internet. 16 the forthcoming shortage of available ip addresses forced the ietf to initiate the design and development of a new internet protocol. in the meantime in response to the growing demand for ips a number of solutions were       deployed, such as large internet carriers, furtherly obscuring identification. additionally some protocol vulnerabilities caused cases of ip collision,17 making identification and regulation even more challenging. ipv6 might not be fundamentally different from ipv4, however, it has some key aspects that make anonymity less common. the newer protocol, offering 128bit addresses will allow a nearly infinite number of available addresses, preventing cases of ip collision and rendering the use of large carriers unnecessary,18 canceling the potential of hiding behind them. the capacious source of unique ips may also challenge the status quo of dynamic ips towards static ones, enhancing tracing through reverse look up, thus leading to simpler and less time-consuming identification or the usage of vpn services that rely on pptp to conceal ones will be harder if not impossible, enabling easier and better control and enforcement. conclusions that has ended a long time ago. ipv6 is the first internet protocol designed to facilitate the needs of a global mean of communication and commerce. the new protocol ultimately proves there is nothing necessarily unchangeable in tecture that hampers regulation, ending permanently the discussion over the regulability of the internet. simultaneously, making anonymity significantly harder it allows for state regulation to become easier and more efficient. references                                                                                                                       1 murray, andrew. the regulation of cyberspace: control in the online environment. routledge, 2007 2 brown, ian. research handbook on governance of the internet. edward elgar publishing, 2013 3 david r. johnson, david g. post. "law and borders the rise of law in cyberspace." stanford law review (1996). 4 see barlow, john perry. a declaration of the independence of cyberspace. 1996. https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/declaration-final.html 5 hardy, trotter i. "the proper legal regime for 'cyberspace." university of pittsburg law review 55 (1994).reidenberg, joel r. "governing networks and rule making in cyberspace." emory law journal 45 (1996). 6 savin, andrei. european union internet law. edward elgar publishing, 2013. 7 lilian edwards, charlotte waelden. law and the internet. hart publishing, 2009. 8 murray, andrew. information technology law: the law and society. oxford university press, 2013                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   9 anderson, james. the rise of the modern state. harvester wheatsheaf, 1986. bronwen morgan, karen yeung. an introduction to law and regulation: text and materials. cambridge university press, 2007. 10 mueller, milton l. network and states: the global politics of internet governance. the mit press, 2010. 11 see 8 12 bendrath, ralf. "global technology trends and national regulation: explaining variation in the governance of deep packet inspection." international studies annual convention. new york, 15-18 february 2009. 13 lessig, lawrence. code : version 2.0. createspace independent pub, 2010. 14 zittrain, jonathan. the future of the internet and how to stop it. yale university press, 2008 15 brown, ian. research handbook on governance of the internet. edward elgar publishing, 2013 16 see internet protocol, version 6 (ipv6) specification, ietf https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2460.txt 17 see on that arin: ipv6 & internet governance developments (august 2014)   microsoft word oztok.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): oztok, m. (2014, october 22-24). social presence and social absence: sociocultural production of self in online learning environments. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. social presence and social absence: socio-cultural production of self in online learning environments murat oztok lancaster university the concept of social presence has long been employed to study identities in online learning environments. however, the process of identification in digitally-mediated experiences is not only articulated by what is represented but also defined by what is filtered-out in that particular representation. i shall term these consciously filtered-out identifications social absence. therefore, i regard social absence as the extent to which particular identifications are not represented in one’s social presence. the idea of social absence suggests that individuals may hide behind their relative anonymity. this research, therefore, introduces the concept of social absence and illustrates the ways individuals experience social absence in online learning. introduction defined as the degree to which individuals represent themselves and perceive others in digitally-mediated environments, social presence has long been employed to study human experience in online learning environments (oztok & brett, 2011). i argue, however, a comprehensive understanding of identities in digitally-mediated environments should go beyond how individuals represent themselves depending on their perceptions of self in relation to others and further includes the qualities and cultural background that individuals consciously filter-out when they create their online existence. that is, the process of identification in digitally-mediated experiences is not only articulated by what is represented but also defined by what is filtered-out in that particular representation. i shall term these consciously filtered-out identifications social absence. therefore, i regard social absence as the extent to which particular identifications are not represented in one’s social presence. social absence is not the opposite of social presence; rather, one’s social presence and absence are always related to each other and both are situated in and defined by discourses. in digitally-mediated environments, one’s social presence or social absence operates as a site for the process of identification since individuals use their presence in conveying who they are to other people. this process of identification is called impression management (goffman, 1959), whereby individuals write themselves into online beings. the process of impression management can be thought of as the process by which certain individuals from certain cultural groups hide their differences since the difference is the primary point of othering, constituting a fixated form of representation for both the dominant and the subaltern (spivak, 2012). social absence, therefore, is the degree to which individuals hide their differences in digitally-mediated environments through the process of self-monitoring. current research this study explores how individuals manifest and utilize their identities in online learning environments. data are gathered through discourse analysis and semi-structured interviews from two randomly selected graduate level online courses offered at a public research university at canada. both courses were taught by the same instructor, and used the same institutional online learning environment. a total of 37 students (17 in the first course and 20 in the second) were enrolled but with some overlap, the total number of distinct students was 28. producing self in between social presence and social absence here, i present data from 2 individuals due to space limitations. johanne identifies herself as a “caribbean-canadian” who was born in a caribbean country and grew up in canada. johanne suggests that she is a very active participant who is not shy in bringing her perspectives in discussions. she claims that, compared to face-toface courses, she engaged more with her peers. in a classical sense, she is socially present in discussions. however, when i ask her if she believes that she truly represents herself, she answers with no hesitation: no! although i have always been genuine in my self-representation, i don't truly represent myself. no! and here is why. ok, for example, they would know which university i got my degrees, they would know what tv shows or music i like. they, wouldn't know how really i am because there are other aspects of me that i don't talk about. it is only half of me. for example, they wouldn't know what it means to be different because i never talked about it, i think what you present about yourself is only the half of it, right? johanne's answer suggests that even though her social presence is a genuine and true representation of herself, there is more to her identification than what she represents. according to johanne, her online self is “only half of” who she really is. i ask her to explain what was missing in her online self. she says: “funny but my ethnicity was definitely absent. i am canadian, right? but i was caribbean in the [online] course. so, it is funny because i was not caribbean-canadian but i was simply caribbean. so, my ethnicity was not there”. in the two online courses i study, what it means to be canadian is available to certain individuals; that is, being canadian means to be white. thus, johanne believes that she was identified as caribbean even though is canadian. johanne continues: my ethnicity was absent because i didn't even have a chance to bring it in. i wasn't canadian whose ethnic background is caribbean; i was just caribbean. so, if i had a chance to be who i was, i would probably use my ethnic background. but, um, now i am not this person, so i don't use my ethnicity. how can i use my ethnicity if i am not using my ethnic background? i am canadiancaribbean. not just caribbean. so, if you make me caribbean, you erase my caribbean-canadian background. johanne's articulation is quite powerful. precisely because her caribbean-canadian background is “erased”, johanne believes her online self does not represent her. thus, johanne's social absence is her ethnic background. race, ethnicity, and nationality are common points of juncture between presence and absence for those who were not positioned on top of the hierarchy of privilege. nalini, who self-identifies as “indian-canadian”, suggests that her ethnicity was absent. i ask her why and she answers: i don't know. i think it just didn't come up. i mean, i thought it is ok not to mention it. i mean, parts of me were missing. you know, like my culture and cultural background. i could have put more of myself and wrote about myself. but in terms of what i shared with people, i was accurate. but, yes, there were some parts missing. so, i did not reflect myself fully. you know ... honestly, i thought people do not care about it or take that into account; i thought they don't want to know about it. so, um, i thought ... i thought i should not mention it because i am not a typical canadian. nalini echoes johanne in many ways. most importantly, she believes that her ethnicity is absent through being accepted as indian rather than indian-canadian. in a preview interview, however, nalini suggested that she had to be indian because it is the role that was expected of her. her contradictory explanations suggest that she is caught in a dilemma that she feels her identification as indian is absent, yet she feels like she is expected to be indian. spivak (2012) calls this dilemma “double-bind”; an irreconcilable binary in which two subject positions can simultaneously oppose yet construct one another. for nalini, double-bind is the dynamic interplay between discourses and her social absence. i wonder what nalini meant when she said “because i am not a typical canadian”. nalini explains: well, you have limited social cues in online learning, right? so people fill in those cues they make guesses, they stereotypify you depending on their dominant ideology. so, let's be honest. they stereotypify me depending on what they think of me. they do; they start guessing. so, my picture was up there, and my name was there, right? so, they guess that um, they assume that i am brown and i have a different name, so i am not canadian or white. (laughs). yand if you don't represent yourself according to the image they have in [their] mind, they think you are fake. according to nalini, people try to make sense of their peers and stereotypify each other by using meanings that are defined and delimited by the very same discourses. this explains why nalini is caught in a double-bind: she is brown and has a different name; therefore, she cannot be canadian, otherwise her peers may think she is “fake”. consequently, for nalini, her social absence is a matter of race, ethnicity, and nationality. yet, similarities between nalini and johanne are quite interesting. they both believe that their ethnicities are absent from their online selves because they are identified as who they are not: not canadian but caribbean and indian. furthermore, they both believe that their absence is the direct result of stereotypification that is originated from macro-level societal discourses. such effects can have dramatic outcomes for them, such as isolation, disengagement, or veiled acceptance for the purposes of a parsimonious online experience with peers. discussion the dynamic interplay between social presence and absence provides means to explore the effects of identification in digitally-mediated learning environments. for those who i interviewed, their online self captures only a partial representation of themselves. for them, social absence is part of their identification: race, ethnicity, or nationality. for those “non-whites”, social absence means disconnection. they believe that they are being stereotyped and that their perspectives are devalued; therefore, they articulate that the communication process breaks down. nalini says: “it means that you have no choice but follow the path that is already put there for you. you just pretend”. johanne answers the same questions similarly: “you can't stop thinking that you could have said more or done more. for me, it is living with “could haves” or “would haves” (she makes quotations marks with her hands). their answer is at the heart of this manuscript: being present in online learning environment does not mean that individuals have same learning experiences; some people may experience more absence than presence. conclusion identification is an ongoing reconstruction of self; it requires articulation, embodiment, personification, acknowledgement, and engagement. i conceptualized identification as a relational concept that is composed of social presence and social absence; as such, identification is a dialogic construction that is situated within discourses. the findings suggest that certain individuals, particularly those who are identified as non-white, are caught in the double-bind of their social presence and social absence. this means that the process of identification have implications on how individuals experience online learning. references goffman, e. (1959). the presentation of self in everyday life. new york: anchor. oztok, m., & brett, c. (2011). social presence and online learning: a review of research. the journal of distance education, 25(3). retrieved from http://www.jofde.ca/index.php/jde/article/view/758 spivak, g. c. (2012). an aesthetic education in the era of globalization. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. microsoft word lawsonaoirfinal.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): lawson, c. (2015, october 21-24). cascading exploitations: a digital analysis of the celebrity nude photo hack. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. cascading exploitations: the celebrity nude photo hack as digital phenomenon caitlin e. lawson university of michigan background on august 31, 2014, the internet was abuzz after the release of hundreds of private nude photos of female celebrities. for months, a collective of hackers had worked to penetrate apple’s icloud storage, which automatically backs up photos from devices such as iphones. however, icloud does not lock users out after a number of incorrect login attempts, so the hackers guessed the usernames/email addresses and passwords of female celebrities until they were able to access the accounts. an anonymous selfproclaimed “collector” then acquired the photos and published them on social media sites such as anonib, 4chan and reddit. from there, they quickly spread via various digital networks across the world. while the scandal was analyzed ad nauseum by media outlets, largely lost in the discussion was a sustained examination of the ways in which the affordances of digital media, and particularly social media, facilitated the incident. this essay examines the digital implications of the celebrity nude photo hack by analyzing three facets: its relation to the broader practices of hacking, the implications of the photographs’ circulation online through social media, and the photographs as a form of online pornography. ultimately, the transcoding and online circulation of these nude and semi-nude images of women facilitated not only the exploitation of the celebrities but also the exploitation of the affordances of digital media. method this article employs a triadic critical framework to examine the implications of the celebrity nude photo hack at three levels: in the context of hacking more generally, at the level of their dissemination through social media, and as a form of online pornography. first, i explore the photo hack in the context of hacking more broadling, placing particular emphasis on its heavily gendered culture. then, drawing primarily from van dijck’s (2013) theory of social media logics, i explore the ways in which the hacked photos were disseminated through social media platforms like anonib, 4chan and reddit. finally, i present an analysis of the photos as online pornography and place them within the broader context of celebrity pornography. pulling from susanna paasonen’s (2011) insights, i explore the digital materiality of the images and their complicated status as “amateur” pornography due to the fame of their subjects. findings hacker culture and gender to begin teasing out the implications of the celebrity nude photos as a digital phenomenon, we can first view them within the context of hacking more broadly. in hacking: the art of exploitation, jon erickson (2008) explains that “the essence of hacking is finding unintended or overlooked uses for the laws and properties of a given situation and then applying them in new and inventive ways to solve a problem – whatever that may be” (p. 1). further, he explains that early hackers were driven by their belief that “information should be free and anything that stood in the way of that freedom should be circumvented” (p. 2). for some hackers, the problems they seek to solve and the pieces of information they work to expose are, at least in their minds, noble. a perfect example of this facet of hacker culture is anonymous, the most prominent hacker collective. as gabriella coleman (2014) explains, what began as internet mischief and run-of-the-mill trolling eventually morphed into “an earnest activist endeavor…to improve the world” through hacking (p. 21). as a result, many of anonymous’ actions involve organizing cyberprotests, hacking individuals or organizations that (in anonymous’ view) threaten or violate human rights, and/or stealing and releasing information that will harm those individuals or organizations. for anonymous, even though their methods are illegal and the outcomes vary, their goal is activism and the service of communities and/or individuals that are being harmed or exploited. however, in the case of the celebrity nude photo hack, the goal was not of “hacktivism” but rather what tim jordan (2008) calls “cracking.” “crackers” are cybercriminals who “break open your computer and sneak inside, for their own purposes” (p. 3). for the “crackers” who stole the celebrity nudes, the “problem” they sought to solve was their lack of access to nude photos of celebrity women. by exploiting the flaw in icloud’s security, the circumvented the barriers to this content and disseminated it. this hack is an instantiation of male domination and subjugation of the female body – vigilantism in the pursuit of sexual gratification. while hacking may be a potentially liberating action, in this context, it resulted in the harassment and exploitation of women. the celebrity hackers’ exploitation of security flaws to exploit female bodies was facilitated by the heavily gendered practice of hacking. in her work on hacker culture and its relation to gender politics, a.e. adam (2003) points out that, even more than other jobs in the technology sector, hacking is dominated by men. she contends that this is due at least in part to the "wild west," frontier-like masculinity espoused by the hacker ethic. because hackers operate at the margins of computing where the laws don't apply, much of the ethos of hacking is imbued with notions of vigilantism, which is typically gendered masculine. as a result, in the world of hacking, women are cast as "other" and generally rendered invisible. despite the hacker ethic (levy 2010) promoting equality regardless of characteristics like age, race and presumably (though unstated) gender, in doing so it renders difference invisible and serves to cloak its implicit sexism. in this way, the act of hacking in and of itself has been gendered male and carries with it ideologies of domination and appropriation. with this context in mind, the sizeable hacking subculture, housed in large part on anonib and 4chan, that seeks the domination and appropriation of women’s bodies by hacking and stealing their private photographs can thus be seen as a logical outgrowth of hacking more broadly. this is not to say that this outcome was inevitable, but the masculine desire to overcome barriers and appropriate content lends itself such phenomena. the “wild west” of social media: the logics anonib, 4chan, and reddit like many other hackers seeking to release information, the “collector” used social media as his primary distribution site, in particular anonib, 4chan, and reddit. these sites operate according to the principles of social media logic, and these principles help us to better understand why these particular social media enabled the dissemination of the nude celebrity photos. in his explication of social media logics, van dijck (2013) emphasizes that one key facet of social media is its programmability. these sites’ programmability means that what users see on the site is a two-way street; users can upload their own content, but it is modified and controlled by the programmers who tweak the sites’ algorithms and interfaces. this push and pull between users and programmers means that “social media platforms can neither take credit nor blame” for what happens on the site, although van dijck emphasizes that social media are not “neutral platforms” (p. 9, 2). the principles by which each individual social media site negotiates programmability “affect[s] the conditions and rules of social interaction” on that site (p. 2). anonib, where the “collector” originally shopped the photos around, hoping to sell them to users in exchange for bitcoin, is an anonymous online imageboard that prides itself on the anonymity of its users. the interface of the site is extremely basic, much in the vein of 4chan, and its primary function is that of pornography. like most pornography, the images are categorized by the “type” of women or activities they feature (such as “college bitches” or “bj/oral sex”) or by the location of the women (by state or country). once a user clicks on one of these categories, images appear in the order they were posted, with most recent posts at the top of the page. older posts are pruned, disappearing from the site permanently. this simplistic interface and the lack of algorithmic ranking or search means that the focus is solely on temporality and the images posted by the users. the anonymity and temporality of the site facilitate its use as a place for illegal content. the poster of the offending content is unidentifiable, and before the post can be discovered and legal action taken against it, it has most likely been pruned anyway. many of the images on the board are revenge porn (nude images released by a partner or former partner) or stolen photographs that are the result of hacks. in fact, hackers on the site advertise their services and will take payment from users to hack the cloud storage of women and disseminate their photos (hess 2014). while the site features moderators, they only have two rules. the first is no child pornography, which is often broken by posters. if moderators catch the offending post in time, the post will be removed, but often it is pruned before this happens. the second rule is “don’t be evil;” on anonib, being “evil” apparently consists only of releasing the “personal details like addresses, telephone numbers, social network links, or last names” of those in the photographs as well as avoiding private trading (http://anon-ib.co/rules.txt). in other words, the theft of women’s private photos, the non-consensual spread of those photos, and the consequent dehumanization and objectification of these semi-anonymous women does not constitute evil and thus does not warrant any interference from the moderators. as amanda hess (2014) argues in her analysis of the site for slate, anonib users thus see the hunting of nude photos of women as a sport, and their capture as a “win.” she explains that anonib “is an organized network of people who seek to exert power over women and girls by reducing them to lifeless bodies and hoarding them in their hard drives.” more than lifeless bodies, however, the women are rendered only images of those bodies; two-dimensional trinkets to be collected, traded, and sold. the celebrity images constitute a bigger “win” because of the fame of their subjects. following the “collector’s” largely failed attempt to sell the photos on anonib, the images appeared on 4chan and quickly migrated to reddit. while not as lawless as anonib, 4chan and reddit, and the proprietors’ reaction to the posting of the photos (“every man” 2014), evinces what alice marwick (2013) identifies as the influence of neoliberal individualism on the logics of web 2.0. drawing implicitly from the hacker ethic (levy 2010) and its praise of the open and free circulation of information, reddit in particular placed all the ethical responsibility for the circulation of the photographs in the hands of the posters, electing not to police its community unless moved to action by forces (like the digital millennium copyright act) larger than itself. the dmca was invoked to attempt to stem the flow of the celebrity images across the internet, including on 4chan and reddit. the reaction of the moderators on reddit is especially fascinating, reading more as a manifesto of the freedom of information and neoliberal ideas of individual responsibility than a mea culpa for their part in disseminating illegal content. on september 6, a week after the leak, reddit finally banned r/thefappening, the subreddit on which the photos were housed. the moderators posted an explanation of their banning policies in response to the outrage of those in the community who cried foul. the post, entitled “every man is responsible for his own soul,” explains their compliance with dmca obligations in removing the content or directing copyright holders and their representatives to images not hosted by their servers. it then morphs into a statement of reddit’s ethos, praising its lack of barriers and the open circulation of information. the anonymous editor explains: “we uphold the ideal of free speech on reddit as much as possible not because we are legally bound to, but because we believe that you the user has the right to choose between right and wrong, good and evil, and that it is your responsibility to do so. when you know something is right, you should choose to do it. but as much as possible, we will not force you to do it.” apologizing more to its community than to the victims of theft, the post places all the responsibility in the hands of the posters, electing not to police its community until it was legally forced to do so. overall, these social media sites’ simple interfaces and refusal or at least hesitation to police content emphasizes user control. in this way, the hacker principles of the lawless “wild west” frontier invade social media, and women, celebrity or not, often pay the price. it is productive, then, to view the celebrity nude photo hack within the context of other social media harassment of women. in their discussion of sexting and nonconsensual pornography, henry and powell (2015) emphasize the extended access to women that digital media has provided for harassers, saying, "where before harm occurred primarily where a woman could be accessed physically – now women can be accessed in other ways" (p. 11). that harm, which can include the release of photographs, personal information, or vitriol, can now haunt women constantly and permanently through the persistence of social media. in this way, the affordances of digital media – the ability to hack and steal photos and information without physical proximity and the easy and often uncurtailed dissemination of this content on social media – have increased male access to women and their resources to harass and exploit them. the resonances of online and celebrity pornography finally, the nude celebrity photographs shared on 4chan and reddit can be understood both in the context of online pornography and of leaked (or in some cases, merely “leaked”) celebrity pornography. in carnal resonance, susanna paasonen explores both the digital and affective aspects of online pornography, asking, what happens to pornography when it goes online, and what embodied experiences and emotions does it move us to have? in approaching the leaked photos as a form of online pornography, i will first touch on their purely digital aspects: the ways the files are organized and indexed and the materiality of the images. i will then move to explore the dichotomy of the amateur and the professional in pornography, examining the ways in which celebrity complicates this binary and the notions of authenticity the split engenders. in her analysis of the ways in which online environments shape users’ experiences with pornography, paasonen discusses the indexing and categorization of videos and images on pornography websites. she explains, “the visibility and clear articulation of subcategories facilitated by indexing and categorization provide users with faster access to the imageries of their choice and give them a plethora of brands and alternatives to choose from” (p. 70). indexing is thus motivated by speed and convenience, allowing users to quickly get to the “brand” of pornography they desire. typically, these brands are subgenres that are often descriptive of the sexual acts they depict for example, “blowjob,” “group sex,” “anal,” etc., or that refer to physical characteristics such as age, hair color, or body size. these organizational techniques share a generality; most mainstream, general porn websites like youporn.com do not have categories devoted to specific stars. they assume that users are less interested in who specifically appears onscreen but rather what that (often nameless and, in the case of male performers, faceless) person is doing. however, the photos released in the celebrity nude photo hack were indexed exclusively by celebrity. take, for example, the torrent files available online after sites like 4chan and reddit removed the photos due to dmca claims. the file i downloaded on september 3, 2014 contained all of the photos leaked on august 31, indexed by celebrity. the torrent consisted of a .zip file which, when opened, contained a myriad of folders labeled with the celebrities’ first and last names. such indexing structures how users interact with the files and belies a structuring logic that indicates how these images were understood as having meaning. they were not indexed by sex act or position; indeed, many of the photos were relatively mundane nude selfies taken in the mirror, barely titillating by most standards of online pornography. nor were they indexed by general physical characteristics or location. instead, they were indexed by star, indicating that the user is presumed to care who this person is, not specifically what she is doing, how she looks, or where she is located. while the photos released in the celebrity photo hack are indeed part of broader trends of revenge porn and other types of online harassment against women, these photos in particular were newsworthy because of the fame of their subjects, and the organization of the files reflects this. paasonen also explores the materiality and aesthetics of online amateur pornography through her case study of images on wife bucket, an amateur site where users upload photographs of their female partners. paasonen reminds us that “the images materialize not merely as digital files—for this would be an abstract materialization, indeed—but as shots interpreted through the codes of amateur imaging and home media (that is, directness, authenticity, realness, and recognizably intimate resonance). they are embedded in textures of domesticity that have a particular feel” (p. 104). just as the photos on wife bucket were often taken in the home, so too were the photos released in the hack. the notions of authenticity and intimacy in the “feel” of these images, a more affective materiality, points to a key reason for users’ curiosity about the photos. indexed as they are to highlight the famous subjects they depict, the photos allow us an unfiltered intimacy and with celebrities that we rarely get to experience. this desire for authenticity and intimacy with celebrities through viewing their nude bodies and/or sexual exploits is not unique to the nude photo hack. in her analysis of pamela anderson and tommy lee’s sex tape, hillyer (2004) makes many of the same arguments that paasonen does about amateur pornography, saying, "the tape's domestic credentials serve both to establish its authenticity in an environment populated by fake celebrity sightings and computer-generated imagery and to add an extra charge to its pornographic appeal” (p. 52). the mundane, amateur aesthetics of the sex tape adds to the experience of its integral realism, authenticating itself by virtue of its boringness much in the way of the celebrity nude photos. however, while pam and tommy’s tape was physically stolen from their home, the digital nature of icloud storage removes a significant barrier for audiences who want a more intimate glimpse at celebrities. this desire for a peek behind the curtain at celebrities is unsurprising due to our celebrity-obsessed culture; indeed, doll (2011) posits that celebrity pornography “may be the penultimate form of celebrity watching” (p. 108). thus the masculine aspects of hacker culture, its fringe nature, the affordances of social media sites like 4chan and reddit, and the resonances of online pornography coalesce to explain the celebrity nude photo hack as a digital extension of misogyny, sexual harassment, and our culture’s fascination and desire for intimacy with celebrities. discussion in conducting this research, i was struck by the repetition of exploitation at each level of analysis. the hackers who stole the photos exploited a flaw in icloud security to steal the celebrities’ private photos. while some hacking collectives, such as anonymous, use their exploitation of security lapses to work for social good (as dubious as that work may be), these hackers used their skills to extend the masculine, vigilante ethos of hacker culture into the practical exploitation of women’s bodies by rendering their private images public. the “collector” and other individuals who obtained the photos then exploited the anonymity and lack of policing on social media sites like anonib, 4chan, and reddit to disseminate the photos around the web. the logics of these social media sites reflect the openness of information and relative lawlessness of the hacker ethic and afforded the spread of the images across the web. the theft and dissemination of these photos rendered them non-consensual online pornography, and their amateur aesthetics lent an intimacy to the images that was all the more engrossing because of the fame of their subjects. however, this intimacy exploited the bodies and images of the female celebrities, appropriating their private images for our entertainment and titillation. while these cascading exploitations are not necessarily causal, the logic of taking advantage of weakness connects our understanding of hacking and the logics of certain social media to our understanding of the status of women in patriarchal societies. as a whole, the celebrity nude photo hack exposes the gendered logics of hacking and certain social media sites, where images of the female body are hunted for sport and stolen intimacy with celebrities constitutes an epic win. references adam, a. e. (2003). hacking into hacking: gender and the hacker phenomenon. sigcas comput. soc., 33(4), 3–. http://doi.org/10.1145/968358.968360 coleman, g. (2014). hacker, hoaxer, whistleblower, spy: the many faces of anonymous. verso books. doll, d. (2011). celebrity sex tapes: a contemporary cautionary tale. in porn – philosophy for everyone: how to think with kink. john wiley & sons. erickson, j. (2008). hacking, 2nd edition: the art of exploitation. no starch press. “every man is responsible for his own soul.” (2014). retrieved december 3, 2014 from http://www.redditblog.com/2014/09/every-man-is-responsible-for-hisown.html freeman, h. (2014). the naked celebrity hack: an outstanding example of sexism. retrieved february 1, 2015, from http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2014/sep/01/stealing-naked-photos-femalecelebrities-online-sexism-privacy henry, n., & powell, a. (2014). beyond the “sext”: technology-facilitated sexual violence and harassment against adult women. australian & new zealand journal of criminology, 0004865814524218. hess, a. (2014, september 3). inside anonib, where hacking is a sport and women’s bodies are the prize. slate. retrieved from http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/09/03/anonib_nude_photo_site_wher e_hackers_and_users_treat_women_as_property.html hillyer, m. (2004). sex in the suburban: porn, home movies, and the live action performance of love in pam and tommy lee: hardcore and uncensored. in porn studies. duke university press. http://anon-ib.co/rules.txt. (n.d.). retrieved july 30, 2015, from http://anon-ib.co/rules.txt jordan, t. (2008). hacking: digital media and technological determinism. polity. kashner, s. (2014). both huntress and prey [online]. vanity fair, 17 october. retrieved january 15, 2015, from: http://www.vanityfair.com/vfhollywood/2014/10/jennifer-lawrence-photo-hacking-privacy levy, s. (2010). hackers: heroes of the computer revolution 25th anniversary edition (1 edition). sebastopol, ca: o’reilly media. marwick, a. e. (2015). status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. yale university press. paasonen, s. (2011). carnal resonance: affect and online pornography. cambridge, mass.  ; london: the mit press. the digital millennium copyright act of 1998. (n.d.). retrieved from http:// www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf van dijck, j., & poell, t. (2013). understanding social media logic. media and communication, 1(1), 2–14. microsoft word berg.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): berg, m. (2014, october 22-24). the production of online space: facebook and algorithmic metapower. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the production of online space: facebook and algorithmic metapower martin berg halmstad university abstract throughout the history of internet studies, online space has been conceptualised in dramatically different ways. in the early days of internet research, online space was commonly described as a separate social sphere governed by the absence of mundane regulations. in cyberspace, as peter steiner (1993) noted in his now famous illustration, ”nobody knows you’re a dog” and in fact, it was often assumed that online space did not only allow for an increased connectivity but also that the basic conditions for self and subjectivity to some extent were altered. the social order online and the lack of corporeality in this seemingly unbound space were frequently thought of as helping people to transcend everyday power relations related to gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, class and so forth. since these days, the internet has undergone a vast array of changes and today online space is rarely understood as different from everyday life offline. as berg (2011) explains, the field of internet studies has taken a socio-spatial turn which has underpinned extensive explorations of the intertwinement between online and offline spaces, thus de-emphasising the importance of how certain kinds of online spatiality are produced and experienced. online and offline spaces are increasingly thought of as merged and researchers tend to assume that social network sites such as facebook are deeply embedded in everyday life social practices. despite this common assumption, current research on social network sites is roughly divided in two separate fields which emphasize either instrumental or institutional characteristics (berg 2012). whereas the immensely popular instrumental approach emphasizes various aspects of how users put social network sites into play, the institutional perspective focuses on how social network sites put users into play through various kinds of exploitive data harvesting. although early accounts of online space frequently explored the altered conditions for self and subjectivity, contemporary research, with some exceptions, rarely put these matters under scrutiny. a number of recently published papers point at an emerging interest in the effects of embedded algorithms and and their potential function as social social structures. although researchers such as david beer (2009), taina bucher (2012a, 2012b), robert w. gehl (2011) and astrig mager (2014) provide excellent accounts of how software and algorithms sink into the background of people’s everyday life and affect social interaction through subtle structuring processes, it remains unclear if and to what extent these changes alter the conditions self and subjectivity. explicitly focusing on facebook, this paper aims at exploring the effects of algorithms as social structures and strives at advancing the study of how algorithms contribute to a production of online space and its impact on various social processes concerning self and subjectivity.1 the opening section revolves around a literature review which establishes an understanding of how the algorithmic processing of personal and interactional data on facebook forms the basis for the emergence of a certain kind of ”metapower”. the following section describes core aspects of the facebook interface which are subsequently elaborated by turning to an empirical study of approximately 470 self-reflexive diary entries about facebook use, authored by self-selected facebook users from sweden between the ages of 22 and 68. the final section of this paper aims at elaborating the theoretical and empirical readings by turning to the core readings in the emerging field of software studies (kitchin & dodge 2011, manovich 2013) along with the works of henri lefevbre (1999/1974), georg simmel (2009/1908) and george h. mead (1934). in overall terms, this paper suggests that spatiality is still an important facet of contemporary online sphere yet in a radically different sense than early accounts of online space proposed. by exploring the changed characteristics of online space, this paper advances the ongoing discussion of algorithms as social structures as well as the possible surfacing of new forms of power and their general implications for everyday life (online). these are all matters that need to be taken seriously if research is supposed to establish an understanding of the complex nature of the digital world and the ways in which it feeds into, affects and become part of material social spaces. references beer, d. (2009). "power through the algorithm? participatory web cultures and the technological unconscious." new media & society. 11(6): 985-1002. berg, m. (2011). checking in at the urban playground: digital geographies and electronic flâneurs. networked sociability and individualism: technology for personal and professional relationships. f. comunello. hershey, pa, information science reference: 171-196. berg, martin. (2012). social intermediaries and the location of agency: a conceptual reconfiguration of social network sites. contemporary social science, 7(3), 321-333. berg, m. (forthcoming). "participatory trouble: towards an understanding of algorithmic structures on facebook." cyberpsychology: journal of psychosocial research on cyberspace 8(3). 1 these matters have also been approached in berg (forthcoming). bucher, t. (2012a). want to be on the top? algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on facebook. new media & society. bucher, t. (2012b). "a technicity of attention: how software 'makes sense'." culture machine 13: 1-23. gehl, r. w. (2011). "the archive and the processor: the internal logic of web 2.0." new media & society 13(8): 1228-1244. kitchin, r. & dodge, m. (2011). code/space: software and everyday life. massachusetts: mit press. lefebvre, h. (1999/1974). the production of space. oxford, blackwell. mager, a. (2014). "defining algorithmic ideology: using ideology critique to scrutinize corporate search engines." triplec 12(1): 28-39. manovich, l. (2013). software takes command. new york: bloomsbury. mead, g. h., ed. (1934). mind, self, and society : from the standpoint of a social behaviorist. chicago, university of chicago press. simmel, g. (1950). the metropolis and mental life. the sociology of georg simmel. k. h. wolff. new york, free press: 409–424. simmel, g. (1978). the philosophy of money. london, routldege & kegan paul. simmel, g. (2009/1908). sociology: inquiries into the construction of social forms. leiden, brill. steiner, p. (1993). on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. the new yorker. new york. 69: 61. microsoft word roth.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): roth, y. (2014, october 22-24). “no overly suggestive photos of any kind”: technics and normativity in social network content management policies. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “no overly suggestive photos of any kind”: technics and normativity in social network content management policies yoel roth university of pennsyvania abstract this article examines the policies and practices that manage user-submitted content on three gaytargeted social networking services. while managing user-generated content is a common practice across social networking services, the policies implemented on gay-targeted services tend to be distinctively restrictive in scope and highly specific in formulation. this analysis identifies the technical, legal, and social affordances that authorized the creation of these policies. framing content management policies as derived from the technical rules of platforms like apple’s app store obscures normative judgements about proper self-presentation and community formation. identifying the normative character of these policies requires an analysis rooted simultaneously in technology studies, media policy, and subcultural identity politics. managing user-generated content online is a wide-reaching and frequently contentious activity. (gillespie, 2010; 2012; van dijck, 2009; 2013). this article examines the content management policies and practices of the three most popular gay-targeted social networking services: grindr, scruff, and manhunt. social networking services, including ones focused on romantic or intimate relationships, cut across gay and straight communities; but the policies in place to manage gay services are distinctive in their specificity. this article asks how these restrictive policies came to be authorized — both by application developers and by users themselves. in evaluating the relationship between policy and practice on these services, this study outlines both a model of content policies as their most specific, as well as a model for how the relationship between technical systems and subcultural practice should be conceptualized. framing these content management policies as solely technical in origin obscures the value judgements that are embedded in them — value judgements that have particular valence in subcultural communities. content management policies rest at the nexus of three sets of standards: first, that which is lawful; second, the requirements of technical actors like apple and google; and third, that which application developers and designers deem proper, as determined outside of and beyond the external policies. the terms of service for manhunt, grindr, and scruff (grindr, 2012; manhunt, 2009; scruff, 2012) establish a broad class of content that is forbidden within the context of these services, regardless of other constraints. i argue that these policies constitute a normative declaration, although only a rarely-acknowledged one, that what laws and technical policies consider objectionable is, in some instances, not sufficient to govern online services. the developers of both grindr and scruff emphasize the fact that their content guidelines are designed primarily to ensure compliance with the rules set forth by apple and google for developers on their respective mobile platforms. developers remind their users that apps distributed through mainstream smartphone application clearinghouses require more restrictive content standards. the narrative presented to users is that, faced with the choice between not offering an application at all or abiding by apple and google’s rules, developers have opted to limit the types of content available on their services for the users’ benefit. this focus on externally imposed developer guidelines constitutes an important reframing of the discourse around content management practices. in particular, it shifts the responsibility for these policies off of application developers and onto apple and google. as grindr’s chief executive joel simkhai explains, “from day one, we basically used the app store guidelines as a framework for development.” the ambiguity of these guidelines, simkhai continued, explains the grindr staff’s cautious development approach: apple and google don’t have very specific guidelines — sometimes they can be quite vague. trying to make sense of them is often a talmudic exercise, so when we drew up the grindr profile guidelines, we were very conservative in our interpretation of apple and google’s guidelines. by focusing on the rules set forth by apple and google, simkhai downplays the internal design process behind grindr as a factor in developing content restrictions. the choices were made for grindr by apple and google, rather than by grindr’s staff. apple’s guidelines are fairly open-ended in their articulation of restrictions on user generated content in apps: we view apps different [sic] than books or songs, which we do not curate. ... we will reject apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. what line, you ask? well, as a supreme court justice once said, “i’ll know it when i see it”. and we think you will also know it when you cross it. (apple, 2013) the guidelines are more specific on the issue of pornography, noting that apps containing objectionable, crude, or patently pornographic material (user-generated or not) will not be distributed through the app store. google likewise notes that pornography, nudity, graphic sex acts, and sexually explicit material are all prohibited in applications distributed on google play (google, n.d.). while frequently ambiguous, these policies do not, in themselves, prohibit the full spectrum of content addressed in the grindr, scruff, and manhunt guidelines. this gap between platform policies and specific app practices can be explained in two ways. first, these policies constitute an important and non-content-neutral restriction on developer behavior (hestres, 2013). this is the most direct explanation of control: apps constrain user behavior because apple and google specifically proscribe certain types of content. but, in practice, these restrictions tend to be considerably more restrictive than direct control can account for. instead, these platform-wide policies can create a chilling effect on developer behavior: rather than running the risk of violating platform rules, developers might elect to be more conservative in their specific policies. this is the explanation offered by grindr, scruff, and manhunt. few services, however, acknowledge their own normative interventions into this process: an important act of translation occurs between the apple and google developer policies and the rules users actually engage with. herein, both platform curators like apple and google and application developers behave in a non-content-neutral manner. the technical systems that frame these services obscure the relations of power encoded in them. presenting a content policy as the product of technological requirements rather than normative ones reduces opportunities for user resistance and self-expression. hiding certain types of sexuality from view on social networking services isn’t to say that they don’t exist; but diminishing their visibility is in itself a value judgement and an affordance for a particular and limited type of representation. these are normative considerations, not technological ones — considerations which have important consequences for the agency of individual users as well as the visibility of diverse practices and patterns of self-expression in gay communities. as social applications continue to become more prominent, particularly in subcultural communities, frameworks of values and norms will be indispensable in the design and management of technical systems. technological and legal considerations alone are insufficient. references apple. (2013). app store review guidelines. retrieved august 19, 2013, from https:// developer.apple.com/appstore/resources/approval/guidelines.html gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of “platforms.” new media and society, 12(3). gillespie, t. (2012, february 22). the dirty job of keeping facebook clean. social media collective research blog. retrieved january 30, 2013, from http:// socialmediacollective.org/2012/02/22/the-dirty-job-of-keeping-facebook-clean/ google. (n.d.). google play developer program policies. retrieved december 7, 2012, from http://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy.html grindr. (2012, june 22). grindr terms of service. retrieved december 7, 2012, from http://grindr.com/app/terms-of-service hestres, l. (2013). app neutrality: apple's app store and freedom of expression online. international journal of communication, 7. manhunt. (2009, march 23). terms of access and use. retrieved december 7, 2012, from http://help.manhunt.net/question.php?id=225 scruff. (2012, november). terms of service. retrieved december 7, 2012, from http:// www.scruffapp.com/en/tos/ van dijck, j. (2009). users like you? theorizing agency in user-generated content. media, culture & society, 31(1). van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. oxford: oxford university press. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  chapin,  w.  e.,  &  wesley-­smith,  i.  n.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  what’s  behind  the   mask?:  understanding  stealth  practices  of  grindr  users.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual   conference  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from   http://spir.aoir.org.   what’s  behind  the  mask?:  understanding  stealth   practices  of  grindr  users   w.  e.  chapin   university  of  washington     ian  wesley-­smith   university  of  washington     introduction   geo-­social  dating  apps  like  grindr  target  gay  communities  to  facilitate  finding  people   who  may  otherwise  remain  hidden.  although  grindr  is  known  as  a  gay  hook-­up  app   focused  on  men  seeking  sex  with  other  men,  it  also  contributes  to  the  visibility  and   acceptance  of  gay  culture,  and  even  facilitates  friendship  for  many  who  once  thought   they  were  alone  in  the  world  (ritter,  2012).  grindr  users  create  profiles  describing   themselves  and  the  partners  they  are  seeking.  the  primary  interaction  mechanism  for   grindr  users  is  the  “cascade”,  a  page  that  displays  profile  pictures,  sorted  by  distance.   this  means  that  a  user's  profile  picture  is  extremely  important,  as  it  is  often  the  only   aspect  of  a  user  that  will  be  visible.  although  ideally  this  picture  is  of  the  user's  face,   some  users  choose  pictures  unrelated  to  them,  pictures  not  including  their  face,  or  no   picture  at  all.     however,  using  an  unidentifiable  profile  picture  is  at  odds  with  the  overall  goal  of  grindr:   how  are  other  users  supposed  to  identify  whether  they  are  interested  in  a  person  if  they   don't  know  what  that  person  looks  like?  furthermore,  there  is  anecdotal  evidence  that   the  prevalence  of  unidentifiable  pictures  vary  by  region:  grindr  users  in  the  southern   united  states  seem  to  choose  unidentifiable  pictures  at  a  much  higher  rate  than  those   on  the  west  coast.  observation  of  this  regional  bias  led  us  to  the  following  questions:     •   why  do  grindr  users  post  a  profile  picture  in  which  they  are  unidentifiable  (e.g.   torso  shot)  or  not  present  (e.g.  car,  beach)  in  the  picture?   •   what  key  themes  emerge  as  explanations  of  why  grindr  users  choose   unidentifiable  profile  pictures?   •   in  what  ways  do  these  explanations  vary  with  regions?   •   what  are  the  grindr  community  perceptions  of  unidentifiable  profile  pictures?     in  order  to  answer  these  questions,  we  designed  an  online  survey  instrument  and   recruited  grindr  users  to  respond  anonymously.     method   the  survey  includes  closed  and  open-­ended  questions  and  is  structured  into  four  sets  of   questions:  demographics,  grindr  usage  and  choice  of  profile  pictures,  measures  of   outness  in  various  social  relations,  and  perceived  discrimination  experienced  in  their   everyday  lives.  surveys  were  distributed  via  posts  to  online  community  forums,  mailing   lists,  and  snowball  recruitment  techniques.       we  performed  inductive  analyses  of  response  data  using  open  coding  techniques   (corbin  &  strauss,  2008).  we  labelled  participants'  responses  to  the  open-­ended   questions  and  organized  codes  into  preliminary  categories.  we  then  refined  the   categories  and  labels  and  coded  the  data,  resulting  in  13  top-­level  categories,  including   codes  relating  to  body  image,  disclosure,  profile  descriptions,  motivations,  user  control,   anonymity,  and  privacy.                   we  continued  our  analyses  through  the  conceptual  frameworks  of  queer  theory  (nash  &   browne,  2012)  and  stealth  (edelman,  2009,  2014).  the  concept  of  stealth  offers  a  queer   conceptual  framework  that  destabilizes  the  binary  notions  of  the  closet  and  a  person's   relationship  to  the  closet  as  fixed  in  either  ``in''  or  ``out''  positions.  the  lived  experiences   of  many  lgbtq  people  confirm  the  notion  that  moving  in  and  out  of  ``the  closet''   depends  on  the  context.  this  practice  of  sometimes  hiding  and  other  times  revealing   lgbtq  identity  is  a  common  practice  and  a  way  of  practicing  stealth.    edelman  (2014)   discusses  stealth  practices  in  relation  to  trans  subjectivities  and  defines  stealth  as  ``a   dynamic  practice  of  contextual  disclosures  and  non-­disclosures''  noting  that   ``economies  of  stealth  and  disclosure  are  deployed  to  maintain  physical  and  emotional   safety,  get  or  keep  a  job,  and  avoid  alienation.''       we  explore  this  concept  of  stealth  in  relationship  to  users  of  grindr  and  their  choices  of   profile  pictures.  for  example,  most  users  who  download  and  set  up  a  profile  on  grindr   are  in  some  sense  identifying  as  a  man  seeking  sex  or  dating  relationships  with  other   men.  if  users  of  grindr  are  in  some  sense  self-­identifying  as  gay  by  using  the  app,  we   wondered  why  users  would  choose  to  hide  their  identity  in  their  profile  pictures.  we   employ  queerness  as  a  conceptual  framework  and  as  the  lens  through  which  we   interpret  and  analyze  the  boundaries  between  identifiability  and  unidentifiability  among   grindr  users.  woo  (2006)  describes  the  concept  of  “identifiability”  on  apps  such  as   grindr.  for  woo,  unidentifiable  users  do  not  want  their  online  identity  to  be  easily  traced   back  to  their  offline  identity.     key  findings   we  discovered  that  location  was  a  factor  in  why  some  grinder  users  displayed   unidentifiable  profile  pictures,  although  their  locational  concerns  were  more  tied  to   whether  or  not  they  were  in  their  hometowns,  not  the  destination  they  were  traveling  to.   respondents  also  communicated  that  they  change  their  profile  from  identifiable  to   unidentifiable  as  a  means  of  controlling  interactions  with  other  users.  we  also  found  a   significant  difference  in  perceptions  of  unidentifiable  users  between  users  who  are   identifiable  and  users  who  are  unidentifiable.  ultimately,  posting  unidentifiable  profile   pictures  on  grindr  is  a  complicated  practice  with  multiple  explanations.     conclusion   attempts  at  understanding  lbgtq  subjects  and  their  practices  related  to  sexual   behavior  continues  to  be  a  challenging  endeavor.  as  queer  researchers  before  us  have   encountered  difficulty  in  recruiting  subjects  and  navigated  complicated  ethical  terrains  in   doing  field  work,  we  too  have  come  up  against  significant  limitations  in  making  sense  of   grindr  users'  choices  to  use  unidentifiable  profile  pictures.     we  discovered  the  complexity  of  social  cues  and  social  signaling  that  are  variously   interpreted  by  grindr  users.  the  differences  between  self-­reporting  and  community   perceptions  of  unidentifiability  showed  us  that  explaining  behavior  on  social  networks   involves  complicated  social  interactions  and  power  relations  where  users  were  blocking   or  avoiding  unidentifiable  users  and  refusing  to  consider  them  as  potential  partners.  our   respondents  clearly  engaged  in  stealth  practices  of  contextually  disclosing  or  hiding   information  about  themselves,  but  not  always  in  ways  we  expected.  sometimes  they  did   so  to  protect  their  career,  others  because  they  didn't  want  to  be  outed,  and  some   because  they  were  new  to  grindr.  users  varied  their  actions  by  location,  motivation,  and   desire.  so,  what's  behind  the  mask?  well,  it's  complicated.     references     corbin,  j.,  &  strauss,  a.  l.  (2008).  basics  of  qualitative  research:  techniques  and   procedures  for  developing  grounded  theory.  sage  publications.   edelman,  e.  (2009).  the  power  of  stealth:  (in)visible  sites  of  female-­to-­male  transsexual   resistance.  in  lewin,  e.,  &  leap,  w.  l.  (eds.).  (2009).  out  in  public:  reinventing   lesbian  /  gay  anthropology  in  a  globalizing  world.  wiley.   edelman,  e.  (2014).  neither  in  nor  out:  taking  the  ”t”  out  of  the  closet.  in  zimman,  l.,   davis,  j.,  &  raclaw,  j.  (eds.).  queer  excursions:  retheorizing  binaries  in   language,  gender,  and  sexuality.  oxford  university  press.   nash,  c.  j.,  &  browne,  p.  k.  (2012).  queer  methods  and  methodologies:  intersecting   queer  theories  and  social  science  research.  ashgate  publishing  limited.   ritter,  m.  (2012,  june  4).  pride  in  grindr:  a  sex-­positive,  global  cyber  space  for  gay   men.  retrieved  march  8,  2016,  from   http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/psychoanalysis-­30/201206/pride-­in-­grindr-­ sex-­positive-­global-­cyber-­space-­gay-­men   woo,  j.  (2006).  the  right  not  to  be  identified:  privacy  and  anonymity  in  the  interactive   media  environment.  new  media  &  society,  8(6),  949–967.   microsoft word gibbs 2013 ir14 wow funeral raid selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 serenity now bombs a world of warcraft funeral: negotiating the morality, reality and taste of online gaming practices martin gibbs the university of melbourne australia martin.gibbs@unimelb.edu.au marcus carter the university of melbourne australia marcus.carter@unimelb.edu.au michael arnold the university of melbourne australia mvarnold@unimelb.edu.au bjorn nansen the university of melbourne australia nansenb@unimelb.edu.au abstract in this paper we examine the controversy surrounding the serenity now bombs a world of warcraft funeral video. this video depicts a group of players in world of warcraft attacking a group of enemy players as they gather for the in-game funeral of a woman who had recently passed away. we argue that this historical controversy and the ongoing debate surrounding it is a form of “boundary-work” though which players are negotiating the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate online gaming practices. this boundary work involves three strands of demarcations. it has ethical, ontological and aesthetical filaments. the fact that the disputes played out through these entangled filaments haven’t been resolved seven years after the incident indicates that the spaces and boundaries of online interaction remain uncertain and contested. thus, this paper speaks directly to the themes of appropriation, resistance, and how people negotiate acceptable and unacceptable uses of the internet. keywords world of warcraft; serenity now bombs a world of warcraft funeral; commemoration; griefing; boundary-work introduction on march the 4th, 2006, around 5:30 p.m., members of the horde on illidan-us gathered together at the frostfire hot springs in winterspring at a memorial service for fayejin, who suffered a stroke and passed away earlier in the week. as her avatar shone brightly by the shore of the lake and as mourners lined-up in an orderly queue ready to file past and pay their respects, a group of alliance players led by members of the guilds serenity now and gnomeland security charged through the snow-clad forest, down to the shores of the small lake, and killed everybody. while not necessarily common, the practices of holding weddings, funerals, birthdays, and the like in massively multiplayer online games (mmog) are well known (gibbs et al., 2012). the practices of ‘griefing’ – taking actions to deliberately frustrate, annoy or harm other players – are also well known. the above events that occurred in the mmog, world of warcraft (wow), are noteworthy because members of serenity now made a video of the event and shared it online. 1 like much on the internet, the video has been posted and reposted, recycled and rehashed. the video can be found in dozens of locations, has been viewed millions of times, and has been discussed by tens of thousands of people in various online forums. the incident was reported in gaming and mainstream media including pc gamer (graziani, 2006) newsweek (elf, 2006), the guardian (davis, 2006) and the howard stern show (2010). discussion, debate and controversy over the “rights” and “wrongs” of the actions depicted have emerged with each reposting of the video with little signs of “closure”. we argue that the debate is a form of “boundary-work” (gieryn, 1999) though which players are negotiating the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate online practices. in gieryn’s work the 1 see hollingsworth 2006 for a reposting to youtube. the originals are no longer available. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 term refers to the rhetorical work scientists do to demarcate science from non-science by establishing boundaries around intellectual activities and to mark one side of these boundaries as legitimate and the other as illegitimate. in this paper we use the term to refer to the rhetoric used by participants to position the activities depicted in the video as legitimate or illegitimate. this boundary-work involves three entwined filaments of demarcations: ethical, ontological and aesthetical. boundary-work 2 ethically, the debate concerns morally acceptable behavior in an online game and on the internet more generally. some argue that common decency gave the mourners the right to be “left alone” and that pvp rules of play should have been suspended given the gravitas of grieving and death. “that doesn't excuse the fact that choosing to use people who are feeling real grief and are vulnerable to you because of that for your own entertainment is still pretty shitty behavior.” others argue that serious matters such as funerals have no place in online games and that the raiders were playing the game how it should be played. “serenity now were playing the game as was intended, the others are upset because they got killed as a result. meh.” ontologically, participants adopt differing positions on the reality of online persons, online games, and online spaces more generally. some emphasize the ontological personhood of the avatar; “this is an mmo, your character is quite literally an extension of yourself” and assert the reality of online life; “it’s a video game that deals with real people… if you don’t understand that then you’re ignorant”. others argue for the artificiality of game spaces and in-game actions, and assert that as wow is “only a game” its in-game activities are inconsequential. others extend this argument to online spaces as a whole: “i’m not excusing it, but some of you guys are getting far too worked up over something that happened on the internet”. predictably, many argue that serious matters do not belong in games, “mad props to serenity now, for keeping wow what it should be, a light hearted game, not a virtual life” and some go further to criticize the funeral for being a “disingenuous and disgusting representation of serious real life matters”. aesthetically, through their rhetoric (paul, 2009) and invective (voorman, 2002), participants construct and position identities for themselves and others through expressions of taste and tastelessness within gaming culture. some find the “massacre” reprehensible: “you just don't do something like that and then wear it like a badge of pride if you are normal, responsible human being”. others find the incident hilarious: “that was brutal, in bad taste, and funny as hell though”. ubiquitous throughout are various forms of invective and personal abuse. serenity now were “gaping assholes” and the mourners “sad geeks” or some variant thereof. boundary-play considerable scholarly ink has been spilt on the incident. the incident was discussed at length on the terra nova blog (combs, 2006). dyer-witheford and de peuter (2009) have suggested that the exploits depicted in the video have become an important part of wow history (p. 131). 3 moral philosophers have evaluated the case and arrived at predictably moral conclusions (goguen, 2009; luck, 2009). frier and saulnier (2010) use the incident as an example of morally ambiguous play and suggest that discussion of cases like this can aid in the moral development of children and adolescences. it has been used as a case in the discussion of legal liabilities and harms in virtual worlds (levine, 2010). evans (2010) points to contested notions of the reality and consequences of online game spaces and suggests both groups, raiders and mourners, have an entirely valid, if conflicted, perception of the gamespace. hutchings (2012) follows suit. varnelis and friedberg (2008, 2 all quotes are, as phillips (2011) might say, subject to flashing neon “[sic]”. 3 however, they wrongly describe it as “the attack by serenity now on a rival group, crom.” the majority of the mourners were from fayejin’s guild, maledictions. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 p.26) suggest the debates about the video raises questions about “the moral behavior and the limits of reality in mmorpgs” but offer no answers. heidbrink et al. (2011) argue that the controversy stems from different perception of the reality of online spaces and its suitability for ritual practice. as the above literature and our discussion of boundary-work indicate, the incident raises many questions about the morality, reality and consequences of online actions. ethical considerations and the ontology of personhood and the game space are thoroughly entwined. this is clear. however, a third thread in the triple helix is largely missing from the above considerations. that is, the way competing expressions of taste (bourdieu, 1984) provides an opportunity to perform identities by celebrating and/or lamenting aspects of the incident. boundary work around taste is thus played out according to what is identified as “funny” or “sad”, “cheap” or “disrespectful”, “naïve” or “shit”, and so on. using such aesthetic-descriptors to express the subjectivities of taste, participants jockey for cultural position by using appeals to “good taste” and “bad taste”. these appeals establish and perform identities by marking affiliations and drawing distinctions, and in so doing gesture towards ontological and moral positions about what is real and/or acceptable. serenity now bombs a world of warcraft funeral thus provides an important opportunity to the game community for boundary-work around the morality of online activities, the reality of online spaces and the consequences of online actions, as well as the performance of identity and cultural positioning. that this controversy has been ongoing since 2006 and has still not reached closure is a strong indication that these still remain largely unresolved and are perhaps irreconcilable. acknowledgments this research was supported under australian research council's discovery projects funding scheme (project number dp130101519). we also thank the institute for a broadband enabled society (ibes) and the australian communications consumers action network (accan) for their generous support of our research. references bourdieu, p. (1984). distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste. translated by richard nice. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. combs, n. (2006). the price of serenity? terra nova [blog post]. 15 april. retrieved from http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2006/04/serene.html davis, m. (2006). gamers don't want any more grief: players who abuse others in online games may soon be ostracized as virtual communities start to police their own environments. the guardian, 15 june, technology section. retrieved from: www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/jun/15/games.guardianweeklytechnologysection2/print dyer-withereford, n. & de peuter, g. (2009). games of empire: global capitalism and video games. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. elf (levy), s. (2006). living a virtual life: is world of warcraft a game, or is it a harbinger of virtual realities that we all might inhabit? only a night elf knows for sure. newsweek, 18 sept, 48. evans, m. (2010). murder, ransom, theft and grief: understanding digital ethics in games. in d. riha (ed) videogame cultures and the future of interactive entertainment. oxfordshire, uk: inter-disciplinary press, pp. 81-89. frier, n. & saulnier, e. (2010). the new backyard: social and moral development in virtual worlds. in k. schier and d. gibson (eds) designing games for ethics: models, techniques and frameworks. hershey, pa, usa: igi global. gibbs, m., mori, j., arnold, m. & kohn, t. (2012). tombstones, uncanny monuments and epic quests: memorials in world of warcraft. games studies 12 (1). retrieved from http://gamestudies.org/1201/articles/gibbs_martin selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 gieryn, t. (1999). cultural boundaries of science: credibility on the line. chicago: the university of chicago press. goguen, s. (2009).dual wielding morality: world of warcraft and the ethics of ganking. in j.r. sageng (ed) proceedings of the philosophy of computer games conference 2009 (oslo, 13-15 august). retrieved from: http://proceedings2009.gamephilosophy.org graziani, g. (2006). massacre in winterspring: the most shocking attack in wow history! pc gamer magazine, july, 80. heidbrink, s., miczek, n. and radde-antweiler, k. (2011). contest rituals in virtual worlds. in r. grimes, u. hüsken, u. simon and e. venbrux (eds) ritual, media, and conflict. oxford: oxford university press, pp. 165-187. hollingsworth, j. (2006). serenity now bombs a world of warcraft funeral [video file]. retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihjvolac8pw hutchings, t. (2012). wiring death: dying, grieving and remembering on the internet. in d. davies and c. park (eds) emotion, identity and death: mortality across disciplines. surrey, uk: ashgate. levine, a. (2010). play harms: liability and the play conceit in virtual worlds. mcgeorge law review 41, 929965. luck, m. (2009). crashing a virtual funeral: morality in mmorpgs. journal of information, communication and ethics in society. 7(4): 280-285. paul, c. a. (2010) welfare epics? the rhetoric of rewards in world of warcraft. games and culture, 5(2), 158176. phillips, w. (2011) loling at tragedy: facebook trolls, memorial pages and resistance to grief online. first monday 16(12). retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3168/3115 stern, h. (2010). the howard stern show. 8 dec., sirius xm. varnelis, k. & friedberg, a. (2008) place: the networking of public space. in k. varnelis (ed) networked publics. cambridge ma: the mit press. voorman, s.v. (2002) the art of invective: performing identity in cyberspace. new media & society, 4(1): 51– 70. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. microsoft word 783-532-1-pb.docx selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 assembling affordances: towards a theory of relational affordances julian hopkins monash university malaysia julian.hopkins@monash.edu abstract drawn from a long-term ethnographic research into personal blogging, this paper proposes a theoretical approach to the issue of materiality and culture in technology that combines the concept of affordances and that of deleuze & guattari’s concept of assemblage. highlighting the relational aspect of these concepts, a list of blog affordances is proposed. these can provide a basis for further analysis of blogs as well as other internet media forms. keywords affordances, assemblage, blogs, internet introduction the concept of affordances address the central issue of materiality and culture in technology , and has been used by wellman et al. (2003) and baym (2010), as well as by blog analysts (e.g. al-ani, mark, & semaan, 2010; graves, 2007; luehmann, 2008). however, there is a lack of theoretical consideration of the term and the need for a more developed understanding of the role of affordances in blogging. thus, this paper proposes a theoretical approach that combines deleuze & guattari’s ‘assemblage’ with the concept of affordances,1 and proposes a list of blog affordances that can provide a basis for further analysis. although deleuze & guattari did not address social sciences directly (brown, 2009), their ideas have been fertile in social-scientific analyses – as demonstrated in some edited volumes (collier & ong, 2005; jensen & rödje, 2009; poster & savat, 2009). developed from a long-term ethnographic research project, this paper draws upon their concept of the assemblage to explore the intermingling of material, technological, sociocultural, and personal components that are relevant to an analysis of internet media forms such as blogs. affordances hutchby has defined affordances as “functional and relational aspects which frame, while not determining, the possibilities for agentic action in relation to an object” (2001, p. 444). james gibson, who coined the term, explained that an “affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. it is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior” (1986, p. 129). his arguments suggests that affordances are relational, stating that “[a]ffordances are properties taken with reference to the observer” (gibson, 1986, p. 143). although they remain properties of the object, they are only empirically relevant when actualised through interaction with other actors or actants. seeking to clarify the use of this popular term, norman has made a distinction between ‘real’ and ‘perceived affordances’ – the former are those that gibson described, and the latter are “visual 1 there are clear parallels with latour’s actor-network theory, but not enough space here to discuss these. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 feedback that advertise the [real] affordances” (norman, 1999, p. 40). this visual emphasis may be extended to other forms of social perception. thus, bloggers may learn about different blogging affordances through observing other bloggers’ practices, as well as being presented with naturalised choices – for example, the option to include embedded advertisements in their blog is integrated into the setting up process of the blog software. when deleuze & guattari argue that “tools exist only in relation to the interminglings they make possible or that make them possible” (deleuze & guattari, 1987, p. 99), there is a resonance with this relational conceptualisation of affordances. assemblage & affordances an assemblage is a relatively stabilised multiplicity of heterogeneous components that resonate through their causal relations, which have consistent effects on its constituent parts, and the other assemblages with which it interacts. it contains an axis of ‘expressive’ and ‘machinic’ poles that lie “in reciprocal presupposition” (bogard, 2009, p. 16), and which consist of incorporeal components and material bodies and/or actions, respectively. it is a dynamic model – the assemblage tends to stabilise and reproduce itself, through ‘territorialising’ movements, but nonetheless also contains ‘deterritorialising’ components that may lead to ‘lines of flight’ that can result in new assemblages (delanda, 2006; deleuze & guattari, 1987). assemblages have emergent properties that are only possible because of the particular configuration of the heterogeneous components. these emergent properties are however consequences of the assemblage, not causes – they are observed or deduced from the operation of the assemblage, but this does not mean they can be inferred as antecedent causes. thus, ‘assemblage’ is useful because it not only allows that that both human and non-human components can have agency but it also emphasises how the world is built of many clusters of interlocking mechanisms, components connected through causal relations that are not restricted by predetermined spheres such as ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ dimensions. a blog is an assemblage of computer code, blogger, readers, a cpu, and other components. each of these components can be understood on one level as independent actors, and on another as dynamically interconnected clusters of components – as delanda describes it, there can be a “series of differently scaled assemblages, some of which are component parts of others which, in turn, become parts of even larger ones” (2006, p. 18). this paper will argue that, within the concept of assemblage, affordances also provide a ‘diagrammatic function’, describing a potential relation between non-necessarily related factors (deleuze & guattari, 1987). thus an affordance is one way of estimating the potentials and limits to the conjunction of persons and technology. blog affordances the ability to quickly develop and iterate changes means that blogging software can be flexible and open to innovation. however, blogging templates are typically taken as given and manipulated only by a minority of users (papacharissi, 2007), with most changes being made to the sidebar (scheidt & wright, 2004). similarly, in language that coincides with the use of affordances, schmidt states that “[s]oftware code is fundamental for blogging episodes because it enables or restricts certain actions [...] a blogger can modify and personalize the software to a certain degree, depending on individual skills” (2007). basic and emergent blog affordances this paper proposes a distinction between two types of blog affordances. basic affordances are those that are intrinsic to the blog medium itself – for example, the ability to hyperlink which is based on a selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 functioning semi-autonomous piece of code. this is not only a surface level element used to connect to other website, but also connects the webpages and blog database together internally. emergent affordances arise from the interaction of the components of the blog, but are not reducible to any particular programmable code. for example, the ability to interact anonymously with other bloggers and readers is not the result of any one piece of program code explicitly written to enable anonymous interaction, but is an unintended, emergent, objective consequence of a series of sociotechnical decisions relating to the lack of legal restrictions on online publishing, and the distributed architecture of the internet. the proposed blog affordances are outlined in table 1. table 1: blog affordances affordance description b as ic a ffo rd an ce s storage memory is automated and expanded. search and retrieval are simplified. perfect reduplication multiple readers can access the same blog content simultaneously, and interact via the comments. asynchronous communication asynchronous communication enables one-to-many two-way communication. multimedia a range of media modalities are available. at least one is necessarily used. modularity relatively autonomous blocks of code, each enabling particular functions, constitute a blog. blog posts are fundamental modules. hyperlinking quick and simultaneous connections to other websites are possible, inserting a blog into a network of potential relations. structural consistency is maintained through internal hyperlinking. em er ge nt a ffo rd an ce s anonymity functional anonymity is easy to achieve. disembodiment social interaction is possible without physical collocation. accessibility given internet access, there are minimal barriers to creating a blog, and a very large potential audience. personalisation gate keeping processes can be eliminated. interactivity interpersonal interaction is possible, via the comments and between blogs. passive interaction can occur via visitor traces in server logs. conclusions this paper has argued for a theoretical approach that combines affordances with the concept of assemblage. it has used blogs as an example (for an example as applied to political blogging, see hopkins, forthcoming), but this approach – as well as many of the particular affordances – can be applied to other internet media. the relational aspect means that the social relevance of internet media can also be explored via affordances (see also delanda, 2006 for a discussion of ‘social assemblages’). it is also important to note that, in the fluid context of the internet, affordances can shift rapidly. they are presented here as a form of ‘virtual diagram’, describing potential relations between nonnecessarily related factors – they are not purporting to detail a fixed set of actual properties, but the virtual diagram represents potential nodes, opportunities for causal relations. the actual assemblage, the blogs, bloggers and associated collective practices, is what is in motion at any point in time, and the affordances – as actualised, used, and observed – can be used as explanatory vectors. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 acknowledgments the research upon which this paper is based was supported by a scholarship from monash university, sunway campus. references al-ani, b., mark, g., & semaan, b. (2010). blogging in a region of conflict: supporting transition to recovery. in proceedings of the 28th international conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1069–1078). presented at the conference on human factors in computing systems, atlanta, georgia, usa: acm. doi:http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753485 baym, n. (2010). personal connections in the digital age. cambridge: polity. bogard, w. (2009). deleuze and machines: a politics of technology? in d. savat & m. poster (eds.), deleuze and new technology (pp. 15–31). edinburgh: edinburgh university press. brown, s. d. (2009). between the planes: deleuze and social science. in c. b. jensen & k. rödje (eds.), deleuzian intersections: science, technology, anthropology (pp. 101–120). oxford and new york: berghahn books. collier, s. j., & ong, a. (2005). global assemblages, anthropological problems. in a. ong & s. j. collier (eds.), global assemblages: technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems (pp. 3–21). malden, ma: blackwell publishing. delanda, m. (2006). new philosophy of society: assemblage theory and social complexity. london & new york: continuum. deleuze, g., & guattari, f. (1987). a thousand plateaus  : capitalism and schizophrenia. (b. massumi, trans.). london: continuum. gibson, j. j. (1986). the ecological approach to visual perception. new york & hove: psychology press. graves, l. (2007). the affordances of blogging: a case study in culture and technological effects. journal of communication inquiry, 31(4), 331–346. retrieved from http://jci.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/31/4/331 hopkins, j. (forthcoming). cybertroopers & tea parties: government use of the internet in malaysia. asian journal of communication. hutchby, i. (2001). technologies, texts and affordances. sociology, 35(2), 441 –456. doi:10.1177/s0038038501000219 jensen, c. b., & rödje, k. (eds.). (2009). deleuzian intersections: science, technology, anthropology. oxford and new york: berghahn books. luehmann, a. l. (2008). blogs’ affordances for identity work: insights gained from an urban teacher’s blog. the new educator, 4(3), 175 – 198. retrieved from http://www.informaworld.com/10.1080/15476880802234797 norman, d. a. (1999). affordance, conventions, and design. interactions, 6(3), 38–43. retrieved from http://interactions.acm.org/ papacharissi, z. (2007). audiences as media producers: content analysis of 260 blogs. in m. tremayne (ed.), blogging, citizenship, and the future of media (pp. 21–38). new york: routledge. poster, m., & savat, d. (eds.). (2009). deleuze and new technology. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 scheidt, l. a., & wright, e. (2004). common visual design elements of weblogs. in l. j. gurak, s. antonijevic, b. johnson, c. ratliff, & j. reyman (eds.), into the blogosphere: rhetoric, community, and culture of weblogs. retrieved from http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere schmidt, j. (2007). blogging practices: an analytical framework. journal of computer-mediated communication, 12(4). retrieved from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/schmidt.html wellman, b., quan-haase, a., boase, j., & chen, w. (2003). the social affordances of the internet for networked individualism. journal of computer-mediated communication, 8(3). retrieved from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol8/issue3/wellman.html license this article is © julian hopkins 2013, and licensed under cc by-nc-sa. non-lethal farce: "pepper spray cop" photoshopping as visual rhetoric andrew peck the university of wisconsin-madison usa ampeck@wisc.edu abstract this paper examines photoshopping as an important emerging genre of vernacular civic discourse on the internet. by sharing digitally altered images (“photoshops”) across networks, users engage in a vernacular process that creates and participates in discourses concerning social knowledge, shared expectations, and shared values. to demonstrate this process, this paper analyzes how photoshopping was used as a response to the pepper spraying of a group of peaceful protesters on the university of california, davis campus. enabled by the affordances of networked communication, this paper argues that photoshopping represents a powerful new form of vernacular rhetoric for the digital age. keywords photoshop; play; social knowledge; vernacular; visual rhetoric non-lethal farce: "pepper spray cop" photoshopping as visual rhetoric in the late afternoon of november 18, 2011, a pair of police officers pepper sprayed a group of nonviolent protesters occupying the university of california, davis campus. the official story was that the protesters had encircled the officers, who, unable to get out and fearing for their safety, resorted to pepper spray as crowd control. however, bystander photographs of the event told a much different story. the incident was filmed and photographed by several spectators. these images and videos captured police lt. john pike nonchalantly strolling in front of the seated, peaceful protesters while discharging pepper spray into their faces at point-blank range. the protesters hunched over, trying to cover their eyes as pike walked down the line. each slumped in pain as the noxious orange mist billowed across the sidewalk. shielding their faces, they sat, still resolute. after two full passes pike appeared to run out of spray. he motioned for the other officers; one began spraying the remaining students while others moved to drag them away from the line. as more officers descended on the protesters, spectators began pushing forward. vantage points became obscured and chaotic. spectators recording the event quickly found themselves lost amid the increasingly tumultuous crowd. these videos went viral on youtube almost immediately, and photographs of the event quickly spread across social networking and media-sharing websites, such as facebook and reddit. public opinion widely reflected shock and disgust over the officers' actions, and within hours the “uc davis pepper spray incident” had become a national headline. but, beyond the headlines it spawned, the incident is noteworthy because of the ways in which everyday individuals used the digital communication practice of “photoshopping” to engage discursively across networked spaces. these digitally altered images, or “photoshops,” quickly became a popular internet meme. the dozens of variants that were created and circulated during the following week spawned hundreds of comments on sites such as reddit, 4chan, and somethingawful. microblog tumblr cataloged over 130 image variants with tags such as “casually pepper spray everything” and “pepper spraying cop.” enacting playful engagements with the social knowledge surrounding photographs of the incident, photoshoppers used digital photo manipulation software to place lt. pike into a wide variety of new contexts. pike was made to apply his signature brand of non-lethal force to a wide array of popular figures, both real and fictional—from george washington, frodo baggins, and sesame street's grover, to a baby harp seal, bambi, and jesus christ. why did this image spur such a large and diverse response? why were individuals drawn to create and share these images? why was such a serious image reimagined at the vernacular level as a medium for digital play? in order to address these questions, it is necessary to understand the communicative practice that is at the heart of this memetic phenomenon: “photoshopping,” the sharing of digitally altered images or “photoshops.” to examine the potential of photoshopping as a visual form of civic discourse, we can consider it from the perspective of rhetorical theory. as robert asen notes, citizenship is a mode of public engagement that extends beyond the voting booth and into everyday life. according to asen, the civic potential of discourse “arises in important respects from its capacity to refashion social norms and beliefs and to recast nonpolitical activities as political” (2004: 207). these discourse practices “present potentially accessible and powerful everyday enactments of citizenship” and include not only verbal communication but also “other modes of symbolic expression” (2004: 207). expanding on asen's work, this article argues that photoshopping is an everyday enactment of citizenship that demonstrates a form of visual discourse. when viewed in this way, pepper spray cop photoshopping suggests some of the possibilities for vernacular expression now afforded by networked communication. enabled by networked communication and combined with easy reproduction, customization, and circulation, photoshopping represents a vernacular route to civic engagement via increasingly acessible visual media. as a powerful new location for personal expression, scholars of visual culture must seek to understand photoshopping as a vernacular enactment of political expression, civic engagement, and visual rhetoric. since photoshopping has a necessarily visual component, i will first consider digitally altered images in light of recent theories of visual rhetoric. from this perspective, these images are understood as contextual in the sense that they work by rhetorically playing on the shared expectations and social knowledge of a community. since images are contextually situated, the next section considers recent scholarship on photoshops and explores how they become meaningful through a process of social interaction. this interaction recognizes the “alteredness” of these images, the ways in which they diverge from reality and suggest perceived incongruities. this social process of recognizing alteredness emphasizes understanding these communicative events not as discrete images (photoshops) but instead as a set of discursive practices (photoshopping). as an ongoing, iterative process, photoshopping’s meanings become emergent from the continuous interaction between image and discourse across networked groups. with this reconfigured understanding, i return to the case of the pepper spray cop meme to demonstrate how photoshopping can constitute an everyday route toward communal engagment and visual argument. ultimately, i argue that since new media technologies are becoming progressively integrated into everyday life, scholars must endeavor to better understand the innovative ways in which individuals perform political, personal, and group identity on the web. by creating, sharing, and discussing politically engaged photoshops, individuals perform a novel category of discursive action that merits such attention from scholars of visual media, digital culture, and civic discourse. therefore, recognizing the potential for internet memes—such as pepper spray cop photoshopping—to function as everyday visual rhetoric is imperative because it allows for a better understanding of an emergent mode of public engagement in the digital age. references asen, robert. (2004). “a discourse theory of citizenship.” quarterly journal of speech 90(2), 189–211. microsoft word 797-545-1-pb.docx selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 revisiting the emergent norm theory to understand protest communication in social media: the improvisation-verificationkeynoting (ivk) framework k. hazel kwon, phd arizona state university usa khkwon@asu.edu onook oh, phd university of warwick united kingdom onookoh@gmail.com h.r. rao, phd suny-buffalo usa mgmtrao@gmail.com abstract twitter has been discussed as a collective social awareness system during social crises. we revisit the classical theory of collective behavior, called the emergent norm theory by killian and turner (1987), to introduce the analytic framework that highlights major genres of protest communication activities in social media. in particular, we adapt the concept of “milling” and “keynoting” of emergent norm theory and suggest that protest communication in social media can be categorized into three types: improvisation, verification, and keynoting (ivk). based on the analysis of twitter usages during jan 25th protest in egypt, the validity of ivk framework is discussed in terms of the temporal and spatial differences of each communication genre. keywords twitter; social media; protest; emergent norm theory, egypt revolution description of the work the current study introduces a content-analytic framework called “improvisation-verificationkeynoting (ivk),” useful to explore systematically the spontaneous, instantaneous process of social media protest communication. drawing upon emergent norm theory (ent) (turner & killian, 1987; turner, 1995; aguirre et al., 1998), one of the classical theories of collective behavior, we argue that three important concepts in ent –“milling” (informal sharing of improvised information and knowledge), “keynoting” (construction of common vocabularies to shape collective identity), and the “diffuse crowd” (a special type of crowd that involves both physical interpersonal contacts and mass communication) –are relevant to contemporary social media context. in particular, ent helps to articulate three characteristics of social media communication, manifest especially during political crises when the society is challenged by high-level of uncertainty and ambiguity of information: the hybridity of interpersonal conversations and factual news (papacharizzi & de fatima oliveira, 2012), the instantaneous and episodic flow of contents (kwak et al., 2010), and the spontaneous communicative participation (bennett & segerberg, 2012). after further discussing the relevance and challenges of adapting the ent’s three concepts to social media context, this study introduces a modified framework called the improvisation, verification, and keynoting (ivk), the three genres of social media communication during political protest. improvisation refers to the exchange of situational information based on limited knowledge without previous planning. verification refers to the clarification of improvised information via identification of credible sources. lastly, keynoting refers to the voicing of collective awareness. as an empirical application of this framework, we content-analyzed twitter activities during the january 25 protest in egypt 2011. the study enriches theoretical explanation of recently emergent, technology-mediated self-organized political actions by revisiting the traditional collective behavior theory. the newly introduced theoretical framework helps understand the actual communication activities occurring on social media platform. methods and results research questions selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 three research questions are posited. rq1. are communication activities in twitter shaped by personalized participation? rq2. how disproportionately do three genres of communication appear for the january 25th demonstration? rq3. are there any association between the genres of communication and regional differences? ivs framework operationalization to answer the questions, we specified improvisation, verification, and solidification as such (intercoder reliability kappa alpha = .734, p < .001), 1. improvisation: a firsthand statement without presenting supporting materials created by others, including (a) immediate communication such as question and situation updates without detailed source identification, (b) interpersonal communication between two or more users in a small group, (c) sharing personal knowhow about certain skills or activities. 2. verification: the provision of access to detailed or evident information by hyperlinking or retweeting formal channels such as mass media, officials, governments, and advocacy organizations, or solid evidences such a photo, video, and interviews, etc. 3. keynoting: an emotive expression of collective identity, which (a) reveals a sense of belonging to protester or supporter communities, (b) highlights the injustice of the current regime, or (c) wishes the victory of revolution. results the ivs framework was applied to content-analyze a total of 4,108 tweets between jan 23rd and jan 25th, 2011, collected in real time by the keyword “egypt”. in response to rq1, most of activities were sent out from personal profiles, implying that twitter communication during the january 25th demonstration can be characterized as the public’s personalized activities. in response to rq2, improvisation appeared the most, followed by verification and then keynoting. interestingly, three types occur in a sequential order from improvisation to verification, and to keynoting (figure 1). in response to rq3, each genre of communication occurred significantly differently between egypt and non-arab countries. egypt-originating tweets contained the improvisation more frequently, while non-arab countries include more verification. keynoting was evenly distributed across different regions. figure 1: the sequential occurrences of improvisation, verification, and solidification. st1, st2, st3 refers to the cut-off points that split the chronologically ordered tweets into three groups. 0   200   400   600   800   st1   st2   st3   improvisation   veri6ication   keynoting   selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 findings and discussions personalization one of the noteworthy findings of this study is the prominence of personalized activities and the relative underrepresentation of formal organizational strategies in twitter. most of central actors’ profiles described themselves as individual activists, public speakers/writers, or journalists, many of which included not only egyptian protest-related tweets but also tweets about various other human rights issues. therefore, the influential twitter users should be understood as a subset of online public who are heavily committed to political discourses rather than general online public. sequential and spatial development of ivs another finding is that protest communication in twitter is developed sequentially from improvised sharing to information verification, and to solidification of collective awareness. in particular, it is noteworthy that the temporal stage of information verification was identified distinctively form the stage of improvisation. in addition, the verification occurred disproportionately in non-arabic countries, while improvisation occurred in egypt. the verification stage included tweets that hyperlink reputed journalism sources or user-generated visual evidences. these informational sources contribute to authenticate and legitimize the improvised and informal contents shared during the earlier stage of improvisation. this result confirms how promptly twitter was utilized as a crowd-sourced “awareness system” (hermida, 2010: 300) that integrated impromptu local knowledge and transnationally verified and legitimized information into one stream of collective conversations. development of globalized collectivity solidification was evenly spread out across different countries worldwide, implying the rapid emotional contagions across global borders. the worldwide emergence of solidification confirms that the jan 25th demonstration was indeed a concern of global activist communities, reaffirming the impact of the globalization of local politics on social changes within less-democratic countries (gorrido and halavais, 2003). while the establishment of global allies and coalitions have always been an important element of social movements (mcadams, 1996), the mobilization process becomes much faster in the case of social-media blended protests, partly thanks to the increased amounts of lateral online communication among personal activists worldwide. implication of ivs framework we conclude that the ivs framework represents the episodic process of information dissemination in the twitter. however, the framework is still preliminary, given that only one particular incidence was explored. there were momentums of episodic events even within the cycle of the egyptian revolution 2011. while the ivs framework might be insightful to understand the outbreak of social media communication during crises events, we acknowledge that the study explores only a partial piece of a complicated phenomenon with a longer-period spectrum. also, the study explores only one particular social media platform, twitter, which is embedded in a more complex media environment. the application of micro-temporal perspective to a single communication channel does not provide the comprehensive understanding of a social change process. as mcphail (1993) asserts, however, understanding the phenomena of collective behaviors requires collective efforts with multilevel perspectives. our study may complement the historical, reflexive, and macro-perspectives presented in extant literature on the relationship between social media and the egyptian revolution in general. acknowledgments this research has been supported by the national science foundation under grants 1227353 and 0916612. the research of the last (correspondent) author is also supported by the world class university program funded by the ministry of education, science, and technology through the national research foundation of korea (r3120002) selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 references aquirre, b. e., wenger, d., & vigo, g. (1998). a test of emergent norm theory of collective behavior. sociological forum 13(2), 301-320. bennett ,w. l., & segerberg, a. (2012). the logic of connective action. information, communication, and society 15(5), 739-768. garrido, m., & halavais, a. (2003) mapping networks of support for the zapatista movement: applying social networks analysis to study contemporary social movements. in m. mccaughey & m. d. ayers (eds.), cyberactivism: online activism in theory and practice (pp.165-184). london, uk: routledge. hermida, a. (2010). twittering the news. journalism practice, 4(3), 297–308. kwak, h., lee, c., park, h., & moon, s. (2010). what is twitter? a social network or a news media? international world wide web conference, april 26-30, 2010, raleigh, nc, usa. mcadam, d. (1996). conceptual origins, current problems, future directions. in d. mcadam, j. d. mccarthy, & m. n. zald (eds.) comparative perspectives on social movements: political opportunities, mobilizing structures, and cultural framings (pp.23-40). new york, ny: cambridge university press. mcphail c (1991). the myth of the madding crowd. new york, ny: aldine de gruyter. papacharizi, z. & de fatima oliveira, m. (2012). affective news and networked publics: the rhythms of news storytelling on #egypt. journal of communication 62, 255-282. turner, r.h. (1996). the moral issue in collective behavior and collective action. mobilization: an international journal 1(1), 1-15. turner, r.h., & killian, l. m. (1987). collective behavior (3rd ed). englewood cliffs, nj: prentice-hall. microsoft word 834-579-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 is it time to rethink ‘digital inequality’ (again)? christo sims university of california, san diego united states christosims@ucsd.edu abstract digital inequality scholarship has rightly criticized the concept of the ‘digital divide’ for oversimplifying and distorting relations between digital media and social inequalities. instead of focusing on binary conceptualizations of access, digital inequality scholars recommend studying ‘differentiated use,’ which depends on access, but which is mediated by additional factors such as skill. despite these advances, much digital inequality scholarship retains many of the limitations of the digital divide framework it criticizes. as such, scholars thwart their honorable aims and paradoxically risk contributing to the reproduction of historical structures of power and privilege. this short paper identifies three persistent shortcomings with prevailing views about digital inequality: slippage between ‘digital inequalities’ and ‘social inequalities’; unacknowledged normativity; and a deficit model of difference. the paper ends with brief recommendations for how scholars and practitioners can move beyond these limitations. keywords digital inequality; digital divide; social inequality; skill; education digital inequality in the twenty-first century over roughly the past decade, scholars concerned with relations between digital media and social inequalities rightly criticized the concept of the ‘digital divide’ for oversimplifying and distorting relations between digital media and social inequalities (e.g. dimaggio & hargittai, 2001; hargittai, 2002; mossberger, tolbert, & stansbury, 2003; selwyn, 2004; van dijk, 2005; warschauer, 2003). these scholars argued that the metaphor of the digital divide bifurcated persons into two categories – the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ – and defined inequality too narrowly by focusing on differences in access to digital media content, tools, and infrastructures. in subsequent years, a research agenda centered on ‘digital inequality’ largely replaced earlier academic discourses about the digital divide. this agenda reframed digital inequality in terms of ‘differentiated use’ (dimaggio, hargittai, celeste, & shafer, 2004), an outcome that depended on, but could not be reduced to, differences in access. in attempting to account for differentiated use, a consensus emerged that digital ‘skills,’ or related concepts such as ‘literacies’ or ‘cultural capital’, were important contributors to differentiated use, and hence digital inequality (e.g. brandtweiner, donat, & kerschbaum, 2010; brock, kvasny, & hales, 2010; gilbert, 2010; halford & savage, 2010; hargittai, 2002; jenkins, clinton, purushotma, & weigel, 2006; livingstone & helsper, 2010; mossberger et al., 2003; tondeur, sinnaeve, van houtte, & van braak, 2011; van deursen & van dijk, 2011; warschauer, 2003; zhang, 2010). by implication, policy-makers, foundations, and educators should attempt to provide digital skills as well as access to those who do not yet have them. while digital inequality scholarship has significantly improved digital divide discourse, the ‘digital inequality’ framework continues to suffer from several limitations that can thwart researchers’, policymakers’, and educators’ well-intentioned efforts to combat social inequalities. there are three interrelated limitations that i highlight in this short paper: conceptual slippage between ‘digital inequality’ and ‘social inequality’; unacknowledged normativity; and a deficit model of difference. slippage between digital inequalities and social inequalities much digital inequality scholarship fails to sufficiently account for how differentiated use contributes to the making and remaking of social inequalities – whether specified in terms of social class selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 asymmetries, gender privilege, racialization, exclusions from sites of power, etc. scholars often substitute digital inequalities for social inequalities, rather than showing the role of the former in making and remaking the latter. there is no harm in documenting how differences in digital media use correspond with historical and emergent structures of privilege; doing so helps scholars better understand what social inequalities look like. the mistake is suggesting, implicitly or explicitly, that differences in digital media use play a salient role in making and remaking social inequalities. to understand the roles of digital media in producing social inequalities, scholars should first attempt to document and theorize the processes by which social inequalities are being made and remade, and only then attempt to understand the roles of digital media in those processes. without paying attention to the broader constellation of factors and processes that produce privilege, scholars risk diagnosing symptoms as causes. unacknowledged normativity a related limitation of digital inequality scholarship is the tendency to slip between descriptive and normative accounts. on the one hand, digital inequality scholarship can be read as merely descriptive: it documents differences in use and attempts to account for those differences. on the other hand, normative ideas about use are entailed in those accounts: some uses of digital media are seen as beneficial, others are stigmatized or simply not documented. while all empirical and theoretical work entails normative commitments, scholars can be more clear about those commitments, especially when digital media’s contributions to the production of social inequalities – the presumed object of shared concern – has not been clearly established. deficit models of difference the unacknowledged normativity of much digital inequality research also tends to produce a deficit model of difference. despite ongoing criticisms of the digital divide metaphor, digital inequality research is rife with images of chasms and gaps. more recently, these have taken the form of the ‘participation gap’ (jenkins et al., 2006), the ‘participation divide’ (hargittai & walejko, 2008), or the ‘production gap’ (schradie, 2011). continuum models of digital inequality, such as livingstone and helsper (2007), also implicitly rely on a gap metaphor, but gradated steps now bridge the binary poles of the chasm. there are several limitations of such a framing. for one, by focusing solely on deficits, researchers and educators overlook the ‘repertoires of practice’ (gutierrez & rogoff, 2003) and ‘funds of knowledge’ (moll, amanti, neff, & gonzalez, 1992) that exist among persons and collectives that researchers locate on the wrong side of the divide. some of these cultural resources undoubtedly involve digital media, but not necessarily in ways anticipated by digital inequality scholars. other resources likely have little or nothing to do with digital media, and, as such, they remain beyond the vision of much digital inequality scholarship. second, deficit models provide ideological support to well-intentioned interventions that can paradoxically discipline, control, or exclude difference. all deficit models imply that those on the wrong side of the gap should be more like those on the right side. when informed by such models, interventions, however well-intentioned, risk becoming missionary projects that attempt to mold persons into a normative type. what to do? scholars and reformers can take several practical steps to address these limitations. first, if scholars are concerned with relations between digital media and social inequalities, they can first try to understand how social inequalities are being made and remade, and only then look at the role of digital media in those broader processes. historical and ethnographic approaches would be especially helpful for providing more holistic and contextualized accounts. second, those who wish to intervene on behalf of less-privileged persons and groups can involve those they aim to help in a more collaborative and participatory manner. instead of attempting to lead or force persons across various digital chasms, educators and other care workers can help recognize, honor, translate, and support the repertoires of practice and aspirational trajectories of persons as they make their lives in a historically structured everyday world. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 references brandtweiner, r., donat, e., & kerschbaum, j. (2010). how to become a sophisticated user: a twodimensional approach to e-literacy. new media & society, 12(5), 813–833. brock, a., kvasny, l., & hales, k. (2010). cultural appropriations of technical capital. information, communication & society, 13(7), 1040–1059. dimaggio, p., & hargittai, e. (2001). from the “digital divide” to “digital inequality”: studying internet use as penetration increases. princeton, nj. dimaggio, p., hargittai, e., celeste, c., & shafer, s. (2004). digital inequality: from unequal access to differentiated use. in k. neckerman (ed.), social inequality (pp. 355–400). new york: russell sage foundation. gilbert, m. (2010). theorizing digital and urban inequalities. information, communication & society, 13(7), 1000–1018. gutiérrez, k. d., & rogoff, b. (2003). cultural ways of learning: individual traits or repertoires of practice. educational researcher, 32(5), 19–25. halford, s., & savage, m. (2010). reconceptualizing digital social inequality. information, communication & society, 13(7), 937–955. hargittai, e. (2002). second-level digital divide: differences in people’s online skills. first monday, 7(4). hargittai, e., & walejko, g. (2008). the participation divide: content creation and sharing in the digital age. information, communication & society, 11(2), 239–256. jenkins, h., clinton, k., purushotma, r., robinson, a. j., & weigel, m. (2006). confronting the challenges of participatory culture: media education for the 21st century. chicago, il: the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation. livingstone, s., & helsper, e. (2007). gradations in digital inclusion: children, young people and the digital divide. new media society, 9(4), 671–696. livingstone, s., & helsper, e. (2010). balancing opportunities and risks in teenagers’ use of the internet: the role of online skills and internet self-efficacy. new media society, 12(2), 309–329. moll, l. c., amanti, c., neff, d., & gonzalez, n. (1992). funds of knowledge for teaching: using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. theory into practice, 31(2), 132–141. mossberger, k., tolbert, c. j., & stansbury, m. (2003). virtual inequality: beyond the digital divide. washington d.c.: georgetown university press. schradie, j. (2011). the digital production gap: the digital divide and web 2.0 collide. poetics, 39(2), 145– 168. selwyn, n. (2004). reconsidering political and popular understandings of the digital divide. new media & society, 6(3), 341–362. tondeur, j., sinnaeve, i., van houtte, m., & van braak, j. (2011). ict as cultural capital: the relationship between socio-economic status and the computer-use profile of young people. new media & society, 13(1), 151–168. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 van deursen, a. j. a. m., & van dijk, j. a. g. m. (2011). internet skills and the digital divide. new media & society, 13(6), 893–911. van dijk, j. a. g. m. (2005). the deepening divide: inequality in the information society. thousand oaks, ca: sage. warschauer, m. (2003). technology and social inclusion: rethinking the digital divide. cambridge ma: the mit press. zhang, w. (2010). technical capital and participatory inequality in edeliberation. information, communication & society, 13(7), 1019–1039. microsoft word humphreys-wilken.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): humphreys, l. & wilken, r. (2014, october 22-24). social media, commercialization, and the control of information. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. social media, commercialization, and the control of information lee humphreys cornell university rowan wilken swinburne university of technology background much of the research on mobile social media has focused on end-consumer users of the technologies (e.g. frith, 2013; humphreys, 2007; lindqvist, cranshaw, wiese, hong, & zimmerman, 2011). there has been a shift, however, in the categorization of users. foursquare, like other social media, has begun attending to the business side of their user-base, that is, business owners or managers who use social media to connect with their customers. as of 2014, there were over 1,500,000 businesses on foursquare (foursquare, 2014). while emerging research examines how businesses adopt social media (e.g. nah & saxton, 2013; vaast & kaganer, 2013), the current study explores these business users in relation to issues of social media, commercialization, and privacy. privacy has been defined as the control of information, not merely the withholding or hiding of personal information (altman, 1976). previous social media research has examined privacy from the perspective of users, customers, or citizens whose priorities and values are sometimes pitted against those of the institutions and organizations which collect and commodify personal information (e.g. acquisti & gross, 2006; albrechtslund, 2008; barnes, 2007; boyd & hargittai, 2010; marwick, 2012; trottier, 2012). a key influence in existing research examining social media and privacy practices is communication privacy management (cpm) theory (petronio, 2002) to demonstrate the dialectical tensions of disclosure and privacy for consumer users of social media (bazarova, 2012; waters & ackerman, 2011). cpm theory suggests there are personal and collective rules for managing the boundaries of information revealing and concealing (petronio, 2002). one of the key principles of cpm is that people feel they own their personal information and that when they share it with others, they become coowners of such information. this theory was primarily based on interpersonal and family studies (petronio, 2002), but its applicability to small business owners and customers warrants closer examination. foursquare has focused increasing attention on establishing relationships with small businesses (bercovici, 2013). small businesses, which represent an important economic sector, are independently owned and operated businesses that are not dominant in their field (peterson, albaum, & kozmetsky, 1986). carland, hoy, boulton & carland (1984) define a small business owner as “an individual who establishes and manages a business for the principal purpose of furthering personal goals” (p. 358). this canonical definition highlights the blurry distinctions between personal and professional motivations and resources of small business owners. as such, small business owners occupy a unique position through which to understand their control and management of information through social media. therefore, this study aims to explore the following research questions: 1) what kinds of information are generated by and managed through foursquare by venue-owners? 2) how do foursquare venue-owners think about privacy and the privacy of their customers? method we used an interactive and interpretive framework for data collection and analysis (lofland, snow, anderson, & lofland, 2006). to explore the role of foursquare for venue-owners, the authors conducted qualitative group interviews with small business owners in new york city and melbourne in june and august of 2013. four groups were held, two in each country, consisting of 6-8 participants per group, for a total of 28 participants. a market research firm was hired to help recruit participants, but the authors conducted the group interviews which were video recorded and transcribed. the criteria for recruitment was being the manager or owner of a business which had claimed a foursquare venue that people could currently check into and having personal experience using social media services like foursquare. participants owned or managed bars, restaurants, bakeries, real estate companies, retail stores, auto repair garages, community centers, among other companies. the group interviews discussed several issues related to foursquare including: motivations for establishing the business account, customer interactions through the service, challenges of managing the account, and conceptualizations of privacy. while we were primarily interested in foursquare, participants often reported on their social media use more broadly. social media use and small business the paper explores how participants’ communication privacy management occurred at three levels with foursquare: 1) information about the company or business; 2) information about customers; and, 3) information about the business owner or manager him or herself. participants reflected dialectical tensions at all three levels of information. the paper suggests that as we expand our definition of social media user, we again find dialectical values and motivations regarding privacy. venue-owners in our study struggle with the same rules and management of the information control generated through and around social media platforms as consumer users do. while there is variation in how some of them dealt with these tensions, it is nonetheless important to bring their perspective into the discussion about privacy management and social media more broadly. moreover, as new socio-spatial information (i.e. who checks in where) is introduced via the mobile social network, it creates new opportunities for engagement, surveillance, and commodification. we identify the key levels of information that need to be managed by venue-owners and explore the ethical dimensions and reflections regarding communication privacy management. too often the platform or service and the users are the primary focus of inquiry, however, this research suggests that, to understand the broader picture, we must examine the perspective of these business owners as intermediaries who are simultaneously the potential producers and consumers of commodifiable socio-locative information. references acquisti, a., & gross, r. (2006). imagined communities: awareness, information sharing, and privacy on the facebook. pet 2006, cambridge, uk. albrechtslund, a. (2008). online social networking as participatory surveillance. first monday, 13(3), article 6. altman, i. (1976). privacy: a conceptual analysis. environment and behavior, 8, 7-29. barnes, s. (2007). a privacy paradox: social networking in the united states. first monday, 11(9-4), http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1394/1312. bazarova, n. n. (2012). public intimacy: disclosure interpretation and social judgments on facebook. journal of communication, 62(5), 815-832. bercovici, j. (2013, october 14). foursquare launches ad platform for small businesses. from http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/10/14/foursquare-launches-adplatform-for-small-businesses/ boyd, d., & hargittai, e. (2010). facebook privacy settings: who cares? first monday, 15(8), http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3086/2589. foursquare. (2014). foursquare for business: about. available at: http://business.foursquare.com/ frith, j. (2013). turning life into a game: foursquare, gamification, and personal mobility. mobile media & communication, 1(2), 248-262. humphreys, l. (2007). mobile social networks and social practice: a case study of dodgeball. journal of computer mediated communication, 12(1), article 17. lindqvist, j., cranshaw, j., wiese, j., hong, j., & zimmerman, j. (2011). i’m the mayor of my house: examining why people use foursquare – a social-driven location sharing application. 2011 chi proceedings. vancouver, bc, canada. marwick, a. e. (2012). the public domain: social surveillance in everyday life. surveillance and society, 9(4), 378-393. nah, s., & saxton, g. d. (2013). modeling the adoption and use of social media by nonprofit organizations. new media & society, 15(2), 294-313. peterson, r. a., albaum, g., & kozmetsky, g. (1986). the public's definition of small business. journal of small business management, 24(3), 63. petronio, s. (2002). boundaries of privacy: dialectics of disclosure. albany, ny: suny press. trottier, d. (2012). social media as surveillance. aldershot, uk: ashgate. vaast, e., & kaganer, e. (2013). social media affordances and governance in the workplace: an examination of organizational policies. journal of computer-mediated communication, 19(1), 78-101. waters, s., & ackerman, j. (2011). exploring privacy management on facebook: motivations and perceived consequences of voluntary disclosure. journal of computer-mediated communication, 17(1), 101-115. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  mitchell,  p.,  bruns,  a.,  &  münch,  f.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  the  (net)work  of   mourning:  emotional  contagion,  viral  performativity,  and  the  death  of  david  bowie.  paper  presented  at   aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  conference  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:   aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.   the  (net)work  of  mourning:  emotional  contagion,  viral   performativity,  and  the  death  of  david  bowie   peta  mitchell   queensland  university  of  technology     axel  bruns   queensland  university  of  technology     felix  victor  münch   queensland  university  of  technology   david  bowie’s  death  in  january  2016  led  to  a  vast  outpouring  on  social  media  of  grief   and  public  mourning.  according  to  twitter  uk  (2016),  over  4  million  bowie-­related   tweets  were  sent  in  the  24-­hour  period  following  news  of  his  death  becoming  public,   with  the  stream  of  tributes  peaking  at  20  thousand  tweets  per  minute  just  after  7  am   gmt  (twitter  uk,  2016).  bowie’s  death  takes  its  place  among  a  number  of  other  high-­ profile  ‘celebrity’  deaths  in  the  social  media  era,  including  those  of  michael  jackson  in   2009,  which  famously  tested  twitter’s  capacity,  and,  more  recently,  robin  williams  in   2014  and  leonard  nimoy  in  2015.  what  makes  bowie’s  death  particularly  notable  in   regard  to  social  media  is  the  way  in  which  it  has  opened  up  a  renewed  dialogue  about   public  responses  to  celebrity  deaths,  and  whether  this  marks  a  new  moment  in  the   sociology  of  mourning.     within  days  of  bowie’s  death,  journalists  such  as  caroline  framke  (2016)  were   attempting  to  explain  “why  we  grieve  artists  we’ve  never  met,  in  one  tweet.”  while   framke  argued  that  these  public  expressions  of  grief  were  individual  and  authentic,   other  commentators  expressed  skepticism.  spiked  editor  brendan  o’neill  (2016),  for   instance,  contrasted  the  “shallow”  sadness  expressed  by  “hacks”  and  “fans”  on  social   media  with  the  “deep  and  raw  and  real”  grief  of  bowie’s  family,  which  in  his  view  was   signalled  by  their  relative  distance  from  social  media,  their  need  to  grieve  in  private:   “bowie’s  son,  duncan  jones,  left  twitter  immediately  after  announcing  his  father’s   death.  iman  [bowie’s  wife]  is  nowhere  to  be  seen.”  in  many  respects,  this  debate  over   authenticity  merely  replays  earlier  ones  about  the  role  of  the  media  in  the  spread  of   public  mourning  following  celebrity  death.  in  understanding  celebrity,  graeme  turner   (2014)  explores  this  debate  in  the  context  of  the  1997  death  of  diana,  princess  of   wales,  arguing  that  media  and  cultural  studies  were  at  the  time  ill-­equipped  to  respond   to  the  “debates  about  the  authenticity  versus  the  mediated  character  of  the  event”  that   the  public  response  to  diana’s  death  provoked  (p.  109).       taking  a  more  considered  approach  to  the  public  grieving  that  surrounded  bowie’s   death,  megan  garber  (2016)  notes  that,  in  the  social  media  age,  “[m]ourning  has   become,  as  it  were,  #content.”  the  sharing  of  emotion  that  occurred,  particularly  around   the  #ripdavidbowie  hashtag,  was  evidence,  garber  writes,  of  people  “forming  a   community  of  grief.  #ripdavidbowie  was  a  hashtag,  yes;;  it  was  also  a  funeral.”  this,   she  adds,  is  less  a  novel  development  than  a  return  to  earlier  forms  of  mourning  in   western  society:  “the  internet  is,  in  some  sense,  returning  us  to  the  days  before  war   transformed  grief  into  a  largely  solitary  affair.  public  mourning—via  twitter,  via   facebook,  via  tumblr—has  become  its  own  kind  of  ritual.”  candi  k.  cann  (2014)   recently  made  a  similar  point,  arguing  that  “[p]ublic  and  communal  grief  is  returning  to   society  through  social  media,  as  new  communities  formed  in  virtual  spaces  bond   together  over  death  events,  and  reveal  a  communal  identity  shaped  over  grief”  (p.  83).   cann  also  notes  social  media  data  increasingly  allow  researchers  to  “track  trends  in   mourning  at  a  broader  scale,  and  to  examine  the  role  of  bereavement  in  everyday  life,   and  across  social  strata”  (p.  83).  finally,  gillian  terzis  (2015)  suggests  the  public   performance  of  grief  via  social  media  also  highlights  the  complex  relationship  between   performativity  and  authenticity,  particularly  in  regard  to  the  ways  in  which  grief  (or  its   performance)  spreads  through  a  network  as  a  kind  of  “emotional  contagion”  (p.  15).       in  the  context  of  mourning,  then,  social  media  not  only  raises  new  questions  about   public  mourning,  social  and  emotional  contagion,  and  viral  performativity,  but  also  offers   potential  to  visualise  and  analyse  this  networked  spread  of  affect  and  the  forms  it  takes.   in  recent  years,  large-­scale  visualisation  projects  have  emerged  that  employ  automated   sentiment  analysis  to  display,  in  real  or  close-­to-­real  time,  emotional  content  shared  via   twitter.  csiro’s  we  feel  and  fuse*’s  amygdala  project  are  notable  examples— indeed,  amygdala  offered  a  near-­real-­time  “generative  emotional”  visualisation  of  the   #ripdavidbowie  hashtag  as  it  unfolded  (brownlee  2016).  these  visualisations,   illustrative  though  they  may  be  of  broad  emotional  trends  on  twitter,  offer  little  by  way  of   an  understanding  of  who  is  sharing  emotional  content,  what  they  are  sharing,  and  how   they  are  connected  to  others  sharing  emotional  content  within  the  network.  in  particular,   the  focus  on  a  specific  hashtag  already  privileges  a  self-­selecting  sample  of  mourners:   those  who  chose  to  connect  their  expressions  of  grief  with  the  stream  of  similar   statements  collected  under  the  #ripdavidbowie  hashtag.  this  focus  on  the  macro-­level   of  twitter’s  communicative  layers  (bruns  &  moe,  2014)  misses  a  potentially  much   broader  and  more  diverse,  as  well  as  less  public,  range  of  responses  to  bowie’s  death,   by  users  who  did  not  include  the  hashtag.     in  this  paper,  we  therefore  take  a  more  meso-­  and  micro-­level  approach  to  examining   the  networked  spread  of  mass  mourning  on  twitter  in  the  wake  of  bowie’s  death.  we   focus  on  a  corpus  of  6.3  million  tweets  containing  the  keyword  ‘bowie’,  collected  using   the  twitter  capture  and  analysis  toolkit  (tcat)  over  15  days  following  the  confirmation   of  bowie’s  death  (from  7.12  am  gmt  on  11  january  to  5.48  am  gmt  on  26  january).   while  comprehensive,  this  dataset  is  not  complete.  because  bowie-­related  tweets   accounted  for  more  than  1%  of  total  twitter  traffic  as  news  of  his  death  broke,  there  are   inevitable  gaps  in  the  early  stages  as  our  data  collection  was  rate-­limited.  the  dataset   will,  nonetheless,  allow  us  to  focus  on  the  period  of  collective  mourning,  when  a  broader   range  of  expressions  of  mourning,  beyond  initial  expressions  of  disbelief  and  shock,   were  entering  the  twitter  discourse.  by  examining  how  particular  mourning  practices   and  mourning  artifacts  (e.g.,  images,  links)  spread  across  and  through  the  network  after   bowie’s  death,  we  will  map  in  a  more  refined  way  the  dynamics  of  emotional  contagion   around  this  particular  instance  of  mass-­mourning,  and  suggest  ways  that  this  method  of   analysis  adds  to  existing  understandings  of  mediated  celebrity  death  and  public  grief.     references     brownlee,  j.  (2016).  this  massive  twitter  brain  visualized  the  news  of  david  bowie's   death  in  real  time.  fast  company.  18  february.  http://bit.ly/1qopg0v     bruns,  a.,  &  h.  moe.  (2014).  structural  layers  of  communication  on  twitter.  in  k.  weller,   et  al.  (eds.),  twitter  and  society  (pp.  15-­28).  new  york:  peter  lang.     cann,  c.  k.  (2014).  tweeting  death,  posting  photos,  and  pinning  memorials:   remembering  the  dead  in  bits  and  pieces.  in  c.  m.  moreman  &  a.  d.  lewis  (eds.),   digital  death  (pp.  69–86).  santa  barbara:  praeger.     framke,  c.  (2016).  why  we  grieve  artists  we’ve  never  met,  in  one  tweet.  vox.  12   january.  http://bit.ly/1rafhje     garber,  m.  (2016).  enter  the  grief  police.  the  atlantic.  20  january.   http://theatln.tc/1sxtfgh     o'neill,  b.  (2016).  that  thing  you’re  feeling  about  bowie—it  isn’t  grief.  spiked.  13   january.  http://bit.ly/1uv3sze     terzis,  g.  (2015).  death  trends:  hashtag  activism  and  the  rise  of  online  grief.  kill  your   darlings,  22,  9–24.     turner,  g.  (2014).  understanding  celebrity  (2nd  ed.).  london:  sage.     twitter  uk  (2016).  #ripdavidbowie:  twitter  pays  its  respects  to  a  music  legend.   http://bit.ly/1tidtmj     microsoft word arvidsson.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): arvidsson, a. (2014, october 22-24). collaborative crowding, a digital ethnography of adolescent fan cultures on twitter. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. collaborative crowding, a digital ethnography of adolescent fan cultures on twitter adam arvidsson university of milano the study of celebrity and fandom is a well-established area of inquiry into the field of online popular culture. adolescent use of social media in practicing fandom and celebrity have been explored in particular detail. most of these studies have used small data seta and focused on identity construction and the interpersonal dynamics of celebrity and fandom. the result has been an image of online fandom as transpiring in deliberative publics where actions can be understood as rationally motivatedwhether in terms of the instrumental rationality of the ‘neoliberal’ branded self, or in terms of the communicative rationality of the fan community. in this study we have looked at the crowd dynamics of adolescent fandom by gathering a corpus of 110.000 tweets around the top ten trending teen-band tags on twitter during a week of may 2013. the result is an image of fan cultures as structured by cascades of imitation, with very little in terms of deliberation of information transfer. however, this dynamics differs from classic accounts of crowds in two ways. first, the directionality of crowding on twitter is given by the algocratic affordances of the platform itself: this way crowd behavior becomes directed towards the purposeful pursuit of individual visibility (defined as number of rt and @) and, at the collective level of turning a hashtag into a tending topic. second, individual actors are reflexively aware of the power of the crowd in achieving celebrity and trend and frequently appeal to it in their attempt to pursue these aims. this gives rise to a collaborative ethic whereby individual make affective appeals to the collective identity of the crowd in order to attract mobilize its potential for the purpose at hand. looking at fan-culture on twitter form he point of view of crowd dynamics provides new insights on the nature of value and value creation on social media platforms. first, this study points to what we call ‘collaborative crowding’ as a model for value creation. this modality is distinct from both traditional models of economic rationality and contemporary theories of peer-to-peer dynamics in that its primary motivation is located at the level of collective affect, rather than individual motivation. second, this collaborative crowding comes with an embryonic ethical dimension that emphasizes the collective dimension of value creation and, along with it individual debts towards the collectivity. this suggests that social media platformseven when they are used in the most banal and commercial waycannot simply be reduced to the proponents of ‘neoliberal’ selfhood. rather adolescent micro celebrities on twitter seem to be harbingers of a new kind of as yet un-theorized post-neoliberal frame of mind. we suggest that further research on this have implications for elaborating a more nuanced understanding of the forms ethics and solidarities that prevail in the new social overall. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 user resistance and repurposing: a look at the ios ‘jailbreaking’ scene in brazil adriana amaral unisinos brazil adriamaral@unisinos.br rosana vieira de souza unisinos brazil rovieira.unisinos@gmail.com abstract the paper aims to discuss the growth of mobile platforms and the emergence of user counter-power in these environments. in that respect, we intend to reflect upon ‘jailbreaking’ practices from the users’ point of view. the study is based on a qualitative approach that examined both motivations to engage in jailbreaking and critical incidents and included interviews with cydia store users from brazil, the primary jailbreak apps store available to users of ios devices. we discuss how the users of jailbroken handsets articulate the tensions between jailbreaking practice and market constraints, as well as the trade-offs and paradoxes (e.g. stability versus freedom) the users have to deal with in the jailbreaking scene. our findings suggest that even though jailbreaking practices reflect social counter-power, it emerges from a free culture logic that legitimates the freedom to access, distribute or modify content and creative work, and not from an explicit political motivation. . keywords resistance; mobile media; hacker community; jailbreaking practices introduction the internet is seen as an open space that creates a number of collaborative practices. in contrast, freedom produces a deep worry concerning security issues. as the internet is moving towards a more mobile environment, the understanding of the dynamic structures of control underpinning the decisions on its nature are critical for society. some scholars (benkler, 2006; galloway, 2006 and zittrain, 2008) point out that users of mobile devices are being locked down in a new wave of closed environments. by accepting more controlled spaces, they give up freedom in exchange for improving both security and stability. this is the case of devices from companies like apple. an increasing number of users are looking for an experience that goes beyond the scripts defined by the platform owner. the practice called ‘jailbreaking’ has emerged as an alternative to those restrictions with around 22.8 million jailbroken ios devices running cydia store, the jailbreak apps store (perez, 2013). our main goal is to discuss the emergence of the user counter-power in such environments. the methodological design comprised a qualitative approach and data were collected by (1) analysis of discussion forum; and (2) in-depth interviews with jailbreakers. the interviews were conducted through the examination of both motivations for jailbreaking and critical events perceived as highly significant for either success or failure of the practice (critical incident technique, flanagan, 1954). this preliminary phase was conducted from april to june 2013 (24 critical incidents from 12 interviewers). resistance in the mobile environment and jailbreaking lately, a “post-pc” era has been debated due to the unprecedented adoption of mobile devices. as a new computer-mediated platform, what is at play is the role of mobile operating systems (e.g. ios, android) in the mobile environment. mobile digital devices designed by apple such as the iphone, ipod, and ipad are referred to as ios devices once all of them run the ios operating system. the release of the official app store, in july 2008, set up the beginning of the app store market for native apps. all of these “i-devices” bring together several features that constitute a very attractive business model for the handset manufacturer since it profits from the device-specific native apps sold selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 through the app store and the interoperability of the ios devices. the fact that users cannot realize the full potential of these devices has been seen as one of the reasons for the expansion of jailbreaking practices in the hacking and user communities. jailbreaking could be investigated both from the hackers or the users’ point of view. even though the literature on the hacking scene has covered fundamental aspects such as ethics, politics, economic and technical practices of hacking (wark, 2004; coleman, 2013) less attention was paid to the user’s experience with jailbreaking strategies. jailbreaking allows users to change a device’s operating system to run a number of applications not approved by apple or to open up additional features. the procedure includes the download of free computer software that installs a hack onto the device and the installation of an alternative store called cydia, released in february 2008. cydia store was developed by jay freeman and is considered the primary jailbreak apps store. its name is allusive to the cydia pomonella, the scientific name for the “worm of the apple”. some analysts claim that the practice of jailbreaking ios devices has evolved into a lucrative industry earning about $10 million in annual revenue with 4.5 million active weekly users worldwide (shapira, 2011). even though jailbreaking makes the installation of pirated apps easier, it is not the main goal of such a practice. for some of the biggest jailbreaking communities like the iphone dev-team, jailbreaking benefits people who are willing to take back control over their ios devices. besides, jailbreaking is considered legal in the usa since the library of congress ruled that it does not violate apple’s copyright. in brazil this is still a grey area since it has no legislation on the issue yet. despite that, apple claims that the practice voids the handset’s warranties. the company actively improves the anti-hacking strategies in every upgrade of the mobile operating system, bringing more complexity to the task for the hacker communities (greenberg, 2013). results and discussion the jailbreakers expect an experience that resembles the flexibility provided by the internet. therefore, they intend to extend the device capabilities in order to keep it more personalized (fig. 1) or to escape from purchase requirement before the experience with the app. these motivations are legitimated by the perceived high costs of the ios devices in the brazilian market, as stated by camila, an undergraduate fashion student: “you stop and think that you pay a lot for something that is not what you expected, and since apple do now allow you to perform a ‘test drive’ for apps then it is complicated”. figure 1: screenshot of jailbroken iphone home screen with personalization apps. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 the possibility of being creative through flexible and open environments and, on the other hand, the security of closed and stable devices provided are typical trade-offs the jailbreakers have to deal with. this decision, though, does not always happen with full comprehension of both the upside and downside of this practice, since it is not clear for the users the risks with which the device is involved. even though the jailbreaking itself is seen as a user resistance mechanism, the users need to cope with the “not controllable” side of the practice. james, an undergraduate student of geography, described the practice of downloading cracked apps as risky if the user depends on the app for working: “when i know that the app is very important for my presentations, i need to buy it ‘cause i cannot take the risk of having an unstable app”. on the other hand, a positive event for jailbreakers is when they get rid of the restrictions they perceive as framing their use of mobile devices when the jailbreak process works well. as laila, a 15 years old girl who reported how important it was for her to have the apps her friends have because they use another operating system and her parents don’t let her pay for apps. conclusion since the results point out the paradoxical nature of this relationship (users-technology) (mick e fournier, 1998), some tensions might not be easily solved in the jailbreaking scene (straw, 2006). the results of this preliminary data indicate that jailbreaking could be seen as a social counterpower that reflects the weakening of the manufacturers’ hegemonic positions. the findings suggested that although jailbreaking indicates some kind of resistance to the market, it doesn’t emerge from an explicit political motivation, but instead, from a free culture logic that legitimates the freedom to access, distribute or modify content and creative work. these situations are especially significant for those who believe they pursue interests that are outside of the intended by the company. they believe that there is an ios that are for “medium users” for whom the official functionalities and apps will work well. however, if the user seeks personalization and the right to download whatever they want to an expensive device (in brazil), the jailbreak is an alternative despite some risks involved in the practice. acknowledgments we would like to thank ford foundation and the brazilian funding agency cnpq for financial support. references benkler, y. (2006). the wealth of networks: how social production transforms markets and freedom. new haven: yale university press. coleman, g. (2013). coding freedom. the ethic and aesthetics of hacking. new jersey: princeton university press. flanagan, j.c. (1954). the critical incident technique. psychological bulletin 5, 327–358. galloway, a. (2006). protocol: how control exists after decentralization. cambridge: mit press. greenberg, andy (2013). evasi0n is the most popular jailbreak ever: nearly seven million ios devices hacked in four days. forbes, february 8. retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/02/08/evasi0n-is-the-most-popular-jailbreak-evernearly-seven-million-ios-devices-hacked-in-four-days/ mick, david glenn; fournier, susan (1998). paradoxes of technology: consumer cognizance, emotions and coping strategies. journal of consumer research, 25, 123-47. perez, s. (2013). “evasi0n” overloads servers as over 270,000 people download the new jailbreak for ios 6.0/6.1 devices, including iphone 5. techcrunch, february 4. retrieved from http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/04/jailbreaking-is-back-new-evasi0n-software-works-on-most-ios-6-061-devices-including-iphone-5/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/02/08/evasi0n-is-the-most-popular-jailbreak-ever-nearly-seven-million-ios-devices-hacked-in-four-days/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/02/08/evasi0n-is-the-most-popular-jailbreak-ever-nearly-seven-million-ios-devices-hacked-in-four-days/ selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 shapira, i. (2011). once the hobby of tech geeks, iphone jailbreaking now a lucrative industry. the washington post, april 6. retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/once-the-hobby-oftech-geeks-iphone-jailbreaking-now-a-lucrative-industry/2011/04/01/afbj0vpc_story.html straw, w. (2006). scenes and sensibilities. in: revista ecompós, brasília, ed. 06,. retrieved from http://www.compos.org.br/e-compos wark, m. (2004). a hacker manifesto. cambridge: harvard university press. zittrain, j. (2008). the future of the internet: and how to stop it. new haven: yale university press. 1 digital inequality and intergenerational solidarity: the role of social support in proxy internet use vesna dolničar university of ljubljana slovenia vesna.dolnicar@fdv.uni -lj.si maša filipović hrast university of ljubljana slovenia masa.filipovic@fdv.uni -lj.si vasja vehovar university of ljubljana slovenia vasja.vehovar@fdv.uni -lj.si andraž petrovčič university of ljubljana slovenia andraz.petrovcic@fdv.uni -lj.si abstract the digital divide research has recently documented a set of new practices related to people’s internet use that put the binary division between internet users and non-users under question. especially, among the elderly population a considerably large group of proxy internet users has been identified who do not use the internet by themselves, but rather ask members of their personal networks to do things online for them. as proxy internet users rely mainly on their children and/or grandchildren, who play the role of warm experts, this paper suggests that the notion of intergenerational solidarity might be a sound conceptual basis to understand the underresearched relationship between social support and digital inequality. on the empirical level, this paper explores how the availability and lack of different types of social networks and their characteristics is associated with proxy use and non-use of internet. the results of multivariate analysis on survey data from a nation-wide representative sample show that between emotional and socializing support only the latter is associated with proxy internet use: internet non-users with larger socializing networks and stronger intergenerational support (e.g., a higher proportion of (grand)children) are more likely to be proxy internet users. findings also indicate that younger internet non-users with higher education and children are more inclined to be proxy internet users. keywords proxy internet use, digital divide, social support network, intergenerational solidarity, digital inequality background over the past 20 years academic research about digital inequality has provided a comprehensively documented theoretical and empirical insight into the material and immaterial factors associated with access to and use of internet-based services. especially, studies drawing on the digital divide perspective have elaborated various theoretical and methodological approaches that have helped us to better understand what socio-economic (e.g., age, education, income, employment, gender), psychological (e.g., lack of motivation, fear and anxiety, lack of confidence, negative attitudes) and personal characteristics (e.g., competences, skills) of individuals determine whether they are internet users or non-users. although several of these models and approaches have been exposed to criticism and consequently have been further developed in order to become more comprehensive and theoretically grounded (tsatsou, 2011), this paper addresses two important aspects that have been almost completely overlooked and to our best knowledge not holistically included in the studies of digital inequalities. on the one hand, in the digital divide research internet use is generally defined as personal use of the internet, meaning that an internet user is a person, who is using the internet by him/herself. considering the recent evidence from the uk (dutton, helsper, & gerber, 2008; dutton & blank, 2011; ofcom, 2011) and the united states (horrigan, 2010) such a definition of internet use(rs) disregards different forms of indirect internet use and thus seems to be conceptually narrow. in fact, scholars have identified a considerably large group of proxy internet users (reisdorf, 2011; selwyn, gorard, & furlong, 2005), who do not use the internet by themselves, but due to various reasons rather ask members of their personal networks to do things online for them (e.g., send an email, get information, or make a (cheaper) purchase from the internet). proxy internet use can refer to various online activities, ranging from merely entertaining or strictly instrumental (e.g., benefiting economically from booking holidays or paying taxes) to empowering (e.g., access to health information, social support (e.g., zhao, 2009)). when considering the potential of proxy internet use mailto:vesna.dolnicar@fdv.uni-lj.si mailto:vesna.dolnicar@fdv.uni-lj.si mailto:masa.filipovic@fdv.uni-lj.si mailto:masa.filipovic@fdv.uni-lj.si mailto:vasja.vehovar@fdv.uni-lj.si mailto:vasja.vehovar@fdv.uni-lj.si mailto:andraz.petrovcic@fdv.uni-lj.si mailto:andraz.petrovcic@fdv.uni-lj.si 2 for overcoming the digital inequalities, the main question that should be raised is what are the implications (i.e., the (un)intended consequences and benefits) of this specific usage practice for internet nonusers. if the impact of the internet is understood: “… in terms which reflect the extent to which its use enables individuals to live their day-to-day lives, experience their everyday pleasures and to participate and be part of society” (selwyn, gorard, & furlong, 2005, p.23), proxy internet use has a potential to enable internet non-users to become engaged in various online activities and to (through mediation of an experienced user) use internet in ways that enhance their social capital. for example, proxy users can through the knowledge and skills of persons, who help them to access the information on the internet, become aware and explore the opportunities of the internet that would otherwise be out of their reach. therefore, proxy internet use seems to be closely associated with the notion of social support (networks). surprisingly, the digital divide literature has rarely considered how the availability of social support as an important aspect of people’s social capital might be involved into the adoption of the internet. generally, when it comes to the investigation of individual’s socio-economic conditions that determine their internet (non)use the digital divide research has been limited to a more or less inclusive set of socio-demographic characteristics and individual’s economic resources. however, according to various authors (e.g., hargittai 2003; selwyn, 2004; van dijk, 2006) social support networks play an important role as they provide non-users with cognitive, material and social resources in the appropriation of digital technologies (van dijk, 2006). generally, the availability of such resources is dependent upon the presence of warm experts (bakardjieva, 2005) in support networks, who help nonand inexperienced users in the first moves toward the use of technology, which are perceived as complex and difficult to take up (selwyn, 2005). however, the domestication literature also suggests that the support of warm experts could also lead to proxy internet use, since non-users can rely on “expert-help”, not seeing the point in using the internet by themselves (bakardjieva, 2005; selwyn et al., 2005). this is often the case in parent-child or, more generally, in intergenerational relationships (wyatt, henwood, hart, & smith, 2005). in this context, the notion of intergenerational solidarity could provide us with a suitable conceptual framework to understand the support provided for the proxy internet use. one of possible conceptual models to observe this is bengston and roberts’ (1991) model of intergenerational solidarity. within the model six dimensions of solidarity are distinguished, one of them being functional solidarity (i.e., exchange of resources and services). help with the access to the information on the internet is therefore one such form of exchange, which has however not been included in research on solidarity. additionally, if we want to observe the influences on exchange of support the theoretical model of syzdlik (2008) is useful, as it defines the relation between giver and receiver of support within the structure of opportunities, needs, family structure and culturalcontextual arrangements. as proxy internet use typically involves informal and occasional learning processes (reisdorf, axelsson & söderholm, 2012; selwyn et al., 2005) it can be studied also within the framework of lave’s (2009) theories of situated everyday practice. research design the aim of this paper is to contribute to the current debate about proxy internet use through social networks and, in particular, to understand the potential of intergenerational cooperation in overcoming digital inequalities as well as how the availability and lack of emotional support and socializing personal networks as well as their characteristics is associated with proxy use and non-use of internet. the empirical analysis is based on nation-wide survey, carried out on a representative sample of 602 slovenians (77 of them reported to be proxy internet users) in december 2009. proxy internet use was measured with standard survey questions (see dutton et al., 2009; dutton and blank, 2011), whereas information about personal networks was collected with the egocentered network approach using adapted name generators for emotional (burt, 1984) and socializing support (van der poel, 1993). the paper seeks to explore the following research questions: (1) how the size of social support networks is associated with proxy internet use? (2) how the composition of social support networks in terms of presence of (grand)children and younger people is associated with proxy internet use? (3) is there any 3 difference between types of social support networks (emotional vs. socializing networks) and proxy internet use? (4) how the personal characteristics of individuals (such as gender, age, education, marital status, having children, household size) interact with the structural characteristics (e.g., size and composition) of their social support networks in terms of proxy internet use? results to answer the four research questions a series of binary logistic regressions was run on a subsample of 177 respondents, who were internet non-users, with the proxy internet use as a dependent variable, measuring whether internet non-users ask members of their personal networks to do things online for them (e.g., send an email, get information, or make a purchase from the internet). the results indicate that neither size nor composition of emotional support networks is associated with the proxy internet use. conversely, the size and the presence of (grand)children in internet non-users’ socializing support networks is positively correlated with proxy internet use. internet non-users with larger socializing networks and a higher proportion of (grand)children in them are more likely to be proxy internet users. in addition, the observed association between the composition of socializing networks and proxy internet use remains stable after controlling for the selected socio-economics characteristics of internet non-users. nevertheless, the control for socio-demographic variables reveals some interesting patterns: age, education and having children are significantly correlated with proxy internet use, whereas gender and marital status are not. conclusion the findings of this study seem to suggest that the notion of intergenerational solidarity might give us a valuable insight into the aspects of digital inequality that are related to proxy internet use. by showing that the presence of (grand)children in internet non-users’ socializing support networks increases the probability of proxy internet use, it might be concluded that a form of functional solidarity exists in socializing networks between proxy internet users and their (grand)children. such kind of solidarity, based on provision of support in accessing the resources available on the internet, could be beneficial for proxy users as it represents a stable vessel through which they can get to know and explore the opportunities of the internet. due to the informal nature of functional solidarity, it could also become a basis for a new strategy that will mitigate the disadvantages of digital inclusion policies that turned out to be ineffective as involving only formal educational structures (marien & van audenhove, 2010). moreover, the findings confirm that as in the case of other dimensions of digital inequality and of proxy internet use in particular (e.g., dutton et al., 2009; dutton and blank, 2011), proxy use is shaped by people’s socio-economic characteristics: age, education, having children and household structure seem to correlate with proxy internet use. however, a different conclusion emerges in terms of intergenerational solidarity. unlike in our case, prior literature on other types of functional solidarity (emotional, material support, etc.) has shown that gender is highly relevant, and that support is more commonly provided by women, and usually also addresses women to a larger extent (lawton et al., 1994; silverstein et al., 1995; silverstein & bengston, 1997; szydlik, 2008). this suggests that in the context of digital inequality research the notion of international solidarity requires additional conceptual and empirical elaboration. references bakardjieva, m. (2005). internet society: the internet in everyday life. london: sage. bengston, v. l. & roberts, r. e. l. (1991). intergenerational solidarity in aging families: an example of formal theory construction. journal of marriage & family 53 (4), 856–870. burt, r. s. (1984). network items and the general social survey. social networks 6 (4): 293–339. dutton, w. h., helsper, e. j. & gerber, m. m. (2009). oxford internet survey 2009 report: the internet in britain. oxford: oxford internet institute, university of oxford. 4 dutton, w. h. & blank, g. (2011). next generation users: the internet in britain 2011. oxford: oxford internet institute, university of oxford. hargittai, e. (2003). the digital divide and what to do about it. in c. d. jones (ed.) new economy handbook (pp. 822–841). san diego, ca: academic press. horrigan, j. b. (2010). broadband adoption and use in america. obi working paper series no. 1. washington, dc: federal communications commission. marien, i. & van audenhove, l. (2010). embedding e-inclusion initiatives in people’s daily reality: the role of social networks in tackling the digital divide. digitas conference ‘digital natives, digital immigrants, digital asylum-seekers: the clash of cultures’, 21-23 june, sibiu, rumania. retrieved from: http://smit.vub.ac.be/files/publications/627/20100920224111.pdf lave, j. (2009). the practice of learning. in k. illeris (ed.). contemporary theories of learning (pp. 200-208). london: routledge. lawton, l., silverstein, m. & bengston, v. (1994). affection, social contact, and geographic distance between adult children and their parents. journal of marriage and the family 56 (1): 57–68. ofcom (2011). adults media use and attitudes report. london: author. retrieved from http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/market-data-research/medialiteracy/archive/medlitpub/medlitpubrss/adults-media-use-attitudes/ reisdorf, b. c. (2011). non-adoption of the internet in great britain and sweden: a cross-national comparison. information, communication & society 14 (3), 400-420. reisdorf, b. c., axelsson, a.-s. & söderholm, h. m. (2012). living offline a qualitative study of internet non-use in great britain and sweden. selected papers of internet research: ir 13.0 technologies. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org/index.php/spir/article/view/10 selwyn, n. (2004). reconsidering political and popular understandings of the digital divide. new media & society 6 (3): 341–362. selwyn, n. (2005). the social processes of learning to use computers. social science computer review 23 (2), 122-135. selwyn, n., gorard, s. & furlong, j. (2005). whose internet is it anyway? exploring adults’ (non)use of the internet in everyday life. european journal of communication 20 (1), 5–26. silverstein, m. & bengston, v. l. (1997). intergenerational solidarity and the structure of adult child-parent relationships in american families. amreican journal of sociology 103 (2), 429–460. silverstein, m., parrott, t. m. & bengston, v. l. (1995). factors that predispose middle-aged sons and daughters that provide social support to older parents. journal of marriage & family 57 (2), 465– 475. szydlik, m. (2008). intergenerational solidarity and conflict. journal of comparative family studies 39 (1), 97– 114. tsatsou. p. (2011). digital divides revisited: what is new about divides and their research? media, culture & society 33 (2), 317–331. van der poel, m. g. m. (1993). delineating personal support networks. social networks 15 (1), 49–70. van dijk, j. a. g. m. (2006). digital divide research, achievements and shortcomings. poetics 34 (4-5), 221– 235. wyatt, s., henwood, f., hart, a. & smith, j. (2005). the digital divide, health information and everyday life. new media & society 7 (2), 199-218. zhao, s. (2009). parental education and children’s online health information seeking: beyond the digital divide debate. social science & medicine 69 (10), 1501–1505. background research design results conclusion selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): larsen; m.c. & kofoed, j. (2016, october 5-8). a snap of intimacy: investigating photo sharing practices on snapchat and instagram . paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. a snap of intimacy: investigating photo sharing practices on snapchat and instagram malene charlotte larsen aalborg university jette kofoed aarhus university in this paper we investigate photo sharing practices among young people on the social media platform snapchat. what kind of photos are exchanged amongst 12-17 year olds through this app where pictures are elicited after 10 seconds? how is the content of the photos perceived by the young people themselves? empirical background snapchat is a photo sharing app where the content self-destruct after a short while. sometimes the content is screenshot by the viewer (and possibly shared again). ephemeral social media such as snapchat thus interrupts linear temporality and, we argue, plays with both temporality and intimacy. instagram, on the contrary, can be described as a media where the content shared is persistent. i.e. the app allows the users to organize, use, document and remember in a persistent manner (bayer et. al., 2015). in order to investigate young people’s photo sharing practices on snapchat and instagram we employ an internet mediated mixed methods approach (hesse-biber & griffin, 2013; larsen, 2014). the primary empirical material consists of an online survey focusing on photo-elicitation practices on the two platforms, secondary empirical material consists of qualitative interviews conducted prior to the survey. the primary focus is on typical content and most commonly shared pictures as well as the sharing of and experiences with photos that are seen as unpleasant or disruptive by the receiver. the survey is conducted in 2015 and 2016 amongst danish youth. our findings suggest that snapchat is a site for intimacy where pictures of double chins and ugliness are exchanged. hence, snapchat seems to be site of self-exposure. these activities of photo-sharing and photo-communication bind the youth in closeness, dramas and friendships. in this respect snapchat differs from, for instance, instagram where the pictures shared tend to be more polished, neat and perfect. the intimacy shared and maintained on snapchat does, however, also cover nudes, dickpics and tarnished pictures that discredit certain individuals; or by intimate sharings of nude pictures that are screenshot. in this respect, intimacy entails both the comfort of sharing and the dramas of disruptions. analytical foci in this paper we take our empirical point of departure in the ephemeral social media app snapchat. we investigate how snapchat interacts with social relations in particular manners. snapchat is an app used on mobile devices which allows the user to be ‘on the go’ and hence update self-destructing photos continuously. such mobility allows users to share photos remotely and irrespective of time and place. on snapchat they often employ a higher level of self-disclosure and have reduced self-presentational concerns compared to other social media platforms (larsen & kofoed, 2015; bayer et. al., 2016). the self-destruction of photos and hence the ephemerality of the app is of particular interest since the altered temporality (compared to persistent social media) seems to be of importance in how intimacy is allowed. our main research question is: how do danish youth aged 12-17 regulate intimacy and maintain relationships through photo sharing practices on snapchat? to answer this question, we make use of the concept of intimacy as this is theorized by lauren berlant (1998). on this basis, we have two analytical foci in the paper: 1. snapchat involves sharing a moment on the move and often non-glamorous selfies (larsen & kofoed, 2015; christensen et. al., 2015; katz & crocker, 2015; bayer et. al., 2016). how does such non-glamorous self-disclosures play out? how are they perceived? are they utterly unimportant, as respondents often state themselves (larsen & kofoed, 2015; lobinger & brantner, 2015)? or are they, on the contrary, key players in maintaining and challenging intimate relations because of their apparently unimportant and self-disclosing content such as visits to the toilet, double chins or hangovers (larsen & kofoed, 2015)? 2. a high level of self-presentational concerns are often expressed in relation to instagram whereas snapchat by the youth is seen as an emotional escape and an intimate “free space”; free of having to be evaluated, notified or “liked” thus paving the way for more distributed practices of self-presentations through photo sharing, as opposed to photo sharing on facebook where users are subject to a more unified selfpresentation (wittkower, 2014). users are generally aware that snaps might be screenshot and saved on the receiver's phone, which often creates an even closer bond of intimacy and trust between users. however, these issues also put users at risk of cyberbullying (kofoed, 2014; kofoed & ringrose, 2012) and the feelings of feeling safe in the shared intimacy are experienced as intimidated. in the paper we discuss issues of trust and expectations of privacy in social media environments where content is shared for a limited period of time and promises to evaporate. discussion the two analytical foci are based on an exploration of differences in photo sharing practices on snapchat and instagram. we discuss how different affordances are far from innocent and how photo sharing practices and the performances of intimacy are embedded in the particular affordances and the temporalities allowed by these. references bayer, j. b., ellison, n. b., schoenebeck, s. y., & falk, e. b. (2016). sharing the small moments: ephemeral social interaction on snapchat. information, communication & society, 19(7), 956–977. berlant, l. (1998). intimacy: a special issue. critical inquiry, 24(2), 281-288. retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344169 christensen, j. r., hansen, j. c., larsen, f. h., & nielsen, j. s. (2015). from snapshot to snapchat: panopticon or synopticon?. akademisk kvarter, 11(june), 69-84. hesse-biber, s., & griffin, a. j. (2013). internet-mediated technologies and mixed methods research: problems and prospects. journal of mixed methods research, 7(1), 43–61. katz, j., & crocker, e. (2015). selfies and photo messaging as visual conversation: reports from the united states, united kingdom and china. international journal of communication, 9, 12. retrieved from http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/3180/1405 kofoed, j. (2014). non-simultaneity in cyberbullying. in r. m. schott & d. m. søndergaard (eds.), school bullying. new theories in context. cambridge: cambridge university press. kofoed, j. & ringrose, j. (2012). travelling and sticky affects: exploring teens and sexualized cyberbullying through a butlerian-deleuzian-guattarian lens. discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, 33(1), 5-20. larsen, m. c. (2014). internetbaseret feltarbejde, spørgeskemaer og kvalitative interview: unges brug af sociale medier. i m. frederiksen, p. gundelach, & r. s. nielsen (red.), mixed methods-forskning: principper og praksis. (1. udg., s. 155-186). kapitel 7.hans reitzel. (samfundsvidenskabernes metoder, vol. 4). larsen, m. c., & kofoed, j. (2015). snip snap snude dobbelthagerne er ude: analyse: hvorfor hitter snapchat?. kommunikationsforum, 8. april 2015. lobinger, k. (2016). photographs as things – photographs of things. a texto-material perspective on photo-sharing practices. information, communication & society, 19(4), 475–488. wittkower, d. e. (2014). facebook and dramauthentic identity: a post-goffmanian theory of identity performance on sns. first monday; volume 19, number 4 7 april 2014. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016   suggested  citation  (apa):  kift,  p.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  in  search  of  safe  harbors:  privacy  and   surveillance  of  refugees  at  the  borders  of  europe.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual   conference  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from   http://spir.aoir.org.   in  search  of  safe  harbors  –  privacy  and  surveillance  of   refugees  at  the  borders  of  europe   paula  kift   new  york  university     introduction     over  the  course  of  2015,  more  than  a  million  refugees  and  migrants  arrived  at  the   borders  of  europe.  one  of  the  ways  in  which  the  european  union  (eu)  attempted  to   manage  the  continuous  inflow  of  people  was  through  the  collection  of  vast  amounts  of   personal  information;;  information  that  is  not  only  used  to  assess  and  process  asylum   claims  but  also  to  prevent  irregular  migration  and  to  alleviate  national  security  concerns.     two  eu  regulations  are  particularly  noteworthy  in  this  regard:  eurosur  (mandating  drone   and  satellite  surveillance  of  the  mediterranean  sea)1  and  eurodac  (biometric   information  collection  at  the  border).2  while  biometric  data  collection  under  eurodac   clearly  raises  both  privacy  and  data  protection  concerns,  as  defined  in  european  law,   eurosur  is  said  to  raise  neither  because  drone  and  satellite  surveillance  of  the   mediterranean  sea  only  involves  the  collection  of  information  about  boats,  but  not  the   collection  of  any  personally  identifiable  information  (pii)  of  the  passengers  on  those   boats.  the  following  paper  questions  the  soundness  of  this  argument.  more  specifically,   it  argues  that  while  anonymity  in  this  case  protects  against  identifiability,  it  does  not   protect  against  reachability;;  the  latter  arguably  being  a  much  more  important  privacy   concern  in  the  age  of  big  data.     eurodac  and  eurosur       the  eurodac  regulation  was  introduced  in  the  european  parliament  on  december  11,   2001.3  the  original  purpose  of  the  regulation  was  to  allow  for  the  effective  enforcement   of  the  dublin  convention,  which  mandates  that  refugees  have  to  apply  for  asylum  in  the   1.  regulation  (eu)  no.  1052/2013  of  the  european  parliament  and  the  council  of  22  october  2013   establishing  the  european  border  surveillance  system  (eurosur)  [hereinafter:  eurosur  regulation].   2.  regulation  (eu)  no.  603/2013  of  the  european  parliament  and  the  council  of  26  june  2013  on  the   establishment  of  ‘eurodac’  [hereinafter:  2013  eurodac  regulation].   3.  council  regulation  (ec)  no  2725/2000  of  11  december  2000  concerning  the  establishment  of   ‘eurodac’  for  the  comparison  of  fingerprints  for  the  effective  application  of  the  dublin  convention   [hereinafter:  2000  eurodac  regulation].   first  country  of  arrival  in  the  eu.  the  establishment  of  a  central  european  database   comprised  of  the  fingerprints  of  all  asylum  seekers  above  the  age  14  was  deemed   necessary  towards  this  end  because  it  allowed  each  individual  eu  member  state  “to   check  whether  an  alien  found  illegally  present  on  its  territory  has  applied  for  asylum  in   another  member  state”4  and  thus  to  prevent  asylum  seekers  from  filing  multiple  asylum   applications.5  in  june  2013,  the  mandate  of  the  eurodac  regulation  was  expanded  to   also  allow  european  law  enforcement  agencies  access  to  the  database.6  finally,  in  may   2016,7  the  european  commission  published  a  proposal  to  collect  not  only  fingerprints   but  also  facial  recognition  data  under  the  eurodac  regulation,8  to  lower  the  minimum   age  for  inclusion  in  the  database  from  14  to  69  and  to  extend  the  data  retention  period   from  18  months  to  five  years.10  finally,  in  may  2016,    the  european  commission   published  a  proposal  to  collect  not  only  fingerprints  but  also  facial  recognition  data   under  the  eurodac  regulation,    to  lower  the  minimum  age  for  inclusion  in  the  database   from  14  to  6    and  to  extend  the  data  retention  period  from  18  months  to  five  years.         the  eurosur  regulation,  on  the  other  hand,  was  adopted  on  october  22,  2013.11  the   goal  of  the  eurosur  regulation  is  to  provide  eu  member  states  and  frontex,  the  eu’s   border  management  agency,  “with  the  infrastructure  and  tools  needed  to  improve  their   situational  awareness  and  reaction  capability  at  the  external  borders  of  the  member   states  of  the  union  (‘external  borders’)  for  the  purpose  of  detecting,  preventing  and   combating  illegal  immigration  and  cross-­border  crime  and  contributing  to  ensuring  the   protection  and  saving  the  lives  of  migrants.”12  towards  this  end,  eurosur  proposes  a   comprehensive  system  of  surveillance  of  the  maritime  and  external  land  borders  of  the   eu,  including  the  establishment  of  so-­called  national  coordination  centers  (nccs)  and   the  use  of  sophisticated  surveillance  tools,  such  as  satellite  imagery  and  drones.13   importantly,  in  order  to  maintain  pre-­frontier  intelligence  pictures,  the  eu  not  only   monitors  its  own  external  land  and  maritime  borders,  but  also  the  borders  of  neighboring   third  countries.  towards  this  end,  the  eurosur  regulation  explicitly  encourages   information  sharing  and  cooperation  with  those  countries.14     4.  id.  at  para.  3.   5.  see  franziska  boehm,  information  sharing  and  data  protection  in  the  area  of  freedom,   security:  towards  harmonised  data  protection  principles  for  information  exchange  at  eu-­level   305  (2012).   6.  see  2013  eurodac  regulation  supra  note  2.     7.  european  commission,  proposal  for  a  regulation  of  the  european  parliament  and  the  council  on  the   establishment  of  'eurodac'  for  the  comparison  of  fingerprints  for  the  effective  application  of  [regulation   (eu)  no  604/2013  establishing  the  criteria  and  mechanisms  for  determining  the  member  state   responsible  for  examining  an  application  for  international  protection  lodged  in  one  of  the  member  states   by  a  third-­country  national  or  a  stateless  person],  for  identifying  an  illegally  staying  third-­country  national   or  stateless  person  and  on  requests  for  the  comparison  with  eurodac  data  by  member  states'  law   enforcement  authorities  and  europol  for  law  enforcement  purposes  (recast),  european  commission  2   (may  4,  2016),  http://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regdoc/rep/1/2016/en/1-­2016-­272-­en-­f1-­1.pdf.   8.  id.  at  12-­13.   9.  id.  at  6.   10.  id.  at  4.   11.  see  eurosur  regulation  supra  note  1.   12.  id.  para  1.   13.  id.  article  12(3)c.   14.  id.  article  20.   the  rights  to  privacy  and  data  protection  as  applied  to  eurodac  and  eurosur     the  fundamental  right  to  privacy  is  anchored  in  article  8  of  the  european  convention  on   human  rights  (echr),  which  is  closely  mirrored  by  article  7  of  the  charter  of   fundamental  rights  of  the  european  union  (cfreu).  it  stipulates  that  “everyone  has   the  right  to  respect  for  his  private  and  family  life,  his  home  and  his  correspondence.”   the  cfreu,  moreover,  also  includes  a  separate  right  to  data  protection  according  to   which  “everyone  has  the  right  to  the  protection  of  personal  data  concerning  him  or  her.”   the  applicability  of  the  right  to  privacy  in  european  law,  then,  is  defined  by  whether  a   government’s  actions  impinge  on  a  person’s  “private  life”  whereas  the  applicability  of  the   right  to  data  protection  depends  upon  the  presence  of  “personal  data”  which  is  defined   as  “any  information  relating  to  an  identified  or  identifiable  natural  person”  in  art.  2   directive  95/46/ec  (the  eu  data  protection  directive).     while  biometric  data  collection  under  eurodac  clearly  raises  both  privacy  and  data   protection  concerns,  as  defined  in  european  law,  eurosur  is  said  to  raise  neither   because  drone  and  satellite  surveillance  of  the  mediterranean  sea  only  involves  the   collection  of  information  about  boats,  but  not  the  collection  of  any  personally  identifiable   information  (pii)  of  the  passengers  on  those  boats.  the  continued  reliance  of  the  right  to   data  protection  on  the  presence  of  “personal  data”  is  thus  a  serious  limitation  in  this   case.       a  person’s  private  life,  by  contrast,  can  be  affected  by  a  public  authority’s  data  collection   practices,  even  when  no  pii  is  being  collected.  in  the  case  of  eurosur,  even  if  drones   and  satellites  do  not  enable  the  eu  to  identify  who  these  passengers  are,  they  do   enable  the  eu  to  identify  what  they  are,  namely,  irregular  migrants  and  possibly   refugees  in  need  of  international  protection.  while  anonymity  in  this  case  protects   against  identifiability,  it  does  not  protect  against  reachability.15  indeed,  somewhat   paradoxically,  in  this  case  it  may  actually  be  the  refusal  of  eu  authorities  to  collect  pii   about  the  passengers  on  these  boats  that  raises  fundamental  rights  concerns  since  they   are  collectively  classified  as  “illegal”  migrants  and  potentially  sent  back  to  their  ports  of   origin  without  first  establishing  whether  there  are  refugees  with  international  protection   claims  among  them.     privacy  and  data  protection  in  an  age  of  big  data     the  implications  of  these  findings  are  not  limited  to  the  applicability  of  the  rights  to   privacy  and  data  protection  to  migrants  and  asylum  seekers  at  the  borders  of  europe.   rather,  they  encourage  us  to  look  ahead  and  to  reflect  on  the  continued  viability  of  the   rights  to  privacy  and  data  protection  in  an  age  of  big  data  more  generally.  as  notable   15.  for  a  discussion  of  anonymity  as  unreachability,  see  helen  nissenbaum,  the  meaning  of  anonymity   in  an  information  age,  15  info.  soc.  141,  142  (1999)  (arguing  that  “the  value  of  anonymity  lies  not  in  the   capacity  to  be  unnamed,  but  in  the  possibility  of  acting  or  participating  while  remaining  out  of  reach,   remaining  unreachable”).  see  also  solon  barocas  and  helen  nissenbaum,  big  data’s  end  run  around   anonymity  and  consent,  in  privacy,  big  data  and  the  public  good:  frameworks  for  engagement  45   (julia  lane  et  al.  eds.,  2015)  (arguing  that  “[e]ven  when  individuals  are  not  ‘identifiable’,  they  may  still  be   ‘reachable’,  may  still  be  comprehensibly  represented  in  records  that  detail  their  attributes  and  activities,   and  may  be  subject  to  consequential  inferences  and  predictions  taken  on  that  basis”).   privacy  scholars  have  pointed  out,  rapid  technological  advances  in  the  areas  of  data   collection  and  processing  have  rendered  the  concepts  of  pii  and  anonymity  mostly   meaningless,  as  even  the  most  innocuous  seemingly  unconnected  bits  and  pieces  of   data  might  be  recombined  to  constitute  “personal  data”  and  thus  raise  significant  privacy   concerns.16  furthermore,  as  public  and  private  actors  increasingly  make  profiles  about   us,  they  could  easily  argue  that  their  practices  do  not  raise  any  privacy  or  data   protection  concerns  because  their  profiles  are  not  concerned  with  the  identity  of  the   people  they  are  targeting,  but  only  their  characteristics.  this  may  suggest  that  the  right   to  privacy  is  ultimately  better  suited  to  protect  us  against  both  private  and  public  sector   intrusions  in  the  future.  this  is  because,  unlike  the  right  to  data  protection,  the  right  to   privacy  not  only  regulates  the  lawful  processing  of  personal  data,  but  it  also  provides  us   with  the  freedom  of  not  having  any  data  about  us  processed  to  begin  with  –  regardless   of  whether  that  information  is  ultimately  accurate  or  “personally  identifiable.”       references     barocas,  solon  and  helen  nissenbaum,  big  data’s  end  run  around  anonymity  and   consent,  in  privacy,  big  data  and  the  public  good:  frameworks  for  engagement   44-­75  (julia  lane  et  al.  eds.,  2015).     boehm,  franziska.  information  sharing  and  data  protection  in  the  area  of   freedom,  security:  towards  harmonised  data  protection  principles  for   information  exchange  at  eu-­level  (2012).     council  regulation  (ec)  no  2725/2000  of  11  december  2000  concerning  the   establishment  of  ‘eurodac’  for  the  comparison  of  fingerprints  for  the  effective  application   of  the  dublin  convention.     narayanan,  arvind  and  vitaly  shmatikov,  myths  and  fallacies  of  ‘personally  identifiable   information’,  53  comm.  of  the  acm  24  (2010).     nissenbaum,  helen,  the  meaning  of  anonymity  in  an  information  age,  15  info.  soc.   141  (1999).     ohm,  paul,  broken  promises  of  privacy:  responding  to  the  surprising  failure  of   anonymization,  57  ucla  l.  rev.  1701  (2010).     rubinstein,  ira  and  woodrow  hartzog,  anonymization  and  risk,  91  washington  l.  rev.   (forthcoming  2016).     16.  on  the  failures  of  anonymization,  see  paul  ohm,  broken  promises  of  privacy:  responding  to  the   surprising  failure  of  anonymization,  57  ucla  l.  rev.  1701  (2010);;  and  ira  rubinstein  and  woodrow   hartzog,  anonymization  and  risk,  91  washington  l.  rev.  (forthcoming  2016).  on  the  increasing  difficulty   to  define  what  constitutes  pii,  see  paul  m.  schwartz  and  daniel  j.  solove,  the  pii  problem:  privacy  and   a  new  concept  of  personally  identifiable  information,  86  n.y.u.  l.  rev.  1814  (2011);;  and  arvind   narayanan  and  vitaly  shmatikov,  myths  and  fallacies  of  ‘personally  identifiable  information’,  53  comm.   of  the  acm  24  (2010).   regulation  (eu)  no.  1052/2013  of  the  european  parliament  and  the  council  of  22   october  2013  establishing  the  european  border  surveillance  system  (eurosur).     regulation  (eu)  no.  603/2013  of  the  european  parliament  and  the  council  of  26  june   2013  on  the  establishment  of  ‘eurodac’.     schwartz,  paul  m.  and  daniel  j.  solove,  the  pii  problem:  privacy  and  a  new  concept   of  personally  identifiable  information,  86  n.y.u.  l.  rev.  1814  (2011).   microsoft word 871-615-1-pb.doc that was then, this is now -paper abstracts latour revisited: computers as inscription devices in the digital laborator nathan ensmenger indiana university nensmeng@indiana.edu in his landmark study of "laboratory life" at the salk institute for biological studies, the anthropologist bruno latour revolutionized the field of science studies by asking some basic questions about the material culture of contemporary scientific practice. if the primary work of most scientists was, as latour suggested, the "coding, marking, altering, correcting, reading, and writing" of paper documents, then it is essential that scholars pay careful attention to the techniques and technologies (or "inscription devices," as latour calls them) that they use to transform the complexities of the natural world into representations amenable to literary manipulation. the tools we use to think with affect the character of our thoughts, latour argued, and instruments and information technologies are epistemologically significant. in a recent essay in the journal technology & culture, i used an imaginary (re)visit by latour to the present-day salk institute to explore the profound and pervasive influence of computer, computer-based instruments, and computational techniques on the theory and practice of modern biology. if to write a thing down is to transform it, as latour famously suggested, then surely it means something to make the same object digital? in the t&c article i only hinted at the potential value of reinterpreting latour though the lens of the recent developments in computing and information technology. in this paper, i develop these line of thought to include not only the computer as instrument and production technology, but also digital "documents" (including databases and code) as elements in the modern scientific "cycle of credit." linkedin’s weak ties ilana gershon indiana university igershon@indiana.edu in 1973, when granovetter first wrote about weak ties, letters and telephone calls were the channels for experimenting with social networks, not facebook or linkedin. granovetter wanted to provide a sociological framework for transformations across scale – he wanted to link individual micro-interactions with larger structural patterns. to do so, he studied job seekers. he interviewed 100 people about how they received information about jobs, tracking which media used and how this correlated with the strength of the social ties the job seekers were mobilizing to get information about possible jobs. in this paper, i discuss how the various media now available have transformed the process both of finding out about jobs and presenting oneself to others as a jobseeker. that is, the media used have transformed how information in a labor market circulates and how people represent themselves as being able to circulate. i explore what these changes in micro-interactions reveals about the contemporary neoliberal labor markets. i address how the concept of weak ties not only has its roots in an earlier form of capitalism and older media, but has recursively shaped how people understand and navigate job markets in contemporary networks. tracing the shadow of the sandman in today’s posthuman imaginary mark deuze university of amsterdam mdeuze@uva.nl in this contribution we will revisit the classic work “the sandman” (1816) by e.t.a. hoffman – serving as the inspiration for operas and ballets, the psychoanalysis of sigmund freud, and for the computer hal in stanley kubrick’s “2001: a space oddyssey” – and ask how hoffmann would look at the emerging field of man-machine hybridization – considering literature on biomedia, sex and love between humans and robots, technogenesis, technobiophilia, mediatization, and posthumanism. this experiment will enable us to historicize current concerns, allow us to look beyond media when studying media, and open up new ways of producing what bruno latour advocates as ‘nonmodern’ theory and research when studying the relationship between people and (their) media. sports as culture: carey revisited gordon carlson fort hayes state university gscarlson@fhsu.edu james carey introduced an important distinction between the primary views of communication in the united states with his seminal text “a cultural approach to communication” (1989). carey argues that americans predominantly look at communication through the lens of transportation but goes on to make a case for a ritual view of communication. prior to the world wide web his first and classic example was the place newspapers had in american life. this paper will ask was james carey would think of the changes professional sports have experienced in the last 20 years. this paper argues that prior to the 1980s professional sports had a foothold in society primarily as a cultural phenomenon (ritual in carey’s context). expansion in several sports during the 1980s and early 1990s aided by an explosion in cable television and a concerted effort by several sport leagues, professional sports rapidly shifted into a traditional “big business” phase modeling other successful industries (transmission in carey’s context). however, in the 1990s they began, perhaps without even realizing it, to transition away from simply a business within society and instead to societal institutions marrying their cultural and financial significance to a degree most industries have never experienced. this new status is a social construct related to the carey’s ritual view. this paper argues this occurred because of the rapid increase in speed and richness of information about professional sports brought about by ubiquitous web access. free fantasy leagues, message boards and blogs supplanting talk radio, and the commercialization of stats and data all combine to create a convergence of media and society that has in return affected professional sports themselves. taken to the extreme it is possible to draw a line from this phenomenon to socially significant events such as the erin andrews tape (an issue of privacy intrusion), brett favre sexting (an issue of interpersonal boundary change), and the increasingly common viewer-constructed commercials or programming (an issue of fan labor and social fandom). this paper argues various disruptive new media allow the traditional divide between sport and fan to be breached with impacts on both parties, most notably the return of professional sports to a ritual in communication contexts. references carey, james w. (1989). a cultural approach to communication. in *communication as culture: essays on media and society*. new york: routledge. granovetter, mark s. (1973) the strength of weak ties. american journal of sociology 78 (6): 1360-1380. hoffman, e. t. a. (1816). the sandman. new york: dodo press. latour, bruno and steve woolgar. (1986) laboratory life: the construction of scientific facts. princeton: princeton university press. microsoft word ir16-roginsky.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 why and how politicians use social media? understanding sensemaking and representations of digital platforms. the case of “facebook” and “twitter” in the european parliament sandrine roginsky université catholique de louvain (ucl), belgium introduction the mainstream perspective on politicians who use social media has been based on the premise that social media technology is, by nature, an innovative tool and that politicians are not using it to its full potential (roginsky, 2014). in my paper, i will outline some of the existing claims made for the innovative potential of social media regarding politics and lay out a number of uses and questions that should lead to be wary about celebrating accounts. such an approach requires us to first focus on digital imaginaries as apprehended by social media promoters before looking at its development and circulation within a specific political context – taking into account the different types of actors that may be encountered (internet specialists, journalists, politicians, employees…). as underlined by flichy, “the imaginaire is at the center of (…) use of the internet” and is diverse and riddled with contradictions (2004:11). i will challenge the mainstream normative approach and will rely on a socio-technical approach to demonstrate that social media technology is not innovative by nature and innovation is not necessarily where it is expected, nor it is necessarily easily visible: it is however part of a “technical imaginaire” (flichy, 2004:10). such an approach highlights the existence of a “symbolic universe” (granjon, 2014:113) accompanying adoption and uses of social media. this will lead me to call into question the capacity of quantitative analysis of large datasets to understand how social media are used as a tool for political communication and the manner in which politicians use it. in the realm of new media, populated as it is by rhetoric about technical possibilities and potentials, it is indeed important to look at actual users, uses and experience. however, there is a lack of comprehensive accounts of how political actors perceive social media. we must therefore examine carefully the experiences they make in specific environments and suggested citation (apa): roginsky, s. (2015, october 21-24) why and how politicians use social media? understanding sensemaking and representations of digital platforms. the case of “facebook” and “twitter” in the european parliament. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. understand how practices are shaped. in other words, “scholars should not take the technological affordances of social media for granted – but should carefully consider the way in which users understand, appropriate and experience social media” (barassi & treré, 2012: 12). how to study uses and representations of social media? in this regard, the presentation will highlight the contribution of ethnographic methods to better understand perceptions and use’s patterns of social media technology, focusing on the recursive intertwining of users and technology in practice. i will argue that communication emerges from the performativity of social media as interacting with actors’ practices. the performativity is sociomaterial, shaped by the way in which the technology is designed, configured but also engaged in practice (orlikwoski, 2007). a socio-technical approach allows the researcher to articulate both technical elements and social actions. such an approach demonstrates the importance to look at “social media imaginaries” in order to understand how political actors1 make sense of social media and how it drives their usages of such digital tools. indeed social media practices are not phenomena that take place exclusively online but are rather consecutive with and embedded in other social spaces (miller & slater, 2005:5). as reminded by brewer (2000:10), “ethnography is the study of people in naturally occurring settings or ‘fields’ by means of methods which capture their social meanings and ordinary activities”. ethnology, through (both offline and online) participant observation and interviews, allows us to analyse social media uses in relation with “other social practices that bear them, frame them or graft onto them” (granjon, 2014:118). in the field of european politics, this is of particular importance as politicians are embedded in a series of contrasting roles and various settings. case study in the european parliament throughout this presentation, i will use one specific field to exemplify my arguments – my research related to the use of social media by members of the european parliament from 2009 to 2014. the approach is longitudinal and sheds light on the evolution of representations and uses of social media over five years. i will provide empirical insights into how political actors make sense of social media technology and the “imaginary world” (mésangeau & povéda, 2013) they create, emphasizing the importance of contexts and interactions. political actors act with social media technology as a function of the meaning this technology has for them, and this meaning is constructed in the course of social interactions as well as individual and collective practices. this research adopts an ethnographic perspective in order to investigate how social media technology is described and discussed among users. it includes a mix of participant observation within the european parliament (2009-2012) and about 50 interviews with assistants to members of the european parliament (2010-2014). i also interviewed 8 meps. as a parliamentary assistant between 2009 and 2012 in the european parliament, i was involved in a series of informal discussions with assistants on the use of social media as well as few workshops and trainings organized within the parliament. michon (2008) argues that parliamentary assistants are key political actors, even though they remain virtually unstudied. their knowledge of working practices within mep’s offices as well as their position “in the background” (michon, 2008:169) 1 politics is a profession, as highlighted by hubé (2009). the term « political actor » includes both elected representatives as well as their employees. indeed, they are both “professionals” in politics, as they both live for and by political activity (paoletti, 2014:118). provide them with an insightful understanding of meps’ approaches to social media technology and the possibility to speak in a more free way than their employer. furthermore my own position as a former parliamentary assistant, therefore a former colleague, contributed in facilitating dialogue. i did not take nationality and party politics into account, although i was cautious to have a variety of profiles – both in term of country of origin and political groups. the analysis of the representations of social media by political actors does not limit itself to ethnography of situational practices but includes the analysis of published messages on social media platforms (facebook and twitter). triangulation allows the researcher to study practices and uses of social media from more than one standpoint in order to explain more fully the richness and the complexity of the different ways that social media are imagined in the political realm. textual readings of profiles are conducted and status updates analysed, focusing on those politicians and staff who have been interviewed. hine (2009) notes indeed that the ethnography of the internet should involve mobility between contexts of production and use as well as between online and offline. deconstructing normative assumptions through practice accompanying discourses play a decisive role in highlighting how technology should be used, why it should be used and the consequence of its usage (breton, 2002). as michel de certeau (1998:185) notes, “narratives precede social practices and pave the way for them”. however, the same author also develops the concept of bricolage to refer to the ways individuals “borrow from existing cultural forms and meanings to create new uses, meanings and identities” (humphry, 2011). in order words, people negotiate with technology, in relation to “the institutional contexts in which they live and work, and the social and cultural conventions associated with participating in such contexts” (orlikowski, 2000:410). the concept of practice allows us to articulate both technical elements and social actions in order to understand better the relationships between technology and social use. rather than starting from the assumptions that the technological affordances of social media could create more interactivity and increased participation, we should start instead with (individual and collective) social practices and examine how political actors interact and shape social media. in doing so, it is possible to show that the advent of social media in the existing arsenal of communication has participated in transforming political practices in a number of ways; although most of them cannot be grasped online, such as (1) work patterns; (2) listening practices; (3) writing routines; (4) offline interactions triggered by online presence. the content analysis of messages published on twitter or facebook suggests that tweets or facebook status updates do not give much information about the people behind the messages, even though many of these are synopses of activities at work. it goes back to what orlikowski (2000:407) calls “emergent structures”, i.e. “how structures are constituted and reconstituted in recurrent social practices” to acknowledge that “while users can and do use technologies as they were designed, they also can and do circumvent inscribed ways of using the technologies”. more importantly perhaps, this approach suggests that there are a number of reasons why political actors use social media the way they do, such as (1) the work settings in meps’ offices, (2) the institutional settings of the european parliament and the nature of political and legislative work as well was “case work” in constituencies, (4) the representations political actors have of their profession, their role, their audiences (5) the way they understand, appropriate and experience social media; (6) the co-existence of older and more recent technologies. conclusion this presentation is intended as a contribution to the on-going discussion on social media and politics in highlighting the complexities of political actors’ everyday interaction with technology. indeed it is important to remember that “we cannot describe technical devices without referring to the acts of habitus, skills, tactical sense and social knowledge of the individuals themselves” (granjon, 2014:114). to investigate users’ practices in relation to social media, we need to go beyond the traces of uses that we can capture online – as “analysing the social uses of technical devices on the unique basis of this material may capsize the whole project into a state of empiricism. (…) ” (granjon, 2014:117). instead, one should “analyse in order to measure and not measure in order to analyse” (bachelard, 1970:213) – in other words we should not take as an explanation that which needs to be explained. ethnographic and qualitative approaches can therefore help us to provide meaning to observed use, calling for triangulation of data in order to give a detailed and balanced picture of the situation. the objective is to better understand why and how political actors use social media in everyday political life. references bachelard, g. (1970). la formation de l’esprit scientifique. paris: vrin barassi, v., treré, e. (2012). does web 3.0 come after web 2.0? deconstructing theoretical assumptions through practices. new media & society. 14(8). 1269-1285. breton, p. (2002). les discours d’accompagnement. les dossiers de l’audiovisuel. les nouvelles technologies : quels usages, quels usagers. 103. 59. brewer, j. (2000). ethnography. buckingham : open university press. de certeau, m. (1980/1998). l’invention du quotidien: 1. arts de faire, paris: gallimardfolio flichy, p. (2004). the imaginary internet: how utopian fantasy shaped the making of a new information infrastructure. business and economic history on-line. vol.2. 1-11. granjon, f. (2014). problematizing social uses of information and communication technology: a critical french perspective. canadian journal of communication. vol.39. 111-125. hine, c. (2009). question one: how can internet researchers define the boundaries of their project. in markham a., baym n. (ed.). internet inquiry. london: sage. 1-25. hubé, n. (2009). le recrutement social des professionnels de la politique. in cohen, a., lacroix, b., riutort, p. (ed.). nouveau manuel de science politique. paris: la découverte. 335-354. humphry, j. (2011). making an impact: cultural studies, media and contemporary work. m/c journal, vol.14, n°6. http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewarticle/440. méseangeau, j., povéda, a. (2013). analyser l’adoption des réseaux socionumériques professionnels: entre approche pragmatiste et étude de la dimension symbolique des usages. etudes de communication. 41. http://edc.revues.org/5336 michon, s. (2008). assistants au parlement européen, un tremplin pour une carrière européenne. sociologie du travail 50(2), 169-183. miller d., slater d. (2000). the internet: an ethnographic approach. oxford, berg. orlikowski, wj. (2007). sociomaterial practices: exploring technology at work. organization studies. 28(09). 1435-1448 orlikowski, wj. (2000) using technology and constituting structures: a practice lens for studying technology in organizations. organization science. 11(4). 404-428. paoletti, m. (2014). l’organisation du travail de représentation politique. in mazeaud, a. (ed.). pratiques de la représentation politique. rennes: presses universitaires de rennes. 117-122. roginsky, s. (2014). social network sites: an innovative form of political communication? a socio-technical approach to media innovation. journal of media innovations. 1/2. 97-125. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17 th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): birkland, j., quan-haase, a., communello, a., rosales, a., mulargia, s., fernández-ardèvol, m., quinn, k., & massanari, a. (2016, october 5-8). aging in a digital world. panel presented at aoir 2016: the 17 th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. aging in a digital world participants: johanna birkland, syracuse university anabel quan-haase, western university francesca communello, lumsa university andrea rosales, universitat oberta de catalunya simone mulargia, sapienza university mireia fernández-ardèvol, universitat oberta de catalunya kelly quinn, university of illinois at chicago adrienne massanari, university of illinois at chicago the temporality of digital living is typically associated with the short history of the internet, the rapid obsolescence of digital technologies, and even the compression of time and space afforded through internet communication. we often overlook, however, the temporality of those that engage with digital life, assuming instead that everyone has citizenship in our digital world. digital existence, however, appears to be somewhat attached to age and aging. and despite that today’s older adults are healthier and better educated than prior generations, many of those over the age of 50 are somewhat isolated from digital life. older adults have been slower to use the internet, are less likely to have broadband access, and adopt technologies such as social media and smartwatches at lower rates. increasingly, though, they are using new technologies and putting them to use in different ways and for different purposes than younger adults. for example, though they lag younger populations in adoption of smartphones and twitter, the proportion of those owning tablets and e-readers compares much more favorably (smith, 2014). physical, perceptual and cognitive changes coincident with aging may present some explanation for this lower engagement, yet we suspect something more. there is mounting evidence that older adults approach digital life from unique perspectives. older adults are often challenged by having to navigate unfamiliar concepts and interfaces, challenges often associated with a lack in digital literacy skills. but viewed through the lens of life experience, older adults bring perspectives to their use of technology that are distinct from those of younger users. who are these emerging entrants to digital life? what challenges and opportunities are associated with digital living in later life? what does it mean to grow older in the digital or to digitally age? this panel will explore the intersection of the internet and later life stages to begin to give shape to some answers. our first panelist begins with an exploration of the spectrum of digital technology use at older ages. using an interpretive interactionist approach, this study examines the ways in which older adults are introduced to, use, display, and assign meaning to digital technologies. a typology of users emerges, revealing technology adoption at older ages to be a complex and dynamic process. one of the challenges to digital living in later life is that the training and education life stage, which typically takes place in takes place during youth and young adulthood, has passed. our second panelist examines the challenges inherent in acquiring digital literacy at older ages. using a mixed methods approach, this study highlights that attaining digital competency at older ages not only encompasses the acquisition of skills, but also must focus on the cognitive and socio-emotional aspects of digital engagement to be truly successful. our third paper will focus on the adoption of a specific digital technology by older adults, a smart watch, and draws attention to the domestication processes that older adults employ in the adoption of a digital device. using interviews, focus groups, and user logs, this study explores the discourses around the user relationship with the smartwatch, as well as its tracked use/non-use. in doing so, we are provided with a nuanced view of how technology use intersects with personal values and identity at older ages. media, especially mass media, are powerful forces of socialization in our culture. the ways in which groups are presented within media, often reflect a particular societal vision and create a social reality by suggesting ways in which the group in question ‘should’ act. our fourth paper explores the role of digital play in older adulthood by examining the media representation of older adults as video game players. through a content analysis of major newspaper and news organization accounts, this study explores how media representations resist and reinforce prevailing positive and negative stereotypes of older adults and aging, and discusses the implications. finally, our fifth panelist contemplates what it means not only to age in a digital world, but also what it means to age in an era that at once experiences rapid digital obsolescence while simultaneously considering the internet’s potential immortality. by highlighting the intrinsic tension between the rhetoric of computer-mediated communication and the ways in which aging users conceive of and participate in internet communication, this study exposes how internet rules impact contemporary online and offline social interaction, and by extension, the digital reality of older adults. in sum, this collection of papers provides a varied and nuanced view of what it means to age and be aging in today’s digital world. taken together, they provide important perspectives on how later life stages overlap with the internet, especially as its use grows increasingly central to the provision of information, resources, and sociality. references smith, a. (2014). _older adults and technology use_. washington, dc: pew research. retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/04/03/older-adults-andtechnology-use/ a user typology for understanding older adult information, communication, and technology (ict) use johanna birkland syracuse university introduction despite the dominant research discourse on older adults and information and communication technologies (icts) use focusing on the two ends of the ict use spectrum (the highly capable and the “want-nots”) (brabazon, 2005; millward, 2003), our common sense tells us that older adults are a diverse group of ict users. however, there is little empirical evidence in how older adults are using and integrating multiple forms of icts in their daily lives. the following paper attempts to begin to fill that gap by describing an user typology of older adult ict use developed through an interpretive interactionist (denzin, 2001) study guided by domestication theory (silverstone, 1994). literature review the current literature on older adults and ict use concentrates on exploring how older adults use single ict forms (such as computers), focuses on robotics and engineered solutions to help individuals deal with aging-related declines, and over relies on studying older adults who attend community centers or are living in institutionalized care environments (citation concealed). therefore, little is understood about how older adults integrate multiple icts into their work, their family and friend relationships, and in their community lives. most of this literature also sees adoption as a simple “yes” or “no” process by which an ict is either adopted or not (citation concealed). domestication theory proposes that technology adoption is a complex process, by which icts are introduced, used (or rejected), are displayed, and come to develop meaning to users (silverstone, 1994). using domestication theory as a theoretical lens, the researcher sought to understand how older adults were using and integrating various forms of icts (including, but not limited to radio, television, telephone, cell phones, and computers) into all aspects of their lives. method using an interpretive interactionist method (denzin, 2001), the researcher examined the ict use of 17 members of the united states’ lucky few’s birth cohort (born 1935-1945) (carlson, 2008). a birth-cohort (commonly referred to as generations) based design (giele & elder, 1998) was chosen rather than age criteria to account for the fact that ict introduction is a historical event with dramatically different impacts for individuals depending upon their ages (and therefore life phase) (citation concealed). for the lucky few, radio and telephone use was common in their childhood, television was introduced during adolescence, and personal computers were introduced during their midto late-working careers. each of the 17 older adult participants was treated as a case. each case included 3 interviews with the older adult, observations of the older adult’s icts in their home and work (where applicable), and interviews with friends, family members and coworkers (where possible). each case represented roughly six to fourteen hours of interviews. these interviews explored a short life history of the older adult and ict use over their lifespan. interviews were transcribed, coded, and analyzed immediately following each interview, focusing on the meaning that icts held for the older adult. these meanings were brought to the following interview, which allowed the researcher to check the generated meaning of the icts with the older adult. results and discussion based upon the 17 cases of older adult ict users, a user typology emerged. this user typology suggests that users fall into one of five distinct types, each of which is unique in how they are introduced to, use, display, and come to assign meaning to icts. these five types include the enthusiast, the practicalist, the socializer, the traditionalist, and the guardian. for brevity, three of these user types are highlighted below. enthusiasts “love” their “fun” icts. enthusiasts are the most likely to be involved in highly technological careers and they enjoy discovering new ways to use their icts in all areas of their lives. many of their relationships focus on ict sharing and learning. they predominantly display icts in their home. practicalists see icts as “tools” for dedicated purposes in their work, family, and community lives. they place icts in function specific rooms, with computers located in offices and televisions placed in living rooms. guardians view all icts with “suspicion” as they believe all icts, if used incorrectly, allow individuals to exhibit negative human traits such as gluttony, selfishness, and laziness. they carefully self-regulate their own ict use and tend to “hide” all forms of icts in their homes. this user typology suggests that older adults of the lucky few birth cohort can be sorted into these five “user types,” with each of these types differing in the way they are introduced to, use, display, and come to assign meaning to icts. conclusion and future work the implications of the user typology presented in this paper are far-reaching. technological adoption among older adults is complex and rooted in their user type, such that any single ict can have broadly different meanings to a given set of older adults. take the example of a smartphone. enthusiasts, practicalists, and even some guardians may adopt a new smartphone, but each type will use it in a unique way. enthusiasts will immediately fully explore their new “fun” smartphone and practicalists will learn how to use the smartphone as a device for “work” to be productive (if applicable) and/or for “family” to stay in touch. guardians, who are much more likely to prefer a simple cell phone, will likely set strict limits on their smartphone use. this user typology has several implications, for both researchers and practitioners. for researchers, this is a call away from understanding older adult ict adoption as simple, but instead as a complex process. for practitioners, there is no single “older adult market” for ict devices or innovations, as very different aspects of icts appeal (or fail to appeal) to each of the user types. future questions remain to be studied, including if this user typology is consistent across various birth cohorts, if it is observed cross-culturally, and when and how these user types develop. references citation concealed for blind review. brabazon, t. (2005). from eleanor rigby to nannanet: the greying of the world wide web. first monday, 10(12). carlson, e. (2008). the lucky few: between the greatest generation and the baby boom new york: springer. denzin, n. k. (2001). interpretive interactionism (second ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage. giele, j. z., & elder, g. h., jr. (1998). life course research: development of a field. in j. z. giele & g. h. elder, jr. (eds.), methods of life course research: qualitative and quantitative approaches (pp. 5-27). thousand oaks, ca: sage. millward, p. (2003). the "grey digital divide": perception, exclusion and barriers of access to the internet for older people. first monday, 8(7). retrieved from http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue_8_7/millward/index.html silverstone, r. (1994). television and everyday life. new york: routledge. http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue_8_7/millward/index.html selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17 th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): birkland, j., quan-haase, a., communello, a., rosales, a., mulargia, s., fernández-ardèvol, m., quinn, k., & massanari, a. (2016, october 5-8). aging in a digital world. panel presented at aoir 2016: the 17 th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the seniors digital literacy paradox: measures of digital literacy in seniors anabel quan-haase western university introduction internet penetration rates continue to increase in north america and the adoption of social media sites is rapidly growing (duggan, et al., 2015). through interventions such as e-rate many of the gaps in internet use observed between social groups in the past have largely disappeared. nonetheless, the rate at which older generations are lagging behind continues to be a cause for concern. according to a 2013 pew report, 47% and 70% of adults and seniors have a broadband connection, respectively (smith, 2014). haight, quan-haase, and corbett (2014) report a similar trend in canada, where age continues to be a key predictor of internet access and level of use. evidence suggests that seniors lag behind in terms of their digital engagement and a key barrier to seniors utilizing the internet has been identified as their lack of digital literacy (broady, chan, & caputi, 2010). understanding the second digital divide in the context of aging is critical because users’ online skills enable them to engage with the internet in ways that are useful and meaningful to their specific needs (hargittai, 2002). in addition, digital literacy allows users to feel competent when online and take full advantage of the features and capabilities afforded by the technology. the present study contributes to the literature on the second digital divide by specifically examining seniors and their digital literacy. the study investigates how we can measure seniors’ digital literacy and what challenges are inherent in those kinds of measures. being able to evaluate a seniors’ digital literacy may be an important first step in helping them gain further experience and become more comfortable interacting with digital technology. research question how can we measure seniors’ digital literacy and what challenges exist? methodology we employed a mixed methods approach, collecting data via 23 surveys and 21 indepth interviews. this is a good approach, as it allowed us to triangulate data from different sources and also balance the strengths and weaknesses of various data collection approaches. all participants were recruited from southwestern ontario and represent a population that has a good familiarity with digital technology. the age range for participants was 61 to 84 (md = 68). the majority of participants were female (81%) and 9 participants were married, 5 widowed, 4 divorced, and 2 single. the survey was available either online or as a paper-and-pencil version to maximize participation by making different formats available. the survey included questions about computer and internet use and specifically examined seniors’ level of digital literacy based on a framework previously developed by hargittai and hsieh (2012). the survey data specifically helped to better understand seniors’ familiarity with various internetrelated terms, which we employ as a proxy for digital literacy (hargittai & hsieh, 2012). the ages of survey participants were between 60-84: 5 were between 60-64 years of age, 7 were between 65-69, 6 were 70-74, and 4 were between 80-84 years old. findings learning curve. for many seniors, digital literacy is difficult to achieve. this is often not directly linked to an unwillingness to learn, but rather to the notion that learning would take a lot of effort and constitute an enormous learning curve. some seniors in our interviews don’t shy away from taking on the challenge, but others engage in a careful cost-benefit analysis, and often realize that the cost is greater than the benefit: “i wonder about age. is it older people like me who are resistant to electronic media?” or it’s down for a number of hours and it’s panic. so i think…i just wonder about it. you know, that’s part of my age. i’m 82. so i think that’s part of it, you know, there’s a built-in resistance to, in a sense, think, “do i have time to do this?” is this how—what i want to do in how i spend my time? digital skills. there was a lot more variability in seniors’ understanding of the terms than we expected. a few seniors were fairly technology savvy and understood many of the terms, while others only were familiar with a few. terms we assumed most seniors would be familiar with were often not understood fully, but only somewhat. for instance, 8 seniors indicated understanding “advanced search”, while 15 only had some understanding or none. while we did not expect for seniors to be familiar with all the terms, it is clear that some terms are rather obscure for this population. for example, the majority did not know what the meaning is of such terms as rss, tagging, weblog, and phishing. table 1. digital skills of digital seniors. no understanding little understanding some understanding good understanding full understanding advanced search 1 3 11 4 4 bookmarks 2 2 5 8 6 favourites 1 0 5 11 5 firewall 3 1 7 6 3 jpg 6 4 2 8 3 malware 8 2 5 4 2 pdf 3 2 7 7 4 phishing 10 2 4 6 1 podcasting 7 4 5 5 1 preference setting 8 2 5 4 2 rss 16 3 3 1 0 spyware 8 3 5 3 2 tagging 13 4 2 3 1 weblog 13 2 6 2 0 wiki 10 5 3 4 1 challenges in measuring digital literacy in the senior population. seniors have a limited understanding of internet-related terms such as advanced search, phishing, and podcasting. seniors use technology for a specific set of activities such as sending an email or reading the news, and thus develop specialized skills around these activities. conclusions digital literacy is particularly complex because it can only be gained through experience, but seniors often lack the experience because they are afraid of trying the technology. we term this the senior digital literacy paradox and show in our paper how understanding this paradox is critical for the development of digital literacy programs geared specifically toward the senior population. through the lens of the senior digital literacy paradox it becomes evident that supporting seniors in their digital literacy is a complex endeavor that requires not only a focus on skills, but also on the cognitive and socio-emotional aspects of digital engagement (haight, et al., 2014; eshet-alkalai, 2004). references eshet-alkalai, y. (2004). digital literacy: a conceptual framework for survival skills in the digital era. journal of educational multimedia and hypermedia, 13(1), 93106. broady, t., chan, a., & caputi, p. (2010). comparison of older and younger adults’ attitudes towards and abilities with computers: implications for training and learning. british journal of educational technology, 41(3), 473–485. duggan, m., et al. (2015). social media update 2014. retrieved january 5, 2016, from http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/01/09/social-media-update-2014/ haight, m., quan-haase, a., & corbett, b. (2014). revisiting the digital divide in canada: the impact of demographic factors on access to the internet, level of online activity, and social networking site usage. information, communication & society, 17(4), 503–519. hargittai, e. (2002). second-level digital divide: differences in people’s online skills. first monday. http://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.5210%2ffm.v7i4.942 hargittai, e., & hsieh, y. p. (2012). succinct survey measures of web-use skills. social science computer review, 30(1), 95–107. http://doi.org/10.1177/0894439310397146 smith, a. (2014). older adults and technology use. pew research center, (april), 1– 26. http://doi.org/202.419.4500 selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17 th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): birkland, j., quan-haase, a., communello, a., rosales, a., mulargia, s., fernández-ardèvol, m., quinn, k., & massanari, a. (2016, october 5-8). aging in a digital world. panel presented at aoir 2016: the 17 th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. adoption is a question of interests. appropriation and domestication processes of smartwatches among adult and older adult users francesca communello lumsa university andrea rosales universitat oberta de catalunya simone mulargia sapienza university mireia fernández-ardèvol universitat oberta de catalunya introduction the goal of this paper is to explore the appropriation and domestication processes related to the adoption of smartwatches with a generational perspective, involving adults and older people in italy and spain. smartwatches have been a marketing trend in the last few months, but are still used by a minority of people (kantar, 2015); this allows to explore the adoption of a device that is perceived as ‘new’, requiring their users to elaborate expectations, social representations, usage strategies and norms. moreover, smartwatches, like other wearable technologies, represent powerful tools for integrating the online and the offline dimensions, with main regard to supporting users in everyday life practices (exercising, moving around their cities, etc.); with regard to older people, major attention can be devoted to health-related application (hearth-rate measuring, etc.). domestication processes of smartwatches: a generational perspective in our analysis, we rely on a theoretical framework that builds on the concept of domestication, as well as on a generational perspective on digital communication tools; moreover, we consider the ways in which social norms and usage practices are negotiated among users. more specifically, when analysing appropriation processes, sense-giving practices and usage patterns, the domestication framework focuses on different stages. first, the initial moment of ‘appropriation’, during which users negotiate the meanings of a ‘new’ technology (or device). second, the ‘incorporation’ stage, during which the new device is placed in users’ homes (or, in our case, between their homes and their very body). the third stage describes the ‘objectification’ processes, during which the device becomes a part of users’ everyday practices. finally, during the ‘conversion’ stage, users elaborate on the ways in which the new device is involved in their identity performances (silverstone and haddon, 1996; haddon, 2011). in this regard, we observe an interplay between device characteristics (which can be understood in terms of affordances and constraints, norman 2013), and user perceptions and social usage norms, that contribute to shaping individual usage practices. when each ‘new’ technology starts spreading, people develop specific media ideologies: ‘people’s beliefs about how a medium communicates and structures communication’ (gershon 2010, p. 21). users develop their idioms of practice (gershon 2010, p. 6) accordingly. idioms of practice are negotiated collectively (among users and often non-users), through ongoing processes that can also include misunderstandings between users; they are not universally shared, nor are they explicit. in building our framework, we adopt a generational approach, considering media platforms as ‘generational contexts’ (mannheim, 1952), and focusing on the ways in which media usage can contribute to the social construction of a ‘generational identity’ (colombo and fortunati, 2011). moreover, we are interested in exploring the ways in which the generational semantics (corsten, 1999) produced by both adult and older users interacts with the perception of the individual relation with the ‘new’ device (including usage goals and skills), as well with the related social expectations. exploring appropriation and domestication processes of smartwatches: our research in this paper our major focus is on individuals’ elaboration of expectations, social representations, usage strategies, and norms related to a digital device that is still in its infancy in terms of adoption (kantar, 2015) and already became popular (nagtegaal, 2015). in order to analyse the very first steps of device appropriation, we provided a smartwatch to individuals that were not using it when we started the research. more specifically, we provided an android smartwatch to 14 individuals: 10 older participants (65 to 80), 5 living in barcelona (catalonia, spain), 5 living in rome (italy); and 4 researchers of the project (37 to 44), 3 living in barcelona and 1 in rome. selection criteria for older individuals were: age (being 65+) smartphone usage (we recruited users that were actively using a smartwatch compatible android smartphone) gender (in each city, we recruited at least 2 women) we are aware that our own usage practices are biased by our role of researchers, but we believe that our experiences could anyway provide insights into the generational dimensions of appropriating and domesticating smartwatches. we established a one-year relationship with participants, gathering information mainly by means of: semi-structured interviews, every two months a monitoring app developed for the project, to track the activities of android smartwatches training sessions and focus groups every six months therefore, our analysis is based in two complementary dimensions: the discourses around the relationship with the smartwatch, and the tracked uses (and non-uses) of the device. more specifically, we explore the following main topics with a generational perspective: user expectations around smartwatches appropriation and domestication processes learning paths specific usage (and non-usage) patterns negotiations with friends and family about smartwatch usage in this paper we discuss partial results of an ongoing project. according to our preliminary analysis, expectations are influenced by technological trajectories; while older participants mostly base their expectations on the impact of previous “new” technologies in their everyday life, researchers mostly base them on what they have seen about smartwatches on the media. moreover, personal values and ideologies influence the perception of smartwatches; for both older adults and researchers, the smartwatch can be seen as an intrusion on private life, as a showcase of private life, as a ticket to socialize, or as a symbol of identity. these ambivalent perceptions depend more on personal values, and on relational networks, than on age. otherwise, technical difficulties are persistent in different ages; there is a clear learning curve as all participants use mainly the most basic tools and/or had technical problems in the initial setup or during the first days of use. finally, specific uses are related with personal interests; beyond time keeping and notification management, the nuanced use of the smartwatch depends on the already existing interests of each user. for instance, those who already used sports trackers on the smartphone use them on the smartwatch extensively. others enjoy it mostly by changing the style of the screen often, or by exploring new smartphone apps. in more general terms, we are observing a complex domestication process, that is taking place at the intersection of individual, social and technological dimensions. acknowledgement: this project is supported by xxx references colombo, f., and fortunati, l. (2011). broadband society and generational changes. frankfurt am main: peter lang. corsten, m. (1999). the time of generations. time and society 8(2), 249-272. gershon, i. (2010). the breakup 2.0. disconnecting over new media. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. haddon, l. (2011). domestication analysis, objects of study, and the centrality of technologies in everyday life. canadian journal of communication 36, 311-323. kantar (2015). smart watches: all in good time, retrieved from http://www.kantarworldpanel.com/global/news/us-smartwatch-market-notready-for-prime-time-yet mannheim, k. (1952). the problem of generation. in k. mannheim (ed.), essays on the sociology of knowledge (pp. 276-320). london: routledge. nagtegaal, f., verzijl, d., dervojeda, k., probst, l., frideres, l., and pedersen, b. (2015). internet of things. wearable technology, business innovation observatory. retrieved from http://ec.europa.eu/docsroom/documents/13394/attachments/3/ translations/en/ renditions/native norman, d., (2013). the design of everyday things: revised and expanded edition. new york, ny: basic books. silverstone, r., and haddon, l. (1996). design and the domestication of ict: technical change and everyday life. in r. silverstone and r. mansell (eds.), communication by design. the politics of information and communication technologies (pp. 44-74). oxford: oxford university press. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17 th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): birkland, j., quan-haase, a., communello, a., rosales, a., mulargia, s., fernández-ardèvol, m., quinn, k., & massanari, a. (2016, october 5-8). aging in a digital world. panel presented at aoir 2016: the 17 th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. no place for old men (and women): representations of older adult gamers in media kelly quinn university of illinois at chicago adrienne massanari university of illinois at chicago video games are an important source of activity for most adults, with approximately half of all adults engaging in some form of game play via consoles, computers, and mobile devices (duggan, 2015). contrary to popular images, older adults, or those over the age of 50 years, are also increasingly involved in video gaming. recent studies indicate that older adults represent more than a quarter of computer and console game playing population (esa, 2015) and that 40% of adults between the ages of 50 and 64, and 25% of adults over the age of 65 engage in regular video game play (duggan, 2015). at younger ages, women and men are equally as likely to engage in play, but over the age of 50, women are much more active players than men (duggan, 2015), especially when it comes to mobile and “casual” games. furthermore, research suggests that older adults who do play games, even minimally, are more likely to demonstrate signs of “successful aging,” showing lower levels of depression, and higher levels of well-being and self-reported health (allaire et al., 2013). these realities of older adult gaming are unlikely to be reflected in media coverage about games and their players, however, as the stereotype of the “gamer” as a young person remains prevalent (shaw, 2013). in general, media portrayals of aging and older adulthood generally often do not reflect the realities of daily living at older ages with accuracy. television characters underrepresent the gender, race, and ethnicities of the older adult population (kessler, rakoczy & staudinger, 2004). moreover, representations of the older adult experience tend to be polarized into positive and negative extremes (mchugh, 2003). at one end are overly negative representations, which tend to depict older adults as physically or cognitively debilitated, and/or helpless and infantilized (levy, chung, bedford & navrazhina, 2014). in contrast, print and television advertisements frequently ascribe older adults with overly positive attributes and traits, such as happiness and wealth (lee, carpenter & meyers, 2007), and suggest their lifestyles are active a health-filled, consisting of activities such as mountain hiking and beach walking (mchugh, 2003). this polarization in media representation of the aging adult experience (mchugh, 2003) creates obstacles for older adult participation in gaming. first, it permits selfstereotyping that implicitly may limit certain social certain behaviors, such as gaming, by older adults (cuddy & fiske, 2004). for example, media framing of games may suggest they are not targeted to older adults, and/or simply that games are merely instrumental to improving cognitive and physical abilities rather than something to be enjoyed. older adults may shy away from playing games because they do not see themselves as game players. likewise, stereotypes are mechanisms to reinforce in-group and out-group status, permitting those in the out-group to be judged as different from or unequal to those in the in-group, and marginalizing those that do not fit into the stereotype (rozanova, northcott & mcdaniel, 2006). further compounding this issue is that representation of older adults as characters and avatars in games are scant (williams, martins, consalvo & ivory, 2009). these stereotypes, of older adults as neither game players or the subject of game narratives is troubling, as video games have been important to bridging digital divides in the past, especially with respect to technology adoption between boys and girls (cassell & jenkins, 1998). so while it is possible that games might help bridge the technology gap between younger and older adults, who lag behind in internet use, broadband adoption, and online social networking (pew research center, 2014), media messages may preempt these opportunities. this study attempts to discover how are older adults are represented in mainstream media coverage about gaming. we employ a content analysis on five years of media coverage (2011-2016) of older adult game players in mainstream us print and online media outlets; these included the four major us newspapers, the new york times, usa today, the wall street journal, and the washington post, and the four leading news websites as ranked by pew research (2015), yahoo-abc news network, cnn network, nbc news digital, and huffingtonpost.com. in doing so, we attempt to highlight how media representations of older adult gamers both resist and reinforce prevailing stereotypes of seniors by reinforcing the trope of aging as debilitation in physical and cognitive functioning. references allaire, j.c., mclaughlin, a.c., trujillo, a., whitlock, l.a., laporte, l., & gandy, m. (2013). successful aging through digital games: socioemotional differences between older adult gamers and non-gamers. computers in human behavior, 29(4), 1302-1306. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2013.01.014 cassell, j. & jenkins, h. (1998). chess for girls? feminism and computer games. in j. cassell & h. jenkins (eds.), from barbie to mortal kombat: gender and computer games (pp. 2-45). cambridge, ma: mit press. cuddy, a.j. & fiske, s.t. (2004). doddering but dear: process, content, and function in stereotyping of older persons. in t. nelson (ed.), ageism: stereotyping and prejudice against older persons (pp. 3–26). cambridge, ma: mit press. duggan, m. (2015). gaming and gamers. washington, dc: pew research center. retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/12/15/gaming-and-gamers/ entertainment software association (esa). (2015, april). 2015 essential facts about the computer and video game industry. retrieved from http://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/esa-essential-facts2015.pdf kessler, e.m., rakoczy, k., & staudinger, u.m. (2004). the portrayal of older people in prime time television series: the match with gerontological evidence. ageing & society, 24(4), 531–552. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0144686x04002338 lee, m.m., carpenter, b. & meyers, l.s. (2007). representations of older adults in television advertisements. journal of aging studies, 21(1), 23–30. doi:10.1016/j.jaging.2006.04.001 levy, b.r., chung, p.h., bedford, t. & navrazhina, k. (2014). facebook as a site for negative age stereotypes. gerontologist, 54(2), 172–176. doi:10.1093/geront/gns194 mchugh, k.e. (2003). three faces of ageism: society, image and place. ageing and society, 23(2), 165–185. doi:10.1017/s0144686x02001113 pew research center. (2014). older adults and technology use. retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/files/2014/04/pip_seniors-and-tech-use_040314.pdf rozanova, j., northcott, h.c., & mcdaniel, s.a. (2006). seniors and portrayals of intragenerational and inter-generational inequality in the globe and mail journals. canadian journal on aging = la revue canadienne du vieillissement, 25(4), 373–386. doi:10.1353/cja.2007.0024 shaw, a. (2013). on not becoming gamers: moving beyond the constructed audience. ada: a journal of gender, new media, and technology, 1(2). available online: http://adanewmedia.org/2013/06/issue2-shaw/ williams, d., martins, n., consalvo, m., & ivory, j.d. (2009). the virtual census: representations of gender, race and age in video games. new media & society, 11(5), 815-834. available online: http://nms.sagepub.com/content/11/5/815.abstract http://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/esa-essential-facts-2015.pdf http://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/esa-essential-facts-2015.pdf http://www.pewinternet.org/files/2014/04/pip_seniors-and-tech-use_040314.pdf http://www.pewinternet.org/files/2014/04/pip_seniors-and-tech-use_040314.pdf http://www.pewinternet.org/files/2014/04/pip_seniors-and-tech-use_040314.pdf http://adanewmedia.org/2013/06/issue2-shaw/ http://adanewmedia.org/2013/06/issue2-shaw/ http://adanewmedia.org/2013/06/issue2-shaw/ http://nms.sagepub.com/content/11/5/815.abstract http://nms.sagepub.com/content/11/5/815.abstract http://nms.sagepub.com/content/11/5/815.abstract microsoft word imagining home away from home_elledgekwon_spir.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 imagining home away from home: wi-fi use in suburban coffehouses tracy l. elledge arizona state university k. hazel kwon arizona state university introduction along with exponential advances in mobile computing technologies, mobile devicebased internet use in western countries has skyrocketed, often referred to as the mainstreaming of “next generation users” (ngus) (blank & dutton, 2012), or as the “mobile revolution” (rainie & wellman, 2012). one of the more remarkable aspects of the mobile revolution is the societal shift from group-bound networks to dispersed connectivity, a gradual change that has been in motion since the mid-20th century (rainie & wellman, 2012). as wireless internet connectivity continues to gain popularity, (semi-) public spaces have started to reemerge as irreplaceable spheres wherein private-ness and public-ness can coexist. while some scholars have expressed concerns about privatizing public spaces, and the subsequent risk of losing community culture (hampton & gupta, 2008), others have highlighted the potential of public wi-fi in collocating individuals who might have otherwise decided to avoid public spaces (hampton, livio, & goulet, 2010). the current study is in line with existing scholarly endeavors to understand public realm practices within contemporary socio-digital environments. previous research has focused on downtown urban settings where exposure to the public realm is a natural part of a citizen’s everyday life (hampton & gupta, 2008; hampton et al., 2010). this paper extends prior discussions by exploring suburban areas where residents’ lives have been said to be particularly isolated from a sense of community and have also been said to experience a loss of social capital because of it (putnam, 2001). considering that coffeehouses have become one of the most common realizations of networked semi-public spaces, we conducted participatory observations and interviews at multiple coffee shops located across various suburbs of a major metropolitan area in the southwest. the goal of this study is two-fold: first, our study attempts to enrich the ongoing discussions about the use of wi-fi in semi-public spaces (i.e., coffeehouses) by categorizing different types of visitors. in doing so, we integrate the cultural discourse suggested citation (apa): elledge, t., & kwon, k. (2015, october 21-24) imagining home away from home: wi-fi use in suburban coffehouses. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. of home (oldenburg, 1989; wise, 2000) into the literature of networked individualism (wellman, quan-haase, boase, chen, hampton, diaz, & miyata, 2003). second, through a participatory study, we attempt to draw some insights on the role of wi-fi coffee shops in transforming the culture of public space in general, and of coffeehouses in particular. we also drew insights about redefining community life in suburban areas. before discussing the field observations and interviews, the paper begins by examining the evolving nature of home, community, and public spaces in suburban life, and how the progress of these places is much indebted to the evolution of communication technologies. literature background home anywhere “the first place is the home—the most important place of all” (oldenburg, 1989, 16). not long after oldenburg made this statement about the first place, a large part of what it meant to be at home was to enjoy the advantages each new wave of equipment brought to domestic life – such as refrigerators, dishwashers, dryers, and microwaves. although initially skeptical, families moved away from always pickling and salt-curing to utilize the fridge and microwave, moved away from trying to line-dry indoors during a storm to throwing wet clothes in the dryer. following this logic, lee (1999) asserts that continuous use of technologies creates a routine that incorporates those technologies into everyday experience of ‘being at home’. communication technologies are no exception the more accustomed users are to relying on technology as part of their daily communications routine, the more technological products are marketed as personcentered devices and services. this shift toward individuation generated a deeper move that drove device use specifically to the private realm (home) (graham & marvin, 1996), partially because the ability to operate technology at home was once predicated on the basic rule that all connections were wired. thus, consumers had to stay “physically rooted to fixed personal computers and internet connections at home, work, school, or public places” (wellman, et al., 2003, netville section, para. 6). while the original conceptualization of home was defined by physical fixation or bound location, a societal shift of dispersed connectivity has loosened the place-based notion of home. according to wise (2000), home is not a static location: “we mark out places in many ways to establish places of comfort” (p. 297) – for example, a way of indicating a space is temporarily claimed is throwing a coat over a chair to save a seat. conceptualizing home based on a feeling of comfort, as opposed to location, means the notion of home is applicable to any place a person feels comfortable (wise, 2000). the traditional idea of home is built on the separation of public and private life. while the widespread use of the internet via the personal computer has long been associated with the private home rather than a public space, many researchers have challenged the home-centric assumption when attempting to understand users’ internet experiences (hampton, lee, & her, 2011). being exposed to various environs while engaging in online activities, individuals experience messaging that is “ideologically divergent or absent from the intimate networks of the private realm” (hampton et al., 2010, 703). distinguished from private home use, connecting to the internet in a public space involves the interaction of three different realms – private, public, and global – at the moment of user engagement: online activity is an isolated act from collocated others, which is understood as an extension of the private realm; at the same time, the online activities are enacted with some degree of awareness of others’ presence, understood as an extension of the public realm; finally, online activities could embrace a variety of social networking and information consumption easily expanded to a global scale, which is understood as an extension of global realm (graham & marvin, 1996). as more individual users connect to online networks on an increasingly global scale, the line between public, private, and global blurs even more, which enhances the concept of “home anywhere.” since ties to a place no longer hamper connections made, technology allows for “shifting of work and community ties from linking people-in-places to linking people at any place” (wellman, et al., 2003, rise of networked individualism section, para. 4). rainie and wellman (2012) characterize “networked work” to be work culture in which productivity is assumed even though the employee is away from the office. indeed, it should come as no surprise that telework at home saw an upswing in the 1990s (graham & marvin, 1996), after the original division between work and home that the suburbs helped facilitate in the 1940s started to come together. while oldenburg (1989) stated that the first place is home and the second place is work, the line has been greatly blurred concurrent with the rise of “bit” workers and networked work culture (rainie & wellman, 2012). suburbs as technological advancements made it more profitable and effortless to work from home, the suburbs started to lose the distinct separation for which they were specifically created (henderson, 1986). suburbia is a space that researchers find difficult to define, but regardless of the different ways in which social scientists approach the issue, popular culture representations generally do not paint the ‘burbs’ in a positive light. in fact, suburbia has been called a “nightmare of isolation” (st. antoine, 2007, 128), “sterile, monotonous, illiberal, consumerist, bourgeois” and “villainous in every way”(jack, 2008, 37), “defined negatively as being neither urban nor rural” (vaughan, griffiths, haklay, & jones, 2009, 482), and a space that “led to a breakdown in community and the evisceration of the public space” (st. antoine, 2007, 128). there was even a television show called ‘suburgatory’ that implied suburban areas are a form of punishment or limbo for those souls unfortunate enough to end up there. the tagline for the show was “escape is not an option” (kapnek, 2011). foster (2012) commented on pop culture and the ‘burbs by stating that most forms of entertainment (film, stage, tv, etc.) constantly critique the suburban lifestyle. thankfully, although it may have been perceived negatively, the collective mind of the ‘suburban area’ continues to treat its ignoble history with a certain amount of selfdeprecation. thus, the suburbs manage to thrive, especially because of associations with creative high-tech industries in locations like silicon valley, california (vaughan, et al., 2009) and because of the fact that “the most ordinary of suburbs of most cities now act as hubs in the growing electronic cacophony of global image and media flows and the ongoing participation of people in virtual communities” (graham & marvin, 1996, 380). the suburb of even ten years ago is radically different than the suburb of today. flew, gibson, collis, and felton (2012) state that today’s suburbs are centers of work, and that researchers have started to move away from the widely agreed upon notion that the suburban lifestyle is one of consumption. they assert that suburbs have become their own entities that do not require the big city, because the people living outside of the city are increasingly likely to also work outside of the city – whether in the suburb of their residence, or simply another suburb nearby. the old idea that the suburbs are breeding grounds for “desperate housewives” or a culture of consumption is turned on its head as, “…many suburbs are themselves centres of work and industry” (flew et al., 2012, 200). if the suburbs are becoming self-contained extensions of an earlier existing city, then they are more than work or home (or a combination of the two) as they contain certain elements of lifestyle choice and leisure pursuits. in the context of changing suburban culture in the recent decade, the presence of networked public spaces may play its own unique role in enriching the aspect of community in suburb culture beyond the dichotomized realm of the first (home) or second (work) place. networked third place at the time oldenburg published the great good place, it was true that individuals spent the greatest portion of their time at home, followed by work, and whatever leftover time to be had was spent in a third place. “the third place is a generic designation for a great variety of public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals…” (oldenburg, 1989, p. 16). oldenburg (1989) also stated that the third place was “…the people’s own remedy for stress, loneliness, and alienation…” (p. 20). while work could be considered a gathering of individuals and a remedy for loneliness, and home can be considered a remedy to stress, neither of them can provide the opportunity to combine the private and the public in a way that does not upset societal norms. moreover, many researchers suggest that exposing oneself to many different opinions and perspectives beyond one’s comfort zone is beneficial to sustain democracy and political tolerance (eveland & hively, 2009; mutz, 2006). while technology and internet use are generally “associated with higher levels of participation in traditional settings that support the formation of diverse networks” (hampton, et al., 2011, 1035), it remains to be seen to what extent internet use in the third place contributes to exposure to different groups of others. oldenburg (1989) cites the coffeehouse as one of the more dynamic and transformative third places, and the background of this place supports a long history of sociability mixed with learning opportunities. for example, the rise of the internet used to result in cyber café phenomenon, which has been described as a resurrection of “the original notion of the coffee-house where people gathered to read newspapers, gossip and generally do what is now called networking’” (john naughton, as quoted in lee, 1999, 336). combining the support of a virtual network with the atmosphere of the coffeehouse is a modern way of finding a balance between life outside of the first and second place while maintaining the comfort of first place life and the mental engagement of the second. lee (1999) simplified the concept by stating, “the café environment makes internet use more of a social activity than a ‘gadget’ to indulge in at home” (p. 344). and, oldenburg (1989) rationalized merging the second and third places by commenting that, “many people keep regular hours at the coffeehouse and conduct a variety of business transactions on its premises” (p. 197). coffeehouse ambiance does not simply enhance social activities; it also allows visitors to use the wi-fi for leisure or telecommuting, thus enabling them to treat the shop as an extension of home. increased online activities at coffee shops may reflect scholarly concerns that wi-fi networks deteriorate public space culture through privatization and the loss of the habermasian “public sphere” (hampton et al., 2011). similarly, other concerns may arise regarding the disappearance of the serendipitous encounters that help society experience the world through varied perspectives, and open channels for novel opportunities (hampton et al., 2010), as was mentioned with regard to users spending too much time online in isolation. coffeehouses and community when discussing the coffeehouse as the quintessential third place, especially when the coffeehouse is in the suburbs, it is imperative to consider its function as a buttress to the community. “in order for the city and its neighborhoods to offer the rich and varied association that is their promise and their potential, there must be neutral ground upon which people may gather” (oldenburg, 1989, 22). oldenburg was speaking of the third place, and was also speaking to the generally agreed-upon notion that it is important to have a life outside of the home and the workplace. even though the home can act as a gathering place, someone always has to be in charge. often, the host is managing their own stress even as they strive to enjoy the atmosphere of their gathering. since work is supposed to be focused on the bottom line and accomplishing tasks, even though people may gather there, a hierarchy exists that would not allow for a feeling of complete ease. wellman et al. (2003) said that a community consists partly of people who know each other who choose to interact socially. the full definition of what they term a ‘neighborhood community’ is a “bounded geographical area in which many of the residents know each other” (rethinking sociability section, para. 1). third places offer the ideal space to maintain and expand community. hampton et al. (2011) uphold that notion by agreeing “public spaces are where existing social ties are maintained, but occasionally they are also a source of serendipity—chance encounters with acquaintances or potential new friends” (hampton, et al., 2011, 1034). interestingly enough, mesch and levanon (2003) argue that utilizing “a local geographically-based computer-supported network” will more likely create ties than “a geographically-dispersed virtual community” (p. 337). while coffee shops in neighborhood may be an integrated part of the community in the same way a favorite bar may create a feeling of neighborliness among the regulars, they also provide a space for efficient, brief encounters that can be imperative for fostering community interactions. given their potential role as a part of vibrant community life, thriving coffeehouses are an important element for sustaining a lively suburb society. as oldenburg (1989) pointed out, one way to ensure coffeehouse prosperity is to keep them current to the times. in the contemporary networked environment, the vogue is technological, and offering free wi-fi is an essential part of keeping the place up-todate. as hampton et al. (2010) suggest, free wi-fi access “may reshape the public realm. because of its location, it may revitalize, repopulate, and improve safety of public spaces. because of the electronic connectivity it offers, it may reduce social inequalities and increase the use of public spaces” (hampton, et al., 2010, 701-2). in other words, the more time people spend out in the public arena – due in part to free wi-fi – the more opportunities exist for imagining a community among the visitors. it is a unique space where visitors are allowed and often encouraged to form new connections with strangers (e.g. baristas or regulars), while at the same time networking with strangers in the virtual realm accessed via wi-fi (antoci, sabatini, & sodini, 2014). in summary, despite becoming highly commercialized and causing some concerns about privatization, coffee places may be reimagined as an additional source of community life. the homey atmosphere developed through interior design, musical arrangement, and mobile connectivity makes co-presence among strangers more relaxing and comfortable. coffeehouses offer a particularly singular space for efficient and brief gatherings, which are often facilitated by free wi-fi. the attractive combination of home, workplace, public place, and global reach is a unique characteristic of contemporary coffeehouses as a third place, which could re-invite suburban residents, once lamented to be isolated from each other, back to networked community life. research design this study attempts to expand the aforementioned literature about networked community, cultural notion of home, and the role of wi-fi in third place, by specifically highlighting the role of coffeehouses in suburban communities. our field study was intended to respond to the research questions: (1) how does wi-fi motivate and construct patrons’ social activity patterns in suburban coffeehouses? (2) what kind of cultural properties are emergent from patrons’ activities in suburban coffeehouses? the observations were conducted in 20 different starbucks coffeehouses located in the various suburbs around a large city in the southwest. the sites were selected because of their suburban locations, and because starbucks shops provide a measure of uniformity and proliferation. in february and march 2015, four different main observers and two researchers conducted 63 separate visits for a total of 132 hours of observation. the main foci of observation: (1) visitors using mobile devices; (2) social interaction patterns; and (3) visitors’ behavioral patterns and seating. the first 54 hours of visits – made by researchers and observers – only required field notes about the patrons’ movements and device use. after the observations at 20 different shops, we narrowed the focus to four sites representative of different suburbs of the larger metropolitan area. at the start of each of the subsequent 78 hours, the observer would draw a map of the location, noting the location of each patron, whether they were using a mobile device, and whether they were alone or with others. main observers also conducted 20 separate recorded field interviews, each lasting between 15-20 minutes, during their visits. the interviewees were asked a series of questions about their personal experiences of device use in coffee shops, their general routine, their opinions about free wi-fi, and how they would construct their own ideal coffee shop. they were rewarded with a $10 starbucks card. observers also kept a field diary for each hourly session to record experiences, thoughts and insights, as well as their personal opinions of the people they interviewed. on a weekly basis, a one-totwo hour meeting was held among the observers and researchers to discuss their findings and thoughts, relate interesting incidents, and listen to the interviews together. results notes on observed interaction patterns to make sure to cover different times and days, we initially spread out the observation time slots. in total, 54 hours of observation were made during morning hours (between 5am and noon), 40 hours during afternoon hours (between noon and 5pm), and 38 hours during evening/night (from 5pm before 10:30 pm). table 1 presents the time distribution. table 1. observation times (total hours = 132) time sun mon tue wed thu fri sat 5:00 am 1 1 4 6:00 am 1 2 4 7:00 am 2 2 4 1 8:00 am 1 2 1 2 1 9:00 am 2 3 2 1 2 2 10:00 am 2 2 2 2 11:00 am 1 2 1 1 12:00 pm 2 1 1 1:00 pm 1 1 1 1 2 2:00 pm 1 1 2 1 2 3:00 pm 1 1 1 2 2 4:00 pm 11 2 1 2 5:00 pm 2 2 2 6:00 pm 2 1 2 1 2 7:00 pm 3 2 1 2 1 3 8:00 pm 4 1 3 9:00 pm 1 1 1 10:00 pm 1 total hours 12 16 34 31 6 18 15 in addition to recording time slots, we also mapped user interactions and seating patterns for 78 hours. not surprisingly, the most frequently observed seating and activity pattern was a single user using at least one mobile device (n = 354). however, dyadic interactions were as commonly observed as a single user sitting at a café (n = 376 in 188 pairs). there were 168 visitors observed interacting in a triad or bigger interaction form (45 groups). the least frequently observed pattern was a single person sitting without using any mobile device (n =56). this last pattern was mostly found to include an elderly person reading a book or a newspaper. figure 1 presents different interaction patters we have observed in coffeehouses. figure 1. interaction patterns observed for 78 hours in coffeehouses: light face = non-mobile users at the moment of observation; dark face = mobile users at the moment of observation. visitor typology from the observations, interviews, and discussions, we drew five categories of visitor that stood out in the end: motivated users, motivated non-users, passive visitors (also referred to as “bubble people”), spectators/bystanders, and obnoxious overusers. the labels are not mutually exclusive, although certain categories cannot be paired with others – for example, it is impossible to be passive and obnoxious at the same time. motivated user the motivated user was labeled as such because they came to the coffeehouse for a specific purpose (other than coffee), and knew they would be using a device while they were there. the motivated user has a meeting that requires device use, is meeting in a study group with online components, is working on a device by alone for more than an hour, and may potentially use more than one device. this was the second most common type of coffeehouse visitor. these people were students, business people, or highly connected people not using the free wi-fi for work or school – and the internet was more to them than just a distraction to kill time. one observer stated that these people often seemed to be in an “invisible cubicle” either in the style of an office, or a study carrel in the library. the watchword of the motivated user is “productivity.” interviewees who commented on this type of use (or were this type of user) often said that trying to work at home is “too distracting” and that being at the coffee shop is “energizing” because there are people working all around you, and the invigorating smell of coffee helps with focus and “makes studying more efficient.” the coffee shop also helps the user feel more comfortable meeting in a group to get work done because noise is not a factor, and no one has to feel uncomfortable hosting everyone else at a private home. informal, quick interviews revealed that many visitors fell into this category because the coffeehouse is “a place to come and relax and use wi-fi away from home.” motivated non-user a motivated non-user is someone who has a reason for being at the coffee shop (e.g. a meeting, caffeine addiction), but does not use a mobile device while they are there. that is not to say that do not have other distractions, such as a book or newspaper, but they do not get on a device. many motivated users are at the starbucks to get together with a friend, or attend a meeting. older people were mentioned most often in regard to this category, as many go there as a part of their daily routine – read the paper, catch up with friends, even meet for bible study. younger people are the least likely demographic to end up in this category, but do occasionally if they are meeting someone and do not check their phone. the motivated non-users seemed to gravitate to the “comfy chairs” as proximity to a plug was not a concern. a single motivated non-user does not have to rely on a device, as one observer witnessed a woman dumping out her purse and sorting the mail from the trash. the woman then brought out a calculator and proceeded to pay her bills, effectively blurring the line between the private and the public. passive visitor (bubble person) passive visitors were the most common type of patron, and could be users or nonusers. the moniker “bubble person” comes from hampton et al. (2010), “mobile bubbles of private and parochial interaction within the public realm erase or significantly curtail the potential for interaction between strangers and mobile users” (p. 705). this is probably why many observers characterized passive users as being “in the zone” or “shut off from any interaction.” passive users also use their device as a shield so they do not have to interact with others, such as when a person pulls out their phone and looks to be texting while they’re waiting in line or to pick up their drink. passive non-users will use some other form of device shield such as a newspaper. device “shields, behind which individuals can safely do the kind of things that ordinarily result in negative sanctions” (goffman, 1963, 39), come into play when people would rather not interact with those around them. lee (2005) asserts that “people compensate for being alone and feeling vulnerable in these situations by using self-defense mechanisms to justify their singular presence in public spaces” (lee, 2005, 813). one observer was the second visitor to arrive at the coffeehouse one morning, and the only other person in the place did not acknowledge that anything had changed, “i don’t even think he realized i walked in and sat.” observers also noted that people tended to choose seats that were a table apart from others (if such seats were free), and would spread themselves out over the table to claim the space as their temporary home. an interviewee commented that the free wi-fi would cause more isolation, but that if a person wanted to talk, they’d talk and if they didn’t, they wouldn’t. spectator/bystander spectator/bystanders did not have a reason to go in to the coffee shop – maybe a parent or a friend wanted a coffee, or maybe they’re just waiting to meet a friend out front. the biggest part of this category is that these people do not feel the need to use a mobile device as a shield against the public at large. these visitors are content to people-watch and generally don’t want to get involved. obnoxious overuser both the interviewees and the observers had a lot to say about this type of visitor. this is the person with no regard or respect for others, and treats the whole world like their private home. they can be loud, apathetic, and completely inconsiderate. “it’s the worst when you’re sitting down with someone and they’re glued to their phone.” one interviewee lamented, “kids today….gets me in a tizzy!” she’s referring to when people are in a twosome or group, but one or more of them is constantly checking their phone. one observer saw a man conduct a videoconference over skype with flagrant disregard for the other visitors – he treated the shop like his own closed-door office. many times, obnoxious overusers irritate others by using their phone. one observer reported that a woman was on her phone (with no consideration for volume), and almost as soon as the call ended, she would be on the phone with someone else, and “she didn’t seem to mind that she was being rude to the people around her.” another problem that came up more than once was when someone would stay on their phone while they were ordering. observers reported that both baristas and other visitors were visibly annoyed when these people came through the line. volume is not the only problem with obnoxious observers, as many of them suffer from chronic distraction as well. for example, people would be so focused on their phone or device on their way into the shop they would run into people in line. one last example of an obnoxious overuser stood out above all others. a woman had her device, her phone, and a portable printer. she was not overly loud, but she was certainly distracting. emergent properties of shared place wi-fi as an inherent element of the coffeehouse experience “in the era of its reign, which some set at two hundred years, or from 1650 to 1850, the coffeehouse was often referred to as the penny university” (oldenburg, 1989, 185). for a long time, traditional english coffeehouses were places of enlightenment where rank did not matter, and everyone was free to learn and debate and speak freely. laborers and dockworkers could learn how to read, and everyone was interested in the latest edition of the local news. it seems as though coffee shops like starbucks are attempting to recapture that feeling of learning, albeit in a much more modern way. the observers saw people come in to the stop for the sole purpose of using the free wi-fi, and among these people, most of them were students. the norm of the traditional educational coffeehouse lives on in current shops. when attempting to identify norms in the modern coffeehouse, the observer must view things with the understanding that the visitors will come into the situation with an ideal version of the shop in their head. when asked to describe their own idea of a perfect coffee shop, almost all interviewees’ first answer was free wi-fi. and, most of them were of the same opinion as schmidt and townsend (2003): “…providing wireless connectivity is so inexpensive that charging for access is as counterintuitive as installing a pay phone in your kitchen” (the impact of the free wireless movement section, para. 1). emergent norms as an amalgam of first, second and third place outside of wi-fi, the coffeehouse is an amalgam of the first, second and third place. during an observer’s early morning visits, it was noted that people were bringing their own breakfasts from home to enjoy with their coffee. “in a way the coffee shop acts like a kitchen table; it is a place to eat breakfast, yet it doubles as a workstation.” this observer brought up the very valid point that many people eat their breakfasts at their desks at work, making this statement a perfect example of the merging of the different types of places. a secondary observer struck up a conversation with another patron and ended up making a networking connection with a line on a potential job after graduation. this situation ties an original purpose of the coffeehouse – networking – to the idea of the coffee shop as a second place. time of day brought another round of norms into the discussion, as it was more natural for older patrons to frequent the shop in the morning, and younger visitors to come later in the day. volume also depended on time of day, as observers reported loud music sometimes and “library silence” in others. another norm is built upon layout and seating. many observers noted that people tended to spread out as much as the space allowed, trying to sit at least a table away from other visitors – “the tables the visitors sat at may as well have been islands in the middle of the ocean.” the one exception to this was when motivated non-users, spectators/bystanders, or bubble people would come in. often, they would select the more comfortable seating grouped into conversation arrangements. trust in place “…users of new technologies alter customary social distances among citizens. to manage the anxieties that result from these shifts, they must invent new conventions of social trust appropriate to these new technologies” (lee, 2005, 811). many of the interviewees, as well as the observers, made the comparison of urban vs. suburban coffeehouses. one observer remarked that if they were in a different location (an urban location), they would not be able to trust the patrons at the same level they do in the suburbs. all of the observers noticed patrons leaving high-end devices unattended while they stepped out to the restroom or their car. occasionally, they would ask a fellow visitor to watch their things, but either way, they had to trust that their things would be there when they got back. observers and interviewees agreed that the trust they felt in the suburban coffeehouses would not translate to an urban setting. revitalizing a sense of neighborliness the most important role the coffeehouse can play in today’s world seems to be that of community-builder. the suburbs have a long history of being looked down upon even as they become more self-sufficient communities that are less reliant on the “big city.” throughout the data-collecting phase, the observers noted example after example of people coming together in serendipitous ways. an observer noticed an older couple struggling to perform a function on one of their phones. the observer stepped in and showed the couple how to accomplish a few simple tasks, and spent a few minutes getting to know the couple. another observer wrote of an older man that made it a point to say hello to everyone in the shop, with a few personalized phrases to the regulars he recognized. as one interviewee said, coffee shops seem to play a unique role in community life: “honestly, i can’t think of any (public gathering place similar to coffeehouses)”. in another example, a customer was heard asking the baristas their opinion on what college her son should attend. the observer stated that the customer seemed “like an aunt figure to the young baristas.” the lady also said that she was proud of the baristas and told them to “keep up the good work.” the last example of community building through suburban coffeehouses speaks to the chance encounters one might miss if they don’t leave their first or second place. one of the observers spoke with a group of people they assumed worked together because they were all in business attire, and seemed to know one another really well. it turns out, they had all been visiting the starbucks at the same time and finally decided to introduce themselves. now, they make it a point to meet up and discuss their lives, ask advice about work, and enjoy one another’s company for a while. the use of mobile device actually facilitated their socializing activities. all of these examples establish a positive relationship between the suburb and the coffeehouse. conclusion although the project began as a seemingly simple observation-based piece of research, it ended up as a glimpse into a cross-section of life in the suburbs, and a deeper study of the nature of community and connectivity. the coffeehouse has become one of the only places where people can feel the comfort of home, the productive atmosphere of work, and the social opportunities of the third place. wi-fi was a unifying component – no matter which suburb the observer was in, no interviewees would make do without free wi-fi, and most spoke of wi-fi as an absolute – there is no feasible reason for shops to not offer a connection. thus far, things seem to be holding at equilibrium despite researchers’ fears that community culture would be lost, or that public spaces would become even more privatized. coffeehouses have evolved into hubs that are so much more than local watering holes. far from creating a community of isolation, coffee shops are getting people out of the house and into the real world. references antoci, a., sabatini, f., & sodini, m. (2014). bowling alone but tweeting together: the evolution of human interaction in the social networking era. quality & quantity, 48(4), 1911-1927. blank, g., & dutton, w. h. (2012). age and trust in the internet: the centrality of experience and attitudes toward technology in britain. social science computer review, 30(2), 135-151. eveland, w. p., & hively, m. h. (2009). political discussion frequency, network size, and “heterogeneity” of discussion as predictors of political knowledge and participation. journal of communication, 59(2), 205-224. flew, t., gibson, m., collis, c., & felton, e. (2012). creative suburbia: cultural research and suburban geographies. international journal of cultural studies, 15(3), 199-203. foster, d.w. (2012). erma bombeck: the phoenix suburban underbelly. the journal of popular culture, 45(1), 27-40. goffman, e. (1963). behavior in public places: notes on the social organization of gatherings. new york: free press. graham, s., & marvin, s. (1996). telecommunications and the city: electronic spaces, urban places. new york: routledge. hampton, k.n., & gupta, n. (2008). community and social interaction in the wireless city: wi-fi use in public and semi-public spaces. new media & society, 10(6), 831-850. hampton, k.n., lee, c., & her, e.j. (2011). how new media affords network diversity: direct and mediated access to social capital through participation in local social settings. new media & society, 13(7), 1031-1049. hampton, k.n., livio, o., & goulet, l.s. (2010). the social life of wireless urban spaces: internet use, social networks, and the public realm. journal of communication, 60, 701-722. henderson, k. (1986, may 4). tracing the genesis of suburbia. los angeles times, 20. humphreys, l. (2005). cellphones in public: social interactions in a wireless era. new media & society, 7(6), 810-833. jack, i. (2008, december 20). we are all suburban now: in popular culture the suburbs are always somewhere we long to escape from. not true. the guardian, 37. kapnek, e. (creator). (2011). suburgatory [television series]. burbank, ca: american broadcasting company. lee, s. (1999). private uses in public spaces: a study of an internet café. new media & society, 1(3), 331-350. mesch, g.s., & levanon, y. (2003). community networking and locally-based social ties in two suburban localities. city & community, 2(4), 335-351. mutz, d. c. (2006). hearing the other side: deliberative versus participatory democracy. cambridge university press. oldenburg, r. (1989). the great good place. new york: paragon house. putnam, r.d. (2001). bowling alone: the collapse and revival of american community. new york: simon & schuster. rainie, h., & wellman, b. (2012). networked: the new social operating system. cambridge, ma: mit press. schmidt, t., & townsend, a. (2003). why wi-fi wants to be free. communications of the acm, 46(5), 47-52. st. antoine, t.j. (2007). making heaven out of hell: new urbanism and the refutation of suburban spaces. southern communication journal, 72(2), 127-144. vaughan, l., griffiths, s., haklay, m., & jones, c.e. (2009). do the suburbs exist? discovering complexity and specificity in suburban built form. transactions of the institute of british geographers, 34, 475-488. wellman, b., quan-haase, a., boase, j., chen, w., hampton, k., diaz, i., & miyata, k. (2003). the social affordances of the internet for networked individualism. journal of computer-mediated communication, 8(3). wise, j.m. (2000). home: territory and identity. cultural studies, 14(2), 295-310. microsoft word 786-535-1-pb.docx selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 methodological challenges for studying cross-platform conversations ylva hård af segerstad dept. of applied it, university of gothenburg sweden hardy@ituniv.se alexandra weilenmann dept. of applied it, university of gothenburg sweden alexandra.weilenmann@ituniv.se abstract during the last decade, the multimedia landscape has evolved in several ways, calling for a reconsideration of methodologies for studying mobile communication. understanding mobile communication no longer entails focusing on either voice or text in isolation; rather we need to study how all aspects of mobile communication together make up a continuous conversation of intertwined messaging. people use a multitude of channels and platforms in their multi-media conversation. however, there are both ethical and technical challenges of studying evolving cross-platform conversation. in this talk, we address a few ethical and technological challenges involved in trying to capture a wider picture of the evolving cross-platform conversation. keywords mobile communication; cross-platform; continuous conversation; methodology; data collection. introduction information and communication technologies, and particularly mobile technologies are becoming increasingly important in people’s lives today. in sweden, where we are performing our research, 97% of the population owns a mobile phone, most of whom use it for private purposes (96%) (falck, 2012). today’s internet connected mobile devices are ‘technologies of sociability’ (thurlow, 2003), incorporating ever more of the functions that computers have today, and the inherent mobility allows us to be ‘always on’ (baron, 2008) and in ‘perpetual contact’ with each other (katz & aakhus, 2002). mobile technology is changing the conditions of communication and interaction and provides new, mobile arenas for information access and socialization, which affects language use as well as usage patterns. mobile communication has been studied from many different perspectives in the last decade. in general, these studies have mostly relied on large-scale statistical studies (e.g. ling et al., 2011), selfreports or logs of communication patterns (raento et al., 2009). these methods have been criticized for ignoring the content of the actual communication (boase & ling 2011). one of the possible reasons that so few studies have used natural conversations is that it has been technically and ethically difficult to collect data. researchers in sociology or linguistics have often lacked the technological expertise required to make such data collections. this has forced many researchers to make a choice between studying either text or talk, or to analyze communication logs. currently, few studies have been made of the integrated aspects of mobile communication. there are a handful of studies of mobile phone calls, based on naturally occurring conversations (laurier, 2001; weilenmann, 2003; arminen, 2005; arminen & weilenmann, 2008; hutchby & barnett, 2005), and a few studies of the sequential organization of text messaging (laursen, 2006; 2012; spagnolli & gamberini, 2007; hutchby & tanna, 2008). a decade ago, it was natural to study one or the other channel possible in mobile communication. for instance, there have been studies focusing on spoken mobile phone communication (e.g. arminen & selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 weilenmann, 2009,), and on text-based mobile phone communication (hård af segerstad 2002; 2005a; 2005b). however, these two aspects of mobile communication in isolation far from covers what is going on in the continuous conversations in which many of us engage daily, often across platforms, involving text, talk and multimedia. to get a more complex picture of mobile communication, we need to study how all aspects of mobile conversation together make up a continuous conversation of intertwined messaging. the media landscape has changed profoundly the last few years, forcing internet researchers to adapt. people use a multitude of channels and platforms for communication these days, including everything from basic mobile phone affordances of voice calls and text messages, to interaction through facebook and instagram, skype and face time. this is a form of cross-platform conversation (weilenmann et al. 2013), where threads in an ongoing conversation might be started in one channel to be picked up and continued in another, commented on in yet another, using voice, text, photos and videos, links, ‘likes’ etc. these days, it seems rather more relevant to look into the units of analysis in this evolving multimedia conversation, how a continuous conversation is interconnected and maintained, what items make up this stream of communication and how users manage and make meaning of the multitude of communication opportunities. choosing perspective – from big data to micro studies studying multi-platform mobile communication involves choosing the perspective or scope of investigation. one of our perspectives is to collect data of users continuous, everyday conversation across multiple platforms. the data categories comprise audio (voice calls), text (text messages, status updates and comments), visual material (photos, videos), links and “likes”, etc. the material can be stored and visualized in a corpus. here we have the potential to, with relatively low effort once the system is up and running, to collect a large corpus. however, it might be difficult to keep the sequencing and linking the material to specific users in such a corpus, thereby losing some of the context. another perspective is to study users more in-depth, for example by ethnographic observations and interviews. this would allow us to get a more comprehensive picture of the use of these services in the context that they occur. these studies would shed light on the data collected in the corpus, contextualizing that material. however, there are both ethical and technical challenges of studying evolving cross-platform conversation. these issues will be discussed below. technological and ethical challenges the challenges involved in collecting data of cross-platform conversations are both technological and ethical. sometimes technology allows us to capture “too much” information, and we also need to handle information that is collected as a bi-product of the material we are aiming to gather. to illustrate this, we can briefly mention a pilot study that we undertook during 2012. in this small study, we gathered audio recordings of mobile phone voice calls and logs of text messages by installing software on mobile phones that the research subjects in the project used. this software allows for audio recording of both sides of voice calls as well as logging text messages. during the pilot study we used and evaluated two different applications for data collection on smartphones (killer mobile software llc and mobistealth). the software we used, did not only collect the audio and text data from our subjects’ conversation that we intended. it also gathered unwanted information such as the phones gps position, web browsing history, contacts, photos and videos etc. even though this fact was openly discussed with the subjects in the pilot study as an ethical and methodological problem, it posed a delicate ethical dilemma and made clear that ethical practices are lagging behind what is possible to do in technological terms. all gathered material was accessible to us as it was selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 automatically uploaded to our password-protected accounts on servers of the system providers. apart from being uploaded in this rather dubious way, as the material was potentially vulnerable both to the scrutiny of others and for the data to vanish, the software was also unreliable by not working smoothly at all times, e.g. by sometimes recording only one side of the conversation, and missing some logs of text messages. the quality of recordings was also unreliable. conclusions – allowing for new perspectives on cross-platform conversations moving onwards and forwards, and learning from difficulties and flaws in previous studies, we have to meet the ethical and technological challenges in trying to capture a wider picture of the evolving cross-platform conversation. in order to gather the data we require for the study, and only the data we require, and to keep control of both ethical issues and the data itself, we have to develop a tailor-made application for data collection. furthermore, we also have to adapt existing corpus methods to make the multimodal material searchable and possible to visualize in both chronological and (a)synchronous fashion. we are currently in the process of developing an application, which will collect data from cross-platform communication, capturing the data we want while at the same time adhering to ethical principles for internet research. references arminen, i., (2005/2006). social functions of location in mobile telephony. personal and ubiquitous computing 10 (5), 319–323. arminen, i. & weilenmann, (2008). mobile presence and intimacy: reshaping social actions in mobile contextual configuration. in journal of pragmatics, special issue on communicating space and place, elsevier. arminen, i & leinonen, m. (2006). mobile phone call openings—tailoring answers to personalized summons. discourse studies 8 (3), 339–368. baron, n. s. (2008). always on: language in an online and mobile world. new york: oxford university press. boase, j. & ling, r. (2011). measuring mobile phone use: self-report versus log data. paper presented at the annual meeting of the international communication association, tba, boston, ma, may 25, 2011. falck, c. (2012). rapport. svenskarnas användning av telefoni & internet 2011. individundersökning 2011. projektnummer 1522079. tns sifo. hutchby, i. & barnett, s. (2005). aspects of the sequential organization of mobile phone conversation. discourse studies 8 (2), 147-171. hutchby, i. & tanna, vanita. (2008). aspects of sequential organization in text message exchange. discourse & communication, vol. 2: 143. hård af segerstad, y. (2002). use and adaptation of written language to the conditions of computer-mediated communication. doctoral dissertation. dept. of linguistics. university of gothenburg. hård af segerstad, y. (2005a). language in sms – a socio-linguistic view. in harper, r., palen, l. & taylor, a. (eds.), the inside text. social, cultural and design perspectives on sms. kluwer academic publishers bv, dordrecht. hård af segerstad, y. (2005b). language use in swedish mobile text messages. in ling, r. och pedersen, p. (eds.). front stage-back stage: mobile communication and the renegotiation of the social sphere. kluwer academic publishers bv, dordrecht. katz, j.e. & aakhus, m. (eds.). (2002). perpetual contact: mobile communication, private talk, public performance. cambridge university press, cambridge. laursen, d. (2006). det mobile samtalerum unges kommunikationog samværsformer via mobilteltelefon, ph.d. thesis, university of southern denmark. laursen, d. (2012). sequential organisation of text messages and mobile phone calls in interconnected communication sequences. discourse & communication, vol. 6, no. 1, 2012, p. 83-99. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 laurier, e., (2001). why people say where they are during mobile phone calls. environment and planning d: society & space 485-504. ling, r., bertel, t. f. & sundsøy, p.r. (2011). the socio-demographics of texting: an analysis of traffic data new media & society, november 11, 2011. raento, m., oulasvirta, a., & eagle, n. (2009). smartphones: an emerging tool for social scientists. sociological methods and research, 37 (2), 426-454. spagnolli, a. & gamberini, l. (2007). interacting via sms: practices of social closeness and reciprocation. british journal of social psychology, 46, 343–364 thurlow, c. (2003). generation txt? the sociolinguistics of young people's text-messaging. discourse analysis online, 1 (1). weilenmann, a. (2003). ”i can’t talk now, i’m in a fitting room”: availability and location in mobile phone conversations, environment and planning a, special issue on mobile technologies and space, (ed) e. laurier, vol. 35 (9), 1589 – 1605, pion ltd. weilenmann, a. & larsson, (2002). “local use and sharing of mobile phones”, in wireless world: social and interactional aspects of the mobile age. eds. b brown, n green, r harper (springer verlag: london) pp 92-107. weilenmann, a., hillman, t. & jungselius, b. (2013). instagram at the museum: communicating the museum experience through social photo sharing. proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems, paris: acm press. microsoft word ir16-template-final.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 sick girls: gender, disability, and cyborg hoaxes elizabeth elicessor indiana university the story, told and retold, has become an academic urban legend. its outline is as follows: a male psychiatrist, alex, entered online spaces under an assumed identity as a woman with a disability, “joan,”1 described by sherry turkle as “severely handicapped and disfigured,” and unable therefore to leave the house or meet people in person,2 and by jodi o'brien as having damaged “speech and motor coordination.”3 “joan” conversed with and gained the trust of many women, offered therapy, and engaged in cybersex or set up dates between these women and her “friend” alex. eventually, the strain of passing under an assumed identity became too much for alex, who decided to kill “joan.” when he posted that she was ill, those who befriended her attempted to contact hospitals and send their condolences, only to find that she did not exist. those who considered joan a friend experienced shock, betrayal and outrage at the deception. as an urban legend—always a moralizing genre—the lesson is clear. we must be wary of the truthfulness of those we encounter online, as they may easily be deceptive. although many internet scholars took up the case of “joan” in relation to gender, sexuality, postmodern identity and online disembodiment, analysis of the place of disability was sorely lacking.4 this cyborg hoax—linking embodiment, gender, technology, representation, emotion, and data—was equally indebted to ideologies of ability that figure disability as deficit to be “cured” through technology or other interventions. gerard goggin and christopher newell refer to a “lacuna” within internet studies where disability is concerned5; this paper combines a critical review of internet studies literature featuring “joan” with theories of normalcy drawn from disability studies and with contemporary cases of gender and disability deception. ultimately, i argue that disability may be used as a category of critical analysis through which it is possible to resist the normalizing pressures of new media interfaces and structures, and to theorize new media in its variable configurations rather than through generalities. disability studies has as its mission the politicized revelation of the ways in which a normative, able body is used as a default basis for various forms of social, cultural, and material interaction. gender and disability theorist rosemarie garland-thomson suggested citation (apa): elicessor, e. (2015, october 21-24). sick girls: gender, disability, and cyborg hoaxes. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. coined the term “normate” to refer to a privileged body, without stigma, that functions as a universal type in a given society.6 frequently, the normate body is hailed and produced through the preferred user positions of new media. these are cultural, material, and social factors that enable an individual to take up the user position as it is “intended” to be inhabited, using the tools, engaging in the activities, and reproducing the ideologies thatare part and parcel of the design and use of digital media such as internet applications, cell phones, streaming video, and multiple other forms of mediated interaction. although deceptions involving sick or disabled women may seem to destabilize the preferred user position, they may also further marginalize embodied disability identities in digital media by casting doubt upon their veracity and burying their technocultural experiences beneath stereotype. a second, more recent, case may prove instructive. in january 2013, it was revealed that notre dame football star manti te’o had been the victim of a hoax; his “inspirational” girlfriend, who died within hours of his grandmother, was revealed to be a fictional construction. the girl, lennay kekua, was reportedly in a major car accident and then diagnosed with leukemia, undergoing a bone transplant before dying in september 2012. in 2013, it was revealed that this relationship had occurred only in mediated forms, through social media and cell phone communication, and had been elaborately orchestrated by ronaiah tuiasosopo.7 once again, we see a representation of a woman in a state of unhealth turning to digital media as a social, and romantic, solution. once again, it is orchestrated by a man, for unclear purposes. it is reminiscent of comeand-marry schemes, involving young men taking on feminine identities in order to make connections with (and receive money or gifts from) men abroad.8 was tuiasosopo attempting to benefit from te’o’s rising star? there is also an element of trolling, which judith donath defines as “a game of identity deception” undertaken at the expense of the target.9 if this is a kind of game, why is presenting as a disabled young woman a winning move? first, it draws upon longstanding representations of what martin norden calls “the innocent,” a young person, usually female, whose disability or disease is used to make them appear more vulnerable, more sympathetic, and more morally pure.10 secondly, it reinforces utopian visions of digital media as “solving” the problem of disability.11 these strands make it an enormously appealing and familiar representation, pulling at heartstrings and pocketbooks while offering a sense of moral rectitude. but, the short-term success of such deceptions, and their coverage in popular media, also have the effect of perpetuating stereotypes and overshadowing many of the material, political, and experiential dimensions of disability and digital media. as nakamura argued that racial identity deception often reinforced stereotypes,12 these gendered portrayals of disability often draw upon and strengthen notions of disability dependence, narratives of overcoming, and ultimately trajectories of tragedy, as these disabled, sick, online girlfriends move towards the end of the deception – death. as these representations are strengthened, they crowd out lived experiences; much as come-and marry schemes (and their cousins, nigerian bankers) create an atmosphere in which all web users from africa may be perceived as scammers, the disabled girl has been so often revealed as a fake that all those who present as disabled online come under scrutiny regarding the authenticity of their identities. furthermore, as these personas are constructed from a preferred, normate user position, there is a lack of attention to the issues of access, technological accommodation, and personal autonomy that are central to experiences of disability online. disability – particularly female disability – becomes spectacle, a signifier without a referent, a costume to be taken on and discarded. in the absence of disability analysis, the emptiness of these narratives, and their embeddedness in the normate user position and its exclusions, are not made visible to scholars of new media. to return to “joan,” it is notable that its first telling indicated that disabled women were the first to question “joan,” as her experiences did not ring true.13 in ignoring or glossing over this detail, scholars ignored the realities of technological and interpersonal interactions for internet users with disabilities. inattention to disability in this case and internet studies at large is illustrative of the centrality of a preferred user experience of online media and how it may mask how different identities, bodies, and use conditions might affect theories of deception, identity, community, and new media technologies and their users. 1 allucquère rosanne stone refers to the psychiatrist as stanford lewin, and refers to his assumed online identity as “julie.” stone, the war of desire and technology at the close of the mechanical age (cambridge ma: mit press, 1995). 2 sherry turkle, life on the screen: identity in the age of the internet, 1st touchstone ed.(new york, ny: simon & schuster, 1997), 228. 3 jodi o’brien, “writing in the body: gender (re)production in online interaction,” in communities in cyberspace, ed. marc a. smith and peter kollock (new york, ny: routledge, 1999), 88. 4 see also: mark poster, the second media age (cambridge, ma: polity press, 1995); howard rheingold, the virtual community: homesteading on the electronic frontier (new york: harperperennial, 1994). 5 gerard goggin and christopher newell, digital disability: the social construction of disability in new media, critical media studies (lanham: rowman & littlefield, 2003), 115. 6 rosemarie garland-thomson, extraordinary bodies: figuring physical disability in american culture and literature (new york, ny: columbia university press, 1997). 7 ilana gershon, “the samoan roots of the manti te’o hoax,” the atlantic, january 24, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/01/the-samoan-rootsofthe-manti-teo-hoax/272486/. 8 jenna burrell, invisible users youth in the internet cafés of urban ghana (cambridge, mass.: mit press, 2012). 9 judith donath, “identity and deception in the virtual community,” in communities in cyberspace, ed. p. kollack and m. smith (new york, ny: routledge, 1999), 31–56. 10 martin f. norden, the cinema of isolation: a history of physical disability in the movies (rutgers university press, 1994). 11 alison kafer, feminist, queer, crip, (bloomington: indiana university press, 2013). 12 lisa nakamura, cybertypes: race, ethnicity, and identity on the internet (new york: routledge, 2002). 13 lindsy van gelder, “the strange case of the electronic lover,” in computerization and controversy: value conflicts and social choices, ed. charles dunlop and rob kling (new york, ny: academic press, 1996 microsoft word kadi.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): kadi, s. (2014, october 22-24). “i don’t know a man who isn’t knee-deep in it”: intersections of age and gender in older people’s internet use. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “i don’t know a man who isn’t knee-deep in it”: intersections of age and gender in older people’s internet use selma kadi eberhard karls university tübingen abstract older people use the internet less than younger people, and older women less than older men (office for national statistics, 2014). this presentation examines intersections of age and gender in older people's internet use. the research perspective combines a focus on technology adoption in the tradition of domestication theory with the understanding of gender-technology relations developed in feminist technology studies, and research on ageing. findings from a sociological study conducted in the north east of the uk, based on 33 semi-structured interviews with women and men between the ages of 55 and 80 about their computer and internet use are presented, demonstrating the significance of traditional age-gender-technology relations and the variety of outcomes of intersections between gender and age in older people's internet use. introduction social sciences research on internet use tends to focus on the experiences of younger people, often exploring the construction of young people's identities through internet use (see for examples: valkenburg et al., 2005; garcia-gomez, 2009; boyd, 2014). this contrasts with a relative scarcity of qualitative studies that investigate older people's internet use and more particularly the domestication of the internet in later life (see for exceptions: haddon and silverstone 1996; buse 2009). however, older people, and older women in particular, have been shown to be the groups with the lowest rates of internet access (office for national statistics, 2014). research on gender and internet use rarely examines the way in which multiple social inequalities shape internet use through an intersectionality perspective (see for exceptions: kennedy 2005; stepulvage 2001). gender and age are different in that all individuals rather than some change their status in terms of age. furthermore, gender is more often studied as social inequality than age (see mcmullin, 2004 for age as social inequality). i suggest an approach for studying gender and age as intersecting social inequalities and as mutually shaping with technology in internet use. this approach aims to take different dimensions of gender and age (e.g. access to ict and ict training, ascribed competences and expertise, ways of relating to the internet) into account. using this approach, the persistence of traditional age-gender-technology relations and the diversity of outcomes of the intersection of age and gender in older people’s internet use will be demonstrated. i will first discuss the theoretical background of this approach, which is based on a combination of domestication theory, feminist technology studies, ageing research and intersectionality research. following this, i will describe methodological aspects, and then present selected findings from the analysis of older people’s internet use in everyday life. theoretical background: the internet as domesticated technology and as mutually shaping with gender and age i suggest to study the internet as a technology which is domesticated in everyday life. following silverstone et al (1992), technologies are appropriated, integrated in spaces and activities1, and used to demonstrate the integrity and autonomy of households and individuals to others. in these processes of domestication, the internet is ascribed meanings by those who are possibly using it for specific purposes. domestication is further conceptualized as process in which technology is adopted according to one’s position (the position of the household and the individual) in society. thus, for example, gender can be important for the way in which technology is used. although domestication theory conceptualizes gender as one of several elements of technology adoption processes in households (silverstone et al., 1992), it is not always researched in this tradition. in contrast to domestication research, feminist technology studies focus on the analysis of gender and technology. within the latter tradition, both are understood as mutually shaping (wajcman, 2004) and as social processes (berg, 1994). traditional gendertechnology relations exclude women from the use of particularly advanced technology, tend to neglect technology used mainly by women (in the definition of advanced technology) and describe women as less competent in technology use. faulkner (2001) highlighted, following harding (1986) the effectiveness of gender in terms of structure, symbolic associations and identity. gender and technology are mutually shaping on these three different levels. traditional gender-technology relations result in women being structurally excluded from technology use (e.g. due to a gender segregated job 1 the integration of technology and icts into households has also been discussed as their integration into a gendered space, e.g. due to the use of different rooms for differently gendered activities (mallett, 2004) and due to links between domesticity and femininity (flynn, 2003). an example for the link between domesticity, femininity and computer respectively internet use in the interviews is that several women emphasized that they did not want computers in rooms dedicated to other activities (e.g. living room, bedroom). one interviewee also exchanged her own and her husband’s computer (which was located in the living room) so she could have ‘a tidy living room’. market), in the symbolic association between technology and masculinity, and in the integration of technical competence in men's gender identity. i argue that an approach which integrates this analysis from feminist technology studies into the investigation of domestication processes, and conceptualizes gender as more than gender identity can take the limits of user agency better into account, since structure and symbolic associations are also analysed. based on the analysis of age as social inequality (mcmullin, 2004), age-technology relations can be conceptualized as similarly shaping on these different levels. older people are excluded in terms of access (e.g. less computer training in retirement), symbolic associations (e.g. younger people are seen as particularly competent in ict use), and age identity (e.g. older people deciding not to use computers because they do not see it as part of their identity as older persons)2. an analysis of these three different levels (winker and degele, 2011) and the conceptualisation of the intersecting of social inequalities as processes of mutual shaping (walby et al., 2012) has recently also been suggested in intersectionality research. the proposed perspective follows calls for a more integrationist approach (risman, 2004, kerner, 2012), in which the analysis of intersectionality can encompass more than one level. such an approach enables us to study not only “what”, but also “how” different social inequalities are intersecting in ict use. this allows us to examine the domestication of the internet in everyday life in a perspective which can take exclusion from technology use into account and simultaneously explain atypical cases, which do not follow traditional age-gendertechnology relations. compared to traditional domestication theory, the claim that internet adoption takes place “according to one’s position” becomes more complicated in this analysis, since we ask how different social inequalities intersect in domestication processes. the suggested approach enables us to study mutual shaping processes including more than one social inequality compared to feminist technology studies. it allows to explore more than gender identity in comparison to traditional domestication theory, and more than structure in comparison to digital divide research. methodological approach this paper is based on research i conducted for my phd dissertation which explored the significance of age and gender for understanding internet use in later life. it reports findings from the analysis of 33 semi-structured interviews with older women and men in the north east of england. participants were between the ages of 55 and 80, including 18 women and 15 men. they were recruited through an educational organisation for older people, an action research project, and snowballing from other interviewees. in the semi-structured interviews, participants were asked about their past and present computer and internet use. they were also asked about the use of other icts, of 2 richardson et al. (2005) discussed negative stereotypes related to older people and computer use as one of several barriers to computer use in later life. neves and amalo (2012) highlighted the role of stereotypes in popular culture which describe older people as incompetent technology users. they also surveyed older people who reported that they did not use computers due to ‘age’. different web 2.0 applications and whether they engaged in a variety of internet use activities. additionally, the semi-structured interviews included questions concerning differences between women’s and men’s and younger and older people’s use of computers and the internet and technology more generally. interviews were transcribed and then analysed through several steps of coding and memo-writing using the qualitative analysis software nvivo. when i asked participants about differences between younger and older people’s use, and between men’s and women’s use, interviewees had to position themselves, share their views about age-gendertechnology relations “in general” and relate their own experiences to it. this is important since experience in using a technology does not necessarily make symbolic associations irrelevant (see e.g. thornham and mcfarlane 2011). this paper draws on many empirical examples of the description of gender-agetechnology relations in older people’s stories. these stories include the description of women’s and men’s and older and younger people’s internet use in the experiences of the interviewees, and also an interpretation by interviewees on whether these are representative for general age-gender-technology relations. older people’s stories about computer and internet use not only convey a description of what the interviewees observed, they are simultaneously intertwined with interviewees’ views on gender and ageing. rather than shying away from the “mess” of gender relations and gender ideology, and age relations and age ideology, i argue that we have to investigate these acts of reporting and interpreting technology use to understand the intersecting of age and gender. the interviews differ in terms of the questioning of traditional age-gender-technology relations, and the types of critique which are developed by interviewees. following henwood (1993), the problematization of traditional gendertechnology (resp. age-gender-technology) relations is key for changing them. older women’s and men’s internet use includes the shaping of gender and age by the technology of the internet and simultaneously the shaping of the technology by gender and age (e.g. through domestication processes). asking interviewees about the ways in which women and men and older people and younger people use the internet, is an approach which allows us to directly address both the observed use and its interpretation in the interview. the interviews also include examples in which interviewees contrast their own technology use experiences with perceived general age-technology or gendertechnology relations.3 gender and age as intersecting social inequalities in older people’s internet use i will now discuss different examples for the intersection of age and gender in older people’s internet use, demonstrating the significance of both traditional age-technology 3 resistance to traditional age-gender-technology relations which might be expressed in these stories has to be thought of as being facilitated by the fact that someone occupies a subject position in which he/she can question these through his or her own practice (including action and speech). another point worth noting is also that interviewees generally did not tend to understand age and gender as forms of oppression, producing a systematic disadvantage for women and men. however, we find in their stories examples which can be analysed as highlighting the effectiveness of gender and age on the different levels, producing a systematic disadvantage for older people and women. and gender-technology relations, and the variety of outcomes. the main question is thus, how traditional age-gendertechnology relations are reproduced, respectively how age and gender intersect in atypical experiences. the examples highlight the “what” as well as the “how”. first, i will discuss the “double jeopardy thesis”, then atypical experiences, thirdly i will focus on age-technology relations, and fourthly gendertechnology relations. i argue that what we see shaping older people’s internet use are traditional age-gender-technology relations and exceptions to these. my study focuses on age and gender in the domestication processes of the internet. i am particularly interested in processes through which technologies attain certain meanings in specific contexts in which they are used. traditional gender-technology relations and age-technology relations were significant, e.g. only two of the women were the main computer users in multi-gender households, several individuals had started to use computers only later in their lives after they had initially thought that they were already “too old” to use computers. the examples i present include elements of age and gender shaping internet use in terms of structure, symbolic associations and identity, but i will emphasise aspects of identity in the first two and symbolic associations in the last two examples. the double jeopardy: “that daft, you know, women in their 50ies” as i have outlined in the introduction, older people use the internet less than younger people, and older women less than older men. this results in older women being (both compared to men and to younger people) particularly excluded from internet use. this is partly an exclusion from access (e.g. training, financial resources), partly, as i argued previously also an effect of age-technology and gender-technology relations in terms of symbolic associations and gender and age identity. in social gerontology, this has been discussed as the “double jeopardy” of older women (dowd and bengtson, 1978), which results in worse prejudices and discriminations compared to being only older or a woman. however, the double jeopardy thesis has also been criticized (krekula, 2007) for oversimplifying the intersecting of different inequalities, assuming that different disadvantaged positions can be added to each other, contributing to an increasingly disadvantaged position. krekula argued that research also demonstrated that the double jeopardy is not an inevitable outcome of the intersections of age and gender for older women. my study includes many examples for the double jeopardy and also two for atypical experiences. there are many possible contributing factors for these different experiences. for example, intersections with other social inequalities, e.g. class, could have an impact. for the examples which i will present in this and the following section, gender and age identity are clearly also very important. different women who occupy a similar structural position in terms of the intersecting of social inequalities, can have different technology use experiences. this also points to the difficulties of changing traditional agegender-technology relations and the radical character of questioning them, since abandoning them then also interrogates age and gender identities (see also harding 1986; risman, 2004). monica, a retired teacher, described her own position as a woman and an older person, as someone who lacks experience with email. for her, the combination of being a woman and being in her 50s, explains her initial difficulties in using email. “and i can remember sending my first email. and it was to my friend who lived in (place) near (place). and i actually rang her up to tell her i had sent it. and 'will you ring me back when you've got it' sort of thing, you know. that daft, you know, women in their 50s. so i can remember doing that.” (monica, l.228) she is now using email as well as various websites on a regular basis but she still finds computer use difficult, and described “a love-hate relationship”. this experience conveys the difficulties of using the computer for monica. it contrasts starkly with the symbolic association between masculinity and technology, and analyses of men’s pleasure in technology use (see kleif and faulkner, 2003). “well, if it is over an hour, i start to get, i just hate it (..). and i hate it when it doesn't work properly. it is not necessarily, i know it is not necessarily the computer. like, you know, it is as much me as the computer. but i get all 'oh heck with that', wait, finish what i'll be doing, and i switch it off. and i do actually talk, and it is quite nice then to actually walk out of the room and shutting the door thinking 'i've done it' and i'll say to it 'i'm not coming back to it'. so it is a bit of a love-hate relationship.” (monica) it is likely that monica’s way of relating to the computer could hinder her from spending more time with this technology, and as such, also result in her developing fewer skills.4 the way in which gender and age intersected in her experience, created a situation in which she perceived computer use to be difficult for her because she was a woman and an older person. atypical experiences: “it gives you a world, really” through an intersectional perspective, we can also explain atypical experiences. while women tended to use the internet less than men, or often had less expertise than men, this did not describe the experience of all women i interviewed. both therese and tamara lived together with their husbands and were the only computer users in their households. they emphasised the benefit of the computer in connecting them to the wider world. in terms of age-gender-technology relations, similar to monica, these women were disadvantaged not only by being older but also in terms of being women. however, their experiences of being the main computer user in their household enabled them to challenge traditional gender-technology relations to some extent. the symbolic associations between ageing and new technologies are important to understand these 4 another interviewee, who had previously had difficult computer use experiences when she worked as a teacher in the classroom, emphasized how she had to learn to do less activities on the computer compared to her friends, since her adult son would do certain things (e.g. uploading photographs) for her. atypical experiences. the use of the computer, and its association with connectedness (richardson, 2005) and youth, seemed to help them to avoid aspects of the positioning as an older, less connected person. for example, therese emphasised how the use of the computer is particularly beneficial for an older person because it is a link to the wider world. as the main internet users in the household, these women occupy atypical positions within gendertechnology relations. for therese, a designer, who spends a lot of time in her home caring for her husband and her mother (who lives around the corner in a care home), this atypical position seems to enable a different position in terms of agetechnology relations, namely “being in contact like younger people” through the use of the internet. tamara uses the computer much more than her husband, and sees it as a means to avoid being “left behind”. she taught herself the use of the computer, relying on official helplines from it companies. “he is only a beginner. i feel i am quite experienced now, you know, having for some years. but he is a bit frightened of it, so, he is the, he does some...he is getting used to that, printing out, saving, and he goes on the internet. he is a bit scared of messing it up, you know, pressing all the wrong things and getting, i say 'well, you know, it doesn't matter, i'll sort it out'.” (tamara) therese described the computer as an important enhancement to her life. “i don't know how to live without a computer. because when my computer has a problem and it goes off, i feel shut off from the rest of the world. because you can always send information, or a hello email, and it just gives you a world really...i mean like i said in the beginning, if my computer goes down for some reason, or i've got a problem, i feel as though my life has gone so small, and it is in here. well, at my age, it must be good for you, to have the internet, for it to be so mammoth, the things you've got contact” (therese) “i'd like to get, really, you young people, you have your mobiles on all the time, and there is people getting in touch and texting and all that. i'd like to be more like that...i'd like to be more like that, use my mobile more. but my life is not. i am not out and about all the time. ... if you want me on the phone, you can get me here, i am here.” (therese) tamara and therese, who emphasised the advantage of “connectedness”, and who are the main computer users in their households, both argued that the use of the computer improves daily life. this has to be understood as an alternative outcome of the intersection of age and gender, which does not follow the double jeopardy hypothesis. tamara and therese both find that computers have a positive impact for older people, but they are not questioning the symbolic associations of traditional age-technology relations which suggest that older people are less able technology users, because they are older. age-technology relations: “they are competent, but only within a limited range” brynin (2006) argued that men are using computers more than women because they encounter them differently in the workplace. he viewed gender as shaping computer use only because men are faster in adopting technological innovations because they are differently exposed to technology at work. in contrast to brynin’s study, the analysis of intersecting gender-technology and age-technology relations demonstrates the significance of gender and age, which goes beyond exposure at work. some older men, for example, are able to question the position of younger people as more competent in terms of technology use. some interviewees had been using computers as part of their work or leisure for many years. although some of the women had been using computers for work, it was two men in the sample who had been trained in computer programming. some of the male interviewees, who had been in contact with computers in a leisure or work context for many years, developed a critique of traditional agetechnology relations. however, it was only men who were familiar with computers before retirement who seemed to be in a position in which they could challenge age-technology relations in this way. because of their secure position and experience as technology-using men, they could challenge the dominant association between youth and competent computer use. this is an example in which gender and age intersect in the sense that their experience and positioning as men allows them to critique dominant age-technology relations. when making this argument, they spoke about their own experience, which included their own age and gender identity, and made claims which pointed to structural relations and the inadequacy of symbolic associations. lars, who has been using computers for many years, found that his experience of having worked as a computer programmer fits uneasily with his new age-related identity, because of age-technology relations which position him as a computer use beginner. “i think it is backed up a little as well, by the idea, which i find slightly annoying, when you go to ... a bookshop, and you find, in the computer section, and you have a little section of books that are written for senior computer users, who are people who are over 50. i was thinking 'you don't need to say things in one syllable to me for me to understand it, you know, in regards to computers, you don't become an idiot when you are, become fifty. and besides, which, a lot of people have, who are fifty, like me, have been working in the computer industry for twenty, thirty years, so, it is a little bit patronising.” (lars) peter, who worked as an accountant and company secretary before he retired, argued that his adult daughters, whom he refers to as “girls”, are rarely able to remember the actions which led up to encountering a problem with their computer. “i think younger people use it more, whether it is knowledgeable as some of the older ones, i don't know. the thing i have found, if something goes wrong, especially if my girls have been on, and you ask them what they've done, they don't know. whereas we quite often work backwards, to see what has actually happened” (peter) john, a retired community worker, perceived younger people's knowledge of computers as limited because of their scant knowledge of office software. younger people, in his view, are using the internet and word processing programs competently, but they are not as familiar as older people with “harder office software”. “it is, you know, they, younger people, you will find they have a limited range. they are competent, but only within a limited range. you find a lot of young people are not proficient in a number of things. particularly, they might be alright in word processing and internet, but apart from, many other aspects, for instance spreadsheets, they don't have any particular age competence there...that is what i found. and it just depends on what you are doing. i think the average young person has a very limited set of competencies. when you are, say it is widespread, they are competent, they don't, they are not afraid of computers. but what i've noticed is that they, they use facebook, youtube, digital and all those other things. but the harder office software, they are not any better off, are they? i don't think they are any more competent than the old people in that respect.” (john) as these examples illustrate, older men who have been using computers for many years, develop a critique of younger people’s competent technology use. however, like tamara and therese, they did not argue that there are no links between age and technology use. in contrast to peter and john, ed, a retired human resources manager, learned to use a computer only “as much as he needed to”, and questions age-related competence of use in general. “i learned as much as i needed to do the job. whereas there were people around me who wanted to know more. because they were interested in computers rather than the job. i always thought of it as a tool. but the, other people thought of it as a toy. so, there were always people around who could help if anything went wrong.” (ed) “i speak to young people who don't use it... i think the majority of people my age use it. and i don't think, it is about the same percentage i think as for younger people. and i know accepted wisdom is that old people find it difficult and young people, it comes easy to them. it is not my experience, really. i mean, because computers have been around for a long time. i mean, i have been using them for 30 years. .. old people have had access to computers for a long, long time.” (ed) in contrast to those men previously discussed, ed is not developing a critique of younger people’s competence and positioning himself as immersed in technological culture. instead, he occupies an atypical position (only being interested in computers to a limited extent), and questions not only the “technologically aware” description of younger people, but age-technology relations in general. gender-technology relations: “i don’t know a man that isn’t knee-deep in it” the focus on traditional gender-technology relations in feminist technology studies has been criticised for its neglect of atypical experiences. lohan (2000), for example, argued that feminist technology studies should examine men’s gender identities more. some men who have only started to use computers later in their lives and often after initial resistance, relate to the internet in a way which does not position them as competent users. in contrast to similar descriptions by women, these men talk about genderless “people” who are interested in computers and do not portray computer use as a typically male activity. for example, jack, a retired gp, distanced himself from a position of intensive use, where computers dominate an individual's life. for some of the men, their initial resistance to learning to use computers was framed within agetechnology relations. they thought that they themselves were already too old to learn computing, and only later revised this position. age-technology relations, and their identification with becoming older, initially supported their choice not to use a computer. “and obviously we all know people who are mad about computers. you know, and all their life is dominated by them. they just love it.” (jack) norman, a retired shift supervisor, similarly took a very critical stance towards the use of the internet for communication, as he preferred letters and phones. “i think that there is a tendency for some people to avoid, well, avoid is not the right word, but, to put off having personal contact with acquaintances, or friends, or something, via the telephone, or the good old fashioned written letter, by utilising a computer for either contacting people or staying in contact with people, using it as a communication exercise with friends. i am not convinced that is the right thing. because i find that to be very negative, particularly looking at typed info.” (norman) these examples demonstrate how age-technology relations enable older men to delay the use of the computer. despite their unusual positioning in terms of internet use (they are older and do use it), they do not discuss their atypical positioning as men who do not enjoy technology use. it could be argued that the symbolic association between technology and gender is so important for their gender identity (and presentation in the interview), that they prefer not to discuss non-use as atypical for men. in contrast to this, the women who do not enjoy internet use connect it to what could be described as a critique of male cultures of technology use. faulkner (2001) argued that within the male-dominated profession of engineering, men’s pleasure in technology is important not only for their individual identities but also for their shared culture, offering them compensation for limited power in their work environment (faulkner 2001). men’s intimacy with technology has been researched in both work and leisure settings (kleif and faulkner, 2003). kleif and faulkner argued that it is linked to the socialization of boys and girls, in which boys are allowed more time to play; subsequently adult women feel that spending time with technology is genderinauthentic, and that they have to justify spending more leisure time. they suggest further, that for the men who spent large amounts of time with technology, this was a “gender-authentic” and “gender-available” way to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity, offering them the experience of being powerful in relation to technology. some of the female interviewees in my study emphasised the associations between masculinity and technology in terms of internet use. they stated that they used the internet as a “tool”, rather than as a (men’s) “toy”. while some men also described their use of the internet as tool-like, they did not relate this to masculinity-technology associations. the use of the internet as a tool is often also associated with a lack of enjoyment. monica, the retired teacher, does not see her internet use as entertainment. “so i think i tend to use it as a sort of a tool, as a means, rather than for my own entertainment really” (monica) this contrasts starkly with the description of being pleasurably lost in the activity, losing track of time when using the internet by john, the retired community worker. harriet, a retired marketing research assistant, also emphasised how women would use the computer as a tool and not as a (musical) instrument, highlighting the mundanity of the internet for her. “men like complexity. the, men like to go into the far end of everything. and they do things, just because they can. women use it, because they need to, want to, and they do what they want, that's the end of it. we don't need, computer to me is just (.), it's a tool, it's not an instrument. ... it's a tool, that's all it is. it is not a substitute for real life.” (harriet) amanda, a retired care home inspector, also viewed internet use as linked to masculinity and enjoyment within a male culture of technology. her own use of the internet helps her stay in contact with others. amanda previously also maintained her own blog, and uses facebook. however, she does not perceive her technology use to be as enjoyable as her perception of male pleasure in internet use. “i think most men just love anything that they can press a button and something happens. they just love it! they are like children in a toy shop, aren't they? and they love it! and that's why they love the, you know, they love the games and funny little creatures running around a screen, at least all the men i know love that sort of thing! and just the sheer technology, just the whole business of a shiny little piece of equipment that is this size, that you can talk to somebody in iceland, you know, and find out all this information and, they just love it! is my experience. i don't know a man that isn't knee-deep in it! i don't think i know, i do know one man who won't touch a computer, but it is the only one! everybody else is, yes. even the elder, you know, the elder ones. the very elder ones don't, because they, you know, they are not gonna do it well, so they are not gonna do it. mainly, it is a man thing that. so they are not gonna touch it at all. but anybody you know, below sort of 80, is gonna have a pretty good crack! and before you know where you are, they'll have all the gist of the gadgets and what have you, that go along with it. and, i think that is one of these competitive things that they tend to have more than we do. maybe not. but that, sort of my experience is that they explore what is, the possibilities of all these, excite them far more than they excite my friends, certainly. you know, we acknowledge that it is very useful, we acknowledge that it is very time saving on some things.” (amanda) discussion i have demonstrated four different examples of intersections of age and gender in older people’s internet use: (1) an example for the double jeopardy hypothesis, (2) atypical experiences of older women who are the main computer users in multi-gender households, (3) older men who develop different types of critiques of age-technology relations, (4) the absence of references to gender in the stories of some older men who started to use computers later in their lives contrasting with the critique of masculine cultures of technology use in some older women’s stories. these examples highlight different aspects of traditional age-gender-technology relations. for some, these explain their own experiences (1), for others traditional gender-technology relations do not explain computer and internet use in the household, but the symbolic associations of age-technology relations are very present and an opportunity to position themselves differently in terms of ageing (2). some men develop a critique of younger people’s competences, one interviewee a critique of the importance of age-technology relations for internet use (3). the description of male cultures of technology use by some women contrasts with the absence of a discussion of gender among men who have only later in their lives started to use computers (4). in terms of the mutual shaping of social inequalities and icts, and the opportunities to change traditional age-gender-technology relations through their problematization, it is important to examine how gender and age are effective on several levels, and whether they are taken as explanations for use and non-use. this could be illustrated with the difference between arguing that someone ‘uses the internet because he is a man’ and that someone ‘uses the internet because men are advantaged due to gender inequality’. whereas the first example contributes to a naturalization of traditional gender technology relations, the latter leaves more options for changing these. although traditional age-gender-technology relations were important for understanding the experiences of many interviewees, some interviewees also had atypical experiences, demonstrating the diversity of outcomes of intersections of age and gender in internet use. instead of focusing on patterns of use (e.g. habib and cornford 2002), this approach particularly enables us to study what has been largely neglected up to now the social construction of gender and age in the context of agegendertechnology relations. research on technology use in later life often limits itself to studying older people as less able technology users (see joyce and mamo 2006 for a critique of this approach) without a further theorization of age-technology relations, emphasizing the physical ageing of older bodies, and neglecting the importance of symbolic associations. studying age and gender only as men’s and women’s and older and younger people’s use, does underreport their significance and locate both only at the level of the individual. this risks projecting an essentialist view in which gender and age have a uniform impact upon all women, men, younger and older people in terms of shaping internet use. if traditional age-gender-technology relations are analysed as context of internet use it is possible to highlight how they are significant but can lead to varying outcomes. i argue that the study of social inequalities in internet use needs to take the intersecting of different inequalities on several levels into account. this approach can also be expanded to include more social inequalities than gender and age. references berg, a.-j. (1994) ‘technological flexibility: bringing gender into technology (or was it the other way round?)’ in: cockburn, c. and fuerst dilic, r. (eds.) bringing technology home: gender and technology in a changing europe buckingham: open university press. boyd, danah (2014) it’s complicated. the social lives of networked teens yale university press. brynin, m. (2006) ‘the neutered computer’ in: kraut, r., brynin, m. and kiesler, s. (eds.) computers, phones, and the internet: domesticating information technology new york: oxford university press. buse, c. (2009) online @ home in retirement: situating computer and internet use within bodies, spaces and biographies university of york: submitted phd thesis. dholakia, r. (2006) ‘gender and it in the household: evolving patterns of internet use in the united states’ the information society: an international journal 22(4): 231. dowd, j. and bengtson, v. (1978) ‘aging and minority populations: an examination of the double jeopardy hypothesis’ journal of gerontology (30): 584. faulkner, w. (2001) ‘the technology question in feminism: a view from feminist technology studies’ women’s studies international forum 24(1): 79. flynn, bernadette (2003) geography of the digital hearth information, communication and society 6(4): 551. garcía-gómez, a. (2009) ‘teenage girls’ personal weblog writing’ information, communication and society 12(5) 611. habib, l., and cornford, t. (2002) ‘computers in the home: domestication and gender’ information, technology and people 15(2): 159. haddon, l. and silverstone, r. (1996) information and communication technologies and the young elderly spru/cict report series nr. 13 university of sussex. harding, s. (1986) the science question in feminism new york: cornell university press. henwood, f. (1993) ‘establishing gender perspectives in information technology: problems, issues, and opportunities’ in: green, e., owen, j. and pain, d. (eds.) gendered by design? information technology and office systems london: taylor and francis. henwood, f., kennedy, h. and miller, n. (eds.) (2001) cyborg lives? women’s technobiographies york: raw nerves books. joyce, k. and mamo. l. (2006) ‘greying the cyborg’ in: calasanti, t. and slevin, k. (eds.) age matters: realigning feminist thinking new york: routledge. karavidas, m., lim, n. and katsikas, s. (2005) ‘the effects of computers on older adult users’ computers in human behaviour 12(5): 697. kennedy, h. (2005) ‘subjective intersections in the face of the machine: gender, race, class and pcs in the home’ european journal of women's studies 12(4): 471. kerner, ina (2012) ‘questions of intersectionality. reflections on the current debate in german gender studies’ european journal of women’s studies 19(2): 203. kleif, t. and faulkner, w. (2003) ‘“i’m no athlete, [but]i can make this thing dance!” men’s pleasures in technology’ science, technology and human values 28(2): 296 krekula, c. (2007) ‘the intersection of age and gender. reworking gender theory and social gerontology’ current sociology 55(2): 155. lohan, m. (2000) ‘constructive tensions in feminist technology studies’ social studies of science 30(6): 895. mallett, s. (2004) ‘understanding home: a critical review of the literature’ the sociological review 52(1): 62. mcmullin, j. (2004a) age and inequality in: mcmullin, j. (2004) understanding social inequality. intersections of class, age, gender, ethnicity and race in canada ontario: oxford university press. neves, barbara barbosa and fausto amaro (2012) too old for technology? how the elderly of lisbon use and perceive ict the journal of community informatics 8(1). office for national statistics (2014) internet access quarterly update q1 2014 http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_362910.pdf (accessed: 24.08.2014) richardson, m., weaver, k. and zorn, t. (2005) ‘“getting on” older new zealanders perceptions of computing’ new media and society 7(2):219 risman, b. (2004) ‘gender as a social structure: theory wrestling with activism’ gender and society 18 (4): 429. silverstone, r., hirsch, e. and morley, d. (1992) ‘information and communication technologies and the moral economy of the household’ in: silverstone, r. and hirsch, e. (eds.) consuming technologies. media and information in domestic spaces london: routledge. stepulvage, linda (2001) ‘becoming a technologist: days in a girl's life’ in: green, e. and adam, a. (eds.) virtual gender london: routledge. thornham, helen and angela mcfarlane (2011) cross-generational gender constructions. women, teenagers and technology. the sociological review 59(1): 64. valkenburg, p., schouten, a. and peter, j. (2005) ‘adolescents’ identity experiments on the internet’ new media and society 7(3): 383. van dijk, j. (2005) the deepening divide: inequality and the information society thousand oaks: sage. walby, s., armstrong, j. and strid, s. (2012) ‘intersectionality: multiple inequalities in social theory’ sociology 46(2): 224. williams, m. (2011) ‘internet access quarterly update’ 18 may 2011 office for national statistics http://www.statistics.gov.uk/articles/nojournal/internet-access-q1-2011.pdf (accessed: 21.07.2011) winker, g. and degele, n. (2011) ‘intersectionality as multi-level analysis: dealing with social inequality’ european journal of women’s studies 18(1): 51. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 internet  politics.  mapping  wsis+10  controversies  on   internet  governance     mauro  santaniello   internet  &  policy  communication  centre,  department  of  political,  social  and   communication  sciences,  university  of  salerno,  italy       introduction     the  world  summit  on  information  society  (wsis)  is  one  of  the  most  important  global   policy  arena  for  internet  governance  (ig),  and  ig  in  turn  has  soon  emerged  as  the  most   controversial  issue  of  the  summit  (mueller  2010).  the  wsis,  which  was  initially   organised  under  the  aegis  of  the  united  nations  (un)  in  two  phases,  geneva  2003  and   tunis  2005,  is  commonly  considered  the  birthplace  of  the  multi-­stakeholder  governance   model  in  ig.  in  fact,  it  was  the  first  attempt  to  create  a  policy  forum  to  address  an  issue   which  was  usually  considered  an  affair  of  just  one  stakeholder:  the  private  sector,  under   the  political  supervision  of  the  us  government.  the  multi-­stakeholder  model  extended   the  range  of  participation,  allowing  new  actors  to  be  legitimised  into  ig  decision-­making   processes  “on  an  equal  footing”  with  the  others.  this  model  was  reflected  into  the   design  of  the  summit  and  of  political  processes  activated  by  it  –  the  working  group  on   internet  governance  (wgig)  and  the  internet  governance  forum  (igf)  –  which  were   characterised  by  the  participation  of  five  stakeholder  groups:  governments,  private   sector,  civil  society,  technical  and  academic  community,  intergovernmental   organisations.  in  2015  the  un  has  started  a  review  process  of  the  wsis  and  of  the   goals  settled  in  its  main  policy  output:  the  tunis  agenda.  this  process,  known  as   wsis+10  review,  has  involved  many  actors,  mainly  through  written  and  standardised   submissions  to  an  open  call.  this  paper  proposes  a  comparative  analysis  of  policy   preferences  expressed  by  each  actor  on  issues  relating  to  internet  governance  in  the   context  of  the  wsis+10  review.     wsis  controversies  on  internet  governance     two  main  controversies  have  emerged  around  the  global  governance  of  the  internet   within  the  wsis:  the  inclusiveness  of  the  decision-­making  process,  and  the  bindingness   of  decisions.  the  first  one  relates  to  who  is  admitted  in  participating  in  internet  policy   formulation.  till  the  end  of  the  1990s,  internet  communities  and  culture  were  deeply   crossed  by  the  idea  of  “governance  denial”,  depicting  governance  as  a  dangerous   concept  opening  the  doors  to  governments,  intergovernmental  organizations  and  “state-­ centric  approaches  that  would  be  fundamentally  out  of  synch  with  and  damaging  to  the   internet”  (drake,  2004:  2).  in  the  early  2000s  the  failure  of  the  “self-­governance  model”   legitimised  governments  and  public  authorities  in  the  ig  arena  together  with  the  global   civil  society  and  non-­state  actors  (hofmann  2005),  allowing  the  rise  of  the  multi-­ stakeholder  governance  model.  on  the  other  hand,  this  model  has  been  questioned   both  by  scholars  highlighting  power  disparity  among  stakeholders  (malcolm  2015)  and   by  authors  demanding  for  a  more  representative,  democratic  and  participative  mode  of   governance  (gurnstein  2014).  in  this  paper,  inclusiveness  is  operationalised  as  a   variable  upon  which  actors'  preferences  are  distributed  among  four  modalities,  from  the   least  inclusive  to  the  most  one:       i)   a  preference  for  the  leadership  of  one  stakeholder  group  with  power  enough  to   decide  alone;;   ii)   a  preference  for  the  current  multi-­stakeholder  model  including  the  classic  five   stakeholder  groups;;     iii)  a  preference  for  the  strengthening  of  one  of  the  stakeholder  groups  which  is   perceived  as  too  week  compared  with  the  others;;     iv)  a  preference  for  the  inclusion  of  new  subjects  beside  the  classic  stakeholder   groups.       while  inclusiveness  is  a  controversy  about  the  input  of  the  decision-­making  process,  the   second  controversy,  bindingness,  relates  to  the  output  of  the  process.  how  binding   should  be  decisions  taken?  how  binding  should  be  policies  formulated  in   single/multi/equal/extra-­stakeholder  forums?  this  controversy  has  been  a  key  issue   since  the  very  initial  phase  of  the  wsis,  and  it  was  divisive  also  in  the  context  of  the   igf.  milton  mueller  (2010:  110-­111),  for  example,  identifies,  on  this  controversy,    two   distinct  factions  within  the  igf:  forum  hawks,  which  conceived  the  igf  as  “a  place  for   norm  production  and  dissemination”,  and  forum  doves,  which  “emphasised  those   aspects  of  the  mandate  that  were  purely  educational  or  informational”.  other  scholars   have  highlighted  how  this  controversy  has  produced  relevant  tensions  within  the  igf,   leading  some  actors  to  threaten  the  igf  mandate  renewal  in  2010  (brousseau  and   marzouki  2015:  380).     this  controversy  too  is  operationalised  in  a  variable  with  four  modalities,  from  the  least   binding  to  the  most  one:       i)   actor  asking  for  private  self-­regulation  and  opposing  even  a  policy  debate  as  an   interference  with  technological  innovation  and  freedom  of  economic  initiative;;   ii)   actor  maintaining  a  debate-­oriented  approach  promoting  policy  discussion   among  stakeholders  but  with  no  binding  statements  or  agreements  at  the  end  of   the  process;;     iii)  actors  demanding  for  binding  multilateral  treaties  and  national  laws  and  policies   as  process'  outputs;;     iv)  actors  preferring  binding  principles  and  declarations  framed  into  the  international   human  rights  law  and  national  constitutions.       seventy-­three  documents  submitted  to  the  wsis+10  review  open  call  have  been  hand-­ coded  assigning  to  each  of  them  a  numeric  value  between  -­1  and  1  for  each  variable:  i)   -­1;;  ii)  -­0,5;;  iii)  0,5;;  iv)  1;;  0  has  been  assigned  to  not-­expressed  preferences.  in  this  way,   actors  preferences  have  been  mapped  in  order  to  explore  stakeholder  groups'   specificities,  conflict  areas  and  possibilities  for  coalition.  moreover,  for  each  actor  also   comments  later  submitted  to  a  draft  document  (the  so-­called  zero  draft,  prepared  on   the  base  of  the  starting  submissions)  have  been  codified  in  order  to  track  changes  in   their  respective  policy  preferences.     mapping  internet  governance  policy  preferences among  governments,  bindingness  seems  to  mirror  the  geopolitical  opposition  between   the  west  and  other  countries  of  the  world,  with  the  former  clearly  oriented  toward  a  non-­ binding  policy  dialogue  and  the  latter  toward  more  binding  outputs  such  as  national  laws   and  multilateral  treaties.    a  major  variety  of  positions,  among  governments,  is  traceable   on  the  inclusiveness  axis,  with  the  eu  and  india  representing  the  most  inclusive   positions  at  all.  on  the  contrary,  the  us  and  russian  governments  stand  for  an   exclusive  leadership,  even  if  according  to  the  usa  a  predominant  role  should  be  given   to  the  private  sector  while  for  russia  it  should  be  appointed  to  national  governments.   moreover,  on  this  axis,  the  coalition  led  by  china  (including  g77,  cuba,  egypt,  saudi   arabia)  generally  refers  to  national  governments  as  the  subject  to  be  strengthened  in   the  ig  governance  arena,  while  such  countries  as  argentina,  australia  and  mexico  refer   to  developing  countries  as  a  stakeholder  to  be  reinforced.   that  of  civil  society  organisations  is  the  stakeholders  group  with  the  highest  number  of   different  positions  (9).  it  is  also  the  group  most  oriented  towards  binding  principles  and   declarations,  and  the  inclusion  of  new  actors  in  the  internet  governance  arena.  four   actors,  in  fact,  get  a  score  of  1  on  both  dimensions:  access,  association  for  progressive   communication,  apig  and  idp.  moreover,  no  civil  society  organisation  gets  a  score  of  -­ 1  on  both  dimensions,  and  only  one  (acnu)  gets  a  score  of  -­1  on  only  one  dimension   (particularly,  on  inclusiveness). -­0,6 -­0,4 -­0,2 0 0,2 0,4 0,6 -­1,5 -­1 -­0,5 0 0,5 1 1,5 chi,  cub,  egy,  g77,  sau rus asis eu,  ind arg,  aus,  mex can,  jap,  kor,  pol,  swi usa fig.1  -­  governments bindingness in c lu si ve n e ss on  the  contrary,  the  private  sector  is  the  group  least  oriented  towards  both  binding   policy  outputs  and  the  inclusion  of  new  subjects  in  the  internet  governance  arena.  no   private  actors  gets  the  score  of  1  on  either  axes,  while  the  most  of  our  cases  are  placing   on  a  position  inspired  by  the  private  self-­governance  model  for  what  concerns  the   bindingness  (-­1)  and  on  the  defense  of  the  current  multi-­stakeholder  model  including  the   classic  five  stakeholder  groups  on  the  inclusiveness  axis  (-­0,5). -­0,6 -­0,4 -­0,2 0 0,2 0,4 0,6 0,8 1 1,2 -­1,5 -­1 -­0,5 0 0,5 1 1,5 access,  apc,  apig,  idp justnet asabe irpc cis,  gpd ict4p acnu publicknowledge cdt,  ec  medici,  hu-­an,  ifip,  ifla fig.2  -­  civil  society bindingness in c lu si ve n e ss among  intergovernmental  organisations,  unesco  presents  the  most  progressive   stance,  aiming  to  both  binding  principles  protecting  human  rights  and  the  inclusion  of   new  actors  in  the  ig  policy  arena.  on  the  opposite  side,  we  find  escwa  and  wipo   whose  preferences  are  fully  situated  on  a  multistakeholderist  position,  expressing  a   policy  preference  for  non-­binding  policy  debate  and  a  satisfaction  for  the  current   stakeholders  groups  involvement.  generally,  un  organisations  are  more  inclusive  than   the  others,  with  the  exception  of  the  international  telecommunication  union  (itu),  a   powerful  un  organisation  very  active  in  the  ig  landscape,  which  prefers  the  current   multistakeholder  participation  while  demanding  for  more  binding  policy  outputs. -­1,2 -­1 -­0,8 -­0,6 -­0,4 -­0,2 0 0,2 0,4 0,6 -­0,6 -­0,4 -­0,2 0 0,2 0,4 0,6 tkeb 25th-­ctlaficta,  icc igcjbf,  jusa,  telefonica fig.3  -­  private  sector bindingness in c lu si ve n e ss the  group  of  technical  and  academic  communities  has  no  inclination  for  binding  policy   outputs,  as  testified  by  the  fact  that  no  actor  in  this  group  gets  a  positive  score  on  the  x-­ axis.  the  least  binding  position  at  all,  within  this  group,  is  that  of  the  institute  of   electrical  and  electronics  engineers  (ieee),  an  important  standard  developing   organisation.  on  the  contrary,  this  is  a  generally  inclusive  group,  with  policy  preferences   ranging  from  the  inclusion  of  new  subjects  within  the  ig  arena  (+1  like  icann,  4s,  and   cts/fgv)  and  the  satisfied  evaluation  of  the  current  stakeholder  groups  (-­0,5  like   internet  society,  jprs  and  rirs).   -­0,6 -­0,4 -­0,2 0 0,2 0,4 0,6 0,8 1 1,2 -­0,6 -­0,4 -­0,2 0 0,2 0,4 0,6 0,8 1 1,2 unesco ituelac unwomen unctad/cstd escwa,  wipo fig.4  -­  intergovernmental  organisations bindingness in c lu si ve n e ss at  this  point,  we  can  identify  four  main  stances  on  the  map  and  three  main  rifts  between   them.  around  the  main  stances  we  can  define  four  heterogeneous  coalitions:  a   democratic  coalition  (with  scores  1;;1),  a  sovereigntist  coalition  (0,5;;-­1),  a  neoliberal   coalition  (-­0,5;;  -­1),  and  a  liberal  coalition  (-­0,5;;  1).  the  rift  between  the  democratic   coalition  and  the  sovereigntist  one  can  be  traced  upon  the  difference  between  those   actors  demanding  for  the  strengthening  of  national  governments  as  perceived  as  weak   actors  (the  stance  of  china,  cuba,  g77,  and  so  on)  and  those  actors  (like  justnet)   preferring  the  strengthening  of  non-­state  actors.  the  fracture  between  sovereigntists   and  neoliberals  represents  a  struggle  between  actors  claiming  a  governmental   leadership  (like  russia)  and  actors  claiming  a  private  sector  leadership  (like  usa).  the   third  rift  is  that  between  neoliberals  and  liberals  (like  ue  and  india)  which  share  the  idea   of  a  non-­binding  policy  debate,  but  are  in  contrast  about  the  range  of  inclusion  in  policy   arenas.   -­1,2 -­1 -­0,8 -­0,6 -­0,4 -­0,2 0 -­0,6 -­0,4 -­0,2 0 0,2 0,4 0,6 0,8 1 1,2 4s,  cts/fgvicann jpnic isoc,  jprs,  rirs ieee fig.5  -­  technical  and  academic  communities bindingness in c lu si ve n e ss finally,  for  what  concerns  the  dynamic  dimension  of  this  mapping  exercise,  we  can   observe  a  few,  but  significant,  cases  of  shifting  policy  preferences  by  comparing  the   early  submissions  and  the  successive  comments  to  the  zero  draft: •   china  and  g77  express  a  more  accentuated  inclination  towards  the  leadership  of   national  governments  in  the  second  round  of  submissions,  thus  getting  closer  to   the  russian  position;;   •   the  eu  seems  to  move  towards  the  democratic  coalition  for  what  concerns  the   dimension  of  bindingness,  making  an  evident  endorsement  for  unesco   principles  for  a    human  rights  based  internet;;   •   the  united  states  seem  to  move  towards  an  even  more  clear  preference  for  the   private  self-­governance  model;;   •   apig  seems  to  become  both  less  binding  (from  the  preference  for  a  “un  general   assembly  resolution  endorsing  a  declaration”  to  the  focus  on  governmental   policies  and  the  right  of  states)  and  less  inclusive  (from  the  inclusion  of  new   actors  to  the  focus  on  national  governments);;   •   cis  seems  to  become  more  binding  as  it  makes  an  evident  reference  to  the   international  human  right  law  during  the  second  round  of  submissions;;   •   justnet  seems  to  move  towards  the  democratic  coalition  as  it  becomes  more   inclusive  (from  a  strengthening  of  weak  actors  to  the  inclusion  of  new  ones);;   -­1,5 -­1 -­0,5 0 0,5 1 1,5 -­1,5 -­1 -­0,5 0 0,5 1 1,5 chi,  cub,  egy,  g77,  sau rus,  acnu asis,  25th-­ctl eu,  ind,  unwomen,  ican arg,  aus,  mex,  pub-­kno,  aficta,  icc,  unctad/cstd,  jpni can,  jap,  kor,  pol,  swi,  cdt,  ec  medici,  hu-­an,  ifip,  ifla,  ig,  escwa,  wipo,  isoc,  jprs,  rir usa access,  apc,  apig,  idp,  unesco justnet asabe irpc cis,  gpd ict4p,  it tkeb jbf,  jusa,  telefonica elac 4s,  cts/fgv ieee fig.6  -­  overall  map bindingness in c lu si ve n e ss •   igc  becomes,  at  the  same  time,  even  less  binding  (from  a  preference  for  a  non-­ binding  policy  debate  to  the  clear  rejection  of  an  international  legal  framework   and  of  regulation  on  content),  and  more  inclusive  (from  a  preference  for  the   current  stakeholder  groups  to    the  preference  for  the  strengthening  of  developing   countries). concluding,  findings  suggest  that  actors'  preferences  are  more  articulated,  dynamic  and   complex  than  that  depicted  in  previous  literature  by  means  of  dichotomies  such  as   globalists  versus  sovranists,  multilateralists  versus  multistakeholderists,  and  igf  hawks   versus  doves.  such  complexity  should  be  taken  into  account  when  addressing  internet   governance  both  by  an  academic  and  a  diplomatic  point  of  view.     references     brousseau,  e.,  marzouki,  m.  (2015)  internet  governance:  old  issues,  new  framings,   uncertain  implications.  in:  brousseau  e,  marzouki  m,  méadel  c  (eds)  governance,   regulations  and  powers  on  the  internet.  cambridge:  cambridge  university  press,  368-­ 397).     drake,  w.  j.  (2004,  february).  framing  ‘internet  governance’policy  discourse:  fifteen   baseline  propositions.  in  itu  workshop  on  internet  governance  (vol.  26,  p.  27).     gurstein,  m.  (2014)  democracy  or  multi-­stakeholderism:  competing  models  of   governance.  retrieved  from  https://gurstein.wordpress.com/2014/10/19/democracy-­or-­ multi-­stakeholderism-­competing-­models-­of-­governance/     hofmann,  j.  (2005)  internet  governance:  a  regulative  idea  in  flux.  in:  ravi  kumar  jain   bandamutha  (ed.)  internet  governance:  an  introduction,  icfai  university  press,  2007,   pp.  74-­108.     malcolm,  j.  (2015)  criteria  of  meaningful  stakeholder  inclusion  in  internet  governance.   internet  policy  review,  volume  4,  issue  4.     mueller,  m.  (2010)  networks  and  states.  the  global  politics  of  internet  governance.   microsoft word o'neil-ackland.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): o’neil, m. & ackland, r., (2014, october 22-24). fields or network? strategic action and social skill amongst twitter activists.. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. fields or network? strategic action and social skill amongst twitter activists mathieu o'neil university of canberra robert ackland australian national university networks and fields though massive amounts of digital trace data can be collected about how people exchange information online, the question of why they do so remains elusive. in order to explain how information cascades, how viral dynamics are launched, researchers often analyse issue diffusion following a “social contagion” model whereby information spreads smoothly and continuously across nodes (myers and leskovec 2010; onnela & reed-tsochas 2010). network science can be used to model the interdependence of individual actions and decisions: the previous behaviour of network participants can affect subsequent actions and decisions. at the ego-level, social influence and thresholds are invoked to explain at what point individuals are moved to act by the behaviour of others. at the macro-level, the focus shifts to the effects of network centralisation, clustering and density (gonzalez-bailon 2013). social contagion does not account for cultural dynamics or the reflexivity of actors, and we argue that a field-level approach is useful to understand how patterns of relations between networked actors are organised in collectively significant ways. fligstein & mcadam (2012) define a strategic action field as a constructed mesolevel social order in which individual or collective actors are attuned to and interact with one another on the basis of shared (though not consensual) understandings about the purposes of the field, relationships to others in the field (including who has power and why), and the rules governing legitimate action in the field. right away then we must address the question of what constitutes an online field. it would be tempting to argue that, on the internet, a network equals a field. indeed patterns of interpersonal ties can build a network with outcomes greater than the sum of the pairwise connections between participants (haythornthwaite 2007). such outcomes include the ways in which information flows, positions of individuals within the network (e.g., who is most central), and how resources are distributed and circulate across the network as a whole. however the notion that a prominent actor's sudden entry or withdrawal would significantly change a network's metrics, and hence its shape; whereas the boundaries of a field, created by the mutual recognition and interaction of all actors, would not be affected, is persuasive: offline, the logic of fields is not encoded in the structure of the network but in the “cultural conceptions of power, privilege, resources, rules and so on that shape action within the strategic action field” (fligstein & mcadam 2012: 30). online activist fields though compelling, this notion must be balanced against the specificity of internet sociality, which is that online interactions are extraordinarily more public than their offline counterparts. what is required for an online field theory is to weigh the public performances of actors and the trajectory of issues against what is known about actors' status. previous research in this vein has examined the online environmental field in terms of how hyperlink and frame networks foster a sense of collective identity (ackland & o'neil 2011). a statistical analysis of which online environmental groups were most likely to adopt a new issue such as the contestation of nanotechnology suggested that the newest entrants were more likely to adopt a new frame as the means to gain recognition and challenge the issues that the incumbents regard as legitimate (o’neil & ackland 2014). similarly in the case of occupy wall street activists on twitter, new entrants were found to be more likely to use the “#s17” frame (which commemorated the first-year anniversary of the movement) than incumbents (perez, ackland & o’neil 2014). building on these insights, we characterise an online activist field as a social arena in which participants vie for the definition of the most urgent cause or risk issue. in addition to enrolling others into a customisable collective identity, a core social skill in online activist fields is the capacity to successfully launch issues into social space. online activist fields can be equated to networks in terms of the status of nodes and messages (since there are no other means of expressing recognition and appreciation than through visible signs such as retweets, follows and @replies). however the overall shape of a network does not constitute a field (the removal or addition of an actor might significantly change the structure of the network, but not necessarily of the field). in order to determine what makes an online field a field we examine two core aspects of field theory: the behaviour of incumbents and new entrants in response to a new issue, and the dynamics of field formation. hashtags create ad-hoc connections between people, resulting in what bruns and burgess (2011) call “ad hoc publics”. yang et al. (2012) argue that twitter hashtags “serve as both a tag of content and a symbol of membership of a community”. we take the use of the hashtags #ows and #occupywallstreet as a proxy for participation in an activist field. using netbadges data we track and analyse the spread of issues having emerged amongst twitter users who employed the hashtags #ows and #occupywallstreet since october 2011. issue popularity phases are identified by applying change-point detection algorithms to a time series of the volume of tweets mentioning the relevant keywords. rq1. the role of dominant actors in issue diffusion retweets are the clearest measure of influence on twitter, since they indicate that someone has made a conscious decision to pass information on, so we define dominants as those actors who are the most retweeted. fligstein & mcadam (2012) suggest that incumbent socially skilled actors will defend the status quo. it follows that if a new frame emerges, it will come from a challenger group. we will assess to what extent this is the case online, or if online dominants have a different behaviour, by presenting a dynamic map of the network of actors (connected by retweets, mentions or follower relationships). to what extent are challengers prone to build niches, to what extent are dominants defined by incumbency, and likely to imitate, coopt, or merge with new frames? rq2. the factors leading to the formation of a new online activist field we will also present a dynamic semantic map of hashtags constituting the issue space for ows on twitter, which we will then correlate to the network of actors and to the timeline of ows events. we assess the internal and external factors which affect the trajectory and longevity of activist issues such as anonymous, fablab, and fracking. do exogenous shocks lead to field formation? to what extent are new online activist fields likely to emerge nearby existing fields, likely to be populated by existing groups who “migrate” or by offshoots of existing groups? to what extent are new online activist fields destabilized by external shocks originating from other online activist fields, or by state actions? references ackland, r. & o'neil, m. (2011) online collective identity: the case of the environmental movement. social networks 33(3): 177-190. bruns, a. & burgess, j. e. (2011) the use of twitter hashtags in the formation of ad hoc publics. in 6th european consortium for political research general conference, reykjavik. fligstein, n. & mcadam, d. (2012) a theory of fields, oxford: oup. gonzález-bailón, s. (2014). online social networks and bottom-up politics. forthcoming in w.h. dutton and m. graham (eds) society and the internet: how networks of information and communication are changing our lives, oxford: oup. haythornthwaite, c. (2007). social networks and online community. in a. joinson, k. mckenna, u. reips & t. postmes (eds.), oxford handbook of internet psychology (pp. 121-136), oxford: oup. myers, s. and j. leskovec (2012) clash of the contagions: cooperation and competition in information diffusion. ieee international conference on data mining (icdm). o'neil, m. & ackland, r. (2014) competition and influence amongst online environmental social movement organisations. forthcoming in mobilization, special issue on “researching collective action through networks: taking stock and the way forward”. onnela, j.-p., & f. reed-tsochas (2010) spontaneous emergence of social influence in online systems. proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 107(43): 1837518380. perez, c., ackland, r., o'neil, m. (2014) tweeting the frame: frames and fields in the age of the networked individual. adsri working paper, australian national university. yang, lei, tao sun, ming zhang, and qiaozhu mei. (2012) we know what @you #tag: does the dual role affect hashtag adoption? in proceedings of the 21st international conference on the world wide web. ir16-latzerjust selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 automated and commercialized reality constructions: governance by algorithms on the internet michael latzer university of zurich, ipmz, media change & innovation division, switzerland natascha just university of zurich, ipmz, media change & innovation division, switzerland abstract the growing societal significance of algorithms on the internet has by now been widely acknowledged in and beyond the academic field (salvin 2011, mager 2012, gillespie 2014, steiner 2012, anderson 2013, latzer et al. 2014). a wide range of our daily activities in general and our media consumption in particular are increasingly shaped by algorithmic selection – in essence, by the automated assignment of relevance to certain automatically selected pieces of information. the selection of online news via search engines and news aggregators, the consumption of music and video entertainment via recommender systems, the choice of services and products in online shops and the selection of status messages displayed on social online networks are prominent examples of this omnipresent trend. this paper focuses on the governing effects of internet algorithms in information societies. it analyzes the often-neglected significance, role and challenges of (software) technology in the co-evolutionary institutionalization of governance. according to the ir16 conference theme digital imaginaries, this paper scrutinizes the topic: relationship between technology and the imaginary. more precisely, it explores the reality construction by algorithmic selection on the internet that includes and at the same time goes far beyond the formation of collective imaginaries of networked technologies. the paper highlights the interplay with and the differences to reality constructions by traditional mass media, and investigates the societal and democratic consequences of this growing internet phenomenon. suggested citation (apa): latzer, m. & just, n. (2015, october 21-24). automated and commercialized reality constructions: governance by algorithms on the internet. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. theoretically, the paper builds on (co-)evolutionary innovation studies (nelson/winter 1982, ziman 2000, frenken 2006, latzer 2013) in order to adequately grasp the interplay of technological and societal change, and combines these with institutional approaches to incorporate governance by technology or rather software as institutions (reidenberg 1998, lessig 1999, shah/kesan 2011, napoli 2014). the paper shows how the market of attention – the central scarce resource in information societies – is increasingly being co-produced and allocated by automated algorithmic selection in many life domains. algorithmic selection on the internet has in fact become a growing source and factor of social order (scott 1987), of a shared social reality (berger/luckmann 1967) that is increasingly being co-constructed by automated algorithmic selection on the internet. the paper reviews the wide spectrum of individual actions and behavior that is co-governed by algorithmic selection applications. for this endeavor it methodologically draws from an empirical survey of internet-based services that rely on automated algorithmic selection (latzer et al. 2014), a functional typology derived from it (search, aggregation, observation / surveillance, recommendations, prognosis, scoring, filtering, content production and allocation), and an analysis of associated potential social risks (manipulation, biases and distortions of reality, constraints on the freedom of communication, threats to privacy and intellectual copy rights, social discrimination, possible transformations of cognitive capabilities and adaptations of the human brain, uncertain effects of the power of algorithms). it argues that – similar to the construction of realities by traditional mass media – automated algorithmic selection applications shape daily lives and realities, increasingly affect the perception of the world, and influence behavior. however, major differences are identified and their possible consequences, in particular for the democratic quality of societies, are discussed. it claims that these differences are to be found first in the growing individualization/personalization of constructed realities, and second in the constellation of actors. this constellation differs, because (a) the selection and hence the governance is shaped and dominated by global companies, and because (b) algorithms are increasingly (self-learning) autonomous actors. finally, the paper points out that these differences create risks, among other things the detrimental effects on the democratic quality of societies. it outlines options of how to influence this course of development by a mixture of (a) governance by algorithms – a form of governance by design, and (b) governance of algorithms – that includes options ranging from self-help by users to self regulation by the industry, and finally statutory state regulation. references anderson, c. w. (2013), towards a sociology of computational and algorithmic journalism, new media & society, 15 (7), 1005-1021. berger, p. l.; luckmann, t. (1967), the social construction of reality, new york: doubleday. frenken, k. (2006), innovation, evolution and complexity theory, cheltenham: edward elgar. gillespie, t. (2014), the relevance of algorithms, in: gillespie, t.; boczkowski, p.; foot, k. (eds), media technologies, ma: mit press, 167-194. latzer, m. (2013), medienwandel durch innovation, ko-evolution und komplexität. ein aufriss, medien und kommunikationswissenschaft, 2/2013, 235-252. latzer, m.; hollnbuchner, k.; just, n. & saurwein, f. (2014), the economics of algorithmic selection on the internet. university of zurich, zurich.http://www.mediachange.ch/media//pdf/publications/economics_of_algorithmic_s election_wp.pdf lessig, l. (1999), code and other laws of cyberspace, new york, ny: basic books. mager, a. (2012), algorithmic ideology: how capitalist society shapes search engines, information, communication & society, 15 (5), 769-787. napoli, p. m. (2014), on automation in media industries: integrating algorithmic media production into media industries scholarship, media industries journal, 1(1), 33-38. nelson, r.; winter, s. (1982), an evolutionary theory of economic change, cambridge: harvard university press. reidenberg, j. r. (1998), lex informatica: the formulation of information policy rules through technology, texas law review, 76 (3), 553-593. salvin, k. (2011), how algorithms shape our world, ted talks, july 2011, http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html. scott, w. r. (1987), the adolescence of institutional theory, administrative science quarterly, 32 (4), 493-511. shah, r. c.; kesan, j. p. (2011), software as governance, illinois public law and legal theory research papers series no. 10-33, march 2011, http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1799431. steiner, c. (2012), automate this: how algorithms came to rule our world, new york: penguin. ziman, j. (ed) (2000), technological innovation as an evolutionary process, cambridge: cambridge university press. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16​th​ annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 citizenfour: internet publics and the imaginary of privacy a content analysis of twitter commentaries around the 2015 oscar winning documentary abstract  the aim of the paper is to analyze the twitter conversations produced by networked  publics of the laura poitras’s documentary citizenfour (2014). the documentary deals  with the case of the computer analyst edward snowden and it was aired by hbo in  usa and channel 4 in uk respectively the 23th and 25th of february 2015.  we  focused on the type of representations produced around the relationship between  privacy and the internet, ie the imaginary related to privacy conveyed by snowden case.  the paper thus attempt to answer the following rq: what are the privacy’s imagery  around snowden case emerging from double screen audience of documentary  citizenfour?  based on a complete corpus of 25,000 tweets containing the hashtag #citizenfour and  created between 22th and 26th of february 2015, the research identified peaks in the  twitter activity (through a ‘breakout detection’) as well as what accounted for those  peaks (through a semantic cluster analysis). finally, a sample of original tweets will be  content analyzed using a codeset derived by decew (1997) definitions in order to  identify the emerging imaginary of privacy.   keywords: ​privacy, twitter, networked publics, citizenfour, snowden  introduction  the documentary citizenfour (2014), directed by laura poitras, has been shown on  hbo (and on channel 4 for the uk readers) soon after receiving the academy awards  best documentary feature of 2014. the documentary deals with the case of the  computer analyst edward snowden who, in 2013, leaked classified documents he had  obtained from the national security agency detailing the extent of government  surveillance of u.s. citizens. after going into hiding to avoid extradition and arrest,  1  giovanni boccia artieri fabio giglietto laura gemini university urbino carlo bo italy suggested citation (apa): boccia artieri, g., giglietto, f., & gemini, l. (2015, october 21-24). citizenfour: internet publics and the imaginary of privacy a content analysis of twitter commentaries around the 2015 oscar winning documentary. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. snowden himself became a news story that threatened to eclipse the implications of the  information he had revealed.  as poitras said in her acceptance speech “the disclosures that edward snowden  reveals don’t only expose a threat to our privacy but to our democracy itself. when the  most important decisions being made, affecting all of us, are made in secret, we lose  our ability to check the powers that control” . 1 under this perspective, the focal point of a documentary as citizenfour is to produce a  representation of the privacy based on a non­fiction story. this representation is, in turn,  able to affect the collective imaginary, that is the set of symbolic representations  generated by media that serve for the communication of a social system (morin, 1962;  williams, 1974).  as a topic clearly linked to the digital culture, the case appears also particularly  interesting from the point of view of the digital imaginary for a number of different but  interlinked reasons. 1. the case, and the documentary that revealed the attack to our  privacy, concern some of the most important topics of the internet imaginary: privacy  and its relation to surveillance and security (moglen, 2014). 2. documentary, despite its  character of non­fiction cinema (nichols, 2001; bruzzi, 2006), can be seen nowaday as  an important part of the collective imaginary based on the mix of fact and fiction  (benson & anderson, 2002). under this perspective, citizenfour produces a narration of  the digital culture that is able to affect the audience leveraging the storytelling  archetypes (for example snowden seen as an hero) (vogler, 2007). 3. part of the  audience that followed the documentary on hbo and channel 4, live commented the  documentary on twitter and other social media (doughty et al., 2012). this group can  be seen as a networked publics (ito,2008; boyd, 2010) producing and sharing a  double­screen storytelling by spreading an imaginary of the digital based on the  collapse of some different digital qualitative contexts: internet and privacy, the  documentary storyline, the audience and its narration about the case.   citizenfour’s online conversations and the representations of privacy  the aim of this paper is to analyze the conversations produced by networked publics of  the documentary citizenfour on twitter and to identify the type of representations  produced around the relationship between privacy and the internet, ​ie the imaginary  related to privacy conveyed by snowden case.   1 cfr. http://www.meetthefilmmakers.com/filmmakers/laura­poitras/  2  for our purpose, privacy is intended throughout this paper as “the claim of individuals,  groups or institutions to determine for themselves when, how and to what extent  information about them is communicated to others” (westin, 1967, p.7). the question of  privacy in a digital era has resurfaced as a central topic a. from the point of view of the  state power, in relation to issues of surveillance and security  (chadwick, 2006) and b.  from an individual perspective,  because of the increasingly blurred boundaries between  private and public generated by social media practices (boyd, 2014).   more exactly we will code the imaginary of “privacy” on twitter conversations using the  distinction between (decew, 1997, pp. 75­76):  1. informational privacy, regarding the control over one‘s information; 2. accessibility privacy, about control over physical access to information; 3. expressive privacy, that is the control over how to choose, interact and act. therefore, we will especially attempt to answer the following research question:  rq: what are the privacy’s imagery around snowden case emerging from double  screen audience of documentary citizenfour?    methodology  based on a complete corpus of 25,000 tweets containing the hashtag #citizenfour and  created between 22th and 26th of february 2015, we identified peaks in the twitter  activity (through a ‘breakout detection’) as well as what accounted for those peaks  (through a semantic cluster analysis).  finally, a sample of original tweets will be content analyzed using a codeset derived by  decew definitions in order to identify the emerging imaginary of privacy.    references  benson, t.h. & anderson, c. (2002). ​reality fictions. the films of frederick wiseman​.  carbondale: southern illinois university press.  boyd. d. (2010). "social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics,  and implications." in networked self: identity, community, and culture on social  network sites (ed. zizi papacharissi), pp. 39­58.  boyd, d. (2014). ​i​t's complicated: the social lives of networked teens​.​ new haven:  yale university press.  bruzzi, s. (2006). ​new documentary: a critical introduction​. new york: routledge.  chadwick, a. (2006). ​internet politics: states, citizens, and new communication  technologies​. new york: oxford university press  decew, j. (1997). ​in pursuit of privacy: law, ethics, and the rise of technology​. ithaca:  cornell university press.  3  http://www.danah.org/itscomplicated/ http://www.danah.org/itscomplicated/ http://www.danah.org/itscomplicated/ doughty, m., rowland, d., and lawson, s. 2012. ​who is on your sofa?: tv audience  communities and second screening social networks​. in proceedings of the 10th  european conference on interactive tv.  ito, m. (2008). introduction. in k. vernelis (ed.) networked publics (pp. 1­14).  cambridge, ma: mit press.  moglen, e. (2014, may 24). privacy under attack: the nsa files revealed new threats to  democracy. ​the guardian  http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/27/­sp­privacy­under­attack­nsa­fil es­revealed­new­threats­democra​cy  morin, e. (1962). ​l’esprit du temps. 1. nevrose​. paris: édition grassette & fasquelle.  nichols, b. (2001). i​ntroduction to documentary​. bloomington: indiana university press.  vogler, c. (1989). t​he writer’s journey. mythic structure for writers​. studiocity, ca:  michael wiese production.  westin, a. f. (1967). ​privacy and freedom​. new york: athenum.  williams, r. (1974). ​television: technology and cultural form​. london: fontana. 4  http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/27/-sp-privacy-under-attack-nsa-files-revealed-new-threats-democracy http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/27/-sp-privacy-under-attack-nsa-files-revealed-new-threats-democracy joint digital storytelling on twitter: creative appropriation in political deliberation caja thimm mark dang-anh jessica einspänner university of bonn university of bonn university of bonn germany germany germany thimm@uni-bonn.de mda@uni-bonn.de jei@uni-bonn.de 1 theoretical background partly driven by social media, the mediatisation of society has spawned new forms of political communication in the public sphere, accompanied by high hopes for more deliberative discourse along the habermasian concept of deliberative democracy (habermas 1989). habermas sees the public sphere as a discursive space in which individuals and groups congregate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, reach a solution shared by all. this ideal constellation of public discourse is based on certain normative conditions, which include formal and discursive equality, reciprocity and rational critique as core qualities of the discourse; and ideal role taking. how this model can be adapted to online discourse is a widely discussed question (davis 2009). this paper explores on the basis of empirical research, how patterns of interaction and argumentation in political discourse on twitter evolve as online discursive practices. the analysis is based on the model of twitter as a ‘discourse universe’ which is constituted by a semiotic sign system of its own. this multi-referential semiotic system consists of language signs, images, and other signifiers. single tweets have a contextualised communicative function within a larger framework, which is conceptionalised as the “functional operator model of twitter” (thimm/einspänner/dang-anh 2012). 2 model although twitter has mostly been regarded as a platform for the diffusion of information and personal opinion for individual or corporate interests, new and creative modes of interpersonal exchange patterns are increasingly leading to the perspective of twitter as a platform for political debate and deliberation. due to its format and technological frame, twitter can even be seen as highly relevant for “public reasoning around social contention” (vicari 2012). one of these new and creative patterns of interaction takes up the classical extension of the ancient art of storytelling, now interwoven with digital photos, films and sound. however, in contrast to widely accepted definitions of “digital storytelling” as an individualistic strategy to communicate details and stories about one’s own life, digital storytelling in political context takes up the shape of “joint storytelling”. joint storytelling embraces coordinated activities by multiple actors focusing on a shared topic. by adding personal bits and pieces of information and evaluation, participants construct an open narrative format, which can be inviting and inspiring for others, who then join in with their own narratives. these coordinated activities do non only contribute to the information gathering process in political deliberation, but also create ‘translocal communites’. translocal communities are often shaped around personal experiences or opinions and reflect the intensity of interpersonal exchanges, particularly on social networking sites with a private and personal character. by using the program code of twitter, for example by embedded retweets and @signifers, participants creatively make use of the media logic of twitter for their purpose of building up a translocal community. 3 data and methods to underpin the role, function, and creativity of storytelling on twitter in a political context, we differentiate three media-based levels of political storytelling: (1) the textual level of storytelling, (2) the operative level of storytelling (hashtags, @and rt-symbol, hyperlinks etc.) and (3) the visual level of storytelling (embedded fotos, videos). from the perspective of narration, we assess narrative and discursive value to the storytelling episodes by distinguishing actor-centrered patterns like multimailto:mda@uni-bonn.de actor joint storytelling, collaborative vs. argumentational storytelling and cascaded storytelling (intensity over time). to demonstrate how joint storytelling on twitter can be approached from the perspective of political communication, a large body of tweets from a long-term research project was analysed. background of the analysis is a collection of tweets by proponents and adversaries of a local traffic project (underground train station in the city of stuttgart, germany) in 2011 and 2012. this local project became well-known nationally due to violent street fights between protestors and police and stands symbolically for the new power of citizens’ online participation. in this context a large body of over 107.000 tweets was collected. for the analysis, a rss feed reader (“omea reader”) was used for collection of tweets with the hashtag ‘#s21’, the respective hashtag for the train project of “stuttgart21”. the following dimensions were chosen for the analysis: (1) quantitative operator usage and topic frequency (frequency over time): with this method, correlations between storytelling activities, narration intensity and real life developments can be demonstrated. this included an analysis of the embedded multi-modal content (photos, videos, and links to other websites), by which the users were able to substantiate their arguments, i.e., uploading a picture as evidence of a particularly newsworthy situation. inserted hyperlinks to online articles or blogpostings can provide additional background information and help to create multiple forms of joint narrations. (2) discursive participation on the individual level: from the perspective of joint storytelling it is necessary to identify and analyse specific interactive activities as ‘communicative actions´. here two perspectives can be taken: the individual level (style of tweets) and the interactive level (interactive exchanges), by which narrative episodes can be linked. at the individual level, the operator model of twitter allows for a systematic approach of operator usage and frequency as well as their integration into linguistic practices of personal storytelling. (3) discursive participation on the interactive exchange level: direct discursive exchanges and types of storytelling reflect the dyadic approach to the dynamics of political storytelling. for this perspective, direct exchanges on twitter are taken as ‘deliberative discussions’, which demonstrate the discursive options of microblogging. 4 results results show that certain narrations can be regarded as more (or less) influential. here agenda setting functions of twitter also come into play. particularly powerful was joint storytelling about the various demonstrations, here the community building and sharing functions were particularly evident. the paper argues for a micro-level perspective on online activities, as the internet does not only cause societal changes as meta-processes, but also evokes changes in communicative patterns on a microlevel. on a larger scale the paper aims to show that online deliberation and online discussions are becoming more and more refined by creatively adopting options of the respective media logics. in addition, it will be demonstrated using one concrete case, how much influence online discourses already have on political decision making. references: davies, t. (2009). the blossoming field of online deliberation. in: t davies & s p gangadharan (eds.). online deliberation: design, research, and practice (1-19). csli publications. habermas, j. (1989). the structural transformation of the public sphere. an inquiery into a category of bourgeois society. cambridge: polity press. thimm, c., einspänner, j., dang-anh, m. (2012). politische deliberation online – twitter als element des politischen diskurses. in: a hepp and f krotz (eds.). mediatisierte welten: forschungsfelder und beschreibungsansätze (pp. 95-117). wiesbaden: springer vs vicari, s. (2012). twitter and public reasoning around social contention: the case of #15ott in italy”. in: b tejerina & i. perugorria, i. (eds.). from social to political: new forms of mobilization and democratization, conference proceedings (pp. 277–292). servicio editorial de la universidad del pais vasco, bilbao. microsoft word mowlabocus-economies of the internet ii-economies of the internet ii.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 economies of the internet ii: affect nancy baym microsoft research susanna paasonen university of turku sharif mowlabocus university of sussex d.e. wittkower old dominion university the internet has increasingly been conceptualized as a space of economic activity. this contemporary imaginary has been particularly influenced by insights from the school of autonomist marxism in the foundational work of tiziana terranova and through the dominance of christian fuchs’ application of marxist economic concepts. while this has generated great insight into the political economy of the internet, and in particular allowed for the conceptualization of user activity as labor, this approach is only one paradigm for considering the economic activities and implications of the internet. for internet research, there is also the need to move beyond the long schism between political economy and cultural studies as we try to understand user activity that is socially and affectively rich, but emerges from commercial contexts. this series of panels proposes to expand the exploration of the internet as an economic construct in a number of directions. it pluralizes the definition of “economy”, expanding it from the strictly fiscal to include other economies such as the moral, (sub-) cultural, affective, queer, or libidinal (to name merely a few). various papers propose different economic models for understanding the interactions within and between these various economies. they also expand the range of actors and economic contexts associated with the internet, drawing attention to the intersections of race and gender in particular. the goal of these papers across the various sessions is to expand our imaginary of the internet economy. the generation of affective intensities is arguably central to the internet economy and a key source of value. social media relies on the interactions between users and the investment in those interactions to generate consumer lock-in and facilitate the on-going contribution of taste-identifying data that is appropriated and sold to internet advertisers and marketers. however, the value generated by these exchanges cannot be reduced to only the monetary. the labor of users and the products this work generates also circulate in other economies, where value is socially embedded and which refuse the formal alienation associated with the fiscal. the studies in this panel engage with these other economies, investigating their internal dynamics and the socially meaningful mechanisms by which resources are produced, distributed and valued in digital media. the first speaker begins with an exploration of personal and intimate connections in social media, offering musicians as the exemplification of the contemporary trend towards self-branding in the way they use online relationships with fans as a professional strategy. this paper explores this demand to connect with audiences as a form of work, specifically as “relational labor”. drawing on interview data exploring how musicians understand their relationship with their audiences, the speaker explains this concept, emphasizing the ongoing communicative practices and skills required to sustain this affectively rich economy. continuing the focus on the processes through which affective states become valued, the second speaker engages with virtual content distributor distractify, conceiving it as more than a site exploiting the audience commodity. instead, the speaker notes the entanglement of distraction, attention and affect in its model of value production. conceptualizing the cognitive and affective work involved in the user experience, the speaker argues for a move from investigating a binary between distraction and attention towards investigation of the rhythms and tempos of user engagement in order to understand this economy. the third speaker also focuses on the dynamics of distraction and attention but this time in the use of smartphones. combining psychoanalytic methods and political economy approaches, this speaker identifies the phone as a transitional object integral to the negotiations between self and other. the centrality of our relationships to the smartphone and the individuation enacted there is then linked to a culture of narcissism emerging from conditions of political, social, economic and environmental precarity. in this speaker’s argument, the distracted use of the smartphone is of value individually and socially, providing a bulwark against the insecurities of the contemporary context. the final speaker also explores the valorization and distribution of quotidian information exchanges on the internet, offering a postphenomological analysis shaped by feminist ethics of care. the speaker describes the moral intuitions that we attach to asymmetrical information flows, offering a theoretical account of what it is to be a “lurker” or a “creeper,” and of how these commonly-used terms of disapprobation do indeed meaningfully identify common ways of failing to act in an appropriate and caring fashion in the conduct of personal relationships online. the argument is then extended to a variety of case studies including targeted advertising, the right to be forgotten, predictive services, and brand-user interactions, to explore how the ethics of care can also help us better understand the significance of asymmetrical information exchanges in internet economies. paper 1: the relational labor of connecting to audiences author: nancy baym one outcome of social media has been that in a variety of fields, people are now expected to build public profiles and connect with audiences to demonstrate and achieve marketability. social media figure centrally as sites through which individuals can acquire and display the markers of status that make them attractive hires or entrepreneurs worthy of investment (marwick, 2013). employers in diverse fields recruit based on linkedin connections and how many friends, followers and retweets job applicants have. companies like klout aggregate everyone’s presence across social media platforms to assign them a numerical “influencer” score, which some employers consider in hiring. millions of people who never thought of themselves as having audiences now find themselves trying to “self-brand” in hopes it will help them follow their dreams, live their passions, or maybe get a paying gig to cover rent. even people who aren’t thinking of their social media use as a way to help their careers may nonetheless find that what they say to their facebook friends and other online contacts can impact their career both positively and negatively. personal and work lives become intertwined in ways more complicated than they once were. this talk focuses on musicians as forerunners and exemplars of this trend. it’s not surprising that musicians were the first to turn to social media platforms in hopes of building their careers. music is a predictive social science (attali, 2014), a harbinger of the future (benkler, 2006). what manifests first in music spreads widely for years afterwards. music led the world toward individualism, as soloists began to take center stage in orchestral performances rather than blending in with a unified chorus. music led the way toward artificial scarcity through copyright. assembly-line manufacturing produced gramophones before henry ford made it famous with automobiles (attali, 2014). music has also led the transition to an internet-networked economy (e.g. benkler, 2006). now music is leading the way toward a world where developing personal connections through social media is an essential professional strategy and social connections are increasingly appropriated for economic markets. it is stunning how quickly the idea that musicians would interact directly with audiences online flipped from being the geeky anomaly it was in the 1990s to a widely-shared expectation. mtv’s survey of music listeners between the ages of 15–29 found that “artists are expected to be constantly accessible, especially on social media, offering unique and intimate moments to their fans” (hillhouse, 2013). digital music pioneer dave kusek (2014) describes social media as the “cornerstone” of a music career. in fostering audience relationships, artists must balance their own sometimes-competing economic and social needs with their audiences’ needs to connect with them and with one another. it is a radical departure from the recent past, when, as roger o’donnell of the cure put it, “bands could disappear for four years and live in a mansion somewhere, and people were just happy when they did come down from their ivory tower and release a record and allow you to go and buy it.” yet the demand that musicians connect with their audiences is rarely unpacked to see the kinds of work it entails, nor identified as a mode of labor in the contemporary economy. this paper draws on several years of research into how musicians understand their relationships with their audience to articulate the concept of “relational labor” and trace its relation to larger social and economic trends. i interviewed nearly forty musicians in a variety of genres. i focused on professionals who had built audiences before myspace and who would be able to reflect on changes over time. some were in bands that sold millions of albums. most had been able to earn a living primarily as a musician, at least for a while, but many worked other jobs as well. i also read musician biographies. i followed musicians on social media. i followed entertainment news closely for years, collecting examples of artist-audience interactions that drew attention in music and other creative fields. ever since arlie hochschild (1983) described “emotional labor” in her seminal book, the managed heart, we’ve been able to see how workers in many fields – flight attendants, sales people, real estate agents, home health care workers – have had to sublimate their own feelings in order to create particular kinds of emotional experiences in interactions with their customers and clients. now that social media are ubiquitous, and direct interaction is structurally easy, people are not just expected to engage in emotional labor when they are on the clock, they are supposed to do it wherever and whenever they are able. and they are supposed to connect often, so often that interactions become relationships. when musicians feel the need or desire to create “unique and personal” relationships with their audiences, it’s not just emotional labor, it’s relational labor. the concept of “relational labor,” abuts “emotional labor,” “affective labor,” “immaterial labor,” “venture labor,” and “creative labor” but offers something new by emphasizing the ongoing communicative practices and skills of building and maintaining interpersonal and group relationships that is now so central to many careers. the relational labor expected of musicians exemplifies contemporary work. optimistically, culture workers like musicians are seen as models for a future of fulfilled creative laborers and cities. what could be better than spending a career building relationships with people who care passionately about your work? less optimistically, they are seen as exemplifying insecurity, informality, discontinuous employment, bearing of individual risk, and as “poster boys and girls of the new ‘precariat’” (gill & pratt, 2008, p. 2). cultural work is temporary and intermittent, work/play boundaries are collapsed, the pay is poor, and people must be mobile. the mindset of the cultural worker is “a blend of bohemianism and entrepreneurialism; informal work environments and distinctive forms of sociality; and profound experiences of insecurity and anxiety about finding work, earning enough money and ‘keeping up’ in rapidly changing fields” (gill & pratt, 2008, p. 14). the demands for ongoing relationship building and maintenance emerge as a strategy against this precarity. building bonds that bear greater resemblance to friends and family than to customers and clients affords some protection against the cruelties of pure market economics. what musicians must do to connect with their audiences is indicative of labor shifts that have already begun and points to a future in which even those not oriented toward producing creative works feel compelled to connect with customers and clients through means both social and sustained. cultivating audiences is the future of work. paper 2: affective economies of distraction author: susanna paasonen launched in 2013, distractify, “the cure of the common internet”, is a media startup aiming to generate and distribute viral content, similarly to its competitors such as upworthy, buzzfeed, boredpanda or viralnova. all these sites are crucially about spreadable media (jenkins, ford & green 2013) that want to capture the users’ attention and make them further circulate their content. 2013 business insider interview with distractify ceo quinn hu explains that “the idea is to bring people closer through a shared experience. hu says he wants to make people feel an emotion that's universal. ’there’s no agenda outside of that,’ hu says.” (http://www.businessinsider.com/distractify-media-startup-2013-11?ir=t). this apparently simple statement is in fact anything but, pointing as it does to the complex entanglement of distraction, attention, affect, value production and social media. this entanglement is also where the focus of this paper lies. when browsing through instagram, snapchat, whatsapp, tinder, facebook, buzzdeed or distractify, attention quickly moves and shifts. distraction refers both to pleasurable entertainment and dissatisfactory disorientation: it is both an affective and a cognitive state, both desired and undesired, both chosen and difficult for an individual to control that signifies rupture and reorientation of attention. when distracted, attention shifts, comes to a halt and perhaps fails to come into focus at all. as perception is constantly split and experience fragmented between different media technologies, screens, apps and impulses, the capacity to capture attention has become a matter of value production. as discussed and debated in the framework of attention of economy, attention itself has taken the shape of valuable commodity (see webster 2011; crogan & kinsley 2012). at the same time, distraction and attention are often difficult to tell apart. both attention – as fleeting as it may be – and distraction involve intensity of experience, the opposite of which would seem to be boredom. however, as i argue in this paper, the issue at stake is one of a form of experience – an emergent structure of feeling of sorts – where boredom, distraction and interest are patterns in the same fabric. rather than conceptualizing distraction as the polar opposite of attention, it is therefore be more productive to examine their rhythms, tempos and affective intensities in order to figure out how they work and move. according to raymond williams’ (1977, 133–134) classic definition, structures of feeling are social experiences “in solution” related to emergent formations rather than more readily available and tangible social formations: they are a matter of “particular linkages, particular emphases and suppressions … starting-points and conclusions.” the question then is, what kind of linkages and emphases might distraction involve. while distraction may seem acutely specific to contemporary media culture of ubiquitous connectivity, similar diagnoses have been a key concern in cultural theory for over a century, from georg simmel’s (1903) and siegfried kracauer’s (1926) analyses of mass cultures of distraction to the more recent diagnoses of media culture as generative of sensory and cognitive overload (crary 2001; 2014; mccullough 2013; andrejevic 2013), neurological re-wiring of our brain (hayles 2012) and even “digital dementia,” the loss of cognitive capacity (e.g. hassan 2014; stiegler 2008; 2010). as different as these analyses are, they involve analysis of media technology as contributing to, and shaping, forms of experience, feeling and thinking. the structures of feeling they point towards are ones where media saturation, multi-tasking and ubiquitous connectivity generate distraction as scattering attention. early 20th century diagnoses of distraction focused on industrial capitalism whereas contemporary analyses have examined the specific ways in which labour, commodity formation and value production operate (e.g. thrift 2005; boltanski & chiapello 2005). building on the example of distractify as a highly successful startup, this paper inquires after the value of distraction in social media. if distraction is in fact an emergent structure of feeling particular to contemporary late capitalist culture, there is value to investigating its ways of operation. according to oed definition, “value” refers to importance, worth and usefulness; to material and monetary worth; to principles of behaviour and judgements over what is important. the value of distraction then refers to the generation of monetary value – for example, for distractify as a startup and facebook as it’s main engine of traffic through the constant provision of sticky content. in terms of the users, the target audience of the sticky stuff, the value of distraction involves a different kind of worth, that which hu referred to as shared emotional experience. the uses of social media can be seen as driven by a search for intensity; a desire for some kind of affective jolt, a moment of interest, amusement, empathy, anger or disgust (dean 2010; paasonen 2015). this desire for intensity provokes the interest and curiosity of users; it grabs their attention, and drives their movements across platforms and apps. at the same time, the promise of intensity is elusive, contingent and often fails to deliver. as michael petit (2015) points out in his discussion on disaffect, the search for thrills, shocks, and jolts continues despite, or perhaps because of, the boredom involved in browsing from one page to another. while distractify may aim at the production of a shared universal emotion that would grab people independent of their mutual differences, its attempts at “transmission of affect” (brennan 2004) are much more volatile and disjointed. at the same time, distraction is explicitly the company’s mean of generating profit. paper 3: the ‘mastery’ of the swipe: smartphones and precarity in a culture of narcissism. author: sharif mowlabocus in this paper i seek to establish a dialogue between two discrete critical methodologies in order to consider the role of ‘distracted’ smartphone use within a socio-political context. by ‘distracted’ i am referring to the banal, everyday interactions we have with our smartphones throughout our day; the processes of swiping, tapping and gazing at our handheld devices, which occur dozens, if not hundreds of times a day, and which have taken on the appearance of a habit or social ‘tic’ (see also caronia, 2005; bittman et al. 2009). drawing on the work of winnicott (1971) lasch (1991), silverstone (1993), ribak, (2009) and kullman (2010), i commute between psychoanalytic and political-economy methods in order to connect an analysis of distracted smartphone use to a broader discussion of social, political and economic precarity. such an approach allows me to explore the relationship between the individual and society in order to identify how contemporary digital media practice is both a product of, and a response, to political, social and economic uncertainty. i begin my discussion by conceptualising the smartphone as a form of ‘transitional object’ (winnicott, 1971); an intermediary object that serves as a negotiating point between self and other (see also herdt, 1989). in classic psychodynamic theory, transitional objects enact both an illusion (of undifferentiated wholeness) and a disillusion (the reality of the external world). as such, the transitional object is the first ‘not-me’ object that facilitates the awareness of self and other. importantly, in the context of my argument, it achieves this by providing an ongoing site of trust, security and comfort particularly during times of stress, anxiety and uncertainty. the concept of the transitional object has been deployed in discussions of digital technologies of communication (see, for example, dovey, 2006; ribak, 2009; kullman, 2010). building on this work, i posit the smartphone as a transitional object in order to identify the methods by which this technology has become integral to what lasch terms a ‘culture of narcissism’ (lasch, 1991). the culture of narcissism here refers not to a specific pathology, but to the identification of a particular personality (or aspect of personality), which lasch (and others) identify as having becoming central to our sense of self since the mid-1970s. for lasch, a ‘normalised’ level of narcissism has become the overriding personality trait of our time; ‘the narcissist depends on others to validate his [sic] self-esteem. he [sic] cannot live without an admiring audience. his apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. on the contrary it contributes to his insecurity, which he can overcome only by seeing his “grandiose self” reflected in the attentions of others’ (lasch, 1991: 10) from reality television to youtube videos, to selfies, ‘snapchatting’, twitter and facebook updating, it is not difficult to maintain the argument that 21st century society has continued to be defined by this culture of narcissism. in this paper, i draw upon aspects of lasch’s thesis in order to conceptualise smartphone use as a narcissistic investment in the transitional object. in our phones we become consumed by the recognition of ourselves through the eyes of others (tagged comments, liked posts, other forms of phatic communication) that become mediated, brought to our attention, by these technologies. at the same time, in securing our sense of self, these transitional objects serve as a defence against the stresses, anxieties and uncertainties that constitute the world in which we live, and which we seek to escape by directing an increasing amount of our attention towards our screens. it is at this point that i perform a critical pivot in my paper, allowing me to explore the political-economic dimension of this intimate psychodynamic relationship. this pivot relies on the durkheimian claim that ‘personality is the individual socialized’ (lasch, 1991: 34). such an assertion allows me to connect the pyschodynamic dimension of everyday smartphone use to a broader discussion that considers the social, political and economic contexts of such use. i argue that our relationship with our smartphones is a response to an environment characterised by political, economic, environmental and biomedical precarity (see neilsen & rossiter, 2005, butler, 2009, allison, 2012). such precarity can be seen at an economic level, where permanent contracts (university tenure, for instance) are increasingly being replaced by a zero-hour, zero-benefits contract culture that offers little to no stability. it can be seen at a social level, where employees are required to be flexible, agile and mobile in order that they can service the diverse needs of multinational companies at short notice and with little regard to (for instance) kinship ties and other social responsibilities (see bauman, 2001). and precarity can be seen at the level of the political, where ‘radical’ fringe parties and organisations (ukip, australia first, pegida, front national, and to a lesser extent golden dawn) are increasingly shaping the policies, legislation and ideologies of elected ruling parties. finally, identifying the precarity that characterises our social world today draws attention to the lack of self-determination and autonomy many of us face, in a world where decision-making increasingly becomes deterritorialised, opaque and incomprehensible to the individual, who nevertheless feels the effect of such decisions. put bluntly, you may have had nothing to do with the causes of the global financial crisis in 2008 but standing in the queue at the local food bank in 2015 you continue to feel its effects. having moved from the level of individual to the social, i conclude my paper by returning to the individual in order to argue for an understanding of smartphone ‘preoccupation’ as an individualised response to such insecurity and uncertainty. acting as a (temporary) disavowal of this landscape of uncertainty i argue that our smartphones (purveyor of selfies, liked statuses, tagged comments, text messages, calls and pokes) allow us to search out familiarity, stability but most importantly, validation (see miller, 2009) thus, when we swipe our screens we are seeking out a sense of our own futurity. when we swipe, we temporarily cast aside doubt and invest in potentiality. when we swipe we are trying to suture together the reality of the social with our illusion of autonomy and freedom. paper 4: asymmetrical information exchange and the latent virtue of interactivity author: d.e. wittkower this presentation presents a portion of a large research project—a postphenomenological analysis, oriented by feminist ethics of care, of everyday online life on social networking sites (sns). postphenomenological analysis, grounded in traditional phenomenology (heidegger, 1962; husserl, 1998; merleau-ponty, 2002; sartre, 1992) as modified by ihde’s refocusing on small-scale structures of experience (ihde, 1990), seeks to describe the ‘what-it’s-like’ of human experience in its most basic terms. a postphenomenological analysis oriented by feminist ethics of care seeks out to describe the ‘what-it’s-like’ of everyday processes in the conduct of personal relationships through a focus on the moral particularity of activities of care. feminist ethics of care (cf. gilligan, 1982; held, 2006; noddings, 1984) is based on the observation that traditional ethical theory—based on objective, universal, public concerns of justice—fails to appropriately recognize and reflect significant and indispensible aspects of our moral lives including family and friendship relationships, which are subjective rather than objective, particular rather than universal, and private concerns of care rather than public concerns of justice. i hold that a postphenomenology of care is able to provide a novel and valuable perspective on informational exchanges online, allowing us a useful alternative mode of addressing privacy issues—useful both in refining and motivating appropriate interpersonal and policy concerns, and also in providing best practices for information exchange to persons and businesses. to provide a quick and simple example of the value and relevance of this approach, we might note that while the public is distressingly unmotivated by public, justice-related concerns about privacy and ownership of data, many, many more express strong concerns when they judge that governments and companies are "being creepy," a kind of concern whose origin is instead in the private realm of proper (and improper) care in the conduct of personal relationships. i begin by advancing a theory of architecturally-created latent moral ambiguities, proceeding analogically from lessig's (2006) idea of architecturally-created latent ambiguities in law. in offline architectures of conduct of personal relationships, the moral value of appropriate interactivity did not need to be affirmed, as information transfer between physically co-present persons tends to reach equilibrium through two primary mechanisms: (1) contexts of interaction tend to create a common set of informational expectations, and (2) constant recalibration and negotiation possible in synchronous one-on-one or small-group interactions as guided by microtransactions of encouragement or discouragement, such as head nods or selective disattention. on snss, in the absence of these contextual delimiters and cues, information asymmetries become increasingly common, and we must develop virtuous habits of conscientious interaction allowing others to see that we are attending to them in the right way, to the right extent, and in the right circumstances. in order to further define this virtue of interactivity, we will look at its related vices: lurking, a vice consisting in an inappropriate lack of interaction, and creeping, a vice consisting in an inappropriate excess of interaction. a lurker remains party to an interaction without signaling her presence within it, creating an informational disequilibrium, which results in very different affective orientations by constitutive parties of the relationship. over time, the lurker may grow to feel quite close to the lurked-upon through experiences of ambient awareness which, in non-digital environments, are attended by significant mutual engagement, such as the day-to-day chats about ephemeral minutiae which are of so little importance that they take place mostly among close friends. the lurker may come to feel that the partners are in community in an intimate 'backstage' setting (goffman, 1959) while the lurked-upon is, by contrast, surprised to discover that the lurker has 'been there the whole time.' a creeper signals presence within too many interactions, interactions of the wrong sort, or in a way disproportionate to interactants’ responses. we might imagine an uncle who "likes" all of his young niece's spring break photos—or, in a less troubling example, someone who simply comments on your posts over and over again, in the absence of encouragement or reciprocation. as with lurking, there are reasonable prima facie reasons for the creeper to believe that she has been invited to be a proper and welcome party to these interactions as an accepted member within the creeped-upon’s network of communicants, but by failing to appropriately scale interactions to interactant reciprocation, the creeper creates an informational disequilibrium by attending to others in inappropriate ways, becoming too present, too often, and too unreservedly. the concern with lurking and with creeping is thus not a matter of control or access, but of equilibrium and exchange: the concern we have in these moral categories does not correspond to maintaining appropriate privacy, but instead corresponds to our concern for maintaining appropriate intimacy. this perspective brings us to an appreciation of concerns having to do with information flows that are also not captured by discussion of contextual integrity (nissenbaum 2004), for lurking and creeping can be transgressive even when performed by agents with relationships and within interactions fitting to the communicative intent of the lurkedor creeped-upon. by looking at what count as proper and improper data flows within personal relationships of care, we can (a). gain a fuller understanding of the ethics of data use, (b). gain new tools for engaging with the public about ethical issues in data use, and (c). gain new tools that can better orient businesses and employees in moral use of data. in order to extend these categories from postphenomenology of interpersonal care to other categories, i consider several case studies, including targeted advertising, brand-user interactions on facebook, google and the right to be forgotten, eulas, and predictive recommendation services offered by e.g. pandora, netflix, and amazon. this final case in particular may be a useful example of why a perspective of care has already been adopted by consumers in response toward companies, and why it should also be adopted by those companies in relating to consumers. under communicative capitalism, corporations must use user data, and should be virtuously interactive: i.e. they should attend to user-customers in a way that appropriately signals their appropriate attention with appropriate frequency and with appropriate responsivity to user/consumer recognition of their attention, demonstrating moral recognition and care. such a perspective is possible, and is not incompatible with successful conduct of business. references allison a. (2012) ‘ordinary refugees: social precarity and soul in 21st century japan’ anthropological quarterly 85 (2): 345 – 370. andrejevic, m. 2013. infoglut: how too much information is changing the way we think and know. new york: routledge. attali, j. (2014) music as a predictive social science. talk at department of music, harvard, cambridge ma, april 21. bauman z. (2001) the individualized society cambridge, polity. benkler, y. (2006). the wealth of networks: how social production transforms markets and freedom. new haven, ct and london, england: yale university press. bittman m, browne j.e. and wajcman j. (2009) ‘the mobile phone, perpetual contact and time pressure’ work, employment and society, 23(4): 673-691. boltanski, l. and chiapello e. 2005. the new spirit of capitalism. new york: verso. brennan, t. 2004. the transmission of affect. ithaca: cornell university press. butler j. (2009) ‘performativity, precarity and sexual politics’ aibr. revista de antropología iberoamericana. 4 (3): i-xiii. caronia l. (2005) ‘mobile culture: an ethnography of cellular phone use in teenagers’ everyday life’ convergence: the journal of research into new media technologies 11(5): 960-103. crary, j. 2001. suspensions of perception: attention, spectacle, and modern culture. cambridge: mitp. crary, j. 2014. 24/7: late capitalism and the ends of sleep. london: verso. crogan, p. & kinsley, s. 2012. paying attention: towards a critique of the attention economy. culture machine 13: http://culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/463/482. dean, j. 2010. blog theory: feedback and capture in the circuits of the drive. oxford: polity dovey j. (1996) ‘how do you play? identity, technology and ludic culture’ digital creativity 17(3): 135-139. gill, r., & pratt, a. (2008). in the social factory?: immaterial labour, precariousness and cultural work. theory, culture & society, 25, 1–30. gilligan, c. (1982). in a different voice. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. goffman, e. (1959). the presentation of self in everyday life. new york: doubleday. hardt, m. 1999. affective labor. boundary 2, 26(2):89–100. hassan, r. 2014, a temporalized internet. the political economy of communication 2(1): http://polecom.org/index.php/polecom/article/view/27/204. hayles, n. k. 2012. how we think: digital media and contemporary technogenesis. chicago: university of chicago press. heidegger, m. (1962). being and time. j macquarrie and e. robinson, trans. oxford: basil blackwell. held, v. (2006). ethics of care. oxford: oxford university press. herdt g. (1987) ‘transitional objects in sambia initiation’ ethos: journal of the society for psychological anthropology.15 (1): 40 57 hillhouse, a. (2013). study: mtv’s “music to the m power.” blog.viacom. retrieved from http://blog.viacom.com/2013/06/study-mtvs-music-to-the-m-power hochschild, a. r. (1983). the managed heart: commercialization of human feeling. berkeley: university of california. husserl, e. (1998). ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy. (f. kersten, trans.). dortdrecht, the netherlands: kluwer. ihde, d. (1990). technology and the lifeworld: from garden to earth. bloomington, in: indiana university press. jenkins, h,. ford, s. & green, j. (2013), spreadable media: creating value and meaning in a networked culture. new york: nyup. kracauer, s. 1995, the mass ornament. cambridge: harvard. kullman k. (2010) ‘transitional geographies: making mobile children’ social & cultural geography, 11 (8): 829-846. kusek, d. (2014). 10 secrets of social media for musicians. hypebot.com. retrieved from http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2014/03/10-secrets-of-social-media-formusicians.htm lasch c. (1991) the culture of narcissism: american life in the age of diminishing expectations. new york, norton. lessig, l. (2006). code, version 2.0. new york: basic books. marwick, a (2103). status update. new haven, ct: yale university. mccullough, m. 2013. ambient commons: attention in the age of embodied information. cambridge: mit press. merleau-ponty, m. (2002). phenomenology of perception. (c. smith, f. williams, & d. gurrière, trans.). new york: routledge. miller v. (2009) ‘new media, networking and phatic culture’ convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 14(4): 387-400. neilson b and rossiter n. (2005) ‘from precarity to precariousness and back again: labour, life and unstable networks’ fibreculture 5: np. nissenbaum, h. (2004). privacy as contextual integrity, washington law review, 79(1), 119–57. noddings, n. (1984). caring: a feminine approach to ethics and moral education. berkeley, ca: university of california press. paasonen, s. 2015. a midsummer’s bonfire: affective intensities of online debate. in k. hillis, s. paasonen & m.petit (eds.), networked affect. cambridge: mit press, 27–42. petit, m. 2015. digital disaffect: teaching through screen. in k. hillis, s. paasonen & m.petit (eds.), networked affect. cambridge: mit press, 169–183. ribak r. (2009) ‘remote control, umbilical cord and beyond: the mobile phone as a transitional object’ british journal of developmental psychology. 27: 183 – 196. sartre, j.-p. (1992). being and nothingness. (h. barnes, trans.). new york: washington square press. silvertsone r. (1993) ‘television, ontological security and the transitional object’ media culture & society 15: 573 – 598. stiegler, b. 2008. technics and time 2: disorientation. stanford: stanford up. steigler, b. 2012. uncontrollable societies and disaffected individuals. cambridge: polity. thrift, n. 2005. knowing capitalism. london: sage. webster, j.g. 2011. the duality of media: a structurational theory of public attention. communication theory 21: 43–66. williams, r. 1977. marxism and literature. oxford: oxford up. winnicott d.w. (1971) playing with reality. london, tavistock. spir guidelines 1 the positioning of pooky: a semi-professional's utilization of a virtual world for experimenting with television carrielynn d. reinhard dominican university united states of america creinhard@dom.edu pooky amsterdam pookymedia info@pookymedia.com abstract the emergence of the web 2.0 paradigm has brought more attention on to the idea of internetbased interactive television where the audience is allowed and even encouraged to participate in and interact with the stages of television production, distribution and exhibition. this paper focuses on virtual worlds as one internet-based platform within which people are experimenting with how to produce such egalitarian television programming. for this paper, virtual worlds television is seen through the experiences of one virtual worlds entrepreneur. the analysis focuses on how this entrepreneur, pooky amsterdam, positions herself as a producer of virtual worlds television by positioning herself in relationship to the users or audiences of her shows. the analysis considers her comments on how she is trying to position herself against the traditional power dynamics of television broadcasting paradigms by positioning herself as an entrepreneur in a new(er) power dynamic. thus, her positioning of herself relates to how she endorses the web 2.0 paradigm as a user herself of virtual worlds technologies. keywords virtual worlds; web 2.0; positioning theory as the newer media subsumes the reception activities of the old media, many in the public and academia are questioning what happens when the content and activities of the old 2 media are subsumed, and even supplanted, by the new. in particular, the rise of streaming and mobile television programming has led some to wonder about this new paradigm of television and how it impacts production, distribution, exhibition and reception (bruns 2008; green 2008; grindstaff & turrow 2006; meikle &young, 2008; tay &turner 2008; wood 2007). these questions include understanding how the interactive nature of digital technologies, such as the internet, impacts the traditionally passive, audience-as-consumer conceptualization of television. how does television becoming internet-based change how things have been, and would such changes be for better or worse? the study discussed in this paper reflects these issues regarding ‘television 2.0’, participatory television, interactive television, and internet-based television. with the move to internet-based television, there is a concurrent renewal of interest in interactive television. television has dabbled with interactive experiences as far back as the 1960s (howley, 2005; kim, 1999; kim & sawhney, 2002; stewart, 1999). interactive television discussions and experiments focused on making the delivery platform technology, conventional television, interactive for delivering content, or with content offering limited interactive possibilities for consumers (jensen & toscan, 1999; kim, 1999; stewart, 1999). the rise of web 2.0 has seen a rise in discussion and application of more audience-centered interactive television to deliver more content interaction (reinhard, 2010). such television strategies align with the overarching paradigm of web 2.0 that celebrates the activity of the audience as requisite for content to be produced and distributed (carpentier, 2009). such influence from the web 2.0 discourse should thus be seen in how produsers (bruns, 2008) approach this new era of television and the traditional television positions of producers and audience. for this paper, i have been in dialogue with one such produser: a semi-professional producer of television programs and machinima films. her name is pooky amsterdam. as part of this dialogue, we toured the ongoing productions she currently has, and i have participated in the live shows. we have discussed her views on the future of television, which she has described as "connected television", "intertainment", and "citizen shows": her use of this jargon reflects her goals of creating more participatory television experiences for her audiences. this paper focuses on how pooky positions herself as a television producer, and how she performs this identity through her interactions with others. this paper addresses the research question of how she sees herself and her relationship with her audience. these positioning and relationships are used to address the overarching issue of how pooky relates to the discourses of traditional television production and web 2.0. 3 first, i discuss the issue of content interactivity, interactive television, and internetbased interactive television in which i argue that for a particular type of content interactivity, virtual worlds television production may be better suited as a production technology. following that discussion is background information on pooky amsterdam, the television programming we discussed, and the methods used to see how pooky is positioning herself. finally, the analysis of our discussions and her online descriptions focuses on the performance and positioning of pooky as enacted through her description of herself, her programs and her audiences. virtual worlds television interactive television has been concerned with how the technology used for distributing and exhibiting the television content provides the consumer with more control in accessing the content (kim, 1999). however, true content interactivity occurs when the structure of the delivery technology for television programming allows for users to have some influence over the progression of the content, either before or after its production (cover, 2004; 2006; mcmillan, 2002); how a player interacts with and controls the unveiling of the content of a digital game is an example of such interactivity. interactive television providers working with conventional television have attempted to replicate existing content participation by replicating preexisting genres and audience activities such as weather, sports, talk shows, game shows, and polling (baldwin, mcvoy & steinfeld, 1996; kim, 1999; kim & sawhney, 2002). since the rise of digital games, with their increasingly complicated narratives, and the internet, with its requirements for content interactivity, there has been growing interest in how to learn from these interactive media for the production of interactive television content (cover, 2004; ekman & lankoski, 2004; owen, 1999; ursu et al., 2008). researchers have conducted joint investigations into how internet-based technologies could be used to create a broadcast model to enable content interactivity. different european research teams have developed computational engines that utilized databases of pre-recorded, scripted video and audio files (hales, pellimen & castrén, 2006; ursu et al., 2008; van den bergh, 2007). the database selected which files to use to construct the broadcast content, editing the scripted program in real-time as if it was a live broadcast, essentially becoming “a personal tv postproduction team for each viewer” (ursu et al, 2008, p. 28). other researchers have attempted to design systems that present more immediate content interactivity. in japan, saito and murayama (2010) developed adlivtv (audience 4 driven live tv system) as a prototype broadcasting system where the audience could impact the outcome of a live broadcast through their requests to a camera operator on what to record and transmit during the live broadcast. in belgium, van den bergh et al (2007) discussed how to design technical systems to support ‘staged participatory multimedia events’ that would allow users to become their own television producers, creating interactive shows based on existing genres, such as quiz shows. however, the content interactivity offered in these experiences is not a one-to-one ratio such as that found in playing more advanced digital games (reinhard, 2010). this means that the progression of the television content, whether mediated in real-time by a computer or a human, was not reactive to every single user. instead, the content responded to the aggregated audience; this is understandable given the broadcast models under which the producers and researchers were operating. digital games, while mass produced, are largely consumed in a relatively individualized manner. for interactive television to achieve a type and amount of content interactivity akin to digital games, it would have to negotiate these two models, which have been constructed from traditions associated with two different technologies: broadcast television and computers. such a negotiation can be seen in amateur and semi-professional television programming that utilizes the internet for distribution of webseries (van den bergh et al, 2007). for example, youtube producers chad, matt and rob (www.chadmattandrob.com) have been producing interactive short films that utilize the hyperlinking possibilities of youtube videos to provide each audience member the chance to influence the outcome of the film. these produsers have found a way to combine the broadcast model with the expectation of individualized reception with computers. however, such participation is a limited form of one-on-one content interactivity, impacting only its progression. this lack of participation during generation may be due to the structure of websites like youtube where production happens offline and where there is no networking capability for users to join together for content creation (bruns, 2008). a different internet-based platform may be better suited for producing more content interactivity via online production. social virtual worlds may be well suited for this position given the user-generated requirements structured into these internet-based platforms to provide the platform's content. from a common definition, virtual worlds are the reproduction of the appearance of the physical world in a digital environment into which people, via digital representations or avatars, can gather and engage in a variety of social and personal activities (bell, 2008; schroeder, 2008). virtual worlds are spaces that require user activity in order for 5 them to become places in which things happen, whether those things are slaying dragons in game worlds or producing works of art in social worlds. virtual worlds, when they are not strictly for gaming purposes, are social worlds that require, to varying degrees, user-generation for their content; that is, nothing happens if the users do not do something. in these virtual spaces people have been creating places to produce television programs. unlike websites like xtranormal (www.xtranormal.com) or tvml (www.nhk.or.jp/strl/tvml) that offer single users the chance to create computer animated programs, virtual worlds can involve the activities of multiple users coordinating in real time to produce programming via processes that are similar to television production in the physical world. within linden lab's virtual world second life, a number of amateur and semi-professional producers have been producing television programs for the past several years, with an entire segment of the world's inhabitants involved in some type of media production (http://secondlife.com/destinations/media). many of these productions appear to follow a pattern of activities seen in research on television production in collaborative virtual environments a decade earlier. in the united kingdom, researchers experimented with how to use a three-dimensional virtual environment to produce inhabited television (benford et al 1999; craven et al 2000). the audience was invited into the virtual environment to participate in the content production, which was recorded and broadcast. in their virtual worlds television, the television producer defined a framework within which the audience interacted and participated to generate content; the interaction between performers and the audience was then recorded to broadcast to television viewers (van den bergh et al, 2007). this production paradigm can be seen in various virtual worlds for television production (reinhard, 2010): it is the idea of “build it, and let them create” that is a foundational paradigm to virtual worlds and reflects the web 2.0 paradigm of providing the structures in which people can behave more agenticly through user-generated content creation (jarrett, 2008; leung, 2009): that is, to "build it and let them create". two television series illustrate how second life's structure let produsers create talk shows within which their audiences could creatively participate. the television series, metanomics, has been produced, distributed and exhibited in the world as well as streamed to their website, www.metanomics.net, since the first show on september 17, 2007 (reinhard, 2010). it is the work of a professor of economics, dr. robert bloomfield of cornell university, who, as part of his interest in the economics of virtual worlds, began producing his own inworld talk show. the national public radio series, science friday, owned and operated an island in http://secondlife.com/destinations/media� 6 second life to which they streamed each episode. while on the island, people could watch the show, comment on it via the text chat feature of the virtual world, and even have their questions become part of the broadcast. the series started in 1991, but did not stream inworld until august 31, 2007, just before metanomics began. unlike metanomics, the series stopped streaming inworld in may 2010, due to budget drawbacks. structurally, these programs are very similar for how they incorporated the audience, and dr. bloomfield discussed having learned from this series during a presentation he made to my research project in september 2008. the entrepreneur discussed in this paper utilizes a similar format to metanomics and science friday in the two programs she produces inworld. as did the previous examples, she utilizes virtual worlds, and specifically second life, to produce her television programming, while also utilizing websites, including youtube, to distribute and exhibit them. thus, her television programs are completely online creations. as i will describe in the following sections, she structures her programs in the paradigm of “build it, and let them create” with herself being a user and endorser of that framework, as the analysis will illustrate. this paradigm’s connection with the overarching web 2.0 discourse, and how it relates pooky’s positioning of herself, is the focus of this paper’s analysis. positioning of pooky this paper’s goal is to analysis how pooky amsterdam discussed herself and her perspectives on virtual world based television production, distribution and exhibition. the analysis draws on two theoretical perspectives. first, positioning theory is drawn on for analyzing the rhetoric she uses to reflect upon herself, her beliefs, and her practices. second, as the topic is virtual world television, issues of web 2.0, and the discourses surrounding web 2.0 are considered. according to positioning theory, how people converse in any given situation can reveal the beliefs and practices they are acting upon; that is, the positions they are undertaking during the situation reflect their endorsement of certain “storylines” that frame how they make sense of the world or the topic on hand and act accordingly (harre et al, 2009; paulus, 2009; tirado & gálvez, 2007). what a person says during a conversation reflects the role(s) s/he is taking on in any given situation (ligorio & pugliese, 2004), and the positionings people take during a conversation are their maneuverings between storylines, or discourses (linehan & mccarthy, 2000). positionings can be reflexive, where in a conversation a person positions himself or herself (davies & harre, 1999, as cited in linehan & mccarthy, 2000). positions can only be 7 understood in relation to one another, and in the context of some discourse or storyline (paulus, 2009). positions can be generated from a discourse, and/or work towards shaping the context and thus the discourse within which one is positioned (riva, 2002; tirado & gálvez, 2007). discourses involve the creation, avocation, and evocation of grand narratives on a sociocultural macrolevel that can become frames for making sense of everyday life on a microlevel (tirado & gálvez, 2007). according to carpentier (2009), the discourses surrounding the emergence of the web 2.0 paradigm has placed participatory and interactivity audience activities to the forefront of consideration of what is important in the reception of media technologies and contents involved in the paradigm (cammaerts, 2008; carpentier, 2009). to a degree, such participation is celebrated and not critically considered for political economies or actual instances of media reception (carpentier, 2009). the emergence of new media technologies that promote and/or require audience participation has been heralded as creating a new communication paradigm. such a new paradigm is then placed into opposition with older paradigms: in this instance, it is the difference between audience-as-consumer and audience-as-agent (reinhard, 2011), with audience-as-agent representing the web 2.0 discourse, and audience-as-consumer representing the traditional television production discourse. method i have come to know pooky solely through computer mediated channels. she emailed my research project at roskilde university seeking participants for her inworld quiz show, the 1st question. i emailed her my willingness to participate. our next channel of communication was via the inworld text chat feature of second life to arrange my appearance on the show. we also communicated via the voip program skype for the audio aspect of the show. our subsequent communications have occurred via skype, email and inworld text and voice chats. i have never meet this woman in the physical, and only knew her via her avatars from second life and her computer-mediated presence; in both, her primarily presence has been to call herself “pooky amsterdam”1 the methods of data collection/production utilized in this study have focused on these computer-mediated communication channels. in this paper, i analyzed two interviews i conducted with her via email and skype. the first interview was intended to produce an overview of pooky's relationship with virtual worlds. she was interviewed on her motivations . 1 pooky amsterdam is the pseudonym of the woman; it is her avatar's name. i asked her how she would prefer to be addressed, and she confirmed to refer to her only by this pseudonym. 8 for getting inworld, becoming a virtual worlds television producer, and what led to the start of her various projects. this interview occurred on january 28, 2011. the second interview occurred on march 2, 2011 during which two ‘walk abouts’ and ‘talk alouds’, akin to the fieldwork studies of steele and brown (1995), were conducted to visit two of her inworld second life productions, the 1st question and the dating casino. she was interviewed on the design of each space and the reasons it was constructed as it was, how she sees the role of the audience for each show, and about what questions, learnings, helps and hinders she faced using the virtual world to meet her goals of ‘citizen shows’. as with the online descriptions, the interviews were analyzed for how pooky positions herself in relationship to virtual world television. this is a study and a paper about pooky's thoughts as communicated through her voice. my positions as researcher are as a receiver first, a transmitter second, and an analyst third. in this paper i take on all three roles to varying degrees, with the receiver position backgrounded through data collection/production. as i want to ensure that i am an adequate transmitter of her thoughts and her voice, i invited pooky into the writing phase as a member check against my transcription and analysis of her comments, to ensure i have not said something she asked me not to as it was said in strict confidence. upon her request, the quotes given in the analysis section have been cleaned of idiomatic phrases such as the use of “like” and “you know” as conversational pauses. additionally, to ensure that i am an ethical analyst, she was invited to check me for slander or misrepresentation: any time we conflicted with our interpretations of what she said, we discussed that matter in more depth, creating the space for clarification and further analysis. while it is my goal to seek understanding of pooky's thoughts and actions through the theoretical lens of positioning theory and discourse theory, it is not my goal to be overtly negative or positive of her; having pooky read my words and discuss them with me was a means to ensure more objectivity on my part. pooky's television programs the 1st question (http://www.the1stquestion.com) is a quiz show designed to test avatars on their knowledge of current events, science and technology. three contestants compete in a series of rounds, answering questions and creating neologisms – all with the assistance of the studio audience, who can text their answers to the questions and who vote for the best neologism. the program is produced at the studiodome on the spindrift island, located at http://slurl.com/secondlife/spindrift/70/241/701. when i participated in the show as 9 foxmarie tennen on december 19, 2010, the episode was for their winter holiday season special. the set was designed to reflect non-religious aesthetic themes of the holiday, while maintaining the standard aesthetic orientation towards science and technology. figure 1. the 1st question, december 19, 2010 the program continues to be produced regularly inworld, and is broadcast via treet.tv, with archives of the show available www.the1stquestion.com. the dating casino (http://www.thedatingcasino.com/) is a game show designed to help avatars meet avatars to form romantic encounters and even relationships. in the vein of the dating game (chuck barris, 1965), three male and three female contestants answer a series of questions, and their answers are used to determine which man would be best paired with which female. for this program, pooky assumes a different avatar identity, lovey foxtrot, to be the show’s host. the program has been produced at the lovedome on spindrift island at http://slurl.com/secondlife/spindrift/68/223/752. during my visit for a special valentine’s day program (02/14/2011), the program was being produced from the lovedome on northpoint island. the set was designed to reflect the dual aesthetic themes of ‘love’ and ‘casino’. at the time of writing this paper, the program is only produced for specials. however, archives of the show can be found at the program's website. http://www.thedatingcasino.com/� http://www.thedatingcasino.com/� http://www.thedatingcasino.com/� http://www.thedatingcasino.com/� http://www.thedatingcasino.com/� http://www.thedatingcasino.com/� http://www.thedatingcasino.com/� http://www.thedatingcasino.com/� http://www.thedatingcasino.com/� http://www.thedatingcasino.com/� http://www.thedatingcasino.com/� http://www.thedatingcasino.com/� 10 figure 2. the dating casino, february 14, 2011 pooky's positionings this is a paper about how a woman is positioning herself in the terrain of a virtual world as an entrepreneur of television production, distribution and exhibition for a new media technology era. a focus on positioning is, to some extent, a focus on identity construction(ing) (ligorio & pugliese, 2004; riva, 2002): how the person describe him or her self in relationship to aspects of the world around him or her can help us to understand how that person makes sense of not only the world but of his or her position within it. as the creator and individual primarily responsible for the operations of the 1st question and the dating casino, pooky positions herself as the producer of these two television programs. in addition, her tongue-incheek description of herself reveals how confident she feels in that role: i’m the best producer there is online, virtually. … i have an incredible eye for detail. i have an understanding of the medium. i know what has to get done. i have a will of iron. and i’m funny, which helps. (interview 1/28/11) she positions herself as a unique individual, from which she derives her confidence as a producer: "i don’t think there’s anybody who has the experience i have in production." (interview 1/28/11). perhaps some of that self-confidence also comes from a feeling of being driven. she repeatedly indicated that she felt compelled by a vision of the future of television to act upon it, positioning herself as a visionary by describing her drive as such: 11 so what really drove me, though, to second life and to do the show in second life was more of a vision that compelled me and that i had to manifest, because i already knew that people like to sort of log in and be active… (interview 1/28/11) thus, she sees herself as somewhat unique by positioning herself as a pioneer, an innovator, for having seen the future of television entertainment. in her own words, pooky is not only positioning herself as a producer who performs the work necessary to create the television programming; she has also positioned herself as an entrepreneurial visionary and innovator of what she sees as the next step in television. however, there is humility in any selling of her own abilities as she couches her discussion of her abilities in the ideology of crowdsourcing and social media: that she would not be the visionary, innovator and entrepreneur she is if it were not for the actions of the unseen but not unfelt masses -the many hands that help her to create her productions: i can think of a lot of things, carrielynn, and do. i’ll never be able to implement everything that i think of in this lifetime. but i am only one person. and i can only think of what i can think of. with you, i can think of twice as much. with another person, three times, with another person, four times. and so the ability of this medium to call and draw upon other people’s contributions is also huge. (interview 1/28/11) she not only speaks of the general publics and audiences of the virtual worlds, but also mentions the specific people who help her create her programming, such as for the 1st question: i write this show top to bottom myself. and always have done, because i always will. although i do have some audience members who send me articles of things that they think i would like, which i enjoy. ... and i also book the show as well. petlove helps with the soundcheck. i give the script to hydra, and he … does a remarkable job. he’s a wonderful, charismatic co-host. i’m very fortunate to have him. he’s been with me since the first show. in fact the whole team has really been with me since the first show. rob does the set managing and he brings the winner’s names out at the end. he resets the buzzers, he puts the names up. … it’s a small crew, but we do put the show on every week and yes, i suppose do the lion’s share of work in production. (interview 3/2/11) 12 she feels that she could not be where she is without the positive reinforcement she felt she received from others by going in and producing inworld, beginning in the virtual world habbo hotel and then in second life: well, it became, to some extent, a refuge. … i was going through a [rough time in life]. and it became a place where i guess i could go and find some support. (interview 1/28/11) at first glance, there appears to be a tension between selling oneself as unique and then lauding the actions of others. however, given that her vision of participatory television, which requires the actions of the unseen but not unfelt masses, perhaps she positions herself as confident because she saw how to utilize this new paradigm to create an egalitarian ideal. thus, she couches her responses in the ideology of social media repeatedly when she positions herself as a producer in a somewhat humbled position to her audiences – as if it is her role to bring something to them, to serve them, through her entertainment: q:...what do you see as your relationship to the audience? a: to bring them something valuable. q: and how do you find it valuable? a: to bring them meaningful information. (interview 1/28/11) i do love people. and i think that we do need each other. and being in a virtual world has allowed me the honor of, i think, serving a bigger slice of the human pie. (interview 3/2/11) additionally, she sees her role as producer as being one where she is serving people by preparing them for the future and bringing them what they want in a format that they would consider to be entertaining. i feel my responsibility is to inform my audience in a fun and entertaining way. ...when you give somebody a message, they’ve got to be ready to receive it. you could have the best message in the world. if your audience isn’t ready to receive it, they’re not going to hear it. so my job is to provide the format by which important information can get in. (interview 1/28/11) 13 her idea is that she is creating these programs to empower others. with her programming, she sees herself as a mediator for empowerment and understanding. and to provide this service, she feels she has to be in dialogue with her audience. thus, for her, any power or influence she has comes from being in dialogue with her audience by providing something of value. she feels she needs to have the confidence to be the leader, but that she is always open to criticism to learn and improve. … it’s like i don’t need to be powerful. i just need to be creative. i need to do it. i don’t see myself as more or less powerful. i don’t have a power relationship with my audience. i’m there to provide something that they want. … i’m very open to advice. i’m always open to what other people have to say. you have to have an ego in this business; you have to have an ego to put yourself forward, to make a better product, right? (interview 1/28/11) in her view, the role of a producer in virtual world television is to be less powerful than a traditional television producer, and to be more in service to the needs of the unseen but not unfelt masses. again, she is both selling herself and her idea of such an egalitarian television production, distribution, exhibition and reception by positioning herself as someone who recognizes this relationship as the future of television, and who embodies it through her actions. pooky sees herself as both humbled by the opportunity to produce this more egalitarian, participatory virtual world television, and determined not to let the opportunity pass her by: …the way i see myself in relation to technology is that i’m fortunate enough to have a vision and even more fortunate to be in a time where it can be implemented. (interview 1/28/11) her humility and determination is likewise linked to the sense of compulsion that she has. she is simultaneously positioning herself as self-determined and as driven by the uncontrollable force that is her own desire to partake in this egalitarian ideal. the tension of positioning herself presiding over her audience versus serving them, both the top-down versus the bottom-up approach to television production, is a tension very familiar in the ideology of web 2.0. in the light of her endorsement of that egalitarian ideology, her rhetoric can be seen as an attempt to position herself firmly within its discourse, as her conversation and production actions are attempts to legitimate the ideology, and thus herself. it is the tension of audience-as-consumer versus audience-as-agent (reinhard, 2011) that underlines web 2.0. 14 pooky endorses the position of audience-as-agent by endorsing the discourse of empowering people: ...that concept alone is behind the movement in blogging and the movement in the social media. where people now have the ability and also the vanity of seeing their name in press, of seeing their name on twitter. of feeling a bit that they’ve got the power back. and i think that that’s also what viewer log-in entertainment is about. where you give people power to be a part of the proceedings. and how important that is. (interview 3/2/11) in her view, then, audience-as-agent is an enjoyable position for the person to be in with regards to television programming. she sees the power of the audience to participate and control as the future. the way people would begin to take over is in their being able to express their opinion. … so i guess i see this kind of entertainment as presaging what will be coming, undoubtedly this decade, with the growth of connected tv, and that is with people being able to form their own entertainment and to do it freely. i think this is tremendously freeing. it’s just so empowering, i guess, to use the 70s term. (interview 1/28/11) by positioning her audience as audience-as-agent, she then sees her role as being to empower people to reach this desired position. to aid her in this role, she sees technology as empowering and changing how people engage with the media. in particular, virtual worlds technology enables this audience-as-agent position by having structured into it the requirement for some level of audience participation, as the minimum to engage with virtual worlds technology tends to be higher than the requirement for engaging with other new media technologies. but i also know that, if you look at the content creators, for example on youtube − and i think these numbers are actually born out in other areas − you’ve only got like 15% of the community that creates the content, and 85% that watches it. so not everybody is a content creator, and not everybody is comfortable coming up and talking and expounding. maybe a lot more people are watchers, but one thing that being an avatar does give you is the ability to join in and be less judged and to do things easier. so maybe being an avatar does ‘up’ being part of the content quotient. that would be my guess. (interview 3/2/11) 15 here she aligns with new media studies that celebrate the emancipatory participation required in engaging (carpentier, 2009). she sees this technology enabling and empowering people to reach their full potential by endorsing the ideological position on the positive effects of computer-mediated communication: and so the ability of this medium to call and draw upon other people’s contributions is also huge. for example, shy people: there are people who probably would not make much of a contribution in open society because they’re so shy. but in a place like second life, they can shine. they can find their true talents. it’s remarkable to me how places like second life allow people to discover their inner abilities. (interview 1/28/11) throughout the interviews, she did not discuss virtual worlds technology as having structures that disempowered individuals from reaching their potential, from becoming audience-as-agent. virtual worlds technology was positioned as a positive factor in her role as producer and in her audience’s role as participant-viewers. any failure to achieve the audience-as-agent position was attributed more to failings of human nature. technology may not enable any and all agentic behaviors because people are still limited by being people. "i think people will live up to their expectations, as well as down, and i see the virtual worlds providing a very positive pull up." (interview 1/28/11). any failure to be more innovative was not the fault of the technology but the users. i mean, once again, we’re people, we can invent a lot, but we will generally react positively to things which are somewhat familiar. so i definitely see game shows being played out in virtual worlds. game shows are enormously popular in traditional television. (interview 1/28/11) in endorsing the positive ideology of computer-mediated communication technologies, she again reiterates her position as being aligned with web 2.0 discourses that suggest the new internet-based technologies, such as virtual worlds, promote the type of audience participation that disempowers producers by empowering consumers. and therein lies tension. she speaks about her audience-as-agents, as being empowered, and that she is not more powerful than them. however, it was through her own agency with the virtual worlds technology’s structures – designing her television programs – that the audience was given the space in which to become agentic. indeed, in her own words, while she sees 16 technology having a role in empowering the audience, she as sees her actions and encouragement as being important in the development of audience-as-agent in relationship to her programs: i’ve always encouraged my audience to be a part of the proceedings, because them typing stuff out in open chat is fantastic. … that’s part of the enjoyment. ... but i think it’s the way that the audience is treated, in here, and welcomed, in here, that creates their participation. encourages their participation. i don’t think it’s merely the way the set is designed. (interview 3/2/11) in her own words, the ways to “treat” people to participate in virtual worlds television production indicates a tension that exists in the web 2.0 paradigm: the issue of structure versus agency. while virtual worlds technologies empower humans through requirements for how to engage with it, as she also mentioned, technology cannot overcome human nature. such as the human nature associated with power, with someone having to be in control, if only moderately. she creates the space, she encourages participation. however, this power dynamic, as associated with traditional media, is lessened in web 2.0 media because of the space created by the producer to encourage and even require participation. while a power dynamic is at play, due to the requirement for structure to exist, it is not as predominant as in other media related producer/audience relationships. conclusions the emergence of web 2.0 has seen online technologies and sites propagate on social media and user-generated principles: provide the space for people to create and communicate, and they will do just that. in virtual worlds, such as second life, there are amateur and semiprofessional produsers who are doing just that with their creation of inworld television production, distribution, and exhibition. among these entrepreneurs and innovators is pooky amsterdam. like other produsers, she has been using a structure she has not created – the technology behind second life – to structure spaces within the virtual world that has allowed her to produce television programming that asks other inworld inhabitants to interact in order for content to be produced. as a user, she has utilized the space built by linden labs to build her own spaces as a producer within which her audience can create social connections via their chatting, engage with the content of the show through audience participation, and even become potential show contributors. 17 pooky's activities, and her descriptions to me of these activities and the ideas that guide them, are indicators for how she endorses the web 2.0 paradigm of "build it, and let them create". pooky has positioned herself as a producer within the tension of the dual identity of "producer" and "user" that has come to be associated with the web 2.0 paradigm (bruns, 2008; ross, 2008). on the one hand, she speaks of her skills, her drive and her confidence that would be associated with a producer who has taken the lead to create something for others to consume. one the other hand, she humbles herself to her audience, celebrating the ability of the multitudes to come together to create while also somewhat placing herself in a position of service to her audience. this tension also speaks to how she sees the power relationship between herself and her audiences. in the physical world of traditional television production, one person or the few are in charge of production, of idea generation, and they utilize more people to produce the final product. in pooky's view, her relationship with her audience can be more of her audience being an extended television crew, helping to finalize the production of the show. this positioning between herself and her audience can also be seen as reflecting the ideology of web 2.0, especially the ideas of crowdsourcing and participatory design: here production is decentralized, allowing for an egalitarian rather than hierarchical power relationship. however, some of the traditional power relationship between producer and audience remains, in that her programs are structured with narratives similar to established game show and talk show genres. during the shows, there is a clear demarcation between who is on stage, and who is not, and the audience participation in content creation is more akin to how the studio audience or television audience can be invited to join in through specified communication channels, such as asking questions when allowed by a talk show host or callers being given the chance to participate in a quiz show. as she herself admits, virtual world television can only innovate so far when the constraints of human nature exert themselves through audience expectations; the still very human audience members have had more experiences with traditional television practices than innovative practices. virtual worlds are already innovative: to layer on more innovation without the audience being ready for it may dissuade participation at all. after all, had more people been prepared for the participation requirements of web 1.0 for designing websites, there may not have been such a boom-and-bust in the late 1990s. perhaps that is why she positions herself as a pioneer in this field, with her desire to prepare the audience for more user-generated television. perhaps only more familiarity with their own 18 potential as produsers will more firmly disrupt the traditional producer-audience power relationship. in relation to the issues discussed in this paper, future research will need to examine the audience members’ reception of her programs: the audiences of those inworld and those viewing in a more traditional manner. such research can examine the positionings of pooky, especially the aspects of power dynamics, from the audiences' perspective, and to understand how they interpret these programs in the discourse of web 2.0. carpentier (2009), in his critique of this discourse, produced a study to understand reception of web 2.0. however, his study did not research reception as participation in content creation, of which pooky's positioning are focused. perhaps inworld audience members feel more empowered by the experience and this gratification, as identified by leung (2009), which would help explain their interested in attending such user-generated television production. pooky is not alone. her audiences are not alone. how she positions herself to her audiences, and views her audience's position in regards to her productions is not alone in online interactions. her positioning reflects the celebratory approach to the technologies and practices of the web 2.0 paradigm. pooky has taken up the standard web 2.0 discourse of being both empowered by the technology and more disempowered compared to traditional television producers in her relationship with her audiences by striving for the egalitarian potential idea of the web 2.0 discourse. she is thus similar to so many other internet entrepreneurs who seek to capitalize on the structure of internet technologies to generate enough interest amongst consumers and to use them to propagate the enterprise. the power of crowdsourcing, participatory design and viral marketing are all predicated on achieving interest amongst users to participate and to provide the means by which they can without having to learn whole new skill sets. future studies with other entrepreneurs and audiences will help us to understand to what extent the ideologies of web 2.0 are fundamentally altering how people engage with television, with each other, and with media content in general. it will help us understand if these ideologies are more than a passing phase, and what that means for the fabric of our daily lives. references baldwin, thomas. f., mcvoy, d. stevens, & steinfeld, charles w. (1996). convergence: integrating media, information, and communication. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. 19 bell, m. w. (2008). toward a definition of “virtual worlds”. journal of virtual worlds research, 1(1), retrieved from at http://jvwresearch.org. benford, s., greenhalgh, c., craven, m., walker, g., regan, t., morphett, j., wyver, j., & bowers, j. (1999). broadcasting on-line social interaction as inhabited television. in s. bødker, m. kyng, and k. schmidt (eds.). proceedings of the sixth european conference on computer-supported cooperative work, j2-16 september 1999, copenhagen, denmark. (pp. 179-198.). netherlands: kluwer academic publishers. bruns, a. (2008). reconfinguring television for a networked, produsage context. media international australia, 126, 82-94 cammaerts, b. (2008). critiques on the participatory potentials of web 2.0. communication, culture & critique, 1, 358-377 carpentier, n. (2009). participation is not enough: the conditions of possibility of mediated participatory practices. european journal of communication, 24(4), 407-420. chorianopoulous, k. & lekakos, g. (2008). introduction to social tv: enhancing the shared experience with interactive tv. international journal of human-computer interaction, 24, 113-20. cover, r. (2004). new media theory: electronic games, democracy and reconfiguring the author-audience relationship. social semiotics, 14, 173-91. cover, r. (2006). audience inter/active: interactive media, narrative control and reconceiving audience history. new media and society, 8, 139-158. craven, m., benford, s., greenhalgh, c., wyver, j., brazier, c., oldroyd, a., et al. (2000). ages of avatar: community building for inhabited television. in proceedings of the third international conference on collaborative virtual environments (cve'00) (pp. 189–194). new york: acm press. ekman, i. & lankoski, p. (2004). integrating a game with a story – lessons from interactive television concept design. computers & graphics, 28, 167-177. 20 green, j. (2008). why do they call it tv when it's not on the box? 'new' television services and old television functions. media international australia, 126, p.95-105 grindstaff, l. & turow, j. (2006). video cultures: television sociology in the "new tv" age. annual review of sociology, 32, 103-125. hales, c., pellimen, t. & castrén, m. (2006). a story between storeys: algorithmic and audience control of video segments in an experimental interactive television programme. digital creativity, 17, 234-42. harré, r., moghaddam, f. m., pilkerton, c., rothbart, d. & sabat, s. r. (2009). recent advances in positioning theory. theory psychology, 19, 5-31. howley, k. (2005). manhattan neighborhood network: community access television and the public sphere in the 1990s. historical journal of film, radio and television, 25(1), 119-138. jarrett, k. (2008). beyond broadcast yourselftm: the future of youtube. media international australia, 126,133-144. jenkins, h. (1992). textual poachers: television fans and participatory culture. london: routledge. jensen, j. f., & toscan, c. (1999). interactive television: tv of the future, or the future of tv? ålborg, denmark: årlborg university press. kim, p. (1999) a story of failed technology: deconstructing interactive tv networks. javnost: the public, 6(3), 87-100. kim, p. & sawhney, h. (2002). a machine-like new medium – theoretical examination of interactive tv. media, culture and society, 24, 27-33. leung, l. (2009). user-generated content on the internet: an examination of gratifications, civic engagement and psychological empowerment. new media & society, 11, 1327-1347. ligorio, m. b. & pugliese, a. c. (2004). self –positioning in a text-based virtual environment. identity: an international journal of theory and research, 4(4), 337-353. linehan, c. & mccarthy, j. (2000). positioning in practice: understanding participation in the social world. journal for the theory of social behaviour, 30(4), 435-453. 21 mcmillan, s. j. (2002). a four-part model of cyber-interactivity: some cyber-places are more interactive than others. new media and society, 4, 271–91. meikle, g., & young, s. (2008). beyond broadcasting? tv for the twenty-first century. media international australia, 126, 67-70. noam, e. (2003). will internet tv be american? trends in communication, 11(2), 101-109. owen, b. m. 1999. the internet challenge to television. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. reinhard, c.d. (2010). structuring virtual spaces as television places: experiments in producing interactive internet television international communication association conference, june 2010, singapore. reinhard, c.d. (2011). gameplay marketing strategies as audience cooptation: the story of the dark knight, the cloverfield monster, and their brethren. international journal of communication,5, retrieved from http://ijoc.org richards, r. (2006). users, interactivity and generation. new media and society, 8, 531-50. riva, g. (2002). the sociocognitive psychology of computer mediated communication: the present and future of technology-based interactions. cyberpsychology & behavior, 5(6), 581598. ross, s. m. (2008). beyond the box: television and the internet. malden, ma: blackwell publishing. saito, y., & murayama, y. (2010). a proposal of an interactive broadcasting system for audience-driven live tv on the internet. journal of information processing,18, 26-37. schroeder, r. (2008). virtual worlds research: past, present & future. journal of virtual worlds research, 1(1). retrieved from at http://jvwresearch.org. steele, j. r. & brown, j. d. (1995). adolescent room culture: studying media in the context of everyday life. journal of youth and adolescence, 24(5), 551-576. 22 stewart, j. (1999). interactive television at home: television meets the internet. in j. f. jensen & c. toscan(eds.), interactive television: tv of the future, or the future of tv?(pp. 231-260). aalborg, denmark: aalborg university press. tay, j., & turner, g. (2008). what is television? comparing media systems in the postbroadcast era. media international australia, 126, 71-81. tirado, f., & gálvez, a. (2007). positioning theory and discourse analysis: some tools for social interaction analysis. qualitative social research, 8(2), retrieved from http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs/ ursu, m. f., thomas, m., kegel, i., williams, d., tuomola, m., lindstedt, i., wright, t., leurdijk, a., zsombori, v., sussner, j., myrestam, u., & hall, n. (2008). interactive tv narratives: opportunities, progress, and challenges. acm transactions multimedia computer communication, 4. van den bergh, j., bruynooghe, b., moons, j., huypens, s., hemmeryckz-deleersnijder, b., & coninx, k. (2007). using high-level models for the creation of staged participatory multimedia events on tv. multimedia systems, 14(2), 89-103. van dijk, jan a. g. m., & de vos, loes. 2001. searching for the holy grail: images of interactive television. new media and society, 3, 443–65. ytreberg, e. (2009). extended liveness and eventfulness in multi-platform reality formats. new media & society, 11, 467-484. wood, h. (2007). television is happening: methodological considerations for capturing digital television reception. european journal of cultural studies, 10(4), 485-506. leung, l. (2009). user-generated content on the internet: an examination of gratifications, civic engagement and psychological empowerment. new media & society, 11, 1327-1347. ligorio, m. b. & pugliese, a. c. (2004). self –positioning in a text-based virtual environment. identity: an international journal of theory and research, 4(4), 337-353. linehan, c. & mccarthy, j. (2000). positioning in practice: understanding participation in the social world. journal for the theory of social behaviour, 30(4), 435-453. mcmillan, s. j. (2002). a four-part model of cyber-interactivity: some cyber-places are more interactive than others. new media and society, 4, 271–91. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): büchi, m., festic, n., & latzer, m. (2017, october 18-21). consequences of digital divides: how internet use affects social well-being. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. consequences of digital divides: how internet use affects social well-being moritz büchi university of zurich noemi festic university of zurich michael latzer university of zurich with the diffusion of the internet in modern societies came a plethora of research on differences in internet access (first-level digital divides) and use (second-level digital divides). while much research has been conducted on socio-demographic differences concerning internet access, digital skills, and specific uses of the internet (dimaggio, hargittai, celeste, & shafer, 2004), the consequences of these digital divides remain largely unclear. the significance of digital inequality research lies in the implicit assumption that effective internet use enables participation in networked publics and yields personal, social, and economic advantages. a key challenge, however, has been the identification of relevant outcomes of socially differentiated internet use in everyday life (van deursen & helsper, 2015). this paper argues that social integration and subjective well-being are key outcomes to consider and contain potential as the object and basis of public digital-information policies. how do internet skills and different usage types affect individuals’ social well-being? the intention to measure an individual’s mental health more generally has given rise to an interdisciplinary research tradition concerned with conceptions of well-being going beyond purely economic definitions. subjective well-being in the eudaimonic tradition represents an individual’s self-assessment of their well-being (keyes, 2014); social wellbeing as a subtype is further specified as a reflection of “positive social health” and represents an individual’s perception of their positive functioning in life (keyes, 1998). social integration, social acceptance, social contribution, social actualization, and social coherence constitute the components of social well-being (keyes, 1998). moreover, individuals’ perceptions of their positive functioning in a social context seems to be a factor for the success of a society as a whole. individuals with more connections in social offline networks tend to be more engaged in online networks and vice versa (see van dijk, 2013); as both networks provide access to valuable resources to increase life chances, effective internet use may increase social well-being. the concept of social well-being is especially useful in research on internet effects, since on the one hand various online services enable and facilitate social interaction, and on the other hand preference for online social interaction over face-to-face can lead to negative outcomes of internet use (caplan, 2003). empirically, this paper addresses the question of how internet use variables predict social well-being. the study uses nationally representative survey data from switzerland (n=1121) collected in 2015. a latent variable structural equation model (χ2(128)=302.18 (p<.001), cfi=.952, rmsea=.04, srmr=.04) tested the effects of three different types of internet use, internet skills, and feelings of belongingness to the information society on social well-being. additionally, the model controlled for the socio-demographic variables of sex, age, and level of education. the preliminary results show that internet use for informational, entertainment, or social purposes, as well as internet skills, do not have a direct effect on social well-being. however, the perception of belongingness to the information society—which significantly depends on internet skills and internet use for informational purposes—positively predicts social well-being. one of the main insights of the article is that different types of internet use have different effects on social well-being. furthermore, internet skills have proven to be an important indirect predictor of social well-being. in order to broaden the results, differences between internet users and non-users in terms of well-being will be further analyzed. the current structural model will also be tested in multiple age groups to detect potential differences in the effect of internet use on perceptions of belongingness and well-being in different life stages. this article makes three main contributions to the research on digital social well-being. first, the data used for the empirical analysis is representative of a country with high internet penetration and thus allows reliable and nationally generalizable statements; the results also have value for other western social democracies where the internet is crucial for everyday functioning. research on the effects of the internet on subjective well-being so far lacks studies that are based on population-level data and include validated measures. second, the model includes users’ internet skills, which is essential in light of the fact that insufficient skills seem to prevent users from engaging in beneficial online activities (nimrod, 2014). against the background of the knowledgegap hypothesis and the fact that more educated people use the internet more frequently for informational purposes (büchi, just, & latzer, 2016), internet skills are an important factor for social well-being. third, this article studies different types of internet use and their effects on subjective well-being since previous research has shown that the amount of internet use as a one-dimensional concept is insufficient in research into internet effects (valkenburg & peter, 2007). a differentiated operationalization of several types of internet use allows for more fine-grained findings. an additional asset of the data collected via computer-assisted telephone interviews is that it also contains extensive information about people who do not use the internet, not only concerning their well-being and integration into the information society, but also about their reasons for not participating in the networked information society. this article is also particularly relevant to the current academic debate on subjective well-being since it focuses on its social component which has been neglected thus far. the results of this study not only illustrate the consequences of existing digital divides, but also have broad policy implications since they contribute to the empirical basis of evidencebased policy-making regarding the promotion of internet use and skills development. references büchi, m. just, n., & latzer, m. (2016). modeling the second-level digital divide: a fivecountry study of social differences in internet use. new media & society, 18(11), 2703–2722. doi:10.1177/1461444815604154 caplan, s. e. (2003). preference for online social interaction: a theory of problematic internet use and psychosocial well-being. communication research, 30(6), 625– 648. doi:10.1177/0093650203257842 dimaggio, p., hargittai, e., celeste, c., & shafer, s. (2004). from unequal access to differentiated use: a literature review and agenda for research on digital inequality. in k. m. neckerman (ed.), social inequality (pp. 355–400). new york, ny: russell sage foundation. keyes, c. l. m. (1998). social well-being. social psychology quarterly, 61(2), 121–140. keyes, c. l. m. (2014). happiness, flourishing, and life satisfaction. in w. c. cockerham, r. dingwall & s. r. quah (eds.), the wiley-blackwell encyclopedia of health, illness, behavior, and society (pp. 747–751). chichester, uk: wiley blackwell. nimrod, g. (2014). the benefits of and constraints to participation in seniors’ online communities. leisure studies, 33(3), 247–266. doi:10.1080/02614367.2012.697697 valkenburg, p. m., & peter, j. (2007). internet communication and its relation to wellbeing: identifying some underlying mechanisms. media psychology, 9(1), 43–58. doi:10.1080/15213260709336802 van deursen, a. & helsper, e. j. (2015). the third-level digital divide: who benefits most from being online? in l. robinson, s. r. cotten, j. schulz, t. m. hale, & a. williams (eds.), communication and information technologies annual (vol. 10, pp. 29–52). bingley, uk: emerald. doi:10.1108/s2050-206020150000010002 van dijk, j. a. g. m. (2013). inequalities in the network society. in k. orton-johnson, & n. prior (eds.), digital sociology (pp. 105–124). london, uk: palgrave macmillan. microsoft word 895-639-1-pb.docx selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 theatre as method in surveillance research david phillips u. toronto canada davidj.phillips@utoronto.ca abstract the goal of method design is a process where people are persuaded by surprising results. theatrical events can be contrived to meet these criteria in seemimgly exhausted fields and in cultures other than the academy. the field of surveillance is in the midst of a crisis of theory at the same time that it is of compelling importance across society. we report on the design and performance of a theatrical event addressing the broad question “what are the traps, contradictions, conflicts, inevitabilities, and possibilities when life is organized around surveillance?” a team of collaborators has been assembled, including a surveillance scholar, a dramaturg, two actors, a dancer, a visual/projection artist, a data wrangler, a statistician, and an audience. we will isolate and articulate interesting moments in surveillance infrastructure, then design a set of theatrical constraints, imperatives, and desires that will facilitate an embodied articulation and exploration of the moment. keywords theatre as research, surveillance, practice as research what is research? what is method? luker says that “the twin goals of ‘method’ are to create a research design where (1) you can be surprised by your findings and (2) others can be persuaded by them.” (luker 2010, p 6) this persuasion, this justification of the research process, always occurs within a certain ideologies, ontologies, epistemologies. effective persuasion depends on our understanding, implicit or explicit, of what matters, what exists, and the relation of our consciousness to those things. research questions, politics, theory, and method are always entwined. the political economy of academic research constrains research in particular ways. it makes certain questions difficult to ask, certain phenomena difficult to notice, for three reasons. first, they may be unsayable within a politically structured discourse. as hunter puts it, “powerful political structures train us to listen, speak, see, and feel in specific ways, ways that often exclude the possibility of recognizing people and actions, animals and environments, that do not fit the parameters of those structures.” second, relations, entities, and perceptions may be emergent and slippery, not yet fixed or fixable or namable. thirdly, understandings may be tacit, embodied, understood in a way beneath or beyond language (hunter 2009, p 231). performance offers a way of “foregrounding difficult-to-articulate theoretical engagements and materializing them in an embodied way” – a way of engaging the unsayable while maintaining credibility (hunter 2009, p 231). theatre as method theatre can be devised in ways that engage randomness, embodiment, and theory to produce, extend, and critique theory. it can activate an alternative discursive structure, freeing the researchers to name, gesture toward, and create entities and relations outside of expert frameworks. it provides a release from rational argument and instead calls on the different disciplines of honesty and truth. the discipline of the actor, performance artist, or improvisor includes the embrace of and skill in: selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 • collaboration, communication, and collective modes of knowing; a focus on ever shifting relationships rather than static entities • finding and elaborating conflict and tension • embodiment and the embrace of the tacit • the holding in abeyance of logic and abstraction • reevaluating assumptions and reframing worlds to encompass phenomenon – playing it as it lays. by engaging the practical consciousness and critical reflection of the performers (including the audience), by articulating through engagement rather than abstraction, focused, devised theatre can generate unpredicted insight. in this sense it is like a survey, like an experiment – explicitly contrived with a focus and purpose, a theoretical framework, and a set of mechanisms for creation of the as-yetunknown. the credibility of theatrical method is often dismissed or treated with suspicion within academic discourse. to the extent that it is dismissed, academic discourse is the poorer. performance is a form of formal experimentation, resulting not in factual certainty, but in useful fiction, in workable paradigms of engagement. it is part of a systematic, iterative process of observation, analysis, embodiment, and intervention. performance is simultaneously an act of imagination, a pragmatics of inquiry, and a tactic of intervention (conquergood 2002, p 152). intractable problems in surveillance studies certain recurrent problems, contradictions, and lacunae have long been evident in theoretical frameworks scholars have used to understand surveillance. among these are • the different experiences of the possibilities and constraints of surveillance practice by those in different gendered, raced, and classed social positions • the possibilities of surveillance practice, not as a mechanism of care or control, but as a pervasive mode of knowledge-making, sense-making, and world-making • a theoretical conflation of many practices, from webcams to data-mining, under the single rubric of “surveillance” • a reliance on privacy and data protection as the framework for policy responses to surveillance practice. surveillance research is at a state where relations, practices, and entities are emergent, impelled by tacit rather than explicit knowledge; a dominant discursive framework cannot articulate or make sense of apparently contradictory phenomena. hence, surveillance research is ripe for performance based research. moreover, issues of performance, theatricality, dramaturgy, and spatiality are recurrent metaphors, organizing principles, and nagging problems in surveillance theory. the medium of theatre aligns and resonates with these questions. designing theatrical research method “[t]o be defined as research, practice-based investigation [must] locate and address in advance a question … before identifying appropriate practice-based means of addressing them” (freeman 2010, p 61). the author of this paper is currently engaged in performance based research investigating the infrastructure of surveillance as the medium and outcome of power. the project addresses the broad question “what are the traps, the contradictions, the conflicts, the inevitabilities, the possibilities when selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 life is organized around surveillance?” we are dealing with particular form of surveillance, often referred to as dataveillance – a process in which individuals are tracked and monitored, the data they produce is collated and analyzed to produce statistical knowledge about the population, and that knowledge is applied back to individuals, as they are put into certain categories. a team of collaborators has been assembled, including a surveillance scholar (the present author), a dramaturg, two actors, a dancer, a visual/projection artist, a data wrangler, a statistician, and a small audience. through april 2013 we will have four or six meetings for table work. during these meetings, we will, in collaboration but calling on the scholar’s expertise, isolate and articulate interesting moments in surveillance infrastructure. that is, we will analytically break down the surveillance process into activitities of individuation, identification, monitoring, data collation, data analysis, and response. we will recognize the institutionalization of the practices, and explore those processes of institutionalization as moments of conflict and power. as an example, we might decide to explore the ways that data is made to have meaning. suppose we have a devise, a metal band, that acts as a flexometer. when it is straight, it emits a “0”. when it’s bent a little, it emits a “1”. when it’s bent a lot, it emits a “2”. suppose we embed these in a seat cushion. suppose we embed them in every seat cushion in the theatre. what can we make of the data they produce? maybe a steady stream of 0’s means an empty seat. or maybe somebody with a bad back removed the cushion and put it on the floor. maybe a stream of alternating 1’s and 2’s means someone is in the seat jiggling their leg. or jerking off. does it matter which? why? even if we decide that it probably, in this context, means jiggling, what do we do with that? does jiggling connote rapt attention or distraction? are there ways we can insist that it mean one thing and not another? similar moments of conflict and decision occur throughout the surveillance process. again in collaboration, and with attention to our skills, desires, and resources, we will design a set of theatrical constraints, imperatives, and desires that will facilitate an creative, imaginative, embodied articulation and exploration of the moment. having developed this design, we will have ten days of rehearsal in early may, rearticulating the conditions and implications of those moments of conflict. these will culminate in two workshop performances engaging the audience as collaborator. this is a method of theory building. through it, we hope to produce unexpected, credible insight. ideas are thrown into conflict in unanticipated ways, and those conflicts are thought out, and played out, in a community of performers researchers trained in a kind of authenticity, creativity, and truth foreign to much scholarship. what will come? this is a work in progress, but with a firm schedule of performance in may. i have no findings. i can promise no findings. i am certain, though, that at worst i will have an extremely interesting failure to report at ir14 in october. references conquergood, d. (2001). performance studies: interventions and radical research. tdr 46 (2): 145156 freeman, j. (2010). blood, sweat and theory. u.k.: libri. hunter, l. (2009) theory/practice as research: explorations, questons and suggestions. pp. 230-236 in riley, s.r. and hunter, l. (eds.) mapping landscapes for performance as research: scholarly acts and creative cartographies. new york: palgrave macmillan. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 luker, k. (2010). salsa dancing into the social sciences. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 disturbed data: hacking, encrypting, and designing methods that agitate proprietary knowledge production gregory donovan cuny usa gdonovan@gc.cuny.edu abstract large data sets are increasingly processed into disembodied knowledges about communities and neighborhoods that often misrepresent the people and places from which this 'big data' is generated. central to such misrepresentation is the exclusion of everyday people from the research process through modes of privatization. counter to this large scale quantification of lived experience, communities are collaborating with media activists and social researchers to challenge such knowledge production by going straight to the source and engaging the public in acts of methodological resistance and appropriation. this paper considers a series of nyc-based hackathons and cryptoparties as participatory methods for agitating dominant forms of proprietary knowledge production. such agitation provides openings for more creative and egalitarian knowledge production as well as fosters mutual subjectivities, challenges stereotypes, and affords more just outcomes. keywords cryptoparty; data; hackathon; participation; privatization the explosive growth of data generation, consumption, and circulation in advanced capitalist nations has given way to the popularization of a new term often cited in it circles without the slightest connection to its ‘big brother’ and ‘big government’ surveillant connotations: ‘big data.’ this term evokes massive and complex data sets generated about seemingly everything and everyone at all times through the ubiquity of information communication technologies (icts) in daily environments. the aim of corporations and governments alike is to figure out how to meaningfully aggregate and mine this big data to produce actionable intelligence and thus socioeconomic value. this entails the development of new markets, presupposed by capitalist regimes of property ownership, that enclose data and monetize access to the information and knowledge produced from it. further, the exclusionary method of production entailed in such knowledges frequently misrepresent the lived experiences that first generated such data. as societies learn to txt, email, browse, and search, their mediated identity configurations link up with informational modes of capitalist production. the resulting privatization of personal data is presupposed by and intertwined with privatization happening elsewhere in cities, schools, and homes. meanwhile, communities are collaborating with activists and scholars to challenge this phenomenon by going straight to the source of data and engaging everyday people in more equitable modes of knowledge production. in this paper i consider methodological approaches that agitate proprietary knowledge through open platforms and participatory practices. i specifically look at a series of nycbased hackathons and cryptoparties to unpack the ways they foster mutual subjectivities, challenge stereotypes, and afford more just outcomes for certain communities. proprietary ecologies of production mcluhan (1964) declares that “the medium is the message” (p. 9) to draw attention to the mutual shaping of media, defined as “any extension of ourselves” (p. 10) and messages, defined as “the change of scale or pace or pattern that [a medium] introduces into human affairs.” in making the medium the message, mcluhan argues that human experience and media are locked in a state of reciprocity thus producing an environment of relationships where people and extensions of people shape each other. the medium remains the message under informational capitalism, but also emerges selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 6 as method. regardless of whether research is for profit, governance, or social justice, the methods used to rationalize and mine human experience mediate the knowledge produced. whether this mediation is privatized or participatory influences whether the research product is proprietary or public, thus shaping both the aims of the research and the ends to which it can be applied. i theorize ‘proprietary ecologies’ to bring into focus the ecosystems of privatized data with/in which everyday life increasingly takes place. the “everyday” that lefebvre (1987) describes as constituting “the platform upon which the bureaucratic society of controlled consumerism is erected” (p. 9) is thus mediated by any number of proprietors. through the material social constitution of proprietary ecologies, corporations such as facebook and google and governments such as china and the us develop platforms and practices that enclose and control access to phenomena such as personalities, reputations, communications, and social networks. i theorize 'ecology' because the concept bridges an it discourse of information systems that interact at various scales (i.e., information ecology) with a spatial understanding of the relations of production and reproduction at various scales (i.e., political ecology). i thus consider privatization ecologically to explore the platforms and practices that produce and sustain digital enclosure (c.f. boyle, 2008; andrejevic, 2007), accumulation by dispossession (c.f. harvey, 2010), policing, and socioeconomic inequality. participation as agitation daily interactions are research relationships in proprietary ecologies. i thus analyze a series of hackathons and cryptoparties organized in nyc that drew from participatory action research (par), participatory design (pd), and participatory action design research (padr) methodologies to raise public consciousness around common research relationships. these public events resisted and appropriated proprietary ecologies by engaging participants in reflexive analysis of their mediated relationships through collaborative data analysis and visualization as well as practical cryptography. par aims to simultaneously involve communities in the collective investigating and improving of problematic situations in their environment. par represents an epistemological stance within academic inquiry that “assumes knowledge is rooted in social relations and most powerful when produced collaboratively through action” (fine et al., 2003, p. 173). in a digital context, pd “shares some theories and methods with user-centered design and interaction design, but the main thrust is on democratic and emancipatory practice” (greenbaum & loi, 2012, p. 81). with information systems now a critical component of post-industrial cities, padr has also been drawn on increasingly in the field of urban informatics to understand and engage urban development according to situated interests and concerns (cf., bilandzic and venable, 2011; foth and adkins, 2006). instead of producing new knowledges through proprietary means that are mystified to all but their proprietors, these hackathons and cryptoparties combined aspects of par, pd, and padr to open up dominant regimes of ownership and governance in research relationships. in establishing a time and space for people to come together for research and action, these events took seriously the knowledge gained from lived experiences while also developing media and methods through a collaborative process that addressed their situated interests and concerns. in the case of hackathons, this meant compiling, cleaning, visualizing, and analyzing data from a needs assessment conducted in nyc neighborhoods that were devastated by hurricane sandy. in the case of cryptoparties, this meant engaging journalists, researchers, and activists in visualizing routine dataveillance and then participating in skill-sharing activities to learn how to use open source encryption tools such as tor and gpg tools to renegotiate this dataveillance. conclusion proprietary ecologies do not imply infallible domination but they speak to the ways class power is consolidated by the structuring of data flows within a fragmented geography unevenly connected through icts. such ecologies are thus the medium and the method of accumulation by dispossession in an age of big data. although empowerment is possible, even within such proprietary ecologies, it selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 7 remains a material social process and thus calls for a dissolving of dualisms and a playful building of new understandings to realize its potential. this means considering how proprietary media such as google or facebook can afford empowerment, domination, or both and neither depending on the situated practices that create and make use of them. as consciousness raising acts that agitate proprietary knowledge, the considered hackathons and cryptoparties present a methodological approach more interested in the production process than the production of products. that routine forms of personal and collective knowledge are increasingly privatized and oriented toward capital accumulation through the enclosure of information ecologies is problematic, and presented here as a form of dispossession. yet, more critical participation in such production, not less, is necessary to reorient accumulation and resist such dispossession. if people only generate and process data in ways they are socially or academically expected to, then they will never imagine or realize alternative applications for such data nor will they come to see their own situated knowledges as something worth building upon rather than suppressing with/in everyday research relationships. references andrejevic, m. (2007). surveillance in the digital enclosure. the communication review, 10. 295-317. bilandzic, m., & venable, j. (2011). towards participatory action design research: adapting action research and design science research methods for urban informatics. the journal of community informatics 7(3). boyle, j. (2008). the public domain: enclosing the commons of the mind. new haven: yale university press. fine, m., torre, m.e., boudin, k., bowen, i., clark, j., hylton, d., martinez, m., ‘missy’, rivera, m., roberts, r.a., smart, p. & upegui, d. (2003). participatory action research: within and beyond bars. in p. camic, j.e. rhodes, & l. yardley (eds.), qualitative research in psychology: expanding perspectives in methodology and design. washington, dc: american psychological association. 173-198. foth, m., & adkins, b. (2006). a research design to build effective partnerships between city planners, developers, government and urban neighbourhood communities. the journal of community informatics, 2(2). greenbaum, j. & loi, d. (2012). participation, the camel and the elephant of design: an introduction. codesign: international journal of cocreation in design and the arts, 8(2-3). 81-85. harvey, d. (2010). a companion to marx’s capital. new york: verso. lefebvre, h. (1987). the everyday and everydayness. yale french studies, 73. 7-11. mcluhan, m. (1964). understanding media: the extensions of man. cambridge: mit press. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 8 resisting methods & newness: juxtaposition, play, & interactivity lee humphreys cornell u. usa lmh13@cornell.edu abstract this paper is a methodological reflection on a broad study of social media practices and historical precedents. first, i explore the key research insights from the project comparing twitter to 18th century diaries and identify the discursive strengths and weaknesses of research talks. next, i reflect on the preference of one particular style for the presentation of research in this vein due to its juxtaposition, playfullness, and interactivity. finally, i argue that alternative, non-linear writing and presentation techniques, hold possbilities for engaging issues of authority, evidence, and play. keywords juxtaposition, methodological reflexivity, twitter resisting new communication technologies and services are typically characterized by their “newness”. “new” communication technologies such as microblogs are often compared with their immediate predecessors (e.g. blogs and social network sites). it can be revealing, however, to make comparisons with media practices from even earlier historical periods. resisting the newness of new media and placing social media into a longer historical context helps to reveal broader insights into media, culture and the human condition. this paper is part of a larger project that argue that many of the ways we use social media today have longstanding precedents in historical media like diaries, journals, and scrapbooks. what we think of as the ‘social media revolution’ is part of a much longer story about the use of media for connecting people through the documenting and sharing of the everyday. in particular, i draw on couldry’s (2012) concept of ‘media practice’ to explore the activities, uses, structures, and conceptualizations of and surrounding media. the first part of this project sought to historicize twitter within a longer historical framework of diaries to better understand twitter and broader communication practices and patterns. based on a review of historical literature regarding 18th and 19th century diaries, we created a content analysis coding scheme to analyze a random sample of publicly available twitter messages according to themes in the diaries (author et al, in press). findings suggest commentary and accounting styles are the most popular narrative styles on twitter. despite important differences between the historical diaries and twitter, this analysis reveals long-standing social needs to account, reflect, communicate, and share with others using media of the times. the methods we employed to draw these comparison felt less effective than other forms of communication about the research. indeed when i presented the content analysis at an academic conference, the presentation felt flat, devoid of voice or character, and overly scientific. by focusing on the standardization and systematicity necessary for a robust content analysis (krippendorff, 2004), i squished out all of the life of this story. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 9 in contrast, my presentations on the research before we had finished the content analysis were much more lively and interesting. i think this is because i gave people a quiz. i provided four examples of short messages and asked the audience to raise their hands to vote for whether they believed it was a tweet or a diary entry: 1. i must say i find this weather to be very disagreeable. 2. cold disagreeable day. felt very badly all day long and lay on the sofa all day. nothing took place worth noting. 3. had an early morning today. went for breakfast at mr. teh tarik, passed invitation card to my youngest aunt and visited my grandma. 4. fidelia mirick here visiting to-day.1 some people got one or two right, but most got one or two wrong. most often people did get the last one correct because no one on twitter would ever add a dash to the word “today”. i then go on to show pictures of old diaries on the screen as i dispel common assumptions that diaries have always been a private place to bare our souls and reveal our inner most secrets. rather, prior to the end of the 19th century most diaries and journals were considered public or semi-public documents to be shared with other family members and visitors. juxtaposition, play, & interactivity reflecting on what makes the quiz as a form of research presentation so much better than my presentation of the content analysis reveals three important insights. methodologically speaking, this kind of discussion around old and new media practices is particularly illuminating because of the juxtaposition of old and new. within qualitative and interpretive methods, juxtaposition can be a particularly evocative interpretive lens through which to highlight the differences or in this case the similarities between two disparate objects or texts (becker, 1998). the second methodological insight into this juxtapositional form of inquiry is its playful quality. most people laugh when they get the quiz right and laugh when they are wrong. they also realize that they are supposed to get it wrong. that’s the point. methodologically speaking, the playfulness of the juxtaposition draws the audience into story i want to tell about the fetishization of newness, the importance of looking back to understand the contemporary human condition, and a celebratory focus on the mundaneness of everyday life. as scholars, it can be enjoyable to surprise people with our research and i enjoyed tricking people with my quiz. to some audiences the playfulness of the quiz diminished the seriousness of my analysis, but for others it seemed to act as both evidence and analysis of my research. 1   1  answers   reveals:  numbers  one  and   three  are   tweets   from  2010,  while  number   two   is   a  diary  entry   from   1892,  and  number  four  is  a  diary  entry  from  1796.     selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 10 the third important insight into my “tweet or diary quiz” is its interactivity. as a scholar who often utilizes symbolic interactionism (blumer, 1986) as a platform for much of my research, i embrace on the co-creation of knowledge between researcher and research participant. but i had never let myself move into an arena where my audience or reader could also be a co-creator of knowledge. the interactivity of the quiz, while somewhat superficial, has led me to reflect on the ways that we as scholars are engaging with multiple audiences for our workour participants, our colleagues, our students, our neighbors. to think about co-creating knowledge with all of them encourages us to engage not just in peer review and member checks, but in meaningful interactions and feedback with those whom i had previously thought to be passive receivers of my work. what would it mean to cocreate knowledge with those who may be assigned my work? what would that presume about scientific authority and expertness? most importantly, the quiz, the juxtaposition, the playfulness, and the interactivity are a methodological means of engaging in the same media practices that i seek to reveal in my analyses. that is, more than just showing that new isn’t new, i want to reveal the ways that people use media, including monographs, journal articles, and powerpoint presentations to apprehend, document, and reflect on the world we encounter, just like i argue that people do with twitter or with diaries. perhaps this suggests that rather then resisting methodological prescriptions, i am embodying them. references humphreys, l. gill, p., krishnamurthy b., and newbury, e. (2013). historicizing new media: a content analysis of twitter. journal of communication 63(3): 413-431. becker, h. (1998). tricks of the trade: how to think about your research while you're doing it. chicago: university of chicago press. blumer, h. (1986). symbolic interactionism: perspective and method. berkely, ca: university of california press. couldry, n. (2012). media, society, world: social media and digital media practice. london: polity. krippendorff, k. (2004). content analysis: an introduction to its methodology (2nd ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage publishing. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. (authors may use any license they prefer, or none at all.) selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 11 everything (smart) i know about social media methods, i learned from hip hop culture theresa m. senft new york u. usa tsenft@gmail.com abstract many of the challenges facing today’s social media researchers are ones that researchers of hip hop culture have been facing for decades. this paper begins by surveying a range of aesthetic, social and political issues hip-hop researchers have had to address as they work in their field, focusing especially on how they balance desires for specificity and clarity with increasing demands that they distill complex cultural practices into quick sound bytes that easily explain what hip hop “means” for culture at large. i then turn to the ways in which social media and hip hop culture are already culturally cross-pollinating in the form of memes, viral videos, and through social media projects like rapgenius.com. i end by articulating elements of what i term “hip hop methodology,” discussing its value for social media researchers. keywords methodology; social media; race; hip hop; globalization studying hip hop, studying social media: common research challenges many of the challenges facing today’s social media researchers are ones that researchers of hip hop culture have been facing for decades. this paper begins by surveying a range of aesthetic, social and political issues hip hop researchers have had to address as they work in their field. my interest is in demonstrating overlaps between the challenges faced by hip hop culture and those presented to social media researchers. these include, but are not limited to: • struggles over the ephemeral nature of musical, dance, and graffiti as performance, and the ossifying nature of all archiving practices, even ones that involve audio, images and video (neal, 2004). • a perception of conversational exchanges in hop as technologically inspired remixes of sorts—a perception that challenges existing notions of intellectual property and ownership (schur, 2009). at the same time: • a desire on the part of hip hop producers and consumers to be treated as authors of and authorities on their own speech acts (harrison, 2009). this desire corresponds to a rise in hop communities of what antonio gramsci called “organic intellectualism.” • battles over the significance of history: although most hip hop researchers are old enough to recall a time before hip hop (rebakka, 2011) most consumers and producers increasingly see it as “the way things have always been” (emory, 2011). • the culture industries’ propensity for absorbing hip hop’s subcultural practices into mass culture (spence, 2011). for example, currently, roughly 70-75% of hip hop consumers in america are white (jeffries, 2012). • the globalization of hip hop as a cultural form, and hip hop’s “glocalization” into specific regional variants, requiring specific sorts of knowledge to completely understand (terkourafi, 2010). • hip hop researchers’ struggles with the racism, sexism and homophobia in the material they study (rose, 2008); users’ demands that hip hop researchers “check their privilege” before issuing judgments on the audiences they study (harisson, 2009). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 12 hip hop and/as social media: thinking through case studies to help ground this discussion of what might social media researchers might learn from the experiences of hip hop researchers, i turn to a series of case studies where hip hop and social media culture can be seen to directly overlap one another. the first case study concerns the creation and circulation of an older meme on the internet called “yo dawg”, featuring xzibit, a rap star and host of mtv show pimp my ride. 2 against the near universal appeal of “yo dawg,” i consider a recent meme-wannabe: an image passing through social media that featured the face of jesus and the following tagline: “pray the gay away? bitch, my inbox is overflowing with starving babies and cancer. i aint be havin’ time to fix your kid who isn’t broken.”3 further investigation revealed that image was created by fckh8.com, a private t-shirt company with a “directly charitable mission.” their web site argues “we believe the world would be a better place if good causes had the same savvy marketing as products like ipods, soft drinks and designer jeans, and we hope you agree.” fckh8.com’s mission statement begs the question: does black “street” vernacular now constitute social media marketing savvy? in the “street jesus” meme, who exactly is doing the speaking, here? does the right to “technologically tinker” include cultural appropriation in this vein? would this meme feel the same if conservatives used racially coded “street talk” to protest, say, government-issued food stamps? my third case study concerns the rise of the social media start up rapgenius.com, an annotated rap lyrics site begun by three iranian americans. the site was recently awarded 15 million dollars in venture capital money, and the founders have plans to expand into poetry and law (they already have annotated the supreme court's decision in plessy v. ferguson.) recently the press gossip site gawker suggested that although the site has an enthusiastic user and contributor base, “rap genius nurtures a young, white-leaning user base that desperately wishes to do things like say the n-word.” what happens when investors who claim to “own” hip hop sensibility and have social media savvy engage in projects like annotated supreme court decisions? the fourth case is one that combines the topics of hip hop, globalization, and social media as constitutive of new public/subcultural/counter-cultural spheres. it involves conversations among youtube users watching the video “fatty boom boom,” made by the south african hip hop group die antwoord.4 although the video would have gained circulation simply due to its high production values and the fact that it featured white south african performers rapping wearing blackface, it went viral once viewers realized it featured a cameo from lady gaga, who played a sheltered american tourist being subjected to a range of african stereotypes, such as men walking pet panthers on the street. in this project, i discuss viewers’ responses to the video, particularly noting their original point of entry, as, for instance, a lady gaga fan who wandered in from another video; as a hip hop fan forwarded the link; as someone identifying as south african, etc. towards a hip hop methodology in both hip hop and social media, researchers must balance a desire for thick description and cultural sensitivity with the pressure to distill complex cultural practices into quick sound bytes that easily explain what hip-hop or social media “means” for culture at large. to help, i offer elements of what i see as an emergent “hip hop methodology.” these include, but are not limited to, notions common in hip hop and african american studies today: • you feel me? to better honor the ephemeral and body-centered nature of our research, social media researchers might consider turning away from ideas about distance and impartiality in their writing, and toward notions of affect, phenomenology and flow. 2  see:  http://memegenerator.net/yo-­‐dawg   3  see:  http://www.terrisenft.net/images/pray-­‐gay-­‐away.jpg   4  see  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aixugtnc4kc   selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 13 • you better recognize. social media researchers—particularly those old enough to recall a time before social media—should strive to transmit the cultural history in a way that makes it clear to newer members what and who matters from the past, and why the past is worth knowing. • nothing but a g thing. if the industry success rapgenius.com shows anything, it is that internet speech works as labor that can be monetized in the form of advertising dollars, venture funding, ipo launches and so forth. researchers need to keep these realities in mind, and resist characterizations of users as difficult, troubled, or narcissistic because they demand creative control over their words, images, and sounds released online. • it’s a double consciousness thing. social media researchers have an obligation to subcultural and splinter groups to represent their experiences in social media spaces as both part of “everyone’s experience” and as something unique and significant in its own right. the term “double consciousness” comes from the writer w.e.b. du bois, who argued that black americans have always been responsible for two modalities of consciousness: their own, and that of dominant (white) culture (dickson, 1992.) • it’s a signifyin’ thing. increasingly, individuals in super-public realms such as twitter and facebook have turned to coded speech, inside jokes, and other tactics that allow groups to converse while “hiding in plain sight” from those who don’t understand their particular social conventions. henry louis gates calls this practice “signifyin’, and recent scholars have applied gates’s work to theorize performances on “black twitter” (florini, 2013; brock, 2012.) i would like to extend their observations further. • check yourself (before you wreck yourself.) if necessary, this will be explained during the conference. references brock, a. (2012) “from the blackhand side: twitter as a cultural conversation.” journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 56:4, 529-549 dickson, d. (1992) “w.e.b. du bois and the idea of the double consciousness.” american literature, vol. 64, no. 2, pp. 299-309. florini. s. (2013) tweets, tweeps, and signifyin’: communication and cultural performance on black twitter.” television and new media. jeffries, m.p. (2012) thug life: race, gender and the meaning of hip hop. university of chicago press. harrison, a.k (2009) hip hop underground the integrity and ethics of racial identification. philadelphia: temple up. neal, m. a. (2004) that's the joint! : the hip-hop studies reader. new york: routledge. 648. petchauer, e. (2011) hip-hop culture in college students' lives elements, embodiment, and higher edutainment. new york: routledge. 144. rabaka, r. (2011) hip hop's inheritance from the harlem renaissance to the hip hop feminist movement. lanham, md: lexington books. 302. rose, t. (2008) the hip hop wars what we talk about when we talk about hip hop--and why it matters. new york: basiccivitas. 320. schur, r. (2009) parodies of ownership hip-hop aesthetics and intellectual property law. ann arbor: university of michigan library. spence, l. k. (2011) stare in the darkness the limits of hip-hop and black politics. minneapolis: university of minnesota terkourafi, m. (2010) the languages of gobal hip-hop. london ; new york: continuum. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 14 license this article is ©2013 the author and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. aoir2016-submission-seeingisbelieving-final-mk2 selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): kasra, shen, and o’brien (2016, october 5-8). seeing is believing: do people fail to identify fake images on the web? paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. seeing is believing: do people fail to identify fake images on the web? mona kasra, phd university of virginia cuihua shen, phd university of california davis james o’brien, phd university of california berkeley introduction if a picture is worth a thousand words, then is a manipulated picture worth a thousand lies? as the abundance of hardware and software tools continues to dramatically decrease the cost and effort required to convincingly manipulate digital images, the risks and dangers associated with ill-intentioned individuals or groups easily routing doctored images through computer and social networks to cause emotional distress or to purposefully influence opinions, attitudes, and actions have never been more severe. not only can bad actors infiltrate cyberspace to gain or attack information online, but they can also stream manipulated information, particularly doctored visual content, to inflict cognitive stress, exploit prior beliefs, or to shape and control individuals’ decisions. due to the scope and speed of information dissemination across social media websites, visual misinformation could act as a form of social cyber-attack (goolsby) capable of manipulating crowds, propagating hysteria, confusion, distress, panic, violence, and escalating chaotic mass behavior at a fast pace and on a large scale. unfortunately, even when doctored images are eventually exposed as forgeries, their lingering impact on viewers’ emotions, viewpoints and attitudes may lead to dangerous personal and/or sociopolitical outcomes. these images could even hinder humanitarian or disaster relief efforts by spreading misinformation and promoting hostility. we know alarmingly little about the public’s vulnerabilities to visual misinformation, how individuals make credible evaluations about image authenticity, or what social and cognitive heuristics they rely on for these evaluations. this paper describes results from an exploratory study focusing on how individuals react and respond to images that 2 accompany online stories in internet-enabled communication channels (social networking sites, blogs, email), as well as their ability to identify authentic or false visual information on the web. our exploratory study is an initial step toward addressing the need to better understand how and why people trust online images, and how people are influenced by manipulated images both when they are aware or unaware of the manipulation. our eventual goal is to lay the grounds for new technologies that aid internet users in developing a healthy skepticism toward the mediated visual hoaxes, scams, and misinformation that they receive online. study methodology we designed and administered an exploratory focus group study where participants were asked to evaluate and reason about a set of images paired with news and stories similar to those they might encounter on the web. image creation: we first collected 44 doctored imagery that received significant media attention in recent years and created a chart to sort the manipulation techniques and methods applied to them. studying these images allowed us to identify a few common manipulation objectives ranging from fabricating scenes of natural disasters to political propaganda involving negative or positive portrayals of characters. the process also enabled us to identify four classes of common manipulation techniques used to forge online images: composition, elimination, retouching, and misattribution. we then created a set of image compositions spanning a range of topics, placed them into documents showing a variety of online stories and contexts, and presented them to our participants. the final compositions were presented to the focus study participants as mockups, showing the medium purportedly used to disseminate the images (twitter, instagram, facebook, or email), and the source varying from reputable outlets such as bbc, fox news, and cnn, to general social media users with few or many followers. images accompanied different commentaries or stories and if applicable revealed the number of viewers, likes, shares, or retweets. focus groups: we chose the focus group format, which has been used in similar studies (e.g., ringel morris et al.), because: 1) it allows participants to explore, clarify and mutually influence their point of view in a natural collective process, interacting with others just as they would in online environments; and 2) it is more cost-effective than individual interviews yet still gives us access to multiple perspectives. to ensure that the results of the exploratory study were minimally biased by the political climate surrounding the participants, we conducted our focus groups sessions at two separate sites, a large public university in california and a large public university in texas. we also asked participants to complete the initial credibility rating before starting the group discussions to minimize group polarization effects and prevent the group discussion from being excessively influenced by the most outspoken subjects. 3 findings overall, we found that participants in this pilot study performed poorly at identifying the fake online images presented to them. the questionnaire asked to what extent participants were confident about the authenticity of each image, with 1=not at all confident, 5=extremely confident. the average rating for the eleven images was 2.7, even though each of the images had been manipulated in a way that substantially changed its content. after completing the questionnaire, there was a discussion within each focus group. these discussions revealed some common patterns. first, we found that the participants made judgments based mostly on non-image cues. these cues included the disseminating source of the image story, the media platform used, and/or captions and commentaries accompanying the images. image-specific cues, such as inconsistencies in lighting and shadows, were rarely mentioned. aside from the source, the textual description or commentaries accompanying the images also appeared to play a key role in credibility evaluation or detecting a forgery. in analyzing the images, participants tended to make an assessment based on predispositions and the textual information. after the initial gravitation toward the words and applying preconceptions in examining image authenticity, they then applied post hoc analysis to look for evidence and cues that supported their assessment. in other words, if a participant wanted to believe an image was authentic or forged, they would find ways to justify their view. another finding was that when participants purposefully looked for clues to dismiss the authenticity of an image due to existing predispositions, they tended to fail to identify the elements of the image compositions that had actually been modified. in many cases, the participants were unable to identify any manipulation, and their solution was to assume misattribution rather than forgery. discussion & conclusion preliminary analysis of our focus group results suggests that people generally perform poorly at making credibility assessments of online images. further, non-image factors, such as the source of the image and its accompanying story, appear to play a much more significant role in participants’ credibility judgment than image-specific factors such as inconsistencies in lighting and shadows. contrary to our original expectations, when confronted with an implausible image, most subjects did not immediately suspect some form of image manipulation. these findings have important implications. for image creators and publishers, the most productive ways to increase credibility ratings lie elsewhere, namely, in non-image features such as the source, story content, and online media interface. for example, images posted on twitter can be perceived credible if they have a large number of retweets, favorites and followers, regardless of the actual image content. for image consumers at large, it is advisable not to assume every image on the web is authentic. 4 this pilot study was limited by its small sample size and lack of demographic diversity. moreover, the fake images analyzed in the study provided limited combinations of image content, source, and other contextual factors, making it difficult to isolate each factor’s specific effect on image credibility perceptions. but these limitations will be addressed in the next stage of our work, a larger-scale online experiment on amazon mechanical turk. sample composition example 1: mockup of atwitter post from a fake twitter user, ajmartin jr, who is allegedly a verified member. the image shows a collapsed bridge which the post explains due to infrastructure failure in china. the source image shows a functioning bridge over the taedong river in pyongyang, north korea. the manipulated image retouched and eliminated a section of the bridge. references goolsby, r. “on cybersecurity, crowdsourcing, and social cyber-attack.” technical report. 2013. ringel morris, meredith; counts, scott; hoff, aaron; roseway, asta; schwarz, julia. "tweeting is believing? understanding microblog credibility perceptions," microsoft research, proceedings of cscw 2012, february 2012. microsoft word 854-598-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 a phenomenology of sns sharing d.e. wittkower old dominion university usa dwittkow@odu.edu abstract in this contribution to a phenomenology of social network sites (sns), we see how the share button brings about an alteration in our being-with others. on the side of the sharer, we see an experience of the world in a mode of possible retroactive sociality, creating an enigma in the constitution and attention of the subject of a given experience. on the side of the receiver, we see how being shared with creates sometimes unwelcome retrospective ideation of the sharer’s experience, and requires a choice whether, by liking or commenting, to bring the sharer into retroactive awareness of having been experiencing the shared alongside the receiver. only if and when the shared has been received and the reception has been shared is asynchronous being-with at a distance constituted. keywords sns; phenomenology; sharing; facebook; heidegger a phenomenology of sns sharing in this contribution to a phenomenology of social network sites (sns), we see how the share button brings about an alteration in our being-with others. similar phenomena have already been observed and theorized in other media, as in despatialized simultaneity and the decoupling of time and space (thompson, 1995), remote connectivity in a mobile private sphere (papacharissi, 2010), connected presence (campbell and park, 2008), and the space of flows (castells, 2000). while the focus of this paper is sns sharing, it is hoped that the analysis will be of a kind fundamental enough to be clearly applicable (although perhaps sometimes in different and incomplete ways) to these similar modes of mediated construction of shared experience. the analysis takes place against the background of heidegger’s consideration of loneliness, and its goal is, first, to explicate the process whereby sns allow the construction of asynchronous shared experience, and, second, to demonstrate that some of the user experiences resulting from sharing are rightly characterized as “shared experience” in a substantial sense. heidegger (1962) argues that it is only because our mode of being is fundamentally social—dasein is always already mitsein—that it is possible for us to be lonely. loneliness follows from the ontic condition of not being with others of a being that is ontologically being-with others; loneliness, then, is being-with in a negative mode. sns “sharing” allows two or more persons to experience an object of attention together asynchronously and at a distance. typical objects of such shared experience include an article or website, a song or video, or an image—as for example a funny cat picture, or a photograph of one’s meal. the construction of a shared experience of this object of attention consists schematically of two processes, joined together by the technically necessary but experientially unrelated process of sns posting: (1) the initial experience of the sharer prior to sharing and (2) the subsequent experience of the receiver following sharing. (1). the pre-sharing experience of the sharer is an experience of the present as potentially at a later time retrospectively experienced by another as having been experienced along with the sharer, hence representing a distinct and unprecedented intermediate between the negative mode of being-with in loneliness and the positive mode of being-with in community. this is a novel experiential presence of the modal category of the possible, whose resolution into actual presence or non-presence of others is determined in the future—in ihde’s (1990) phenomenology of human-technology relations, it appears selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 as an asynchronous form of embodiment technics, but which produces an enigma position within the constitution and attention of the subject ((i/we-)-technology à world), forming an opposite extreme to his alterity relation (i à technology-(-world)). once habituated to the possibilities of retroactive construction of shared experience presented by sns, we carry our networks along with us as persons or groups whom we are potentially in the future to have currently been with. the misspelled store sign we see now is experienced no longer as something that would have been funny to experience with an absent friend, but as something which is funny to potentially be retroactively currently experiencing with an absent friend—should we only choose to photograph and share it with that friend. this is similar to the internal narrativization of daily experience in anticipation of the possibility of later recounting to friends who may be concerned with or amused by the events experienced, but is substantially different in that sharing constructs the object itself as subject to shared experience, while narrative recounting can aim only towards an “as if” presence of the object of experience to the other. in the case of projected posterior narration, we ideate the later retelling as a layer placed on top of the current experience, whereas in the potentially shared experience we ideate the retroactive gaze of the absent friend through the very lens of our camera phone as an added co-present subjectivity—and this ideation affects our experience whether or not we choose, in the end, to post the picture. (2). in the reception of the shared object of attention, the receiver experiences the object alongside a retrospective ideation of the sharer’s initial experience, which, however, is only experienced as potentially knowingly along-with the receiver, again representing an intermediate between negative and positive modes of being-with. when the receiver experiences the shared object she projects backwards the sharer’s experience of the object. she may seek to reconstruct the sharer’s experience in asking, for example, what’s supposed to be funny about it, or perhaps whether the sharer shared this as something to be celebrated and enjoyed or something to be lamented. in any case, if she considers indicating receipt of the shared object through commenting, liking, or sharing the post, she must imagine not only the sharer’s experience of the object, but the sharer’s ideation of the receiver’s experience of the object—roughly speaking, she must imagine the experiencing-together of the object by the sharer and the receiver. the retrospective construction of such a shared experience may be meaningful, creating a mutual feeling of warmth and closeness, or may even be highly disruptive, as in the case of a parent who comments upon a child’s drunken photograph. the technical act of sns sharing, being related only externally to the sharer’s experience of something as to be shared, often fails to reach all and only the ideationally intended recipients. while for the most part and for most users this is a feature rather than a bug, allowing for collateral benefits in accidental contributions to the maintenance and development of untargeted relationships, the receiver may be forced to engage in unwelcome ideation of the sharer—“who is my cousin such that she shared this?”; “does my former student really think this is funny?”—or may simply have been invited by implication into a group, context, or event of a too-intimate nature. this transgressive form of sharing (“oversharing”), which creates a retrospective ideation of beingwith the sharer against the will and preferences of the receiver, has a parallel in a transgressive form of receiving a shared experience. having been accidentally included as potential recipient of a shared event, the recipient can create retroactive co-presence in the past experience against the will and preferences of the sharer. the parent may know full well that he is not among the community of intended recipients of the child’s post, and by replying to it may rightly be called a “creeper.” both parties must recognize that the merely external relation between the ideational and technical acts of sharing creates accidental moments of publicity, which call for civil inattention (goffman, 1971). in an offline example of these mirrored forms of transgression, while it is surely transgressive to use the bathroom with the door open while company is over, it is also surely trangressive, having accidentally walked into the bathroom in use, to assume that one has implicitly been invited to stay. only once the shared has been received and the reception has been shared is asynchronous being-with at a distance constituted—the circle must be closed at both ends, otherwise consisting only of an abstract and generic being-possibly-with on the part of the sharer and a being-merely-alongside on the selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 part of the receiver. by articulating these moments in the construction of asynchronous shared experience at a distance through sns sharing we can see the intricate and rich modulations of beingwith resulting from what we might call—following heidegger’s analysis of loneliness—the sudden ontological being-online of our lives, in which synchronous, monomodal offline life is merely a negative mode of synchronous, multimodal being-online. references castells, m. (2009). the rise of the network society. oxford: wiley-blackwell. campbell, s. w., & park, y. j. (2008). social implications of mobile telephony: the rise of personal communication society. sociology compass, 2(2), 371-387. goffman, e. (1971). relations in public: microstudies of the public order. new york: basic books. heidegger, m. (1962). being and time. (j. macquarrie & e. robinson, trans.). malden, ma: blackwell. ihde, d. (1990). technology and the lifeworld: from garden to earth. bloomington: indiana university press. papacharissi, z. (2010). a private sphere: democracy in a digital age. cambridge, uk: polity. thompson, j. b. (1995). the media and modernity: a social theory of the media. stanford, ca: stanford university press. license this article is ©2013 d.e. wittkower, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. microsoft word 763-513-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 the nra and social media: context collapse, power, and multilevel identity construction for complex organizations dawn r. gilpin arizona state university united states dgilpin@asu.edu abstract current scholarship treats organizational and issue identity as a fluid, discursively constructed concept, inextricably bound to the negotiation and maintenance of power structures. the interactive nature of identity construction emphasizes the importance of communicative interactions between stakeholders and organizations in shaping identities. this paper uses social and semantic network plus qualitative analysis to investigate the social media strategies adopted by the national rifle association (nra). the nra constitutes its identities and power through a complex network of relationships, and seeks to personalize the issue to constituent groups through differentiated use of digital media. the analysis conducted offers insights into the ways in which complex organizations may structure their social media presence to construct their identity and influence aggregation patterns among stakeholders. identity; social media; organizations; issues; power current scholarship increasingly treats identity as a fluid, discursively constructed concept (author, 2013). along with organizational identity, both issues and publics can be conceptualized as dynamic, cocreational processes rather than objectively defined entities (botan & taylor, 2004). issues in particular may be characterized as having a range of identities, constructed by publics working from various cultural contexts (curtin & gaither, 2006). henderson (2005) pointed out that issue identities have practical consequences, since “the ways in which public issues are signified in discourse . . . both represent and institute power and resource allocation” (p. 121). these identity construction processes are therefore also inextricably bound to the negotiation and maintenance of power structures. the interactive nature of identity construction within this theoretical framework, which “allows for pluralistic identities and multiple meanings” (motion & leitch, 2002, p. 46), places significant emphasis on stakeholders and their communicative interactions with organizations in shaping organizational and issue identities (curtin & gaither, 2006). given the importance of interactivity in constituting issues, many organizations turn to social media platforms in an attempt to strategically influence the emergence of publics and issue identities. in doing so, they also coconstruct their own identities. previous research has examined ways in which organizations use social media to present a cohesive core identity, while engaging with constituents to emphasize different identity aspects through different platform formats and engagement styles (gilpin, 2010). scholars have also addressed the influential role of interactive digital media in global issues, noting that activist organizations adopt varying approaches to dialogue and narrative to personalize issues that support their mission (bennett & segerberg, 2012). however, the linkage between efforts by politically engaged organizations to construct their own socially mediated identity while influencing the identities of issues and publics with which they are involved, has not yet been widely explored. lobby organizations represent a particular set of organizational features and highly diverse stakeholder networks: they must serve their constituents’ needs while simultaneously representing them to the public at large and seeking to influence both public opinion and policy decisions. issue networks are morphologically diverse, including special interest organizations, the policy makers they seek to influence, and various constituent networks. they can contain a virtually unlimited number of players, and these players may change over time as they move in and out of the issue domain in question (hallacher, 2005). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 this paper investigates the social media strategies adopted by the national rifle association (nra). gun ownership and security has risen to the forefront of public discourse in the united states in recent years, due primarily to high-profile mass shootings at schools and other public places. meanwhile, the political and social climate in the u.s. surrounding the topic of gun ownership has grown highly contentious. tensions over interpretations of the second amendment, which ensures “the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” have caused social rifts and led to battles over proposed gun-related legislation. the nra plays a pivotal role in mediating gun-related issues. it has positioned itself as a central actor advocating for protection of gun ownership and the availability of firearms for sports, hunting, and personal defense. this position places the organization at the nexus of american gun owners and enthusiasts, law enforcement and military personnel, policy makers, and the public at large. through its public communications and online presence, nra represents itself, its key constituents, and gun rights issues. the complexity of identity complex systems, comprised of numerous relationships among agents interacting to produce nonlinear outcomes, are particularly relevant when studying questions of power relations and identity construction in online settings (gilpin & miller, 2013; qvortrop, 2006). the nra occupies a unique position within the complex system of the firearms issue network, thus an exploration of how it constitutes its various relationships through publicly accessible online media can illuminate patterns of power and influence, as well as the multifaceted identity construction processes surrounding gun issues, the nra as an organization, and its constituent stakeholders. addressing these questions not only provides insights into the specific activities of the nra, but also offers a starting point for understanding the ways in which complex organizations negotiate the tensions created by context collapse in a relatively transparent communication environment. context collapse has been defined as “the flattening out of multiple distinct audiences in one's social network, such that people from different contexts become part of a singular group of message recipients" (vitak, 2012, p. 451). it has typically been addressed from the standpoint of individuals with diverse social circles on social networking sites. however, complex organizations also find themselves having to negotiate multiple, potentially conflicting relational contexts in public through social media platforms. methods the nra has an articulated social media presence linked through the organization’s main site, numerous subsites, print publications, and activity programs. these include 55 multiple, overlapping accounts on facebook, twitter, youtube, instagram, google+, and pinterest, as well as blogs. the messages of each subsite are tailored to an array of interests and needs, and mini-communities emerge from sites that frequently share or repost content from each other. this complex network of relationships, all of which are publicly visible and interconnected, can be investigated using a combination of social and semantic network analysis, to identify both structural patterns of connections and the content of the various interactions. this study examines twelve months of text data collected from nra facebook, twitter, google+, and blogs throughout 2012. the data were analyzed both qualitatively and using the automap semantic network analysis package, which detects patterns of aggregation and allows the creation of contextspecific ontologies (carley, columbus, & azoulay, 2012) to classify the different issue, organization, and stakeholder identities. conclusion selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 the nra constitutes its identities and power through a complex, multiplexed network of relationships with consumer and social publics, which express the organization’s ontological perspective with regard to gun ownership and use in the united states. the primary nra sites focus on second amendment issues, whereas ancillary sites variously emphasize sportsmanship, personal protection, education and safety, or lifestyle and values. the structure and content of this network suggests that the organization approaches its stakeholders as varying widely both in their views of gun issue identities and the degree to which those issue perspectives contribute to constituents’ self-identity. the nra thus seeks to personalize the issue to constituent groups through differentiated use of digital media while constructing a richly nuanced tapestry of gun culture. the analysis conducted offers insights into both the specific context of gun rights advocacy as well as the ways in which complex special interest organizations may seek to structure their social media presence to construct their identity and influence aggregation patterns among stakeholders. references author. (2013) bennett, w. l., & segerberg, a. (2011). digital media and the personalization of collective action. information, communication & society, 14(6), 770-799. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2011.579141 botan, c. h., & taylor, m. (2004). public relations: state of the field. journal of communication, 54(4), 645661. doi:10.1093/joc/54.4.645 carley, k. m., columbus, d., & azoulay, a. (2012). automap user's guide 2012. pittsburgh, pa: center for the computational analysis of social and organizational systems, carnegie mellon university. retrieved from http://www.casos.cs.cmu.edu/publications/papers/cmu-isr-12-106.pdf curtin, p. a., & gaither, t. k. (2006). contested notions of issue identity in international public relations: a case study. journal of public relations research, 18(1), 67-89. doi:10.1207/s1532754xjprr1801_4 gilpin, d. r. (2010). organizational image construction in a fragmented online media environment. journal of public relations research, 22(3), 265-287. doi:10.1080/10627261003614393. gilpin, d. r., & miller, n. k. (2013). exploring complex organizational communities: identity as emergent perceptions, boundaries, and relationships. communication theory, 23(2), 148-169. doi:10.1111/comt.12008 hallacher, p. m. (2005). why policy issue networks matter. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. henderson, a. (2005). activism in "paradise": identity management in a public relations campaign against genetic engineering. journal of public relations research, 17(2), 117-137. doi:10.1207/s1532754xjprr1702_4 motion, j., & leitch, s. (2002). the technologies of corporate identity. international studies of management & organization, 32(3), 45-64. qvortrup, l. (2006). understanding new digital media. european journal of communication, 21(3), 345-356. doi:10.1177/0267323106066639 vitak, j. (2012). the impact of context collapse and privacy on social network site disclosures. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 56(4), 451-470. doi:10.1080/08838151.2012.732140 selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): bruns, a., b. moon, f. münch, j.-h. schmidt, l. merten, h. moe, and s. schwartz. (2016, october 5-8). news sharing on twitter: a nationally comparative study. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. news sharing on twitter: a nationally comparative study axel bruns, brenda moon, felix münch digital media research centre, queensland university of technology, brisbane jan-hinrik schmidt, lisa merten hans-bredow-institut für medienforschung an der universität hamburg hallvard moe department of information science and media studies, university of bergen sander schwartz department of digital culture and mobile communication, it university copenhagen introduction the utility of twitter as a medium for public engagement with news events has been well documented. research has particularly highlighted the importance of twitter as a space for the rapid assembly of ad hoc publics (bruns & burgess, 2015) around breaking news events, aided also by the availability of hashtags as a flexible mechanism for collecting all tweets marked as relevant to a specific topic (rambukkana, 2015). in this, twitter arguably even surpasses facebook, as its flat, non-reciprocal, weak-tie network facilitates the dissemination of news more effectively than the hierarchical, reciprocal, strong-tie structure implemented by facebook (dewan & kumaraguru, 2014). reflecting on this function, hermida (2010) and burns (2010) have both described twitter as an “ambient news network” that is always active in the background, and springs into foreground action as major news breaks. while this correctly characterises twitter’s role during such events, much less is known about the platform’s performance during its “ambient” phases – that is, about the day-to-day news sharing and news engagement practices of users outside of periods of heightened attention. in part, this comparative lack of research into routine news practices on twitter also stems from the methodological challenges associated with researching them: while it is relatively easy to capture all of the hashtagged tweets relating to a given breaking news event, it is considerably more difficult to track general, non-exceptional user activities on twitter (burgess & bruns, 2015). addressing this substantial gap in the literature, this paper presents the first results from a major, long-term, internationally comparative study of news sharing on twitter. gathering twitter data since mid-2012, we have managed – within the limitations set by the public twitter api – to capture all tweets linking to a large selection of news sites in australia, germany, and the nordic countries; our analysis of these data shows the distribution of attention to these sites, the dynamics of such marketshare over time, and the structure of each nation’s news-sharing user populations on twitter, as well as comparing these patterns across the countries against the backdrop of their respective media ecologies. approach and method given a domain name such as abc.net.au, the twitter search api returns all recent tweets containing links to that domain, even if those links were shortened in tweets by twitter’s mandatory url shortener t.co and/or further secondary url shorteners such as bit.ly or ow.ly. building on this functionality, we have used the twitter data capture tool yourtwapperkeeper since mid-2012 to track tweets linking to some 35 australian news sites; since late 2012 to track some 400 german news sites; and since late 2013 to track some 100 news sites in norway, sweden, finland, and denmark. in each country, these lists of sites constitute a comprehensive selection of all major news and opinion sites in the local mediasphere; in each national case they include newspaper, television, radio, and online-only news sites. in total, this approach has resulted in datasets comprising some 45 million tweets linking to australian news sites; some 50 million linking to german news sites; and some 10 million linking to nordic news sites. building on these large datasets, we develop a number of key metrics for nation-bynation and comparative analyses. first, the study of long-term sharing patterns reveals the respective marketshare of each news site within the overall volume of sharing activity in each country. this indicates the key sources that twitter users draw on in their routine news sharing activities. second, our longitudinal dataset enables a study of the dynamics of this market structure, showing the relative rise and decline of specific sites within each national mediasphere. we examine this both for the entire timeframe covered by each dataset, and in the context of specific major events, to explore whether the marketshare of specific sites is greater in particular news contexts (political scandals, natural disasters, sporting and entertainment events) than over the long term, and correlate this with existing knowledge about the digital and social media strategies of these sites and about how these sites are generally perceived in each country. third, we examine the structure of the specific userbases for the leading news sites in each country. this provides information, for instance, about the extent to which their marketshare within overall sharing activities is driven only by a small number of highly active users, or by widespread sharing across a large userbase, and thus indicates the relative general popularity or topical specialisation of each site. fourth, by systematically analysing the overlaps between these userbases we are able to shed new light onto users’ prevalent news sourcing practices within these national twitterspheres, identifying which combinations of sites are commonly shared by the same users. this is likely to reveal a number of affinities between sites: for instance, users may typically share links to a selection of all sites that is based on the sites’ perceived quality, ideological orientation, or topical specialisation, and sharing patterns may also be influenced by cross-promotions between sites belonging to the same media outlets. preliminary analysis: news sharing in australia early analyses of the australian data, for instance, reveal a number of significant patterns (fig. 1). first, there is a clear and largely stable hierarchy of site popularity amongst twitter users, with the national public broadcaster australian broadcasting corporation and the quality broadsheet sydney morning herald closely matched in first and second place, a second tier of broadsheet the age and generic online-only site news.com.au, and all other sites playing much more minor roles. since 2012, the volume of news sharing in australia has increased substantially especially for these leading sites; this may point to the changing demographics of the australian twittersphere, as well as to a rich-get-richer tendency that over time directs more and more attention towards already leading sites. fig. 1: tweets per week linking to australian news sites, aug. 2012 to jan. 2016 further, an analysis of the overlaps amongst the 10,000 users each who most actively shared one of five leading sites in january to march 2015 points to some pronounced bifurcations in these users’ sharing practices (fig. 2). there are strong overlaps in the groups sharing links to quality news sites australian broadcasting corporation (abc), sydney morning herald (smh), and the australian (aus), but considerably more limited overlaps between these groups and sharers of news.com.au (news) and especially tabloid news site herald sun (hs); in fact, herald sun sharers constitute the most solipsistic group: nearly half of the top 10,000 hs sharers did not share any links to any of the four other sites. somewhat surprisingly, userbase overlap for the herald sun is greatest with the australian and news.com.au; this may be explained by the fact that all three sites belong to news corporation and are cross-promoting each other’s content online. fig. 2: overlap between top 10,000 sharers of links to the australian broadcasting corporation (abc), sydney morning herald (smh), news.com.au (news), herald sun (hs), and the australian (aus), january-march 2015. (bruns, forthcoming 2016) our paper deepens this analysis and extends it across the various territories covered by the datasets, and thereby also enables further comparative studies of news sharing that reveal significant national differences in the use of twitter for sharing the news. additional nation-specific investigations are planned for the future. references bruns, a. (2016, forthcoming). making audience engagement visible: publics for journalism on social media platforms. in the routledge companion to digital journalism studies, eds. b. franklin and s. eldridge. new york: routledge. bruns, a., and j. burgess. (2015.) twitter hashtags from ad hoc to calculated publics. in hashtag publics: the power and politics of discursive networks, ed. n. rambukkana. new york: peter lang, 13-28. burgess, j., and a. bruns. (2015). easy data, hard data: the politics and pragmatics of twitter research after the computational turn. in compromised data: from social media to big data, eds. g. langlois, j. redden, and g. elmer. new york: bloomsbury academic, 93-111. burns, a. (2010). oblique strategies for ambient journalism. m/c journal 13(2). http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/230 dewan, p., and p. kumaraguru. (2014). it doesn’t break just on twitter: characterizing facebook content during real world events. arxiv 1405(4820). http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.4820 hermida, a. (2010). from tv to twitter: how ambient news became ambient journalism. m/c journal 13(2). http://journal.mediaculture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/220 rambukkana, n., ed. (2015). hashtag publics: the power and politics of discursive networks. new york: peter lang. microsoft word lingel-sinnereich.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): lingel, j. & sinnreich, a. (2014, october 22-24). resisting sovereign surveillance: an activist agenda from the incarcerated. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. resisting sovereign surveillance: an activist agenda from the incarcerated jessa lingel microsoft research aram sinnreich rutgers university keywords online surveillance, information activism, prisons in the wake of recent disclosures about government surveillance, longstanding questions of privacy and individual control of information have become vitally and politically important. although there is much that we do not know about the extent of who is watching and what happens to the data generated by these actions, we do know that surveillance is constant and wide reaching, such that it can be difficult to imagine technological practices that would ensure privacy, whether of cell phone use, search engine queries or emailing. in order to suggest an activist agenda for protesting infrastructures of surveillance, this paper draws on practices of resistance among populations that have extensive experience with near-totalizing mechanisms of monitoring and control the incarcerated. institutional monitoring of prisoners typically encompasses clothing, food, visitors, medication and communication, where part of the loss of subjectivity and selfhood that prisoners frequently report is tied to the inability to experience any sense of personal privacy (passmore, 2009; ziarek, 2008). despite, and in fact because of, these mechanisms of surveillance, penal history contains many examples of resistance, including staging protests, forming alternate networks of communication and appropriating minimal resources into bootstrapped tools and artifacts. these tactics form the crux of our inquiry, in that we use these forms of protest as a means of thinking through possibilities for coping with and perhaps even undermining institutional surveillance. it's important to state at the outset that there is a real risk of rhetorical overstatement in drawing a comparison between people serving prison sentences and people whose information and communication technologies (icts) are being monitored. rather than trying to draw a direct comparison, we investigate modes of resistance that have emerged within prisons as useful in identifying tools of dissent in the context of technological monitoring. following appadurai’s (2001) work on infrastructure of sewage as a point of intervention for class politics, we conceptualize the socio-technical practices of surveilled prisoners as a “node at which concerns of the human body, dignity and technology meet” (p. 37). in this article, we identify three such nodes, drawn from the praxis of incarcerated communities. we divide analysis of each technology into three parts: a brief introduction to its penal history, a rearticulation in terms from critical theory, and suggestions for how these technologies of resistance can be deployed by individuals and communities contesting government surveillance. across these cases, we seek to address questions of how to identify acts of resistance among surveilled and dispossessed groups, and how the public at large can use these tactics to develop responses to state and sovereign surveillance in their everyday online lives. we begin with a discussion of hunger strikes, which we connect to a foucauldian construct of askesis (1988). under circumstances of near-total surveillance and highlystructured routine, hunger strikes have offered a highly disruptive form of protest, where contemporary examples include members of the russian feminist punk band pussy riot refusing food in the fall of 2013 at a forced labor camp (coleman, 2013); years-long protests among prisoners held at guantanamo (harris, 2013); and a massive hunger strike among inmates in california's prison system in the summer of 2013 (wallacewells, 2014). in developing a theoretical lens for adapting hunger strikes to modes of protesting mass surveillance, we turn to foucault’s later work on askesis, or “an exercise of self upon self by which one tries to work out, to transform one’s self and to attain a certain mode of being” (p. 2). for foucault, askesis becomes transformative both individually and collectively, referring to the ability of the self to generate an impact on those in the surrounding community as well as to reconstitute oneself through daily practices of self. our paper considers what online hunger strikes might look like, framing actions such as unplugging, information detoxing, page blackouts and icon alteration in terms of askesis and ideological praxis of political change. in the following section of the article, we identify four specific technologies of resistance that have been employed as alternative communication networks within prison populations: argot, knock codes, encryption and smuggling. as a theoretical lens, we draw on de certeau’s (1984) construct of tactics as individual moments of resistance to institutional strategies of control. the tactics identified in this section offer some provocative suggestions regarding resistant technologies that may be deployed by the broader internet population to counter institutional surveillance. by connecting each of these alternative communication technologies to forms of information activism that have surfaced online, we suggest possibilities of resistance for contesting and appropriating infrastructures of surveillance, including memes, mesh networks, encrypted cybernetic communications and virtual private networks. finally, we consider the phenomenon of viral dance videos choreographed in prison, framed through a discussion of ranciere’s (2013) work on aesthetic politics. we refer to a phenomenon that could be called viral dance videos, the most famous example of which comes from the cebu provincial detention and rehabilitation center (cpdrc) in the philippines, where inmate performances range from michael jackson’s "thriller" to a queen medley to psy's "gangnam style.” we view prison dance videos as both highly mediated (leveraging convergence culture to produce an artifact that is at once a representation and somehow unknowable) and ultimately illegible, and it is precisely this inscrutability that we see as potentially disruptive in the context of sovereign surveillance. ranciere argues that to produce illegibility is a deeply powerful (and perhaps the only) form of political protest, in keeping with lorde’s (2003) insistence that the master’s house will not be dismantled with the master’s tools. we connect viral prison dance videos to actions like flash mobs (bimber, flanagin & stohl, 2005) and street art directed to cctv (moore, 2008). in doing so, we provide a highly politicized framing of media content that circulates quickly and with sociopolitical consequences, contributing to existing research on memes (shifman, 2014) and spreadable media (jenkins, ford & green, 2013). references appadurai, a. (2001). deep democracy: urban governmentality and the horizon of politics. environment and urbanization, 13(2), 23-43. bimber, b., flanagin, a. j., & stohl, c. (2005). reconceptualizing collective action in the contemporary media environment. communication theory, 15(4), 365-388. coleman, m. (june 1, 2013). pussy riot member ends hunger strike: maria alyokhina's security demands have been met, bandmate's husband says. rolling stone. retrieved from: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/pussy-riot-member-endshunger-strike20130601#ixzz2tjyh7us5 de certeau, m. (1984). the practice of everyday life. berkeley: university of california press. foucault, m., bernauer, j. & rasmussen, d., eds. (1988). the final foucault. mit press: cambridge, massachusetts, 1988. harris, p. (2013, may 4). how guantanamo’s horror forced inmates to hunger strike. the guardian. retrieved from http://gu.com/p/3ftqz jenkins, h., ford, s., & green, j. (2013). spreadable media: creating value and meaning in a networked culture. new york: new york university press. lorde, a. (2003). the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. feminist postcolonial theory: a reader, 23-28. moore, m. (apr. 15, 2008). banksy pulls of daring cctv protest in london. the telegraph. retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1895625/banksypulls-offdaring-cctv-protest-in-london.html passmore, l. (2009). the art of hunger: self-starvation in the red army faction. german history, 27(1), 32-59. plonowska ziarek, e. (2008). bare life on strike: notes on the biopolitics of race and gender. south atlantic quarterly, 107 (1), 89-105. rancière, j. (2013). the politics of aesthetics. a&c black. wallace-wells, b. (2014). the plot from solitary. new york. retrieved from http://nymag.com/news/features/solitary-secure-housing-units-2014-2/ microsoft word ir16-template-final.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 re-placeing the city: digital navigation technologies and the experience of urban place germaine halegoua university of kansas the ways in which urban form is understood and valued, how populations navigate urban environments, and how people experience and understand cities is more reliant on digital media technologies and practices than ever before. digital media researchers have allotted vast attention to the ways social and mobile media and ubiquitous computing create networked publics, reorganize interpersonal and group interactions, foster new forms of publicity, and blur boundaries between public and private contexts. however, among these investigations, less attention has been given to the relationships between digital media and physical interactions with place and space. while digital media platforms help shape how people interact with each other in public, they also influence the ways that people physically and digitally interact with public space and place. scholars of mobile, locative, or location-based social media have considered the role that digital media play in reorganizing public space (gordon and de souza e silva, 2011; humphreys, 2010), re-conceptualizing and analyzing the social structures that define physical spaces (sheller, 2004; cranshaw et al., 2012), coordinating activities or face-to-face interactions (ling and yttri, 2002), exhibiting geo-coded texts and images as identity performance (schwartz and halegoua, 2014), encouraging certain types of mobility (frith, 2013), which are sometimes playful or creative (de souza e silva and sutko, 2009; cramer et al., 2011; farman, 2012; licoppe, 2010). while the proliferation of geo-coded digital traces, the utilization of gps coordinates in locative media projects and games, and the disclosure or sharing of location within social media systems tends to be the focus of scholarly and industry research, more research is needed on the relationship between experiences of place and the use and non-use of navigation technologies in particular (such as gps, digital maps, and mobile navigation systems) as well as digital practices and strategies of wayfinding more generally. one of the most common uses of gps, particularly among smartphone users, is online mapping tools and portable navigation technologies (zickuhr, 2013), yet we know very little about how these technologies are incorporated into everyday life, how they shape spatial relations, and how they contribute to the formation of a sense of place. suggested citation (apa): halegoua, g. (2015, october 21-24). re-placeing the city: digital navigation technologies and the experience of urban place. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. many scholars and critics have understood digital navigation technologies as enacting processes of alienation, abstraction, and disembedding or distancing of the digital media user from space and place. in contrast to popular assumptions about the distracted sense of space and place encouraged by digital navigation technologies, i illustrate and analyze the ways in which the exact opposite processes are observable: that navigation technology users are developing wayfinding strategies to re-embed and imagine themselves within urban space and to cultivate a sense of place within urban environments. this case study is an example of a process i describe as “re-placeing” the city: the subjective, everyday practices of assessing and combining physical, social, and digital contexts in order to more fully understand one’s embeddedness within urban places, and to produce a unique sense of place. i will briefly define and discuss placemaking and “re-placeing” the city before presenting research on digital navigation technologies specifically. this paper combines media and cultural studies, science and technology studies, geography and urban studies approaches in order to investigate navigation technology users’ understandings of their own spatial relations and conditions of mobility. through interviews and questionnaires with 132 navigation technology users, this paper identifies the ways that people actually use digital navigation technologies, why they use these technologies, how these technologies influence their physical movement, and how navigation technology users cognitively map and understand their embeddedness within urban space. in addition to interviews and surveys with members of this group, this paper also analyzes the ways in which digital spatial navigation has been constructed in popular culture, press releases, advertisements, and legal documents and how these texts contribute to users’ understandings of digital navigation technologies and placemaking. through the intersections of marketing campaigns, popular discourse, regulation, and actual practices i investigate how the social and technological construction of place is experienced and understood through services and practices of digital navigation. ultimately, i analyze the ways in which digital navigation technology use encourages pedestrians and motor vehicle operators to re-place the unknown, unfamiliar space of the city as a manageable, organized, bounded space and how this understanding of space allows for a deeper sense of place on the part of digital media users. although navigation technology non-use is not directly addressed in this paper, i will present some preliminary findings regarding non-use that were gathered as part of the questionnaire process. the findings presented in this paper urge researchers to rethink what we know about the use of navigation technologies in urban space and to reconsider how these technologies help users cultivate a sense of place, rather than distract them from their surroundings. references cramer, h., ahmet, z., rost, m., holmquist, e. (2011). gamification and locationsharing: some emerging social conflicts. chi 2011 vancouver, bc, canada. may 7-12. cranshaw, j., schwartz, r., hong, j., and sadeh, n. (2012). the livehoods project: utilizing social media to understand the dynamics of a city in proceedings of the sixth international aaai conference on weblogs and social media (icwsm 2012). de souza e silva, a. and sutko, d. (eds.). (2009). digital cityscapes: merging digital and urban playspaces. new york: peter lang. farman, j. (2012). mobile interface theory: embodied space and locative media. new york: routledge. frith, j. (2013). turning life into a game: foursquare, gamification, and personal mobility in mobile media & communication, 1(2), 248-262. gordon, e. and de souza e silva, a. (2011). net locality: why location matters in a networked world. malden: wiley-blackwell. humphreys, l. (2010). mobile social networks and urban public space in new media & society, 12(5), 763-778. licoppe, c., and inada, y. (2010). "locative media and cultures of mediated proximity: the case of the mogi game location-aware community" in environment and planning d: society and space, 28(4), 691 – 709. ling, r. and yttri, b. (2002). “hypercoordination via mobile phones in norway” in j. katz and m. aakhus (eds.) perpetual contact: mobile communication, private talk, public performance. pp. 139-69. cambridge: cambridge university press. schwartz, r. and halegoua, gr. (2014). the spatial self: location-based identity performance on social media in new media & society. sheller, m. (2004). mobile publics: beyond the network perspective in environment and planning d, 22(1), 39-52. zickuhr, k. (2013). location-based services. pew research center. september 12, 2013. 1 fixity: identity, time and durée on facebook richard harper microsoft research cambridge uk r.harper@microsoft.com eryn whitworth university of texas, austin usa erynwhitworth@gmail.com ruth page university of leicester, leicester uk rep22@leicester.ac.uk abstract the purpose of social network services (sns) is to enable new ways of making contact and staying in touch. the finessed use of sns can enable people to manage their social connections with fluidity; enabling change of social grouping and evolving identity. key to this performance is that it is enacted through time. certain aspects of sns may of course create a fixing in identity and its performance, trapping people, for example, in a display of identity in the past that they have come to regret. in this paper, we shall report evidence that suggests that the temporal experiencing of facebook with regard to this aspect of time and identity needs to be placed alongside another feature of the way the service is used. this feature leads people to feel as if they are always acting ‘in the now’ and that their history as well as that of others they connect to – seems to disappear from view. we shall suggest that the performance of identity through time is thus constrained. users seek but cannot find adequate ways of adjusting their identity by crafting past and future performances outside the envelope of identity in the present, in the ‘now’, the one facilitated and emphasized by facebook design and use patterns. keywords time; durée; identity; networked society; social networking. mailto:erynwhitworth@gmail.com� mailto:rep22@leicester.ac.uk� 2 it is a truism to say that social network systems (sns) are about identity. it is equally true to say that they are about bringing people of similar identities together. it is hardly surprising therefore that most of the research on sns examines who connects to whom and why, or looks at how people assemble a model of themselves that leads them to make the right connections, either with friends or with a professional group (castells, 2009). though this is to treat the research in broad brushstrokes, at a similar level, a proportion of this research can also be said to look at how the creation of links through identity can go wrong. from time to time connections are made between people and or groups that have no affinity – the matching of identities is not always successful. sometimes it is not just a matter of affinity; sometimes mistakes occur when malign parties enter the world of sns. as many have noted, making connections can be a risky business: a hurtful public at large might appear and sometimes a stranger might create connections that appall and frighten. one cannot guarantee that the individual lurking in a facebook account is one that ought to be there (boyd, 2008; harper, 2011). despite the apparent dominance of one social network at the current time, people are likely to have several human networks enabled by sns. doing so allows them to create dynamic patterns in their relations, patterns that allow them to converge around one aspect of their identity in one sns sphere, and diverge from that with regard to another sns enabled sphere (papacharissi, 2011). all these connections are bound by the nexus of ‘who they are’, but this ‘networked identity’ or identities have, as a consequence, more inflection and dynamic properties than might otherwise be possible. in short, and although ‘who one is’ remains concrete and real, the expression of this identity is through diverse performances. of course, despite the ease with which fictional identities can be created on sns, most research shows that the ‘essential person’ behind an sns identity remains true, albeit that this might be inflected on different sites. one remains the same person, but may emphasise different aspects and facts in different virtual places. nevertheless, because identity is much more deeply embedded in sociality, the implication is that there is more fluidity in social connections (papacharissi, 2011: 305). one can make connections with one set of persons and then, 3 as these ebb and flow, remake connections with others through another set of webenabled bonds: the trick is the adroit management of sns. whether this turns out to be true in the long term is yet to be ascertained; some research has suggested that though there might be more fluidity in the periphery (in what are often called ‘weak ties’ in honour of gravonetter), strong ties (primary or close friends) remain strong for longer (hamill, et al, forthcoming). time will tell. however, this concern with the 21st century self, the one that is allowed to evolve and change as well as connect through sns, might draw attention away from the opposite, how certain aspects of social networking create a ‘fixing’ of this self. considerable research (and public concern) has focused, for example, on how past behaviours documented on social networking sites can come to haunt an individual later on in their lives. pictures taken when people were larking about at university are discovered by potential employers and referred to when interviews are undertaken. thus who a person was is used to constrain and judge them in the current time, now. of course just as this is so, so the reverse also applies: a person can use the same or similar resources to manage and adjust views of themselves, creating a preferred self. just how they might manage this will depend not just on the affordances of the sns but also on their management of other resources too, such as their skill at presenting themselves via other digital media as well as face to face (retterberg, 2008; harper, 2011). in this respect, the potential fixing of identity via (or partly through) social network sites and resistance to this fixing asserts the correctness of giddens’s view (1990) that contemporary identity (or selfhood) has greater reflexivity than hitherto. people have to manage various ways of presenting themselves and their control is contested by (and with) others (shirky, 2007). resistance and control – the reflexive acts of identity production – can entail, for instance, replacing old pictures on social networking sites with ‘more suitable’ ones; it can lead people to find that pictures they have decided ought to be removed from their ‘homepage’ have in fact already been copied by others. these might have already been circulated. or it can entail tagging pictures with new lines that give the images and thus the person represented a better accord with due propriety. likewise others may impose their own tags on pictures which offer a different and (perhaps) less appealing meaning. one could add to this list 4 of tools and means for articulating identity. in these ways, then, what a person would like to suggest about themselves can slowly transform; what comes to be understood as what was said in the past might thus be plastic or reflexive, as giddens would have it. people can manage how they present themselves in the present and likewise they can control how they are presented in history. and all of this can be resisted and contested; identity is produced through interaction; reflexively. however, when giddens was writing – the consequences of modernity came out in 1990 he was not thinking about the age of networked connectivity. it was a time before the likes of facebook became commonplace. and, accordingly, he was alluding to a tempo of sociality that reflected the now seemingly slow steps of reflexive action that were then possible. giddens was talking about how people managed their identity through weeks, months, years, or even a whole lifetime. as it happens, commentators then thought life was fast, liquid, as bauman argued this in his (1995) book liquid life. today, we like to think that the tempo of our lives has sped up even more – bauman’s views notwithstanding. our reflexive management of identity will likely be more fraught as a result, one can hear the likes of clay shirky exclaim (see for example his 2007 book, here comes everybody). giddens, bauman and shirky aside, research on the relationship between sns and identity shows that the rhythm of managing one’s networked identity is linked to the rhythms of real life. as bayn notes (2010), ‘most online communication happens against a background of shared history’ (p. 71). consequently, there is more stability through time than one imagines given the ease with which one can, say, set up a new facebook account. the use of sns reflects the kinds of social relations that giddens had in mind when he wrote consequences: issues of geography, profession and employment, family and sexuality are all part of the equation. we might have networked identities, but these are bound to the culture of the real. nevertheless, much of the discussion of identity both before the widespread take -up of sns and latterly, where the technology has almost become ‘domesticated’, tends to, in our view, hypostasize the nature of identity (i.e. give it too much concreteness). as gergen notes (2009), the view one finds in many sociological texts on the topic turns around an eighteenth century philosophy, one that implies an essence to identity, one 5 inside the head, the body, or isomorphic with a romantic sense of the soul. in the networked society, this might no longer apply, and identity might be better thought of as relational, as his book of that title suggests. even so, this alternative view, the idea that identity has no singular source but is networked, a production of social acts between a web of connected persons, might simply be offering another exaggerated notion of identity; one that makes it too weak, too ephemeral. both views might disregard the detailed ways in which identity – whatever it is – is managed, facilitated, or ‘worked’. simple notions of identity, that ‘it’ is singular and essential, for example or that it is a product of connection say, both might hypostasize the complex acts that constitute ‘who one is’ into a conceptual box that does not necessarily allow the kinds of ambiguities and contrasts constitutive of a ‘real person’ or the performativities that manifest that person’s identity. all the more so if those performativities are diverse or contradictory – indicating one thing about identity in one context, something else in another. someone might be both singular and connected, and much else besides. it might depend on when and where, what and why, and, of course, on the ways that this performativity is done. consider how little about these properties one finds in, say, castells (2009) whose views focus on ‘connecting informational circles in social arrangements’ but offer little insight into the organization of self in those circles. think of wellman and his ‘society beyond the garden gate’: this too shows little observation on the ‘who’s’ that do the connection outside of the envelope of geography (for the latest version of this see rainee & wellman, 2011; for a discussion, see harper, 2011). and thus, in a roundabout way, is the topic of this paper. a way of finding out what a person might be should entail, in our view, looking at or acknowledging how each method or mechanism of identity production might have its own unique properties in addition to the assembly that is provided together. these individual and corporate properties might emphasise not just different concepts of the essential or connected self, but might also reflect-be tied to the mechanisms themselves. hence a concern with the human aspect of identity will become connected with the properties of the mechanisms used to perform that identity. in this way, a concern for the thing that might be self or identity, for the theoretical and empirical topic that this 6 constitutes, can be combined with a concern for materiality, the real things that allow this virtual thing (as it were), the self, to be mediated. we take our cue here from de certeau (1984). as he notes, all technologies offer sets of affordances that ‘organise an ensemble of possibilities and interdictions’ (p. 98). the performative use of these need investigation before there is a rush to more encompassing theory such as about identity. so, for example, individuals will manage sns by taking heed of what is possible and leveraging or thwarting those possibilities as necessary when they undertake to perform, create and manage their ‘selves’. how they do so might be bound to small details, and to the prismatic effects of the affordances in question. this leads us to the rub of this paper. if it is the case that there are, broadly speaking, two sides to research on the networked society and its impact on identity, the one emphasising how individuals can create more connections with others and do so more fluidly than before, and the other emphasising how networked connection can leave traces that constrain and limit identity, then both these approaches assume the status of identity to start off with. neither emphasise nor allow a careful examination of the specific ways that articulation of individual actions through sns might frame specific possibilities of identity production, possibilities that do not so much encompass identity in the whole (however it might be conceived) but only aspects of it, particular instantiations of its performance, particular kinds of identity ‘work’. there are, needless to say, many sites of such investigation available. here we focus on one such site, or rather one locus of interacting sets of performativities: the use of facebook to maintain contact and identity production as a routine feature of daily life. our evidence will not be of the large scale but qualitative and focused; a small ethnographic type approach meant to be illustrative rather than definitive. daily existence, de certeau tells us, is an unconscious navigation which involves leveraging the affordances of space, technology and human connection. the affordances of facebook, this paper will assert, can facilitate many things, but when appropriated, ‘navigated through’ in particular ways by users (ways we shall come to describe), they can emphasise an especial way of experiencing how time is connected to the ability to perform self-hood. this can result in people finding their ability to articulate selfhood 7 and/or identity through the adroit management of self is time constrained. what they were cannot be adjusted; what they will be cannot be controlled; what they are ‘now’ seems to dictate all the prismatic effects on selfhood that facebook enables. to put this another way, the affordances we will focus on relate to the interaction between what facebook status updates and postings allow and encourage, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the way these opportunities for connection are exploited by users in such a fashion that the performance of identity through these acts and affordances has constraining features. postings about ‘what is on your mind’ encourage a certain articulation of contemporary topic, we shall assert, and the management of these articulations through ‘likes’ and other related commentaries (often also in the ‘what is on your mind’ dialogue box) produce a particular temporal ordering of experience, or, rather, come to emphasise a particular sense of time as experienced and relatedly, self as expressed and expressable in that kind of time. this leads to a peculiar fixing of identity in one moment of time, in an ever present ‘now’. thus the title of the paper: fixity. evidence evidence for our explorations were collected through qualitative interviews in the summer of 2011. twelve participants (seven female and five male) were recruited through email and word of mouth advertisements using a gift card as an incentive. our goal was to encompass a diversity of people within this small group, varying in age, gender, location and of course, in practices. at the same time we selected individuals who treated facebook as an important element in their repertoire of social connection. of the twelve participants, eight resided in the south eastern region of the united kingdom, the other four lived in the southern and western regions of the us. their ages were as follows: (teenagers [p7 and p8 aged 14], early to mid-twenties [p3 aged 21, p2, p10, and p11 aged 26], late-twenties and early thirties [p4 and p5 aged 28, p1 aged 30, p12 aged 33]; forties [p6 aged 42 and p9 aged 44]. (numbering of the subjects was based on order of interview). occupations included: students (secondary school, 8 university and graduate), shop attendant, teacher-in-training, law consultant and land management officer. the interviews were audio recorded. this resulted in 19 hours of recording. during the interviews with participants screenshots of discussed digital objects were also captured, with participants’ permission, and these were added to the research corpus. follow up interviews were conducted as needed. the main interviews, conducted both in-person and remotely, and lasting 90 to 180 minutes, were devised to develop an understanding of participants’ history of social network use (and not just facebook); to gather recent examples of postings and post annotations (‘likes’ or ‘comments’) that would provide a feel for the kinds of daily expressive practices that the participants engaged in; and explorations of their beliefs about or understandings of such concerns as the relationship between these postings and annotations and the management of their identity. keeping in touch: a sense of life with facebook life as should be clear, our evidence is only of a small scale ‘sample’, and should not be treated as necessarily representative of facebook use in the general. what it does provide, though, is rich data about kinds of uses: and what we found in our subjects practices was diversity and similarity, though these words are somewhat too general to convey the richness of the acts in question. the social networking habits and contexts of “logging on” differed for each participant and the orientations and experiences varied. some visited facebook daily or multiple times (p1, p4, p5, p7, p8, and p9) for example; one even had over 1,000 photos tagged of himself (p4). three had had difficult or ‘negative experiences’: two with sharing online (p10 and p12) the other with regard to a significant break up or broken relationship where facebook played a role (p9). these differences notwithstanding, one may note how much time was given to being on facebook by all of our subjects. ‘doing facebook’, monitoring what is happening through it, was part of the fabric of their daily lives. “i guess i’ve spent off and on throughout the day probably an hour to two hours a day on facebook.” (p9). p9 9 explained that daily usage of an hour or two was not all at once, noting that she skimmed facebook while eating lunch. in examining his posts during the interview p4 noticed that he tended to post when his workday at the office would begin to drag, he remarked to himself, “oh god this one was at?” then continued, “see apparently i like to post around three o’clock in the afternoon on work days […].” such patterns of ‘logging on’ were evidently linked to patterns found in everyday life, like meal times, as these quotes make clear. this points towards what levebrve (2004) might have called their daily rhythms. p8 and p7 mentioned, for further example, that they logged onto facebook at regular times together with peers after school. p8 said of this, that he was on facebook, “often when i’ve been at school and then i come home, basically it gives me an overview of what has happened, and the stuff that has happened, with the people at school which is quite nice.” likewise p7 explained her reason for using facebook at this particular time of day saying, “umm, it’s good when i post on my wall or on facebook and [see] lots of messages and things” attempting to explain why she continued, “i don’t know, to see who is online, to talk to them.” besides getting online at particular times of day, facebook served as a buffer between other tasks on the computer. p9 explained, “a lot of that [hour or two hours] is while i’m doing something else, i will be waiting for something to download and i will click over to facebook.” the rhythm of checking, then backgrounding, then checking facebook again, has a peculiar property however, or rather a kind of gravity. it pulls the user in. p8’s account of using facebook after school demonstrates how. i probably spend about half an hour, and if anything particular happens i’ll scroll down it quickly and then i’ll have a look down and see what happened, and leave it running in the background and if i run into something interesting i’ll leave a comment, and if other people comment on it as well then i will start using it, and sort of a conversation is going, and i’ll leave it running in the background. 10 expectations for response all of this has to do with our participants’ expectation of others being aware of their posts and their desire that others will respond to that content. the same holds true for the opposite, as is attested to by the problems that arose when posts were neglected; that is to say not noticed in the rhythm of looking and then looking again. in several instances, participants recounted how they had experienced disappointment that their most recent posts had not been annotated. p7 explained that if something she posted doesn't get a response, she would delete the original thread, evincing a kind of embarrassment at the apparent failure to stimulate some response from those in her network. similarly participants p5, p1 and p2 each expressed surprise or disappointment when, during the interview, they found their recent posts had not garnered any likes or comments. p1 discussed one of his recent posts by saying “i’m quite upset that no one commented about this” and later explained why: “because it is actually really fascinating, and umm, i had posted it because i wanted people to know more about it.” p1's explanation points to a feature we saw elsewhere in the interviews, where commenting or liking posts is a means of communicating that content posted has been consumed or at least noticed by others. p6 explained what comments meant to her, “i know it [commenting] is nice, because, […] if no one commented on anything then it would feel like no one is listening to me, […] so often it is not so much the comment it is the fact that someone paid attention to something that i said.” as a result, what we describe above as a rhythm of use, a way of passing the time of day, turns into what can be better cast as a kind of coercive practice, though this is as much self-applied as it is externally imposed by others. this practice necessitates that one ‘needs to look now’. one has to watch, that is to say, one has to see what has is – happening. but this is mediated not by a ‘real looking’ at ‘the real thing’ first hand, so much as a writing and a reading. these connections are textually mediated. at the same time, one needs to watch to see if one has been noticed; if one’s own postings have been commented on and brought to attention by others. if they have not been noticed, there is shame involved or implied, almost as if one is becoming ‘invisible’. in some cases, neglected postings might need to be removed. of course, they 11 might not be if attention is drawn to the latest or newest posting, thereby burying that hurt in a neglected past, a moment before the latest textual connection, even if that moment is simply beneath the bottom of the screen, out of view. design and the affordances of facebook a cursory look at facebook’s interface will make it evident that its design privileges the present and near temporal past: one doesn’t go to facebook to see what happened days ago, but what is happening now, more or less. this is ‘achieved’ through users broadcasting updates and inviting more. as we say, this is textually mediated. we shall come back to the importance of this later on. meanwhile, the salience of the contemporary is evidenced by the problems users have when this is not achieved. p6, for example, pinpointed a difficulty experienced by several others (p1, p2, p3, p7 and p10). once content has moved from being ‘now’ to some prior moment, some past, it is very difficult to find again. scrolling through her wall, p6 said to herself, “once again, how do i find this quickly?” she then remarked, “basically on these social networks these days are really, are like built for whatever is the most latest, and it makes it really difficult to find the stuff that you have commented on.” facebook does not promote navigation of prior events. the search function, for example, indexes others’ profiles but does not retrieve old entries. techniques and workarounds are required if a user wants to engage with things other than in the present; things beside the most recent postings and updates. one user, p2, developed a strategy to search his email notifications from the website to find links to old content friends had posted, as he described here, though as we shall see this became an option that came to be closed: umm, usually, for example, a link that i’ve shared that i cannot find any more […]. maybe there was some comment or something that i want to remember what they’ve said and i can’t find it [pause] so i used to use gmail for this because i used to get notifications in gmail but now they 12 don’t work well anymore, something changed on facebook so that they don’t send an email notification. as p2 suspected, facebook did indeed change its notifications feature, though we have no knowledge as to why. nevertheless it is arguable that it did so by exploiting user’s willingness to frequently click over to facebook to attend to the posts of others. in doing so it further promotes the site as a place not so much to ‘simply spend time’ nor indeed a place to ‘simply monitor others’. rather it becomes a place to keep up to date, to see what is happening, to be, as it were, ‘in the now’. this ‘now’ entails mutual monitoring and connection to be achieved, of course; a human effort, not merely a technological one; it is the user of facebook who makes the now come to be, in their views, a textual, a literal, ‘now’. in these ways, the interface favours a particular treatment of the relationship people have with others. it also supplies a particular temporal framing of that relationship. consider how a post is presented on facebook: its centrality and its ordering. at the top of the newsfeed, on the default and non-configurable view of an individual’s account, one will find a box in which to enter a status update, post a socalled “wall photo” or check in: a ‘what is on your mind’ dialogue box (see figure 1). figure 1: the primary dialogue box of facebook updates in this dialogue are presented in the standard form of a blog, namely in reverse chronological order, the most recent therefore being the uppermost. thus, if someone glances at facebook to see what is happening they will see first and foremost (uppermost as it were), the thing most recently posted by themselves and their buddies (figure 2). 13 figure 2: the privileging of status updates and comments on the facebook default ‘homepage’. they do not see a range of ‘things that have’ or ‘are happening’ placed equally; the timing of the post orders the display absolutely in chronological terms of when the post was made. whatever the time outside of facebook and indeed whatever the importance of the things reported, it is the time organization of data management (i.e., reverse chronology) in facebook that holds sway. of course, facebook would not be so appealing if this were all it showed; there is much else too (as shown in figure 3, next page). (a) marks the what is on your mind’ box; to the left (b) is a space designed for notifications and alerts, messages and event information; below the status update box and to the right are automatically updated columns of ‘featured content’ (selected by the sns), with actions have been annotated or embellished upon by others’ likes, tags and comments. below the status update box and to the right of it are automatically updated column right. to the left is a space 14 designed for notifications to alert one when any of their featured content to the left (c), with the most granular and most instantaneous content in what is referred to as "the ticker" on the right (d). figure 3: the privileging of status updates and comments on the facebook default ‘homepage’. the point is that facebook constrains the user, controlling what they can opt to see. the set-up of pages is not configurable, as we note above, and many ‘features’ (such as some of those items displayed on the right of the screen) cannot be disabled. the default screen, one’s news feed, can’t be changed. one can configure whose stories are featured on one’s news feed, but the presentation of this is nevertheless always linear, reflecting the temporal order of the posting. thus it is not the status of a feed that is important, it is its timeline. in other words, facebook favours the most temporally current content, and always serves this to its users uppermost, as in the premise of a blog, most recent top. by doing so, users almost naturally come to focus on generating new content rather than reconfiguring the old; the system encourages them to (though of course the users are willing and compliant in this). though some of their comments and responses to ‘what is on your mind’ prompts might allude to past events – to other’s postings particularly the experiential theme is the present. it has to do with ‘what is 15 happening ‘now’. little attention or encouragement is given to, say, altering the importance of some prior event, or re-crafting its interpretation historically. time and content in our research corpus, a cluster of related stories, frustrations and incidences relate to the difficulties or ‘inappropriateness’ of posting of out-of-time content. p1 shares one such story: i was tagged in some photo like a year after it was taken, because someone finally decided to put their photos up, and it was a friend of mine, but i don’t know what he was thinking, because it was a picture of me ummm, talking to a girl, at a halloween party, and it seemed a little bit weird for it to be posted in the context of me being in a relationship and he continued, all of a sudden this thing appears and no one knows when it is from and umm, it was very surprising, it was quite annoying. by virtue of being tagged in an old photo p1 was presented an identity associated with a former girlfriend and thus not in keeping with his current presentation of self, nor his current mode of interacting with facebook in the here and now. it does not matter whether it is old facebook content that has resurfaced in the news feed (through commenting say) or if it is new facebook posts of old pictures. both are out-of-time content and both are distributed through a system that focuses one’s attentions on now. p11, sensitive of the incongruity of out-of-time content, discusses her transition from one social network, bebo. she says, “i had them [photos from college] on bebo, because they happened when i was on bebo, and therefore i am sharing them on bebo, right?!” these last two examples are of content that is quite old, far from the present one might say, but as p11 expands on her comments, even photos captured a short while ago can jar with the here and now of facebook. p11 explains that she even struggled with and ultimately refused to upload photos that a friend had been “pestering her to 16 upload”. about this she said “but it’s too late now”; she explained that she would ask herself “why am i putting up photos from months ago?” she went on, “maybe if it were two weeks ago, max, no not event then.” the photos were nothing alarming in content, just shots from a birthday party, p11 informed the interviewer. she then explained what she would like to do, “i’d rather give them, i should put them on a cd, but i don’t know if she would then put them on facebook.” these small pieces of evidence would seem to suggest, then, that ‘out of time’ content jars with the other content streaming from the actions of those in the network. it would appear that most of the content posted on facebook depicts the present, though just what that means seems a little fuzzy: some things that occurred a little while ago seem to be allowed. the important point being not so much the specificities of this fitting in current time as whether their posting generates a timely response. it is this that is the anchor of the interaction that is sought for and enacted by our participants. it is, as we have repeatedly coined, about nowness. this content, its enactment, its articulation as the negotiated object of discourse between the connecting parties of facebook, has consequences for the performance of identity. content from the past yanks an individual back to an earlier time, of course, but as it does so, it allows the articulation of an earlier self. but what we see above is that there appears to be little opportunity for such historisizing of the self; all there is, or rather what is privileged, is a singular self and that is the one in the here and now. moreover, this self is also judged by the responses of others. if one makes a post and no-one comments one removes it quickly for fear of being ignored. one is, in these respects, only existing in the present and only insofar as one is a product of relational acts. comments: the articulation of identity through time the philosopher bergson was perhaps the first to suggest that there are two types of time, the first having to do with the experiential aspect, which he called ‘durée’; and the second, contrasting with this, having to do with the objective measure and passing of time, which he called ‘tempo’ (1910). following in this vein, husserl and 17 philosophers of social action (such as wittgenstein, heidegger and more recently, schatzki (2011); for a good early introduction to this literature see adam, 1990), as well as philosophers of the quotidian (such as the already mentioned de certeau), have further delineated elements within the experiential form of time, durée. attention has been drawn to distinctions between, for example, time as experienced chronologically and time as label for the organisation of recollection, memory and forethought. distinctions have also been made between time as a term in language, one that can act in various ways to alter the experience of the speaker/hearer reader/writer of that language, and time as an empirical label for everyday experience. in this way, the experience of time as durée can be negotiated by the experience of time constructed by narrative, even though the narrative will unfold in chronological time. when seen in light of these sorts of discussions, we can begin to see even with the limited evidence presented above that when people post a status update on facebook, or, by the same token, when they read and comment on such a comment produced by others, they are not simply living in the durée but organising themselves, defining themselves, and the experience of themselves vis-à-vis their relations with others, in particular ways. there are a set of possibilities here, not all of which are used concurrently or evenly by different social groups, but the amalgams of which will construct certain forms of experience. a great deal of research would need to be done to grasp all the ways that facebook is used, all the more so when contrasts are made between this sns and others. consider ito et al’s collection on sns (2010), the papacharissi collection mentioned before; these are almost compendiums of diversity. there does seem however a certain unity of experience and use attested to in the evidence presented above amongst this small set. first, the experiences we have highlighted here have to do with the moment to moment features of using social networking. ‘users’ in this case are disposed to articulating (and presenting) themselves in ways that mediate their identity via a practice of reading and writing rhythmically (or rather persistently and continuously within rhythmic moments – at work, after tea, at the end of the day). this practice of 18 writing/reading constitutes a narrative frame that privileges the most recent articulation of self. this frame has other features. acts of articulation only count when others note through their own textual manifestations the existence of that ‘post’. in this sense, users of facebook do indeed sound like gergen’s relational beings, only existing in terms of connection. but gergen’s vision also implies a fully blown identity; the scraps of text constitutive of a posting, an answer to ‘what is on my mind’, are hardly sufficient to do more than garner another’s attention. as should be clear, facebook postings don’t even manage this, in all instances. but this also begs the question as to the relation between text and identity in the bigger sense. as page notes (2011; 2012), theorists of narrative assume that this ‘structural form’ is sufficient to encompass the production of a self: in their view, following jameson (1974), the ‘prison of words’ in which individuals operate might trap those individuals within ideological frameworks but it does allow the delineation of a story, the narrative of their selves. the tidbits offered on facebook cannot do this; all they afford are details, pointers, parts; barely a narrative at all. if a concern with theories of identity is that they over-theorise and rush to abstraction, hypostasize as we put it alluding to hegel, then these faults are all the more valid when details is all that is available to the individual. facebook affords little more. besides, there is one other feature that we want to mention that also threatens the credibility of gergen’s view and asserts not just simply the need to look at the details of interaction but at how details might be all there is. his view, like the one that emphasizes the source of identity in some inner place, also presupposes that identity can assert itself through and across time. both accounts treat identity as transcendental. our research suggests that the articulation of the self on facebook can sometimes result in struggles to reach beyond the instant moment, the now of the latest posting. users endeavor to find ways of dealing with past content because the past is more or less out of bounds within the textually mediated practice of connection facilitated by facebook. things that happened that might allow users to assert some inner soul or, for that matter, actions that were valued by the connections that might define a person relational are all immaterial if they are historical. one is only as good as one’s last posting. 19 there is a third point that follows on. though the centrality of posting also constitutes an opportunity – after all there is always a new posting to be made the very fact that one is never more than the latest posting has the curious consequence of making one less, or rather somehow fixed. one is trapped in the now, reduced to the articulations of a few words and desirous that they solicit a response by others who are similarly fixed in the present moment. they too only have a few words to express themselves. for all users, oneself and those one connects with, what one was cannot be crafted again or adjusted through facebook. not only does its design de-privilege ways in which this might be done, but users – users in our study anyway – also show lack of desire for this: no-one looks back. after all, if one attempts to do so, one’s efforts need to be accounted for in the present and that causes complexity and complaint. thus one is brought back to heel; one is brought back to a fixed ‘now’, the endless durée of facebook. no wonder people keep going to it, looking at it, monitoring it. the way it is used ends up ensuring that their use of it – their performance in and through it is all they are allowed to be: a fleeting thing, made in a moment, forgotten in a moment, trapped in a moment, waiting for the next moment even as the present moment ends. acknowledgments thanks to all the subjects in this study and colleagues at microsoft research, cambridge. references adam, b. (1990). time and social theory. cambridge, polity press. barkhuus, l. and tashiro, j. (2010). student socialization in the age of facebook. in proceedings of the 28th international conference on human factors in computing systems (chi '10). acm, new york, ny, usa, 133-142. baym, n. (2010) personal connections in the digital age. cambridge, polity press. bauman, z. (2005) liquid life. cambridge, polity press. bergson, h. (1910) time and free will. london: swan sonnesnschein. 20 boyd, d. (2008) taken out of context: american teen sociality in networked publics. phd dissertation, school of information, university of california berkeley. castells, m. (2009) communications power, oxford: oup. de certeau, m. (1984) the practice of everyday life. berkeley: university of california press. deuze, m. (2007) media work. cambridge: polity press. ellison, n., steinfield, c. & lampe, c. (2007) the benefits of facebook ‘friends’: social capital and college students use of online social networking sites, journal of computer mediated communication 12 (4). ess, c. (2008). culture and global networks: hope for a global ethics? in j van den hoven & j weckert (eds.). information technology and moral philosophy (pp. 195225). cambridge: cambridge university press. gergen, k. (2009) relational being: beyond self and community, oxford: oup. giddens, a. (1990) the consequences of modernity. cambridge: polity press. hamill, l, harper, r. & gilbert, n (under review) ‘the impact of the internet on the duration of friendship ties’, under review, the british journal of sociology. harper. r (2011) texture: human expression in the age of communications overload. boston: mit press. husserl, e (1964) the phenomenology of internal time consciousness. translated by j. churchill, the hague: martinus nijhoff. ito, m. et al, (2010) hanging out, messing around and geeking out. cambridge: mit press. james, f. (1974) the prison-house of language: a critical account of structuralist and russian formalism. princeton university press, new jersey. 21 lefebrve, h. (2004) rhythmanalysis: space, time and everyday life. translated by s,. elden & g. moore, london: verso books. page, r. (2012) re-examining narrativity: small stories in status updates, text & talk 30 (4), 423-444. page, r (2011) stories and social media: identities and interaction, london: routledge. papacharissi, z. (2011). conclusion: a networked self, in papacharissi, z. (ed.) a networked self: identity, community and culture on social network sites. london: routledge, 304-318. rainee, l. & wellman, b. (2012) networked: the new social operating system. boston: mit press. rettberg, j. (2008) blogging cambridge: polity press. schatzki, t. (2011) the timespace of human activity: on performance, society, and history as indeterminate teleological events. maryland: lexington books. shirky, c. (2007) here comes everybody london: allen lane. sosik, v. zhao, x. & cosley, d. (2012) see friendship: sort of: how conversation and digital traces might support reflections on friendships, cscw 2012, seattle, washington: acm press. stefanone, c. lackaff, d. & rosen, d. (2011) contingencies of self-worth and socialnetworking behaviour, cyberpsychology, behaviour and social networking 14 (1-2), 41-49. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  ribak,  rivka.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  standards  rule?  regulations,  literacies  and   algorithms  in  times  of  transition.  panel  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  conference  of  the   association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org. standards  rule?  regulations,  literacies  and  algorithms   in  times  of  transition   chair:  rivka  ribak,  university  of  haifa   moderator:  joseph  turow,  university  of  pennsylvania     in  this  panel  we  seek  to  reflect  upon  the  theme  "internet  rules"  by  drawing  on  the  notion   of  standards,  developed  in  science  and  technology  studies.  the  work  of  susan  leigh   star  lays  a  foundation  for  considering  the  relationships  between  rules,  standards  and   algorithms  as  forms  of  infrastructure.  in  the  panel,  we  explore  the  production  of   standards  as  they  become  transparent  infrastructures,  heeding  star  and  lampland's  call   to  restore  these  standards'  "historical  development,  their  political  consequences,  and   the  smoke-­filled  rooms  always  attached  to  decisions  made  about  them"  (2009:13).   standards  –  and  algorithms  –  are  rarely  queried,  as  they  promise  and  embody   efficiency  and  order.  indeed,  modernity  may  be  described  as  a  concentrated,  relentless   effort  to  contain  the  accidental,  the  arbitrary,  the  residual;;  to  categorize,  order,  and   routinize  the  unexpected;;  and  to  preclude  the  exceptional  and  unpredictable  (bauman,   1991)  –  in  a  word:  to  standardize.  as  larkin  writes,  it  is  difficult  to  separate  an  analysis   of  infrastructures  such  as  standards  from  the  modernist  belief  that  by  promoting  order,   "infrastructures  bring  about  change,  and  through  change  they  enact  progress,  and   through  progress  we  gain  freedom"  (2013:332).     it  is  ironic,  then,  that  standards  are  distributed  unevenly  across  the  sociocultural   landscape,  that  they  are  increasingly  linked  and  integrated  with  one  another,  and  that   they  codify,  embody  or  prescribe  social  values  that  often  carry  great  consequences  for   individuals  and  groups  (star  and  lampland,  2009:5).  in  this  context,  the  four  papers  and   the  moderator  of  this  panel  explore  the  meaning  of  contemporary  standardization   practices  in  such  diverse  fields  as  memory  applications,  crowdfunding,  biometric   identification  and  national  archiving,  and  internet  literacy  –  viewing  them  as  empirically   distinct  yet  theoretically  interrelated  attempts  to  impose  order  in  times  of  growing   uncertainty.  together,  they  address  two  tensions  that  inform  contemporary   standardization  efforts,  regarding  standards  as  an  encounter  between  analogue  and   digital  objects  and  practices;;  and  as  dialectic  of  invisibility  and  transparency,  a   pragmatic  and  symbolic  endeavor.     references     bauman,  z.  (1991).  modernity  and  ambivalence.  cambridge,  uk:  polity  press.   larkin,  b.  (2013).  the  politics  and  poetics  of  infrastructure.  annual  review  of   anthropology,  42,  327-­343.   star,  s.  l.,  &  lampland,  m.  (2009).  reckoning  with  standards.  in:  m.  lampland  &  s.  l.   star  (ed.),  standards  and  their  stories:  how  quantifying,  classifying,  and   formalizing  practices  shape  everyday  life  (pp.  3-­33).  cornell  university  press.     total  recall:  standardizing  memory  in  facebook  applications     hagar  bohbot  &  rivka  ribak,  university  of  haifa     "memories  include  things  like  your  posts  and  others'  posts  you're  tagged  in,  major  life   events  and  when  you  became  friends  with  someone  on  facebook".   (facebook's  "on  this  day"  help  center1,  february  2016)       it  seems  that  while  memory  studies'  scholars  are  debating  the  implications  and   meanings  of  digital  memory  artifacts  (garde-­hansen,  2009;;  mayer-­schönberger,  2011;;   schwarz,  2013;;  van  dijk,  2007),  facebook  has  it  all  figured  out:  the  official  help  center   for  facebook's  memory  applications  (including  "on  this  day,"  "year  in  review"  and  most   recently  "friends  day  video"),  describes  in  a  clear,  even  laconic  manner  what   constitutes  a  memory.  yet  facebook's  definition  for  memory  has  not  always  been  as   clear.  in  fact,  as  late  as  june  2015,  the  same  official  help  center  page  did  not  offer  any   explanation  at  all.     what  was  it  that  brought  about  this  conceptual  change?  facebook's  memory   applications  were  publicly  criticized  by  users  from  the  moment  they  came  into  being:   "algorithms  are  essentially  thoughtless.  they  model  certain  decision  flows,  but  once  you   run  them  no  more  thought  occurs,"2  wrote  a  blogger  who  was  reminded  of  his  young   daughter's  death  earlier  that  year  by  facebook's  "year  in  review"  application,  which   pops  up  in  december  with  algorithmically-­selected  highlights  of  the  passing  year.  "for   those  of  us  who  lived  through  the  death  of  loved  ones,"  he  continued,  "or  spent   extended  time  in  the  hospital,  or  were  hit  by  divorce  or  losing  a  job  (…)  we  might  not   want  another  look  at  this  past  year."     these  types  of  criticism  were  also  made  in  relation  to  "on  this  day"  memory  application,   which  was  officially  launched  on  march  24,  2015  after  about  a  year  of  test  versions  and   user  feedbacks.  by  that  time,  facebook's  designers  and  coders  provided  users  with   some  control  over  the  reminiscing  process,  featuring  new  filters,  customized  notification   and  privacy  settings.  this  trajectory  highlights  the  negotiations  between  coders  and   algorithms  on  the  one  hand  and  users  on  the  other.  at  the  same  time,  it  sheds  light  on   the  emergence  of  a  standardized  definition  of  "memory,"  allowing  us  to  "restore  the   narratives  of  these  standards:  their  historical  development,  their  political  consequences,   and  the  smoke-­filled  rooms  always  attached  to  decisions  made  about  them"  (lampland   &  star,  2009,  p.  13).     1  retrieved  from:  https://www.facebook.com/help/439014052921484   2    eric's  archived  thoughts,  retrieved  from:  http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/12/24/inadvertent-­ algorithmic-­cruelty     this  paper  seeks  to  explore  the  standardization  process  of  digital  memory  artifacts   generated  by  facebook's  various  applications.  the  framework  for  this  discussion   considers  the  specific  characteristics  of  standardization,  as  well  as  the  current  discourse   surrounding  digital  memory  and  algorithms.  lampland  &  star  (2009)  offer  five   commonalities  regarding  all  standards,  making  them  easier  to  identify:  standards  fit   inside  one  another,  they  are  linked  and  intergraded,  their'  ability  to  function  is  relative  to   specific  practices,  they're  unevenly  distributed  and  carry  a  set  of  values  which  impacts   individuals.         these  commonalities  can  be  used  to  describe  memory  algorithms  and  view  them  as   certain  types  of  standards.  for  the  purpose  of  this  discussion,  facebook's  memory   algorithms  are  nested  in  other  algorithms  in  the  sense  that  they  require  having  e-­mail   addresses  and  phone  numbers  to  sign  up  for  the  social  media  site,  which  are  linked  and   nested  in  the  common  ways  to  invite  friends  to  like  a  facebook  page  or  become   facebook  friends.  facebook's  memory  algorithms  can  be  considered  unevenly   distributed  because  they  assume  basic  technical  knowledge  for  all  users  (e.g.  how  to   set  privacy  settings,  enable  or  disable  specific  applications  and  so  on),  they  are  relative   in  their  meaning  and  impact  for  individuals,  so  one  user's  nostalgic  trip  down  memory   lane  can  be  another's  horrible  recollection.  facebook's  memory  algorithms  are  also   intergraded  with  other  algorithms  in  the  sense  that  they  contain  different  forms  of   standards:  writing  on  a  friend's  wall  is  significantly  different  than  writing  a  private   message,  how  and  when  we  publish  photos,  who  we  tag  and  when  should  we  keep   from  sharing  our  specific  location.  finally,  these  memory  algorithms  embody  a  set  of   values  and  ethics  by  filtering  conflict  and  diversity.  facebook's  memory  algorithms   operate  by  pulling  what  they  count  as  valid  memories  out  of  a  set  of  general  algorithm   system,  and  they  are  able  to  do  so  by  employing  standards.  over  time,  these  algorithms   had  to  learn  to  identify  what  counts  as  memories  that  are  worth  reminiscing.     according  to  busch  (2011),  standards  –  and  by  extension,  memory  algorithms  –  are   also  ideally  invisible,  anonymous,  merely  technical  and  even  neutral,  and  therefore   exercise  power.  by  looking  at  facebook's  memory  applications,  its  official  help  center   pages,  as  well  as  the  texts  that  accompany  them  and  the  media  publications  regarding   them,  and  performing  textual  and  visual  content  analysis,  i  hope  to  gain  insight  to  the   standardization  process  of  digital  memory  on  facebook,  and  the  algorithms  that   organize  these  memory  artifacts.     for  example,  facebook's  memory  applications  make  apparent  use  of  post-­human   language,  which  contributes  to  the  anonymity  of  the  algorithms  that  operate  them:   "would  you  like  to  receive  notifications  when  you  have  new  memories  to  look  back   on?"3  asks  "on  this  day."  this  rhetoric  links  the  human  reminiscing  process  with  a  non-­ human  technical  action  –  to  receive  a  notification  from  facebook,  but  more  importantly,   it  throws  into  relief  the  standardization  of  technical  memory  production,  as  today's  posts   are  turned  into  tomorrow's  "new  memories."  the  media  coverage  regarding  users'   protest  against  the  cruelty  of  these  algorithms  and  their  expectation  for  higher  levels  of   sensitivity  portrays  the  ongoing  negotiation  between  algorithms  and  users.  but  it  also   sheds  light  on  what  constitutes  worth  reminding  on  facebook,  worth  archiving  and   3  retrieved  from:  https://www.facebook.com/onthisday/?source=bookmark     appropriate  for  sharing  on  the  social  network.  the  standards  that  impose  a  certain   amount  of  friends  in  order  to  generate  a  "friends  day"  video,  which  portrays  a  specific   set  of  photos  and  posts  made  by  those  who  are  considered  users'  best  (facebook)   friends,  or  a  certain  amount  of  content  in  order  to  actually  have  "facebook  memories,"   and  users'  expectations  to  avoid  bad  memories  (of  e.g.  ex-­partners,  the  death  of  loved   ones,  divorce  or  loss  of  jobs)  are  keys  to  further  understanding  the  specific  terrains  of   conflict  regarding  digital  memory.  "consuming  memories  from  the  past  and  resharing   them"  promises  facebook's  product  manager  jonathan  geller,  "rewires  our   relationships."4  this  quote  portrays  facebook's  ambition  do  draw  clear  boundaries   between  analog  and  digital  memory,  and  define  the  latter  as  a  preferred  and  ideal  way   to  experience  human  relations.  digital  memory  is  intertwined  in  the  various  ways  in   which  we  perceive  human  memory,  and  facebook's  memory  algorithms  offer  a  unique   window  to  these  practices.     references     busch,  l.  (2011).  standards:  recipes  for  reality.  mit  press.   garde-­hansen,  j.  (2009).  mymemories?  personal  digital  archive  fever  and  facebook.   in  j.  garde-­hansen,  a.  hoskins  &  a.  reading  (eds.)  save  as…  digital  memories.   (pp.135-­150).  basingstoke:  palgrave.   mayer-­schönberger,  v.  (2011).  delete:  the  virtue  of  forgetting  in  the  digital  age.   princeton  university  press.   schwarz,  o.  (2013).  the  past  next  door:  neighbourly  relations  with  digital  memory-­ artefacts.  memory  studies,  7/1,  7-­21.   star,  s.  l.,  &  lampland,  m.  (2009).  reckoning  with  standards.  in:  m.  lampland  &  s.  l.   star  (ed.),  standards  and  their  stories:  how  quantifying,  classifying,  and   formalizing  practices  shape  everyday  life  (pp.  3-­33).  cornell  university  press.   van  dijck,  j.  (2007).  mediated  memories  in  the  digital  age.  stanford  university  press.       crowdfunding  as  an  infrastructure  and  the  standards  governing  it     roei  davidson,  university  of  haifa     standards,  particular  legitimated  ways  of  doing  things  often  anchored  in  technological  or   bureaucratic  settings,  have  a  key  role  in  modern  life,  and  an  especially  prominent  role  in   mediated  processes.  in  this  study,  i  will  consider  divergent  understandings  of  standards   in  sts  (science  and  technology  studies)  and  economic  sociology  (for  an  overview  see   talmud  2013).  while  recent  sts  treatments  of  standards  have  emphasized  their   exclusionary  consequences  (lampland  &  star  2009),  work  in  economic  sociology,   especially  in  valuation  studies,  suggests  that  standards  are  essential  for  the  design  of   fair  socio-­technical  systems.  to  integrate  these  understandings,  this  study  will  consider   cultural  crowdfunding  as  a  complex  infrastructure  “that  facilitate[s]  the  flow”  (larkin   2013,  328)  of  money  and  attention  from  backers  to  founders  of  cultural  projects  in   4  the  washington  post,  retrieved  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-­ intersect/wp/2015/03/25/facebooks-­on-­this-­day-­wants-­to-­rewire-­your-­relationship-­to-­the-­past-­heres-­why-­ thats-­strange/     diverse  cultural  sectors  (see  bennett  et  al.  2015  on  cultural  crowdfunding)  and  focus  on   the  nature  of  the  standards  governing  it.     sts  approach     from  an  sts  perspective,  lampland  &  star  (2009)  emphasize  the  exclusionary  aspects   of  standards.  they  note  that  “standards  are  distributed  unevenly”  (6)  and  that  these   standards  assume  that  the  individuals  and  groups  interacting  with  them  possess   particular  proficiencies  or  properties.  as  a  result,  those  lacking  such  proficiencies  or   properties  might  be  denied  access  to  the  services  or  products  these  standards  govern   often  while  creating  a  façade  of  equality  and  fairness.  for  example,  an  individual  that   does  not  use  social  network  sites  might  find  it  difficult  to  use  crowdfunding  platforms.       valuation  approach     the  notion  of  standard  is  invoked  differently  in  valuation  studies,  a  branch  of  economic   sociology  which  deals  with  the  way  actors  evaluate  the  worth  of  products  or  services.   going  beyond  the  neo-­classical  assumption  that  the  value  of  a  product  is  neutrally   shaped  by  forces  of  supply  and  demand,  these  studies  distinguish  between  “standard   markets”  and  “status  markets”  (aspers  2009).  standard  markets  are  markets  in  which   an  explicit  socially-­constructed  quality  convention  exists  to  assess  the  goods  being   exchanged.  by  contrast,  in  status  markets  the  value  of  a  good  is  assessed  according  to   the  social  status  of  the  actors  interacting.  in  sts  terms,  one  could  think  of  both  these   types  of  markets  as  governed  by  standards.  however,  in  “standard  markets”  the   standards  are  explicit  while  in  status  markets  they  are  more  implicit.  art  markets   (velthuis  2005)  and  illegal  markets  governed  by  the  mafia  are  such  “inscrutable   markets”  (gambetta  1994)  where  it  is  difficult  to  assess  the  value  of  the  product  and   therefore  buyers  and  sellers  revert  to  assessing  actors’  reputation.  in  art,  such   reputation  might  be  divined  from  the  success  of  an  artist’s  past  work  in  the  market,  or   from  the  identity  of  their  representing  gallery.  in  illegal  markets,  reputation  can  be   gleaned  from  an  actor’s  affiliation  with  a  particular  crime  organization.       in  highlighting  the  advantages  of  explicit  standards  as  an  alternative  to  implicit   standards  linked  to  reputation,  the  valuation  approach  draws  on  classic  analyses  of   modern  society  which  emphasize  its  complex  nature  (durkheim  1933)  and  the   emergence  of  bureaucratic  structures  to  deal  with  such  complexity.  from  a  neo-­ weberian  perspective,  systems  of  peer-­production  such  as  crowdfunding,  which  have   been  hailed  as  radically  democratic,  might  in  fact  be  coercive  and  charisma-­driven,   compelling  participants  to  adopt  social  networking  technologies,  eroding  distinctions   between  work  and  the  private  sphere,  and  benefitting  a  small  elite  of  charismatic   individuals.  this  perspective  is  attentive  to  the  “inclusivity  and  accountability  that  have   long  characterized  bureaucracies”  (kreiss  et  al.  2011,  255)  and  the  tendency  of  sharing   economies  to  erode  these  capacities.     integrating  the  approaches  and  applying  them  to  crowdfunding     both  approaches  agree  that  standards  are  important  social  phenomena  and  that  they   are  anchored  in  particular  social  contexts  and  embody  particular  values.  this  is  evident   in  economic  sociology  in  the  argument  that  all  economic  action  is  socially  embedded   (granovetter  1985).  the  claims  that  standards  are  often  nested  within  broader   standards  and  that  these  in  turn  operate  within  vaster  infrastructures  (lampland  &  star   2009,  17)  also  reflect  this  position.  theoretically,  a  valuation  approach  contributes  the   insight  that  in  the  absence  of  explicit  standards  focused  on  the  particular  action  of  an   individual  or  group,  implicit  standards  linked  to  social  status  automatically  kick  in,  and   therefore  while  some  standards  can  be  inherently  exclusionary,  the  lack  of  explicit   standards  can  be  even  more  regressive.       empirical  study     this  study  examines  the  role  of  implicit  standards  (status)  and  explicit  standards  in  a   crowdfunding  platform’s  operation.  further,  from  an  infrastructural  perspective,  the   study  examines  crowdfunding’s  nested  dependence  on  online  social  networks  which   promote  particular  neoliberal  practices  of  self-­promotion  (marwick  2013)  and  its   embeddedness  in  contemporary  culture  industries  which  demand  from  producers   intense  “self-­discipline”  (mcrobbie  2002).  in  the  second  post  published  on  the   kickstarter  blog,  one  of  its  founders  echoed  the  optimistic  view  of  peer  production:   “kickstarter  aims  to  give  each  one  of  us  a  chance  to  fund  our  ideas,  starting  directly  with   the  people  who  are  closest  to  it  (friends,  fans,  community-­fellows)  …  to  discover  that  we   can  offer  each  other  value  through  creation  without  a  middleman  dictating  the  product   and  terms”  (strickler  2009).  in  contrast,  semi-­structured  interviews  with  17  culture   producers  in  the  u.s.  and  israel  who  have  attempted  to  use  crowdfunding  suggest  that   crowdfunding  is  enabled  by  a  long  list  of  intermediaries  –  agents,  pr  professionals,  and   journalists  among  others.    i  thematically  analyze  these  interview  transcripts  as  well  as   data  from  participant  observations  of  crowdfunding-­related  events,  and  analyze  the   kickstarter  blog  and  kickstarter  fulfillment  list  –  to  consider  both  the  nature  of   crowdfunding  as  a  heterogeneous  infrastructure  that  has  not  done  away  with   middlemen,  and  the  prominence  of  implicit  and  explicit  standards  as  criteria  for   assessing  crowdfunding  projects  and  their  founders.       references     aspers,  p.,  2009.  knowledge  and  valuation  in  markets.  theory  and  society,  38(2),   pp.111–131.  available  at:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11186-­008-­9078-­9.   bennett,  l.,  chin,  b.  &  jones,  b.,  2015.  crowdfunding:  a  new  media  &  society  special   issue.  new  media  &  society  ,  17  (2  ),  pp.141–148.  available  at:   http://nms.sagepub.com/content/17/2/141.abstract.   durkheim,  e.,  1933.  the  division  of  labor  in  society,  new  york:  free  press.   gambetta,  d.,  1994.  inscrutable  markets.  rationality  and  society,  6(3),  pp.353–368.   granovetter,  m.,  1985.  economic  action  and  social  structure:  the  problem  of   embeddedness.  american  journal  of  sociology,  91(3),  pp.481–510.   kreiss,  d.,  finn,  m.  &  turner,  f.,  2011.  the  limits  of  peer  production:  some  reminders   from  max  weber  for  the  network  society.  new  media  &  society  ,  13  (2  ),  pp.243– 259.  available  at:  http://nms.sagepub.com/content/13/2/243.abstract.   lampland,  m.  &  star,  s.l.,  2009.  reckoning  with  standards.  in  standards  and  their   stories:  how  quantifying,  classifying,  and  formalizing  practices  shape  everyday  life.   ithaca:  cornell  university  press,  pp.  3–24.   larkin,  b.,  2013.  the  politics  and  poetics  of  infrastructure.  annual  review  of   anthropology,  42(1),  pp.327–343.  available  at:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev-­ anthro-­092412-­155522.   marwick,  a.e.,  2013.  status  update:  celebrity,  publicity,  and  branding  in  the  social   media  age,  new  haven:  yale  university  press.   mcrobbie,  a.,  2002.  clubs  to  companies:  notes  on  the  decline  of  political  culture  in   speeded  up  creative  worlds.  cultural  studies,  16(4),  pp.516–531.   strickler,  y.,  2009.  why  kickstarter?  kickstarter  blog.  available  at:   https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/why-­kickstarter.   talmud,  i.,  2013.  economic  sociology.  sociopedia.isa.  available  at:   https://economicsociologydotorg.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/economic-­ sociology.pdf.   velthuis,  o.,  2005.  talking  prices:  symbolic  meanings  of  prices  on  the  market  for   contemporary  art,  princeton  university  press.       technological  standards  and  the  politics  of  representation     avi  marciano  and  sharon  ringel,  university  of  haifa     in  the  introduction  to  their  edited  collection,  star  and  lampland  suggest  that  "to   standardize  an  action,  process,  or  thing  means,  at  some  level,  to  screen  out  unlimited   diversity,"  and  argue  that  "the  silencing  of  'other'  choices  […]  is  a  moral  choice"  (2009,   p.  8).  busch  contextualizes  this  claim  within  a  wider  political  perspective,  suggesting   that  "however  much  standards  appear  to  be  neutral,  benign,  merely  technical  [and]   obscure,  […]  they  are  […]  an  extremely  important  and  growing  source  of  social,  political,   and  economic  relations  of  power"  (2011,  p.  28).     in  this  paper,  we  reflect  upon  the  moral  choices  and  power  relations  hidden  in   processes  of  standardization,  as  implicated  in  two  case  studies  in  israel:  the   establishment  of  a  national  biometric  database  and  the  digitization  of  archives  at  the   national  library  of  israel  (nli).  we  show  how  institutionalized  standards  –  allegedly   technical  and  objective  –  work  to  define  different  aspects  of  israeli  nationality.  more   specifically,  we  point  to  the  ways  in  which  standardized  digitization  of  texts  and  bodies   sets  the  boundaries  of  israeli  nationality  through  the  shaping  of  memory  and  citizenship,   respectively.     case  study  #1:  the  establishment  of  a  national  biometric  database     in  december  2009,  after  a  decade  of  public  debates,  the  israeli  parliament  approved  a   controversial  law  sanctioning  the  issuing  of  biometric  ids  and  passports,  and  more   importantly  –  the  establishment  of  a  national  biometric  database.  the  law  imposes   compulsory  enrollment  upon  israeli  citizens  and  allows  access  to  the  database  to  all   national  security  authorities.  as  such,  the  israeli  biometric  project  is  unprecedented  in   the  democratic  world.  almost  four  years  later,  in  july  2013,  the  israeli  government   launched  a  two-­year  preliminary  experimental  phase  before  the  full  implementation  of   the  project,  during  which  citizens'  enrollment  is  voluntary.  this  preliminary  phase  is   aimed  to  evaluate  different  aspects  of  this  project,  including  the  public  response  and  the   suitability  of  technical  criteria  according  to  which  the  biometric  machines  operate.  since   the  beginning  of  this  phase,  the  israeli  biometric  database  management  authority  has   published  four  biannual  reports  that  summarize  the  results  and  detail  the  challenges  –   technical  and  others  –  that  have  arisen  at  this  meeting  point  of  technologies  and   citizens.       in  this  first  case  study,  we  analyze  various  operational  documents  as  well  the   aforementioned  interim  reports,  to  show  how  "technological  standards"  are  used  to   define  eligible  bodies  through  inclusion,  exclusion  and  hierarchization  of  citizens.  we   illustrate  how  such  standards  turn  the  complex  socio-­cultural  notion  of  citizenship  into   technical  quests  of  authentication  and  identification,  and  more  importantly  –  how  they   produce  a  "layered  citizenship"  (lips,  taylor,  &  organ,  2009).     case  study  #2:  the  digitization  of  archives  at  the  national  library  of  israel       since  2008,  the  nli  began  implementing  a  digitization  project,  which  includes  both   conversion  of  analogue  materials  into  digital  formats,  and  maintenance  of  digitally-­born   cultural  and  heritage  materials.  when  cultural  texts  are  digitized  and  made  publicly   accessible  on  the  web,  they  become  an  open  resource  for  a  variety  of  cultural  agents,   including  historians,  authors,  teachers,  screenwriters  and  others.  therefore,  the   formation  of  a  digital  corpus  is  not  a  mirror  image  of  the  library,  or  an  online  archive  –   rather,  it  is  a  new  means  for  storing  and  retrieving  information,  which  provides  new   affordances  for  cultural  production  (marcum,  2014;;  marty,  2009).  the  practices  and  the   meanings  developed  during  this  transitional  period  were  studied  through  participant   observation  at  the  nli  digitization  center,  and  through  an  analysis  of  reports  and  other   documents  that  were  produced  in  the  process.  since  the  beginning  of  the  project,  the   workers  who  are  in  charge  of  the  scanning  faced  questions  regarding  the  best  practices   for  scanning  the  historical  materials.  however,  only  in  2014  the  nli  published  a   document  that  defines  the  standards  for  digitization  of  archival  materials.             in  the  second  case  study,  we  analyze  the  official  reports  that  guide  the  selection  of   archival  materials  for  digitization,  define  appropriate  techniques  for  scanning,  and   suggest  formats  for  the  preservation  of  digital  objects.  we  show  how  those  "technical   guidelines"  define  the  ways  in  which  archival  materials  should  be  preserved  as  digital   objects  for  future  generations.  furthermore,  we  illustrate  how  those  standards  have  the   potential  to  shape  future  national  memory.     standards  and  the  politics  of  representation     our  case  studies  demonstrate  how  political  questions  are  reduced  to  technological   standards  that  eventually  shape  specific  aspects  of  israeli  nationality,  but  at  the  same   time  bypass  the  public  discussion  about  the  meaning  of  inclusion  and  exclusion.  in  the   first  case  study,  the  standards  appear  as  numbers  that  set  the  threshold  for  citizenship   through  the  definition  of  a  successful  biometric  enrollment.  in  joseph  pugliese's  terms,   these  numbers  actually  set  the  boundaries  of  representation  by  including  the  eligible   and  excluding  the  others  (pugliese,  2005).  in  the  second  case  study,  the  standards  are   operational  scanning  guidelines  that  determine  not  only  which  cultural  texts  will  make   their  way  into  digital  archives,  but  also  how  these  texts  will  be  digitally  preserved.  in   other  words,  the  standards  of  scanning  have  the  power  to  shape  the  digital  national   memory  by  determining  the  boundaries  of  the  representation  of  texts.  the  highly   technological  contexts  in  which  the  standards  we  analyze  operate  shed  technical,   objective  and  scientific  light  on  these  processes  of  standardization.  thus,  these   contexts  have  the  capacity  to  obscure  the  politics  behind  these  standards.       putting  these  case  studies  together,  we  conceptualize  standardization  in  terms  of  the   politics  of  representation,  and  attend  to  the  ways  in  which  practices  of  standardization   have  the  capacity  to  shape  the  relationship  between  the  state  and  its  citizens.  from  this   perspective,  our  study  demonstrates  busch's  claim  that  "standards  are  the  recipes  by   which  we  create  realities"  (busch,  2011,  p.  2).       references     busch,  l.  (2011).  standards:  recipes  for  reality.  cambridge,  ma:  the  mit  press.   lips,  a.  m.  b.,  taylor,  j.  a.,  &  organ,  j.  (2009).  managing  citizen  identity  information  in   e-­government  service  relationships  in  the  uk.  public  management  review,   11(6),  833-­856.   marcum,  d.  (2014).  archives,  libraries,  museums:  coming  back  together?  information  &   culture,  49(1),  74-­89.   marty,  p.  f.  (2009).  an  introduction  to  digital  convergence:  libraries,  archives,  and   museums  in  the  information  age.  museum  management  and  curatorship,  24(4),   295-­298.   pugliese,  j.  (2005).  in  silico  race  and  the  heteronomy  of  biometric  proxies:  biometrics  in   the  context  of  civilian  life,  border  security  and  counter-­terrorism  laws.  the   australian  feminist  law  journal,  23,  1-­32.   star,  s.  l.,  &  lampland,  m.  (2009).  reckoning  with  standards.  in  m.  lampland  &  s.  l.   star  (eds.),  standards  and  their  stories:  how  quantifying,  classifying,  and   formalizing  practices  shape  everyday  life  (pp.  3-­24).  ithaca,  ny:  cornell   university  press.     who  rules  the  rules?   definitions  of  risk  among  media  literacy  stakeholders       neta  ziskind,  university  of  haifa  and  open  university     can  too  many  cooks,  even  those  with  the  best  intentions,  spoil  the  broth?  in  this   presentation  i  focus  upon  the  ways  various  stakeholders  attempt  to  cooperate  in  the   formulation  of  rules  that  children  must  abide  to  avoid  risks  of  digital  technologies.   children's  safety  in  this  context  is  a  primary  public  concern.  when  it  is  compounded  by   uncertainty  about  the  power  of  new  technologies,  public  and  policy  debates  become  a   tug  of  war  between  highly  protectionist  positions  versus  libertarian  ones  (livingstone,   haddon,  &  görzig,  2012).  here  i  present  a  similar  tug  of  war  between  various   stakeholders  in  israel,  as  each  promotes  their  own  standards  and  rules  to  achieve   digital  literacy  and  safety  of  children  online.  both  standards  and  rules  are  linked  to   policy;;  standards  in  this  context  refer  to  an  agreement  towards  a  common  ground  to  put   together  a  curriculum  (tyner,  2014),  while  rules  are  formulations  of  explicit  procedures   to  produce  and  interpret  texts  as  the  curriculum  demands  (olson,  &  torrance  (2009).  i   analyzed  the  attempts  to  agree  upon  standards  and  rules  and  ask  what  the  process   reveals  as  to  the  relative  power  of  various  stakeholders.         the  discourse  of  risk     in  ulrich  beck's  seminal  work  from  1992,  he  argued  that  modern  societies  in  the  west   were  in  a  transition  from  being  industrial  into  being  risk  societies.  beck  was  concerned   with  hazards  that  arise  from  natural  causes  but  also  from  the  operation  of  modern   technologies.  parental  attitudes  towards  digital  and  mobile  media  may  serve  as  an   illustration  of  the  complexities  of  everyday  struggles  in  the  risk  society.  parents  express   fear  that  they  will  not  know  how  to  cope  with  risks  faced  by  their  children  online.  though   the  fears  are  not  always  warranted,  the  rise  in  the  perception  of  fear  has  real   consequences  in  their  lives  (clark,  2013).  smedts  (2008)  argues  that  parents'  identity  is   being  "entrepreneurially  filled  in"  (p.  126)  as  more  and  more  experts,  including  those  on   educational,  psychological,  and  technological  issues,  tell  parents  how  to  act.       in  this  presentation,  i  describe  findings  from  interviews  i  conducted  with  a  highly  diverse   set  of  expert  stakeholders  who  all  attempt  to  cooperate  in  conceiving  rules,  guidelines   and  standards  for  advancing  practices  of  literacy  they  deem  necessary  to  deal  with  risks   associated  with  children  and  the  internet.  as  standards  codify  and  embody  ethics  and   values  (lampland  &  star,  2009,  p.  5),  i  asked  what  the  process  of  formulating  a   standard  of  digital  literacy  reveals  as  to  the  motives  and  values  of  the  various   stakeholders.           stakeholders  and  the  rules  of  media  literacy     the  stakeholders  i  interviewed  take  part  in  the  collaborative  effort  known  as  safe   internet  week.  this  event  was  initiated  in  israel  in  2004  by  a  commercial  stakeholder,   microsoft.  after  a  few  years,  the  ministry  of  education  took  over  the  reins  and  started   orchestrating  a  joining  of  forces  to  promote  media  literacy  among  students.   stakeholders  include  government  agencies  –  the  israeli  police,  israel  defense  forces,   and  the  ministry  of  public  defense;;  commercial  entities  such  as  microsoft,  intel  and   google;;  and  ngos,  notably  israel  internet  association  (isoc),  eshnav  (dedicated  to   teaching  safe  internet  usage),  the  adler  institute  (promoting  adlerian  family  therapy),   eli  (foundation  for  protection  of  abused  children),  the  red  button  (an  ngo  dedicated   to  battling  cyber  bullying  using  their  own  app).       as  may  be  deduced  from  the  diversity  of  stakeholders'  backgrounds  and  therefore  their   motives,  early  on  in  the  interviews,  i  found  that  the  guidelines  to  promote  literacy  by   each  stakeholder  vary  significantly  in  approach,  design  and  underlying  values.  some   address  one  particular  issue.  others  are  of  the  omnibus  type  and  deal  with  different   types  of  risky  behaviors.  some  prescribe  values  of  human  compassion  (as  in  battling   cyber-­bullying)  while  others  promote  technological  expertise  (as  in  preventing  phishing   attempts).         method     i  adopted  the  framework  proposed  by  burns  and  machado  (2010)  to  analyze  the   discourse  of  collaborative  management  of  risk  that  arises  from  new,  complex   technologies,  in  order  to  reflect  upon  the  process  of  standardizing  media  literacy  rules.  i   employed  critical  discourse  analysis  (cda)  to  address  these  issues.  fairclough  (2001)   states  that  every  practice  is  an  articulation  of  diverse  social  elements  within  a  relatively   stable  configuration.  cda  allows  exploration  of  discourses  of  risk  preventions  and   shows  that  rules  proposed  by  stakeholders  both  generate  and  depend  upon  prevalent   ideas  about  childhood,  hierarchy,  and  responsibility.       initial  findings     analysis  of  practices  of  each  stakeholder  allows  insight  into  the  questions  of  power,   authority  and  responsibility.  the  ministry  of  education,  as  the  organizing  stakeholder,   promotes  cooperation  by  opening  the  yearly  efforts  with  an  official  meeting  of  all   stakeholders  at  the  ministry's  headquarters.  while  this  meeting  sets  the  standards  for   safe  internet  week,  nearly  all  stakeholders  are  united  in  criticizing  the  ministry  of   education;;  they  perceive  it  as  concentrating  its  efforts  in  a  single  week,  while  forsaking   the  instruction  of  media  literacy  for  the  rest  of  the  school  year.               authority  figures  also  do  not  adhere  to  a  single  formulation  of  values.  one  ngo   employs  soldiers  to  lecture  pupils,  other  pupils  are  addressed  by  police  officers  or  by   volunteers  from  the  public  defenders'  office,  while  still  others  watch  a  presentation   delivered  by  pupils  from  their  own  school,  who  had  received  a  brief  preparation  on  the   bare  essentials  of  media  literacy.       the  question  of  responsibility  is  a  particularly  thorny  one.  the  ministry  of  education   assigns  teachers  with  the  responsibility  of  dealing  with  cyber  bullying,  including   incidents  that  happen  after  school  hours.  parents  expect  the  school  system  and  ngos   to  teach  digital  literacy  as  they  feel  unequipped  to  do  so,  while  all  stakeholders  hold   parents  responsible  to  the  children's'  knowledge  of  media  literacy,  as  the  values  that   underlie  it  must  be  instilled  inside  the  home.             while  the  common  goal  is  to  formulate  educational  standards  that  outline  what  digitally   literate  students  should  know,  understand  and  be  able  to  do  (pearson  &  young,  2002),   it  proves  difficult  to  agree  upon  them  in  the  discussed  context.  a  critical  analysis  of  the   discourse  of  risk  and  media  literacy  highlights  the  values  that  lie  at  the  heart  of  the   practice  of  standardization.  this  analysis  delves  into  the  process  of  the  making  of   standards  that  frequently  remains  transparent  and  even  invisible.       references   beck,  u.  (1992).  risk  society:  towards  a  new  modernity  (vol.  17).  sage.   burns,  t.  r.,  &  machado,  n.  (2010).  technology,  complexity,  and  risk:  a  social  systems   perspective  on  the  discourses  and  regulation  of  the  hazards  of  socio-­technical   systems.  sociologia,  (62).     clark,  l.  s.  (2013).  the  parent  app:  understanding  families  in  the  digital  age.  oxford   university  press.   fairclough,  n.  (2001).  the  dialectics  of  discourse.  textus,  14(2),  231-­242.   lampland,  m.,  &  star,  s.  l.  (2009).  standards  and  their  stories:  how  quantifying,   classifying,  and  formalizing  practices  shape  everyday  life.  cornell  university  press.   livingstone,  s.  m.,  haddon,  l.,  &  görzig,  a.  (eds.).  (2012).  children,  risk  and  safety  on   the  internet.  policy  press.   olson,  d.  r.,  &  torrance,  n.  (2009).  the  cambridge  handbook  of  literacy.  cambridge   university  press.   pearson,  g.,  &  young,  a.  t.  (eds.).  (2002).  technically  speaking:  why  all  americans   need  to  know  more  about  technology.  national  academies  press.   smedts,  g.  (2008).  parenting  in  a  technological  age.  ethics  and  education,  3(2),  121-­ 134.   tyner,  k.  (2014).  literacy  in  a  digital  world:  teaching  and  learning  in  the  age  of   information.  routledge.   1 an old regime for viewpoint diversity of the new media: protecting anonymity for a functioning ‘marketplace of ideas’ in cyberspace ju young lee pennsylvania state university the united states jil5393@psu.edu abstract this study examines the necessity of protecting anonymity as a way to promote „marketplace of ideas‟ in cyberspace. as an old regime, fairness doctrine that used to apply to radio broadcasting industry, provides not only the rationale for the protection of political viewpoints diversity but also the reason why the direct government intervention in content is neither appropriate nor effective in facilitating the public‟s access to diverse political views on the internet. with regard to the fairness doctrine, red lion broadcasting co. v. fcc (1969) indicates that the government should play a role in achieving the public interest by imposing the obligation to provide balanced coverage of controversial issues on the privileged spectrum users. however, the doctrine was abolished in 1987 on the grounds that it was having a „chilling effect‟ on speech and could not serve the public interest. as a relevant case, in miami herald publishing co. v. tornillo (1974), the supreme court held a „right of reply‟ statute unconstitutional because it intruded into the function of editors and would lead to a chilling effect on their political coverage. from those two cases, three important principles are drawn: (1) the political viewpoint diversity is a public interest that the government should attempt to achieve; (2) the government measure to achieve the diversity of views is unconstitutional and, thereby, unacceptable when it has chilling effect on speech; (3) speakers have the right to decide what not to speak as well as what to speak. applying these principles to the internet regulation, protecting the anonymity of on-line speakers is the key to the viewpoint diversity in cyberspace in terms that it can prevent chilling effect that is possibly caused by the fear of reprisals and punishments. 2 keywords marketplace of ideas, diversity, fairness doctrine, chilling effect, anonymity. one of the most significant contributions of the internet to modern democratic society might be the realization of „marketplace of ideas‟ by integrating political participation into popular culture. in theory, the public can freely participate in discussion on political issues through the internet, which is clearly different than traditional mass media used dominantly by the „privileged‟ few. thus, the internet environment appears to have achieved a level of viewpoint diversity that other media cannot hope to achieve. however, in practice, it is doubtful that there is substantial diversity in viewpoints on the internet, because a variety of restrictions, ranging from government censorship to personal attack, may negatively influence the public‟s on-line communication. in this case, the internet will only have the status of a new „old medium.‟ to promote the viewpoint diversity of old media especially in terms of political viewpoints, in the past, the government chose to directly intervene in communication process, but the direct intervention would not likely work for the internet as an effective way to foster the viewpoint diversity. the direct government measure could degenerate the decentralized internet and chill free discussion. thus, it is necessary to create an environment in which people feel free to exchange their ideas on public issues through an indirect measure. from this perspective, protecting anonymity can be considered as a measure to promote the viewpoint diversity in cyberspace. the right of anonymity has been protected as a constitutional right and constitutes the fundamental mechanism of on-line communication. however, anonymity is often infringed by compulsory identification and government surveillance for preventing and coping with on-line problems including defamation, copyright infringement, and various cybercrimes. therefore, this study intends to revisit the importance of protecting anonymity in promoting diverse viewpoints on the internet by examining the applicability of the direct government intervention in the speaker‟s autonomy to decide the content, exemplified by the fairness doctrine, to the internet. historically, the diversity regulation has taken largely two forms: structural regulation, such as media ownership rules, and content-based regulation, such as the fairness doctrine. 3 both ways of regulation presuppose the passive public, who do have the right of access to diverse viewpoints provided by the media but do not have the right to express their viewpoints using the media. accordingly, the main purpose of those regulations is to prevent a „big‟ media from controlling people‟s thoughts, ideas, and elections. yet, the emergence of the internet undermined the basic premise of the passive public. that is, the one-way nature of the communication between the media and audience dramatically changed. the interactive nature of on-line communication has heated debate on the necessity of the fairness doctrine type of regulation directly limiting the speaker‟s autonomy over the content, whereas the structural regulation, which in effect restricts the quantity of audience a single media entity can reach, appears to retain justification. therefore, this study reviews the fairness doctrine to address the questions of whether or not the doctrine is applicable to the internet and what is the diversity implication of anonymity protection. to investigate these questions, red lion broadcasting co. v. fcc (1969), miami herald publishing co. v. tornillo (1974) and mcintyre v. ohio elections commission (1995) will be analyzed. through the analysis of mcintyre v. ohio elections commission, which is a landmark case of the protection of anonymous political speech, in light of three principles derived from red lion and miami herald, it will be examined how the first amendment protection of anonymous speech can play a crucial role in creating a functioning „marketplace of ideas‟ on the internet. additionally, this study would provide insight into how ensuring anonymity on the internet could make significant contributions to participatory democracy by reviewing prior studies applying the mcintyre case to on-line communication issues. political speech and marketplace of ideas political speech has received the greatest protection under the first amendment in the united states. the principal premise underlying the political speech protection is that under the federal system, the state is governed by „informed citizenry‟ (see franklin, anderson, & lidsky, 2005, p. 17). alexander meiklejohn (1961) argued that first amendment protection of free speech should be understood as the protection of the „governing‟ activities such as casting a ballot. he maintained that the freedom of governing activities must not be abridged in order for people to make a wise and effective decision. according to his extreme viewpoint that the first amendment protected only political speech essential for self-government (meiklejohn, 1948 in franklin, anderson, & lidsky, 2005, p. 19), political speech, including “public discussion of public issues together with the spreading of information and opinion bearing on those issues” (p. 4 18), lies at the core of the first amendment. while meiklejohn emphasized the importance of political speech in terms of self-government and participatory democracy, blasi (1977) implied the value of political speech by stressing the function of first amendment protection in checking the abuse of official power. thus, both of the viewpoints agree that free discussion on political issues is protected as a fundamental element of democratic society. before the internet emerged, public debate on political issues had long been dominated by the mass communication media such as newspapers, television, and radio. therefore, u.s. government has attempted to intervene in the editorial or programming decision of those institutionalized media to promote diversity of view on controversial issues including political issues. the two landmark supreme court cases, miami herald publishing co. v. tornillo (1974) and red lion broadcasting co. v. fcc (1969), show the governmental attempts. in red lion, the supreme court held that the fairness doctrine, which required broadcast stations to provide the fair and balanced coverage of controversial issues, was constitutional, whereas, in miami herald, the court found that the editor‟s first amendment rights to decide the content of the paper outweighed a right to access to diverse viewpoints, which the florida's „right of reply‟ statute intended to assure. the fairness doctrine is an important regulation example that shows the government‟s stance on controversial political speech. sunstein (1993) asserted that such intervention in the „marketplace of ideas‟ “could promote both political deliberation and political equality” (p. 18-19). however, it is too hasty to say that the same type of government intervention is applicable to the internet. in order to examine the applicability the old rules, it is necessary to identify the principles that can be derived from the cases related to the fairness doctrine. lessons from the fairness doctrine the fairness doctrine was adopted as an fcc rule in 1949 on the basis of the assumption that the broadcast media were trustees of a scarce public resource (i.e., spectrum), which were required to share their frequencies with others for viewpoint diversity in exchange for the exclusive use of a frequency, that is, gaining a license or license renewal. more specifically, the fairness doctrine consisted of two requirements; both radio and television stations were required to devote some of their airtime to the coverage of “vitally important controversial issues of [public] interest” and to “provide a reasonable opportunity for the 5 presentation of contrasting viewpoints on such issues” (hazlett & sosa, 1997).1 red lion broadcasting co. v. fcc (1969) indicates how this type of direct regulation of speakers can be justified. in red lion, the court held that broadcast television and radio stations could be regulated to ensure a balanced and open discussion of contested issues, which promotes political participation as well as the viewpoint diversity, because they were granted the exclusive right to use a scarce radio spectrum. despite this justification, the fairness doctrine had been harshly criticized from the beginning for the possibility of causing self-censorship of broadcasters and resulting in the decrease in controversial speech (simmons, 1977; krattenmaker & powe, 1985). in 1985, the fcc announced on the basis of its fairness report (102 f.c.c.2d 145) that the doctrine did not serve the public interest and thus violated the first amendment. further, it found that the spectrum scarcity rationale for the doctrine became invalid due to the advent of multiple channels on cable television. for these reasons, in 1987, the commission abolished the doctrine. a lesson from the fairness doctrine is that even the regulation designed to promote political discussion might have a chilling effect on controversial speech including political speech and, as a result, actually decrease the quantity of speech. hazelett and sosa (1997) empirically examined the chilling effect of the doctrine in evidence – decrease in the quantity of the coverage of controversial issues – by analyzing informational programming on am radio between 1975 and 1995. their analysis demonstrated that informational programming, which might trigger public controversy, increased relative to other formats after the fairness doctrine had been abolished. as a relevant case, miami herald publishing co. v. tornillo (1974) clearly demonstrates the conditions for the application of the fairness doctrine type of content regulation to the media. in miami herald, florida statute 104.38 (1973) called a „right of reply‟ statute required newspapers that criticized a political candidate to publish the candidate‟s reply on his request. the supreme court held the „right of reply‟ statute unconstitutional because it not only intruded into the function of editors but also would lead to a chilling effect on editors who want to avoid controversy and reduce the coverage of political issues. the court clarified that telling editors what to publish was unconstitutional as was telling them what not to publish, as long as there was no ground to apply the scarcity rationale to the media such as newspapers. 1 see also the general fairness doctrine obligation of broadcast licensees, 102 f.c.c. 2d 145, 146 (1985). 6 the aforementioned two cases indicate that a legitimate government interest could be outweighed by the chilling effect of the government measure to foster that interest. the chilling effect in relation to the doctrine was not theoretically conjectured but embodied by the mechanism in which fear of punishment causes the decrease in the quantity of controversial speech. additionally, editors, namely, speakers, have the constitutional right to decide what not to speak as well as what to speak. in other words, people can decide whether or not to include certain information (e.g., personal identity information) in the content of their speech. these principles provide justifications for protecting anonymity on the internet. in the next section, the history of anonymity protection will be reviewed, and it will be examined how the chilling effect was embodied in relation to the compulsory disclosure of identity. protection of anonymous political speech and chilling effect un has declared anonymous communication as a strongly protected human right (choi, na, & park, 2010).2 the right to speak and publish anonymously is a fundamental right that is based on a long historical tradition that dates to the very founding of democracy in the united states.3 “during the break with great britain, the revolutionaries employed pseudonyms both to conceal their identity from crown authorities and to impart a message‟. (mcintyre v. ohio elections commission, 1995, p. 368) pseudonymous and anonymous speech was also frequently used during and after the ratification debates on the constitution (mcintyre v. ohio elections commission, 1995, p. 368).4 specifically, alexander hamilton, james madison, and john jay wrote the federalist papers advocating the adoption of the constitution under the pseudonym publius (larios, 2010).5 the anti-federalists‟ critics also published anonymously (mcintyre v. ohio elections commission, 1995, p. 343). thomas paine published many of his popular pamphlets pseudonymously, including common sense. not only this anonymous political speech but also non-political speech was commonly used in the united states well into the 19th 2 quoting 1948 un general assembly's human rights declaration 3 see ‘the constitutional right to anonymity: free speech, disclosure and the devil’. (1961). yale law journal, 70(7), 1084–1128. 1961. “at the time the first amendment was adopted, the device of anonymous political authorship was well known, and utilized by many of the founding fathers.” 4 pseudonymity is conceptually different from anonymity and needs a different legal approach and interpretation. thus, it will be only mentioned as a way of anonymous speech, in terms of a shield of identity, and will not be discussed further. 5 quoting ‘defending federalism: realizing publius's vision’, (2008). harvard law review, 122, 745-, n.2 (2008). 7 century by those who had fear of retaliation or insisted on separating themselves from their messages by hiding or disguising their identities (carr, 1996). several u.s. court cases on the constitutionality of the statues restricting the distribution of anonymous literature show a historical path of the protection of anonymous political speech.6 the supreme court made a decision that freedom of anonymous expression is comprised in the freedom of speech as a constitutional right. the first major u.s. supreme court case regarding the prohibition on private anonymous speech was lewis publishing co. v. morgan (1913), involving government-mandated disclosure of identity and ownership of a newspaper who wished to qualify for second-class postage. in this case, the court rejected the argument that such disclosures violated the freedom of the press and held that the requirement was a reasonable regulation of the mail system. the court characterized the disclosure as „incidental‟ to the privilege of the status enjoying less expensive second-class postage rates and, therefore, found that it is not unconstitutional to restrict the freedom of anonymous speakers “only if necessary to qualify for some granted privilege or entitlement‟.7 twenty-five years later, the court decided its first handbill ban case, lovell v. griffin (1938). the lovell court struck down an ordinance in the city of griffin that requires “any distribution of literature of any kind”, – anonymous or not – “including newspapers, handbills, or advertisements, to first obtain a permit from the city manager‟. (lovell v. griffin,1938, p. 316) considering the framers' original intent in extending protection to the press, the court unanimously held that “the ordinance in question would restore the system of license and censorship in its baldest form” and violated the first amendment (lovell v. griffin,1938, p. 452). the court also noted that “the liberty of the press is not confined to newspapers and periodicals. it necessarily embraces pamphlets and leaflets…. the press in its historic connotation comprehends every sort of publication which affords a vehicle of information and opinion‟. (carr, 1996, p. 526) this indicates that the court intended to apply the press freedom to diverse media, as well as to printed text. 6 the precedent dealt with in this paper is the handbill-related laws, which appear to be appropriate and useful in understanding political speech on the internet. 7 the court stated: we are concerned solely and exclusively with the right on behalf of the publishers to continue to enjoy great privileges and advantages at the public expense, a right given to them by congress upon condition of compliance with regulations deemed by that body incidental and necessary to the complete fruition of the public policy lying at the foundation of the privileges accorded (p. 316). 8 the first case declaring that the first amendment protected anonymous speech is talley v. california (1960), which is the foundation of mcintyre v. ohio election commission (1995). in that case, the court judged “whether the provision of a los angeles city ordinance restricting the distribution of [anonymous] handbills abridge the freedom of speech and of the press secured against state invasion by the fourteenth amendment of the constitution‟. (p. 60) this court referred to lovell and asserted that “the obnoxious press licensing law of england… was due in part to the knowledge that exposure of the names of printers, writers and distributors would lessen the circulation of literature critical of the government‟.(talley v. california, 1960, p. 65) it in turn noted that the identification requirement of the ordinance “could tend to restrict freedom to distribute information and thereby freedom of expression‟. (talley v. california, 1960, p. 64) the court also pointed out that “identification and fear of reprisal might deter perfectly peaceful discussions of public matters of importance‟. (talley v. california, 1960, p. 65) justice harlan in his concurring opinion pointed to the overbreadth of the ordinance. the ordinance could suppress “the circulation of all anonymous handbills” in order to identify the distributors of the obnoxious handbills although it was “aimed at the prevention of fraud, deceit, false advertising, negligent use of words, obscenity, and libel‟. (talley v. california, 1960, p. 67) thus, he concluded that the all-embracing ordinance is likely to have the deterrent effect on free speech (talley v. california, 1960, p. 67). for these reasons, the court held void on its face the broad los angeles ordinance. while the talley v. california (1960) case ruled on the dissemination of anonymous handbills in general, mcintyre v. ohio election commission (1995) is cited most as a landmark case holding that the first amendment protects anonymous political speech. the supreme court ruled that an ohio law8, which required the disclosure of personal identity on political literature, violates the first amendment by “burdening core political speech” and was subject to “exacting scrutiny” of whether the law was narrowly tailored to promote a compelling state interest (mcintyre v. ohio election commission, 1995, p. 334). the court said, [a]n author generally is free to decide whether or not to disclose his or her true identity, and that the decision in favor of anonymity may be motivated by fear of economic or official retaliation, by concern about social ostracism, or merely by a 8 ohio rev. code ann. 3599.09(a) (anderson 1988) the ohio code provides, in relevant part, that “no person shall write, print ... or distribute ... a notice ... or any other form of general publication which is designed to ... influence the voters in any election ... unless there appears on such form ... the name and residence ... of the ... person who issues, makes or is responsible therefore.” 9 desire to preserve as much of one's privacy as possible. (mcintyre v. ohio election commission, 1995, p. 342) accordingly, it is recognized that an author's decision to remain anonymous is an aspect of the freedom of speech protected by the first amendment (mcintyre v. ohio election commission, 1995, p. 342). concerning the question of whether “„the freedom of speech, or of the press”, as originally understood, protects anonymous political” speech, the constitution says nothing about freedom of anonymous speech. however, according to justice thomas‟s concurring opinion in mcintyre, the historical evidence indicates that framers of the constitution opposed attempts to force anonymous authors to disclose their identities and believed that the forced disclosure violated the freedom of the press (mcintyre v. ohio election commission, 1995, p. 364). that is, “framers understood the first amendment to protect an author's right to express his thoughts on political candidates or issues in an anonymous fashion‟. (mcintyre v. ohio election commission, 1995, p. 371) in practice, anonymity was defended “because it encouraged authors to discuss politics without fear of reprisal”, and “the liberty of the press” was invoked “as the guardian for anonymous political writing‟. (mcintyre v. ohio election commission, 1995, p. 363-364) the court also believed itself bound by the intent of the framers who draft and ratified the constitution, as well as by the text of the constitution (mcintyre v. ohio election commission, 1995, p. 371). justice stevens additionally stated that anonymity provides a writer with an opportunity to be read by unprejudiced readers regardless of the writer‟s personal popularity (mcintyre v. ohio election commission, 1995, p. 343). in conclusion: [a]nonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority and thus exemplifies the purpose behind the bill of rights, and of the first amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation – and their ideas from suppression – at the hand of an intolerant society. (mcintyre v. ohio election commission, 1995, p. 357) the court held that the ordinance prohibiting all anonymous handbills was unconstitutionally overbroad because “the prohibition encompasses documents that are not even arguably false or misleading”, although it only sought to identify persons who distributed false statements during political campaigns (mcintyre v. ohio election commission, 1995, p. 352). that extremely broad prohibition was not justified by its compelling interest in preventing 10 fraudulent and libelous statements and its interest in providing the electorate with relevant information (mcintyre v. ohio election commission, 1995, p. 348). the court concluded that although “political speech by its nature will sometimes have unpalatable consequences, … our society accords greater weight to the value of free speech than to the dangers of its misuse” (mcintyre v. ohio election commission, 1995, p. 357). both talley and mcintyre cases are representative cases dealing with the protection of anonymous speech. in particular, mcintyre demonstrates u.s. supreme court's position towards anonymous statements, which approved right to express political messages anonymously as a constitutional right. mcintyre v. ohio election commission (1995) not only has far-reaching implications regarding the viability of similar disclosure statutes constraining political speech, but also has an obvious relevance to current debates about regulating anonymous messages on the internet (constantine, 1996). many prior studies analyzed the mcintyre case to enunciate the scope of the protection of anonymous political speech and to find its implications for dealing with future anonymous speech questions. constantine (1996) pinpointed the normative approach of the mcintyre decision for balancing between promoting unfettered political discussions and protecting the election process from corruption. she clearly demonstrated the value and impact of anonymous speech by contrasting the philosophical grounds of the majority and dissent opinions of the mcintyre court. constantine also points out the difference between the majority and the dissent in their understanding of the motivation for anonymous speech and their disagreement on the value of the anonymous speech and the compulsory disclosure. for the majority, the protection of anonymous political speech is in line with the democratic tradition and is “critical in protecting controversial ideas from suppression” (constantine, 1996, p. 4). thus, a disclosure requirement shall not be approved because it may selectively deter unpopular ideas and stifle valuable sources of information (constantine, 1996, p. 4-5).9 although the majority acknowledged that the right to anonymity may be abused and generate fraudulent speech, they found that “the interest in having anonymous works enter the marketplace of ideas unquestionably outweighs any public interest in requiring disclosure as a condition of entry‟. (mcintyre v. ohio election commission, 1995, p. 342) on the contrary, the dissent asserted that the mandatory disclosure of the speaker‟s identity is necessary to prevent the dissemination of false information. justice scalia argued that “[anonymity] facilitates wrong by eliminating 9 citing comment. (1961). ‘the constitutional right to anonymity: free speech, disclosure, and the devil’, yale law journal, 70, 1084, 1108. 11 accountability” and, therefore, would encourage individuals to produce irresponsible statements (constantine, 1996). for the dissent, the compulsory disclosure helps protect the electoral process by preventing fraudulent and libelous expressions and enhancing the quality of political debate. what constantine (1996) extrapolates from the majority and dissent‟s normative stance on the forced disclosure of the speaker‟s identity is that both the opinions recognized that the compulsory disclosure will exclude some ideas from the marketplace of ideas. therefore, the majority supported anonymity, which “facilitates the search for truth by increasing the amount of information in the marketplace” while the dissent opposed to the protection of anonymity, which hinders the search for truth by decreasing the accuracy of information (constantine,1996, p.5). although there was the disparity of philosophy between the majority and the dissent, the mcintyre court gave priority to protecting speakers who remain anonymous because of their fear of reprisal. despite the implication of this normative approach (i.e., the consideration of the value and impact of anonymous speech relative to the attributes of human), constantine (1996) concluded that the mcintyre court remained legislative uncertainty, that is, failed to delineate “the requirements of a constitutionally sound statute regulating anonymous political speech” (p. 8). although norton (1996)10 also points to the weakness of the mcintyre case as “a predictive model for anticipating how the court will decide future anonymous political speech questions”, he derives a principle underlying the mcintyre decision by considering normative concerns about human tendency (p. 555). as aforementioned, in mcintyre, the majority held that anonymous pamphleteering (i.e., political speech) is “a shield from the tyranny of the majority [and]… protect[s] unpopular individuals from retaliation and their ideas from suppression” (mcintyre v. ohio election commission, 1995, p. 357). also, the court noted by quoting talley v. california (1960, p. 64) that “[p]ersecuted groups and sects from time to time throughout history have been able to criticize oppressive practices and laws either anonymously or not at all” (mcintyre v. ohio election commission, 1995, p. 380). to sum up, the court asserts that a right of anonymity needs to be ensured to control the power of majoritarian 10 he addresses the following three questions of human tendency: 1) “how vigorously we should protect the use of anonymity as a shield from coercion and reprisal,” 2) “how much we should concern ourselves with the human tendency to hide behind the shield of anonymity in order to sling mud,” 3) “how much faith can be put in the ‘ordinary voter’ to discern truth from mud and discount the sullying effects of dirty tricks and character assassination.” (norton, 1996, p. 574) 12 tyranny that causes public fear of “threats, harassment, or reprisals” (mcintyre v. ohio election commission, 1995, p. 380). from mcintyre, norton (1996) reasoned that the court would strike down “any state or federal proscription on one's ability to engage in anonymous political speech, whenever anonymity is necessary as a check against coercion and reprisal” (p. 554-555). this provides a useful standard for determining the constitutionality of the restriction on anonymous political speech, as well as an insight into the role that anonymity plays in our society. although the majority in mcintyre left open the possibility that more narrowly tailored proscription on anonymous speech could be allowed, it shed light on the benefits (or interests) that might be achieved by protecting anonymous political speech. the mcintyre model ensures a right of anonymity to encourage the public to freely discuss political issues without fear of reprisal or majoritarian tyranny. this can be a useful framework in addressing questions of the protection of on-line anonymous speech even though it is unclear how mcintyre applies to other media than leaflets. protecting on-line anonymity and chilling effect there have been numerous studies on the internet ramifications of mcintyre, showing how the court's decision will affect various phenomena on the internet (e.g., branscomb, 1995; carr, 1996; cohen, 1996; froomkin, 1999; long, 1994; stieglitz, 2007; tien, 1996). larios (2010) examines the lower federal court cases such as aclu v. johnson (d.n.m. 1998), which held the unconstitutionality of a georgia statute criminalizing the use of false names on the internet, aclu v. miller (n.d. ga. 1997), which found the unconstitutionality of a new mexico statute requiring websites with sexual content to verify the ages of their visitors, and doe v. 2themart.com (w.d. wash. 2001), which quashed a subpoena seeking to force an internet service provider to disclose the identity of anonymous online speakers. the court in 2themart.com upheld the right to speak anonymously on the internet, acknowledging “the constitutional rights of internet users, including the first amendment right to speak anonymously, must be carefully safeguarded” (doe v. 2themart.com, 2001, p. 1097). the court said, “the free exchange of ideas on the internet is driven in large part by the ability of internet users to communicate anonymously” (doe v. 2themart.com, 2001, p. 1093). larios‟s review (2010) of those cases indicates that the courts have held that the first amendment protection of anonymous speech extends to the internet (p. 41-43). carr (1996) investigated how the traditional anonymous speech protection principles apply to the relationship between internet 13 users and internet access service providers who enable people to access the communication medium. he acknowledges that users, who gain access through a government-sponsored access provider, have the right to technologically „anonymize‟ their speech as an extension of their right to determine the content of their speech (carr, 1996, p. 521). therefore, if a governmental access provider requires identity verification as a precondition for access to the internet using government facilities, it, under mcintyre, would be “content-based speech discrimination” and thus violating the first amendment (carr, 1996, p. 541). carr‟s study implies that the identity verification required by government entities could deter the general public‟s on-line communication. while the aforementioned cases and studies examined the protection of the right of anonymity on the internet in terms of freedom of „speech‟, many other studies view the right of anonymity as an essential element of social interaction, which presupposes freedom of assembly or association. tien (1996) illustrates that anonymity on the internet is consistent with mcintyre's protected anonymous speech in terms of “speaker autonomy” and, at the same time, emphasizes the characteristics of on-line anonymous speech as a type of social interaction.11 considering potential retaliation against the speaker and actual speech deterrence as costs of regulating anonymity, he asserts that on-line anonymous speech deserves first amendment protection based on the premise that on-line speech is a “cheap speech”12 protected in mcintyre. additionally, tien (1996) argues that on-line speech should be viewed as social interaction (or association), and that information about identity plays a crucial role in that interaction. the principle of speaker autonomy in relation to freedom of assembly was established in hurley v. irish-american gay, lesbian & bisexual group of boston (1995). in hurley, the court ruled that a group of people organizing a public demonstration were permitted to exclude groups who presented a message contrary to the one that the organizing group wanted to convey. that is, if inclusion of certain groups into a demonstration affects what message is actually conveyed to the public, the organizers may not be compelled by the state to include or exclude the groups who intend to impart different messages. in this vein, the court stated that 11 he generalize the notion of speaker autonomy to consider “speakers as participants in discursive interaction.” “speech is framed as discourse with others taking place in time and space, and if it's clear that what's going on is expressive, both what is said and who says it may be irrelevant.” (tien, 1996, p. 155) 12 in mcintyre, justice stevens said that mrs. mcintyre composed and printed her leaflets on her home computer and then paid a printer to make extra copies. “except for the help provided by her son and a friend, who placed some of the leaflets on car windshields in the school parking lot, mrs. mcintyre acted independently.” (mcintyre v. ohio election commission, 1995, p. 337) 14 mcintyre‟s protection of anonymity should be regarded as “an instance of the general first amendment principle of speaker autonomy” (tien, 1996, p. 132).13 thus, a speaker has the right to decide to remain anonymous, as an author has the right to omit or add certain messages to the content of a publication (mcintyre v. ohio election commission, 1995, p. 342).14 additionally, since control over the circumstances of speech, such as the boundaries of communicational association,15 is part of freedom of speech, anonymity can be protected as a context of speech (tien, 1996, p. 158; hurley v. irish-american gay, lesbian & bisexual group of boston, 1995; naacp v. alabama ex rel. patterson, 1958). tien (1996) concluded that anonymity should be seen as “safeguarding the ability independently to define one's identity [in interaction] that is central to any concept of liberty” (p. 123).16 the speaker‟s autonomy as the anonymity jurisprudence also includes „associational privacy‟ (tien, 1996, p. 176; carr, 1996, p. 543-545). naacp v. alabama ex rel. patterson (1958) holding the protection of the right of anonymity coheres with the speaker autonomy grounds in mcintyre. in this case, the national association for the advancement of colored was afraid that the compelled disclosure of membership “may induce members to withdraw [from the association]… and dissuade others from joining it because of fear of exposure of their beliefs shown through their associations and [fear] of the consequences of this exposure” (naacp v. alabama ex rel. patterson, 1958, p. 463). in response to this petitioners‟ contention, the court held that the “[i]nviolability of privacy in group association may in many circumstances be indispensable to preservation of freedom of association, particularly where a group espouses dissident beliefs” (naacp v. alabama ex rel. patterson, 1958, p. 462). applying this case law to on-line anonymous speech, tien (1996) theorizes that “any broad regulation of anonymity on the internet” would be found to be unconstitutional because that regulation is a restriction on an associational expressive activity (i.e., on-line communications) (p. 123). 13 “although justice stevens's opinion for the court in mcintyre did not expressly employ speaker autonomy, the court has since characterized mcintyre as an example of this principle.” (tien, 1996, p. 189, n.83) 14 anonymity was part of a speaker's autonomy "to decide whether or not to disclose her true identity." (tien, 1996, p. 124); “given the mcintyre court's assumption that there are legitimate reasons for anonymity, it necessarily follows that banning anonymity will alter the content or distribution of speech.” (tien, 1996, p. 117) 15 anonymous speech can be related to first amendment rights of association because typical on-line activities, such as bulletin boards, mailing lists, and newsgroups, are ways that people assemble in cyberspace (tien, 1996, p. 176). 16 quoting roberts v. jaycees, 468 u.s. 609, 619 (1984). 15 if the protection of anonymity includes the associational privacy, questions about the relationship between anonymity and privacy as constitutional rights can be raised. brenner (2002) provides a demarcation between the two intertwined rights. although a right to privacy is not expressly granted as a general right by the constitution, the supreme court has recognized that the right to privacy is derived from the first amendment protecting anonymous speech and the confidentiality of associations, the fourth amendment prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures, and the fifth amendment protecting the right to avoid self-incrimination – the right to not divulge one‟s guilty secrets (brenner, 2002, p. 124). on the other hand, anonymity is part of the right to privacy and is guaranteed only by the first amendment protecting the right to speak anonymously and the right to associational privacy (brenner, 2002, p. 125, 139).17 additionally, the purpose of protecting privacy is to “shield [one‟s] activity from observation by members of the general public” (brenner, 2002, p. 171) whereas the focus of the protection of anonymous speech is on encouraging people to freely discuss controversial political issues without fear of reprisal, discrimination, and social ostracism. therefore, anonymity can be interpreted as a way to preserve one‟s privacy and thus can be protected by invoking the privacy protection. however, with regard to the protection of anonymous political speech, the first amendment right of anonymity is the most relevant legal ground. as reviewed above, nonymous political speech has been protected as “valuable and necessary elements of society” (du pont, 2001). in mcintyre v. ohio election commission (1995), the court asserted that a major purpose of the first amendment was to protect the free discussion of governmental affairs including discussions of candidates,18 and that protecting anonymity facilitated the unfettered interchange of ideas for political and social changes desired by the people.19 nevertheless, government measures to cope with internet problems often involve identity disclosure. stieglitz (2007) expresses concern about such governmental intervention. he maintained that because those who commit serious cybercrimes may elude the law enforcement through hiding their communications using security and anonymity software, the chilling effect of the government regulation would be “on „gray‟ speech rather than communication that is truly dangerous” (p. 1394). as found in mcintyre, the government restriction on anonymous speech, which only seeks to prevent fraud, false and libel statements, could suppress and deter political speech in general. in this vein, government regulation to 17 the right to associational privacy means the right to preserve the confidentiality of one's associations. 18 quoting mills v. alabama, 384 u. s. 214, 218 (1966). 19 quoting roth v. united states, 354 u. s. 476, 484 (1957). 16 prevent illegal behaviors in cyberspace, from ex post facto identity verification to internet surveillance, may result in the reduction in the quantity of on-line political communication, which can easily be deterred by government regulation. conclusion: on-line anonymity and viewpoint diversity from red lion broadcasting co. v. fcc (1969) and miami herald publishing co. v. tornillo (1974), three important principles are drawn: (1) the political viewpoint diversity is a public interest that the government should attempt to achieve; (2) the government measure to achieve the diversity of views is unconstitutional and, thereby, unacceptable when it has chilling effect on speech; (3) speakers have the right to decide what not to speak as well as what to speak. applying these principles to the internet regulation, protecting the anonymity of on-line speakers is the key to the viewpoint diversity in cyberspace in terms that it can prevent chilling effect that is possibly caused by the fear of reprisals and punishments. unlike the traditional media, the internet technically enables every person to freely and easily publish his or her opinion. additionally, people no more rely only on a limited number of mass media for political information, but they depend on each other as each of them can be an information source. therefore, in order to promote the diversity of viewpoints on the internet, it is utmost important to provide an environment in which individuals feel free to express what they think and believe. if on-line speakers do not want to disclose their identity in expressing their opinion on a controversial issue, the government should not require them to provide their identity information. this is evident in the prior court cases reviewed including mcintyre v. ohio elections commission. the jurisprudence of the protection of speakers‟ anonymity has been developed with special emphasis on controlling a chilling effect of identification on the circulation of political messages and protecting speakers‟ autonomy. despite the necessity of the anonymity protection for the viewpoint diversity in cyberspace, it could be inevitable to identify an internet user‟s identity and infringe upon his or her right of anonymity for finding a criminal who commits a cyber crime. because the identification requirement or any type of identity tracking can make people think that they are watched and become unwilling and hesitant to speak of controversial issues, it should be narrowly tailored and very carefully applied. 17 references blasi, v. (1977). the checking value in first amendment theory. law & social inquiry, 2(3), 521–649. branscomb, a. w. (1995). anonymity, autonomy, and accountability: challenges to the first amendment in cyberspaces. yale law journal, 104, 1639-1679. brenner, s. w. (2002). the privacy privilege: law enforcement, technology, and the constitution. journal of technology law & policy, 7, 123-193. cantijoch, m., & san martin, j. (2008). exposure to political information in new and old media: which impact on political participation? apsa 2008 annual meeting, hynes convention center, boston, massachusetts, aug 28, 2008. retrieved from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p280108_index.html. carr, g. h. (1996). application of u.s. supreme court doctrine to anonymity in the networld. cleveland state law review, 44, 521-546. choi, j. m., na, h. s., & park, y. k. (2006). an empirical analysis of the effect of real-name system on internet bulletin boards: focusing on how the real-name system and users' characteristics influence the use of slanderous comments and abusive language. 2010 international communication association conference june 22-26, singapore, singapore. cohen, j. e. (1996). a right to read anonymously: a closer look at "copyright management" in cyberspace. connecticut law review, 28, 981-1039. constantine, a. (1996). what's in a name? mcintyre v. ohio elections commission: an examination of the protection afforded to anonymous political speech. connecticut law review, 29, 459-. (retrieved from lexisnexis. the page number is omitted.) d‟andrade. r. g. (1982). reason versus logic. symposium on the ecology of cognition, greensboro, nc. du pont, g. f. (2000). the criminalization of true anonymity in cyberspace. michigan telecommunications and technology law review, 7, 191-216. 18 franklin, m. a., anderson, d. a., & lidsky l. b. (2005). mass media law: cases and materials (7th ed.). new york, ny: foundation press. froomkin, a. m. (1999). legal issues in anonymity and pseudonymity. the information society, 15, 113-127. furlong, a., & cartmel, f. (2007). young people and social change: new perspectives. maidenhead: open university press. gaw, s., felton, e. w., & fernanadez-kelly, p. (2006). secrecy, flagging, and paranoia: adoption criteria in encrypted e-mail. acm chi 2006, 591-600. hazlett, t. w., & sosa, d. w. (1997). was the fairness doctrine a “chilling effect”? evidence from the postderegulation radio market. the journal of legal studies, 26, 279-301. kelly-woessner, a., woessner, m. & rothman, s. (2009). perception of political disagreement and self-censorship in downward communication. ispp 32nd annual scientific meeting, trinity college, dublin, ireland, jul 14, 2009. retrieved from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p305670_index.html. kim, e. & kim, s. (2007). talking about mundane topics on the internet: a comparison of political and nonpolitical online discussions in korea. annual meeting of the international communication association, san francisco, ca, retrieved from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p171174_index.html. krattenmaker, t. g., & powe, jr., l. a. (1985). the fairness doctrine today: a constitutional curiosity and an impossible dream. duke law journal, 151–176. larios, m. e. (2010). epublius: anonymous speech rights online. rutgers law record, 37, 3643. long, iii, g. p. (1994). who are you?: identity and anonymity in cyberspace. university of pittsburgh law review, 55, 1177-1213. meiklejohn, a. (1948). free speech and its relation to self-government. new york, ny: harper brothers publishers. 19 meiklejohn, a. (1961). the first amendment is an absolute. the supreme court review, 245266. nam, k. g. (2004). freedom of speech on the internet (korean). unpublished master‟s thesis, yonsei university, seoul, korea. nicholas, a. v., antoine, j. b., vincent, l. h., & anne, k. d. (2009). selective exposure in the internet age: the interaction between anxiety and information utility. political psychology, 30(4), 591-613. norton, r. k. (1996). mcintyre v. ohio elections commission: defining the right to engage in anonymous political speech. north carolina law review, 74, 553-584. peer, l. (2007). the former audience and the future public: conceptualizing and measuring new media use and its potential for democracy. annual meeting of the american political science association, hyatt regency chicago and the sheraton chicago hotel and towers, chicago, il, aug 30, 2007. retrieved from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p211461_index.html. simmons, s. j. (1977). the problem of “issue” in the administration of the fairness doctrine. california law review, 65, 546-595. stieglitz, e. j. (2007). anonymity of the internet: how does it work, who needs it, and what are its policy implications?. cardozo arts & entertainment law journal, 24, 1395-1417. sunstein, c. r. (1995). democracy and the problem of free speech. new york, ny: the free press. tien, l. (1996). symposium: innovation and the information environment: who‟s afraid of anonymous speech? mcintyre and the internet. oregon law review, 75, 117-189. venturelli, s. (2002). inventing e-regulation in the us, eu and east asia: conflicting social vision of the internet & the information society. telematics and informatics, 19(2), 69-90. lewis publishing co. v. morgan, 299 u.s. 288 (1913). lovell v. griffin, 303 u. s. 444 (1938). naacp v. alabama ex rel. patterson, 357 u.s. 449 (1958). 20 talley v. california, 362 u.s. 60 (1960). red lion broadcasting co. v. fcc, 395 u.s. 367 (1969). miami herald publishing co. v. tornillo, 418 u.s. 241 (1974). buckley v. valeo, 424 u.s. 1 (1976). mcintyre v. ohio elections commission, 514 u.s. 334 (1995). hurley v. irish-american gay, lesbian & bisexual group, 115 s. ct. 2338 (1995). aclu v. miller, 977 f. supp. 1228, 1230 (n.d. ga. 1997). aclu v. johnson, 4 f. supp. 2d 1029, 1031 (d.n.m. 1998). selected papers of aoir 2016:  the 17th annual conference of the  association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5­8 october 2016 the place of free speech in internet governance debate artem antonyuk st. petersburg state university introduction in an outline of cultural construction of computers in terms of an opposition between sacred and profane, alexander states that ‘[w]e must learn to see technology as a discourse, as a sign system that is subject to semiotic constraints and responsive to social and psychological demands’ (alexander 1998, pp. 35-36). he illustrates this thesis with historical examples of practices of naming computers in popular magazines. for example, an early computer was called a ‘transistorized prophet’ or a ‘figure factory’. its broader descriptions were filled with aspirations and fears almost religious in their character. these meanings, in turn, have influenced technological development. by extension, the internet may be seen as a more recent example of technological innovation embedded in different discourses and social contexts where its meaning is reconsidered. it is usually taken for granted that the internet supports freedom of expression. this connection is not stable, though. the internet rather poses a challenge to our understanding of free speech and undermines its previous conceptions. for example, as an alternative to the strict judicial interpretation of free speech as a right, in this context there appeared a more broad interpretation of it as a set of values. the latter include interactivity, popular participation and cultural creativity (balkin 2004). in the political sphere, the debate on free speech is roughly characterized by division between liberal and communitarian conceptions. it is based on the philosophical distinction between negative and positive conceptions of freedom understood as freedom from and freedom for something. critical theory has problematized the very connection between free speech and internet services and technologies (fuchs 2013). moreover, in an attempt to challenge existing institutional structures supporting internet regulation, there occurred a shift in regulatory approaches. the multilateral top-down regulatory model was countered by a horizontal multistakeholder model. since different theoretical and practical perspectives on freedom of speech and the internet might have implications for businesses, policies and everyday practices, different parties engage in discoursive struggles to support their interests. these struggles are supposed to be resolved (or at least suspended) in the context of multistakeholder deliberations. this process entails elaboration of new meanings of suggested citation (apa): antonyuk, a. (2016, october 5-8). the place of free speech in internet governance debate. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. core concepts, including freedom of speech. how does this happen in practice? in an attempt to answer this question, i analyze discussions at the internet governance forum (igf, see pavan 2012), applying a neo-institutional framework and a mixture of quantitative and qualitative text analysis methods. in this perspective, the igf is an organization that exploits institutionalized opportunities for behavior. the latter include formal rules (e.g., the ethical code, the un mandate that established and supported the igf), informal rules (the norms of neutrality and objectivity that govern discussions) and ideas (accessibility, education, participation, technoromanticism and so on) (phillips, lawrence & hardy 2004; scott 2013). in this paper, i focus on the ideas provided by institutional structures and contextualized in actual debates on internet governance. data and method analysis focuses on the texts produced in dynamic coalitions of the igf – internal thematic subgroups with sometimes overlapping membership. the dataset consists of transcripts of talks given at 12 dynamic coalitions at the 2014 igf meeting. texts were collected from the igf website1. the total amount of words is 136 118. in order to grasp the structural features of these texts, i conduct semantic network analysis. this approach allows one to understand how meanings are shaped by their contexts, which is supposedly the case in igf meetings. i use automap (diesner & carley 2004) to perform basic text cleaning procedures (word stemming, removal of punctuation and noise words) and create per-text semantic networks of concepts (stemmed words). the relations between concepts are created based on their co-ocurrence in original texts, and tie strengths indicate the frequencies of co-ocurrence. in order to reduce network size and complexity, ties with value less than four are removed. the resulting networks are interpreted as representations of core semantic structures driving production of texts and reflecting the relational nature of meanings (doerfel 1998). in other words, this approach captures how the meaning of concepts depends on other concepts expressed in narratives. thus, central concepts which have the largest amount of connections are interpreted as either important for the community under consideration, or as highly ambiguous and easily redefined. for example, ‘content’ is a word which gains specific meaning only when used in a particular context. in a sense, central concepts are institutionalized meanings providing legitimacy to the group and its discourse. at the same time, they drive continuous change thanks to their unstable connections to other concepts. after identifying contextual meanings of the focal concepts related to freedom of speech, i provide examples of their usage in original texts. i assess the differences in contextual meanings and then draw conclusions. results and discussion the core semantic networks are of different size and complexity. some have a large connected component and several central concepts, while others have one central concept and few ties between surrounding concepts. the following central concepts relevant to the free speech debate were identified: ‘access’, ‘content’, ‘imag[e]’, ‘internet’, ‘network’, ‘right’. it is peculiar that the concepts ‘speech’, ‘expression’ and ‘freedom’ are not central or even absent from these structures. this indicates that their 1 http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/igf-2014/igf2014-transcripts meaning is either stable and unproblematic, or they fall out of scope of a thematic group. in general, concepts ‘content’ or ‘inform[ation]’ are used as substitutes for ‘speech’. this change of core vocabulary, needless to say, make it difficult to apply the traditional theories of free speech. instead, we see an emerging repertoire of core concepts specific to digital communications which may be appropriated by different discourses – technological, legal, feminist, liberal, etc. central concepts identified earlier are used in several dynamic coalitions, at the same time being put into different contexts. for example, ‘access’ is a central concept in dynamic coalitions on accessibility and disability, public access in libraries and gender and internet governance. their contextual meaning is shaped by the topic of dynamic coalition. in the first case the strongest tie is to concept ‘disabl[ed]’, in the second – to concepts ‘public’, ‘inform[ation]’ and ‘internet’, in the last case – to concepts ‘internet’ and ‘women’. to a certain extent, the concept ‘access’ is rather important for these discourses to be cohesive. its meaning may be redefined during the talks, as in the following quote: ‘so if we are talking about access, actually besides the infrastructure we are also talking about the access to the minority groups in indonesia, how they marginalize us’2. by contrast, the same concept is peripheral in several other cases. in the semantic structure of the dynamic coalition on child online safety, it is placed between concepts ‘block’ and ‘image’, and thus has an unambiguous meaning. surprisingly, this concept is not included in the semantic core of the dynamic coalition on freedom of expression, although it is used with regard to information: ‘to get access to content which is legitimate and lawful’3. while the reconceptualization of free speech as access to the internet was taken up by other dynamic coalitions, it did not become central in this case. instead, the central concept there is ‘content’. it has the strongest connection with the concept ‘remov[e/al]’ and weaker ties to concepts ‘block’ and ‘legitim[ate]’. the core semantic structure seems to be focused on censorship, which fits well into the scope of the group. yet, it contains concepts which exemplify the changing vocabulary of free speech regulation. in place of speech there is user-generated content, and in place of censorship there is blocking, removal and filtering of websites, content and images. in one case the word ‘censorship’ is used reluctantly: ‘when you are being, well, i’ll say censored, but when your information is being blocked or content removed, it’s really hard to challenge it’4. in another it used plainly: ‘they [internet watch foundation] engaged in censorship effectively, with no accountability, no real formal due process or appeal’5. yet, the concept is not included in stable semantic structures in any dynamic coalition. one reason for this may be a persistent opinion that censorship is non-existent in contemporary democratic societies. its meaning conflicts with descriptions of internet as an open and inherently democratic platform. regarding this problem, there are attempts at reflecting on this ambiguity: ‘i think it’s not just governments that are threats to freedom of expression online. i think we face a lot of private censorship from platforms’6. 2 participant, dynamic coalition on gender and internet governance. 3 participant, dynamic coalition on freedom of expression. 4 participant, dynamic coalition on freedom of expression. 5 participant, dynamic coalition on core internet values. 6 participant, dynamic coalition on freedom of expression. the concept of ‘rights’ is invoked and reconceptualized in a number of cases. the concept is central in the semantic core of the dynamic coalition on internet rights and principles. it is connected to concepts ‘human’, ‘privac[y]’, ‘internet’ and others. besides human rights, ‘internet rights’, and a right to privacy are discussed. here the latter topic is reflected upon in connection with freedom of speech: ‘... from a freedom of expression import, the right to privacy is not historical or traditional’7. at the same time, this relationship is a difficult one: ‘... what you’re talking about very often is a breach of privacy for something that has little free speech value’8. conclusion i have attempted to show how different understandings of freedom of speech are brought up and contested in the deliberations at igf. moreover, i have emphasized that the meaning is often constituted by contextual relationships to other concepts. the shift is sometimes substantial. for example, while for traditional media free speech was threatened by censorship, for the internet the threat is exemplified by content removal. in addition, there is increased focus on privacy, anonymity, and surveillance. overall, the discoursive dynamic is characterized by redefinition of key concepts (such as speech) and struggle to impose certain definition on other parties (either by way of dialogue or by way of rhetoric). there is a number of distinct and relatively stable types of discourse on free speech: legal, political, technological, commercial, feminist and philosophical. these discourses may influence, legitimate and contest each other. for example, while technological discourse claims that decentralized infrastructure supports free speech, a skeptical theoretically informed view argues that social, cultural and political contexts of implementation of free speech matter. it is crucial to understand that different perspectives on the relationship between freedom of speech and the internet are based on power relationships which often remain implicit. moreover, these positions may be disguised as merely theoretical differences, grounded in different ontological assumptions (about the nature of technology, relationships between law, technology and society, the role of users in regulation, etc.). the power of discourses and shifting meanings is closely tied to changes in institutional structures. while present analysis was concerned with discourse, future research has to analyze power relationships underlying discoursive change in the internet governance domain. references alexander, j. c. (1998). the computer as sacred and profane in p. smith (ed.), the new american cultural sociology (pp. 29-47). cambridge: cambridge university press. 7 participant, dynamic coalition on internet rights and principles. 8 participant, dynamic coalition on freedom of expression. balkin, j. m. (2004). digital speech and democratic culture: a theory of freedom of expression for the information society. new york university law review, 79(1). diesner, j., & carley, k. m. (2004). automap 1.2: extract, analyze, represent, and compare mental models from texts. available from http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1853&context=isr doerfel, m. l. (1998). what constitutes semantic network analysis? a comparison of research and methodologies. connections, 21(2), 16-26. fuchs, c. (2013). social media: a critical introduction. london: sage. pavan, e. (2012). frames and connections in the governance of global communications: a network study of the internet governance forum. lanham: lexington books. phillips, n., lawrence, t. b., & hardy, c. (2004). discourse and institutions. academy of management review, 29(4), 635-652. scott, w. r. (2013). institutions and organizations: ideas, interests, and identities. thousand oaks, ca: sage. assmann_karin_aoir2016_submission selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 bill cosby on twitter and beyond karin assmann university of maryland when a video of comedian hannibal buress calling entertainer bill cosby a rapist went viral in october 2014, journalists were quick to explain why they had not pursued these rape allegations much earlier. “the absence of social media in 2005” was one of the reasons they gave for dropping the story when cosby was first charged. this paper examines features and participants of the 2014 discourse on social media about bill cosby following the hannibal buress video. what was it about this discourse that made this topic newsworthy to mainstream media? who determines what is newsworthy remains a core question as the role of gatekeepers is undergoing significant shifts in a news media landscape that has been opened up to user and audience participation. since galtung und ruge’s work on news values (galtung & ruge, 1965), their criteria have been updated (brighton & foy, 2007; harcup & o'neill, 2001) and adjusted to include new forms of news delivery (meissner, 2015). audiences are members of more than one network and can form powerful communities. on twitter these are networks of bloggers or micro-bloggers who produce and use news, or “produsers” (bruns, 2009, 2011). news items on social media and mainstream media sites do not differ significantly (bastos, 2014) and so it follows that “produsers” in both spaces work with similar criteria for newsworthiness (braun, 2009). yet in the cosby case, “produsers” of social media content led the way and initiated, perhaps even sanctioned mainstream news media coverage. what accounts for this? twitter users understand that they influence what becomes news and use the power of social media to galvanize support, unify communities and create movements (jurgenson, 2012; veenstra, iyer, park, & alajmi, 2014). staying informed and engaging in social contact has been found to motivate participation on social media, with the desire for information leading among twitter users (johnson & yang, 2009). this goes beyond the argument that weak ties bind members of a social media platform who follow in order to belong (granovetter, 1983), but suggests the emergence of a subculture of powerful agenda-setters, potentially dictating the direction of news coverage for mainstream media platforms. some research indicates that the propagation of twitter discourse more closely resembles the behavior of a news propagation vehicle (kwak, lee, park, & moon, 2010), without any of the apparent constraints or controls of a newsroom. research questions discussed in this paper center around the nature and effect of the twitter discourse about bill cosby: who are the influencers on twitter in the discourse about bill cosby and how did their tweets propagate within and outside of their networks? what was the effect of images on the twitter discourse about bill cosby? what sentiments were associated with tweets about bill cosby that included an image? were these retweeted more often than those containing other content, such as urls or just text? an advanced search was conducted on twitter of the hashtags: #billcosby and #cosbymeme using the operators: #name lang:en since:2014-10-17 until:2014-11-17. results were imported into maxqda for qualitative content analysis. the day with the most tweets in #billcosby scraped with this operator was identified (nov 17, 2014) and coded for source (mainstream media, online, aggregator, mixed and emerging), content (image, url, vine, text only), sentiment (positive, negative, neutral, sarcasm and anger) and mention of specific terms. key players and their roles were identified (for example the originator of the most retweeted tweet in #cosbymeme) and their 1.5 follower networks were downloaded through nodexl and network visualizations were made with gephi. the network around 200 followers of dan mcquade (@dhm), the author of the original 2014 post on philly.com about comedian hannibal buress calling bill cosby a rapist, and 500 followers in the network of philadelphia magazine (@phillymag) as well as elon james white (@elonjames) after identifying him as the person whose #cosbymeme tweet on november 10, 2014 was the most retweeted on the first day of the use of the hashtag, were downloaded, visualized and analyzed. a content analysis of members of the mainstream media's explanations for their silence in covering the bill cosby rape allegations after 2005 until 2014 when the hannibal buress video surfaced was done in a previous project (unpublished). visualizations of twitter activity and of the follower networks of influencers in the twitter discourse about bill cosby offered an insightful overview of the network structure of social media audiences in general and blacktwitter audiences in particular, as well as of their reach into mainstream media outlets. an analysis of the networks of the most outspoken twitter participants showed that communities of opinionand sense-makers, were both fulfilling roles of traditional news media on blacktwitter and have ties to traditional news media, serving as sources into the community. in this case, one tweet from a main influencer, elon james, literally granted a community permission to criticize bill cosby, opening the story up to mainstream media. although the use of images, i.e. memes, was a given in #cosbymeme, the analysis of the content used in the most impactful tweets, particularly for #billcosby, does not support the idea that the use of images accelerates the propagation of tweets. in fact, this study shows that not the content alone, but the deliverer of the content, makes the difference. if an influencer shares an opinion and not just a neutral url or a meme, the impact is multiplied. in this case, it significantly contributed to news media outlets reporting on bill cosby and the rape allegations. the emergence of audiences as agenda setters in a media environment in which social and traditional media intersect requires further study, as do the hierarchies of influence within social media venues and how they influence news selection in traditional news media venues. this paper shows what type of content played a role in influencing mainstream media in its decision to pursue a story that not the editors but the "produsers" (bruns, 2009) deemed newsworthy. content that contains an opinion, positive or negative sentiment, particularly among communities that have strong ties on a social media platform, in this case twitter, can meaningfully influence what news media considers newsworthy and how they report about a previously ignored event. although images can help an issue gain traction and generate traffic, the mobilization of opinion requires trusted influencers within a social media network, in short, a new kind of news media that is more personalized and self-selected. references bastos, m. t. (2014). shares, pins, and tweets. journalism studies, 1-21. doi:10.1080/1461670x.2014.891857 braun, j. a. (2009). rehashing the gate: news values, non-news spaces, and the future of gatekeeping. paper presented at the media in transition, mit, cambridge, ma. http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6/index.html brighton, p., & foy, d. (2007). news values. london: sage publications ltd. bruns, a. (2009). from reader to writer: citizen journalism as news produsage. 119133. doi:10.1007/978-1-4020-9789-8_6 bruns, a. (2011). gatekeeping, gatewatching, real-time feedback: new challenges for journalism. brazilian journalism research journal, 7(2), 117-136. galtung, j., & ruge, m. h. (1965). the structure of foreign news the presentation of the congo, cuba and cyprus crises in four norwegian newspapers. journal of peace research, 2(1), 64-90. granovetter, m. (1983). the strength of weak ties: a network theory revisited. sociological theory, 1(1), 201-233. harcup, t., & o'neill, d. (2001). what is news? galtung and ruge revisited. journalism studies, 2(2), 261-280. doi:10.1080/14616700118449 johnson, p. r., & yang, s. (2009). uses and gratifications of twitter: an examination of user motives and satisfaction of twitter use. paper presented at the communication technology division of the annual convention of the association for education in journalism and mass communication in boston, ma. jurgenson, n. (2012). when atoms meet bits: social media, the mobile web and augmented revolution. future internet, 4(1), 83-91. kwak, h., lee, c., park, h., & moon, s. (2010). what is twitter, a social network or a news media? paper presented at the proceedings of the 19th international conference on world wide web. 4 4 meissner, n. (2015). 50 years on: galtung and ruge's news value factors revisited in online audience building for independent films. first monday, 20(3), 1-14. veenstra, a. s., iyer, n., park, c. s., & alajmi, f. (2014). twitter as “a journalistic substitute”? examining# wiunion tweeters’ behavior and self-perception. journalism, 1464884914521580. 5 5 appendix 0 500 1000 1500 2000 oct 17: philly mag nov 10: "cosbymeme" twitter activity oct 17-nov 17 #billcosby #cosbymeme 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 co sb y st or ie s/ ou tl et october 17, 2014 november 17, 2014 bill cosby coverage in the media main stream other media elon james white @elonjames nov 10: i think bill cosby still thinks he's america's dad and not america's creepy uncle who's not allowed to visit anymore... #cosbymeme 1,228 retweets 1,181 favorites 6 6 @elonjames 500 follower network nodes: 1000 node size: betweenness centrality color: modularity class edges: 18401 5 communities microsoft word 691-444-1-pb.docx “but still it moves”: screens, print, and reading naomi s. baron american university usa nbaron@american.edu abstract as the amount of reading people are doing on digital devices mushrooms, a growing number of voices are suggesting that onscreen reading will replace printed hard copy. digital reading has multiple advantages, including portability, democratic access, and (generally) price. however, concerned scholars are questioning whether reading on digital devices undermines important aspects of reading, including uninterrupted concentration. this paper compares the cases for reading onscreen versus reading in hard copy, considering such variables as cognitive performance, eye-movement, and reader preference. after summarizing studies the author has previously done on college students’ self-reported reading patterns, the paper presents findings from a subsequent study in which subjects were observed actually reading on a computer screen versus in hard copy. the study compared the extent to which readers were distracted from the reading tasks (e.g., checking their mobile phones, playing with distractor toys in the experimental room) during the two reading conditions. subjects in the same study completed a questionnaire that probed multitasking and distraction issues. keywords ereaders; hard copy; reading; mobile phones; tablets “babies born today will probably never read anything in print.” thus declared ben horowitz, co-founder of andreessen horowitz venture capital, in 2012.1 the same year, hugh mcguire argued that the book and the internet will merge, with traditional stretches of text yielding to shorter passages containing hyperlinks, a task for which the internet is ideally suited (mcguire 2012). as sales of ebooks, ereaders, tablets, and smart phones surge, and as the march towards online education fuels production and adoption of digital texts, the future of reading in hard copy is generating growing scrutiny. digital reading was initially the domain of desktop computers or terminals, with laptops then assuming a larger role. the first ereader to show commercial success, amazon’s kindle (introduced in 2007), downloaded books electronically but was designed as a stand-alone platform. following apple’s launch of the multifunctional ipad in 2010, both amazon and barnes & noble introduced ereaders that also provided general internet access. reading on digital screens (including desktops, laptops, ereaders, tablets, and mobile phones) has become integrally tied to simultaneous internet availability.2 given the growing shift from reading in hard copy to reading onscreen, we need to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of digital reading. these include the challenges of reading on devices that entice users to toggle between reading and internet functions, thus breaking concentration. we therefore begin with a short overview of positive aspects of reading onscreen, including relevant current research from the psychological literature. we then turn to dissenting voices, including from users and from reading experts. we conclude by addressing the specific                                                                                                                 1  the association of magazine media, san francisco, october 2012. 2 one exception is kindle’s paperwhite (given its limited internet access), which some users purchase explicitly to avoid distraction. issue of multitasking, presenting results from a recent study in the us exploring user multitasking when reading onscreen versus in print. the case for reading onscreen general considerations among the advantages of digital reading are these: § ebooks are generally less expensive than print counterparts. § multiple books can be loaded onto a single portable device, also reducing paper use. § thanks to the internet, democratic access to digitized scholarship becomes technologically possible. see baron (in preparation) for expanded discussion of these issues. psychological/cognitive literature early studies comparing reading performance onscreen versus in print indicated that print yielded better outcomes (dillon 1992). however, with improvements in screen quality, along with users’ exponentiallyexpanded experience reading onscreen, most current studies report no fundamental differences in such areas as reading speed, comprehension, and eye-movement (ackerman and goldsmith 2011; holzinger et al. 2011; zambarbieri and carniglia 2012).3 case closed? hardly. the case for reading in hard copy in 1633, the inquisition demanded galileo disavow his claim that the earth revolves around the sun, rather than the sun going around the earth. according to subsequent physics hagiography, following his recantation, galileo is reputed to have whispered under his breath, “but still it moves.” just so, despite the benefits of ereading – and surging sales of digital content and devices – the fate of print is hardly sealed. the first relevant voices we need to hear are from readers themselves. user preference numerous studies find users continuing to favor hard copy. parents prefer their young children read (or be read to) in print (mclean and kulo 2013). teenage readers show a preference for reading printed books (mclean and kulo 2013), even as teens’ access to ebooks grows (rainie and duggan 2012; scholastic 2013). austrian (holzinger et al. 2011) and german (kretzschmar et al. 2013) studies note that although adult subjects performed equally well on tests when reading in both media, the vast majority indicated a preference for print. in a late 2010 study, american college students overwhelmingly preferred reading hard copy for all genres except academic journal articles, most of which were only available digitally anyway (baron 2013). as of late 2012, 60% of us college students still preferred printed books over etexts, and only 26% were “very satisfied” with digital texts, down from 30% the previous year (book industry study group 2013).                                                                                                                 3  however, see mangen et al. (2013) for evidence of superior comprehension with print.   reading specialists experts on reading are expressing concern that reading onscreen compromises some components of what it means to read. anne mangen argues that haptic differences between physically handling print versus viewing digital text yield gaps in both cognition and aesthetic experience (mangen 2011). maryanne wolf questions whether ereading might be undermining our skills in “deep reading”: we still know very little about the digital reading brain. my major worry is that, confronted with a digital glut of immediate information that requires and receives less and less intellectual effort, many new (and older) readers will have neither the time nor the motivation to think through the possible layers of meaning in what they read (wolf 2010) of relevance to this discussion are findings from several psychological studies. rakefet ackerman and morris goldsmith (2011) report that when allowed to self-regulate the time they spent in reading passages presented in hard copy or onscreen, subjects took less time – and performed worse – in the onscreen condition. betsy sparrow and her colleagues (2011) observed that when asked to find information on the internet, adult subjects were better at recalling the search path used for accessing the information than at remembering the information itself. spring 2013 multitasking and distraction study the major cognitive challenge from reading on internet-enabled devices is distraction caused by multitasking. psychologists have long confirmed that multitasking diminishes performance. yet both anecdotal reports and experimental findings continue to indicate that users reading onscreen tend to multitask (commonly by shifting to internet-powered activities). baron (2013) reported that 90% of subjects said they were likely to multitask when reading onscreen (compared with 10% when reading in hard copy). to learn more about the temptation to multitask while reading onscreen, the author and her graduate research assistant conducted an observational study in the us in spring 2013. forty-seven undergraduate psychology students aged 18-24 read passages in two conditions: on a computer screen and in hard copy. each passage took approximately 10-15 minutes to read. the experimental room was equipped with video cameras (recording reading behavior and other activity) and with sources of distraction (including popular hard-copy reading materials, a computer with an internet connection, and toys such as a yoyo and a koosh ball). students also had access to their personal mobile phones, providing further potential distraction. in addition to participating in the observation sessions, subjects completed an online questionnaire regarding their reading practices. several of the questions focused on multitasking and distraction. openended questions at the end of the survey inquired what subjects liked most and liked least about reading onscreen versus in hard copy. additional surveys will be administered to university students in germany and japan during summer and fall 2013. the observational study failed to reveal significant differences in the levels of distraction during the two reading tasks. in fact, very little distraction was evidenced in either condition. since students were participating in the experiment in partial fulfillment of a course requirement, it seems likely that they essentially performed as instructed, reading the passages straight through, regardless of the reading platform. however, to the extent students did become distracted during the tasks, the level of distraction was higher in the screen reading condition. moreover, at the end of the experiment, a number of subjects spontaneously commented that when doing actual schoolwork, they are more likely to be distracted when reading on a screen than when reading in hard copy. the questionnaire revealed additional evidence that the sample of undergraduate students perceived themselves to engage in more multitasking when reading onscreen and to find it easier to concentrate when reading in hard copy. while only 4% said they multitasked “very often” when reading in hard copy, 64% reported multitasking “very often” when reading on a digital screen. when asked on which platform it was easiest to concentrate on reading (hard copy, desktop or laptop, tablet computer, or ereader), 91% said “hard copy”. in the open-ended question that asked “what is the one thing you like least about reading on a digital screen?”, 43% explicitly mentioned problems with either distraction or concentration. (the next largest complaint was eye strain.) despite the assumptions of many educators that today’s students increasingly prefer doing their reading on computers, tablets, or mobile phones, a growing number of teenagers and young adults are indicating a continuing preference for print (e.g., zickuhr et al. 2013). findings from the author’s studies help us better understand contemporary reading practices. hopefully such research will have practical implications for shaping directions in educational pedagogy. acknowledgments the author is grateful to ms. mazneen havewala for organizing, conducting, and analyzing data from the spring 2013 study of multitasking and distraction. references ackerman, r. & goldsmith, m. (2011). metacognitive regulation of text learning: on screen versus on paper. journal of experimental psychology: applied 17(1), 18-32. baron, n. s. (2013). reading in print versus onscreen: better, worse, or about the same. in d tannen & am trester (eds.). discourse 2.0: language and new media. washington, dc: georgetown university press. baron, n. s. (in preparation). words onscreen: the fate of reading in a digital world. new york: oxford university press. book industry study group (2013). student attitudes toward content in higher education. volume three, number one, february. dillon, a. (1992). reading from paper versus screens: a critical review of the empirical literature. ergonomics 35, 1297-1326. holzinger, a., baernthaler, m., pammer, w., katz, h., bjelic-radisic, v. & ziefle, m. (2011). investigating paper vs. screen in real-life hospital workflows: performance contradicts perceived superiority of paper in the user experience. international journal of human-computer studies 69, 563-570. kretzschmar, f., pleimling, d., hosemann, j., fuessel, s., bornkessel-schlesewsky, i. & schlesewsky, m. (2013). subjective impressions do not mirror online reading effort: concurrent eeg-eye-tracking evidence from the reading of books and digital media. plos one february 6. mangen, a. (2011). why bother with print? some reflections on the role of fixity, linearity and structure for sustained reading. the unbound book conference, amsterdam/den haag, may 19-21. mangen, a., walgermo, b. & brønnick, k. (2013). reading linear texts on paper versus computer screens: effects on reading comprehension. international journal of educational research 58, 61-68. mcguire, h. (2012). why the book and the internet will merge. in h mcguire & b o’leary (eds.). book: a futurist’s manifesto. sebastopol, ca: o’reilly. mclean, k. & kulo, c. (2013). understanding the children’s book consumer in the digital age. bowker market research. rainie, l. & duggan, m. (2012). e-book reading jumps; print book reading declines. pew internet & american life project, december 27. scholastic (2013). kids and family reading report, 4th edition. harrison group. sparrow, b., liu, j. & wegner, d. (2011). good effects on memory: cognitive consequences of having information at your fingertips. science 333 (6040), 776-778. wolf, m. (2010). our ‘deep reading’ brain: its digital evolution poses questions. nieman reports: nieman foundation for journalism at harvard, summer. zambarbieri, d. & carniglia, e. (2012). eye movement analysis of reading from computer displays, ereaders, and printed books. ophthalmic and physiological optics 32, 390-396. zickurh, k., rainie, l. & purcell, k. (2013). younger americans’ library habits and expectations. pew internet & american life project, june 25. available at http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2013/06/25/youngeramericans-library-services/ license this article is ©2013 naomi s. baron. microsoft word 694-447-1-pb.docx selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 hearing "lady game creators" tweet: #1reasonwhy, women and online discourse in the game development community bridget m. blodgett university of baltimore united states bblodgett@ubalt.edu anastasia salter university of baltimore united states asalter@ubalt.edu abstract this paper examines the rise of the #1reasonwhy hashtag on twitter during november 2012. it looks at how the @replies and rts used within the hashtag built a picture of the issues facing women within the field of game development. the discourse and sharing of experiences amplified through the hashtag provide a broad picture of gender discrimination and sexism within the industry’s culture, along with potential community-driven methods for confronting these entrenched traditions of harassment. in particular this paper uses the conversations developed by women during this period to understand how twitter acted as a tool to build solidarity and amplify the message of gender discrimination within the industry. keywords #1reasonwhy; gender; game development; social movements; twitter introduction the demographics of the game industry skew towards men: in an industry survey in 2012, women were a minority in most industry disciplines, making up only 3% of programmers, 13% of artists and animators, 11% of designers, 6% of audio developers, and 5% of qa testers (gamecareerguide.com, 2012). these demographics reflect strikingly poor gender diversity even in disciplines more traditionally gender-neutral, such as art and animation, which only slightly edge out the technical positions in representation. responses to this strong disparity vary, and are subject to the same challenges as any stem discipline, with blame centered on the “leaky pipeline” or assumptions that women don’t enjoy games or the disciplines that produce them. the culture of the game industry continues to reflect this dynamic, with regular appearance by booth babes dressed as game characters at major industry conventions and game publishers touting the improved “boob physics” of their releases (cardoso, 2009). this is in spite of a far greater gender equity among players of games: according to the esa, 42% of game players are women (entertainment software association, 2011). yet it is difficult to document the correlation between this game development culture and the number of women making games until that discourse moves into the public sphere, revealing the larger patterns of sexism within the community and suggesting change on the horizon. case in november of 2012 female game developers took to twitter under the hashtag 1reasonwhy in response to game designer luke crane’s tweet, “why are there so few lady game creators?” (crane, 2012). the women and allies detailed their own experiences with sexism in the field of game development along with other obstacles that prevent women from joining game development as a career. details that women shared varied from being mistaken as the office secretary, to being physically assaulted, to having their work outright dismissed by peers and reviewers. this outpouring was one of the first self-motivated instances of a minority group within the industry sharing their experiences en masse. it highlighted the commonality of many of these issues and identified major areas of the culture of game development which excludes, harasses, or forces out women. this sharing raised its own slew of hostile responses from other members of the community and participants on twitter who unintentionally reinforced the validity of those shared experiences through further selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 harassment and attempts at silencing or drowning out the hashtag. in most instances, these attempts were quickly overtaken by those supporting the original message and who worked to refocus the topic. methods the authors collected tweets in a spreadsheet using the twitter archive google spreadsheet (tags) template (hawksey, 2013). the data was collected hourly from november 26th through november 30th. this period reflects some of the heaviest use of the twitter hashtag with participation dropping off significantly after the week. periodic captures were completed after this period using tweet archivist in order to estimate the continued interest and community discussion about the issue as well as to determine how if late stage hashtag hijacking would be successful. through an analysis of dominant @replies and rts this paper examines how the #1reasonwhy hashtag created opportunities for female game developers to connect with one another and build a community voice regarding harassment they faced within the industry. building upon existing work using both twitter other social media sites, this paper follows the conversation that developed as individuals built networks of @replies to advance a conversation across the social networking platform or rts to amplify and increase points which they jointly found moving, important, or exemplary (papacharissi & oliveira, 2011; boyd, et al., 2010; bruns & burgess, 2012; honeycutt & herring, 2009). this data was analyzed with the goal of understanding how twitter acted as a tool for solidarity building and message amplification within the protest like atmosphere of the #1reasonwhy hashtag (goldsmith & siegel, 2012; harlow, 2011; caren, et al., 2012; bennett, 2012). analysis while the conversation began as an airing of grievances prompted by the initial question, it quickly transformed in response to backlash from hecklers and “trolls” within the hashtag itself. the discourse further moved from an observation of problems to discussions of methods and resources that might improve working conditions for women within the industry. the discussion spawned additional hashtags dedicated to those solutions, including the #1reasonmentors hashtag for women to find support for their efforts to enter the industry. given the persistent issues that are faced by female players attempting to integrate with the hardcore fan community that surrounds games, increasing the number of women developers has been seen as a key resource in improving these issues across the board (salter & blodgett, 2012). the use of twitter and the #1reasonwhy tag were important steps forward in identifying issues within the culture of game development. particularly, these highlighted the experiences of women within the industry, rather than outside forces like academia, and presented not only clear instances of problematic behavior but also the frequency of such transgressions. the women’s use of twitter challenged typical usage to create a point of solidarity building and connection between many separate individuals who received public recognition of their private hurts and experiences. it also acted to amplify the message that the issue of why there were so few women in game design had nothing to do with women. conclusion this case is one example among many instances in the last year which show that the game development and consumer communities are in the midst of reorganization of their thinking about gender, inclusiveness, and participation. in particular, it represents one of the most visible instances of a joint vocalization by women who participate in the community. given that this movement was also based upon women’s experiences with harassment and hostility, it is surprising that the story was taken and shared among many major news sources including kotaku, the guardian, and forbes. this research builds upon existing work studying message amplification in social networking and selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 grassroots movements, as well as solidarity building. it identifies how this twitter hashtag not only caught on with a larger than intended group, but also how that group dynamically identified and put forward shared issue-shaping stories. the effects of this research support an expansion of qualitative methods into the areas of big data and social media and theorize a transformational shift in one of today’s largest entertainment media as the discourse starts to reflect the gender diversity already present among consumers if not developers. references bennett, l. (2012). the personalization of politics: political identity, social media, and changing patterns of participation. the annals of the american academy of political and social science 644 (1), 20-39. doi: 10.1177/0002716212451428. boyd, d., golder, s., & lotan, g. (2010). tweet, tweet, retweet: conversational aspects of retweeting on twitter. 43rd hawaii international conference on system sciences. retrieved from http://www.danah.org/papers/tweettweetretweet.pdf bruns, a. & burgess, j. (2012). new methodologies for researching news discussion on twitter. journalism studies 13 (5-6), 801-814. doi: 10.1080/1461670x.2012.664428. cardoso, d. (2009). got boobs? breast physics in videogames. gamer’s intuition. retrieved from http://www.gamersintuition.com/article.php?t=gotboobs caren, n., jowers, k., & gaby, s. (2012). a social movement online community: stormfront and the white nationalist movement. in j earl, d.a. rohlinger (eds.) research in social movements, conflicts and change, volume 33 (pp. 163-193). london: emerald group publishing limited. crane, l. (2012, november 26). why are there so few lady game creators? [twitter post]. retrieved from https://twitter.com/burning_luke/status/273121518362439680 entertainment software association. (2011). essential facts about the computer and video game industry. retrieved from http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/esa_ef_2011.pdf gamecareerguide.com staff. (2012). game developer salary survey 2012. gamasutra. retrived from http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/1108/game_developer_salary_survey_2012.php?page=1 goldsmith, d., & siegel, m. (2012). cyber politics: understanding the use of social media for dissident movement in an integrated state stability framework. ieee proceedings of 2012 the international conference on advances in social network analysis and mining. retrieved from http://ecir.mit.edu/images/stories/massn2012%20paper%20for%20circulation%20with%20ieee%20 copyright.pdf harlow, s. (2012). social media and social movement: facebook and an online guatemalan justice movement that moved offline. new media & society 14 (2), 117-213. doi: 10.1177/1461444811410408. honeycutt, c., & herring, s. (2009). beyond microblogging: conversation and collaboration via twitter. 42nd hawaii international conference on system science. retrieved from http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/honeycutt.herring.2009.pdf papacharissi, z., & oliveira, m.f. (2011). the rhythms of news storytelling on twitter: coverage of the january 25th egyptian uprising on twitter. world association for public opinion research conference. retrieved from http://www.insideview.ie/files/rhythms-of-news-storytelling.pdf salter, a., & blodgett, b. (2012). hypermasculinity & dickwolves: the invisibility of women in the new gaming public. journal of broadcasting & electronic media 56(3), 401-416. doi: 10.1080/08838151.2012.705199 farman aoir 14 abstract final selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa site-specificity, pervasive computing, and the reading interface jason farman university of maryland, college park usa jasonfarman@gmail.com abstract through a media archaeology approach, this paper offers a historical grounding for emerging mobile media storytelling projects. by linking these locative media projects to the larger history of attaching narratives to specific places, these projects build on practices that have been done for millennia. from stone inscriptions to the stories that accompany religious pilgrimages, from graffiti in early rome to historic walking tours of cities, the practice of sited narratives has many precedents. the desire to attach story to space (and to do so through pervasive and mobile computing) is found in the connection between the historical context of a community and the need to determine the character of that space. around these two points arises a contention over who is actually allowed to tell the story of a location. a site’s dominant narrative is often told through durable while the narratives on the margins are relegated to ephemeral media. keywords mobile media, pervasive computing, digital storytelling, urban markup, locative technologies introduction when our perspectives of our mobile media practices go from being so familiar that they seemingly disappear and instead shift to a perspective where we see entirely new ways of using these devices, the results can be revolutionary. this shift is a transformative one. this paper begins to gesture toward such shifts taking place around us. emerging storytelling projects offer some of the best examples of the transformative potential of mobile media. the projects referenced in this paper typically take the mobile device out of the realm of the everyday and insert it into practices that reimagine our relationship to technology, place, and our own sense of self in the spaces we move through. as such, this paper argues for a departure from the work of ubiquitous computing researcher, weiser (1999), who argued, “the most profound technologies are those that disappear. they weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it” (n.p.). instead, through heightened visibility, these projects demonstrate profoundly unique ways of using mobile media. however, such shifts in perspective can be challenging to accomplish. the goal, therefore, of storytelling projects like [murmur], on this spot, curzon memories, and these pages fall like ash is to “defamiliarize” people with their places and the technologies that mediate these places. in order to accomplish this defamiliarization, artists, authors, and scholars often turn to what is called “creative misuse,” or finding a way to use mobile media and software, like iphone apps, in ways that they were never intended. the result is often a deeper sense of place and a stronger understanding of our own position within that place. the history of site-specific storytelling people have attempted to tie stories to places for as long as stories have existed. the meaning of a story is affected by the place in which the story is told and, similarly, the meaning of a place tends to be told through stories. by employing a media archaeology approach (gitelman, 2008; huhtamo, 2011; parikka, 2012), an analysis of mobile story projects is contextualized in light of the historical practices of sited narratives. drawing on a similar methodology, pervasive computing scholar mccullough (2008) has contrasted “durable” inscriptions—such as those carved into stone or into the side of a building—to “ephemeral” inscriptions like graffiti, banners, and billboards that aren’t as long lasting and are characterized by their transitory nature. he categorizes both of these forms of site-specific storytelling as “urban markup.” interestingly, these two forms of site-specific storytelling also demonstrate the power dynamics and hierarchies involved in who gets to tell the story of a space. 1 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa those with economic wealth and political clout tend to be the ones who are able to place durable inscriptions throughout a city. they can afford the statue of a particular war hero or politician, linking the life of this figure to the place where the statue is located. in contrast, graffiti functions similarly to tell a certain story or life of a place but tends to be done by those without the power or political clout to create durable inscriptions. these inscriptions often serve to stand in opposition to the legal and “authorized” ways of storytelling about a place. mobile media storytelling project seek to intervene in these dichotomies by sitting at the hinge of durable and ephemeral inscriptions. also, as mccullough notes, contemporary mobile media narratives fall somewhere along the spectrum between the durable and ephemeral inscriptions that characterize such urban markup. new forms of urban markup that utilize mobile technologies are “neither organized ‘media’ as the twentieth century knew them, nor random graffiti as all the ages have witnessed.” these forms of site-specific markup are seen in the “new practices of mapping, tagging, linking, and sharing [that] expand both possibilities and participation in urban inscription” (p. 69). the mobile device and medium-specificity thus, while it is vital to situate these mobile digital storytelling projects historically (and understand how they are developing on things like stone inscriptions on buildings, graffiti, or the stations of the cross), it is also important to ask, “what is unique about storytelling projects that use mobile media?” linking media archaeology with material culture methods (hayles, 2004; doane, 2007; brown, 2010), i explore how these projects make important advancements on the process of writing, distributing, and reading a story. mobile media (broadly) are spatial media and thus are uniquely equipped to engage with site-specific narratives. yet, there are things about contemporary mobile technologies that are distinct in comparison to previous media for storytelling. tapping into this mode of exploration is called “medium-specific analysis” and asks us to understand that the medium’s unique capabilities (and constraints). these affordances and constraints will significantly affect the content of the story and the experience of it (hayles, 2004, p. 67-90). a medium-specific analysis understands that the medium will often impact the ways a story is told, distributed, and experienced. this impact is often because of issues like the interface (does an author want to compose a long text on the small keyboard of a mobile phone?) or the cultural expectations (do we read stories on an ipad in very similar ways that we read them on a print book because that is what is culturally accepted?). conclusions: the problems of “narrative” and “story” while we can layer multiple stories on a site to tell a range of perspectives about what a place means, the process can involve some challenging hurdles that are inherent in all acts of storytelling. often, the idea of “narrative” itself is rife with problems because it tends to put forth an idea of a cohesive, linear story about a site, an event, or a community. certain historical narratives are a good example. some approaches, as performance studies scholar román (1998) notes, seek to tell an “official history” of an event (román cites the origin stories told about the emergence of hiv/aids). these “totalizing narratives . . . [present a] genealogy of aids [which] overdetermines the arrival of aids and obscures the process(es) of aids.” as such, “aids will continue to be understood within the confines of these narratives of origin” (p. xviii-xix). for román, any narrative or history of aids needs to be presented as multiple and discontinuous rather than cohesive and linear. projects that utilize mobile media to tell stories offer possible futures of narrative and an intervention to these concerns about the limitations of story. [murmur], rider spoke, and on this site thus embrace the subjective experiences of the storyteller and reader (and thus offer narrative practices that encourage fragmentation, limited point-of-view, and the insertion of many voices to help offset the limited perspective of the individual reader or storyteller). 2 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa references brown, b. (2010). “materiality.” in critical terms for media studies, m. b. n. hansen & w. j. t. mitchell (eds.). chicago: university of chicago press. doane, m. a. (2007). “the indexical and the concept of medium specificity.” differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies 18 (1): 128-152. gitelman, l. (2006). always already new: media, history, and the data of culture. cambridge, ma: the mit press. hayles, n. k. (2004). “print is flat, code is deep: the importance of media-specific analysis.” poetics today 25 (1): 67-90. huhtamo, e. & j. parikka. (eds.). (2011). media archaeology: approaches, applications, and implications. los angeles: university of california press. mccullough, m. (2008). “epigraphy and the public library,” in augmented urban spaces: articulating the physical and electronic city, a aurigi & f de cindio (eds.). burlington, vt: ashgate publishing. parikka, j. (2012). what is media archaeology? cambridge: polity press. roman, d. (1998). acts of intervention: performance, gay culture, and aids. bloomington: indiana university press. uricchio, w. (2003). , “historicizing media in transition.” in rethinking media change: the aesthetics of transition, d thorburn & h jenkins (eds.). cambridge, ma: the mit press. weiser, m. (1999). “the computer for the 21 st century,” acm sigmobile mobile computing and communications review 3(3). retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=329126 license this article is ©2013 authors. 3 microsoft word i can’t see you any more aoir 2016.docx selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): john, n. and gal, n. (2016, october 5-8). ‘i can’t see you any more’: a phenomenology of political facebook unfriending. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ‘i can’t see you any more’: a phenomenology of political facebook unfriending nicholas a. john department of communication, the hebrew university of jerusalem noam gal department of communication, the hebrew university of jerusalem the summer of 2014 saw a flare up in the ongoing violent conflict between israel and hamas in the gaza strip. social media played an important role throughout the fighting, be that in recruiting support for one side of the conflict or the other, distributing news, images and propaganda, and as a platform for the expression of individuals’ opinions on the events. israeli facebook users’ news feeds were dominated by content pertaining to the conflict to the extent that it was even considered inappropriate to post content about anything else. as is typical of online political debates, discussions were very polarized (adamic & glance, 2005; himelboim, mccreery, & smith, 2013), and the press reported high levels of facebook unfriending. in a quantitative survey-based study, john & dvir-gvirsman (2015) established that one in six jewish israeli facebook users unfriended or unfollowed a facebook friend during the 50 days of fighting in 2014. it was also found that unfriending was more prevalent among more ideologically extreme and more politically active facebook users. building on that research, the current study explores the phenomenology of facebook unfriending and is based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with 18 jewish israeli facebook users who unfriended at least one facebook friend during the conflict. this research contributes to two main theoretical concerns. the first is the emerging study of disconnectivity (karppi, 2014; light, 2014; light & cassidy, 2014; portwoodstacer, 2013), and particularly unfriending (peña & brody, 2014; quercia, bodaghi, & crowcroft, 2012; sibona, 2014; sibona & walczak, 2011), which is an understudied aspect of the use of social network sites (snss). the second relates to the potential for social media to serve as platforms for political discussion (papacharissi, 2002). on the face of it, at stake here would appear to be one of the classic issues of political communication, at least since the emergence of multiple tv news channels in the us, namely, the democratizing potential of exposure to varied political positions versus the tendency to selective exposure and its implications for polarization (prior, 2007; sunstein, 2009). this raises the question, which we try to answer, as to how to conceptualize unfriending. is it part of a trend towards polarization, whereby we screen out political views we find unpalatable? is it a normative statement about the acceptable limits of discourse? or is it an apolitical act of consumer choice, more akin to changing channels on the tv than voting in an election? 18 interviewees were recruited. apart from two skype interviews, interviews were carried out face to face. interviews lasted between 35-90 minutes. all interviews were recorded (with the interviewees’ permission) and transcribed. the transcriptions were imported into maxqda for coding and analysis following the principles of grounded theory (corbin & strauss, 2008). two main groups of findings emerge from analysis of the interviews. first, unfriending can be conceptualized as metacommunicative. through unfriending, users are saying something about unacceptable types of talk. for some interviewees, it was to do with how one should talk during wartime; others said they had unfriended someone for posting idiotic content, or in a style that they considered inferior. in this regard, they are saying something about the ‘protocols’ (gitelman, 2006) of facebook communication. others described unfriending as a recognition that dialogue with such a person is impossible, either because they are perceived as lying, because they won’t change their mind, or because the disagreements are too profound to bridge. second, all of the interviewees said they unfriended someone because they simply couldn’t deal with seeing that person’s content any more. this was very often accompanied by metaphors of cleanliness, and was related to the fact that facebook is on their phone in their pocket or on their pc in their living room. unfriending was a way of decontaminating what was perceived as a domestic (and not political) space. while interviewees unfriended people whose political views they disagreed with (as reported by author 1, 2015), the unfriending was non-political in that it was not an attempt to change the world out there: interviewees did not think that the people they unfriended knew about it; they did not tell them they had unfriended them; and it was not especially important to them that they knew they had been unfriended. through unfriending, facebook users shape both the content and the style of expression to which they are exposed on their feed. unfriending is thus conceptualized as a kind of boundary maintenance. however, unlike previous work that relates boundary maintenance to privacy and looks at what information about ourselves we allow out (vitak, blasiola, litt, & patil, 2015), here we see unfriending as a mechanism for controlling what we allow in within a context of networked sociality. references adamic, l. a., & glance, n. (2005). the political blogosphere and the 2004 us election: divided they blog. paper presented at the proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on link discovery. corbin, j. m., & strauss, a. l. (2008). basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory (3rd ed.). los angeles, calif.: sage publications, inc. gitelman, l. (2006). always already new : media, history and the data of culture. cambridge, mass.: mit press. himelboim, i., mccreery, s., & smith, m. (2013). birds of a feather tweet together: integrating network and content analyses to examine cross‚ ideology exposure on twitter. journal of computer-mediated communication, 18(2), 40-60. doi:10.1111/jcc4.12001 john, n. a., & dvir-gvirsman, s. (2015). ‘i don’t like you any more’: facebook unfriending by israelis during the israel-gaza conflict of 2014. journal of communication, 65(6), 953–974. doi:10.1111/jcom.12188 karppi, t. (2014). disconnect. me. user engagement and facebook. (phd), university of turku, turku. retrieved from http://www.doria.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/95616/annalesb376karppi.pdf light, b. (2014). disconnecting with social networking sites. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. light, b., & cassidy, e. (2014). strategies for the suspension and prevention of connection: rendering disconnection as socioeconomic lubricant with facebook. new media & society, 16(7), 1169-1184. papacharissi, z. (2002). the virtual sphere the internet as a public sphere. new media & society, 4(1), 9-27. peña, j., & brody, n. (2014). intentions to hide and unfriend facebook connections based on perceptions of sender attractiveness and status updates. computers in human behavior, 31(0), 143-150. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2013.10.004 portwood-stacer, l. (2013). media refusal and conspicuous non-consumption: the performative and political dimensions of facebook abstention. new media & society, 15(7), 1041-1057. doi:10.1177/1461444812465139 prior, m. (2007). post-broadcast democracy: how media choice increases inequality in political involvement and polarizes elections: cambridge university press. quercia, d., bodaghi, m., & crowcroft, j. (2012). loosing friends on facebook. paper presented at the proceedings of the 3rd annual acm web science conference. sibona, c. (2014). unfriending on facebook: context collapse and unfriending behaviors. paper presented at the system sciences (hicss), 2014 47th hawaii international conference on. sibona, c., & walczak, s. (2011). unfriending on facebook: friend request and online/offline behavior analysis. paper presented at the system sciences (hicss), 2011 44th hawaii international conference on system sciences. sunstein, c. r. (2009). republic. com 2.0: princeton university press. vitak, j., blasiola, s., litt, e., & patil, s. (2015). balancing audience and privacy tensions on social network sites: strategies of highly engaged users. international journal of communication, 9, 20. aoir2019-submission-template-sunden-paasonen.pdf selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): lastname, firstinitial. (2019, october 2-5). paper title. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. laughter out of place: affective homophily and the absurd comedy of #metoo jenny sundén södertörn university susanna paasonen university of turku consider this hypothetical scene: two feminist scholars having a hotel breakfast in the very beginning of the #metoo movement, october 2017, during aoir. “well i’m gonna have some more coffee, possibly an orange juice,” one of them says. “me too!,” the other replies, making the hashtag symbol up in the air with her fingers. in a split second, both are laughing, helplessly. the more they realize how inappropriate it is to laugh, the harder it becomes not to, and tears are soon running down their cheeks. starting from this scene of absurd laughter out of place, and the contagious energy that it involves, this paper investigates feminist humor as a strategy of resistance in connection with #metoo, asking what laughter may do to, and in the affective politics driving the movement. although the hashtag was coined already a decade ago by the black feminist activist tarana burke for supporting survivors of sexual abuse, #metoo grew into a global, viral twitter campaign within the harvey weinstein scandal, soon bleeding into other social media platforms, news outlets, parliamentary investigations, and forms of retrospective inquiry revisiting accusations of sexual misconduct by powerful men. in the course of this, sexual harassment became a topic of debate and intervention on an unprecedented, international scale. #metoo has connected personal accounts into a networked entity making visible structures of privilege and sexual violence across national borders. bringing together experiences of harassment, from the casual to the profoundly traumatic under a hashtag, it has made them visible as nodes and patterns in a broader social fabric. within this fabric, the anecdotal meets the structural while gaining solidity, gravity, unity, and expansiveness in the process. following john protevi (2009), this is a means of connecting the somatic—as the immediately and corporally suggested citation (apa): sundén, j. & paasonen, s. (2019, october 2-5). laughter out of place: affective homophily and the absurd comedy of #metoo paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. felt—with the social, and the level of personal action with political activism on a civic level. in this sense, #metoo exemplifies the transformative potential of contingent “hashtag publics” (bruns and burgess, 2015) operating through, and galvanized by articulations of affect. it can equally be conceptualized as an affective public emerging as a networked, contingent sense of belonging as people tweet, retweet, share, follow, and post in social media (papacharissi, 2014). as an affective public, #metoo is energized by articulations of anger and outrage. shaped by the sharpness of negative affect, its affective politics are as serious as the claims to bodily integrity and gender equality that the movement makes. the tone of #metoo is, in sum, angry inasmuch as it is serious and engaged with the redistribution of shame connected to sexual harassment. as we argue in more detail in the full length paper, this dynamic gives rise to what we would like to call “affective homophily,” that brings people together through expressions of similar feeling. humor and laughter are therefore probably not the first responses to come to mind when considering the movement and its possible affective dynamics. playfulness, humor, and laughter may feel impossible to connect with experiences and incidents of sexual harassment and violence. at the same time, feminist and other political movements have long used humor as a form of resistance, and even as one of subversion, in coping with, or providing relief from oppression and violence. considering this legacy of laughing at power, humor may provide a breathing space of sorts where the pressing heaviness of power abuse and trauma become momentarily lighter to bear. for this reason, we find it important to explore the unexpected spaces of laughter in contexts where playfulness and humor seem unlikely, out of place, or even inappropriate. in our paper, we investigate the affective and ambiguous dynamics of humor when it unexpectedly makes its way into the heart of the #metoo debate. our analysis plays out through two examples. firstly, we deploy nanette—hannah gadsby’s 2018 netflix success heralded as the comedy of the #metoo era—as our entry to explore the interconnections of humor, seriousness, and feminist politics. electrified by glowing reviews, journalistic coverage, and countless shares and likes in social media, nanette did not only resonate powerfully in queer and feminist settings but managed to grab the attention of a much broader audience. we argue that the uniform viral warmth surrounding the show drives the emergence of networked feminisms through affective homophily, or a love of feeling the same which allows for affective intensity while resisting dissent in what is being felt. moreover, in contrast to gadsby’s understanding of humor, and the format of stand-up, as something which short-circuits her (and, by extension, her audience’s) possibilities of reworking and understanding hurt and trauma, we argue for other ways of thinking about the affective unpredictability of laughter as it intersects with, and operates through networked feminist politics and registers of vulnerability. secondly, and as a counter force of sorts to such intense sameness, we open up the door to feminist humor in the absurd, something which traffics in the unreasonable, illogical, and inappropriate. in considering the unexpected pockets of humor within the #metoo scandal that ripped apart the prestigious institution of the swedish academy, we explore the emergence of absurdist feminist comedy by zooming in on the figure of the unseemly woman and a type of humor which is out of tune with both reason and decency (cf. sundén & paasonen 2018). the ignition of the swedish #metoo movement involved eighteen women accusing jean-claude arnault—a high-profile player in stockholm’s literary circles close to the swedish academy—of more than two decades of sexual assault. sara danius (the first female head of the academy) launched a legal investigation into the matter and was eventually forced to leave her post. her alter ego, the unruly and absurd “gittan” who crashed academy meetings and functions, along with spectacularly loud designer gowns at the nobel banquets did not help her case. by turning things nonsensical, absurd feminist humour refuses to operate within a preset logic, be it one of binary gender, heteronormativity, or something else while allowing for both affective release and affective rerouting. absurdity is a tactic for rupturing things, for opening them up—and, possibly, for proposing entirely different places to start. in its unpredictability, absurdity remains resistant to affective homophily as that which aligns people and joins them in affective publics. our strands of investigation then move from the affective homophily of seriousness, anger, and shame, to the shared refusal to laugh and the much more volatile feminist terrain of the absurd where things just refuse to make sense. they map out ripples of feminist laughter (or the lack thereof) connected to #metoo and the affective politics they perform and intervene in. taken together, our examples allow us to argue for the political importance of affective ambiguity, difference, and dissent in contemporary feminist movements in social media, and to highlight the risk involved when such movements close ranks around homogenous feelings of not only shame and rage, but also those of love. our discussion further opens up a space for laughter and affective release that the unpredictable and surprising routes of absurd humour, combining the illogical with the indecent, afford. references bruns, axel and jean burgess. 2015. twitter hashtags from ad hoc to calculated publics. in #hashtag publics: the power and politics of discursive networks, edited by nathan rambukkana, 13–28. new york: peter lang. papacharissi, zizi. 2014. affective publics: sentiment, technology, and politics. new york: oxford university press. protevi, john. 2009. political affect: connecting the social and the somatic. minneapolis: minnesota university press. sundén, jenny & susanna paasonen (2018) “shameless hags and tolerance whores: feminist resistance and the affective circuits of online hate”. feminist media studies 18(4): 643-656. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  burgess,  j.,  baym,  n.,  bucher,  t.,  helmond,  a.,  john,  n.,  nissenbaum,  a.,   cunningham,  s.,  &  craig,  d.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  platform  studies:  the  rules  of  engagement.  panel   presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  conference  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,   germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org. platform  studies:  the  rules  of  engagement     jean  burgess queensland  university  of  technology nancy  baym microsoft  research   taina  bucher university  of  copenhagen anne  helmond   university  of  amsterdam     nicholas  a.  john   department  of  communication,  the  hebrew  university  of  jerusalem     asaf  nissenbaum   department  of  communication,  the  hebrew  university  of  jerusalem   stuart  cunningham   queensland  university  of  technology  (qut)     david  r.  craig   university  of  southern  california     panel  overview       social  media  platforms  like  twitter,  facebook  and  youtube  are  central  to  people’s   experiences  of  the  internet  and  mobile  media,  and  increasingly  extend  far  beyond   communication  or  entertainment,  into  transport,  health,  and  finance.  these  platforms   also  serve  up  and  serve  as  data  for  internet  scholars  and  practitioners.  how  should  we   best  approach  platforms  as  objects  of  study?  how  do  platforms’  rules  and  norms  for   engagement  shape  the  practices  we  study?  how  do  the  material  rules  of  these  systems   –  their  algorithms,  their  apis,  the  analytics  they  provide  –  shape  what  we  can  know   about  them?     while  the  importance  of  and  methods  for  studying  platforms  have  long  been  debated  in   game  studies  (bogost  &  montfort,  2009;;  apperley  &  parikka,  2015),  this  panel   represents  a  more  inclusive  and  deeper  iteration  of  platform  studies,  one  that  focuses   on  thinking  critically  about  the  best  ways  to  understand  the  roles  platforms  play  in   mediating  our  media,  communication  and  cultural  environments;;  and  one  that  integrates   materialist  approaches  such  as  software  studies  with  the  core  concerns  of  the  media   and  communication  disciplines  understood  more  broadly.  we  bring  together  four  papers   that  examine,  first,  how  platforms  shape  what  can  be  known  about  them;;  and  second,  to   what  extent  we  can  understand  them  not  only  despite  but  through  those  processes  and   the  traces  they  leave  behind.       each  paper  models  a  distinctive  theoretical  and/or  methodological  approach;;  and  they   collectively  engage  with  and  across  diverse  media  cultures,  paying  specific  attention  to   the  sociotechnical  arrangements  that  coordinate  and  influence  them.     1.   how  affordances  arise  through  relations  between  platforms,  their  different  types   of  users,  and  what  they  do  to  the  technology;;     2.   how  the  social  media  apis  that  scholars  so  often  use  for  research  are—for   commercial  reasons—skewed  positively  toward  ‘connection’  and  thus  make  it   difficult  to  understand  practices  of  ‘disconnection’;;   3.   a  biography  of  twitter  (a  story  told  through  the  intertwined  stories  of  its  key   features  and  the  social  norms  that  give  them  meaning,  drawing  on  archival   material  and  oral  history  interviews  with  users);;  and   4.   insights  into  the  actual  uses  to  which  audience  data  analytics  are  put  by  content   creators  in  the  new  screen  ecology  (and  the  limitations  of  these  analytics).       references     apperley,  t.,  &  parikka,  j.  (2015).  platform  studies’  epistemic  threshold.games  and   culture,  doi:1555412015616509.   bogost,  ian  and  nick  montfort.  2009.  ‘platform  studies:  frequently  questioned   answers.’  in  proceedings  of  the  digital  arts  and  culture  conference.   http://escholarship.org/uc/item/01r0k9br.pdf.           1.  a  platform-­sensitive  approach  to  analyzing  the   affordances  of  social  media  platforms     taina  bucher   university  of  copenhagen     anne  helmond   university  of  amsterdam     introduction   the  concept  of  affordance  has  emerged  as  an  important  keyword  within  media  and   communication  studies  to  describe  the  relations  between  technology  and  its  users.   originally  developed  in  the  field  of  ecological  psychology  (gibson  2015)  and  later   adopted  in  design  studies  (norman  1988),  the  concept  of  affordance  is  generally  used   to  describe  what  material  artifacts  like  media  technologies  afford  people  to  do.  in  this   paper  we  will  suggest  a  platform-­sensitive  approach  to  affordance  as  an  analytical  tool   for  examining  social  media  platforms  with  a  case  study  on  twitter.       as  we  will  highlight,  however,  the  concept  of  affordance  an  ambiguous  concept.  in   outlining  its  specific  intellectual  trajectory  from  psychology,  technology  and  design   studies,  sociology,  to  communication  and  media  studies,  our  intention  is  to  focus  on   some  of  the  many  (and  sometimes  conflicting)  ways  in  which  affordance  has  been   conceptualized  and  operationalized  across  various  disciplinary  boundaries.  even  within   the  field  of  communication  studies  there  is  not  one  single  way  in  which  scholars  have   come  to  understand  the  concept  of  affordance.  following  the  renewed  debates  over   affordances  in  recent  scholarship  on  social  media,  this  paper  addresses  some  of  the   new  directions  in  which  scholars  have  proposed  to  define  and  analytically  deploy  the   concept  in  media  and  communication  studies.       conceptualizing  affordances   we  first  describe  how  the  concept  of  affordance  has  been  used  to  study  the  relations   between  technology  and  users  through  the  notions  of  affordances  as  a  relational   property  between  actors  and  their  environments  (gibson  2015),  perceived  affordances   (norman  1988),  technology  affordances  (gaver  1991),  social  affordances  (wellman   2003),  and  communicative  affordance  (hutchby  2001).  subsequently  we  address  how  it   has  been  employed  to  analyze  social  media  in  particular  with  ideas  of  imagined   affordances  (nagy  and  neff  2015)  and  vernacular  affordances  (mcveigh-­schultz  and   baym  2015)  to  better  account  for  the  complex  relationships  between  technology  and   sociality.     the  multi-­directionality  of  agency  and  connectivity   our  purpose  with  outlining  the  different  conceptions  of  affordance  is  to  point  out  its   intellectual  history,  ontological  status  and  analytical  value.  the  different  concepts   outlined  above  seem  to  focus  on  what  technology  does  to  users,  and  not  for  instance   the  other  way  around.  given  the  relational  ontology  of  gibson’s  original  concept,  it   seems  somewhat  surprising  that  the  relationality  in  question  often  seems  to  be  applied   rather  unidirectional.  the  question  is  seldom  what  platform  users  such  as  end-­users   afford  or  do  to  technology  (not  to  be  confused  with  the  rather  popular  question  of  what   users  do  with  technology),  or  even  what  a  technology  affords  another  piece  of   technology.  in  order  to  do  the  concept  of  affordance  justice  we  need  to  think  much  more   relationally  and  multi-­layered  about  the  concept  and  retain  a  sense  of  platform-­ sensitivity.       if  actor-­network  theory  (ant)  and  similar  approaches  have  taught  us  anything,  isn’t  it   to  think  more  fully-­fledged  about  agency  and  connectivity?  ant,  while  not  a  coherent   approach,  holds  that  agency  is  distributed  and  relational,  and  that  non-­humans  are   actors  with  agency  too.  as  latour  suggests,  their  agency  refers  to  the  ways  in  which   ‘things  might  authorize,  allow,  afford,  encourage,  permit,  suggest,  influence,  block,   render  possible,  forbid,  and  so  on’  (2005:  72).  as  latour  acknowledged  in  a  footnote  to   this  much-­cited  reference  on  the  idea  of  non-­human  agency,  it  is  highly  indebted  to   gibson’s  notion  of  affordances  and  the  question  of  what  technology  does  to  users.  this   may  also  be  where  some  of  the  overemphasis  on  affordance  as  something  seemingly   tied  to  the  agency  of  technological  objects  comes  from.  while  we  are  deeply   sympathetic  to  the  notion  of  non-­human  agency  and  its  importance  in  studying  social   media  platforms,  we  should  also  not  lose  sight  of  the  multi-­directionality  of  agency  and   connectivity  at  work  in  approaching  questions  of  affordances.     introducing  a  platform-­sensitive  affordance  perspective   rather  than  introduce  yet  another  concept  of  affordance,  we  aim  to  contribute  one  way   of  approaching  the  empirical  analysis  of  affordances  in  social  media  by  being  sensitive   to  platform  specificities.  our  approach  is  sensitive  to  the  medium-­specificity  of   platforms,  as  technological  intermediaries  and  entities  that  can  be  built  upon  draw   different  stakeholders  together  and  orchestrate  their  relationships  to  each  other   (gillespie  2010).  affordances,  we  argue,  manifest  in  relations  between  platforms  and   their  different  types  of  users  such  as  end-­users,  advertisers,  developers,  and   researchers.  we  extend  previous  conceptualizations  of  affordances  understood  as  the   action  possibilities  made  available  to  users  by  means  of  technology,  not  only  by   expanding  the  notion  of  the  user,  but  also  by  considering  the  inverse  question  of  what   users  do  to  the  technology.       we  suggest  a  platform-­sensitive  perspective  that  take  four  aspects  into  account:  first,  it   considers  how  social  media  platforms  do  not  only  afford  things  to  end-­users  but  also  to   other  actors  such  as  developers  who  can  extend  the  affordances  offered  by  the   platform,  advertisers  who  can  monetize  on  platform  activities,  as  well  as  researchers   who  can  collect  and  analyze  platform  data  for  studying  social  issues.  second,  it   examines  how  these  actors  are  addressed  by  distinct  surfaces,  platform  interfaces,  and   explores  what  these  surfaces  afford.  third,  it  sees  these  surfaces  as  malleable  and   relative  to  the  actors  as,  contra’s  gibson’s  natural  environment  which  is  the  same  for  all   actors,  social  media  platforms  provide  highly  personalized  environments.  finally,  a   platform-­specific  approach  acknowledges  how  platforms  are  inhabited  by  both  human   and  non-­human  actors  which  hold  agency  and  also  afford  things  back  to  the  technology.       to  operationalize  our  case  study  on  twitter,  we  make  use  of  the  platform’s  own   developer  and  help  documents  to  uncover  the  platform  actors  and  their  action   possibilities.  in  addition,  we  examine  the  different  surfaces  that  the  actors  of  the  twitter   platform  inhabit  and  how  actors  are  connected  through  their  respective  interfaces.  in   order  to  to  so  we  focus  on  one  specific  feature,  the  twitter  like,  in  order  to  map  the   relations  between  the  different  users  as  a  way  to  map  out  the  ‘platform  politics’   (gillespie  2010)  of  these  relations.  the  entry  points  are  the  different  interfaces/surfaces,   the  end-­user  interface,  advertising  interface,  developer/researcher  interface,  which  are   seen  as  as  distinct  ‘zones  of  affordances’  (drucker,  2011).       to  conclude,  we  reflect  on  what  our  platform-­specific  affordance  approach  may  bring  to   affordance  theory,  platform  studies  and  studying  social  media  platforms  in  particular.         references     drucker,  johanna.  2011.  “humanities  approaches  to  interface  theory.”  culture   machine  12  (0).  http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/434.   gaver,  william  w.  1991.  “technology  affordances.”  in  proceedings  of  the  sigchi   conference  on  human  factors  in  computing  systems,  79–84.  acm.     gibson,  james  j.  2015.  the  ecological  approach  to  visual  perception.  classic  editions.   new  york:  psychology  press.   gillespie,  tarleton.  2010.  “the  politics  of  ‘platforms.’”  new  media  &  society  12  (3):  347– 64.   hutchby,  ian.  2001.  “technologies,  texts  and  affordances.”  sociology  35  (2):  441–56.   doi:10.1177/s0038038501000219.   latour,  bruno.  2005.  reassembling  the  social:  an  introduction  to  actor-­network-­ theory.  oxford,  uk:  oxford  university  press.   mcveigh-­schultz,  joshua,  and  nancy  k.  baym.  2015.  “thinking  of  you:  vernacular   affordance  in  the  context  of  the  microsocial  relationship  app,  couple.”  social   media  +  society  1  (2):  2056305115604649.     nagy,  peter,  and  gina  neff.  2015.  “imagined  affordance:  reconstructing  a  keyword  for   communication  theory.”  social  media  +  society  1  (2):  2056305115603385.     norman,  donald  a.  1988.  the  psychology  of  everyday  things.  new  york:  basic  books.   wellman,  barry,  anabel  quan-­haase,  jeffrey  boase,  wenhong  chen,  keith  hampton,   isabel  díaz,  and  kakuko  miyata.  2003.  “the  social  affordances  of  the  internet  for   networked  individualism.”  journal  of  computer-­mediated  communication  8  (3).           unobservable  unfriending:  an  agnotological  analysis   of  apis     nicholas  a.  john   department  of  communication,  the  hebrew  university  of  jerusalem     asaf  nissenbaum   department  of  communication,  the  hebrew  university  of  jerusalem     this  research  examines  the  role  of  application  program  interfaces  (apis)  in  the   production  of  knowledge  based  on  use  of  social  network  sites  (snss).  taking  its  lead   from  scholars  of  disconnectivity  (see  esp.  karppi,  2014;;  light,  2014),  this  study  shines  a   new  kind  of  critical  light  on  apis.  following  an  analysis  of  api  documentation  for  12   snss,  we  find  that  data  related  to  disconnectivity  (unfriending,  unfollowing,  etc.)  are   unattainable  to  researchers.  we  argue  that  this  is  a  function  of  a  culture  of  connectivity   and  positivity  that  reflects  the  commercial  interests  of  snss  and  marketers.       big  data  and  its  associated  research  practices  have  been  under  scrutiny  right  from  the   off  (e.g.  bodle,  2011;;  bucher,  2013).  one  problem  is  posed  by  what  burgess  and  bruns   (2015)  call  ‘regimes  of  access’,  referring  to  scholars’  differential  access  to  twitter  data   (and  other  social  media).  because  of  this,  most  research  is  either  based  on  hashtags   (which  entails  missing  out  on  broader  context),  or  is  limited  to  1%  of  the  twitter  stream   in  a  fashion  that  raises  questions  about  the  validity  and  representativeness  of  the  data.   in  addition,  precise  modes  of  data  collection  and  analysis  tend  to  remain  opaque,   making  replicability  almost  impossible  (bruns,  2013;;  bruns  &  burgess,  2016).       apis  are  a  key  feature  of  big  social  data  research,  as  it  is  through  them  that  researchers   often  collect  their  data  in  the  first  place.  bruns,  burgess  and  others  acknowledge  the   lack  of  researchers’  control  over  the  apis  they  use  to  collect  data,  and  the  fact  that  they   are  rarely  unrestricted  (bruns  &  burgess,  2016).  it  has  also  been  noted  that  the  way   apis  are  shaped  favors  certain  methodological  choices.  for  instance,  since  much  of  the   data  available  do  not  allow  for  archival  browsing,  researchers  focus  on  the  present  or   the  recent  past  (boyd  &  crawford,  2012).  yet  another  example  are  the  interactions   snss  include,  which  are  mostly  positive  and  approving  (baym,  2013;;  gerlitz  &   helmond,  2013).       so  far,  however,  the  critical  literature  on  apis  has  paid  insufficient  attention  to  a  large   blind  spot  in  big  data  collection:  disconnectivity.  we  make  two  claims  in  this  regard:  (1)   snss  are  purposely  selective  in  the  information  they  make  accessible  through  their   apis;;  and  (2)  they  are  biased  towards  connectivity,  and  against  disconnectivity.  to   explore  these  claims,  we  analyzed  the  apis  of  12  snss  to  see  what  information  they   enable  users  to  glean.  the  snss  were  selected  by  triangulating  sources  (alexa,   wikipedia  and  also  web  of  science)  to  establish  which  are  the  largest  and  most   significant  platforms.  the  12  sites  with  the  highest  average  ranking  according  to  these   three  sources  were  included  in  the  study.1         the  findings  show  that  there  is  indeed  a  strong  bias  towards  connectivity.  while  sites   regularly  list  current  friendships,  followings,  group  memberships,  and  so  on,  apis  hardly   include  any  information  about  blockings  and  disconnections,  along  with  an  inability  to   track  changes  in  connections  over  time.  however,  this  bias  is  far  less  pronounced  when   it  comes  to  businesses.  for  instance,  the  owners  of  pages  and  apps  on  facebook  can   get  information  about  unlikes  and  various  other  kinds  of  negative  feedback.   furthermore,  businesses  are  afforded  a  diachronic  view  that  users  (and  researchers)   are  denied.  thus,  businesses  on  linkedin  and  venues  on  foursquare  are  able  to  track   engagement  over  time  and  discern  downturns.  evidently,  this  information  is  technically   deliverable,  making  its  unavailability  to  a  wider  audience  a  choice  based  on  the  interests   of  snss.       these  findings  are  significant  for  a  number  of  reasons.  first,  if  what  we  can  know  is  a   function  of  how  we  can  know,  this  study  has  implications  for  our  ability  to  research  what   we  do  with  snss,  and,  to  the  extent  that  they  are  a  proxy  for  broader  social  processes,   for  those  processes  as  well.       secondly,  the  findings  suggest  that  researchers,  marketers  and  the  snss  industry  are   partners  -­  often  unwittingly  so  -­  in  promoting  a  culture  of  connectivity.  this  is  not  unique   to  the  contemporary  sns  scene;;  social  scientists  have  always  been  interested  in   connectivity.  however,  breaking  up,  quitting  a  workplace,  cancelling  subscriptions,  and   dropping  out  are  all  meaningful  social  actions  to  which  snss’  apis  are  blind.     this  has  practical  implications  for  social  science  researchers.  (1)  because  negative   data  are  unattainable  through  apis,  researchers  must  seek  alternative  means  of   attaining  them,  such  as  surveys.  these  are  both  costly  and  are  liable  to  be  perceived  as   less  reliable.  more  generally,  apis’  failure  to  provide  access  to  negative  activities  means   that  researchers  interested  in  them  have  to  forego  the  considerable  advantages  offered   by  apis.  take  unfriending  in  the  context  of  the  us  elections,  for  instance.   commentators  have  started  writing  about  it,  but  measuring  it  (and  similar  acts)  is  not   possible  using  the  tools  provided  by  the  platforms  themselves,  even  though  the  data   exist.  (2)  this  also  makes  for  worse  science:  if  we  want  to  know  how  many  negative   interactions  people  have  been  involved  in,  we  would  have  to  rely  on  the  memory  of   survey  participants,  or  other  external  and  less  reliable  sources.  (3)  moreover,   researchers  run  the  risk  of  their  survey-­based  data  becoming  utterly  redundant  should   the  platform  decide  to  publish  the  data  it  rendered  inaccessible  through  its  api   protocols.  given  all  this,  researchers  might  decide  that  these  directions  are  less   worthwhile  to  pursue.       obscuring  negative  social  dynamics  may  benefit  the  advertiser-­friendly  atmosphere   snss  try  to  create,  but  it  comes  at  the  price  of  misrepresenting  social  realities—imagine   if  stock  markets  only  reported  on  prices  rising.  the  deeper  implications  of  various   1  the  snss  are:  facebook,  google+,  twitter,  linkedin,  sina  weibo,  livejournal,  habbo,  foursquare,   flickr,  pinterest,  instagram,  tumblr.   conflicts  may  be  hidden  behind  this  façade  of  connectivity  and  positivity,  and  this  should   be  a  concern  for  society  at  large  but  even  more  so  to  the  academic  endeavors  utilizing   snss’  apis  for  social  science.             references     baym,  n.  k.  (2013).  data  not  seen:  the  uses  and  shortcomings  of  social  media  metrics.   first  monday,  18(10).     bodle,  r.  (2011).  regimes  of  sharing:  open  apis,  interoperability,  and  facebook.   information,  communication  &  society,  14(3),  320-­337.     boyd,  d.,  &  crawford,  k.  (2012).  critical  questions  for  big  data:  provocations  for  a   cultural,  technological,  and  scholarly  phenomenon.  information,  communication   &  society,  15(5),  662-­679.     bruns,  a.  (2013).  faster  than  the  speed  of  print:  reconciling  ‘big  data’social  media   analysis  and  academic  scholarship.  first  monday,  18(10).     bruns,  a.,  &  burgess,  j.  (2016).  methodological  innovation  in  precarious  spaces:  the   case  of  twitter.  in  h.  snee,  c.  hine,  y.  morey,  s.  roberts,  &  h.  watson  (eds.),   digital  methods  for  social  science:  an  interdisciplinary  guide  to  research   innovation  (pp.  17-­33).  london:  palgrave  macmillan.   bucher,  t.  (2013).  objects  of  intense  feeling:  the  case  of  the  twitter  apis.   computational  culture,  3.     burgess,  j.,  &  bruns,  a.  (2015).  easy  data,  hard  data  :  the  politics  and  pragmatics  of   twitter  research  after  the  computational  turn.  in  g.  langlois,  j.  redden,  &  g.   elmer  (eds.),  compromised  data  :  from  social  media  to  big  data  (pp.  93-­111).   london:  bloomsbury  publishing.   gerlitz,  c.,  &  helmond,  a.  (2013).  the  like  economy:  social  buttons  and  the  data-­ intensive  web.  new  media  &  society,  1461444812472322.     karppi,  t.  (2014).  disconnect.  me.  user  engagement  and  facebook.  (phd),  university   of  turku,  turku.  retrieved  from   http://www.doria.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/95616/annalesb376karppi.pdf       light,  b.  (2014).  disconnecting  with  social  networking  sites.  basingstoke:  palgrave   macmillan.           3.  @rt#:  towards  a  platform  biography  of  twitter       jean  burgess   queensland  university  of  technology  (qut)     nancy  k.  baym   microsoft  research     overview     in  late  2015,  the  twitter  user  community  briefly  flared  up  in  passionate  reaction  to   changes  twitter  had  made  to  the  platform—switching  out  the  ‘favorite’  star  and  turning  it   into  a  ‘like’  feature  represented  by  a  red  heart;;  there  has  been  a  steady  stream  of  tech   and  mainstream  media  stories  on  the  social  ‘decay’  and  ‘death’  of  twitter  in  a  range  of   media  outlets  as  well.       across  these  discussions,  a  core  narrative  of  decline  is  emerging:  people  feel  that   something  fundamental  has  gradually  but  inexorably  shifted  in  twitter’s  structure  of   feeling,  to  borrow  loosely  from  raymond  williams  (1977).  commentators  seem  to   broadly  agree  that  twitter  has  become  less  intimate  and  more  public;;  less  personal  and   more  political;;  less  sociable  and  more  newsy.  is  this  even  true?  if  so,  how  did  it   happen?  given  the  challenges  of  getting  beyond  our  own  ‘front  stage’  experience,  let   alone  gaining  access  to  the  ‘back  stage’  of  the  platform’s  developer  culture  and   technical  infrastructure,  how  would  we  even  begin  to  ask  this  question  empirically?       we  demonstrate  a  way  of  doing  so  through  the  story  of  twitter’s  oldest  continuous  key   features:  those  ‘objects  of  intense  feeling’  that  act  as  mediators  between  multiple  media   ideologies,  individual  human  desires,  and  business  logics:  the  @mention,  the  #hashtag,   and  the  retweet.       the  platform  biography  approach     the  distinctive  cultures  of  social  media  platforms  owe  much  to  the  particularity  of  their   key  sociotechnical  objects  –  facebook’s  ‘like’  button  and  status  update  box;;  tumblr’s   ‘reblog’  feature  –  and  twitter’s  @mention,  #hashtag,  and  retweet.  we  argue  for  an   approach  to  understanding  these  features  through  multiple  data  sources  that  allow   researchers  to  get  at  many  intertwined  levels  that  together  comprise  their  meaning  and   show  how  innovation  happens  over  time.  these  levels  include  the  material  affordances   of  the  site  and  its  third-­party  clients,  the  media  ecosystem  within  which  the  site   operates,  the  company’s  changing  and  sometimes  competing  business  models,  and  the   experiences  of  users  embedded  in  social  practices  of  which  the  platform  is  only  a  part.         especially  in  twitter’s  case,  the  existence,  meanings  and  uses  of  features  such  as  @,  #   and  rt  are  as  much  a  product  of  third-­party  innovation  and  competing  community  uses   as  they  are  of  in-­house  design  and  development.  practices  that  emerge  organically  (like   reposting  friends’  tweets)  have  a  range  of  competing  conventions  associated  with  them;;   closely  connected  subcultures  of  early  adopters  (and/or  ‘lead  users’)  influence  which   conventions  come  to  dominate  (kooti  et  al,  2012);;  these  functions/practices  only  then   get  turned  into  platform  ‘features’  through  being  embedded  into  the  functionality  of  third-­ party  apps  or  the  twitter  architecture  itself  (bruns,  2012;;  halavais,  2014).  these   features  are  also  ‘objects  of  intense  feeling’  (bucher,  2013),  and  controversies  to   changes  made  to  them  are  both  revealing  of  these  relations  and  transform  them—so   they  are  extremely  useful  sites  of  investigation.     in  telling  the  stories  of  the  @mention,  the  retweet,  and  the  retweet,  we  build  a  ‘platform   biography’  of  twitter.  the  term  ‘biography’  is  chosen  deliberately  to  invoke  both  the   historical  and  the  social  aspects  of  how  things  are  created,  how  they  are  used,  and  what   they  mean,  while  recognising  that,  as  with  all  biographies,  the  account  is  inevitably   partial.       in  constructing  this  account,  we  combined  web  history,  digital  methods  and  qualitative   research  approaches.  we  collected  data  from  a  range  of  sources:     a.   complete  archives  of  the  official  twitter  blog  (mined  for  references  to  the   @mention,  hashtag  and  retweet  features);;   b.   internet  archive  (especially  for  the  twitter  landing  page,  home  page,   instructions/tutorials),  tech  industry  and  third  party  developers’  blogs  and   published  company  histories  (eg  crunchbase;;  nick  bilton’s  (2014)  book   hatching  twitter);;   c.   existing  scholarly  research  on  twitter’s  features  and  users  covering  its  entire   history;;  and   d.   interviews  with  users  about  their  twitter  ‘careers’,  using  personal  twitter   archives  as  prompts.     three  features,  three  phases   we  trace  the  life  stories  of  each  of  the  three  features  across  three  key  phases:  first,  its   origins  and  emergence  as  a  novel  user  convention  (including  the  alternative  ideas  and   solutions  with  which  it  competed);;  second,  its  mainstream  adoption  by  the  twitter   community  and  experimental,  early  embedding  into  the  platform  by  the  company;;  and   third,  its  retention,  or  ‘hardwiring’  into  the  platform,  later  changes  made  to  it  alongside   changes  to  twitter’s  business  model,  and  moments  of  continuing  controversy   surrounding  its  conflicting  meanings  and  uses.       in  all  three  cases,  there  is  a  consistent  pattern  of  change:  first,  a  set  of  conventions  that   will  eventually  become  codified  as  a  feature  emerges  through  user  experimentation,  as   people  seek  to  concretise  the  platform’s  emerging  uses  and  norms,  and  in  some  cases   to  develop  tools  to  enhance  and  better  coordinate  these  conventions.  different  sets  of   users  with  different  practical  solutions  in  effect  compete  in  an  origin  period  of  relative   interpretative  flexibility  (van  dijck,  2013).    in  the  most  well-­known,  canonic  version  of   this  narrative,  tech-­savvy  “lead  users”,  in  conjunction  with  the  media  whose  attention   they  are  able  to  elicit,  win  the  day  and  twitter  adopts  the  practice  in  a  form  built  into  the   interface.  but,  far  from  being  settled  at  that  point,  a  third  phase  of  retention  and   controversy  continues  in  which  diverse  communities  develop  diverse  cultural   applications  of  these  features,  thereby  continuing  to  experiment  with  their  affordances,   both  adopting  and  pushing  back  against  how  twitter  has  institutionalized  the  feature.     in  this  ongoing  process  that  can  involve  deeper  embedding  or  other  interface  changes,   controversies  can  reignite  or  reveal  competing  norms,  meanings  and  understandings  of   each  feature  and,  by,  extension  the  twitter  platform  more  broadly.       competing  uses,  competing  futures   we  see  constant  and  ongoing  struggles  among  all  stakeholders  over  the  purposes,   meanings  and  value  of  twitter–and  this  is  not  simply  a  matter  of  market-­oriented   business  goals  versus  non-­market  communitarian  ideals.  rather,  there  are  a  number  of   competing  visions  of  what  twitter  should  or  could  be  for  that  have  always  co-­existed   and  continue  to  compete  within  the  company  and  among  the  increasingly  diverse  user   community:  was  it  a  personal  messaging  service  –  and  then  maybe  a  social  networking   site?  was  it  a  platform  for  creating  and  sharing  media  and  entertainment?  or  was  it  a   global  news  dissemination  network  that  would  one  day  “fade  into  the  background”  and   become  an  invisible  utility  as  co-­founder  jack  dorsey  had  fantasised  (in  van  dijck,  88)?       this  dual  struggle  between,  on  the  one  hand,  social  network-­oriented  models  and   media-­centric  business  models  for  the  platform,  and  on  the  other  (especially  among   users),  between  different  understandings  and  values  of  courtesy,  respect,  sociability,   intimacy,  and  publicness,  has  been  a  constant  baseline  underscoring  the  history  of   twitter  (bilton,  2014).  it  continues  to  play  out,  increasingly  publicly,  and  the  core   mediating  features  of  the  platform  –  where  business  and  back  end  meet  a  diverse  range   of  users  and  their  practices  and  understandings  –  are  the  battleground.         references     bilton,  n.  (2014).  hatching  twitter.  london:  hodder  &  stoughton.   bruns,  a.  (2012).  ad  hoc  innovation  by  users  of  social  networks:  the  case  of   twitter.  zsi  discussion  paper,  16(2012),  1-­ 13.  https://www.zsi.at/attach/dp16_bruns.pdf   bucher,  t.  (2013).  objects  of  intense  feeling:  the  case  of  the  twitter  apis.   computational  culture,  3.     halavais,  a.  (2014)  structure  of  twitter:  social  and  technical.  in  weller,  k.  et  al  (eds.)   twitter  and  society  (pp.  29-­41)  new  york:  peter  lang.   kooti,  f.,  yang,  h.,  cha,  m.,  gummadi,  k.,  &  mason,  w.  (2012).  the  emergence  of   conventions  in  online  social  networks.  in  international  aaai  conference  on   weblogs  and  social  media.   from  http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/icwsm/icwsm12/paper/view/4661   van  dijck,  j.  (2013).  culture  of  connectivity:  a  critical  history  of  social  media.  new   york:  oxford  university  press.   williams,  r.  (1977).  marxism  and  literature.  oxford:  oxford  university  press.           4.  qualifying  the  quantified  audience     stuart  cunningham   queensland  university  of  technology  (qut)     david  r.  craig   university  of  southern  california     ‘critical  algorithm  studies’  is  a  burgeoning  field.  there  are  about  150  items  on  tarleton   gillespie  and  nick  seaver’s  (2015)  recent  ‘reading  list’,  and  it  is  growing  strongly.  as   elmer  et  al  (2015)  point  out,  big  data  analytics  can  give  us  authoritative  pictures  of   global  warming  and  the  effects  of  armed  conflicts.  nevertheless,  the  focus  in  the  field  is   very  much  on  the  power  of  the  algorithm  as  ‘a  tool  of  predictability  and  therefore  as  a   tool  for  social  and  economic  control’  (elmer  et  al  2015).     but  we  need  to  specify  better  which  groups  are  impacted,  in  what  ways,  to  what  extent,   and  with  what  outcomes,  through  surveillant  algorithmic  cultures.     this  paper  takes  a  significant  cohort  working  within,  and  superintending,  algorithmic   culture,  and  offers  an  immanent  critique  pointing  to  limits  to  the  power  of  the  algorithm   as  ‘a  tool  of  predictability  and  therefore  as  a  tool  for  social  and  economic  control’  in  what   we  call  social  media  entertainment  (sme).     a  new  screen  ecology  (cunningham  &  silver  2013;;  2015)  is  spawning  rapidly  around   the  major  social  media  platforms  –  youtube,  facebook,  instagram,  snapchat,   periscope–  which  is  bringing  entertainment  and  information  content  together  with  social   media  connectivity  coupled  with  powerful  data  analytics  to  provide  opportunity  for   previously  amateur,  newly  professionalizing  and  commercializing,  content  creators.   there  are  now  more  than  1  million  youtube  creators  receiving  some  level  of   remuneration  from  their  uploaded  content;;  more  than  1500  youtube  channels  have  at   least  a  million  subscribers  (and  many  of  the  more  influential  creators  have  less  than  a   million  subscribers).  we  differentiate  this  emerging  social  media  entertainment  proto-­ industry  from  the  professionally-­generated  content  which  is  the  core  product  of  the  other   component  of  the  new  screen  ecology  –  the  major  streamers  netflix,  amazon,  hbo   now,  and  their  national  epigones.     this  paper  steers  between  positions  of  celebration  and  critical  suspicion,  offering  an   immanent  critique  of  the  limits  of  data  analytics  in  shaping  sme  and  controlling  its   participants.  our  theoretical  framework  draws  on  foucault’s  (1991)  distinction  between   power  and  domination.  power  is  relational,  contingent,  unstable  and  reversible  -­  power   produces  resistance  –  whereas  there  is  a  tendency  in  critical  algorithm  studies  to  view   the  power  of  agents  in  algorithmic  culture  such  as  the  platforms  as  domination  –  one   way,  supervening,  and  controlling.       based  on  this  framework,  an  ‘immanent’  approach  to  social  and  industry  critique  works   within  the  terms  set  by  the  object  of  critique  in  order  expose  its  own  internal   contradictions.  we  offer  an  immanent  critique  of  the  limits  of  data  analytics  and  a   broader  algorithmic  culture  in  shaping  sme  from  within  the  industry  on  both  the  creator   (bottom  up)  and  platform  (top  down)  side.  this  is  a  limited,  but  strongly  evidenced,   critique  of  the  tendency  to  totalise  notions  of  surveillant  power  and  therefore  treat   resistance  as  standing  outside  of  such  power.     based  on  extensive  field  research  conducted  collaboratively  in  2015  and  ongoing  (more   than  100  interviews  with  new  screen  ecology  players  from  creator  to  platform   executives),  the  paper  offers  a  thick  description  of  how  youtube  (and  crossplatform)   content  creators  manage  the  relationship  between  the  quantitative  feedback  generated   by  the  data  analytics  stream  from  google’s  adsense  and  many  multichannel  networks’   suite  of  business  analytics,  and  the  qualitative  feedback  offered  freely  by  the  fan  base.       the  findings  –  many  of  which  are  now  outlined  -­  suggest  creators  spend  at  least  half   their  working  week  interacting  directly  with  their  crossplatform  communities  and  cannot   rely  on  data  analytics  alone  for  either  management  of  their  channels  or  adequate   revenue  derived  from  programmatic  advertising.  single-­platform  analytics  (such  as  the   standard  dashboard  available  to  youtube  partners)  are  not  sufficient  and  often  induce   information  overload  without  real  analytical  insight.  managing  community  interaction   cross  platform  –vital  for  maintaining  authenticity  and  maximising  promotion  –   significantly  extends  creators’  workload.  unlimited  word  counts  on  facebook  often   mean  trying  to  limit  the  workload  by  attempting  to  direct  engagement  to  twitter,  for   example.     there  is  a  range  of  non-­scalable  practices  essential  to  success.  a  ‘trial  and  error’   approach  is  prevalent;;  lots  of  time  is  spent  ‘tweaking’  various  elements  to  ensure   content  is  able  to  find  a  place  in  a  crowded  cultural  space  across  numerous  countries.   this  means  ensuring  that  their  work  is  contextually  relevant,  which  is  in  turn  dependent   on  mastering  metadata,  video  tagging,  and  copywriting  for  search  engine  optimization,   including  understanding  different  cultural  nuances  and  modes  of  engaging  in  multiple   national  contexts  simultaneously.  creators  spend  much  time  in  trial  and  error,  learning   when  work  should  be  uploaded  and  amplified,  while  working  in  seasonal,  regional  and   national  references  targeting  key  viewerships  in  dozens  of  countries.       at  the  same  time,  the  massive  growth  in  scale  of  sme  content  has  destroyed  value  –   the  click-­per-­thousand  rate  that  drives  ad  sense  revenue-­sharing  on  youtube  has   bottomed  out,  driving  creators  into  further  non-­scalable  engagements  to  restore  value   (brand  deals,  merchandising,  television  and  cable  options,  and  live  appearances,   licensing  content).     this  is  the  bottom  up  dimension  of  an  immanent  critique.  looking  at  the  top-­down   dimension,  our  critique  extends  to  the  way  in  which  the  it  behemoths,  pre-­eminently   google,  are  having  to  come  to  terms  with  both  the  old  and  the  new  fundamentals  of   media  entertainment:  the  messy  idiosyncrasies  of  taste  on  the  consumer  side  that  has   given  rise  to  established  media’s  ways  of  dealing  with  radical  uncertainty  of  demand.  it   also  includes  the  wary  conservatism  about  the  digital  harboured  by  brands  and   advertisers  –  which  are  the  source  of  virtually  all  funding;;  as  well  as  the  new  power  and   agency  of  content  producers.  google’s  engineering  culture  has  to  come  to  terms  with   non-­scalable  branded  content.       this  is  the  challenge  of  ‘monetisation  after  [google’s]  adsense’,  in  the  words  of  digital   executive  jordan  levin  (2014)  -­  marketing  and  advertising  that  cannot  be  massively   scaled-­up  through  automation  (or  ‘programmatics’,  as  it  is  called  in  the  industry).   indeed,  it  is  our  contention  that  the  ten  year  history  of  youtube  since  google’s  takeover   can  be  written  as  a  history  of  google  seeking  to  come  to  terms  with  the  non-­scalable   fundamentals  of  entertainment,  notoriously  fickle  consumer  taste,  and  content  and   talent  development,  from  its  base  as  an  information  technology/engineering  company   dedicated  to  scale,  automation,  permanent  beta,  rapid  prototyping  and  iteration.  the   regular  strategy  shuffles  between  its  core  it  business  models  and  entertainment   industry  plays  will  be  outlined.     references   cunningham,  s.  and  silver,  j.  (2013).  screen  distribution  and  the  new  king  kongs  of   the  online  world.  london:  palgrave  macmillan.   cunningham,  s.  and  silver,  j.  (2015).  studying  change  in  popular  culture:  a  “middle-­ range”  approach.  in  t.miller  (ed),  the  routledge  companion  to  global  popular   culture.  new  york:  routledge.   elmer,  g.,  langlois,  g.,  powell,  a.  and  renzi,  a.  (2015).  call  for  papers:  international   communication  association  preconference  big  data:  critiques  and  alternatives,   fukuoka,  9  june  2016.   foucault,  m.  (1991).  governmentality.  in  g.  burchell,  c.  gordon  and  p.  miller  (eds.),   the  foucault  effect:  studies  in  governmentality  (london:  harvester   wheatsheaf),  pp.  87–104.   gillespie,  t.  and  seaver,  n.  (2015).  critical  algorithm  studies:  a  reading  list.  the   http://socialmediacollective.org/reading-­lists/critical-­algorithm-­studies/   levin  j  (2015).  interview  with  jordon  levin,  chief  content  officer  at  nfl,  with  stuart   cunningham  and  david  craig.  los  angeles,  17  april.       microsoft word korn.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): korn, j.u. (2014, october 22-24). black women exercisers, asian women artists, white women daters and latina lesbians: how race and gender matter in facebook groups. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. black women exercisers, asian women artists, white women daters, and latina lesbians: how race and gender matter in facebook groups jenny ungbha korn university of illinois chicago introduction in this paper, i contribute to the “new cultural politics of difference” by focusing on modern, organic representations of race and gender on the internet (west, 1993). facebook groups reflect a contemporary way for users to demonstrate membership in cultural groups that are salient to them, including ones based on race and gender. internet-based displays of intersectional membership via facebook groups reflect the ongoing significance of race with gender. together, race and gender may be understood as part of “culture” or “the sum of the available descriptions through which societies make sense of and reflect their common experiences” (hall, 1980: 59). facebook groups as cultural classifications facebook groups are cultural representations of the ways that individuals understand their intersectional group membership (rockquemore & arend, 2002). facebook groups serve as voluntary communities open to internet users that desire homophilic relationships. facebook groups exist as online examples of individual agency in their founding and then transform into institutionalized, online forces that shape and reflect the agency of each additional individual through her choice to augment that facebook group. social network sites make finding these groups easy through keyword searches via built-in search engines specific for facebook groups. facebook groups constructed upon ethnic belonging contribute to the prevalent cultural practice of the automaticity of race as a basis for social categorization (hewstone, hantzi, & johnston, 1991). in other words, facebook groups are formed as a function of “societal culture” (erez & earley, 1993: 69). because facebook groups come into existence at the behest of individuals and because facebook groups consist mainly of digital text, they become an ideal site for cultural study as “the culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles” (geertz, 2005: 85). self-categorization and intersectional identity theory self-identification of the individual with a group provides the individual with a social identity as the individual acknowledges and affirms belonging to that group as part of the individual’s own identity (turner & reynolds, 2011). intersectional identity research highlights how race and gender operate simultaneously in terms of subjectivities, experiences, and identities. rather than a single, central category, intersectionality calls for analysis along multiple dimensions (nash, 2008). the act of a woman subscribing to intersectional identity groups online is deliberate, political, and meaningful. in this study, i focus on intersectionalitybased facebook groups as sites of cultural identification for internet users. research design while facebook has been the site of study for individual behavior, facebook group behavior has been understudied (park, kee, & valenzuela, 2009). this study is among the first to center analysis upon the group, rather than individual, level of facebook users. within this paper, i adopt a critical humanist perspective in that i view culture as interpretive and sociallyconstructed, which means culture is open to power struggles, contested meanings, and evolving identifications (martin & nakayama, 1999). through critical discourse analyses, i examine how intersectional identities reproduce oppression found within dominant discourse and how intersectional identities present counter-narratives to stereotypical depictions involving women of color by the mass media. within facebook, i examine groups that feature racialized and gendered words corresponding to the major racialized groups in the united states among women: white women, black women, asian-american women, and latinas. for a study involving women of color online, facebook is an ideal social network. women are more likely than men to use facebook and spend greater time there (duggan & brenner, 2013). in addition, while 13% of american internet users are latina and 10% of online users in the united states are black, 14% of facebook users are latina and 11% of facebook users are african-american (koh, 2014; rainie, smith, & duggan, 2013). study results overwhelmingly within facebook groups, the combination of race and gender creates a narrative around finding, courting, and marrying women of all races by straight men and women. rather than objectification of women depicted in such a sexualized manner, facebook groups emphasize the commonality of interracial dating and unify like-minded others who identify as white women who love their black men, black women and white men, latino/a and black love, and black men + asian women = love. some romantic groups specified additional identity components besides race and gender to their sexuality, like religion (christian black women for christian white men) and age (black women and white men 40 plus). by far, black women are represented in facebook groups more strongly than any other racialized group: facebook groups for black women numbered well over 1,000. in contrast, white women facebook groups totaled 162, latina facebook groups equaled 75, and asianamerican women facebook groups numbered only 32. inventing (call) and joining (response) intersectionality-based groups may be an electronic implementation of church culture as a strategy of action in the black community, spurring diverse classification creation and subscription, including occupation, creativity, spirituality, and beauty (pattillo-mccoy, 1998). nearly a third of all asian-american women’s facebook groups focused on solidifying american women of asian descent as a viable racial classification, e.g., asian american women’s alliance and asian-american’s women’s circle. in contrast to asian-american women’s discourse, latina online identity construction included lesbianism (latina lesbians) and lesbianism in specific states (lesbyanas latinas en texas). nearly all of the facebook groups that referenced white women did so as a racialized and gendered category that spoke to dating attractions and sexual preference, e.g., freaky white women for black men, asian men and white women only, and white women who love their hot chocolate [meaning race, not the drink]. conclusions while scholars utilize intersectionality as a critical framework for research, my study examines how intersectionality appears in practice online. the discourses on the politics surrounding culture are changing, forcing internet representations of race and gender to follow suit. this study explores how the intersection of race with gender matters online. references duggan, m., & brenner, j. (2013). the demographics of social media users 2012. pew research center’s internet & american life project. erez, m., & earley, p. c. (1993). culture, self-identity, and work. new york: oxford university press. geertz, c. (2005). deep play: notes on the balinese cockfight. daedalus, 134(4), 56-86. hall, s. (1980). cultural studies: two paradigms. media, culture, and society, 2, 57-72. hewstone, m., hantzi, a., & johnston, l. (1991). social categorization and person memory: the pervasiveness of race as an organizing principle. european journal of social psychology, 21(6), 517-528. doi: 10.1002/ejsp.2420210606 koh, y. (2014, january 20). twitter users’ diversity becomes an ad selling point. wall street journal. retrieved from http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/sb1000142405270230441910457932344234664616 martin, j. n., & nakayama, t. k. (1999). thinking dialectically about culture and communication. communication theory, 9(1), 1-25. nash, j. c. (2008). re-thinking intersectionality. feminist review, 89, 1-15. park, n., kee, k. f., & valenzuela, s. (2009). being immersed in social networking environment: facebook groups, uses and gratifications, and social outcomes. cyberpsychology & behavior, 12(6), 729-733. pattillo-mccoy, m. (1998). church culture as a strategy of action in the black community. american sociological review, 63(6), 767-784. rainie, l., smith, a., & duggan, m. (2013). coming and going on facebook. pew research center’s internet & american life project. rockquemore, k. a., & arend, p. (2002). opting for white: choice, fluidity and racial identity construction in post civil-rights america. race and society, 5(1), 49-64. turner, j. c. & reynolds, k. j. (2011). self-categorization theory. in p. a. m. van lange, a. w. kruglanski, & e. t. higgins (eds.), handbook of theories of social psychology: volume two (pp. 399-417). london: sage. west, c. (1993). the new cultural politics of differences. in s. during (ed.), the cultural studies reader (pp. 203-220). london: routledge. microsoft word gotved-bjerager.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): gotved, s. & bjerager, k. (2014, october 22-24). privacy with public access: digital memorials on qr codes. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. privacy with public access: digital memorials on qr codes stine gotved it university of copenhagen klaus bjerager it university of copenhagen the focus in this short paper is how digital memorials perforate the (already uneasy) distinction between private and public, both in emotional and physical space. as a contemporary parallel to meyrowitz' (1985) elaboration of goffman's (1958) frontand backstage1, digital memorials are making the private grief visible to a much larger public than before. this goes for the many variations of memorials found in social media and throughout the web (gotved, 2014), whatever the set-ups for accessibility might be. indeed, the fast growing research area on digital memorials draws on the very fact of public (or semi-public) access, combined with different takes on participation and ethical issues. theoretical context the required actions around the physical death of an individual are transformed in tandem with the options available on the net (walter, hourizi, moncur, & pitsillides, 2011), and inherently involves the sharing of emotions (bensky & fisher, 2014; jakoby & reiser, 2014). even though news reports in the mass media for years have challenged the notion of sequestration2 (gibson, 2007; walter, littlewood, & pickering, 1995), public accessibility to private memorials is raising new questions of ethics, distinctions, and possible transgressions (phillips, 2011). furthermore, the following study builds on existing research of the offline cultural changes around physical death (hviid jacobsen, 2013), death represented online (gotved, 2014), and privacy as a question of contextual integrity (nissenbaum, 2010). research project 1 meyrowitz remarked on tv's ability to broadcast private spaces previously inaccessible to strangers, and thus redefined goffman's backstage into two: a mediated middlestage and a deep backstage. 2 hidden from everyday life, both institutionally (special places for the dying and the dead: giddens, 1992) and individually (grief as a private matter: walter, 1999) digital memorials come in many variations, and the empirical bases in this ongoing study are the qr (quick response) codes mounted on gravestones (cann, 2013). with the epicenter in japan (2004), qr codes on gravestones are a slowly spreading global phenomenon, closely connected to digital mobile technology and with unknown viability. as now, qr-codes have entered the cemeteries under the figurative radar. no authorities have been involved, no act of regulation is passed, and no priest seems to bother. the codes are literally set in stone and thus close to impossible to get rid of again, should the legislation catch up. with a qr code, the gravestone is at once physical and digital, underhandedly putting presumably private content within public reach. thus, issues of privacy and publicness are at play in the study's two connected but rather different empirical spaces: the physical space with the stonecutters, the cemetery, and the grave, and the emotional space of significance and forms of expression. accordingly, the methodology covers a range of different perspectives, including a cumbersome collection of geo-data, interviews with diverse stakeholders, and textual analysis of the uploaded material. the physical space in a danish context, the stonecutters are true gatekeepers in relation to qr codes on gravestones. they advertise, sell, deliver, and host the qr-code as part of their service. with two big chains and a score of independent stonecutters, the opinions on qr codes differ. the codes are acknowledged to merit some competition, but different issues concerning privacy surface in the sales material. similarly, several stonecutters are unwilling to participate in the study, as they regard the whole qr code transaction as confidential. the cemetery as a secluded space for contemplation is challenged by pervasive communication technology, and presumably, today most visitors bring their mobile phone. download of private memorials in a public space might disturb other visitors, either directly (by being, e.g., noisy) or ethically (perceived as out of line). the grave itself is a private spot, often clearly marked with small fences or hedges. one particular qr code design is extra large (5x7 cm) so the visitor can download from a respectful distance without trespassing. another 'solution' found to the apparent dilemma of privacy in public is to hide the qr code itself behind a small locked gate, thus making the sheer installation somewhat puzzling. in sum, the physical space around qr codes on gravestones is an arena for renewed negotiations of private public distinctions, closely connected to contextual integrity (nissenbaum, 2010) and the physical introduction of digital memorials. the emotional space a part of the study, not yet executed, is to do interviews, thus closing in on the subjective significance of the qr coded memorial. the stakeholders are the stonecutters, their customers (who might be identical with the 'chief mourners' (moncur, bikker, kasket, & troyer, 2012)), the closest family, the friends, and the random visitors to the grave. questions like 'who decide what is uploaded and why?', 'who are the imagined downloaders?' and 'how does download alter the visit to the grave?' does all pivot around issues of privacy with public access and are likely to produce important insights. likewise, the forms of expression (obituaries, letters, photos, drawings, videos, etc.) and the potential inclusion of social media profiles (e.g., memorialized facebook timelines or simulated tweets from “liveson”) points toward co-constructed legacies (kasket, 2012), even with a technology as pedestrian as the qr code. conclusion digital memorials represent a certain part of a bigger picture of changing rituals for mourning, remembrance, and legacy. in this study, the departure is gravestones with qr codes, as the overlap between physical and digital objects act as a prism for cultural change within the subjects of death, bereavement and memorials. the ongoing negotiation of definitions in the borderland between private and public is illustrated by examples from both physical and emotional space. with our study and the upcoming presentation, we are ensuring a continued discussion on privacy as well as legacy in our digital society. references bensky, t., & fisher, e. (eds.). (2014). internet and emotions. new york: routledge. cann, c. k. (2013). tombstone technology: deathscapes in asia, the u.k. and the u.s. in c. maciel & v. c. pereira (eds.), digital legacy and interaction (pp. 101–113). springer international publishing. gibson, m. (2007). death and mourning in technologically mediated culture. health sociology review, 16(5), 415–424. giddens, a. (1992). modernity and self-identity, self and society in the late modern age (repr.). cambridge: polity. goffman, e. (1958). the presentation of self in everyday life (2. impr.). edinburgh: university of edinburgh social sciences research centre. gotved, s. (2014). death online research review. thanatos. special issue on death, mourning and the internet, 3(1). hviid jacobsen, m. (ed.). (2013). deconstructing death – changing cultures of death, dying, bereavement and care in the nordic countries (vol. 457). university of southern denmark. jakoby, n. r., & reiser, s. (2014). grief 2.0: exploring virtual cemeteries. in t. bensky & e. fisher (eds.), internet and emotions. new york: routledge. kasket, e. (2012). being-towards-death in the digital age. existential analysis: journal of the society for existential analysis, 23(2). liveson. (n.d.). retrieved february 25, 2014, from http://liveson.org/connect.php meyrowitz, j. (1985). no sense of place, the impact of electronic media on social behavior (paperback ed.). new york: oxford. moncur, w., bikker, j., kasket, e., & troyer, j. (2012). from death to final disposition: roles of technology in the post-mortem interval. in proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 531–540). acm. nissenbaum, h. (2010). privacy in context: technology, policy, and the integrity of social life. stanford university press. phillips, w. (2011). loling at tragedy: facebook trolls, memorial pages and resistance to grief online. first monday, 16(12). walter, t. (1999). on bereavement, the culture of grief. buckingham: open university press. walter, t., hourizi, r., moncur, w., & pitsillides, s. (2011). does the internet change how we die and mourn? overview and analysis. omega--journal of death and dying, 64(4), 275–302. walter, t., littlewood, j., & pickering, m. (1995). death in the news: the public invigilation of private emotion. sociology, 29(4), 579–596. microsoft word boccia artieri-et-al.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): boccia artieri, g., gemini, l., giglietto, f., & orefice, m. (2014, october 2224). from #x6 to #serviziopubblico: cross-genre analysis of tv audience participatory practices in italy. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. from #xf6 to #serviziopubblico: cross-genre analysis of tv audience participatory practices in italy giovanni boccia artieri university of urbino carlo bo, italy laura gemini university of urbino carlo bo, italy fabio giglietto university of urbino carlo bo, italy mario orefice university of urbino carlo bo, italy trans-media usage practices, with a specific reference to the ones that imply strong correlation between tv viewing and online content production, are quickly becoming a fascinating field of study for scholars and practitioners. according to nielsen, during 2013, about 36 million people sent out 990 million of tweets about tv (nielsen socialguide 2014). at the same time, growing number of studies focus on users’ communicative dynamics while watching specific tv programs or genres (geerts and de grooff 2009). from surveys about participatory viewing styles and repertoires (mitchell et al. 2010, cesar and geerts 2011) to market-oriented researches (proulx and shepatin 2012), and more general attempts to go beyond habermasian definition of public sphere (de zúñiga, jung, and valenzuela 2012, fuchs 2014). from media adoption perspective, italy seems to be in line with general trend. showing increasing shares both in tv viewing and internet usage. in fact while, on the one side, average tv audience in a normal day raised of 1.8% from 2012 and “average time viewed” (the average daily time spent by every tv users) of 1.3% (nielsen 2013), on the other side, total amount of people using social networking sites like facebook and twitter, wikis or traditional websites passed from 53,8% to 58,7% (+5%) during 2013 (istat 2013). despite this complex and interesting scenario, analyses and researches aimed at highlight some kind of correlations between different tv viewing styles and online contents actually represents an underestimated field of study. opposite to this trend, this paper presents the first large-scale comparative study of twitter contributors’ behavior in commenting two different types of tv format. trying to validate (or refute) the main assumption according to which, while tv programs based on pure entertainment are more likely to develop within participatory audience some kind of self-representative or conversational practice tout court, political tv show viewing should be mainly focused on developing a sort of conversation-based civic engagement in which information as well as communication production and sharing appear to be highly covered with political/civic sense (bruns and stieglitz 2012). therefore, we will especially attempt to answer the following research questions: rq1. are twitter contributors taking part to conversations around political talk shows, different from contributors commenting around talent shows? do they show different patterns of behavior concerning form, topic and the explicit twitter recipient? rq2. what are (if there is) the most significant elements of continuity/discontinuity between these contributors regarding contents as well as communicative styles? rq3. to what extent socio-technical features of “twitter as platform” influence the emergence of tv-based participatory practices? to answer the above research questions we collected, during tv season 2012/2103, two complete datasets of tweets. the first consists of tweets (n=474,167) belonging to one of the most engaging italian political talk show named “servizio pubblico”. during the 28 episodes aired during the season, we observed an average of 17,196 tweets per episode. the second dataset contains tweets (n=772,018 tweets) published during the 9 live episodes aired during the season 2012/2013 of “x factor” italy. in both cases, we choose to collect only the twitter messages marked by the official hashtags launched by tv program itself (#serviziopubblico, #xf6). instead of random sampling the data – a strategy not always effective with highly skewed distribution such the one we are dealing with – we decided to focus our analysis on peaks of twitter activity. for both datasets we calculated a by minute time series of original tweets (excluding both reply and rt). on these time series, we run an algorithm for peaks detection (marcus 2011) identifying 115 peaks in the #xf6 dataset and 127 peaks in the #serviziopubblico one. a content analysis was carried on tweets (n=3,000) created in a random sample of 10 peaks for each dataset. for these 10 peaks we also analyzed the corresponding tv scene. references bruns, a., and stieglitz, s. 2012. quantitative approaches to comparing communication patterns on twitter. in journal of technology in human services, 30 (3-4), 160-185. cesar, p., and geerts, d. 2011. past, present, and future of social tv: a categorization. in proceedings of 2011 ieee consumer communications and networking conference (ccnc), 347-351. las vegas, nv: consumer communication and networking conferences (ccnc). couldry, n.; livingstone, s.; and markham, t. 2007. media consumption and public engagement: beyond the presumption of attention. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. dahlgren, p. 1995. television and the public sphere: citizenship, democracy, and the media. london: sage. de zúñiga, h.g., jung, n., and valenzuela, s. 2012. social media use for news and individuals’ social capital, civic engagement and political participation. in journal of computer-mediated communication (17) 3: 319-336. doughty, m., rowland, d., and lawson, s. 2012. who is on your sofa?: tv audience communities and second screening social networks. in proceedings of the 10th european conference on interactive tv and video euroitv ’12, 79-86. new york, ny: association for computing machinery. fuchs, c. ed. 2014. social media. a critical introduction. london: sage. geerts, d., and de grooff, d. 2009. supporting the social uses of television: sociability heuristics for social tv. in proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems, 595-604. boston, us: sigchi conference. giglietto, f., and selva, d. 2014. second screen and participation: a content analysis on a full season dataset. in journal of communication. forthcoming. highfield, t., harrington, s., and bruns, a. 2013. twitter as a technology for audiencing and fandom. in information, communication & society 16(3): 315–339. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2012.756053. istat, 2013, annuario statistico dell’istat, istat-istituto nazionale di statistica, roma, it. larsson, a. o. 2013. tweeting the viewer: use of twitter in a talk show context. journal of broadcasting & electronic media 57(2): 135–152. doi:10.1080/08838151.2013.787081 livingstone, s. 2005. audiences and publics: when cultural engagement matters for the public sphere. bristol: intellect. marcus, a., bernstein, m. s., badar, o., karger, d. r., madden, s., & miller, r. c. (2011). twitinfo. in proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on human factors in computing microsoft word oostveen-reisdorf-eccles.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): oostveen, a-m., reisdorf, b., & eccles, k. (2014, october 22-24). access denied: a qualitative study of inadequate broadband access in rural britain. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. access denied: a qualitative study of inadequate broadband access in rural britain anne-marie oostveen university of oxford bianca reisdorf university of leicester kathryn eccles university of oxford background adequate broadband access is necessary for business development & efficiency, social support, delivery of health and government services, leisure, consumption, employment, and educational services (townsend et al., 2013). although broadband is available to nearly all uk homes and commercial properties, there is a considerable disparity in the quality of access across the uk. variations are most evident between urban and rural areas: the more remote and sparsely populated a location, the more likely it is to experience slow connectivity. the most common type of broadband in the uk is via adsl and it is distance dependent; the connection speed relies on how close the household or business is to the nearest telephone exchange. the uk government defines adequate broadband as speeds of at least 2 megabits per second. whether this is still sufficient for the use of high bandwidth applications such as video conferencing or tv streaming is debatable. although the government has committed funding to improve broadband in rural areas, it has had to delay its initial target of universal availability of at least 2mb/s by 2015 to the year 2017. this is problematic, as ofcom reports that 8% of the uk population cannot currently access broadband of at least 2mb/s (2013, p. 21), while others claim that 11% of uk users are in such ‘slow spots’ (cswbroadband.org.uk). furthermore, internet speeds in rural areas are not just slow but also unreliable, and there is contention at peak times. variations in broadband connectivity have important implications, as the quality and speed of connections determine the activities and resources users can access adequately—in other words: inadequate access presents a boundary toward full online participation for those uk citizens living outside of urban areas. most studies on the availability and speed of internet access are of a quantitative nature. for instance, the oxis 2013 survey found that nearly a third (31%) of those living in deep rural areas say that their internet speed is always too slow for what they want to do, compared with 20% in shallow rural areas and only 6% in urban areas (dutton & blank, 2013). although quantitative studies give a first indication of the scope of the problem, they are not well suited to examine the actual impact of inadequate internet speed on the lives of people, nor do they give an insight into people’s strategies to cope with these problems. these more nuanced aspects are more appropriately examined with qualitative research methods. on the basis of a range of qualitative methods, our study will explore how the boundary of very limited broadband speed affects the daily lives of rural internet users. we will investigate how people work around the constraints and whether they opt for alternative technologies to get online. due to a counter-urbanization process (wealthier people move to the countryside in pursuit of a higher quality of life) there are rather mixed populations in rural areas, which can be both relatively rich and relatively poor. depending on their socio-economic position, users might have different strategies to cope with inadequate network performance. technologies such as satellite or mobile phone can provide alternatives for rural communities. however, these technologies are often expensive, have restricted data allowance, are slower than fixed lines, have a high latency, are susceptible to bad weather, get blocked by trees or clouds, and are sometimes complex to install. furthermore, public awareness of these alternatives might be low. research questions adequate broadband speed is important to make living and working in rural areas sustainable. in relation to recent digital inequality research and theories (helsper, 2011; van deursen & van dijk, 2013), we theorize that quality of access has a strong impact on the breadth of internet uses in rural communities, rather than a potential lack of skills as is often found to be the case in urban communities. research in rural communities is required to gain an understanding of the current and future access requirements across rural britain. this project will focus on how people living in rural areas are affected by the unavailability of (adequate) internet connections. the research questions for this study are: • how do people cope with inadequate internet speeds? do the strategies they employ depend on their socio-economic position? • what are the alternative technologies available to rural communities? are people aware of these technologies? to which degree are these alternative technologies considered to be viable options (in terms of cost, performance, speed, or complexity)? • what kind of public or community-based interventions are considered to be the most successful by rural communities? • does the distinction between ‘shallow’ and ‘deep’ rural areas enable a (more) meaningful comparison between different locations? methodology to shed light on theses questions, we will (initially) conduct semi-structured interviews and focus groups in four locations across england and wales. • face-to-face interviews. we will conduct 15 in-depth semi-structured interviews with adult internet users in each location, resulting in a total of 60 interviews. participants will also be asked to measure their internet speed during a 24-hour period. • focus groups. we will organise a focus group in each location with teenagers (between 12 and 18 years of age). these 4 focus groups will inform us how adolescents in rural areas cope with slower internet speeds and whether it affects their personal lives and their schoolwork. in a bigger follow-up study, we will look at additional rural areas across all of great britain to verify our findings from this pilot study. impact across different levels (eu, national, regional, county, local or community) considerable effort is being invested in developing policy measures that aim to increase the availability of internet services. a frequent critique of the current public policies is that the focus on super-fast broadband for the masses is diverting resources away from investments to implement universal access across all of the uk. our results from this project have considerable potential to influence policy regarding intervention by public bodies (e.g. subsidy or public procurement, service obligations on providers). we will inform efforts taken by central, devolved and local governments to develop intervention policies that target areas where the market will not deliver internet availability. policymakers may need to redress existing types of policy. in doing so, they may expand the scope of available opportunities and open avenues to local and community-based initiatives for which these avenues do not sufficiently exist. references dutton, w.h., & blank, g., with groselj, d. (2013). cutlures of the internet: the internet in britain. oxford internet survey 2013. oxford internet institute, university of oxford. helsper, e. j. (2011). the emergence of a digital underclass: digital policies in the uk and evidence for inclusion. lse media policy brief 3. available online: http://www.itslifejimbutnotasweknowit.org.uk/files/libraryfrom2012/digital_under class.pdf (last accessed: 24/02/14) ofcom (2013). uk communications infrastructure report. available online: http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/telecoms-research/infrastructure report/iru_2013.pdf (last accessed: 28/02/14) townsend, l., sathiaseelan, a., fairhurst, g., & wallace, c. (2013). enhanced broadband access as a solution to the social and economic problems of the rural digital divide. local economy, 28(6), 580-595. van deursen, a. j., & van dijk, j. a. (2013). the digital divide shifts to differences in usage. new media & society. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 from  moon  to  comet  landing:  re-­imagining  (scientific)   media  events  in  the  age  of  twitter     fabio  giglietto   università  di  urbino  carlo  bo     luca  rossi   university  of  copenhagen     jiyoung  kim   cyber  emotions  research  center       introduction  and  related  works       the  apollo  11  space  mission  took  place  46  years  ago.  it  was  an  international  event   covered  by  the  largest  media  sources  of  the  time.  the  global  participation  to  this   scientific  and  technological  achievement  is  commonly  considered  a  turning  point  in  the   history  of  media.       in  a  near-­perfect  comparison  to  the  famous  1969  event,  on  november  12  2014,  the   european  space  agency's  (esa)  rosetta  spacecraft  and  philae  made  history  landing   for  the  first  time  on  a  comet.       launched  toward  comet  67p/c-­g  in  2004,  rosetta  traveled  about  4  billion  miles   through  the  solar  system  before  reaching  the  comet  in  august.  the  lander  successfully   made  it  to  the  surface  of  comet  and  philae's  landing  signal  was  received  by  earth   communication  stations  at  16:03  utc  on  november  12.  one  minute  later1,  the  philae   lander  twitter  account  published  the  following  update  “touchdown!  my  new  address:   67p!  #cometlanding”,  putting  an  end  to  the  dramatic  waiting  of  users  watching  the  live   broadcast  provided  by  esa  and  nasa’s  website.       1  https://twitter.com/philae2014/status/532564514051735552.     suggested  citation  (apa):  giglietto,  f.,  rossi,  l.,.  &  kim,  j.  (2015,  october  21-­24)  from  moon  to  comet   landing:  re-­imagining  (scientific)  media  events  in  the  age  of  twitter.  paper  presented  at  internet   research  16:  the  16th  annual  meeting  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  phoenix,  az,  usa:   aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.     #cometlanding  was  therefore  a  (1)  live  transmission,  (2)  of  a  pre-­planned  event,  (3)   framed  in  time  and  space,  (4)  featuring  a  heroic  personality  or  group,  (5)  having  high   dramatic  significance.  all  but  one  “(6)  the  force  of  a  social  norm  which  makes  viewing   mandatory”  of  the  necessary  conditions  identified  by  katz  as  the  basic  ingredients  of  a   media  event,  are  clearly  met  (1980).         while  even  traditional  well  established  events  such  as  the  broadcast  of  the  olympic   games  are  increasingly  facing  challenges  in  fitting  the  original  definition  of  the  concept   (rivenburgh  2002),  it  is  clear  that  a  media  event  must,  by  definition,  interrupt  daily  lives.   both  broadcasters  and  the  audience  adjust  their  schedules  to  attend  the  event.       was  this  the  case  for  #cometlanding?  can  we  still  talk  about  media  events  when  the   audience  feeling  viewing  as  mandatory  is  a  globally  scattered  elite,  instead  of  the   masses?  how  the  traditional  role  played  by  the  media  changes  when  internet’s   disintermediation  make  it  possible  for  the  creator  of  a  media  event  to  also  act  as   narrator?         in  this  proposal  we  present  the  preliminary  results  of  an  ongoing  study  on  these  issues.   results  are  based  on  the  analysis  of  twitter  live  commentary  collected  during  the  hours   immediately  before  and  after  the  landing  of  the  rover  on  the  comet.       we  focused  on  the  following  questions:       rq1)  how  #cometlanding  compares  to  previously  studied  twitter  media  events?  rq2)   who  are  the  actors  involved  in  the  twitter  live  commentary  of  #cometlanding?  rq3)   what  role  have  the  various  actors  played  during  the  event?     rq4)  are  there  any  traces  showing  that  the  audience  really  perceived  viewing  as   mandatory  and  adjusted  their  schedule  to  attend  the  event?       methodology       using  twitter  streaming  api,  we  collected  406,011  tweets  (210,239  unique  contributors)   containing  either  #cometlanding  or  #rosetta  hashtags  and  created  between     2014-­11-­12  16:03:25  cet  and  2014-­11-­12  20:49:34  cet.         in  order  to  answer  the  research  questions  we  employed  a  mixed  method  approach.  we   started  with  a  quantitative  analysis  of  the  twitter  metrics  (rt,  @replies,  tweet  with  url)   and  the  network  structure  of  the  dataset.         concerning  rq1,  following  the  approach  used  by  bruns  and  stieglitz  (2013)  to  classify   media  and  emergency/crisis  twitter  events,  we  compared  #cometlanding  with  other   events  ranging  from  #londoriots  to  #royalwedding  and  #eurovision.       for  rq2  and  rq3  we  have  extracted  both  the  reply  network  and  retweet  network.   these  networks  have  been  analysed  through  standard  social  network  analysis   techniques  that  have  been  previously  applied  to  the  study  of  twitter  data  about  media   events  (highfield,  harrington,  and  bruns  2013;;  rossi  and  magnani  2012)       finally,  in  order  to  answer  rq4,  we  planned  a  content  analysis  of  a  sample  of  original   tweets.  the  sampling  technique  will  leverage  the  results  of  quantitative  analysis.         preliminary  results       mapping  the  percentage  or  retweets  and  tweets  with  url  in  several  different  twitter   datasets,  bruns  and  stieglitz  (2013)  observed  the  emergence  of  two  clearly   distinguished  clusters:  crisis/emergency  events  (e.g.  #tsunami,  #londonriot,  #lybia)  and   media  events  (e.g.  #eurovision,  #royalwedding).       as  shown  in  figure  1,  both  retweets  and  tweets  with  url  are  significantly  present  in   twitter  commentaries  around  #cometlanding.       figure  1.  cometlanding  is  closer  to  emergency/crisis  events  than  media  once       under  this  perspective,  the  deeds  of  philae  and  rosetta  seems  to  have  more  in   common  with  crisis/emergency  events  than  media  once.  the  scientific  nature  of  the   event  itself,  may  have  discouraged  some  viewers  to  express  their  personal  opinions   with  original  comments.  at  the  same  time,  the  slow  approach  of  a  lander  on  a  comet   miles  away  from  earth,  is  not  in  itself  a  news  event  rich  of  developments.         nevertheless,  judging  from  the  list  of  top  retweeted  contributors  (table  1),  the  twitter   account  of  esa’s  probe  and  lander  were  very  central  to  the  conversation.  if  the   presence  of  an  hero  is  an  ingredient  of  what  katz  filed  under  “conquest  media  events”,   philae  and  rosetta  definitely  played  this  role.       username   retweets   type   philae2014   65,416   lander   esa_rosetta   33,223   probe   esaoperations   14,369   space   agency   bbcbreaking   12,633   news   nasa   6,370   space   agency   esa   5,202   space   agency   observingspace   4,124   website   mashable   3,453   website   badastronomer   2,460   website   nasajpl   2,208   space   agency   table  1.  typology  of  top  retweeted  users       it  is  worth  to  note  that,  unlike  what  usually  happens  on  twitter  where  the  account  of   well-­established  news  outlets  are  often  prominent  (highfield,  harrington,  and  bruns   2013),  only  bbc  breaking  is  present  in  table  1.  furthermore,  this  account  appears  to   be  disconnected  from  the  network  of  reciprocal  retweets  that  links  the  major  actors   (figure  2).       figure  2.  retweet  network:  node  size  and  color  according  to  degree  centrality           conclusions       despite  the  similarities  with  the  moon  landing,  preliminary  results  of  our  study  clearly   show  a  marginal  role  played  by  mainstream  media  and  a  prominent  role  played  by  the creator  of  the  event  (esa).  esa  (together  with  nasa)  created,  broadcasted  and   narrated  the  event  making  an  example  of  how  to  disintermediate  a  media  event  or,  in   other  terms,  how  to  run  a  media  event  without  the  media.  the  online  media  strategy   performed  by  esa  (e.g  the  twitter  “conversations”  between  philae  and  rosetta)   provided  an  experience  of  liveness  (couldry  2004)  for  something  that  was  actually   happening  miles  away  from  earth  and  25  minutes  before  (due  to  the  communications   delay).       the  planned  but  not  yet  performed  content  analysis  will  allow  a  better  understanding  of   the  intentions  and  feelings  of  the  online  audience  of  this  atypical  (or  brand  new  type  of)   media  event.         references       bruns,  axel,  and  stefan  stieglitz.  2013.  “towards  more  systematic  twitter  analysis:   metrics  for  tweeting  activities.”  international  journal  of  social  research   methodology  16  (2).  routledge:  91–108.     couldry,  nick.  2004.  “liveness,  ‘reality,’  and  the  mediated  habitus  from  television  to   the  mobile  phone.”  the  communication  review  7  (4).  routledge:  353–61.     highfield,  tim,  stephen  harrington,  and  axel  bruns.  2013.  “twitter  as  a   technology  for  audiencing  and  fandom.”  information,   communication  and  society  16  (3).  routledge:  315–39.     katz,  elihu.  1980.  “media  events:  the  sense  of  occasion.”  studies  in  visual   communication  6  (3).  repository.upenn.edu:  84–89.     rivenburgh,  nancy  k.  2002.  “the  olympic  games:  twenty-­first  century  challenges  as   a  global  media  event.”  culture,  sport  society  5  (3):  32–50.     rossi,  luca,  and  matteo  magnani.  2012.  “conversation  practices  and  network   structure  in  twitter.”  in  icwsm.  aaai.org.   http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/icwsm/icwsm12/paper/viewpdfinterstitial/4 634%26  lt%3b/5058.   microsoft word 804-551-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 legal issues in byop: bring your own persona abstract increasingly businesses are requiring or encouraging employees to maintain a presence on social media either through personal media use or control of a corporate account. this paper defines this kind of social media use as bring your own persona, as corporations are using the social media popularity of their employees for potential economic gain. but issues surrounding employee use and control of social media are emerging, causing businesses to go to court to assert social media account ownership, or to defend against claims of unauthorized access. this paper examines the court cases that have arisen connected to byop. keywords social media, appropriation, property, privacy introduction in december 2010 jill e. maremont, a public relations professional, filed a lawsuit against her former employer, susan fredman design group (sfdg), claiming the company violated the both lanham act and the illinois right of publicity act, and invaded her privacy when sfdg employees made posts to her personal social media accounts, as well as posted to the business social media account in her name (maremont v. susan fredman design group, ltd, 2011). to be sure, maremont is not the only individual suing or being sued by their former employer for social media related issues. a man was sued by his former employer for changing his twitter account name and password, thus taking the 17,000 followers, many of which he amassed while working for the company, with him to his new employer (phonedog, llc v. kravitz, 2011). that case settled in 2012, but it, along with the maremont case and others demonstrate an emerging issue for all businesses using social media: the problems with “bring your own persona” (byop) policies. byop the researcher defines bring your own persona as the requirement that employees have and maintain their own online social media presence, as well as the act of a business placing an employee in charge of running a social media account connected to the business, though not necessarily the business’ official account. the researcher calls this phenomenon byop as a reference to a related trend in business, “bring your own device,” in which companies allow employees to use their own smart devices or provide employees with smart technology in the workplace, and as a direct invocation of the marketing practices from which business social media usage has its foundation (oliver, 2012). the definition of “persona” has a latin origin and means the face the individual wears in public or during social interaction (perlman, 1986). carl jung described the persona as “a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual” (jung, 1953, p.190). beyond psychology, the idea of the persona is used in marketing as a character or archetype created to represent a targeted population. marketers create a persona in an attempt to attract potential customers (mayfield, 2005; pike 2010). this includes the creation and maintenance of social media accounts. businesses have adopted a similar marketing strategy and are increasingly asking their employees to maintain presences on the major social networking sites including, twitter, facebook and tumblr. in fact, some media organizations have begun using the number of social media account followers as a barometer for prospective employees. businesses believe that the corporate brand and consumer base may grow with the addition of employees with strong social media presences (miller, 2012). an employee’s social media presence may also be a cause for concern should that employee ever decide to leave the company. although researchers have and are currently studying the impact of social media on business and the use of social media strategy by business, little research exists concerning the legal issues related to having employees create and maintain social media personas related to their work. this paper aims to fill in the gaps in this research. methods selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 the researcher used legal research methods, which involves the analysis of trends and precedents in court opinions. this research examines the trends in the cases involving businesses and their employees, current or former, over the ownership, use, or access to a social media account. more specifically, the researcher analyzed these cases to establish the kinds of issues emerging from byop and how the courts are ruling in these cases. findings the cases found in this research trended into three categories: ownership, appropriation, and access. ownership cases grouped in the ownership category usually involve a conflict between the business and former employee concerning who owns social media information. the information at issue may be the social media profile, the followers or connections related to the profile, or the information published in connection that profile. for example, in phonedog v. kravitz, a case that the parties settled in december 2012, a company sued its former employee over ownership of a twitter account. the company claimed that it owned both the employee’s twitter account name and the followers connected to that account. other cases also involve the ownership of social media account followers with businesses claiming quasi-property rights by way of trade secret. appropriation case categorized under appropriation deal with the unauthorized use of an employee’s social media account. the maremont case mentioned above demonstrates the kind of claims that former employees have made against businesses. in maremont the plaintiff claimed that her employer had made posts to her personal as well as the sfdg facebook and twitter accounts promoting the business. because of this, maremont argued that the business had violated her right of publicity under both federal trademark law and state statute. the right of publicity recognizes the economic value in the personas of those who have attained a certain level of fame or notoriety, and allows the individual to control who uses their name or likeness for a commercial purpose (mccarthy, 1995). other cases under appropriation involve similar unauthorized use of a social media profile such as the taking of the linkedin profile of a former employee. access both the ownership and appropriation cases involve the issue of access, whether it be access to information, profiles, or social media connections. in the ownership cases a specific issue concerned who, the former employee or the business, should have access to the social media profile and, therefore, the connections to that profile. for businesses the connections are viewed as potential customers, and lack of access to those customers removes the ability to profit from those connections. another important access issue concerned who should have the ability publish posts or updates to a social media profile. conclusion the various kinds of legal cases found, and that lawsuits exist, demonstrate the possible issues with byop. in spite of the risks, the continuing popularity of social media and business use of social media will mean an increase in byop usage. because of this, it is imperative that businesses take steps to avoid the lawsuits by instituting byop policies. the policies would offer guidelines and expectations for employees using social media. a byop could go so far as to create a contract between the business and the employee addressing the issues of ownership, appropriation and access mentioned above. the policies may not prevent all possible issues related to required or encouraged employee social media use. without such policies, however, business and employees are open to conflicts similar to those mentioned above. references jung, c. (1953). two essays on analytical psychology. london: routledge & kegan paul, ltd. maremont v. susan fredman design group, ltd. 772 f. supp. 2d 967 (2011). mayfield, b. (2005, february). rainmaking: business development and retention techniques. the practical lawyer, 24, 45-47. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 mccarthy, j.t. (1995). the human persona as commercial property: the right of publicity. columbia journal of law & the arts, 19, 129-148. miller, n. (2012). who has the right to a twitter account and its followers?. journal of intellectual property law & practice, 7(1), 39-43. oliver, r. (2012, november). why the byod boom is changing how we think about business it. engineering & technology, 7(10), 28. perlman, h.h. (1986). persona: the social role and personality. chicago, il: university of chicago press. phonedog llc v. kravitz. no. c 11-03474 mej (2011). pike, b. (2010, november). persona management. computer fraud & security, 11, 11-15. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): büchi, m, just, n., & latzer, m. (2016, october 5-8). enhancing online privacy at the user level: the role of internet skills and policy implications. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. enhancing online privacy at the user level: the role of internet skills and policy implications moritz büchi university of zurich natascha just university of zurich michael latzer university of zurich in contemporary information societies internet users permanently balance the benefits of information disclosure and the risk of privacy incursions (acquisti et al., 2015). such societies are marked by several defining features: big (social) data as a new asset class, new methods of extracting economic and social value from big data, a high potential for growth in data-driven management in many sectors, and a growing platformization of internet-based (social media) markets that depend on the revelation of personal data. in such an environment, online privacy has become a widely discussed and highly controversial example of rule-making and rule-breaking in the digital age. on the one hand, the unprecedented availability of data on individuals’ personal information, behavior, communication, and transactions has prompted much debate and research on the connected risks in terms of loss of privacy, privacy violations, and surveillance. on the other hand, information disclosure and sharing also enhance and personalize services, simplify transactions, and strengthen social ties and social capital. it is thus rarely an attractive option for individuals to entirely opt out of services that potentially threaten both their privacy and the control over their own personal data (van dijck, 2013). from a public-policy perspective, this calls for adequate policies and rules for privacy protection (bennett & parsons, 2013). accordingly, the discussion of privacy governance on the internet has gained prominence – propelled by widely discussed surveillance scandals (e.g., nsa) and sensational law suits (e.g., against google and facebook) – for example by the resolution of the united nations general assembly on the right to privacy in the digital age (a/res/68/167). privacy behavior is also related to digital inclusion (park, 2013). internet uses and skills are associated with existing social inequalities (robinson et al., 2015; hargittai, 2008), thus disadvantaged internet users are likely to be more vulnerable to privacy threats. in order to avoid transforming control over personal information into a luxury good, privacy should be governed as a basic necessity in the information society; not being able to put the internet to effective and beneficial use may hinder digital inclusion. therefore, the extent to which internet users can and do manage their personal online information while still benefiting from the use of data-hungry internet services moves to the center of public-policy attention. self-help (self-protection) is one of several adequate measures against privacy risks (latzer, price, saurwein, & verhulst, 2007) and the potential for private solutions is high, ranging from not using problematic services to technical selfhelp. in contrast, individual self-regulation by companies and collective industry selfregulation lack the necessary incentives, because companies profit from personal data (saurwein, just, & latzer, 2015). accordingly, default privacy settings are generally low and have decreased over time (acquisti et al., 2015), compelling users to become active. nonetheless, although users are increasingly concerned about their privacy, research reveals the phenomenon of a “privacy paradox,” meaning that despite knowledge and concern about risks, users readily share information and engage in behavior that could threaten their privacy (norberg et al., 2007; kokolakis, 2015). hence it is in the public interest to better understand internet users’ active privacy protection, including enablers and barriers, as well as options for state interventions concerning privacy protection that might reduce barriers to self-help. with internet diffusion rates around 80% or more in many developed countries and with privacy risks becoming apparent not only for applications that entail explicit information disclosure, there is a gap in research on privacy-protecting behavior covering the whole range of internet activities. in order to understand and govern privacy risks, wellfounded knowledge is required on factors that influence the degree of individuals’ selfhelp. the empirical part of this paper thus addresses the question of which factors explain self-protective privacy behavior online. the study used nationally representative survey data from switzerland (n=1121), analyzed concrete actions to protect privacy, and examined the role of general internet skills (see van deursen, helsper, & eynon, 2015). a latent variable structural equation model tested the effects of privacy breaches, privacy attitudes, and internet skills on the level of privacy protection (χ2(84)=159.53 (p<.001), cfi=.980, rmsea=.03, srmr=.03). three main findings were gained from the empirical analysis: first, perceived data abuse and concrete experiences of privacy violations (β=.41) are associated with higher levels of self-protection, suggesting a “learning the hard way” mechanism. second, pro-privacy attitudes (β=.18) as evaluations of the sensitivity of personal information have a significant but relatively weak positive influence on privacy self-protection. third, internet skills (β=.57) have by far the strongest effect on behavior. it is thus general internet skills that best explain the extent to which users actively protect their privacy online – merely caring about privacy is evidently not sufficient to provoke strong self-protective behavior. these insights are particularly relevant for rule-making and research concerned with digital inclusion: internet skills are an asset in market economies and are associated with a broad range of beneficial internet uses, yet they are unequally distributed in the population based on existing stratification by social class and status. the finding that skills rather than attitudes mainly influence privacy self-help behavior leads to the conclusion that policies aimed at empowering users may promise little success if concerned solely with raising awareness. this directs the attention to governance strategies that foster skill development and ensure that digital skills are developed, maintained and enhanced on a continuous basis. references acquisti, a., brandimarte, l., & loewenstein, g. (2015). privacy and human behavior in the age of information. science, 347(6221), 509-514. doi:10.1126/science.aaa1465 bennett, c. j., & parsons, c. (2013). privacy and surveillance: the multidisciplinary literature on the capture, use, and disclosure of personal information in cyberspace. in w. h. dutton (ed.), the oxford handbook of internet studies (pp. 486–508). oxford, uk: oxford university press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199589074.013.0023 hargittai, e. (2008). the digital reproduction of inequality. in d. grusky (ed.), social stratification (pp. 936–944). boulder, co: westview press. kokolakis, s. (2015). privacy attitudes and privacy behaviour: a review of current research on the privacy paradox phenomenon. computers & security. doi:10.1016/j.cose.2015.07.002 latzer, m., price, m. e., saurwein, f., & verhulst, s. (2007). comparative analysis of international coand self-regulation. vienna, austria: institute of technology assessment of the austrian academy of sciences. norberg, p. a., horne, d. r., & horne, d. a. (2007). the privacy paradox: personal information disclosure intentions versus behaviors. journal of consumer affairs, 41(1), 100-126. doi:10.1111/j.1745-6606.2006.00070.x park, y. j. (2013). digital literacy and privacy behavior online. communication research, 40(2), 215-236. doi:10.1177/0093650211418338 robinson, l., cotten, s. r., ono, h., quan-haase, a., mesch, g., chen, w., … stern, m. j. (2015). digital inequalities and why they matter. information, communication & society, 18(5), 569-582. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2015.1012532 saurwein, f., just, n., & latzer, m. (2015). governance of algorithms: options and limitations. info, 17(6), 35–49. doi:10.1108/info-05-2015-0025 van deursen, a., helsper, e. j., & eynon, r. (2015). development and validation of the internet skills scale (iss). information, communication & society. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2015.1078834 van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. oxford, uk: oxford university press. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): kligler-vilenchik, n. (2016, october 5-8). . paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. neta kligler-vilenchik, hebrew university of jerusalem theorists point to informal political talk as a way for citizens to deepen their understanding of why the political world matters to them, form opinions, and set the ground for collective action (barber, 1984). in particular, scholars stress the benefits of cross-cutting conversation, involving exchange of dissimilar perspectives (delli carpini, cook, & jacobs, 2004). yet informal political talk is recognized as a challenging endeavor (e.g. eliasoph, 1998). the promises and perils of informal political talk cannot be treated as equal across geographical and cultural contexts. in comparison to the us context, israeli society exhibits greater openness towards political talk (e.g. mor, kligler-vilenchik & maoz, 2015). at the same time, israeli political talk has its own challenges, many of which are mirrored in online spaces. online discourse in israel often takes up extremely volatile tones (the berl katznelson foundation, 2015), making the challenge to achieve talk that is civil (papacharissi, 2004), that involves listening to opposing points of view while maintaining mutual respect. over the past two decades, the rise of digital media has afforded additional contexts for political conversation. in the study of naturally-occurring online political talk, the early optimism of scholars excited about the deliberative potential of online spaces (see, e.g., papacharissi, 2002) soon gave way to more realistic and nuanced analyses, investigating the nature of actual political talk online, where most discussion groups consist of people with similar political views (wojcieszak & mutz, 2009). against this backdrop, more recent technological advances offer innovative contexts for political talk. one such context is whatsapp a mobile instant messaging application, both cell-based and web-based, that has gained immense popularity in israel (vidal, ziv & orpaz, 2015). in israel, it is particularly the (free) group messaging affordance that has proliferated. whatsapp groups have become a prevalent phenomenon among school-children, parent groups, families, workplaces and more (fisher, 2013). case study and method this project investigates two whatsapp groups specifically dedicated to informal political talk among a heterogeneous group of israeli citizens. leading up to the 2015 israeli election, prominent political blogger tal schneider created whatsapp groups dedicated to informal political conversation with the pitch anyone, through payment of a nominal monthly fee of 15 nis, and are extremely active. group members are heterogeneous in terms of age, gender, religion/religiosity, and political identification, spanning the full spectrum of israeli politics, from far right to far left. these political discussion groups are a unique case study in that they are a naturallyoccurring site of informal political talk across significant political difference. yet, unlike much of israeli political discourse online, these groups are generally characterized by a willingness to talk to others, hear their viewpoints, and attempt to persuade rationally. moreover, the characteristics of the mobile instant-messaging medium make this a fascinating context for political conversation. an app embedded within the mobile phone, the whatsapp group accompanies participants everywhere they go, and for many is always-on, creating a heightened sense of intimacy and presence (rosenberg, ). the research method for this project is threefold. first, group conversations are qualitatively content analyzed to identify instances of disagreement, serving as the units of analysis, and within them, mechanisms of conflict management and resolution are identified. the second method consists of in-depth interviews with group participants, with the goal . a third method entails participant-observation, both in the whatsapp group, and in face-to-face gatherings. initial findings mediated mechanisms of conflict management and resolution 1. what can we agree on and where do we part in instances of disagreement, participants often employ a method of hashing out areas of agreement, even when it seems initially unlikely, to then hone in on areas of disagreement left. in the course of sometimes long exchanges of whatsapp messages, often between a dyad, what starts out as a fundamental disagreement on core beliefs is agree to disagree while 2. brute force / persistence not in all cases are disagreements settled so civilly. in some cases, some members of the disagreeing participant. in cases like this, the whatsapp medium plays a key role. as the mobile phone accompanies participants in their daily lives, some participants will often give up a long-lasting conversation because they have to attend to other matters, or are simply fed up with texting messages. in these cases, the more persistent participants often these with the more ideologically extreme views will often be seen as dominating the discussion space. 3. governing the boundaries of acceptable speech schneider, the group administrator, takes a neutral role, so far having never banned participants. yet the group governs the boundaries of acceptable speech, not so much by pushing out deviant participants, but rather by highlighting their deviant behavior by the deviant members are left as participants, they recognize their own behavior as having crossed the line and may, at least for a time, self-correct. through identifying these mechanisms, this research of political disagreement and identify mechanisms of conflict management or resolution. while much work investigates political disagreement (e.g. kim & kim, 2008), this work usually relies on self-reported disagreement, and we have a surprisingly limited understanding of what political disagreement looks like, and how one can move beyond it, particularly in the israeli context. furthermore, this research pinpoints the characteristics and potential of the whatsapp medium as a new and understudied site for heterogeneous political talk. references barber, b. (1984). strong democracy: participatory politics for a new age. berkeley, ca: uc press. delli carpini, m.x., cook, f.l. & jacobs, r. (2004). public deliberation, discursive participation, and citizen engagement: a review of the empirical literature. annual review of political science,7(1), 315-344. eliasoph, n. (1998). avoiding politics: how americans produce apathy in everyday life. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. fisher, i. (2013, september 26). facebook is dead: long live the new king the whatsapp group. themarker (hebrew). http://hasata.berl.co.il/ kim, j. & kim, e.j. (2008). theorizing dialogic deliberation: everyday political talk as communicative action and dialogue. communication theory, 18, 51-70. mor, y., kligler-vilenchik, n. & maoz, i. (2015). political expression on facebook in a context of conflict: dilemmas and coping strategies of jewish-israeli youth. social media + society, 1(2), 1-10. papacharissi, z. (2004). democracy online: civility, politeness, and the democratic potential of online political discussion groups. new media & society, 6(2), 259-283. rosenberg, h. (2014). taking mom in the backpack with me: the cellular phone and the backpacking experience. media frames, 13, 39-62. (hebrew) schneider, t. (2015, january 5). my first whatsapp group (hebrew). the plog: tal http://www.talschneider.com/2015/01/05/theplogwhatsapp/ vidal, e., ziv, a. & orpaz, i. (2015, december 29). tech nation: whatsapp top israeli mobile app, poll finds. haaretz.com. available: http://www.haaretz.com/israelnews/business/.premium-1.694289 news media appropriation: strategical possibilities of pro-am on twitter 1 news media appropriation: strategical possibilities of pro-am on twitter gabriela zago universidade federal do rio grande do sul brazil gabriela.zago@ufrgs.br vivian belochio universidade federal do rio grande do sul brazil vicabel@terra.com.br abstract this paper aims to characterize pro-am possibilities in a specific social network site, twitter microblog, considering it as a journalistic strategy. the exploratory study is based on the observation of twitter's use of two world leading newspapers, el país, from spain, and the guardian, from united kingdom. we've perceived some practices that point to a collaboration between amateurs and professionals on the production and circulation of news, showing traces that twitter can be integrated into the journalistic process as a whole. among other things, we've noted two movements that indicate that pro-am may take place on twitter or from twitter. as we show in the article, this can be perceived a) by invitations to collaborate and the establishment of conversations with the public (specially in the guardian’s twitter account) and b) by the use of hashtags that can be replicated by the users when posting or commenting on twitter about news (on both twitter accounts analyzed). keywords journalism; pro-am; media convergence; twitter. everyday, new tools and web services appear, with different proposals and for different purposes. individuals, who use them with many interests, appropriate these spaces in different ways. some of these spaces and appropriations may have implications for journalistic practice. 2 this is the case of twitter, whose appropriation for news circulation made news media outlets to also seek to use the space for the extension of its contents (jenkins, 2006), as well of its contexts of actions. however, because it is a relatively new tool, there isn’t, yet, a precise set of rules and procedures to follow1 1 first steps towards this were taken by the end of june, 2011, when twitter launched twitter for newsrooms, a guide for news organizations on the tool, available at http://media.twitter.com/newsrooms/ , which makes room for new and interesting appropriations to emerge, from the practices tested and observed. based on this scenario, this paper aims to discuss the pro-am movement, described by anderson (2006) as the partnership between amateurs and professionals with the help of digital communication, as a process that is possible from the appropriation made by news media on twitter. the study presents the results from an exploratory qualitative analysis of the practices observed in twitter’s use of two world-leading newspapers, el país, from spain, and the guardian, from united kingdom. as discussed throughout the paper, those outlets seem to use a launch and learn strategy (saad, 2003) in their approach on the tool. the article is divided into three parts, followed by conclusions. in part 1, we discuss pro-am and produsers. in part 2, we talk about twitter as a space where a new standard of information exchange can be observed. in part 3, we discuss the pro-am possibilities on twitter, based on our empirical observations. among other things, we've noted two movements that indicate that pro-am may take place on twitter or from twitter. as we show in the article, this can be perceived a) by invitations to collaborate and the establishment of conversations with the public and b) by the use of hashtags that can be replicated by the users when posting or commenting on twitter about news. in the end, some points are raised for discussion in the form of preliminary conclusions, about the possible relationship between pro-am, journalism and twitter. pro-am and produsers: amateurs and professionals cooperation pro-am is a process described by anderson (2006) as the partnership work among amateurs and professionals using possibilities that are brought by the digital media. as the author says, the term was coined by demos, a british think tank, to describe a scientific discovery about how the universe works that was confirmed thanks to the collaboration between amateurs from new zealand, australia and chile and professionals from the united states and japan. this experience was considered the key moment in the arrival of a “pro-am” era, “a time when professionals and amateurs work side by side” (anderson, 2006, p.60). 3 the dynamics of the exchanges established by the implantation of systems that support the participation of readers on digital news outlets show that this phenomenon may be taking place on journalism (ruellan, 2007; belochio, 2009; bruns, 2010). it can be observed when digital newspapers request the user submission of texts, pictures and videos about certain events that they can’t cover in a broad and instantaneous way by themselves. by this action, news outlets seek to expand quality and quantity of information and details about the events they work with, through the help received from the amateur public. in addition to this, pro-am can also be perceived when exchanges between collaborative pages and media outlets take place, by the appropriation of those contents in order to enrich their coverage. ruellan (2007, p.2) believes that actions such as the one aforementioned shed new light “on the relationship in the media and journalism between professional and amateur practices”. to bruns (2008), these initiatives demonstrate the collaborator’s importance as a “produser”. he coined the expression in order to refer to the individual that simultaneously uses and produces web contents. new participation models allow ordinary people to collaborate with the production of information, what then turns users into produsers (bruns, 2008). besides news consumption, they also have and active part on the content production process. the idea of a produsage opposes to traditional models of industrial production. on traditional production, there were three clear roles: producer, distributor and consumer. on the internet, a single individual can simultaneously play those three roles. to bruns (2005), everyone has at least the potential to publish something. however, what is much more important in the networked environment of the early 21st century is that today, anyone with access to the web can be an editor, a contributor, a collaborator, a participant in the online news process – in short, a produser (bruns, 2005, p.8). in this sense, users’ participation on news construction in digital environments is not limited to the possibility of autonomously publishing contents. web users can collaborate in other forms to the production and distribution of information, as by suggesting topics, or commenting on traditional news sites. bowman & willis (2003) lists some of the roles that can be played by the audience on participative journalism: publishing, audio and video broadcast, editing, content creation (text, pictures, video, cartoon), comments and opinion, documentation, content management and publishing. 4 to bruns (2008), in face to active audiences, news ceases to be a product to become a process, “never finished, always continuing, and (…) gradually evolving towards a better understanding of ‘the truth’” (bruns, 2008, p.82). thus, these produsers can collaborate in many steps of the journalistic process, making clear a relationship among amateurs and professionals, the pro-am. bruns (2010, p.11) believes that “given the challenging financial circumstances currently experienced by the journalism industry, such disruptive innovation at the pro/am interface – now visible in a few early projects – may be just what it needs” (bruns, 2010, p.11). with pro-am initiatives, journalism can be reinvented and expanded into many ways. twitter as a support for a new pattern in the exchange of information twitter has been constantly appropriated and shaped by individuals, organizations and institutions as journalism. the microblog is gradually moving away from its original purpose of being a space to share personal information, originally in response to the question “what are you doing?”, to become a more complex medium, in which different actors – individuals, companies, news media outlets – can interact in different forms in real time. it is probably because of these changes that twitter modified its main question, that since 2009 is “what’s happening?”. perhaps because of this particularity on the appropriation, news media outlets have the tendency to join the tool using a strategy described by saad (2003) as “launch and learn”. referring to the adaptation of traditional news organizations to the demands of the web at the beginning of the millennium, the researcher explains that media conglomerates would first launch their sites on the web to then later learn, in practice and with market reactions, what directions to take and which strategy to follow (saad, 2003, p.123). we believe that this type of experience is taking place nowadays with twitter. this idea is supported by the fact that reference newspapers are present on the tool, even though they don’t have a clear strategy of how to use it. appropriation gradually takes shape, while learning to deal and interact with the new medium. thus, even though at first news outlets tended to use twitter just as a means to share headlines and links (zago, 2009), they are gradually promoting experimentations and creating new uses and appropriations to the tool (silva & christofoletti, 2010; zago & recuero, 2011). according to silva & christofoletti (2010), twitter operates as an extra intermediate between senders and receivers of news, in a modern, portable, quick and free way. 5 hermida (2010) believes that microblogging services such as twitter allows individuals to exercise institutionalized functions of journalists. to the author, systems that allow collaborative exchanges constitutes an ambient journalism, in which citizens would be responsible for the production of small pieces of contents that could collectively be considered as journalism. in this paper, we understand that the increasingly frequent manifestation of the traditional media on twitter shows that the tool has become important among the strategies employed by digital news media. therefore, we ask whether the microblog is considered as just one more resource in order to attract new readers, or more than that. what are the reasons to the delivering of journalistic contents on twitter? digital newspapers have clear objectives when creating an account and providing their content in twitter? one of the reasons that may lead reference newspapers to appropriate the microblog is the fact that it is becoming an important element in what primo (2008) calls the “media information compound”, “a set of information technologically disseminated by the media that serve to the individual update on news” (primo, 2008, p. 46). in other words, the compound is formed by the content broadcasted by news media with which a citizen has access day to day. a user consumes different information in many supports throughout a day. based on that, they interpret those data and incorporate them into their routines, according to their needs. twitter is one of the means through which individuals can construct their impressions about facts and about reality. because of that, it becomes an important place for the news media outlets to be present. thus, these outlets perform a movement called by jenkins (2006) as “extension”. according to the author, this is a convergence effect marked by the strategic expansion of journalistic content to different distribution systems. it is one more mark that the convergence process does not only refer to the mixture of images, sounds and texts in the composition of the information that appears on the network. as jenkins states, it also involves the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want (jenkins, 2006, p.2). extension is typical of journalistic convergence (salaverría, 2003; 2008; domingo et al., 2007). it represents a transformation in the processes of production, distribution and consumption of information from the gradual reorientation in the way a news media outlet 6 works and, also, from the new profile of their audiences. this is directed to the integration and to the collaboration among teams that work in distinct outlets (tv, radio, online, print) administrated by the same organization. according to salaverría (2003; 2008), it involves changes in the business, technological, professional and communicational dimensions. domingo et al. (2007) cites integrated production, multiskilled professionals, multiplatform delivery and active audience as emerging dimensions on these environments. multiplatform delivery, according to domingo et al. (2007), refers to the circulation of news in multiple web 2.0 spaces. salaverría explains that this dynamics is marked by procesos tecnológicos y editoriales que se orientan a la generación de contenidos para su posterior consumo a través de multiples médios o dispositivos de contenidos para su posterior consumo a traves de multiples médios o dispositivos de recepción (salaverría, 2008, p.53) in a context of media convergence (jensen, 2010), there is a complexification of strategies, models and news products by the extension of media contents (jenkins, 2006). the manifestation of news media in spaces such as twitter follows appropriation trends and models that are typical of the web 2.0. by those actions, news media seek to expand its cyberspace strategies, by using systems that are only possible on this environment, due to the easiness of use provided by certain types of technologies. among these systems we can highlight formats that are strengthened with public participation (kovach & rosenstiel, 2007), recognized as one of web 2.0 principles and as traces of the strengthening of collective intelligence (o'reilly, 2005; romani & kuklinski, 2007; jenkins, 2006; lemos & lévy, 2010). based on that, we believe that multiplatform delivery can be considered as a direct mark of the expansion movement described by jenkins (2006). among the most evident results of this extension, we highlight the modification of the presentation of journalistic content on the web. this movement obligates outlets to adapt its contents to the norms of other media to which it is being delivered. this happens when news are adapted in order to be showed up on social network sites such as facebook or google plus, for example. at these spaces, news acquires distinct formats. this also takes place on twitter. only updates with up to 140 characters can be posted on the tool. because of that, it is common to observe, on the microblog, the posting of short headlines followed by a link. but news media twitter presence doesn’t need to be limited to that. other uses can be conceived, and even pro-am practices can take place on the tool, as we will discuss further on the next section. 7 strategical possibilities of pro-am on twitter over time, news outlets came up with new possibilities of using twitter. thus, following the logics of launch and learned, as explained above, they experimented new strategies, capable of enhancing not only its popularity on the tool, but also the interaction with their own sources of information. besides posting headlines using resources such as hashtags and retweets, languages created by users of the microblog, news media outlets started a process of information exchange with their readers/followers. we related this initiative to the process called by anderson (2006) as pro-am. we believe that the more intense exchange between journalists and amateurs, as described here, can also take place on twitter or from twitter. in order to address this, we made and exploratory study based on the observation of twitter's use of two world-leading newspapers, el país, from spain, and the guardian, from united kingdom. tweets from those two newspapers were observed daily for a period of one week in july, 2011. the guardian a recent appropriation from the guardian on twitter can be seen on figure 1. figure 1: hashtags appropriation from the guardian. as shown in the picture above, hashtags utilization (highlighted in red) on the guardian demonstrates a signal of appropriation. the expressions “#notw” and 8 “#jawsdropping” refer to the closing of the news of the world, a british tabloid run by rupert murdoch. the publication had its activities closed in july 2011 due to a scandal related to phone hacking by members of its editorial staff. we can observe, in the tweet, guardian’s staff opinion about the fact. hashtags, in this case, serve as a label to identify the topic under discussion, which facilitates the later search and recuperation, and stimulates the conversation about the same topic. besides, they also express the impressions of the guardian’s staff about the fact, by using terms such as “jawdropping”. the use of hashtags by the newspaper demonstrates the guardian’s adherence to the dynamical use possibilities of twitter, by adapting the newspaper language to the tool’s language conventions and space constraints. the next figure highlights the guardian twitter’s use to exchange ideas with users: figure 2: conversation between the guardian staff and a user on twitter. on figure 2, the user @bobohara talks about a new button implemented by the guardian in its website in order to share contents from the newspaper on twitter. the sentence “@bobohara yes. isn’t it exciting?” appears as an answer from the staff to the previous user comment. it is interesting to note that the manifestation of the newspaper appears to have a friendly tone. we observe, in the example above, the possibility of effectively establishing informal public dialogues on particular topics between journalists and the public with the help of twitter. we consider such practice a differential compared to what used to happen in journalism in its older formats. conversation was not common, and the exposure of feedback from the public was often limited to areas such as letters from readers, for example. we believe 9 that the openness to dialogue is an important step in order to pro-am to take place in journalism. the next picture shows a case of publication of a call for participation on twitter. the participation could contribute to the enrichment of a coverage held by the guardian’s staff. this type of expression is considered an initiative that can trigger pro-am. figure 3: call for participation from the guardian on twitter. the call was published on twitter on july 7, 2011. it invites the public to send questions to the astronaut jeff hoffman in a special live chat, promoted by the guardian in its website. users could access the chat by clicking on the short link before the hashtags “#shuttle” and “#nasa”. the debate about the launch of the space shuttle followed with the tweet “first impressions of the final space #shuttle launch? leave your comments here: http://bit.ly/pj2ybd #sts135 #nasatweetup breathtaking, no?”, published on july 8, 2011. this other tweet has the same features of the one on figure 3: it is a call for participation that seeks for the collaboration of the public. the intention is, probably, to guarantee the expansion of the development of the topic, with the assistance of amateurs willing to participate. how the guardian uses the returns from the public to this type of call? an example can be viewed on a news piece called “space shuttle launch – live coverage”, published on the website on july 8, 2011. figure 4 shows tweets from the public that appears on this news piece: http://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23shuttle� http://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23sts135� http://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23nasatweetup� 10 figure 4: tweets from the space shuttle launch on the guardian. a total of seven manifestations from the public on twitter were added to the article. this act demonstrates that the microblog is not used solely with the intention to “be there”, as it might be the case for some other newspapers. the guardian actually uses contents produced by their followers on their news, exploring, thus, its potential to make them more comprehensive or even more interesting. we believe that the example used as an illustration here brings traces of the pro-am movement, as it demonstrates one possible form of partnership between amateurs and professionals at (in the case of figure 2) and from (as on figure 3 and 4) twitter el país after describing the findings related to the guardian, we will now discuss the twitter appropriation of el país. our main focuses are the processes that demonstrate the experimentation of the languages of the tool, and, essentially, those that enable the practice of pro-am to emerge. the following image depicts the appropriation of everyday practices from twitter users, such as the use of hashtags and follow friday (#ff): 11 figure 5: follow friday thanks and the use of hashtags on el país. as it can be seen on figure 5, the adoption of practices first created by twitter users, such as follow friday (a), and the use of hashtags (b), also takes place in el pais twitter initiatives. in a, the newspaper is thanking all the users that mentioned el pais’s twitter account on a follow friday. the tweet appears as a collective response to the users. in b, the hashtag “#lomasvisto” refers to a category in el pais website, lo más visto2 2 availabe at http://www.elpais.com/lomas/ (or, “most viewed”). the hashtag is used to identify the article as a part of this series. the tweet links to an article on sports written by ramon besa and published on july 7, 2011. as we saw previously when discussing the guardian’s use of twitter, el pais also seeks to employ the microblog tool language in order to draw the public’s attention to its own pages and content. other users may see that hashtag and also employ it in order to discuss about the same category of news. the next picture brings an example of a mobilization that can allow exchanges that resembles pro-am practices. 12 figure 6: call for participation from el país. figure 6 highlights a call for participation. this time, the journalistic staff is requesting the public to send their pictures from the san fermín party3 3 in this event, it takes place the “encierro”, marked by people dressed in red chasing bulls through the streets of pamplona. in the end, animals are sacrified. . held in july, this party honors the patron saint of pamplona, spain. pictures are shown in a specific gallery for the event on el país.com. they appear to be inserted in the publication as a complement to the whole coverage of the festival. we see it as a trace that the newspaper seeks, on the microblog, more than merely mark their presence. we identify, in this type of initiative, the intention to seek for useful contributions to the enrichment of the publication, allowing users to show different points of views about certain events. in many cases, news media professional reporters are unable to register everything about news events, since it is impossible to be everywhere every time. with the help from the public, it is possible to enhance the news, by receiving contributions from twitter, and other social network sites. in a broader sense, pro-am can take place on el país from twitter, especially by call for participations on the website. conclusion the paper aimed to characterize pro-am possibilities in a specific social network site, twitter microblog, considering it as a journalistic strategy. for that, we made an exploratory study based on the observation of twitter's uses of the guardian and el país. we've perceived some practices that point to a collaboration between amateurs and professionals on the production and circulation of news, showing traces that twitter can be integrated into the journalistic process as a whole 13 among other things, we've noted two movements that indicate that pro-am may take place on twitter or from twitter. as we show in the article, this can be perceived a) by invitations to collaborate and the establishment of conversations with the public (in both cases, but especially on the guardian’s twitter account) and b) by the use of hashtags that can be replicated by the users when posting or commenting on twitter about news (on both twitter accounts analyzed). based on those observations, we believe that the exchanges between journalists and amateurs verified on the microblog tool (such as those observed on the empirical analysis, presented above) show that the way the tool is being explored by news media is widening and becoming more audacious, if compared to the initial appropriation of the tool. from the mere display of headlines followed by links to the news (zago, 2009) to the use of the tool for conversation (hermida, 2010), the appropriation of twitter by news media has been improving and becoming more complex every day. thus, the coverage of certain facts and the finding of new topics to develop can gain strength from the complements provided with the help of amateurs on the tool as noted by asur et al (2011), twitter trending topics can influence news media. also, news circulation (thorn & pfeil, 1987) can be significantly enhanced by the intervention of the public, since links to news can be tweeted and retweeted by users, expading the reach of news. although pro-am doesn’t necessarily take place on twitter or from every tweet posted by news organizations, it is interesting to note that the use of the tool can be incorporated into the journalistic process as a whole. sometimes, a call for participation can be posted on twitter. other times, a response to a user can be posted there. amateurs can also suggest by twitter topics for consideration, and their reactions on twitter to a news event could enrich traditional news coverage. references anderson, c. (2006). the long tail. london: random house. asur, s.; huberman, b.; szabo, g., & wang, c. (2011). trends in social media: persistence and decay. hp research labs. retrieved from http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/trends/trends_web.pdf 14 belochio, v. (2009). jornalismo colaborativo em redes digitais: estratégia comunicacional no ciberespaço. o caso de zero hora.com. dissertation (msc. in communication). universidade federal de santa maria, santa maria, brazil. bowman, s. & willis, c. (2003) we media. the media center. retrieved from http://www.hypergene.net/wemedia/ bruns, a. (2010). news produsage in a pro-am mediasphere: why citizen journalism matters. in meikle, g. & redden, g. (eds.). news online: transformations and continuities. london: palgrave macmillan. bruns, a. (2008). blogs, wikipedia, second life, and beyond: from production to produsage. new york: peter lang. bruns, a. (2005) gatewatching. new york: peter lang. domingo, d. et al (2007). four dimensions of journalistic convergence: a preliminary approach to current media trends at spain. in 8th international symposium on online journalism, texas university. retrieved from http://online.journalism.utexas.edu/2007/papers/domingo.pdf hermida, a (2010). from tv to twitter: how ambient news became ambient journalism. m/c journal, 13 (2). retrieved from http://journal.mediaculture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewarticle/220 jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture. new york: nyu press. jensen, k (2010). media convergence: the three degrees of network, mass, and interpersonal communication. kindle edition. london: t&f books uk. kovach, b. & rosenstiel, t. (2007). the elements of journalism. new york: three rivers press. lemos, a. & lévy, p. (2010). o futuro da internet. em direção a uma ciberdemocracia planetária. são paulo: paulus. o'reilly, t. (2005). what is web 2.0? o'reilly media. retrieved from http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html 15 primo, a. (2008). a cobertura e o debate público sobre os casos madeleine e isabella: encadeamento midiático de blogs, twitter e mídia massiva. galáxia, são paulo, 16, 43-59. romaní, c. & kuklinski, h. p. (2007). planeta web 2.0. inteligencia colectiva o medios fast food. flacso/méxico.barcelona/méxico: grup de recerca d’interaccions digitals, universitat de vic. ruellan, d. (2007). to think “citizen journalism”. in comunicação, história e política, natal. retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1300839 saad, b. (2003). estratégias para a mídia digital: internet, informação e comunicação. são paulo: editora senac. salaverría, r. (2003). ¿hacia donde se dirige la convergencia de medios? mediacción.doc, retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10171/5107 salaverría, r. & negredo, s. (2008). periodismo integrado: convergencia de medios y reorganización de redacciones. barcelona: editorial sol 90. silva, f.m. & christofoletti, r. (2010). jornalismo em 140 toques; análise de três contas do twitter no brasil. intexto, porto alegre, 1(22), 65-80. thorn, w. & pfeil, m. (1987). newspaper circulation: marketing the news. new york: longman, 1987. zago, g. (2009). what's going on? exploring microblogs as a tool for journalism. in internet research 10.0, milwaukee. zago, g., & recuero, r. (2011). jornalismo em microblogs: um estudo das apropriações jornalísticas do twitter. in silva, g.; kunsch, d.; berger, c.; albuquerque, a. (eds.). jornalismo contemporâneo: figurações, impasses e perspectivas. brasília: compós, p.243-266. microsoft word 788-537-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 discourses of internet freedom caroline jack cornell university usa csj44@cornell.edu abstract public discourses about information and communication technologies (icts) mobilize the phrase “internet freedom” as they grapple with the proper roles of the state, organizations and individuals in society. this paper analyzes public instances of internet freedom discourse, using discourse as an analytical construct that characterizes language practices as expressions of systems of power. textual analysis of press accounts, policy texts and influential digital manifestos finds that internet freedom discourses increasingly signify a system of power relations in which individual autonomy can be facilitated or limited by private enterprise organizations, but is predominantly limited by the actions of nation-states. these findings imply an ongoing reliance on classical political theories along with neoliberal and cyberlibertarian ideals, although such traditions provide a scarce and ill-fitting vocabulary to describe current ict practices. the research suggests that examining and questioning the assumptions that inform inherited ideas of freedom might open new avenues of political possibility. keywords discourse; freedom; internet freedom; politics; textual analysis discourses of internet freedom public discourses about information and communication technologies (icts) mobilize the phrase “internet freedom” as they grapple with the proper roles of the state, organizations and individuals in society. this paper identifies and analyzes discourses of internet freedom in order to examine and question the assumptions that inform inherited ideas of political freedom. theoretical orientation and methodological approach language and power are intertwined: both the words that come to us easily and the cases in which we grasp for words are instantiations of relations of power (foucault, 1982; orwell, 1946; taylor, 1984). foucault (1982) asserts that discourses are systems of power expressed through language practices; discourses instantiate ‘soft’ social enforcement that produces power relations through particular types of knowledge and behavior. foucault’s insights inform scholarly works that use the term ‘discourse’ as an analytical category (similar to genre) for use in textual analysis, yet maintain a focus on individual agency in place of the “power without agency” for which foucault has been critiqued (edwards, 1996; fairclough, 1995; grewal, 2008). this paper draws attention to the symbolic realm, in which words signify our categorizations of events by connecting particular historical and cultural moments to existing complexes of meaning (bazerman, 2002). discursive articulations--of freedom to information technologies, for example--matter, because they affect perceptions of what is possible and desirable in the realms of commerce, law, cultural practice, and the distribution of power in society (balkin, 2004; kelty, 2013; wyatt, 2004). this paper analyzes public invocations of internet freedom in policy, press accounts, and the statements of digital activists. i draw, here, from two bodies of text. first, i collected policy and press accounts through a database search for co-occurrences of the terms internet and freedom in u.s. and international major newspapers, and in the texts of u.s. federal laws and regulations from june 1995 through june 2012. the resulting texts were screened to remove chance co-occurrences of terms and then grouped around key events in order to interpret the emergence of meanings over time. these press and policy accounts reflect vernacular instances of internet freedom talk. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 second, the publication of two competing “declarations of internet freedom” (access, american civil liberties union, credo, electronic frontier foundation, and free press, 2012; techfreedom and institute for competitive enterprise, 2012) in the wake of protests over proposed intellectual property laws sopa and pipa prompted me to seek out digital manifestos (see for example dyson, gilder, keyworth, and toffler, 1994; barlow, 1996). these digital founding documents articulate understandings of the allocation of power in society in a particular historical moment by putting forth particular conceptualizations of freedom, constructing the subjects for whom freedom is claimed, and identifying threats to freedom. areas of similarity and difference in digital founding documents indicate areas of consensus and contestation about how “internet freedom,” as a polysemic trope, fits into and functions within existing systems of meaning. taken together, then, these two bodies of text suggest preliminary understandings of how people employ the notion of internet freedom, both in a practical sense (to what phenomena or principles do people refer by using this phrase?) and in a symbolic sense (how does the phrase function politically and culturally within historically based understandings of subjectivity and autonomy?). findings evolving interrelations between technology and society can prompt novel uses of existing terms (marx, 2010). analysis of the texts indicates internet freedom served as a signifier for a diverse array of emerging practices and controversies related to digital communication. in the mid-1990s, press and policy texts used the phrase “internet freedom” to describe existing debates issues over socially acceptable expression (hate speech, pornography, and incitements to personal violence, for example) along with new issues including internet service providers’ responsibilities to monitor and limit access to content. meanwhile, cyber-libertarian digital founding documents constructed claims to freedom in the digital age as the right to defy state and corporate bureaucracies’ infringements upon the autonomy of an entrepreneurial (and sometimes disembodied) individual. by the midto late 2000s, net neutrality-related invocations of internet freedom facilitated both individual and corporate claims of freedom to act in relation to information, thus constituting both human and corporate political subjects. the emergence of another set of meanings in the late 2000s and early 2010s further highlighted the presence of the corporation in notions of internet freedom. press accounts figured u.s. technology companies’ involvement in chinese state oppression and u.s. social networking services’ facilitation of political demonstrations in the middle east as issues of internet freedom, highlighting how corporations could act with or against state attempts to limit both access to information and expression of political dissent. domestically, press accounts raised access to information and personal expression (including creative expression and political dissent) as key elements of internet freedom discourses regarding pipa and sopa. the competing “declaration[s] of internet freedom” published in 2012 both claimed rights of access to the network, but presented differing visions of material and intellectual property rights; these points of difference constructed different political subjects for whom internet freedom could be claimed. conclusions and implications internet freedom discourses increasingly signify systems of power relations in which individual autonomy can be facilitated or limited by private enterprise organizations, but is predominantly limited by the actions of nation-states. post-world war ii american assumptions and ideals about freedom and autonomy combined classical theories of sovereignty with fears of totalitarianism; these anxieties and ideals inform the language and ideas employed in internet freedom talk despite providing a scarce and ill-fitting vocabulary to describe current practices and the configurations of power they imply. use of the term “internet freedom,” then, may bear out orwell’s (1946) concern that ready-made phrases allow speakers to bypass critical thought in favor of vague but familiar linguistic tropes. foucault suggests that classical political theory relies upon models of sovereignty and law that are insufficient to describe modern relations of power (taylor, 1984). the current american selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 understanding of freedom favors a non-interventionist, ‘negative’ classical ideal of ‘freedom to be left alone,’ bolstered by a midcentury understanding of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ liberties that characterized ‘positive’ state interventions designed to facilitate individual autonomy and selffulfillment as inevitably oppressive and/or totalitarian (berlin, 1958; foner, 1998; taylor, 1979). the neoliberal and cyber-libertarian impulses of recent decades have combined these understandings with, respectively, faith in market forces’ capacities to distill optimal societal outcomes from the actions of sovereign individuals, and a vision of icts as the best means by which to realize such visions of sovereign individuality (harvey, 2007; streeter, 2011; turner, 2006). political philosophers from midcentury through the present time have challenged the positive/negative model in favor of relational or voluntaristic models (maccallum, 1967; olsaretti, 2009). still, the influence of the positive/negative schema endures in political thought at large and in ict scholarship; berlin’s positive/negative terms fit awkwardly to nuanced explications of how concepts of freedom are designed into and modified by digital technologies (kelty, 2013). critically re-examining discourses of internet freedom provides scholars the opportunity to examine, question and possibly destabilize the assumptions that inform inherited ideas of freedom. by doing so, internet research holds the potential to open new concepts of political subjectivity and new avenues of political possibility. acknowledgments the author sincerely thanks lee humphreys for guidance and feedback on an early iteration of this work, steven j. jackson and tarleton gillespie for critiques and literature recommendations, and the cornell university department of communication’s new media and society working group for insightful comments on a draft of this work. references access, american civil liberties union, credo, electronic frontier foundation, and free press. “declaration of internet freedom.” (2012). retrieved november 3, 2012 from http://www.internetdeclaration.org. balkin, j. m. (2004). digital speech and democratic culture: a theory of freedom of expression for the information society. new york university law review 79(1). retrieved from www.yale.edu/lawweb/jbalkin/telecom/digitalspeechanddemocraticculture.pdf. barlow, j. p. (1996). “a declaration of the independence of cyberspace.” retrieved december 6, 2012 from https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/declaration-final.html. bazerman, c. (2002). the languages of edison’s light. cambridge, ma: mit press. berlin, i. (1958). two concepts of liberty: an inaugural lecture delivered before the university of oxford on 31 october 1958. oxford: clarendon press. dyson, e., gilder, g., keyworth, g., & toffler, a. (1994). “cyberspace and the american dream: a magna carta for the knowledge age.” retrieved december 7, 2012 from http://www.pff.org/issuespubs/futureinsights/fi1.2magnacarta.html. edwards, p. n. (1996). the closed world: computers and the politics of discourse in cold war america. cambridge, ma: mit press. fairclough, n. (1995). media discourse. new york: st. martin’s press. foner, e. (1998). the story of american freedom. new york: w. w. norton & co. foucault, m. (1982). the history of sexuality: volume i: an introduction. new york: pantheon. grewal, d. s. (2008). network power. new haven: yale university press. harvey, d. (2007). a brief history of neoliberalism. new york: oxford university press. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 kelty, c. m. (2013). the fog of freedom. in t. gillespie, p. boczkowski, and k. foot (eds.), media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society. cambridge, ma: mit press.mit press. maccallum, g. c. jr. (1967.) negative and positive freedom. philosophical review, 76: 312–34. marx, l. (2010). technology: the emergence of a hazardous concept. technology and culture 51 (3): 561-577. olsaretti, s. (2009). liberty, desert and the market. cambridge: cambridge university press. orwell, g. (april, 1946). politics and the english language. horizon magazine. streeter, t. (2011). the net effect: romanticism, capitalism and the internet. new york: new york university press. taylor, c. (1984). foucault on freedom and truth. political theory 12:2, 152-183. taylor, c. (1979). what’s wrong with negative liberty. in a. ryan (ed.), the idea of freedom, oxford: oxford university press, reprinted in miller 1991. turner, f. (2006). from counterculture to cyberculture: stewart brand, the whole earth network, and the rise of digital utopianism. chicago: university of chicago press. wyatt, s. (2004). danger! metaphors at work in economics, geophysiology, and the internet. science, technology, & human values 29 (2): 242–261. license this article is ©2013 caroline jack, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016   suggested  citation  (apa):  geiger,  r.  halfaker,  a.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  open  algorithmic  systems:   lessons  on  opening  the  black  box  from  wikipedia.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual   conference  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from   http://spir.aoir.org.     open  algorithmic  systems:  lessons  on  opening  the  black  box   from  wikipedia   r.  stuart  geiger,  berkeley  institute  for  data  science   aaron  halfaker,  wikimedia  foundation       methodological  and  theoretical  overview   an  ethnography  of  algorithmic  governance     this  paper  reports  from  a  multi-­year  ethnographic  study  of  automated  software  agents   in  wikipedia,  where  bots  have  fundamentally  transformed  the  nature  of  the  notoriously   decentralized,  ‘anyone  can  edit’  encyclopedia  project.  we  studied  how  the  development   and  operation  of  automated  software  agents  intersected  with  the  project’s  governance   structures  and  epistemic  norms.  this  ethnography  of  infrastructure  (star,  1999)  involved   participant-­observation  in  various  spaces  of  wikipedia:  both  routine  editorial  activity  in   wikipedia  (which  is  assisted  through  bots)  and  specific  work  in  wikipedian  bot   development  (including  proposing,  developing,  and  operating  bots).  we  also  conducted   archival  analyses  of  bots  in  the  history  of  wikipedia,  which  included  tracing  the   development  of  wikipedia’s  norms  and  governance  structures  alongside  the   development  of  software  infrastructure.       algorithms  are  relational,  embedded  in  social  and  technical  systems     we  focused  on  these  infrastructures  as  dynamic  and  relational,  ‘emerg[ing]  for  people  in   practice,  connected  to  activities  and  structures'  (bowker,  baker,  millerand,  &  ribes,   2010,  p.  99).  we  analyzed  wikipedia’s  governance  structure  as  a  socio-­technical   system,  comprised  of  people  and  algorithms  that  collectively  constitute  a  fluid  and  ever-­ changing  system.  we  emphasize  the  importance  of  understanding  both  code  and  the   broader  “algorithmic  systems”  (seaver,  2013)  in  which  code  is  embedded.  this   investigation  is  one  of  algorithms  ‘in  the  making,’  which  was  possible  partly  because  of   the  public  ways  in  which  wikipedians  develop  and  debate  about  bots.  like  seaver’s   ethnography  of  recommender  systems,  we  found  that  algorithms  studied  in  the  making   looked  different  than  how  they  are  often  discussed  in  ‘critical  algorithms  studies’   literature  –  which  often  involves  studying  algorithms  that  are  developed  in  relatively   closed  settings,  platforms,  and  organizations:     these  algorithmic  systems  are  not  standalone  little  boxes,  but  massive,   networked  ones  with  hundreds  of  hands  reaching  into  them,  tweaking  and  tuning,   swapping  out  parts  and  experimenting  with  new  arrangements  …  when  we   realize  that  we  are  not  talking  about  algorithms  in  the  technical  sense,  but  rather   algorithmic  systems  of  which  code  strictu  sensu  is  only  a  part,  their  defining   features  reverse:  instead  of  formality,  rigidity,  and  consistency,  we  find  flux,   revisability,  and  negotiation.  (seaver  2013,  9-­10)     findings   the  wisdom  of  bots       hundreds  of  fully-­  and  semi-­automated  software  agents  operate  across  wikipedia,  and   they  have  profound  impacts  on  how  wikipedians  accomplish  the  work  of  writing  and   editing  an  encyclopedia  (niederer  &  van  dijck,  2010;;  geiger,  2011;;  halfaker  &  riedl,   2012).  in  the  english-­language  wikipedia,  22  of  the  25  most  active  editors  are  bots,  and   in  january  2016,  they  made  28%  of  all  edits  to  pages  in  the  project  and  20%  of  all  edits   to  encyclopedia  articles.1  bots  and  bot  developers  have  long  been  an  important  part  of   the  volunteer  community  of  editors.  the  tasks  that  wikipedia’s  bots  are  delegated   extend  to  almost  every  aspect  of  the  encyclopedia  and  the  community  who  writes  it.   bots  play  a  particularly  important  role  in  policing  articles  for  spam,  vandalism,  and   plagiarism,  automatically  reverting  edits  that  are  determined  to  pass  a  certain  threshold   and  passing  suspicious  edits  to  human  reviewers.  in  fact,  much  of  the  relatively  high   quality  and  internal  consistency  of  wikipedia  should  be  attributed  more  to  a  ‘wisdom  of   bots’  than  just  the  frequently-­cited  (and  often  ill-­defined)  ‘wisdom  of  crowds.’   algorithmically  assisted  bots  and  tools  also  play  roles  in  newcomer  socialization,  as   they  often  structure  the  first  interaction  a  newcomer  has  with  “the  wikipedia.”  (halfaker,   geiger,  morgan,  &  riedl,  2013;;  halfaker,  geiger,  &  terveen,  2014)     the  politics  of  bots       wikipedia’s  bots  codify  particular  understandings  of  what  encyclopedic  knowledge   ought  to  look  like.  wikipedians  have  particular  assumptions  about  how  knowledge  ought   to  be  represented,  and  bots  play  a  major  role  in  enforcing  these  assumptions.  the   political  implications  of  the  automation  of  wikipedia  plays  out  even  in  seemingly-­minor   tasks  like  fixing  spelling  mistakes.  in  one  example,  the  decision  to  potentially  deploy  a   spellchecking  bot  on  the  english-­language  wikipedia  necessitated  deciding  what   national  variety  of  english  (american,  british,  canadian,  etc.)  ought  to  be  used  for  the   dictionary.  this  meant  deciding  if  wikipedia’s  articles  will  universally  adhere  to  one   national  variety  of  english  –  a  proposal  that  has  been  perennially  rejected,  leading  to   the  rejection  of  fully-­automated  spellchecking  bots.     bots  are  publicly  debated  and  negotiated   this  example  also  shows  how  the  wikipedia  community’s  model  of  technical   administration  dramatically  differs  from  that  of  many  social  networking  sites  or  task   economy  platforms.  bot  developers  must  get  the  approval  of  a  special  committee  of  bot   developers  and  non-­developer  wikipedians,  who  publicly  discuss  the  proposed  bot’s   functions  and  potential  implications,  then  make  decisions  according  to  a  specified                                                                                                                             1  based  on  data  from  wikimedia  labs.  see  http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/7331  for  all  edits  (including  discussion   pages)  and  http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/7332  for  edits  to  articles.   process.  bots  are  ‘open  algorithm,’  as  the  approval  process  requires  that  developers   describe  the  kind  of  work  their  bots  will  do  and  how  they  will  do  it.  bots  are  a  frequent   topic  of  discussion  in  wikipedia’s  internal  deliberation  spaces,  where  bot  developers   and  non-­developers  seek  to  build  a  consensus  about  what  kinds  of  automated  agents   ought  to  exist  in  wikipedia.  (geiger  2011)  finally,  bots  that  use  machine  learning   processes  to  identify  malicious  or  spam  content  have  been  built  to  incorporate  feedback   about  false  positives  or  negatives,  such  that  the  editing  community  can  take  part  in   training  these  systems.     conclusion   automated  software  agents  are  playing  increasingly  important  roles  in  how  networked   publics  are  governed  and  gatekept  (e.g.  crawford  2016,  diakopoulos,  2015;;  gillespie,   2014;;  tufekci,  2015),  with  internet  researchers  increasingly  focusing  on  the  politics  of   algorithms.  wikipedia’s  bots  stand  in  stark  contrast  to  other  platforms  that  have  been   delegated  moderation  or  managerial  work  to  algorithmic  systems.  typically,  algorithmic   systems  are  developed  in-­house,  where  there  are  few  measures  for  public   accountability  or  auditing,  much  less  the  ability  for  publics  to  shape  the  design  or   operation  of  such  systems.  wikipedia’s  model  is  far  from  perfect,  and  there  are   substantial  barriers  that  make  it  difficult  for  newcomers,  outsiders,  and  even  active   wikipedians  to  participate  in  these  processes.  furthermore,  it  is  not  necessarily  the   case  that  all  interested  individuals  have  the  expertise  to  participate  in  such  processes   as  they  currently  operate.  however,  wikipedia’s  model  presents  a  compelling   alternative  to  the  dominant  practices  of  automation  in  which  algorithmic  systems  are   developed  behind  closed  doors  and  non-­disclosure  agreements.     references   bowker,  g.  c.,  baker,  k.,  millerand,  f.,  &  ribes,  d.  (2010).  toward  information   infrastructure  studies:  ways  of  knowing  in  a  networked  environment.  in   international  handbook  of  internet  research  (pp.  97–117).   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­1-­4020-­9789-­8_5   diakopoulos,  n.  (2015).  algorithmic  accountability:  journalistic  investigation  of   computational  power  structures.  digital  journalism,  3(3),  398–415.  retrieved  from   http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21670811.2014.976411   geiger,  r.  s.  (2011).  the  lives  of  bots.  in  g.  lovink  &  n.  tkacz  (eds.),  wikipedia:  a   critical  point  of  view  (pp.  78–93).  amsterdam:  institute  of  network  cultures.   retrieved  from  http://www.stuartgeiger.com/lives-­of-­bots-­wikipedia-­cpov.pdf   gillespie,  t.  (2014).  the  relevance  of  algorithms.  in  t.  gillespie,  p.  boczkowski,  &  k.   foot  (eds.),  media  technologies:  essays  on  communication,  materiality,  and   society  (pp.  167–194).  cambridge,  mass.:  the  mit  press.  retrieved  from   http://6.asset.soup.io/asset/3911/8870_2ed3.pdf   halfaker,  a.,  geiger,  r.  s.,  morgan,  j.  t.,  &  riedl,  j.  (2013).  the  rise  and  decline  of  an   open  collaboration  system:  how  wikipedia’s  reaction  to  sudden  popularity  is   causing  its  decline.  american  behavioral  scientist.  retrieved  from   http://abs.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/12/26/0002764212469365.abstract   halfaker,  a.,  geiger,  r.  s.,  &  terveen,  l.  (2014).  snuggle:  designing  for  efficient   socialization  and  ideological  critique.  proc  chi  2014.  retrieved  from  http://www-­ users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/snuggle/halfaker14snuggle-­personal.pdf   halfaker,  a.,  &  riedl,  j.  (2012).  bots  and  cyborgs:  wikipedia’s  immune  system.   computer,  45(3),  79–82.  retrieved  from   http://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/co/2012/03/mco2012030079-­abs.html   niederer,  s.,  &  van  dijck,  j.  (2010).  wisdom  of  the  crowd  or  technicity  of  content?   wikipedia  as  a  sociotechnical  system.  new  media  &  society,  12(8),  1368–1387.   https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365297   seaver,  n.  (2013).  knowing  algorithms.  media  in  transition  8.  retrieved  from   http://nickseaver.net/papers/seavermit8.pdf   star,  s.  l.  (1999).  the  ethnography  of  infrastructure.  american  behavioral  scientist,   43(3),  377–391.  https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326   tufekci,  z.  (2014).  engineering  the  public:  big  data,  surveillance  and  computational   politics.  first  monday,  19(7).  https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v19i7.4901   1 living offline a qualitative study of internet non-use in great britain and sweden bianca christin reisdorf university of oxford, oxford internet institute united kingdom bianca.reisdorf@oii.ox.ac.uk ann-sofie axelsson chalmers university of technology sweden ann-sofie.axelsson@chalmers.se hanna maurin söderholm university college of borås sweden hanna.maurin@hb.se abstract this study explores and compares attitudes and feelings of middle-aged british and swedish internet non-users as well as their reasons for being offline. the rich qualitative data are conceptualized and presented according to various reasons for non-use, positive and negative feelings regarding non-use, and the positive as well as negative influence of and dependence on social networks. the comparison shows both unique and common perceptions of the british and swedish respondents, some of which can be attributed to social, economic, or socio-economic factors. however, it also displays vast differences between middle-aged nonusers in both countries. the analysis paints a complex picture of decisions for and against the use of the internet and the need for more research to understand these highly complex phenomena, which cannot simply be attributed to socio-economic backgrounds as has been done in most previous research. the analysis shows that more complex reasons, such as lack of interest or discomfort with technologies, as well as the somewhat surprising finding that social networks can prevent non-users from learning how to use the internet, as it is more convenient to stay a proxy-user, should be considered in future research and policies regarding digital inequalities. 2 keywords internet non-use; digital inequalities; cross-country comparison; qualitative research. with increasing proportions of internet users in developed countries, the focus of digital inequality research has shifted towards examining different types of internet use and users. internet non-use has accordingly become an under-researched topic over the past decade. a number of recent studies focus on distinguishing different types of users, and established that low use or staggered use of the internet can pose a disadvantage for these low users in various areas of their lives, as many of them have already socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds, such as low income or low educational qualifications (e.g. helsper, 2011; white & selwyn, 2011; zillien & hargittai, 2009). if we regard low use as potentially problematic and disadvantageous, then within that world-view complete non-use might be an even bigger problem. hence, non-users, their characteristics, experiences with non-use in everyday life, attitudes, and reasons for non-use should be examined carefully. this paper will examine internet non-use of britons and swedes aged 25 to 55 years. with regards to digital inequalities and internet use and non-use we find a large proportion of studies on young people (e.g. hargittai & hinnant, 2008; livingstone & helsper, 2007) and the elderly (e.g. kiel, 2005; milligan & passey, 2011). middle-aged populations have thus far not specifically been looked at. however, this age group is particularly interesting, as they are likely to be part of the work force for at least 10 more years. many jobs require use of computers and the internet nowadays. moreover, this group is more likely than any other age group to have children living in the household who often use computers and the internet for schoolwork and in their leisure time. internet non-use might thus be especially problematic for this age group. a cross-country comparison of two highly developed and technologized countries such as great britain and sweden is fruitful as they share similarities in terms of economic development, but also differ with regards to policies regarding the internet, cultural perceptions of technologies, and proportions of non-users. while we find 12 per cent non-users in the middle-aged british population (2011 data from oxford internet surveys; reisdorf, forthcoming), there were less than 2 per cent non 3 users in the same group in sweden (2011 data from world internet institute; reisdorf, forthcoming). qualitative semi-guided interviews will give insight into experiences and attitudes as well as reasons for staying offline. the detailed data bring a new dimension to non-user research that has not been investigated a lot before. while a small amount of qualitative work has been done on british internet non-users, a systematic literature search in spring 2012 showed that no qualitative research has been done on swedish non-users. this paper will examine these factors for middleaged internet non-users in great britain and sweden on basis of a qualitative research design. research questions over the last decade governments in europe have recognized the link between socio-economic inequalities and digital disengagement reported in research. accordingly, lack of economic resources and access is what policies focus on in their efforts to tackle digital inequalities. most studies focus on physical access and neglect other issues such as lack of knowledge about technologies, attitudes towards technologies, or lack of skills or interest in the internet (see also eynon & helsper, 2011; selwyn, 2003, 2004). to know how to motivate internet non-users to become users, the first step needs to be a thorough understanding of why they do not use the internet in the first place. in light of the mostly quantitatively research in the area, digital inequality studies only rarely focus on underlying reasons for internet non-use. to be able to develop a theoretical and practical understanding of non-use, it is essential to take this first step. our first research question addresses this problem: 1. what reasons do non-users give for staying offline? closely related to underlying reasons and motivations for non-use are attitudes towards technologies, as well as perceptions and experiences of non-users. the conscious or unconscious decision to be a non-user can be fuelled by many reasons, such as economic constraints, discomfort with using technologies, not seeing any benefit or avoiding some degree of reliance on technologies. the widely assumed 4 negativity of internet non-use makes offliners seem ‘left behind’ and perceived as outsiders (klecun, 2008, p. 267). many policy makers aim for 100% internet penetration and usage (e.g. race online, 2012) without considering that not using the internet might be the right choice for some. to understand whether internet non-use actually is a problem in today’s highly technologized societies of developed countries – and if yes, for whom – the analysis of attitudes, perceptions, and experiences of non-users themselves is key. only then can useful and sensible policy agendas regarding e-inclusion be designed. accordingly, our second research question asks: 2. how do non-users themselves perceive technologies and their offline lives, and how do they ‘get on’ in a highly technologized world? research design to tackle these questions we conducted semi-structured interviews with 10 internet non-users in great britain and sweden respectively. the british interviews were mainly conducted in and around birmingham, which is after london the most populous british city. london displays an unusually high proportion of 83 per cent of households with internet access (office for national statistics, 2010, p. 7) in contrast to 74 per cent averaged across great britain. on the other hand, the west midlands and birmingham are areas more similar to the british average with 73 per cent of all households having access to the internet (office for national statistics, 2010, p. 7). the swedish average is much higher. in 2011, 93 per cent of the swedish population aged 16-74 had internet access at home (statistics sweden, 2011, p. 11). the interviews with swedish non-users were mainly conducted in and around the secondlargest city in sweden: gothenburg, and its surrounding regions. in total, 20 people in the age 25-55 were interviewed in the spring of 2012, 10 in sweden and 10 in great britain. the interviewees were selected through purposive sampling (miles & huberman, 1994, pp. 27 et seq.; patton, 2002, p. 230). this approach was inspired by the concept of theoretical sampling by glaser and strauss (1967), which aims “[…] at that material that promises the greatest insights, viewed in the light of the material already used, and the knowledge drawn from it” (flick, 2009, p. 118). the selection 5 was informed by the research questions as well as previous results in this field. the interviewees were initially recruited via uk online centers it beginner courses, swedish adult learning centers, libraries, community centers, and later through snowball sampling and follow-up phone calls to uk survey respondents. despite applying the same recruitment strategies in both countries, the samples differ in terms of variety of socio-economic background characteristics with the swedish sample being more diverse than the british one. tables 1 and 2 below describe the socioeconomic characteristics of participants in britain and sweden. table 1: socio-economic characteristics of british interviewees no name in study age gender nationality school qualifications occupation living situation 1 paul 53 male english none machine operator with wife, daughter (16) 2 lisa 55 female english none unemployed alone 3 martin 50 male english gcses unemployed alone 4 tom 54 male english o-levels (now gcses) unemployed alone 5 georgina 53 female english gcses unemployed alone 6 rita 52 female english gcses, nvq2, nvq3 care assistant with husband, daughters (21, 25) 7 david 49 male english none selfemployed all-rounder alone 8 barbara 48 female english a-levels lorry driver alone 9 gail 55 female welsh bachelor’s degree out of work for health reasons with husband 10 sandra 56 female english none selfemployed with husband, son, daughter-inlaw while most of the british participants were older (48-56), working in low skilled trades or were unemployed, the swedish sample includes a wider age range (28-56), more nationalities and a larger variety of different occupational statuses. 6 we used a semi-structured interview-guide with open-ended questions in order to explore respondents’ perceptions of internet non-use in the light of “the personal worldview of the interviewee […] in detail” (gaskell, 2000, p. 46). the interviewguide was informed by questions brought up by previous quantitative analyses of this specific group (reisdorf, 2011). it focused on perceptions of different icts 1 no and devices, such as tv and mobile-phones, but mainly on computers and the internet; and on probes, conceptualized as every-day situations such as banking, shopping or buying train-tickets, where the use of internet-based technology might be necessary. to secure comparability and prepare for a straightforward analysis approach, we used similar questions and probes for both great britain and swedish respondents. table 2: socio-economic characteristics of swedish interviewees name in study age gender nationality school qualifications occupation living situation 1 karolina 38 female swedish grammar school childcare with husband, children 2 lina 55 female lebanese none part-time school alone 3 nasan 32 female iraqi none part-time school with husband, sister, daughter (7) 4 mai 39 female vietnamese none part-time school with husband, children (2, 4) 5 piotr 56 male bosnian compulsory school unemployed with children 6 annika late 20s female swedish compulsory school handicraft work with mother 7 johan 48 male swedish grammar school contract work with wife 8 hanna 34 female swedish compulsory school unemployed with husband, children (2, 4) 9 kerstin 53 female swedish university childcare with husband 10 emil 51 male swedish compulsory school actor with wife, children (8, 13) 1 we understand information and communication technologies (icts) as technologies that enable digital information gathering or communication with others. these include all internet-based technologies and mobile technologies. as such, internet use represents one of a number of ict uses. 7 the interviews were conducted face-to-face or by phone, and took place at a time and location selected by the interviewee, or at the location for recruitment, i.e. a library. the swedish interviews were conducted in swedish to keep the interviewees comfortable and avoid issues of ambiguity and miscommunication (marshall & while, 1994). all the interviews were digitally recorded, and transcribed. the swedish data were transcribed in swedish, then translated and analyzed in english. data analysis took place in several steps and was conducted by two researchers. as stated by gaskell, the process of analyzing qualitative interviews includes several modes of analysis, from reading and re-reading to thematic coding and categorization (ib., pp. 53 et seq.). we analyzed the interviews starting with broad descriptions of the interviews and working towards a more detailed process of coding the interviews and categorization of important topics within the data. this process worked in “analytic circles” (creswell, 1998, pp. 142 et seq.), which included the repetition of certain analytical methods such as categorization, comparison and contrasting of occurring themes within the data. results recruitment of interviewees in both countries proved to be difficult, with many non-users not being willing to participate and others agreeing initially and then refusing to participate later. social desirability of using the internet as promoted through the media and policies was already apparent in the recruitment of interviewees. one of the british interviewees mentioned that her husband was not using computers and the internet, but said that he would not want to participate in the study as he struggled to admit to his non-use: interviewer: do you think you could take a little information sheet and ask him, if he would be happy to talk to me? rita: he probably won’t because he won’t admit that he can’t do computers. he’s a man, you know. one swedish non-user refused to talk to us and others were reluctant, because they were worried that we were trying to sell them an internet connection or ‘make’ 8 them go online. others, especially in britain, were worried they would be judged for not using the internet and needed reassurance before agreeing to participate. moreover, the social desirability was an underlying notion in most of the attitudes and feelings that the interviewees mentioned. during the interviews it seemed that the majority of the respondents felt like they ‘should’ be using the internet, that they were expected to use it. interviewer: when you think about everyone around you using the internet, how do you feel about that? gail: i do feel a little bit out of it, actually. because i know it’s something i should be doing more. […] interviewer: and when you say you think you should, why do you think so? gail: well, because i’m missing out on … i haven’t kept up with the times. it’s an essential part of live these days, isn’t it?! the following sections will present different reasons for not using the internet including: no interest or need; technology discomfort; complexity and complication; physical impairment; refusal; and, social network. this is followed by an analysis of different feelings in relation to non-use, including: being happy with it; feeling different; and, regret. finally, results pertaining social networks, influence and dependence will be presented. overall, we found unique and common perceptions and variations both within and between british and swedish non-users and results will be underpinned with quotes from both groups of interviewees. reasons for non-use as internet use is widely spread and omnipresent in media and everyday life, not doing something that the majority of a population does, such as not driving a car (wyatt 2003), is likely have more behind it than ‘no interest’. the reasons for non-use deriving from the interview study are manifold and intertwined. 9 no interest and no need martin and david were both professional footballers when they were younger. they did not need to use the internet or computers for their occupation. accordingly, neither of them concerned themselves with these technologies until recently. both of them say they were simply not interested in it: martin: i was only interested in football […], and i went on to play football for coventry, man united, man city, hong kong. […] i wasn’t interested; i was just wanting to be a footballer. david reported similar reasons and added that he did not need technologies for his later work or in his spare time, as he did mainly manual labour after his career as a sportsman ended. as his main hobby was still sports after the end of his professional sports career, he found information on what he was interested in in offline settings, such as books, magazines, and tv. gail, who was working as a music teacher before a major operation that prevents her from leaving the house, said she did not need the internet for her job. another similar case was paul who worked as a machine operator in a composting firm at the time of the interview. in the swedish sample johan, emil, and kerstin stood out as having a clear disinterest in the internet. johan and emil were self-employed and successful, but in quite different fields: johan within contract work, handling and renting big machines within the building industry, and emil as a freelancing actor. kerstin worked within childcare. all three strongly expressed that they had no interest in the internet: emil: i am completely uninterested in it. but i understand, on the other hand, that to many other people it is a source of happiness and joy but i have never had any need for using it. similar to martin and david these swedish non-users were interested in things that did not require any internet use. kerstin: i have always been uninterested, i mean, to sit around, staring at the computer like some people do at work. that i find extremely boring. and also boring to do this at home – i rather go out, take a walk in the woods, do something in the garden, or drive off and do something, like 10 take a daytrip. in fact, i rather do anything else. as it is, the computer comes last. looking deeper into these cases, however, it also became obvious that a number of those who said they did not need the internet or were not interested in it were additionally lacking essential skills to do so and did not know what kinds of things people might use the internet for. paul, for example, also reported problems with the technology and problems with typing: paul: i’m just there looking for, where is d {laughs}, you know, one finger here and then two and it’s not worth it. it’s 2 seconds and they’ve done it, they found it, they got what i want and that’s it, and so i just sit there and read it through and say ‘right, i finished’ and they just come and knock it off. these issues were reported by a number of interviewees, often regardless of their educational background. many of them were also worried of breaking the computer, ‘messing up’, or ‘getting it all wrong’. one of the interviewees was especially worried about this in light of others using the same computer: karolina: the anxiety is always there, that something will go wrong so that you destroy someone else’s things on the computer. discomfort with technologies this points to a second closely related reason for non-use. interviewees in both countries mentioned the notion of discomfort in using technologies such as computers and the internet. while many british non-users said that this was because these technologies were for a different generation, this was not mentioned at all by the swedish sample. several swedish interviewees noted that young people and children use computers and mobile phones a lot, but more as a fact than saying that this is not for them, due to age. 11 a number of british and swedish interviewees mentioned that they found specific aspects of internet use scary, such as criminals being able to steal credit card details, worries about privacy, or the molesting of children via the internet. interviewer: and is there any technology that you don’t like to use? georgina: yeah, i wouldn’t like to go on the sites that man went on [conspiracy theories] i gotta admit. i think that would be quite scary. i think there’s too much … privately there’speople put very private things on the computer, which i think is a bit tooit’s very scary. hanna had worries concerning addiction and that children grow up spending too much time online. this is a worry that she shares with lina who also worries about ‘dangerous’ things that can be found by children on the internet. lina: i think that i can’t leave him [grandchild] alone at the computer all that time. i know that they are very good at finding other pages that are not good and look at that. rita was learning to use computers and the internet at the time of the interview. she described her extremely negative feelings towards the internet that she had until recently: rita: hated computers, thought they were a waste of time, didn’t wanna know them, thought they were taking over the world. but my two daughters, they’re brought up with it– one’s 25, one’s 21, they both use computers and easy peasy for ‘em. so, we’ve got one in the house, and i’ve just been sort of determined to try to come to grips with it, and not be scared of it – it’s only a machine. like many other british respondents she related to the internet as being something that her generation had not grown up with. she explained that her age group was not as technology-prone as young people and that it was harder for them to accept them and learn how to use them. however, she admitted that she did not really understand what they were about, or why she was scared of them before she learned how to use them. 12 complexity and complication difficulties in using technologies and discomfort with them are often related to the general feeling that using computers and the internet was very complicated. all those interviewees who had only tried using the internet a few times or who had just started learning how to use it reported feelings of frustration. it started with ‘simple’ things, such as the design of the keyboard, which was generally perceived as being complicated. david started using the internet on his smartphone recently and mentioned struggling with computers: interviewer: so, when you think about computers instead of your phone how do you feel about all the keys, the keyboard, the mouse and stuff like that? david: well, yes, i mean, i must admit, sometimes i can get distracted with the mouse … with the laptop with the screen. it can be sometimes too much for me. so, that was a problem at first. […] that’s why i’ve been doing most of the things on my own phone, on my own time. martin explained that apart from the basic technical problems with computers, there were a lot of things he would have to consider, if he decided to go online: martin: especially when i was lookin’ at the viruses and stuff, i found that difficult. and i thought, oh, even if you do get a computer you’ve gotta get all these viruses and everything to stop people latchin’ on to your stuff. this is only one of many examples where non-users got confused with terminology. most of them were generally not sure of how the internet ‘works’. this is exemplary of how complex the technology and all the components that are needed for it to function properly are. for non-users it might be even more complicated to become users today than five or ten years ago. on the other hand, devices such as smartphones and tablets might overcome some of these technological hurdles as the quote from david shows. 13 another example is piotr from sweden, who said he never used the internet himself, but got onto his smartphone during the interview and showed us the weather forecast for the region without realizing that his phone was connecting to the internet to do so. the majority of the swedish sample expressed a general problem with handling icts other than the internet; for example that they find texting on the mobile phone complicated, whereas a few others in the same sample do not text due to illiteracy. interviewer: do you have a mobile phone? lina: yes. interviewer: do you use it? lina: only for calling, i can’t write with… sms or messages. interviewer: do you send pictures? lina: no, no, can’t use, it is hard for me. physical impairments one of the british interviewees had vision impairment and was thus struggling to use icts of any type, which included the internet. while she acknowledged that there were possibilities for her to use computers and the internet, she found them too complicated. her husband and family were using the internet for her on a regular basis. sandra felt that in this era of technologies, she would be stuck without the help of her husband. sandra: i mean if i didn’t have my husband, i wouldn’t be in this job. because although i do my fair share of work, he’s the one that does all the technical side of it with the computer. so without him, i would be stuck. she described how the royal national institute of blind offers computer courses for visually impaired people, but that she would also have to buy a completely new computer set, which is expensive and hard to set up. for her, having her husband 14 use the internet instead of her was a much better solution. however, sandra also mentioned that it was frustrating for her to not be able to use these technologies herself. sandra: i do feel that i miss out. and what i also find is that i have friends and relatives that just want to communicate on the internet, send emails, facebook. so that’s all sort of closed to me really. refusal only few interviewees named conscious refusal as their main reason for not using the internet. barbara stopped using the internet and all other ‘modern’ technologies four years ago. after her divorce from her previous husband, she made a conscious decision to ban all things from her life that used to annoy her within the marriage. technologies, such as tv, stereo, a landline, computers, and the internet were not part of her current lifestyle. barbara: everything that came with the marriage i’ve left behind and i have basically made a conscious decision not to reintroduce the technological things that used to annoy me until i’m personally ready for them. as a lorry driver, she did not need any of these technologies for her work, and she did not feel like she was experiencing any major disadvantages from it that would make her become an internet user again. barbara: i did my insurance online and searching for information online. […] but now i go to the local insurance shop that’s got a high street’s branch that i can walk in and speak to a real person rather than do it online. […] i know i pay a bit extra. doing things on the internet is often cheaper nowadays, but i’m still rebuilding my life. the only ict present in her life was her mobile phone, with which she kept in touch with her adult sons who used the internet for her every now and then. for her 15 the negative association of the internet and similar technologies with her previous life was a decisive reason to live without them until she felt ready to use them again. emil has also actively chosen to stay away from computers. a lack of interest in icts in general, along with political and ideological reasons has gradually developed into a conscious decision to resist computers as long as he can: emil: this has become a project of mine [to stay offline], this which wasn’t a thought from the start but merely disinterest. since i now realize that i belong to a rather small and exclusive group, if not only from a research perspective, it would be fun in the future with a 80, 90 year old who hasn’t used computers. these examples show that there are cases of non-use that have nothing or only very little to do with socio-economic background or lack of access and skills. it shows the importance of individual and psychological factors for the use of technologies. both barbara and emil had the financial means to be online, but made a conscious decision to stay offline. in their current lifestyle, they did not see the need for internet or computer use. however, emil admits that he is in a privileged position because he has people working for him, doing banking, travel arrangements and such. feelings about non-use reasons for non-use and potential future use are related to the feelings of nonusers about being offline and potential (future) use or their progress with learning how to use computers. the different cases described below show that some non-users were content with being offline while others felt different from their peers or even ‘stupid’. i’m happy with it as one of very few british respondents paul said that he was happy with his own non-use and the proxy use through his wife and daughter: paul: i’m quite happy with that. i don’t have to use the internet in the work place. and i’m quite happy with that. 16 his feelings about his non-use were positive, because he had no need to use computers or the internet in any part of his life. he did not need them to be more successful in his work and his family used the internet for him, when he saw a need for it. although their main reasons for non-use differ, barbara and paul were similar in terms of their feelings about their non-use. barbara too did not see any need for computer or internet use in her current life, as neither would improve her work or her private life. similar to paul, if barbara saw the need to get information from the internet, she would ask one of her sons to look it up for her. neither of them mentioned feelings of being different or pressured by others to use the internet. in sweden several interviewees reported being happy with their situation as they had family, friends, or hired staff (e.g. accountants) doing things online for them. piotr: it’s good and i say: “i can’t do anything, can you help me with this… viruses and such” and they [children] help me fix it. freelance actor emil and contract worker johan both had professional help for internet related issues so that they did not have to deal with them themselves. emil: it’s wonderful! i buy these services and for me it’s perfect – i wish everyone could lead a life like this, but i understand, of course, that not everybody can afford it or live a life like that. being different a number of non-users in both countries mentioned a feeling of being different as well as a certain degree of pressure from their surroundings to use technologies, such as the internet. lisa: i mean they [sisters] use the internet all the – they’re using it in their work business, and they’re great. i’m the only one really, an’ i’m the oldest. but they’re very good at things, pick up things quick like that. an’ i don’t, i never have done that. i’m a bookworm, i read. i just read and read and read and read. so that’s where i am. well, we all can’t be the same. 17 lisa also reported a certain lack of understanding from her nieces and nephews, who all used technologies and helped her with her mobile phone on a regular basis. with them having grown up with these technologies, they did not understand why it was hard for her to deal with them: lisa: ‘cos even my li’l niece she’s 6 and she knows how to use the c […] there was a photo of my son that i wanted on my phone, and my nephew was staying with me at the time. he was ten at the time, he’s eleven now. he says ‘oh, it’s so easy, aunty lisa’, and he was doin’ this, i said ‘oh, just do it’. ‘honestly, aunty lisa, get with it, get with it’. many non-users reported being the only ones in their family or circle of friends who were offline. they mentioned feeling left out in conversations about things ‘happening’ on the internet and were uncomfortable with not being able to join in. martin: i’m probably the last one. it’s probably the reason why i’ve done it, ‘cos they’re talkin’ about it and i’m like ‘right …’ you know. in other cases this feeling went a step further to not only feeling left out, but also feeling stupid, such as mentioned by several interviewees in both countries: johan: and you notice in my kind of profession, it’s a question of being available so that customers can reach you, usually via phone. but you notice that if you want to get information, people ask you whether you have email, and no, i haven’t, and then it’s almost like they think you are a bit stupid. hanna describes similar notions about this: hanna: if you tell people “i haven’t got a computer” they think you are from the middle ages. like, “what, don’t you have a computer?” regret for many of those non-users who did not explicitly express being happy with being offline the interviews carried a general notion of feeling behind, mirrored by a 18 number of them saying that learning it now was a case of ‘better late than never’ or that not learning it before was a mistake: martin: it’s just silly because i remember distinctly as i played in hong kong when i was about 24, so it’s 25 years ago. there were no computers, were all just startin’ an’ i remember people talking the odd things. […] but i mean i trained, and trained, an’ i’d come for an hour […] four days a week, the rest of me time was me own. apart from match day, an’ i think in all that time i coulda, and i know then i’d picked it up a lot quicker. but … we all make mistakes, don’t we. in sweden karolina explicitly expressed regrets about not knowing how to use the internet in relation to feeling like a burden to her husband and colleagues. she mentioned it would be easier for them, if she could do these things on her own: karolina: he [husband] gathers a lot of information as we’re renovating our house, so a lot of information on how to do that and such is what he’s getting. interviewer: and you think that is positive and useful things? karolina: yes, it is. so maybe because of that you sometimes regret not being more interested in that, in fact. so you’d been able to do all that yourself. social networks: influence and dependence in the context of adoption of technological innovations, social influence is often seen as one of the core concepts affecting technology adoption and use (rogers, 1995). in our data we found subtle and complex nuances and differences in how the influence of social networks affected internet non-use. one difference between the swedish and british data was the opposite effect that families’ and friends’ attitudes towards the internet seemed to have on non-users. some of the british data suggest that if respondents’ friends and family were reluctant about using the internet and their scope of use was narrow or sceptical, non-users 19 often displayed similar opinions. a prime example for this was paul, who was not using the internet himself, but said that his wife was. however, she would not buy things online due to worries about credit cards and privacy: interviewer: and what do you think about holidays? you said earlier that your wife sometimes looks up holidays with you on the internet. paul: yeah, we’ve looked on there at different holidays, yeah, it’s good in that way, and we have actually booked holidays from there mainly in this country. we took it off the, the internet and then talked to normal people direct, and done it that way, because that’s one thing that my wife doesn’t like doing, perhaps fair enough, there’s a lot of spies. she won’t give her card details out over travel on the internet. don’t do any banking or anything like that. she just does it direct over the phone. similar to her, paul reported sceptical feelings towards the internet and did not want to try it. he preferred using telephone or face-to-face contacts in his private life. another unexpected difference between the swedish and british respondents was related to how the presence of social networks, or lack thereof, were both reasons for non-use. all but one of our swedish respondents were living together with other family members who used the internet for them, compared to the british respondents where six of the ten interviewees lived alone. some of these swedish non-users stayed offline because it was more convenient for them to have other people use the internet for them. while the support of their social networks meant they could use the internet by proxy, it might also diminish incentives to learn how to use the internet. interviewer: it seems like there are some things that your husband can do and that you might go to him with a question or task and then they [husband and daughter] do it for you? how do you feel about that? karolina: well, how do i feel about that? it makes you a bit inflexible, because you always need to have someone around to help you and it’s not very nice to them to ask them for help all the time, i don’t do that but they are usually very helpful because he enjoys sitting [by the computer] so it works very well. 20 on the other hand, among our british respondents, several lived alone and mentioned being the only ones in their circle of friends who were not using the internet. a number of those who did mention this were determined to start using it. thus, the availability of warm experts (bakardjeva, 2005; selwyn et al. 2005) provides a support network that makes the move towards using technologies easier, which are perceived as complicated and hard to pick up. on the other hand, it might also make people rely on the “expert-help” so that they do not see the point in using the internet themselves. although many of the respondents seemed content with people in their social network helping them, some of the swedish interviewees but none in the british sample reported negative feelings about having to ask their family or colleagues to help them using the internet. hanna, who, currently on maternal leave, lived with her husband and two children in the swedish countryside, felt that she ought to learn how to handle computers and the internet. they had a laptop at home but no internet connection due to economic reasons. hanna also ascribed the feeling that she ought to learn how to use the internet to implicit pressure from her family: hanna: so you always need to ask other people, if there is something you would like to look up. it feels a bit like ‘hello, couldn’t you look that up yourself?’ but i can’t because then i need to travel to my sister with the children and that feels a bit unnecessary. interviewer: but sometimes you ask your sister for help to do that for you and then she does that for you and thinks it’s okay? hanna: yes, sure, or yes, she doesn’t say no, she doesn’t do that. but it feels like you are an adult person now and should be able to… karolina expressed a feeling that she was a burden to her colleagues in the kindergarten and to her husband and daughter, since they needed to support her in various situations related to internet use. this constant need of help made karolina feel left out. 21 interviewer: you said that both at home and at work you are taking part in the work and helping out but you sit with or next to someone else using the computer, how do you feel about that at work? karolina: it can be a bit excluding, because i can’t do those things on my own, whereas the other two [colleagues] can just go and do something i always need someone else’s help. discussion middle-aged non-users in great britain and sweden differ on a variety of characteristics – not only with regards to socio-economic background, but also in terms of reasons for being offline. we found a large range of reasons for non-use and feelings about this in both countries. all non-users had a number of reasons for being offline with some of these being more important than others. two of the major reasons in both countries were lack of interest in the internet, which relates to the lack of perceived added value to their current lifestyles, and social networks, which can have a positive influence on the wish to use the internet, but also an effect of holding non-users back. both will be discussed more below. added value and social networks a theory prominent in economics is the theory of added value. applying it to information markets, kuhlen (1996) differentiates a number of potential added values: organizational, strategic, innovative, macroeconomic, efficiency, effectiveness, aesthetic-emotional, and flexible. the latter four are regarded as impacting individuals while the first four impact organizations. the individual factors can be related to personal internet use. efficiency and effectiveness would positively influence the decision to use the internet, if individuals thought using the internet would make their lives easier, e.g. that they could get information faster, pay less money, etc. aesthetic-emotional added values relate to subjective wellbeing or satisfaction with life, and flexibility added value relates to being able to perform daily 22 tasks flexibly, e.g. on laptops, tablets, and smartphones without being bound to one specific location. for many interviewees in britain and sweden using the internet did not offer enough added values in any of the abovementioned realms to go through the effort of learning a new technology. they found their information easily enough elsewhere and did not feel that internet use would improve their lives significantly. this phenomenon is closely related to the availability of proxy-use through social networks. even if they were aware of the benefits that internet use might bring them, many of those non-users who were not planning to use the internet themselves in the near future had family and friends who made regular use for them. for these non-users it was easier and more efficient if they did not use the internet themselves. this was the case for a large number of non-users in both countries and was brought to the point by gail: interviewer: do you have any idea why, why you didn’t feel like trying it before? gail: well, it’s laziness really, because my husband is very efficient on the computer and using the internet and so i’m afraid i’ve left it to him. future use a notion strongly related to reasons for non-use and feelings about being offline is the likelihood of future use. we found that those interviewees who were happy with their situation as a non-user and especially those with a strong social network that used the internet for them were the least likely to mention having an interest in going online in the future. these non-users also displayed lack of interest as one of their main reasons for being offline. this was often paired with a lack of skills, which means that non-users would have to put in time and effort to learn how to use computers and the internet. the notion of being happy with their non-use was more prominent in sweden than in britain. this might be because the swedish interviewees also reported having a stronger support network around them and coming from more advantaged socio-economic backgrounds. 23 in contrast to this, non-users who saw themselves as being outsiders or felt that they were missing out or being too dependent on their family and friends were more likely to consider going online in the future. however, many of them were held back by economic or time constraints, or felt that more basic things were of higher importance. a number of interviewees especially in sweden mentioned that they had trouble with literacy and language, both of which are key factors for using the highly text-based internet: interviewer: what is it you find difficult? is it writing? or reading? lina: yes, writing, or finding the numbers and so. on keyboard is hard to do. interviewer: would you like to learn more? lina: maybe. maybe i need to but first i need to know how to read good swedish, then i can use it but cannot read good swedish – cannot use it, it is difficult. although the number of respondents with these issues was smaller in britain, more basic factors such as cost and basic skills were still important there as well. the number of respondents who were highly likely to start using the internet was higher in britain than in sweden. often these non-users were facing a radical change in their living circumstances, which led to a change in behaviour. ajzen (1991, p. 815) described this phenomenon in his ‘theory of planned behavior’. if a certain set of factors, and this includes proxy-use through social networks, “[…] remains unchanged, the behavior also remains stable over time” (ib., p. 202). some of the interviewees found themselves in changed circumstances when partners died, they separated from a long-term partner, or their circumstances had changed due to other factors, such as health. while these major changes motivated some non-users to start learning how to use the internet (e.g. tom, georgina, gail) it led barbara to stop using the internet. this is again closely related to social networks. if the current proxy-users did not have others using the internet for them, some of them would (have to) overcome their reservations and start using the internet, as some of them also admit: 24 johan: if you are self-employed in sweden you need to have regular contact with the tax office [online]. and if i hadn’t had an accountant i would have been much more interested and dealt with these things myself. then i’d be forced to do that. conclusion this paper set out to answer two important questions relating to reasons for non-use and perceptions and feelings of non-users in two technologized societies. the comparison of great britain and sweden shows that we encounter similarities and differences in middle-aged non-user populations of both countries. socio-economic factors, such as cost or employment, play an important role for non-users in both countries, as do basic factors, such as literacy. the data show that complex reasons, such as lack of interest or discomfort with technologies, should be considered in future research and policies regarding digital inequalities. the influence of social contacts that do use the internet has previously been evaluated as exclusively positive. it was assumed that these social networks would encourage non-users to go online and that the availability of warm experts would provide the needed support to overcome technical difficulties and develop the necessary skills. while this is a valid point, our data show that social networks can also have the opposite effect and prevent non-users from learning how to use the internet, as it is more convenient to stay a proxy-user instead. policies the connotation of social desirability of internet use in media, policies, and the surroundings of non-users makes many of them feel left behind (klecun 2008) or even worse: stupid. a considerable number of non-users, however, were happy and successful without ever having used a computer or the internet themselves. similar to selwyn (2006) we find that “[…] the perceived ‘need’ for all citizens to engage with icts in order to survive and thrive in the current information age – could therefore be 25 considered erroneous in light of the many people in our study who were surviving (and often thriving) without it” (ib.: pp. 289). in light of many interviewees feeling left out, we come to the conclusion that it would be better to avoid stigmatizing non-use as something abnormal. instead it would be valuable to highlight potential personal benefits for non-users. if non-users thought they could find things online that interest them, e.g. in relation to their hobbies, internet use might become more attractive and motivate them to try it. moreover, similar to illiteracy it is detrimental for internet non-use to be a taboo topic. it would be more beneficial if policies promoted an open dialogue and hence enabled those who are struggling with literacy, computers, and the internet to find the help they need. future research more research is necessary in the area of social networks and their potentially negative impact on internet use that we found in our data. the notion that internet users in close networks would automatically have a positive, encouraging influence on future use needs to be reconsidered and studied more closely. while the potentially positive influence of warm experts is undeniable, we need to look more into the potentially negative influence of these experts. while the rich qualitative data showed a new facet of internet non-use that has rarely been considered before, it only scratches the surface. more research is needed to find out about especially vulnerable groups, such as immigrants and those who are struggling with more basic problems, such as literacy. for many interviewees more substantial problems than internet non-use came first on the agenda of things to be resolved. this suggests that socio-economic factors still play a big role in who is online and who is not. references ajzen, i. (1991): the theory of planned behavior. in: organizational behavior and human decision process 50, 179-211. 26 bakardjeva, m. (2005): internet society: the internet in everyday life. london, sage. creswell, j.w. (2009): research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. thousand oaks/london: sage. eynon, r., helsper, e. (2011): adults learning online: digital choice and/or digital exclusion? in: new media and society 13(4), 534-551. findahl, o. (2009): who are excluded and why? a study of the non-users of the internet. in: cunningham, p., cunningham, m. (eds.): echallenges e-2009 conference proceedings. iimc international information management corporation. flick, u. (2009): an introduction to qualitative research. thousand oaks/london: sage. gaskell, g. (2000): individual and group interviewing. in: bauer, m.w., gaskell, g.: qualitative researching with text, image, and sound. a practical handbook (pp. 3856). thousand oaks/london: sage. glaser, b.g., strauss, a.l. (1967): the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. chicago: aldine publishing. hargittai, e., hinnant, a. (2008): digital inequality: differences in young adults’ use of the internet. in: communication research 35(5), 602-621. helsper, e.j. (2011): the emergence of a digital underclass. digital policies in the uk and evidence for inclusion. in: lse media policy project: media policy brief 3. london: london school of economics. holstein, j.a., gubrium, j.f. (1995): the active interview. thousand oaks/london: sage. kiel, j.m. (2005): the digital divide: internet and e-mail use by the elderly. in: informatics for health and social care 30 (1), 19-23. london/new york: routledge. 27 klecun, e. (2008): bringing lost sheep into the fold: questioning the discourse of the digital divide. in: information technology & people 21 (3), 267-282. kuhlen, r. (1996): informationsmarkt: chancen und risiken der kommerzialisierung von wissen. konstanz. kvale, s., brinkmann, s. (2009): interviews: learning the craft of qualitative research interviewing, 2nd edition. thousand oaks/london: sage. livingstone, s., helsper, e. (2007): gradations in digital inclusion: children, young people, and the digital divide. in: new media & society 9 (4), 671-696. marshall, s.l., while, a.e. (1994): interviewing respondents who have english as a second language: challenges encountered and suggestions for other researchers. in: journal of advanced nursing 19 (3), 566-571. miles, m.b., huberman, a.m. (1994): qualitative data analysis: an expanded sourcebook, 2nd edition. thousand oaks/london: sage. milligan, c., passey, d. (2011): ageing and the use of the internet – current engagement and future needs. a state of the art review. oxford: nominet trust. office for national statistics (2010): statistical bulletin: internet access 2010. households and individuals. newport: office for national statistics. patton, m.q. (2002): qualitative research and evaluation methods, 3rd edition. thousand oaks/london: sage. race online 2012: available at: http://raceonline2012.org/ (accessed: 24/01/2012) reisdorf, b. (forthcoming): internet non-use: a comparative study of great britain and sweden. doctoral dissertation. university of oxford. reisdorf, b. (2011): non-adoption of the internet in great britain and sweden: a cross-national comparison. in: information, communication & society 14 (3), 400420. 28 rogers, e. (1995): diffusion of innovations. newyork: free press. selwyn, n., gorard, s., and furlong (2005) whose internet is it anyway? exploring adults (non) use of the internet in everyday life. european journal of communication 20, 5-26. selwyn, n. (2006): digital division or digital decision? a study of non-users and lowusers of computers. in: poetics 34, 273-292. selwyn, n. (2004): reconsidering political and popular understandings of the digital divide. in: new media & society 6 (3), 341-362. selwyn, n. (2003): apart from technology: understanding people’s non-use of information and communication technologies in everyday life. in: technology in society 25, 99–116. silverman, d. (2000): analyzing talk and text. in: denzin, n.k., lincoln, y.s. (eds.): the handbook of qualitative research, 2nd edition, 821-834. thousand oaks/london: sage. strauss, a., corbin, j. (1998): basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory, 2nd edition. thousand oaks/london: sage. white, p., selwyn, n. (2011): moving on-line? an analysis of patterns of adult internet use in the uk, 2002-2010. in: information, communication & society. doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2011.611816. wyatt, s. (2003): non-users also matter: the construction of users and non-users of the internet. in: oudshoorn, n., pinch, t. (eds.): how users matter: the coconstruction of users and technologies (pp. 67-79). cambridge/ma: the mit press. zillien, u., hargittai, e. (2009): digital distinction: status-specific types of internet usage. in: social science quarterly 90 (2), 274-291. ir16-template-final selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): rettberg, j. (2015, october 21-24). corpses, fetuses and zombies: the dehumanization of media users in science fiction and mainstream media. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. corpses, fetuses and zombies: the dehumanization of media users in science fiction and mainstream media jill walker rettberg university of bergen the relationship between humans and media is a central trope of classic science fiction, and one where media is frequently portrayed as a threat. ray bradbury's fahrenheit 451 (1953) is focalised through mildred’s husband, who sees her as distant from him, imprisoned by the media she loves and surrounded by her soap opera heroes: “his wife stretched on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of a tomb, her eyes fixed to the ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable. and in her ears the little seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind.” bradbury’s media prison is imagined from the world of television and radio, but the anxieties expressed are the same as those we see today, for instance in the short film i forgot my iphone (2013), where the protagonist goes through her day as the only person not constantly interacting with their phone. the two minute short has nearly 50 million views on youtube, showing that the motif hits a nerve. i forgot ends with an image very reminiscent of bradbury: as the protagonist curls up in bed with her boyfriend and turns out the light, he lifts up his phone and stares transfixed at its screen, his face bathed in its light. these two portrayals of humans and technology, created sixty years apart, use the same imagery: media creates distance between lovers. this paper aims to connect the motif of the human imprisoned and isolated by media as it is expressed in dystopic science fiction to its expressions in mainstream discourse. as a scholar of digital aesthetics and narratives rather than a social scientist, my aim is not to survey a representative selection of science fiction or to provide statistically reliable data, but to explore ways in which we make meaning by analysing passages and scenes that yield productive images about the relationship between humans and media, from science fiction literature, games and movies as well as from contemporary media discourse. immersion mildred is experiencing an immersive form of virtual reality. she has screens on all her walls and the characters in her favourite soap operas include her in the plots, waiting for her to say her lines. the holodeck in star trek and the flicksyncs in ernest cline’s ready player one (2011) follow the same idea, and many of today’s richly graphical games have a similar ambition. in the 1990s and early 2000s, immersion was a key concept for scholars of electronic literature and video games, and was viewed as highly desirable (murray 1997, ryan 2001, walker 2003). early cyberpunk fiction expresses some of the same excitement, notably with william gibson’s coining of the term cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination” in neuromancer (1984). in the early 90s, video game arcades and fairgrounds allowed visitors to try out simple vr helmets and gloves, and although the internet had almost no images, virtual, textual worlds like muds and moos were what interested scholars the most. online and offline seemed like separate worlds, and as sherry turkle described in life on the screen (1995), people often acted out different roles in different “worlds”. today mmogs like world of warcraft are important alternate worlds for millions of people, but in mainstream discourse, and in some scholarship such as sherry turkle’s alone together (2011), immersive media have become a threat. un-human, post-human, or a corpse? nathan jurgensen, who coined the term “digital dualism” to describe the false but common separation of “real life” and the digital (2012), wrote that i forgot my iphone “isn’t about the problems of digital connection, it’s about propping oneself up as more human and alive” (2013). he was referring to the reception of the film, but the contrast is evident in the film itself as well. the protagonist is shown appreciating the beauty of nature, in stark contrast to her phone-loving friends. birds sing joyfully as she wakes, and she listens, smiling, until her lover reaches for his phone. she goes for a morning run and rests to watch the sunrise, as a man talks into his phone, ignoring the view. she is shown to us as beautiful, alive and healthy, in contrast to the others who are locked to their phones. in fahrenheit 451, mildred’s husband imagines her as a corpse, with “invisible threads of steel” fixing her eyes to her media. the image of a skull invaded by metal is physically jarring, and reminiscent of the images of wires jacked into skulls in the matrix (1999). the metal in flesh is a graphical expression of the loss of our humanity, or, read in a more positive light, as we likely should in the matrix, it is an expression of the posthuman, where we become more than human. it is harder to find a positive interpretation of the comparison of the media-loving human to a corpse, and yet this is also a common trope in science fiction. media in science fiction doesn’t always lead to our apparent death, but it does often cause us to be in a state other than fully alive as independent animals. in the matrix most humans are kept naked in glass vats, floating in something akin to umbilical fluid. these humans are portrayed not as corpses but as unborn fetuses. the un-human in these stories is linked to the time after death or before birth. we still have bodies, but exist in a form of limbo, with no free will or agency. in the full paper, i will also examine the motionlessness of humans trapped by media, as in the children’s movie wall-e (2008), and the ways in which the dehumanizing powers of the media are imagined as robbing humans of their free will, as in the simulations that control people in divergent (2013). there are of course also many examples of positive portrayals of the relationship between humans and media in science fiction. daniel suarez’s two novels daemon (2009) and freedom (2010) show how easily the balance can shift from dystopia to utopia. in daemon software and augmented reality media appear to control humans completely and in a very frightening manner, but in the sequel freedom we see how that same software and media tools allow humans to create a better society. but even science fiction that shows the human user in control of media tends to touch upon the same tropes of media as dehumanizing. in ready player one almost all the plot occurs within the oasis, a virtual world, but descriptions of the protagonist hooked up to his virtual reality rig use imagery that contrast him to a healthy, adult human, for instance by emphasizing his removal of all body hair, even his eyebrows, to improve the connections between his haptic body suit and his skin. by providing a better understanding of the cultural imaginaries of humans and our relationship to technology, this paper will be useful to other scholars who wish to understand the actual ways in which humans think about our media. references jurgensen, nathan. 2012. “the irl fetish.” the new inquiry. http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-irl-fetish/. jurgensen, nathan (26.08.2013): “the problem with the ‘i forgot my phone’ video.” cyborgology. http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/08/26/the-problem-with-thei-forgot-my-phone-video/ murray, janet h (1997): hamlet on the holodeck. the future of narrative in cyberspace. cambridge, ma: mit press. ryan, marie-laure (2001): narrative as virtual reality: immersion and interactivity in literature and electronic media. baltimore: johns hopkins up. turkle, sherry (1995): life on the screen: identity in the age of the internet. new york: simon & schuster. turkle, sherry (2011): alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other. new york: basic books. walker, jill (2003): fiction and interaction: how clicking a mouse can make you part of a fictional world. university of bergen. https://bora.uib.no/handle/1956/1040 microsoft word kibby-surveillance, privacy, and social media-surveillance, privacy, and social media.doc selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): kibby, m. and fulton, j. (2015, october 21-24). surveillance, privacy and social media. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. surveillance, privacy, and social media marjorie d kibby the university of newcastle janet fulton the university of newcastle abstract the millennial generation seems to be habituated to having immediate access to information, including essentially private information on people of interest to them. social media has accustomed them to watching and being watched. albrechtslund (2013) describes this type of surveillance as “participatory surveillance”, where people willingly keep watch on each other through social media. an anonymous focus group and online survey of 80 australians aged between 18 and 34 investigated their use of participatory surveillance, that is, of their surveillance techniques on others and their awareness of the level of surveillance they themselves are under. the results reveal that while these young people were concerned about the privacy and security of their own personal information, they had come to rely on being able to access the personal information of others. keywords mutual surveillance; facebook; social media; millennials; privacy introduction the millenial generation (howe and strauss, 2009) seems to use facebook for four primary reasons: socializing, entertainment, information, and status seeking (park, kee and valenzuela, 2009), functions that are dependent on users’ self-disclosure of personal information. facebook facilitates the sharing of ideas and experiences, enabling a visibility of personal details that goes beyond that which would typically be available to acquaintances in the off-line environment (trottier, 2012). facebook suggests the sharing of “status updates”, “life events” and “photos/videos” encouraging a flow of personal information. responses to posts can be a “like”, a “comment”, or a “share”, responses that limit the possibility of a conversation and favour a one way discourse. in using facebook as a vehicle for staying in touch with personal networks, relationships become more like surveillance, where users are monitoring each other rather than engaging in a conversation with one another. the mutual surveillance on social media is different from the panopticon-style surveillance for control, and for this group the experience of social surveillance has largely been positive. individuals’ online visibility and concurrent watching of others functions “to foster deeper social connections” (markwick, 2012: 391), rather than to overtly influence their behavior. this study of australian students aged between 18 and 35 asked them about their use of facebook to uncover the extent to which that use constituted a normalization of the public disclosure of personal information. the study identified that these students are generally concerned about privacy and security for their personal information, particularly from individuals and from the government, but they are also reliant on facebook for information on individuals they have an interest in; friends, acquaintances, and strangers. method the project employed a mixed method approach, relying on both qualitative and quantitative data collection, and analysis and inference techniques (johnson, onwuegbuzie, & turner, 2007). an online survey used a likert scale to collect data on the likelihood of participants engaging in a range of surveillance practices on facebook, and on their attitudes to personal surveillance in both online and offline spaces. an asynchronous online discussion forum was used to conduct an unstructured focus group where participants were able to raise their own opinions and experiences of surveillance and respond to the ideas of others. results and discussion most of the respondents controlled the access to their information on facebook, with 51.9% having their privacy settings on “friends” and a further 31.2% using “customised” settings, indicating that at least at this level there was a deliberate decision made to limit the sharing of their personal information. while 32.1% often used facebook to communicate with friends and family, a majority used the site to establish new contacts, and to maintain contact with past friends, acquaintances and friends of friends. their use seemed to be directed towards establishing and maintaining weak ties. more than half of the participants (53.2%) said that they would share information or images that could be considered personal, with a significant number often (28.6%) or very often (5.2%) doing so. facebook normalizes this sharing of personal details, with strategies such as the “ask” button beside missing personal data, which emphasizes its absence. most seemed to be accepting of commercial entities and platforms collecting their data, with frequent comments in the focus group like: people act like it is a massive abuse that the service providers are selling our info info that we freely give. google/facebook aren't altruistic companies, and they need to make the money somehow. of course they are going to try and get as much information as possible. there was a general concern around government collection and use of data; however this was combined with an acceptance of its inevitability: have we reached an unspoken understanding? we aren't all going to just give up the internet, and do we really have any chance of stopping government surveillance? the discussion in the focus group suggested that privacy from individuals (latent axe murderers and vengeful exes) was a greater motivation in limiting and restricting disclosure, than fears of commercial and government monitoring of data: i start to freak out a bit when apps and services want my location because i'm one of those paranoid people that think when someone sees my location they will stalk and kill me. i know that the likelihood of this happening is very slim but it still completely freaks me out. i do feel that more people are using facebook and social media to "stalk" or monitor their partners. however despite their concerns regarding their own personal information and fears of how it might be used by others, the majority of respondents admitted to using facebook to collect data on others, or to publish others’ information. tagging family and friends without their prior permission was common (68.8% had done so), and uploading photos or videos of strangers an accepted practice (36.4%). before an interview or other important meeting 62.4% of this group would check the profile of the person(s) they were to meet. 87% of the group have checked the facebook profiles of people they met casually, such as in class, and 81.8% of them reported that they had looked up the profile of people that had not actually met, but were personally interested in. 14.3% of the survey respondents had considered checking the profile of an ex-partner or former friend to keep track of their activities, and an additional 71.4% had actually done so. amongst this group of millenials there seemed to be an understanding that the personal details of other people was information that was available for their use, with the majority accessing that information in circumstances where it provided them with a benefit or advantage. conclusion the risk of intimate data being circulated is balanced by the ability to receive immediate information on others, to be the first with the latest social news, or to be immediately armed with personal information. immediacy has become a primary factor in the way that millenials understand and engage with the internet and social media (lee and cook, 2014), and while privacy for their own information is a concern, it seems that this group willingly traded that privacy for immediacy of access to information about others. references albrechtslund, a. (2013) new media and changing perceptions of surveillance. in j. hartley, j. burgess and a. bruns, (eds.) blackwell companion to new media dynamics, chichester: wiley-blackwell. pp..311–321. howe, n., & strauss, w. (2009). millennials rising: the next great generation. vancouver: vintage books. johnson, r. b., onwuegbuzie, a. j., & turner, l. a. (2007). toward a definition of mixed methods research. journal of mixed methods research, 1(2), pp. 112-133. lee, ashlin and cook, peta s. (2014) the conditions of exposure and immediacy: internet surveillance and generation y published online 27 march 2014 journal of sociology marwick, a. (2012) the public domain: surveillance in everyday life, surveillance & society 9(4): pp. 378–93. trottier, d. (2012). interpersonal surveillance on social media. canadian journal of communication, 37(2). pp. 319-332 microsoft word aoir-2016_one-week-twitter_lang-checked_v3.docx selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): geenen, d. van, schäfer, m. t., boeschoten, t., hekman, e., bakker, p. and moons, j. (2016, october 5-8). mining one week of twitter. mapping networked publics in the dutch twittersphere. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. mining one week of twitter. mapping networked publics in the dutch twittersphere daniela van geenen university of applied sciences utrecht mirko tobias schäfer utrecht university thomas boeschoten utrecht university erik hekman university of applied sciences utrecht piet bakker university of applied sciences utrecht jonas moons university of applied sciences utrecht introduction how do “networked publics” (boyd, 2010) evolve and manifest themselves through everyday communication practices in the social media ecosystem twitter? twitter is often analyzed in relation to events, high-impact incidents (specific issues or hashtags), or with focus on particular groups represented on the platform (see e.g. case studies in weller et al., 2014). others examine the geographical dimension of follow relationships and hashtag use as a national indicator on twitter (bruns et al., 2014). however, the investigation of twitter as infrastructure for everyday communication and social interaction is underrepresented. taking the name of the medium for the message, this paper casts a view upon the daily chatter of participants. in an effort to map all conversations that constitute the dutch-speaking twittersphere over a period of one week, we identify the many conversations and the diverse interrelated publics constituting the ‘static’ of twitter communication. data collection and sampling the starting point for our analysis is a dataset of more than 4.4 million dutch tweets distributed between 4 and 12 september 20161 gathered in collaboration with media monitoring company buzzcapture.2 with approximately 2.8 million registered accounts (newcom, 2016), twitter is exceptionally popular in the netherlands. to give an impression of its popularity, the country counts a population of around 17 million inhabitants (cbs, 2016). this observation is underscored by a count of 763,255 active users that tweeted during the selected period. we employed digital methods (rogers, 2013) to collect and sample the data querying twitter’s application programming interfaces (apis). the data extraction was based on language detection using (a) a predefined list of frequently occurring dutch words and (b) an empirically defined extended list of distinctive dutch words, in terms of integrity retrieving data through both twitter’s streaming and search api (see figure 1 for detailed information). beside the tweet content and the account name, the set consists of metadata such as date and time. moreover, this study leaves aside geolocation to identify dutch tweets, as only 0,5 percent of accounts provided this information in tweets (also discussed by wilken, 2014, p. 161). 1 we chose to expand the timeframe of one week by including two additional days in order to create the opportunity to follow conversations that started on 10 september 2016. 2 for more information visit buzzcapture’s website: http://www.buzzcapture.com/. figure 1. corpus collection scheme methodology the methodological strength of our investigation is the combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches to collecting, processing, and exploring the data. for the analysis we identified and focused on conversations enabled by twitter’s @reply functionality which affords interaction and discussion between (virtually) all twitter users addressing a tweet’s author directly (bruns & moe, 2014, pp. 19-23). in this sense, interaction is not necessarily limited to ‘friends’, users that follow each other, or users that constitute like-minded publics. whoever takes a stand in a polarized debate, may count on responses by users with contradictory opinions. in that manner replies are suitable for mapping the infrastructure of public debate, as well as networked publics, since people tend to communicate with users similar to themselves, sharing the same interests or profession (cf. boeschoten, 2015). we performed social network analysis by the application of gephi (bastian et al., 2009) to map and statistically detect communities in the communication infrastructure. these “distant reading” strategies (moretti, 2013) were combined with interpretative tactics of ‘close reading’ supported by participatory observations of the dutch twittersphere and its publics. different dimensions of twitter use we singled out two case studies focused on twitter networks and conversations in two different cities in the netherlands: 1) almere and 2) wijk bij duurstede. we further investigated the relation of locality and media practice pertaining to these cases. the former is a fairly young metropolitan area, newly founded in the 1970s on reclaimed polder land, located near the capital city, amsterdam. with 198,823 inhabitants almere is the eighth most densely populated dutch city (1 april 2016, cbs), though since 2003 it has been without a daily newspaper (cf. van kerkhoven, 2016). in which ways is twitter used as a news medium and to distribute information to fill the gap of official news coverage? both cases were chosen in an endeavor to examine if locality and thus, distinct local media practice are traceable in municipalities of diverse dimensions, including size, infrastructure, and demographics. accordingly, the 23,392 inhabitants of wijk bij duurstede, a comparatively small municipality (1 april 2016, cbs), are on average older than the population of almere. furthermore, wijk bij duurstede is a rather rural commune, though it is located near utrecht, a university town and the fourth most populous dutch city. local dynamics were explored using a set of tweets distributed between 19 and 25 november 2015 that was collected in an earlier stage of the research (see figure 1). in this data set of more than 4.78 tweets, we found 1,333 tweets sent by 199 unique users that indicated local engagement with wijk bij duurstede, either by means of the location information offered by the twitter profile settings or the users’ profile description. adopting the same criteria for the identification of tweets and related accounts from almere, we traced 20,486 messages sent by 2,069 unique accounts. findings in our effort to provide an exhaustive mapping of national twitter communication, we detected accounts of politicians, media organizations, and journalists, which form the highly connected core of the most active part of the dutch reply network (see figure 2). to be specific, accounts in this network sent at least ten responses within the selected timeframe. these clusters of networked publics are often studied posing questions about twitter’s quality as medium for deliberative communication and public debate (for related examples see weller et al., 2014). our approach traced and placed individual clusters in the overall context of sent replies during one week in the dutch-speaking twittersphere. by doing so, we revealed less visible publics and their everyday communication practices as well. the latter clusters include several well-defined publics (in the visualization below) showing less connection with the center of the network graph, such as youtubers and gamer scenes, urban, memes and fan cultures. to clarify, the layout algorithm we used, forceatlas 2, clusters the network by virtue of repulsing nodes and attracting edges (jacomy et al., 2014, p. 2). also, we found that some accounts that show interaction with a diverse range of twitter accounts – situated in the center of the graph – are web care accounts, for example, the most prominent account in the reply network hosted by the dutch national railways. other accounts that stand out are those of community police officers. this group is particularly active on dutch twitter and connects multiple publics through their accounts. they also connect local publics with the national networks. figure 2. @reply practices in the active top of the dutch speaking twittersphere (degree 10) mapped by the application of gephi’s forceatlas 2 algorithm and partitioning (colors) based on statistical community detection (modularity) thus, our findings show the networked publics engaging in the “exchange of information and points of view” (habermas, 1996, p. 360) on a national and local level. many networks appear to be topic-based, such as the netherland’s youtube communities on twitter, the fans of theme park de efteling, or the community of police officers who cover local and national security topics. on a local level (cities or villages) we can observe the emergence of local twitter elites. in both local samples these consist of active and highly connected citizens, journalists, and politicians. in opposite to wijk bij duurstede, the twitter networks of almere show a higher number of political accounts in the top 100 most active accounts. almere is one of two larger cities in the netherlands, where the nationalist pvv (freedom party) is one of the biggest parties in the city council. this polarized political sentiment is also recognizable in the local twitter conversations. the account of the local fraction leader (pvv almere) is especially telling in its way to handle news: retweets are often used to place a commentary or an endorsement. without any commentary, tweets from known (international) rightwing sites are redistributed (e.g. breitbart), and mainstream media reports are often accompanied by a cynical or critical comment. moreover, local news is disseminated through tweets related to blogs and other online media dedicated to covering almere, since a local newspaper is not available to refer to. discussion in view of our findings, this paper addresses three points of discussion providing empirical, theoretical, and epistemological insights. firstly, valorizing data from twitter outside the high-awareness events and below the threshold of trending topics, we are able to make statements concerning everyday use of twitter and to zoom in on the intertwined local and national networks and their various publics. secondly, on a theoretical level, we can address these phenomena as forms of “citizen microbroadcasting” (erickson, 2010, p. 1201). this step provides the opportunity to draw from habermas’ (1989) notion of the “public sphere” and explore its “structural transformation” in local terms and related to topic-based publics, in the context of and through the rise of social media. while the many publics constitute both a multiplication and an increasing fragmentation of publics, they expose rather different media practices. the deliberation of societal questions, in order to support opinion formation and democratic organization is only one of many uses. however, these twitter-based networks are still connected to other media referring to them as cultural references or as source of information. with an awareness of the techno-economical and socio-technical fragmentation of web platforms (van dijck, 2013, p. 163), and taking geographical distribution into consideration, we map a plurality of (interconnected) public spheres. further investigation of interrelations between participants on local and national level, including professional media outlets, politicians, or members of civil public allows us to make an in-depth analysis of power relations and communicative effects. thirdly, on an epistemological note, the study raises the issue of completeness and representation of twitter data sets and critically reviews the possibilities and limitations of social media metrics. since we faced selection bias in monitoring all dutch actors participating on a regular basis, we enhanced the data extraction method in order to improve the initial data material. furthermore, this improvement of the collection method allows us to make inferences discussing the completeness of data mined through twitter’s apis (see e.g. collection scheme as figure 1). therefore, a further elaboration of this aspect will respond to the swelling call for “data critique” (rieder et al., 2015). references boeschoten, t. (2015). stedelijke publieken op twitter (master’s thesis). http://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/311619. boyd, d. (2010). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in papacharissi, z., networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 39-58). new york: routledge. bruns, a., burgess, j., & highfield, t. (2014). a “big data” approach to mapping the australian twittersphere. in p. l. arthur & k. bode (eds.), advancing digital humanities: research, methods, theories (pp. 113-129). basingstoke, hampshire: palgrave macmillan. bruns, a. & moe, h. (2014). structural layers of communication on twitter. in k. weller et al. (eds.), twitter and society (pp. 15-28). new york: peter lang. cbs (2016). statline. in centraal bureau voor de statistiek. http://statline.cbs.nl/statweb/search/?q=inwoneraantallen. dijck, j. van (2013). the culture of connectivity. a critical history of social media. new york: oxford university press. erickson, i. (2010). geography and community: new forms of interaction among people and places. american behavioral scientist, 53(8), pp. 1194-1207. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0002764209356250. habermas, j. (1989). the structural transformation of the public sphere. cambridge, ma.: mit press. --(1996). between facts and norms: contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. cambridge: polity. jacomy, m., heymann, s., venturini, t. and bastian, m. (2014). forceatlas2. a continuous graph layout algorithm for handy network visualization. plos one 9(6). http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0098679. kerkhoven, m.c. van (2016). lost in transition: media innovations in the netherlands. ph.d thesis. university of amsterdam. http://hdl.handle.net/11245/1.535977. moretti, f. (2013). distant reading. london: verso. newcom (2016). nationale social media onderzoek 2016. www.newcom.nl/socialmedia2016. rieder, b., abdulla, r., poell, t., woltering, r. and zack, l. (2015). data critique and analytical opportunities for very large facebook pages: lessons learned from exploring "we are all khaled said", big data & society, 2(2). http://bds.sagepub.com/content/2/2/2053951715614980. rogers, r. (2013). digital methods, cambridge, ma.: mit press. weller, k., bruns, a., burgess, j., mahrt, m. & puschmann, c. (2014). twitter and society. new york: peter lang. wilken, r. (2014). twitter and geographical location. in k. weller et al. (eds.), twitter and society (pp. 155-167). new york: peter lang. microsoft word 898-642-1-pb.docx navigating media ambivalence: strategies of resistance, avoidance, and engagement of media technologies in everyday life panel abstract as media technologies continue to infiltrate the domestic sphere with interactive opportunities, an increased interest in time and content management has surfaced. social media websites such as facebook and twitter have been commonly associated with “wasted time” and the accessibility of unchecked content has placed a strain on the preservation of family ethics and values. on the other hand, media technologies continue to offer spaces of both meaningful and necessary communication, as well as enjoyment, education, creativity, and political action. based on this cultural conundrum, important questions about social practice and media resistance follow: under what logics are individuals and families using deciding to resist media technologies? what are the everyday practices of media ambivalence and resistance and how do they operate in the domestic sphere? in most research and popular discussion of media texts and platforms, the focus is understandably on current or potential users of media. this panel aims to provide space for discussing an important, though perhaps under-attended to, phenomenon within media consumption: the active non-use or negotiation of media by subjects who hold ambivalent attitudes toward communication technologies. using empirical evidence and discourse analysis, each of the papers on this panel draws attention to the strategies employed by people who want to actively manage their own media use, as well as that of their families. the papers collected here consider a variety of communication technologies (email, television, smart phones, and social network sites) and focus on a range of factors (including gender, religion, and national context) that shape the attitudes taken and the tactics deployed in regulating media use. the first paper in this panel explores and analyzes technological and discursive “tactics” (i.e., “screen time”) that users employ to negotiate and limit media use for themselves and their families. drawing upon qualitative interviews conducted in households in israel, the authors try to make sense of these different practices through comparisons with research conducted about parents and children. the second paper looks at the role of gender, as a social practice, in the regulation of domestic media consumption—including the gender identification of the primary policing parent and resistance toward gendered symbols in media culture—in order to identify how gender norms are perpetuated through practices of media regulation. the third paper in this panel explores how muslims in the united states devise evasive tactics that both engage and resist the proliferation of media technologies in the household. in particular, the author argues that given their media deficit in american society, muslims often feel they cannot afford to resist media technologies, particularly smart phones and social media because of their connective qualities and their interventionist affordances. finally, the last paper examines the practice of refusal of social media platforms, for example, the active resistance by potential users to participation on sites like facebook. the author argues that this works against the potential for media refusal to function as effective strategy of collective action. practices of social media refusal and the discourses around it serve as sites of symbolic and material struggle within the contemporary commercial media context. as a panel, the papers converse with each other to examine the ways that individuals and families confront their usage of new technologies in a media saturated age. in particular, the nuances of media resistance are analyzed at the discursive and textual level in order to understand the productive ways in which media technology is managed. in an age where individuals and families increasingly use technology to restrict their technology use, scholarship on digital media ambivalence becomes essential to understanding contemporary media culture.       self-restraint as freedom: limitation of use as a form of media ambivalence michele rosenthal university of haifa israel mrosenthal@com.haifa.ac.il rivka ribak university of haifa israel rribak@com.haifa.ac.il sharon ringel university of haifa israel sharonringel@gmail.com abstract in the contemporary media-saturated landscape, even small acts of non-use or temporary avoidance can be understood as expressions of media ambivalence. this paper explores and analyzes technological (i.e., http://macfreedom.com/) and discursive “tactics” (i.e., “screen time”) that users employ to negotiate and limit media use for themselves and their families. drawing upon qualitative interviews conducted in households in israel, as well as popular texts in israel and the u.s. that discuss media “diets” and tactics for “slowing down” (http://slowmedia.typepad.com/), we show how these approaches express ambivalence about the effects of media upon children, family life, or upon the individual’s quality of life. in this context, we ask how moral responsibility for use and non-use is delegated to both human and non-human actants in different cultural and religious environments. keywords media avoidance; limitation; restriction; slow media; media accounts the national day of unplugging was celebrated world-wide on march 1-2 2013 (http://nationaldayofunplugging.com/). in preparation for that day, computer users were encouraged to unplug – to avoid technology and commerce, to connect with their loved ones, to get outside and to find silence (http://www.sabbathmanifesto.org/). many heeded the call and before unplugging, uploaded photos of themselves holding a sign in which they explained: "i unplug to" – recharge, rest, be with family, play music, read etc. this national-global day, then, both advocates and creates an opportunity to practice a particular form of media avoidance – one based on the limitation of use. unlike avoidance, in which one decides or is expected to practice total resistance, here technology is used and yet moderation is recommended: enjoy, but do not surrender; let go, but set limits. nationaldayofunplugging.com is not alone. the web offers a broad array of services, from friendly advice to actual "productivity tools," that advocate moderation and practically restrict use. this paper analyzes these web-based services as sites of media ambivalence in order to gain insight into the ways in which they reconcile "use" and "don't use." drawing on billig et al.'s (1988) notion of ideological dilemma, it explores the complexities of middle-range media resistance and reflects upon the role of limitation as a practice of media ambivalence. the paper is part of a larger project that studies media ambivalence in everyday life (r&r) in an attempt to map the practices that lie between media use and non-use, viewing and not-viewing, adoption and avoidance. the project is based mainly on observations and interviews with individuals and families that practice media avoidance or otherwise critically negotiate household or personal media. in this paper, by contrast, the reliance on websites' "about" and faq pages offers a unique understanding of the ways in which the limitation of media use, as a dilemmatic social practice, is "sold," literally and metaphorically, to users. limitation of media use is advocated in two types of websites. nationaldayofunplugging.com, sabbathmanifesto.org, letsmove.gov and others formulate the rationale for restricting media use and discuss ways to put it into practice. let's move, for example, contrasts screen time with physical activity and recommends setting screen time and logging screen time vs. active time (http://www.letsmove.gov/reduce-screen-time-and-get-active). other websites present tools for practicing limitation: selfrestraint, selfcontrolapp, macfreedom, getcoldturkey, unplug, rescuetime, minutesplease, internettimer, leechblock, stayfocused, anti-social, facebooklimiter – to name a few – sell applications that allow their users to reduce the time spent surfing in general and social networking in particular. both types of websites view excess use as a vice and view moderation as an ideal, and emphasize the role of self-control or restraint. they view time as an important resource that needs to be wisely managed, especially since technological convergence blurs the boundaries and distracts the user from "more important" goals. finally, the websites imply an imagined community that helps users feel "that they are not alone," even though they are sitting in front of the screen. despite these common features, the first type of websites – nationaldayofunplugging.com, sabbathmanifesto.org, letsmove.gov – can be described as discursive and performative in that they provide users with a common language and approach for managing their media in everyday life. the second type of websites – that offer tools for practicing limitation – are technologically and commercially based. the performative websites engage users with a vision of a wholesome life, and promises of self-improvement. practicing unplugging helps the user to remember what is truly important. creativity is considered the basis for a happy, healthy lifestyle, and users can express their own individuality through the practice (and by uploading their photo to the website). the technological websites focus on productivity and the exchange value of their services: "antisocial might be the best fifteen bucks you have ever spent." users are viewed as addicts and procrastinators who need a technological solution for their weaknesses. they are offered statistics based on their performance as an incentive, yet they are perceived as too weak to actually perform restraint or self-control without an electronic pat on the back or a technological nudge. in our paper, we try to make sense of these different practices through comparisons with research conducted about parents and children (see clark, 2012; livinngstone and helsper, 2008; nelson, 2010; seiter, 1999), particularly those that point to class as a distinguishing factor between parental approaches to technology. we complement those studies by emphasizing how users (individuals) delegate moral authority to the technologies, so that they share responsibility with them for social action. references billig, m. et al. (1988). ideological dilemmas: a social psychology of everyday thinking. sage. clark, l. s. (2012). the parent app: understanding families in the digital age. oxford university press, 2012. hoover, s., clark, s. l., alters, d. (2003). media, home, family. routledge. latour, b. (1992). where are the missing masses? the sociology of a few mundane artifacts. in shaping technology/building society: studies in sociotechnical change, edited by w. e. bijker & j. law, pp. 225–258, mit press. livingstone, s. and helsper, e. (2008). parental mediation and children’s internet use. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 52/4, 581-599. nelson, m. k. (2010). parenting out of control: anxious parents in uncertain times. new york university press. seiter, e. (1999). television and new media audiences. oxford: clarendon press. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd identity politics and domestic media regulation: gender ideology, negotiation, and strategy rachael liberman university of colorado boulder usa rachael.liberman@colorado.edu abstract based on household interview data, this paper analyzes the role(s) of gender, as a system of social practices, in the enactment of regulating domestic media consumption for children. whereas time management and content-related issues, such as violence and language, were often cited by parents as justifications for control, issues directly related to gender performance in household practices were absent from responses at the conversational level. using critical discourse analysis, and focusing primarily on gender ideologies and strategies, this study uncovers three main findings: (1) a correlation between the primary caregiver of the child/children and an increased knowledge base for the family media policy; (2) management of gendered messages were most often directed at female children; (3) household gender ideologies intersected with other social beliefs. these particular findings will be instructive for future studies on media resistance and media ambivalence in the home, and in particular, studies that focus on digital media and communication. keywords gender politics; media policy; domestic sphere; regulation sociologists have often noted that gender, as a social practice, plays a dominant role in familial relations, negotiations, and strategies within the domestic sphere. in particular, this role is often cited as political rather than organizational, and is often situated as perpetuating inequality. in her seminal work, the second shift, arlie hochschild (1989) argues that the allocation of domestic duties is directly related to gendered power dynamics, thus creating a “second shift” of labor that is directly connected to gender ideologies. these gender ideologies are developed as a result of an individual “unconsciously synthesizing certain cultural ideas with feelings about their past” (p. 16). through ethnographic research, hochschild found that due to the subjectification of women as inferior in the public sphere, many families have adopted the belief that women are naturally apt to manage the domestic sphere, including the “second shift” of childcare, cleaning, cooking, etc. however, hochschild also demonstrates that the “second shift” of domestic labor remains at the negotiated level rather than the hegemonic. similarly, cecilia ridgeway (2011) argues that gender ideologies are negotiated at the interpersonal level, as part of a framing device that regulates the ways that men and women relate to one another. here, gender works as an initial framework for “defining ‘who’ self and other are in order to coordinate their behavior and relate” (p. 7). and because gender is imbued with beliefs about status, masculinity/femininity, ability, and respect, interpersonal negotiation within the domestic (and public) sphere often becomes a site of power and inequality. the domestic sphere, then, functions as a highly gendered space that offers a stage for the performative negotiation of gender ideology. of the various domestic activities that are cited as gendered battlegrounds—childcare, cleaning, work—the enactment of regulating children’s media consumption has yet to be analyzed in this way. for now, media policies have been often articulated as part of a family’s collective identity or as an extension of their views on media effects (hoover, clark, and alters, 2004). this paper is uniquely interested in the roles of gender vis-à-vis media regulation in the domestic sphere and seeks to uncover the ways in which identity politics shape parental duties and implementation. specifically, this paper draws from audience reception analysis within the cultural studies framework. rather than abstractly conceptualize these domestic relations, this paper draws on transcripts from twenty family interviews conducted between the mid-1990s from 2008 as part of a center for media, religion, and culture project on media, meaning, and work. this particular interview instrument focused on responses to religion, work, calling, media consumption, and media policy. in order to identify the ways in which gender ideologies are perpetuated through media regulation, interview data were critically analyzed using questions such as: how are gender norms perpetuated through the management of media regulation? what is the gender of the policing parent? what gendered symbols are regulated? are there differences for regulation strategies among male versus female children? although these particular transcripts focus most heavily on television regulation, the conclusions drawn from this data set will be used to construct a forthcoming interview instrument for analyzing the domestic regulation of new media. because there has been a “stalled revolution” in the adjustment to updated gender relations, the findings from this study will be informative for future studies on domestic media policies (hochschild, 1989, p. 12). based on the application of critical discourse analysis with an emphasis on ideology, strategies and performance, three major findings emerged from the family transcripts. first, a correlation emerged between the primary caregiver of the child/children and an increased knowledge base for the family media policy. most often, whomever was designated as the stay-at-home caregiver, or the parent with more time for caregiving (over 50% of the households included a stay-at-home mother), was also the parent that would offer more detailed information regarding the length of time that children were allowed to consume media as well as the type of content that they were allowed to consumer. although the secondary caregiver responded as well, they appeared to be more interested in “big picture” regulations such as “language,” rather than an awareness of particular programming, characters, or scheduling. based on this correlation, it could be argued that a “media policy shift” is added to other domestic duties, creating another area of maintenance for the primary caregiver, who—based on these transcripts—is most often the mother. the second finding was based on media content and the management of gendered and sexual messages. although the transcripts revealed that time management and commercialization were the two main features of regulation that parents shifted into focus, conversations about “age appropriate” language, sexuality, and violence were often cited as additional markers. interestingly, concerns related to daughters and sexual content, values, and specific characters (i.e. hannah montana) were cited more than issues related to sons. further, when those issues were raised, it was most often the mother that elaborated on the topic. the third finding was that the gendered beliefs that were used to cite regulation strategies were most often used in conjunction with other variables, such as religion, socialization (childhood experience), social beliefs, and work. although this was to be expected, based on the work of hochschild and ridgeway, among others, it was helpful to find examples of gender ideology operating at the conversational and negotiated level. during discussions of work, daily activities, and their media policies, parents revealed meaningful clues about their beliefs on gender. based on these findings, it is essential that future interview instruments that seek to locate domestic practices of media consumption include questions that focus directly on gender strategies. further, due to the familial adoption of new media for entertainment and monitoring, questions should reflect this social update, as well inquiries into affordances, taste, and agency. in the end, while it is already well understood that the domestic regulation of media is not value-free, this area of research could benefit from locating the negotiations of gender ideology within lived practice. references gill, r. (2007). gender and the media. malden, ma: polity press. goffman, e. (1959). the presentation of self in everyday life. new york: anchor books. hochschild, a. (2012). the second shift: working families and the revolution at home (3rd ed.). new york: penguin books. hoover, s. m., clark, l.s., & alters, d.f. (2004). media, home, and family. new york: routledge. ridgeway, c. (2011). framed by gender: how gender inequality persists in the modern world. oxford: oxford university press. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. evasive tactics, media ambivalence and resistance in the muslim home nabil echchaibi university of colorado boulder usa nabil.echchaibi@colorado.edu abstract based on semi-structured household interviews, i examine how muslims in the united states devise evasive tactics that both engage and resist the proliferation of media technologies in the household. specifically, i look at how parents spatially deploy these technologies in the home and how they manage their media use and that of their children. i argue that given their media deficit in american society, muslims often feel they cannot afford to resist media technologies, particularly smart phones and social media because of their connective qualities and their interventionist affordances. media use and management in the muslim household can also be heavily regimented by degrees of piety, creating in the process new moral spaces where muslims experiment with different devotional practices and imagine new mediated paths to cultivating religious virtue.   keywords resistance; muslim home; media accounts; social media; media literacy in the past few decades, american muslims have rallied behind the critical need to combat discrimination and the increasing racialization of their faith, particularly following the events of 9/11. a number of organizations emerged to defend the legal and civil rights of muslims and urge them to become active civic servants. other muslim organizations targeted popular media and lobbied against stereotyping while helping muslims navigate better the beguiling world of secular media. scholars have written about how these organizations encourage muslims to amplify their voices and develop a media competence to counteract their marginalization in public life. but little has been written about how muslims negotiate the spatial and ethical terms of their media use at home and how they develop new media pathways that are consistent with their religious convictions and norms. as nick couldry (2012) argues, our research is narrowly centered around new articulations of media use and rarely on disarticulations of the media. couldry calls for a new paradigm of media research that should address “the whole range of practices in which media consumption and media talk are embedded, including practices of avoiding and selecting media input. the household, which has not been researched much in muslim contexts, becomes a critical material space, a site for political engagement, negotiation and resistance to narratives of othering. it is a good place to interrogate, through the spatial use of media technologies and engagement with media content, what it means to be muslim and muslim american today. much like the home can reflect the piety of muslims in terms of its material presentation and spiritual deployment of space -display of calligraphy on the wall, demarcation of spaces for prayers, designation of special places for the display of the qur’an, etc.media regulation or resistance in the home can be a good place to explore other practices and micropolitics of making home or performing the homeplace. following couldry’s call for a practice-based media studies, i argue that accounts of media use, regulation and resistance help us understand the centrality of home as an important site of identity, security, and belonging for muslim families. these accounts of media-related practices reveal not only important answers to how family values are inscribed in media practices, but they also interrogate the agency of muslim families in their struggle to reclaim and re-signify their domestic space, and finally the way in which the geopolitical is experienced and negotiated in the intimacy of home making. the media in this context are part of a social and cultural toolbox used to act on warped representations of islam, redress the invisibility of muslims in public culture, and police the boundaries of what it means to be muslim in america today. in their work on diasporic communication and everyday life, roger silverstone and myria georgiou (2007) write that “…mediation is a political process in so far as dominant forms of imaging and storytelling can be resisted, appropriated or countered by others both inside media space, that is through minority media of some kind or another, or on the edge of it, through the everyday tactics of symbolic engagement, in gossip, talk or stubborn refusal” (31). in this paper, i argue that tactics of stubborn refusal and engagement with the media in the muslim american context take on a different dimension, precisely because the media are both a source of tension, othering, and poor perceptions but also a source of escape into alternative and acceptable frames of what it means to be muslim. based on semi-structured household interviews, i examine how muslims in the united states devise evasive tactics that both engage and resist the proliferation of media technologies in the household. specifically, i look at how parents spatially deploy these technologies in the home and how they manage their media use and that of their children. i argue that given their media deficit in american society, muslims often feel they cannot afford to resist media technologies, particularly smart phones and social media because of their connective qualities and their interventionist affordances. media use and management in the muslim household can also be heavily regimented by degrees of piety, creating in the process new moral spaces where muslims experiment with different devotional practices and imagine new mediated paths to cultivating religious virtue and building political capital. media accounts also reveal how a complex sense of media literacy is critical in helping both parents and kids understand not only how to be alert to negative stereotyping but also how to strike back with their own media. in a sense, home dynamics of media use for some families, through the promotion of a ‘media talkback culture’ as read and write instead of read-only, generates a subversive, internal media capital to compete with the symbolic power of mediated discourse of islam and muslims. this study explores how this kind of disruptive use of media is embedded in family values and how muslim american households revise their media rules in the digital era. finally, this kind of research on muslims as dynamic subjects has significant value because it thickens our understanding beyond issues of representation of islam and muslims in media texts and beyond our focus on predictable sites of research on muslims such as formal spaces of worship as the mosque. it highlights how muslims produce their homes through a dialectical relationship with media and through media-related practices. it’s not only about what the media do to muslim but also what muslims do with and to media. references couldry, n. (2012). media, society, world: social theory and digital media practice. cambridge: polity press. georgiou, m and silverstone, r. (2006). diaspora and contra-flows beyond nationcentrism. in: d. k. thussu, (ed.) media on the move: global flow and contra-flow (pp. 30-44). routledge, london. hoover, s., clark, s. l., alters, d. (2003). media, home, family. london and new york: routledge. livingstone, s. and helsper, e.(2008). parental mediation and children’s internet use. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 52 (4). 581-599. alsultany, e. (2012). protesting muslim americans as patriotic americans: the allamerican muslim controversy. journal of mass media ethics 27(2). 145-1 media refusal as site of struggle: the contested meanings of digital labor, lifestyle activism, and opting out of facebook laura portwood-stacer new york university usa lportwoodstacer@gmail.com abstract this paper examines the practice of refusal of social media platforms, for example, the active resistance by potential users to participation on sites like facebook. it situates such resistance within debates about digital labor and neoliberal lifestyle politics. as a practice of activism, "media refusal" must be understood as a hybrid between a labor strike and a consumer boycott, since social media users are positioned simultaneously as producers, commodities, and audiences. however, the decision to abstain from facebook use is often discursively constructed, by both non-users and by commercial media representations, as an individual lifestyle choice rather than a tactic of political resistance. i argue that this works against the potential for media refusal to function as effective strategy of collective action. practices of social media refusal and the discourses around it serve as sites of symbolic and material struggle within the contemporary commercial media context. keywords social media; resistance; labor; lifestyle; activism a small but vocal contingent of social media users are fed up. popular blogs and technology columns are abuzz with accounts of those who are actively turning away from networks like facebook. some people object to their incorporation and exploitation into an ever-more omnipotent (and therefore ominous) commercial network. others simply find the platform—or their friends who also populate it—distracting, frustrating, or over-dramatic. still others use refusal as a means to establish themselves as elites or hipsters, above the masses of social media sheep who blindly scroll along with the crowd (though few will willingly claim the hipster label for themselves). this paper draws on my analysis of these discourses of refusal—as published in the popular journalistic press and as expressed in interviews i conducted with facebook nonusers—to theorize how acts of social media refusal might be understood in relation to notions of online labor, lifestyle, and resistance. social media refusers can be situated within a tradition of media resistance that includes anti-television campaigns (mittell, 2000) and other historical precedents, but they also responds to specific conditions of the present moment, namely the political economy of digital labor and the neoliberal culture of lifestyle politics. the phenomenon of social media refusal bears a complex and at times contradictory relationship to the concept of work. by attempting to remove themselves from the network, some facebook refusers enact a kind of individualized resistance to incorporation in an exploitative system of user labor. within media studies, there is a longstanding understanding that commercial media audiences are consumers, commodities, and workers (smythe, 2006; andrejevic, 2002). social media users bring into stark relief the interconnections between production and consumption that were perhaps more abstract with regard to other media forms such as television. indeed, popular statements of resistance sometimes echo the critiques that have been leveled by theorists of digital labor (terranova, 2013; andrejevic, 2011). through active not-consuming, these actors simultaneously attempt to make themselves into non-producers. resistance to social media participation thus must be situated at the crossroads of activist traditions that include both labor strikes and consumer strikes (cohen, 2003; de certeau, 1984; micheletti, 2003). simultaneously, and in contrast to the more overtly critical resisters, there is a discourse employed by some refusers that indicates their rather straightforward incorporation into neoliberal ideologies of personal productivity. for example, many explain their negative attitudes toward facebook in terms of its interference with their ability to “get work done.” in this sense, resistance to social media might be seen as a kind of technology of the self, used to discipline the subject into docility as an offline worker (foucault, 1988). this view assumes a different definition of labor than the web 2.0 free labor model; in this perspective, the kind of “prosumptive” (ritzer and jurgenson, 2010) activity that happens in social networks is a distraction from more authentic (and remunerative?) forms of labor. as i have argued elsewhere (author, 2012b) the issue of productivity is clearly complicated by a political economy driven by user generated content, immaterial labor, unceasing surveillance by both corporations and the state, and (if we’re feeling optimistic) participatory democracy through media channels. being “more productive” while offline, then, may actually simultaneously entail becoming less productive in the new ways that productivity has come to be defined for today’s media-using citizens. social media refusal must also be understood as a practice of lifestyle activism that goes beyond the mere rejection of a particular product, potentially aligning the refuser with a way of life and even an identity whose meaning is constituted by revolutionary opposition to mainstream patterns of work and leisure. the “facebook dropouts” of today evince parallels with the other countercultural refusers such as hippies, anarchists, and feminist separatists (marcuse, 1972; author, 2012a; echols, 1989), yet media resistance is also a unique phenomenon both within the digital labor economy and under the general conditions of neoliberalism in which individuals are made responsible for their own well-being in the realm of (supposedly) autonomous lifestyle choices (mcgee, 2005; littler, 2009). while strikes and boycotts are proven forms of collective action in some instances, the individualism of many practices of media refusal render them perhaps less likely to succeed in altering the structural conditions that spawn the problems to which refusers object. even where objections are not based purely in individual self-interest, popular media representations of abstainers’ motivations may encourage such an interpretation, thereby steering readers away from a critical stance toward conditions of corporate exploitation. based on the accounts of politicized media refusers, practices of media refusal can be usefully understood as instances of “propaganda by deed,” in the tradition of anarchist activism. just as anarchists from the turn of the twentieth century on saw their acts of insurrection—notably assassinations and riots—as spectacles which could potentially inspire the masses to revolt against oppressive systems, some of today’s social media abstainers see their resistance to corporations like facebook as an act of moral and political integrity that sets an example for others to follow. in other words, the choices made by individual (non)users become deeds which propagandize for the arguments against facebook’s exploitative commercial model. despite their utopian aspirations, anarchist propagandists often find themselves vilified by media representations and state institutions; their political critique gets lost in the face of mainstream discourses that use various tactics to minimize dissent against hierarchical systems of power. while the stakes appear lower in the case of media refusal propagandists, the discursive conditions faced are similar. deeds which indict the centralized power of media corporations are unlikely to get a full airing in commercial media contexts. drawing on analysis of media representations of facebook abstention, i show that this tactic which may have substantial ethical and political motivations is often represented as a consumer trend or personal quirk, thus leaving intact the hegemonic view of the commercial media economy as a neutral backdrop to individual lifestyle choices. in these instances, resistance is re-appropriated by commercial media itself, as a driver for view counts and click-throughs. further complicating this is the variety of spaces opened up by social media platforms for discourses of resistance, as when facebook quitters take to twitter, blogs posts, and comments sections to air their objections to zuckerberg’s empire, often in direct response to the hegemonic representations just mentioned above. we must see social media participation as both the object of resistance struggles, as well as a site for the representation of those struggles over meaning and resistance. it’s clear that media refusal is a complex phenomenon, made even more complicated by the multiple discursive frames through which it is represented and understood, even by its own practitioners. this paper presents the above brief discussion of these complexities, as an intermediate step toward a fuller understanding of the ambivalent cultural attitudes toward media consumption and the ambiguous place of social media participation within contemporary societies and political economies. acknowledgments this paper has benefitted from the insights and feedback of christina dunbar-hester, dan greene, elana levine, alice marwick, michael newman, rivka ribak, michele rosenthal, marita sturken, and louise woodstock, as well as participants at the 2012 theorizing the web conference and the 2012 meeting of the society for cinema and media studies. references andrejevic, m. (2011). surveillance and alienation in the online economy. surveillance & society 8 (3): 278-287. andrejevic, m. (2002). the work of being watched: interactive media and the exploitation of selfdisclosure. critical studies in media communication 19 (2), 230-248. cohen, l. (2003). a consumer’s republic: the politics of mass consumption in postwar america. new york: vintage books. de certeau, m. (1984). the practice of everyday life, translated by steven rendall. berkeley: university of california press. echols, a. (1989). daring to be bad: radical feminism in america, 1967-1975. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. foucault, m. (1988). technologies of the self. in lh martin, h gutman & ph hutton (eds.). technologies of the self: a seminar with michel foucault (pp. 16-49). amherst: university of massachusetts press. littler, j. (2009). radical consumption: shopping for change in contemporary culture. berkshire, uk: open university press. marcuse, herbert. (1972). counterrevolution and revolt. boston: beacon press. mcgee, m. (2005). self-help inc.: makeover culture in american life. london: oxford university press. micheletti, m. (2010). political virtue and shopping: individuals, consumerism, and collective action. new york: palgrave macmillan. mittell, j. (2000). the cultural power of an anti-television metaphor: questioning the ‘plug-in drug’and a tv-free america. television and new media 1 (2), 215–238. ritzer, g. & jurgensen, n. (2010). production, consumption, prosumption: the nature of capitalism in the age of the digital “prosumer.” journal of consumer culture 10 (1), 13-36. doi: 10.1177/1469540509354673. smythe, dw. (2006). on the audience commodity and its work. in mg durham & dm kellner (eds.). media and cultural studies: keyworks (pp. 230-256). malden, ma: blackwell publishing. terranova, t. (2013). free labor. in t scholz (ed.). digital labor: the internet as playground and factory (pp. 33-57). new york: routledge. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd.           microsoft word aoir2017final.docx selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): losh, e. (2017, october 18-21). i did not have text with that server: attitudes about gender, technology, and digital literacy in the 2016 u.s. presidential election. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. i did not have text with that server: attitudes about gender, technology, and digital literacy in the 2016 u.s. election author #1 elizabeth losh author #1 william and mary gender, privacy, and transparency many will argue that hillary clinton lost the recent u.s. presidential race because of her gender. communication scholars have argued that sexism was already a major factor in the 2008 election (carlin and winfrey, 2009; anderson, 2011) and that clinton threatened gender norms during her tenure as first lady (templin, 1999). others might argue that clinton’s digital practices and those of her campaign staff were a greater factor. polling data indicated that leaked emails undermined voter trust (suffolk, 2016) at a time that wikileaks had an improved reputation (yougov, 2016). the fbi investigation of her possible mishandling of classified information (washington post-abc, 2016) also seemed to have damaged voter support. this paper asserts that a conflation of gender and technology may have contributed to clinton’s defeat, because her digital literacy practices were judged as non-normative, based on evidence in materials in the @realdonaldtrump twitter archive, the fox news website (http://www.foxnews.com), the wikileaks database of hacked emails from hillary clinton and john podesta, and fbi documents. it uses a theoretical framework from science and technology studies that views technology as “both a source and a consequence of gender relations” (wajcman, 2006). assuming the coproduction of gender and technology emphasizes the performative and processual character of both to avoid the pitfalls of essentialism (bray, 2007). discourse analysis of legal decisions about u.s. technology law indicates that privacy has often been equated with womanhood (suk, 2008). this association of privacy, femininity, and computation has a long history in american rhetoric (losh, 2009). in contrast, masculinity may be affiliated with transparency, access, and penetration (keller, 1985). trump’s calls for transparency were often presented in terms of gender binaries, as in the case of his demand for open access to a secure technology after a 2015 terrorist attack in california and permission to “get into her cell phone” and “open it up” (struyk, 2016). the victory of trump — who famously refused to participate in the backchannel of email (barbaro and eder, 2015; haberman, 2016) and only used the front channel of twitter during the campaign — may indicate that populist sympathies could not be aligned with clinton because of her gendered affiliation with digital media and its ambiguities of access and delivery. in defending personal privacy clinton often claimed feminine privilege. for example, she described many of the more than thirty thousand emails that were deleted from her private account as not pertinent to the government’s inquiry because they were about her “daughter chelsea’s wedding, her mother dorothy’s funeral, her yoga routines and family vacations” (gearan and rucker, 2015) rather than worldly professional matters. critics of visual culture watching television coverage of clinton’s email scandal might be quick to observe a particular pattern. when news anchors discussed her emails, the accompanying b-roll showed a montage of images of clinton on her blackberry. these images of ubiquitous computing use showed clinton as withdrawn and ignoring other people or her environment. servers, peripherals, and promiscuous computing the association of clinton’s computer practices with impurity was also facilitated by comparisons with her husband’s infidelities and deceptions. a popular internet meme showed her image juxtaposed with “i did not have textual relations with that server.” the meme suggested that mrs. clinton was denying her own digital promiscuity and lack of self-control. however, as wendy chun points out, purity myths about digital privacy perpetuate blind spots about computer functions and foster denial of the fact that digital discourse always requires a public machine engaged in incessant intercourse (2006). the presence of printers and other peripherals could make the existing dynamic around security, transparency, and technological dependence even more problematic for clinton. as the wikileaks archive indicates, “pls. print” was a common clinton directive. in the literature about practices to protect digital security, gender continues to be an important area of investigation, although much of the scholarship on digital selfprotection focuses on minors (sonck, livingstone, kuiper & de haan, 2011) or on how online misogyny inhibits public participation in computer-mediated communication (jane, 2014) instead of email transmitted privately by adults. unpacking the rhetoric of stories with titles like “clinton directed her maid to print out classified materials” (sperry, 2016) requires addressing multiple layers of concern about class, gender, and national security. it is also possible that this is as much a story about age as a marker of technological competency (graff, 2016) as it is one about gender. nonetheless, if age rather than gender is the root cause of consternation about inappropriate digital intermingling, why was clinton punished for her lack of digital fluency so much more harshly than trump? as researchers begin to consider the digital literacy practices of prominent figures – such as politicians – and public attitudes about those practices, as important areas for scholarly inquiry, questions about gender inequities in claiming privacy rights over electronic files may still prove to be important for future democratic contests. references anderson, k. v. (2011). “rhymes with blunt”: pornification and u.s. political culture. rhetoric and public affairs, 14(2), 327–368. barbaro, m., & eder, s. (2015, july 28). under oath, donald trump shows his raw side. the new york times. retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/29/us/politics/depositions-show-donald-trump-asquick-to-exaggerate-and-insult.html bray, f. (2007). gender and technology. annual review of anthropology, 36(1), 37–53. carlin, d. b., & winfrey, k. l. (2009). have you come a long way, baby? hillary clinton, sarah palin, and sexism in 2008 campaign coverage. communication studies, 60(4), 326–343. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510970903109904 chun, w. h. k. (2006). control and freedom: power and paranoia in the age of fiber optics. cambridge, mass.: mit press. galloway, a. r. (2004). protocol: how control exists after decentralization. cambridge, mass.: mit press. retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.31968 gearan, a., & rucker, p. (2015, march 10). clinton: it “might have been smarter” to use a state dept. e-mail account. washington post. retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-to-answer-questions-aboutuse-of-private-e-mail-server/2015/03/10/4c000d00-c735-11e4-a1996cb5e63819d2_story.html graff, g. m. (2016). what the fbi files reveal about hillary clinton’s email server. politico magazine. retrieved from http://politi.co/2cfumcq haberman, m. (2016, december 31). trump promises a revelation on hacking. the new york times. retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/31/us/politics/donald-trump-russia-hacking.html jane, e. a. (2014). “back to the kitchen, cunt”: speaking the unspeakable about online misogyny. continuum, 28(4), 558–570. keller, e. f. (1985). reflections on gender and science. new haven: yale university press. losh, e. (2009). virtualpolitik: an electronic history of government media-making in a time of war, scandal, disaster, miscommunication, and mistakes. cambridge, mass.: mit press. sonck, n., livingstone, s., kuiper, e., & de haan, j. (2011). digital literacy and safety skills. retrieved february 19, 2017, from http://www.eukidsonline.net/ sperry, p. (2016, november 6). clinton directed her maid to print out classified materials. retrieved from http://nypost.com/2016/11/06/clinton-directed-her-maidto-print-out-classified-materials/ struyk, r. (2016, february 17). donald trump says apple should hack san bernardino attacker phone. retrieved from http://abcnews.go.com/politics/donald-trump-applehack-san-bernardino-attacker-phone/story?id=36997198 suk, j. (2008). is privacy a woman? the georgetown law journal, 97(2), 485–513. suffolk university political research center. (2016). national issues poll with usa today october 26, 2016. retrieved from http://www.suffolk.edu/documents/suprc/10_26_2016_tables.pdf templin, c. (1999). hillary clinton as threat to gender norms: cartoon images of the first lady. journal of communication inquiry, 23(1), 20–36. wajcman, j. (2006). technofeminism. cambridge, uk; malden, ma: polity press. washington post-abc news tracking poll october 25-28. (2016). retrieved february 19, 2017, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/apps/g/page/politics/washingtonpost-abc-news-tracking-poll-october-25-28/2115/ yougov. (2016). yougov october 23 24, 2016. retrieved from https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/ncxbe6al7h/tab s_op_wikileaks_20161024.pdf selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 online communities and the affordances of anonymity jessica l. beyer university of washington u.s.a. jlbeyer@uw.edu abstract in many cases the affordances of an online space have a crucial role in creating the “shape” of an online community including the adoption of cultural norms based on the structural restrictions of a given space. what then becomes a driving factor in producing outcomes—the structure of a technological space, the guiding principle of a cultural value, or the agency of actors? anonymity in online communities offers a useful lens to explore questions about affordances and online communities, in particular, in relation to political mobilization. this paper is an attempt to articulate how the intricacies of anonymity can generate different types of political outcomes. keywords affordance; anonymity; political mobilization; online communities online communities and affordances of anonymity in many cases the affordances of an online space have a crucial role in creating the “shape” of an online community including the adoption of cultural norms based on the structural restrictions of a given space. what then becomes a driving factor in producing outcomes—the structure of a technological space, the guiding principle of a cultural value, or the agency of actors? anonymity in online communities offers a useful lens to explore questions about affordances and online communities, particularly in relation to political mobilization. this paper is an attempt to articulate how the intricacies of anonymity can generate different types of political outcomes. as an affordance of online spaces, anonymity is a component that crosscuts research agendas, theoretical discussions, design choices, and policy debates. indeed, anonymity is often considered in causal terms and discussed in relation to the outcomes that it fosters. further, it is frequently framed in relation to its benefits or consequences. for good reason, as anonymity has a profound impact on what users do in a given space, what users feel they can do, and the types of communities that appear. many scholars have observed the affordances of anonymity in relation to the varied anonymous groups (e.g. beyer, forthcoming; coleman, 2012; knuttila, 2011; norton, 2011; phillips, 2012; sauter, 2012; simcoe 2012). in the case of anonymous, the anonymity built into the structure of anonymous’ birthplace, 4chan.org, not only kept users from developing identities but also became internalized as a community value and maintained once participants left the space (beyer, forthcoming; simcoe, 2012). in addition, successful website creators mark zuckerberg (facebook) and christopher poole (4chan), have debated the benefits and drawbacks of online anonymity, with each articulating a different set of affordances attached to “public-ness” (kirkpatrick 2010: 199) or anonymity (poole, 2011). for example, in a speech in 2011, poole asserted that the anonymous nature of 4chan.org allowed a contributory culture to flourish in a way that sites without anonymity did not saying, “anonymity is authenticity. it allows you to share in a completely unvarnished, raw way.” the popular press has created boogeymen in online spaces where child predators and highway robbers “dressed” as women lurk while other research has shown that anonymity or pseudo-anonymity protects activists (e.g. howard and hussain, 2011). however, how much agency should we ascribe to a single technological attribute of an online community space? drawing data collected during comparative ethnographic research in a variety of selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 highly populated online communities, i focus on three aspects of anonymity and political mobilization here. first, often anonymity is divided into three categories—anonymity, pseudo-anonymity, and “non-anonymity”—but these categories do not necessarily capture the nuances of what anonymity means in a given online space. thus, to articulate “anonymity” online i inductively created a set of criteria for coding online communities and produced a continuum of anonymity. for example, while many would consider most of 4chan.org to be a completely anonymous online community, the site administration tracks users’ ip addresses. in contrast, world of warcraft players are pseudoanonymous (i.e. aliased) as people use names distinct to that space. nevertheless, layers of reputation based on traceable behaviors, group membership, and other factors including blizzard’s behavior tracking mean users are known, particularly within their own sub-communities. second, i then apply this continuum to questions of what types of affordances foster political mobilization in online communities. peculiarly, my research has indicated that the more regulated and the more known users are, the less likely they are to mobilize politically. as part of my findings, i argue that in online spaces where there are high levels of anonymity and low levels of formal regulation, it is more likely that conflicts with offline behavioral norms will emerge and with it, political mobilization. the structural restrictions placed upon users by websites can generate a culture of anonymity in which anonymity becomes a value that is policed and considered a defining community feature. in such spaces, users that break the norm of anonymity, particularly for their own glorification, are punished for their transgression. anonymous and 4chan are obvious examples of this, but this concept is embedded in the norms of other online communities such as reddit where it is a formal site rule and also a community norm to refrain from posting personal information. these findings indicate that the affordances of an online space have a fairly significant impact on the types of behaviors that emerge from the space. finally, i assert that once internalized as a value, anonymity is drawn upon to pursue particular types of outcomes using particular types of strategies. as scholars such as earl and kimport have argued: “that a technology such as a computer or the web can offer an affordance doesn’t really matter unless people leverage that affordance” (earl and kimport, 2011: 33). using anonymous as an “easy case” to test this, it has appeared that the community value of anonymity has reinforced political strategy choices. in anonymous produced videos, texts, and websites, anonymity is clearly identified as a valuable attribute of anonymous. organizational forms that flow from anonymity, such as lack of hierarchy, are also identified as strengths. in addition, all of the following articulated ideas are associated with anonymity: there is strength in numbers, the whole is more powerful than the individual, and the collective does not represent any individual voice, but rather an idea whose time has come. as a video from 2008 states, “we have no leaders, no single entity directing us – only the collective outrage of individuals, guiding our hand in the current efforts to bring awareness” (church0fscientology, 2008). thus, while there are functional reasons for the choice to wear a mask at “real life” protests—such as to maintain anonymity to avoid retribution from church of scientology officials—and reasons for maintaining anonymity online—such as avoiding law enforcement—these choices also are related to the value placed on anonymity. in conclusion, when considering my research in relation to the concept of affordances a murkier picture appears than one that can be simplified into a consideration of the structure versus agency. the “geography” of online communities do structure behaviors, but “the rules” and individuals are inherently engaged in mutually transformative relationships (migdal, 2001: 254). references beyer, j. l. (forthcoming). expect us: online communities and political mobilization. new york, ny: oxford university press. church0fscientology. (2008). call to action. youtube. january 27, 2008. retrieved from http://youtu.be/yrkchxczy70 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 coleman, g. (2012). our weirdness is free, the logic of anonymous—online army, agent of chaos, and seeker of justice. triple canopy. january 2012. retrieved from http://canopycanopycanopy.com/15/our_weirdness_is_free earl, j. and kimport, k. (2011). digitally enabled social change: activism in the internet age. boston: mit press. howard, p.n. and hussain, m. (2011). the role of digital media. journal of democracy 3(22): 35-48. kirkpatrick, d. (2010). the facebook effect: the inside story of the company that is connecting the world. new york, ny: simon & schuster. knuttila, l. (2011). user unknown: 4chan, anonymity, and contingency. first monday 16(10). retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3665/3055 migdal, j. (2001). state in society: studying how states and societies transform and constitute one another. cambridge: cambridge university press. phillips, w. (2012). the house that fox built: anonymous, spectacle, and cycles of amplification. television & new media. retrieved from http://tvn.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/08/27/1527476412452799 doi: 10.1177/1527476412452799 poole, c. (2011). keynote speech, sxsw. march 13, 2011. retrieved from http://schedule.sxsw.com/2011/events/event_iap000001 norton, q. (2011). anonymous 101: introduction to the lulz. wired magazine: threat level. november 8, 2011. retrieved from http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/anonymous-101/all/ sauter, m. guy fawkes mask-ology. hilobrow. april 30, 2012. retrieved from http://hilobrow.com/2012/04/30/mask/ simcoe, l. (2012). the internet is serious business: 4chan's /b/ board and the lulz as alternative political discourse on the internet. m.a. thesis, ryerson university. license this article is ©2013 jessica l. beyer, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 technology as virus: using biological metaphors to talk about determinism miles c. coleman gina neff university of washington, seattle abstract this paper argues that the best way to understand “determinism” is to reformulate the idea that technology and human sociality constitute a dynamic interplay. contrary to the idea that this interplay is symmetrical, however, the authors argue that this interplay is best understood as inherently asymmetrical. using the metaphor of a virus, the authors question whether the “agency” of technology necessarily needs to imply the same kind of agency that human actors imply. keywords technological determinism; metaphor; science and technology studies; agency technology as virus: using biological metaphors to talk about determinism the challenges for sts remain: to understand how machines make history in concert with current generations of people; to conceptualize the dialectical relationship between the social shaping of technology and the technical shaping of society; and to treat them symmetrically the categories of analysts and those of actors even in if the latter includes technological determinism, anathema to so much contemporary scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. –sally wyatt today, nearly six years following wyatt’s (2008) bold admonition to scholars of science and technology, we still find that the “monster under the bed” that is technological determinism is still being ignored. perhaps we think that if we put our heads under the covers it will eventually go away, freeing us of the oppressive aura that it brings. but the fact remains, ignoring something as persistent as technological determinism won’t make it go away. if anything, leaving it unwatched leaves us vulnerable to its potential violences, and unaware of any beneficence it might have. there are certainly conversations that critique this lack of awareness head-on (e.g., neff, jordan, mcveigh-sculz, 2012), stating that while we may have come to understand the relationships between technologies and users in more complex and sophisticated ways, we nonetheless tend to focus most hardily on the “social shaping” side of wyatt’s (2008) abovementioned symmetrical structure, leaving “technological shaping” under-theorized. in an effort to continue this conversation, it will be argued that the symmetry that is so central to wyatt’s vision of how sts scholars should approach determinism can be constructively reformulated to allow for a more dynamic relationship between users and technologies, not as elements in balance, but rather as entities that contingently negotiate agency based on asymmetrical contextual particulars much the same as when a meets a host. the host might get sick, it might keep the contagion at bay, or, it might even benefit from the entity’s presence, depending on the contextual elements that surround the instance of interaction, not necessarily the interaction itself. using context to define how agency is actualized allows space to attribute agential influence to either technical or social influences, depending on the instance in which the interaction occurred. sometimes we make our own decisions; other times, our decisions are made for us. biotic metaphors help us deal with this reality by animating technology as something that can, in fact, possess agency. metaphors work enthymematically, by asking the reader to “fill in the blank,” to “carry over” the meaning of the vehicle (bios) to the tenor (technology) based on the communal information available selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 to him or her. as a result of such an enthymematic reformulation of vehicle and tenor, a new understanding of the terms is yielded (burkholder & henry, 2009). the complexities and contingencies we commonly associate with living life day-to-day, amidst a world inundated with other non-static, animated life forms describes the connotations this work hopes to transfer to technical agency, and our (human) relationship to it. for thomas & wyatt, (1999), the metaphors we choose to describe the relationships between technology and users have "a normative dimension; they can be used to help the imaginary become real or true"(p. 695). exploring specific biotic metaphors can help to create a useful taxonomy for dealing with determinism in increasingly dynamic ways. though not exhaustive of all possibilities of bios, one particularly potent biotic relationship between technology and society will be discussed in this paper: virus. technology as virus the notion that a nearly lifeless modicum of proteins can confiscate and re-appropriate the reproductive functions of a living cell so as to repeatedly, and rapidly, self-replicate to the point of evolutionary mutation, all the while interrupting the normal processes of that cell, brings a foreboding sense of unpredictability. just as the influenza virus can keep a person in bed, technology as virus can affect the choices people are able to make. j. macgregor wise (1998) helps draw out this deterministic relationship rather well when he depicts technical agents as not possessing a will like a human, or even a cat, or a dog would, but rather an “effectivity” upon those beings that do possess a will. just like a virus, integrated into the workings of a cell, injecting and reproducing its influence upon that cell. technology as virus does not act per se. rather, it effects action in such a way as to continually reproduce the effect. for instance, as communication technologies evolve, personal information is made more easily accessible, creating concern for users in the form of “information privacy” (belanger & crossler, 2011). communication technologies' introduction to the host cell of society has created a self-replicating producer of information privacy concern. every new operating system, advance in social media, or portable computing device has depended upon the developments that preceded it; one would think that designing a “smart” phone is a complicated endeavor, easily facilitated by the use of other information technologies, for example. within each technological development is an established framework of privacy concern, say the difference between computer viruses in email attachments and the remote identity theft that can happen on "smart" phones. within each of these frameworks is an established set of "entrenched norms…. key social interdependences, as responsible for its features, function, and impact" (nissenbaum, 2010, pp. 4, 5). the creation of many new technologies is determined by the concern for information privacy; the concern for information privacy is perpetuated by the creation of communication technologies—like a virus reproducing itself in the host cell of the social. the agency of the host cell can exist independently of a virus. nonetheless, when a virus is introduced to the host cell that actualization of agency is reconfigured in such a way as to require negotiation with the virus. the host cell’s decisions become the host cell/virus’ decisions. to explain, we’ll visit balsamo’s (2011) conceptualization of “intra-actions,” which describe agency that is actualized in the opening between the embedded agency of the technical and the expressive agency of the social. an example of this can be drawn from mackenzie’s (2007) “machine time,” the “different timings attached to contemporary computing and information technologies” (p. 89). the actualization of a user’s agency when using a communication technology is not necessarily the product of a user socially constructing the keyboard under their fingers, or the email software meeting their eyes on a screen. rather, the actualization of a user’s agency is the product of the circuit inlays of the keyboard, the keyboard’s key matrix and keymap interacting with the input/output system of the computer, which interacts with the transmission control protocols that allow the computer to connect to an email service, which interacts with the coding of the email service, which interacts with the political, aesthetic, and scientific values and beliefs of the user. the matrices that exist along these nodes of selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 6 connection influence the user in varied and unbalanced ways, which effect the agential outcomes of the interaction—just like a virus infecting a cell effects the processes that the cell can carry out. conclusion the dynamics inherent to “living” make biotic metaphors useful for animating analysis of agential outcomes. technology as virus has been discussed to show that determinism can occur asymmetrically between social and technical entities. references balsamo, a. (2011). gendering the technological imagination (pp. 27-50). durham, nc: duke university press. belanger, f., & crossler, r. e. (2011). privacy in the digital age: a review of information privacy research in information systems. mis quarterly, 35(4), 1017-1041. burkholder, t. r., & henry, d. (2009). criticism of metaphor. lanham, md: lexington books. mackenzie, a. (2007). protocols and the irreducible traces of emobodiment: the viterbi algorithm and the mosaic of machine time. in r. hassan & r. e. purser (eds.), time and temporality in the network society (pp. 89-105). stanford: stanford university press. nissenbaum, h. f. (2010). privacy in context: technology policy, and the integrity of social life. stanford, ca: stanford university press. thomas, g., & wyatt, s. (1999). shaping cyberspace: interpreting and transforming the internet. research policy, 28(7), 681-698. wyatt, s. (2008). technological determinism is dead; long live technological determinism. in e. j. hackett, o. amsterdamska, m. lynch & j. wajcman (eds.), the handbook of science and technology studies (3rd ed., pp. 165-180). cambridge, ma: mit press. wise, j. m. (1998). intelligent agency. cultural studies of science and technology, 12(3), 410-428. wyatt, s. (2008). technological determinism is dead; long live technological determinism. in e. j. hackett, o. amsterdamska, m. lynch & j. wajcman (eds.), the handbook of science and technology studies (3rd ed., pp. 165-180). cambridge, ma: mit press. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 7 affordance out of place: reflexive use and the designerly capacities of “users” joshua mcveigh-schultz university of southern california, media arts and practice, school of cinematic arts jrmcveig@usc.edu abstract in hci, cscw, and related fields, the term ‘affordance’ gained purchase in the late 80s and early 90s, during a period of heightened interest in hybrid media spaces and collaborative virtual environments. for design researchers, these platforms accentuated differences between space (as designable structure) vs. place (as emergent within social practice). migrating to the social sciences, ‘affordance’ now broadly accounts for the ways that online platform-features influence social practice, but such usage sometimes retains an artificial separation between space and place and, in so doing, obscures users’ own reflexive engagement with affordance. this essay rereads selected research from the 1990s in order to draw attention to the ways that users can act like designers—manipulating ‘space’ with an eye towards reshaping ‘place.’ extrapolating to contemporary online contexts, we can similarly identify users’ own reflexive attention to affordance as increasingly key to understanding the entanglement of technical systems and social practice. keywords affordance; reflexive use; space; place affordance out of place: reflexive use and the designerly capacities of “users” psychologist james gibson developed affordance theory as a way of reframing visual perception in terms of what he called ‘ecological physics.’ later donald norman adapted affordance theory from gibson’s psychology of vision to account for the ways that designed objects telegraph their actioncapacities to users. key to both gibson’s and norman’s formulations was an insistence on affordances as having formal properties accessible through perception.1 in its contemporary incarnation, however, the term ‘affordance’ operates in the humanities and social sciences as a useful shorthand to account for the ways in which platforms open up, privilege, or constrain, particular actions and social practices (boyd, 2011; hutchby, 2001; wellman et al., 2003). in these contexts, theorists have moved away from the criterion that an affordance needs to be directly perceivable. especially when describing interaction with digital platforms, theorists have pointed to algorithms, or digital materiality, as having certain properties which may not be immediately perceivable by those interacting with a platform. for example, danah boyd identifies four affordances inherent to digital platforms, properties which shape networked publics: persistence, replicability, scalability, and searchability (boyd, 2011). and due to the lack of inherent visibility of these properties, users of digital platforms can sometimes stumble upon unexpected context collapse (ibid). this framing of affordance, as inherent to systems but not necessarily accessible to perception, offers a different kind of explanatory framework than the version of affordance that gibson, and later norman, privileged. that said, this social science conception of affordance shares ground with a particular 1 “affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things. plates are for pushing. knobs are for turning. slots are for inserting things into. balls are for throwing or bouncing. when affordances are taken advantage of, the user knows what to do just by looking: no picture, no label, or instruction is required. complex things may require explanation, but simple things should not” (norman, 1988, p. 9). note: norman later clarifies this position, stating that he was intending to describe ‘perceived affordance’ as opposed to ‘actual affordances. however, he argues prescriptively that designers should seek to align the two (1999). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 8 thread of hci research that positions affordances as potentially hidden (w. gaver, 1991; mcgrenere & ho, 2000). 2 without pre-judging one or the other notion of affordance as more or less valuable, it is nevertheless productive to unpack what gets elided when the terminology shifts in this way. if affordances can be invisible or misperceived, we can indeed account for misperceived affordances and, for example, unanticipated context collapse in digital platforms. but given an alternative perspective that emphasizes the way affordances are inscribed in interfaces, we have a different sort of reading with a different sort of explanatory power. for instance, consider the case of facebook’s shift from an interface that privileged ephemerality—by burying status updates—to one that foregrounded persistence in the facebook timeline.3 this version of affordance, rather than emphasizing infrastructural capacities, instead underscores the ways in which facebook’s ui initially promoted a false sense of ephemerality. by collapsing these two senses of affordance, we collapse important distinctions between foregrounded interface features vs. the obscured capacities of platform infrastructures. in so doing, we perhaps unnecessarily privileges designers, developers, coders, etc. as those who have the exclusive ability to think about, structure, and act agentively upon affordance, and likewise draw attention away from the ways that users themselves articulate and manipulate affordances reflexively. and this oversight, i would suggest, also makes us less equipped to understand the ways that technical systems and social practices become entangled. for example, twitter features like @reply, retweet, and hashtag were all initially invented through emergent practice long before analogous digitally supported affordances were introduced by twitter’s developers. this trajectory (from practice to platform) upends the privileged status of designers as uniquely able to conceptualize new models of use. the tendency to emphasize affordance as the domain of the designer/developer parallels distinctions between space (as designed structure) and place (as lived practice) that emerged in hci and cscw research on hybrid and virtual spaces. by revisiting this literature, we can start to imagine an alternative reading of the relationship between structure and practice which positions users as actors grappling reflexively with affordance. in a much cited article in computer supported cooperative work titled “re-place-ing space: the roles of place and space in collaborative systems,” steve harrison and paul dourish (1996) grapple with distinctions that had become apparent in the 1990s between the abilities of designers to structure collaborative spaces vs. the understood social reality of those spaces, which harrison and dourish 2 writing in 1991, william gaver found it helpful to distinguish affordances from the perceptual information available about them (w. gaver, 1991). within this framework he identifies the notion of a hidden affordance, in cases where no perceptual information is available about an affordance but a latent action-capacity is present. i would argue here that the notion that an affordance is “hidden” suggests some other being could independently verify it or intend it (know of its existence) without being positioned as a “user.” in other words, the notion of a “hidden” affordance assumes a designer who has preconceptualized a model of use. it also assumes an ideal user who does not tinker with their environment, nor engage with its properties in an exploratory fashion, but rather experiences objects’ action-capacities as knowable through perception. in “the wild,” however, we know this scenario to be suspect, both in terms of material affordances of objects as well as in terms of digital platforms. humans learn about affordances not only by perceiving objects and interfaces but by manipulating them. especially when affordances are contingent upon an intermingling of technical infrastructure and inter-subjective practices, then, we need alternative modes of attending to users’ own designerly capacity to tinker, probe, and reimagine the relationship between formal structure and practice. in this sense, affordance, as in gibson’s original formulation, is not exclusively defined by the properties of a system but rather by the relationship between an organism (human) and its environment. and as such, affordances can be pliable, emergent, or tinkerable properties of systems. 3 before facebook’s recent shift to timeline, users could still reach back into the history of their wall by scrolling down and loading one page-increment of update-history after another in reverse chronological order. the affordance of this interface mechanism communicated a particular message: that contributions to facebook were indeed persistent, but that they were also fairly buried, and that a degree of labor would be required for someone to “dig” that far back into the history of their own, or another’s, wall postings. by contrast, a view of affordance that emphasizes persistence as a capacity inherent to networked platforms sees facebook’s positioning differently—i.e. from this perspective, facebook’s status preand posttimeline is stable with respect to the affordance of persistence. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 9 refer to as “place.” building on research by gaver (1992) that called attention to the collaborative affordances of hybrid media spaces, the tagline that emerged out of harrison and dourish’s essay was that “space was the opportunity” and “while place was the shared understanding.” more importantly for this discussion, they also pointed to limitations that they saw in designers’ abilities to determine place. in other words, they felt that designers could structure the geometric and mediated features of space, but they didn’t have complete control over the ways that lived practice laminated a shared sense of place onto that designed space. this position about the non-designability of place emerged largely from their work with hybird media spaces and collaborative virtual environments. hybrid media spaces were experimental platforms that supported remote audio-visual communication—and might now be recognized as something like a proto-skype experience. collaborative virtual environments (cves) were platforms for remote participants to experience a shared 3d immersive environment (predecessors to today’s multiverses). for both cves and hybrid media spaces, there was a sense of discovery about the new forms of social practice facilitated by these systems, but it was coupled with a healthy dose of modesty about the limits of control that designers had over the sorts of emergent “placeness” that they were witnessing. in other words, lived practices within these systems evolved with a great deal of independence and were not entirely predictable based on choices the designers made about how to structure these new social environments. so while one of harrison and dourish’s initial questions for this research was: how do we make spaces into places? their take-away from design research on hybrid media spaces was that “placeness is created and sustained by patterns of use; it’s not something we can design in” (ibid: 70). what they meant is that “cscw tools and technologies create new social places, based on the ways in which their users ascribe new social meanings to new technological features.” however, harrison and dourish also hint at the ways in which users of hybrid media spaces themselves conceived of and self-consciously manipulated affordances of space. in one particular example, they note a key decision by one of the users of a hybrid media space to rotate their camera 180 degrees. this change ensured that the ambient video camera was directed now towards the office door, a change that the authors acknowledged actually altered the sense of place considerably by, for example, prompting novel greeting rituals with remote participants when a physically located subject entered or passed by the office. importantly, the role of the participant who moved the camera 180 degrees wasn’t framed as an act of design. but such manipulation, like opening or closing a door or window, all represent new configurations of what ito and okabe have described as the technosocial situation (ito & okabe, 2005). to think of this action within a design framework we could pose the question: in what context did the camera’s mobility and redirectional affordances become activated through particular discoveries? within harrison and dourish’s example, the movement of the camera could be reinterpreted as an act of design that reshapes the relationship between space and place. in this sense the affordances of a system, when attended to, can be available for reflexive reconfiguration—becoming what bruno latour has described as “matters of concern” (latour, 2008). by framing an affordance as either actual or perceived, we undervalue the reflexive capacities of users-as-actors and miss an important opportunity to hone an alternative analytical vocabulary, one that could trace how geometries of practice entail new affordances and move dynamically between categories of “hidden” and “perceived.” references: boyd, danah. (2011). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in ed. z. papacharissi (ed.), networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 39–58). taylor & francis. gaver, w. (1991). technology affordances. acm. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 10 gaver, w. (1992). the affordances of media spaces for collaboration. proceedings of the 1992 acm conference on computer-supported cooperative work cscw ’92, 92, 17–24. harrison, s., & dourish, p. (1996). re-place-ing space : the roles of place and space in collaborative systems. proc. acm conf. computer-supported cooperative work cscw’96 (boston, ma). new york: acm. hutchby, i. (2001). the communication affordances of technological artefacts. conversation and technology: from the telephone to the internet. malden, ma, usa: blackwell publishers. ito, m., & okabe, d. (2005). technosocial situations: emergent structures of mobile email use. in m. ito, d. okabe, & m. matsuda (eds.), personal, portable, pedestrian. cambridge, ma: mit press. latour, b. (2008). a cautious prometheus? a few steps toward a philosophy of design (with special attention to peter sloterdijk). design history society (p. 2). universal-publishers. mcgrenere, j., & ho, w. (2000). affordances : clarifying and evolving a concept. (m. m, ed.) interface, 177(may), 1–8. norman, d. a. (1988). the design of everyday things. basic books. norman, d. a. (1999). affordance, conventions, and design. interactions, 6(3), 38–42. wellman, b., quan-haase, a., boase, j., chen, w., hampton, k., de diaz, i. i., & miyata, k. (2003). the social affordances of the internet for networked individualism. journal of computer-mediated communication, 8(3), 0. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 11 affordance as a metaphor for power sam srauy temple university, media and communication, school of media and communication ssrauy@temple.edu abstract the theory of affordances is often used in internet studies. however, the concept has undergone drastic changes since its original inception. without taking a firm stance one way or another regarding the veracity of gibson’s theory, the author argues that the continuous shift away from its original use warrants a reconsideration of the theory. the author concludes that the idea of affordances is better suited as a metaphor for power than a theoretical lens in its own right. employing a foucauldian lens, i reexamine what have been understood as affordances as articulations of power relations in human society. the paper addresses whether or not social agency ought to be given more consideration if we do assume affordances exist. by contrasting the theory of affordances with other competing theories, the author unpacks these implications, readdresses earlier critiques of affordances, and offer a potential alternative that might prove useful. keywords power; discourse; affordance; metaphor critiques that came before martin oliver (2005) questions the concept of affordances and highlights its theoretical problems. specifically, oliver (2005) points out that the way the theory has been used is a wide departure from gibson’s (1977) original conception. of course, this does not imply that the way affordances have been used in internet studies is invalid or not useful. rather, i argue there needs to be some theoretical re-evaluation so that we may clearly see where problems lie and address them. to do so, this short paper highlights objections to affordances and address them. namely, i argue that the concept of affordances is better served by using foucault’s characterization of discourse. i do not wish to dismiss affordances outright, however. therefore, i argue affordances are most useful metaphors that describes the power relationship between humans and objects. gibson’s affordance and norman’s interpretation for james gibson (1977), affordances are cues inherent to an object that a creature sees and take advantage of. as oliver (2005) rightly points out, the key for gibson is that these cues are present in the natural environment and that the creature sees it (e.g., coss & moore, 1990). gibson, after all, is a perceptual psychologist (o’neill, 2008; oliver, 2005). he was concerned with how a creature perceives these cues (oliver, 2005). of course, humans can perceive in different ways than merely sight. yet gibson’s writings implies that seeing these affordances is paramount (gibson, 1977; oliver, 2005). oliver (2005) points out that this emphasis on visual perception in the natural environment is telling because of the time period in which he wrote. gibson wrote during a wave of positivist thinking and was committed to positivism (oliver, 2005). gibson’s inclusion of the creature’s agency was apparently trying to address social constructivists’ criticism of positivism. gibson’s argument carves out a couple of “safe spaces” for both positivist and constructivist. first, gibson (1977) argues that there is a fundamentally real physical cue that potentially permits a particular series of uses. second, what use is chosen depends on the creature who uses it (coss & moore, 1990; gibson, 1977; o’neill, 2008). the creature and the object, in a sense, co-construct their relationship to each other. if that’s the case, then that means this relationship is limited to objects in the environment that pre-exist human influence (oliver, 2005). objects that are created by humans, by necessity are an articulation of human intent. therefore, a downed tree might be used as building selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 12 material for a table. but, to say a table affords anything is problematic because a table already is an articulation of human will regardless of how that table is ultimately used. fast forward several years and gibson’s theory is rearticulated by donald norman (2002). norman takes the theory and applies it to human designed objects. for norman (2002), this move seems to be intended to center the end-user’s perception of the object. in effect, norman favors human perception over the object; whereas, gibson treated the object and perception as having equal influence. i suspect norman’s intention is to carve a space for technology (and other objects of human design) to have an influence on the user. this is norman’s so-called user centered approach. if we take norman’s and gibson’s intention as an attempt to “make peace” between positivism and social constructivism (oliver, 2005), then norman version of affordances is indeed compatible with gibson’s—but only to an extent. the questions become: is norman’s rearticulation of gibson’s theory of affordances successful? in norman’s conception, can a human created object “speak”? or, do we abandon it altogether? is norman successful? i do believe that norman’s rearticulation is successful. but the rearticulation is successful as a metaphor for humans’ relationship to their environment. in some of the ways that the theory of affordances has been used, other theoretical lenses are more appropriate. dissatisfied with how affordances has been used in their field, wright and parchoma (2011) turned to actor-network theory (ant) to explain how technology is used in education. in many ways, ant is a better theoretical alternative because it argues that humans and their environment (inclusive of technology) ought to be considered as a heterogeneous network in which each part disciplines the others (wright & parchoma, 2011). therefore, any analysis must employ a symmetric analysis of humans and their technologies (wright & parchoma, 2011). in short, ant satisfies our observation that our technologies do exert some influence on us. yet, where ant may fall short is that by insisting on a symmetric analysis, it grants objects the same level of influence as humans. but, if we are talking about technology, embodied in the objects themselves are the influences of humans. whether i sit at or stand on a table may be my choice. but, in the design of a table, there already is a presupposition that i should sit at the table. thus, designed objects “speak” only the words of their designers. another argument is that affordances may be nothing more than symbols in the symbolic interactionist sense. lee humphreys postulated this possibility at aoir 13. yet, as i examine the literature, it is not an argument that seems to be explicitly advanced. however, i believe her observation is quite important for a couple of reasons. first, as my colleagues on this panel suggest, the social does seem to hold more weight than objects if these things called affordances do exist. second, humphreys’ observation seems to be reflected indirectly in the literature. for example, one study observes that affordances mean very little without a common cultural framework from which to draw understanding (oshlyansky, thimbleby, & cairns, 2004). another study argue that affordances arise from social interaction (vyas, chisalita, & van der veer, 2006). by arguing for a user centered design, norman is also indirectly arguing this. and, indeed, those arguments suggests we learn the “meanings” of these technologies and how we use them from our interaction with others. the “voice” of technology is the voice of the designer as well as users in the social world. future studies should investigate this possibility. speaking through the designer: affordance as a metaphor for power there is another possibility. oliver’s (2005) article suggests that one useful alternative is foucault’s (1981) conception of discourse as articulations of meaning and power relations. foucault (1981) points out that practices and objects (i.e., discourse) concretize meanings and power relations. while oliver (2005) ultimately adopts another answer without explaining why, i believe that discourse in a foucauldian sense is more appropriate. again, what’s important is that when we speak of affordances, selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 13 we are assuming that objects have an “agency” and affect humans that use them. designers and culture are answers, but power relations is a better answer because the concept illustrates the sometimes coercive ebb and flow of meaning making that makes technology appear to have agency. humans speak, power is concretized, and humans rearticulate power continuously. but does that mean affordances ought to be abandoned wholesale? i do not think so. i think the reason affordances have such staying power is precisely because it helps us see how technology affect our relations to them. affordances persists because it is a powerful metaphor. foucault’s discourse is an abstract one. by situating power relations as affordances, we can see this abstraction clearly. gibson’s attempt to carve out a space for positivism as it was being threatened by social constructivism takes a powerful metaphor and shackles it in an attempt to address criticisms. as a metaphor for foucault’s discourse, norman’s appropriation of affordance frees it to be used in a more understandable. references coss, r. g., & moore, m. (1990). all that glistens: water connotations in surface finishes. ecological psychology, 2(4), 367–380. doi:10.1207/s15326969eco0204_3 foucault, m. (1981). the order of discourse. in r. young (ed.), untying the text: a post-structuralist reader (pp. 51–78). boston: routledge & kegan paul ltd. gibson, j. (1977). the theory of affordances. in r. shaw & j. bransford (eds.), perceiving, acting, and knowing: toward an ecological psychology. new york: lawrence erlbaum associates. norman, d. a. (2002). the design of everyday things (first edition.). basic books. o’neill, s. (2008). affordance: a case of confusion. in interactive media: the semiotics of embodied interaction (2009th ed.). springer. oliver, m. (2005). the problem with affordance. e-learning, 2(4), 402. doi:10.2304/elea.2005.2.4.402 oshlyansky, l., thimbleby, h., & cairns, p. (2004). breaking affordance: culture as context. in proceedings of the third nordic conference on human-computer interaction (pp. 81–84). acm. vyas, d., chisalita, c. m., & van der veer, g. c. (2006). affordance in interaction. in proceedings of the 13th eurpoean conference on cognitive ergonomics: trust and control in complex socio-technical systems (pp. 92–99). acm. retrieved from http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:xtermfkyylyj:scholar.google.com/&hl=en&as_sdt=0,39 wright, s., & parchoma, g. (2011). technologies for learning? an actor-network theory critique of “affordances” in research on mobile learning. research in learning technology, 19(3), 247–258. doi:10.1080/21567069.2011.624168 license this article is ©2013 sam srauy, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. microsoft word aoir-engaging-with-vis-ir16-final.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): kennedy, h and hill, rosemary lucy. (2015, october 21-24). seeing data, feeling numbers: how people interact with data visualisations. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. seeing data, feeling numbers: how people interact with data visualisations helen kennedy university of sheffield, uk rosemary lucy hill university of leeds, uk abstract whilst there has been considerable attention to the development of strategies to maximise effectiveness in data visualization research, only some of this has engaged actual users in the research process. practitioners and researchers alike agree that historically, the field has lacked a user-centred knowledge base. research which engages users often provides little information about who they are and how this might affect their engagement with visualizations. research into user engagement with visualizations almost never considers the socio-cultural factors that affect how people engage and some research even attempts to bypass or ‘overcome’ such factors. drawing on qualitative, empirical research with users of visualizations on seeing data: are good big data visualisations possible? (http://seeingdata.org), in this paper we identify six factors that affect engagement, which we define as socio-cultural: subject matter; source/media location; beliefs and opinions; time; emotions; and confidence and skills. we argue that to fully understand engagements with visualizations, it is important to acknowledge these factors. we conclude by reflecting on what these findings mean for how ‘effectiveness’ could and should be defined in relation to data visualizations. our research suggests that the study of engagement with visualizations, to date primarily carried out within fields such as hci or computing, can benefit from adopting qualitative approaches developed within media studies, specifically in relation to media audience research. context & literature as data become more and more ubiquitous and the main way that ‘ordinary’ people get access to them is through visualizations, it is more important than ever to attend to questions of how people engage with data visualizations. in literature concerned with measuring the effectiveness of visualizations, there is widespread discussion of how to suggested citation (apa): kennedy, h and hill, rosemary lucy. (2015, october 21-24). seeing data, feeling numbers: how people interact with data visualisations. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. optimise them, but, as some commentators have argued, more empirical research with users of visualizations is needed to ground assertions about what works in a visualization (for example kirk 2009 and lin et al 2009). because some of the most influential work in the field, such as the writings of edward tufte (1983, 1991, 2006), draw on design instincts, a number of calls have been made for the field to pay more attention to the ordinary users of visualizations. since those calls were made, some research on the effectiveness of data visualizations has involved users, but we argue in this paper that this is limited in a number of ways. 1. research in this field focuses on measures such as accuracy, consistency and speed of comprehension, as if socio-cultural factors did not play a part. for example huang et al (2009) focused on cognitive load (that is, the amount of interpretative work the brain has to do) in their study of visualization efficiency. borkin et al (2013) argue that being able to identify and quantify what makes a visualization memorable is important, in order to be able to design effective visualizations. chin et al (2009) tested dynamic data visualizations to find out which visualization methods were most helpful in the quick accomplishment of tasks. haroz and whitney (2012) tested how layout, visual features like colour and motion and the inclusion of specific visualization elements affected users’ task performance. some research even attempts to bypass or ‘overcome’ social or cultural influences on engagements with visualizations, opting for techniques like electroencephalography (eeg) which go straight to the brain, an alleged biological entity unaffected by society or culture (anderson et al 2011). 2. the authors of these papers provide little information about the participants in their studies. huang et al tell us that their participants were it students, while anderson et al explain that their user group was made up of 10 men and 7 women. borkin et al tell us more about their participants, but none of these authors consider the ways in which demographic factors might impact on visualization engagement. there is no information about who the users are in the tests carried out by einsfeld et al (2009) other than that they were non-experts. haroz and whiteney tell us very little about their five participants, only that three were female and they were either graduate or postgraduate students in psychology or computer science or trained university staff. given the small number of participants, a more precise description of each one would have been possible and desirable. chin et al also tell us little about their users. the work of dadzie et al (2009) is an exception. they gathered and report on demographic data about participants, used qualitative methods like observation and interviews and aimed to reproduce realistic conditions of engagements in order to elicit ‘more valid feedback’. (ziemkiewicz and kosara (2009) and kosara et al (2003) are also exceptions). we argue that to fully understand how people engage with visualizations and how visualizations can be effective, it is important to acknowledge these factors. our research suggests that the study of engagement with visualizations, to date primarily carried out within fields such as hci or computing, can benefit from adopting qualitative approaches developed within media studies, specifically in relation to media audience research, that are attentive to social and cultural influences on engagement with suggested citation (apa): kennedy, h and hill, rosemary lucy. (2015, october 21-24). seeing data, feeling numbers: how people interact with data visualisations. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. designed artefacts like visualizations. this includes the work of stuart hall (1973) and others in highlighting the importance of two elements in engagements with media products: the encoding of meaning as the media product is produced, and the decoding of meaning as it is used or consumed. another important contribution from media studies (and other fields) is the recognition of the role of emotions in engagements with media artefacts. methods this paper is based on qualitative, empirical research with users of visualizations on seeing data. we define the users with whom we worked as ‘non-expert’ because they were not expert in data visualization, although some had expertise in related fields, such as data, visual design, or the subject matter of some of the visualizations that we examined. the project aimed to explore factors in visualization consumption and production processes that affect engagement, and through this identify how effectiveness could and should be defined in this context. the project addressed these questions through a range of methods, including focus group research, interviews and diary-keeping. we carried out nine, two-hour focus groups with a total of 46 participants, in four geographical locations which, given our focus on migration as a case study, we characterise in the following ways: • rural, high migration • rural, low migration • urban, high migration • urban, low migration. we aimed to recruit participants who might be assumed to be interested in data, the visual, or migration, and so ‘already-engaged’ in one of the issues at the heart of the project, and others about whom we could not make these assumptions. 27 participants were female and 16 were male; ages ranged from 11 to 70, with the 3039 age range best represented (18 participants). employment sectors were extremely diverse, including fields like hairdressing and cleaning, local government, agricultural work, teaching, media, retail and information services. most participants had qualifications of some kind; 19 had completed tertiary education and 11 had higher degrees. as the study took place in the uk, most participants (n=30) self-reported as british, and other nationalities included german, indian, lithuanian, pakistani, polish and thai. focus group participants kept diaries of their encounters with visualizations for one week before the focus group; seven participants kept longer diaries, for one month after the focus groups. the visualizations on which we based discussion in the focus groups can be seen here: http://seeingdata.org/understanding-datavisualisations/rate-these-visualisations/. socio-cultural factors suggested citation (apa): kennedy, h and hill, rosemary lucy. (2015, october 21-24). seeing data, feeling numbers: how people interact with data visualisations. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. we argue that socio-cultural factors matter when it comes to engaging with data visualizations, and the field of visualization engagement research needs to pay attention to them. we identify six factors that affect engagement, which we define as sociocultural: 1. subject matter. visualisations do not exist in isolation from the subject matter that they represent. when subject matter speaks to people’s interest, people are engaged. as we found in our efforts to set up focus groups, it is hard to engage people around the topic of visualisations alone. 2. source and media location. participants expressed concern that the media aim to confuse, so visualisations encountered within the context of certain media were therefore suspect too. however, when media are sought out and alreadytrusted, the visualisations within them acquire the trustworthiness of those media. 3. beliefs and opinions. as stated, participants trust visualisations that appear in trusted publications, which fit in with their worldviews. some participants liked visualisations that confirmed their beliefs and opinions, but others liked it when data called into question existing beliefs. 4. time: engaging with visualisations can be seen as work, or as laborious, by people for whom doing so does not come easily: time is crucial in determining whether people are willing to do this ‘work’. when time was made and set aside to engage with visualisations, as in our focus groups, participants found the experience enjoyable. 5. confidence and skills: some people lacked confidence in their statistical education because they did not know how to read particular chart types. many participants doubted their ‘graphicacy’ skills, the combined statistical and visual capacities required to interpret graphics. others did not have the language skills to feel confident engaging with visualisations. some felt that critical thinking skills were also needed, such as asking what has been left out, or what point of view is being prioritised); some of the designers we interviewed highlighted this point too. 6. emotions: we argue that all of these factors contributed to participants’ particular emotional responses to visualisations. strong emotions arise when considering a visualisation, which relate to the subject matter, source and location, beliefs and opinions, available time, confidence in skills and responses to the visual aspects of a visualisation. these contribute to first impressions of visualisations and also emerge from longer-term engagement with them. when we interviewed focus group participants a few weeks after their participation, none of them could remember any specific data or figures from the visualisations they looked at there. they could, however, remember the overall impressions that the visualisation made, and the way they felt. suggested citation (apa): kennedy, h and hill, rosemary lucy. (2015, october 21-24). seeing data, feeling numbers: how people interact with data visualisations. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. definitions of effectiveness what do these findings mean for how ‘effectiveness’ could and should be defined in relation to data visualizations? we suggest that technical measures like memorability, speed, accuracy of recall or consistency of comprehension are not adequate for determining what users experience as an ‘effective’ visualization, as they fail to consider the factors that we discuss here as dimensions of effectiveness. although challenging and not necessarily easy to implement, we propose moving away from assumptions about the existence of ‘average users’ or the possibility of ‘universal design’, which are implicit in existing definitions of effectiveness, and moving towards an acknowledgement of socio-cultural differences amongst users and the contexts in which they engage with visualizations, as this will lead to fuller understanding of how we might think about their effectiveness. references anderson ew, potter kc, matzen le, shepherd jf, preston ga and silva ct. a user study of visualization effectiveness using eeg and cognitive load. computer graphics forum. wiley online library, 2011, p. 791-800. borkin ma, vo aa, bylinskii z, et al. what makes a visualization memorable? visualization and computer graphics, ieee transactions on. 2013; 19: 2306-15. chin g, singhal m, nakamura g, gurumoorthi v and freeman-cadoret n. visual analysis of dynamic data streams. information visualization. 2009; 8: 212-29. dadzie a-s, lanfranchi v and petrelli d. seeing is believing: linking data with knowledge. information visualization. 2009; 8: 197-211. einsfeld k, ebert a, kerren a and deller m. knowledge generation through humancentered information visualization. information visualization. 2009; 8: 180-96. hall s. encoding and decoding in the television discourse birmingham centre for contemporary cultural studies. [s.l.]: the university of birmingham, 1973. haroz s and whitney d. how capacity limits of attention influence information visualization effectiveness. visualization and computer graphics, ieee transactions on. 2012; 18: 2402-10. huang w, eades p and hong s-h. measuring effectiveness of graph visualizations: a cognitive load perspective. information visualization. 2009; 8: 139-52. kirk a. paradox of form vs function in graph design. university of leeds, 2009. kosara r, healey cg, interrante v, laidlaw dh and ware c. user studies: why, how, and when? ieee computer graphics and applications. 2003: 20-5. suggested citation (apa): kennedy, h and hill, rosemary lucy. (2015, october 21-24). seeing data, feeling numbers: how people interact with data visualisations. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. lin x, kerren a and zhang j. challenges in human-centered information visualization: introduction to the special issue. information visualization. 2009; 8: 137-8. tufte er and graves-morris p. the visual display of quantitative information. graphics press cheshire, ct, 1983. tufte er. envisioning information. optometry & vision science. 1991; 68: 322-4. tufte er. beautiful evidence. graphics press cheshire, ct, 2006. ziemkiewicz c and kosara r. preconceptions and individual differences in understanding visual metaphors. computer graphics forum. wiley online library, 2009, p. 911-8. microsoft word hunsinger-imagining darknets-imagining darknets.doc selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 imagining darknets: privacy as commodity aesthetics jeremy hunsinger wilfrid laurier university as a field of distributed subjectivity, consumption is one mode through which we coconstruct ourselves and our relation to things. darknets and their users are clearly participating in reconstituting field of consumption, as is the internet in which darknets exist. within consumption we labor to represent ourselves in relation to our material relations(baudrillard, 1981) (baudrillard, 1998). this paper argues that darknet users examples of both the de-massification of internet audiences and the re-constitution of a mass consumer identity centered on the commodity aesthetics of darknets(haug, 1986). specifically, i demonstrate that privacy on darknets is not so much a matter of reality but is a matter of a perceived commodity aesthetic by their subjective audience. our consumption and our co-construction of the relations of our subjective approaches to commodity aesthetics is both the identification and alienation of the reflexive awareness of the subject’s desires/needs. within darknets these desires/needs extend through our simplest curiosities, to political organizing, to representations of illicit activities, to the activities themselves. the alienation and identification of desires functions much like the creation of the identity qua the quasi-object that is produced is always partly the user's alienated identity (gehl, 2014; herman, 2013; latour, 1993). this process produces the capacity to realize the values in the darknets as capital itself, including the values found in the relationship to the materiality of capital presented therein. given the proclivities of the representations of constituted on darknets, this proposal examines how users create and recreate the darknet, both as a capital materiality and as an capital idea. fundamentally, my argument resists the idea of criminality and exceptionalism found in popular press understandings of darknets, in favor of the argument that although the criminal element does exist, the broader nature of capital in darknets is about knowledge, information provision, and economic value creation. in short, i argue that the representation of material and non-material capital on darknets creates a wild zone of consumption allowing the subject to be reconstituted with the awareness of an extended horizon (luke, 1995);(o’tuathail, 1994) suggested citation (apa): hunsinger, j. (2015, october 21-24). imagining darknets: privacy as commodity asthetics. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. darknets, darkwebs, and the related conceptual entities described in this paper are internet-based information systems that limit and redirect access into intentionally hidden or very difficult to enter areas. i present them primarily as constituted capital because they are contiguous with the our everyday lives with other forms of capital. darknets have a referent set of things, practices, and ideas of capital than the consumer internet in some respects, but those things are fluid and changing in a broad ecology of information services. the boundaries between darknets and the consumer internet are similarly fluid, and some of the arguments i make here can apply to both, because darknets are a subset of the internet. a more technical understanding of the type of darknet that i am investigating is that darknets are securitized internet networks operating over existing networks through encrypted traffic on those networks. another central idea of a darknet is that it is either technologically or socially designed to be private or at least it is trusted to be private. that is, users should be able to trust the securitized, private nature of the darknet with their activities, although sometimes that security will fail and thus the privacy does too. various modalities of darknets predated the internet; they existed on bulletin board systems, and in all likelihood they will exist on almost any securable network where its produsers can create trusted and apparently private connections. examples of darknets include the hiddenwiki and other services in tor .onion services, i2p services, various secured ftp and encrypted p2p services, and freenet services. darknets arise for any number of reasons, but generally they are motivated by issues of surveillance, privacy, security, and economic value, which are rooted in the capitalized of their produsers. the constitution of perceived commoditized value is a significant motivator in a capitalist society, but beyond that it is complicated because the tension between possible exposure vs privacy deters many users. for instance, if you increase your perceived trust in your network by relaying more and valuable information about you might gain social capital, which could generate economic gain. or you could download a series of costly digital objects from trusted friends, which might also increase your economic value. those two actions are likely the most common modes of economic value creation on darknets; they happen on all darknets because trust and sharing are central to their social operation. however exposure of illicit gains is always a risk in a securitized environment, and as such the creators/users of darknets need to construct a commodity aesthetic of privacy that is 'trustable'. the representation of privacy as commodity aesthetics as noted in the larger papery relates to knowledge and resistance to surveillance, among other laborious endeavors. darknets are part of a global system of information provision. they are a vital part of that system because they provide avenues for populations to choose to be the same as certain kinds of people and to be different from other kinds of people. in making that choice, these populations have come to choose to consume 'privacy'. this act of choosing will certainly expose them to many kinds of information to which they might not want to be exposed and obversely they might have information exposed to others that they do not want exposed. this process of consumption of privacy will also give them a particular sense of their subjectivity, their knowledges, and their own expertise. those transformations of subjectivity are co-constructed in relation to darknets. the modes of being of these darknet subjectivities will hinge upon their co-constructed commodity aesthetics. these aeshetics may be portrayed as natural or true choices for privacy, but again are also co-constructing the darknet consumers. even if they are acting politically or criminally in those environments they are still produsing the consummativities of that politicality or criminality. references baudrillard, j. (1998). the consumer society: myths and structures (isbn: 0761956921 ed.). london, u.k.: sage. baudrillard, j. (1981). for a critique of the political economy of the sign. st. louis, missouri: telos press. gehl, r. w. (2014). reverse engineering social media: software, culture, and political economy in new media capitalism. philadelphia, pennsylvania: temple university press. haug, w. f. (1986). critique of commodity aesthetics: appearance, sexuality, and advertising in capitalist society. univ of minnesota pr. herman, a. (2013). production, consumption, and labor in the social media mode of communication and production. in the social media handbook (1 ed.). london, u.k.: routledge. latour, b. (1993). we have never been modern (isbn: 0674948394 ed.). cambridge, massachusetts: harvard univ press. luke, t. w. (1995). new world order or neo-world orders: power, politics and ideology in informationalizing glocalities. global modernities, 91, 99-100. o’tuathail, g. (1994). (dis) placing geopolitics: writing on the maps of global politics. environment and planning d, 12, 525-525. . microsoft word aoir-visualisation-convention-ir16-final.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): kennedy, h and hill, rosemary lucy. (2015, october 21-24). how conventions make visualisations (and their data) seem objective. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. how conventions make visualisations (and their data) seem objective helen kennedy university of sheffield, uk rosemary lucy hill university of leeds, uk abstract this paper highlights the work that conventions do in making visualisations seem objective. this focus on visualisation conventions is important in order to make sense of the apparent contradiction between critics’ assertions that visualisations serve as mechanisms of control and designers’ assertions of their desire to ‘do good with data’ (periscopic, nd). we focus on two conventions here. first, the use two-dimensional viewpoints, such as front-on views in graphs or top-down views in maps and pie charts, which encode objectivity because the 'distortions that usually come with perspective' are 'neutralised' (2006, p.149). second, the inclusion of data sources in visualisations, which call upon the viewer to see visualisations as objective and based on ‘facts’. thus designers make choices about the data visualisations that they produce, but their choices are constrained by semiotic resources and other conventions that are available to them. we argue that visualisers are not in league with ‘them’ to bamboozle ‘us’, as one participant in our focus groups with visualisation consumers claimed. rather, they do their best to ‘do good with data’ with available conventions. thinking in this way advances understanding of the ways in which visualisations come into being, the conventions on which visualisers draw to produce them, and how these conventions imbue visualisations with particular qualities. introduction visualisations, we might argue, are imaginings of data; their production involves imagining data in certain ways. just as the map is not the territory (korzybski (1948), the visualisation is not the data. indeed, some visualisation designers argue that a core skill needed to make sense of data visualisations is the ability to understand that in a visualisation, some things have been transformed into other things (research suggested citation (apa): kennedy, h and hill, rosemary lucy. (2015, october 21-24). how conventions make visualisations (and their data) seem objective. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. interviews). yet belief in the power of visualisations to promote greater understanding of data (for example in zambrano and engelhardt, 2008) and the argument that we need more, better data visualisations (2008) suggest that visualisations are tools for showing data or windows onto data, rather than ‘purposeful acts’ (ruppert, 2014) that mediate and produce data in particular ways. to understand the performativity of data visualisations, it is important to make visible how visualisations come into being, the conventions on which visualisers draw to produce them, and how these conventions imbue visualisations with particular qualities. visualisation as purposeful act as some commentators argue, turning data into a visualisation is not an automated process (amoore, 2009). a visualisation is the result of numerous decisions involving a range of people (those who want the visualisation to be made, those making it, and others in between). yet the resulting visualisation often ‘pretends to be coherent and tidy’ (ruppert, 2014): visualisations have been critiqued as necessarily reductive, and the loss of complexity that is an inevitable part of the visualisation production process has been mourned. these arguments have been made about visualisation and power: • discussing the rise of maps, graphs, pie charts and infographic illustrations in newspapers, barnhurst (1994) argues that charts are able to ‘influence the perception of how the world works’ (1994, p.79). chart-making depends on the notion that ‘there can be a one-to-one correspondence between the measurements of the real world and their graphic representation’ (1994, p.81): the power of charts lies in the belief that they are accurate because they report numbers, which in turn are assumed to be neutral. • monmonier (1996) argues that maps can be used to tell ‘lies’, in that cartographic information can be represented in multiple ways for different audiences and purposes. trifonoff observes ‘any map is just one of many maps that could have been made’ (1996, p.36), so maps, particular types of visualisations, are aggregations of choices. • valarakis (2014) argues that visualisations can be potent rhetorical devices harnessed for political ends. similarly, dick (2014) examines the use of infographics and visualisations by the uk newspaper the daily express to convey a particular anti-union ideology. visualisation designers’ desire to ‘do good’ whilst it is undoubtedly true that some visualisations are designed promote a particular position, this does not reflect the intentions of many visualisation designers. the visualisation practitioners we interviewed believe they can ‘do good with data’ (periscopic, 2014; and see also few, 2008). this is the strapline of one us-based visualisation agency, and it is an idea that can be traced back to the work of the neuraths in the mid 19th century and their development of a graphical language called isotype, a visual way of representing quantitative information via icons (zambrano and engelhardt, 2008). this belief in visualisation’s capacities is brought up-to-date in suggested citation (apa): kennedy, h and hill, rosemary lucy. (2015, october 21-24). how conventions make visualisations (and their data) seem objective. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. contemporary projects like the roslings’ gapminder (http://www.gapminder.org/world), ‘a modern “museum” on the internet’ aiming to promote global sustainable development by visualising related statistics, or in stefanie posavec’s air transformed (http://www.stefanieposavec.co.uk/airtransformed), visualisations of air quality data for the better with data society. our interviews with visualisation designers suggest that in their work, they aim to be true to the datasets they work with and lament the ways in which intermediaries can sometimes curtail the visualisation process. so how does what visualisers say about their professional practice square with concerns about the performativity of visualisations and their use as mechanisms of control? how can we think about visualisations, their tidiness and aura of truthfulness, without thinking that ‘they’ are trying to pull the wool over ‘our’ eyes? one answer can be found in close examination of the conventions and semiotic resources available to visualisers. we make sense of the contradiction outlined here by arguing that visualisation designers necessarily draw on a limited range of conventions, some of which contribute towards visualisations’ objective aura and imbue them with the kinds of powers noted by critical commentators. visualisation conventions the semiotic resources utilised in the production of visualisations (as described, for example, by hullman and diakopoulos (2011)) perform rhetorical work: they play a persuasive role. conventions, such as the use of geometrical shapes and a tendency to clean, uncluttered layouts, work towards obfuscating the ‘messiness’ of data processes including visualisation. here we focus on two examples of conventions – twodimensional viewpoints and references to data sources – which play an important role in communicating facticity and imbuing visualisations with scientific objectivity and transparency. two-dimensional viewpoints it is common for visualisations to use two-dimensional viewpoints, either through a front-on view, as in graphs that use an x/y axis, or a top-down view, as in maps and pie charts. in this example of a map of non-uk born citizens by the ons (office for national statistics), we hover above england and wales and are able to see the whole nation. maps use specific projections which introduce perspective, yet this is not commonly known or seen. for example, the size suggested citation (apa): kennedy, h and hill, rosemary lucy. (2015, october 21-24). how conventions make visualisations (and their data) seem objective. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. of africa is very different between the mercator and peters projections. the mercator projection produces the western world view that emphasises the powerful imperial position of the uk (hodgson, 1963). chord diagrams such as the global flow of people (by nikola sander, guy j. abel & ramon bauer (http://www.global-migration.info/), pie charts and radial charts similarly encode this objective view. in another example, a bbc scatter graph showing the heights and weights of olympic athletes, we look at the data from a front-on position as if we view it from the sidelines. where a top-down view appears objective because it shows everything at once without an angle, the front on view adds ‘attitudinal meaning’ (152) as if we stand to one side looking on. suggested citation (apa): kennedy, h and hill, rosemary lucy. (2015, october 21-24). how conventions make visualisations (and their data) seem objective. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the use of 3d elements is generally frowned upon amongst data visualisers for good reason, because it is difficult to read the values being shown (carswell et al., 1991; siegrist, 1996; few, 2005). the professional dismissal of 3d graphs prioritises the convention for 2d, but kress and van leeuwen argue that using a front-on or a topdown view hides perspective. it encodes objectivity because the ‘distortions that usually come with perspective’ are ‘neutralized’ (2006, p.149). although such views look objective, they actually embody a perspective, or a ‘god-like view’ (2006, p.149). data sources visualisations usually include a link to an often downloadable dataset, or a note saying where the data have come from. suggested citation (apa): kennedy, h and hill, rosemary lucy. (2015, october 21-24). how conventions make visualisations (and their data) seem objective. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. in this visualisation about the quality of life in different european countries, the better life index, the data source appears at the bottom –a conventional location – and the links takes the viewer to the data in chart form, which can then be downloaded in a number of formats. the inclusion of data sources in visualisations calls upon the viewer to see visualisations as based on ‘facts’. their inclusion suggests that we can examine the raw data, check the veracity of the visualisation, and be sure that the designer has not led us astray. the inclusion of the data source also tells us that the designer feels confident that s/he has been honest in representing the data, so we may feel we have no need to check. conclusion • the resources and conventions available to visualisers have a long history and a long association with objectivity: manovich (2011) locates conventions within the enlightenment project of pursuing rational knowledge about an external world. given longstanding critique, by feminist epistemologists amongst others, about the assumed objectivity of knowledge, we might ask why these are still the primary resources available for visualisation, when visualisers are well aware of the nonobjectivity of the data visualisations that they produce? • contemporary debates about the non-objectivity of data tend to focus on data themselves, as seen in bowker and those who draw on his notion that ‘raw data is […] an oxymoron’ (2005, p.184). however, we also need to take into account that data’s ‘visual manifestations are themselves informed by judgement, discernment suggested citation (apa): kennedy, h and hill, rosemary lucy. (2015, october 21-24). how conventions make visualisations (and their data) seem objective. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. and choice’ (ambrosio, 2015, p.137). in other words, visualisation conventions play a role in ascribing power to data. • we found that designers make choices about the data visualisations that they make, but their choices are constrained by semiotic resources and other conventions that are available to them. visualisers are not in league with ‘them’ to bamboozle ‘us’, as one participant in our focus groups with visualisation consumers claimed. rather, they do their best to ‘do good with data’ with available conventions. thinking in this way leads to more sophisticated understanding of the work of digital designers who play a role in imagining data, but who are not all-powerful. references ambrosio, c. 2015. objectivity and representative practices across artistic and scientific visualization. in: carusi, a., et al. eds. visualization in the age of computerization. london: routledge, pp.118-144. amoore, l. 2009. lines of sight: on the visualization of unknown futures. citizenship studies. 13(1), pp.17-30. barnhurst, k.g. 1994. seeing the newspaper. new york: st. martin's press. bowker, g.c. 2005. memory practices in the sciences. cambridge, mass. ; london: mit. carswell, m.c. et al. 1991. graphing in depth: perspectives on the use of threedimensional graphs to represent lower-dimensional data. behaviour & information technology. 10(6), pp.459-474. dick, m. 2014. just fancy that: an analysis of infographic propaganda in the daily express, 1956–1959. journalism studies. [online]. (ahead-of-print), pp.1-23. [accessed 25 march 2014]. available from: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1461670x.2013.872415#.uzuyrpl_ti4. few, s. 2005. bad graphs: the stealth virus. dm review. 15(1). few, s. 2008. what ordinary people need most from information visualization today. perceptual edge: visual business intelligence newsletter. hodgson, m.g. 1963. the interrelations of societies in history. comparative studies in society and history. 5(02), pp.227-250. hullman, j. and diakopoulos, n. 2011. visualization rhetoric: framing effects in narrative visualization. visualization and computer graphics, ieee transactions on. 17(12), pp.2231-2240. suggested citation (apa): kennedy, h and hill, rosemary lucy. (2015, october 21-24). how conventions make visualisations (and their data) seem objective. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. korzybski, a. 1948. science and sanity: an introduction to non-aristotelian systems and general semantics. 3rd ed. lakeville, ct.: international non-aristotelian library publishing. kress, g.r. and van leeuwen, t. 2006. reading images : the grammar of visual design. 2nd ed. ed. london: routledge. manovich, l. 2011. what is visualisation? visual studies. 26(1), pp.36-49. monmonier, m.s. 1996. how to lie with maps. chicago, ill. ; london: university of chicago press. periscopic. 2014. home page. [online]. available from: http://www.periscopic.com/. ruppert, e. 2014. visualising a journal: big data and society. in: ics visual & digital cultures research seminar, 13th may, leeds. siegrist, m. 1996. the use or misuse of three-dimensional graphs to represent lowerdimensional data. behaviour & information technology. 15(2), pp.96-100. trifonoff, k.m. 1996. book review: . “how to lie with maps.” second edition, by mark monmonier. cartographic perspectives. 25, pp.35-37. valarakis, a. 2014. on data visualization: rhetoric and the revival of the body politic. ma thesis, university of amsterdam. zambrano, r.n. and engelhardt, y. 2008. diagrams for the masses. in: stapleton, g., et al. eds. diagrams 2008. berlin, heidelberg: springer verlag, pp.282-292. microsoft word richard.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): richard, g. (2014, october 22-24). intersections of play at the margins: experiences across gender, ethnicity and sexuality in game culture. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. intersections of play at the margins: experiences across gender, tehnicity and sexuality in game culture gabriela t. richard university of pennsylvania digital gaming, and the physical and virtual spaces formed around its play and engagement, has long been seen as male-dominated and marginalizing, especially for females. most research that explores issues of equity and play is focuses on gendered imbalances. this line of research, which has spanned the past 30 years, was prompted by concerns that game-based subject matter wouldn’t be of interest to females, and their lack of access would lead to differential experience and confidence to pursue and engage with skills and competencies that computers and digital games fostered (e.g., cassell & jenkins, 1998; kafai, heeter, denner & sun, 2008; searle & kafai, 2009). however, some researchers criticized this line of research for stereotyping gender preferences (e.g., carr, 2005; dickey, 2006). contemporary work is also demonstrating that females and males enjoy more things in common when it comes to gaming despite gender (lazzaro, 2008; yee, 2008). overall, “physical and social barriers to entry for women become misrepresented as a lack of desire to play video games” (yee, 2008: 86). in other words, and as emerging research continues to point out, gendered access and experience are increasingly being shown as more significant when it comes to differential use of digital games (e.g., jensen & decastell, 2011). despite the long line of research on gendered experience, there is relatively little written about its intersections with race, ethnicity (kafai, cook & fields, 2010) and sexuality (sunden & sveningsson, 2012). emerging research on ethnic minorities and gaming efficacy is finding that certain minority groups are less likely to have access to high-tech gaming and computer equipment than whites, which limits the kinds of technology literacies they can engage in (disalvo & bruckman, 2010; disalvo, yardi, guzdial, mcklin, meadows, perry & bruckman, 2011). in addition, research on ethnic minority experiences in game culture is finding that their play experiences are often colored by ethnic harassment and marginalization (gray, 2012; nakamura, 2009; richard, 2012), often across gender (gray, 2012; richard, 2012; richard, 2013); specifically, ethnic minorities cite linguistic profiling, or being targeted by the way they speak (gray, 2012), and discrimination based on their play styles (nakamura, 2009). furthermore, little has been studied regarding male experiences in game culture (searle & kafai, 2009). focusing on gender difference tends to privilege masculinity as the “norm” and everything else as the alternative (dickey, 2006), which is partly to explain why the focus on gender tends to focus on female experiences. however, scholars have found gaming spaces to be places where males can try out different masculinities (jenkins, 1998; searle & kafai, 2009), “dominance bond” (kimmel, 2008) or “perform” masculinity, as it has been culturally defined, through violence and competition (burrill, 2008). while this creates a unique space for masculine gender expression, it may also be creating a space of exclusion for those that may threaten that expression (kimmel, 2008). despite notable emerging work on experiences across race, ethnicity and sexuality (e.g., gray, 2012; richard, 2013; shaw, 2012; sunden & sveningsson, 2012), there is still a lack of understanding of the nuance in marginalized play, particularly across intersecting sociocultural experiences, in part because different groups’ experiences are assessed separately and juxtaposed to the experiences of the dominant group (in this case, white male players). this paper will detail survey and interview data of gamers across gender, ethnicity and sexuality to highlight where identity and play experiences intersect and diverge. it will discuss the ways that players experience support and unsupport within the greater gaming space, and within supportive communities built around identity characteristics (i.e., female-supportive communities). in particular, the paper will discuss how gender and ethnic signifiers play similar and different roles in shaping play, as well as the tenuous role of negotiating homophobic norms in game space. for example, gender has become an increasingly easy to target identifier, in part due to the rise in voice-based player communication and in part due to the greater propensity in which gender has been a point of discussion and focus, whereas race and sexuality are somewhat more difficult to pinpoint. however, lgbt gamers are often frustrated by the homophobia and hetereonormative nature of gamer lingo, which often frames homosexuality in negative terms (such as “gay” being used as a term for incompetence or stupidity in game play). furthermore, lgbt gamers that don’t fall into the gender binary – particularly trans-gamers – find that supportive communities, often framed to provide support from gender harassment, aren’t always accepting of their gender. moreover, since most of the social understanding of marginalization in game culture has focused on gender, racial and ethnic sidelining and harassment is less discussed and explored. gamers across race and ethnicity have similar and diverging experiences of harassment and vitriol, which can be derived from “linguistic profiling” (gray, 2012) and other tactics (such as looking up one’s ethnicity in their profile or avatar). however, survey and qualitative data shows that, in most instances, gender and race/ethnicity are related to sense of ability, investment and persistence in gaming, with females and racial/ethnic minorities more vulnerable to experiencing performance drops and lack of identification. based on the research and related literature in similar domains, i will offer suggestions for understanding the complexity of intersectional experiences in game culture in the interest of creating a more inclusive and multifaceted space across the multiple identities that define our experiences. references burrill, d.a. (2008). die tryin’: videogames, masculinity, culture. new york, ny: peter lang. carr, d. (2005). contexts, gaming pleasures, and gendered preferences. simulation & gaming, 36(4), 464-482. cassell, j. & jenkins, h. (1998). chess for girls? feminism and computer games. in j. cassell & h. jenkins (eds.) from barbie to mortal kombat: gender and computer games. mit press, london. dickey, m. d. (2006). girl gamers: the controversy of girl games and the relevance of female-oriented game design for instructional design. british journal of educational technology, 37(5), 785–793. disalvo, b., & bruckman, a. (2010). race and gender in play practices: young african american males. in proceedings of the fifth international conference on the foundations of digital games (pp. 56-63). acm. disalvo, b., guzdial, m., mcklin, t., meadows, c., perry, k., steward, c., & bruckman, a. (2009). glitch game testers: african american men breaking open the console. in proceedings of digra 2009, september 2009, brunel, uk gray, k.l. (2012). intersecting oppressions and online communities: examining the experiences of women of color in xbox live. information, communication & society, 15(3), 411-428. jenkins, h. (1998). complete freedom of movement: video games as gendered play spaces. in j. cassell & h. jenkins (eds.) from barbie to mortal kombat: gender and computer games (pp. 262-297). mit press, london. jensen, j. & de castell, s. (2011). girls@play: an ethnographic study of gender and digital gameplay. feminist media studies, 11(2), 167-179. kafai, y. b., cook, m. s. & fields, d. a. (2010) ‘‘blacks deserve bodies too!’’: design and discussion about diversity and race in a tween virtual world. games and culture, 5(1), 43-63. kafai, y. b., heeter, c., denner, j. & sun, j. y. (2008). pink, purple, casual, or mainstream games: moving beyond the gender divide. in y. b. kafai, c. heeter, j. denner & j.y. sun (eds.) beyond barbie and mortal kombat: perspectives on gender and gaming. cambridge, ma: mit press. lazzaro, n. (2008). are boy games even necessary? in y. b. kafai, c. heeter, j. denner & j.y. sun (eds.) beyond barbie and mortal kombat: perspectives on gender and gaming (pp. 198-215). cambridge, ma: mit press. nakamura, l. (2009). don't hate the player, hate the game: the racialization of labor in world of warcraft. critical studies in media communication, 26 (2), 128-144. richard, g. t. (2012, oct). on the periphery of video game culture: understanding urban latino gamers’ experiences. poster presented at meaningful play 2012, michigan state university, east lansing, mi. richard, g.t. (2013). the interplay between gender and ethnic harassment in game culture and its implications for play and learning [abstract]. in proceedings of digra (digital games research association) 2013, 6, 96. searle, k. a., & kafai, y. b. (2009). boys’ play in the fourth space: freedom of movements in a tween virtual world. in proceedings of the fourth international conference of the digital games research association (digra), london, uk: brunel university. sunden, j. & sveningsson, m. (2012). gender and sexuality in online game cultures. new york, ny: routledge. yee, n. (2008). maps of digital desires: exploring the topography of gender and play in online games. in y. b. kafai, c. heeter, j. denner & j.y. sun (eds.) beyond barbie and mortal kombat: perspectives on gender and gaming (pp. 83-96). cambridge, ma: mit press. 1 effects of home environment on internet use and dependence of children and adolescents sora park university of canberra australia sora.park@canberra.edu.au abstract in this study, the concept of internet dependence of adolescents is explored. due to the prevalence of digital media, many young people experience the borderline of becoming addicted to the internet, often causing problems in their personal and social lives. for the purposes of this study, internet dependence is defined broadly to include the over-use and abuse of the internet that may have a negative impact on children and adolescents. a survey was conducted on 1002 parent-child pairs in seoul metropolitan area in south korea. children between the ages of 10 and 15 and their mothers were included in the sample. the parent was asked about the home media environment and how parents monitor and guide their children’s media use at home. the results reveal that the age of child, media-richness and restrictive mediation of parents were not significant factors that influence internet use and internet dependence. internet dependence of the child could be explained by the time child spends online, how competent the child is in using the internet, active mediation of parents and interaction type with parents. children who engage in outdoor activities with their parents were less likely to have high levels of internet dependence. the transition from mass media to digital media often means the personalization and mobilization of media. while mass media is usually consumed a context of the home, digital media expands into personal mobile spaces. nonetheless the media environment at home, including the media-richness and parents’ mediation, significantly affects the way children use digital media. this is because most media habits are formed within the context of home. further analysis of how the personalized use of media and how that is related to the habits and norms that are developed at home is called for in future studies. keywords internet use; internet dependence; parental mediation; children; adolescents home media. 2 introduction according to pew internet 93% of u.s. teenagers aged 12 to 17 use the internet on a regular basis (lenhart, purcell, smith, and zickuhr, 2010) and 66% of children and young people aged 8 to 18 own mobile phones (kaiser family foundation, 2010). the statistics are similar in south korea. 99.9% of teenagers use the internet (kisa, 2010) and 81.8% use mobile phones (kcc, 2010). globally, digital media have become an important part of young people’s lives in the 21st century. providing access to digital media enables young people to get information, learn and participate in the society. however, there is also a downside of using the technoloogies among young children in such ways that cause personal and social problems such as becoming addicted, invading upon privacy, copyright issues, etc. among the negative consequences, this study explores the over-use of the internet by children and young people, which may affect their normal routine at school, home or in their social lives. instead of using the concept of addiction, i prefer to use the term ‘dependence’ since it embraces a broader range of general over-use and not in only in a narrow pathological sense. the concept of internet dependence is less rigid than internet addiction. internet addiction is a pathological state where in most cases, clinical treatment is required. however, on the borderline of pathological internet use there is an area of dysfunctional internet use that causes concern because it results in everyday conflicts and problems. media consumption habits are formed during the early ages of childhood and usually within the context of home. parents have an enormous influence over what types of content and media children are exposed to in the early stages of life. parents provide children with media devices, set the rules at home in regards to usage, provide examples by communicating their thoughts and beliefs about how a person should use and understand media content (na, kim and park, 2009; kim, 2011; park, yoon and yang, 2004; song et al, 2009). even with digital media, where much of the consumption takes place in individual spaces and outside of the home boundaries, parents continue to exercise influence on the amount and ways children use the media. the impact is subtle because there seems to be minimal intervention in children’s digital media use (tapscott, 2008). this study looks at how home environment set by the parents affect internet use and dependence among young children. i use a broad concept of home media environment that includes not only the parenting and interaction style of parents but also the availability and richness of media environment at home. 3 literature review internet dependence internet addiction among young people is becoming more of a concern with the growth in the penetration worldwide. usually addiction is studied as a clinical condition to be treated. there have been empirical studies on how pathological use of the internet may harm people and develop further mental problems, such as depression (change and law; richards, et al, 2010). a meta-analysis of internet use and psychological well-being concludes that there is a small detrimental effect of internet use on level of depression, self-esteem and life satisfaction (huang, 2010). with new digital devices and the increased penetration of the internet in the daily lives of young people, over-use or mal-use of the new technologies is becoming an increasing concern for parents and policymakers. especially when there might be an area where young people in fact over-use the technology and become dependent but cannot be diagnosed as pathological and thus are difficult to seek professional help. this type of problematic internet use is as much of concern as well as addiction. in this study, the term ‘internet dependence’ is used in a broader sense than pathological addiction in order to embrace all types of mal-use of the internet among young people. the term is used broadly to include the over-use and abuse of internet that might negatively affect children and young people’s everyday lives. internet dependence is not simply staying online for long periods of time but it implies a use such that it has an attitudinal and behavioral impact on the everyday functions of a person. parental mediation and interaction digital media, such as the internet, mobile phones and game consoles, are more personalized both in the very act of consuming and in the context of consumption. thus, it may be problematic to apply theories and empirical findings of mass media such as television, directly to digital media. for instance, internet is a personalized medium where consumption occurs at the individual level. in contrast to television, internet usage is sporadic and spread throughout the day, often involving entertainment, work and communication. increasingly the usage occurs in mobile spaces even within the home. parents are less knowledgeable about the complex technologies and it is often the case that children have higher competency in using the internet (facer, sutherland, furlong, and furlong, 2001; tapscott, 1998; 2008). to complicate the matters, parents tend to have dubious perceptions about the effects of internet exposure. they want their children to perform well and be able to fully utilize this new technology for 4 their benefits but parents also fear the potential negative content that are so readily available on the internet (park, 2005). nonetheless, the home is where most children experience media technologies and develop their usage habits. media in the home not only provides the necessary access to technologies but parents, in particular, have an impact on how children perceive and use the media. parent-child interaction plays an important role in forming young people’s habits and attitudes of media use. parental interventions (padilla-walker, 2006; valkenburg, krcmar, peeters and marseille, 1999) as well as family communication style (krcmar, 1996; messaris and kerr, 1983) affect the way children use the media. parents have enormous amount of influence on their children in forming attitudes, values and behaviors. research on child psychology also concludes that the level of involvement of parents in their children’s lives and the type of intervention affects the social and emotional well-being of children and adolescents (arim, marshall and shapka, 2010; barber, stolz and olsen, 2005; smetana and daddis, 2002). the potentially conflicting values of peers and media often bring about proactive parenting, especially in regards to the media (padilla-walker, 2006; padilla-walker and coyne, 2010). despite parental concerns about the negative effects of media, a study reports that only one third of parents use media restriction or monitoring on their teenage children (kaiser family foundation, 2010). among the proactive remedies, there are different types of parental intervention in media use. cocooning or restrictive mediation is when parents restrict certain types of content, usage time and placement of devices within the home. the goal is to avoid exposure altogether or to restrict usage. on the other hand, pre-arming or active mediation is a method of open discussion with the child about the messages in the media. the aim is to build the child’s critical thinking. the third type is co-viewing, where parents consume the media with their child (padilla-walker and coyne, 2010). valkenburg, krcmar, peeters and marseille (1999) identify the different methods as restrictive intervention, social co-viewing, and instructional intervention. similarly, nathanson (1999, 2001a) proposes three strategies of parental regulation; active, restrictive, and co-viewing mediation, also used by livingstone and helsper (2008). restrictive intervention generally refers to controlling the content children get access to and active mediation means talking about the content after exposure so that children can actively interact with the content. co-viewing generally means passive monitoring by way of consuming media together. the effectiveness of each parental monitoring method has been under scrutiny with inconclusive results. restrictive intervention was found to be generally effective (desmond, singer, singer, calam, and colimore, 1985; raminez, norman, rosenberg, kerr, saelens, 5 durant and sallis, 2010), while nathanson (2002) found that restrictive intervention led to more positive attitude towards content and more viewing with peers. buijzen, van der molen, and sondij, 2007) found neither positive nor negative effects. raminez et al (2010) found that limiting screen time at home and also not having screen-based media in the bedroom both reduce adolescents’ usage. cocooning appears to be more successful with younger children (nathanson and yang, 2003), the reason being that restricting behavior is a signal towards the child that the parent is involved (nathanson, 1999) and parental influence wane when children reach adolescence (nathanson, 2001b). most parents use more than one approach to intervention and it is suggested that cocooning works well for adolescents if used with prearming (nathanson, 2002). research on restrictive intervention also has mixed results. park’s (2005) study also showed no correlation between parents’ restriction and the children’s tv and internet usage. co-viewing is sometimes conceptually separated from active intervention (austin, bolls, fujioka and engelbertson, 1999) but it also has both positive and negative effects. some studies show that co-viewing facilitates learning aggression from violent television because children tend to believe co-viewing as endorsement (nathanson, 1999; nathanson, 2001a) but also has positive educational outcomes (valkenburg, krcmar, and de roos, 1998). wilson and weiss (1991) studied preschoolers’ reactions to scary television shows while watching with siblings and found that they were less emotionally aroused compared to those who watched alone. not only the type of intervention but the existing relationship between the parents and children affect the effectiveness of mediation. in warren, gerke and kelly’s (2002) study, parental involvement was important and mediation was dependent on parents’ accessibility to children. the fact that parents’ intervention shapes the child’s attitude and consequently modifies the effects of the medium is in line with the uses and gratification tradition. according to the uses and gratifications theory, an individual’s attitude towards a medium affects the extent of what they see and also how they are affected (rubin and perse, 1987). the type of online content children access was related to what parents’ recommend as useful and also their co-using habits. again, parental restrictions on time and web sites did not alter children’s actual internet usage (lee and chae, 2007). some studies find the relationship between family communications and the influence of negative content (cho and cheon, 2005; wartella et al., 2002), while others focus on the contextual factors such as internet usage time (kim, na and park, 2007). communications among family members help mediate children’s overall experience of the internet. the level of 6 intimacy between parents and children as well as the parents’ attitudes toward the internet were good predictors of the children’s exposure and response to negative content online (cho and cheon, 2005; wartella, et al., 2000). usage is also a function of family relations. it has been shown that internet use is negatively related to adolescents’ perception of the quality of family relationships (mesch, 2003). other studies have found that the time children spend with screen media is associated with poorer attachment to parents (richards, et al, 2010). studies have shown that malfunction and miscommunication within the household can lead to adolescence delinquency. communication within the household is important for children to use the media wisely and intelligently. this is more so in the case of digital media since, digital media require active involvement and self-control of the user. this argument is consistent with the fact that it has been repeatedly reported that parental control of children media use, especially restrictive mediation is proven to be not as effective in the digital media environment. parents play an important role in providing the digital environment and mediating media use of their children. this study explores both the parental mediation and communication style within the family and examines how they can influence the internet usage of children. family communication affects children’s general media use including tv viewing habits (austin, 1993; krcmar, 1996; messaris and kerr, 1983). how children interact with their family members is crucial to determining their behavior. livingstone (2002) identifies six different types of family types based on the levels of interaction; low interaction, conventional, intimate, talkative, democratic and high interaction families (p191). children from low interaction families have the least favorable attitudes towards their parents. high interaction families, in contrast, are more communal in their orientation and have higher levels of satisfaction. co-consumption of media is correlated with other communal activities. both the frequency of interaction and the quality have consequences in the overall behavior of children. therefore, not only the type of parental mediation but the overall home media environment, the interaction among family members should influence the amount and way children use the media. research questions the overall home media environment including the accessibility to media, interaction with parents and the type of parental mediation, is predicted to have an impact on how much a child uses the internet and how dependent the child tends to be on the medium. two research questions were set up as follows; 7 rq1. what is the relationship between home media environment with children’s internet use? rq2. what is the relationship between home media environment with children’s internet dependence? previous studies indicate that not only the home media environment of providing access to media but also the parents’ involvements in various forms affect the children’s usage and attitude toward media. in this study, a broad concept of ‘home media environment’ is used to include not only the physical access but also the parents’ guidance in media use. method data face-to-face interviews were conducted with 1002 children and their mothers in the seoul metropolitan area including bundang and ilsan, the two major adjacent suburbs. a stratified sample was drawn from districts to include children and adolescents in grades 5th to the 9th. the interviews were conducted between december 17, 2007 and january 25, 2008. the sample consisted of 50.2% girls and 49.8% boys, evenly spread out across age groups. a summary of respondents are on table 1. table 1: summary of respondents school grade m f total elementary 5 101 100 201 6 101 102 203 middle school 1 99 101 200 2 102 100 202 3 100 96 196 average age of children 13.9 13.5 13.07 average age of mothers 41.19 40.98 41.08 total 503 499 1002 8 variables internet use time the average use time per day was measured in minutes. internet use time included all activities including games, searching, chatting, etc. internet usage is very difficult to gauge accurately, so two different methods were used. first the average time a person spent on the internet was measured. then children were asked on a scale ‘never use’ ‘rarely use’ ‘use about once a month’ ‘use about once in two or three weeks’ ‘use about once or twice in a week’ ‘use about 3~5 times per week’ ‘use almost every day’ ‘use several times a day’ for 12 different types of internet content; homework, games, news, search, email, im, post messages, blogging/sns, video, music, surf and shopping. the average score of the scale was compared with the first variable. correlation between the two variables were high enough (r= .289) to conclude that the first method of measuring internet use could be used as the dependent variable in this study. internet dependence internet dependence was measured by adapting young’s internet addiction questions (young, 1999). young (2004) characterizes internet addiction as an impulse-control disorder that mainly involves psychological dependence and results in distress in daily life. chang and law (2008) reduced the scale into three factors of ‘withdrawal and social problems’, ‘time management’ and ‘performance and reality substitute’. among the seven constructs that constitute internet addiction, disturbance of reality and interpersonal relation orientation substitute were omitted and five less pathological states were included; withdrawal, compulsive use, positive anticipation, tolerance and deviance. children’s internet dependence was measured on a five-point scale asking how much they agreed with each statement from ‘not at all’ to ‘very much’. the statements used in this study were (1) i keep using the internet even though i have other obligations (2) i want to reduce the amount of internet usage but can’t (3) when i am on the internet i can’t keep track of time (4) life would be boring without the internet (5) when i am not on the internet i feel that life is empty (6) internet interferes with my studies (7) internet relieves my stress (8) i feel better when i am on the internet (9) internet has caused conflict with family members (10) i use the internet behind my parents’ back. cronbach’s alpha was 0.913. 9 parental mediation both restrictive and active parental mediation were measured, since they may result in different outcomes. restrictive mediation was measured by asking the parents if they have rules to restrict the time children spent on the internet and games on a five-point scale from ‘not at all’ to ‘very much’. the average of the two scales was used as the variable for restrictive mediation. cronbach alpha was 0.819. active mediation was measured by asking the parents if they knew which internet sites and online games their children used, respectively, also on a fivepoint scale. cronbach’s alpha was 0.713. time spent together with parent mothers were asked how much time they spend with the child on average on a weekday, excluding sleep time. the answer ranged from ‘seldom see my child’ ‘less than one hour per day’ ‘one to two hours per day’ ‘three to five hours per day’ and ‘more than five hours per day’. the variable was used as a scale even though it was measured as an ordinal variable. parent-child interaction parents were given a list of indoor and outdoor activities and asked how often they engaged in each of them with their child on a five-point scale of ‘never’ to ‘very often’. indoor activities included card/board games, listen to the radio, listen to music, crafts, talk about books, play video games and use the internet (cronbach’s alpha = 0.840). outdoor activities included go to parks/recreation facilities, go to the movies/theater, play sports and hobbies (cronbach's alpha = 0.789). child’s media richness the number of devices the child can use at home was measured by asking the parents whether or not the child owned or used the product or service in their own room. media devices included television, dvd player, home theater system, pc or laptop, internet connection, audio (mp3 or cd players), portable game or multimedia device such as pmp or psp, console game, camcorder and digital camera. the sum of the devices owned in the child’s room was used to gauge the media richness of each child. parent’s internet use time the time spent on the internet per day was measured by asking the mother how much on average she spends on the internet including games. 10 extracurricular activities media use is usually a function of how much a person spends at home. for school age children, the time spent at home is correlated with the number of activities they engage in after school. to see if this is related to media use, the number of extracurricular activities the child participates in was measured by asking the child whether or not they received extra tutoring in the following subjects; math, science, english, korean, social studies, arts or sports, third language, writing and chinese characters. the sum of the number of subjects was used as the variable. internet competency internet competency was measured by asking the child how well they could perform the ten activities online on a five-point scale from ‘not at all’ to ‘very well’ ; finding friend’s blog or sns site, uploading photos or images on to a bulletin board, attaching files to email, downloading files from the internet, listening to music or watching video clips, moving downloaded files to other devices, making a web site, editing video files, editing photo/images (“photoshop”) and using text, music, image and video clips to make a presentation document. the average of the ten scales was used as the variable. gender and age boys were coded as one and girls zero to use as a control variable to see the gender differences. age of child was also used as a control variable. results regression analyses were conducted to see how the home media environment is related to young people’s internet use and over use. first, the time children and adolescents spent on the internet were regressed on home media environment factors and the child’s demographics. age was not a significant variable in explaining the time spent online. however boys tended to spend more time online compared to girls. the reason age was not an important factor is because the selected respondents were between a certain age range – children born between 1992 and 1997 – which can explain the homogeneity within the sample. the variable, “media richness of child” as measured by how many digital media devices they own, was not significant. it should be noted that 93% of the respondents had less than 4 out of 10 media devices in their rooms, 53.3% of the respondents owning their own computer. thus the variance was not large, which may explain why this variable was not significant. 11 extracurricular activities were significant and negative. children who participate more in afterschool studies or activities spend less time on the internet as predicted. table 2: ols regression results (i) : dependent variable is internet use time variables b std. error beta t sig. (constant) 85.21 24.29 3.507 0.00 indoor activities with parent 6.47 3.75 0.07 1.728 0.08 outdoor activities with parent -12.67 3.10 -0.15 -4.088 0.00 active mediation -5.55 2.52 -0.08 -2.205 0.03 restrictive mediation -3.16 2.16 -0.05 -1.467 0.14 weekday time spent with mother 3.71 2.41 0.05 1.538 0.12 age -0.86 1.39 -0.02 -0.621 0.53 gender 14.22 3.69 0.12 3.859 0.00 extracurricular activities -3.83 1.10 -0.11 -3.481 0.00 media richness of child 0.85 1.48 0.02 0.571 0.57 child's internet competency 15.16 2.52 0.19 6.017 0.00 parent’s daily internet use time 0.25 0.04 0.19 6.137 0.00 adjusted r square 0.101 depending on the type of parental mediation, the effects on internet use time varied. restrictive mediation variable was not significant, although the coefficient had a negative direction. the coefficient for active mediation was negative and significant, which means that restrictive mediation is not effective while active mediation may be effective in reducing the time a child spends on the internet. while knowing what the child does on the internet per se will not reduce the time spent online, it is more likely that parents who know what the child does online will be more interactive and communicative with their child. parents’ time spent with the child during the week was not correlated with internet use time. however, when we look at the interaction between parents and children in terms of indoor and outdoor activities, we can see a clearer pattern. children who engage in more outdoor activities with their parents use the internet less. this is intuitive since time spent outside means 12 less time spent in front of a screen at home. indoor activities had a positive correlation with the child’s internet use. among the indoor activities, playing online games together with the parent and using the internet together were included in the measurement, which means that the increase in indoor activities could mean an increase in time spent in front of a computer, be it alone or together. the time the mother spent online was correlated with the child’s internet usage as found in previous studies (park, yoon and yang, 2005). the example the parents set at home is consistently important in determining how children use media. the adjusted r square was 0.101 which implies that there are other factors that influence a child’s internet use time and the atmosphere the parents set for children is only one of the many factors that shape internet usage behavior of children. the second set of regression analysis was conducted to examine how home media environment affects the internet dependence of children and adolescents. the child’s gender and age variables were not significant. extracurricular activities, media richness of child were also not significant. the child’s internet use time was positive and significant. if a child spends more time on the internet it is indicative of the child’s internet dependence. whether or not this is the cause cannot be inferred from the data in this study. however, the correlation between the two variables implies that internet dependency can be reduced by limiting the time spent online. however, restrictive mediation by parents was not a significant variable. it is not effective to limit the time a child spends online by setting the rules. on the other hand, active mediation variable was effective. higher levels of active mediation resulted in lower levels of internet dependence. parents’ interaction with children was also important, especially the outdoor activities they share. indoor activities with parents were not significant. the child’s internet competency was positively related to internet dependence. as the child is exposed to more types of services and skills required to use the internet, the chances are that his or her internet dependency increases. the adjusted r square was 0.16. 13 table 3: ols regression results (ii) : dependent variable is internet dependence b std. error beta t sig. (constant) 3.928 0.2978 13.189 0.00 indoor activities with parent 0.063 0.0457 0.05 1.372 0.17 outdoor activities with parent -0.204 0.0380 -0.19 -5.387 0.00 active mediation (internet and game) -0.065 0.0307 -0.07 -2.124 0.03 restrictive mediation (internet and game) -0.030 0.0263 -0.04 -1.152 0.25 weekday time spent with parent -0.158 0.0292 -0.16 -5.393 0.00 age -0.026 0.0169 -0.05 -1.517 0.13 gender 0.004 0.0453 0.00 0.095 0.92 extracurricular activities 0.006 0.0135 0.01 0.409 0.68 media richness of child -0.029 0.0181 -0.05 -1.620 0.11 child's internet competency 0.296 0.0313 0.30 9.458 0.00 child’s daily internet use time 0.001 0.0004 0.09 2.963 0.00 adjusted r square 0.16 conclusion knowing how media consumption habits are formed at home at an early age is important since once fixed, media tastes and habits do not change easily. parents have a big influence on how children and young people are exposed to various media at home. not only do they provide access to devices and services but also set rules and provide examples by communicating their beliefs about how people should use and understand media. this study looked at how home environment set by the parents affect internet use and dependence among young children. both home environment and internet dependence were broadly defined in order to include the various usages and interventions within the home. a national survey in south korea revealed that the parents’ use of internet, the way parents intervene, the time the child spends at home and time spent with parents outside were all significant predictors of a child’s internet use. direct restriction on usage time was not effective as found in previous studies. the media richness of home was not a significant variable that 14 explains young people’s internet use time. providing children access to media alone does not enable them to use it in a certain way. rather the interaction among family members, especially with parents seems to be important in determining how young people use the media. screen time is in competition with other leisure activities and was reflected in the negative coefficient of time spent with parents outside the home. similarly, internet dependence was negatively correlated with active parental mediation. internet dependence was also a function of the time spent on the internet and internet competence. those who use the internet more and at ease have higher levels of internet dependence. this implies that internet use has both negative and positive impact on young people. internet use has beneficial outcomes as well as negative impact since it exposes young people to a variety of content. the implications of this study are that parents’ active involvement can reduce the risks of internet use, not only in terms of time spent online but also the type of content children get exposed to. in the digital media era, the role of parents in mediating media use is changing, where more interaction with the children is required to have an impact on how children use the media. however, the risks that young people today are exposed to are unprecedented and unknown to their parents. so becoming an active mediator may be problematic due to this digital gap among the parents and children. thus, we need to take up a broader approach when examining the parents’ role in mediating digital media use of children and adolescents. further investigation on the role of parents in different levels of internet competence is necessary to see how the digital gap may influence the family dynamics in internet use and mal-use. references arim, r. a. g., marshall, s. k., & shapka, j. d. (2010). a domain-specific approach to adolescent reporting of parental control. journal of adolescence, 33(3), 355-366. austin, e. w. (1993). exploring the effects of active parental mediation of television content. journal of broadcasting and electronic media, 37(2), 147-158. austin, e. w., bolls, p., fujioka, y., & engelbertson, j. (1999). how and why parents take on the tube. journal of broadcasting and electronic media, 43(2), 175. 15 barber, b. k., stolz, h. e., & olsen, j. a. (2005). parental support, psychological control, and behavioral control: assessing relevance across time, culture, and method. monographs of the society for research in child development, 70(4), 1-151. buijzen, m., walma van der molen, j. h., & sondij, p. (2007). parental mediation of children's emotional responses to a violent news event. communication research, 34(2), 212-230. cho, c. h., & cheon, h. j. (2005). children's exposure to negative internet content: effects of family context. journal of broadcasting and electronic media, 49(4), 488 509. desmond, r. j., singer, j. l., singer, d. g., & calam, r., & colimore, k. (1985). family mediation patterns and television viewing: young children's use and grasp of the medium human communication research, 11, 461-480. eastin, m. s., greenberg, b. s., & hofschire, l. (2006). parenting the internet. journal of communication, 56(3), 486-504. facer, k., sutherland, r., furlong, r., & john, f. (2001). what's the point of using computers? new media & society, 3(2), 199-219. lenhart, a., purcell, k., smith, a., & zickuhr, k. (2010). social media and mobile internet use among teens and young adults: pew internet and american life project. rideout, v.j., foehr, u., & roberts, d.f.(2010)generation m2: media in the lives of 8to 18year olds. menlo park, ca: kaiser family foundation. kim, e. (2011). is internet literacy inherited from parent to children? korean journal of journalism and communication studies, 55(2), 155-177 korea communication commission (2010). survey on internet usage. krcmar, m. (1996). family communication patterns, discourse behavior, and child television viewing. human communication research, 23(2), 251-277. lee, s.j., & chae, y.g. (2007). children's internet use in a family context: influence on family relationships and parental mediation. cyberpsychology and behavior, 10, 640-644. lei, l., wu, y. (2007). adolescents' paternal attachment and internet use. cyberpsychology and behavior, mary ann liebert, inc. 16 livingstone, s. (2007). strategies of parental regulation in the media-rich home. computers in human behavior, 23(2), 920-941. livingstone, s. (2002). young people and new media. london: sage publications. livingstone, s., & helsper, e. j. (2008). parental mediation of children's internet use. journal of broadcasting and electronic media, 52(4), 581 599. mesch, g. s. (2003). the family and the internet: the israeli case. social science quarterly, 84(4), 1038-1050. messaris, p., & kerr, d. (1983). mothers' comments about tv. communication research, 10(2), 175-194. na, e., kim, e., and park, s. (2009). equality of family communication and adolescents’ internet dependency: mediation of self-efficacy and family conflicts. journal of cybercommunication, 26(4), 5-49. nathanson, a. i. (2002). the unintended effects of parental mediation of television on adolescents. media psychology, 4, 207-230. nathanson, a. i. (2001a). parent and child perspectives on the presence and meaning of parental television mediation. journal of broadcasting and electronic media, 45(2), 201. nathanson, a. (2001b). parents versus peers: exploring the significance of peer mediation of antisocial television communication research, 28(3), 251-274. nathanson, a. (1999). identifying and explaining the relationship between parental mediation and children's aggression. communication research, 26(2), 124-143. nathanson, a. i., & yang, m. (2003). the effects of mediation content and form on children’s responses to violent television. human communication research, 29, 111–134. padilla-walker, l. m., & coyne, s. m. (2010). "turn that thing off!" parent and adolescent predictors of proactive media monitoring. journal of adolescence, in press, corrected proof. padilla-walker, l. m. (2006). peers i can monitor, it’s media that really worries me! journal of adolescent research, 21(1), 56-82. 17 park, s. (2005). individual and environmental factors that influence children's internet use: an empirical study of elementary school children in korea. korean journal of journalism and communication studies, 49(4), 165-189. park, s., yoon, s., & yang, j. (2004). children and the internet. seoul: communication books. ramirez, e. r., norman, g. j., rosenberg, d. e., kerr, j., saelens, b. e., durant, n., et al. (2010). adolescent screen time and rules to limit screen time in the home. journal of adolescent health, in press, corrected proof. richards, r., mcgee, r., williams, s., welch, d., & hancox, r. (2010). adolescent screen time and attachment to parents and peers. archives of pediatrics and adolescent medicine, 164(3), 258-262. rubin, a. m., & perse, e. m. (1987). audience activity and soap opera involvement a uses and effects investigation. human communication research, 14(2), 246-268. smetana, j. g., & daddis, c. (2002). domain-specific antecedents of parental psychological control and monitoring: the role of parenting beliefs and practices. child development, 73(2), 563-580. song, y., oh, s., kim, e., na, e., jung, h., & park, s. (2009). media user patterns of adolescents in a multimedia environment: an assessment of gender and income differences. journal of communication research, 46(2), 43-77. tapscott (2008). grown up digital: how the net generation is changing your world. new york: london : mcgraw-hill. tapscott, don. (1998). growing up digital: the rise of the net generation. new york : mcgraw-hill. valkenburg, p. m., krcmar, m., peeters, a. l., & marseille, n. m. (1999). developing a scale to assess three styles of television mediation: instructive mediation, restrictive mediation and social coviewing. journal of broadcasting and electronic media (1), 52 66. valkenburg, p. m., krcmar, m., & de roos, s. (1998). the impact of a cultural children's program and adult mediation on children's knowledge of and attitudes towards opera. journal of broadcasting and electronic media, 42(3), 315-326. 18 warren, r., gerke, p., & kelly, m. a. (2002). is there enough time on the clock? parental involvement and mediation of children's television viewing. journal of broadcasting and electronic media, 46(1), 87. wartella, e. a., lee, j. h., & caplovitz, a. g. (2002). children and interactive media: research compendium update. markle foundation. wilson, b. j., & weiss, a. j. (1991). the effects of two reality explanations on children's reactions to a frightening movie scene. communication monographs, 58(3), 307. sora park university of canberra australia sora.park@canberra.edu.au among the negative consequences, this study explores the over-use of the internet by children and young people, which may affect their normal routine at school, home or in their social lives. instead of using the concept of addiction, i prefer to use ... media consumption habits are formed during the early ages of childhood and usually within the context of home. parents have an enormous influence over what types of content and media children are exposed to in the early stages of life. parents provide... internet addiction among young people is becoming more of a concern with the growth in the penetration worldwide. usually addiction is studied as a clinical condition to be treated. there have been empirical studies on how pathological use of the inte... with new digital devices and the increased penetration of the internet in the daily lives of young people, over-use or mal-use of the new technologies is becoming an increasing concern for parents and policymakers. especially when there might be an ar... in this study, the term ‘internet dependence’ is used in a broader sense than pathological addiction in order to embrace all types of mal-use of the internet among young people. the term is used broadly to include the over-use and abuse of internet th... digital media, such as the internet, mobile phones and game consoles, are more personalized both in the very act of consuming and in the context of consumption. thus, it may be problematic to apply theories and empirical findings of mass media such as... nonetheless, the home is where most children experience media technologies and develop their usage habits. media in the home not only provides the necessary access to technologies but parents, in particular, have an impact on how children perceive and... the potentially conflicting values of peers and media often bring about proactive parenting, especially in regards to the media (padilla-walker, 2006; padilla-walker and coyne, 2010). despite parental concerns about the negative effects of media, a st... the effectiveness of each parental monitoring method has been under scrutiny with inconclusive results. restrictive intervention was found to be generally effective (desmond, singer, singer, calam, and colimore, 1985; raminez, norman, rosenberg, kerr,... co-viewing is sometimes conceptually separated from active intervention (austin, bolls, fujioka and engelbertson, 1999) but it also has both positive and negative effects. some studies show that co-viewing facilitates learning aggression from violent ... not only the type of intervention but the existing relationship between the parents and children affect the effectiveness of mediation. in warren, gerke and kelly’s (2002) study, parental involvement was important and mediation was dependent on parent... the type of online content children access was related to what parents’ recommend as useful and also their co-using habits. again, parental restrictions on time and web sites did not alter children’s actual internet usage (lee and chae, 2007). some studies find the relationship between family communications and the influence of negative content (cho and cheon, 2005; wartella et al., 2002), while others focus on the contextual factors such as internet usage time (kim, na and park, 2007). com... studies have shown that malfunction and miscommunication within the household can lead to adolescence delinquency. communication within the household is important for children to use the media wisely and intelligently. this is more so in the case of d... family communication affects children’s general media use including tv viewing habits (austin, 1993; krcmar, 1996; messaris and kerr, 1983). how children interact with their family members is crucial to determining their behavior. livingstone (2002) i... both the frequency of interaction and the quality have consequences in the overall behavior of children. therefore, not only the type of parental mediation but the overall home media environment, the interaction among family members should influence t... research questions previous studies indicate that not only the home media environment of providing access to media but also the parents’ involvements in various forms affect the children’s usage and attitude toward media. in this study, a broad concept of ‘home media en... method data table 1: summary of respondents variables internet use time time spent together with parent parent-child interaction child’s media richness parent’s internet use time extracurricular activities internet competency gender and age results table 2: ols regression results (i) : dependent variable is internet use time table 3: ols regression results (ii) : dependent variable is internet dependence microsoft word gilbert.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested  citation  (apa):  gilbert,  a.  (2015,  october  21-­24).  smutty  fantasy  in  the  digital  sphere:  self-­ published  erotic  romance  and  spaces  of  alternative  feminism.  paper  presented  at  internet  research  16:   the  16th  annual  meeting  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  phoenix,  az,  usa:  aoir.  retrieved   from  http://spir.aoir.org.   smutty  fantasy  in  the  digital  sphere:  self-­published   erotic  romance  and  spaces  of  alternative  femininism   anne  gilbert   university  of  kansas       feminist  perspectives  on  the  romance  novel  are  often  ambivalent  as  they  attempt  to   reconcile  its  contradictions:  on  one  hand  is  the  liberatory  possibility  of  sexually  explicit   fantasies  authored  by  and  for  women,  but  this  is  countered  by  the  reality  of  a  genre  that   frequently  reverts  to  safe,  accepted  reinscriptions  of  heteronormative  values.  in  this   presentation,  i  consider  how  these  tensions  play  out  in  a  digital  sphere,  where  the  rise   of  e-­books  and  digital  publishing  platforms  has  created  a  market  for  independent   romance  authors,  erotic  self-­published  novels,  and  networks  of  blogs  and   recommendation  sites  supporting  them.  i  argue  that  the  cottage  industry  of  erotic   romance  e-­books  and  review  blogs  represent  an  online  space  of  gendered   conversation,  an  opportunity  for  participants  to  legitimate  devalued,  feminized,  risqué   texts,  as  well  as  the  practices  of  both  writing  and  reading  them.       the  arenas  in  which  self-­published  erotic  romance  novels  are  promoted  and   recommended  are  spaces  on  the  internet  in  which  romance,  happy  endings,  and  explicit   sexuality  are  celebrated  in  the  collective  imaginations  of  its  participants.  through  an   analysis  of  reviews  and  recommendations  of  self-­published  erotic  romances;;   promotional  and  paratextual  materials  created  by  authors;;  and  of  book  blogs  and   message  boards,  this  presentation  will  investigate  how  these  networks  operate  as  an   alternate  sphere  for  feminized  discussion,  a  space  for  formulating  and  indulging  in   fantasy.     lori  kido  lopez  (2009)  refers  to  mommy  blogging  is  a  “radical  act”  for  the  way  in  which   it  “challenges  and  reinterprets  representations  of  motherhood”  (p.  730),  and  allows   bloggers  and  readers  alike  to  collectively  reimagine  mothering  and  femininity.  similarly,   sex  blogs  written  by  and  for  women  have  been  argued  to  be  safe  spaces  in  which   women  can  build  community  by  articulating  sexual  desires  and  shames  (wood,  2008).   the  proliferation  of  digitally  self-­published  erotic  romances,  and  the  semi-­professional   network  of  bloggers,  recommenders,  and  marketers  that  accompany  them,  act  in  much   the  same  way.  like  mommy  blogs,  sex  blogs,  or  even  crafting  circles,  blogging  about   so-­called  smut  validates  the  significance  of  culturally  neglected  and  deeply  feminized   artifacts,  creating  a  space  in  which  the  value  of  both  the  e-­books  themselves  and  the   interest  in  them  is  accepted  as  a  given  by  its  participants.  sexual  imagination  is   celebrated  here,  not  merely  for  the  content  of  fantasies,  but  for  the  presumed  pleasures   of  being  permitted  to  indulge  that  imagination  through  writing  and  reading.     e-­book  romances  are  big  business,  done  $2.99  at  a  time.  romance/erotica  brought  in   $1.1  billion  in  2013,  with  digital  book  sales  outpacing  romances  published  in  other   formats  (terrero,  2014).  of  the  top  100  romance  e-­books  in  2014,  a  full  50%  were  self-­ published,  with  small  publishers  (including  author  collectives)  and  amazon  adding  an   additional  20%  (robertson,  2015).  self-­published  e-­books  comprise  a  significant  portion   of  bestseller  lists,  from  amazon  to  the  new  york  times.  successful  self-­published   authors  often  receive  offers  for  contracts  from  traditional  publishing  houses  and  book   agents.  electronically  published  erotic  romances  have  emerged  as  in-­demand   commodities.       the  significance  of  the  digital  boom  in  erotic  e-­books,  however,  extends  beyond   economic  value.  successful  self-­published  authors  often  choose  to  remain  independent,   rather  than  accept  industrial  offers;;  amateur  reviewers  create  sites  to  sort  through  the   myriad  novels  published  each  month  and  make  recommendations;;  enthusiastic  readers   participate  in  discussions,  leave  author  feedback,  and  advocate  for  authors  and   individual  books  in  message  boards  and  review  sites  across  the  internet.  participants  in   the  interactive  process  of  publishing  and  circulating  erotic  e-­books  –  writers,  yes,  but   also  these  editors,  bloggers,  volunteer  marketers,  notable  reviewers  –  can  build  fame  in   this  arena  and  develop  a  following  from  others  who  appreciate  their  labors.   communities  and  networks  devoted  to  self-­published  romance  celebrate  creators  and   consumers  of  these  books,  fostering  the  legitimacy  of  writing,  reading,  and  promoting   sexually  explicit  romantic  novels.  this  valorization  is  an  internal  construct;;  these   pursuits  are  not  legitimated  by  economics  or  industrial  structures,  but  by  the  significance   awarded  to  them  by  the  actions  of  their  participants.     blogs,  with  names  such  as  shh  moms  reading,  flirty  and  dirty  book  blog,  the   subclub  books,  and  up  all  night  book  blog,  are  modeled  on  longer-­standing  romance   review  sites  such  as  all  about  romance  and  smart  bitches,  trashy  books.  whereas   sites  had  previously  adhered  to  a  professionalized  model  of  reviews,  in  which  reviewers   were  paid  at  least  a  nominal  sum  and  the  site  solicited  and  accepted  review  copies  of   books  from  publishers,  newer  blogs  are  grounded  in  affective  attachments  rather  than   institutional  structures.  bloggers  refer  to  themselves  as  “book  junkies”  or  “addicts,”   “fangirls”  and  “obsessives,”  and  the  transition  from  reader  to  reviewer  is  prompted  by  an   overflow  of  enthusiasm  for  reading,  sexy  romances,  and  even  book-­based  fantasy   boyfriends.  the  books  reviewed  are  also  different,  as  book  bloggers  are  interested  in   books  that  can  be  had  instantly  and  at  low  cost  via  digital  channels.  subsequently,  only   a  small  percentage  of  books  reviewed  on  amateur  book  blogs  are  those  originally   published  by  imprints  at  a  major  publishing  house.  the  conventions  and  practices  of   these  user-­generated  blogs  reinforce  the  interest  in  a  steady  supply  of  new  romance   novels  and  also  indicate  the  role  that  the  consumption  and  celebration  of  erotic   fantasies  –  beyond  the  production  of  them  by  writers  –  plays  in  building  a  collective   romantic  imagination  among  the  readership.     in  addition  to  reviews,  book  blogs  include  author  interviews,  previews  of  covers  and   excerpts  of  upcoming  titles,  notifications  of  price  drops  and  release  dates,  and   interactive  comments  sections  or  forums.  conversations  on  these  blogs  are  also  part  of   a  larger  network  of  interactions  surrounding  the  publicizing  and  recommending  of  titles.   these  interactions  also  take  place  on  social  media  pages  of  authors  and  bloggers,   review  sections  of  amazon,  good  reads,  barnes  &  noble,  kobo,  and  wattpad,  on   message  boards  of  retailers,  and  author  websites.  in  these  spaces,  readers,  authors,   and  amateur  reviewers  praise  and  critique  book  content,  articulate  preferences  for  the   heroes,  heroines,  sexual  encounters,  and  romantic  outcomes  they  hope  to  find  in  their   books,  and  situate  writing  and  reading  romances  within  their  daily  lives.       i  consider  the  nature  of  the  gendered  empowerment  that  arises  from  the  collective   imaginations  of  participants  as  they  create,  circulate,  and  promote  digital  erotic   romances  within  a  feminized  online  space.  empowerment  here  may  be  a  challenging   concept;;  the  fantasies  inscribed  in  these  erotic  romances  often  reinforce  traditional   gender  dynamics,  heteronormative  values,  and  idealized  (and  unattainable)  standards   of  beauty,  wealth,  and  purity,  and  may  seem  incompatible  with  opportunities  for   reimagining  female  writers’  and  readers’  cultural  roles.  nevertheless,  by  constructing  a   venue  where  the  creation  and  articulation  of  desire,  wish  fulfillment,  and  sexuality  are   imagined  as  productive  pursuits  that  speak  to  entrepreneurial  energy  and  digital  savvy,   online  spaces  surrounding  the  publication  and  circulation  of  smutty  e-­books  speak  to   how  participants  are  able  to  realize  a  degree  of  agency  that  has  implications  beyond   textual  content.     references     lopez,  l.k.  (2009).  the  radical  act  of  “mommy  blogging”:  redefining  motherhood   through  the  blogosphere.  new  media  &  society,  11(5),  729-­747.     robertson,  e.  w.  (2015).  “self-­publishing’s  share  of  the  kindle  market  by  genre.”   edward  e.  robinson.  retrieved  from  http://edwardwrobertson.com/self-­publishings-­ share-­of-­the-­kindle-­market-­by-­genre/     terrero,  n.  (2014,  october  24).  romance  by  the  numbers.  entertainment  weekly,  1334,   40-­41.     wood,  e.a.  (2008).  consciousness-­raising  2.0:  sex  blogging  and  the  creation  of  a   feminist  sex  commons.  feminism  &  psychology,  18(4),  480-­487.     selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 panel:  karma  policing:  re-­imagining  what  we  can  (and   can't)  post  on  the  internet.     michael  burnam-­fink   arizona  state  university     katrin  tiidenberg   tallinn  university     john  carter  mcknight     cindy  tekobbe   university  of  alabama     abstract     popular  discourse  and  culture  on  the  internet  of  2014-­2015  is  well-­removed  from  that   envisioned  by  the  pioneers,  idealists,  and  many  scholars  of  the  medium  in  its  formative   years.  far  from  the  “early  days  of  a  better  nation,”  a  phrase  of  alasdair  gray’s  engraved   upon  the  scottish  parliament  building  and  often  deployed  in  public  discourse  on  social   media  during  the  2014  campaign  for  scottish  independence,  this  past  year  has  seen   attention  drawn  to  some  of  the  worst  of  online  behavior,  from  videos  of  beheadings,  to   rape  and  death  threats,  to  the  aggressive  vitriol  of  what  some  regard  as  a  backlash  by   young  white  men  against  the  increased  visibility  of  women,  people  of  color,  and  those   identifying  with  one  or  more  non-­hegemonic  identities.  whatever  today’s  internet  may   be,  it  is  not  barlow’s  (1996)  independent  republic  of  cyberspace  or  rheingold’s  (1993)   “virtual  community”  of  the  well,  a  homogeneous  assemblage  of  white  male  late-­baby   boomer  software  engineers  of  libertarian  bent.  with  global  reach  and  diversity  have   come  challenges  to  discourse  traditions,  cultures,  and  social  identities  engaging  with   each  other  over  new  platforms  which  enable  and  favor  some  discourses  while   challenging  or  suppressing  others.  clashes  are  perhaps  inevitable.  however,  the   technologies  and  socio-­technical  practices  which  have  given  rise  to  conflict  may  also  be   used  to  address  imbalances  of  power,  to  create  if  not  the  libertarian  republics  of  1990s   imagining,  then  creative  counterpublics  of  peer  production  in  which  official  and  dominant   narratives  are  refuted,  repurposed,  or  simply  ignored.       presenter  one  describes  gamergate  as  a  systemic  problem  enabled  by  the  ubiquity  of   the  internet  in  everyday  life;;  argues  for  a  proactive  counter-­insurgency  strategy  rather   than  the  passive  ‘don't  feed  the  trolls’  conventional  wisdom  written  into  the  terms  of   service  (tos)  documents  of  many  online  platforms;;  and  suggests  the  implementation  of   a  modified  bayesian  filtering  technique  that  has  been  successful  in  regard  to  reducing   email  spam  to  combat  online  harassment  and  trolling.  interrogating  the  february  2015   memes  of  “left  shark,”  “llama  drama,”  and  “the  dress,”  presenter  two  argues  that   collaborative  meme-­making  can  build  solidarity  and  community,  while  countering  anti-­ meme  discourse  and  the  “serious  business”  of  the  internet,  by  invoking  collective   whimsy  and  humor.  presenter  three  takes  on  dominant  ideologies  around  gender,   embodiment,  age,  aesthetics,  sexuality,  body  policing,  and  more  by  investigating  the   #over40  and  #over50  women  posting  on  tumblr  and  instagram  arguing  for  a   complicated  notion  of  resistance  through  self  image  re/crafting  of  fitness,  motherhood,   and  lifestyle  among  women  over  25.  presenter  four  explores  the  rhetorical  genre  of  the   satirical  review  on  amazon.com  as  feminist  resistance,  and  argues  for  the  disruptive   and  counter-­narrative  affordances  of  social  media  comments  contrasted  with  the   conventional  wisdom  of  the  comments  as  a  cesspool  of  abuse  and  trolling.     together,  this  panel  presents  a  range  of  imagined  alternatives  to  polarized  and  bitter   online  discourse,  from  perspectives  of  media  and  cultural  studies,  political  philosophy,   counterinsurgency  theory,  science  and  technology  studies,  and  rhetorical  genre  theory.     problems  of  contemporary  internet  discourse  -­  both  textual  and  visual  -­    and  imagined   alternatives  are  situated  not  only  historically  and  theoretically  but  are  also  grounded  in   close  analysis  of  technological  affordances  and  constraints  of  media  and  platforms.       references     barlow,  j.p.  (1996).  a  cyberspace  independence  declaration.  online:   https://w2.eff.org/censorship/internet_censorship_bills/barlow_0296.declaration   rheingold,  h.  (1993).  the  virtual  community:  homesteading  on  the  electronic  frontier.   mit  press.   turner,  f.  (2010).  from  counterculture  to  cyberculture:  stewart  brand,  the  whole  earth   network,  and  the  rise  of  digital  utopianism.  university  of  chicago  press.         presenter  one:  napalm  on  trolls:  counter-­insurgency  strategies  for  internet   harassment     harassment  of  women  online  is  a  longstanding  problem,  rising  to  a  fever  pitch  with  the   gamergate  shambles  in  autumn  of  2014.    online  harassment  ranges  from  persistent,   detailed,  and  graphic  death  threats  against  specific  women[1]  to  increased  levels  of   ordinary  “trash-­talk”  in  online  gaming[2].  despite  the  scope  of  the  problem,  and  the   consequences  of  violence  against  women  for  the  victims  and  the  communities  that  have   been  targeted,  there  has  not  been  an  effective  response.  law  enforcement  agencies,   their  hands  bound  by  jurisdictional  and  evidentiary  standards,  are  unable  to  punish   harassers  or  protect  their  targets.  proposals  to  strengthen  community  norms  or  “don’t   feed  the  trolls”  fail  to  address  how  deeply  embedded  the  internet  is  in  the  conduct  of   daily  life,  or  harassers  who  simply  don’t  care  about  community  norms.[3]  organized  and   systemic  harassment  demands  an  organized  and  systemic  response.    i  propose   incorporating  a  bayesian  filter  for  detecting  harassing  messages  into  common  online   platforms,  and  explore  how  and  why  said  filter  may  work  to  decrease  harassment.       this  work  combines  and  extends  theories  of  online  technopolitics  and  counter-­ insurgency  warfare.  technopolitics  in  generals  notes  that  political  values  are  embedded   in  system  design,  that  technological  affordances  channel  human  action,  and  that   political  and  technological  critique  must  be  done  in  parallel.[4]  for  computer  networks,   the  creation  of  a  problem  and  a  community  are  historically  synonymous,  with  the   paradigmatic  example  being  the  rise  and  decline  of  spam;;  unsolicited  commercial   messages[5].  counter-­insurgency  (coin)  is  a  set  of  military  strategies  for  fighting   guerrillas,  most  recently  associated  with  general  petraeus  and  the  us  occupation  of   iraq,  which  focuses  on  protection  of  the  population  and  political    legitimacy  as  key   objectives.[6]                               together,  these  frameworks  draw  attention  to  strategy,  terrain,  and  tactics.  the   strategic  objective  is  significantly  reducing  online  harassment,  one  consonant  with  the   first  principle  of  coin:  that  security  of  the  population  is  key  and  a  perquisite  to  other   objectives  (i.e.  “smashing  the  patriarchy”).  terrain  means  analyzing  the  affordances  and   encoded  political  values  of  online  platforms  seriously.  the  online  communication   consider  in  this  piece  takes  place  via  privately  owned-­and-­operated  platforms  such  as   twitter,  reddit,  and  youtube,  which  have  design  commitments  to  making  it  easy  to  join   and  post  content,  and  relatively  lax  or  under-­utilized  systems  of  content  moderation.  in   short,  these  platforms  make  it  easy  to  send  harassing  messages  and  difficult  to   maintain  a  persistent  digital  identity  in  the  face  of  harassment.  terrain,  moreso  than   political  or  social  factors,  is  a  significant  explanation  for  the  success  of  insurgent  groups   as  analyzed  across  20th  century  conflicts.[7]  the  online  terrain  of  platforms,  as   compared  to  the  physical  terrain  of  earth,  is  amenable  to  changes  in  affordances  by  the   development  team.  finally,  a  tactical  lens  focuses  on  the  kinds  of  actions  that  are   possible  and  successful.  in  analogy  with  the  advice  of  john  paul  vann,  america’s  most   successful  practitioner  of  counter-­insurgency  warfare,  against  indiscriminate  aerial   bombardment  during  the  vietnam  war,  “this  is  a  political  war  and  it  call  for   discrimination  in  killing.”[8]  i  propose  that  we  need  automated  tactics.  to  be  effective,  a   defensive  tactic  must  require  less  cognitive  and  emotional  work  than  sending  a   harassing  message.                             the  test  i  am  proposing  is  a  modification  of  bayesian  filtering  techniques,  which  have   worked  extremely  well  in  countering  spam  email.  in  general,  bayesian  filters  compare   the  frequency  of  words  in  a  message  to  determine  the  probability  that  a  message  fits   into  one  or  more  categories  (e.g.  spam,  harassment,  purposeful  communication).  the   filter  would  assess  that  the  message  is  harassing,  notify  the  sender  if  they  wish  to   proceed  (in  test  cases  notifying  the  sender  can  reduce  harassment  by  ~90%)[9],  notify   the  recipient  of  a  harassing  message,  and  if  both  the  filter  and  a  human  agree  that  the   message  is  harassment  (the  recipient  if  they  choose  to  the  view  the  message,  a   moderator  if  not),  the  sender  is  automatically  banned,  with  increasing  duration  for   multiple  infractions.  as  per  usual  practices,  the  filter  ‘learns’  from  human  judgment  of   harassment,  and  is  applied  evenly  to  messages  in  all  directions.  the  human-­in-­the-­loop   prevents  over-­zealous  machine  banning,  while  fair  application  makes  this  politically   acceptable.  those  who  care  to  live  glass  houses  of  safe  speech  will  not  be  able  to   throw  stones.  new  accounts,  which  may  be  sock-­puppets,  will  be  under  the  tightest   restrictions.  those  who  do  throw  stones  will  suffer  immediate  consequences  for  their   actions,  breaking  the  motivational  loop  that  sustains  this  form  of  behavior.[10]                             users  can  force  their  services  to  change.  today,  no  self-­respecting  email  service  lacks   a  spam  filter.  platforms  interested  the  long-­term  engagement  with  their  userbase  should   strongly  consider  building  anti-­harassment  systems  into  their  services,  as  twitter   suggested  in  early  february  2015.[11]  the  goal  of  this  research  is  to  explain  more   clearly  what  online  harassment  is,  and  how  it  may  be  tactically  countered,  along  with  a   prototype  filter.     ________________________________________   [1]  wu,  b.  (2015,  february  10).  i’m  brianna  wu,  and  i’m  risking  my  life  standing  up   to  gamergate.  www.bustle.com.  retrieved  from  http://www.bustle.com/articles/63466-­ im-­brianna-­wu-­and-­im-­risking-­my-­life-­standing-­up-­to-­gamergate   [2]  kuznekoff,  j.  h.,  &  rose,  l.  m.  (2013).  communication  in  multiplayer  gaming:   examining  player  responses  to  gender  cues.  new  media  &  society,  15(4),  541–556.   doi:10.1177/1461444812458271   [3]  cross,  k.  (2014).  ethics  for  cyborgs:  on  real  harassment  in  an  “unreal”  place.  the   journal  of  the  canadian  game  studies  association,  8(13),  4–21.   [4]  winner,  l.  (1989).  the  whale  and  the  reactor  a  search  for  limits  in  an  age  of  high   technology.  chicago:  university  of  chicago  press.   [5]  brunton,  f.  (2013).  spam:  a  shadow  history  of  the  internet.  cambridge,   massachusetts:  the  mit  press.   [6]  united  states.  (2007).  the  u.s.  army/marine  corps  counterinsurgency  field  manual:   u.s.  army  field  manual  no.  3-­24:  marine  corps  warfighting  publication  no.  3-­33.5   (university  of  chicago  press  ed).  chicago:  university  of  chicago  press.   [7]  fearon  j.d,  &  laitin,  d.  d.  (2003).  ethnicity,  insurgency,  and  civil  war.  the   american  political  science  review,  97(1),  75–90.   [8]  sheehan,  n.  (1989).  a  bright  shining  lie:  john  paul  vann  and  america  in  vietnam   (1st  vintage  books  ed).  new  york:  vintage  books.   [9]  prabhu,  t.  (2014).  rethink:  an  effective  way  to  prevent  cyberbullying.  google   science  fair.  retrieved  from   https://www.googlesciencefair.com/projects/en/2014/f4b320cc1cedf92035dab51903bdd 95a846ae7de6869ac40c909525efe7c79db   [10]  kunzler,  j.  (2014,  october  22).  the  gamification  of  terror:  manufacturing   gamergate’s  sphere  of  delusion.  retrieved  from   http://designislaw.tumblr.com/post/100651306295/the-­gamification-­of-­terror-­ manufacturing   [11]  tiku,  n.,  &  newton,  c.  (2015,  february  4).  twitter  ceo:  “we  suck  at  dealing  with   abuse.”  the  verge.  retrieved  from  http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/4/7982099/twitter-­ ceo-­sent-­memo-­taking-­personal-­responsibility-­for-­the     presenter  two:  the  left  shark,  white  llama,  blue  dress  sutra:  in  defense  of  silly   memes     the  origin  of  zen  buddhism  is  traditionally  ascribed  to  the  event  described  in  the  flower   sermon  (拈花微笑,  literally  "pick  up  flower,  subtle  smile"):  towards  the  end  of  his  life  the   buddha  called  together  his  disciples  and  held  up  a  single  lotus  flower.  the  learned   group  debated  the  meanings  and  implications  of  the  flower  and  the  gesture,  but  one,   mahākāśyapa,  simply  smiled.  recognizing  true  wisdom  in  that  disciple,  the  buddha   named  him  his  spiritual  heir  (welter  2000).   in  the  agricola,  the  roman  historian  tacitus  grapples  with  the  proper  response  of  the   honorable  citizen  to  a  media  environment  in  which  narratives  counter  to,  or  even  aloof   from,  that  of  the  official,  are  impermissible.  ultimately,  the  general  agricola’s  abstinence   from  either  support  or  criticism  of  imperial  propaganda  ends  in  an  untimely  and  perhaps   suspicious  death.  (tacitus  and  mattingly  2010).       february  2015  was  a  good  month  for  internet  memes;;  it  was  also  a  good  month  for  their   castigation  as  not  merely  trivial  distractions  but  as  a  sign  of  moral  and  ideological  rot   from  perspectives  on  both  the  right  and  left  of  american  discourse.  this  paper   analyzes  the  rhetorical  and  affective  content  of  a  range  of  anti-­meme  posts  on  social   media  in  the  last  week  of  february  2015  and  challenges  them  with  a  counter-­framing  of   memes  as  giving  rise  to  an  alternative  public  discourse  to  corporate  and  governmental   media  narratives,  one  which  replaces  a  focus  on  anger  and  othering  with  values  of   solidarity  and  positivity  more  often  mobilized  to  criticize  the  current  diverse  media   environment  from  a  perspective  of  the  era  of  monolithic  broadcast  television.  memes   and  their  critique  are  situated  in  traditions  of  critical  media  studies  and  political   philosophy  which  grapple  with  questions  of  the  proper  roles  of  popular  and  official   discourses.     shifman  (2014,  8)  regards  memes  as  “socially  constructed  public  discourses.”    couldry   (2012),  drawing  on  a  media  studies  tradition  stretching  from  carey  (2008)  to  mcluhan   (1967)  interpreting  the  role  of  media  in  creating  spectacle  and  ritual,  often  in  the  service   of  reinforcing  national  identity  (anderson  2004).  shifman’s  work,  however,  suggests  a   crucial  difference  in  the  role  of  social  media  as  opposed  to  broadcast  media:  the  ability   of  “public  discourses”  to  arise  from,  rather  than  being  an  echo  of,  discourses  initiated  by   a  unitary  power  source,  be  it  corporate  or  state.  these  social-­media  discourses  can   imply  a  rejection  of  the  preferred  discourses  of  the  powerful:  the  2015  super  bowl,  while   a  traditional  example  of  media  ritual  created  and  framed  by  powerful  organizations,  was   subverted  by  the  popularity  of  the  “left  shark”  meme,  which  celebrated  a  genuine   moment  of  awkwardness  in  the  midst  of  heavily-­produced  and  –scripted  spectacle.   alternatively,  they  may  begin  as  minor  and  local  media  ephemera  which  capture  the   imaginations  of  a  global  collective  of  social  media  users,  who  remix  and  reimagine  the   source  material  for  peer-­to-­peer  experiences  of  shared  community  building,  as  with  the   “llama  drama”  meme.  or,  apparently  most  threatening  to  a  particular  mindset  studied   in  this  work,  utterly  unconnected  to  agendas  advanced  by  corporate  and  state  interests   (“the  dress.”).     this  threefold  typology  of  the  relationship  of  memes  to  official  discourses  (countering,   remixing,  and  ignoring)  is  situated  within  pre-­internet  manifestations  of  popular  culture   and  their  critiques,  particularly  those  occurring  in  conditions  of  substantial  differentials  in   power  between  the  “public”  in  which  they  circulate  and  the  dominant  institutions  of   society:  here,  particularly  jewish  humor  in  the  mid-­20th  century  united  states  and  folk   humor  and  samizdat  (self-­published)  literature  in  the  soviet  union,  though  examples   from  other  relatively  disempowered  groups  are  extensive.  these  examples  are  chosen   to  reflect  a  divergence  of  media  strategies  parallel  to  contemporary  conditions  involving   social  media:  use  of  the  dominant  group’s  media  to  advance,  both  covertly  and  overtly,   alternative  messages  (countering  and  remixing)  as  well  as  the  development  of   alternative  and  oppositional  channels  (countering  and  ignoring).     having  established  the  “content,  form,  and  stance”  (shifman  2014,  40)  of  the  three   memes  at  issue,  this  work  performs  a  discourse  analysis  (gee  2014)  of  public  critical  or   antagonistic  comments  upon  or  in  response  to  the  memes.  from  a  broad  corpus  of   comments,  key  themes  and  phrases  are  articulated  and  assembled  into  a  composite   counter-­narrative.  this  counter-­narrative  is  then  situated  within  a  history  of  critiques  of   popular  use  of  emerging  communications  technologies  and  associated  moral  panics.   finally,  a  counter-­counter  narrative,  an  apologia  for  the  meme  is  asserted:  one  in  which   the  countering,  remixing,  and  ignoring  of  the  preferred  narratives  of  the  powerful  is   valorized  as  the  expression  of  a  robust  “private  sphere”  (papacharissi  2010)  founded   upon  shared  delight  rather  than  divisive  antagonisms.  here,  tacitus’s  question  is   resolved  by  the  buddha’s  flower:  when  beauty  transcends  doctrine  and  dominant   narratives  are  set  aside,  a  private  sphere  of  democratic  solidarity  may  -­  just  might  -­   flourish.       references   anderson,  b.  (2004).  imagined  communities:  reflections  on  the  origin  and  spread  of   nationalism.  nationality  and  nationalism.  verso  books.   baym,  n.  k.  (2010).  personal  connections  in  the  digital  age.  polity.   carey,  j.  w.  (2008).  communication  as  culture,  revised  edition:  essays  on  media  and   society.  routledge.   chilton,  p.  (2005).  manipulation,  memes  and  metaphors.  in  de  saussure,  l.  and   schultz,  p.j.,  eds.  manipulation  and  ideologies  in  the  20th  century:  discourse,   language,  mind.  john  benjamins  publishing  co.   couldry,  n.  (2012).  media,  society,  world:  social  theory  and  digital  media  practice.   polity.   de  seta,  g.  (2015).  memes  in  digital  culture.  new  media  &  society,  17(3),  476-­478.   deuze,  m.  (2012).  media  life.  polity.   draitser,  e.  (1989).  soviet  underground  jokes  as  a  means  of  popular  entertainment.   the  journal  of  popular  culture,  23(1),  117-­125.   epstein,  l.  j.  (2002).  the  haunted  smile:  the  story  of  jewish  comedians  in  america.   publicaffairs.   gee,  j.  p.  (2014).  an  introduction  to  discourse  analysis  4th  edition:  theory  and   method.  routledge.   harris,  d.  a.,  &  rabinovich,  i.  (1988).  the  jokes  of  oppression:  the  humor  of  soviet   jews.  jason  aronson  incorporated.   katz,  n.,  &  katz,  e.  (1971).  tradition  and  adaptation  in  american  jewish  humor.journal   of  american  folklore,  215-­220.   marwick,  a.  (2013).  memes.  contexts,  12(4),  12-­13.   mcluhan,  m.,  &  fiore,  q.  (1967).  the  medium  is  the  message.  new  york,  123,  126-­ 128.   papacharissi,  z.  (2010).  a  private  sphere:  democracy  in  a  digital  age.  polity.   parker,  e.  (2014).  now  i  know  who  my  comrades  are:  voices  from  the  internet   underground.  sara  crighton  books.   pyzik,  a.  (2014).  poor  but  sexy:  culture  clashes  in  europe  east  and  west.  john  hunt   publishing.   rheingold,  h.  (1993).  the  virtual  community:  homesteading  on  the  electronic  frontier.   mit  press.   shifman,  l.  (2014).  memes  in  digital  culture.  mit  press.   shifman,  l.  (2013).  memes  in  a  digital  world:  reconciling  with  a  conceptual   troublemaker.  journal  of  computer-­‐mediated  communication,  18(3),  362-­377.   tacitus  (mattingly,  h.,  trans.)  2010.  the  agricola  and  the  germania.  penguin  classics.   terranova,  t.  (2004).  network  culture:  politics  for  the  information  age  (vol.  23,  p.  25).   pluto  press.   wellman,  b.,  &  gulia,  m.  (1999).  net  surfers  don't  ride  alone:  virtual  communities  as   communities.  networks  in  the  global  village,  331-­366.   welter.  (2000).  mahākāśyapa’s  smile:  silent  transmission  and  the  kung-­an  (kōan)   tradition.  in  heine,  s.  and  wright,  d.s.,  eds.  the  kōan:  texts  and  contexts  in  zen   buddhism.  oxford  university  press,  pp.  75–109.   whitfield,  s.  j.  (1986).  the  distinctiveness  of  american  jewish  humor.  modern  judaism,   245-­260.   wiggins,  b.  e.,  &  bowers,  g.  b.  (2014).  memes  as  genre:  a  structurational  analysis  of   the  memescape.  new  media  &  society,  1461444814535194.     presenter  three:  fitness,  fatness  and  photographability  of  women’s   bodies  after  40  and  50     the  ubiquity  of  social  media  and  photography  (hand,  2013)  and  the  historical  tradition   of  overburdening  (schilling,  1993)  women’s  bodies  means  that  by  observing  what  is   considered  photographable  (bourdieu,  1996)  and  sharable  about  them  allows  us  access   to  dominant  ideologies  about  gender,  embodiment,  age,  aesthetics,  sexuality  and  much   more.  this  paper  explores  the  social  imaginaries  women  themselves  construe  of   women  over  40  and  50  on  image-­heavy  social  media  platforms  tumblr.com  and   instagram.     theoretical  background     the  contemporary  visual  economy  has  been  labeled  “profoundly  ageist,  (dis)ablist  and   heteronormative”  (gill,  2009:  139)  and  a  connection  has  been  made  between  it  and   women's  feelings  of  inadequacy  and  dissatisfaction  (mcrobbie,  2009).  women  have   traditionally  been  seen  as  more  embodied  than  men,  thus  the  discourses  that  equate   slenderness  and  youth  with  beauty  and  fitness  with  moral  character,  have  particularly   strong  implications  to  whether  women  are  accorded  ‘embodied  subjecthood’  (gill,  2008:   44)  or  not.     to  understand  the  relations  between  the  social  imaginaries  of  appropriate  feminine  self-­ presentation  and  the  coded  structure  of  social  media  patforms  (van  dijck,  2013)  i  will   look  at  womens  selfie-­practices  on  tumblr.com  -­  a  blogging  and  social  media  platform   founded  in  2007  and  sold  to  yahoo  in  may  2013  for  1.1.  billion  usd;;  and  instagram  –  a   mobile  social  media  platform  founded  in  2010  and  sold  to  facebook  for  $1  billion  in   2012.  both  of  these  have  seen  a  significant  recent  growth  in  users  (tumblr  120%,   instagram  64%  in  the  past  six  months  in  november  2014,  global  web  index,  2014).     results  and  discussion     for  a  previous  research  project  with  people  who  post  sexy  selfies,  i  interviewed  an   over-­50  female  blogger  and  self-­shooter  about  the  role  photographic  and  textual  self-­ expression  and  social  media  interactions  have  had  in  her  embodied  subjecthood.  this   sparked  an  interest  in  better  understanding  how  the  coded  structures  of  different  social   media  platforms  enable  and  reject  particular  forms  of  subjecthood.   to  explore  this  topic  further,  i  analyzed  images,  captions  and  tags  of  20  women  over  40   and  50  who  post  selfies  on  tumblr  or  instagram  and  tag  them  with  #over50,  #over40  and   the  like.  considering  my  previous  work  has  found  that  safe  and  enabling  spaces  for   embodied  subjecthood  are  possible  on  nsfw  tumblr,  i  am  now  questioning  the  (style   of)  visibility  of  mature  women  on  instagram  and  tumblr.   not  all  images  on  tumblr  and  instagram  are  publicly  available,  and  not  all  of  them  are   tagged.  tagging  makes  one’s  content  searchable  and  enters  it  into  the  attention   economy  (goldhaber,  1997)  that  may  bring  with  it  like-­minded  peers,  new  friends,   hateful  trolls,  popularity,  economic  gain,  community,  all,  or  none  of  the  above.    i  suggest   that  because  of  this  tagged  content  reflects  dominant  normative  ideologies  more  closely   than  non  tagged  content.     the  women  whose  accounts  i  analyzed  for  this  paper  all  tag  at  least  some  of  their   content  with  specifically  age-­related  tag  words.  i  have  no  way  of  assessing  what  portion   of  all  women  over  40  on  instagram  and  tumblr  they  represent,  but  it  can  be  said,  that   they  are  doubly  visible  (searchable  content  and  visible  as  embodied  women  on  social   media).  in  the  limited  sample  of  these  visible  women,  it  seems  that  both  on  tumblr  and   on  instagram,  age-­specific  tags  are  used  alongside  fitness  (weight  loss,  nutrition)  and/or   motherhood,  with  there  being  more  of  it  (and  more  of  fitness  content  overall)  on   instagram.  additionally,  while  narrating  captions  are  technically  possible  and  used  on   instagram,    the  women  included  in  this  research  seemed  often  to  just  rely  on  tags  when   captioning  their  images.     in  comparison,  the  three  over-­40  women  and  one  over-­50  woman  whose  nsfw  tumblr   blogs  i  followed  in  a  previous  research  project  never  used  age-­related  tag  words   although  they  addressed  issues  of  body-­image,  sexuality  and  age  in  their  interviews.   both  motherhood  and  fitness  have  been  interpreted  as  morally  and  socially  successful   statuses  in  previous  research  (featherstone,  2010;;  dworkin  &  wachs,  2004).   considering  that  age  is  revealed  in  images  of  women  who  focus  on  these,  i  argue  that   women  have  to  ‘earn’  the  right  to  exhibit  bodies  that  diverge  from  the  restricting  norms   of  the  western  visual  economy.  sexy  selfies  make  a  woman  vulnerable  -­  if  revealing   one’s  age  alongside  them  is  avoided,  it  could  be  claimed  that  revealing  one’s  age  (past   25)  on  social  media  would  increase  one’s  vulnerability  as  well.  looking  at  the  discursive   tools  used  in  images  marked  as  mature  both  on  tumblr  and  instagram,  they  come   across  as  trying  to  explain  or  apologize  for  their  existence.     as  these  women  posted  plenty  of  images  that  were  not  tagged  with  age-­specific  tag-­ words,  it  is  significant  that  it  was  the  mid-­exercise  images  (holding  a  difficult  yoga  pose,   lifting  weights);;  beach-­bikini  images;;  dressed-­to-­kill  images  and  face-­selfies  with  a  lot  of   make-­up  that  had  indications  of  age  attached  to  them.  together  with  the  comments  -­   “omg  50?!  gorgeous!”  -­  i  suggest  they  speak  of  the  “looking  good  for  40/50”  social   imaginary  rather  than  the  “i’m  40/50  and  i  think  i  look  good”  one.   a  discourse  of  success,  pride  and  hard  work  is  present  in  the  way  age-­specific  tag   words  are  combined  with  image  content  and  other  tags.    most  captions  –  for  example   “#awesome  #weekend  #fitness  #insanity  #inshape  #love  #workingout  #over50   #healthylife  #beachbody  #dedication  #strength  #determined  #foreveryoung”  -­  come   across  as  celebratory  or  even  bragging.  the  hard  emotional  and  physical  work  that   goes  into  reclaiming  or  maintaining  a  very  fit  body  after  40  is  offered  as  evidence  of   strength,  the  necessity  of  which  is  never  questioned.     conclusion     based  on  content  explicitly  tagged  as  #over40  and  #over50,  women  on  both  instagram   and  tumblr  seem  to  follow  the  same  logic  of  having  to  excuse  or  earn  the  right  to  make   their  bodies  visible.  we  can  question  whether  the  wide  spread  of  sharing  bodies  among   women  of  any  age  are  a  result  of  the  normative  architectures  of  the  social  media   platforms  (van  dijck,  2013)  and  my  previous  research  with  sexy  self-­shooters  on  tumblr   indicates  the  possibility  of  spaces  safe  for  non-­normative  expression,  it  appears  that  the   social  imaginary  of  women  over  40  is  equally  restricted  within  the  tagged  spaces  of  both   platforms.     references   bourdieu,  p.  (1996).  photography:  a  middle-­brow  art.  stanford:  stanford  university   press.   dworkin,  s.  l.,  &  wachs,  f.  l.  (2004).  “getting  your  body  back”:  postindustrial  fit   motherhood  in  shape  fit  pregnancy  magazine.  gender  &  society,  18(5),  610–624.   featherstone,  m.  (2010)  ‘body,  image  and  affect  in  consumer  culture,’  body  &  society,   16(1):  193–221.   gill,  r.  (2008)  ‘empowerment/sexism:  figuring  female  sexual  agency  in   contemporary  advertising,’  feminism  &  psychology,  18(1):  35–60.   gill,  r.  (2009)  ‘beyond  the  ‘sexualization  of  culture’  thesis:  an  intersectional  analysis  of   ‘sixpacks’,‘midriffs’  and  ‘hot  lesbians’  in  advertising,’  sexualities,  12  (2):  137–60.   goldhaber,  mh.  (1997).  the  attention  economy  and  the  net,  first  monday,  2  (4  –  7)   april  1997  http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/519/440   hand,  m.  (2013).  ubiquitous  photography:  digital  media  and  society  series.   cambridge:  polity  press.   mcrobbie,  a.  (2009)  the  aftermath  of  feminism:  gender,  culture,  and  social  change.   london,  england:  sage.   olszanowski,  m.  (2014).  feminist  self-­imaging  and  instagram:  tactics  of  circumventing   sensorship.  visual  communication  quarterly,  21,  83–95.   shilling,  c.  (2003)  the  body  and  social  theory,  thousand  oaks:  sage
   van  dijck,  jose  (2013).  the  culture  of  connectivity:  a  critical  history  of  social  media   oxford  university  press.  kindle  edition.     presenter  four:  do  read  the  comments!  re-­imagining  the  comment  genre  as   feminist  resistance     conventional  wisdom  advises  social  media  denizens  to  avoid  the  comments  sections  of   social  media  platforms  that  are  often  sites  of  abject  abuse,  logical  fallacies,  trolling,  and   spam.  in  her  may  2014  article  in  wired  magazine,  “curbing  online  abuse  isn’t   impossible.  here’s  where  we  start,”  laura  hudson  explains  that  too  often  abusive   comments  are  considered  part  and  parcel  of  being  online.  problematically,  she   describes,  “online”  is  now  a  generally  persistent  state,  with  many  people  regularly   socializing,  dating,  communicating,  generating  commerce,  working,  and  being  online.   while  some  research  demonstrates  that  most  online  abuse  is  directed  at  women,  fully   70%  of  online  users  experience  harassment  (pew,  2014).  the  ugliness  of  the   comments  section  appears  to  be  common  knowledge  and  the  subject  of  popular   imagination.  the  poor  quality  of  youtube  commenters  specifically  are  the  subject  of  the   popular  online  comic  xkcd  #202  “youtube,”  drawn  by  randall  munroe,  where  munroe   captions  “  the  internet  has  always  had  loud  dumb  people,  but  i’ve  never  seen  anything   quite  as  bad  as  the  people  who  comment  on  youtube  videos”  (munroe,  2006).   comments  are  not  always  the  location  of  terrible  behavior;;  rather  they  can  also  be  the   site  of  humorous  audience  engagement,  e.g.  spontaneous  gif  partiers  where   commenters  swap  reaction  gifs  in  response  to  a  post.  they  can  also  be  the  site  of  viral   innovations,  such  as  when  memes  are  created  to  respond  to  specific  comments  and   commenters.  a  number  of  amazon  reviews  have  achieved  viral  and  meme  status,  such   as  in  december,  2009  when  writer  and  cultural  critic  cory  doctorow  posted  on  the   technology  culture  blog  boing  boing,  “just  look  at  this  awesome  banana  slicer.  just   look  at  it,”  and  then  linked  the  post  to  the  amazon.com  listing  for  the  hutzler  571   banana  slicer,  a  plastic  kitchen  tool  advertised  as  able  to  uniformly  slice  bananas.  what   followed  were  hundreds  of  people  posting  satirical  reviews  exaggerating  the  practicality   and  innovation  of  the  banana  slicer,  and  then  many  other  users  sharing  the  satirical   reviews  across  social  media  platforms.  while  entertaining  to  the  many  who  wrote  and/or   shared  these  reviews,  the  collaborative  satirical  meme-­ing  of  the  banana  slicer  functions   as  community  building  and  collective  identity  construction  for  the  boing  boing  audience   by  replicating  some  aspects  of  the  review  genre,  such  as  commenting  on  the  ease  of   use  and  reliability  of  the  banana  slicer  in  the  amazon  reviews,  and  pairing  them  with  the   technology  culture  sensibilities  of  the  boing  boing  community  (shifman,  2014).       in  late  february  2015,  social  media  platforms  dissolved  in  intense  debate  of  the  color   (gold/white;;  or  blue/black)  of  “the  dress,”  and  the  amazon  listing  for  the  “roman   women’s  lace  detail  bodycon  dress  royal  blue”  accumulated  a  large  number  of   humorous  reviews  that  acted  as  both  satire  of  social  systems  and  identity-­building  of   social  media  savvy  users,  e.g.  the  review  by  user  “angela”  posted  on  february  27,  2015   titled  “perfect  outfit  for  a  life  of  crime,”  where  “angela”  writes,  “robbed  a  bank  in  this   dress.  nobody  could  agree  on  a  proper  description  of  me.  sketch  artist’s  head   exploded.  got  away.  fantastic.”  here,  angela  signals  her  familiarity  with  the  review   genre  by  making  a  reference  to  the  functionality  of  the  dress  in  her  title,  suggesting  it  is   “perfect”  for  crime.  she  also  comments  on  her  overall  experience  with  the  product  in  the   body  of  her  review,  calling  it  “[f]antastic.”  angela  nods  to  the  virality  of  the  dress  and  its   meme  status  when  she  writes  in  her  review  that  the  “[s]ketch  artist’s  head  exploded.”       while  the  creation  of  satirical  memes  can  be  amusing,  as  well  as  a  site  of  humor  and   communal  identity  building,  satire  can  also  serve  the  social  functions  of  critique  and   resistance.  jacqueline  jones  royster  and  gesa  kirsch  argue  that  social  media   platforms  offer  unique  opportunities  for  acts  of  feminist  resistance  when  they  enable  the   production  of  innovative  multimodal  compositions  that  not  only  rethink  and  repurpose   genres  but  also  “invite  democracy  quote  boldly  into  the  public  sphere”  (66-­67).  several   product  listings  on  amazon  unite  features  of  viral  meme-­ing,  community  building,   identity  building,  insider-­signaling,  and  feminist  resistance.  the  listing  for  the  avery   durable  view  binder  with  2”  slant  ring  became  a  site  of  transmedial  and  multimodal   feminist  composing  for  those  reacting  to  u.s.  presidential  candidate  mitt  romey’s   description  of  his  “binders  full  of  women,”  a  reference  to  the  number  of  female  job   candidates  submitted  to  romney  during  his  tenure  as  the  governor  of  massachusetts.  a   review  by  “penname220”  titled  “one  missing  bit  of  information  you  might  want  to   know,”  makes  a  feminist  argument  while  fulfilling  the  evaluative  requirements  of  the   review  genre  by  writing,  “[w]hile  this  is  a  lovely,  multi-­purpose  binder,  it  does  not   come  with  women.  presumably  one  is  expected  to  find  women  on  one’s  own,  or   contact  women’s  groups  who  are  supposedly  eager  to  help  stock  your  empty  binder   with  women.”     the  listing  for  bic  cristal  for  her  ball  pen,  1.0mm  also  received  the  satirical  meme   treatment  resulting  in  transmedial  and  multimodal  feminist  resistance.  reviewer   “courtney,”  in  a  review  titled  “great  fit,  but  i  have  a  question…,”  writes  “i  see  this  comes   in  a  sleek  design.  but  as  a  “full  figured”  woman,  do  these  pens  come  in  “curvy  and   carefree?”  while  amazon.com  does  have  a  question  and  answer  section,  and  this   question  may  have  been  posted  there  where  satirical  questions  and  answers  are  shared   on  this  listing,  courtney  does  post  her  review  in  the  form  of  a  question.  questions  and   points  of  ymmv  (your  mileage  may  vary),  as  in  this  might  work  for  you  but  it  did  not   work  for  me,  do  appear  in  the  amazon  review  genre.  in  this  case,  courtney’s  question  is   an  expected  ymmv  in  the  review  genre,  but  the  writer  also  uses  this  ‘question’  to   comment  on  the  postfeminist  consumer  culture  that    bic  is  attempting  to  tap  into  with   their  product  by  suggesting  cutesy  names  for  plus  sizes.       based  on  these  examples,  and  others  collected  but  not  described  here,  the  online   comments  section  affords  resistance  possibilities  by  leveraging  meme-­ability,  virality,   rhetorical  genre  theory,  and  multimodality  in  community  and  identity  building  efforts.   employed  this  way,  comments  can  unify  audiences  behind  a  cause,  disrupt   stereotypical  online  cruelty  with  strategically-­deployed  satire  and  whimsy,  and  interrupt   hegemonic  narratives  with  counter-­narratives  of  resistance.       references   angela  (2015).  perfect  outfit  for  a  life  of  crime.  amazon.com.  online.   http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/pdp/profile/apgexx15dlcac/ref=cm_cr_dp_pdp/279-­ 1469608-­7818940   courtney  (2012).  great  fit  but  i  have  a  question  …  amazon.com  online.   doctorow,  c.  (2009).  just  look  at  this  awesome  banana  slicer.  boingboing.net.  online.   http://boingboing.net/2009/12/06/just-­look-­at-­this-­aw-­2.html   hudson,  l.  (2014).  curbing  online  abuse  isn’t  impossible.  here’s  where  we  start.   wired.  online.   monroe,  r.  (2006).  202.  xkcd.com.   pew  research  center  (2014)  online  harassment.   http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-­harassment/   penname220  (2012).  one  missing  bit  of  information  you  might  want  to  know.   amazon.com.  online.   royster,  j  j  and  kirsch,  g.  (2012.  feminist  rhetorical  practices:  new  horizons  for   rhetoric,  composition,  and  literacy  studies.  southern  illinois  university  press.   shifman,  l.  (2014).  memes  in  digital  culture.  mit  press.     selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  johnson,  n.  f.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  you’re  always  online:  negotiating  internet   temporalities  in  the  secondary  school.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  meeting  of  the   association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.   you’re  always  online:  negotiating  internet   temporalities  in  the  secondary  school     nicola  f.  johnson   federation  university  australia     the  structures  and  constructs  of  time,  that  is,  the  rules  of  time,  have  always  governed   how  schools  operate.  timetables,  bells,  calendars,  vacations,  schedules,  and  diaries   are  examples  of  how  schools  have  been  structured  and  schooling  has  been  performed.   schools  have  been  predicated  by  these  particular  rhythms  of  time,  i.e.  being  ‘present’.   long-­held  assumptions  persist  that  internet  technology  provides  a  ready  infrastructure   for  transforming  the  experience  of  teaching  and  learning  within  the  organizational   setting  of  the  school.  the  effect  of  internet  technology  as  a  presence  in  schools  is  real   enough  (i.e.  investment  has  been  substantial)  but  the  extent  of  its  effect  on  change  and   innovation  in  terms  of  what  gets  done  (and  what  gets  learned)  is  less  certain.  as   internet  technologies  and  media  are  an  integral  element  of  contemporary  education,   and  increasingly  shape  the  ways  in  which  time  is  experienced  in  schools,  internet   technology  use  is  often  shaped  and  bounded  by  dominant  structures  and  ‘grammars’  of   schooling  –  not  least  formal  assessment  and  curriculum  requirements,  tacit   expectations  of  time,  space  and  place,  and  management  regimes  of  accountability  and   performativity.  the  fundamental  nature  of  time  means  that  we  are  constantly  negotiating   it,  are  ‘in’  it,  are  using  it,  are  spending  it,  and  are  wasting  it,  which  can  be  considered   theorisations  of  temporality.  when  discussing  concepts  such  as  the  acceleration  of   society  (wajcman,  2015,  2008),  the  age  of  distraction  (hassan,  2012),  the  attention   economy  (goldhaber,  1997)  and  itime  (agger,  2011),  theorisations  surrounding   temporality  are  occurring.  for  instance,  judy  wajcman  claimed,  “technologies  change   the  nature  and  meaning  of  tasks  and  work  activities,  as  well  as  creating  new  material   and  cultural  practices”  (wajcman,  2008,  p.  66).  increasingly,  the  way  time  is  passed  is   closely  aligned  with  neo-­liberal  presuppositions.  capitalist  constructs  of  productivity  are   linked  to  how  effectively  people  are  using  their  time  to  achieve.     digital  devices  and  ubiquitous  online  access  have  enabled  and  produced  temporalities   and  rhythms  –  part  of  the  assemblage  of  practices  that  construct  a  school.  this  paper   examines  the  multiple  ways  that  time  is  negotiated  in  contemporary  technology-­infused   schools.  given  the  dramatic  changes  in  temporality  produced  by  new  media,  it  is   evident  there  are  (mis)assumptions  about  the  ‘correct’  use  of  time  which  are  embedded   and  reproduced  via  binary  distinctions  such  as  work  and  play,  productivity  and  waste.   teachers  regularly  state  there  is  not  enough  ‘time’  to  get  through  curriculum  or  to  teach   children  or  to  attend  to  the  multiple  demands  expected  of  the  profession.  this  paper   outlines  and  then  contrasts  how  different  groups  of  teachers  and  principals  view  internet   technologies  alongside  their  understandings  of  time.  this  is  particularly  important  given   that  everyday  actions  generate  temporal  qualities  and  these  rhythms,  practices  and   rituals  construct  our  sense  of  time.     the  research  questions  that  are  of  particular  interest  are:   •   how  is  the  understanding  of  school  teachers  and  leaders’  sense  of  time  shaped   by  their  use  of  internet  technologies?   •   where  are  internet  technologies  implicated  in  instances  of  temporal  control  within   the  school  context?       the  paper  draws  upon  in-­depth  ethnographic  studies  of  three  australian  secondary   schools  across  a  period  of  twelve  months.  this  extended  period  of  immersive  fieldwork   utilized  the  main  forms  of  data  generation  associated  with  classroom  research  and   school  ethnography  –  including  over  100  site  visits,  300  hours  of  in  situ  observations,   field  notes,  documentary  analysis,  photographing  and  videoing,  corridor  conversations,   and  numerous  interviews  with  staff,  students  and  other  members  of  the  school   communities.  within  the  paper,  experiences  from  both  ‘high-­using’  and  ‘low-­using’   students,  teachers,  and  leaders  are  provided.   the  paper  draws  upon  thematic  analysis  of  this  large  corpus  of  ethnographic  data  and   applies  particular  concepts  surrounding  the  acceleration  of  life  within  digital  society   (developed  by  judy  wajcman,  ben  agger,  robert  hassan,  and  others)  to  the  secondary   school  context.  particular  focuses  include:  the  temporal  contexts  of  ‘doing  school’  via   internet  technology,  how  internet  technology  fits/shapes  the  rhythms  of  the  school,  and   how  internet  technologies  are  implicated  in  instances  of  temporal  control  within  the   school  context.   on  one  hand,  the  paper  charts  how  internet  technologies  are  implicated  in  the   persistence  (and  entrenchment)  of  traditional  modes  of  ‘school  time’  -­  in  particular  the   forms  of  analogue  time  associated  with  the  ‘factory’  model  of  school  arrangements  and   organization.  these  include  the  persistence  of  the  familiar  linear  rhythms  and   temporalities  of  the  school  lesson,  day,  week,  term  and  year  –  all  of  which  are   reinforced  through  many  of  the  dominant  (internet)  systems  and  structures  used  in   schools  –  particularly  notable  given  that  everyday  actions  generate  temporal  qualities   and  these  rhythms,  practices  and  rituals  construct  subjectivities  of  time.  the  paper   explores  how  analogue  practices  surrounding  the  structured  notions  of  time  and   conceptions  surrounding  the  use  and  understanding  of  time  are  being  newly  mediated   by  internet  technology  and  internet  practices  within  schools.  as  teachers  and  students   have  the  ability  to  be  ‘always  online’,  the  article  discusses  how  this  impacts  on  students’   learning,  and  teachers’  health,  sociability,  practice  and  productivity.       in  contrast,  the  paper  also  highlights  practices  that  are  negotiated  through  the  use  of   personalised  digital  devices  and  online  modes  of  interaction  and  communication,  in   particular,  the  fluid  intensifications,  accelerations  and  compressions  of  time.  the   research  points  to  how  for  a  group  of  educators  in  one  school,  their  sense  of  autonomy   and  control  was  heightened  when  using  internet  technology  as  it  increased  their   capacity  of  when  they  could  communicate  and  how  much  could  be  communicated,   facilitating  greater  temporal  communication.  for  some  teachers,  their  practices  meant   they  did  not  have  time  to  effectively  learn  how  to  use  digital  devices.  for  some   principals,  the  use  of  email  and  other  web-­based  software  for  broadcast  communication   meant  that  their  subjective  sense  of  time  was  saved.  while  some  participants  were  able   to  make  the  most  of  technology  to  transverse  constructions  and  subjectivities   surrounding  temporal  control,  in  contrast,  others  appeared  burdened  by  technology   which  led  to  a  reduced  sense  of  autonomy  and  control  over  their  time.  the  paper   therefore  concludes  by  exploring  how  (what  seems  to  be)  the  same  technologies   mediate  very  different  internet  temporalities  in  secondary  schools.     references     agger,  b.  (2011).  itime:  labor  and  life  in  a  smartphone  era.  time  &  society,  20(1),  119-­ 136.     goldhaber,  m.  h.  (1997).  the  attention  economy  and  the  net.  first  monday,  2(4),   available  athttp://firstmonday.org/article/view/519/440  (date  accessed  29  september,   2014).     hassan,  r.  (2012).  the  age  of  distraction:  reading,  writing,  and  politics  in  a  high-­speed   networked  economy.  london,  uk:  transaction  publishers.     wajcman,  j.  (2015).  pressed  for  time:  the  acceleration  of  life  in  digital  capitalism.  the   university  of  chicago  press:  chicago,  il.     wajcman,  j.  (2008).  life  in  the  fast  lane?  towards  a  sociology  of  technology  and   time.  the  british  journal  of  sociology,  59(1),  59-­77.     selected papers of internet research 16: the 16 th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 making ethical decisions: seeing twitter bots as (non) ‘human subjects’ when including them as research participants estee n. beck the university of texas at arlington leslie a. hutchinson michigan state university overview this collaborative talk challenges the definitions of the situated site of human subjects protection in internet research. the collaborators address a major tension to the deliberative process of ethical decision-making as proposed in the 2012 aoir report: the role non-human language objects (computer code and bots) have as entities worth ethical consideration in the research process about consent and risk/harm. using the @horse_ebooks hoax as a relatively similar manipulation to that of the facebook emotional contagion story, the speakers will talk theorize the relationship between human, algorithm, and emotional persuasion, and present findings from two wholly algorithmic twitter bots, @sargoth_ebooks and @randi_ebooks to challenge an ontological relationship with humans and algorithms. the speakers will close with specific ethical questions related to computer code and bots and ask for audience member participation to establish future guidelines in this area. accessible print handouts / accessible information will be provided on a website during (and made available) after the talk. abstract ethical decision making is necessary for internet research, especially for addressing the major tensions of data(text)/persons, which blurs the conditions of anonymity and effects of emotional contagion on human subjects. drawing on media and actor network theories, this proposed talk (re)defines the ethics of data(text)/persons with consideration of non-human twitter bots by asking what are the ethics involved in researching and working with non-human language objects, i.e., computer code operating without human intervention? to address this theoretical question, the speakers draw upon an imaginary of rhetorical agency and persuasion, recognizing that computer code, as a nonconscious actant, makes things happen in internet cultures. as such, the speakers claim a responsible ethical consideration entails being open and suggested citation (apa): beck, e. & hutchinson, l. (2015, october 21-24) making ethical decisions: seeing twitter bots as (non) ‘human subjects’ when including them as research participants. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http:// spir.aoir.org. responsive to the actions of twitter bots, thus considering persuasion operating at the code-level. ultimately, this talk features discussions of how to work with non-human subjects/objects in internet research by expanding the scope and guidelines of the 2012 aoir ethical decision-making and internet research report. in the final copy of the aoir ethics report, the authors outline guidelines for ethical internet research for data collection, human use, data processing, software technologies, and design elements. in the key guiding principles, the authors position “vulnerability” and “harm” along a human-axis. later in the document, the authors describe complications of data(text)/personhood, using bots as an example of research with non-human subjects. however, the proposers argue for aligning vulnerability and harm along a non-human axis as well, insofar as considering how elemental forces, distress, aging, software updates, and sustainability issues layer into an ethical guideline for research with internet-connected, non-human subjects/objects. the proposition of computer code as rhetorical agents capable of persuasion is provocative insofar as a claim divorces human activity, free will, and consciousness from the definition of agency. rhetorician marilyn cooper (2011) elsewhere stated that agents are not necessarily aware or conscious of the changes they make in the world, and argued agency arises from an “emergent property of embodied individuals” (p. 421). however, we contend that agency also arises from computer code. for example, under latour’s terms computer code is an actant; code compiles, analyzes, synthesizes, executes data to make change in machines and people. we draw upon media studies and scientific and technological scholars wendy chun (2011), katherine hayles (2005), and rob kitchen & martin dodge (2011), who theorize that computer code “performs” and “acts” once integrated into a program’s functions. in the first half of our talk, one collaborator will draw attention to an imaginary of rhetorical agency and persuasion of computer code to establish computer code as rhetorical agents capable of persuasion and change and align this theoretical discussion with guiding principles of a non-human ethical guidelines for internet research. the second collaborator will apply lucas introna’s (2009) argument for overcoming an anthropocentric ethics through an ethics of hospitality going “beyond the self-identical of human beings” to discuss how the persuasive of computer code and the imaginary of rhetorical agency can exist within twitter bots. through the analysis of several “ebook” accounts on twitter, this part of the conversation will question the relationship between doing internet studies research with twitter bots as participants while considering the ethics involved in speaking with them as subjects. as introna has considered the star trek: the next generation episode, “the measure of a man” (1989) (in which captain picard argued for lieutenant commander data’s right of determination and agency as a sentient being), the way people treat technological artifacts as artificial beings emphasizes an anthropocentric ethics that fails to accept a true otherness. in light of his view, this part of the discussion will analyze how we build community with beings much unlike ourselves in “body,” but who speak and participate in twitter all the same. the analysis of three twitter accounts @horse_ebooks, @sargoth_ebooks, and @randi_ebooks provides grounds to consider an ethics for non-human participants in internet research from a theoretical perspective of rhetorical agency and persuasion. as mackenzie (2006) noted, computer code and software harnesses agency through technicity, with the ability to augment and mediate transactions in situations. he reminds researchers that code operates through its situated activity, and the degree of autonomy code produces relies upon the complexity of the code itself. in sum, this proposed talk considers the concept of ‘human subject’ under a vigorous perspective through the context of real-time twitter participation, which is concurrent with calls in the aoir 2012 ethics report. since the results of the 2014 pnas facebook emotional contagion story were made public in the news media and scholarly circles, much of the discussion has centered on the ethics of the research under irb guidelines. we contend that researchers must pay attention to how the manipulation of algorithms in over 600,000 facebook newsfeeds resulted swaying the emotions of people. nonhuman language objects, in this case, algorithms, persuaded people to certain emotional states. thus, we are interested in how such a study lends itself to the imaginary of rhetorical agency as described herein. how do twitter bots challenge researchers to make ethical decisions about the bot’s roles as participants in the research process? do bots enact agency and/persuasion, which lead people to shift their thoughts, beliefs or feelings from the interaction with the bots? if so, how might internet researchers account for this non-human rhetorical agency and persuasion in their research? we will close this collaborative talk with specific ethical questions related to computer code and bots, and will ask for audience member participation to establish guidelines for treating twitter bots and other types of code as legitimate research participants in academic scholarship. there will be accessible print handouts as well as accessible information provided on a website for audience members to access during and after the talk. references aoir ethics committee. (2012). ethical decision-making and internet research. retrieved from aoir website: http://www.aoir.org/reports/ethics.pdf chun, w. h. k. (2011). programmed visions: software and memory. cambridge, mass: mit press. cooper, m. (2011). rhetorical agency as emergent and enacted. college composition and communication, 62(3), 420–449. hayles, k. (2005). my mother was a computer: digital subjects and literary texts. chicago: university of chicago press. horse_ebooks. (n.d.). tweets [twitter page]. retrieved july 30, 2015, from https://twitter.com/horse_ebooks introna, l. (2009). the ‘measure of man’ and the ethos of hospitality: toward an ethical dwelling with technology. ai and society, 25(1), 93–102. kramer, a., guillroy, j., & hancock, j. (2014). experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. pnas, 111(24), 8788–8790. kitchin, r., & dodge, m. (2011). code/space: software and everyday life. cambridge, mass: mit press. randi_ebooks. (n.d.). tweets [twitter page]. retrieved july 30, 2015, from https://twitter.com/randi_ebooks sargoth_ebooks. (n.d.). tweets [twitter page]. retrieved july 30, 2015, from https://twitter.com/sargoth_ebooks snodgrass, m. m. (writer), & scheerer, r. (director). (1989). the measure of a man. [television series episode]. in rr. berman (producer), star trek: the next generation. los angeles, ca: paramount television. microsoft word ir16_swearing effect.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 reimagining swearing effects online: the use of swearwords in news audience commenting k. hazel kwon arizona state university daegon cho postech, s. korea background a provocation of high-arousal emotion such as anger and frustration has become increasingly prevalent in contemporary media culture. online audience comments to news articles are no exception, with commonplace swearing and cursing. either explicitly or implicitly, swearing is often considered to be one type of uncivil behaviors with negative connotations. however, attributing negativity to an inherent trait of swearing may be questionable since swearwords can be used not only for malicious intentions but also as a rhetorical function to create an ambience of informality (cavazza & guidetti, 2014; jay, 2009). therefore, it would be hasty to categorize swearing as an uncivil behavior without investigating its impacts on message recipients’ perceptions and responses. instead of subsuming it to incivility or any other high-level concepts that connote negativity (e.g. flaming, trolls, etc.), this study reimagines the role of swearing by adapting a neutral definition: an utterance of a taboo word that conveys a high level of emotional arousal (jay, 2009). this definition helps situate swearing effect within a broader inquiry of political impacts of emotions, which recent studies have found to be contagious through online textual interactions even in the absence of nonverbal cues (kramer, guillory, & hancock, 2014). while the roles of high-arousal emotions have been largely imagined to be detrimental to audiences’ discursive participation (e.g., markus et al. 2000), recent studies have pointed out that such emotions are important impetus to facilitate the spread of political information (stieglitz & dang-xuan, 2013), to encourage more discursive participation (castells, 2013) in particular in online sphere. swearing is one common way of expressing high-arousal emotions, which has not yet been rigorously studied in online public discussion contexts. the aim of this study is to explore swearing effects on online public perceptions of other audiences’ comments, with a focus on swearing effects in interplay with anonymity and suggested citation (apa): kwon, k.h. & cho, d. (2015, october 21-24). reimagining swearing effects online: the use of swearwords in news audience commenting. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. topical difference (political vs. non-political) on the volume of public attention (total votes received by a comment) and perceptional valence (a difference between positive and negative votes). methods the data aggregates two months of user comments collected during a congress election campaign in 2012 from 26 s.korean news websites, including 83,322 comments written by 24,415 commenters. considering the difficulty in gaining largescale swearing utterances in a traditional research setting (thelwall, 2008), the use of a large scale online data provides a novel opportunity for a more rigorous examination of swearing impacts. a dictionary consisting of 593 strongly explicit swearwords was referenced to classify whether or not a comment includes swearing. these words were the variations of original 319 words designated as offensive by nielsen korea, one of the largest audience research firms in s. korea. findings regression models were performed. about 10% comments included at least one swearword. political comments include more swearing than non-political topics. although anonymous comments were perceived more negatively, there was no interaction effect with swearing on public perceptions. figure 1 presents the comparisons among different conditions based on anonymity, swearing, and news topics, with the outcome variable as the total number of votes. political news comments tended to receive more votes, indicating high public attention. also, the swearing effect on audience attention was particularly higher for political than non-political comments, confirming the interaction effect. figure 1. differences in public attention (n = 83, 322) 10.5   15.3   21.6   28.6   0.0   5.0   10.0   15.0   20.0   25.0   30.0   35.0   40.0   a.  non-­‐anonymous  comments   non-­‐politics   politics   13.5   17.9   30.0   36.2   0.0   5.0   10.0   15.0   20.0   25.0   30.0   35.0   40.0   b.  anonymous  comments     non-­‐politics   politics   another modeling was performed to predict the perception valence. results show that swearing comments tended to be perceived more positively than non-swearing. specifically, the magnitude of the difference between the numbers of positive and negative votes for swearing comments was greater by 3.8 times than for non-swearing. the swearing effect was significantly different between political and non-political comments, confirming the interaction effect, β = -4.06, p < .01. although swearing political comments were the most positively perceived across all types of comments, the largest swearing effect actually found among the non-political comments. the average gap of perceptions (i.e., the differences between positive and negative votes across comments) between swearing and non-swearing was 10.7 votes in non-political topics, while the gap was much narrower, 6.6 votes, for political topics. figure 2 presents the comparisons among different conditions based on anonymity, swearing, and news topics, with the outcome variable as the perception valence, of which the greater value means more positive public perception of a comment. figure 2. differences in public perception valence (n = 52,032 excluding zero votes) discussion and conclusions the results of this study provoke two topics for further discussions: first, swearing norms may vary across news topical areas: swearing in political comments, on the one hand, could have become the norm in audience community and thus not as surprisingly perceived as in non-political comments. swearing in non-political comments, on the other hand, could be more surprising since it is less normative, but may actually produce positive effects on the readers’ perceptions. in other words, swearing in nonpolitical comments could be a more positive violation of communicative expectancy than swearing in political comments (burgoon, 1993). some of the comments that we heuristically reviewed were supportive of this argument in that many of swearing 16.9   28.4   23.9   31.3   10.0   15.0   20.0   25.0   30.0   35.0   a.  non-­‐anonymouse  comments   non-­‐politics   politics   17.3   27.2   22.0   27.8   10.0   15.0   20.0   25.0   30.0   35.0   b.  anonymous  comments   non-­‐politics   politics   comments were an emotional outburst fused with humors and satires. that is, swearing could be interpreted as a rhetorical tactic that increases informality and witticism. second, highly positive valence of political comments in both swearing and nonswearing conditions implies that, by default, online news audiences may be selectively participatory: audiences are already polarized to some extent, actively showing their support for the likeminded comments to which they are exposed. if swearing culture makes the non-likeminded feel reluctant to read the comments, resulting in the occurrence of discursive interactions only among the likeminded, the greater positive perceptions on swearing political comments could be, in truth, the bi-product of dispiriting holders of different viewpoints from reading the comments. if then, swearing could indeed be harmful to civility, further strengthening the “nasty effect” thesis (anderson et al, 2014). the causal effect of swearing on political polarization is beyond the scope of this study, warranting future research. future research could gain granular insights on the relationship between high-arousal emotional expressions and online commenting culture by considering other rhetorical forms of strong emotional utterances beyond swearing. references anderson, a. a., brossard, d., scheufele, d. a., xenos, m. a., & ladwig, p. (2014). the “nasty effect:” online incivility and risk perceptions of emerging technologies. journal of computer‐mediated communication, 19(3), 373-387. burgoon, j. k. (1993). interpersonal expectations, expectancy violations, and emotional communication. journal of language and social psychology, 12(1-2), 30-48. castells, m. (2013). network of outrage and hope: social movement in the internet age. cambridge, uk: polity press. cavazza, n., & guidetti, m. (2014). swearing in political discourse why vulgarity works. journal of language and social psychology, 33(5), 537-547. jay, t. (2009). the utility and ubiquity of taboo words. perspectives on psychological science, 4(2), 153-161. marcus, g. e., neuman, w. r., & mackuen, m. (2000). affective intelligence and political judgment. chicago: university of chicago press. stieglitz, s., & dang-xuan, l. (2013). emotions and information diffusion in social media—sentiment of microblogs and sharing behavior. journal of management information systems, 29(4), 217-248 thelwall, m. (2008). fk yea i swear: cursing and gender in myspace. corpora, 3(1), 83107. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): rossi, l., & giglietto, f. (2015, october 21-24). from moon to comet landing: re­imagining (scientific) media events in the age of twitter. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. from moon to comet landing: re­imagining (scientific) media events in the age of twitter luca rossi it university copenhagen fabio giglietto università di urbino carlo bo introduction and related works the apollo 11 space mission took place 46 years ago. it was an international event covered by the largest media sources of the time. the global participation to this scientific and technological achievement is commonly considered a turning point in the history of media. in a near­perfect comparison to the famous 1969 event, on november 12 2014, the european space agency's (esa) rosetta spacecraft and philae made history landing for the first time on a comet. launched toward comet 67p/c­g in 2004, rosetta traveled about 4 billion miles through the solar system before reaching the comet in august. the lander successfully made it to the surface of comet and philae's landing signal was received by earth communication stations at 16:03 utc on november 12. one minute later, the philae lander twitter account published the following update “touchdown! my new address: 67p! #cometlanding”, putting an end to the dramatic waiting of users watching the live broadcast provided by esa and nasa’s website. #cometlanding was therefore a (1) live transmission, (2) of a pre­planned event, (3) framed in time and space, (4) featuring a heroic personality or group, (5) having high dramatic significance. all but one “(6) the force of a social norm which makes viewing mandatory” of the necessary conditions identified by katz as the basic ingredients of a media event, are clearly met (1980). while even traditional well established events such as the broadcast of the olympic games are increasingly facing challenges in fitting the original definition of the concept (rivenburgh 2002), it is clear that a media event must, by definition, interrupt daily lives. both broadcasters and the audience adjust their schedules to attend the event. was this the case for #cometlanding? can we still talk about media events when the audience feeling viewing as mandatory is a globally scattered elite, instead of the masses? how the traditional role played by the media changes when internet’s disintermediation make it possible for the creator of a media event to also act as narrator? in this proposal we present the preliminary results of an ongoing study on these issues. results are based on the analysis of twitter live commentary collected during the hours immediately before and after the landing of the rover on the comet. we focused on the following questions: rq1) how #cometlanding compares to previously studied twitter media events? rq2) who are the actors involved in the twitter live commentary of #cometlanding? rq3) what role have the various actors played during the event? rq4) are there any traces showing that the audience really perceived viewing as mandatory and adjusted their schedule to attend the event? methodology using twitter streaming api, we collected 406,011 tweets (210,239 unique contributors) containing either #cometlanding or #rosetta hashtags and created between 2014­11­12 16:03:25 cet and 2014­11­12 20:49:34 cet. in order to answer the research questions we employed a mixed method approach. we started with a quantitative analysis of the twitter metrics (rt, @replies, tweet with url) and the network structure of the dataset. concerning rq1, following the approach used by bruns and stieglitz (2013) to classify media and emergency/crisis twitter events, we compared #cometlanding with other events ranging from #londoriots to #royalwedding and #eurovision. for rq2 and rq3 we have extracted both the reply network and retweet network. these networks have been analysed through standard social network analysis techniques that have been previously applied to the study of twitter data about media events (highfield, harrington, and bruns 2013; rossi and magnani 2012) finally, in order to answer rq4, we planned a content analysis of a sample of original tweets. the sampling technique will leverage the results of quantitative analysis. preliminary results mapping the percentage or retweets and tweets with url in several different twitter datasets, bruns and stieglitz (2013) observed the emergence of two clearly distinguished clusters: crisis/emergency events (e.g. #tsunami, #londonriot, #lybia) and media events (e.g. #eurovision, #royalwedding). as shown in figure 1, both retweets and tweets with url are significantly present in twitter commentaries around #cometlanding. figure 1. cometlanding is closer to emergency/crisis events than media once under this perspective, the deeds of philae and rosetta seems to have more in common with crisis/emergency events than media once. the scientific nature of the event itself, may have discouraged some viewers to express their personal opinions with original comments. at the same time, the slow approach of a lander on a comet miles away from earth, is not in itself a news event rich of developments. nevertheless, judging from the list of top retweeted contributors (table 1), the twitter account of esa’s probe and lander were very central to the conversation. if the presence of an hero is an ingredient of what katz filed under “conquest media events”, philae and rosetta definitely played this role. username retweets type philae2014 65,416 lander esa_rosetta 33,223 probe esaoperations 14,369 space agency bbcbreaking 12,633 news nasa 6,370 space agency esa 5,202 space agency observingspace 4,124 website mashable 3,453 website badastronomer 2,460 website nasajpl 2,208 space agency table 1. typology of top retweeted users it is worth to note that, unlike what usually happens on twitter where the account of well established news outlets are often prominent (highfield, harrington, and bruns 2013), only bbc breaking is present in table 1. furthermore, this account appears to be disconnected from the network of reciprocal retweets that links the major actors (figure 2). figure 2. retweet network: node size and color according to degree centrality conclusions despite the similarities with the moon landing, preliminary results of our study clearly show a marginal role played by mainstream media and a prominent role played by the creator of the event (esa). esa (together with nasa) created, broadcasted and narrated the event making an example of how to disintermediate a media event or, in other terms, how to run a media event without the media. the online media strategy performed by esa (e.g the twitter “conversations” between philae and rosetta) provided an experience of liveness (couldry 2004) for something that was actually happening miles away from earth and 25 minutes before (due to the communications delay). the planned but not yet performed content analysis will allow a better understanding of the intentions and feelings of the online audience of this atypical (or brand new type of) media event. references bruns, axel, and stefan stieglitz. 2013. “towards more systematic twitter analysis: metrics for tweeting activities.” international journal of social research methodology 16 (2). routledge: 91–108. couldry, nick. 2004. “liveness, ‘reality,’ and the mediated habitus from television to the mobile phone.” the communication review 7 (4). routledge: 353–61. highfield, tim, stephen harrington, and axel bruns. 2013. “twitter as a technology for audiencing and fandom.” information, communication and society 16 (3). routledge: 315–39. katz, elihu. 1980. “media events: the sense of occasion.” studies in visual communication 6 (3). repository.upenn.edu: 84–89. rivenburgh, nancy k. 2002. “the olympic games: twenty-first century challenges as a global media event.” culture, sport society 5 (3): 32–50. rossi, luca, and matteo magnani. 2012. “conversation practices and network structure in twitter.” in icwsm. aaai.org. http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/icwsm/icwsm12/paper/viewpdfinterstitial/4634%26lt%3b/ 5058. https://paperpile.com/c/4gviwt/lch1 http://paperpile.com/b/4gviwt/nrj1 microsoft word 853-597-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 foursquare, the politics of location platforms, and the importance of geocoded data rowan wilken swinburne institute for social research, swinburne university of technology australia rwilken@swin.edu.au abstract this paper takes a political economic and “platform politics” approach in examining the shifting business model of mobile social networking service foursquare. working from an understanding that medium (or platform) specificity still matters, it explores how foursquare’s shifting business model is driving changes in location data generated by its users is extracted, handled, and “monetized”. keywords foursquare; platform politics; location; geocoded data; business models introduction this paper explores the growing significance of location and geocoded data for social media services. taking a political economic (albarran, 2013) and “platform politics” (gillespie, 2010) approach, i examine the shifting business models of mobile social networking service foursquare (a focus which forms one part of a larger study examining the geolocational affordances of a number of social media services, including twitter, facebook, google, and grindr). drawing on existing scholarship and industry reportage and analysis, i develop a “platform critique” of foursquare which, in gerlitz and helmond’s (2013, p. 2) words, aims to be sensitive to its technical infrastructure whilst giving attention to the social and economic implications of it as a platform. medium specificity still matters (maras & sutton, 2000, p. 103), and there are clear differences between social media platforms in terms of how location data is extracted and how it is handled (barreneche, 2012; van dijck, 2011). in the case of foursquare labs inc., its still evolving business model, and the design and use of its platform, i argue, shapes how geocoded data is obtained and “monetized”. from badges to “location-and-discovery” foursquare encourages the use of a mobile device to check-in to particular locations (such as a café) that the user is visiting. with the service, gps and/or network location data is accessed to provide the user with a list of nearby locations, and points are awarded for each check-in. a key feature of foursquare since its launch has been its game-like qualities, which include earning badges for various milestones, creating patterns of check-in locations, and the inter-user competition to become “mayor” of a location via repeated visitation. another significant attribute is social, including sharing one’s location with friends within the service, as well as the option of pushing check-in notifications to other social media platforms. since its launch in 2009, foursquare has acquired more than 10 million users and has registered over 1 billion total check-ins. recently, however, foursquare has been facing persistent questions “about the long-term sustainability of its business” (isaac, 2013b). due to reported slowing in user growth, and underwhelming revenue generation to date, investors are said to be reluctant to give the company additional injections of capital investment (fiegerman, 2012). this has prompted foursquare to rethink its corporate strategy and business model. the path it appears to be taking is not new: the monetization of user traffic data. as van couvering points out, search and social media services tend to be characterized by media platforms that facilitate exchange between producers and audiences, and selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 which operate across “complex content pools that are large in size, extremely varied in terms of producers, and frequently refreshed” (van couvering, 2011, p. 198). due to the complexity of the “content pool”, the platform thus “becomes the central way to mediate connections between audiences and producers” (p. 198). significantly, “if the content pool is the network”, then “audience traffic, enabled through the platform, are the connections within the network” (p. 198). it is these “connections” which form the “core, saleable asset” for the owners of the platform (p. 198). for foursquare, the ability to parse geolocational and user check-in data is “key to its monetary strategy” (goldman, 2012). moreover, by bucking recent trends (sheehan, 2013) and maintaining an accessible api, “popular apps like instagram and path use foursquare’s api to serve up location-based data”, which in turn adds to the overall data pool foursquare is able to access and sift (calore, 2013). foursquare’s dennis crowley notes, “we are starting to get really good at figuring out what the context is” in the geo-data accrued through check-ins (crowley quoted in goldman, 2012) and using this check-in data “as the basis for a search and recommendation platform” (marketingmanagersinfo, 2013; kerr, 2012). in short, the value of check-ins for foursquare is the accumulation of large amounts of data concerning people’s movement through urban space and their patterns of consumption. this information holds clear value for advertisers and marketers, as well as providing the opportunity for foursquare to develop new features that make use of that data – three such features are discussed here. the first of these is the “explore” feature, aimed at foursquare users. in essence, it is a recommendations and ratings system – or, in the words of one commentator, an “interactive city guide” (gobry, 2012) – utilizing a series of metrics drawn from each user and their social network history (including tips, likes, dislikes, popularity, local expertise, and so on – kerr, 2012). this information is then targeted to that user in the form of “recommendations for places you would probably like to visit based on your profile and check-in history” (goldman, 2012). accompanying the explore feature is an upgraded website, which is said to attract 1 million visits per day, with a prominent search box (kerr, 2012) – perhaps in recognition of the fact that “a lot of entertainment planning takes place at work or in the home” (marketingmanagersinfo, 2013). in late may, 2013, foursquare added what it calls “super-specific search” to explore. this applies a range of filters to search results that combine common queries (such as price, opening hours, and so on), with additional information drawn from check-ins and user data. in the words of one tech commentator, “the end result isn’t far off what facebook is attempting to do with its ambitious graph search” (welch, 2013). in short, in ceo dennis crowley’s words, foursquare is no longer about leader boards, badges and points; it’s about local search and discovery. in addition to the above are new features developed specifically for businesses. these fit squarely with foursquare’s plans to “get most of its future sales from software that helps merchants track the behavior of potential customers” (crowley quoted in chang & macmillan, 2011). while foursquare already collects some revenue through strategic partnerships with competitors such as groupon inc. (chang & macmillan, 2011) and other companies (van grove, 2013), these recent developments are quite different in that they want “businesses to pay for help analyzing the data generated by [foursquare’s] 10 million users” (chang & macmillan, 2011). foursquare’s “first revenue-generating product” (fiegerman, 2012), launched in 2012, was “promoted updates”, advertising messages sent to users who are in the vicinity of a restaurant or other business. what distinguishes this service is that, rather than buy “advertising impressions”, participating brands pay on a “cost-per-action model related to how consumers interact with the updates” (kelly, 2012). the second business feature is the foursquare for business app (foursquare blog, 2013; isaac, 2013b). launched in early 2013, it allows businesses to offer “digital punchcard” deals when users check-in, as well as send messages to regulars (isaac, 2012). discussion & conclusion these constitute significant developments. foursquare is strategically downplaying its gameplay elements (isaac, 2013a) and repositioning the urban exploration aspects of its service to fit within what selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 has recently been termed the “like economy” (gerlitz & helmond, 2013). while foursquare is facing increasing competition, including from twitter and facebook, unlike these other platforms, it has a user base already acclimatized to location-sharing, and an emerging ability to interpret and leverage this data. it is banking on the granulation of this location and recommendation information to maintain its place in the social media ecosystem (calore, 2013), especially as it goes head-to-head with the likes of groupon and yelp. but there is risk involved. the strategy focuses on foursquare’s so-called “super users”, the “contingent of users and merchants who are seriously engaged by its platform”. once the company has a “dense, engaged, revenue-generating core of users, its aim is to expand from this base (gobry, 2012). the trick for foursquare will be in managing commercial and new user growth, without ostracizing its core constituency of high-end users – those initially drawn to its gameplay elements. acknowledgments this paper is an output from a program of research under an australian research council early career research award – de120102114, “the cultural economy of locative media”, funded 2012-2014. the author gratefully acknowledges the arc’s financial support, and the research assistance provided to the program by emily van der nagel and jenny kennedy. references albarran, alan b. (2013). the social media industries. london: routledge. barreneche, c. (2012). governing the geocoded world: environmentality and the politics of location platforms. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies 18 (3), 331-351. doi: 10.1177/1354856512442764. calore, m. (2013). how foursquare is forcing social networks to check in or check out. wired, march 12. retrieved from http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/03/location-apps-social-media/. chang, e. & macmillan, d. (2011). foursquare says merchant services will provide bulk of revenue. bloomberg.com, august 2. retrieved from http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-02/foursquareceo-says-merchant-services-will-provide-bulk-of-startup-s-sales.html. fiegerman, s. (2012). foursquare will make just $2 million in revenues this year. mashable.com, november 22. retrieved from http://mashable.com/2012/11/21/foursquare-revenue-2-million-2012/. foursquare blog. (2013). manage a business on foursquare? download our new app to easily connect with customers right from your phone. foursquare blog, january 29. retrieved from http://blog.foursquare.com/2013/01/29/manage-a-business-on-foursquare-download-our-new-app-toeasily-connect-with-customers-right-from-your-phone/. gerlitz, c. & helmond, a. (2013). the like economy: social buttons and the data-intensive web. new media & society [online first]. doi: 10.1177/1461444812472322. gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of “platforms”. new media & society 12 (3), 347-364. gobry, p.-e. (2012). foursquare’s revenue model sharpens into focus. business insider, may 9. retrieved from http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-05-09/research/31634849_1_foursquare-business-model-yelp. goldman, d. (2012). foursquare ceo: “not just check-ins and badges”. cnnmoney, february 29. retrieved from http://money.cnn.com/2012/02/29/technology/foursquare_ceo/index.htm. isaac, m. (2012). with new merchant local updates tool, foursquare is getting serious about its business. all things d, july 18. retrieved from http://allthingsd.com/20120718/with-new-merchant-local-updatestool-foursquare-is-getting-serious-about-its-business/. isaac, m. (2013a). ceo dennis crowley on foursquare’s biggest mistake. all things d, march 11. retrieved from http://allthingsd.com/20130311/ceo-dennis-crowley-on-foursquares-biggest-mistake/. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 isaac, m. (2013b). foursquare’s new app is open for business. all things d, january 29. retrieved from http://allthingsd.com/20130129/foursquares-new-app-is-open-for-business/. kelly, a. m. (2012). three reasons why foursquare’s new advertising model might work. forbes, august 22. retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/annemariekelly/2012/08/22/three-reasons-whyfoursquares-new-advertising-model-might-work/. kerr, d. (2012). foursquare launches rating system, competes with yelp. cnet.com, november 5. retrieved from http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57545517-93/foursquare-launches-rating-system-competeswith-yelp/. kessler, s. (2012). foursquare’s plan for making money: promoted specials. mashable.com, may 9. retrieved from http://mashable.com/2012/05/09/foursquares-plan-for-making-money/. marketingmanagersinfo. (2013). foursquare finds its business model – maybe… marketingmanagersinfo.co.uk. retrieved from http://www.marketingmanagersinfo.co.uk/articles/foursquare_finds_its_business_model.aspx. maras, s. & sutton, d. (2000). medium specificity re-visited. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies 6, 98-113. doi: 10.1177/135485650000600207. sheehan, j. (2013). apis are dead, long live apis. the next web, march 12. retrieved from http://thenextweb.com/dd/2013/03/12/apis-are-dead-long-live-apis/. van couvering, e. (2011). navigational media: the political economy of online traffic. in d. winseck & y. yin (eds.). media political economies: hierarchies, markets and finance in the global media industries (pp. 183-200). london: bloomsbury. van dijk, j. (2011). tracing twitter: the rise of a microblogging platform. international journal of media and cultural politics 7 (3), 333-348. van grove, j. (2013). foursquare checks in to more revenue with credit card specials. cnet news, february 25. retrieved from http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57571202-93/foursquare-checks-in-to-morerevenue-with-credit-card-specials/. welch, c. (2013). foursquare rolls out “super-specific” filters to help you search out the perfect destination. the verge, may 22. retrieved from http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/22/4355862/foursquare-rolls-outsuper-specific-natural-language-search. license this article is ©2013 rowan wilken, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. microsoft word 730-480-1-pb.doc urban jamification: gincanas as location-based mobile games in brazil adriana de souza e silva north carolina state university usa aasilva@ncsu.edu isabel froes it university of copenhagen denmark icgf@it.dk abstract gincanas are a traditional event in brazilian culture where groups of people compete against each other by solving tasks. recently, the dutch waag society and the brazilian mobilefest developed the location-based game called global gincana, where players use their phones as interfaces to interact with the game space through solving location-based tasks about the countries’ history and culture. by exploring the history of brazilian gincanas and how they have evolved through the spread and appropriation of mobile technologies, this article addresses two main research questions: (1) how mobility and the configuration of urban space influence the design and performance of location-based mobile games; and (2) how the urban and socio-economic context of developing countries, specifically brazil, shape mobile technology appropriation and locationbased mobile game design. we demonstrate that urban spaces can convey a multiplicity of performances, encompassing a vast arrange of applications, ranging from education and philanthropic to marketing oriented. keywords gamification; gincana; location-based games ; mobile phones, brazil, global south by exploring the history of brazilian gincanas and how they have evolved through the spread and appropriation of mobile technologies, this article addresses two main research questions: (1) how mobility and the configuration of urban space influence the design and performance of locationbased mobile games, and (2) how the urban and socio-economic context of developing countries, specifically brazil, shape mobile technology appropriation and location-based mobile game design. in order to answer such questions, we first define location-based mobile games through the theoretical frameworks of net locality (gordon and de souza e silva 2011). we address how commercial location-based mobile games distinguish themselves from artistically-driven games, and how these kinds of games make specific commercial use of urban spaces. we then present the case study of the global gincana, in order to illustrate how location-based games cross and challenge cultural barriers and create new playful grounds. we do that by first describing a brief history of gincanas, and then linking this history to the more recent development of locationbased games in brazil. location-based mobile games use the city space as their game board. they are multiplayer games, in which players use mobile devices to communicate with each other depending on their location in urban space (de souza e silva and hjorth 2009; shklovski and de souza e silva 2012). first developed within academic circles (lantz 2006; chang and goodman 2006), such games— also named alternate reality games (args) —were commercially appropriated as advertisement campaigns most prominently for movies and cars (mcgonigal 2007; hjorth 2008). some wellknown examples are the beast for a.i. in 2001, and i love bees for the halo 2 game release in 2004. location-based mobile games often subvert the traditional playspace of digital games, merging digital and physical spaces through the mobility of players (de souza e silva 2006; gordon and de souza e silva 2011). as a consequence, they have the potential to transform modes of mobility and immobility within everyday life, allowing players to rediscover local surroundings through playful interactions. although location-based games have been extensively studied in north american and european contexts (licoppe and inada 2006; mcgonigal 2007; de souza e silva 2009; montola 2005), scant attention has been paid to how mobile technologies and urban spaces act as game interfaces in developing countries. this is particularly interesting as technologies are appropriated differently in diverse parts of the world (bar et al. 2007), and distinct environments affect urban practices of mobility, game design and play. when researching mobile technology appropriation and the gamification of urban spaces, brazil represents a relevant case study. the country is a developing leading world economy with the 5th largest mobile market in the world (de souza e silva et al. 2011). the country has also witnessed artistic and commercial development and deployment of urban and location-based games in its major cities. for example, blast theory performed can you see me now? in belo horizonte (2008, arte.mov festival) and audi developed the arg art of the heist, to sell their audi a3 car in 2005 (gosney, 2005). despite the growing popularity of these initiatives, few studies have looked at how the configuration of urban spaces, mobility and mobile technology use in the developing world influence game design and play. one interesting example in brazil is the global gincana (mobilefest and waag-society 2009), a location-based game developed in 2009 as a collaboration between the brazilian mobilefest, an international festival dedicated to mobile art and creativity running yearly in são paulo since 2006; and the dutch waag society, an art, science and technology institute focused in technology for social innovation from amsterdam, holland. the piece was based on the “gincana” concept, a traditional event in brazilian culture where groups of people compete against each other by solving tasks involving a wide range of capacities. gincanas may be described as a fusion between olympic games and scavenger hunt. however, in the global gincana, gps-enabled mobile phones were the game interface. on a map on the participants’ mobile phones they could see the location of tasks to be performed. once they stood at a task location, instructions would pop-up on their mobile screen (de souza e silva & duarte). for example, “you are now at casa das rosas – one of the oldest buildings on paulista avenue. ask about the history of the building and look at how it is situated. take photos of the most striking contrasts (of old and new).”1 this is one of the most famous avenues in the city of são paulo in brazil. the global gincana’s tasks had as a purpose to teach participants about são paulo’s and amsterdam’s history, culture, and urban spaces. gincanas are not a new phenomenon. they were very popular events throughout the 1970s and 1980s in the third largest brazilian city, salvador. normally local governments and schools organized them. gincanas aimed at engaging, helping, and educating large groups of people on social, political, and cultural topics. government organized gincanas tended towards philanthropic causes, as well as creating awareness towards local issues and attainments. some of the tasks included blood donating, collecting non-perishable food for donation to impoverished areas, as well as writing and performing plays based on famous historical events. another type of gincana was the gincanas promoted by local schools, which besides having philanthropic tasks, also had specific learning goals within the school syllabus. the tasks varied from solving mathematical equations within a given time constrain, play performances of chemistry combinations, as well as many others, which included not only the school pupils from first grade to senior high-school, but also their parents and school employees. these events were highly organized and required a fixed structure, despite its mobile aspect, due to technological constrains of the time. as mobile technology was not an available source, team members had to rely on fixed arrangements. they had to be at specific locations at specific times in order to receive and deliver the tasks. therefore, these events were geographically and therefore socially bound, with limited communication resources and little space for improvisation regarding time and space. in contrast, participants of the global gincana were able to defy space boundaries and coordinate experiences cross-atlantic, challenging gincanas’ early constrains. tasks coordinated by various locations, times and devices, instead of fixed ones, open up for a range of possibilities within play in urban environment. as in the global gincana, gincanas are being rediscovered and reappropriated through location-based technologies. simultaneous and independent games run locally and globally. we use the case study of the global gincana to demonstrate that urban spaces can convey a multiplicity of playful performances including a vast range of applications, from education to marketing-oriented. we conclude that the popularization of mobile technologies and locationbased services in the developing world help not only economic development and information access. these technologies are also creatively appropriated to foster new types of collaborations and constructions of urban spaces. references bar, f., pisani, f. & weber, m. (2007). mobile technology appropriation in a distant mirror: baroque infiltration, creolization and cannibalism. in: telefónica, f. (ed.) seminario sobre desarrollo económico, desarrollo social y comunicaciones móviles en américa latina. buenos aires: fundación telefónica. chang, m. & goodman, e. (2006). asphalt games: enacting place through locative media. leonardo electronic almanac, 14, 4-4. de souza e silva, a. (2006). from cyber to hybrid: mobile technologies as interfaces of hybrid spaces. space and culture, 3, 261-278. de souza e silva, a. (2009). hybrid reality and location-based gaming: redefining mobility and game spaces in urban environments. simulation & gaming, 40, 404424. de souza e silva, a. & hjorth, l. (2009). playful urban spaces: a historical approach to mobile games. simulation and gaming. gordon, e. & de souza e silva, a. (2011). net locality: why location matters in a networked world, boston, blackwell publishers. hjorth, l. (2008). being real in the mobile reel. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 14, 91-104. lantz, f. (2006). big games and the porous border between the real and the mediated. vodafone receiver magazine. licoppe, c. & inada, y. (2006). emergent uses of a multiplayer location-aware mobile game: the interactional consequences of mediated encounters. mobilities, 1, 39-61. mcgonigal, j. (2007). the puppet master problem: design for real-world, mission-based gaming. in: harrigan, p. & wardrip-fruin, n. (eds.) second person: role-playing and story in games and playable media. boston, ma: the mit press. mobilefest & waag-society (2009). global gincana. são paulo. montola, m. (2005). exploring the edge of the magic circle. defining pervasive games. dac 205 conference. it university of copenhagen. sheller, m. (in press). mobile mediality: location, dislocation, augmentation. in: kesselring, s., vogl, g. & witzgall, s. (eds.) tracing mobilities. ashgate. shklovski, i. & de souza e silva, a. (2012). an urban encounter. information, communication and society, 1-22. 1 http://holambra.wordpress.com/results/ bookpirates selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 book pirates: tethered technologies and their domestication mathias klang university of borås sweden mathias.klang@hb.se jan nolin university of borås sweden jan.nolin@hb.se abstract this work is part of a larger study on the effects of ebooks in small language markets. the results presented here are a study of more sophisticated technology users and an attempt to capture: (1) their domestication of ebook readers and surrounding technologies, and (2) their attitudes towards their tethered ebook applications. the goal is to better understand the sophisticated users as representatives of the early adopters who shape wider social technology adoption, interpretation and understanding. keywords piracy; ebooks; ebook readers; domestication; tethered technology introduction in 561 ad, the first copyright dispute was settled in a battle near benbulben. thousands of men lay dead in the field when the abbot colmcille emerged as victor and claimed the right to his copy of the abbot finian’s manuscript. this conflict arose when colmcille secretly copied the book when he was a guest at finian’s abbey. the latter claimed ownership in the copy and the dispute was taken to be settled by diarmuit ui neill, high king of ireland, whose judgment was: “to every cow its calf and to every book its copy.” colmcille, not satisfied with this decision, brought his troops to battle against the high king and emerged victorious from the field (corrigan, 2007). bloody battles for the right to copy are exceptions to the norm, the goal of this paper is to understand the performances of resistance towards the experience of copy limitations in ebook technologies. while most of history of the right to copy has been much less bloody technological developments, such as the printing press, and the introduction of copyright law (statute of anne 1710) have ensured that the discussion of rights and limitations has never died down (johns, 2009). in recent decades, with the developments in digitalization, personal computing and internet access, the copyright discussion has grown and widened to include ever-larger circles of interested parties. the debate on file sharing is intimately connected with our technical ability to copy and share. technical measures, digital rights management (drm), have been developed order to maintain control over the ability to copy. on the one hand drm, in relation to copyrightable material, is a technical measure implemented to ensure adherence to legally established rights. the reader who buys a book does not acquire unlimited legal rights to make copies of the book. therefore, adding drm to ebooks ensures that users cannot use technology to go beyond their legally established rights. however, drm can also restrict users from using their ebooks in ways that are both socially and legally acceptable if we were dealing with analogue books. thus, ebooks bought via amazon can only be read on their kindle ebook reader, they cannot easily be lent to others and they cannot be resold. these limitations are impractical to implement on analogue books. however, the implementation of drm with the limitation of certain practices is redefining the nature of the book, and in extension the whole ecology of reading. technology is re-shaping, and maybe regulating (baym, 2010; winner, 1985), an established social practice. the role of technology as regulator has naturally been promlematized earlier (winner, 1985; latour, 1992; norman, 1990). as the digital delivery of software, films and music has been more widespread than books it is only natural that the drm discussion is more established in relation to these products. with the growth of selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 the ebook market a level of discussion on the use of drm has grown, however, there is a marked difference in the tone in these discussions. signs of this are visible, inter alia, by quality publications arguing for the right to remove drm, the users openness about their practices and the low level of legal action against ebook file sharing. theoretical framework while the earliest history of ebooks is much earlier, the use of devices as ebook readers began in earnest in the 1990s. the sony data discman was released in 1992 and apple launched its newton personal digital assistant in 1993. continued development resulted in probably the device most dedicated to the task of reading with the rocket ebook reader, launched by nuvomedia in 1998. while these early devices were far from mass-market successes they did have a reasonably dedicated following. these early adopter should be important to the “domestication” (haddon, 2003) of the ebook reader. haddon suggests that people generally adopt new and exciting technology through a process of domestication, quickly taming what is strange and wild. the idea is that the exotic technology entails a dual process, partly a normalization of the technology and the adaption of everyday interaction. through this process the widespread understanding of what technology is, and how it should be understood, is subtly changed. technological improvements have enabled the development of more practical ebook devices and market forces have lowered the costs to the consumer. these forces have made the ebook reader a commonplace device today. the increased customer base and the use of drm have created an interesting practice among users – the use of software to remove drm limitations from what many consider to be “their” books. the latter may be seen as a reaction to the hobbled technology, or what zittrain (2008) refers to as tethered appliances. these are devices, which are closed off to amateur tweaking and modification, available only to the manufacturer. while zittrain mainly focuses on product development, the use of drm in books limits new use practices with this technology. goals in order to better understand the sophisticated ebook user, this study explores their technology use practices including their information collection and dissemination, their acquisition and consumption of ebooks and any technology adaptations they undertake. additionally this work also aims to understand sophisticated users’ attitudes towards tethered ebook applications and the ways they adapt their usage to the inherent limitations. the overall goal is to better understand the sophisticated users as representatives of the early adopters who shape wider social technology adoption, interpretation and understanding. the empirical data in this work is based on media reports, mining discussion forums and interviews with sophisticated users. . references baym, n. (2010). personal connections in the digital age. london: polity press. corrigan, ray (2007). colmcille and the battle of the book: technology, law and access to knowledge in 6th century ireland. in: gikii 2 workshop on the intersections between law, technology and popular culture at university college london, september 19th, 2007, 19 september 2007, london, uk. haddon, l. (2003). domestication and mobile telephony, in katz, j. (ed.) machines that become us: the social context of personal communication technology, transaction publishers, new brunswick, new jersey, pp.43-56. johns, adrian (2009). piracy: the intellectual property wars from gutenberg to gates. chicago: university of chicago press. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 latour, b. (1992). where are the missing masses? sociology of a few mundane artefacts. in bijker, w. & law, j. (eds) shaping technology, building society: studies in sociotechnical change. cambridge, mass: mit press. norman, d. (1990). the design of everyday things. new york: doubleday. winner, l. (1985). do artefacts have politics? in mackenzie, d. & wajcman, j., (eds), the social shaping of technology, buckingham: open university press. zittrain, j. l. (2008). the future of the internet: and how to stop it. new haven: yale university press. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. microsoft word mccosker.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): mccosker, a. (2014, october 22-24). peripheries of dissent: youtube’s civic cultures and pluralistic micropublics. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. peripheries of civil dissent: youtube’s civic cultures and pluralistic micropublics anthony mccosker swinburne university of technology abstract this paper examines a marginal youtube channel of civil dissidence based around anarchist principles of anti-state protest and videos of challenges to police and security personnel in public/private spaces. the channel offers a useful site for considering the emergence and trajectories of pluralistic and antagonistic micropublics. the qualitative analysis focuses on a) spaces and communicative access, b) social media practices, and c) identity and affiliation. each of these are problematised by the pluralistic and contested nature of engagement with the channel, qualifying our understanding of the civic cultures enabled and the way micropublics emerge and endure or intensify around issues of protest. keywords digital protest, micro-publics, peripheral voices, youtube channel, video, comments this paper examines peripheral channels of protest, or more specifically the use of youtube vlogs to garner large numbers of subscribers around acts of civil dissidence and dissident beliefs. the study considers the kinds of pluralistic and contested ‘micropublics’ that form in relation to activities within a youtube channel. much emphasis has been placed on large-scale, highly visible social mediaenhanced protest, the so called twitter and facebook revolutions across the middle east and northern africa and the distributed protests of the occupy movement (hands, 2011). use of social media in grassroots mainstream political mobilisation has also been widely studied (howard, 2005). far less attention has been paid to the more prolific, more marginal and less visible nodes of dissent that populate platforms such as youtube. these peripheral nodes of dissent may reveal more about how such platforms generate, replicate or constrain, rather than simply aid or extend, civic cultures and political activism. recent research has targeted the role of video and the uses of youtube in protest movements. in this vein a central and unique role has been identified in the use of the vlog format as an emerging form of self-expression and civic performance (griffith and papacharissi, 2010; banaji, 2013). video functions within youtube as a point of intersection, between located spaces of protest and online publics as a means of generating affinity, but also as a mode of provocation or witness (van zoonen etal., 2011). research examining youtube as platform for emergent civic cultures has begun to illustrate the pluralistic, contested and agonistic qualities of those publics (uldam and akanius, 2013; neumayer, 2012; mccosker, 2014). aims and methods my focus is on the construction, maintenance and contestation of youtube channels for activism at the margins. as a case study i examine the channel of charles veitch, an anarchist who has been active on youtube since 2007 with over 88,500 subscribers and 19,500,000 video views. in the uk and us, a number of channels have built large subscriber bases around philosophical or investigative provocations, activism and ‘alternative’ civic cultures; some popular examples include the channel of stefan molyneux – the voice of popular webbased freedomain radio – or mark dice and his secondary channel the resistance, and the many ‘chapters’ of the wearechange channel. the channel of anarchist charles veitch presents in this context wide ranging expressions of dissent and long standing practices of public agitation that centre on regular, location specific vlogs, megaphoneenhanced confrontations and public dialogue. through veitch’s videos i identify some patterns of activity that grant broader insights into the processes of emergence and contestation at play within youtube’s myriad micropublics. specifically, the research asks: how do videos, comments and other channel features operate in relation to user and moderator activity to facilitate civic cultures and active micropublics? the study employed a digital ethnographic approach to examine the channel’s history, external links, playlists, videos and interaction within the video comments field. this involved observations of activity over a 12 month period (january 2013 to january 2014), qualitative analysis of videos posted (n = 625), and analysis of comments for a selection of four videos (n = 1457 total comments). the videos and comments were examined through open and axial coding to adjust identified themes in relation to the theoretical framework. the research applies and adapts dahlgren’s dimensions of civic engagement and civic cultures (2007), which aims to identify factors that promote or impede political participation and civic engagement, with a specific focus on the dimensions of (a) spaces and platforms for dissent, (b) social media practices, (c) identity and affinity. findings in terms of the subject matter covered within the videos (see figure 1), as well as playlists and other interface features, the youtube channel offers a rich space for dissident expression and subsequent communicative access. these are the conditioning elements for the expressive events that constitute the channel's mircopublics. videos and comments exhibit extensive reference to, and detailed discussion of, both the offline and online spaces of protest made available through video practices, and the intersections bebetween them as a contest over veitch’s ‘right to film’ and protest in ‘public’ spaces (themselves contested). veitch’s videos most often take the form of street based vlogs and deliberate confrontations with police or security. he refers to this as ‘sensitivity capture’ where the aggressive responses of police in public/private spaces become the subject matter for online protest. a high proportion of the comments engage further with the subjects of protest, and with the idea of the right to protest. and strong emphasis is placed on providing a platform for others’ protests – for example during the 2011 england riots, or 2012 student protests, and recent protests against mining companies’ fracking practices. the channel’s role in providing communicative access and platforms for protest can be weighed against often competing aspects of channel maintenance practices, funding appeals and other requests for support that appear regularly throughout. in addition, commenting is disabled for 106 videos, which often provokes consternation among users. comment practices can also be described as fragmented and inconsistent when examined across videos. despite heavy activity within videos, none of the top 15 commenters commented on more than one of the four selected videos. this is not to say this did not take place, but indicates that where publics form in relation to the videos, they are episodic or ephemeral. a wide range of topics are covered in the 625 videos analysed, but particular emphasis is placed on subject matter central to the anarchist ideals and the producers’ identity and beliefs (figure 1). despite the coherence of these themes, the analysis of video comments reveals a far greater contestation over identity and affinity or affiliation than might be expected by the high subscriber numbers and as a factor of effective civic cultures in dahlgren’s framework. there is consistent antagonism and contest, indicating the pluralistic character of the dissident publics that form. coding of comments revealed that more than half of comments within the sample videos expressing anti-veitch sentiment (126 antiveitch vs 99 pro-veitch). govt, establishment, monarchy & state others people's protests police & law the love police' charles veitch free speech & freedom to film corporations & consumerism private security funding appeals & support new world order & global governance anarchism banks & capitalism platforms for protest mainstream & corporate media surveillance indigene military power israel, zionism & palestine tory christianity 9‐11, terrorism & fear global warming wikileaks youtube users & comments poverty freedom of information racism scientology fracking many anti-veitch comments express differences of belief or affinity highlighting, for instance, veitch’s revised opinion on the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the us as an ‘inside job’, a perspective veitch held and promoted but later rescinded after appearing on a bbc documentary exploring conspiracy theory. others express simple forms of vitriolic disagreement, and there is often extensive discussion from commenters about why they agree or disagree with veitch, other commenters, and the channel as a whole. these observations indicate a strong sense of contestation across the site. however these kinds of passionate activity also help to sustain and intensify civic engagement and draw attention to dissident activities over time. references banaji, s. (2013) ‘everyday racism and my tram experience: emotion, civic performance and learning on youtube’, comunicar, 40: 69-77. dahlgren, p. (2007) ‘civic identity and net activism: the frame of radical democracy’, l. dahlberg and e. siapera, (eds), radical democracy and the internet: interrogating theory and practice, houndmills: palgrave macmillan, 5572. griffith, m. and papacharissi, z. (2010) ‘looking for you: an analysis of video blogs’, first monday, 15(1), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2769/2430 hands, j. (2011) @ is for activism: dissent, resistance and rebellion in a digital culture, pluto press, new york. howard, p. (2005). ‘deep democracy, thin citizenship: the impact of digital media in political campaign strategy. the annals of the american academy of political and social science, 597(1): 153-170. neumayer, c. (2012) ‘which alternative? a critical analysis of youtubecomments in anti-fascist protest’, triple-c, 10(1), 56-65. mccosker, a. (2014) ‘trolling as provocation: youtube’s agonistic publics’, convergence, 20(2): 201-217. papacharissi, z. (2010) a private sphere: democracy in a digital age, cambridge, mass.: polity uldam, j., and askanius, t. (2013) ‘online civic cultures: debating climate change activism on youtube’, international journal of communication, 7, 1185-1204. van zoonen, l. et al (2011) ‘youtube interactions between agonism, antagonism and dialogue: video responses to the anti-islam film fitna’, new media and society, 13(1): 1-18. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17 th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 1 willson, m. and kinder-kurlanda, k. (2016, october 5-8). playing the algorithm: mobile gamers’ everyday (in)visibility strategies. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. playing the algorithm: mobile gamers’ everyday (in)visibility strategies michele willson curtin university, australia katharina kinder-kurlanda gesisleibniz institute for the social sciences, germany internet users are increasingly aware that they generate data traces and that they are acting in spaces in which algorithms operate. in germany, scandals related to intelligence services’ data collection practices have been instrumental in shaping people's image of social media and personal digital devices. in australia, the revelation about the release of australian user data to the nsa in the united states similarly highlighted the capacity for data to be reappropriated and employed for other unrelated and unapproved purposes. globally, concerns about a loss of the private sphere also led to negative reactions towards unsolicited information gathering, for example, by the google streetview car. public concerns have resulted in legislative and policy changes, and prompted reactions and behavioural changes among users. in this contribution, we examine the everyday practices of casual gamers in their interaction with mobile games as algorithmic spaces. games on mobile phones or tablets, similar to many other mobile apps, enable the collection and analysis of user data. these analyses are performed by simple or complex algorithms. we are interested in how casual gamer awareness of these practices alongside broader privacy concerns are navigated. tufekci (2014) showed how social media users adapt their practices on the basis of experiences with algorithmic agency in the context of the gezi protests. the trending topics on the twitter start page are an example of such algorithmic agency. tufekci describes how the announcement of the publication date of a specific hashtag in advance led to the hashtag being re-tweeted by thousands of twitter users (tufekci 2014). publishing a hashtag at a predefined moment leads to the generation of a maximum spike, to which twitter’s trending algorithm reacts. as trending generates great attention for a specific topic, numerous practices of deliberate manipulation of trends have been established which are more or less professionally used by individual users, organizations or enterprises. lobbying right up to the deployment of botnetworks, which push content for often opaque reasons (hegelich 2016) are being employed. such practices lead to data containing an element of recursiveness and ‘cultures of circulation’ emerge as the algorithms adapt to user behaviour and users in turn adapt to the results of algorithmic analyses (beer and burrows 2013). couldry and powell (2014) found too little attention is given to the consideration of the power of algorithms: the consequences of analysis results for user behaviour and algorithmic reflexivity are often neglected. they call for making space for agency or reflexivity on the part of the ‘smaller’ actors and for the various ways in which they construct and implement power and participation in diverse contexts. a ‘social analytics’ approach can reveal how specific actors are involved in social processes of reflection, surveillance and observation as well as in iterative adjustment even though often only minimal adjustments are possible for the users (couldry and powell 2014). in his discussion of everyday life practices, michel de certeau (1984) notes how tactics are commonly employed by people (in their capacity as consumers, readers, audiences, pedestrians, and so forth) in order to shape or influence constrained environments (e.g. by technical, economic, political systems) and practices. tactics are described as practices of resistance and appropriation enacted against the constructs of (seemingly) larger and more powerful systems and actors. in our discussion here, these may refer to individual corporate actors such as game developers (who may again be entangled in constraints); companies such as facebook; or even the broader capitalist system that generates value from data gleaned from users’ everyday activities. beer (2009) mentions three areas for such empirical studies: the organizations of social media providers; software infrastructure and their applications on the web; and how these two play out in the everyday lives of those using (or not using) participatory webapplications. this third area considers “...how and why individuals divulge information about themselves, how they play with and within the boundaries of the software, how they react to and resist the impulsions written into the codes” (beer 2009) and it is this area that we are interested in here. the complex practices of utilizing or resisting algorithmic power in everyday life become particularly visible in the game interaction of players of so called casual and/or social games. these games can be accessed and played within social network sites such as facebook or downloaded as apps. they often operate using a freemium model (free to play but offer microtransactions –small monetary transactions within the game) and are referred to as casual games to indicate that gameplay can be intermittent and played for short periods of time (juul 2010). for this study, casual mobile games act as a focal point for observing everyday algorithmic practices 1) because they act as a first point of contact for devices such as the ipad for many users and 2) because it is here that the ludic sphere, shaped by playing and fun, and the strive towards achieving maximum user attention to generate ad revenue meet. mobile applications have the added complexity of potential geolocation data generation. through the use of qualitative interviews and a questionnaire, we investigate the practices of casual mobile gamers around management of visibility and invisibility, mainly focusing on the following:  deciding at which point and in which way to link games to social network platforms such as facebook  balancing sometimes incommensurable game interests such as social interaction, building and stress relief by making use of game features for player interaction (e.g. managing membership in player groups such as ‘neighbourhoods’ or ‘clans’ to fit in with different levels of intimacy and anonymity depending on the situation)  navigating geolocation, personal and social information data choices through game practices we consider these practices as ways of managing privacy requirements within algorithmic public spheres. we are looking at australian and german mobile game play to identify similarities and differences in practices of situated algorithmic management in the everyday. germany has been the locus of considerable concern about online privacy, and part of the impetus behind the right to be forgotten data protection legislation. it therefore should pose an interesting site of comparison with australia, where similar concerns have been evinced but are less evident within the broader public discourse and in legislative approaches. references beer, d. (2009). power through the algorithm? participatory web cultures and the technological unconscious. new media & society 11, 985-1002. beer, d. and burrows, r. (2013). popular culture, digital archives and the new social life of data. theory, culture & society, 2013(30), 47-71. couldry, n., powell, a. (2014). big data from the bottom up. big data & society, 1(2), 15. de certeau, m. (1984). the practice of everyday life. trans. s. rendall. university of california press: berkeley. hegelich, s. (2016). social botnets auf twitter der fall ukraine. in: schriftenreihe des instituts für rundfunkrecht an der universität zu köln, 2016/112, 127-136. juul, j. (2010). a casual revolution: reinventing video games and their players. the mit press: cambridge, ma. tufekci, z. (2014). big questions for social media big data: representativeness, validity and other methodological pitfalls. in icwsm’14: proceedings of the 8th international aaai conference on weblogs and social media. final_aoir civil keystrokes paper selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): dillon, kp, neo, rl, & seeley, n. (2015, october 21-24). civil keystrokes: examining anonymity, civility, and politeness in online newspaper forums. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. civil keystrokes: examining anonymity, politeness, and civility in online newspaper forums kelly p dillon, doctoral candidate school of communication, the ohio state university, columbus, oh, usa rachel l. neo, doctoral candidate school of communication, the ohio state university, columbus, oh, usa natalee seely, doctoral fellow mass communication, university of north carolina – chapel hill, usa abstract online news discussion forums have become popular virtual spaces for public discourse, especially as more newspapers bring their publications online. computermediated communication theories, such as the social identity model of deindivudating effects (spears & lea, 1994), suggest the anonymity afforded by online platforms leads to a deindividuation of the individuals involved, leading to less civility and politeness. the current study examines the role of anonymity within the cmc setting of online news comment forums and whether commentary posted by anonymous users contains more incivility and impoliteness than facebook identified users. comments left to two associated press articles, political and non-political, were collected from four major midwest newspapers’ websites. results suggest individuals commenting from anonymous handles are less civil and less polite in their comments than those individuals commenting through facebook profiles. political news stories garnered more comments that were less civil and less polite than non-political stories. future research is necessary to determine the implications of incivility in online discussion and its effects on democracy and productive public discourse. introduction americans’ online news consumption has surpassed radio and print media, becoming the second most popular news media outlet only to television (the pew research center for the people and the press, 2012). as the online presence of newspapers has grown, the avenues for the expression of public opinion have become more diverse. historically, letters to the editor served as the primary feedback forums in the news industry. with more newspapers taking their publications to the internet, readers can now express their opinions in online news forums, characterized by fewer gatekeepers and more opportunity for participation across time and space. these forums are virtual spaces where readers can offer their voices, opinions and feedback on news content and issues, allowing them to interact with both the content and other readers (hlavach & freivogal, 2011). furthermore, such forums may or may not be monitored or censored by news staff. many large u.s. newspapers including the los angeles times and the washington post enable readers to register anonymously to post comments. users have the autonomy to be identified by usernames and handles that can be as vague or as descriptive as they choose. other newspapers, like usa today, or scholarly websites such as popular science, recently have taken steps to restrict anonymity by linking comments to facebook profiles or disable comments entirely. some research has suggested online civility can not only lead to polarization between commenters, but readers’ perception of the subject matter (anderson, brossard, scheufele, xenos, &ladwig, 2013) and can possibly affect journalist approach or credibility (diakopoulos & naaman, 2011). some scholars have suggested that anonymity enables users to express unconventional opinions without the fear of being judged by gender, race or disability (papacharissi, 2004). conversely, others have contended that higher levels of anonymity exacerbate hostile discourse (halpern & gibs, in press). in an initial content analysis of comments made in the washington post’s website and in a comparison of comments made in the washington post’s website and those made on the newspaper’s facebook page, rowe (2013) found a clear difference in civility. however, rather than examining content found through the source’s (newspaper) social networks, drawing upon the social identity model of deindividuation effects (side), we aim to examine whether nonymous sns profiles on source sites or anonymity leads to uncivil and impolite behavior in online news forums. anonymity in cmc anonymity is a construct defined by the absence of identifiers (marx, 1999); however, many scientists agree that anonymity is a social phenomenon. marx (1999) argued that anonymity requires an audience of at least one other person. rationales for anonymity include the facilitation of information, the protection and privacy of one’s self, the avoidance of persecution and the encouragement of experimentation and risk-taking (marx, 1999). the different type of online platforms allow for varying degrees of concealment of physical appearance, location, name and other identifying characteristics. for instance, some types of news sites allow people to create a user account with the news site and post comments using pseudonyms and fake names. however, online platforms such as facebook do not necessarily have ‘visual anonymity’ as others can easily glean clues about a person’s real identity from information displayed on his or her facebook profile—people typically put their real names and display photos of themselves on their facebook profiles (deandrea & walther, 2011). the social identity model of deindividuation effects (side) model provides a salient theoretical framework to explain why online platforms facilitate impolite and uncivil discourse (walther, 2011). though originally constructed with organizational groups in mind, the side model has been applied to a wide variety of cmc situations and environments (tidwell & walther, 2006). the side theory was derived from the concept of deinviduation, which sprung from early research on crowd behavior (festinger, pepitone, & newcomb, 1952). the term deindividuation refers to the stripping of selfawareness in-group settings, which may lead someone to engage in behavior they would typically not engage in otherwise. the group becomes its own entity, loosening restraints on individual members further, becoming more attractive to others, and perpetuating its own effects. reduced self-awareness has been found to cause people to act irrational and uninhibited, acting with aggression, malice, and violence (zimbardo, 1969). however, in a meta-analysis of deindividuation research, no consistent results were found to completely support the overwhelmingly negative effects of deindividuation, but instead found that reduction of self-awareness enhanced group norms (postmes & spears, 1998; postmes, spears, & lea, 1998). deindividuation leads to a reduction of selfawareness and self-monitoring, marked by lowered observations of social norms and a lack of planning (diener, 1980.) according to side theory, deindividuation in online group settings leads to a transfer of salience from self to the collective, causing group identification and adherence to group norms. the side model identifies two factors that drive cmc behavior: visual anonymity that leads users into a state of deindividuation and the lack of verbal and nonverbal cues, known as the cues-filtered-out approach (walther, 1992). when in a state of deindividuation, cmc users will “orient themselves to a salient social category or group” and relate with other users on the basis of group membership (lea, spears, & de groot, 2001; walther, 2011). this anonymity frees people from ordinary relationships and social conventions such as politeness, and transports the user into an environment where the self is less important than the collective (reicher, spears, & postmes, 1995). users will act according to in-group norms and adopt a group identity. going by the tenets of side, it is a logical inference that newspapers allowing anonymous users to comment will have statistically more comments after articles compared to those newspapers requiring a known profile login, such as through facebook. furthermore, based on the reduction of social presence afforded by cmc we seek to examine the conditions under which commenters will be more likely to disclose their own personal political identities. h1: newspapers allowing anonymous comments will have more initial and responsorial comments than newspapers that do not allow readers to post anonymous comments. rq: under what conditions, topical and anonymity, would commenters self-disclosure their own personal political identities? politeness although extensive research has examined the effects of politeness in conversational exchanges, there is no fixed scholarly consensus as to what constitutes ‘politeness.’ according to fraser (1990), there are four broad perspectives of ‘politeness.’ the ‘social-norm’ perspective views ‘politeness’ in terms of speech styles and contends that politeness is associated with higher levels of formality and adherence to social etiquette rules. grice’s (1989) “conversational maxim” describes how communication efficiency can be enhanced using principles such as conflict, minimizing strategies to maximize cooperation between parties. goffman’s (1971) ‘face saving’ view delineates between two types of ‘faces’: positive and negative face. ‘positive’ face describes how people behave politely in order to maintain relationships with others whereas ‘negative’ face describes how people assert their autonomy by expressing frank opinions that could potentially offend other parties. lastly, the ‘conversational-contract’ view posits that conversation participants have certain preliminary normative expectations of one another that are applied to all discussion parties (fraser & nolen, 1981). ultimately, politeness is defined as the extent to which a participant follows these conversational norms. in sum, politeness can be described as the extent to which people adhere to conversation etiquette and norms, negotiate between sacrificing one’s face and saving face, and attempt to minimize conflict by cooperating with other parties (fraser, 1990). according to “cues filtered out” approaches, online communication platforms lack the visual markers of face-to face communication (culnan & markus, 1987). such visual anonymity makes it harder to trace peoples’ real identities and reduces the social cost of being impolite. consequently, scholars have contended that the anonymity afforded by online platforms emboldens people to be impolite when having political discussions with others (ng & detenber, 2005; papacharissi, 2004). given that previous studies have shown that people tend to have more impolite political discussions on anonymous platforms than on known platforms (e.g., halpern & gibs, in press), we hypothesize that people who post comments with their news site user accounts will be more impolite than people who post comments using their facebook accounts. h2: people who post comments with their news site user accounts will be more impolite than people who post comments using their facebook accounts. civility civility is regarded as a key hallmark of deliberative political discourse. the term ‘civility’ was derived from the term ‘civil discourse’. civil discourse is essential for the functioning of a democracy (e.g., dutton, 1996; johnson & johnson, 2000). some scholars have lamented the decline of civil discourse in the public sphere (bowman & knox, 2008). nevertheless, other scholars have cited the potential of online platforms to foster civil discourse (pavlik, 1994). as such, it is imperative to examine the extent to which online platforms promote or stymie civil discourse. previous research tends to conflate incivility with impoliteness. for instance, in ng and detenber’s (2005) study, their ‘uncivil’ experimental conditions consisted of people being impolite by flouting conversation norms, e.g., hurling personal attacks at one another. some scholars have suggested that it is unrealistic to expect political discourse to always be carried out in a polite fashion (garnham, 1992). furthermore, political discourse that is carried out in a polite manner tends to be more restrained because people practice self-censorship and espouse the status quo so as to avoid offending people (holtgraves, 1997). it would seem that such measured polite discourse impedes spirited debate that reflects democratic ideals (e.g., lyotard, 1984; schudson, 1997). rather, whimsical, heated political debate that flouts conversation norms and etiquette might actually enhance democratic goals as such discussions tend to be more diverse than polite political discourse (dillard, wilson, tusing, & kinney, 1997). thus, it is important to delineate between impoliteness and incivility. according to papacharissi (2004), uncivil discourse goes beyond what is typically regarded as ‘impoliteness’, i.e., flouting etiquette or social norms, and being uncooperative. rather, civil discourse is discourse that espouses democratic ideals and the common societal good (shils, 1992). papacharissi (2004) goes further to argue that civility is a form of ‘collective politeness’. as such, when people denigrate social categories of people, they are deemed to be behaving in an uncivil manner. however, if people hurl aspersions at each other (e.g., “you’re an incompetent governor!”), they are simply being impolite, not uncivil. given that civility is a hallmark of a democratic society in which each individual ideally has an equal opportunity to voice their frank opinions for the collective good, papacharissi (2004) defined uncivil discourse as discourse that undermines democratic ideals, challenges the common good by depriving people of their personal freedoms and discriminating against social categories of people. thus far, few studies have explicitly delineated between nonymous and anonymous online platforms when examining the extent to which people engage in uncivil political discourse online. although papacharissi’s (2004) content analysis showed that people were generally civil when expressing their views online, he only focused on examining civility within the context of online message boards. such displays of uncivil behavior are probably more likely to occur in anonymous contexts than in nonymous contexts because people become less inhibited about saying things that would otherwise be considered heterodox in a democracy, such as condemning democratic ideals or threatening to take away peoples’ rights to express themselves (papacharissi, 2002; spears & lea, 1994). furthermore, according to the side model (postmes, spears, & lea, 1998; spears & lea, 1992), the lack of non-verbal cues on the internet causes people to interact with one another using cues (e.g., textual cues) that give indications about group-level attributes of other discussants. consequently, people are more likely to form stereotypes of other online discussants and make derogatory remarks based on perceptions of social categories that these discussants belong to (spears & lea, 1992). as such, we hypothesize that: h3: there will be more uncivil comments from news site user accounts than comments using facebook accounts. furthermore, online political news stories generally tend to receive more comments than non-political online news stories (tsagkias, weerkamp, & de rijke, 2009). scholars contend that the online political sphere is highly polarized, with opposing parties having factious debates on political issues that are characterized by emotionally charged vitriol (hargittai, gallo, & kane, 2008; sunstein, 2001). as such, we predict that online political news stories will receive more impolite and uncivil comments than nonpolitical online news stories. h4: comments to political stories will be less civil than non-political stories.. h5: comments to political stories will be less polite than non-political stories. methods sample four midwest newspapers that allow online comments to associated press articles were chosen for the current study. the newspapers range in daily circulation from 95,000 to 300,000 and are each well established in their respective communities. two of the newspapers require commenters to use their known facebook profile in order to leave a comment. two newspapers require commenters to create an account, creating any handle they would like. real names, photos, and locations are not necessary to comment in these anonymous conditions. table 2 contains circulation and total comments drawn from each paper. content newspaper articles surrounding a non-political and political event approximately one week apart were used for the current study. associated press (ap) articles on a political topic and a non-political topic were chosen as the stimuli for collecting comments. the ap is a news agency that operates nearly 250 news bureaus throughout the world, and the agency’s news content is published and circulated in more than 1,500 newspapers. the ap’s articles are written in plain, non-inflammatory language and circulated widely across communities. the choice of ap articles helped in the standardization of article content, regardless of the partisan leanings of the editorial boards of the newspaper. the same ap article was available in all four newspapers in both topics and was examined for edits or updates during the 24-hour comment capture timeframe. the non-political topic chosen was a controversial ruling by replacement referees during the seattle seahawks-pittsburgh steelers nfl game on september 24, 2012. the referees’ ruling, outcome of the game, and subsequent national outrage was a hot topic and the final straw in a media narrative about the ongoing nfl referee strike. the political topic chosen for this study is the recap of the presidential debate covering domestic policy held in denver, co on october 3, 2012. this was the first of three presidential candidate debates and will cover domestic policy exclusively (where the remaining debates will either be a blend of foreign and domestic policy or a town hall meeting). procedures comments and articles were printed every few hours for 24-hours after the articles’ posting to the newspapers’ websites. articles were compared for substantial editing and none was found. streams of comments were compared to determine if newspaper webmasters removed or flagged comments deemed offensive or in violation of the newspapers’ policies and none were found. comments were recorded in chronological order and coded for newspaper, topic, condition, and if they were initial or responsorial. each commenter from each newspaper was given a unique subject identification code and all comments from the commenter were coded with this code. a total of 210 unique commenters were found across the four newspapers and two topics. one commenter appeared to comment on each newspaper’s political article, using the same handle and nearly the same comment. civility and impoliteness coding a total of 582 comments were organized according to paper, condition, topic, timing, and commenters’ subject identification codes by the lead author. all subsequent data analysis was conducted using only subject identification codes in order to ensure handles, which can contain political or uncivil speech in and of themselves, would not affect analysis of comments. each post was coded as either an initial post, where the author addressed the content of the news article in a new “thread,” or as a reply, where the author addressed a comment from another author or another author directly. if available, the number of likes/dislikes a comment received and whether the newspaper designated the author as a “top commenter” was also recorded. the remaining two authors adapted previous civility and politeness coding schemas to use to train on 25 comments, illustrated in table 1 (papacharissi, 2004). civility codes focused on verbalization of threats to democracy, political identification or stereotypes directed towards self, other commenters, or a non-present generalized ‘other.’ comments containing threats to another commenter’s rights (e.g., “keep talking like that and you’ll see what i mean”) or a non-present other (e.g., “seniors listen up…those death panels are for real.”) were coded as uncivil. according to the tenets of side theory, it would be uncivil for a commenter to deindividuate another commenter (or nonpresent other) and ascribe assumed group characteristics. included in these codes are comments containing political identification of self (e.g., “as a democrat and as an obama voter”), other commenter (e.g., “jim, if you were an actual conservative”), or general non-present other (e.g., “as a liberal, obama goes left”). comments containing stereotypes (either towards another commenter or non-present other) such as “women are so desperate” or political stereotypes towards specific parties such as “you lefties just cant let bush go!” or “what do we expect who was trained by marxist professors?” were also coded for incivility. the coding schema for impoliteness contained more specific interpersonal communication codes (papacharissi, 2004; jamison & falk, 1999). each type of interpersonal communication was coded for either towards another commenter (ip) or a non-present other (npo). use of sarcasm was coded as a measure of impoliteness, such as “’romney is ducking the issues regarding his refusals to release his income tax return."’ it's filed away safe and sound with the president's birth certificate :)” or a nonpresent other such as “pete carroll has been on the right end of both the bush push and now the fail mary.” comments in all-caps were labeled as impolite as overcapitalization of text online is a known heuristic for yelling (brusco, 2011). aggressive communication such as name calling (e.g., “romney has been a clown since day one.”) and aspersions (e.g., “you lose the argument about aca everytime and yet you continue are you stupid as well as ignorant?”) excluding lying were considered impolite comments. accusing of others of lying (e.g., “love watching you liars get their butts handed to them”), non-cooperation (e.g., “obama has no intention of ever working with the republicans”) and hyperbole (e.g., “certaintly you are referring to the amateur king”) could be considered threats to democratic conversation and therefore impolite (ng & detenber, 2005; papacharissi, 2004). finally, any comments including vulgarities or swear words were coded as impolite per societal norms of public speech. after training, each coder coded the same random 10% sample. cohen κ was calculated for each variable (hayes & krippendorf, 2007). all categories met a threshold of cohen κ > 0.80. each coder then coded the remaining sample available for hypothesis testing. results hypothesis tests a comparison of total number of comments in each condition was conducted to test h1. in the facebook condition, readers left a total of 119 comments (20.45%). in the anonymous condition, readers left a total of 463 (79.55%) comments. a binomial test found this distribution is not due to chance, p < .001. h1 is therefore supported. in order to test h2, seven categories were summed creating a civility index of comments (see table 3). a higher score on this index illustrated a more uncivil comment. a onetailed independent groups t-test found anonymous comments were less civil than facebook comments, t(579)=-1.732, p=.043, supporting h2. sub-scales of civility were calculated, summing the codes of comments made towards other discussants (od) and non-present others (npo). one-tailed independent groups t-tests suggest a difference in civility by condition in comments made towards non-present others, but no difference in those comments made towards other discussants (see table 3). comparison of total number of comments across profile conditions revealed only one variable, assigning political stereotypes to generalized others not involved in the online discussion, was found in nearly 10% of all comments. the remaining six variables were equal to or less than 1% of comments coded in the affirmative for the incivility code. across conditions, negative stereotypes were rarely assigned to other discussants or non-present generalized others, and the differences in frequency were found to be statistically insignificant. of the 50 comments coded as assigning political stereotypes to a generalized other, 43, or 86%, were in the anonymous profile condition and only seven, or 14%, were in the facebook profile condition. a binomial test found this distribution to be due to condition, and not chance. therefore, political stereotypes will be more likely to be assigned to non-present generalized others in an anonymous profile. to test h3, 16 coding categories were summed to create an impoliteness index based on comments towards other discussants or generalized others (see table 4). a higher score on this index meant the comment was more impolite. a one-tailed independent groups t-test found anonymous comments were marginally less polite than facebook comments, and trending towards significance, t(575)=-1.439, p=.076. sub-scales of politeness were calculated, summing the codes of comments made towards other discussants (od) and non-present others (npo). one-tailed independent groups t-tests suggest a difference in politeness by condition in comments made towards non-present others, but no difference in those comments made towards other discussants. binomial tests were calculated for five of the individual politeness items that were coded as ‘present’ (1) in at least 9% of the comments across conditions. nearly 90% of the comments did not contain the remaining eleven variables. the impoliteness variables examined were typing in all caps about a generalized other, calling a generalized other names, accusing a generalized other of lies, and using aspersions towards other discussants or generalized others (see table 5). using the same civility index used for testing h2, a one-tailed independent groups t-test comparing means in each topic condition were calculated and found comments left on political articles were less civil than comments left on non-political articles, t(579)= 8.742, p < .001. sub-scales of civility were created to comparing comments directed towards other discussants and comments made about non-present generalized others across topics (see table 6). comments made about non-present others in political topics were less civil than those made in reaction to the non-political news story. there was no statistical difference between topics on comments made towards other discussants, t(579)=-0.875, p=.191. just as in the condition tests, only assignment of political stereotypes to non-present others was present in at least 10% of the total comments. the remaining six variables were coded in no more than 2% of the comments, and not analyzed. a pearson chi-square and follow-up binomial test found a significant difference between article topic and rate of political stereotypes being assigned to non-present generalized others. of the 50 comments coded as assigning political stereotypes to a generalized other, all were written in comments to the political article. therefore, political stereotypes will be more likely to be assigned to non-present generalized others in a political article. assignment of political stereotypes to other discussants and non-present generalized others was not expected in comments made to non-political stories. pearson chi-square and binomial tests examining frequencies of comments assigned to other discussants were not significant, but comments made to non-present others were. the only comments assigning political stereotypes to non-present others were found in response to a political article. additional chi-square tests compared the frequency of negative stereotypes (nonpolitical) towards other discussants and non-present others in comments by topic. once more, there were no statistical differences between the cells. nearly 99% of comments did not contain a negative stereotype towards anyone and does not warrant further comparison of frequencies. therefore, topic does not affect the probability of assignment of negative stereotypes being made by commenters to other discussants or non-present generalized others. the same politeness index was used to calculate one-tailed independent groups t-tests comparing means in each topic condition (see table 7). comments left on political articles were not found to be less polite than comments left on non-political articles. political news stories had less polite comments directed at non-present others than nonpolitical stories. four of the same specific politeness variables were present in at least 10% of comments, leading to binomial tests to determine if distribution of codes was due to chance or the article’s topic (table 8). individuals commenting on political stories are less civil directing their comments towards non-present others indexed by typing in all caps, name-calling, use of aspersions, and accusing non-present others of lying. therefore, h5 is partially supported. ninety-nine percent of all commenters did not self-identify in any way, and four of the six who had were found in the anonymous condition. pearson chi-square tests were found to be non significant. self-disclosure of political identity in comments to non-political stories was not expected. a pearson chi-square test did not show any statistical significance difference between topics and self-disclosure. therefore, neither condition nor article topic affect rate of self-disclosure. discussion according to dubrovsky (1985) the utilization of computer conferencing “promotes rationality by providing essential discipline (task orientation, coordination, equality of participation) by filtering out affective components of communication and emphasizing the content, minimizing social influences” (p. 381). our current study found civility and politeness, and possibly rationality, are hard to come by when users are anonymous to others. in total, most of our hypotheses were either completely or partially supported. the anonymity of certain newspaper comment forums yielded more comments, and these comments were less civil and polite compared to comments left in forums requiring a facebook login. additionally, political news articles in general tend to lead to less civil and less polite comments than non-political news stories. comments towards non-present others are especially less civil and less polite across condition and topic. these findings are consistent with the tenets of the side theory (postmes & lea, 1992) and previous findings indicating that people tend to be more impolite on anonymous online platforms than on nonymous online platforms (e.g., halpern & gibs, in press). furthermore, this study filled the gap in the literature by using the side theory to examine whether people were more uncivil in anonymous online conditions than in nonymous online conditions. concerns of individuals becoming somehow “submerged in the machine” leading to social isolation and deindividuation effects lead more psychological, sociological, and communication research to focus on the interpersonal aspects and ramifications of cmc (kielser, siegel, & mcguire, 1986). this study aimed to explore the role of anonymity on incivility in cmc settings, but current research only scratches the surface of how anonymity affects the dynamics of online discussion. future research can take a number of directions, including the experimental route to establish a more causal relationship between anonymity and incivility. an experimental design involving the creation of anonymous and identified conditions within the context of comment forums would have great explanatory power. further research is also needed to gauge the effects of incivility on readers’ perception of bias in the news and their perception of the journalist and newspaper’s credibility. with online news consumption on the rise, comment forums are becoming increasingly common, and thus more visible to readers. even if an online newsreader is not actively participating in the discussion, the comments from other readers are easily seen following most news articles. a more qualitative approach could explore the effect of negative and impolite comments on journalists themselves, especially those comments directed at the author or publisher of a story by examining whether uncivil comments affect a journalist’s mental health, their ability to perform their job well, or their job satisfaction. limitations we were faced with certain challenges when choosing our non-political ap story. our original story regarding the emmys, did not yield any comments. our third choice of non-political story, hurricane sandy, yielded highly politicized conversations due to the involvement of key campaign surrogates and government entities. the choice of political topic may have had some influence in which civility and politeness indexes were significant: other discussants vs. non-present others. had we chosen a political story less centered around the performance of a non-present other, the comments may have been coded differently. future research should attempt to validate the findings obtained in this study by examining the nature of comments posted in reference to online news stories on controversial political issues that do not necessarily have specific political scapegoats such as climate change, gun control laws, or equal rights for gay men and lesbians. although we drew upon coding categories that were used in previous studies on impoliteness and incivility in online comments (papacharissi, 2004), we were unable to find the specific adjectives and nouns comprising each of these coding categories. consequently, we had to use our discretion to decide on the most appropriate coding categories for words that appeared in the comments that we encountered. also, we coded for the absence or presence of specific words and did not code for the tone of the entire comment. for instance, one commenter wrote, “well the failed one proved what he is all about and how is looking out for a special segment of the population. now you should understand. thank me for educating you.” using our coding schema, we coded that the commenter was simply calling others names (e.g., “failed one”). however, we did not deem the commenter to be hurling aspersions because none of the individual words in those two sentences were derogatory. future research should examine the comment holistically. finally, the four newspapers chosen were based on circulation figures and whether they allowed readers to comment on ap news stories. we did not take socio-demographic factors such as the political climate of geographical regions into consideration when choosing the four newspapers. regression analyses showed that geographical region was a significant predictor of frequency of comments. the cleveland plain dealer accounted for the most number of comments overall and was in the anonymous commenters condition. it is situated in an overwhelmingly democratic county, which may have lead to differences in the coding. interestingly enough, the comments that appeared on the political news story that was carried by the online version of the newspaper were largely hostile and anti-obama. it is plausible that the republicans living in that region knew that they were in the minority and thus felt more comfortable criticizing obama online under the guise of anonymity. more research is needed to examine the extent to which anonymity creates partisan echo chambers online among political groups whose opinions are in the minority. conclusion scholars have expressed hope that the anonymity of online platforms would bridge divides between various social classes of people and enhance deliberative democracy (barlow, 1996; pavlik, 1994). however, the findings from this study seem to suggest otherwise. although anonymous online platforms generate higher levels of discourse than nonymous online platforms, such discourse also tends to be more impolite and uncivil than discourse on nonymous online platforms. thus, there seems to be a tradeoff between anonymity and discourse that is both civil and polite. as such, newspaper websites that prize civil and polite discourse over the volume of discourse might want to consider making users post comments using their facebook accounts. references anderson, a. a., brossard, d., scheufele, d. a., xenos, m. a., & ladwig, p. (2013). crude comments and concern: online incivility's effect on risk perceptions of emerging technologies. journal of computer‐mediated communication. doi: 10.1111/jcc4.12009 bowman, j. s., & knox, c. c. (2008). ethics in government: no matter how long and dark the night. public administration review, 68, 625–637. doi: 10.1111/j.15406210.2008.00903.x brusco, j. m. (2011). know your netiquette. aorn, 94(3), 279-286. culnan, m. j., & markus, m. l. (1987). information technologies. in f. jablin, l. l. putnam, k. roberts, & l. porter (eds.), handbook of organizational communication (pp. 420-443). newbury park, ca: sage. deandrea, d. c., & walther, j. b. (2011). attributions for inconsistencies between online and offline self-presentations. communication research, 38, 805-825. doi: 10.1177/0093650210385340 diakopoulos, n., & naaman, m. (2011, march). towards quality discourse in online news comments. in proceedings of the acm 2011 conference on computer supported cooperative work (pp. 133-142). acm. doi: 10.1145/1958824.1958844 diener, e. (1980). deindividuation: the absence of self-awareness and self-regulation in group members. in p. b. paulus (ed.). psychology of group influence (pp. 209242). hillsdale, n. j.: l. erlbaum. dillard, j. p., wilson, s. r., tusing, k. j., & kinney, t. a. (1997). politeness judgments in personal relationships. journal of language and social psychology, 16, 297–325. doi: 10.1177/0261927x970163003 dubrovsky, v. (1985). real-time computer conferencing versus electronic mail. proceedings of the human factors society. 29, pp. 380-384. santa monica: human factors society. dutton, w. h. (1996). network rules of order: regulating speech in public electronic fora. media, culture & society, 18, 269-290. doi: 10.1177/016344396018002006 festinger, l., pepitone, a., & newcomb, t. (1952). some consequences of deindividuation in a group. journal of abnormal and social psychology, 47, 382389. doi: 10.1037/h0057906 fraser, b. (1990). perspective on politeness. journal of pragmatics, 14, 219–236. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(90)90081-n fraser, b., & nolen, w. (1981). the association of deference with linguistic form. international journal of the sociology of language, 27, 93–109. doi: 10.1515/ijsl.1981.27.93 garnham, n. (1992). the media and the public sphere. in c. calhoun (ed.), habermas and the public sphere (pp. 359-376). cambridge, ma: mit press. goffman, e. (1971). interaction ritual. new york: doubleday. grice, p. (1989). studies in the way of words. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. halpern, d., & gibbs, j. (in press). social media as a catalyst for online deliberation? exploring the affordances of facebook and youtube for political expression. computers in human behavior. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2012.10.008 hargittai, e., gallo, j., & kane, m. (2008). cross-ideological discussions among conservative and liberal bloggers. public choice, 134, 67-86. doi: 10.1007/s11127-0079201-x hayes, a. f., & krippendorf, k. (2007). answering the call for a standard reliability measure for coding data. communication methods and measures, 1, 77-89. doi:10.1080/19312450709336664 hlavach, l. & freivogel, w. h. (2011). ethical implications of anonymous comments posted to online news stories. journal of mass media ethics, 26, 21-37. doi:10.1080/08900523.2011.525190 holtgraves, t. (1997). yes, but . . . positive politeness in conversation arguments. journal of language and social psychology, 16, 222–239. doi: 10.1177/0261927x970162006 jamieson, k. h. and falk, e. (1999). civility in the house of representatives: the 105th congress. the annenberg public policy center of the university of pennsylvania. retrieved 8 october, 2013 from http://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/downloads/political_communication/105th congresscivil/rep26.pdf johnson, d. w., & johnson, r. t. (2000). civil political discourse in a democracy: the contribution of psychology. journal of peace psychology, 6, 291-317. doi: 10.1207/s15327949pac0604_01 lea, m., o'shea, t., fung, p., & spears, r. (1992). flaming in computer-mediated communication: observations, explanations, implications. in m. lea (ed.), contexts of computer-mediated communication (pp. 89-112). london: harvester-wheatsheaf. lea, m., spears, r., & de groot, d. (2001). knowing me, knowing you: anonymity effects on social identity processes within groups. personality and social psychology bulletin, 27, 526-537. doi: 10.1177/0146167201275002 lyotard, j. f. (1984). the postmodern condition. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. marx, g. t. (1999). what's in a name? some reflections on the sociology of anonymity. information society, 15, 99-112. doi:10.1080/019722499128565 ng, e. w. j., & detenber, b. h. (2005). the impact of synchronicity and civility in online political discussions on perceptions and intentions to participate. journal of computermediated communication, 10. doi: 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2005.tb00252.x papacharissi, z. (2002). the virtual sphere: the internet as a public sphere. new media and society, 4, 9-27. doi: 10.1177/14614440222226244 papacharissi, z. (2004). democracy online: civility, politeness, and the democratic potential of online political discussion groups. new media and society, 6, 259-283. doi: 10.1177/1461444804041444 papacharissi, z. (2004). democracy online: civility, politeness, and the democratic potential of online political discussion groups. new media and society, 6, 259-284. doi: 10.1177/1461444804041444 pavlik, j. v. (1994). citizen access, involvement, and freedom of expression in an electronic environment. in f. williams and j. v. pavlik (eds.), the people’s right to know: media, democracy, and the information highway (pp. 139–162). hillsdale, nj: lawrence erlbaum. postmes, t., & spears, r. (1998). deinviduation and anti-normative behavior: a metaanalysis. psychology bulletin, 123, 238-259. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.123.3.238 postmes, t., spears, r., & lea, m. (1998). breeching or building social boundaries? side-effects of computer-mediated communication. communication research, 25, 689715. doi: 10.1177/009365098025006006 postmes, t., spears, r., & lea, m. (2000). the formation of group norms in computermediated communication. human communication research, 26, 341–371. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2958.2000.tb00761. reicher, s. d., spears, r., & postmes, t. (1995). a social identity model of deindividuation phenomena. european review of social psychology, 6, 161-198. doi:10.1080/14792779443000049 schudson, m. (1997). why conversation is not the soul of democracy. critical studies in mass communication, 14, 1–13. doi:10.1080/15295039709367020 shils, e. (1992). civility and civil society. in e. c. banfield (ed.), civility and citizenship (pp. 1–16). new york: pwpa (professors world peace academy). spears, r., & lea, m. (1992). social influence and the influence of the 'social' in computer-mediated communication. in m. lea (ed.), contexts of computer-mediated communication (pp. 30-65). new york: harvester wheatsheaf. spears, r., & lea, m. (1994). panacea or panopticon? the hidden power in computermediated communication. communication research, 21, 427-459. doi: 10.1177/009365094021004001 sunstein, c. r. (2001). republic.com. princeton, nj: princeton university press. the pew research center for the people and the press. (2012). in changing news landscape, even television is vulnerable. retrieved from http://www.peoplepress.org/files/legacy-pdf/2012%20news%20consumption%20report.pdf tidwell, l. c., & walther, j. b. (2006). computer-mediated communication effects on disclosure, impressions, and interpersonal evaluations: getting to know one another a bit at a time. human communication research, 28, 317-348. doi: 10.1111/j.14682958.2002.tb00811.x tsagkias, m., weerkamp, w., & de rijke, m. (2009, november). predicting the volume of comments on online news stories. in proceedings of the 18th acm conference on information and knowledge management (pp. 1765-1768). new york, ny: acm press. walther, j. (1992). interpersonal effects in computer-mediated interaction: a relational perspective. communication research, 19, 52-90. doi: 10.1177/009365092019001003 walther, j. b. (2011). theories of computer-mediated communication and interpersonal relations. in m. l. knapp & j. a. daly (eds.), the handbook of interpersonal communication (4th ed., pp. 443–479). thousand oaks, ca: sage. zimbardo, p. g. (1969). the human choice: individuation, reason, and order vs. deindividuation, impulse and chaos. in j. arnold, & d. levine (eds.), nebraska symposium on motivation. 17(pp. 237-307). lincoln: university of nebraska. table 1 civility, politeness codes and actual sample examples category code (to od or npo) actual user comments civility politically identify (self) “as a democrat, and as a obama voter, political stereotype “you lefties just cant let bush go!” non-political stereotype “this is why people call you desperate!!” threat to freedoms “his efforts to increase socialism in the us won't work as it never has and never will…freedom remains the answer.” politeness sarcasm “pete carroll has been on the right end of both the bush push and now the fail mary.” all caps “you can raise revenue and lower taxes when you grow the economy.” name calling “romney has been a clown since day one” aspersions (excluding lying) “you lose the argument about aca everytime and yet you continue are you stupid as well as ignorant?” accusations of lying “love watching you liars get their butts handed to them. face it doink, obama was exposed last night for the liar he is!” hyperbole “certainly you are refering to the amateur king.” non-cooperation “obama has no intention of ever working with republicans.” vulgarities “hell, he didn't even read his own bill!” table 2 condition, daily circulation, and total number of comments from sample newspapers newspaper condition circulation n of comments cleveland plain dealer anonymous 246,571 431 cincinnati enquirer facebook 144,154 88 toledo blade facebook 94,215 31 dayton daily news anonymous 94,425 32 table 3 comparison of civility indexes by condition facebook anonymous m sd m sd t p civility index 0.076 0.266 0.126 0.332 -1.732 .043 civility – npo 0.059 0.236 0.11 0.314 -1.974 0.25 civility od 0.017 0.129 0.015 0.122 0.130 .448 table 4 comparison of politeness indexes by condition facebook anonymous m sd m sd t p politeness index 0.949 0.955 1.100 1.234 -1.439 .076 politeness – npo 0.723 0.929 0.919 1.061 -1.938 .027 politeness od 0.227 0.173 0.459 0.524 1.034 .151 table 5 pearson chi-square and binomial tests of politeness variables by condition analysis of comments coded ‘yes’ χ2 facebook anonymous binomial p all-caps non-present other 2.424 n=7 (12.5%) n=49 (87.5%) p < .001 name call of non-present other 9.239 * n=9 (9.2%) n=89 (90.8%) p < .001 aspersion other discussants 3.059 n=16 (29.6%) n=38 (70.4%) p = .004 aspersion non-present other 4.889 * n=36 (15.9%) n=191 (84.1%) p < .001 accuse lying non-present other 5.485 * n=23 (30.7%) 52 (69.3%) p = .001 ns=p>.05, *=p<.05, **=p<.001 table 6 comparison of civility means of comments on non-political and political news articles non-political topic political topic m sd m sd t p civility index 0 0 0.125 0.331 -8.742 < .001 civility – npo 0 0 0.108 0.311 -8.057 < .001 civility od 0 0 0.017 0.129 -0.875 .191 table 7 comparison of politeness means of comments on non-political and political news articles non-political topic political topic m sd m sd t p polite index 0.822 0.834 1.09 1.206 -1.461 .072 politeness – npo 0.778 0.849 0.896 1.05 -0.732 .232 politeness – od 0.044 0.208 0.196 0.577 -3.916 < .001 table 8 pearson chi-square and binomial tests of politeness variables by condition analysis of comments coded ‘yes’ χ2 sports politics binomial p all-caps non-present other 0.495 n=3 (5%) n=53 (95%) p < .001 name call of non-present other 0.060 n=7 (7%) n=93 (93%) p < .001 aspersion non-present other 1.182 n=7 (7%) n=91 (93%) p < .001 accuse lying non-present other 7.230 * n=0 n=75 (100%) p = .001 ns=p>.05, *=p<.05, **=p<.001 microsoft word 701-453-1-pb.docx selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 governing our sick souls, mutilating our bodies – the appropriation of social media as a means of corporeal annihilation, resisting the neoliberal logic of self-optimization thomas christian bächle university of bonn germany tbaechle@uni-bonn.de abstract the theory of governmentality assumes a logic of self-optimization and self-regulation to be characteristic of neoliberal societies. this research paradigm has been widely used to analyze social and political phenomena (biopower and biopolitics) and has also been productively applied to cultural phenomena, such as media technologies which can be interpreted as tools to promote and produce narratives in accordance with the idea of leading a valuable life for the common weal. there are digital phenomena, however, which do not seem to follow this logic of optimization, but on the contrary offer instruments of self-destruction and annihilation. in particular anorexia, the deliberate infection with hiv, suicide and the mutilation of bodies contradict this allegedly universal will to improve. within the theoretical framework of governmentality, the limits of the universal ideal of self-optimization (n.b. a normative system of values) become visible, as these phenomena are extraordinary examples of an oppositional appropriation, resisting the powers of set values being exerted on post-modern subjects. keywords governmentality; body; self regulation; digital media; social media discussion the foucauldian notion of governmentality (foucault 1991) describes a complex mode of power exercised through self-regulation of supposedly ‘free’ subjects in neoliberal societies. subjects are produced and produce themselves within a framework of life politics (giddens 1991) around questions of how to live valuable and morally justifiable lives against the background of the common weal. a universal and paradoxically free “will to improve” (li 2007) necessitates subjects to succumb to the prevalent regime of power, urging us to “govern our souls,” even “life itself” (rose 1990, 2007). while pathological minds and bodies have always been intensely subjected to power and politics, they have become much more visible in recent years: coping with depression; watching your sexual health; preventing cancer; healthy lifestyles and the war against obesity; pre-implantation genetic diagnostics in in-vitro-fertilization; calculating genetic risk and proactive breast amputation; optimization of self through therapy; or biopolitics and incentives for reproduction. they all have in common that they inherently perpetuate normative schemes of self-regulation and self-optimization and along the way stigmatize certain allegedly ‘deficient’ identities or social groups entirely. due to these developments the concept of governmentality and ideas around a neoliberal logic of optimization, life politics and biopower have in recent years become increasingly influential (e.g. nadesan 2011, walter 2012). they have proved to be fruitful points of reference for many cultural phenomena with the internet in particular, as its rise is generally said to be closely intertwined with discourses of liberation, power and knowledge. this becomes particularly visible in phenomena related to the notions of the self and the body. the initial narrative of liberation attached to networked communication in the 1990s (discourses of ‘free’ virtual communities bodies and identities) has in light of governmentality been succeeded by a counter-narrative of biopower. digital culture is in this selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 respect seen as a means of subtle self-regulation, towards the optimization of the body and the self and as a consequence can on a larger scale be interpreted as a neoliberal way of government. while the media, especially television, have come under scrutiny for promoting narratives of desirable selves (e.g. gergen 1996) and at the same time provide powerful technologies of the self (foucault 1988), digital media seem to slowly become an even more powerful site of enforcing sharp selfregulation. they appear to be closely linked to governmentality’s mechanisms of producing, controlling, diagnosing and perfecting ‘deficient’ selves and bodies: (1) universal measuring of defined parameters of a ‘normal’ body (weight, hours of sleep, calorie intake, etc.), promoted for example by the quantifiedself-movement, corresponds to the idea of self-health-management; (2) the idea of depression preventing the self from being a productive part of society (teghtsoonian 2008) is mirrored in digital technologies of mood management (e.g. moodscope.com); (3) the use of social networking sites in hiv awareness campaigns adds digital media technologies to the instruments of self-regulation for already heavily governed subjects (e.g. elbe 2009, schenk/singh 2012); or (4) the idea of sexual liberation is contradicted by the tendency of an ever more powerful homogenization of sex and love (illouz 2007; c.f. o’brian/shapiro 2000). thesis within the framework of governmentality theories, however, there are (digital) phenomena, which seem to contradict this widely-diagnosed logic of optimization and can thusly be interpreted as valid forms of resistance in their own right – albeit the thought of self-regulation still plays a major role. the idea of an in any sense ‘deficient’ self or body, it must be noted, is always a normative concept, in this case being valid only in terms of a neoliberal assessment of the value attributed to subjects as commodities. these selves and bodies are measured against the backdrop of predefined ideas of perfection (beauty, health, productivity, happiness, fulfillment, fertility etc.) and are products of the mechanisms of power described by governmentality theories. within this theoretical framework, a self needs to necessarily find its place within pre-existing semiotic and performative discourses and structures of power/knowledge (foucault 1980, butler 1990). in other words, only by appropriating existing systems of representations (and thus power), do we succeed in becoming subjects. succinctly put, appropriation in this sense seems in part to equal subjugation. there are, however, ways of appropriating digital media which renounce the normative notion of optimizing the self. in these cases, subjects may be said to use social media as a technology to construct a self – indeed still in a regulatory manner, yet not in a neoliberal logic of progress, but instead a defeatist logic of annihilation. this refractory construction of self bears subversive potential (cf. butler 1997), as it resists the dominant narratives and measuring marks of how to live a ‘good’ life. examples of this are: 1. the pro ana movement which maintains a considerable digital social network promoting the qualities of anorexia: a powerful regime of self-deprecation and self-annihilation is imposed while highly relying on the subject’s will to self-regulate. 2. suicide forums and manuals which give detailed advice and counseling on how to end one’s life most effectively. 3. so-called bug-chasing-networks which enable people to find hiv-positive partners in order to deliberately get infected with the hi virus. this can be interpreted as subjects deliberately seeking to adopt an identity which is widely regarded as ‘abnormal’ and ‘pathological’. this pursuit of becoming an ‘other’ means resisting dominant narratives of a desirable self. 4. a new amateur culture of participatory pornography ostensibly reinforces the notion of sexual liberation. however, the exposed bodies succumb to highly regulated performative acts, their corporeal integrity being visibly mutilated. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 these phenomena illustrate a counter-narrative against neoliberal homogenization. even though the regulation of self undeniably still plays a major role, the narrative of optimization seems in these cases to have been inverted. subjects choose to construct a self within narrative patterns the dominant discourse denounces as destructive, pathological, dangerous and utterly wrong. this choice reflects a will to improve in a different direction (which is equally legitimate) and can thusly be seen as a form of resistance. social media sites in this regard seem to offer a unique environment for the regulation of self to become extraordinarily powerful. here the mechanisms of governmentality, regulation and resistance find themselves combined with a medium which carries a bias of the non-fictional (the ‘real’ self) and offers detailed taxonomies of the self. there are two reasons in particular the theorization of social media needs to be broadened in this respect: first, through new mobile media such as smartphones and tablets, the documentation and regulation of the self in digital social media has finally become truly ubiquitous; and second, this real-time documentation triggers new forms of public certification of the self, authentication and surveillance. conclusion the examples discussed are part of a counter-narrative to the logic of self-optimization. they cannot be simply dismissed as part of an ‘abnormal other,’ on the contrary, they need to be acknowledged as cultural phenomena of resistance against dominating (and necessarily judgmental) ideas of optimization. while the idea of neoliberal biopower can in no way be discarded altogether, its reach does in no way seem to be universal. in this respect, the role of social media as tools of regulation/resistance needs to be revised. references butler, j. (1990). gender trouble. london: routledge. butler, j. (1997): excitable speech. a politics of the performative. new york: routledge. elbe, s. (2009). virus alert: security, governmentality, and the aids pandemic. new york: columbia university press. foucault, m. (1980). power/knowledge. selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977. new york: pantheon. foucault, m. (1988). technologies of the self. a seminar with michel foucault, ed. by luther martin. amherst, mass : university of massachusetts press. foucault, m. (1991). the foucault effect. studies in governmentality, ed. by graham buchell. london: harvester wheatsheaf. giddens, a. (1991). modernity and self-identity. self and society in the late modern age. stanford/ca: stanford university press. gergen, k. (1996): technology and the self. from the essential to the sublime. in: d grodin, & t lindlof (eds.). constructing the self in a mediated world. inquiries in social construction (pp. 127-140). thousand oaks: sage. illouz, e. (2007). cold intimacies. the making of emotional capitalism. cambridge: polity press. li, t. m. (2007). the will to improve. governmentality, development and the practice of politics. durham: duke university press. nadesan, m. h. (2011). governmentality, biopower, and everyday life. new york: routledge. o’brien, j. & shapiro, e. (2000). ‚doing it‘ on the web. emerging discourses on internet sex. in d gauntlett & r horsley (eds.). web.studies (pp. 114-126). london: hodder education. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 rose, n. (1990). governing the soul. the shaping of the private self. london: routlegde. rose, n. (2007). the politics of life itself. biomedicine, power and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. princeton/oxford: princeton university press. schenk, l. & singh, g. (2012): bringing sexy back into gay men’s community empowerment for hiv prevention, care and support: the poz & proud approach. digital culture & education 4 (1), 1842. teghtsoonian k. (2008). managing workplace depression: contesting the contours of emerging policy. in p moss & k teghtsoonian (eds.). contesting illness. processes and practices (pp. 69-89). toronto: university of toronto press. walters, w. (2012). governmentality. critical encounters. london: routledge. warin, m. (2011). foucault's progeny. jamie oliver and the art of governing obesity. social theory & health 9, 24–40. microsoft word 893-637-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 ir14 panel: conceptualizing non-users of the internet and mapping digital (dis)engagement driven by the government, australia’s national broadband network (nbn) will reshape telecommunications infrastructure by rolling out very high speed broadband networks, with the expectation that ubiquitous connectivity will bring value to all. by highlighting perennial issues of digital engagement and inclusion, this panel questions whether enabling ubiquitous connectivity is sufficient to bring widespread benefit across society. drawing from a conceptual framework that problematizes and redefines the concept of non-users of the internet, the five papers presented foreground concerns surrounding digital engagement by highlighting mechanisms of resistance. a variety of empirical methodological approaches are used to examine opportunities and challenges for less engaged users in australia. the papers offer a range of perspectives on digital disengagement within the context of the public’s everyday internet use. together, these papers provide broad insight into the appropriation of digital technologies, and responses from both the public sector and communities towards fostering digital engagement. rather than assuming that the provision of information and communication technology (ict) will render effective uses, emphasis is placed on the ways that users and organizations resist new technologies and the context in which such resistance unfolds. the first paper, “conceptualizing the nonand low users of the internet”, provides a broad framework to investigate digital engagement and offers context for the specific case studies presented by other panelists. while there have been studies that examine different uses of the internet, less attention has been given to the varied degrees of non or low level uses. acknowledging that there is a considerable variation among non-users, the paper examines a broader spectrum of non to low internet uses and conceptualizes these in terms of digital disengagement. second, “users and non-users of next generation broadband” presents a case study of household broadband adoption and non-adoption in brunswick, victoria in australia, which is one of the early release sites of the australian nbn. the paper identifies that adoption of broadband does not occur in isolation, but as part of increasingly dense household media ecology of digital infrastructures, devices, services and knowledge. the third paper, “mum. dad. do you need some help with that? empowering older australian adults in a digital era”, examines the challenges middle and older aged people experience while adapting to the digital technologies used to communicate with family members. it explores limitations in digital media literacy, particularly surrounding understandings of devices, forms of connectivity, and installation of devices, and highlights how digital connectivity may cause intergenerational tensions. the final paper, “digitally disengaged: government resistance to civic participation”, examines digital engagement through an australian local government study conducted in the city of casey, victoria. it highlights government non-use of official spaces for civic participation, and suggests that current limitations to online involvement are often the result of insufficient government reception of, and responses to, citizens’ views. the papers presented in this panel illustrate that improved access to technological infrastructure will not routinely transfer into effective use of icts and increased digital engagement for all, as often implicitly assumed by governments. these empirical investigations of individual users, households, communities, and organizations highlight a complex interplay between ict infrastructure, acceptance and adoption of digital media. individual and institutional variables and settings hold considerable roles in shaping capacity to access, literacy to use, and the effectiveness of communication through digital technologies. as such, this panel illustrates that digital engagement is influenced by the capabilities and willingness of individuals, communities and organizations to decipher, adapt to, and identify potential benefits from digital media use. this observation should be reflected in government selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 policies and practices intended to encourage digital inclusion. the identified issues associated with non and low internet use indicate, however, that while digital engagement can and will be fostered, various forms of resistance towards technology use in everyday practice are also likely to persist. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 conceptualizing the (non) users of the internet sora park university of canberra australia sora.park@canberra.edu.au catherine middleton ryerson university canada catherine.middleton@ryerson.ca matthew allen deakin university australia matthew.allen@deakin.edu.au abstract most studies about internet use examine how usage differs among users and why. less attention has been paid to the varied degrees of non-use or low levels of use. non-adopters of digital media are usually understood as not having access to digital media. however, there is a considerable variation among them with regards to how and why they lack the connectivity. furthermore, it is important to acknowledge those who do have access but use the internet only in a limited capacity. digital exclusion does not only occur among those who do not have access but expands to those who cannot use the internet effectively. a new type of digital exclusion is emerging due to this variation of usage and appropriation. we propose a nuanced approach in defining the various levels of internet nonand low use. rather than highlighting how social exclusion, therefore the lack of connectivity, leads to digital exclusion, this paper looks at the various contexts in which people might be digital disengaged and therefore digitally excluded. keywords digital divide; digital exclusion; internet use; broadband; non-users introduction we can no longer separate the physical and digital world, and the interplay between located and distributed communications is becoming more and more significant every day. the internet and related networks gives rise, in the words of rainie and wellman (2012), to a new “social operating system”, effectively imbricated into our daily lives, both in its absence and presence. effective use of digital networks has become crucial for social connectedness, civic engagement and economic opportunities. the benefits of being connected range from productivity or employment gains in work, through to the capacity to engage meaningfully in social relations of both a private and public nature. in particular, as communities exploit the effectiveness of the internet, civic participation is coming to depend on connectivity (hargattai & walejko, 2008). gaining and spending social capital through digital networks now defines the information society. broadband connectivity, designed and built to provide the technologies for populations to embrace inclusion in a networked information society, has also had a paradoxical opposite outcome. uneven availability of technology, limited user skills and, most of all, ill-distributed awareness of the potential in such networks has meant increased risks of exclusion for some, even as others benefit. the australian government for example envisions social inclusion being increased through its new broadband program, the national broadband network (nbn), believing that by extending broadband connectivity it is building a nation in which every citizen has the opportunity to participate in the community (australian social inclusion board, 2012). however, merely providing home access to technologies cannot overcome longstanding barriers to use. for instance, existing socio-economic disadvantage warrants continued attention in its relation to internet use (livingstone & helsper, 2007). many who are socially excluded also live in communities with poor broadband access, with these two factors often times reinforcing each other (dailey, et al, 2010). income, employment, geographic area, gender and age all play a role here (holloway, 2002; lengsfeld, 2011; holfeld et al, 2008; hargittai & shafer, 2006; asthana, halliday & gibson, 2009). nonetheless, we cannot assume existing social exclusion is exactly the same as digital exclusion. we need to examine why people are outside the digital mainstream, and determine the extent to which this is due to reasons of exclusion or choice. by exploring the implications such lack of participation has selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 on their everyday lives, we can begin to bridge the second level digital divide that occurs when physical access is less of an issue. as ubiquitous, affordable network connectivity is provided through initiatives like australia’s nbn, the question remains as to why some people do not take it up, or make limited use of it, and thus become part of the digitally excluded. while appearing connected, they are not techno-socially connected. as access issues recede, we need to carefully consider “non and low users” those who have limited or partial uses of the technology. revisiting the digital divide scholars have acknowledged that the dichotomy between haves and have-nots is simplistic (barzilainahon, 2006; middleton, veenhof & leith, 2010; selwyn, 2003; selwyn, 2004; sourbati, 2009; tsatsou, 2011; verdegem & verhoest, 2009). a more useful idea is to see the information society creating a continuum of digital inclusion and exclusion, (warschauer 2002; lenhart and horrigan, 2003; eynon & geniets, 2012). rather than positioning “access” as the main determinant of social exclusion, we should examine how and how much people use digital technologies particularly in relation to the different levels of skills that result in divergent uses (dobransky & hargittai, 2006; vicente & lopez, 2010). this second level digital divide, amplified by the multiple levels of access, use and appropriation of technologies (livingstone & helsper, 2007; park, 2012; selwyn, 2004; tsatsou, 2011; van dijk, 2006a; verdegem & verhoest, 2009), must be understood now as a question of the quality and extent of digital engagement, the realization of potentials, not just the connecting and skilling of a receptive population (see tsatsou, 2011). gurstein’s (2003) concept of effective use extends the access issue to larger concerns of how uses can benefit individuals and communities, shifting the focus to the entire process of harnessing infrastructure, hardware, software and social organizational elements for collective benefit. in order to use the online resources for beneficial activities, one must have constant access and the motivation to use various services. meaningful use, as discussed by ito, et al, (2008), can also reframe our awareness that access and use are not, of themselves, sufficient. reconceptualising non users studies on non adopters of digital technologies usually attempt to find out why people choose not to be connected and find no uniform reason. but they have shown that socio-economic status and associated costs of adopting new technologies are less significant than factors such as: skills and efficacy (world internet project, 2010), motivation and disinterest (verdegem & verhoest, 2009; zickuhr, 2010), and attitudes and personal traits (davis, 1989; matei & ball-rokeach, 2003; stanley, 2003; verdegem & verhoest, 2009; vishwanath & golohaber, 2003). “non-users” have been variously labeled and constructed as subjects of research: dropouts (katz, rice & aspen, 2001), laggards (goldenberg & oreg, 2007), unadopters (dailey et al, 2010), narrow frequent users, occasional users and non-users (selwyn et al, 2005; selwyn, 2006), unengaged and marginalized (longley et al, 2006), nonor sporadic users (brandtzaeg, heim & karahasanovic, 2010) and lapsed users (eynon & geniets, 2012). such people are hard to understand as a collective, as well, since many move back and forth between being users and non users (mehra, merkel & bishop, 2004). according to mossberger et al (2008), digital citizenship requires online participation. for this reason, they define digital citizens as those who use the internet every day. infrequent or occasional users either might not have the skills to use the internet effectively or do not have the opportunity to develop such skills. allen’s (2010) experience of connectivity provides a useful the framework for studying internet uses and non-uses. he defines connectivity as “having and using internet connection at home” (p. 351). the experience of connectivity is the ways in which people utilize the internet to achieve a variety of outcomes in their everyday lives. brandtzaeg (2010) defines media behavior as the totality of human behavior in relation to new media use, which includes both the frequency of use (the level of participation) and the form of use (content and activity preference). the latter is similar to the quality of use, which can largely be determined by the motivation of the users. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 by examining how and how much people use the internet and using such measures to provide a new framework of researching uses and non uses of the internet, we can link how digital engagement is related to digital inclusion among the various user typologies. similarly, when we examine nonand low users of the internet, the context in which digital disengagement may lead to digital exclusion must be considered. references asthana, sheena, halliday, joyce, & gibson, alex. (2009). social exclusion and social justice: a rural perspective on resource allocation. policy & politics, 37, 201-214. australian social inclusion board. (2012). social inclusion in australia: how australia is faring 2012 (2nd ed.): australian government, department of the prime minister and cabinet. barzilai-nahon, karine. (2006). gaps and bits: conceptualizing measurements for digital divide/s. the information society, 22(5), 269-278. brandtzaeg, petter bae. (2010). towards a unified media-user typology (mut): a meta-analysis and review of the research literature on media-user typologies. computers in human behavior, 26(5), 940-956. brandtzaeg, petter bae, heim, jan, & karahasanovic, amela. (2010). understanding the new digital divide: a typology of internet users in europe. international journal of human-computer studies, 69, 123-138. dailey, dharma, bryne, amelia, powell, alison, karaganis, joe, & chung, jaewon. (2010). broadband adoption in low-income communities: social science research council. davis, fred d. (1989). perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user acceptance of information technology. mis quarterly, 13, 319-340. dobransky, kerry, & hargittai, eszter. (2006). the disability divide in internet access and use. information, communication & society, 9, 313-334. eynon, r. and geniets, a. (2012) on the periphery? understanding low and discontinued internet use amongst young people in britain. report for the nominet trust. goldenberg, jacob, & oreg, shaul. (2007). laggards in disguise: resistance to adopt and the leapfrogging effect. technological forecasting and social change, 74(8), 1272-1281. gurstein, m. (2003). effective use: a community informatics strategy beyond the digital divide. first monday, 8(12). hargittai, eszter, & shafer, steven. (2006). differences in actual and perceived online skills: the role of gender. social science quarterly, 87(2), 432-448 hargittai, eszter, & walejko, gina. (2008). the participation divide: content creation and sharing in the digital age. information, communication & society, 11(2), 239 256. hohlfeld, t. n., ritzhaupt, a. d., barron, a. e., & kemker, k. (2008). examining the digital divide in k-12 public schools: four-year trends for supporting ict literacy in florida. computers & education, 51(4), 1648-1663. holloway, darren. (2002). disparities in internet access: a case study of the digital divide in western sydney. australian journal of social issues, 37(1), 51-69. horrigan, john. (2010). broadband adoption and use in america obi working paper series (vol. 1): federal communications commission. ito, m., horst, h., bittanti, m., boyd, d., herr-stephenson, b., lange, p., pascoe,c.j., & robinson, l. (2008). living and learning with new media: summary of findings from the digital youth project building the field of digital media and learning. the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation. katz, j. e. , rice, r. e., & aspen, p. . (2001). the internet, 1995-2000. american behavioral scientist, 45(3), 405-419 livingstone, sonia, & helsper, ellen. (2007). gradations in digital inclusion: children, young people and the digital divide. new media & society, 9(4), 671-696 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 6 longley, pa, webber, r, & li, c. (2006). the uk geography of the e-society: a national classification centre for advanced spatial awareness (ucl), london, uk: university college london. rainie, lee & wellman, barry. (2012). networked: the new social operating system cambridge, ma.: mit press matei, sorin, & ball-rokeach, sandra. (2003). the internet in the communication infrastructure of urban residential communities: macroor mesolinkage? journal of communication, 53(4), 642-657. mehra, bharat, merkel, cecelia, & bishop, ann peterson. (2004). the internet for empowerment of minority and marginalized users. new media & society, 6(6), 781-802 middleton, c., veenhof, b., & leith, j. (2010). intensity of internet use in canada: understanding different types of users. ottawa: statistics canada – business special surveys and technology statistics division working papers. mossberger, karen, tolbert, caroline j., & mcneal, ramona s. (2008). digital citizenship: the internet, society, and participation. cambridge, ma: mit press. park, s. (2012). dimensions of digital media literacy and the relationship to social exclusion. media international australia, 142, 87-100. putnam, r.d. (2000). bowling alone: the collapse and revival of american community. new york: simon and schuster. selwyn, neil. (2003). apart from technology: understanding people's non-use of information and communication technologies in everyday life. technology in society, 25, 99–116. selwyn, neil. (2004). reconsidering political and popular understandings of the digital divide. new media & society, 6(3), 341-362 selwyn, neil. (2006). digital division or digital decision? a study of non-users and low-users of computers. poetics, 34(4-5), 273-292. selwyn, neil, gorard, stephen, & furlong, john. (2005). whose internet is it anyway? exploring adults' (non)use of the internet in everyday life. european journal of communication, 20, 5-26. sourbati, maria. (2009). media literacy and universal access in europe. the information society: an international journal, 25(4), 248 254. stanley, laura d. (2003). beyond access: psychosocial barriers to computer literacy. special issue: icts and community networking. the information society: an international journal, 19(5), 407 416. tsatsou, panayiota. (2011). digital divides revisited: what is new about divides and their research? media, culture & society, 33(2), 317-331. van dijk, j. (2006). digital divide research, achievements and shortcomings. poetics, 34(4-5), 221-235. verdegem, pieter, & verhoest, pascal. (2009). profiling the non-user: rethinking policy initiatives stimulating ict acceptance. telecommunications policy, 33(10-11), 642-652. vicente, maria rosalia, & lopez, ana jesus. (2010). a multidimensional analysis of the disability digital divide: some evidence for internet use. information society, 26, 48-64. vishwanath, arun, & golohaber, gerald m. (2003). an examination of the factors contributing to adoption decisions among late-diffused technology products. new media & society, 5, 547-572. warschauer, mark. (2002). reconceptualising the digital divide first monday, 7(1). zickuhr, kathryn. (2010). generations 2010: pew research center’s internet & american life project. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 7 users and non-users of next generation broadband bjorn nansen university of melbourne australia nansenb@unimelb.edu.au michael arnold university of melbourne australia mvarnold@unimelb.edu.au rowan wilken swinburne university australia rwilken@swin.edu.au martin gibbs university of melbourne australia martin.gibbs@unimelb.edu.au abstract this paper explores the contexts and motivations that underpin the uptake of australia’s national broadband network (nbn). the findings are drawn from a mixed-methods research study of households using surveys and interviews conducted in 2011 and 2012 in an early release site of the nbn rollout. whilst use and non-use have traditionally been treated as questions of digital access, inequality and exclusion, there is evidence for emerging forms of non-use characterized by more critical and discriminating approaches. we contribute to this evidence, but our findings suggest that use and non-use of high speed broadband do not occur in isolation or as an expression of individual choice, but as part of increasingly dense household media ecologies of digital infrastructures, devices, services and knowledge. keywords technology use; non-use; broadband; household adoption; australia; national broadband network introduction the issue of internet use and non-use were traditionally treated as simple questions of inequality and exclusion, accounted for in terms of lack of access to technologies, and addressed by greater provision of those technologies. more sophisticated approaches argued that personal, social, cultural and economic conditions were important to use and non-use (e.g acma, 2009; warschauer, 2003); that the prevailing emphasis on technology-provision alone did little for effective use. more recently, the role of individual agency in the context of a diffusionist model of uneven yet inevitable technology adoption has been reasserted, a position which points to a growing population of individuals who actively choose to evade (lenhart et al., 2003), reject (wyatt, 2003) or resist digital media (satchell and dourish, 2009). this paper draws attention to the ways individual agency is mediated by the relational, material and interdependent contexts in which use and non-use takes place. we seek to understand how technology innovations are incorporated – or not – not in and of themselves, but as part of a dynamic household media ecology shaped by issues such as complexity, accumulation, functionality, interoperability and management. methods this paper is based on research findings from a study of household broadband adoption and nonadoption during the early rollout stages of the australian national broadband network (nbn) (nansen et al., 2013). to investigate household broadband adoption, we visited 2600 homes in the early release site of brunswick, victoria. we surveyed 282 households in late 2011, including homes with an nbn connection and those without, and conducted follow-up interviews (based on a purposive sample of various internet connection types) and surveying of a smaller subset of these households. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 8 background over 80% of australian households now have internet access, with over 90% of these connections via broadband (abs, 2012; ewing and thomas, 2012). these metrics (internet, broadband, no internet) offer a starting point for analysis, yet inattention to both the variability and interdependency of internet infrastructures within the sociotechnical contexts of households disregards the ways technologies complicate patterns of adoption and non-adoption. households have differing internet options available to them (e.g. dial-up, dsl/adsl, fibre-optic, cable, satellite, wireless broadband), some of which are beyond the household’s control, and this complexity is compounded by the aggregation and interaction of the household ecology of hardware devices, internal connections, software, and of course the digital competency and interest of householders (shepherd et al., 2007; wilken et al., 2011). findings the survey data (see figure 1) revealed that nbn use and non-use involved a number of factors. these can be grouped into three categories, which show: 1. 36% of non-using households were not in a position to make a decision to adopt – due to lack of awareness (17%), service provider difficulties around contracts or plans (5%), lack of communication from nbn installers (6%), or because their landlord had not agreed to a household connection (8%). 2. 28% of non-users had made a decision to refuse to adopt – due to perceptions of increase cost associated with the nbn (17%), or satisfaction with their current internet (11%). 3. 28% of non-users were in the process of adopting the nbn – 13% of respondents had the nbn equipment installed but not activated with a service provider yet, while a further 15% were in the process of organizing a service with an internet provider but this was delayed. figure 1: reason for non-adoption of high-speed broadband selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 9 the quantitative data suggests that a range of external factors mediate and shape use and non-use within household decision-making, whilst the qualitative data below helps to unpack some of these factors. discussion brunswick residents were among the first to confront a new set of decisions, dealing with unfamiliar broadband technology, and an installation process that was still in an early stage of development. yet, issues of broadband literacy, uncertainty in decision-making within a complicated environment of internet service provision, and difficulties integrating new technologies into the existing household media ecology are common difficulties, and were evident in our discussions with households. these findings revealed that use and non-use of the nbn does not occur in isolation, and must be considered as part of an aggregation of household media and technologies, their provision and management, and their understanding within the wider media infrastructure. refusal to adopt the nbn was often a decision about arrangements of complementarity or substitution within the household and wider media ecology, based upon the affordances of different forms of broadband internet: “my wife and i have moved to wireless broadband, we each have one, on different accounts ... it offers us flexibility because we just moved house, and if we used the hard-wired broadband it would be hard for us to connect and disconnect the service if we move.” reluctance to adopt the nbn was often explained by an absence of information, including but not restricted to the nbn, extending across the ecologies of technologies and services: “it’s always complicated; i don’t know why it is that telecommunication companies make their products incomprehensible.” in the face of complexity, the reluctance of many households seemed to be a decision not to decide: “i couldn’t be bothered changing everything around because then you have to get new modems and all that sort of stuff...” resigned adoption of high-speed broadband often emerged as a response to the inevitability of technical innovation, albeit underutilized: “i probably have enough computing power on my computer to design the space shuttle and i use it 90% of the time as a word processing machine. and the speed of the internet i could probably do something extraordinary but i won’t use it…” further, nbn adoption did not conclude with activation but often required ongoing forms of regulation to manage issues of installation, integration and interoperability with the existing household equipment: “we had very poor signal coming from the wifi so they had to install a signal amplifier, a boost to the wifi. we had a wifi before but they gave us a new modem…” finally, adoption of new technologies is also associated with disuse and problems of redundancy: “i’ve got boxes down there of cables and leads and ports and every other little bit that i’ve bought over the years to get rid of.” conclusion the introduction of the nbn is occurring in an environment in which the accumulation of new devices and services is often accepted as part and parcel of contemporary living, and in which short life cycles, quick turn-over and high redundancy rates would appear to be a digital industry standard. in these contexts, non-adoption needs to be considered less within a dichotomy of use and non-use, and instead as part of an increasingly differentiated landscape of engagement in which limited, partial and legacy uses of digital media and the internet abound. the decision to use or not may be an expression of individual choice, yet it is also shaped by complicated ecologies of digital infrastructures, devices, services and knowledge. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 10 acknowledgments this research was funded through a postdoctoral research fellowship from the institute for a broadband enabled society (ibes), and a research grant from the australian communications consumer action network (accan). we are grateful to our participants for their contribution. references australian bureau of statistics (2012). household use of information technology, australia, 2010-11. canberra: abs. australian communications and media authority (acma). (2009). australia in the digital economy. report 2: online participation. canberra: acma. ewing, s. & thomas, j. (2012). the internet in australia, 2012. melbourne: arc centre of excellence for creative industries and innovation swinburne university of technology. lenhart, a., horrigan, j., rainie, l., allen, k., boyce, a., madden, m., & o’grady, e. (2003). the ever-shifting internet population: a new look at internet access and the digital divide. pew internet & american life project. nansen, b., arnold, m., wilken, r. & gibbs, m. (2013). broadbanding brunswick – high-speed broadband and household media ecologies: a report on household take-up and adoption of the national broadband network in a first release site. sydney: australian communications consumer action network. selwyn, n. (2006). digital division or digital decision? a study of non-users and low-users of computers. poetics 34, 273–292. satchell, c. & dourish, p. (2009). beyond the user: use and non-use in hci. in proceedings of ozchi 2009. acm press. shepherd, c., arnold, m., bellamy, c., and gibbs, m. (2007). the material ecologies of domestic icts. the electronic journal of communication 17(1-2). warschauer, m. (2003). technology and social inclusion: rethinking the digital divide, cambridge: mit press. wilken, r., arnold m., & nansen b. (2011). broadband in the home pilot study: suburban hobart. telecommunications journal of australia 61(1), 5.1 to 5.16. wyatt, s. (2003). non-users also matter: the construction of users and non-users of the internet. in pinch and oudshoorn (eds) how users matter, 67-79. mit press. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 11 mum. dad. do you need some help with that? empowering older australians in a digital era. scott rickard university of canberra australia scott.rickard@canberra.edu.au abstract the change to a digital environment for australian families is more than simply adopting internet connectivity or a mobile phone. moving from an analog environment and into a digital sphere for many individuals is confronting: the transition requires digital media literacy, that is an understanding of devices, forms of connectivity, installation of devices and how best to use digital connectivity to connect with other family members. in this australian study the interviewees revealed that tensions occur between middle and older adults as both generations try to understand the effect of the change to a digital environment on each other and navigate the best path that enables communication and connection between family members. this paper will primarily draw on the interviews held with middle adult john and his mother vera1. keywords older adults; digital media literacy; families methodology the adoption and practice of digital communication technologies of two generations, youth and elderly has been the subject of much international research (lim and tan, 2003; lally, 2002; ling, 2004; wong, 2006). however, there is a hidden group of consumers in the ‘gap’, the middle adults. the middle adults who as individuals and in their roles as parents to some, and children to others have distinctly different needs from the individualized groups of youth and elderly. for this group, digital technology, and their uses for it seem much more mundane but are in fact integral to the family unit as they form the pivot point between generations. the larger study offers a unique insight into intra-generational digital communication between family members, and specifically middle adults and their older adult parents. a few communication studies are framed using nuclear families with parents and children (canon and caronia, 2001; green, holloway and quin, 2004; lally, 2002; lim and tan, 2003), however the majority of studies use parts of a family such as intergenerational generations like grandparents and grandchildren or a single familial generation such as the elderly (haddon, 2000; ling, 2007; wong 2006). sometimes studies are framed around a particular gender and their adoption of technology (dare, 2008; dobashi, 2005; gray, 1995; rose 2004). another common framework is to investigate aspects of family communication as part of a larger investigation on cultural practices such as the nordic region of europe (kaare et al., 2007). this study is unique in that it investigates families from a familial generational position such as youth, middle adult and older adult recognizing that within families there are distinct familial responsibilities and expectations placed on each generation. the focus of this paper is the tensions that arise between the middle adults (who were the largest respondent group in the study) and their older adult parents in relation to technology adoption and practice. the explosion of multiple internet devices within homes places greater emphasis on the need for individuals to be digitally literate in order to be socially included. in 2010 a study revealed that over 50% of all melbourne homes use four internet enabled devices (thom, 2010, para 3). the data for this paper comes from 11 face-to-face interviews with middle and older adults from 8 families. the interviews were in-depth and unstructured with a focus on understanding the broader study question of 1 all participant names have been changed and pseudonyms used for reasons of privacy. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 12 how the generations of family ‘youth’, ‘middle’ and ‘older adult’ communicate with each other using digital communication technologies. results and discussion during their interviews the middle adults offered their reflections of their older adult parents use of digital communication technologies. these can be categorized into disinterest, resistance and lack of conceptual understanding. older adults expressing a disinterest or resistance to technology is well documented (haddon, 2000; palmer, 2011; wong, 2006; wyatt, 2003). this paper focuses on the third barrier identified in this study a lack of conceptual understanding. unlike disinterest or resistance, a lack of conceptual understanding is not tied with the older adults inability to use the device but rather the inability to recall or learn new features because they fail to understand the basic premise on which the communication technology works. for these older adults it causes confusion and they often selfdeprecate their abilities with the device and its applications. in this study older adult and part time worker vera indicates in her interview that she fails to understand digital technologies and demonstrates a lack of understanding in her everyday practice. while her son john can explain to her about how a particular device works and indeed write instructions when needed, vera often fails to comprehend how things correlate, even if it may be a similar task that she completes daily. therefore when something goes wrong, vera gives up hope as she has a complete lack of understanding about the device and how it works. this can sometime create tension between her and john as he works hard to help her understand technology. john assists his mother with computer software, her entertainment system at home, her personal laptop and the setting up of her wireless connection at home. john demonstrates empathy for vera and it motivates him to assist. he considers her lack of skill within context, “my mum learnt how to write shorthand, which is a lost art these days ... i would contrast me trying to me trying to learn shorthand is like my mum trying to understand computer technology. i don’t understand shorthand at all … it’s the same that i could be taught a squiggle is an f, but i wouldn’t understand why and how she got the squiggle to be an f. it’s the same with computers to her”. the tension discussed above between vera and john is common between the middle adults and their older adult parents in this study. however rather than holding a negative perspective in the main the middle adults in this study supported their older adult parents lack of conceptual understanding through empowerment. empowering older adults in this study involved providing access as well as supporting education. different approaches were taken by the participants to teach their parents how to use technology. some participants provided written instructions and guidelines (john for vera), while simon encouraged his father to enroll in short courses. having themselves taken advantage of peer based learning some of the middle adults (simon, andrea and beth) encouraged their parents to do the same. peer based learning for older adults is acknowledged as one of the most effective teaching methods (palmer, 2011). conclusion the tensions that arose between the middle adults and their older adult parents in this study resulted in proactive measures on the part of the middle adults. keen to get their parents using digital communication technologies it can be argued that they found positive methods of engaging their parents in technology by assisting with adoption and fostering empowerment through peer based learning where possible. some middle adults also demonstrated empathy with their parents as can be seen in john’s statement about vera’s shorthand skills. this empathy also encouraged john to see past his mother’s inability to understand technology and to assist where possible with instructions and ‘how to’ graphics when she asked for help. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 13 references caron, a. h., & caronia, l. (2001). active users and active objects: the mutual construction of families and communication technologies. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies 7(38). dare, j. (2008). like mother, like daughter: intergenerational media use for kin-keeping and connection. in e. tilley (ed.) power & place: refereed proceedings of the australian & new zealand communication association conference, wellington, july 9 – 11. issn 1179-0199 retrieved from http://www.anzca.net/past-conferences/anzca08proceedings.html dobashi, s. (2005). the gendered use of keitai in domestic contexts. in m. ito, d. okabe & m. matsuda (eds.), personal, portable, pedestrian. mobile phones in japanese life. (pp. 219-236). mit press. gray, a. (1995). technology in the domestic environment. in s. jackson & s. moores (eds.). the politics of domestic consumption. hertfordshire: prentice hall/harvester wheatsheaf. green, l., holloway, d., & quin, r. (2004). @ home. australian family life and the internet. in g. goggin (ed.). virtual nation. sydney: unsw press. haddon, l. (2000). social exclusion and information and communication technologies. lessons from studies of single parents and the young elderly. [article]. new media & society 2(4), 387 406. kaare, b. h., brandtzaeg, p. b., heim, j., & endestad, t. (2007). in the borderland between family orientation and peer culture: the use of communication technologies among norwegian teens. new media & society 9(4), 603-624. lally, e. (2002). at home with computers. oxford, uk: berg. lim, s., & tan, y. (2003). old people and new media in wired societies. media asia 30(2), 95-102. ling, r. (2004). mobile telephones and the disturbance of the public sphere. retrieved from http://richardling.com/papers/2004_disturbance_of_social_sphere.pdf ling, r. (2007). children, youth and mobile communication. journal of children and media 1(1), 60 67. doi:10.1080/17482790601005173 palmer, s. (2011). where do i start? female seniors and the internet 2011. perth: council on the ageing (wa)/accan. rose, g. (2004). 'everyone's cuddled up and it just looks really nice': an emotional geography of some mums and their family photos. social & cultural geography 5(4), 549-564. thom, g. (2010, 26/7/2010). internet is our food and drink. news.com.au. retrieved from http:www.news.com.au/internet-is-our-food-and-drink-story-e6frf7kx-1225896804453? wong, w. w. (2006). mobile phones, aged homes, and family relations in hong kong preliminary observations. in p. law, l. fortunati & s. yang (eds.). new technologies in global societies. singapore: world scientific publishing co. pty ltd. wyatt, s. (2005). non-users also matter: the construction of users and non-users of the internet. in n. oudshoorn & t. pinch (eds.). how users matter: the co-construction of users and technologies. cambridge, mass: the mit press. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 14 digitally disengaged: government resistance to civic participation julie freeman university of canberra australia julie.freeman@canberra.edu.au abstract this paper examines digital engagement through local e-government. drawing from a local government case study, it suggests that limitations to online civic involvement are often the result of insufficient government reception of, and responses to, citizens’ views. interviews with local representatives illustrate inadequate digital education and broad reluctance towards civic inclusion in political processes. nevertheless, the local government established a consultation website to facilitate increased citizen discussion and participation in decision-making. examination of this website reveals intermittent and generic government responses, with little feedback on how civic views inform the actions undertaken. citizens’ posts demonstrate disenchantment due to scarce government involvement and identify that the website may be a tokenistic attempt to placate the community. in addition to providing frameworks for online participation, e-government engagement requires governments to consider civic views, contribute to debate, and enable citizen input to impact decision-making. keywords e-government; local government; citizen participation; digital (dis)engagement local e-government: political willingness towards e-participation governments are increasingly utilizing e-government to aid information dissemination, improve service delivery, and enable citizen participation. local governments offer key contexts for egovernment for reasons of scale and as they occupy the site where the majority of citizen interactions with government occur (see, for example, o’toole, 2009; bradford, 2008; jimenez et al., 2012). however, use of information and communication technologies (icts) is politically shaped (chadwick, 2011). government centricity in e-government developments often emphasizes mechanisms that aid efficiency, largely overlooking civic inclusion in political processes (verdegem & hauttekeete, 2010). jensen’s (2009) empirical investigation into citizens’ interactions with local government highlights that offline communication channels are more likely to impact policy-making than online participation methods. moreover, icts are often only used by governments to suit particular priorities and to respond to political stresses, rather than on account of advanced technological and communicative capabilities (jensen, 2009). in order words, when icts are used to communicate with citizens, it is often reactive rather than proactive in nature. jensen (2009) further notes that “there is little political will to use the internet to facilitate greater levels of participation” (p. 298). civic participation through e-government therefore requires a governmental culture change to be receptive and response to civic views (gauld et al., 2009). following these findings, this paper explores the understandings and experiences of political representatives in relation to ict use for civic engagement, and examines whether current opportunities for e-participation influence local decision-making. findings are drawn from semistructured interviews conducted with five councilors from the australian municipality of the city of casey (casey) and through examination of casey’s civic consultation website.2 2 in accordance with ethics requirements, interviewed councilors cannot be identified by name. each has subsequently been assigned with a color. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 15 e-participation in the city of casey key e-government and digital engagement findings that emerged from councilor interviews include substantial variations in ict knowledge and broad resistance towards civic inclusion in decisionmaking. in relation to ict knowledge, on the one hand, some councilors were aware of ways icts can save time, increase information dissemination, and facilitate complementary understandings of political issues (councilor red; councilor black). there was also evidence that councilors recognized digital divide constraints including access and literacy issues (councilor yellow; councilor blue; councilor red). on the other hand, there was considerable confusion surrounding the actual technologies. this was evident in comments such as: i think broadband is available. everyone keeps talking about broadband and whatever the other one is called… i don’t know whether broadband is a must have (councilor white). i don’t get contacted by anyone via the internet. unless, does emailing come under the internet? (councilor yellow). these types of comments suggest there is a need for further ict education amongst local representatives. on the topic of civic inclusion in decision-making, interviewed councilors demonstrated reluctance towards both on and offline methods of citizen participation, as well as use of civic input in political processes. for example, councilors viewed petitions as “dodgy” (councilor yellow) and citizen attendance at council meetings as “a waste of time” (councilor white). direct contact with representatives was the only “genuine” (councilor yellow) form of participation, provided there were enough citizens with similar concerns. when there was civic involvement in previous issues, the decisions “never really got down to the citizens’ influence” (councilor black). when discussing twoway discussion forums, councilor white indicated that citizens are largely uninformed and too emotional to effectively contribute to debate, with civic involvement unnecessary given representatives are elected to make decisions. one of the rare positive comments was the suggestion that polls could be sent out via email to gauge public opinion (councilor blue). in regards to the potential development of online practices, negative understandings of ict-enabled practices far outweighed positive comments. for example, there was concern surrounding the increased visibility associated with webcasting council meetings: several councilors wouldn’t want to have been put under the pump of having their actions broadcast… fear of being recorded would’ve been too much (councilor red). overall, councilors’ comments suggest a failure amongst representatives to fully understand and appreciate the importance of citizen participation in political decision-making, and the role icts may play in this process. these observations do not bode well for the likely development and success of eparticipation practices. the council has, nonetheless, continued to develop its online presence with the inclusion (in 2011) of casey conversations, a civic consultation website on municipal issues. casey conversations (caseyconversations.com.au) is intended to help the local government understand the needs and preferences of the community and enable civic involvement to shape decision-making. the development and moderation of the website are outsourced, and no elected representatives have posted comments (as of february 2013), with an administrator instead responsible for official comments. examination of the discussion forums revealed that the administrator’s comments accounted for approximately 25 percent of all postings since the site’s inception. however, these posts are sporadic, with numerous comments occurring on individual days and long periods in between. furthermore, these posts frequently only offer generic, thank-you for your feedback replies to citizens. citizens’ comments illustrate continuing disenchantment with the council’s insufficient responsiveness through the website, the lack of feedback surrounding use of civic input, and how the site is being used to shift responsibility for issues. examples of these concerns include: selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 16 so after more than 4 months of community feedback for this topic, may i ask what has actually been provided to the councilors regarding this feedback and if their staunch 'advocating' has achieved anything? also it seems from the lack of updates and other new topics in general that community feedback is no longer sought after (daniel, april 13, 2012). 3 not one of the issues raised on this forum has resulted in a fix, just handballing blame from one sad and sorry government department to another and back again (not happy, march 19, 2012). i believe this site is more of a front to stop us calling and bothering casey. seriously will we get any feedback from this? (peterk, july 19, 2011). these and other citizen comments suggest that casey conversations may be a tokenistic attempt at engagement designed to placate the community. there is little evidence to suggest that representatives engage with the site, or that civic input is used to inform decision-making. this case study illustrates that digital (dis)engagement is influenced by institutional settings, with governments able to act as mechanisms of resistance to new communicative practices. evans-cowley and conroy (2009) indicate that “[t]he success of e-government will be tied to citizens’ willingness to use the tools” (p. 284). extending this argument, this paper suggests e-government success equally depends upon the willingness and capabilities of government officials. citizens are accessing and using casey conversations, yet their discussions are not informing decision-making. the government has failed to recognize that digital engagement requires receptive and responsive ongoing actions, which should be incorporated into the council’s everyday operations. government resistance to online civic participation is furthermore exacerbated by problems such as limited ict education and misconceptions surrounding the value of citizen participation. such institutional barriers need to be addressed to facilitate digital engagement. references bradford, n. (2008). canadian social policy in the 2000s: bringing place in. ottawa, ontario: canadian policy research networks. chadwick, a. (2011). explaining the failure of an online citizen engagement initiative: the role of internal institutional variables. journal of information technology & politics, 8(1), 21-40. city of casey (2013). casey conversations. retrieved february 15, from http://caseyconversations.com.au evans-cowley, j. & conroy, m.m. (2009). local government experiences with ict for participation. in c.g. reddick (ed.), strategies for local e-government adoption and implementation: comparative studies (pp. 269-287). hershey, pennsylvania: information science reference. gauld, r., gray, a. & mccomb, s. (2009). how responsive is e-government? evidence from australia and new zealand. government information quarterly, 26(1), 69-74. jensen, m.j. (2009). electronic democracy and citizen influence in government. in c.g. reddick (ed.), strategies for local e-government adoption and implementation: comparative studies (pp. 288-305). hershey, pennsylvania: information science reference. jimenez, b. s., mossberger, k. & wu, y. (2012). municipal government and the interactive web: trends and issues for civic engagement. in a. manoharan & m. holzer (eds.), e-governance and civic engagement: factors and determinants of e-democracy (pp 251-271). hershey, pennsylvania: information science reference. 3 minor typographical errors in citizens’ comments have been corrected to aid readability. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 17 o’toole, k. (2009). australian local government and e-governance: from administration to citizen participation? in m. khosrow-pour (ed.), e-government diffusion, policy and impact: advanced issues and practices (pp. 171-184). hershey, pennsylvania: information science reference. verdegem, p. & hauttekeete, l. (2010). a user-centric approach in e-government policies: the path to effectiveness? in c.g. reddick (ed.), citizens and e-government: evaluating policy and management (pp. 20-36). hershey, pennsylvania: information science reference. microsoft word aoir2018_final_not_anon.docx selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 a division of labor: the role of big data analysis in the repertoire of internet research methods in recent years, large-scale analysis of log data from digital devices – often termed “big data analysis” (lazer, kennedy, king, & vespignani, 2014) – have taken hold in the field of internet research. through application programming interfaces (apis) and commercial measurement, scholars have been able to analyze social media users (freelon 2014) and web audiences (taneja, 2016) on an uprecedented scale. and by developing digital research tools, scholars have been able to track individuals across websites (menchen-trevino, 2013) and mobile applications (ørmen & thorhauge 2015) in greater detail than ever before. big data analysis holds unique potential for studying communication in depth and across many individuals (see e.g. boase & ling, 2013; prior, 2013). at the same time, this approach introduces new methodological challenges in the transparency of data collection (webster, 2014), sampling of participants and validity of conclusions (rieder, abdulla, poell, woltering, & zack, 2015). firstly, data aggregation is typically designed for commercial rather than academic purposes. the type of data included as well as how it is presented depend in large part on the business interests of measurement and advertisement companies (webster, 2014). secondly, when relying on this kind of secondary data it can be difficult to validate the output or techniques used to generate the data (rieder, abdulla, poell, woltering, & zack, 2015). thirdly, often the unit of analysis is media-centric, taking specific websites or social network pages as the empirical basis instead of individual users (taneja, 2016). this makes it hard to untangle the behavior of real-world users from the aggregate trends. lastly, variations in what users do might be so large that it is necessary to move from the aggregate to smaller groups of users to make meaningful inferences (welles, 2014). internet research is thus faced with a new research approach in big data analysis with potentials and perils that need to be discussed in combination with traditional approaches. this panel explores the role of big data analysis in relation to the wider repertoire of methods in internet research. the panel comprises four presentations that each sheds light on the complementarity of big data analysis with more traditional qualitative and quantitative methods. the first presentation opens the discussion with an overview of strategies for combining digital traces and commercial audience data with qualitative interviews and quantitative survey methods. the next presentation explores the potential of trace data to improve upon the experimental method. researcher-collected data enables scholars to operate in a real-world setting, in contrast to a research lab, while obtaining informed consent from participants. the third presentation argues that large-scale audience data provide a unique perspective on internet use. by integrating census-level information about users with detailed traces of their behavior across websites, commercial audience data combines the strength of surveys and digital trace data respectively. lastly, the fourth presentation shows how multi-institutional collaboration makes it possible do document social media activity (on twitter) for a whole country (australia) in a comprehensive manner. a feat not possible through other methods on a similar scale. through these four presentations, the panel aims to situate big data analysis in the broader repertoire of internet research methods. references boase j and ling r. (2013) measuring mobile phone use: self-report versus log data. journal of computer-mediated communication 18: 508-519. freelon d. (2014) tweeting to power: the social media revolution in american politics. political communication 31: 502-505. lazer d, kennedy r, king g and vespignani a. (2014) the parable of google flu: traps in big data analysis. science 343: 1203-1205. menchen-trevino e. (2013) collecting vertical trace data: big possibilities and big challenges for multi-method research. policy and internet 5: 328–339. prior m. (2013) the challenge of measuring media exposure: reply to dilliplane, goldman, and mutz. political communication 30: 620-634. rieder b, abdulla r, poell t, woltering r and zack l. (2015) data critique and analytical opportunities for very large facebook pages: lessons learned from exploring "we are all khaled said''. big data & society 2. taneja h and webster jg. (2016) how do global audiences take shape? the role of institutions and culture in patterns of web use. journal of communication 66: 161-182. webster jg. (2014) the marketplace of attention. how audiences take shape in a digital age, london and cambridge, ma: mit press. welles bf. (2014) on minorities and outliers: the case for making big data small. big data & society 1: 1-2. ørmen j and thorhauge am. (2015) smartphone log data in a qualitative perspective. mobile media & communication 3: 335-350. combining digital trace data with research methods on a global scale rasmus helles university of copenhagen jacob ørmen university of copenhagen signe sophus lai university of copenhagen klaus bruhn jensen university of copenhagen this paper looks at the role big data can play in comparative media research on a global scale. it does so with reference to an ongoing research project, the peoples’ internet (pin), which studies internet use in three world regions. in this way, the project functions as a case for mapping out the unique contribution of big data analysis in relation to traditional methods of internet research. the pin project the pin project (http://peoplesinternet.ku.dk/) investigates how ordinary people use the internet in daily life across 5 european countries, the us, and china. it relies on a mixed-methods approach combining ethnography with large-scale surveys, document analysis and big data analysis. the ethnography component will be carried out as 6month field work studies (relying primarily on interviews and observations) in china, the us and denmark. simultaneously, population surveys in each participating country will map out internet use practices in relation to communication patterns more broadly (jensen & helles, 2011). these methods are supplemented by document analysis of legal and policy texts to establish the political and economic context for the internet in each country under study. in this paper, we focus on the big data component of the project. the big data in pin will be digital trace data (freelon, 2014) of online users collected by the audience measurement company comscore. this data makes it possible to analyze audiences for various web sites (and possibly mobile applications) as well as user flows (jensen, 2012) across the web. in this way, digital trace data provide a lens on internet usage across world regions that complement the ethnographies and survey research. this paper maps out the various roles digital trace data play in relation to the other methods in the project. strategies for mixing digital trace data with other methods the methodological framework of pin is to collect data concurrently across methods and analyze data separately as well as in combination. accordingly, all methods applied play an equal part in the analysis. at the same time, each of the methods provides a unique perspective on internet use, which makes it necessary to both compare and contrast findings across methods. to do this, the project relies on various strategies for mixing methods (inspired by greene, caracelli, & graham, 1989). complementarity. a prime reason for combining methods is to research several aspects of the phenomena under study which no single method can cover in itself (greene et al., 1989). for instance, research has found behavioral trace data to be more suitable for capturing precise communication (boase & ling, 2013) or media use (prior, 2009) patterns than surveys. in the pin context, the comscore data is able to map out the popularity and audience overlap for various web genres (such as news sites, social network sites, video streaming sites) on a more detailed level than is feasible through other methods. conversely, the comscore data cannot grasp important aspects of internet use such as what happens within the different constituents of social network sites or in mobile apps. the surveys and ethnographies will have to fill the void here. corroboration. another goal of the project is to establish confidence in the empirical findings. this strategy is often termed triangulation (for overview see greene et al., 1989). although originally used as a technique to conduct precise geographical measurement, triangulation is now applied in a more metaphorical sense in social research to corroborate findings through different methods (blaikie, 1991). by seeking corroboration, it is possible to lend credibility to the overall research design. in pin, the internet habits of individual participants, as located through ethnographies, can be compared to the audience patterns indicated by digital trace data. if these findings correspond to each other, it makes a stronger case for trusting data sources, the sampling techniques used as well as the interpretations of findings. contestation. although often overlooked, an important aspect of combining methods is to look for deviations and contradictions. as well as establishing agreement, findings from various methods might also point in vastly different directions. qualitative interviews might paint a different picture of media-related behavior than surveys or digital trace data. in this way, the methods in combination can expose contradictions such as the well-known “paradox of popularity” (meijer, 2007), whereby people tend to express contempt for some genre of media content (in interviews) they nonetheless spend a lot of time engaging with (as elucidated by e.g. digital trace data). this should not be interpreted as a sign of incompatibility between methods, but rather as a core strength of mixing methods. these contradictions are vital for challenging existing theories and pushing new ones forward. enhancement: last but not least, we envision that the digital trace data can be used to enhance the value of other data sources. one way to do this would be to enrich one data source with another (salganik, 2016), e.g. by estimating the likelihood that respondents in the survey would showcase the behavior observed in the digital trace data (based on matching socio-demographic characteristics available in both types of data). another way would be to augment data sources with each other (boase, 2016), e.g. by tracing the online behavior of participants through their digital devices in the ethnographies and integrate these data in subsequent interviews. summing up, the role of big data in the pin project is to supplement, underpin and contrast the other methods used. importantly, big data does offer unique perspectives on internet use that are hard to cover with other methods. whereas digital trace data are more suitable for looking into specific uses of the web (in particular types of websites used) on a national and global scale, it cannot provide an encompassing picture of internet use. for this, we still need traditional methods for internet research such as quantitative surveys and qualitative ethnographies. references blaikie, n. (1991). a critique of the use of triangulation in social research. international journal of methodology, 25(2), 115-136. doi:10.1007/bf00145701 boase, j. (2016). augmenting survey and experimental designs with digital trace data. communication methods and measures, 10(2-3), 165-166. doi:10.1080/19312458.2016.1150975 boase, j., & ling, r. (2013). measuring mobile phone use: self-report versus log data. journal of computer mediated communication, 18(4), 508-519. doi:10.1111/jcc4.12021 freelon, d. (2014). on the interpretation of digital trace data in communication and social computing research. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 58(1), 59-75. doi:10.1080/08838151.2013.875018 greene, j. c., caracelli, v. j., & graham, w. f. (1989). toward a conceptual framework for mixed-method evaluation designs. educational evaluation and policy analysis, 11(3), 255-274. doi:doi:10.3102/01623737011003255 jensen, k. b. (2012). communication in context. in k. b. jensen (ed.), a handbook of media and communication research (2 ed.). london & new york, ny: routledge. jensen, k. b., & helles, r. (2011). the internet as a cultural forum: implications for research. new media & society, 13(4), 517-533. doi:10.1177/1461444810373531 meijer, i. c. (2007). the paradox of popularity. journalism studies, 8(1), 96-116. doi:10.1080/14616700601056874 prior, m. (2009). the immensely inflated news audience: assessing bias in selfreported news exposure. public opinion quarterly, 73(1), 130-143. doi:10.1093/poq/nfp002 salganik, m. j. (2016). bit by bit: social research in the digital age. open review. retrieved from http://www.bitbybitbook.com/ trace partnership: collecting real-world behaviors and self reports ericka menchen-trevino american university many of the most persistent and difficult questions in the social sciences involve relating people’s behaviors to their attitudes. one such issue that has been the focus of my research is selective exposure to political communication. that is, to what extent do people select attitude-consistent information and avoid attitude-dissonant information about politics or policy? at issue is the relationship between attitudes in the mind (political or policy views) and behaviors (selecting or avoiding information). this may seem like an un-controversial topic, particularly in the trump era. however, there have been decades-long controversies about the extent and nature of selective exposure (feldman, stroud, bimber, & wojcieszak, 2013; dvir-gvirsman, tsfati, & menchentrevino, 2014; hart et al., 2009; sears & freedman, 1967). there are two established social science methods that typically collect self-reported and behavioral data, albeit in very different contexts, experiments and ethnography. in experiments and ethnography behavior is observed and recorded, traditionally by humans but also potentially by machines. self-reports are typically collected by questionnaires in experiments and with in-depth interviews in ethnography. here i am arguing for a third approach in the digital era, partnering with participants to examine real-world digital trace behavior and self-reported attitudes. digital traces are records of behavior recorded by digital technologies, such as web browsing history, phone location history, and social media activity logs. often, these traces are accessed by researchers through agreements with or application programming interfaces (apis) provided by the companies that generate them, e.g. the new york times website, cell-phone service providers, twitter or facebook. this platform-centric approach to trace data gathering is useful, but limited to a single platform, and ethical concerns about privacy appropriately prevent sharing the identifying information that would be needed to recruit individuals to participate in other studies. by partnering with users who have access to their own traces, researchers can gather cross-platform trace data and link it with self-reported data such as survey responses or interviews. i will call this approach trace partnership. i used this approach in my work where i collected digital traces, survey responses, and in-depth interviews with participants (menchen-trevino, 2012; menchen-trevino & karr, 2012). this is similar to what i have discussed as the collection of vertical trace data, but focuses on the research method rather than the data (menchen-trevino, 2013). several other projects and research groups, discussed in detail in the full paper, use trace partnership as a practical way to advance various fields. labeling trace partnership as a methodological approach provides a conceptual toolkit for researchers to engage across methodological divides and recognize common challenges and opportunities toward the goal of strengthening social research in the digital era. methodological distinctions although the distinction between quantitative and qualitative methods is important to describing contemporary research traditions (see goertz & mahoney, 2012) a more useful distinction in the context of digital trace data is to differentiate inductive versus deductive approaches. experiments are necessarily deductive, with pre-defined variables and methods resulting in a support or lack of support for a hypothesis. although an ethnographer enters the field with particular interests, they often shift their inquiry based on conditions in the field, using an inductive approach. trace datasets, which often contain textual data like tweets are frequently so large that reading them is impossible. any overview of a large dataset is necessarily quantitative, but not necessarily deductive. some quantitative methods like factor analysis, network analysis, and machine learning are primarily inductive. focusing on combining digital traces and self-reports, therefore, does not necessitate quantitative or qualitative research alone. it does, however, involve an inductive approach, particularly as relating traces to self-reports involves a process of triangulation and identification of complementarities (blok & pedersen, 2014). to the extent that the digital traces collected for a project are too numerous to examine with qualitative methods alone, and this is usually the case, a trace partnership does require quantitative methods. while quantitative inductive work is necessary, it could be part of an otherwise qualitative approach, e.g. incorporating web browsing history log analysis into an ethnography of digital journalists, or a quantitative approach, such as a survey of internet users. partnership through informed consent it is essential that social researchers distinguish themselves from corporations and governments plying uninformed consent, or no consent at all, from individuals to collect their digital traces. this means that researchers need to be public educators, and risk scaring away some participants by educating them about what the data they are asking them for can actually contains. this is the only long-term sustainable path forward for social researchers collecting digital traces, and allies researchers with the public interest in the right to access their own data. the full paper offers practical information visualization techniques for better informing the consent process for digital traces to make the partnership between users and researchers meaningful. references blok, a., & pedersen, m. a. (2014). complementary social science? quali-quantitative experiments in a big data world. big data & society, 1(2), 2053951714543908. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951714543908 dvir-gvirsman, s., tsfati, y., & menchen-trevino, e. (2014). the extent and nature of ideological selective exposure online: combining survey responses with actual web log data from the 2013 israeli elections. new media & society. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814549041 feldman, l., stroud, n. j., bimber, b., & wojcieszak, m. (2013). assessing selective exposure in experiments: the implications of different methodological choices. communication methods and measures, 7(3-4), 172–194. https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2013.813923 goertz, g., & mahoney, j. (2012). a tale of two cultures : qualitative and quantitative research in the social sciences. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. hart, w., albarrac n, d., eagly, a. h., brechan, i., lindberg, m. j., & merrill, l. (2009). feeling validated versus being correct: a meta-analysis of selective exposure to information. psychological bulletin, 135(4), 555–588. menchen-trevino, e. (2012, december). partisans and dropouts?: news filtering in the contemporary media environment. northwestern university, evanston, illinois. menchen-trevino, e. (2013). collecting vertical trace data: big possibilities and big challenges for multi-method research. policy & internet, 5(3), 328–339. https://doi.org/10.1002/1944-2866.poi336 menchen-trevino, e., & karr, c. (2012). researching real-world web use with roxy: collecting observational web data with informed consent. journal of information technology & politics, 9(3), 254–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2012.664966 sears, d. o., & freedman, j. l. (1967). selective exposure to information: a critical review. public opinion quarterly, 31(2), 194–213. theoretical purchase from “audience centric logs” harsh taneja university of illinois urbana-champaign angela xiao wu new york university in this abstract, i introduce “audience centric log data,” a class of log data provided by commercial audience measurement companies. first, i acknowledge the turn in internet research towards “log data” and note some of their limitations. then i focus on audience centric log data and demonstrate how they combine essential characteristics of both surveys and log data. i conclude with an overview of some specific usage measures that these data capture and how through relational techniques such as social network analysis scholars can harness these to advance internet research. the presentation will elaborate on ideas discussed in this note with examples from empirical studies conducted by the author(s) and their collaborators in the last five years. “big data” now attract significant scholarly interest in both social sciences and humanities (boyd & crawford, 2012). internet research is no exception. recognizing the inherent difficulties of survey research to accurately gauge people’s exposure to content in a high choice media environment, internet researchers take immense interest in “log data” – defined loosely as collections of traces from users’ online activities. wikipedia editing histories, repositories of tweets by twitter handles, server side “web analytics”, are all examples of such logs. the resulting “big data” are large-scale census level estimates of digital media use. their popularity across fields has germinated a new academic discipline termed “computational social science”. log data have attracted fair share of criticism both from substantive and ethical standpoints. substantively, data from server logs (such as web analytics) or from virtual profiles (e.g., twitter, wikipedia) does not have information about actual user characteristics and attitudes. further, they rarely represent any meaningful target population. finally, analyzing user behavior on a single domain such as one news website, or one social media site such as twitter or wikipedia ignores and obscures their usage of other digital media outlets. ethically, one may argue that these data are analyzed without informed consent. yet there is a special class of “log data” free of these limitations. these are “audience measurement (panel) data”, generally collected by commercial market research firms at the behest of media companies and advertisers. first collected for radio and television, these combine essential characteristics of both survey and log data. common examples include nielsen ratings and comscore media metrix. collecting such data is a multistep process (webster, phalen & lichty, 2014). first through a nationally representative sample is selected based on a largescale study such as the population census. the selected people (or households) are carefully profiled on a range of demographic and psychographic characteristics. a “meter” then logs usage for the chosen panel of respondents directly through the device. therefore these data are sometimes referred to as “audience centric” log data (to differentiate them “server centric” log data). hence with audience centric log data, researchers potentially have information about audience characteristics, and data about their usage across a range of outlets. further these panels are quite representative of the target populations whose usage they intend to measure, and people need to consent to be on such panels. traditionally limited to specific mediums (such as radio, television, computers or mobiles) audience measurement firms are increasingly trying to measure cross-platform media use. it is also worth noting that media industry has collected and worked with metered “audience centric log data” for at least six decades, much before social science researchers became interested in “big data”. despite their promise, audience centric log data have found limited use among academics. traditionally research in certain subfields of media communication has been highly critical and even cynical of audience measurement data. further most communication departments lacked the computational resources to deal with such voluminous logs of data. surprisingly this reluctance continues among internet researchers, many of whom possess the requisite training and infrastructures to handle log data. part of this reluctance comes from the proximity of computational social scientists to the silicon valley, which has successfully propagated among internet researchers an imaginary of the “internet as anti –television” (sandvig, 2015) and in this perspective commercial audience measurement is most strongly associated with nielsen television ratings. thus for a typical computational social scientist while wikipedia or twitter are cool digital laboratories for advancing social science, audience measurement panels come loaded with the unfavorable baggage of their traditional media legacies. a second technical limitation is that often providers make audience centric log data available to researchers in the aggregate at the level of media outlets rather than at the individual user level. traditionally, social science theories have been built with data collected at the individual level (such as in surveys). although it is hard to alter the ideological disinclination of certain academics to use these data, one can certainly address the technical limitations, which i will discuss in what remains. specifically, although audience centric log data are generally provided in the aggregate, these firms also provide “relational” data. that is how do people use media outlets in relation to one another. first audience measurement firms provide a measure called “audience duplication” – which is the extent of overlap between two media outlets or in other words, the proportion of users of a given outlet who also use another outlet. these pairwise audience duplication data can be used to create an audience duplication matrix, which effectively is a network of media outlets connected to each other through shared audience traffic. a second measure of interest these panels provide is “user clickstreams” which essentially capture user’s temporal order of using various outlets. thus clickstream data informs us that of all people who visited a given website a, how many of them were on another given website immediately before and after visiting a. these data can also be converted to pairwise “audience flow” matrices and unlike audience duplication matrices they also have directionality, which allows for rich analysis of not only people’s shared visitation patterns but their order of visiting. clickstream data for example can help discern the role of search engines and social networks in influencing specific patterns of news usage. finally, i recognize that bulk of social science theories relate behavior to user characteristics such as demographics. although reporting information in the aggregate, audience centric log data do provide demographic breakouts of whatever information they report on at least on key variables such as gender, age, household income and race. thus the matrices based on relational measures such as duplication and clickstreams i just described can be obtained for the same media outlet for different demographic segments and usage can be compared between them. in sum, i hope that by elaborating on the nature of and possibilities with audience centric log data, this presentation will convince more internet researchers to embrace this class of log data. references boyd, danah, & crawford, k. (2012). critical questions for big data. information, communication & society, 15(5), 662–679. sandvig, c. (2015). the internet as the anti-television: distribution infrastructure as culture and power. in: l. parks and n. starosielski (eds.), signal traffic: critical studies of media infrastructures, pp. 225-245. chicago: university of illinois press. webster, j. g., phalen, p. f., & licthy, l. w. (2014). ratings analysis: audience measurement and analytics. new york: routledge. a multi-institutional approach to ‘big social data’: the trisma project axel bruns queensland university of technology introduction methods for the gathering and analysis of large datasets about communicative interactions between users, especially on digital and social media platforms, have become increasingly prominent in the field of internet research in recent years. this is sometimes aligned with a push towards more quantitative perspectives in communication research, but often also enables the development of new mixedmethods approaches where quantitative analytics for large datasets are used to pinpoint subsets of the data that would benefit especially strongly from a further, detailed qualitative exploration and assessment, for instance through close reading and manual coding approaches. any quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods analyses that draw on such ‘big social data’ are necessarily always limited by the quality and reliability of the datasets underlying them, however. alongside the rise of ‘big data’ in internet research we have therefore also seen the emergence of a body of literature that critically reviews the limitations of ‘big data’ as an overall concept, and of specific sources of ‘big data’ as they are commonly used in the field. these include overall challenges such as boyd & crawford’s influential “provocations” about ‘big data’ (2012), as well as detailed analyses especially of the limitations, reliability, and representativeness of the various sources of twitter data that are particularly widely used in recent scholarship (e.g. gerlitz & rieder, 2013; driscoll & walker 2014; bruns & burgess 2015; weltevrede, 2016). limitations of current ‘big data’ approaches in the field of social media research, such studies have shown that much current scholarship, even when it works with very large datasets, continues to work with data that are subject to a range of severe limitations. common twitter data gathering techniques, for instance, continue to rely largely on the tracking of sets of hashtags and/or keywords; although these can generate some very large datasets (comprised of millions or tens of millions of tweets), they nonetheless miss out on important aspects of the communicative process that would be valuable for the full analysis of specific practices, issues, or events: for instance, such hashtag datasets do not contain any of the tweets preceding or responding to a matching tweet unless those tweets themselves also contain the same hashtag. working with these datasets is analogous to listening in on only one side of a multi-sided phone conversation, therefore, and complicates or prevents any research approaches that seek to examine the full conversations. similarly, data gathering approaches that proceed in this way from a set of search terms fundamentally lack context; while it is possible to establish patterns in a given dataset, and compare them against other, similar datasets, there is usually no baseline information on total platform activity against which they might be benchmarked. a major event (a celebrity death, a political scandal) can be assessed by determining the number of hashtagged tweets it generates, for instance – but how does this number compare to the total volume of tweets posted to twitter during the same timeframe? more specifically, how many of these tweets were posted by users in a given demographic category, or from a specific geographic region? towards more comprehensive ‘big social data’ infrastructures some such data may be available from platform providers or their third-party data resellers. in theory, researchers could pay for access to twitter’s global ‘firehose’ of all tweets, or to equivalent datasets from other platform providers, but both the costs and the infrastructure required to ingest and store such vast quantities of data are likely to be insurmountable hurdles for most individual projects. this paper outlines one possible solution to this problem (as well as the potential pitfalls with this approach): the formation of multi-institutional consortia to underwrite the development and operation of the next generation of ‘big social data’ infrastructure. it focusses on the trisma: tracking infrastructure for social media analysis (bruns et al. 2016) project, supported by seven australian universities, the national library of australia, and the australian research council. trisma provides the infrastructure to gather data from a number of leading social media platforms. on twitter, for instance, it has identified some four million australian accounts from a global userbase of 1.4 billion accounts (as of early 2016), and mapped the follower relations amongst them; it gathers new public tweets from these accounts on a continuing basis (capturing an average of 1.3 million new tweets per day). in the absence of country-specific ‘firehose’ offerings from twitter or its data resellers, this dataset represents the closest available equivalent to an australian ‘firehose’; it constitutes a comprehensive repository of australian twitter activity independent of predetermined keywords, hashtags, or other features, and offers a reliable baseline for the overall volume of domestic twitter activity. the challenges of multi-institutional data infrastructures the deployment and use of this shared infrastructure also presents unique new challenges to the developers and researchers involved, however. first, the technical challenges inherent in gathering, processing, and storing such large datasets (the twitter collection alone now contains more than 2.2 billion tweets) are significant, and the changeable nature, limited documentation, and vague terms of service of the twitter application programming interface complicate this further. second, the multiinstitutional nature of the project introduces coordination challenges: for instance, while researchers at all member institutions are able to access the infrastructure, it is necessary to ensure that they have also received the required ethics clearances and methods training before they do so. third, the social media analytics methods required to use trisma data remain emergent and experimental, and rely on a number of key data processing tools and skills; a pronounced need for coordinated research training for users of the infrastructure has therefore also become apparent. finally, with an increasing number of projects drawing on the infrastructure, ensuring its stability and reliability has also become a crucial concern. this paper reviews these challenges and presents some of the solutions emerging. it also outlines the unique contributions that this multi-institutional ‘big social data’ infrastructure is able to make to the field, over and above more limited data gathering frameworks. amongst these are, for twitter, the ability to work with a comprehensive dataset of domestic australian tweets; to trace more complex communicative exchanges independent of the keywords and hashtags in each contributing tweet; and to examine the intersections between communicative activity (tweets) and underlying structural factors (follower relations). it closes by outlining further needs in infrastructure and methods development. references boyd, danah, and kate crawford. 2012. “critical questions for big data: provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon.” information, communication & society 15 (5): 662–79. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2012.678878. bruns, axel, burgess, jean, banks, john, tjondronegoro, dian, dreiling, alexander, hartley, john, leaver, tama, aly, anne, highfield, tim, wilken, rowan, rennie, ellie, lusher, dean, allen, matthew, marshall, david, demetrious, kristin, and sadkowsky, troy. (2016). trisma: tracking infrastructure for social media analysis, http://trisma.org/. burgess, jean, and axel bruns. 2015. “easy data, hard data: the politics and pragmatics of twitter research after the computational turn.” in compromised data: from social media to big data, edited by ganaele langlois, joanna redden, and greg elmer, 93–111. new york: bloomsbury academic. driscoll, kevin, and shawn walker. 2014. “working within a black box: transparency in the collection and production of big twitter data.” international journal of communication 8 (0): 20. http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/2171. gerlitz, carolin, and bernhard rieder. 2013. “mining one percent of twitter: collections, baselines, sampling.” m/c journal 16 (2). http://journal.mediaculture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/620. weltevrede, esther. 2016. “repurposing digital methods: the research affordances of platforms and engines.” phd, amsterdam: university of amsterdam. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 cirucci, a. m. (2015, october 21-24). socially divided: affordances, gender, and race in facebook. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. socially divided: affordances, gender, and race in facebook angela m. cirucci, phd kutztown university abstract this study investigates created, non-neutral affordances granted by social networking sites and their implications for perceptions of marginalized communities. i employ facebook as a case study and speak with emerging adults to comprehend how socially marginalized groups are represented through facebook’s affordances. in particular, i consider: how familiar are users with facebook’s affordances?; how are issues of gender and race represented through facebook?; and how do users conceive of gender and race? brief literature review with each new technological advancement comes a declaration of some “great social equalizer” (boyd, 2014). when the internet was first entering households, a common belief was that its integration would bring a cultural and social shift. these sentiments were guided by the fact that virtual communities allowed users to leave their bodies behind; users met new people and experimented with their identities (rheingold, 1996; turkle, 1995). prejudices were assumed to soon be a thing of the past—race, gender, and physical appearances would no longer be delineating factors. today, these utopian visions are criticized for their optimism. it seems that technologies cannot solve social issues and perhaps even work to emphasize social divisions (boyd, 2014). the prejudices that we learn offline are likely to journey with us into digital spaces. although facebook, for example, allows users to connect to people in new ways, it also reinforces existing networks and norms transferred from offline spaces. in other words, facebook relationships are “anchored” and compel users to value nonymous (zhao, grasmuck, & martin, 2008), and perhaps even anti-anonymous (cirucci, 2014), identifications over anonymous ones. integral to understanding these spaces is examining interfaces’ affordances (gibson, 1979); they are human-made and therefore inherently hold political, economic, and social powers (winner, 1980). it is not that technologies force themselves onto people, but work to set parameters regarding what acts of identification are possible (hutchby, 2001). facebook is not concerned with knowing offline realities but with “how specific, abstract definitions are executed to form a world” (galloway, 2013, p. 23). just as with offline structures and expectations, online affordances are reified and naturalized, becoming invisible, but powerful, templates for users as they attempt to create their identities and comprehend others’. indeed, investigating digital affordances may lead to some better understanding of the ways in which technology and society are synchronously working to determine one another and to cultivate new cultural identification norms. technologies may appear to have agency (srauy, 2013). however, those who create digital structures are constantly making moral choices that directly affect functionalities, representations, and social expectations. the technologies themselves are certainly important. but, i argue that many do not pay enough attention to the human actors behind them. users are constantly in discourse with the interfaces, connecting them to the sites’ human programmers. thus, because social networking sites are human-made structures, they are necessarily not neutral. recently, digital media scholars have started to push for a more rigorous analysis of digital affordances (e.g., neff, jordan, mcveigh-schultz, & gillespie, 2012). previous discussions may have warned against technologically deterministic language, but perhaps this position became too strong, leading users and academics alike to pay too little respect to the power that digital media designers, and thus their tools, hold. tools are programmed to render social change, even if this view is not common, or liked, among the general population. affordances online are arguably more “distinct” than offline affordances (boyd, 2011, p. 39), and, as such, more closely influence identifications. while it may be extreme to state that digital affordances dictate behavior, it is appropriate to claim that, through calculated suggestions, they shape engagement with the self and with others (boyd, 2011; papacharissi, 2009). because social media affordances are so seamlessly integrated into their respective sites, they are easily viewed as “natural” and quickly folded into users’ daily lives. affordances in online spaces can be viewed as within one of two categories: technical and social. however, social affordances rely on technical affordances, and, in many cases, it is difficult to clearly separate the two for analysis. in short, social affordances are created through the afforded acts of their technical counterparts (postigo, 2014). through social media affordances, our identification information is amplified, recorded, and spread in new ways. digital selves exist in perpetuity, constantly transformed and interpreted in new ways. the self can be replicated an inordinate number of times, and it is impossible to distinguish the original from the copy. in addition, sophisticated algorithms allow our digital bodies to be searched and for others to find the different iterations of self with one click (boyd, 2011). method as galloway (2013) suggests, i view facebook’s interface not as a medium, but as a mediator. instead of examining what the structure mediates (identity performances through facebook), i first explored the ways in which facebook mediates identifications (the interface itself). i then conducted focus groups with emerging adults (n=45) at a large, urban, east-coast university in the united states. because facebook is a social medium, focus groups are particularly relevant because they mimic customary social interaction. informants were 18-30 and declared their racial affiliations as: white (71%), black (13%), asian (9%), latina/o (4%), and other (2%). i applied a narrative approach to analyzing and reporting my findings. listening to informants’ narratives allowed them to recall stories and to find language that adequately expresses the meaning of past experiences (e.g. bochner, 2011). employing an “off-the-cuff” interview style (frey & fontana, 1993), i invited my participants to tell their own stories about interacting with and through facebook’s interface, while also providing them with new vocabulary and space to be critically reflexive. findings the following sections outline some key findings drawn from a larger study wherein i catalogued and analyzed all of facebook’s affordances (cirucci, 2014). i then spoke with emerging adults regarding their experiences with the site. this study provides a short list of findings, specifically related to gender and race affordances, representations, and expectations on facebook. each subsection that follows notes a select few of the affordances found and then presents participants’ experiences. digital gender in early 2014, beyond binary options, facebook afforded us users 50+ gender affiliations.1 although this change occurred shortly before i spoke with my informants, only half were familiar with the additions and only one had changed her gender. the gender prompt is not perceived as a space for expression by my informants, but as a space to check a box that mirrors their birth certificate or a medical form. ryan a., 19-year-old white male: 2 i think as soon as i got a facebook i put it [gender selection] and my gender hasn’t changed; though, i haven’t really changed. some even noted that using the space to perform more than gender ascribed at birth is identification “overload.” 1 currently, at the time of publication, facebook allows users to type anything into the “gender” box, after they have selected “custom” as their main gender, instead of “female” or “male.” 2 each informant was asked to choose a pseudonym and was provided a blank space to provide identifying information including, but not limited to: age, racial affiliation, ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic class davina, 19-year-old black female: if you are non-binary, then…whoever knows you would know that. like, does that have to be the first thing that somebody sees on your profile? gender just matters more in comparison to the growing affordances of gender, race/ethnicity is an anti-affordance. in other words, on facebook, there is no specific space that invites users to input their ethnicity/race identifications. this omission led my informants to make general conclusions about race and gender identifications. three general themes emerged: (1) race is too complex to include as an identification category, deb, 18-year-old african american female: i know a lot of people who have a lot of race identity. (2) our society is post-racial, lj, 19-year-old white female: umm, i like that there isn’t one actually; i think that it’s good that it’s [facebook’s] color blind. (3) and visible, corporeal identifiers (namely profile pictures) deem ethnic/racial affiliation unnecessary. stephanie, 27-year-old white female: i think it’s the fact that you can post a picture of your race but you can’t post a picture of your gender. it should not need to be explicated here that race and visual signifiers play a large role in society and in the way what we view and judge others. media have long been known to play a significant role in creating and maintaining negative stereotypes. people regularly learn how to interact with one another through physical features, and it would be naïve to assume that digital worlds open up new, equal spaces (nakamura & chowwhite, 2012). as nakamura (2002) argues, the internet supports cybertyping—digital realms such as facebook harbor hegemonic ideals, and race becomes just as important online as it has always been offline (martin, trego, & nakayama, 2010; tynes, reynolds, & greenfield, 2004). with the above in mind, it is also important to question why facebook would leave out race/ethnicity seeing that it is a valuable marketing tool. beyond the notion that facebook employs powerful algorithms that likely abstract what a user’s race/ethnicity is through stereotypical likes and browsing history, stephanie may be correct. it is not impossible, or even improbable, that facebook “guesses” race/ethnicity based on profile, uploaded, and tagged photographs of users. therefore, facebook’s active decision to leave out race/ethnicity affordances, while constantly updating and posting messages about gender affordances, has led users to view gender as a more important, but less messy, identification aspect. viewing our society (particularly in the american context) as post-racial and guessing race/ethnicity through skin color and other physical “tells” is socially normalized through facebook’s actions. none of the above identifications like gender are required for facebook users. all must choose female, male, or custom. this is in line with other anti-anonymous identification trends on the site such as asking for real names and full birthdates. attempting to elicit some thoughts about agency, i asked participants to reflect on why facebook is lacking “none of the above” affordances. my informants were in agreement that facebook, similar to the census, a medical form, or a job application, is an official space that obviously needs to collect identifying information. this interpretation is important, and lucrative, for facebook, as it ensures that facebookers are accurately,3 not necessarily authentically, broadcasting themselves. jm, 20-year-old white female: i think when i filled out facebook it was, like, so long that it was just kind of like, kind of like checking off a physical form, like, male, female, what are you interested in. alessia, 20-year-old white female: when you first start out with facebook, it’s an application process too… the idea that facebook is some official, patrolled identification space is in line with comments from its creator, mark zuckerberg: you have one identity. the days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity. (kirkpatrick, 2011, p. 199). immersed in the “official” facebook space, users are compelled to believe that accuracy equals authenticity. thus, to perform “authentically,” users are more likely to input incredibly identifying information that is deemed important through facebook’s interface design. apparently, to be “authentic” then is (citing only two examples) to accurately include the gender that was assigned at birth and to not explicitly define race/ethnicity. conclusion facebook strategically decides how identities will be shaped in an effort to construct more efficient data collection, algorithmic, and marketing models. the process of selecting which identification affiliations to request, and which to simply not mention, places value on select identifications. as supported through my brief summary of findings, this leads to facebookers adopting new expectations and norms regarding the identification process and important cultural issues. some users believe that gender is more important than race because facebook explicitly asks users to define it. others noted that race is a more complex and important fight than gender, and facebook is right in “staying out.” thus, just as offline expectations follow us into online spaces, prejudices that we learn online journey with us into offline spaces—they are naturalized and reified through our constant performances guided by the interface’s affordances. 3 in this context, “accurately” is defined generally as performing some legal and corporeal self. it should be noted that although this paper’s findings were meticulously analyzed, there are limitations. participants were emerging adults between the ages of 18 and 30 and all attended an urban university in the north eastern united states. results from different age groups or cultural settings could vary greatly. as such, this study does not claim to be widely generalizable. instead, it presents a small look into facebook’s affordances and their implications for gender and race identifications and perceptions. future research should collect and analyze narratives that are relevant to other demographics. in addition to exploring race and gender, this study acts as a call toward the more rigorous analysis of social networking sites’ structures, interfaces, and affordances. before we analyze how users perform on sites, we should first investigate the spaces through which they are doing so. a fresh approach to understanding media affordances is especially important as we continue to attempt to comprehend how digital spaces alter culture and identities. references bochner, a. p. (2001). narrative’s virtues. qualitative inquiry, 7(2), 131-157. boyd, d. (2011). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in z. papacharissi (ed.) a networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites. 39-58. new york, ny: routledge. boyd, d. (2014). it's complicated: the social lives of networked teens. new haven, ct: yale university press. cirucci, a. m. (2014). the structured self: authenticity, agency, and anonymity in social networking sites. proquest. http://search.proquest.com/docview/1651611916?accountid=14270 frey, j. h., & fontana, a. (1993). the group interview in social research. in d. k. morgan, (ed.), successful focus groups. advancing the state of the art. newbury park, sage publications. galloway, a. r. (2013). the interface effect. malden, ma: polity. gibson, j.j. (1979). the ecological approach to visual perception. boston, ma: houghton mifflin. hutchby, i. (2001). technologies, texts and affordances. sociology: the journal of the british sociological association, 35(2), 441. kirkpatrick, d. (2011). the facebook effect: the inside story of the company that is connecting the world. new york, ny: simon & schuster. martin, j. n., trego, a. b., & nakayama, t. k.. (2010). college students’ racial attitudes and friendship diversity. the howard journal of communications, 21, 97-118. doi: 10.1080/10646171003727367 nakamura, l. (2002). cybertypes: race, ethnicity, and identity on the internet. new york, ny: routledge. nakamura, l., & chow-white, p. a. (2012). introduction – race and digital technology: code, the color line, and the information society. in l. nakamura & p. a. chow-white (eds.), race after the internet (pp. 1-18). new york, ny: routledge. neff, g., jordan, t., mcveigh-schultz, j., & gillespie, t. (2012). affordances, technical agency, and the politics of technologies of cultural production journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 56(2), 299. papacharissi, z. (2009). the virtual geographies of social networks: a comparative analysis of facebook, linkedin, and asmallworld. new media & society, 11(1-2). 199220. doi:10.1177/1461444808099577 postigo, h. (2014). the socio-technical architecture of digital labor: converting play into youtube money. new media & society, 1(18). doi: 10.1177/1461444814541527 rheingold, h. (1996). a slice of my life in my virtual community. high noon on the electronic frontier: conceptual issues in cyberspace, 413-36. srauy, s. (2013). affordances as a metaphor for power. extended abstract. selected papers of internet research 14.0, denver, co. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org/index.php/spir/article/view/910/483 turkle, s. (1995). life on the screen: identity in the age of the internet. new york, ny: simon & schuster. tynes, b., reynolds, l., & greenfield, p. m. (2004). adolescence, race, and ethnicity on the internet: a comparison of discourse in monitored vs. unmonitored chat rooms. journal of applied developmental psychology, 25(6), 667-684. doi: 10.1016/j.appdev.2004.09.003 winner, l. (1980). do artifacts have politics? daedalus, 109(1), 121-136. zhao, s., grasmuck, s., & martin, j. (2008). identity construction on facebook: digital empowerment in anchored relationships. computers in human behavior, 24(5), 18161836. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2008.02.012 microsoft word zimmer-hoffmann.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): zimmer, m. & hoffmann, a.l. (2014, october 22-24). privacy and control in mark zuckerberg’s discourse on facebook. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. privacy and control in mark zuckerberg’s discourse on facbeook michael zimmer university of wisconsin milwaukee anna lauren hoffmann university of wisconsin milwaukee the dominance of online social networking sites, such as facebook, in much of contemporary life necessarily sparks various questions and concerns in terms of information privacy (boyd & ellison, 2008; gross & acquisti, 2005; mayer-schšnberger, 2011; solove, 2007), online identity and representation (ellison, steinfield, & lampe, 2006; marwick, 2013), and, broadly, the complexities of social life online (baym, 2013; boyd, 2014; dijck, 2013). as users and scholars of such platforms, we are increasingly confronted with new questions like: • what is the purpose and value of sharing information online? • what are reasonable expectations of privacy in social networking environments? • what kind of control should users have over their information? • how are the rights and responsibilities of users defined and distributed throughout social networking sites themselves? • should law or policy exist to manage how social networking providers can access and utilize users personal information? an important step towards addressing these concerns is to gain a better understanding of how facebook – the world’s largest social networking site – approaches these debates, how it frames issues of privacy and user rights within its own discourse, and how this framing might be reflected in the design of the platform and the affordances it provides (see, for example, cheney, christensen, conrad, & lair, 2004). since the messages propagated by a technology’s purveyors can play a particularly influential role in the development of our knowledge and understanding of that technology (pfaffenberger, 1992), this paper will approach these questions through the lens of facebook’s founder and ceo mark zuckerberg’s own language. making use of “the zuckerberg files” (zimmer, 2013) – a digital archive of all public utterances by facebook’s founder and ceo totaling over 100,000 words – this paper reports the results of a discourse analysis of zuckerberg’s public language as it relates to related concepts of information privacy and control—as well as attendant concepts of sharing, openness, and the ownership of data. as an analytical method, discourse analysis allows us to systematically address zuckerberg’s framing of these important topics, understanding his language as not “simply a neutral means of reflecting or describing the world” (gill, 2000, p. 172). instead, his use of language is purposeful – “performative and functional” (rapley, 2008, p. 2) – and helps shape available conceptions of online social life in ways that serve facebook’s interests. in the end, this discourse analysis represents an important contribution to understanding the ways in which the founder and ceo of the world’s largest social network conceptualizes the role of information privacy and control— concepts indispensible to navigating online social life today. by gaining a better understanding of how facebook’s founder and ceo conceptualizes the political, social, and ethical debates surrounding social networking, we will be better suited to critically engage in a dialogue on privacy and facebook, inform design and policy recommendations, and increase user awareness and literacy. references baym, n. k. (2013). personal connections in the digital age. john wiley & sons. boyd, danah.(2014). it’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens. yale university press. boyd, danah, & ellison, n. (2008). social network sites: definition, history, and scholarship. journal of computer-mediated communication, 13(1), 210–230. cheney, g., christensen, l., conrad, c., & lair, d. (2004). corporate rhetoric as organizational discourse. in the sage handbook of organizational discourse (pp. 79– 105). london: sage. dijck, j. van. (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. oxford [u.a.]: oxford univ. press. ellison, n., steinfield, c., & lampe, c. (2006). spatially bounded online social networks and social capital: the role of facebook. in in proceedings of the annual conference of the international communication association. gill, r. (2000). discourse analysis. in corporate rhetoric as organizational discourse (pp. 172–190). thousand oaks, ca: sage. gross, r., & acquisti, a. (2005). information revelation and privacy in online social networks. 2005 acm workshop on privacy in the electronic society. retrieved from http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1102199.1102214 marwick, a. (2013). status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. mayer-schonberger, v. (2011). delete: the virtue of forgetting in the digital age (new in paper). princeton university press. pfaffenberger, b. (1992). technological dramas. science, technology, and human values, 17(3), 282–312. rapley, t. (2008). doing conversation, discourse and document analysis. los angeles: sage. retrieved from http://www.sagepub.com/books/book225076?prodid=book225076 solove, d. (2007). the future of reputation: gossip, rumor, and privacy on the internet. new haven, ct: yale university press. zimmer, m. (ed.) (2013). the zuckerberg files. the zuckerberg files. retrieved february 27, 2014, from http://zuckerbergfiles.org/ microsoft word 831-576-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 internet use and global activism at the united states social forum elizabeth a. g. schwarz university of california, riverside usa eschw001@ucr.edu abstract in this study, i examine specific types of online tools as influential factors for several aspects of global social movement involvement. social movement scholars highlight the ability of the internet to encourage global connectedness and global activism. testing these hypotheses using survey data from the 2010 united states social forum, this study extends research exploring internet use and global social movement activity by examining activists’ use of four different internet technologies as they relate to three facets of global activism. the empirical evidence offers some support that the use of communication tools influences being affiliated with international movements; however, this finding is moderated when controlling for other factors. in part, the findings challenge traditional notions of the relationship between internet use and global activism. this study offers a more nuanced understanding of how activists might use internet technologies to maintain their networks with other activists around the globe. keywords social movement; internet; global activism; social forum exploring the internet and the united states social forum this study examines the relationship between internet use and global activism. scholars argue that in general, the use of the internet increases local and global contacts (hampton and wellman 2001). similarly, social movement scholars highlight the ability of internet technologies to encourage global connectedness and global activism. in particular, the global justice movement has been associated with use of the internet since the zapatistas and the battle in seattle because of its nonhierarchical foundation, multi-issue focus, and loosely networked structures (arquilla and rodfeld 2001, castells 2004, kahn and kellner 2004). social movement activists developed the world social forum (wsf) in 2001 as an open space where activists who were resistant to the dominant globalization process could congregate and work together (smith, byrd, reese, and smythe 2012). the united states social forum (ussf) “interfaces with the wider wsf, integrating local, national, and regional experiences into a transnational process of experimentation with ideas, strategies, and methods for practicing global democracy” (juris and smith 2011 p. 284-285). as some scholars contend that the greatest proportional benefit of the internet may for groups that are the most distant and the most intermittent (walgrave, bennett, van laer, and breunig 2011), the relationship between the ussf and wsf makes the ussf an ideal setting to study internet use and global activism. della porta and mosca (2005) focus on internet use by the movement for global justice. they maintain that the internet is seen as a sign of globalization and a way to spread information at a global level. the internet favors non-hierarchical forms of organization. the internet is a cheap, quick way of international communication that simplifies mobilization. the improved communication the internet provides may spur transnational organizing by encouraging the creation of coalitions and networks. the internet can strengthen identities and solidarities by increasing the rate of exchange between distant organizations and individuals (diani 2000) and help maintain geographically distant face-toface networks (garrett 2006, van laer and van aelst 2010). fisher, berman, and neff (2005) maintain that organizations connect their members to transnational advocacy networks via the internet. they explain, "many local organizations involved in the globalization movement connect their members to transnational advocacy networks and coalitions via the internet" (p. 117). however, other research questions the relationship between the internet and global activism. analyzing 17 transnational organizations’ websites, van aelst and walgrave (2002) contend they selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 cannot say the movement is becoming a transnational social movement. bedoyan, van aelst and walgrave (2004) examine the composition of anti-neoliberal protesters and their presumed transnational character using a case study and survey at anti-neoliberal globalization protests during the eu summit in brussels on december 14, 2001. they find use of the internet does not differentiate between foreign and belgium demonstrators which they find surprising because internet use is typically emphasized when discussing transnational organizing. kavada (2005) finds face-to-face contact coexists with mediated forms of mobilization in her analysis of the global social justice movement. she questions just how ‘internet’ the global justice movement is and wonders if "… it is more the case of a movement with an electronic spine in terms of the connections among key activists across different countries but whose day-to-day organizing and mobilization takes place locally and through face-to-face communication?" (p. 26). while there is a large amount of literature looking at the internet and social movement activity, scholars call for research that looks at different media use patterns or different internet applications (dimitrova et al. 2011, kavada 2005). kavada (2005) argues that researchers need to distinguish between the different internet applications, explaining that “bundling up all of these applications under the category ‘internet’ cannot adequately capture the role of new communication technologies in social movement activity” (p. 27). this study examines communication, sns, collaboration and multimedia-sharing technologies. this study extends research on social movements use of the internet for global activism by including four types of internet technologies as well as three measures of global activism. methods this study uses survey data from the 2010 ussf to examine internet use and global activism. this study draws from responses from 241 ussf attendees. the 50-question survey gathered information about respondents’ demographic and socio-economic characteristics, political views, affiliations with organizations and social movements, and political activities. the three dependent variables i use in these analyses are global movement identity, international contact, and international movements. global movement identity refers to whether or not the respondent said they considered themselves to be part of a global social movement. international contact refers to how often respondents contact someone outside of the united states for political purposes. based on the median response, individuals who sometime, frequently, or sometimes contact someone outside the us were coded 1, as having high international contact while those who never or rarely contact someone outside the us were coded as 0. international movements refers to the number of movements respondents are involved in internationally. the key independent variables are four types of internet tools. the four types of tools include: communication, social network, collaboration, and multimedia sharing. responding to a question inquiring about the forms of online technologies and tools they use for political purposes, respondents indicated they used a specific technology by checking the specific responses: communication (e.g. blogs or email), social networking (e.g., facebook), collaboration (e.g., wiki), or multimedia sharing (e.g. flickr). control variables include age, number of movements, number of organizations, gender, race, education, personal income, marriage, children, and employment status. the other dependent variables are also included in later models. in order to test the hypotheses that certain online tools are related to having a global movement identity and international contact, i use logistic regressions. this study employs negative binomial regressions to examine the relationship between the use of different types of online technologies and involvement in international movements. i include three models for each dependent variable. first, i include a baseline model with only controls; next a model with controls and the internet tools; and finally, a model with the controls, internet tools, and the other dependent variables. findings and conclusion selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 smith and wiest (2012) maintain that, in part, the introduction of new technologies, including the internet, facilitated the increased role of social movement challengers at a global level. states no longer have a privileged role in global politics. this has “expanded the class diversity of those engaged in and attentive to global politics because it created new avenues for local and national groups to participate” (p. 168). this study offers a more nuanced understanding into how this process might work. the use of the four types of internet tools does not relate to making contact with people internationally or having a global movement identity. instead, findings suggest that using communication tools is positively associated with being part of international movements. however, this relationship is moderated when controlling for the other global activism measures. the findings point to the important role communication technologies may play in the social forum process. while the results highlight the importance of exploring different types of internet tools, the findings also suggest it may be important to consider the entire media ecology in which movements are embedded to explore this topic further. references bedoyan, i., van aelst, p. & s. walgrave. 2004. “limits and possibilities of transnational mobilization: the case of eu summit protesters in brussels.” mobilization 9(1): 39-54. bennett, w. 2003. “communicating global activism.” information, communication & society 6(2): 143-168. diani, m. 2000. “social movement networks virtual and real.” information, communication & society 3(3): 386-401. dimitrova, d., shehata, a., stromback, j, and lars nord. 2011. “the effect of digital media on political knowledge and participation in election campaigns: evidence from panel data” communication research: 1-24. fisher, d. r., stanley, k., berman, d. and g. neff. 2005. “how do organizations matter? mobilization and support for participants at five global protests.” social problems 52(1): 102-121. garrett, r. k. 2006. “protest in an information society: a review of literature on social movements and new icts.” information, communication & society 9(2): 202–224. juris, j. 2005. “the new digital media and activist networking within anti-corporate globalization movements.” annals of the american academy of political and social sciences 597: 189-208. kavada, a. 2005. “exploring the role of the internet in the ‘movement for alternative globalization’: the case of the paris 2003 european social forum.” westminster papers in communication and culture 2(1): 72-95. langman, l. 2005. “from virtual public spheres to global justice: a critical theory of internetworked social movements.” sociological theory 3(1): 42-74. smith, j. and d. wiest. 2012. social movements in the world system: the politics of crisis and transformation. russell sage foundation. new york, new york. smith, j., byrd, s., reese, e., and e. smythe (eds). 2012. handbook on world social forum activism. boulder, co: paradigm publishing. van aelst, p. and s. walgrave. 2002. “new media, new movements? the role of the internet in shaping the ‘anti-globalization’ movement.” information, communication, and society vol. 5(4): 465-493. van laer, j. 2010. “activists online and offline: the internet as an information channel for protest demonstrations.” mobilization 15(3): 347-366. van laer, j. and p. van aelst. 2010. “internet and social movement repertoires: opportunities and limitations.” information, communication, and society 1-26. walgrave, s., bennett, w. l., van laer, j., & breunig, c. 2011. multiple engagements and network bridging in contentious politics: digital media use of protest participants. mobilization, 16(3), 325-349. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 cassidy, e., wang, w. (2017, october 18-21). gay men’s digital cultures beyond gaydar and grindr: line use in the gay chinese diaspora of australia. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. gay men’s digital cultures beyond gaydar and grindr: line use in the gay chinese diaspora of australia elija cassidy & wilfred wang queensland university of technology recent research on gay men’s digital cultures indicates that the values and identities associated with the ‘metropolitan model of homosexuality’ (sinfield, 1998) that first emerged in the 1970s centred around youthful, white, middle-class masculinity and urban, consumption-based lifestyles, are still very much embedded in the digital infrastructure of contemporary gay men’s social networking services (see light, 2007; cassidy, 2013). hence, interactions that might once have occurred in these sites are increasingly taking place in and across other social media, including more mainstream services such as facebook and instagram (see cassidy 2013; cassidy forthcoming). beyond these services, and traditional sites of research in this area, such as gaydar and grindr, however, very little is known about the broader collection of sites and practices that shape gay men’s digital cultures, as work in this field has thus far tended to focus predominantly on western, english-language based sites and populations. building on the small amount of research that has sought to redress this imbalance by examining minority and non-western gay male groups and services (see, for example, dhoest, 2015 and mcclelland, 2002), thereby placing emphasis on the important role of social, cultural and material contexts in digital media research, our work examines the use of social networking sites oriented towards asian user groups and their role in local gay men’s digital cultures in australia. against a background of significant levels of chinese immigration over the past several decades (abs, 2016)1 we focus, in particular, on the chinese diaspora of gay men in this context, and on key services popular amongst this demographic, such as blued, zank, line and weibo. 1 http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/3412.0/ the current paper, emerging from this much broader project, presents research in progress on the social chat application line and its use amongst the chinese diaspora of gay men in australia. it is based on data from an initial phase of participant observation on this site carried out in december 2015 and january 2016. what’s line? line is an instant text and voice messenger application freely available on smartphones, tablets and personal computers with close to 700 million users in 2015. line was first launched in japan in june 2011 by nhn japan corporation as a response to the tohoku earthquake in march 2011, which damaged telecommunications infrastructure nationwide (saito, 2012). though developed in japan, line has a global reach, with users from more than 13 countries (bahk, 2015), and is particularly popular in hong kong, taiwan and south east asia. in addition to facilitating free text, voice and video calls, line allows users to share location information and audiovisual materials either through private conversation or on a facebook-like timeline. importantly for the purposes of this project, line also has the capacity for users to create and join groups of up to 200 people in which they can chat and share media. group chats also have bulletin boards onto which users can post, like and comment. initial findings to study line use amongst the chinese diaspora of gay men in australia, since december 2015 we have been observing core communicative practices within the line group called ‘australia-nz common happy group’ (ao niu tong le hui) (anzchg). the term ‘common’ (tong in mandarin) here is the abbreviated expression for ‘comrade’ (tongzhi), which is a widely used reference to homosexuality in the greater chinesespeaking world. the in-group conversation in anzchg is chinese and all group members are men. initial observations indicate the most frequent uses of line in this group include: 1. ritual practices: greetings and status updates; 2. information seeking: about work, study, leisure and entertainment, and local culture and festivals (especially those lgbt community related) in australia; 3. ‘prince charming’ discussions – where members share photos of men they have taken and other materials that contain what they perceive as the ‘ideal man’ the majority of these are white men; 4. networking: organizing offline meetings; finding nearby members to meet-up; discussing how to expand personal (gay) networks – friend/boyfriend search; or networking in other social media platforms (such as grindr, wechat). implications/relevance the above observations underline important cultural, social and material aspects of chinese gay men’s line use in australia. first, the negotiation of ethnic culture plays a crucial role in shaping anzchg members’ line use and serves as a gateway to navigating australia. that is, while in-group conversation suggests that the ideal man is white (the imagined), when it comes to actual friendship and relationship building, group members still prefer chinese/asian men (cultural proximity), and the distinction between the 'imagined' and the 'actual’ is made quite consciously. this apparent ethnic paradox serves as a gateway to navigating australia, as discussion about others (white men) often functions as a platform for examining australian lifestyles (e.g. are white men are more muscular because of their diet?). in this way, discussion about sexual desire, romance and network building becomes a crucial aspect of social learning and cultural negotiation. second, line is being treated as a cultural product by these users rather than merely a communicative tool. routinised ritual practices, such as daily and festival greetings and constant ‘status updates’ about their everyday lives (‘i finished work now!’ or ‘i sleep now’) seem to suggest that members have developed emotional attachments to the group, and by extension, the service. in this sense, line acts a cultural product helping to define users’ sense of identity, social practices, consumption behaviours and even their developing sense of (new) social values in a cultural environment that is different from the one they were born in. finally, line use amongst gay men of chinese descent needs to be understood within the broader ecology of digital media services engaged by these men, including other more mainstream sites such as grindr and wechat. and, inversely, understandings of popular western services such as grindr, and their associated cultures and practices, must also recognize the embedded nature of niche sites such as line in these dynamics. these initial findings tie our work to the conference theme by highlighting and interrogating the multiplicity of networked publics that feed into to gay men’s digital culture in australia, while placing emphasis on an understudied platform in line. references australian bureau of statistics. (2016). migration, australia, 2014-15. available at: http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/3412.0/ (accessed: 13 february 2017). bahk, e. (2015). number of line users to top 700 mil. this year. available at: http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/tech/2016/01/419_173201.html (accessed: 13 february 2017). cassidy, e. (2013) gay men, social media and self-presentation: managing identities in gaydar, facebook and beyond. unpublished phd thesis, queensland university of technology, brisbane, qld, australia. cassidy, e. (forthcoming). gay men, identity and social media: a culture of participatory reluctance, routledge. dhoest, a. (2015). identifications, communities and connections: intersections of ethnicity and sexuality among diasporic gay men. identities, doi: 10.1080/1070289x.2015.1009463 light, b. (2007). introducing masculinity studies to information systems research: the case of gaydar. european journal of information systems, 16, 658-665. mcclelland, m. (2002). virtual ethnography: using the internet to study gay culture in japan. sexualities, 5(4), 387-406. saito, m. (2012). born from japan disasters, line app sets sights on u.s., china. available at: http://www.reuters.com/article/japan-app-line-idusl2e8jd0pz20120816 (accessed: 13 february 2017). sinfield, a. (1998). gay and after. london: serpent’s tail. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): abidin, c. (2015, october 21-24). introduction to panel: fame and microcelebrity on the web. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. introduction to panel: fame and microcelebrity on the web crystal abidin university of western australia objectives the main objective of the panel is to present cross-cultural case studies (asia and north america) that discuss developing trends of fame on the internet and expand on existing theories of microcelebrity. taking an ethnographic approach, our aim is to broaden the methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of self-made celebrity and selfbranding on social media, particularly that of young entrepreneurial women professionalizing their craft. additionally, young women who are not intentionally pursuing celebrity but through online interactions have the potential for celebritylike experiences will be discussed. we offer new ways of thinking about microcelebrity, identity, and social media. the five members of this panel sought each other out through academic circles on social media platforms because of their similar research interests and regularly discuss their projects through email chains, facebook posts, and twitter conversations. our mutual interest in social media, celebrity culture, and commercial use prompted us to come together and create a panel for ir16. although submitting individual papers is also an option, working within a panel allows us to present a dynamic dialogue founded in mediated collaboration and varying experiences and perspectives. themes celebrity culture is a discourse that focuses on individualism, identity, and public transformation, and constituted by a real or imagined audience (marshall, 2006, p. 635). reality television brought about the average, everyday celebrity, but new media have taken celebrity culture to another level. ‘microcelebrity’ was first coined by theresa senft in her work on camgirls (2008) as a burgeoning online trend wherein people attempt to gain popularity by employing digital media technologies videos, blogs, social media, etc. microcelebrities are “non-actors as performers” whose narratives take place “without overt manipulation”, and who are “more ‘real’ than television personalities with ‘perfect hair, perfect friends and perfect lives’” (2008, p. 16). unlike mainstream television and cinema celebrities who are public icons with large scale followings, microcelebrities are famous only within small, niche networks (marwick, 2013). senft also foregrounds microcelebrities’ focus on responding to their communities in the ways that maintain open channels of feedback on social media to engage with their audience. in addition, microcelebrity involves the curation of a persona that feels “authentic” to fans (marwick, 2013, p. 114). in response to this, our panel offers a discussion on the themes of: § (re)presentation of the self in the age of social media § formulaic productions of microcelebrity on social media § manifestations and experiences of internet celebrity across different social media platforms § self-branding techniques by everyday social media users § case studies of embodied experiential affective work online and offline § expand existing theories of microcelebrity through cross-cultural case studies § methodological approaches to studying internet celebrity § reifications of microcelebrity status through fan (and anti-fan) texts § gendered responses to microcelebrity (i.e. “catty” women and hoards of gossip) § disengagement with internet fame § accidental celebrity status shaped and influenced by platform affordances § positive internalization of celebrity experiences papers our five papers are conscientiously ordered to present the unfolding of a metanarrative of microcelebrity in the age of social media, and the evolution of shared concepts of the internet, following the investigation of magic, myth, accidents, the darkside, and structural guides. we begin with vimviriya limkangvanmongkol’s paper, online red carpet: the magic of instaselfie culture, which investigates self-made microcelebrities and the deliberate affectual and aesthetic work they engage in, thus illuminating the high glamour of internet fame through methodological explorations of ‘celebrity’ imagery. crystal abidin’s paper, internet (in)famous: the mystification and folklore of microcelebrification, moves away from the more obvious reputation work of microcelebrities to look at those whose origins of fame are shrouded in folklore and myth, exploring alternative discourses of celebrification on the internet circulating in the popular imaginary. we continue with megan lindsay’s paper, accidental celebrity: exploration of fame, timing, and response to popularity, that focuses more on internet users on the periphery of microcelebrity, and how their accidental stumblings into fame especially at the intersection of internet imaginaries of race, class, gender, and sexuality. renee m. powers’ how does she afford all that?: rumors, anonymity, and the darkside of being a youtube microcelebrity takes us over to the flip side of microcelebrity, in pursuit of narratives of the lesser seen ugly and less glamorous backstage of celebrification, which speaks to internet ethics and the social imaginary. finally, we conclude with angela m. cirucci’s identity guides: the implications of facebook’s affordances and tacit celebrification, that uncovers internet fact and fiction through the examination of the meta-structures of social media platforms, without which, microcelebrification would not be possible. our cross-cultural research material also present comparative examinations of the digital imaginary across cultures. the five papers move from a more traditional south east asian country (limkangvanmongkol), to an extremely cosmopolitan south east asian country (abidin), to marginal peoples and persons of colour in various parts of north america (lindsay), to vloggers in the anglophonic west (powers), to investigating the material structures of microcelebrification with supporting interviews from emerging adults in a large, east coast city in the us (cirucci). our panel also collectively presents interpretations and operations of microcelebrity across different social media platforms including blogger, facebook, instagram, tumblr, twitter, youtube, and social forums. short paper abstracts online red carpet: the magic of instaselfie culture in thailand vimviriya limkangvanmongkol, university of illinois at chicago the worldly explosion of selfie culture has occupied the social media landscape in thailand, shaping the rise of microcelebrity in the attention economy. this research examines the celebrification of the new breed of thai celebrities driven by the selfie culture and instagram use. i argue that thai microcelebrities are instaselfie, referring as a subset of instafame (marwick, 2015) mind-set and online self-presentation practice but focusing on using selfie posts to gain social capital. using visual and textual analysis methods to unpack the instaselfie mind-set and practice, publicly available selfie photos of twenty thai instagram users who have more than 30,000 followers were qualitatively analyzed. instaselfie celebrities transcends beyond the showcasing of their faces and bodies by embracing the glamour of an envidious “good” life/look, “luxury” lifestyle and “celebrity”-type personality. the final section illustrates three outstanding examples which are selected according to their unique positioning: a selfie queen, a beauty influencer, and a luxury elitist. internet (in)famous: the mystification and folklore of microcelebrification crystal abidin, university of western australia the attainment of microcelebrity has been theorized as being ‘achieved’ and ‘ascribed’. however, microcelebrification is seldom as neatly categorized, as demonstrated by folkloric speculations of celebrification in singapore. to demystify fame on social media, a more nuanced nomenclature for the formulaic geneses of microcelebrity is required. in response, this paper reports on long-term online and offline ethnographic fieldwork among cohorts of social media microcelebrities in singapore and east asia. it investigates the folkloric imaginaries of celebrification in the vernacular of everyday users and the press, and introduces the notion of ‘systemic’ and ‘diffuse’ microcelebrification; the former being more constituted with a firm indication of one’s crossover into microcelebrity, and the latter being less organized and contingent on a more organic accumulation of attention before attaining microcelebrity. accidental celebrity: exploration of fame, timing, and response to popularity megan lindsay, arizona state university celebrity is often thought of as a person, or individual identity. within the literature, scholars provide examples of individuals adapting online lives to enhance their popularity and pursue an achievement of status. according to marwick (2011), celebrity may also come through cultural phenomena. a study of young adult women in the us provides examples of the daily lived experiences when individuals are exposed to some form of internet fame or popularity, because they identified and capitalized on an ongoing cultural phenomenon. however, the narratives, motives, and intentions of these heterogeneous (e.g. race/ethnicity, age, sexuality, and socioeconomic status) users varied, and the daily lived experiences of certain women complicate the idea of celebrity as a pursuit. i will examine four case examples of young women who happened to gain traction online and elaborate on the ways they chose to (dis)engage, further pursue, and interact with their online presence, post-fame. how does she afford all that?: rumors, anonymity, and the darkside of being a youtube microcelebrity renee m. powers, university of illinois at chicago this paper explores the world of youtube beauty vloggers and the people who love to hate them. using discourse analysis, i focus on a forum created specifically for discussing the content and lives of popular youtube beauty vloggers. the forum participants hide behind anonymity to discuss and dissect the lives of the most popular vloggers in the beauty industry. these forum discussions point to a darkside of microcelebrity unique to online spaces and to the darkside of boyd’s (2007) characteristics of networked publics. when a microcelebrity’s communication is persistent, searchable, and replicable to an invisible audience, it can easily be aggregated to be used against him or her (solove, 2006). the invisible audience uses this aggregated information to create or support rumors about the vlogger. all digital footprints have the potential to become proof of feminine transgressions. this includes not conforming to an appropriate economic class performance, not policing one’s body in correct ways through postfeminist consumption practices, and violating the trust of the audiences. ultimately, forum participants ‘hate-watch' these popular beauty vloggers to find more apparent evidence to support the rumors and opinions that the other forum participants have perpetuated. identity guides: the implications of facebook’s affordances and tacit celebrification angela m. cirucci, phd, temple university in defining microcelebrity, media technologies are often described as integral to the selfbranding process. this paper argues that social networking platforms are not social utilities, but, in fact, celebrification utilities. that is, they are programmed to necessarily brand users by extracting and filtering identifications to be easily consumed by advertisers, just as celebrities and microcelebrities promote specific, “authentic” aspects of self that can be easily consumed by fans. through a discourse analysis of facebook’s affordances and in depth interviews with emerging adult women (n=30), i present a meta-analysis of celebrity culture through the narratives of everyday women who are not actively involved in self-branding but are instead compelled by the site’s inherent design to tacitly brand — they unknowingly align with corporation-like mission statements, ignore multiple, dynamic selves, and discard their right to anonymity. references boyd, d. (2007). why youth (heart) social network sites: the role of networked publics in teenage social life. in macarthur foundation series on digital learning – youth, identity, and digital media volume (ed. david buckingham). cambridge, ma: mit press. horton, d., & wohl, r. r. (1956). mass communication and para-social interaction. psychiatry 19(3): 215-229. republished in particip@tions 3(1), viewed 15 june 2013, http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/modules/tf33120/horton_and_wohl_1956.html marshall, p. d. (2006). new media new self: the changing power of celebrity. in p. d. marshall (ed.), the celebrity culture reader (p. 634-644). new york, ny: routledge. marwick, a. e. (2013). status update: celebrity, publicity, & branding in the social media age. new haven, ct: yale university press. marwick, a. e. (2015). instafame: luxury selfies in the attention economy. public culture, 27(175), p. 137-160. senft, t. m. (2008). camgirls: celebrity & community in the age of social networks. new york, ny: peter lang. solove, d. j. (2006). a taxonomy of privacy. university of pennsylvania law review, 154(3), p. 477-564. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): limkangvanmongkol, v. (2015, october 21-24). online red carpet: the magic of instaselfie culture in thailand. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. online red carpet: the magic of instaselfie culture in thailand vimviriya limkangvanmongkol university of illinois at chicago introduction the worldly explosion of selfie culture has also occupied the social media landscape in thailand. time magazine reported in ‘is this woman the world’s selfie queen?’ that a thai woman under the pseudonym, mortao maotar, posted over 12,000 selfies (luscombe, 2014), outcompeting the world’s most prolific selfie-taker, kim kardashian. mortao maotar, with 20,000 instagram followers, epitomizes the status of microcelebrity defined by marwick (2013) as “a state of being famous to a niche group of people” (p. 3). this research examines the celebrification of the new breed of thai celebrities driven by selfie culture and instagram use. marwick (2015) conceptualizes the phenomenon of instagram use to gain online status as “instafame”. the term refers to a form of microcelebrity which is “a mind-set and a collection of [online] presentation practice” but centering on having a relatively great number of instagram followers by “emulating the visual iconography of mainstream celebrity culture” (p.139). focusing on the self-made fame by regular instagram users, microcelebrities like mortao maotar craft their own persona (goffman, 1959) through selfie posts in the attention economy. i argue that they are instaselfie, referring to a subset of the “instafame” mindset and practice but focusing on using selfie posts to gain social capital (ellison et al., 2007). thus, instaselfie is not a selfie itself but is a method involving instagram users’ production of the selfie. this research is one of the first academic works that unpacks the instaselfie practice by thai self-made microcelebrities and illustrates three outstanding examples which are selected according to their unique positioning: a selfie queen, a beauty influencer, and a luxury elitist. method this research primarily relies on grounded theory (glaser & strauss, 1967) as an entry point to qualitatively analyzed publicly available selfie photos of twenty thai instagram users, who each have more than 30,000 followers. i included mortao maotar who has approximately 20,000 followers because time magazine named her as “the world’s selfie queen”. i collected fifty photos posted between 2014 and 2015. by looking at photos from the instagram web viewer, www.iconography.com, i aim to code themes across photos in the dataset. adapted from oxford dictionaries (2013), i define the term “selfie” as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or [handheld devices or selfie sticks]” and posted on instagram. this definition includes a photograph of the half or whole body as well as specific parts of the body. thus, this research incorporates visual and textual analysis methods as ways to explore cultural meaning as a part of instaselfie practice. particularly, i record users’ account names, usernames, biographies, number of followers, as well as the number of “likes” and comments, geotag, hashtags, and emoticons on each photograph (adapted from marwick, 2015). i analyzed why each account seems to attract a lot of followers so as to unpack instaselfie mind-set and practice in thailand. instaselfie mindset and practice in thailand instaselfie celebrities use selfie posts to represent the way they want to be perceived from their instagram fans in a niche community. mostly taken by front-camera smartphones and selfie sticks, instaselfie celebrities transcend beyond the representation of self through the showcasing of specific parts of the body. facial expression, gestures, clothing, accessories, make-up, background scenes and anything as a part of selfie posts’ composition symbolically reinforce concepts of the good life/look, luxury lifestyle, and celebrity-type personality. this type of aspirational persona is perceived as distinctive from regular instagram users with fewer followers. as a form of instafame, instaselfie also rarely responds to followers’ comments and “likes.” however, i found that they interact with those whom were tagged on the post, such as users whom they know or have met at events or received gifts from, but not with stranger followers. interestingly, instaselfie celebrities who have 20,000 followers or fewer still interact with followers’ comments. it may be due to the fact that they want to increase their popularity. the next section illustrates three outstanding instaselfie examples that are selected according to their unique positioning: a selfie queen, a beauty influencer, and a luxury elitist. the world’s (insta)selfie queen: mortao maotar named by time magazine as the world’s selfie queen, mortao maotar, known as @mortao on instagram, has reportedly posted over 200 selfies every week on social media sites. she has approximately 20,000 followers. her selfies are taken in various postures: sitting on the floor or in the bathtub, standing, laying on her stomach on the bed, and raising her legs with sexy tights. @mortao usually wears short shorts and takes selfie photos in front of a bathroom mirror, showing off her face with or without make-up on and her slim legs. her selfies receive up to 278 likes and 60 comments, including “very seductive and hot, love” comment from user, @devilstar13. @mortao usually uses an emoji or the emoticon ‘<3’ as her photo captions but bombards it with more than 10 hashtags: #beautiful, #eyes, and #cute. interestingly, she usually tries to increase the number of comments by responding to her commenters in the form of “thnx @username” or “@username [emoji].” this instaselfie queen differs from the other two instaselfie examples used in this research because she does not have as many followers as they do. beauty influencer: amata chittasenee self-claimed as a beauty influencer on her instagram biography, amaya chittasenee, known as @pearypie, has 965,106 followers. the self-taught makeup artist is presently one of the most popular thai beauty gurus. she uses instagram to strengthen her positioning as a unique beauty influencer, in addition to her blog, facebook page, and youtube channel. she usually posts her selfies showcasing her upper half of the body aiming to show her creative makeup experiments on her own face, hair colors, hairdos, and accessories in different themed looks: glamourous (fake eyelashes), street (purple lipstick), neon (green eyeshadow), and theatrical themes (ghost). she also zooms in on her selfies to show only her nail colors and hands holding some suggested must-try beauty products or shoes. crucially, @pearypie likes to use emoji in her captions and includes more than two hashtags, with #pearypiearoundtheworld as the primary personalized hashtag. @pearypie is a typical instagram famous showcasing her consistent persona as a beautiful, talented and glamorous beauty guru. she sets herself apart from followers as she rarely responds to their “likes” and comments. luxury elitist: maesa wanwilai techasomboon born into a wealthy family, maesa wanwilai techasomboon, known as @maesaa, has 104,982 followers. her selfie posts showcase herself usually in full makeup with fake eyelashes and colored hair in various stylish dresses and accessories. she informs followers about brands of her shoes and bags, and events that she attends by using hashtags, such as “#christianlouboutin shoes”, “#burberry clothes”, and “#samsunggalaxyalpha event”. her selfies taken with her baby, usually with the personalized #babybhupha hashtag, also hint at the family’s extravagant lifestyle as he wears gucci kids clothing. her chanel swim towel is always in the selfies taken in her swimming suit with her husband. geotagged posts at places like “the peninsula hong kong” also become a part of using instaselfie practice to influence aspirational consumption. like @pearypie, @maesaa rarely responds to her followers’ “likes” and comments but only to her friends. conclusion instaselfie is a subset of the “instafame” mindset and practice but focuses on using selfie posts to gain to gain social capital. in the ‘immaterial and attention economy’, instaselfie celebrities use visual representation as well as captions, hashtags, and geotags to post self into being possessing an envidious “good” life, “good” look, “luxury” lifestyle and “celebrity”-type personality, marking themselves off as distinctive from other instagram users. they transcend beyond the showcasing of specific parts of their bodies and develop celebrity-type charisma through their unique looks, clothing, cuisine, travel as well as socializing with their circles of friends. references ellison, n. b., steinfield, c., & lampe, c. (2007). the benefits of facebook “friends:” social capital and college students’ use of online social network sites. journal of computer‐mediated communication, 12(4), p. 1143-1168. glaser, barney g. & strauss, anselm l. (1967). the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. chicago, il: aldine publishing company. goffman, e. (1959). the presentation of self in everyday life. new york [n.y.]: doubleday. luscombe, b. (2014). is this woman the world’s selfie queen? time inc. retrieved february 7, 2014, from http://time.com/3079473/selfie-queen/ marwick, a. e. (2013). status update: celebrity, publicity, & branding in the social media age. new haven, ct: yale university press. marwick, a. e. (2015). instafame: luxury selfies in the attention economy. public culture, 27(1 75), 137-160. oxford dictionaries. (2014). oxford dictionaries word of the year 2013 selfie. oxford university press. retrieved february 7, 2014, from http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/press-releases/oxford-dictionaries-word-ofthe-year2013/ selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): abidin, c. (2015, october 21-24). internet (in)famous: the mystification and folklore of microcelebrification. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. internet (in)famous: the mystification and folklore of microcelebrification crystal abidin university of western australia introduction youtube sensations ala zoella, popular instagrammers ala tanner zagarino, and celebrity bloggers ala tavi gevinson have been occupying the media imaginary for their social influence, earning power, and potential usurp of the mainstream entertainment industry. analytically, they are microcelebrities. theresa senft defines microcelebrity as “a new style of online performance that involves people ‘amping up’ their popularity over the web using technologies like video, blogs and social networking sites” (2008, p. 25). unlike mainstream entertainment industry celebrity who are public icons with largescale followings, microcelebrity “is a state of being famous to a niche group of people” and involves the curation of a persona that feels “authentic” to readers (marwick, 2013, p. 114). marwick distinguishes between two types of microcelebrity: ‘ascribed microcelebrity’ where the online personality is made recognizable through the “production of celebrity media” such as paparazzi shots and online memes (2013, p. 116), or ‘achieved microcelebrity’ where users engage in “self-presentation strateg[ies]” such as fostering the illusion of intimacy with fans, maintaining a persona, and selective disclosure about oneself (2013, p. 117). however, personal narratives of microcelebrification are rarely clean-cut and intersect across achieved, ascribed, and other ambiguous origins of fame. this paper aims to offer a more nuanced nomenclature for formulaic geneses of microcelebrity, in response to folkloric vernacular imaginaries of celebrification, as one node of demystifying fame on social media. being ‘internet famous’ in singapore although they are prominent across various social media platforms, singaporean microcelebrities first debut on blogs in the mid-2000s, and are referred to as ‘bloggers’ in the native nomenclature circulating in the wider public imaginary. they are perceived as thought leaders and influential opinionators across a wide east asian demographic, mostly pitching to readers between the ages of 13 and 35. their extreme influence and success is manifested in their inclusion into industries including entertainment, education, healthcare, and politics that wish to leverage on their clout. reading blogs was reported to be the third most popular online activity in singapore (ida, 2012). the draw factor of such microcelebrities in the ‘lifestyle’ genre is that their persona is premised upon sharing the personal, usually publically inaccessible aspects of their lives. therefore, their celebrification unfolds in a narrative of the traditionally ‘private’ self archived on their social media enterprises. in response, this paper aims to demystify internet celebrification from the emic perspective. the data were collected during anthropological fieldwork between december 2011 and june 2013, including participant observation, web archaeology, and personal interviews. a grounded theory approach (glaser & strauss, 1967) was adopted in the thematic coding of all content. the analysis features 10 young women microcelebrities evenly spread across the ages of 16 to 25. 9 are full-time bloggers, and 1 works a second job. 5 of the full-time bloggers also own their own blogshops. pseudonyms are used. folkloric imaginaries of celebrification the origins of microcelebrification are often cloaked in vernacular folklore perpetuated by netizens. interviews and archival research on the comments on microcelebrities’ social media platforms and speculations on popular local forums were analyzed in conceptualizing folkloric imaginaries of celebrification. the four most popular tropes speculating the very beginnings of microcelebrity fame are overnight prominence, blogshop eminence, beauty, and proximate fame. firstly, microcelebrities are believed to have become “suddenly famous overnight” for controversial social media posts that achieve virality. secondly, microcelebrities are thought to have developed from owners and models of blogshops whose youth and relative commercial success have incited envy, and whose pervasiveness across websites and blogs iconized them as ‘feminine’ role models. thirdly, microcelebrities are known for their unusually good looks, including “parallel double eyelids” or “mixed blood” (a colloquial phrase for people of mixed heritage). others become renown for undergoing plastic surgery or their cosmetic skills. lastly, microcelebrities inherit peripheral popularity from their proximity to mainstream celebrity, such as cinema and television stars or established microcelebrities who have crossed over to mainstream media. press fascination on these self-made entrepreneurs has highlighted their earning power, generated fictives of their ‘accidental’ celebrity, and speculated their usurp of the mainstream entertainment industry. headlines such as “from blog to riches”, “net worth”, “model owners”, and “plastic fantastic” speak to speculations of their apparent commercial success coupled with relative youth and extreme beauty. such news coverage has constructed what boorstin (1961) terms ‘pseudo-events’ around the microcelebrity, in that the ‘news’ generated is but a “synthetic novelty” (1961, p. 9) that is not spontaneous but staged, executed for the mere purpose of creating ‘newsworthy’ content, bears an ambiguous representation of the reality of events, and most crucially, becomes a self-fulling prophecy (1961, p. 11-12). while such news coverage has further compounded the celebrification of these young women, it has also inevitably obscured their esoteric discourses of their labour and their vernacular interpretations of conspicuous fame. systemic geneses of microcelebrity the geneses of microcelebrification can be largely categorized into two structures, systemic and diffuse. in the systemic structure, celebrification is constituted with a more firm indication of one’s crossover into microcelebrity. there are four collectives in systemic microcelebrification: blogshops, brands, talent firms, and mainstream media. blogshops are a sister economy to commercial blogging and social media in singapore. they began in 2005 on livejournal where young women hawked used apparel. as the industry matured, they shifted to more personalized web hosts such as blogspot and wordpress, before graduating into dotcoms. owners and models of blogshops garner a following and fame for their entrepreneurial success or distinctive looks. many microcelebrities today began as blogshop models, or continue to run blogshops for supplementary income. secondly, some brands poach everyday users on social media or run contests seeking brand ambassadors. ordinary netizens and internet microcelebrities are believed to be more accessible than mainstream entertainment industry celebrities, and thus perceived as more relatable and emulatable in marketing products. brands also sponsor public events for users to network or develop their microcelebrity, in exchange for ‘shout-outs’ on their social media feeds. thirdly, social media advertising firms across the asia-pacific poach and groom microcelebrities for whom they broker engagements with brands. they fims operate similarly to talent agencies who send personalities for casting. blogger specialists or talent managers spot potential microcelebrities for grooming or vye to sign on established independent microcelebrities, or those between contracts. lastly, mainstream media exposure elevates the status of everyday users into microcelebrity, and propels the fame of established microcelebrities through press interviews, newspaper features, or magazine cover shots. microcelebrities have been cast in advertisements or been given cameo or supporting roles in cinema and television, in a bid to harness their fanbase’s consumer power. in fact, recent local movie productions are exclusively casting social media microcelebrities to pander to the youth dollar. diffuse geneses of microcelebrity the second category of microcelebrification has a diffuse structure. in the diffuse structure, celebrification is less organized and depends on a more organic accumulation of attention before attaining microcelebrity. however, the genealogy and progress of microcelebrification can still largely be traced. there are three collectives in diffuse microcelebrification: organic readers, proximate celebrity, and controversy. many microcelebrities start out as everyday users with no commercial intent. for a variety of reasons, they attract a strong following of readers who are passing strangers, or those accumulated from personal networks and friends of friends. readers usually engage with them on three levels; aspirationally, in seeking advice on issues including beauty, fashion, and relationships; critically, in imposing judgement or jealousy as manifested in ‘hate mail’; and curiously, in voyeuristically observing their private lives on display like spectacles. secondly, some users attain microcelebrity from their proximity to mainstream celebrities whose fame rubs off onto those around them (marwick, 2015, p. 151). in singapore, these proximate microcelebrities include goddaughters of hollywood celebrities, personal friends of korean pop stars, partnerships and friendships with local television actors, and personal friends of other established microcelebrities who now inhabit mainstream media. they leverage on these relations by publishing photographs and word snippets ‘exposing’ behind-the-scenes of these mainstream celebrities’ lives. lastly, some users gain microcelebrity from controversial ‘shame’ acts directed upon themselves, or imposed upon by others. borrowing from twitchell (1997), i term the first form of strategic self-shame ‘shamelebrity’, wherein the deliberate construction of scandal around the self is a means to incite provocative reactions from the public and increase one’s visibility and infamy. these include staged ‘leaked’ sex tapes and high profile plastic surgeries. the second form of infamy is imposed upon by others, and takes the form of ‘blog wars’ or ‘tweet wars’ where users and microcelebrities break into camps and voice support for either party. these include ‘hate’ campaigns, defamatory allegations, or organized bullying tactics. demystifying fame on social media the following table presents the microcelebrification processes for four young women, formulated through personal interviews, prolonged participant observation in their daily affairs, and web archival research. through cases studies juxtaposed against folkloric imaginaries of how these four women attained their fame, my presentation will demonstrate the genesis and genealogy of microcelebrification and the productive impact of such nuanced nomenclatures. structure collective subgroup bonnie’s genealogy michelle’s genealogy tania’s genealogy nicole’s genealogy systemic blogshops model 3 2 5 owner 6 6 2 brands poached 3 approached 1 talent firms poached 5 5 4 4 mainstream press 4 8 6 media coverage entertainment industry 2 7 7 diffuse organic readers strangers 1 4 2 friends of friends 1 1 proximate celebrity peers 2 5 partners 3 9 controversy shamelebrity 8 blogwar 3 references boorstin, d.j. (1961). the image: a guide to pseudo-events in america. new york, ny: harper colophon books. glaser, b.g. & strauss, a.l. (1967). the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. chicago, il: aldine publishing company. ida. (2012). infocomm usage – households and individuals, infocomm development authority of singapore. retrieved april 10, 2013, from http://www.ida.gov.sg/infocommlandscape/facts-and-figures/infocomm-usage-households-and marwick, a. e. (2013). status update: celebrity, publicity, & branding in the social media age. new haven, ct: yale university press. marwick, a. e. (2015). ‘instafame: luxury selfies in the attention economy’, public culture, 27(1): p. 137-160. senft, t. m. (2008). camgirls: celebrity & community in the age of social networks. new york, ny: peter lang. twitchell, j. b. (1997). for shame: the loss of common decency in american culture. london, uk: st. martin's griffin. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): lindsay, m. (2015, october 21-24). accidental celebrity: exploration of fame, timing, and response to popularity. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. accidental celebrity: exploration of fame, timing, and response to popularity megan lindsay arizona state university introduction the perceptions, motivations, and experiences that happen through the online world are based on subjectivity, and a “break” from the natural world (floridi, 2010). for that reason, people may have experiences and interactions that resemble online celebrity, but their interpretations remain central to defining the experience. specifically, the practice of microcelebrity, may or may not have direct links to the original intentions of the individual who becomes popular. experiences of online presence are internalized only based on the perception of self, in turn they may remain distant from experiences of popularity or for different reasons connect positively to popularity. this study examined how these random encounters with potential fame are impacting individuals’ based on their interpretation of the experience. within the literature, scholars provide examples of individuals adapting online lives to enhance their popularity and help to further pursue an achievement of status. according to marwick (2011), celebrity may also come through cultural phenomena. furthermore, our online presence is co-created with interaction from any given platform, designing an online self that interweaves with algorithms of a site (markham, 2013). five individual cases demonstrate how the combination of site design, cultural phenomenon, timing, proximity, and perhaps some serendipity lead to encounters with microcelebrity status. for various reasons, some individual participants described these encounters as a moment in time, or an event, rather than thinking of these as opportunities; they (dis)engaged with the experiences and enforced boundaries between the online self and their embodied day-to-day living. alternatively, some participants stumbled into the opportunity, but decided to take full advantage of the moment and sustain a network and internalize the experience as a part of their personal identity (archer, 2012). methods the individual case examples in this study came from a larger phenomenological study about young adult women and ict use in the united states. themes and patterns in regard to celebrity experiences emerged from the data, and were not the direct subject throughout interviews. therefore, these emergent themes may shed light on the shared experiences surrounding microcelebrity, but for various reasons produced trajectories outside expectations of celebrity culture. all participants were interviewed two times. the first interview asked for in-depth descriptions of their lived experiences and online routines during their transition to adulthood. the second interview was an informal conversation, led by the participant. in addition to the interviews, participants were offered ongoing contact with the researcher and it was suggested they share certain online experiences or content that was meaningful to them (markham, 2013). to triangulate the interview data, digital content was collected from different social media sites where they interact on a regular basis. data were analyzed using a two-step process. first, narrative summaries describing individual participants online experiences were constructed. the narrative methodology stresses the use of story to conceive how a sequence of events becomes a part of an individual's personal identity through reflexivity. by allowing different stories from the view of the participant, the researcher has an opportunity to see how the events are edited, altered, and emphasized based on personal perspectives. lastly, all transcripts were reviewed using an open-axial coding method; individual cases relevant to the topic of microcelebrity were compared looking for convergence and divergence. common themes among all participants included exclusive networks/niche audience, timing, emotional expression, and controversy. many issues of divergence intersect with specific identity politics, specifically the experiences varied based on socio-economic class, race, and social support networks offline. microcelebrity through proximation: casey on an everyday basis, casey uses multiple social media platforms, and cultivates multiple profiles intended for different purposes. she uses facebook, twitter, instagram, and youtube. during her early twenties, casey struggled with self-esteem and accepting her own body. she started to film online fitness videos to stay in shape and appreciate her own body. in order to keep up with specific youtube personalities who produced these videos she created her own fitness instagram. based on proximity to the youtube fitness personalities, her fitness account grew to over 700 people. also, she has a youtube channel where she gives tips about shopping, nutritious meals, and discusses her personal goals. while the channel is steadily growing, her audience remains relatively modest and believes the youtube is just a hobby or an outlet. based on her own descriptions, she does not want, need, or seek any type of popularity. however, with proximity to other online personalities, and the benefit of fitting traditional beauty standards, her online presence had certain potential for growth and commercial exploit. microcelebrity through sociality: bethany when bethany was an adolescent she experienced a great deal of hardship, including the loss of her mother. the social situation eventually took a toll, and was the catalyst for intensive therapeutic treatment throughout high school. afterward, she turned to online groups that focused on positive thinking to provide her the extra support she would need during transition. bethany is doing very well; she works part time, and attends school full time. her mannerisms, and social presentation come across as reserved and introverted. despite what could be considered obstacles to social popularity, she experienced an outpouring of support and popularity through participation in her positive thinking group. after writing a personal essay about how she works to stay positive the essay became extremely popular amongst the users, and at one time had generated 41,000 views. although she did not gain popularity from people recognizing her as a figure, or knowing details about her personal identity, one of her favorite essays gained significant traction. for her, the experience was meaningful, not because she saw herself as a celebrity, but because she felt valued. microcelebrity through critical analysis: holly & tina holly is a 19-year-old woman living in the south. she has risen to a coveted status among youth — she is ‘tumblr famous’. during a popular media event, holly wrote a passionate blog about a white woman pop star appropriating black culture and exploiting black women’s bodies for show. the next morning when she awoke she had gained 9,000 followers. her blog about the pop star had become extraordinarily popular, and in turn she gained an audience. although, as she describes the events, there was nothing intentional or purposeful about gaining her following, she does take full advantage. she uses her popular online presence to weigh in on current events and challenge institutions that promote sexism and racism. as a young black woman, having an online presence derives a certain power she has yet to experience in her life offline. specifically, tumblr provided her a space to voice opinions to a broad audience, find a community receptive to deconstructing influences of white supremacy culture, and experiment with her identity as a cultural activist. tina is a 23-year-old phd student living in los angeles, during her undergraduate she was a passionate writer for her school's newspaper. during her first two years of college she was intrigued and invested in queer theory, and gender deconstruction. even before she would outwardly use the label of feminist, that was how her close friends would describe her to other people. her writing gig at the newspaper was influential for how she saw herself because her articles were widely circulated. in particular, one article she wrote about the media’s treatment of trans children and their bodies was gaining popularity including being picked up by the huffington post, and laverne cox, a famous trans activist and actress who shared the article to her fans. later, janet mock interviewed her later about the article for a tv show, that unfortunately never aired. part of her interest in trans issues came from being with a partner who is trans, eventually she stopped writing about this topic because she thought her position as an outsider to the community would become a problem down the road. while appreciative and pleased with the attention the issue received, she did not want to continue down this particular path despite her skill in critical analysis and the popularity that she was unintentionally building. microcelebrity through transgression: stephanie stephanie recently filed a lawsuit that garnered attention from political blogs, both conservative and liberal. because the lawsuit involved public records, several blogs revealed her personal identity and talked at length about how her choice was a part of the political climate. the blogs that were written about her led to trolling, bullying, and harassment. ultimately, she wanted nothing to do with the fame that was thrust upon her and she took several measures to conceal her identity, including deleting certain social media accounts. understandably, stephanie had something to lose online. she had worked hard to complete a graduate degree and pursue a professional career. although she became a talking point and object of fame, her life outside of the events were already relatively stable. being middle-class, white, and educated contributed to the leverage for day-to-day life enough that her focused remained on career, family, and private life. conclusion celebrity culture is considered an important and dominant force in contemporary culture, but that does not mean that all people respond to the opportunities for niche audience in the same way. some individuals stumble into fame and enjoy the experience but do nothing to capitalize on the opportunity. other people will identify their niche audience and work to sustain the gains, but not at the risk of losing their message or purpose for passion that brought them to the audience (marwick & boyd, 2011). many people receive the experience of celebrity as positive, feeling accomplished and acknowledged because of the attention. the intersectional identities of these womenspecifically race, socioeconomic status, and age, influenced how the experiences were internalized. references archer, m. s. (2012). the reflexive imperative in late modernity. cambridge university press. floridi, l. (2010). the informational nature of personal identity, minds and machines, 21, 549-566. doi:10.1007/s11023-011-9259-6 markham, a. (2013). remix cultures, remix methods. global dimensions of qualitative inquiry, edited by norm denzin and michael d giardina, 63-81. markham, a. n., kruse, h., hemsley, j., & steenson, m. (2013). algorithmic identity: networks, data, and the terrible beauty of the black box. selected papers of internet research, 3. marwick, a. e. & boyd, d. (2011). i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. new media & society, 13(1), 114-133. doi: 10.1177/1461444810365313 marwick, a. (2011). to see and be seen: celebrity practice on twitter. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 17(2), 139-158. doi: 10.1177/1354856510394539 senft, t. m. (2013). microcelebrity and the branded self. in j. hartley, j. burgess, & a. bruns (eds.), a companion to new media dynamics (pp. 346-354). west sussex, uk: blackwell. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): powers, renee m. (2015, october 21-24). how does she afford all that?: rumors, anonymity, and the darkside of being a youtube microcelebrity. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. how does she afford all that?: rumors, anonymity, and the darkside of being a youtube microcelebrity renee m. powers university of illinois at chicago introduction this paper uses discourse analysis to explore the world of youtube beauty vloggers and the darkside of their microcelebrity status. i focus on a forum created specifically for discussing the content and lives of many youtube beauty vloggers, with analysis centered on six of the most discussed english-speaking beauty vloggers. drawing from boyd’s (2007) characteristics of networked publics, these forum discussions highlight the ways in which a microcelebrity’s communication is persistent, searchable, and replicable to an invisible audience. these features contribute to the ways in which sharing personal information can be used against the vloggers as “proof” of their feminine transgressions. the invisible audience ultimately uses aggregated information shared by the vlogger against the vlogger to support or create rumors. the insults hurled at the vloggers on these forums also illuminate a very specific femininity and authenticity required to be a successful youtube beauty vlogger and microcelebrity. method for this project, i focus on a selection of six of the most active subforums on a gossip forum. each subforum is dedicated to a specific youtube beauty vlogger. these vloggers were chosen to represent specific characteristics of anglophonic western beauty experts and also to represent specific lifestyles and choices for women. all six vloggers are white women in their 20s[1]. two are from the united states, one is from new zealand, one is from england, one splits her time between canada and the us, another splits her time between canada and england, and all of them are native english speakers. all six are partnered with men, three are married, one has a child, and two live with their significant others. one is a transgendered woman and two openly discuss their plastic surgery procedures. all six rely on youtube for their primary income, though three have makeup-related products tied to their names. pseudonyms are used. within each subforum are threads. at a point determined by the moderators, threads are closed and new threads are created. threads are divided into pages, with 25 comments on each page. very few subforums have content-specific threads. instead, threads are intended for general gossip and are titled with some variation of “[vlogger’s name] – thread 3,” depending on how long the forum participants have been discussing the vlogger. additional threads were included in the study if they were relevant to the project themes. for example, a thread focused on one vlogger’s spending habits was included. thirty pages of recent discussion were collected from each selected subforum, for a total of 180 pages and 4700 comments. close reading of the discussions determined common themes for each vlogger’s subforum, which contribute to constructions of youtube beauty vlogging reality. discourse analysis is an approach to knowledge construction that focuses on how people or groups of people construct their reality (philips & hardy, 2002). this study follows fairclough’s approach to discourse analysis, that is it analyzes texts “with a view to their social effects… [dependent] upon processes of meaning-making” (2003, p. 11). like fairclough, i acknowledge that this mode of analysis is not the only way to interpret these forum postings as texts, rather it is only one of many ways to approach the dataset. i apply grounded theory (glaser & strauss, 1967) as a way of acknowledging the nuances of the emerging discourse. fairclough writes, “[w]e cannot assume that a text in its full actuality can be made transparent through applying the categories of a pre-existing analytical framework” (p. 16). in other words, the meaning of the text can change depending upon the perspective from which we choose to draw. in this project, i draw from a lens informed by feminist theory, celebrity studies, and internet studies to interrogate how rumors, anonymity, and ‘hate-watching’ can contribute to expectations of femininity in microcelebrity. an obsession with class the most salient component of the discussions on these forum revolve around the class of the vlogger. sometimes class discussions are veiled through insults, like “hick”, “snooty”, “trash”, and “yuppie”. other insults are more directly related to the vlogger’s consumption practices, such as “label-obsessed” and “bougie skank.” vloggers perceived as lower class are deemed “trashy” and photographs taken from the vlogger’s instagram feed serve as proof of her trashy life (e.g. tacky high heels, unclean home, and sexy outfits worn to more formal events). however, for the vloggers perceived as wealthy, participants enjoy detailed discussions of their income and spending habits. one participant worries, “she only spends money. is she saving anything for her baby’s future?” another participant reminds the forum that the vlogger owns two homes and her husband has a high-earning career, so their baby will probably want for nothing. nevertheless, forum participants worry that the baby will grow up wearing luxurious brands like its mother, scoffing at walmart clothing. body policing because youtube beauty vloggers spend so much time in front of a camera, filming videos and posting selfies, it seems unavoidable to hide body changes from their audiences. this includes aging. again, instagram photos and screenshots from old videos are displayed on the forums as proof of a vlogger’s weight gain or wrinkling skin. these discussions often include remarks such as “she looked so much better in 2013,” and “she uses those lights to wash out her wrinkles.” from a post-feminist perspective, aging is distasteful but women can combat it through a variety of consumer choices (negra, 2009). when the vloggers do not acknowledge their aging or weight gain or do not consume the correct products to maintain their youth or weight, they violate the trust of their audiences. in other words, the forum participants expect the vloggers to adhere to specific boundaries of femininity or, at the very least, apologize for violating them. disclosure, trust, and authenticity another common thread in these forums involves levels of disclosure and trust. in the united states, the federal trade commission (ftc) requires bloggers and vloggers to disclose if they have been sent an item for free or have been compensated for a product in any way. forum participants are skeptical of some vloggers’ vague (or absent) disclosures and many feel misled. this shatters trust. there are a lot of references on the forum to vloggers “selling out” for free products or to make more money. all six in this paper accept sponsors and the forum participants discuss this for all six vloggers. most participants argue that sponsorships are not inherently bad, but honesty is highly valued. when forum participants suspect a vlogger was sent an item for free, discussions turn to the vlogger’s history with the company and with monetary decisions, often pointing to past videos, tweets, or instagram posts as “proof.” conclusion youtube beauty vloggers are microcelebrities whose lives have become fair game for discussion. in this networked public, all digital footprints have the potential to become proof of feminine transgressions. this includes not conforming to an appropriate economic class performance, not policing one’s body in correct ways through postfeminist consumption practices, and violating the trust of the audiences. success of a microcelebrity is determined by the audiences, but violating specific guidelines of femininity and authenticity leads to a darkside of fame. as one gossip forum participant writes, “what else is the point of this forum but to be nit-picky. what did she expect putting her life on social media?” [1] no women of color or men have top subforums on this site, though some are discussed in a section called “less popular gurus.” references boyd, d. (2007). why youth (heart) social network sites: the role of networked publics in teenage social life. in macarthur foundation series on digital learning – youth, identity, and digital media volume (ed. david buckingham). cambridge, ma: mit press. fairclough, n. (2003). analysing discourse: textual analysis for social research. new york city, ny: routledge. glaser, b. g. & strauss, a. l. (1967). the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. chicago, il: aldine publishing company. negra, d. (2009). what a girl wants? fantasizing the reclamation of self in postfeminism. london, uk: routledge. philips, n. & hardy, c. (2002). discourse analysis. thousand oaks, ca: sage. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): cirucci, angela m. (2015, october 21-24). identity guides: the implications of facebook’s affordances and tacit celebrification. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. identity guides: the implications of facebook’s affordances and tacit celebrification angela m. cirucci temple university introduction it is no secret that digital media technologies are integral to the self-branding process. users create, maintain, and broadcast the self in ever-evolving ways. what is not often investigated, however, are the ways in which the affordances of these spaces compel users, who have no desire to become microcelebrities, to craft the self through a celebrified identification template. this paper argues that social networking platforms are not social utilities, but celebrification utilities. social networking sites are programmed to necessarily brand users by extracting and filtering identifications to be easily consumed by advertisers, just as celebrities and microcelebrities promote specific, “authentic” aspects of the self that can be easily consumed by fans. toward a more nuanced definition of celebrity culture microcelebrity is defined as a set of practices wherein a user’s audience is viewed as a fan-base with whom she constantly engages to ensure continued popularity. presenting the self must be specially constructed and managed for consumption. success then is promoting an illusion of backstage behavior, recognizing a power differential, intimacy, and public acknowledgment (marwick & boyd, 2011). thus, identification online becomes a branded good (senft, 2013). as with any product to be sold and consumed, microcelebrities extract core features of the self that can then be easily branded and maintained. while the core features of an object may be easy to obtain, the process becomes problematic when people are viewed as objects with some core, essential characteristics that easily fit into marketing schema. because they lack pr teams, marwick (2013) explains that microcelebrities, following the strategies proven successful for celebrities, work to brand themselves, taking on corporation-like characteristics — honesty and transparency. as the celebrified culture increases, identification practices more closely follow this celebrity structure. as such, social media structures are celebrified themselves. in other words, identification structures in these spaces parallel celebrity structures — they extract and summarize the self, valuing and focusing on characteristics that are important for celebrity status. the facebook self, as the definitive example, is boiled down for mass consumption. affordances granted for identification are crafted in ways that deem marketing algorithms most efficient. thus, just as branding a product means extracting and simplifying its core qualities, i argue that instead of supporting socialization, facebook affords identification guides that support celebrification — templates that work to extract some core, foundational self through drop-box affiliations, limited choices, and privileged identifications that are aligned with increasingly fragmented markets. method employing a structural discourse analysis of facebook’s affordances and in-depth interviews with emerging adult women (n=30), i present a meta-analysis of celebrity culture through the narratives of everyday women who are not actively involved in selfbranding but are instead compelled by the site’s inherent design to tacitly brand — they unknowingly align with corporation-like mission statements, ignore dynamic selves, and discard their right to anonymity. findings like microcelebrities, my informants worry about filtering their identities, interacting with followers, and remaining highly visible. unlike microcelebrities, my informants are forced to collapse their multiple, dynamic identifications. they do not view their performances as some illusionary backstage. instead, they describe the space as requiring an *accurate* portrayal of one, authentic self that remains consistent through time and space. the following four sections briefly summarize my findings. structural discourse analysis through seven architectural subcategories: sign up, about, timeline, friends, likes, photographs, and cookies, facebook guides users to present canonical selves that are visible and aligned with celebrity goals. for example, users (1) must adhere to facebook’s real name policy and enter legal names, (2) compete for likes, comments, and shares, to ensure they will appear on the news feed, and (3) are consistently reminded to validate their collapsed selves through photograph uploads and gps check-ins. these identification affordances (among many others) are not commonly linked with socialization, but instead with celebrification. interviews – filtered self what it means to be *real* on facebook is inextricably tied to what the site affords in the self-presentation process. my informants explained that their profiles present a shallow, sweeping version of the self that encapsulates many of their identifications through attempting to extract core qualities of the self. this method was referred to as filtering. often skirting questions regarding authenticity, informants noted that they are accurate in their presentation strategies. leah, 21-year-old white female: i’m thinking of it [her personal profile]…like business. if you can prove that it’s real, [if] you can talk with someone that runs it… fans and likes facebook’s structure is designed to complement marketing algorithms. in turn, users necessarily sculpt their identities to this structure. facebook gains a majority of their information not from the personal information that users input, but through interactions. users who interact with their networks more often are favored — the more a post is liked, commented on, or shared, the closer it moves to the top of the news feed. thus, facebook compels users to collect as many friends as possible and then perform in a way that garners attention. jane, 18-year-old african-american female: i feel pressured to have people comment on my facebook statuses… the visible self facebook defines authenticity as broadcasting an honest self and collecting validation from others. because it is the goal to be known, the site compels users to discard their right to anonymity and instead promote the corporeal self. in doing so, the site favors those who are comfortable with connecting their online life to their offline lives. in particular, it privileges those who are able to present their corporeal selves. indeed, when a profile picture does not link the user to her offline self, my informants noted that they will ostracize her, even when they know her offline and know that she is controls the faceless profile. hilari, 21-year-old asian female: facebook in general, it’s not about being anonymous, it’s about being known. discussion as social networking sites are increasingly programmed in parallel with microcelebrity identification guidelines, everyday users are unknowingly adopting a self that is based in these ideals — to be authentic is to perform an honest, corporate self; to be social is to compete in gaining more friends, likes, comments, and shares; and to be accepted is to sacrifice privacy and anonymity and to become increasingly visible. marwick (2013) writes that the self-presentation strategies of microcelebrities are not real life, but illusions of backstage life to garner attention. conversely, the women i spoke with consider sites like facebook to be real and important spaces for socialization. instead, however, the sites are programmed to assist with celebrification in an attempt to turn users into simple lists of core, marketable qualities. it is important to note that this is not a technologically deterministic discussion. we must first and foremost remember that facebook, like all websites, are built, maintained, and defined by a specific group of people. thus, we should strive to analyze both users and the spaces’ affordances that they rely on for identification, and we should attempt to more closely investigate celebrity culture and its implications. references marwick, a. e. (2013). status update: celebrity, publicity, & branding in the social media age. new haven, ct: yale university press. marwick, a. e., & boyd, d. (2011). i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. new media & society, 13(1), 114-133. doi:10.1177/1461444810365313 senft, t. m. (2013). microcelebrity and the branded self. in j. hartley, j. burgess, & a. bruns (eds.), a companion to new media dynamics (pp. 346-354). west sussex, uk: blackwell. (social) media use and news: news usage patterns and their effects on political participatory behavior selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): kümpel, a. s., & karnowski, v. (2015, october 21-24). (social) media use and news: news usage patterns and their effects on political participatory behavior. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. (social) media use and news: news usage patterns and their effects on political participatory behavior anna sophie kümpel institute of communication studies and media research, lmu munich veronika karnowski institute of communication studies and media research, lmu munich introduction mass media use is a crucial determinant of political participatory behavior, which is true both for “traditional” news media as well as for online media. for example, studies have shown a positive relationship between reading newspapers or television news use and political efficacy and engagement (e.g. eveland & scheufele, 2000; moeller, de vreese, esser, & kunz, 2014; norris, 1996; zhang & chia, 2006). however, critical voices have argued that media use provokes political distrust and cynicism and thus ultimately leads to decreased participatory behavior (e.g. mcbride, 1998; putnam, 1995). in the context of online media and the simultaneous utopian and dystopian imaginaries of the internet for civic engagement, the debate about the impact of news media use on political participation and efficacy continues. while some authors emphasize the adverse effects (e.g. kraut et al., 1998), latest studies find positive effects of online news use in general as well as of social media news use in particular (e.g. bode, vraga, borah, & shah, 2014; esser & de vreese, 2007; gil de zúñiga, jung, & valenzuela, 2012). just recently, boulianne (2015) conducted a meta-analysis of research on social media use and participation and found more than 80% of the coefficients to be positive, indicating a positive relationship between social media use and participation in civic and political life. our goal is to study the relationship between general news use and political participatory behavior more thoroughly and to investigate the effects of different news usage patterns. we define political participatory behavior as online and offline forms of political participation that, for example, include discussing political issues, commenting political news on social networking sites (sns) or participating in petitions. since we assume that device use is associated with specific information needs (e.g. humphreys, von pape, & karnowski, 2013), we not only focused on participants’ use of different media for learning and obtaining further information about news events but also on the devices (e.g. tv, laptop, smartphone) that are used for these tasks. method our study is based on original survey data collected in december 2014 in germany. quota sampling was used to recruit a total of 190 participants that were selected according to the allensbach media market analysis (awa) whose findings are representative of the german-speaking resident population. quotas were assigned on the basis of sex, age, educational level and smartphone or tablet ownership. participants ranged in age from 18 to 87 years (m = 50.29, sd = 18.77), 52.1 % were female. 31.1 % of the surveyed germans own a smartphone, 14.2 % own a tablet and 13.2 % own both devices. general news use frequency is high, with 73.7 % using news several times per day. besides sociodemographic characteristics and general news use frequency, measures included (1) learning about news events as well as (2) obtaining further information about news events using different media types like newspapers, radio, tv and their associated websites or sns, news or messenger apps (5-point likert-type scale from 1 [never] to 5 [very frequently]). we also asked participants how frequently they use specific (3) devices to perform these tasks, including radio, tv, newspaper, laptop, desktop computer and smartphone or tablet. (4) political participatory behavior was assessed by asking participants about the frequency of eight different onand offline activities that, for example, included discussing political issues, reading, commenting or sharing political news on sns and participating in petitions. results first, an exploratory factor analysis (efa) was conducted on all items regarding (1) learning about news events; (2) obtaining further information and the (3) use of devices to identify news usage patterns. factors were extracted using the generalized least squares method. since we expected the factors to be correlated, oblique methods are more appropriate than orthogonal ones (cf. morrison, 2009). hence, the factors were rotated using the “promax” option in spss. examination of the scree plot suggested a six-factor solution with a clean separation between the scales (see table 1). to identify participation patterns, we used the same approach and conducted an efa on the eight (4) political participatory behavior items. this time, examination of the scree plot suggested a three-factor solution (see table 2). to investigate the factors that influence political participatory behavior we conducted hierarchical regression analyses with the three identified behavioral patterns as dependent variables (see table 3). regarding (i) participation via sns, results suggested three main influences: the usage pattern “sns & laptop” showed the strongest influence (β = .77, t(185) = 10.79, p < .001), followed by age (β = .19, t(185) = 2.50, p < .05) and the usage pattern “smartphone & apps” (β = .13, t(185) = 2.19, p < .05). gender, educational level or the other news usage patterns had no significant or meaningful effect. overall, the model explains 56.9% variance of participation via sns (see also table 3). (ii) participation via personal discussions on the other hand could not be explained to the same extent by the tested variables (r2 = .17, f(9,176) = 3.96, p < .001). nevertheless, three significant predictors emerged: gender (β = -.24, t(185) = -3.34, p < .01) as well as the usage patterns “sns/laptop” (β = .24, t(185) = 2.43, p < .01) and “newspaper” (β = .17, t(185) = 2.25, p < .05). hence, males are more likely to participate via personal discussions about political news as well as people that show usage patterns associated with newspaper and sns/laptop use for news consumption. finally, (iii) participation via petitions could be predicted by the usage patterns “sns/laptop” (β = .28, t(185) = 2.92, p < .01) and “desktop” (β = .18, t(185) = 2.39, p < .05) as well as educational level (β = .20, t(185) = 2.83, p < .01) and gender (β = .20, t(185) = 2.89, p < .01). females are more likely to participate via petitions as well as people who have a higher educational level and show usage patterns associated with news use on a stationary computer or via sns/laptop. overall, the model explains 24.2 % variance of participation via petitions (see also table 3). discussion first, the results of our efa of news usage patterns provide evidence that the german population has relatively stable patterns of news consumption: favored media and devices are generally used for both learning about news events and obtaining further information about them. once people have found their personal media/device of choice, they seem to stick to it (“single-media use”, cf. westlund & färdigh, 2015). second, studying the relationship between the identified news usage patterns and political participatory behavior revealed several influences on participation. while it is not surprising that participation via sns can mainly be predicted by news usage patterns associated with sns/laptop use, smartphone use and age (i.e. the older, the more participation), participation via personal discussions is also influenced by the “sns/laptop” usage pattern as well as by using newspapers for news consumption and gender (i.e. males tend to participate more in political discussions). participation via petitions is once more connected with online news use as suggested by the influence of the usage patterns “sns/laptop” and “desktop”. besides, female gender and educational level were positively associated with this participation form. taken together, our results suggest a) that news usage—and especially online news usage—has a distinct influence on participation and b) that political participatory behavior should not be treated as a whole since different kinds of participation are influenced by different factors (as already suggested by e.g. beaufort & seethaler, 2014). future studies should continue taking this into account by not only differentiating between different kinds of media/news use but also between various levels and forms of political engagement. however, it should be noted that our study is not without limitations. since most of the variables uncovering political participatory behavior are explicitly or implicitly related to online or sns use, the identified relevance of usage patterns related to new media might at least partially be an artifact of the measurements. while we can conclude that online news consumption indeed matters for forms of online participation, it certainly would be valuable to address other “offline” forms of participation more thoroughly. tables table 1 factor analysis of news usage patterns item smartphone & apps radio tv newspaper sns & laptop desktop learning: news apps .97 learning: messenger apps .72 learning device: smartphone/tablet .93 further information: news apps .96 further information: messenger apps .70 further inf. device: smartphone/tablet .93 learning: radio .96 learning device: radio .96 further information: radio .80 further inf. device: radio .71 learning: tv .87 learning device: tv .87 further information: tv .78 further inf. device: tv .71 learning: newspapers .90 learning device: newspapers .76 further information: newspapers .81 further inf. device: newspapers .69 learning: sns .84 learning device: notebook/laptop .60 further information: sns .85 further inf. device: notebook/laptop .55 learning device: notebook/laptop .91 further inf. device: notebook/laptop .95 eigenvalues 6.62 4.19 2.19 2.06 1.56 1.42 note: bold items indicate factor loadings >.50. total variance accounted for 75.2 %. table 2 factor analysis of political participatory behavior item (i) participation via sns (ii) participation via personal discussions (iii) participation via petitions reading news on sns .75 sharing news on sns .89 commenting news on websites or sns .86 posting political content on sns .93 retelling political news (conversations) .91 discussing political news (conversations) .89 participating in petitions .88 participating in online petitions .78 eigenvalues 3.48 1.52 1.14 note: bold items indicate factor loadings >.50. total variance accounted for 76.6 %. table 3 hierarchical regression analyses predicting (i) participation via sns, (ii) participation via personal discussions and (iii) participation via petitions (i) participation via sns (ii) participation via personal discussions (iii) participation via petitions stable factors (1. step) age -.46*** .00 -.26*** gender1 .08 -.24** .19** education2 .02 .14* .21** explained variance (%) 21.4%*** 8.3%** 15.6%*** news usage patterns (2. step) age .19* .20 .01 gender1 .06 -.24** .20** education2 -.00 .12 .20** smartphone & apps .13* .09 .08 radio -.01 .04 .10 tv -.04 .01 .04 newspaper -.06 .17* .00 sns & laptop .77*** .24* .28** desktop .06 .07 .18* add. explained variance (%) 35.5%*** 8.5%** 9.1%** overall explained variance (%) 56.9%*** 16.8%*** 24.7%*** f value (overall model) 25.83 3.96 6.40 note: method = enter; coefficients are standardized beta values; df = 9, 176; 1 dummy-coding (0 = male, 1 = female); 2 dummycoding (0 = no a level, 1 = a level); * p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001 references beaufort, m., & seethaler, j. (2014). wandel der mediennutzung wandel im politischen verhalten? [changing media use changing political participation?]. medien journal, 38(1), 15–41. bode, l., vraga, e. k., borah, p., & shah, d. v. (2014). a new space for political behavior: political social networking and its democratic consequences. journal of computer-mediated communication, 19(3), 414–429. http://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12048 boulianne, s. (2015). social media use and participation: a meta-analysis of current research. information, communication & society, 18(5), 524–538. http://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2015.1008542 esser, f., & de vreese, c. h. (2007). comparing young voters’ political engagement in the united states and europe. american behavioral scientist, 50(9), 1195–1213. http://doi.org/10.1177/0002764207299364 eveland, w. p., & scheufele, d. a. (2000). connecting news media use with gaps in knowledge and participation. political communication, 17, 215–237. gil de zúñiga, h., jung, n., & valenzuela, s. (2012). social media use for news and individuals’ social capital, civic engagement and political participation. journal of computer-mediated communication, 17(3), 319–336. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2012.01574.x humphreys, l., von pape, t., & karnowski, v. (2013). evolving mobile media: uses and conceptualizations of the mobile internet. journal of computer-mediated communication, 18(4), 491–507. http://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12019 kraut, r., patterson, m., lundmark, v., kiesler, s., mukopadhyay, t., & scherlis, w. (1998). internet paradox. a social technology that reduces social involvement and psychological well-being? the american psychologist, 53(9), 1017–1031. mcbride, a. (1998). television, individualism, and social capital. ps: political science and politics, 31(3), 542–552. http://doi.org/10.2307/420614 moeller, j., de vreese, c. h., esser, f., & kunz, r. (2014). pathway to political participation. the influence of online and offline news media on internal efficacy and turnout of first-time voters. american behavioral scientist, 58(5), 689–700. http://doi.org/10.1177/0002764213515220 morrison, j. t. (2009). evaluating factor analysis decisions for scale design in communication research. communication methods and measures, 3(4), 195– 215. http://doi.org/10.1080/19312450903378917 norris, p. (1996). does television erode social capital? a reply to putnam. ps: political science and politics, 29(3), 474–480. http://doi.org/10.2307/420827 putnam, r. d. (1995). bowling alone: america’s declining social capital. journal of democracy, 6(1), 65–78. westlund, o., & färdigh, m. a. (2015). accessing the news in an age of mobile media: tracing displacing and complementary effects of mobile news on newspapers and online news. mobile media & communication, 3(1), 53–74. http://doi.org/10.1177/2050157914549039 zhang, w., & chia, s. c. (2006). the effects of mass media use and social capital on civic and political participation. communication studies, 57(3), 277–297. http://doi.org/10.1080/10510970600666974 microsoft word 865-609-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 reconfiguring meaning: conceptions of time and relationship at a danish online memorial site dorthe refslund christensen associate professor aarhus university denmark nordrc@hum.au.dk kjetil sandvik associate professor university of copenhagen denmark sandvik@hum.ku.dk abstract this research project explores relations between ritualized space and the conceptions of time reflected in the danish memorial website, mindet.dk, a designated online community in which individuals can perform their grief for their deceased loved ones and get social support in their mourning processes through communication with other mourners and through emotional labor reflected in the individual memorial profiles. based on an ongoing content analysis of 20 profiles for stillborns and very young children we aim at demonstrating how memorial sites like mindet.dk constitute a space for maintaining as well as producing relations to the dead child and how these practices imply certain conceptions of time. we demonstrate that the timework performed at mindet.dk is a necessary strategy for the parents in order to reconfigure meaning after an event – the death of the child – which initially has rendered their lives meaningless. keywords death online; memorial sites, grief; timework; ritual practices research scope this project is situated in the realm of various studies on death and bereavement in today’s western society and the growing role of new media and the internet in this context (cf. carol & landry 2010, gustavsson 2011) and of grief and commemoration practices online whether this is happening on social network sites (cf. pennington, forthcoming) or in online games and virtual worlds (cf. havarinnen, forthcoming). through ongoing content analyses of the expressions and activities on 20 profiles for stillborns and very young children and the use of functionalities such as guest books and ‘light a candle’ we seek to expand on our understandings of practices of grief and commemoration by demonstrating how online memorial sites like mindet.dk (see fig. 1) constitute a space for maintaining as well as producing relations to the dead child and how these practices imply certain conceptions of time. preliminary findings have been presented in christensen & sandvik 2008, 2009, 2012a, 2012b. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 figure 1: screendump of mindet.dk’s entry with our explanations mindet.dk seems to fill a void for having marked or designated places for mourning and bereavement (after the funeral and in addition to the graveyard), not the least in the case with the loss of infants or with stillborns: deaths which more than others leave the bereaved asking “why” and a lengthy process of mourning and reworking the meaning of life. the quality of an online community (baym 2010) is evident in this respect; this is where users with the same experiences can meet. analysis: working and reworking time in the following we analyze the mourning practices at mindet.dk following the thoughts of romano as cited in the panel proposal and his analysis of how specific events like the death of a child is of such nature that “meaning is so radically modified, the totality of projections and finalities that dwelled in it and conferred a signifying structure on it are so altered, that strictly speaking it is no longer the same world”, which implies that “the occurring of such an event renders the former world insignificant, since this event can no longer be understood in light of that world’s context”. (romano 2009: 38f). our analysis also draws on paul ricoeur’s philosophy of time and narrative (ricoeur 1980) and the concept of timework suggested by sociologist michael g. flaherty (2011). basically, we suggest considering the mourning practices at mindet.dk as special ways of doing time. the mourners engage in different kinds of timework which structures their ritual performances of grief especially in accordance to flaherty’s category duration (e.g. ‘stretching’ time) (flaherty 2011: 11). how does mindet.dk function as an organizing device for the bereaved? how can time be reclaimed as meaningful? how can the tragic events of losing a child be narrated in ways which may reconfigure life as signifying structures (cf. romano 2009)? due to the death of the child the parents at mindet.dk have changed from being parents to be to parents not to be. their main narrative of preparing for the parenthood to be has been broken into bits and pieces and this causes a narrative collapse which may best be characterized, we suggest, as a situation where the direction of time is reversed. the death of the child becomes an event of the past and of such strong significance, that the future dissolves as a meaningful entity and the present may be described as folded into the past, because of the allabsorbing emotions of loss and grief connected to the bereavement. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 conclusions: death ends a life, not a relationship1 we suggest that 3 different chronological phases of grief can be identified at mindet.dk: 1. establishing the death of the child 2. staying alive and performing parenthood 3. developing new narratives/new directions in life seligman et al. argue that ritual remains necessary to the ones that experience the world and life as fragmented and fractured and we suggest that even though the parents move on in life the fragmentation is permanent. “ritual … is an endless work of creating a subjunctive world in overt tension with the world of lived experience” (seligman et al. 2008: 28). in the first phase of ritualizations at mindet.dk, the parents’ timework consists of “stretching” time, imparting “duration” to the narrative of the child’s short life, sorting out the “succession” of events regarding the child’s life and death process and thereby negotiating “what happened” and, not least, appropriating death by being the ones to say: “our baby died”. part of this process is about coming to terms with the loss of the child and producing some kind of closure, but at the same time there also is a strong sense of documenting the child through giving it some kind of duration, however short it may be. we have suggested the term invention of memories for these practices (christensen & sandvik, 2013) in the second phase, the repeated ritualizations of lighting a candle or other actions stress how mindet.dk enables performing negotiations of new narratives and life practices, while still trying to find one’s feet in the world and, not the least, negotiating the future position of the child. this is a matter of establishing a persistent and bearable relation to the dead child, and due to the fact that mindet.dk is a social sphere (a community of mourners), part of this “establishing relations to/with the dead” is also about “establishing relations to/with the living” by way of supporting, comforting and sharing. at mindet.dk a certain “angel”-terminology is dominant where the dead children are referred to as angels and narrated as located in the heavens and also supplied with certain superhuman qualities. one might even suggest that the ending of this phase – even though the borders to the third phase are fluid – is constituted by the child having been established in its afterlife existence, however nebulously (see fig. 2). figure 2: new signifying structures in the life of the parents in which the narrative consists of a past once again being reflected in meaningful ways in the present, creating possible directions into a set of meaning-making possibilities in the future. 1  the  former  slogan  at  mindet.dk   selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 the third phase is, logically, a continuation of the second. now, the narratives are in place, time may yet become meaningful and the child – and not the least, the relationship to the child – can be maintained through less frequent, even though intense, ritualizations of the relationship. however, we cannot document the ultimate point of the third phase merely through content analysis since the parents have moved on with their lives. they may still be active at mindet.dk both in regard to their own lost child and in regard to showing respect and comfort to other grieving parents, but the performances, like lighting candles at bedtime or on red letter days, do not inform us of the new life they now live, though it may tell us that the dead child is not forgotten. the child has been given a parallel existence which the parents can and still do keep in touch with when they choose to do so – now and then, not very frequently, but they are continuously keeping hold (walter 1997) even though they are moving on in their lives. references baym, n. (2010): communities and networks. in: baym, n. personal connections in the digital age. cambridge: polity press. pp. 78-98. carroll, b. & landry, k. (2010). logging on and letting out: using online social networks to grieve and to mourn. bulletin of science technology & society, 30, 341-349. doi: 10.1177/0270467610380006 christensen, d. r. & sandvik, k. (2008). sharing death. on the performativity of grief. paper at ecrea’s 2nd european communication conference “communication policies and culture in europe”, barcelona christensen, d. r. & sandvik, k. (2009). inventing memories. on the performance of loss and grief. paper at nordmedia 09, karlstad christensen, d. r. & sandvik, k. (2012a). sharing death. danish online memorial site mindet.dk as a marked place for performing grief and inventing memories. paper at the 2nd symposium on death and dying, helsinki christensen, d. r. & sandvik, k. (2012b). creating space and time: ritualistic practices at memorial sites for dead children. paper at 4th european communication conference, ecrea, istanbul christensen, d. r. & sandvik, k. (2013). sharing death. conceptions of time at a danish online memorial site. in: willerslev, r. & christensen, d. r. (eds.): taming time, timing death: social technologies and ritual, london: ashgate flaherty, m. g. (2011). the textures of time: agency and temporal experience. philadelphia: temple university press. gustavsson, anders. (2011). cultural studies on death and dying in scandinavia. oslo: novus press. havarinnen, a. (forthcoming). in-­‐game and out-­‐of-­‐game mourning: on the complexity of grief in virtual worlds. in: christensen, d. r. & sandvik, k. (eds.) (forthcoming). mediating and remediating death. london: ashgate pennington, n. (forthcoming). grieving for a (facebook)friend: understanding the impact of social network sites and the remediation ofthe grieving process. in: christensen, d. r. & sandvik, k. (eds.) (forthcoming). mediating and remediating death. london: ashgate ricoeur, p. (1980). narrative time. in: critical inquiry 71. pp. 169-190. doi: 0093-1896/80/0701-0001$02.07 romano, c. (2009). event and world. new york: fordham university press. seligman, a.b., weller, r.p, puett, m.j. & simon b. (2008). ritual and its consequences: an essay on the limits of sincerity. new york: oxford university press. walter, t. (1997). letting go and keeping hold: an answer to stroebe. in: mortality vol. 2, no. 3. pp. 263-266. doi:10.1080/713685875 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 mourning the unknown – affective “r.i.p’ing” on facebook lisbeth klastrup associate professor it university of copenhagen denmark klastrup@itu.dk abstract this panel paper examines the affective mourning practices of social network users active on facebook “r.i.p” pages, with a particular focus on the practice of mourning both strangers and parasocial acquaintances, coined “r.i.p’ing”. using previous findings from studies of mourning practices online as an analytical point of departure, it presents findings from a study of three danish “r.i.p. pages”, including qualitative analysis of 4100 comments made on these pages. first findings show that people on these pages use comments and postings of audio-visual material to express sympathy, talk to the deceased, share values and personal stories and material. however, a huge majority of users do this fleetingly, use banal religious discourse, and perform in affective response to general media attention. keywords facebook; death; mourning; affect; community; fandom; media ecology; r.i.p. introduction if the grief of “just a fan” can be so great, you can only guess how the family feels (woman on deceased musician’s r.i.p. page) maria rest in peace don’t’ know you but hope you will feel good up there [in heaven] (male on r.i.p. page of young woman just murdered) which factors drive social network site (sns) users to engage in online memorial practices relating to deceased people they have never met or only know “parasocially” through the media? a study of r.i.p pages and practices on facebook reveal that the death of what is in principle strangers attract a huge number of “mourners” who use social network sites such as facebook to pay their respect to the deceased. the unknown person in question can either be an ordinary person; a celebrity; or someone well-known in the public (such as influential business person or politician). what these “unknowns” have in common is that their death have generated headlines in the press and public attention. following this mediation of death, the sns-mourners virtually “pass by” a public r.i.p page or similar memorial page, either once or repeatedly to express their emotions through the use of likes, posts, drawings, photos and shared lyrics and songs; clearly visibly or textually affected by the deaths in question. this practice in its own way reflects what current death studies points out are a modern paradox: while death in the family is increasingly strange to us, the death of strangers (as experienced through the media) are what we are most familiar with. the current body of literature on the subject of mourning on sns primarily focus on the mourning of deceased people by users closely linked to the mourners such as family and friends, see for instance degroot 2008, caroll and landry 2010, brubaker et al 2011, forman 2012, kern et al 2012. some researchers have also looked at the online mourning of celebrities (see f.i. sanderson and cheong 2010, walter 2011, radford and bloch 2012). thus to my knowledge this paper present the first study of affective r.i.p’ing practices on social network sites, understood as the media driven and often fleeting mourning of unknown others by ordinary sns users. can unique characteristics of this form of practice be identified? selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 6 method the study is based on a comparative analysis of practices and comments on three danish r.i.p pages, one with +177.000 “fans” (as of february 2013) created in memory of the popular danish musician flemming “bamse” jørgensen who died january 1st, 2011 (sample of 885 comments); a group page in memory of a young danish girl, maria møller christensen, who was brutally killed january 1st, 2010 (sample of 2877 comments) this group at its peak had +22.000 members. finally, i include a r.i.p. page for a drowned young man, martin svejgaard helbo, created may 12th 2013 (sample of 402 comments and 20.000 “fans”), which were shortly after taken down by its unknown creator after enquiries on behalf of the family. using findings from earlier studies of mourning practices social media sites as an analytical point of departure, screen dumps of the pages and verbal comments have and will continue to be analysed using qualitative discourse analysis and quantitative sorting. earlier findings previous research shows that on social network sites people use “r.i.p” or memorial pages dedicated to people they know for sensemaking and relational continuity purposes (degroot 2012) and “postmortem social networking” (brubaker and hayes 2011). in general it appears that the bereft use these sites to speak directly to the deceased (see f.i. degroot 2008) and as a way to let the deceased “remain in perpetuity”, thus changing the notion of what r.i.p practices has traditionally entailed (kern et al 2013). the r.i.p and memorial pages are places to commune with, and about the dead in public (kern 2012), and places to both publicly and visibly express symbolic loss and solidarity, creating a biography of the person lost through personal narratives (caroll and landry 2010). public communal sharing of grief using religious discourse as a shared language, and rapid cycling through grief stages are particularly salient in celebrity mourning (gibson 2007, sanderson and cheong 2010, walther 2011, radford and bloch 2012). own findings first findings show that “r.i.p’ing” can be divided into two phases. the first phase initiates immediately after the person mourned is dead. that is, all three of the studied r.i.p. memorial pages were created the same day as the death of the person were made public in the media, and a quick and viral sign up of page fans and group members took place. my tracking of the “r.i.p. flemming “bamse” jørgensen” page showed that 64.000 had “liked” the page within one day of the creation and 110.000 people had “liked” it after five. this first affective phase lasts for around one to two weeks during which new people with regular intervals post comments. during this phase, comments express shock and sensemaking, and sympathy with the family of the deceased. some people share personal stories, either about “close encounters” with the deceased (concerts with the musician), identify with the situation (being a mother of a young girl) or of own experiences of loss of family members. however, most comments consists of a few words or a few sentences using religious discourse (“rest in peace“ “lighting a candle”), or as an alternative, posting of a picture or link to a song. there is one notable difference between r.i.p’ing practices on the three sites: in the maria møller christensen and martin svejgaard helbo group, people emphasise that they “didn’t know you [her] /[him]” but nevertheless are very touched and express their sympathy with the family of the deceased. on bamse’s page, people emphasise familiarity: he is “our bamse”, and they will miss “your music”, and find comfort in the fact that he will live on through his music. the second cyclic phase is characterised by the fact that only a minority of users are now active (most mourners only post once in the affective phase). they can be characterised as “hard core fans” or “hard core mourners” who appear to return on special occasions, such as holiday seasons (for instance, christmas), or on the dead person’s day of birth and death. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 7 conclusions so far findings show that the practice of “r.i.p’ing” and mourning the unknown show many similarities with findings from the studies of mourning of relatives, friends and celebrities. however, “r.i.p’ing” takes place over a short period of time, and for most appear to be express immediate affect rather than actual grief. references brubaker, j.r., kivran-swaine, f., taber, l. and hayes, g. r. (2012). “griefstricken in a crowd: the language of bereavement and distress in social media”. paper presented at the association for the advancement of artificial intelligence, sixth international aaai conference on weblogs and social media brubaker, j. r. & hayes, g. r. (2011). “we will never forget you [online]”: an empirical investigation of postmortem myspace comments. cscw 2011, march 19–23, 2011, hangzhou, china carroll, b. & landry, k. (2010). logging on and letting out: using online social networks to grieve and to mourn. bulletin of science technology & society, 30, 341-349. degroot, j.m. (2008). facebook memorial walls and cmc’s effect on the grieving process. paper presented a the annual meeting of the national communication association. degroot, j. m. (2012). maintaining relational continuity with the deceased on facebook. omega: journal of death & dying, 65, 195-212. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.2190/om.65.3.c forman, a., kern, r. & gil-egui, g. (2012). death and mourning as sources of community participation in online social networks: r.i.p. pages in facebook. first monday 17(9). gibson, m. death and mourning in technologically mediated culture. health sociology review 16, 415-424. kern, r. forman, a. & gil-egui, g. (2012). r.i.p.: remain in perpetuity. facebook memorial pages. telematics and informatics 30, 2-10. radford, s.k & bloch, p. (2012). grief, commiseration and consumption following the death of a celebrity. journal of consumer culture 2(2), 37-55. sanderson, j. & cheong, p.h. (2010). tweeting prayers and communicating grief over michael jackson online. bulletin of science, technology and society 30 (5), 328-340. walter, t. (2011). angels not souls: popular religion in the online mourning for british celebrity goody. religion 41 (1), pp. 29-51. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 8 qr codes in danish cemeteries. how digitizing the dead might change the living. stine gotved associated professor it university of copenhagen denmark contact@contact.edu abstract on several danish cemeteries, the gravestone granite is recently supplied with way more information about the deceased that just the laconic "name + lifespan". since early 2012, those ordering the grave monument can choose to have a qr code embedded in the stone, for them to upload digital memories, pictures, obituaries and the like. the visitors to the grave can then access the digital content with a swipe of their smartphone. this research project takes a closer look on this new way of digitizing the dead. how might this kind of concealed public disclosure change the way we are dealing with the dead? what is the reasoning behind choosing material for upload, and how does the ability affect visitors to the grave? the study is about to be executed, and the explorative approach aims to place the digitized gravestone within the fast evolving culture of online memorial practice. keywords digital memorials; qr codes; sharing death online field of research taking my departure in the actual gravestone and the embedded qr-code, there are at least two tracks to follow: the human stakeholders and the digital content. even though the tracks will zigzag each other later in the study, e.g., when researching the stakeholders' responses to the digital content, the preliminary ontology keeps them apart. the stakeholders are divided into four categories, with an overlap between the last two. • the deceased • the stonecutters • the closest relatives • the visitors to the grave in an attempt to outline the field, the following is a first description of the stakeholders, primarily based on assumptions. the deceased the name on the gravestone represents the pivotal stakeholder without whom there would be no activity to speak of. the deceased might have been an active part in deciding on a qr-coded gravestone, and might just as well have produced personal digital content in advance. however, as interviewing is out of question, this group of stakeholders will be accessed through another group of stakeholders, the closest relatives. (they are also likely to consider what kind of memorial they want for themselves, thus producing a kind of forewarning to the future growth in the number of deceased underneath a qr-coded headstone). the stonecutter selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 9 in this study, the stonecutter is actually a kind of digital gatekeeper. as far as the pilot study goes, the actual upload of commemorative content to a secure and commercial free server is included in a qrcode gravestone deal and done by the stonecutter. furthermore, the stonecutters might be those presenting the idea of a qr-code to the buyers, and are thus exposed to the relatives' reasoning back and forth in the decision process (regardless of the outcome). connected to the last point, the stonecutters might offer a unique insight into the hype and fashion around the activities with qr-codes and digitized memorials, as they presumably are interested in turning the trend into serious business. the closest relatives the closest relatives are here defined as those who actually order the monument and/or do have the last word on the digital material. the relatives have to make decisions on how to deal with this new category of memorial, what to upload and what to keep private. the need for ethical considerations is grave when the material is made public; it might be more difficult to honor the dead without the risk of offending the still living. on the other hand, the qr-code might be the first step to a time-extended digital presence for the deceased, linking to, e.g., a facebook memorial page or other personal profiles, thus taking part of the possible pressure of digital production away from the relatives. by deciding on a qr-coded gravestone, the closest relatives are some of the frontrunners in the cultural change, where our everyday digital life seems to continue seamlessly after the physical death. the visitors to the grave the last group of stakeholders is the visitors to the grave, and they can be anyone stepping by, grieving or not. they enter the cemetery with a certain set of expectations, and maybe a smartphone in their pocket. the qr-code is a visible feature, still setting the grave apart from the surrounding memorials. indiscriminately, the closest relative and the extended family, the long-lost friend and the total stranger (like a researcher) are offered a glimpse of the deceased and her/his achievements in life. the tangible gravestone becomes a portal to the deceased's digital afterlife, and the visitors to the grave are likely to reflect upon this collision of realms. scanning the qr-code and engaging with the digital content is definitely a new way of relating to death and the processes of grieving, and it might change the experience of the physical location as well. the digital content (track two) as yet, no study has uncovered the kind of digital content available in the qr-coded memorials. the material might be pictures, films, and/or text, it might be home-produced and/or clipped from the mass media, it might add a few words or a whole new perspective to the life of the deceased it is rather hard to predict. thus, the study of the digital content intends to analyze the material both vertically (in-depth content analysis, closely connected to the stakeholders in question) and horizontally (categorizing and comparing different kinds of material, outlining the broader cultural change in memorial practices). in sum the study draws on my cross-disciplinary background in cultural sociology and internet studies, and include studies in memorial and mourning practices. the total number of qr-codes in danish cemeteries is still within reach of both quantitative and qualitative approaches, and likewise, the number of stakeholders is rather predictable. the main part of the empirical research takes place during spring and summer 2013 and includes extensive interviewing, visits to cemeteries and download of qr-coded memorials. when an increasingly large part of life, from the most intimate to the most officious is manifest online, it should be of no surprise that death is there as well. we share experiences of mourning and memorials, and there is a cultural change towards online integration in the ways we deal with death. furthermore, as the median age of the internet population continues to go up, matters connected to the physical death will have increasing importance. the study's pivotal point is the cultural change as well selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 10 as the convergence of physical and digital, as it is played out in everyday life in our mundane activities, in the cultural concessions, and on the actual gravestone. references brubaker, j. r. & hayes, g. r. (2011). “we will never forget you [online]”: an empirical investigation of postmortem myspace comments. cscw 2011, march 19–23, 2011, hangzhou, china. brubaker, j. r., kivran-swaine, f., taber, l., & hayes, g. r. (2012). grief-stricken in a crowd: the language of bereavement and distress in social media. sixth international aaai conference on weblogs and social media caroll, b. & landry, k. (2010). logging on and letting out: using online social networks to grieve and to mourn. bulletin of science, technology & society 30(5) 341–349 christensen, d. r. & sandvik, k. (2013). sharing death: conceptions of time at a danish online memorial site. in d. r. christensen & r. willerslev (eds.) taming time, timing death: social technologies and ritual. ashgate publishing limited. forman, a., kern, r. & gil-egui, g. (2012). death and mourning as sources of community participation in online social networks: r.i.p. pages in facebook. first monday 17(9). jacobsen, m. h. (2011). sociology, mortality and solidarity : an interview with zygmunt bauman on death, dying and immortality. mortality, vol. 16, nr. 4, 2011, s. 380-393. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 11 communicating feelings of loss and anger: an analysis of grief communication on facebook profiles in instances of suicide natalie pennington phd student the university of kansas usa natpen@ku.edu abstract this research project seeks to look at a specific instance of death and grieving: how a social network communicates through facebook when the deceased committed suicide. past research on open social network sites such as my mydeathspace.com suggested that flaming and other negative behaviors often occurred on the site as raw emotions emerged. given the relatively closed nature of facebook profiles however, it is expected that there will be different results here versus memorial sites. the big research questions are: how do members of the social network of the deceased interact on the profile page of a friend who has committed suicide? how does the discussion of suicide (if at all) change how members of the social network interact on the profile page of the deceased? keywords facebook; grief communication; suicide rationale past research has successfully shown that individuals can both give and receive social support through social networking sites such as facebook (carroll & landry, 2010; degroot, 2012). more specifically, research has found that in times of grief, individuals believe that they can turn to facebook for support from friends and family alike (degroot, 2009). missing from the current literature however is a discussion about how the cause of death can influence the effectiveness of support received from social media. more specifically, while research has been conducted on memorial pages relating grief communication and suicide (degroot, 2009; leonard & toller, 2012), no study specifically has tied grieving the death of a friend who committed suicide on their facebook profile page. memorial pages are distinct from a profile page in that their primary purpose on facebook is to be a place to go and mourn and discuss the loss of someone—and anyone is able to join in that discussion. research showed that these pages often attract “emotional rubberneckers”, who would access the memorial group page and talk about their own loss they’ve experienced in life, taking the focus away from the deceased (degroot, 2009). conversely, the profile page is self-created and self-contained. it stands in memory of the deceased and how they wanted to be represented online—the profile picture they chose, the status updates they wrote, the interests they picked, and most importantly, the people that they chose to be friends with are connected to the page already, and the probability of the publicat-large accessing that page is low given the focus we have in society on ensuring privacy for our profiles. in the case of suicide, privacy is of particular importance (leonard & toller, 2012). while it is important to consider how we grieve when something as horrific as a school shooting happens, it is of equal importance to understand how we grieve when a less-publicized death occurs. this research is important as we seek to grapple with changing patterns in grief communication in a digital world. more specifically, an open dialogue about loss is important for those experiencing grief (dyregrov & dyregrov, 2008). while there is a tendency to want to say to the bereaved that they are “so strong” and “holding up well,” research suggests that these statements foreclose the possibility for the bereaved to express their loss, forcing them to think they are supposed to react a certain way and not talk about their feelings (dyregrov & dyregrov, 2008, p. 28). facilitating open communication about grief is difficult, especially with the death is sudden and unexpected; finding the right words to say when selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 12 someone close to you as committed suicide can be particularly hard, as emotions are often mixed between sadness that they are gone, and anger that they took their own life. as goldsmith (2004) suggests, the burden falls on the entire social network to determine the appropriate ways to communicate their loss, co-creating a space to discuss their feelings of grief. this can be incredibly difficult for some members who were not as close to the deceased as others, while they too are grieving, knowing the appropriate words to say to others, and when to say them, can be difficult (dyregrov & dyregrov, 2008). indeed, a lack of understanding of what grief is, and the process that follows, often leads to miscommunication within the network. dyregrov and dyregrov (2008) note that the assumption that grief is meant to be private that permeates american culture often causes members of the social network to cease discussion about the deceased with each other after a certain time period. this expectation to “move on” rather than continue bonds stymies dialogue following the funeral and/or memorial service for the deceased, preventing members of the deceased’s social network from continuing to communicate about their loss. how then do we continue to cope with grief over time? research suggests that writing and talking about our grief is important in helping to deal with loss (pennebaker, 1997), and as communication technology advances, another possible location for individuals to express their grief can be found on the internet. leonard and toller (2009) in their research on the virtual memorial site mydeathspace.com suggest that increased anonymity on the sites encourages negative discussions about the deceased, particularly in the case of suicide. by allowing users to post comments without logging in or attaching their name to the comment left on the memorial page, the researchers found that users would lash out not only at the deceased for how they died (e.g. jumping in front of a car or train), but also judged the friends and family of the deceased asking questions like “where are the parents” (leonard & toller, 2009, p. 16). additional research on trolling and memorial pages (phillips, 2011) also notes that when a page is not tightly monitored that the conversation can quickly turn negative. this is particularly true in the case of pages of where the death or discussion is seen as sensitive, because those posting are seen as easy targets (phillips, 2011). research on myspace as a memorial site (carroll & landry, 2010) speaks to the problems found in the mydeathspace.com study. while the results found that users believed it was socially acceptable to write on the wall page of the myspace profile of the deceased as a method of coping, which is consistent with barnhill and owen’s (2007) analysis of online virtual memorials, they also found that these posts were often establishing a competing narrative of the life of the deceased, and that the open nature of a myspace profile allowed most anyone to post a comment on the wall if they wanted to, altering the overall content of the page and leading sometimes to negative discussions on the site about the deceased (carroll & landry, 2010). additional research on myspace as a location for grief found that most comments left on the page occur on major holidays and the anniversary of death, though taper off and decrease as each year goes by (brubaker & hayes, 2011). all together, these studies paint a fairly cohesive picture of grief on social network sites, but leave room for further analysis of suicide specifically in relation to profile pages and how friends and family of the deceased communicate their grief. conclusions this project points to a continued importance of understanding how computer-mediated communication can affect a person following the loss of a friend, and finding ways to help make that affect beneficial, particularly for college students who not only frequently use social media, but will most likely experience the loss of a friend during their time in college (balk, 2011). by acknowledging that the fb profile page of the deceased is a probable location for the bereaved to communicate about their loss, society can help to ensure that these avenues remain open to members of the social network. while facebook as an organization doesn’t actively delete profiles of its deceased members, increasing awareness that the existence of the pages help members communicate selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 13 their grief is important in addressing additional avenues for individuals to grieve and communicate with the deceased after they passed away. references attig, t. (2001). relearning the world: making and finding meanings. in r. a. neimeyer (ed.), meaning reconstruction & the experience of loss (pp. 33-53). washington, dc: american psychological association. balk, d. e. (2011). helping the bereaved college student. new york, ny: springer publishing company. barnhill, j., & owen, j. t. (2007). virtual memorials: a place to grieve. paper presented at the annual meeting of the national communication association, chicago, il. brubaker, j. r., & hayes, g. r. (2011). “we will never forget you [online]”: an empirical investigation of postmortem myspace comments. paper presented at the conference on computed support cooperative work, hangzhou, china. burleson, b. r., & macgeorge, e. l. (2002). supportive communication. in m. l. knapp & j. a. daly (eds.), handbook of interpersonal communication (3rd ed., 374-424). thousand oaks, ca: sage. carroll, b. & landry, k. (2010). logging on and letting out: using online social networks to grieve and to mourn. bulletin of science technology & society, 30, 341-349. degroot, j. m. (2009). reconnecting with the dead via facebook: examining transcorporeal communication as a way to maintain relationships. unpublished doctoral dissertation, ohio university, athens, oh. degroot, j. m. (2012). maintaining relational continuity with the deceased on facebook. omega: journal of death & dying, 65, 195-212. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.2190/om.65.3.c dyregrov, k., & dyregrov, a. (2008). effective grief and bereavement support: the role of family, friends, colleagues, schools, and support professionals. london, england: jessica kingsley publishers. goldsmith, d. j. (2004). communicating social support. cambridge, england: cambridge university press. leonard, l. g., & toller, p. (2012). speaking ill of the dead: anonymity and communication about suicide on mydeathspace.com. communication studies, 63, 387-404. doi: 10.1080/10510974.2011.629274 pennebaker, j. w. (1997). opening up: the healing power of expressing emotions. new york, ny: the guilford press. phillips, w. (2011). loling at tragedy: facebook trolls, memorial pages, and resistance to grief online. first monday, 16, http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3168/3115 vicary, a. m., & fraley, r. c. (2010). student reactions to the shootings at virginia tech and northern illinois university: does sharing grief and support over the internet affect recovery? personality and social psychology bulletin, 36, 1555-1563. 1 creating networks through search pagerank, algorithmic truth, and tracing the web john jones west virginia university united states of america john.jones@mail.wvu.edu abstract this paper analyzes pagerank, a key feature of google's search algorithm, showing how its primary function is not to identify quality web pages but rather to identify hubs within a network defined by the internet's link structure. while pagerank's method has been compared to the process of using the wisdom of crowds to determine quality, by relying on network effects to identify hubs, the algorithm does not allow users the independence and diversity necessary for crowdsourcing to be completely effective. for these reasons, google and other search engines cannot be simply understood as information providers, for their role in defining the network structure of the web makes these search companies the holders of a significant form of network power: programming. however, users can offset this power by becoming switchers who actively connect networks in order to diversify their information sources. keywords search; networks; algorithms; programming and switching; google. in his description of the features of the network society, castells (2009) notes that networks are inefficient compared to top-down "command-and-control structures" unless those networks are paired with computing technology that allows users to manage their "complexity" (p. 22). castells directly credits the creation of the world 2 wide web and the concomitant rise of search for managing the complexity of networked information online, making it useful to the average user (2000, pp. 50-51). while internet search has taken on various forms (dennis, bruza, & mcarthur, 2002), from curated, user-contributed directories like yahoo! to the query-based search of google, the exponential growth in complexity of the internet (barabási, 2002, pp. 3738) has rendered directories less effective for web search. instead, users increasingly rely on query-based search to find information. query-based search relies on algorithmic methods that not only find matching documents but seek to determine their relevance to the query and rank them accordingly. this is the method applied by google, typified by its pagerank formula, which was adapted into an algorithm that assigns a rank to web pages based on an analysis of the links directed toward them (brin & page, 1998). currently, google is not only the most popular internet search engine, but also the most visited site on the internet <www.alexa.com/topsites>, a fact that underscores the extent to which search is used as a portal for navigating the web (halavais, 2009, p. 33). as such, the methods used by google and other search engines are important objects of research not only for the ways that they provide access to the web, but also how they mediate the web for users. recently, increased scrutiny has been brought on the methods employed by search engines to generate results and how those methods relate to knowledge access and the effects of internet search on information seeking and culture (halavais, 2009; vaidhyanathan, 2011). a clear understanding of the effects of search algorithms is crucial for users to craft their searches in effective ways. since the centerpiece of google's algorithm is pagerank, which claims to model users' information-seeking behaviors (brin & page, 1998, p. 110), an analysis of the effect of pagerank on information seeking is instructive both for understanding how search constructs the web and how users can be better informed information seekers. of course, pagerank is only one part of how google determines search results, but, despite the efforts of researchers (evans, 2007) and google's increasing acknowledgement of the changes it makes to its algorithms (cf. huffman, 2012), there are few public, concrete details about google's search algorithms. for this reason, the analysis in this paper is limited. nor is this analysis intended as a particular critique of google or to 3 suggest that the effects of choices made by the search company do not have a counterpart in the choices made by other search engines. rather, the goal of this paper is to analyze the network properties of pagerank and its effect on search users. while pagerank has been extensively analyzed, such analysis tends to focus either on its mathematical properties (ding, he, husbands, zha, & simon, 2002; evans, 2007; gu, chen, chen, & lu, 2012; nie, davison, & qi, 2006) or the application of the formula to networks besides the web (iván & grolmusz, 2011; takahashi, et al., 2011). in this paper, i will describe how pagerank mediates the web by bringing into existence a version of the network that would not exist without it. i will then show how that network privileges unique goals and values, examining how those goals and values prescribe a particular role for users within that network. i will begin by describing pagerank's method of determining the relevance of pages to a query and, following latour (2004, p. 132), i will argue that this method traces a unique network within the wider web. i will then ask how this tracing determines the role of the user in assigning relevance to search results. finally, i will explore the impact these answers have on users' information-seeking behaviors. after this analysis, i will suggest some ways that acknowledging the network properties of algorithms like pagerank in discussions of search could provide new directions for research on this topic. because of the important role search plays in navigating online information, it is crucial to understand how search algorithms like pagerank privilege certain kinds of information and informationseeking over others, as well as the role that networks play in this process. pagerank and tracing the web network theorists have argued that networks are not things, but rather are constituted in "discourses" (castells, 2009, p. 53) and the "frames" and values (castells, 2009, p. 46) they provide for particular information or interactions. as latour (2004) puts it, networks are not simply physical entities like "nylon thread" (p. 132); rather, they are "the trace left behind by some moving agent" (p. 132) through both technological and cultural structures. as such, descriptions of networks are necessarily partial and interpretive. being a network, the internet is not a distinct thing, but it is a process that connects many different—and constantly changing—resources, both 4 technological and human. in their discussion of search algorithms, heineman, pollice, and selkow (2009) state that efficient search depends not only on the effective structuring of data, but also on choosing the right algorithm for the particular search task (p. 106). for a search to return results quickly and effectively, it is important to organize the information being searched in a way that allows the algorithm to quickly navigate it for the result that is desired. for this reason, algorithms and data structure are intimately connected, and the choice of one directly influences the choice of the other. indeed, while google is well known for its search algorithms, it has also been praised for the unique methods it uses to index and structure web data. o'reilly (2005) has specifically claimed google's primary value was as a "specialized database," not a search engine. as halavais (2009) notes in his cultural analysis of search, search algorithms present particular views or biases of information (p. 87), and i argue that this claim not only covers the methodology of search, but also the ways that search conceptualizes the information that is being searched for. search engines do more than simply provide a window onto the web, but, in indexing and formatting the web in particular ways, they value certain forms of participation and certain classes of information over others. in this section i will discuss what the known portions of the pagerank algorithm tell us about how it structures a network, describing both how pagerank creates a trace of the web and the types of pages that are privileged in this tracing. describing pagerank in making the case for pagerank, brin and page (1998) argue that then-current methods like directories and keyword searching were unable to handle the constant growth of the web. in the first case, while directories like yahoo! were good for some purposes—covering "popular topics," for example—they had trouble scaling and updating with new web content, and in the second case traditional keyword search "return[ed] too many low quality" results (p. 107). brin and page's answer to these problems was to use "the link structure of the web," or the "citation (link) graph," to determine the "quality" of "each web page" encountered by their algorithm (p. 109). pagerank gives each page it in its index a score based on how many other pages link to 5 it and how many pages it links to. further, links that come from pages with a high pagerank are weighted more heavily within the system than links that come from pages that do not have a high pagerank (p. 110). this method is supposed to be "a model of user behavior," where the user is described as a 'random surfer' who is given a web page at random and keeps clicking on links, never hitting 'back' but eventually gets bored and starts on another random page. the probability that the random surfer visits a page is its pagerank. (p. 110) in the initial presentation of pagerank, then, we are told that it can determine the importance of a web page by quantifying the way in which pages are linked together, or cite each other, and that this method should replicate how an average user would navigate the web, following links from high quality pages to other high quality pages. network effects and pagerank page, et al. (1998), in their discussion of citations, note the work of goffman who argues that information moves through citation networks via an "epidemic process" (p. 2), and they draw on research that models the web using graph theory and other forms of network analysis, identifying the web, for example, as "hubs and authorities" (p. 2). in his discussion of the development of graph theory and network analysis, barabási (2002) addresses an individual like the "random surfer" the google founders adopted as their conceptual model for pagerank, and barabási uses this conceptual device—which, following brin and page, i will call the random surfer—to describe two features of the internet that allow algorithms like pagerank to work: "small worlds" (p. 37) and "preferential attachment" (p. 85). in the first case, the web is a "small world" (p. 37), where "small world" means that any page on the web is only a few links— around nineteen, at the time of barabási's analysis—away from any other. this fact allows for the random surfer to navigate the internet, but it does not mean that it is necessarily easy for this surfer to find a particular page online, as the exponential growth of the web would make finding a page nineteen links away involve sifting 6 through millions of documents (p. 37). in addition to the small worlds effect, the web is governed by another network feature: "preferential attachment" (p. 85). preferential attachment describes the likelihood that nodes in a network with many links will acquire more links. or, as barabási puts it, "[w]hen choosing between two pages, one with twice as many links as the other, about twice as many people link to the more connected page" (p. 85). this process creates the "hubs" that we find on the web, pages with many more links than other pages, and it is these hubs that pagerank is so effective in ferreting out. writing a decade ago, barabási states that pages that are not hubs—those with only 1-2 incoming links—are frequently ignored by search engines (p. 58), a situation that has largely changed as search engines have been able to create more comprehensive web indexes. however, the fact remains that non-hubs are not preferred by pagerank, which utilizes the links in its index to discover hubs, and those hubs receive preferential rankings in the system. in short, while it is possible for a random surfer to find relevant pages on the web by moving from link to link, because this surfer is constrained in time, she or he would never be able to reliably find particular documents due to the sheer size of the web. yet, individuals do find pages by "interpreting the links," looking for the most relevant one (barabási, 2002, pp. 37–38). while the google system described by brin and page (1998) attempts to take into account the text associated with links in order to identify page content, in lieu of this interpretation pagerank largely relies on the status of particular page as a hub as a substitution for the situated decision making of the random surfer. in doing so, pagerank traces a particular version of the web, one characterized not by decisions about relevance but by preferential attachment. to put it another way, what pagerank describes is not necessarily a map of quality web pages, but rather a map of the growth of preferential attachment defined by links between pages. of course, it is not a given that the hub structure of the web does not map onto quality. however, i would point out two other features of the network that militates against the easy conflation of quality with network structure. first, search engines cannot reliably index the entire web. second, and more importantly, by focusing on internet structure, this tracing or model of the network excludes from considerations of 7 quality significant forms of action from the actor-network, thus devaluing the user. in the first case, because the internet is a directed network—meaning that if there is a link from page a to page b, it is possible for a user to navigate from a to b, but not from b to a—this has particular effects on how it is possible to navigate the network. whereas in a network that allows connections in both directions all pages would be navigable from all other pages, the directed nature of links on the internet has resulted in it being divided into distinct "continents," or groups of connected nodes (barabási, 2002, p. 166). barabási (2002) identifies four such continents on the internet: the central core, the in continent, the out continent, and the tendrils (p. 166). the central core consists of most major sites, and a page on this continent is able to connect with any other page (p. 167). the in continent is connected to the core, but it is not possible to navigate from the core back to this collection of nodes, while pages in the core are connected to the out continent, but it is not possible to return to the core from it (p. 167). finally, the tendrils are a series of interconnected nodes that are not connected to any other continents (pp. 167-168). because the web has this topology, search engines can only reliably index roughly 24% of web pages, leaving the rest "unreachable by surfing" (p. 165) or by ranking methods that emulate surfing. it is clear, then, that the random surfer is not reliably reaching all portions of the web, so any definition of quality based on this model would have to account for this lack of coverage. i wish to deal with the second case—how pagerank accounts for the judgments of internet users—more fully in the next section. the user and pagerank as i have argued, the link structure of the web is not a concrete thing, but rather a particular tracing of a wider actor-network (latour, 2004, p. 132). further, pagerank does not simply present that link structure, but rather it interprets it, placing more importance on some links than others, and using that interpretation to identify hubs within the network; indeed, this hub structure is itself merely a representation of the internet, seeing as it only covers a small portion of the documents on the network (barabási, 2002, p. 165). because it is an actor network, one that puts particular emphasis on the role of users in its creation, we should examine the network pagerank 8 creates not simply for its technological features but also for the role that individuals play in it. in their various descriptions of pagerank, brin and page (1998) place a high level of importance on the role of the user, stating that pagerank's formula and resulting algorithms replicate users experience in navigating the web (p. 110). additionally, although it is not directly stated, there is another role for the user, that of deciding which pages to link to from a particular page, thus making choices about connections that are mined by pagerank to determine quality in web search. while the authors do not use this phrase, the way in which they frame the "link structure" of the internet (page, brin, motwani, & winograd, 1998, p. 1) as a means of determining the value of individual pages is very similar to the idea of using the "wisdom of crowds," or "crowdsourcing"— the process of using aggregate decisions of many people, as opposed to top-down decisions from one or a few, to determine importance—concepts that would later be a key component of what was called "web 2.0." indeed, o'reilly (2005), the author of a seminal document describing web 2.0, specifically connects pagerank to crowdsourced methods of evaluating information. in this section i wish to complicate the relationship between the user and pagerank, suggesting that, while users do influence the results returned by the algorithm, their influence is significantly constrained. specifically, i will look at the role that the user plays in the collective action that forms the link structure of the web as that structure is modeled by pagerank. according to surowiecki (2004), there are four conditions that allow for wise crowds: diversity of opinion (each person should have some private information, even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts), independence (people's opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them), decentralization (people are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge), and aggregation (some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision). (p. 10) whereas pagerank is wildly successful at aggregating results and does little to interfere with the local knowledge that informs decisions made about links, it has biases that interfere with diversity of opinion and independence. namely, the way in which 9 pagerank structures the index of the web allows for it to harness particular network effects that it then uses to create search results. however, these network effects can limit both the diversity of opinion available in search results as well as the independence of individual users. in the previous section, i noted that pagerank identifies the hub structure of the internet by discovering those pages that have a large number of incoming links. the assumption being made by this formula is that these incoming links are indicators of quality, and page, et al. (1998, p. 2) cite research into citation analysis as a means of justifying the connection between incoming links and relevance. yet, despite this connection, by focusing more on the existence of links rather than the interpretation of those links, mere citation can lead to two problems. the first is that citation without interpretation can fail to distinguish between negative citations and positive ones. in a well-known case, the owner of an online store that sold sunglasses would regularly harass and otherwise provide poor customer service to certain customers in order to get them to write negative reviews of his site (segal, 2010). the reason given for this behavior was that the owner found that mentions of any kind, positive or negative, tended to cause his site to rise in google rankings (segal, 2010). while google has since claimed that they have altered their other algorithms to account for negative reviews, pagerank, in itself, does not allow for diverse opinions, counting each link as a single vote for another page. the effect is, as surowiecki (2004) puts it, to limit the "private information" (p. 10) that users can contribute to web results. whereas a scientific paper that is negatively reviewed in a journal, or cited in order to debunk its claims, would never be mistaken as authoritative by human readers of the article, pagerank does not distinguish between positive and negative mentions. it is this feature of pagerank that led to famous "google bombs" ("google bomb," n.d.) instances where individuals have used the features of pagerank to influence search results for generally non-commercial purposes. interestingly, while brin and page (1998) note as an example of poor search quality that a then-major search engine returned a joke page as its first link for searches of "bill clinton" (p. 116), the most famous google bomb 10 connected searches for the phrase "miserable failure" to then-president george w. bush's official white house biography page ("google bomb," n.d.).1 while it may seem that noting the direction of links is itself a significant form of reference, and that individuals can draw on their private knowledge to interpret search results, there is another aspect of pagerank that affects the role of individuals. even though pagerank counts links in aggregate, individual choices about links are constrained by network effects. as mentioned earlier, pages with large numbers of incoming links are hubs, but, as barabási (2002) points out, hubs are not random. rather, hubs are the result of preferential attachment in the growth of networks (p. 91). the presence of preferential attachment indicates that some networks generate hubs as an outcome of their growth process, and hubs develop not simply because of inherent qualities but because of early preferences ( in short, because the algorithm cannot natively distinguish between positive and negative mentions of a particular source, its effect is to limit all user knowledge that contributes to its calculations to only public knowledge—the links themselves—thus restricting individual interpretations and other private knowledge. cf. waldrop, 1992, p. 45). as barabási (2002) notes, individuals, when choosing to create links, are far more likely to create links to pages that already have a great number of links (p. 85). while such linking behavior is not centrally controlled, it is constrained by this feature of networks, and this constraint is a direct product of the way that pagerank traces the web. the 1 examples like these, and the fact that google must constantly fight spam, suggest another problem with the simple equation of pagerank's results with quality. page et al. (1998) note that it is possible to try to "manipulat[e]" the pagerank system by "buying" links to a particular page, thus increasing the page's rank by increasing the number of pages that link to it (p. 12). however, in 1998 they argued that this type of manipulation was largely preventable, suggesting that the cost of such a practice— purchasing a number of ads on various sites—would make it prohibitive. they did not anticipate the rise of free services like blogs were users could easily create numerous unique subdomains then have them link to a site, or they could create numerous comments on other blogs that would link to the site in question. google has taken steps to limit the effectiveness of this type of manipulation, both by directly restricting it ("report spam, paid links, malware, and other problems to google," 2012), and by modifying its algorithms to devalue sites that they identify as so-called link farms (singhal & cutts, 2011). yet, if pagerank was a means of assessing quality and was based on an unconstrained version of crowdsourcing, one would expect that this effort on google's part would not be necessary, as low quality sites would be identified as such and devalued by users. however, because pagerank's true function is to discover hubs, not quality, and because hubs can be created by anyone with sufficient time and resources, the arms race against spammers is a constant concern to the search company. 11 tendency of pagerank to produce this behavior is hinted at even in the earliest writings about the formula. page, et al. (1998) argue that, given a limited set of web pages, pagerank is an excellent predictor of citation counts (p. 13). that is, when not all citations are known, the pagerank of a particular page within the known set of pages is strongly correlated with the number of citations for a given page within a larger or complete set. or, as the authors put it, "pagerank may even be a better citation count approximation than citation counts themselves" (p. 13). while this result may suggest confidence in pagerank's results—indeed, the authors argue that it is a "powerful justification for using pagerank" (p. 13)—it may be that it is instead merely an indicator of the formula's effectiveness of ferreting out the structure of the network that it examines. or, to rephrase page, et al.'s (1998) statement, pagerank is a better predictor of a network's structure than the known structure of the network. these issues are exacerbated by the tendency of search engines to offer personalized search results, results designed to fit the particular interests of the individual user ("google personalized search," n.d.). indeed, page, et al. (1998) suggest searching the saved bookmarks on a user's computer as one means of creating these personalized results (pp. 11–12). while the ostensible purpose of personalized search is to increase the relevance or quality of results returned to searchers, one way of conceptualizing personalized search is that it shifts the location of the search from the wider web to a more limited network. that is, rather than identifying the hubs of particular topics or other information within the web, personalized search merely identifies the hubs and other network features of what (it assumes) are the individual's personal or local networks. at first blush, this may seem to be a means of increasing the independence of search results by giving more prominence to user-generated choices. however, because pagerank operates by identifying the hubs in a link network, the effect of personalized search is to limit the network that is being searched to one that is relevant to the searcher, thus effectively limiting independence by excluding what are determined to be irrelevant networks and their associated hubs. similarly, personalized search could give too much prominence to individual interpretations of facts, thus not allowing for enough outside opinion to temper individual results. 12 these conclusions do not necessarily argue against the use of pagerank. indeed, one of the benefits of an algorithm like pagerank is that it identifies web structure. barabási (2002) notes that, because of the density of links on the web and its small world properties, while any page is theoretically within nineteen clicks of any other page, the random surfer has no effective means of determining the shortest path between those two pages (p. 37). however, algorithms like pagerank can effectively surf connections, and, consequently, identify hubs and other major features of the web (p. 38). yet, pagerank does not represent a model of the random surfer because it does not provide searchers with the shortest distance between two pages. rather, it reformats the data it indexes to emphasize the hub structure of the web that it has defined using the link information it collects. one result of identifying this hub structure is to make those pages more visible for users, thus intensifying the effect of preferential attachment on those pages. for this reason, to the extent that pagerank influences search results, it does not allow for true independence in the establishment of hubs. drawing attention to a page as a potential hub increases the likelihood that it will draw more links, thus giving it more attention, thus drawing more links, and so on. for these reasons— pagerank places particular, although not absolute, restrictions on the diversity of opinion and independence of its results—the algorithm constrains the role of the user in creating the knowledge that informs its definitions of quality. within the actor-network, prominence is given to the technical features of the network—the hubs—while the choices of users are constrained by that network and network effects. algorithms, "programming" and "switching," and networked search so far i have discussed the effects of pagerank on the creation and growth of networks of information. the question that remains, is: how do these effects influence the information-seeking activities of google's users? this is a relevant line of inquiry, for as search has become the dominant interface for information seeking in a digital society, "permeating our social lives" as halavais (2009, p. 31) puts it, a common argument has been that search skills are an essential emerging literacy. halavais (2009) identifies the focus of many search literacy efforts as being on the role of query formation on the part of users and the continual refinement of those search queries so as 13 to close in on the object of the search (p. 34). understanding how to successfully query a search engine is an important part of being able to craft effective searches, but, as i have argued, the unique network effects of pagerank suggest that the role of networks and their structure must be taken into account as part of the search process. that is, in combination with choosing the correct query, it is important to choose the correct network or networks to search and—when possible—to understand the structure of those networks. while jenkins, clinton, purushotma, robison, and weigel (2006) do not specifically identify search literacy in their list of the core skills of twenty-first century media education, search nevertheless underlies many of the skills they do identify, particularly "networking," which the authors describe as "the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information" (p. 4). in this concluding section, i will suggest that we need to think of user interactions with search not simply as interactions with an interface or with search queries, but as interactions with networks. to that end, i address the effects of pagerank in terms of castells's (2009) "programming" and "switching" (p. 45), describing how the network-creating features of pagerank can influence search results and how users can respond to this influence in order to be more informed and effective information-seekers. before addressing how users are affected by the network features of search, i will briefly describe some challenges facing researchers interested in search procedures, describe how what we know about google searches can impact users in light of the analysis in this paper, then, following jenkins et al.'s (2006) description of the role of search in networking, suggest how search users can increase their access to information by becoming effective "switchers" (castells, 2009, p. 45). pagerank and creating networks through search rather than simply being a passive recorder of the web, pagerank makes google a wielder of a form of power uniquely suited to networks: programming. castells (2009) argues that the primary means of exercising power within a network are "programming" and "switching" (p. 45), and he defines these skills respectively as: 14 (1) the ability to constitute network(s), and to program/reprogram the network(s) in terms of the goals assigned to the network; and (2) the ability to connect and ensure the cooperation of different networks by sharing common goals and combining resources, while fending off competition from other networks by setting up strategic cooperation. (p. 45, original emphasis) because of pagerank's role in tracing or "constituting" a particular network, first identifying the hubs in that network and then reinforcing those hubs through preferential attachment (or undermining them when it appears that they have been created in ways that violate its policies), google has significant programming power. by establishing the goals of the network it wishes to trace—one where a large number of inbound links, or inbound links from important sites, equals quality—pagerank effectively programs users' web experience so that it privileges these features. yet, acknowledging the role of pagerank in programming networks, it is necessary to point out that while pagerank is a highly significant factor informing google's search algorithms, it is not the sole determiner of the company's search results. while a search for a particular term would, in theory, yield a list of pages matching that query ordered by their pagerank, in practice google search results are determined by hundreds of factors (evans, 2007, p. 23) and the algorithms governing them are altered frequently (huffman, 2012). whereas the pagerank algorithm is publicly available, these other factors are either only generally known or are kept completely secret. evans (2007) notes the following issues that effect what we know about google's ranking methods: • there are over 200 different factors (or signals) used by google to calculate a page’s rank.2 2 n.b.: evans (2007) is referring here to the order in which a web page is ranked within a set of search results, not that page's particular pagerank. • what these factors are is unknown, as is the weighting of each factor towards the final rank. 15 • the weighting of each factor used to determine the top ten results may be different from the weighting used for the remainder. • different query terms may employ different ranking factors and/or different weights (bifet et al., 2005). • google has multiple data-centres distributed across the world, not all of which are in sync at any one time. thus the ranking algorithm used in one data-centre may change subtly from the ranking algorithm used in another (cutts, 2006). (evans, 2007, p. 23). vaidhyanathan (2011) notes that we now know the bare outlines of some of those factors, for google localizes and, in some cases, personalizes search results (p. 139). in the first case, the company tailors certain search results to particular regions of the world, sometimes actively filtering search results to comply with local laws (p. 47), and sometimes complying with local views about contested issues like national borders (p. 117). similarly, personalized search places primacy on those results that google's algorithms calculate to be of most relevance to the user—although, as evans (2007) points out, the top results in a search may be unaffected. this is not to say that there is not some benefit to localization and personalization for certain types of searches; however, it is not clear that this type of restriction is beneficial for the type of openended research that benefits knowledge creation (vaidhyanathan, 2011, p. 192 ff.). as i have suggested in my earlier analysis, the effect of localization, personalization, and the other factors used to determine google's search results would be to create smaller, more specialized networks. there is no reason to think that network effects like preferential attachment are not operative within these networks, albeit with different outcomes and creating different hubs. consider the case of localization, where the results of a search query made in the united states might be quite different from one made in a different country. however, such a search, while not necessarily searching the entire network consisting of the web pages google indexes, would still be dominated by hubs and other network effects just as with the larger network, although those effects would be constrained to the sub-network. that is, pagerank, in conjunction with other 16 search criteria like localization and personalization, creates sub-networks that also privilege these biases. networks that are localized and personalized are even more constrained in their access to information because, in addition to limiting the diversity of opinion and independence of those results (surowiecki, 2004, p. 10), they would emphasize these constraints by drawing from a smaller network of websites. impact of search networks on information-seeking we know that pagerank continues to play an important role in google searches, despite the fact that it is not the only factor used to calculate search results. as i have described above, this means that individual searches do not interact with a network that is determined by google's entire index of the web, but rather with smaller subnetworks. the effects of these sub-networks on information-seeking have the potential to be significant. in previous sections, i have argued that the network-creating functions of pagerank do not fully tap into surowiecki's (2004) "wisdom of crowds" and, rather than simply organizing "quality" information online (brin & page, 1998, p. 107), the effect of the algorithm is to create hubs via network effects like preferential attachment. there are two problems associated with the way that pagerank interacts with google's localization and personalization features. by excluding information through focusing on local or personal sub-networks, search algorithms can effectively "disappear" some topics in the eyes of the searcher, obscuring difficult problems that should be addressed or giving the searcher a false sense of the universality of his or her beliefs. in the first case, vaidhyanathan (2011) describes how google localizes searches in france and germany to "actively block anti-semitic" websites (p. 47). while at first blush it may seem that this is a positive action—who wishes to defend access to such sites?—such blocking may give the impression to searchers in those regions that such sites do not exist or that the thinking they promote is non-influential. the effect of excluding the websites of anti-semitic groups—or any category of information—from search relegates such groups to their own networks, and those networks—as barabási (2002) has shown with the different continents of the web (p. 165)—can grow despite being cut off from searches. however, by being disconnected from web search, the primary interface for many web users, it is possible that the growth of such networks 17 could go unnoticed by those users, thus masking the extent of the problem represented by such thinking and slowing potential interventions. in the second case, personal searches could obscure or deemphasize contrary views if such views are determined by the personalization algorithm to be outside of a user's preferences. for example, a personalized search for a political figure that primarily delivered results that were deemed to support the users' beliefs might reinforce those beliefs by giving the user the impression that those beliefs were more widespread—or unchallenged—than is actually the case. such search has the potential to turn into an echo chamber, where only what pleases the searcher is contained in the network of search results. in both cases, the ability to see the importance or growth of ideas obscured by these searches would be lost, and this loss would be reinforced by the effects of preferential attachment within the sub-networks created around these searches. such searches simply reinforce the features of pagerank described in this analysis by enacting them in smaller networks. in light of these problems, users cannot simply improve search results by crafting better queries or simply understanding the limits of search engines. when access to networks is key, an important skill would be the "networking" ability described by jenkins et al. (2004). the skill would lie not simply in discovering static knowledge, but discovering the networks can point to or accommodate the knowledge being sought. in this way, effective searching should involve castells's (2009) "switching," bringing the network of search results into contact with other networks that are able to provide outside perspectives on those results that may not be constrained by the same preferential attachments. different networks will show their own biases, but querying many different networks should help alleviate the effects of those biases. in the case of monitoring the rise of hate groups, even when access to that material is inaccessible via search networks, users could connect with groups that monitor such activity—as the southern poverty law center <splcenter.org> does with hate groups in the united states. this switching—connecting these two networks in order to "disrupt dominant" connections that serve to obscure (castells, 2009, p. 431)—is an important form of information literacy. similarly, in the case of personal search, users could seek out opposing views, to both inform themselves and understand the relations between different arguments. indeed, switching is a key response to network power, a 18 "counterpower" (castells, 2009, p. 431) to networks, like those created by pagerank, that are incomplete representations of the information they claim to characterize. in this way, switching allows for private information (surowiecki, 2004, p. 10), thus providing for greater coverage of crowdsourced information, and in theory better informationseeking outcomes. conclusion like other search algorithms, to operate efficiently the pagerank algorithm relies on constructing the web in a particular way, as a series of hubs. while this method is able to keep up with the rapid growth of web pages when compared to web directories, it sacrifices the individual interpretive decision making of the user and replaces it with an analysis of the network effects present in this network. further, rather than simply recording the network, it affects the network itself. when a page appears near the top of google search results, this reinforces that page's importance as a hub, thus tending to cause the page to acquire more links through preferential attachment. pagerank, by identifying and reinforcing the hub-structure of the web and limiting the agency of users in determining value, has a powerful role in creating hubs on the net, effectively programming the primary version of the network that many users interact with. this is also true of sub-networks generated by google's localization and personalization features. while there has been great utility in this structure, users should not simply accept it as being a stand-in for quality, as brin and page (1998, p. 107) argue, but should both recognize the function of the algorithm in programming this version of the network and identify those instances where this program can actually conflict with the identification of quality information. while this paper is merely the beginning of a longer inquiry into the effects of algorithms on users, here i have suggested that, given the networked nature of this information, the most effective user response is to engage in switching, or bringing multiple networks into contact in order to counteract the biases of "dominant" connections (castells, 2009, p. 431) that exist in more powerful networks. this view of search algorithms could open some new areas for research in this field. first, researchers could examine search results not simply as lists of ranked pages, 19 but rather as networks generated in response to particular search queries. while we are aware of localization and personalization, we know little about the actual effects of these features. evans (2007) has attempted to examine search results by seeing how sites with particular search engine optimization (seo) enhancements are ranked by google. similarly, an analysis of the network connections—or lack thereof—between items in a list of search results could offer insight into how google's algorithms work and the type of coverage they offer. comparing the coverage of such networks to those generated by other search terms or affected by localization or personalization could yield valuable information about how these features impact search results. further, an investigation of other network effects, such as those outlined by o'reilly (2005) in his description of web 2.0 would be beneficial for understanding how the networks created by search algorithms affect users. for example, the role of "user contributions" (o'reilly, 2005) and their affect on the creation of these networks is an important one that should be examined. finally, a fruitful area for information-literacy research would be the studies of actual users' switching habits and how those users cope with search limitations in information-seeking. such research is necessary, for this analysis has only introduced the possibility of these effects on search results. we need a greater understanding of how actual searches impact users in order to inform greater search and information-literacy initiatives. acknowledgments this research was sponsored in part by grants from the west virginia university office of the provost and the faculty development grant program. the author would like to thank the editors and reviewers of spir for their helpful feedback during the revision process for this paper. references barabási, albert-lászló (2002). linked: the new science of networks. cambridge, ma: perseus. brin, sergey, & page, lawrence (1998). the anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine. computer networks and isdn systems 30, 107–117. 20 castells, manuel (2000). the rise of the network society (2nd ed.). oxford: blackwell. castells, manuel (2009). communication power. oxford: oxford up. dennis, simon, bruza, peter, & mcarthur, robert (2002). web searching: a processoriented experimental study of three interactive search paradigms. journal of the american society for information science and technology 53 (2), 120-133. ding, chris, he, xiaofeng, husbands, parry, zha, hongyuan, & simon, horst d. (2002). pagerank, hits and a unified framework for link analysis. proceedings of the 25th annual international acm sigir conference on research and development in information retrieval. tampere, finland. evans, michael p. (2007). analysing google rankings through search engine optimization data. internet research 17 (1), 21-37. wikipedia. (n.d.). google bomb. retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/google_bomb wikipedia. (n.d.).google personalized search. retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/google_personalized_search google, (2012) report spam, paid links, malware, and other problems to google. support.google.com. retrieved from http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93713 gu, w.l., chen, w., chen, j., & lu, x.y. (2012). improved pagerank algorithm. jisuanji xitong yingyong computer systems and applications 21 (2), 214-217. halavais, alexander (2009). search engine society. malden, ma: polity. heineman, george t., pollice, gary, & selkow, stanley (2009). algorithms in a nutshell. sebastopol, ca: o'reilly. 21 huffman, scott. (2012). search quality highlights: 39 changes for may. google inside search , june 7. retrieved from http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/06/searchquality-highlights-39-changes.html iván, gábor, & grolmusz, vince (2011). when the web meets the cell: using personalized pagerank for analyzing protein interaction networks. bioinformatics 27 (3), 405-407. jenkins, henry, clinton, katie, purushotma, ravi, robison, alice j., & weigel, margaret (2006). confronting the challenges of participatory culture: media education for the 21st century john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation. retrieved from http://digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7b7e45c7e0-a3e0-4b89-ac9ce807e1b0ae4e%7d/jenkins_white_paper.pdf latour, bruno (2004). politics of nature: how to bring the sciences into democracy. cambridge, ma: harvard up. nie, lan, davison, brian d., & qi, xiaoguang (2006). topical link analysis for web search. proceedings of the 29th annual international acm sigir conference on research and development in information retrieval. seattle, washington, usa. o'reilly, tim (2005). what is web 2.0: design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. retrieved from http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html page, larry, brin, sergi, motwani, rajeev, & winograd, terry (1998). the pagerank citation ranking: bringing order to the web. retrieved from http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf segal, david (2010). a bully finds a pulpit on the web. new york times, nov 26. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html singhal, amit, & cutts, matt. (2011). finding more high-quality sites in search. google oficial blog, feb 24, retrieved from http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/findingmore-high-quality-sites-in.html 22 surowiecki, james (2004). the wisdom of crowds: why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies, and nations. new york: doubleday. takahashi, yuku, ohshima, hiroaki, yamamoto, mitsuo, iwasaki, hirotoshi, oyama, satoshi, & tanaka, katsumi (2011). evaluating significance of historical entities based on tempo-spatial impacts analysis using wikipedia link structure. paper presented at the 22nd acm conference on hypertext and hypermedia. vaidhyanathan, siva (2011). the googlization of everything (and why we should worry). berkeley: u of ca press. waldrop, m. mitchell (1992). complexity: the emerging science at the edge of order and chaos. new york: simon & schuster. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16 th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 credibility and search engines. the effects of source reputation, neutrality and social recommendations on the selection of search engine results julian unkel lmu munich alexander haas lmu munich introduction mass media use has always required a certain degree of selection by the recipient. but in the online environment, these active selection processes are even more important, as the internet confronts the user with an immense amount of options from which she or he may obtain the desired information. web search engines are the method of choice for the majority of internet users to tame this proverbial information tide and have thus emerged as new gatekeepers (machill, beiler, & zenker, 2008). even well-known news sites receive about 10-30% of their traffic through search engines.1 previous surveys on search engine use and log-file analyses show that search engine link selection largely follows a habitualized primacy effect: the majority of users choose one of the top ranked results, in many cases the first one (agichtein, brill, dumais, & ragno, 2006; kink & hess, 2008). however, financial and organizational requirements for creating online content are much lower, while at the same time control and filtering mechanisms are not as established online as in the traditional media. thus, scholars argue that credibility evaluation of online content becomes a “core component” for the recipients (metzger, flanagin, eyal, lemus, & mccann, 2003, p. 294). otherwise, they risk getting exposed to wrong or even harmful information. credibility is conceptualized as a subjective, perceived quality that is based on the two dimensions expertise and trustworthiness (self, 2009). credibility attribution may be influenced by several cues present in search engine results pages (serps). first, the reputation of the source seems to play an important role, as well-known news media sites are generally perceived as more competent and thus credible as other sites, e.g. 1 in january 2015, according to web analytics company similarweb (http://www.similarweb.com/), search engine links accounted for 23.60% of all traffic on washingtonpost.com, 21.64% on nytimes.com, and 14.67% on cnn.com. suggested citation (apa): unkel, j. & haas, a. (2015, october 21-24) credibility and search engines. the effects of source reputation, neutrality and social recommendations on the selection of search engine results. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. private blogs (flanagin & metzger, 2007; fogg et al., 2001). second, the absence of bias or the neutrality of a message leads to a higher perceived trustworthiness. finally, recent research has concentrated on the effects of social recommendations (e.g., “likes”) on perceived credibility (metzger, flanagin, & medders, 2010). we therefore analyze whether these credibility cues are also able to influence recipients’ selection decisions. method a sample of 247 students of a large german university completed an online questionnaire in a university computer laboratory and was randomly assigned to one of eight settings. included in the questionnaire were two research tasks about two controversial issues (implementation of rent control mechanism and legal issues of online streaming). each research task presented the participants with a preset, fully functional serp of the search engine duckduckgo. each serp featured eight search results relevant to the research issue as well as one labeled advertising entry on top of the results list and two irrelevant results (e.g., a link to a shopping site). the ranking of the eight search results differed in the eight settings, with each result once on rank 1, once on rank 2, etc. within these search results, three credibility cues were varied on two factor levels each: 1) source reputation: well-known news site (high reputation) or private blog (low reputation), as indicated by url and site favicon 2) message neutrality: two-sided (high neutrality) or one-sided (low neutrality) reporting on the respective issue, indicated by headline and snippet text 3) social recommendations: high three-digit (high social recommendations) or low two-digit (low social recommendations) number of user recommendations of the search result, indicated by displayed number of recommendations (“xxx users recommend this link”) each factor level appeared four times and each possible combination between the three factors appeared once per serp (see figure 1). each research task lasted five minutes, during which the participants could open as many or as little search results as they liked. measures included the observed information research behavior—selected results and the order in which they were selected—as well as personal characteristics, such as prior knowledge about the issues, individual search engine selection strategies, and media, internet and search engine use. results logistical regression analysis on the selection decisions (see table 1) confirms the results of previous studies. considering only the first selection decisions (the search result first clicked on by the participants), the model has a good fit (r² = .40). the search results’ rank shows the strongest influence on the selection: the higher the result is ranked on the results list, the more likely it is selected. of the three credibility cues, only reputation still shows an effect, with high reputation results being selected more likely than low reputation ones. the analysis furthermore shows a (weak) interaction effect between reputation and neutrality, with neutral results only selected more often if they also are of high reputation. because most participants had chosen a top-ranked result during the first selection decision, the influence of the rank is comparably lower in the following selection decisions, but still remains the strongest predictor for the selection of results. high reputation results again are more likely to be selected compared to low reputation ones. again, social recommendations and neutrality show no individual effect. in comparison with the first model, goodness of fit decreased considerably (r² = .10), indicating a more random selection of the following search results. furthermore, we analyzed whether personal characteristics such as prior knowledge about the issues, search engine selection strategies (ranked vs. spontaneous vs. evaluative selection), or media, internet and search engine use influence individuals’ preferences to select results with high reputation, high neutrality and high social recommendations, respectively. however, apart from a weak effect of media use on selection of high reputation results—that is, people that use certain reputable news media sites more often are also more likely to select them on serps—, no further effects of personal characteristics on selection behavior were found. discussion the comparatively small influence of credibility cues on selection decisions—as opposed to the rank—can be interpreted in different ways. from a theoretical perspective, (1) this small influence can be seen as evidence for the secondary nature of credibility (cues) when it comes to the selection of search engine results. search engine users might not be aware that the assessment of the quality of information should be a core concern to them and seem to trust the given ranking rather uncritically. (2) but this might also mean that during selection decisions, users indeed assess the credibility of information sources very well, but that this assessment is guided largely by their imaginary of search engines as providing the best results on top: a high ranking could be perceived by users as an indicator of high credibility (cf. westerwick, 2013). (3) finally, the research tasks can be described as low-cost scenarios. this means that neither were there any limitations of search results allowed to be viewed, nor were there any consequences of being exposed to inaccurate or biased information. situations with potential monetary or social losses thus could increase the influence of credibility cues. this leads to two avenues for future research. first, user’s awareness about the necessity of credibility assessments, and how these assessments are influenced by general trust in search engines, should be investigated. second, personal, contextual and situational factors that lead to a higher motivation to systematically process serp information and evaluate credibility (cf. metzger, 2007; wirth, böcking, karnowski, & von pape, 2007) should be explored. references agichtein, e., brill, e., dumais, s., & ragno, r. (2006). learning user interaction models for predicting web search result preferences. in proceedings of the 29th annual international acm sigir conference on research and development in information retrieval (pp. 3–10). new york, ny: acm. flanagin, a. j., & metzger, m. j. (2007). the role of site features, user attributes, and information verification behaviors on the perceived credibility of web-based information. new media & society, 9, 319–342. fogg, b. j., marshall, j., laraki, o., osipovich, a., varma, c., fang, n., … treinen, m. (2001). what makes web sites credible? a report on a large quantitative study. in proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 61–68). new york, ny: acm. kink, n., & hess, t. (2008). search engines as substitutes for traditional information sources? an investigation of media choice. the information society, 24, 18–29. machill, m., beiler, m., & zenker, m. (2008). search-engine research: a europeanamerican overview and systematization of an interdisciplinary and international research field. media, culture & society, 30, 591–608. metzger, m. j. (2007). making sense of credibility on the web: models for evaluating online information and recommendations for future research. journal of the american society for information science and technology, 58, 2078–2091. metzger, m. j., flanagin, a. j., eyal, k., lemus, d. r., & mccann, r. m. (2003). credibility for the 21st century: integrating perspectives on source, message, and media credibility in the contemporary media environment. in p. j. kalbfleisch (ed.), communication yearbook (vol. 27, pp. 293–335). new york, ny: routledge. metzger, m. j., flanagin, a. j., & medders, r. b. (2010). social and heuristic approaches to credibility evaluation online. journal of communication, 60, 413–439. self, c. c. (2009). credibility. in d. w. stacks & m. b. salwen (eds.), an integrated approach to communication theory and research (2nd ed., pp. 435–456). new york, ny: routledge. westerwick, a. (2013). effects of sponsorship, web site design, and google ranking on the credibility of online information. journal of computer-mediated communication, 18, 80–97. wirth, w., böcking, t., karnowski, v., & von pape, t. (2007). heuristic and systematic use of search engines. journal of computer-mediated communication, 12, 778–800. table 1 logistic regressions on selections decisions first selection decisions a following selection decisions b model b se wald χ² (1) or 95% ci b se wald χ² (1) or 95% ci step 1 position c -0.71 0.04 409.81*** 0.49 [0.46; 0.53] -0.16 0.02 102.56*** 0.85 [0.83; 0.88] constant d 0.40 0.10 15.49*** 1.49 -0.95 0.08 151.36*** 0.39 schritt 2 position c -0.77 0.04 414.71*** 0.46 [0.43; 0.50] -0.19 0.02 134.32*** 0.82 [0.80; 0.85] reputation d 1.66 0.13 175.98*** 5.27 [4.12; 6.73] 1.09 0.08 212.96*** 2.98 [2.57; 3.45] neutrality d 0.75 0.12 41.83*** 2.11 [1.68; 2.64] 0.37 0.07 25.53* 1.44 [1.25; 1.66] social recomm. d 0.34 0.11 9.10** 1.41 [1.13; 1.76] 0.12 0.07 2.73 1.13 [0.98; 1.30] constant -1.02 0.16 42.60*** 0.36 -1.63 0.10 260.96*** 0.20 schritt 3 position c -0.78 0.04 413.08*** 0.46 [0.42; 0.49] -0.20 0.02 134.84*** 0.82 [0.80; 0.85] reputation d 0.98 0.22 19.23*** 2.66 [1.72; 4.11] 0.95 0.13 53.86*** 2.60 [2.01; 3.35] neutrality d 0.24 0.23 1.10 1.28 [0.81; 2.02] 0.41 0.14 0.09 1.04 [0.80; 1.36] social recomm. d 0.05 0.24 0.04 1.05 [0.66; 1.67] -0.16 0.14 1.27 0.85 [0.65; 1.13] rep × neu 0.77 0.25 9.61** 2.15 [1.33; 3.49] 0.18 0.15 1.40 1.19 [0.89; 1.60] rep × s.r. 0.47 0.24 3.65 1.60 [0.99; 2.58] 0.07 0.15 0.22 1.07 [0.80; 1.43] neu × soe -0.05 0.23 0.04 0.96 [0.61; 1.50] 0.44 0.15 9.24* 1.55 [1.17; 2.06] constant -0.54 0.21 6.83** 0.58 -1.41 0.13 113.75*** 0.24 note: or = odds ratio; ci = confidence interval; rep = reputation; neu = neutrality; s.r. = social recommendations. a n = 3,984, nagelkerke’s r² = .40. b n = 6,256, nagelkerke’s r² = .10. c rank on the serp, 1(top)-8(bottom). d categorial variable, 0/1 coded (1 = high characteristic). * p < .05. ** p < .01. *** p < .001. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16 th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): unkel, j., & haas, a. (2015, october 21-24). credibility and search engines. the effects of source reputation, neutrality and social recommendations on the selection of search engine results. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16 th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. figure 1. serp built into the questionnaire with (1) rudimentary browser controls and countdown, (2) pre-set search query, (3) advertisement and irrelevant search results and (4) manipulated search results. 1 2 3 3 4 microsoft word berg-i have a dream! on the perceived limits and imagined possibilities.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): berg, m. (2015, october 21-24). i have a dream! on the perceived limits and imagined possibilities of body monitoring. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. i have a dream! on the perceived limits and magined possibilities of body monitoring martin berg halmstad university i have a dream! on the perceived limits and imagined possibilities of body monitoring. there is a growing market for, and use of, digitally mediated body monitoring and selftracking devices – technologies that measure and report on everything from how fast you run, and what mood you are in, to devices that measure sleep patterns and pulse. the development of new social and digital body monitoring technologies has profound implications for the ways people experience both their bodies and the environments in which they live, and raises practical and ethical questions about how the body can (or should) be monitored/quantified, and how people imagine their futures/ future bodies. digital technologies of these sorts are increasingly ubiquitous in everyday life forming part of the the way we live and experience the world. processes of mediatization involving ‘the pervasive spread of media contents and platforms’ are integral to our everyday environments (couldry & hepp, 2013) and part of the practices through which the everyday is lived (bräuchler & postill, 2010). indeed media participates in everyday worlds beyond its role as a provider of content and for communication. it permeates cultural and societal spheres in ways that enable it to have a coordinating function (hjarvard, 2013) and generates new types of social and technological presence (pink & leder mackley, 2013). yet as advocates of a ‘non-media-centric’ approach to media stress, media are not the most important things in people’s lives, but they are part of everyday life (morley, 2009; moores, 2012; couldry, 2012). this paper approaches the conditions for body monitoring practices by putting the social and cultural framing of software and hardware design under scrutiny. in terms of hardware, body monitoring devices are relatively simple constructions that are controlled by and sometimes even integrated in smart phone devices. the software that fuel these devices and allow them to process, present and share data between devices in a manner that is intelligible and meaningful from a user perspective is of a more complex kind. bodies and their actions are not only monitored and measured by these devices but in the very code that fuels them, an interpretive process takes place before the information is presented to and interpreted by the users. this is done in multiple ways but most importantly by opening up new forms of mediated spaces in and through which we can observe and feel our bodies. this entails that software works as a ‘social intermediary’ (berg, 2012) and thus structures how we can establish mediated understandings of our past, present and future bodies and selves. the software that allows us to interact reflexively with body monitoring devices springs from complex design processes in which the personal experiences and imaginations of designers and technological developers are highly involved. drawing on the growing field of software studies (kitchin & dodge, 2011; manovich, 2013), this paper approaches body monitoring practices from the perspective of the designers and developers of software and hardware in order to understand what kinds of assumptions, emotions and expectations that are built into the technologies and their software. this paper is empirically grounded in a netnographic (berg, 2011, 2015; kozinets, 2010) study of a number of body monitoring devices, most importantly withings, runkeeper, fitbit and jawbone up! that to various degrees are interconnected through apis (application programming interfaces). the paper will focus on how these devices and their related software are framed, described, and discussed from developers’ point of view following the research question: how are the technologies and software involved in body monitoring given form by designers and developers in relation to how they perceive and imagine their past, present and future bodies and selves? focusing on how the practice and outcome of body monitoring are described in textual and graphic communication between developers and designers in online communities and discussion boards along with a study of technical documentation, this paper provides an understanding of how the technological limits and possibilities of body monitoring software and hardware are perceived and imagined. references berg, m. (2011). netnografi. in g. ahrne & p. svensson (eds.), handbok i kvalitativa metoder (pp. 118-130). malmö: liber. berg, m. (2012). social intermediaries and the location of agency: a conceptual reconfiguration of social network sites. contemporary social science, 7(3), 321-333. berg, m. (2015). netnografi. lund: studentlitteratur. bräuchler, b. & postill, j. (eds.). (2010). theorising media and practice. new york & oxford: berghahn books. couldry, n. (2012) media, society, world: social theory and digital media practice. cambridge: polity press. couldry, n. and a. hepp (2013) ‘conceptualizing mediatization: contexts, traditions, arguments’ communication theory 23: 191–202. hjarvard, s. (2013) the mediatization of culture and society. london & new york: routledge. kitchin, r. & dodge, m. (2011). code/space: software and everyday life. massachusetts: mit press. kozinets, r. (2010) netnography. london: sage. manovich, l. (2013). software takes command. new york: bloomsbury. moores, s. (2012) media, place and mobility. london: palgrave macmillan morley, d. (2009). for a materialist non-media centric media studies. television and new media, vol. 10, pp. 114-16. pink, s. and k. leder mackley (2013) ‘saturated and situated: rethinking media in everyday life’ media, culture and society 35(6): 677-691 selected papers of internet research 16: the 16 th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 cyberbullying policies of social media companies tijana milosevic university of oslo scope, theoretical framework and significance of the research topic “why don’t you kill yourself?” was the question 14-year-old hannah smith from the united kingdom received on social media website ask.fm, before she hanged herself in her bedroom (smith-spark, 2013). the teen had allegedly been exposed to a series of online taunts prior to leaping to her death. ask.fm allows users to pose questions to other users anonymously. it boasts more than a hundred million users from more than 150 countries (ask.fm, 2015), around half of which are under 18. in response to hannah smith’s suicide, some 15,000 people have signed an online petition requesting the uk government to act (hm government, 2013). uk prime minister called the website “vile,” and asked advertisers to boycott it. the social media website issued a statement of condolences and promised to improve its safety measures and cyberbullying policies. yet, a year after her suicide, a coroner’s report concluded that the girl had been sending vile messages to herself on ask.fm and a police investigation could not find any evidence of cyberbullying (davies, 2014). in the united states, state laws and proposed federal laws contain anti-cyberbullying provisions which stipulate the role of schools in working with parents and sometimes law enforcement to address cyberbullying; the situation is similar in the european union. however, these laws do not contain provisions regarding social media companies. when an incident with severe consequences unfolds, the companies become embroiled in controversy, which increases incentives for them to regulate cyberbullying behavior on their platforms. the companies require that users agree to terms of service (tos), contracts which typically contain anti-cyberbullying provisions. they have a number of other corporate documents such as “statements of rights and responsibilities,” “principles,” or “community guidelines,” which stipulate the behavior that is allowed on the platform. this study addresses a gap in academic research about the role of social media companies in addressing cyberbullying –as one aspect of digital imaginary. it draws on two theoretical frameworks: 1. privatization of the digital public sphere, a body of works that analyze the increasing role of private companies in regulation of civil liberties (balkin, 2008; denardis, 2014; denardis, 2012; hestres, 2013; vaidhyanathan, 2011; zuckerman, 2010); 2. youth risks and opportunities online, a body of research led by suggested citation (apa): milosevic, t. (2015, october 21-24). cyberbullying policies of social media companies. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. dr. sonia livingstone and eu kids online project, which seeks to attenuate moral panics that can emerge around youth’s use of technology, and provide evidence-based understanding of children’s digital experience (livingstone, haddon & gorzig, 2012). cyberbullying or online bullying, typically defined as “repeated harm inflicted,” can appear in the form of verbal abuse, harassment, rumors or social exclusion and can result in anxiety, low self-esteem, depression and maladaptive behavior (hinduja & patchin, 2009; subrahmanyam & smahel, 2011). cyberbullying is a contested term that is difficult to define and that youth tend not to identify with (boyd & marwick, 2011; marwick & boyd, 2014), making it increasingly difficult for companies to regulate incidents on their platforms in ways that users would find helpful. although there is no single agreed-upon definition of cyberbullying (mishna, 2012; vandenbosch & van cleemput, 2010), similar to offline bullying, it is defined as “willful and repeated harm inflicted” towards another person which typically involves power imbalance between two people (hinduja & patchin, 2009: 9). there is no academic consensus on how many times such harm needs to happen in order for a case to classify as “repeated.” once a case occurs it may be difficult to classify it and determine if it constitutes cyberbullying (nocentini et al., 2010). by “cyberbullying policies” i refer to self-regulation mechanisms that social media companies have in place to intervene in existing and prevent future cyberbullying incidents on their platforms. these mechanisms include, but are not limited to, reporting and social reporting tools, blocking, filtering, geofencing as well as any forms of human or automated moderation systems such as supervised machine learning; and socialemotional learning-based educational materials. key research questions include:  what is the role of technological platforms in intervening with and preventing cyberbullying cases?  what cyberbullying-related provisions are stipulated in companies’ corporate documents and how do they differ among the companies? what are the implications of such phrasing?  what are the tools of enforcing compliance of cyberbullying-related provisions?  what issues might these companies be encountering and what can be known about effectiveness of these policies?  how is “effectiveness of cyberbullying policies” constructed in the companies’ discourse?  how do the companies react to cases of perceived ineffectiveness of their tools of enforcement? this kind of systematic analysis of cyberbullying policies of social media companies has not been conducted thus far and through interviews with key companies, which are difficult to obtain, this study seeks to provide pioneering steps towards a framework for analysis of effectiveness of industry self-regulation. brief overview of method the companies included in this sample have been selected on two criteria: the large number of users they had at the time when this study was conducted; and appearance in media reports in relationship to online bullying, especially in reference to self-harm or suicide. social media companies included in this sample are: facebook, instagram (facebook-owned), twitter, ask.fm, youtube (google-owned), yik yak, secret app, google+, tumblr (yahoo! owned), snapchat and whisper and digital messengers voxer, whatsapp (facebook-owned), and kik. some of these platforms gain and lose user base as well as media attention in the course of a couple of months. as an illustration of such state of affairs: in march 2014, there were hardly any media reports about secret app, which was only being launched at the time; in august 2014, a brazilian judge had ordered google play and apple app store to remove the app due to cyberbullying concerns in media reports (beasley, 2014). this is why the overview presented here does not purport to be comprehensive, since the landscape changes relatively quickly; rather, it hopes to provide a systematic analysis of relevant social media’s cyberbullying policies, which form the basis of selfregulatory efforts in the industry; and which should inform the policies of new apps and companies that are yet to come. based on an interpretivist approach to qualitative textual analysis (daly, 2007) i seek to understand both the policies and mechanisms that exist and the various meanings that they have for participants in this study. to that end, i have conducted: 1. a qualitative textual analysis of these companies’ tos, all corporate documents that are related to online bullying, harassment and abuse; as well as corporate blogs. 2. twenty-seven in-depth interviews with the companies’ representatives; representatives from e-safety ngos from the united states and the european union that work with social media companies on their cyberbullying policies; as well as with non-affiliated e-safety consultants. brief overview of results the results provide a systematic analysis of tools that social media companies in the sample employ to address cyberbullying cases on their platforms; an analysis of how the companies interpret the relative effectiveness of their tools; as well as an analysis of the implications behind unavailability of some data that would testify to tools’ effectiveness. for instance, most companies do not reveal the guidelines that their moderators use to determine if a case constitutes bullying; the statistics on how many bullying reports they receive and the number of moderators they employ, as well as other specifics of their moderation systems. the results also detail the differences in sophistication of tools between different types of companies; use of supervised machine learning, blocking and filtering; a comprehensive overview of social reporting1 and use of emotional intelligence research in guiding the policy; as well as the logic that guides 1 social reporting refers to the reporting system that employs emotional intelligence research to enable conflict resolution between two or more users without reporting a case to the company. employment of these tools. the discussion focuses on the tension between ensuring child safety and users’ civil liberties, primarily freedom of speech and privacy. references balkin, j. (2008) “ the future of free expression in a digital age,” pepperdine law review, vol. 36, 2008. beasley, m. (2014). brazilian judge orders apple, google to remove secret from the app stores, remotely delete from users’ phones. 9to5mac. retrieved from: http://9to5mac.com/2014/08/19/brazillian-judge-orders-apple-to-remove-secret-fromthe-app-store-remotely-delete-from-users-phones/. accessed on: february 22, 2015. boyd, d. & marwick, a. (2011). bullying as true drama. the new york times. retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/opinion/why-cyberbullying-rhetoric-missesthe-mark.html?_r=0. accessed on february 22, 2015. daly, k. j. (2007). qualitative methods for family studies & human development. los angeles: sage publications denardis, l.e. (2012). hidden levers of internet control: an infrastructure-based theory of internet governance. journal of information, communication and society. 15 (3). denardis, l.e. (2014). the global war for internet governance. yale university press: new haven, connecticut. davies, c. (2014). hannah smith wrote ‘vile’ posts to herself before suicide, police say. the guardian. retrieved from: http://www.theguardian.com/uknews/2014/may/06/hannah-smith-suicide-teenager-cyber-bullying-inquests. accessed on february 22, 2015. hestres. l.e. (2013). app neutrality: apple’s app store and freedom of expression online. international journal of communication. (7): 1265-1280. hinduja, s., & patchin, j. w. (2009). bullying beyond the schoolyard: preventing and responding to cyberbullying. thousand oaks, california: sage. hm government (2013). government to take safeguarding position against sites like ask.fm (2013). retrieved from: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/48886. accessed on february 22, 2015. livingstone, s., haddon, l & gorzig, a. (eds). 2012. children, risk and safety on the internet: research and policy challenges in comparative perspective. the policy press: bristol and chicago. marwick, a. & boyd, d. (2014). “it’s just drama”: teen perspectives on conflict in a networked era.” journal of youth studies 17 (9): 1187-1204 (p. 1188). nocentini, a., calmaestra, j., shultze-krumbholz, scheithauer, h., ortega, r. & menesini, e. (2010). “cyberbullying: labels, behaviors and definition in three european countries.” australian journal of guidance and counseling 20 (2): 129142. smith-park, l. (2013). hannah smith suicide fuels calls for action on cyberbullying. cnn.com. retrieved from: http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/07/world/europe/uk-socialmedia-bullying/. accessed on february 22, 2015 subrahmanyam, k., & smahel, d . (2011). chapter 10: the darker side of the internet: violence, cyber-bullying and victimization. in digital youth: advancing responsible adolescent development (pp. 179-199). new york: springer tokunaga, r. s. (2010). following you home from school: a critical review and synthesis of research on cyberbullying victimization. computers in human behavior 26: 277-287 vaidhyanathan, s. (2011)the googlization of everything (and why we should worry). university of california press 2011. zuckerman, e. (2010) “intermediary censorship,” in access controlled: the shaping of power, rights and rule in cyberspace. mit press: cambridge. spir guidelines 1 ‘netizen mobs’ and their performance: a content analysis of participants and their political participation in chinese online forum siyuan yin university of illinois at chicago united states of america syin5@uic.edu abstract in computer-mediated communication, the importance of civility is no less than that in face to face communication. when discussions are exchanged mainly through texts, the prevalence of civil discourse could act as a stronger factor for interpersonal evaluations, while uncivilized behaviors (e.g., rude and irrational words) detract civic engagement and political participation by impeding effective online discussions. this study analyzed cross-sectional data obtained from 588 respondents in chinese political online forum kaidi communitycat eyes forum and textual data from each respondent’s postings. the social demographic variables data of each respondent were selected from an online survey conducted by a forum participant. the study assessed the impacts of social economic status, age and engagement of online participation on the level of civility of participants’ online performance, to reveal the composition of ‘net mob’ and discuss factors that influence online performance. the study found that social classes (based on occupation) and monthly income exert no significant effect on online civilized behavior, but the specific uncivilized behavior varies with different social classes. uncivilized behavior increases with age. the engagement of online participation did not affect the levels of civility of the participants’ online performance. the study contributed a new approach to discussing the internet, chinese netizens and their implications for the construction of civil society in china. keywords political online forum; civil performance; social economic status; age; engagement of participation 2 in china, the internet has provided platforms (e.g., online forums, blogs, microblogs and so forth) to enable citizens to expand their political participation, which is vital to the construction and maintenance of civil society and online public sphere especially when mass media is highly controlled by central government. among those platforms, online forums have become the most influential ones which facilitate participatory democracy and civic engagement. (qiang, 2004). as participants in online political discussion, citizens’ online performance undoubtedly merits attention. ‘netizen mobs’ refers to a specific group of online participants who express their opinions and comments with rude, irrational or extreme words, phrases and sentences on public issues or towards other netizens. in computer-mediated communication, when interaction is mainly based on text, civility of language is no less important than in face-to-face communication, the prevalence of civility could act as a stronger factor for interpersonal evaluations, while uncivil utterances used by ‘netizen mobs’ detract civil engagement and political participation by impeding effective online discussions. scholars have discussed how internet impacts the way people do political participation, and some has criticized that internet is a breeding ground for extremism in political discussions (sustein, cass, 2001), but there is few empirical study about how netizen’s online political performance is influenced by both offline social context and their online virtual life. the author conducted an empirical quantitative study to discuss how netizens’ online political performance is influenced by their social economic status and their engagement of virtual life in cyberspace. specifically, i use demographic variables as attributes to describe netizens’ social economic background, and level of their online participation in forum as a variable to analyze their engagement of virtual life. i adopt quantitative content analysis to analyze cross-sectional data from 588 participants in a chinese political online forum kaidi community – cat eyes forum, which is one of the prominent political online forums in china, textual data from each participant’s postings, and their social demographic data collected from an online survey that a forum participant initiatively conducted. by analyzing the correlation and regression between participants’ demographic characteristics, level of online participation and the amount as well as types of online civil and uncivil performance, the study assesses the impact of socioeconomic factors, age, and the level of online participation on the participants’ civil and uncivil online performance, to analyze netizen mobs’ performance in their online political discussions. 3 literature review civility and civil society in computer-mediated communication, when interaction is mainly based on text, civility of language is no less important than in face-to-face communication, the prevalence of civility could act as a stronger factor for interpersonal evaluations, while uncivil utterances detract civil engagement and political participation by impeding effective online discussions. civility refers to “behavior between persons and groups that conforms to a social mode (that is, in accordance with the civil society), as itself being a foundational principle of society and law.”1 incivility is a “general term for social behavior lacking in civic virtue or good manners, on a scale from rudeness or lack of respect for elders, to vandalism and hooliganism, through public drunkenness and threatening behavior.” 2 as for media, the impact of mass media on construction of civil society in china is far less than that of the internet, for the former is highly controlled and censored by central government, while internet provides platforms for discussions and expressions by citizens which are relatively free of control and censorship. internet plays a significant role in inspiring and cultivating the spirit of citizenship by expanding civic engagement and political participation, for example, the instance of zhigang sun, south china tiger, sichuan earthquake. citizens actively participate in public and political issues, exercise their power of participation, expression and supervision towards bureaucracy, and protect social justice (yan, 2009, p.83). study shows that civility is not associated with gender, color and region, yet weakly associated with income and significantly associated with education, occupation, age and health (ferriss, 2002, p.388). civil society stresses civic engagement of citizens and the restraint of national power. since 1980s, along with the advancement of the social transformation and reform of political, economic and cultural system, civil society has gradually emerged in china. the awareness of citizenship and the construction of civic culture have profound impact on chinese citizens who has experienced ‘subject consciousness’ resulted from feudal autocracy for thousand years. scholar believes that the measurement of civility can provide the characteristics of the political and social behavior of modern chinese citizens in contemporary china, which can be adopted to predict the tracks of their social behavior and its change (yang, 2008). 1 civic virtue, from wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/civic_virtue#incivility 2 incivility, from wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/civic_virtue#incivility http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/civic_virtue#incivility� 4 civility in virtual sphere the internet transforms the society into a networked one, which formed a ‘grassroots’ link, whose characteristic is to provide access to expression and discussion for those who are at the bottom or margins of the society with few opportunities to get them heard to the public (liu, 2002, p.81). in virtual sphere, discussions are mainly through texts which construct the virtual identity of participants. are there new civility paradigms for communication in virtual sphere (naaman et al, 2009)? people construct new identities through texts, images and videos, and eventually establish these digital identities by interacting and discussing with other users in virtual world (foucault, 1988, p.16). scholar believes that new technology, especially the internet spoils public decorum. “rather than the use of proper titles, cordial and appropriate greetings, correct punctuation and the complete spelling of words, and formal sentence structure, we witness rather selective and even terse interpersonal communication via the internet” (peck, 2002, p.363). the cause of these is the lack of ‘social action’ in cyberspace which is defined by max weber: whether interaction is considered social depends on whether one embraces a traditional orientation toward ‘‘role’’ and ‘‘status’’ in social life. internet breaks the formation of social action, which leads to the technically sophisticated information-oriented individuals who is devoid of offline social roles and status (peck, 2002). study shows that civility in online communication exerts great impact on people’s perception of the credibility and authority of the information, while incivility makes discussion incredible, radical and sometimes threatening (ng & detenber, 2005, p13-16). online public opinion and group polarization online public opinion is one of the influential forms for civic engagement and political participation in cybersphere. wangluoyulun, referring to online public deliberation, has exerted significant impact on of china’s political and social life. examples include online public activism for social injustice, like sun zhigang incident and deng yujiao incident, public criticism on sensitive political issues, like corruption and autocracy of chinese government, public debate on moral issues, like human flesh search, and among others. online public deliberation is not without its limitations. extreme opinions and emotions could be expanded through online interaction which leads to extremism and group polarization. group polarization could facilitate consensus, while makes existed bias and prejudice extreme (sustein, 2003, p.50). the online extremism would result in virtual violence that has exerted 5 negative impact on social security and stability (peng, 2004, p.290). these netizens are referred as “the mobs with keyboards as weapons”, who uses discourses to attack and reproach specific people or events (zhang, 2008, p.160). irrational discourses could easily outweigh rational discourses due to the extremism and group polarization in virtual sphere (zhang, 2009, p.196).the constitution of opinion subjects varies with different opinion objects. netman and net violence netman, refers to people who are actively involve in virtual life and online interactions and addict to virtual sphere (wu, 2009, p.68). one of the characteristics of netman is that their behavior in virtual life greatly contrasts with those in real life. anonymity makes netmans’ behavior out of constraint of disciplines and orders. a gentleman could become a violent attacker while a disregarded man could gain unexpected respect in virtual sphere (rheingold, 2004). the emergence of netman has positive and negative impacts on the society. on one hand, it breaks the social hierarchy and promotes the flow of social classes. netman could construct virtual identities and sense of belonging by participating in online discussions, which would influence their beliefs and conducts in real life. on the other hand, netman could exert violence that is constrained in real life in virtual world. the violence exerted by netizen mobs is different from that in real life, for it is a symbolic violence that is realized by discourses and texts to express opinions or emotions in an irrational way (zhang, 2009, p. 197). ‘netizen mobs’ refers to a specific group of online participants who express their opinions and comments with rude, irrational or extreme words, phrases and sentences on public issues or towards other netizens. habermas put forward the concept of ‘ideal speech’ which stresses that speech acts in public sphere should be appropriate and rational (habermas, 1985). yet, the contemporary communication situation is filled with symbolic violence, and more and more net violence incidents appeared, for example, human flesh search, personal attack, virtual wanted posters and so forth (wu, 2009, p.68). based on the discussions on the relationship between the internet, chinese netizens and construction of civil society, i intend to analyze the impact of offline demographic factors on the civil performance of the participants in political online forums, which includes their social economic status and age; and investigate whether involvement of virtual life would influence the civility of participants’ online performance. i put forward the following research question and hypothesis: 6 rq1 is there a relation between levels of civility of participants’ online performance and their social economic status? h1 the higher social class of the participants are, the higher level of civility of their online performance is. h2 the more the monthly income of the participants are, the higher level of civility of their online performance is. h3 the older of the participants are, the lower of levels of the civility are. h4 the deeper engagement of participants’ online participation, the lower level of their civility of online performance. method cat eye forum, a forum of kaidi online community, is one of the most popular political online forums in china. participants actively generate discussions on political and social issues, including democracy in china, autocracy, misconducts of government, corruption, social inequality, wealth gap and so forth. sample according to an online survey conducted by a forum participant to collect the demographic information (occupation, monthly income and age) of the participants, the unit analysis is each respondent of the survey, most of who are the active participants of the forum, and the number of sample of the participants is 585. i select all the posts and correspondences posting by each respondent in cat eye forum (till 01/15/2010), and the number of the sample is 550,000. procedure i adopt content analysis to measure the correlation between the level of the civility of the participants’ online performance (posts and correspondences) and their social economic status, age and the engagement of their online participation. the data were analyzed using the statistic package for social science programs (spss). descriptive statistics analysis presented the frequency and percentage of the respondents’ social economic status, age and level of the engagement of their online participation; and anova was carried out to test difference which was set to a significance level of 0.05 and the correlations between the level of civility and four independent variables were analyzed. 7 the variables in the study were distributed between independent and dependent variables. independent variables include social class, monthly income, age and level of engagement of their online participation (see appendix 1). social economic status was described by ordinal variable social class and ratio variable monthly income as two independent variables, and the other two were age and engagement of online participation which was measured by the frequency of logging in as a ratio variable. according to report of social stratification in contemporary china published by the social science academy of china, social hierarchy in china is divided into five classes based on the distribution of organizational, economic and cultural resources, namely, underclass, lower class, middle class, middle-upper class, upper class (lu, 2002). 74.6 % participants are distributed into middle and middle-upper class. table 1: descriptive statistics for social class of participants. frequency percent valid percent cumulative percent valid underclass 50 8.5 14.2 14.2 lower class 33 5.6 9.4 23.6 middle class 164 27.9 46.7 70.4 mid-up class 98 16.7 27.9 98.3 upper class 6 1.0 1.7 100.0 total 351 59.7 100.0 missing missing 237 40.3 total 588 100.0 monthly income was categorized into nine groups depends on the personal income tax. 3 3 policy for personal income tax in china. http://zhidao.baidu.com/question/256160286.html 8 table 2: descriptive statistics for monthly income of participants. frequency percent valid percent cumulative percent valid 0-786 79 12.6 13.5 13.5 787-2000 156 24.9 26.6 40.1 2001-5000 188 30.0 32.1 72.2 5001-20000 126 20.1 21.5 93.7 20001-40000 17 2.7 2.9 96.6 40001-60000 8 1.3 1.4 98.0 60001-80000 3 .5 .5 98.5 80001-100000 3 .5 .5 99.0 100001-above 6 1.0 1.0 100.0 total 586 93.6 100.0 missing system 40 6.4 total 626 100.0 income: ￥ age was classified by five groups, under18, 18-27, 28-44, 45-59, 60-80, which represent children and adolescence, young adults, middle-aged, middle-old aged, old aged. table 3: descriptive statistics for age of participants. frequency percent valid percent cumulative percent valid below-18 1 .2 .2 .2 18-27 64 10.9 12.4 12.6 28-44 320 54.4 62.1 74.8 45-59 109 18.5 21.2 95.9 60-above 21 3.6 4.1 100.0 total 515 87.6 100.0 missing missing 73 12.4 total 588 100.0 dependent variable was the level of civility of participants’ online performance which was calculated as the percentage of the civil posts and correspondences (see appendix 1). civility policy for standards of conduct of wikipedia users was adopted to measure the posts and correspondences of the participants.4 4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wikipedia:civility http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wikipedia:civility� 9 intercoding reliability reliability for all content analysis variables was calculated using the perreault and leigh (1989) reliability index: ir = {[(fo/n) – (1/k)][k/(k–1)]}0.5, for fo/n > 1/k, where fo is the observed frequency of agreement between coders, n is the total number of judgments and k is the number of categories. this index accounts for coder chance agreement and the number of categories used and is sensitive to coding weaknesses. reliability scores can range from 0 to 1, with higher scores indicating greater intercoder agreement. the interceding reliability between the ten coders was 0.9 which reached a significant level. results rq1 is there a relation between levels of civility of participants’ online performance and their social economic status? h1 the higher social class of the participants are, the higher level of civility of their online performance is. empirical results rejected the h1. a one-way between-groups analysis of variance was conducted to explore the impact of social class on levels of civility. participants were divided into five groups according to their social class (group1: underclass; group2: working class; group3: middle class; group4: middle-upper class; group5: upper class). there was no statistically significant difference at the p<.05 level in levels of civility for five social class groups: f (4,335) =1.6,p=.16. post-hoc comparison using the turkey hsd test indicated that the mean scores for the five groups were not significantly different from each other. table 4 presents the results of analysis from one-way anova, which demonstrates the relations between the level of the civility of participants’ online performance and their social class. 10 table 4: correlation between levels of civility and social class dependent variable: levels of civility sum of squares df mean square f sig. between groups 2143.804 4 535.951 1.651 .161 within groups 108745.273 335 324.613 total 110889.077 339 h2 the more the monthly income of the participants are, the higher level of civility of their online performance is. empirical results rejected the h2. the relationship between levels of civility and monthly income was investigated using pearson product-moment correlation coefficient. preliminary analyses were performed to ensure no violation of the assumptions of normality, linearity and homoscedasticity. there was no significant correlation between the two variables, p>.05. table 5 presented the results of pearson product-moment correlation coefficient. a oneway between-groups analysis of variance was conducted to explore the impact of monthly income on levels of civility. participants were divided into nine groups according to their monthly income (group1: 0-786; group2: 787-2000; group3: 2001-5000; group4: 5001-20000; group5: 20001-40000; group6: 40001-60000; group7: 60001-80000; group8: 80001-100000; group9: 100001-1000000). there was no statistically significant difference at the p<.05 level in levels of civility for nine monthly income groups: f (8,559) =.9,p=.51. post-hoc comparison using the turkey hsd test indicated that the mean scores for the nine groups were not significantly different from each other. table 6 presents the results of analysis from one-way anova, which demonstrates the relations between the level of the civility of participants’ online performance and their monthly income. 11 table 5: pearson product-moment correlations between levels of civility and monthly income dependent variable: levels of civility monthlyincome levels of civility monthlyincome pearson correlation 1 -.079 sig. (2-tailed) .062 n 585 567 levels of civility pearson correlation -.079 1 sig. (2-tailed) .062 n 567 570 ** correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed) table 6: correlation between levels of civility and monthly income dependent variable: levels of civility sum of squares df mean square f sig. between groups 2557.260 8 319.658 .911 .507 within groups 196138.203 559 350.873 total 198695.464 567 thus, since social class and income are two factors that determine the social economic status, there was no significant correlation between the levels of civility of participants’ online performance and their social economic status. h3 the older the participants are, the lower of levels of the civility are. empirical results supported the h3. the relationship between levels of civility and age was investigated using pearson product-moment correlation coefficient. preliminary analyses were performed to ensure no violation of the assumptions of normality, linearity and homoscedasticity. there was a weak, negative correlation between the two variables, r=-.089, n=502 p<.05, with low levels of civility associated with older age. table 7 presented the results. a one-way between-groups analysis of variance was conducted to explore the impact of age on levels of civility. participants were divided into five groups according to their age (group1: 018; group2: 19-27; group3: 28-44; group4: 45-59; group5 60-80). there was a statistically significant difference at the p<.05 level in levels of civility for five age groups: f (4,496) =3.5, p=.009. post-hoc comparison using the turkey hsd test indicated that the mean scores for the group2 (m=76.67, sd= 14.71) was significantly differently from group4 (m=68.51, sd=20.38). the mean scores for the other groups were not significantly different from each other. table 8 presents the results of analysis from one-way anova, which demonstrates the 12 relations between the level of the civility of participants’ online performance and their monthly income. table 7: pearson product-moment correlations between levels of civility and age dependent variable: levels of civility levels of civility age levels of civility pearson correlation 1 -.089* sig. (2-tailed) .046 n 569 502 age pearson correlation -.089* 1 sig. (2-tailed) .046 n 502 514 **. correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). table 8: correlation between levels of civility and monthly income dependent variable: levels of civility sum of squares df mean square f sig. between groups 4443.985 4 1110.996 3.448 .009 within groups 159811.300 496 322.200 total 164255.286 500 h4 the deeper engagement of participants’ online participation, the lower level of their civility of online performance empirical results rejected h4. the relationship between levels of civility and engagement of participants’ online participation was investigated using pearson productmoment correlation coefficient. preliminary analyses were performed to ensure no violation of the assumptions of normality, linearity and homoscedasticity. there was no significant correlation between the two variables, p>.05. table 9 presented the results of pearson productmoment correlation coefficient. 13 table 9: pearson product-moment correlations between levels of civility and age dependent variable: levels of civility levels of civility online engageme levels of civility pearson correlation 1 -.005 sig. (2-tailed) .906 n 569 563 online engagement pearson correlation -.005 1 sig. (2-tailed) .906 n 563 568 **correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). discussion the goal of this study is to explore the constitution of netizen mobs in virtual sphere and the factors that influence their performance, by analyzing the relations between the levels of civility of participants’ online performance and their social economic status, age, and engagement of online participation. according to the results, participants’ social economic status exerted no impact on the levels of the civility of their online performance. in cyberspace, middle and upper classes who are well-dressed and well-behaved in real life did not perform more civility than lower class and underclass stereotyped as lack of manners and self-control. even in some heated discussions, so-called social elites showed abundant extremism and rudeness, for example, “in china, even ass knows power means everything”, “damn it…”, “curse party members”, “we can’t live in such a country” and so forth. up to 74.6% of the participants were distributed into middle and middle-upper class, most of whose occupations were managers, teachers, technicians, engineers and so forth; while lower class and underclass counted 23.6%, including manual workers, the unemployed, the homeless among others; very a few of them were upper class: government officials, presidents of corporations, etc. middle and middle-upper class did not perform enough civility as expected, instead, they tended to complain and criticize the reality in an irrational way. although they earned good education and social resources, they were burdened with more stress: compared with upper class, they were faced with fierce competition from peers to gain more social resources and higher social status; compared with lower class, they were more sensitive to realize the defects of the government and political system. as with some issues related to social inequality, like the privilege of the authorities and 14 legal injustice, they expressed resentment and anger with provocative or antagonistic discourses, for example, “is there any responsible officials in china?!”, “no political leaders can be trusted in china”, “it’s too dark to live there”, etc. no one can deny that it is one of the forms of civic engagement and political participation, yet the irrationality would not lead to democracy in china. as stated, internet breaks down the formation of offline social roles and status, which leads to the technically sophisticated information-oriented individuals (peck, 2002). the group characteristics set by occupations were weakened or even abandoned in virtual sphere. a worker and a college teacher could express the same rage towards a controversial social issue in online discussions, due to a certain overlapped standpoint. when participants had easy and equal access to sharing, exchanging and discussing ideas in cyberspace, extreme opinions and uncivil discourse would destroy the maintenance of cybersphere and construction of civil society by impeding the order of rational discussions. according to further analysis, participants’ uncivil performances differed with different social classes. although there was no relationship between levels of civility of participants’ online performance, and their social economic status, their online uncivil performance had revealed the characteristics from their own class. cyberspace reduced the constraints of performance from real world for participants, yet they failed to get rid of the influence of disciplines and boundaries totally. lower class preferred direct rudeness and personal attack, while middle and upper class preferred exaggerated irony and extreme statements. lower class and underclass were encountered the direct pressure for surviving and the most serious exploitation and oppression, which lead to their extreme emotional outbursts with resentment and vilified words. lack of education and knowledge, they tended to express the direct rudeness and emotional words. another finding was that the levels of civility of participants’ online performance were negatively associated with their age. in this study, 62.1% participants were between middleaged participants, who were not only responsible for supporting family but burdened with pressure to get promoted at work. it’s highly possible for them to be discontent with the injustice and unfairness of various social issues due to their frequently direct contact with the society. they were more likely to be provoked by criticism and reproach about the society in the forum and produce a strong desire to express and communicate themselves. yet, these criticism and accused were often beyond the rational discussions and became extremist or provocative 15 discourses and opinions with great anger, for example, “hope he takes bombs at beijing”, “you are pretty silly”, “be against stupid chinese”, etc. last, there was no relationship between the levels of civility of participants’ online performance and the engagement of their online participation, which revealed that online performance in political forum was more influenced by experience of real life than virtual environment. it is not the cyberspace that nurtures the extremism but the dissatisfaction with the reality that lead to the resentment. this implies that online performance is more influenced by offline factors and ought to be analyzed and interpreted within specific social context. the performance of netizen mobs has no associations with netizens’ social economic status and their engagement of virtual life. as the opinion subjects vary with the different opinion objects, the constitution of netizen mobs is issue-oriented whose extremism are due to the dissatisfaction of social inequality and injustice. the emergence of netizen mobs reflects the profound social conflicts and contradictions. in contemporary china, when citizens finally get the access to speaking to the public via internet, the irrationality is inevitably coming with rationality. it is a long and difficult period leading to the democracy, which is at least practiced by chinese netizens through civic engagement and political participation in virtual sphere. (yang, 2009) conclusion the study had several limitations. first, in the discussions of the impact of social economic status, the absence of education as the variable would affect the precision of the results. second, online surveys and interviews could be adopted in the future research to investigate other factors that would influence the levels of civility of participants’ online performance, like personal experiences, social events within specific period of time and so forth. third, the forum i studied was a political forum whose atmosphere of discussions was rather radical and critical, which would limit the application of the results. future research could compare different online forums or social network sites, to discuss the impact of different characteristics of the virtual sphere on the participants’ online performance. in addition, i intend to analyze the relationship between the different categories of discussion topics adopted by the participants and their social economic status, to investigate the constitution and formation of groups of opinion subjects through internet in china, to discuss the role of the internet that plays in the facilitation of civil engagement and the construction of civil society. 16 acknowledgments i greatly appreciate the advice and guidance from prof. boxu yang whose my undergraduate advisor in peking university. i also show my thankfulness to the other nine coders, zexi li, wenjie zhu, xinchen yuan, tian zhang, hexin chen, xiao ren, nan zhou, jie zhao, shihui chen, who were undergraduate students in peking university, school of journalism and communication for their meticulous and serious work and help. references ferriss, a.l. (2002) studying and measuring civility: a framework, trends and scale. sociological inquiry, 72 (3), 376-392. foucault, m. (1988). technologies of the self. in martin, l.h. , gutman, h. & hutton, p.h. (eds.) technologies of the self (pp.16-49). amherst: university of massachusetts press. habermas, j. (1985). theory of communication action: reason and the rationalization of the society. ( mccarthy, t.) boston, ma: beacon press. 刘文富.(2002) 网络政治-网络社会与国家治理. 北京，商务印书馆，p.81 lu, x.y (eds).(2002). report of social stratification in contemporary china. retrieved from http://www.sociology.cass.cn/pws/lichunling/grwj_lichunling/p020041222488561878219.pdf naaman, m., boase, j. & lai, c. h. (2009). “is it really about me? message content in social awareness streams.” cscw 2010, february 6–10, 2010, savannah, georgia, usa. retrieved from http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/~mor/publications/naamancscw2010.pdf ng,e.w.j & detenber, b.h. (2005). the impact of synchronicity and civility in online political discussions on perceptions and intentions to participate’. journal of computermediated communication, 10(3), 13-16. peck, d.l. (2002). civility: a contemporary context for a meaningful historical concept. sociological inquiry, 72(3), 358-375. 彭兰泽.(2004). 网络研究. 北京，新华出版社. p.285-298 17 perreault, w.d & leigh, l.e. (1989) reliability of nominal data based on qualitative judgments. journal of marketing research, 26, 135-48. rheingold, h. (2002). smart mobs: the next social revolution. basic books sustein, c. (2002). republic.com. princeton, nj: princeton university press. wu, w.j. (2009).analysis on the formation and behavior of netman. contemporary communication, 2, 68-72 yan, g.j.(2009). the new media and the construction of civil society. contemporary communication, 2, 82-85 yang, g. (2009). the power of internet in china. new york: columbia university press. yang, y.y.(2008). the exploration of consciousness of citizenship in contemporary china. retrieved from http://www.sachina.edu.cn/htmldata/article/2008/11/1586.html 张海鹰主编.(2008) 网络传播概论新编.上海，复旦大学出版社，p.157-163. 张磊主编.(2009) 和谐社会、公民社会与大众媒介.北京，中国传媒大学出版社，p.193-198. 18 appendix 1 codebook coder: check the appropriate name ______siyuan ______shihui _____wenjie _____zexi ______xinchen ______tian _____hexin ____xiao ____nan ____jie url, data accessed write down the complete url of the site of each blog visited. mark down the page of each comment post by followers of each blog. measurement of level of civility of participants’ online performance this section measures ‘civility’ attributes of the participants’ posts and correspondence in online forum. we adopt code of conduct set for wikipedia editors and users to measure the civil performance of the forum participants. the operationalized definition of ‘civility’ is whether the participants behave politely, calmly and reasonably, even during heated discussions. ‘incivility’ consists of personal attacks, rudeness, disrespectful comments, and aggressive behaviours. all of the posts and correspondence of each participants will be coded as civility or incivility according to different categories of each concept, and then the calculated percentage of the civil ones will be serving as the level of civility of the participants’ online performance. different categories of civility and incivility will be recorded for further analysis. civility 1: originally publish or share posts of political, economic or cultural issues, events, opinions or criticism without irrational or provocative discourses. coded 1 examples of civility 1 include: topics about corruption, national image, freedom, cultural revolution, welfare, socialism and capitalism, autocracy, olympic games, spring festival ceremony, government administration and so forth. rational or constructive criticism and comments on immoral or illegal issues. “political privilege is too pervasive to be forbidden in china”, “ the government should serve the citizens not be served by the citizens”, “corrupt officials and dishonest traders are the most serious problems in china”, among others. civility 2: publish posts seeking for suggestions and help. coded 2 examples of civility2 include: “look for children in sichuan earthquake”, “can pension be returned?”, “ask for advice: how to obtain legal guns in china?” and so forth. civility3: in discussions, actively interact with other participants; respect different opinions: disagree without being disagreeable; be forthright and reasonably cooperative, responsible for good-faith questions; to avoid personal attack, avoid to make spirited discussions into personal argument; to stop uncivil behaviors in an appropriate way. coded 3 examples of civility3 include: “it’s ok to apologize if you have attacked others”, “i disagree with your point, 19 for…”, “your opinion is reasonable, but…”, “i didn’t judge on you….”, “in your case, you can contact local government.”and so forth. incivility1: direct rudeness, “insults, name-calling, gross profanity or indecent suggestions; personal attacks, including racial, ethnic, sexual, gender-related and religious slurs, and derogatory references to groups such as social classes or nationalities; ill-considered accusations of impropriety, belittling a forum administrator” (cited from wikipedia5 underclass: ). coded 4 examples of incivility1: “ta ma de (damn it),” “cao (fuck)”, “fangpi (your word is ass)”, “gun（滚）”,”zhaosi （找死）”, “quan jia si guang guang (curse your family)”, “nongmin mei jian shi” (disregard peasants)”, “islamic have no good people”, “party=ass (党 =裆 )”， “pen fei（喷粪） ”， “useless brain（脑 瘫） ” ， ”forum administrator is a crazy dog biting everyone”, “silly forum administrator”, “forum administrators are all zou gou (网管都是走狗)“，etc. incivility 2: other uncivil behaviors: taunting or baiting; harassment; sexual innuendo; lying; quoting another editor out of context to give the impression they hold views they do not hold, or to malign them; meaningless posts; coded 5 examples of incivility2: “can’t you read?”, “mark here (到此一游，路过，打个酱油，冒个泡)“, publish issues contrary to facts, etc. levels of civility of participants’ online performance _____% measurement of the social class of the participants according to report of social stratification in contemporary china published by the the social science academy of china, social hierarchy in china is divided into five classes based on the distribution of organizational, economic and cultural resources, namely, underclass, lower class, middle class, middleupper class, upper class. the unemployed, the half unemployed, and farmers in poverty coded 1 lower class: servants, workers,and farmers coded 2 middle class: primary professional or technical personnel, small business owners, and junior staff for corporation or government coded 3 middle-upper class: leading cadres, senior staff in large enterprise, managers in small and medium-sized enterprise, advanced professional or technical personnel and the medium business owners coded 4 upper class: leadership cadre, managers in large enterprise, and large private business owners coded 5 measurement of the monthly income of the participants 5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wikipedia:civility 20 the monthly income is divided into nine groups according to the national standards of personal income tax and the absolute poverty line set by chinese government. 0-￥786 coded 1 ￥787-￥2000 coded 2 ￥2001-￥5000 coded 3 ￥5001-￥20000 coded 4 ￥20001-￥40000 coded 5 ￥40001-￥60000 coded 6 ￥60001-￥80000 coded 7 ￥80001-￥100000 coded 8 ￥100001 and above coded 9 measurement of the age of the participants age is classified into five groups which respectively represent children and adolescence, young adults, middle-aged, middle-old aged, old aged. below 18 coded1 18-27 coded 2 28-44 coded 3 45-59 coded 4 60 and above coded 5 measurement of the engagement of the participants’ online participation the engagement of online participation is measured and presented by the numbers of the logging in of the forum by each participant with their forum id. ____ deepfakesfinal.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 carvajal, l., & iliadis, a. (2020, october 28-31). deepfakes: a preliminary systematic review of the literature. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 201th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. deepfakes: a preliminary systematic review of the literature laura carvajal temple university andrew iliadis temple university deepfakes are becoming a key topic in debates around politics and misinformation on the internet today. according to paris and donovan (2018), “av manipulation includes both the cutting edge, ai-reliant techniques of deepfakes, as well as “cheap fakes” that use conventional techniques like speeding, slowing, cutting, re-staging, or re contextualizing footage” (p. 4). while the phenomenon of deepfakes is relatively new with the first documented public appearances recorded in 2017, there is already a growing scholarly literature about deepfakes and the various methods that can be used to help understand and combat them. this paper presents a preliminary systematic review of the academic literature on deepfakes. methods we assessed a representative sample (n=1049) of sources from four popular electronic databases, including google scholar, scopus, crossref, and web of science. these electronic databases were chosen because it is relatively easy to automatically pull reference information from them and because they contain a wide variety of academic literature. this allowed us to glean a snapshot of the type of work that is being done in the academic community on deepfakes. we used relevant search and key terms "deepfake" or "deep fake" and ("machine learning" or "image generation" or "video") to generate results and create an archive of the articles related to the development and effects of deepfakes in society. this search yielded potentially relevant journal articles, books, dissertations, and conference papers that were screened for retrieval based on their title and abstract. we then virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): carvajal, l., & iliadis, a. (2020, october). deepfakes: a preliminary systematic review of the literature. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. downloaded csv files for each of the results from the four databases. then, all the articles were coded in three areas: academic field (stem, humanities and social sciences, or medicine), theoretical approach (prescriptive or descriptive), and themes (automated program, review, state-of-the-art, literacy, best practices, public policy, or critical analysis). these three categories were chosen to determine the field of the published articles, the theoretical approach that academic authors took when addressing deepfakes, and the nature of the output that scholars created to address the possible effects of deep fakes in society. initially, we separated the sources with respect to the academic field to which each of them belonged. in “stem” we included "science, technology, engineering, and mathematics" (bybee, 2010), in “humanities and social sciences” we included "psychology, economic and finances, law, politics and public administration, sociology, education, philosophy, and linguistics” (huang & chang, 2008) as well as media and communication, and “medicine” included all fields related to health. the articles were then classified according to their theoretical approach that could be prescriptive or descriptive. by prescriptive we mean the theories that “are concerned with guidelines that describe what to do in order to achieve specific outcomes” (ullrich, 2008, p.37) and by descriptive we mean when “theories make statements about how learning occurs and devise models that can be used to explain and predict learning results” (ibid). since our interest is to understand how academics are approaching the study of deepfakes, knowing whether a study is descriptive or prescriptive allows us to see where research is heading; we want to know if the study of deepfakes is primarily around recommendations or concrete outcomes. lastly, we wanted to see what types of conversations are happening, whether they are primarily around public knowledge or on practices and technological solutions. after separating the articles by theoretical approach, we classified the sources into seven themes that defined their purpose. the first one was automated programs to find an optimal technical solution. the second theme was a review paper that tries to succinctly review recent progress in a particular topic, and the state-of-the-art papers reflect the present state of scientific or engineering development. the fourth theme was literacy articles, which focus on the documents that generate awareness about the effects of deepfakes. the fifth category was public policy focusing on articles that specify the rules, guidelines, and regulations that government and non-profit organizations may take with respect to deepfakes. the best practices theme corresponds to papers where a practice “has been shown to produce superior performance” (druery, j & mccormack, n & murphy, s, 2013, p.111); these articles show specific guidelines towards the use or identification of deepfakes. the last theme, critical analysis, included sources that examine ideas, perspectives, or critical opinions. after classifying the sources in these categories, statistics were carried out to show the aspects and relationships of the data sample. for each electronic database, three-bar diagrams were made for each category (academic field, theory approach, and theme) to show the relation between them. finally, a total bar chart was made with results from all four electronic databases to have an overview of the approach of published sources concerning deepfakes (figure 1). analysis the systematic review of the sources through the three categories allowed us to make some general and preliminary conclusions. first, checking the data, most of the articles belong to the stem area. this may confirm that the academic community is interested in further developing the technology behind deepfakes and may imply that the main focus of researchers is related to the development of automatic programs allowing for advanced and faster responses. from the 1049 articles, 300 of them belong to the area of humanities and social sciences, and most of the sources in this field were focusing on state-of-the-art, literacy, and critical analysis. this may show that academics in those areas are establishing ground that informs users about deepfakes, answering questions such as “what are deepfakes? what are the possible effects? or what are the threats to democracy?” these documents generate debate about what practices scholars should study to recognize deepfakes and mitigate their negative effects. in response to this, in the database, we found that some academics understand the significance of writing literature that monitors the production and detection of deepfakes. from the database, 53 sources explore topics related to public policies, and 35 sources studied the best practices. stem produced 381 articles that in different ways promote innovation concerning deepfakes. 530 sources have a descriptive approach, implying that deepfakes are a new topic requiring discussion through the observation of models and the prediction of results. the lopsidedness in prescriptive and descriptive approaches (descriptive was almost double that of prescriptive) may show that there could be a need increase the production of articles that focus on the technical automation of detecting deepfakes. figure 1 results from coding deepfake scholarly literature references paris, b. and donovan, j. (2018). deepfakes and cheap fakes: the manipulation of audio and visual evidence. data & society. retrieved from data & society: https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ds_deepfakes_cheap_fakesfinal 1.pdf bybee, r. w. (2010). advancing stem education: a 2020 vision. technology and engineering teacher, 70(1), 30-35. druery, j & mccormack, n & murphy, s. (2013). are best practices really best? a review of the best practices literature in library and information studies. evidence based library and information practice. 8. 110-128. 10.18438/b8rc9s. huang, m. h., and chang, y. w. (2008). characteristics of research output in social sciences and humanities: from a research evaluation perspective. journal of the american society for information science and technology, 59(11), 1819-1828. ullrich, c. (2008). descriptive and prescriptive learning theories. in pedagogically founded courseware generation for web-based learning (pp. 37-42). berlin: springer. living a life online selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 living a life online: trust, expression, and interaction in mmogs richard wirth university of texas at dallas rosanna e. guadagno (corresponding author; rosanna.guadagno@utdallas.edu) university of texas at dallas abstract life on the internet has possibly as many forms and functions as real-world existence – a notion that is readily apparent through an examination of virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online games (mmogs). in the daily operation of such a world, players face social interactions in much the same fashion that individuals are likely encounter in their offline “real” life (guadagno, muscanell, okdie, burk, and ward, 2011). these gaming experiences are of course colored by both the nature of the medium and the unique design of the virtual world in question (taylor, 1999, 2004; park and namho, 2011). scholars seeking to study the medium itself often look to the ways in which video games affect behavior or facilitate the acquisition of social capital (zhong, 2011; collins & freeman, 2013), while the analysis of specific virtual worlds is traditionally limited to the ethnographic study of social institutions, play communities, and the daily lives of players (mnookin, 1996; pearce 2009). this paper is the result of a literature review of social interaction and online communication, as well as a pilot study on mmog players, examining the relationship between self-disclosure (miller, berg, & archer, 1983), motivation (yee, 2006), social perception, and resultant behavior. a small pilot study indicated that people’s motivations for gameplay as well as the group memberships of other players affect the likelihood of trusting and helping other players in mmogs. introduction when any new media are introduced to society at large, questions about their impact fall into three traditional categories, and video games are no exception (williams, 2003). these questions typically ask what the new artifact replaces, how it impacts the health of individuals in society, and how it impacts society at large. with the pervasive nature of games in today’s world and the increasing frequency with which these games contain online social elements, the second and third categories of concern have inspired a respectable surge in social research. still, the density of literature pales in comparison to the prevalence of online interactions, cultures, and even functioning social structures. citation: wirth, r., & guadagno, r. e. (2015, october 21-24). living a life online: trust, expression, and interaction in mmogs. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. over the past decade online games have become increasingly ubiquitous as players from around the globe connect in ever-growing numbers, and prominent titles emerge from a variety of countries. while the world marveled at the seemingly unstoppable growth of everquest back in 2002, its total user count peaked at just over 500,000 players. only a few years later, world of warcraft boasted a staggering five million players, peaking at 12 million in 2012, just a decade after the decline of everquest. the number of active users has risen so rapidly that in 2008, china alone contained over 147 million players of online games, 53% of which were massively multiplayer online role playing games (mmorpgs) (zhong, 2011). as the number of players in online worlds continues to rise, the effects that this digital existence has on peoples’ interpersonal communication patterns becomes increasingly relevant. one of the most critical elements to consider in online communication and interpersonal relationships is the notion of anonymity. much scholarly literature explores the nature of online anonymity in affecting individuals’ personality, social capital acquisition, behavior, and their propensity for truthfulness (singer, 1996; qian & scott, 2007; bernstein et al., 2011). while many scholars have pursued the nature of these elements in social media such as facebook and chat rooms, online games provide a unique, ludic context for this anonymity. these considerations offer up a variety of research questions concerning the players and developers of online games. how can developers create game systems and promote social structures that support the formation of trust and the acquisition of social capital? can and should an individual trust somebody in an online space, whether that space is purely a social forum or a game world? many elements of online communication are founded upon the ability of users to remain anonymous, which prompts the question of how much one should discuss with somebody who is a relative stranger (qian & scott, 2007). additionally, this concern questions the role that games play in navigating interpersonal relationships. despite the seeming importance of this concept, only a sparse area of the anonymity literature concerns the nature of trust in online spaces. the majority of seminal research on trust is based in real-world interactions or across social media such as facebook and twitter, with a prominent gap in the literature where online games are concerned. despite the large percentage of the world’s population that inhabits online game worlds, the majority of literature considered directly applicable for the study of socialization in online games was written three or more decades ago. recently however, scholars of new and interactive media have worked to reconcile this lack, relating the concept of self-disclosure to the proclivity for trust in online spaces. while a number of methods have been developed for measuring self-disclosure in real world contexts, these are not directly applicable to the study of multi-user communication across digital media. this due strictly to issues of replicating experiment conditions in virtual worlds, as many scholars believe that there is no substantial difference in the “real” and “virtual” world (lehdonvirta, 2010). joinson, paine, buchanan, and reips (2008) developed a web-based form that adapts the jourard self-disclosure questionnaire, a widely accepted and yet outdated measure, to contemporary standards. once the ability to measure self-disclosure levels in online game players is established, the challenge becomes finding the methodology with which one relates disclosure to trust, and the context at work in online games. ratan, chung, shen, williams, & poole (2010) measured the amount and type of communication among players in an mmorpg guild – a collection of players joined ingame under a named social organization – in order to determine what social factors affected trust. their research found that trust levels were related to both the nature of player social structure and the mode of communication between players, such as voicechat and in-game guild-wide messages. comparing their data with the results of selfdisclosure measures, ratan et al. (2010) found that players trusted those in their guild more closely than other players in the game. this study will use similar methodology to relate self-disclosure to additional variables in player affiliation, the motivation types of those players, and personal experiences shared by participants about their most memorable game moments. self-disclosure a key element of social penetration theory, self-disclosure is a communication process wherein an individual reveals information about themselves to another person. any details the individual shares about themselves falls under the umbrella of selfdisclosure, including “thoughts, feelings, aspirations, goals, failures, successes, fears, dreams as well as one’s likes, dislikes, and favorites,” (ignatius & kokkonen, 2007). this range of topics refers to the first of two dimensions to self-disclosure: the breadth of the information, and the depth. breadth is the most easily expanded portion of selfdisclosure, as the information involved refers to our general interests, preferences, and everyday lives. no real depth of revelation is required, simply the acknowledgement of a personal opinion or lack thereof. conversely, the second dimension to self-disclosure involves the depth of information revealed, which is much more difficult to expand upon due to the intimate nature of delving deep into an individual’s emotions and reasoning. the more personal the revealed details are about an individual’s life or identity, the greater the propensity to self-disclose must be in order to share those details. if this is the case, then what in-game actions or communications increase the level of intimacy between players? there are a number of answers to this question, such as achievements, social circles, and memorable shared experiences. this concept relates to one of the other variables of the present study – motivation. according to miller, berg, and archer (1983), willingness to self-disclose is positively correlated with the discloser’s level of intimacy towards the recipient. their study established measures for quantifying the natural inclination for an individual to selfdisclose to a stranger, as well as to a same-sex friend. as one would expect, the study evidenced that the more personal a series of questions became, the less the participant was willing to disclose. additionally, this willingness decreased at a significantly lower rate when disclosing to a same-sex friend, as opposed to a stranger. combined, these findings would suggest that in an online game setting, in which the majority of players with whom an individual makes contact will be anonymous, high-depth self-disclosure is a fairly rare occurrence. however, this may not be the case. in a study of anonymity and ephemerality in online communication, bernstein et al. (2011) found that if given the option to remain anonymous, over 90% of users would choose to do so, and the remaining 10% often adopted fake identities related to some facet of online culture, such as comedic trends and current events. despite the prevalence and general perception of anonymity, bernstein et al. (2011) found that this was not always a negative community element; in fact, their research evidenced that anonymity was positively correlated with more frequent occurrences of intimate and open conversation, and that anonymity can act as a socialization tool that protects a person from their online failures. in the context of an mmorpg, this protection against failure becomes particularly relevant, as game mechanics add the role of the avatar and ludic progression to a user’s social identity. park and chung (2011) conducted a study on avatars and self-presentation desire in mmorpgs, and concluded that these dual elements promoted trust of online games, as well as a commitment to an online community. if this is the case, then could there be a link between anonymity and an increased occurrence of self-disclosure? in studies such as ratan et al. (2010), self-disclosure is analyzed alongside messaging patterns to determine the correlation between trust and communication medium of choice. this study is a promising early look into understanding the nature of player communication and interpersonal relationships in online games spaces, with both prior and subsequent studies in related areas lending additional validity to their hypotheses. as an example, a study conducted by collins and freeman (2013) concluded that problematic and non-problematic player types did not differ significantly in terms of personality (trait empathy, prosocial behavior, and extraversion), but they both evidenced significantly higher levels of online social capital acquisition, and sub-standard offline social capital acquisition. this can be interpreted to show that online anonymity prompts higher levels of intimacy and self-disclosure, while the medium of mmorpg promotes trust and elicits a desire for self-representation. in continuing to build on this interrelated literature, the present study aims to observe additional components of player behavior. specifically, it compares self-disclosure and socialization to well-established player taxonomy (yee, 2006; williams, 2008) to determine the role that motivation plays in the formation of and propensity for trust. motivation for online play establishing taxonomy of player types is one of the fundamental ways in which scholars can begin to break down the complex nature of online communities, especially with regards to drawing similarities and consistencies between the diverse groups of people from across the globe. yee (2006) defines 10 motivation subcomponents that grouped into three primary groups, labeled social, immersion, and achievement. according to yee, social players are motivated by relationships, teamwork, and self-disclosure. achievement players are considered to be a reversal of the social group, with their primary motivations consisting of progress, optimization, challenging others, and domination. immersion falls between the two extremes, with players in this group being motivated by exploration, narrative, aesthetics, and escapism. williams, yee, and caplan (2008) sampled thousands of participants in cooperation with a large for-profit mmorpg developer, reproducing and validating yee’s earlier findings. these motivation types can be linked to a number of play patterns, the most notable for this study being both self-disclosure and community engagement. the present study the purpose of this study is to analyze self-disclosure in the context of player motivation types and guild perception to determine the predictive factors of trust in online games. while previous studies have found certain elements of personality such as prosocial tendencies and trait empathy to lack statistical significance with regard to social capital acquisition (collins & freeman, 2013; odrowska & massar, 2014), the present study aims to explore the correlation between the personality factor of motivation and the social elements of trust and guild perception. by observing trends in player behavior, the potential exists to both garner extensive knowledge on the nature of trust and selfrepresentation, and to design future online experiences in such a way that they promote these behaviors we as a society consider healthy and positive. adapting measures from the yee (2006) and williams (2008) player motivation survey, as well as two unique sets of self-disclosure measures (joinson, paine, buchanan, & reips, 2008; miller, berg, & archer, 1983), players of mmorpgs will be asked to complete a survey to determine their proclivity to self-disclose and the motivation type their play patterns most associate with. the participants will additionally answer a series of questions about decisions they would make in certain game scenarios, rate their agreement with a series of attitudinal statements, as well as share some of their most memorable moments in an mmorpg through a short answer response. predictions based on the subcomponents associated with the three types of player motivation, as well as previously observed elements of guild communication and commitment, a number of predictions can be made. first, players in the social motivation category should display higher levels of self-disclosure overall, as this is one of the factors yee (2006) associates with that group. building on this hypothesis, players in the achievement category should be less likely to trust others than would either of the two other motivation types, due to their penchant for competition and domination. because of this, players who are socially motivated will trust players more willingly; players motivated by achievement will trust the least willingly, and trust in a player will decrease based on their social distance from the participant’s guild. second, it can be predicted that players will more frequently engage in spontaneous helping of those who are in their guild over those who are in another guild or are in no guild. conversely, players will be more willing to attack another player if the target in question is not affiliated with any guild, or is in a guild other than their own. furthermore, the previously reviewed research suggests that due to the relationship between mmorpg commitment and guild socialization, the short answer responses of participants who report higher levels of self-disclosure should reflect high guild activity. method participants participants were 37 (27 men, 10 women) students at a large southwestern university who volunteered to participate in response to a request for participation sent via email to members of the university’s video game player club. in response to our request, a total of 54 members participated in the study but only the above 37 (68.5%) indicated that they played mmogs. thus, our final sample only included the 37 participants who indicated that they played mmogs. their age ranged from 18 to 46 (m = 25.73, sd = 5.73). measures to assess motivations for playing mmogs, participants filled out the online gaming motivations scale (yee, ducheneaut, & nelson, 2012). this scale assesses three different types of motivations: social, achievement, and immersion by asking participants to rate a number of in-game activities in importance on a likert scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 5 (extremely). an example of social motivations is the following item: “being part of a guild”). asking participants to evaluate statements such as “acquiring rare items” assessed achievement motivations. the immersion subscale included items such as “learning about stories and lore of the world.” for the present study, the reliabilities for each subscale were as follows: social, α = .87; achievement, α =.68; immersion, α = .79. despite the small sample size, these reliabilities are comparable or greater than reported previously. to examine self-disclosure in mmogs, we assessed two different measures, both developed by miller, berg, and archer (1983). the first assessed individual differences in the extent to which people elicit personal information from others. those scoring high on this scale are referred to as “openers,” reflecting their skill in obtaining selfdisclosure from others. example items include: “i can easily get people to “open up.” the second measure assessed the extent to which participants engaged in selfdisclosure themselves by asking them to indicate the frequency of sharing with a samesex stranger information on their personal habits and deepest feelings. participants completed 10 items on each measure using a likert scale that ranged from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). in the present study, our results indicated the following reliabilities: openers α = .83; self-disclosure α = .90. participants also completed a series of questions assessing their likelihood of joining a guild and their willingness to other trust players with their in-game items and currency, to share their email address, and to assist another player on a scale ranging from 1 (never) to 5 (likely). each item was analyzed separately with the trust and helping items assessed three times, once for guildmates, second for members of other guilds, and third for players with no guild affiliation. procedure after participants received an email requesting participation in the survey, willing volunteers were directed to a website hosting the survey using a computer of their choice. participants who indicated that they did not play mmogs were excused, while those that were mmog players filled out each survey then were thanked for their time. results in addition to the above measures, we also assessed how much time participants spent playing mmogs per week. our results indicated that participants’ play time breakdown was as follows: 0 to 5 hours = 1 (2.7%); 6 to 10 hours = 4 (10.8%); 11 to 15 = 6 (16.2%); 20 to 30 = 11 (29.7%); 31+ = 15 (40.5%). thus, most participants devoted quite a bit of time per week playing mmogs. initial analyses to examine the relationship between motivations for playing mmogs, self-disclosure, and gender, we first ran a series of correlations indicating that achievement motivation was negatively correlated with immersion, r (37) = -.44, p = .007. similarly, social motivation was positively correlated with self-disclosure, r (37) .37, p = .023. next, we conducted a series of independent samples t-tests to examine whether any of our measures differed by participant gender. consistent with previous research (yee et al., 2012), men were significantly more achievement motivated than were women (m = 3.88, sd = .73 vs. m = 3.27), sd = .70), t (35) = 2.26, p = .03. unlike the prior research, the gender difference in social or immersion motivations for mmog play were not significant. helping intentions prior to examining participants’ intentions to assists other mmog players as a function of their guild status (own guild, other guild, or unguilded), we examined participants’ likelihood of joining a guild when playing an mmog and whether men and women differed in this. our analyses revealed that the majority (81%) of participants reported being likely (37.8%) or very likely (43.2%) to join a guild. men and women did not differ significantly on this measure. data analysis strategy. we examined whether participants differentiated between their own guildmates and other mmog players in terms of trust and helping to examine our first two hypotheses. to examine this, we conducted a series of mixed design anovas with guild membership of the other players (guildmate vs. member of another guild vs. unguilded) as the within subjects variable and gender of the participant is the between subjects variable. see table 1 for means by guildstatus for each question. table 1. means and standard deviations for the trust and help measures by guild status own guild other guild no guild trust with items 1.98 (1.65) 2.00 (1.03) 1.59 (0.83) give money 2.00 (1.65) 1.76 (0.96) 1.54 (2.14) share email 3.11 (1.15) 2.46 (1.22) 2.14 (1.23) helping 4.68 (0.53) 4.03 (0.80) 3.84 (1.17) trusting other players. in response to the item assessing the likelihood that participants would trust another player with their in game items, our results revealed a significant main effect for guild status, wilks’ λ = .65, p = .001, ηp 2 = .354. post hoc tests using fischer’s lsd indicated that participants were more likely to trust members of their guild (m = 1.89, sd = 1.7) and members of other guilds (m = 2.0, sd = 1.3) with their in-game items more so than individuals who were unguilded (m = 1.59, sd = 0.83). the difference between the guilds was not significant. there was no difference between male and female players and the interaction was not significant. giving money to other players. participants were more likely to give money to members of their own guild money relative to players in other guilds and unguilded players, wilks’ λ = .71, p = .01, ηp 2 = .239. post hoc tests also revealed that participants were more likely to give members of their own guilds money (m = 2.32, sd = 1.67) relative to members of other guilds (m = 1.76, sd = 0.96) and unguilded players (m = 1.54, sd = 0.84). participants did not differentiate between players in other guilds and unguilded players on this measure. there was no main effect for participant gender. however, the interaction between participant gender and type of guild was significant, wilks’ λ = .71, p = .01, ηp 2 = .239 indicating that, compared to men, women were significantly more likely to give money to members of their own guilds. men and women did not differ in likelihood of giving money to mmog players who were not guild members. see figure 1 for a breakdown of means by gender and guild status. sharing contact information with other players. there was also a significant main effect for participants’ willingness to share their email address with other players, wilks’ λ = .65, p = .001, ηp 2 = .354. post hoc tests indicated that participants were significantly more likely to share their email addresses with members of their own guilds (m = 3.11, sd = 1.15) relative to members of other guilds (m = 2.46, sd = 1.22) or unguilded players (m = 2.14, sd = 1.23). participants did not differentiate between players in other guilds and unguilded players on this measure. there was no difference between male and female players and the interaction was not significant. providing help to other players. similar to above, our analyses revealed a significant main effect on participants’ likelihood of helping other players such that participants were significantly more likely to help their guildmates (m = 4.68, sd =.53) relative to members of other guilds (m = 4.03, sd =.80) or unguilded players (m = 3.84, sd = 1.17), wilks’ λ = .58, p < .001, ηp 2 = .422. men and women did not differ on this measure nor was the interaction significant. individual differences and trust and help in mmog play finally, to examine the role of player motivations, individual differences in opening others to self-disclose and participants’ own self-disclosure, we ran a series of correlations between these items and the measures of trust and helping in mmogs. given that, consistent with predictions, the results reported above revealed that participants differentiated between their own guildmates vs. other players, the correlations were conducted separately for each guild status. 3.2$ 2$1.7$ 1.78$1.52$ 1.8$ women$ men$ figure'1.'gender$by$guild$status$interac=on$on$ likelihood$of$giving$money$to$other$players$ guildmates$ members$of$other$guilds$ unguilded$ being likely to join a guild while playing an mmog was significantly correlated with social motivations for mmog play, r (37) = .80, p < .001, and with self-disclosure, r (37) = .34, p = .037. guildmates. trusting one’s guildmates with in-game items was negatively correlated with achievement motivation for playing mmogs, r (37) = -.40, p = .014, and the openers self-disclosure scale, r (37) = -.33, p = .05. additionally, social motivation for mmog gameplay was significantly related to the likelihood of giving guildmates their email addresses, r (37) = .60, p < .001. no other correlations were significant. members of other guilds. as with one’s guildmates, social motivation for mmog play was significantly correlated with the likelihood of giving members of other guilds their email address, r (37) = .36, p = .029. unguilded players. achievement motivation for mmog play was negatively correlated with trusting unguilded players with one’s items, r (37) = -.38, p = .019, and in game money, r (37) = -.34, p = .039. discussion the results of this pilot study expand the work of previous scholars in identifying elements of player psychology in relation to trust and helping. as predicted, player motivation type was related to specific actions and levels of trust in other mmog players. as predicted, players who identified as being motivated by social elements of online play revealed higher levels of self-disclosure and were more willing to trust their fellow mmorpg players with information such as their email address. similarly, we found as expected that achievement-oriented players, whose motivation subcomponents contain such factors as domination, challenging others, and status, would be less likely to trust and cooperate with other players. in support of these predictions, we mound that players high in achievement motivation were less trusting with their in-game items when the other player was unguilded or a member of their guild. these results suggest that a mmog player’s motivation for playing the same has important implications for the way in which they behavior towards other players in their gaming environment. one such additional factor is the guild status of the other players. generally, across the different motivations for gameplay, participants reported greater levels of trust and willingness to help members of their own guild relative to other players. this finding is consistent with much previous literature in social psychology revealing that people prefer members of their own groups (tajfel, 1982). thus, as with previous research (e.g., guadagno et al., 2011) the results of this pilot study indicate that people behavior similarly online as they do in other contexts. limitations and future directions the methodology for this study was fairly limited, as a questionnaire, no matter how thorough, does not perfectly account for play experience. as such, this was intended to be a pilot study into the relationship between what motivates people to play mmorpgs and the actions they take in game with regards to social interaction and participatory game culture. future research will be informed by the results of the present study, and analysis of certain factors, such as achievement motivation and inclination to attack others, can prompt additional studies on motivation and morality, the nature of social pacts in mmorpg spaces. similarly, this study suffers from a small sample size and was drawn from one university’s gamer guild. as a result, the conclusions of this study need to be examined with a larger and more heterogeneous sample to increase confidence in the validity of our findings. future research on this topic should aim address the above limitations and to obtain an accurate depiction of gameplay, either through recording people’s play time or personally observing it, or through a potential lab experiment. references bernstein, m. s., monroy-hernández, a., harry, d., andré, p., panovich, k., & vargas, g. g. (2011). 4chan and/b: an analysis of anonymity and ephemerality in a large online community. in icwsm. collins, e., & freeman, j. (2013). do problematic and non-problematic video game players differ in extraversion, trait empathy, social capital and prosocial tendencies? computers in human behavior, 1933-1940. guadagno, r. e., muscanell, n. l., okdie, b. m., burke, n. m., & ward, t. b. (2011). even in virtual environments women shop and men build: gender differences in second life. computers in human behavior, 27, 304-308. joinson, a. n., paine, c., buchanan, t., & reips, u. (2008). measuring self-disclosure online: blurring and non-response to sensitive items in web-based surveys. computers in human behavior, 2158-2171. mnookin, j. (1996). virtual(ly) law: the emergence of law in lambdamoo. journal of computer-mediated communication, 2. miller, l. c., berg, j. h., & archer, r. l. (1983). openers: individuals who elicit intimate selfdisclosure. journal of personality and social psychology, 1234-1244. park, s., and namho c. (2011) mediating roles of self-presentation desire in online games: community commitment and trust behavior of massive multiplayer online role-playing games. computers in human behavior, 2372-2379. pearce, c. (2009). collaboration, creativity and learning in a play community: a study of the university of there. proceedings, digital games research association (digra), london, uk. qian, h., & scott, c. r. (2007). anonymity and self‐disclosure on weblogs. journal of computer‐mediated communication, 12(4), 1428-1451. ratan, r. a., chung, j. e., shen , c., williams, d., & poole, m.s. (2010) schmoozing and smiting: trust, social institutions, and communication patterns in an mmog. journal of computer-mediated communication, 16(1), 93-114 shin, d. (2010). the dynamic user activities in massive multiplayer online roleplaying games. international journal of human-computer interaction, 317-344. singer, j. b. (1996). virtual anonymity: online accountability and the virtuous virtual journalist. journal of mass media ethics, 11(2), 95-106. taylor, t.l. (1999). life in virtual worlds: plural existence, multimodalities, and other online research challenges. american behavioral scientist, 43, 436-449. williams, d. (2003). the video game lightning rod. information, communication & society, 523-550. williams, d,, yee, n., & caplan, s. e. (2008). who plays, how much, and why? debunking the stereotypical gamer profile. journal of computer-mediated communication, 993-1018. yee, n. (2006). motivations for play in online games. cyberpsychology & behavior, 9(6), 772-775. yee, n., ducheneaut, n., & nelson, l. (2012, may). online gaming motivations scale: development and validation. in proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 2803-2806). acm. zhong, z. (2011). the effects of collective mmorpg (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) play on gamers' online and offline social capital. computers in human behavior, 2352-2363. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): vivienne, s., byron, p., abidin, c., robards, b. (2016, october 5-8). patrolling gender and sexuality in digital social spaces. papers presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. patrolling sexuality and gender in digital social spaces son vivienne flinders university of south australia paul byron university of new south wales crystal abidin national university of singapore brady robards monash university keywords: gender, identity, queer, rules, sexuality abstract: all social spaces are governed by rules, both spoken and unspoken. gender and sexuality are especially subjected to policing and governance, both formally and informally. this panel presents four examples in which sexuality and gender are ‘patrolled’ in digital social spaces, through both explicit rules and implicit ideals: hook­up/dating app codes of conduct, informal digitally mediated sex education in singapore, the circulation of pornography and ‘sexual storytelling’ on subreddit r/totallystraight, and boundary patrolling of memory and materiality in a trans and gender diverse (tgd) community in adelaide. while we recognise a clear distinction between gender and sexuality we adopt a cross­platform and interdisciplinary perspective from which it is evident that negotiations over the boundaries are often fraught, causing blurriness between otherwise neat categories. the first paper in this collection, draws on a trans and gender diverse (tgd) case study in social media storytelling. it explores the ways tgd participants patrol the boundaries of personal and familial archives, and the digital trace that affirms or counters shared memories. it considers the ‘turf’ wars that take place online between different stakeholders of material identity (including trans exclusionary radical feminists or terfs). even individuals apparently united under the tgd acronym engage in disputes over collective representation and which strategies should be prioritised in pursuing legal reform. regardless of a digital trace that can seem permanent and definite, memory and materiality are subjective frontiers that shapeshift in different contexts and with different perspectives. this paper argues that sophisticated negotiations undertaken by tgd people, particularly around coherence and congruence, demonstrate skills that constitute a kind of broadly applicable playbook for surviving modern networked sociality and civic engagement. the second paper examines how influencers act as informal, digitally mediated educators of sex and sexuality in singapore. institutionalized sexuality education in singapore undertakes a conservative, medicalised approach that preaches abstinence, and is premised on promoting healthy (heterosexual) relationships between married couples for reproduction purposes, to uphold the stable family unit. it assigns parents, the school, students, and the community as stakeholders in maintaining a comprehensive sexuality education. however, young people are increasingly turning to influencers who are trendy, clout rich, and influential on the internet for first­hand ‘lifestyle’ information and advice. in response, some influencers use personal experiences of sex and sexuality to lure traffic and increase their viewership. through ethnographic fieldwork conducted with these influencers and content analysis of one specific influencers’ social media between december 2012 and july 2013, this paper examines how influencers have stepped in as informal educators of sex and sexuality education to provide alternative approaches amidst a state­controlled hegemonic discourse. the third paper centres on a case study of the ‘totally straight’ (r/totallystraight) ‘subreddit’ on social media site reddit. r/totallystraight serves as a web forum for sharing gay pornography amongst men who identify as straight, governed by a strict set of framing rules that determine what is and what is not appropriate in this space. this paper draws on a small­scale study of the r/totallystraight subreddit, conducted over a period of three months. analysis reveals that while r/totallystraight is largely used as a forum for sharing porn depicting men, it also serves as a space for affirmation and sharing personal narratives related to contested ‘mostly straight’ sexual identities. the moderators of the subreddit, and the users themselves, foster a supportive, non­judgemental discourse in the telling of ‘sexual stories’ (plummer 1995). it is argued that this phenomenon could be representative of broader cultural shifts towards less rigidly defined sexual identities, and that this case study points to the potentials for digital social spaces to act as sites for organising and affirming non­dominant identity­projects. in the fourth and final paper discourses of hook­up/dating app rules and etiquette are considered, drawing from focus groups with same­sex attracted young people from sydney. unlike in other social network sites, user conduct cannot be publicly discussed on grindr and similar apps since these offer no space for public interaction beyond static profiles. this ensures that one’s 'rules of play' are developed through practice, and this encompasses ethical practices of self­formation (foucault 1982) in which users consider how their ethical conduct reflects or departs from the suspected 'norms' of a platform. the communicative limits of these apps also ensures that 'private chats' bleed into other spaces, with screen grabs commonly shared among friends and peers. in focus groups, users described these apps as unregulated, gave examples of improper use, and discussed their personal rules of engagement. drawing from foucault's work on pleasure and the ethical subject, this paper highlights the hook­up/dating app dual process of negotiating one’s relation to self and others. here, personal codes of conduct are recognised as unstable, yet are necessarily deployed for the app user’s ethical self­formation. collectively these papers represent some fascinating ways in which definitions and performances of sex and gender are patrolled by people inside and outside of arbitrary boundaries. while previously these boundaries have appeared self­evident (e.g male, female, gay, straight, private, public, normal, variant etc.) these rich descriptions of networked social spaces reveal otherwise. t(e)rf wars: patrolling the boundaries of memory and materiality in the tgd community son vivienne, flinders university of south australia the stories beyond gender case study over the last year a diverse and politicised group of tgd (trans and gender­diverse) people have been engaging in monthly workshops that explore the boundaries of gender identity in adelaide, australia. their creative outputs are curated in an online gallery of memes, poems, artwork (produced with pencil, paper and digital tools) photo­taichi and video at www.storiesbeyondgender.com. they have also hosted a face­to­face trans world café as an experiment in facilitating conversations across difference, and travelled to regional centres to connect with geographically isolated tgd people. this initiative was conceived as a creative community development intervention that aims to address tgd peoples’ over­representation in statistics on bullying, homelessness, drug abuse, depression and suicide (smith et al., 2014). with funding from the sa government department of community and social inclusion it bridges gaps between policy, research and everyday practices, as well as the tensions established in a small but vibrant gender­diverse community. patrolling boundaries while many young people ascribe to non­binary and fluid understandings of gender, an older generation have battled to achieve recognition in what are arguably quite rigid renditions of masculinity and femininity. lateral violence among people with different understandings of transition, different amounts of social capital and privilege, and different understandings of gender expression is acknowledged as one of the obstacles to collective representation. the ways in which boundaries around memory, materiality and activism are patrolled demonstrates profound schisms in social understandings of gender and identity. in the face of the aforementioned dire social problems faced by tgd people this lack of wholly affirmed allegiance is a concern. on the other hand tgd people circumnavigate risk and harm (livingstone, 2013) in some very interesting selective representations of self. tgd people seize opportunities for connection despite increasing exposure to context collapse. when things don’t work out as they hope they demonstrate (and model) resilience. threaded through blog posts online and interviews with participants are themes of renegotiating memories of childhood and the material traces of previous as well as projected incarnations. sometimes there are boundary wars between territory holders – between people supposedly unified under the ‘transgender umbrella’ about cross­dressing, gender­fluidity, stealth and sex reassignment surgery (srs) etc; between doctor and lawyer over ‘rights of the child’; between parent and child over pronouns and toddler photos ­ essentially canvassing how to be trans ‘enough’ some tgd people nurse grudges against gay activists in exclusive lobby groups, another tells stories of gleefully taunting the terfs (trans exclusionary radical feminists) in online forums. http://www.storiesbeyondgender.com/ performing fluidity for affective publics most people have experienced the slight shock brought upon by social convergence or context collapse (boyd, 2014). attempting to hold in one’s mind the multiple audiences for a single performance both now and in the future is well­nigh impossible. internet researchers routinely build upon goffman’s analogy of front and back stage (1959) and giddens’ work on curated identity, to offer new theories about networked spaces and intimate citizenship. papacharissi extends this corpus and argues for a routine construction of multiple selves, negotiated among networks as a core component of what she calls ‘affective publics’: friction and acquiescence are integrated into self­narratives, channelled into performances that are telling of both what we want to be and what we cannot be. (papacharissi, 2014, p. 96) fundamentally, asserting the terms of one’s own material existence, and the framing of one’s memories is central in acquiring what i call ‘curated congruence’. the most resilient of tgd people manage to do this by holding close their personal congruence and dismissing charges of incoherence or inauthenticity. personal congruence in the tgd community ‘congruence’ is often used to mean an alignment between how you see yourself and how others see you. for tgd people much emotional labour goes into aligning their chosen gender (sometimes referred to as ‘true’, or ‘affirmed’ so as to highlight a lack of choice) with the way they are ‘read’ or perceived by others. i draw a distinction between congruence and coherence, which is most often taken to mean a logical and consistent whole (as judged by others). arguably, congruence is self­determined while coherence is a social determination. here i briefly draw on the experiences shared by two participants in the stories beyond gender project, to illustrate how they manage their personal congruence in contested terrains of memory and materiality with different audiences both on and offline. lillith, 22, shares selfies across different platforms for distinct purposes. she updates her facebook profile with a similarly framed selfie each month, partly for herself in order to observe subtle changes in soft tissue influenced by oestrogen and partly for her friends, so that ‘they’re kept in the loop’ and are never unduly surprised by her changed appearance. lillith also posts these selfies to a subreddit called ‘trans­passing’ that she describes as being full of ‘hypercritical transphobic haters’. she prefers this community’s criticism of her physical appearance over the alternative: ‘i’d rather they say “hey you look like a dude in a dress” rather than honey it up!’. in the early days of transition lillith would post on the subreddit to see if she passed as a boy, because at that stage she still needed to attend family functions in her male assignation. joslyn, 25, provides still further evidence of the complex interweaving of digital self­representation over time­frames and multiple platforms and devices. joslyn said she doesn’t like selfies and only includes them in chat on facebook to occasionally ‘save words’ or to describe something like a new hat. she acknowledges that she barely remembers what she looked like as a child because she doesn’t keep personal photographs, though notes ‘my mum will never forget’. while she acknowledges that her material trace may still be searchable she nevertheless regards chat selfies as transient and prefers to characterize herself and her current thinking as manga­influenced colourful characters in graphic novel vignettes. conclusion curated congruence is largely conceptual, somewhat ideal, and occasionally at odds with real­life turf wars. on social media non­linear fragments of stories can be difficult to curate. highly fraught, yet successful, journeys towards collective representation can also fall apart online. for tgd people who face the risk of physical violence in public spaces, lateral violence within the community and flaming online, there are many disincentives to social and civic engagement. this heightened awareness of contested gender identity (self and collective) is both a reason to seek online affirmation and a reason to highly curate and moderate online engagement. tgd knowledge of the fluidity of memory, materiality and the digital trace underpins their daily uses of social media in everyday life, which assume context collapse and thereby challenge social injunctions to present coherence. tgd people model nuanced digital self­representation strategies and these skills constitute a kind of play book for surviving modern networked sociality and civic engagement. references boyd, danah. (2014). it’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens. yale university press. giddens, a. (1992). the transformation of intimacy: sexuality, love and eroticism in modern societies. stanford, california: stanford university press. goffman, e. (1963). stigma: notes on the management of spoiled identity. new york: simon & schuster. livingstone, s. (2013). online risk, harm and vulnerability: reflections on the evidence base for child internet safety policy. zer: revista de estudios de comunicación= komunikazio ikasketen aldizkaria, (35), 13–28. papacharissi, z. (2014). affective publics: sentiment, technology, and politics. oxford: oxford university press. “there are literally no rules when it comes to these things” paul byron, university of new south wales regarding social media platforms, mclaughlin and vitak note how “new members of a group may struggle to learn group norms initially, especially when those norms are not codified” (2012, 301). this can be said of hook­up/dating apps that offer limited opportunity to watch and learn how one should interact. it is mostly through practice – chatting, arranging dates, or hooking up – that one can come to comprehend these norms. a growing literature on same­sex hook­up/dating apps mostly focuses on sexual health risks or queer community practices, yet this paper offers a foucauldian account of users’ personal rules of engagement and sexual ethics (foucault 1986). i also discuss young people’s practice­based knowledges of using hook­up/dating apps, and how this is forged through various intimacies that include chatting and meeting through apps, discussing ‘codes of conduct’ with friends and partners, and sharing app­based encounters with peers. i draw upon focus group interviews with same­sex attracted young people (18­29 years) from sydney, where participants discuss their personal rules of engagement. this reflects foucault’s writings on ethical practice that is necessary to negotiate unwritten social rules, norms and expectations (1986). since the arrival of grindr, user etiquette guidelines have been regularly published online. this indicates something particular about these platforms, in which public conversations about etiquette cannot be had on the apps itself, and where users cannot simply lurk and watch other interactions to figure out the communicative cultures of these spaces. to gain a sense of protocol, one must engage in communication with other users. the abundance of online etiquette guides also highlights our discomfort and uncertainties about how ‘grindring’ works. this discomfort featured in focus groups, in which other users’ poor conduct was heavily discussed. through dual practices of consumption/production in media such as these, “watchers expect, and desire, to be watched” (marwick 2012, 380). the practice and awareness of ‘lateral surveillance’ (andrejevic 2005) on grindr is made evident through tumblr sites such as douchebags of grindr, where user behaviour is brought into question. through a range of sites like this – where in­app profiles, photos, and conversations are screen­grabbed and published – as well as the sharing of ‘private’ talk/photos between friends and peers, users are not only reminded that their profiles are judged and scrutinised by other users, but that their profiles and interactions could have broader audiences than anticipated. in determining ‘proper use’ of hook­up/dating apps, focus group discussions illustrate a key tension in framing digital spaces as no different to non­digital spaces (i.e. the same rules and codes apply), and understanding these spaces as somewhat isolated from everyday practice, warranting a unique experience. teasing out this discrepancy, user expectations are brought into question, as per the following example. bec: yeah but like, if you're on these apps there might be an expectation that you’re in for the sex kind of thing. lauren: ready to fuck. bec: you are dtf as the cool kids say these days, which would, sort of, there'd be an implied consent there. lauren: but that makes everyone a whore. ashleigh: but dtf with every single person on that application? bec’s suggestion of implied consent to receive sexual messages is immediately questioned by lauren and ashleigh who question the feasibility (and morality) of users being sexually available to all other users. this implies a similarity to non­digital engagements, where sex must be negotiated more carefully, within social norms and expectations (e.g. sexual photos should not precede conversation). another example of this tension emerges in participants’ discussions of harassment. the seriousness of these offences shifts depending on context, ranging from annoyance (e.g. unexpected photos), to feeling personally harassed (e.g. multiple unwanted messages), to feeling sexually harassed (e.g. being sent a cock pic on an all­female dating app). in the latter example, the photo and its sender not only break the rules of the app (as women­only), but are unlawful on account of being an unwanted sexual act. this discussion frames hook­up/dating app interactions as indistinct from spaces where physical bodies are co­present. yet there are few penalties for any form of harassment in these spaces. in discussing harassment, participants particularly expressed desire for apps to better moderate user content and behaviour. along with the view that these spaces enjoin everyday life, participants considered how existing sexual cultures inform values and practices in hook­up/dating apps. josh: it all comes down to just the community as it is. whether it be online, whether it be in person. it is very sexually orientated. so then you throw in apps that are specifically designed for sex and there’s no rules. there are literally no rules when it comes to these things. participants deploy a range of tactics for managing the risks of using hook­up/dating apps. these include generating personal rules and processes for deciphering the authenticity of profiles, confining conversations and picture­sharing within these apps, following particular steps towards meeting other users off­screen, and carefully moving conversations to other platforms and offline spaces. it was noted that a lack of moderation by platforms themselves premises a greater need set one’s own rules. tensions between the codes of conduct that participants expected and those they experienced can be considered in relation to moral codes and ethical practice (foucault 1986). for foucault, moral codes are associated with social understandings of how to behave, and these are deciphered and negotiated (and possibly rejected) through an individual’s ethical practice. according to foucault, ethical practice involves more than self­awareness, and encompasses the self­formation of the ethical subject (1986, 28). in practicing self­formation, the app user is required "to act upon himself, to monitor, test, improve, and transform himself" (foucault 1986, 28). this is a creative space, where new intimacies are forged through one’s negotiations of the socio­sexual codes, systems, and pleasure affordances of these media. as kane race notes, through hook­up app cultures and platforms, queer sexual relations are “taking new forms, assuming new genres and proceeding through new avenues in their encounter with digital media" (2015, 503). that participants discussed app norms, rules, and conduct with ease highlights their practices of deciphering the moral codes of these sites. but participants also expected the codes to be transgressed, including by themselves. this reflects foucault’s argument that observance to codes and rules are often less important than the process of self­formation that takes place through rule­making in the face of moral questions and goals (1986). evidently, the ethical work of setting agendas, boundaries, and expectations is more important to the ethical subject than adhering to a particular code of conduct. as per focus group discussions, ethical practice requires self­work alongside our creative responses to new media environments. these are risky spaces ­ not because of the sexual encounters they organise, but because of the need to negotiate ethical conduct in a space with ‘no rules’. references andrejevic, m. 2005. the work of watching one another: lateral surveillance, risk, and governance. surveillance & society, 2. foucault, m. 1986. the use of pleasure, random house, new york. marwick, a. 2012. the public domain: surveillance in everyday life. surveillance & society, 9, 378­393. mclaughlin, c. & vitak, j. 2012. norm evolution and violation on facebook. new media & society, 14, 299­315. race, k. 2015. speculative pragmatism and intimate arrangements: online hook­up devices in gay life. culture, health & sexuality, 17, 496–511. queer influencers: personal illustrations amidst repressive sexuality education crystal abidin, national university of singapore introduction institutionalized sexuality education in singapore undertakes a conservative, medicalised approach that preaches abstinence, premised on promoting healthy (heterosexual) relationships between married couples for reproduction purposes to uphold a stable family unit. it assigns parents, the school, students, and the community as stakeholders in maintaining a comprehensive sexuality education. however, young people are increasingly turning to influencers who are trendy, clout rich, and influential on the internet for first­hand ‘lifestyle’ information and advice. in response, some influencers personal experiences of sex and sexuality to lure traffic and increase their viewership. through ethnographic fieldwork conducted with influencers and content analysis of one specific influencers’ social media between december 2012 and july 2013, this paper examines how influencers act as informal sex educators to provide alternative approaches amidst a state­controlled hegemonic discourse. this talk specifically focuses on “personal illustrations” as a strategy to reach out to queer young people through the case study of influencer peggy. sexuality education in singapore sexuality education in singapore is generally disseminated via education institutes regulated by the ministry of education (moe). among its goals are for students to inculcate virtue “premised on the heterosexual married couple forming a nuclear family as the basic unit of society, through the inculcation of positive mainstream values and attitudes about sexuality” (moe, 2014a). on a practical level, students are taught about contraception and the prevention of diseases “from a health perspective” (moe, 2014b). however, the focus of the programme is still very much focused on rejecting sexual advances and the repercussions of casual sex. the moe focuses on “what homosexuality is and the current legal provisions concerning homosexual acts in singapore” (moe, 2014b) – same sex unions are not recognized in singapore, and section 377a of the penal code in singapore criminalizes sex between men. charismatic activism in singapore, only a handful of influencers have had their sexuality questioned on forums. a couple have responded to such speculation, but even so, only ambiguously acknowledged their homosexuality or same­sex partner in brief token moments. however, peggy has been consistently and overtly featuring her partner and their lives in her social media content, in an aesthetic similar to influencers who write about their heterosexual male partners. peggy first publically wrote about her confusion over being attracted to a same­sex person in september 2011. at the time, her blog already contained archives of her past two relationships with men. a month later, she wrote a heartfelt entry about how she met her female partner. the post contained intimate exchange from the long­time friends including screenshots of facebook messenger conversations dating to february 2008. peggy produced a narrative account of the uncertainty and frustration she felt towards the development of her feelings throughout the course of these years, and talked followers through her various stages of self­discovery. supportive comments from followers poured in during her coming out. more significantly, several followers wrote in (mostly anonymously) to share their own experiences and difficulties. over the next few months, peggy’s blog inevitably become a site on which several users congregated to share in the joy of her new relationship. those who were in seasoned same­sex relationships offered her support while others who were less experienced wrote to seek advice from peggy and others. she had also become an agony aunt to a niche market in this time. since then, peggy has been blogging about her experiences and resources available to her. for example, she has written about oogachaga, a queer­friendly organization that provides counseling and support to gay and lesbian communities, and pink dot sg, an annual non­profit public event in support of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual (lgbt) people in singapore. as of february 2016, peggy has wedded her same­sex partner and documented the legal, logistical, and emotional aspects of the experience for her followers. influencers as informal sexuality educators amidst singapore’s conservative approach towards sexuality education, influencers have emerged – intentionally and incidentally – as thought leaders providing alternative discourses to sexuality education within their cohorts. in contrast to the overtly disciplinary, pragmatic, and prescriptive (haywood, 1996) model of sexuality education regulated by the state, influencers provide more receptive informal modes of learning, which are “spontaneous” (eshach, 2007, pp. 173). informal sexuality education includes all sources of sex­related information and influence a person receives apart from the syllabus disseminated within the classroom (spanier, 1976). in this particular route of informal learning where influencers role models replace authoritative didactic figures, readers are also “motivated intrinsically” (csikszentmihalyi & hermanson in eshach, 2007, pp. 173) given that they exercise agency in seeking their reading material and imitating the sexual scripts they wish to pursue. as one successor of contemporary women’s magazines, it is tempting to brand influencers’ blogs as mere trashy, raunchy, or frivolous media. the ‘confessional’ trope of peggy’s personal illustrations, as a mode of ‘unmasking’ one’s personal sex life, also bears a “normalizing function” against which “’bad’ sex [or bad beliefs about one’s sexuality] can be corrected” (yang, 2004, pp. 516). in addition, exposure to influencers’ blogs cultivates particular depictions of women, femininity, and sexuality as “normative, expectable, and acceptable” (cf. basnyat & chang, 2014, pp. 83). queer influencers the highly personalized narratives offered by peggy present the ‘sex talk’ message as intimate and accessible, and differs from the moralistic staple of formal sexuality education and the explicitly commercial and bland framing of mainstream advertising formats. the resources shared, although freely available and searchable on the web, are not promoted in the mainstream educational syllabus. personal voices on the struggles of coming out also do not feature in the hegemonic discourse of mainstream sexuality education, although schools provide counselling services for students who indicate that they are struggling with these issues. the level of intimacy and insight that peggy offers through her narrative accounts of her self­discovery and relationship as they unfold invites these sidelined others to partake in a conversation and community of support. the informal networks that peggy has (inevitably) developed over time premise her as the main node of information dissemination. unlike the hard and fast faqs available on most lgbt support websites, peggy delivers information about external lgbt support agencies by interweaving them into her personal journey, thus delivering sexual literacies effectively via the charismatic blog persona she has built up. references basnyat, i., and chang, l. (2014). ‘are you a “woman”? representation of femininity in two women’s magazines in singapore, cleo and her world’. communication research reports 31(1): 82­91. eshach, h. (2007). ‘bridging in­school and out­of­school learning: formal, non­formal, and informal education’. journal of science education and technology 16(2): 171­190. haywood, c. (1996). ‘sex education policy and the regulation of young people’s sexual practice’. educational review 48(2): 121­131. moe. (2014a). sexuality education: moe framework for sexuality education. retrieved june 6, 2014, from <http://www.moe.gov.sg/education/programmes/social­emotional­ learning/sexuality­education/framework/> moe. (2014b). sexuality education: scope and teaching approach of sexuality education in schools. retrieved june 6, 2014, from <http://www.moe.gov.sg/education/programmes/social­emotional­learning/sexuality­ education/scope/> spanier, g. b. (1976). ‘formal and informal sex education as determinants of premarital sexual behavior’. archives of sexual behavior 5(1): 39­67. yang, f­c. i. (2004). ‘international women’s magazines and the production of sexuality in taiwan’. the journal of popular culture 37(3): 505­530. http://www.moe.gov.sg/education/programmes/social http://www.moe.gov.sg/education/programmes/social http://www.moe.gov.sg/education/programmes/social http://www.moe.gov.sg/education/programmes/social 'totally straight': contested sexual identities and sexual storytelling on social media site reddit brady robards, monash university this paper is centred on a case study of the ‘totally straight’ (r/totallystraight) ‘subreddit’ on social news site reddit. r/totallystraight serves as a forum for sharing gay pornography amongst men who identify as straight. i draw on a small­scale study of the r/totallystraight subreddit, conducted over a period of three months, during which time 186 ‘posts’ were analysed. analysis reveals that while r/totallystraight is largely for sharing porn depicting men (still images, gifs, and videos), it also serves as a space for affirmation and ‘telling sexual stories’ (plummer 1995) related to contested ‘mostly straight’ sexual identities. the category of the ‘mostly heterosexual’ emerges at a time of heightened awareness of sexual identities that do not fit into neat categories like gay, lesbian, or bisexual. savin­williams and vrangalova (2013: 85) have argued for the existence of a ‘mostly heterosexual’ orientation: ‘a touch of homosexuality without losing or decreasing their heterosexuality… mostly heterosexuals call into question the traditional three­group system of assessing sexual orientation’. r/totallystraight operates as an example of this phenomenon. further, mckee, albury and lumby (2008) point out that for queer porn consumers, there is a process of re­affirmation in consuming non­hetero porn. one of their participants explains, ‘porn sort of gives you this erotic charge but also reaffirms you’ve got this sexual identity involved with another bloke ­ there’s this sexual action you can do’. thus, r/totallystraight serves as both a site for exchanging pornography, but also as a site for telling and consuming sexual stories. r/totallystraight operates under an enforced set of rules: ‘this sub is for guys who identify as straight but get off to gay porn, every gender and sexual orientation is welcome here’ and ‘no one gives a shit if you think we might be bi­sexual or gay. any shaming or trying to "convince" someone you believe is gay or in "denial" will result in comment removal and you'll likely be banned’ (‘r/totallystraight’, march 2016). these rules work to shape both the content posted and discussion threads. in the longer version of this paper, i explore in detail my findings around the content posted to the subreddit, which was 84% ‘explicit’ or ‘not safe for work’ (nsfw) and 16% ‘non­explicit’ (sfw). in this this short paper, however, i will focus on a discussion of ‘nsfw labour’ and the telling of sexual stories. the ‘nsfw labour’ involved in posting content to the subreddit is performed by a minority of users. while there were over 15,000 redditors subscribed to r/totallystraight at the time of my analysis, only 74 different redditors posted to the subreddit during the study. 73% of the redditors who posted to r/totallystraight during data collection only posted once. the remaining 23% posted more than once, and three redditors posted more than ten times. the other kind of labour discovered in my analysis was ‘source requests’. source requests came in the form of comments on still images or gifs, asking where the images were taken from or the names of the men represented. 38% of the posts recorded during the study contained some kind of source request. over half the time (56%) source requests were answered, by either providing a link to a full video or by providing the name of the actors and/or production house behind the video from which the image was taken. the most compelling finding was the presence of posts detailing personal narratives. these were text­only posts where redditors disclosed stories of (purportedly) their own sexual activities, anxieties, and experiences navigating a ‘mostly straight’ sexual identity, sometimes several thousand words long. while they were rare (5 posts, <3% of the overall corpus) these personal narratives brought a different dimension to the subreddit, distinct from the visual porn that dominated it. these narratives revealed complicated processes of identity­work and experimentation, as narrators skirted around what was ‘acceptable’ for straight men when pursuing their not­so­straight desires, seeking (and always receiving) validation and advice. while there was no way to confirm these stories as true, they nonetheless serve as compelling texts in better understanding the ‘mostly straight’ phenomenon. plummer (1995) theorised that when it comes to telling sexual stories, there are ‘tellers’, ‘coaxers’, and ‘consumers’ (105­106). while people may move between these different roles, the ‘products’, those ‘social objects (texts), which harbour the meanings that have to be handled through interaction,’ (106) are at the core. the meanings of these texts are, for plummer, never fixed, but rather ‘emerge out of a ceaselessly changing stream of interaction between producers and readers in shifting contexts and social worlds… meaning is a problematic emergent that is contextually based’ (p. 106). only a small number of redditors assumed the role of tellers (.5%) if users who post are the primary tellers. however, the nature of reddit is such that it is not only the ‘original posters’ who tell the story, but those who comment become part of that story (van der nagel 2013). this digital entanglement complicates the dynamic between plummer’s (1995) tellers, coaxers, and consumers. the role of the coaxer is fulfilled on r/totallystraight in three ways. first, the subreddit – and perhaps the moderators themselves – invite (and thus ‘coax’) stories, be they pornography or more elaborate personal narratives. second, the redditors requesting the source of particular images or gifs (seeking the ‘full video’, for instance) could also be read as coaxers. third, those redditors who upvote content could similarly be read as coaxers, as they reward (and further surface) certain content. the role of the consumer on r/totallystraight is a more open one, and indeed all subscribers and more casual visitors to the subreddit who are not subscribers can be read as consumers. at the same time, any single consumer is able to fulfil the role of coaxer or indeed teller, given the nature of reddit. unlike the sexual stories plummer was interested in, redditors do not need to convince a book publisher or a television producer to authorise their voices to speak about particular sexual desires or traumas. in this sense, reddit provides a space for these narratives to play out in a networked public far beyond the slow momentum of traditional media discussed by plummer (1995). in turn, exercising these stories here can lead to identity­work in a social context (with input and support from likeminded others, as in the case of both personal narratives described in the previous section) that are not reliant on the zeitgeist of the day; before, in plummer’s terms, ‘a community has been fattened up’ (1995: 116) to a story. the conceptual category of ‘mostly straight’ or ‘mostly heterosexual’ proposed by savin­williams and vrangalova (2013) is productive for thinking through what r/totallystraight might tell us about non­dominant sexual story telling in a broader, ‘confessional society… cluttered with sexual stories’ (plummer 1995: 102). the notion that men can actively consume gay pornography and still retain a straight identity troubles neat boundaries and hegemonic rules around sexualities, and the ‘rules’ that govern this subreddit actively promote that troubling. references mckee, a., albury, k., & lumby, c. (2008). the porn report. melbourne university press. plummer, k. (1995). telling sexual stories in a late modern world. studies in symbolic interaction, 18, 101–120. savin­williams, r. c., & vrangalova, z. (2013). mostly heterosexual as a distinct sexual orientation group: a systematic review of the empirical evidence. developmental review, 33(1), 58–88. van der nagel, e. (2013). faceless bodies: negotiating technological and cultural codes on reddit gonewild. scan: journal of media arts culture, 10(2). selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  comunello,  f.,  and  mulargia,  s.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  ‘no  more  birthday   greetings  on  my  facebook  wall,  please!’  social  media  platforms  usage  patterns,  user  perceptions,  and   idioms  of  practice  among  young  italian  users.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual   conference  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from   http://spir.aoir.org.     ‘no  more  birthday  greetings  on  my  facebook  wall,  please.’   social  media  platform  usage  patterns,  user  perceptions,  and   idioms  of  practice  among  young  italian  users     francesca  comunello   lumsa  university,  rome,  italy     simone  mulargia   sapienza  university  of  rome,  italy       when  considered  as  cultural  artefacts,  the  internet  as  a  whole  along  with  each   individual  digital  platform  undergo  a  complex  process  of  ongoing  negotiation  of  their   meanings  and  of  the  related  usage  norms  and  practices.  in  such  a  context,  ‘proper’   usage,  as  socially  perceived,  derives  from  the  negotiation  between  each  platform’s   affordances  and  constraints  (norman,  2013),  and  user  perceptions  and  social  usage   norms.  while  existing  literature  on  social  network  sites  (snss)  has  mainly  focused  on   single  platforms,  or  on  the  comparison  between  different  platforms,  in  order  to  highlight   such  perceptions  and  usage  norms,  as  well  as  the  tactics  users  employ  in  everyday  life   (de  certeau,  1984),  we  adopt  a  media  ecological  approach  (barnes,  2008;;  boase,   2008;;  jenkins,  ito,  &  boyd,  2015)  in  this  paper,  and  consider  the  wide  variety  of   platforms  that  people  use  in  their  everyday  lives  (rainie  &  wellman,  2012).       the  intersections  between  platform  affordances  and  constraints  on  the  one  hand,  and   user  perceptions  and  social  usage  norms  on  the  other,  can  be  understood  through  the   concept  of  media  ideologies,  as  proposed  by  gershon  (2010).  media  ideologies  are   “people’s  beliefs  about  how  a  medium  communicates  and  structures  communication”   (gershon,  2010,  p.  21).  media  ideologies  are  not  intrinsically  true  or  false,  but  people   are  guided  by  them  when  using  digital  communication  tools.  media  ideologies  are  often   shared  among  smaller  or  larger  groups  of  users  and  are  related  to  idioms  of  practice,  as   “people  figure  out  together  how  to  use  different  media  and  often  agree  on  the   appropriate  social  uses  of  technology  by  asking  advice  and  sharing  stories  with  each   other”  (gershon,  2010,  p.  6).  while  idioms  of  practice  are  built  and  negotiated   collectively,  they  are  not  universally  shared  among  a  specific  population,  nor  are  they   explicitly  addressed  by  users,  thus  sometimes  generating  misunderstandings  among   different  users.  moreover,  both  social  media  architecture  (papacharissi,  2009;;  boyd,   2011),  and  idioms  of  practice  are  changing  rapidly  over  time.  for  instance,  by  analysing   snss,  boyd  underlines  that  people  build  their  communication  strategies  both  by  taking   advantage  of  such  affordances  and  by  further  shaping  this  architecture  (boyd,  2011).       exploring  user  perceptions  and  idioms  of  practices:  our  research  project     in  order  to  explore  such  dimensions,  we  conducted  focus  groups  with  young  italian   people  living  in  rome.  we  chose  this  technique  given  that  social  norms  and  usage   practices  are  socially  negotiated,  and  because  we  aimed  to  detect  not  only  each   individual’s  perceptions,  but  also  their  sharing  and  negotiating  processes.  we  first   conducted  4  focus  groups  in  2012  involving  high  school  students  aged  18–20.   moreover,  as  norms  and  practices  seemed  to  be  changing  rapidly  over  time,  we   decided  to  replicate  the  study  in  2015  and  2016,  conducting  6  additional  focus  groups   involving  university  students  living  in  the  same  city,  and  born  in  the  same  years  as  the   first  respondents.       our  research  questions  are  the  following:   -   do  young  people  have  a  precise  representation  (ideology)  of  the  peculiarities  of   different  digital  platforms?     -   do  they  perceive  some  platforms  as  more  appropriate  for  specific  tasks,   contexts,  or  relational  patterns?   -   with  respect  to  a  specific  platform,  are  there  communicative  practices  (tools,   actions,  etc.)  that  are  perceived  as  more  intimate  than  others?   -   how  are  such  representations  built  and  shared  among  their  peer  groups?   -   how  do  they  verbalize  their  representations  of  different  platforms  and  the   motivations  for  such  perceived  differences?   -   do  such  representations  change  over  time?  if  so,  how?     in  conducting  the  focus  groups,  we  offered  a  set  of  different  scenarios  such  as  birthday   greetings  (both  from/to  close  friends  and  acquaintances),  the  organization  of  a  large   party,  a  huge  disagreement  with  a  friend/acquaintance  to  be  faced,  etc.,  and  asked   respondents  how  they  would  act  in  such  different  situations.  at  first,  we  did  not  mention   any  specific  social  media  platform,  or  digital  communication  as  a  whole,  letting  the   respondents  freely  elaborate  on  the  proposed  stimuli.  after  the  respondents   spontaneously  introduced  social  media  platforms,  usage  experiences,   misunderstandings  related  to  different  media  ‘ideologies’,  and  appropriate/inappropriate   usage  patterns  were  also  discussed.     results  show  that  young  people  both  follow  group-­specific  norms  and  more   individualized  usage  patterns.  all  of  our  respondents,  however,  show  that  they  have  a   clear  picture  of  what  can  be  defined  as  an  appropriate  use  of  social  media  platforms  in   relation  to  specific  purposes,  contexts,  tie  strength,  etc.  among  the  dimensions  that   have  been  used  to  motivate  such  perceived  differences  are:  publicity,  communicative   bandwidth,  synchrony  vs.  asynchrony,  investment  in  terms  of  time  and  money,  etc.     moreover,  even  younger  people  seem  to  attribute  a  high  emotional  value  to  face-­to-­face   interaction,  often  opposing  a  critical  distance  (at  least  in  terms  of  self-­representation)   towards  snss.  furthermore,  the  diffusion  of  ‘new’  platforms  (such  as  whatsapp,  or   instagram)  which  were  not  available  or  widespread  in  italy  when  we  realized  the  first   focus  groups,  comes  with  specific  media  ideologies,  and  reconfigures  the  whole   (personal)  media  ecology,  sometimes  redefining  the  role  of  ‘older’  platforms.  moreover,   shared  usage  norms  appear  to  be  a  dynamic  and  constantly  negotiated  process:  what   our  respondents  used  to  perceive  as  an  appropriate  behavior  in  the  past  (e.g.,  birthday   greetings  on  close  friends'  facebook  walls)  is  no  longer  accepted  as  legitimate.     moreover,  results  highlight  the  specific  norms  and  usage  patterns  that  appear  to   organize  user  choices  when  interacting  with  friends  and  family  (also)  through  social   media.  far  from  exerting  only  oppositive  tactics  towards  a  social  media  platform’s   desiderata,  but  also  far  from  passively  integrating  its  preferred  reading,  users  show  that   they  are  involved  in  a  constant  negotiation  (hall,  1973)  both  with  the  platform’s   affordances  and  constraints  and  with  their  peers.  we  believe  that  such  a  framework   could  be  applied  in  different  domains  in  order  to  gain  a  deeper  understanding  of  user   representations  and  practices,  and  thereby  also  avoiding  any  technological  deterministic   approach.         references     barnes,  s.  b.  (2008).  understanding  social  media  from  the  media  ecological   perspective.  in  e.  a.  konijn,  s.  utz,  m.  tanis,  &  s.  b.  barnes  (eds.),  mediated   interpersonal  communication  (pp.14–33).  new  york:  routledge.     boase,  j.  (2008).  personal  networks  and  the  personal  communication  system:  using   multiple  media  to  connect.  information,  communication  &  society,  11(4),  490– 508,  http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13691180801999001     boyd,  d.  (2011).  social  network  sites  as  networked  publics:  affordances,  dynamics  and   implications.  in  z.  papacharissi  (ed.),  a  networked  self:  identity,  community  and   culture  on  social  network  sites  (pp.39–58).  london:  routledge.     de  certeau,  m.  (1984).  the  practice  of  everyday  life.  oakland,  ca:  university  of   california  press.     gershon,  i.  (2010).  the  breakup  2.0.  disconnecting  over  new  media.  ithaca,  ny:   cornell  university  press.       hall,  s.  (1973).  encoding  and  decoding  in  the  television  discourse.  stencilled   occasional  paper.  birmingham:  birmingham  centre  for  contemporary  cultural   studies.       jenkins,  h.,  ito,  m.,  &  boyd,  d.  (2015).  participatory  culture  in  a  networked  era:  a   conversation  on  youth,  learning,  commerce,  and  politics.  hoboken,  nj:  john   wiley  &  sons.     norman,  d.  (2013).  the  design  of  everyday  things:  revised  and  expanded  edition.  new   york:  basic  books.     papacharissi,  z.  (2009).  the  virtual  geographies  of  social  networks:  a  comparative   analysis  of  facebook,  linkedin  and  asmallworld.  new  media  &  society  11(1–2),   199–220,  http://nms.sagepub.com/content/11/1-­2/199.short     rainie,  l.,  &  wellman,  b.  (2012).  networked.  the  new  social  operating  system.   cambridge,  ma:  mit  press.   selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  van  den  bulck,  h.  &  larsson,  a.o.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  ‘there’s  a  starman   waiting  in  the  sky’:  mourning  david  #bowie  on  twitter.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual   conference  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from   http://spir.aoir.org. ‘there’s  a  starman  waiting  in  the  sky’:  mourning  david   #bowie  on  twitter hilde  van  den  bulck university  of  antwerp anders  olof  larsson westerdals  oslo  school  of  arts,  communication  and  technology   extended  abstract   this  contribution  analyses  the  twitter  response  to  the  death  of  musician  and  popular   culture  icon  david  bowie  as  an  inroad  to  discuss  key  characteristics  and  functions  of   twitter  in  the  mediated  relationships  between  celebrities,  fans  and  the  popular  culture   industry.       social  media,  including  twitter,  have  become  key  players  in  the  mediated,  parasocial   relationships  between  celebrities  and  audiences.  twitter  allows  celebrities  to   communicate  (seemingly)  directly,  intimately  and  authentically  with  audiences  and  fans   (marwick  &  boyd,  2011),  and  provides  the  latter  with  tools  to  discuss  celebrity  news  and   to  engage  in  fan  behaviour  (van  den  bulck  et  al.  2014).  this  role  is  exacerbated  in  the   case  of  a  celebrity  death,  when  twitter  and  other  social  media  seems  to  create  a  space   for  people  to  come  together  to  grieve  and  mourn  the  deceased,  as  illustrated  by  studies   into  social  media  response  to  the  death  of  michael  jackson  (hoe-­‐‑lian  goh  and  sian   lee  2011),  steve  jobs  (holiman,  2013)  and  amy  winehouse  (lansdall-­welfare  et  al.,   2012).       however,  several  critical  questions  remain  unanswered.  first,  it  is  unclear  how  and  to   what  extent  reactions  on  twitter  constitute  a  conversation  and  a  community  (honeycutt  &   herring,  2009)  or  simply  a  mass  of  individual  reactions.  second,  beyond  a  rudimentary   insight  into  igrieve  as  involving  exchange  of  information  and  expression  of  emotions   (hoe-­‐‑lian  goh  and  sian  lee  2011),  relatively  little  is  known  about  the  types  of  emotions   and  the  types  of  fan  creativity  these  twitter  reactions  present,  themselves  indicative  of   the  depth  of  a  celebrity-­fan  (parasocial)  relationship.  finally,  little  or  no  research  has   looked  into  the  composition  of  these  imourners.  is  this  icommunity  of  mourners   reflective  of  a  ‘twitter  of  the  masses’  as  or  is  it  in  fact  directed  by  a  popular  culture   industry-­related  elite,  reflective  of  a  level  of  commodification  of  mourning  (kyllonen,   2010).         these  questions  will  be  developed  theoretically  by  taking  inspiration  from  twitter   research,  celebrity  studies,  fan  studies  and  the  political  economy  of  the  popular  culture   industry.  the  research  questions  will  then  be  addressed  empirically  through  analysis  of   twitter  data.  following  similar  studies  (e.g.  hoe-­‐‑lian  goh  and  sian  lee  2011),  we   collected  all  tweets  with  #bowie  in  the  first  48  hours  after  bowie  passed  away  (11/1/16-­ 13/1/16)  (n=252  318)  by  means  of  the  texifter  service  which  allows  for  full  historical   access  to  the  archives  upheld  by  twitter  itself  through  their  subsidiary  gnip.  keeping  in   mind  wu  et  al.’s  (2011,  4)  claim  that  ‘less  than  0.05%  of  users  attract  almost  50%  of  all   attention  in  twitter’  (2011,  4)  and  mahrt  and  scharkow  (2013,  20)  advice  that   ‘researchers  need  to  consider  whether  the  analysis  of  huge  quantities  of  data  is   theoretically  justified’,  we  opted  for  the  assessment  of  a  series  of  variables  related  to  top   twitter  users  in  the  data  set  with  the  highest  degrees  of  retweets.  as  such,  every  tweet   that  had  been  redistributed  more  than  100  times  was  made  subject  for  analysis   (n=130).     these  130  tweets  were  analysed  by  means  of  a  quantitative  content  analysis  focusing   on  variables  detailing  the  user  behind  the  tweet  and  content  of  the  tweet.  a  coding   schedule  was  designed  based  on  previous  analyses  of  twitter  content  (larsson  &  moe,   2012),  on  imourning  of  a  celebrity  death  (e.g.  holiman,  2013),  on  fandom  and  fan   activity  (e.g.  abercrombie  &  longhurst,  1998),  on  parasocial  relationships  with   celebrities  (claessens  &  van  den  bulck,  2014)  and  on  the  political  economy  of  popular   culture  (kyllonen,  2010).  as  such,  tweets  were  gauged  for  textual,  visual  and  audio-­ visual  content,  for  sentiments  –  ranging  from  anger  over  the  passing  to  messages   focusing  on  bowie’s  musical  legacy  –  and  for  expressions  of  (para)social  relationships.   all  130  tweets  were  coded  by  both  authors.  finally,  the  twenty  most  retweeted  tweets   were  submitted  to  a  qualitative  analysis  for  in-­depth  understanding  of  the  user  behind   and  the  content  of  the  tweet.       preliminary  results  indicate,  first,  that  55%  of  all  tweets  collected  between  january  11th   and  january  13th  (i.e.  137  950  of  252  318)  were  retweets.  this  relatively  high  number   confirms  a  twitter  trend  noticed  in  election  studies.  for  instance,  33  %  of  tweets  sent   during  the  2010  swedish  elections  were  retweets,  compared  to  60  %  in  2014  (larsson,   2014).  this  begs  to  reconsider  the  suggestions  from  the  early  years  of  twitter  when  use   was  thought  to  develop  into  more  conversational  modes  (cf.  honeycutt  &  herring,   2009).  second,  the  results  show  a  limited  number  of  tweets  being  retweeted   exceptionally  often,  suggesting  there  is  something  of  a  twitter  elite  taking  the  lead  in  the   twitter  mourning.  this  elite,  third,  seems  to  consist  predominantly  of  media  figures,   celebrities,  artists  and  people  from  the  music  industry.  the  latter  counters  much   research  into  fan  studies  that  focus  on  the  ‘bottom’  up’  and  resistive  forces  of  fans   rather  than  on  the  commodification  aspect  of  the  popular  culture  industry.  this  finding   may  also  explain,  fourth,  the  relative  absence  of  expressions  of  strong  parasocial   relationships,  as  the  dominant  tweets  are  not  from  ordinary  fans.  these  findings  do  not   contradict,  fifth,  the  notion  of  twitter  providing  a  mediated  coming  together  of  mourners,   looking  for  recognition  of  loss  and  expressions  of  support.  indeed,  content  analysis  of   the  tweets  suggest  a  strong  focus  on  positive  affirmation  in  tribute  to  his  work,  next  to   information  and  emotions  of  grief.  results  will  be  further  analysed  and  discussed  in  this   light.   references     abercrombie  nicholas.  and  brian  j.  longhurst.  1998.  audiences:  a  sociological  theory   of  performance  and  imagination.  london:  sage.     borra,  erik  and  bernhard  rieder.  2014.  programmed  method:  developing  a  toolset  for   capturing  and  analyzing  tweets.  aslib  proceedings.     claessens,  nathalie  and  hilde  van  den  bulck.  2015.  parasocial  relationships  with   audiences’  favourite  celebrities:  the  role  of  audience  and  celebrity  characteristics  in  a   representative  flemish  sample.  communications  40,  1,  43-­56.     giglietto,  fabio  and  donatella  selva.  2014.  second  screen  and  participation:  a  content   analysis  on  a  full  season  dataset  of  tweets.  journal  of  communication  64,  2,  260-­ 277.     hoe-­‐‑lian  goh,  dion  and  chei  sian  lee.  2011.  an  analysis  of  tweets  in  response  to  the   death  of  michael  jackson.  aslib  proceedings  63,  5,  432-­444.     holiman,  john  m.  2013.  igrieve:  social  media,  parasocial  mourning  and  the  death  of   steve  jobs.  unpublished  manuscript,  retrieved  from   http://www.suu.edu/hss/comm/masters/capstone/thesis/igrieve-­holiman-­j.pdf     honeycutt,  courtney  and  susan  c.  herring.  2009.  beyond  microblogging:  conversation   and  collaboration  via  twitter.  proceedings  of  the  forty-­second  hawai’i  international   conference  on  system  sciences  (hicss-­42).  los  alamitos,  ca:  ieee  press.     kyllonen,  hanna  e.  2010.  the  darker  side  of  fame:  celebrity  death,  tabloid  culture  and   the  death  industry.  international  journal  of  the  humanities  8,  3,  129-­137.     lansdall-­welfare  thomas,  vasileios  lampos  and  nello  cristianini.  2012.  nowcasting   the  mood  of  the  nation.  significance,  9,  4,  26-­28.       larsson,  anders  o.  and  hallvard  moe.  2012.  studying  political  microblogging:  twitter   users  in  the  2010  swedish  election  campaign.  new  media  &  society  14,  5,  729-­747.     larsson,  anders  o.  2014.  comparing  swedish  elections  on  twitter:  first  impressions.   retrieved  from  http://www.andersoloflarsson.se/2014/09/28/comparing-­swedish-­ elections-­on-­twitter-­first-­impressions/       mahrt,  merja  and  michael  scharkow.  2013.  the  value  of  big  data  in  digital  media   research.  journal  of  broadcasting  &  electronic  media  57,  1,  20-­33.       marwick,  alice  and  dana  boyd.  2011.  to  see  and  be  seen:  celebrity  practice  on  twitter.   convergence,  the  international  journal  of  research  into  new  media  technologies  17,  2,   139-­158.     van  den  bulck,  hilde,  nathalie  claessens  and  annebeth  bels.  2014.  ‘by  working  she   means  tweeting’:  online  celebrity  gossip  media  and  audience  readings  of  celebrity   twitter  behaviour.  celebrity  studies  5,  4,  514-­517.     wu,  shaomei.,  jake  m.  hofman,  winter  a.  mason  and  duncan  j.  watts.  2011.  who   says  what  to  whom  on  twitter.  international  world  wide  web  conference  committee   (iw3c2). microsoft word ir16-template-final.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): muñoz-bates, s. (2015, october 21-24). instant results with lingering effects: how google can bias our social conversations. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. instant results with lingering effects: how google can bias our social conversations sarah muñoz-bates arizona state university introduction google boasts that its autocomplete function has saved users over 100 billion keystrokes or about two to five seconds per search (“about google” n.p.). for benign searches, such as “how to tie a tie,” such might be the case. but what about searches that are politically charged or address important social issues faced by societies across the world? many controversial terms appear in immigration discussions in the united states. these terms include anchor babies, illegal (in contrast to undocumented), and alien (in contrast to immigrant). in such cases, google’s word suggestions hold the potential to bias searchers into using certain vocabulary, thereby creating the possibility of constricting how social conversations occur around these topics and what information directs the conversations. google attains this level influence through the technologies it implements to make our lives easier, such as the autocomplete function, and through the mass dependence people have developed on it over the years. this pilot study attempts to discover the ways in which google can bias searchers into privileging one set of terms over the other, particularly in regards to undocumented immigration in the united states. by examining three standard functions of google – (1) google autocomplete, (2) related search results, and (3) the actual results themselves – we shall see how google can shape society’s vocabulary (and therefore ideas) about immigration and undocumented immigrants. particularly, we shall see how google often directs users toward the word illegal over the word undocumented and how this biasing can have negative repercussions in immigration discussions. i argue that the simple act of repeatedly displaying specific words or phrases holds the potential to influence how people research, learn, and discuss a specific topic, thereby shaping or constricting social conversation. politically-charged immigration words in the social and political conversations that occur regarding undocumented immigration to the united states, many words have become politically charged. as mentioned earlier, some of the words that appear in the immigration debate in the united states include illegal, undocumented, alien, immigrant, wetbacks, and anchor babies, just to name a few. with the phrases illegal immigrant and undocumented immigrant, debate swirls around which one serves as the most neutral and accurate description of immigrants who enter the united states without authorization. respected news organizations, such as the associated press and the new york times, prefer to use the word illegal over the word undocumented. they point out, “when you enter the united states without permission or overstay a visa, you break a law… the word ‘illegal’ simply means against the law” (navarrette n.p.). they argue that the word illegal does not dehumanize immigrants. instead, “it describes an action as much as it does a person. an illegal immigrant is someone who immigrates illegally” (navarrette n.p.). however, people on the other side of this debate believe that the words used in association with immigration are imbued with certain meanings that convey specific ideas to those involved in immigration discussions. for instance, when it comes to the word illegal being used in conjunction with immigration, the national association of hispanic journalists (nahj) argue that the term implies much more than crossing a border without papers. in 2010, the organization issued a statement, declaring, “using the word [illegal] … crosses the line by criminalizing the person, not the action they are purported to have committed” (rubio 51). other organizations agree with the nahj’s stance, claiming that the term illegal dehumanizes people (demby) and conveys the idea of a dangerous, criminal activity (martin). in addition, they fall back on the statement from nobel prize winner elie wiesel, “no human being is illegal,” which seems to be the connotation when illegal is attached to the word immigrant. after all, if a person breaks the law by driving over the speed limit, that person is not called illegal, as unauthorized immigrants are when they cross the border. in addition, groups such as the nahj argue that the term illegal has been highly racialized and associated increasingly with latina/os, causing the term to lose any neutrality that the associated press claims it still contains. as a result, they argue that the word undocumented removes the racialization that has come to surround the word illegal, making undocumented the more neutral of the two. how google functions google could be said to participate in this debate on immigration vocabulary with the word choices it provides to users. when discussing representation, meaning, and language, stuart hall writes, “it is us – in society, within human cultures – who make things mean, signify. meanings, consequently, will always change from one culture or period to another” (62). with its near omnipresence in our lives, google has served as one means through which we, as members of society “make things mean, signify.” google’s algorithm regularly updates the search results to show what the online culture has deemed the most relevant information to people’s searches. google’s algorithm evaluates websites according to several different criteria. a couple of these criteria include the presence of a search word on a website, as well as how many other websites have, in effect, “voted” for a particular search result by linking to it or even tweeting about it. google’s dependence on linking – weighing the importance of links from one website to another – could be seen as its evaluation of the language and its meanings as defined by internet culture. for example, if a person searches for the word horse, then google will bring back results that the internet culture has determined to represent a horse. more often than not, the representations of objects provided by the internet culture through google correspond to the representations that have been established through society offline, outside of the realm of the internet. however, sometimes these representations do not align. in fact, the representations provided by the internet culture can be downright offensive. a couple illustrations of this are the ape image that appeared with a google search of “michelle obama” a few years ago, as well as the anti-semitic sites that used to appear in the top results with a search of the word “jew” (“google explains”). a more amusing example for some would be when the search “miserable failure” brought back results for former president george w. bush (sullivan, “google kills”). while some of these instances, such as the bush one, were achieved through purposeful manipulations of google’s ranking factors, most of time google’s search results – even the most offensive ones – are true representations of what the internet culture has deemed to be the meaning of different words or phrases at that particular moment in time. i emphasize this last part, because google’s search results are constantly changing. a website that could rank in the top 10 results one day might not rank the next – another website deemed more relevant or a better representation by the internet community replaces it. while this explanation creates a gross oversimplification of the complex ranking process google implements, i use it to illustrate the role of the internet culture in assigning meaning and significance to different terms and phrases. with the above explanation of how google returns search results, it seems that the search engine serves merely as a reflection of society and what it thinks. it could be thought of as a large world brain, if you will. google typically takes this stance – “it’s not us; it’s them [the internet culture]” – in many of the lawsuits in which it is tried for character defamation, among other things (khalid). in many respects, google’s stance in these matters is true. autocomplete suggestions are based, in part, on the most popular searches done by other users, on user location, and on what the algorithm deems to be relevant (sullivan, “how google”). the “searches related to” section includes searches that other users have gone on to perform after conducting the same keyword search, as well as any phrases that google’s algorithm considers to be synonyms to the search. however, placing all responsibility on the internet culture simplifies the matter far too much and fails to recognize that google might also affect how users approach and research different subjects, such as the topic of immigration and undocumented immigration, which will be examined in this study. it would be very easy to fall into a chicken or egg – or in this case, google or user – type of debate through this study. however, the purpose of this study is not to determine who holds the upper hand in deciding search results. instead, it will attempt to examine the immigration vocabulary that google presents and encourages searchers to use, thereby revealing how google participates in influencing – or constricting – the conversations around unauthorized immigration. people conducting searches in google are presented with information from google throughout their search process. first, as a person starts typing a term into the search engine, google automatically offers suggestions for completing or changing the search. this feature is known as google autocomplete. once users have entered their desired search phrase, google presents them with a list of results. even after completing a search and providing users with the most relevant results (according to the system’s algorithm), google still presents users with alternate search terms that they might want to explore. these suggestions appear under the label “searches related to [search phrase].” though google may not create the terminology it displays in its search results and suggestions (the search engine, after all, compiles and interprets information it finds on the internet or receives from users), i argue that the simple act of repeatedly displaying specific words or phrases holds the potential to influence how people research, learn, and discuss a specific topic, thereby shaping or constricting social conversation according to the vocabulary that it teaches searchers to use. one of the potential ways in which google and the information it provides might shape social conversations include the vocabulary it encourages searchers to use. this study will show how google often guides users to use the term illegal instead of undocumented. in the case of unauthorized immigration, google’s use of illegal in lieu of undocumented could be said to constrict social conversations around this topic and lead to the continued perpetuation of this politically charged word and therefore the negative ideas often associated with it. methodology i started my research by using the broadest of terms – immigration – and i worked from there. i proceeded with my searches, in part, based on the recommendations provided by google. if the search “immigration” recommended “illegal immigration” as a related result, then “illegal immigration” served as the next keyword phrase to be examined. since this study is interested in google’s role in regards to unauthorized immigration, preference was given to searches that led in that direction. if a search for “immigration,” for instance, yielded recommendations such as “immigration history” or “immigration facts” in addition to “illegal immigration” and “undocumented immigration,” the phrases “illegal immigration” and “undocumented immigration” were selected over the other two. with each search, i took a screenshot of the autocomplete suggestions and of the page 1 results in google (capturing the title tags, urls, and descriptions, and related search results, as well as any images, that showed up in search results). while the search results themselves, as well as google autocomplete, were used to evaluate the vocabulary and information being disseminated through google, the related search results served as the main source for most new search phrases that were examined. after clicking through on related search suggestions from google and capturing the search results and suggested searches for those terms, i also initiated searches for those terms in google, so i could capture the google autocomplete suggestions that they generate. obviously, i was not able to pursue and study all recommended searches, as the potential number of searches could be endless. instead, i ended up focusing on a small sample of searches – four for each country. the search phrases for the united states were: “immigration,” “illegal immigration,” “illegal immigration pros and cons,” and “undocumented immigrants.” for mexico and the dominican republic, the search phrases were: “inmigración,” inmigración clandestina,” inmigración ilegal,” and “inmigración indocumentada.” after the initial phase of searching and recording the results and recommendations for these different immigration terms, i proceeded to conduct the same keyword searches once a week for 12 weeks (three months) to account for any changes that occurred in the search results. this process started the first week of february 2013 and ended it the last week of april 2013. this study takes a comparative approach by examining the us google search results side by side with google results in mexico and the dominican republic. examining how google presents results and suggests additional searches in mexico will help provide some perspective on how conversations around undocumented immigration occur outside of the united states. the dominican republic searches serve as a balance to mexico, revealing if online immigration conversations occur differently in countries that do not contribute on the same scale to the unauthorized immigration flows to the usa. to receive the same results that searchers in those countries would receive, i utilized the google search engines for these countries (http://www.google.com.mx and http://www.google.com.do). to help ensure that my results would not automatically be adjusted to reflect an address in the united states, i also changed my address to represent one coming from the country from which i wanted to perform a search. by addressing these two factors, the results i received from google should represent the results a local user in those countries would receive. for both mexico and the dominican republic, i conducted my searches in spanish. results the initial review of collected data from the us reveals a pattern that could bias users into using the terminology “illegal immigrant” over “undocumented immigrant.” from the first search of “immigration,” users are introduced to the word “illegal,” with the word “undocumented” or “unauthorized” not being offered as alternatives. only when users purposefully enter “undocumented immigrant” or “undocumented immigration,” are they provided suggestions along such lines. even then, the word “illegal” is regularly shown to users, a stark contrast to the manner in which “undocumented” fails to appear unless the user enters the word. in contrast, the google results and suggestions for the search query “inmigración” in mexico and the dominican republic do not show the same types of uni-lateral results for “inmigracioón ilegal.” instead, “inmigración ilegal” appears alongside other alternatives, such as “inmigracioón clandestina.” in addition, in both countries, “inmigración ilegal” is associated with the search results “xenophobia” and “inmigración legal,” among other things. the mixing of words from both sides of the immigration debate holds the potential to shape the users’ perspective on the topic much differently than if they only received suggestions with the word “ilegal,” which can carry with it racialized ideas. as a whole, the google results and search suggestions for immigration phrases in the dominican republic and mexico seem to provide a more balanced, unbiased perspective than what us-based users receive. while google as a company may not consciously choose to present biased results (in that the algorithm evaluates and ranks websites), the provided results can still reinforce racialized ideas, thereby potentially inhibiting (though not eliminating) the ability for new, less controversial terminology to arise and thus changing the direction of the debates on immigration. cognizance of how the search engine works can enable users in being more savvy with their searches and how they approach using google. references “about google instant.” google.com. google, n.d. web. 7 feb 2013. agre, philip e. “real-time politics: the internet and the political process.” the information society 18 (3 jan 2002): 311-331. ebscohost. web. clemons, erik k. “the power of patterns and pattern recognition when developing information-based strategy.” journal of management information systems 27.1 (summer 2010): 69-95. ebscohost. web. demby, “in immigration debate, ‘undocumented’ vs. ‘illegal’ is more than just semantics.” npr.org. npr, 30 jan 2013. web. 7 feb 2013. gleick, james. “how google dominates us.” the new york review of books 58.13 (18 aug 2011): 24. web. “google sued over bettina wulff search results.” bbc. bbc, 10 sep 2012. web. 5 feb 2013. fiorelli, gianluca. “the evolution of the use of the internet: the italian case.” seomoz.org. seomoz, 5 feb 2013. web. 7 feb 2013. fishkin, rand and ben hendrickson. “discussing lda and seo – whiteboard friday.” seomoz.org. seomoz, 9 sep 2010. web. 7 feb 2013. flores, jenny. “s.o.s. para los inmigrantes.” elsalvador.com. el diario de hoy, el salvador c.a., n.d. web. 3 april 2013. fraim, john. “electric symbols: internet words and culture.” first monday 7.6 (3 jun 2002): n. pag. web. “google explains racist, anti-semitic search results.” google.com. google, 24 nov 2009. web. 7 feb 2013. hall, stuart. “the work of representation.” presentation: cultural representations and signifying practices. ed. stuart hall. london: sage publications ltd, 1997. print. hargittai, eszter. “do you “google”? understanding search engine use beyond the hype.” first monday 9.3 (1 mar 2004). web. harris, kaplan page. “new narrative and the making of language poetry.” american literature 81.4 (dec 2009): 805-832. ebscohost. web. hayles, n. katherine. “virtual bodies and flickering signifiers.” october 66 (autumn 1993): 69-91. jstor. web. hoeffer, michael, nancy rytina, and bryan baker. “estimates of the unauthorized immigrant population residing in the united states: january 2011.” dhs.gov. u.s. department of homeland security, march 2012. web. “how search works.” google.com. google, n.d. web. 1 apr 2013. jeynes, karen. “rose-tinted google glasses?” cape times 05 aug 2011: 10. lexisnexis academic. web. kehoe, stacy. “how can you change ‘google related searches?’.” seomoz.org. seomoz, 4 oct 2012. web. 3 apr 2013. khalid, amrita. “google loses lawsuit in australia over defamatory search results.” slate.com. the slate group, llc, 12 nov 2012. web. 5 feb 2013. levy, steven. in the plex: how google thinks, works, and shapes our lives. new york: simon & schuster, 2011. print. “location settings.” google.com. google, n.d. web. 3 apr 2013. lohr, steve. “market shaped by consumers.” the new york times 1 dec 2003: 20. lexisnexis academic. web. manovich, lev. “the practice of everyday (media) life: from mass consumption to mass cultural production?” critical inquiry 35.2 (winter 2009): 319-331. jstor. web. martin, michel. “which is acceptable: ‘undocumented’ vs. ‘illegal’ immigrant?” npr.org. npr, 7 jan 2010. web. 7 feb 2013. mcgee, matt. “google removes offensive obama image; was it justified?” search engine land. third door media, inc., 19 nov 2009. web. 7 feb 2013. navarrette, ruben. “10 reasons why journalists use the term ‘illegal immigrant’.” voxxi.com. voxxi, 9 nov 2012. web. 7 feb 2013. palis, courteney. “google instant’s allegedly ‘anti-semitic’ results lead to lawsuit in france.” the huffington post. thehuffingtonpost.com, inc., 5 feb 2012. web. 5 feb 2013. papacharissi, zizi. “democracy online: civility, politeness, and the democratic potential of online political discussion groups.” new media & society 6.2 (1 apr 2004): 259-283. sage. web. rubio, angelica. “undocumented, not illegal: beyond the rhetoric of immigration coverage.” nacla report on the americas 44.6 (nov 2011): 50-52. academic search premier. web. shafer, jack. “how google has changed everything.” the hamilton spectator 23 apr 2011: na. newsbank. web. shore, elena. “how do ethnic media say ‘illegal immigrant’?” new america media. new america media, 10 sep 2011. web. 20 mar 2013. statcounter global stats. statcounter, n.d. web. 7 feb 2013. sullivan, danny. “google: 100 billion searches per month, search to integrate gmail, launching enhances search app for ios.” search engine land. third door media, inc., 8 aug 2012. web. 5 feb 2013. --. “google kills bush’s miserable failure search & other google bombs.” search engine land. third door media, inc., 25 jan 2007. web. 7 feb 2013. --. “how google instant’s autocomplete suggestions work.” search engine land. third door media, inc., 6 apr 2011. web. 5 feb 2013. tartarchevskiy, tatiana. “the ‘popular’ culture of internet activism.” new media & society 13.2 (6 dec 2010): 297-313. sage. web. “the art of listening: finding & monitoring the most influential online conversations.” pr news 65.26 (29 jun 2009): na. proquest. web. vaidhyanathan, siva. the googlization of everything (and why we should worry. berkeley: university of california press, 2012. ebook. microsoft word ir16 final submission.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 pattwell, a. (2015, october 21-24). facebooking toward death: how digital legacy impacts curation in online settings. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. facebooking toward death: how digital legacy impacts curation in online settings ashley b. pattwell drexel university introduction the complex and meaningful ways that we present ourselves both offline (goffman, 1959) and online (papacharissi, 2010; bergman, et al., 2010; boyd, 2008; farquhar, 2012) are often conceived of as immediate, temporally-based social interactions. and of course, the ephemerality of sites like twitter and snapchat, where most activity – comments, shares, and likes – takes place within the first hour of posting (silverman, 2015a), can make it seem like such identity performances are fleeting. however, these social broadcasts are not just communications, but data, records, and archives that eventually will, in sum, make up our digital legacy (carroll & romano, 2011). often a look at the press’s coverage of someone’s death will show the ways online identity is mined for clues as to who a person was, what they valued, or even what their “last words” and pictures were. this paper asks whether increased attention to notions of online legacy or digital afterlife could impact social media management and other online behavior. put another way, if networked technologies are imagined as an opportunity for not just identity performance, but identity preservation, would online activity show signs of curation? curation of self, legacy and the digital afterlife noting the sometimes illusory nature of online interactions isn’t to say that online identity isn’t a carefully crafted, thoughtful endeavor. scholars like hearn (2008) and marwick (2013) even show how selves can be conceived of as brands. jacob silverman (2015b) writes, “placing [anything] on your blog or in your twitter stream acts as a form of identification – a signal of your aesthetics, a reflection of your background, an avatar of your desires.” however, deliberate identity work with legacy in mind may look different than these neo-liberal constructions. curating in traditional settings, like art museums, entails selecting, organizing, presenting and looking after items. in digital fields, any mention of curation often has to do with the maintenance and storage of large-scale data. elsewhere it remains undertheorized, especially given the emphasis on symbolic interactionism by many scholars, as noted above. while not always labeled as such, some researchers have noted facets of curation in online phenomena like personal archiving (garde-hansen, 2009; cox, 2009), virtual memories (czerwinski, et al., 2006) and digital artifacts (gulotta, et al., 2013). katie day good (2012) conceptualized social media, like its scrapbook predecessor, as sites of personal media assemblages and personal media archives, pointing to the dual social and archival dimensions of the platforms. preliminary methodology & discussion there is a tension that exists in attempting to document one’s life while simultaneously living it. thoreau more eloquently put it: “my life has been the poem i would have writ, but i could not both live and utter it.” however, what heidegger (1962) called beingtoward-death, or an orientation that acknowledges and accepts death, opens possibilities for living in a purposeful, authentic way, even online. this paper proposes to build on the aforementioned body of work by exploring whether users take into account their digital afterlife and if this leads to a curation of the self, distinct from other forms of identity work. the study will employ interviews and case studies in exploring the different ways users might curate information or orient themselves toward digital legacy, and whether or not they see it in those terms. by considering heidegger’s being-toward-death in matters of digital identity and online social interaction, we might get a sense of some of the values or standards by which users choose to curate their online identity. questions like this are quite timely as technology companies and software designers grapple with digital legacy and online mourning. in fact, a recent facebook policy change stating users could name digital heirs to manage their accounts posthumously received substantial media coverage and user discussion. digital legacy is certainly being incorporated into our collective imagining of the internet and will likely have consequences for the ways in which users present and share content. references bergman, s.m., fearrington, m.e., davenport, s.w. and bergman, j.z. (2011). millennials, narcissism, and social networking: what narcissists do on social networking sites and why. personality and individual differences, 50(5), pp.706–711. boyd, d. (2008). none of this is real: identity and participation in friendster. in: j. karaganis (ed.) structures of participation in digital culture. new york: social science research council, pp.133–157. carroll, e. & romano, j. (2011). your digital afterlife. berkeley, ca: new riders. cox, r.j. (2009). digital curation and the citizen archivist. in proceedings of digccur2009. available at http://sils.unc.edu/news/2009/digccurrconference. czerwinski, m., gage, d., gemmell, j., marshall, c., pérez-quiñonesis, m., skeels, m., & catarci, t. (2006). digital memories in an era of ubiquitous computing and abundant storage. communications of the acm, 49(1), 44-50. farquhar, l. (2012). performing and interpreting identity through facebook imagery. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies. garde-hansen, j. (2009). mymemories? personal digital archive fever and facebook. in j. garde-hansen, a. hoskins & a. reading (eds.) save as... digital memories. new york: palgrave macmillan, 135–150. goffman, e. (1959). the presentation of self in everyday life. new york: doubleday. good, k.d. (2012). from scrapbook to facebook: a history of personal media assemblage and archives. new media & society, 15(4), 557-573. gulotta, r., odom, w., forlizzi, j., & faste, h. (2013) digital artifacts as legacy: exploring the lifespan and value of digital data. proceedings of chi 2013, april 27–may 2, 2013, paris, france. hearn, a. (2008). variations on the branded self: theme, invention, improvisation and inventory. in d. hesmondhalgh & j. toynbee (eds.) the media and social theory. new york: routledge, 194–210. heidegger, m. (1962). being and time. new york: harper & row. litt, e. (2012). knock, knock. who’s there? the imagined audience. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 56(3), 330–345. marwick, a. (2013). status update: celebrity, publicity and self-branding in web 2.0. new haven, ct: yale university press. marwick, a.e. & boyd, d. (2011). i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. new media & society, 13(1), 114–133. papacharissi, z. (ed.) (2010). a networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites. new york: routledge silverman, j. (2015a). terms of service: social media and the price of constant connection. london: harper. silverman, j. (2015b, february 26). ‘pics or it didn’t happen’ – the mantra of the instagram era. the guardian. available at http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/26/pics-or-it-didnt-happen-mantrainstagram-era-facebook-twitter microsoft word larsen-contradictions of the social imaginary-contradictions of the social imaginary.doc selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 contradictions of the social imaginary: making sense of digital food snaps jessica nicole larsen university of illinois at chicago beyond our biological needs for food, food cultures are arranged from series of complicated and often contradictory magical thinkings, where ideologies of food do not match practices (kaufman, 2010). the introduction of mobile-social photography into everyday food space has disrupted patterns of thinking about the boundaries between technology and food space, provoking reconsideration of the cognitive and sensory orientation of the individual toward a meal, as well as the social appropriateness of the translation of a meal from a private to a public event. this theoretical discussion is aimed at making sense of these reconsiderations, and addressing the relationship between mobile-social photography and what it means for the contemporary eater to engage with food. taking and sharing online photos of everyday activities can seem trivial and not ideologically valued. food photography has been claimed to affect restaurant experience, create conflict between chefs and consumers, and has been ridiculed for its amateurism. on the other hand, like many online social practices, digital food photography may be a method of self-representation and have important social value. ultimately, however, the ideological criticism of food photography contradicts with its existence as a popular practice among the social collective. this argument conceives the practice of sharing food photos online using the concepts of mediation and remediation to reflect this contradiction in our imagination of the digital foodscape. the digital photo shared online represents the practice of photography and the values inherent in forming identities and sharing ourselves in the constellation of online social spaces (larsen & sandbye (2014) coin this as a ‘digital snap’). this discussion conceives digital food snaps as both a remix of the values embedded in photography and online sharing as well as the values of sharing and connecting through food offline remixed in digital space. the resulting claim is that digital food snaps are a transforming the cultural meaning of and reshaping the values of our engagement with food. popular aesthetic, online food photography, and sharing amateur photography is a way to observe the collective imagination of the “popular aesthetic” (bourdieu, 1965). criticism of food photography reflects varied standards for suggested citation (apa): larsen, j. (2015, october 21-24). contradictions of the social imaginary: making sense of digital food snaps. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. what photography ‘should’ be. professionalized photographs possess high-art qualities and symbolize the ideal sought by amateurs. this professionalized standard perpetuates the production, interpretation, and acceptance of images in the form of that standard (gonzalez, 1992). thus, the bulk of food photographs, produced by amateurs, seem to fall short of ‘good’ allowing the practice of taking photos of food to seem amateurish itself. digital photos are an abstraction of reality and embodied version of something real (bolter & grusin, 2000). a contradiction is built into the simple viewing of a photograph: on one hand is the cultural ideal that photographs should represent reality, on the other, we must acknowledge that photographs are manipulated and reality is fabricated through them. this tension is exacerbated by the idea that, as copies, remediated things are not authentic. placing a photo online perpetuating a copy of a copy – exacerbates this tension even further. digital snapping is a new way to engage with photography, but quality-based criticisms and questions of authenticity are also critiques of analog photography. thus, it’s not specifically the ‘digital’ piece of the food snap that is disdained in popular thought, but more likely the insertion of that photographic practice into the traditionally non-digital engagement of eating. furthermore, given its low barriers, digital photography is changing what it means to share photographs. camera phones elevate the mundane to a site of news and visual archiving (daisuke & ito, 2003) and everyday life is remediated as a socially acceptable way to visibly connect with others. the everyday image is something the amateur can create; but it is also something others can relate to and comment on (murray, 2008). also, online content sharing platforms have shifted our gaze to archiving ourselves online, and using digital snaps as a means of everyday self-expression and articulation of our public life (burgess & vivienne, 2013). digital snaps also serve as “an instrument for peer bonding and interaction” (van dijck, 2008, p. 62) used to fulfill the desire to create community within a fragment technical society. collective nostalgia for ‘simpler times’ (petrusich, 2012) – where feelings of connectedness were valued – can be alleviated via imagined communities created through sharing, liking, and commenting on online photos. these communities remediate notions of community possessed offline, in that everyday life is a common ground for conversation. offline food culture remediated in digital space a social function is shared among the practice of photography, sharing online, and communing through food. food is a culture of sharing and a nonverbal way we communicate meaning with others that permeates everyday life (greene & cramer, 2011). an important element of this culture is selective identity construction – we expresses social relationships via who we decide to share a meal with in the same way we express our biological food identity through our food choices. likewise, online we construct specific relationships between our communities and ourselves through choices of what, where, and when to share photos. both modernity and information society have made these identities problematic by overloading exposure to food-related information, creating struggle in the biosocial need to classify and categorize cuisines or form guidelines for what to eat. digital food snaps are a way to help categorize and organize these identities. making public statements through food talk, including digital snaps, structures our experience of food, crafts our identities and constructs our social world, and has intensified in the age of the blogosphere (ferguson, 2014). concluding thoughts ultimately, digital snaps are prevalent online, which contradicts with the ideological criticism of their practice as trivial. the present argument outlined this practice as a remediation of photography culture, the culture of sharing online, and the concepts of community and self-identification associated with food culture. although we imagine food to be an unimportant object of attention, food is content we are naturally drawn to share online due to tendencies to form identity through food and curate our identities online. digital practices are shaping our contemporary food culture and some online practices, such as digital snaps of food, are entrenched in layers of cultural significance both online and offline. references bolter, j. d., & grusin, r. (2000). remediation: understanding new media. mit press. bourdieu, p. (1965). photography: a middle-brow art. burgess, j. & vivienne, s. (2013). the remediation of the personal photograph and the politics of self-representation in digital storytelling. journal of material culture, 18(3), 279–298. daisuke, o. & ito, m. (2003). camera phones changing the definition of picture-worthy. japan media review, 29. ferguson, p. p. (2014). word of mouth: what we talk about when we talk about food. university of california press. gonzalez, j. (1992). a contemporary look at pierre bourdieu’s ‘photography: a middlebrow art. visual anthropology review, 8(1), 126–131. greene, c. p. & cramer, j. m. (2011). beyond mere sustenance: food as communication/communication as food. in j. m. cramer, c. p. greene, & l. m. walters (eds.), food as communication/communication as food. new york, ny: peter lang publishing. kaufmann, j.c. (2010). the meaning of cooking. polity. larsen, j. & sandbye, m. (2014). digital snaps: the new face of photography. new york, ny: palgrave macmillan. murray, s. (2008). digital images, photo-sharing, and our shifting notions of everyday aesthetics. journal of visual culture, 7(2), 147–163. petrusich, a. (2012). instagram, the nostalgia of now and reckoning the future. retrieved from http://www.buzzfeed.com/petrusich/instagram-the-nostalgia-of-now-andreckoning-the#276mbmf van dijck, j. (2008). digital photography: communication, identity, memory. visual communication, 7(1), 57–76. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): damkaer, ms, southerton, c, albrechtslund, a. (2019, october 2-5). relief from communication: parental surveillance technologies, trust and care. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. relief from communication: parental surveillance technologies, trust and care maja sonne damkaer center for surveillance studies, aarhus university clare southerton vitalities lab, university of new south wales anders albrechtslund center for surveillance studies, aarhus university introduction the everyday adoption of digital technologies such as mobile phones and social media has had transformative effects on interactions within the family (clark, 2013), as families become increasingly dependent on their capacities for coordinating day-to-day activities and maintaining intimate relationships (licoppe, 2004; ling, 2014). concurrently, these technologies enable new forms of surveillance, allowing parents to observe their children’s movements and interactions remotely, eg. via gps-apps (marx & steeves, 2010), as well as lateral forms of surveillance embedded in social media practices like ‘facebook stalking’ (albrechtslund, 2013). this paper explores how the surveillant capacities of communication technologies are involved in shaping relations of trust in the family, drawing on empirical data from in-depth interviews with adolescents at two schools and 17 danish families conducted during 2017. despite surveillance often being represented as a practice which undermines trust (mayer, 2003; neyland, 2006; rooney, 2010), our findings suggest that the relationship between trust and surveillance, for the families in our study, was far less straightforward. surveillance was an important part of care practices for parents and, in some instances, tracking technologies were able to offer a kind of ‘relief’ from social pressures to remain in contact. this paper explores the perceptions of parents and adolescents regarding using communication technologies for surveillance, to examine the nuanced constitution of trust occurring. case study: communication technologies in danish families this study is part of a danish research project that explores perceptions and experiences of everyday surveillance practices in family life. the project aims to understand changing family relations as digital technologies become deeply embedded in many social rituals. denmark is an affluent nation in the global north with a strong uptake of domestic digital technologies. 93% of danish families have access to a computer with internet access, and 88% of households have at least one smartphone (tassy, nielsen, & jakobsen, 2018). scandinavian parenting, in general, is oriented towards democratic ideals, conversation and trust (forsberg, 2009; miklikowska & hurme, 2011). certainly, danish parents tracking children without their knowledge is not the norm. to understand both the perceptions of parents and young people, who experience these technologies differently, the project draws on two data sets comprised of 17 semi-structured in-depth interviews with families with children living at home, and 50 interviews conducted with adolescents (aged 14-17) at two danish schools. affording surveillance to understand the complex relationship between trust and privacy, we explore the interconnection between parenting, digital communication technologies and surveillance. surveillance is an integrated part of parenting, as children need supervision until they come of age. the surveillant capacities of many of the digital technologies integrated into family life interact with relations of trust both directly, as a result of surveillant practices, and indirectly, through the perception of these surveillant capacities. we draw on the theory of affordances (gibson, 1986) to conceptualise the capacities of these technologies as well as the perception of these capacities by the parents and adolescents in our study. communication and media scholars have adopted the term both to emphasise the way that technologies enable actions as well as constrain and discourage others, both through their materiality and users perceptions (hutchby, 2014; schrock, 2015). parents and children mobilise the surveillant affordances of communication technologies both to establish trust and to provide relief from social pressures to remain in constant contact. on the basis of our analysis, we present compelling evidence that: 1) tracking of children without their consent were in general perceived as a violation of their privacy and an unacceptable breach of trust (unless the child requires special assistance); 2) both parents and adolescents perceived parental surveillance by means of communication technologies (e.g. calls and texts) as a practice of care, as this rested on ideals of dialogue and trust; and 3) the families that had adopted tracking apps used them for mutual monitoring, as all family members were visible to each other, but surprisingly, their main motive was not efficient surveillance: it was ‘communication relief’ from a lot of ‘disturbing’ micro-coordination and ‘checking up on each other’s whereabouts’. conclusion this paper examines the ways in which parents and children perceive and navigate the surveillant capacities of these everyday technologies, and the ways in which trust is both established and undermined. it is perhaps paradoxical that the danish families in our study use communication tools for parental surveillance and tracking technologies for ‘relief’ from the pressure of constant communication. it is important to understand the way that the perception of the affordance of these technologies has influence, sometimes as much as the actualisation of that affordance. it is necessary also to note that denmark is known for having high levels of social trust (sønderskov & dinesen, 2014), as well as a family and parenting culture that rests on 'democratic ideals', dialogue-based child rearing focusing on mutual trust and children’s autonomy (forsberg, 2009; miklikowska & hurme, 2011). these characteristics no doubt influence the ways surveillance capacities are engaged with. finally, though new technologies do introduce new capacities, there are continuities with existing family trust dynamics and we contend that child rearing necessarily involves a balancing of care and surveillance, freedom and control. references albrechtslund, a. (2013). new media and changing perceptions of surveillance. in j. hartley, j. burgess, & a. bruns (eds.), a companion to new media dynamics (vol. 13, pp. 309–321). oxford: wileyblackwell. forsberg, l. (2009). involved parenthood: everyday lives of swedish middle-class families (phd). linköping university. retrieved from http://www.divaportal.org/smash/get/diva2:221242/fulltext02.pdf gibson, j. j. (1986). the ecological approach to visual perception. new york, ny: psychology press. hutchby, i. (2014). communicative affordances and participation frameworks in mediated interaction. journal of pragmatics, 72, 86–89. licoppe, c. (2004). “connected” presence: the emergence of a new repertoire for managing social relationships in a changing communication technoscape. environment and planning d: society and space, 22(1), 135–156. ling, r. (2014). theorizing mobile communication in the intimate sphere. in g. goggin & l. hjorth (eds.), the routledge companion to mobile media (pp. 32–41). new york: routledge. marx, g., & steeves, v. (2010). from the beginning: children as subjects and agents of surveillance. surveillance & society, 7(3/4), 192–230. mayer, r. n. (2003). technology, families, and privacy: can we know too much about our loved ones? journal of consumer policy, 26(4), 419–439. miklikowska, m., & hurme, h. (2011). democracy begins at home: democratic parenting and adolescents’ support for democratic values. the european journal of developmental psychology, 8(5), 541–557. neyland, d. (2006). privacy, surveillance and public trust. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. rooney, t. (2010). trusting children: how do surveillance technologies alter a child’s experience of trust, risk and responsibility? surveillance & society, 7(3/4), 344–355. schrock, a. r. (2015). communicative affordances of mobile media: portability, availability, locatability, and multimediality. international journal of communication systems, 9, 1229–1246. sønderskov, k. m., & dinesen, p. t. (2014). danish exceptionalism: explaining the unique increase in social trust over the past 30 years. european sociological review, 30(6), 782–795. tassy, a., nielsen, m. b., & jakobsen, d. t. (2018). it-anvendelse i befolkningen 2018. danmarks statistik. retrieved from http://www.dst.dk/publ/itbefolkning selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): kappler, k. (2016, october 5-8). big dataphenomenology. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. karolin eva kappler soziologie ii: soziologische gegenwartsdiagnosen, institut für soziologie, fernuniversität in hagen introduction currently, big data is attributed a high potential of control and value creation. mayerschönberger and cukier (2013: 182) consider big data to be the main raw material of the information and knowledge society, comparable with the role of oil in the industrial society. pursuing this metaphor, crude oil is not easily accessible, but it requires a whole industry to detect the oil deposits, dig it out of the soil, purify and process it in refineries. in this sense, big data should not be considered an easily accessible material. the main (and partly still open) question is how to make sense out of big data and how to find its value. to reflect (differently) on these questions, i want to propose a phenomenological view on big data, raising issues on structures of experience, consciousness, lifeworlds, and embodiment. at a first sight, this might make no sense, as big data at least from a technological point of view is defined through the 4 vs volume, velocity, veracity and variety , representing the growing technological capacity to collect, aggregate and process an always bigger volume of always more varied data with always higher velocity and an allegedly high veracity (uprichard, 2013). accordingly, big data is supposed to be , neutral, and objective material for information retrieval, generation, and analysis. in contrast, boellstroff and maurer (2015) propose 3 rs to characterize big data: relation, recognition, and rot. following these anthropologists, big data are made through the relation between human and non-human actors (or actants), conferring specific meaning to it, transforming and sometimes deteriorating or rotting with time; following a social, cultural and political process. big dataphenomenology expands this critical view, focusing on the depth of big data which reflect the aggregation of millions of single experiences, allowing insight into thousands of different lifeworlds and maybe generating a new collective consciousness. enriched, small, or thick big data some researchers already propose a more phenomenological perspective on big data, without calling it big dataphenomenology: crawford (2013) discloses the myths of big data which is supposed to be true, precise and objective (boyd / crawford, 2011) , exposing one of its main problems: its missing depth, meaning data without or with little context. therefore, crawford pleads for the combination of big data and small data, in orde ) of social life and experience. likewise, boellstorff (2013) claims recognizing its irreducible contextuality (boellstorff, 2013) of datageertz, 1973 terpretive , 2013). (geertz, 1973: 16). phenomenological data assemblages ruckenstein (2014) takes / ericson, 2000: 606) operations that first abstract human bodies by separating them into various data flows or streams and then reassemble them into data doubles to be analyzed and targeted for intervention ruckenstein, 2014 data-doppelganger, being a perfect copy of the original processes that abstract and slice the self into various kinds of data flows ruckenstein, 2014). following haraway (2003), these are generated in (digital) data assemblages, where humans become just one node in a network of software, digital data repositories and smart objects that configure and exchange digital data with each other , 2016), measuring and calculating everyday life and body experiences through digital devices, such as smartphones or sensors. these slice human experience into physical body measurements, e.g. heart rate variability, pulse, steps, or calories, and social practices into digital traces, such as number of messages, number of friends, geolocation information, or personal images. embodied big data , 1941: 240), the current data assemblages and data doubles can partly represent the body/körper and social behavioral structures, if at all; considering the body/körper as an objectively observable thing. in contrast, the body/leib is alive, and needs to be understood functionally. therefore and following merleau(1945), the body/leib should be seen as the principal organ of perception, as the zero point of orientation, as a specific and single way of world access: these are keywords that refer to the phenomenological tradition of thinking of corporeality. and they raise two questions regarding big data: 1what happens to big data, its analysis, results and insights in life, society and the world, if they miss this phenomenological perspective? as an example, it is possible to think of an illness without experienced symptoms, such as pain. what happens with someone, who has a broken leg, but no pain, hence does not feel and experience the broken leg, but only the doctor sees the broken bone on an x-ray? 2and vice versa: how should big data and its corresponding data assemblages look like, if they included a phenomenological point of view? the paper claims, that the current problem of (not) making sense of big data and fruitless efforts to detect its value is intrinsically linked to the above questions. based on interdisciplinary collaborations, new approaches of empathic, holistic and phenomenological data retrieval tools and algorithms should be discussed and developed, in order to make big data sensitive to experiences, narratives, and the specificities of different lifeworlds. by this, big data could be enabled to reach a distinctive consciousness by aggregating human and non-human perception. references boellstorff, tom, and bill maurer (ed.) (2015). data, now bigger and better! chicago: prickly paradigm press. boellstorff, tom (2013). making big data, in theory. first monday, vol. 18, num. 10. october. available at: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4869/3750 (accessed 12 february 2016). boyd, danah, and kate crawford (2011). six provocations for big data. ssrn, september 21. available at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1926431 (accessed 2 february 2016). crawford, kate (2013). algorithmic illusions: hidden biases of big data. talk at strata conference. available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irp5rcdpilc (accessed 20 february 2016). geertz, clifford (1973). thick description: toward an interpretive theory of culture, in: clifford geertz. the interpretation of cultures: selected essays. new york: basic books. pp. 3 32. haggerty, kevin d., and richard v. ericson (2000). the surveillant assemblage. british journal of sociology, 51(4): 605-622. haraway, donna (2003). the companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. chicago: prickly paradigm. lupton, deborah (2016). digital companion species and eating data: implications for theorising digital data-human assemblages. big data & society, january. available at: http://bds.sagepub.com/content/3/1/2053951715619947 (accessed 28 february 2016). mayer-schönberger, viktor, and kenneth cukier (2013). big data. a revolution that will transform how we live, work and think. london: john murray. merleau-ponty, maurice (1945). phänomenologie der wahrnehmung. berlin 1974. pasquinelli, matteo (2014) der italienische operaismo und die informationsmaschine. in: reichertz, ramón (ed). big data. bielefeld: transcript. pp. 313-332. plessner, helmuth (1941). lachen und weinen. eine untersuchung der grenzen menschlichen verhaltens. in: helmuth plessner. gesammelte schriften, ed. v. günter dux et al., vol. 7, frankfurt/m. 1982. pp. 201-387. ruckenstein, minna (2014). visualized and interacted life: personal analytics and engagements with data doubles. societies, 4, 68-84. available at: http://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/4/1/68 (accessed 27 february 2016). uprichard, emma (2013). focus: big data, little questions? discoversociety, issue 1, october. available at: http://discoversociety.org/2013/10/01/focus-big-data-littlequestions/ (accessed 29 february 2016). microsoft word aoir2016_interruptedhistorydigitaldivides_final_rev.docx selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  reisdorf,  b.c.,  triwibowo,  w.,  nelson,  m.,  &  dutton,  w.h.  (2016,  october  5-­ 8).  an  interrupted  history  of  digital  divides.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  meeting  of   the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.   an  interrupted  history  of  digital  divides       bianca  c.  reisdorf   michigan  state  university     whisnu  triwibowo   michigan  state  university     michael  nelson   michigan  state  university     william  h.  dutton   michigan  state  university     background   in  the  early  days  of  the  internet,  researchers  across  various  fields  and  disciplines   focused  on  the  phenomenon  of  digital  divides  and  digital  inequalities  (e.g.  dimaggio  et   al.,  2004;;  hargittai,  2002;;  norris,  2001;;  van  dijk  2005;;  warschauer,  2004),  and  this   area  is  reviving  as  a  focus  of  research  (e.g.  reisdorf  &  groselj,  2015;;  robinson  et  al.,   2015;;  van  deursen  &  van  dijk  2014;;  van  deursen  &  helsper,  2015).  however,  with   changing  proportions  of  internet  users  and  non-­users  and  the  changing  perception  from   the  internet  being  a  new  innovation  to  something  that  the  majority  of  citizens  in  north   america  and  western  europe  take  for  granted  come  changing  foci  of  investigation  and   changing  questions.  in  this  paper,  we  will  investigate  the  history  of  methodologies  to   measuring  digital  divides  and  inequalities  in  the  united  states  and  other  countries  with   lower  proportions  of  internet  use,  with  a  case  study  of  an  ongoing  survey  of  the  state  of   michigan.  using  questionnaires  from  michigan,  the  us,  hungary,  and  south  africa   reaching  back  to  1997,  this  paper  examines  how  the  very  definition  and  severity  of   digital  divides  have  evolved  over  the  last  twenty  years  across  these  diverse  contexts.   changing  definitions  of  digital  divides  and  inequalities  are  reflected  in  how  questions   about  internet  access  and  use  have  changed  overtime,  when  asked  at  all.  in  this   regard,  by  tracking  several  survey  measure  over  time,  it  is  possible  to  capture  the  ebb   and  flow  of  academic  interest  in  digital  divides,  the  changing  meaning  of  that  term,  and   the  changing  character  of  divides.       research  queries     to  examine  the  history  of  digital  divide  research,  we  ask  the  following  questions:     1.   how  have  survey  questions  regarding  internet  use  and  access  changed  over  the   last  20  years?  in  many  respects,  changes  in  the  wording  of  questions  about   digital  divides  are  as  telling  as  the  responses  themselves.     2.   how  frequently  were  survey  questions  regarding  internet  use  and  access  asked   in  the  last  20  years?  if  the  frequency  has  changed,  when  did  this  happen  and   what  might  be  the  reason?  is  the  attention  cycle  of  academia  little  better  than  the   press?  how  can  academic  research  maintain  the  systematic  study  of  evolving   phenomena  through  the  rise  and  fall  of  academic  fashions?     methodology   the  methodology  for  this  study  combines  several  approaches:     survey  of  surveys:  we  will  compare  a  number  of  questionnaires  investigating  internet   use  and  non-­use  from  various  years  and  countries,  including  questionnaires  used  in  the   world  internet  projects  (wip)  from  the  us,  hungary,  and  south  africa.  in  addition,   multiple  waves  of  the  state  of  the  state  survey  (soss),  conducted  by  michigan  state   university’s  institute  of  public  policy  and  social  research  (ippsr)  included  questions   on  internet  access  and  use  between  1997  and  2016.  tracking  and  comparing  the   wording  of  questions  as  well  as  answer  options/values  regarding  internet  access  over   time  and  across  national  contexts  provides  a  complementary  indication  of  the  changing   meaning  of  the  internet  and  digital  divides.  not  only  the  wording,  but  also  the  presence   of  questions  speaks  to  how  and  when  the  perception  of  having  internet  access  changed   from  something  unusual  into  something  expected.  moreover,  tracking  the  frequency   with  which  these  questions  were  asked  provides  a  sobering  indication  of  the  rise  and  fall   of  interest  in  digital  divides  in  the  academic  community.       analysis  of  primary  and  secondary  survey  data:  to  provide  a  background  context  of   changing  questions,  we  will  analyze  primary  and  secondary  survey  data  from  the   countries  whose  questionnaires  we  are  analyzing.  this  allows  us  to  examine  whether   the  wording  changes  with  the  proportion  of  internet  users  or  within  a  specific  country   context  at  a  certain  time.     impact   the  combination  of  these  sources  of  evidence  provides  a  new  and  unique  perspective   on  digital  divide  research.  it  demonstrates  the  importance  of  placing  digital  divide  and   inequality  research,  as  well  as  the  policy  recommendations  borne  out  of  this  research,   in  the  context  of  particular  time  periods  and  national  contexts,  along  with  the  changing   perception  of  the  internet  and  online  access  at  the  time.  as  questionnaires  were   adapted  to  general  perceptions  in  each  context,  we  can  identify  nuanced  changes  in  the   data.  as  an  example,  someone  who  was  online  “a  few  times  per  year”  (an  actual   answer  option  in  early  soss  waves)  was  considered  an  internet  user  in  1999,  but   would  barely  be  considered  an  internet  user  in  2016.  in  such  ways,  this  history  raises   the  definition  of  use  vs.  non-­use  as  a  topic  of  debate  in  itself.     at  a  time  where  daily  internet  use  on  a  variety  of  devices—often  even  simultaneously— is  considered  the  norm  in  highly  technologized  countries,  it  is  important  to  reflect  back  to   the  rather  short  history  of  the  internet  when  this  was  not  the  case.  the  observed   changes  in  the  proportion  of  users  and  non-­users  as  well  as  the  frequency  of  use  and   the  way  we  inquire  about  digital  divides  and  inequalities  can  be  a  powerful  and   informative  tool  for  understanding  not  only  the  history  of  digital  divides  in  highly   technologized  countries,  but  also  remind  the  research  community  of  the  dramatic   changes  occurring  in  the  short  history  of  the  internet  in  ways  that  can  open  up  new  and   old  streams  of  research  for  understanding  digital  divides  in  countries  with  low   proportions  of  internet  users.       references     dimaggio,  p.,  hargittai,  e.,  celeste,  c.,  &  shafer,  s.  (2004).  from  unequal  access  to   differentiated  use:  a  literature  review  and  agenda  for  research  on  digital  inequality.   social  inequality,  355-­400.     hargittai,  e.  (2002).  second-­level  digital  divide:  differences  in  people’s  online  skills.   first  monday,  7(4),  3.     norris,  p.  (2001).  digital  divide:  civic  engagement,  information  poverty,  and  the  internet   worldwide.  cambridge  university  press.     reisdorf,  b.  c.,  &  groselj,  d.  (2015).  internet  (non-­)  use  types  and  motivational  access:   implications  for  digital  inequalities  research.  new  media  &  society,  online  first.  doi:   10.1177/1461444815621539       robinson,  l.,  cotten,  s.  r.,  ono,  h.,  quan-­haase,  a.,  mesch,  g.,  chen,  w.,  schulz,  j.,   hale,  t.m.  and  &  stern,  m.  j.  (2015).  digital  inequalities  and  why  they  matter.   information,  communication  &  society,  18(5),  569-­582.     van  deursen,  a.  j.,  &  helsper,  e.  j.  (2015).  the  third-­level  digital  divide:  who   benefits  most  from  being  online?.  in  communication  and  information  technologies   annual  (pp.  29-­52).  emerald  group  publishing  limited.     van  deursen,  a.  j.,  &  van  dijk,  j.  a.  (2014).  the  digital  divide  shifts  to  differences  in   usage.  new  media  &  society,  16(3),  507-­526.     van  dijk,  j.  a.  (2005).  the  deepening  divide:  inequality  in  the  information  society.  sage   publications.     warschauer,  m.  (2004).  technology  and  social  inclusion:  rethinking  the  digital  divide.   mit  press.   microsoft word 830-575-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 bridging the politician-citizen divide? interaction on sns during the danish parliamentary election 2011 sander a. schwartz it university copenhagen denmark sans@itu.dk abstract in denmark, like in many other places in the world, support for political parties is declining, making political parties more eager to engage with citizens in order to narrow the politician-citizen divide. however, some researchers fear that social media might be polarizing political debate online. this general study examines how politicians can successfully encourage vertical interaction and debate with citizens through social media and whether polarization is taking placing horizontally user-to-user. the interaction between politicians and citizens are analyzed using a dataset recording politicians’ facebook activity during the danish national election 2011. keywords politics; social network site; social media; election introduction politicians have always had a natural interest in meeting the citizens or voters where they are, either on a busy street offline or, now more than ever, through the internet highways or hubs of citizen debates online. in denmark the national election campaign every fourth year have increasingly spread to digital platforms, and in 2011 facebook was by far the preferred online social medium for politicians according to own studies (hoff, jensen, klastrup, schwartz, & brügger, 2012). politicians are eager to engage with citizens but the support for political parties seems to be declining in denmark (elklit, møller, svensson, & togeby, 2005) like many other places in the world (coleman & blumler, 2009) increasing a politician-citizen divide. however, the danish voting percentage in 2011 was one of the highest in many years nationally as well as being one of the highest in the world (oecd, 2011). apparently then lack of party support from danish citizens is not equal to a general lack of interest in politics. this study examines how politicians engaged with citizens through their facebook page during the election and analyses which communication styles successfully encouraged interaction and debate. however, social media has been criticized for potentially polarizing political debates or producing echo chambers (conover et al., 2011; munson & resnick, 2010; sunstein, 2009; yardi & boyd, 2010). thus this study will both look into the vertical relationship between politician-citizen, but also the horizontal citizen-to-citizen debate. these issues are studied by crawling and analyzing political candidates’ (mainly the 9 top candidates from each party) public facebook page activity including updates, likes and user comments during the danish 2011 election campaign. the case of denmark, a facebook nation denmark has a very high percentage of facebook users per capita1, but much fewer are active on twitter and so most danish political candidates also chose facebook over twitter as their preferred social medium (hoff, jensen, klastrup, schwartz, & brügger, 2013; skovsgaard & van dalen, 2013). 1 http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/ [accessed 14th of march 2013] selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 blogging was less popular, and since the danish politicians’ blogging heydays of the national election 2007, the number of politicians blogging actively have decreased from 249 to only 83 in 2011 (hoff, jensen, klastrup, schwartz, & brügger, 2013). our studies show that in 2011, around 475 candidates had a personal profile2 on facebook while 297 had a facebook page. in comparison, only 107 had a twitter-profile and many of these were inactive, with low activity or were merely duplicating facebook activity. facebook therefore seems to be a good platform for politicians to engage the citizens where they are and also the obvious choice for researchers to analyze danish politician-citizen interaction. i am conducting analysis of the debates that took place on politicians’ facebook candidate pages in order to give insight into the potential benefits and issues of choosing facebook as a mean of communication with potential voters. i wish to conceptualize different communication styles on social media from the study of candidates’ facebook pages by taking a qualitative approach of coding text moving from open codes to focused codes (emerson, fretz, & shaw, 1995). this includes looking into what types of messages and type of candidates seems to be most successful in generating user/citizen activity both likes and comments. in addition to codifying the politicians’ communication from a strategic perspective, my study also examines the users’ reactions and engagement with each other. this allows for an evaluation of whether echo chambers or polarization seem to be prevalent user-to-user, or whether a more distributed and inclusive debate seems to be taking place. here, facebook is an interesting platform to study since the boundary between private and public is more converging than on twitter, a public-bydefault platform. communication on a mixed public and private platform might be corrupted by private agendas, life politics (giddens, 1999), life style (bennett, 1998) or other narcissistic projects. on the other hand more people might be exposed to political debate in their daily life and consequently might also interact in debates that they normally would not engage in. sunstein’s warning of political polarization (2002) and echo chambers (2009) online might be more relevant to smaller groups as highlighted by farell (2012). whether facebook’s networked structure and political networked sphere encourages or excludes diverse opinions for deliberation is so far unclear since studies of social interaction and political debate on this platform is so far underrepresented in social research (enli & moe, 2013) in comparison to the more accessible twitter platform, which have been studied in various national contexts (for instance see ausserhofer & maireder, 2013; larsson & moe, 2011; burgess & bruns, 2012). different politician, different style this general study is ongoing but preliminary results show that danish politicians chose very different approaches to citizen engagement on social media during the election best exemplified by very different level of activity from the two top candidates competing for the position of prime minister lars løkke rasmussen (llr) and helle thorning-schmidt’s (hts). llr posted about 210 updates during the election campaign from 26th of august until the 15th of september whereas hts only posted 33. hts had much more likes of her page (128.743 against 91.411) but llr accumulated more likes of his updates in total than she did (92.125 against 50.090). in short llr encouraged more activity from users probably because of his many updates, even though hts had a larger audience from the likes of her page. 2 this number could deviate when taking into account unsearchable facebook profiles and profiles made under alias selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 another interesting example of social media use is the danish leading candidate for the red-green alliance party (dk: enhedslisten) johanne schmidt-nielsen (jsn) who apparently had considerable success in using facebook. jsn differed from the other leading candidates in that she had low visibility in traditional media including television (infomedia, 2011), but high activity on her facebook page both own activity and from citizens. in terms of election results, she ended up with second most personal votes, surpassed only by the former prime minister lars løkke rasmussen (llr). she by far surpassed the winning prime minister helle thorning-schmidt in personal votes. jsn was very active on facebook, posting 110 updates during the election campaign, but part of her high citizen response could also be because her party traditionally has always had a large amount of young supporters, making facebook an obvious platform for her and her party. variations in communication and style might make sense when considering politicians’ various audiences, different political candidates and their respective political parties. however, by analyzing the activity and interaction between politician and citizen on facebook further quantitatively and qualitatively, we should be able to make general statements about what type of communication and style generally encourage activity and response. variations and commonalities in candidates’ communication style are currently being analyzed further including comparisons of more candidates from the 2011 election with a focus on the 9 top candidates from each party. also users’ responses to politicians’ updates as well as user-to-user debates are being studied and results from this second part of the overall study are forthcoming. acknowledgement i want to thank dr, the danish broadcasting corporation, and danske medier (danish media) for their support and helpfulness collection of data. also thanks to my supervisor lisbeth klastrup as well as fellow colleagues jens hoff, jakob linaa jensen and niels brügger for cooperation on, and insights into, the election campaign 2011. references aronovitch, h. (2012). interpreting weber’s ideal-types. philosophy of the social sciences, 42(3), 356–369. doi:10.1177/0048393111408779 ausserhofer, j., & maireder, a. (2013). national politics on twitter. information, communication & society, 1–24. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2012.756050 bennett, w. l. (1998). 1998 ithiel de sola pool lecture: the uncivic culture: communication, identity, and the rise of lifestyle politics. ps: political science and politics, 31(4), 741–761. burgess, j., & bruns, a. (2012). (not) the twitter election. journalism practice, 6(3), 384–402. doi:10.1080/17512786.2012.663610 coleman, s., & blumler, j. g. (2009). the internet and democratic citizenship: theory, practice and policy (1st ed.). cambridge university press. comunello, f., & anzera, g. (2012). will the revolution be tweeted? a conceptual framework for understanding the social media and the arab spring. islam and christian–muslim relations, 23(4), 453–470. doi:10.1080/09596410.2012.712435 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 conover, m. d., ratkiewicz, j., francisco, m., gon\ccalves, b., flammini, a., & menczer, f. (2011). political polarization on twitter. proc. 5th intl. conference on weblogs and social media. retrieved from http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/icwsm/icwsm11/paper/download/2847/3275 elklit, j., møller, b., svensson, p. & togeby, l. (2005). gensyn med sofavælgerne valgdeltagelse i danmark. santa barbara: aarhus university press. emerson, r. m., fretz, r. i., & shaw, l. l. (1995). writing ethnographic fieldnotes. chicago: university of chicago press. enli, g., & moe, h. (2013). introduction to special issue. information, communication & society, 16(5), 637–645. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2013.784795 giddens, a. (1999). modernity and self-identity  : self and society and the late modern age (repr.). cambridge: polity press. hoff, j., jensen, j. l., klastrup, l., schwartz, s., brügger, n. (2013). internettet og folketingsvalget 2011. danskemedier. infomedia. (2011). valgkampen på facebook (report). munson, s. a., & resnick, p. (2010). presenting diverse political opinions: how and how much. proceedings of the 28th international conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1457–1466). retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1753543 larsson, a. o., & moe, h. (2011). studying political microblogging: twitter users in the 2010 swedish election campaign. new media & society, 14(5), 729–747. doi:10.1177/1461444811422894 oecd (2011), “voting”, in society at a glance 2011: oecd social indicators, oecd publishing. sunstein, c. r. (2002). the law of group polarization. journal of political philosophy, 10(2), 175–195. doi:10.1111/1467-9760.00148 sunstein, c. r. (2009). republic.com 2.0. princeton, n.j.; woodstock: princeton university press. yardi, s., & boyd, d. (2010). dynamic debates: an analysis of group polarization over time on twitter. bulletin of science, technology & society, 30(5), 316–327. doi:10.1177/0270467610380011 license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. microsoft word aoir2019_panel_final.docx selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 nansen, b. hjorth, l. pitsillides, s. and gould, h. (2019, october 2-5). the afterlives of memorial materials: data, hoax, bot. panel presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the afterlives of memorial materials: data, hoax, bot the study of death online regularly intersects with questions of trust, though such questions have evolved over time to not only include relations of trust between individuals and trust within online communities, but also issues of trust emerging through entanglements and interactions with the memorial materials, and their afterlives. papers in this panel attend to issues of trust in our relations with the afterlives of digital data, the circulation of fake deaths, the care attached to memorial bots, and the intersection of robots and funerals. over the last twenty years the study of death online developed into a diverse field of enquiry. early literature addressed the emergence of webpages created as online memorials and focused on their function to commemorate individuals by extending memorial artefacts from physical to digital spaces for the bereaved to gather (de vries and rutherford, 2004; roberts, 2004; roberts and vidal, 2000; veale, 2004). the emergence of platforms for social networking in the mid-2000s broadened the scope of research to include increasingly knotted questions around the ethics, politics and economics of death online. scholars began investigating issues like the performance of public mourning, our obligations to and management of the digital remains of the deceased, the affordances of platforms for sharing or trolling the dead, the extraction of value from the data of the deceased, and the ontology of entities that digitally persist (e.g. brubaker and callison-burch, 2016; gibbs et al., 2015; karppi, 2013; marwick and ellison, 2012; phillips, 2011; stokes, 2012). scaffolding this scholarship are a number of research networks, including the death online research network and the deathtech research network, who encourage international collaboration and conversation around the study of death and digital media, including supporting this aoir panel. this panel challenges us to go beyond a focus on the commemoration of humans to encompass a broader set of materialities in the field of research on death and digital media. digital residues of the deceased persist within and circulate through online spaces, enrolling users into new configurations of posthumous dependence on platforms, whilst at the same time digital afterlives now intersect with new technologies to create emergent forms of agency such as chatbots and robots that extend beyond the human, demanding to be considered within the sphere of digital memorialisation. questions of trust emerge in this panel through various kinds of relationality formed with and through digital remains. these extend from relations of trust in the digital legacies now archived within platform architectures and how we might curate conversations differently around our personal data; to the breaking of trust in the internet when creating or sharing a hoax death; to the trust involved in making and caring for a posthumous bot; to the trust granted to robots to perform funerary rites. it is anticipated that this panel will not only appeal to scholars interested in the area of death and digital media, but also engage with broader scholarly communities in which questions of death now arise in larger debates around data, materiality, and governance on and of the internet. references brubaker, j. r. and callison-burch, v. (2016) legacy contact: designing and implementing post-mortem stewardship at facebook. paper presented at chi workshop on human factors in computer systems, san jose california. de vries, b. and rutherford, j. (2004) memorializing loved ones on the world wide web. omega: journal of death and dying, 49(1), 5-26. gibbs, m., meese, j., arnold, m., nansen, b., and carter, m. (2015) #funeral and instagram: death, social media and platform vernacular. information communication and society, 18(3): 255-268. karppi, t. (2013) death proof: on the biopolitics and noopolitics of memorializing dead facebook users. culture machine, 14, 1-20. marwick, a. and ellison, n. (2012) “there isn’t wifi in heaven!” negotiating visibility on facebook memorial pages. journal of broadcasting and electronic media 56(3), 378– 400. phillips, w. (2011) loling at tragedy: facebook trolls, memorial pages and resistance to grief online. first monday 16(12). retrieved from http://firstmonday.org roberts, p. (2004) the living and the dead: community in the virtual cemetery. omega: journal of death and dying, 49(1), 57-76. stokes, p. (2012) ghosts in the machine: do the dead live on in facebook? philosophy and technology, 25(3), 363-379. veale, k. (2004) online memorialisation: the web as a collective memorial landscape for remembering the dead. the fibreculture journal, 3. retrieved from http://three.fibreculturejournal.org. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 hjorth, l. (2019, october 2-5). the future is death: #dearfuturecitizen. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. they say the future is death: #dearfuturecitizen larissa hjorth rmit university in a few years, facebook will have more dead than living users. what does it mean to live with data of the dead haunting us every day? how does trust operate in such a space? and how are everyday citizens thinking about digital legacy provision (i.e who will steward your data when you are dead)? in recent times there has been a growth of work considering the potential implications of our digital legacy (kaskett forthcoming; gibbs et al., 2015). we are seeing older interactions between technology and death (such as the role of the camera in memorial practices) being renewed through social media practices (for example, funeral selfies [meese et al., 2015]). at the same time, social media opens up new avenues for experiencing death and loss, from accessing facebook tribute pages during public disasters to the lingering digital traces on a smartphone of someone deceased (gibbs et al., 2015; brubaker et al., 2012; graham et al., 2013; lingel, 2013; church, 2013; deger, 2008, 2006; gibson, 2015, 2008; gibbs et al., 2015b; refslund christensen and gotved, 2014). social and mobile media are having a substantial impact on the way we think about and deal with death, loss and grief. our relationship with social media and the mobile devices we use to access social media and the array of other attendant media technologies can often be best characterised through understanding a series of intimate relationships (hinton and hjorth 2013). often these relationships are considered with respect to the living, but increasingly we need to consider the implications of the intimacy associated with social and mobile media, and how we use these to relate to death and loss. digital data allow for new ways to think about, configure and contextualise death (gotved, 2014; baumer et al., 2015). much of the literature around the way that digital media has changed our relationship with death has focused upon online memorials (de vries and rutherford, 2004) and other forms of grieving online (veale, 2003). researchers are now beginning to go further and are looking at the way engagement with death online is complicated due to the way that our online and offline lives have become entangled through social and mobile media, and thus necessarily also rituals and processes around death, dying and after-death (graham et al., 2013). where victorian rituals of death (walter et al., 2011) once compartmentalised death to the grave, and psychological models have constructed grief as something that one can “get over” (rosenblatt, 1996), the everydayness of digital media see that “death and (after-) death are, once again, becoming more public and everyday” (graham et al., 2013: 136). mobile and social media bring together a series of unique affordances that not only contextualise death within the everyday, but does so in more immediate and personal ways. our devices don’t just mediate death and its attendant rituals, but also remediate and mediatise, allowing for the emergence of different interactions between individuals, intimate publics, peri-mortem and post-mortem rituals. this phenomenon can be understood in terms of digital afterlife. the digital afterlife in the past when a loved one passed away, those left behind continue to have duties to the deceased. material possessions are sorted, sold, gifted, and traces of the deceased such as photos or the most personal possessions are stored as memorial keepsakes. today it is hard not to leave a digital footprint. many people have at least one social media profile, and as we increasingly use technologies like wearables to track our behaviour, and even as our consumption moves from physical media, to broadcast and live streaming media, we accrue a digital presence, replete with digital possessions and us-shaped data patterns in the digital firmament. what happens to these digital possessions and traces that defined a person in life? what are the issues we need to consider in the digital afterlife? graham et al. have argued new media are changing our relationship with life and death. they are enabling new modes for life to be “extended, prolonged and ultimately transformed through the new circulations, repetitions, and recontextualizations on the internet and other platforms” (2013: 133). digital data allow new ways in which to construct one’s life, death and after-death (stanyek and piekut, 2010; de vries and rutherford, 2004; veale, 2003; bollmer, 2013; bennett and bennett, 2000; jones, 2004). mobile media can play a role as a witness, repository, disseminator and magnifier of events. however, we are also seeing the development of novel ways to engage with death at a personal level through social media, with new genres such as “selfies at funeral” signalling emergent relations between intimacy, mobile media, etiquette and affect (meese et al., 2015; gibbs et al., 2015). through its assemblage of intimate and yet public textures, mobile media makes us reconsider the relationship between death and afterlife, especially with the digital afterlife and posthumous performativity still relatively underexplored (stanyek and piekut, 2010). as refslund christensen and gotved observe, “media are materialities that allow us to communicate with the dead or about the dead over the gaps between the world of the living and whatever spatial and temporal sphere the dead may reside without being absorbed into these gaps ourselves” (2015: 1). these materialities potentially includes a vast range of digital possessions and derived data, ranging from social media accounts to music collections, from collected data such as exercise and other qs data to all manner of things which are now stored on the cloud. these media materialities provide often significantly intimate connections with the deceased, and raise important questions about what is to be done with this data, and who should make decisions about that data on behalf of the dead. we are now witnessing the rise of digital afterlife roles such as “stewarding” (or managing online media of a posthumous loved one) that involves often invisible and yet symbolic practices not often acknowledged in visual labour of social media (brubaker, 2016). this talk explores how we might curate conversations differently around data of dead. it draws on an art installation entitled #dearfuturecitizen (rmit gallery feb 2019) that asked audience members to sit on a fake island and contemplate the future of data in their life. through postcard prompts, audience participants are asked to write on a postcard their hopes and fears for the future of data. it seeks to ask: how should living with data of the dead look and feel like? the postcards were then documented through social media #dearfuturecitizen to curate a space for sharing these stories and hopes online. this talk explores how creative methods and modes of knowledge exchange might create (and curate) a deeper understanding into these cofuturing issues around trust, data and death. references bollmer, g. (2013) millions now living will never die: cultural anxieties about the afterlife of information. the information society, 29(3), 142–151. brubaker, j. r. (2016, june 13) stewarding someone else’s self: a study of stewardship experiences of post-mortem profiles on facebook. paper presented at the international communication association annual conference in fukuoka, japan. brubaker, j., ananny, m., and crawford, k. (2014) departing glances: a sociotechnical account of ‘leaving’ grindr. new media and society, 18(3), 373–390. brubaker, j. r., dombrowski, l., gilbert, a., kusumakaulika, n., and hayes, g. r. (2014) stewarding a legacy: responsibilities and relationships in the management of post-mortem data. proc.chi 2014. toronto, canada. april 26–may 1. cumsikey, k. and l. hjorth (2018) haunting hands. oxford: oxford uni press. gibbs, m., meese, j., arnold, m., nansen, b., and carter, m. (2015b) #funeral and instagram: death, social media, and platform vernacular. information, communication and society, 18(3), 255–68. gibson, m. (2015) automatic and automated mourning: messengers of death and messages from the dead. continuum, 29(3), 339–353. gotved, s. (2014) research review: death online alive and kicking! thanatos, 3(1), 112–180. retrieved from https://thanatosjournal.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/gotved_deathonline2.pdf graham, c., gibbs, m., and aceti, l. (2013) introduction to the special issue on the death, afterlife, and immortality of bodies and data. the information society, 29(3), 133– 141. hinton, s., and hjorth, l. (2013) understanding social media. london: sage. hoskins, a. (2011) media, memory, metaphor: remembering and the connective turn. parallax, 17(4), 19–31. jones, steve. (2004) 404 not found: the internet and the afterlife. omega: journal of death and dying, 49(1), 83–88. kohn, t., nansen, b., arnold, m., and gibbs, m. (2012) facebook and the other: administering to and caring for the dead online. in g. hage (ed.), responsibility (pp. 128–141). melbourne: university of melbourne press. leaver, t. (2013) the social media contradiction: data mining and digital death, m/c journal, 16(2) — 'mining'. retrieved from http://journal.mediaculture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/625 lingel, j. (2013) the digital remains: social media and practices of online grief. the information society: an international journal, 29(3), 190–195. meese, j., gibbs, m., carter, m. et al. (2015) selfies at funerals: mourning and presencing on social media platforms. international journal of communication, 9(1), 1818–1831. nansen, b., arnold, m., gibbs, m., and kohn, t. (2014) the restless dead in the digital cemetery. in c. moreman and lewis, a. (eds.), digital death: mortality and beyond in the online age (pp. 111–124). westport: abc-clio, llc. papailias, p. (2016) witnessing in the age of the database: viral memorials, affective publics, and the assemblage of mourning. memory studies, 9(4), 437–454. refslund christensen, d., and gotved, s. (2014) online memorial culture: an introduction. new review of hypermedia and multimedia, 21(1–2), 1–9. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 nansen, b. o’donnell, d. arnold, m. kohn, t, gould, h, and gibbs, m. (2019, october 2-5). “i’m bout to get this trending…”: fake deaths on twitter. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “i’m bout to get this trending…”: fake deaths on twitter bjorn nansen, dominic o’donnell, michael arnold, tamara kohn, hannah gould, martin gibbs the university of melbourne introduction and background on the 23rd of february 2015, a rumour began circulating on twitter that singer beyoncé knowles had died, resulting in “#ripbeyonce” trending. the rumour began with a user, @mattmcgrail, deliberately starting the hashtag, tweeting “i’m bout to get this trending… #ripbeyonce” (8:19 pm – 23 feb, 2015). the hoax quickly spread with numerous users tweeting the news via the hashtag, and as the initial tweet gained more feedback (i.e., replies/retweets/likes), the hashtag trended and there emerged a diversity of user responses, spreading from grief, to doubt, to more critical and cultural commentary on the phenomenon of fake death announcements online. media have long operated as a means of both memorializing and communicating death (e.g., arnold et al., 2018; jones 2004). print enabled a death notice posted in a public place or an obituary in a newspaper to circulate widely than (starck, 2006). more recently, death notices have spread beyond the classified sections of newspapers, via the internet and social media, eroding social, geographic and temporal limitations in communicating news of the deceased. this has, in turn, amplified possibilities for fake or premature announcements of death to be produced and distributed. in this paper, we analyse fake death announcements of public figures on social media, and the public responses to them. we identify a pattern of user responses, which cycle through more expected reactions from sharing the news, to grief, to uncertainty and disbelief. but we also identify more critical and culturally oriented responses to such death announcements. these responses offer critiques of the context of this phenomenon in relation to either the quality of digital news or to cultures of social media. such critiques raise questions about the viral and performative qualities of both public mourning and expressions of cultural capital in public responses to fake death announcements. research approach this analysis draws from a range of public sources to collect and categorise the volume of fake death announcements noted on twitter – see table 1 for types. we then conducted a case study analysis of representative examples of these different types of fake death using twitter’s advanced search feature to collect data on the timeline, posts, and reactions to these fake announcements – see table 1 for cases studies. this analysis is briefly summarised below. table 1: types, and case studies of fake death announcements type/definition case studies accidental: inadvertent release of drafted obituaries or death announcement prince philip (2017) misreport: unintentional misreporting by news account (often misinterpreted illness or near death) tom petty (2017) misunderstanding: unintentional misreport by social media user gene hackman (2015) hacking: account of public figure or news outlet hacked, and fake death deliberately posted jack black (2016) hoax: deliberate fake report made on social media as prank or scam beyoncé (2015) brad pitt (2016) discussion inadvertent fake announcements inadvertent types of publicly announced death announcements include accidental, misreporting, and misunderstanding. for example, most accidental publications of draft obituaries come from news websites, such as the sun accidentally publishing a drafted obituary of prince philip in 2017. misreported deaths typically result from misinterpretation of a reported illness or brush with death, such as when cbs news prematurely announced in 2017 that tom petty had died after he went into cardiac arrest. misunderstood deaths often result from a user posting a death announcement after misunderstanding news information, such as pop-culture blog grantland posting an article in 2017 on gene hackman’s retirement from acting with the vague use of the word ‘gone’ in the headline “the greatest living american actor at 85: gene hackman is gone but still in charge”. deliberate fake announcements in contrast, deliberate hoax death announcements mostly functioned as a prank as in the case of beyoncé, but also for more malicious purposes, such as phishing scams, as in the case of a fake news article claiming brad pitt had suicided in 2016. other deliberate fake deaths use hacked social media accounts of a public figure or news provider. for example, in 2016, @ruthless hacked the account of jack black’s band tenacious d (@realtenaciousd) and posted the false claim that black had died. patterns of user response on twitter, these announcements typically cycle through a pattern of personal and affective responses, with initial posts reporting the event or expressing grief. another set of tweets express uncertainty, confusion or doubt about the event. users question the veracity of the story based on the source of the announcement, or try to debunk rumours by reference to other reporting or authoritative sources: • “did gene hackman die? i just saw @dylanmcdermott post that he did but i can’t find proof on the internet. another #celebritydeathhoax?” (@heathercnick, 27 jan 2015) • “tom petty didn’t die? his daughter posted on instagram that he’s still alive. come on fam.” (@___panther, 3 oct 2017, 3 replies, 7 retweets, 18 likes) beyond this clear pattern, we also saw two key threads of user commentary and critique emerge around fake deaths. commentary on fake deaths critical responses to the more inadvertent types of fake death focused on the deterioration of journalism in digital spaces, accusing both individual journalists – as in the disapproval of grantland for its vague headline – and news organisations or media more generally of poor quality journalism for prematurely (mis)reporting a death in the rush to publish first: • “so grantland puts up a confusing headline that presumes gene hackman is dead and it goes viral. click-bait has once again reached a new low.” (@sleepyskunk, 28 jan 2015) • “unsure if tom petty is actually dead. however i’m very sure that ‘getting it right over getting it first’ journalism is.” (@cathrynlavery, 3 oct 2017, 1 retweet, 8 likes) in contrast, critical responses to deliberate types of fake death (hoax, hacking), were directed at social media platforms for enabling fake deaths to be generated and circulated, or at cultures of social media use contributing to the frequency of instances and persistence of rumours surrounding fake deaths: • “just a meme bro” (@realtenaciousd, 5 jun 2016, feedback data not available) • “i love when twitter kills off celebrities #ripbeyonce” (@loveyahbrooke, 8:53 pm – 23 feb 2015, 1 like) • “there’s always a couple of friends who are first with the “rip celebrity” post on fb.. just waiting them to fall for the jack black hoax!” (@qn1981, 2 likes) • “the jack black death hoax proves one thing. children and idiots should not be allowed to use the internet unsupervised! that is all.” (@originalkrush, 5 jun 2016, 1 like) users often deployed humour as a form of social commentary about the operation of fake deaths within internet culture, and topics ranging from fake news, to celebrity, to contagion, to memes (phillips and milner, 2017). here, the ‘spreadability’ (jenkins, 2013) of fake deaths is facilitated through platform affordances and features such as hashtags; whilst the culture of ‘viral performativity’ in pubic mourning (mitchell et al., 2016) is subverted and critiqued as a way to assert one’s digital literacy and cultural capital. references arnold, m., gibbs, m., kohn, t., meese, j., and nansen, b. (2018) death and digital media. routledge. jenkins, h. (2013) spreadable media: creating value and meaning in a networked culture. new york: new york university press. jones, s. (2004) 404 not found: the internet and the afterlife. omega, journal of death and dying, 48(1), 83-88. karlsson, m. (2011) the immediacy of online news, the visibility of journalistic processes and a restructuring of journalistic authority. journalism 12(3), 279–95. mitchell, p., axel, b., and münch, f. (2016) the (net)work of mourning: emotional contagion, viral performativity, and the death of david bowie. in proceedings of the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers, 1–2. phillips, w., and milner, r.m. (2017) the ambivalent internet: mischief, oddity, and antagonism online. polity press. starck, n. (2006) life after death: the art of the obituary. melbourne university publishing. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 pitsillides, s. (2019, october 2-5). care between humans and non-humans: material/ making/ memorialisation. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. care between humans and non-humans: material/ making/ memorialisation dr stacey pitsillides university of greenwich care is a concept that has strong interdisciplinary qualities and deep roots as a mode of inquiry. when framed as a research question care can be used a method to draw together different disciplines such as philosophy (kirkegard, 2009 [1938]), nursing (dyson, 1996) and design (latour, 2008) into a productive dialogue. the move towards a person-centred approaches [client-centred theory] in hospice care and user-centred or human-centred design principles, put the human holistically at the heart of the product, service or system. however, what happens to these approaches when involving nonhumans in networks of care? consider the word care, etymologically it embodies strong links to grief1 but was defined (1580s) as an “object or matter of concern” (https://www.etymonline.com/word/care). exploring how care can be informed by grief through an object highlights the deep connection between human and non-human actors. it connects to latour’s (2008) use of things as gatherings to open up a theory of design as engagement, including: “care, precautions, skills, crafts, meanings, attention to details … [and] careful conservations” (p.7). this paper extends latour’s research, questioning how care is activated and situated within networks when creating memorial bots and activating twitter-based tributes. the material of care: making as an expression of care considering the work of søren kierkegaard (1938) the link between labour and care provides a conducive platform for understanding the transformation of material things into matters of concern, for example the woman making an altar cloth works: 1 old english caru, cearu "sorrow, anxiety, grief" and proto-germanic karō "lament; grief, care." “day and night for her … beloved work. but when the cloth is finished and put to its sacred use: then she is deeply distressed if someone should make the mistake of looking at her art… instead of the meaning of the cloth. for she could not work the sacred meaning into the cloth itself, nor could she sew it onto the cloth as though it were one more ornament.” (kierkegaard, 2009: 13) this statement explores how the material qualities of making are used critically to embed meaning into something beyond ourselves. in design this form of care is a creative practice that produces critical and situated reflections (suchman, 2002). mol (2008) states “good care is … something that grows out of collaborative and continuing attempts to attune knowledge and technologies to diseased bodies and complex lives” (loc 11), while gunaratnam (2007) reflects on her practice of constructing poems that respond to pain. her practise of caring for the data and the people interviewed creates an emotional response, which is ethically situated and corporally felt. mol and gunaratnam share an approach to care as a responsive process, similar to the attempt to embed spirituality into alter cloth. rather then imposing our will on materials, we are in correspondence with them (ingold, 2013: 31) crafting code in response to “material, humanity, and environment” (richardson (2005: 157) that allows online or digital making to be situated within the technological system enhancing the agency of the dead and our trust in the technologies that produce them. constructing care: dadbot and #thatdragoncancer the dadbot project documents the life of noah’s farther with stage iv lung cancer transforming overtime into a project to distil his father’s biographical narrative (walter, 1996) into a bot. making the bot was a way of spending time with his father during his death and posthumously. in wired’s short film (2017)2 noah describes making the bot as a way of ‘being’ with his father after death. his solace was that “the dadbot’s digital brain has [his] dad’s real words” (0:50 – 0:58). during the process of the oral history he recorded 91,970 words that needed to be pattern matched through artificial intelligence and it is through this reassembly that the network is revealed. there is a reciprocal relationship demonstrated here. through interacting, the dadbot takes care of noah by singing (0:22), chatting and revealing particular links to memories and he takes care of the dadbot through working on the code that constructs it. there is a trust placed in the way that the technology illuminates the playfulness of their relationship. however, it is when it breaks down that its agency is revealed for example when it doesn’t say ‘i love you.’ noah reflects: “i was disappointed in the dadbot when he didn’t say he loved me back… on two levels, one just the technological, like dadbot your supposed to know that… but, its fake and yet i wanted to hear it even though i am making it, it still feels nice to me if my dad says something personal to me” (6:46 – 7:14) 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq7v74s6e04 however, there is something in the error of recognition that reveals a very human quality. through his fathers lack of response, he is able to question his relationship within the technological system. in contrast to the dadbot being a collection of noah’s father, that dragon, cancer is computer game made as a tribute to the life of joel green who died of cancer at the age of five. the game navigates a range of surreal environments showing the various stages of cancer’s infiltration into the green’s lives. the game is a form of care as an expression of love and loss. it gives their sons story the agency to extend his presence beyond his short life. his mother’s words on their blog give some insight into this: “he might not have had a job, or a wife, but he did impact the world, because he impacted us”3. the game ends with a scene called the pancake party (figure 1) that is a 3d manifestation of all the things that joel loved, set up as an interactive collage with oversized pancakes and blowable bubbles. these digital things confirm joel’s childlike desires and his families need to continue bonds through the things he loved. the pancakes are expanded as a network through launching the game with a worldwide pancake party for joel on twitter. this act of eating pancakes and writing messages for the family extends the final scene of the game into the material world, sharing the labour of making pancakes and the results as a multisensory digital memorial – a collection of care and an act of collective care that the family entrusts to this digital community. conclusion considering dadbot and the twitter pancake party, this paper considers how we may explore sites of digital care holistically beyond their products. both examples encompass a tangible link to how the practice of making is embedded into the creative interpretation, past and present. the pancake party on twitter constructs a shared act 3 http://www.thatdragoncancer.com/thatdragoncancer/2015/12/28/pancakes-for-dinner-summarizing-a-lifecut-short of eating that creates an online space for taking care of the bereaved family. dadbot shows a correspondence of care and trust between humans and non-humans that embodies externalisation of conversations with the dead. together they activate the role of things, materials and practices in relation to caring for the dead digitally. references: dyson, j. (1996). nurses' conceptualizations of caring attitudes and behaviours. journal of advanced nursing, 23(6), 1263-1269. gunaratnam, y., (2007). where is the love? art, aesthetics and research. journal of social work practice, 21(3), p.271-287. ingold, t. (2013). making: anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. routledge. kierkegaard, s. (2009). purity of heart is to will one thing. feather trail press: usa latour, b., (2008). a cautious prometheus? a few steps toward a philosophy of design. in proceedings of the 2008 conference of the design history society (p. 2-10). mol, a. (2008). the logic of care: health and the problem of patient choice. routledge. richardson, a., (2005). new media, new craft. in proceedings of the international conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques (p.157-159). suchman, l. (2002). located accountabilities in technology production. scandinavian journal of information systems, 14(2), 7. walter, t., (1996). a new model of grief: bereavement and biography. mortality, 1(1), p.7–25 selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 gould, h. arnold, m. gibbs, m. kohn, t. nansen, b. (2019, october 2-5). robotic paths to a good death: funerals with, by, and for robots. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. robotic paths to a good death: funerals with, by, and for robots hannah gould, michael arnold, martin gibbs, tamara kohn, bjorn nansen the university of melbourne across the globe, experiences of death, dying, disposition, and grief are increasingly inflected by digital technologies (arnold et al. 2017), including robotic agencies. while popular visions of robotic technofutures drift between apocalypse and utopia, between the annihilation of human life and the transcendence of human mortality, this paper considers more mundane, but still significant, entanglements between robotics and death in the context of the funeral ceremony. recently, a number of experimental robotic technologies have emerged as possible means for securing a ‘good death’ in the 21st century. this analysis is based on fieldwork within japanese and us funerary industries during 2016-2019. in the following case studies, robots take on the funeral roles of attendee, religious specialist, and the dead. a ‘good death’ generally describes culturally normative modes of dying and memorialisation, although it is a shifting signifier with diverse meanings. robotic agencies now dominate other dimensions of our lives, but can we trust them to deliver a ‘good death’ for our loved ones? or, is our model of a ‘good death’ being transformed by robotic participation? the extra-human intimacies that robotic participation creates also prompt us to consider if and when the pliable notion of a ‘good death’ might extend to non-human robotic kin. carl: funerals with robots bailey and walter argue that “the very presence” of those who knew the deceased at the funeral is one of the most important factors people use in assessing the quality of a funeral experience (2016). however, within increasingly globally dislocated communities, attending funeral services in person can place substantial burdens on time and finances. travel to funerals by attendees is also one of the most significant factors contributing to the environmental impact of funerals (keijzer 2017). figure 1. carl deployed at funeral ceremony robots present one possible solution to this challenge, by creating a mobile telepresence for those unable to attend the service in person. ‘carl’ (figure 1) was showcased at various funeral industry expos in 2016. with a high-definition monitor for a ‘head’, together with a webcam and sound system mounted to a remote-controlled mobile pedestal ‘body’, adjustable to any height, carl lets users deliver eulogies from the pulpit and mingle with other guests at the ceremony. many funeral service providers offer video recording and live streaming of funeral services, which can capture its formal aspects. however, they elide the social aspects of the funeral, which emerge from informal interactions between guests (arnold et al. 2018: 112). the proposition offered by carl was to provide social engagement at funerals for distantly-located guests, who would ‘drive’ the machine and make choices about how to engage. however, a relative novelty at the industry expo, carl’s commercial fate is uncertain. pepper: funerals by robots at the 2017 international funeral industry expo in tokyo, large crowds witnessed the launch of a new service by plastics manufacturer nissei eco: buddhist funeral rites conducted by a robot priest (figure 2). the robot in question, pepper, was launched in 2014 and has since become japan’s most prevalent commercial robot. pepper’s unique selling point is its ability to read human emotions via the analysis of human speech patterns and facial expressions. dressed in silk robes with a mallet strapped to one arm, pepper performed excerpts of the heart sutra, striking a large bell and wooden block in time. figure 2. pepper performs a demonstration funeral rite, tokyo, 2017. the service addressed growing vulnerabilities identified in japanese social structure that have historically been relied upon to secure a ‘good death’ via the performance of extended funeral ceremonies. an increasingly isolated and ageing rural population and economic downturn has resulted in temple closures across japan in recent years, and nissei esso presents pepper as filling a serious deficit in the number of monks available to perform funerals. the socio-religious context of japan helps explain why robotic funeral specialists make sense. in japan, priests perform an increasingly limited role as ritual specialists within a broader, more secular ceremony (suzuki 2000). further, as rambelli observes (2018) japanese buddhism has a long history of mechanising ritual performance, to a perceived increase, not decline, in its spiritual efficacy. aibo: funerals for robots how might the participation of robots in human funerals affect how we view, and perhaps mark, the life and death of robots? figure 3. a kofukuji priest performs kuyō for aibo, 2018. in may 2018, the 450-year-old buddhist temple, kofukuji, held a memorial service (kuyō) for over one hundred aibo ‘dog’ robots (figure 3). aibo were produced by sony from 1999-2006. despite gaining a cult following, they never became commercially viable. in march 2014, sony stopped producing replacement parts for the early models and many aibo fell into disrepair and eventually ‘died’, despite efforts to crowdsource parts from ‘donor’ dogs (robertson 2018: 164). in japan, there is a long history of buddhist memorial rites marking the death of nonhuman persons. historically, the list of entities deemed to require kuyō is subject to contestation and change, but has often included objects of intense use and human contact, such as professional tools (needles, scissors, eye glasses), or quasi-humanoid objects, like dolls and certain animals (whales, laboratory monkeys). social scientists have suggested that lay people’s performance of memorial rites for objects are motivated by feelings of kinship and concern towards things, rather than buddhist doctrine (kretschmer 2000). this sense of kinship between human and nonhuman persons is not exclusive to the religious or cultural context of japan. in 2013, american soldiers stationed in iraq were reported to have held an elaborate funeral including a 21-gun salute for their fallen comrade, boomer; a robot designed to locate and disarm explosives (garber 2013). conclusion one persistent definition of humanity’s distinctiveness as a species is our awareness of mortality and its marking through ritual, but recently, participation in these rites has extended to include non-human robotic persons. in japan, robotic priests borrow the authenticity of buddhist performance; companion robots borrow the authenticity of their intimate interactions with the lives of their owners. they appear to create meaningful funeral experiences and contribute to a ‘good death’. however, robotic funeral experiments in the us have been less successful, and those in japan are not without their detractors. death and its ritualization are a space in which the personhood of robots, and their ability to sustain authentic moral and social relations, are tested. references arnold, m., gibbs, m., kohn, t., meese, j., & nansen, b. 2017. death and digital media. routledge. bailey, tara & tony walter. 2016. funerals against death. mortality, 21(2): 149-166. garber, megan. 2013. funerals for fallen robots. the atlantic, september 20. kretschmer, angelika. 2000. mortuary rites for inanimate objects: the case of hari kuyō. japanese journal of religious studies, 27(3/4), 379–404. keijzer, elizabeth. 2017. the environmental impact of activities after life: life cycle assessment of funerals. the international journal of life cycle assessment 22(5): 715-730. rambelli, fabio. 2018. dharma devices, non-hermeneutical libraries, and robotmonks: prayer machines in japanese buddhism. journal of asian humanities at kyushu university, 3, 57–75. robertson, jennifer. 2018. robot reincarnation: rubbish, artefacts, and mortuary rituals. in cwiertka, katarzyna j. & ewa machotka (eds.)., consuming life in postbubble japan: a transdisciplinary perspective, 153-173. amsterdam university press. suzuki, hikaru. 2000. the price of death: the funeral industry in contemporary japan. stanford university press. microsoft word 861-605-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 #lightsout: audiencing and ad hoc community formation in the super bowl discussion network stacy blasiola university of illinois at chicago united states sblasi2@uic.edu james carviou university of iowa united states james-carviou@uiowa.edu abstract when the lights went out at the superdome during the 2013 nfl super bowl, twitter exploded. this paper presents a discourse analysis of tweets that used the #lightsout hashtag. drawing from the concepts of audiencing and ad hoc community formation, we argue that in addition to serving a role for football fans to audience the event, #lightsout became a site of cultural negotiation for communities otherwise marginalized by the cultural force of the super bowl. the results of this research serve as a theoretical launch point for the study of twitter and television audience practices. twitter, audiencing, introduction in the u.s., the national football league’s championship game, the super bowl, is a major cultural event. super bowl xlviii captured 108.4 million television viewers (nielsen, 2013) and generated a total of 24.1 million related tweets (ashtari, 2013). interestingly, it was an event peripheral to the game that created the most chatter: the unexpected power outage that caused the lights in the superdome stadium to go out resulting in a thirty-four minute stoppage of play. almost instantly, the #lightsout hashtag became a trending topic on twitter. we conducted a qualitative discourse analysis of #lightsout tweets to explore how the blackout affected the discourse practices of a dominant cultural event. we found evidence of ad hoc community formation (bruns & burgess, 2011) in that the unexpected blackout allowed for marginalized communities to appropriate the narrative of the super bowl to fit their own storytelling devices. we also found evidence of traditional audiencing (fiske, 1992) as displaced viewers took to twitter to comment on the game and ponder the cause of the delay. twitter television studies the micro-blogging tool twitter has provided researchers with the ability to track and analyze realtime discussions of topical events. twitter television studies have investigated how fans interact with episodic (mcpherson et al., 2012) and live events (highfield, harrington, & bruns, 2012). rather than detracting users from television viewing, twitter creates a shared space for fans to come together to discuss and critique television shows and events (highfield, et al., 2012) and engage in audiencing--a behavior that allows an audience to connect itself with the content. live-tweeting television shows enhances the viewing experience for users and serves to reinforce the tweeting behavior (mcpherson et al., 2012). ad hoc publics and audiencing bruns and burgess (2013) identified ad hoc publics created around political user-generated hashtags, explaining they emerge “the moment they are needed” (p. 7). we argue that similarly, ad hoc communities may form around socio-cultural events. bruns and burgess distinguish the behavior of ad hoc communities from audiencing--the flow of activity between a text and the consumer of it that makes him/her both a recipient and an actor (fiske, 1992)--by citing the difference in discursive practices and engagement (rts, @replies) afforded by twitter. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 drawing from the previous literature we ask: what were the discursive practices used by those who tweeted #lightsout? what communities, if any, emerged through the #lightsout conversation? what audiencing behaviors emerged? method guided by the frameworks of audiencing and ad hoc communities, this analysis seeks to understand the “systematic links between texts, discourse practices, and sociocultural practices” (fairclough, 1995, p. 17). we define discourse as a text (fairclough, 1995; wood and kroger, 2000) that may encompass “spoken or written language use” in which language use is a social practice (fairclough, 2000, p. 309). our unit of analysis is the individual tweet. data tweets were collected with the open source yourtwapperkeeper. we collected a total of 16,443 tweets containing the #lightsout hashtag between 10:00 pm sunday, february 3rd and 11:59 pm monday, february 4th. due to limitations in the twitter api not all tweets were collected (see bruns, 2011). there were 11,942 tweets marked as retweets (rt). of those, 88 individual tweets accounted for a total of 9,770 rts. given their prominence, these 88 top tweets were isolated for analysis. analysis twitter mechanics analysis of the top tweets revealed a keen understanding of the mechanics of hashtag use on twitter with advertisers and individual users making use of its popularity for self-promotion (page, 2012). bruns and burgess (2011) found that hashtags are often negotiated. there was evidence of this, for example, as one top tweet commented “@nicoleblogsbuzz: #lightsout by @wearetheincrowd is the best song ever...wait...what do you mean i'm not using the hashtag right?!” such self-awareness of the hashtag’s intended purpose and the reappropriation to fit a personal narrative reflects skilled use of the affordances of twitter (magee et al. 2013) while reinforcing the emergent proper use of the hashtag (bruns & burgess 2011, page, 2012). audiencing not unexpectedly, multiple top tweets related to the game itself and the effect the blackout would have on the outcome, for example, “rt @dfreese23: just like rain delays. how quickly games can change. #lightsout”. thus the event-within-the-event not only prolonged the outcome of the game, but also created a space to extend fan engagement at its peak—providing evidence of audiencing. humorous, sarcastic, and speculative tweets about what could have caused the delay gained the most traction in rts about the game: “rt @sean_spurney: the 49'ers said we aren't losing like this... *pulls the power plug* .. #lightsout” ad hoc communities many of the top tweets contained references to pop culture titles such as the hunger games, batman, and harry potter. in keeping with magee et al., (2013), these tweets displayed knowledge of the narrative by including characters and specific terminology in a manner that indicates ingroup affiliation. interestingly, these tweets renegotiate the super bowl narrative as a form of storytelling— specific to their referenced pop culture text—under the shared theme of a hashtag. for example “@arrypottah: the power went out at the super bowl. too bad you muggles don't have lumos. #lightsout #poweroutage” uses the harry potter pejorative term “muggles” along with “lumos,” the name of a spell, to appropriate the super bowl narrative into a potter storyline. similar tactics were displayed across the tweets that made references to pop culture titles. thus #lightsout allowed existing, potentially marginalized communities to come together—via a larger ad hoc community centered on the hashtag—to appropriate the dominant super bowl narrative. discussion selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 the audience for the super bowl represents one of the widest variations of demographics on television. our analysis revealed #lightsout was used in both audiencing practices and in the formation of ad hoc communities. given the large number of rts in the dataset, there is evidence that “users were not merely tweeting into the hashtag stream, but also following what others are posting” (bruns & burgess, 2011, p. 6). additionally, the use of ingroup terminology and the appropriation of the narrative in the rts suggest that many users in the dataset were participating in the formation of an ad hoc community, one that connected their own with the larger cultural event of the super bowl. tweets with references to pop culture were evidence of this in their shared nerdiness with one’s followers and the larger hashtag community. although this study is limited in the scope of its dataset, it suggests the potential for future research that works to interrogate audience practices that are dynamically attached to the opportunity to instantly respond to live events on twitter. more research needs to be conducted in this realm by examining the potential communal engagement that unfolds via a trending hashtag where elements of social capital (putnam, 2000) are present even for a brief moment. twitter offers the opportunity to examine both without actually going into the individual homes of members of the audience. unlike ethnographies of television from past audience studies, researchers are in the position to quickly gauge audience response and examine the flow (williams, 1975) of the audience. thus, this study serves as launch point for research on the relationship between twitter and audience practices. references ashtari, o. (2013, february 03). the super tweets of #sb47. twitter blog. retreived from http://blog.twitter.com/2013/02/the-super-tweets-of-sb47.html bruns, a. (2011). how long is a tweet? mapping dynamic conversation networks on twitter using gawk and gephi. information, communication & society, 15(9), 1323-1351. bruns, a., & burgess, j. (2011). the use of twitter hashtags in the formation of ad hoc publics. in 6th european consortium for political research general conference, 25 27 august 2011, university of iceland, reykjavik. retrieved from http://eprints.qut.edu.au/46515/1/the_use_of_twitter_hashtags_in_the_formation_of_ad_h oc_publics_(final).pdf fairclough, n. (1995). media discourse. london: edward arnold. fairclough, n. (2000). critical analysis of media discourse. in p. morris & s. thornham (eds.), media studies: a reader (pp. 308-325). new york: nyu press. fiske, j. (1992). audiencing: a cultural studies approach to watching television. poetics, 21(4), 345 359. highfield, t., harrington, s., & bruns, a. (2012). twitter as a technology for audiencing and fandom: the #eurovision phenomenon. information, communication & society (ahead-of-print), 1-25. magee, r. m., sebastian, m., novak, a., mascaro, c. m., black, a., & goggins, s. p. (2013). #twitterplay: a case study of fan roleplaying online. paper presented at the proceedings of the 2013 cscw conference, san antonio, tx, usa. mcpherson, k., huotari, k., cheng, f. y.-s., humphrey, d., cheshire, c., & brooks, a. l. (2012). glitter: a mixed-methods study of twitter use during glee broadcasts. paper presented at the proceedings of the acm 2012 conference on computer supported cooperative work companion, seattle, washington, usa. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 nielsen. (2013, february 5). super bowl xlviii: how we watch and connect across screens. nielsen.com. retrieved from http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/newswire/2013/super-bowl-xlvii draws-108-7-million-viewers-26-1-tweets.html page, r. (2012). the linguistics of self-branding and micro-celebrity in twitter: the role of hashtags. discourse & communication 6 (2), 181-201. putnam, r. (2000). bowling alone: the collapse and revival of american community. newyork: simon and schuster. sarver, r. (2013, february 03). [tweet]. retrieved from https://twitter.com/rsarver/statuses/298245885517783042 williams, r. (1975) television: technology and cultural form. new york: schocken books. wood, l. a., & kroger, r. (2000). doing discourse analysis: methods for studying action in talk and text. thousand oaks: sage. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 previously on…participatory culture and the recap melinda sebastian drexel university department of culture & communication united states mjs426@drexel.edu abstract this paper presents a comparative framing analysis of “recaps” of an episode of “the vampire diaries” (tvd), from www.ew.com (ew) and www.televisionwithoutpity.com (twop). ew and the cw network, which airs tvd, are both owned by time warner and twop has been owned by nbc universal since 2007. recaps were initially almost always a fan endeavor, written with sarcasm, with enjoyment or both. recently a tension has emerged between the writers of recaps (recappers), the fans of the recaps, and the corporations who own the sites that host them. this analysis attempts to discuss the ways in which the recap can serve as an example of the tension inherent to convergence culture, where emphasis on the production and circulation of media content depends heavily on the participation of the consumer. this paper is presented as part of ongoing research into the participatory culture of recaps and online fan communities. keywords recap; fan culture; participatory culture; convergence culture; community; play introduction a recap is in essence a summary of events. television creators have been using them for decades as television began to showcase increasingly narratively complex shows (thompson, 2003) that required a short “previously on” segment at the beginning of each new program to “catch up” the viewers. this was because the number of characters and plots had increased to the point that a summary of events was often necessary. in recent years the idea of a recap has grown into something even more playful, with more recappers offering thoughtful recaps of popular shows that are often works of art all their own. the shows recapped range in genre and include dramas, situational comedies, and reality tv. as the recap has grown more popular, it has also grown more profitable, and the pressure has also grown to produce them as quickly as possible after a show airs. this may leave a recapper in an uncomfortable space, pulled in two directions by their enjoyment of a show and the need to produce quickly to earn the most participation and profit. this is not to oversimplify the issue and suggest that profit margins must always somehow “mar” art, but is instead intended to articulate a potential issue for particular online communities in the recapping world, that may be explored through qualitative analysis. baym writes that qualitative research is a “dynamic” process, where researchers must continually, “find balance between opposing pulls” (markham & baym, 2009, p. 174). similarly, i attempt to situate this research in the convergence culture literature (jenkins, 2006) by acknowledging the often opposing pulls of fandom, and the consumer side of the transmedia phenomenon (phillips, 2012) of the recap. this “pressure of production” can prove too much for some recappers. some may quit recapping particular shows or may stop recapping altogether. the deadlines can be “brutal” in a competition to remain “relevant”(juzwiak, 2012). the pressure to produce is similar to journalism and other time sensitive businesses, except that recapping is inherently a creative endeavor, not one based in fact. so for those who write the most popular recaps, simply offering the fastest and most “correct” recap is not competitive. a good recap elevates the material and makes a contribution to the story in a silly, thoughtful, or sarcastic way. the work necessary to craft a competitive piece in a very short amount of time, could eventually seem futile. recappers can feel overwhelmed by the very ephemeral nature of the whole endeavor. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 6 yet at the same time this ephemeral state may allow a certain freedom and chance at play that isn’t present in the creation of other media, particularly if profit is not of primary concern to the recapper. if the recapper doesn’t write for a major site, they may often feel free to experiment with content and structure. the very fact that it could be forgotten immediately may be what appeals to them about it. those types of recaps can be as silly or a serious as the recapper chooses, and this freedom may end up being what eventually earns them the most fan participation of their own. (stryker, 2012). related research participatory culture is a growing field of research with contributions from scholars such as jenkins who writes that convergence culture, “is shaped by the desires of media conglomerates to expand their empires across multiple platforms and by the desires of consumers,” (jenkins, 2006 p. 3). he, and researchers like andrea phillips further acknowledge that consumers are “courted” across multiple platforms, in transmedia efforts (jenkins, 2006, phillips, 2012). participatory culture is part of this media system jenkins describes, where the traditional idea of producer and consumer relationship no longer applies, and the lines between each have become blurred, in the deluge of information now available. jenkins reasons that because of the amount of information available, it creates a stronger incentive to talk about the media we consume with others. this incentive he discusses is helpful in understanding the online context where most recapping occurs, where recappers are able to use new media to encourage playful participation from other fans. similarly paul booth’s (2010) “philosophy of playfulness”, is the notion that much of contemporary media has been made pleasurable to use. recaps can certainly fall into that category as they are often meant to be a playful expression of fandom using the affordances of contemporary new media to create content. they can be a pleasurable way to read, write, or otherwise participate in an online fan community. method & findings this paper presents a comparative framing analysis of two different recaps of the same episode of “the vampire diaries”. goffman’s framing theory (1974) supposed that “mediation” could provide social cues for those trying to interpret events. the recaps from each respective website, ew and twop, provide different social cues for their readers, and each frame the same story in a different way, using different technological affordances. this analysis also took the purpose of each site into account. twop is a site created for recapping and ew is a site that features recaps, but that is not its sole purpose. each post was analyzed according to features such as time of posting, length of post, and number of “visible” participants, such as comments or episode “grades”, although less visible participation is still important. ew offered the shorter recap at 4 pages, while twop’s recap was 17 pages of text. both of these page numbers are fairly standard for a recap of tvd, for each site. the ew recap was posted on october 12, 2012, a day after the episode aired. twop’s recap was posted almost a week later on october 16, 2012. however, both sites acknowledge the emphasis on time as each site employs an immediate reaction after the episode airs. ew has a short “instant react” and twop calls theirs a “recaplet”, or a very short version of what will be a longer recap for each. each site uses different affordances, as ew relies on comments for participation and twop relies on their forum and episode “grading”. ew’s recap garnered 178 comments, while twop had 0, because their community generally relies on the forums. the forums are typically not about one episode, but serve as a continuing discussion of the story as a whole, and the number of posters there is continually changing, but currently registers at over 30,000 for this show. in addition twop community members are asked to “grade” each episode on the recap page, where 651 users of the site graded it with a “b”. conclusion selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 7 the “pressure of production” in the context of what was previously a mostly playful endeavor manifests itself in different ways in these online communities and in recaps themselves. the overall tone of the ew recap is less critical, it is significantly shorter, and there is less participation than can be found on the lengthier twop recap. although twop recaps of nbc owned television shows might reveal more on the story of convergence culture that warrants further research. this paper is part of ongoing research into fandom, and participatory culture, and in the future i hope to conduct interviews with recappers. references bierly, m. (2012, october 12). ‘the vampire diaries season premiere recap: death becomes her. retrieved from http://tvrecaps.ew.com/recap/vampire-diaries-season-4-episode-1/ booth, p. (2010). digital fandom: new media studies. new york: peter lang publishing. goffman, e. (1974). frame analysis: an essay on the organization of experience. new york: harper & row. jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york: new york university press. juzwiak, r. (2012, march 22). tune in, recap, drop out: why i’ll never recap a tv show again. retrieved from http://gawker.com/5895232/tune-in-recap-drop-out-why-ill-never-recap-a-tv-show-again markham, a. & baym, n. (eds.) (2008). internet enquiry: conversations about method. london: sage. mclennan, c. (2012, october 16). have you heard of switches? http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/show/vampire-diaries/growing-pains-1.php phillips, a. (2012) a creator’s guide to transmedia storytelling: how to captivate and engage audiences across multiple platforms. mcgraw hill professional. stryker, c. (2012). how recappers re-invented tv culture”, retrieved from http://storyboard.tumblr.com/post/27404657646/how-recappers-re-invented-tv-culture-i-hated thompson, k. (2003). storytelling in film and television. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. (authors may use any license they prefer, or none at all.) selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 8 prompting fan anticipation and participation via show accounts on twitter rachel m. magee college of information science and technology drexel university rachelmagee@drexel.edu melinda sebastian department of culture and communication drexel university mjs426@drexel.edu abstract research is increasingly acknowledging the importance of fan practices on twitter, but less work examines the ways production companies use the service to represent their shows and interact with fans. our work studies the tweets from five accounts from hour long shows (the americans, breaking bad, faceoff, grimm, and house of cards) to characterize the way they interact with their fans and promote their shows. we find that these shows use a variety of practices to encourage fan anticipation of new episodes and seasons, as well as participation in the story or fan group. anticipation is supported through content sharing, countdowns, and discussions of watching styles, while participation focused practices include interaction with fans and performers/producers, use of insider knowledge and humor, and explicit calls for participation. keywords fans; anticipation; participation. introduction internet research recognizes the importance of fan communities online, and work examining fan practices on twitter is increasing as people flock to the service to express their fanhood, extend their engagement with the stories that are important to them, and connect with performers, producers, and other fans. studies of fans and twitter include works that follow conversations about large events, such as awards shows like eurovision (highfield, harrington & bruns, 2012). other research focuses on more long term practices of storytelling, including as roleplayers focusing on characters from the west wing (bore & hickman, 2011) and the hunger games (magee, sebastian, novak, mascaro, black, & goggins, 2013). research in the design community recognizes the importance of avoiding spoilers, with work developing twitter filters (goldbeck, 2012), and other work emphasizes how fans on twitter use shows to “interpret their life own experiences” (marwick, gray & annany, 2013, p.1). while research is engaging with fan practices on twitter, less research has focused on how content producers or affiliated companies work to interact with fans. however, as jenkins and deuze argue, “media companies can no longer be meaningfully studied in the absence of understanding of how they relate to consumers. by the same token, consumers, audiences, fan communities…can no longer be meaningfully understood without a better understanding of the economic and technological contexts within which they operate” (2008). our research endeavors to work at this intersection, and focuses on the ways production companies are representing their narrative properties and engaging with fans via twitter. methods in order to develop a better understanding of how media companies and fans are interacting through twitter, we conducted a thematic analysis of tweets from the production company accounts dedicated to five different serialized shows, which we refer to as show accounts. selected shows include nbc’s grimm, syfy’s faceoff, fx’s the americans, amc’s breaking bad and netflix’s house of cards. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 9 these hour-long shows were selected to represent a range of fan group sizes. as newer properties, the americans and house of cards are working to develop fanbases with less than 25,000 twitter followers, while grimm and faceoff have been on air for multiple seasons and have more than 25,000 followers on twitter. breaking bad has been in production the longest, and has more than 240,000 twitter followers. while fan bases played an important role, we also worked to include network, cable, and streaming distribution processes. data was collected beginning in winter 2013 using tags v 5, developed by martin hawksey (2013). this work reports on analysis of 285 tweets, though data collection is ongoing. findings our analysis revealed two main themes that arose in the tweets from each show: anticipation and participation. each theme is supported by several practices that we observed across the dataset. importantly, the majority of tweets included practices that supported both anticipation and participation. anticipation practices included content sharing, countdowns, and discussions of watching styles, while participation practices included interaction with fans and performers/producers, insider knowledge and humor, and explicit calls for participation. content sharing involved linking to coverage of the show from other media outlets, as well as to fan created media. content sharing also included linking to new content from the production itself, such as behind-the-scenes media offerings or information from production staff about how the show is created. this content sharing reminds fans of the show and encourages engagement when waiting for the next viewing opportunity. countdown language discussed anticipation over many different time periods. during the beginning of our collection period, grimm’s show account generated a countdown hashtag, #march8isgrimm, which was added to the great majority of tweets, and started weeks before the actual airdate. other accounts tweeted about new episodes within days and even minutes of airtime. this explicit countdown language stimulates audience anticipation, and often, the show accounts go further and retweet or share fan tweets that discuss looking forward to the next episode or season. multiple show accounts also highlight their upcoming new seasons, adding another element to look forward to. coupled with these conversations about anticipating new content, show accounts also discussed methods of watching available shows, including on-air marathons, encores on affiliated channels, and online streaming services. house of cards stands out with regard to watching style, as all episodes in the season were released together, resulting in “marathon watching” of many episodes in one sitting, as well as much conversation about this watching style. the show account not only discussed marathon watching, but also retweeted fans’ tweets about their watching experiences. as demonstrated by the importance of retweeting fans in anticipation practices, interaction with fans is a key part of how these show accounts operate. show accounts retweet and converse with fans on a regular basis, including the previously mentioned conversations about watching style, generating and using a special name for fans, such as “hey, grimmsters” for grimm fans, and directly responding to questions or comments in a reply-to tweet. additionally, these show accounts also work to interact with performers and production staff. this includes using castmembers’ usernames in tweets and retweeting performers or staff’s tweets about the show, but also includes incorporating live question and answer sessions with performers or staff, sometimes having them take over the actual show account. knowledge of performers and production staff also connects with the larger practice of sharing tweets that require insider knowledge to understand context or to get the joke. this is one of the most common practices, and often overlaps with content sharing. humor is one way that this insider knowledge is highlighted, but other examples include sharing fan pictures of important show elements, such as the peachoid, a giant peach shaped water-tower featured in an episode of house of cards, as selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 10 well as references to facts or background story elements that surface knowledge of the show isn’t sufficient to understand. this kind of tweet engages fans and rewards their participation as viewers. show accounts also engage fans by explicitly calling for fan participation in the form of retweeting show account tweets, taking quizzes to demonstrate knowledge of the show and “prepare” for upcoming episodes, and playing games to engage with the narrative and demonstrate their fandom. discussion in this dataset, the great majority of tweets worked to combine multiple practices discussed above, demonstrating a variety of techniques to encourage audience anticipation and participation. show accounts on twitter are working to extend existing fan practices, but are also working to encourage new practices of engagement. though many of the tweets we examined reveal shows interacting with fans to encourage anticipation and participation, and in some cases, even acting as fan-like themselves, it is important to consider that these accounts function as marketing and public relations, and as such function within an economic relationship with their followers. acknowledgments this material is based upon work supported by the national science foundation graduate research fellowship under grant no. 2011121873. references bore, i-l. & hickman, j. (2011). let bartlet be bartlet? the west wing continues on twitter. transforming audiences, sept. 1-2, 2011, london, uk. golbeck, j. (2012). the twitter mute button: a web filtering challenge. in proc. chi 2012, acm (2012). austin, tx. 2755-2758. hawksey, m. (2013). twitter archiving google spreadsheet tags v5. retrieved from http://mashe.hawksey.info/2013/02/twitter-archive-tagsv5/. highfield, t., harrington, s., & bruns, a. (2012). twitter as a technology for audiencing and fandom: the #eurovision phenomenon. information, communication & society, 1-25. jenkins, h. & deuze, m. (2008). convergence culture. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, vol 14(1): 5–12. magee, r.m., sebastian, m., novak, a., mascaro, c.m., black, a., goggins, s.p. (2013). #twitterplay: a case study of fan roleplaying online. cscw 2013 companion, february 23-27, 2013, san antonio, tx. (extended abstract & poster). marwick, a., gray, m.l., & annany, m. (2013). “dolphins are just gay sharks”: glee and the queer case of transmedia as text and object. television new media, feb. 26, 2013. retrieved from http://tvn.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/02/25/1527476413478493.full.pdf+html. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd 3.0. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 11 microblogging as non-violent resistance miao feng university of illinois at chicago united states mfeng4@uic.edu liu jun university of copenhagen denmark liujun@hum.ku.dk abstract with the growing popularity of information and communication technologies (icts), new media are penetrating people’s everyday life and transforming the way they express themselves, interact with each other, articulate daily experience, and perceive the world. a large amount of research is devoted exclusively to the alternative or antagonistic use of new media in particular moments (e.g., the arab spring), failing to associate these specific uses with a larger living context, the everyday experience and social memory of new media users in particular. to fill that gap, this study explores how—and to what extent—everyday use of new media articulates people’s experiences and shapes social memory, makes them relevant to the changing socio-political context of china, facilitates a new type of public sphere, and generates a form of non-violent resistance by taking weibo in china as a case. keywords weibo; non-violent; microblogging; social memory; china introduction ongoing researches try to explore the relationship between the use of new media and certain social changes. the heavy emphasis on the role of new media in specific contentious issues overlooks cumulative impacts from the everyday uses of new media on social memory, failing to capture, reflect, and assess the political potential embedded in the routine use of new media—beyond a simple realization of overt contentious possibility. china has the world’s most active social media users (chiu, lin, & silverman, 2012). among over 550 million internet users (xinhua, 2012), the world’s largest online population, 95 percent of them from major cities are regular users of social media (chiu et al., 2012: 1). in particular, chinese citizens’ reliance on the social media as platforms for airing opinions, exposing discontent, criticize government policies, or vent anger over specific incidents is specifically intensifying (liu, 2011) as the tightening of state control over the mass media persists, leaving people with only limited or no access to mass media and mass-mediated public sphere (esarey, 2006; zhao, 1998, 2009). method current study investigates how social media provide a platform for chinese citizens to articulate their experience and shape social memory through analyzing tweets on the country’s most popular social media site, sina weibo. the authors perform a discourse analysis on tweets generated by the verified chinese official city accounts on weibo. three cities have been chosen—xiamen, shifang and ningbo, where collective action took place in the past. for each city, a randomly selected sample of 5,000 tweets has been collected for analysis. the analysis is based on the tradition of discourse analysis framework, which helps to understand the constitutive relationship between language and its social norms and provide empirical basis for this research (fairclough, 1995, 2000; van dijk, 1997). by exploring the meaning of the texts on weibo, current study hopes to extend the research scope to explore the magnitude of people’s engagement in discussing sensitive topics and potentially formulating new discourse online in the recalling of collective actions to forge a new understating of people’s social memory. the authors also systematically identify the major themes of the tweets and clarify the elements in each theme. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 12 conclusion drawing on negt and kluge’s (1993) conceptual framework of public sphere and experience, current study demonstrates that social media in china contribute to a broader sense of the public sphere as an organizational form articulating a societal, collective horizon of experience and shaping social memory. importantly, chinese social media provide people an alternative communicative sphere for sharing and accumulating “unofficial” social memory as a kind of covert resistance (scott, 1990). the article contributes to (a) a better theoretical understanding of the role of social media in everyday experience and social memory, with special reference to “the transformations of publicness and experience in the digitally based media environment” (hansen, 2011: xiv); (b) a comprehensive understanding of the progressive changes by mundane use of social media beyond those revolutionary moments; and (c) a deeper understanding of the place and potential of social media in chinese users’ daily life, in particular how social media have been incorporated into the fabric of experience, nurturing everyday resistance and facilitating an alternative public sphere. references chiu, c., lin, d., & silverman, a. (2012). china’s social-media boom: mckinsey & company. esarey, a. (2006). speak no evil: mass media control in contemporary china. new york: freedom house. fairclough, n. (1995). media discourse. london: edward arnold. fairclough, n. (2000). critical analysis of media discourse. in p. marris & s. thornham (eds), media studies: a reader (2nd ed.) (pp. 308–25). new york: new york university press hansen, m. (2011). cinema and experience: siegfried kracauer, walter benjamin, and theodor w. adorno. berkeley, calif. ; london: university of california press. liu, l. (2011, december 18). weibo to start real-name registration, global times. retrieved july 20, 2012, from http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90882/7680067.html negt, o., & kluge, a. (1993). public sphere and experience: toward an analysis of the bourgeois and proletarian public sphere. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. scott, j. c. (1990). domination and the arts of resistance: hidden transcripts. new haven: yale university press. van dijk,t.a. (1997). discourse as interaction in society. in t. a. van dijk (ed.), discourse as social interaction (pp.1-37). london: sage. xinhua. (2012). china's internet users hit 538 million. retrieved july 20, 2012, from http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2012-07/19/content_15601041.htm zhao, y. (1998). media, market, and democracy in china: between the party line and the bottom line. urbana: university of illinois press. zhao, y. (2009). communication in china: political economy, power, and conflict. lanham, md.: rowman & littlefield. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. (authors may use any license they prefer, or none at all.) aoir2018 individual paper selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 mass media and the legitimation of internet control in russia: the case of telegram mariëlle wijermars, university of helsinki in today’s hyperconnected world, states are confronted with the global challenge of responding to potentially disruptive online communications, such as terrorist propaganda and fake news. formulating effective internet regulation to address these threats carries the risk of infringing upon media freedom and constitutional rights. in the case of russia, ostensibly sound legitimations have been instrumentalised to bring about a dramatic decline in internet freedom, leading human rights watch (2017: 1) to conclude, that “[s]tate intrusion in media affairs has reached a level not seen in russia since the fall of the soviet union.” up until 2011, when thousands of russians, mobilised through social media, protested against electoral fraud, the internet remained relatively free. whereas traditional media were brought under increasingly strict state control after 2000, channelling unwanted discourses online long relied on active participation in and manipulation of these discourses (deibert & rohoyzinski 2010; stähle & wijermars 2014). now, the russian government turned to legal measures, including website blocking, to control the online sphere. a similar backlash could be observed elsewhere, e.g. following the arab spring. with the 2018 russian presidential elections approaching and mass street protests, this time mobilised through youtube, re-emerging in the spring of 2017, efforts to control online communications are intensifying. controlling public opinion may well be decisive for russia’s “success” in expanding its system of internet controls without arousing popular resistance. scholarship thus far, however, has neglected to critically examine how the russian government legitimates and cultivates popular support for restricting online freedom of speech. this paper aims to address this crucial aspect of internet censorship by studying how restrictions of internet freedom, freedom of expression and the right to information and privacy are framed in political and media discourses. employing a mixed methods, case-study approach, it analyses how frames are produced by policymakers and how they are translated and disseminated in state and (semi-)independent media. examining the framing of legislation as it passes through these levels of communications can increase our understanding of why, up until now, resistance to these restrictions has been marginal. russia’s expansion of internet controls and surveillance prerogatives and their legitimation are not unique, nor are they an exclusive feature of hybrid and authoritarian suggested citation (apa): wijermars m. (2018, october 10-13). mass media and the legitimation of internet control in russia: the case of telegram. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. regimes. similar tendencies can be noticed elsewhere in europe, where anti-terrorism measures, neoconservative tendencies (e.g., presumed societal values concerning sexuality), as well as policies aimed to protect children put pressure on media freedom and freedom of expression (nieminen et al 2015). the research aims to contribute to this urgent debate on balancing citizen protection with the safeguarding of democratic principles. a critical study of these legitimation strategies is warranted since the russian government invests significant efforts in presenting its policies as reasonable and necessary, and claims to act in response to popular demands for regulating the internet. for example, in 2017, a proposed law regulating social media supposedly responded to societal concerns about online ‘death groups’ inciting teenagers to commit suicide. such legitimating frames appear to be successful in maintaining a high level of support for internet censorship. according to independent pollster levada center, 60 percent of respondents were in favour of restricting online communications in october 2016 (konobeevskaia 2016). only a third of respondents thought website blocking could be used against civil activists (levada center 2016). in a more recent poll, connected to a proposal to introduce an age-limit for social media use, 62 percent supported the initiative (vtsiom 2017). the legitimation of censorship largely relies on portraying the internet as a dangerous information space; posing a threat to state security, stability, shared moral values and individual safety. it relies on the illusion of creating an online safe space and the presentation of “control as freedom” (chun 2006: 274). the paper, therefore, investigates the affective dimension in frame building: the extent to which the restriction of civil rights is legitimated through mobilising sentiments of anxiety, distrust and fear. how is internet control, including surveillance and banning of online anonymity, reconceptualised into a virtue of effective state governance, rather than a violation of democratic rights? affective framing may be particularly persuasive among audiences with limited understanding of information technologies. how do framing strategies play into feelings of vulnerability and sense of incapacity to control perceived dangers inherent to online communications? methodology the paper presents a case study examining the legitimation of user data storage, surveillance and restriction of online anonymity, on the example of messaging application telegram. to justify legal measures in these domains, policymakers have framed their proposals as anti-terrorist, or claimed the need to protect personal data from foreign states. typically, anonymity and privacy are recast as secrecy indicating criminal (e.g., drug dealers) or morally derogatory intent (e.g., paedophilia). the research draws upon the fields of political communication, internet governance and media studies. it primarily employs discourse analysis (in particular frame analysis) complemented by content and legal analysis. in russia, television continues to be the leading source of information, overtaken by the internet only among the younger generation (khruleva 2017). television is, on average, perceived to be a more reliable information source than the internet (levada center 2016). the paper, therefore, diverts particular attention to television news and popular genres such as talk shows. references stähle, h., and m. wijermars. 2014. “forget memory. aleksei navalnyi’s livejournal and the memory discourse of the protest movement (2011-2012).” studies in russian, eurasian and central european new media (12): 105-128. chun, wendy hui kyong. 2006. control and freedom: power and paranoia in the age of fiber optics. cambridge, ma: mit press. deibert, ronald, and rafal rohozinski. 2010. “control and subversion in russian cyberspace.” in access controlled: the shaping of power, rights, and rule in cyberspace, edited by ronald deibert, john palfrey, rafal rohozinski and jonathan zittrain, 15-34. cambridge, ma & london: mit press.   human rights watch. 2017. online and on all fronts: russia’s assault on freedom of expression. july 2017, accessed 15 july 2017, https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/russiafoe0717_web_1.pdf. khruleva, tat’iana. 2017. “televizor prodolzhaet lidirovat’.” rosbalt 21 april, accessed 15 july 2017, http://www.rosbalt.ru/russia/2017/04/21/1609456.html. konobeevskaia, nadezhda. 2016. “rossiiane stali men’she doveriat’ televideniiu” [trust in television has dropped among russians]. rbc 18 november, accessed 26 april 2017, http://www.rbc.ru/politics/18/11/2016/582dc27f9a794723c3f3a270. levada center. 2016. “doverie smi i tsenzura” [trust in mass media and censorship]. 18 november, accessed 26 april 2017, http://www.levada.ru/2016/11/18/doverie-smi-itsenzura/. nieminen, hannu, allessandro d’arma, claudia padovani and helena sousa. 2015. “challenges and confusion in media regulation. a four-country comparison.” in european media in crisis. values, risks and policies, edited by josef trappel, jeanette steemers and barbare thomass, 163-181. abingdon and new york: routledge. vtsiom. 2017. “press-vypusk no. 3347. zabanit’ sotsseti?” 10 april, accessed 15 july 2017, https://wciom.ru/index.php?id=236&uid=116150. microsoft word 738-488-1-pb.docx selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 overcoming the authority problem: a subculture-centered approach for health communications lindsay ems indiana university united states lems@indiana.edu amy gonzales indiana university united states gonzaamy@indiana.edu keywords social media; social marketing; health communication; social support; subcultures; inequalities a subculture-centered approach traditionally, health communicators have assumed an interventionist stance, seeing their job as “distributing” or “transferring” knowledge to at-risk populations. this is made evident in the wealth of studies on communications designed to improve health (fleischer et. al 2012; holt et. al 2012; palmgreen & donohew 2003; pierce, macaskill & hill 1990; sheer & cline 1995; worden et. al 1996)1. this is changing though and many health communication theorists call for more culturecentered approaches, which encourage research partnerships with marginalized groups (arunachalam 2002; baker et al. 2002; desouza 2009; dutta 2007; dutta & dutta 2012). this paper explores how educators and care coordinators at a community hiv prevention clinic have begun using a subculturecentered communication strategy to improve the health of marginalized individuals. our initial aim with this study was to explore how poor healthcare patients maintain communication with healthproviders even when technological connections are intermittent because of disconnection. we found evidence that social media may provide a platform for fostering a subcultural network of social support which in which individuals are intrinsically motivated to participate. these networks provide an arena for educators to serve and inform people in culturally specific ways. this contrasts with traditional approaches that draw individuals into rational, bureaucratic, and (a)social contexts. overcoming the authority problem in health communications subcultural theorists suggest that people assemble into subgroups in reaction to the individualizing forces of modernity. studies of punks (hebdige 1979), hard criminals (polsky 1967) and drug abusers (davis & munoz 1968) find that subculture members identify themselves symbolically through sartorial, linguistic, and behavioral choices2. subcultures are tied together by an “organic solidarity” that helps individuals avoid feeling alienated in a stratified society (durkheim 1964; gelder 2005; maffesoli 1996; park et al. 1925; tonnies 1955). often a shared value system connects members and guides everyday decision-making on an individual level (cohen 1955). as such, subcultures represent a cordoned off cluster within a rational social system where ritual and passion unite and govern behavior. from the subculture-centered perspective it is not the “deviant” that the educator seeks to change. that is, the client is not the problem, but rather the institutional authority structure is the problem. the healthcare communicator, using the subcultural approach, overcomes this authority problem by reimagining his or her charge. instead of setting out to “fix” deviant behavior, the educator’s job is first to understand the subculture and then provide needed health information in culturally sensitive ways. this approach aims to empower subcultures to provide and receive social support and accurate health information—making the most of existing two-way communication infrastructures and social networks. the educator becomes a pseudo-insider in order to circulate important health messages 1 these are just a few examples of the diverse body of research done in this vein. 2 this is just a small selection from a wide array of subcultural types studied. subcultures differ greatly in the amount of stigma and integrity of morals that often act to connect people together. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 while abiding by the group’s existing symbolic repertoires and value systems. he or she becomes a curator of health information, encouraging existing intrinsic motivation within the subculture to improve healthy behavioral change in ways that are consistent with existing subcultural norms. reducing the spread of hiv in young men who have sex with men (msm) methods our study involved interviewing low-income individuals and their providers about their use of cell/smart phones in navigating the healthcare system (e.g. contacting providers, calling in prescriptions, finding health information, developing networks of social support etc.). we conducted twenty-five in person interviews with clients and six interviews with staff at a local community clinic that serves patients with hiv and aids. this clinic was chosen because seventy-five percent of the client base lives at or under the poverty level and clients require prolonged contact with caregivers. the data presented here comes from in-depth interviews with two healthcare providers tasked to reduce the spread of hiv in the local 18-29 year old population of msm. in these interviews we asked what staff do to educate clients and potential clients who often become unreachable due to cell/smart phone disconnection. we also explored alternative modes of provider-patient communication, including text, email, and social media. findings interviews with staff at the clinic revealed that they circumvent the authority problem using a subculture-centered approach to circulate salacious, personalized health messages through a variety of subcultural social media platforms below we focus on two specific examples of this: one describes the use of instagram and the other describes the use of grindr for communicating hiv health information. we refer to these media platforms as subcultural in this context because, according to clinic staff, these constitute the existing communications infrastructure of the local, young msm sub-community. according to one staff member, these non-institutionally affiliated social media messages are more successful in garnering the attention of subculture members than social media used by the hospital system. for example, when a staff member posted a notice about free std testing on the hospital system’s facebook page thirty-seven people saw it. when he posted the same message on a local msm instagram site, one hundred people “liked” it in an hour. describing communications via subcultural media, the staff member said, we are posting things that aren’t seen as spam. [members of the group] think [the information on the hospital’s facebook page] is propaganda. ultimately, there’s a lot of propaganda we push out. coming from the hospital system, it’s a very sanitized message, it’s a very clinical message, and that’s not what we need. we need a very human message. when asked about differences in use of the hospital’s facebook page and the more informal subcultural social media, a staff member emphasized the importance of segmenting the population: we have to know who is contracting the disease in our service area. sixty percent of hiv cases in the u.s. are men who have sex with men. the messages have to be culturally competent. if not, it won’t attract their attention. [messages] have to be representative of the community. the members of the subculture and the clinic staff take photos at their offline gatherings and use them in their subcultural social media messaging. according to the staff, this ensures that messages are representative of the community they seek to reach with educational information. it also appeals to people on a personal, intimate level. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 a rather unusual use of social media to circulate prevention information was developed by an intern at the clinic. he used an anonymous avatar on the geosocial networking application, grindr, to spread information about free testing. grindr helps connect gay, bisexual, and bi-curious men within close proximity to one another, often with the goal of engaging in sexual activity. the intern used grindr because he knew that users were in the clinic’s target population. because it is often used to facilitate spontaneous sexual encounters, the clinic staff did not make the hospital system aware of this tactic. the fact that an intern took charge of this, the staff felt, relieved the clinic and hospital of legal liability. the staff felt strongly, however that this was a useful approach, citing an increase in people coming in for testing after the use of grindr began. conclusion the subculture-centered approach described in this paper illustrates an alternative patient-provider mode of communication via social media. the clinic overcame the classic public health authority problem by resisting overly sanitized messages that risk alienating members of target subcultures. instead, using indigenous media, they craft and curate culturally relevant messages. according to staff, these tactics have been effective at tapping into the intrinsic motivations of subculture members to connect and improve the sexual health of their community. gathering more data from healthcare recipients will help us better understand how clients feel about attempts to overcome the authority problem using subculture-centered social media communication. references arunachalam, s. (2002). reaching the unreached: how can we use information and communication technologies to empower the rural poor in the developing world through enhanced access to relevant information? journal of information science, 28(6): 513-522. baker, e. a., kreuter, m., homan, s. m., starklogf-morgan, s., schonhoff, r. & francioni, a. (2002). using community-based participatory processes to bring health education technology to communities. health promotion practice 3(1): 83-94. cohen, a. k. (1955). the symbolic construction of community, london: routledge and kegan paul. davis, f. & munoz, l. (1968). heads and freaks: patterns and meanings of drug use among hippies. journal of health and social behavior, 9(2): 156-164. de souza, r. (2009). creating "communicative spaces": a case of ngo community organizing for hiv/aids prevention. health communication, 24(8): 692-702. durkheim, e. [1933](1984). the division of labour in society. london: macmillan. dutta, m. j. (2007). communicating about culture and health: theorizing culture-centered and cultural sensitivity approaches. communication theory, 17(3): 304-328. dutta, m. j. & basub, a. (2008). meanings of health: interrogating structure and culture. health communication, 23(6): 560-572. dutta, m. j. & dutta, u. (2012). voices of the poor from the margins of bengal: structural inequities and health. qualitative health communication, 23(1): 14-25. fleisher, l., kandadai, v., keenan, e., miller, s. m., devarajan, k., ruth, k. j., rodoletz, m., bieber, e. j. & weinberg, d. (2012). build it, and will they come? unexpected findings from a study on a web-based intervention to improve colorectal cancer screening. journal of health communication: international perspectives, 17(1): 41-53. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 gelder, k. (2005). the subcultures reader. london: routledge. hebdige, d. (1979). subculture: the meaning of style, london: methuen. holt, c. l., scarinci, i. c., debnam, k., mcdavid, c., litaker, m., mcneal, s. f., southward, v., lee, c., eloubeidi, m., crowther, m., bolland, j. & martin, m. y. (2012). spiritually based intervention to increase colorectal cancer awareness among african americans: intermediate outcomes from a randomized trial. journal of health communication: international perspectives, 17(9): 1028-1049. maffesoli, m. (1996). the time of the tribes: the decline of individualism in mass society. don smith, london: sage. palmgreen, p. & donohew, l. (2003). effective mass media strategies for drug abuse prevention campaigns. in z. sloboda & w. j. bukoski (eds.), handbook of drug abuse prevention: theory, science and practice. new york: kluwer/plenum, 27-43. park, r. e., burgess, e. w. & mckenzie, r. d. (1925). the city, chicago and london: university of chicago press. pierce, j. p., macaskill, p. & hill, d. (1990). long-term effectiveness of mass media led antismoking campaigns in australia. american journal of public health, 80(5): 565-569. polsky, n. (1967). hustlers, beats and others, harmondsworth: penguin books. sheer, v. c. & cline, r. j. w. (1995). individual differences in sensation seeking and sexual behavior: implications for communication intervention for hiv/aids prevention among college students. health communication, 7(3): 205-223. tonnies, f. (1955). globalization and culture. chicago: university of chicago press. worden, j. k., flynn, b. s., solomon, l. j., secker-walker, r. h., badger, g. j. & carpenter, j. h. (1996). using mass media to prevent cigarette smoking among adolescent girls. health education behavior, 23(4): 453-468. microsoft word ir16_final_version.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 digital games and heteronormativity: the case of china’s ‘losers’ marcella szablewicz pace university the events of #gamergate in the united states have shed a renewed light on issues of gender and representation in video games. in the past year, feminist game designers, journalists and academics have become the target of vicious name-calling and death threats online. the charge of the so-called “gamer-gaters” is that game critics are unfairly favoring games with feminist content and attempting to rob gamers of the pleasure of playing the (sexist) games they love. according to chess and shaw (2015), the issues unearthed as a result of #gamergate are a symptom of a much larger problem within american video game culture. they argue that “sexism, heterosexism, and patriarchal undercurrents” have served as a “constant guidepost for the video game industry” (p. 208). while this claim may be accurate with regard to the games industry in the united states, less is known about issues of gender, representation and sexism as they pertain to chinese digital gaming culture. thankfully, there is no direct parallel to #gamergate in china at this time, but the issue of gender and sexuality within chinese digital gaming culture is nonetheless a complicated one. while the games played by chinese gamers often perpetuate the very “sexist, heterosexist and patriarchal” representations discussed by chess and shaw, the forms of sociality that develop through and around digital games are reflective of the unique socio-cultural context from which they emerge. this paper offers a preliminary analysis of the existence and function of sexual slang within chinese digital gaming culture, suggesting a link between gaming culture and the pressure to achieve heteronormative success within contemporary china. methodologically, i rely on a combination of ethnographic observations and data from informal interviews conducted at a number of chinese e-sports events, as well as at chinajoy, china’s largest digital games expo. additionally, i draw data pertaining to the definition and application of these slang terms from popular chinese media, bbs, and web television series. i will argue that the slang by which gamers render themselves masturbatory ‘losers’ who ‘act gay’ and shut themselves indoors to play games is in fact indicative of a sense of disillusionment with a society in which they lack socio-economic mobility. by contrast, by queering games and gaming culture, chinese gamers may effectively open up a space of what i call “sideways mobility” through which they challenge the “normative” and allow for alternative lifestyles and fantasies. suggested citation (apa): szablewicz, m. (2015, october 21-24). digital games and heteronormativity: the case of china’s losers. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. heterosexuality, homosociality and digital game culture homosociality is a concept that has existed for some time and is meant to refer to “nonsexual attractions held by men (or women) for members of their own sex” (bird, 1996). far from challenging traditional gender norms and power imbalances, homosociality, argues bird (1996), can in fact be used to reinforce hegemonic masculinity. with regard to game culture, feminist scholars such as taylor (2011) have noted that digital gaming fosters “homosocial spaces” that are nonetheless often “strongly ‘policed’ in order to maintain and re-affirm participants’ heterosexual identities” (p. 236). similarly, game scholars sundén and svengisson (2011) reference eve sedgwick’s (1985) notion of homosociality in which the aim is to “create an intimacy between men by excluding that which is not defined as manly” (p. 48). in observing the actions of a guild of digital gamers, svengisson remarks on the abundance of “jokes and make-believe performances that make fun of homosexual desires and actions.” through joking banter, male gamers call each other “bitch” and pretend to “pimp” each other out for (homo)sexual favors. writes svenginsson, “neither the woman nor the fag fits into the collective, and so they are symbolically disarmed and made innocuous so that the men can create a phallic domination which cannot be questioned by the new sexual practices” (p. 49). while acknowledging the ways in which homosociality can be employed to reinforce hegemonic masculinity, sundén and svenginsson also suggest, via sedgwick, that homosociality and homosexuality may exist on a continuum, thus problematizing distinctions between “straight” and “non-straight” and opening up an avenue for discussions of queer desire and intimacy within the game space. other scholars have since suggested that homosocial relationships need not always reinforce hegemonic masculinity. hammaren and johansson (2014) theorize that a form of “horizontal homosociality” can be more “inclusive” and refer to relations between men that are based on “emotional closeness, intimacy, and a nonprofitable form of friendship” (p. 1). by closely examining some of the ways in which sexual slang is employed online by chinese gamers, this paper aims to add a nuanced and culturally specific analysis to this discussion of homosociality and sexuality within game culture. ‘diaosi,’ ‘gaoji,’ and other sexual slang on the chinese internet digital game culture in china, like game culture everywhere, is riddled with sexual slang. in a previous paper (szablewicz, 2014), i have discussed the phenomonenon of ‘diaosi.’ the term, which is adopted from cantonese slang, roughly approximates to ‘penis hair,’ but is more commonly translated as ‘loser.’ as i note within my article： “depending on the source, diaosi may embody some or all of the following traits: they may be poor, short and ugly; are of rural origin; and have a low education level, low income, blue-collar job, no house, no car, and no girlfriend. their leisure activities include playing video games, spending a lot of time online, and excessive masturbation. they are also sometimes described as nerds who rarely leave the house.” one thing that remains consistent throughout the various applications of the term is the notion that the ‘diaosi’ male is the opposite of the ‘tall, rich and handsome’ man; he is not ‘the second generation of wealthy families’; he does not enjoy the privileges of ‘the second generation of officials’ families.’ he cannot date, or even successfully converse with, goddesses. “simply put, the diaosi are at odds with popular representations of the successful, heteronormative male” (szablewicz, 2014). similarly, the term ‘gaoji’ originates from cantonese, in which ‘ji’ is pronounced ‘gei,’ and is a phonetic translation of the english word “gay.” the term has multiple usages. originally referring to homosexuality, the term retains this connotation, and sites and message boards devoted solely to the subject of “jiqing” or gay love, often contain homosexual content. the term is also used to refer to japanese manga in which homosexuality between young male characters is an acknowledged theme. indeed, when searching for the term “gaoji” or “jiyou” on baidu’s search engine, an image search unearths quite a few references to japanese yaoi culture1. but the term has since been adopted as a form of internet slang for young men who form close bonds through digital games. the vast majority of these young men still identify as heterosexual, despite admitting that they are “gay friends.” according to the definition of “gaoji” on baidu encyclopedia, the term may be used to connote homosexuality, but it is also used as a form of self-mocking and internet slang. the entry states the following: 搞基多指两个男性有过于亲密的⾏行为举⽌止，旁者⽤用来调侃。如今随着⽹网 络游戏 深⼊入以及 im 的交流影响⽇日趋扩⼤大，搞基渐渐地从基友⾥里⾯面发展出来 并形成⼀一个词 汇，他们基本都是在⽹网络上熟识，聊得来并且有相同的爱好，例如⽹网络游戏。也有 很⼤大⼀一部分年轻⼈人，尤其是青少年喜欢⽤用搞基来代称玩游戏。搞基⼀一般出现在游戏 组队的称呼⽐比较多，⽐比如寻基情队友来搞基，等等显⽰示亲密的意思，可以配合得很 好。 “gaoji can also be used to refer to two men who exhibit excessively intimate behaviors and mannerisms, as a form of ridicule or mocking. nowadays, due to the penetration of digital gaming and expansion of im sociality (‘gaoji’ has gradually emerged from the concept of ‘jiyou’ to become a new word), the term is used to refer to those who become well acquainted through the internet, and who, through conversation, discover similar hobbies, for example internet games. there are also a large percentage of young people, especially teenagers, who like to use the term ‘gaoji’ as an alternate name for ‘playing digital games.’ ‘gaoji’ is generally used more as a form of address among gaming teammates, for example “searching for ‘jiqing’ teammates to ‘gaoji,’ etc., and is used to express ‘closeness,’ and the idea of a harmonious match.” 1 yaoi, also known as “boys love” is a particular subgenre of japanese manga that features romantic relationships between two young male protagonists. notably, in many of these tales, the two men do not overtly identify as homosexual. this subgenre has gained limited popularity in china, and is often read by females, who are known as “rotten girls” or 腐⼥女. notably, this definition is accompanied by an image depicting the logo of the real time strategy game defense of the ancients (dota), thus making clear the link between game culture and this particular form of slang. in this regard, the terms gaoji or jiyou are commonly employed in game-related message boards, for example as follows: ⼤大家可以在⼀一起做个朋友⼀一起开⿊黑，⼀一起搞基 （咳咳咳） “everyone can become good friends together, create a custom game lobby2 together, act gay together…(cough, cough).” the popularity of sexual slang has also become the subject of many popular web series. in “撸友派” (which might be loosely translated as lol friend’s clique), the series continuously pokes fun at gender norms and sexuality. the opening skit of the web series depicts three young friends, one female and two males, each engrossed in a game of lol on his/her individual laptop. the girl is the first to look up, exclaiming in frustration “i hate people who are better at lol then i am!” the chubby young man next to her looks up and states, “i hate people who are better looking than i am,” and finally, the third friend, a skinny and slightly effeminate young man, looks up and states “i hate people who have boy… i mean, i hate people who have girlfriends!” reinforcing gender normativity? in employing the phrases, “diaosi,” “gaoji” and/or “jiyou” as a form of ridicule and selfmocking it must be acknowledged that this phenomenon perpetuates the notion that homosexuality is something to be viewed in a negative light. homophobia remains a problem in china, and the use of “gay” in this joking and derogatory manner may in many ways perpetuate the stigma surrounding those who do actually identify as homosexual. in this sense, we can see similarities between the phenomenon and that of the western notion of ‘bromance,’ which simultaneously describes a homosocial interaction while reinforcing stereotypes about masculinity (the “bro”). in such cases, men are expected to bond with each other while also upholding certain gender norms. any indication of transgression of these norms is qualified by the remark, “no homo,” suggesting that homosexuality is something to be avoided at all costs. what is more, while being a ‘jiyou’ may indicate strong emotional bonds between men, it does not preclude the objectification of women. the spaces surrounding digital gaming in china also mark themselves as heterosexual via the presence of booth babes (at live events) and pages devoted to ‘meinü’ (beautiful girls) on gaming websites, including one on the aforementioned www.jiyou.tv. in both cases, women featured in these live 2 there is no direct english translation for the chinese term “kaihei” but, according to baidu and gamer forums, the phrase refers to the process of creating a team of players who are closely connected through either physical location (playing in the same internet café, for example) or connected via voice chat platforms such as yy. this custom built team maintains close contact with one another and has a general advantage over teams that were randomly selected or paired by the computer. most specifically, the phrase may be a reference to the black “lobby” window that appears when players attempt to create a custom team/game. events and these online photos and videos are scantily clad and overtly sexualized. this is in many ways consistent with western gaming culture. as noted by taylor, jenson and de castell (2009), the so-called “booth babes” can be interpreted as “guarding an intensely ‘homosocial’ (willis 1991) space from homosocial desire” (p. 248). indeed, given the predominately male nature of digital gaming culture, women who do take part in gaming often become fetishized objects of desire. ironically, however, these women are also often marked as “unobtainable” “goddesses.” as such, there is a distinct separation between the fantasy created by “booth babes/meinü,” which effectively reproduces sexism and gender normativity, and social reality, in which a much more complicated and “queer” form of intimacy has developed between male gamers. discussion the sexual slang employed on the chinese internet clearly targets the multitude of ways in which young chinese males grapple with societal pressure to achieve heteronormative success according to a narrow definition of the term. the chinese “losers” are known for their lack of money and their inability to get the attention of the chinese ‘goddess.’ instead, gamers, in loneliness, are left to masturbate to images of sexy ‘booth babes’ and ‘meinü’ who they cannot ever hope to successfully date. in such cases, acting “gay” seems to have the potential to serve as a form of compensatory intimacy along the lines of the “horizontal homosociality” discussed by hammaren and johansson (2014). at the same time, however, many of the signs of hegemonic masculinity discussed by games scholars such as sundén and svengisson (2011), taylor (2011), taylor, jenson and de castell (2009), and wu, fore, wang and ho (2007) seem to remain. what are we to make of these seemingly mixed signals? in this case, a further discussion of both technology’s role in socio-economic mobility and the equation of heteronormativity with success may be useful. cara wallis (2011) suggests that mobile phones have provided migrant women with a kind of “immobile mobility.” by this she means that mobile phones permitted migrant women to “overcome limited and limiting economic, social and spatial conditions,” but that, despite this, the people these women would interact with via cell phone were generally “like them”; i.e. migrants from the same town, classmates and family members—people with whom they likely would have been in contact had they stayed at home in their rural villages. before the widespread use of the cell phone, such local ties would likely have been severed when the migrant women left home. through this discussion, wallis draws our attention to a different type of mobility—social mobility— and notes that cell phones, while overcoming physical distance, do not permit young women to bridge socio-economic gaps, and instead reinforce their social standing as migrants. as noted by fengshu liu (2011), many youth in china turn to the internet when they feel that “the pressure on the self in ‘real’ life [is] too great” (p. 89). this pressure, though shared by both men and women, is particularly acute for young chinese men. states liu (2011): “the sense of achievement and being in control may be especially relevant for boys and men, who are supposed to achieve something in life according to the traditional gendered expectations still very prevalent in today’s china” (p. 90). with regard to digital game culture specifically, consider the following statement, offered by the director of one of china’s most famous machinimas: “in this day and age of growing pressures, we choose to play games because of our feelings of helplessness with regard to our real economic power. try to imagine, if i had money to travel and surf, why would i shut myself at home in front of a computer to play games? because the vast majority of youth living in today’s world of high rents and low wages don’t have that ability...” in tying digital game culture to economic disempowerment, the above statement shares much in common with the rhetoric of the chinese ‘diaosi.’ such ‘diaosi’ often profess that they turn to the ‘spiritual homeland’ of the game-world due to their inability to achieve what is expected of them by parents and society—the white-collar job, house, car, and girlfriend. unlike the case of cell phone usage by migrant workers, however, digital games do provide young men with an alternative and new form of sociality. i would like to refer to the mobility offered by games as “sideways mobility.” the concept of “sideways” movement draws upon the work of a number of different scholars, one of whom is queer theorist kathryn bond stockton (2009), who writes of the queer child and the concept of “sideways growth.” stockton notes that a child’s growth: “has been relentlessly figured as vertical movement upward (hence, ‘growing up’) toward full stature, marriage, work, reproduction, and the loss of childishness. delay, we will see, is tremendously tricky as a conception, as is growth. both more appropriately call us into notions of the horizontal— what spreads sideways—or sideways and backwards—more than a simple thrust toward height and forward time” (p. 4). stockton’s discussion of growth seems here equally suited to a discussion of young men in china who find themselves in a state of suspended animation (delay) when confronted with realities such as the lack of job prospects, and hence, the lack of marriage prospects. they are, in essence, not allowed to “grow up” in the heteronormative sense of the word. similarly, the scholar judith halberstam writes about “heteronormative common sense, “ the kind that “leads to the equation of success with advancement, capital accumulation, family, ethical conduct and hope” (p. 89). by contrast, “subordinate, queer, or counterhegemonic modes of common sense lead to the association of failure with nonconformity, anticapitalist practices, nonreproductive lifestyles, negativity, and critique,” (p. 89) all of which seem to align well with the lifestyle choices of the ‘loser’ who chooses to ‘act gay.’ importantly, conceiving of sideways growth and “failure” as viable ways of life empowers those who are otherwise disempowered by dominant conceptions of success. by actively choosing to identify themselves as ‘losers’ and ‘gay friends,’ male gamers may reclaim a sense of agency and identity. though marginalized within dominant chinese culture, they effectively carve out a niche in which their way of life is both acceptable and common. references bird, sharon r. (1996) welcome to the men’s club: homosociality and the maintenance of hegemonic masculinity. gender and society 10 (2): 120-132. chaogui shi daixu de mei (2011, august 13). “zenme jiu gaoji le?” [how to act gay] dotaba. retrieved from: http://tieba.baidu.com/p/1174129816 chess, s. & shaw, a. (2015) a conspiracy of fishes, or how we learned to stop worrying about #gamergate and embrace hegemonic masculinity. journal of broadcasting & electronic media 59(1): 208-220. doi: 10.1080/08838151.2014.999917 diaosi nadian shi (that diaosi thing) (2013) feidie shuo. http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_ xntaxnzkxnzu2.html, accessed 1 july. “gaoji,” baidu baike. retrieved from: http://baike.baidu.com/view/636233.htm hammarén, n. & johansson, t. (2014). homosociality: in between power and intimacy. sage open: 1-11. doi: 10.1177/2158244013518057 halberstam, j. (2011). the queer art of failure. durham, nc: duke university press. liu, f. (2011). urban youth in china: modernity, the internet and the self. new york, ny: routledge. “zhei bo zhen bu kui” (2014, august 19). lu you pai. [lol friends clique] [web series] retrieved from: http://v.qq.com/cover/5/5046ij2wwvqgeoq.html?vid=m0134kh1guq rensi (2013, august 10). “gay love & gay friends” chinasmack. retrieved from: http://www.chinasmack.com/2013/more/jokes-humor/gay-love-gay friends.html stockton, k.b. (2009) the queer child, or growing sideways in the twentieth century. durham, nc: duke university press. sundén, j. & sveningsson, m. (2012). gender and sexuality in online game cultures: passionate play. new york: routledge. szablewicz, m. (2014). “the losers of china’s internet: memes as ‘structures of feeling’ for disillusioned young netizens” china information 28(2): 259-275. doi:10.1177/0920203x14531538 taylor, n. (2011) play globally, act locally: the standardization of pro halo 3 gaming. international journal of gender, science and technology 3(1). retrieved from: http://genderandset.open.ac.uk/index.php/genderandset/article/view/130/260 taylor, n., jensen, j. & de castell, s. (2009). cheerleaders/booth babes/ halo hoes: progaming, gender and jobs for the boys. digital creativity. 20(4): 239-252. doi: 10.1080/14626260903290323 wallis, cara. (2011). immobile mobility: marginal youth and mobile phones in beijing. in r. ling & s. campbell (eds.), mobile communication: bringing us together and tearing us apart (pp. 61-81). new brunswick, nj: transaction publishers. wu, w., fore, s., wang, x.y. & ho, p. (2007). beyond virtual carnival and masquerade: in-game marriage on the chinese internet. games and culture. 2(1): 59-89. twitteraoir2013-final twitter  in  the  context  of  the  arab  spring     1   twitter in the context of the arab spring muhammad abdul-mageed christopher brown dua'a abu-elhij'a mahajna department of linguistics & school of informatics and computing indiana university, bloomington mabdulma@indiana.edu department of linguistics university of texas at austin chrisbrown@utexas.edu department of linguistics indiana university, bloomington dabuelhi@umail.iu.edu abstract except for some initial analyses (abdul-mageed & albogmi, 2011; abdul-mageed, albogmi, gerrio, hamed & aldibasi, 2011; abdul-mageed & abu mostafa, 2012; abdul-mageed, 2013), arabic twitter has not been the target of much research. although these initial analyses have accumulated insights as to some twitter user practices and the micro-blogging service’s content, these studies remain limited in terms of scale (i.e., they did not depend on huge datasets as is attempted in the current work), nor did they examine twitter use and practices in the context of the arab spring. in the current work, our goal is to bridge these gaps. in other words, we investigate (1) the employment of various arabic varieties, (2) sentiment expression, and (3) topic distribution in two twitter sub-corpora, one pre-dating the arab spring and another occurring in its context. our analyses show the impact of the political events on the social network at the three fronts. keywords arab spring; twitter; computer-mediated communication; sentiment; arabic; arabic dialects; modern standard arabic; social media; internet activism. introduction twitter, the micro-blogging service, has become popular in many countries as a communication platform for posting updates about personal activities, expressing opinions, sharing experiences, broadcasting news, etc. however, although there is currently a flurry of interest in researching the english-language twitter, as yet not much research has been done on other languages used on the micro-blogging service, and arabic is no exception. in the current paper, we report attempts to partially bridge this gap by investigating the use of arabic twitter both before and in the context of the arab spring. motivations for studying arabic twitter include (1) the popularity of twitter as a networking and communication tool during the ongoing arab spring, (2) that the language is very widely spoken (with about 300 million native speakers in 22 countries), and (3) the fast growing rate of arabic on the web (with arabic rated as the world’s fastest growing language on the web in 2009 with 2,297.7% growth rate, http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm). goal and research questions our goal in the current work is to analyze the linguistic features, identify language variety employed (i.e., modern standard arabic [msa], the modern standard variety of the language, vs. dialects [e.g., egyptian, levantine, moroccan]), topics, and sentiments expressed in arabic tweets. we thus aim to answer the following specific research questions: rq1: what are the linguistic features of arabic as used in twitter? rq2: what is the distribution of modern standard arabic vs. dialects (i.e., all dialects as a single category) in arabic twitter? rq3: what is the distribution of arabic dialects in arabic twitter? rq4: what are the topics that arabic users tweet about? rq5: to what extent are arabic tweets opinionated and what is the distribution of sentiment (e.g., positive, negative) in opinionated tweets? twitter  in  the  context  of  the  arab  spring     2   data collection, sampling, and methods we employ corpus linguistics (mcenery & wilson, 2001) and content analysis (bauer, 2000) methods on two arabic twitter corpora, one collected before the arab spring and one after it. the first sub-corpus is composed of 233,309 tweets (henceforth the twitter arabic corpus [tac]) automatically extracted from a two-month twitter stream between november 11th, 2009 and february 1st, 2010 as reported in petrovic, osborne & lavrenko (2010). the second sub-corpus is composed of about 50,000,000 tweets (henceforth the twitter arabic spring corpus [tasc]) collected between february 1st, 2012 and march 1st, 2013. for the manual content analysis, we employ a grounded-theory approach to analyze a random sample of 2,000 tweets from each subcorpus (making up a total of 4,000 tweets). results results of the analysis of linguistic features show that arabic tweets do not differ strikingly from ‘offline’ arabic, although they share some features characteristic of some varieties of online language (e.g., paralinguistic and prosodic features). regarding the analysis of language variety, it was found that 66.1% of the tweets were in msa, whereas the remaining 33.9% were in arabic dialects. initial nuanced analyses of dialects show that dialects associated with countries where revolutions/protests have taken place (e.g., egyptian arabic) are represented with higher rates than other dialects. the sentiment analysis indicates that 35.44% of the tweets are solely factual and bear no sentiment. out of the 65.66% non-factual/opinionated tweets, 25.28% are positive, 17.22% are negative, 9.40% are neutral, and 2.78% are mixed. initial analyses of tasc show more negative than positive content. an analysis of the topics of tweets in the tac sub-corpus revealed that 17.25% of users tweeted about cultural issues, 14.80% about politics, 7.40% about feelings & activities, and the rest about other miscellaneous (e.g., religious, economic, and educational) topics. initial analyses of topics in tasc quite predictably show a significant increase of especially political content. discussion and conclusion at first glance, the finding that the 140-character limit imposed by twitter does not force users to frequently employ specific linguistic features (e.g., clippings and abbreviations) is surprising. however, this is expectable as in arabic the practice of dropping vowels results in a level of ambiguity and employing clippings and abbreviations would heighten such ambiguity and render text unintelligible. we thus note that social media arabic is different from digital forms of other indo-european languages (e.g., english), not only because of cultural differences but also because of the linguistic features of the language itself (e.g., its orthographic underspecification). the finding that the majority of tweets are in msa is equally surprising. this specific language variety distribution is perhaps due to the fact that several news organizations use twitter to post headlines of their news stories. in addition, many news anchors and highly educated individuals are among the arabic twitter users. the finding that more positive than negative tweets are posted shows that twitter is different from e.g., listserves (thompsen & ahn, 1992) where users are less likely to know one another. the more negative use of the tasc is indicative of the employment of the twitter medium for argumentative causes (e.g., causes characteristic of the arab spring). the fact that cultural and political tweets are the most frequent in tac indicates that arabic twitter users are less interested in personal issues than they are in community-based issues. this claim can perhaps be accounted for by the ongoing revolutions in the arab world in which arabic twitter is playing a major role. perhaps the period from which tac was collected can be viewed as setting the stage for the revolutions. the more political content and the heightened proportion of dialects representing regions with political changes in tasc are intuitive yet illustrative results, which show the role that social media in general, and twitter in particular, has been playing in the arab spring. twitter  in  the  context  of  the  arab  spring     3   sources bauer, m. (2000). classical content analysis. in m. bauer & g. gaskell (eds.), qualitative researching with text, image and sound (pp. 131-151). thousand oaks, ca: sage. abdul-mageed, m., albogmi, h. (2011). taghreed?: what arabs say on twitter and how they say it. paper presented at the georgetown university round table on languages and linguistics (gurt2011): language and new media: discourse 2.0, march 9-12, washington dc, usa. abdul-mageed, m., albogmi, h., gerrio, a., hamed, e., & aldibasi, o. (2011). tweeting in arabic: what, how and whither. paper presented at the 12th annual conference of the association of internet researchers (internet research 12.0 – performance and participation), october 1013, washington, seattle, usa. abdul-mageed, m., & abu mostafa, h. (2012). linguistic features, language variety, and sentiment in online arabic. pragmatics festival, april 19-21, indiana university, bloomington, usa. abdul-mageed, m. (2013). social media arabic. paper presented at the 27th annual symposium on arabic linguistics, feb. 28 march 2, indiana university, bloomington, in, usa. mcenery, t., & wilson, a. (2001). corpus linguistics (vol. 1). edinburgh. petrovic, s., osborne, m., & lavrenko, v. (2010, june). the edinburgh twitter corpus. in proceedings of the naacl hlt 2010 workshop on computational linguistics in a world of social media (pp. 25-26). thompsen, p.a., & ahn, d.k. (1992). ‘to be or not to be: an exploration of e-prime, copula deletion and flaming in electronic mail.’, et cetera: a review of general semantics, 49, 146–164. microsoft word aoir 2015 conference paper final submission.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 from borking to streaming: the normalization of media surveillance blake hallinan university of colorado boulder introduction this paper builds on existing research on the role of surveillance in quotidian institutional contexts (gilliom & monahan 2012; turow 2006; turow 2011) and follows jeremy packer’s provocation to communication scholars to understand “media not merely as transmitters—the old ‘mass media’ function—but rather as data collectors, storage houses, and processessing centers” (2013, 296). through an analysis of congressional documents, news reports, and scholarly literature, the case study of the video privacy protection act shows how social, technological, and legal changes associated with media distribution trouble the distinctions between audience and user, how the social, technological and legal changes associated with video challenge new media and old media. a class action lawsuit filed in late 2009 alleged that netflix, the popular streaming video and dvd-by-mail company, perpetrated the “largest voluntary privacy breach to date, disclosing sensitive and personal identifying consumer information” (jane doe v. netflix 2009). the alleged privacy breach referred to the netflix prize dataset released to the public in 2006 in conjunction with a contest of the same name. the lawsuit also argued that movie and television ratings should be considered sensitive information since they may reveal an individual’s “sexuality, religious beliefs, or political affiliations,” in addition to personal struggles “with issues such as domestic violence, adultery, alcoholism, or substance abuse” (jane doe v. netflix 2009). such concerns are well captured by the plaintiff, a jane doe and closeted lesbian mother from ohio, who believed public knowledge of her sexual orientation threatened the social and economic well being of her and her family. in making these claims, the lawsuit draws upon the cultural and legal heritage of an earlier privacy breach involving video rental information. during the 1987 congressional confirmation hearings for judge robert heron bork, a freelance journalist obtained a copy of bork’s complete rental history from potomac video and published an exposé on his viewing habits in the local weekly newspaper. the resulting scandal brought congress together in the long-honored american tradition of bipartisan outrage and provided the impetus for the video privacy protection act (vppa). enacted into law in 1988, the vppa prohibits “video tape service providers” suggested citation (apa): hallinan, b. (2015, october 21-24). from borking to streaming: the normalization of media surveillance. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. from disclosing personally identifiable information without informed and written content obtained at the time of disclosure, except to certain enumerated persons. it also requires providers to destroy personally identifiable information no later than one year after the data is no longer being used for the purpose it was originally collected (murphy 2011). it is under this consumer privacy law that the class action lawsuit jane doe v. netflix alleged wrongdoing. the exposure of robert bork’s rental history and the release of the netflix prize dataset share a number of structural similarities, including an obvious proximity to the vppa, a conception of usage records as sensitive information, and a belief that policy plays an essential role in protecting the privacy of individuals. despite these similarities, the two cases differ greatly with regard to public reception and the position of privacy within the cultural imagination. after the nonconsensual publication of his rental history, robert bork garnered public sympathy and righteous indignation on his behalf. nearly two decades later, jane doe was met with apathy and a slew of threats and personal accusations. why the differing reactions? certainly, one might note issues of gender, sexuality, and anonymity as possible explanations, especially with regard to the threats and personal accusations directed towards jane doe (cherny & weise 1996; whitehead & wesch 2012). however, these issues do not fully account for the level of public apathy surrounding the ‘largest voluntary privacy breach,’ an exposure that potentially threatened the reputations of nearly 500,000 netflix subscribers. as such, the two events bracket a number of changes in media consumption, technology, and society that collectively result in the normalization of media surveillance, or the collection of information about individuals related to the use of media. this normalization gives reason to the public apathy surrounding jane doe v. netflix and other recent data breaches and, at the same time, suggests the value of returning to the bork hearings and subsequent enactment of the video privacy protection act in order to recover an awareness of the historical specificity of media surveillance and to explore the associated concerns at a time when they were widely and publically expressed. tracking, profiling, human, machine the process of media surveillance differs according to the content and delivery system involved. for example, journalist michael dolan acquired robert bork's rental history from potomac video by walking into the store, stating his intention to write an article about the judge, and asking to see the records. the clerk readily obliged and provided a list of all 146 vhs tapes the bork family had rented over the past two years (dolan). with the advent of the world wide web in 1991, computers also play an increasingly important role in providing direct access to various digital media, including web pages and electronic forms of news, books, music, images, and video. while these changes have not eclipsed older forms of distribution, digital distribution profoundly alters the possibilities for tracking media consumption. where bork’s rental history remains agnostic to a number of questions concerning the use of the videotapes, consumption records maintained by netflix, hulu, and other online streaming video providers offer a more granular picture. for any given consumer, these services may have access to the following kinds of information: the name of the content; time and location of access; behavior during access, such as pausing, rewinding, and fast-forwarding; ratings; device information; metadata from third parties; social media data; search information; and, increasingly, information about the content itself (harris 2012; havens 2014). the resulting glut of information fits within what mark andrejevic and kelly gates describe as the “collective everything approach” of big data surveillance (2014, 185). compared to the records maintained by potomac video, the legitimate business interest in the more expansive records associated with data surveillance is both less singular and less obvious and may include everything from verifying the identify of a subscriber to assessing audience demographics to producing personalized recommendations. from the dominant industry perspective, as the volume of the data grows, so too does its value. however, from the perspective of privacy activists like janlori goldman, staff attorney for the american civil liberties union, this growth is a cause for concern as it contributes to the creation of a “wombto-tomb dossier” for every individual (u.s. congress 1988). beyond loss of privacy, the creation of a ‘womb-to-tomb’ dossier also poses problems related to profiling, the active assessment of an individual based on a set of discrete information. although some forms of profiling may be inevitable and even desirable (consider, for instance, the forms of profiling involved creating personalized media recommendations), other forms of profiling, such as journalist michael dolan’s exposé on robert bork’s viewing habits, appear considerably less justified. the newspaper article, described during congressional hearings as “beyond the pale” and a cause for “outrage,” (u.s. congress 1988) claimed to reveal the “inner workings” of the judge’s mind by analyzing the movies he and his family rented (dolan). while the tone of the article is both pointed and hyperbolic, the general structure of argument, that of making inferences about other people from the media they consume, has broad acceptance. as judith klug, director of the american library association’s office for intellectual freedom notes, “there are people in every community who believe that a person’s interest [sic] in a subject must reflect not merely his [sic] intellectual interests, but his character and his attitudes” (u.s. congress 1988). certainly some degree of inference undergirds all forms of social interaction, as humans are limited by mortality, social conventions, and bodily capacity to know everything about an interlocutor and her intentions. however, communication promises the ability to address incorrect or harmful assumptions and forge ethical ways of ‘being with’ other people (peters 1999). surveillance undercuts the experience of mutuality and separates words and behaviors from a given social context. this separation increases the possibility for misunderstanding and exposes individuals to an untold and inaccessible series of assessments that influences their ability to act in the world. isolated and individual acts of profiling, like robert bork’s treatment at the hands of michael dolan, give a human face to what is largely a hidden, structural phenomenon but, in so doing, threaten to paper over the extensive institutional aspects of media surveillance. such papering took place during the period of time from when the vppa was first proposed to when it was signed into law in january of 1989. the initial draft of the law included both libraries and direct marketers alongside videotape service providers and had an expressed goal of protecting the records of all “content based” media. however, thanks to lobbying efforts from the direct marketing industry and concerns over unduly restricting access to law enforcement officials and the fbi, the final law was much reduced in scope and only pertained to the single media type and content provider directly applicable to the bork incident namely, videotapes and videotape rental services. as a result, the vppa primarily protected individual consumers from the profiling committed by other individuals and left institutionalized forms of profiling unchecked. however, the records from the hearing do provide a clear sense of the stakes of institutional profiling. in a premonitory moment, senator patrick leahy, sponsor of the video privacy protection act, described his vision of the near future, where somebody sits at a massive computer—somebody whom [he has] never seen, never will meet in [his] life—but that person can kind of figure out that patrick leahy is this sort of person based on what he reads or what he thinks or what he views and, therefore, he gets pegged a certain way and we are now going to bring whatever the marketing tools are available against him. (u.s. congress 1988) this future has been robustly realized in the world of database marketing and personalized media, with a small amendment. instead of a person sitting at a massive computer, the computer itself conducts mass profiling according to a set of programmatic rules. though the participants of surveillance have expanded to include both human and nonhuman agents, the fundamental processes of collecting information and producing actionable judgments remains the same. conclusion: frictionless sharing and the datafication of the social the recent spate of lawsuits invoking the video privacy protection act demonstrates its continued legal relevance within the contemporary media environment, while the lack of significant public and scholarly attention to these cases, which involve major media companies like netflix, facebook, hulu, redbox, the cable news network, espn, google, and others, attests to its diminished cultural heritage. however, it is a mistake to treat privacy as either unspeakably obvious or outdated, a purely legal problem properly relegated to historical accounts of the 1970s and 1980s. rather, the juxtaposition of the vppa and jane doe v. netflix speaks to a broad shift from a culture of protection to a culture of surveillance, and the normalization of tracking and profiling media consumption points to the importance of thinking through issues of privacy and intellectual freedom in this new context. social media platforms encourage a kind of surveillant sociality, in that they allow users to observe the words, images, and media shared by others online without a public record. while most information posted to social networks is the result of a conscious decision, the more recent advent of ‘frictionless sharing’ removes this requirement. frictionless sharing transforms media consumption and social networking into a closed system through an application that tracks what an individual reads, listens to, or watches and broadcasts that information automatically on a social network. while advertisers have long tracked media consumption, the possibility of publically broadcasting this information to friends and associates introduces a novel element. through the broadcast, an individual’s friends and associates may see that individual the way data-miners do: as a stream of behavioral data. in a culture that implicitly endorses the validity of character judgments drawn from records of media consumption, the expanded availability of this information is a cause for concern. datafication, or transformation of behavior into quantified data, encroaches on previously unmeasured aspects of everyday life (van dijck, 2014). here, the history of media distribution proves instructive: before the rise of video rental stories in the 1970s and 1980s, there was very little individualized tracking of commercial media consumption; from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, various media industries shifted to more individualized forms of measurement; and finally, with the advent of online media distribution, these practices have increased in scope and, at the same time, have become increasingly proprietary. with the integration of media consumption patterns to social networks, the risk of this information reaching unanticipated audiences increases greatly. these audiences may include the same kinds of folks seeking records from video stores and libraries, removing the need to obtain a subpoena. the video privacy protection act was designed, in part, to prevent these kinds of unanticipated exposures. in fact, the act was the reason netflix did not introduce social integration in the american market until 2013, despite frictionless sharing apps available for other, less regulated media forms such as music and the news since 2011. however, the 2012 amendment to the vppa, colloquially and tellingly known as the netflix amendment, authorized durable—long term and automatic-consent and paved the way for the social integration of video. during the congressional hearing, david hyman, the general counsel for netflix, pointed out the inconsistent regulation of different types of media (u.s. congress, 2012). where hyman argued the special treatment of video was antiquated, a leftover from the historical accident of robert bork’s leaked rental history, a more robust consideration of the vppa shows that the real historical accident was the failure to protect all forms of content media. references andrejevic, mark and kelly gates. 2014. “big data surveillance: introduction” surveillance and society 12(2): 185-196. cherny, lynn and elizabeth reba weise. 1996. wired women: gender and new realities in cyberspace. seattle, washing: seal press. dolan, michael. "the bork tapes saga." the american porch. available at: http://www.theamericanporch.com/bork2.htm. gilliom, john, and torin monahan. supervision: an introduction to the surveillance society. chicago: university of chicago press, 2013. harris, derrick. "netflix analyzes a lot of data about your viewing habits." gigaom. june 14, 2012. accessed december 15, 2014. https://gigaom.com/2012/06/14/netflix-analyzes-alot-of-data-about-yourviewing-habits/. havens, timothy. 2014. “media programming in an era of big data” media industries journal 1.2. jane doe v. netflix. 2009. original complaint, 17 december (united states district court for the northern district of california). available at: http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2009/12/doe-v-netflix.pdf. murphy, bart. 2011. the latest trend of the plaintiff class action bar: video privacy protection act class action litigation. intellectual property & technology law journal, 23.7. packer, jeremy. 2013. epistemology not ideology or why we need new germans. communication and critical/cultural studies, 10:2-3. peters, john durham. 1999. speaking into the air: a history of the idea of communication. chicago: university of chicago press. turow, joseph. 2006. niche envy: marketing discrimination in the digital age. cambridge, ma: mit press. turow, joseph. 2011. the daily you: how the new advertising industry is defining your identity and your worth. new haven: yale university press. u.s. congress. 1988. committees on the judiciary of the u.s. house and the committee on the judiciary of the u.s. senate. video and library privacy protection act of 1988 hearing, 3 august 1988. washington: government printing office, 1993. u.s. congress. 2012. committee on the judiciary of the u.s. senate. the video privacy protection act: protecting viewer privacy in the 21st century. washington: government printing office, 2012. van dijick, josé. 2014. “datafication, dataism and dataveillance: big data between scientific paradigm and ideology” surveillance & society 12(2): 197-208. whitehead, neil l and michael wesch. 2012. human no more digital subjectivities, unhuman subjects, and the end of anthropology. boulder, colorado: university press of colorado. microsoft word kripe.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): kripe, z. (2014, october 22-24). the business behind the business: the role of finance in the design of web services. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the business behind the business: the role of finance in the design of web services zane kripe lieden university abstract this article explores the production of internet services by looking at how web technology startups design their products and develop their business models. in particular, it explores how financial considerations of startups influence the types of digital services that become available to the internet users and under what terms. the research is based on an ethnographic study of investment seeking technology startups in singapore and uses qualitative data gathered during participatory observation of startup entrepreneurs and investors. it argues that to a large extent the technology business is characterised by commodification at two levels. first, as the company develops its service into a commodity for its users and customers. second, as the startup itself becomes a commodity for the venture capital* as it seeks to attract funding in the investment market. exploration of this double relationship reveals how different regimes of value influence the social and material construction of the internet. this paper argues that for a better understanding of the contemporary internet landscape, the internet services have to be situated in their political economy relations and dependencies. in 2012 technology business portal techcrunch featured an article on how facebook has changed the design of its ‘app permission requests’ in a way that significantly downplays the privacy tradeoffs users agree to when engaging with apps. in the article such change in the interface design was explained as nearly self-evident: “after all, this access to our information and identity is the currency facebook is trading in and what is driving its stock up or down.” (charkham, 2012) since the summer of 2012 the discussion of privacy and social media has clearly gone a long way. however, this facebook example highlights also another, much less discussed aspect, namely, the active role financial considerations and venture capital plays in shaping the internet landscape. this aspect is to what i wish to turn the attention to in this paper. two level commodification process the paper proposal is based on eight months long ethnographic study of young technology companies in singapore that were developing their products and working towards attracting early stage investment (at the time of this research it was in the range of usd 250 000 to 750 000). i argue that web technology startup companies are often characterized by a commodification process at two levels. at the first level the startup develops its technological solution into a commodity which is marketed, sold and used by the internet users and the services customers. at the second, perhaps less obvious level the startup itself becomes a commodity. this, what i call ‘the commodification of company’, is a development that occurs as the startup searches for additional funding from investors. it is in this process that the startups can be understood as commodities in the investment market as they fashion themselves as ‘good investment cases’ for their (potential) investors. in the startup vocabulary these two levels of commodification are referred to as two different value propositions the startups have to develop one is for its users (‘user value proposition’) and the other for investors (‘investor value proposition’). this differentiation reveals that what is under the question are different ‘regimes of value’ (appadurai 1988). in this paper i will explore the relationship between the two levels of commodification and how they influence one another. understanding this double relationship in greater detail is crucial if we want to better grasp what kind of services became available to internet consumers, under what conditions and shaped by what kind of structural forces. social history of a web technology startup social and cultural anthropology has a long tradition of studying commodities, gifts, consumption and changing notions of value (miller 1995). arjun appadurai (1988) and igor kopytoff (1986) have successfully discussed how we can gain insights in the changing nature of value by tracing the social histories of objects as they are being produced, exchanged, discarded, etc. adapting their approach in this paper i will give an account of the social history of a web based internet service called “explorations”. from starting off as a creative hobby project to being a venture capital backed company that needs to deliver ‘results’ to its investors, the service provided by “explorations” has undergone multiple changes over the course of three years. i will analyse how the founders discussed, re-envisioned, changed and re-modelled their service as they were trying to make their project become a ‘business’ and a viable investment case. good investment cases this paper will explore the interaction between these two levels of commodification trying to explicate how the nature of venture capital plays role in the type of internet products that become available to users and under what conditions. the “explorations” case is an example from a wider context of internet company production. based on interviews with and observations of technology startup entrepreneurs and early stage investors i will discuss the preference for certain types of products and product mechanisms by venture capital. for example, during my fieldwork it became apparent that investors favor startup companies that provide services with reoccurring monthly fees rather than buy-it-once products, services that are platforms for other businesses, services that can claim patents, services that gather users’ data and other solutions which are seen as more likely to ensure the ‘exponential growth’ web startups are known for. i will explain how these preferences can be seen as deeply imbedded in the nature of venture capital, which aims for extremely high returns in the case of successful investment and absolute loss in the case of failure. to summarize this paper calls for a more holistic investigation of internet services. one that pays attention to the commercialization processes and that situates the internet services in what nigel thrift (2001) has called ‘the cultural circuit of capital’ where the knowledge and practices of technology entrepreneurship are produced and reinforced in close interaction with financial world (see also arvidsson 2012). * i use the term venture capital as an umbrella term to refer to a spectrum of investors ranging from venture capital firms to private angel investors. references charkham, avi. 2012. 5 design tricks facebook uses to affect your privacy decisions, techcrunch, http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/25/5-design-tricks-facebook uses-to-affect-your-privacy-decisions/ thrift, nigel. 2001. 'it's the romance, not the finance, that makes the business worth pursuing': disclosing a new market culture. economy and society 30 (4): 412-432 miller, daniel. 1995. consumption and commodities. annual review of anthropology 24:141-161. kopytoff, igor. 1986. the cultural biography of things. in the social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective. ed. arjun appadurai. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1986 appadurai, arjun. 1988. introduction: commodities and the politics of value. in the social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective. ed. arjun appadurai. cambridge: cambridge university press arvidsson, adam and elanor colleoni. 2012. value in informational capitalism and on the internet. the information society 28 (3): 135-150 selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): richterich, a. (2016, october 5-8). ‘do not hack’. rules, values, and communal practices in hackerand makerspaces. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. annika richterich maastricht university this paper explores which rules and values are relevant to contemporary practices of hacking and making. it examines how members in hackerand makerspaces conceptualise their communities and their use of digital technology. based on interviews with community members in england, observations of physical spaces and online message boards, it shows how rules, social values, and communal practices are interrelated. hackerspaces (also called hackspaces) and makerspaces are physical locations where community members meet in order to engage in and discuss activities such as programming and electronics construction. while the public perception of hacking as illegal activity is common,1 hackerspace members understand and pursue hacking mainly as creative interaction with digital technology.2 hackerspaces have a great potential to facilitate creativity and it literacy, and to act as hubs for (digital) civic engagement and learning.3 at the same time, while feminist hackerspaces have received increased attention more recently, it is important to recognise that such spaces often suffer from a gender bias as male-dominated communities.4 expertise as it is acquired and maintained in such spaces facilitates new forms of civic participation.5 nevertheless, the term hacking is still closely associated with illegal activities, immoral use of information technologies, and breaking into closed systems. in computer science education and for trainings targeted at an employment in the field of it security, educational institutions and service providers have even suggested the term ‘ethical hacking’ in order to dissociate ‘legal’ from ‘illegal hacking’ (cracking).6 moreover, the term makerspace has become more common during the last years: it refers to communities which are (in many ways) similar to hackerspaces, while avoiding the negative connotations of ‘hacking’.7 'doo not hack'. rules, values, and communal practices in hacker and makerspaces 2 figure 1: ‘do not hack’ sticker at london hackspace. photo taken by the author (august 2016) in order to contextualise my research, i will first provide a brief overview of the different understandings of hacking8 and of the debate regarding differences between hackerand makerspaces. secondly, i will highlight the ethos of hacking and making, and how these practices relate to legal rules regarding digital technology. going back to the hacker ethic, depicted by levy in 1984, hacking is rooted in the fundamental conviction that individuals need to be able to deconstruct technology, to ‘take it apart’, in order to understand how it works, to acquire knowledge, and to use this for future innovations.9 this assumption has fostered a strong connection (or rather vast overlaps) between hacking and making communities and free and open source projects.10 levy explains the need for non-proprietary, open systems: ‘if you don’t have access to the information you need to improve things, how can you fix them? […] the best way to promote this free exchange of information is to have an open system.’11 however, as coleman and golub (2008) point out with reference to elias ladopoulos (acid phreak 1990): there is no universal hacker ethic, but rather ethical diversity among hackers. the authors describe how ‘[...] hacker morality in fact exists as multiple, overlapping genres that converge with broader prevailing political and cultural processes, such as those of liberalism’.12 hence, this paper also contributes to the discussion of the multiple meanings of hacking and its ethos. with regards to technology interaction in hacker-/makerspaces, hacking can be understood as concept and practice which implies pushing boundaries and predefined modes of usage, but does not involve illegal activity. firstly, this paper will hence examine which technology is utilised in hackerand makerspaces, and which rules and values apply to related practices. secondly, it aims at going beyond an investigation of technological activities: it will explore the communal values and issues emerging in such 3 spaces, e.g. concerning efforts towards inclusivity and self-governance. on community websites such as the london hackspace wiki, it is for example stated that ‘[a]s hackers we hate making rules almost as much as we hate following them, so we really want to keep the number of rules to a minimum.’13 rules are seen as ironically unavoidable (rather than desirable) elements for maintaining the community. this has e.g. led to the common practice of labelling stored items with ‘do no hack’ stickers in order to prevent that they are utilised by other members (see figure 1). overall, by investigating the rules and values relevant to hackerand makerspaces, i aim at contributing to a better understanding of normative assumptions guiding members’ individual and communal practices. my paper will present the results of interviews with members of two hackerspaces and one makerspace in england (london and oxford). this approach will be combined with observations of the physical community spaces as well as their online message boards and general websites. based on this material, i will discuss how members conceptualise their communities and their personal engagement. on a methodological level, i will also reflect on the development that internet research already has expanded and needs to expand even further to approaches which are not limited to e.g. on-screen content, but look into spatial, material interaction between humans and digital technology. references 1 ziccardi, g. (2013). resistance, liberation technology and human rights in the digital age. heidelberg/new york/london: springer, pp. 1–25; alleyne, b. (2011). challenging code: a sociological reading of the kde free software project. sociology, 45(3), 496–511; jordan, t., & taylor, p. (1998). a sociology of hackers. the sociological review, 46(4), 757–780; chandler, a. (1996). the changing definition and image of hackers in popular discourse. international journal of the sociology of law, 24(2), 229–251. 2 nikitina, s. (2012). hackers as tricksters of the digital age: creativity in hacker culture. the journal of popular culture, 45(1), 133–152; kelty, c.m. (2008). two bits: the cultural significance of free software. durham: duke, pp. 182ff. 3 lindtner, s. (2014). hackerspaces and the internet of things in china: how makers are reinventing industrial production, innovation, and the self. china information, 28(2), 145–167; kera, d. (2014). innovation regimes based on collaborative and global tinkering: synthetic biology and nanotechnology in the hackerspaces. technology in society, 37, 28–37; springer netherlands; slatter, d., & howard, z. (2013). a place to make, hack, and learn: makerspaces in australian public libraries. the australian library journal, 62(4), 272–284. 4 lewis, j. (2015). barriers to women’s involvement in hackspaces and makerspaces. retrieved from http://access-space.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/ 10/barriers-to-womens-involvement-in-hackspaces-and-makerspaces.pdf; toupin, s. (2014). feminist hackerspaces: the synthesis of feminist and hacker cultures. the journal of peer production. retrieved from http://peerproduction.net/ issues/issue-5-shared-machine-shops/peer-reviewed-articles/feministhackerspaces-the-synthesis-of-feminist-and-hacker-cultures. 4 5 rosner, d. k., lindtner, s., erickson, i., forlano, l., jackson, s. j., & kolko, b. (2014). making cultures: building things and building communities. in: proceedings of the companion publication of the 17th acm conference on computer supported cooperative work & social computing, pp. 113–116. acm; kahne, j., lee, n. j., & feezell, j. t. (2012). digital media literacy education and online civic and political participation. international journal of communication, 6, 1–24. 6 see e.g. http://www.abertay.ac.uk/studying/ug/ethhac or https://www.eccouncil.org /certification/certified-ethical-hacker. 7 van holm, e.j. (2014). what are makerspaces, hackerspaces, and fab labs?’ ssrn. retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2548211; cavalcanti, g. (2013). ‘is it a hackerspace, makerspace, techshop, or fablab?’ make. retrieved from http://makezine.com/2013/05/22/the-difference-between-hackerspaces-makerspacestechshops-and-fablabs. 8 jordan, t. (2016). ‘genealogy of hacking’. convergence. advance online publication. doi: 10.1177/1354856516640710. 9 levy, s. (1996) [1984]. hackers: heroes of the computer revolution. retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/729. 10 see e.g. coleman, g. (2012). coding freedom: the ethics and aesthetics of hacking. princeton, nj: princeton university press; jordan, t. (2008). hacking: digital media and technological determinism. cambridge: polity; söderberg, j. (2008). hacking capitalism: the free and open source software movement. london: routledge; kelty, c.m. 2008. two bits: the cultural significance of free software. durham, nc: duke university press. 11 levy (1996) [1984]. 12 coleman, g. & golub, a. (2008). hacker practice: moral genres and the cultural articulation of liberalism. anthropological theory, 8(3), p. 256. 13 see https://wiki.london.hackspace.org.uk/view/rules. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 d heer, e., verdegem, p. & de grove, f. (2016, october 5-8). #missingdata: a methodological inquiry of the hashtag to collect data from twitter. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. evelien d heer, pieter verdegem & frederik de grove iminds mict ghent university introduction in this paper, we assess the twitter hashtag from a methodological perspective. compared to conventional methods in social science research (such as surveys and indepth interviews), social media as a method is far from being fully understood. we evaluate a popular sampling procedure for twitter studies, i.e. the hashtag approach (ausserhofer & maireder, 2013; bruns & burgess, 2011; iannelli & giglietto, 2015). hashtags are valuable to study the emergence and evolution of twitter debates around particular topics. however, scholars do acknowledge not all relevant tweets are we may significantly underestimate the full volume of @replies which was prompted by hashtagged tweet is that so? what are we missing? and does it matter? research aims this paper empirically examines the impact of hashtag sampling on conversation networks. conversation networks are user-user networks, based on users that address other users via the @reply function. our dataset includes hastagged tweets, hashtagged replies and non-hashtagged replies. the data allows us (1) to compare the characteristics of hashtagged and non-hashtagged responses, (2) to assess the changes in the network structure and (3) to assess the relative positions of the users in the network. data collection and analysis the empirical work of this study is based on hashtag data related to the 2014 elections in belgium. in this respect, the study is explorative, looking for a number of tendencies that are worth investigating for other events and contexts. data collection is based on the combination of hashtag and user streams to capture follow-up responses that do not contain the hashtag. this procedure was followed for a selected period of time during the pre-election campaign (early may 2014). first, all tweets containing the dedicated hashtag (i.e. #vk14 or #vk2014) are captured via the public stream. second, for each harvested tweet the original sender is tracked, capturing all tweets from and to this specific twitter user. following, the combination of the hashtag and user streams allows us to reconstruct full conversations containing both hashtagged tweets and non-hashtagged responses. in total, our sub-sample consists of 1719 tweets from 868 unique users which reflects about 10% of the preelection debate. we used a logistic regression to account for the differences between hashtagged and non-hashtagged responses. the independent variables are: (1) the number of included hyperlinks, (2) the number of additional hashtags, (3) the number of included @mentions and (4) the message word count. via social network analysis (sna) we network and (2) the conversation network including non-hashtagged responses. we with respect to the identity, we distinguish between elites (i.e. journalists and politicians) and non-elites (i.e. citizens). the analyses were conducted in ucinet (borgatti, everett & freeman, 2002). results the difference between hashtagged and non-hashtagged responses the logistic regression showed structural differences between replies that include or exclude the dedicated hashtag (i.e. #vk14/2014). in particular, the following elements show a significant positive relation with the inclusion of the dedicated hashtag: (1) additional hashtags***, (2) the presence of hyperlinks*** and (3) tweet length***. in other words, the inclusion of the dedicated hashtag (i.e. #vk14/#vk2014) co-occurs with in inclusion of interactive, informational elements (e.g. hashtags/hyperlinks). further, the significance of tweet length also indicates the usage of the dedicated hashtag is linked to the information value of the twitter message. the changes in the conversation network when including non-hashtagged responses the 161 users and 156 relations, whereas the network including non-hashtagged responses contains 518 users and 1082 ties (see figure 1 below). figure 1 spring-embedding representation of the network excluding (left) and including (right) non-hashtagged responses (bruns & moe, 2014); as it measures to what extent reciprocal relations between two users occur. reciprocal ties are represented by the thicker red lines in figure 1. f size from 37 nodes to 359 nodes. hence, more users are added and more connections between users occur in the network. however, these connections occur amongst a relatively limited set of users, rather than across the entire network. since the network grew in s altered. for about half of the users, we found the relative amount of messages they send or receive, increased when we include non-hashtagged responses. taking a closer look at the identity of the users, we found differences between elites (i.e. politicians and journalists) and non-elites (i.e. citizens). it is predominantly the former that strengthen their position. the inclusion of non-hashtagged responses further confirms the insights we receive f twitter, i.e. the popularity and dominance of elites in the network. references ausserhofer, j., & maireder, a. (2013). national politics on twitter: structures and topics of a networked public sphere. information, communication & society, 16(3), 291 314. borgatti, s.p., everett, m.g. & freeman, l.c. 2002. ucinet 6 for windows: software for social network analysis. harvard, ma: analytic technologies. bruns, a., & burgess, j. (2011). #ausvotes: how twitter covered the 2010 australian federal election. communication, politics & culture, 44(2), 37 56. bruns, a., & moe, h. (2014). structural layers of communication on twitter. in k. weller, a. bruns, j. burgess, m. mahrt, & c. puschmann (eds.), twitter and society (pp. 15 28). new york: peter lang. bruns, a., & stieglitz, s. (2014). metrics for understanding communication on twitter. in k. weller, a. bruns, j. burgess, m. mahrt, & c. puschmann (eds.), twitter and society (pp. 69 82). new york: peter lang. iannelli, l., & giglietto, f. (2015). hybrid spaces of politics: the 2013 general elections in italy, between talk shows and twitter. information, communication & society, 18(9), 1006 1021. larsson, a. o., & moe, h. (2012). studying political microblogging: twitter users in the 2010 swedish election campaign. new media & society, 14(5), 729 747. microsoft word 787-536-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 “what we write is used against us”: the participants' views on tightened control in online debate after the oslo terrorist attacks karoline andrea ihlebæk university of oslo norway k.a.ihlebak@media.uio.no anders sundnes løvlie gjøvik university college norway anders.lovlie@hig.no abstract this paper investigates the participants' experience of changes in the editorial control with online debate after the 22 july 2011 terrorist attacks in norway. through a large-scale web survey and in-depth interviews with a small group of respondents it is uncovered that a majority of the respondents experience a tightening of editorial control, and a reduction in their freedom to participate in the debate. the participants express suspicion and a lack of understanding of the moderation policies of the newspapers, indicating a need for the media organisations to improve the transparency of moderating practices towards participants. furthermore, participants express a strong preference for being able to comment anonymously, and fear of potential repercussions if being forced to use their real names when commenting, indicating that taking away the possibility to be anonymous may curb participation in online debate. keywords online debate; participation; moderation; editorial control; press ethics the 22 july 2011 terrorist attacks in norway constituted an exceptional national crisis, characterized as the worst incidence of violence in the country since world war ii. this tragic episode led to a public debate about online discussion forums due to the perpetrator's internet activities and his distribution of a political “compendium” that was comprised of material written on extremist websites. the controversy brought forth a public re-examining of the core dilemmas regarding new forms of public deliberation and how they should best be administrated. the starting point for our paper is that the media actively invites the public to participate in a number of services ranging from playful activities to journalistic content and online deliberation (larsson, 2012; singer et al. 2012). the dramatic increase in participatory services and deliberative forums has been followed by discussion, both among the general public and the media sector, about the level of and need for editorial control. on the one hand there is a participatory ideal that emphasizes ‘openness’ and ’democratization’ and that indicates a low threshold for participation. an important reason for this is the belief in empowering the public to participate in the public debate, and particularly ordinary citizens who have largely been excluded from this arena. on the other hand there has been a competing argument that criticizes the decreasing degree of legitimate editorial control because it leads to a lowering of the quality of public debate (barber, 2004; bruns, 2008). several studies have explored how different forms of intervention can be applied to impact the debate in a positive direction (coleman and moss, 2012; edwards, 2002; jensen, 2003; kies, 2010; wright, 2006; wright and street 2007). the particular contextual contingencies in the aftermath of the terror attacks challenged normative ideals for participation and put established editorial practices under pressure. it presents a highly interesting case for the study of the conditions for online political debate. in an ongoing research project we have been investigating how four central norwegian newspapers (vg, dagbladet, aftenposten, vårt land) have handled these controversies after the attacks. elsewhere we have shown how the three largest of these newspapers have moderately tightened the editorial control over their online debate systems, moving from what can be described as an 'anarchic' regime for debate in the direction of a more 'interventionist' regime (ihlebæk, løvlie and mainsah, forthcoming). in this paper we investigate how the participants experience the online debate forums one year after the terrorist attack, and their view on editorial control. we have been particularly interested in exploring selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 participants’ opinions on anonymity and moderation practices, the level of dialogue between the facilitators and the users, and the expectations of transparency in editorial decisions-making processes. these questions have been examined through a web survey with 3470 respondents among participants in online debate forums, as well as in-depth interviews with 10 of the respondents. these data supplement earlier information gathered through interviews with editors and moderators in the four newspapers in our study. our findings suggest that while editors and moderators claim that moderation policies have not changed significantly, participants disagree. a large majority of the respondents in our survey believe that moderation of online debate has become stricter, and that participants are less free to “say what they want”. furthermore a majority of the respondents feel that the limits for what they are allowed to write in the online discussion forums where they participate are too strict. this finding indicates a conflict between the participants' desire for greater freedom and the facilitators' need to comply with ethical standards as outlined in the code of ethics of the norwegian press, legal restraints based on editorial responsibilities and the limits of freedom of speech, as well as the newspapers' internal normative evaluations concerning acceptable online utterances. earlier research into norwegian online debate (ihlebæk and ytreberg, 2009) has concluded that debate moderation is to a large degree carried out based on individual judgment and lacks transparency towards the participants. while one can argue that having moderators remove or edit contributions that do not conform to the guidelines of the discussion sites is a necessary requirement in order to make sure that the online debate meets the legal and ethical standards that the press is obliged to follow, it is not fortunate if this is done in such a way that the participants do not understand what contributions are removed, and why. data from both the survey and the in-depth interviews confirm that this is a problem for the discussion sites in our study, suggesting that participants carry a large degree of misunderstanding and distrust against the moderators and editors. of the 40% of the respondents to our survey who have experienced having their contributions deleted or edited by moderators, 84% claim that they could not understand why this was done. in both the survey and interviews respondents express suspicion that the moderation of online debate is motivated not only by neutral guidelines, but also by “political correctness” and censorship of controversial political views. it is reasonable to believe that most participants, if they knew how, would prefer to phrase their comments in such a way that they avoid having them removed or edited by moderators – since the opposite would result simply in having their comments redacted. these findings therefore indicate that online newspapers that wish to reduce the amount of debate contributions that is in breach of their guidelines, and to improve the general climate for discussion, should try to improve the ways in which the practice of the moderators is made transparent and clear to the participants in the debate. after the 2011 terrorist attacks it has often been argued that media organizations should curb the possibility to make anonymous comments in online debate, based on the belief that writing under one's full name would discipline participants into sticking to legal and ethical norms and reduce hate speech. a large majority of the respondents to our survey prefer to comment anonymously, and free-form answers indicate that many respondents fear that what they write in only debate can be used against them in other contexts. a small, but significant minority consisting of 10% of our respondents claim to have experienced “problems in everyday life” as a result of their participation in oline debate. the phenomenon is more prevalent among the more active participants, and free-form answers indicate that the problems experienced may range from “uncomfortable confrontations” in outside contexts like the workplace or other social settings, to threats of violence and criminal cases. these data indicate that removing the possibility to comment anonymously is problematic from the participants' perspective, and may need to be weighed against the danger of curbing participation in the debate. acknowledgments we would like to thank the norwegian council for applied research and gjøvik university college for funding this study. references selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 barber, b. r. (2004). which technology and which democracy? in henry jenkins and david thorburn (eds.) democracy and new media. cambridge, mass.: the mit press. bruns, a. (2008). blogs, wikipedia, second life, and beyond. from production to produsage. new york: peter lang. coleman, s. and moss, g. (2012). under construction: the field of online deliberation research. journal of information technology & politics 9(1), 1-15. edwards, a. r. (2002). the moderator as an emerging democratic intermediary: the role of the moderator in internet discussions about political issues. information polity 7, 3–20. ihlebæk, k. a., løvlie, a. s., mainsah, h. n., (forthcoming). mer åpenhet, mer kontroll? håndteringen av nettdebatten etter 22.juli. norsk medietidskrift. ihlebæk, k. and ytreberg, e. (2009). moderering av digital publikumsdeltakelse: idealer, praksiser og dilemmaer. norsk medietidskrift 16 (1), 45–65. jensen, j. l. (2003). public spheres on the internet – anarchic or government-sponsored: a comparison. scandinavian political studies 26(4), 349–374. kies, r. (2010). promises and limits of web-deliberation. new york: palgrave macmillan. larsson, a. o. (2012) doing things in relation to machines: studies on online interactivity, phd dissertation, uppsala university. singer, j., hermida, a. domingo, d., heinonen, a. paulussen, s., quandt, t., reichog, z. and vulnovic, m. (2012). participatory journalism. guarding open gates at online newspapers. uk: wiley-balckwell. wright, s. (2006). government-run online discussion fora: moderation, censorship and the shadow of control. british journal of politics and international relations 8(4), 550–568. wright, s. and street j. (2007). democracy, deliberation and design: the case of online discussion forums. new media & society 9(5), 849–869. microsoft word ir16-template-final.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): allaste, a-a and tildenberg, k. (2015, october 21-24). imaginary inactivity and the share button. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. imaginary inactivity and the share button allaste, airi-alina university of tallin, estonia tiidenberg, katrin university of tallin, estonia political participation is seen as a prerequisite for democratic governance (lamprianou, 2013) but past decades have seen a steady decrease in electoral turnout and voting among younger generations in most european countries. this paper explores youth’s social media practices and the social imaginary of their political passivity. using estonian data from a 14-country european study memory, youth, political legacy and civic engagement (myplace, 2011-1015) we thematically analysed in-depth interviews (60) in 2 contrasting sites and contextualized it with survey results from all participating countries. instead of questioning how social media enables activism (papacharissi & oliveira, 2012, coleman, 2013) or contrasting political commitment in internet based and physical-space activism (morozov, 2011), our interest lies with understanding young people’s social media practices that could be considered a form (political) participation (liking and sharing political critique and parody, signing petitions), but which young people themselves do not recognize as such. our central research interest lies with young people’s own social imaginary of youths’ political participation and social media practices. cultural context post regaining its independence in 1991, estonia chose a distinctive path compared to other eastern european countries by undertaking neo-liberal economic and political reforms that lead to the popularisation of a success oriented, materialistic and individualistic public discourse. civic activism and protests are rare in estonia. while the recent years have seen a rise of social or community movements and there was a protest against acta (2012), being an activist has a rather negative connotation due to the soviet history, where ‘activism’ meant state mandated communist practices (allaste 2014). participation is much lower than in neighbouring western countries 58% of young people in estonia belong to an organization, compared 73% in finland 73% and 87% denmark. theoretical context recent approaches to activism stress cause-oriented repertoires that have broadened to include ‘consumer’ and ‘lifestyle’ politics (c.f. norris 2007). that relates to a new perception of politics as a concrete handling of difference; actors are seen as ‘everyday makers’ (bang 2005), who, through their daily interactions seek to create small and local change. bakardjeva (2009) offers the concept of ‘subactivism’, which refers to the kind of politics that unfold on the level of subjective experiences and are submerged in the flow of everyday life. considering the constitutive nature of social imaginary (ricoeur, 1994) and building on work regarding imaginary audiences (litt, 2012) we are working with an assumption that young people’s own social imaginary of youth participation is influential and important in determining their behaviour. notably, this social imaginary is situated within a larger one of political passivity of youth and radical individualism and anti-activism of estonians. finally, important to our argument is the constructive power of social media ‘buttons’ (i.e. sharing, liking) on our values and cultural practices. based on van dicjk (2013) we argue, that the coded structure of social media draws young estonians into subactivism that they don’t experience as activism because of their social imaginary of political participation. results and discussion based on our survey data, we found that 10% of young estonians in the region of tartumaa had uploaded political material to the internet and 21% had signed petitions in an online petition platform. both of these can be seen as fairly intensive forms of (online) political participation (compared to, for example merely liking, sharing or following). in addition our interview data uncovered a variety of less-engaged forms of participation. our informants said social media has jumpstarted their awareness of hot topics (i.e. acta) and that they do read articles posted on facebook to help them become better informed of political issues. interestingly, from the perspective of understanding the social imaginary of youth participation – our interviewees interpreted sharing political or civic content on social media primarily as self-presentation and impression-management. yet, looking at how ‘sharing’ and ‘liking’ are contrasted in the following quote, an awareness of the participation element of these social media practices is evident. tarmo, 21, tartu county: i know a couple of people who constantly share something, one of them is the former president of the students’ union who shares political articles and what ministers have said all the time. so i read these sometimes. i very rarely share. especially political messages. i `like` things but i keep a low profile with it. i just give my small approval to something, but sharing means it has to be something i really want all my acquaintances to know about. young people were most comfortable with sharing political content on social media, when it was packaged as humour or parody. while media remix and parody are legitimate forms of political critique, it is our argument that in this case, some of its appeal stems from the political being somewhat hidden. karmen, 24: the last thing i shared was a joke guideline from the estonian tax board that said: ‘please don’t add the members of the parliament to your dependents list on your tax declaration’. you know, because they are actually dependents for estonian people. on the other hand, the belief in efficacy of distributing political messages on social media sites to influence politics was low (24%) compared to denmark (44%) or finland (32%). it seems then, that estonian youth may use social media as everyday makers – they may share a critical joke, press a like on a campaign or even sign a petition about something that directly influences their everyday life, yet the discourse they employ in interpreting this speaks of the individual decisions and actions and thus the social imaginary of non-activism. conclusion estonian young people, similarly to their peers in many countries of the world, do not believe in politics, politicians or see a point in trying to do anything. we need to consider, whether in a post soviet country like estonia, where civic engagement is low and ‘activism’ has a negative connotation, signing petitions, sharing, commenting and ‘liking’, is something that can be seen as ‘gateway activism’, which will lead new generations of people towards participation, or whether what we see are practices the coded structure of social media mandate and which are not, in fact indicative of any interest in politics or desire to participate. references allaste, a.-a. (2014) lgbt movement in estonia. research report http://www.fp7-myplace.eu/documents/d7_1 bakardjieva, m. (2009) ‘subactivism: lifeworld and politics in the age of the internet’, the information society, 25: 91–104 bang, h. 2005. ‘among everyday makers and expert citizens.’ in remaking governance: people, politics and the public sphere, ed. j. newman. bristol: policy press. coleman, g. (2013). coding freedom: the ethics and aesthetics of hacking. princeton university press litt, e (2012): knock, knock. who's there? the imagined audience, journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 56, 330-345 morozov, e. (2011). the net delusion – the dark side of internet freedom. new york: public affairs. norris, p. (2007) political activism: new challenges, new opportunities.the oxford handbook of comparative politics oxford: oxford university press papacharissi, z.; oliveira, m.f. (2012). affective news and networked publics: the rhythms of news storytelling on #egypt, journal of communication, 62, 266–282 ricoeur, p. (1994). imagination in discourse and in action. in (eds) robinson, g. & rundell, j. rethinking imagination, culture and creativity. van dijck, jose (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media oxford university press. kindle edition. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): trott, v. (2019, october 2-5). #metoo and intersectionalism: “radical community healing” or “voyeuristic trauma porn?”. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. #metoo and intersectionalism: “radical community healing” or “voyeuristic trauma porn?” verity trott monash university in october 2017, millions of people reflected on their experiences of sexual abuse and harassment, publicly sharing their testimonials in an expression of global vulnerability using the hashtag #metoo. social media platform twitter became the site of an international phenomenon with reports documenting that in less than a month #metoo had been tweeted over 1.7 million times across 85 countries (park, 2017). however, amongst all of the testimonials emerged an undercurrent of those who were absent from the movement. many of the tweets portrayed the angst and distress individuals experienced in their decision to participate, indicating the emotional and psychological costs of engaging with online feminist campaigns. further, some tweets questioned the efficacy of the movement; expressing frustration at the re-appropriated nature of the campaign and the collective feeling of an “intersectional betrayal” by white women and feminists who dominated the mainstream media reporting of the movement. the phrase “me too” can be traced back to 2006 when african-american activist tarana burke used the phrase to raise awareness of the pervasiveness of sexual violence against women. it was used between survivors to let them know they were not alone. more than a decade later, the hashtag spread virally after american actress alyssa milano tweeted #metoo and accused film producer harvey weinstein of sexual misconduct. the shift from a private exchange of solidarity to a public testimonial is crucial in understanding the costs associated with participation and how the action was reappropriated, consequently overlooking the affective labour of the black woman who laid the foundation. a growing body of literature is developing in attempt to conceptualise the large-scale impact of what has potentially been one of the most highly publicised movements in the connective era (kunst et al., 2018; lilja & johansson, 2018; mendes et al., 2018; onwuachi-willig, 2018; roy, 2018; sharoni, 2018; zarkov & davis, 2018). much of this research examines #metoo as a secondary case study, considering the broad meanings of the large-scale movement and using a more local and defined protest to flesh out the examination in finer detail. this is understandable given the radical pace of the movement and its global spread. many of the impacts and the peripheral actions that have been energised by #metoo are yet to be fully realised. this paper centres the #metoo movement, providing an intersectional critique and drawing attention to the absent or overlooked voices as well as the additional costs of participation that prevent less privileged women from participating. the paper adopts an intersectional framework, as conceptualised by kimberle crenshaw (1991), to analyse the intersectional issues within the #metoo movement. crenshaw (1991:1246) in her research into violence against women of colour, develops the concept of intersectionality to denote the ways in which “systems of race, gender, and class domination converge” and how the patterns of subordination intersect in women’s experiences. crenshaw (1991:1249) identifies how another dimension of disempowerment can be a result of the imposition of one subordinal factor and how it interacts with a pre-existing vulnerability. this results in unique intersectional concerns that are often not addressed by social movement groups. further, crenshaw (1991) demonstrates how feminist and antiracist discourses not only fail to address the issues that arise at the intersection of gender and race but can unintentionally further reproduce the subordination of both. crenshaw’s notion of intersectionality is used as a conceptual framework for the analysis of the narratives that arose from the tweets collected for this research. the tweets demonstrate some of the issues that women of colour experienced within the movement as well as the additional challenges that arose surrounding the inclusion of queer women and women with disabilities. adrienne rich’s (1980) research problematizing the often default assumption of heterosexuality is also employed to expand the analysis into looking at queerness within #metoo and how the movement adopted a heterosexual framework. similarly, trans scholar and writer julia serano (2007, 2013) also identifies how feminist movements have often been unwelcoming to trans folk and particularly transwomen. trans folk experience both traditional and oppositional sexism, which contribute to the high levels of sexual harassment and assault they experience, making them an exceptionally vulnerable community (serano, 2007, 2013). together, this literature helps to inform the intersectional analysis provided within this article. the paper draws on a large data set of 241,361 tweets collected on the platform discovertext from the first three days of the #metoo movement and combines content, discourse and social network analysis to examine the narratives related to participation. specifically, the paper highlights the experiences and reflections of users who selfidentified as queer, disabled, or a person of colour within their tweets. in addition, a social network analysis is used to visualise a snapshot of the affective publics that arose at the beginning of the movement and to illustrate how systems of oppression converged. this research foregrounds the intersectional concerns that result from the scale and reach of the millions of testimonials suspended online that constitute the #metoo movement. it further highlights how the many voices and stories that have circulated the online sphere obscure the absence and recognition of marginalised women and those who are already more vulnerable in regards to experiencing sexual assault (onwuachiwillig, 2018). the findings illustrate how the original creator of the term ‘me too’, tarana burke, was extremely distanced from the centre of the movement in the first three days. in comparison, the women’s march twitter account dominated the protest network on the first day and maintained a central and influential position. further, the findings document the intersectional differences in relation to how victimhood is afforded; sexual violence is experienced; and how access to resources and support networks are granted. last, the analysis found key themes including a distrust of white allies and a need for a more inclusive feminist movement. references crenshaw, k. (1991). mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. stanford law review, 43(6), 1241-1299. kunst, j., bailey, a., prendergast, c., & gundersen, a. (2018). sexism, rape myths and feminist identification explain gender differences in attitudes toward the #metoo social media campaign in two countries. media psychology. 1-26. doi: 10.1080/15213269.2018.1532300 lilja, m., & johansson, e. (2018). feminism as power and resistance: an inquiry into different forms of swedish feminist resistance and anti-genderist reactions. social inclusion, 6(4), 82-94. mendes, k., ringrose, j., & keller, j. (2018). # metoo and the promise and pitfalls of challenging rape culture through digital feminist activism. european journal of women's studies, 25(2), 236-246. onwuachi-willig, a. (2018). what about #ustoo?: the invisibility of race in the #metoo movement. yale law journal forum, 128, 105-120. retrieved from https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/what-about-ustoo. park, a. (2017, december 6). #metoo reaches 85 countries with 1.7m tweets. cbs news, retrieved from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/metoo-reaches-85-countrieswith-1-7-million-tweets/ rich, a. (2003). compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence [1980]. journal of women’s history, 15(3), 11-48. roy, s. (2018). #metoo is a crucial moment to revisit the history of indian feminism. lecture transcript. retrieved from: https://www.cetri.be/metoo-is-a-crucial-momentto?lang=fr sharoni, s. (2018). speaking up in the age of# metoo and persistent patriarchy or what can we learn from an elevator incident about anti-feminist backlash. feminist review, 120(1), 143-151. serano, j. (2007). whipping girl: a transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity. seal press: seattle. serano, j. (2013). excluded: making feminist and queer movements more inclusive. seal press: seattle. zarkov, d., davis, k., (2018). ambiguities and dilemmas around #metoo: #forhow long and #whereto?. european journal of women’s studies, 25(1), 3-9. microsoft word brooks-discourses, a community of scientists, and long-tail data-discourses, a community of scientists, and_ed selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): brooks, c. f., heidorn, p. b., stahlman, g., and chong, s. (2015, october 2124). discourses, a community of scientists, and long-tail data in the cloud. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. discourses, a community of scientists, and long-tail data in the cloud catherine f. brooks university of arizona p. bryan heidorn university of arizona gretchen stahlman university of arizona steven chong university of arizona data in the sciences data collection, use, and management are significant activities in the scientific enterprise, and are evolving given the onset of a big data world. many scientists (e.g., scholars or instructors) do not have access to the computing infrastructure needed to work with large data sets. this is particularly true at many biological research stations – while some stations are part of or loosely affiliated with major universities, others are stand-alone entities. the station researchers are relatively transient, spending seasons at the stations then returning to their home institutions – their data scatter in their differing formats (estrin et al., 2003). this is particularly true for little data that often do not conform to established standards (borgman et al., 2007). previous research on the long tail of data (heidorn, 2008; palmer, cragin, heidorn, & smith, 2007) suggests that a significant portion of data collected in previous eras was actually lost or went unused, data collected may have been used for specific projects then left to die on floppy disks or personal computers. data sharing on cloud-based platforms provides a way to share costs for needed infrastructure and offers hope that previously-lost ‘dark’ data will be brought to light. discussions of day-to-day computing needs and data-sharing possibilities are an important initial step in enabling problemsolving for contemporary scientists – facilitating this type of discussion was the focus of the workshop interrogated in this study. data sharing and related infrastructure dilemmas are of interest across a wide variety of scientists, salient for those engaging with ‘little’ or big data. scientists tend to work with technologist and engineers as part of their working teams (smaller projects often rely on graduate students working in laboratories). so, it is easy to imagine the ways in which shifts in scholarly practice, data collection, and the management of information – especially in an age of big data – are of paramount importance across sectors and to those coming from the entire research spectrum. to interrogate contemporary concerns in science about data management, particularly that in the cloud, the following research question was posed: rq: how do issues with sharing data in the cloud get discursively situated by an interdisciplinary group of scientists? method this qualitative work (miles & huberman, 1994) drew themes from within the data themselves, and followed protocols that are well established in qualitative research traditions (lindlof, 1995). data collection and organization was irb approved and involved the audio recording of whole-workshop talk between a leader and workshop attendees. these recordings were then transcribed and analyzed. this qualitative work (miles & huberman, 1994) drew themes from within the data themselves, and followed protocols that are well established in qualitative research traditions (lindlof, 1995). data collection and organization was irb approved and involved the audio recording of whole-workshop talk between a leader and workshop attendees. these recordings were then transcribed and analyzed. the central premise of the workshop was that new science could be enabled through the development of shared cloud-based cyberinfrastructure. the work was funded under the national science foundation’s software infrastructure for sustained innovation program1. alongside one primary workshop leader, there were three other workshop facilitators, 29 participants, and five assisting doctoral students. findings: framing shared problems as described previously, these scientists came together to resolve a shared problem, considering tools that can support sharing data in the cloud. if dark data from smaller projects were drawn together, scientists would have a broad set of data available to them. shawn, the workshop planner began the first meeting by explaining dark data: gyou could pull it together and get to a critical mass to make it easier to share and useful for science. he continued to explain that if scholars share and work together though the internet or other web-based platforms, more data will be made available, viewable, and usable – 1 this workshop was sponsored in part by the national science foundation through the following collaborative si2-s2i2 grants: 1216726, 1216754, 1216872, 1216879, 1216884. http://www.nsf.gov/si2/ data will become increasingly ‘democratized’ and access across communities of scholars and practitioners will be enhanced. as shawn continued, gthere is a huge growth in the amount of data that we can acquire. sequenced data, in particular, is outstripping the moore’s law, so, in fact, the amount of data we have is growing faster than our computing capacity to process that data. to give context for the current interrogation, then, shawn’s talk shows that shifts in computing infrastructures and cloud-based solutions need consideration. findings: capital, commercialized threats, and the economy of innovative science in some ways, sharing data on the cloud implies trust of commercial interests. in such an environment, data become the commodity providing a rich place for commercialized competition. moderator: g programs, like [those with] amazon gthat are put in place for science datag they’ll take data, literally for free, and host it for free within certain constraints that they’re still often a little fuzzy aboutg participant: right. moderator: i think this is actually a wingding for everybodyg indeed, commercial concerns were continually voiced relative to companies like amazon and google, as shawn discussed: some of you may remember that google would send you a suitcase with a hard drive that said, “just send your data. we’ll take care of the rest.” it took them less than six months to close that program downg [laughter] for these scientists, individualized academic culture, institutionalized legal concerns, and a broad capitalist culture were all considered disruptions or barriers to the common scientific enterprise and to ‘figuring out’ how to share and manage data with and through contemporary internet, web, or cloud-based tools. conclusion contemporary science has witnessed recent shifts that are powerful, cultural, and sit within and well beyond the confines of academia. the very nature of our knowledgerelated capabilities has changed. computing infrastructure is needed, most practicing scientists cannot manage those needs alone. this study provides an early glimpse of how these issues are situated by scientists and in relation to the broader milieu in contemporary science. references borgman, c. l., wallis, j. c., & enyedy, n. (2007). little science confronts the data deluge: habitat ecology, embedded sensor networks, and digital libraries. international journal on digital libraries, 7(1-2), 17-30. estrin d, michener w, bonito g, and the workshop participants (2003) environmental cyberinfrastructure needs for distributed sensor networks: a report from a national science foundation sponsored workshop. scripps institution of oceanography, la jolla, ca. august 12-14, 2003. heidorn, p. b. (2008). shedding light on the dark data in the long tail of science. library trends, 57(2), 280-299. lindlof, t. r. (1995). qualitative communication research methods. thousand oaks, ca: sage. mayernik, m. s., batcheller, a. l., & borgman, c. l. (2011). how institutional factors influence the creation of scientific metadata. acm international conference proceeding series, 417–425. doi:10.1145/1940761.1940818. miles, m. b., & huberman, a. m. (1994). an expanded resource: qualitative data analysis (2nd ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage. palmer, c. l., cragin, m. h., heidorn, p. b., & smith, l. c. (2007). data curation for the long tail of science: the case of environmental sciences. paper presented at the third international digital curation conference, washington, dc. 1 engaging the disengaged via performance in online virtual worlds donna z. davis university of oregon united states dzdavis@uoregon.edu abstract in 2010 an estimated 3 billion hours were spent weekly playing online games. only recently, however, have these environments been considered more than entertainment. after an initial failed approach following media exuberance of these environments as a panacea for marketing and alternative meeting and work space, companies, governments, universities, non-profit organizations, and marketers are beginning to re-explore the use of these games for social engagement as well as opportunities to engage workers, volunteers and consumers. as more is known about performance in these virtual spaces as experienced through immersion, interactivity and the sense of presence, these environments may indeed offer creative solutions to the challenges of shrinking budgets, displaced workers and socio-economic or cultural alienation. using digital ethnography to understand the nature of 3-d ‘game’ culture, this 2-year study explored the development of relationships and the strength of trust and reciprocity in second life, a 3-d online immersive social environment. this study supported previous findings of online trust as participants reported a willingness to trust their virtual counterparts equally (40%) or greater (32%) in the virtual world as they did in their real lives. this trust was often attributed to a sense of “safety” as a function of role play and anonymity in these environments. implications of this research add to growing evidence of using virtual environments for business, education, and as viable cultures unique to the virtual world; where individuals ‘from the edges’ who may feel marginalized and disengaged as a result of physical world barriers such as age, gender, race, or even extreme shyness may feel empowered to participate and collaborate in planning and problem resolution. keywords virtual worlds; engagement; digital ethnography; social capital mailto:dzdavis@uoregon.edu� 2 social systems of every nature including those within corporate, non-profit, educational, community and political organizations are all facing unprecedented challenges in ways to strategically engage both internal and external audiences in a global landscape. ironically, as challenges of distance, unemployment, underemployment, apathy, alienation, disenchantment and disengagement are placing greater pressure on these systems, the number of people connecting, engaging and making profound changes as a result of their online activity in both the private and public sectors continues to increase exponentially. the blogosphere, twitter activity as evidenced throughout numerous political uprisings, and the global tremors incited recently by wikileaks are perhaps the most obvious internet media to generate international awareness and action. although these are very recent examples, since the advent of the internet in 1970s and the subsequent launch of the world wide web in 1991, online media have spread across the world in ways that few visionaries could have predicted. as negroponte wrote in 1995 – before blogs, twitter, facebook, youtube, or wikipedia -"computing is not about computers any more. it is about living" (p. 6). computers today have created a new media landscape that gives nearly every person the opportunity to be media producer, writer, artist, performer, communicator, observer, or active participant in their local or global community. as the goliaths of these new media currently include blogs, microblogs, social networking giant facebook, and online video sharing on youtube, one social medium that has often been overlooked in the quest to engage individuals in meaningful ways is online gaming. yet, analysts estimate that in 2010 an estimated 183 million gamers in the u.s. reported spending, on average, thirteen hours a week playing computer or video games (mcgonigal, 2011). statistics gathered globally between 2008 and 2010 reflected more than 4 million gamers in the middle east, 10 million in russia, 105 million in india, 10 million in vietnam, 10 million in mexico, 13 million in central and south america, 15 million in australia, 17 million in south korea, 100 million in europe, and 200 million in china (mcgonigal, 2011, p. 3). are online games nothing more than entertainment and social spaces? although 3-d online immersive social environments such as second life were originally met with unrealistic expectations among marketers and suffered a lingering trough of disillusionment on the gartner hype cycle (2010), the 3 slow adoption of these as social environments continues to build. this growth has occurred simultaneous to a relatively new interest in ‘gamification’ as a result of the explosive growth of entertainment gaming culture (reeves & reed, 2009; blascovich & bailenson, 2011; mcgonigal, 2010). corporations, universities, healthcare organizations, and non-profits are among the many institutions that are finding these spaces can engage individuals in unexpected ways including harnessing untapped perspectives in an environment that steps beyond traditional boundaries. online virtual worlds that allow users to generate content provide opportunities for artistic, altruistic, and intellectual collaboration as well as development of community, enhanced by the power of telepresence. additionally and perhaps astonishingly, research continues to show like other online interactivity, individuals report a sense of trust that is often stronger than what is experienced in real world interaction. to that point, walther’s hyperpersonal model of computer mediated communication (cmc) (1996) reflects a paradigm shift in how individuals seek information and who they turn to as their most trusted sources. most recently, peer influence has been identified as the most trusted source of information with 9 out of 10 people globally reporting they trust the recommendations of the people they know more than traditional sources such as media, clergy, parents, and political leaders (smith, 2011). this form of trust was also reflected in yee’s (2006) work which found that of almost 3,500 adults who participated in massively multi-user online role-playing games (mmorpgs), more than 20% of males and more than 30% of female players “had told personal issues or secrets to their… [online] friends which they had never told their real-life friends” (p. 320). nearly 40% of men and more than 50% of women studied also said that “their… [virtual] friends were comparable or better than their real-life friends” (p. 321). this trust is shared between two humans who are performing as their virtual selves, or avatars, in the 3-d online immersive environment. is there a distinction between human and avatar? as people seek to connect in new computer mediated ways, there has been great speculation as to the positive and negative societal impacts of this mechanism. this study explored the development of both real and virtual social capital as enhanced by the effects of presence, interactivity, and engagement experienced in the 3-d online immersive environment second life as a social space rather than a gaming environment. the focus of the study was to examine the uses and gratifications of second life users; the presentation of self in the virtual world and how it influenced trust in virtual interaction; how trust differed in the virtual environment and if that difference also influenced the strength of ties created there; 4 and the definition of virtual romantic relationships and their influence on the way individuals approach their real-life relationships and marriages. who are the disengaged? for the purposes of this study, the theoretical framework of social capital was used to explore engagement and disengagement. for example, coleman (1988), identified social capital as a “resource embodied in the relations among persons and positions that facilitates action” including obligations, expectations and trustworthiness of structures; information channels; and social norms. social capital, and its decline, was further defined in putnam’s seminal work, bowling alone (2000) when putnam identified the erosion of social capital in u.s. culture as a threat to both civic and personal health. putnam identified voting rates, participation in bowling leagues and neighborhood associations, and volunteering in nonprofit organizations or schools as some of the behaviors that formed social capital and his research pointed to the decline in each of these areas of participation. helliwell and putnam (2004) later confirmed “that social capital is linked to subjective well-being through many independent channels and in several forms” (p. 1435). they identified marriage and family, friends and neighbors, workplace ties, individual and collective civic engagement, as well as trust and trustworthiness independently related to the overall vitality of social capital. the breakdown of social capital can be seen as a real threat to a functional society in our communities, our workplaces and in our relationships. likewise, if following trends in behaviors in each of these sectors, disengagement is evident in each. for example, the u.s. census bureau (2010) has shown a consistent stagnation in volunteerism, hovering consistently at around 26 percent since from 2006 to 2010. likewise, an unprecedented economy has generated some of the worst employment numbers in the u.s. since the great depression with unemployment hovering at 9 percent from mid-2009 to mid-2011 (u.s. bureau of labor statistic, 2011). and among those who are employed, underemployment (which is typically accompanied by worker dissatisfaction) in the u.s. has jumped to more than 20 percent (gallop, 2011). additionally, although the divorce rates have fallen slightly over the past ten years (cdc, 2009), the percentage of marriages that end in divorce remains at just under 50 percent. as communities, workplaces and families struggle, media has often been named the culprit in these declines (putnam, (2000); nie & erbring (2002); kraut, et al. (1998)). 5 in times of challenge, individuals often seek escapism as a coping strategy, and media has often been seen as a great form of escape. the opportunities to ‘escape’ have become even greater as media has become more engaging and participatory. yet, in their escape, individuals are also forming new relationships, communities, and a potential to create change that translates in real world terms. in the 3-d online immersive environment, individuals create avatars and have the ability to walk, dance, fly, or animate their virtual ‘self’ in a dynamic, vivid and realistic 3-d space. in this space they experience a well documented sense of presence and immersion that appears to accelerate emotions in virtual environments (banos, botella, liano, buerrer, rey, & alcaniz, 2004; tang, biocca & lim, 2005; eber, betz & little, 2007). if exploring virtual worlds as a medium, one must also consider media effects as originally theorized my mcluhan in 1964. mcluhan wrote, “any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. all media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical (p.26).” with the evolution of media from written, to audio, to video (i.e. television), researchers have long documented the powerful influence these media had on creating social and cultural change. but what happens when the individual functions within the medium and through interactivity is actively engaged in the development and outcome of the ‘story’? and how much of this story is fantasy or becomes a part of an individual’s reality? the online interactive 3-d immersive experiential medium provides a rich environment to explore online relationships that often are shared virtually, or as what many consider role play, while keeping physical world identity anonymous. these relationships include social and professional relationships as well as romantic and love relationships as they form online and as enhanced by the effects of interactivity and visual/social presence. in this study, more than half of the study participants (60 percent) reported having been involved romantically with another virtual resident, four of whom (16 percent) reported their relationships were extramarital. these romantic and sexual motivations of virtual residents in second life, as well as the reported desire for social interaction, were primary motivations for participating in the online environment. for centuries, people have turned to media for escape and romance, whether in a book, at a play, on the big screen, on television or in music where the common themes of love, heartbreak and ‘living happily ever after’ are often dominant. that is further enhanced via the phenomenon of parasocial interaction, as defined by horton and wohl (1956) which identifies the bond that is formed between a real person and a fictional or celebrity character such as those individuals who ‘fall in love’ with a character in 6 a film or television program. horton and wohl also referred to this phenomenon as “intimacy at a distance”. in the 3-d online social world, individuals expressed that they often take on the role of the actor in the story, creating a powerful bond and what they often cited as “very real” relationship with their virtual counterpart. methodology the mixed method ethnography incorporated participant observation over a two-year period, group discussion content analysis, and 25 semi-structured interviews. in the groundbreaking anthropological review of second life, boellstorff (2008) explained, “that virtual worlds are places means they can be fieldsites; it makes an ethnographic approach conceivable – and what makes virtual worlds so revolutionary is that they are new kinds of places” (p. 91). “studying a virtual world in its own terms does not mean ignoring the myriad ways that ideas from the actual world impinge upon it; it means examining those interchanges as they manifest in the virtual world, for that is how residents experience them when they are in-world” (p. 64). additionally, as research emerges on behaviors in virtual environments, there is evidence that many of the same social cues that apply in real life may apply in the virtual world. for example, in an experimental study of avatars and body language, yee, bailenson, urbanke, change and merget (2007) found that when functioning in the virtual realm, individuals applied the same social norms they were accustomed to in real life including eye gaze and personal distance. however, in a world where people can fly, teleport or ‘shape shift’, clearly not all the usual social norms apply. however, interpersonal communication in the virtual world is still challenged, especially if only communicating in text-based chat, when there are no facial expressions, body language or changes in voice tone to help interpret the nature of a conversation. for example, it is impossible to detect sarcasm in text (if taken out of context). understanding the nuanced behaviors as well as the nature of interaction taking place in a virtual setting is possible, however it requires in-depth qualitative exploration. qualitative research assumes “reality is subjective and multiple” (creswell, 2007). reality in the virtual world is completely subjective to the extent that in second life, not only do the inhabitants of the culture have an opportunity to create their ‘selves’ in the image they choose, but also the environment is designed and built by its residents who can create any environment they choose with none of the physical 7 limitations of the physical world. qualitative research also provides an epistemological assumption that the researcher becomes part of the culture being observed and the axiological assumption that the researcher is cognizant of values and biases and shares an interpretation of the culture that is blended with the interpretation of those being observed. qualitative inquiry solicits detailed narratives from the respondents without which it would be impossible to understand the values, beliefs, feelings, and their own interpretation and personal understanding of the culture in which they reside. participant observation in this study, participant observation included weekly discussions about evolutionary psychology and ‘the cyborg as self’ at ‘thothica’ at clemson university’s island, bi-weekly discussions at the sl/rl relationships group, and occasional attendance at the discussions of personality exploration at the delphi project, a sim that offers “a place and a process that encourages objective self-examination” (delphi landmark in second life). the researcher also joined and participated in multiple groups including music, academic, fantasy and residential communities to better understand the broad nature of the online community. recognizing the researchers’ role in second life as one of observation and data collection, friendships were developed with the members of the virtual environment who were very willing to openly share about their real lives and second lives and thus create an initial understanding of the culture and its functions. one case was a couple from who is married in rl but whose avatars are single in second life. this married couple willingly explores their sexuality through relationships with others, even ‘partnering’ with others (the second life equivalent of marriage) but with ‘the rule’ that neither of them will ever meet their virtual partners in the physical world. they are very comfortable with this arrangement. the researcher had also met other individuals who have virtual partners while being married in the physical world, where their physical world mates are completely unaware of their online activities. in one case the researcher received an email from one single friend whose partner (or virtual wife) was married in real life and whose husband had not been aware of her online relationship. when the relationship was discovered, the virtual partner emailed the following: good morning… about 6:00 am, on saturday, i got a phone call… from x’s husband,,, threatening to kill me… thought i should share, if i turn up missing… his name is, xx, and you are the only person to know this. 8 many of the people encountered in second life consider their experience a blend of a dramatic story that might be read in a novel or watched on film, with a touch of reality as the player becomes immersed in the media environment and becomes the ‘author’ and ‘actor’ within their own virtual story. in a sense, it becomes an augmented reality or an extension of their real lives or as one study participant frequently referred to it as ‘life in the mind’. semi-structured in-depth interviews in addition to participant observation, to get the in-depth and rich context of life in the virtual culture, semi-structured interviews were conducted entirely in-world and in text chat with avatars recruited from a number of sources. the researcher established an identity and built trust with numerous individuals and groups that represent international virtual ‘communities’ from which participants were recruited for this research. these recruitment sources included discussion groups in second life, from professional psychologists currently doing research in second life and from word of mouth. as previously noted, the researcher attended weekly discussion groups regarding second life relationships. this group had been meeting in second life for more than a year and developed a loyal group of regular participants who have created a sense of ‘community’ in this virtual environment. some members of those communities who did not have an interest in participating told friends who they thought would be willing to be interviewed, creating somewhat of a ‘snowball sample’. as boellstorff (2008) explained about a snowball sample, “it is a desirable approach for ethnographers, who typically acknowledge their partiality and seek to trace social networks rather than artificially isolate members of a culture through randomization” (p. 76). participants participants in weekly discussion groups were informed that their chat would be logged for public archive and these chat logs were used for content analysis purposes. review of these chat logs enabled the researcher to identify themes that emerged in the ‘local’ chat dialogs exchanged in an ‘instant message’ format. analyses included several months of discussion logs from several of the relationship group meetings previously discussed. content analysis of these discussions revealed a number of themes about trust and reciprocity especially due to the nature of internet communication. these themes guided the focus of the final component of the ethnography, semi-structured personal interviews. these interviews 9 were conducted in private settings within the virtual world with the 25 individuals who volunteered in response to the notices sent to the discussion group members. because this study proposed to evaluate the experience of residents in the virtual world, all communication (including the semi-structured interviews) was digitally exchanged. most communication in second life is done using a text-based chat, and second life offers a feature to log all chats with other avatars either as private or local chats. the researcher made the conscious decision to accept the validity of the information provided based on the experience as self-reported by the avatars just as one must presuppose that in any research, the participant (real or virtual) is telling the truth. while the virtual representation of self provides the opportunity to veil or deceive with the mask of an avatar, the enhanced anonymity of computer mediated communication also creates a sense of comfort in speaking without fear of judgment or negative real world implications. to recruit participants for interviews, notices in the form of ‘note cards’ can be created and sent en masse in second life as event or activity announcements to avatars who join groups, such as the sl & rl relationships group or retail groups. they are in essence the equivalent of advertisements or press releases in the virtual world. note cards had been previously used as invitations to participate in studies conducted by researchers at the virtual studies research institute at minnesota state university moorehead when it offered anyone in the group $300 linden (the second life currency which is the equivalent of just over one u.s. dollar) to participate. however, this research offered no financial incentive. note cards were sent from group owners to members of two second life membership groups inviting them to participate in this study by agreeing to a private and confidential interview. interviews were scheduled over a five-week time period to accommodate the 25 people who agreed to participate. a constant comparative approach was utilized to identify saturation of categories or “looking for instances that represent the category and to continue looking (and interviewing) until the new information obtained does not further provide insight into the category” (creswell, 2007, p. 160). by the 25th interview, it was clear saturation had been achieved. participants represented six countries including the u.s., canada, switzerland, england, sweden, and the netherlands so interviews had to be scheduled from early morning to late evening eastern 10 standard time (est) to accommodate european times as well as those on the east and west coasts of the u.s and canada. upon agreement of an interview time, an irb-approved informed consent was sent to the participant again, as a note card with instruction to return it to the researcher to confirm their agreement to the protocol. interviews the interviews covered a series of questions that incorporated both an understanding of level of presence experienced by the individual as well as further explored the themes that emerged from the participant observation and the discussion analysis. for example, in addition to statistical data such as how many and what type of relationships a person has experienced in the virtual world, the researcher investigated the strength of the ties created in the virtual world and how those relationships impacted the subject’s real lives. with the study of new technology and new environments come new challenges. in the digital or virtual realm, for example, the researcher is dealing with ‘virtual’ people. fundamentally one must ask, “is this person real?” and “how does the information collected relate to physical reality?” perhaps most important is the question of why that differentiation is important. distinction between virtual and real is critical in collecting data, just as it is important to determine how they intersect. the separation between person and persona raises a common dilemma reported by digital ethnographers with a wide array of thoughts and processes adopted. for example, taylor (1999) explained, “issues of plural existence, anonymity/disclosure, and reliability” challenge validity and reliability. he posits, “at what level is it necessary or desirable to actually prove in some fashion the offline identity/body of a given participant?” (p. 443). likewise, questions are raised regarding the authenticity of responses from virtual beings when they are not only anonymous, but often in an altered state of ‘self’. on the other hand, this raises the issue of truth in any form of personal data gathering whether it is online or offline. for example, in a study of young adults attending clubs, even when knowing they were going to be tested for drugs, 41 percent of the participants lied about their drug consumption to the researchers, claiming they had not used any drugs (johnson, voas, miller and holder, 2009). this raises important questions about truth in data collection via interviews and questionnaires in general, not specific to online but to all data collection. 11 likewise, in carter’s (2005) ethnography of the virtual world cybercity, she found “verifying the authenticity or truthfulness of the data i have collected is no more problematic in this particular environment than any other” (p. 151). as she explained, it is through ethnographic research that we are required to continue to collect data, reflect on it, and understand that it is “situationally negotiated, rather than an objectifying process to be undertaken only when analyzing the data themselves” (p. 151). in fact, it could also be proposed that because sociological research very typically requires assurances of anonymity, participants may feel even more secure in revealing their most authentic selves when they are responding as their virtual selves. at this time, establishing formal consent in the virtual world is also complicated from an irb perspective as there is little agreement on whether ‘virtual people’ can be studied as ‘real people’. however, as more research is being conducted in the virtual realm, especially with online surveys, the line between virtual and real is becoming less distinct. irb protocols require assurance of anonymity for both the avatar name (or virtual persona) and the real person behind the avatar. likewise, the ethical decision-making and internet research recommendations from the association of internet researchers ethics working committee (simteach, 2008) provide an excellent guide for on-line data collection (http://aoir.org/reports/ethics.pdf). as previously mentioned, another obvious challenge to online interviews is the lack of facial expression, body language or other nonverbal communication that may reveal important information including the use of sarcasm or an interviewee’s discomfort in responding to sensitive questions. on the other hand, it can be argued, that this lack of eye-to-eye contact can put the interviewee more at ease, for example individuals who have a difficult time looking at people when they speak due to extreme shyness and lack of self-confidence. in the virtual setting, individuals report they can express themselves freely and in what they perceive to be a ‘safe’ environment. for example, there is no fear that they may encounter the interviewer in a public setting in their real life where they may feel judged. for example, one study respondent explained: [15:07] interviewee: but on sl, after spending so much time using text, i guess you can open up in different ways because you don't have to worry about blushing or your voice cracking when you say something that might be potentially embarrassing. [15:07] interviewee: or ...looking people in the eyes. [15:08] interviewee: something that i apparently have a problem with. http://aoir.org/reports/ethics.pdf� 12 [15:08] researcher: has that changed the way you interact in rl now? [15:08 interviewee: yes, definitely. [15:08] interviewee: i think that i recognize to some degree that people expect you to... [15:09] interviewee: act a certain way, put a certain inflection on your voice and wear your face in a way that 'conveys' the meaning of what you're telling them. [15:09] interviewee: for instance, i could tell you something totally serious in text. and if it's in a serious context, you might take me seriously. [15:09] interviewee: in rl, if i were looking at the ground and i said something that i wanted to be serious they might think i'm being facetious. [15:10] researcher: so true [15:10] interviewee: or if i'm not loud enough. or mumbling. [15:11] researcher: so you are changing the way you communicate to reflect that? [15:11] interviewee: yeah. i don't like looking people in the eyes for some reason when i talk to them? i just let my eyes wander and look at objects irrelevant to the conversation. [15:11] interviewee: i don't even realize it. [15:11] interviewee: but, uh. [15:12] interviewee: i make the conscious decision to do it if i have to put on my 'get serious' face. [15:12] interviewee: "time to be serious. look them in the eye. this is serious business because we make eye contact!" [15:12] interviewee shrugs. [15:12] interviewee: <_< at the conclusion of each interview, each participant was asked how they felt during the interview as they might have compared it to meeting in the physical world. specifically, they were asked if they were more, less or equally comfortable sharing their stories both as their avatar and in text chat. all but one study participant indicated that they much preferred meeting virtually as they felt more comfortable to share what they truly felt than they would if they’d been face-to-face in person. the one who indicated otherwise indicated that because he wasn’t a good typist he would have preferred to do the interview using the voice feature. results 13 of the 25 interviewees, 36 percent (n=9) were married, 32 percent (n=8) were single, .4 percent were separated (n=1), 24 percent (n=6) were divorced, and .4 percent (n=1) were in a cohabiting relationship. fifteen (60 percent) were either in or had previously been in a second life relationship, only one of which was with their real life spouse and four of which were extramarital. the average age of study participants was almost 49 and 80 percent had either undergraduate or advanced degrees and sought interaction in second life for the intellectual stimulation. these demographics do not fit the stereotype ‘gamer’ that is often represented in popular press dominated by youth, young male adults, or a social outcast. rather, these demographics are more consistent with reeves & reed (2009) whose research revealed the average age of a gamer is 35-years-old with 26 percent of players older than 50. they likewise earn a mean household income of approximately $85,000 with almost two-thirds having at least some college education (p.21). although there were dramatic stories of deception in the virtual world, perhaps one of the most surprising results of the interviews was a willingness to trust a virtual person. in an era of decline in social capital resulting from the deterioration of trust in our neighbors, co-workers, religious, civic and political leaders (putnam, 2000), the participants in this study reported a willingness to trust their virtual counterparts equally (40 percent) or greater (32 percent) in this environment as they do in their real-life environment. as one interviewee explained, “due to the security and anonymity here, [trust] is easier i guess. well, people online are simply more open with their feelings, and what is the risk?” the results of this study reveal social, entertainment and escape motivations as well as gratification factors of information seeking, intellectual stimulation, communication and employment. the key themes aligned with social gratifications included social interaction in addition to the development of sexual and romantic relationships. more than half of the study participants (60 percent) reported having been involved romantically with another virtual resident, four of whom (16 percent) reported their relationships were extramarital. the study participants consistently cited anonymity via a virtual persona and the sense that virtual actions did not share the same depth of potential consequence as they would in real life, as a source of confidence to explore their sense of self and others in a perceived “safe” environment. this finding is consistent with bargh and mckenna (2004) who found that the “relative anonymity aspect encourages self-expression, and the relative absence of physical and nonverbal interaction cues (e.g. attractiveness) facilitates the formation of relationships on other, deeper bases such as shared values and beliefs” (p. 586). their extensive literature review also revealed evidence that communicating via the 14 internet was instrumental not only in maintaining close ties with friends and families, but in forming new close and meaningful relationships in a relatively safe environment (p. 582). one of the common themes revealed in the interviews was that these individuals were, as one participant explained, “seeking romance that seems to be missing in rl [real life].” for example, when talking about her relationships in second life, one participant lamented “i do wish my husband would come in here and type to me. i miss having love letters.” this response was reflected in others’ interviews who reported being married in their real lives but seeking sexual or romantic bonds in second life, considering it a ‘safe’ place to explore their fantasy through virtual performance and in several cases without feeling they were being unfaithful to their spouse. although most of the participants who were in virtual relationships were single in their real lives, those who were married often reported that their spouses were unaware of their second life relationships although others in the discussion group and one interviewee had come into second life because their spouses had encouraged it. one study participant indicated he had an ‘open’ marriage in second life while he and his spouse vowed monogamy in real life. another important distinction the study participants frequently made was their ability to reflect their idealized selves in their online social and professional interactions with personal recognition and reward they previously had not found in the physical world. for instance, another 60-year-old male interviewee who had not completed college expressed his gratification for the ability to “interact with people who are intellectuals, and often they are professors, and they seem to like what i have to say – so it’s pretty rewarding.” in this environment, those who may feel they were marginalized in their culture for a lack of education have the ability to interact and achieve status based on what they bring to the community intellectually. as one european male interviewee who had left school at 16 due to life circumstances described, “external confirmation from others is wonderful… healthier than broadsheet, magazine, good-looking stereotypical ‘better’ people.” finally, as a result of the ability to role play or perform via the virtual representation of self, others spoke to the way they experienced personal growth and changed the way they communicated with individuals in the physical world. such was the case with the college professor who explained that when she googled some of the speakers she’d heard at events in second life, she discovered their avatars had been modeled after older and ‘more distinguished’ men yet their appearance in reality was young and handsome. this is not typical in the virtual world, however, it points to the image the professionals wanted to convey and the desire to be taken more seriously or to be more respected. in this case, the 15 speaker felt marginalized in his field by his boyish looks. the study participant reported being much more open to listening to what a person has to say, rather than making visual judgments she didn’t even realize she had been making. she also admitted that in this process she had discovered how bitter a human she had become and assumed that others judged her in her university work due to her age and weight and as such typically dealt with people defensively. she explained, “being in here has made me really more sensitive and accepting, i think.” conclusions and implications although second life, the dominant 3-d online social virtual world doesn’t command the staggering numbers of participants that entertainment games such as world of warcraft has -in what has become a $10 billion dollar industry of online multiplayer games (reeves and reed, 2009) – it has built and maintained a vibrant following and now boasts an economy of more than 30 million in u.s. dollars transacted quarterly in the virtual exchange (linden lab, 2011). likewise, it is anticipated that the emerging tracking and rendering technologies offered by nintendo’s wii, microsoft’s kinect, and playstation’s move will combine with 3d monitors and inexpensive head mounted displays to increase consumer demand in the next few years as immersive worlds continue to gain popularity (blascovich & bailenson, 2011). at the same time that these technologies are commanding stronger audiences, organizations are facing unprecedented challenges in building relationships or motivating apathetic or disengaged workforces and volunteers. the question is whether the technology that is often seen as a distraction and a cause of public malaise can actually become part of the solution. can communities, companies, organizations and even families use these technologies to engage each other in meaningful ways and rebuild the functions of social capital that have been lost or diminished as online media have become more dominant in our culture? can role play or virtual performance invite individuals to creatively engage in their work and in their relationships using the same motivations that captivate gamers when they are in a state of ‘flow?’ as the moderator of the ‘thothica’ discussions reflection freenote stated: do we tend to approach novel situations and creative challenges with greater enthusiasm in sl, than in rl? is this because we are better aware that they are not ‘life and death’ encounters for our avatars? if so, our perception of reality is more accurate in sl than in rl. 16 individuals performing as avatars participating in this study revealed that although they may feel ‘marginalized’ in their real lives as a result of isolation, age, gender, race, or even extreme shyness, they were able to create an online persona and essentially role play their ‘idealized self’ and build meaningful connections. these bonds were reportedly equal to or greater than the bonds they had been able to create in their physical worlds. this is important, for example, if companies or organizations want to invite those individuals ‘from the edges’ to participate and collaborate in planning and problem resolution. based on the results of this research, for example, allowing employees to participate in this environment in a corporate dialog anonymously could break the “spiral of silence” (noelle-neumann, as cited in shoemaker, tankard, & lasorsa, 2004) and potentially increase collaborative and creative thought. perhaps one of the most startling discoveries of this research was the power of the mediated effects on the way individuals approached ‘visual identity’ in real life. in the virtual environment, most participants were performing as an idealized version of themselves in order to experience interaction as the ‘person’ they would like to be seen as. or, contrarily, they create sometimes whimsical and sometimes grotesque fantasy creatures as a way to become fully immersed in role play or to solicit attention. as a result many individuals explained they have to learn how to look past virtual appearances to discover the personalities of their virtual peers. as revealed in the findings about representation of virtual self, several of the study participants indicated that they now see people differently in real life based on their experiences with virtual beings in second life (such as the woman who sees her sister as both human and ‘nekko’ and the professor who now listens to the student with dreadlocks rather than passing judgment based on his appearance). this is a truly extraordinary shift in values systems that could be applied to the understanding of visual discrimination and to such problems facing our cultures as negative self body image. these results speak to the potential to development of image based on action and thought more powerfully that looks. on the other hand, true anonymity would also invite the potential of disruptive and potentially destructive behavior, given the perception that there would be little to no possibility of consequence in their real lives. further research is needed to better understand how the strength of trust and reciprocity as well as the potential to deceive in a 3-d online immersive environment will translate in the real world as individuals, institutions, and industry turn to these environments for work, education, entertainment, news, and social connection. 17 references baños, r., botella, c., liaño, v., guerrero, b., rey, b., & alcañiz, m. (2004). sense of presence in emotional virtual environments. presence 2004: the 7th annual international workshop on presence. valencia, spain. bargh, j., mckenna, k. & fitzsimons, g. (2002). “can you see the real me? activation and expression of the ‘true self’ on the internet”. journal of social issues, 58(1). blascovich, j., & bailenson, j. (2011). infinite reality: avatars, eternal life, new worlds, and the dawn of the virtual revolution. new york, ny: harpercollins publishers. boellstorff, t. (2008). coming of age in second life: an anthropologist explores the virtually human. princeton, nj: princeton university press. carter, d. (2008). living in virtual communities – an ethnography of human relations in cyberspace. information, communication & society, 8(2), 148-167. creswell, j. (2007). qualitative inquiry and research design: choosing among five approaches. thousand oaks, ca: sage. centers for disease control (cdc) (2009). national marriage and divorce rate trends. retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/divorce_rates_90_95_99-09.pdf coleman, james s. (1988). social capital in the creation of human capital. the american journal of sociology, 94, supplement: organizations and institutions: sociological and economic approaches to the analysis of social structure (1988), s95-s120. retrieved from http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00029602%281988%2994%3cs95%3ascitco%3e2.0.co%3b2-p. eber, d., betz, b., and little, g. (2007). the aesthetic experience, emotion and an artistic virtual environment. intelligent agent, 5(1). retrieved from http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/vol5_no1_ave_eberlittlebetz.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/divorce_rates_90_95_99-09.pdf� 18 gallup.com (2011).. underemployment rises to 20.3% in march unemployment saw a slight but insignificant decline. jenny marlar. april 1, 2010. retrieved from http://www.gallup.com/poll/127091/underemployment-rises-march.aspx helliwell , j. and putnam, r. (2004). the social context of well-being . the royal society, 359, 1435– 1446. retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc1693420/pdf/15347534.pdf horton, d. and wohl, r. (1956). "mass communication and para-social interaction: observations on intimacy at a distance". psychiatry, 19(3), 215–229. johnson, m., voas, r., miller, b. and holder, h. (2009). predicting drug use at electronic music dance events: self-reports and biological measurement. evaluation review, 33(3), 211-225 kraut, r., patterson, m., lundmark, v., kiesler, s., mukopadhyay, t., scherlis, w. (1998). internet paradox: a social technology that reduces social involvement and psychological well-being? american psychologist, 54(9), 1017-1031. linden lab (2011,). q1 2011 linden dollar economy metrics up, users and usage unchanged. may 6. retrieved from http://community.secondlife.com/t5/featured-news/q1-2011-linden-dollar-economymetrics-up-users-and-usage/ba-p/856693 mcgonigal, j. (2011). reality is broken: why games make us better and how they can change the world. new york, ny: penguin press. mcluhan, m. (1964). understanding media: the extensions of man (1st ed.). new york, ny: mcgraw hill (reissued by mit press, 1994) negroponte, n. (1995). being digital. new york: random house, inc. nie., n., and erbring, l. (2002). internet and society: a preliminary report. it&society, 1(1) 275-283. retrieved from http://www.stanford.edu/group/siqss/itandsociety/v01i01/v01i01a01.pdf putnam, robert d. (2000) bowling alone. new york: simon & schuster. reeves, b., & read, j. (2009). total engagement. boston, ma: harvard business press. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc1693420/pdf/15347534.pdf� 19 shoemaker, p.j., tankard, j.w., & lasorsa, d. (2004). how to build social science theories. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. simteach.com (2008). ethical decision-making and internet research recommendations from the association of internet researchers ethics working committee. retrieved from http://www.simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=second_life_education_wiki#academic_research smith, t. (2011). annual report 2011: welcome to social entertainment. retrieved from http://globalwebindex.net/thinking/annual-report-2011-welcome-to-social-entertainment/ tang, a., biocca, f., and lim, l. (2004). comparing differences in presence during social interaction in augmented reality versus virtual reality environments: an exploratory study. in presence 2004: the 7th annual international workshop on presence, valencia, spain. 2004. retrieved from http://www.temple.edu/ispr/prev_conferences/proceedings/2004/tang,%20biocca,%20lim.pdf taylor, t.l. (1999). life in virtual worlds: plural existence, multimodalities; and other online research challenges. american behavioral scientist, 43, 436-449. u.s. census (2011). economic news release volunteering in the united states, 2010. for release 10:00 a.m. (est) wednesday, january 26, 2011. u.s. bureau of labor statistics. retrieved from http://www.bls.gov/news.release/volun.nr0.htm u.s. department of labor statistics (2011). the editor’s desk: unemployment rate at 9.2 percent in june 2011. july 12. retrieved from http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2011/ted_20110712.htm. walther, j.b. (1996). computer-mediated communication: impersonal, interpersonal and hyperpersonal interaction. communication research, 23(1), 3-43. yee, n. (2006). the demographics, motivations, and derived experiences of users of massively multi-user online graphical environments. presence, 15(3), 309-329. yee, n., bailenson, j., urbanke, m., change, f, & merget, d. (2007). the unbearable likeness of being digital: the persistence of nonverbal social norms in online virtual environments. cyberpsychology & behavior, 10(1), 115-121. http://www.simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=second_life_education_wiki#academic_research� http://www.temple.edu/ispr/prev_conferences/proceedings/2004/tang,%20biocca,%20lim.pdf� http://www.bls.gov/bls/newsrels.htm� http://www.bls.gov/news.release/volun.nr0.htm� http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2011/ted_20110712.htm� centers for disease control (cdc) (2009). national marriage and divorce rate trends. retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/divorce_rates_90_95_99-09.pdf gallup.com (2011).. underemployment rises to 20.3% in march unemployment saw a slight but insignificant decline. jenny marlar. april 1, 2010. retrieved from http://www.gallup.com/poll/127091/underemployment-rises-march.aspx linden lab (2011,). q1 2011 linden dollar economy metrics up, users and usage unchanged. may 6. retrieved from http://community.secondlife.com/t5/featured-news/q1-2011-linden-dollar-economy-metrics-up-users-and-usage/ba-p/856693 negroponte, n. (1995). being digital. new york: random house, inc. putnam, robert d. (2000) bowling alone. new york: simon & schuster. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  menchen-­trevino,  e.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  using  web  browsing  histories  to   facilitate  multi-­method  research.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  meeting  of  the   association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.   using  web  browsing  histories  to  facilitate  multi-­method   research     ericka  menchen-­trevino   american  university   extended  abstract     if  someone  has  any  relationship  at  all  to  their  web  browsing  history,  it  is  probably  best   summarized  in  one  word,  “delete.”  all  major  web  browsers  keep  a  log  of  the  websites   they  access.  this  is  needed  for  the  normal  functioning  of  the  “back”  button  that  enables   users  to  return  to  previous  sites,  and  to  show  users  which  links  they  have  visited  on  a   web  page  by  displaying  visited  links  in  a  different  color,  as  well  as  auto-­filling  the  url  of   a  recently  visited  site  when  partially  typed.  although  the  functions  browsing  histories   enable  are  quite  banal,  these  logs  are  perceived  as  having  a  high  potential  for   embarrassing  the  user  if  publically  exposed  (bogart,  2015).  it  is  likely  that  many  a   romantic  relationship  has  ended  after  one  partner  combed  through  the  other’s  browser   history,  and  certainly  the  employment  of  some  has  been  jeopardized  by  browsing   history  log  analysis  as  well.     despite  the  sensitive  nature  of  this  data,  if  given  the  ability  to  explore  and  better   understand  their  own  data  and  remove  what  they  choose,  some  web  users  may  opt-­in   to  sharing  this  data  with  researchers  they  trust.  in  fact,  the  informed  consent  process   could  demystify  this  often  poorly  understood  source  of  information  and  give  individuals   better  tools  for  understanding  and  controlling  their  own  browsing  data  logs  (menchen-­ trevino,  2016).  furthermore,  this  user-­focused  data  crosses  between  platforms  where   data  is  often  siloed,  such  as  different  social  media  sites  and  web  services  making  it   particularly  useful  for  extending  platform-­based  studies  of  digital  traces  (menchen-­ trevino,  2013).   the  herodotus  (name  changed  for  anonymous  review)  project  has  developed  an  open-­ source  web  browser  extension  with  the  goal  of  informing  users  of  the  insights  available   in  their  browsing  history  data  through  visualizations  and  analytics.  the  extension  allows   users  to  opt-­in  to  share  their  data  with  a  research  project.  participants  not  only  submit   their  browsing  data  but  are  immediately  directed  to  a  survey.  this  survey  can  inquire   about  the  context  of  the  browsing  they  submitted  (e.g.  “does  more  than  one  person  use   this  web  browser?”),  as  well  as  provide  questions  relevant  to  the  study.  the  survey  also   allows  participants  to  be  compensated  for  their  participation  and  enables  participants  to   choose  whether  they  would  allow  the  researcher  to  contact  them  for  a  follow-­up   interview  via  online  video.  critically,  this  approach  allows  for  the  collection  of  both   observed  and  self-­reported  information  about  web  browsing.  this  can  help  researchers   assess  the  accuracy  of  self-­reports,  but  perhaps  more  importantly  it  can  address   questions  about  the  impact  (or  lack  thereof)  of  attitudes  on  behaviors  in  a  more  valid   way  than  self-­reported  behavior  data  can  provide.   this  approach  extends  the  methodology  the  author  developed  in  2010  using  a  proxy   server  to  collect  real-­world  web  browsing  data  with  the  informed  consent  of  participants   (menchen-­trevino  &  karr,  2012;;  menchen-­trevino,  2012).  browsing  histories  provide   similar  data  to  the  proxy  system  and  the  data  is  created  before  a  participant  agrees  to   be  part  of  a  study.  the  participant  can  be  better  informed  about  what  data  they  are   providing  since  they  can  explore  it  before  deciding  to  participate.  the  exploration   process  itself  has  been  developed.  interactive  data  visualizations  enable  informed   consent  and  also  provide  knowledge  that  is  a  direct  benefit  to  participants  about  their   own  web  browsing  habits  and  behaviors  (see  figures  1-­4).  each  visualization  can  focus   on  a  specific  time  period  using  a  calendar  feature  for  begin  and  end  date.       figure  1.  websites  visited:  circle  size  represents  the  number  of  visits  to  a  domain.  tooltip   identifies  the  domain  name  and  number  of  visits.     figure  2.  search  words:  word  size  increases  when  the  word  is  used  in  different  search  terms.  the  tooltip   shows  the  search  terms  in  which  the  word  appears  (here  the  search  terms  containing  javascript  are   shown).       figure  3.  network:  arrows  connect  domains  where  the  user  browsed  from  the  origin  to  the  destination   domain.  hovering  over  the  node  or  label  allows  the  user  to  reposition  the  node  manually.     figure  4.  data  table  with  two  visit  records:  checking  the  box  in  the  remove  field  allows  users  to  remove   records  by  pressing  the  “remove  checked  items  from  history”  button.  columns  can  be  sorted  by  any   field,  and  the  search  field  quickly  narrows  the  results  to  items  containing  the  search  term  in  any  field.   based  on  the  research  questions  of  the  investigators,  the  browsing  history  and  the   survey  data  may  become  the  basis  for  interviews  regarding  the  context  of  web  browsing   and  its  role  in  the  topic  of  interest.  that  is,  the  herodotus  project  can  support  research   focusing  on  web  history  data  itself,  the  relationship  between  attitudes  (measured  on  a   survey)  and  web  history  data,  or  questions  about  the  role  of  the  web  in  broader  social   processes  or  in  the  context  of  individuals  or  communities.  a  key  limitation  for  those   interested  in  studying  large  populations  is  that  some  people  who  are  concerned  about   sharing  private  data  will  not  participate,  and  perhaps  these  users  browse  the  web   differently  than  others.  these  same  people  may  also  be  less  likely  to  complete   telephone  surveys,  or  research  of  any  kind.  as  refusal  rates  rise  this  is  a  problem  faced   by  all  researchers  who  need  to  partner  with  participants  to  complete  their  studies.  an   important  benefit  of  this  approach  is  that  it  may  be  possible  to  get  anonymized  or   summarized  browsing  data  for  a  large  population  of  users  such  that  the  differences   between  volunteers  and  non-­volunteers  can  be  observed.   in  an  interview  context  the  visualizations  aid  participant  recall.  the  participants  can   validate  the  accuracy  of  the  data  using  the  visuals  and  may  identify  missing  data.   researchers  can  define  a  list  of  websites  about  their  topic  of  interest  to  focus  on  and   highlight  these  websites  within  the  visualizations,  and/or  they  can  ask  participants  to   identify  websites  they  use  for  particular  purposes.       this  work  fits  dubois  and  ford’s  definition  of  a  trace  interview  (2015)  where  participants   are  provided  data  visualizations  as  part  of  a  qualitative  interview  process.  they  point  out   the  complexity  and  challenge  of  understanding  visualizations  of  digital  traces  and  the   importance  of  introducing  the  visualizations  clearly,  as  well  as  the  kind  of  rich  contextual   information  that  can  be  gained  from  aiding  participant  recall  in  this  way.  this  project  will   build  on  the  work  of  dubious  and  ford  by  using  a  different  and  more  individual-­focused   form  of  data.     currently  the  herodotus  browser  extension  is  undergoing  beta  testing  to  facilitate  wider   deployment.  nine  preliminary  interviews  have  been  conducted  with  young  adults  in  the   netherlands,  and  additional  interviews  will  be  conducted  in  the  u.s.  in  the  coming   weeks  to  refine  the  utility  of  the  visualizations  for  interviewing  purposes.  the  final  paper   will  report  the  methodological  findings  regarding  the  browsing  data,  surveys,  and   interviews.       references     bogart,  n.  (2015,  august  20).  bank  statements,  browser  history  “most  embarrassing”   info  to  leak  online:  survey  |  globalnews.ca.  retrieved  march  1,  2016,  from   http://globalnews.ca/news/2176339/bank-­statements-­browser-­history-­most-­ embarrassing-­info-­to-­leak-­online-­survey/     dubois,  e.,  &  ford,  h.  (2015).  trace  interviews:  an  actor-­centered  approach.   international  journal  of  communication;;  vol  9.  retrieved  from   http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/3378/1416     menchen-­trevino,  e.  (2012,  december).  partisans  and  dropouts?:  news  filtering  in  the   contemporary  media  environment.  northwestern  university,  evanston,  illinois.   menchen-­trevino,  e.  (2013).  collecting  vertical  trace  data:  big  possibilities  and  big   challenges  for  multi-­method  research.  policy  &  internet,  5(3),  328–339.   https://doi.org/10.1002/1944-­2866.poi336     menchen-­trevino,  e.  (2016).  web  historian:  enabling  multi-­method  and  independent   research  with  real-­world  web  browsing  history  data.  presented  at  the   iconference,  philadelphia:  ideals.  retrieved  from   http://hdl.handle.net/2142/89388     menchen-­trevino,  e.,  &  karr,  c.  (2012).  researching  real-­world  web  use  with  roxy:   collecting  observational  web  data  with  informed  consent.  journal  of  information   technology  &  politics,  9(3),  254–68.   https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2012.664966     selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17 th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 claire, m. (2016, october 5-8). decoding risk: making sense of predictive data analytics. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17 th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. decoding risk: making sense of predictive data analytics claire maiers the university of virginia introduction researchers have increasingly recognized the need to investigate algorithmic and datadriven technology, practices, and culture (gillespie 2014, beer 2015, striphas 2015). due to their powerful position in decision-making processes, many scholars have drawn attention to the social construction of algorithms (martin and lynch 2009, anderson 2012, gitelman 2012) and emphasized the importance of unpacking how algorithms work by opening up the “black boxes” through which algorithms turn data into knowledge and decisions (pasquale 2015). here, i suggest that understanding the way in which users make sense of algorithmic output is as important as the affordances contained within the technology itself. in many cases the work of algorithms and analytics are mediated through the culture and practices of various sectors, professions, and workplaces. i explore the implications of predictive analytics by examining their use in context. do data analytics function as prognostications of the future? how does the presence of predictive technology shape judgement in context? i approach these questions through an examination of the ways in which clinicians integrate predictive analytics into the local culture and practices of a neonatal intensive care unit (nicu). i find that far from providing unquestionable readings of the future, predictive risk scores are integrated into a constellation of signs and intervene in the process of care in particular ways. i describe these processes as conditioned reading, accumulative reading, and retroactive reconditioning. i suggest that these particular processes occur in response to the cultural dominance of evidencebased medicine. data and methods during 2015-2016, i spent eight months regularly observing the use of horizon at eastern hospital1. conceptualized as an early warning system, horizon uses patient vitals to calculate the likelihood that an infant will develop a life-threatening infection within the next twenty-four hours. i conducted 60 hours of observation and 11 1 the names of technology, individuals, and locations have been replaced by pseudonyms. interviews with the users of horizon. observations consisted of shadowing individual physicians as they conducted rounds, shadowing individual nurses throughout shift work, and observing the unit as a whole from the nurses’ station. horizon and three ways of knowing horizon is one of many signifiers in the nicu through which clinicians make judgements about care. horizon displays a risk score between 1 and 7 for each infant. i find that clinicians integrate these predictive risk scores through the following three interpretive processes. conditioned reading: focusing on deviations from expected norms and behavior, clinicians interpret horizon in light of their experience with the individual infant for whom they are caring. as christina described: “i think you just learn…what their trend is. i get report from a nurse whose never had the baby, and they're like, "oh my gosh, their horizon is 3." and i'm like, "oh no, it goes to 3 every night, don't worry, it'll come back down." like kind of like that. we kind of learn their trend.” christina’s approach epitomizes the processes that i witnessed during observations. clinicians consistently told me about how they make judgements about when to react to a change in horizon and when to ignore it. as robin told me, she always asks herself, “okay, do i believe horizon in this kid or not?” that judgement of the horizon risk score is based primarily on the clinician’s existing experience with a particular infant or experiential information passed on from other clinicians. accumulative reading: while the developers intend horizon to be an early warning system, it more commonly helps to reinforce or dissuade existing suspicions of infection. respondents rarely articulated experiences where an increase in the horizon score was the first and primary indicator of infection. they were more likely to tell me about instances in which they noticed horizon after the onset of other symptoms or simultaneously with other symptoms. for example, consider anthony’s story of a baby that developed an infection: “he was doing fine […] but then near the end of our shift his residuals…say he was getting 10, his residual was 8! and it looked more bloody-ish rather than just undigested food, and i was like, “amy, i don’t know about this. this is not looking right.” […] and i was like, “also, his stomach’s a little bit rounder. it feels firm. i’m kind of concerned. this is not how he was three hours ago.” […] they didn’t come around until after we’d left, but when we came back the next morning, the nurse said they did a full sepsis workup on him last night because he had a horizon spike right after you guys left and his temperature started going up. it’s those small things where you’re like, oh maybe it’s just a feeding thing, but over the course of two or three hours, these other things started happening.” while anthony knew that his patient was not well, he did not yet have a particular interpretation of what was causing the symptoms. reading the constellation of signs, which included the rise in the horizon score, the rest of the medical team determined that the baby was ill and initiated a medical intervention. retroactive reconditioning: on occasion, clinicians have experiences that cause them to recast their readings of horizon. as bonnie described to me: “i know there are cases where we haven't started, you know, we haven't necessarily changed our management, and the patient has decompensated and, looking back the horizon score was elevated, but maybe we were attributing it to something else, or maybe it's just been elevated for days, and it just wasn't a big change in the trend.” in this case, it was only through the appearance of infection via other signs that, in retrospect, horizon and the other symptoms were made interpretable as indicators of infection. in sum, horizon does not function solely as an early warning system. instead, it enters a constellation of signs. whether or not horizon is interpreted by the medical staff as trustworthy and useful in a particular case can influence how the other signs within the constellation are understood. in particular, when horizon is taken as a legitimate indicator, it can be a powerful force in shaping readings of other signs. discussion the dominance of evidence-based medicine may explain why the interpretation of predictive analytics takes the shape of the processes discussed above. evidencebased medicine focuses on informing practice with “a clearly defined hierarchy of available evidence” (timmermans 2010: 309). quantifiable and measurable information are often seen as more powerful, while narrative and qualitative descriptions are somewhat suspect. as meaning-making beings, people must be able to account for their actions and beliefs in ways that are recognizable to others and themselves (berger and luckmann 1967). acceptable explanations vary according to social context; different institutions have different ways of reasoning that count as legitimate (mills 1940, boltanski and thévenot 2006). therefore, clinicians must make judgements about care within the appropriate framework attached to the institution of medicine. the acceptable framework within the nicu is undoubtedly that of evidence-based medicine. over time, clinicians build up experiential knowledge of infants in general and of particular patients under their care. this experience attunes them to small changes and provides them with feelings about a baby’s condition. these hunches alert them to potential illness, but are often insufficient for making a diagnosis. diagnoses require evidence, usually in the form of quantifiable vitals and lab results. horizon is powerful because it provides a quantified metric through which to make sense of the qualitative signs the clinicians receive through other means. references anderson, c.w. (2012). towards a sociology of computational and algorithmic journalism. new media & society, 15(7), 1005-1021. beer, d. (2015). productive measures: culture and measurement in the context of everyday neoliberalism. big data & society 2(1). berger, p.l., & luckmann, t. (1967). the social construction of reality: a treatise in the sociology of knowledge. anchor. boltanski, l., & thévenot. l. (2006). on justification: economies of worth. princeton up. gillespie, t. (2014). the relevance of algorithms. in gillespie, boczkowski, & foot (eds.) media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society (167194). cambridge: mit press. gitelman, l. (2013). "raw data" is an oxymoron. cambridge: mit press. mills, c.w. (1940). situated actions and vocabularies of motive. american sociological review 5(6):904–913. pasquale, f. (2015). the black box society: the secret algorithms that control money and information. cambridge: harvard up. striphas, t. (2015). algorithmic culture. european journal of cultural studies 18(4–5), 395–412. timmermans, s. (2010). evidence-based medicine: sociological explorations. in bird, c.e., conrad, p., fremont. a.m., & timmermans, s., handbook of medical sociology, (6th ed). (309-323). nashville: vanderbilt up. http://mitpress.mit.edu/authors/lisa-gitelman selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 kümpel,  a.  s.,  &  haim,  m.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  popularity  indicators  in  online  media.  a  review  of   research  on  the  effects  of  metric  user  information.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual   conference  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from   http://spir.aoir.org. popularity  indicators  in  online  media.  a  review  of   research  on  the  effects  of  metric  user  information.   anna  sophie  kümpel     institute  of  communication  studies  and  media  research,  lmu  munich   mario  haim   institute  of  communication  studies  and  media  research,  lmu  munich   introduction 900.000  likes  on  mark  zuckerberg’s  latest  facebook  post,  an  average  of  2  out  of  5  stars   by  75  users  for  a  restaurant  on  yelp,  or  a  9.1  film  rating  by  23.000  movie  fans  on  imdb:   internet  users  are  constantly  confronted  with  metric  information  about  the  popularity  of   goods,  services,  or  content.  these  popularity  indicators  (pis),  which  we  define  as  metric   information  about  users’  behavior  or  their  evaluations  of  entities,  serve  as  social  signals   for  users  who  are  confronted  with  them.  as  prior  research  shows,  pis  are  thereby  able   to  influence  users’  perceptions  of  the  evaluated  object  and  might  thus  affect  their   subsequent  decisions.     in  research,  however,  pis  are  subject  to  strong  conceptual  and  operational  ambiguity.  a   plethora  of  terms  is  used  to  denote  pis,  ranging  from  “bandwagon  cues”  (kim  &  sundar,   2014)  or  “helpfulness  ratings”  (walther,  liang,  ganster,  wohn,  &  emington,  2012)  to   “social  media  metrics”  (stavrositu  &  kim,  2014)  or  “social  endorsement  cues”  (messing   &  westwood,  2014).  moreover,  pis  are  visualized  either  graphically  (e.g.,  star  ratings)   or  numerically  (e.g.,  “23  likes”),  depict  either  qualitative  (e.g.,  likes)  or  quantitative  (e.g.,   clicks)  data,  and  are  presented  in  either  real-­world  (e.g.,  facebook)  or  fictitious  (e.g.,   “an  online  community”)  environments.       a  systematic  overview  of  conceptualizations,  operationalizations,  and  effects,  however,   is  still  missing.  yet,  such  a  systematization  is  highly  necessary  to  say  the  least.  the   mass  of  information  online  encourages  website  providers  to  implement  filters  and   signals,  thus  offering  guidance  for  their  users.  the  dissemination  of  (visible)  pis  has   increased  drastically  over  the  recent  years  (napoli,  2010;;  webster,  2014).  despite  filters   oftentimes  building  upon  pis  implicitly,  explicitly  depicted  pis—as  summarized  in  this   work—are  apt  to  serve  as  social  signals  and,  thus,  influence  internet  users.   due  to  this  high  relevance  of  pis  for  (media)  organizations,  (news)  consumers,  and,  not   least,  internet  researchers,  the  aim  of  this  work,  first,  is  to  analyze  the  field’s  large  body   of  research  that  deals  with  pis.  that  is,  we  provide  a  review  of  academic,  peer-­reviewed   papers  on  pis  in  online  media  (n  =  61).  second,  we  address  current  shortcomings  and   utilize  the  results  of  our  review  to  provide  insights  for  future  research.     method     all  papers  discussed  in  this  literature  review  have  been  obtained  by  searching  the   databases  communication  &  mass  media  complete,  web  of  science,  acm  digital   library,  and  google  scholar.  papers  had  to  have  been  published  between  2005  and   2015  and  had  to  empirically  focus  on  the  effects  of  metric  user  information  (e.g.,  “256   users  recommend  this  book”).  that  said,  papers  on  content-­related  effects  of  user   information  (e.g.,  a  comment  stating  “this  book  rules!”)  were  explicitly  excluded.       to  address  the  problem  of  conceptual  diversity,  two  groups  of  search  terms  have  been   defined  (see  table  1).  all  reasonable  combinations  of  the  terms  within  the  first  (n  =  5)   and  second  (n  =  8)  group,  such  as  “popularity  indicators,”  have  been  used  to  search  for   studies.  additionally,  the  two  terms  “approval  ratings”  and  “rating  visualizations”  have   been  included.  all  terms  were  used  in  quotation  marks  to  enable  searching  for  exact   phrases.     table  1  search  terms  used  in  the  literature  search  procedure   search  term  group  1   search  term  group  2   popularity   indicators   bandwagon   indications   social  media   bandwagons   user   cues   interface   information     metrics     ratings     recommendations     initial  search  yielded  a  total  of  133  unique  papers  that  appeared  to  be  meeting  the   access  criteria  based  on  title  and  abstract.  relevant  papers  (peer-­reviewed  conference   manuscripts  or  journal  articles),  at  least  to  some  degree,  had  to  empirically  deal  with   pis—defined  as  metric  information  about  users’  behavior  or  their  evaluations  of  entities.   ultimately,  a  total  of  611  articles  met  our  criteria.  we  coded  these  articles  both   quantitatively  and  qualitatively.     while  qualitative  coding  provides  differentiated  insights  into  the  studies’  results  and   implications,  categories  of  the  quantitative  analysis  included  but  were  not  limited  to  a)   methodological  approach,  b)  type  of  pis  (e.g.,  likes,  clicks,  ratings),  c)  independent  and   dependent  variables,  d)  study  context  (e.g.,  online  news,  e-­commerce),  e)   operationalization  of  pi  extent  (e.g.,  two  digit  number  for  low  popularity)  and  f)  the   direction  of  effects.       1  21%  of  these  articles  were  conference  manuscripts,  79%  published  studies.   results     we  found  surveys  to  be  the  most  frequently  used  method  in  pi  research  (69%),  followed   by  content  analyses  (23%)  and  (online)  observations  (8%).  the  majority  of  surveys   employed  an  experimental  approach  (93%),  while  there  were  no  experimental  content   analyses  and  just  one  experimental  observation  in  our  sample.  in  85%  of  the  articles,   pis  were  examined  as  the  independent  variable—thus,  most  of  the  studies  investigated   the  effects  of  pis,  whereas  15%  addressed  pis  as  the  dependent  variable.       considering  the  different  types  of  pis,  ratings  were  investigated  the  most  (in  52%  off  all   articles),  followed  by  clicks  (30%),  comments  (18%)  and  other  types  of  pis  (16%).   although  mostly  designed  to  look  like  existing  pis,  the  majority  of  studies  (54%)  focused   on  fictitious  pis.  researchers  investigated  pis  in  the  context  of  e-­commerce  and   marketing  (38%),  online  communities  (33%),  online  news  sites  (23%),  as  well  as  in   connection  with  blogs  and  search  engines  (each  3%).       in  the  11  experimental  studies  that  differentiated  between  different  degrees  of   popularity,  low  popularity  was  indicated  by  either  one-­  (64%)  or  two-­digit  (34%)   numbers,  whereas  high  popularity  was  indicated  by  three-­  (73%)  or  four-­digit  (27%)   numbers.  among  all  experimental  studies  which  employ  pis  as  independent  variable   (n  =  52)  the  majority  finds  either  clear  positive  (34%)  or  nuanced  (38%)  effects  of  pis.  in   addition,  28%  of  the  studies  could  not  reveal  any  effects.  dependent  variables  included   users’  evaluations  of  the  object  associated  with  pis  (50%),  user’s  subsequent  selection   of  content  (42%)  and  other  behaviors  (38%).     discussion     taken  together,  to  the  best  of  our  knowledge,  a  prototypical  study  on  pis  uses   experimental  surveys  to  examine  the  effects  of  fictitious  rating  scales  on  users’  own   evaluations  in  an  e-­commerce  setting.  it  thereby  uncovers  nuanced  effects  prone  to   moderating  influences.  in  this  concluding  section,  we  seek  to  take  the  results  of  the   literature  review  one  step  further  by  providing  concluding  remarks  on  current  pi   research.  by  doing  so,  we  also  offer  suggestions  on  how  scholars  could  move  forward   in  pi  research.     conclusion  i:  the  meaning  of  pis  has  to  be  learned.  the  more  experience  users  have   with  a  certain  pi,  the  better  they  are  able  to  use  this  pi  in  their  selection  and  navigation   behavior.           conclusion  ii:  the  effectiveness  of  pis  depends  on  factors  external  to  pis  such  as  user   variables  (e.g.,  informational  needs,  behavioral  intentions,  and  involvement)  as  well  as   context  variables  determining  the  vividness  and/or  salience  of  pis.       conclusion  iii:  to  move  forward  in  pi  research,  a  comprehensive  theoretical   framework  which  is  open  for  emerging  and  evolving  online  environments  is  necessary.     these  conclusions  first  and  foremost  highlight  the  need  for  a  more  structured  research   approach.  that  is,  future  (experimental)  studies  should  focus  on  specific  aspects  of  pi’s   effects,  such  as  differences  between  short-­  and  long-­term  users  or  influences  of   individual  predispositions.  in  addition,  large-­scale  observations  seem  necessary  in  order   to  reveal  broader  trends  in  users’  interactions  with  pis.   microsoft word aoir2019-oldsocialmedia-final.docx selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation: maxigas, & latzko-toth, g. (2019, october 2-5). trusted commons: why ‘old’ social media matter. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. trusted commons: why ‘old’ social media matter maxigas lancaster university guillaume latzko-toth laval university context and argument the term social media is problematic. as papacharissi puts it, “all media are social” and “invite [their] own form of sociality” (2015: 1). as a category, the term lacks a clear boundary. further, using the phrase “social media” as a way to categorise a bound set of digital communication devices may be seen as a negation of the sociality fostered by other technological artifacts that existed prior to them. it pertains to the rhetoric of periodisation that has become commonplace in studies of digital media as the notion of newness has been instrumental in structuring the research agenda (gitelman 2006; park, jankowski, and jones 2011). drawing attention to the most recent technologies contributes to framing already existing technologies as “old” in the derogatory sense of “obsolete” and “irrelevant”. it obscures (and denies) the possibility for users of technologies that are not in the spotlight of the largest public’s attention to contribute to a social critique of dominant technologies, overlooking their political and subversive potential. by investigating all digital media in current use regardless of their “newness” nor the amplitude of their user base, we can see devices that enjoy continued use as legitimate technologies, rather than mere oddities surviving thanks to their users’ nostalgic attachments to obsoleted machines – as reported in lindsay (2003) on retrocomputing. dunbar-hester’s work on low-power radio activism shows how political values attached to the understanding of media in continued use shape the appropriation of new technologies (2014). we would like to build on her arguments to show “how” contemporary use of “old” social media can inform a critique of new media. by “old” social media we mean pre-platform age digital communication protocols presenting what hogan and quan-haase (2010: 310) call “social affordances”—notably many-to many communication. an example of these is internet relay chat, a long-standing protocol of real-time text conferencing. while our relationship to technology is strongly structured around the modern myth of progress, it can be helpful to pay attention to users who go against the grain in their technological choices. in line with edgerton’s (2008) plea for decentering our historical accounts of technology from innovations to uses, we focus on the irc case and argue that this decentralised, co-constructed (latzko-toth, 2014) communication infrastructure continues to serve social groups who tend to distrust proprietary platforms—groups who are key to the collaborative production of software, hardware and politics. 2. theoretical framework boltanski and chiapello (2005) propose a theoretical framework where historical developments are analysed as an alternating series of critique and recuperation. anne barron already showed how floss (free and open source software) social movement went through such an ideological cycle from critique (free software) to recuperation (open source software). established as a critical response to the commodification of code that has been freely shared before by academics, amateurs, and corporations, in a few decades floss technologies became an organic part of capital accumulation practices in the information technology industry (barron 2013: 19). söderberg and delfanti (2015) suggest that the critique/recuperation framework is general enough to be applied to the study of different time frames. drawing on their conclusions, we suggest that the critique/recuperation framework of the pragmatic school can be applied to technological cycles over much narrower time frames (maxigas 2017a). indeed, it seems that user communities who managed to preserve control over their means of communication in the face of recuperative structural logics were ones that preferred the simplicity and flexibility of unfinished, co-constructed artifacts to the user friendly interfaces of platforms, or in other words, valuing the democratisation of expertise over the democratisation of technology (maxigas 2017b). 3. methodology our claim that irc serves as preferred communication infrastructure of peer production communities—a trusted commons—rests on the study of three specific user groups from the realms of software, hardware and politics. in software, we looked at the communication practices of floss developers. in hardware, we investigated the media use of hackerspace members, since these shared machine workshops are considered the infrastructure of peer production “in the physical realm” (kostakis, 2014). in politics, we examined the reported technological choices of participants in the anonymous hacktivist group, since they have been the most visible example of peer produced politics of the last years (dagdelen, 2012). we structured the data collection and systematic analysis into three phases: a) the hypothesis was formulated based on our online and offline participative observation and historical ethnography. first author focused on the technical repertoire of hackers, while second author researched the social affordances of irc networks. we noticed that the continued use of irc constituted a routine practice in peer production communities while other user groups slowly but surely migrated away to more popular social media platforms over the years. b) then, we used quantitative, computational methods to test the hypothesis. we collected data from community platforms about how to contact the respective peer production projects for support. we analysed the frequency of irc as a contact option offered by the projects, versus other means of communication. we verified the results by correlating them with the names of these projects occurring in the list of irc channels on popular networks (mainly freenode.org). c) finally, we are completing a dozen semi-structured interviews with a diversity of users (casual and heavy users, server maintainers, developers) in order to contextualise and refine the results of the preliminary analysis. we use the findings from the quantitative phase as a prompt during the interviews. references barron, anne. 2013. free software production as critical social practice. economy and society, 42(4). boltanski, luc, and eve chiapello. 2005. the new spirit of capitalism. new york: verso. dagdelen, demet. 2012. anonymous, wikileaks and operation payback: a path to political action through irc and twitter. paper presented at the ipp2012 conference, oxford internet institute, oxford, uk. dunbar-hester, christina. 2014. low power to the people: pirates, protest, and politics in fm radio activism. inside technology. cambridge: mit press. edgerton, david. 2008. the shock of the old: technology and global history since 1900. london: profile books. gitelman, lisa. 2006. always already new: media history and the data of culture. cambridge: mit press. hogan, bernie, and anabel quan-haase. 2010. persistence and change in social media. bulletin of science, technology & society, 4: 309–315. kostakis, vasilis. 2014. production and governance in hackerspaces: a manifestation of commons-based peer production in the physical realm? international journal of cultural studies, 17(2). latzko-toth, guillaume. 2014. users as co-designers of software-based media: the coconstruction of internet relay chat. canadian journal of communication, 39(4), 577595. lindsay, christina. 2003. from the shadows: users as designers, producers, marketers, distributors, and technical support. in how users matter: the co construction of users and technology, ed by. nelly oudshoorn and trevor pinch, 29– 50. cambridge: mit press. maxigas. 2017a. hackers against technology: critique and recuperation in technological cycles. social studies of science, 47(6). ———. 2017b. keeping technological sovereignty: the case of internet relay chat. in technological sovereignty 2, ed by. alex haché. vol. 2. paris: ritimo. papacharissi, zizi. 2015. we have always been social. social media + society, 1(1): 1–2. park, david w., nicholas w. jankowski, and steve jones, eds. 2011. the long history of new media: technology, historiography, and contextualizing newness. new york: peter lang. söderberg, johan, and alessandro delfanti. 2015. hacking hacked! the life cycles of digital innovation. science, technology and human values, 40(5). microsoft word 837-582-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 online political memes and youth political engagement in singapore t.t. sreekumar mudra institute of communications ahmedabad india sreekumar@micamail.in shobha vadrevu national university of singapore singapore shobha.vadrevu@nus.edu.sg abstract this paper explores political actors’ practice of posting static visual online memes on social media in singapore to convey messages commenting on the ruling party and its policies. the paper presents a discussion based on semiotic analysis of selected memes, and interviews with singaporeans aged 18-24 about their responses to memes, to understand how circulation of memes might influence quality of political engagement. results suggest that while memes hold potential for enhancing political engagement among a citizenry that is often seen as depoliticised, youths’ perceptions of the memes do not allow for deterministic conclusions about their efficacy in this regard. rather, the popularity of memes in general as devices of humour, cultural resonance and identity representations suggests that the appropriation of cyberculture for localized political means does have potential for socialising citizens to become critical of the status quo as part of a wider network of political action. keywords singapore; youth; memes; political engagement; citizen participation introduction the use of humour and satire as political commentary is well documented (schutz 1977; mascha 2008), and in singapore, with its political system that has been described as soft authoritarian (george 2006), there is a history of persistent counter narratives in the guise of comedy (lim 1997; tju 2000; lee 2005; tan 2005; lin & tan 2010). this subculture seems to have surfaced as online memes in recent political campaigns in the us (vernallis 2011; sampson 2012). while the concept of memes harks back to dawkins’s (1976) analogy with genes, memes as artefacts of cyberculture have been viewed as a form of vernacular culture that is creatively constructed (burgess 2008). the use of online memes in political discourse would seem to validate theories of convergence culture (jenkins 2006) and cognitive surplus (shirky 2011), whereby artefacts and discourses generated in the informal space of the virtual world get transformed into some sort of political capital, most notably among the young. however there are sceptical voices about convergence culture (jarrett 2008; mosco 2008; van dijck 2009), digital natives (selwyn 2004) and even about online memes (morozov 2012). apart from criticising the content of memes, morozov also points to the role of non-human actors in influencing which memes become popular. these arguments suggest that a closer look needs to be taken at points of convergence between the rhetoric of digitally perceptive youth, cyberculture artefacts and political engagement. it has been shown that glorifying the technological aspects of political engagement risks marginalising those who do not have access to technology. but in technologically advanced societies such as singapore, where access is not an issue (lim 2009), can the confluence of the three discourses still be maintained? if indeed political memes tap on a history of satire and future of cultural convergence via artefacts of cyberspace, might they not have a powerful impact on politicising a generation that is always connected (turkle 2008)? the internet has been a powerful medium in singapore for keeping space for political engagement open even while overtly political action is heavily controlled both online and off (george 2012). in line with this trend, political actors in singapore have attempted to tap upon the satirical potential of online memes in efforts to critique the dominant narratives of the state. yet the question remains as to selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 how this practice translates into the political space in the perceptions of citizens. in particular, young citizens who have just completed school and are at the point of adulthood are in a space of special interest. they are immersed in digital cultures and have completed at least 10 years of education in a school system that is aligned towards national narratives. their views on the political significance of these online memes are indicators of the larger interaction between social media and political change in singapore. methodology a two-step study was conducted between january and june 2012. the first part of the study involved a semiotic analysis of selected memes posted by political actors on facebook. five facebook pages were identified which carried such content.  among these, two were linked to socio-political websites that carried other content such as articles and reports1. both were known for their role as alternative media to the state-controlled mainstream press. they posted multiple items on their facebook pages daily, and most received many comments. the posts themselves were varied, ranging from the serious to the witty. the conversations surrounding each post were often polemical and informal. when memes were posted, therefore, they were not seen as incongruent. memes that specifically dealt with political issues were selected based on their portrayal of people and issues related to the political sphere in singapore2. a common start date of april 2011 was selected, which was when campaigning started for the 2011 may general elections. it is also around this time that posts of a political nature began to proliferate on facebook, even among ordinary citizens. from this small corpus of singaporean online political memes, 3 were selected for a detailed semiotic analysis based on their appropriateness for offering insight into the manner in which they employed intertextuality to embed political messages into common meme formats and attempted to resonate with their audiences. the second part of the study involved interviews with 20 young singapore citizens between the ages of 18 and 24. questions were asked about their general media use, their use of social media, their views on political engagement, and their specific perceptions relating to online memes. participants were requested to log into their social media profiles during the interview so that they could talk about their perceptions and use habits with reference to actual posts and interactions. this ‘interview-plus’ technique helped to stimulate participants’ memory, as well as contextualise the data for the researchers. findings and discussion the potential for powerfully conveying messages in a visual format, combined with the privileging of visual content in cyberspace, points to the potential of online memes for bridging playful interpersonal practices on online social network sites with critical awareness of political issues. in order to interrogate this potential, three online memes were subjected to semiotic interpretations, selected purposively for the manner in which they embedded political statements within a widely recognised meme format. the analysis of the memes, which were posted on publicly available facebook pages by singaporean political actors, shows that the use of social media to activate a depoliticised citizenry, even with powerful memetic imaging, requires a larger context of social, political and cultural support. memes have become important vehicles of expressing political views in singapore, and there has been a surge of interest in using new media platforms for political engagement since mainstream media is seen as pro-establishment and conservative. yet the interviews suggest the need for a more nuanced perspective. none of the participants was unaware of key political issues and popular memes, whether they chose to follow either avidly, or resolutely keep away. ironically, while they would not consider 1  these  two  websites  were  the  online  citizen  and  temasek  review  emeritus.   2  from  each  page,  the  album  entitled  ‘wall  photos’  was  accessed,  because  this  is  common  to  all  facebook  pages.  the  album   contains   photographs   that   have   been   posted   on   the   page,   rather   than   uploaded   as   part   of   another,   specifically   named,   album.   selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 production and transmission of memes as a ‘serious’ mode of engagement to circulate political ideas and would privilege longer blog posts over visual formats, their ambivalences in terms of the understanding of the political function that memes serve in illiberal democracies is particularly striking. with regard to gathering information that will inform their vote, they adopt a ‘wait and see’ attitude – when they feel it is relevant to them, they will find out what they need to know, possibly indicating an instrumental view of political engagement. most consider memes in general as objects of humour, cultural resonance and personal identity representation, and engage in a range of sharing practices that point to the continued popularity of these artefacts. viewed through the lenses of subpolitics (de vries 2007) and subactivism (bakardjieva 2009), the appropriation of cyberculture for localized political means does hold the potential for socialising citizens to become critical of the status quo as part of a wider network of social media and political acculturation (sreekumar & vadrevu 2013). references bakardjieva, m. (2009). subactivism: lifeworld and politics in the age of the internet. the information society 25 (2), 91–104. burgess, j. (2008). ‘all your chocolate rain are belong to us?’ viral video, youtube and the dynamics of participatory culture. video vortex reader: responses to youtube. institute of network cultures, amsterdam, 101-109. dawkins, r. (1976). the selfish gene. oxford: oxford university press. de vries, g. (2007). what is political in sub-politics? how aristotle might help sts. social studies of science 37 (5), 781–809. george, c. (2006). contentious journalism and the internet: towards democratic discourse in malaysia and singapore. singapore, nus press. george, c. (2012). freedom from the press: journalism and state power in singapore. singapore: nus press. jarrett, kylie (2008). interactivity is evil! a critical investigation of web 2.0. first monday 13 (3). retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2140/1947 jenkins, h. (2006). the convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york and london: new york university press. lee, t. (2005). online media and civil society in the" new" singapore. in m. bromley & a. romano (eds.) journalism and democracy in asia. london: routledge curzon. lim cheng, t. (1997). singapore political cartooning. southeast asian journal of social science 25 (1), 125150. lim, s. s. (2009). home, school, borrowed, public or mobile: variations in young singaporeans’ internet access. journal of computer-mediated communication 14 (4), 1228-1256. lin, t. t. & p. s. w. tan (2010). how cultural and linguistic pluralism shape humor: social construction of singapore’s humor industry. intercultural communication studies xix (1). mascha, e. (2008). political satire and hegemony: a case of “passive revolution” during mussolini's ascendance to power 1919–1925. humor – international journal of humor research 21 (1). morozov, e (2012). muzzled by the bots. slate. october 26. mosco, vincent (2008). current trends in the political economy of communication. global media journal 1 (1), 45-63. retrieved from http://www.gmj.uottawa.ca/0801/inaugural_mosco.pdf sampson, t. d. (2012). tarde's phantom takes a deadly line of flight – from obama girl to the assassination of bin laden. distinktion: scandinavian journal of social theory 13 (3), 354-366. schutz, c. e. (1977). political humor: from aristophanes to sam ervin. fairleigh: dickinson university press. selwyn, n. (2004). reconsidering political and popular understandings of the digital divide. new media and society 6 (3), 341-362. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 shirky, c. (2011) cognitive surplus: creativity and generosity in a connected age. the penguin press hc. tan, s. e. (2005). manufacturing and consuming culture: fakesong in singapore. ethnomusicology forum 14 (1), 83-106. tju, l. c. (2000). political cartoons in singapore: misnomer or redefinition necessary? the journal of popular culture 34(1), 77-83. turkle, s. (2008). always-on/always-on-you: the tethered self. in j. e. katz (ed.), handbook of mobile communication studies. cambridge, ma: mit press. van dijck, jose (2009). users like you? theorizing agency in user-generated content. media, culture and society 31 (1), 41-58. retrieved from http://mcs.sagepub.com/content/31/1/41.full.pdf+html sreekumar, t.t. and vadrevu, s. (2013). subpolitics and democracy: the role of new media in the 2011 general elections in singapore. science, technology and society 18 (2): 231–249 vernallis, c. (2011). audiovisual change: viral web media and the obama campaign. cinema journal 50 (4), 7397. 1 fandoms, trending topics and social capital in twitter raquel recuero ucpel brazil raquel@raquelrecuero.com adriana amaral unisinos brazil adriamaral@yahoo.com camila monteiro unisinos brazil camilafrancomonteiro@gmail.com abstract it is increasingly common to see hashtags about celebrities, musicians and famous people among the trending topics (tts) on twitter. in this paper, we examine fans strategies to put their hashtags in the top ten list of trending topics and the social values created and used during the process. to discuss these appropriations, we studied the case of hashtags created by fans from a brazilian pop rock band, restart . we used a quanti-qualitative approach through online and offline ethnography (with 71 interviews) and the collection and analysis of 20 trending topics and six networks extracted from them during the second semester of 2011. as results, we discuss how the groups of fans of restart learned to create hashtags in a cooperative way in order to spread their relations with their idols; which strategies they used to create the hashtags and get them into the tts; and how they fight back the tags created by anti-fans, generating what we call fan wars. finally, we show how fans are able to create bonding ties, network clusterization and influence visibility of information in twitter. keywords fandom; social capital; twitter; trending topics. 2 since its launch, twitter has been able to gather more than 100 million1 fandom is a concept without a clear definition. while fiske (1992) defines it as “a collective strategy, a communal effort to form interpretative communities that in their subcultural cohesion evaded the preferred and intended meanings of the power bloc”, baym (2007, p.1) argues most definitions involve a "collective of people organized socially and their shared appreciation of a pop culture object of objects", which is the way we will further use this term in this paper. users around the world. the tool has become popular also among celebrities (marwick, 2010; kwak et al, 2010) whose presence brought yet another public: fans and groups of fans we will refer to as fandoms (hagittai & litt, 2011). the presence of these fandoms created new appropriations and practices, which is changing twitter's dynamics. among trending topics (tts), for example, it is increasingly common to find hashtags about celebrities, such as fan's tributes, critics, requests etc. (monteiro, 2011). however, the mechanism through which fans are using twitter to spread their message has not, to our knowledge, been explored. in this context, this paper seeks to explore the fans practices in twitter, focusing on hashtags and trending topics. more specifically, our main objective is to discuss fan's strategies to put their hashtags in trending topics through a case study of the fandom of the brazilian band "restart ". in order to do this discussion, we gathered data through a combined quanti-qualitative approach, using online and offline ethnography, interviews, observation of from 20 trending topics and the networks extracted from 6 of these. our results show that through practices that increase the clusterization in the group, restart fans are able to cooperate in order to reach and maintain their hashtags in twitter's tts, to quickly win fights against anti-fans and other fans for tts, and learn how to lure twitter's spam detection. fandoms, fans, social capital and twitter 1 http://mashable.com/2011/09/08/twitter-has-100-million-active-users/ 3 although fan studies pre-date the internet, the emergence of digital media that allowed groups of fans new practices and new forms of connections (baym, 2000; hills, 2002), specially with social network sites (snss). they allow people to more directly find and connect to others with the same likes and dislikes, which is key for fans and fandom emergence. social network sites, thus, create a new space for fans to appropriate and share their practices (booth, 2010). fans tend to look for other fans that share the same passion and interest, which allows them to build a collective identity (baym, 2000). in social networks, this characteristic is often related to homophily. homophily usually refers to the tendency of people who are similar to connect to each other. newman & dale (2005) showed that homophily is related to strong social ties (bonding ties) and social capital, especially because they focus on very specific interests. strong ties are related to the amount of intimacy, engagement and trust shared by two actors in the social network, in opposition to weak ties, which are related to connections that don't share these values (granovetter, 1973). putnam (2000) calls these bonding (strong) and bridging (weak) ties. social networks enable people to interact, and thus, to build social values putnam regard as "social capital". fan groups and social capital social capital is, according to putnam (2000) to the connections among individuals and the values that arise from them. these connections are closely related to the ability of social groups to engage themselves and to values such as reciprocity and trust. social capital is thus based on the value social structure creates to actors, in the sense that through this structure, they can achieve benefits as individuals or as groups. it is also a result of each actor's investments in a social network. online social networks are not only able to create these values, but also, to create new forms of social capital (ellison, steinfeld & lampe, 2007; recuero, araújo & zago, 2011). fan groups and fans commonly engage in cultural practices that allow them to gain more visibility or reputation in social media. they also engage in building information repositories, acting as curators and editors and exchanging goods (amaral 4 & amaral, 2011). because of these practices, fandoms are often compared to communities (baym, 2007) in the sense they are very engaged and committed to the group. fan groups, thus, are built upon bonding ties, which are able to generate more cooperation and more engagement than bridging ties (putnam, 2000). trough social network sites, fans are able find other forms of interaction, connections and social values such as reputation and visibility (amaral & amaral, 2011). also, they can find each other, connect and cooperate more easily and feel more close to their idols (hagittai & litt, 2011). cooperation and engagement are key values to fandoms. without them, there are only fans, not groups (as they lack the collective identification and the sense of group baym, 2000 and fiske, 1992 argue they need). fan groups, hashtags and trending topics twitter is usually considered a microblogging or micromessaging service (java et al, 2007). nonetheless, it also publicly displays social networks, allowing users to interact and to create profiles. therefore, it is also a social network site. while early studies focused on twitter as an information or conversational tool (java et al, 2007), more recent studies have shown more complex appropriations and movements that emerge in the tool, for example, its usage for online activism (gaffney, 2010), for journalism (zago, 2011) and also by celebrities (muntean & peterson, 2009, marwick, 2010). it is the arrival of celebrities in twitter that drove in another phenomena: the fans and the fan groups. because idols started using twitter as a channel to reach fans and to "officially" talk to press, fans are also using twitter as a channel to reach to their idols (monteiro, 2011). fans also feel that they have an affective connection with their idol when they were mentioned or replied by them (amaral & amaral, 2011). this new population of users creates several new phenomena in twitter. in this paper, we chose to focus on how fans are influencing one of the key twitter features, the trending topics. trending topics (or popularly "tts") are a list of the ten most recurrent topics in any given time, classified by country or "worldwide" (which shows the most 5 discussed things in all twitter). according to twitter "trending topics reflect what new or newsworthy topics are occupying most people's attention on twitter at any one time"2 lately, however, we have been observing a different movement, where tts about idols and celebrities are more and more common. in order to achieve this, fans organize themselves to create what we will call "artificial trending topics", which are not topics created by thousands of users talking about the same thing, but rather topics created by a small group of users, who cooperate and activate their social ties to create a huge amount of tweets and avoid twitter's mechanisms of spam detection . twitter hashtags, keywords, and phrases become trending topics when the number of people who use them increases rapidly in a short period of time. twitter currently employs a proprietary algorithm to display trending topics, consisting of terms and phrases that exhibit “trending” behavior. while twitter’s trending topics sometimes reflect current events (e.g., “world cup”), they often include keywords for popular conversation topics (e.g., “#bieberfever,” “getting ready”), with no discrimination between the different types of content. (becker, naaman & gravano, 2011, p.02) thus, they are the reflection of topics that are popular in tweets, a reflection of an organic information movement among social networks. several studies focused tts as organic ecosystem of information (becker, naaman & gravano, 2011; zubiaga et al, 2011). 3 the snss have an historic tradition of trolls (recuero & araujo, 2012). 4 2https://support.twitter.com/entries/101125-about-trending-topics 3 twitter has a strong policy against spam (https://support.twitter.com/articles/18311-the-twitter-rules). 4 according to donath (1998, p.14): “the troll attempts to pass as a legitimate participant, sharing the group’s common interests and concerns; the newsgroup members, if they are cognizant of trolls and other identity deceptions, attempt to both distinguish real from trolling postings and, upon judging a poster to be a troll, make the offending poster leave the group.” and haters (donath, 1998). these are the anti-fans (alters, 2007), or users who hate a certain fan group. sometimes, fan groups are so overwhelming that they can take an entire list of tts (figure 1) thus creating insatisfaction among other users and creating anti-fans. these anti-fans also create hashtags and spread them in organized ways to influence trending topics against 6 the idols, which also generate more action from fans. these disputes create what we are calling "fan wars" in this paper and may last for several hours or days, hijacking trending topics during the entire time. figure 1: trending topics in brazil on january 10th, 2012. note that at least 6 topics refer directly to fans. to understand how online social networks create, share and activate these values is key in this work. online groups of fans are social networks that are creatively using twitter as a way to display their love for their idols. because they share bonding ties, engagement and commitment, they are able to artificially influence and take over twitter's trending topics. methodology in this paper, we proposed an analysis of the hashtag/trending topics ecology through a case study of the restart band fan groups in twitter. restart is a brazilian band formed by 4 boys between 18-20 years old. they called themselves a happyrock band, a mixture of colorful clothes and happy rock songs. because of the invention of a "new genre" of rock the band got plenty of hate both from critics and public. as pe lanza the vocalistaffirmed in their biography, the change of style before restart they were called c4 was inspired by american bands such as all time low and cash cash. all the boys have more than 700k followers on twitter, being pe lanza the most 7 popular one, with 1mi590k followers. usually they use twitter to promote concerts, promotions and interact with fans – including "blessing" new fan clubs." our main research question was "how and why fans create and maintain hashtags in twitter's trending topics?". through a both qualitative and quantitative approach, we gathered different datasets from observation, tweets and interviews and show how these strategies emerge and how groups of fans organize themselves to artificially influence the tts. while the qualitative approach helped us to understand fandoms and fans in twitter and their values, the quantitative approach allowed us to gather tweets and analyze the social networks. this combined approach allowed the finding of "fan wars" within trending topics, which enriches and illustrates our results. qualitative approach: online and offline ethnography our qualitative approach comes from online and offline ethnography (orgad, 2009) of the restart fandom in twitter. this study has been developed during whole the year of 2011 and it is based on participant observation, interviews and a field diary, often using qualitative data collection methods. we interviewed 43 fans selected during two restart concerts5 for this paper, we will focus on the data gathered from the interviews and the observation of hashtags created by fans in twitter, bringing the data that helps us understand the values and practices related to hashtags and trending topics. in 2011 and other 28 through social network sites. these interviews were conducted as conversations, where fans were asked about their relations with each other, the band and twitter. we were able to gather a large amount of data about the fans practices, ideas and codes. we also observed 20 hashtags created by the restart fans during the second semester of 2011. the hashtags were observed through twitter's search feature and conversations with fans. the goal was to understand how the hashtag is created, why and through which mechanisms they spread and reach the trending topics. 5 the concerts were in two different brazilian capitals: porto alegre (in the south) and salvador (in the northeast). 8 quantitative approach: mapping fans networks in order to understand how the social networks fans create in twitter can help them achieve the trending topics and how they active their ties, we gathered quantitative data from 20 hashtags created by the restart fans during the second half of 2011. these tags were all in twitter's trending topics, even if for a short amount of time. we didn’t collect all the hashtags that made in trending topics because they are extremely volatile. rather, we collected an arbitrary sample of hashtags that appeared in the period. these hashtags were monitored using the twitter's search feature and nodexl6. in order to choose the tags, we monitored trending topics weekly, selecting the hashtags that referred to the band or to their members. we were able to collect over 22,0007 in our case study we were able to find several aspects that enlighten how social capital built through twitter allows fans to cooperate and engage in new social and tweets regarding these hashtags, collecting not only the users who tweeted using the hashtag but also the relations between them (for example, followers and types of tweets mentions and replies). in this paper we will present the part of this data that support the qualitative evidence about fan practices regarding fan wars and fan groups cooperation. to analyze the data and create the graphs we also used nodexl, always showing the clustering coefficient of these networks. clusters are usually more dense regions in a graph (scott, 2000). they can refer to a group of more interconnected users in twitter. the clustering coefficient, thus, shows us how well connected are the nodes in our graph. examining the clustering coefficient can help us understand how interconnected are the groups of fans and how valuable is this network structure for some of their practices. results 6 nodexl: http://nodexl.codeplex.com/ 7 due to nodexl and twitter limitations, however, we were not able to gather all tweets regarding each hashtag. 9 informational practices that influences the twittersphere as a whole. restart fan groups as a social network restart fans are strongly active in twitter. these fans chose to use the tool as the main space for all their activities. each account (which we will call "fan account") is usually held by more than one fan and they take turns using it. for example, the fan account @poarestart _rs is owned by one of the interviewees, vitoria. however, brenda, who is vitoria's friend, also helps her and her access to the account. fan accounts can have several participants and although fans also have personal accounts, it is usually through the fan accounts that they interact more with the group. as one fan explains: "i dedicate myself to twitter because it is something quick and practical, and i can talk to everyone". because the tool makes fans feel closer to the band members, they feel it is the ideal place to interact with each other and, of course, with their idols (similarly to what hagittai & litt, 2011 found). fans use twitter as the space for the fan group itself and to show their identity as fans. it is in twitter and through twitter that they exchange information about their idols, share ideas and organize themselves. thus, being connected to several other fans (or fan accounts) that share the same passion is strategically important to have access to social values such as information (putnam, 2000), reputation and collective discussions about the idols (baym, 2007). restart fans have a clear vision of these values. they cherish connections and have a specific process to popularize their tweet accounts to each other and to legitimate the group. they call it "nomination process". their method is simple: popular fan accounts ask if someone wants to be nominate; unknown fan accounts show interest in gaining visibility tweeting them back, then other people start to retweet the nomination, spreading the info about new groups of fans. the "nomation process", thus, is a way to nominate someone for the other fans to follow. thus retweeting some information creates value to fans, like a sponsorship, in a very similar way as described by recuero, araújo & zago (2011). “fans ask for help to promote their own fandom because they want more 10 followers” says brenda, owner of a popular fan account. she also affirms that usually they choose to do a “promotional time”, when they ask if someone wants to be helped. “the best time to do this is at the beginning of the evening because it is the peak hour, lots of people are online” she says. even though it is an common practice, she said that the whole "nomation process" can be very tricky: “our main goal is to inform, [ask others to] vote for singles to gain airplay in radios, help videos to be in the top 10 on tv shows, and people sometimes think nomination is the most important thing in the world, which is not. we also nominate them, but it’s not our priority”. the "nomination process" is ubiquitous within restart ’s fan accounts and represents not only a legitimation of the account, but also, the chance to have more followers, which is an important value in twitter (recuero, araújo & zago, 2011). promoting someone else’s twitter account, besides a nomination process, is also form of participation and support, also forms of social capital (see putnam, 2000). having fan accounts following each other has also an indirect value: it increases the network's clusterization, thus drawing fans closer. this structure of very connected fans is key for a phenomenon we call "fan wars", which we will discuss further on. by having more connections, fans enhance the values they share and the ability to quickly cooperate to influence trending topics. another type of recognition may be achieved by receiving an answer from the idol himself or herself. the direct mention by the idol is even a bigger achievement than the trending topic hashtag, because every fandom obviously follow the idol. one fan explained she tried every day for months to talk to pe lu (one of the restart members), until one day she tweeted "can't you just send me a kiss? i'm dying", whereat the band member answered "i'll send you two". the fan shows a screenshot of the tweet as a trophy. these processes highlight the fact that groups of fans also want to be recognized by other fans. this recognition and legitimation imply the creation of reputation and popularity which are types of social capital gathered through social ties created in twitter (similarly to what recuero, araújo & zago, 2011 discuss). also, practices such as the "nomination process" are able to generate more connections, thus, more social 11 capital such as engagement and reputation. engagement allows cooperation, which will enable the fans to put their hashtags in twitter's trending topics more easily. hashtags and trending topics for a group of fans create a trending topic hashtag is a huge triumph. achieving a tt is not only an honor, but also a legitimation of the fan that is recognized by the others. the following tweet exemplifies this feeling fans share when a hashtag they created gets to the tts:"where is the girl who created the tag? she must be dying right now!" (fan tweet). creating a "famous" hashtag also implies the fan account or /and the fan group have power and followers. sometimes, when a hashtag created by fans starts to become popular in twitter, other people start to complain about it, thus creating even more volume of tweets using the tag. while people don't seem to be aware that when they use the tag they contribute for its maintenance in the trending topics, fans don't mind, as long as they keep the hashtag in the list. types of trending topics the fan groups motivations to create a hashtag and making it a trending topic may vary. examining these goals, however, is important to understand which types of values fans create and seek when they are acting in tts. we found five types of hashtags based on the goals of the fan account: 1. tribute the motivation is to show the world their love for the idol. examples: pelanzanossoorgulho, (pe lanza our pride pe lanza is the head singer of the band); happybdaypelu (happy birthday pe lu another member of the band); luansantana&restart -orgulhodobrasil (luan santana and restart brazil's pride luan santana is a popular country singer). 2. promotion the motivation for the trending topic is to promote something the band is currently doing or something fans find important. examples: #lancamentodvdrestart and dvdhappyrocksunday (about the launch of the 12 band's new dvd); #restart naeliana, #restart noraulgil, (all about the band's featured in popular tv shows); "e hoje sei sei sei" (part of one of the band's new single lyrics), pelunorockgol (about pe lu, another of the band's members, participation in mtv's popular show rock gol). 3. response the goal is to answer to a hashtag or media story (usually negative) or even someone famous who may have said something negative about the band. tts in this category: maisrespeitomenosinveja (more respect, less envy) which was an answer to the topic #menoscormaisrock (less color, more rock restart is known by their "colorful" clothes, and usually referred to as "the colorful band"; #calabocar7, (shut up r7) against a story published by the brazilian portal r7 about a rumor that the band had ended8 4. requests the goal for these tts is to make a request for the band or for other fans. for example: #voterestart (vote for restart ) which was a topic asking other fans to vote for restart as the "best band" in mixtv (and was also used for top ten mtv and other awards during the year), restart voltaprapoa (restart come back to poa, asking the band to come back to a brazilian city). . 5. war topics that are created within fan wars to answer other usually negative hashtags. although they also make a statement and answer other tag, these topics differ because of the motivation. fans don't want simply to put one tag in trending topics, but to put one tag in first place or to replace offensive tags. trending topics in this category: #pelanzacausainveja "pe lanza, the lead singer of restart causes envy" was a hashtag created by fans to answer other very offensive hashtags created by anti-fans: #pelanzauzacalcinha (pe lanza the singer of the band uses panties) and #pelanzadaocu (pe lanza makes anal sex). however, these "war" hashtags can be made in a war between grups of fans (for example, which one gets to be the first in twitter's tts). the collected hashtags were divided among the categories (table 1): 8 http://entretenimento.r7.com/jovem/noticias/restart-nao-acabou-ah-que-pena-20111215.html 13 table 1: number and types of fan hashtags collected in trending topics. number of hashtags tribute 3 promotion 9 response 2 requests 2 war 6 to reach trending topics is also a way to be seen and to make a statement. hashtags are created and spread to generate visibility and popularity, not only for the group of fans itself, but also for the fan account. however, the key motivation is higher: fans feel they have a commitment with the band and a mission to propagate their work to the world. the majority of the observed trending topics are promotions, which shows that fans are highly engaged in advertising and telling others about their idols. thus, fans are not only generating value for the group of fans itself, but also for restart band, acting like prs and promoting the band's actions, new releases and products. the band is very aware of this power and frequently asks the fans for something (for example, to spread the work about their new release or to vote for them in some award). these types of trending topics are all about visibility, which is another type of social capital (recuero, araújo & zago, 2011). they show fans are able to make information they find relevant visible and to reduce the impact of negative information. strategies for achieving tts and maintaining a hashtag in the top ten fans create a hashtag for everything: the birth of a band member's nephew, the birthday of one of the idols, the last wish of another fan or event the fact that the band is appearing in national television. everything is a reason for a hashtag in tts. however, to create and move one hashtag among the top ten, avoiding twitter's spam mechanisms is not an easy task. fans need to create ways to "activate" their social ties and cooperate so their hashtag can be seen. but how they do this? which are the strategies they use? 14 1. activating the fan groups using twitter and other social media tools (such as livemessenger or gtalk, fans chose a hashtag they want to make the statement they want. in order to do so, the organizers often use war metaphors, such as "troops let's conquer the tts (...)" or "to rank up the tag" or messages that appeal to the bonding connection they feel with each other: "let's show our love!", "united restart family!" (the fan groups call themselves restart family). using these metaphors, fans are able to reach the values they share with other fans, such as a collective identity and the bonding ties they share. the more one engages in a crusade to make a hashtag a tt, the more love one has for their idol. depending on the type of hashtag they want to promote, they also may use different motivational tweets. "let's show how wrong is this tag!", "come on guys! i'm not seeing anyone using the tag around here!” or even "help promote the band". 2. tweeting everything with the hashtag of the moment when the hashtag is chosen fans then start twitting everything with it. for example: “where do you live? restart naeliana”, “dying with a headache restart naeliana” “i’m thirsty, be right back restart naeliana” “i can’t believe that i spent the whole night tweeting and i’m not even tired #restart notvxuxa” “can someone please nominate my twitter? i just need 20 followers to complete 400 restart naeliana”, “sweetie, i’m following you back restart naeliana”, “i think i’m going to study later restart naeliana”, “i play video games, i love sneakers and plain shirts and i’m still a girl #orgulhofamiliarestart ” “familarestart causainveja so many jealous people, it’s quite funny”. 3. teaching each other how to avoid spam detection claiming to other fans, organizers also tweet about the strategies other fans should use. for example: "tweet everything with the hashtag!"; "don't forget to not tweet too many times the same thing!"; "rt the tag, guys!". this strategy allows the group to literally attack tts, generating thousands of tweets in a very short time. 4. cooperating with other fan groups for fans, often maintaining a top ten hashtag is difficult. sometimes, it is because there is something else that is capturing everyone's attention (such as some news or event), sometimes, because anti-fans start a counter movement. thus, other strategies are key to achieve this one 15 interesting example was the hashtag luansantana&restart orgulhodobrasil (luan santana and restart brazil's pride). the topic appeared on december of 2011 and dominated trending topics for almost an entire day. the movement was a result of a cooperated action between two different groups: restart and luan santana (a popular country singer). while the fans also used other strategies, it was the fact that both groups of fans were tweeting with the hashtag that was capable to make the topic last for so long. fans seem to understand the value of connections and even though they share them more freely with other groups of fans of the same idol, they are not so willing to connect to other idols' fandoms. thus they don't nominate other fan groups. "my heart is restart " explains julia, owner of a fan account, "i can't betray them by following others". these actions often create expectations that a "true" fan will help the group, engaging him or she in the movement to get the hashtag in the tts. fans are, thus activating their ties through social capital, specially, through reputation. the strategies fans use to reach trending topics work because fans are interconnected. they follow each other within the same group of fans and it is a general accepted rule that to be part of the fandom, one has to be connected to other fans. thus, connections are a key resource to fans and are able to create the social capital they need to "activate" a hashtag. clusterization, thus, is very important to allow information, knowledge and cooperation within the fandom. fan wars another phenomenon found in our research was the "fan wars". these wars are created by different fandoms or fans and anti-fans that actively engage in a dispute for the trending topics. we found two types of fan wars. the first one was one group fo fans against other group of fans, where the dispute was about "who is the best" and fans that want to 16 show which idol has the biggest goup of fans and which group loves their idol more, by reaching the number one place in trending topics. this type of "fan war" is about which group of fans is the strongest, largest and more loving of their idols. in figure 2 we can see brazilian trending topics on october 30th, 2011. these tts show a war between several groups of fans (among them, the restart fans) for the first place in the list, which was hold by paramore (another band) fans. figure 2: trending topics in brazil in october 30th. note that all the topics refer to fans. "come on guys, we are almost there", tweeted a fan asking others to keep the effort in order to make the restart hashtag the first one. tweets like this one in our corpus showed that fans were committed; using the strategies they learned with each other to achieve their goal. the second type of war was established between fans and anti-fans. mostly, these wars seem to start when a grupo of fans is making too much noise in twitter and annoying other users, who start tweeting hashtags against the idols to infuriate the fans. one example was the hashtag #pelanzadaocu (pe lanza makes anal sex), which insinuates that pe lanza, the lead singer of restart was a homosexual in a derogative way. the hashtag appeared in the brazilian's tts on early morning of july 12th of 201, with others such as "#pelanzatemxoxota" (pe lanza has a vagina, insinuating he was a 17 girl), infuriating restart fans. quickly, fans created not one hashtag, but several in order to take over the tts. after two hours, the entire brazilian tt's was dominated by hashtags such as #pelanzadainveja (pe lanza causes envy), #pelanzameuorgulho (pe lanza, my pride), etc. but how did they do it? because fans are very connected it is easier for them to activate their ties in twitter and quickly create a hashtag to answer the offending one. we mapped both fan (#pelanzacausainveja pe lanza causes envy) in figure 3, and anti-fan hashtags (#pelanzadaocu), in figure 4, in order to show how these networks are organized. figure 3: users who tweeted the hashtag #pelanzadaocu and follow each other 18 figure 4: users who tweeted the hashtag #pelanzacausainveja and follow each other the hashtag #pelanzacausainveja had 3716 tweets mapped and an average clustering coefficient of 0,124. the hashtag #pelanzadaocu had 1462 tweets mapped and found an average clustering coefficient of 0,040. the average in and out degree in this network was 0,096. this same pattern of network was frequent among all the three fan wars trending topics we collected data about (see tables 2 and 3.) table 2: anti-fans topics tweets edges vertices clusterin g coefficie nt #pelanzauzacalcinha (pe lanza wears ladies panties) 1234 1048 883 0,054 #pelanzaboquete (pe lanza makes blow jobs) 3270 1685 479 0,085 #pelanzadaocu (pe lanza makes anal sex) 1462 1144 1184 0,040 in the data, the edges represent the number of twitter accounts (profiles) which participate tweeting about each trending topic. the vertices represent the number of 19 connections (ties of followers/following) in the network. the more vertices and less edges, the more connected is the group, thus, clutering coefficient should be higher. if the clustering coefficient is low, it means the group of edges is less connected. table 3: fan topics tweets edges vertices clusterin g coefficie nt #restart thebest 10977 431 9331 0,253 #orgulhorestart (restart pride) 1596 201 1477 0,196 #pelanzacausainveja (pe lanza causes envy) 3716 628 3495 0,124 as we can see in this data, not only are fans much more connected than antifans, but they also are more effective in quickly creating a big amount of tweets and reaching the trending topics. this is not something random. actually restart fans are more efficient because they are far more interconnected than anti-fans. this interconnection is key for bonding ties and social capital (putnam, 2000). thus, fans have more engagement, trust and commitment and activate this social capital when they activate their network in a fan war. fans also have a sense of collective identity and identification with other fans and the idols (baym, 2007). this is also an important motivation for them to participate in a fan war. for example in tables 2 and 3, we can see that fan networks have far less edges, in general, than anti-fans. however, these networks have much more tweets per fan. also, seems that the "nomination process" helps the fan accounts to achieve a higher clustering coefficient. because fans are very connected it is easier for them to activate each other. users who follow each other and share bonding ties (putnam, 2000) are more likely to engage with each other because they share trust and commitment. thus, they are more willing to spend time and invest effort in tweeting to reach the tts than the anti-fans. these wars always seem to end with fans being able to swap the anti-fans 20 hashtags out of the trending topic's list fans seem to be more engaged and more capable of acting quickly like a group in order to swap depreciative hashtags out of tts. we observed three wars between fans and anti-fans of restart , for example. usually, in a matter of minutes fans were able to dominate not only the first place, but also the entire trending topic list with their pride hashtags. sometimes, anti-fans and other users help fans by trolling their hashtags. for example, the tag #familiarestart causainveja (restart family causes envy) was replicated by several other users with other contexts, such as "#familiarestart causainveja aos teletubbies (restart family causes envy to the teletubbies) or "#familiarestart causainveja ao arco-íris (restart family causes envy to the rainbow) and so on. these are trolling ways where anti-fans can make a statement about restart and their fans without the war. however, they also increase the potential of a fan hashtag to reach the trending topics. once we analyze the disputes between fans and antifans on twitter, it seems irrelevant to point it out which group started each trend. mainly because the whole dynamic is cyclic: if antifans start a trending using a negative tag such as #lesscolormorerock, in a couple of hours, fans reunite their forces/power and begin to spread the exact opposite, reviding, trending #morecolorlessprejudice, and vice versa. then, the battle stays on and it’s interesting to observe which group is able to perpetuate a trend for more time – with fans winning most of the time because of their organization and union. it's interesting to highlight the importance of the random tweets, especially for the antifans side. they incorporate the tag to mock, troll and/or prove their points but don't hate the band itself, only what they represent (bad teen pop songs). the same occurs with justin bieber, one direction and other teen idols. by trolling, people help the antifans to get what they want. conclusion restart fan groups use frequently the word "family" to describe the relation they have with each other and the bond they feel they have with the band and other fans. social network sites allow these connections to flourish more easily because they allow users to find each other through their likes. through twitter, restart fans are not just 21 able to connect to each other but also with their idols, negotiating values and creating visibility to their goals. this fact creates an unique ecology in trending topics, which we sought to discuss in this paper. as putnam (2000) argues, social capital is key for social engagement. through twitter, interaction and designed new social practices (such as the "nomination process"), fans are able to create a collective identification (baym, 2007), which produces more homophily, and social capital (newman & dale, 2005) and more clusterization. through these ties, they manage to influence twitter's trending topics and create visibility to the messages they want. this phenomenon of artificial creation and maintenance of hashtags in trending topics by a small set of users seem to become increasingly common in the twittersphere. to understand how social networks create and exchange values through the appropriation of snss is relevant to also understand the emergence of new informational ecologies. references alters, d. f. (2007). the other side of fandom: anti-fans, non-fans, and the hurts of history. in j. gray, c. sandvoss & c. l. harrington (eds.) fandom: identities and communities in a mediated world. new york: new york university press. amaral, a. & amaral, j.p. (2011). s2, s2. afetividade, identidade e mobilização nas estratégias de engajamento dos fãs através das mídias sociais pelo happy rock gaúcho. in: m. herschmann (eds) comunicação, indústria da música e desenvolvimento local sustentável. sao paulo: estação das letras. baym, n. (2007). the new shape of online community: the example of swedish independent music fandom. first monday 12 (8). retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1978/1853 baym, n. (2000). tune in, log on: soaps, fandom, and online community. thousand oaks, ca: sage. becker, h.; naaman, m. & gravano, l. (2011). beyond trending topics: real-world http://people.ku.edu/~nbaym/2007baymfirstmonday.pdf#_blank� http://people.ku.edu/~nbaym/2007baymfirstmonday.pdf#_blank� http://people.ku.edu/~nbaym/2007baymfirstmonday.pdf#_blank� http://www.amazon.com/tune-log-fandom-community-cultures/dp/0761916490#_blank� 22 event identification in twitter. in proceedings of fifth international aaai conference on weblogs and social media (icwsm). barcelona, spain: aaai press. retrieved from sm.rutgers.edu/pubs/becker35-icwsm2011.pdf booth, p. (2010). digital fandom: new media studies. new york: peter lang publishing. boyd, d. m., & ellison, n. b. (2007). social network sites: definition, history, and scholarship. journal of computer-mediated communication 13 (1). retrieved from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html. donath, j. (1998). identity and deception in the virtual community in: p. kollock & m. smith (eds) communities in cyberspace. london: routledge. ellison, n. b., steinfield, c., & lampe, c. (2007). the benefits of facebook "friends:" social capital and college students' use of online social network sites. in journal of computer-mediated communication 12 (4). retrieved from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/ellison.html fiske, j. (1992). the cultural economy of fandom. in: l lewis.(ed) the adoring audience: fan culture and popular media. london: routledge. gaffney, d. (2010). #iranelection: quantifying online activism. in: proceedings of the websci10, extending the frontiers of society on-line, raleigh, nc: us. retrieved from http://journal.webscience.org/295/ granovetter, m. (1973). the strength of weak ties. american journal of sociology 78 (6) (may, 1973. chicago: the university of chicago press, 1360-1380. hargittai, e. & litt, e. (2011). the tweet smell of celebrity success: explaining twitter adoption among a diverse group of young adults. new media & society 13 (5), 824-842. retrieved from http://webuse.org/p/a36 hills, m. (2002). fan cultures. new york: routledge. java, a., x. song, t. finn, & b. tseng. (2007). why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities. proceedings of joint 9th webkdd and 1st sna-kdd workshop, acm press. retrieved from http://aisl.umbc.edu/get/softcopy/id/1073/1073.pdf http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/judith/identity/identitydeception.html#_blank� http://webuse.org/p/a36� http://webuse.org/p/a36� http://webuse.org/p/a36� 23 kwak, h.; lee, c.; park, h.; moon, s. (2010). what is twitter, a social network or a news media? in proceedings of www 2010, raleigh, north carolina: us. retrieved from http://an.kaist.ac.kr/~haewoon/papers/2010-www-twitter.pdf marwick a. (2010). status update: celebrity, publicity, and self-branding in web 2.0. unpublished doctoral dissertation. new york university: new york. retrieved from http://www.tiara.org/blog/wp content/uploads/2010/09/marwick_dissertation_statusupdate.pdf monteiro, c. (2011). fã-mília #happyrock: “recomeço” em cores. proceedings of i simpósio em tecnologias digitais e sociabilidade, simsocial 2011. salvador, ba, brazil. retrieved from http://migre.me/7dt0v muntean, n. & peterson, a. h. (2009). celebrity twitter: strategies of intrusion and disclosure in the age of technoculture. m/c journal, 12 (5). retrieved from http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewarticle/194 newman, l. & dale, a. (2007) homophily and agency: creating effective sustainable development networks. environment, development and sustainability 9 (1), 79-90. retrieved from http://crcresearch.org/articles/homophily-and-agency-creating-effectivesustainable-development-networks orgad, s. (2009) how can researchers make sense of the issues involved in collecting and interpreting online and offline data? in: markham, a. n & baym, n. (eds) internet inquiry. conversations about method. los angeles, us: sage. putnam, r. (2000). bowling alone. the collapse and revival of american community. new york, us: simon & schuster. recuero, r. ; araújo, r.m. ; zago, g. (2011). how does social capital affect retweets? in proceedings of fifth international aaai conference on weblogs and social media (icwsm). barcelona, spain: aaai press. retrieved from http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/icwsm/icwsm11/paper/view/2807 recuero, r; araújo, r. m. (2012). on the rise of artificial trending topics in twitter. proceedings of 23 acm hypertext and social media (hypertext 2012), milwaukee, us. retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2310046 http://migre.me/7dt0v� http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewarticle/194� http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewarticle/194� http://www.springerlink.com/content/1387-585x/� http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0743203046/bowlingaloneco00/104-1664796-9890344?creative=125581&camp=2321&link_code=as1� 24 scott, j. (2000). social network analysis. thousand oaks, ca: sage. zago, g. (2011). informações jornalísticas no twitter: redes sociais e filtros de informações. comunicologia 1, p. 58-73. retrieved from http://www.gabrielazago.com/pesquisa zubiaga, a., fresno, v., spina, d., martínez, r. (2011) classifying trending topics: a typology of conversation triggers on twitter. proceedings of cikm’11, glasgow, scotland, uk. retrieved from http://nlp.uned.es/~damiano/pdf/zubiaga2011trendingtopics.pdf fiske, j. (1992). the cultural economy of fandom. in: l lewis.(ed) the adoring audience: fan culture and popular media. london: routledge. newman, l. & dale, a. (2007) homophily and agency: creating effective sustainable development networks. environment, development and sustainability 9 (1), 79-90. retrieved from http://crcresearch.org/articles/homophily-and-agency-creating-effective-su... recuero, r. ; araújo, r.m. ; zago, g. (2011). how does social capital affect retweets? in proceedings of fifth international aaai conference on weblogs and social media (icwsm). barcelona, spain: aaai press. retrieved from http://www.aaai.org/ocs/inde... selected papers of internet research 16: the 16 th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 reclaiming networked space through alternative models of connectivity philip m. bain university of denver introduction the advent of computer networking brought with it promises of solutions and conveniences to work in favor of humanity, but it also introduced previously unfathomed problems and complications. technology theorist benjamin bratton, channeling french philosopher paul virillio states, “the invention of any new technology is also the invention of a new kind of accident.”1 the internet, a product of many minds building upon the inventions of older minds, has been characterized as both a panacea and an instrument of oppression.2 but, like any tool, it is only as effective as the human beings who wield it. recently there have been many hardware and software innovations used to create information networks that enhance and compliment the internet. this research suggests that these alternative networking techniques have the power to promote digital democracy through challenging incumbent access providers by fostering community engagement and redefining our relationship with infrastructure. in today’s techno-political climate, the internet has been tamed by agents powerful enough to control one or more aspects of its utility. technology firms create suites of products that provide useful services to users, but also entrap them in walled gardens characterized by inoperability between providers. while these services are often offered to the user free of cost, these institutions collect data from the users by storing and analyzing communication and search history. this data is used to classify users into marketing demographics, which is sold to media buyers who target them with directed advertising. government agencies also have operations in place that amass and catalogue enormous amounts of data on citizen behavior online, including phone records and 1 metahaven, “the cloud, the state, and the stack: metahaven in conversation with benjamin bratton,” accessed april 4, 2015, http://mthvn.tumblr.com/post/38098461078/thecloudthestateandthestack. 2 evgeny morozov, the net delusion: the dark side of internet freedom, 1st ed (new york: public affairs, 2011). suggested citation (apa): bain, p. (2015, october 21-24) reclaiming networked space through alternative models of connectivity. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. email communications. the most notable and far-reaching of these operations is the nsa’s prism program, which was revealed to the public by former nsa contractor edward snowden in june 2013. the snowden revelations brought these actions into the public eye, but to many it reinforced what was already suspected; that the us government was performing surveillance operations on its citizens and worldwide. yet, despite the disclosure of the prism program, true reform has yet to take place. collective outrage has not led to mobilization against the nsa’s policies, and many internet users in america and worldwide have been provided with ineffective means to protect their privacy. still for others these privacy issues are not a priority, for network access is out of reach to them due to economic disparities stemming from unequal deployment of networks by internet service providers (isps), and lack of technological competency. what is known as the “digital divide” affects a certain segment of our country, and it is amplified along trends consistent with social and economic inequality.3 members of lower socioeconomic classes as well as minorities are disproportionally affected by the technology gap. alternative models of connectivity alternative networking is a broad term that refers to anything that falls outside of the traditional model of connectivity. the traditional model is where the end user connects via “last mile” access from an isp who, in turn, connects via backbone access from a tier 1 provider. in this example, the isp is the gateway between the consumer and the internet. the isp may own or lease the last mile infrastructure, and therefore commands a large amount of control of how the data is shaped, and how the infrastructure is deployed. comcast, the country’s largest internet provider, has been criticized for only providing infrastructure to locations where it is commercially advantageous, thus leaving out rural and poor areas that do not meet this criteria.4 however, because many of the important protocols and specifications that comprise the internet have been classified as open source, computer networking can exist and be functional on its own, without needing to abide by the traditional model. there is a host of emerging technologies on the market that will make development of alternative networking much easier. what was once the exclusive realm of geeks and computer enthusiasts can now be utilized by artists and activists. in the past decade, the evolution of web design and other coding practices has swiftly jettisoned into the realm of creativity and craft. this paradigm shift has set a precedent for other technological endeavors, and computer networking has the potential to follow a similar trajectory. 3 karen mossberger, “toward digital citizenship: addressing inequality in the information age,” routledge handbook of internet politics, 2009, 173–85. 4 gerry smith, “at&t, comcast have spotty record of giving internet to rural and poor,” the huffington post, accessed april 27, 2015, http://social.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/12/att-comcast-mergers_n_5484595.html. there are many tools that are available now to construct new networking arrangements. along with the rise of “maker culture” in the past few years, creative hardware manufacturers have introduced dozens of microcontrollers—small, use-specific computing devices—to the market.5 products like pinnocio mesh networking “scouts” and spark core wi-fi development boards are approximately the size of your thumb, and come with out-of-the-box configuration. these emerging tools have the potential to bring alternative networking into the mainstream. characteristics and implementation alternative networking can improve digital democracy and combat the widening technology gap by adhering to two principles. first, alternative networking should be able to provide a low barrier of entry to set up. and second, it should be able to provide useful and desirable services. adhering to these two principles will give alternative networking a shot at more widespread adoption. dominant isps are able to provide extremely high bandwidth speeds to many people due to their control of the last mile infrastructure and vast financial resources. alternative networks are mostly small-scale, and community driven. they do not have the resources to compete with isps, and that is not their intention. rather than focusing on bandwidth and throughput, alternative networks aim to provide more versatile avenues of connectivity. even so, in order to make a successful contribution to the community, an alternative network must be able to provide an acceptable end-user experience that facilitates adoption alternative models of connectivity can protect us from the monopolization of the internet by “state” or “cloud” entities because the building blocks are available to everyone. people can take advantage of the vast resources and create custom architectures to suit the needs of their particular implementation. in doing so, people can help close the digital divide, support digital democracy, and have the potential to reinvigorate the public sphere by engaging their community. creating and deploying networks, whether isolated or linked to the internet, will become as easy and commonplace as building a webpage or starting a blog. advancements in website and blog hosting service gained popularity in the early 2000’s thanks to services provided by the now defunct webhosting companies tripod and angelfire. it stands to reason that personalized networks can follow in these footsteps thanks to the popularity of small wireless integrated microcontrollers and other recent advancements. developments in micro infrastructure devices are gaining popularity due to the ease in which networking interfaces can be integrated into pcb boards.6 made possible by 5 maker culture is a subset of do-it-yourself (diy) culture that makes ample use of 3-d printing technology and wireless networking advancements. the focus is typically a convergence of robotics, 3-d printing, computer programming and networking. 6 pcb, or printed circuit boards are hard, flat boards that have circuitry embedded (printed) upon them, along with other microchips. advancement in wireless networking technology, they have the ability to deploy network infrastructure rapidly and flexibly. these devices, such as the pinoccio, and flutter wireless, can be powered by small, rechargeable batteries, and have powerful radios to broadcast their signal.7 these advancements are helping people take more control over technology, and networking should follow this trend. pervasive, ubiquitous networking is rapidly moving into the mainstream, and it is imperative for the public to stay ahead of the curve and take control early on to prevent state and cloud entities from monopolizing the services. mastering low cost networking hardware and emergent protocols are of key importance to maintaining openness in network infrastructure. it is clear that traditional models of connectivity have a tendency to discriminate against groups of lower socio-economic status. access to the internet through isps comes at a cost that may be out of reach for some. additionally, infrastructure owners do not typically provide services to geographic locations that are not profitable or sustainable to be deployed. alternative models of connectivity such as community designed mesh networks can circumvent the need to force alignment with an isp by amplifying and sharing a few access points to the larger community. alternative networking initiatives find ways to mobilize neglected communities to implement their own network infrastructure. community run networks tend to have higher levels of engagement and provide bonding opportunities due to the collaboration involved.8 mesh networks using wi-fi technology by design are better applied to higher population density areas because of the necessarily limited distance between nodes.9 but rural areas can benefit from alternative networking techniques such as free space optical (fso) communication. fso networks most commonly utilize laser light or led technology to create data links between distances of up to 3 km.10 globalization and localization can work in concert and should be considered as two sides of the same coin. the adage “think globally, act locally” is applicable in the alternative networking movement. much of the character of the internet has been ascribed to its ability to connect the entire world. there is a benefit in this, to social and economic applications. people tend to be more conscientious toward members of their 7 the pinocco is a small but powerful wireless mesh device. 8 j. soderberg, “free space optics in the czech wireless community: shedding some light on the role of normativity for user-initiated innovations,” science, technology & human values 36, no. 4 (july 1, 2011): 423–50, doi:10.1177/0162243910368398. 9 mesh networks are decentralized; each node is able to communicate with every other neighboring node. contrast with the centralized model of traditional networks, where each node connects to a single routing node. 10 tom garlington, joel babbitt, and george long, “analysis of free space optics as a transmission technology,” us army information systems engineering command 3 (2005). same group, and global networking can produce feelings of inclusiveness. conversely, local strategies have a positive impact on using resources that can be obtained without the expended energy of transporting them across large distances. alternative networks can add networking infrastructure to places that don’t have it, and can be done without intervention from major players like isps. in other words, it can be accomplished by activist organizations or local communities working together. additionally, alternative networks can be made privately and hidden, thus providing local free network initiatives the ability to add network infrastructure surreptitiously as deemed necessary. adoption and future development it was not long ago when building websites was the exclusive domain of knowledgeable individuals with a strong background in computers and programming. it started as an underground phenomenon, paralleling the rise of programming in the 1980’s. writing and hosting a website in the 1990’s required a lot of skill due to the fact that the technology was still relatively new. however, the practice gained traction, becoming more popular each year. alternative networks big and small have a future along these lines. in no small part due to the decreasing size and cost of hardware technology, particularly innovations in wireless, networking projects are becoming more and more frequent. ten years ago the consumer market was populated with relatively few hardware networking options, now wireless chips can fit in the size of dime and can be attached to nearly anything. this should be encouraging to individuals who are interested in building their own “boutique” network infrastructure. with networking hardware following the cycle of moore’s law, it is easy and affordable to build and deploy personalized networks, and incorporate a virtual space into any physical space.11 the research suggests there is a growing interest in the field, with the many resources and communities of developers offering their support. in most alternative networking projects, users possessing a strong working knowledge of technology are the ones who typically initiate community-led innovation. because these projects require an initial configuration of hardware and software, those who have a background in related technology fields comprise the community. if the project gains traction into the wider community, people who have only a cursory knowledge of the technological aspect, fall into other roles suited to their capabilities. political skills such as management and organization, as well as non-technical design such as promotion and advertising, prove valuable in community construction. so, as the community grows, the concentration of technology enthusiasts diffuses as others lend their skills to the project. this helps adjust the scope to a more inclusive place, allowing for increased levels of participation, and more democratic representation of the group. because of this 11 moore’s law says that the number of transistors able to fit in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. it is sometimes used to account for the explosion in computer development from 1980-2000, and also looked at as self-fulfilling prophecy. inclusive trait of alternative networking, the ability for developing a public sphere around the technology increases. conclusion this research explores the emergence of network alternatives to the global internet. new spaces for computer networking to exist are waiting to be discovered. this could be through new and updated protocols, and also through the use of advanced new technology. wireless routing hardware is becoming more specialized and can be adapted to use for smaller, private network solutions. what is special about this is that individuals and groups that participate in this concept will be bringing their own interests, skills, and motivations to the table. with these tools, the paradigm of the internet can be re-evaluated. computer networking has evolved significantly since it was first conceived. the collaborative and open nature of its foundational codes is imprinted upon its dna, fostering connections and cooperation to help bring about social good. by presenting humankind with new interfaces to find our place in the world, communications technologies will become intertwined with its effects. however, it is a tool, and it can be used for purposes both positive and negative. if participants continue the practices of sharing and community engagement, the future of alternative networking has the potential to place greater control of the democratic aspects in the hands of the public. by wresting the means of access from the gatekeepers, and constructing new spaces for communication, the possibility of a public sphere becomes much more viable. the potentials of alternative networking will become evident as the practice matures. the trend of networking hardware and computer chips shrinking in size produces new products that are rapidly emerging, allowing for more versatile integration of spaces and networks. enthusiasts will continue to develop networking projects that, over time, become adopted by a broader cross-section of the public, bringing unique skillsets that enhance the possibilities of the network. much like the evolution of the html language from a modest style guide for transmitting documents, to the innovative and creative craft we see today, networking will evolve into a more tangible and substantial practice. these characteristics indicate a reflection of the past promises of democratization, amplified, and offering hope for the emergence of a new virtual public sphere. reclaiming networks by implementing alternative techniques will yet again shift the balance of power among network communication infrastructures, and the democratizing potential of computer networking may be presented. these alternative models of connectivity will face a trial as they become more widely adopted, and it is up to those who continue to work with the technology make a constructive impact. by sharing work, and providing support for one another, the architects of the future can maintain the ethos that propelled computer networking to the magnitude we see today. references garlington, tom, joel babbitt, and george long. “analysis of free space optics as a transmission technology.” us army information systems engineering command 3 (2005). metahaven. “the cloud, the state, and the stack: metahaven in conversation with benjamin bratton.” accessed april 4, 2015. http://mthvn.tumblr.com/post/38098461078/thecloudthestateandthestack. morozov, evgeny. the net delusion: the dark side of internet freedom. 1st ed. new york: public affairs, 2011. mossberger, karen. “toward digital citizenship: addressing inequality in the information age.” routledge handbook of internet politics, 2009, 173–85. smith, gerry. “at&t, comcast have spotty record of giving internet to rural and poor.” the huffington post. accessed april 27, 2015. http://social.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/12/att-comcast-mergers_n_5484595.html. soderberg, j. “free space optics in the czech wireless community: shedding some light on the role of normativity for user-initiated innovations.” science, technology & human values 36, no. 4 (july 1, 2011): 423–50. doi:10.1177/0162243910368398. http://mthvn.tumblr.com/post/38098461078/thecloudthestateandthestack http://social.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/12/att-comcast-mergers_n_5484595.html selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 imagining&social&justice&through&the&internet&and& beyond& anna(lauren(hoffmann((moderator)( university(of(california,(berkeley( ( from(scholarly(discussions(to(mainstream(publications,(there(is(a(growing( understanding(that(theoretical,(largely(academic(conceptions(of(social(justice(are(in( many(ways(disconnected(from(the(people,(practices,(and(projects(actively(pursuing( justice(today.(at(the(same(time,(concepts(with(rich(theoretical(histories(have(emerged( as(key(terms(and(battleground(ideas(for(discussions(of(social(justice(online—including,( for(example,(renewed(discussions(of(feminism,(social(and(economic(class,( intersectionality,(and(familiar(liberal(ideals(of(liberty(and(equality.(in(an(effort(to( overcome(the(distance(between(social(justice(as(a(target(of(scholarly(inquiry(and(the( real(concerns(of(social(justice(movements,(contributions(to(this(panel(critically(engage( issues(of(social(justice(both(within(and(across(different(applied(online(contexts(and( practices.(they(articulate(various(possibilities(and(limits(for(imagining(a(more(just(world( through(the(communicative(and(political(affordances(of(the(internet(and(other(advanced( information(and(communication(technologies((icts).( ( in(the(first(paper,(the(experiences(of(women(bloggers(are(marshaled(to(challenge( established(theories(of(the(public(sphere(that(might(otherwise(fail(to(account(for(the( voices(of(those(writing(about(the(politics(of(women,(family(and(maternity.(in(doing(so,( we(are(encouraged(to(imagine(more(broadly(inclusive(democratic(debates.(in(the( second(paper,(the(idea(of(the(“social(justice(warrior”—a(term(that(has(emerged(online( as(a(way(to(marginalize(individuals(deemed(excessive(in(their(pursuit(of(inclusion(and( represetnation—and(its(implications(for(social(justice(discourse(broadly(are(discussed.( in(this(case,(we(are(presented(with(an(example(of(hegemonic(resistance(to(expressions( and(imaginaries(of(justice(enabled(by(the(affordances(of(certain(online(platforms(for( political(and(progressive(expression.( ( in(the(remaining(papers,(established(political(frames(for(addressing(injustice(are( critiqued(and(countered.(in(the(third(paper,(the(appeal(by(both(activists(and(academics( to(discourses(familiar(to(the(liberal(democratic(state—including(rights(and(liberties—is( challenged(and(shown(to(limit(our(collective(imaginaries(of(social(justice(online.(in(the(( ( ( final(paper,(neoliberal(policies(of(privatization,(gentrification,(and(dataadriven(“smart( urbanism”(and(their(failure(to(improve(or(respond(to(local(injustices(faced(by( marginalized(citizens((specifically(black(and(brown(youth)(are(laid(bare.(the(author— drawing(on(the(successes(and(failures(of(four(different(“smart”(initiatives(in(the(new( york(city(area—responds(by(developing(an(alternative(framework(grounded(not(in( quantitative(analyses(but,(rather,(in(empathy(and(qualitative(study.( ( combined,(these(papers(explore(some(of(the(ways(in(which(theoretical(and(empirical( scholarly(investigations(can(open(up(new(paths(for(thinking(about(social(justice(with( regard(to(platforms,(communities,(or(practices—online(and(beyond.(they(attend(to(the( ways(in(which(broader(conversations(or(movements—for(example,(those(oriented( around(the(efforts(of(western(women(bloggers,(rightsabased(liberatory(language,(or( resistance(to(“smart”(urban(policies—challenge(or(force(us(to(reconsider(the(ways(in( which(we(conceive(of(and(discuss(values(relevant(to(social(justice,(like(inclusion,( fairness,(and(equality.( ( finally,(the(panel(members(all(share(an(awareness(of(the(fact(that(this(panel(is( articulated(in(a(way(familiar(to(those(embedded(in(an(academic(or(researchaintensive( context.(we(recognize(that(any(conversation(about(social(justice(issues(online(is( incomplete(without(the(inclusion(of(a(wider(range(of(voices,(from(activists(to(organizers( to(advocates.(to(that(end,(we(intend(this(panel(as(one(part(of(a(larger(series(of( proposed(sessions(engaging(social(justice(issues(and(the(internet,(some(of(which(go( beyond(traditional(academic(frameworks.(here,(however,(we(use(the(standard(“panel(of( papers”(frame(in(an(effort(to(show(how(even(conventional(formats(can(generate( productive(or(liberatory(discussions.(ultimately,(it(is(our(position(that(more( conversations—within(and(across(various(contexts—are(better(than(fewer(when( confronting(pressing(issues(of(discrimination,(bias,(fairness,(and(equality(today. & & the&haphazard&democratic&potential&of&social&media& & stine(eckert( wayne(state(university&& ( this(paper(examined(the(experiences(of(109(women(with(varying(backgrounds(who( blog(or(write(online(about(the(politics(of(women,(family(and(maternity(in(the(united( states,(the(united(kingdom,(germany(and(switzerland.(based(on(the(concepts(of( minimal(politics((macgilchrist(&(böhmig,(2012d(marchart,(2011),(it(argues(that(a(broader( definition(of(what(counts(as(political(needs(to(be(applied(to(the(voices(of(women(online( to(capture(their(political(expressions(in(western(democracies.(an(analysis(of(inadepth( interviews(found(that(84(percent(of(interviewees(considered(their(blogging(to(be(political.( a(statistically(significant(relationship(was(found(to(exist(between(women( bloggers/writers(online(who(identified(as(feminist(and(who(considered(their(blogging(to( be(political.(rather(than(categorizing(the(personal(styles(of(women(who(blog/write( online((in(and(outside(my(sample)(as(“just”(“personal(journaling,”(the(fluidity(of(topics( they(address(needs(to(be(recognized(as(a(feature(of(fluid(public(clusters(online,(which( are(tied(to(their(lives(offline.(( ( hence,(this(paper(argues(that(it(is(necessary(to(amend(the(critical(theories(of(public( spheres((felski,(1989d(fraser,(1990d(gitlin,(1998d(squires,(2002)(to(capture(the(political( expressions(and(experiences(of(women(who(use(social(media(to(write(about(their( concerns(publicly.(this(study(suggests(a(new(theory(of(fluid(public(clusters.(this(new( theory(expands(on(the(idea(of(a(multitude(of(publics(rather(than(the(oftenacriticized( singularity(of(the(original(habermasian(public(sphere.(it(emphasizes(that(publics(are( messy,(overlapping(and(changing(over(time.(it(also(highlights(that(offline(social( hierarchies(of(power(and(identities(migrate(online.(( ( further,(this(paper(concludes(that(national(contexts(shape(the(expressions(of(women( bloggers/writers(online(and(that(these(were(particularly(apparent(in(the(fluid(public( clusters(that(were(salient(in(each(country.(one(key(finding(was(that(switzerland(differed( significantly(from(the(united(states,(the(united(kingdom(and(germany.(in(the(latter( three(countries(women(–(across(a(wide(variety(of(backgrounds(–(women(have((or(at( least(are(not(denied)(ample(opportunities(to(make(their(voices(heard.(in(switzerland,( women’s(voices(online(have(been(constrained(in(number(and(range(of(perspectives(to( center(around(traditional(understandings(of(motherhood(while(feminist/progressive( views(remain(rare.( ( while(73(percent(of(interviewees(said(they(had(negative(experiences(due(to( blogging/writing(online,(all(109(interviewees(said(they(had(at(least(one(positive( experience(due(to(blogging/writing(online.(these(included(personal,(professional(and,(in( some(cases,(also(commercial(benefits.(interviewees(cherished(having(a(digital(room(of( their(own(to(write(what(they(want(in(a(space(for(which(they(set(the(rules.(interviewees( dealt(with(negative(experiences(mostly(on(a(personal(level,(as(police,(state(and( lawmakers(have(been(slow(in(recognizing(and(prosecuting(online(discrimination(and( abuse(leveled(against(women.(positive(experiences(are(nearly(guaranteed(but(negative( interactions(remain(and(are(more(likely(to(happen(to(women(who(identify(as(feminists( and/or(say(that(their(writing(is(political.(seventyatwo(percent(of(interviewees(remained( skeptical(about(the(democratic(potential(of(social(media.(most(interviewees(had( concerns(about(internet(access,(internet(literacy,(online(harassment(and(which(voices( get(heard(or(amplified.(yet,(interviewees(also(shared(examples(of(starting(or( contributing(to((national)(public(debates(over(issues(of(their(concern.(the(democratic( potential(of(social(remains(haphazard.(( ( finally,(this(paper(argues(that(women(–(who(have(been(underarepresented(and( misrepresented(in((news)(media(content(and(production(in(switzerland(((pfenniger,( 2011d(zaslawski,(2013),(in(germany((proquote,(2014),(in(the(united(kingdom( (cochrane,(2011)(and(in(the(united(states((everbach,(2014d(women’s(media(center,( 2014)(–(need(to(keep(blogging,(tweeting(and(writing(online.(by(doing(so,(women(will(tap( into(the(haphazard(democratic(potential(of(social(media.(this(will(make(western( democracies(more(democratic.(given(the(current(lack(of(legal(and(societal(support(to( properly(and(comprehensively(address(and(penalize(online(harassment((citron,(2014),( this(paper(also(offers(recommendations(to(women(on(managing(blogs/sites((safely)(to( encourage(women(to(start(and(keep(on(blogging(and(addressing(their(concerns(via( social(media.( ( references& ( citron,(d.(k.((2014).(hate&crimes&in&cyberspace.(cambridge,(ma:(harvard(university( press.( ( cochrane,(k.((2011).(why&is&british&public&life&dominated&by&men?(women(in( journalism.(retrieved(from(http://womeninjournalism.co.uk/whyaisabritishapublicalifea dominatedabyamen/( ( everbach,(t.((2014).(women’s((mis)(representation(in(news(media.(in(armstrong,(c.( (ed.),(media&disparity:&a&gender&battleground((pp.(3a14).(lanham,(md:(lexington(books.( ( felski,(r.((1989).(beyond&feminist&aesthetics:&feminist&literature&and&social&change.( cambridge,(ma:(harvard(university.( ( fraser,(n.((1990).(rethinking(the(public(sphere:(a(contribution(to(the(critique(of(actually( existing(democracy.(social&text,&25/26,(56a80.( ( gitlin,(t.((1998).(public(sphere(or(public(sphericules?(in:(liebes,(t.,(&(curran,(j.((eds.),( media,&ritual,&identity&(pp.(168a175).(london,(uk:(routledge.( ( macgilchrist,(f.(&(böhmig,(i.((2012).(blogs,(genes(and(immigration:(online(media(and( minimal(politic.(media&culture&&&society,&34(1),(83a100.( ( marchart,(o.((2011).(democracy(and(minimal(politics:(the(political(difference(and(its( consequences.(south&atlantic&quarterly,&110(4),(965a973.( ( pfenniger,(s.((2011).(frauen(sind(in(den(schweizer(medien(untervertreten([women(are( underrepresented(in(swiss(media].(medienheft.(retrieved(from( http://www.medienheft.ch/index.php?id=14&no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5btt_news%5d=6 68&chash=96f77a607462e4aa502b3aa602363423( ( zaslawski,(v.((2013).(“frauen(wollen(entdeckt(werden”([“women(want(to(be( discovered”].(neue&zürcher&zeitung.(retrieved(from( pro(quote.((2014).&homepage.(retrieved(from:(http://www.proaquote.de/( ( squires,(c.((2002).(rethinking(the(black(public(sphere:(an(alternative(vocabulary(for( multiple(public(spheres.(communication&theory,&12(4),(446a468.( ( women’s(media(center.((2014).(the&status&of&women&in&u.s.&media&2014.(retrieved( from(http://wmc.3cdn.net/ae1a5542872fc8810b_5tm62xgrd.pdf( & & & & & imagining&the&social&justice&warrior& & ruth(deller( sheffield(hallam(university,(uk( ( the(term(social(justice(warrior,(or(sjw,(is(one(that(has(become(common(in(internet( parlance(over(the(past(few(years.((this(pejorative(term(is(used(to(criticise(those(deemed( as('excessive'(in(seeking(digital(inclusion(and(representation(of(a(range(of(identities(and( interests,(usually(by(portraying(them(as(histrionic,(unreasonable(and(hypocritical.( ( in(this(paper,(i(look(the(construction(of(the(sjw(as(a(figure(of(derision(across(a(number( of(sites(and(memes(and(explore(how(the(imaginary(sjw(is(presented(as(someone( obsessed(with(shutting(down(free(speech,(and(how(the(term(is(paradoxically(used(to( silence(the(voices(of(minorities,(activists(or(those(advocating(social(change.( ( the(sjw(is(characterised(as(an(armchair(activist(who(moans(about(perceived( inequalities(without(‘doing’(anything,(seeks(attention(and(popularity,(and(is(usually( hypocritical.(the(meme(social(justice(sally(epitomises(this(stereotype(a(an(attractive( blonde(white(woman,(shaking(her(fist(and(pulling(a(face,(whilst(espousing(a(hypocritical( statement.((the(college(liberal(or(‘bad(argument(hippie’(meme((a(white(woman(with( dreadlocks(captioned(with(a(similarly(hypocritical(line)((see(shifman(2013:(113)(could(be( viewed(as(another(iteration(of(this(stereotype.(( ( the(term(is(often(applied(in(conjunction(with(other(pejoratives,(such(as(‘special( snowflake’,(‘hipster’,(‘armchair(activist’(or(‘keyboard(warrior’.((whilst(sjw(is(a(crossa platform(insult,(it(is(also(often(aligned(with(platformaspecific(terms(such(as(‘twitchfork( mob’,(‘twitter(lynch(mob’((twitter)(or(‘tumblrina,(‘tumblrista’((tumblr).((reddit,(whilst( hosting(a(number(of(sincere(social(justice(subreddits((e.g.(socialjustice,( socialjustice101),(also(has(its(share(of(those(mocking(sjws((e.g.(tumblrinaction,( kotakuinaction).((( ( the(problems(caused(by(the(imaginary(sjw(are(legion(–(they(have(been(accused(of( becoming(an(anonymous,(yet(legion,(force(against(freedom(of(speech,(enforcing(their( opinions(through(trolling,(doxing(and(demanding(trigger(warnings(be(applied(to(sensitive( content.((the(use(of(sjw(can(be(found(in(criticisms(of(everything(from(#gamergate(and( #everydaysexism(to(#blacklivesmatter.(((( ( criticisms(of(sjws(echo(the(criticisms(of(‘political(correctness’(as(a(policing(force( seeking(to(restrict(freedom(of(speech(and(dampen(fun.(as(encyclopedia&dramatica(puts( it:( ( a(bunch(of("activists"(who(sit(around(all(day(and(bitch(and(moan(about(how( everyone(and(everything(is(racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic/whorephobic/( fatphobic/(arachnophobic/bigoted/oppressive.”(ironically,(as(people(who(claim(to( want("progress"(in(society,(social(justice(warriors(are(currently(the(biggest( hindrance(to(the(arts,(and(are(overall(a(cancer(to(society(that(needs(to(be(put( down.(they(consider(everyone(who(disagrees(even(in(the(slightest(to(be(a("white( heteroacis(scum",(even(if(the(ones(disagreeing(with(them(are(ethnic(minorities,( gays,(bisexuals,(etc.((https://encyclopediadramatica.se/social_justice)( ( as(for(urban&dictionary’s(top(rated(definition:( a(social(justice(warrior,(or(sjw,(does(not(necessarily(strongly(believe(all(that( they(say,(or(even(care(about(the(groups(they(are(fighting(on(behalf(of…(they(are( very(sure(to(adopt(stances(that(are("correct"(in(their(social(circle.((the(sjw's( favorite(activity(of(all(is(to(dogpile.(their(favorite(websites(to(frequent(are( livejournal(and(tumblr.(they(do(not(have(relevant(favorite(realaworld(places,( because(sjws(are(primarily(civil(rights(activists(only(online.( (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sjw)( ( however,(condemnation(of(sjws(is(not(confined(to(the(spikier(edges(of(the(internet,(but( crosses(into(mainstream(media.((west(writes(about(them(‘losing’(in(their(attempts(to( police(the(internet(through(‘ideologicallyajustified(bullying’(in(the&spectator((2014)(and(in( the(normally(proasocial(justice(guardian,(filopivic(argues(that(campaigners(have(‘gone( too(far(with(trigger(warnings’((2014).((they(do(find(an(advocate(in(mtv’s(marusic((2015)( although(the(majority(of(comments(on(her(article(contain(antiasjw(sentiments:( ‘manipulative(crazy(liars(who(focus(only(on(their(crazy(agenda’d(‘harangued(by(shrill( harpies’d(‘no(young(person(is(remotely(interested(in(having(their(culture(overtaken(and( dumbed(down(by(weirdo(marxist(sjw's.(it's(like(you(want(to(police(our(very(thoughts’.( ( the(daily&dot’s(orsini(specifically(connects(the(term(to(tumblr(claiming(‘social(justice( is(a(movement(on(tumblr(without(any(selfaidentifying(movers—a(cause(that(no(activist( wants(to(be(associated(with’((2012).((tumblr’s(status(as(a(community(comprised(of( sjws(is(further(reiterated(by(reddits(like(tumblrinaction,(or(encyclopedia(dramatica’s( claim(that(‘pretty(much(99%(of(the(time,(social(justice(warriors(on(tumblr(never(get(the( fuck(off(their(ass(and(actually(do(something’.( ( despite(this(perception(of(tumblr(being(a(haven(for(the(imagined(sjw,(when(using( tumblr’s(search(facility(for(‘social(justice’,(the(vast(majority(of(results(are(critical(of( sjws(a(although(a(search(for(‘socialjustice’(returns(a(small(majority(of(results( highlighting(social(justice(issues(rather(than(criticising(sjws.((‘tumblrina’,(‘tumblrista’,( ‘sjw’,(‘socialjusticewarrior’(and(‘social(justice(warrior’(return(almost(universally(negative( content(as(do(more(explicitly(antagonistic(tags(such(as(‘antiasjw’(and(‘sjw(bullshit’(and( catchphrases(associated(with(the(imagined(sjw(such(as(‘die(cis(scum’,(‘diecisscum’,( ‘truscum’(and(‘checkyourprivilege’((although,(in(a(reversal(of(‘social(justice’(vs( ‘socialjustice’,(‘check(your(privilege’(returns(several(results(using(the(tag(seriously).(( indeed,(it(is(easier(for(the(casual(user(to(find(criticisms(of(this(soacalled(pervasive( presence(on(tumblr(than(it(is(to(find(posts(echoing(the(sentiments(of(the(sjw( stereotype.( ( recuber’s(analysis(of(the(tumblrahosted(we(are(the(99%(and(response(blog(we(are( the(53%(notes(that(both(campaigns(spoke(of(users’(personal(struggles(and(that(those( criticising(online(social(justice(and(activist(campaigns(have(more(in(common(with(the( ‘sjws’(they(are(seeking(to(silence(than(they(might(realise.((( ( whilst(the(conflating(of(a(range(of(social(justice(concerns(and(critiques(as(being(the( preserve(of(funaleeching(sjws(seeks(to(silence(many(dissenting(and(diverse(voices,( this(should(perhaps(come(as(no(surprise.(as(kate(miltner(notes:( ( conflicts(over(control(and(legitimacy(are(taking(place(in(communities(all(over(the( internet,(and(at(their(cores(are(entrenched(disparities(of(power(and(voice…( when(women(and(people(of(color(start(participating(on(platforms(that(are(the( province(of(white,(technically(literate(early(adopters,(they(are(often(met(with( hostility( ( although(human(beings(are(excessive(and(dramatic(and(laughing(at(our(excess(is(a( part(of(human(nature,(and(especially(internet(culture,(many(of(the(jokes(and(criticisms(of( the(sjws(are(not(from(the(minority(groups(themselves.((the(conflation(of(a(range(of( concerns(and(debates(into(one,(sweeping,(pejorative(term(becomes(an(attempt(to( silence(the(arguments(of(many(lgbtq+(people,(women,(people(of(color,(young(people( and(those(with(disabilities(and(challenging(their(legitimacy(as(agents(for(change.( ( references& ( filopivic,(jil((2014)(we’ve(gone(too(far(with(trigger(warnings.((the&guardian,(5(march.(( available(at:(http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/05/triggerawarningsa canabeacounterproductive( ( marusic,(kristina((2015)(sorry(trolls,(you’re(not(going(to(win(the(battle(against( social(justice(warriors.((mtv&news.((23(february.(available(at:( http://www.mtv.com/news/2087859/trollsasjwalaciagreen/( ( miltner,(kate((2014)(“there’s(no(place(for(lulz(on(lolcats”:(the(role(of(genre,(gender,( and(group(identity(in(the(interpretation(and(enjoyment(of(an(internet(meme.((first& monday(19((8).((available(at:(http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5391( ( recuber,(timothy((2015)(occupy(empathy?(online(politics(and(microanarrative(of( suffering.((new&media&&&society(17(1)(62–77( ( shifman,(limor((2013)(memes&in&digital&culture.((massachusetts:(mit(press.( ( west,(ed((2014)(why(social(justice(warriors(are(losing.((the&spectator,(12(november.((( available(at:(http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/edwest/2014/11/whyasocialajusticeawarriorsa arealosing/( & & & & social&justice&online:&looking&beyond&liberalism& & sky(croeser( curtin(university( & discussions(of(social(justice(online(cross(a(range(of(academic(literature,(including(work( on(internet(governance,(censorship(and(surveillance,(online(community,(online( harassment,(and(content(creation.(this(paper(does(not(aim(to(provide(a(comprehensive( overview(of(the(work(on(social(justice(online,(but(rather(to(point(to(a(common(trend(in( this(broad(and(crossadisciplinary(body(of(writing:(the(tendency(to(ground(discussions( either(explicitly(or(implicitly(within(a(western,(liberal,(political(framework.(this(is(most( visibly(manifested(in(the(frequent(appeal(to(discourses(around(free(speech(and/or( human(rights(when(addressing(moral(and(ethical(questions(about(the(internet.( karanasiou((2012:(249)(notes(that(broad(concepts(of(universal(human(rights((including( free(speech)(have(important(differences(from(the(specific(incarnation(of(free(speech( discourse(in(the(us.(however,(both(are(firmly(grounded(in(western(liberal(tradition,(with( its(attendant(assumptions(about(the(primacy(of(the(individual,(the(role(of(the(state,(and( the(relationship(between(the(state(and(capital.(while(these(discourses(are(powerful,( particularly(given(their(hegemonic(political(and(social(position,(there(are(important( reasons(to(look(beyond(their(boundaries(when(considering(social(justice(online.(( ( frequently,(we(see(debates(about(the(transfer(of(preaexisting(political(concepts(online( framed(by(considerations(of(the(degree(to(which(the(internet(shares(similarity(with,(or( overlaps(with,(the(offline(spaces(in(which(these(concepts(were(first(developed.(we(see( karanasiou((2012:(254),(for(example,(arguing(that(regulation(of(free(speech(online( needs(to(be(reconsidered(because(of(“the(widening(chasm(between(the(classic( theoretical(framework(for(free(speech(and(the(current(reality(enfolding(speech(online”d( casacuberta(and(senges((2008:(102)(calling(for(a(recognition(of(the(shared(similarities( between(the(internet(and(other(collective(goods(and(the(resultant(need(to(“prudently( respect(and(embrace(the(experience(the(traditional(negotiators(of(international( agreements(contribute(to(the(process”(by(creating(an(internet(bill(of(rightsd(and( researchers(calling(for(action(on(online(harassment(based(on(its(impacts(on((“broad( ideals(such(as(civil(discourse,(social(inclusivity,(and(democratic(engagement”(both( online(and(offline((jane(2014:(542).(what(these(discussions(have(in(common(is(the( assumption(that(the(liberal(democratic(model(has(been(successful,(and(need(only(be( modified(to(the(extent(that(online(and(offline(spaces(differ.(( ( this(assumption(leads(to(a(number(of(recurring(themes(in(the(kinds(of(solutions(which( are(proposed(within(academia(to(social(injustice(online.(perhaps(the(most(common( class(of(solutions(are(those(which(attempt(to(extend(the(model(of(the(liberal(democratic( state,(or(related(instruments(of(government,(to(the(internet.(frequently,(these(efforts(are( positioned(as(an(attempt(to(bring(governments’(regulation(of(the(internet(within(the( framework(of(human(rights(instruments(as(a(way(to(protect(users.(for(example,(there( have(been(multiple(calls(by(academics,(activists,(and(regular(internet(users(for(some( form(of(online(‘bill(of(rights’((o’byrne(2014d(casacuberta(&(senges,(2008d(reddit(users( 2012).(similarly,(the(liberal(democratic(model(of(citizenship(is(often(invoked(as(a(way(to( hold(national(governments(or(other(bodies(with(power(over(the(internet(accountabled(the( ‘netizen’(will,(many(hope,(“be(able(to(serve(as(a(critical(concept(in(the(politics(of( democratization”((poster(2006)(both(online(and(in(countries(which(do(not(currently(fit(the( liberal(democratic(model((see(also(mackinnon(2012).(the(internet(is(positioned(in(these( discussions(as(both(a(vehicle(for(the(expansion(of(a(particular(model(of(democracy,(and( as(a(site(requiring(further(incorporation(into(that(model.( ( the(tendency(to(adopt(a(liberal(democratic(model(is(also(visible(in(the(tendency(to( frame(discussions(of(online(harassment(with(reference(to(debates(around(free(speech.( authors(who(highlight(the(problems(associated(with(leaving(online(spaces(unmoderated( in(the(name(of(avoiding(censorship(tend(to(return(to(competing(interpretations(of( classical(free(speech(theory:(the(argument(that(free(speech(is(necessary(to(reveal(the( truth((williams(2009).(thus(wotanis(and(mcmillan(frame(concerns(about(the(effects(of( online(harassment(in(terms(of(the(possibility(that(it(is,(“silencing(voices(that(could(benefit( others”((2014:(915).(citron((2008),(similarly,(calls(for(action(against(online(harassment( by(appealing(to(deeper(underlying(civil(rights,(and(by(talking(about(the(ways(in(which( harassment(impinges(on(the(free(speech(of(women(and(minorities(online.( ( what(is(frequently(missing(is(a(critique(of(whether(the(liberal(democratic(model(has,(in( fact,(been(successful(enough(that(we(should(be(focusing(on(how(to(transfer(and(extend( it(online,(making(small(modifications(as(necessary.(we(tend(to(see(human(rights(and( democracy(as(frameworks(separate(from,(or(offering(alternatives(to,(the(neoliberal( systemd(however,(the(spread(of(these(ideas(has(been(tightly(interlinked(with(colonialism( and(neoliberalism’s(environmental,(social,(and(political(crises.&tsing((2011)(argues(that( while(concepts(like(human(rights(and(free(speech(may(have(power,(they(also(come( packaged(with(their(own(histories(and,(“these(packages(carry(the(inequalities(of(global( geoopolitics(even(as(they(promote(rhetorics(of(equality.(those(who(adopt(and(adapt( them(do(not(escape(the(colonial(heritage,(even(as(they(explore(its(possibilities”.(we( should(therefore(be(extending(our(collective(imaginary,(drawing(on(histories(of(political( thought(and(praxis(that(work(beyond(the(limitations(of(liberal(western(theory.(( ( references( ( casacuberta,(d.,(&(senges,(m.((2008).(do(we(need(new(rights(in(cyberspace?( discussing(the(case(of(how(to(define(onaline(privacy(in(an(internet(bill(of(rights.( enrahonar,(40/41,(99–111.( ( citron,(d.(k.((2008).(cyber&civil&rights((ssrn(scholarly(paper(no.(id(1271900).( rochester,(ny:(social(science(research(network.(retrieved(from( http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1271900( ( jane,(e.(a.((2014).(“your(a(ugly,(whorish,(slut.”(feminist&media&studies,(14(4),(531– 546.(doi:10.1080/14680777.2012.741073( ( karanasiou,(a.(p.((2012).(on(balancing(free(speech(in(a(digital(context.(masaryk& university&journal&of&law&and&technology,(6(2),(247–266.( ( mackinnon,(r.((2012).(the(netizen.(development,(55(2),(201–204.( doi:10.1057/dev.2012.5( ( o’byrne,(w.(i.((2014,(july(18).(toward(an(internet(bill(of(rights.(retrieved(from( http://wiobyrne.com/towardaanainternetabillaofarights/( ( poster,(m.((2006).(information&please:&culture&and&politics&in&the&age&of&digital& machines.(duke(university(press.( ( reddit(users.((2012).(free(internet(activism(–(authors(of(the(digital(bill(of(rights.( retrieved(june(26,(2012,(from(http://www.reddit.com/r/fia/( ( tsing,(a.(l.((2011).(friction:&an&ethnography&of&global&connection.(princeton(university( press.( ( williams,(s.(h.((2009).(feminist(theory(and(freedom(of(speech.(indiana&law&journal,( 84,(999.( ( ( ( ( empathy&and&efficiency&on&the&‘smart’&urban&frontier& ( gregory(t.(donovan( fordham(university( ( this(paper(situates(smart(urbanism(within(an(historical(geography(of(privatization(and( gentrification(so(as(to(critically(analyze(the(cultural(values(embedded(in(the(platforms( and(practices(of(dataadriven(efficiency.(building(from(this(analysis,(empathy(is(theorized( as(a(counter(ontology(for(drawing(together(a(more(just(and(even(mode(of(urban( development(with(and(through(digital(media.(‘smart(urbanism,’(or(‘smart(cities,’( represent(the(rapid(integration(of(digital(platforms(and(communication(infrastructures( into(all(modes(of(urban(living(and(development(as(well(as(the(reorienting(of(urban( economies(toward(creative(and(digital(industries((kitchin(2013).(while(smart(urbanism( broadly(represents(multiple(and(often(contradictory(movements((hollands(2008),(it(is( loosely(organized(by(an(ontology(of(efficiency(or(an(articulated(desire(to(harness(big( data(and(technological(innovation(for(the(purposes(of(orienting(the(urban(everyday( towards(maximum(economic(and(social(production.(( ( dataadriven(governance,(the(privatization(of(communication(infrastructures,(and(the( privileging(of(new(media(districts(are(regularly(framed(as(‘smart’(and(‘efficient’(ways(for( cities(to(compete(with(each(other(for(global(capital.(within(these(databases,( infrastructures,(and(planning(policies,(who(and(where(are(considered(waste(lay(at(the( center(of(concerns(over(increased(surveillance((wood(&(ball(2013),(digital( discrimination((gangadharan(and(woolley(2014),(softwareasorting((graham(2005),(and( uneven(development(in(urban(environments((indergaard(2009).(further,(the(imaginary( of(a(‘new(frontier’(embraced(by(corporations(such(as(ibm,(cisco,(and(siemens,(serves( to(elide(the(creative(destruction(and(social(injustice(often(entailed(in(the(classification(of( certain(people(and(places(as(waste,(risk,(or(simply(other.(( ( cases(are(drawn(from(ongoing(ethnographic(work(in(new(york(city(to(compare(and( contrast(the(linknyc(wifi(initiative(with(the(communityabased(red(hook(wifi,(as(well( as(the(nypd’s(dataadriven(justifications(for(stop(and(frisk(with(the(participatory(media( work(of(researchers(for(fair(policing((rfp).(whereas(a(smart(urban(ontology(calls(for( the(quantification,(modularization,(and(layering(of(urban(people(and(place,(a(hybrid( ontology(oriented(toward(empathy(calls(for(a(more(qualitative,(situated,(and(shared(form( of(urban(development.(collectively,(red(hook(wifi(and(rfp(represent(a(challenge(to( contemporary(modes(of(urban(privatization(and(gentrification(within(nyc(by(socially(and( materially(reducing(the(experiential(distance(between(the(self(and(the(other(and(thus( fostering(what(fine((2006)(has(called(theoretical(and(provocative(generalizability.( ( efficient&urbanism&as&the&new&frontier& ( the(informationalization(of(everyday(life(in(most(u.s.(cities(has(become(so(pronounced( that(it(is(now(difficult(to(disentangle(the(production(of(urban(media(from(that(of(place.( the(reciprocal(production(of(geography(and(technology(entailed(in(globalization(has(led( to(a(reatheorization(of(the(urban(form(over(the(past(two(decades.(hybrid(constructions(of( the(“informational(city”((castells(1992),(“cybercity”((boyer(1992),(and(more(recently(the( “realatime(city”((hollands(2008,(kitchin(2014)(suggest(a(growing(interest(and(inquiry( into(the(political(ecology(of(an(urbanism(often(phased(as(‘newer’(and(‘smarter.’( this(paper’s(primary(concern(with(smart(urbanism,(particularly(regarding(marginalized( and(poor(communities,(is(that(dataadriven(development(comes(at(the(expense(of( empathy(and(often(obscures(injustice(as(statistically(necessary(or(irrelevant.( additionally,(as(nycs(economy(becomes(oriented(toward(highatech(and(creative( industries,(public(investments(are(made(to(recruit(a(highly(educated(workforce.(existing( processes(of(urban(gentrification(are(thus(ramped(up(to(make(room(for(an(incoming( young,(largely(white,(and(supposedly(more(creative(class(of(workers((indergaard(2009).( marginalized(and(poor(communities(are(meanwhile(segregated(and(largely(sorted(out(of( this(highatech(and(creative(urban(economy.( the(frontier(mythology(surrounding(the(smart(city—of(data(seamlessly(generated(thru( technosocial(interactions,(circulated(in(immaterial(cloudalike(form,(and(objectively( analyzed(to(inform(actions(both(slight(and(profound—obscures(the(lived(realities(of( contemporary(modes(of(production(and(reproduction.(it(conjures(an(imaginary(of(reala time(knowledge,(flexible(production,(reduced(carbon(emissions,(and(privately(contracted( gig(for(everyone.(this(imaginary(may(hold(when(evaluated(within(the(narrow(context(of( affluent(urban(populations(and(their(neighborhoods,(but(it(dances(around(a(persistent( historical(geography(of(uneven(socioeconomic(development.(despite(a(boom(in(new( york(city’s(‘silicon(alley’(industries(and(recordabreaking(real(estate(acquisitions,(46%(of( new(yorkers(currently(make(less(than(150%(of(the(poverty(threshold.( there(is,(however,(nothing(particularly(new(about(this(mythology,(just(as(there(was(little( new(about(the(“revanchist”(underpinnings(of(the(gentrification(of(manhattan’s(lower( east(side((smith(1996).(this(wave(of(1980sa90s(gentrification(was(framed(as(a(middle( class(colonization(of(a(modern(day(wild(west—an(imagined(reestablishment(of(white( middle(and(upper(class(values(into(the(social(material(organization(of(urban(life.(as(this( paper(discusses,(many(of(these(popular(and(political(framings(of(the(lower(east(side’s( gentrification(can(be(found(in(the(more(lofty(corporate(rhetoric(surrounding(the( possibilities(of(smart(urban(policies(and(platforms.( new&media’s&uneven&geography( new(york(city’s(official(map(of(digital(industry(reveals(that(little(is(located(in(lowera income(areas(and(almost(none(in(the(bronx(or(east(new(york((http://digital.nyc/map).( this(unevenness(is(further(accentuated(if(the(interactive(map(is(modified(to(only(show( coaworking(and(incubator(spaces.(the(underrepresented(areas,(where(the(majority(of( new(yorkers(live,(receive(little(attention(in(the(city’s(cultivation(of(digital(industry(aside( from(enhanced(policing(and(surveillance.(a(map(created(by(researchers(for(fair( policing((rfp)(of(stop(and(frisk(activity,(a(controversial(policing(tactic(of(the(nypd,( presents(a(stark(contrast(to(the(digital.nyc(map,(indicating(that(not(only(were(90%(of( those(stopped(between(2002(and(2010(of(color(but(those(stops(were(highly( concentrated(in(a(few(geographical(regions((https://vimeo.com/117420571).(( the(city’s(rationalization(for(why(this(policing(policy(was(not(a(matter(of(unconstitutional(( racial(profiling,(was(predicated(on(the(notion(that(police(officers(were(simply(stopping( and(frisking(those(statistically(most(likely(to(be(carrying(an(illegal(weapon.(data,(and(not( the(passions(of(cultural(politics,(supposedly(guided(the(practice(despite(88%(of(those( stopped((3.8m(people)(being(found(of(no(wrong(doing.(to(counter(the(ways(black(and( brown,(and(mostly(male,(youth(have(been(represented(within(public(databases,(as(well( as(the(local(and(national(urban(imaginary,(the(rfp(have(been(developing(videos(for( social(media(that(look(critically(at(the(statistics(behind(stop(and(frisk(and(also(amplify( the(narratives(of(young(people(who’ve(been(frisked.(examples(from(their(public(media( work(will(be(highlighted(and(discussed(as(a(way(of(organizing(meaningful( understandings(of(injustice(in(the(smart(city(through(the(sharing(of(lived(experience.(& the(more(material(aspects(of(smart(urbanism’s(uneven(geography(will(also(be(explored( by(comparing(and(contrasting(two(different(wifi(initiatives(in(nyc.(the(first(example,( linknyc,(is(a(cityawide(initiative(to(convert(existing(payphones(into(high(bandwidth(wifi( kiosks.(following(the(publicaprivate(partnership(model(that(governs(most(nyc(parks(in(( affluent(areas,(this(‘public(wifi’(is(being(developed(as(a(profitadriven(infrastructure( focused(on(generating(ad(revenue.(in(contrast,(red(hook(wifi(is(a(communityabased( initiative(aimed(at(enhancing(digital(access(within(the(red(hook(houses(and(their( surrounding(community(in(brooklyn.(in(this(example,(the(community(itself(builds(and( maintains(a(free(mesh(network(that(provides(people(in(the(area(with(access(to(both(a( local(intranet(and(the(broader(internet.(while(linknyc(is(a(consortium(of(corporations( represented(within(the(digital.nyc(map(that(aims(to(generate(more(revenue(for(the(city( by(upgrading(an(existing(communication(infrastructure,(red(hook(wifi(builds(a(local( infrastructure(with(and(within(a(lowaincome(neighborhood(unlikely(to(generate(significant( advertising(revenue(and(thus(unlikely(to(attract(many((if(any)(linknyc(kiosks.( empathy&as&ontological&stance( quantified measurements of wifi access in nyc, or of innocent youth frisked by armed officers in their own neighborhoods, are unlikely to produce statistical generalizability and thus warrant broad public concern. these experiences, once quantified and entered into urban dashboards, are visualized at the margins of society. the consequences of efficiency fall largely on the others and happen in the elsewheres of the smart city. although often commanding public sympathy, quantified experiences alone fall short of fostering public empathy. numbers frame stop and frisk and digital divides as aberrations of injustice, something experienced by a minority of new yorker’s and that should be addressed with myopic focus (if at all). this side-steps a discussion of how such phenomena are intertwined outcomes of structural oppression and inequity—a structure that broadly effects and ironically connects the public in banal, profound, and yet to be imagined ways. as fine explains (2006), bearing witness to lived injustice through critical and participatory inquiry offers more than direct generalizable extensions of one’s findings. fine offers us two conceptualizations of generalizability that require more than statistical analysis: theoretical and provocative. a theoretical generalizability represents the “extent to which theoretical notions or dynamics move from one context to another” whereas a provocative generalizability demonstrates a shared concern in understanding and addressing injustice across context. both the rfp and red hook wifi work with/in digital media and communication infrastructures to offer theoretical and provocative generalizations across context, in ways typically overlooked by the gaze of big data and left unimagined. each project helps reduce the experiential distance between the self and the other in order to draw together a more just imaginary of the smart city. such a focus on media for empathy, rather than media for efficiency, counters ahistorical frontier imaginaries as much as it helps urban communities address who and where is being left out of smart urbanism.( ( references( ( boyer,(c.((1992).(the(imaginary(real(world(of(cybercities.(in(assemblage,(18:115–127.( mit(press.( ( castells,(m.((1992).(the(informational(city:(economic(restructuring(and(urban( development.(wileyablackwell.( ( fine,(m.((2006).(bearing(witness:(methods(for(researching(oppression(and(resistanceaa a(textbook(for(critical(research.(social&justice&research(19((1):(83a108.( ( gangadharan(and(woolley((2014).( ( graham,(s.d.n.((2005).( ( hollands,(r.((2008).(will(the(real(smart(city(please(stand(up?(intelligent,(progressive(or( entrepreneurial?”(city(12((3):(303–320( ( indergaard,(m.((2009).(what(to(make(of(new(york's(new(economy?(the(politics(of(the( creative(field.(urban&studies(46:(1063a1093.( ( kitchin,(r.((2014).(the(realatime(city?(big(data(and(smart(urbanism.( ( smith,(n.((1996).(the(new(urban(frontier:(gentrification(and(the(revanchist(city.( geojournal.( ( wood,(d.m.(and(ball,(k.((2013).(brandscapes(of(control?(surveillance,(marketing(and( the(coaconstruction(of(subjectivity(and(space(in(neoaliberal(capitalism.”(marketing& theory(13((1):(47–67.( microsoft word 816-670-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 virtually managing (in)visibility: girls, social media, and rural u.s. family relationships abstract drawing upon data from a year-long ethnographic study involving 15 rural female u.s. teens, this paper uses critical theory and queer theory to explore how facebook and twitter use influences and is influenced by young women’s experiences within family. findings suggest interlocutors use social media to “get around” ideological and physical constraints to involvement they face as minors and females in families. living in social media, interlocutors reported they strategically perform social identities to enhance the visibility of traits encouraging parental trust and connection. at the same time, they used these platforms together to perform invisibility, allowing them to quietly subvert certain parental controls that police and restrict their involvements offline. keywords: social media; youth; gender; family the past decade has seen in a steady growth in social media use throughout the united states. the pew research center’s internet & american life project reports that the percentage of all adults in the u.s. using social media climbed from 16 to 69% between august 2006 and august of 2012. additionally, pew reports that, in 2011, 95% of all u.s. teens under the age of 18 accessed the internet, up from 93% in 2006, and from 73% in 2000. while 55% of teen internet users took part in social media in 2006, in 2011, 80% reported being social media users. in fact, in 2011, social media use represented the activity teens stated they were most likely to participate in while online. because of this increase in use, social media has gained an increased presence in family life. mobile access has allowed social media to further challenge some boundaries separating family members’ on and offline involvements, as well as to change the nature of some of the involvements they have within family. with a wider world of peers, work, and involvements reached through a simple touch of a button on the phone in one’s pocket, social media easily “crashes” family events, connecting family members to other aspects of their life during traditional family-only time. horst, herr-stephenson and robinson (2010) note that while people as a whole are spending greater time online, young people in the u.s. grow up understanding digital media as central to their life. for these youth, horst et al. (2010) explain that “(t)he social desire to share space and experiences with friends is supported now selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 by a network and digital media ecology that enables . . . fluid shifts in attention and copresence between online and offline contexts” (50). as such, social media use presents opportunities and challenges to parent-child connectedness, as well as to family relations and child development, as a whole. while allowing for greater monitoring and new types of interaction between family members, young people’s social media use (like youth usage of many new technologies throughout history) is a common source of stress, tension, and misunderstanding for many families. parents and their children – especially daughters – commonly disagree on the importance and safety of social media. these disagreements have implications for family relationships, and for youth welfare. longitudinal psychological research finds that trusting, caring relationships with adults are critical to young people’s successful development, even through extremely difficult circumstances, as concluded by scholars such as werner (2010). additionally, attachment research makes clear that youth family relationships are informed by children’s perceptions of parental support (see ainsworth, blehar, waters, & wall, 1978; bowlby, 1973, 1988). the connection and trust young people hold with parents have developmental implications for their other relationship, as well. extending attachment research into the later years, catalano et al. (2002) argue that parent-child relationships impact youths’ social competence, trust, and interactions with their peers. “how a child establishes early bonds to caregivers,” they write, “will directly affect the manner in which the child later bonds to peers, school, the community, and culture” (102). as such, parent-child tensions and synergies ignited by social media have broad implications for adolescent well-being. using a critical theory (lesko, 2001) and queer theory (butler, 1990; gray, 2009) approach, this paper will discuss findings of a twelve-month ethnographic study examining rural u.s. young women's use of social media as it relates to the identities they hold within family. drawing upon data from formal and informal interviews, offline and online observations, and homepage review of 15 rural teenaged females between the ages of 14 and 18, this research suggests that young females strategically use employ tactics aimed at visibility and invisibility in social media to meet local needs. they use social media to perform specific acts of trustworthiness, responsibility, and “goodness” to audiences they selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 know consist of parents and other adults in an effort to meet some of the expectations they have as a child in their family. at the same time, they also use social media to render invisible other less parentfriendly involvements. drawing parallels to teens’ offline living, this research argues that young people live strategically online in ways that to “get around” some of the cultural, physical, and ideological constraints they experience as a daughter in modern-day us society. furthermore, data from this study finds that these youth recognize social media as a source of extreme parental concern regarding their safety and well-being in the present and in the future, and as an area of deep parental mistrust. youth reported agreeing with their parents about many of the concerns they raised, and were observed taking specific steps in to attempt to protect their images and information online. however, they attributed a number of these worries to parents “freaking out,” or projecting their need to shelter and protect daughters onto their new spaces of involvement. the validity of parental concerns for the safety of these youth in social media will be discussed in light of historical panic over females occupying social spaces (fine, 1988; odem, 1995), as well as in reference to the areas of online identity and data mining. overall, this paper will discuss how young women’s rules for engagement online both align with and diverge from those held for them offline as members of families, and examine how young rural teenage women use online spaces to negotiate and mediate offline experiences they have as daughters in their families. while young people live in families, they increasingly also live in social media. this paper explores how social media use both influences and is influenced by young rural u.s. females’ social position within their family, and within society. it will examine the implications of daughters being able to employ social media to attempt to affirm, test, and challenge boundaries set by parents on their actions and involvements, as well as the need they feel to “go around” parental blocks to involvement in on and offline lives. in doing so, it will ask how social media use influences the interactions, support, connectedness, and trust young women are able to experience within family, and, as a result, in wider society. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 acknowledgments this research was supported by the illinois program for research in the humanities and the myra sadker foundation. references ainsworth, m. d., blehar, m. c. waters, e. & wall, s. (1978). patterns of attachment: a psychological study of the strange solution. new york: psychology press. bowlby j (1973). separation: anxiety & anger. attachment and loss (vol. 2); (international psycho-analytical library no.95). london: hogarth press. bowlby j (1988). a secure base: parent-child attachment and healthy human development. tavistock professional book. london: routledge. catalano, r. f., berglund, m. l., ryan, j. a. m., lonczak, h. s., hawkins, j. d. (2002). positive youth development in the united states: research findings on evaluations of positive youth development programs. prevention & treatment 5(1). fine, m. (1988). sexuality, schooling, and adolescent females: the missing discourse of desire. harvard education review, 58 (1). 29-54. horst, h. herr-stephenson, b. and robinson, l. (2010) media ecologies. in ito, m., baumer, s., bittanti, m., boyd, d., cody, r., herr-stephenson, b., horst, h. a., lange, p. g., mahendran, d., martinez, k. z., pascoe, c. j., perkel, d., robinson, l., sims, c. & tripp, l.. (eds), hanging out, messing around, and geeking out: kids living and learning with new media, pp. 29-78. cambridge, ma: mit press. kerr, m. e. & bowen, m. (1988). family evaluation: an approach based on bowen theory. new york: w. w. norton & co. levine, j. (2002) harmful to minors: the perils of protecting children from sex. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. odem, m. (1995). delinquent daughters: protecting and policing adolescent female sexuality in the united states, 1885-1920. durham, nc: university of north carolina press. pew research center’s internet & american life project surveys, 2005-2012. retrieved 1/12/13 from: http://pewinternet.org/commentary/2012/march/pew-internet-social-networking-full-detail.aspx pew research center’s internet & american life project. trend data. retrieved 1/12/13 from: http://pewinternet.org/trend-data-%28teens%29/online-activites-total.aspx selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 halford, s., weal, m., tinati, r., carr, l., pope, c. (2016, october 5-8). digital data infrastructures: interrogating the social media data pipeline. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. digital data infrastructures: interrogating the social media data pipeline susan halford web science institute, university of southampton, uk. mark weal web science institute, university of southampton, uk. ramine tinati web science institute, university of southampton, uk. les carr web science institute, university of southampton, uk. catherine pope web science institute, university of southampton,uk. social media are now firmly embedded across economies, cultures and politics and in the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of people, most famously a billion users signing on to facebook in a single day. particularly extraordinary is not just the new forms of social practice associated with social media – and their consequences – but that the very nature of these activities as digital and online constitutes them as a remarkable new source of social data. these data are generating widespread interest from business and government but the response from social scientists is mixed. on one hand, social media offers new insights to the things that people say and do ‘in the wild’, rather than the things they say they do in interviews and surveys, in real time, and at unprecedented a scale and pace (savage and burrows 2007, burnap et al 2013, tinati et al 2014; weller et al 2013). on the other hand, some see these data as deeply problematic, flawed by demographic biases and unknown provenance. the wellestablished and well-regarded principles of social scientific research are grounded in clearly understood populations, carefully controlled sampling and well-known methods for collecting data, with a high value placed on transparency. social media data offer none of this. accordingly, it is suggested, this may lead not only to poor research and unsustainable claims but may ultimately risk the hard-won reputation of social science (golthorpe 2016; hardaker 2016). this paper seeks a middle path in the space between ‘giving in and getting out’ (gehl 2015; 148): between accepting social media data at face value and abandoning the opportunities that they might offer. the key, we suggest, is methodological. working with conventional sources of data, professional standards demand that we make the details of our research design, methods of data collection and data management explicit. this is rarely the case in publications that use social media data, which is typically presented with remarkably little methodological consideration of the data used. certainly this is challenging. the most popular social media platforms are privately owned and make their data available, if at all, on their own terms and with differing levels of detail. however, just because social media are a novel, and opaque, source of secondary data is no less reason to consider these issues and their implications. to the contrary, there is all the more reason, if we are to allow social media data to be a credible and sustainable source for research. we situate our investigation theoretically by drawing on the rich tradition of science and technology studies, long used to conceptualise data infrastructures (bowker and starr 1999) and which informs recent theorisations of the broader ‘dispositifs’ (ruppert et al 2012) or ‘assemblages’ (kitchin and lauriault 2013) that produce new forms of digital data. in short, whilst social media data have emerged from beyond the conventional practices of social science research, they are despite the rhetoric sometimes deployed – anything but ‘naturally occurring’. to the contrary, our theoretical approach insists that data are constructed through the actions of heterogeneous actors, from data bases, interfaces and browsers to consumers, markets and legal regulations. on this wider landscape our specific focus in this paper is on the processes through which social media data are produced and made available to researchers. to investigate this we explore the ‘pipeline’ of social data production and circulation: from the user who creates the content, posting to a social media platform, to the client software on the phone, laptop, etc. that represents the data (sometimes in different ways, if there are multiple clients available for a given platform), the to the application programming interface(s) (apis), which enforces rules to determine what is passed through to the company’s server software, and how, and the server software that organizes content into data bases that store data in particular formats and structures. this is a thoroughly sociotechnical process, shaped by technical interfaces and protocols, data storage and software applications. and by popular culture, business models, organizational resources and so on. in turn, all this shapes if and how these data are circulated for re-use, back down the pipeline. this ‘output’ is not a simple reversal of the ‘input’ and is shaped by the methods that researchers use to access data, the economics and practicalities for the companies in sharing data, with whom and on what basis, both shaped by legal and sometimes even ethical considerations. our paper explores how the data pipeline shapes three key methodological issues for researchers using social media data: the population, the sample and the method of data production. taken together, this problematization of social media data may appear only to underscore the concerns expressed by those who have doubted their promise for robust social scientific research. this is not our intention. to the contrary, our tactic is to suggest that those of us using social media data should seek to address these challenges in our research. certainly, we must accept that social media data are not like earlier generations of data, and consequently that the exact same methodological frameworks will not be appropriate. however, we should seek to position this new form of data methodologically, and develop new frameworks that will ensure its future value for researchers. we conclude by suggesting some methodological principles for the use of social media data that might strengthen – and thereby protect – this new source of data for sociological research. our conviction is that this will produce better academic research and will also develop our critical capacity to contribute to, and where necessary critique, the claims that are increasingly made from social media data by governments, the media and other commercial organizations. bowker, g., and starr, s.l-, (1999) sorting things out: classification and its’ consequences cambridge, ma., mit press. burnap, p., avis, n. and rana, o. (2013) ‘making sense of self-reported socially significant data using computational methods’ international journal of social research methodology 16(3), pp. 215-230. gehl, r. (2015) ‘critical reverse engineering’ in langlois, g., redden, j., and elmer, g. (eds) compromised data: from social media to big data’ london, bloomsbury. goldthorpe, j. (2016) sociology as a population science, cambridge, cambridge up hardaker, c. (2016) ‘misogyny, machines, and the media, or: how science should not be reported’ http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/drclaireh/2016/05/27/misogyny-machines-and-themedia-or-how-science-should-not-be-reported/ accessed 2 august 2016 kitchin, r. and lauriault, t. (2013) towards critical data studies: charting and unpacking data assemblages and their work’ the programmable city working paper 2, university of ireland maynooth. ruppert, e., law, j., and savage, m. (2012) ‘reassembling social science methods: the challenge of digital devices’ theory, culture and society 30(4) pp.22-46. savage, m., and burrows, r. (2007) ‘the coming crisis of empirical sociology’ sociology, 41(5) pp.885-899. weller, k., bruns, a., burgess, j., mahrt, m., & puschmann, c. (eds.) (2014) twitter and society new york, peter lang. tinati, r., halford, s., carr, l., & pope, c. (2014) ‘big data: methodological challenges and approaches for sociological analysis’ sociology 48 (4) pp. 663-681. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/47026 http://orca.cf.ac.uk/47026 http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/drclaireh/2016/05/27/misogyny-machines-and-the-media-or-how-science-should-not-be-reported/ http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/drclaireh/2016/05/27/misogyny-machines-and-the-media-or-how-science-should-not-be-reported/ microsoft word 838-665-1-pb.docx selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 shaking off the ‘other’: appropriation of marginalized cultures and the ‘harlem shake’ abstract the recent harlem shake viral meme points to an intersection between the potential participatory promise of memetic content online and hegemonic appropriation of marginalized culture by the dominant group. the meme, while making use of the name ‘harlem shake’ does not draw upon the dance which originated in harlem in the 1980s which was popularized in the 1990s. this paper traces by means of textual analysis the origins of the dance, the release of the 2012 song, the 2013 memes and the reaction video created using interview from actual harlem residents. drawing upon the idea of misappropriation and ‘eating the other’, this internet phenomenon allows us to address the ways in which participatory culture can serve to further marginalize rather than liberate. this case follows similar patterns within the historical legacy of commodification of black culture and causes us to complicate our sometimes overly optimistic notions of participatory culture online. keywords memes; marginalization; cultural appropriation; participatory culture; others introduction getting ‘a bit of the other’, the british expression made widely known in critical culture studies analyses by scholar bell hooks originally referred to upper middle class british men’s predilection for sleeping with ‘exotic’ women of color in an attempt to elevate one’s status and engage is behavior considered rebellious in their own cultural circles. hooks traced how this phenomenon is not localized in british culture, nor is it relegated to sexual inclinations. eating the other describes the tendency of the dominant group to make use of pieces of marginalized culture for their own gain to the detriment of the marginal culture. this happens frequently in media texts when music and visual imagery is appropriated into consumerist culture and commodified to fit the needs of the dominant group. however, in a modern media context which is increasing reliant upon user generated content, appropriation of content becomes even more complex. while commodification of otherness is still present, the ability of the marginalized community to push back and/or participate is a possibility. such is the case with the viral video ‘harlem shake’. beginning as a techno song produced by baauer in 2012, the song and eccentric dance has become an internet meme spreading globally as crowds recreate their own ‘harlem shake’ for online distribution on social networking sites. recreations of the dance are in no way linked to the actual ‘harlem shake’, a dance originating in harlem in 1981 that became popular among african americans in the 1990s and early 2000s. literature review participatory culture is defined as the way in which fans and viewers are able to participate and collaborate in mass culture, sharing their own perspective and experience of the content (jenkins, 2003; 2007). conceptualized as a means to react to the corporate controlled mass media, this mechanism of contemporary media culture can enable average citizens to participate in the archiving, annotation, appropriation, transformation, and recirculation of media content. participatory culture is studied as a radical alternative to dominant media content which provides space for minority groups to tell own stories/question hegemonic representations of their culture and a push back against an increasingly convergent landscape where ownership and production are in the hands of the elite few (jenkins, 2003). memes are units of cultural transmission which make use of copying and/or imitation (dawkins, 1976). as shiffman (2011) explains, memes should not be considered as units in isolation, rather, they are “the building blocks of complex culture, intertwining and interacting with one another” (p. 189). while memes have always existed within oral culture in the form of jokes, urban legends and selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 fables, the internet and social networking sites have made the distribution of memes much easier and more readily accessible to a wider number of people over a shorter period of time. memetic videos ‘lure extensive user engagement’ and include either imitation or re-mixing. we see imitation and remixing in the spread of memes like “shit white girls say” and or “this is what my [blank] thinks i do”. memetic videos differ from viral videos in that viral videos are spread without much alteration by the user. the term viral relates more to the way in which he video is spread and the size of the audience (burgess, 2008; jenkins et al., 2009a; knobel and lankshear, 2007). participating in the release of memetic videos sheds light on users as not only having the ability to interpret media but to be creative in its distribution. successful internet memes tend to have some salient qualities including: humor, simplicity, repetitiveness, whimsical content and flawed masculinity (shiffman, 2011). all of these traits are present in the recently successful harlem shake internet meme. beyond simply fitting into the category of internet memetic video, the harlem shake meme presents a unique act of cultural appropriation at the hands of a group unfamiliar with the historical and cultural significance of the dance or community from whence the memetic content gets its name. because of this, this cultural artifact, while containing elements of participatory culture, is not liberating or rebellious against the dominant group, rather is an act that can serve to further marginalize a community of people. method and analysis this paper examines the evolution of the ‘harlem shake’ from the original dance made popular in the 1990s, original music video produced by baauer in 2012, user generated memes of harlem shake videos in 2013 and the ‘harlem residents respond to harlem shake’ interviews produced by schleppfilms via means of textual analysis. textual analysis allows for a close examination of authorship, authenticity and meaning construction. the analysis emphasizes the way in which meaning is highly subjective for the audience and interpretation of content carries different meanings for different subcultures. the analysis therefore yields a discussion of both the intention of users and the potential impact the video has in a larger examination of cultural appropriation using hooks’ idea of eating the other. the harlem shake meme serves as violation of the ‘other’ much in the sense that hooks describes regarding british men’s sexual fantasies about women of color. she explains (1992), “unlike racist white men who historically violated the bodies of black women/women of color... they see themselves as non-racists who choose to transgress racial boundaries... not to dominate the ‘other’, but rather so they can be acted upon, so that they can be changed entirely” (p. 368). the appropriation of the dance and the proliferation of the meme is not a conscious act of dominance rather a subtle act of privilege which allows for the dominant group to re-imagine the ‘other’ and participate in acts of appropriation of culture for the purpose of changing themselves. in this case the change that the dominant group experiences through participating in the ‘shake’ is three dimensional. imitation and distribution of the harlem shake online provides the user with attention (lanham, 2006), affinity (lange, 2009) and serves as means of cultural production. in this case the culture being produced/ re-produced again leaves out the marginalized ‘other’, supplanting their culture for the whimsical imaginings of the dominant group. discussion this appropriation of the legacy of dance and art in harlem parallels the appropriation of african american culture more widely in the u.s. the reaction video featuring harlem residents captures the frustration of this community with a privileged mentality that allows the dominant group to ignore, use and misuse cultural artifacts for their own purpose. however, the act of ‘eating the other’ also forms, within the marginalized community, a “resurgence of essentialist culture nationalism” (hooks, 1993). this forces the marginal community to see themselves within the lens of the primitive, thus keeping intact the imperialist nostalgia that makes the meme possible in the first place. while new media is not responsible for this kind of cultural appropriation, it both widens the scope of participants and perhaps creates the potential for the reaction from the marginalized community to be more widely received as well. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 references burgess j. (2008). all your chocolate rain are belong to us? viral video, youtube and the dynamics of participatory culture. in: lovink g and niederer s (eds) video vortex reader: responses to youtube. amsterdam, netherlands: institute of network cultures, 101–109. dawkins r. (1976). the selfish gene. oxford: oxford university press. hooks, b. (1992). eating the other: desire and resistance. in bell hooks black looks: race and representation. boston: south end press, 1992. 21-39. jenkins, h. (2003) quentin tarantino’s star wars?: digital cinema, media convergence, and participatory culture, retrieved from http://web.mit.edu/cms/people/henry3/starwars.html jenkins h, clinton k, purushotma r, robinson aj and weigel m (2007) confronting the challenges of participatory culture: media education for the 21st century. chicago, il: the macarthur foundation. jenkins h, li x, krauskopf ad and grean jb (2009a) if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead (part one): media viruses and memes. available at: http://henryjenkins.org/2009/02/if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p.html/ knobel, m. and lankshear, c. (2007). online memes, affinities, and cultural production. in: knobel m and lankshear c (eds) a new literacies sampler. new york: peter lang, 199–227. lange, p.g. (2009). videos of affinity on youtube. in: snickars p and vonderau p (eds) the youtube reader. stockholm: wallflower press, 228–247. lanham, r.a. (2006). the economics of attention: style and substance in the age of information. chicago, il: the university of chicago press. shiffman, l. (2011). an anatomy of a youtube meme. new media & society, 14(2), 187–203. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): lin, c. z., jacobson, j., & mcewen, r. (2019, october 2–5). personal information archiving: behavioural responses to the perception of risk. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. personal information archiving: behavioural responses to the perception of risk chang z. lin university of toronto jenna jacobson ryerson university rhonda mcewen university of toronto introduction risk is an inherent aspect of human life and self-preservation is an instinct that mitigates real and imagined harms in response to tangible or perceived risks. personal information archiving relates to perceptions of risk as 88% of internet users report being concerned about the privacy of their personal information (usc annenberg school, 2004). problematically, individuals’ expressed concerns about risks online and actual behaviour online are not always aligned (quinn, 2016); further, what people say they do and what they do are not aligned. this apparent inconsistency between what people describe as risky and whether this changes or predicts their future actions is inconsistently debated in scholarly literature. in this research, we identify factors that influence perceptions of online risk and analyze the behavioural responses to those perceptions. building on bates’ theory of information behaviour, we focus on online protection strategies and digital archiving as a specific instantiations and manifestations of information behaviour. the research analyzes how factors, such as perceptions of online risk and self-reported internet skills, have consequences for information behaviour. we focus on information behaviours and ask what factors influence perceptions of online risk and what are the behavioural responses to those perceptions. we investigate this question using online protective strategies and archival habits as proxies for online behaviours, which often involve choices and cost-and-benefit analyses of the risk and convenience involved. theoretical framework in this research, we use bates’ (2010) theory on information behaviour as the conceptual framework because of the focus on the ways in which technologies have consequences for how individuals engage with information. for bates (2010), information behaviour describes the many ways in which people interact with information—in particular, the ways in which people seek and use information. bates encourages researchers to examine how people perceive their own actions online as this holds more explanatory power than simply observing what they do. focusing on perception provides a lens through which to consider both purposeful and passive information behaviour—using surveys and interviews as the primary data collection methods (fisher & julien, 2009). methods this research uses data from 101 semi-structured interviews with a representative sample of residents in east york (toronto, canada). we constructed a list of both closedand open-ended questions to collect data on perception of risk online, selfreported internet skills, protective measures when going online, and digital archiving practices. the interviews were recorded, transcribed, and anonymized. considering that the interview data are largely qualitative, we manually analyzed and hand-coded participants’ responses by categorizing them into discrete categories. to uncover some of the underlying patterns, we focus on the following variables: (1) internet skills, (2) perception of online risk, (3) third party negative experience, (4) online protection method, and (5) digital archiving practices. this dataset provides a rich comparative data source of a well-studied and well-documented community that has previously been analyzed by other scholars (jacobson, lin, & mcewen, 2017; quan-haase, mo, & wellman, 2017; wang, zhang, & wellman, 2018). considering the size of the dataset, we used a mixed-method approach to identify the relationship between various factors related to perception of risk and assess whether they are also related to subsequent behavioural outcomes. findings & discussion from our dataset, we found that an individual’s self-perceived internet skills and having a third party negative experience are two major factors that influence perceptions of risk online. as a behavioral response to perceptions of online risk, people engage in active protection strategies and active avoidance techniques online. our findings indicate that hearing about a negative experience influences how skilled users behave online, regardless of what they say they would or would not do, as they take precautions by employing various active protection strategies online. for those who identified as not skilled computer users, having heard of a negative experience appears to be related to certain information behaviours. a minority of this group uses some form of online protection to reduce their own online risk, while the majority either engage in active avoidance or use no protection and accept the risks. developing a typology influenced by the theory of information behaviour provides a way to operationalize user interactions and consider user behaviour as influenced by social factors. based on our findings, we identified three general classes: 1) cautiously optimistic offliners, 2) confident onliners, 3) and utopic onliners. cautiously optimistic offliners believe themselves to be skilled internet users, do not feel that being online is particularly risky, yet they actively protect themselves online, and rarely engage in digital archiving activities. confident onliners feel comfortable with their ability to protect themselves online, which allows them to engage in online activities without fear; they regularly store personal information online and employ active protection strategies to mitigate risk online. finally, utopic onliners are the internet champions who embrace the internet without reservation; they are relatively fearless online, have not heard of many negative experiences, generally do not use online protection strategies, archive content online without much concern for risks, are confident in their internet skills, and utopically embrace the internet. this typology is a reductive framework that is both a simplification and a reminder that the relationships between people and technology are multi-faceted. conclusion the research offers an alternate perspective on online information behaviour that departs from traditional classifications that rely on demography. people engage in active protection strategies and active avoidance strategies as a response to their perceptions of risk online. human behaviour is complex and often requires more nuanced analyses to understand the factors that drive action; demographic markers are not enough to understand information behaviour. as the research has shown, despite what people say, they may not be aware of what drives their actions. this is irrespective of age, gender, or country of birth—when it comes to online risk these groupings are less important. while the three-part typology simplifies the array of online behaviours, we hope it can be used as a way to understand and analyze information behaviour online more broadly and applied to other contexts. references bates, m. j. (2010). information behavior (3rd ed). in marcia j. bates and mary niles maack, eds., encyclopedia of library and information sciences, (pp. 2381–2391) new york: crc press. fisher, k. & julien, h. (2009). information behavior. annual review of information science and technology, 43(1), 1–73. jacobson, j., lin, c., & mcewen, r. (2017). aging with technology: seniors and mobile connections. canadian journal of communication, 42(2), 331–357 quan-haase, a., mo, g. y., & wellman, b. (2017). connected seniors: how older adults in east york exchange social support online and offline. information, communication & society, 20(7), 967–998. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2017.1305428 quinn, k. (2016). why we share: a uses and gratifications approach to privacy regulation in social media use. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 60(1), 61–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2015.1127245 usc annenberg school of communication-center for the digital future. (2004). the 2004 digital future report: surveying the digital future. retrieved from http://www.digitalcenter.org/downloads/digitalfuturereport-year4-2004.pdf wang, h., zhang r., & wellman b., (2018) are older adults networked individuals? insights from east yorkers’ network structure, relational autonomy, and digital media use. information, communication & society, 21(5),681–696, doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2018.1428659 microsoft word 760-510-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 design by bot: power and resistance in the development of automated software agents r. stuart geiger uc-berkeley school of information united states stuart@stuartgeiger.com abstract in this paper, i discuss how application programming interfaces (apis) have enabled new modes of software development that complicates traditional distinctions between developers and users. coders can build bots, scripts, scrapers, extensions, aggregators, and other tools that change how software applications, platforms, and protocols operate – all without requiring privileged access to software codebases. in wikipedia, user-authored bots and tools perform a staggering amount of the work required to keep the collaborative encyclopedia project operating in the manner that it does. bots remove vandalism and spam, alert administrators to conflicts, harmonize linguistic standards, and enforce discursive norms. in reddit, bots have recently emerged to provide new functionalities to the news aggregation and discussion site. i report from an ethnographic study of bot development and bot developers in wikipedia and reddit, demonstrating the various ways in which the rise of automated software agents has enabled new forms of both power and resistance. keywords bots, software agents, algorithms, ethnography, values in design body lawrence lessig famously declared that “code is law” (1999), arguing that developers have immense power when constructing software platforms and protocols. those in the “values in design” movement (c.f. knobel & bowker 2011, friedman and nissenbaum 2004) have demonstrated the many different ways in which power relations can be produced through code. from youtube’s anti-copyright infringement algorithms (gillespie, 2010) to facebook’s formalized ontology of romantic relationship statuses (brubaker & hayes, 2011), there is much attention on how code operates as infrastructure. however, unless users are explicitly brought into the design of software, code is seen as written from above and embedded into the lives of users. for the people who use these systems, the only choices seem to be to accept the platform, contest it through discourse, or, as has emerged in the area of participatory design, program an alternative platform that operates according to a different codebase. in this paper, i document an emergent mode of power based on the development of autonomous software agents, or bots. most existing studies of bots have been based on a functionalist approach to code, showing how software agents are key social actors in enforcing behavioral and epistemological norms. tracing the banning of a malicious vandal in wikipedia, geiger and ribes (2010) showed how tools and bots structure administrative workflows such that ad-hoc teams can quickly identify and block contributors. recent research on wikipedia’s editor decline have also asserted that quality control bots are having negative effects on socialization in wikipedia (halfaker et al, 2013). however, bot development itself is a relatively unstudied sociotechnical phenomenon, although studies of bots in irc (latzko-toth, 2000) have shown how the notoriously thin and featureless chat protocol was extended through the development of a diverse set of automated bots. most notably, these software agents were delegated key administrative privileges and responsibilities in irc channels when their operators were away, producing new relations of power and authority without changing the protocol. the primary empirical goal of this paper is to investigate the ways in which bot development comes to constitute social and technical relations in collaborative communities. to this end, i am ethnographically investigating how bot development is situated within various online communities, specifically wikipedia and reddit. this work is based on participant-observation in both bot development itself and dispute resolution, semi-structured interviews with bot developers, and archival analysis of important selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 controversies. theoretically, i relate these social sub-worlds (strauss, 1982) of bot development, relating the emic perspective (morey & luthans, 1984) of what it means to be a bot developer. i use bowker and star’s notion of “infrastructural inversion” (2000) to examine how user-generated infrastructures enable new modes of power and new modes of resistance. this work extends the longstanding body of research into socio-cultural aspects of software development and software developers (e.g. kelty, 2008; crowston & howison, 2005) as well as ethnographies of robotics as a socio-technical field (vertesi, 2012). my guiding questions on this topic include issues such as: who are bot developers and why do they build these automated software agents? how do bot developers conceptualize themselves and their work in relation to that of others in and around their community? what kinds of social relationships do bot developers have with “official” developers and “ordinary” users? i situate answers to these questions in the context of controversies surrounding bot developers, like gillespie (forthcoming) has investigated with search algorithms. given the way in which bot developers see themselves, how are the inevitable issues surrounding bot development articulated and resolved? furthermore, in line with the growing body of work on the socio-technical nature of interaction, this study also investigates the relations bot developers have with technical actors. this work particularly draws on the work of ed hutchins on distributed cognition (1996) as well as suchman’s reconfigurations of humanmachine interactions (2007), exploring how bot development reshapes our notion of who – and what – participates in the online systems we inhabit. questions on this topic include: what kinds of social and technical infrastructures do bot developers rely upon to do their work? how have changes in these infrastructures – such as altering an api’s functionality, establishing rules for bots, or inviting a bot developer into the server-side codebase – alter the bot development process? finally, i believe it is critical to investigate how bot developers relate to and experience their own bots. is there a tension between bots as software maintained as features for the community and bots as extensions of the developer’s own self. based on the first stages of my ethnographic fieldwork with bot developers, i have found that the ability to develop for a given software platform is not simply a factor of programming skill, but also is affected by a wide variety of factors, most notably whether a codebase is open source or not. yet even in oss platforms, some communities are less open to new members and new code than others, and to add a new feature to the live site, a developer may have to enroll a wide array of allies. platforms are also typically written in a particular language and design approach, requiring that a developer gain familiarity with these potentially foreign modes of software development. finally, some platforms are built to be modular and extensible, but many more are quite complicated assemblages that require substantial effort to extend and modify. bots seemingly do away with many of these barriers to software development. a developer may have to request access to an api or get authorization to run a bot, but this barrier is often far lower than getting a patch merged, much less full commit access. bots can be written in most modern programming languages, and for specific platforms (like mediawiki), frameworks have been developed in dozens of languages to make it easy for a novice developer to write their own bot in their favorite language. bots do not require or allow the developer to interact with a platform’s code, and as such, bot developers can treat the underlying software platform as a black box. however, bots raise new issues in the development of software, as bot developers cannot rely on the same regimes of sovereignty that make a feature embedded into a platform instantly implementable. bot developers struggle with new issues of legitimation and negotiation, which i explore through controversy studies. like foucault argues with all forms of power relations (1976), i argue that bot development produces new forms of domination alongside new forms of resistance. i conclude by discussing the implications that this new mode of software development has for how we understand values and design. i ultimately concur with both lessig and the values in design movement in that the design of computational systems has profound implications for how social interaction and collaboration is constituted and made possible. however, i expand the location in which software design and development is typically understood take place. beyond the specific case studies i investigate, i advocate that we should broaden our traditional understandings of where and how design takes place. to this end, i contextualize bot development as a case in which values are not embedded in design, but produced as a result of a decentered, distributed design process that situates users as designers. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 references brubaker, j. r., & hayes, g. r. (2011). select * from user. proceedings of the acm 2011 conference on computer supported cooperative work (cscw ’11). doi:10.1145/1958824.1958881 bowker, j. & star, s.l. (2000). sorting things out: classification and its consequences. cambridge, mass.: the mit press. crowston, k., & howison, j. (2005). the social structure of free and open source software development. first monday, 10(2), 1–21. doi:10.1.1.89.3506 foucault, m. (1978) the history of sexuality volume 1: an introduction. r. hurley (trans.). london: allen lane. friedman, b. & nissenbaum, h. "bias in computer systems." in b. friedman (ed.). human values and the design of computer systems. cambridge: cambridge university press. halfaker, a., geiger, r.s., morgan, j.t., & riedl, j. (2013) the rise and decline of an open collaboration system: how wikipedia’s reaction to popularity is causing its decline. american behavioral scientist. doi:10.1177/0002764212469365 geiger, r. s., & ribes, d. (2010). the work of sustaining order in wikipedia: the banning of a vandal. proc cscw 2010. new york: acm press. doi:10.1145/1718918.1718941 gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of “platforms”. new media & society, 12(3). doi:10.1177/1461444809342738 gillespie, t. (forthcoming). the relevance of algorithms. in t. gillespie, p. boczkowski, & k. foot (eds.). media technologies. cambridge, ma: mit press. retrieved from http://www.tarletongillespie.org/essays/gillespie%20%20the%20relevance%20of%20algorithms.pdf hutchins, e. (1996). cognition in the wild. cambridge, mass.: the mit press. kelty, c. (2008). two bits: the cultural significance of free software. durham: duke university press. knobel, c., & bowker, g. c. (2011). values in design. communications of the acm, 54(7), 26. doi:10.1145/1965724.1965735 latzko-toth, g. (2000). l’internet relay chat  : un cas exemplaire de dispositif sociotechnique. commposite, v2000.1. retrieved from http://www.commposite.org/index.php/revue/article/viewarticle/91 lessig, l. (1999). code and other laws of cyberspace. new york: basic books. morey, n. c., & luthans, f. (1984). an emic perspective and ethnoscience methods for organizational research. academy of management review, 9(1), 27–36. doi:10.2307/258229 strauss, a. (1982). social worlds and legitimation processes. studies in symbolic interaction, 4, 171– 190. suchman, l. (2007). human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated actions (p. 314). cambridge: cambridge university press. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 vertesi, j. (2012). seeing like a rover: visualization, embodiment, and interaction on the mars exploration rover mission. social studies of science, 42(3), 393–414. doi:10.1177/0306312712444645 license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc-by-sa 3.0. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 adieu wikipedia: understanding the ethics of wikipedia after gamergate andrew famiglietti saint joseph's university introduction this essay explores the possibilities for using the ethical thought of emmanual levinas to better understand ethical behavior within the wikipedia project. at its inception, the free encyclopedia project wikipedia was hailed by some as an example of a productive method capable of breaking from entrenched systems of power and privilege. however, as the project has matured it has has to deal with the ways these forms of power and privilege have reproduced themselves within its community. in particular, wikipedia has struggled with a well documented gender gap in its editor base; according to the best estimates available, fewer than 16% of wikipedia contributors identify as female (hill and shaw). wikipedia's problematic gender dynamics were further highlighted when, in january 2015, the site's arbitration committee (or arbcom) ruled to exclude editors deemed “disruptive” from participating in the article documenting the still-unfolding campaign of anti-feminist harassment dubbed “gamergate.” this action was reported in the press, somewhat inaccurately, as a “feminist purge” of wikipedia (hern), largely because of the arbcom decided to include some high profile wikipedia editors working to prevent gamergate related harassment in its sanctions. while initial press reports may have over-emphasized the impact of the gamergate arbcom decision, the engagement between wikipedia and gamergate is still a useful case as it demonstrates how wikipedia shies away from an understanding of its own ethical guidelines that would foreground the obligation to an embodied other, as found in the work of levinas. instead, we see how the project interprets these guidelines in a way that emphasizes procedural fairness and follows habermas' prescription for establishing a just discursive environment, as described in previous work (hansen, berente, and lyytinen). this procedural focus may, in part, explain wikipedia's continued difficulty in addressing power, privilege and exclusion in its community. wikipedia and gamergate suggested citation (apa): famiglietti, a. (2015, october 21-24). adieu wikipedia: understanding the ethics of wikipedia after gamergate. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. before beginning to analyze the implications of the wikipedia/gamergate encounter, it is perhaps best to briefly recount the history of “gamergate” and its interactions with wikipedia. the self-styled “gamergate movement” began in august 2014, when an exboyfriend of feminist game developer zoe quinn published a blog post that claimed, among other things, that quinn had advanced her career by sleeping with other men in the gaming industry, including journalists who had reviewed quinn's game depression quest. in response to these claims, since debunked, a loose coalition of (mostly male) gamers began to protest what they claimed was an unethical collusion between feminist and anti-racist activists and gaming journalists to promote progressive content in video games. these complaints became more visible after the actor-turned-libertarian-activist adam baldwin (mostly known for his role on joss whedon's firefly) tweeted his support for them using the hashtag #gamergate. this term quickly became the consensus moniker for the movement, which attracted media attention mostly because of the proclivity of some of its members for using graphic threats of rape and assault against feminist designers and journalists. in addition quinn and others were the victims of personal information releases (or “doxxing”) and other forms of harassment by gamergate affiliated internet users.(dewey) on september 5, 2014 established wikipedia editor “mckaysalisbury” created an article stub for an article documenting gamergate on wikipedia. the very earliest revisions of the article appear to have been composed by gamergate supporters, mostly editing anonymously or using newly created wikipedia accounts. these early versions make claims such as “gamergate is an ongoing issue in the video game community, mostly surrounding corruption within the game blogging industry” and listing incidents where gamergate supporters had been banned from commenting on websites “for opinions.” two of these early revisions have since been redacted from the page history for violating wikipedia's “biography of living persons” policy, which forbids potentially libelous material from being posted on wikipedia. these early, gamergate sympathetic versions do not last very long. a little over six hours after the creation of the initial stub article, they are replaced by a version authored by veteran wikipedia article northbysouthbaranof. this version states: in august 2014 gaming culture engendered a complicated and manifold controversy [1] known as gamergate (partially promulgated on twitter with the hashtag #gamergate) involving journalistic ethics and misogyny[2] in gaming culture which itself went viral.[3][4] the controversy began attracting mainstream media coverage,[5] including the business press[6] and time magazine.[7] the controversy began with the release of private information about the game developer zoe quinn, and expanded to include the video journalist anita sarkeesian, the latter of whom has received death threats.[8] this begins a battle over the article's content that will continue for the next three months. editors sympathetic to gamergate rapidly become frustrated by wikipedia's verifiability policy, which holds that wikipedia simply reports facts that have been documented by outside “reliable sources.” since the balance of reliable media outlets describe gamergate as a reactionary and misogynist movement, they have difficulty swaying the article to describe it otherwise. in addition, a cadre of experienced wikipedia editors, took it upon themselves to prevent what they saw as skewed editing on the part of gamergate aligned wikipedians. five of these editors, northbysouthbaranof among them, were dubbed “the five horsemen” by gamergate activists working on 8chan and reddit, who discussed methods for removing them from the article editing process (williams). on november 27, 2014, a request for action by wikipedia's arbitration committee (arbcom) was filed by wikipedia user the devil's advocate. arbcom, which serves as wikipedia's dispute resolution organ of last resort, was asked by the devil's advocate to take action to resolve what he saw as biased collusion on the part of gamergate opponents. he writes, “while editors with fewer contributions, as far as i know only those who are or are seen as favorable to the gamergate side, have been routinely sanctioned or blocked, the established editors who are unfavorable to the gamergate side and are the source of a lot of the conflict continue unimpeded.” (“wikipedia”) this arbcom case would ultimately find against the editors identified as “the five horsemen” (along with a variety of other editors, including the devil's advocate himself) banning four of them from editing “any page relating to, (a) gamergate, (b) any gender-related dispute or controversy, (c) people associated with (a) or (b), all broadly construed.” it was this ban of the five horsemen that lead to wikipedia being criticized for purging feminist editors. understanding the rationale given for this decision will help us better understand wikipedia's sense of its own ethical commitments. “wikipedia is not a battleground:” the ethical importance of civility for wikipedia while the arbcom cited a variety of wikipedia policies in their decision on the gamergate case, one in particular was presented by the committee as key to their decision, and used in the rationale for almost all of the actions taken to discipline editors. this was the “wikipedia is not a battleground” policy, one of the core “what wikipedia is not” policies that defines the scope of the project via exclusion. the policy reads, in part, “wikipedia is not a place to hold grudges, import personal conflicts, carry on ideological battles, or nurture prejudice, hatred, or fear. making personal battles out of wikipedia discussions goes directly against our policies and goals.” (“wikipedia:what wikipedia is not wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”) this policy was named as the second of 14 principles enumerated by arbcom as informing their decision, and all of the editors sanctioned by the committee were found guilty of “battleground conduct.” (“wikipedia”) the use of the battleground policy in the gamergate decision highlights an ethical dilemma for wikipedia. on the one hand, the use of the policy is clearly an attempt to maintain wikipedia as a space where differing viewpoints can be represented and synthesized. along these lines, hansen et. al. have argued that wikipedia represents “an approximation of rational discourse” as theorized by habermas. they write that wikipedia attempts to create a space where the sort of “communicative action” described by habermas can occur. for habermas, communicative action is ethically desirable since it “refers to the situation in which 'the actions of agents involved are coordinated not through egocentric calculations of success but through acts of reaching understanding.'” (hansen, berente, and lyytinen) in order for mutually-based communicative action to thrive, actions taken by agents in pursuit of a unilateral agenda, so-called “strategic actions” must be limited. it is exactly this limitation of strategic action on the part of wikipedia editors that the battleground policy seeks to achieve. the policy itself defines it's purpose in terms of preventing editors from pursuing individual goals, whether those goals are “personal conflicts” or “ideological grudges” in ways that would damage their fellow editors, or the larger wikipedia project. in the case of the gamergate article, the evidence selected by the arbcom in finding editors guilty of “battleground conduct” also helps demonstrate the prevention of “strategic action.” in some cases, this evidence consisted of showing that the editor in question had repeatedly inserted text into the article that promoted the view of his or her preferred “side,” especially when this text was sourced to texts that were not considered “reliable.” for example, northbysouthbaranof was found to have engaged in battleground conduct for inserting material sourced to a salt lake tribune editorial that included a quote stating that the threats anita sarkeesian received would seem to support sarkeesian’s point about a link between some video games and violent attitudes toward females" (“wikipedia”). in other cases, the evidence showed that the editor in question had strong language or insults to attack opposing editors. for example user ryulong, another of the “five horsemen” and the only user banned from wikipedia by the gamergate arbcom decision, was banned in part for telling another editor to “stop bitching about neutrality because things aren't going the way of the gater” (“wikipedia”). in both cases, editors were found guilty of battleground conduct for pursuing their own strategic goals at the expense of project goals. while neither wikipedia co-founder jimmy wales nor the wikimedia foundation are directly involved in the operation of the arbcom, which consists of volunteers elected from the editing community, their statements on the interaction between gamergate and wikipedia can still shed light on the ethical framework guiding the arbcom decision. both wales and the wikimedia foundation made statements that stressed the need to limit strategic actions on the part of users for the good of the larger community. the foundation, in a statement released in response to the press coverage of the gamergate arbcom decision, repeatedly stressed the need to prevent “disruptions” to that “wikipedia can remain a civil, productive place for all editors.” wales, in a series of tweets written in september 2014 (during the thick of edit warring on the gamergate article) compared the conflict to “a controversy at wikipedia about a breed of dog” in which “virtually all the editors were activists.”(wales, “1/i remember a controversy at wikipedia about a breed of dog. when i looked into it, virtually all the editors were activists.”) he suggests that the model set by that case, in which “all the activists on all sides were topic banned”(wales, “2/what eventually happened, as i recall, is that all the activists on all sides were topic banned. to their dismay.”) and then “the wikipedians were able to write a neutral article that more or less satisfied everyone” (wales, “3/and then the wikipedians were able to write a neutral article that more or less satisfied everyone.”) could set an example for the ongoing gamergate article. the way wales' comments divide “activists” pursuing their own agendas from “wikipedians” pursuing the collective agenda of a “neutral” article is particularly telling. it shows again how the ethical framework of wikipedia divides individual strategic action from collective action. gamergate as point of failure for wikipedia's habermasian ethics and a potential contribution from levinas while wikipedia may benefit from maintaining a “civil and productive” space for editors, the case of gamergate shows the ethical limits of this approach. for one, it limits the ability of wikipedia to protect editors who are hounded into incivility by determined provocateurs. northbysouthbaranof, in his presentation of evidence to the arbcom in the gamergate case, argues that “gamergate supporters have targeted long-term editors, creating multiple pages which are "hit lists" including dozens of long-term wikipedia editors who have opposed them. this has included implied and explicit threats, abusive vandalism, miscellaneous garbage and other personal attacks”(“wikipedia”gamergate evidence) and providing links to the evidence of this behavior. elsewhere, wikipedia user mark bernstein, who was not named in the arbcom case, but who was aligned with the anti-gamergate editors (and who wrote the blog post that started much of the press coverage of the arbcom case) explained the situation this way: “those topic-banned were indeed not topic-banned because they were harassed: in many cases, they were topic banned because intolerable harassment drove them to be impolite on-wiki to people who were threatening their lives, health, careers, and honor elsewhere. sanctimoniously to demand ideal deportment at all times from persons placed in such circumstances is to expect too much, which is precisely the reason gamergate adopted these tactics in its attack on wikipedia.” (“user talk”) more importantly, the gamergate article represents a case where the line between individual strategic action and the collective goals of the project were blurred in an important way. as both reagle (reagle) and myself (famiglietti) have previoulsy shown, wikipedia relies on it's policies of “verifiability” and “neutral point of view” to establish a workable definition for the otherwise unreachable “neutrality” the project sets as it's goal. the neutral point of view policy holds that wikipedia does not seek neutrality in the form of some perfectly objective truth, removed from all points of view, but rather in the form of a fair reporting of “all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic.”(“neutral point of view wikipedia”) verfiability holds that the encyclopedia's “content is determined by previously published information rather than the beliefs or experiences of its editors.”(“wikipedia: verifiability”) however, in the case of gamergate, the ability of these policies to set a collective goal larger than individual strategic actions was frustrated by the fact that the mass media had overwhelmingly, and correctly, reported on the gamergate phenomenon as an outburst of violent misogynist thuggery. this left wikipedia trapped between its own content policies and the gamergaters, who were able to use their technological savvy, and their demographic similarities to wikipedia's own core editing population, to cause trouble for the encyclopedia, including hounding the editors who opposed them into acts of incivility, as documented above. the arbcom decision, then, becomes an outcome of this basic breakdown of wikipedia's ability to define its own collective project in procedural terms in this case. it is here that we can find a productive contribution from existing work comparing the ethics of habermas and levinas. in his piece “speech and sensibility: levinas and habermas on the constitution of the moral point of view,” steven hendley makes the case that the two thinkers' “differing conceptions of the moral significance of language need not be seen as opposed to each other.” instead, he argues, “they can be conceptualized as complimentary accounts of the ways in which a moral point of view onto life is inextricably bound up for us with our capacities as linguistic creatures, animals with logos.” (hendley 1) hendley's compliment of habermas with levinas allows us to more clearly see the point of failure in wikipedia's handling of gamergate. he writes that an approach to communicative ethics that entirely hews to the procedural mandates given in habermas is unable to “answer why we should be moral, why the procedures of communicative rationality which constitute the moral point of view should be understood as unconditionally authoritative for us, as meriting our respect even to the point of the sacrifice of other strategic interests we may have in our lives.”(hendley 10) it is here that he argues the thought of levinas can make a contribution, by providing exactly this impetus for moral action. he writes, “for levinas, to speak is to do more than to undertake a particular mode of action with distinctive procedural commitments. it is to come into proximity to the face of the other to whom my speech is addressed who, in that proximity, emerges for me as the one with the authority to command my consideration, the one whose 'always positive value' enables me to make sense of why it is important to give the other the unconditional sense of consideration my communicative commitments demand of me.” it is this sense of unconditional sense of obligation to embodied others that wikipedia's purely procedural ethics lack. without such a sense, the arbcom, and indeed the project as a whole, is unable to distinguish between the hounding of editors by gamergate activists and the sometimes uncivil responses by those same editors to being hounded. while this lack may seem a dire problem for wikipedia, let me close on a reason why i believe it might be mended. while wikipedia's codes of conduct may currently lack this levinas inspired sense of commitment to the other, there are important parallels between wikipedia's codes and levinas' thought which might make it possible to restore this sense to the project. for levinas, “ethics precedes ontology.” as he explained to one interviewer, levinas understood the “the priority of being, this insistence on the oneself” implied in ontology to be “something like a threat against all others, a war inherent in this affirmation of oneself” (levinas and robbins 105). instead of starting from being, levinas took the relationship to the other as the starting point of his philosophy. later in the same interview he explains, “the recognition of the other happens beyond being, beyond essence” and that “the true humanity of man begins in this recognition, before any cognition of being, before onto-ology”(levinas and robbins 106). just as levinas secures his ethics in a recognition of the other prior to being, so too wikipedia secures its epistemology in such a recognition. in an early draft of the npov, wikipedia founder jimmy wales explains the rationale for the policy this way: “perhaps the easiest way to make your writing more encyclopedic, is to write about _what people believe_, rather than _what is so_. if this strikes you as somehow subjectivist or collectivist or imperialist, then ask me about it, because i think that you are just mistaken. what people believe is a matter of objective fact, and we can present _that_ quite easily from the neutral point of view [emphasis in original]” (“wikipedia”). this parallel, the fact that both levinas and wikipedia take the other as foundation to their ontology and epistemology, suggests that their work might be usefully hybridized in the future. works cited: dewey, caitlin. “the only guide to gamergate you will ever need to read.” the washington post 14 oct. 2014. washingtonpost.com. web. 31 july 2015. famiglietti, andrew. “hackers, cyborgs, and wikipedians: the political economy and cultural history of wikipedia.” american culture studies ph.d. dissertations (2011): n. pag. web. hansen, sean, nicholas berente, and kalle lyytinen. “wikipedia as rational discourse: an illustration of the emancipatory potential of information systems.” system sciences, 2007. hicss 2007. 40th annual hawaii international conference on. ieee, 2007. 253c–253c. google scholar. web. 31 july 2015. hendley, steven. “speech and sensibility: levinas and habermas on the constitution of the moral point of view.” continental philosophy review 37.2 (2004): 153–173. link.springer.com. web. 1 aug. 2015. hern, alex. “wikipedia votes to ban some editors from gender-related articles.” the guardian. n.p., n.d. web. 5 mar. 2015. hill, benjamin mako, and aaron shaw. “the wikipedia gender gap revisited: characterizing survey response bias with propensity score estimation.” plos one 8.6 (2013): e65782. plos journals. web. 31 july 2015. levinas, emmanuel, and jill robbins. is it righteous to be?: interviews with emmanuel lévinas. stanford, calif.: stanford university press, 2001. print. “neutral point of view wikipedia.” n.p., n.d. web. 17 apr. 2010. reagle, joseph michael. good faith collaboration: the culture of wikipedia. the mit press, 2010. print. “user talk:jimbo wales.” wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 28 july 2015. wikipedia. web. 1 aug. 2015. wales, jimmy. “1/i remember a controversy at wikipedia about a breed of dog. when i looked into it, virtually all the editors were activists.” microblog. @jimmy_wales. n.p., 25 sept. 2014. web. 1 aug. 2015. ---. “2/what eventually happened, as i recall, is that all the activists on all sides were topic banned. to their dismay.” microblog. @jimmy_wales. n.p., 25 sept. 2014. web. 1 aug. 2015. ---. “3/and then the wikipedians were able to write a neutral article that more or less satisfied everyone.” microblog. @jimmy_wales. n.p., 25 sept. 2014. web. 1 aug. 2015. “wikipedia:arbitration/requests/case/gamergate.” wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 18 may 2015. wikipedia. web. 26 july 2015. ---. wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 18 may 2015. wikipedia. web. 31 july 2015. “wikipedia:arbitration/requests/case/gamergate/evidence.” wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 31 dec. 2014. wikipedia. web. 1 aug. 2015. “wikipedia: neutralpointofview.” n.p., 16 apr. 2001. web. 5 mar. 2015. “wikipedia:verifiability.” wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 22 july 2015. wikipedia. web. 1 aug. 2015. “wikipedia:what wikipedia is not wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.” n.p., n.d. web. 17 july 2010. williams, lauren c. “the ‘five horsemen’ of wikipedia paid the price for getting between trolls and their victims.” thinkprogress. n.p., n.d. web. 7 mar. 2015. microsoft word 812-559-1-pb.docx mcda of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation in the igbp 1 a multimodal critical discourse analysis of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation within the “it gets better project” laurie m. phillips, phd assistant professor school of journalism and communication university of oregon 1275 university of oregon allen hall room 219 eugene, or 97403-1275 lauriep@uoregon.edu abstract: in september 2010, dan savage founded the youtube-based “it gets better project.” a key component within the ongoing social movement to eradicate youth bullying and suicide, igbp messaging requires further examination of how life “gets better.” through a multimodal critical discourse analysis and application of collins’ (2000) matrix of domination framework, this study examines race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. empirical data reveal participants offered little about their own racial and class identities and the impact of those on life getting better but were forthcoming in discussing how their gender and sexual identities impacted their childhood victimization. concurrently, participants made gross assumptions about viewers’ racial, class, gender, and sexual identities, projecting an overly simplistic message of life improving regardless of viewers’ circumstances or intersectionality. findings contribute to online participation research concerning how the internet is used for social change and how social inequalities are (re)produced in online projects. keywords: multimodal critical discourse analysis (mcda); matrix of domination; intersectionality; it gets better project; youtube overview: in response to multiple suicides among self-identified or perceived lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (lgbtq) youth (brooks, 2010), columnist and “sexpert” (thomas, 2011) dan savage created the youtube-based it gets better project (igbp) on september 15, 2010. more than 50,000 videos targeting at-risk lgbtq youth exist in the igbp corpus today, created by lgbtq-identified and allied adults and adolescents (“about,” 2013). moreover, global media attention has been garnered for youth bullying and suicide (mackenzie, 2010), and policy changes have been implemented at the local, state, and federal levels (cooper, 2013), rendering the igbp a key, onlinebased component within a larger, ongoing social movement. the goal of the igbp was to bring awareness to the problem of lgbtq youth bullying and suicide, but the messages contained within the project demand further examination, specifically in consideration of how life “gets better” and what, where, why, when, and for whom. through a multimodal critical discourse analysis (mcda) of the igbp messaging applying sociologist’s patricia hill collins’ (2000, 2009) matrix of domination theoretical framework, race, class, gender, and sexual orientation are examined in depth. theory: building upon crenshaw’s (1993) intersectionality framework, collins (2000) coined the phrase matrix of domination and defined it as “the overall social organization within which intersecting oppressions originate, develop, and are contained” (p. 228). she explained that four elements of power combine to form a matrix of domination: mcda of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation in the igbp 2 the structural domain organizes oppression, whereas the disciplinary domain manages it. the hegemonic domain justifies oppression, and the interpersonal domain influences everyday lived experience and the individual consciousness that ensues. (p. 276). as collins (2009) articulates, the media are part of the structural domain and are used to reproduce hegemonic ideals about race, gender, class, and sexual orientation, yet the matrix of domination has yet to be applied to social media-based content, such as youtube videos. therefore, guided by the matrix of domination framework and employing mcda, this study furthers understanding of social media content by answering the following: how are race, class, gender, and sexual orientation discussed within the youtube-based igbp videos? method: critical discourse analysis is concerned with “the effect of power relations and inequalities in producing social wrongs,” with the ultimate goal of moving beyond the interpretation of texts and advocating for social change (fairclough, 2010, p. 8). power is revealed through the implicit meanings of texts “at the word, sentence, and passage level” (brabham, 2012, p. 398). nonetheless, the intent of cda is not description but rather explanation and intervention within social interaction and social structures (van dijk, 2001), and because of the intense process of examining explicit and implicit meanings, the method is typically reserved for understanding a small corpus of data. historically, interdisciplinary scholars have used cda to understand written texts, but the igbp is a visual project comprised of text and imagery. thus, transcript analysis alone would be insufficient in fully understanding producers’ meanings as conveyed in their videos. therefore, to account for both the videos’ verbal and non-verbal information, i used multimodal critical discourse analysis (mcda) as outlined by machin and mayr (2012), which considers how elements of visual communication contribute to power relations alongside verbal or written texts. i critically analyzed a total of 21 igbp videos uploaded between september 2010 and may 2012. videos ranged from 46 seconds to 13 minutes and 49 seconds, averaging 5 minutes in length. the sample is comprised of individual testimonials featuring one person speaking, as opposed to myriad other types featured in the igbp, such as couple, small or large group videos; video montages with little to no spoken words from a visible person; homemade music videos or enacted screenplays; or any other visual presentation that does not exclusively focus on one person speaking directly into the camera. as guided by machin and mayr (2012), i considered how participants presented themselves in their videos (i.e., dress, hair, make-up, etc.); settings in which videos were filmed; and participants’ gazes, mannerisms, poses, camera angles/distance, and identifiable editing, all of which contribute further to their overall message. discussion: i analyzed the videos according to: 1) how participants spoke about their own racial, class, gender, and sexual identities; and 2) the assumptions participants’ made about their viewers’ racial, class, gender, and sexual identities. collectively, participants offered little explicit information about their own racial and class identities and the impact of those on their own experiences of life “getting better,” leaving it to viewers to read into the implicit information conveyed. regarding their own gender and sexual identities, however, participants were much more forthcoming and explicitly discussed both with regularity, taking time to explain how their gender and sexual identities impacted the bullying they were subjected to as youth. concurrently, often participants made gross assumptions about their viewers’ racial, class, gender, and sexual identities, overwhelmingly presuming viewers to be caucasian and of middleor upper class status and that racial/class differences would have little to no impact on viewers’ lives improving according to the matrix of domination. moreover, participants presumed viewers to be traditional, gender-conforming men or women who already identify as either lesbian or gay. the discourse was problematic on several levels. first, when participants fail to explicitly mention their identities and explain how their multidimensionality impacted both the bullying they received and how life got better, they were likely to project an overly simplistic, limitedmcda of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation in the igbp 3 value, and in some instances blatantly false message of life getting better for everyone, regardless of individual circumstances. furthermore, the narrow assumptions participants projected onto their presumed viewership may have the opposite effect of that intended: viewers who do not fit within these rigidly-defined boundaries may disregard participants’ igbp messaging altogether and miss out on life-saving resources contained within the social change project. intellectual merit: in sum, this study provides a unique application of collins’ (2000, 2009) matrix of domination framework, which has been applied only sparingly in mass communication studies overall, and to the author’s best knowledge has never been applied to published data concerning social media-based strategic messaging. this empirical data offers further insight into participatory culture among marginalized populations (jenkins, 2006), specifically through an understanding of how race, class, gender, and sexual orientation are discussed within an online-based social change project. moreover, the study extends research on lgbtq media representation, most of which has centered on traditional media outlets like print, television, and film and has failed to adequately examine user-generated media content (alwood, 1996; gross, 2001; streitmatter, 1995, 2009; walters, 2003). at its broadest, findings contribute to literature examining advantages and disadvantages of online participation (jenkins, 2006; rheingold, 2002), including how the internet is used for social change and how social inequalities are (re)produced online (brabham, 2008; postigo, 2009; schäfer, 2011). acknowledgments the author would like to thank dr. daniel riffe, dr. daren brabham, dr. barbara friedman, dr. terri phoenix, and dr. george noblit for their insightful suggestions and guidance during the course of this study. references “about the it gets better project.” (2013, march 13). it gets better website. retrieved from http://www.itgetsbetter.org/pages/about-it-gets-better-project/. alwood, e. (1996). straight news: gays, lesbians, and the news media. new york: columbia university press. brabham, d. c. (2008). crowdsourcing as a model for problem solving: an introduction and cases. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 14(1), 75-90. brabham, d. c. (2012) the myth of amateur crowds: a critical discourse analysis of crowdsourcing coverage. information, communication, & society, 15(3), 394-410. brooks, k. (2010, september 13). bullied greenberg student takes his own life. fox59.com. retrieved from http://www.fox59.com/news/wxin-greensburg-student-suicide-091310,0,1101685.story. collins, p. h. (2000). black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. new york: routledge. collins, p. h. (2009). black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. 2nd ed. new york: routledge. cooper, a. (2013, february 22). “the bully effect: an anderson cooper special” premieres thursday, february 28th. cnn [weblog]. retrieved from http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2013/02/22/thebully-effect-an-anderson-cooper-special-premieres-thursday-february-28th-bullyeffect/. crenshaw, k. (1993). mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. stanford law review, 43, 1241-1299. fairclough, n. (2010). critical discourse analysis: the critical study of language. 2nd ed. edinburgh, united kingdom: pearson education. gross, l. (2001). up from invisibility: lesbians, gay men, and the media in america. new york: columbia university press. jenkins, h. (2006b). convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york: new york university press. mcda of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation in the igbp 4 levy, p. (2013, march 1). minnesota house committee passes anti-bullying bill. star tribune. retrieved from http://www.startribune.com/politics/statelocal/194096251.html?refer=y. machin, d., & mayr, a. (2012). how to do critical discourse analysis: a multimodal introduction. london: sage publications. mackenzie, i. (2010, september 30). student kills himself after gay sex footage put online. bbc news. retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11446034. postigo, h. (2009). america online volunteers: lessons from an early co-production community. international journal of cultural studies, 12(5), 451-469. rheingold, h. (2002). smart mobs: the next social revolution. cambridge, ma: perseus. schäfer, m. t. (2011). bastard culture!: how user participation transforms cultural production. amsterdam: amsterdam university press. streitmatter, r. (1995). unspeakable: the rise of the gay and lesbian press in america. boston, ma: faber & faber. streitmatter, r. (2009). from perverts to fab five: the media’s changing depiction of gay men and lesbians. new york, ny: routledge. thomas, m. (2011, march 17). dan savage’s message to gay youth: “it gets better.” chicago sun-times. retrieved from http://www.suntimes.com/ entertainment/books/4064600-421/dan-savages-message-itgets-better.html. van dijk, t. a. (2001). critical discourse analysis. in d. schiffrin, d. tannen, & h. e. hamilton (eds.), the handbook of discourse analysis (p. 352-371). malden, ma: blackwell publishing. walters, s. d. (2003). all the rage: the story of gay visibility in america. chicago: university of chicago press. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  williams,  m.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  a  digital  black  press?:  exploring  what   constitutes  the  black  press  online.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  conference  of  the   association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.   a  digital  black  press?:  exploring  what  constitutes  the  black   press  online     miya  williams   northwestern  university     the  traditional  black  press  in  the  united  states  is  typically  conceptualized  as  legacy   print  publications  that  have  endured  over  many  decades.  since  the  inception  of  the   black  press  in  1827,  there  has  been  little  debate  about  the  categorization  of  newspapers   and  magazines  that  are  produced  by  and  for  the  african-­american  community.   however,  some  efforts  have  been  made  to  more  concretely  define  the  attributes  of  the   black  press.  oft-­cited  are  de  felice’s  (1969)  black  press  attributes,  which  include  being   owned  and  managed  by  blacks,  intended  for  a  black  audience  and  advocating  for  the   racial  equality  of  african  americans.  yet  in  the  current  digital  environment  this   conception  is  debatable  as  journalists  are  reconsidering  what  constitutes  the  black   press.  black-­targeted  websites  that  primarily  produce  entertainment  news  and  sites  that   target  african-­american  readers  but  are  owned  by  white  media  companies  create   ambiguity  (thompson  greenwell  2012).  this  paper  examines  how  the  black  press  has   adapted  to  the  digital  landscape  and  how  investigates  how  previous  definitions  of  the   black  press  have  been  affected  as  a  result.     method     this  study  uses  interviews  and  media  metrics  to  understand  the  shifts  in  production  and   consumption  practices  in  the  black  press  during  the  new  media  age.  interviews  with   publishers  of  traditional  black  press  publications  and  black-­targeted  news  websites  are   employed  to  provide  further  insight  into  how  the  production  of  the  black  press  is  being   re-­imagined  in  digital  spaces.  interview  subjects  were  selected  based  on  the  following   criteria:  their  publication  attracted  a  sizable  audience,  their  content  was  news  related   and  had  a  clear  emphasis  on  african  americans  and  their  website  was  up-­to-­date.  only   journalists  in  decision-­making  positions  were  interviewed  for  this  study  as  they  were   thought  to  be  more  responsible  for  their  publications’  content.         the  consumption  of  online  news  by  black  audiences  is  also  integral  to  this  research.  as   such,  i  include  data  from  comscore,  a  platform  that  measures  digital  audiences,  to   observe  which  black  news  sites  are  attracting  the  most  unique  visitors.  i  examine  the   websites  that  correspond  with  the  place  of  employment  for  the  interview  subjects  and   other  popular  black  news  sites.  i  then  use  both  interview  data  and  media  metrics   information  to  inform  my  analysis  of  how  these  sites  are  serving  black  readers.       discussion     new  understandings  of  the  black  press  have  already  emerged  in  the  new  media  age.       harris-­lacewell  expands  on  previous  definitions  of  the  black  press  asserting,  “to  the   extent  that  african  americans  perceive  a  media  source  (television  show,  radio  station,   novel,  magazine,  movie,  or  internet  website)  to  be  something  that  ‘belongs’  to  black   people,  it  can  be  considered  a  black  media  space”  (2004,  p.  10).  this  conceptualization   allows  room  for  scholars  to  analyze  the  cultural  significance  of  spaces  that  are  not   black-­owned  yet  influential  in  the  black  community.  this  paper  analyzes  what  happens   when  this  definition  is  applied  to  entertainment  news  sites  and  blogs  that  arguably  do   not  uphold  what  some  journalists  consider  the  traditional  goals  of  the  black  press.  in  his   analysis  of  ten  african-­american-­owned-­and-­targeted  websites,  akil  (2007)  found  that   all  of  the  sites  offered  more  entertainment  news  than  hard  news  and  entertainment  was   the  most  likely  type  of  content  to  be  featured  on  each  of  the  websites.  as  such,  this   paper  will  investigate  the  impact  that  increased  entertainment  content  online  has  on   understandings  of  the  black  press.     conclusion     as  print  circulation  numbers  continue  to  decline,  determining  whether  there  is  an  online   black  press  increases  in  importance.  the  continuance  or  discontinuance  of  the  nearly   200-­year-­old  institution  of  the  black  press  has  implications  for  both  the  field  of   journalism  and  racial  relations.  yet  while  the  existence  of  a  digital  black  press  is   contentious,  as  some  journalists  only  consider  print  publications  as  legitimate,  online   news  may  fulfill  the  historical  purpose  of  the  black  press  better  than  print  publications.   everett  (2009)  views  the  digital  space  as  promising  for  the  survival  of  the  black  press.   she  posits  that  the  web  allows  for  more  uncensored  content  and  provides  unreported   news.  black  news  sites  may,  in  fact,  be  influencing  the  content  of  traditional  black  press   publications  (brock  et  al.  2010).  these  legacy  publications  are  necessarily  entering  into   the  digital  environment  where  their  competition  increases  exponentially.  squires  (2009)   finds  that  many  consumers  of  traditional  black  publications  have  followed  them  online,   which  provides  a  more  unambiguous  demonstration  of  the  continuance  of  the  black   press.       this  study  investigates  how  producers  and  consumers  of  black  news  content  online  are   troubling  previous  definitions  of  the  black  press.  i  find  that  among  digital  journalists,   expectations  of  advocating  for  the  black  community  and  african-­american  ownership,   while  preferable,  are  not  essential  elements  in  determining  whether  an  outlet  is  part  of   the  black  press  online.  journalists  tend  to  be  more  inclusive  than  exclusive  when   characterizing  the  digital  black  press  and  most  consider  any  website  that  targets  african   americans,  including  entertainment  sites  and  blogs,  to  be  black  press  outlets.  the  types   of  websites  that  african-­american  audiences  visit  for  black  news  content  have   implications  for  understandings  of  the  black  press  both  on  and  offline.  by  examining   how  black  news  publishers  of  print  and  online  content  conceptualize  their  publications   and  how  they  are  situated  in  the  new  media  age,  i  am  able  to  elucidate  the  effect  that   the  changing  digital  landscape  has  on  understandings  of  the  black  press.       references     akil,  b.  (2007).  “african  american  websites:  publishers’  views,  perspectives  and   experiences  in  relation  to  the  social  construction  of  news,  online  news  and  the  black   press.”  florida  state  university.  dissertation.       brock,  a.,  kvasny,  l.,  and  hales,  k.  (2010)."cultural  appropriations  of  technical  capital:   black  women,  weblogs,  and  the  digital  divide."  information,  communication  &  society   13:  1040-­1059.         de  felice,  k.  (1969).  the  black  press  defined.  (m.a.  thesis).  syracuse  university,  new   york         everett,  a.  (2009).  digital  diaspora:  a  race  for  cyberspace.  albany:  state  university  of   new  york.       harris-­lacewell,  m.  (2004).  bibles,  barbershops,  and  bet.  princeton,  nj:  princeton   university  press.       squires,  c.  (2002).  “black  audiences,  past  and  present:  commonsense  media  critics   and  activists.”  in  r.  means  coleman  (ed.)  in  say  it  loud!  african-­american  audiences,   media,  and  identity.  (pp.  45-­76).  new  york  and  london:  routledge.         squires,  c.  (2009).  african  americans  and  the  media.  malden,  ma:  polity  press.       thompson  greenwell,  a.  (2012).  “twentieth-­century  ideology  meets  twenty-­first-­ century  technology:  black  news  websites  and  racial  uplift.”  fire!!!:  the  multimedia   journal  of  black  studies,  2012,  vol.1(2),  pp.111-­138.     microsoft word google books as infrastructure of injustice revision jun 30 2013.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 google books as infrastructure of in/justice abstract to date, google books has scanned and made searchable more than 20 million books from library collections around the world. proponents of the project tout its potential for promoting social justice and equality through increased information access. critics, however, have argued that unresolved issues with regard to privacy, copyright, and censorship ultimately subvert the values the project claims to further. these controversies reveal google books as a rich example of the complex relations infrastructures establish between technologies, institutions, and individuals. current debates, however, have concentrated on the interests of the project’s stakeholders, overlooking google books as sociotechnical infrastructure—that is, as a set of relations mobilized in practice. employing a practice-dependent account of social justice informed by the concept of “infrastructural inversion” (bowker, 1994), this paper examines the interdependence between technologies and social practices organized by google and inquires whether or not the “egalitarianism of information” touted by google is rendered possible by the sociotechnical relations it mobilizes. keywords google books, infrastructure, social justice, sts introduction google launched its book scanning initiative in 2002, furthering the company’s stated mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” (google, inc., n.d.). despite technological and legal challenges, google has been largely successful in its efforts; today, the company has scanned and made searchable more than 20 million books, creating a digital library unrivaled in size and scope. according to proponents of the project, its success has not only been one of numbers, but also one of overall cultural and political impact; these proponents point towards the possibilities google books opens up for furthering important liberal ideals of social justice and equality—through, for example, an increased “egalitarianism of information” (schmidt, 2005, para. 9) and as opening up new opportunities for widespread economic and cultural exchange. critics of the project, on the other hand, have been quick to show that unresolved issues with regard to privacy, copyright, and censorship may ultimately subvert the liberal values it claims to further (samuelson, 2009; grimmelmann, 2010; newman, 2011; zimmer, 2012). the controversies surrounding google books reveal it as a highly visible example of the complex relations information infrastructures establish between technologies, institutions, and individuals. current debates on the ethics of google books, however, have largely concentrated on the interests of various stakeholders—from google to libraries, publishers, and authors. overlooked in these debates is google books as information infrastructure—that is, as a set of relations established between various components to organize and make available its resources in practice. this examination aims to interrogate according to a conception of justice the books project as infrastructure. to this end, the author employs a practice-dependent interpretation of social justice in the rawlsian tradition (rawls, 1993; james, 2005; sangiovanni, 2008; ronzoni, 2009). rather than depend on the most prevalent practice-dependent accounts of justice, however, the author proposes a new practice-dependent framework informed by the concept of “infrastructural inversion” (bowker, 1994; bowker and star, 1999). a focus on infrastructure, the author argues, allows a close examination of the interdependence between technologies, individuals and social practices mobilized by the google books project. such an analysis compliments established debates, as it inquires into whether or not the “egalitarianism of information” touted by google is rendered possible by the sociotechnical relations organized by the books project. google books as infrastructure selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 an infrastructure “…seeks to be a persistent set of resources that can also support the ongoing daily activities of heterogeneous actors” (ribes & polk, 2012, p. 254). these resources include some combination of the technological (tools and technologies), the technical (classifications and standards), and the social (work and communication practices). infrastructure is not, however, merely a static thing or set of things—it only emerges in practice as a “when,” not a “what,” occurring “when local practices are afforded by a larger-scale technology, which can then be used in a natural, ready-to-hand fashion.” (star & ruhleder, 1996, p. 4-6). following star and ruhleder (1996), infrastructure occurs along a series of interrelated dimensions: embeddedness, transparency, reach or scope, learned as part of membership, links with conventions of practice, embodiment of standards, built on an installed base, and becomes visible upon breakdown (for a more detailed exploration of these dimensions, see star & ruhleder, 1996, p. 5-6). using these dimensions as a guide, this examination seeks to articulate google books as infrastructure—that is, as a set of relations mobilized in practice. for example, google books is “embedded” in existing technological structures; it is “sunk” into and dependent upon other networks (technological, economic, and political). it also shapes and is shaped by communities of practice, as its scanning initiative is informed by the practices of its partner institutions—in particular, research libraries—and, in turn, informs and overcomes these localized practices by making collections accessible beyond the confines of a single publisher or library. practice-dependent accounts of justice and infrastructural inversion in this work, the author relies on a practice-dependent account of social justice in the rawlsian tradition (james, 2005; sangiovanni, 2008; ronzoni, 2009).1 on a practice-dependent account, “existing institutions and practices…play a crucial role in the justification of a conception of justice rather than merely its implementation” because the “content, scope, and justification of a conception of justice depends on the structure and form of the practices that the conception is intended to govern” (sangiovanni, 2008, p. 138). the practice-dependent interpretation commonly takes two forms: “cultural conventionalism” and “institutionalism.” cultural conventionalism seeks to understand how “social goods…acquire value and meaning from the culturally distinct practices through which they are distributed” (sangiovanni, 2008, p. 138). these values and meanings, according to the cultural conventionalist, inform and constrain the development of principles of justice. institutionalism, on the other hand, focuses not on cultural meanings but on shared social and political institutions. “social and political institutions,” the institutionalist argues, “fundamentally alter the relations in which people stand, and hence the first principles of justice that are appropriate to them” (sangiovanni, 2008, p. 138). this analysis, however, resists both the cultural conventionalist and institutionalist frameworks in order to advance a practice-dependent account of social justice that might best be called an “infrastructuralism.” following insights from social justice theorists as varied hume (1777/1975), rawls (1993), o’neill (2000), and sen (2009), the author argues that it is neither exclusively cultural convention nor institutions that give rise to obligations of justice, but infrastructure. to flesh out an infrastructuralist account, the author relies on the concept of “infrastructural inversion” developed by geoffrey bowker (1994) and designed to keep infrastructural elements at the forefront of empirical analyses (see also: star & ruhleder, 1996; bowker & star, 1999; lee, dourish, & mark, 2006). briefly, infrastructural inversion is “…a struggle against the tendency of infrastructure to disappear (except when breaking down). it means learning to look closely at technologies and arrangements that, by design and by habit, tend to fade into the woodwork…” (bowker & star, 1999, p. 34). this approach serves to keep morally relevant features of the sociotechnical system in question—in this instance, the google books project—from “fading into the woodwork” during the course of the analysis. 1 importantly, this work takes practice-dependence as its starting point. in doing so, it sets aside debates between practice-dependent and practice-independent accounts of justice. such debates are important, but fall outside of the scope of this paper. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 google books as infrastructure of in/justice undertaking a practice-dependent analysis of google books according to a conception of social justice requires conceptualizing the project not as a “thing stripped of use,” but as infrastructure. in the process, the focus shifts from one that conceives of the service as a “what”—that is, as a tool for information access—and, instead, towards understanding google books as a “when,” occurring, following star and ruhleder (1996) “when local practices are afforded by a larger-scale technology” (p. 6). consequently, this reconceptualization affords an examination into whether or not the “egalitarianism of information” touted by google is rendered possible by the sociotechnical relations organized by the books project. in doing so, the author advocates for conceiving of sociotechnical infrastructures not as mere tools, but as potentially just or unjust things that actively mediate issues of moral and political concern. references bowker, g.c. (1994). science on the run: information management and industrial geophysics at schlumberger, 1920-1940. cambridge, ma: mit press. bowker, g.c., & star, s.l. (1999). sorting things out: classification and its consquences. cambridge, ma: mit press. bowker, g.c., baker, k., millerand, f., & ribes, d. (2010). toward information infrastructure studies: ways of knowing in a networked environment. in j. hunsinger, l. klastrup, & m. allen (eds.) international handbook of internet research, 97-117. new york, ny: springer. google, inc. (n.d.). google books history. retrieved from http://books.google.com/intl/en/googlebooks/about/history.html grimmelmann, j. (2010, january). objections and responses to the google books settlement: a report. publicinterest book search initiative at new york law school. available at: http://works.bepress.com/james_grimmelmann/30 hume, d. (1975). an enquiry concerning the principles of morals. in l.a. selby-bigge & p.h. nidditch (ed.), enquiries concerning human understanding and concerning the principles of morals by david hume (3rd ed., 169-284). oxford, uk: clarendon. (reprinted from the posthumous edition of 1777.) james, a. (2005). constructing justice for existing practice: rawls and the status quo. philosophy & public affairs, 33(3), 281-316. lee, c.p., dourish, p., & mark, g. (2006, november). the human infrastructure of cyberinfrastructure. in proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on computer supported cooperative work, 483492. acm. newman, j. (2011). the google books settlement: a private contract in the absence of adequate copyright law. scholarly and research communication, 2(1): 010106, 75 pp. o'neill, o. (2000). bounds of justice. cambridge, ma: cambridge university press. rawls, j. (1993). political liberalism. (expanded ed.). new york, ny: columbia university press. ribes, d. & j.b. polk (2012). historical ontology and infrastructure. in iconference '12 proceedings of the 2012 iconference. toronto, ca, acm: 252-264. ronzoni, m. (2009). the global order: a case of background injustice? a practice‐dependent account. philosophy & public affairs, 37(3), 229-256. sangiovanni, a. (2008). justice and the priority of politics to morality*. journal of political philosophy, 16(2), 137-164. samuelson, p. (2009). google book search and the future of books in cyberspace. minnesota law review, 94, 1308-1374. schmidt, e. (2005, october 18). books of revelation. the wall street journal. retrieved from http://online.wsj.com/article/sb112958982689471238.html sen, a. (2009). the idea of justice. cambridge, ma: belknap press. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 star, s. l., & ruhleder, k. (1996). steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: design and access for large information spaces. information systems research, 7(1), 111-134. zimmer, m. (2012). the ethical (re)design of the google books project. in iconference ’12 proceedings of the 2012 iconference, toronto, ca, acm, 363-369. doi: 10.1145/2132176.2132223 microsoft word paper submission extended 3 aug.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 digital alternatives: mobile-centric creatives anja venter center in ict4d, university of cape town introduction & overview in the city of cape town, the legislative capital of the republic of south africa located on the southern tip of africa; the visual creative industries (such as graphic design, web design, game design, industrial design, fine arts, fashion design, to name a few) have experienced a slow transformation 20 years after the advent of democracy. a quick look at the most recent statistics for the design industry show that merely 9.4% of businesses in the visual design sector are owned by “previously disadvantaged individuals” [1]. in other words, people of color (poc) who were systemically excluded from economic participation until the fall of apartheid in 1994 are not being represented in the creative economy. considering that 91% of the country’s population are poc – this frames an urgent issue of social and cultural inequality. from a cultural studies perspective, this also problematizes the visual cultural production that is currently originating from the country – whose stories are being told? and whose voices are silenced? art and visual design produce and reproduce ideology [2] and by extension, the global imaginaries of everyday life in a particular geographic location [3]. as political scientist joost smiers argues extensively in his tome arts under pressure [4] – plurality of creative and cultural expression, particularly in an age of globalization, is fundamental to the creation of knowledge and skill infrastructures that can compete in the global creative economy. today, the entirety of africa has less than 1% share in this industry, according to a recent united nations report [5]. creative careers are typically built upon years of training in visual arts, visual methods and more recently, experience in the creative use of information technologies [6]. the cultivation of these skills takes a dedicated variable of time. as such, most of the formal positions require university degrees or extensive portfolios, at the very least, to prove competence. in practice, this has lead to a very exclusive community of artists and designers, who have the power of accreditation and dedicated training, and by extension, the power to visually create the spaces that come to constitute both the physicality of the city, and it’s visual and cultural imaginaries. suggested citation (apa): venter, a. (2015, october 21-24) digital alternatives: mobile-centric creatives. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. post-apartheid, around 1% of school-going students have access to visual arts and information technology as subjects until a school-leaving level. this means that around 1% of students stand any chance of being accepted into highly competitive visual arts degrees. conversely, most of the schools that offer art or technology as subjects are located in the geographic centers of economic privilege – quietly continuing the modus operandi of apartheid right into the year 2015. effectively, these systems contribute to silencing the artistic voices of poc’s who do not have access to the resources that might offer access to cultural and economic participation. although there have been extensive white papers drawn up over the short course of the post-94 political history to address creative participation [7], these strategies have been slow in empowering more young people to participate in structuring a diverse and rich picture of art and design in south africa. although art education at schools and access to computers and broadband internet is still only accessible to a minority group in south africa, the increasingly pervasive access to mobile phones has hinted at an alternative, and increasingly accessible, tool for digital creativity. mobile phones have often been hailed as the device that will connect africa to the global information economy [8]. yet, research on their usage is currently predominantly described in terms of the consumption of, or access to, information toward “developmental” purposes (such as access to health care, employment, banking, business, and education). few studies have explicitly looked at mobile phones as a tool for generating original creative content [9]. as smartphones are becoming affordable to a larger portion of the south african population, this might signal an increase in such visual cultural production – allowing a new generation of visual creatives a platform for networked artistic expression and instrumental visual design. providing a ticket to participation on the ‘visual web’ – a means to compete in the attention economy [10] that drives international socioeconomic agendas. this research paper describes the implications of two selected case studies that were explored through an participatory action research (par) approach [11] (which includes ethnographic methods, research through design (rtd), and participatory design (pd) in uncovering the emerging creative ecologies among a group of young creatives (n=33) who are from “previously disadvantaged” backgrounds, and enrolled in extended curriculum programs1 for visual design at two institutions in cape town. i focus on evoking an understanding of the media ecologies that lead to their acceptance into these courses, based on two illustrative case studies. the findings presented here include the emergence of amateur ‘kasi2’-inspired fashion brands, networked and crowd-sourced over social networks such as whatsapp, bbm 1  the extended curriculum program is a government initiative that aims to broaden access to courses that would usually require extensive training at a secondary school 2 “kasi” is a local slang word that directly translates to “the hood” – a term used to refer to the townships in south africa. and facebook; the utilization of free image editing tools to produce promotional materials and decorative images; mobile photography as a means of documenting, editing and sharing work; self-taught proficiencies through free online resources on platforms such as youtube; and the emergence of informal learning communities on facebook. these often networked designs are providing “new social, emotional and creative cartographies” [12] for young people who seek agency and a means of personal expression – cultivating a ‘first touch’, as beth kolko [13] would frame it, of instrumental visual design. these case studies are of general interest to members of the internet studies community, but particularly to those who focus on the cultural role that mobile phones may play in low-resourced contexts, from a social science and cultural studies vantage point. these findings are also of interest to scholars of human-computer-interaction, who may gain on-the-ground insights of personalized usage among an emerging wave of technology users. from this perspective, these case studies hint at the implications for the design of creative technologies made exclusively for use on mobile phones as a standalone platform, for use among mobile-first young people who might not have access to exclusive formal design courses. the exploration of alternative access points to creative participation might signal the emergence of functional, if not accredited, designers and artists. the continuation of such research also feeds into the emerging field of post-colonial computing, and challenge the from-the-west-to-the-rest model of technology design and appropriation [14]. overview of the study this study was undertaken over a period of 18 months between two classes of visual design students. the first class was composed of 28 students who were in a mixed foundation course for fashion design, industrial design, surface design, jewellery design, and graphic design. the second comprised 36 students who were in a foundation course for graphic design only. i spent a period of 4 months at each site to conduct participant observation, and identify students for unstructured in-depth interviews. in total, i conducted 33 in-depth interviews with students for a period of one and a half hours each. these sessions included discussions of visual artifacts that participants had produced on their mobile phones and elsewhere. i obtained signed consent forms, and followed standard ethics guidelines for each of these interviews. i also “hung out” with these selected students in an informal capacity to observe their lives outside of the university context (ethics protocol was followed with these encounters as well) – activities included going shopping, hanging out with friends, or working on projects at home. this gave me deeper insights into the socio-technical and material affordances of these young people. after this period of research using ethnographic methods, i conducted three participatory design sessions with 9 students (which varied between six days, and an afternoon, in length), and two user-testing sessions, in the development of a mobile app called “molio” (the mobile portfolio). for the purposes of this paper, and the limitations of its scope, i will not explicitly focus on these sessions. instead, i present a picture of the systemic inequalities that make it difficult for young people from low-resourced backgrounds to gain access to the skills and epistemologies that are required for access into exclusive design courses. then, i offer two case studies of young people who have hacked the system to forge their interests into careers, re-mixing technologies to suit their situations, and along the way have used what they had to their disposal to create, sustain and learn. in both cases, these pictures have a shared mediator: the mobile phone. creative inequalities and mobile emancipation beyond the schooling system, access to the technologies that enable creative production and participation in online creative spaces remain limited beyond mobile access in south africa. according to a recent study [15] on access and digital technologies – 34% of the adult population in south africa now actively access the internet in one way or another. the majority of these users are young, black and live on less that r1500 a month ($118). of these internet-accessing young people, almost three-quarters use their phones to go online. the report frames this group of users as “the new wave” of internet users in the country – young people who have only recently gained access to a wider repertoire of online activities from their phones. this can be framed as the result of ever-cheapening internet-enabled handsets, and specialized data packages that offer deals for ‘pay-as-you-go’ mobile users. very recently, facebook and wikipedia, among many other curated sites, have fallen into a zero-rating tariff, on local service provider cell c under the global initiative internet.org. exorbitant data costs mean that the majority of young people have limited access to the web [16]. among my participants, this research is reflected: 30 of the students interviewed had access to internet-enabled handsets at the time of our interviews. students spent on average r50 (approximately $4) per month on airtime, and employed a number of strategies to extend this value: including switching off online service, only visiting trusted low-data websites, and owning multiple sim cards to make use of a full spectrum of deals from service providers. more than half of these students relied on their phones to do research for university courses when away from university resources. in the interview process, i directed questions towards comparisons of past and present, over a period of an averaged two years, i asked young people how they decided on their chosen career; how teachers, mentors, parents and peers played a role in that decision; their ideals, their goals; and their changing use of information technologies over the period before coming to university. this investigation was aimed at mapping the role that information technologies played in creative production, exposure to artistic resources, and enabling networks of people. questions were also directed towards eliciting the material and socio-cultural values of information technologies throughout their teenage years. many of the participants, particularly those from township-settings, have described their phones as an invaluable tool for allowing them to become familiarized with their chosen career choices before enrolling, to make contact with course conveners or older students, to archive their creative images, and in many cases, a means to find images for design purposes, share creations, and oftentimes, find jobs with their creative skills. below i describe two case studies that illustrate these alternative spaces and media for participation. the couturiers: kasi fashion i meet bongani for an interview on the field adjacent to their university design studio. he wears a red snapback cap and black skinny jeans. his hair is intricately braided, and his adidas sneakers gleam. when i compliment his outfit, he let’s out a low whistle, “all you see is swag nê, but i had to go through a lot...a lot to get here.” at the age of 16 bongani’s grandmother sent him to live with his aunt, in the largest township in cape town – a place called khayelitsha. both of his parents died of aidsrelated illnesses when he was very young, and his grandmother took him and his two younger brothers under her care. bongani was a “difficult child” – and was “mixing with the wrong crowds” back in his native port elizabeth, according to his grandmother. a creative child, with a keen interest in hip-hop subcultures and fashion design, he was oftentimes in trouble with his teachers. his school did not offer visual design or information technologies, and bongani remembers that the subjects were boring to him: “my school didn’t have anything to do with art and things like that, it’s just study study study...” the final straw was drawn when bongani was caught drinking at school, and he was put on probation pending a disciplinary hearing. his grandmother decided to send him to his aunt who had a strict, hands-on attitude toward raising children. his grandmother worked as a domestic worker for a local family who lived in the suburbs, and in bongani’s words, “she didn’t have like money or time to spend on me, and the drinking…it was…well honestly, it was bad. and i had my brothers. two young ones, and then my cousin-sisters. so, she was like aiiiiii….you musn’t show these kids to be like that, you must go be with your strict aunt.” his aunt had personal connections at a local school, and was able to secure a place for him in the 10th grade. at first, he disliked the city, “people here were different than in p.e. i didn’t like anybody, it was more dangerous and i just wanted to go home to my friends...” but he recalls a change as he entered the 11th grade. he recalls the period when he received his first mobile phone (a nokia 500) for his 18th birthday, “you can be in your room, and talk to people far. my own thing. like the best thing”. he spent hours chatting to strangers on the internet on mxit3 and later whatsapp, and met a peer who shared his interests and lived nearby. soon, bongani became friends with a group of young people from his neighbourhood who were interested in spending constructive time playing music, rapping and creating art. “like our school had one computer, but there were more computers around the kasi. and people were making hip hop. so i liked it. and i got to know some guys…so ja, we just started this crew.” their crew, whose central interests were american hip hop, freestyle rapping, and skateboarding, called themselves “the riot squad”. with mobile phones in hand, they began sending images of their crew, stylized and posed, to friends on social media such as mxit, black berry messenger (bbm) and then later, whatsapp. according to bongani, the image grew: “people were like, that’s cool. we like the style. it says something about where you are from and where you want to go. like, we ‘kasi, it’s rough but we cool. we can have the lifestyles too.” they fashioned a logo on an older friend’s laptop, using adobe photoshop, “yooooh! that laptop. yoh! man, and the program was a bit broken…like, sometimes it wouldn’t…it would just [makes low buzzing noise]…” despite the technical constraints, bongani and his friend managed to export the file, and visited a local print shop to have t-shirts made. soon, a few friends asked for shirts, and bongani saw a business opportunity, “i said ok. give me r120, i’ll make you a shirt. then i go to the print shop and they print the t-shirt for r70…maybe r60…but that’s not so nice the material…but so we make maybe r50 per shirt.” soon bongani saw value in extending the brand. they took photographs of them wearing the shirts on a friend’s samsung galaxy s, which had the best camera among them. then they used the image editor to stylize the image, and another app (he had forgotten the name) to overlay text on the image. the text simply read “order riot squad” with a bbm pincode and a telephone number spaced below it. the idea was that friends in their networks could contact them directly, via bbm or whatsapp, to place an order. effectively producing micro-advertisements, on mobile for mobile. “i didn’t know what you even called that back in the days…” bongani says about making the logo, “and then one guy asked me, ‘so are you the graphic designer for riot squad?’ and i was like ‘yes’, so now…i know that one day i want to be good at this. i 3 mxit is a south african developed chat-based social network. it gained huge popularity due to it’s low-data considerations, and was the largest social networking site on the african continent until 2010. it works on over 10000 different handsets and mobile devices. this feature-phone dominant model of chat is now, due to cheapening smartphones, directly challenged by mammoth companies such as whatsapp and facebook, resulting in plummeting user numbers. want to be a graphic designer. so i google this on my phone, where can you do this graphic design? and this school was covered by the nsfas4.” when he suggested this idea to his aunt, she went with him to visit the campus and find out about the courses. “i knew i had to send in this portfolio. we were given a list of the portfolio, what to do, things to draw like that. so there were different things whereby you had to draw on the paper, you draw a shirt and then you have to write a name on that shirt. so you could use pencil, pencil crayons; those are the two things that we used. then there were tasks like drawing someone who’s making a sandwich, and then you draw a shirt, then you draw a plastic bottle on top of a table and shoes, things like that and a book on top the table…i was like…now i must practice drawing.” during our interview, bongani pulls out his phone, he scrolls down his photo album on his nokia 500, and shows me a few photographs of pencil drawings on blue-lined folio paper. on one image, he points at a photograph of a skull tattoo, framed next to a drawing of the tattoo, “i googled for ‘skull art’, and then i put the phone here [indicated with his hand to the left of him on the desk] and i look, and on the paper, i try to make it just like that. luckily i was good. i draw a lot when i was little, i just had to find the talent again.” learning how to draw: libraries, blackberry and candlelight neo is a 21-year-old from gugulethu, another townships located on the cape flats. since he was young he loved drawing, and when he finished school (where art as a subject did not exist) he had a vision of studying art or design, “so every day i was drawing and even at school i was not good with those major subjects like maths and physics and stuff. it was the next level, my dream to be a famous artist.” neo faced a number of difficulties over the course of his young life, “so actually it’s like: i’m coming from the poor background where there is no opportunities to succeed, where there is lack of knowledge on some stuff especially in township schools there. it’s sort of like a village you know, and we’re like xhosa so there’s nothing that is coming like “wow”, we’re not rich and get those things. i was not good at school, during those periods for maths i’m drawing comics, making jokes and so on. you know like i’m also in touch to technological stuff you know, it’s like every time i would borrow my friend’s cell phone. i would like to chat or download games or just something graphic you know?” neo and his younger brother, older cousin and younger sister live with his aunt. his father passed away when he was very young, and his mother died of an illness a few years prior. for many years his aunt worked as a packer at a nearby grocery store, but 4 nsfas is the south african government student loan and bursary scheme that offers funding for students who can prove financial need. had started acting erratically over the last few years, and lost her job in 2012. after a 5month struggle, she was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia at a local mental health clinic. although she had received treatment, she is still unable to work and relies on government grants to look after the children. in neo’s mind, “i am the parent now. and when i am not home, then my cousin is the parent.” neo tried to apply for the graphic design course for both the 2012 and 2013 intake, but did not make the cut in either year, “i was not accepted because i didn’t meet the minimum requirements, and secondly my drawings were poor that time.” instead, he did some work at their church, and decided it was his duty to help support his family by taking any jobs he could find. “on 2013 i didn’t get school, i didn’t get any job, i didn’t get anything like i was just sitting at home doing nothing. so i tried to get a job but i don’t find job, i tried to get school but my dream was to be in university. when i was looking at my marks, maths and physics it’s like elementary achievement so it’s like where i’m going i didn’t have that hope that i will one day be at university. but on that year 2013, i decided to just follow my dream, to continue what i’m doing and love, which is art, drawing, designing some stuff… i started to draw and to do research; every day i woke up and went to the library just to research about drawings, how to do realistic portraits, how to do figure drawings and some stuff. keep on practicing up until i gained the skills, and after that during that year i decided to start my own business, a small business where i was doing portraits for people and charge them. because you know at that time my brother didn’t have money because he was not having a job in that year. to be able to have money i have to get clients to draw something for them so i was living that dream, like doing what i love. i was taking art as a business because i have no choice. i’ve tried to seek for jobs but i don’t get any.” “so when i started that business i was always getting one client per week, i didn’t have that marketing strategy you know. and i didn’t have that skill like to make things digital because i was not used to softwares for computers and some stuff. there was this guy there in my community, he was a graphic designer. ya so he picked me up and said, ‘you know what, when you are free you can just visit me at my home and say’. he showed me everything, i was like wow…you know, he told me that, ‘you know what, you’ve got skill bro, you’ve got talent that can make you go far’ and some stuff you know? ‘but the only thing you need to do is to get in the institution and learn more; don’t take yourself as, okay you know it all because you’ve got a talent, but talents is something that needs to be submitted of which education is the key’. so he told me that he’s a graphic designer and he’s a third year student at the university doing graphic design, and graphic design includes this and this. he showed and briefed me about graphic design and i was so excited. i was so excited in the case that there are those softwares you use to transform things and some stuff. i didnt know much about graphic design; the only thing i know about graphic design is that they do logos, but there are people that does those things without formal training. so he tells me that i can do these things called tutorials to improve my drawing. i should look on the computer at the library on youtube.” suddenly neo was exposed to graphic designers the world over, and spent his 35 minutes of free internet allowance at the library watching tutorials on drawing techniques. a technical assistant at the library saw what he was doing, and suggested that he download videos onto his phone so he could take them home with him. but at this stage, neo did not have a phone. he remembers telling a friend at church that he was looking for a mobile phone, and a lady at church gifted her old blackberry 9320 to him later in that same year. neo brought his blackberry to the library, and the technical assistant plugged it in and showed neo how he could copy videos that he could later watch at home, “sometimes the power was out, but then the phone makes some light, or then i take a candle and turn the screen down a bit so it lasts longer.” neo remembers sitting awake for long nights, concentrating on improving his drawing. during this 6-month period, he continued working as an artist in his community, volunteering at his church, and getting paid to help out at a local orphanage, keeping him busy during the days. now, at night, he could work through a handful of videos, cultivating his skills without needing to heed library times and usage rules. in january 2014 neo was accepted into the extended curriculum program for graphic design. today, he is one of the top students in the class, with a full scholarship. however, the foundation year was tough. he did not have enough money to purchase materials and food. additionally, he struggled to concentrate on his schoolwork while living with his family. he nearly failed the mid-year theory exam because he had a crisis with his aunt at home. in response, his lecturers asked for an urgent placement for him in residence. an attentive lecturer also helped him out with groceries and materials, and suggested he share his story on a local radio station. after the radio exposure, a cereal company offered him a generous scholarship. he has since made appearances on television and in print: to many, his story of overcoming adversity in the face of extreme poverty is a great inspiration. at the time we spoke, his obligations had put him in a complex moral position: “i like the res and i love class, but sometimes it doesn’t feel right…you know, when i’m here it feels wrong, and then at home people maybe are not doing well, or my aunt is walking around the streets. now my sister is in charge and it’s difficult for her. but i can always just send a whatsapp, and then go home if they need me.” discussion & conclusion: the new mobile creative both bongani and neo’s case studies illustrate the complex relationships between family, school, technology, sub-cultures, peer groups, materials and chance encounters, in assisting young people to access a formal creative education. mobile phones have played an integral part in facilitating the pathways that have enabled these young men’s journey from the kasi to the studio. bongani’s connection to a peer group that shared his interests was mediated by his access to a mobile connection. in addition, his phone allowed him to search images, document his own creations, produce content for distribution and start up a diy enterprise. “the riot squad” as an identity construction, also points at a subversion of the typical media images of township life. bongani and his crew have, through processes of visualization, crafted their own images of personal identification. through his access to digital creative media, bongani can play with these constructions and produce artifacts that are not only artistic and cultural expressions of a lived reality, offering and broadcasting a new imaginary of himself and his peers, but has also found a way to monetize these digital cultural objects through their duplication and media displays over ubiquitous social networks. by using mobile creative technologies, bongani is able to recreate the workflow of a small fashion brand on a micro-scale. additionally, bongani is actively hacking the materials available to him, to familiarize himself with literacies and skills that he would otherwise have not been exposed to. he is piecing together an education that is directly influenced by the conditions of his lived reality: the materials, technologies, cultures and social configurations that are immediately available. in his particular case, these tools have also allowed him to leverage his entertainment-driven interests into enrolment towards a formal degree. for neo, his escape from a life of poverty was a direct result of his artistic talent. however, talent alone did not allow him access into a formal visual design course. due to the direct disadvantages of not having art at school, neo was not able to spend dedicated time on refining his skills enough to produce a satisfactory portfolio for access into the university course. however, through his chance encounter with a graphic design mentor, he was introduced to the world of online tutorials. although neo had already utilized the library as a safe space to practice his drawing skills, the addition of youtube tutorials on library computers expanded his self-education. on top of this revelation, a mobile phone that could store and save videos even further expanded his resources: neo was now able to access these educational resources from anywhere, and document his work for display on-the-go. the mobile phone offered him an extension of time and space – a means to hack out his own ‘leisure time’ necessary to acquaint himself with the epistemologies and culture of his chosen profession. bourdieu [17] would surely see this as a hack – leisure time is a privilege that is usually reserved for the upper classes: “presuppose not only dispositions associated with long establishment in the world of art and culture but also economic means...and spare time.” [17] neo and bongazi present merely two instances of young people who have been able to remix their affordances into tertiary education. many of the young creatives interviewed for this project have hacked informal mobile handset tools to produce instrumental visual designs that have directly helped them socially or economically. for students who are not trained in visual design or information technology at a secondary level (like 99% of their peers in south africa) this passage into the elite world of formal design training (which is predominantly based on particular cultivated literacies such as perspective drawing and familiarity with international industry-sanctioned software that run on fast-processing desktop computers) can be incredibly difficult. this transition also raises questions around the training of visual designers, and the technologies that “legitimize” such practice. in many ways, access to mobile phones and custom remixing of available resources allowed these young people a means to exercise their talents and leverage them into an economic product – in the case of bongani’s t-shirts, and neo’s portraits. for both of these students, the university offers a pathway to formal industry. yet, these courses remain exclusive, and the yearly intake of ecp courses are limited. what happens to all of the students that do not make it into such courses? access to custom tools for mobile, or tools that are built on ruminations of these demonstrated ad-hoc applications and strategies, could perhaps offer ‘lifelines’ or ‘passports’ to young people who are unable to discover these connections and resources for themselves. such tools also contribute to the development of alternative spaces for creative practice, removed from the bottle-neck of university accreditation. at the same time, these digital expressions and related material objects indicate an emerging creative economy that plays out on mobile screens – offering a new imaginary of township life, which is dominated by negative stereotypes. instead, these young people assert agency through creativity and innovation. through this paper i invoke a call to artists, visual designers and developers to take the torch and explore mobile phones as a stand-alone design platform and learning aid for young aspiring designers. the purpose of developing such an application would be to support and enhance formal (educational and instrumental) and informal (entertainment-driven and non-instrumental) participatory cultures amongst young people who do not have primary access to computer-based design or editing software for visual creativity. in effect, such apps and tools would attempt to afford a larger demographic of young people the ability to create functional visual designs (that are for example, printable) for everyday design purposes. in addition, i advocate for the collocation of emerging design aesthetics, fostering an alternative space for visual creativity, and allow for learning that is in line with the ethos of new diy and maker movements: informal, networked, peer-led, and shared. ultimately, universities can only take in a handful of young people such as neo and bongani, and access to such courses do not guarantee the successful completion of the degree. participation remains difficult for students from township settings. perhaps ever-cheapening smart phones offer a valid digital alternative for an emerging generation of mobile-centric creatives. references [1] esme kruger and jacques lange, "ida world design survey pilot project: south african findings," sabs design institute, pretoria, pilot 2008. [2] gunther kress and theo van leeuwen, reading images: the grammar of visual design, 8th ed. new york, usa: routledge, 2004. [3] stijn reijnders, "place of the imagination," in place of the imagination: media, touism, culture. farnham: ashgate publishing limited, 2011, pp. 13 20. [4] joost smiers, arts under pressure: promoting cultural diversity in the age of globalization. london: zed books, 2003. [5] united nations conference on trade and development, "creative economy report 2010 unctad," united nations , new york, report 2010. [6] travis noakes, marion walton, anja venter, and johannes cronje, "phone to photoshop: mobile workarounds in young people's visual self-presentation strategies," in design. development. research, bellville, 2014. [7] department of arts and culture, "revised white paper on arts, culture and heritage ," department of arts and culture south africa, pretoria, white paper 2013. [8] jenny c aker and isaac m mbiti, "mobile phones and economic development in africa," journal of economic perspectives, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 207 232, 2010. [9] jonathan donner and marion walton, "public access, private mobile: the interplay of shared access and the mobile internet for teenagers in cape town," university of cape town, cape town, south africa, 2012. [10] arthur goldstruck, "internet matters: the quiet engine of the south african economy," world wide worx, pp. 38 50, 2012. [11] greg hearn, jo tacchi, marcus foth, and june lennie, action research and new media: concepts, methods and cases. cresskill: hampton press, inc., 2009. [12] marsha berry and max schleser, mobile media making in an age of smartphones, 1st ed., marsha berry and max schleser, eds. new york, usa: palgrave pivot, 2014. [13] beth e kolko and cyntha putnam, "computer games in the developing world: the value of non-intrumental engagment with icts, or taking play seriously," the human development report, pp. 1-9, 2008. [14] lilly irani, janet vertesi, paul dourish, kavita philip, and rebecca e grinter, "postcolonial computing: a lens of design and development," in chi '10 proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems pages 1311-1320 , new york, 2010, pp. 1311-1320. [15] indra de lanerolle, "the new wave," university of witwatersrand, johannesburg, 2012. [16] marion walton and jonathan donner, "spatial injustices and mobile communication: patterns of internet access in urban south africa," in 2012 ica mobile communication pre-conference workshop, arizona, 2012. [17] pierre bourdieu, distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste. london: routledge, 1984. [18] tino kreutzer, "assessing cell phone usage in a south african township school," international journal of education and development using ict, vol. 5, no. 5, 2009, [online] available: http://ijedict.dec.uwi.edu/viewarticle.php?id=862. [19] nic bidwell. (2014) decolonizing. [online]. www.nicbidwell.me selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): baym, n., shifman, l., persaud, c., & wagman, k. (2019, october 2-5). intelligent failures: clippy memes and the limits of digital assistants. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. intelligent failures: clippy memes and the limits of digital assistants nancy k. baym microsoft research limor shifman hebrew university of jerusalem christopher persaud university of southern california kelly wagman massachusetts institute of technology it looks like you’re trying “it looks like you’re trying to write a letter. would you like help with that?” this now-iconic query was posed by clippy, an animated paperclip with fierce eyebrows, beseeching eyes, and fatal shortcomings in its ability to determine when users actually needed help. often hated during its lifespan in product (1996-2006), the character has nonetheless persisted, finding a vibrant afterlife in comedic treatments, digital art, artisanal stitchwork available on sites like etsy, easter eggs in other software, and, as this paper discusses, memes. why, we ask, should a questionable character from a software program that has been out of use for well over a decade have so vibrant an afterlife? if clippy has become a rhetorical resource, what is it being used to do? drawing from a corpus of 1,148 memes (340 of which were unique) collected from five sites, we argue that the answer, at least in part, is that clippy’s dual status as the original natural-language digital assistant, one that fell critically short in its ability to actually assist, makes it an ideal vehicle for critique of today’s ubiquitous assistants. since humorous memes rely on inappropriate juxtaposition, a meme in which clippy suggested citation (apa): baym, n. k., shifman, l, persaud, c, & wagman, b. (2019, october 2-5). paper title. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. behaves as one wants a virtual assistant to behave is a bad meme. analysis of clippy memes thus offers a lens through which to understand cultural attitudes about the limits of contemporary virtual assistants such as alexa, siri, and cortana. much of the contemporary literature on digital assistants and conversational agents explores technologies as direct communication partners (guzman, 2017), representations of race and ethnicity (marino, 2014), and gender (phan, 2017; woods, 2018). as a non (or male) gendered animated paperclip, clippy provides a provocative contrast with the feminine yet disembodied virtual assistants of today. moreover, as this paper shows, the memetic afterlife of clippy reflects on the multiple kinds of “intelligence” at play in artificial intelligence. gardner’s (1983) classic intelligence typology, for instance, included (among others) bodilykinesthetic, logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial, inter-personal (communication with awareness to others’ feelings), and intra-personal (self-awareness) intelligences. suggested citation (apa): baym, n. k., shifman, l, persaud, c, & wagman, b. (2019, october 2-5). paper title. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. a brief biography of clippy originally called clippit, clippy, illustrated by kevan atteberry, made its public debut in microsoft’s office 97. clippy was based in large part on research by clifford nass and byron reeves’s “computers as social actors” (casa) theory that people understand and treat computers as if they were people. clippy drew on wizards, natural language processing, predictive computing, and user goal-modeling in efforts to detect the user’s activity and, when appropriate, to offer help. clippy quickly became notorious for interrupting when it was not wanted; it failed to model user goals correctly, and it failed as a communicator. after a series of downgrades, clippy was removed entirely in office 2007. clippy in memetic humor clippy the product may have disappeared, but clippy the icon endured as a focus of both affection and humor. while early clippy humor highlighted its mechanistic behavior in contrast to human flexibility (shifman & blondeim, 2010), in the years since its downfall, the variety of comic texts featuring clippy grew dramatically. we conceptualize this flow of humor as an internet meme, since it’s a form of user-generated content based on imitation with variation (milner, 2016). the shared feature that turns a group of texts into a meme may relate to form (layout and physical components), content (ideas and ideologies), or stance (the author’s position in relation to the text) (shifman, 2013). an initial examination of clippy humor along this model suggests that while the paper clip itself is the shared component that holds this group of texts together (no pun intended), texts’ content and stance vary greatly. in terms of content, we explore the personality characteristics ascribed to clippy, and ask in which realms of life it offers assistance. with regards to stance, we investigate questions that relate to identification, striving to reveal when users see clippy as the “other” and when it functions as an extension of the self. methods we collected memes from the websites know your meme, me.me, tumblr, instagram, and reddit. we searched the keyword "clippy" on each of the websites, captured the source code from the resulting webpages, and extracted the image urls. this resulted in 3,016 images. we manually cleaned that set of images to remove those unrelated to clippy (such as hair clips) or those that were merely stylistic references (e.g. vaporwave imagery or pictures of paperclips). we used an iterative inductive approach to code the resulting 354 images. our initial analysis yielded 14 non-mutually exclusive categories: clippy’s character (mean/snarky, mechanistic, or nice/earnest); clippy’s environment (or “friends”, including ai assistants, internet/fandom culture and microsoft-related); what clippy offers to assist with (bodily functions, conceptual/political concerns, creative output, dark temptations, and life/work skills) and perception of clippy (as annoying, omnipotent, and pitiful). we then suggested citation (apa): baym, n. k., shifman, l, persaud, c, & wagman, b. (2019, october 2-5). paper title. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. examined the overlaps between these categories. finally, we examined what kinds of intelligences are at play in each category. findings and discussion an overarching evaluation of the categories in light of gardner’s (1983) aforementioned typology of intelligence leads to two interrelated conclusions. first, clippy humor relies on the contrast between types of intelligence. in the memes, clippy is often too good at one kind, while lacking in another. in particular, clippy lacks interpersonal intelligence: even when it taps into the user’s intrapersonal intelligence (as reflections of the self, clippy has access to the most private thoughts and emotions of the user), it serves as a disruptive mediator between that person and the world, as well as other human beings. clippy is at its savviest when it assists users in voicing their dislike and scorn towards others, and when it lures them towards self-destruction. it is almost useless for any other mission, and seems particularly comical when it tries to tap into bodily/kinesthetic intelligence. yet this failure in “knowing its limits” is also what gives clippy character. clippy is not adaptive: its lack of interpersonal intelligence prevents it from smoothly interacting with anyone or anything, making its presence stand out time and again. this constant failure makes clippy less effective but more interesting and, at least in retrospect, endearing, than contemporary adaptive digital assistance. this suggests that digital assistants must attend to multiple kinds of intelligences. attending to any one over others may create an endearing character but won’t create an effective digital assistant. furthermore, the fact that the unbending yet personality-filled character of clippy remains ungendered or male gives us richer insight into gendered power dynamics of the pliant and empty characters of the female gendered alexa, siri, and cortana. references gardner, howard e. intelligence reframed: multiple intelligences for the 21st century. hachette uk, 2000. guzman, a.l. (2017). making ai safe for humans: a conversation with siri. in r.w. gehl and m. bakardjieva (eds)., socialbots & their friends: digital media and the automation of sociality (pp. 69-82). new york: routledge. guzman, andrea l., ed. human-machine communication: rethinking communication, technology, and ourselves. new edition. new york, ny: peter lang inc., international academic publishers, 2018. marino, mark c. “the racial formation of chatbots.” clcweb: comparative literature and culture 16, no. 5 (2014). milner, ryan m. the world made meme: public conversations and participatory media. mit press, 2016. suggested citation (apa): baym, n. k., shifman, l, persaud, c, & wagman, b. (2019, october 2-5). paper title. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. phan, thao. “the materiality of the digital and the gendered voice of siri.” transformations, no. 29 (2017) shifman, limor, and menahem blondheim. "the medium is the joke: online humor about and by networked computers." new media & society 12, no. 8 (2010): 1348-1367. shifman, limor. memes in digital culture. mit press, 2014. woods, heather suzanne. “asking more of siri and alexa: feminine persona in service of surveillance capitalism.” critical studies in media communication 35, no. 4 (2018): 334–49. saariketo aoir2018 selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 feeling the rhythms of code networked digital devices and algorithmic processes of data mining have become fundamentally intertwined in people’s daily lives. conceptualizations such as softwarization (manovich 2013), datafication (mayer-schönberger & cukier 2013; van dijck 2014), and code/space(-time) (kitchin & dodge 2011; kitchin 2017) have offered insights into the power dynamics of code in shaping our lives, actions, and environments. yet, only rarely has software been studied from the perspective of people’s everyday experiences and meaning making practices (see e.g. bucher 2017). i embark from the proposition that in order to understand the sociotechnical power of software, it is not enough to analyze its technical mechanisms. the code-based infrastructures are not merely external frames or background in our daily lives, but people contribute to their production and maintenance with mundane activities and interactions (kitchin & dodge 2011; ridell 2013). due to this mutual shaping, it is substantial to understand how people experience the everyday code-based environments and how they negotiate the places of technology in their daily lives. in previous research, it has been noted that despite the proliferation of code-based technology, people pay little attention to the conditions of software (e.g. kitchin & dodge 2011). with the concept ‘technological unconscious’, geographers nigel thrift and shaun french (2002) capture the process in which computation has sunk as a selfevident, unseen and unknown part of the everyday. in spite of its taken-for-granted and hidden existence, code structures and times daily lives in ways that evoke feelings. in the presentation, these feelings are analyzed as cues of the power of software. the research design is inspired by the so-called privacy mirrors (nguyen & mynatt 2002). the research intervention aims at enabling reflection on the “absent presence” of software with visualisations of daily ict use. in the autumn 2017, 13 participants (aged 27–45) used tracking software (rescuetime, manictime, app usage or realizd) in their smartphones and computers and kept a media diary for seven days. these applications tracked how often, how long, and when use occurred. the tracker provided data on such use that is otherwise difficult to record, and the media diary provided a chance to report observations and feelings as well as additional information that was not recorded by the software (e.g. who with messages were exchanged, why an app was used). in the analysis, i concentrate on the qualitative interview data as they open up a minna saariketo, aalto university suggested citation (apa): saariketo, m. (2018, october 10-13 feeling the rhythms of code. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. nuanced outlook to experiences on living in the technologically mediated world. tracker data and media diaries were used as artefacts to initiate discussion. the semistructured interviews included questions on use of media devices, thoughts on tracked data, and the politics of platforms. the participants were invited to participate in the interpretative process by commenting on the results in the winter 2018. in previous studies, similar research design has been applied in studying how people engage with their heart-rate variability measurement data (ruckenstein 2014) or data from their smartphones (pybus et al. 2015). in the analysis, i applied henri lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis (1992/2004). lefebvre’s methodological reflections on the rhythmics of everyday life resonate prolifically with the idea of technological unconscious. the power of software actualizes in the way it structures, organizes, and imposes spatial-temporal rhythms. both rhythms and software become commonly perceivable through disruptions or deviation (kitchin & dodge 2011; lefebvre & régulier 2004). thus, rhythmanalysis is used to understand how people as users of icts feel the bundle of rhythms orchestrated by technology. the concept ‘rhythm’ enables analysis of the manifold experiences of living in a complex technological environment, in which people as users are not straightforward in control any more than technology straightforward determines actions. tracing how people describe feelings induced in encounters with technology from the research data leads to what moves and matters to the participants. the analysis describes experiential landscapes of users who self-identify as having intense relationships to networked technology. the manifold experiences they depict arise from complicated intertwinements of technological and non-technological rhythms. simultaneously, technology is perceived as an aid in organizing and managing the everyday, but it also induces feelings of losing control, chaos, and burden. the “absent presence” of software becomes visible when the fluency of daily life is disturbed: failures and abrupt moments of unavailability are a source of anguish, irritation, frustration, stress, and panic. technology is experienced as a source of discord, when it forces practices, alters routines in unpleasant ways, or imposes temporal arrangements that are tiring, distracting, hooking, or too time-consuming. the results diversify understandings of the power of software in everyday life. although infrastructural conditions, such as data mining, are taken-for-granted and people submit to the terms of use offered, my analysis demonstrates that people actively negotiate their relation to devices and applications vis-à-vis the temporal organization of the everyday. this is exemplified in creating device-free zones, quitting using timeconsuming applications, switching from smartphone to “basic model”, and using an app to block access to social media. a different, but equally interesting, negotiation is taking place, when a smart watch is purchased to free oneself from having to check the smart phone or when the negative feedback from one’s constant smartphone use is interpreted as a result of society not being ready for the pioneer style of intense use. outcomes from the intervention encourage developing further research designs that use the means of softwarization itself (e.g. tracking and digital traces) to enable critical reflection. references bucher, t. (2017) the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms. information, communication & society, 20:1, 30–44. kitchin, m. & dodge, r. (2011) code/space. software and everyday life. cambridge & london: the mit press. kitchin, r. (2017) the timescapes of smart cities. the programmable city working paper 35. pre-publication available at socarxiv https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/y4e8p lefebvre, h. (1992/2004) rhythmanalysis. space, time and everyday life. london & new york: continuum. lefebvre, h. & régulier, c. (1985/2004) the rhythmanalytical project. in lefebvre, h. rhythmanalysis. space, time and everyday life. london & new york: continuum, 73– 83. manovich, l. (2013) software takes command. new york: bloomsberg. mayer-schönberger, v. & cukier, k. (2013) big data: a revolution that will transform how we live, work and think. new york: houghton mifflin harcourt. nguyen, d. h. & mynatt, e. d. (2002) privacy mirrors: understanding and shaping sociotechnical ubiquitous computing systems. everyday computing lab, college of computing and gvu center, georgia institute of technology, ftp://130.207.127.123/pub/groups/gvu/tr/2002/2002-2016.pdf. pybus, j. & coté, m. & blanke, t. (2015) hacking the social life of big data. big data & society 1–10. ridell, s. (2013) the city as a medium of media. in tosoni, simone and tarantino, m. and giaccardi, c. (eds.) media and the city: urbanism, technology and communication. newcastle: cambridge scholars publishing, 32–50. ruckenstein, m. (2014) visualized and interacted life: personal analytics and engagements with data doubles. societies 4, 68–84. thrift, n. & french, s. (2002) the automatic production of space. transactions of the institute of british geographers, 27:3, 309–335. van dijck, j. (2014) datafication, dataism and dataveillance: big data between scientific paradigm and ideology. surveillance & society 12:2, 197–208. microsoft word milan-vdvelden-data-grassroots.docx selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): milan, stefania and van der velden, lonneke. (2017, october 18-21). data politics at the grassroots. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. data politics at the grassroots stefania milan university of amsterdam & university of oslo lonneke van der velden university of amsterdam in the age of datafication we increasingly witness the emergence of transformative experiments of engagement with data that see citizens to put data to new uses. these “moments where meaningful change can occur, even if those changes are (…) tinged with technocracy” (schrock, 2016, p. 583), speak to the unprecedented possibility for ordinary people to foster social change by engaging in data politics. civic hackers seek to improve institutional output and democratic governance (townsend, 2013); data visualization has become part of the activists’ skillset (tactical tech collective, 2013); capacity building manuals target low-skill users. meanwhile, activists counter massive data collection by means of resistance and obfuscation, offering trainings and off-theshelves tools to secure digital communications (kazansky, 2016). we subsume these diverse manifestations of an emerging bottom-up critical attitude towards massive data collection under the rubric of “data activism”. data activism embraces the composite series of practices that, emerging at the fringes of contemporary activism ecosystem, critically interrogate datafication and its socio-political consequences. data activism identifies as well as intercepts emergent “networked publics”, as they are structured by data and software and the related imaginaries (see boyd, 2010). two elements characterize data activism: its sociotechnical nature and the mobilization factor. first, data activism is enabled and constrained by data and software, both its availability and its pursuit—and this special relation shapes tactics, identities, and modes of organizing. second, data activism represents an instance of political mobilization explicitly confronting or engaging with datafication. this definition foregrounds democratic agency, while taking a holistic perspective that unites under the same label instances of affirmative engagement with data and tactics of resistance to surveillance. groups active in this domain range from techand digital rights-oriented nongovernmental organizations to informal communities of hackers and developers involved in designing encryption tools. innovative alliances emerge when, for example, journalists collaborate with advocates and progressive data analysts, or environmental activists look for data experts in order to support their campaigns. data is increasingly perceived as a crosscutting, sine-qua-non tool for participation in today’s democratic life. the social forces supporting these incipient activism practices are not new. for one, current data activism is modeled after hacker cultures and rituals: similarly, data activists preach technical engagement as a way of confronting elite expertise and taking control over technology. there is, however, a novel attempt to move beyond the expert niche to involve and empower lay users (milan, 2017). nonetheless, and despite data activism is imbued with an ethos of inclusion and empowerment, it still presents evident limitations insofar as expertise remains a key determinant for engagement. we argue that data activism is a tool to think politically about big data from the perspective of users. this theoretical article explores the notion of data activism as a new entry in the conceptual toolbox of contemporary digital activism research. it offers a conceptual map to approach grassroots engagement with data from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining science and technology studies with political sociology/theory. it zooms in three ways of mobilizing the notion of data activism for research purposes, as derived from our empirical work within the datactive project1: #1 as a heuristic tool for empirical analysis and theoretical development; #2 as (a) novel epistemic culture(s) emerging within civil society; #3 as a speculative device to rethink the definition of citizenship and the state/citizen relation with respect to digitalization and datafication. in what follows we briefly outline these three possibilities. #1 data activism as a heuristic tool data activism constitutes a valuable heuristic tool for the study of political participation and civil engagement in the age of datafication. as such, it presents four features. it is a composite concept because, as its interdisciplinary origin suggests, it is made of parts: at the minimum people, contention, information, and technology. it is polyfunctional as it can be read through diverse disciplinary lenses, and can be domesticated to investigate different dynamics and relations. third, it encourages us to adopt a holistic perspective, as it brings together the opportunities and the threats brought forward by datafication and the varied response of the grassroots (engagement/resistance). by taking data activism as a whole, we acknowledge engagement and resistance adhere to the same phenomenon, whose components cannot be fully understood if taken in isolation. finally, the notion of data activism is polysemic: “activism” embraces distinct practices as discrete but complementary means to achieving political goals, allowing different attitudes towards institutions and social norms to coexist (milan & van der velden, 2016). we distinguish two forms of data activism: i) proactive data activism, which identifies affirmative uses of data for advocacy and social change, and ii) reactive data activism, which on the contrary embraces instances of resistance to massive data collection. 1 see https://data-activism.net. the datactive project explores the evolution of activism and democratic participation vis-à-vis datafication. it is supported by a starting grant of the european research council awarded to stefania milan as principal investigator (stg-2014_639379). while these represent merely ideal-type, fluid categories, they provide a useful map to make sense of forms of activism that are usually considered in isolation from each other, but that, we argue, can only be properly understood in their relation to datafication as the fundamental paradigm change of our age. #2 data activism as novel epistemic cultures big data constitutes a novel, powerful system of knowledge with its own epistemology and (seductive, simplified) representations. they have the potential to alter our vision of the world and our “theory of knowledge”. as a response to the big data phenomenon, data activism can be seen as an exercise in creating alternative ways of seeing the world, while questioning the positivism ethos of the “data revolution” and criticizing the control by the elites over the “politics of representation” (fraser, 2005). data activism represents a set of novel epistemic cultures emerging within civil society: a way of making counter-discourses challenging the mainstream readings of reality or “producing new languages or modifying old ones so as to find words for novel phenomena” (jasanoff, 2004, p. 41). epistemic cultures shape the way we relate to knowledge and its validation, how we understand and filter the world around us as well as our experiences. data activism, postulating a critical/active engagement with data, its forms, and its infrastructure, functions as a producer of counter-expertise and alternative epistemologies, making sense of data as a way of knowing the world and turning it into a point of intervention (milan & van der velden, 2016). in so doing, data activists challenge and change the mainstream politics of knowledge, and operate as mediators between the dominant algorithmic culture and the citizenry. #3 data activism as redefinition of citizenship a third way of reading data activism is through the lenses of political theory. data activism encourages us to rethink the relationship between the state and its citizens. these practices can be seen as an instance of revitalization of the citizens’ democratic agency. they build upon the ongoing crisis of the liberal democracy as it is being accelerated by “surveillance capitalism” (zuboff, 2015), and carve out spaces that intercept the growing demand for participation and direct engagement with public matters. they create bridges between different organizational cultures, including the corporate one, and seek to construct public space that subvert the “algorithmic citizenship” (cheney-lippold, 2011) as defined by the state apparatus. in the same way in which the rise of the network society observed by castells (2009) has altered the relation between the state and civil society, data activism has the potential to change the way people enact their democratic agency. positing data as an object of contention and intervention and fostering citizen empowerment thanks to the direct engagement with data and data infrastructure, data activism comes to constitute a novel “politics of the quotidian” (rodriguez, 2001) that expands and multiplies spaces and opportunities for political action. moving towards a technical notion of citizenship (feenberg, 2011), data activism encourage us to take democratic innovations seriously, and to see resilience and mobilization as democratic processes of the everyday—and by extension to reconsider the definition and evolution of citizenship with respect to digitalization and datafication. cited works boyd, dana. (2010). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in z. papacharissi (ed.), networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 39–58). routledge. castells, m. (2009). communication power. oxford: oxford university press. cheney-lippold, j. (2011). a new algorithmic identity soft biopolitics and the modulation of control. theory, culture & society, 28(6), 164–181. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276411424420 feenberg, a. (2011). agency and citizenship in a technological society. presented at the the course on digital citizenship, it university of copenhagen. fraser, n. (2005). regraming injustice in a globalizing world. new left review, 36. jasanoff, s. (ed.). (2004). states of knowledge: the co-production of science and the social order. new york: routledge. kazansky, b. (2016). digital security in context: learning how human rights defenders adopt digital security practices. retrieved from https://secresearch.tacticaltech.org/media/pages/pdfs/original/digitalsecurityinco ntext.pdf?1459444650 milan, s. (2017). data activism as the new frontier of media activism. in v. pickard & g. yang (eds.), media activism in the digital age (pp. 151–163). new york: routledge. milan, s., & van der velden, l. (2016). the alternative epistemologies of data activism. digital culture & society, 2(2), 57–74. https://doi.org/10.14361/dcs-2016-0205 rodriguez, c. (2001). fissures in the mediascape. an international study of citizens’ media. cresskill, nj: hampton press. schrock, a. r. (2016). civic hacking as data activism and advocacy: a history from publicity to open government data. new media & society, 18(4), 581–599. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816629469 tactical tech collective. (2013). visualising information for advocacy. bangalore: tactical tech collective. townsend, a. m. (2013). smart cities: big data, civic hackers, and the quest for a new utopia. new york and london: w. w. norton & company. zuboff, s. (2015). big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization. journal of information technology, 30, 75–89. for more information see https://data-activism.net and follow @data_ctive on twitter selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): tirthali, d. & murai y. (2019, october 2-5). don’t just say thank you: exploration of types of posts inspiring and hindering deep conversations online. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. don’t just say thank you: exploration of types of posts inspiring and hindering deep conversations online. devayani tirthali independent researcher yumiko murai massachusetts institute of technology how can we create an online learning environment that is so engaging that learners keep learning together beyond the given course period? this paper reports on an experience of a free open online course “learning creative learning” launched in the fall of 2017. primary aim of the course was to facilitate the development of a community of educators and designers as they learned about the creative learning framework through engagement in hands-on, peer-supported, project-based activities (resnick, 2017). cormier (2014) experimented with the idea of ‘community as the curriculum’ in his open online course on rhizomatic education. his objective was to "organize an ecosystem where people form affinity connections" that continue beyond the course. another example is siemen and downes' cmooc on connectivist learning created with a vision of learners owning their interaction space (siemens in hollands & tirthali, 2014). both these courses were spread out across various platforms chosen by the participants instead of a central course space and did not follow a pre-set curriculum. many participants thrive with the openness but some also flounder due to the lack of structure (mackness & bell, 2015). the course learning creative learning tried to find a space in between the highly structured instructor-centred space of a massive open online course (mooc) and the wide open space of the cmoocs. it was organized as self-paced modules including a short video, reading materials, a hands-on activity, reflection prompts, and extra reading materials for those interested in learning more. in addition to the facilitator prompted structured discussions every week, an open discussion forum was created where participants could start their own discussion thread. by creating this open online discussion space, the course attempted to create an environment similar to participantdriven open online communities. in contrast to most moocs, that are often highly structured and instructor-driven (swan, day, bogle, & prooyen, 2014), participant-driven open online communities, where people gather to share questions and seek information related to their interest on the platforms such as twitter, reddit, or stack overflow, tends to achieve high and sustained engagement. this is because open online environments tend to provide freedom for the participants to discuss topics they are most interested in, with people they are interested to interact with, sharing specific real-world cases that are meaningful to them (ahn, butler, alam, & webster, 2013). in a structured online discussion, facilitators play a crucial role in shaping the discussion to meet their goals, making sure all members engage in a focused and deeper conversation one way or another. in an open online discussion, on the other hand, where there is no fixed structure or facilitator, every participant’s action is a driving force that impacts the depth and direction of a conversation. employing both quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis, we examined the open online discussion forum, specifically looking at the impact of participant actions as facilitative moves to gain a better understanding of the types of actions in the discussion that inspired deeper engagement with the ideas of interest. this will inform course developers and organizers about the types of actions they should support in order to promote sustained participant engagement. in this paper, we will first share the analysis of the patterns of conversational pairs based on types of posts, and then we will present examples of discussion threads to highlight the ways in which deeper conversation evolves over time. about the course the online course “learning creative learning” that we looked at, was the third edition of the course started in 2013 (schmidt et al., 2014), aimed to introduce the constructionist pedagogical approach creative learning (resnick, 2018) to educators around the world. the course was organized in six modules, each designed to take one week to go through. every module consisted of a short video introducing the topic of the week, short reading materials, a hands-on activity that they can do on their own, reflection prompts to be discussed in the discussion forum, and additional resources for further reading (figure 1). each module was independent allowing learners to go through the materials at their own pace, in the order they want. at the same time, participants were encouraged to participate in conversations with other participants in the discussion forum (figure 2) as well as in the weekly conference call which was an opportunity for participants to engage in synchronous conversations with other participants. for the discussion forum, an open source tool called discourse.org was used. for the weekly conference call, another open source tool called unhangout (sethi, mcconachie, detar & schmidt, 2014) was used. the course was designed to support learner agency and self-directed learning, rather than driving them with extrinsic rewards such as grades and credentials. figure 1: website figure 2: discussion forum methods we analysed 32 threads with 172 total posts from the open discussion forum. we started with process coding (saldana, 2016). the codes were then grouped in smaller number of categories to allow analysis of sequences based on jeong’s (2003) discussion analysis tool (dat). dat is a predictive tool, created in ms excel, that estimates which types of sequences of posts or interactions are most likely to occur in a threaded discussion; for example, how likely does a post sharing experience elicit responses as opposed to a post citing a reading; what kind of responses will these posts elicit? we zeroed down on four categories from the second coding process: type 1 (t1). asking question: posts that include a question or request to others. type 2 (t2). sharing resources: posts that point readers to an external content such as a paragraph from readings, relevant websites or pedagogical resources. type 3 (t3). sharing opinion, practice, experience or anecdote: posts that are primarily about the participant’s own ideas or experiences. type 4 (t4). acknowledging: posts that are intend to thank the respondent, applauding or what lowes (2007) terms cheerleading. very few posts were purely of one type. therefore, we also considered combinations of categories i.e. t1+2, t1+3, and t2+3 bringing us to seven categories. dat was used to build matrix of sequences (post type-response type) and calculate probability for each type following the other. the sequential analysis was chosen to explore the type of posts that keeps conversations going. in contrast to content analysis, it focuses not on the individual message, but on the relationship between messages in a threaded discussion. the dat tool helped handle multiple levels of branching sub-threads instead of manually counting permutations and combinations of interaction units. we also conducted a close reading of two conversation threads to see if/in what way multi-level threaded discussions that seem robust structurally, build on each other’s ideas. the threads selected for close reading had similar sequence structures and had multiple levels of sub-threads. findings and discussion the sequence analysis revealed that out of 172 posts 113 posts shared personal experiences or opinions (t3) either by themselves or in combination with a question (t1) based on it. here are some key points we gleaned from the probability matrix: • a reply just acknowledging the previous post did not get any response. it ended the conversation. • if a post shared only a resource (t2) there was a 40% chance that it received just acknowledgement in response and the conversation died after that. if there was a question embedded in the post, the reply rate was 87% and the responses were mostly of the type “sharing experience, suggesting practice, sharing opinion” • there was about 60% or more chance that responses focused on sharing experiences or opinions about teaching practices (t3), when the post was mainly personal experience (t3), a question (t1), or a question in combination with other categories. participants seemed to be more comfortable sharing tangible things such as teaching experiences or ‘how to’ of practice rather than discussing abstract ideas/concepts. these results highlight the importance of sharing personal experiences and opinions in attracting more contributions from other participants. in order to further understand how dialogues evolved and to triangulate the findings from the matrix analysis, we took a closer look at two threads. both threads consisted of multiple lines of conversation that were structurally complex. thread a was an example in which the original proposer showed a high degree of commitment to facilitate responses posted in the thread. the original proposer replied to most responses, either acknowledging the contribution or sharing further related experiences. interestingly, while the original proposer’s responsiveness kept the thread active, there was almost no follow-up response when she acknowledged replies. this is consistent with our matrix analysis described above. social presence of facilitators is deemed important for encouraging participation in an online forum (garrison, anderson & archer, 2000). however, the frequent response by this original proposer did not necessarily inspire others to make more contribution, and as a result, the responses did not build on each other’s ideas. another pattern that stood out in this thread was that the sub-threads that slightly diverged from the original post tended to prosper more than the ones that were strictly answering the original question. this may imply that both acknowledgement and the response specifically pointing to the question closed down the conversation by signifying that the interaction with the original poster had concluded. in contrast to thread a, thread b was started with a conceptual question about creative learning, the pedagogical approach featured in this course. although some responses engaged with the concept itself exploring its nuances, it was difficult to keep participants focused on the abstract. many of the participants responded with a post exploring the nuances of the abstract concept by sharing what it meant for their practice. as a result, wherever the sub-threads started, it ended in sharing experiences and inspired responses comparing and contrasting each other’s experiences. in contrast to the weekly discussion prompts, the open discussion space allowed participants to share personal stories in relation to the questions they had. it also enabled people to collectively explore an idea, when there was no correct answer. by exchanging their questions and their thoughts back and forth, participants built a deeper understanding of the topic. these observations point to the value of having open discussion spaces for participants in online learning communities. conclusion this study examined an open online discussion forum to explore how different types of participant actions in the discussion inspired or hindered engagement with the idea of interest. overall, the analysis highlighted the value of having an open discussion space in an online course. open discussion space not only allowed people to collectively build understanding about a topic but also helped them ground those discussion in personal experiences. we also found that a post acknowledging the previous post, thanking for resources provided, or agreeing with the previous post might be useful to build community, but by itself, it made it difficult for the conversations to last. on the other hand, an interaction perceived as incomplete or a diverging response, tended to create a space for others to contribute more. the purpose of the study was to hone the course design and delivery. we identified the following implications for design and facilitation. firstly, the course organizers can model posting open-ended questions or responses. for example, they can post a response highlighting facets of the original post that are not yet discussed but has a personal connection. secondly, they can encourage participants to be responsive, but not for the sake of responding. the analysis also implied that sometimes deviating from conversation ends up in a more engaging interaction. this means that rather than just leaving a thank-you note, adding a question, a piece of resource, or pointing to a different way of looking at a concept might help others to join the conversation. thirdly, it is important to create a culture where people feel comfortable to share their personal experiences. the facilitators can model this type of participation by sharing her own experiences. in addition to the design implications, this also proved to be an exploration of the ways to look at large scale discussion forum data with a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis that can be applied to other medium scale discussion forums. references ahn, j., butler, b. s., alam, a., & webster, s. a. (2013). learner participation and engagement in open online courses: insights from the peer 2 peer university. journal of online learning and teaching, 9(2), 160-171. cormier, d. (2014). rhizo14 -the mooc that community built. international journal for innovation and quality in learning, 107. garrison, d., anderson t. & archer, w (2000). critical inquiry in a text-based environment: computer conferencing in higher education. the internet and higher education, 2: 87–105. hollands, f. m. & tirthali, d. (2014). moocs: expectations and reality. center for benefit-cost studies of education, teachers college, columbia university, 138. jeong, a. (2003). sequential analysis of group interaction and critical thinking in online threaded discussions. american journal of distance education, 17(1), 25–43. lowes, s., lin, p., & wang, y. (2007). studying the effectiveness of the discussion forum in online professional development courses, journal of interactive online learning, 6 (3). 181-210. mackness j. & bell f. (2015) rhizo14: a rhizomatic learning cmooc in sunlight and in shade. open praxis 7(1), pp. 25–38. resnick, m. (2017). lifelong kindergarten: cultivating creativity through projects, passions, peers, and play. cambridge, ma: mit press. saldana, j. (2016). the coding manual for qualitative researchers. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. schmidt, p., resnick, m., rusk, n. (2014). learning creative learning: how we tinkered with moocs. retrieved from http://reports.p2pu.org/learning-creativelearning. sethi, s., mcconachie, k., detar, c., & schmidt, p. (2014). unhangout. mit media lab. retrieved from http://unhangout.media.mit.edu swan, k., day, s., bogle, l., & van prooyen, t. (2015). amp: a tool for characterizing the pedagogical approaches of moocs. moocs and open education around the world, 105-118. microsoft word ir16-template-final.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): clark, l.s. (2015, october 21-24). participants on the margins: examining the use of snapchat, facebook, and twitter among political newcomers during the student ferguson protests. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. participants on the margins: examining the use of snapchat, facebook, and twitter among political newcomers during the student ferguson protests lynn schofield clark university of denver introduction “whites torch cop cars and destroy property after baseball games: rowdy. blacks torch cop cars and destroy property after cops get away with murder: savages.” observation attributed to a comment in worldstarhiphop.com and circulated via blogs, tweets, tumblrs, and instagram, december 5, 2014. in late november and early december 2014, thousands of people in more than 170 cities across the u.s. participated in demonstrations protesting the grand jury decision not to indict officer darren wilson in the shooting death of unarmed teenager michael brown (almasy & yan 2014). a week after the decision in ferguson, mo, protests widened after the new york grand jury declined to indict an nypd officer in the case of eric garner, an unarmed man who resisted arrest and then died when placed in an apparent chokehold. by early december, as protests continued, several began speculating that this was the beginning of a new social movement decrying not only racial bias in law enforcement, but also the wider social and economic system that reinforces disadvantage among u.s. young people of color (blake 2014; madhani and alcinor 2014; roth 2014). through a variety of media platforms, voices within this emergent movement discussed interrelated issues of racial profiling, police brutality and police accountability, and criminal justice reforms aimed at ending the “school to prison pipeline” through increased investment in urban educational and economic opportunities (roth 2014). young activists such as 20-year-old rasheen aldridge were invited to the white house; other young people, who had staged protests beginning with michael brown’s death in august 2014, formed organizations such as millennial activists united, hands up united, and lost voices to continue coordination of protest efforts (corey 2014; swaine 2014). by late november in areas around new york city, boston, philadelphia, oakland (ca), denver (co), san antonio (tx), st. paul (mn), and st. louis (mo) as well as in other locations, thousands of students between the ages of 11 – 18 staged walkouts from their schools in solidarity with the ferguson and garner protesters. some held their hands in the air and others hoisted signs reading, “black lives matter” and “hands up, don’t shoot;” some participated in “die-ins” in honor of brown and garner (klein 2014; morrison 2014; nolan and mezzacappa 2014, schworm, 2014). many more expressed solidarity in online venues, sharing photos and expressions of indignation via twitter, facebook, instagram, and tumblr (see, e.g., http://millennialau.tumblr.com/; https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/ferguson). this article presents a case study of a group of high school aged students of color as they considered participating in a walkout, as they observed others in their peer networks who were making similar decisions about participating, and as they then interpreted that participation after the fact. it explores the role that the social media platforms snapchat, facebook, and twitter played in this decision-making and in reflections about their own participation. it therefore aims to contribute to understandings of how social movements develop, following palczewski (2011), who argued that scholars need to pay attention to both state-focused political activism as well as culturally driven discursive politics. the ways that the students communicated with one another in social media locations was of course shaped by both the specific political and cultural settings of the young people themselves and by the infrastructure of connectivity, as will be discussed (van dijk, 2012; khamis & vaughn 2011). whereas some young people received encouragement to participate in the protests via social media, a number of participants later received criticism in a variety of online venues for acting rudely or violently toward law enforcement, for participating in protests merely as an excuse to skip class, for not understanding the issues, and for merely “following the crowd.” students mentioned other deterrents to participation as well, expressing concerns about missing school, worries about personal safety, and fears of being singled out by their peers or by school administration as “troublemakers.” both the online and offline venues in which the student protesters expressed their dissent therefore became contested public spaces that these young people needed to navigate in relation to their choices. how did these students, many of whom were newcomers to political action, navigate these spaces, and how did the techno-commercial and political settings of the major social network sites amplify, shape, and constrain these processes of navigation? this article argues that as young people navigated these spaces, some of them experienced themselves as members of a counterpublic for the first time. the article will argue that online artifacts of political engagement – whether they were in the form of photos, quoted sayings, passed along commentary, or something else – were important in the formation of counterpublics with which newcomers could come to identify as they decided whether or not to add their voices to dissent within contested public spaces. equally important were the constraints of differing social media spaces, which shaped how, in what venues, and when young people participated. this case thus draws upon ethnographic fieldwork to provide new insights into the relationships between what bennett and segerberg (2012) have termed connective action and its relationship to the formation of counterpublics (fraser 1992). results suggest that when newcomers from minoritized communities utilized social network sites to display artifacts of their own engagement in political activities, others in their social networks who were casual observers interpreted those artifacts in ways that may have strengthened their own motivation to participate – or, they may have made decisions not to participate based on the criticisms they witnessed others receiving. this challenges the claim that online activism can be dismissed as “cheap talk” (farrell & rabin 1996) or “slacktivism” (morozov 2011), demonstrating that digital activism plays an important role in providing encouragement for those at the political margins to see themselves as at least potentially part of an unfolding movement. it also underscores the criticisms that newcomers encounter in various social media sites and that they must decide to overcome in order to actually engage in participation. as networks in minoritized communities largely remain difficult for social movement organizations to mobilize and recruit, the article argues for the need for more communication researchers to focus on marginal and first time participation at the hyperlocal level, and for more research on the ways that social networks may facilitate the linking of participants at the margins with wider resources for social change efforts going forward. in order to develop this argument, we first turn to a review of existing research in order to situate this article’s case study. social media, publics, and race/ethnicity many of our recent and evolving theories regarding the role of social media in political change have taken as their starting point the national and international protest movements that involve large numbers of people who hail from western europe and from the u.s.(bennett & segerberg 2012, 2013; castells 2012; donk et.al. 2004; howard and parks 2012; juris 2012). exploring cases of contentious politics such as occupy wall street, the arab spring, the spanish indignados and greek aganaktismenoi movements, scholars working in politics and communication have considered the role of networked communication in collective action. scholarship has focused on the social media practices and intentional efforts of those who have been involved in coordinating protest activities, those who have been active participants in such activities who work independently or in collaboration with collective organizing efforts, and those covering such activities in the legacy and alternative media (ardevol et.al. 2010; papacharissi 2012b; postill 2013; russell 2013). a particularly influential line of thought from bennett and segerberg (2013) has explored the emergence of connective action, or the ways in which individuals personalize expressions of a movement’s goals and act independently in networking efforts that sometimes complement the collective action work of social movement organizations (smos) but sometimes occur with little organized leadership. extending research on social movement organizations and resource mobilization that has long been an important strand of research within political sociology, communication scholars working in this space therefore have been contributing useful theoretical frameworks and analyses regarding the ways that social media platforms such as twitter and facebook have come to be incorporated into increasingly sophisticated efforts to mobilize constituents, raise funds, and to garner new forms of power in the discursive battles that are waged in and through the news media. but as existing research has focused on participants in political action who are already “in the fold,” we have missed a key point: how is it that people come to be involved politically in the first place, and what role do social media play in these processes? this article contributes to this research by considering u.s. urban young people from communities that are historically underrepresented in public spaces as more than casual observers to the action, considering newcomers as more than viewers of “clicktivism” who may think of those in their social networks as friends rather than “slacktivists.” rather, this article posits that as young students of color observe others in their social networks who share views, photos, stories, and other materials about ferguson and related incidents, they are actively hailed into a counterpublic that is coming into being in relation to the heightened tensions around u.s. racial/ethnic identity, specifically in reference to relations between u.s. law enforcement and communities of color. this occurs as those they know use social media to express views, share stories, and pass along photos and videos that reinforce a way of viewing the world that is counter to the mainstream and consistent with some elements of their own lived experiences – even as the conversations about these issues are often contested for a variety of reasons. scholars theorizing about public spaces are often in conversation with those who write about what habermas (1989) termed the public sphere. the public sphere is understood as a space where people can share information and opinions in order to form a public will that influences political action, and the public sphere is also a space in which political officials are held accountable for that action. but not all members of society enjoy the same level of access to public realms of decisionmaking. in the u.s., white male landowners initially were granted the right to represent everyone else in such decisionmaking. after the women’s and african american suffrage movements, the right to vote was extended to other populations, but due to inequities that continue to structure life in the u.s., political power remains overwhelmingly in the hands of the white wealthy male elite. because of this, groups within society that have not had access to public decisionmaking have gathered in spaces that are far removed from mainstream media discourse and separate from state-approved spaces in order to discuss their shared political interests. in response to habermas’ description of a singular public sphere, then, nancy fraser (1992) and others have argued that there are actually multiple publics, and that “subaltern” or marginalized groups have participated in creating counterpublics in response to the exclusionary politics of dominant publics. michael warner (2002) has added the key point that counterpublics exist not out of intentional creation on the part of would-be members but by virtue of being addressed. according to warner, counterpublics do maintain some awareness of a subordinate status as they are marked off from a dominant public, but like all publics, counterpublics come into existence in relation to texts and their circulation. this article therefore argues that when people participate in political action for the first time and choose to share such “texts” here identified as artifacts of their political engagement with others in their social networks via snapchat, facebook, twitter, or other social media platforms, they may in some sense be participating in hailing a counterpublic into being. it is not that people intentionally “join” a counterpublic, but rather, as people seek to express something of their own experiences to those in their networks, they rely on readily-available and easily-recognized resources, such as photos, videos, jokes, statements, and quotations like the one that opened this article. as these items are shared, they become evidence of convictions that are shared and that are thus part of a collective expression that further connects those sharing such artifacts with others. those who do not overtly identify with that collective and who may not find its expressions convincing may nevertheless find the expressions of those in their social networks to be persuasive, or at least thought-provoking and relevant. in this way, even those at the margins are hailed into a counterpublic as it comes into existence. this helps us to conceptualize what happened as people connected with one another and with an emerging social movement’s agenda in the case of the ferguson protests and the broader issues the protests represented. although conversations about ferguson seemed to erupt spontaneously on social media in the days and months following the shooting death of michael brown, what was articulated aligned with the african american community’s longstanding rage about injustices in law enforcement. as people expressed their dismay and frustration over the death of michael brown and eric garner, and as they expressed anger over the ways they perceived that the justice system had failed their communities, such texts were recognizable and personalizable, even as they were only loosely connected with existing and nascent social organizations seeking to bring about political change. and the students in this study found that their own conflicted feelings about law enforcement were echoed and reinforced in what they were seeing and hearing in the various social media spaces where they interacted with their peers, as will be discussed. this article therefore looks at how students interacted with one another and with others across a variety of social media platforms. social media platforms have become sites for political expression, and as hutchby (2001) observed, there are values embedded in every technology that shape and constrain the ways in which those technologies are used. the students in this study did not explore any of the tools such as ushahidi or freenet that have been utilized by protesters who are more central to political action (russell 2015). rather, these students relied on commercial tools that are easily accessible. whereas social media platforms such as snapchat, twitter, facebook, tumblr, and instagram are distinct, they share certain characteristics in common. they are commercial; they are easily accessed through smart phones, laptops, or tablets; they allow for instantaneous and real time postings that can consist of quick reports, shared photos, or short replies; and, as marwick (2013) has pointed out, these social media offer users a way to measure their own status by considering the number of followers, friends, retweets, comments, and @replies they receive. but they are also distinct. facebook serves as a “social lubricant” that allows people to broadcast positive and negative life occurrences and to seek further support or information (ellison, steinfield, and lampe 2011). twitter encourages playful performances and improvisation within its 140-character limit (papacharissi 2012). it also allows for instant validation of the quality of one’s public contribution and is used by some as a form of public instant messenger (manjoo 2010). snapchat allows users to communicate with a select group of recipients, to control how long those recipients will have access to the message that the user is sending, and to learn instantly whether or not the recipient has opened the “snap.” it is therefore less public than other social network sites, and also more likely to garner an immediate response because of its time limit. as danah boyd (2014) writes, “the underlying message is simple: you’ve got 7 seconds. pay attention. ” plus, if it’s a group “snap,” the recipients face the added social pressure of responding more quickly than the other recipients who have also received the “snap.” in previous research, social media such as facebook and twitter have been found to enhance or enlarge counterpublics (eckert & chadha 2013; leung and lee 2014). milioni (2009) suggests that online counterpublics are sites defined by information self-determination, interactivity, and delocalized network (inter)action. but dahlgren (2005) broadens this definition beyond single sites, suggesting that a public or counterpublic may be understood as “a constellation of communicative spaces in society that permit the circulation of information, ideas, debates, ideally in an unfettered manner,” where political will may be constituted. it is this definition that is embraced here. soriano (2014) further points out that the process of connectivity facilitated acrosss social media sites creates opportunities for the identification, belonging, and support that energize collective resistance to oppressive power, which is also important in this case. counterpublics still face several definitional issues, however, such as whether counterpublics are primarily recognizable in relation to membership in marginalized communities, which in the u.s. are usually comprised of racial/ethnic and historically underrepresented groups. following holt (1995), squires (2002) has noted that there is a key distinction between groups engaged in “idle talk” and those that have the potential to act as counterpublics, noting that what she terms a black public sphere must offer space for the critique of the dominant order and must also enable participants to engage in action that can challenge and change that order. she proposes a definition of a black public as “an emergent collective composed of people who (a) engage in common discourses and negotiations of what it means to be black, and (b) pursue particularly defined black interests (p. 454).” she notes that this definition allows for heterogeneity and also allows for coalitions including those who do not self-identify as black but who identify with similar issues. according to pew, 73 percent of african american internet users participate in social media, and nearly one quarter of african americans online utilize twitter (smith 2014). the internet, as brock (2012) writes, “maintains western culture through its content and often embodies western ideology through its design and practices,” and is therefore not “value-neutral” but rather mediates racial and cultural identity (pp. 531-2). this has led to the emergence of what some have termed “black twitter,” which brock (2012) identifies as the “mediated articulations of a black subculture” (p. 545; see also manjoo 2010). black twitter thus becomes a space for what gates (1983) terms “signifyin,’” which is the articulation of a shared world view expressed through references to black culture and black idioms (brock 2012). according to brock, black twitter calls into question the whiteness of online public space, as it disrupts the way in which white experiences are taken as normal and invisible whereas racialized populations are visibly marginalized. black twitter is not a counterpublic, but is rather a space in which counterpublics may form as people find and follow one another, engage in discussions about the meanings of blackness, and discuss strategies for engaging in political action that arises from those meanings. hashtag memes, twitter @replies and retweets flourish among densely connected clusters of people who are highly connected with one another, as is the case among young black social media users, as meeder (2012) found. from august 2014 onwards, key voices on ferguson emerged in twitter and in other social network spaces. some of these emergent leaders, like ta-nehisi coates, were also affiliated with media outlets like the atlantic monthly. others, such as ashley yates, tory russell, johnetta elzie and deray mckesson, and organizations such as the ferguson response network and millennial activists united, were also active in twitter as well as elsewhere, and came to be identified by mainstream media as activists after assuming organizational roles in the protests and responses. but even with the emergence of black twitter, young people from historically underrepresented communities do not experience themselves as members of a singular community, nor do they uniformly choose to follow or interact online with elites or those who have emerged as political leaders. this is in part because political activism is understood among young people in these communities in ways that differ from their more privileged counterparts, and schooling shapes these differences in profound ways. in the u.s., privilege is correlated with higher parental educational levels and better schools, both of which are predictors of participation in political activism (van aelst and walgrave 2001). in privileged communities, schools may be understood as locations where young people are encouraged to draw connections between civic engagement and personal empowerment (middaugh and kahne 2009). in contrast, young people from what definney and colleagues (2011) refer to as “minoritized” backgrounds are more likely to attend high schools that are underfunded and undersupported. they are aware of the negative judgments rendered against their schools by outsiders, and many believe that their education has suffered due to discriminatory practices and policies that shape their school experiences in many ways. rather than viewing the school setting as a place for empowerment, therefore, they may experience their school context as at least in part an extension of a national discourse that emphasizes the containment of youth and the embedding of young minoritized “others” into a racialized construct that privileges whiteness (giroux 1996). as foreman (2005) writes in his study of somali immigrant and refugee youths, these young people “are regularly denied adequate opportunities in society or their schools to implement the values of their experiences and to collaborate meaningfully in the redefinition and reinvention of “the nation.” members of minoritized groups thus have fewer connections to social movements, and encounter more barriers to engagement (juris 2012; mercea 2014). it is from these points of departure that minoritized young people express skepticism about participation in large scale collective action and do not necessarily see themselves as part of what they perceive to be a “white” public. this article argues that the social network spaces of participants at the margins function as spaces for the formation of counterpublics. prior research suggests that social network spaces constitute contested public spaces for young students of color, and thus any consideration of the formation of counterpublics within social media must begin by examining how young people navigate those spaces as they encounter and consider political participation in relation to an unfolding movement. digital media club: using media to make a difference in our communities the findings from this article are based on a larger ethnographic project that has explored how minoritized young people become engaged in utilizing media to make a difference in their communities (author 2014). my colleagues and i created a context in which young people of color would have an opportunity to work together within a process that involved, first, a critical examination of our places in and the relationship of media systems to existing hierarchies of power, and secondarily, a consideration of how various media might be used to organize for change. my university colleagues and i therefore had committed to leading an after-school group called the digital media club in one of the city’s most culturally diverse high schools, where 40 different language groups and more than 60 countries are represented in the student body. the most intensive part of the study took the form of two-hour weekly interactions and observations with 19 high school students over a three-month period, although relationship-building between the researcher and students had taken place over a three month period prior to that. discussions in the weekly interactions included one-on-one consultations as well as group conversations. students discussed how social media had played a role in the ways students, and they themselves, had learned about and shared views about unfolding events related to both ferguson and to local law enforcement. interviews and observations with teachers, staff persons, and administrators who worked with the students on a daily basis also informed this analysis. the school administrators were supportive and granted irb approval for the presence of an ethnographic researcher who would be co-leading the club. school leaders take an asset-based approach to the school’s diversity, and they are interested in after school activities that encourage students to build relationships with other students whose backgrounds that differ from their own. they are also glad for a connection to the nearby university as that helps them to make manifest the high school’s strong interest in supporting their students as they move toward a college education. the after-school program has drawn about four dozen students over its four years, and students involved have included those who were born in the u.s., mexico, ghana, ethiopia, somalia, eritrea, guinea, jordan, iraq, russia, taiwan, and vietnam. students born outside the u.s. have had varying levels of english language proficiency and had been in the u.s. from between 2 months to twelve years. ferguson protests during the weeks following the ferguson grand jury decision, the young people in this after school group reported that they, along with most of the students they knew, seemed to have first learned about the protests from face-to-face communication with friends, peers, family members, or teachers. students then also encountered news about the protests secondarily through facebook. consistent with what is already known about social network sites, the students said that many more young people had read about than had posted about the happenings. students reported that many of their peers had chosen to engage in online discussion about the protests in a somewhat tentative way, viewing a tumblr, tweet, comment or photo and then tagging or @tweeting a friend or family member they knew to be sympathetic with the views of the protesters, thereby identifying themselves as supportive to someone else they believed to be equally supportive. others chose to “like” or “favorite” a message they encountered on someone else’s feed, thereby leaving a more public declaration of how their views comported with those of the protesters. even more courageous students chose to repost, retweet, or otherwise share a curated message more broadly through their own facebook, twitter, tumblr, or instagram feeds, either with or without commentary. the students reported that a few young people they knew had gone so far as to create their own tumblr on the issue. when students engaged in the reposting of curated content, they risked receiving negative comments or feedback from those in their social networks who disagreed with them. responses could take on the form of “microaggressions (boyd 2013).” sometimes, these curated reposts, retweets, or shares were effectively silenced after receiving negative comments. one student who re-posted a curated message supportive of the ferguson protesters noted that while some peers “liked” his post, another peer enacted a form of microaggression by tagging him without comment in a post that denigrated the protesters. the student who’d been tagged felt embarrassed, but also seemed to believe that by publicly voicing support through his facebook page, he was “taking a stand,” or, perhaps, participating in a form of digital activism. even questions about safety were interpreted as potential microaggressions meant to express a difference of opinion about unfolding events. one student noted, “i got a lot of texts from family members and friends asking if i was safe, but who’s asking if the black men who live in this city are safe every day?” (kram 2014). students who chose to express opinions about the protests and walkouts in any way therefore experienced themselves as entering contested social spaces. news of the non-indictments in the michael brown and eric garner cases had occurred when students were out of school during the u.s. thanksgiving holiday. on the second day back in school, the city’s largest urban high school staged a walkout. one news report, giving voice to the dominant frame of police as public servants who protect all members of the comununity equally, quoted a member of the police union who labeled the walkouts “unlawful,” complaining that they cost taxpayers money and restricted the police’s ability to pay attention to other issues as they were charged with keeping students protected during their walkouts (mcghee, 2014). the following day, three other urban high schools joined in staging walkouts. on that day, conversations about ferguson and about the protests in the urban high school where i volunteered were tense. the students i talked with during after school hours that day seemed to feel that the majority of students in their school were listening rather than commenting on the protest activities and tensions at other schools. as a group, the students present in the after school program that day were reticent, and tentative. i learned from the students that whereas many teachers in their own school had offered general support for participation in the walkouts, only a few teachers discussed the protests. the students said that these few teachers attempted to place the frustration and rage behind the protests in a larger historical context, noting that many in the african american community did not feel that the police were there to protect them and the courts were not, either. one student in our after school discussion volunteered that maybe this was because of the u.s. legacy with slavery, as the law during that time was used against the interests of minority communities and law enforcement protected the interests of slaveowners rather than slaves. all of the students in our after school circle recognized the contentiousness of the issues involved, and were reluctant to enter into the contested public spaces of online discussion about the unfolding events. one student noted her reluctance about participating in discussions about the protests because, as she said, in “heated situations,” people can become “targets” for the aggression of others, and she didn’t want to put herself in a position of becoming such a target. later on, however, the same student that had been concerned about being a “target” reported excitedly that she had just received a text from another student about the possibility that her school would be organizing a walkout. her enthusiasm was palpable as she frantically texted others in her social circles, seeking more information about where and when the walkout would take place and then reporting to others in the room on what she was learning: “they’re trying to decide if it’s going to be tomorrow or the next day,” she said to no one in particular. but this interaction, witnessed by the other students, changed the tone of the discussion from a conversation about what others had done, to what this particular group of students might or might not do. seated in one of the school’s computer labs, students quickly found news and alternative news images online of those at other neighboring schools who had participated in a walkout that day, and they shared and discussed them with one another. when an adult mentor then asked another student whether or not she would attend her own school’s walkout if indeed it was staged, the second student was hesitant. her parents would not want her to miss school, she said. another volunteered that he had heard that the walkouts at one school had led to a disciplinary lockdown, in which no one was allowed to leave the school building. that student did not want his school to receive a “bad reputation,” and he was concerned that participation in a walkout during the school day might contribute to that. finally, several students noted that they did not believe that they understood all of the facts related to the protest. “what if someone asks me what i’m protesting for and i can’t really explain it?,” one wondered, giving this as a reason for hesitation in participating. but by the next day, many more students had received word of the possibility of a walkout through in-person and text conversations. a student organizer had set up a facebook event page that quickly circulated throughout the student body. another organizer stopped in to the school’s front office to discuss the protest with the high school administration, who in turn alerted local law enforcement and parents: their school was going to stage a walkout in solidarity with the other protesters. together, student organizers and teachers decided on a plan to walk around the nearby park, hold a rally, and then return to classes. on the day of the scheduled protest, students from that urban high school held handmade signs reading, “respect,” and chanted, “hands up, don’t shoot,” using the mantra associated with michael brown’s arrest. they shared photos with their friends primarily through snapchat. but during the protest, the group split, with some students following the original plan to walk and then rally at the school while others elected to walk downtown to the grounds of their rival high school, where the first local school protests had taken place. much to the chagrin of the student organizers and school administrators, the rogue student protesters shut down a major thoroughfare, snarling traffic for more than an hour. some reportedly shouted profanities. they were all eventually bussed back to their school. “come back!,” students who had remained with the protest organizers had texted their friends. many sent snaps with photos so that those who had begun the trek downtown would realize that not all students were heading downtown. these instantaneous communications were important during the chaos of the moment, as the school’s principal used a bull horn to try to stop the impromptu rogue protesters and as the protest’s organizers continued back toward the school. students also texted and exchanged snaps with their friends at the rival school downtown, alerting them that some had chosen to take the protest to their school grounds. that school went on lockdown, and students in the school texted and exchanged snaps with friends they saw outside, reportedly telling them to go back to their own school. the split colored the experience for many and became central to the narrative students later told about their involvement in this protest activity. perhaps it is ironic that in the midst of all of the personalized communication through various social media, students later articulated the problem as a lack of centralized leadership and communication. still, many students saw the participation in the protests as valuable. one student at another school expressed to a journalist the feeling that seemed to be a part of many experiences of those engaged in the walkouts. responding to some of the criticisms he and others had heard about the walkouts, he noted, “some people were like, why is walking out of school even going to help anything. to me it was like, we’re students, and this is what we can do. a grievous injustice took place in our nation and it’s continuing to take place.” and then, this student noted the significance he felt in recording the event as it was happening: “as i was filming, i was getting a shot of everyone’s feet coming down, and i just got goosebumps.” (zubrzycki 2014). artifacts of engagement why was it that this particular student had “goosebumps” when filming the activities of his school’s walkout? a great deal of research has already focused on the fact that being involved in the action through protesting, as well as by photographing and texting about it, enhances a person’s sense of emotional identification with a movement and its aims (pappacharissi 2013). but what was particularly of interest in this case was what happened when those on the margins of political action, such as students who had been unsure about the walkouts, encountered first-hand evidence of others in their peer networks who had already decided to walk out: in other words, it is worth focusing not on the smaller numbers of creators and circulators of most of the protest’s video or texts, but on the larger numbers of recipients and viewers of that material. not all of the students in the digital media club after school program decided to join the walkout as soon as they learned that others their age had been similarly involved, and many expressed hesitation even when they learned that those in their peer networks were going to participate. but the conversation noticeably shifted as they encountered more and more images, texts, and other forms of evidence of how people they knew had been involved in these activities. it became difficult for them to remain indifferent to or isolated from the protests and the many discussions that took place about them. the recording of these activities through video, photos, and messages thus had a particular salience: not just for those who created and shared, but also for those participants at the margins who saw themselves as less involved or at a greater distance from the core of the movement activities. the comments, photos, videos, and stories were no longer simply the stories of unknown involved individuals; as they became artifacts shared online, these stories spoke of a form of political action writ large and inserted recognizable actors into the narrative. these artifacts provided evidence of their peers’ engagement, not only in political activities like the walkout, but in the activity of sharing stories about their own engagement with a wider audience. the sharing of these artifacts of engagement – comments, photos, videos, tweets, news stories that were found or created and then passed along largely via snapchat, facebook, and twitter as well as through texts – may not have been on the same order as other political activities, but they provided an avenue into what dahlgren (2009) calls the “proto-political,” or the important step whereby young people come to be aware of the collective limits of their situation and thus the possibility that things could be different as a result of their own involvement in the action at hand. the artifacts of engagement that others created and shared sutured young people into emergent counterpublics coalescing around the perceived injustices in ferguson and in other places. these artifacts thus became part of a non-linear chain of causality that contributed to the ways that the less-involved students came to see participation as not just something that others did, but as something in which they themselves might also engage. the artifacts thus functioned as the personalized expressions of a collective counterpublic that propelled people toward connective action. discussion communication about political action among one’s networks within social network sites has become an important “open channel” associated with the mobilization of other newcomers, particularly in locations where civic infrastructures are weak (mercea 2014). as young people shared their artifacts of engagement on their social networks, their activities and shared perspectives became visible to other members of their communities who might not otherwise consider such actions to be part of the repertoire of actions that are deemed appropriate for their group. this is important, as we do know that strong collective identities as well as strongly felt shared grievances can play a central role in mobilizing members of one’s extended social networks to consider participation for the first time themselves (verhulst & walgrave 2009; jasper & poulsen 1995). knowing that others in one’s social circle are expressing their concern through action is a strong predictor for future participation (verba et al., 1995; schussman & soule, 2005). this then makes artifacts of engagement that signal a possible connection to an emergent social movement something worthy of further investigation as we strive to understand the role of social media in fostering connective action. it also points to the significance of the more immediate and less public forms of communication that are a part of snapchat, as young people at the margins who may have been reluctant to voice either support or opposition on facebook or twitter found the barriers of entry to participation to be much lower when communication was primarily between and among a select circle. through snapchat, young people could express their views or call on their peers to act, thus signaling their membership in a nascent counterpublic in a less public yet still social setting that demanded attention and reponse. as tufekci and wilson have argued (2012), digital activism, like activism occurring in the streets, is not without costs. additionally, there is a sort of “root for the winning team” phenomenon that takes place in relation to political involvement (walgrave and verhulst 2009). and indeed, when students in this study encountered evidence of the fact that others agreed with their stances or actions, they became more willing to consider greater involvement themselves. however, they were aware that the open-ended nature of platforms such as twitter and facebook meant that they were more likely to encounter resistance when they engaged in expressing views or engaging in actions related to contentious politics. snapchat provided an attractive alternative, as students could then select recipients and share messages. snapchat also became primary during the actual protest event, as students were able to relay messages instantaneously that demanded immediate attention. after the event, conversations continued on twitter and facebook, although of course many more students were observers than produsers (bruns 2008). the use of differing social platforms for different kinds of communication demonstrates that students were able to utilize a variety of strategies as they and their peers were hailed into an emergent post ferguson counterpublic and were compelled to negotiate the contested public spaces of social media. conclusion reflecting on findings from an ethnographic study of young students of color engaged in discussing how to use media to make a difference in their communities, this article has argued that as students encountered evidence of how their peers and others in their communities participated in political dissent through social media, they may have been able to overcome fears and find the courage to participate themselves as they were hailed as members of counterpublics. but the case study demonstrates that both political and proto-political participation occurs among political newcomers in contested social spaces and not without risk. students in this study utilized differing social media platforms for differing actions. they used a facebook group to organize a protest, twitter to send messages to their followers about their activities, and then snapchat as events were unfolding and as disagreements about the nature and direction of the protest emerged. once the student protest event was passed, conversations returned primarily to the sharing of broader commentary through twitter, instagram, and facebook. the affordances of differing platforms combined with the political and cultural contexts to shape how students negotiate their felt desire or reluctance to participate in the unfolding political action. newcomers to political activities like the students in this study are, of course, not embedded in the relationships that comprise formal and informal movement networks. and yet, “first-timers” come to these new activities as members of a variety of other communities and networks. whereas a great deal of existing research has focused primarily on the outcomes of such participation on the individuals who are full participants, or on members of social movement organizations and their goals, this case study instead focuses attention on individuals who are marginally involved in political action. by exploring participants at the political margins and their relationships with other communities and networks outside the realm of the current political action, the article extends the timeline of when and how we might think about the ways that political awareness might transform into political action, and how we might conceptualize the role of social media in this process. because newcomer participants may generate or share artifacts of engagement on their social networks, such activities are revealed to community members who might not otherwise consider such actions to be part of the repertoire of actions that are deemed appropriate for a certain group. this is important, as we do know that strong collective identities as well as strongly felt shared grievances can play a critical role in mobilizing members of one’s extended social networks to consider participation for the first time themselves. knowing that others in one’s social circle are expressing their concern through action is a strong predictor for future participation. this then makes artifacts of engagement that signal a connection to emergent counterpublics something worthy of further investigation as we strive to understand the role of social media in fostering connective action. this finding confounds prior theories that presumed that casual online and largely observation-only participation might be dismissed as merely a form of “slactivism.” the article suggests instead that such casual observation may serve an important role as a form of early participation that is made possible through digitally networked communication, even as the opportunities to observe those artifacts are increasingly limited as the structures of commercial social network sites continue to shift. the article therefore concludes that further studies of the role of social media in early political participation among minoritized communities across a variety of social media platforms are necessary to enrich our theories of the role of social media usage in long term political change. this article has therefore argued that when people participate in political action for the first time and choose to share artifacts of that engagement with minoritized others via snapchat, facebook, twitter, instagram, or other social media platforms, they participate in hailing a counterpublic into being. through this sharing of artifacts with those in their networks who, like them, are also at some distance from the mainstream, people in their networks are given the opportunity to consider and possibly render meaningful those artifacts of engagement shared by their friends or family members in social media. the act of using social media to share the artifacts of one’s engagement in political action is therefore potentially potent as a means for garnering support for an alternative vision that can further mobilize counterpublics toward political action. in other words, even participation at the margins and its representation in social media matters; it just may matter to different groups, and on a different time frame, than our theories might have invited us to pay attention to at present. references almasy, s. & yan, h. (2014, november 26). protesters fill streets across country as ferguson protests spread coast to coast. cnn. available: http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/25/us/national-ferguson-protests/ ardevol, elisende, antoni roig, gemma san cornelio, ruth pages and pau alsina. (2010). playful practices: theorizing ‘new media’ cultural production (pp. 259-280), in bridget brauchler & john postill, eds., theorizing media and practice. berghahn books. bennett, w. lance and alexandra segerberg. (2013). the logic of connective action: digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. cambridge: cambridge university press. bennett, w.l. and segerberg, a. (2012) the logic of connective action. information, communication & society 15 (2012): 739-768. blake, j. (2014, august 30). how ferguson could become a movement: lessons from history. cnn. available: http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/17/us/four-ways-to-beat-the-man/ brock, a. (2012). from the blackhand side: twitter as a cultural conversation. journal of broadcasting & electronic media 56(4): 529-549. boyd, d. (2014). why snapchat is valuable: it’s all about attention. social media collective research blog. available: http://socialmediacollective.org/2014/03/21/snapchat-attention/. boyd, d. (2013). it’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens. yale university press. castells, m. (2012). networks of outrage and hope: social movements in the internet age. cambridge: polity. corey, c. (2014, october 24). with ferguson protests, 20-somethings become first-time activists. national public radio. available: http://www.npr.org/2014/10/24/358054785/with-ferguson-protests-20somethingsbecome-first-time-activists dahlgren, p. (2005). the internet, public spheres, and political communication: dispersion and deliberation. political communication, 22(2),147–162. dahlgren, p. (2009). media and political engagement: citizens, communication and democracy. cambridge university press. de finney, s., dean, m., loiselle, e., and saraceno, j. (2011). ‘all children are equal, but some are more equal than others:’ minoritization, structural inequalities and social justice praxis in residential care. international journal of child, youth and family studies, 3 & 4, pp. 361-384. donk, b d. loader, paul g. nixon, d. rucht, eds. (2004), cyberprotest: new media, citizens and social movements (london: routledge. eckert, s. & chadha, k. (2013). muslim bloggers in germany: an emerging counterpublic. media, culture & society 35(8): 926-942. fiegerman, s. (2014, june 27). world cup highlights difference between ‘real time’ on facebook, twitter. mashable. available: http://mashable.com/2014/06/27/facebooktwitter world-cup/ forman, m. (2005). straight outta mogadishu: prescribed identities and performative practices among somali youth in north american high schools (pp. 3-22). in s. maira and e. soep, eds., youthscapes: the popular, the national, the global. university of pennsylvania press. ellison, n., steinfield, c., & lampe, c. (2011). connection strategies: social capital and implications of facebook-enabled communication practices. new media & society 3(6): 873-892. farrell, j. & rabin, m. (1996). cheap talk. journal of economic perspectives 10(3): 103 118. fraser, n. (1992). rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy," pp. 122-33. in craig calhoun, ed., habermas and the public sphere. cambridge: mit press. giroux, h. (1996). fugitive cultures: race, violence, and youth. new york: routledge. habermas, j. (1989). the structural transformation of the public sphere. trans. t. burger & f. lawrence. cambridge, ma: mit press. holt, t. (1995). afterword: mapping the black public sphere. in black public sphere collective (eds.), the black public sphere (pp. 325-328). chicago: university of chicago press. howard, p. and parks, m.r. (2012). social media and political change: capacity, constraint, and consequence. journal of communication 62 (2012): 359-362. hughes, t. (2014, december 3). cop critically hurt at ferguson protest in denver. usa today. available: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/12/03/denverhigh school-walkout-protest-dont-shoot/19846479/ hutchby, i. (2001). technologies, texts and affordances. sociology 35 (2): 441-456. jasper, j. m., & poulsen, j. (1995). recruiting strangers and friends: moral shocks and social networks in animal rights and anti-nuclear protests. social problems, 42, 493– 512. juris, j. (2012). “reflections on #occupy everywhere: social media, public space and emerging logics of aggregation”, american ethnologist 39 (2012): 259-279. khamis, s. & vaughn, k. (2011). cyberactivism in the egyptian revolution: how civic engagement and citizen journalism tilted the balance. arab media & society 14. available: http://www.arabmediasociety.com/countries/index.php?c_article=249 klandermans, b., & oegema, d. (1987). potentials, networks, motivations and barriers: steps towards participation in social movements. american sociological review, 52, 519–531. klein, r. (2014, december 1). high school students around the country are walking out of class for ferguson. huffington post. available: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/01/high-school-students-protestferguson_ n_6249802.html kram, z. (2014, december 8). a mass of voices: an oral history of student involvement in protests. student life (online independent newspaper of washington university in st. louis). leung, d.k. and lee, f.l. (2014). cultivating an active online counterpublic: examining the impact of internet alternative media. international journal of press/politics 19(3): 340-359. madhani, a. and alcindor, y. (2014, december 8). ferguson has become a springboard for many movements. usa today. available: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/12/05/ferguson-protestsbroadenoccupy-wall-street/19917015/ manjoo, f. (2010, august 10). how black people use twitter. slate. available online: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2010/08/how_black_people_use_t witter.2.html marwick, a. (2013). status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. yale university press. mcghee, t. (2014). denver protests spark dialogue between police and students. denver post. http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_27069788/denver-protestssparkdialogue-between-police-and-students meeder, b. (2012). network structure and its role in information diffusion and user behavior. ph.d. dissertation, carnegie mellon university. mercea, d. (2014), towards a conceptualization of casual protest participation: parsing a case from the save rosia montana campaign. east european politics and societies (in press). middaugh, e. & kahne, j. (2009). online localities: implications for democracy and education. yearbook of the national society for the study of education 108(1): 192-218. milioni, d. (2009). probing the online counterpublic sphere: the case of indymedia athens. media, culture & society 31(3): 409-431. morozov, e. (2009, may 19). the brave new world of slacktivism. foreign policy. available: http://foreignpolicy.com/?s=slacktivism nolan, s. & mezzacappa, d. (2014, november 25). constitution high students march to liberty bell to protest ferguson. the notebook (independent voice of philadelphia public schools). available: http://thenotebook.org/blog/147955/constitution-highschoolstudents-march-liberty-bell-protest-ferguson palczewski, c.h. (2011). cyber-movements, new social movements, and counterpublics. (pp. 161-186). in r. asen, d. brouwer, eds., counterpublics and the state. albany, ny: suny press. papacharissi, z. (2012a). without you, i’m nothing: performances of the self on twitter. international journal of communication 6. available: http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1484 papacharissi, z. and de fatima oliviera, m. (2012b). affective news and networked publics: the rhythms of news storytelling on #egypt. journal of communication 62(2), pp. 266-282. papacharissi, z. (2014). affective publics: sentiment, technology, and politics. new york: oxford university press. poell, t. & van dijck, j.. (2015). social media and activist communication. the routledge companion to alternative and community media. london: routledge. postill, j. (2013). democracy in an age of viral reality: a media epidemiography of spain’s indignados movement. ethnography 15(1): 51-69. richardson, v. (2014, december 9). denver mayor tells protesting students to return to class after walk-outs. washington times. available online: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/9/denver-mayor-tellsprotestingstudents-return-clas/ roth, z. (2014, december). after ferguson, some see a movement taking shape. msnbc. available: http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/after-ferguson-some-seemovementtaking-shape russell, a. (2013). innovation in hybrid spaces: 2011 un climate summit and the expanding journalism landscape. journalism 14(7): 904-920. russell, a. (2015). prototyping change. unpublished manuscript. schussman, a., & soule, s. a. (2005). process and protest: accounting for individual protest participation. social forces, 84, 1083–1108. schworm, p. (2014, december 16). boston students leave class early to rally for equality. boston globe. available online: http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/12/16/students-walk-out-bostonschoolsprotest/am0regye2emxoqcyqcph8l/story.html smith, a. (2014). african americans and technology use. pew research center report. available: http://www.pewinternet.org/files/oldmedia/ files/reports/2014/pip_african%20americans%20and%20technology%20use_ 010614.pdf snow, mcadam, d. (1988). micromobilization contexts and the recruitment to activism. in b. klandermans, h. kriesi, & s. tarrow (eds.), from structure to action (pp. 125– 154). greenwich: jai-press. soriano, cheryll ruth. (2014). constructing collectivity in diversity: online political mobilization of a national lgbt political party. media, culture, society 36(1): 20-36. squires, c.r. rethinking the black public sphere: an alternative vocabulary for multiple public spheres. communication theory 12(4): 446-468. swaine, j. (2014, october 8). ferguson protest leaders: ‘we’ll take our anger out on people who failed us.’ the guardian. available: http://www.theguardian.com/usnews/ 2014/oct/08/ferguson-protest-leaders-rally-new-york-michael-brown-shooting tufecki, z. and wilson, c. (2012). social media and the decision to participate in political protest: observations from tahrir square. journal of communication 62(2): pp. 363-279. van aelst & walgrave (2001). who is that (wo)man in the street? from the normalization of protest to the normalization of the protester. european journal of political research 39(4): 461-486. van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. new york: oxford university press. verhulst, j. and walgrave, s. (2009). the first time is the hardest? a cross-national and cross-issue comparison of first-time protest participants. political behavior 31: 455-484. verba, s., schlozman, k. l., & brady, h. e. (1995). voice and equality civic voluntarism in american politics. cambridge: harvard university press. walgrave, j. and verhulst, s. (2009). the first time is the hardest? a cross-national and cross-issue comparison of first-time protest participants. political behavior 31:455-484. walgrave, s., & verhulst, j. (2006). towards ‘new emotional movements’? a comparative exploration into a specific movement type. social movement studies, 5, 275–304. warner, m. (2002). publics and counterpublics. public culture 14(1): 49-90. 20 zubrzycki, j. (2014, december 4). as high school ferguson protests snowball, east students search for the story. chalkbeat colorado. http://co.chalkbeat.org/2014/12/04/as-high-school-ferguson-protests-snowballeaststudents-search-for-the-story/#.vkmjjgtf-na 1 #rescatemineros: global media events in the microblogging age luca rossi university of urbino carlo bo italy luca.rossi@uniurb.it matteo magnani university of bologna italy matteo.magnani@cs.unibo.it barbara iadarola univeristy of bologna italy iadarola@cs.unibo.it abstract contemporary media events are experienced within the complex scenario of convergence media. broadcasting channels and traditional mass media coexist with online digital news channels and with countless social media services. this paper describes how a global media event (the rescue operation of the 33 chilean miners trapped underground for 69 days between august and october 2010) can be observed through the communication occurred inside twitter, the largest microblogging platform. the article proposes a data-driven methodology that, starting from a large data acquisition procedure, is used to investigate: a) what communication patterns emerged within the microblogging sites; and b) how relevant information is propagated through the microblogging network of users. keywords microblogging; social network analysis; twitter; information propagation; media events 2 introduction: monitoring global media events in microblogging sites our contemporary media experience is based on a continuous flow of information coming to our attention from all over the world. despite the fact that we usually give a higher attention to those events happening closer to our everyday life (luhmann 2000) we can be emotionally involved also with events happening very far away from us and having no practical impact on our lives. usually we know these events through the media and our participation to the ongoing facts is mostly media based. since the early work by dayan and katz (1994) media studies have thoroughly analyzed how media events are constructed and managed worldwide by media companies and their relationship with the concept of public sphere as defined by habermas (1987). however, today for the first time we are facing a radical transformation of these concepts because social media raise individuals to a higher level of communicational power. what we are facing today has been described in terms of a networked public culture by russell and echchaibi (2009), showing how individual and interpersonal cultural production could come out of their isolation to become a new public language once again able to mix and stimulate mass media products and audience practices. within this novel context media events are no longer a place for more or less passive audiences but constitute opportunities for connected publics to join this new form of mediated participation (wohn, d. y., na, e.-k. 2011). the 2010 copiapò mining accident offered a great opportunity to observe how global media events appear when observed through the lens of social media, specifically through the lens of microblogging sites. this event can be briefly summarized as follows: on august 5, 2010 a cave-in occurred at the san josé copper-gold mine in the atacama desert near copiapò, chile, leaving thirty-three men trapped 700 metres (2,300 ft) below ground. the miners survived underground for a record 69 days, until when all of them were rescued and brought to the surface (october 14, 2010). the rescue process (named operation san lorenzo) raised a huge global interest and emotional participation. while the whole history is surely dramatic and poses many questions about the safety of workers all around the world, what really caught the international attention was the chilean national effort to save the miners’ lives. as it is possible to see in figure 1, which shows the average worldwide traffic related to the mineros keyword as reported by google trends, during the first days the news of the incident had a small impact producing a very low amount of researches. the highest level of interest is not just after the collapse of the mine, nor when the miners were discovered to be still alive (august 22nd) but it happened to be in october when the rescue mission was first announced and then accomplished. 3 the final phase of the san lorenzo operation was carefully prepared both from the technical and the media point of view and as such many international broadcasters showed it live and many users produced a live coverage of it through the social media. what we witnessed was a large active participation into the media coverage of the event itself. this participation involved several thousands of users worldwide in many different ways: some users decided to spread the news they were seeing on television to their online contacts while others wanted to comment about the occurring events or share their feelings and emotions. figure 1: web searches for "mineros" (source: google trends) the digital nature of these online communications gave us the opportunity to investigate several aspects of contemporary online media events. in order to investigate what happened in online communications about the #mineros rescue as it was labelled on twitter we studied the twitter messages produced during the event and we focused on two main research questions: (rq1) what kind of twitter communications take place among the users during a global media event? and (rq2) how does information and specific messages (in our case related to the final phase of the rescue operations) spread within the twitter network? microblogging data: collection and methodology since the whole event spans more than two months (69 days) and it is internally made of many overlapping sub-events (the collapse itself, the finding of the alive miners, the planning of the rescue operation etc.) we decided to focus our observation only on the rescue phase that corresponds to the higher level of interest and volume of communication. therefore the data we deal with from now on concerns the time between october 12, 2010 (12:00 chilean time), the day when the rescue operation started, and october 14, 2010 (12:00 chilean time), the day when all the miners had been rescued at the end of a long and complex operation. in addition to 4 the huge amount of data available focusing only on the rescue operation allows the research to observe how social media communication interacts with a carefully prepared traditional media event since the rescue operations were broadcasted world-wide by tv channels from all over the world. the data have been extracted from twitter using an on line tweet archiver (twapperkeeper.com) (kelly, b. et al., 2010) filtering messages containing the hashtag #mineros. the hastag emerged globally during the first phase of the crisis as a general tag to identify tweets related to this event. in addition we added to the dataset also an archive with tweets containing the hashtag #rescatemineros that was more specific to the rescue phase. this double query produced a cleaned archive of 30.169 twitter messages. the (unavoidable) problem in filtering tweets about some news concerns the fact that hashtags are user-generated, and thus there can be relevant messages using rare tags or even without any tags. obviously these messages may be lost, even if during global events even when an official hashtag is not provided consensus about the hashtag(s) to be used is usually reached in short time. from these data we have extracted two networks: a first network where nodes represent users and edges represent direct communications between them – such as replies or messages addressed to a specific user and a second network of users where edges represent information flows, i.e., a message retweeted by several users. in the remaining of the paper we analyze these networks to highlight the behavior of users with regard to the event under examination. these two networks have different functions: on one side the direct communication network can be used to detect how the twitter platform is used as a conversational place in order to support the sharing of messages and opinions among users, on the other side the propagation network can be used to study how and to what extent twitter works as a social tool to spread information. in the microblogging context, in fact, concepts like final audience and visibility of a specific message are the result of a complex series of interactions between users. the final choice about what to share is up to every user. users decide the relevance of the stories that end up into their feeds and decide how to behave according to different kinds of messages. as noticed by previous researches on microblogging sites by honeycutt and herring (2009), boyd et al. (2010) and magnani et al. (2010) different communicative practices may coexist: while some users share information of general interest others are more concerned about what their specific audience might find interesting. 5 within this user-centric selection of information when users share some news there is a known number of other users (their followers) receiving the message on their news feed. if some of them find it interesting the message will be probably re-shared and it will be thus kept alive and made visible to a larger audience. this user-generated propagation is the baseline of information propagation within the microblogging sites and within the specific context of twitter is achieved through the retweet practice. in twitter it is also possible to reply to specific messages, without making their content visible to the replier’s followers, and it is also worth mentioning that retweets and replies are often specified by manually editing the messages and thus present a lot of variations sometimes difficult to identify (e.g., rt, rt:, via, using quotations, and with or without the @ symbol to reference the author of the retweeted message, etc.). as a consequence, which news is shared and how long it stays visible is induced autonomously by users’ behaviors and decisions. within this perspective the final audience of specific news posted by a user is not determined only by his/her first level of followers but is more specifically a matter of how many times that news will be re-shared moving away from the original audience toward a larger one. direct communication network: chatting alone together we define as direct communication network the set of messages explicitly addressed to other users. this set has been extracted from the data by collecting all messages with an explicit reply mark @ within the body of the message. in order to avoid misleading data messages had to be cleaned from retweeted messages that usually include the @ sign (retweets have been analyzed with regard to the process of information propagation). the goal of extracting the direct communication network is to highlight the messages exchanged among the users and to identify major hubs or highly intercommunicating users. the direct communication network has been extracted as described above and has been visualized (figure 2) through the graph analysis software gephi with a force layout algorithm (bastian & heymann, 2009). it is worth noticing that the large majority of users exchange a very small number of messages with a small number of other users. the large group of nodes with only one connection visualized at the centre of figure 2 represents users with just a single interaction with another user. those are surrounded by users with more than one single direct interaction. the most interacting users are at the border of the visualization and have been colored to highlight the clusters. 6 figure 2 direct communication network different communicating clusters of users have been manually coloured and the name of the most addressed node has been added. now we can focus our attention on the most commented twitter users (those who received the largest number of messages). among them it is possible to find the major newspapers and television channels from southern america: tvn (the state-owned chilean television station), el universal (a major colombian newspaper), tele13 (a chilean news program) c5n (the argentinian canal 5 noticias). these tv channels are followed by some international news actors like el pais or the cnn (spanish edition). beside the official news actors it is possible to see how also the personal account of some journalists (who were live covering the news) generated a high level of communication from twitter users. monterocnn (the twitter channel of carlos montero news anchor for cnn en español or those from mauricio bustamante (tvn mauricio) have a large number of incoming messages showing how users seem to appreciate the opportunity of interacting directly with the news anchors during a crisis communication time. in addition to those addressed to journalists or tv channels a large number of messages have been addressed both to the chilean prime minister (mr. sebastian pinera) and to the 7 chilean mines minister (mr. laurence nelson golborne). what is worth noticing is that – similarly to what happens with the news channels accounts – this kind of communication is not necessarily bidirectional. most of the journalists and politicians that receive twitter messages do not reply to them but it seems to be a way for the audience to show its presence and to publicly address complains or emotions: los 33 #mineros en la superficie !!!! gracias @sebastianpinera @lgolborne a todos los rescatistas y a dios ** #vivachilemierda #miners. this message was clearly a joy expression broadcasted through twitter but, at the same time, it addresses directly two user accounts. within this context every distinction between personal and public communication collapses (boyd, 2008): the message is at the very same time broadcasted directly to the user’s followers, aggregated through the #mineros hashtag for a larger and public visibility and notified to the mentioned users @sebastianpinera and @lgolborne. the analysis of the communication network represented in figure 2 shows also how local national communities seem to connect around a local influent node (typically a mass media actor). in figure 2 we use different colours to highlight different groups of interconnected users representing different geographical areas. while the largest interconnected group (in the bottom right part of the picture) is easily identifiable with a chilean cluster of users (all the hubs are belonging to the chilean public sphere) it is possible to identify also clusters of interconnected users belonging to different countries: argentina, coloured in green and connected to the c5n tv channel, colombia, coloured in orange and connected to the newspaper el universal, spain, coloured in red and connected to the el pais newspaper and other clusters harder to identify from a specific geographic perspective, like those connected to the spanish edition of the cnn (coloured in green). the emergence of these geographical clusters is rather interesting since even if all the messages appeared into the global twitter conversation (through the #mineros hashtag) the communication between the users seems to reproduce some already existing pattern of geographical or cultural proximity. 8 propagation network in addition to the analysis of conversations it is also important to understand how information spreads within the network. to study this phenomenon we need to define when a communication act implies an information flow. in many cases the identification of an information flow is an easy task. when a twitter user retweets a message he/she is explicitly exposing this message to a new set of followers. this kind of propagation can be easily identified and visualized. beside this kind of explicit propagation information can also be spread following alternative dynamics. for instance, a user might read some news posted by a twitter contact of him/her and he/she might decide to autonomously post a new tweet on the same topic. even in this case of implicit propagation we can nevertheless verify that that specific user had been previously exposed to that news by looking at the chronological sequence of messages and the following/follower relationship between the users. figure 3 possible states of twitter users during the propagation process from a formal point of view, any microblogging site can be described as an open system consisting of users communicating both inside the system and with the outside world. users introduce new information into the site from the outside and propagate that information inside it. before an event happens, all users are inactive with respect to that event. at some point after the event has happened users may learn about it from outside the site and introduce (inoculate) the news. these users become inoculators, and as a consequence other users following them remain exposed to the news. if some of the exposed users retweet the news, they propagate it, potentially exposing new users. the state diagram in figure 3 illustrates this dynamic. to decide when potentially exposed users become exposed we applied the following assumptions: 9 1) if a user is exposed to some news from one of his/her contacts and retweets it we are sure that he/she read the message inside the microblogging site, therefore we can define a propagation path between this user and the poster of the message. 2) if a user is exposed to some news and writes a new independent message on the site, we cannot be sure he/she read the original message but we know he/she was active on the website. therefore, we may assume there has been propagation. with regard to the second point, we could add some time-related constraints, for example that if a user posts something on a topic months after a related message of one of his/her connections we cannot consider this a propagation. however, in the context under analysis where discussions usually last a few minutes and rarely more than a few days these constraints seem to represent an unnecessary complexity. in summary, the retweet interaction is explicitly available in the data and indicates with certainty a propagation path if the user was not already active, although retweets are made in different ways according to alternative social practices and may be hard to identify. on the other hand, the last assumption may be used to identify additional propagation paths not explicitly represented in the data that would otherwise be lost. this model allows us to mark explicit and implicit propagation paths, and the result of its application to our data is represented in figure 4. the visualization in figure 4 – obtained with gephi and the use of a force atlas algorithm (bastian & heymann, 2009) – shows that information propagates through the network starting from several sources, constituting independent flows of propagation. even if twitter can be described as a social media tool with a broadcasting attitude, due to the non reciprocity of the following/follower system that often leads toward a one to many broadcasting of messages, it is interesting to notice than from a larger perspective, when it comes to propagation of specific information through the network, the system appears to have several sources where information are inserted into it. online social environments are not a homogeneous continuum of interconnected people but, on the opposite, are made of several loosely connected communities. in substance, global knowledge is built upon a multiplicity of local knowledge spreading processes. 10 figure 4 propagation of #mineros messages through the twitter network (only nodes with degree higher than 3 are displayed). in a way similar to what we did with the direct communication network in order to identify the most prominent users we focused on the users that had a higher level of propagation of their messages. in figure 4, due to the structure of twapperkeeper data, nodes are identified by their twitter id instead of their twitter username. nevertheless converting twitter ids to twitter usernames is a simple procedure then we can retrieve the username of most propagated users. these are id 37978920 (user: tvn_mauricio), id 106502630 (user: tvn) and id 13623532 (user: sebastianpinera). it is interesting to notice that, as it happened in the direct communication network, the chilean public television and the chilean prime minister official accounts appear to be the most influent users. messages from these sources are the most propagated and retweeted. while we are analyzing the consequences of these data in the following section it seems important to notice that users chose to broadcast official and reliable information sources. a final element that should be stressed is that several users seem to be active as retweeters or propagators of multiple users. as an example user id 58386168 (user: an_drem) retweeted messages both from tvn_mauricio and from sebastianpinera acting as a collector and retweeter of several #mineros-related messages. 11 discussion in this article we focused our research on the rescue of the 33 chilean miners trapped into the copiapò mine from the 5th of august 2010 to the 14th of october 2010. the main goals of the analysis were on one side (rq1) to describe what kind of direct communication emerges between twitter users in terms of which users where involved and on the other side (rq2) to describe how specific messages spread through the network of twitter. we have found that, as shown also by previous researches (marwick & boyd, 2010), most of the users had none or very small communication activities while a very small number of users generate the larger part of the interactions. similarly to what has been observed before (wu et al., 2011) the most addressed users are famous persons in the offline world. nevertheless within this specific context of crisis communication these users are not celebrities, actors or musicians but journalists (or official account of tv channels) and politicians. the centrality of this kind of users can be observed both into the direct communication network and in the propagation network. this suggests that not only their messages are judged as worthy to be spread (and trustable) by several twitter users but that, at the same time, twitter users use the microblogging site as a platform that gives them the opportunity to address messages directly to vips. this happens even if – at least according to our data – it seems to be mostly a single way communication with normal users addressing messages and referring to vip users with no feedback. the analysis of the direct communication network showed also some unexpected results. users communication seems to stay within sub-networks geographically defined. as it can be seen from figure 2 the large clusters of users exchanging direct communications are often based on a central user that is a mainstream media actor (a journalist or a tv channel). these media players appear to speak to specific geographical communities of users. in fact many major news actors from latin america are present in the visualization: tvn, cn5, el universal, cnn spanish edition, el pais, etc. users, when it comes to the news on a dramatic event, still prefer to follow and interact with local players instead of an international news channels, or a local tv channel closer to the centre of the events. while this behaviour can be easily understood when there are cultural or linguistic differences between the users, in the copiapò rescue operations this is not the case because the largest part of the interacting users and almost all the media actors were from latin america or from a spanish speaking countries. nevertheless users seem to communicate according to a regional or geographical identity. local 12 communities are clearly visible as clusters of connected users. understanding why this happens even when every user is potentially connected with every other user no matter where they are based and especially being able to understand what will be the relationship between global events and local communities within the networked media surely requires more detailed research. by moving on the analysis of the propagation patterns of specific messages within the network we have pointed out two different issues. on a first level of analysis it is possible to say that information propagates through the network starting almost simultaneously from several sources. these users propagate first the information to their closer community then information moves gradually toward a larger audience. nevertheless the global knowledge is built upon the sum of local knowledge instead of being the result of an unstoppable viral propagation. even within the networked context communities – often based on local identities as we saw before – still exist. within these propagation processes vip users (journalists, tv) have a strategic role. their messages are those with a higher chance of being propagated and therefore they seem to be the primary source for the largest part of the stories propagating through the network. nevertheless at the same time users that actively retweet messages play a central role into the propagation process by allowing to the message to move out of the first followers circle. even if the retweet practice can be perceived as a practice with a low level of engagement it has to be said clearly that no propagation would be possible without it. so far we have described the communication patterns that have occurred on twitter during the rescue operations of the 33 chilean miners and at the same we have identified some of the actors and processes involved into the propagation of a specific messages through the network. while these elements answer the research questions we have presented at the beginning of the article the data that we have collected allow us also to briefly touch a more general topic about the evolution and the future of contemporary audience experience. the data we have presented clearly show that users want to be part of contemporary global media events. nevertheless this participation seems to be less interactive that it was thought to be. the largest part of the messages produced by the users does not generate any response and only a minor part of users – usually vips users – get a large number of replies and messages. at the same time low engagement practices such as retweeting have a central role in information propagation processes allowing messages to reach a larger number of users and therefore bringing news form something known within specific circles to something widely known within the society at large. while traditionally media events – as they have been described by dayan 13 and katz (1994) – left the audience alone, when it comes to contemporary media events supported by social media the audience is made visible and it plays and active role within the propagation processes. even if this is undoubtedly a larger level of engagement than the one possible with mass media, today large real time conversations on the occurring events seem still far to come. acknowledgments this research has been funded, as part of the sigsna project -http://www.larica.uniurb.it/sigsna by telecom italia – working capital initiative. references bastian, m., & heymann, s., (2009). gephi: an open source software for exploring and manipulating networks. proceedings of the third international icwsm conference, pp. 361362. boyd, d., golder, s., & lotan, g. (2010). tweet, tweet, retweet: conversational aspects of retweeting on twitter. proceeding of hicss-43nd hawaii international conference on system sciences. ieee: kauai, hi. dayan, d., & katz, e. (1994). media events: the live broadcasting of history. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. habermas, j. (2009). strukturwandel der offentlichkeit: untersuchungen zu einer kategorie der bürgerlichen gesellschaft; mit einem vorwort zur neuauflage 1990. frankfurt: suhrkamp. honeycutt, c., & herring, s. c. (2009). beyond microblogging: conversation and collaboration via twitter. proceedings of hicss 42nd hawaii international conference on system sciences. ieee: kauai, hi. kelly, b. et al., (2010). twitter archiving using twapper keeper: technical and policy challenges. proceedings of the 7th international conference on preservation of digital objects. (ipres 2010), 19-24 september 2010, vienna, austria. retrieved from: http://opus.bath.ac.uk/20326/ luhmann, n. (2000). the reality of the mass media. stanford, ca: stanford university press. 14 magnani, m., rossi, l., & montesi, d. (2010). friendfeed breaking news: death of a public figure. proceeding of the second ieee international conference on social computing, los alamitos, ca: ieee computer society, pp. 528–533. russell, a., & echchaibi, n. (2009). international blogging. bern: peter lang pub inc. wohn, d. y., & na, e.-k.. (2011). tweeting about tv: sharing television viewing experiences via social media message streams. first monday, 16 (3). retrieved from: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3368/2779 microsoft word ir16-doing-internet-governance-sts-final.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 doing internet governance sts-informed perspectives on ordering the net joint panel christian katzenbach alexander von humboldt institute for internet and society dmitry epstein university of illinois, chicago francesca musiani cnrs centre national de la recherche scientifique, paris, france continous orderings and algorithmic translations: how sts opens up and re-assembles internet governance christian katzenbach alexander von humboldt institute for internet and society jeanette hofmann alexander von humboldt institute for internet and society kirsten gollatz alexander von humboldt institute for internet and society this paper contributes to the recent move towards a more systematic reflection on the conceptual foundations of internet governance. recently, scholars have begun to challenge the prevalent focus on internet governance institutions such as icann and igf and opened up the question what constitutes internet governance in the first place. perspectives rooted in science and technology studies (sts) can inform this debate in various ways: they highlight the multi-sited and networked character of governance and ordering, the performative function of the debates themselves, the agency of the infracture and materialities involved etc (musiani 2014). these stimuli from sts help to overcome the institutionalist bias in internet governance and shed light on highly relevant phenomena contributing to ordering the net. this paper builds on these debates that question and open-up conventional understandings of internet governance and addresses two key, interlinked questions within that debate: firstly, as we detach the notion of internet governance from governing organizations, how are we to understand ordering and governing processes in the digital realm? in other words: what is it that we are talking about, when we talk about internet governance? secondly, this raises the question how technologies (infrastructures, platforms, devices, algorithms) reflect and influence, mediate and translate these ordering processes. the paper contributes to this nascent discussion by mobilizing concepts from sts such as “ordering” (law 1992, 1994; flyverbom 2011) and “translations” (callon 1986; latour 1991) to address these key questions. the conceptual considerations are illustrated along the case of copyright regulation on video platforms like youtube that apply content matching algorithms to detect copyright infringing material. the first question relates to the understanding of internet governance itself. traditionally, when talking about internet governance researchers and practitioners referred to the new organizations and institutions that had been established explicitly to regulate and discuss issues of internet governance, such as icann and igf. recently, authors have criticized this institutional focus in internet governance research. instead, they highlight the continuous, heterogenous and multi-sited character of the activities and processes that contribute to the ordering of the net (chenini 2009, denardis 2012, 2014, eeten/mueller 2013, hofmann et al. 2014). this paper suggests to address these heterogenous process of internet governance with the concept of “ordering”. in contrast to regulatory and institutional perspectives in law, political science and economics, an sts-perspective does not primarily ask for decisions about (more or less) collectively binding rules, enforcement measures and the structure of transaction costs but instead interrogates the fabric of the social itself – as john law (1994: 101) famously put it: „there is no social order. rather, there are endless attempts at ordering.“ michael flyverbom (2011) has already used this notion of ordering – instead of regulation or control – to highlight the mundane activities that constitute internet governance: the „practices, interactions and assemblages at play in the socio-political space under scrutiny the work, techniques and interactions through which the global information society was made governable.“ (flyverbom 2010: 426) but these practices not only take place around the united nations bodies so instructively studied by flyverbom, instead they continuously happen by ways of economic and technological developments driven by platform providers (gillespie 2010, denardis 2012), decisions and rulings about the internet infrastructure (denardis 2012), the interconnection agreement between network providers (meier-hahn 2015), the day-to-day handling and regulation of user-generated-content on platforms such as facebook, youtube and twitter. the concept of ordering thus opens ups ways to investigate these diverse practices as internet governance, as they are not seen as mere objects of regulation, but as elements constitutive to articulating, reifing and questioning established, emerging or contested norms. the continously emerging and dissolving order is, in this view, an “effect generated by heterogeneous means“ (law 1992: 382). the second part of the paper addresses the relationship between these heterogenous means of ordering. a core theme in current debates on internet governance relates to the role of technology (infrastructures, platforms, devices, algorithms) in ordering the net. lessig (1999) had highlighted this dimension early-on with his catch-phrase “code is law”, recent contributions emphasize the “politics of platforms” (gillespie 2010, langlois 2013, hands 2013) and the materialization of political conflicts within the internet’s architecture and infrastructure (denardis 2012). this paper contributes to this debate by mobilizing the sts concept of “translation” (callon 1986). this notion – that latour (1991) explained illustratively with his hotel key narrative – accounts for the (sometimes tiny) shifts that occur when norms and practices circulate across people, things, and contexts. by translating ‘leave your key at the front desk’ from an oral appeal to a heavy object attached to the hotel key, the hotel manager not only enrolls a more powerful functional equivalent, instead the whole arrangement is displaced. for studying the growing salience of political conflicts mediated through digital technologies (denardis 2012) this proves an instructive perspective. for example, content regulation on online platforms is increasingly enacted by algorithmic filtering systems that scan uploaded texts, videos and audio material for possible coypright infringements and user rights violations. systems like youtube’s contentid matching algorithm translate legal copyright norms into computable pattern recognition, assuming every match to be a copyright infringement at first. the algorithmic translation of copyright thus comes with a displacement of the frameworks that govern the circulation of cultural works. these new arrangements consider infringement as the default and contribute to the growing privatization of internet governance. by providing this algorithmic system in combination with a license clearing mechanism, youtube becomes a key arbiter of copyright regulation worldwide (dobusch 2014). thus, the concept of translation proves a useful concept for investigating the role of technology in handling governance conflicts: algorithms and infrastructures not only mediate or enforce legally or socially articulated norms, but they translate these into something different, something computable, instigate different dynamics, and contribute in this manner to re-assembling the social (latour 2007) – and as it is here: internet governance. references callon, michel, 1986: some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of st. brieuc bay, in: john law (hrsg.), power, action, and belief: a new sociology of knowledge? routledge and kegan, london, s. 196233. cheniti, tarek. 2009. ‘‘global internet governance in practice. mundane encounters and multiple enactments.’’ dphil thesis, university of oxford, oxford, uk. denardis, laura. 2012. ‘‘hidden levers of internet control: an infrastructure-based theory of internet governance.’’ information, communication and society 15 (5): 72038. denardis, laura. 2014. the global war for internet governance. new haven, ct: yale university press. dobusch, leonhard, 2012: algorithm regulation #3: appealing youtube’s content id claims. weblog "governance across borders" (04/10/2012). url: http://governancexborders.com/2012/10/04/algorithm-regulation-3-appealing-youtubescontent-id-claims/. eeten, michael von & milton mueller. 2013. “where is the governance in internet governance?” new media & society 15 (5): 720-736. flyverbom, mikkel, 2010: hybrid networks and the global politics of the digital revolution – a practice-oriented, relational and agnostic approach. global networks 10 (3). s. 424442. flyverbom, mikkel, 2011: the power of networks : organizing the global politics of the internet, edward elgar, cheltenham, uk ; northampton, ma. gillespie, tarleton, 2010: the politics of 'platforms'. new media & society 12 (3). s. 347-364. doi: 10.1177/1461444809342738. hands, joss, 2013: introduction: politics, power and ‘platformativity’. culture machine 14 (special issue on "platform politics")s. 1-9. url: http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/504/519. hofmann, jeanette, christian katzenbach & kirsten gollatz, 2014: “between coordination and regulation: conceptualizing governance in internet governance”. hiig discussion paper series, no. 2014-04. berlin, august 2014. url: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2484463. langlois, ganaele, 2013: participatory culture and the new governance of communication: the paradox of participatory media. television & new media 14 (2). s. 91-105. doi: 10.1177/1527476411433519. latour, bruno, 1991: technology is society made durable, in: john law (hrsg.), a sociology of monsters, routledge, london, s. 103-131. law, john, 1992: notes on the theory of the actor-network: ordering, strategy, and heterogeneity. systems practice 5 (4). s. 379-393. law, john, 1994: organizing modernity: social action and social theory, blackwell, oxford. lessig, lawrence, 1999: code and other laws of cyberspace, basic books, new york, ny. meier-hahn, uta. 2015. internet interconnection: networking in uncertain terrain. ripe labs. february 2015. url: https://labs.ripe.net/members/uta_meier_hahn/internetinterconnection-networking-in-uncertain-terrain musiani, francesca. 2014. “practice, plurality, performativity, and plumbing: internet governance research meets science and technology studies”. science, technology & human values 40 (2): 272-286. practices, plurality, performativity and plumbing: sts approaches meet internet governance research francesca musiani cnrs centre national de la recherche scientifique, paris, france recent scholarship provides the opportunity for an assessment of the underexplored, but promising, marriage between science and technology studies (sts) and internet governance (ig) research. this paper1 seeks to discuss the ways in which sts scholars’ approaches to ig bring to the fore a number of aspects that political and legal sciences – the disciplines that have so far mostly shaped the field – have addressed only incompletely so far, but are crucial to understand today’s governance of the internet as a complex sociotechnical system of systems. these aspects include the day-to-day, mundane practices that constitute ig alongside global fora and transnational political initiatives; the plurality and “networkedness” of hybrid devices and arrangements that populate, shape, and define ig processes; the performative function of these arrangements vis-à-vis the virtual, yet very material, worlds they seek to regulate; the invisibility, pervasiveness, and agency of infrastructure. the paper first addresses the debate on the “boundaries” of the internet governance field. while the research that explores it is certainly “in the making” (latour, 1987), the very definition of ig is contested by differing groups across political and ideological lines. among the most accepted definitions is the one authored by the united nationspromoted working group on internet governance (wgig, 2005), broad enough to reach wide consensus, but has nonetheless been criticized for its limited usefulness in drawing the boundaries of the field (malcolm, 2008). the consequence of this definition is that scholars seeking to elaborate a theory of internet governance have always been heavily informed by assumptions about the nature of the social forces and agencies underpinning the ig phenomenon (cheniti, 2009). sts scholars tackle this issue by suggesting, in essence, that not only is it not necessary to provide one precise definition and perimeter of ig, but that the assumptions derived from this operation may go to the detriment of apprehending how the practice of internet governance is enacted, in pervasive, networked and often invisible ways (ziewitz & pentzold, 2013). secondly, the paper shows how, trying to bring together a young discipline of disciplines and an emerging field of study, sts scholars of internet governance have a common interest in the epistemological, methodological and lexical implications of their work. indeed, sts provides a vocabulary and a toolbox, both of which confront and dialogue with vocabularies and tools of political and legal sciences on one hand, engineering sciences on the other. ‘classic’ sts concepts and references such as geoffrey bowker 1 an earlier version of this paper, in the form of a review essay, has appeared in science, technology and human values, 40 (2): 272-286, in february 2015. and susan leigh star’s work on standards (1996), bruno latour’s technical mediation (1994), michel callon’s sociology of translation (1986), as well as tarleton gillespie’s more recent research on the “politics of platforms” (2010) are mobilized and updated in order to bring to the fore the “power and politics” qualities of technical architectures, the uses of internet governance technologies as “hidden levers for content control”, and the privatization of ig (denardis, 2012). the paper then examines how the very concepts related to governance, of the internet and beyond, that have interrogated political science in the past few years – like the cumbersome multi-stakeholderism – are being revisited in light of sts-born concepts like socio-technical assemblages and hybrid forums, defined by callon et al. as “political institutions […] expanded and improved to manage […] controversies, to transform them into productive conversations, and to bring about ‘technical democracy’ […] in which experts, non-experts, ordinary citizens, and politicians come together” (callon et al., 2009). understanding multi-stakeholder arrangements as hybrid forums helps to shed light on how these arrangements enact a relational conception of authority, one based on networking and “facilitation of linkages between social worlds” as a form of power (flyverbom, 2011). the debate on multi-stakeholderism in ig is also bound to be revisited because of the increasing privatization of ig (denardis, 2014; brousseau et al., 2012). if the role of the private sector is more and more important in internet governance arrangements, the technology-embedded nature of their intervention how they “hold stakes” in the internet and act accordingly can be placed at the foreground by sts methods. finally, the paper addresses another common thread in sts-informed approaches to internet governance: the examination of the structuring and performative effects that controversies and negotiations have on governance. to put it in the words of ziewitz and pentzold (2010), sts ig-related contributions present different versions of the worlds in which notions of governance take place. thus, for the analyst, the negotiations and controversies that take place around claims of “internet governanc-ing” (cheniti, 2009b) can be viewed as performative, inasmuch as they “both implicate and are implicated in creating the worlds in which a mode of governance makes sense” (ziewitz & pentzold, 2010: 20). in ig, the very processes by which norms evolve are put to the test, made the subject of conflict and realignment, destabilization and re-stabilization becomes central, as they provide different types of guarantees to the various stakeholders. references bowker, geoffrey c. and susan leigh star (1996). “how things (actor-net)work: classification, magic and the ubiquity of standards”, philosophia, november 18, 1996. brousseau, eric, meryem marzouki and cécile méadel (2012). governance, regulations and powers on the internet. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. callon, michel, pierre lascoumes and yannick barthe (2009). acting in an uncertain world. an essay on technical democracy. cambridge, ma: the mit press. callon, michel (1986). “elements of a sociology of translation”, in john law (ed.), power action and belief: a new sociology of knowledge?, london: routledge. cheniti, tarek (2009a). global internet governance in practice. mundane encounters and multiple enactments. unpublished dphil thesis, university of oxford. cheniti, tarek (2009b). “internet governanc-ing”, paper presented at the modes of governance in digitally networked environments workshop, oxford internet institute, march 26, 2009. denardis, laura (2014). the global war for internet governance. new haven, ct and london: yale university press. denardis, laura (2012). “hidden levers of internet control: an infrastructure-based theory of internet governance”, information, communication and society, 15 (5): 720738. drake, william (2011). “multistakeholderism: external limitations and internal limits.” mind: multistakeholder internet dialog, co:llaboratory discussion paper series no. 2, internet policymaking, 68-72, berlin: co:llaboratory. flyverbom, mikkel (2011). the power of networks: organizing the global politics of the internet. cheltenham, uk: edward elgar publishing. gillespie, tarleton (2010). “the politics of ‘platforms’”, new media and society, 12 (3): 347-364. latour, bruno (1994). “on technical mediation”, common knowledge, 3 (2): 29-64. latour, bruno (1987). science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. malcolm, jeremy (2008). multi-stakeholder governance and the internet governance forum. wembley, wa : terminus press. working group on internet governance (wgig, 2005). report of the working group on internet governance. château de bossey, switzerland, june 2005. available at http://www.wgig.org/docs/wgigreport.pdf ziewitz, malte and christian pentzold (2010). “modes of governance in digitally networked environments: a workshop report”, oxford internet institute forum discussion paper n° 19, october 2010. duality squared: enhancing theoritization of internet governance with science and technology studies dmitry epstein university of illinois, chicago there is a growing interest in the study of internet governance, but the demarcation of this field or even the use of the term “internet governance” in scholarship remain ambiguous and contested. in her 20120 preliminary analysis of self-identified internet governance scholarship, laura denardis, showed that 42% of publications focused on either “nation state in internet governance” or “assessments of wsis/igf processes” (denardis, 2010, pp. 3–5). similarly, van eeten and mueller (2013) describe the current state of scholarly literature as focused “almost exclusively on international institutions involved in explicit discussions of the global governance of the internet” (p. 721). these authors make an argument for the study of private institutions involved in internet governance through steering of the day-to-day business arrangements running the internet infrastructure. the goal of this paper is to extend this conceptualization of internet governance further, to include other decision-making activities and practices with constitutive effect that shape the internet. i put forward a proposal for the “duality squared” model of internet governance that brings together the notions of agency (of policymakers, technology designers, and technology users), social systems (as a reference to values in policy and design), and social structures within which practices and decisions evolve. building on braman’s (2009) definition of governance as “decision-making with constitutive [structural] effect whether it takes place within the public or private sectors, and formally or informally” (p. 3), i claim that governance of the internet extends beyond formal policymaking by either public or private actors and involves decisions made not only about the physical layer (borrowing from benkler, 2006). internet governance involves “decision-making with constitutive effect” that occurs also at the logical and the content layers and, in addition to policymakers, involves both technology designers and users of those technologies. literature dealing with questions of internet governance, however, rarely brings these various actors together. this is where lies the promise of contribution of science and technology studies (sts). sts offer an invaluable conceptual toolset for explaining the constitutive effects of interactions among policymakers, technology designers, and technology users, and between those actors and the outcomes of their activity, being it policy, technology or practice. there is a growing number of sts-informed research on internet governance that provides insights in the mundane practices around the management of internet infrastructure (denardis, 2009), content monitoring (mueller, kuehn, & santoso, 2012), or practices of intenret-related policy deliberation (epstein, 2013; flyverbom, 2011). yet there are few to none attempts to provide a unified conceptual network for the ‘expansive’ notion of internet governance. in fact, since lessig’s “pathetic dot” theory (2006), there was little conceptual innovation in constructivist understanding of how governance, design, and adoption of the internet and web-based technologies mutually shape each other. this piece puts forward a proposal for a structuration-theory-based framework to analyze the interaction between information technology artifacts, their users, designers, and policymakers regulating information governance, as well as policy “artifacts” they create (as in regulations and regulatory institutional settings). this framework is inspired by giddens’ (1984) theory of structuration and the work done by orlikowski around technology adoption in organizations (orlikowski, 1992, 2000). compared to approaches such as social construction of technology (oudshoorn & pinch, 2007; pinch, 1996; pinch & bijker, 1987) and actor-network theory (callon & latour, 1992; callon, law, & latour, 1986; pinch, 2006), structuration has had limited application in the social studies of technology. however, the attempts that were undertaken produced useful insights that allow building on the strengths of the “mainstream” approaches, while bridging the conceptual dualism regarding agency and structure. the proposed model revolves around the notion of duality of social structures and human agency. orlikowski (1992), and then desanctis and poole (1994), have established the notion of duality of technology, which has since been widely employed in the study of technology use and adoption. building on that work i develop the notion of “duality of policy” as a systemic “artifact” that embodies explicit negation of structures of signification, legitimation, and domination. i then integrate the notions of duality of information and duality of policy in a single model (thus “duality squared”). the resulting model views technology development, use, and regulation as occurring within the context of, and thus both challenging and reifying, existing social structures and systems (technology and policy). i will discuss potential applications of this model for unpacking notions such as multistakeholderism in internet governance. conceptually, this proposal is motivated by my interest in the inherent tension between individual agency and micro-behaviors of individuals on the web, and the systemic and structural properties of the environments where information technologies are being created, regulated, and used. practically, this work is fueled by the ongoing discussions about internet governance and the growing body of literature on this topic, with particular emphasis on attempts to bring in conceptual contributions from sts. technologies and policies governing how information can be created, used, shared, remixed, abused, etc. make a particularly interesting case for the analysis of the agency-structure tension both because of the ubiquitous presence of such technologies and policies in contemporary society and because of their fundamental importance for the notion of power in social analysis. references benkler, y. (2006). the wealth of networks: how social production transforms markets and freedom. yale university press. braman, s. (2009). change of state: information, policy, and power. cambridge, ma: mit press. callon, m., & latour, b. (1992). don’t throw the baby out with the bath school. a reply to collins and yearly. in a. pickering (ed.), science as practice and culture (pp. 343–368). chicago: university of chicago press. callon, m., law, j., & latour, b. (1986). mapping the dynamics of science and technology. london: macmillian. denardis, l. (2009). protocol politics: the globalization of internet governance. cambridge, ma: mit press. denardis, l. (2010). the privatization of internet governance. presented at the fifth annual giganet symposium, vilnius, lithuania. desanctis, g., & poole, m. s. (1994). capturing the complexity in advanced technology use: adaptive structuration theory. organization science, 5(2), 121–147. epstein, d. (2013). the making of institutions of information governance: the case of the internet governance forum. journal of information technology, 28(2), 137–149. flyverbom, m. (2011). the power of networks: organizing the global politics of the internet. northampton, ma: edward elgar pub. giddens, a. (1984). the constitution of society. berkley, ca: university of california press. lessig, l. (2006). code. version 2.0. new york, ny: basic books. mueller, m. l., kuehn, a., & santoso, s. m. (2012). policing the network: using dpi for copyright enforcement. surveillance & society, 9(4), 348–364. orlikowski, w. j. (1992). the duality of technology: rethinking the concept of technology in organizations. organization science, 3(3), 398–427. orlikowski, w. j. (2000). using technology and constituting structures: a practice lens for studying technology in organizations. organization science, 11(4), 404–428. oudshoorn, n. e. j., & pinch, t. (2007). user-technology relationships: some recent developments. in e. j. hackett, o. amsterdamska, m. lynch, & j. wajcman (eds.), the handbook of science and technology studies (3rd ed., pp. 541–566). cambridge, ma: mit press. pinch, t. (1996). the social construction of technology: a review. in r. fox (ed.), technological change: methods and themes in the history of technology (pp. 17–37). amsterdam: harwood. pinch, t. (2006). the sociology of science and technology. in c. d. bryant & d. l. peck (eds.), 21st century sociology: a reference handbook (pp. 266–275). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. pinch, t., & bijker, w. e. (1987). the social construction of facts and artifacts. in t. p. hughes & t. pinch (eds.), the social construction of technological systems (pp. 17–50). cambridge, ma: mit press. van eeten, m., & mueller, m. (2013). where is the governance in internet governance? new media & society, 15(5), 720–736. doi:10.1177/1461444812462850 lgbt rights conflicts within internet architecture and governance laura denardis american university, washington, d.c. andrea hackl american university, washington, d.c. political conflicts are increasingly mediated by internet infrastructure and governance rather than materializing at the level of content (denardis, 2012). politically motivated distributed denial of service attacks (ddos) have enabled governments to silence human rights organizations (zuckerman et al., 2010). private financial companies severed the flow of donations to wikileaks after it released u.s. diplomatic cables (benkler, 2011). the egyptian and syrian governments disrupted internet and phone service during political turmoil (roberts et al., 2011). this phenomenon of infrastructureembedded political conflict makes digital control points visible and illustrates the power of internet governance levers in either restricting or expanding the public sphere. online political expression about lgbt (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) issues has historically materialized at the level of content. hundreds of thousands have participated in dan savage’s “it gets better campaign” to digitally speak out against bullying and give hope to lgbt youth (it gets better project, 2013). equality campaign “all out” (2013) posted a video prior to the 2014 russian olympics depicting a lesbian figure skater winning the olympics and breaking russian law by publicly kissing her partner. but conflicts over lgbt rights, similar to other social conflicts, are also increasingly mediated by systems of internet architecture and governance. for example, members of egypt’s lgbt community have raised concerns that government authorities use the gay dating app grindr to track down gay men (tanriverdi, 2014). activists hacked the facebook fan page of ridgedale church after it expelled a family supportive of its lesbian daughter’s appeal for domestic partner benefits. private information intermediaries such as yelp routinely make policy decisions regarding what lgbtrelated comments to delete from its pages. scholarship around lgbt rights issues has not yet caught up to this phenomenon, instead primarily focusing on critical issues of usability and online behavior, identity politics online, and lgbt cyberbullying. this paper fills a gap in scholarship and policy by examining the rising phenomenon of infrastructure-based lgbt rights mediation. it employs an existing six-layer typology of internet governance by denardis and raymond (2013) as a conceptual framework for locating and analyzing empirical cases studies that could help establish how lgbt conflicts are mediated at various levels of internet governance and what it might mean for the future of lgbt rights. these layers include: control of critical internet resources such as internet names and numbers; setting internet standards; access and interconnection coordination; cybersecurity governance; private information intermediation; and architecture-based intellectual property rights enforcement. the underlying research question examines whether lgbt rights conflicts embed within all six layers, even the most hidden and technical areas of coordination. the research findings locate cases, multiple cases, at all six layers of internet infrastructure governance: case 1. the domain name system as battlefield over a .gay top-level domain – the first case study examines contention over the approval of the proposed .gay top-level domain (tld) by the internet corporation for assigned names and numbers (icann). for example, countries like saudi arabia objected to the application arguing that a .gay tld would violate moral values. case 2. politics of standards: gamertags restraining lgbt expression – the second case examines restrictions on gay-related gamertags on multiplayer gaming platforms like xbox. technical standards, whether open specifications established by institutions such as the internet engineering task force (ietf), or more proprietary specifications used within a technology company’s platform, involve technical design choices that both enable and constrain behavior online. the technical specifications (rules) within microsoft’s multiplayer platform xbox live excluded lgbt-identifying gamers through restrictive gamertag user names. case 3. governments and private entities controlling access to lgbt-related content – the third case analysis examines the use of access and interconnection control points by the russian government to diminish lgbt visibility online, as well as private technology companies blocking access to lgbt-related information. case 4. cybersecurity and conflicts over lgbt rights – the fourth case examines the hacking of an anti-gay church’s website to make the organization an involuntary advocate for lgbt rights and a case of a hacker associated with the global network anonymous targeting the nigerian government’s website over the country’s anti-lgbt stance. case 5. lgbt conflicts mediated through private information intermediaries private intermediaries assume an increasingly important role in mediating civil liberties like privacy and free expression (balkin, 2009). for example, facebook came under attack for terminating the user accounts of drag queens and other members of the lgbt community over their violation of real name policies. legendary drag queen sister roma and other members of the lgbt community played a central role in challenging facebook to relax its policy (holpuch, 2014). case 6. architecture-based intellectual property rights enforcement and lgbt rights – the final case area examines a conflict resolving whether the satirical website chickfilafoundation.com constituted a violation of chick-fil-a’s trademark. the world intellectual property organization (wipo) was at the center of a dispute over the website chickfilafoundation.com that parodied chick-fil-a’s traditional family values and its stance against marriage equality. considering the website as “confusingly similar” to the chick-fil-a name and design, representatives of the fast food chain filed a trademark violation complaint. while wipo (2012) found the website to be “confusingly similar” to the chick-fil-a trademark, it rejected the complaint as the site had not been created in “bad faith” or for commercial purposes. the paper explains the applicability of the six-layer typology for analyzing the various layers of internet infrastructure governance, develops the six case areas in which each of these layers directly mediates lgbt rights conflicts, and presents a future agenda for research into this nascent phenomenon. it concludes with a discussion of the implications of infrastructure-based rights mediation for the techniques of lgbt rights activists and identifies several open debates over the future of internet governance that could have implications for the future of lgbt expression and identity formation in the online public sphere. references all out (2013). love always wins. https://go.allout.org/en/a/lovealwayswins/ balkin, j. m. (2009). the future of free expression in a digital age. pepperdine law review, 36(2), 427-444. benkler, y. (2011). a free irresponsible press: wikileaks and the battle over the soul of the networked fourth estate. harvard civil rights civil liberties law review, 46(2), 311-397. http://benkler.org/benkler_wikileaks_current.pdf denardis, l. (2012). hidden levers of internet control: an infrastructure-based theory of internet governance. journal of information, communication and society, 15(3), 720738. denardis, l., & raymond, m. (2013, october). thinking clearly about multistakeholder internet governance. paper presented at eighth annual giganet symposium, bali, idn. holpuch, a. (2014, october 17). facebook still freezing accounts despite apology to drag queens over 'real names'. the guardian. http://www.theguarddian.com/technology/ 2014/oct/17/facebook-still-freezing-accounts-despite-apology-drag-queens-real-names it gets better project (2013). it gets better. http://www.itgetsbetter.org roberts, h. et al. (2011, august 18). the evolving landscape of internet control. a summary of our recent research and recommendations. cambridge, ma: berkman center for internet & society at harvard university. http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2011/ evolving_landscape_internet_control tanriverdi, h. (2014, september 11). jagd auf schwule via dating-app. sueddeutsche zeitung. http://www.sueddeutsche.de/digital/dating-app-fuer-homosexuelle-jagd-aufschwule-via-grindr-1.2123810 world intellectual property organization (2012). administrative panel decision. case no. d2012-1618. http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/search/text.jsp?case= d20121618 zuckerman, e. et al. (2010, december 20). distributed denial of service attacks against independent media and human rights sites. cambridge, ma: berkman center for internet & society at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2010/ddos _independent_media_human_rights the cloud as a modular infrastructure: implications for governance jean-françois blanchette department of information studies, university of california, los angeles from the perspective of policy analysis, cloud computing presents itself as an object with particularly problematic boundaries. depending on one’s mood and perspective, cloud computing can be variously characterized as: (a) the realization of computing’s promise as utility, the freedom to access processing power and storage as instantaneously and flexibility as electricity, water and gas (armbrust et al. 2010); (b) a new era in the economics of computing, allowing providers to price computation at an unprecedented granular level, transforming fixed capital investments into operational expenses, and lowering barriers to entry for computing innovation (weinman 2012); (c) a return to the mainframe era and its model of centralized control of resources (lanier 2010); (d) the development of a new industrial form, the data center, devoted to the efficient transformation of electrical power into flows of bits (barroso and hölzle 2009); (e) the computing architecture appropriate to the era of big data/big brother, dramatically increasing the capabilities of governments, businesses, and scientists for surveillance, targeted advertising, and research (mosco 2014; clarke et al. 2013); (f) the elevation of access to broadband as a key economic issue for governments all over the world, as well as the defining material line between the digital haves and have-nots (fcc 2010); (g) another illustration of the power of modular design, whereas the enormous processing and storage capacity of data centers is based on the interfacing of thousands and thousands of small-bore individual servers and disk drives (barroso and hölzle 2009). in this paper, i propose instead that the cloud is shorthand for the moment where computing has become, both materiality and symbolically, infrastructure, that is, a sociotechnical system that has become ubiquitous, essential, and foundational (edwards 2002, 187). as infrastructure then, the cloud necessarily becomes the focus of a series of policy concerns that deal with issues of market regulation, fairness, universal access, reliability, criticality, national security, sharing of limited resources, congestion, internetwork competition, national economic welfare, capacity planning, monopoly, antitrust, etc. these issues and the debates are familiar: they have, in one form or another, featured in every type of energy, transportation, and communication network deployed before. yet the cloud is distinctive for its ubiquity: if energy, transportation, and information infrastructures tend to be tightly intertwined, the cloud’s capacity for real-time measurement and statistical analysis of supply and demand is making it integral to the functioning of a large number of other infrastructures, including energy (smart grids), financial services, airports, the upcoming driverless cars, and even the cloud itself. the cloud has become, in effect, a certain kind of meta-infrastructure (while of course remaining itself entirely dependent on the electrical grid). governance and regulation of the cloud thus pose exceptional challenges, with far reaching impact. the study of the development, evolution, and governance of the large technical systems that invisibly power the social word has long been a focus of sts scholars, including hughes (1983), star and ruhleder (1996), and latour (1993). leveraging the work of jackson (2007), bowker (2010), sandvig (2013) on the dynamics of information infrastructure, i show that like the networks that preceded it, the cloud develops, operates, and breaks down following specific infrastructural dynamics. it has, for example, developed incrementally, from the progressive laying down of its infrastructural components, including data centers, fiber cables, economic models, regulatory frameworks, etc. the ability to develop incrementally through interconnection and layering of functional components has however been adopted as a core design technique of computing systems. indeed, scholars such as lessig (2002), zitrain (2008), and wu (2010) have elevated modularity and layering to a quasi-religious principle, arguing that the innovative character of the internet is a direct outcome of its modular design structure and the kind of markets this structure supports. in this paper, i tease out the implications for governance of the historical development of modular systems. i illustrate that the very structure of modular architectures implies that early-stage design choices persist, often with unforeseen consequences, and become increasingly difficult to correct as the infrastructure become ubiquitous, its functionality expands, and the nature of the traffic it services evolves (e.g., the suezmax standard for shipping, the maximum size of ip addresses specified by ipv4, and best-effort service in the context of the dramatic expansion of streaming video traffic). the cloud is then not so much layered, as it is sedimented, and its many strata provide us with a rich sociotechnical history of the evolution of modular relations, the negotiation of design tradeoffs, and the technical dramas that accompany the integration of new computational resources within the computing stacks. the history of these evolutionary processes that hark back to the early beginning of computing is essential to understanding current policy debates, insofar as they illustrate the constraints on cloud’s future evolution. references armbrust, michael et al. 2010. a view of cloud computing. commun. acm 53, 4 (april 2010), 50-58. baldwin, carliss young, and kim b. clark. 2000. design rules: the power of modularity. vol. 1. cambridge, mass: the mit press. barroso, luiz andré, and urs hölzle. 2009. the datacenter as a computer: an introduction to the design of warehouse-scale machines. morgan and claypool publishers. bell, gordon, tony hey, and alex szalay. 2009. beyond the data deluge. science 323.5919: 1297-1298. bowker, geoffrey, karen baker, florence millerand and david ribes. 2010. towards information infrastructure studies: ways of knowing in a networked environment. in international handbook of internet research, ed. jeremy hunsinger, lisbeth klastrup and matthew allen, 97-117. springer. cisco. 2013. cisco visual networking index: global mobile data traffic forecast update, 2012–2017. clarke, richard a., michael j. morell, geoffrey r. stone, cass r. sunstein and peter swire. 2013. liberty and security in a changing world. report and recommendations of the president’s review group on intelligence and communications technology. edwards, paul n. 2002. "infrastructure and modernity: force, time, and social organization in the history of sociotechnical systems." in modernity and technology, ed. thomas j. misa, phillip brey, and andrew feenberg, 185-225. cambridge, mass: mit press. federal communications commission. 2010. the national broadband plan. washington dc. available at: http://transition.fcc.gov/national-broadband-plan/national broadband-plan.pdf hughes, thomas parke. networks of power: electrification in western society, 1880 1930. baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 1993. lanier, jaron. 2010. you are not a gadget. random house. jackson, steve, edwards, paul n., bowker, geoffrey, & knobel, cory. 2007. understanding infrastructure: history, heuristics and cyberinfrastructure policy. first monday, 12(6). lessing, lawrence. 2001. "the architecture of innovation," duke law journal 51: 1783. latour, bruno. 1993. aramis ou l’amour des techniques. la découverte. mosco, vincent. 2014. to the cloud: big data in a turbulent world. new york: paradigm. sandvig, christian. 2013. the internet as infrastructure. in the oxford handbook of internet studies, ed. william h. dutton, 86. oxford university press. star, susan leigh, and karen ruhleder. “steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: design and access for large information spaces.” information systems research 7, no. 1 (march 1, 1996): 111–34. weinman, joe. 2012. cloudonomics: the business value of cloud computing. john wiley and sons. wu, tim. 2011. the master switch: the rise and fall of information empires. random house. zittrain, jonathan. 2008. the future of the internet--and how to stop it. yale university press. microsoft word wilken-kennedy.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): wilken, r.c. & kennedy, j. (2014, october 22-24). it’s always in my bag, my little trusty usb. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. it’s always in my bag, my little trusty usb rowan cameron wilken swinburne university of technology jenny kennedy swinburne university of technology this paper draws from a study we conducted to examine one particular form of ‘halfway media’ (sterne 2007, p. 23): usb portable flash drives. portable storage media are significant in that they are generally understood as personal media while their use often intersects and combines in complicated ways with institutional (tertiary study, for example) and corporate uses. and yet, despite their continued importance, very little is understood about their patterns of personal use. while there is a vast literature on mobile media and communications, and a smaller yet significant literature on portable music storage devices (sterne 2012; bull 2008) and other portable objects (ito, okabe and anderson 2009), very little work has been done to date specifically on more general portable storage devices, such as usb portable flash drives, and associated practices of use. to recast gitelman’s words (2008, p. 4), our interest, then, is in examining the ways that established media technologies are experienced and studied as contemporary subjects. drawing from interviews with 14 consumers of portable storage devices (recruited according to convenience and snowball sampling, and across cultural and demographic differences), this paper focuses on the data retention and data ordering practices of individual end users, and why these devices continue to be of practical use, as well as why they hold personal, social, and enduring economic significance. in particular, we explore how they tend to exist in a kind of (mobile) middle ground between the ‘immaterial’ and more emergent practices of ‘cloud computing’ on the one hand, and other established forms of more centralised data storage, such as on the harddrives of home computers or the shared drives of work-related networked computers, on the other hand. michael arnold argues that paradox and contradiction are at the center of our understanding and usage of mobile media technologies. in this sense, arnold (2003, p. 234) argues, they are very much ‘janus-faced’ technologies, ‘always and at once pointing in different directions’: they facilitate independence as well as co-dependence, lead to a greater sense of vulnerability while also providing reassurance, facilitate social proximity at the same time as allowing greater geographical distance, blur the public and the private, and so on. building on arnold’s arguments, in this paper we take a line of enquiry that attends to the ambiguous, contrary tensions present in our personal data management practices on usb portable flash drives. the crucial affordance of usb portable flash drives is their mobility. as portable objects they are subjected to various forms of physical mishandling which highlights the limitations of their material form. the more significant the content, the less likely the portable device will be regularly transported. the smaller the device, the quicker it is expected to be lost unless attached in some way to a less mobile object. usb portable flash drives have reduced drastically in price to the point where they can be considered ‘disposable’. if broken, lost or unavailable, it is always possible to buy another. as disposable objects, they require little regard for care. they can be left at the bottom of bags, in jean pockets, or thrown around on key rings. adding to this sense of disposability is the regularity with which they are gratuitously dispensed as promotional materials. assumed to be readily available, it is problematic to assert justification for return of usb portable flash drives that have been loaned. yet there is little expectation that they will be loaned given the assumption that everyone has access to at least one usb portable flash drive of their own. there is tension between the ‘fragility’ of the media object, which easily breaks, and the ‘persistence of immaterial and intangible content’ (magaudda 2011, p. 26). the higher the capacity of a usb portable flash drive, the higher the failure rate, yet significant personal documents, such as photos of children and personally meaningful content, is stored on multiterabyte usb portable flash drives with a temporally indeterminate future of failure. this paper will describe the key tensions that emerged in our interview data on portable media storage as halfway media across three areas of significance. these are summarised below: portable and static usb portable flash drives serve as archives of personal histories. data management processes are idiosyncratic, sentimental, and reflective of transitionary states of being. as one participant describes the contents of their usb drive: ‘if the files were two years old i would ... delete them without thinking but if the files are six years old i think that’s kind of a snapshot of who i was then’. also, once hard drives become inaccessible or obsolete through succession, they are retained with no clear idea of their ongoing purpose. vital redundancy redundancy is a security measure in data management strategies. duplicate files serve as insurance against loss or corruption, yet there are often few barriers of preservation between copies. for example, multiple versions of the same document are stored on the same usb portable flash drive, and drives used to backup content from other devices are often stored adjacent, in close proximity, or even attached, to the primary device they serve as back-up for. curating content as it is transitioned from ‘front-end’ use to ‘back-up’ storage is time-consuming, so it is often ‘dumped’ in bulk when transferals are necessary in creating a surplus of nonessential data that obfuscates the essential objects. further, when it comes to finding files previously stored, participants rely on time-stamping and metadata based searches rather than logical file and folder naming strategies. obsolescence and interoperability practices of use around usb portable flash drives intersect with uses of pre-existing and new forms of data storage and assemblages, such as email, institutional protocols, and cloud computing, which highlights how established technologies are often employed to work around issues with newer technologies and sociotechnical structures. the socio-technical imagination of cloud computing signals a de-emphasis of the materiality of technology, yet attempts to make use of the affordances of cloud computing brings to attention a host of material and substrate limitations, such as data upload speeds, institutional policies governing application installations, and access costs. usb portable flash drives are then (re)employed to circumvent such limitations. references arnold, m. (2003) ‘on the phenomenology of technology: the “janus-faces” of mobile phones’, information and organization, 13, p. 231-256. bull, m. (2008) sound moves: ipod culture and urban experience, routledge, london. gitelman, l. (2008) always already new: media, history, and the data of culture, mit press, cambridge, ma. ito, m., okabe, d., and anderson, k. (2009) ‘portable objects in three global cities: the personalization of urban places’, in rich ling and scott w. campbell (eds), the reconstruction of space and time: mobile communication practices, transaction, new brunswick, pp. 67-87. magaudda, p (2011) ‘when materiality “bites back”: digital music consumption practices in the age of dematerialization’, journal of consumer culture, 11(1), pp.15–36. sterne, j. (2012) mp3: the meaning of a format, duke university press, durham. sterne, j. (2007) ‘out with the trash: on the future of new media’, in charles r. acland (ed.), residual media, university of minnesota press, minneapolis, pp. 16-31. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation: quinn, k. & epstein, d. (2019, october 2-5). making sense of social media privacy: a framing experiment. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. making sense of social media privacy: a framing experiment dmitry epstein hebrew university of jerusalem kelly quinn university of illinois at chicago given the conceptual fluidity of privacy, its framing in both popular and policy discourses is increasingly important (epstein, roth, & baumer, 2014; mukherjee, 2000), especially as trading of privacy for information and services has become commonplace. framing offers individuals “schemata of interpretation” (goffman, 1974, p. 21) or “a central organizing idea” (gamson & modigliani, 1989, p. 3) for sense-making of complex, highly contextualized issues. in policy discourse, frames define problems, set priorities, and suggest solutions; media frames, are likewise influential, as they establish a common ground linking elite and non-elite discourses, and have the potential to sway public opinion (chong & druckman, 2007). while the mechanisms of framing have been excessively studied in a variety of politically-charged contexts such as nuclear power (gamson & modigliani, 1989) and climate change (nisbet, hart, myers, & ellithorpe, 2013), there is limited research on the framing of privacy (epstein, roth, & baumer, 2014). this paper aims to help addressing this lacuna. literature on framing distinguishes between frames in thought and frames in communication. the former refer to the considerations and associated subjective values that impact an individual’s evaluation of a given problem or a situation, thus demarcating the range of possible or desirable alternatives. the latter, also sometimes referred to as media frames, relate to the words and styles that an elite speaker typically uses, either intentionally or unintentionally, when relaying information about an issue to an audience; these typically align with the values and priorities of the involved parties (chong & druckman, 2007). research on the framing of privacy has suggested that while elites tend to use vertical (or institutional) privacy frames in communication (epstein, et al., 2014), non-elites tend to hold onto horizontal (or social) privacy frames in thought (quinn & epstein, 2018). the question, thus, is what happens to the individual’s privacy concerns and attitudes when their frames in thought about privacy collide with the frames in communication they are exposed to from authoritative sources. specifically, we ask: rq1: what is the relationship between an individual’s ‘frames in thought’ about privacy (vertical/horizontal) and their privacy concerns and privacy self-efficacy? rq2: how does vertical/horizontal privacy framing in communication affect an individual’s privacy concerns and privacy self-efficacy? rq3: what effect does (lack of) consistency between one’s ‘frames in thought’ and ‘frames in communication’ have on privacy concerns and privacy selfefficacy? method we explore the relationship between frames in communication, frames in thought, and associated privacy concerns and self efficacy from three different perspectives. first, we examine whether an individual’s ‘frame in thought’, as either verticallyor horizontallyoriented, results in differing levels of privacy concern and privacy self-efficacy. next, we probe whether introducing either a horizontal or vertical ‘frame in communication’ alters these same outcomes. finally, we explore whether there is a difference in privacy concerns or privacy self-efficacy when the ‘frame in communication’ is consistent, or alternatively inconsistent, with the participant’s ‘frame in thought.’ we draw on survey-based experiment conducted with a unique sample of us social media users. participants (n=628) were recruited in june-august, 2018 through a qualtrics panel service and surveyed on their social media privacy attitudes and behaviors. embedded in the survey was a 2x2 experiment which first ascertained a participant’s privacy orientations as horizontal or vertical, and then randomly assigned participants into a vertical or horizontal ‘frames in communication’ condition (i.e. participants ‘frame in thought’ was either reinforced or contradicted with a ‘frame in communication’). following this manipulation, participants were asked a series of questions about their social media privacy concerns and privacy self-efficacy. privacy concerns were measured with both horizontal and vertical dimensions: horizontal concerns centered on the use of one’s personal information by other individuals who used the social media platform; and vertical concerns focused on the use of user-supplied information by platform sponsors and other institutional actors (such as government agencies). privacy self-efficacy assessed the degree to which the participant felt in control of who could view their social media information and confidence in what information could be shared by others. results we conducted a series of anova analyses to examine these framing effects. addressing rq1, which explored the effects of frames in thought, we found no significant difference in privacy concerns (horizontal f1,626=.14, p=.71; vertical f1,626=1.21, p=.27) or privacy self-efficacy (f1,626=.34, p=.56) based on whether the individual frames privacy in horizontal or vertical terms. rq2 considered frames in communication, and whether a horizontallyor vertically-oriented message resulted in differing levels of privacy concerns. here, we found an indication that receiving a message about privacy that is horizontally/socially focused results in higher levels of privacy self-efficacy (f1,588.87=10.24, p=.001), but has no effect on either horizontal (f1,626=2.04, p=.15) or vertical (f1,626=1.31, p=.25) privacy concerns. finally, rq3 explored whether a message consistent with the participant’s frame in thought about privacy resulted in a different level of privacy concern. here, we found that messaging consistent with the participant’s frame in thought resulted in lower levels of privacy concerns overall, with vertically-oriented privacy concerns (f1,626=3.85, p=.05) demonstrating significant differences. there were no significant differences in privacy self-efficacy between those receiving either a consistent and inconsistent frame in communication. implications with privacy taking central stage in the contemporary information society, it is important to pay attention to how this complex issue is communicated to the public. potential implications of this study can be viewed on both strategic and tactical levels. on the strategic level, our findings reinforce the idea that the framing of privacy matters. as such, privacy framing mechanisms deserve additional scrutiny by scholars and additional efforts by activists to make said mechanisms explicit. on the tactical level we observe how communicating about privacy in horizontal terms a strategy often times employed by social media platform providers makes people more confident in their ability to protect their privacy, despite whether this is actually the case. such dynamics may play into preservation of existing power structures where individuals provide personal information without considering its institutional uses. if we subscribe to the idea that critical participation in the information society is beneficial overall, findings about the (in)consistency of privacy framing highlight the importance of both research and education to the multidimensionality of privacy as a pivotal concept. our findings may of course reflect the limitations associated with online panel survey sampling, self-reported data, and known weakness associated with experimental studies, but it offers insights that both the policy and scholarly community should be grappling with. our further work will delve deeper into unpacking the relationships between framing, confounding factors, and the relationships between them. first, we will highlight relationships between demographic characteristics and ‘frames in thought,’ to explore structural influences on how privacy is conceptualized. second, we will explore in greater detail how ‘frames in thought’ as verticallyor horizontally-oriented are differentially impacted by (in)consistency in ‘frames in communication.’ references chong, d., & druckman, j. n. (2007). framing theory. annual review of political science, 10, 103–126. epstein, d., roth, m. c., & baumer, e. p. s. (2014). it’s the definition stupid! framing of online privacy in the internet governance forum debates. journal of information policy, 4, 144–172. gamson, w. a., & modigliani, a. (1989). media discourse and public opinion on nuclear power: a constructionist approach. american journal of sociology, 95(1), 1. goffman, e. (1974). frame analysis. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. mukherjee, r. (2000). “now you see it, now you don’t”: naming privacy, framing policy. critical studies in media communication, 17(4), 469–492. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295030009388414 nisbet, e. c., hart, p. s., myers, t., & ellithorpe, m. (2013). attitude change in competitive framing environments? open-/closed-mindedness, framing effects, and climate change. journal of communication, 63(4), 766–785. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12040 quinn, k., & epstein, d. (2018). #myprivacy: how users think about social media privacy. in proceedings of the 9th international conference on social media and society (pp. 360–364). new york, ny, usa: acm. https://doi.org/10.1145/3217804.3217945 microsoft word boundaries_spir_final.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): quinn, k. (2015, october 21-24). the navigation of boundaries in online social spaces. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the navigation of boundaries in online social spaces kelly quinn department of communication university of illinois at chicago social media blur everyday distinctions between what is public and private, online and offline, and professional and personal, creating an imaginary of a boundary-free digital world. researchers have attended to the ways in which individuals navigate this new environment, for example by examining how individuals negotiate privacy in these spaces, however much less consideration has been given to the other ways in which social boundaries are established. this paper deconstructs the digital imaginary of a boundary-free digital world and explores the boundary work that takes place with using digital social spaces. by examining boundary placement processes and boundary navigation, this study attempts to provide a description of boundary work in the emerging social media environment. in doing so, it highlights the important function that connection and disclosure through social media platforms play in social classification processes and thinking. boundaries and boundary work “boundary” is a metaphor used to delineate the “physical, temporal, emotional, cognitive, and/or relational limits that define entities as separate from one another” (ashforth, kreiner and fugate, 2000, p. 474). though often unseen, boundaries are integral to the way individuals order their environment and reveal how individuals’ identity is structured (zerubavel, 1991). they arise in environmental contexts, as with making a distinction between home and work; in role identity, such as with distinguishing between being a parent and worker; and in privacy negotiation, such as with limiting disclosures to select individuals. the many varied and complex roles that individuals play in everyday life provide significant opportunity for establishing boundaries, and for boundary crossings and transition, i.e., the psychological movement between roles and contexts (ashforth, kreiner and fugate, 2000). individuals differ in the degree of flexibility and permeability of the boundaries that segment their lives. flexible boundaries allow individuals to change the time and location in which a role is enacted or to allow private information to be relayed to another; flexibility is often thought of as the ‘when’ of boundaries (sundaramurthy and kreiner, 2008), and is often tied to role and environmental contexts. the more inflexible suggested citation (apa): quinn, k. (2015, october 21-24). the navigation of boundaries in online social spaces. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. a boundary is, for example, the greater the constraints on role performance in alternative environments (ashforth, kreiner and fugate, 2000), and the less opportunity for role identity failures. permeability refers to the degree to which an individual physically located in one domain must be psychologically concerned with another (hall and richter, 1988), and refers to the substance of our categorizations. boundaries that are permeable allow individuals to transition easily between spheres; rigid boundaries, on the other hand, limit the ability to perform roles in alternative spheres. studies of boundary work, or the strategies, principles, and practices by which we create and maintain cultural categories and role identity (nippert-eng, 1996a), are illuminating because they provide insight into the ways in which individuals create and understand their environment and self, and for how they give meaning to everyday life. significant attention has been paid to the examination of work-family boundaries in offline contexts (e.g., ashforth, kreiner and fugate, 2000; nippert-eng, 1996a, 1996b; rothbard, phillips and dumas, 2005), but few studies have examined how boundary transitions or boundary work are carried out in online spaces. boundary-relevant characteristics of social media social media platforms are designed to address multiple audiences as one, and this quality of broadcast alters the control an individual has over the intended audience for disclosure (tufekci, 2008). this can result in user-generated content becoming decontextualized for other viewers; in disclosures being communicated beyond the imagined audience (litt, 2012); or in ‘context collapse,’ the convergence of disparate social contexts into a single space (boyd, 2008). these conditions challenge the processes associated with boundary establishment and maintenance, processes which are especially important to relational development (altman and taylor, 1983) and to the regulation of privacy (petronio, 2002). social media platforms, and their propensity for context collapse, have some impact on boundary flexibility; however, by their very nature, they increase the level of boundary permeability between social spheres significantly. the proliferation of social media, and their widespread adoption, elevates the significance that boundary work and boundary transitions have to everyday living. method using data collected through in-depth, face-to-face interviews with 23 social media users between the ages of 45 and 65 years, this study explores attitudes and the strategies used, often in combination, in the processes of social boundary placement and navigation. the interview data was thematically analyzed and clustered into an explanatory framework consistent with the interview texts. findings analysis reveals connection activity on social media platforms is an important site for the construction and maintenance of social boundaries. the strategies used by participants to place social boundaries and make them more rigid were responsive to the characteristics of digital media that foster boundary permeability, and especially context collapse. integrating boundary work, or the strategies that participants used to navigate and make boundaries more permeable, consisted of social behaviors as well as discursive tactics, and served to integrate multiple environments into a single forum suggested citation (apa): quinn, k. (2015, october 21-24). the navigation of boundaries in online social spaces. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. and multiple roles into a unified identity. these practices and dispositions often result from accumulated life experiences, and distinguish social media use at midlife as unique from that of persons in earlier life phases. importantly, the articulation of social media boundary placement and navigation processes underscores some of the inconspicuous ways in which these technologies have shaped everyday life. references altman, i. & taylor, d. a. (1983). social penetration: the development of interpersonal relationships. new york: irvington. ashforth, b. e., kreiner, g. e., & fugate, m. (2000). all in a day’s work: boundaries and micro role transitions. academy of management review, 25(3), 472–491. doi:10.5465/amr.2000.3363315 boyd, d. (2008). facebook’s privacy trainwreck: exposure, invasion, and social convergence. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 14(1), 13–20. doi:10.1177/1354856507084416 hall, d. t., & richter, j. (1988). balancing work life and home life: what can organizations do to help? academy of management executive, 2(3), 213–223. doi:10.5465/ame.1988.4277258 litt, e. (2012). knock, knock . who’s there? the imagined audience. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 56(3), 330–345. doi:10.1080/08838151.2012.705195 nippert-eng, c. e. (1996a). calendars and keys: the classification of “home” and “work.” sociological forum, 11(3), 563–582. doi:10.1007/bf02408393 nippert-eng, c. e. (1996b). home and work: negotiating boundaries through everyday life. chicago: university of chicago press. petronio, s. s. (2002). boundaries of privacy: dialectics of disclosure. albany, ny: state university of new york press. rothbard, n. p., phillips, k. w., & dumas, t. l. (2005). managing multiple roles: workfamily policies and individuals? desires for segmentation. organization science, 16(3), 243–258. doi:10.1287/orsc.1050.0124 sundaramurthy, c., & kreiner, g. e. (2008). governing by managing identity boundaries: the case of family businesses. entrepreneurship: theory and practice, 32(619), 415–436. doi:10.1111/j.1540-6520.2008.00234.x tufekci, z. (2008). can you see me now? audience and disclosure regulation in online social network sites. bulletin of science, technology & society, 28(1), 20–36. doi:10.1177/0270467607311484 zerubavel, e. (1991). the fine line: making distinctions in everyday life. new york: the free press. aoir.paper.near-finalupdated12-30 selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 isis vs. the u.s. government: a war of online video propaganda william h. allendorfer susan c. herring indiana university, bloomington introduction the self-proclaimed islamic state of iraq and syria (isis)1 is a militant group claiming the establishment of an islamic caliphate in areas it has occupied since june 2014 in iraq and syria. isis relies heavily on propaganda in the form of videos and images distributed over social media to generate support and recruit new members to its cause, including from the united states. paul neuman, director of the international center for the study of radicalisation and political violence (icsr), reports that “[a]ccording to icsr’s latest estimate, the total [number of foreign militants in iraq/syria] now exceeds 20,000 – of which nearly a fifth were residents or nationals of western european countries” (neuman, 2015). to counter this trend, the u.s. department of state (usds) posts anti-isis propaganda online as part of a project called think again turn away that aims to advance “some truths about terrorism”2 and discourage young people who are drawn to the beliefs and actions of extremist organizations. the project has a dedicated youtube site as well as accounts on twitter and other social media, including accounts in arabic, urdu, somali, and english, where videos and messages countering jihadist claims and arguments are actively posted. however, the effectiveness of the usds’s efforts at discouraging people from joining isis has been called into question. some critics have claimed that the state department's campaign "provides jihadists with a stage to voice their arguments" and thus strengthens, rather than weakens, isis’s recruitment efforts (mclaughlin, 2014, n.p.). moreover, although isis propaganda videos are regularly banned from major social media sites such as youtube, facebook, and twitter for their violent content, which includes beheadings, isis often uploads its videos to sites like liveleaks, pastebin, and the internet archive, where users are allowed to upload information anonymously (collier, 2015). these videos are then shared through social media networks by isis supporters, so that even if they are deleted from major sites, they are 1 the acronym isil, where the l refers to the levant, is also used. 2 https://www.youtube.com/user/thinkagainturnaway/about, retrieved july 28, 2015. suggested citation (apa): allendorfer, w. & herring, s. (2015, october 21-24). isis vs. the u.s. government: a war of online video propaganda. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 2 still accessible to interested audience members. on twitter alone, a recent study estimated that there were at least 46,000 isis-supporting accounts, including 500 to 2,000 accounts of highly active users who sent more than 50 tweets on average per day between september and december 2014 (berger & morgan, 2015). this situation has led michael steinbach, the head of the fbi’s counterterrorism division, to announce recently that the u.s. government is “losing the [propaganda] battle” against isis. in steinbach’s words, “the sheer volume” of isis messaging online, particularly as it is dispersed through social media networks, “eclipses [u.s. government] effort” (levine, 2015, n.p.). “media is more than half the battle" is the motto of the usds center for strategic counterterrorism communications (cscc), the department that produces the think again turn away campaign. it is a paraphrase of a statement purportedly written by an al-qaeda leader to abu musab al-zarqawi, the leader of al-qaeda in iraq in 2005 (cottee, 2015), and the usds has adopted this perspective in its online war with isis through social media. this social media war represents a historical shift in the control of media discourse. through the internet, isis is able to actively recruit with its video propaganda anywhere in the world, whereas the usds may control traditional, centralized media outlets, but its efforts have been unsuccessful in containing the ability of online sympathizers to self-select and disseminate information. the use of terms such as “losing” and “battle” frames the social media activities of isis and the usds as a war. rather than a military conflict,3 however, it is a rhetorical war; a “war of ideas” (johnson, 2015), in which the weapons are words and images wielded in the service of conflicting moral ideologies, and in which the essential goal is to persuade. this article critically examines the rhetorical strategies used in isis and usds propaganda videos to evaluate how these groups present their messages to a shared target audience of american muslims, as well as how the values reflected through the structure and content of the videos may be affecting the videos’ reception by their target audience. the article concludes by suggesting that the success of isis videos is due in part to their ability to properly identify and appeal to their virtual target community, and that the usds videos will be unable to appeal to that community until they understand and incorporate its values. background motion pictures have been used for war propaganda purposes since the early 1900’s (véray, 2010). initially, a projector was required to screen films, so it was not easy to distribute this propaganda across enemy lines unless someone physically brought the films. nowadays, the distribution of war propaganda videos is benefitting from ease of access to the internet, and through it, to populations that would have been difficult to contact previously. however, aside from the fact that such video has been converted to a digital format, it remains very similar to its predecessor: the war propaganda film. in herring’s (2013) tripartite web content classification scheme, the genre of online 3 there is also a military component to the conflict between isis and the us, but this paper is concerned only with its online, discursive manifestations. 3 propaganda videos can be considered “familiar [in that it has been] carried over into web 2.0 environments with minimal differences” from its offline antecedents (p.1). as a “familiar” genre, one can ask to what extent online war propaganda videos utilize traditional rhetorical methods of the genre. christie and clark (2008) performed a content analysis of world war ii-era hollywood war propaganda films to see how closely they followed a 1942 list of enemy combatant characteristics identified by the u.s. government. they found that selected government-defined themes depicting germans and japanese during the war were systematically found in popular movies. as part of the present analysis, we apply the same checklist of enemy characteristics to a corpus of online propaganda videos from isis and the usds to see how each group characterizes the other, and whether there are differences in their strategies of characterization. taking audience into account can help provide insight into the views of various groups involved in a conflict as well as how those views could be interpreted. for example, dimitrova et al.’s (2005) content analysis of international news stories on the 2003 iraq war found that different news frames were more prominent for audiences in different countries. in the present study, we analyze language use – english versus arabic, translated in subtitles or not – as a clue to the identity of the intended audience. as fairclough (1992) points out, “it is important to take account of how interpreters interpret texts if one is to properly assess (and not, for example, exaggerate) their political and ideological effectivity” (p. 292). in other words, it is possible to overestimate the effectiveness of online propaganda videos if one does not consider their relevance for the intended target audience, e.g., american muslims. while dimitrova et al. (2005) show the importance of differences in rhetorical framing in reaching different audiences, other studies reveal similarities between apparently disparate groups. for example, hodsdon-champeon’s (2010) analysis of discourse in online racially antagonistic debates found that people with opposing viewpoints employed similar rhetorical strategies, even when advancing different ideological positions. thus, it is important to consider both differences and similarities when comparing the discourse of ideologically opposing groups. hodsdon champeon (2010) found that the participants in the debates she studied tended to use indirect intertextual reference strategies for ideas they felt were valid or true and direct quotations (which are easier to discredit) for those they considered invalid or false, independent of their ideologies about race. this observation is in keeping with van dijk’s (2003) assertion that “a typical feature of manipulation is to communicate beliefs implicitly, that is, without actually asserting them, and with less chance that they will be challenged” (p. 358). intertextuality is also manifested in social media through implicit cultural references, as well as through incorporating outside context by paraphrasing, quoting, retweeting, or linking to other texts elsewhere on the web. the proand anti-isis videos analyzed in the present study abound with references to arabic and islamic culture, and they reuse (and recontextualize) footage from other sources, including from each other. if this co-opted footage were simply analyzed for it surface characteristics, the broader implications of its recontextualization would be missed. 4 data for the purpose of this study, we sought out comparable samples of video from isis and the usds. the isis video clips are taken from an hour-long film titled flames of war, a high production-value propaganda video that isis released in mid-september 2014 on various online sites such as liveleaks. we chose to analyze this video for several reasons: 1) as the first full-length video released by isis, it lays out the group’s overall ideology; 2) it includes explicit references to, and characterization of, the united states; and 3) the usds posted a number of (shorter) videos over the following months that responded to many of the video’s claims. these response videos, of which eight were posted to the think again turn away website between september 2014 and february 2015,4 constitute our usds sample. the usds videos, considered collectively, are shorter at just over 18 minutes than the hour-long flames of war, and the isis video includes content for which there is no analog in the usds videos – notably, narration of battle sequences in iraq and syria in which isis was victorious. therefore, a subset of video clips from flames of war was sampled, excluding all but one of the battle segments. a total of six clips was sampled from the beginning, middle, and end of the film and assigned thematic titles, as shown in table 1. the usds videos with their original titles are also listed in table 1. as the table shows, the total times for these two samples are approximately the same. table 1. video samples time (mins:secs) number of scenes usds videos baghdadi's isis schools 1:34 2 isis kills muslims 2:50 4 isis leaves only tears and rubble 1:36 2 isis kills journalists 2:28 3 young people fooled by isis/isil 2:55 2 isis and women: the real story 0:57 3 baghdadi and the state of denial 1:57 2 isis inside the tent 4:10 6 total 18:27 24 isis video clips from “flames of war” flames of war introduction 3:51 3 fighting begins in sham 4:43 4 the role of martyrs 2:37 2 media war against the islamic state 2:54 3 benefits for believers & punishment for disbelievers 1:23 2 flames of war closing 4:10 4 total 19:38 18 4 after february 2015, posting of usds videos to the site dropped off. 5 the clips were further broken down into ‘scenes,’ operationalized as continuous segments of video that address a coherent topic and/or that take place in a single setting. (that is, if there was a shift in topic and/or setting, we counted it as a new scene.) the two authors identified the video clips and scenes together. the isis sample has fewer scenes, as shown in table 1, because scenes in the isis video tended to be of longer duration. finally, the language used in each scene was broken down into utterances. an utterance was operationalized as a sentence-like unit characterized by final intonation in speech; and in writing, by initial capitalization and final punctuation in english. written arabic lacks these indicators, but only one utterance written in arabic was found in the data, so the issue of identifying others did not arise. the usds videos contain 193 utterances, and the isis video samples contain 160 utterances. methods multimodal analyses of content themes and language use were performed on the scenes and utterances in each video, following the web content analysis paradigm developed by herring (2010). the unit of analysis for the thematic analysis was the scene. we coded thematically by 1) applying the checklist of enemy characteristics used by the u.s. government to portray enemies in films since 1942 (christie & clark, 2008) and 2) using a grounded theory approach (glaser & strauss, 1967) to identify other emergent content characteristics, such as participant status and demographics. for the grounded theory analysis, we ended up coding the following categories: gender, age, occupation, and health status for each person portrayed (or group of persons, if no single individual was salient) in a scene. we coded for language use in the videos at the level of the utterance. the language analysis focused on the use of arabic and/or english in speech and subtitles. most of the video clips include both speech and subtitles, although some usds videos have no subtitles. we also coded for the source of each utterance, for example, whether it was isis, the usds, or another source such as a news broadcast or television talk show. also as part of the language analysis, we identify expressions in arabic that were left untranslated in the videos and discuss their significance. the coding was done manually by the first author, who speaks and reads arabic, and checked by the second author; disagreements were resolved through discussion. the findings are presented using descriptive statistics, except for the analysis of untranslated arabic terms, which is qualitative. findings enemy portrayals christie and clark (2008) derived a list of 10 suggested ways to portray the enemy from the government information manual for the motion picture industry, section ii, which was produced by the u.s. office for war information in 1942. this list is reproduced as table 2. 6 table 2. u.s. government (1942) recommendations for portrayal of enemies in film enemy characteristics 1. having no legitimate government order or alliance 2. cruel 3. cynical (insulting) 4. deceitful, not trustworthy 5. disregarding basic people’s rights 6. dividing the u.s. (causing fear and distrust among americans or allies) 7. dominating by force, power 8. lying, spreading rumor, false optimism and defeatism 9. not invincible (can be defeated) 10. sabotaging (e.g., spies who damage american industry/war machinery) the usds is still using the same enemy frames in video propaganda about isis, as table 3 shows. the usds videos especially characterize isis as cruel (#2), cynical (#3), disregarding people’s basic rights (#5), dominating by force (#7), and lying/false optimism (#8), with an increasing focus on force/violence and lying toward the end of our sampling period. in fact, the only items that are missing are dividing the u.s. (#6) and sabotaging (#10). homeland terrorism by foreign groups is still a sensitive issue in the u.s. post-9/11, and the usds may not wish to emphasize that possibility lest it empower a group like isis to take that initiative. table 3. 1942 checklist of enemy characteristics: usds videos usds video/scene 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 1-1 1-2 2-1 2-2 2-3 2-4 3-1 3-2 4-1 4-2 4-3 5-1 5-2 6-1 6-2 6-3 7-1 7-2 8-1 8-2 8-3 7 8-4 8-5 8-6 totals 3 8 1 8 7 0 3 7 6 0 the following are (textual) examples of characterizations of isis in the usds videos: excerpt 1: deceitful; cruel isis claims to be the defender of muslims… but the only thing isis knows how to do is kill (‘isis kills muslims’) excerpt 2: false optimism; not invincible isis’ claims can’t stand up to the truth. inside a tent, isis boasts of its plans to conquer the world… openly inviting military action and making claims of invincibility… meanwhile, outside the tent… coalition airstrikes destroy isis armored personnel carrier coalition airstrikes destroy isis armed military truck [etc.] back inside the tent, isis continues its façade of invulnerability… (‘isis inside the tent’) the isis videos demonstrate a different approach to presenting their war propaganda, however. as table 4 shows, the main characteristics from the u.s. list that isis attributes to its enemies are that they lie (#8) and are untrustworthy or deceitful (#4). table 4. 1942 checklist of enemy characteristics: isis videos isis video/scene 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 1-1 1-2 1-3 2-1 2-2 2-3 2-4 3-1 3-2 4-1 4-2 4-3 5-1 5-2 6-1 6-2 6-3 6-4 totals 1 2 1 4 0 0 1 5 3 0 8 this attribution is repeated explicitly in flames of war, as in the following spoken (transcribed) excerpt about the usds: excerpt 3: lying [narrator] you are with us or against us, bush had said. [bush] “either you are with us or you are with the terrorists” narrator] they thought they had won. [bush] “major combat operations in iraq have ended. in the battle of iraq, the united states and our allies have prevailed.” *applause* [narrator] they lied! the flames were only beginning to intensify. obama then claimed it was over. [obama] “iraq’s future will be in the hands of its people. america’s war in iraq will be over.” [narrator] they lied! (‘flames of war introduction’) in addition, the isis video clips characterize enemies in religious terms, as ‘christian,’ ‘shia,’ or kufar (‘nonbeliever’), all of which are terms of disapprobation. all are infidels in the eyes of isis, which sees itself as waging a jihad, or holy war, against the enemies of god. the usds clips also characterize isis in religious terms, as ‘irreligious,’ ‘heretical,’ and ‘hostile to muslims,’ to show that isis is hypocritical and to undermine the legitimacy of its claims to establishing an islamic government, favored by god. as these observations suggest, religion is a heavily contested site of discourse (cf. foucault, 1991) in this war of propaganda. self-portrayals it is also instructive to consider self-descriptive terms used in the videos. using a grounded theory approach, we identified five main characteristics that isis attributes to itself, as shown in table 5. ‘favored by god’ is mentioned in the majority of scenes; other self-portrayals include ‘persistent,’ ‘honest,’ and ‘fearless.’ table 5. isis portrayals of itself isis video/scene honest favored by god persistent believers fearless 1-1 1-2 1-3 2-1 2-2 2-3 2-4 3-1 3-2 4-1 4-2 4-3 5-1 5-2 9 6-1 6-2 6-3 6-4 totals 2 10 4 2 1 in contrast, the usds videos say nothing about the usds or the us. this is one of the most striking differences between the two video samples: while isis portrays its enemies in a negative light, the main purpose of flames of war is to recruit supporters to the isis cause by portraying the group in a positive light – its glorious mission, its military successes (evidence of the favor of god), and the (purported) good it has done for the people of iraq and syria. in contrast, the exclusive focus of the usds videos is to portray isis negatively. this rhetorical asymmetry favors isis, in that a positive or balanced message tends to be more persuasive than a purely negative one. people depicted in the videos the fact that the focus of both groups (whether positive or negative) is on isis means that the same kinds of people tend to be depicted in both video samples. tables 6-8 summarize the results of the content analyses of people depicted in the videos. a total of 174 individuals or groups of people were coded in the usds videos, and 215 individuals or groups of people were coded in the isis video clips. the majority of people in both video samples are adult males, as shown in table 6; however, the usds videos show somewhat more females and children than the isis videos.5 table 6. gender and age of people depicted male female child adult senior all usds 157 (90%) 17 (10%) 24 (14%) 139 (80%) 11 (6%) 174 (100%) isis 213 (99%) 2 (1%) 6 (3%) 196 (91%) 13 (6%) 215 (100%) in terms of occupation (table 7), a majority of people depicted in both samples are soldiers, consistent with the status of isis as a military organization. again, the usds videos showed somewhat more diversity, in that they included more civilians and journalists. conversely, the isis videos included more people in political and/or military roles.6 5 a person between the ages of 0 and 15 was coded as a child; seniors were considered to be older than 55; and all others were coded as adults. 6 persons wearing uniforms, who were armed, and/or who were engaged in military acts were coded as soldiers. abu bakr al-baghdadi, the leader of isis who has been proclaimed by his supporters to be the caliph, or the political and religious leader of the muslim community, was coded as political/military rather than religious because he is portrayed in this role in both the usds and isis videos. religious figures include clerics and people on talk shows discussing religious/moral issues. journalists were identified on the basis of their activities and/or because 10 table 7. occupations of people depicted soldier journalist political/ military religious civilian all usds 107 (61%) 16 (9%) 4 (2%) 8 (5%) 39 (22%) 174 (99%) isis 159 (74%) 2 (1%) 24 (11%) 6 (3%) 24 (11%) 215 (100%) as table 8 shows, although most people depicted in the videos were alive, a not insignificant number were dead. more dead persons, including non-combatants killed by isis, were depicted in the usds videos, but the isis videos were more likely to show actual dead bodies. they also showed more wounded soldiers, many of whom were isis soldiers (mujahidin, or ‘holy warriors’) represented as returning to god in heaven, whereas the death of enemy (e.g., iraqi or syrian) soldiers was represented as righteous justice befalling kufar.7 table 8. health status of people depicted living wounded dead all usds 148 (85%) 2 (1%) 24 (14%) 174 (100%) isis 189 (88%) 9 (4%) 17 (8%) 215 (100%) one reason for the general similarities in the depiction of people in the two video samples is that the usds videos often incorporate footage from isis, as well as from religious leaders and news media in the middle east. the usds recontextualizes this footage to support its position that isis is a terrorist organization that is killing innocent people and cruelly abusing human rights. thus it is important to take into account not only who is depicted, but what message their depiction is intended to convey. authorial source in the usds videos it is mostly the usds perspective that is presented, in the sense that the text that appears on-screen appears to have the think again turn away campaign people as its author, although they never speak, and no actual author is identified. the only identifiable people who speak are in embedded video segments taken from other, typically middle eastern, sources. thus the usds videos recontextualize segments in which isis members speak, creating the effect of a dialogue or debate between isis and the usds intended to convey the impression that the usds is winning the debate. the usds videos also incorporate testimony by saudis who were formerly isis soldiers speaking against isis on a cleric talk show, and middle east news agencies reporting on isis’s victims and military defeats. this breakdown is summarized in table 9. they were specifically named as news agency employees. unarmed people in civilian clothing were coded as civilians. 7 we coded persons as dead if they were deceased but living pictures of them were shown, as was often the case in the usds videos. we coded persons as wounded if they had visible injuries or bloody clothes. 11 table 9. authorial source of usds utterances usds isis muslim clerics saudi soldiers news agencies nonprofit unknown all usds 76 (41%) 36 (19%) 9 (5%) 29 (16%) 16 (9%) 8 (4%) 11 (6%) 185 (100%) conversely, the source of most utterances in the isis clips is isis itself, but unlike in the usds videos, it is actual, identifiable isis members who speak. also represented are muslim clerics (some speaking for and some speaking against isis) and the text of the quran, which is quoted to support isis’s methods and mission. the video additionally includes an extended scene that purportedly shows a captured syrian soldier speaking submissively as he digs his own grave. u.s. voices are heard in only 4% of the utterances, e.g., when snippets of speeches by presidents bush and obama are incorporated to accuse the u.s. of lying, as in excerpt 3 above. thus there is some dialogic exchange between proand anti-isis perspectives, but not as much as in the usds videos. most of the perspectives presented are pro-isis. the distribution of the various authorial sources in the isis sample is summarized in table 10. table 10. authorial source of isis utterances isis us muslim clerics syrian soldiers quran/ hadeeth all isis 92 (58%) 6 (4%) 10 (6%) 36 (23%) 15 (9%) 159 (100%) the fact that isis members speak for themselves directly in flames of war lends the video an authenticity and sincerity that the usds videos, with their disembodied, unidentified narrators, lack. intended audience the language used to convey the message of the videos provides insight into their intended audiences. perhaps unsurprisingly, given their countries of origin, the isis videos use more spoken arabic than english, and the usds videos use more english than arabic, as shown in table 11. table 11. language of utterances (as a percentage of number of utterances) all arabic mostly arabic half/half mostly english all english all usds 75 (39%) (0%) 11 (6%) 2 (1%) 105 (54%) 193 (100%) isis 79 (49%) (0%) 2 (1%) 31 (19%) 48 (30%) 160 (100%) moreover, isis provides subtitles with translations of english into arabic and arabic into english, such that a monolingual speaker of either language could understand everything in the videos (except possibly for certain untranslated arabic words, see below). however, the usds only translates arabic into english, and does not translate english into arabic (see table 12). this suggests that the target audience for the usds 12 videos is english speakers or bilingual arabic speakers, whereas the target audience for the isis video is broader, including monolingual arabic speakers. that is, even though the title of the video is in english, and it was posted to english-language online forums, the isis video does double duty as a recruitment tool for both middle eastern arabic audiences, which generate many isis recruits, and muslims living in the u.s. and other english-speaking countries. table 12. language of subtitles (as a ratio to number of utterances) all arabic mostly arabic half/half mostly english all english all usds 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 1 (1%) 14 (7%) 56 (29%) 71 (37%) isis 80 (50%) 0 (0%) 1 (1%) 16 (10%) 60 (38%) 157 (99%) these u.s. muslims may have been born and raised in the u.s. by immigrant parents who passed on cultural concepts and values to their offspring, or they could be converts who are still developing an islamic religious identity. indeed, both the usds and the isis videos assume that the viewer has knowledge of arabic cultural and religious terminology. the appendix lists arabic terms from the video samples that were not translated into english, along with their english translations. we found 67 such tokens in the isis videos, and 20 tokens in the usds videos, representing 45 different words and expressions. the untranslated arabic terms are almost all religious. some untranslated terms overlap in usage by both isis and the usds; of these, some are common expressions that have entered english language usage, such as jihad (‘holy war to maintain islam’), mujahidin (‘people engaged in jihad’), and insha allah (‘god willing’), while others are terms for more advanced islamic religious concepts, such as kufar (‘infidel, unbeliever’), and tauhid (lit. ‘oneness’; monotheism, belief in god’s singularity). the terms left untranslated by the usds only are of both types; they include allah akbar (‘god is the greatest’), fitna (e.g., ‘strife’ or ‘trial’), qibla (the direction muslims face when praying), sahabah (the first muslims), shahada (the declaration of belief in islamic faith), shirk (‘attributing a partner to god’, the opposite of tauhid), and takfiri (‘accusing someone of being a kufar’). these words speak directly to muslims because they are foundational to islamic creed. isis also leaves untranslated many words in the same religious semantic domain, and the isis video clips use many more arabic terms without translation, despite translating more of the video’s content overall, as noted above. these terms are more likely to have political connotations (e.g., sharia ‘islamic law’; khilafa ‘an islamic form of government’) or be highly specialized terms for religious concepts such as tuaghit (‘anything worshipped other than god’) or names of specific religious and military groups, such as al-muhajirin wal-ansar (a brigade of pro-islam foreign and native fighters in syria). thus the vocabulary in the isis video requires specialized knowledge. this could be a way of appealing to muslims who are keeping themselves very informed regardless of their geographical location, or it could be because the target audience of 13 the video includes muslims living in the middle east, who are assumed to be familiar with these terms. discussion according to the u.s. state department, to date no extremist has publicly declared that he or she has reconsidered joining isis or any other extremist group because of the department’s messages (mclaughlin, 2014). our findings suggests several rhetorical reasons for this lack of persuasive success. first, there are differences in the content and presentation of videos by isis and the usds, despite the fact they address many common topics and entities. scenes in the usds videos depict isis using a wide array of enemy characteristics from the 1942 office for war information checklist; however, isis only uses a few of these characteristics to describe its western enemies, especially, that the west lies. isis is more likely to attribute lack of religious faith to its enemies in the middle east and elsewhere, whereas the usds videos cast isis members as religious hypocrites and not true muslims. these differences point to a difference in the underlying narrative of each group. the usds narrative portrays isis as an enemy group, but portraying the u.s. as an enemy is only part of isis’s narrative; its overarching message is that its establishment of an islamic caliphate is favored by god, and that isis soldiers are holy warriors. isis’s message is affirmative and initiating, whereas the message in the usds videos is negative and reactive, and this defensive position is inherently weaker. the coordinator of the usds think again turn away program at the time these videos were posted, alberto fernandez, has acknowledged the difficulty faced by his department in countering the narrative produced by isis: “we don’t have a counter-narrative that speaks to that. what we have is half a message: ‘don’t do this.’ but we lack the ‘do this instead’” (cottee, 2015). second, the usds videos suffer from a lack of authority and credibility relative to isis. since the u.s. is not officially at war with isis, its narrative stance of isis-as-enemy-ofthe-state could be questioned; isis adopts no such stance. moreover, representatives of the u.s. government do not speak directly in the usds videos, but rather condemnation of isis is made through embedded clips, taken from middle eastern media sources, of muslim clerics and former soldiers speaking out against the group. in contrast, the isis videos feature narrators, including high-ranking members of isis, who speak directly to the audience. in these videos, isis appears more open and forthright than the usds, whose disembodied voice from behind the scenes could appear to be hiding. given isis’s repeated assertion that the west is deceptive, this is an unfortunate impression for the usds to give off. the use of english, spoken and in subtitles, as well as arabic religious terms without translation in both the isis and usds videos suggests that the common target audience of both is english speakers with some knowledge of arabic culture and religious terminology, hence, probably, u.s. muslims, although the isis videos appear to target monolingual muslims in the middle east, as well. it is problematic, therefore, that the usds videos display a lack of sensitivity to islamic cultural values. although not specifically addressed in our analysis, one usds video includes an extended scene of 14 supposed isis members discussing the market for slaves among conquered people. the usds claims that isis members are barbaric slave holders, a portrayal that is designed to make isis look bad in terms of american values. but it may also cause problems for muslims who see this portrayal as characterizing muslims in general, since the issue of slave ownership is discussed in the quran, and some interpretations allow for such slave ownership. in another usds video, usds accuses isis of violating human rights by requiring women to cover themselves and by segregating them from men, but many muslims believe that these practices are appropriate and morally correct, and they could reasonably take offense at the usds’s characterization, even if they do not support isis. another example of cultural insensitivity involves the use of background music in the videos. instrumental music is a feature of every usds video, but there is no instrumentation in any isis video. instead, the isis videos use anasheed (sing. nasheed) or lyrical poems, sung a capella, which appeal to religious values (al-awlaki, 2009). in contrast, the usds videos all feature instrumentation, which is a problem for adherents to islamic schools of thought that advise that musical instruments are forbidden. thus, while the u.s. videos aim to engage the emotions of their viewers through the use of background music which superficially resembles that in the isis videos, this difference of religious acceptability could undermine the appeal of the usds videos to some muslim viewers. in short, unlike the ideologically-opposed groups studied by hodsdon-champeon (2010), isis and the usds employ divergent rhetorical tactics in their online propaganda videos. our findings shed light on some of the reasons why the usds antipropaganda videos are less rhetorically effective than the isis videos, including a onedimensional narrative, an inauthentic stance, and a lack of sensitivity to islamic culture. these qualities could cause muslim viewers, the ostensible target audience, to find the usds videos unpersuasive, and possibly even offensive. conclusion and recommendations the u.s. government believes that it is losing the online propaganda war to isis for reasons of quantity: “[t]he sheer volume’ of isis messaging online, particularly through social media, “eclipses [u.s. government] effort” (levine, 2015, n.p.). the findings of our study suggest that in addition to quantity considerations, the rhetorical quality of usds online counter-propaganda contributes to this outcome. it suggests that the success of isis is due in part to their ability to properly identify and appeal to their virtual target community, and that the usds will be unable to appeal to that community as effectively unless they understand and engage with its values, while speaking from a position of authenticity and credibility. it would be most effective for the u.s. to establish its own positive narrative with regard to isis rather than simply focusing on its counter-narrative. this positive narrative does not need to address the same issues as the isis narrative; instead, it could focus on the reasons why american muslims do not need to join a militant group in the middle east. in order to promote this narrative, videos could focus on positive aspects of modern muslim life in the united states and other countries of the world. for instance, these 15 videos could engage with such issues as religious tolerance and acceptance, with an emphasis on the importance of these values in islam. in this way, the videos could appeal to values, like the viewers’ responsibility to take care of their own families and communities here in america, in a positive way rather than simply condemning the actions of isis. in addition, in order to establish authenticity, the u.s. narrative could benefit from allowing american muslim voices to speak directly to the target audience rather than using foreign clerics or impersonal on-screen text to deliver the usds narrative. at the same time, the usds counter-narrative could also be enhanced through a focus on criticism of isis without co-opting the materials of this group. as the language of both the usds and isis videos demonstrates, the intended audience of these videos are muslims with at least a basic understanding of islamic creed. in order to appeal to the values of this audience, the counter-narrative could co-opt authentic islamic materials (e.g., the quran and hadith,8 both of which are present in isis videos and absent from usds videos) to enhance the legitimacy of these claims for viewers who are versed in this islamic discourse. in addition, the question of the legitimacy of isis’ claims of establishing a caliphate could be addressed by providing historical education on the many disagreements over rightful leadership that have existed since the creation of the first islamic caliphate. thus, it is our belief that the establishment of both an authentic, positive narrative that promotes constructive portrayals of american muslims and an informed counter-narrative grounded in islamic texts and history can better position the usds to offer a persuasive alternative to isis recruitment propaganda. meanwhile, online videos are one of the main ways isis currently recruits new members and supporters. in addition to longer, hollywood-style videos like flames of war, short videos and animated gifs are posted to sites like twitter and tumblr, where the usds also maintains active antiterrorist accounts. it would be interesting to analyze the interactions there using the kinds of methods employed in this study to see whether these findings extend to other social media contexts, especially those contexts where the more rapid exchange of short postings would likely reveal additional rhetorical dynamics. the data from these sites, as well, could be mined for insights to inform the creation of more effective antiterrorist propaganda. references al-awlaki, a. (2009). 44 ways to support jihad. victorious media (p. 19). [self-published] retrieved july 31, 2015 from http://ebooks.worldofislam.info/ebooks/jihad/anwar_al_awlaki__44_ways_to_support_jihad.pdf berger, j., & morgan, j. (2015, march). the isis twitter census: defining and describing the population of isis supporters on twitter. the brookings project on u.s. relations with the islamic world, analysis paper no. 20. 8 hadith (lit. ‘report, narrative’) is a collection of reported sayings and actions of the prophet muhammad. 16 christie, t. b., & clark, a. m. (2008). framing two enemies in mass media: a content analysis of u.s. government influence in american film during world war ii. american journalism, 25(1), 55-72. collier, k. (2015, january 1). fearing isis, india censors dozens of popular websites. retrieved january 30, 2015 from http://www.dailydot.com/politics/indiacensorship-isis-is-islamic-state/ cottee, s. (2015, march 2). why it’s so hard to stop isis propaganda. the atlantic. retrieved july 31, 2015 from http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/03/why-its-so-hard-to-stopisis-propaganda/386216/ dimitrova, d. v., kaid, l. l., williams, a., & trammell, k. d. (2005). war on the web: the immediate news framing of gulf war ii. the harvard international journal of press/politics, 10(1), 22-44. fairclough, n. (1992). intertextuality in critical discourse analysis. linguistics and education, 4, 269-293. foucault, m. (1991). politics and the study of discourse. in g. burchell, c. gordon, & p. miller (eds.), the foucault effect: studies in governmentality (pp. 53-72). chicago: university of chicago press. glaser, b. g., & strauss, a. l. (1967). the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. chicago: aldine publishing. herring, s. c. (2010). web content analysis: expanding the paradigm. in j. hunsinger, m. allen, & l. klastrup (eds.), the international handbook of internet research (pp. 233-249). berlin: springer verlag. herring, s. c. (2013). discourse in web 2.0: familiar, reconfigured, and emergent. in d. tannen & a. m. tester (eds.), georgetown university round table on languages and linguistics 2011: discourse 2.0: language and new media (pp. 1-25). washington, dc: georgetown university press. hodsdon-champeon, c. b. (2010). conversations within conversations: intertextuality in racially antagonistic online discourse. language@internet, 7, article 10. retrieved july 28, 2015 from http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2010/2820 johnson, n. (2015, june 8). how isis is waging a ‘war of ideas’ through social media. the daily signal. retrieved july 28, 2015 from http://dailysignal.com/2015/06/08/how-isis-is-waging-a-war-of-ideas-throughsocial-media/ 17 levine, m. (2015, february 26). fbi: ‘we are losing the battle’ to stop isis radicalization online. abc news. retrieved july 28, 2015 from http://abcnews.go.com/news/fbi-losing-battle-stop-isis-radicalizationonline/story?id=29241652 mclaughlin, j. (2014, september 19). why the u.s. government's counter-terrorism tweeters are finding it tough to fight isis online. mother jones. retrieved july 28, 2015 from http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/09/isis-social-media-statedepartment neuman, p. r. (2015, january 26). foreign fighter total in syria/iraq now exceeds 20,000; surpasses afghanistan conflict in the 1980s. the international centre for the study of radicalisation and political violence. retrieved august 1, 2015 from http://icsr.info/2015/01/foreign-fighter-total-syriairaq-now-exceeds-20000surpasses-afghanistan-conflict-1980s/ van dijk, t. a. (2003). critical discourse analysis. in d. schiffrin, d. tannen, & h. e. hamilton (eds.), the handbook of discourse analysis (pp. 352-371). malden, ma: blackwell. véray, l. (2010). 1914–1918, the first media war of the twentieth century: the example of french newsreels. film history: an international journal, 22(4), 408-425. 18 appendix. untranslated arabic expressions in the videos arabic expression english translation usds isis al-ḥamdulilah allah akbar amir al-muminin al-muhajirin wal-ansar aqida dawa fitna ghurba ḥadud ḥijri ḥukum iman insha allah istishahadin jihad khawarij khilafa kufar muḥajirin mujahidin mujahid munafiqin nifaq nusayriyya nusayri qibla rab al-alamin rabi al-awwal rasul allah rawafid safawi ṣaḥabah ṣala allah alayhi wa salam shahadah sham sharia shirk shuhada takfiri ṭauḥid ṭuaghit umma wallahi zakat ‘all praise to god’ ‘god is the greatest’ ‘prince of the believers’ muhajirin brigade of foreign and native fighters in syria lit. ‘to tie/knot’; any religious belief system or creed lit. ‘making an invitation’; proselytizing islam meanings include ‘temptation’ and ‘trial’ lit. ‘foreigners’; foreign isis fighters lit. ‘limits’; crimes forbidden in the quran year-numbering in the islamic calendar lit. ‘judgment’; quranic punishments for crimes ‘faith’ ‘god willing’ ‘the ones seeking the death of a martyr’ lit. ‘to strive/struggle’; islamic term for maintaining religion lit. ‘outsiders’; unorthodox islamic extremists islamic form of government ‘disbeliever, infidel’ lit. ‘emigrants’; refers to the muhajirin brigade plural of mujahid ‘a person engaged in jihad [a struggle to maintain islam]’ lit. ‘hypocrites’; a disbeliever who outwardly practices lit. ‘hypocrisy’; feigning love for islam to conceal disbelief the beliefs of a shi’ite sect called nusayri a shi’ite sect that maintains unorthodox islamic beliefs lit. ‘direction’; the direction muslims face when praying ‘lord of the worlds’ the third month in the islamic calendar ‘messenger of god’ lit. ‘refusers’; shi’ites, who refused to accept sunni rule lit. ‘of the safavid dynasty’; derogatory for shi’a lit. ‘companions’; the first muslims ‘may god honor him and grant him peace’ lit. ‘testimony’; the declaration of belief in islamic faith term used for the geographical area known as the levant islamic legal system derived from the quran and hadeeth ‘attributing a partner to god’; the opposite of tauheed plural of shahid [‘martyr’] lit. ‘accusing of being a kufar [‘disbeliever’]’ lit. ‘oneness’; monotheism, belief in god’s singularity plural of taghut [‘anything worshipped other than god’] lit. ‘nation’; the collective community of muslims ‘i swear to god’ lit. ‘that which purifies’; an obligatory tax in islam 0 4 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 2 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 2 0 1 1 1 2 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 3 3 2 6 1 3 1 1 1 2 3 0 1 2 2 1 1 0 3 0 5 1 0 1 0 1 1 4 2 1 n=45 20 67 selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 katz,  y.  and  shifman,  l.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  making  sense?  the  structure  and  meaning  of  digital   memetic  nonsense.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  conference  of  the  association  of   internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.     making  sense?  the  structure  and  meaning  of  digital  memetic   nonsense     yuval  katz,   university  of  michigan     limor  shifman,     the  hebrew  university  of  jerusalem         this  paper  offers  the  first  systematic  analysis  of  ‘digital  memetic  nonsense’  –  clusters  of   seemingly  meaningless  digital  texts  imitated  and  circulated  by  many  participants.  we   evaluated  this  phenomenon  through  two  conceptual  lenses:  theories  on  nonsense  in  the   pre-­digital  age  and  the  techno-­cultural  conditions  that  facilitate  its  contemporary   formations.  while  memetic  nonsense  is  a  new,  understudied  phenomenon,  nonsensical   utterances  have  been  part  of  human  culture  for  centuries  and  have  received   considerable  scholarly  attention.  during  these  years,  three  main  perspectives  of   nonsense  have  emerged:  (1)  nonsense  as  lack  of  meaning,  referring  to  the   abandonment  of  any  pretense  of  saying  something  substantial  about  the  world  (for   instance,  in  the  case  of  “empty”  imitation,  or  “pastiche”  [jameson,  1991]);;  (2)  nonsense   as  play  with  meaning,  namely  the  redesign  and  manipulation  of  given  meaningful   structures  (for  example  edward  lear's  limericks  [rieder,  1998]);;  and  (3)  nonsense  as   deconstruction  of  meaning  –  defying  meanings  by  dismantling  them,  often  undermining   social  and  textual  hierarchies  (for  example,  the  criticism  of  victorian  england  imbedded   in  lewis  carol's  alice  books  [rackin,  1991]).  “meaning”  in  these  veteran  definitions   relates  mainly  to  what  we  label  as  “referential  meaning”,  in  which  demarked  phenomena   in  the  world  are  pointed  out  to  through  signs.  however,  as  elaborated  in  the  full  paper,   we  draw  on  zizi  papacharissi’s  (2015)  work  on  affect  to  suggest  that  another  type  of   meaning  –  labeled  by  us  as  “affective  meaning”  –  is  particularly  relevant  for   understanding  digital  nonsense.         when   re-­examining   the   classic   definitions   of   nonsense   in   digital   contexts,   we   also   highlight   the   relevance   of   three   features   of   such   environments   to   the   augmented   formation  of  nonsense:  visual  dominance,  which  enhances  the  creation  of  liquid  texts  that   are  hard  to  anchor  to  a  specific  context  (barthes,  1978);;  remix  culture,  characterized  by   constant  manipulations  of  and  combinations  between  texts  (knobel  &  lankshear,  2008),   often  blurring   the  meaning  of   the   texts  being   remixed;;  and  phatic  communities,  which   highlight   the  pivotal  social   functions  of  new  media,   in  which   texts  often  serve  more  as   means  of  bonding  than  as  carriers  of  referential  meanings    (miller,  2008).         nonsensical  texts  in  these  environments  often  take  the  form  of  memes  –  clusters  of   digital  texts  imitated  and  circulated  by  many  participants  (who,  for  instance,  put  their   heads  in  freezers  or  pretend  to  be  owls).  memes  strongly  embody  the  three   aforementioned  features  of  digital  environment:  many  of  them  are  visual,  they  are  often   based  on  remixes,  and  they  are  used  for  community-­building  purposes  (milner,  2013;;   shifman,  2013).  we  ask  three  questions  about  these  texts:  (1)  what  are  the  main   structures,  or  sub-­genres,  underpinning  digital  memetic  nonsense?  (2)  how  do  they   relate  to  both  the  old  formulations  of  nonsense  and  the  features  unique  to  digital  media?   (3)  what  are  the  overarching  implications  of  these  changes  on  the  meaning  and   functions  of  contemporary  nonsense?         to  address  these  questions,  we  first  screened  350  memes  selected  randomly  out  of  a  list   of  “confirmed”  memes  in  the  popular  database  “know  your  meme.”  the  authors  and  two   independent  coders  separated  nonsensical  memes  from  sensical  ones  by  distinguishing   those  that  contain  a  clear  referential  meaning  from  those  that  do  not.  the  screening  phase   resulted   in   the   identification   of   913   nonsensical   memes,   which   were   subjected   to   a   grounded-­theory-­based  analysis  (corbin  &  strauss,  1998).   in  addition,  we  also  used  a   multimodal  approach  (kress  &  van  leeuwen,  2001),  focusing  on  the  interrelation  between   the  memes’  visual  and  written  modes.       our  analysis  led  to  the  identification  and  conceptualization  of  five  distinct  types  of  digital   memetic  nonsense:   (a)  linguistic   silliness  depicts  memes   that  undermine   the   rules  of   standardized  language  by  distorting  it.  at  the  very  same  time,  it  invites  people  to  learn  the   new  lingo  and  become  part  of  a  community  of  its  speakers.  (b)  embodied  silliness  relates   to  memes  in  which  the  human  body  performs  a  variety  of  peculiar  acts,  such  as  dancing   or  singing.  these  bizarre  uses  of  the  body  often  pose  a  challenge  to  other  people,  either   implicitly  or  explicitly,  encouraging  them  to  use  their  bodies  in  similar  ways.  (c)  pastiche   refers  in  this  context  to  texts  that  point  to  a  textual  source  without  adding  any  significant   referential   meaning   to   it.   what   such   memes   often   express,   however,   is   shared   acquaintance  with   a   certain   genre,   template   or   text.   (d)  dislocations   characterize   the   binding  of  unrelated  textual  elements  in  order  to  create  decontextualized  and  humorous   effects.  (e)  finally,  by  interruptions,  we  refer  to  the  use  of  memes  by  trolls  (phillips,  2015)   to   disrupt   the   flow   of   texts   and   online   interactions   in   a   way   that   undermines   their   coherence.       in  each  of  these  genres,  we  show  how  digital  nonsense  may  potentially  serve  as  a  social   glue  that  bonds  members  of  phatic,  image-­oriented,  communities.  thus,  for  instance,  silly   languages   cannot   exist   without   a   core   of   participants   mastering   the   vernacular   and   pastiche  is  based  on  a  shared  acknowledgment  of  a  text.  if,  in  the  past,  nonsense  was   depicted   in   both   intellectual   terms,   as   defiant   deconstruction   of   meaning,   and   in   playful/social  terms,  its  current  memetic  manifestations  lean  heavily  toward  the  latter.  this   shift  from  an  intellectual  approach  to  a  more  communitive  one  turns  digital  nonsense  from   a  reflection  on  “referential  meaning”  to  a  generative  source  of  “affective  meaning”,  which   marks  the  ongoing  formation  of  social  connections  preceding  cognitive  understanding.     nonsensical  memes  are  thus  the  result  of  everlasting  processes,  devoid  of  any  intent  to   reach  mutual  consent.  yet  doing  it  “for  the  lulz”  (colman,  2014;;  phillips,  2015)  does  not   merely  reflect  people  doing  silly  things  over  the  internet.  quite  the  contrary;;  the  creation   of   texts   for   their   sheer   enjoyment   is   subversive,   as   it   liberates   participants   from   the   burdensome   obligation   to   generate   new   meanings.   moreover,   this   obliteration   of   referential  meaning  may  enable  the  creation  of  inclusive  communities:  as  perpetual  empty   templates,   nonsocial  memes   can   potentially   include   anyone   and   anything,   allowing   a   variety  of  participants  to  express  their  quirky  creatively  without  being  sanctioned.  future   studies  could  determine  how,  and  to  what  extent,  this  potential  is  realized.       references     barthes,  r.  (1978).  image-­music-­text.  new  york,  ny:  farrar,  straus  and  giroux.   colman,  g.  (2014).  hacker,  hoaxer,  whistleblower,  spy:  the  many  faces  of  anonymous.   london,  uk;;  new  york,  ny:  verso.     corbin,  j.,  &  strauss,  a.  (1998).  basics  of  qualitative  research:  techniques  and   procedures  for  developing  grounded  theory  (2nd  ed.).thousand  oaks,  ca:  sage.   jameson,  f.  (1991).  postmodernism,  or,  the  cultural  logic  of  late  capitalism.  durham,   nc:  duke  university  press.     knobel,  m.,  &  lankshear,  c.  (2008).  remix:  the  art  and  craft  of  endless   hybridization.  journal  of  adolescent  &  adult  literacy,  52,  22–33.   kress,  g.,  &  van  leeuwen,  t.  (2001).  multimodal  discourse.  london,  uk:  arnold.   miller,  v.  (2008).  new  media,  networking  and  phatic  culture,  convergence,  14,  387– 400.     milner,  r.  (2013).  pop  polyvocality:  internet  memes,  public  participation,  and  the   occupy  wall  street  movement.  international  journal  of  communication,  7,  2357– 2390.   papacharissi,  z.  (2015).  affective  publics  and  structures  of  storytelling:  sentiment,   events  and  mediality.  information,  communication  &  society,  advance  online   publication.  doi:  10.1080/1369118x.2015.1109697   phillips,  w.  (2015).  this  is  why  we  can’t  have  nice  things:  mapping  the  relationship   between  online  trolling  and  mainstream  culture.  cambridge,  ma:  mit  press.   rackin,  d.  (1991).  alice’s  adventures  in  wonderland  and  through  the  looking  glass:   nonsense,  sense,  and  meaning.  woodbridge,  ct:  twayne.   rieder,  j.  (1998).  edward  lear’s  limericks:  the  function  of  children’s  nonsense  poetry.   children’s  literature,  26,  47–60.     shifman,  l.  (2013).  memes  in  digital  culture.  cambridge,  ma:  mit  press.         selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 marino, s. (2017, october 18-21). transnational social spaces and diasporic publics. how diasporic connections online contribute to the digital transformation of the public sphere. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. transnational social spaces and diasporic publics. how diasporic connections online contribute to the digital transformation of the public sphere sara marino school of journalism, english and communication bournemouth university paper proposal this paper investigates how diasporic connections online contribute to the digital transformation of the public sphere through an analysis of the impact of connectivity on the way diasporic identities and communities are formed, and of the role of digital media on the development of transnational publics as mediated and discursive arenas of (political) conversation. theoretical framework research on the relationship between migrant practises and digital networks returns a broad spectrum of insights into how migrants use digital technologies to form and transform networks (karatzogianni et al. 2016; dekker & engbersen 2014; diminescu & loveluck 2014; georgiou 2006; levitt 2001). this includes the debate around the emergence of so-called ‘transnational public spheres’ and ‘diasporic public spheres’ as discursive arenas that overflow the boundaries of nations and states (volkmer 2003, 2014; laguerre 2006; parham 2005; appadurai 1996). however, this discussion seems to raise a problem. the concept of the public sphere and i am here referring to habermas’s theoretical framework was developed not simply to understand how people communicate, but to contribute a theory of democracy, which proposed the public sphere as a space for the production of public opinion through territorially delimited processes of communication conducted in the national language (fraser 2007). as couldry and dreher pointed out (2007), this framework fails to address the complexity of today’s global mobility, which is characterised by the emergence of counter-public spheres, indigenous public spheres, and diasporic public spheres, which represent the main focus of this presentation. a contemporary analysis of the public sphere cannot also ignore how audiences shape and construct new types of public-ness (baym and boyd 2012) my presentation revolves around these key areas of enquiry: first, the role of online spaces in the (re)-configuration of arenas where political discourses of we-ness can take place (wolkmer 2010); second, the redefinition of boundaries of public and private around forms of mediated public-ness. what my research brings to the discussion is how the circulation of social capital and digital togetherness create a space where italians not only discuss and share practical information, but also where they start to perceive themselves as members of a community of equals, where they can share their opinions on integration processes, the struggles they face and the hopes they have. in doing so, i wish to emphasise that research on diasporic publics needs to contextualise the role of social capital as a crucial asset. my research also intends to stimulate a discussion on the differences between media platforms: online communities and social networking sites present disparities that need to be taken into account when we discuss the impact of transnational connections on contemporary public spheres. method the discussion will present evidence from a three-year digital ethnographic study that consisted of web forum analysis and observation of users’ conversations online. a preliminary observation identified seven online communities as main objects of investigation: italians of london, italians in london, the london link, the london web, sognando londra, qui londra, and italiani a londra. three online fora (italians of london, the london link, and italiani a londra) were then identified as main ‘ethnographic objects’. the qualitative corpus consisted of publicly viewable posts that were analysed with text-mining techniques. transcripts of forum discussions were manually inserted into a dataset containing information about the user, the topic of the post, and the content included within it. this dataset was then transferred and analysed using nvivo software, which allowed a more in-depth observation of content, frequency of words, and recurrent patterns of conversation. a total of 300 posts was collected during the observation. this initial stage of research was followed by a more recent analysis of migrants’ interactions on facebook. the facebook group italians in london, which counts more than 40.000 members, was selected by virtue of its popularity among users and in an attempt to observe what social networks can tell us about diasporic publics. findings research suggests that online diasporic spaces act as: • polycentric and polycephalic webs of solidarity and support where specific nodes (long term migrants) exercise more influence than others; • spaces where emotional connections are established among migrants, with the purpose of overcoming social isolation and of coping with a sense of deterritorialisation; • spaces where users share personal experiences and private information in a fundamentally public space; • spaces where migrants can celebrate their identity in the national context where they now live, in relation to their homeland and within a broader diaspora context. that said, diasporic communication can also be dominated by powerful voices – especially on social networks – that make mediated communication an area of struggle. on the one hand, online spaces help italians identify themselves as members of the same diaspora. the community is fundamental in providing comfort and a sense of collective identity, as it allows its members to explore their values and beliefs within environments that they perceive to be safe. in this respect, the combination of material and emotional support provides ground for the emergence of a transnational social space that is characterised by the accumulation and use of human (know-how, material support) and social capital (resources that allow individuals to cooperate in networks, groups, and organizations). on the other hand, research on facebook emphasised the emergence of a critical view of diasporic publics, where conversation is more fragmented, the opportunity to organise physical meetings reduced, and the impact of solidarity mitigated. conclusions the circulation of digital togetherness and social capital are important aspects in the formation of transnational publics despite their circulation appears more problematic on facebook. in thinking about the public/private dichotomy, research suggests that transnational communities develop a sense of public-ness as they acquire visibility (silverstone 2002). at the same time, on-line communication is non-public in the sense that it fosters intimacy among migrants. what seems to circulate online is a sense of mobile public-ness where the circulation of social capital and the creation of spaces of digital togetherness contribute to the formation of discursive arenas that migrants themselves negotiate on a daily basis through their interactions, urgencies, personal and interpersonal needs. this expands the notion of the public sphere to include not only transnational connections between already settled migrants and those who access the community before leaving italy, but also different forms of trust, accountability and legitimacy. this mobile public-ness is public as it takes place in an openly accessible arena, and private as individuals negotiate their own privacy depending on the urgency of each situation (papacharissi 2010). digitality does not change the functional features of the public sphere, which still remains a space where meanings and values are produced and negotiated. however, studying online spaces allows us to focus on different aspects of this mediated public sphere. online communities can become “a site for the production, distribution, consumption and discussion of political content on issues of societal relevance (…)” but also a space where “different frames clash, which corroborates the public sphere’s function as a stage for conflict and contestation” (nguyen 2016:214) references appadurai, a. (1996) modernity at large. cultural dimensions of globalization. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. baym, n. and boyd, d. (2012) socially mediated publicness: an introduction. journal of broadcasting and electronic media 56 (3): 320-329. couldry, n. and dreher, t. (2007) globalization and the public sphere: exploring the space of community media in sydney. global media and communication 3 (1): 79-100. dekker, r. and engbersen, g. (2014) how social media transform migrant networks and facilitate migration. global networks 14: 401-418. diminescu, d. and loveluck, b. (2014) traces of dispersion: online media and diasporic identities. crossings: journal of migration & culture 5 (1): 23-39. fraser, n. (2007) transnationalizing the public sphere. on the legitimacy and efficacy of public opinion in a post-westphalian world. theory, culture & society 24(4): 7-30. georgiou, m. (2006) diasporic communities on line: a bottom up experience of transnationalism. in: sarikakis, k. and thussu, d. (eds.) ideologies of the internet. cresskill: hampton press, pp. 131-145. habermas, j. (1991) the structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. cambridge, ma: mit press.. karatzogianni, a., nguyen, d. and serafinelli, e. (2016) the digital transformation of the public sphere. conflict, migration, crisis and culture in digital networks. london: palgrave. levitt, p. (2001) transnational migration: taking stock and future directions. global networks, 1: 195-216. laguerre, m. s. (2006) virtual diasporic public sphere. in: laguerre, m. s. diaspora, politics, and globalization. new york: palgrave macmillan, pp. 113-131. nguyen, d. (2016) analysing transnational web spheres: the european example during the eurozone crisis. in: karatzogianni, a., nguyen, d. and serafinelli, e. (eds). the digital transformation of the public sphere. conflict, migration, crisis and culture in digital networks. london: palgrave, pp. 211-233. papacharissi, z. (2010) a private sphere: democracy in a digital age. malden, ma: polity press. parham, a. a. (2005) internet, place, and public sphere in diaspora communities. diaspora: a journal of transnational studies 14 (2/3): 349-380. silverstone, r. (2002) finding a voice: minorities, media and the global commons. in: stald, g. and tufte, t. (eds.) global encounters: media and cultural transformation. luton: university of luton press. volkmer, i. (2003) the global network society and the global public sphere. development 46(1): 9-16. volkmer (2010) between “publicness” and “publicity”: conceptualizing discourse “assemblages” of public legitimacy in transnational spaces. review of communication 10 (1): 53-60. volkmer, i. (2014) the global public sphere: public communication in the age of reflective interdependence. malden, ma: polity press. microsoft word 706-661-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 screaming more, listening less? an investigation of participation and deliberation dynamics in the italian five stars movement abstract this paper investigates the tension between participation and deliberation in the italian “five stars” movement. this grassroots movement has based its activity almost entirely on the internet, becoming a political organization able to receive more than 25% in the last national elections. while its success seems to be a good outcome for democratic participation, the effects on deliberation seems to be more complex. this study analyzes the comments on the communication platform of the movement, its leader beppe grillo’s blog. the comments reveal a low level of criticism towards the leader’s opinions, a high uncivil tone, a tendency to avoid policy discussion, a low level of justifications for claims expressed and, lastly, very few diverse points of views presented. overall, the implications for political deliberation are not very positive: while the five stars movement, through the internet, has promoted civic engagement and participation, his members do not seem to be engaged in a civil and rational discussion, at least on the movement’s most important communication platform. keywords italy; mobilization; deliberation; internet; grass-root movement introduction the financial crisis that shocked the global world economy in 2008 had a tremendous impact on the lives of millions people in terms of job losses, diminished purchase power, and an overall decline of the quality of life (world bank, 2009). recent research in political science and economics (hacker & pierson, 2011) shows that, over the last 25-30 years, income inequalities and poverty have risen unrestrained in western countries and this phenomenon has been exacerbated by the global economic crisis (world bank, 2009). in this economic context, several protest movements have emerged over the last three years. in particular, in southern europe, the spanish indignados and other national groups in italy and greece have successfully organized rallies and garnered significant buzz and media coverage. however, their impact on traditional forms of politics and on the implementation of policies has been very mild, mainly for two reasons. first, we have to consider the increasingly diminished power and autonomy of individual european national governments that, often, have to follow austerity economic policies dictated by bruxelles technocrats and governments of more powerful nations such as france and germany. second, we have to take into account the fact that these movements are very different from traditional political organizations. indeed, a lot of new grassroots political movements are less likely to have a hierarchical structure (bimber, 2003) and tend to be organized around online communities. in fact, the internet has become a sort of lifeblood for these movements, which need the web to recruit volunteers, mobilize them, and share information without the filter of traditional news media. an exceptional case among the european movements is the italian "five stars movement", a grass-roots political movement funded by the comedian beppe grillo. the movement has fought the culture of corruption and the gerontocratic system of italian politics, pushing for a series of innovative reforms that could drastically change the face of italian politics. the movement developed from a group of loyal followers of beppe grillo's own blog and it has become a political phenomenon, which received circa 25% of votes in the last italian national elections. the movement has been harshly criticized by traditional news media and political parties for its populist tones and policy proposals, rooted in the "anti-political' message of its leader and main spokespeople. participation versus deliberation the success of this movement poses very interesting questions for political communication researchers, in particular concerning the relationship between two of the most cherished democratic selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 outcomes, participation and deliberation. on one hand, the fact that this grass-root movement has its base online seems to reinforce the idea that information and communication technologies can actually have a positive effect on participation outcomes, allowing citizens who have been on the sidelines of the political process to be more engaged and make their voices heard. on the other hand, it is important to understand whether this positive effect on participation could have a boomerang effect on deliberation. how much rational discussion is there among people’s involved in the movement? are people who participate to the discussion on beppe grillo’s blog open to listen and evaluate different ideas? this question goes back to a fundamental tension in the political communication literature. if we look at who's politically active on the internet, several studies have shown that the users who tend to get their political information from the internet and participate in online public debates tend to be already politically engaged (prior, 2007), and more partisan (di maggio and sato, 2003; inoue, 2003; iyengar and hahn, 2003). these very partisan and informed individuals often are part of so called “eco-chambers”: they would tend to look for information online on websites that are more closely aligned with their political views. the effects of eco-chambers for democratic outcomes seem to be mixed: on one hand these individuals tend to become more engaged and participate more in the political process, on the other hand they tend to increase their level of polarization and avoid exposure to cross cutting information (sunstein, 2001). methodology this study begins to investigate whether the communication platform of the movement offers some opportunities for rational debate. i started analyzing online deliberation in the five stars political movement, focusing on the discussion to beppe grillo’s posts on his blog. comments to more than 100 of beppe grillo’posts on the blog were analyzed over three months before the election. five specific variables were considered in the analysis: 1. number of comments 2. negativity or positivity of the comment, focusing in particular on the comments that would contradict the opinion of the movement’s leader 3. tone of the comment, civil versus uncivil 4. subject of the comment, focusing on the differences between policy-oriented comments versus not policy-oriented comments 5. number of justified argument for each comment 6. number of different points of view included in the comments. preliminary results and discussion preliminary results indicate that comments rarely contradict the opinions of beppe grillo (there is a 78% for positive comments). the tone of the comments was mostly divided between civil (47%) and uncivil (53%). a majority of comments were not focused on policy issues (62%). justifications for arguments were somewhat rare in comments (mean of 0.3 justifications for comment). lastly, different points of view were seldom included in comments: only 12% of individuals who commented on the blog were bringing in different points of views. these results pose us very important questions in terms implications for democracy. is criticism tolerated in the five stars movement? is there a dangerous adoration for the movement’s leader? would we encounter the same results in different communication spaces, such as a forum or facebook pages? and, more broadly, if this movement has contributed to increase participation in some segments of the italian population, should we really worry about the outcomes for deliberation? answering this last question, i would argue that an equilibrium between participation and deliberation is vital for democratic life, especially in a young democracy like italy, a country particularly fascinated by autocratic political personalities. however, further research is necessary to understand the complex effects of the development of the five stars movement on italian politics. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 references bimber b. (2003). information and american democracy. cambridge: cambridge university press. dimaggio, p. j., & sato, k. (2003). does the internet balkanize political attention? a test of the sunstein thesis. paper presented at the annual meeting of the american sociological association, atlanta, ga, usa, august. hacker j & paulson. p. (2011) winner-take-all politics: how washington made the rich richer and turned its back on the middle class. new york: simon & schuster iyengar, s., & hahn, k. s. (2009). red media, blue media: evidence of ideological selectivity in media use. journal of communication, 59:19-39. inoue, y., (2003). selective exposure and impact of a cyber election campaign on voting behaviors: u.s. presidential election 2000. michigan state university. college of communication arts and sciences. prior, m. (2007). post-broadcast democracy. how media choice increases inequality in political involvement and polarizes elections. cambridge: cambridge university press. sunstein, c. r. (2009). going to extremes: how like minds unite and divide. oxford, england: oxford university press. world bank data. (2011). retrieved from http://data.worldbank.org/ . microsoft word yeo.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): yeo, t.e.d. (2014, october 22-24). the great firewall of china: uses and gratifications for circumventing state-imposed internet boundaries. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. scaling the great firewall of china: uses and gratifications for circumventing state-imposed internet boundaries tien ee dominic yeo hong kong baptist university abstract this paper examines the motivation of chinese internet users for circumventing stateimposed internet restrictions – a practice called fanqiang (to scale the great firewall of china). it fills an important gap in our knowledge of state-imposed internet controls in china which has been dominated by discussions on technological dimensions and implications on the public sphere. through a series of focus group interviews with chinese internet users in guangzhou, the study in this paper found fanqiang to be driven by more deliberative motives – largely information-seeking but also, to a smaller extent, entertainment and social utility. our findings clarify the nature of users’ information-seeking motive for fanqiang. unsurprisingly, research participants reported that they fanqiang to search for news outside china, expressing their distrust of the account of the official media on events in the country. but contrary to conventional wisdom, we found that the desire for political or other forms of sensitive content was not the most salient motive for circumventing internet restrictions. the desire for politically sensitive information was largely driven by curiosity rather than personal values; it was stronger when individuals initially fanqiang but is attenuated after the initial novelty of the “forbidden fruit” wears off. furthermore, the information routinely sought by research participants outside the great firewall was neither politically sensitive nor falling within the officially expressed categories of undesirable materials. overall, our findings suggest that the desire for more complete knowledge provides a clearer picture of chinese internet users’ information-seeking motive for fanqiang. introduction this paper speaks to the conference theme on boundaries through an examination of those imposed by the state on internet users’ online activities in china. internet censorship in china is mainly operated through the great firewall, officially known as the golden shield project, which blocks undesirable content and sites through firewalls and proxy servers. websites that are completely or partially banned by the great firewall not only include sexually explicit and religious sites but notably, social media sites based in the west such as facebook, twitter, google, and yahoo. these restrictions have led to the rise of fanqiang, which literally means “scaling the wall” in chinese. internet users typically fanqiang by connecting to certain proxy servers or virtual private networks based overseas. hitherto, the attention of both scholars and commentators on internet censorship in china has mostly been focused on its technological dimensions (e.g., mackinnon, 2011; bailey & labovitz, 2011) and its implications on the public sphere (e.g., diamond, 2012). the motivations of internet users for engaging in fanqiang, however, have been implicitly assumed and largely neglected. this paper thus fills an important gap in our knowledge of state-imposed internet controls in china by exploring the motivations of chinese internet users for fanqiang. methodological framework our investigation is guided by the uses and gratifications perspective, which assumes that people are active and goal-directed in their usage of the media (katz, blumler, & gurevitch, 1973). the perspective is well suited for studying the highly deliberative activity of circumventing state-imposed restrictions in internet use. owing to the lack of empirically established motives in this area, focus group interviews were conducted with research participants (n = 24, aged 21 to 30) from the southern chinese city of guangzhou to explore the motives of chinese internet users for fanqiang. summary of findings as with previous studies on the uses and gratifications for internet use (stafford, stafford, & schkade, 2004; papacharissi & rubin, 2000), we found users’ motives for fanqiang to fall within the categories of information-seeking (e.g., view external news sites), entertainment (e.g., play online games), and social utility (e.g., connect to facebook). several research participants mentioned that they fanqiang to look up information for professional or academic purposes. unlike regular internet use, fanqiang is a tedious cat-and-mouse game between censors and users; each side has to constantly update their circumvention or counter-circumvention techniques in response to moves by the other sides. users who regularly circumvent internet restrictions, particularly to access politically sensitive sites, also risk getting into trouble with the authorities monitoring such activities. it is therefore unsurprisingly that less deliberative motives such as escape and pass-time were not expressed by research participants. discussion an important contribution of this paper is to clarify the nature of users’ informationseeking motives for fanqiang. an obvious reason for fanqiang is to access politically sensitive information and news not available within china. our findings do indicate that research participants fanqiang to search for news reports outside china, expressing their distrust of the account of the official media on events transpiring in the country. however, the implicit assumption that people circumvent internet restrictions to access politically sensitive content in extant literature (e.g., taneja, 2013) is probably overplayed. the search for political or other forms of information deemed sensitive to the authorities is not necessarily the most salient motive for circumventing internet restrictions. our findings indicate that seeking sensitive information was largely driven by curiosity rather than personal values. we found that the desire to seek politically sensitive information may be stronger when individuals initially engage in fanqiang but is attenuated after the initial novelty of the “forbidden fruit” wears off. our findings further indicate that the desire for more complete information as opposed to the desire for restricted content offers a clearer picture of chinese internet users’ informational needs for fanqiang. although research participants reported circumventing internet controls in order to access restricted information (e.g., news on sensitive topics), the type of information sought also included ordinarily unrestricted information (e.g., sports instruction) that happens to be found on a restricted platform such as certain social network sites or search engines. by elucidating people’s motives for fanqiang, this paper helps to inform the debate concerning internet censorship and its impact on society. some form of internet censorship exists in many countries but few as extensive as that in china which has the largest number of internet users in the world. internet controls in china have mainly been targeted at restricting the spread of pornography, gambling, hate speech, and “counterrevolutionary” materials such as those concerning the 1989 tiananmen square, falun gong, and free tibet movements (harwit & clark, 2001; jujaroen, 2010; lacharite, 2002). such undesirable materials are deemed detrimental to social harmony by the beijing authorities (lagerkvist, 2010). yet, state-imposed internet restrictions not only represent an affront to basic freedoms but also a major inconvenience to the legitimate activities of internet users. in this paper, we found that the information routinely sought by research participants outside the great firewall was neither politically sensitive nor falling within the officially expressed categories of undesirable materials. our findings thus question the legitimacy of both explicit and implicit justifications for the state-imposed restrictions on internet use. reference bailey, m., & labovitz, c. (2011). censorship and co-option of the internet infrastructure. ann arbor, 1001, 48104. diamond, l. (2012). liberation technology. in l. &. diamond, liberation technology: social media and the struggle for democracy (pp. 3-17). jhu press. harwit, e., & clark, d. (2001). shaping the internet in china. evolution of political control over network infrastructure and content. asian survey, 41(3), 377-408. jujaroen, j. (2010). internet censorship in china: technology, boundaries, and popular attitudes. retrieved 11 18, 2013, from http://careers.sewanee.edu/assets/uploads/jujaroen,%20jearranai%20(biehl) internship%20final%20report%202010.pdf katz, e., blumler, j. g., & gurevitch, m. (1973). uses and gratifications research. the public opinion quarterly, 37(4), 509-523. lacharite, j. (2002). electronic decentralisation in china: a critical analysis of internet filtering policies in the people's republic of china. australian journal of political science, 37(2), 333-346. lagerkvist, j. (2010). after the internet, before democracy: competing norms in chinese media and society. peter lang. mackinnon, r. (2011). china's" networked authoritarianism". journal of democracy, 22(2), 32-46. papacharissi, z., & rubin, a. m. (2000). predictors of internet use. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 44(2), 175-196. stafford, t. f., stafford, m. r., & schkade, l. l. (2004). determining uses and gratifications for the internet. decision sciences, 35(2), 259-288. taneja, h. &. (2013). how does the great firewall of china affect online user behavior? isolated 'internets' as culturally defined markets on the www. 1305. retrieved feb 10, 2014, from http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.3311 microsoft word aoir2017-submission.docx selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): hänska, max & bauchowitz, stefan. (2017, october 18-21). mapping twitter’s information sphere in the lead-up to the brexit referendum: how eurosceptic views outpaced their rivals. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. mapping twitter’s information sphere in the lead-up to the brexit referendum: how eurosceptic views outpaced their rivals max hänska de montfort university, uk stefan bauchowitz unaffiliated (note: results are preliminary) short abstract how did eurosceptic (leave) and pro-european (remain) activity compare on social media in the run-up to the eu referendum, what kind of information did users share, and did this confine the two camps to informational echo chambers? to answer these questions we collected more than 7.5 million brexit-related tweets through twitter’s streaming api. we enriched our data using a support vector machine to identify which tweets clearly supported the leave or remain camp, mapped twitter users within our data to the location specified in their user profile, and mined urls shared in tweets. we find that leave users were more numerous, and individually more active in tweeting to support their cause. leave users also tended to be less open, and more engaged within their own echo-chamber, something that is reflected in the urls they shared. urls pointing to eurosceptic domains were shared more widely than those pointing to proeuropean domains. surprisingly, the express was one of the most prominent domains shared on twitter, more than its more prominent eurosceptic counterpart, the daily mail. overall, twitter users who supported leave appeared to be much more active and motivated in advancing their cause than remainers were in advocating continued eu membership. the use of twitter in the brexit campaign demonstrates how social media users pushed a hitherto marginal political agenda to the front and center of public discourse. 2 extended abstract commentators have not tired of asserting the outsized influence social media supposedly played in the us presidential election and the campaign leading up to the uk’s referendum on leaving the european union; though the campaigns differ in important ways (curry, 2016; herrman, 2016; lapowsky, 2016; murray, 2016; ohlheiser, 2016; polonski, 2016). in particular researchers have asked whether social media confines users to silos of the like-minded (brundidge, 2010; feldman, myers, hmielowski, & leiserowitz, 2014; garrett, 2009; pariser, 2011). in this paper we map twitter’s info-sphere in the run-up to the uk’s brexit referendum. how did eurosceptic (leave) and pro-european (remain) information compare on social media in the run-up to the eu referendum, what kind of information did leave and remain supporters share, and did this confine the two camps to informational echo chambers which kept feeding them information congenial to their views? and, did those supporting britain’s continued membership in the eu interact with twitter users who sought to end britain’s membership, and vice versa? to answer these questions we collected more than 7.5 million brexit-related tweets through twitter’s streaming api. we enriched our data using a support vector machine to identify which tweets clearly supported the leave or remain camp, mapped twitter users within our data to the location specified in their user profile, and mined urls shared in tweets. to compare the activity of either side in the campaign we plotted the number leave and remain supporting users at different level of of activity: that is, how many users were there in each camp that tweeted once, twice, or a hundred times about the brexit referendum. to control for possible sampling bias that may have resulted from our filter terms, we plot results for sub-samples that containing either ‘brexti’, or ‘euref/eu referendum.’ irrespective of filter term, leave supporters were more numerous and more active on twitter by a factor of 2.3 and 1.75 respectively (see figure 1). figure 1: level of tweet activity by keyword. 3 using the location information with which we enriched our data set, we plotted the share of users supporting remain against share of the remain vote, aggregating users to their local authority district. districts with a greater share of twitter users supporting leave also tended to vote for leaving the eu, so that twitter activity correlates with voting in the referendum (see figure 2). figure 2: share of remain tweets by share of remain vote. to analyse the nature of pluralism or homogeneity on twitter—which crucially affords users the ability to interact, share, and engage with each other—we examined the extent to which users who supported leave and remain interacted with each other. to do so we took each tweet that was a retweet, reply or quote of another tweet, and matched it with the corresponding parent tweet (the tweet which the given tweet quoted, retweeted, or to which it was a reply). this allowed us to map interactions between leave and remain supporters. we aggregated all tweets by remain supporters that were retweets, replies or quotes of leave supporters, and vice versa. we find that leave users also tended to be less open, and more engaged within their own echo-chamber. remain supporters are much more open than leave supporters, with leave supporters predominantly interacting with other leave supporters (83% of their interactions—see table 1), while remain supporters interact with other remain supporters less than half 4 the time (only 46% of interactions initiated by a remain supporter were with other remain supporters, while 50% of their replies are to leave users). interacting with percentage leave user interacting with leave 82.97% remain 8.73% na 8.29% remain user interacting with leave 40.08% remain 46.11% na 13.82% table 1: who interacts with whom? we also calculated e-i indices for the leave and remain network. e-i indices range from +1 (network is entirely external in orientation) and -1 (entirely internal in orientation). lower values indicate more homophile networks, while higher values indicate a more heterophile network. -1 indicates an entirely internally oriented network, while +1 an entirely externally oriented network, and 0 an equal balance between internal and external links. the e-i index for the leave network was -0.81, while the index for the remain network is -0.07. this tendency to interact only with the likeminded is also is reflected in the urls shared. leave users tended to decisively share eurosceptic domains, which were also more frequently shared overall than pro-european ones. surprisingly the express, a staunchly eurosceptic tabloid, was one of the most prominent domains shared on twitter—more than the daily mail, which is well known for running a hugely successful website that attracts over 14 million unique users a day. however, it is worth noting that weighted for circulation, 82% of newspaper articles in the lead-up to the referendum supported leaving the european union (deacon, 2016; graham, hale, & gaffney, 2014). the balance of information on twitter thus appear to be tilted in the same direction as the balance of information in the press. overall, twitter users who supported leave appeared to be much more active and motivated in advancing their cause, than remainers were in advocating continued eu membership. it seems plausible that leave voters were more motivated, and consequently more active on twitter. it also seems likely that slogans such as vote leave, take control, or even brexit better lent themselves to simple, sound bite messages (which is particularly useful given the character constraints of a tweet). furthermore, the press coverage of the referendum also favoured leaving the eu. the use of twitter in the brexit campaign demonstrates how social media users helped pushed a hitherto marginal political agenda to the front and center of public discourse. references brundidge, j. (2010). encountering ‘difference’ in the contemporary public sphere: the contribution of the internet to the heterogeneity of political discussion networks. journal of communication, 60(4), 680–700. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14602466.2010.01509.x 5 curry, k. (2016, september 30). more and more people get their news via social media. is that good or bad? washington post monkey cage. retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/09/30/more-andmore-people-get-their-news-via-social-media-is-that-good-or-bad/ deacon, d. (2016, june 14). 82% circulation advantage in favour of brexit as the sun declares. retrieved from https://blog.lboro.ac.uk/crcc/eu-referendum/sun-no-longerhedging-bets-brexit/ feldman, l., myers, t. a., hmielowski, j. d., & leiserowitz, a. (2014). the mutual reinforcement of media selectivity and effects: testing the reinforcing spirals framework in the context of global warming. journal of communication, 64(4), 590–611. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12108 garrett, r. k. (2009). echo chambers online?: politically motivated selective exposure among internet news users1. journal of computer-mediated communication, 14(2), 265–285. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2009.01440.x graham, m., hale, s. a., & gaffney, d. (2014). where in the world are you? geolocation and language identification in twitter. the professional geographer, 66(4), 568–578. herrman, j. (2016, july 16). ‘brexit’ talk on social media favored the ‘leave’ side nytimes.com. new york times. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/25/business/brexit-talk-on-social-media-heavilyfavored-the-leave-side.html?nytmobile=0 lapowsky, i. (2016, july 11). the 2016 election exposes the very, very dark side of tech. retrieved 8 november 2016, from https://www.wired.com/2016/11/2016election-exposes-dark-side-tech/ murray, a. (2016, november 7). us election: fake news becomes the news. bbc news. retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-37896753 ohlheiser, a. (2016, october 4). this is the news facebook chooses for you to read. the washington post. retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theintersect/wp/2016/10/04/this-is-the-news-facebook-chooses-for-you-toread/?tid=sm_tw&utm_campaign=buffer&utm_content=buffereb2eb&utm_medium= social&utm_source=twitter.com pariser, e. (2011). the filter bubble: how the new personalized web is changing what we read and how we think. penguin. polonski, v. (2016, may 15). social media voices in the uk’s eu referendum – vyacheslav polonski. retrieved 6 december 2016, from https://medium.com/@slavacm/social-media-voices-in-the-uks-eu-referendumbrexit-or-bremain-what-does-the-internet-say-about-ebbd7b27cf0f#.wtk0mbjfq max hänska is a lecturer (assistant prof.) at de montfort university (uk) where his research interests center on social media, political communication and collective decision-making. stefan bauchowitz holds a phd from the london school of economics. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16 th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 advancing political and economic interests through data localization in the name of privacy and security tatevik sargsyan american university abstract revelations about the us national security agency’s mass surveillance programs presented an opportunity for foreign governments to push forward their internet governance agenda. many nation states proposed infrastructure-based initiatives to localize data within their jurisdiction citing concerns over privacy and security of their citizens. relying on a conceptual framework that connects internet infrastructure to power and social control this paper examines data localization proposals by a number of governments arguing that their purpose is to pursue alternative political and economic objectives in the name of privacy and security. extended introduction in the last two decades the world has witnessed ongoing battles between nation states, international institutions and private companies over control of the internet. scholars have addressed the question of who should control critical internet resources and what economic and political advantage the control embeds. this paper, however, explores a different question. instead of looking at who controls the internet infrastructure, it looks at how nation states rely on internet infrastructure to advance their political and economic goals in the name of privacy and security in the post-snowden era. the conceptual framework at the foundation of this paper is that technical architecture embodies power and can be an instrument to pursue various political and economic goals (denardis, 2012; lessig, 1999). well-known empirical evidence in support of this framework is instances of desperate regimes disconnecting their citizens from the global information infrastructure by choking off internet connection. such cases occurred during the civil unrests in the aftermath of the 2009 disputed iranian presidential elections, as well as the uprisings in north africa (howard, agarwal, & hussain, 2011). another example that captures the essence of this framework is surveillance, which is not only technologically imposed but also involves cooperation between governments and private companies (balkin, 2014). more recently, increased privacy and security concerns following revelations about nsa surveillance have generated new government initiatives for data localization, once again encapsulating governments’ desire to achieve goals relying on internet infrastructure. suggested citation (apa): sargsyan, t. (2015, october 21-24) advancing political and economic interests through data localization in the name of privacy and security. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the term “data localization” broadly refers to any initiative limiting the collection, storage, and transfer of data based on jurisdiction. most commonly, “data localization” takes the form of legal restrictions on data location and export, such as when an e-mail or cloud computing service is required to physically locate servers containing data belonging to a country’s residents within that country’s jurisdiction. efforts to create national e-mail services, or cloud servers dedicated to support countrylevel networks are also drivers of data localization (chander & le, 2015; hill, 2014). governments may pursue a variety of goals with data localization proposals ranging from enhanced privacy and security to economic development to making it easier to track and oppress dissidents. often, the stated incentives are a cover for alternative political and economic objectives. to set the stage for further exploration of such objectives, it is necessary to understand the relationship between large private companies that manage internet infrastructure and governments. global information and communication technology (ict) companies operating the internet’s material and virtual infrastructure have helped create universal and interoperable networks of communication, which have promoted access to knowledge and empowered individuals to advocate for their rights. these networks have also increased economic activity across jurisdictions by providing services to various industries, enabling digital trade, raising competition and reducing costs (benkler, 2006; castro & mcquinn, 2015). at the same time, by facilitating information flow and managing huge amount of data, these companies and the data they host have inadvertently become targeted by governments. generally, governments cannot easily influence and control data flow without ict companies’ mediation, which has been demonstrated by governments’ growing reliance on internet infrastructure to enact law enforcement, surveillance, and control of communication. many of the large ict companies whose services are most used globally are headquartered in the united states, and not only subject to us antiterrorism and surveillance law but also to us government pressure to promote its national security, and political and economic interests. it is no secret that the us government has been able to build backdoors to private companies’ communications data to engage in unwarranted mass surveillance, espionage, and cyberattacks on foreign governments and companies (deibert, 2013; greenwald, 2014). in this context, foreign governments have long realized that they do not always have the leverage to influence decisions by us-based ict companies, associating the latter with the us government interests (mueller, 2010). moreover, a variety of governments around the world have continuously expressed concerns about the reliance on ict infrastructure that disproportionately flows through the united states. as an alternative, they have promoted the creation of local networks. these governments, however, gained new leverage over ict companies and the us government when the guardian revealed national security agency (nsa) consultant edward snowden’s leak of classified documents in 2013, including a secret cooperative agreement between us intermediaries and the us government (ball, 2013; greenwald, 2014). the nsa surveillance scandal allowed foreign governments to question the legitimacy of us companies and the us government in promoting and protecting privacy and security of global internet users, and to justify a renewed push for infrastructure-based initiatives to localize data within their borders as the most reasonable solution to resolve concerns over privacy and security. to explore this phenomenon, this paper takes a case study approach to review data localization initiatives by both democratic and nondemocratic nation states, such as china, russia, germany, and france, and delivers a thorough analysis of the unstated incentives behind those initiatives, and subsequent implications. despite the outrage with which these countries responded to the nsa spying revelations, and promised to ensure enhanced privacy and security to their citizens, data localization is hardly the answer. these countries engage in their own extensive surveillance programs, often with little oversight, and would greatly benefit from access to more localized data about domestic citizens’ social, economic, and political activities. moreover, even in states where privacy laws are stricter, they can be overridden in the name of national security, public safety and crime. governments’ arguments that data localization will keep foreign surveillance at bay are also subject to question. foreign intelligence agencies often focus their surveillance activities abroad, relying on various malware and surveillance technologies that hack into systems. under such circumstances, locating servers inside a country will not hinder foreign governments from engaging in espionage and gaining economic and political advantage. moreover, data localization does not prevent states from collaborating and regularly sharing data with each other. data localization will also increase security risks for internet users. the decentralized nature of cloud systems allows companies to provide better security; while on the other hand centralizing data in one location creates a “single point of failure,” making the data more vulnerable to hacking attacks, criminal breaches and technical outages. thus, user privacy and security will only depend on the available technologies and their lawful deployment, and the ability of authorities to get access to data rather than their location. hence, this paper argues that many nation states, including the case studies discussed in this paper, use privacy and security protection as a proxy to advance alternative interest. instead, governments’ incentives to increase security and privacy of their citizens can be achieved through strengthening the infrastructure of international internet companies without compromising the inherent nature of the global and universal internet through data localization. the industry deploys two technical approaches to enhancing privacy protection: privacy enhancing technologies (pets) and privacy by design (pbd). pets are applications to manage various dimensions of privacy, such as anonymity and confidentiality. privacy by design is a more systematic approach to designing technology that carries desirable values (borking & raab, 2001; cavoukian, 2012). potentially, pets and pod can shift the focus of privacy protection from data localization to the prevention of unauthorized data access by governments. additionally, since privacy and security are not only a function of technological solutions but also governments’ ability to access data through overarching laws, technical “backdoors” and malware, it is necessary to continue to push back against broad surveillance capabilities domestically, and increase transparency. references balkin, jack. (2014). old-school/new-school speech regulation. harvard law review, 127(8), 2296-2342. ball, james. (2013). nsa's prism surveillance program: how it works and what it can do | us news | theguardian.com. the guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-prism-server-collectionfacebook-google benkler, yochai. (2006). the wealth of networks: how social production transforms markets and freedom: yale university press. borking, john j., & raab, c. (2001). laws, pets and other technologies for privacy protection. journal of information, law and technology, 1, 1-14. castro, daniel, & mcquinn, alan. (2015). cross-border data flows enable growth in all industries: the information technology & innovation foundation. cavoukian, ann. (2012). privacy by design. report of the information & privacy commissioner ontario, canada. chander, anupam, & le, uyen p. (2015). data nationalism. emory law journal, 64(3). deibert, ronald. (2013). black code: inside the battle for cyberspace. toronto, ontario: mcclelland & stewart. denardis, laura. (2012). hidden levers of internet control: an infrastructure-based theory of internet governance. information, communication & society, 15(5), 720-738. greenwald, glenn. (2014). no place to hide: edward snowden, the nsa, and the us surveillance state. new york, ny: metropolitan books. hill, jonah force. (2014). the growth of data localization post-snowden: analysis and recommendations for us policymakers and business leaders. paper presented at the the hague institute for global justice, conference on the future of cyber governance. howard, philip n., agarwal, sheetal d., & hussain, muzammil m. (2011). the dictators' digital dilemma: when do states disconnect their digital networks? issues in technology innovation. http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2011/10/dictators-digital-network lessig, lawrence. (1999). code: and other laws of cyberspace. new york, ny: basic books http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-prism-server-collection-facebook-google http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-prism-server-collection-facebook-google http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2011/10/dictators-digital-network microsoft word velkova.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): velkova, j. (2014, october 22-24). thresholds for participation in open animation production: a critical exploration of some assumptions on peer-production. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. thresholds for participation in open animation production: a critical exploration of some assumptions on peer-production julia velkova södertörn university the success of wikipedia and other large online collaborative projects has led many scholars to speak about the emergence of new forms of production that the internet has enabled – commons-based peer production, “social production”, crowdsourcing, and produsage which all map a future of an increased user participation in media creation in a landscape of lowered technical and distribution barriers (benkler, 2006; castells, 2009; lessig, 2004; bruns, 2012). this paper presents a case which challenges the assumption of the easiness to produce media in such alternative ways, and argues for the need to nuance the celebratory discourse adjusting it tighter to the specifics of the different media genres and participatory cultures developed in such an internet mediated landscape. the case in focus is “morevna” project (www.morevnaproject.org) – a siberia-initiated experiment which has been trying since 2008 to create a feature-length open-content 2d animation film of industry quality. the case is one of two which i explore within a bigger research project on opencontent media production with the aim to understand the mechanics and cultural aspects of producing independent industry-quality animation films in the domain of digital commons .“morevna” project is an interesting case because in the course of 4 years it tried different models of alternative production. starting with a brief period of an in-house studio based work, the project soon moved entirely online and tried an open for participation, collaborative, peer-production approach for about 3 years. after that it changed strategy again and finished with a mixture between crowdsourcing and distributed inhouse production. the project had three distinguishing features: it maintained a public production blog where it shared artwork and works in progress under open licences; it reappropriated and developed further its own open-source tools for making the film; and it relied almost exclusively on volunteers due to lack of resources. not least, it had high production values and demands for quality. after four years the project managed to accomplish only its first milestone – to produce a 4-minute demo of what the feature-length film would look like with the purpose to demonstrate the abilities of the team, the technology and to seek funding. the shift between different public production strategies and the relatively long production time brought my attention to the question in focus in this paper – the potential tensions and problems and ultimately thresholds for participation in large scale collaborative projects in relation to the particular media genre produced – animated film. methodologically i approached the question by first doing a thematic text analysis of the public production blog located at morevnaproject.org. in parallel, i performed an online media ethnography with numerous discussions over skype and co-working in some side production tasks with the main project leader to understand his intentions and rationale of the different production strategies. finally, i conducted also in-depth interviews with him and three contributors to the project in order to get their point of view on the way they joined the production, and their experiences from it. the analysis of the blog revealed that morevna project had managed to develop a substantial public online communication infrastructure with the purpose to enable online contributions from a multitude of participants who were expected to come from the online sphere. in the same time, it also revealed that despite the technical possibilities for enabling participation the project had problems to actually get contributors leading to long periods of time when the project stood still. the qualitative interviews and informal discussions with the project participants pointed further to the following spectrum of tensions and thresholds for participation that were experienced in the project. open-source technology and knowledge transfer. while the use and development of open-source tools for professional 2d animation production has opened up the project towards a broader group of potential contributors – by offering non-proprietary, free of charge customizable technology its perpetual development and improvement in the course of making the film has limited the number of people who knew how to work with it. the lack of resources to assist the knowledge transfer through for example documentation or training courses has ultimately become a direct obstacle for wider participation. high production values. the desire to create an industry quality animation resulted in the enforcement of a power structure which filters participants so that their contributions satisfy the aesthetic and production requirements of the project. this has filtered out enthusiasts and the broader media user, limiting the range of contributors to freelancing animators and beginning professionals from the graphics-design-illustration production branch. need for geographic closeness. coordination of production tasks over email and internet with project contributors has been recognized as cumbersome and timeconsuming. this has led to the move of the production back to an in-house model complemented with crowdsourcing secondary tasks – ultimately limiting external participation even more, but resulting in increased speed and desired quality of the media produced. long-term commitment. volunteer contributions helped substantially the project to develop, but their ad-hoc appearance and usually short term, unpredictable in time contributions has not been enough to bring the project to an end. this has led to the project limiting participation even more, and finishing in a more closed, place-based production model. the combination of all of the above has ultimately increased the degree of complexity of the project in a way which has not been realized by the participants before hand. while morevna project remained open in terms of content and technology sharing, it has gradually become much more closed for participation. therefore, the alternative approaches for producing animation film discussed here can be related to the concept of “collaborative media” developed by löwgren and reimer (2013). they argue that collaboration is a relative concept related to distinct media forms – where some forms are more suitable for collaboration than others, and “at those occasions when they are put to use collaboratively they become collaborative media” (ibid, p. 15). they acknowledge though that there exists a distinction between different media genres which represent different “forms of practice” that contain the specifics of what they can make possible (ibid). in the case of morevna project, certain moments of the production have been more online collaboration prone – and thus more open for participation than others. however, the subjective requirements for quality and the demands posed by the media genre – animation – have ultimately been limiting for broader participation. based on these findings i conclude that within the sphere of alternative models of cultural production, the complexity and specifics of the media genre combined with a requirement for quality creates a dependency on two axis: time and openness, which are directly correlated with each other. the more open for participation a process, the more undefined time it takes for the production and increases its complexity. certain media forms such as wikipedia are less sensitive to these dependencies since accumulation of content and contribution happen independently and benefit from developing over long periods of time. however, for a media genre such as animation film which attains its form in a particular moment in time and exists until then in an undefined, ephemeral, fragmented state this is problematic. references benkler, y. (2006). the wealth of networks how social production transforms markets and freedom. new haven: yale university press. bruns, a. (2012). reconciling community and commerce?: collaboration between produsage communities and commercial operators. information, communication & society, 15(6), 815–835. castells, m. (2009). communication power. oxford ; new york: oxford university press. lessig, l. (2004). free culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity. new york: penguin press. löwgren, j., & reimer, b. (2013). collaborative media: production, consumption, and design interventions. cambridge, massachusetts: the mit press. microsoft word blasiola-you dont gotta pay the troll toll-you dont gotta pay the troll toll.doc selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 you [don’t] gotta pay the troll toll: a transaction costs model of online harassment stacy blasiola university of illinois chicago this year’s conference theme challenges us to imagine. when it comes to the future of the internet, is it possible to imagine a space where users are free from harassment? probably not. but it is possible to imagine spaces where the effort to harass outweighs the efforts from victims to stop the harassment. how might we begin to create this future? i propose that it starts with a reframing of the language currently used to describe these issues. in this paper i will lay out a conceptual framework for describing the processes users—both the harassed and the harassers—must go through to participate in an online environment. given that harassment occurs across platforms, it is important that we have a way of speaking about these processes that encompasses all the potential spaces where harassment happens. drawing from economics, i present a transaction cost model to describe, predict, and hopefully offer solutions to reduce online harassment. a brief introduction to transaction costs transaction cost theory was introduced by coase (1937; 1960; 1988) as a way to make predictions about firms in marketplaces. for our purposes, however, it is not the theory i intend to draw on, but rather the terminology. the language of transaction costs is commonplace in economics and i will argue that it presents an opportunity to rethink platform design in ways that create quantifiable differences for harassers and victims. in economics, “transaction costs” serves as an umbrella term that describes the costs required to participate in a market. these costs can be further defined. a fixed cost relates to a cost that remains constant despite the desired level of output. so, for example, a fixed cost might be the purchase of a license or the price of a machine. when fixed costs are high, entry into the market is difficult. a variable cost, on the other hand, is a cost that is relative to the level of output desired by a producer. variable costs help a producer determine if the cost of producing additional units is justified by the increase in revenue. marginal costs refer to the specific cost incurred by raising one’s output by precisely one unit. additionally, transaction costs can be understood as a type of friction that is introduced to a market to curb a particular outcome (klaes, 2000). put in this way, some suggested citation (apa): blasiola, s. (2015, october 21-24) you [don’t] gotta pay the troll toll: a transaction costs model of online harassment. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. transaction costs are meant to “put sand in the wheels” of a process and are induced when “externalities” result in inefficient outcomes. an externality may be thought of as a financial consequence of production that is incurred by another entity; in other words, the cost is external to the production company. so, for example, if a company produces a large amount of toxic gases as a result of manufacturing a product, an externality exists because other organizations—the local government—must bear the cost of cleanup. because the producer does not account for these costs, the “bottom line” is inaccurate, and thus production is inefficient. to correct this inefficiency, the company must be made to internalize that cost. the local government might impose a tax on the company to ensure that this cost is internalized, which for the company results in an increase in cost of producing units and a reduction in revenue. applying the terms of transaction costs to online harassment the purpose of this paper is to begin to frame the actions required to participate in online communities in terms of costs, so the following presents a preliminary explanation. when it comes to social media platforms, we can think of transaction costs as the cost for users to participate in an online “market” whether it be twitter, facebook, a message board, a video game chat, or any other online community. to define some of these costs, we must first reduce our understanding of certain behaviors to the essential actions that are required by the platform. thus while crafting a message requires various levels of time and thought in regards to its content, if we reduce its cost to the acts of typing and clicking “send” then we can immediately quantify the effort. thus, specific costs would include the creation of an account, the building of an audience, and the sending of messages, the blocking of users, or the reporting of harassment. furthermore, if we understand the “currency” of these costs as measured by time, then we can compare the costs of trolling or harassing to the costs incurred by the target or victim. while there are important qualitative differences between trolling and harassment, the model described here allows for comparisons, regardless. as we will see, because the goals of trolling or online harassment are to disrupt targeted users in some way, the tactics used for both often rely on externalities created by the platform. by reducing the costs for victims, and increasing the costs for harassers, we may find that a decrease in harassment will occur. take for example the following scenario. on twitter, harassment may occur when a person becomes the target of: one user sending many messages, many users sending one message each, one user creating many accounts to send many messages, or a combination of these techniques. in these instances, the "transaction costs” for the harasser(s) remains low. there is the initial fixed cost of creating the accounts, and the fixed cost of sending the messages. importantly, there is no marginal increase to the troll: it is no more “expensive” to send one message than it is to send 200. that is, if it takes 10 seconds to send the first message, it also takes 10 seconds to send the second, and the 200th. if we flip this scenario around and look at it from the target’s perspective, the inefficiencies become apparent: whereas harassers often operate using throwaway accounts, the target has potentially already invested a significant amount of time building her account by creating both an audience and an archive of tweets. the cost for moving all one's followers, or ignoring/reporting multiple accounts or messages, or simply leaving the platform altogether is high. due to this inequality in transaction costs the platform provides leverage to the harassers, and necessitates that the victim internalize the costs of the solution. in sum, these imbalances create enormous inefficiencies. conclusion how then might we move forward? if we apply this model to current platforms, we might find that we can predict where trolling and harassment is likely to occur. we may also identify platform design features that are already effectively creating efficiencies for users and apply those to future platform design decisions. in the current situation, victims of harassment are too often held responsible for the results of harassment. either they are expected to manage the actions of blocking or reporting themselves, or they are told to ignore the problem (marwick & miller, 2014). neither of these options are workable solutions. in some cases, platforms have made efforts to curb trolling, but they are presented in blanket solutions that resort to the public-vs-private profile or page (phillips, 2011), or that place more costs on users are they are expected to “up-vote” or “down-vote” individual posts or messages (bergstrom, 2011). in the case of the twitter user, one solution might be for users to flag their own accounts as being targets in an ongoing attack, and the platform then raising the marginal costs for other users to send multiple messages to that account. perhaps most importantly, by thinking about trolling or harassment in terms of costs, we can begin to see solutions that reduce costs for the targets of attacks and/or increase costs for harassers. in either scenario, the responsibility is placed back on the platform. after all, it is the platform that sets the market price for participation. references bergstrom, k. (2011). “don’t feed the troll”: shutting down debate about community expectations on reddit. com. first monday, 16(8). coase, r. h. (1937). the nature of the firm. economica, 4(16), 386-405. coase, r. h. (1960). problem of social cost, the. jl & econ., 3, 1. coase, r. h. (1988). the nature of the firm: influence. journal of law, economics, & organization, 33-47. klaes, m. (2000). the history of the concept of transaction costs: neglected aspects. journal of the history of economic thought, 22(02), 191-216. marwick, a. e., & miller, r. w. (2014). online harassment, defamation, and hateful speech: a primer of the legal landscape. fordham center on law and information policy report(2). phillips, w. (2011). loling at tragedy: facebook trolls, memorial pages and resistance to grief online. first monday, 16(12). selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): milne, e., mccosker, a., albury, k., grønning, a., cabalquinto, e., bossio, d., and schleser, m. (2020, october). older people’s digital lives. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. older people’s digital lives esther milne, anthony mccosker and kath albury swinburne university of technology, australia anette grønning university of southern denmark, denmark earvin cabalquinto deakin university australia diana bossio and max schleser swinburne university of technology, australia older people have rich and varied digital lives. but this has not always been the way that older people’s use and negotiation of online, social and digital communication technologies has been framed. much of the previous research about older people and digital or internet-based technologies focusses on the lack of uptake and efficacy, particularly for more dynamic online skills such as content creation, sharing and engagement. there is good reason for this research focus; there is still a considerable link between older people’s digital exclusion and poor health and social outcomes (hunsaker and hargittai, 2018). while older people derive many health and well-being benefits from digital and online engagement (bath and deeg, 2005), a number of factors may influence whether digital engagement in later life is possible, or even wanted. these issues can range from reluctance to engage with online public sharing, to difficulty finding digital technologies that cater for older people with declining physical ability (warchauser, 2002).furthermore, there is little research on older people’s more everyday and informal uses of digital and online tools by older people, much less the various negotiations and complexities that occur by using these tools in various social and cultural contexts. this panel explores some of the key reasons for the differences between older people who are engaging with the benefits of having more digital tools and skills, and the way these play out in the everyday lives. the panel’s central argument is that many seniors experience a rich social life integrated with digital technologies. how these digital lives are negotiated and developed, and the particular frustrations and barriers to their digital participation, are particular to their cultural context for use of communication tools. the papers within this panel will consider: • how digital practices emerge in older people’s everyday activities and social contexts; • how older people negotiate digital skills such as safety, communication, engagement and representation; • how older people’s confidence and motivation to engage with online and digital technologies may change in certain contexts. in doing so, this panel contributes new understanding of how older people’s digital lives are emerging, moving away from simplistic descriptions of lack of digital skill, to the multifaceted and complex negotiations occurring when older people make decisions about how and why to connect with digital tools and online environments. milne’s paper provides theoretical framework for some of the complexity around older people’s use of online digital technologies. milne’s analysis reveals older people’s varied, and often sophisticated use of online and digital media, for formal and ‘telegrammatic’ forms of digital communication, but this is tempered with very reluctant consideration of new forms of social media sharing. cabalquinto and gronning add to milne’s theoretical analysis by indicating some of the social and cultural uses of digital communication tools within older people’s everyday lives. grønning’s research about e-health consultations recently rolled out across denmark have had a marked success rate with older people. preliminary data indicates that far from eschewing digital health care, older patients prefer e-consultations to going to see the doctor. extending grønning’s work on digital care practices amongst older people, cabalquinto builds on the intersections of care practices, wellbeing and digital media in the migration context. he argues that elderly cald people deliver multigenerational care practices among australian-based loved ones while using smartphones, social media and mobile apps on the move. bossio’s paper completes the panel by indicating that older people’s lack of participation in, and access to, their own digital representation has often perpetuated ageist stereotypes about older people. facilitation of increased access to digital tools and opportunities to tell digital stories helps to disrupt ageist assumptions by framing ageing as a positive experience and representing older people as active, positive and socially connected. references: bath, p. a., & deeg, d. (2005). social engagement and health outcomes among older people: introduction to a special section. european journal of ageing, 2(1), 24-30. hill, r., betts, l. r., & gardner, s. e. (2015). older adults’ experiences and perceptions of digital technology: (dis)empowerment, wellbeing, and inclusion. computers in human behavior, 48, 415-423. hunsaker, a., & hargittai, e. (2018). a review of internet use among older adults. new media & society, 20(10), 3937-3954. warschauer, m. (2002). reconceptualizing the digital divide. first monday, 7(7), retrieved from: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/967. does anyone want a facebook message from their grandmother? older people’s use and anxieties about social and digital media communication tools. esther milne social media research group swinburne university of technology anthony mccosker social media research group swinburne university of technology kath albury social media research group swinburne university of technology much of the existing research about the age-related ‘digital divide’ (friemel, 2016), focusses on lack of access to digital tools (gonzales, 2016) or lack of relevant digital literacies (van deursen and helsper, 2015). however, more recent statistical evidence points to increasing numbers of older people (aged over 50) are gaining access to digital technologies through personal computer use and wifior data-enabled mobile devices, and social media tools such as facebook. despite increasing access to these tools, uneven participation in online social and digital media cultures persists, most often linked to older people’s low self-efficacy in the face of new technology (hernández-encuentra et al. 2009). this divide has historically been most evident amongst older people, particularly when considered in relation to motivation, skills, physical access and usage (van dijk 2006). the negative outcomes of the digital divide have been discussed in regard to health and wellbeing (dobransky and hargittai 2012), social inclusion (livingstone and helsper 2007), and social and political participation. in response, social policy, along with a wide range of digital skills and literacy programs have been developed in many countries to address digital inclusion as social policy, with the aim of ‘getting older people online’. one of the problems, however, with these established approaches is that they take an individual, psychological perspective, emphasising skills deficits or seniors’ low selfefficacy in the face of new technology (hernández-encuentra et al. 2009), at the expense of examining cultural and social barriers related to what platforms ask of their ideal (i.e., young) users. this paper addresses older people’s use of online social and digital media communication tools by focusing on the complex personal and social factors that contribute to older people’s decision making around use (or non-use) of social and digital media communication tools. there is little research on these more informal and unstructured uses of digital and online tools by older people, much less the various negotiations and complexities that occur by using these tools in various social and cultural contexts. in this paper we argue that older people’s use of social and digital communication tools is predominantly formal and ‘telegrammatic’; that is, their use of communication tools is largely administrative, informational or familial in context. furthermore, a number of factors may influence whether digital engagement is possible, or even wanted, especially existing cultures of digital communication use and anxieties about new forms of online public sharing. this paper reflects on the research question: how do older people perceive their decision making and use of online social and digital communication tools? the research methods chosen for the evaluation and exploration of seniors’ digital lives were in-depth interviews (n=19) with older people aged 65 years or over in participants’ homes (n=16), with a home technology tour, and digital skills self-efficacy survey. sixteen interviews took place in the participants’ home, and following interviews, a ‘technology tour’ was conducted to provide some further domestic contextual information about participants’ internet access, use and capacity. the in-depth interviews included a simple survey to capture participant demographics, internet technology and device ownership and access, and self-reported confidence rating on online and digital media communication skills, following the digital inclusion and participation research work of van deursen et al. (2016). data collected through interviews and focus groups was thematically analysed through an open coding process to establish broad themes. narrative analysis was used to bring these themes together around the personal contexts of the participants, with a selection of focus case studies presented. our analysis reveals varied, and often sophisticated use of online and digital media by older people, tempered with very reluctant consideration of new forms of social media sharing. each of the homes visited had a central computer set-up, whether this was a desk with a pc and printer, or a space for a laptop and tablet devices to be used, indicating a degree of everyday access and use. for many participants, digital technologies offer a means of fulfilling banal administrative tasks, while for others, it offers an informational purpose with the possibility of fulfilling gaps left by physical services, and for others the pursuit of personal relationships and interests. digital technologies were most often linked to banal administrative tasks and, as such, were associated with domesticity. digital technologies are often used for what jane (knox) describes as “home business”: banking, online shopping, and paying bills. other participants indicated sophisticated strategic and critical internet skills, citing instances where they had used the internet to make sure that information they had seen elsewhere was legitimate. internet, social media and everyday communication digital technologies were also consistently mentioned as a means for maintaining social ties whether individual and personal, or within and across groups. for most participants email was the most used method for keeping in touch with friends and family while overseas, due largely to the immediacy of the platform. but the analysis also highlights the gaps in knowledge and skills, difficulties negotiating processes of learning new devices, applications or tasks, and some of the frustrations and barriers to learning. many remained hesitant in applying current communication practices to social media platforms and suggested that it seemed somewhat ageinappropriate to be using social media. anxieties about social media use were exacerbated by a range of personal and social factors, but in particular by the dataintrusive requirements imposed by platforms that often do not match older people’s use or interest of communication tools. references dobransky, k and hargittai, e. (2012). “inquiring minds acquiring wellness: uses of online and offline sources for health information.” health communication, 27(4), 331– 343. friemel, t. (2016). “the digital divide has grown old: determinants of a digital divide among seniors.” new media & society, 18(2), 313-331. hernández-encuentra, e., pousada, m., & gómez-zúñiga, b. (2009). “ict and older people: beyond usability.” educational gerontology, 35(3), 226-245. livingstone, s and helsper, e. (2007). “gradations in digital inclusion: children, young people and the digital divide.” new media & society, 9(4), 671–696. van deursen, a and helsper, e. (2015). “a nuanced understanding of internet use and non-use among the elderly”. european journal of communication, 30(2): 171-187. van deursen, a. j., helsper, e. j., & eynon, r. (2016). development and validation of the internet skills scale (iss). information, communication & society, 19(6), 804-823. van dijk, j. (2006). digital divide research: achievements and shortcomings. poetics, 34(4-5), 221-235. “dear doctor” e-consultation and ageing: perception, mediation and ethics from a spatio-temporal perspective anette grønning university of southern denmark e-consultations are online consultations that allow general practitioners (gps) and patients to communicate without requiring their physical and/or temporal co-presence (andreassen, 2011; ball & lillis, 2001; recupero, 2005; ye, rust, fry-johnson, & strothers, 2010). e-consultations, which are intended to supplement rather than replace the dyadic encounter in the clinical setting, take place through closed messaging systems that encrypt the exchanges and integrate them into patients’ medical records. uptake of this relatively new form of consultation is contingent on aspects such as political will, technical infrastructures, and the motivation and resources of gps and patients (newhouse, lupiáñez-villanueva, codagnone, & atherton, 2015; ye et al., 2010). currently, six different software systems (websites and apps) are used in danish gp clinics to manage e-consultations. clinics decide on which system to use, the amount of text that patients can produce and whether pictures can be uploaded. in 2009, a collective agreement made it mandatory for all danish gps to offer digital consultation (econ) to “increase efficiency and quality through the digitisation of health care” (plo, 2010). e-consultations were introduced as a cost-effective, convenient means of providing access to gps, primarily for communication of test results and quick questions. in denmark, e-consultation use has increased steadily since its introduction. a recent study found that denmark had the highest numbers of doctor-patient emails sent/received in europe (newhouse et al., 2015), making it a forerunner in the adoption of e-consultations and thus an important case to investigate. by 2018, the number of econsultations in denmark had risen from 1.3 million in 2008 to 7.1 million per year, corresponding to 19% of all gp consultations (plo, 2018). aged patients (65–89 years) participate in these digital consultations with the highest frequency, women more than men, generally. as part of a larger velux funded project (2018-2021), this presentation focuses on senior patients born 1954 or earlier and their perception and use of econ. the project was carried out as a perception analysis exploring the questions: how do senior patients perceive and practice econ with their gps? what are the potential barriers and perceived advantages? the empirical data was collected during spring 2019 and consists of semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted as talk around texts with 20 patients, four gps and two nurses around concrete examples of their econs. the analysis is carried out focusing on selected spatio-temporal aspects: here, there, my time, your time, our time. preliminary results show that the aged patients are happy not to have to attend the clinic in person as they find that e-consultations are more convenient than going to see the doctor. the patients emphasize that they do not want to be any bother, and that econsultations are perceived less disruptive than face-to-face consultations. for example, one patient says, “i don't want to be any trouble because it's probably nothing”, and another, when asked why she prefers e-consultations states: “because [that way] you are not any trouble. they answer when they have time”. patients appreciate close contact with their gp which they consider to be facilitated by e-consultations. at the same time, they know that gps are busy as they have many other patients to take care of. as one patient states, “i also think that by using econsultations, it must take some of the pressure off [the doctor] in [face-to-face] consultations”. several patients consider their gp’s workflow and mention that if they send an e-consultation message in the morning, the gp will answer in the afternoon or the next morning, at the latest. thus, patients perceive e-consultations as less disturbing for gps, which makes it easier for them to communicate with their gp without feeling stressed or under time pressure. the non-physical shared contact space of e-consultations breaks the traditional association between social presence and physical proximity, creating a new form of mutual presence or co-access. for patients, e-consultations are perceived as facilitating new conversations with their gp, which give them a sense of equanimity. most patients find that they can ask their gp about anything in e-consultations including their worries and concerns. the study brings new knowledge about aged patients’ perception of time and space through digital consultations. the analysis is of relevance not only for scholars interested in understanding the implications of new technologies for our health systems and everyday life, but also for the aged patients themselves, gps and policy makers involved in the application, regulation and guidance about such technologies. the research results will also benefit the health care education sector, since programmes within the area do not at present include digital consultations. moreover, there is a need for further studies in different countries as our findings are likely to be inflected by the local danish context (e.g. the triage system may operate differently). finally, we also need to highlight the likelihood that as our patient interviewees were those who chose to use e-consultations, they may be quite technology-savvy and thus not be representative of the general population. all participants provided informed written consent. the study was approved by the institutional review board of the university of southern denmark, the research and innovation organization (rio) (journal no. 10457) and conducted in accordance with the gdpr and declaration of helsinki (association, 2013). references andreassen, h. k. (2011). what does an e-mail address add?-doing health and technology at home. social science & medicine, 72(4), 521-528. association, w. m. (2013). ethical principles for medical research involving human subjects. journal of the american medical association, 310(20), 2191-2194. ball, m. j., & lillis, j. (2001). e-health: transforming the physician/patient relationship. international journal of medical informatics, 61(1), 1-10. newhouse, n., lupiáñez-villanueva, f., codagnone, c., & atherton, h. (2015). patient use of email for health care communication purposes across 14 european countries: an analysis of users according to demographic and health-related factors. journal of medical internet research, 17(3), e58. plo. (2010). praktiserende lægers organisation [the danish organization of general practitioners]. lægernes overenskomst om almen praksis [doctor's agreement]. plo. (2018). praktiserende lægers organisation [the danish organization of general practitioners]. aktivitet og økonomi i almen praksis i dagtid og vagttid 2007 til 2017. [activity and economy in general practice 2007-2017]. retrieved from https://www.laeger.dk/sites/default/files/aktivitet_og_oekonomi_i_almen_praksis_20062016.pdf recupero, p. r. (2005). e-mail and the psychiatrist-patient relationship. journal of the american academy of psychiatry and the law online, 33(4), 465-475. ye, j., rust, g., fry-johnson, y., & strothers, h. (2010). e-mail in patient–provider communication: a systematic review. patient education and counseling, 80(2), 266 ageing in the age of mobile media: the case of elderly labour migrants in melbourne, australia earvin cabalquinto deakin university mobile communication technologies are crucial in enabling the conduct of family life in contemporary times. the experiences of labour migrants, who were employed overseas during the 1960s and 1970s, and who are now ageing in their host countries, reflect how everyday mobilities, relationships and settlement have been revolutionised in a networked environment. these labour migrants no longer use digital communication technologies to sustain transnational ties (madianou & miller, 2012). smartphones and social media channels are also utilised to activate and maintain connections among loved ones who were born in or who migrated to australia. notably, these labour migrants, who typically come from a culturally and linguistically diverse (cald) population, are part of australia’s ageing population. according to the australian bureau of statistics (2020), there are 1.38 million overseas born 65 years old and over as part of a total 3.67 million people aged 65 years old and over in australia. the leading groups are southern and east africa (36,800), chinese asia (65,400), and southern asia (50,400) (australian bureau of statistics, 2020). ultimately, societal and technological transformations are impacting the lives of elderly cald people in australia. a sense of ‘doing family’, belongingness and wellbeing is performed, interrupted and constantly negotiated in a highly tech-based arrangement. as part of a broader project that seeks to examine how elderly cald people use mobile media in managing their wellbeing, this paper investigates how elderly cald people in melbourne australia utilise mobile communication technologies to forge and sustain multigenerational care practices among their australian-based children and grandchildren. it explores how multigenerational and mobile caregiving practices contributes in shaping the wellbeing (baldassar, kilkey, merla, & wilding, 2016) of elderly cald people. the research inquiry revolves around four questions: how does mobile devices shape the interactions between the elderly cald people and their australian-based children and grandchildren? what are the impacts of mobile interactions in the wellbeing of the elderly migrant? what are the forces that engender the provision of mobile caregiving? what are the possible tensions that might arise in such mediated relations, and how these ruptures are managed to sustain familial ties? in addressing these inquiries, the paper involves an in-depth interview among elderly cald people in melbourne. drawing upon methodological considerations in a migration context (baldassar, baldock, & wilding, 2007; madianou & miller, 2012) through a biographical-narrative interview (brandhorst, 2020), the study maps out the migration pathway, technological profile, and familial relationship and arrangement of the informants. the paper builds upon a growing study on the intersections of care practices, wellbeing and digital media in the migration context (baldassar et al., 2007; wilding & baldassar, 2018). it acknowledges that support networks of elderly people play a huge role in the uptake of mobile technologies among elderly people (baldassar & wilding, 2019; baldassar, wilding, boccagni, & merla, 2017). however, a gap remains in exploring how elderly cald people deliver multigenerational care practices among australian-based loved ones while using smartphones, social media and mobile apps on the move. interactions while moving with digital devices may impact notions of co-presence, carework, familyhood, and a sense of wellbeing. in analysing the motivations, perceptions and outcomes of multigenerational and portable care practices, i deploy a critical mediated mobilities lens (keightley & reading, 2014). i identify the role social structures and technological affordances (keightley & reading, 2014) in shaping mobile practices. in the first instance, mobile caregiving is understood as shaped by care regimes in a multigenerational household, including familial or gendered expectations (merla, 2014). for instance, elderly cald people deliver practical and emotional care to their non-proximate family members through mobile device use. to stay involved in the lives of their family members contributes to one’s sense of worth and well-being. significantly, the technological affordances of communication channels shape interactivity and lessen loneliness and isolation. however, mobile device use is not detached from communicative challenges. one’s access to resources (madianou & miller, 2012), socio-technological competencies (parreñas, 2014; wilding, 2006) and even familial expectations on care (baldassar & wilding, 2019) impact communicative capacities. in some situations, the technological affordance of the platform can become a barrier in digital media use (thomas et al., 2017). it is through personalised tactics that elderly migrants sustain ties in a multigenerational familial setting. it is important to note that this paper draws upon a critical mediated mobilities perspective to offer a multi-scalar approach in analysing multigenerational care practices. this means that a migrant’s agency in sustaining ties or managing one’s wellbeing is not only shaped by personal capacities, social networks, and broader policies on cross-border migration and settlement (ciobanu, fokkema, & nedelcu, 2017). i highlight that factors such as socio-technological abilities (micro), online social networks (meso), and globalising digital care policies and services (macro) are fundamental in moulding the dynamics and textures of a multigenerational familial arrangement. by doing so, this paper foregrounds the complexities, nuances and paradoxes of digital media use among elderly cald people. references australian bureau of statistics. (2020). estimated resident population, country of birth, age and sex as at 30 june 1996 to 2019. baldassar, l., baldock, c., & wilding, r. (2007). families caring across borders: migration, ageing and transnational caregiving. basingstoke, hampshire: palgrave macmillan. baldassar, l., kilkey, m., merla, l., & wilding, r. (2016). transnational families, care and wellbeing. in f. thomas (ed.), handbook of migration and health. cheltenham and northampton: edward elgar publishing, 477 497. baldassar, l., & wilding, r. (2019). migration, aging, and digital kinning: the role of distant care support networks in experiences of aging well. the gerontological society of america, 1 9. retrieved from https://academic.oup.com/gerontologist/advancearticle/doi/10.1093/geront/gnz156/5669942 baldassar, l., wilding, r., boccagni, p., & merla, l. (2017). aging in place in a mobile world: new media and older people's support networks. transnational social review. 7(1), 2-9. brandhorst, r. m. (2020). a regimes-of-mobility-and-welfare approach: the impact of migration and welfare policies on transnational social support networks of older migrants. australian journal of family research, 3, 1-19. ciobanu, r. o., fokkema, t., & nedelcu, m. (2017). ageing as a migrant: vulnerabilities, agency and policy implications. journal of ethnic and migration studies, 43,164-181. keightley, e., & reading, a. (2014). mediated mobilities. media, culture & society, 36(3), 285-301. madianou, m., & miller, d. (2012). migration and new media: transnational families and polymedia. abingdon, oxon: routledge. merla, l. (2014). a macro perspective on transnational families and care circulation: situating capacity, obligation and family commitments. in l. baldassar & l. merla (eds.), transnational families, migration and the circulation of care: understanding mobility and absence in family life. new york: routledge, 115 132. parreñas, r. s. (2014). the intimate labour of transnational communication. families, relationships and societies, 3(3), 425 -442. thomas, j., barraket, j., wilson, c., ewing, s., macdonald, t., tucker, j., & rennie, e. (2017). measuring australia’s digital divide: the australian digital inclusion index 2017. retrieved from https://digitalinclusionindex.org.au/wpcontent/uploads/2016/08/australian-digital-inclusion-index-2017.pdf. wilding, r. (2006). ‘virtual’ intimacies? families communicating across transnational contexts. global networks, 6(2), 125-142. wilding, r., & baldassar, l. (2018). ageing, migration and new media: the significance of transnational care. journal of sociology, 54, 226-235. access to digital oldness: a reflection on the opera project and digital interventions into experiences of ageism diana bossio swinburne university of technology max schleser swinburne university of technology this paper presents the results of the opera (older people, equity, respect and ageing) project, which used extensive community consultation to perform a ‘digital intervention’ into ageism as a primary driver of abuse against older people in victoria, australia. we argue that older people’s lack of participation in, and access to, their own digital representation has resulted in top-down approaches to primary prevention strategies and campaigns about elder abuse. these digital representations have consistently shown older people and abuse survivors as vulnerable, frail, unhappy and lacking independence or social connection. thus digital representation of older people in the context of elder abuse has often actually perpetuated ageist stereotypes about older people. abuse against older people, more commonly known as ‘elder abuse’, is best understood as an umbrella description for a broad range of abusive behaviours against an older person in a family or care context, including financial abuse, physical, sexual and emotional violence and isolation and neglect (respect victoria, 2019; elder abuse, n.d). in 2016, the australian royal commission into family violence identified elder abuse as a complex form of family violence requiring further research about successful intervention and prevention strategies (state of victoria, n.d). compared to other forms of family violence, elder abuse is not well understood by the general public and continues to be underreported in australia (volmert et al, 2016: 11). similarly, while there is a growing understanding and acceptance of elder abuse as a form of family violence, successful prevention strategies are lacking in many parts of the service sector (joosten et al., 2017). the victorian state government’s office for women funded the opera (older people, equity, respect and ageing) project to design and implement a ‘digital intervention’ into ageism as a primary driver of elder abuse. the project focussed on understanding firstly, how ageism is perceived and experienced by older people in one area of metropolitan melbourne, and secondly, how that evidence can be used to frame a codesigned digital intervention to disrupt ageist assumptions and behaviours as part of a community-led primary prevention strategy. the digital intervention comprised a series of co-designed digital stories made with smartphones and providing micro-insights into older people’s perspective on ageing and ageism (davis et al. 2019 the opera digital intervention recruited 27 participants with an equal split between the 61-70 and the 71-80 age groups and representation of the community’s different ethnic and indigenous groups. participants were predominantly female (21 females to 6 males) and retired, receiving a pension and living in their own home, with almost all participating in some kind of recreation, hobby or exercise group. a quarter identified as having a disability. during the project, consultation and co-design workshops were conducted with participants to create and evaluate key storylines and design of the videos. this evaluation was conducted with a flexible feedback model to allow researchers to change and develop video messaging and production styles to accommodate the participant attitudes and evaluations. to evaluate the project and its methodology, surveys, interviews and focus group evaluations of the project methodology were conducted to evaluate whether the project outcomes were understood and supported. the opera project indicated that traditional governmental primary prevention strategies have focused on changing perpetrator attitudes – and thus have consistently focused on presenting frail or vulnerable ‘victims’ of abuse as a consequence of ageist and abusive behaviours. participants in the opera project consultation and co-design suggested that this approach to elder abuse perpetuated ageist stereotypes of older people as vulnerable, unhappy and lacking independence or social connection. this was seen as problematic by participants because these stereotypes impacted on older people’s perception of their social visibility, relevance and led to feelings of decreased purpose and efficacy in society, and thus less social power. the findings of the opera project indicated that while older people generally reported enjoying the ageing process, and leading “active” and “full” lives, they lacked access to digital representation of their lives. evaluation of the project found that co-design methodologies for the digital intervention were successful because they were necessarily reflexive; the method gave access and agency to older people’s voices in construction of elder abuse primary prevention strategies. digital stories differ from traditional broadcast in that they are generally first-person stories, shot and edited individually and have a more intimate quality of production (schleser et al, 2013). however, digital storytelling often assumes the access to, and agency over, the means to production, editing and distribution of digital stories and representation. for older people, this is not always the case. a number of participants suggested that while older people and ageing was presented in a negative light, this was based on the ageist assumptions perpetuated by the focus on younger people’s lives on digital media. unsurprisingly in this context, ageism and the notion of ageing itself, seemed to trigger negative responses for some participants, and a strong desire not to be associated with this language. as the direct questioning in the workshops was aimed at the co-design of their own digital stories, one of the main issues with confronting ageism as a primary driver of abuse was that they would have to align themselves with the negative language that they felt described older people and ageing. indeed, most participants felt that the negative ‘baggage’ associated with ageing did not adequately represent their own lives. most participants described themselves as having very active lifestyles, though the activities themselves varied according to physical ability, work status and personal interest. during the workshops, participants acknowledged that the busy lives they were describing were different from the stereotyped view of ageing they were so afraid of. these active and engaged lives are largely in line with the specific demographics of the older community in the emr of victoria, which shows a higher than average social engagement amongst older people, as well as better educational, socio-economic and health outcomes. while the outcomes of the digital storytelling intervention would no doubt have differed in communities with poor socio-economic, health and inclusion outcomes, in this specific community almost all the workshop participants suggested that prevention strategies should focus on disrupting negative assumptions about ageing. the opera digital storytelling intervention subsequently produced nine digital stories documenting different phases of transition in older people’s lives, including moving into assisted living, keeping healthy and active in older age, dealing with chronic illness or physical pain and finding social connections after bereavement. the stories openly acknowledge some of the difficult transitions associated with ageing including disability, bereavement and loss of a career-focussed identity in retirement, but also positioned these as surmountable difficulties in what could be an otherwise active and independent lifestyle. the opera project showed that compared to the more traditional methodologies, the co-design and digital storytelling methodologies resulted in a much more nuanced conceptualisation of ageism and experiences of ageing. the subsequent co-designed digital story-telling allowed researchers to understand how older people understood and experienced the interconnections between ageism within larger social structures and their own ageing journey. thus the opera indicated that digital storytelling is both an effective data-gathering and primary prevention methodology because the process of co-designing, creating and viewing digital stories captures the inherent complexity of abusive behaviour towards older people, without positioning ageing itself as problematic, or older people as helpless or frail victims of abuse. thus, in the context of primary prevention, the opera project showed that community interventions need to facilitate appropriate access and agency over the means to digital representation of older people’s lives. further, that increased access to digital tools and opportunities to tell digital stories helps to disrupt ageist assumptions by framing ageing as a positive experience and representing older people as active, positive and socially connected. references crichton, s. j., bond jr, j. b., harvey, c. d., & ristock, j. (1999). elder abuse: feminist and ageist perspectives. journal of elder abuse & neglect, 10(3-4), 115-130. davis, h., waycott, j,. & schleser, m. (2019). digital storytelling: designing, developing and delivering with diverse communities. in s, miettinen & m, sarantou (eds.) managing complexity and creating innovation through design. oxon: routledge, 15-25. dow, b., gaffy, e., & hwang, k. (2018). elder abuse community action plan for victoria. national ageing research institute ltd (nari). retrieved from: https:// www.nari.net.au/files/files/documents/elder_abuse_ community_action_plan_for_victoria_feb_2018.pdf elder abuse. (n.d). world health organisation. retrieved from https://www.who.int/ageing/projects/elder_abuse/en/. harbison, j. (1999). models of intervention for “elder abuse and neglect”: a canadian perspective on ageism, participation, and empowerment. journal of elder abuse & neglect, 10(3-4), 1-17. joosten, m., vrantsidis, f. and dow, b. (2017). understanding elder abuse: a scoping study national ageing research institute. retrieved from: https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/ resource-files/2017/08/apo-nid1127161208041.pdf. meadows, d. (2003). digital storytelling: research-based practice in new media. visual communication, 2(2),189-193. neave, m., faulkner, p., & nicholson, t. (2016). royal commission into family violence volume iii. retrieved from: https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/file_uploads/1b_rfv_284ppa4_reportrecommenda tions_volumei.web_yhw6fgch.pdf. nelson, t. d. (2005). ageism: prejudice against our feared future self. journal of social issues, 61(2), 207-221. phelan, a. (2008). elder abuse, ageism, human rights and citizenship: implications for nursing discourse. nursing inquiry, 15(4), 320-329. respect victoria (2019) respect older people: call it out. retrieved from: https://www.respectvictoria.vic.gov.au/ campaigns/respect-older-people-call-it-out. schleser, m. (2013). collaborative mobile phone film making. in e milne, c mitchell & n de lange (eds.) handbook of participatory video. blue ridge summit, pa: altamira press. seniors rights victoria. (2019). older, better, together: the primary prevention of elder abuse by prevention networks. retrieved from: https://seniorsrights.org.au/wpcontent/ uploads/2019/08/2019-06-28-older-better-together-fullreport.pdf state of victoria. (2014–16). royal commission into family violence: summary and recommendations, parliamentary paper no. 132. volmert, a., & lindland, e. (2016). you only pray that somebody would step in: mapping the gaps between expert and public understandings of elder abuse in america. frameworks institute. retrieved from: http:// frameworksinstitute.org/assets/files/elder_abuse_mtg_ report_formatted_final.pdf microsoft word 800-548-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 using mobile augmented reality to re-encounter, re-create, and re-appropriate public spaces author university country contact@contact.edu author school country contact@contact.edu abstract as augmented reality (ar) is becoming technologically possible and publicly available through mobile smartphone and tablet devices, there has been relatively little empirical research studying how people are utilizing mobile ar technologies and forming social practices around mobile ar. this study looks at how mobile ar is mediating the everyday practices of urban life, and how users are deploying it to shape their relationship and interpretations of places around them. through qualitative interviews with users of layar, a mobile ar browser, we found several emerging uses. first, users are navigating with these tools to experience place in ways that are distinct from other location based services. second, we found a growing segment of users creating content for layar that aims to communicate about and through place, historicize and challenge the meanings of place, and assert their own narratives of place through their augmentations. keywords mobile augmented reality; users, digital media artists; tactics and social practices background augmented reality technologies, defined as those which can display content in real-time, 3dimensions, and superimposed on physical space (azuma, 1997), have been under development for decades (feiner, 1999; haller, billinghurst, & thomas, 2007; wagner & schmalsteig. 2007; zhou, duh, & billinghurst, 2008). only in recent years, however, has ar become publicly available on mobile devices (butchart, 2011). to date, there has been little empirical research studying the social dimensions of ar. some early work has looked at the user experience of mobile ar applications (olsson & salo, 2011), but less well understood is how early adopters are deploying mobile ar, in what ways they are using it to experience the spaces around them, and how those uses might change their relationship to their surroundings. literature review the relationship between place and space is complex, and we adopt harrison & dourish’s (1996) definition that the key principle distinguishing the two is that “space is the opportunity; place is the (understood) reality” (p. 69). advances in ubiquitous computing, mobile and wireless technologies, and the internet are enabling augmentation of spaces and changing the possibilities by which people experience and encounter lived place (aurigi & de cindio, 2008; thrift & french, 2002; urry & sheller, 2006). mobile ar has the potential to “more fundamentally mediate the everyday practices of urban life, subtly shaping senses of place as particular interpretations of events and locations are foregrounded or side-lined” (graham, zook, & boulton, 2012, p. 1). while augmentation of information through mobile devices is nothing new, the visual, interactive, and real-time nature of digital augmentations offer fundamentally new ways of experiencing, moving through, annotating, and enacting place (graham, zook, & boulton, 2012). in addition to browsing content, mobile ar applications also allows users to create content on their platform, a practice similar to mobile geo-tagging. humphreys & liao (2011) have explored how users communicate selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 through places using mobile geo-tagging, which we push upon in this paper with specific uses of mobile ar. because of these possibilities of mobile ar to enact social practices in everyday life through place, we chose to use de certeau’s (1984) theory of spatial practice as the analytical lens. in particular we look at mobile ar uses as ‘tactics,’ or specific ways everyday people create meaning and move through everyday spaces (de certeau, 1984). this inquiry looks first at how users are describing their adoption of ar technology in everyday life and secondly at how they are utilizing it tactically to mediate their experience of place. case and methodology layar is a mobile augmented reality browser that first launched in june of 2009, and is the largest mobile augmented reality platform with more than 25 million downloads. we employed a naturalistic and interpretivist framework (lofland et al., 2006), to focus on emergent practices, and focused our recruitment on ar sites and blogs where layar users are likely to be. we conducted 12 semi-structured in-depth interviews. through the recruitment and snowball sample, we found six layar users who were utilizing the technology to create digital ar art and installations. of the twelve participants, we interviewed ten men and two women, ranging in age from early-20s to mid-50s. interviews ranged from 30-90 minutes, with an average of 55 minutes. interviews were audio recorded and transcribed for the purpose of accuracy. names of informants are pseudonyms unless interviewees explicitly waived confidentiality. findings our study suggests that mobile ar does open up new tactical possibilities for reproducing and reinterpreting places in three important ways. first, users can modify what representations of the space they choose to see and what the space looks like to them (e.g. changing the front of a building). secondly, these augmented creations only come into existence when someone chooses to look for them, which allows for a wide range of public or private communications that are simultaneously temporal, spatial, and personal. lastly, mobile ar also allows for unlimited reproductions of that space because augmented space is non-exclusive. unlike the assertion of power in physical space through exclusion, one persons’ augmentation of a physical object does not prohibit anyone else from being able to augment a space. through the accounts of these early adopters, our study documents several important ways mobile ar can be tactically deployed to potentially affect our relationship with space. ar as private spatial communication certain uses of layar were envisioned for augmented, private communication. because these augmented creations only come into existence when someone chooses to look for them, they allow for private communications that are simultaneously temporal, spatial, and personal. without the motivation to look at a particular place or the knowledge that something is there, the message is not delivered. therefore, mobile ar can allow for tactical interactions between people that are spatially based and only accessible at a particular location. historicizing/memorializing public place one distinct practice that informants discussed in their production of ar was the creation of memorials. such projects include the the border memorial: frontera de los muertos, which creates augmented calacas (traditional oaxacan skeletons commemorating the dead) on places where remains have been found near the u.s./mexico border (see figure 1). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 figure 1 – ‘border memorial: frontera de los muertos’, created by john craig freeman and mark skwarek other interviewees have also placed augmented depictions of the goddess of democracy and augmented tanks in tiananmen square. in their accounts, we begin to see explicit examples of using mobile ar as a new tactic in reclaiming both public spaces (squares, parks; museums) and contested spaces (borders, public places) within the artists’ explanations, motivations, and goals of their work. their augmented memorials aim to speak for the oppressed and remember events that are erased by strategies and institutions that manage place. particularly in targeting public squares and places where governments and institutions often attempt to assign their own meaning and history through rigid and disciplinary forces (e.g. international borders, tiananmen square), ar content in these memorials work to recontextualize place by playing “on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power” (de certeau, 1984: p. 37). ar allows artists to create augmented objects in the strategic terrain but out of the panoptic eye of the dominant authorities. conclusion mobile technologies increasingly force us to confront issues of location as an influential factor for communication. sheller (2012) uses the term “mobile medialities” to describe the various ways mobile technologies are mediating experiences, practices, and creating new and flexible mediated spatiality. this study contributes to this area of research by providing an empirical examination of mobile ar use. as mobile ar becomes accessible for more people around the world, analyzing these early adopters and uses of layar helps deepen our understanding of how changes in media may complicate the spatial landscape and our relationship within place. while there are structural and pervasive power asymmetries in the strategic creation of physical spaces, we see examples in this study where people are utilizing mobile ar technology to tactically exert their own power on these places. the developing relationship between augmented space, physical space, and sense of place will continue to be negotiated by the people creating ar content and the people perceiving the content. references aurigi, a., and de cindio, f. (2008). augmented urban spaces. london: ashgate publishers. azuma, r. (1997). a survey of augmented reality. presence, 6(4), 355-385. buchart, b. (2011). “augmented reality for smartphones: a guide for developers and content publishers.” techwatch report, jisc observatory. http://observatory.jisc.ac.uk/docs/ar_smartphones.pdf de certeau, m. (1984). the practice of everyday life (s. rendall, trans.). berkeley, ca: university of california press. feiner s. (1999). the importance of being mobile: some social consequences of wearable augmented reality systems. in proc. of international workshop on augmented reality, san francisco, ca, october 20-21, pp. 145-148. haller, m., billinghurst, m., & thomas, b. (2007). emerging technologies of augmented reality: interfaces and design. hershey, pa: idea group publishing harrison, s., & dourish, p. (1996). re-place-ing space: the roles of place and space in collaborative systems. in selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 proc. cscw’96 (pp. 67–76), new york: acm press. doi:10.1145/240080.240193 humphreys, l. and liao, t. (2011). mobile geo-tagging: re-examining our interactions with urban space. journal of computer mediated communication. 16: 407-423. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2011.01548.x graham, m., zook, m, & boulton, a. (2012). augmented reality in urban places: contested content and the duplicity of code. transactions of the institute of british geographers, 37(4). doi: 10.1111/j.14755661.2012.00539.x lofland, j., snow, d., anderson, l., and lofland, l.h. (2006) analyzing social settings: a guide to qualitative observation and analysis. belmont, ca: wadsworth. olsson t. and salo. m. (2011). online user survey on current mobile augmented reality applications. in proc. of international symposium on mixed and augmented reality ‘11, basel, switzerland. (pp.75-84). papagiannakis, g., singh, g., and magnenat-thalmann, n., “a survey of mobile and wireless technologies for augmented reality systems.” journal of computer animation and virtual worlds, 19(1), 3-22. sheller, m. (2012). mobile mediality: location, dislocation, augmentation. in s. kesselring, g. vogl & s. witzgall (eds.), tracing the new mobilities regimes. aldershot: ashgate. sheller, m. and urry, j. (2006). mobile technologies of the city. new york: routledge. thrift, n.j. and french s. (2002) ‘the automatic production of space’, transactions of the institute of british geographers 27(3): 309–25. wagner d., & schmalstieg d. (2007). artoolkitplus for pose tracking on mobile devices. computer vision winter workshop, 2007, austria, february. zhou, f., duh, h.b., and billinghurst, m. (2008). "trends in augmented reality tracking, interaction and display: a review of ten years of ismar," in international symposium for mixed and augmented reality 2008, cambridge, uk. september 16-18. pp. 193-202, microsoft word doty-believing the internet-believing the internet.doc selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): doty, c. (2015, october 21-24). believing the internet: user comments about vaccine safety. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. believing the internet: user comments about vaccine safety colin doty ucla dept of information studies introduction there is a popular perception that because of the internet, misinformation spreads faster and farther than ever, presumably because information can be created, shared and accessed so easily that anyone can make or find support for anything they wish to believe (keen, 2006). somewhat contradictorily, the abundance of information on the internet might also make it easier than ever to verify information (floridi, 1996), while at the same time leading to echo chambers where internet users encounter only information that confirms their beliefs (sunstein, 2007). yet regardless of how much misinformation is created or how quickly it spreads, it does not misinform unless someone believes it. indeed, in light of concerns about the social construction of knowledge, what constitutes misinformation is often determined by who believes it (stahl, 2006). this suggests that the actual concern about misinformation in the digital age is a concern about how individual internet users decide what to believe. to explore this, this study investigates debates on the internet about vaccine safety. the focus of the study has not been to determine the correctness or incorrectness of any particular belief, but rather to understand what people believe about vaccine safety, how and why they believe it, and the relationship between the internet and those beliefs. methodology internet content was collected using google searches for “vaccine safety” and “vaccines autism” and a supplemental snowball sample of relevant links found within the original search results. this collection approach attempted to approximate the search behavior of a typical internet user researching the subject. the collected content totaled more than 1500 pdf pages, including formal websites of health organizations and advocacy organizations, blog entries, and news articles, as well as a significant corpus of user comments. a content analysis of the collected material was coded in three rounds by the author. the first round highlighted passages that demonstrated either a belief about vaccine safety or evidence cited. during this preliminary round, two patterns emerged: 1) recurring categories of beliefs held, and 2) recurring categories of evidence used to justify beliefs. a second round of coding marked the data according to those recurring categories (detailed below), while also refining and expanding the category system. so, for example, if a passage articulated a belief that vaccine ingredients were toxic because of the number of shots given, it would be categorized as containing beliefs about toxicity and beliefs about the cumulative effects of vaccines. if the passage then related an anecdote about the commenter’s child, it would be categorized as using personal experience to justify the beliefs. a third round of coding confirmed the accuracy of the second round while identifying particularly illustrative quotations in the data. the most interesting and illuminating data was found in the comments posted by readers in response to articles. here, beliefs about vaccine safety are articulated and defended. this study makes the assumption that the evidence people use to justify their beliefs in a debate on the internet is the same evidence that they themselves find compelling. findings the most prevalent beliefs were about vaccine toxicity, the cumulative effects of vaccines, the integrity of vaccine research, the premise of immunization, civil liberties and civic responsibility. the most common justifications for those beliefs were riskbenefit negotiations, attributions to reason, references to personal and emotional experiences, and evaluations of authority. discussion at the core of all evaluations of vaccine safety is a comparison of risks and benefits, as in the following quotation from the data: “one person out of a thousand died from an outbreak of measles? those odds are a lot better than putting every kid at risk for autism.” to the extent that the internet may play some role in such negotiations, we may presume that people researching vaccine safety would seek information regarding the degree of the respective risks. it is therefore notable that anti-vaccination websites have been found by other researchers to increase the perceived risks of vaccinating and decrease the perceived risk of not vaccinating (betsch et al., 2012) and that such websites were over-represented in search results, especially when using generic search terms (downs, de bruin & fischhoff, 2008). hence the internet may influence the core evaluation at the heart of vaccine safety. this is underscored in the collected data by the exaltation of reason, on both sides of the debate, as an essential tool for evaluation that is presumed to reveal the “correct” conclusion. the data provide some evidence of motivated reasoning, i.e. believers’ tendency to evaluate information in a way that confirms what they already believe (hart et al., 2009) and to resist correction (nyhan & reifler, 2010). such behavior would account for the internet’s echo chamber effects, since confirmatory evidence may be easier to find than ever, and the easily-found refutation may never be sought. the data suggest this behavior spans the entire spectrum of vaccine beliefs. long-established psychology research has identified emotion as a principal motivator of reasoning (haidt, 2001) and particularly of risk evaluation (slovic, finucane, peters & macgregor, 2004). importantly, emotional, personal experiences are exceedingly common in the data: “within 2 days [of the vaccine] our very content, happy little boy changed. he started screaming, bashing his head against the wall, hitting himself, biting me, kicking me and the list goes on.” because the internet’s participatory tools enable user-generated content, the internet increases access to and prominence of personal testimonials and emotional appeals (betsch et al., 2012; witteman & zikmund-fisher, 2012). the prevalence of this kind of data may enhance its influence, especially to those inclined to find the testimony of parents more trustworthy than official, traditional sources. indeed, a contrast between personal authority and medical authority dominates vaccine safety discourse on the internet: “strange how doctors’ treatment of our children is driven by parental input of data — yet that empirical evidence gets reflexively downgraded to anecdotal if one reports vaccine adverse reactions.” of course, the internet’s magnification of individual contribution and redefinition of expertise (keen, 2006) both play directly into this conflict between established knowledge hierarchies and personal knowledge networks. in particular, the antiestablishment voice of vaccine-negative beliefs, elsewhere pushed to the fringe of mainstream discourse, easily finds its venue and community on the internet (witteman & zikmund-fisher, 2012). this may even exaggerate the appearance of consensus, as when a parent suspecting his or her child has been vaccine damaged finds corroborating anecdotes on the internet. furthermore, since authority on many parts of the internet is not established through traditional markers (rieh, 2002), each person making a factual claim must establish his or her authority independently. because of the ease of hyperlinking, the internet provides the unique ability not only to refer to a source, but to provide it directly to someone else, therefore enabling a user to establish authority with a mere cut and paste, and to verify authority with a click. internet research is so easy, in fact, that it seems to raise the expectation of evidence required on the web: “free-thinking mothers who do their own research are not fooled by this pathetic propaganda [sic], and to expect us to robotically accept these flat-out lies mixed with twisted "truths" is nothing short of an insult to our intelligence.” here and in numerous similar quotes in the data, the internet is seen as a platform for the discovery of previously unavailable truths, and for the airing of antiestablishment positions, where repressed testimony is at last being heard. for internet users displeased with traditional sources of authority, the internet’s enabling of one’s “own research” implies a truth now unobscured because of the internet, there to be discovered as self-evident once one makes the effort to look. whether or not the internet actually enables new breadth of evidence evaluation, internet users in comments sections perceive that it enables it. notably, while the internet may mediate the experience of risk, reason, emotion and authority, it does so as one component of a holistic information environment with social and psychological influences, a complex digital imaginary often overlooked by technologically deterministic claims that the internet is uniquely likely to misinform. references betsch, c., brewer, n.t., brocard, p., davies, p., gaissmaier, w., haase, n., et al. (2012). opportunities and challenges of web 2.0 for vaccination decisions. vaccine, 30, 3727-3733. doi: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2012.02.025 downs, j.s, de bruin, w., & fischhoff, b. (2008). parents’ vaccination comprehension and decisions. vaccine, 26, 1595 – 1607. doi: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2008.01.011 floridi, l. (1996). brave.net.world: the internet as a disinformation superhighway? electronic library 14(6), 509-514. haidt, j. (2001). the emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. psychological review, 108(4), 814-834. doi: 10.1037/0033295x.108.4.814 hart, w., albarracin, d., eagly, a.h., brechan, i., lindberg, m.j., & merrill, l. (2009). feeling validated versus being correct: a meta-analysis of selective exposure to information. psychological bulletin, 135, 555-588. doi: 10.1037/a0015701 keen, a. (2006, feb 14). web 2.0: the second generation of the internet has arrived. it’s worse than you think. the weekly standard. retrieved from http://www.weeklystandard.com/content/public/articles/000/000/006/714fjczq.as p nyhan, b. & reifler, j. (2010). when corrections fail: the persistence of political misperceptions. political behavior, 32(2), 303-330. doi: 10.1007/s11109-010-9112-2 rieh, s.y. (2002). judgment of information quality and cognitive authority in the web. journal of the american society for information science and technology, 53(2), 145-161. doi: 10.1002/asi.10017 slovic, p., finucane, m.l., peters, e. & macgregor, d.g. (2004). risk as analysis and risk as feelings: some thoughts about affect, reason, risk, and rationality. risk analysis, 24(2), 311-322. doi: 10.1111/j.0272-4332.2004.00433.x stahl, b.c. (2006). on the difference or equality of information, misinformation, and disinformation. informing science journal, 9, 83-96. sunstein, c.r. (2007). republic.com 2.0. princeton, nj: princeton university press. witteman, h.o. & zikmund-fisher, b.j. (2012). the defining characteristics of web 2.0 and their potential influence in the online vaccination debate. vaccine, 30, 37343740. doi: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2011.12.039 selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015   tl;;dr:  temporality  shifts  in  digital  culture     stacey  may  koosel   estonian  academy  of  arts     abstract     temporality  is  an  influential  aspect  of  digital  culture,  both  in  the  design  and   understanding  the  effects  of  digital  technologies.  this  essay  probes  ideas  about   temporal  and  spatial  ordering  online  from  the  viewpoint  of  media  ecology,  digital   ethnography  and  the  philosophy  of  technology.     keywords:  digital  culture,  media  ecology,  temporality     the  term  ‘tl;;dr’  is  internet-­jargon  for  ‘too  long  didn’t  read.’  it’s  a  dismissive  response   to  a  text  that  was  too  long  or  not  interesting  enough  to  read.  cultural  significance  can  be   derived  from  the  new  term  (coined  in  2003)  as  an  example  of  the  demand  for  a  certain   style  of  communication,  a  need  for  instant  satisfaction  and  the  current  state  of  attention   spans.  in  the  information  deluge  of  the  digital  age  attention  spans  are  getting  shorter   and  communication  styles  are  adapting  to  our  new  technologies  (turkle  2011,  carr   2010).  media  theorists  attribute  this  change  in  literacy,  as  a  response  to  information   overload.  when  an  environment  overwhelms  the  senses,  we  revert  to  aural,  spatial  and   visual  styles  of  information  processing  as  well  as  pattern  recognition.         the  subject  of  temporality  factors  in  on  many  different  levels  when  dealing  with  digital   culture.  online  time  or  ‘virtual  time’  can  differ  from  offline  ‘real  world’  time,  as  online  or   ‘virtual  time’  can  be  asynchronous.  that  is  to  say  that  online  time  can  be  more  easily   manipulated,  artificially  constructed  and  fragmented  than  offline  time.  the  study  of   temporality  in  digital  culture  can  also  dig  deep  into  the  husserlian  notions  of  time,   dealing  more  with  the  consciousness  of  time  itself  rather  than  the  empirical  concept  of   time  (dreyfus  2006).  temporal  awareness  online  is  often  a  by-­product  of  design,  by   software  that  guides  temporal  and  spatial  constructs  that help  create  meaning  in  the   virtual,  online  environment.     the  paradoxically  ephemeral  aspects  of  digital  culture       temporality  also  plays  a  part  in  the  discourse  on  memory,  narrative,  identity  and   technology.  particularly  when  attempting  to  draw  connections  and  trace   suggested  citation  (apa):  koosel,  s.  (2015,  october  21-­24)  tl;;dr:  temporality  shifts  in  digital   culture.  paper  presented  at  internet  research  16:  the  16th  annual  meeting  of  the  association  of   internet  researchers.  phoenix,  az,  usa:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.   phenomenological  investigations  into  our  new  media  ecologies.  it  is  with  lightening   speed  that  artifacts  of  digital  culture  can  mutate  from  the  pinnacle  of  technological   progress  and  cultural  attention  to  obsolete  technology  that  is  long  forgotten  from  the   collective  memory.  for  example  early  internet  phenomena  such  as,  jennicam  (1996  –   2003),  muds  (multi-­user  dungeons)  and  aol’s  19,000  chatrooms  in  1997.  these  three   examples  were  popular  culture  sensations  of  their  day,  yet  now  have  all  but  vanished   from  the  internet  but  more  tellingly  from  collective  memory.         why  have  our  new  forms  of  entertainment  and  communication  lost  the  ability  to   withstand  the  tests  of  time  and  stay  in  collective  memory?  digital  culture  seems  to  leave   a  lighter  foot  print  on  our  collective  memory  as  it  is  easily  lost,  forgotten  or  made   redundant.  which  leaves  us  with  a  paradox,  where  the  technology  exists  to  archive,   store  and  easily  retrieve  digital  content  –  but  the  demand  for  browsing  old  digital  content   as  entertainment  does  not  exist  the  same  way  as  other  (older)  forms  of  media.  old   digital  content  is  not  consumed  the  same  way  as  television  show  reruns,  old  films,   ‘golden  oldies’  music  or  even  old  images  and  books.         the  idea  of  validating  the  relevance  of  information  through  the  use  of  time  stamps  or   even  more  subtle  clues  such  as  webpage  design  elements  –  can  help  an  online  user   determine  the  reliability  and  relevance  of  information  found  online.  the  study  of  digital   identity  is  a  sub-­category  of  digital  culture,  that  can  look  specifically  at  the  discourse  in   the  relationship  between  the  offline  internet  user  and  the  online  manifestation  of  virtual   existence.  online  communication  is  a  hybrid  of  many  offline  styles  of  communication,   including  visual  communication.         often  online  writing  is  more  ephemeral  with  more  similarities  in  time  and  space  to   spoken  conversation  rather  than  written  communication,  traditional  story  telling  and   literature  genres.  “the  momentary  writing  of  new  social  media  loses  the  slow  and  deep   aspects  of  traditional  written  thought,  but  gains  the  immediacy  and  vibrancy  of   momentary  speech.”  (wittkower  2012)  the  written  form  of  communication  used  online   has  been  referred  to  as  ‘spoken  written  communication’     (kacandes  2001)  or  ‘secondary  orality’  (ong  1982).  social  media  platforms  such  as   facebook  and  twitter  have  changed  the  way  we  think  and  communicate  with  others   both  online  and  offline.       marshall  mcluhan  observed  in  his  study  of  the  effects  of  media  on  culture,  that  the  old   medium  becomes  the  content  of  the  new  medium.  (mcluhan  1964)  much  like  the   written  word  became  content  for  books,  books  became  the  content  for  plays  and  theater   became  content  for  films,  films  became  content  for  television  –  and  all  these  older,   established  forms  of  media  became  content  for  the  internet.  the  difference  between  the   old  more  traditional  forms  of  electronic  media  and  digital  media,  is  temporal  and  spatial   ordering.  (hine  2000)         for  example,  if  one  wants  to  attend  a  play  at  the  theater,  or  watch  a  program  on   television  –  there  is  a  fixed  time  and  place  sequence  to  be  able  to  catch  the  show.   traditionally  the  television  show  starts  at  a  fixed  time  on  a  fixed  channel,  and  the   television  itself  is  located  in  a  fixed  location.     internet  users  creates  meaning  out  of  the  use  of  multiple  temporal  and  spatial  orderings   to  create  social  contexts.  temporal  and  spatial  ordering  helps  internet  users  tell  where   and  when  they  are,  which  helps  orient  them  to  others  inhabiting  the  same  digital   environment.  (hine  2000)  the  construction  of  social  contexts  online  mimic  offline   contexts  in  many  cases,  however  the  nature  of  the  medium  does  call  for  innovation  and   adaptation.  the  phenomena  of  dead  websites  or  http  404,  ‘page  not  found’  and   broken  links  are  indicators  of  websites  that  once  existed  but  no  longer  exist,  or  are  no   longer  updated.  information  on  the  internet  has  a  lifecycle,  the  birth  is  the  initial   distribution  of  information  and  the  death  can  be  either  information  that  is  no  longer   current  and  updated,  or  information  which  no  longer  can  be  accessed.     relevancy  of  information,  identity  and  community  online  are  communicated  in   connection  to  spatial  and  temporal  context.  the  timestamp  has  become  an  integral  part   of  social  and  interactive  media  web-­design,  as  it  shows  the  time  and  date  that  a   particular  story  or  comment  was  written  on  a  news  site,  or  a  post  was  posted  on  a  blog   or  status  was  updated  on  a  social  networking  site.  the  timestamp  creates  temporal  and   spatial  meaning  to  communication  that  would  otherwise  just  be  text  out  of  context.   douglas  coupland,  the  canadian  artist  and  author  of  the  infamous  1991  novel   “generation  x:  tales  for  an  accelerated  culture”  has  said  that  the  difference  between   art  and  writing  is  that  the  written  word  takes  place  in  time  and  art  takes  place  in  space.         time  out  of  mind     temporality  shifts  are  a  marked  characteristic  of  digital  culture  and  contemporary   society,  but  it  is  also  important  to  also  recognize  the  changes  in  how  time  has  been   restructured  in  new  historical  perspective  as  well  as  online  environments.         luciano  floridi,  professor  of  philosophy  and  ethics  of  information  at  the  university  of   oxford  and  the  oxford  internet  institute  has  explained  how  our  new  digital  technology   has  reshaped  human  reality  in  what  he  calls  the  fourth  revolution  the  ‘infosphere’.   according  to  floridi,  some  six  thousand  years  after  the  onset  of  the  written  word,  the   digital  revolution  has  created  a  new  form  of  history,  which  he  calls  ‘hyperhistory’.  as   floridi  explains  there  are  three  stages  of  information  and  communication  technology.  in   the  first  stage  (prehistory)  there  were  no  icts,  in  the  second  stage  icts  record  and   transmit  data,  but  in  the  third  ‘hyperhistory’  stage  icts  not  only  record  and  transmit  but   also  process  data  autonomously  –  and  societies  become  fundamentally  dependent  on   these  autonomous  functions.  (floridi  2012)       much  like  manuel  castells  wrote  about  in  his  trilogy  of  books  on  the  ‘the  information   age’  in  the  mid  to  late  1990s  which  traced  the  history  of  production,  power  and   experience  from  a  sociological  perspective,  floridi  also  outlines  communication  history   but  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  philosophy  of  technology.  the  philosophy  of  technology   ultimately  seeks  to  make  sense  out  of  conveyed  worlds  and  attached  meanings.  (ruin   2011)the  increasingly  impermeable  relationship  of  man  and  communication  technology   have  created  a  hybrid  of  human  existence,  that  transcend  many  assumed   understandings  and  ideas  of  self  and  community,  time,  temporality  and  space.         references     boyd,  danah  2010.  "social  network  sites  as  networked  publics:  affordances,   dynamics,  and  implications."  in  networked  self:  identity,  community,  and  culture  on   social  network  sites  (ed.  zizi  papacharissi)     carr,  nicholas  2010.    the  shallows.  what  the  internet  is  doing  to  our  brains.  new   york:  norton.         coupland,  douglas  1991.    generation  x:  tales  for  an  accelerated  culture  .  london:   st.martin’s  press.         dreyfus,  hubert  l.  and  mark  a.  wrathall  2006.  a  companion  to  phenomenology  and   existentialism.  oxford:  blackwell  books,  p.  127.     floridi,  luciano  2013.  the  philosophy  of  information.  oxford:  oxford  university  press.       floridi,  luciano  2012.  hyperhistory  and  the  philosophy  of  information  policies.   philosophy  and  technology  25  (2),  pp.129-­131.       hine,  christine  2000.  virtual  ethnography.  london:  sage  publications,  pp.114-­117.     kacandes,  irene  2001.  talk  fiction:  literature  and  the  talk  explosion.  lincoln:   university  of  nebraska  press.     mcluhan,  marshall  1964.  understanding  media:  the  extension  of  man.  new  york:   signet.     ong,  walter  1982.  orality  and  literacy.  new  york:  routledge.     ruin,  hans  2011.  ‘technology  as  destiny  in  cassirer  and  heidegger  –  continuing  the   davos  debate.’  technology:  reading  ernst  cassirer  from  the  present.  pp.  9-­10         sharma,  sarah  2014.  in  the  meantime:  temporality  and  cultural  politics.  durham:  duke   university  press.         turkle,  sherry  2011.  alone  together:  why  we  expect  more  from  technology  and  less   from  each  other.  new  york:  basic  books.       wittkower,  d.e.    2012.  “‘friend’  is  a  verb”  apa  newsletter  on  philosophy  and   computers  v.12(1).     <https://www.academia.edu/2066472/_friend_is_a_verb_in   _the_apa_newsletter_on_philosophy_and_computers_fall  _2012_>   1 guattari’s on facebook?! affects, refrains and the digital cloud alex monea bowling green state university united states amonea@bgsu.edu abstract there are two fundamental questions about the digital cloud: what forces are behind it (i.e. what is its ontology)? and, how does it function? i argue that the force behind the digital cloud and all of its changes to institutions, discourses, power, and social norms is an affective „cloudness‟. this force is folded into the actual world through refrains, which work to both capture virtual affects and to catalyze their crystallization into the actual world. in so doing refrains institute myriad (re-)(de-)territorializations which in themselves are heterogeneous to the virtual affect that presupposes them, yet contain traces of affect that help us piece together a more thorough understanding of their ontology and functions. this paper is in large part a tracing of the affective residues in facebook, which is one of the refrains that makes up the digital cloud. while the first sections of this paper will deal in the abstract and work to set up a theoretical framework, the later sections will focus more specifically on facebook and the actual consequences of the (re-)(de-)territorializations that it entails. i will make the case that facebook functions according to cloud logic, working to organize people into social rhizomes with a closeness that constitutes a reworking of tribalism (a neo-tribalism), and further that facebook makes possible a becoming-cloud in which identity is spread out into a cloud in the manner of a subjective pluralism. finally, this paper will close by looking at the ethical and political stakes in this new territory. on the one hand, this territory disrupts grids of normativity by affirming subjective pluralism, short-circuits abjection in favor of potential interconnectedness, and facilitates the founding of communities and coalitions. on the other hand, this territory also creates opportunities for powerful, new forms of biopower. keywords facebook; affect; digital cloud; becoming-cloud; neo-tribalism 2 in the introduction to a thousand plateaus, gilles deleuze and félix guattari (1987) argue that, as an assemblage, a text has only itself, and its connections to and relations with other assemblages and bodies without organs. it is unseemly to ask what the semiotic meaning of a text is. their plan, instead, is as follows: we will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge. (deleuze & guattari, 1987, p.4) later in that same volume they declare that the sole purpose of schizoanalysis is to make rhizomes and enter into becomings (deleuze & guattari, 1987, p. 251). this task is not one that can be planned for, so it is one that is instead engaged in through trial and error, efforts in multiple directions, and with any luck the seizing of a bit of kairōs. this paper is in large part a shot at schizoanalysis, an attempt to forge a rhizome, or, more accurately, to point out an already existing one. taking facebook as a point of departure, this piece attempts to unravel some of the changes that digital social networking has made to analog social networks, and to articulate these changes as part of a larger (re-)(de-)territorialization that is instituted by refrains of an affective „cloud-ness‟. first, this piece will articulate a basic understanding of affect, paying particular attention to the way in which affects function in the virtual, and are only folded into the actual, and in particular the symbolic, through the work of refrains. next, it will argue that there is an essential affective „cloud-ness‟ that looms on the horizon of the internet that is manifested continually in refrains. as evidence of this, i will trace the way in which facebook, a single refrain of that initial event, constitutes a return to tribalism in which each community member receives all of the daily news, from banalities to catastrophes, from every member of her community. this constitutes a neo-tribalism though, because digital tribal borders are so dynamic that they‟re almost nonexistent. each member of your digital tribe has an entirely different digital tribe of their own, which creates a web of social connections so thick and complex that it becomes a „cloud‟. finally, i will try to map some of the implications of this affective event and its refrains on traditional notions of subalternity and hegemony, particularly focusing on the becoming-cloud that it initiates. while now we can only speculate as to the eventual effects of this (de-)(re-)territorialization, this paper argues that investigations into the new potentialities for biopower opened up by the cloud are called for. 3 section 1 affect has no meaning, per se. in his article fashioning a stave, or singing life, greg seigworth (2003) argues that affects are both a-objective and a-subjective, and both a-signifying and a-representational. affect exists outside of the realm of the symbolic, but is capable of irrupting into that realm. it can flow through objects, subjects, signs, and representations without ever being captured by them. it is for this reason that greg seigworth and melissa gregg (2010) write about the interminateness or the never-quite-fully-determined-ness of affect in the affect theory reader. seigworth and gregg distill much of affect theory into the first few pages of their introduction. they note that affect can be an impingement or extrusion, or a sustained and everyday state, as well as the passage of all of these. it is a force or intensity that works alongside, behind, and in between the actual. at its most anthropomorphic, affects are all of those forces outside of both consciousness and unconsciousness that can drive us toward specific movements, thoughts, and extensions, but can also suspend us or overwhelm us. affect is a body immersed in the world and all of that world‟s ebbs and flows (seigworth & gregg, 2010, p. 1). in his book intensive science & virtual philosophy, manuel delanda (2002) attempts to explain the science that gilles deleuze somewhat silently put to work in his texts. delanda makes the case that affect functions similarly to information in that both effect a pattern or a shift in pattern. when we look at abstract (read: virtual) affects or information, both can be theorized as effecting pattern shifts (or as creating differential relations) without any need to reference a channel or mode of communication. affect and information both behave strikingly similar to the particles in einstein‟s “spooky action at a distance,” or in subsequent quantum entanglement schemas (delanda, 2002, p. 75-81). this version of affect operates purely in the realm of the virtual. the instituted pattern that arises in the virtual does, however, come to affect the “real” world, but only by altering the trajectories of actualizations. this process of actualization works through refrains (which are, somewhat paradoxically, captured affects and empty husks or crystallizations from which affect has slipped away). deleuze and guattari refer to refrains as “essentially territorial, territorializing, or reterritorializing” (1987, p. 300). refrains fold the virtual changes into the real world, creating new territories at the same time that they deconstruct old ones. it is important to note here, however, that these new territories, and the refrains that institute them, do not necessarily bear any resemblance to the initial virtual affects they attempt to capture. 4 it is from this virtuality that affect derives its force in the real world. in her essay “affective economies,” sara ahmed notes that, “it is the very failure of affect to be located in a subject or object that allows it to generate the surfaces of collective bodies” (2004, p. 128). in other words, it is the virtuality of the digital cloud that affords it the intensity to institute existential, physical, and discursive (de-)(re-)territorializations. this is why félix guattari in particular was so interested in affects and refrains. he saw in this radical alterity and intensity the possibility to constitute a new societal/communitarian logic of subjective pluralism. lone bertleson and andrew murphy (2010) similarly construct the affective event as a “looming-onthe-horizon-ness,” an indeterminate intensity, that works through its refrains to institute changes in the actual world that parallel (heterogeneously) the changes in the virtual. this whole process is perhaps best described in lone bertelson and andrew murphie‟s article an ethics of everyday infinities and powers, where they argue that affects are unqualified intensities that are at work in us through refrains and modulation, affecting even those who cannot consciously detect their effects (2010, p. 148). in this article, bertelson and murphie are reworking the idea of the refrain (or ritornello) articulated by guattari (1996) in ritornellos and existential affects. in that article guattari developed the notion of existential affects looming outside of the actual and the symbolic realm, but affecting that realm as they are reconstituted, looped, revamped, and remixed by their refrains. it is through these refrains that affective (re-)(de-)territorializations 1 are instituted and that new strata and lines of flight are established. it is only through these refrains that information about affective events can be gathered. what this means for our purposes is that investigation into the affects lurking in, around, behind, and in-between the internet must proceed by way of the refrain. we must examine effect to get back to affect. section 2 facebook itself is but a single refrain of the affective event best described as a „cloudness‟. while this affective event slips away when we try to capture it in language, its effects and the refrains it works through contain enough of a trace of that initial, virtual affect for us to glean some information about it. everything that functions in accord with the new logic of the digital cloud, from arpanet to facebook, contains these traces, particularly in their attempts to build rhizomes. as we noted earlier, the actualized version of an affect may bear no direct 1 and here these (de-)(re-)territorializations can be the construction, deconstruction, or reconstruction of institutions, biopower/grids of normativity, ideologies, discourses, etc. 5 resemblance to its virtual counterpart, and further, these actualizations may go awry. there is always a large possibility for the diversion and corruption of this actualization process as it folds a new affect into the actual world. for this reason it is important for us to examine the way in which internet sites function, what logics they follow (read: what their trajectories are), and subsequently for us to determine whether they actually function rhizomatically, or instead are false rhizomes, tubers with fascicular roots arranged into faux-rhizomes. as a refrain, facebook works to institute a (de-)(re-)territorialization of social space along the lines of marshall mcluhan‟s notion of a „global village‟, but only in some senses. it would serve us better to think of facebook as instituting a social rhizome, a decentralized system of social connections in which every heterogeneous point is potentially connected to every other. and in fact, this is exactly how gilles deleuze and félix guattari (1987) describe rhizomes in their introduction to a thousand plateaus. they further note that rhizomes have no beginnings or ends, only middles or milieus from which they overspill and grow by “variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots” (1987, p. 21). any investigation into the rapid expansion of facebook, its pandemic spread between bodies, its spilling across all boundaries, its capturing of public attention, market shares, bandwidth, and its offshoots into other websites, 10,000 of which integrate with facebook every day ( facebook.com), will demonstrate facebook‟s rhizomatic social structuring and its virulent agency. however, in recognizing these constant fluctuations, these ebbs and flows, one must also accept that facebook is in a continual state of mutation that may violently and rapidly obsolesce any scholarship based on it. the complexity of facebook, particularly the virtual affect whose trace can be found in it, always slips away at the very same moment that it crystallizes into language. a better picture is still available to us though. deleuze and guattari also argue that the rhizome is made of lines, lines of segmentarity and stratification of its dimensions, and also lines of flight along which the multiplicity changes in nature and which can be followed in becomings (1987, p. 21). what then are the stratifications in a social rhizome like facebook? although every point or port in such a social rhizome is potentially connected, the actualization of these relationships occurs in stratifications that i would like to term neo-tribes. a facebook user is constantly and directly plugged into the daily banalities and idle thoughts of every one in her friend-base. this is much akin to village life as imagined by marshall mcluhan (1992), where an intimacy is forged between community members by this knowledge of banalities and a new form of public accountability ensues. but facebook institutes a neo-tribalism because the boundaries of this tribe are infinitely dynamic. each member of a user‟s neo-tribe has an entirely different neo 6 tribe of their own, thus in potentiality every point is connected to every other, and in actuality every point is connected to every other by at most a few degrees of separation. facebook is but a single refrain of what i have labeled the affective event of the digital cloud. i have selected facebook because it is indubitably the most proliferant, expansive, and penetrating iteration of the digital cloud. as i write, facebook has over 500 million active users, half of whom log in daily, and collectively spend 700 billion minutes each month on facebook. the average user is connected to 130 people, 80 community pages, groups, and/or events, and creates more than 90 pieces of content each month. also, as illustrated in homer gil de zúñiga and sebastián valenzuela‟s (2010) table in “who uses facebook and why” users are rather evenly spread across income brackets, education levels, gender, and race/ethnicity. the largest fluctuations occur between age levels, but even 11% of 65+-year-olds are active on facebook. these authors further note that facebook is the second most accessed site on the internet, second only to google (zúñiga and sebastián, 2010, p. xxxiii). all of this demonstrates rather clearly that any argument that falls under the penumbra of internet studies generally must take facebook into account. and, particularly in the case of postcolonial and subaltern studies, this relatively even distribution of use and access to facebook (and more generally the internet) warrants investigation into which forms of biopower, both top-down (à la michel foucault) and bottom-up (à la michael hardt) are rendered obsolete and which are just coming into being. however, a full investigation of the political implications of the digital cloud falls outside the purview of this paper. section 3 deleuze and guattari often argue that all affects are becomings (1987, p. 256; 1994, p. 169). the affective „cloud-ness‟ that gets reworked and remixed in refrains, at the very same time that it is folded into the world, creates becomings: becomings-cloud, becomings-tribal. this becoming-cloud is yet another trace of the virtual, affective cloudness in the realm of the actual. a becoming-cloud is always a becoming-multiple, a dispersion of self outside the skin, intermingling, always, with what in the previous territorialization was other 2 . in parables for 2 it is important to note here that deleuze and guattari distinguish between negative or false deterritorializations and absolute deterritorializations. there may be two types of becoming-cloud, a negative and an absolute. here i am speaking about an absolute version. later i point out that a 7 the virtual, brian massumi (2002) argues that the body, and specifically the skin, is radically open to the world through affect, and in fact, the body is the primary source of our interaction with the world. both conscious and unconscious awareness comes only after the body has interacted with the world, and linearity and causality are retroactively inscribed upon events to conceal this fact (massumi, 2002, p. 28-29). for massumi „every body‟ is a body without organs, a subjective pluralism exploding out from the skin, forming a subjective „cloud‟. a becoming-cloud or a becoming-tribal can challenge the traditional discursive practices founded on binaries like self/other, public/private, insider/outsider, and absence/presence. further, as massumi argues in his essay realer than real: the simulacrum according to deleuze and guattari, each and every becoming constitutes a line of flight, an escape from a singular position on the grid of normativity. as such, each subversive becoming-other is a step towards the destruction of the grid of normativity itself (1987, p. 95-97). the extension of the body beyond the organism and the dispersion of univalent identity in favor of a cloud of multiple subjectivities also creates a radical new potential for the mass use of biopower. this is the type of power that michael hardt (1999) refers to as „bottom-up biopower‟ in his essay affective labor, and as biopolitics in his later work with antonio negri. by facilitating vast social connections unbound by space and capital, the possibility for counter and a-hegemonic communities grows; by creating potential social connections between any two points the logic of abjection can be short-circuited. as these identity clouds blur into one another, and multiplicities are affirmed (both subjective and objective), perhaps it also becomes easier to form the affinity-based cyborg coalitions that donna haraway (2000) calls for in a manifesto for cyborgs. maybe becoming-cloud is to open oneself up to myriad affinities, to potential affinities with any and every other subjective pluralism in existence. these ideas are all underdeveloped, and perhaps they always will be, but further investigations are again called for. on the obverse end, this becoming-cloud also engenders a certain vulnerability to a foucauldian type of biopower. tiziana terranova (2004) uses the term pointcasting to describe the most likely form that this new biopower will take. becoming-cloud, and facebook in particular, allows for the targeting not just the individual, but of sub-individual units. the elements that make up a subjective pluralism are susceptible to being targeted, isolated, decomposed and recomposed, formed into patterns, and integrated and disintegrated by becoming-cloud may be initiated by advertisers, which itself might be the model of a negative becomingcloud. 8 marketing models employing complex algorithms. terranova writes that “the postmodern segmentation of the mass audiences is pursued to the point where it becomes a mobile, multiple and discontinuous microsegmentation” (2004, p. 34). in a thousand plateaus, deleuze and guattari argue that every multiplicity has an anomaly, every pack has a leader, even though the occupant of that position, or the seat of leadership itself, may always be changing. it is with this anomaly that one must form a devil‟s pact in order to initiate a becoming and chase a line of flight (1987, p. 245-246). what pointcasting posits is a stray to every pack, a weakling, an infirm, a newborn. every pack has a weak link that can be targeted by power structures and exploited, and as subjective pluralism it is impossible to escape this weakness of the multiplicity. this radical potentiality for affinity, coalition, and friendship is at the same time and necessarily a radical vulnerability to manipulation, biopower, and (re-)subsumption under capital. again, this issue bears further investigation, particularly into the efficacy of algorithmic targeting of microsegments of subjective pluralisms. section 4 in closing i would like to articulate one final concern, and that is the potentiality what gareth williams (2002) has described as whitewashing. the transitioning between temporal contours, between territorialities – existential, physical, and particularly socio-political – engenders a potentiality for the whitewashing or erasing of the atrocities and suffering created by the previous regimes, institutions, discursive frameworks, etc. in such a case, williams articulates a particular form of affective haunting. he writes: the residues of past suffering emerge as little more than anxious and, perhaps, frustrated signifiers of negative languages, part-narratives, fragmentary responses, affective residues, and fissured experiences that exceed, and that remain extraneous to, not just the managed transparency and consensual positivity of the current order, but also the historical and epistemological limits of critical reason itself. (williams, 2002, p. 285) we must keep in mind that these sorts of whitewashings are common occurrences across the globe; they are easy traps to fall into because they ease the burden of a heavy-laden conscience. if the future lies in a (de-)(re-)territorialization by cloud logic, in which the potential for both affinities/coalitions and biopower are amplified, we must remain apprised of the traumas of old modes of power (particularly the traumas of those previously on the losing end of hegemonic binaries). we must, as cathy caruth argues in unclaimed experience, remain in a 9 dialogue with our collective wounds and continue to listen to the stories that they tell us (1996, p. 3-4). keeping our eyes open towards the future, and the opportunities for biopower in the future is not enough. our eyes must remain pried open, gazing both forward and backwards, ever-vigilant. acknowledgments i‟d like to thank dr. radhika gajjala, dr. greg seigworth, and nicole sickinger for their tireless support and much-needed input, without which this project would‟ve been impossible. references ahmed, s. (2004). affective economies. social text 79. 22(2), 117-139. bertelsen, l., & murphie, a. (2010). an ethics of everyday infinities and powers. in g. seigworth & m. gregg, (eds.), the affect theory reader (pp. 138-160). durham, nc: duke university press, p.. caruth, k. (1996). traumatic departures: survival and history in freud. unclaimed experience: trauma, narrative, and history. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press, p. 57-72. delanda, m. (2002). intensive science & virtual philosophy. new york, ny: continuum. deleuze, g., & guattari, f. (1987). a thousand plateaus (b. massumi, trans.). minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. deleuze, g., & guattari, f. (1994). what is philosophy? (h. tomlinson & g. burchell, trans.). new york, ny: columbia university press. guattari, f. (1996). ritornellos and existential affects (g. genosko, trans.). the guattari reader (g. genosko, ed.). cambridge, ma: blackwell publishers inc., p. 158-171. haraway, d. (2000). a cyborg manifesto: science, technology and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. in d. bell & b. kennedy( eds.), the cybercultures reader (pp. 291324). london, england: routledge. 10 hardt, m. (1999). affective labor. boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture. 26(2), 89-100. massumi, b. (2002). parables for the virtual. durham, nc: duke university press. massumi, b. (1987). realer than real: the simulacrum according to deleuze and guattari, 90-97. mcluhan, m. & fiore, q. (1996). the medium is the massage. singapore, hardwired. mcluhan, m. & powers, b. (1992). the global village: transformations in world life and media in the 21st century. new york, ny: oxford university press. seigworth, g. (2003). fashioning a stave, or, singing life. in j. slack & l. grossberg (eds.), animations (of deleuze and guattari) (pp. 75-105). new york, ny: peter lang. seigworth, g. & gregg, m. (2010). introduction. in g. seigworth & m. gregg (eds.), the affect theory reader (pp. 1-28). durham, nc: duke university press. terranova, t. (2004). network culture: politics for the information age. ann arbor, mi: pluto press. williams, g. (2002). the other side of the popular: neoliberalism and subalternity in latin america. durham, nc: duke university press. zùñiga, h. & valenzuela, s. (2010). who uses facebook and why? in d. wittkower( ed.), facebook and philosophy (pp. 21-27). chicago, il: open court. microsoft word dss aoir 14 short paper submission final.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 understanding digital network engagement: aiding resistance and appropriation of technology diane spencer-scarr curtin university australia diane@spencer-scarr.com abstract some individuals actively resist the impact of digital network technology or appropriate it for their own ends while others passively accept it. this can lead to dramatically different outcomes. understanding this complex process of human-technology engagement provides insights into how to anticipate and manage the outcomes. correlations between personality, decision-making style and engagement have been identified from research and surveys, revealing some key distinctions; 'engaged-but-unaware' and 'engaged-and-aware'. using an ecological approach where 'digital networks' are a tool and the synthesized human-tool unit is evaluated, engagement was found to involve a suite of behaviors 1) intensity and embededness, 2) responsiveness to feedback, 3) decisionmanagement and 4) motivators. this forms a practical conceptual model explaining and possibly predicting why some individuals resist and appropriate digital network technology to their advantage while others passively accept and are managed by the technology. this paper is part of ongoing research into understanding digital network engagement. keywords engagement; personality; decision-making; individual commercial interests use digital network technology to extract benefits from audience engagement aiming for exclusive locked in relationships not necessarily to the individuals’ advantage. the individual on the other hand engages with digital technology to further their own ends. this results in an undeclared battle for the individual's head-space. the inherent nature of digital networks (ubiquitous, embedded, iterative and adaptive) amplifies choices an individual makes at the micro level leading to major societal changes: for example social networking. this paper focuses on understanding the complex processes through which an individual integrates digital network technology into their life. this process is referred to as engagement. it is proposed that engagement involves an interaction of different levels of intensity and embededness, responsiveness to feedback, decision-management and motivators. the range of engagement with digital network technology varies from not-engaged (individuals who simply use it as a tool or entertainment) to very-engaged (those who embed it into their lives and to varying degrees their cognitive processing). superficially it is easy to assess an individual's level of engagement but understanding it is more complex. based on original research this paper identifies key elements of engagement and explores reasons for differing engagement levels. it concludes with a discussion on the significance of the results and it’s potential application. over the last few decades it has become evident that digital technology skills can be taught to standardized levels across multiple demographics (walton, putnam, johnson, & kolko, 2009) but high skill levels do not automatically translate into awareness of the consequences. while sharing similar skill levels there can be variations between individuals’ conceptual understanding of their engagement with digital technology. this should not be confused with increased competencies resulting from technical developments like improved user interfaces (calhoun et al., 2008; myers, hudson, & pausch, 2000). for example individuals may accurately describe what they are doing but not be aware of the complexities of conceptual adjustments undergone for that activity. to understand the variations, this research turned to the uniqueness of individuals: their personalities. personality was selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 deemed vital because it is the filter through which the individual gives and receives information and experiences. for example: a person who scores high on the personality trait ‘openness’ is more likely to seek information and experiences. but if they also have a high level of ‘neurosis’ or low level of ‘trust’ then their openness could be modified. for this reason the five factor model which provides a complete description of an individuals’ personality has been used (buss, 1996; cooper & pervin, 1998; jang, mccrae, angleitner, riemann, & livesley, 1998; loehlin, mccrae, jr., & john, 1998; mccrae & paul t.costa jr, 1997; soldz & vaillant, 1999; thompson, 2008). additionally, the individual’s decision making style has been considered because decision making is the mechanism that influences actionable outcomes which impacts both externally on the environment and internally on the individual. rosemary pacini and seymour epstein's self-reporting test provides a measure of the individual's decision making style (pacini & epstein, 1999; witteman, bercken, claes, & godoy, 2009). this test is in line with keith stanovich’s concept of dual process decision-making (stanovich, 2010). the third consideration is four selected personality tests deemed relevant to self-awareness in engagement with digital network technology. the factors 'flexibility', 'trust', 'self-disclosure' and 'private self-consciousness' were chosen from ipip (goldberg et al., 2006) and all have a cronbach's alpha over 0.7. all three sections were compiled into a randomized online survey. participants were also interviewed three times providing a deep understanding of each participant’s engagement level from which a subjective evaluation of their engagement was derived. the subjective evaluations were then correlated to their survey results using a new model developed for this purpose: the 'dne model' (digital network engagement model) consists of four components: 1) 'interactive-style' which involves the elements of engagement-intensity, embeddedness and self-consciousness, 2) 'feedbackloop' which involves the elements considered necessary to exploit feedback 3) decision-making style and action-potential, 4) motivators for engaging, such as social, entertainment, information seeking and novation. initially, there appeared to be no correlation on any factor for any part of the dne model. on closer examination, participants with higher elemental scores had good correlations in some areas whereas those with lower scores had poor correlations which were masking the results. participants were therefore divided into two groups based on their elemental scores: group a the higher scores and group b being low scores. group a now produced correlations well over 0.7 in some areas. group b however showed erratic patterns and low correlations for those areas. this was interpreted as high performers at the elemental level having common causes for their engagement at the factor level i.e. shared personality factors or decision-making style. for example a high score in ‘extraversion’ corresponded to participants with lower digital engagement scores suggesting face-to-face competencies disinclined investing in on-line interactions. overall results indicate three major divisions; 'not engaged', 'engaged-but-unaware' and 'engaged-andaware'. the consequences of higher ‘awareness’ appears to be a more proactive and self-managed engagement which can significantly affect individual outcomes. there are new insights that flow from considering digital networks via an ecological approach to tooluse (gibson, 1979) which considers the fluid relations and interactions between organisms and their environment, including other organisms. tool use will be shaped by the intensity of the individual's motivation. but tool-use initially requires the individual’s perception-ability to see potential within the tool (smitsman, 1997) and perception, which gibson suggests reveals the objects affordance properties not their qualities. the affordance properties of digital networked technologies are more than simply a tool because they are increasingly revealed through engagement which itself is determined by personality and decision-making style. an iphone for example starts out as a black box filled with circuitry. depending on the user’s level of perception (personality factors are core to this) and action (decision-making style), the smart-phone becomes more than a single use object through its embedding into the users’ life. whether this use of the device enables or disables the individual can be measured and this will give insights into the individual's potential to resist or appropriate digital technology to their advantage. but potential is of little consequence without action-ability which is in selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 turn dependent not only on decision-making and the individuals ability to take feedback but also on the individual’s self-awareness. therefore all of these elements have to be considered in concert as individuals synthesize with digital networked technologies. provisional results of research show self-awareness of the engagement process will increase individuals’ capacity to resist and appropriate technology. self-awareness alone is insufficient. it is the combination of all four factors brought together as a constructive and iterative system that results in positive actionable outcomes for the individual and this led to the development of the dne model. the application of the dne model could assist educators and commercial entities to better evaluate, educate and train for improved outcomes. current research is indicating that this methodology can be deployed on a mass scale. these results are part of ongoing research into developing an understanding of engagement with digital network technology. it is believed this research addresses meta-level human concepts and behaviors and is therefor independent of culture, class or ethnicity. future research may shed more light on this issue. references buss, d. m. (1996). social adaptation and five major factors of personality. in j. s. wiggins (ed.), the fivefactor model of personality: theoretical perspectives (pp. 180-207). new york: guilford. calhoun, c. c., stobbart, c. e., thomas, d. m., villarrubia, j. a., donald e. brown, f., & conklin, j. h. (2008, 25 april). improving crime data sharing and analysis tools for a web-based crime analysis toolkit: webcat 2.2. paper presented at the ieee systems and information engineering design symposium, university of virginia,charlottesville, va, usa. cooper, c. l., & pervin, l. a. (eds.). (1998). personality: clinical concepts in personality. london: routledge. gibson, j. j. (1979). the ecological approach to visual perception. hillsdale, new jersey: lawrence erlbaum associates inc. goldberg, l. r., johnson, j. a., eber, h. w., hogan, r., ashton, m. c., cloninger, c. r., et al. (2006). the international personality item pool and the future of public-domain personality measures. journal of research in personality, 40, 84-96. jang, k. l., mccrae, r. r., angleitner, a., riemann, r., & livesley, w. j. (1998). heritability of facet-level traits in a cross-cultural twin sample: support for a hierarchical model of personality. journal of personality & social psychology, 74(6), 1556-1565. loehlin, j. c., mccrae, r. r., jr., p. t. c., & john, o. p. (1998). heritabilities of common and measurespecific components of the big five personality factors. journal of research in personality, 32(4), 431-453. mccrae, r. r., & paul t.costa jr. (1997). personality trait structure as a human universal. american psychologist, 52(5), 509-573. myers, b., hudson, s. e., & pausch, r. (2000). past, present, and future of user interface software tools. acm transactions on computer-human interaction (tochi) special issue on human-computer interaction in the new millennium, part 1 tochi homepage archive, 7(1). doi: 0.1145/344949.344959 pacini, r., & epstein, s. (1999). the relation of rational and experiential information processing styles to personality, basic beliefs, and the ratio bias phenomenon. journal of personality and social psychology, 76(6), 972-987. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.76.6.972 smitsman, a. w. (1997). the development of tool use: changing boundaries between organism and environment. in c. dent-read & p. zukow-goldring (eds.), evolving explanations of development: ecological approaches to organism–environment systems (pp. 301-329). washington, dc,: american psychological association. soldz, s., & vaillant, g. e. (1999). the big five personality traits and the life course: a 45-year longitudinal study. journal of research in personality, 33(2), 208-232. stanovich, k. e. (2010). decision making and rationality in the modern world. new york: oxford university press. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 thompson, e. r. (2008). development and validation of an international english big-five mini-markers. personality and individual differences, 54(6), 542-548. walton, r., putnam, c., johnson, e., & kolko, b. (2009). skills are not binary: nuances in the relationship between ict skills and employability. information technologies and international development, 5(2), 1-18. witteman, c., bercken, j. v. d., claes, l., & godoy, a. (2009). assessing rational and intuitive thinking styles. european journal of psychological assessment, 25(1), 39–47. aoir2020 activist browser extensions as interface d‚tournement 342.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): cao, t. (2020, october). activist browser extensions as interface détournement: reminding, coping, and infrastructural alignment. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from https://spir.aoir.org. activist browser extensions as interface détournement: reminding, coping, and infrastructural alignment tiancheng cao the university of texas at austin introduction this paper investigates web browser extensions as an under-researched media object for their capacity for activism. the relevance of the study stems from the ubiquity of the web browser as a communication tool and its increasing power in shaping how web content is delivered to users. browser extensions typically customize the functionality of a webpage, but some creators have used them to foreground highly contested social issues. one early example is facebook demetricator, which removes all the metrics from facebook’s user interface and highlights the dependence of social media platforms on the quantification of user activities. this particular extension has been studied in the existing literature as a practice of design activism (lievrouw, 2018), countergamification (dragona, 2014), and resistance against digital surveillance (zuboff, 2019), but the browser extension in general, including its behavioral pattern, capacity for activism, and relationship with the browser platform, has yet to be thoroughly examined. “activist extensions” disrupt a webpage’s intended use and redirect users’ attention by modifying textual, visual, or auditory elements of the web user interface. this paper generates a typology of existing activist extensions and provides a theoretical framework to analyze their operations as a process of interface modification, a relationship to users, and a counteract to the browser platform’s means of governance. based on these considerations, this study asks: how do activist extensions redirect users’ attention from the webpage to real-world social issues? what are the potential implications for users? and how can browser platforms condition the creation and distribution of activist extensions? 2 literature review digital interfaces are as technical as they are political, as their design elements make an implicit claim about their intended use. web interfaces are therefore “carriers of cultural logics and ideologies” (ash, 2015, p. 20) with “assumptions built into [them] as the normative or ‘correct’ or path of least resistance” (stanfill, 2014, 1060). advancing a transductive approach to interface, ash (2015) suggests that digital interfaces be seen as “sets of objects that continually encounter one another and generate particular qualities” (p. 28). by altering the conditions of such encounters, browser extensions thus “transduce” certain qualities to users. meanwhile, davis and chouinard (2016) define affordances as “the range of functions and constraints that an object provides for, and places upon, structurally situated subjects” (p. 241). four different types of affordances operate in interaction design: cognitive, physical, sensory, and functional (hartson, 2003). this distinction is relevant in that it specifies the mechanisms through which activist extensions modify the interface and in so doing attract users’ attention. it is against this path of least resistance that activist extensions counter embedded cultural logics and ideologies. activist extensions can be regarded as instances of “cybersituation,” which involves “the appropriation, use, and reconstruction of technologies against the spectacle and other forms of domination, alienation, and oppression” (best & kellner, 1999, p. 149). echoing the aesthetic strategy of the situationist international, détournement, or “the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble” (situationist international, 2006, p. 67), activist extensions operate to disrupt and transgress. as they appropriate and reconstruct preexisting web elements into new critical ensembles, they embody what can be termed “interface détournement,” creating the potential to remold passively consuming subjects into ones “fully participating in the production of everyday life, their own individuality, and, ultimately, a new society” (best & kellner, 1999, p. 142). while activist extensions operate mostly on the interface level, their creation and distribution are highly contingent on the browser platform’s infrastructural services, which creates lopsided power relations between platform providers and extension developers. identifying access to apis as one of the primary ways in which platforms control their complementors, nieborg and poell (2018) ask “how platform power is operationalized through platform governance frameworks” (p. 4285). this question becomes increasingly relevant as many extensions have been removed on technical or legal grounds, although some of them managed to resurface despite stringent platform control. methods this study adopts a mixed-methods approach to examine activist extensions. based on their defining characteristics, twenty extensions are identified for comparative analysis. employing what stanfill (2014) terms “discursive interface analysis,” this paper analyzes the affordances of these extensions to examine how they counter embedded social logics through interface modifications. critical discourse analysis is then used with the situationist vocabulary to examine the activist capacity of browser extensions. meanwhile, to evaluate the extensions’ impact on users, user comments are collected 3 from the chrome web store for content analysis. finally, semi-structured interviews are conducted with two extension developers to illustrate the relational dynamics between extension developers and the browser platform. results three preliminary results emerge from this study. first, the redirection of users’ attention from the webpage to social issues is achieved through the mechanism of reminding. through transductive processes that alter the textual, visual, or auditory elements of the user interface, activist extensions disrupt the intended use of the webpage and constantly remind users of particular social issues. departing from the existing literature that focuses on individual extensions such as facebook demetricator, this study generalizes the conditions on which all activist extensions operate. second, the situationist framework characterizes activist extensions, through interface détournement, as the creation of cybersituations, resisting dominant cultural logics embedded in the web interface. as a theoretical contribution, this paper coins the term “datafied spectacle,” exemplified by the operation of social media platforms, as an update to guy debord and the situationist international’s critique of spectacle in general. moreover, user comments illustrate that activist extensions provide users with a coping mechanism against certain online rhetoric, which sometimes channels users’ attention into real-world social actions. third, the relationship between the browser platform and extension developers is demonstrated through the unfolding of chrome’s manifest v3 proposal, which imposes an infrastructural alignment on the part of developers. the browser platform’s official extension store also functions as a heavily gated regime of visibility, exerting control over the distribution of activist extensions. nonetheless, some developers exploit the computational nature of digital platforms to circumvent such restrictions by distributing extensions through alternative means. references ash, j. (2015). the interface envelope: gaming, technology, power. bloomsbury academic. best, s., & kellner, d. (1999). debord, cybersituations, and the interactive spectacle. substance, 28(3), 129–156. jstor. https://doi.org/10.2307/3685437 davis, j. l., & chouinard, j. b. (2016). theorizing affordances: from request to refuse. bulletin of science, technology & society, 36(4), 241–248. https://doi.org/10.1177/0270467617714944 dragona, d. (2014). counter-gamification: emerging tactics and practices against the rule of numbers. in m. fuchs, s. fizek, p. ruffino, & n. schrape (eds.), rethinking gamification (pp. 227–250). meson press. 4 hartson, r. (2003). cognitive, physical, sensory, and functional affordances in interaction design. behaviour & information technology, 22(5), 315–338. https://doi.org/10.1080/01449290310001592587 lievrouw, l. a. (2018). alternative computing. in g. meikle (ed.), the routledge companion to media and activism (pp. 65–74). routledge. nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society, 20(11), 4275–4292. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769694 situationist international. (2006). détournement as negation and prelude. in k. knabb (ed.), situationist international anthology (pp. 67–68). bureau of public secrets. stanfill, m. (2014). the interface as discourse: the production of norms through web design. new media & society, 17(7), 1059–1074. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814520873 zuboff, s. (2019). age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. publicaffairs. fuck-parasites_revised2 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa the free universal construction kit: on appropriation and parasites lone koefoed hansen pit and department of aesthetics and communication, aarhus university denmark koefoed@cavi.au.dk jan løhmann stephensen department of aesthetics and communication, aarhus university denmark aekjls@hum.au.dk abstract with the increasing economic accessibility of 3d printers, the lessons learned and the logics cultivated on digital web 2.0 now seems applicable to the world of material things. released in early 2012 by the artist groups f.a.t. and sy-lab, the free universal construction kit is a set of 3d drawings that enable everyone with access to a 3d printer to make connectors, “the missing links”, between intellectual property restricted toys like lego, tinkertoys, and fischertechnik. however, with the description “reverse engineering as a civic activity” it seems obvious that the greater agenda of the project is not just to enable cross-over playing but rather to problematize and ultimately open up closed formats through critical appropriation. but how does that, for instance, conform with the fact that the connectors are parasitically attached to these toys, whose logic it is simultaneously defying? keywords 3d printing, political economy, art, appropriation, file sharing introduction an acronym for free art and technology, the f.a.t. lab is a group of artists, tinkerers, researchers and hackers whose sarcastic but functional projects comment on digital practices and phenomena by dealing with appropriations of ‘the digital’ in the broadest possible sense. a collaboration with sy-lab, free universal construction kit (figure 1) is a project promising “complete interoperability between 10 popular construction toys”. 80 two-way adaptors enable connections between ten different proprietary toy systems – e.g. lego, tinkertoys, and fischertechnik. the connectors are downloaded as 3d files and printed on a 3d printer. figure 1: the complete free universal construction kit printed in beige plastic. picture by f.a.t. lab and sy-lab. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa this paper discusses the free universal construction kit as a particular way of critiquing contemporary (digital) culture and its political economy based on intellectual property rights (ip). through appropriating highly canonized toy objects, the connectors express a resistance to the capitalist culture they are embedded in, all the while affirming the importance of the original toys themselves. an industrial revolution? one of the joys of construction toy systems is the multitude of combinations and constructions possibilities they offer. however, they rarely provide connectors to other proprietary systems. these barriers to “cross-brand interoperability” are removed with the free universal construction kit where manipulation of digital bits results in physical atoms that form “a ‘meta-mashup system’ ideally provisioned for the creation of transgressive architecture and chimeric readymades.” (f.a.t., 2012) chris anderson (2012) asserts that home 3d-printing and maker-culture is part of a new industrial revolution that will change complicated and sometimes quite laborious, capital-based manufacturing into a process of diy entrepreneurial creativity. affordable 3d printers and online databases like thingiverse (thingiverse.com) are becoming as important to the “object industries” as online sharing systems (legal as well as illegal) have been to the music industry. although referring to karl marx’ call for control over the means of production as a way of overcoming capitalism, anderson (2012, p. 26) still understands this development as an addendum to “the long tail” (anderson 2006). like any other object, home-printed 3d objects will be part of the capitalist circuits of economic exchange. conversely, others believe that 3d printing will profoundly “disrupt established patterns of massproduction, mass-consumption and global distribution networks” (söderberg & daoud, 2012, p. 66). a database like product bay, an atoms-oriented parallel to the pirate bay where bits are shared, specifically follows this logic. the free universal construction kit project uses a similar revolutionary rhetoric to criticize the various proprietary rights in the “old world” of closed business models based on ip. on the project’s website, making, distributing, and playing with toys across various brands is described as a kind of fundamental rights – even something essentially human – stifled by economic interests (f.a.t., 2012). parasitic sharing? the connector files can be downloaded (1) from thingiverse, (2) from f.a.t. lab’s website and (3) on pirate bay. in combination, these distribution channels describe how the internet works as an environment for distributing and sharing – the myriad of technologies that allow for bits and bytes to multiply and change hands. however, they also constitute quite different discursive environments with differing takes on what it means to share: 1. based in the web2.0 paradigm, thingiverse is a typical diy website similar to those in e.g. programming (sourceforge.com) and knitting (ravelry.com). these sites gain their importance because users share experiences with particular files and projects. 2. the fat website is the web1.0 distribution channel: a file is made available for download on a private server, other people download it. 3. heavily debated, blocked in many countries, and highly political, pirate bay is the primary symbol of subversive or illegal file sharing. free universal construction kit thus also reflects an anti-capitalist and anti-proprietary attitude where resistance is primarily a matter of “freeing” material from the hands of capitalist corporations. hence perhaps the acronym f.u.c.k. notable, though, is the simultaneity of the parasitic and the “anti-”: pirate bay has come into existence and, it could be argued, has been kept alive (as well as sought killed) only because of selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa capitalist, proprietary social systems (cf. stallman 2010, p. 18). in many ways, the free universal connector kit highlights the complexities of these issues. the connectors are only fun, and only toys, because something else makes them toys. otherwise, they would merely be strangely shaped objects. they can only display resistance because there is something to appropriate, and they can only be functional objects of play because they parasitically feed off of the proprietary and trademarked toy systems. (il)legal art? in the world of toys, it appears, a playful attitude is only allowed on levels that do not include ip. facing the fact that this project borders on infringements, it invokes a multiple defense strategy in the accompanying description (f.a.t., 2012), appealing (1) on a normative level (“please think of the children”); (2) on a semi-threatening level (referring to the so-called ‘streisand effect’: prohibitions often increase desirability); and (3) on a legal level (by referring to fair use). however, fair use only applies to copyright, not patent, trademark or design (o’rourke 2000, bradshaw et al. 2010). since f.a.t. and sy-lab must know this, their defense fundamentally rests on the assumption that patent holders (hopefully?) will perceive the connector kit as an artistic expression, not as a set of functional objects even if they are also functional. concluding remarks whether a manifest-like statement or fully functional objects, it could be argued that these connectors show the many consequences of the fact that digital files can be endlessly manipulated and copied. this can be hard to fathom when moving a file from a computer and onto dropbox, or when uploading a picture to facebook. but when holding a strange amalgamation of lego and fischertechnik – an object which is simultaneously both and none of those – the concept of remix and digital materiality literally becomes tangible. thus, expressing a particular kind of resistance and appropriation, the connectors enable us to understand what it means ‘to manipulate the digital’ – conceptually, materially, politically, and economically. in addition, and this may be the most important point concerning the ways that the project appropriates the existing toy systems, it becomes obvious that processes of appropriation will always need the ‘original’ forms. without the individual toy systems, the connectors will be very un-fun toys – even when they are great appropriations, and even when they clearly serve as a kind of physical resistance towards the mechanisms of proprietary formats. in conclusion, we would suggest that this physical appropriation is a critical conceptual artwork, engaging in a socio-economic and political discussion of digital culture in general and online sharing in particular. the explicit reference to fair use gives away the artistic nature of the project. it is primarily an art project using marxist inspired analysis and appropriation techniques of modifying and creating anew, thus showing that things could be different. still, the free universal construction kit only gains significance, because it is also a project with a practical purpose: this is both art and design, both aesthetic objects made for contemplative pondering and practical objects made in order to be useful. acknowledgments this research has been funded by aarhus university’s interdisciplinary research center participatory it (pit) and by au ideas pilot centre: the democratic public sphere. references anderson, c. (2006). the long tail: how endless choice is creating unlimited demand, new york: random house. anderson, c. (2012). makers: the new industrial revolution, new york: random house. bradshaw, s.; bowyer, a. & haufe, p. (2010). the intellectual property implications of low-cost 3d printing, scripted 7(1), 5-31. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa free art and technology [f.a.t.] lab and sy-lab. (2012). the free universal construction kit. fffff.at. retrieved 27 june 2013 from http://fffff.at/free-universal-construction-kit ravelry. retrieved 27 june 2013 from http://ravelry.com söderberg, j. & daoud, a. (2012). atoms want to be free too! expanding the critique of intellectual property to physical goods, triplec 20(1), 66-76. sourceforge. retrieved 27 june 2013 from http://sourceforge.net thingiverse. retrieved 27 june 2013 from http://thingiverse.com license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc. sk aoir 0818 deep-fry selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): kowalchuk, s. (2018, october 10-13 ‘deep-fried’ and denaturalized: critiquing memetic meta-ontologies. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ‘deep-fried’ and denaturalized: critiquing memetic metaontologies saskia kowalchuk concordia university background this essay offers a theoretical and critical approach to the practice of internet meme making, popularly referred to as ‘deep-frying’, which involves the degradation of visual quality and linguistic comprehensibility for the purposes of humor. the paper is primarily focused on the ways in which these memes can be called upon to subvert ontological and material norms of existing memetic communications. the significance of these practices lies in a coherent understanding of ‘memeing’, and ‘deep-fried memeing’, as a collective artistic phenomenon that circumvents national boundaries and is bound up in the shared experience of cooperative image reappropriation. hito steryl’s notion of ‘poor images’ provides an ideal conceptual framework for the potentially disruptive quality of memes. these low-resolution reproductions circulate through non-sanctioned channels, standing in direct opposition to the fetishization of rich images in the state sponsored image making hegemony (steryl, 2012). poor images are unmoored from their original context and are re-imagined with every reproduction, connecting global communities of illicit creativity; forming what filmmaker dziga vertov referred to as ‘visual bonds’ (steryl, 2012). in this way, a deep-fried meme can be thought of as a poor image brought to its logical extreme. purposely degraded and recontextualized, the deep-fried meme exists to defamiliarize practices of networked engagement and re-mystify the processes of reading and creating memes. fundamentally, the successful deployment of memetic humor relies on a thoughtful adherence to established generic conventions with a creative and unexpected twist (shifman, 2015; milner, 2016; phillips and milner, 2017). these conventions are upheld by the communities of consumption who enforce quiddity and quality, forming an ‘ingroup’ of those who can read and create memes within the given parameters (miltner, 2014). deep-fried memes, however, seek to complicate this phenomenon by breaking with generic convention so dramatically and frenetically that the images produced bear little or no resemblance to their source imagery and associated in-groups. in doing so deep-fried memes can bring users together from a place of mutual alienation, demonstrating an uncanny awareness of the existing tensions of memetic production and consumption. methodology & analysis as a starting point for this formal analysis, i began by assembling a corpus of 150 memetic images that demonstrated the quiddity of deep-fry. by doing so i identified necessary formal requirements that qualify the present parameters of deep-fry practices. these include, saturated coloration; increased grain; lowered resolution or increased compression; warping or bubbling effects; unnecessary lens flaring; excessive emoji usage; and linguistic misdirection or formulaic subversion. the corpus included 56 selections from tumblr, 54 selections from instagram, and 39 examples from reddit, all of which demonstrate two or more of the aforementioned qualities. i have subsequently explored three primary layers on which these techniques operate, to produce an ontological meta-critique. the first resides at the level of the message, both linguistic and iconic, as per barthes. in the essay, i examine the joint degradation of visual clarity and linguistic comprehensibility through multi-paneled memes, elucidated by the increasing formalization of the pronoun ‘who’, that produce a relay function (barthes, 1977). this relay function suggests the creators’ awareness of the prevailing discourses surrounding digital communications and the ostensible impoverishing of visual and linguistic quality. crucially, this self-awareness is the driving force of the deep-fried meme; users are swept up in the tide of teleological acceleration but can still have fun on the ride. the second and third levels of analysis that i undertook relate to the tenants of information theory, through which i identified two major memetic defamiliarizing practices in noise introduction and redundancy augmentation. following rosa menkman, i conceived of deep-fried memes as noise artifacts; objects that radically exploit their failure to disappear as techné and therefore confront embedded teleological anxieties (2011, p.14). as such, noise is introduced with the visual effects that give deep-fried memes their name and through breaking with formal linguistic requirements of memetic humor. the memes i chose to analyze exemplify the “bottom text” trend in deep-fried. this technique relies on a reader’s familiarity with the traditional set up/punchline format of a top text-bottom text meme. rather than providing the payoff, the author replaces it with the “bottom text” placeholder present while making a meme using an online generator. this is highly characteristic of the operational closure associated with noise objects (nunes, 2012, p.100) and forces the viewer to question the ways information is relayed through memes. to understand the significance of trends in memetic redundancy, popularly known as ‘anti-memes’, i first conceived of reaction memes as highly entropic. entropic messages are characterized by a high level of unpredictable information, and trend towards decay (shannon, 1948). the unexpected image and text combinations in reaction memes produce high visceral reactions and readily efface their channel. in contrast, anti-memes are highly redundant and ensure the predictability of the message received; highlighting the existence of the channel in the process. this anti-meme logic is repeatedly demonstrated throughout the corpus and consists of such examples as memes bearing the phrases “if i’ve been distant lately i’m sorry it’s because i’ve been distant lately” or “ariana grande is called ‘ariana grande’ because her first name is ariana and her last name is grande” (esoteric_queen, 2017; grapejuiceboys, 2018). to conclude, i synthesize an understanding of deep-fried memeing as an art practice that adheres to menkman’s notion of ‘post-procedural glitch art’ (2011, p. 38). these artworks, infused with intentional failure of a digital system, produce befuddling and repellent results as a means of interrogating established aesthetic norms (menkman, 2011, p.38; contreras-kotterbay & mirocha, 2016, p.149). they speak to a spaciotemporal sensibility that is entirely preoccupied by the ever-present threats of acceleration and accident (contreras-koterbay & mirocha, 2016, p. 13), which it not only accepts but displays boldly. deep-fry perhaps best embodies a cubist moment in meme-ing. we know that the canvas is flat, so to speak, therefore which creative possibilities present themselves now that this has been acknowledged? references barthes, roland. “the rhetoric of the image.” in image-music-text, translated by heath, stephen, 32–51. new york: hill and wang, 1977. contreras-koterbay, scott, and łukasz mirocha. the new aesthetic and art: constellations of the postdigital. theory on demand. amsterdam: institute of network cultures, 2016. esoteric_queen. (2017, november 12). sometimes it just be like that. [instagram post]. retrieved from https://www.instagram.com/p/bby1scgabgv grapejuiceboys. (2018, june 18) incase you wanted to know. [instagram post]. retrieved from https://www.instagram.com/p/bkmpu00fzyuveenk9ybh6b0781tmvyqnlliuda 0 menkman, rosa. the glitch moment(um). network notebook 4. amsterdam: institute of network cultures, 2011. milner, ryan m. the world made meme: public conversations and participatory media. the information society series. cambridge, massachusetts: the mit press, 2016. miltner, kate m. “‘there’s no place for lulz on lolcats’: the role of genre, gender, and group identity in the interpretation and enjoyment of an internet meme.” first monday 19, no. 8 (august 1, 2014). http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5391. phillips, whitney, and ryan m milner. the ambivalent internet: mischief, oddity, and antagonism online. wiley, 2017. nunes, m. (2012). seductive errors. in x. burrough (ed.), net works: case studies in web art and design (pp. 100–102). new york ; london: routledge. shifman, limor. memes in digital culture. boca raton; london: crc press, 2015. steyerl, hito, and franco berardi. “in defence of the poor image.” in the wretched of the screen, 31–45. e-flux journal. berlin: sternberg press, 2012. aoir2020 move eat sleep repeat.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): bergroth, h. & saariketo, m. (2020, october 27–31). move, eat, sleep, repeat: rhythmic struggles in proactive self-tracking practices. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. move, eat, sleep, repeat: rhythmic struggles in proactive self-tracking practices harley bergroth university of turku minna saariketo stockholm university proactive self-tracking is a proliferating digital media practice that involves the gathering data about the body and one’s everyday patterns of being outside the context of clinical health care. common consumer-grade gadgets for self-monitoring track for example steps, heart rate, calorie consumption, and various biomarkers related to the quality of one’s sleep (lupton, 2016; schüll, 2016). many studies have noted that self-tracking technologies affect people’s everyday modes of thought and action, and ‘stick’ to their lifeworlds as these technologies seek to promote ‘improved’ and healthier modes of behavior (schüll,2016; fotopoulou & o’riordan, 2017; bergroth & vuorinen, 2019). while people may readily explicate resistance towards the demanding, optimizationrelated character of self-tracking devices, these technologies still resonate in the ‘technological unconscious’ (thrift & french, 2002) as self-tracking technologies tap in to the habitual and affective dimensions of human experience. in the paper, we address the gap that still exists in exploring the mechanisms by and through which these human-technology attachments operate in practice. we focus on the rhythmic aspects of self-tracking by asking how specific self-tracking devices and interfaces attract and prescribe repetition, rhythms, beats, pulses, and cycles into everyday lives. in so doing, we elaborate how different systems – namely human bodies and technical systems of self-tracking – interact rhythmically. while self-tracking may present harmonious sequences of human-technology co-operation, for the purposes of this paper, we will focus on the diverse layers of struggle in self-tracking practices, including for example falling out of rhythms, longing for rhythms, being unable to understand or follow certain rhythms, or unwillingness to adhere to specific rhythms. virtual event virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 theoretically we draw from new materialist ontology and the idea of self-tracking agencements and combine it with henri lefebvre’s (1992/2004) rhythmanalysis. in the analysis, we have traced, following lefebvre’s conceptualization, the formation of eurhytmia (harmony of rhythms), arrhythmia (discordance), and polyrhythmia (multiplicity of overlapping rhythms). our contribution to the rhythmanalytic theory is complementing it with theorization on the hierarchical organisation of rhythms. in relation to human–technology attachments and power, we consider self-tracking practices as agencements of ‘dressage’ (ibid: 40–44), referring to how self-tracking seeks an ‘automatism of repetitions’ that always includes also disruptions, crises or struggles in the system; crises that have ‘origins in and effects on the rhythms’ themselves. methodologically we are inspired by lefebvre’s idea that people live in rhythms and their bodies are crucial node in the rhythmic fabric of life and society. for lefebvre, rhythms are corporeal; to grasp a rhythm it is necessary to have been grasped by it (lefebvre, 1992/2004: 27). inspired by this, we applied the method of ‘collaborative autoethnography’ (e.g. chang, hernandez & ngunjiri, 2012). through the process of tracing the rhythmicities created in/with activity trackers, we engaged both authors’ personal and situated fieldwork experiences of wearing self-tracking devices, while simultaneously cross-analyzing, comparing, and contrasting our experiences and our visual-textual research materials. both authors used activity trackers (fitbit charge hr and garmin vivosmart hr+, and later apple watch s3), in total 25 months between april 2015 and december 2019. we kept a diary of our observations, photographed the screens of the devices, and took screenshots from the smartphone apps. the observations and experiences were regularly reflected both face-to-face and via instant messaging, and this interaction constitutes a crucial part of our research data. instead of following the mainstream of collaborative autoethnographic research and focusing in perspectives on or experiences of issues that relate to personal or professional identities or the self, we placed technology at the centre of our study. we relate to the method of ethnographic research that ’has technology as its perspective’ called ‘technography’ (bucher, 2012). thus, our methodology is built on technographical collaborative autoethnography. our findings illustrate the multiplicity of rhythms and rhythmic struggles with everyday networked technology. in the analysis, we describe how the self-tracking devices have educated us on a certain type of wellbeing and self-care, while also ritualizing wellbeing by organizing time in new ways and seeking to establish automatism in self-care. our observations shed light on the ways in which the technologies bent us into new rhythms. simultaneously, we have shared an uncomfortable surprise of the sneaky habitualisation that has happened despite our critical analytical starting point – discussed in the paper through the concept of dressage. a main example of this is the pleasure and attachment that one of us feels in using apple watch despite the initial rejection and resentment to the smartphone extension vibrating in the wrist that made her constantly aware of the highspeed and persuasive rhythms of the digital world. in the analysis, we discuss the temporal struggles of fitting time and attention seeking self-tracking devices into the everyday. we reflect how devices require effort in initiating the use, adjusting the default settings, entering one’s details, becoming familiar with the different functions, and learning to interpret the visualisations. second, the materiality of device organizes the user’s everyday in unexpected ways: the need to recharge the battery forces the user to choose what data to give up or to synchronize the recharge and daily movements so that no data is lost. these reflections on ‘letting data go’ shed light the persuasive power of constant data collection and adjusting the user to its logics. third, we argue that feeling haptically the constant flow of notifications while using activity trackers that are extensions to a smartphone, can be a moment of becoming conscious of the rhythm of manifold persuasions that a user is digitally targeted with. to conclude, the analysis has given us a chance to closely analyze the rhythms and beats that we interpret as illustrations of the ’technological unconscious’ (thrift & french 2002). we bring our observations in dialogue with the contemporary critical arguments pointing to the design of products that are made as addictive as possible in the race for ‘hijacking minds’ and capturing attention (see e.g. lewis, 2017; thompson, 2017). our research contributes empirically to the lack of research that has systematically examined these seductive and yet controlling properties of software. bergroth, h. & vuorinen, j. (2019) towards the ontology of becoming in self-tracking research. in: kurosu, m. (ed.) human-computer interaction. perspectives on design. hcii 2019. lecture notes in computer science, vol 11566. springer, cham. pp 270– 287. bucher, t. (2012) programmed sociality: a software studies perspective on social networking sites. ph.d. diss. chang, h., hernandez, k.-a. c., & ngunjiri, f. w. (2012). a collaborative autoethnography. walnut creek: left coast press. cifor, m. & garcia, p. (2019). inscribing gender: a duoethnographic examination of gendered values and practices in fitness tracker design. in proceedings of the 52nd hawaii international conference on system sciences. scholar space, honolulu, hi, usa, 21322141. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/59652 fotopoulou, a., & o’riordan, k. (2017). training to self-care: fitness tracking, biopedagogy and the healthy consumer. health sociology review, 26(1): 54 68. lefebvre, h. (1992/2004) rhythmanalysis. space, time and everyday life. london & new york: continuum. lewis, p. (2017). ‘our minds can be hijacked’: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia. the guardian, october 6, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/smartphone-addiction-siliconvalley-dystopia?cmp=share_btn_fb( lupton, d. (2016) the quantified self: a sociology of self-tracking. cambridge: polity press. schüll, n.d. (2016) data for life: wearable technology and the design of self-care. biosocieties. online first: 1–17. thompson, n. (2017) our minds have been hijacked by our phones. tristan harris wants to rescue them. wired 26.7.2017. https://www.wired.com/story/our-minds-havebeen-hijacked-by-our-phones-tristan-harris-wants-to-rescue-them/(accessed 4.11.2017). thrift, n. & french, s. (2002) the automatic production of space. transactions of the institute of british geographers, 27(3): 309–335. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  suzor,  n.,  burgess  j.,  gray,  m.,  &  chen,  y.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  the  sharing   economy  and  its  discontents:  labour,  fairness,  and  legitimacy.  panel  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th   annual  meeting  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from   http://spir.aoir.org.   the  sharing  economy  and  its  discontents:  labour,   fairness,  and  legitimacy     nicolas  suzor   queensland  university  of  technology  (qut)     jean  burgess   queensland  university  of  technology  (qut)     mary  l.  gray   microsoft  research     yujie  “julie”  chen   school  of  journalism  and  communication,  chinese  university  of  hong  kong       this  panel  brings  together  a  series  of  related  critiques  over  labor  and  fairness  in  the   sharing  economy.  the  last  decade  has  brought  a  startling  growth  in  the  deployment  of   networked  communications  technologies  to  organize  work.  mobile  apps  in  particular  are   helping  to  restructure  contractual  relationships  in  ways  that  disrupt  old  and  create  new   intermediaries.  the  logics  and  affordances  of  these  digitally  mediated  platforms  for   negotiating  labor  agreements  differ  widely  in  the  extent  to  which  they  empower  their   users.  on  the  one  hand,  the  sharing  economy  present  the  possibility  of  greatly  reducing   transaction  costs  and  radically  increasing  access  to  shared  resources  and  opportunities   for  participation  in  the  workforce.  but  at  the  same  time,  the  precarious  labor  of  the  ‘gig   economy’  can  drive  down  effective  wages,  the  material  protections,  and  real  choices  for   the  workers  upon  which  it  depends.  the  rapid  growth  of  these  new  markets  present  new   challenges  for  understanding  how  work  is  regulated,  and  new  opportunities  for   imagining  how  it  might  be  organized  in  the  future.     this  panel  begins  with  a  mapping  of  the  chinese  sharing  economy.  the  first  paper   provides  a  provocative  critique  of  the  common  assumption  that  sharing  platforms   necessarily  weaken  the  formal  legal  protections  granted  to  workers.  it  provides  a  new   typology  to  systematically  characterize  the  range  of  sharing  economy  platforms  in  china   according  to  the  real  resources  and  opportunities  of  the  participants  who  share  their   goods  and  labor.  the  next  two  papers  zoom  in  to  more  closely  study  labor  on  sharing   economy  platforms,  through  two  different  methodological  approaches.  the  second   paper  provides  a  rich  ethnographic  study  of  women  task  workers  in  south  india  and  the   us,  making  visible  the  complex  relationships  around  the  sharing  economy  that  are   otherwise  obscured  behind  the  apis  that  mediate  transactions.  the  third  paper  takes  on   this  theme  and  makes  the  sharing  economy  platform  its  central  object  of  study.  this   paper  examines  how  a  task  working  platform  structures  the  conflicts  between  neoliberal   ideals  of  frictionless  markets  and  the  precariousness  that  this  freedom  so  often  brings   for  the  laborers  who  depend  upon  it.  it  considers  how  the  platform  shapes  the   presentation  of  work  and,  by  encouraging  the  quantified  self,  promotes  ideal  workers  to   maximize  the  platform’s  value.  finally,  the  fourth  paper  turns  to  consider  the  regulation   and  legitimization  of  sharing  economy  platforms  as  they  disrupt  established  labor   markets.  it  focuses  particularly  on  the  disconnect  between  political  deliberative  debates   over  fairness  and  consumer  protection,  on  the  one  hand,  and  the  ongoing  legitimization   of  sharing  economy  markets  as  reflected  through  the  everyday  experiences  of   consumers  and  workers.  in  this  context,  it  provokes  a  series  of  core  questions  around   the  regulation  of  industry  and  the  public  interest,  seeking  to  understand  in  greater  detail   how  different  approaches  to  organizing  labor  become  accepted  and  justified.       all  papers  ultimately  ask  the  important  question  about  who  benefits  from  these  new   markets.  we  highlighting  both  the  opportunities  for  reconfiguring  labor  relations  that   these  markets  provide,  and  the  threats  to  working  conditions  that  they  pose.  in  doing  so,   we  seek  to  move  beyond  the  dichotomy  of  sharing  as  liberation  and  as  exploitation  to   consider  how  platforms  and  networks  might  be  designed  and  deployed  to  enhance  real   capabilities  and  opportunities  for  human  flourishing.         bringing  the  informal  economy  back  in:  a  mapping  of   chinese  sharing  economy     yujie  “julie”  chen   school  of  journalism  and  communication,  chinese  university  of  hong  kong     jack  linchuan  qiu   school  of  journalism  and  communication,  chinese  university  of  hong  kong       christian  fuchs  ends  his  2016  article  in  asian  journal  of  communication  with  a  bold   hypothesis:  "without  any  historically  formed  obsession  with  patents  and  copyrights,   china  can  also  be  a  relatively  easy  place  to  promote  open  source,  open  access,  and   free  information  as  a  public  good  (p.  37).”  yes,  conceptually  speaking,  there  are  notable   similarities  between  the  digital  sharing  economy  and  the  collectivist  traditions  of  china,   be  they  socialist  or  confucian.       yet,  the  assumed  pattern  does  not  reflect  reality  if  we  scrutinize  the  short  history  of   open  source  movement  in  china  since  the  early  2000s.  chinese  linux  was   quickly  commercialised  (e.g.,  red  flag  linux);;  wikipedia  was  blocked  and  its   competitors  such  as  hudong  baike  and  baidu  baike  were  owned  by  private  companies;;   creative  commons  didn’t  really  take  off,  in  both  mainland  china  and  hong  kong.  even   though  isaac  mao,  leader  among  china’s  first-­generation  bloggers,  has  proposed  his   philosophy  of  “sharism”  since  2008,  the  material  developments  have  so  far  been  quite   limited  and  the  spirit  of  sharism  draws  more  from  a  belief  in  technology  than  from   chinese  socialism  or  other  legacies  from  the  past.       meanwhile,  a  full  range  of  sharing  economy  practices  have  indeed  emerged  in  china,   which  we  will  systematically  introduce  in  the  following.  they  have  given  rise  to  a  wide   variety  of  user  and  creator  communities  that  span  online  and  off.  why  do  models  of   digital  sharing  economy  transplanted  from  the  west  generally  have  mediocre  success   or  completely  fail  in  china?  how  should  we  make  sense  of  the  great  many  grassroots   sharing  economies  that  have  mushroomed  in  recent  years?  calling  them  precarious   labor  seems  to  have  only  scratched  the  surface.  to  understand  it  better,  we  propose  to   reconsider  the  perspective  of  informal  economy  (castells  &  portes,  1989)  and   informatization  (sassen,  1999)  in  the  context  of  contemporary  china,  which  shall  shed   more  light  on  our  subject  matter  than  traditionalist  or  technologist  explanations.       as  the  model  of  sharing  economy  is  claimed  to  disrupt  existing  industries  in  post-­ industrial  societies,  represented  in  particular  by  uber  and  airbnb,  the  most  salient   concern  over  participants  in  sharing  economy  is  their  precarious  or  flexible  status:   flexible  hours,  lack  of  protection  and  benefits,  exploitations  hidden  behind  screens  and   intensified  by  algorithms,  and  flexible  but  also  low  wages  (e.g.  the  case  of  wage   reimbursement  in  california).  this  type  of  criticism  of  sharing  economy  assumes  that   the  sharing  model  disrupts  traditionally  unionized  labor,  a  more  privileged,  albeit   shrinking,  workforce,  who  still  enjoy  benefits  and  job  security  under  post-­industrial   conditions.  against  this  backdrop,  what  sharing  economy  makes  obsolete  is  stable   paychecks,  labor  protections,  and  prospects  of  comfortable  retirement.  scholars  warn   against  “the  end  of  work”  or  “taskification”  of  jobs  (grey  2016).  sharing  economy,   conceived  this  way,  strengthens  the  ongoing  trend  of  informaliztion  initiated  by   globalization,  enhanced  by  the  neoliberal  ideology,  and  carried  out  through  austerity   practices  in  the  aftermath  of  the  2009  financial  meltdown.       however,  in  contrast  to  the  post-­industrial  transformation  where  formal  and  unionized   employment  is  forced  to  become  more  informal,  rare,  and  precarious,  a  great  majority  of   the  chinese  labor  force  was  already  in  the  informal  sector  (huang  2013)  when  the   digital  sharing  economy  emerges  in  china.  as  huang  points  out,  85%  of  chinese  work   force  was  not  protected  by  the  labor  law  in  2005.  in  2010,  63.2%  of  urban  workers   were  employed  in  informal  economy,  and  only  the  remaining  36.8%  of  urban  employees   qualify  for  the  status  of  urban  middle  class  who  have  properties,  assets,  and  share  most   of  the  consumption  habits  with  urbanites  in  other  cosmopolitan  areas.  according  to   huang,  the  informal  sector  includes  urban  migrant  workers  and  rural  non-­agricultural   workers.  it  also  draws  from  laid-­off  workers  and  other  groups  suffering  from   underemployment.       in  other  words,  informal  work  is  the  norm  not  the  aberration  in  chinese  economy.   absorbing  informal  labor,  rather  than  the  nostalgia  that  the  good  old  days  of  union   protection  and  collective  bargain  are  gone,  reflects  the  deeper  contentious  force  behind   the  full  range  of  chinese  sharing  economy.  thus,  a  urgent  question  concerning  the   sharing  economy  in  the  chinese  context  is  the  relationship  between  the  sharing  model   and  the  vast  existing  informal  work  force,  which  constitute  the  bulk  of  the  information   have-­less  (qiu  2009).       along  this  line,  with  informal  workers  at  the  center,  we  will  survey  not  only  startup   sharing  /  gig  companies,  but  also  the  sharing  practices  popular  among  the  have-­less   which  spur  the  development  of  new  informal  businesses.  specifically,  we  categorize   chinese  sharing  economy  by  considering  the  role  played  by  the  have-­less.  we  ask:  are   they  the  main  initiators,  beneficiaries,  participants,  or  simply  laborers  in  the  particular   sharing  economy?     in  so  doing,  we  dismiss  the  conventional  means  of  categorization  by  terminal  parties   like  b2c,  p2p,  or  c2c.  our  categorization  also  rises  above  the  industrial  barriers,  such   as  taxi-­hailing,  rental  space  sharing,  and  crowdsourced  service  provision.  meanwhile,   our  categorization  attempts  to  reflect  complexity  and  heterogeneity  of  chinese  sharing   economy,  even  more  so  when  it  comes  to  its  impact  upon  the  information  have-­less.     based  on  our  analysis,  we  propose  to  understand  chinese  sharing  economy  into  the   four  categories  that  are  not  mutually  exclusive.  we  will  elaborate  on  each  category  by   drawing  examples  from  representative  companies.     1）have-­more  sharing  economy.  disproportionate  participants  in  this  type  of  sharing   economy  are  urban  workers  who  have  spare  assets  or  cognitive  surplus  to  share.  their   sharing  act  is  motivated  less  by  monetary  needs  than  social  needs.  examples  include：      -­  ride-­sharing  (e.g.  didi,  kuaidi,  tiantian;;  zhuanche)      -­  space-­sharing/rentals  (e.g.  soho  3q,  little  pig  rentals)      -­  one-­to-­one  knowledge  sharing  and  consulting  (e.g.  zaihang).     2）delivered  by  have-­less.  this  category  covers  most  of  the  crowdsourced  service-­ provision  companies  whose  last-­mile  delivery  person  is  typically  a  migrant  worker.  the   way  in  which  the  have-­less  participate  in  this  type  of  sharing  economy  is  more  often  as   laborer  than  as  customer,  although  they  can  be  both.  examples  include:      -­  the  crowdsourced  logistic  industry,  e.g.  jingdu  crowdsource  and  dada  delivery;;   interestingly  enough,  china's  e-­commerce  miracle  in  the  past  few  years  has  caught   global  attentions,  migrant  workers  who  form  the  mainstay  of  the  workforce  that  sustain   the  miracle  stay  in  the  informal  economy  as  they  did  a  decade  ago  in  manufacturing   industries.          -­  housekeeping  (e.g.  e-­jiajie,  a’yi  bang,  yunjiazheng)      -­  personal  care/service  (e.g.  helijia,  gongfuxiong,  woyoufan,  witmart.com,  etc.)      -­  grocery  delivery  (e.g.  beequick)     3）  have-­less  sharing,  the  sharing  practice  and  economy  mainly  originated  from  the   have-­less.  this  is  the  most  neglected  reality  at  the  bottom  of  chinese  sharing  economy.      -­  mobile  phone  sharing  among  hmong  children  (zhang,  2012);;      -­  video-­copying  and  sharing  via  smartphones  from  the  internet  cafes  and  cell  phone   shops,  because  migrant  workers  are  prudent  about  purchasing  data  plans.     4）mass  sharing.  sharing  of  resources  and  contents  without  distinct  targeted   participants.  this  category,  in  essence,  is  the  closest  to  the  sharing  spirit  promoted  in   the  peer  sharing  and  open  source  movement.      -­  resources  sharing  (e.g:  mingyi  zhudao,  genshuixue.com)        -­  ugc-­sharing  (e.g.  bilibili,  bullet  curtain)      -­  e-­book  sharing  (e.g.  v-­disk,  baidu  yun)     the  above  categorization  begins  to  show  a  complex  picture  of  the  chinese  sharing   economy,  which  cannot  be  exhausted  by  some  simplistic  imported  models.  the   heterogeneity  of  the  sharing  economy  in  china  is  associated  with  the  components  and   the  particular  organization  of  chinese  work  force,  namely,  a  great  majority  of  migrant   workers  in  informal  economy.  given  this  context,  we  need  put  the  have-­less  at  the   center  and  examine  to  what  extent  they  would  change  or  shape  new  rules  for  china’s   current  economic  transformation  and  the  internet  economy.       references     castells,  m.,  &  portes,  a.  (1989).  world  underneath:  the  origins,  dynamics,  and  effects   of  the  informal  economy.  the  informal  economy:  studies  in  advanced  and  less   developed  countries,  12.     huang,  z.  (2013).  “reconsidering  chinese  workers”  open  time  2013:  issue  5.     grey,  m.  (2016).  “your  job  is  about  to  get  ‘taskified,’”  los  angeles  times.  january  8,   2016.       sassen,  s.  (1999).  globalization  and  its  discontents:  essays  on  the  new  mobility  of   people  and  money  (vol.  9).  new  york:  new  press.     zhang,  q  (2012).    grassroots  media:  the  construction  of  resistance  identities  in  the   process  social  transformation.  (unpublished  doctoral  dissertation).  chinese  academy   of  social  sciences,  beijing.             legit(imizing)  work:  making  sense  of  precarity  in  the   lives  of  u.s.  and  south  indian  women  laboring  in  on-­ demand  economies     deepti  kulkarni   microsoft  research     mary  l.  gray  (corresponding  author)   microsoft  research     siddharth  suri   microsoft  research       this  paper  uses  philip  et  al’s  lens  of  “postcolonial  computing”  to  interrogate  how   women’s  affective  relationships  with  contingent  labor  practices  refract  and  complicate   universalizing  critiques  of  precarity.  we  draw  on  a  larger,  mixed-­methods  study  of   crowdsourcing  or  “crowdwork”—an  open  call  for  paid  work  distributed  through  an   application  programming  interface  (api)—carried  out  in  both  india  and  the  united   states.  we  compare  a  sample  of  twelve  women  from  the  larger  study,  between  the   ages  of  19-­43  years  of  age,  living  in  smaller  towns  and  cities  throughout  south  indian   states  of  goa,  karnataka,  maharashtra,  tamil  nadu  and  telangana  with  fifteen  women,   between  the  ages  of  18-­57  years  of  age,  living  in  the  united  states.  we  focus  on  how   crowdwork,  as  an  expanding  form  of  post-­fordist,  digital  production  (irani  2013),   impacts  the  lives  of  women  in  india  and  the  united  states  to  understand  how  women’s   participation  in  crowdwork  both  conforms  and  challenges  normative  assumptions  about   the  role  of  gender  in  the  home  and  workplace  as  well  as  the  relationship  between   contingent  labor  and  precarity.  the  data  were  collected  over  the  span  of  19  months,   through  open-­ended,  semi-­structured  ethnographic  interviews,  surveys  and  participant   observation.     philips  et  al  define  the  lens  of  “postcolonial  computing”  as  “a  bag  of  tools…for  continual,   careful,  collective,  and  always  partial  reinscriptions  of  a  cultural–technical  situation  in   which  we  all  find  ourselves.”  (philip  et  al,  2011).  specifically,  they  look  at  the  cultural   and  spatial  specificities  of  digital  production  to  understand  not  just  the  centers  and   margins  of  these  sociotechnical  systems,  but  also  how  information  and  communication   technologies  (icts)  are  remade  and  transformed  as  they  circulate  and  land  in  people’s   lives.  we  focus  the  postcolonial  computing  lens  on  our  longitudinal,  multi-­modal  study  of   crowdwork  to  ask:  how  do  women,  in  particular,  rework  the  value  of  icts,  opening  up   new  models  for  reimagining  their  use  and  possibilities?     without  question,  crowdwork,  the  focus  of  our  paper,  maps  onto  earlier  practices  of   outsourcing  business  processes,  from  customer  service  and  coding  to  transcription  and   database  clean  up.  outsourcing,  from  the  early  1970s  onward,  literally  built  the  “call   center”  infrastructure  of  internet  connectivity,  multinational  support  offices,  and  training   centers  that  drives  paid  crowdwork  today,  both  in  the  united  states  and  india,  our  two   fieldsites.       much  of  the  internet’s  automation  and  upkeep,  still  require  a  great  deal  of  human   participation.  work  that  was  once  the  purview  of  temporary  agencies  or  outsourced  to   local  independent  contractors  can  now  be  or  has  been  shifted  to  an  on-­demand   workforce,  largely  invisible  to  the  very  firms  that  rely  on  their  labor.     drawing  on  a  postcolonial  computing  approach,  our  analysis  begins  with  the  ways  in   which  the  application  programming  interfaces  (apis)  of  the  most  popular  crowdwork   platforms  do  two  things:  1)  render  workers’  contributions  to  computation  invisible  to  the   technological  interface,  or  what  lilly  irani  has  called  the  “invisible  labor”  of  microwork   (2013)  and  2)  presume  that  the  price  earned  per  task  is  the  most  important  variable  in   incenting  participants  to  contribute  their  labor.  we  argue  that,  by  design,  crowdwork   apis  limit  our  capacity  to  imagine  how  people  might  derive  or  produce  other  forms  of   value  through  their  crowdwork  or  see  what  sociologist  gina  neff  calls  the  “venture   labor”(2012)  that  individuals  invest  in  the  work  that  they  do.  with  this  mode  of  analysis   in  mind,  we  turn  to  the  experiences  of  women  doing  crowdwork  to  understand  how   gender,  social  expectations,  and  cultural  imperatives  interplay  to  shape  women’s   participation  in  crowdwork  and  the  ways  that  they  extract  and  redefine  the  value  of   crowdwork  in  their  lives.       we  argue  that  women  use  crowdwork  platforms  to  negotiate  both  traditional   expectations  of  their  gender  roles,  such  as  unpaid  demands  for  caregiving  and   managing  the  household,  as  well  as  more  contemporary  expectations  to  be  a  “career   woman.”  women  in  both  the  u.s.  and  india  used  crowdwork  to  deal  with  challenges  that   keep  many  women  out  of  the  workplace,  such  as  time-­consuming  work  commutes,   safety  at  work  and  in  commute,  and  limited  social  acceptance  of  women  taking  on   careers  that  compete  with  family  and  social  obligations.  as  hochschild  (1989)  and,   more  recently  melissa  gregg  (2011)  have  argued,  achieving  as  a  “career  woman”   becomes  difficult  when  women  are  faced  with  the  time  constraints  and  expectations  of  a   fulltime  career  while  also  carrying  out  the  fulltime  “second  shift”  of  managing  a   household.  while  crowdwork  mitigates  some  of  the  pressures  of  the  second  shift,  giving   women  a  way  to  work  from  home  and  work  around  their  unpaid  caregiving  schedules,  it   also  leaves  them  less  able  to  draw  on  that  work  experience  to  build  a  resume  or   advance  in  formal  employment.       though  they  come  from  different  religious,  socio-­economic  backgrounds,  educational   levels  and  social  roles,  women  doing  crowdwork  in  the  u.s.  and  india  share  similar   challenges  in  positioning  their  paid  work  in  formal  economies  as  legitimate  and,   paradoxically,  as  valuable  as  their  unpaid  “second  shift”  work  as  caregivers  in  their   households.  u.s.  and  indian  women  use  their  participation  in  on-­demand  economies  to   navigate  traditional  and  modern  expectations  of  them,  from  being  a  key  member  of  the   household  to  a  career  woman.  we  argue  that  crowdwork  offers  women  digital  literacy,  a   sense  of  identity,  respect  among  family,  financial  independence,  and  opportunities  to   feel  a  sense  of  autonomy  and  control  over  their  schedules.  at  the  same  time,  female   crowdworkers  are  still  expected  to  prioritize  family  and  social  obligations  over  their   commitments  to  crowdwork  and  may  not  be  able  to  reap  the  benefits  of  a  professional   it  career,  such  as  stable  pay,  family  leave,  insurance,  and  validation  as  a  “career   woman.”  we  return  to  a  postcolonial  computing  critique  as  a  tactic  that  might  better   acknowledge  the  importance  of  place  and  social  context  to  employment’s  social   contract.  as  philip  et  al  argued  “postcolonial  computing  advocates  a  focus  not  simply  on   the  negative  critique  of  constructions  of  cultural  difference,  but  on  the  productive   possibilities  of  ‘‘difference’’  itself  (philip  et  al:  5).       we  end  with  a  call  to  take  a  “capabilities  approach”  (sen  1999;;  kleine  2013)  to   crowdwork.  specifically,  legitimizing  the  importance  of  reckoning  with  the  gendered   dynamics  of  crowdwork  and  more  fully  measuring  the  growth  and  development  of   productivity,  beyond  gdp,  must  include  looking  at  the  values  that  people  bring  to  their   labor  and  how  they  use  that  labor  to  expand  their  capacity  to  enjoy  a  choice-­full  life.     literature  cited     gregg,  m.  (2011).  work's  intimacy.  cambridge,  uk:  polity.     hochschild,  a.  r.,  &  machung,  a.  (1989).  the  second  shift:  working  parents  and  the   revolution  at  home.  new  york,  n.y:  viking.     irani  lilly.  (2013).  “the  cultural  work  of  microwork.”  new  media  &  society  may  2015  17:   720-­739,  first  published  on  november  21,  2013.     kavita  philip,  lilly  irani,  and  paul  dourish.  “postcolonial  computing:  a  tactical  survey”   science,  technology  &  human  values  january  2012  37:  3-­29,  first  published  on   november  21,  2010.       kleine,  d.  (2013).  technologies  of  choice?:  icts,  development,  and  the  capabilities   approach.  cambridge,  mass:  mit  press.     neff,  g.  (2012).  venture  labor:  work  and  the  burden  of  risk  in  innovative  industries.   cambridge,  mass:  mit  press.     sen,  a.  (1999).  development  as  freedom.  new  york:  knopf.         sharing  the  work?  airtasker  and  the  quantified  self     ben  light   queensland  university  of  technology  (qut)     jacinta  buchbach   queensland  university  of  technology  (qut)     stefanie  duguay   queensland  university  of  technology  (qut)     ben  goldsmith     university  of  the  sunshine  coast       this  paper  considers  the  implications  of  the  quantified  self  at  work  in  what  has  become   recognised  as  the  sharing  economy.    we  draw  upon  the  case  of  airtasker,  which  was   launched  in  australia  in  february  2012.  airtasker  (2015)  describes  itself  as  “a  trusted   community  marketplace  for  people  and  businesses  to  outsource  tasks,  find  local   services  or  hire  flexible  staff  in  minutes  -­  online  or  via  mobile.”  paid  tasks  include   generating  likes  on  facebook,  household  cleaning,  assembling  furniture,  software   development  and  dog  walking.  task  runners  and  job  posters  (potentially  one  and  the   same)  use  the  site  to  advertise  and  negotiate  the  terms  of  work  on  a  task-­by-­task  basis.   airtasker  provides  the  digital  infrastructure  for  this  negotiation  work  and  charges  a  fee  to   runners  –  15%  of  their  earnings.  airtasker  is  rooted  in  ideas  of  collaborative   consumption,  contemporary  notions  of  the  sharing  economy  and  enrols  quantified  self   elements.     since  the  1990s,  changes  in  employment  have  included  the  growth  of  flexible  work   arrangements,  homeworking  and  the  capacity  of  the  internet  and  mobile  technologies  to   facilitate  these  practices  (mcdonald  and  thompson  2015)  albeit  on  terms  dictated  by   the  employer  (light  2014).  a  strand  of  changing  work  practices  is  connected  with  idea   of  collaborative  consumption,  and  in  recent  years,  sharing  economies.  collaborative   consumption  involves  systems  of  organized  sharing,  bartering,  lending,  trading,  renting,   gifting,  and  swapping  that  are  said  to  afford  the  benefits  of  ownership  but  with  reduced   personal  burden  (botsman  and  rogers  2010).  sharing  economies  enrol  digital   networks,  which  facilitate  collaborative  consumption  by  providing  platforms  for   consumers  rather  than  delivering  services  directly  (sundararajan  2013).  however,  it  has   also  been  argued  that  the  sharing  economy  is  actually  an  access  economy   (sundararajan  2013):  rather  than  sharing,  consumers  are  paying  to  access  someone   else’s  goods  or  services  for  a  period  of  time,  leading  to  a  desire  for  utilitarian  rather  than   social  value.     within  this  context,  we  find  the  work  of  callon  et  al.  (2002)  helpful  with  respect  to  an   economy  of  qualities  and  calculating  consumers.  they  suggest  that  a  good  (or  service)   is  defined  by  the  qualities  attributed  to  it  during  qualification  trials.  this  process  of   qualification  involves  singularisation,  attachment  and  detachment.  singularisation   involves  the  alignment  of  consumer  expectations  with  what  is  on  offer,  in  terms  of  how   differences  affecting  choice  are  both  articulated  and  understood.  attachment  and   detachment  involve  the  capturing  of  consumers  (attaching  them)  through  detaching   them  from  rivals  by  engaging  them  in  processes  of  requalification.     our  focus  in  this  paper  is  how  the  digital  attempts  to  mediate  calculating  consumers’   attempts  at  qualification  and  how  providers  of  services  are  configured  to  perceive  and   provide  this  data  of  the  self.  this  involves  elements  of  the  qualified  self  (humphreys   forthcoming)  where,  as  we  create  media  traces  of  ourselves,  we  create  representations   of  ourselves  to  be  consumed.  shifting  from  qualitative  traces  to  numerical  data,  the   datafication  of  the  self  has  accrued  importance  via  the  rise  of  the  quantified  self  -­  a  set   of  practices  and  technologies  that  facilitate  self-­tracking  (nafus  and  sherman  2014).   the  vision  of  the  quantified  self  is  one  of  systemic  monitoring  where  an  individual’s   personal  information  provides  real-­time  performance  optimisation  suggestions  and   where  the  individual  (body)  becomes  a  more  calculable  and  administrable  object  (swan   2013).  in  a  work  context,  the  rise  of  the  quantified  self  has  been  linked  with  an  increase   the  precariat  who  experience  unstable  working  conditions  characteristic  of   contemporary  capitalism  (standing  2011).  self-­quantification  has  also  been  argued  to   intensify  workloads,  rationalize  staff,  and  displace  managerial  accountability  (moore  and   robinson  2015).     we  use  a  walkthrough  method  (burgess  et.  al.  2015)  to  identify  a  set  of  associations   relating  to  airtasker,  the  quantified  self  and  the  sharing  economy.  this  method  offers  a   way  of  generating  data  about  and  analysing  the  expected  and  unexpected  appropriation   of  apps.  we  searched  for  details  about  airtasker  on  the  web,  including  news  articles   and  the  site’s  pages  to  develop  a  narrative  of  how  the  service  presents  to  the  public.  we   were  interested  in  airtasker’s  imagined  users  and  expectations  of  use.  we  then   registered  via  a  desktop  browser  and  documented  the  process  with  attention  to  points  of   mediation  constituting  qualification  and  quantification  of  users.  we  explored  the  site  as   both  a  runner  and  poster,  attending  to  points  of  mediation  that  shape  these  roles.       we  demonstrate  how  narratives  regarding  the  quantified  self  are  presented  by  actors  in   the  sharing  economy  of  airtasker.  we  note  how  airtasker  is  engaged  as  an  actor  that   prepares  the  workforce  for  this  set  of  arrangements  before  people  join  and  as  they  use   the  service.    elements  of  the  quantified  self  at  work  are  present  before  a  user  signs  up  – as  they  search  for  the  site  and  especially  on  the  welcome  page.  quantification  defines   the  role  of  imagined  users  as  ideal  workers,  who  are  depicted  in  airtasker’s  materials.   quantified  self  at  work  elements  further  appear  during  the  registration  process  and  are   in  full  momentum  as  runners  and  posters  negotiate  tasks.       we  shed  light  on  the  quantified  self  in  the  contradictory  sociotechnical  conditions  of   airtasker.  the  platform  is  at  once  a  gateway  to  the  neoliberal  capitalist  ideal  of  the  free   market,  individual  meritocracy,  and  the  positive  positioning  of  precarious  work  lives  as   allowing  for  freedom,  flexibility  and  greater  quality  of  life.  at  the  same  time,  it  mediates   self-­regulation  through  quantification  of  the  self  in  a  way  comparable  to  constraints   placed  upon  workers  contracted  to  an  organisation.  the  site  is  structured  to  operate  in   favour  of  posters  although  they  may  be  one  and  the  same  with  runners.    sharing  in  this   economy  is  one  sided  in  that  the  effects  of  quantified  self  arrangements  reflect  more   heavily  on  runners:  the  sharing  economy  is  also  a  reputation  economy  for  precarious   workers  whose  quantification  supposedly  proves  their  value.  the  ultimate  beneficiary   within  these  arrangements  is  airtasker.  the  quantification  of  the  self  at  work  is  alive  in   the  sharing  economy  and  the  role  of  the  digital  must  be  taken  seriously  as  an  actor   across  a  range  of  occupations  we  might  not  have  considered  in  the  past.         references     airtasker.  (2015).  company  information.  retrieved  31  august  2015,  from   http://press.airtasker.com/company.   botsman,  r.  and  rogers,  r.  (2010)  what’s  mine  is  yours:  the  rise  of  collaborative   consumption.  new  york:  harperbusiness.   callon,  m.,  méadel,  c.  and  rabeharisoa,  v.  (2002).  the  economy  of  qualities.   economy  and  society  31(2):  194-­217.   burgess,  j.,  light,  b.,  and  duguay,  s.  (2015).  studying  hookup  apps:  a  comparative   platform  analysis  of  tinder,  mixxxer,  squirt  and  dattch.  ica  65th  annual   conference,  san  juan,  puerto  rico.   humphreys,  l.  (forthcoming).  the  qualified  self:  social  media  and  the  accounting  of   everyday  life,  cambridge,  mit  press.   light,  b.  (2014).  disconnecting  with  social  networking  sites.  basingstoke,  palgrave   macmillan.   mcdonald,  p.  and  thompson,  p.  (2015).  social  media(tion)  and  the  reshaping  of   public/private  boundaries  in  employment  relations.  international  journal  of   management  reviews  (online  first  -­  accessed  15  september  2015).   moore,  p.  and  robinson,  a.  (2015)  the  quantified  self:  what  counts  in  the  neoliberal   workplace.  new  media  and  society  (online  first  -­  accessed  15  september   2015).   nafus,  d.  and  sherman,  j.  (2014)  big  data,  big  questions  -­  this  one  does  not  go  up   to  11:  the  quantified  self  movement  as  an  alternative  big  data  practice.   international  journal  of  communication,  8,  1784-­1794.   sundararajan,  a.  (2013).  from  zipcar  to  the  sharing  economy.  harvard  business   review.  hbr  blog  network.  https://hbr.org/2013/01/from-­zipcar-­to-­the-­sharing-­ eco/  date  accessed:  28  october  2015.     ride-­sharing  and  the  struggle  for  legitimacy  in  digital  media       jean  burgess   queensland  university  of  technology  (qut)       ariadna  matamoros  fernandez   queensland  university  of  technology  (qut)     nicolas  suzor   queensland  university  of  technology  (qut)     patrik  wikström   queensland  university  of  technology  (qut)   background     the  rapid  growth  of  the  peer  economy  is  creating  significant  challenges  for   governments  around  the  world.  the  entrance  of  new  and  powerful  industry  players  like   uber  and  airbnb  into  heavily  regulated  markets  has  literally  disrupted  the  regulatory   status  quo,  provoking  both  concerns  about  societal  risk  and  enthusiasm  about  market   innovation.  for  policy,  the  resulting  uncertainty  is  complex:  it  entails  balancing  questions   of  efficiency  with  questions  about  levels  of  service,  controls  over  pricing,  and   assurances  of  safety,  fair  labour  relations,  and  social  equality  (witt,  suzor,  &  wikström,   2015).     in  this  paper,  we  take  the  entrance  of  uber  in  australia  as  a  case  study  of  this   contestation.  uber  and  the  taxi  industry  incumbents  are  locked  in  a  battle  for  legitimacy:   both  sides  involve  private  companies  that  regulate  networks  of  passenger  vehicles,   drivers,  and  customers,  and  each  group  is  competing  for  social  acceptance  of  their  right   to  govern.  legitimacy,  here,  means  social  credibility  and  acceptability  –  “a  generalized   perception  or  assumption  that  the  actions  of  an  entity  are  desirable,  proper,  or   appropriate  within  some  socially  constructed  system  of  norms,  values,  beliefs,  and   definitions”  (suchman,  1995,  p.  574).  the  achievement  of  legitimacy,  seen  in  this  way,   is  a  communicative  act.  different  actors  provide  or  withhold  legitimacy  to  regulators  for   different  reasons,  on  contested  and  sometimes  conflicting  criteria.  we  seek  to   understand  the  contest  for  legitimacy  not  only  in  the  public  sphere  debates  over  policy,   but  as  socially  constructed  through  the  everyday  participation  and  ordinary  experiences   of  individuals.       methods     our  research  examines  how  the  competition  for  legitimacy  between  uber  and  the   australian  taxi  industry  is  playing  out  in  social  media.  we  conducted  a  preliminary   thematic  analysis  of  a  sample  of  400  mainstream  news  articles  covering  the  period   between  october  2012  (uber’s  australian  launch)  to  july  2015.  this  background   analysis  enabled  us  to  identify  the  key  frames  used  to  report  on  the  struggle  between   uber  and  the  taxi  industry  incumbents.  in  terms  of  the  substantive  policy  arguments  that   were  present  in  the  mainstream  media,  we  identified  a  series  of  tensions  over  fairness   (to  drivers  and  customers);;  illegality  and  tax  avoidance;;  safety;;  service  quality  and   customer  experiences;;  and  social,  economic,  or  industrial  benefits  of  innovation.   overall,  we  noted  that  mainstream  media  outlets  tended  to  focus  on  the  compelling   narrative  of  the  controversy  itself,  as  the  conflict  between  the  taxi  industry  and  uber   over  uber’s  legality  developed  across  australian  states  and  territories.     the  second  phase  applies  social  media-­based  issue  mapping  methods  (see  burgess  &   matamoros  fernandez,  2016;;  marres  &  moats,  2015)  informed  by  controversy  analysis   (callon,  lascoumes,  &  barthe,  2001).  the  dataset  for  this  study  comprises  219,040   tweets  from  user  accounts  identified  as  australian  containing  the  keyword  ‘uber’  (which   includes  but  is  not  limited  to  the  #uber  hashtag)  posted  between  november  2011  and   november  2015.         uber’s  legitimacy  on  twitter     our  findings  suggest  that  uber  has  been  more  successful  in  its  publicity  campaigns   than  the  australian  taxi  industry,  at  least  on  twitter.  stunts  like  #ubericeream  (launched   every  july  since  2013  –  during  australia’s  winter)  and  #uberkittens  marked  substantial   peaks  in  activity  in  our  dataset.  the  taxi  industry’s  campaigns,  on  the  other  hand,  were   typically  engaged  with  and  retweeted  by  a  smaller  audience,  and  external  links  to  taxi   industry  official  websites  did  not  have  a  strong  presence  in  our  data.       discussions  of  the  political  conflict  between  uber  and  the  taxi  industry  were  certainly   present  in  our  dataset,  and  are  particularly  visible  around  a  set  of  political  hashtags.  the   hashtag  used  for  australian  politics,  #auspol,  is  the  most  tweeted  hashtag  after  #uber   and  #taxi  in  all  our  data  set.  the  first  apparent  ‘ad  hoc’  hashtag  (bruns  &  burgess,   2015)  that  surfaced  from  the  data  is  #sydneysiege,  reflecting  a  controversy  over  uber’s   surge  pricing  in  december  2014  during  the  terrorist  attack  in  sydney.  the  regulatory   debate  was  reflected  in  other  thematic  uses  of  hashtags,  particularly  including   increasingly  visible  discussions  over  innovation  and  taxation,  but  the  debate  over  uber’s   safety  was  surprisingly  relatively  less  prevalent  than  it  was  in  our  mainstream  media   analysis.  tweets  expressly  engaging  with  regulatory  issues  peaked  primarily  in  the   context  of  regional  debates  over  the  legalisation  of  uber  in  particular  australian  cities.         material  participation  in  the  struggle  for  legitimacy     legitimacy  is  not  only  constructed  from  the  competing  normative  assessments  visible  in   the  political  debates  reflected  in  mainstream  media;;  legitimacy  is  also  derived  from  the   ordinary  values,  pragmatic  interests,  and  cognitive  frames  of  individual  members  of  the   public  (black,  2008).  alongside  explicitly  evaluative  statements,  our  dataset  contains  a   significant  number  of  tweets  by  ordinary  users  that  make  visible  their  quite  mundane   material  engagements  with  uber  rides,  drivers  and  cars.    for  example,  in  august  2014  a   user  posted:  “we  were  hungry  so  we're  catching  an  @uber  to  mcdonald's  @[redacted]   #artrave  #rkobh”  -­  embedding  a  selfie  of  two  young  people  in  the  back  of  the  car.   another  example  which  implicitly  references  the  battle  for  legitimacy  but  reads  it  through   mundane  experience,  is  the  tweet,  “my  taxi  driver  farted  an  uber  driver  would  never  do   that”.  these  tropes  of  everyday  experience  also  feature  heavily  among  teen  celebrity   uber  users,  whose  tweets  are  heavily  retweeted  by  australian  accounts—and  these   celebrities  were  not  identified  in  our  mainstream  media  analysis  as  being  part  of  the   debates  (or  pr  machinery)  around  uber.  the  media  practices  of  these  teen  celebrities   articulate  another—and,  whether  authentic  or  not,  highly  sociable  and  humanistic— mode  of  legitimisation.  for  instance,  on  24  august  2014,  the  south  african-­born   australian  singer  and  youtuber  troye  sivan  tweeted  a  vine  video  of  his  uber  driver   relating  his  own  story.     the  controversies  and  policy  debates  that  dominate  mainstream  media  coverage  of   uber—while  sometimes  present  in  social  media  activity  especially  in  the  form  of  news   media  links  and  so  on—play  only  a  relatively  small  part  in  these  everyday  expressions,   representations  and  interactions.  particularly  significant  is  that  links  to  instagram  were   remarkably  prevalent  in  our  dataset,  which  suggests  that  a  great  deal  of  the  work  of   legitimising  (or  contesting)  uber  may  be  occurring  in  the  context  of  the  personal   experiences  of  ordinary  users.  we  argue  that  studying  the  traces  of  these  ordinary   experiences  opens  up  powerful  opportunities  to  empirically  explore  the  ‘material   participation’  (marres,  2012)  of  users,  consumers  and  workers  in  the  ‘peer  economy’.   this  form  of  analysis  provides  a  key  opportunity  to  reveal  a  rich  set  of  experiences  of   ordinary  individuals  that  likely  play  a  large  role  in  the  legitimisation  of  uber  but  are  not   visible  in  public  debates.       acknowledgements     researchers  on  this  panel  have  received  funding  from  an  australian  taxi  industry  body   to  study  the  peer  economy.     references     black,  j.  (2008).  constructing  and  contesting  legitimacy  and  accountability  in   polycentric  regulatory  regimes.  regulation  &  governance,  2(2),  137–164.   bruns,  a.,  &  burgess,  j.  (2015).  twitter  hashtags  from  ad  hoc  to  calculated  publics.  in   n.  rambukkana  (ed.),  hashtag  publics:  the  power  and  politics  of  discursive   networks.  new  york:  peter  lang.     burgess,  j.,  and  matamoros  fernandez,  a.  (2016)  mapping  sociocultural  controversies   across  digital  media  platforms:  one  week  of  #gamergate  on  twitter,  youtube   and  tumblr.  communication,  research  &  practice  [forthcoming]     callon,  m.,  lascoumes,  p.,  &  barth,  y.  (2001).  acting  in  an  uncertain  world:  an  essay   on  technical  democracy.  cambridge,  ma.:  mit  press.       marres,  n.  (2012)  material  participation:  technology,  the  environment  and  everyday   publics.  london:  palgrave  macmillan.     marres,  n.  &  moats,  d.  (2015).  mapping  controversies  with  social  media:  the  case  for   symmetry.  social  media  +  society  1(2):  2056305115604176       suchman,  m.  c.  (1995).  managing  legitimacy:  strategic  and  institutional  approaches.   the  academy  of  management  review,  20(3),  571–610.   http://doi.org/10.2307/258788     witt,  a.,  suzor,  n.,  &  wikström,  p.  (2015).  regulating  ride-­sharing  in  the  peer  economy.   communication  research  and  practice,  1(2),  174-­190.   aoir2018-submission-non-anonymised final selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): lewis, k. (2018, october 10-13). mediated death and digital martyrdom: ethical considerations for visual social media researchers. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. mediated death and digital martyrdom: ethical considerations for visual social media researchers kelly lewis digital media research centre, queensland university of technology introduction the digital mediation of visual content depicting death and martyrdom as a trope of resistance and contestation is increasingly employed within social media platforms by activist cultures and popular social movements. while the trope of death and martyrdom as a form of political expression and resistance is not a new phenomenon, what is different is how it is being performed through digital technologies and the affective, ritualised entanglements this engenders. importantly for researchers, the mediation of death imagery that becomes witnessed as a public event – via digital technologies that enable the capture, dissemination and consumption of visual content – raises ethical considerations and implications for the design, collection, presentation and publishing of academic work. the aim of this paper is to raise questions and provocations regarding the ethical challenges faced by researchers engaged in digital and visual social media research with respect to the mediation of death and posthumous imagery online. the questions presented in this paper have emerged out of a systematic study of death and martyrdom online, with a particular focus on case studies drawn from the middle east and the united states. researching digital martyrdom in visual social media the emergence of digitally mediated martyrdom – a term i employ to refer to the contemporary visual social media phenomenon practiced within transnational activist cultures – can, arguably, be said to have materialised with the public witnessing of the death of neda agha-soltan on june 20, 2009. neda attended a street protest in tehran against the disputed election of president mahmoud ahmadinejad when she was fatally shot by a government sniper. onlookers recorded her final moments on their mobile phones and broadcast it on the internet for the world to witness. through mobile phones, youtube, facebook, myspace, twitter, blogs and global mainstream media, the video footage of her death went viral with some claiming her death as one of the most widely witnessed in history (mahr, 2009). neda’s image was mediated and remediated across digital and social media technologies and she became symbolically appropriated by the people as the martyr of the iranian green movement. my research explores the evolution of this phenomenon through a systematic analysis of visual content motivated in response to the brutal death of khaled said by egyptian police in 2010, and the appropriation of his image in the 2011 egyptian revolution. it establishes digitally mediated martyrdom as a reoccurring theme that both persists within middle eastern-based conflicts, and which has emerged within transnational activist cultures and popular social movements. displays of digitally mediated martyrdom manifest in occurrence with the unjust death of trayvon martin in 2012 and his posthumous symbolic appropriation as the face of the black lives matter movement in the united states. moreover, the phenomenon of digitally mediated martyrdom is evident in popular uprisings that took place to protest the unjust death of razan al-najjar, a gaza medic, who was shot by israeli soldiers on 1 june 2018 while attending to injured victims during the demonstrations dubbed #thegreatreturnmarch. in her death, razan al-najjar has become an icon and appropriated as a martyr of palestinian resistance. i argue a new form of martyrdom has emerged post the 2010-11 egyptian uprisings: one that is digitally mediated by individuals through the affordances of visual social media and digital technologies; has given rise to new performative rituals of witnessing and commemoration; offers new possibilities for popular political participation and expression; and challenges the dominant ways of doing politics online. findings and implications at the core of this research the central questions emerged: what ethical obligations do researchers owe to victims of injustice and to their posthumous representation in our research? what ethical considerations do researchers owe to the posthumous rights of the deceased individual? what is the moral and ethical duty to the surviving family and the research audience? should academic findings that address potentially distressing visual content discuss the impact of such visuals without explicitly showing them? as a visual-digital centric field of research does it make sense not to ‘show’ death and posthumous visuals that have already gained widespread publicity through their mass dissemination via digital and social media technologies? how should research in this field approach the legal and copyright complexities that arise when dealing with the ever-expanding array of visual social media content and platform affordances? further problematic questions arise for researchers who decide not to show visual content that depicts victims of specific acts of injustice, in particular those that serve as testimony to acts of violence and brutality. for example, in the case study analysis of khaled said the research finds his family employed digital and visual social media technologies with the explicit intent to give testimony to the act of injustice committed against khaled. this raises an important moral and ethical question for me: if i as a researcher, investigating visual activist cultures and digital practices, do not honour this context by showing the visuals within the presentation and publication of my work, am i complicit in suppressing the act of injustice that khaled’s family were trying to give visibility to? a rich body of literature addresses digital witnessing and the visual representation of death within environments of resistance and contestation (chouliaraki, 2015; mirzoeff, 2017). yet scholarly thinking about the new ethical implications and moral dilemmas that arise through the memetic circulation of death and posthumous imagery – in its diffusion, collectivism and reappropriation within visual social media platforms – are undertheorised and analysed, and merit specific ethical considerations. this ethical imperative is of particular importance for visual social media research that extends beyond a western context and considers the cross-cultural, transnational dimensions of memetic protest. visual social media play a role in how we experience death and make meaning from death events. this signifies new possibilities for performative rituals of witnessing and commemoration, and a new terrain for researchers to study emergent digital death practices within visual social media platforms. importantly, within an activist context, it presents researchers with the opportunity to consider the ways activists and citizens strategically and symbolically employ narratives of death and martyrdom as a means to give visibility to injustice and mobilise global publics. the imperative here is to ensure the research approach is ethically informed and that regulatory and disciplinary structures evolve to accommodate the increasing complexities and ethical implications of doing research online. references mahr, k. (2009) ‘neda agha-soltan’. time magazine (online article 8 december). retrieved from http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1945379_1944701_1 944705,00.html chouliaraki, l (2015) mediatized death in post-arab spring conflicts. in eskjær, m. f., hjarvard, s., and mortensen, m. (eds.) the dynamics of mediatized conflicts. new york: peter lang. global crises and the media, vol. 3. mirzoeff, n. (2017) the appearance of black lives matter. society. name publications. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): ditchfield, h. (2020, october) presenting perfection: constructing identity in the rehearsal stage of online interaction. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. presenting perfection: constructing identity in the rehearsal stage of online interaction dr hannah ditchfield university of sheffield abstract social media platforms have long been understood to present new opportunities for every day interaction and self presentation. among these opportunities, however, there have been long-standing concerns surrounding the ‘decline’ or even ‘death’ of our social interaction and conversation (see the guardian, 2012). concerns around the quality of our digital conversations centre on how our online interaction is becoming shorter and more quantified, for example, through actions such as liking and sharing. yet, social media users still engage in conversational dynamics that are more time consuming and less quantifiable, for example, writing posts and messages. even in this context, though, scholars such as sherry turkle (2011) have argued that we ‘flatten out what we say to each other’ in new ‘reductive’ ways on digital platforms and that we are increasingly becoming accustomed to reductions within our daily interactions (p. 280). however, these debates have not been discussed from the ‘pre-post’ perspective of online interaction:that is, the activity and interactional work that occurs before (‘pre’) messages are sent (‘posted’) on social media platforms. this paper therefore provides a unique perspective on these issues by examining what the pre-post space online reveals about the quality of our digital interactions. interactional quality, in this paper, is understood through the goffmanian notion of interactional order: the idea that interaction is entwined with rules and rituals that set expectations around the most appropriate or moral way to act and behave. quality in this sense refers to a set of rules that encapsulates what it means to be ‘appropriate’ and ‘moral’ beings within our encounters with others. in this way, interactional order is intrinsically linked with the presentation of self (see goffman, 1959): the more order is maintained, the more individuals perform appropriate and moral presentations of self. due to this link, this paper addresses the concerns of the declining nature of our online interactions through the lens of identity construction. like interaction, there have been long standing discussions regarding the opportunities and possibilities that social media platforms offer us in relation to identity construction (marwick, 2013). these discussions, though, have also neglected the pre-post dimension: the space where users can change, edit, or completely restart an interaction before sharing with the intended audience. scholars have noted how the affordance of editability ‘allows individuals to carefully craft the information being sent for a desired effect’ (quinn and papacharissi, 2018, p. 359) giving users the opportunity to ‘maintain a consistent presentation of self’ and ‘maximising their ability to generate a desired image’ (p. 359). however, exactly how, and to what extent, social media users utilise the pre-post space to edit their messages is understudied and the link this has to ongoing debates of declining interaction remains unexplored. the pre-post space of online interaction has also, until now, not been theorised. this paper therefore presents this preparatory space as the ‘rehearsal stage’ of interaction. this argument extends erving goffman’s (1967) conceptualisation of ‘stages’ and puts forward that pre-post editing occurs not in what he termed the ‘front’ or ‘back’ regions of interaction but instead in a ‘rehearsal’ space that is made possible through the architectural qualities of platforms like facebook. the rehearsal stage is unique in the way it offers social media users a space to practice and draft their interactions before sharing such performances with their audience, offering a different form of interactional context to that of the front and back regions of interaction, both of which are accountable to others. to reveal how facebook users utilise the pre-post space real time recordings of facebook interactions were collected. through using screen capture technology participants recorded their screens whilst on the facebook platform capturing the moment by moment edits made within their message constructions and revealing every change, edit and deletion made to messages before posting. drawing on conversation analysis (sacks, schegloff and jefferson, 1974), this research conducted a micro analysis of the screen capture data with a specific focus being given to how users accomplish certain presentations of self within their facebook interactions. through this analysis, the data revealed how the rehearsal stage of interaction plays a key role in processes of identity construction online. previous work that has explored practices of pre-post editing (such as meredith and stokoe, 2014) revealed simple edits (such as word swaps that occur immediately within the typing out of a message or post). this analysis, however, unveiled an elaborate editing process in which users engage in several minutes of work that including multiple edits, large deletions and complete rewrites with users altering presentations of self drastically in this preparatory space of online interaction (see full paper: ditchfield, 2020). due to the level of complexity and the laborious nature of the pre-post editing captured in this research, this paper argues that the quality of online interaction is not in decline as previous arguments suggest (turkle, 2011). instead, i argue that the act perfecting one’s presentation online is itself a form of reduction. through the rehearsal stage and act of pre-post editing, the inconsistencies and messiness of offline face to face communication and identity are lost in the attempt to perfectly construct self. in this way, concerns of decline and quality should instead be directed towards the reduced and ‘flattened out’ self instead of our reduced interaction. with the ability to carefully craft our presentations of self, it is essential to consider what the implications of presenting ‘perfect’ selves and lives may be and calls into question what, if any, pressures this creates for users to put forward consistent perfection. with increasing attention to the discourse of digital detoxes and growing concerns around social media and mental health, this article argues that critical perspectives on these issues are increasingly pressing. references ditchfield h (2020) behind the screen of facebook: identity construction in the rehearsal stage of online interaction, new media & society, 22(6): 927-943 goffman e (1959) the presentation of self in everyday life. new york: anchor books. goffman e (1967) interaction ritual. chicago, il: aldine publishing company. marwick a (2013) online identity. in: hartley j, burgess j and bruns a (eds) a companion to new media dynamics. chichester: john wiley & sons, pp. 355–364. meredith j and stokoe e (2014) repair: comparing facebook ‘chat’ with spoken interaction. discourse & communication 8(2): 181–207. quinn k and papacharissi z (2018) our networked selves: personal connection and relational maintenance in social media use. in: burgess j, marwick a and poell t (eds) the sage handbook of social media. london: sage, pp. 353–371. sacks h, schegloff e and jefferson g (1974) a simplest systematics for the organisation of turntaking for conversation. language 50(4): 696–735. the guardian (2012) now everyone is connected, is this the death of conversation? available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/apr/26/everyoneconnected-death-ofconversation (accessed 13 april 2019). turkle s (2011) alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other. new york: basic books. aoir2019-mardi gras through instagram stories selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 mardi gras through instagram stories: how ephemeral media shape everyday engagements with identity politics elija cassidy queensland university of technology ariadna matamoros fernandez queensland university of technology t.j. thomson queensland university of technology a third of the world’s population is active on social media and a growing number is sharing ephemeral content on such platforms. though originally pioneered by snapchat, instagram has come to dominate the ephemeral media market and, as of january 2019, boasts half a billion daily instagram stories users (statista, 2019). launched roughly 2.5 years ago, in august 2016, instagram stories offers people a novel way of communicating through sharing photos and videos that, by default, are only available for 24 hours and then disappear. this phenomenon presents unique challenges for researchers but also demands additional attention in order to understand contemporary forms of sociability and meaning-making. this study examines people’s everyday engagements with ephemeral media through an exploration of more than 400 instagram stories created during the 2019 sydney gay and lesbian mardi gras festival. while current public debates around ephemeral content revolve around how bad users have turned to the likes of instagram and snapchat in order to circumvent platform moderation (gerrard, 2018) or boost engagement with brands (trounce, 2018), we are interested in broader dynamics involved in the shift to temporary media for everyday social media communication. what factors drive user interaction with ephemeral enelyaoronar enelyaoronar suggested citation (apa): cassidy, e., matamoros fernandez, a., thomson, t.j. (2019, october 2-5). mardi gras through instagram stories: how ephemeral media shape everyday engagements with identity politics. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org.� content? how does the immediacy or 'liveness' (amaral, 2018) of temporary media reconfigure the workings of digital publics, identity politics, and individual user experiences? this paper presents initial findings from phase one of an exploratory project that seeks to address these questions through the lens of ephemeral media on instagram, and, in particular, through the practices associated with use of instagram stories around a key public event. we use the sydney gay and lesbian mardi gras for its concrete/timebound nature and because it brings together history, politics, corporate, state, and community actors. this event is also replicated in one fashion or the other around the world; thereby opening up opportunities for future comparative studies. the event allows us to examine the nature of community engagement with ephemeral media, and the potential challenges and opportunities for identity politics brought about through instagram stories. the latest cutting-edge research in the digital media field places instagram at the centre of emerging social media research (serafinelli, 2018; leaver, highfield, & abidin, 2019). however, research specifically on stories, as a common feature of this platform, is scarce. hence, this paper contributes to further extending developments in research on ephemeral media by examining user practices with instagram stories and their implications for everyday communication from a critical cultural studies perspective. it is guided by the following research questions: rq1: how are ephemeral media changing user practices on instagram? rq2: what challenges and opportunities exist around platform affordances, like stories, for instagram users (e.g. modes of expression, loss of cultural archive, spread of false information, community engagement issues); and rq3: how does the above play out in the context of an event focussed around identity politics, such as the sydney gay and lesbian mardi gras? method our overarching project takes an ethnographic approach to the study of digital media, integrating content analysis of instagram stories with semi-structured interviews with relevant public actors involved in mardi gras who used instagram stories as part of their engagement with the event. this paper emerges from the first phase of the data gathering, involving the collection and analysis of more than 400 instagram stories published on the platform during mardi gras. to identify a manageable sample of stories to examine, the research team first started with all 942 accounts the official @sydneymardigras instagram account followed in january 2019. all private accounts were removed from the sample along with accounts not actively posting stories content. this was determined by examining accounts twice within the span of one week, with 24 hours in between examinations, to see if users had posted a story in the previous 24 hours. only accounts which had posted stories during both checks were classified as 'active' posters of ephemeral instagram content. this resulted in 135 accounts. based on the remaining list of 135 accounts the team deductively created the following five category types: 1) official organising committee and members of @sydneymardigras 2) official partners/sponsors 3) public figures 4) organisations 5) members of the general public a random sample from each account type was created to generate a sample of 30 accounts. every day of the official sydney gay and lesbian mardi gras festival (feb. 15-march 3, 2019) all stories posted to these accounts were saved by the research team using built-in smartphone screen recording technology. the resulting body of material was analysed in order to better understand how users are employing the stories feature in their everyday communication and to engage in identity politics. we identified thematic patterns in content posted, hashtags used, and actors tagged. in phase two of the project the team will interview users of the above accounts to more fully understand their experiences using and engaging with instagram stories. users’ reflexive participation in these interview sessions will construct a feedback loop, to work as a check against the veracity of the observations made in phase one of the project. contribution in this project we aim to examine the place of ephemeral media in everyday communication. some exploratory work using interviews has been done in this vein but few studies have attempted an analysis of users’ practices through instagram stories themselves. preliminary findings show that people engaged with stories for different purposes during the mardi gras celebration. users created ephemeral content showing nudity; promoting products from advertisers; political talk; and as means to broadcast what was happening on tv with overlaid stickers and comments. users also employed stories to connect with their audiences through personal “confessions”, or direct-tocamera narrations. in these cases, instagram stories’ unique “ask me a question” feature further afforded direct communication with audiences, since users would generate more stories with their answers to these questions. common internet practices like self-deprecating humour (to give a sense of authenticity) were also salient in user practices with ephemeral media. through this empirical work, we aim to start a public conversation around the implications of “losing” ephemeral media and how this might impact archival practices for the study of historical events that get heavily mediated through digital media. the larger project from which this paper emerges also contributes more broadly to digital media studies by addressing how to effectively study ephemeral digital objects, like instagram stories. references amaral, l. (2018). liveness beyond live video: immediacy and presence on instagram stories. paper presented at instagram conference 2018: studying instagram beyond selfies. middlesex university, london, 1 june, 2018. gerrard, y. (2018). beyond the hashtag: circumventing content moderation on social media. new media & society, 20(12), 4492-4511. leaver, t., highfield, t., & abidin, c. (2019). instagram: visual social media cultures. cambridge: polity press. serafinelli, e. (2018). digital life on instagram: new social communication of photography. bingley, west yorkshire: emerald publishing limited. statista. (2019). number of daily active instagram stories users from october 2016 to january 2019 (in millions). retrieved march 1, 2019, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/730315/instagram-stories-dau/ trounce, d. (2018). ephemeral content: everything marketers need to know. retrieved march 1, 2019, from search engine journal, https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ephemeral-content/238589/#close microsoft word carter-et-al.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): carter, m., gibbs, m., nansen, b., & arnold, m. (2014, october 22-24). #funeral. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. #funeral marcus carter the university of melbourne martin gibbs the university of melbourne bjorn nansen the university of melbourne michael arnold the university of melbourne abstract in this paper we highlight preliminary findings from a study at the intersection of instagram use and funerary practices. this study analyses photographs tagged with “#funeral” and contributes to research into death and digital media by extending the focus from social networking sites such as facebook to consider the photosharing application instagram, and how different media platforms are connected with the physical event of funerals. by categorizing photos tagged with “#funeral” on instagram we show how media architecture and use shapes a complex ecology of grieving practices, with distinct differences from practices that have coalesced around other social media platforms. we consider the collision of digital culture and traditional memorializing practices, and suggest the need for further work that attends to the variety of social media being mobilized in death, grieving and commemoration, as well as to the ways platforms become entwined with physical places and rituals. keywords #funeral, instagram, social media, commemoration, grieving, selfies social media and the dead there is a growing body of research addressing issues around the dead in online environments. following the emergence in the 1990’s of online memorials, or so-called ‘virtual cemeteries’, and the more recent popularity of memorialized profiles on social media platforms, researchers from a range of disciplines have become increasingly interested in the digital mediation of death and commemoration. in turn, platforms like facebook have responded with memorialization policies (bellamy et al 2013, gibbs et al 2013). research has focused particularly on social network sites (sns) and their affordances for maintaining a connection to the deceased, including how social grief and support takes shape in online networks (e.g. moss 2004; williams and merten 2009); and how the dead continue to persist and participate within the platforms and protocols of sns (e.g. brubaker and hayes 2011; karppi 2013; marwick and ellison 2012). to date, research studying death and digital technologies has predominantly focused on the meaning and practice within particular sns, especially facebook, while other popular platforms have been neglected. similarly, there is much less attention paid to how media platforms intersect with physical environments and traditional practices, such as funerals, with few exceptions (e.g. walter et al 2011). this suggests the need to consider the shifting boundaries, ecologies and contexts of media platforms in shaping emergent cultural practices around death, grieving and commemoration. consequently, in this paper we continue our studies of emerging practices associated with death and new digital media (e.g. gibbs et al 2012; kohn et al 2012) through an exploration of the use of instagram – a social, mobile photo-sharing platform – to mediate funerary practices. our preliminary results analysing photographs tagged with “#funeral” highlight the evolving use of digital platforms for mediating death, grief, remembrance and mourning and we consider the collision of digital culture with traditional memorializing practices. methods we downloaded all #funeral images posted to instagram over two 24 hour periods on the 9th and 15th of february, which resulted in a data set of 525 images. we then sorted these images into categories based on themes around practices that emerged through inductive analysis. the hashtag is a word proceeded by a hash symbol (#), a form of metadata that allows messages to be grouped and searched. originally from twitter, hashtags are commonly conceptualised as creating a "hashtag conversation" (bruns et al 2011), however instagram's “like economy” (gerlitz et al 2013) has resulted in #hashtags #being #used #like #this, #not #necessarily #to #engage #in #conversations #but #as #a #linguistic #style as much as it is about engaging in a '#funeral conversation'. the implications of this like economy for our analysis meant we needed to filter out a number of images utilizing #funeral. these discarded images included the commemoration of dead animals (6), or the “death” of inanimate objects (such as a spilt ice cream) (10), pop culture (47), or death themed artwork (5). another forty-seven images were meme-like re-shares, such as “i wear black when i exercise, it's like a funeral for my fat”. figure 1. images from #funeral of (clockwise): a funeral flower arrangement, a moment from a funeral service, a family photo of those who had come together and a selfie, depicting the user’s funeral outfit. findings for #funeral our review identified a complex ecology of commemorative and grieving practices around the #funeral on instagram. of those that related explicitly to the passing of a loved one, common photographic themes were of family or togetherness featuring multiple people (46), funeral flowers (31), older photos of the deceased (12) and the funeral service (43). there were also numerous photos of landscapes, buildings or even weather forecasts (25) that the associated text indicated were meant as a sharing of their personal situation, such as being on the way to a funeral service or the weather at a funeral’s location. there were a number of photos of text documents (6) of information about a funeral time and location, or messages from the deceased's family. only 3 images were overtly religious, while there were 2 photos of an open casket. eclipsing the frequency of any of these individual categories were ‘selfies’ (photographic selfportraits) taken at and/or in the context of attending a funeral (135). similarly, there were also 30 photos of individuals, often uploaded by the person in the photo, but not taken by them. based on the text and associated hashtags, we felt these were very similar to those categorised as selfies. we also categorised selfies with multiple people (27), a category with substantial thematic overlap with family photos; the attention in these examples was typically on togetherness, rather than the individual. discussion: practices around death, grieving and commemoration instagram is structurally different from other digital platforms that have previously been the dominant focus for thanatological research on digital domains. sns, such as facebook, allow for profiles to be memorialized, and thus provide a locus for networked publics to converge around a marker of the deceased and share in remembering the dead. in contrast, instagram has no convergent spaces where people can share memorializations. instead, users are restricted to posting things to their own public space (which others cannot post to), connected to other users through #hashtags and @user connections. the implications of this platform architecture for emerging cultural practices of sharing in grief and commemorating the dead can be found in the ways different users engage with #funeral, particularly through the diverse and sometimes competing content connected to the hashtag, and in turn, how #funeral and hashtags more generally are understood in mediating interaction. while photos of the funeral service were common, it was very rare that these photos captured individual mourning. rather they focused on the material culture and metonymy of mourning such as flowers, graves, or funeral service cards. similarly, the many images of landscapes, places or buildings emphasized the atmosphere of remembrance, often on the way to the funeral to share the situation rather than personal grief with others. family photos or images of gathered groups taken at funerals often featured smiling faces, and appeared to shift from an affect of loss or mourning to one of celebration of the life of the deceased, the conventions of photography, and the social network the event of their passing drew together. the most frequent category of #funeral photographs was the selfie. we are aware of recent controversy and media attention surrounding “selfies at funerals” (fiefer, 2013) and their exemplification of supposedly narcissistic and insincere youthful practices (see also gibbs et al., 2014). indeed, many instances of the #funeral photographs we categorized as selfies were associated with overtly narcissistic hash-tags such as “#likeforlike”; “#sexy”, “#fashion” or “#follow me” and seemed to be more about presentation of the self and self-promotion rather than acknowledging the solemnity and gravitas of funeral rites. in contrast, family photos or photos for togetherness were typically accompanied by more respectful hashtags (such as “#rip”) which do not have an expectation of strangers searching and liking personal photos (as “#sexy” might). rather, comments and compositions of these photos typically highlighted shared mourning and sadness, or the reunion of extended family. however, not all selfies can be interpreted as narcissistic self-aggrandizement. many selfies appear to be an attempt to share grief, placing emphasis on the context in which the image is taken, and the message in the accompanying text, rather than the person in the photo. for these users, we suggest that the selfie is drawing on, and constrained by, the architecture and rhetorical style of instagram use: a smart-phone based platform that only allows users to engage by sharing photographs. quantifying the division between these types of selfies proved difficult, but the two genres were clearly evident. we felt this demonstrated both a problematic collision of selfie culture with existing memorialization practices, and an appropriation of new media practices to help teenagers and young adults express grief and mourning. conclusion a discussion of categories of photos tagged with “#funeral” on instagram has highlighted how the use of this social media photo sharing application forms part of a complex ecology of grieving imagery and practice. instagram is a digital, social media platform that differs from other sns, such as facebook, that have previously been the dominant focus for thanatological research on digital media. our initial study of the use of photo sharing social media suggests that the emerging practices associated with these platforms differ from the practices that have coalesced around other sns platforms. platforms have implications for practices. this suggests that future work in this space needs to look beyond facebook and attend to the variety of social media being mobilized in practices associated with death, grieving and commemoration as well as attending to how these various platforms interact within a complex media ecology that also intersects, mingles, supports and appropriates traditional practices. acknowledgments this research was supported by funding from australian research council discovery project (dp140101871), and the institute for a broadband-enabled society at the university of melbourne. references brubaker, j.r. and hayes, g. r. (2011) ‘we will never forget you [online]’: an empirical investigation of postmortem myspace comments. in proceedings of computer supported cooperative work cscw 2011: 123-132. bellamy, c., arnold, m., gibbs, m., nansen, b., and kohn, t. (2013) death and the internet: consumer issues for planning and managing digital legacies. australian communications consumer action network, sydney. retrieved from: https://accan.org.au/files/death_and_the_internet.pdf bruns, a. and burgess, j. (2011) the use of twitter hashtags in the formation of adhoc publics. in 6th european consortium for political research general conference, iceland. fiefer, j. (2013) obama's funeral selfie is a fitting end to my tumblr – selfies at funerals. the guardian, wednesday 11 december 2013. retrieved from: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/11/obama-funeral-selfietumblrmandelateens/print gerlitz, c. and helmond, a. (2013) the like economy: social buttons and the data intensive web. new media & society. gibbs, m., mori, m., arnold, m. and kohn, t. (2012) tombstones, uncanny monuments and epic quests: memorials in world of warcraft. game studies 12(1). retrieved from: http://gamestudies.org/1201/articles/gibbs_martin gibbs m., bellamy cj, arnold mv, nansen b & kohn t. (2013) digital registers and estate planning. retirement and estate planning bulletin. 16 (3): 63-68. gibbs, m., carter, m., nansen, b., kohn, t. (2014) selfies at funerals: remediating rituals of mourning. in selected papers of the 15th association of internet researchers conference, bangkok, thailand. karppi, t. (2013) death proof: on the biopolitics and noopolitics of memorializing dead facebook users. culture machine, 14. kohn, t., gibbs, m., arnold, m., and nansen. b. (2012) facebook and the other: administering to and caring for the dead online, in hage, g. (ed), responsibility, university of melbourne press, parkville, australia, pp 128-141. marwick, a, and ellison, n.b. (2012) ‘there isn't wifi in heaven!’ negotiating visibility on facebook memorial pages, journal of broadcasting and electronic media, 56(3): 378-400. moss, m. (2004) grief on the web, omega: journal of death & dying, 49(1): 77-81. 4 selected papers of internet research 15.0, 2014 (21-24 october): daegu, korea walter, t., hourizi, r., moncur, w., and pitsillides, s. (2011) does the internet change how we die and mourn? overview and analysis, omega, 64(4): 275-302. williams, a.l. and merten, m.j. (2009) adolescents online social networking following the death of a peer, journal of adolescent research, 24(1): 67-90. podcasting-panel-all-rev3-2020.pdf 6hohfwhg 3dshuv ri �$r,5����� 7kh ��vw $qqxdo &rqihuhqfh ri wkh $vvrfldwlrq ri ,qwhuqhw 5hvhdufkhuv 'xeolq ,uhodqg � ����� 2fwrehu ���� 6xjjhvwhg &lwdwlrq �$3$�� $xighukhlgh� 3�� %huu\� 5�� %rqlql� 7��/olqduhv� '�� 6xoolydq� -� ������ 2fwrehu ������� 3rgfdvwlqj lq wudqvlwlrq� )rupdol]dwlrq dqg lwv glvfrqwhqwv� 3dqho suhvhqwhg dw $r,5 ����� 7kh ��wk $qqxdo &rqihuhqfh ri wkh $vvrfldwlrq ri ,qwhuqhw 5hvhdufkhuv� 'xeolq� ,uhodqg� $r,5� 5hwulhyhg iurp kwws���vslu�drlu�ruj� 3$1(/ 32'&$67,1* ,1 75$16,7,21� )250$/,=$7,21 $1' ,76 ',6&217(176 7l]ldqr %rqlql 8qlyhuvlw\ ri 6lhqd� ,wdo\ 'dulr /olqduhv 8qlyhuvlw\ ri %uljkwrq� 8. 5lfkdug %huu\ 8qlyhuvlw\ ri 6xqghuodqg� 8. 3dwulfld $xighukhlgh $phulfdq 8qlyhuvlw\� 86$ -rkq /� 6xoolydq 0xkohqehuj &roohjh� 86$ 3rgfdvwlqj kdv wkulyhg vlqfh lwv srsxodul]dwlrq lq ���� dv d edvwlrq iru dpdwhxu phgld surgxfwlrq� 2yhu wkh sdvw whq \hduv� krzhyhu� hqwuhsuhqhxuv dqg ohjdf\ phgld frpsdqlhv kdyh udslgo\ h[sdqghg wkhlu lqwhuhvwv lq srgfdvwlqj� eulqjlqj zlwk wkhp surihvvlrqdo vwdqgdugv dqg wkh orjlfv ri fdslwdo� %uhdnrxw klwv vxfk dv ����¶v 6huldo �zlwk qhduo\ �� ploolrq grzqordgv� dqg 7klv $phulfdq /lih kdyh ghprqvwudwhg wr erwk surjudpphuv dqg dgyhuwlvhuv wkh srwhqwldo iru srgfdvwlqj wr hphujh dv d frpphufldoo\ yldeoh phgld lqgxvwu\ �2¶&rqqhoo� ������ $ffruglqj wr d uhfhqw qdwlrqzlgh vxuyh\ e\ (glvrq 5hvhdufk ������� dq hvwlpdwhg �� ploolrq olvwhqhuv uhsruwhg kdylqj olvwhqhg wr d srgfdvw lq wkh suhylrxv prqwk� 'hvslwh wkh phglxp¶v krphvsxq� ',< urrwv� wklv gudpdwlf h[sdqvlrq ri wkh srgfdvw dxglhqfh dqg lqwhuhvw iurp ohjdf\ phgld kdv ehjxq wr wudqvirup lw ³iurp d gr�lw�\rxuvhoi� dpdwhxu qlfkh phglxp lqwr d frpphufldo pdvv virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 virtual event phglxp´ �%rqlql� ����� s� ���� 7klv $r,5 ���� sdqho dlpv wr h[soruh wkh wudqvlwlrqv fxuuhqwo\ xqghuzd\ lq srgfdvwlqj� 6shflilfdoo\� hdfk ri wkh sdshuv rq wklv sdqho dgguhvv lq vrph zd\ wkh surfhvv ri irupdol]dwlrq� ru wkh surfhvv e\ zklfk ³phgld v\vwhpv ehfrph surjuhvvlyho\ pruh udwlrqdol]hg� frqvrolgdwhg dqg ilqdqfldoo\ wudqvsduhqw´ �/redwr 7krpdv� ����� s� ���� )rupdol]dwlrq lv qrw d prqrolwklf surfhvv� exw udwkhu rqh wkdw lv uhvsrqvlyh wr h[lvwlqj lqvwlwxwlrqdo� uhjxodwru\� dqg fxowxudo vwuxfwxuhv� ,w lv dovr klvwrulfdoo\ frqwlqjhqw� 7kh iluvw sdshu e\ 7l]ldqr %rqlql� hqwlwohg ³3rgfdvwlqj dv d fxowxudo irup ehwzhhq rog dqg qhz phgld´ xwlol]hv d klvwrulfdo ohqv wr olqn wkh fxuuhqw wudmhfwru\ ri wkh phglxp¶v ghyhorsphqw wr wkh ghyhorsphqw dqg grphvwlfdwlrq ri udglr lq wkh ����v dv zhoo dv wkh ulvh ri rqolqh vwuhdplqj vhuylfhv lq wkh ��vw &hqwxu\� ,q sduwlfxodu� wklv sdshu vlwxdwhv srgfdvwlqj lq wkh frqwh[w ri wkhvh hduolhu whfkqrorjlhv� dujxlqj wkdw wkh phglxp lv ehvw xqghuvwrrg dv d frpsoh[ lqwhusod\ ehwzhhq qhwzrunv ri pdunhw dfwruv� 7kh vhfrqg sdshu e\ 'dulr /olqduhv uhiudphv wkh irupdol]dwlrq ghedwh e\ sxoolqj wkh glvfxvvlrq dzd\ iurp wkh frqilqlqj elqdulhv ri xwrsldq ru g\vwrsldq qduudwlyhv� ,qvwhdg� wklv sdshu vlwxdwhv srgfdvwlqj zlwklq d pxfk eurdghu frqwh[w e\ ohyhudjlqj 'rq ,gkh¶v skhqrphqrorjlfdo sklorvrsk\ ri whfkqrorj\ wr ³vshfxodwh rq d srwhqwldo ixwxuh ri uhlilhg rudo�dxudo phglwdwlrq�´ 7klv sdshu frqvlghuv wkh qdwxuh ri wkh phglxp lwvhoi dv d xqltxh ³whfkqr�vrqlf h[shulhqfh´� +huh� srgfdvwlqj lv qrw frqvlghuhg dv d phglxp ehlqj vkdshg e\ wkh irupdol]dwlrq hiiruwv ri lqvwlwxwlrqv ru ohjdf\ irupv ri phgld� ,qvwhdg� srgfdvwlqj hphujhv dv d wudqvirupdwlrqdo whfkqrorj\ wkdw surplvhv d qhz hud ri vrxqg lqwhjudwlrq� 7kh frpsoh[ lqwhusod\ ri dfwruv lq srgfdvwlqj lv h[soruhg lq pruh ghwdlo e\ sdshuv � dqg �� ,q wkh wklug sdshu� hqwlwohg ³)rupdolvlqj wkh lqirupdo� %%& frpplvvlrqv dqg wkh vkdsh ri srgfdvwv�´ 5lfkdug %huu\ h[soruhv wkh srzhuixo uroh ri wkh %%& lq surylglqj dq lqvwlwxwlrqdo dqg fuhdwlyh iudphzrun iru srgfdvwlqj surgxfwlrq yld lwv %%& 6rxqgv rqolqh udglr sodwirup� 7kurxjk wkh hiiruwv ri wklv yhqhudeoh sxeolf vhuylfh eurdgfdvwhu wr uhdfk qhz dxglhqfhv e\ ghyhorslqj srgfdvw frqwhqw vshflilf wr wklv sodwirup� wklv sdshu dujxhv wkdw wkh phglxp¶v dpdwhxu dqg lqirupdo hwkrv vwdqgv wr eh uh�vkdshg� 7kh irxuwk sdshu e\ 3dwulfld $xighukhlgh hw� do�� hqwlwohg ³3urwhfwlqj sxeolf srgfdvwlqj� $uh 8�6� qhzv� sxeolf diidluv� dqg ohduqlqj srgfdvwv dw ulvn"´� wdnhv d pdfur�ohyho ylhz ri wkh irupdol]dwlrq surfhvv� irfxvlqj rq srgfdvwv zlwklq wkh 8�6� frqwh[w� 1rwklqj wkdw wkh prvw srsxodu srgfdvwv lq wkh 8�6� duh hlwkhu ohduqlqj ru lqirupdwlrq�rulhqwhg� $xighukhlgh dqg khu fr�dxwkruv dujxh wkdw wkh srgfdvw hfrv\vwhp ixoiloov dq lpsruwdqw sxeolf vhuylfh ixqfwlrq� 7kh lqwurgxfwlrq ri sodwirup vhuylfhv olnh 6srwli\ dv srzhu sod\huv lq srgfdvw glvwulexwlrq� frxsohg zlwk wkh ulvh ri dgyhuwlvlqj dv d phdqv ri prqhwl]dwlrq� suhvhqwv qhz ulvnv iru shushwxdwlrq ri wkh phglxp dv dq dxudo sxeolf vhuylfh uhvrxufh� )lqdoo\� wkh iliwk sdshu e\ -rkq 6xoolydq h[sdqgv wkh dujxphqwv vxuurxqglqj srgfdvw irupdol]dwlrq e\ h[sorulqj wkh lqwurgxfwlrq ri pdunhw lqirupdwlrq uhjlphv zlwklq wkh phglxp� 6shflilfdoo\� wklv sdshu h[soruhv wkh ghyhorsphqw ri dxglhqfh phwulfv iru srgfdvwlqj� ehjlqqlqj lq wkh plg�����¶v� 7klv sdshu pdnhv fohdu wkdw srzhuixo lqgxvwu\ sod\huv vxfk dv $ssoh dqg wkh ,qwhudfwlyh $gyhuwlvlqj %xuhdx �,$%� duh txlfno\ vwdqgdugl]lqj wkh phdvxuhphqw ri srgfdvw dxglhqfhv� 7khvh vwdqgdugv fuhdwh d pruh wudqvsduhqw pdunhw iru dgyhuwlvhuv� exw lq vr grlqj wkh\ dovr vkliw wkh irfxv dzd\ iurp wkh xqltxh qdwxuh ri srgfdvw frqwhqw dqg pryh lw wrzdug qrwlrqv ri dxglhqfh vl]h� 7klv kdv wkh srwhqwldo wr pryh wkh phglxp ixuwkhu dzd\ iurp lwv dpdwhxu urrwv� 5hihuhqfhv %rqlql� 7� ������� 7kh ³6hfrqg $jh´ ri srgfdvwlqj� 5hiudplqj srgfdvwlqj dv d qhz gljlwdo pdvv phglxp� 4xdghuqv 'ho &$&� ������� ��±��� (glvrq 5hvhdufk� ������ 0dufk ��� 7kh ,qilqlwh 'ldo ����� (glvrq 5hvhdufk� kwwsv���zzz�hglvrquhvhdufk�frp�lqilqlwh�gldo������ 2¶&rqqhoo� 0� ������ $sulo ���� 7kh ³6huldo´ (iihfw� 3urjudpphuv 5dpslqj 8s rq 3rgfdvwv� 7kh +roo\zrrg 5hsruwhu� kwws���zzz�kroo\zrrguhsruwhu�frp�qhzv�vhuldo� hiihfw�surjudpphuv�udpslqj�xs������� /redwr� 5�� 7krpdv� -� ������� 7kh ,qirupdo 0hgld (frqrp\� /rqgrq� 3rolw\� 6hohfwhg 3dshuv ri �$r,5����� 7kh ��vw $qqxdo &rqihuhqfh ri wkh $vvrfldwlrq ri ,qwhuqhw 5hvhdufkhuv 'xeolq ,uhodqg � ����� 2fwrehu ���� 32'&$67,1* $6 $ &8/785$/ )250 %(7:((1 2/' $1' 1(: 0(',$ 7l]ldqr %rqlql 8qlyhuvlw\ ri 6lhqd� ,wdo\ 5dglr dqg hphujlqj srgfdvwlqj vwxglhv lq uhfhqw \hduv kdyh riwhq dujxhg derxw wkh vwdwxv ri srgfdvwlqj� zlwkrxw hyhu uhdfklqj dq djuhhphqw� 5dglr vfkroduv ilqg lq srgfdvwlqj d irup ri uhphgldwlrq ri udglr� zkloh wkrvh zkr dssurdfk srgfdvwlqj iurp rwkhu glvflsolqhv ru iurp gljlwdo phgld vwxglhv whqg wr hqkdqfh wkh glvuxswlyh dvshfwv ri srgfdvwlqj dv d qhz phgld� ,q wklv sdshu , zrxog olnh wr sursrvh d zd\ rxw ri wklv ghedwh� d vruw ri wklug zd\� lq zklfk , zloo gudz iurp wkh fxowxudo klvwru\ ri eurdgfdvwlqj� wkh srolwlfdo hfrqrp\ ri frppxqlfdwlrq dqg fxowxudo vwxglhv wr dqdo\]h wkh h[lvwlqj frqwlqxlwlhv dqg gliihuhqfhv ehwzhhq udglr dqg srgfdvwlqj� &rpsdulqj wkh hduo\ \hduv ri eurdgfdvwlqj zlwk wkh hduo\ vwdjh ri srgfdvwlqj� , zloo wu\ wr vkrz wkdw srgfdvwlqj kdv uh�phgldwhg vrph dvshfwv ri wkh klvwru\� hfrqrp\ dqg dhvwkhwlfv ri udglr� exw lw dovr uhsuhvhqwv vrphwklqj frpsohwho\ gliihuhqw iurp lw� &rqwhpsrudu\ skhqrphqd dv wkh sodwiruplvdwlrq ri srgfdvwlqj �6xoolydq ����� dqg wkh frpprglilfdwlrq ri lwv dxglhqfhv wkurxjk lqwhqvh gdwdilfdwlrq zloo eh dqdo\vhg wkurxjk wkh ohqvhv ri klvwrulfdo lqtxlu\� pdnlqj frpsdulvrqv zlwk wkh frpprglilfdwlrq ri eurdgfdvwlqj �6whuqh hw do� ������ , zloo dujxh wkdw sodwiruplvdwlrq uhsuhvhqwv iru srgfdvwlqj zkdw frpphufldol]dwlrq uhsuhvhqwhg iru eurdgfdvwlqj diwhu wkh dssurydo ri wkh 5dglr $fw ri ����� dqrwkhu f\foh ri frpprglilfdwlrq ri wkh phdqv ri frppxqlfdwlrq dqg ri wkh dxglhqfhv� $qrwkhu vlplodulw\ zlwk wkh hduo\ vwdjh ri eurdgfdvwlqj lv wkh wudqvqdwlrqdolw\ ri srgfdvwlqj� 8qolnh wkh frqwhpsrudu\ udglr eurdgfdvwhuv hfrv\vwhp� vwloo vwurqjo\ olqnhg wr qdwlrqdo erughuv� wkh hphujlqj srgfdvwlqj hfrv\vwhp lv wudqvqdwlrqdo� olnh wkh hduo\ vkruw�zdyh udglr eurdgfdvwhuv� iuhhg e\ wkh pdwhuldo exughq ri dqwhqqdv� srgfdvwlqj furvvhv qdwlrqdo erughuv dqg iorzv iuhho\ rqolqh� exw wudqvqdwlrqdo iorzv ri srgfdvwlqj remhfwv �dxglr dqg udglr vhulhv� prvwo\ ruljlqdwh iurp ihz frxqwulhv� 3rgfdvwlqj wudqvqdwlrqdolw\ eulqjv zlwk lwvhoi txhvwlrqv ri fxowxudo lpshuldolvp dqg frqwhqw glyhuvlw\� vlqfh $phulfdq eruq srgfdvwv duh wkh prvw olvwhqhg wr lq doprvw doo (xurshdq frxqwulhv �(%8 ������ ,q dgglwlrq wr vlplodulwlhv zlwk udglr klvwru\� srgfdvwlqj vkduhv frpprq urrwv zlwk rwkhu phgld� $v /redwr qrwhg zkloh vwxg\lqj dxglrylvxdo vwuhdplqj whfkqrorjlhv� ³1hwiol[ lv d k\eulg whfkqrorj\ wkdw uhphgldwhv d udqjh ri hduolhu phgld whfkqrorjlhv lq gliihuhqw dvshfwv ri lwv rshudwlrq� dqg wklv pl[ ri dvvrfldwlrq lv frqvwdqwo\ fkdqjlqj´ ������ ���� 6lploduo\� srgfdvwlqj lv d k\eulg whfkqrorj\ wkdw uhphgldwhv qrw rqo\ udglr exw d zkroh udqjh ri hduolhu phgld whfkqrorjlhv lq gliihuhqw dvshfwv� ,q wklv sdshu , zloo wu\ wr dffrxqw iru wkh pl[hg qdwxuh ri srgfdvwlqj¶v fxowxudo irup �:looldpv ������ srgfdvwlqj vkrxog qrw eh lqwhqghg vroho\ dv d phgld remhfw �wkh srgfdvw hslvrgh� qru dv d glvwulexwlrq whfkqrorj\ �wkh uvv irupdw� wkh srgfdvw qhwzrunv ru wkh srgfdvw vwuhdplqj sodwirupv�� exw dv d qhz� k\eulg� fxowxudo irup� wkdw gudzv qrw rqo\ iurp udglr� exw dovr iurp wkhdwuh� shuiruplqj duwv� ghvljq dqg lqwhuqhw fxowxuh� 7klv fxowxudo irup kdv dv d glvwlqfwlyh ihdwxuh rq�ghpdqg olvwhqlqj� wkh rssrvlwh ri wkh dxglrylvxdo iorz� zklfk dffruglqj wr :looldpv ������ uhsuhvhqwhg wkh glvwlqfwlyh ihdwxuh ri eurdgfdvwlqj� 2i frxuvh� udglr lv wkh phglxp iurp zklfk srgfdvwlqj gudzv wkh prvw� , zloo dujxh wkdw wkh surfhvv ri uhphgldwlrq ri udglr rffxuv dw wkuhh gliihuhqw ohyhov� �� surgxfwlrq� �� udglr wh[wv �jhquhv dqg irupdwv� glvwulexwlrq dqg �� dxglhqfh uhfhswlrq� 3rgfdvwlqj kdv uh�phgldwhg suhylrxv irupv ri udglr surgxfwlrq �lqfoxglqj vrph hfrqrplf prghov�� suhylrxv udglr jhquhv dqg suhylrxv irupv ri udglr olvwhqlqj� exw kdv dovr gudzq rq rwkhu phgld dqg rwkhu duwv� 7kh dlp ri wkh sdshu lv qrw wr uhvsrqg wr wkh ghedwh rq wkh vwdwxv ri srgfdvwlqj� dv erulqj dv wkh ghedwh rq wkh vh[ ri dqjhov� 5dwkhu� wklv uhiohfwlrq rq wkh qdwxuh ri srgfdvwlqj lv lqwhqghg wr eh xvhg dv dq h[dpsoh wr frqwulexwh wr d juhdwhu xqghuvwdqglqj ri wkh uhodwlrqvkls ehwzhhq rog dqg qhz phgld dqg wr ghprqvwudwh krz wkh dgrswlrq dqg grphvwlfdwlrq ri hdfk qhz phglxp lv irufleo\ vkdshg e\ wkh klvwru\ ri wkh phgld wkdw duulyhg ehiruh klp� wkh srolwlfdo hfrqrp\ ri wkh phgld dqg wkh fxowxudo hqylurqphqw lq zklfk wklv phglxp jurzv xs� , zloo vkrz krz srgfdvwlqj fdqqrw eh xqghuvwrrg dv d vwdeoh hfrv\vwhp exw lw vkrxog eh ehwwhu xqghuvwrrg dv dq hyroylqj qhwzrun ri gliihuhqw foxvwhuv ri dfwruv �surgxfhuv� olvwhqhuv� sodwirupv� glvwulexwlrq whfkqrorjlhv dqg lqwhuqhw lqiudvwuxfwxuhv� frpshwlqj hdfk rwkhu� 7kh qhwzrun ri dfwruv wkdw vkdshg wkh hduo\ vwdjhv ri srgfdvwlqj lq ���� kdv frpsohwho\ fkdqjhg dqg wrgd\ srgfdvwlqj phdqv iru pdq\ shrsoh vrphwklqj yhu\ gliihuhqw iurp ����� ,qghshqghqw surgxfhuv dqg dpdwhxu srgfdvwhuv vwloo h[lvw exw duh orvlqj ylvlelolw\ lq idyrxu ri qhz frpphufldo dfwruv� &rpshwlqj ylvlrqv ri srgfdvwlqj kdyh hphujhg� dq hphujhqw sodwirup�edvhg hfrv\vwhp� gulyhq e\ vxevfulswlrqv ru dgyhuwlvlqj lv lqfuhdvlqjo\ uhsodflqj lqghshqghqw srgfdvwlqj hfrv\vwhp� qrw sodwiruplvhg dqg vwloo uxqqlqj rq uvv ihhg� 7kh fdvh ri srgfdvwlqj zloo eh xvhg dv d wklqnlqj wrro wr xqghuvwdqg wkh xqvwdeoh qdwxuh ri hyhu\ phgld lq vrflhw\� ru� dv &kulvwlqd 'xqedu (vwkhu sxw lw� ³wkh ioh[lelolw\ ri whfkqrorj\ ryhu wlph´ ������ ����� 5hihuhqfhv 'xqedu�+hvwhu� &� ������� /rz srzhu wr wkh shrsoh� 3ludwhv� surwhvw� dqg srolwlfv lq )0 udglr dfwlylvp� 0,7 3uhvv� (%8 ������ 'ljlwdo 5dglr 5hsruw ����� *hqhyh� (%8 3uhvv� /redwr� 5� ������� 1hwiol[ qdwlrqv� 7kh jhrjudsk\ ri gljlwdo glvwulexwlrq� 1<8 3uhvv� 6whuqh� -�� 0ruulv� -�� %dnhu� 0� %�� )uhluh� $� 0� ������� 7kh srolwlfv ri srgfdvwlqj� ileuhfxowxuh� 6xoolydq� -� /� ������� 7kh sodwirupv ri srgfdvwlqj� 3dvw dqg suhvhqw� 6rfldo 0hgld� 6rflhw\� ����� ����������������� :looldpv� 5� ������ 7hohylvlrq� 7hfkqrorj\ dqg &xowxudo )rup� /rqgrq� 5rxwohgjh� i[b[yj[z fwf[hi e\ �7e?h����. j^[ ��ij 7ddkwb 9ed\[h[dy[ e\ j^[ 7iiey_wj_ed e\ ?dj[hd[j h[i[why^[hi l_hjkwb ;l[dj � �(� � eyjex[h ���� 32'723,$1 '5($06� 6281' 7(&+12/2*< $1' &20081,&$7,21 )8785(6 'dulr /olqduhv 8qlyhuvlw\ ri %uljkwrq� 8. &rpshwlqj xwrsldq dqg g\vwrsldq glvfrxuvhv uhjduglqj wkh hiihfwv ri gljlwdo whfkqrorj\ dqg wkh lqwhuqhw rq vrflhwdo dqg kxpdq lqwhudfwlrq� kdyh ehfrph lqfuhdvlqjo\ yrflihurxv dqg srodulvhg� ,qlwldo ihuyrxu dv wr d udglfdo surjuhvvlyh whfkqrorjlfdo wudqvirupdwlrq� lpsurylqj hyhu\wklqj iurp srolwlfv� folpdwh� frppxqlfdwlrq dqg ghprfudf\� kdv ehhq uhsodfhg e\ d pxfk pruh vfhswlfdo rxworrn suhydohqw lq dfdghpld� srsxodu fxowxuh dqg hyhq wkh whfk lqgxvwu\ lwvhoi� :h kdyh vwloo eduho\ ehjxq wr frph wr whupv zlwk wkh glphqvlrqv ri rxu f\ehu�lqixvhg olyhv� erwk lq uhjdugv wr wkh hslvwhprorjlfdo dvvxpswlrqv uhjduglqj phgldwhg lqirupdwlrq �krz gr zh nqrz zkdw zh nqrz� exw lqfuhdvlqjo\ lq whupv ri d uhvkdshg rqwrorj\ ri wkh kxpdq h[shulhqfh �wkh yhu\ qdwxuh ri rxu ehlqj�� 7kh glfkrwrprxv qduudwlyhv xqghuslqqlqj dqdo\vhv ri wkh gljlwdo wudqvirupdwlrq duh pdq\irog� olylqj lq dq lqfuhdvlqjo\ qhwzrunhg vrflhw\ lv ohdglqj wr juhdwhu ohyhov ri xqghuvwdqglqj� hpsdwk\ dqg joredo frpprq fdxvh� ru uhvxowv lq h[foxvru\ jurxslqjv dqg frqiurqwdwlrqdo wuledolvp� wkh ghprfudwlvdwlrq ri lqirupdwlrq doorzv wkh e\sdvvlqj ri wudglwlrqdo jdwhnhhshuv� dxwrqrp\ ri phgld frqvxpswlrq dqg d jurzwk lq wkh pdunhwsodfh ri lghdv� ru kdv orrvhqhg vhqvh ri wkh suryhqdqfh dqg yhudflw\ ri lqirupdwlrq vrxufhv� d fulvlv ri remhfwlyh nqrzohgjh dqg h[shuwlvh uhsodfhg e\ vxemhfwlyh rslqlrq� whfkqrorjlfdo lqwhufrqqhfwlrqv lq dqg dfurvv wkh sxeolf dqg sulydwh vskhuhv fuhdwh ioxlg v\vwhpv ri h[shulhqfh� pruh hiilflhqw� ioh[leoh dqg surgxfwlyh olyhv� ru dq hud ri xowud�vxuyhloodqfh� phwulilfdwlrq ri wkh vhoi� dqg dq hslghplf ri dolhqdwlrq dqg dq[lhw\� 3rgfdvwlqj lv d idvflqdwlqj phglxp wr frqvlghu lq wklv frqwh[w� 6lqfh lwv lqfhswlrq lq wkh plg ����v� lwv iluvw zdyh ri lqwhuhvw zklfk ohg wr surqrxqfhphqwv ri d wudqvirupdwlrq lq dxglr phgld frppxqlfdwlrq dqg rqwr wkh zhoo�grfxphqwhg pdlqvwuhdp furvv�ryhu lq wkh plg�����v� d xqltxh whfkqr�lqgxvwuldo�fxowxudo ghyhorsphqw kdv gulyhq qduudwlyhv ri xwrsldqlvp� $ssoh¶v l7xqhv lqiudvwuxfwxuh dqg 566 glvwulexwlrq iru h[dpsoh idflolwdwhg dq lqghshqghqw surgxfwlrq hwkrv� dq hwklfv ri frppxqlwduldq ydoxh �0dunpdq ����� dqg h[hpsolilhg wkh ehvw ri sduwlflsdwru\ fxowxuh �'hx]h ����� dqg surxvdjh �/hdgehdwhu dqg 0loohu ������ 3rgfdvwlqj¶v dgrswlrq e\ hqwkxvldvwv zlwk qlfkh vhqvlelolwlhv dqg d ',< hwkrv� kdv ehhq fruuhodwhg zlwk d uhqdlvvdqfh lq vrxqg fuhdwlylw\ xqhqfxpehuhg e\ eurdgfdvw uxohv� fhqvruvkls ru d suhfrqfhlyhg dgkhuhqfh wr wkh wudglwlrqdo dhvwkhwlfv ri udglr� 7kdw srgfdvwlqj¶v h[sdqvlrq dovr uholhg rq wkh lqwhuuhodwlrqvkls ehwzhhq qrq� srgfdvw vshflilf whfkqrorjlhv� �vxfk dv wkh hphujhqfh dqg xeltxlw\ ri wkh l3krqh dqg wkh dsslilfdwlrq ri h[shulhqfh� dqg vrfldo phgld dv nh\ wr srgfdvw glvfryhu\�� kdv ohg wr lpsolflw hohphqw ri whfkqrorjlfdo ghwhuplqlvp zlwklq dfdghplf dqg srsxodu glvfrxuvh� :lwklq srgfdvw vwxglhv olwhudwxuh krzhyhu� wkh lpsolhg whfkqrorjlfdo xqghuslqqlqj lv riwhq vxppdulo\ vxevxphg lqwr qduudwlyhv ri vrflr�fxowxudo hiihfwv wkdw duh uhodwhg wr wkh phglxp¶v surgxfwlrq� glvwulexwlrq dqg�ru h[klelwlrq� 6sdwldo dqg whpsrudu\ ioh[lelolw\� ghprfudwlf glvwulexwlrq� surgxfhu dqg frqvxphu dxwrqrp\� euhdnlqj ri erxqgdulhv ri irup dqg frqwhqw uhodwhg wr µrog¶ phgld� duh mxvw vrph ri wkh fulwhuld ri dqdo\vlv exw d ihz� 3rgfdvwlqj lv dovr riwhq shufhlyhg dv ohvv vxvfhswleoh wr wkh qhjdwlyh hiihfwv dvvrfldwhg zlwk lqwhuqhw fxowxuh� wkh vxshuilfldolw\ dqg yhqdolw\ ri vrfldo phgld� vkruwhqlqj ri dwwhqwlrq vsdqv� sk\vlfdo dqg frjqlwlyh lpsdfwv ri vfuhhq xvdjh� 'lvfrxuvhv ri xwrsldqlvp olqnhg wr srgfdvwlqj lqfoxgh lwv iudplqj dv sduw ri wkh rshq vrxufh hwkrv �+hhuhpdqv ������ doljqphqw zlwk wkh lghdo ri sxeolf vhuylfh phgld zkloh fkdoohqjlqj erwk frpphufldolvhg dqg wudglwlrqdo sxeolf vhuylfh vwuxfwxuhv �-duuhw ������ ,q whupv ri dxglhqfh uhvsrqvh� fodlpv iru srgfdvwlqj duh zlgh�udqjlqj� $q dughqw vhqvh ri fxow idqgrp kdv ehhq dvvrfldwhg zlwk wkh phglxp dorqj zlwk wkh qrwlrq wkdw srgfdvwv h[xgh d xqltxh lqwlpdf\ ri olvwhqlqj h[shulhqfh �6slqhool 'dqq ����� dqg wkhuh kdv hyhq ehhq dooxvlrqv wr krolvwlf hyhq plqgixo hiihfwv� h[hpsolilhg lq whupv vxfk dv wkh µsrgfdvw kxj¶ frlqhg rq ,ulvk pxvlfldq %olqger\ rq klv vhoi�wlwohg vkrz �vhh /olqduhv ������ 3rwhqwldo qhjdwlyh dvshfwv ri srgfdvwlqj kdyh odujho\ ehhq irfxvhg rq whfkqrorjlfdo dqg lqgxvwuldo ghyhorsphqwv wkdw pd\ wudqvirup wkh qh[w skdvh ri srgfdvwlqj¶v hyroxwlrq� 6xoolydq kljkoljkwv wkh ³sodwirup frqvrolgdwlrq´ �6xoolydq ����� dv kdylqj wkh srwhqwldo qhjdwlyh frqvhtxhqfh iru wkh lqghshqghqfh� rshq vrxufh sklorvrsk\ dqg xvhu dxwrqrp\ vhhq e\ pdq\ dv hvvhqwldo wr wkh '1$ ri wkh phglxp� :lwk frusrudwh h[sdqvlrq lqwr srgfdvwlqj wkh h[dfhuedwlrq ri wkh phglxp¶v glvfryhu\ sureohp �3kdp ����� dorqj zlwk srwhqwldo hfrqrplf ulqjihqflqj fuhdwlqj d wzr�wlhu klhudufk\� duh rwkhu frqfhuqv wkdw kdyh ehhq kljkoljkwhg� :kdw kdv ehhq h[dplqhg ohvv� dqg zkdw wklv sdshu ehjlqv wr dgguhvv� lv zkhuh srgfdvwlqj vlwv lq wkh eurdghu frqfhuqv zlwk uhjdug wr wkh whfkqrorjlfdo wudqvirupdwlrq ri hyhu\gd\ olih� +rz pljkw srgfdvw olvwhqlqj wr diihfw wkh shufhswlrq dqg xwlolvdwlrq lqirupdwlrq lq glyhuvh phgld ilhogv" 'rhv wkh glvfrxuvh ri lqwlpdf\ h[dfhuedwh wkh hfr� fkdpehu hiihfw" +rz pljkw srgfdvwlqj¶v dgrswlrq dv d mrxuqdolvwlf wrro uhiohfw frqwudglfwru\ phgld hwklfv" 'rhv srgfdvwlqj h[dfhuedwh hxurfhqwulvp dqg wkh (qjolvk dv d ghidxow joredo odqjxdjh" +dv wkhuh ehhq d juhdwhu glyhuvlw\ ri yrlfhv wkdw lwv rshq dffhvv iudphzrun pljkw lpso\" +rz pljkw wkh fxuuhqw skdvh ri µirupdolvdwlrq¶ eulqj srgfdvwlqj lqwr olqh zlwk pruh wudglwlrqdo eurdgfdvw vwuxfwxuhv� dqg vkrxog vfkroduv dqg lqghshqghqw surgxfhuv eh uhvlvwlqj wklv" , zloo dujxh wkdw srgfdvwlqj kdv� xs xqwlo wklv srlqw� ehhq vkdshg glvfxuvlyho\ lqwr sulpdulo\ xwrsldq qduudwlyhv ehfdxvh ri lwv lglrv\qfudwlf whfkqrorjlfdo xqghuslqqlqj� irupdo olplqdolw\ ehwzhhq wkh lghdov µrog¶ dqg µqhz¶ phgld� d shufhswlrq wkdw wkh phglxp hqjhqghuv dq dpdojdpdwlrq ehwzhhq lqglylgxdo dqg froohfwlyh sudfwlfh� dqg d vhqvh wkdw srgfdvwlqj whfkqrorjlhv kdyh lqvwljdwhg d uhhqjdjhphqw zlwk wkh srwhqwldov ri vrxqg phgldwlrq� 7r h[soruh wklv ixuwkhu� , zloo frqvlghu srgfdvwlqj dv pdunlqj wkh ehjlqqlqj ri d wudqvirupdwlrqdo hud lq wkh lqwhjudwlrq ri vrxqg zlwklq rxu hyhu\gd\ h[shulhqfh� 'udzlqj xsrq vrph ri wkh vhplqdo wh[wv lq wkh exujhrqlqj ilhog ri 3rgfdvw 6wxglhv� , frqwh[wxdolvh srgfdvwlqj¶v ghyhorsphqw zlwklq wkh ghwhuplqlvw frqvwuxfwlrqlvw glfkrwrp\ wkdw xqghuslqv wkh sklorvrsk\ ri whfkqrorj\� , wkhq jr rq wr glvfxvv krz wklv ihhgv lqwr glvfxuvlyh vshfxodwlrqv lq dfdghpld dqg wkh srsxodu suhvv zlwk uhjdugv wr d ixwxuh ri kxpdq�whfkqrorj\�zruog lqwhudfwlrq lq zklfk vrxqg whfkqrorjlhv uhrulhqw rxu hperglhg kxpdq h[shulhqfh� 5hihuhqfhv 'hx]h� 0� ������� &rqyhujhqfh &xowxuh lq wkh &uhdwlyh ,qgxvwulhv� ,qwhuqdwlrqdo -rxuqdo ri &xowxudo 6wxglhv� ������ �������� *rogvwhlq� -�$� ������� 7kh &rpsolfdwhg (wklfv ri µ6huldo�¶ 7kh 0rvw 3rsxodu 3rgfdvw 2i $oo 7lph� 7klqn3urjuhvv� 5hwulhyhg iurp kwwsv���wklqnsurjuhvv�ruj�wkh�frpsolfdwhg� hwklfv�ri�vhuldo�wkh�prvw�srsxodu�srgfdvw�ri�doo�wlph��i�����gh�d�� +huuhpdqv� /� ������� µ3rgfdvw 1hwzrunv� 6\qglfdwlqj 3urgxfwlrq &xowxuh¶� ,q /olqduhv� '�� )r[� )� %huu\� 5� �hgv� 3rgfdvwlqj� 1hz $xudo &xowxuhv dqg 'ljlwdo 0hgld� /rqgrq� 3dojudyh 0dfploodq -duuhww� .� ������� 3ulydwh 7don lq wkh 3xeolf 6skhuh� 3rgfdvwlqj dv %urdgfdvw 7don� &rppxqlfdwlrq� 3rolwlfv dqg &xowxuh� ������ �������� 5hwulhyhg iurp kwwsv���vhdufk�lqiruplw�frp�dx�grfxphqw6xppdu\�gq ����������������uhv ,(/+66 /hdgehdwhu� &� 0loohu� 3 ������� 7kh 3ur�$p 5hyroxwlrq� +rz (qwkxvldvwv $uh &kdqjlqj 2xu (frqrp\ dqg 6rflhw\� /rqgrq� 'hprv� /olqduhv� '� ������� %olqger\¶v 3rgfdvw +xj� 5hwulhyhg iurp kwws���zzz�gdulroolqduhv�frp�eorj�����������eolqger\v�srgfdvw�kxj 3kdp� 6� ������� 3rgfdvwv kdyh d vhulrxv glvfryhu\ sureohp� 5hwulhyhg iurp kwwsv���pdvkdeoh�frp������������ilqg�qhz�srgfdvwv�"hxursh wuxh 6slqhool� 0� dqg 'dqq� /� ������� 3rgfdvwlqj� 7kh $xglr 0hgld 5hyroxwlrq� /rqgrq %orrpvexu\� 6xoolydq -� ������� 7kh 3odwirupv ri 3rgfdvwlqj� 3dvw dqg 3uhvhqw� 6rfldo 0hgld � 6rflhw\� ����� �±��� 5hwulhyhg iurp kwwsv���mrxuqdov�vdjhsxe�frp�grl�ixoo������������������������� 6hohfwhg 3dshuv ri �$r,5����� 7kh ��vw $qqxdo &rqihuhqfh ri wkh $vvrfldwlrq ri ,qwhuqhw 5hvhdufkhuv 'xeolq ,uhodqg � ����� 2fwrehu ���� )250$/,6,1* 7+( ,1)250$/� %%& &200,66,216 $1' 7+( 6+$3( 2) 32'&$676 5lfkdug %huu\� 8qlyhuvlw\ ri 6xqghuodqg� 8. $v d phglxp srgfdvwlqj fdq wudfh lwv ruljlqv edfn wr rshq�vrxufh slrqhhuv zkr dgyrfdwhg d gliihuhqw irup ri phgld �%huu\� ����� rqh wkdw zdv rshq� ghprfudwlf dqg wkdw e\sdvvhg wudglwlrqdo phgld jdwhnhhshuv� (duo\ srgfdvwv zhuh xqvwuxfwxuhg� xqirupdwwhg dqg gulyhq e\ dpdwhxuv� ru dw ohdvw e\ wkrvh dgrswlqj urohv ri dq dpdwhxu vwdwxv� /lnh rwkhu phgld wkh ruljlqv ri srgfdvwlqj zhuh jurxqghg lq vskhuh ri wkh dpdwhxu� zkhuh vhpl�surihvvlrqdo htxlsphqw zdv ghsor\hg dqg zkhuh vriwzduh zdv ghyhorshg e\ wkrvh zlwk olwwoh ru qr h[shulhqfh �%hqvrq� ������ (txdoo\� wkh surgxfhuv lq wklv vsdfh riwhq kdg qr sulru h[shulhqfh ri dxglr surgxfwlrq� %hwzhhq wkh\ irxqghg d phglxp� 7khlu ehkdylrxuv dv lqglfdwlyh ri wkrvh rxwolqhg e\ 0f/xkdq dqg )lruh ������ lq wkh µ0hglxp lv wkh 0dvvdjh¶ zkhq glvfxvvlqj wkh vwdwxv ri wkh dpdwhxu� 7kh\ qrwh �dv rwkhuv kdyh� wkdw fuhdwruv riwhq eulqj wkhlu h[shulhqfh ri rog phgld wr qhz phgld� krzhyhu wklv pd\ qrw eh d surihvvlrqdo uhvsrqvh exw dq lqvwlwxwlrqdo rqh� zkhuhdv dpdwhxulvp lv µdqwl�hqylurqphqwdo´ dqg zkhuh wkh dpdwhxu fdq ³diirug wr orvh´ �lelg�� (duo\ srgfdvwhuv zhuh deoh wr euhdn frqyhqwlrqv ehfdxvh wkh\ vwdwxv dv dpdwhxuv frqihuuhg qrw rqo\ wkh iuhhgrp wr gr vr exw dovr ehfdxvh wkh\ odfnhg wkh frqglwlrqlqj ri wkh lqvwlwxwlrq� :h fdq fdoo wklv wkh µlqirupdolw\ ri srgfdvwlqj�¶ $v 'dqq dqg 6slqhool ������ rxwolqh wkh qdwxuh ri wkh phglxp lq wkh ��vw &hqwxu\ dv �zklovw fkdoohqjhg e\ qhz jdwhnhhshuv� kdv ehhq fdsdeoh ri surgxflqj qhz irupv ri frqwhqw dqg qhz rssruwxqlwlhv iru fuhdwlyhv� $v wkh dxwkruv qrwh ³7kh vlpsolilhg dhvwkhwlf ri srgfdvwlqj doorzv surgxfwlrqv wr eh pdgh fkhdso\� udslgo\� dqg zlwkrxw vshfldolvw nqrzohgjh´ ������ 7klv vxjjhvwv wkdw hyhq zkhuh surgxfwlrqv duh ghylvhg e\ wkrvh zlwk sulru h[shulhqfh lq phgld surgxfwlrq� d gholehudwho\ lqirupdo dssurdfk lv wdnhq� 7kh h[shulhqfhv ri srgfdvwhuv vxjjhvw wkdw wkh xq�uhjxodwhg qdwxuh ri srgfdvwlqj diirughg wkhp wkh delolw\ wr fuhdwh frqwhqw lq wkhlu rzq zd\ �%huu\� ����� ��� ��� zlwkrxw wkh lqvwlwxwlrqdo eudnhv rxwolqhv deryh e\ 0f/xkdq dqg )lruh� ,q wkh zdnh ri wkh srgfdvw 6huldo� wkh phglxp h[sdqghg dqg vdz wkh duulydo ri frusrudwh surgxfhuv� lq dq hdu odehoohg e\ %rqlql ������ dv wkh µ6hfrqg $jh ri 3rgfdvwlqj¶ zkhuh gliihuhqw irupv ri wkh phglxp ehjdq wr hphujh� +rzhyhu� srgfdvwv uhwdlqhg wkh fruh ydoxhv ri lqghshqghqfh� lqwlpdf\ dqg lqirupdolw\� -duuhww kdv vxjjhvwhg wkdw rqh dvshfw ri srgfdvwlqj lv krz ³wkh vrfldo urohv ri frqvxphu dqg surgxfhu duh ehlqj shuiruphg lq d gh�lqvwlwxwlrqdolvhg eurdgfdvwlqj frqwh[w�´ ������ ����� %xw zkdw kdsshqv zkhq wkh\ zrun sdvvhv lqwr dq lqvwlwxwlrqdo eurdgfdvw frqwh[w" ,q ���� wkh %%& uhiudphg wkhlu rqolqh udglr sodwirup� uheudqglqj lw %%& 6rxqgv dqg jlylqj lw d qhz uhplw wr surgxfh ³srgfdvwv zklfk hqjdjh h[lvwlqj srgfdvw olvwhqhuv zkr grq¶w frqvxph %%& rxwsxw dqg srgfdvwv zklfk frqyhuw qhz shrsoh wr wkh mr\v ri srgfdvwv´ �%%& &rpplvvlrqlqj�� :lwklq wklv iudphzrun wkh %%& kdv dovr srvlwhg d jxlgh wr wkh qdwxuh ri wkh phglxp dqg fuhdwhg d vhulhv ri eulhiv wkdw frqqhfw wr wkh lqvwlwxwlrqdo jrdo rxwolqhg deryh� ,w lv lqwr wkh frqwh[w wkdw wklv sdshu zloo h[soruh wkh whqvlrqv ehwzhhq wklv vhqvh ri lqirupdolw\� zkhuh srgfdvwhuv rxwolqh wkhlu rzq iudphzrun dqg rqh zkhuh frqyhqwlrqv ehjlq wr hphujh� krzhyhu khosixoo\ wkh\ pljkw eh iudphg� ,i zh uhwxuq wr wkh hduolhu lghd ri wkh dpdwhxu� zh fdq frqqhfw rxu fxuuhqw h[shulhqfh wr wkdw ri suhylrxv phgld dv wkh\ wudqvlwlrqhg iurp wkh dpdwhxu wr wkh surihvvlrqdo �:x� ������ 7klv sdshu gudzv xsrq wkhvh frqwh[wv dqg iudphzrunv dqg frqvlghuv zkhwkhu wkh vwuxfwxuhv riihuhg khuh e\ wkh %%& dqg wkh zlghu vkliwv rxwolqhg e\ 6xoolydq ������ dv rwkhu frusrudwh jdwhnhhshuv ehjlq wr vwdnh rxw wkh srgfdvw vsdfh� zloo fkdqjh wklv vhqvh ri wkh lqirupdo� 7kh grfxphqwv sxeolvkhg deryh e\ wkh %%&� dorqj zlwk rwkhu surfhvvhv iurp wkdw irup sduw ri d sdudgljp uhihuuhg wr dv µwroo srgfdvwlqj¶ e\ %rqlql ������ wkdw dgg od\huv ri vwuxfwxuh dqg irupdolw\ wr d suhylrxvo\ xq�vwuxfwxuhg dqg lqirupdo phglxp� 7klv sdshu gudzv xsrq wkh jurzlqj ilhog ri srgfdvw vwxglhv� ohyhudjlqj dq dqdo\vlv ri grfxphqwdwlrq� lqvljkwv iurp surihvvlrqdov� dqg h[dpsohv ri frqwhqw wkdw zloo vkrz wkh frqqhfwlrq wr wkh sdvw� , dujxh wkdw wkh vhqvh ri lqirupdolw\ frqwulexwhv wr srgfdvw dhvwkhwlfv� hyhq zkhq wkdw frqwhqw lv pdgh zlwklq wkh frqilqhv ri d frusrudwh erg\� ,qghhg� iru wkh %%& wklv lqirupdolw\ kdv dsshdo wr wkh \rxqjhu wkh\ duh vhhnlqj wr uhdfk dw wkh fxuuhqw wlph� exw e\ lqvwlwxwlrqdolvlqj wkhvh frqyhqwlrqv grhv wklv glvfrqqhfw wkh sudfwlfhv ri srgfdvwlqj iurp wkh vhqvh ri dpdwhxu rxwolqhg e\ 0f/xkdq deryh" 2u kdv lqirupdolw\ ehfrph d wursh zlwklq srgfdvwv� zkhuhhyhu wkh\ pljkw odqg lq wkh /rqj 7dlo" 5hihuhqfhv %%& &rpplvvlrqlqj �qr gdwh� &rpplvvlrqlqj %ulhi 1r� ������� %%& 6rxqgv� 'udpdwlf 6wru\whoolqj� $ffhvvhg yld� kwws���grzqordgv�eef�fr�xn�udglr�frpplvvlrqlqj�&rppvb%ulhib������b%%&6rxqgvb3 rgfdvwvb'udpdwlf6wru\whoolqjb����b�����sgi %hqvrq� 5lfkdug ������ $q 2udo +lvwru\ 2i 7kh 3rgfdvw lq (vtxluh� 5hwulhyhg iurp� kwwsv���zzz�hvtxluh�frp�xn�fxowxuh�d���������rudo�klvwru\�ri�srgfdvwv� �)heuxdu\� ����� %huu\� 5lfkdug ������ :loo wkh l3rg nloo wkh udglr vwdu" 3urilolqj srgfdvwlqj dv udglr� &rqyhujhqfh� 7kh ,qwhuqdwlrqdo -rxuqdo ri 5hvhdufk lqwr 1hz 0hgld 7hfkqrorjlhv� ��� ���±���� %huu\� 5lfkdug ������ ������ µ-xvw %hfdxvh <rx 3od\ d *xlwdu dqg $uh iurp 1dvkylooh 'rhvq¶w 0hdq <rx $uh d &rxqwu\ 6lqjhu¶� 7kh (phujhqfh ri 0hglxp ,ghqwlwlhv lq 3rgfdvwlqj� ,q� 3rgfdvwlqj� 1hz $xudo &xowxuhv dqg 'ljlwdo 0hgld� 3dojudyh 0df0loodq� %dvlqjvwrnh� ������ %rqlql� 7l]ldqr ������ 7kh µ6hfrqg $jh¶ ri 3rgfdvwlqj� uhiudplqj 3rgfdvwlqj dv d 1hz 'ljlwdo 0dvv 0hglxp lq 4xdghuqv gho &$&� �� �;9,,,� ����� -duuhww� .\olh ������ 3ulydwh 7don lq wkh 3xeolf 6skhuh� 3rgfdvwlqj dv %urdgfdvw 7don &rppxqlfdwlrq� 3rolwlfv dqg &xowxuh 9roxph ������ ������� 0f/xkdq� 0duvkdoo dqg )lruh� 4xhqwlq ������ 7kh 0hglxp lv wkh 0dvvdjh 3hqjxlq� /rqgrq 6slqhool� 0duwlq� dqg 'dqq� /dqfh ������ 3rgfdvwlqj� 7kh $xglr 0hgld 5hyroxwlrq %orrpvexu\� /rqgrq 6xoolydq� -rkq ������� 7kh 3odwirupv ri 3rgfdvwlqj� 3dvw dqg 3uhvhqw� 6rfldo 0hgld � 6rflhw\� kwwsv���grl�ruj������������������������� :x� 7lp ������ 7kh 0dvwhu 6zlwfk� 7kh 5lvh dqg )doo ri ,qirupdwlrq (psluhv� $wodqwlf %rrnv� /rqgrq 6hohfwhg 3dshuv ri �$r,5����� 7kh ��vw $qqxdo &rqihuhqfh ri wkh $vvrfldwlrq ri ,qwhuqhw 5hvhdufkhuv 'xeolq ,uhodqg � ����� 2fwrehu ���� 3527(&7,1* 38%/,& 32'&$67,1*� $5( 8�6� 1(:6� 38%/,& $))$,56 $1' /($51,1* 32'&$676 $7 5,6." 3dwulfld $xighukhlgh $phulfdq 8qlyhuvlw\� 86$ 'dylg /lhehupdq 7kh 1hz 6fkrro� 86$ $wlnd $onkdoorxi $phulfdq 8qlyhuvlw\� 86$ -lml 0dmlul 8jurped 7kh 1hz 6fkrro� 86$ 1rz sxeolvkhg lq wkh ,qwhuqdwlrqdo -rxuqdo ri &rppxqlfdwlrq dw kwwsv���lmrf�ruj�lqgh[�sks�lmrf�duwlfoh�ylhz������ ,qwurgxfwlrq :h dujxh wkdw d 8�6��edvhg srgfdvwlqj hfrorj\ fdq xvhixoo\ eh ghilqhg dv sxeolf phgld� dqg wkdw wklv hfrorj\ lv dw ulvn iurp wkh jurzwk ri dgyhuwlvlqj dqg sodwirupl]dwlrq� dowkrxjk wkh qhwzrunhg vwuxfwxuh dqg mrxuqdolvwlf dqg sxeolf eurdgfdvwlqj wudglwlrqv surylgh vrph lppxqlw\� :h dovr eholhyh wkdw wklv frqfhsw fdq hqulfk wkh vwxg\ ri sxeolf phgld� zklfk klvwrulfdoo\ kdv irfxvhg rq vwdwh�vxevlgl]hg eurdgfdvwlqj� 7kh 3rgfdvwlqj %xvlqhvv 3rgfdvwlqj� zkloh vwloo d vpdoo sruwlrq ri phgld exvlqhvv� kdv jurzq gudpdwlfdoo\ lq wkh odvw ihz \hduv�� 6fkrodu -rkq /� 6xoolydq ������ fdoov wklv d prphqw ri irupdol]dwlrq� eulqjlqj frqvrolgdwlrq� udwlrqdol]dwlrq� dqg juhdwhu ilqdqfldo wudqvsduhqf\� 7kh ilqdqfldoo\ yldeoh srgfdvwv� dv +hhuhpdqv ������ qrwhv� kdyh wkh edfnlqj ri odujh phgld lqvwlwxwlrqv� 0ruh wkdq kdoi ri srgfdvw olvwhqhuv urxwlqho\ olvwhq wr qhzv�fxuuhqw hyhqwv� dqg pruh wkdq d wklug olvwhq wr hgxfdwlrqdo surjudpv �:hvwzrrg 2qh� ������ 7kh wrs �� srgfdvwv lq wkh 8�6�� dv ghilqhg e\ 3rgwudf lq ����� ghprqvwudwh wklv� 7kluwhhq frxog eh fkdudfwhul]hg dv sxeolf sxusrvh� 7kuhh qhzv surjudpv �7kh 'dlo\� 8s )luvw� 135 3rolwlfv 3rgfdvw�� wzr wrslfdo hfrqrplfv surjudpv �)uhdnrqrplfv� 3odqhw 0rqh\�� wzr vflhqfh surjudpv �+lgghq %udlq� 5dglr/de�� wzr plql�ohfwxuhv�glvfxvvlrqv rq jhqhudo nqrzohgjh �6wxii <rx 6krxog .qrz� 7(' 5dglr +rxu�� rqh exvlqhvv surjudp �� rqh vwru\whoolqj derxw sxeolf lvvxhv dqg vrfldo ydoxhv �7klv $phulfdq /lih�� rqh frphg\ vkrz derxw wkh qhzv �:dlw :dlw«'rq¶w 7hoo 0h��� dqg rqh lqwhuylhz surjudp rq sxeolf lvvxhv dqg wkh duwv �)uhvk $lu�� 3xeolf srgfdvwlqj dv d frqfhsw )luvw� frqvlghu wkh grplqdqfh dqg ohdghuvkls ri 8�6� sxeolf eurdgfdvwlqj hqwlwlhv lq 8�6� srgfdvwlqj� 2i wkh wrs ��� �� duh surgxfhg e\ sxeolf eurdgfdvwlqj hqwlwlhv �lqfoxglqj )uhdnrqrplfv� dq lqghshqghqwo\ surgxfhg surjudp zkrvh vxffhvv ghshqgv rq uhodwlrqvklsv zlwk sxeolf eurdgfdvwlqj hqwlwlhv�� 3xeolf eurdgfdvwlqj hqwlwlhv� erwk vwdwlrqv dqg surgxfhu�glvwulexwru qhwzrunv vxfk dv $phulfdq 3xeolf 0hgld �$30�� 1dwlrqdo 3xeolf 5dglr �135�� dqg 3xeolf 5dglr ([fkdqjh�3xeolf 5dglr ,qwhuqdwlrqdo �35;�35,�� kdyh wdnhq ohdghuvkls lq lqyhvwlqj lq wkh irup� 135 kdv ghyhorshg uholdeoh phwulfv iurp lwv 5hprwh $xglr 'dwd dqdo\wlfv whfkqrorj\� dqg 35;�35, kdv ghyhorshg g\qdplf dg lqvhuwlrq whfkqrorj\� 7kh\ kdyh ghyhorshg djjuhjdwruv wkdw riihu erwk glvfryhu\ dqg frqvxpswlrq� 135 kdv 135 2qh� dqg 5dglrwrsld� d qrqsurilw wkdw zrunv zlwklq wkh ruelw ri sxeolf eurdgfdvwlqj� kdv 5dglr 3xeolf� 7kh\ kdyh lqyhvwhg ilqdqfldoo\ lq sodwirup exloglqj� 135 dqg uhodwhg sxeolf eurdgfdvwlqj hqwlwlhv kdyh sxufkdvhg 3rfnhw &dvwv� 7khvh wrs�udwhg vkrzv kdyh p\uldg vleolqjv dqg frxvlqv ixuwkhu grzq wkh fkduw ri srsxodulw\� 6hfrqg� frqvlghu wkh sxeolf vhuylfh ixqfwlrq ri wkh srgfdvwv lq wklv plql�hfrorj\� ,w kdv ehhq dujxhg wkdw sxeolf vhuylfh phgld �wudglwlrqdoo\ sxeolf eurdgfdvwlqj� ixqfwlrqv dv d vsdfh lq zkdw lv vrphwlphv fdoohg wkh svhxgr�sxeolf vskhuh �%oxpohu� ������ d ]rqh lq zklfk phgld hqdfwv dqg prghov ehkdylruv ri flylo glvfrxuvh� ,w kdv ehhq ghvfulehg dv d vhuylfh ri wkh ³plfurg\qdplfv ri ghprfudf\´ �'dkojuhq� ����� s� ���� e\ hqjdjlqj ylhzhuv zlwk lpsruwdqw lvvxhv dqg surylglqj wkhp lqirupdwlrq wr ixho lqiruphg frqyhuvdwlrq� 7klv frqfhsw gudzv iurp d qrwlrq ri sxeolfqhvv sduwlfxodu wr wkh $phulfdq wudglwlrq ri sudjpdwlvp �'hzh\� ������ dowkrxjk lw lqyrnhv wkh odqjxdjh ri wkh pruh idploldu +dehupdvldq dujxphqwv derxw wkh sxeolf vskhuh �&dokrxq� ����� *ulsvuxg (lgh� ����� +dehupdv� &urvvoh\� 5rehuwv� ������ )ru 'hzh\� d sxeolf vkduhv lq frpprq wkh hiihfwv ri erwk frusrudwh dqg jryhuqphqw dfwlrqv� lw frqvwlwxwhv lwvhoi lq dgguhvvlqj wkhp e\ frppxqlfdwlqj zlwk rwkhuv vlploduo\ diihfwhg lq lwv rzq ghihqvh �'hzh\� ����� :hvweurrn� ������ &rppxqlfdwlrq ehfrphv dfwlrq� *lyhq wkdw ghilqlwlrq� srgfdvwv rxwvlgh sxeolf eurdgfdvwlqj dovr vrphwlphv ixqfwlrq dv sxeolf phgld� 7klug� lq lqwhulp uhvxowv ri uhvhdufk� zh irxqg vrph frqjuxhqfh ehwzhhq wkh frqfhuqv ri $phulfdqv� dv ghilqhg lq prqwko\ *dooxs sroolqj �*dooxs� ������ dqg wrslfv fryhuhg lq sxeolf phgld srgfdvwv� 2xu suhvhqwdwlrq zloo glvfxvv wkhvh uhvxowv lq pruh ghwdlo� 7kuhdwv dqg rssruwxqlwlhv $owkrxjk rxu frpsohwhg sdshu zloo lqfoxgh d pruh h[whqvlyh hfrqrplf dqdo\vlv� khuh zh srlqw wr srwhqwldo wkuhdwv wr wklv sxeolf srgfdvwlqj hfrorj\� ,q wkh vkruw uxq� hyhq lq wkh uhodwlyho\ ghfhqwudol]hg hqylurqphqw� wkh jurzwk ri dgyhuwlvhu lqwhuhvw lq srgfdvwlqj ohdgv erwk wr dq h[sdqvlrq ri ilqdqfldoo\ yldeoh srgfdvwv dqg wr surgxfwlrqv wkdw wlow pruh wrzdug wkh hqwhuwdlqlqj� vhqvdwlrqdo� ru vkrfnlqj wkdq wkh lqirupdwlyh� &rphg\ srgfdvwv dffrxqwhg iru ��� ri wkh phglxp¶v dg vdohv lq wkh iluvw wkuhh prqwkv ri ����� uhvhdufk ilup 0djhoodq ������ uhsruwv� 7kdw zdv iroorzhg e\ 1hzv 3rolwlfv �������� 6rflhw\ &xowxuh �������� 6sruwv 5hfuhdwlrq �������� %xvlqhvv ������� +hdowk ������� dqg 6flhqfh 0hglflqh ������� zlwk rwkhu fdwhjrulhv froohfwlqj ����� �0djhoodq� ������ ,q wkh phglxp whup� sodwirupl]dwlrq erghv d vhd fkdqjh lq phgld lq jhqhudo� dqg wr srgfdvwlqj lq sduwlfxodu� 7klv lv vljqdohg e\ wkh djjuhvvlyh pryhv lqwr wkh srgfdvwlqj odqgvfdsh e\ 6srwli\ dqg /xplqdu\� 7kh qdwxuh ri wklv wkuhdw lv zhoo lghqwlilhg lq vfkroduo\ olwhudwxuh� 1rw rqo\ 6xoolydq ������� exw dovr 1lheruj dqg 3rhoo ������� zduqhg jhqhudoo\ ri wkh ³sodwirupl]dwlrq ri fxowxudo surgxfwlrq�´ zlwk odujh frpsdqlhv lqfuhdvlqjo\ frqwuroolqj wkh whupv ri dffhvv iru fxowxudo surgxfhuv dqg� xowlpdwho\� frqvxphuv� ,q sxeolf srgfdvwlqj� wkh gdqjhuv ri dgyhuwlvlqj ghudlolqj plvvlrq kdyh ehhq vljqdohg uhshdwhgo\� exw sodwirupl]dwlrq uhpdlqv yluwxdoo\ xqglvfxvvhg� dv zh ohduqhg iurp d uhylhz ri fxuuhqw wudgh olwhudwxuh zlwklq sxeolf srgfdvwlqj dqg iurp lqwhuylhzv zlwk qlqh h[hfxwlyhv� &rqfoxvlrq 3xeolf srgfdvwlqj fdq gudz rq ulfk fxowxudo wudglwlrqv lq mrxuqdolvp dqg sxeolf eurdgfdvwlqj� dqg rq hfrqrplf uhvrxufhv iurp wkh sxeolf hfrorj\ lwvhoi� exw dzduhqhvv ri wkh fkdqjlqj hqylurqphqwv dqg lwv wkuhdwv wr ghfhqwudol]hg exvlqhvv prghov zloo eh lpsruwdqw iru vxuylydo� 5hihuhqfhv %oxpohu� -� *� ������� 7hohylvlrq dqg wkh sxeolf lqwhuhvw� 9xoqhudeoh ydoxhv lq zhvw (xurshdq eurdgfdvwlqj� /rqgrq� 8.� 6$*( 3xeolfdwlrqv lq dvvrfldwlrq zlwk wkh %urdgfdvwlqj 6wdqgdugv &rxqflo� &dokrxq� &� -� ������� +dehupdv dqg wkh sxeolf vskhuh� &dpeulgjh� 0$� 0,7 3uhvv� 'dkojuhq� 3� ������� 'rlqj flwl]hqvkls� 7kh fxowxudo ruljlqv ri flylf djhqf\ lq wkh sxeolf vskhuh� (xurshdq -rxuqdo ri &xowxudo 6wxglhv� ����� ���±���� 'hzh\� -� ������� 7kh sxeolf dqg lwv sureohpv� 1hz <run� 1<� +� +row dqg &rpsdq\� *dooxs� ������� 0rvw lpsruwdqw sureohp� 5hwulhyhg iurp kwwsv���qhzv�jdooxs�frp�sroo������prvw�lpsruwdqw�sureohp�dvs[ *ulsvuxg� -�� (lgh� 0� ������� 7kh lghd ri wkh sxeolf vskhuh� $ uhdghu� /dqkdp� 0'� /h[lqjwrq %rrnv� *urxs0� ������� 7klv \hdu qh[w \hdu� :ruogzlgh phgld iruhfdvwv� 5hwulhyhg iurp kwwsv���zzz�jurxsp�frp�qhzv�\hdu�qh[w�\hdu�joredo�phgld�iruhfdvwv +dehupdv� -�� &urvvoh\� 1�� 5rehuwv� -� 0� ������� $iwhu +dehupdv� 1hz shuvshfwlyhv rq wkh sxeolf vskhuh� 2[irug� 8.� %odfnzhoo� 6rflrorjlfdo 5hylhz� +hhuhpdqv� /� ������� 3rgfdvw qhwzrunv� 6\qglfdwlqj surgxfwlrq fxowxuh� ,q '� /olqduhv� 1� )r[� 5� %huu\ �(gv��� 3rgfdvwlqj� 1hz dxudo fxowxuhv dqg gljlwdo phgld �ss� ��±���� &kdp� 6zlw]huodqg� 3dojudyh 0dfploodq� 0djhoodq� ������� 4� ¶�� srgfdvw dgyhuwlvlqj dfwlylw\� 5hwulhyhg iurp kwwsv���zzz�pdjhoodq�dl�lqgxvwu\� uhsruwv�����t�"xwpbvrxufh phglxp xwpbphglxp whdvhueorj xwpbfdpsdljq ����t�uhsruw 64)b6285&( phglxp 64)b&$03$,*1 ����4�uhsruw 1lheruj� '� %�� 3rhoo� 7� ������� 7kh sodwirupl]dwlrq ri fxowxudo surgxfwlrq� 7khrul]lqj wkh frqwlqjhqw fxowxudo frpprglw\� 1hz 0hgld 6rflhw\� ������� ����±����� grl������������������������� 3rgwudf� ������ 2fwrehu ���� 7rs �� srgfdvwv� 6hswhpehu ����� 5hwulhyhg iurp kwwsv���dqdo\wlfv�srgwudf�frp�eorj�wrs����srgfdvwv�dsulo������m�n�\�\�e\s��w�m�� vomqs�fzin� 6xoolydq� -� ������� 3rgfdvw pryhphqw� $vsludwlrqdo oderxu dqg wkh irupdolvdwlrq ri srgfdvwlqj dv d fxowxudo lqgxvwu\� ,q '� /olqduhv� 1� )r[� 5� %huu\ �(gv��� 3rgfdvwlqj� 1hz dxudo fxowxuhv dqg gljlwdo phgld �ss� ��±���� &kdp� 6zlw]huodqg� 3dojudyh 0dfploodq� 6xoolydq� -� ������ 0d\ ��� 7kh sodwirupv ri srgfdvwlqj� 3dvw dqg suhvhqw� 6rfldo 0hgld � 6rflhw\� ����� �±��� :hvweurrn� 5� %� ������� -rkq 'hzh\ dqg $phulfdq ghprfudf\� ,wkdfd� 1<� &ruqhoo 8qlyhuvlw\ 3uhvv� :hvwzrrg 2qh 3rgfdvw 1hwzrun� �������:hvwzrrg 2qh¶v srgfdvw grzqordg � )doo ���� uhsruw� 5hwulhyhg iurp kwwsv���zzz�zhvwzrrgrqh�frp�zs� frqwhqw�xsordgv���������:hvwzrrg�2qhv�3rgfdvw�'rzqordg�)doo������ 5hsruw�sgi 6hohfwhg 3dshuv ri �$r,5����� 7kh ��vw $qqxdo &rqihuhqfh ri wkh $vvrfldwlrq ri ,qwhuqhw 5hvhdufkhuv 'xeolq ,uhodqg � ����� 2fwrehu ���� 0$5.(7 ,1)250$7,21 5(*,0(6 ,1 32'&$67,1*� )250$/,=$7,21 $1' $8',(1&( 0(75,&6 -rkq /� 6xoolydq 0xkohqehuj &roohjh� 86$ 3rgfdvwlqj kdv wkulyhg vlqfh lwv fuhdwlrq lq ���� dv d edvwlrq iru krphjurzq� dpdwhxu phgld surgxfwlrq� 2yhu wkh sdvw whq \hduv� krzhyhu� hqwuhsuhqhxuv dqg ohjdf\ phgld frpsdqlhv kdyh udslgo\ h[sdqghg wkhlu lqwhuhvwv lq srgfdvwlqj� eulqjlqj zlwk wkhp surihvvlrqdo vwdqgdugv dqg wkh orjlfv ri fdslwdo� 7kh duulydo ri srgfdvwlqj lqwr wkh fxowxudo pdlqvwuhdp kdv dwwudfwhg wkh dwwhqwlrq ri pdmru frusrudwlrqv dqg dgyhuwlvhuv� $gyhuwlvhuv kdyh qrw mxpshg lqwr srgfdvwlqj zlwk eolqg idlwk lq wkh frpphufldo srwhqwldo ri wkh phglxp� krzhyhu� 5dwkhu� wkh\ kdyh lqvlvwhg xsrq uholdeoh dxglhqfh phwulfv wr surwhfw wkhlu folhqwv dqg lqyhvwphqwv� 8qwlo uhfhqwo\� krzhyhu� wkhuh zhuh qr vwdqgdugl]hg phdvxuhphqwv ri dxglhqfh h[srvxuh� qru zdv wkhuh ydolgdwlrq ri phwulfv surylghg e\ d wklug�sduw\ �vxfk dv 1lhovhq ru $uelwurq lq eurdgfdvw udglr�� 3rgfdvwlqj kdv zlwqhvvhg d vslulwhg dqg vrphwlphv frqwhqwlrxv ghedwh dprqj gliihuhqw sod\huv zlwklq srgfdvwlqj derxw zklfk phwulfv vkrxog ehfrph wkh vwdqgdug� ru zkhwkhu wkhuh lv dq\ survshfw iru vwdqgdugl]dwlrq� 7khvh ghedwhv xqghuvfruh wkh frqwhvwhg g\qdplfv ri lqgxvwu\ irupdol]dwlrq� )rupdol]dwlrq lq 3rgfdvwlqj 7kh srgfdvwlqj odqgvfdsh kdv ehhq uhvkdshg lq wkh sdvw vhyhudo \hduv e\ dftxlvlwlrqv dqg phujhuv dprqj sod\huv lq wkh lqgxvwu\� 0dmru sodwirup vhuylfhv olnh 6srwli\� 6wlwfkhu� *rrjoh� dqg $ssoh kdyh doo pdgh pryhv wr pruh forvho\ elqg frqvxphuv wr wkhlu sursulhwdu\ vhuylfhv� wkuhdwhqlqj wkh rshq dufklwhfwxuh ri glvwulexwlrq yld 566 �6xoolydq� ������ 7kh sodwirupl]dwlrq dqg lqgxvwu\ frqvrolgdwlrq lv ixholqj zkdw vfkroduv fdoo irupdol]dwlrq� )rupdol]dwlrq ghvfulehv wkh surfhvv e\ zklfk ³phgld v\vwhpv ehfrph surjuhvvlyho\ pruh udwlrqdol]hg� frqvrolgdwhg dqg ilqdqfldoo\ wudqvsduhqw´ �/redwr 7krpdv� ����� s� ���� $q h[dpsoh ri wkh w\sh ri irupdol]dwlrq wdnlqj sodfh ri wkh phglxp fdq eh vhhq lq dxglr jldqw 6srwli\¶v uhfhqw dftxlvlwlrqv ri srgfdvwlqj surgxfwlrq frpsdq\ *lpohw� srgfdvw krvw $qfkru�ip �+x� ������ dqg lwv ���� dftxlvlwlrq ri wkh vsruwv srgfdvw qhwzrun 7kh 5lqjhu �5rehuwvrq 6fkhlehu� ������ � 7udgh frqyhqwlrqv olnh 3rgfdvw 0ryhphqw kdyh dovr hphujhg dv nh\ vrfldol]dwlrq yhqxhv iru lqvwloolqj wkh ydoxhv ri hqwuhsuhqhxulvp lqwr srgfdvw surgxfwlrq �6xoolydq� ������ (phujlqj 0dunhw 5hjlphv lq 3rgfdvwlqj 7kh uhfhqw lqwurgxfwlrq ri vwdqgdugl]hg dxglhqfh phwulf surplvhv wr dffhohudwh wkh irupdol]dwlrq ri srgfdvwlqj� , dujxh lq wklv sdshu wkdw wkh ghyhorsphqw ri dxglhqfh phwulfv iru srgfdvwlqj uhsuhvhqwv wkh hphujhqfh ri d pdunhw lqirupdwlrq uhjlph� $ pdunhw lqirupdwlrq uhjlph� dv frqfhswxdol]hg e\ $qdqg dqg 3hwhuvrq ������ s� ����� lv frpsulvhg ri ³uhjxoduo\ xsgdwhg lqirupdwlrq derxw pdunhw dfwlylw\ surylghg e\ dq lqghshqghqw vxssolhu� suhvhqwhg lq d suhglfwdeoh irupdw zlwk frqvlvwhqw iuhtxhqf\� dqg dydlodeoh wr doo lqwhuhvwhg sduwlhv dw d qrplqdo frvw�´ 7khvh uhjlphv duh vrfldoo\� frqvwuxfwhg phfkdqlvpv wkdw doorz iru sod\huv zlwklq d pdunhwsodfh wr jdxjh frpshwlwlrq� ehqfkpdun wkhlu rzq shuirupdqfh� vhw jrdov� dqg hqjdjh lq pdunhwsodfh vxuyhloodqfh� $v .rvwhulfk dqg 1dsrol ������ s� ���� qrwh� wkh lqirupdwlrq wkdw wkhvh pdunhw uhjlphv surylgh wr phgld fuhdwruv dqg frpsdqlhv ³ehfrphv ixqgdphqwdo wr krz pdunhwsodfh sduwlflsdqwv shufhlyh wkh g\qdplfv ri wkhlu pdunhw� dqg wkxv diihfwv rujdql]dwlrqdo vwudwhj\ dqg ghflvlrq pdnlqj� 7kh\ duh� hvvhqwldoo\� wkh djuhhg xsrq ohqv wkurxjk zklfk pdunhwsodfh sduwlflsdqwv shufhlyh wkhlu zruog�´ /hjdf\ phgld vxfk dv eurdgfdvw whohylvlrq dqg udglr kdyh ilupo\ hvwdeolvkhg pdunhw lqirupdwlrq uhjlphv wkdw vwuhwfk edfn iru ghfdghv lq wkh irup ri dxglhqfh udwlqjv �%x]]dug� ����� :hevwhu hw do�� ������ dowkrxjk wkh lqwurgxfwlrq ri vrfldo phgld dqdo\wlfv �'¶khhu 9hughjhp� ����� .rvwhulfk 1dsrol� ����� dqg rqolqh glvwulexwlrq yld vwuhdplqj sodwirupv �$oh[dqghu� ����� 6whlqehuj� ����� kdyh ehjxq wr glvuxsw wkh vwdwxv txr� , wudfh wkh ghyhorsphqw ri pdunhw lqirupdwlrq uhjlphv lq srgfdvwlqj e\ iluvw rxwolqlqj wkh frqwhvwhg dxglhqfh phwulfv lq wkh plg�����v� %hjlqqlqj dv hduo\ dv ����� surplqhqw srgfdvw krvwlqj frpsdqlhv frpshwhg iru srgfdvwhuv �wkhlu fxvwrphuv� e\ riihulqj lqirupdwlrq derxw wkh qxpehu ri grzqordgv iru hdfk dxglr iloh ± ru hslvrgh ± wkdw zdv krvwhg rq wkhlu vhuyhuv� 7kh ³grzqordg shu hslvrgh´ �'3(� qxpehu ehfdph vrphwklqj ri dq lqgxvwu\ vwdqgdug iru phdvxulqj dxglhqfh vl]h� wkrxjk srgfdvw krvwv ghyhorshg wkhlu rzq sursulhwdu\ phdqv iru phdvxulqj wklv qxpehu� 6srwli\¶v hqwu\ lqwr srgfdvwlqj dv d pdmru vwuhdplqj sodwirup ixuwkhu frpsolfdwhg srgfdvw dxglhqfh phdvxuhphqw e\ lqwurgxflqj qhz phdqv ri dffhvvlqj srgfdvw frqwhqw yld vwuhdplqj ru ³surjuhvvlyh grzqordglqj�´ 7kh vhfrqg vwdjh lq wkh irupdol]dwlrq ri srgfdvw phwulfv zdv eurxjkw derxw lq sduw e\ $ssoh� zklfk ehjdq wr riihu dqrq\pl]hg grzqordg phwulfv wr lqglylgxdo srgfdvwhuv iru iuhh lq ���� �.dind� ������ $ssoh¶v pryh wr surylgh grzqordg vwdwv zdv vljqlilfdqw gxh wr $ssoh¶v fhqwudo uroh dv rqh ri roghvw dqg odujhvw srgfdvw glvwulexwruv� 7kh grzqordg vwdwlvwlfv riihuhg e\ $ssoh jdyh srgfdvwhuv d jolpsvh lqwr wkhlu dxglhqfh� wkrxjk lw zdv olplwhg wr olvwhqhuv dffhvvlqj wkhlu srgfdvwv rq $ssoh ghylfhv ru yld wkh $ssoh 3rgfdvwv $3,� $w wkh vdph wlph� nh\ pdunhw sod\huv lq srgfdvwlqj iruphg d whfkqlfdo zrunlqj jurxs xqghu wkh dxvslfhv ri wkh ,qwhuqhw $gyhuwlvlqj %xuhdx �,$%� wr fuhdwh wkh srgfdvw phdvxuhphqw jxlgholqhv �,qwhudfwlyh $gyhuwlvlqj %xuhdx� ������ :lwk wkh ,$% djuhhlqj � wr ³fhuwli\´ srgfdvw krvwlqj frpsdqlhv iru frpsoldqfh zlwk wkhvh jxlgholqhv� wkh vwdjh zdv vhw iru d ixoo irupdol]dwlrq ri srgfdvw frqvxpswlrq phwulfv� ,q wkh frqfoxvlrq� , dujxh wkdw wkh hphujhqfh ri d pdunhw lqirupdwlrq uhjlph iru srgfdvwlqj vhuyhv wr vwuhdpolqh wkh irupdol]dwlrq ri wkh phglxp dorqj wkh olqhv ri ohjdf\ phgld vxfk dv eurdgfdvw whohylvlrq dqg udglr� 7kh vkliw wrzdug vwdqgdugl]hg phwulfv pd\ dovr ixuwkhu surihvvlrqdol]h wkh phglxp� prylqj lw ixuwkhu dzd\ iurp lwv urrwv lq dpdwhxu frqwhqw� 5hihuhqfhv $oh[dqghu� 1� ������� &dwhuhg wr \rxu ixwxuh vhoi� 1hwiol[¶v µsuhglfwlyh shuvrqdol]dwlrq¶dqg wkh pdwkhpdwl]dwlrq ri wdvwh� ,q .� 0f'rqdog '� 6plwk� 5rzvh\ �(gv��� 7kh 1hwiol[ hiihfw� 7hfkqrorj\ dqg hqwhuwdlqphqw lq wkh ��vw fhqwxu\ �ss� ��±����� %orrpvexu\ $fdghplf� $qdqg� 1�� 3hwhuvrq� 5� $� ������� :khq 0dunhw ,qirupdwlrq &rqvwlwxwhv )lhogv� 6hqvhpdnlqj ri 0dunhwv lq wkh &rpphufldo 0xvlf ,qgxvwu\� 2ujdql]dwlrq 6flhqfh� ������ ���±���� -6725� %x]]dug� .� 6� )� ������� 7kh 5lvh ri 0dunhw ,qirupdwlrq 5hjlphv dqg wkh +lvwrulfdo 'hyhorsphqw ri $xglhqfh 5dwlqjv� +lvwrulfdo -rxuqdo ri )lop� 5dglr 7hohylvlrq� ������ ���±���� kwwsv���grl�ruj������������������������������ '¶khhu� (�� 9hughjhp� 3� ������� :kdw vrfldo phgld gdwd phdq iru dxglhqfh vwxglhv� $ pxowlglphqvlrqdo lqyhvwljdwlrq ri 7zlwwhu xvh gxulqj d fxuuhqw diidluv 79 surjudpph� ,qirupdwlrq� &rppxqlfdwlrq 6rflhw\� ������ ���±���� kwwsv���grl�ruj����������������;������������ +x� &� ������ )heuxdu\ ��� 6srwli\¶v $ftxlvlwlrq ri *lpohw $qfkru 'rhv wr 3rgfdvwv :kdw ,w &dq¶w $iirug wr 'r wr 0xvlf� %looerdug� kwwsv���zzz�elooerdug�frp�duwlfohv�exvlqhvv�vwuhdplqj���������vsrwli\�jlpohw� dqfkru�srgfdvwv�pdunhwsodfh�dqdo\vlv�pxvlf ,qwhudfwlyh $gyhuwlvlqj %xuhdx� ������� ,$% 3rgfdvw 0hdvxuhphqw 7hfkqlfdo *xlgholqhv� 9huvlrq ���� ,$% 7hfk /de� kwwsv���zzz�lde�frp�zs� frqwhqw�xsordgv���������3rgfdvwb0hdvxuhphqwby��)lqdo�'hf�����sgi .dind� 3� ������ 'hfhpehu ���� $ssoh kdv ilqdoo\ wxuqhg rq lwv srgfdvw dqdo\wlfv ihdwxuh� 5hfrgh� kwwsv���zzz�uhfrgh�qhw���������������������dssoh�srgfdvw�ilqg� olvwhqv�grzqordgv�dqdo\wlfv�dydlodeoh .rvwhulfk� $�� 1dsrol� 3� 0� ������� 5hfrqiljxulqj wkh $xglhqfh &rpprglw\� 7kh ,qvwlwxwlrqdol]dwlrq ri 6rfldo 79 $qdo\wlfv dv 0dunhw ,qirupdwlrq 5hjlph� 7hohylvlrq 1hz 0hgld� ������ ���±���� kwwsv���grl�ruj������������������������� � /redwr� 5�� 7krpdv� -� ������� 7kh ,qirupdo 0hgld (frqrp\ �� hglwlrq�� 3rolw\� 5rehuwvrq� .�� 6fkhlehu� 1� ������ )heuxdu\ ��� 6srwli\ ,v %x\lqj 7kh 5lqjhu� 7kh 1hz <run 7lphv� kwwsv���zzz�q\wlphv�frp������������exvlqhvv�phgld�vsrwli\� wkh�ulqjhu�eloo�vlpprqv�kwpo 6whlqehuj� %� ������ 2fwrehu ���� 1lhovhq 6d\v ,w :loo 0hdvxuh $xglhqfhv iru 79 (slvrghv 7kdw 6wuhdp 9ld 1hwiol[� 9dulhw\� kwwsv���ydulhw\�frp������wy�qhzv�qlhovhq�phdvxuhphqw�qhwiol[������������ 6xoolydq� -� /� ������� 3rgfdvw 0ryhphqw� $vsludwlrqdo /derxu dqg wkh )rupdolvdwlrq ri 3rgfdvwlqj dv d &xowxudo ,qgxvwu\� ,q '� /olqduhv� 1� )r[� 5� %huu\ �(gv��� 3rgfdvwlqj� 1hz $xudo &xowxuhv dqg 'ljlwdo 0hgld �ss� ��±���� 3dojudyh 0dfploodq� 6xoolydq� -� /� ������� 7kh 3odwirupv ri 3rgfdvwlqj� 3dvw dqg 3uhvhqw� 6rfldo 0hgld � 6rflhw\� ����� kwwsv���grl�ruj������������������������� :hevwhu� -� *�� 3kdohq� 3� )�� /lfkw\� /� :� ������� 5dwlqjv $qdo\vlv� $xglhqfh 0hdvxuhphqw dqg $qdo\wlfv ��wk hglwlrq�� 5rxwohgjh� selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): storstein spilker, h., reuter, l., aasback, a., dahl-joergensen, t. (2020, october). datafication in the public sector: exploring the borders between public services and citizens. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. datafication in the public sector: exploring the borders between public services and citizens chair hendrik storstein spilker norwegian university of science & technology (ntnu) presenters: lisa reuter ntnu heather broomfield university of oslo anne aasback ntnu tangni dahl-joergensen ntnu. panel description this panel presents on-going research from a large research project on digital infrastructures and citizen participation, with a focus on the datafication of the public sector and the construction of new borders between public services and citizens. in recent years, governments have faced increasing pressures to become datafied or “data-driven” (andrews, 2019; hintz, dencik, & wahl-jorgensen, 2019; maciejewski, 2016). in policy documents, huge expectations are voiced about the possibilities datafication opens for the public sector – spurred and fueled by technological developments within artificial intelligence and big data analytics (oecd, 2015; ooijen, ubaldi, & welby, 2019). a more data-driven public is said to be able to develop a whole new range of services that are envisaged to result in better services, more effective government, more transparency in the public sector, more just service delivery, and the empowerment of citizens. many of the policy documents are marked by a (historically familiar) mixture of neoliberalist optimism and neo-socialist hopes in the power of technological progress. however, lately the work of living up to these expectations has started. our research project examines critically the challenges that arise when the precepts are to be converted into working services. in the project, we ask questions such as: • what kinds of foreseen and unforeseen transformations does the development of new services give rise to? • what kinds of resistance is it facing? • what new forms of expertise, enrollment of new actors, organizational restructuring and redelegation of roles and relations are needed? • how are citizens/clients envisioned and inscribed into the scenarios for future public administration? • how are citizens/clients consulted in the design and development of the services? • how are the new services experienced by citizens/clients? the presentations in this panel are all based on empirical material from fresh case studies from datafication projects in a nordic country. the nordic countries pride themselves on being at the forefront of developing new ways of dealing with their citizens online and on building digital governance structures (oecd, 2017). in that respect, they offer a good window for looking into what at present appears to be advanced datafication. at the same time, the public sector initiatives in these countries display some special features that deserve special interest from the research community. in particular, they exhibit a more bottom-up and in-house approach to datafication and less reliance-standardized packages than what seems to be the case in other countries (even if presentation three shows that this is not the full picture). the three presentations within this panel focus especially on the construction of new relations and interfaces between public administration and citizens. starting with policies and visions, lisa reuter and heather broomfield’s presentation will discuss how policy makers and data workers envision citizen participation and talk about and “construct” the citizen in big data-based public service development and policy documents. anne aasback’s presentation takes a bottom-up perspective, investigating how social welfare workers and their clients are affected by the implementation of a new service tool, the digital activity plan (dap). she discusses the development of new linkages between social workers and clients/citizens resulting from digitalization as well as the emergence of new divisions of labor and digital divides in the field. finally, tangni cunningham dahl-jørgensen’s presentation looks at efforts to actually involve citizens in service development. in the nordic countries, there is a long tradition together with established procedures for user involvement in service design. based on a case study of municipal service design, dahl-jørgensen discusses the possibilities and challenges for real participatory design in datafication projects, given, among other things, its reliance on installed infrastructures and standardized components. in sum, the presentations in this panel span a range of urgent themes related to the construction of borders (and alleys) between public sector services and citizens – from anticipations to effects and efforts. ------ andrews, l. (2019). public administration, public leadership and the construction of public value in the age of the algorithm and ‘big data’. public administration, 97(2), 296310. doi:10.1111/padm.12534 hintz, a., dencik, l., & wahl-jorgensen, k. (2019). digital citizenship in a datafied society. cambridge: polity press. maciejewski, m. (2016). to do more, better, faster and more cheaply: using big data in public administration. international review of administrative sciences, 83(1_suppl), 120-135. doi:10.1177/0020852316640058 oecd (2015). data-driven innovation: big data for growth and well-being. paris: oecd publishing. oecd (2017). digital government review of norway: boosting the digital transformation of the public sector: paris: oecd publishing. ooijen, c. v., ubaldi, b., & welby, b. (2019). a data-driven public sector: enabling the strategic use of data for productive, inclusive and trustworthy governance. oecd working papers on public governance. presentation 1: in search of the citizen in public administration datafication practices (lisa reuter and heather broomfield) the norwegian public sector is undergoing a profound digital transformation. a central pillar of this transformation is the realization of a data-driven government, which, given norway’s advanced digital infrastructures, the oecd has identified as an apparently untapped opportunity. data-driven government aims to place data as a core practice in all aspects of public administration (ooijen, ubaldi, & welby, 2019a). machine learning fed with big government data carries the promise of effectiveness and improved public services. as porter (1995) argues, the increased quantification of public administration appeals especially to bureaucrats, as it lends legitimation to their work, which often lacks the mandate of popular election. however, researchers have identified a variety of shortcomings resulting from the practice of datafication, such as its impenetrable opaqueness, reinforcement of discrimination and facilitation of surveillance (dalton & thatcher, 2014; o'neil, 2016; pasquale, 2015). at the core of this critique is a change in the power dynamic between government and citizen as datafication enhances the possibility to understand, predict and control citizens’ activities (hintz et al., 2019). datafication, as mcquillan (2018) argues, changes the way the citizen is seen by the state, which may have a severe impact on the citizen herself. the opacity so often associated with citizen datafication, invokes the idea of a corporate/government “inside” exercising power and control over a disempowered and unknowing “outside”. the datafied and disempowered citizen has therefore emerged as an important object of investigation for researchers (gabrys, 2019; hintz et al., 2019). changing power dynamics are however often disregarded by public sector actors (redden, 2018). as hintz et al. (2019) point out, datafication is now integrated as a key component of how decisions about citizens are made concerning their social, political, economic, and cultural participation. keeping track of the ongoing datafication of society, determining its potential social implications and finding appropriate social and legal responses have proven to be challenging (kitchin, 2014). taking a practice approach to datafication means situating it within a specific context, focusing on data and algorithms themselves, the institutions that produce them, and the uses to which they are put. this allows the researcher to understand underlying social mechanisms, as well as the imaginaries of agents both working and living with data (dencik, 2020). in other words, the sociotechnical assemblage of data and algorithms is in need of unpacking in all aspects of social life (kitchin, 2017). this research project was initially conducted to map the norwegian public sector’s early work on datafication and is based on a survey answered by 26 public entities, interviews with 12 of these and a document analysis of submissions to the national ai strategy from several public sector actors. its aim was to obtain a general understanding of what is going on in this field, the involved agents’ imaginaries and what challenges the public sector meets on its way toward datafication. focusing on the ways practitioners include and problematize citizen’s perspectives in their work, the presentation critically reflects on the question of citizen agency in public sector datafication. although highly affected by datafication, citizens are rarely given agency by practitioners in their work on datafication. the norwegian public sector enjoys high levels of trust from citizens. first and foremost, citizens are present in the data material as a demanding entity. citizens, most public sector actors and documents argue, have higher expectations of public service delivery and this requires that the public sector entities work on datafication in order to maintain high levels of trust. although most practitioners agree that datafication should be used for “the best of society”, the concerns raised within the public sector rarely address citizens’ perspectives beyond abstract concerns of privacy and transparency. according to practitioners, many ethical concerns relating to datafication are solved through already existing legal frameworks and gdpr. the norwegian public sector’s policy discourse on user-centered digitalization seemed here to be more of a general idea of thinking about the user, rather than involving citizens directly in datafication practices (kommunalog moderniseringsdepartementet, 2019). currently, the norwegian public sector appears fragmented, working on many small-scale projects. however, these small scale projects are changing local centers of power and knowledge (mackenzie, 2017). a lack of overview and problematization of citizen agency may lead to unintended social consequences (redden, 2018). the datafied and disempowered citizen is rarely addressed by the institutions that produce them. only one of the practitioners interviewed recognizes that there are some broader epistemological and political questions that need to be addressed when changing the way citizens are classified and controlled by public administration. the active politicization of algorithms and data and changing power dynamics between citizen and state, this presentation argues, require democratic involvement by citizens beyond abstract accounts of privacy and transparency. dalton, d., & thatcher, j. (2014). what does a critical data studies look like, and why do we care? seven points for a critical approach to ‘big data.’ retrieved from https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/what-does-a-critical-data-studies-look-likeand-why-do-we-care. dencik, l. (2020). situating practices in datafication from above and below. in h. c. stephensen & e. treré (eds.), citizen media and practice : currents, connections, challenges [book]. retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&an=2277788&site=ehos t-live. gabrys, j. (2019). data citizens how to reinvent rights. in b. didier, e. isin, & e. ruppert (eds.), data politics: worlds, subjects, rights (pp. 249-265). hintz, a., dencik, l., & wahl-jorgensen, k. (2019). digital citizenship in a datafied society. cambridge: polity press. kitchin, r. (2014). the data revolution: big data, open data, data infrastructures &amp; their consequences. in. london: sage publications ltd. kitchin, r. (2017). thinking critically about and researching algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 14-29. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154087. kommunalog moderniseringsdepartementet. (2019). en digital offentlig sektor digitaliseringsstrategi for offentlig sektor 2019-2025. oslo retrieved from https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dokumenter/en-digital-offentlig-sektor/id2653874/. mackenzie, a. (2017). machine learners: archeology of a data practice. cambridge. ma: the mit press. mcquillan, d. (2018). data science as machinic neoplatonism. philosophy & technology, 31(2), 253-272. doi:10.1007/s13347-017-0273-3. o'neil, c. (2016). weapons of math destruction : how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. london: allen lane. ooijen, c. v., ubaldi, b., & welby, b. (2019). a data-driven public sector: enabling the strategic use of data for productive, inclusive and trustworthy governance. oecd working papers on public governance. pasquale, f. (2015). the black box society: the secret algorithms that control money and information: harvard university press. redden, j. (2018). democratic governance in an age of datafication: lessons from mapping government discourses and practices. 5(2), 2053951718809145. doi:10.1177/2053951718809145 presentation 2: linking digital citizens and social workers: a case study of digital activity plan in the norwegian welfare and labor administration (anne w. aasback) since the 80s different kinds of system management tools have been in use to help organize field notes, keep track of clients, and support case management in social services. computer systems in the past have been artifacts used in relation to administrative tasks and outside communication with service users. today this picture is changing. new digital platforms where social workers can interact with clients are developed constantly in different areas of social work (granholm, 2016; hansen, lundberg, & syltevik, 2018; lamendola, 2019; lindgren, madsen, hofmann, & melin, 2019). the nordic countries pride themselves on being at the forefront of developing new ways of dealing with their citizens online and on building digital governance structures (oecd, 2017). hansen et al. (2018) have conducted one of the few studies that investigate how welfare users experience digitalization in norway. they claim that “digital competence combined with life circumstances appears to be the source of a new divide between welfare service users”. this shows a kind of digital inequality that differs from the old idea of a digital divide between those who could and could not access digital technologies. also, it points to the need for new forms of competencies and the development of new linkages between social workers and clients/citizens resulting from digitalization. in this presentation the new role as a “digital citizen” in the norwegian welfare and labor administration (nav) and the expectations related to it will be further investigated. nav has established several ways of interacting with users online. digital application processes and case management systems are developed to promote effectiveness. automated solutions try to prioritize clients labeled by the systems’ algorithms to need more thorough guidance and support to be accepted into the labor marked. the rapid development of digital services aims to relieve employees of bureaucratic chores related to giving information and handling benefits cases. the primary argument for digitalization is the need to strengthen the function of activation and work inclusion of vulnerable and marginalized groups into the labor market this demonstrates how digital welfare state technologies reflect political choices. to free time for social workers to help clients in complex life situations is another important argument for making effective digital solutions to lessen the paper handling part of their job. in parallel to the drive toward digital contact with the citizens, local offices have reduced opening hours and limited opportunities for getting help without an appointment. clients of all categories are expected to contribute by using digital solutions when applying for benefits or asking questions of their designated case handler or counselor which is the official term in nav. this presentation is based on a case study of the digital activity plan (dap). dap is one of the new digital tools available for clients and employees of nav. it’s a platform that is meant to facilitate communication between clients and their counselors. dap replaces the former activity plan which was written by the counselor in the internal computer system, and then printed and mailed to the client to sign. in this way dap is supposed to promote the client’s possibilities for participation. in central documents describing dap, encouraging active clients to take ownership of their plan is emphasized. accessing the plan digitally also makes it possible for clients to access the data registered about themselves and comment when they disagree, which is considered central to the protection of their legal rights. while the clients enter dap through nav’s webpage, counselors have access through their computer systems; but the functions they access are the same. through a chatlike function called “the dialogue” both counselors and clients can start conversations on self-chosen topics related to their collaboration. by encouraging the setting of individual goals and the definition of activities necessary to achieve the goals dap aims to assist the client towards inclusion into the labor marked. “activity cards” that describe job seeking efforts or tasks necessary for becoming an employable citizen can be created by both counselor and client. the cards cover a range of different events and actions like medical treatments, activation programs, job seeking efforts, health fitness activities, or educational programs. some of the cards are standardized, but the plan is supposed to be tailored to each individual client’s needs. employees at local nav offices are street-level-bureaucrats who are supposed to function as gatekeepers for social benefits as well as to motivate job-seekers in their struggles to enter the job market. this tension between help and control is characteristic of social work as a profession. the two concepts are intertwined and interdependent in social work practice. the digital platform where they interact with their clients is supposed to help them maneuver in this space. on the one hand, dap is supposed to enable a helping process that empowers the client and makes interaction accessible and easy. on the other hand, dap acts as a contract between nav and the client and violating this contract can have financial consequences for clients relying on benefits. how do clients negotiate between expectations embedded in data structures that are supposed to be empowering and at the same time serve as a control mechanism? this is one of the questions that will be discussed further in the presentation. other questions are: in what ways do counselors’ roles change as a result of the introduction of dap? what kind of skills is the “digital citizen” supposed to have according to the social workers? and how do the clients perceive themselves regarding “being digital”? the main sources of data for this case study consist of field notes from ethnographic observations at nav offices, together with interviews of clients, and counselors, as well as central documents. findings show that the introduction of dap as a platform for communication changes the roles for both employees and clients in nav. the clients meet changed expectations on how to report and communicate with nav, while the counselors experience changes in the way they organize their work as a lot of the communication is moved from a face-to face or telephone context to the digital platform. granholm, c. p. (2016). social work in digital transfer blending services for the next generation. (ph.d. dissertation), university of helsinki, retrieved from https://helda.helsinki.fi//bitstream/handle/10138/231820/granholmslutlig210316.pdf?se quence=1. hansen, h. t., lundberg, k., & syltevik, l. j. (2018). digitalization, street-level bureaucracy and welfare users' experiences. social policy administration, 52(1), 67-90. lamendola, w. (2019). social work, social technologies, and sustainable community development. journal of technology in human services, 37(2-3), 79-92. retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/15228835.2018.1552905. doi:10.1080/15228835.2018.1552905. lindgren, i., madsen, c. ø., hofmann, s., & melin, u. (2019). close encounters of the digital kind: a research agenda for the digitalization of public services. government information quarterly. oecd (2017). digital government review of norway: boosting the digital transformation of the public sector: paris: oecd publishing. presentation 3: platformization of the public sector: assessing the scope for user participation in municipal design processes (tangni cunningham dahljørgensen) digitalization processes are emerging as a promising avenue to elicit citizen participation in large-scale platforms in the public sector. however, platformization efforts call for deeper insight into how they shape the opportunity for citizen involvement in decision-making in system design. based on an ongoing exploratory study of the early-stage development of a digital platform in a norwegian municipality, we have identified three core challenges to participation via platformization processes: the experts’ views on participation, the existing governance and technical infrastructure, and scaling up efforts. in this presentation, we posit how these core challenges impact the scope of participation. during the past decade, digital platforms are evolving as tools for innovation by prompting external stakeholders, such as users and app developers, to innovate based on a set of shared resources (tiwana, 2014). given the proliferation of this development, platformization is increasingly used to describe the emergence of the platform model over time at the organizational and technical level (plantin et al., 2016). many digital platforms are owned by large it companies with subsidiaries creating applications or add-ons that adhere to certain specifications set by the platform owners (tiwana, 2014). interestingly, platformization processes are increasingly prevalent in the public sector as well. as a result, public organizations are becoming not only users, but also designers and providers of digital platforms that emerge as common goods aimed at offering a variety of services to the public (vassilakopoulou et al., 2017). platformization processes in the public sector have particular characteristics due to the regulations and structures to which public organizations must adhere. however, it is common for parts of the public sector to incorporate platform services created by large private companies such as google or facebook (plantin et al., 2016; van dijck, poell, and de waal, 2018). platformization processes in the public sector therefore impact the inclusion of citizens and civic participation. in particular, they shape how citizens and publics can engage with democratic processes of decision making in the public sphere (plantin and punathambekar, 2018). in this study, i draw on participatory design (pd) as a way of understanding citizen participation in municipal platformization processes. established in scandinavia in the 70s and 80s, pd has been an influential method for carrying out both research and design with its focus on empowering the users who will be affected by the product designed (simonsen and robertson, 2013; spinuzzi, 2005). a central tenet of pd is participation of end users throughout a process, from planning to implementation, as a co-designer or co-researcher a way of integrating stakeholders which has been called ‘genuine participation’ (kensing and greenbaum, 2013). the creation of choices while facilitating the participation of citizens in the public sector is central to the pd agenda (björgvinsson, ehn, and hillgren, 2012; clement, mcphail, smith, and ferenbok, 2012). decisions over available choices connect in decision linkages that express the relationship between decisions (bratteteig and wagner, 2016). as such, decisions cannot be seen as separate. decisions made in the design phase predetermine the scope for subsequent participation in decision-making, and thus which design activities are pertinent. in particular, i look at participation by exploring the decision linkages that are created through the opening and closing of choices “that users participate in as co-producers of design ideas and as ‘evaluators’" (ibid, p. 427). in this presentation, i analyze an early stage platformization process in a specific branch of the public sector, municipalities, which are caught in a tension between a vast array of citizen needs on the one hand and strict governance and funding structures on the other. i consider how platformization and the installed base in digitalization projects impact the scope for citizen participation in a municipality in norway. based on the results of an exploratory case study of a digitalization process, the overarching research question is: what are the implications of platformization processes on citizen participation in the public sector? based on data collection and deductive-inductive analysis (tjora, 2019) of 5 interviews and 4 meeting observations with municipality employees, three challenges emerged that characterize municipality digitalization projects in the era of platformization and their influence on participation. these were: 1) the employee’s views regarding citizen participation: in terms of decision linkages, how participation is understood and enabled shapes the quality of how participation is performed in practice. 2) the role of governance and technical infrastructures: lock-in mechanisms when acquiring software systems or applications from private, and often global, companies constrain the spaces of possibilities for participation. 3) opportunities for scaling up: scaling-up processes make participation hard to trace, thus making learning and follow-up efforts difficult. for future studies on the scope for citizen participation, there is a need for an analytical framework to follow decision linkages in the public sector in terms of participation, while assessing the impact of the existing infrastructure, i.e. governmental constraints, technical limitations, and issues raised by the relationship between global platform owners and public clients. björgvinsson, e. ehn, p. and hillgren, p.a. (2012). agonistic participatory design: working with marginalised social movements, in codesign (8:2–3), 127–144. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2012.672577 bratteteig, t. and wagner, i. (2016) unpacking the notion of participation in participatory design. computer supported cooperative work (cscw) 2016 25:425-475 clement, a.; mcphail, b. smith, k.l. and ferenbok. j (2012). probing, mocking and prototyping: participatory approaches to identity infrastructuring, in proceedings of the 12th participatory design conference: research papers, vol. 1 new york, ny, usa: acm, pp. 21–30. https://doi.org/10.1145/2347635.2347639 kensing, f. and greenbaum, j. (2013) heritage. in simonsen, j., and robertson, t. routledge international handbook of participatory design. routledge, new york. plantin, j.c.; lagoze, c.; edwards, p.n. and sandvig, c. (2016) infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook. new media society 1-18. issn 1461-4448, pp. 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553 plantin, j.c and punathambekar, a. (2018). digital media infrastructures: pipes, platforms, and politics. in media, culture & society, 41(2), (december 2018) 163–174. simonsen, j. and robertson, t. international handbook of participatory design (2012). london/new york: routledge. spinuzzi, c. (2005) the methodology of participatory design. in technical communication, vol. 52, pp. 163-174. tiwana, a. (2014) platform ecosystems: aligning architecture, governance, and strategy. amsterdam, morgan kaufmann publishers. tjora, a. (2018) qualitative research as stepwise-deductive induction, london: routledge advances in research methods, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203730072 van dijck, poell, t. and de waal, m. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford university press. vassilakopoulou, p; grisot, m.; jensen, t.b.; sellberg, n.; eltes, j.; thorseng, a. and aanestad, m. (2017). building national ehealth platforms: the challenge of inclusiveness. in icis 2017 proceedings. https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2017/digitalplatforms/presentations/11 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 the appropriation of privacy: policies and practices of everyday technology use jan fernback undrah baasanjav temple university usa fernback@temple.edu michael zimmer university of wisconsin – milwaukee usa zimmerm@uwm.edu kelly quinn university of illinois at chicago usa kquinn8@uic.edu alice marwick fordham university usa amarwick@fordham.edu abstract privacy is a complex concept involving dimensions of access and control of shared information, expectations of intended audience, and appreciation of the context in which a communication takes place. as new technologies are introduced and become ubiquitous, they intersect with influences of culture and experience to influence and appropriate privacy’s interpretation and meaning. this panel will explore how conceptions of privacy are shaped and understood by examining the implications that everyday technologies, and the policies and practices embodied therein, hold for the realization of privacy goals. culture, mobility and utility of new media forms challenge the conception and construction of privacy in these multiple contexts, and these in turn seize and shape our sociability and interactions with others. intensely cultural, conceptions of privacy highlight the dialectical tensions between public/private and individual/community. cultural conceptions of privacy inform, are reproduced and embodied in societal norms and political frameworks, and not only impact the individual in physical ways, but also as the body is digitized in communicative acts. our first presenter will present findings of how mass media in china reproduce the ideological individual/community tensions that surface through the use of human flesh search engines, and how this is embodied in policy and political frameworks. without clear privacy laws, the chinese state may easily appropriate the concept of privacy away from the legal terrain of information control or human dignity and toward individual selfishness and shame. our second presenter will introduce the emerging infrastructures of augmented mobility technologies, and critically interrogate their impact on conceptions – and expectations – of privacy in our infosphere. emerging augmented mobility platforms are wearable devices that promise to provide new ways of conceiving of our world through the layering of locational information and real-time informational objects onto a physical environment. location-aware mobile internet applications provide new layers of information to aid in navigation, decision-making, and social interactions. but they also require widespread tracking, collecting, and aggregating of users’ precise locations, and the sharing of that locational data with third parties, creating the potential for panoptical surveillance and a reengineering of reality that carries ontological consequences. the contextual nature of privacy reinforces an understanding that disclosure contexts and intended audiences are meaningful and relevant. traditional mechanisms for privacy regulation are challenged by the characteristics of social media, as disclosure is more permanent, sharable and searchable. as these technologies become more ubiquitous and approach near-invisibility in everyday life, understanding the tension between their use and privacy regulation processes becomes more critical. our third presenter will explore how the utility of social media forms relates to privacy enactment by examining the perceived privacy/sociability trade off. by examining the intersection of sociability and privacy practices among social media users at varying ages we are provided insight into how the utility of these media challenges the conception and understanding of privacy in everyday life. finally, our fourth presenter will examine the complicated relationship between anonymity and privacy by undertaking a legal and policy analysis of ‘doxxing,’ or public shaming. recently, in response to online sexist and misogynist speech acts, there has been a series of compromises to online anonymity intended to make an offending individual accountable for their actions. but while public shaming may seem to be an effective solution to those who engage in sexist or racist speech acts, it can just as easily be used to further hateful attitudes towards marginalized groups. this presentation will demonstrate how regulating hate speech may not only hold the possibility for negative consequences for online privacy, but also for desired speech such as activism and protest. by examining privacy and privacy goals through the complex and varied perspectives of technological contexts, practices, and policies, this panel attempts to contribute to our understandings of how privacy is enacted, selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 understood and potentially appropriated in everyday contexts. in doing so, we hope to enhance and refine our understanding of privacy as a desirable and valued outcome. keywords privacy, surveillance, social media, policy, sociability license this article is ©2013 by the authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 human flesh search engine: a discourse of information privacy jan fernback temple university usa fernback@temple.edu undrah baasanjav temple university usa undrah@temple.edu abstract this study compares u.s. and chinese news discourses surrounding information privacy policies in relation to the human flesh search engine phenomenon using articles in major print media outlets. human flesh search engines are a form of crowd sourcing in which thousands of internet users research a phenomenon through social media. despite its benefits in coordinating resources during the 2008 chinese earthquakes, hfse has become controversial due to perceived violations of privacy by the crowd. using critical discourse analysis, the study finds that international news coverage of hfse characterizes it as a form of state sponsored vigilantism whereby individual privacy is not only violated, it is all but ignored. implications focus on the reproduction of chinese collectivist ideology and the lack of regulation surrounding information privacy. keywords privacy; china; social media; critical discourse background: human flesh search, ideology, and privacy this work addresses the conference theme through an examination of the reconfiguration of sociolegal-technical practices occurring in the midst of ideological transformations in china. the paper explores the culturally fluid notions of information privacy in connection with the “human flesh search engine” phenomenon. hfse is a form of crowd sourcing in which thousands of internet users research a phenomenon through social media (chen & sharma, 2011; cheong & gong, 2010; herold 2011; wang et al., 2009). it is characterized by both the offline involvement and voluntary activism of internet users, and has also been used to identify people in videos or in photos (wang, et al., 2010). chinese social networking sites such as mop.com, xitek.com, tianya.cn, and sina.com.cn have become collaborative arenas for thousands who search for and share information. however, legal scholars have begun to address information privacy implications surrounding hfs within the context of a transforming political system with emerging privacy law structures. the consolidation of power by the state in authoritarian regimes takes a new turn with possibilities enabled by the internet (mansell, 2004; morozov, 2011). as an example, the chinese government has been crowdsourcing censorship by paying netizens to post pro-government comments online and to report on antisocial web cites through hfs (morozov, 2011). these practices have resulted in a form of offline vigilantism that subjects the citizenry to exposure of personally identifiable information and raises privacy concerns. consequences of exposure via hfs have included public shaming, loss of employment, and forced relocation (ong, 2012). these questions of human dignity illustrate the tension between privacy rights and rights to free expression. in the united states, these rights are ideally balanced in court cases, however, chinese privacy law is underdeveloped and linked, ideologically, to traditional collective values. privacy law and policy and method although privacy is a human right according to the united nations’ universal declaration of human rights (1948), personal information protection in china is generally not legislated within the context of personal privacy. chinese communal culture attaches a pejorative connotation to the concept of privacy as something self-absorbed or illegitimate (maisog, 2009; wang, 2011). indeed, the chinese “culture of shame” elucidated by confucius has found its way into the general principles of civil law as a means for connecting human dignity, privacy, and reputation. chinese courts have linked privacy selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 breaches to defamation law since such breaches damage an individual’s reputation – a potentially shameful consequence in a communal culture (ong, 2012). as in u.s. law, chinese privacy rights conflict with rights to free expression (wang, 2011). in ancient chinese culture, the concept of privacy attached to social interests or governmental authority as opposed to individual rights, and civil disputes were generally handled in secret (wang, 2011). nevertheless, the concept of privacy developed as an outgrowth of confucian moralism, similar to the western notion of natural law (wang, 2011). with the expansion of economic and technological markets in china and the attendant economic prosperity, the pursuit of individual wealth is more acceptable in chinese culture. with that pursuit comes an interest in individual rights, particularly as chinese citizens become exposed to western values regarding individual freedom. the phrase “this is my privacy” characterizes desires by contemporary chinese citizens to deflect intrusions into personal matters (lü, 2005; wang, 2011). critical discourse analysis (cda) is used in this research to explore news discourses on human flesh search as they relate to privacy and surveillance in the u.s. and china. discourse analysis is used to clarify the presumable connections between texts, discursive tactics, and sociocultural realities (fairclough, 1995) with regard to nascent privacy law, the hfs phenomenon, and chinese political ideology. specifically, the study addresses how hfs is characterized in terms of information privacy in major news outlets and the ideological, legal, and cultural contexts that may clarify these characterizations. the study analyzed total of 23 news articles coming from china daily and the international herald tribune (tiht). china daily is the most prominent english-language national daily newspaper on chinese society, and tiht, the global edition of the new york times, contains extensive international news reporting. discussion and conclusion three themes became apparent in the analysis: 1) hfs and individual rights, 2) the power of the crowd and 3) transparency. these themes illustrate an ideological bent in chinese press coverage of hfs that upholds traditional cultural values regarding shame and privacy couched within an apparent embrace of western notions of free expression and individual rights. the limited mediated discourse on information privacy in a legal or cultural context reflects both the indeterminate and inchoate nature of privacy law in rapidly changing china. current chinese data privacy law does not specify limits upon private information disclosure by non-governmental groups. nor does it consider the immediate, viral and irremovable nature of information online. china daily coverage of hfs shows that chinese courts neither address privacy concerns nor delineate circumstances under which the right to privacy and the right to reputation are protected. thus, chinese legal claimants rarely seek remedies for privacy violation; instead they sue for damage to reputation. china daily discourse indicates how power is co-produced by an elite who maintains the status quo by means including the crowdsourcing of censorship and dismissing local level government officials, and through netizens, who act in the government interest and denigrate others for various reasons of nationalism, financial benefits or simply entertainment. without well developed privacy laws, the state can easily advance positions against information privacy within a legal framework as an individual right and within an ethical framework as an aspect of human dignity. through its discourse of transparency, tiht associates the hfse phenomenon with the “tyranny of the masses” rather than a potential issue of privacy law. the suffusion of china’s historical past into hfs reports suggests an ideology that continues to associate privacy with self-absorption and shame. thus, newer conceptualizations of privacy that link it to dignity and human rights can be shunted aside, and public discourse about hfs, and concomitantly internet freedom, continues to be coupled with salacious human behavior (shaming, ostracization) and government manipulation of netizens. overall, news discourses of privacy surrounding hfs do not reflect new developments in chinese law that define information privacy and seek some basic protections. perhaps more importantly, these news discourses center on vigilantism, salaciousness, and so-called free expression. the safeguarding selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 of individual rights is a secondary discourse in the coverage of hfs, but privacy rights have not been characterized as an element within the sphere of state power. references chen, r. & sharma, s. k. (2011). human flesh search facts and issues. journal of information privacy & security, 7(1), 50-72. cheong, p.h. & gong, j. (2010). cyber vigilantism, transmedia collective intelligence, and civic participation. chinese journal of communication, 3(4), 471-487. cho, h., rivera-sánchez, m. & lim, s.s. (2009). a multinational study on online privacy: global concerns and local responses. new media and society, 11 (3). 395–416. doi: 10.1177/1461444808101618 cohen, j. (2012). configuring the networked self: law, code, and the play of everyday practice. new haven: yale university. fairclough, n. (1995). media discourse. london: edward arnold. herold, d. k. (2011). human flesh search engine: carnivalesque riots as components of a “chinese democracy.” in d. k. herold & p. marolt (eds.), online society in china: creating, celebrating, and instrumentalising the online carnival (pp. 127-145). abingdon, oxon: routledge. lü, y. h. (2005). privacy and data privacy issues in contemporary china. ethics and information technology 7, 7–15. doi 10.1007/s10676-005-0456-y maisog, m.e. (2009). personal information protection in china. beijing, china: hunton & williams llp. retrieved jan 15, 2013 from http://www.huntonfiles.com/files/webupload/privacylaw_personal_information_protection_i n_china.pdf mansell, r. (2004). political economy, power and new media. new media and society, 6 (1). 96–105. morozov, e. (2011). the net delusion: the dark side of internet freedom. nyc: public affairs. ong, r. (2012). online vigilante justice chinese style and privacy in china. information & communications technology law, 21(2), 127-145. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13600834.2012.678653 united nations. (1948). universal declaration of human rights. retrieved jan 28, 2013 from http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml wang, b., hou, b. yao, y. & laibin, y. (2009). human flesh search model: incorporating network expansion and gossip with feedback. proceedings of the distributed simulation and real time applications. singapore, 82-88. doi:10.1109/ds-rt.2009.36 wang, f.y., zeng, d., hendler, j. a., zhang, q., feng z., gao, y. , wang, h. & lai, g. (2010). a study of the human flesh search engine: crowd-powered expansion of online knowledge. computer (ieee computer society), 43(8), 45-53. doi:10.1109/mc.2010.216 wang, h. (2011). protecting privacy in china. berlin: springer-verlag. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 6 privacy and augmented mobility michael zimmer university of wisconsin – milwaukee usa zimmerm@uwm.edu abstract the emergence of augmented mobility technologies brings forth profound transformations and challenging problems for our contemporary information society, particularly regarding privacy and surveillance. locationaware mobile internet applications provide new layers of information to aid in navigation, decision-making, and social interactions. but they also require widespread tracking, collecting, and aggregating of users’ precise locations, and the sharing of that locational data with third parties, creating the potential for panoptical surveillance. and while augmented reality mobile applications help us, for example, recognize places and faces, and interact with our physical world armed with layers of information not otherwise accessible, they also can lead to privacy-invading facial recognition tools, and give content providers new ability to regulate and rationalize how we understand our world through the control of the information layers presented. this paper will introduce emerging infrastructures of augmented mobility technologies, and critically interrogate their impact on conceptions – and expectations – of privacy in our infosphere. keywords privacy; augmented mobility; augmented reality; surveillance; ethics augmented mobility we increasingly are living in what the information philosopher luciano floridi (2007) describes as an “infosphere.” a neologism of “information” and “biosphere,” floridi’s concept of the infosphere denotes our whole informational environment. more than just an “information society” or even the set of networked domains commonly referred to as “cyberspace,” the infosphere is an environment that includes all information spaces and interactions, online and off, digital and analog. conceptualizing our surroundings as an infosphere recognizes how information is increasingly enveloping our environment – information is becoming our ecosystem – and where, as floridi puts it, “the threshold between here (analog, carbonbased, offline) and there (digital, silicon-based, online) is fast becoming blurred” (p. 61). this blurring is perhaps most visible when we consider the recent emergence of advanced mobile technological infrastructures providing new information layers in multiple domains of everyday life. these include three categories of particularly innovative technological platforms: location-aware mobile internet applications, augmented-reality mobile applications, and the convergence of these within wearable augmented reality devices. location-aware mobile internet applications represent a growing set of mobile software tools developed for handheld devices such as personal digital assistants, tablet computers, and smartphones, that deliver new layers of information to users in real-time based on their physical location. application developers employ gps, cellphone infrastructures, or wireless access points to identify where devices are located, and users can choose to share that information with location-aware applications. those applications can then provide users with resources such as a “you are here” marker on a city map, reviews for restaurants in the area (yelp), a nap alarm that’s triggered by your specific stop on a commuter train, or notices about nearby bottlenecks in traffic. applications might also report a user’s location to friends in a social network, prompting those nearby to meet for coffee or dinner, or simply provide relevant advertising based on a user’s present geographic location. this growing category of mobile internet applications provides enhanced environmental awareness, offering users a location-based layer of information to guide their daily activities and interactions. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 7 augmented-reality mobile applications integrate layers of digital information or imagery within a live, real-world physical encounter typically viewed from a smartphone camera and display (parr, 2009). while location-aware applications provide layers of geographic information on artificial displays, augmented-reality layers informational objects onto a physical environment in real-time, allowing users to see supplementary information to aid their perception of the real world and to interact with it. examples include layar, which overlays information from wikipedia, yelp, and other sources on top of live camera images of your current location, augmented id, which identifies a person’s face and overlays her social networking profile information on a smartphone’s display while looking at the individual, and augmented driving applications that provide real-time detection and identification of vehicles and obstacles to assist with driving and vehicle safety. the combination of large-display smartphones and high-speed mobile internet service continue to push the development of these highly innovative and helpful applications. wearable augmented reality devices represent the latest technological evolution of augmented mobility, where the user interface and display of new informational layers becomes more integrated with the user. while the augmented-mobility applications described above typically rely on the presence of a smartphone or similar external device held by a user, wearable augmented reality devices bring the technology one step closer to the body, provide a more transparent and effortless interface for providing real-time layers of information to users. in early versions, augmented reality technology involved specialized equipment such as goggles or head-mounted displays, and depended on bulky computers tethered to or carried by users. miniaturization of processors, sensors, and battery technologies has helped refine these systems and make them more consumer-friendly, such as the vuzix wrap 920ar augmented reality glasses (webb, 2010) which provide rudimentary 3d imaging through (still somewhat bulky) glasses-mounted stereoscopic cameras that can seamlessly blend computer-generated imagery with what the user “sees.” more advanced prototypes show the great potential of wearable augmented reality devices. examples include the (still experimental) sixthsense gestural interface, which projects an information layer onto objects the user interacts with without need of special glasses or displays (pogue, 2009), and the much-anticipated “glass project” from google, which has the potential to augment informationseeking, navigation, and personal interaction through voice-controls and displaying layers of information to users in an unobtrusive heads up display on a small eyeglass frame (gannes, 2012). taken together, location-aware mobile internet applications and augmented reality mobile applications, and wearable augmented mobility devices strive to provide new information layers for our mobile lives, promising to deliver information not otherwise accessible, combining real and informational objects interactively and seamlessly to provide augmented means of exploration, learning, and social interaction. their continued development and deployment are fostering the emergence of new augmented mobility platforms, which increasingly define our infosphere and how we exist within it. privacy and augmented mobility when floridi (2007) ponders the impact of new information technologies and infrastructures on our infosphere, he speaks of the “reontologization of our environment and of ourselves” (p. 62). this reontologizing refers to a very radical form of reengineering, one that not only designs, constructs, or structures a system anew, but that fundamentally transforms its intrinsic nature. reontologizing is about the ontological consequences of the reengineering of reality that happens through converging technologies. emerging augmented mobility platforms are information-rich, constant, and all-encompassing technologies that promise to provide new ways of conceiving of our world: locational information presents new layers of meaning and possibilities of action; augmented realities provide entirely new selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 8 interfaces and means of interacting with our environments; wearable devices remove the sense of mediation and present informational layers as an increasing natural part of our environment. in this sense, augmented mobility technologies are not merely providing new information layers – not merely reengineering how we interface with our reality – but actually reontologizing our environment, our infosphere. as floridi {%floridi, 2007, #4655} explains: the infosphere will not be a virtual environment supported by a genuinely “material” world behind; rather, it will be the world itself that will be increasingly interpreted and understood informationally, as part of the infosphere. (p. 61) the consequences of this reontologization of our infosphere by augmented mobility technologies are both positive and negative, enhancing and threatening. in his writing about “everyware,” a paradigmatic conception of the emergence of ubiquitous and pervasive computing, adam greenfield (2006) warns of the duplicitous effects of these emergent technologies. on the one hand, the appeal of all this is easy to understand. who wouldn’t desire a technology that promised to smooth the edges of modern life, subtly intervene on our behalf to guide us when we’re lost, and remind us of the things we’ve forgotten? …the vision is a lovely one: deeply human, even compassionate. (p. 2) but at the same time, greenfield warns, [we] will have to reckon with the emergent aspects of our encounter with everyware, with all the ways in which its impact turns out to the something unforeseeably more than the sum of its parts. …[e]veryware will surface and make explicit facts about our world that perhaps we would be happier ignoring. in countless ways, it will disturb unwritten agreements about workspace and homespace, and the presentation of self and the right to privacy. it contains an inherent, unsettling potential for panoptical surveillance, regulation, and “rationalization.” its presence in our lives will transfigure our notions of space and time, self and other, citizen and society in ways that we haven’t begun to contemplate. (pp. 2-3) greenfield’s concern over the dual risks and rewards of the ubiquitous computers that make up his “everyware” are equally present when considering the reontologizing effects of ubiquitous mobility technologies in the infosphere. location-aware mobile internet applications provide new layers of information to aid in navigation, decision-making, and social interactions. but they also require widespread tracking, collecting, and aggregating of users’ precise locations, and the sharing of that locational data with third parties, creating the “unsettling potential for panoptical surveillance” greenfield warns us of. and augmented reality mobile applications help us, for example, recognize places and faces, and interact with our physical world armed with layers of information not otherwise accessible. but they also can lead to privacy-invading facial recognition tools, and give content providers new ability to regulate and rationalize how we understand our world through the control of the information layers presented. following greenfields concerns, this paper will introduce emerging infrastructures of augmented mobility technologies, and critically interrogate their impact on conceptions – and expectations – of privacy in our infosphere. references floridi, l. (2007). a look into the future impact of ict on our lives. the information society, 23(1), 59–64. gannes, l. (2012). google unveils project glass: wearable augmented-reality glasses. allthingsd. retrieved from http://allthingsd.com/20120404/google-unveils-project-glass-wearable-augmented-reality-glasses/ greenfield, a. (2006). everyware: the dawning age of ubiquitous computing. berkeley, ca: new riders publishing. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 9 parr, b. (2009). top 6 augmented reality mobile apps. mashable.com. retrieved from http://mashable.com/2009/08/19/augmented-reality-apps/ pogue, d. (2009). at ted, virtual worlds collide with reality. new york times pogue’s posts. retrieved from http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/at-ted-virtual-worlds-collide-with-reality/ webb, m. (2010). vuzix display wrap 920ar augmented reality glasses. gizmag. retrieved from http://www.gizmag.com/vuzix-wrap-920ar-augmented-reality-glasses/13847/ license this article is ©2013 michael zimmer, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 10 the big share: reconciling sociability and privacy in social media use kelly quinn university of illinois at chicago usa kquinn8@uic.edu abstract the contradiction between the stated preferences of social media users toward privacy and actual privacy behaviors has suggested a willingness to trade privacy regulation for social goals. this study employs data from a survey of approximately 350 social media users which collected data on privacy attitudes, online privacy strategies and behaviors, and perceptions of the utility that social media experiences bring. this research enhances the understanding of the contextual dimensions privacy regulation processes by examining how individuals perceive the relationship between sociality and privacy in social media use, how these relate to gratifications derived from social media engagement, and how differences may surface among users at varying points in life. this study lends greater nuance to how the dynamic of privacy and sociality is understood and enacted by users, and how privacy and social goals may intersect at varying points in life. keywords privacy; sociality; social media; life course; background the use of social media has moved from normal into ubiquitous, with 67% of all us adults using social network sites today and significantly higher levels of use evident among young adults and females (duggan and brenner, 2013). yet these technologies continue to challenge the mechanisms for control and access to private information, as established mechanisms of boundary maintenance in everyday life— discriminatory communication with defined groups of others or selective disclosure of information—are not easily accomplished when using these platforms. as the use of these technologies move toward invisibility because of their mundane nature, it becomes critical to understand how they relate to core values and ideals such as the ability to regulate privacy in everyday life. research on internet and social media users has demonstrated that while individuals have strong concerns about their privacy online (buchanan, paine and joinson, 2007; young and quan-hasse, 2009), they do not understand and/or do not engage privacy controls to contain disclosure (debatin, lovejoy, horn and hughes, 2009; tufecki, 2008), do not read privacy policies when registering on a website (milne & culnan, 2004), and disclose sensitive information (strater and lipford, 2008). there is often a mismatch between users’ stated preferences and actual behaviors, as online actions and disclosures do not correspond to users level of apprehension regarding privacy (acquisti and gross, 2006; ahern, et al., 2007; debatin, et al., 2009; fogel and nehmad, 2008; tufecki, 2008; stutzman, capra and thompson, 2011). this presents a contradiction between privacy preferences and privacy behaviors that has puzzled researchers. one perspective on this paradox is that realization of the social capital benefits of participation in social network sites requires a perceived need to exchange personal information (ellison, vitak, steinfeld, gray and lampe, 2011). others indicate that the risk of disclosure is mitigated by the convenience that social network sites offer for relational management (krasnova, spiekermann, koroleva and hildebrand, 2010). while this research is an important step in understanding the tradeoffs users make between privacy regulation and social goals, these studies have concentrated on populations of young adult social media users. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 11 younger adults use the internet for building and maintaining interpersonal relationships more than midlife and older adults (thayer and ray, 2006; zickuhr and madden, 2012) and younger and older users experience different motivations and usage patterns when using social media (brandtzæg, lüders, and skjetne, 2010), so a focus on how young adults view the tension between privacy regulation and sociality may diminish cultural and cohort differences embedded within relational practices and the differing values that arise among users of varying backgrounds and life experiences. more work is required to understand how the dialectic of privacy regulation and sociality is understood and enacted by a wider range of users, and how it might vary at different points in the life course. this study attempts to provide texture to the understanding of the contextual dimensions of informational privacy regulation by examining how individuals perceive the relationship between sociality and privacy in their social media use, and how these relate to the gratifications derived from engagement. of particular interest is examination of how the intersection of behaviors, attitudes and utility derived from social media use might vary at different points in the life course. literature online informational privacy regulation is a complex process, involving control of the release of personal information to others (altman, 1975), an expectation of the intended audience (brake, 2012; nippert-eng, 2010), and the context in which disclosure takes place (nissenbaum, 2010); however from a research perspective, privacy regulation has been approached as a unidimensional construct (buchanan, et al, 2007), captured by activation of technological privacy controls (stutzman and kramer-duffield, 2010), the presence of personally identifying information on sns profiles (acquisti and gross, 2006), or the visibility of profile information (thelwall, 2009). privacy settings, connection decisions and the extent of information disclosure are all components of privacy regulation on social network sites (ellison, et al., 2011; krasnova et al., 2010). without evaluating these multiple levels of context and disclosure, or considering the related gratifications of social media use, little guidance can be provided for privacy-enhancing design improvements for these technologies. method approximately 350 social media using adults are targeted to participate in a self-administered, webbased survey designed to collect data related to privacy attitudes, online privacy strategies and behaviors, and perceptions of the utility and satisfaction that social media experiences bring. the sampling strategies are designed to recruit participants varying in age so that statistical comparisons might be made among social media users at varying points in life. implications prior research has indicated that the utility of social media may shift downward as one ages (brandtzæg, et al., 2010); this may be reflective of lower overall participation rates in social media (zickuhr and madden, 2012), making communication with one’s social network via social media a less effective tool, or possibly that social media is perceived as having reduced salience for sociality as one ages (lehtinen, näsänen, and sarvas, 2009). because the utility of social media has been indicated to be of significance in privacy regulation processes for younger adults (ellison, et al., 2011; krasnova et al., 2010), examining its relationship to privacy attitudes and behaviors at differing points in life will provide a more nuanced perspective on how the dynamic of privacy and sociality is understood by users. examination of this dialectic at varying points in life will also lend insight into how the contextual dimensions of privacy regulation intersect with social media use and are enacted in the everyday. as these media forms move toward near invisibility, understanding this dynamic becomes imperative, not only because insight into privacy regulation processes will point to ways in which system design might be improved to provide meaningful privacy enhancements, but also because it enables a greater appreciation of how these media forms shape core values and ideals. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 12 references references are apa style and times new roman 10, aligned left, single line, 0pt before, 6pt after, hanging 0.5 inches). acquisti, a. & gross, r. (2006). imagined communities: awareness, information sharing, and privacy on the facebook. in g. danezis & p. golle (eds.), privacy enhancing technologies (pp. 36-58). cambridge, uk: springer-verlag. ahern, s., eckles, d., good, n. s., king, s., naaman, m. & nair, r. (2007). over-exposed? privacy patterns and considerations in online and mobile photo sharing. in proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems chi ’07 (p. 357). new york, new york, usa: acm press. doi:10.1145/1240624.1240683 altman, i. (1975). the environment and social behavior: privacy, personal space, territory, crowding. monterey, ca: brooks/cole publishing. brake, d. r. (2012). who do they think they’re talking to? framings of the audience by social media users. international journal of communication, 6, 1056–1076. retrieved from http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/932/747 brandtzæg, p. b., lüders, m. & skjetne, j. h. (2010). too many facebook “friends”? content sharing and sociability versus the need for privacy in social network sites. international journal of humancomputer interaction, 26(11-12), 1006–1030. doi:10.1080/10447318.2010.516719 buchanan, t., paine, c. b., joinson, a. n. & reips, u. d. (2007). development of measures of online privacy concern and protection for use on the internet. journal of the american society for information science, 58(2), 157–165. doi:10.1002/asi debatin, b., lovejoy, j. p., horn, a.-k. & hughes, b. n. (2009). facebook and online privacy: attitudes, behaviors, and unintended consequences. journal of computer-mediated communication, 15(1), 83108. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2009.01494.x duggan, m. & brenner, j. (2013, 14 feb). the demographics of socialmedia users — 2012. washington, dc: pew internet & american life project. retrieved from http://pewinternet.org/commentary/2012/march/pew-internet-social-networking-full-detail.aspx ellison, n. b., vitak, j., steinfield, c., gray, r. & lampe, c. (2011). negotiating privacy concerns and social capital needs in a social media environment. in s. trepte & l. reinecke (eds.), privacy online: perspectives on privacy and self-disclosure in the social web (pp. 19-32). berlin: springer berlin heidelberg. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-21521-6 fogel, j. & nehmad, e. (2009). internet social network communities: risk taking, trust, and privacy concerns. computers in human behavior, 25(1), 153-160. doi:10.116/j.chb.2008.08.006 krasnova, h., spiekermann, s., koroleva, k. & hildebrand, t. (2010). online social networks: why we disclose. journal of information technology, 25(2), 109-125. doi:10.1057/jit.2010.6 lehtinen, v., näsänen, j., & sarvas, r. (2009). “ a little silly and empty-headed ” – older adults ’ understandings of social networking sites. proceedings of the 23rd british hci group annual conference on people and computers: celebrating people and technology bcs-hci ’09 (pp. 45– 54). swinton, uk: british computer society. milne, g. r. & culnan, m. j. (2004). strategies for reducing online privacy risks: why consumers read (or don’t read) online privacy notices. journal of interactive marketing, 18(3), 15-29. elsevier. doi:10.1002/dir.20009 nippert-eng, c. (2010). islands of privacy. chicago: university of chicago press. nissenbaum, h. (2010). privacy in context: technology, policy and the integrity of social life. stanford, ca: stanford law books. raynes–goldie, k. (2010). aliases, creeping, and wall cleaning: understanding privacy in the age of facebook. first monday, 15(1), 1–8. retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2775/2432 strater, k. & lipford, h. r. (2008). strategies and struggles with privacy in an online social networking community. in d. england (ed.), bcs-hci ’08 proceedings of the 22nd british hci group annual selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 13 conference on people and computers: culture, creativity, interaction volume 1 (pp. 111-119). swinton, uk: british computer society. stutzman, f., capra, r. & thompson, j. (2010). factors mediating disclosure in social network sites. computers in human behavior, 27(1), 590-598. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2010.10.017 thayer, s. e. & ray, s. (2006). online communication preferences across age, gender, and duration of internet use. cyberpsychology & behavior: the impact of the internet, multimedia and virtual reality on behavior and society, 9(4), 432–440. doi:10.1089/cpb.2006.9.432 thelwall, m. (2009). social network sites: users and uses. in m. zelkowitz (ed.), advances in computers: social networking and the web, vol. 76, (pp. 19–73). elsevier: amsterdam. tufekci, z. (2007). can you see me now? audience and disclosure regulation in online social network sites. bulletin of science, technology & society, 28(1), 20-36. doi:10.1177/0270467607311484 young, a. l. & quan-haase, a. (2009). information revelation and internet privacy concerns on social network sites. proceedings of the fourth international conference on communities and technologies c&t ’09 (p. 265). new york: acm press. doi:10.1145/1556460.1556499 zickuhr, k. & madden, m. (2012). older adults and internet use, pew internet & american life project, washington, dc. retrieved from http://pewinternet.org/reports/2012/older-adults-and-internetuse.aspx consalvo, m. (2006). console video games and global corporations: creating a hybrid culture. new media & society 8 (1), 117-213. doi: 10.1177/1461444806059921. license this article is ©2013 by kelly quinn, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. http://pewinternet.org/reports/2012/older-adults-and-internet-use.aspx http://pewinternet.org/reports/2012/older-adults-and-internet-use.aspx selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 14 there’s no justice like angry mob justice: regulating hate speech through internet vigilantism alice marwick fordham university usa amarwick@fordham.edu abstract this paper undertakes a legal and policy analysis of public shaming, or “doxxing,” as a possible solution to sexist and misogynist online speech acts. first, government and private regulation of certain types of internet speech are evaluated, concluding that neither is a viable solution. second, incidents in which internet vigilantism has been used to both regulate and further internet hate speech are discussed. third, privacy issues around vigilantism, which often involves revealing secret or obscure information, are analyzed. while doxxing may seem to be a useful tool for regulation, it is as frequently used to further online sexism as to prevent it. however, alternatives for regulating hate speech have possibly unforeseen negative repercussions for online privacy, including the maintenance of anonymity. keywords hate speech; free speech; sexism; misogyny; internet policy introduction while gender equality in the united states made significant gains from the 1950s to the 1990s, research has found a recent slowdown in such attitudes (cotter, hermsen, & vanneman, 2011). scholars have documented repeated instances of aggressively sexist and misogynistic internet speech of late, often including harassment of individual women (bartow, 2009; citron, in press). the possible effects of such acts include a chilling effect on women’s online participation; long-term emotional and professional difficulty for the women harassed; and an increase in sexual stereotyping and discrimination off and online (nussbaum, 2010). the best way to deal with such speech acts, as well as similar speech involving racist and/or homophobic language, is an ongoing question. us government regulation is unlikely given the supreme court’s consistent characterization of internet speech as protected. there are at least two alternative mechanisms for regulation. the first involves private corporations such as facebook defining certain categories of speech as unacceptable in their terms of service, allowing for individual accounts which violate these terms to be removed. the second involves public unmasking of anonymous or pseudonymous accounts, known colloquially as “doxxing” or “internet vigilantism.” underlying doxxing is the belief that individuals are unlikely to undertake hateful speech acts under their own names, as this may result in social ostracizing, job loss, and so forth. this paper undertakes a legal and policy analysis of the privacy issues inherent in the latter means of regulation. doxxing may seem to be a useful regulatory mechanism, but it is as frequently used to further online sexism as it is to prevent it. however, alternatives for controlling hateful speech have potential privacy implications, including compromising anonymity. background in the last decade, several high-profile incidents have raised questions around the limits of online free speech and the prevalence of explicitly sexist commentary on the internet (citron, 2009). as a result, some scholars have called for regulation of online “hate speech” or online defamation (levmore, 2010). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 15 the united states supreme court has consistently held up internet speech as entitled to the same protections as print and spoken speech, most notably in reno vs. aclu. this is unique to the united states as other localities have consistently regulated online speech (vanacker, 2006). given the lack of government regulation, organizations have turned to the private sector. for example, groups like the anti-defamation league and the southern poverty law center have pressured isps into refusing to host hate sites (henry, 2009). ultimately, the ambiguity of “hate speech” as a category, the lack of resources for moderation relative to the amount of content created on social media sites, and the “safe harbor” provision of the digital millennium copyright act, make it unlikely that the private sector will proactively moderate specific types of speech acts. internet vigilantism and doxxing the internet has seen a recent swath of public shaming and unmasking of individuals for engaging in particular speech acts. violentacrez, a popular reddit user who maintained communities promoting candid photography of underage girls, had his “real” identity revealed by gawker. the feminist blog jezebel publicized the twitter names and avatars of teenagers who used racial epithets to refer to president obama. previously, internet vigilantism was rarely targeted towards people engaging in hateful speech; rather, it was used to punish people who violated social norms, such as the “dog poop girl” in south korea who let her dog defecate in a subway car (wehmhoener, 2010). in fact, internet vigilantism has been more frequently used to further misogyny rather than counter it. a prominent example is anita sarkeesian’s feminist frequency project. sarkeesian, a feminist filmmaker and cultural critic, proposed a series of “tropes vs. women” videos focusing on images of women in video games. she was subsequently attacked by anonymous individuals who sent her pornographic images, left thousands of comments containing sexual and misogynistic epithets, and created a web-based game that allowed players to “beat up anita sarkeesian” (o’leary, 2012). privacy issues doxxing and public shaming often involve the reveal of personal information. in some cases, a carefully protected persistent pseudonym is linked to an “offline” identity. in others, an anonymous citizen is identified using digital technologies, such as crowdsourcing the identity of a photographed street vandal. sometimes, an anonymously-posted piece of internet content, such as a youtube video, is associated with an ip address or physical location. these cases share an underlying presumption that by revealing personally identifiable information, an anonymous individual will be brought into the public eye and be made accountable for their actions. this “shame justice” is not motivated by rehabilitation but to punish the offender as drastically as possible (parsons, 2012). in the famous autoadmit case, commenters on a law school message board posted hundreds of violent and sexual comments about female law students. these comments were searchable and appeared as search engine results for the female students’ names, harming their reputation. nussbaum argues that this attempt was motivated by a desire to shame the law students for their success in a male-dominated world. thus, shame is utilized both by feminists—when attempting to unmask sexist commenters— and misogynists alike. in most of these cases, the doxxers or vigilantes remain anonymous, while the target is shamed as publically as possible. critics of internet hate speech call for eliminating online anonymity, with the proposed consequence of eliminating unwanted online speech acts (levmore, 2010). however, anonymity has a complicated relationship to privacy. on one hand, anonymity can be necessary for the free expression of speech, most obviously for people like political activists with a heightened need for safety. on the other hand, anonymity allows for hateful comments to be made without reprecussion. if internet vigilantism is positioned as the logical alternative to the lack of government or private regulation of online speech, it may compromise anonymity, which is a necessary aspect of free speech. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 16 conclusion there is no clear or easy answer to the problem of sexist, racist, or homophobic commentary online. even characterizing this speech as “hate speech” sets up a particular category of speech as less protected, which has not held up under strict scrutiny in the us courts. while public shaming may seem to be an effective solution to those who engage in sexist or racist speech acts, it can just as easily be used to further hateful attitudes towards marginalized groups. ultimately, each of the current alternatives for regulating hate speech have possibly unforeseen negative repercussions not only for online privacy, but for desired speech such as activism and protest. references bartow, a. (2009). internet defamation as profit center: the monetization of online harassment. harvard journal of law and gender, 32(2). retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1447472 citron, d. (in press). hate 3.0. harvard university press. citron, d. (2009). cyber civil rights. boston university law review, 89, 61–125. cotter, d., hermsen, j. m., & vanneman, r. (2011). the end of the gender revolution? gender role attitudes from 1977 to 20081. american journal of sociology, 117(1), 259–289. henry, j. s. (2009). beyond free speech: novel approaches to hate on the internet in the united states. information & communications technology law, 18(2), 235–251. levmore, s. (2010). the internet’s anonymity problem. in s. levmore & m. c. nussbaum (eds.), the offensive internet (pp. 50–67). cambridge, ma: harvard university press. nussbaum, m. c. (2010). objectification and internet misogyny. in s. levmore & m. c. nussbaum (eds.), the offensive internet (pp. 68–87). cambridge, ma: harvard university press. o’leary, a. (2012, august 1). sexual harassment in online gaming stirs anger. the new york times. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/us/sexual-harassment-in-online-gaming-stirsanger.html parsons, c. (2012). shame justice on social media: how it hurts and ways to limit it (ssrn scholarly paper no. id 2151204). rochester, ny: social science research network. retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2151204 vanacker, b. h. (2006). online hate speech regulation in the united states and europe: accommodating conflicting legal paradigms (doctoral dissertation). university of minnesota, minneapolis. wehmhoener, k. a. (2010). social norm or social harm: an exploratory study of internet vigilantism. retrieved from http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd/11572/ selected papers of #aoir2019:  the 20​th​ annual conference of the  association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 a balancing act: putting up bookshelves on a social media platform anne-mette bech albrechtslund independent researcher, denmark introduction this paper addresses the theme of this year’s conference by focusing on the issue of trust in the uneasy relationship between content-generating users and commercially owned platforms. in this paper, i will present a case study of the use of so-called ‘bookshelves’ on goodreads which offers a distinct example illustrating how a social media platform will often tests its users’ trust as it seeks ways to capitalize on its users’ engagement and contributions while still preserving the atmosphere of a social network built for and with its users. i focus specifically on three different examples of negotiations of trust that have emerged in relation to the platform’s policies on bookshelves. the study draws particularly on discourse analysis with a focus on narrative and organizational metaphors (see e.g. morgan, 2006), and the aim is to identify central points of ambivalence in users’ attempts to balance their trust in the platform. bookshelves on goodreads: inhabiting a hybrid space goodreads is a very popular social network site for readers and authors, boasting 65 million users (called ‘members’) around the world. the discourse promoted on goodreads emphasizes its status as a user-driven space which encourages readers to create content, an egalitarian space where the reviews posted by readers as well as the interactions between readers and authors are perceived as actually being able to ‘democratize the literary system’ (vlieghe and rutten, 2013).​ ​while goodreads has, to some extent, been successful in creating the kind of ‘participatory culture’ (jenkins, 2006) which may directly influence the publishing communication circuit (see murray and squires, 2013), it has also become increasingly clear in recent years that there are strong economic and strategic interests tied to the platform’s business model (moody, enelyaoronar suggested citation (apa): albrechtslund , am. (2019, october 2-5). a balancing act: putting up bookshelves on a social media platform. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org.� 2015; see also kleis-nielsen, 2018). particularly since goodreads was acquired by amazon in 2013, suspicions and worries about goodreads’ increasing commercialization have been aired on goodreads forums and elsewhere (see e.g. albrechtslund, 2017), but as goodreads has been a hybrid of ‘community and commerce’ (bruns, 2012) since its inception, such tensions have always been present. it certainly seems that the continuing discussions on the site about the purpose of bookshelves and the policies relating to them is an indication of that. the goodreads ‘bookshelf’ is based on tags, some of which are generic, platform-generated (e.g. ‘to-read’) while others are user-generated and sometimes highly idiosyncratic or creative (e.g. ‘let-me-fight-the-protagonist’). the purpose of bookshelves are, for most users, to organize and keep track of their reading. however, as nakamura remarks, these digital shelves also mirror the function of physical bookshelves in our homes as a form of ‘public consumption’, expressing identity through taste (2013; see also striphas, 2011). further, goodreads shelves constitute the kind of user-generated catalogues or ‘folksonomies’ (see vander wal, 2007) which can be seen as ways for users to name cultural resources in their own terms (adler, 2009). shelving practices on goodreads are thus part of an appropriating strategy which, i suggest, shows users claiming ownership of the online space they inhabit as well as being literary curators and critics in their own right (see also desrochers et al, 2013). in other words, bookshelves constitute a key element in making goodreads a space users can feel ‘at home’ in. in the paper, i show how this becomes clear when considering users responses’ to goodreads policies on bookshelves. case study: three discussions on bookshelves i focus on three specific instances of discussions on bookshelves which have prompted articulations of trust and distrust in the goodreads platform and its different stakeholders: 1. ‘​badly-behaving-authors’​. in 2013, changes in goodreads’ policies on bookshelves were announced on the goodreads forums. the changes focused on the appropriate use of bookshelf tags in relation to criticisms of author behavior and resulted in some users having shelves deleted (see also matthews, 2015; albrechtslund, 2017). this sparked a fierce discussion of the platform’s role as a marketing tool for authors and publishers, and users’ contributions to the platform being exploited to this end. 2. ​private shelves​. the ability to set some bookshelves as ‘private’ (for various reasons) has been a request from users since 2008. this has been continuously rejected by goodreads, and users have resorted to workarounds to have private shelves. in discussion threads about the issue, different understandings of the expectations of privacy, intended audiences, and relationship between users emerge. 3. ​the giveaways program​. one of the ways publishers and authors can use goodreads to promote their books is by setting up giveaway contests. in 2017, changes to the us giveaways program were announced by goodreads product manager. one of the changes directly influenced users’ control of their bookshelves, as users entering a giveaway contest for a book would now have the book automatically added to their ‘want-to-read’ shelf. this prompted several discussions on the function of bookshelves and users’ control over them. it must be stressed that users are certainly not naive about the fact that their content is being used for marketing, nor is goodreads being secretive about it. as this paper shows, policies on bookshelves prompt users to negotiate this community/commerce hybridity (see bruns, 2012) which requires an ongoing balancing act for users to feel comfortable entrusting the platform with their content. references albrechtslund, a.-m. b. (2017). negotiating ownership and agency in social media: community reactions to amazon’s acquisition of goodreads. ​first monday​, 22(5). adler, m. (2009). transcending library catalogs: a comparative study of controlled terms in library of congress subject headings and user-generated tags in librarything for transgender books. ​journal of web librarianship​, 3(4), 309–331. bruns, a. (2012). reconciling community and commerce? ​information, communication & society​, 15(6), 815–835. desrochers, n., quan-haase, a., pennington, d. r., laplante, a., martin, k., & spiteri, l. (2013). beyond the playlist: looking at user-generated collocation of cultural products through social tagging. ​proceedings of the american society for information science and technology​, 50(1), 1–4. devito, m. a., birnholtz, j., & hancock, j. t. (2017). platforms, people, and perception: using affordances to understand self-presentation on social media. in ​proceedings of the 2017 acm conference on computer supported cooperative work and social computing​ (pp. 740–754). new york, ny, usa: acm. jenkins, h. (2006). ​convergence culture: where old and new media collide​. nyu press. kleis-nielsen, r. (2018). lecture: the power of platforms. retrieved february 27, 2019, from ​https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/risj-review/lecture-power-platforms matthews, j. c. (2015). professionals and nonprofessionals on goodreads: behavior standards for authors, reviewers, and readers. ​new media & society. moody, s. (2017). bullies and blackouts: examining the participatory culture of online book reviewing. ​convergence​. morgan, g. (2010 (2006)). ​images of organization​. thousand oaks: sage publications. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/risj-review/lecture-power-platforms murray, p. r., & squires, c. (2013). the digital publishing communications circuit. ​book 2.0​. nakamura, l. (2013). “words with friends”: socially networked reading on goodreads. pmla​, 128(1), 238–243. striphas, t. (2011). ​the late age of print: everyday book culture from consumerism to control​. columbia university press. vander wal, t. (2007). folksonomy coinage and definition. retrieved from http://www.vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html vlieghe, j., & rutten, k. (2013). rhetorical analysis of literary culture in social reading platforms. ​clcweb: comparative literature and culture​, 15(3). webster, l., & mertova, p. (2007). ​using narrative inquiry as a research method: an introduction to using critical event narrative analysis in research on learning and teaching​. routledge. http://www.vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): taylor, s. & witzenberger, k. (2019, october 2-5). pressure controls: data forces creeping through fingertip commands. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. pressure controls: data forces creeping through fingertip commands simon taylor, university of new south wales, australia kevin witzenberger, university of new south wales, australia tactile modes of operation tactile and touch-screen operations are ubiquitous in modern computing environments. their usage is inevitable for everyday users: from mobile devices to atms, from vehicle and work-place dashboards, to wearables and smart watches. but such touch screen operation also creates situations where users participate in the production of complex data sets through routine practices of performative human-computer interaction (hci). due to their magnitude, tactile operations – as a subset of behavioural biometrics – offer methods of verification and authentication as security procedure (yampolskiy & govindaraju, 2008; zhong, deng, & jain, 2012). this can generate peripheral datasets with attributes of motor skills, demographics, cognitive and emotional states. in combination with biometric security measures of ubiquitous computing (weiser, 1991; parisi, 2013), another black-box emerges; not only obscuring decision processes but disguising opaque data harvesting as ‘non-intrusive’ user features. while users can investigate the workings of algorithms as black-boxes through experience, haptic feedback and have the potential to be affected by their outcomes (bucher, 2016; crawford, 2015; witzenberger, 2018), this paper explores the limits of such user-based interrogations by scrutinizing technical accelerations in hand-based operations, the relation between trust and ‘non-intrusive’ data collections and the social, political, and capital dimensions of this data produced through accessing users’ fingertip commands. behavioural biometrics and the multiplicity of intentionality with the introduction of the iphone 6s in 2015, force sensing technology for everyday users shifted from a capacitive touchscreen – able to ‘where you touch’ by detecting xy coordinate(s) – to a pressure sensitivity and sensor resistive screen determining the force being applied (wright, 2016). this ability to measure force with hand morphology arguably opens a door to mining richer user data. in this shift toward responsive media (begole, 2017) and haptic interfaces in hci (parisi, 2018) classifications of a person’s behaviour as a unique biometric are derived from epistemologies of conditioning, habit and reflex, where such behavioural patterns are expected to be stable, measurable, and replicable, informing a signature that will occur in the future (yampolskiy & govindaraju, 2008). statistical modelling of neural networks and fuzzy logic informed a basis for quantitative analysis on conventional keyboards (ahmad, szymkowiak, & campbell, 2013) but user data expands with touching, scrolling, or swiping being recorded as technical models of pressure, force, duration, and position. with each representational communication, another is underwritten — data flows as a transformation from a user’s behaviour into a multiplicity of intentionality — creating a dissonance between a users’ inputs and a technical script. this produces multiple forms of authorship e.g. clicking an item, typing to a loved one, swiping on a map location, can create medical data on motor skills or cognitive deficiencies (giancardo, sanchez-ferro, butterworth, mendoza, & hooker, 2015); demographics (findlater, froehlich, fattal, wobbrock, & dastyar, 2013); stress or drowsiness (exposito, picard, & hernandez, 2018; lee, tsui, & hsiao, 2015; zhong et al., 2012). this data is entrusted by a user to a different, but not necessarily known, group of readers i.e. corporate data bases, engineers, administrators, employers or insurance companies. this constitutes a ‘control creep’ (innes, 2001) as it deviates from the authorised script: not only from the performative patterns read, but from the tactile inputs re-appropriated for another form of governance. while systems of predictive profiling have applications for preventative procedures in securing financial transactions or in privacy features on devices or public networks, this form of non-obtrusive/non-invasive data collection opens possibilities of harvesting without a users’ knowledge and so limit a potential for user interrogation. it opens up modes of anticipatory governance “largely directed by black box algorithms working on data of unknown provenance, and is generally closed to recourse” (kitchin, 2014, p. 178). if we understand this as a shift from traditional phenomenology toward hidden technical sensory environments (hansen, 2012), this situation creates an intermediate repository of data where user inputs are transformed via black box sensors, algorithmic administration, machine learning and material infrastructure, with ethical and socio-political implications, not visible to the users. pressures inside the black-box to unpack these concerns, this paper builds on the historical algorithmic work of an emerging haptic media studies (parisi, 2018) and employs pressure as an analytical concept: examining the tactical sensors registering force in touch analysis and in haptic technologies; but also pressure placed on users to adopt these devices in commercial, work or school environments. of concern, are administrative pressures in spaces like industry or education to employ tactile authentication procedures before adequate data regulations have been formed. the authors present case studies examining biometric techniques and force-sensing materials that are cost-effective and scalable to ubiquitous-computing (vishniakou et al., 2018). by combining these case-studies with how data transformations functions in practice, we demonstrate how user data and computing infrastructures combine as complex assemblages of technical sensing outside a user’s knowledge or experience. this is vitally important, as it may afford some grasp, if not direct user agency, over micro temporal operations (hansen, 2015); not simply to theorise them, but to help live them, through concrete ways data practices may be embraced, reworked, resisted, subverted or trusted by user communities (kitchin, 2014). references ahmad, n., szymkowiak, a., & campbell, p. (2013). keystroke dynamics in the pretouchscreen era. frontiers in human neuroscience, 7(835). doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00835 begole, b. (2017). responsive media: media experiences in the age of thinking machines. apsipa transactions on signal and information processing, 6. bucher, t. (2016). the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms. information, communication & society, 1-15. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154086 crawford, k. (2015). can an algorithm be agonistic? ten scenes from life in calculated publics. science, technology & human values. doi:10.1177/0162243915589635 exposito, m., picard, r., & hernandez, j. (2018). affective keys: towards unobtrusive stress sensing of smartphone users. mobile hci’18. proceedings of the 20th international conference on human-computer interaction with mobile devices and service adjunct. p. 139-145. findlater, l., froehlich, j. e., fattal, k., wobbrock, j. o., & dastyar, t. (2013). agerelated differences in performance with touchscreens compared to traditional mouse input. paper presented at the proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems. giancardo, l., sanchez-ferro, a., butterworth, i., mendoza, c. s., & hooker, j. m. (2015). psychomotor impairment detection via finger interactions with a computer keyboard during natural typing. sci rep, 5, 9678. doi:10.1038/srep09678 hansen, m. b. n. (2012). ubiquitous sensation: toward an atmospheric, collective, and microtemporal model of media. in u. ekman (ed.), throughout: art and culture emerging with ubiquitous computing (pp. 63 88). boston, ma: mit press. hansen, m. b. n. (2015). feed-forward: on the future of twenty-first-century media: university of chicago press. innes, m. (2001). control creep. sociological research online, 6(3), 1-6. doi:10.5153/sro.634 parisi, d. h. (2018). archaeologies of touch : interfacing with haptics from electricity to computing. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. parisi, l. (2013) contagious architecture: computation, aesthetics, and space. mit press. kitchin, r. (2014). the data revolution : big data, open data, data infrastructures and their consequences: los angeles : sage. lee, p.-m., tsui, w.-h., & hsiao, t.-c. (2015). the influence of emotion on keyboard typing: an experimental study using auditory stimuli. plos one, 10(6), e0129056-e0129056. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0129056 vishniakou, s., chen, r., ro, y. g., brennan, c. j., levy, c., yu, e. t., & dayeh, s. a. (2018). improved performance of zinc oxide thin film transistor pressure sensors and a demonstration of a commercial chip compatibility with the new force sensing technology. advanced materials technologies, 3(3), 1700279. doi:doi:10.1002/admt.201700279 weiser, mark. (1991) "the computer for the 21 st century." scientific american 265, no. 3: 94-105. wright, p. (2016). “dimensional touch responds to pressure”. in display daily: https://www.displaydaily.com/article/display-daily/dimensional-touch-responds-topressure yampolskiy, r. v., & govindaraju, v. (2008). behavioural biometrics: a survey and classification. international journal of biometrics, 1(1), 81-113. doi:10.1504/ijbm.2008.018665 zhong, y., deng, y., & jain, a. k. (2012, 16-21 june 2012). keystroke dynamics for user authentication. paper presented at the 2012 ieee computer society conference on computer vision and pattern recognition workshops. witzenberger, k. (2018). the hyperdodge: how users resist algorithmic objectives in everyday life. media theory, [s.i.], v.2, n.2, p. 29-51. avaliable at: http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/56 microsoft word rao.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): rao, a. (2014, october 22-24). extending the debate on icts for civil and political engagement: ruptures between old and new civil society in a high-tech city. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. extending the debate on icts for civil and political engagement: ruptures between old and new civil society in a high-tech city anuradha rao national university of singapore introduction and theoretical overview this paper examines the issues confronting civil society actors as they leverage the internet to create spaces for citizen participation in public affairs. in particular, the paper focuses on the complexities arising from the intersections between the online and offline spaces of civic engagement. the creation of new online spaces of activity is discussed within the current literature on the relationship between icts and civil society for greater democratic engagement (see rao, 2013). this paper draws upon the rich body of work that studies how political activists, journalists, academics, politicians, and ordinary citizens in urban centres have leveraged new technologies for civil and political engagement (castells, 2012; chadwick & howard, 2009; earl & kimport, 2011; foth, forlano, satchell & gibbs, 2011; hands, 2012). the use of icts by youth, sexual and political minorities, other traditionally marginalized groups for greater civic and political engagement has also been well documented (banaji & buckingham, 2013; bennet, 2008; mehra, merkel & bishop, 2004; pullen & cooper, 2010). in recent years, studies have begun to focus on the increased use of icts among conventional and newer civic and political actors, including both elite and marginalized groups, in developing asia (hassid, 2012; rao, 2012; soriano, 2013, 2014; sreekumar, 2013a; zhang & lallana, 2013). this paper examines the efforts of a new type of civil society actor in bangalore city, india, whose extensive use of icts distinguishes him and his activities1 from the more conventional civil society actors in the city. this is premised on the notion that bangalore’s it base has contributed to the rise of a new type of ict-enabled civic action by tech-savvy actors. bangalore, as a technology and knowledge hub, has been associated with the rise of a professional and transnational civil society, working in tandem with it entrepreneurs to reform governance and renew citizenship (benjamin, 2010; dasgupta, 2008; ghosh, 2005; 1 the key players in praja.in are almost exclusively male. heitzman, 2004; sreekumar, 2013b). the role of this new class in urban india has been both admired (angell and ezer, 2006) and critiqued (benjamin, 2010). it is within this context that the paper examines praja.in (henceforth known as praja), a citizen interaction platform co-founded in 2007 by three it professionals keen to use their technical expertise to make civic engagement easier in bangalore. praja (meaning “citizen”) comprises of an online platform for discussion and collaboration and the nonprofit organization (npo), raag (research, analysis and advocacy group) that operates around it. while praja was originally conceived of as a purely internet-based platform, its increased visibility in public affairs mandated a shift towards offline action. raag, as the “advocacy arm”, has undertaken prominent projects in the areas of public transportation, such as commuter rail, bus, and cycling. method and analysis praja was chosen as a case study (yin, 2003) by dint of its active online platform, its use of a variety of new media platforms, its increasingly prominent role in the city’s offline and online public sphere, as well as its linkages with civil society groups and government actors. fieldwork was conducted in bangalore city in two phases: may-july 2011 and december 2011-january 2012, with follow-up data collection via telephone or skype thereafter. the primary method of data collection was in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews (kvale, 1996), supplemented by unstructured observation (nørskov & rask, 2011) of blog posts, observations in the field, as well as other secondary data sources. a total of 23 in-depth interviews were conducted with praja members (10), government officers closely associated with its activities (3), and members of two prominent civil society networks in the city (10). data was analyzed using qualitative data analysis methods underpinned by an inductive approach in general (mason, 2002; thomas, 2003), with an emphasis on coding and memoing to identify categories, relationship between categories, and emerging themes (coffey & atkinson, 1996; hesse-biber & leavy, 2006; richards & morse, 2007; saldana, 2009). main findings ruptures between praja and “traditional”, activist civil society praja was created with the aim of using the internet to overcome the limitations of traditional civil society actors such as non-government organizations (ngos), resident welfare associations (rwas) and the more hard-core or radical activist groups. key raag members distinguished praja from these civic actors in the following ways: structured, citizen-driven advocacy: the platform was designed for analytical discussions, with emphasis on data-driven collaborative interactions, achieved partly through strict moderation. thereafter, discussions on a topic were compiled as a report and forwarded to the government via offline channels. this structured system of providing research-based solutions was distinguished from the cacophony of traditional forms of engagement. ideology: praja members saw themselves as focusing on solutions and data rather than ideology, whereas activists were seen as rigidly adhering to ideology at the cost of flexibility and improvisation. a co-founder described praja as “not ideology neutral”, but pluralistic, balancing between members’ ideologies and advocating the most suitable solutions to the government. collaborative approach: raag’s approach of collaborating with government as distinguished from the confrontational approach of some civil society actors. another aspect of the collaborative approach was praja’s attempts to get traditional civic actors to use the site, so that there could be a seamless interaction between the two realms of activity. however, this idea did not gain traction as the latter expressed reservations about engaging deeply with icts for civic activities. attitude towards and use of the internet: this sceptical attitude towards the internet for civic activity distinguished traditional civil society actors from praja. rao (2013) shows how civil society actors’ perceptions and worldviews/ideologies influence whether and how the internet is used, even in a new media-rich environment like bangalore. the reluctance to use the internet was also explained by the typically older demographic of rwas and ngos, as well as the absence of an internet culture or facilities in government offices, which limited citizen-government interaction online. conclusion the paper has shown that even creative and strategic use of the internet to facilitate citizen-government interaction is limited by the ruptures between newer and older forms of engagement. praja originated from the felt need to enhance citizen participation by overcoming limitations of traditional civil society-government engagement. at the same time, key raag members were aware of the crucial role of these actors in the civic sphere, and keen to partner with them on issues of common interest. however, attempts to connect online and offline spaces of activism were hindered by various incompatibilities, including differing opinions regarding the utility and value of the internet for civic activities. the inability to overcome these ruptures has proved to be a serious limitation, and highlights the complexities arising from the intersections between older and the newer, internet-enabled spaces of activism. references angell, i.o. and ezer, j. (2006). new barbarians at the gate: the new spirit emerging in india, information society, 22, 3, p. 165-176. banaji, s. & buckingham, d. (2013). the civic web: young people, the internet and civic participation. cambridge, ma: the mit press. benjamin, s. (2010). manufacturing neoliberalism: lifestyling indian urbanity, in banerjee-guha, s. (ed.), accumulation by dispossession: transformative cities in the new global order, p. 92-124, new delhi; thousand oaks: sage. bennet, l.w. (ed.). (2008). civic life online: learning how digital media can engage youth. cambridge, london: the mit press. castells, m. (2012). networks of outrage and hope: social movements in the internet age. cambridge; malden: polity press. chadwick, a. & howard, p.n. (eds.). (2009). routledge handbook of internet politics. london; new york, ny: routledge. coffey, a. and atkinson, p. (1996). making sense of qualitative data. thousand oaks: sage publications. dasgupta, s. (2008). success, market, ethics: information technology and the shifting politics of governance and citizenship in the indian silicon plateau. cultural dynamics, 20, 3, p. 213–244. earl, j. & kimport, k. (2011). digitally enabled social change: activism in the internet age. cambridge, ma: the mit press. foth, m., forlano, l., satchell, c., & gibbs, m. (eds.). from social butterfly to engaged citizen: urban informatics, social media, ubiquitous computing, and mobile technology to support citizen engagement. cambridge, ma: the mit press. ghosh, a. (2005, nov 19). public-private or a private public? promised partnership of the bangalore agenda task force, economic and political weekly, p. 4914-4922. hands, j. (2012). @ is for activism: dissent, resistance and rebellion in a digital culture. london, ny: pluto press. hassid, j. (2012). safety valves or pressure cooker? blogs in chinese political life, journal of communication, 62, 2, p. 212-230. heitzman, j. (2004). network city: planning the information society in bangalore, delhi: oxford university press. hesse-biber, s.n. & leavy, p. (2006). the practice of qualitative research. thousand oaks: sage publications. kvale, s. (1996). interviews: an introduction to qualitative research interviewing. thousand oaks, calif.: sage. mason, j. (2002). qualitative researching, 2nd edition. london: sage publications. mehra, b., merkel, c. & bishop, a.p. (2004). the internet for the empowerment of minority and marginalized users, new media & society, 6, 6, p. 781-802. nørskov, s.v. & rask, m. (2011). observation of online communities: a discussion of online and offline observer roles in studying development, cooperation and coordination in an open source software environment. fqs: forum: qualitative social research, 12, 3. retrieved may 5, 2013, from http://www.qualitative-research.net/ pullen, c. & cooper, m. (eds.). (2010). lgbt identity and online new media. new york: routledge. rao, a. (2012). “sister-groups” and online-offline linkages in networked collective action: a case study of the right to information movement in india, the electronic journal on information systems in developing countries (ejisdc), 52, 7, p. 1-17. rao, a. (2013). re-examining the relationship between civil society and the internet: pessimistic visions in india’s ‘it city’, journal of creative communications, 8, 2&3, p. 157–175. richards, l. & morse, j.m. (2007). read me first. user’s guide to qualitative methods, 2nd edition. thousand oaks: sage publications. saldana, j. (2009). the coding manual for qualitative researchers. london: sage publications. soriano, c.r. (2013). online mediation of minority dissent: a historical-dialecticalstructurational analysis, journal of creative communications, 8, 2&3, p. 89-106. soriano, c.r. (2014). constructing collectivity in diversity: online political mobilization of a national lgbt political party, media, culture & society, 36, 1, p. 20-36. sreekumar, t.t. (2013a). global south perspectives on youth culture and gender imaginations in the technological society, journal of creative communications, 8, 2&3, p. 77-88. sreekumar, t.t. (2013b). the transnational politics of the techno-class in bangalore, in quayson, a. & daswani, g. (eds.), a companion to diaspora and transnationalism, p. 539-555, chichester, west sussex: wiley blackwell. thomas, d.r. (2003). a general inductive approach for qualitative data analysis. accessed on july 22, 2013 from http://www.frankumstein.com/pdf/psychology/inductive%20content%20analysis.pdf yin, r.k. (2003). case study research: design and methods, 3rd edition. thousand oaks, ca; london; new delhi: sage. zhang, w. & lallana, e.c. (2013). youth, icts, and civic engagement in asia, international communication gazette, 75, 3, p. 249-252. selfies and cultural events_revisat_toni selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): san cornelio, g.; roig, a; ardèvol, e.; enguix, b. . (2017, october 18-21). selfies and cultural events: mixed methodologies for the study of selfies in context. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. selfies and cultural events: mixed methodologies for the study of selfies in context author #1 gemma san cornelio author #1 open university of catalonia author #2 antoni roig author #2 open university of catalonia author #3 elisenda ardèvol author #3 open university of catalonia author #4 begonya enguix author #4 open university of catalonia context and theoretical framework mass events, such as concerts, music festivals, conventions about technology and popular culture, or celebrity-mediated events have become privileged spaces to showcase the exceptionality of a lived experience. and in these contexts, the selfie can be considered one of the better ways of expression of the ‘here’ and the ‘now’, as well as a key element when integrated in the everyday personal narratives favoured by social media platforms like instagram. in this regard, the analysis of selfies in the context of cultural events is part of the ongoing research project “selfie stories and personal data”, funded by the bbva foundation (2015-2017), in which the present paper is framed. in this project, we address the phenomenon of the selfie as part of a personal or a collective narrative (vivien and burgess, 2013) in social media sites. from this perspective, we consider the selfie as something more than just an image or a representation (gómez and thornham, 2015), adding social and conversational features focused on the fact of being a shared object. thus, the contextual information of the selfie, as the descriptive caption, the hashtags, the mentions, or the moment in time in which it is made public become essential in the shaping of the personal narrative (fallon, 2014). the connection between images and narratives has been taken one step further through the prominent roles of ‘stories’ in recent updates in facebook-owned social media sites like instagram, whatsapp or facebook itself. in this story-intensive environment, characters, time and causality, consubstantial elements of storytelling, become particularly relevant to our frame of analysis. although narrative analysis is not abundant in the academic approaches to selfies, it is worth mentioning georgakopolou’s approach to selfies as 'small stories’, including, among other parameters of analysis, the voices of characters and narrators, in a similar way to our previous work (san cornelio et al, 2007). as she points out, ‘the selfie is shared as a performance and/or responded as a story’ (georgakopolou, 2016, p. 315). methodological approach thus, considering the previous framework, we have introduced the notion of ‘time’ as an explicit element in social media analysis that allows us to articulate different methodological perspectives. unlike other previous projects on selfies with a quantitative approach (manovich, 2013; bruno et al, 2014), or other qualitative inquiries (senft and baym, 2015), our methodological approach involves a hybrid perspective or ‘mixed method’ (markham, 2013). on the one side, we conduct ethnographic fieldwork in order to get a better understanding of different forms of personal narratives and, on the other side, we took a big data approach oriented to the analysis of huge datasets. in order to succeed in this aim we have developed our own data extractor, a scraper based on the instagram api, which has been used for different case studies. instagram was selected as a focus for some reasons: firstly, it is a platform where selfies are extensively present (as previous studies have proven), secondly, the content shared is mainly self produced (re-posts are not frequent in instagram, contrary to other social media), which reinforces the idea of personal narratives, and thirdly, because it is the social media site less studied (compared to twitter, for instance). this entails a methodological challenge in terms of working with the instagram api (highfield, t., & leaver, t. ; 2016). with the aim of testing our methodology in the field we decided to examine the use of the selfie in mass cultural events -which suggested us a relevant activity in terms of selfie uploads-. once situated at the event venues, we could conduct interviews and perform participant observation and, at the same time, we could monitor the instagram activity through the scraper. this simultaneity allows for apprehending both the macro and the micro level and becomes relevant to make sense of the results obtained. quantitative and qualitative data could then provide a complementary view as well as show the limitations of research. data and discussion specifically, in this paper we will present some of the results obtained from two events which took place in barcelona in 2016: the music festival primavera sound and the barcelona games world convention. they are very different events indeed, which allowed us to compare the performances of fieldwork with instagram data analysis. regarding the primavera sound event, we collected data from our scraper for 24 hours during the first day of the festival (01/06/2016) monitoring the official tag for the event: #primaverasound2016 and capturing a total of 1.760 posts that formed our sample. on the other hand, we conducted ethnographic fieldwork during 7 hours, organized in different groups, doing participant observation with a total of 12 interviews. some of the relevant data of this case is the number of selfies found (8,2% of individual selfies, and 7,2% of group selfies). consequently, selfie can’t be considered as the predominant image, but the stage and surroundings (47,8 % of images depicted the festival facilities) and the tag ‘selfie’ is barely used. we also analysed the time where most pictures were uploaded, and we found some peaks, but more interestingly, looking in depth into the images we realised that some users continued uploading pictures some days after the event. this suggests legitimation to share the experience through time, since they had already proved that ‘they were there’. it was also expressed by our participants in both case studies that taking a selfie was significant for them in terms of capturing and sharing a special moment. thus, even if, as we have observed, selfies are not so predominant as considered in mainstream media discourses, this is a practice with a qualitative importance. in our presentation, we will delve into more details and results related to this event, which will be complemented with the work conducted during barcelona games world 2016. this is an event related to video games industries and cultures and we reproduced there the same methodology using the data scraper during 24 hours (07/10/2016) monitoring the official tag: #bcngamesworld. we got a smaller sample (719 posts) and also the ethnographic fieldwork (4 hours) was also smaller in scale, performing 3 interviews with younger pariticipants (compared to primavera sound). contrary to what we expected, some of the participants were more reluctant to talk about selfies and social media in general. nevertheless, the data extracted from the application returned a very similar proportion of selfies (17% including individual and collective selfies). moreover, we obtained a higher amount of portraits (33,4%) depicting others in the fair facilities: this points to the perception of a very significant experience to be captured and shared. regarding the mixed methodological approach, engaging a synchronic research (coincident in time the automatic data extraction and the ethnographic fieldwork) has allowed to detect, for instance, that while the fieldwork in the bcn games world suggested that selfies and personal images were not as significant, the data extraction showed us just the contrary. furthermore, fieldwork at primavera sound was extremely useful in terms of contextualizing our quantitative data. thus, we conclude that the mixed methods approach in a specific timeframe has been useful and can be expanded in further research. references: bruno, n., gabriele, v., bertamini, m., & tasso, t. (2014). “selfies” reveal systematic deviations from known principles of photographic composition. art & perception, 2(12), 45–58. doi:10.1163/22134913-00002027 georgakopoulou, a. (2016). from narrating the self to posting self(ies): a small stories approach to selfies. open linguistics, 2(1). gómez, e., & thornham, h. (2015). selfies beyond self-representation: the (theoretical) f (r) ictions of a practice. journal of aesthetics & culture, 7. highfield, t., & leaver, t. (2016). instagrammatics and digital methods: studying visual social media, from selfies and gifs to memes and emoji. communication research and practice, 2(1), 47-62. markham, a. n. (2013). remix culture, remix methods: reframing qualitative inquiry for social media contexts. in denzin, n., & giardina, m. (eds.). global dimensions of qualitative inquiry inquiry (pp. 63-81). walnut creek, ca: left coast press. san cornelio, g., pagès, r., roig, a. & ardèvol, e. (2007). broadcast yourself! internet and playful media practices. transforming audiences conference. london vivienne, s., & burgess, j. (2013). the remediation of the personal photograph and the politics of selfrepresentation in digital storytelling. journal of material culture, 18(3), 279-98. senft, t. m., & baym, n. k. (2015). selfies introduction~ what does the selfie say? investigating a global phenomenon. international journal of communication, 9, 19 tifentale, a., & manovich, l. (2015). selfiecity: exploring photography and selffashioning in social media. in postdigital aesthetics (pp. 109-122). palgrave macmillan uk. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): kappler, karolin eva. (2017, october 18-21). the interplay of different publics in big crisis data. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18 th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the interplay of different publics in big crisis data karolin eva kappler institute of sociology, university of hagen big crisis data: an emerging field of valuation we presently witness a huge surge of digital data, measurements and new forms of (algorithmic) valuation. this includes the extension of calculative practices to emergency situations (both natural and human-made crisis) and emergency management systems. by introducing big crisis data (castillo 2016) and its consolidating calculative practices of event detection, text classification, analysis of images or sentiment analysis, the very concepts of emergency and crisis rely heavily on the calculation of crisis events and crowd behavior. this data based crisis management takes place constituting, controlling and shifting the interplay between different publics, such as the population directly affected by the emergency, volunteers, networked publics (mainly through social media platforms), civil protection agencies, but also developers of algorithms, researchers, big data experts and ‘the crowd’. these practices can be interpreted as a new manifestation of “calculating the social“ (vormbusch 2012) and “controlling the future” (vormbusch 2009). relevant aspects of the social are being redefined based on calculative practices (hopwood/miller 1994). whereas critical accounting studies and parts of economic sociology are influenced by the notion that numbers should be studied as a dominant form of cognitive knowledge, this paper will study quantitative approaches to emergency management as an emerging practice in the frame of the transdisciplinary ‘valuation studies’ (lamont 2012). in this perspective, data driven emergency management systems presuppose the ongoing calculation and valuation of (transient) events. therefore, the paper asks (1) how these calculative practices look like and how they come into practice and (2) how they mediate between and affect different roles of involved publics. the aim is not only to shed light on the interplay between different publics, but also to understand how measurements and visualizations – based on big data analysis and algorithms – affect these publics following the perspective of a platform society. methodology to answer the above stated questions, the paper analyses a 3-years funded eu-project (super social sensors for security assessments and proactive emergencies management http://super-fp7.eu/) which has just ended. the eu project is composed of a mixed consortium of big data experts (such as academic researchers, commercial big data analysts, but also social network providers) and security experts (such as security and civil protection agencies). the consortium was composed as to introduce a holistic, integrated and privacy-friendly approach to the use of social media in emergencies and security incidents. the super approach exploits social media information in order to assess citizens’ behaviors and attitude before, during and after the occurrence of security or emergency incidents. this information is integrated into tools serving both the strategic and the tactical level of security/emergencies management. the paper is based on an accompanying research of this project, including participatory observations of several technical meetings, review sessions and weekly telephone conferences, qualitative interviews with involved partners and associated end-users, questionnaires with affected and involved publics (e.g. participating volunteers in validation pilots) and the corresponding reports and publications. the paper describes how the developed algorithms measure and visualize events, rumours, and sentiments before, during and after emergencies by use of metadata. it also describes how measurements and visualizations affect involved publics. the results refer to questions about rumours and fake news and how they alter the perception and behaviour of different publics involved. they describe specific types of interaction between different publics to provide “good and valuable” (mega-)data. finally, the results apply to the problems associated with incomplete algorithmic measurements due to fragmented visions of the corresponding public and to the lacking of context. the emergence of a megadata society? the paper explains some of the unfolding practices of emergency-tracking and how – based on individual and social metrics, practices and discourses – metadata gains in importance through supervised and non-supervised algorithms which detect patterns and anomalies. metadata also transforms human beings (at least partially) into simple dividuals, sliced into pieces of data and data assemblages (deleuze 1992). following pasquinelli (2017), this could lead to a shift from network society towards a metadata society, which draws its information, but also its power from big metadata and the corresponding platforms. hence, metadata might not only serve as a benchmark for the value of social relationships and the implementation of machine intelligence, but also as a new form of biopolitical control or “dataveillance” (pasquinelli 2014: 328). new forms of control can be used to manage and predict people’s behavior. however metadata society seems to some extent limited, as metadata still offers a partial view of life patterns, partly hindering “dataveillance”, hampering big crisis data and its uses in emergencies. http://super-fp7.eu/ references castillo, carlos (2016): big crisis data. social media in disasters and time-critical situations, cambridge: cambridge university press deleuze, gilles (1992): postscript on the societies of control, in: october 5 (winter): 3-7 hopwood, anthony g.; miller, peter (1994): accounting as social and institutional practice, cambridge: cambridge university press lamont, michèle (2012): toward a comparative sociology of valuation and evaluation, in: annual review of sociology 38: 201-221 pasquinelli, matteo (2014): der italienische operaismo und die informationsmaschine, in: reichertz, ramón (ed). big data, bielefeld: transcript: 313-332 pasquinelli, matteo (2017): arcana mathematica imperii: the evolution of western computational norms, in: hlavajova, maria (ed.). former west: art and the contemporary after 1989, cambridge: mit press (forthcoming publication) vormbusch, uwe (2009): controlling the future – investing in people. paper presented at the london school of economics and political science, department of accounting, february 4th, 2009; https://www.academia.edu/9774942/controlling_the_future__investing_in_people vormbusch, uwe (2012): die herrschaft der zahlen. zur kalkulation des sozialen in der kapitalistischen moderne, frankfurt/new york: campus verlag https://www.academia.edu/9774942/controlling_the_future_-_investing_in_people https://www.academia.edu/9774942/controlling_the_future_-_investing_in_people selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): azer, e., zheng, y., harindranath, g. (2020, october 28-31). information and communication technologies (icts) as oppressors of social movements: a power perspective. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. information and communication technologies (icts) as oppressors of social movements: a power perspective evronia azer coventry university yingqin zheng royal holloway university of london g. harindranath royal holloway university of london summary while the literature discusses icts as enablers of activism, this paper stresses the need to look at the holistic context that is dangerous and risky, because of icts too. it is a product of 30 semi-structured interviews with grassroots non-hierarchical human rights groups that operated in egypt before 2015 but no longer do because of oppression and how it affected them physically and psychologically. the value that icts have afforded to these groups’ organisation and mobilisation is huge, as they have used icts to organise their work and disseminate news about human rights violations worldwide. however, this cannot be viewed in isolation from the risk of surveillance and how it affects the groups. the oppression of social movements raises the question of how surveillance makes icts work against collective action, and threatens activists’ lives (hier & greenberg, 2009; della porta, 2013; hosein & nyst, 2013). icts created even more ways for authoritarian regimes to watch over activists, who rely largely on icts to organise their work and communicate. it can be argued that the asymmetry of visibility (brighenti, 2010) is one result of the advancements in icts that directly affected activists’ mental health by creating an anxiety among them, not knowing when and how they are being watched. this asymmetry has also endangered activists’ lives, because if they are unaware of being under surveillance and take no precautionary measures, they are an easy target for state oppression (azer et al., 2018, 2019). scholars argue that icts can cause growing social change alongside other efforts (mccaughey & ayers, 2003). this is no longer true in contexts where icts are an arena of power struggle. icts are merely a tool that both helps activists, but also helps regimes, even in a more impactful way. the paper shows that the paradoxical nature of icts helps analyse activists’ modes of visibility and the implicit power in artefacts that enable repressive measures (azer et al., 2018). the paradoxes of technology is defined as “a certain technology applied in a certain way in a certain context may have consequences or implications of one kind, and may necessarily and at once be implicated in a contrary set of consequences or implications” (arnold, 2003, p.231-232). this paper makes a contribution to explain power struggle in icts, by applying the paradoxes concept to social movements, and thus analysing tensions and challenges (zheng et al., 2011) manifested in the online space. the paper shows that the more powerful side is able to make use of icts to serve their goals. the two conflicting sides, activists and the state, both make use of icts as a space for action and therefore, icts have been turned into an arena for power struggle. another side of power that this paper discusses is the implicit power that exists within social movements: “even though activists do not want to be in an authoritarian system, they create a situation whereby their refusal to decide who is in charge actually leads to a power hierarchy” (azer et al., 2019, p.1162). therefore, the paper contributes to explaining power structures enabled by icts inside and outside social movements. it also discusses how the power manifested through icts creates much risk of different types for activists (technical, social, psychological and political), who attempt to mitigate the risk, while at the same time work towards their causes, causing a problem in the establishment of trust, and eventually causing collective action to be unsustainable. contribution this paper brings a much-needed realism to the hype about the role that icts can play in collective action, as it shows that aspects of power have been underplayed in the existing literature. this power leads to making movements’ collective action unsustainable. more importantly, aspects of power contribute to explaining why the arab spring in egypt “was a success at regime change but a failure at governance” (bimber, 2017, p.17), and saw a reverse turn on political and human rights, where rights groups have become constantly under attack (elmasry, 2019). this contributes to our understanding of activism in risky contexts, but more importantly, it contributes to activists’ own understanding of their organisational dynamics. different civil society groups around the world can benefit from this paper, which shows that collective action does not necessarily unfold in the same ways in various contexts. due to the large role that authoritarian regimes play, civil society organisations may think how they want to undertake action, not by imitating other groups, but by better understanding the context they operate in. this is particularly important for organisations that may fund civil society organisations in developing countries who struggle for democracy. this paper’s insights are also important for groups that seek undertaking action based on a horizontal non-hierarchical structure like the groups in this research. groups in authoritarian contexts may want to better appreciate the severe challenges they may face. it can be dangerous for activists to think that icts can be a tool that helps them achieve their goals without thinking of authoritarian use of icts, impacts of surveillance and challenges of leadership, and the implications of all these challenges on their mental or physical health. therefore, the technical activist community can think of how they can design tools and create platforms that are more biased towards serving and protecting activists. for researchers, journalists and media professionals, this paper also implies that it is important not to be optimistic about movements before waiting to see how they unfold, particularly after oppression remained even stronger than before. as oppression rises, movements struggle and outcomes of uprisings may not always be favourable or similar to each other. references arnold, m. (2003). on the phenomenology of technology: the “janus-faces” of mobile phones. information and organisation, 13(4), pp.231-256. azer, e., harindranath, g. and zheng, y. (2019). revisiting leadership in information and communication technology (ict)-enabled activism: a study of egypt’s grassroots human rights groups. new media & society, 21(5), pp.1141-1169. azer, e., zheng, y. and harindranath g. (2018). paradoxes of visibility in activism: the interplay of online power dynamics between activists and the state in the egyptian revolution. in: proceedings of the 12th mediterranean conference on information systems (mcis). corfu, greece, september 2018. bimber, b. (2017). three prompts for collective action in the context of digital media. political communication, 34(1), pp.6-20. brighenti, a. m. (2010). visibility in social theory and social research. hampshire: palgrave macmillan. della porta, d. (2013). can democracy be saved? participation, deliberation and social movements. chichester: polity press. elmasry, h. (2019) why is egypt attacking human rights groups? human rights watch. available at: https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/07/24/why-egypt-attacking-human-rightsgroups (accessed on 27 july 2019). hier, s.p. and greenberg, j. (2009). surveillance: power, problems, and politics. vancouver: ubc press. hosein, g. and nyst, c. (2013). aiding surveillance: an exploration of how development and humanitarian aid initiatives are enabling surveillance in developing countries. privacy international. available at: https://www.privacyinternational.org/sites/default/files/aiding%20surveillance.pdf (accessed on 22 june 2019). mccaughey, m. and ayers, m. d. (2003). cyberactivism: online activism in theory and practice. london: routledge. zheng, y., venters, w., and cornford, t. (2011). collective agility, paradox and organisational improvisation: the development of a particle physics grid. information systems journal, 21(4), pp.303-333. 1 a narrative approach to studying writers’ weblogs as interactive processes of identity performance joke beyl ibbt-smit/vrije universiteit brussel belgium joke.beyl@vub.ac.be abstract our research is directed at understanding how literary writers together with their readers narratively construct a sense of self through blogging. in this paper, we confront tentative results obtained from our analysis of blogging writers’ identity constructions with the observations that followed our analysis of the blogs’ reader comments. the aim of this paper is to understand how readers, by commenting, co-construct the identity of the literary writer. to this aim, we elaborate on the extent to which the comments relate to the narratives that make up the writer’s blog posts and, through a narrative analysis of the comments, how the blog commentators conceive of the writer in terms of authority and involvement. the rationale that underpins this study follows alexandra georgakopoulou’s linguistic ethnographic work on small stories that comprehends narratives as communicative, dialogical and locally produced practices of identity construction. keywords linguistic ethnography, online identity, weblog research, literary writers, blog readers new media as transformers of artistic relations according to susan sontag (1966, p.49-51), artists are granted authority because they possess the sense of a personal and intellectual extremity. this extremity is uttered by behaving 2 in an anti-liberal, anti-bourgeois, obsessive, morbid, unhealthy or hysterical way. their “indulgence in suffering” is what makes us admire these artists, sontag states. the beholder pays respect to their seriousness, their manifest willingness to sacrifice themselves for their truths and views. respecting this type of life relates to acknowledging the presence of mystery in the world. it appears that sometimes mystery is worth more than the truth, sontag concludes. put differently, the audience plays a distinct role in constructing artists’ authority. in les règles d’art, pierre bourdieu (1994, p.76-77) elaborates on the birth and the creation of the artist as a social phenomenon. he compares the symbolic concept of the artist, who is victimized and doomed in this world but consecrated in the hereafter, to the mystique of the christ figure (bourdieu, 1994, p.109). according to bourdieu (1994, p.208-213), the artist is made, authorized, consecrated and acknowledged based on a collective belief in his ‘magic’. without a world of celebrants and believers his artistic acts would bear neither meaning nor value. this observation applies to the literary field as well. the social position of the writer is related to power, to have at one’s disposal a distinct form of capital that is at the origin of social struggles about who is part of this universe and who is not, who is a writer and who is not (bourdieu, [1986] 1993, p.163-168). this is the reason why, for instance, it is argued “while film emerged in the early twentieth century as a commercial and collaborative medium, in order to be taken seriously as an art, alongside literature and the visual arts, it needed its own version of the myth of the solitary genius” (bennett, 2005, p.106). what is important to remember, then, is that in emphasizing the distance between artist and beholder, between writer and reader, readers to a certain extent mystify the author-figure. however, according to brian richardson (2006, p.120), writers equally impersonate “distinct authorial selves” that might differ quite severely from the ‘real’ author. mass media, too, have played a decisive role in constructing a mythical image of the artist. for instance, through underlining the “ideology of absolute artistic individualism” (walker, 1993, p.93). yet, when considering digital media, several scholars argue that, because of the interactive nature of the internet, both artists and members of the audience can become legitimate meaning creators and, thus, can demystify social authority relations. it is argued that manifestations of social and mobile computing, such as facebook and youtube, might realize the avant-garde goal of abolishing the distinction between art and everyday life (bolter, 2007, p.117). firstly, because today, as is argued by alison oddey and christine white (2009, p.8-9), more than ever before the audience wants to experience art in an interactive way. this means that the “spectator” focuses principally on what he or she wants to see and that this spectator 3 does no longer settle for merely viewing the work of art. rather, the spectator wants to engage in a more active way. secondly, it is mentioned that in the context of contemporary art the relation between art, social reality and the artist as a person has changed (kraemer, 2007, p.197). therefore, the artist’s opinion needs to be equated with visitors’ statements of the work of art in order to attain an all-embracing interpretation of the artwork (kraemer, 2007, p.201). also, new media are considered as a way for the artist to engage with offline as well as online communities and, hence, to maintain a connection with the social world. it is argued that the focus of artworks online seems to be more about the social use of technology than about the technology itself, “joining art and life through an activation of or intervention into the social fabric” (cook, 2007, p.114, 118). finally, it is stated that the distinct characteristics of the technology itself stimulate the emergence of a new type of relation. interestingly, this does not merely concern digital media. walter benjamin (1985, p.20-35), in his essay ‘the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, stated that the mechanical reproduction of art (which no longer was a case of unicity and authenticity, yet of mechanically produced and reproduced cultural objects) led up to a situation wherein the exchange of the positions of the artist and the public became easier. he argued that this specific way of creating cultural objects allowed the beholder to become a critical expert and even a creative author, since the opportunity to take part in these art forms was greater than before. these ideas re-emerged in the 1960s when marshall mcluhan repeatedly pointed out that technologies such as tv and other electric media instigated a stress on audience participation “as close to the total involvement of man in his work as of artist in his studio” (mcluhan, 1966, p.134). following mcluhan, each development of the electric age demands a high degree of participation from the audience. he perceives this as the end of the mere consumer phase and as the beginning of a new relation between the artist and the audience. whereas the artist is turned to presenting the creative process in favour of public participation, the audience becomes more actively and communally involved in this process as maker (mcluhan, 1966, p.148-153, 174-175), since the spectator now “must supply all the connections” (mcluhan, 1966, p.viii). today, simon lindgren (2007, web), for one, connects walter benjamin’s writings on mechanical media to his own reflections on web2.0. lindgren applies the analytical concept of benjamin’s flâneur to the current web surfer in order to understand the transition towards an interactive internet environment. this transition, lindgren states, should not be understood as a revolution. rather, we witness a continuation and intensification of an already existing move from simple media consumption towards increased participation and interaction. 4 blogging and de -/mystification of literary authority in this study, we intend to understand how the weblog, as a distinct digital medium, is used by contemporary literary authors in interaction with their readers to construct a sense of self and the other party and how this, as a result, affects their relationship. contrarily to carolyn r. miller and dawn shepherd’s approach (2004) that intends to understand how cultural transformations influence and explain for the emergence and the use of weblogs, other authors aim to comprehend the extent to which the use of digital technologies such as weblogs transforms traditional cultural norms. in other words, miller and shepherd (2004, web) see the blurring of public-private boundaries, the expansion of celebrity culture and voyeurism, and the mediatization of society as the context in which individuals use blogs to regain the balance that is lost in one’s self-identity. they add that apart from self-expression, blogs also fulfill a need for community building. hence, they function as a way of overcoming the post-modern flux of subjectivity and destabilization. laura j. gurak and smiljana antonijevic (2008, p.64-65), conversely, understand weblogs as media that are both private (“writing oneself” through stating past and present experiences) and public (“rewriting oneself” through interaction with the audience) and, thus, as media that invoke the creation of a new, “semiprivate or semipublic” identity, hence stimulating the blurring of social boundaries between public and private. gurak and antonijevic (2008, p.65) speak of blogging as incorporating “both an old human need – the need for temporal structuring and integrating of past and present experiences – and a new way of doing that – relying on speech, reach, anonymity and interactivity of internet communication”. considering both viewpoints, josé van dijck (2004, web) argues that “the diary and lifelog should be studied both as a cultural form or genre, while also taking into account the materiality and technology of (hand) written diaries and lifelogs, as well as the cultural practice of diary writing in comparison to the activities of so-called bloggers”. following van dijck (2004, web), blogs are characterized by a reinvention of old rituals that are adapted in a new way to the modalities of digitization and, thus, can be viewed as both personal artefacts of identity formation and as facilitators of a social process of exchange, participation and community construction. this combination of private and public characteristics, however, is not without its impediments. according to laurie mcneill (2005, web), “the diary is a centuries-old practice associated with the spiritual, the therapeutic, and the strictly private, while the internet, home of the “new media”, has been celebrated for its publicity and accessibility”. as a result, mcneill emphasizes that readers expect blogs to be personal, while at the same time they understand the 5 blog as a shared, public space in which they intend to encounter the blog author as well as other readers. the blog author, for his part, is in light of this paradoxical situation looking for stability, order and reliability rather than for change. hence, the uses of the weblog can be understood as decisions about self-presentation, on the one side, and decisions about social interactions on the other side. it is argued that both issues influence the “development and performance of identity” through weblogs (dennen, 2009, p.23). as a result, the self is multiple given that both the blogger and the readers are involved in creating it, although the blogger’s voice “remains the main center of the self-representational text” (serfaty, 2004, p.61-62). bloggers, hence, seem to be confronted with an ambivalent situation in which the blog functions as both veil and mirror. the veil implies that the internet allows the diary writer to construct and disclose himself as he intends (serfaty, 2004, p.13), thus to build a personal narrative. the mirror, on the other hand, can be found in the presence of a readership of the online diary because, as serfaty (2004, p.57) highlights, “the function of the mirror is to provide a medium for the identification to others as well as for separation from others”. serfaty concludes that: the frontier between writer and readers is no longer impassable, diarists relinquish some of their centrality, and readers are in fact expected to contribute to structuring the text of the blog by participating in the collective writing of entries, thus imprinting their mark on the diary. (serfaty, 2004, p.65) hence, the reader, lena karlsson (2006, p.14) claims, should be acknowledged as “coconstructor” of the blog genre. however, she essentially understands readers’ participation as an act of reading instead of an act of writing. readers’ engagement and activity in the text, karlsson (2006, p.3) states, is influenced by “assumptions about the identicalness of author/narrator/protagonist and the textual world and the “real”” and, thus, not only by “the possibilities of readers to leave their marks on the text”. in this context, she emphasizes that most blog readers refer to the notion of a “autobiographical contract” – thus suggesting a reference to an older medium in which mere identification with the protagonist seemed to be where most readers’ activity was situated – when describing their relation with the blog text (karlsson, 2006, p.50). susan herring et al.’s (2005, p.160-161) viewpoint on the blog as a heterogeneous genre is alike: “in blogging for purposes traditionally associated with other genres, people inevitably carry over some of the practices and conventions of those genres into their blogging practices”. hence, according to karlsson (2006, p.40), readers don’t really want to become writers themselves, they are not eager to participate visibly and seem to be constrained in their relation with the blog author. moreover, even when participating, they tend 6 to confirm the author’s performance. karlsson, thus, argues that authority remains intact and is even strengthened in blogging, irrespective of the interactive opportunities offered by the blog medium: the readerly responses to the questions on interactivity point to the endurance of the ideology of both authorship and autobiography. the diary blog form appears postmodernist (in its technologically inscribed multi-voicedness, in its relation to other texts/other selves, in its open nature whose ending is deferred); however, the readerly assumptions are steadfastly modernist. (karlsson, 2006, p.49) equally, chris chesher (2005, web) claims that weblogs perpetuate, coexist with and transform conventional authorship. he argues that the so-called death of the author as a result of the interactive and democratic opportunities offered by the internet is greatly exaggerated. “the author is alive and well, and has a blog”, he says. according to chesher, the features and conventions of blogs ascribe a certain cultural capital to the blog writer that corresponds to the romantic cultural convention of the author as an individual, mysterious and even magical genius. hence, paradoxically to the predictions of theorists celebrating the liberating potentials of the social web because of its less unidirectional and more interactive qualities, it seems that blogs succeed because they are less innovative than other online forms, chesher concludes. he, thus, seems to imply that people still prefer conventional and recognizable patterns: [blogs] reinvent and reaffirm authorship as the dominant paradigm for the metacommunication associated with written texts. the synchronous inverted narrative structure maintains consistent of voice and visual presentation with events marked location, giving a sense of actual space and real time. the dialogue with readers through comments compensates for the lack of careful editing and conversational style. as a text travels further from its context, the author looms larger. therefore, blog authorship is most prominent outside the blogosphere – in the culture that is still trying to comprehend new media. (chesher, 2005, web) a similar view is held by internet researcher geert lovink (2008, p.20) who states that blog readers’ comments are not of equal value to the blog author’s postings: “users are guests, not equal partners, let alone antagonists”. mathieu o’neil (2006) utters a similar explanation for the fact that authority has not been dissolved by the blogosphere: “if social networks have migrated online, it is logical to assume that the processes of differentiation, hierarchisation and control 7 which, by all accounts, structure offline human interactions, have also done so” (o'neil, 2006, p.2). moreover, it can be questioned whether literary writers actually want to use the internet as a participatory medium. following piret viires and virve sarapik’s (2010, p.353-354) research, writers intend to maintain their artistic authority in cyberspace. it appears that, paradoxically, the participatory connections between writers and readers, which are enabled by the internet, stimulate the author to tighten control of his utterances. rather than being interested in engaging in a dialogue with readers and, as a result, being influenced when creating, the writers mainly intend to get their message forth and stay in control, either by reacting to readers’ comments, closing down their blogs or editing already published texts. contrarily, rebecca lyle skains’ research on online novel communities offers a more optimistic view on “the shifting author-reader dynamic” (lyle skains, 2010, p.95). she elaborates on the way writer-created communities might bridge the old habit of reading print literature with the new engagement with digital literature. in contrast with viires and sarapik’s findings, lyle skains (2010, p.96) states that these online novel communities expand the dynamic between authors, texts and readers since they allow readers to “influence and shape the texts the author is creating, through feedback and reader-contributed material”. for instance, she states that blogs can be used to build a reciprocal conversation between the author and his readers who can use this medium to ask questions, to forward ideas or to give feedback. however, she confirms that it is the author’s choice to change this author-reader dynamic and to engage in an online dialogue (lyle skains, 2010, p.100-103). lyle skains (2010, p.104) is rather optimistic, as she believes that the author-reader relationship will become more equal. for not only does the reader become a co-author, the author also becomes a reader and recipient of the text inspired by his own story. larry friedlander’s understanding of digital stories and the way these exemplify the emergence of “a radical new era of storytelling, one that reflects in exciting but uncomfortable ways the cultural transformations of our time” (friedlander, 2008, p.177) can be situated between both aforementioned standpoints. friedlander underlines the new roles for author and reader that return us to premodern ways of storytelling in which storytelling was a collaborative and public act. according to friedlander (2008, p.182), “the nonhierarchical, improvisatory, open-ended, or non-ended nature of these narratives undermines authority and ownership”. yet, friedlander (2008, p.185) equally moderates his standpoint in saying that “digital worlds cannot function without some equivalent to the relationships of authority and trust”. 8 an important consequence of the appearance of these multiple uses, i.e. the blog as personal narrative and as social medium, seems to be the presence of competing narratives. as research (e.g. gomez, 2010) has shown, bloggers can at the same time sustain and undermine traditional myths and relationships in the narratives that underpin their blog posts. weblogs can, thus, be grasped as media in which distinct functions and features of the analogue and digital genre coexist and co-evolve into hybrid practices of both individuality and collectivity; private utterances and public encounters; memory (personal archive) and experience (social communication and personal evolution) (van dijck, 2004, web). weblogs as linguistic ethnographic constructions of online identity given the weblog’s hybrid character, we try to understand, here, the interaction between blogging writers’ narrative identity-constructions and commenting readers’ conceptualizations of literary authority and involvement. to this aim, we build on the work of alexandra georgakopoulou on small stories, which are understood as “communicative practices enmeshed in people’s social lives” (2007, p.ix). studying these stories means taking into account the spatio-temporal contexts of local narrative constructions of self and relating these actions of agency to extra-situational and structural roles and identities (georgakopoulou, 2007, p.1-8). by focusing on small stories, i.e. non-canonical or atypical narratives, georgakopoulou (2007, p.17-19, 106-108) intends to emphasize the importance of studying relational, dialogical processes of self sense-making that story not only the self but also the other through practices of making out, challenging or defending larger social identities. georgakopoulou (2007, p.123), here, makes use of the notion of “positioning” as a way of understanding how, through narrative performances and language practices, selves and others are located in a distinct space and identity. as a result, it is argued that people at the same time position and are positioned, for positions of self implicate positions of other and vice versa (georgakopoulou, 2007, p.124, 140). these positions involve culturally familiar codes as well as micro-culturally shared codes. moreover, the author’s research has shown that distinct identity constructions, such as femininity, should be understood as creative and critical reworkings of widely available discourses (georgakopoulou, 2007, p.142). in sum, larger contexts of roles and social identities shape and are shaped by local narrative tellings (georgakopoulou, 2007, p.149). in this paper, we focus on our analysis of three case studies (bm, tvl, cp) that were selected based upon the fact that 1) the selected blogging writers have published already at least two literary works with a professional publisher, which makes them ‘established’ or ‘well 9 established’ writers; 2) the selected weblogs are personal weblogs that have a lively nature, meaning that they were updated on a regular basis, i.e. multiple times a month, and that they attract reader responses; 3) these blogs are specifically targeted at disseminating writers’ reflections on their life, work and the entwining of both, rather than on commercial promotion; and 4) these writers regularly, online or offline, utter their opinion about the role, position or identity of contemporary writers. it should be remarked that these reflective writer blogs are sometimes embedded in a larger context of reading promotion, as is the case for the first case study that was published in 2008 when the flemish writer bart moeyaert acted as blogger-inresidence for one month on the website of the flemish centre for children’s literature. although the writer has his own personal weblog, we decided to use the in-residence blog since he extensively used this blog to air reflections about his personal life and work, and, more importantly, readers commented on a regular basis to his blog posts, whereas reader feedback is not made possible on his personal blog. hence, the lack of dialogue and narrative dynamics, crucial to the understanding of weblogs (cf. supra), compelled us to analyze the in-residence blog rather than the personal blog. our study of the two other cases comprised an analysis of at least 100 consecutive blog posts, as well as the related blog comments, that were published on the writers’ personal blog in 2010. the tables that are inserted in the appendix show the literary and blogging context of each of the three case studies. in disentangling the interaction between writers’ blog posts and readers’ blog comments, four main steps were followed in our research, consistent with the thematic narrative analysis approach as described by catherine kohler riessman (2008, p.53-76). in a first instance, we closely read all the selected blog posts and coded words and phrases that could be related to the self-representation and identity construction of the literary writer. secondly, we classified these self-writings in thematic groups, by examining the codes against the aforementioned theoretical-conceptual framework (riessman, 2008, p.66-67). thirdly, we found that these thematic groups could be coupled into several central narratives that each in a specific way related to the concepts of authority and engagement, on the one hand, and to the institutionalized notion of writerhood versus an individualized understanding of the writer, on the other hand. fourthly, these writers’ self-narrations then functioned as the starting point from which to understand the readers’ comments. keeping the writers’ blog narratives in the back of our head, we applied the same three steps as described above to expose the readers’ narrative constructions of writerhood and of the individual writer, in the comments section. this analyzing process, thus, followed an ethnographic approach “making connections between the 10 analytical concepts (etic) and the participants’ own sense making devices and ecologies of meaning (emic)” (georgakopoulou, 2007, p.22). inspired by the work of georgakopoulou, our micro-level narrative analysis focused on understanding the self as relational, fragmented, inconsistent, contradictory and ongoing. this ethnographic analysis as a result provided “context-enriching” accounts that concentrated on identifying traces of participants’ natural histories, sense-making and understandings, whether tacit or articulated in the data, rather then ascribing a priori prevalent frames to the data (georgakopoulou, 2007, p.18-21). in other words, following alexandra georgakopoulou’s (2007, p.39-40) understanding of narrative analysis, our study is grounded in the epistemology of “linguistic ethnography” (le), which combines the characteristics of a textual taxonomy with a social practice-based view of narrative. le, thus, takes into account the embeddedness of stories in a discursive context as well as the disembeddedness and re-embeddedness of stories in different contexts (georgakopoulou, 2007, p.74). writers’ weblogs as performances of controlled interactivity in a first instance, our research was aimed at understanding how weblogs are used as means to construct a sense of self, by way of a thematic narrative analysis of writers’ weblog posts. contrary to media theoreticians who stress the participatory and close relations between cultural content producers and cultural content consumers and contrary to media scholars who emphasize the reinforcement of existing authority by means of digital media, we found that blogging writers make use of multiple narratives at the same time to construct their online identity. in short, we have described these narratives as follows: 1) the writer as artist (n1), 2) the writer and the system (n2), 3) the writer and the audience (n3), 4) the writer as unique personality (n4). the first narrative refers to the romantic, dominant notion of writerhood as a unique, isolated and genius act. the second narrative nuances this view through understanding writerhood as being part of a distinct social group in society, while not being completely detached from society, for the writer is considered to play a role both in the social field and in the literary field in specific. the fourth narrative too underlines the author’s distinction, by having a unique view on life, but simultaneously connects the author with other human beings through mentioning the author’s personal feelings, memories or relations. finally, when the third narrative is used the blogging writer undermines the dominant notion of social distance in that the focus is on the social and collaborative relations of the individual writer with his readers and other people. 11 despite the fact that the three case studies share this complex combination of narratives, an interesting difference between the writers can be discerned when comparing the degree to which the four narratives appear in the blog posts of the case studies (in the appendix we have integrated a quantification of the central narratives per case). in the context of the first case study (moeyaert, 2008-01-01 to 2008-01-31), the first narrative (the writer as artist) and the fourth narrative (the writer as unique personality) dominate the blog posts. the dominance of both narratives is shown in the total number of references to these narratives in the blog posts. this means that this writer mainly subscribes to the idea of writerhood and individual writers in distinction to other members of society. it is, then, not surprising to see the third narrative (the writer and the audience) appear the least in this weblog. contrarily, in the context of the second case study (van lieshout, 2010-01-01 to 201006-30) the second narrative (the writer and the system) is present the most in the blog posts. the first narrative (the writer as artist) also appears a lot, yet the difference with the second narrative’s presence is remarkable. the third (the writer and the audience) and the fourth narrative (the writer as unique personality) are used less often. there is, thus, a significant difference in emphasis between both writers. moeyaert subscribes to the idea of writerhood and of the writer as distinct from society, whereas van lieshout rather defines writerhood mainly in terms of fulfilling a social role and position in society. through highlighting the distinction between the artistic/literary field, on the one hand, and other social fields, on the other hand, we believe that moeyaert intends to have his blog readers gain knowledge about why the artistic/literary field is distinct and, hence, why writers – himself included – should be acknowledged as distinct and unique personalities. in the case of van lieshout, it could be assumed that his blog is aimed more exactly at enlarging the author’s symbolic capital through underlining writers’ important social role and position in relation to other members of society. in the case study of claire polders (2010-01-01 to 2010-08-31) the focus in the blog posts is mainly on the writer as individual agent (narrative 4), while the third narrative (the writer and the audience) is used the least. also, the disparity between the number of references to the fourth narrative and the extent to which the other three narratives are referred to is remarkable. this might be explained given polders’ specific situation, in contrast with the other two authors, as semi-novice within the literary field. perhaps she doesn’t feel confident enough at this stage of her career to picture herself as part of a group of socially distinct writers or to believe in the role she as a writer can take up in social life. the latter, for example, appears in 12 the fact that she refers more often to other writers’ reflections on life than that she provides the reader with some worldly lessons of her own. although we realize that we touch upon the blogging writers’ narrative constructions in a rather narrow way here, we will not elaborate further on these authors’ narrative selfconstructions. in this paper we are interested in comprehending how readers, through commenting, co-construct the notion of the writer and, in addition, how blog commentators as such position themselves in relation to these blogging authors’ conceptualizations of literary authority and engagement. these observations are supported with a detailed quantification of the readers’ narrative responses in each case, which can be found in the appendix. in the first case study (bart moeyaert), the total number of blog comments that readers published during the writer’s blogger-in-residence time was 115, in response to the 42 blog posts that the writer posted. we did not come across any comments from moeyaert (bm) in reaction to his readers’ comments. this could be explained because of bm’s main focus on ‘the writer as artist’ (n1) and on ‘the writer as unique personality’ (n4) narratives in his blog posts. the focus on the self and on writerhood as an isolated, distant occupation seems to indicate that he is not very keen to engage in a debate with his readers. however, in about 50 percent of the blog reader comments reference is made to the third narrative, alluding to the relation between the writer and the audience. this means that readers, who exert themselves in commenting very often respond to moeyaert’s narratives in an active and equal way. hence, it seems that these readers understand writerhood to be a social instead of a solitary activity. they appear to consider their remarks and personal opinions valuable enough to share them with both the writer and other readers. hence, it can be concluded that the identity of the writer as constructed in the blog comments (i.e. mainly through narrative 3) to a certain degree adjusts the narratives that dominate the writer’s blog posts (i.e. narratives 1 and 4) by showing a broader picture and focus than mainly the writer’s self, life and position within the literary and social field. yet, when looking into the comments’ narrative content more thoroughly, it appears that actually we can detect a remarkable resemblance between the blog posts and the blog comments. in the case of bm, the fourth narrative (the writer as unique personality) together with the first (the writer as artist) dominates the blog posts. when looking at the blog comments in detail, we observe that in these comments a lot of references are related to 1) accounts of readers’ personal life and self that resemble the writer’s experiences, e.g. one commentator reacts to a blog post as follows, “it reminds me of the final years of my grandfather’s life” (bm, 2008/01/14); 2) a reinforcement of the mystique that surrounds the notion of the writer, e.g. some readers narrate about how the 13 writer’s artistic work impresses them and mention the impact it has on them in terms of “magic” (bm, 2008/01/28), “a spell” (bm, 2008/01/28), “a gift” (bm, 2008/01/22) or even “a medicine” (bm, 2008/01/31, 2008/01/16); and 3) the use of the blog as a medium to receive personal insights from and about the writer, e.g. one particular reader states to have enjoyed the blog because: “it felt as if i was walking around in your head” (bm, 2008/01/31). it is interesting to observe that the readers’ constructions of the writer via the comments not only show a resemblance to the way and the degree to which the four central narratives are used in moeyaert’s blog posts, but they also relate quite strong to the narrative components that dominate each of the four blog narratives as used by the writer himself (see the appendix for a detailed quantification). these dominant blog posts’ components are, for each central narrative: admiring other artists (n1), underlining the writer’s observatory role in society (n2), mentioning direct contact with the audience and appreciating the audience’s appreciation for the writer (n3), looking back on one’s life as a way of personal self-reflection (n4). the number of blog comments in the second case study (ted van lieshout), which involved 154 blog posts, sums to 820. tvl, in contrast with bm, on occasions engaged in the online interactions by publishing comments in response to readers’ comments or to elucidate certain topics or views that he uttered in his initial blog post. in total, tvl commented 205 times in between his blog readers. this means that the writer himself initiated one out of four comments. we believe that this observation can be understood in light of the narrative that dominated tvl’s blog posts, namely ‘the writer and the system’ (n2). in other words, in the comment section as well we can get an indication of this writer’s intent and view on the social engagement of the writer. for the plentiful use of this narrative shows the importance that tvl attaches to the idea of writers fulfilling a distinct social role or position in the literary field and in society at large. more specific, when considering the narrative components that dominated the narratives in van lieshout’s blog posts, it appears that the ‘writer and the audience’ (n3) narrative mostly takes shape in the form of the blog as a thematic discussion platform. this implies that tvl is convincingly using his blog as a way to instigate a lively debate with and among his blog followers through putting forward, on occasion, distinct topics or questions. also, the first and the second narrative, when used by tvl, often refer to literary prize winning and to literary activities in general, once again stressing the position of the writer in the social and the literary field. although the second narrative dominated tvl’s posts in contrast to the dominance of the third narrative in the readers’ comments, in the case of tvl too the readers seem to follow the writer’s stance to a large extent. so, we observe that the reader comments 14 show an abundant number of utterances in relation to the personal self and life of the reader, as if conversing among acquaintances, and can often be related to dialoguing. also, when we take into account the number of times a certain narrative was touched upon in the readers’ blog comments, in the case of tvl about 87% of the references point to the third narrative (the writer and the audience), whereas in bm’s case this ‘only’ happens in approximately 50% of the references. on the contrary, in 30% of the references the focus in bm’s blog readers’ comments is on ‘the writer as artist’ (n1) compared to 9% in the case of tvl. in sum, tvl’s followers seem to be keener on discussing and uttering their straight opinion than bm’s readers who more often stress the social distance between writer and reader. this also shows through in the fact that tvl’s commentators refer to the fourth narrative (the writer as unique personality) the least, while in the case of bm readers refer only to a minor degree to the second narrative (the writer and the system). furthermore, when looking at the aspect of readers reacting against the author, hence disagreeing, this appears only in 2% of the references in bm’s case compared to 11% in tvl’s blog comments. to conclude, it can be argued that tvl’s attitude as a writer, who strongly positions himself in relation to his distinct social role, stimulates his readers in responding and dialoguing. this takes the form of dialogues, answers, reactions against the writer and other readers, suggestions, questions and teasing the writer. thus, the commenting readers reinforce and confirm tvl’s self-constructed writerly identity. in the case of claire polders (cp) we counted 21 comments to 104 blog posts, wherein the author was responsible for 6 comments. comments, hence, were rather rare in the period under study, i.e. 0,2 % on average per post, and also rather short, i.e. 5 words per comment on average. these observations allow us to assume, firstly, that the number of readers following cp’s blog is perhaps more modest in comparison with the blogs of bm and tvl and, secondly, that both cp and her readers are to a certain extent hesitant in proceeding their dialogue on the blog. the latter could be explained in relation to the first assumption, for it is possible that the limited number of readers who follow cp’s blog perhaps more so than in the case of the more established writers, know the writer in person and, hence, prefer personal media or personal physical encounters to pursue their dialogue. also, this can be coupled with the focus on ‘the writer as unique personality’ narrative (n4) that dominates cp’s blog posts. here, too, it can be argued that the writer, who is younger and less-established than the other two writers, presents herself in a distinct, but personal way rather than as representative of a distinct, social field, thus privileging the personal character of the blog medium over its public reach. this narrative direction also shows through the narrative components that dominated each single narrative that 15 cp used in her blog posts. on the one hand, in the case of the first and second narrative, polders shows a strong admiration for other artists’ work and she often elaborates on other artists’ reflections on life and less on her own. on the other hand, in the case of narratives three and four, she mostly refers to her relationship with her friends and family and to her personal life with her husband. it is interesting, then, to observe that cp’s readers too mainly respond to her individual self rather then to her social or artistic personality, even though most comments refer to the third narrative. for instance, through suggesting that the reader knows the writer in person by wishing her a happy birthday and by mentioning that her birthday gift is on the way (cp, 2010/05/17). also, in the comments there is no reference what so ever to the ‘writer and the system’ (n2) or to the ‘writer as unique personality’ (n4) narrative. finally, given the almost absolute dominance of the third narrative in the reader comments, which highlights the relation between the writer and other people, it could be supposed that most followers of this blog know the writer in person. however, taking into account the limited number of blog comments – which of course in itself also can tell us something about the writer’s (blogging) (in-) visibility – these conclusions should be considered with caution. conclusion and outlook since digital media facilitate the possibilities of narrative co-production and participation and since “to play with narrative is to play with identity” (lundby, 2008, p.5), knut lundby underlines that forms of digital storytelling relate to questions of authorship and authority. though digital stories are personal, small-scale stories about the self, their wider meaning should be sought after in the large-scale institutional contexts of their production and uses. the transforming logic that characterizes digital storytelling, notwithstanding that it is a limited media phenomenon, equals the transforming logic in the major processes of mediatization, lundby states. this means that, for example considering art and literature as traditional storytelling institutions, digital media can generate transformations within these institutions on a semiotic, narrative and institutional level (lundby, 2008, p.6-11). our observations of digital storytelling in literary writers’ blogs seem to strengthen viviane serfaty’s (2004, p.62) aforementioned remark that “the voice of the diarist essentially controls the dialogical space”. the way the author constructs his personal image and public position, on the one hand, and addresses his readers in his blog posts, on the other hand, seems to be determining for the way readers respond in the comments. it could, as a result, be argued that in responding in the way as the writer puts forth, readers strengthen the writer’s authority as 16 the initiator of their relationships, whether conscious or not. these results also resemble the conclusions as stated in the work of pierre bourdieu (1994) on the social need for and maintenance of the mythical capabilities of artists. however, the comments equally suggest that readers intend to overcome the traditional distinction between themselves and the author through the interactive opportunities offered by the blog medium. we argue that our narrative analysis of blog comments, in relation to the author’s blog post narratives, shows that blogs can motivate readers to construct a more personal story in their relation with the writer, yet at the same time the narratives as used in the writers’ blog posts to a large extent frame the readers’ narratives. it seems that readers mostly are not very keen on taking the first step, but do engage in a convinced and individual way once the writer has paved the way. as such, the weblog can change the relation between writer and reader by boosting the reader’s voice in the construction of writerhood, of authors’ relation to society and of authors’ self-understanding. put differently, the blog readers seem to position the author and themselves in a relationship of what we suggest to call controlled interactivity. this means that readers do take advantage of the interactive opportunities to utter their voice and opinion, but in doing so they primarily co-construct instead of de-construct the image as conceptualized in and controlled through the writer’s blog posts. in analyzing the blog comments of the three cases, we found that the main underlying narrative is the third narrative. however, we believe that it is important to understand the dominance of the third narrative (the writer and the audience) in the blog comments’ form in light of the emphasis that the readers put on the distinctiveness of the writer and of writerhood, as regards the blog comments’ content. it could, then, be argued that the comments’ content is to a large extent in agreement with and follows the path as initiated by the writer, even when their form suggests otherwise in terms of a more open, equal and two-way dialogue. our analysis, also, revealed a distinction between the blog of bart moeyaert, on the one side, and the blogs of ted van lieshout and claire polders, on the other side. in the case of the former, it appears that the blog readers to a much lesser extent than in the latter cases make use of the comments section to relate to the writer on a familiar and interactive base. moeyaert’s readers, as aforementioned, refer to the third narrative in about 50% of the comments, whereas in more than 80% of the comments in the blogs of both van lieshout and polders reference is made to this particular narrative that underlines an interactive relation between the writer and other people, among which the author’s readers. this conclusion implies that moeyaert’s followers show a larger degree of self-control concerning their interactivity with the writer. they maintain and strengthen the notion of a greater distance vis-à-vis the writer. we argue that this difference 17 can be explained through the fact that, for instance, the second narrative (the writer and the system) is used less and the first narrative (the writer as artist) is used more in moeyaert’s blog narratives, whereas a reverse situation can be observed in the other two cases, which suggests that bm understands writerhood as a differentiated and mainly writer-controlled activity. put differently, it seems that the more the notions of control, distance and authority are present in the writer’s blog narratives, the higher the level of self-control that resides in the readers’ blog comments and the lower the level of interactivity in the comments that puts writer and reader on the same footing. and vice versa, the more the writer stimulates debate or opens up very personal aspects of his life, the more the readers will be eager to participate on an equal foot. yet, in both instances the writer decides about the intensity and the direction of this relation on his weblog, and the readers seem to follow this line to a considerable extent. it is our intention to elaborate this study through an integration of more case studies, taking into account diverse combinations of literary writers’ characteristics, such as literary position (established and well-established), gender (men and women), nationality (belgian and dutch) and whether one is emigrated or not, to select the case studies. we believe that considering these personal contexts of the blogging writers can help us understand mediatization, in the sense of the digital telling of the literary self, as a complex of agentive and interactive performances that balance both distance and involvement. references benjamin, w. (1985). het kunstwerk in het tijdperk van zijn technische reproduceerbaarheid en andere essays (3rd ed.). amsterdam: boom. bennett, a. (2005). the author. london & new york: routledge. bolter, j. d. (2007). digital media and art: always already complicit? criticism, 49(1), 107118. bourdieu, p. (1986) field of power, literary field and habitus. in randal johnson (ed.). (1993). the field of cultural production. essays on art and literature (pp. 161-175). cambridge: polity press. bourdieu, p. (1994). de regels van de kunst. wording en structuur van het literaire veld. amsterdam: van gennep. 18 chesher, c. (2005). blogs and the crisis of authorship. blogtalk downunder conference. retrieved from http://incsub.org/blogtalk/?page_id=40 cook, s. (2007). online activity and offline community: cultural institutions and new media art. in f. cameron & s. kenderdine (eds.). theorizing digital cultural heritage. a critical discourse (pp. 113-130.). cambridge: the mit press. dennen, v. p. (2009). constructing academic alter-egos: identity issues in a blog-based community. identity in the information society, 2(1), 23-38. friedlander, l. (2008). narrative strategies in a digital age: authorship and authority. in knut lundby (ed.). digital storytelling, mediatized stories: self-representations in new media (pp. 177-194). new york: peter lang publishing, inc. georgakopoulou, a. (2007). small stories, interaction and identities. amsterdam/ philadelphia: john benjamins publishing company. gomez, a. g. (2010). competing narratives, gender and threaded identity in cyberspace. journal of gender studies, 19(1), 27-42. gurak, l. j. & antonijevic, s. (2008). the psychology of blogging: you, me, and everyone in between. american behavioral scientist, 52(1), 60-68. herring, s. c., scheidt, l. a., wright, e. & bonus, s. (2005). weblogs as a bridging genre. information technology & people, 18(2), 142-171. karlsson, l. (2006). acts of reading diary weblogs. human it, 8(2), 1-59. kraemer, h. (2007). art is redeemed, mystery is gone: the documentation of contemporary art. in f. cameron & s. kenderdine (eds.). theorizing digital cultural heritage. a critical discourse (pp. 193-222). cambridge: the mit press. lindgren, s. (2007). from flâneur to web surfer: videoblogging, photo sharing and walter benjamin @ the web 2.0. transformations, 15. retrieved from http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_15/editorial.shtml lovink, g. (2008). zero comments: blogging and critical internet culture. new york: routledge. 19 lundby, k. (2008). introduction: digital storytelling, mediatized stories. in knut lundby (ed.). digital storytelling, mediatized stories: self-representations in new media (pp. 1-17). new york: peter lang. lyle skains, r. (2010). the shifting author-reader dynamic. convergence. the international journal of research into new media technologies, 16(1), 95-111. mcluhan, m. (1966). understanding media: the extensions of man. new york: new american library. mcneill, l. (2005). genre under construction: the diary on the internet. language@internet. retrieved from http://www.languageatinternet.de/articles/2005/120 miller, c. r. & shepherd, d. (2004). blogging as social action: a genre analysis of the weblog. in l. gurak et al. (eds.). into the blogosphere: rhetoric, community, and culture of weblogs. retrieved from http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/blogging_as_social_action_a_genre_analysis_of_the_webl og.html o'neil, m. (2006). weblogs and authority. blogtalk downunder conference. retrieved from http://incsub.org/blogtalk/?page_id=107 oddey, a. & white, c. (eds.) (2009). modes of spectating. bristol & chicago: intellect. richardson, b. (2006). unnatural voices. extreme narration in modern and contemporary fiction. columbus: the ohio state university press. riessman, c. k. (2008). narrative methods for the human sciences. los angeles, london, new delhi, singapore: sage publications. serfaty, v. (2004). the mirror and the veil: an overview of american online diaries and blogs. amsterdam: rodopi. sontag, s. (1966). against interpretation. new york: dell publishing co., inc. van dijck, j. (2004). composing the self: of diaries and lifelogs. fibreculture journal, 3. 20 viires, p. & sarapik, v. (2010). solitude in cyberspace. in agnes aljas et al. (eds.). transforming culture in the digital age. international conference in tartu 14-16 april 2010 (pp. 351-355). tartu: estonian national museum, estonian literary museum, university of tartu. walker, j. a. (1993). art and artists on screen. manchester: manchester university press. 21 appendix table 1: case study bart moeyaert: literary context (retrieved from www.bartmoeyaert.com on 2011-0421) nationality belgian year of birth 1964 gender man education dutch language, german language and history literary position well-established first publication 1983 (professional writer since 1995) type of literary work fiction (32), poetry (3 compilations, 1 anthology, 21 publicly disseminated poems), theatre (16 plays), articles (17), short stories (27), scenarios (2), translations (20), audio books (16) audience children, youth and adults literary prizes or nominations in belgium, netherlands, france, germany, norway, international recognition city poet of antwerp, honorary doctor university of antwerp, lecturer in writing at the royal conservatoire of antwerp (drama department) table 2: case study bart moeyaert: blogging context case bart moeyaert url blog http://www.villakakelbont.be/blog/?cat=56 start blog 2008/01/01 blogging frequency daily for one month context blog organisational blog focus blog life and work reader comments yes, often visuals drawings, photos blogging language dutch table 3: case study bart moeyaert: unit of analysis case bart moeyaert period of analysis 2008/01/01-2008/01/31 number of blog posts 42 total number of blog comments 115 number of blog comments by the writer 0 average number of comments per post 3 average number of words per post 633 average number of words in comments per post 220 total number of words in posts 26.594 total number of words in comments 9.241 22 table 4: quantification of blog writers' self-conceptualization in the case of bart moeyaert the writer as artist the writer and the system the writer and the audience the writer as unique personality 114 (34,1%) 75 (22,5%) 30 (9 %) 115 (34,4%) n references = 334 table 5: quantification of blog readers' construction of writerhood per narrative and per component in the case of bart moeyaert narrative/components (bart moeyaert) the writer as artist the writer and the system the writer and the audience the writer as unique personality reinforcing mystique 31 thanking the artist 22 assenting to the writer’s seclusion 8 appreciating plainness 2 readers learn 5 personal life and self 37 recognition 19 readers look back 12 readers suggest 9 readers agree 15 readers know artist as a person 9 readers react against the artist 2 (2%) blog as news medium about the writer 31 readers know artist as artist 2 sum (n references = 204) 63 (30,9%) 5 (2,5%) 103 (50,5%) 33 (16,2%) 23 table 6: case study ted van lieshout: literary context (retrieved from www.tedvanlieshout.com on 201104-21) nationality dutch year of birth 1955 gender man education illustration and graphic design literary position well-established first publication 1986 type of literary work fiction-poetry-picture books (50 publications in total), theatre (2), scenarios and songs for television shows, games and films (8) audience children, youth and adults literary prizes or nominations in belgium, netherlands, great-britain, germany, norway, international recognition visiting professor university of tilburg, member of literary jury, member of the board of several literary organisations, initiator of events for the promotion of reading, guest curator of an art exhibition for children, lecturer in drawing & illustration at the royal academy of art in the hague until mid 1990s table 7: case study ted van lieshout: blogging context case ted van lieshout url blog http://tedvanlieshout.web-log.nl/ start blog 2005/12/03 blogging frequency almost daily (until present) context blog personal blog focus blog life and work reader comments yes, often visuals drawings, photos, videos blogging language dutch table 8: case study ted van lieshout: unit of analysis case ted van lieshout period of analysis 2010/01/01-2010/06/30 number of blog posts 154 total number of blog comments 820 number of blog comments by the writer 205 average number of comments per post 5 average number of words per post 258 average number of words in comments per post 272 total number of words in posts 39.698 total number of words in comments 42.131 24 table 9: quantification of blog writers' self-conceptualization in the case of ted van lieshout the writer as artist the writer and the system the writer and the audience the writer as unique personality 139 (26,7%) 278 (53,5%) 51 (9,8%) 52 (10%) n references = 520 table 10: quantification of blog readers' construction of writerhood per narrative and per component in the case of ted van lieshout narrative/components (ted van lieshout) the writer as artist the writer and the system the writer and the audience the writer as unique personality reinforcing mystique 75 thanking the artist 16 blog as news medium about the social and literary system 10 readers agree 34 personal life and self 253 recognition 36 self-promotion 10 readers answer 36 readers engage in dialogue 138 readers suggest 50 readers tease 29 readers ask 37 readers react against the artist 79 (11%) readers undermine mystique 7 admiring artistic personality 5 sum (n references = 816) 75 (9,2%) 26 (3,2%) 709 (86,9%) 5 (0,6%) table 11: case study claire polders: literary context (retrieved from www.clairepolders.com on 2011-0504) nationality dutch year of birth 19761 gender woman education literature and philosophy literary position established first publication 2005 type of literary work novels (3), short stories (5), articles (5 + texts for philosophy calendar) audience adults literary prizes or nominations none recognition inclusion in a collection of short stories of young, promising dutch and flemish writers in 2006 1 retrieved from http://auteurs.degeus.nl/polders/index.html on 2011-05-04 25 table 12: case study claire polders: blogging context case claire polders url blog http://www.clairepolders.com/ start blog 2003/02/01 blogging frequency 5-10/month on average context blog personal blog focus blog life and work reader comments yes, few visuals photos, videos blogging language dutch and english table 13: case study claire polders: unit of analysis case claire polders period of analysis 2010/01/01-2010/08/31 number of blog posts 104 total number of blog comments 21 number of blog comments by the writer 6 average number of comments per post 0,2 average number of words per post 234 average number of words in comments per post 5 total number of words in posts 24.363 total number of words in comments 543 table 14: quantification of blog writers' self-conceptualization in the case of claire polders the writer as artist the writer and the system the writer and the audience the writer as unique personality 66 (24,1%) 78 (28,5%) 18 (6,6%) 112 (41%) n references = 274 26 table 15: quantification of blog readers' construction of writerhood per narrative and per component in the case of claire polders narrative/components (claire polders) the writer as artist the writer and the system the writer and the audience the writer as unique personality reinforcing mystique 4 readers agree with the writer 2 readers judge other artists 3 readers suggests 1 readers identify with the writer 1 readers tease 1 readers react against the artist 1 readers ask 1 readers wish luck 2 recognition 1 personal life and self 1 personal characteristics 2 readers know the artist as a person 1 sum (n references = 21) 4 (19%) 0 (0%) 17 (81%) 0 (0%) table 16: quantification of dominant narrative components in the blog posts per narrative and per case the writer as artist the writer and the system the writer and the audience the writer as unique personality bart moeyaert admiring other artists (20% 23/114 references) social role: observe (19% 14/75) artist-audience: direct contact (27% 8/30) + appreciating audience’s appreciation (23% 7/30) self-reflection: looking back (17% 20/115) ted van lieshout literary prize winning (24% 33/139) literary activities in general (11% 30/278) blog as thematic discussion platform (33% 17/52) personal characteristics (45% 23/51) claire polders admiring the work of other artists (30% 20/66) elaborating on other artists’ reflections on life (28% 22/78) relation writer family and friends (61% 11/18) personal life (34% 38/112) microsoft word vickery.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): vickery, j.r. (2014, october 22-24). all quiet on the facebook front: teens’ negotiation of social and mobile media privacy. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. all quiet on the facebook front: teens’ negotiation of social and mobile media privacy jacqueline ryan vickery university of north texas introduction & research question at a time when teens increasingly communicate via mobile and social media, it is not a surprise they are willing to share incredibly personal information with their peers, yet this should not be misinterpreted as a disregard for social privacy (boyd; 2014; boyd and marwick, 2011). research evidences that teens care deeply about their privacy (boyd, 2014; harris, 2010, marwick, diaz, and palfrey, 2011; youn, 2009). this paper focuses on the unique challenges low-income teens face in mitigating social and mobile privacy. due to financial constraints, low-income teens often have precarious access to technology, which leads to an economy of sharing. additionally, compared to adults, teens ( and in particular lowincome teens) are subjected to greater surveillance (kelly, 2000, 2003), thus further complicating privacy management. as such, this paper asks: how do low-income teens mitigate reduced privacy levels in and through mobile technologies and social media? method this ethnographic study focuses on the lives of 18 high school students at a lowperforming, economically challenged, and ethnically diverse high school in the united states. as part of a research team, the reviewer spent one year observing an afterschool digital media club and getting to know students at the high school. while the larger project employed a multi-methodological approach, this particular paper draws analysis from one-on-one interviews conducted with teens over the course of an academic year. interviews were conducted on a weekly basis with a member from the research team and vacillated between semi-structured topical interviews (e.g. technology, peers, education, home life, etc.) and informal unstructured conversations about their day-to-day lives. in most cases, interviews were recorded on mini digital recorders and then transcribed and uploaded to a cloud-based qualitative analysis program called dedoose. analysis involved reading, coding, and analyzing initial interviews and field notes in order to identify emergent themes and trends. in total, the project collected 215 recorded interviews with participants. research & findings as literature demonstrates, teens employ various methods of achieving privacy. this study demonstrates some of the unique challenges low-income teens face managing mobile and social privacy and considers the various tactics they employ in order to manage their digital and social lives. i specifically use the word tactic to invoke de certeau’s (1984) language of resistance. i demonstrate how participants tactically negotiated blurred boundaries and resisted norms of surveillance to manage privacy. blurred boundaries between communal & personal mobile devices research suggests mobile devices are typically constructed as highly personal and individualized; they are worn on the body and enable person-to-person contact, rather than place-to-place communication (campbell & park, 2008; ling, 2010). however, financial constraints prohibited many participants from attaining a phone or mobile device (e.g. ipod or tablet), thus mobile devices were constructed as communal and shareable commodities within peer networks. in other words for many of the participants, mobile ownership was not as simple as ‘yes i have a phone’ or ‘no i do not’, but rather access was temporal and contextual, ‘yes i have a phone right now’. as such, teens developed localized practices of sharing within peer groups that led to constant negotiations and contestations of public and private boundaries. resisting the reconfiguration of social & physical boundaries low-income teens are often discursively constructed as “at-risk” and thus subjected to greater surveillance (kelly, 2000, 2003). furthermore, mobile phones have been simultaneously constructed as tools of freedom and liberation as well as technologies of surveillance and control (ling, 2010). while some participants found that mobile devices granted them freedom to connect with peers outside the purview of parents and authority, other teens in the study resisted the ways in which mobile phones reconfigured parental and peer expectations. some teens in the study deliberately and tactically resisted mobile phones as technologies of further surveillance. for example, mexican senior javier could afford a phone (and his parents offered to help him get one), but he chose not to have one because he did not want to make himself readily available to adults or his peers. in this way some participants actively resisted the ways mobile devices disrupt social and physical boundaries. resisting converged identities & collapsed contexts lastly, teens in the study utilized a variety of different social media platforms – facebook, twitter, tumblr, instagram, youtube in order to reach different audiences, explore different identifies, and form different communities. i argue the use of different platforms is a deliberate privacy strategy intended to resist converged identities and audiences. social media interfaces and corporate influences facilitate the convergence of identities and communities. this is evident through the increasing public nature of facebook, the archival narrative created through sharing, and the collapse of audiences on the site (van dijck, 2013). however, these norms are relatively new within the broader scope of internet history. for example, prior to the rise of social networking sites, teens used blogs as a way to anonymously explore identity and find community beyond their day-to-day interactions. these explorations were often fluid, experimental, and diverged from their offline embodied identities (author, 2010). yet, sites such as facebook encourage the cohesiveness of “one” identity (van dijck, 2013). it is no surprise then that teens are abandoning facebook in favor of social media platforms that allow for greater fluidity and exploration of divergent identities and communities. likewise, teens in this study had a preference for platforms that alleviated them from further surveillance (by adults and authority). these transitions are tactical exercises of resistance that afford greater privacy. that is, rather than negotiate liminal boundaries between what is and is not socially acceptable to share with converged audiences on sites such as facebook, some participants utilized alternative spaces that afforded anonymous disclosure and more private interactions. the norms and technical affordances of different mediated spaces afford teens the freedom to openly disclose information without breaching localized social norms. significance & contribution to conference themes this research is significant because it furthers our understanding of the unique challenges low-income teens face while managing digital and social privacy; it addresses a gap in literature by paying particular attention to the role of economics in shaping teens’ privacy strategies and tactics. the research coincides with several themes of the conference. it focuses on teens who are living marginalized (virtual) lives and focuses on an economically-challenged demographic of digital “have-nots”. the study explores the constant negotiation between social media platforms that encourage context convergence and teens’ desires for divergence, exploration, and privacy. as will be demonstrated in the full paper, this study ultimately argues that the boundaries of sharing and privacy are constantly renegotiated at the intersection of localized social norms, economic and social capital, and the technical affordances of particular platforms and devices. references boyd, d. and marwick, a. (2011). social privacy in networked publics: teens’ attitudes, practices, and strategies. presented at the privacy law scholars conference in berkeley, ca. available online: http://www.danah.org/papers/2011/socialprivacyplscdraft.pdf. campbell, s.w., and park, y.s. (2008). social implications of mobile telephony: the rise of personal communication society. sociology compass 2, no. 2: 371-387. de certeau, michel. (1984), the practice of everyday life. berkeley, ca: university of california press. harris, frances jacobson. (2010). teens and privacy: myths and realities. knowledge quest 39, no. 1 (september/october): 74-79. kelly, peter (2000). the dangerousness of youth-at-risk: the possibilities of surveillance and intervention in uncertain times. journal of adolescence, 23, pp. 463-476. kelly, peter (2003). growing up as risky business?: risks, surveillance, and the institutionalized mistrust of youth. journal of youth studies, 6(2), pp. 165-180. ling, rich. (2010). new tech, new ties: how mobile communication reshapes social cohesion. cambridge, ma: mit press. marwick, alice, diaz, diego murgia, and palfrey, john. (2010). youth, privacy, and reputation.: literature review. harvard law school: public law & legal theory working paper series, paper no. 10-29. available via the social science research network (ssrn) at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1588163. van dijck, jose. (2013). ‘you have one identity’: performing the self on facebook and linkedin. media, culture, & society, 35(2), 199-215. vickery, j. (2010). boyd, d. (2014). it’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens. new haven, ct: yale university press. youn, s. (2009). determinants of online privacy concern and its influence on privacy protection behaviors among young adolescents. journal of consumer affairs, 43(3), 389-418. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): witt, a. (2019, october 2-5). a new black box methodology: the challenges and opportunities of interrogating the moderation of images depicting women’s bodies on instagram. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 1 a new black box methodology: the challenges and opportunities of interrogating the moderation of images depicting women’s bodies on instagram alice witt faculty of law, digital media research centre, queensland university of technology (qut) introduction it is difficult to trust that user-generated content is moderated on social media platforms in ways that are free from arbitrariness and bias. content moderation refers to the processes through which platform executives and their moderators set, maintain and enforce the bounds of ‘appropriate’ content based on many factors, among them platform-specific rules and emergent social norms. decisions around the appropriateness of content, which are made by humans and/or artificial intelligence systems, are ultimately regulatory decisions as they attempt to influence or control the types of content that users see and how and when they see it (suzor, 2018). content is, however, moderated within a ‘black box’ that obscures internal governance processes from external scrutiny. this lack of transparency has far-reaching consequences (pasquale, 2011), one of which is that users’ have limited understandings of the direct interventions that platforms make around content (gillespie, 2018). transparency deficits also contribute to the relative dearth of empirical research into instagram’s moderation processes to date, along with the confidential nature of the rules that moderators follow and ongoing restrictions to the instagram application programming interface (instagram, 2019). this paper, therefore, proposes a black box methodology for empirically examining processes for moderating content when only parts of a platform’s regulatory system are visible from the outside. in doing so, it evaluates the methodological, legal and ethical challenges of studying content moderation in practice. the proposed methodology is 2 explained through a case study into whether like images of women’s bodies are moderated alike on instagram. none of these images are explicitly prohibited under the platform’s terms of use and community guidelines. this is a topical case study given widespread user concerns that instagram is arbitrarily ‘removing’ – also described as ‘banning,’ ‘censoring’ and ‘deleting’ – depictions of female forms (onlinecensorship, 2018). a persistent claim is that the platform is less likely to remove thin-idealised images of women (sarah myers west, 2015). by contrast, some users claim that instagram is creating a positive space for the depiction of all female forms and democratising body standards (katz, 2017). though this subject matter has been highly controversial over several years, users and other stakeholders lack empirical evidence to ground these competing claims. black box methodology the proposed methodology is based on black box analytics, particularly an input/output method that identifies how discrete inputs into a system produce certain outputs (perel & elkin-koren, 2017). input in this paper refers to individual images, while output pertains to the outcome of content moderation (ie, whether an image is removed or not removed). images were programmatically collected through the digital media observatory at qut: specifically, automated tools scraped the last 20 images from selected hashtags every six hours (four times per day) on an ongoing basis. the selected, publicly available hashtags were #curvy, #effyourbeautystandards, #fatgirl, #fitgirl, #girl, #lesbian, #lgbt, #postpartum, #skinny, #stretchmarks, #thick and #thin. these hashtags were mentioned in controversies around women’s bodies on instagram and offered a high volume of fairly diverse content. once images were programmatically collected, content analysis was undertaken to code images as either underweight, mid-range or overweight based on the photographic figure rating scale (pfrs). while coding for women’s bodies is subjective, the pfrs provides a realistic measure of the naturally occurring morphology of women that is arguably more rigorous than descriptive categorisation (swami et al., 2012). a number of images were excluded during coding, including explicitly prohibited content and close-ups of women’s faces. this means that the final coded dataset (a total (‘t’) of 4,994 images, specifically t = 3,879 for underweight, t = 524 for midrange and t = 541 for overweight) primarily comprises ‘selfies’ or portraits that depict a significant portion of a woman’s body. we should arguably expect the sampled images to be moderated alike given that none of the images in this study are explicitly prohibited. approximately one month after images were collected, the availability of each image was tested again to determine whether it had been removed. this provided a discrete output for every coded input. it was then possible to investigate true negatives (images that do not appear to violate instagram’s policies and were not removed), and potential false positives (images that do not appear to violate instagram’s policies and were removed), across underweight, mid-range and overweight categories. results, challenges and opportunities 3 overall, the moderation of images in this paper was inconsistent. the probability of removal for the underweight category is 24.1% followed by 16.9% for mid-range and 11.4% for overweight. up to 22% of images in the coded sample were removed by instagram or by the user and are, therefore, potentially false positives. the results suggest that claims that instagram is less likely to remove thin-idealised images could be overstated, but that concerns around the risk of arbitrariness and, indeed, ongoing distrust of the platform among users, might not be unfounded. the empirical results are statistically significant. the results of probing the black box around instagram’s moderation processes highlight a number of complex methodological, legal and ethical challenges (highfield & leaver, 2016). the foremost methodological challenge is that automated tools cannot determine whether the platform or a user removed an image without knowledge of the platform’s internal processes. this means that this study, like others, cannot draw definitive conclusions about why content was removed. an added complication is that instagram can remove images for a number of reasons that do not directly relate to the depiction of women’s bodies, such as copyright infringement, and users might choose to remove their content for any number of diverse reasons. there is also legal uncertainty, largely because the legality of web scraping data remains unclear, and ethical concerns around coding images into like categories that might differ in terms of race, age, disability or other factors (leurs, 2017). by evaluating these methodological, legal and ethical challenges, among others, we can better assess the efficacy of using black box analytics and digital methods to examine content moderation at scale. the methodology in this paper produced a range of empirical results about the moderation of some images of female forms on instagram and shone a spotlight on a complex regulatory issue despite the lack of transparent information about platform governance more broadly. there is wide scope for researchers to develop and apply the proposed methodology across controversies and platforms. doing so will enable researchers and other stakeholders to continue the important work of empirically examining whether users can trust that processes for moderating content are free from potential arbitrariness and bias. references gillespie, tarleton. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. connecticut, united states: yale university press. highfield, tim and tama leaver. (2016). instagrammatics and digital methods: studying visual social media, from selfies and gifs to memes and emoji. communication research and practice, 2(1), 47 4 instagram. (2019, february 8). platform policy. about us. retrieved from https://www.instagram.com/about/legal/terms/api/ leurs, koen. (2017). feminist data studies: using digital methods for ethical, reflexive and situated socio-cultural research. feminist review, 115, 130 onlinecensorship. (2018, 1 may). a resource kit for journalists, [instagram]. onlinecensorship.org. retrieved from https://onlinecensorship.org/content/a-resourcekit-for-journalists pasquale, frank. (2011). restoring transparency to automated authority. journal on telecommunications and high technology law 9, 235 perel, maayan and niva elkin-koren. (2017). black box tinkering: beyond transparency in algorithmic enforcement. florida law review, 69, 181-221. sarah myers west. (2015, november 18). facebook’s guide to being a lady. onlinecensorship.org. retrieved from https://www.onlinecensorship.org/en/news-andanalysis/15 suzor, n. (2018). digital constitutionalism: using the rule of law to evaluate the legitimacy of governance by platforms. social media + society, 4(3), 1. swami, viren et al (2012). further investigation of the validity and reliability of the photographic figure rating scale for body image assessment. journal of personality assessment, 94(4), 404. katz, evan ross. (2017, august 31). how instagram helped democratise beauty. mic. retrieved from https://mic.com/articles/184143/how-instagram-helped-democratizebeauty#.vhvfc5jel microsoft word huntington_affectandeffectsmemes.doc selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 menacing memes? affect and effects of political internet memes heidi e. huntington colorado state university internet memes and politics scholarship demonstrates that internet memes – digital-media based, intertextual, participatory creations – are polyvocal, political discourse (milner, 2012) and grassroots action and advocacy (shifman, 2014). in democratic and nondemocratic societies, citizens use memes to react, critique, protest, and speak truth to power. political memes are used to critique and comment on social and political issues, from elections, to food stamps, police violence and issues of equality. one example of such political memes, binders full of women, used pop culture references to critique 2012 u.s. republican presidential nominee mitt romney’s words, and to comment on workplace equality and how women are viewed in the united states. figure 1 two examples of the binders full of women meme that referenced pop culture to make a rhetorical point. because of their participatory nature, political or activist memes have been celebrated for offering new avenues for political discourse and participation. while much of the meme scholarship to date has focused on meme creators and the qualities of memes themselves, what is less clear are the effects such memes have on those who view suggested citation (apa): huntington, h. (2015, october 21-24) menacing memes? affect and effects of political internet memes. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. them and within society more broadly. it may be that memes have effects similar to other forms of political media, with implications for how viewers understand or think about particular issues or figures. in a late november 2014 post for the spectator, a long-running conservative british magazine, isabel hardman lamented the spread of a particular meme, the purpose of which was ostensibly to critique the british parliament by highlighting mps’ lack of concern for social issues, in contrast to their over concern for their own benefits. in the post, headlined “the menace of memes,” hardman traced the origins of photos used in the meme to argue that the memes were “deceitfully spreading lies” through a combination of out-of-context images and over-simplification of parliament’s processes (hardman, 2014). figure 2 this example of the parliament debate meme was used to illustrate a news story about the debate (russia today, 2014). underlying hardman’s essay was the assumption that these memes contributed to viewers’ understanding of the issue. while an interesting assumption, it is also an understudied one. though the influence of media on politics has long been of interest to scholars, this research has been largely focused on traditional forms of media. with the rise of social media has come a blurred distinction regarding what counts as “media.” when nearly anyone can write a blog post or share a meme, it becomes necessary to understand how user-generated media influences politics. while this work has begun with studies of relationships between social media use and information-seeking or traditional political participation, there is more work yet to be done to understand how user-generated content, like internet memes, influence those who view them as media. by exploring this question of meme effects, this paper seeks to answer shifman’s (2014) call for future meme research to establish what constitutes an effect of memes and how such effects might be measured. affect, memes, and politics in the case of the parliament debate meme, hardman noted that the meme tapped into feelings of disgust or distrust toward politicians, arguing this connection contributed to viewers’ uncritical take on the meme as they passed it on. indeed, emotionality may be key to memes’ spread (shifman, 2014). this paper argues the emotionality embedded in and elicited by memes is a key to understanding memes’ effects, especially in the realm of politics. feelings and emotions are components of affect (lang & dhillon, 2004), a powerful aspect of political cognition. affect is demonstrated to influence political information seeking, participation, and opinion formation (cassino & lodge, 2007; wyer, 2004). in fact, affect and cognition are intricately linked in political contexts (redlawsk, 2002; wyer, 2004). wyer claimed that affective reactions influence judgments and behaviors by serving as a source of information about the “persons, objects, and events to which these reactions are directed” (2004, p. 363). affect also influences politics through transfer or priming to an object of evaluation (isbell, ottati & burns, 2006). affect is also an outcome of viewing media. for instance, dillard et al. (1996) demonstrated that fear appeals in television public service announcements (psas) did, in fact, make people feel fearful. affect, then, is both an outcome of viewing media and a moderator of effects of consuming media. method to further explore the relationship between memes and affect in political contexts, preliminary research was conducted in advance of a larger research study. an online experiment was used to test a total of 24 political and non-political memes for affect and participant perceptions of the memes, and to look for possible differences in reactions to political and non-political memes. for participating in this online study, participants could choose to be entered into a raffle to win one of two $50 amazon gift cards. college students ages 18 to 24 (n = 100) were drawn from the undergraduate population at a large university in the western united states in an area known for having high numbers of both conservative and liberal voters. after giving informed consent, participants were presented with 6 of the 24 memes, with each participant viewing a mixture of political and non-political memes in random order. the political memes depicted a variety of political issues and figures relevant to politics in the united states. participants were asked to rate each individual meme for its political stance (conservative, liberal, or non-political), and to explain that choice in their own words. next, participants’ emotional responses after viewing all of the memes were recorded using the positive and negative affect schedule (watson, clark & tellegen, 1988). participants also completed a thought-listing task asking for any of their thoughts as they were viewing the memes. to test whether thought-listing can influence emotional responses to memes by triggering deeper thinking about them, half of the participants completed the thought-listing task before the panas, and half completed the panas first. participants were also asked to identify their own political ideology, beliefs and participation, as well as media use habits, including meme viewing and creating. data from this preliminary study will be assessed in order to refine a future study. it is also expected to illuminate how viewers perceive memes’ content as media, and particularly political media, with implications for the role memes play as affective media in modern politics. the full presentation elaborates on the results of this research, including discussion of the most common emotional reactions to the memes as produced by the panas. examples are provided, and the implications for politics and meme effects scholarship are discussed. conclusion because of memes’ visual nature and the centrality of their ability to tap into emotions and feelings in their spread (shifman, 2014), affect is a useful place to begin to understand political memes’ potential effects as a form of media. if memes influence viewers’ affect, such as emotions or feelings, this is an important step toward understanding the implications of such user-generated media for outcomes such as perceptions of political figures or issues. this paper represents preliminary research to establish memes’ effects through the dimension of affect. references cassino, d., & lodge, m. (2007). the primacy of affect in political evaluations. in w. r. neuman, g. e. marcus, a. n. crigler, & m. mackuen (eds.), the affect effect (pp. 101-124). chicago, il: the university of chicago press. dillard, j. p., plotnick, c. a., godbold, l. c., freimuth, v. s., & edgar, t. (1996). the multiple affective outcomes of aids psas: fear appeals do more than scare people. communication research, 23(1), 44-72. hardman, i. (2014, nov. 29). the menace of memes: how pictures can paint a thousand lies. the spectator. http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/isabelhardman/2014/11/the-menace-of-memes-how-pictures-can-paint-a-thousandlies/ isbell, l. m., ottati, v. c., & burns, k. c. (2006). affect and politics: effects on judgment, processing, and information seeking. in d. p. redlawsk (ed.), feeling politics: emotion in political information processing (pp. 57-86). new york: palgrave macmillan. lang, a., & dhillon, k. (1995). the effects of emotional arousal and valence on television viewers' cognitive capacity and memory. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 39(3), 313-327. milner, r. m. (2012). the world made meme: discourse and identity in participatory media (doctoral dissertation). available from proquest dissertation and theses (order no. 3541828, university of kansas). redlawsk, d. p. (2002). hot cognition or cool consideration? testing the effects of motivated reasoning on political decision making. journal of politics, 64(4), 10211044. doi: 10.1111/1468-2508.00161 russia today, (2014, nov. 7). mps snub living wage debate, us socialist leader backs £10/hour in uk. russia today. http://rt.com/uk/203231-mps-living-wage-sawant/ shifman, l. (2014). memes in digital culture. cambridge, ma: the mit press. watson, d., clark, l., tellegen, a. (1988). development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: the panas scales. journal of personality and social psychology, 54(6), 1063–1070. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.54.6.1063 wyer, jr., r. s. (2004). social comprehension and judgment: the role of situation models, narratives and implicit theories. mahwah, n.j.: lawrence erlbaum associates. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): kant, t and reed, l. (2020, october). one donor egg and “a dollop of love”: the banal ambiguities of egg donation advertising on facebook. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. one donor egg and “a dollop of love”: the banal ambiguities of egg donation advertising on facebook dr tanya kant university of sussex dr elizabeth reed university of southampton introduction using textual analysis of 28 adverts for egg donation, sharing, and freezing drawn from facebook’s ad library archive, we consider what forms of motherhood, kinship, and sociality are promised through targeted advertisements for assisted reproductive technologies (herein arts) on facebook. in a contemporary moment of ubiquitous data tracking and gendered, algorithmically targeted marketing (which we call ‘algotargeting’), we seek to understand (1) how egg donation, sharing and freezing adverts by art providers represent the women they expect to use their services; (2) how the meaning of these representations is enhanced or changed by their delivery through algotargeting; and (3) what imaginative, genealogical, and relational possibilities associated with the use of art are foreclosed or endorsed in the delivery of these adverts to algorithmically anticipated “fertile females”. methodology this paper draws on a data set of fertility clinic adverts which were active and visible on the facebook ad library on 30 may 2019. the facebook ad library was launched in october 2018 in the uk in response to criticism that targeted advertising—especially that which was undertaken by political parties—was opaque and unaccountable (bbc, 2017). according to facebook, the ad library “provides advertising transparency by offering a comprehensive, searchable collection of all adverts currently running from across the facebook products” (facebook, 2019). the library also comes with some substantial caveats in what data are available – for example the library only discloses targeting and spending data for ads deemed to be “of national importance”, which does not include any of the egg donation adverts in our data set (facebook, 2019). despite this the facebook ad library provides a valuable resource for researchers interested in exploring social media marketing. in terms of art advertising, the available data reveals a snapshot of the types of advert on facebook used to recruit donors, promote egg sharing, and social egg freezing in the uk. we collected 28 adverts from the 5 clinics which were active on facebook at the time of data collection: (1) bourn hall clinic (2) bristol centre for reproductive medicine (bcrm) (3) centre for reproduction & gynaecology wales (crgw) (4) jessop fertility, and (5) the london egg bank. we seek to understand the forms of potential “life” that are present in the adverts through a textual analysis of the identity configurations and lifestyles represented in them. this approach was selected because it accommodates the polysemic nature of adverts on a complex platform (pedelty & kuecker, 2014). we combine this with a critical interrogation of how and why these adverts are targeted to certain demographics of algorithmically anticipated facebook users. the opacity and structural rigidity of facebook’s algotargeting – structural mechanisms that are binaric in back-end databases and yet “lively” at the point of user interfaces – require that we interrogate both media text and computational delivery mechanisms to meaningfully understand what forms of “life” are promised by gender-targeted art. critical framework and indicative findings art have been described as not only offering reproductive hope within traditionally heterosexual familial paradigms (franklin, 2006; 2013), but also creating opportunities for new genealogies, prompting diverse kinship arrangements, a disruption of orderly biogenetic inheritances, and different ways of producing families (davies and robinson, 2013; mamo, 2013). social media platforms have been noted as spaces which open routes to attach new meanings to biogenetic relationality, reconfigure reproductive roles, and create connected communities of kinship networks (andreassen, 2017; baym, 2010; mamo, 2013). conversely the targeted profiling commonly enacted to monetize these communities is understood to be standardising (kant, 2020), reinforce existing social hierarchies (cheney-lippold, 2017) and be materially oppressive (skeggs, 2017). our research demonstrates that when art services are delivered to social media users through targeted adverts, the supposed limitless possibilities of interactions, kinship, and relationality promised by egg donation are heavily curtailed. we find that women variously appear in art adverts as empowered consumers, generous girlfriends, potential mothers, and essentialist bodies who provide free-floating eggs. the genealogical possibility offered through art is represented with banal ambiguity wherein potentially disruptive forms of biogenetic relatedness and arrangements of kinship are derisked by an overarching narrative of simplicity and sameness. beneath a veneer of apparent flexibility in reproductive choice, feminised personal freedom, and kin-networked self-determination, is a rigorously regimented system of targeting which by design only recognises gender-essentialised bodies. through the banality and bluntness of its delivery, targeted egg donation ads contribute to the rationalisation and policing of subjects into coherent and inherently normative categories. this rationalisation is supported by the simplicity and certainty of the facebook targeted advertising algorithm, which produces a coherent audience and, as cohn argues, “hails” web users through a process of althussurian interpellation: he argues that algorithmically recommended content (such as being marked as ‘interested’ in egg donation campaigns and therefore exposed to them) interpellates us as subjects (cohn, 2019). we argue that women are hailed into place as fertile female bodies through these adverts, and that this interpellation is intensified through the narrowcast delivery of personalised content to users algorithmically constituted as ‘women’. resistant or oppositional readings are of course always possible for audiences of any media texts, however such critical responses do not negate the processes by which targeted advertising algorithms attempt to fix identity to a specific, essentialised body, or the body to inevitable fertility choices. the meaning-making possibilities inherent in these adverts is structurally restricted as a result of algotargeting, in ways that excludes men, messy genealogies, and explicitly queer forms of kinship. imaginative possibilities of family-making are ultimately restricted through both the banal ambiguities of feminised kinship represented in the adverts themselves and the isolating and isolated processes of algotargeted advert delivery. references andreassen, r. (2017) new kinships, new family formations and negotiations of intimacy via social media sites’. journal of gender studies 26(3) 361-371 baym, n.k. (2010). personal connections in the digital age. cambridge: polity press. bbc (2017) ‘facebook to show who buys political ads’. bbc news. available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-41785158 (accessed 12 july 2019). cheney-lippold, j. (2017) we are data: algorithms and the making of our digital selves new york: new york university press. cohn, j. (2019) the burden of choice: recommendation, subversion and algorithmic culture. new brunswick: rutgers university press. davies, c. and robinson, k.h. (2013) ‘reconceptualising family: negotiating sexuality in a governmental climate of neoliberalism’ contemporary issues in early childhood 14(1) 39-53 franklin, s (2013) biological relatives: ivf, stem cells, and the future of kinship. durham: duke university press. facebook (2019) facebook ad library. available at: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/ (accessed 12 july 2019). kant, t. (2020) making it personal: algorithmic personalization, identity, and everyday life. new york: oxford university press. mamo, l. (2013) ‘queering the fertility clinic’. journal of medical humanities 34. 227239 pedelty, m. and kuecker, m. (2014) ‘seen to be heard? gender, voice, and body in television advertisements’. communication and critical/cultural studies 11(3): 250269 skeggs, b. (2017) you are being tracked, valued and sold: an analysis of digital inequalities. available at: http:// www.lse.ac.uk/ events/ eventsassets/ pdf/ 2017/ 2017mt03/ 20170926bevskeggsppt.pdf (accessed september 2, 2018). microsoft word massanari-theorizing the "weird internet"-theorizing the "weird internet".docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): massanari, a.l. (2015, october 21-24). brain tingles and scary holes: asmr, trypophobia, and the sensorial web. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. brain tingles and scary holes: asmr, trypophobia, and the sensorial web adrienne l. massanari university of illinois at chicago there has been a renewed interest in embodied, sensory experiences of everyday life, particularly within the fields of sociology and anthropology (howes, 2003; low, 2013; parisi, 2008; pink, 2009; porcello, meintjes, ochoa, & samuels, 2010). likewise, within new media studies there has been interest in refocusing our investigations of online environments through the lens of materiality (lievrouw, 2014) and affect (garde-hansen & gorton, 2013). such approaches are much needed course corrections if we are to counter the discourse of digital dualism which has often dominated media and popular rhetoric when discussing life “online” (jurgenson, 2011). they are especially important if we wish to engage in deeper explorations of phenomena that seem at first glance odd or peculiar, as they provide a non-judgmental sensitizing framework for unpacking the complexities of human experience. two such phenomena, autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) and trypophobia, serve as case studies for understanding the ways in which individuals experience and make use of the web as a sensorial playground. asmr, or “sounds that feel good,” is described as a kind of brain tingling that occurs when listening to certain sounds. asmr communities, such as www.reddit.com/r/asmr, consist of the making, sharing, and discussion of videos said to trigger asmr feelings: the sounds of quiet whispering, crinkling or tapping. most asmr videos feature an individual (usually female) doing mundane tasks like folding towels or unboxing makeup or mixing drinks. bob ross’ joy of painting, a popular pbs television series from the 1980s and early 90s, is considered the quintessential asmr trigger. it features the painter quietly encouraging the viewer that their work is lovely (filled with “little happy trees”), softly mixing paints, and gently applying them to canvas with a palette knife (abbruzzese, 2015). trypophobia, on the other hand, is a “phobic” aversion to images (static or animated) of holes or cracks. some argue that the strong feelings that these images inspire may be rooted in evolutionary development, as holes are often a sign of disease or illness (cole & wilkins, 2013). and, while its true that some of the images shared on reddit’s trypophobia subreddit (/r/trypophobia) and other forums feature those found in nature (lotus seed pods or corals, for example, are common triggers), other images are photographic manipulations, such as a picture of a person’s hand with seed pods superimposed onto the skin. the creation and sharing of these kinds of images suggest a fascination with and complex desire to experience the grotesque – and in, particular, create a kind of dual feeling of both attraction and repulsion in the viewer (edwards & graulund, 2013). the commentary about both phenomena is similar, albeit inspiring opposite affective reactions. asmr discussions revolve around the feelings of pleasure that certain videos offer, specifically detailing the sense of calmness, or tingly feelings that a person’s soft voice or the sounds of a quiet activity in which they are engaging inspires in the viewer. for those triggered by asmr, the videos are popular folk cures for insomnia. likewise, trypophobia triggers inspire conversation about the intense feelings of revulsion, with specific discussions of how unsettling and disturbing a particular image is. trypophobia sufferers often discuss how particular images will cause itching or intense feelings of nausea. both suggest that the feelings triggered by a particular asmr video or trypophobia image last far longer than the actual exposure, somehow tapping into a primitive aspect of human experience that can stay with one throughout the day. likewise, both asmr and trypophobia as phenomena are uniquely suited to the web. they are fundamentally social, memetic experiences (unsurprisingly, both have their own know your meme entries). neither phenomenon is recognized officially, although both are starting to be discussed by neurologists and medical professionals (ahuja, 2013; cole & wilkins, 2013; fairyington, 2014). using a mixture of psychoanalytic (lacan, 2002) and feminist theory (creed, 1993; price & shildrick, 1999), i argue that both asmr and trypophobia are more than just sociogenic illnesses (bartholomew & wessley, 2002). they reflect a desire within us to collectively experience the affective, sensorial web: both the grotesque (in the case of trypophobia) and the pleasurable (in the case of asmr). they are also demonstrations of what mark dery (1999) called the pyrotechnic insanitarium – the carnivalesque, postmodern moment in which american culture finds itself currently. likewise, both have interesting gendered dimensions worth probing: holes that can be read as representing aspects of the monstrous feminine and whereas feminine voice and affect are often valorized in asmr videos. and the communities that create, share, and revel in this kind of material offer new possibilities for understanding the complexities of how online experiences are fundamentally embodied and sensory. references abbruzzese, j. (2015, january 26). all the feels: how a bunch of youtubers discovered a tingling sensation nobody knew existed. mashable. retrieved february 15, 2015, from http://mashable.com/2015/01/26/asmr-youtube/ ahuja, n. k. (2013). “it feels good to be measured”: clinical role-play, walker percy, and the tingles. perspectives in biology and medicine, 56(3), 442-451. available online: https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/perspectives_in_biology_and_medicine/v056/56.3. ahuja.html bartholomew, r. e., & wessley, s. (2002). protean nature of mass sociogenic illness: from possessed nuns to chemical and biological terrorism fears. british journal of psychiatry, 180(4), 300-306. available online: http://bjp.rcpsych.org/bjprcpsych/180/4/300.full.pdf doi: 10.1192/bjp.180.4.300 cole, g. g., & wilkins, a. j. (2013). fear of holes. psychological science, 24(10), 1980-1985. available online: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/24/10/1980.abstract doi: 10.1177/0956797613484937 creed, b. (1993). the monstrous-feminine: film, feminism, psychoanalysis. london: routledge. dery, m. (1999). the pyrotechnic insanitarium: american culture on the brink. new york: grove press. edwards, j., & graulund, r. (2013). the grotesque. london: routledge. fairyington, s. (2014, july 28). rustle, tingle, relax: the compelling world of a.s.m.r. the new york times: well. retrieved february 15, 2015, from http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/28/rustle-tingle-relax-the-compelling-worldof-a-s-m-r/ garde-hansen, j., & gorton, k. (2013). emotion online: theorizing affect on the internet. london: palgrave macmillan. howes, d. (2003). sensual relations: engaging the senses in culture and social theory. ann arbor: university of michigan press. jurgenson, n. (2011, february 24). digital dualism versus augmented reality. cyborgology. retrieved july 10, 2014, from http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/02/24/digital-dualism-versusaugmented-reality/ lacan, j. (2002). ecrits: a selection. new york: ww norton & company. lievrouw, l. a. (2014). materiality and media in communication and technology studies: an unfinished project. in t. gillespie, p. j. boczkowski & k. a. foot (eds.), media technologies: essays on communication, materality, and society (pp. 167-194). cambridge, ma: the mit press. low, k. e. y. (2013). olfactive frames of remembering: theorizing self, senses and society. the sociological review, 61(4), 688-708. available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-954x.12078 doi: 10.1111/1467-954x.12078 parisi, d. (2008). fingerbombing, or "touching is good": the cultural construction of technologized touch. senses & society, 3(3), 307-327. available online: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&an=35442920&site =ehost-live doi: 10.2752/174589308x331341 pink, s. (2009). doing sensory ethnography. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. porcello, t., meintjes, l., ochoa, a. m., & samuels, d. w. (2010). the reorganization of the sensory world. annual review of anthropology, 39(1), 51-66. available online: http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.105042 doi: doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.105042 price, j., & shildrick, m. (1999). feminist theory and the body: a reader. new york: routledge. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): chess, s. (2015, october 21-24). who <3’s slendy? making sense of slender man fandom. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. who <3’s slendy? making sense of slender man fandom shira chess the university of georgia the slender man mythos since 2009, the slender man has been a popular internet mythology. beginning on the irreverent web forum, something awful, the character was crowd-sourced in a “make paranormal images” thread, and quickly became popular, with web series such as marble hornets, tribetwelve, everymanhybrid, and darkharvest. the meme also traveled in other directions, sparking the popular game slender: the 8 pages (and its follow-up, slender: the arrival). versions of the myth appear on web sites such as creepypasta, slendernation, and have sparked several reddit threads (author, year). in the past year, the slender man has gotten significant attention for potentially sparking an attempted murder (dewey, 2014). the characteristics of this supernatural horror character vary, but have some consistent elements: he is always unnaturally tall, has no face, has long arms or several tendrils, and an unearthly presence. while his specific modus operandi is unknown, early versions of the story had him stalking children – later versions also involved young adults. often, the slender man drives his victims insane, or else they go missing. variations of the story can be understood as a kind of “open-sourcing” (reagle, 2004) of the horror genre, and as the slender man continued to develop, audiences found new and compelling ways to understand him (author, year). this process of the open-sourcing of a character means that there is no centralized control over how a character becomes reinterpreted by discursive audiences. as the meme continued to develop, so have versions of the slender man that exist in peculiar pockets of fandom – groups and individuals have found ways to interpret, re-interpret, and re-shape this once figure of horror into versions where he is a love interest, a sympathetic character, and a father figure. in many ways these re-interpretations might seem to disrupt the original. yet, the character, as an offset of fan communities makes sense of itself; the faceless slender man can be interpreted and understood as anything or anyone. a faceless character gets to be re-constructed by fan communities based on their own desires and insecurities. a faceless slender man gets to have whatever face the fan chooses. slender fandom fan studies is a well-established field which contextualizes how fans reinterpret and repurpose film, television, and other forms of media to better understand primary texts, community actions, socio-political implications, and audience reception of media objects (hellekson & busse 2014). according to henry jenkins (1992), fan fiction writers use methods of “textual poaching” (as originally described by michel de certeau) to appropriate a fictional text and “reread them in a fashion that serves different interests, as spectators who transform the experience of watching television into a rich and complex participatory culture” (jenkins 1992, p. 23). one issue in studying digitally crowd-sourced works, such as the slender man, is a distinct lack of canon, as works are generated through fan communities, not in spite of them. the minimal canon the to slender man myth creates a complex problem in terms of fan studies. while, on the one hand, the original story was only two sentences and two photographs (chess, 2012), the majority of earlier fans chose to continue developing the myth in terms of horror themes. as the popularity of the character expanded, the meme also began to take on elements of parody. booth (2013) suggests that fan-created parodies help highlight the playfulness of fan-created works. popular slender man parodies include the existence of so-called siblings, such as his fashionable brother “trender man” and the effusive “splendor man” (chess & newsom, 2014). as the character developed in expected ways, new versions of the slender man began to find their home in places such as fanfiction.net, tumblr, youtube, deviantart, and even crafting spaces such as etsy. alternative versions of the slender man vary dramatically from the originals: he is often positioned as a love interest, a father figure, or a sympathetic character. the following examples help to give an overview of the range of stories, videos, and images i intend to use as examples during my talk: • the short story “when your dad is slender man” explores the inner life of the slender man’s daughter. • stories such as “the origin of slender” and youtube videos such as those in the “slenderman horror movie” series tell stories a bullied child who ultimately becomes the slender man. • multi-chapter fan fiction such as “cold and dark” and “bold and daring” both enter the world of a young blind girl named aurora whose sight is returned by the slender man’s magic. the slender man becomes a father figure to aurora but forces her to commit murders on his behalf. • “a slender chance” tells the story of a young woman who becomes the slender man’s girlfriend. in one scene, she makes him breakfast (pancakes). it is common to find lovable pictures of the slender man on web sites such as deviantart, or crafting web sites such as etsy. these versions of slender man fandom are entirely different from the original ways that the slender man meme was popularized. while the original character was a representation of the uncanny horrific, this character is a friend and a lover. making sense of slender love the slender man mythos should make us question our approach to canon as it relates to internet fandom. as an online, crowd-sourced text with minimal materials in the original iteration, the original story was built with interpretation and re-interpretation in its intention. busse (2013) has documented that feminine modes of fandom are often deprivileged in comparison to masculine fandom. so while male-centric web series (such as marble hornets) are lauded, love stories based on the slender man – such as those mentioned above (that rely on feminine protagonists) are dismissed. as internet-based folklore, the slender man allows us to reconsider how fan-making practices might maintain gendered fan privileges, and uproot our notions of canon when a text is entirely crowd-sourced. as many scholars of fandom have observed in the past, fan practices can be discursive and difficult to understand. it would be easy to be dismissive of the kind of fan materials listed above. the fan fiction versions of the slender man mythos, from a perspective of the horror genre seems unnerving – why would so many people attach romantic or sympathetic significance to this character? but as already noted, as a faceless villain, it seems apropos that consumers of the text would read it in ways that reveal their personal desires and insecurities. having no face means that he can be re-faced with whatever the reader/viewer wants to see him as. references booth, p. (2013). reifying the fan: inspector spacetime as fan practice. popular communication: the international journal of media and culture 11, no. 2: 146– 59. busse, k. (2013). geek hierarchies, boundary policing, and the gendering of the good fan. participations: journal of audience and reception studies 10(1). chess, s. & newsom, e. (2014). folklore, horror stories, and the slender man: the development of an internet mythology. new york, ny: palgrave pivot. chess, s. (2012). open sourcing horror: the slender man, marble hornets, and genre negotiations. information, communication, & society, 15(3): 374-393. dewey, c. (2014, june 3). the complete, terrifying history of ‘slender man,’ the internet meme that compelled two 12-year-olds to stab their friend. washington post. retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theintersect/wp/2014/06/03/the-complete-terrifying-history-of-slender-man-theinternet-meme-that-compelled-two-12-year-olds-to-stab-their-friend/ hellekson, k, & busse, k. (2014). “introduction: why a fan fiction studies reader now?” in the fan fiction studies reader, edited by karen hellekson and kristina busse. iowa city: university of iowa press. jenkins, h. (1992). textual poachers: television fans and participatory culture. new york: routledge. reagle, j. (2004) open content communities, m/c journal, 7(3). retrieved from: http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/06_reagle.rft.php. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): newsom, e. (2015, october 21-24). /r/alienpumaspacetrain and communal cultivation of mystery. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. /r/alienpumaspacetrain and communal cultivation of mystery eric newsom university of central missouri in november 2013, reddit user tramstopdan posted a series of 102 images to the image-sharing site imgur and the subreddit /r/whatsinthisthing that allegedly showed the contents of a wooden box found beside a trash bin in asheville, nc. the images, many bearing the signature daniel christiansen, began with a series of neatly handwritten treatises on the book of ezekiel, lenticular clouds, steam power, and unidentified flying objects; immaculately drawn periodic tables and world maps; a ball bearing patent design; and various ephemera bearing handwriting in danish. the interest of reddit was fully piqued by the remaining images, which illustrated an otherworldly encounter experienced by christiansen in tampa, fl, 1977, wherein four flying wheels and four-faced angelic creatures descended from a tornado cloud, the creatures appearing, christiansen wrote, as described “in the scriptures of old." christiansen detailed this experience in distanced, analytical paragraphs beneath finely detailed technical drawings of the funnel cloud, wheels, and creatures. numerous pages that followed rendered the angelic visitors from multiple angles, alongside other strange and uncanny inventions, objects, and plans for room-sized installations, all bearing the visual motifs of the celestial vision, and all in the same meticulous, ordered drawing style that typified the collection. the popularity of the initial post led to a new subreddit, /r/alienpumaspacetrain, named after one of the strange devices seen in christiansen's drawings. there, reddit users— including 3,000 regular subscribers—congregated to transcribe and analyze the contents of the box, which were now easily sharable, replicable, spreadable (jenkins, 2013). for just over a year, a community of users posted regularly in attempts to make meaning of the mysterious images, before, its users having exhausted many avenues of inquiry and conversation, activity on the subreddit dwindled. this paper examines the results and nature of that year of regular activity, which saw pre-digital hand-created ephemera mediated into an object of mass spectacle through digitalization and distribution, and the formation of a collective dedicated to cultivating, rather than solving, the mystery of the drawings found in what came to be affectionately known as "the box of crazy." participation followed a model afforded by the digital technology through which the collective communicated (bruns, 2007). once the materials of the box had been digitized in high resolution, participation in the investigation became open to all who were willing to follow a link to the original album or one of several mirrors. the richness of /r/alienpumaspacetrain as a case study partially lies in the variety of perspectives brought to the material. because of the unique subject matter of the box and the situation of its recovery, inquiries came from a spectrum of interests and users both professional and hobbyist in the approaches they took: biblical scholars examined the ezekiel analyses, translators transcribed and converted danish writings to english, handwriting analysts questioned whether christiansen suffered from arthritis, illustrators color-corrected the scans and reproduced technical drawings in vector form, paranormal enthusiasts opined on the angel creatures being von daniken-influenced aliens, engineers developed 3d models of the various devices and components seen in the drawings, historians traced biographical information and relatives of christiansen, organizers tried to build a life-sized version of the train at the burning man festival, and numerous others provided supportive cheerleading, community maintenance, and, occasionally, a theory about what the drawings might actually be. constant turnover of fringe users was offset by new participants who were late in encountering the material or discovering the subreddit. new lines of inquiry that expanded the mystery arose from the intersection of research—for instance, an identification of one rendered building as the st. pete pier coupled with newspaper searches yielded no results for tornadoes around the date of the supposed occurrence, but suggested the potential influence of a laser-based installation art piece. as an investigative body, reddit has a poor track record, becoming international news when they collectively botched identification of a boston marathon bombing suspect. similar to earlier digital communities that approached real-life tragedies as puzzle games to be solved (mcgonigal, 2003), reddit users employed the language of competition when falsely accusing a college student who later was found to have committed suicide, declaring their crowd-sourced sleuthing efforts to be a, "significant, game-changing victory" (tapia, et al, 2013). other reddit-based collectives dedicated to investigation have disappointed in cases with lower stakes, including the geraldo rivera-esque ending following months of speculation on "what's in the safe?" and the fervent over-analysis of the hbo series true detective that led to widespread mocking and parody of reddit users' far-fetched theories (crouch, 2014). the /r/alienpumaspacetrain mystery is different, however, as all verifiable answers exist in the initial 102-image post. further inquiry may provide context or biographical history of the creator, but, barring a return visit from celestial beings or the emergence of an undiscovered christansen diary, the potential for true closure is null. thus, the /r/alienpumaspacetrain community was formed not for genuine pursuit of conclusive answers, but in celebration of the wonderment inspired by encountering the material. though they avowed themselves as investigators, users of the subreddit instead became annotators and archivists, simultaneously curating christiansen’s materials and nurturing the mystery that makes them worth curating. previous found materials and work by non-traditional creators—like henry darger—have been elevated to art status by critics, galleries, academics, estates, and otherwise financially interested parties. documenting the existence of such work necessarily increases its commercial value (kirschenblatt-gimblett, 1988). here, however, documentation has been provided by a digital crowd that, aside perhaps from the initial poster, made no profit from the their documentary efforts. though a collection of the papers did eventually see display in a gallery, the initial digitalization of the christiansen materials makes them inherently experiential: they are not art to be visited and admired, but artifacts to be distributed and examined. the profit for members of /r/alienpumaspacetrain is in cultivating the mystique, wearing the guise of researcher while reveling in the weird. potentially plausible explanations (like the laser show mentioned above) for the material’s meaning and existence were routinely rejected, the community instead favoring narratives that allowed for supernatural, uncanny possibilities that justified further exploration. as fewer opportunities emerged to expand the mystery, activity accordingly slowed. though the subbreddit still sees new posts, they come now at a rate of roughly one per month. the entry point to this case study involves intricate drawings of heavenly mechanisms, but more important implications lie in the mechanism of the digital collective working to explore, preserve, and publicize the materials. /r/alienpumaspacetrain offers an opportunity to observe how community was formed and developed around a center of the unexplainable, and the role that cultivating mystery played in maintaining that community. references bruns, a. (2008). blogs, wikipedia, second life, and beyond: from production to produsage. new york, ny: peter lang. crouch, i. (2014). “what’s so funny about true detective?” the new yorker. retrieved from: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/whats-so-funny-about-truedetective jenkins, h., ford, s., & green, j. (2013). spreadable media: creating value and meaning in a networked world. new york: nyu press. kirshenblatt-gimblett, b. (1988). "mistaken dichotomies." journal of american folklore 101:140-55. mcgonigal, j. (2003). “‘this is not a game’: immersive aesthetics and collective play,” melbournedac: the 5th international digital arts and culture conference, melbourne. tapia, a., lalone n., & kim h. (2013). “run amok: group crowd participation in identifying the bomb and bomber from the boston marathon bombing.” proceedings of the 11th international iscram conference. university park, pa. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): phillips, w. & milner, r. m. (2015, october 21-24). weird to whom, obscene to whom?: folkloric approaches to ambivalent online behavior. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. weird to whom, obscene to whom?: folkloric approaches to ambivalent online behavior whitney phillips mercer university ryan m. milner college of charleston in this paper, we will consider how best to identify and analyze online behaviors that seem strange, creepy, or obscene to outsiders, but which are perfectly normal to participants. we are particularly interested in the space between play and hate: behaviors that are not harmless but are also not straightforwardly negative. this behavioral category includes crass joking, identity experimentation on social media platforms, and ambiguous engagement with digitally mediated content (memes, hashtags, and other visual cultural content). such behaviors are often difficult to classify, let alone analyze. this is due to the polysemy of the content, the frequent anonymity or pseudonymity of participants, the ephemeral nature of much of the content participants create, and the fact that, even if a researcher is able to track down the responsible parties and collect all relevant data, participants are often unwilling to disclose their motivations. it is our contention that internet researchers can learn a great deal about emergent online behaviors by considering the embodied, pre-internet spaces and communities analyzed in traditional folkloric literature. not only do these early folkloric studies provide striking behavioral precedent for more contemporary online behavior, the discipline of folklore houses a number of robust, flexible frameworks perfectly calibrated to identify and analyze online ambivalence. four folkloric frameworks particularly applicable to the digitally mediated space include the twin laws of conservativism and dynamism, the process by which certain aspects of a given tradition remain static while other aspects are subject to change (toelken 1996); notions of liminality, that which is fundamentally “in between” (turner 1982); bricolage, the creative use of found materials (lévi-strauss 1962); folkloric paradigms of play and performance, which focus intently on who is observing a given event for what reasons (schechner 2003); and emic analytic approaches, which take the terminology and cultural logics of a given group into account before attempting to make universalizing claims about what a given set of behaviors mean (shoemaker 1990). given their flexibility, explanatory power, and the fact that they can be applied to such a wide range of behaviors, these four frameworks provide an invaluable entry point when approaching subjects that otherwise might seem strange or indecipherable. they are especially helpful when attempting to analyze ambivalent online behaviors and the communities that engage with (share, remix, creatively reappropriate) digitally mediated content, since as mentioned above, these spaces, communities, and behaviors can be extremely difficult to pin down. not only do folkloric frameworks encourage researchers to focus on the always-evolving verb of online culture (e.g. what people are doing) rather than the nouns (e.g. the specific things that get produced), they allow researchers to approach these subjects using terminology and perspectives indigenous to the group itself. externally imposed systems of classification might describe an event in terms that make sense to the researcher, but aren’t designed to take the group’s understanding of the event into account. in fact, the outsider’s description might baffle the group’s participants, who understand their behaviors entirely differently (shoemaker 1990), certainly not as being “weird” or “obscene.” weird to whom, obscene to whom—these are the questions that careful folkloric analyses can help unearth, in the process revealing a great deal not just about individual participants but about the culture(s) in which the behaviors occur. folklore’s push for emic analyses also helps explain why traditional folklore studies frequently contain descriptions of ambivalent language and behavior, making them all the better prepared to deal with online ambivalence. folklorist barre toelken suggests that the vast majority of orally transmitted material captured by folklorists—up to 80% in his estimation—would be regarded as crude or inappropriate if encountered out of context (xii). he forwards a defense of “the so-called obscene elements that are so characteristic of folklore” (ibid) not to “champion ‘obscene’ materials per se, but to point out that all folklore is phrased in terms appropriate to—and usually demanded by—the group in which it is performed” (8). what one community might regard as commonplace and perfectly acceptable might be obscene, ambivalent, or odd to formal or official culture; but folklore is less interested in formal or official culture, except to the extent that communities engage with, negotiate, or reject mainstream normativity. this ties into another reason folklore so often engages with “strange” content: the fact that research informants (“the folk”) frequently operate outside mainstream channels, increasing the likelihood that apparently non-normative (or at least not officially sanctioned) behavior will proliferate (toelken 1996). by exploring traditional folkloric analyses, internet researchers seeking to identify, analyze, and demystify esoteric online discourses are thus able to draw from ample behavioral precedent and methodological work-around strategies. examples of this— perhaps surprising—overlap abound. the creation and transmission of co-called photocopier art as described by dundes and pagter (1978), for example, is directly comparable to the process by which internet memes are created and transmitted. peter naravez’ exploration of seemingly profane behaviors at turn-of-the-century newfoundland funeral wakes, coupled with elliott oring’s analysis of the “tasteless and cruel” humor in the wake of the 1986 challenger space disaster (1987) as well as timothy tangherlini’s ethnography of bay area medics’ disaster humor and storytelling (1998) help contextualize the emergence of facebook memorial page trolling and other forms of extreme online aggression. alan dundes’ study of latrinalia—e.g. bathroom wall graffiti—found primarily in and around uc berkeley’s campus (1965) is directly analogous to discussions of nasty online commentary. and there are, of course, other connections to establish; our argument is that internet researchers have a rich tradition from which to draw. certain details might change—where the behaviors occur, for example, how they are mediated, and who engages in them—but the tone, objectives, and pleasures of ambivalent behaviors have remained consistent across time, space, and media, and are therefore ripe for comparative analyses. this is not to downplay the differences between “online” and “offline” behaviors. one significant difference between the analog and digital landscape is that digitally mediated content is easily archived, can exist in more than one location, and if search indexed, is accessible to any and all interested parties. this allows information to be shared freely between networks and engaged with by a variety of unintended audiences, which can either be very good or very bad, depending on what kind of information it is. not only do these details have a profound impact on the ethical implications of a given set of behaviors (both for active participants and for observers), they also complicate the basic logistics of ethnographic data collection. that said, the demonstrable behavioral and methodological overlap between contemporary digital and more traditional folkloric studies can help contextualize and lend historical nuance to emergent online ambivalence. which, when considered through a folkloric lens, aren’t emergent as much as precedented—though perhaps mediated in novel ways. references dundes, alan. 1965. “here i sit a study of american latrinalia.” kroeber anthropological society papers 34, 91-105. http://dpg.lib.berkeley.edu/webdb/anthpubs/search?volume=34&journal=5&item= 10. dundes, alan and pagter, carl. 1978. work hard and you shall be rewarded: urban folklore from the paperwork empire. bloomington: indiana university. shoemaker, george h. 1990. the emergence of folklore in everyday life. bloomington: trickster press. levi-strauss, claude. 1972. “the science of the concrete." in the savage mind, 1-33. london: weidenfeld & nicolson. narvaez, peter. 2003. “tricks and fun: subversive pleasures at newfoundland wakes.” in of corpse: death and humor in folklore and popular culture, ed. peter narvaez, 113140. logan: utah state university press. oring, elliot. 1987. “jokes and the discourse on disaster.” the journal of american folklore 100(397): 276-286. schechner, richard. 2003. “play: the joker in the deck.” in performance studies: an introduction. 89-122. routledge: new york. tangherlini, timothy. 1998. talking trauma. oxford: university press of mississippi. toelken, barre. 1996. the dynamics of folklore. logan: utah state university press. turner, victor. 1982. “liminal to liminoid, in play, flow, and ritual.” in from ritual to theatre: the human seriousness of play, 20-60. new york: paj publications. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): leavitt, a. (2015, october 21-24). playing around twitchplayspokemon: an empirical investigation of internet folklore and peer-produced narrative. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. playing around twitchplayspokemon: an empirical investigation of internet folklore and peer-produced narrative alex leavitt university of southern california this paper seeks to contribute to our understanding of peer-produced creative work, narrative collaborations, and emergent collective phenomena brought up by networked technologies. in february 2014, an anonymous australian programmer uploaded an emulated version of pokémon red version (1996) to twitch, a popular video game livestream service, creating twitchplayspokemon (leavitt 2015; margel 2014), which later became a crowd-driven game sensation. the unique twist that the programmer added was a feature in which any person watching the livestreamed video could input a gameboy command into the twitch chat interface, which would then be transferred to the emulated game, triggering actions in the game. over the course of 16 days, hundreds of thousands of individuals visited the stream channel to input commands, and millions more watched and contributed to a vibrant online community, aggregating its content primarily in the /r/twitchplayspokemon forum on reddit.com. in those two weeks, hundreds of pieces of fan art, memes, and other celebratory content were created, bursting forth a rapid (though momentary) folklore around this experimental crowd experience (for example, around the religion-inflected "helix" following or characters such as "digrat" and "bird jesus"). how do emergent collaborative narratives evolve? further, how can we understand internet phenomena and folklore through the precise tracking of online community trace data? can we investigate the collaborative efforts of disparate but networked individuals to see how folk narratives evolve and what factors play into dominant themes' adoption? what role do visibility, leadership, collective intelligence, and mediation (e.g., algorithms) play in the propagation of online phenomena? twitchplayspokemon thrives on the collective contributions of disconnected individuals. peer production (benkler 2006) – and its related concepts of participatory culture (jenkins 2006), produsage (bruns 2008, and collective action (poteete, janssen, & ostrom 2010) – drives many active content communities on the internet. the collaborations between distant individuals united through networked communication technologies have produced impactful projects such as open-source software and wikipedia as well as emergent information phenomena, such as breaking news reporting (weller et al. 2013). one aspect of peer production, the distributed, networked creation of creative works (such as film, music, and video games) manifests to a lesser degree and attracts less academic attention. but in the past decade, numerous peerproduced creative works have set the stage for a new type of collaborative cultural creation distinct from the traditional hierarchies of the creative and entertainment industries. examples such as hatsune miku (a japanese peer-produced music franchise; condry 2011) and minecraft (a video gave that draws from thousands of mods and pieces of ancillary media) demonstrate the potential that user-generated content can have for successful creative media artifacts and franchises. the manifestation of experimental peer-produced creative works presents novel opportunities to study how these collaborations emerge. most academic investigations into the emergence and evolution of collaborative narrative has been studied through anecdote and observation (specifically in digital folklore literature; see for example, blank 2009 and howard 2008). few have investigated collaborative narrative on a quantitative level, demonstrating the exact processes behind how a particular storyworld has developed over time at the intersection of multiple individuals' contributions. however, with increased in storage of and access to digital data traces, narratives (or pieces of them) are increasingly able to be traced and mapped (for instance, see leskovec, backstrom, & kleinberg 2009 on the evolution of linguistic memes, or vis 2014 on the spread of misinformation). the analysis for this investigation draws from a empirical data analysis scraped from online communities and contextualized by ethnographic methods (participant observation and close reading of online trace data; geiger & ribes 2011). i synthesize a variety of data sources: first, 15,702,790 chat messages posted to the twitch live stream chat channel; second, 40,711 posts and 358,380 comments (along with textual, temporal, and user metadata) posted to the /r/twitchplayspokemon subreddit; and finally, a scale-based and open-ended survey (n = 1437) of twitchplayspokemon participants and viewers. in blending these unique, disconnected data sources, i aim to track the precise moments when various folkloric narrative trends emerged and were adopted by the larger community to later become notable themes in the constructed storyworld. further, i draw insights from the survey to contextualize issues of viewership, interactivity, fandom, and especially sociocultural inflections like nostalgia on this involved-yet-audience-driven experience. while the data analysis is not yet complete, ideas about audience and visibility (szabo & huberman 2010) play a large role in the initial findings from the data. initial insights point to a surprising lack of coordination amongst participants, but bursts of information around particular emergent events and coordinated groupthink (esser 1998) seem to ensure that seemingly random ideas stick in the shared imagination of this collective's evolving narrative. future steps in the analysis will focus on modeling the timing and adoption of particular folklore themes within this community and will reflect on the role of online community participation and affordances (particularly across audiences and platforms) to result in the spirited phenomenon that became twitchplayspokemon. references benkler, y. (2006). the wealth of networks. new haven, ct: yale university press. blank, t. (2009). folklore and the internet: vernacular expression in a digital world. logan, ut: utah state university press. bruns, a. (2008). blogs, wikipedia, second life, and beyond: from production to produsage. bern, switzerland: peter lang publishing. condry, i. (2011). post-3/11 japan and the radical recontextualization of value: music, social media, and end-around strategies for cultural action. international journal of japanese sociology, 20. esser, j.k. (1998). alive and well after 25 years: a review of groupthink research. organizational beavhior and human decision processes, 73, (2/3): 116-141. geiger, r.s., & ribes, d. (2011). trace ethnography: following coordination through documentary practices. in proceedings of the 44th annual hawaii international conference on systems sciences, hicss '11. ieee. howard, r.g. (2008). electronic hybridity: the persistent processes of the vernacular web. journal of american folklore, 121 (480): 192-218. jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york, ny: nyu press. leavitt, a. (2015). twitchplayedpokemon: an analysis of the experimental interactive phenomenon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zc6h9us5m8 leskovec, j., backstrom, l., & kleinberg, j. (2009). meme-tracking and the dynamics of the news cycle. in proceedings of the annual conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, kdd '09. acm. margel, m. (2014). an analysis of social dynamics in crowdsourced games. retrieved from http://margel.ca/files/2720/paper.pdf poteete, a.r., janssen, m.a., & ostrom, e. (2010). working together: collective action, the commons, and multiple methods in practice. princeton, nj: princeton university press. szabo, g., & huberman, b.a. (2010). predicting the popularity of online content. communications of the acm, 53 (8). vis, f. (2014). to tackle the spread of misinformation online we must first understand it. the guardian. 24 april 2014. retrieved from www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/24/tackle-spread-misinformationonline weller, k., bruns, a., burgress, j., & mahrt, m. (2013). twitter & society. bern, switzerland: peter lang publishing. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 lundmark, e. (2017, october 18-21). atheism on youtube performing counter publics? paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. atheism on youtube performing counter publics? evelina lundmark, faculty of theology at uppsala university extended abstract in this paper i will explore some of the initial findings of my phd project. the project consists of two steps, the first being an instrumental sample of videos from youtube, and the second being a complementary analysis of the comment fields of said videos. in this paper i will focus on the initial empirical findings from the first part of my project, namely the youtube videos. the purpose of my research is to examine the new visibility of atheism and non-religion in a sphere that blurs private and public. in this paper i will look at how us women performing and constructing atheist identity via personal youtube channels are enacting and invoking a counter public(s). i look at a an instrumental sample of 60 videos that have been selected using the criteria a) made on a personal youtube channel by a woman who is from the us, b) that is about atheism, deconverting to atheism, or the question if she can identify as an atheist.the 60 videos transcribed and coded for this project are the first 60 videos found that corresponded to these criteria. in addition, a supplementary pilot study of interviews with four of these women was conducted in order to gain more insight into their process and thinking regarding their videos. these women can be considered as performing and constructing counter publics via their videos as they openly discuss their minority statuses as atheists in the us, and how this socially precarious status intersects with issues of nationality, religion, gender and race. research has shown the precarious nature of identifying as an atheist in the us, as it is one of the if not the most mistrusted minorities in the us. edgell et al. has tied this mistrust to constructions of the good moral citizen in the us (edgell, gerteis & hartmann 2006; keysar 2009). the women in my study actualize precisely these questions when they position themselves precisely as atheists and as moral, as atheists and as us citizens, as atheists and as good people. my study also actualizes issues of perceived religiosity not only as the national norm, but as tied specifically to issues of race and gender, as particularly black women reflect on how they break stereotypes not only in their immediate social networks but also in relation to other atheists. more broadly in my material, related issues are highlighted by many of these women when discussing the lack of outspoken women atheists. many of these women thus call for greater visibility of atheists and atheist women, but some also speak of fears of being found out by friends of family, or of ostracization and abuse resulting from them coming out as atheists. my study thus highlights issues of what it means to have privacy in a hyper mediated sphere, and how intimacy is invoked in network spaces to connote authenticity. in particular i am interested in how the apparently public space of youtube and the intimate settings of bedrooms and living rooms in which these videos are most often filmed are woven together in a way that blurs traditional distinctions between the public and private. this builds on research by mia lövheim who has looked at how young women bloggers construct and enable new ways of relating to existential and ethical issues (2012). lövheim has also looked at how intimacy is a way to affect authenticity, and can as such be viewed as a new way of constructing authority (2012b). issues of the blurring of the public and the private, as well as questions of how authority is negotiated, constructed and enabled in these women’s videos is central to my study. the purpose is to gain a greater understanding of lived non-religion and lived atheism, not in order to categorize or make sense of the non-religious but to look at the performance of the personal and stigmatized in an ambivalent public. instead of approaching the material as if it necessarily corresponds to a particular group formation, i want to look at how the actors themselves view their social ties. whom are they talking to? to people on youtube? to offline friends? to online friends on another platform? why have they posted this video here? how do they feel about youtube? how do they feel about atheism? do they see atheism as a movement? if so, do they feel part of that movement? what sort of space are they stitching together pulling on different threads in disparate networks? as my study is a qualitative instrumental study, a comparatively small material will be used to reflect on, critique and develop theory. in this case, i will mainly expand upon mediatization theory, especially as it has been used within the sociology of religion. to answer questions regarding these kind of mediated social practices – especially disorganized but tangentially connected social practices like these women’s videos – i also need a solid methodological framework that cane make sense of associations without assuming form. for this purpose, i will use actor network theory (ant). ant contributes to how we understand media as well as technology more broadly, and to how we understand group formation in relation to technology. thus, i will look at how these youtube videos through a series of “tags” form a sort of communal performance that occurs within – as well as reshapes and changes – social conventions. i am particularly interested in how individuals contribute to and partially change relational infrastructure by producing these videos (miller 2012, 5). this production occurs in a field of tension between individuals and their cultural and technological contexts, and youtube thus becomes an important platform for understanding and developing mediatization theory. i will use ant to tease apart the cohesion i as a researcher would like to impose on this group of videos with similar titles and similar themes (latour 2005). i will look for traces, look for how users themselves stitches together different social locations in their practice of making these videos. what i’m interested in is how videos that on the surface may seem similar in that they have the same title, they’re published on the same platform, they bring up similar themes, draw on different associations and are positioned differently by their creators in order to accomplish different things. in this sense, these videos may be thought of as a genre which may be used for disparate aims. using ant i will be looking at these performances as relational and embedded in a particular nexus of technology, associative logic, templates of behavior, as well as material affordances and objects (latour 2005). as a complement to ant i appropriate lynn schofield clark’s (2011) usage of mediatization theory, her usage is dynamic and emphasizes agency, if not necessarily intent, and contributes to a discussion on rethinking the conceptualization of public sphere and public discourse. i will use ant to develop mediatization theory, particularly exploring if and how mediatization can be understood on a micro level. references clark (2011), ”considering religion and mediatisation through a case study of j+k's big day (the jk wedding entrance dance): a response to stig hjarvard”, culture and religion, 12:02, 167-184 edgell, p., gerteis, j. & hartmann, d. (2006), «atheists as ‘other’: moral boundaries and cultural membership in american society», american sociological review, 71(2), 211-234 keysar, a. (2009), “who are america’s atheists and agnostics?”, i kosmin, b. a. & keysar, a. (red.), secularism & secularity: contemporary international perspectives, institute for the study of secularism in society and culture [published online], pp. 33-39 latour, b. (2005), reassembling the social – an introduction to actor-network theory, great britain: oxford university press lövheim, (2012) “mediatization and religion”. in lundby (ed.) mediatization of communication. berlin: de gruyter mouton, (2014) s. 547-571 lövheim (2012b), “negotiating empathic communication”, feminist media studies, doi:10:1080/14680777.2012.659672 miller, k. (2012), playing along – digital games, youtube, and virtual performance, new york: oxford university press aoirsubmission_2015 selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 201 the spirit of technology in e-government: designing democracy capabilities for online citizen-government interaction kristen guth daren brabham university of southern california abstract this paper aims to better understand the various democratic ideals manifested in designs of online crowdsourcing tools that are contracted by government entities. it seeks to answer questions about crowdsourced tools that are developed to serve a democratic purpose, including: (1) how are designers’ intentions incorporated? (2) what are the imagined user groups? and (3) what are the expected outcomes? the startup and technology vendors that contract with north american government bodies provide a particular context in which democratic freedoms are valued. the sample for this study consists of firms that have contracts for crowdsourced tools with canadian or american government bodies. questions were addressed through interviews with the founders or programmers of these technology firms to learn about the design of their products. to advance knowledge across disciplinary boundaries, we review literature on design from science and technology studies, democratic values from political science, and stakeholder theory from management. this study reveals how these perspectives have implications for contracting practical, technical solutions for government. keywords: spirit, technology, e-government, democracy, crowdsourcing introduction & literature designers’ intentions continue to generate lines of inquiry about the technology products they create in the fields of communication, sociology, management, and science and technology studies. building on those investigations, this study seeks to explore questions about intentions built into crowdsourcing technologies, designers’ thoughts about user groups, and intended outcomes of the technologies. crowdsourcing refers to the process of connecting organizations to stakeholders via the internet to solve problems, craft policy, or design products (brabham, 2013). in particular, adaptive structuration theory (ast) has theorized about a coherent and incoherent “spirit” and the features of a technology to account for the process of shaping relevant groups’ social structures (desanctis & poole, 1994; markus & silver, 2008; silver & markus, 2013). spirit refers to the general intent associated with the values and goals of a set of structural features that are presented to users in a technology suggested citation (apa): guth, k., & brabham, d. (2015, october 21-24) the spirit of technology in e-government: designing democracy capabilities for online citizen-government interaction. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 2 (desanctis & poole, 1994). values themselves are contested (cheng & fleischmann, 2010). technology designers can strategically market these platforms to serve multiple constituencies and their desired values through particular vocabulary, while duly neglecting to acknowledge tensions in fulfilling these conflicting needs (gillespie, 2010). this study examines the technology solutions provided by vendors for governmentcitizen interactions, and for those purposes, we draw from literature on online deliberative democracy. for instance, noveck (2003) argues that effective online deliberative democratic processes should be informed by 11 normative values, including accessibility, freedom from censorship, accountability, transparency, and pluralism (pp. 12-17). thus, our first research question is (1) how will technological products designed for citizen-government interaction both inculcate and promote multiple interpretations of democratic values? our study also develops further on sociotechnical systems research to understand the images of users employed by designers and engineers to construct technologies that serve government clients. the depictions of users can include (a) people who will use the system, and their relationships, as well as (b) users that will ultimately benefit from the direct users’ contributions, such as the government entities (wyatt, 2008, p. 171). implicated users, or (c) members of the broader community served by but who may not have any physical contact with the system, may also be distinguished in this study (clarke, 1998). the second research question is (2) what are the intended user groups for crowdsourcing tools that seek to serve democratic purposes? finally, embedded within the e-government philosophies of technology arises a management belief that computerization will automatically enhance productivity gains and enable social transformation, otherwise known as justificatory technological determinism (edwards, 1995). answering a call from wyatt (2008), this study seeks to illustrate how technologically deterministic rhetoric compels both the request for and design of these products by decision makers to serve specific goals and create particular outcomes for multiple stakeholders. despite these top-down outcome intentions, mansbridge (2010) asserts that these expectations may never fully reach the ideal of consensus because of self-interest, whereas weick (1995) believes that only a plausible agreement to make sense of events is needed in the context of ongoing interaction. finally, the third research question is (3) what are the types of supposed goals or outcomes of these tools imagined by designers or stated by government clients? data collection & methods participants were sought who work with the design of crowdsourcing technology in their firm and work in a firm that has or is pursuing a contract with a municipal or regional (state, provincial, or larger region) government. founders or programmers at these technology firms provided insight into the design of their products. the study consists of semi-structured one-hour interviews with fewer than 30 participants via phone or video conferencing (e.g., skype). theme saturation in interviews typically occurs by the twelfth interview, with metathemes appearing as early as the sixth interview (guest, bunce & johnson, 2006). thus this ongoing research aims for no more than 30 interviews total, or until themes reach a saturation point. transcriptions of recorded 3 interviews will be analyzed according to the constant-comparative technique of grounded qualitative data analysis (corbin & strauss, 2008; charmaz, 2014). analysis will generate themes and sub-themes, which will be reported, along with selected interview transcripts excerpts for illustration, about intentional design, intended users, and expected outcomes. conclusion & implications e-government tools have the ability to transform government-citizen interaction, but an explication of the designed values laden in these technologies with an interrogation of democratic values has not been undertaken. we anticipate findings will help shape policy around vendor contracts to enable e-government relations. acknowledgements this study was supported by a [funding agency grant]. references brabham, d. c. (2013). crowdsourcing. cambridge, ma: mit press. charmaz, k. (2014). constructing grounded theory (2nd ed.). los angeles, ca: sage. cheng, a., & fleischmann, k. r. (2010). developing a meta-inventory of human values. in a. grove (ed.), proceedings of the association for information science and technology. silver spring, md: association for information science and technology. clarke, a. (1998). disciplining reproduction: modernity, american life and “the problem of sex”. berkeley, ca: university of california press. corbin, j., & strauss, a. (2008). basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory (3rd ed.). los angeles: sage. desanctis, g., & poole, m. s. (1994). capturing the complexity in advanced technology use: adaptive structuration theory. organization science, 5, 121-147. edwards, p. (1995). from ‘impact’ to social process: computers in society and culture, in s. jasanoff, g. markie, j. petersen, & t. pinch (eds.), handbook of science and technology studies (pp. 257-285). thousand oaks, ca: sage. gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of ‘platforms.’ new media & society, 12(3), 347-364. guest, g., bunce, a., & johnson, l. (2006). how many interviews are enough? an experiment with data saturation and variability. field methods, 18(1), 59-82. mansbridge, j. (with bohman, j., chambers, s., estlund, d., føllesdal, a., fung, a., lafont, c., manin, b., & martí, j. l.). (2010). the place of self-interest and the role of power in deliberative democracy. journal of political philosophy, 18(1), 64-100. 4 markus, m. l., & silver, m. s. (2008). a foundation for the study of it effects: a new look at desanctis and poole's concepts of structural features and spirit. journal of the association for information systems, 9(10/11), 609-632. noveck, b. s. (2003). designing deliberative democracy in cyberspace: the role of the cyberlawyer. boston university journal of science and technology law, 9(1), 1-91. silver, m. s., & markus, m. l. (2013). conceptualizing the sociotechnical (st) artifact. systems, signs, & actions, 7(1), 82-89. weick, k. e. (1995). sensemaking in organizations. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. wyatt, s. (2008). technological determinism is dead: long live technological determinism. in e. hackett, o. amsterdamska, m. lynch & j. wajcman (eds.), new handbook of science, technology and society (pp. 165-180). cambridge, ma: mit press. license this article is ©2015 guth * brabham, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016   visual  arts  in  digital  and  online  environments:  changing   copyright  and  fair  use  practice  among  institutions  and   individuals     patricia  aufderheide,  american  university   aram  sinnreich,  american  university   louisa  imperiale,  american  university     abstract     this  study  measures  changes  in  behavior  and  attitudes  about  fair  use  among   visual  arts  professionals,  the  future  of  whose  field  depends  on  advancing  into   online,  digital  environments  that  depend  upon  it.  a  survey  of  2,394  visual  arts   professionals  demonstrated  broad  awareness  of  and  actions  using  a  then-­ months-­old  code  of  best  practices  in  fair  use  for  the  visual  arts.  it  also  shows   some  lack  of  confidence  in  understanding  the  law  among  those  who  are  familiar   with  the  code.  as  well,  changes  were  less  evident  in  the  area  most  vulnerable  to   self-­censorship:  the  digital  and  online  realm.     introduction     fair  use  is  an  exception  to  copyright  monopoly  that  has  long  served  to  maintain   balance  between  rewards  for  existing  creators  and  incentives  for  future  creators.   it  enables  new  expression  where  existing  material  is  employed  not  for   substitution  but  in  appropriate  amounts  for  a  new  use  (leval,  1990).     u.s.-­based  visual  arts  professionals  have  long  done  their  work  under  a   widespread  expectation  (except  among  artists  themselves)  that  all  copyrighted   material  will  be  used  with  permission  (bielstein,  2006),  but  digital  practices  make   such  practices  untenable.  these  crisis  catalysts  include:   •   “configurable”  digital  (sinnreich,  2010)  artistic  practices;;   •   teaching  practices  online  and  with  online  materials;;     •   online  museum  collections  and  exhibitions;;   •   online  archives.     in  an  earlier  field-­wide  study  conducted  via  both  survey  and  open-­ended   interviews  (aufderheide,  milosevic,  &  bello,  2015),  visual  arts  professionals   demonstrated  that  while  delays,  higher  costs,  and  deformation  of  projects  all   selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016   results  from  “permissions  culture,”  the  most  serious  creative  consequences  result   from  self-­censorship,  especially  in  the  digital  arena.   the  largest  professional  association  in  the  field,  the  college  art  association   (caa),  created  a  code  of  best  practices  in  fair  use  in  2015,  available  at   collegeart.org/fair-­use,  and  widely  publicized  it  with  extensive  web-­based   materials,  social  media,  webinars  and  in-­person  appearances.  it  followed  several   other  professional  groups  in  doing  so  (aufderheide  &  jaszi,  2011).     methods   how  much  have  the  attitudes  and  behaviors  of  visual  arts  professionals  changed   within  the  first  year  of  the  code’s  release?  this  question  was  addressed  both   with  a  discipline-­wide  survey  and  with  interviews  with  members  of  key   constituencies.  expectations  were  low,  both  because  we  had  learned  from  earlier   research  that  “permissions  culture”  was  deeply  entrenched  and  also  because  of   the  many  obstacles  to  both  individual  and  institutional  change.  we  used  as   measures  both  changes  in  attitudes  and  changes  in  actions.   discussion   highlights  from  the  paper:       the  code  was  familiar  to  63%  of  respondents,  and  almost  all  had  heard  about  it   from  multiple  sources.  nearly  half  (47%)  of  those  people  had  shared  the  code,   most  often  with  multiple  people,  including  colleagues,  students  and   administrators.  this  act  of  sharing  is  a  meaningful  sign  of  trust  in  the  code’s   utility.       some  64%  of  respondents  say  they  have  relied  upon  fair  use  at  some  point,   about  half  regularly.  about  11%  of  fair  users  said  they  began  adopting  the  policy   since  the  code’s  publication.  this  suggests  substantial  immediate  impact,   contributing  to  changes  in  both  awareness  and  behavior.       not  only  individuals  but  institutions  have  changed.  in  the  2016  survey,  43%  of   respondents  who  work  for  institutions  say  that  those  institutions  have  updated   their  fair  use  policies  in  the  past  5  years.  among  those,  more  than  half-­-­57%-­-­ said  that  they  had  changed  their  policies  in  the  months  since  the  code  had  been   published.  thus,  the  code  has  already  contributed  to  broader  adoption  of  fair  use   practices  at  both  the  individual  and  the  institutional  levels.     selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016     powerful  institutions  have  changed  their  policies.  yale  university  press  crafted   new  guidelines  for  scholarly  art  publishing,  grounded  in  the  code.  the  college   art  association,  which  publishes  three  major  art  publications,  reversed  its   permissions-­only  policy.  the  menil  collection  in  houston,  and  the  houston   museum  of  fine  arts  (mfah)  both  changed  their  internal  policies  on  press  use   after  consulting  the  code.  the  mfah  and  some  other  museums  are  also  using   the  code  to  make  decisions  about  how  large  online  images  of  artwork  held  in   their  collections  can  be.  (joseph  newland,  betty  leigh  hutchison,  janet  landay,   personal  communication,  feb.  3,  2016)     one  artist’s  story  of  appropriative  digital  art:  prof.  rebekah  modrak,  an  artist  and   professor  at  the  university  of  michigan,  spoofed  the  overexemplifying  hipster-­ brooklyn  site  best  made  co.  with  an  ironic  website  and  side-­by-­side  digital  video   featuring  the  imaginary  company  re  made  co.    after  getting  a  cease-­and-­desist   letter,  she  turned  for  advice  to  caa,  because  she  had  attended  a  webinar  about   the  code.  caa  steered  her  to  her  university’s  lawyers,  who  supported  her  fair   uses.  she  then  wrote  about  her  experience  for  a  routledge  art  scholarly  journal;;   editors  first  said  she  would  need  permission  from  best  made  for  her  appropriative   uses  of  their  images.  she  used  the  code  to  successfully  convince  the  routledge   editors  that  fair  use  would  apply  to  reproduction  of  images  of  her  own  art.   (modrak,  personal  communication,  feb.  5,  2016)     caa  members’  understanding  and  confidence  in  this  area  are  still  tentative.  for   instance,  in  assessing  the  net  impact  of  fair  use  on  the  visual  arts,  although  the   majority  (70%)  ranked  it  as  essential  or  useful,  almost  a  quarter  of  respondents   (23%)  said  they  were  “not  sure.”  (only  6  percent  ranked  it  on  the  negative  side  of   the  spectrum.)  there  is  also  considerable  interest  in  the  visual  arts  community  in   further  expanding  access  to  fair  use,  with  44%  of  respondents  saying  they  would   change  their  practices  if  they  were  more  confident  of  their  fair  use  rights.       the  full  paper  also  discusses  rates  of  delay  and  avoidance  of  work;;  use  of  public   domain  and  creative  commons  material;;  types  of  work  visual  arts  professionals   wish  they  could  do;;  legacy  confusion  and  rejection  of  fair  use  by  a  minority;;   comparisons  with  the  earlier  survey;;  and  differences  among  professional  groups.       conclusion     selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016   the  publication  of  a  best-­practices  rubric  by  which  to  assess  one’s  choices,  and   thus  one’s  risk,  related  to  fair  use  in  the  visual  arts  had  an  immediate  effect  on   behaviors  throughout  the  field.     but  some  doubt  and  confusion  persists.  additionally,  the  boldest  institutional   changes  have  been  made  in  the  most  traditional  sector,  print  publishing.  some   digital  changes  are  evident,  for  instance  in  online  access  to  museum  images.  but   innovating  digitally  or  launching  new  creative  and  digital-­native  projects  widely   may  await  a  firmer,  field-­wide  grasp  of  fair  use.       references     aufderheide,  p.,  &  jaszi,  p.  (2011).  reclaiming  fair  use:  how  to  put  balance   back  in  copyright.  chicago:  university  of  chicago  press.   aufderheide,  p.,  milosevic,  t.,  &  bello,  b.  (2015).  the  impact  of  copyright   permissions  culture  on  the  us  visual  arts  community:  the  consequences   of  fear  of  fair  use.  new  media  &  society.  doi:10.1177/1461444815575018   bielstein,  s.  m.  (2006).  permissions,  a  survival  guide  :  blunt  talk  about  art  as   intellectual  property.  chicago:  university  of  chicago  press.   leval,  p.  n.  (1990).  toward  a  fair  use  standard  harvard  law  review,  103,   1105-­1136     sinnreich,  a.  (2010).  mashed  up  :  music,  technology,  and  the  rise  of  configurable   culture.  amherst:  university  of  massachusetts  press.     selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation: marshall, a. h. (2019, october 2-5). gendered lived experience of digital inclusion in rural australia. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. gendered lived experience of digital inclusion in rural australia amber marshall digital media research centre, qut introduction digital inclusion is becoming an important topic of debate in australia amongst academics, policy makers and practitioners. the australian digital inclusion index (adii) measures digital inclusion along three indices: access, affordability, and digital ability. based on an annual national survey of 50,000 people, the adii compiles numerous variables into a score ranging from 0 to 100. a ‘perfectly included’ individual scores 100 and the average australian scores 60.2 (thomas et al., 2018). digital inclusion is intertwined with social inclusion in two ways. first, social disadvantage based on geography, gender, race, income, education and other factors is an antecedent to digital exclusion. second, digital exclusion can compound social exclusion. in australia, remoteness is a strong indicator of digital exclusion (park, 2017, p. 399). in 2018, rural australians scored 53.9 on the adii compared to 62.4 in capital cities. this ‘city-country divide’ is well-documented and is widening. research approach the research was undertaken in one of australia’s most digitally excluded regions – north west queensland (nwq), which had an adii score of 52.8 in 2018 and just 45.9 in 2017. specifically, the research investigated access, affordability and digital ability amongst agricultural households in the northern gulf region. while this project aimed to demonstrate how digital connectivity (or lack thereof) enables and constrains businesses and lives for farmers, it did not address the specific but equally pressing challenges for nwq’s indigenous communities and people working in other industries (e.g. tourism, health, education, police). the farming focus is in response to unpublished adii data (thomas et al., 2017) suggesting that ‘farmers and farm workers’ return lower digital inclusion scores than other populations in rural areas. between may and october 2018, the researcher shadowed a northern gulf drought ambassador to talk to farmers about the reality of internet and telecommunications connections, and how digital technologies are (or aren’t) used for business, education and civic participation. data were collected through ethnographic interviews/focus groups and participant observations at rural events and property visits. in addition, three case studies of farming households were undertaken to dive deeper into emerging issues. thematic analysis based on the three pillars of digital inclusion revealed the following findings. findings the research highlighted several unique challenges and opportunities for rural, farming women in particular to get connected and improve their lives through digital participation, which were manifest in several ways. 1. reinforcement of gender roles the research revealed that traditional western gender roles in some rural households both enabled and constrained digital access and ability for women. some ‘patriarchs’ – property owners who often direct business and domestic spending – showed little interest in using or investing in digital technologies. for these patriarchs, who have spent most of their lives in the paddock, it can be difficult to grasp why digital connectivity is necessary or even desirable. there can also be a preference for ‘tried and true’ farming equipment and practices and consequent distrust in digital technologies. one contributing factor is that many of these men had little opportunity to go to school, and therefore have poor general literacy, further inhibiting digitally literacy. it is therefore often easier for patriarchs to ask other family members – such and their wife or children – to complete essential tasks online on their behalf, such as answering emails. accordingly, there is often a perception that computer work is women’s work. ironically, the research found that, through obligatory exposure to computer work, rural women develop digital skills such as banking and bookkeeping. 2. management of scarce digital resources the research found that many women manage and allocate available household resources, including consumables like internet data. unlike internet plans in urban areas, on-peak data is capped for rural customers on nbn sky muster satellite plans, which forces many users to log on during off-peak times (e.g.12 midnight to 7am). also, where rural consumers rely on 3/4g mobile broadband, the network is often very congested, delivering download/upload speeds of only a few megabits per second. when internet access and data is scarce, the research showed that women tend to put others’ needs ahead of their own. for example, children’s education (e.g. distance learning via data-hungry video) understandably comes first, and business activities (such as banking, payroll and online accreditation) take precedence over a women’s online personal or professional development. even the digital needs of farm workers are often prioritised because it is increasingly essential to offer wi-fi to attract and retain young and competent staff. under such circumstances, women devise elaborate ways to allocate and track use of data. one mother of two said she allocates specific amounts of data to the farm business, kids’ education and parents’ interests, and then allows her kids to “go nuts” on youtube on the seventh day of every month before the new cycle begins (if there is any data left). the general attitude of women towards this data scarcity was that they just ‘get on with it’. living on the land, many resources are scarce (fuel, food, water) and data is just another resource to be managed fugally. 3. thirst for digital skills rural farming women – who are already geographically isolated – suffer greater levels of social exclusion owing to lack of access to digital technologies. despite this, the research revealed many women have a thirst for connections and opportunities afforded digital connectivity. the need for digital skills development was evident in a ‘bush business’ program where farming women reported gaining life-changing digital knowledge to start or expand their own businesses. these women also stay connected on facebook across many hundreds of kilometres and many months between physical meetings. conclusion this research investigated the lived experience of digital inclusion in rural farming populations in nwq. while the adii provides a year-on-year indicator of overall digital inclusion, this research sought to understand the localised factors that impact people’s access to affordable internet and their capacity use it. the findings give insight into the role gender plays in compounding low levels of digital incision in rural farming households. specifically, it reveals a paradox in women’s lived experience of digital inclusion. while some women have limited control over investment in digital technologies, they are thrust into taking responsibility for managing digital resources and undertaking digital work, which ironically empowers them with digital skills and connections. this taste for digital participation spurs them to seek out further opportunities afforded by digital technologies, such as starting their own business. there is virtually no support for women (or men) to develop digital ability in the nwq context. investment in digital ability programs in rural australia is crucial to prevent farmers and other rural populations being left behind in today’s fast-paced digital economy. references park, s. (2017). digital inequalities in rural australia: a double jeopardy of remoteness and social exclusion. journal of rural studies. (54), 399-407. thomas, j., barraket, j., wilson, c.k., cook, k., louie, y., holcombe-james, i., ewing, s., & macdonald, t. (2018). measuring australia’s digital divide: the australian digital inclusion index 2018. melbourne: rmit university, for telstra. thomas, j., barraket, j., wilson, c.k., ewing, s., macdonald, t., tucker, j. & rennie, e., (2017). measuring australia’s digital divide: the australian digital inclusion index, 2017, rmit university, melbourne, for telstra. microsoft word johnson.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): johnson, a. (2014, october 22-24). voicing technological objects on twitter: from @big_ben_clock to @selfawareroomba. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. voicing technological objects on twitter: from @big_ben_clock to @selfawareroomba amy johnson massachusetts institute of technology on twitter, existence is envoiced rather than embodied. twitter is, moreover, broadly egalitarian in its practices of use—any possessor of a valid email address can register for an account. voices can be directly articulated by a human, a team of humans, a bot, a combination of bot and human. what does it mean that these different voices, bot and human, individual and organizational, performed and animated, interact together as (basically) equals? i examine a collection of twitter accounts that voice technological objects ranging from clocks to drones to washing machines to ask: who are we on twitter? in linguistic anthropology, voice is understood as the “linguistic construction of social personae” (keane 2000:271). it’s the answer to the question of who is speaking, with implications about how we regard the origin of the voice, particularly in terms of agency, rights, and identity. on twitter, different—but often overlapping—types of voices and voicing abound. thus, we have the heteroglossic voicing of personal self-expression; the scripted voicing of a bot; the audienced voicing of celebrity; the ventriloquized voicing of an organization; the double voicing of parody; the world-building voicing of a fictional character. further, this polyphony is actively supported by twitter’s policy decisions: twitter eschews real name requirements and offers explicit parody, roleplaying, and critique guidelines to insulate accounts from accusations of impersonation or trademark violation—the only major social media company to do so. voice is also a political construct. it’s often claimed that social media platforms “give people a voice”—with the assumption that having a voice equates to political representation or authority or power. deeply embedded in this are ideas about the sovereignty and importance of public opinion. what kind of public does this diverse envoiced existence on twitter create? similarly, voice plays an important role in identity politics. here, the concept of voice often manifests in terms of claiming one’s “own voice.” this is framed both through assertion of a right to articulate one’s own—or a particular group’s—experience, and through rejection of a model of reality sponsored by more powerful groups. what does the polyphony of voices on twitter mean in terms of social personae? in terms of social power and authority? in terms of identity and perspective? warner, in discussing publics, suggests that a key element is addressivity—the way participants are addressed and the way they understand themselves as addressed. he suggests that publics are marked by an addressivity that pairs a recognition of both self and strangerness at the same time. in goffman’s terms, this is a particular kind of participation framework. it is also the basic participation framework for public accounts on twitter, spread across the different pages of home, connect, discover, and me. in warner’s text-based publics, participants are implicitly limited to humans as individual actors able to understand texts. on twitter, however, participants aren’t subject to these limitations. and how we imagine our fellow participants thus becomes different. i examine the linguistic, participatory, and curatorial choices of twitter accounts that voice technological objects to investigate how this posthuman, postindividual participation framework affects our understanding of self and strangerness. posthumanism and postindividualism have been defined in different ways. here i draw on hayles’s work on posthumanism (1999) to focus on a shift away from embodied singular existence to distributed existence that integrates nonhumans and nonindividual entities. this corpus of twitter accounts offers a unique opportunity to explore how we understand this phenomenon—when we look at how we voice technological objects on twitter, we see not necessarily how posthuman society is, but how we currently imagine it and ourselves as members of it. and these imaginings are both responsive and performative, revealing the present and shaping the future. in this context, i investigate the interaction patterns, profile choices, and text and media variation of accounts that voice technological objects. further, i pair warner’s emphasis on addressivity with benveniste’s articulation of subjectivity as linguistically realized through deictics of time and person to examine the porousness of borders between subjects, objects, and nonpersons. what does the voicing of imagined participants— made visible through animation or performance—reveal about the societies we imagine ourselves members of? about ourselves, our co-participants, and our co-members? who are “we” on twitter? references agha, a. 2005. “voice, footing, enregisterment.” journal of linguistic anthropology 15 (1): 38–59. azuma, hiroki. 2012 [2009[2001]]. database animals. in fandom unbound: otaku culture in a connected world, edited by m. itō, d. okabe, and i. tsuji. new haven: yale university press. bakhtin, m. 1986 “the problem of speech genres.” in speech genres and other late essays. c. emerson and m. holquist, eds. austin: u of texas p. pp. 60-102. bakhtin, m. m, and michael holquist. 1981. the dialogic imagination: four essays. austin: university of texas press. bauman, richard, and charles l. briggs. 1990. “poetics and performances as critical perspectives on language and social life.” annual review of anthropology 19 (1): 59– 88. benveniste, emile. 1971[1966]. problems in general linguistics. coral gables, fl: university of miami press. braidotti, rosi. 2013. the posthuman. polity. cohen, julie e. 2012. configuring the networked self: law, code, and the play of everyday practice. new haven [conn.]: yale university press. crawford, kate. 2009. “following you: disciplines of listening in social media.” continuum 23 (4): 525–535. doi:10.1080/10304310903003270. derecho, abigail. 2006. archontic literature: a definition, a history, and several theories of fan fiction. in fan fiction and fan communities in the age of the internet: new essays, edited by karen hellekson and kristina busse. jefferson, nc: mcfarland & company, inc. 61-78. goffman, erving. 1979. footing. semiotica 25: 1 – 29. goffman, erving. 1959. the presentation of self in everyday life. new york: doubleday. haraway, donna. 1991. simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. new york: routledge. haraway, donna. 1997. modest_witness@second_millennium.femaleman©_meets_oncomousetm: feminism and technoscience. new york: routledge. hayles, katherine. 1999. how we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, irvine, judith. 1996. shadow conversations: the indeterminacy of participant roles. in natural histories of discourse, ed. michael silverstein and greg urban. university of chicago press: 131-159. keane, webb. 1999. “voice.” journal of linguistic anthropology 9 (1-2): 271–273. keane, webb. 1991. “delegated voice: ritual speech, risk, and the making of marriage alliances in anakalang.” american ethnologist 18 (2): 311–330. kockelman, paul. 2013. “the anthropology of an equation. sieves, spam filters, agentive algorithms, and ontologies of transformation.” hau: journal of ethnographic theory 3(3): 33–61. kunreuther, l. 2006. “technologies of the voice: fm radio, telephone, and the nepali diaspora in kathmandu.” cultural anthropology 21 (3): 323–353. manning, paul, and ilana gershon. 2013. “animating interaction.” hau: journal of ethnographic theory 3(3): 107–37. silvio, teri. 2010. “animation: the new performance?” journal of linguistic anthropology 20(2): 422–438. taylor, jessica. 2009. “‘speaking shadows’: a history of the voice in the transition from silent to sound film in the united states.” journal of linguistic anthropology 19(1): 1–20. warner, michael. 2002. publics and counterpublics. cambridge, ma: zone books. microsoft word aoir2017-controversies in hacker networks selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): richterich, a. (2017, october 18-21). tracing controversies in hacker networks: ethical considerations for research on communal publics. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. tracing controversies in hacker networks: ethical considerations for research on communal publics this paper reflects on the ethical implications of research tracing controversies in digital, communal publics. it addresses two interrelated questions: how private or public are communication platforms used by digitally networked communities? and how should internet researchers assess, define and treat online environments which are technically public, but suggest varying privacy expectations on the part of involved users? these questions are relevant to a wide range of internet research. privacy expectations have been discussed with regards to the ethics of using twitter, facebook, as well as other social media data (zimmer and proferes 2014; ess 2013, 35ff.; markham and buchanan 2012, 6ff.; zimmer 2010). in this paper, i focus on ethical implications of communal debates on controversial subjects. specifically, i examine how genderand diversity-related tensions and incidents have been discussed in hacker communities. i argue that the content reflecting such controversies commonly travels across various platforms which imply different degrees of privacy expectations and therefore require distinct ethical considerations. i particularly highlight the relevance of three factors for ethical decision-making when analysing controversies: the privacy expectations suggested by traversed platforms and users’ interactions; the vulnerability and public/private status of affected individuals; and the (moral) concerns which are at stake in respective debates. within hacker communities, issues related to gender and diversity have increasingly been subject of controversial discussions. this is on the one hand linked to the emergence of feminist hackerspaces and ‘geek feminism’ (fox et al. 2015; toupin 2014; “geek feminism” n.d.). on the other hand, these debates arose due to grave concerns about harassment and sexism in hacker cultures (reagle 2017, 2012; montgomery 2013; mills 2012). in 2013, san francisco hackerspace noisebrige added an anti-harassment policy to its former one-and-only rule “be excellent to each other”. 2 this adjustment of communal principles was implemented after members reported experiences of sexual harassment and assaults. in 2016, a longstanding, male member of the community was expelled, since he had been accused of sexual harassment and abuse of individuals involved in related hacker networks (noisebridge 2016). just like the incidents leading up to noisebridge’s anti-harassment policy, this decision was controversially discussed (see e.g. the comment section in montgomery 2013; isaacson 2016; loll 2016; fuchs and weisbrod 2016). insights into such cases, online controversies and the dynamics leading up to their publication make highly relevant contributions to internet research: they facilitate a better understanding of gender-related issues, discrimination, misogyny and sexism in networked developer publics. this information is needed in order to reflect on and counter factors compromising the mental as well as bodily integrity of (minority) individuals in these groups. moreover, such research sheds light on issues of access and inclusivity – which is also relevant given the more general gender bias in it professions (abbate 2012; misa 2011). however, in many cases, the information needed in order to address controversies and debates pertinent to gender and diversity has ‘travelled’ across different platforms: before it reaches more overtly public platforms, such as blogs or online newspapers, some of the material relevant to analysing and observing sexism and discrimination in hacker communities is posted in google groups, sent via mailing-lists, or posted on communal wikis. methodologically, this indicates the relevance and implications of ‘data tracing’ approaches for internet research (hine 2015, 68ff.; geiger and ribes 2011) which i likewise reflect upon in this paper. in a hackerspaces.org mailing-list discussion, titled “women in makerspaces”, one of the contributors stated: “i highly encourage all members of our space no matter what their gender is to make it their own. […] i would say the same should be true with the female/male issue. if a hackerspace has one female and she wants more females in the hackerspace then she should start a campaign to find more females. it could be that she host [sic!] a class about e-textiles or whatever it is females like to talk about.” (“women in makerspaces” 2013) subsequently, this suggestion has been widely used as illustration for misconceptions and stereotypes towards female hackers, brought forward by their male peers (henry 2014; see also davies 2017). liz henry, one of the co-founders of the women-centred hackerspace double union, wrote that many female hackers “[…] focused on the etextiles message because we could make fun of it, not because it was especially horrible. that month there were many truly appalling, misogynist, sexist posts to the hackerspaces.org list” (2014). her article, published in the online magazine model view culture, links to the abovementioned contribution/comment, hence making its anonymization impracticable – if one likewise aims at crediting henry’s input/publication. 3 it is likely that the sender initially was not aware of the misconceptions implicated in his comment (and the ridicule it would receive). in fact, he later apologised, but also suggested that his message was taken out of context, without accounting for the dynamics of a mailing list discussion. in this sense, the contributions submitted to the mailing list do not only call for an ethical decision regarding if certain material may be referenced and included, but also how it is contextualised. with my analysis, i make two main contributions: specifically, in tracing gender and diversity controversies in hacker cultures, this paper contributes to a better understanding of transitions between different online publics and their ethical implications. more generally, my paper provides insights into ethical decision-making in internet research on controversial, normative subjects. references abbate, j. 2012. recoding gender: women's changing participation in computing. mit press. davies, s. 2017. hackerspaces: making the maker movement. polity. ess, c. 2013. digital media ethics. polity. fox, s. et al. 2015. “hacking culture, not devices: access and recognition in feminist hackerspaces”. computer supported cooperative work and social computing, doi: 10.1145/2675133.2675223. fuchs, c. and weisbrod, l. 2016. “what has this man done?”. august 13. retrieved from: http://www.zeit.de/kultur/2016-08/jacob-appelbaum-rape-sexual-abuseallegations. “geek feminism”. n.d. geek feminism wiki. retrieved from: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/category. geiger, r. s. and ribes, d. 2011. “trace ethnography: following coordination through documentary practices”. ieee computer society, doi: 10.1109/hicss.2011.455. henry, l. 2014. “the rise of feminist hackerspaces and how to make your own”. february 3. retrieved from: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-rise-offeminist-hackerspaces-and-how-to-make-your-own. hine, c. 2015. “ethnography for the internet: embedded, embodied and everyday”. bloomsbury. isaacson, a. 2016. “not working for us”. medium, december 28. retrieved from: https://medium.com/@eqe/not-working-for-us-bff58e96c2ea#.829f90wj9. loll, a.c. 2016. “power, secrecy and cypherpunks: how jacob appelbaum ripped tor apart”. the guardian, october 11. retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/11/jacob-appelbaum-torproject-sexual-assault-allegations. markham, a. and buchanan, e. 2012. “ethical decision-making and internet research”. retrieved from: https://aoir.org/reports/ethics2.pdf. mills, e. 2012. “sexism and the single hacker: defcon’s feminist moment”. cnet, august 17. retrieved from: https://www.cnet.com/news/sexism-and-the-single-hackerdefcons-feminist-moment. misa, t. j. (ed.) 2011. gender codes: why women are leaving computing. john wiley & sons. 4 montgomery, k. 2013. “claims of sexism and sexual assault plague noisebridge hackerspace”. october 1. retrieved from: https://uptownalmanac.com/2013/10/claims-sexism-and-sexual-assault-plaguenoisebridge-hackerspace. noisebridge. 2016. “noisebridge statement on jacob appelbaum”. june 10. retrieved from: https://noisebridge.net/wiki/noisebridge_statement_on_jacob_appelbaum. reagle, j. 2017. naive meritocracy and the meanings of myth. ada: a journal of gender, new media, and technology, 11(1): doi:/10.7264/n34q7s9n. reagle, j. 2012. “‘free as in sexist?’ free culture and the gender gap”. first monday, 18(1). retrieved from: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/ article/view/4291. toupin, s. 2014. “feminist hackerspaces: the synthesis of feminist and hacker cultures”. the journal of peer production. retrieved from: http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-5-shared-machine-shops/peer-reviewedarticles/feminist-hackerspaces-the-synthesis-of-feminist-and-hacker-cultures. zimmer, m. and proferes, n. 2014. “privacy on twitter, twitter on privacy”. in: k. weller et al. (eds.) twitter and society, pp. 169−183. peter lang. zimmer, michael. 2010. “‘but the data is already public’: on the ethics of research in facebook.” ethics and information technology, 12(4): 313–325. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): de wolf, r. & heyman, r. (2017, october 18-21). towards a networked privacy paradigm: assumptions and implications. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. towards a networked privacy paradigm: assumptions and implications ralf de wolf imec-mict-ugent rob heyman imec-smit-ugent in the last decade, many researchers have studied privacy in the context of new media, often inspired by individual (e.g., warren and brandeis, 1890; westin, 1967) or contextual privacy theory (e.g., nissenbaum, 2004, 2010; petronio, 1991, 2010). individual conceptualizations employ a restricted access or control conceptualization. in addition, contextual privacy theory also accentuate the importance of the environment and other people when conceptualizing privacy. recently, a networked perspective on privacy is suggested that takes into account the affordances and dynamics of networked publics (marwick and boyd, 2014; vitak et al., 2015; hargittai and marwick, 2016) where privacy is defined as an “ongoing negotiation of contexts in a networked ecosystem in which contexts regularly blur and collapse” (marwick and boyd, 2014 p.13). that said, it is unclear what makes networked privacy new, how it relates to previous established frameworks and what are its implications. in a critical literature review we therefore analyze and compare warren and brandeis’ right to be let alone, westin’s privacy control, nissenbaum’s contextual integrity, petronio’s communication privacy management theory and recent work on networked privacy. rather than providing an exhaustive framework of all theoretical perspectives we focus on how privacy is approached with the goal of further theorizing a networked perspective on privacy. our main research questions are as follows: rq1: how does networked privacy relate to earlier established privacy frameworks? rq2: what are the assumptions and implications of networked privacy? our study shows how networked privacy is different in some fundamental epistemological and ontological assumptions. contrary to warren and brandeis (1890) who focus on the negative effects of technological advances on individual’s privacy and the right to be let alone, it is noticeable how a networked perspective is more descriptive and less judgmental when describing privacy: “how are individuals or groups managing privacy in networked publics and what are the factors influencing these decisions?” can be seen as the pivotal question. second, whereas westin (1967) and altman (1975) describe privacy as selective control of access to the self or optimizing between the withdrawing or disclosing of information, a network perspective assumes individuals to be fallible agents with only partial knowledge of the networked context. third, a networked perspective takes the affordances of networked publics as a given as well as the sociability that constitutes a networked self. hence, context collapse and invisible audiences are not necessarily perceived as problematic for privacy management. in addition to its contribution to privacy theory, our critical literature review also clarifies the implications a networked environment has for people’s privacy management, privacy technology and public policy. managing privacy has always been dialectical and requires an ongoing process of opening and closing boundaries (petronio, 2002), but with the emergence of networked technologies where temporal, spatial and social boundaries are very open and fluid, the ongoing negotiation of boundaries should be given a greater emphasis. after all, individuals have to coordinate this openness, which can be considered both an opportunity and burden. technical skills are necessary but not sufficient for adequate privacy management. people need to know how the networked context influences their privacy management. the latter implies social skills in the form of boundary reflexivity and communicating with others to construct norms about networked privacy. next to hiding and controlling users also need to understand the networked environment and the role they are attributed for adequate privacy management to be possible. the latter has two implications for the further development of privacy technology. first, privacy technology should not only focus on restricting access or controlling information, but also on making users aware of the networked self, the collapsed and networked audiences and the ways service providers operate as a curator. users need to be aware of the networked environment, have agency in controlling the social situation, free from surveillance or interference for which no consent is given. a second implication, and requirement to the first implication, is that a shift in perspective is necessary from “users need protection because of their limited capabilities” to “users need transparency, control and protection to support and facilitate their privacy management”. the latter perspective acknowledges the reflexive role that is required rather than underlining the bounded rationality of users. acquisti et al. (2015, p.514) believe that a baseline framework of privacy protection is also necessary besides offering control options and transparency. an increased reflexivity is required of users for adequate privacy management, but protection is also needed to prevent that reflexivity from becoming excessive. certainly when users are treated as an object (top-down surveillance and commodification) the goal of public policy should be to balance the relationship more equally and involve users as an active agent in the negotiation process. however, it is also needed to meet the limited capabilities of users and offer clear principles on privacy protection. references acquisti, a., brandimarte, l., & loewenstein, g. (2015). privacy and human behavior in the age of information. science, 347(6221), 509–514. doi:10.1126/science.aaa1465 altman, i. (1975). the environment and social behavior: privacy, personal space, territory, crowding. monterey, ca: brooks/cole. boyd, danah, & marwick, a. e. (2011). social privacy in networked publics: teens’ attitudes, practices, and strategies. presented at the proc. a decade in internet time: symposium on the dynamics of the internet and society. retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1925128 hargittai, e., & marwick, a. (2016). “what can i really do?” explaining the privacy paradox with online apathy. international journal of communication, 10, 37373757. marwick, a. e., & boyd, d. (2014). networked privacy: how teenagers negotiate context in social media. new media & society, 16(7), 1051–1067. doi:10.1177/1461444814543995 nissenbaum, h. (2004). privacy as contextual integrity. washington law review, 79(1), 119–158. nissenbaum, h. (2010). privacy in context: technology, policy, and the integrity of social life. stanford: stanford law books. petronio, s. (1991). communication boundary management: a theoretical model of managing disclosure of private information between marital couples. communication theory, 1(4), 311–335. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.1991.tb00023.x petronio, s. (2002). boundaries of privacy: dialectics of disclosure. albany: state university of new york press. vitak, j., wisnieuwski, p., page, x., lampinen, a., litt, e., de wolf, r., gage kelley, p., & sleeper, m. (2015). the future of networked privacy: challenges and opportunities. proceedings of the 18th acm conference companion on computer cooperative work & social computing, acm press, new york 267 -272. warren, s., & brandeis, l. (1890). the right to privacy. harvard law review, 4(5), 193–220. westin, a. f. (1967). privacy and freedom. new york: atheneum. suggested citation (apa): soriano, c., grohmann, r., chen, j., karatzogianni, a., cabanes, j. alves, p. (2020, october). digital labor solidarities, collective formations, and relational infrastructures. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 digital labor solidarities, collective formations, and relational infrastructures cheryll ruth r. soriano, ph.d de la salle university manila rafael grohmann, ph.d unisinos university julie yujie chen, phd university of toronto athina karatzogianni, phd university of leicester jason vincent cabañes, ph.d de la salle university manila paula alves unisinos university adrija dey, phd soas university of london panel description valorised under the guise of creativity and flexibility and also actively hailed by many governments as a solution to unemployment, there has been tremendous uptake on digital labor over recent years. and yet, research on digital worker experiences have shed light on the problematic realities of digital labor, which include increasing levels of stress and anxiety over financial and career instability, physical exhaustion, and isolation all of which underscore the precarity that belie the optimistic facade of labor under the new economy (hesmondhalgh and baker, 2010, pp. 34-38; graham, hjorth & lehdonvirta, 2017; lehdonvirta, 2016). these include instances of exploitation as well as suggested citation (apa): soriano, c., grohmann, r., chen, j., karatzogianni, a., cabanes, j. alves, p. (2020, october). digital labor solidarities, collective formations, and relational infrastructures. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. feelings of anxiety over job security and isolation due to having to work at intense speeds and with long, unsocial hours for fear of losing to competition (beerepoot and lambregts, 2014; graham, et.al., 2017; wood, graham, lehdonvirta, 2018; wood, lehdonvirta, graham & anwar, 2019; van doorn, 2017), as well as ‘selfexploitation,’ where workers are willing and prepared to take the risks of precarious work in hopes of obtaining future advancement (hesmondhalgh & baker, 2011). expected to be working at home or mobile and physically disconnected, digital labor also raises important questions about how freelancer and entrepreneurial identities are perceived as barriers to effective collective organisation. broadly, social capital theorists have argued that a sense of community of workers has declined with the fragmentation of work places and internationalisation of global value chains driven by technological development. this is accompanied by the decline in trust in large institutions, including labor unions, throughout the industrial world (neilson & rossiter, 2008). following the neoliberal ideology of entrepreneurialism that marked much of contemporary labor, digital workers are expected to overcome the challenges and channel entrepreneurial values to thrive in competitive labor markets by themselves. the notions of flexibility and entrepreneurialism that appear to be the key drivers for the popularity of digital labor pose unique challenges to collective organising, further compounded by the fact that when work is digital, workers are globally and regionally dispersed and also take on highly diverse jobs with diverse income ranges. these provide a limited basis for identity and social formation (wood, graham, & lehdonvirta, 2018; lehdonvirta, 2016). traditional avenues for addressing unequal employment relations are also perceived to be elusive as digital workers are also normally excluded from regulatory frameworks that enable collective representation. that said, it has been contended that precarity has ironically spurred some workers to engage in ‘deep attachment, affective bindings’, and collaborative and communal practices (arvidsson, malossi, & naro, 2010). as such, possibilities for digital worker resistance, solidarity, and explorations of new models for unionising are being explored in a growing number of works (wood, et.al, 2018, wood, 2015; irani and silberman, 2013; karatzogianni & matthews, 2020; lehdonvirta, 2016). some modest and alternative forms of collective organising have also been documented, with social media groups taking on a prominent role (bryson, gomez, & willman, 2010; cant, 2019; lehdonvirta, 2016; wood, et.al., 2018; heckscher & mccarthy, 2014; howcroft & bergvall-kareborn, 2019; geelan & hodder, 2017; englert, cant & woodcock, 2020, soriano & cabañes, forthcoming). yet it remains contentious whether this exponential increase in membership on social media platforms such as facebook alongside possibilities for user-generated content can give rise to a new collaborative form of solidarity useful for productively “structuring of worker debates” (bryson, gomez, & willman, 2010, p.42). suggested citation (apa): soriano, c., grohmann, r., chen, j., karatzogianni, a., cabanes, j. alves, p. (2020, october). digital labor solidarities, collective formations, and relational infrastructures. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. looking at patterns of organisation and challenges to build solidarity across national and even regional experience will enrich the discussion in terms of the politics, nuances, and actual meaning of these spaces for local workers useful for examining worker expressions of resistance and solidarity amidst continuing technological development and platform reforms (alacovska & gill, 2019; grohman, forthcoming). a close examination of comparable and multiple forms of collective organisation, as well as the relational infrastructures underlying them, may demonstrate how workers challenge the dominant claims of global capitalism while steep in recognition of the opportunities that these offer. reflecting on experiences from china, brazil, the philippines, and india, this panel explores the following questions: what are the emerging collective formations among digital workers and what do they seek to achieve? what are the challenges in solidarity-building among digital workers and what conditions activate workers as political actors to organize as a collective force? what are the relational infrastructures and material dimensions of such forms of organisation? how do these formations seek to undo injustices while reflecting new power imbalances? the first paper by julie chen examines the conditions that undermine collective action among ride-hailing drivers in china. manifesting local asymmetries characterized by ‘elite drivers’ that contribute to narratives of success in this economy, the paper argues that these also work to hide and normalise the structural inequality existing prior to the rise of the platform economy and in turn works to undermine the potentials for drivers to build cross-group solidarity. the second paper by cheryll ruth soriano and jason vincent cabañes examines emerging forms of solidarity among digital platform workers in the philippines, one of the largest platform labor supplying countries globally. the paper examines three emerging collective formations among local platform workers: the ‘entrepreneurial solidarity’ model in facebook groups, the ‘cooperative’ model, and the ‘alternative local labor platform’ model. the paper teases out their characteristics as ‘alternative cultures of organizing’ in terms of how they identify‘ new subjects of labor,’ ‘new targets’ to bargain with, new ‘repertoires of struggle’; as well as the material dimensions of these organisational forms. the third paper by rafael grohmann and paula alves examines collective formations among platform drivers in brazil. from the mapping of 18 unions and associations, the paper analyses how the different brazilian organizations build meanings about the struggles of platform workers. most associations do not understand the driver as a worker or "employee", and are supporters of a far-right president who does not like "unions". the paper finds that whatsapp plays a central role in the communication and organisation of app-drivers and facebook consolidates the meanings of unions and associations through the circulation of videos. the fourth paper by athina karatzogianni and adrija dey examines journalistic digital labor amidst the ideological (caste, religious, nationalist, or misogynist) polarisation suggested citation (apa): soriano, c., grohmann, r., chen, j., karatzogianni, a., cabanes, j. alves, p. (2020, october). digital labor solidarities, collective formations, and relational infrastructures. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. during intense political events and trolling, the use of social media for crowdfunding, facilitating fact checking in grassroots activism and investigative journalism, as well as the way social media might be accelerating mobilisation and recruitment for political purposes. vividly juxtaposing testimonies from key journalists (independent and mainstream), fact checkers, political activists and other political actors in india, it situates solidarity-building in journalistic digital labour in india in a context of hate speech, abuse or censorship and silencing. exploring collective organisation as part of the digital worker's "work-world" - where power and control are continually exercised and asserted, reinforced and challenged, jack qiu (discussant) will respond and tease out key themes emerging from the panel. references alacovska, a., & gill, r. (2019). de-westernizing creative labour studies: the informality of creative work from an ex-centric perspective. international journal of cultural studies, 22(2), 195–212. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877918821231 arvidsson, a., malossi, g. & naro, g. (2010) passionate work? labour conditions in the milan fashion industry. journal for cultural research, 14(3): 295-309, doi: 10.1080/14797581003791503 beerepoot, n., & lambregts, b. (2014). competition in online job marketplaces: towards a global labor market for outsourcing services? global networks, 15(2), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1111/glob.12051 bryson, a., gomez, r., & willman, p. (2010). online social networking and trade union membership: what the facebook phenomenon truly means for labor organizers. labor history, 51(1), 41-53. https://doi.org/10.1080/00236561003654719 cant, c. (2019). riding for deliveroo: resistance in the new economy. london: polity. englert, s., woodcock, j. & cant, c. (2020). digital workerism: technology, platforms, and the circulation of workers’ struggles. triplec: communication, capitalism & critique, 18 (1), 132-145. https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v18i1.1133 geelan, t., & hodder, a. (2017). enhancing transnational labor solidarity: the unfulfilled promise of the internet and social media. industrial relations journal, 48(4): 345364. https://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12190 gill, r., & pratt, a. (2008). in the social factory: immaterial labour, precariousness and cultural work. theory, culture & society, 25(7-8), 1-30. doi:10.1177/0263276408097794 suggested citation (apa): soriano, c., grohmann, r., chen, j., karatzogianni, a., cabanes, j. alves, p. (2020, october). digital labor solidarities, collective formations, and relational infrastructures. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. graham, m. & anwar, a. a. (2019). the global gig economy: towards a planetary labour market?. first monday, 24(4). doi:10.5210/fm.v24i4.9913 graham, m., hjorth, i., & lehdonvirta, v. (2017). digital labor and development: impacts of global digital labor platforms and the gig economy on worker livelihoods. transfer: european review of labor and research, 23(2), 135-162. gregg, m. (2013). presence bleed: performing professionalism online. in m. banks & r. gill (eds.), theorizing cultural work: labor, continuity and change in the cultural and creative industries (pp. 122-134). new york, ny: routledge. grohmann, r. (2020). plataformização do trabalho: entre dataficação, financeirização e racionalidade neoliberal. eptic journal, 22(1), 106-122. han, c. (2016). precarity, precariousness, and vulnerability. annual review of anthropology, 47(1).doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-102116-041644 heckscher, c., & mccarthy, j. (2014). transient solidarities: commitment and collective action in post-industrial societies. british journal of industrial relations, 52(4), 627–657.doi:10.1111/bjir.12084 hesmondhalgh, d., & baker, s. (2010). a very complicated version of freedom: conditions and experiences of creative labor in three cultural industries. poetics, 38(1), 4-20. doi:10.1016/j.poetic.2009.10.001 howcroft, d., & bergvall-kåreborn, b. (2018). a typology of crowdwork platforms. work, employment and society, 095001701876013.doi:10.1177/0950017018760136 irani, l., & silberman, m.s. (2013). turkopticon: interrupting worker invisibility in amazon mechanical turk, in proceedings of the acm conference on human factors in computing systems (chi), acm, new york, ny. karatzogianni, a., & matthews, j. (2020). platform ideologies: ideological production in digital intermediation platforms and structural effectivity in the “sharing economy.” television & new media, 21(1), 95–114. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476418808029 lehdonvirta, v. (2016). algorithms that divide and unite: delocalisation, identity and collective action in ‘microwork. in j. flecker (ed.) space, place and global digital work: dynamics of virtual work (pp. 53–80), london: palgrave macmillan. suggested citation (apa): soriano, c., grohmann, r., chen, j., karatzogianni, a., cabanes, j. alves, p. (2020, october). digital labor solidarities, collective formations, and relational infrastructures. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. soriano, c.r. & cabañes, j.v. (2020). entrepreneurial solidarities: social media collectives and filipino digital platform workers. social media + society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120926484 van doorn, n. (2017). platform labor: on the gendered and racialized exploitation of lowincome service work in the ‘on-demand’ economy. information, communication & society, 20(6), 898-914. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2017.1294194 wood, a., lehdonvirta, v., & graham, m. (2018). workers of the world unite? online freelancer organisation among remote gig economy workers in six asian and african countries. new technology, work and employment, 33(2), 95-112. https://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12112 wood, a. j. (2015). networks of injustice and worker mobilisation at walmart. industrial relations journal, 46(4), 259–274. doi:10.1111/irj.12103 the relevance of local and intergroup relational politics for platform workers julie yujie chen, phd university of toronto abstract the employment classification of platform workers has stirred global legislative, regulatory, and scholarly debates (cherry, 2015; prassl, 2018), as well as labor struggles and a new level of lobbying efforts from the tech industry. look no further than the passage and the aftermath of california assembly bill 5. while the legal employment classification provides the “recognition” for the platform workers (lee, 2019), the latters’ lived experience of the transformation of digital work (cherry, 2015), especially concerning the localized politics, is largely underexplored in the growing number of studies on gig workers, platform labor, and so on. through examining the app-based drivers in china, the paper aims to shed new light on the roles played by the localized politics in shaping the lives of suggested citation (apa): soriano, c., grohmann, r., chen, j., karatzogianni, a., cabanes, j. alves, p. (2020, october). digital labor solidarities, collective formations, and relational infrastructures. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. different types of drivers (part-timers vs. full-timers, illegal vs. legal) and the potentials of the solidarity-building of drivers as a collective. the term “new type of employment” is widely used in the government-issued documents and by academics in china to refer to the jobs that emerge on the digital platforms for on-demand services (e.g. for mobility or delivery) (zhang, 2019). the term connotes the newness of the technology, of the organization of work, and of the “flexible” and entrepreneurial character of the platform work. drivers on the ride-hailing apps are often championed as the emblem of the “quality jobs” among the new type of employment (zhang, 2019). the paper juxtaposes the imagination of the “new type of employment” with the diverse practices used to manage a heterogeneous group of drivers at the local level, which corresponds with, complicates, and/or contradicts such an imagination. materials used to analyze the discourse and imagination of the “new type of employment” come from the government-issued documents, scholarly literature, and the publications by the leading ride-hailing company. materials used to examine drivers’ experience and life come from my ethnographic work in two cities in china—namely, beijing and shenzhen. the methodological orientation to study the discursive vector along with the real life politics of workers is informed by revelations on the importance of the discourses for the development and politics of the platform economy (gillespie, 2010; irani, 2015, 2019; pasquale, 2016) and more generally, the science and technology studies (sts) approach toward studying the multiple political articulations of the technological system (harding, 2009; latour, 1988) against the context of global “platform capitalism” (srnicek, 2016). the paper first delineates how the regulations of ride-hailing service in china are embedded in the local politics, which for the least determine the legality of appbased drivers. through comparing the policy differences in beijing and shenzhen, i will demonstrate that the varied criteria for an applicant to become a legal driver are motivated more by the longstanding local politics of population management and economic development than by the technological deterministic changes of the nature of work. the second part of the paper focuses on the lived experience and narratives of drivers in different employment types: legitimate subcontractor drivers and independent drivers with disputable legal status. local politics propel drivers to construct their occupational identity around legitimacy and their perceived relations with other types of drivers. on one hand, legal private drivers distinguish themselves from other types of drivers and perform their legitimacy through professionalism and forming exclusive informal worker organizations to safeguard their legal rights. on the other hand, the localized legality poses a structurally insurmountable barrier for some non-local resident drivers (especially in beijing) to achieve legitimacy and by extension, to resort to legitimate channels of work organization or labor protection. their driving experience surrounds making ends meet or even thriving in the ride-hailing suggested citation (apa): soriano, c., grohmann, r., chen, j., karatzogianni, a., cabanes, j. alves, p. (2020, october). digital labor solidarities, collective formations, and relational infrastructures. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. service without being caught by the law enforcement. the alleged flexible schedule, the most prominent feature of the alleged “new form of employment”, is compromised by the need to accommodate the local schedule of traffic control and temporality of the law enforcement. driver’s legitimacy thus turns into a source of “structured antagonism” (a. wood & lehdonvirta, 2019) between different types of drivers. consequently, it is argued, that local and intergroup relational politics not only make legitimacy a site of contestations and performativity, but also dispel the myth-creation of the new type of employment and lay bare the workers’ collective ambivalence toward the regulations (dubal, 2019). the performativity of legitimacy and professionalism by the elite drivers contribute to the construction of the “successful stories” (ravenelle, 2019) in the new type of employment. however, their performed elitism also hides and normalizes the structural inequality existing prior to the rise of the platform economy. relational and at times antagonistic formation of occupational identity thus complicates the current understandings of labor relations on the digital platforms that are mediated and managed through algorithms (rosenblat, 2018; rosenblat & stark, 2016; a. j. wood, graham, lehdonvirta, & hjorth, 2019), which may undermine the potentials for all drivers to build cross-group solidarity. local politics and intergroup relations thus form two pillars which merit more scholarly and activist attention if a wide scope of app-based drivers’ organizing were to be formed. references cherry, m. a. (2015). beyond misclassification: the digital transformation of work. comparative labor law & policy journal, 37, 577–602. dubal, v. b. (2019). an uber ambivalence: employee status, worker perspectives, & regulation in the gig economy (ssrn scholarly paper no. id 3488009). retrieved from social science research network website: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3488009 gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of ‘platforms.’ new media & society, 12(3), 347– 364. doi: 10.1177/1461444809342738 harding, s. (2009). postcolonial and feminist philosophies of science and technology: convergences and dissonances. postcolonial studies, 12(4), 401– 421. doi: 10.1080/13688790903350658 irani, l. (2015). the cultural work of microwork. new media & society, 17(5), 720–739. doi: 10.1177/1461444813511926 irani, l. (2019). chasing innovation: making entrepreneurial citizens in modern india. princeton, nj: princeton university press. suggested citation (apa): soriano, c., grohmann, r., chen, j., karatzogianni, a., cabanes, j. alves, p. (2020, october). digital labor solidarities, collective formations, and relational infrastructures. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. latour, b. (1988). science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society (rep edition). cambridge, mass: harvard university press. lee, c. k. (2019). the social question as the struggle over precarity the case of china. in j. breman, k. harris, & c. k. lee (eds.), the social question in the twenty-first century (pp. 58–76). oakland, california: university of california press. pasquale, f. (2016). two narratives of platform capitalism. yale law & policy review, 35, 309–319. prassl, j. (2018). humans as a service: the promise and perils of work in the gig economy. oxford, new york: oxford university press. ravenelle, a. j. (2019). hustle and gig: struggling and surviving in the sharing economy. retrieved from https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520300569/hustleand-gig rosenblat, a. (2018). uberland: how algorithms are rewriting the rules of work (first edition). oakland, california: university of california press. rosenblat, a., & stark, l. (2016). algorithmic labor and information asymmetries: a case study of uber’s drivers. international journal of communication, 10, 3758–3784. srnicek, n. (2016). platform capitalism. hoboken, nj: wiley. wood, a. j., graham, m., lehdonvirta, v., & hjorth, i. (2019). good gig, bad gig: autonomy and algorithmic control in the global gig economy. work, employment and society, 33(1), 56–75. doi: 10.1177/0950017018785616 wood, a., & lehdonvirta, v. (2019). platform labour and structured antagonism: understanding the origins of protest in the gig economy (ssrn scholarly paper no. id 3357804). retrieved from social science research network website: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3357804 zhang, c. (2019). employment revolution: digital business and the new form of employment in china. beijing, china: china workers publishing house. [in chinese] suggested citation (apa): soriano, c., grohmann, r., chen, j., karatzogianni, a., cabanes, j. alves, p. (2020, october). digital labor solidarities, collective formations, and relational infrastructures. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. digital platform labor in the philippines: emerging forms of collective organising cheryll ruth r. soriano, ph.d de la salle university manila jason vincent cabañes, ph.d de la salle university manila abstract this paper builds on earlier works that have explored labor organising in the context of the global digital economy (beck & brook, 2020; bryson, gomez, & willman, 2010; chun & agarwala, 2016; geelan & hodder, 2017; heckscher & mccarthy, 2014; howcroft & bergvall-kareborn, 2019; irani & silbermann, 2013; soriano & cabañes, 2020; wood, et.al, 2018, wood, 2015) and explores the characteristics and dynamics of emerging collective formations among filipino digital platform workers. here we focus on the case of the philippines because it is one of the largest suppliers of digital labor globally. in the context of the increasing platformisation of labor at the heart of digital work--which the country’s economic managers bet on as its “sunshine industries”--we look into how filipino digital platform workers organise with shared agendas and perform ‘acts of solidarity’ (beck & brook, 2020). we draw from a three-year digital ethnography project o to understand these how online workers deploy an assemblage of conditions that enable them to survive and organise within the constraints of the world’s digital labor market.the fieldwork involved in-depth interviews with platform workers based in the cities of manila, iligan, and cebu, participant observation in facebook groups for online freelancers, and attendance in related events. the key contribution of our paper is that it underscores the nascent forms of collective organisation that is emerging even from within the strictures of contemporary platform labor. this is crucial because extant literature has suggested citation (apa): soriano, c., grohmann, r., chen, j., karatzogianni, a., cabanes, j. alves, p. (2020, october). digital labor solidarities, collective formations, and relational infrastructures. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. articulated many challenges for collective organisation among digital platform workers. broadly, social capital theorists have argued that a sense of community of workers has declined with the fragmentation of work places and internationalisation of global value chains with the aid of technology (wood, et.al, 2018). mobility of labor and acute fluctuations in work location (i.e. work from home, digital nomads), coupled with high job and income diversity would appear to erode a sense of identity or belonging and poses difficulty for building the foundation for collective action.the transient nature of transactions for freelance and project-based digital workers can also be considered akin to a “spot auction market” (howcroft & bergvall-kareborn, 2019) which is based on individualised and small / immediate tasks that may make resistance with long-term perspectives seem untenable. moreover, the usual absence of formal employeremployee relations can lead to “problems such as identifying exactly who the employer is and raises questions as to who is to be bargained with” (howcroft & bergvall-kareborn, 2019, p. 32). given the ambiguous nature of the employeremployee relationship in platform work, workers have to diversify the target of their demands, and it is important for research to examine the shifts in targets for these demands, as well as the nature of these demands (chun & agarwala, 2016). this paper draws inspiration, however, from the scholarship that argues that amidst the precarity of digital labor, it can also enact “simultaneously, new forms of political struggle and solidarity that reach beyond the traditional models of the political party or trade union” (gill & pratt, 2008, p. 3; chun & agarwala, 2016; beck & brook, 2020). to expand on these works, we inquire about what grounds there are for such solidarity to emerge and what forms these might take. we also take heed from how this scholarship raises concerns about how organising in the context of informality in the global south is strongly tied to local “institutions or systems of patronage” and emerging leaders and goals also come from the higher strata, thus reinforcing social asymmetries (breman, 1977, pp.340-341). as such, in examining these new “cultures of solidarity” (fantasia, 1988), we seek to examine the “cultivation of mutual affinities and associational bonds” beyond the workplace and in the spheres of workers’ everyday lives (beck & brook, 2020, p. 4). this examination of emerging innovations and experiments in organising would help broaden the labor movement agenda with “combining struggles for redistribution with struggles for recognition revealing the social worth of informality and precarity” while also challenging the notion that informal workers are “unorganizable” (chun & agarwala, 2016, p. 635). many of the emerging works on digital labor and collective organisation have focused on exploring models for unionising, but we seek to broaden this discussion and consider other forms of emerging solidarities. following chun & agarwala’s notion of “alternative cultures of organizing,” this study seeks to signal key characteristics of organisation in the context of labor platformisation and informality, opening up opportunities for investigating new scales and spaces suggested citation (apa): soriano, c., grohmann, r., chen, j., karatzogianni, a., cabanes, j. alves, p. (2020, october). digital labor solidarities, collective formations, and relational infrastructures. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. beyond the formal workplace, and examining the involvement of neighborhoods, communities, and local institutions. the paper examines the nature and characteristics of three distinct forms of collective organisation emerging in the philippine digital platform labor economy: 1) facebook group model (i.e. social media ‘communities’ of online filipino freelancers); 2) the freelancer cooperative model (through the case of filipino online professionals cooperative); and 3) the alternative local labor platform model (through the case of wrupup). we tease out the dynamics of these organisational forms and how they differ in terms of: a) how they identify ‘new subjects of labor’, as well as the nature of aims and demands and ideological frames underlying their goals; b) ‘new targets’ or who or what is being challenged or bargained with; c) ‘emerging repertoires of struggle’ and how they interrupt, reinforce, and negotiate digital labor aspirational imaginaries; and d) ‘material dimensions’ of these organisational forms and the role of digital media in these collective formations. this analysis also seeks to understand the imaginaries tied to why digital workers choose to forge solidarities with others across each form of collective organisation, identifying alternative pathways for building solidarity among informal and precarious workers amidst the intersectionality of class and postcoloniality. finally, we examine the entanglement of local structural conditions as well as the dynamics of the platform labor economy that give rise to these forms of organising. we explore how local conditions, including state labor and ict policies, as well as local social and economic structures of class and postcoloniality, are implicated in shaping the development of the platform economy, platform worker imaginaries, as well as the nature of these organisational forms. in turn, we will also describe how these solidarities may manifest power dynamics and asymmetries while also setting norms and standards in this largely unregulated sector. references beck, v., & brook, p. (2020). solidarities in and through work in an age of extremes. work, employment and society, 34(1), 3–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017019881566 breman, j. (1977). labour relations in the “formal” and “informal” sectors: report of a case study in south gujarat, india. part 2. the journal of peasant studies, 4(4), 337–359. doi:10.1080/03066157708438029 bryson, a., gomez, r., & willman, p. (2010). online social networking and trade union membership: what the facebook phenomenon truly means for labor organizers. labor history, 51(1), 41-53. suggested citation (apa): soriano, c., grohmann, r., chen, j., karatzogianni, a., cabanes, j. alves, p. (2020, october). digital labor solidarities, collective formations, and relational infrastructures. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. chun, j. j. & agarwala, r. (2016). “global labour politics in informal and precarious jobs.” in s. edgell, h. gottfried, & e. granter (eds.), handbook of the sociology of work and employment (pp. 634-650). sage: london. pp. 634-650. fantasia, r (1988). cultures of solidarity: consciousness, action and contemporary american workers. berkeley, ca: university of california press. geelan, t., & hodder, a. (2017). enhancing transnational labor solidarity: the unfulfilled promise of the internet and social media. industrial relations journal, 48(4): 345364. gill, r., & pratt, a. (2008). in the social factory: immaterial labour, precariousness and cultural work. theory, culture & society, 25(7-8), 1-30. doi:10.1177/0263276408097794 heckscher, c., & mccarthy, j. (2014). transient solidarities: commitment and collective action in post-industrial societies. british journal of industrial relations, 52(4), 627–657.doi:10.1111/bjir.12084 irani, l., & silberman, m.s. (2013). turkopticon: interrupting worker invisibility in amazon mechanical turk, in proceedings of the acm conference on human factors in computing systems (chi), acm, new york, ny. lehdonvirta, v. (2016). algorithms that divide and unite: delocalisation, identity and collective action in ‘microwork. in j. flecker (ed.) space, place and global digital work: dynamics of virtual work (pp. 53–80), london: palgrave macmillan. soriano, c. & cabañes, jv. (2020). entrepreneurial solidarities: social media collectives and filipino digital platform workers. social media + society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120926484 wood, a., lehdonvirta, v., & graham, m. (2018). workers of the world unite? online freelancer organisation among remote gig economy workers in six asian and african countries. new technology, work and employment, 33(2), 95-112. suggested citation (apa): soriano, c., grohmann, r., chen, j., karatzogianni, a., cabanes, j. alves, p. (2020, october). digital labor solidarities, collective formations, and relational infrastructures. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. unions and associations of app-drivers in brazil: the meanings in circulation of platform workers’ struggles rafael grohmann, ph.d unisinos university paula alves unisinos university abstract in the current scenario of digital labor, there are emergencies of unions and collective organizations of platform workers around the world. however, these collective formations are not the same everywhere, in the same way that digital labor itself has a geopolitical dimension (graham & anwar 2019). neilson (2018), cohen and de peuter (2018), woodcock (2020) and englert, woodcock and cant (2020) wrote about workers’ organization in the areas of technology, journalism, games and app-drivers in a global north context. however, digital labor in the global south is marked by different imaginaries and practices, involving issues of class and coloniality (soriano & cabañes, 2020). in brazil, for example, the ‘gig’ is historically the norm, and not the exception, in the labor market (grohmann 2020). thus, the platformization of labor (casilli & posada 2019) ratifies the condition of most brazilian workers. according to abílio (2020), there is a productive and monopolized appropriation of the living in the global peripheries by digital platforms. this paper aims to map formal collective organizations of platform workers in brazil, such as unions and associations, specifically platform drivers. authors like suggested citation (apa): soriano, c., grohmann, r., chen, j., karatzogianni, a., cabanes, j. alves, p. (2020, october). digital labor solidarities, collective formations, and relational infrastructures. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. woodcock and graham (2019) and cant (2019) have underlined the role of digital communication in the organization of platform workers, such as groups on whatsapp and facebook. there is also a dependency on big tech digital infrastructures and their affordances. in addition, there is the institutionalization of workers' organization through unions and associations. the research wants to know how the different brazilian organizations build meanings about the struggles of platform workers. in south america, the first association was associación de personal de plataformas (app), in argentina. in january 2020, there was the first international meeting of app-drivers’ organizations, with the participation of 23 countries and the support from the open society. the south american participants were argentina, brazil, chile, uruguay, panama and costa rica. then, the international alliance of app-based transport workers (iaatw) was created. this shows, as stated by woodcock (2020) and chun & agarwala (2016), that platform workers are not “unorganizable.” in brazil, there are 17 app-drivers’ associations and unions from 12 different cities. most were founded in 2018. the highlights are sindmaap, from brasilia – a union with 30 thousand workers and affiliated to the largest central of workers in brazil, cut – and ampa, from rio de janeiro, an association whose leader has helped to create other associations (such as the city of juiz de fora, minas gerais) and led the creation of the league of app drivers associations in brazil, which aims to be nationally recognized as the main organization in the country. the research methodology involves analysis of the organizations' websites and interviews with leaders of associations and unions, emphasizing discursive aspects (codagnone, karatzogianni & matthews, 2018). the analysis presents the following dimensions: a) ideologies and worldviews of organizations about (digital) labor, including the main demands of workers; b) the role of digital platforms in the institutionalization of the organization of app-drivers and the material dimension of the organizational form. the results reveal differences between the associations and unions of appdrivers in brazil. while unions, in a minority, are linked to the left-wing and to others workers' movements in the country, the associations – mostly in the brazilian app-drivers context – want to distance themselves from unions, in the discursive and material aspects, and consider themselves “entrepreneurs” on digital platforms . in addition to this entrepreneurial rationality, in the terms of dardot & laval (2014), there is the support of drivers for brazilian president jair bolsonaro and his far-right agenda, which shows the complex relationships between local politics and global digital platforms. in general lines, these associations do not want to be recognized as “employed” by platforms like uber, unlike the context of the united states, for example (rosenblat, 2018). their claims are for higher rates and even a percentage of the data labor generated by drivers. there are statements from the leaders saying that they are not aligned with labor and workers' movements. they also struggle for the safety of drivers, in the context of violence and murders of these platform workers. suggested citation (apa): soriano, c., grohmann, r., chen, j., karatzogianni, a., cabanes, j. alves, p. (2020, october). digital labor solidarities, collective formations, and relational infrastructures. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. regarding digital infrastructures, whatsapp is the main platform for communication between workers, corroborating other research such as cant (2019). in a brazilian context, whatsapp is also the central space for the political communication of jair bolsonaro's supporters (evangelista & bruno 2019). facebook pages are a hub for circulation of content about these organizations. the videos recorded by the leaders of associations and unions and circulated by whatsapp and facebook play a central role in the sedimentation of their proposals and worldviews, which can be exemplified by the comments of others drivers on social media reinforcing support for the leaders of the organizations. the analysis reveals struggles over meanings between the different associations and unions regarding the circulation of workers' struggles (englert, woodcock & cant 2020), including the discursive aspect. these differences, and even contradictions, between unions and associations of app-drivers in brazil reinforce, as cant (2019) states, that digital platforms are a laboratory of class struggles. references abilio, l. (2020). plataformas digitais e uberização: a globalização de um sul administrado? contracampo: brazilian journal of communication, 39 (1). cant, c. (2019). riding for deliveroo: resistance in the new economy. london: polity. casilli, a. & posada, d. (2019). the platformization of labor and society. in m. graham & w. dutton (ed.s). society and the internet (p. 293-306). oxford: oup. chun, j. j. & agarwala, r. (2016). “global labour politics in informal and precarious jobs.” in s. edgell, h. gottfried, & e. granter (eds.), handbook of the sociology of work and employment (pp. 634-650). sage: london. pp. 634-650. codagnone, c.; karatzogianni, a. & matthews, j. (2018). platform economics: rhetoric and reality in the “sharing economy”. london: emerald. cohen, n. & de peuter, g. (2018). “i work at vice canada and i need a union”: organizing digital media. in labour under attack: anti-unionism in canada (pp. 114-128). nova escócia: fernwood. dardot, p. & laval, c. (2014). the new way of world: on neoliberal society. london: verso. englert, s.; woodcock, j. & cant, c. (2020). digital workerism: technology, platforms and the circulation of workers’ struggles. triplec: communication, capitalism & critique, 18 (1). suggested citation (apa): soriano, c., grohmann, r., chen, j., karatzogianni, a., cabanes, j. alves, p. (2020, october). digital labor solidarities, collective formations, and relational infrastructures. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. evangelista, r.; bruno, f. (2019). whatsapp and political instability in brazil: targeted messages and political radicalisation, internet policy review, 8 (4), 123. graham, m. & anwar, m. (2019). the global gig economy: towards a planetary labour market? first monday, 24 (4). grohmann, r. (2020). plataformização do trabalho: entre dataficação, financeirização e racionalidade neoliberal. eptic journal, 22(1), 106-122. neilson, t. (2018). unions in digital labour studies: a review of information society and marxist autonomist approaches. triplec: communication, capitalism & critique, 16 (2). rosenblat, a. (2018). uberland: how algorithms are rewriting the rules of work. berkeley: university of california press. soriano, c. & cabañes, j.v. (2020). between ‘world class work’ and ‘proletarianised labor’: digital labor imaginaries in the global south. in routledge companion to media and class. new york: routledge. woodcock, j. (2020). how to beat the boss: game workers unite in britain. capital & class. online first. woodcock, j. & graham, m. (2019). the gig economy: a critical introduction. london: polity. suggested citation (apa): soriano, c., grohmann, r., chen, j., karatzogianni, a., cabanes, j. alves, p. (2020, october). digital labor solidarities, collective formations, and relational infrastructures. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the dark side of journalists’ digital labour within indian political culture athina karatzogianni, phd university of leicester adrija dey, phd soas university of london abstract this presentation stems from a research project investigating how politics is mediated by and through social media during elections and/or significant political events in india. the project focuses on the use of whatsapp, twitter and facebook by governmental (politicians), corporate (political marketing, pr and campaign managers, and digital campaign workers) and civil society actors (political activists, investigative journalists, social movement and ngo advocacy actors). the project analyses in what ways the use of social media is shaping indian political culture and political ideology, enquiring into filter bubbles, polarisation, fake news, disinformation architectures, hate speech, the rise of far-right populism, leaks and scandals, such as cambridge analytica, and other contemporary digital phenomena. it is set to compare india to similar research during other elections (us, brazil, philippines) and investigates what are the differences (cultural/religious/socioeconomic/political) and/or similarities (digital political economy and structural conditions) in relation to social media campaigns particularly during elections. suggested citation (apa): soriano, c., grohmann, r., chen, j., karatzogianni, a., cabanes, j. alves, p. (2020, october). digital labor solidarities, collective formations, and relational infrastructures. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the research poses the following questions: 1. why and how indian political actors used and experienced social media, such as whatsapp, twitter and facebook use for political purposes, particularly before and during the 2019 elections; 2. what are the key topics, discourses and ideological productions in social media political culture in india; 3. what are key issues journalists and other users face when they engage in politics through social media in india. the methodology for this study includes interviews and participant observation of online discussions and during physical political events. during netnography relevant actors were identified for interview in the field in delhi. here for the purpose of this panel, we shall present a particular strand concerning how journalistic digital labour plays out in such a context of hate speech, abuse or censorship and silencing they might face. further, we enquire into ideological (caste, religious, nationalist or misogynist) polarization during intense political events and trolling, the use of social media for crowdfunding, facilitating fact checking in grassroots activism and investigative journalism, as well as the way social media might be accelerating mobilization and recruitment for political purposes. in a report published in 2018 by reporters without borders (rsf), they voiced their concern about the scale of a new threat to press freedom and the mass harassment of journalists online. their analysis showed that the online attack on journalists took place in 3 stagesdisinformation (drowning out journalistic content with flood of fake news and pro-government content); amplification (progovernment content is artificially enhanced by commentators who are paid by the government to post messages on social networks or by bots, computer programmes that automatically generate posts); intimidation (journalists are personally targeted, insulted and threatened, in order to discredit them and reduce them to silence (reporters without borders, 25 july 2018). in context of india the report states, ‘a, trolls who have been dubbed “yoddhas” by prime minister narendra modi, threaten and insult journalists and flaunt their hostility towards women, minorities, and untouchables. calling themselves “proud hindu,” “bharat mata ki jai” (“long live our mother india”) or “desh bhakt” (patriot”), they post pictures of hindu divinities or modi in their profile photos on social networks’ (reporters without borders, 2018, p.6). in april 2015, india's minister of state for external affairs, general v. k. singh used the term ‘presstitutes’ (a play on the word prostitutes) to describe journalists criticizing him for an earlier comment. since then, the term has been extensively used to troll and harass especially female journalists (dias, 9 may 2016). an issue that is particularly interesting is the threat of direct physical violence stemming from what one states online, which has resulted in an intense culture of fear. in their interviews participants narrated instances of them being followed, stalked, threatened and blackmailed. one of the participants who is in an editorial suggested citation (apa): soriano, c., grohmann, r., chen, j., karatzogianni, a., cabanes, j. alves, p. (2020, october). digital labor solidarities, collective formations, and relational infrastructures. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. position in a leading newspaper in india stated that hate speech and trolling have become an everyday affair and it’s not only limited to online but also phone calls and people turning up at the newspaper office. ‘newspaper offices have armed guards now. it has happened in the past 5 years….. there is a culture of fear. we don’t know when it converts from the online to the offline… we are much more cautious about what we do now’ (participant 4, 5 april 2019, interview with authors, new delhi). another male journalist called trolling in india a ‘work-hazard’. he spoke about an incident of prolonged trolling which led to death threats against him, rape threats against his wife and his home address being openly circulated on twitter. he stated, ‘i was super vocal about political opinions but i stopped after this. i now stick to fun tweets’ (participant 3, 5 april 2019, interview with authors, new delhi). another participant on speaking about this stated, ‘there is a culture of fear. no one wants to question modi’ (participant 5, 6 april 2019, interview with authors, new delhi). every woman interviewed for the research spoke about the sexual nature of the trolling including threats of rape, morphed images being circulated online and phone numbers being leaked. rana ayyub, a prominent female journalist talking about her experience stated, ‘the lowest that the trolls went was when they morphed my face on a pornographic video and sent it to my relatives, my parents and my neighbours. it was unbelievable’ (khybri, 28 august 2018). gudipaty's (2017, p.302) research on trolling of female journalists reveal that if they write ‘soft stories’ on fashion or entertainment they are not trolled but if they write something on politics of religion or if their work is considered feminist in any way, getting trolled was to be expected. hence, following the bjp government’s nationalist agenda, trolling has become yet another way of propagating hyper nationalism, enforcing strict gender roles, rewriting concepts of citizenship and silencing and discipling dissenting voices. however, it was not only women but also men in india who echoed the same views. many of the men we interviewed, especially journalists and social activists, complained about the incessant and dark nature of the trolling leading to either them leaving social media completely or censoring what they say and how they say it to a very large extent (participant 1, 4 april 2019, interview with authors, new delhi; participant 3, 5 april 2019, interview with authors, new delhi; participant 4, 5 april 2019, interview with authors, new delhi). this study vividly and rigorously juxtaposes testimonies from key journalists (independent and mainstream), fact checkers, political activists and other political actors in india and their experience of the effect of social media use for political purposes. it provides elements for comparison to studies in other countries for this panel with colleagues researching on the philippines and brazil. references suggested citation (apa): soriano, c., grohmann, r., chen, j., karatzogianni, a., cabanes, j. alves, p. (2020, october). digital labor solidarities, collective formations, and relational infrastructures. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. dias, c. d. (2016). female journalists, called “presstitutes”, face extreme harassment in india. retrieved september 9, 2019, from https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/53n78d/female-journalists-called-presstitutesface-extreme-harassment-in-india gudipaty, n. (2017). gendered public spaces. online trolling of women journalists in india. comunicazione politica, (2), 299–310. khybri, g. (2018). how threats on twitter manifest in real life: indian troll tales. retrieved september 9, 2019, from https://xiaomi.dailyhunt.in/news/india/english/the+quint-epaperquint/how+threats+on+twitter+manifest+in+real+life+indian+troll+tales-newsid95544999?ps=n&pn=0&mode=wap&&nsk=women-updates-women reporters without borders. (2018). online harassment of journalists: the trolls attack. retrieved from https://rsf.org/en/news/rsf-publishes-report-onlineharassment-journalists selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 john, n. and agbarya, a. (2019, october 2-5). punching up or turning away? when palestinians unfriend jews in israel. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. punching up or turning away? when palestinians unfriend jews in israel nicholas john department of communication and journalism, the hebrew university of jerusalem, israel aysha agbarya department of communication and journalism, the hebrew university of jerusalem, israel in this paper we present findings from in-depth interviews with 20 palestinian citizens of israel who have unfriended jewish israelis on facebook for reasons related to the israel-palestine conflict. in doing so, we introduce considerations of structural inequality to the literature on unfriending (light & cassidy, 2014; sibona & walczak, 2011). unfriending has been attracting growing attention, particularly with regard to disconnective behaviors surrounding the exposure to and consumption of political content and news on social media platforms. survey-based studies carried out in the us (bode, 2016), colombia (yang, barnidge, & rojas, 2017), germany (gashi & knautz, 2016), israel (john & dvir-gvirsman, 2015), and hong kong (zhu, skoric, & shen, 2016) present a fairly clear picture: politically-motivated unfriending tends to be carried out by more politically active users positioned towards the extremes of the political spectrum. these findings are largely presented within a framework of selective exposure and the formation of filter bubbles, where there is an implicit assumption that unfriending should be understood as a proxy for intolerance. interview-based studies (asmolov, 2018; john & gal, 2018; lopez & ovaska, 2013) allow for more nuanced explications of interviewees’ actions. from them we learn that unfriending is a complex mixture of content avoidance (akin to changing tv channels) and communication (letting someone know, albeit indirectly, that their views are unacceptable). however, none of these studies engages significantly with the possibility that unfriending might be fraught with power relations. relatedly, studies of unfriending in the israeli context have included only jewish israelis in their research populations. this study redresses this imbalance--indeed, it offers the first study of the unfriending of members of a majority group by members of a minority group. this adds complexity to our understanding of unfriending, while also shedding light on the experience of social media use from the perspective of an oppressed and heavily surveilled minority (zureik, lyon, & abu-laban, 2010). accordingly, twenty ‘48 palestinians (palestinians who live within the 1948 borders of israel and who have israeli citizenship) who had unfriended a jewish israeli were interviewed by one of the authors, a religious muslim woman and a member of that population. participants were asked about their experiences of unfriending jewish israelis: what led up to the unfriending? how did they feel afterwards? did they talk about it, either with the person they had unfriended, or with anyone else? the interviewees, who were comprised of an equal number of men and women, were aged between 21 and 37. they were mostly traditional or religious, though some were secular. the in-depth semi-structured interviews were recorded and transcribed, and submitted to thematic analysis, based on a series of readings and re-readings of the transcripts. nearly all of the interviewees reported unfriending a jewish israeli against a background of racist hate speech. usually, this speech was directed against arabs in general, and not personally at the interviewees themselves. however, some interviewees were deeply and personally offended, not only because jewish facebook friends had posted racist content, but because they had done so in their (facebook-mediated) presence. most of the accounts of unfriending fell within two broad categories. in the first, interviewees unfriended jewish israelis as a way of expressing their agency in the face of racist posts. for these interviewees, unfriending is somewhat akin to giving someone the finger (albeit without them necessarily seeing that). we refer to this as punching up. while the limitations of a non-representative sample must be borne in mind, we note that this approach was more common among more politically active interviewees. they also reported more positive feelings about the act of unfriending (e.g. relief) and active feelings about the behavior that caused the unfriending (especially anger). in the second category, interviewees unfriended jewish israelis as an avoidance strategy. this might be in order to avoid surveillance by jewish israelis, thereby affording them greater freedom of expression, or it might be in order to avoid hate speech. we see this as a kind of turning away, or withdrawal from interaction. these interviewees tended to be less politically-minded, and expressed more negative and passive feelings (such as disappointment in their jewish facebook friends, or fear). they were especially aware that posting anti-israeli content could land them in trouble with their employers or at college/university. while participation in a deliberative democracy requires exposure to a range of opinions and views, this does not extend to hate speech. while unfriending ties because of cross-cutting political views may help to construct filter bubbles, unfriending ties because of hate speech could be seen as an appropriate response towards the creation of a safe online space. for our interviewees, what makes facebook safer is having fewer jewish israeli friends, who may post racist speech, or who may even more actively seek out “disloyal” citizens and seek to have them punished. where dyadic pairs on facebook enjoy more or less equal social standing, then there may be something to facebook’s belief that connecting people across the world can improve cross-cultural understanding. however, when one social group enjoys power over another, it would seem that the positive potential of online ties is limited. regardless of how empowered they felt by unfriending a facebook tie from a more powerful social group, our interviewees felt safer having done so. indeed, noting that unfriending was largely a response to an action by jewish israeli facebook users; that the interviewees did not talk to the people they unfriended about their hate speech; and that in many instances they unfriended people with whom they were no longer in faceto-face contact, all points to a feeling of a lack of power relative to jewish israeli users. further research should explore unfriending in other contexts of inequality. this may be based on ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, or some other dimension. particular attention should be paid to the use of unfriending as a tool of agency and empowerment that creates a sphere for greater freedom of expression. references asmolov, g. (2018). the disconnective power of disinformation campaigns. journal of international affairs, 71(1.5), 69-76. bode, l. (2016). pruning the news feed: unfriending and unfollowing political content on social media. research & politics, 3(3). doi:10.1177/2053168016661873 gashi, l., & knautz, k. (2016). unfriending and becoming unfriended on facebook. in k. knautz & s. baran katsiaryna (eds.), facets of facebook, use and users (pp. 1-44). berlin: de gruyter gmbh. john, n. a., & dvir-gvirsman, s. (2015). ‘i don’t like you any more’: facebook unfriending by israelis during the israel-gaza conflict of 2014. journal of communication, 65(6), 953–974. doi:10.1111/jcom.12188 john, n. a., & gal, n. (2018). “he’s got his own sea”: political facebook unfriending in the personal public sphere. international journal of communication, 12, 18. light, b., & cassidy, e. (2014). strategies for the suspension and prevention of connection: rendering disconnection as socioeconomic lubricant with facebook. new media & society, 16(7), 1169-1184. doi:10.1177/1461444814544002 lopez, m. g., & ovaska, s. (2013). a look at unsociability on facebook. paper presented at the 27th international bcs human computer interaction conference. sibona, c., & walczak, s. (2011). unfriending on facebook: friend request and online/offline behavior analysis. paper presented at the system sciences (hicss), 2011 44th hawaii international conference on system sciences. yang, j., barnidge, m., & rojas, h. (2017). the politics of “unfriending”: user filtration in response to political disagreement on social media. computers in human behavior, 70, 22-29. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.12.079 zhu, q., skoric, m., & shen, f. (2016). i shield myself from thee: selective avoidance on social media during political protests. political communication, 1-20. doi:10.1080/10584609.2016.1222471 zureik, e., lyon, d., & abu-laban, y. (2010). surveillance and control in israel/palestine: population, territory and power: routledge. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): happio-kirk,l. hawkins, c., de vries-kedem, m., miller, d. (2020, october). ageing with smartphones ‘from below’: insights from japan, uganda, al-quds and ireland. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ageing with smartphones ‘from below’: insights from japan, uganda, al-quds and ireland laura happio-kirk university college london charlotte hawkins university college london maya de vries-kedem hebrew university of jerusalem daniel miller university college london this session examines new ways to theorize the smartphone, based on a comparative study of smartphone use amongst older people in four different fieldsites for a period of 16 months ethnographic fieldwork. along with gender, age is one of the primary parameters by which societies throughout history have structured and governed themselves (spencer, 1990). since the 1960s, however, we have lived with an unprecedented modern consciousness that has presented an increasingly powerful challenge to this hegemonic principle by placing a high value on youth culture (hodkinson, 1999). as a result, there is a new uncertainty about the meaning of age (degnen, 2007). in addition, age has also extended class discrepancies, as those around the world between the ages of 45–70 have become a class that has settled its children and can now capitalize upon the new choices of consumer culture (blaikie, 1999). yet, these ageing populations increasingly face problems of loneliness linked to a loss of authority of seniority (hazan, 1994), though this may be alleviated by contact through digital devices and networked platforms, mainly smartphones. focusing on populations in their sixties, seventies and eighties is one of the panel’s major contributions, as mostly up until now smartphones have been associated with the idea of a youth technology and many of their attributes associated with that age group (jenkins et al., 2016). hence, we wish to release the smartphone from its earlier connections, allowing us to theorise it more broadly as part of the life of ‘non-digital natives’. the four papers in the panel show how understanding smartphones is more than simply addressing the culture of ‘apps’ or the ‘culture of connectivity’. rather, the smartphone presents an ecology of digitization tailored to the specific configurations of the individual user which is best understood through the ethnographic method of holistic contextualization. this approach links smartphone usage with all aspects of offline life and creates a role for digital anthropologists who are well placed to tackle fundamental questions about smartphones because they can gain access to this intimate and mainly private configuration and processes of personalization within their social and cultural contexts. using pype’s (2019) concept of `smart from below’ we provide illustrations showing how it is the users who actually create smartphones. to follow normative contemporary theory, this would require situating our findings in relation to established theoretical debates about new communications media. the nuance given by comparing four fieldsites with a vast variety of smartphone usage ties us to the initial context of difference and comparison, thus providing novel conceptualizations of the smartphone. these include concepts such as ‘screen ecology’, ‘the transportal home’, ‘beyond anthropomorphism’, ‘social ecology’, ‘perpetual opportunism’, ‘contradiction and ambivalence’, ‘the control hub’, ‘multifaceted connectivity’ and others. each of these may help us to visualise, understand, and explain what people do with their smartphones and why. but where this subsumes uganda, al-quds, alongside japan and ireland there is a danger of creating neoimperial homogenisations based on citing de-contextualised critiques. our panel strives to describes an alternative path that could allow for theoretical development of the contemporary smartphone, while avoiding these betrayals of either substance or original insight. three papers provide more extended examples of what we have achieved ‘the transportal home’ through fieldwork in japan, ‘care transcending distance’ through fieldwork in uganda, and we explore ‘contradiction, ambivalence and multifaceted connectivity’ though fieldwork in al-quds. the fourth paper is more theoretical, aiming to link between the presented ethnographies and exemplify the grounding of theory of the smartphone. we hope that our panel will encourage global discussion of the role of the smartphones in the everyday lives of individuals from all age groups, not just the young. such an expansion would allow for a deeper understanding of this device which, as we demonstrate, is so central to many people’s experience of social life, home, and care. references blaikie, a. (1999). ageing and popular culture. cambridge university press. degnen, c. (2007). minding the gap: the construction of old age and oldness amongst peers. journal of aging studies, 21(1), 69-80. hazan, h., & ḥazzān, ḥ. (1994). old age: constructions and deconstructions. cambridge university press. hodkinson, p., & bennett, a. (eds.). (2013). ageing and youth cultures: music, style and identity. a&c black. jenkins, h., shresthova, s., gamber-thompson, l., kligler-vilenchik, n., & zimmerman, a. (2018). by any media necessary: the new youth activism (vol. 3). nyu press. pype, k. (2017). smartness from below: variations on technology and creativity in contemporary kinshasa. what do science, technology, and innovation mean from africa, 97-115. spencer, p. (1990). anthropology and the riddle of the sphinx: paradoxes of change in the life course. routledge. a spatail exploration of the smartphones as a ‘transportal home’ in japan laura happio-kirk university college london this paper elaborates one of the key theoretical outputs of the erc anthropology of smartphones and smart ageing project, that the smartphone has become a ‘transportal home’. based on 16 months’ ethnography conducted between 2018-2019 in kyoto city and rural kōchi prefecture, japan, the paper presents the mechanisms by which the smartphone has become the center of many people’s lives (chushin), an anchor in a rapidly moving world. the smartphone is argued to be a space for intimacy and care, analogous to japanese domestic spaces where delineations of the inside/outside (uchi/soto) are negotiated, facilitating the expression of both ‘true voice’ (honne) and ‘public façade’ (tatemae). the ethnographic evidence presented in this paper describes how a sense of alienation and dislocation in the city motivates internal migrants to seek rootedness in rural japan. however, it is the capacity of the smartphone for connection, intimacy, and selfexpression, that makes the device a space in which ‘home’ is actually realized. contemporary modernity is characterized by experiences of rupture and dislocation as movement and relocation have become the norm for many. indeed, as said wrote in 1979, many of us live in “a generalized condition of homelessness” (1979:18), therefore belonging and meaning become sought after in both physical and imagined ‘places’. the smartphone is part of a history of technological innovation in which the problem of physical distance has been overcome by virtual and instantaneous connection. this has transformed our experience of space and place and has contributed to the delocalization of identity associated with modernity and globalization (appadurai, 1996; gupta & ferguson, 1997; harvey, 1989). smartphone as a space for intimacy and care in a time of rupture “i think when we are elderly, it doesn’t mean that we have friends right next to us. so the smartphone might feel more precious to us because it allows us to stay sociable.” megumi san is 58 years old and lives in kyoto. she feels that the smartphone will become increasingly important to her as she ages. currently, the smartphone helps her to feel close to her friends, even though she does not live near to them. having her friends always available to message through the application line gives her a sense of comfort and strength when dealing with difficult things in her life such as caring for her elderly parents and mother-in-law, or when she became ill with cancer. “i felt that they (my friends) were next to me all the time.” for her, the smartphone became a device in which care transcends distance. megumi uses her smartphone to maintain a close and caring relationship with a small group of friends who do not live near to her, making physical proximity irrelevant to their relationship. many city-center dwellers in kyoto expressed the view that it is normal in city life to not know your neighbors, and communities are becoming weakened as the city center becomes dominated by the hotel industry. as one kyoto man in his early eighties said, “all the horizontal relationships are gone now”. for some people who are seeking the community they feel is lost in the city, rural towns become representative of an idealised state of community and connection. many of the recent migrants arriving to rural kōchi prefecture expressed this search for rootedness and a ‘community to lean on’ (sasaeru) as a motivating factor for moving to a small rural town. this paper suggests that for both urban-to-rural migrants and city dwellers a sense of rootedness in family and a physical homeland is replaced with rootedness in friendship and digital care which transgresses distance. in this sense, the smartphone can be understood as a ‘transportal home’. smartphone as ‘inside’ (uchi) participants were often reluctant to show the interior of their phone. as one woman explained, “i feel shy about showing people my apps. it’s kind of like a bookshelf, it shows my personality. you would only put the covers of the book you want to show in the front too.” when considered in relation to the social concepts of inside/outside (uchi/soto) that have been argued to dominate japanese social interaction (e.g. by benedict, 1946; nakane,1970; doi,1971; hendry,1995), the smartphone becomes another private territory of which the borders are constantly negotiated. it is helpful here to draw on the analogy of the japanese home; as inge daniels’ extensive work (e.g. 2010) on the japanese domestic space demonstrates, there are features of the traditional japanese home such as enclosing fences and high walls, frosted glass and barred windows, that are designed to keep the interior private space separate from the public exterior. however, as daniels (2008) argues, these divisions are not static but are in a constant state of negotiation. much like with the smartphone where people explore various levels of privacy and exposure to see what feels right. people feel comfortable with a certain degree of intimacy on one app, which may then not be appropriate for a different app. here the japanese concepts of honne (true voice) and tatemae (public façade) are useful when discussing how people present different versions of themselves to different audiences. participants explained that it is easier to express your real feelings on line than on facebook. returning to the japanese home analogy, the safety and privacy afforded by high walls and frosted glass (private or small group messaging) feels more appropriate for sharing real feelings, as opposed to a conversation on the street in public (on facebook), where potentially anyone can hear. this paper will expand the home analogy to explain for the prevalence of anonymous twitter and instagram accounts in japan. it is through anonymous accounts that people feel they can be the most authentic versions of themselves, where they can express views freely away from the gaze of their peers. in this sense, this is the most private ‘room’ of the house, where they also experience the most private and interior version of themselves. the smartphone allows people to cultivate ‘honne’ which can sometimes be difficult to articulate, as explained by one woman in her thirties: “for me, honne is like a shadow. you can see the shadow but you can’t touch the shadow right? you can feel the honne but you can’t actually know it right?” references appadurai, a. (1996). modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. benedict, r. (1946). the chrysanthemum and the sword: patterns of japanese culture. boston: mariner (houghton mifflin). daniels, i. (2008). japanese homes inside out. home cultures. 5(2),115–40. daniels, i. (2010). the japanese house: material culture in the modern home. oxford: bloomsbury. doi, t. (1971). amae no kōzō [the anatomy of dependence]. tokyo: kodansha. fielding, a. j., & ishikawa, y. 2003. migration and the life course in contemporary japan. geographical review of japan, 76(12), 882-893. gupta, a. & ferguson, j. (1997). culture, power and place: explorations in critical anthropology. durham, n.c.: duke university press. hendry, j. (1995). understanding japanese society. london: routledge. harvey, d. 1989. the conditions of post-modernity: an inquiry into the conditions of social change. oxford: basil blackwell. nakane, c. 1970. japanese society. new york, ny: penguin books. taxing care: exposing moral economies in kampala, uganda charlotte hawkins university college london mobile money is used almost universally by older participants in kampala, uganda. this practice is embedded in daily life, often to support older relative’s health – demonstrating how ‘care transcends distance’. in this way, it provides a platform to uphold intergenerational obligation, despite displacement and urbanization, and widespread fears around the increasing selfishness of the ‘dotcom generation’. mobile money has been widely lauded as a bottom-up adaptation of technology to african requirements, offering flexibility, particularly for “the unbanked” (kusimba et al., 2016: 266; maurer, 2012: 589) . however, the recent imposition of additional levies on mobile money by the ugandan government offers a lens onto social practices, experiences and hierarchies surrounding mobile money transfers (maurer, 2016: 312). it shows how the digital is embedded within and across blurred personal lives, moral economies and power structures, and thus what it exposes ethnographically. drawing on 16 months ethnographic research, this paper traces digital trajectories, specifically mobile money transfers, as they traverse a range of material and political processes, along moral lines, and between the city and the village. in the ugandan context, money may not equal communication or care, but it is a central element of it (livingston, 2003). as edgar, a 67-year-old from kampala, explained: sickness just comes by coincidence, sometimes abruptly when you’re not even prepared, you need money to take care of that. so if any sickness, you just have to begin to look around, call a family meeting for any contribution for treatment, “this one has a problem, we need to…”, so we help each other like that. alongside regular communication and visitation of older relatives, remittances themselves can be conceived as a ‘care currency’ (singh et al., 2010). i often saw how edgar and his children were called upon to support their relatives at home in the village in palabek, particularly their jajja (grandmother). they would send food and mobile money during increasingly unpredictable dry seasons. edgar would visit regularly to check on the land and his mother’s health, with his children often funding his transport. the mobile money transfer invokes multiple social processes, often precipitated with the ‘beep’ or phone call to make the request from the village. this motivates a decision making process of the potential sender in the city, along moral and financial lines. is the request worthy? was it made at the right time by the right person in the right way? does my pocket stretch far enough beyond immediate family concerns? can i refuse? in some cases, as edgar explains, a request is followed with fundraising. once the cash is collected, the sender will visit the vendor, of which there are as many as 33 in the fieldsite alone. the money is sent via sms by the vendor on their mobile phone. the recipient will then receive notice of the transfer via sms and will travel to their nearest vendor who helps them to collect the money. this can require travel over long distances in rural areas – in edgars’ home village in rural northern uganda, it could take over 2 hours to the nearest trading center by foot. sometimes, the money is transferred or delivered further along a chain of relatives, depending who has been trusted with the money or who has the access and capacity (digital and physical) to do so. various participants explained how they provide for their parents and relatives in the village without visiting them as “you can send money on the phone”. in a survey of 50 older participants phone use in september 2018, 47 had used mobile money in the previous month. the greatest proportion of the 130 recorded remittances, 25% were for health purposes, which could include hospital bills, medicine and transport to hospital. 6 of these transfers were received or forwarded by the respondent in a chain of remittances, for the purposes of supporting older relatives. for example, one respondent had received 200,000 ugx (uganda currency) from her daughter, in order to help her take her mother in the village to hospital; or another who received 30,000 from their aunt for their grandmother’s hospital bills, who did not have a mobile phone herself. in june 2018, a mobile money tax was introduced, including an additional levy of 1% on deposit and withdrawal, later reduced to 0.5%1. at the time, the uganda communications commission (ucc) found that people’s mobile money balances significantly dropped at a national level2, with many mobile money vendors in go-down reporting that they had 30% fewer customers each month. some of them found that people were using different means to transport money, including boarding the 12-hour bus to transport larger sums if the fare was cheaper than the tax. 20 survey participants said they had reduced their mobile money use or stopped completely. but the majority said that they still send mobile money in the same way since the imposition of the tax. “it’s stressing me but nothing to do”. this came as part of a wider crackdown on what the president museveni termed ‘over the top’ internet usage, with uganda controversially becoming the first country to tax social media. the president made an announcement (ironically on twitter) in which he denigrated the immorality of ott ‘olugambo’, malicious gossip and misinformation on social media3 and announced a monthly charge of 6,000ush to access facebook, whatsapp, instagram, twitter, skype, 1 see president museveni’s announcement on his website: https://www.yowerikmuseveni.com/whygovernment-taxing-social-media-president-museveni , accessed 21.02.20 2https://www.ucc.co.ug/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/ucc-sector-report-december-2018_260719.pdf, p.30, accessed 31.07.19 3 https://www.yowerikmuseveni.com/why-government-taxing-social-media-president-museveni, accessed 21.02.20 linkedin accounts. this prompted various petitions and protests, including social media campaigns such as #thistaxmustgo. ferguson argues that economic measures are often presented and interpreted in moral terms in africa (ferguson, 2006). this is evidently true in relation to mobile phone use, primarily a tool for ‘care at a distance’ and therefore already imbued with cooperative moralities. some participants advocated for the tax, the contribution to uganda’s budget, and the prevention of useless ‘olugambo’. but for others it sharpened a sense of imposition, exclusion or marginality, the tax conceived as an assertion of the state as ‘predator’ (ibid, 85); this was also the language of protest (cole & durham, 2007 : 4). narratives of political economy in relation to icts thus draw on, and exacerbate, the contradictory discourses of fear and opportunity (miller & slater, 2000: 140); in this case, new media is simultaneously an idiom and platform to both support and challenge core moralities (ibid), thereby exposing them for ethnographic analysis. references cole, j., & durham, d. l. (2007). generations and globalization youth, age, and family in the new world economy. kusimba, s., yang, y., & chawla, n. (2016). hearthholds of mobile money in western kenya: hearthholds of mobile money in western kenya. economic anthropology, 3(2), 266–279. https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12055 livingston, j. (2003). reconfiguring old age: elderly women and concerns over care in southeastern botswana. medical anthropology, 22(3), 205–231. https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740306771 maurer, b. (2012). mobile money: communication, consumption and change in the payments space. journal of development studies, 48(5), 589–604. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2011.621944 maurer, b. (2016). regulation as retrospective ethnography. banking and finance law review, 27, 299–313. miller, d., & slater, d. (2000). the internet: an ethnographic approach. berg. ageing with smartphone in al-quds: multifacted connetivity maya de vries kedem hebrew university of jerusalem smartphones are one of the most ubiquitous technological devices used in the world today, due to their capacity for use in a vast range of activities (bitman & john, 2019; madianou, 2014). while the concept of polymedia (madianou & miller, 2013) presupposes factors such as access, cost, and literacy move from the foreground to the background, the case study presented in this paper shows that these factors are still significant, implying that users’ feelings and practices of connectivity (van dijck, 2013) are multifaceted. it also contributes to the assa project’s theories of the smartphone concerned with contradiction and ambivalence. this paper is based on a 16 months ethnographic fieldwork (geertz, 1974) in what we called dar al-hawa, a palestinian neighborhood of 10,000 people in al-quds4, among men and women in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. we investigated fundamental changes in the relationship between people’s perception of age, health, digital skills and quality of life as associated with smartphone use. routine connectivity smartphones made communication with their family members (parents, children and grandchildren) easier, whether they were inside or outside the country. family members living outside of jerusalem is common as the palestinian society has a large diaspora in jordan, lebanon, usa and brazil (palestinian central bureau of statistics report, 2015). most of the people we met in the fieldsite actively use voice calls, whatsapp and facebook messenger to communicate. besides catching up with distant family members, they also send each other religious prayers, blessings, and quotes from the qur’an, some browse, mainly on facebook, to follow daily news. however, aligned with lev-on et al.’s (2019) report about digital inequalities in israel, this connectivity may be considered rather basic, as none of the participants use their smartphone to pay bills, do online shopping or to set an appointment with the doctor. in this manner the al-quds fieldsite is quite different when compared to other fieldsites in the assa project such as ireland and japan. it thus indicates how the smartphone is a 4al-quds is the arabic name for jerusalem. since all the informants are arabs, we decided to use the arabic name of the city. cultural tool (gordon, al zidjaly & tovares, 2017) that amplifies the user’s lack of digital knowledge and in al-quds its socio-political gaps. digital and social illiteracy alongside our projects in chile and brazil, my involvement in teaching smartphone use to older people revealed their struggles with this technology including remembering procedures and working with touch screens. the impact of this on digital inequality is argued by mayar (46): “i am afraid that a time will come when everything will be online. i do not know how to pay in this way. sometimes when i am in a car park, i am asked to pay for the space online. i am also afraid that a day will come that i cannot find a machine to pay. that’s why i wish to find a class to teach me how to use the smartphone. girls in their twenties may know how to pay via the internet, but us women over 45 need education in this field.” the fieldwork also demonstrated how digital illiteracy linked to the hebrew language illiteracy and its connection to digital bureaucracy that is becoming more and more present in our life. old people in al-quds who did not learn hebrew at school will be facing hard time when trying to communicate in some of the new governmental apps. knowledge of hebrew is particularly poor for those who had lived on the jordanian side of the pre-1967 border, and for women who are less likely to have worked within israel. when looking at people’s smartphones and asking which apps they use, there was not a single app in hebrew. even not for their health clinic or for the national insurance institute of israel. here we may think of how apps that are produced by formal institutions are in fact making life more difficult for those who cannot use them because when an app exists, there is an expectation that everyone will download and use it. however, when a large language digital and language literacy gap exists like in al-quds, this does not happen. the ethnography also revealed more subtle aspects of digital illiteracy including the anxiety about whether usage conforms to social norms. for example, aya (62) talks about the embarrassing things that can happen as a result of using the phone incorrectly: “if you know how to use it {the smartphone}, it is true that there is a lot of good in it. this phone is a blessing from god, but most people do not know how to use it in a good way, so they use it to do bad stuff. therefore, some people prefer the old ‘dumb’ phone.” the community in dar al-hawa is considered a conservative one. it is not unheard of for some members of this community to use smartphones for abusive purposes that include discrediting or shaming other people. women, in particular, see negative effects of smartphone adoption as reflected in the use of a whatsapp group by the elderly club in dar al-hawa who circulated an image of an old version of a mobile phone, praising its lack of capabilities and naming it “dumb”: “it lived with dignity it died with dignity never took a photo of a girl and did not record any embarrassing situations (scandals) and it did not carry music”. to summarize, the adoption of smartphones by older people in dar al-hawa is multifaceted including factors such as new forms of digital illiteracy which gives rise to expressions of ambivalence and conservatism when thinking of the smartphone situated in users’ social, political, linguistic, and cultural contexts (gordon, al zidjaly & tovares, 2017). references bitman, n., & john, n. a. (2019). deaf and hard of hearing smartphone users: intersectionality and the penetration of ableist communication norms. journal of computer-mediated communication, 24(2), 56-72. geertz, c. (1974). " from the native's point of view": on the nature of anthropological understanding. bulletin of the american academy of arts and sciences, 26-45. gordon, c., al zidjaly, n., & tovares, a. v. (2017). mobile phones as cultural tools for identity construction among college students in oman, ukraine, and the us. discourse, context & media, 17, 9-19. lev-on, a., brainin, e., abu-kishk, h., zilberstein, t., steinfeld, n., naim, s. (2019) narrowing the gap: characterization of participants, shortand long-term effects of participation in lehava program (hebrew). madianou, m., & miller, d. (2013). polymedia: towards a new theory of digital media in interpersonal communication. international journal of cultural studies, 16(2), 169-187. palestinian central bureau of statistics report, 2015. retrieved from: https://www.thisweekinpalestine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/palestiniansin-the-diaspora.pdf van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. oxford university press. a theory of a theory of the smartphone daniel miller university college london what should be the role of theory in social science? this paper begins with the argument that we need a new theory of theory, because currently theory has become a fetish, rather than an aid to social science. to exemplify an alternative use of theory it then discusses the way we have developed theories of the smartphone drawing on two 16-month ethnographies of smartphone use amongst older people in ireland, one in a small town which we have given the name cuan, and the other by pauline garvey in a district of dublin that we have called thornhill. the irish materials are in turn compared with eight other fieldsites in al-quds, kampala, milan, santiago, sao paulo, shanghai, yaoundé and two sites in japan. the philosophical foundations for this critique of theory come mainly from hegel’s philosophy of right (1820/1991), but also there is at least an analogy with wittgenstein’s critique of philosophy when, in repudiation of the way he had been incorporated into formal theory by bertrand russell, he argued for a humbling of philosophy and theory in the face of the creativity, diversity and muddy virtues of natural language (ree, 2019, wittgenstein, 1922/1961:1953/1974). theory has become a fetish as it has shifted from a means to an end, into an end in itself. in earlier social science, the role of theory was to provide understanding, clarity and explanation (e.g. geertz, 1973). the purpose of research was to provide original insight from substantive findings that could be better understood and explained through theory. when today, however, students are constantly told their essays do not have enough theory, we find a fetishism, especially as the main response is expected to be merely to cite established `theorists’ (e.g. castells, 2010; mcquail, 2010). instead of being the handmaiden to understanding the substantive world, the world is there to be exploited with the ultimate goal of paying obeisance to the deified theory. as wacquant (2018) notes `bourdieu (1988, 2003) is frequently misread as a “theorist” when he was a dogged detractor of “conspicuous theorising.” he construed theory not as the haughty master but as the humble servant of empirical inquiry, and he never advanced the one but through developing the other.’ bourdieu (1988) in homo academicus went further in exposing the self-interest of academics in seeking theory with its linguistic field of legitimation such as – brilliant vs. rigorous, superficial vs. deep. these points will be considered in relation to assa a comparative erc research project on ageing with smartphones. a major advantage of this study is that mostly up until now smartphones have been viewed as largely a youth technology. yet we were able to complete 16 months of ethnography on the use and consequences of smartphones with older people a population in ireland that were mainly in their sixties and seventies. this releases the smartphone from its earlier connotations and allows us to theorize the smartphone more broadly. the intention is to avoid contemporary theory making which tends to involve a series of abstractions and generalizations geared to serve established theoretical debates, that were sundered from the initial context. the theories that are developed in the global smartphone include those which are more orientated to understanding the device itself. these include our concepts of ‘screen ecology’, ‘social ecology’, ‘perpetual opportunism’ and ‘the control hub’. others take their point of departure more from the consequences of smartphones for the populations we studied, for example, ‘the transportal home’, ‘beyond anthropomorphism, ‘care transcending distance’ or ‘the relational phone’. each of these ideas may help to visualize, understand and explain what people do with their smartphones and why. the problem of contemporary theorising is that where this subsumes kampala and yaoundé in alongside sao paulo and milan there is a danger of creating neo-imperial homogenisations based on citing de-contextualised critiques. the global smartphone describes an alternative path to theory development, which avoids these betrayals of either substance or original insight. this path remains thoroughly grounded in ethnographic materials. the way in which theory retains its grounding in ethnographic analysis is indicated by the three other papers that are being presented within this session. the first is the way ‘the transportal home is explored through the presentation of ethnographic material from japan much of which concerns quite specific contexts and consequences that pertain only to japan. similarly, in another the theory of ‘care transcending distance is discussed through many very specific issues that derive from the author’s work in uganda. one of the main issues that links many parts of the global smartphone are concerned with ‘contradiction and ambivalence’. the other paper in this session is deeply concerned with issues that give rise to ambivalence, but although this is true of all the fieldsites the paper makes clear that this corresponds also to certain particular issues for the palestinian population of alquds. in this paper the main exemplification of this theory of theory is through grounding the same perspectives in our irish fieldwork. each of these generalised propositions can be linked to the particular way they are manifested in cuan and thornhill as in some sense ‘irish’ (inglis 2014). for example, beyond anthropomorphism argues for a critique of robotics as the more superficial encounter, in favor of a different kind of anthropomorphic intimacy and expressive combination of person and device. this is illustrated both through individuals in these irish fieldsites, but also by issues of gender and other cultural orders that could be considered in some sense ‘irish’. the concept is directed to the unprecedented nature of intimacy between device and persons that thereby explores the issue of ‘life’ the topic of this year’s conference arguing not for life with machines, but a conceptualisation of life that acknowledges the smartphone as an aspect of persons. the intention is to develop theory that could help us to understand smartphones wherever they are found, but which remains grounded in the specifics of each and every population and their differences from any other. references bourdieu, p. (1988). homo academicus. cambridge: polity bourdieu, p. (2003). participant objectivation. journal of the royal anthropological institute 9 281-294 castells, m. (2010) the rise of the network society. oxford: wiley garvey, p. & miller. d. (forthcoming). ageing with smartphones in ireland. london: ucl press geertz. c. (1973). the interpretation of culture. new york: basic books hegel, g. (1991). elements of the philosophy of right. cambridge: cambridge university press inglis, t. ed. (2014). are the irish different? manchester university pressmcquail, d. (2010) mass communication theory: an introduction. london:sage ree, j. (2019). the young man one hopes for. london review of books, november wacquant, l. (2018) four transversal principles for putting bourdieu to work. anthropological theory 18(1): 3–17. wittgenstein, l. (1961). tractatus logico-philosophicus. london: routledge wittgenstein, l. (1974). philosophical investigations. oxford: blackwell microsoft word ir16-template-final.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 tools beyond control: private information intermediaries and the work of advocacy organizations luis hestres the university of texas at san antonio introduction advocacy organizations have come to rely heavily on a new generation of private information intermediaries that have become synonymous with the contemporary internet. in the field of internet governance, private information intermediaries have been defined as “private systems that do not provision actual content but rather facilitate information or financial transactions among those who provide and access content” (denardis, 2014, p. 153). there private information intermediaries can increasingly determine how citizens and activists engage politically online through the technical architectures and policies they choose to implement—a phenomenon that can often disrupt the work of activists. based on 16 in-depth interviews with present and former online strategists at several u.s. climate change and environmental advocacy organizations, this paper addresses the strategic importance and uses that online strategists assign to different types of private information intermediaries; their experiences using these tools and their responses to such experiences; and their perceived need to use these intermediaries to conduct their work and ability to use alternative tools. specialized and non-specialized intermediaries below i will distinguish between two types of intermediaries: specialized advocacy tools and non-specialized advocacy tools. specialized advocacy tools are intermediaries that organizations use to conduct advocacy, have been developed mainly to conduct advocacy or can be customized extensively for this purpose, and over which activists have a comparatively high degree of control and agency. examples include constituent relationship management (crm) systems, content management systems (cms), and software-as-a-service (saas) advocacy platforms that produce database-generated mass emails and ways to communicate with decision makers. suggested citation (apa): hestres, l. (2015, october 21-24). tools beyond control: private information intermediaries and the work of advocacy organizations. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. non-specialized advocacy tools are intermediaries that organizations also use to conduct advocacy but have not been developed primarily to conduct advocacy and cannot be customized extensively for this purpose, and over which activists have a comparatively low degree of control and agency. examples include social media platforms like facebook, twitter, google plus, and others. the combination of these specialized advocacy tools (nielsen, 2011) and better-known private information intermediaries is central to internet-mediated political advocacy. differing conceptual distinctions of intermediaries virtually all strategists reported a high level of reliance on private information intermediaries to communicate with supporters and other potential audiences, but their strategic use of different types of intermediaries varied considerably. most reported using non-specialized tools (primarily social networks like facebook and twitter) to engage with their supporters and new audiences, but not nearly as much for mobilization; specialized advocacy tools—especially database-generated email blasts— are still the tools of choice for the latter purpose. coping with rapid intermediary innovation interviews revealed that some policies and technical features deployed by nonspecialized intermediaries often cause disruptions, but take on a wide variety of forms. one pervasive form is the constantly evolving nature of non-specialized intermediaries like facebook and twitter. the rapid pace of innovation characteristic of nonspecialized intermediaries can impose costs on advocacy organizations, both in terms of time and money. liz langton revealed that nrdc employs outside experts to help it optimize its use of facebook (personal communication, january 7, 2014). content censorship in intermediary platforms some strategists recalled instances when non-specialized intermediaries disrupted their work more directly by censoring content. greenpeace usa online organizer dionna humphrey recalled two such instances of censorship involving linkedin and facebook (personal communication, october 29, 2013). since some private information intermediaries have shown a tendency to censor content within their platforms in order to avoid political controversies, these rejections represent additional instances of a worrisome trend in privatized internet governance that is exacerbated by the growing dependence of advocacy organizations on non-specialized intermediaries. ideological affinity and tool choice—or lack thereof specialized tools allow organizations much greater flexibility in choosing specialized intermediaries that broadly share their ideological leanings and goals. respondents indicated that their organizations exercise such choices whenever possible. michael silberman, global director of greenpeace’s mobilisation lab project, described how greenpeace would not sign a contract with salesforce.com, a crm widely used in the nonprofit world, until it pledged to move away from the “dirty cloud”—a pejorative term for cloud computing systems that rely on coal power plants to meet their energy needs—and instead embrace clean energy (personal communication, october 18, 2013). organizations do not have this level of flexibility in relation to non-specialized intermediaries. strategists revealed a sense of acceptance or even resignation to this situation. technological architecture, intermediaries, and lock-in effects advocacy groups may experience a lock-in effect similar to that of individuals who have invested too much time and effort curating their profiles and accumulating online interactions in one platform to switch to another. attitudes regarding this prospect varied among respondents. some characterized the potential need to migrate or rebuild communities developed through non-specialized intermediaries as daunting, while others were more sanguine about the prospect. discussion the first pattern that emerges through these interviews is the overwhelmingly instrumental view that strategists hold of private information intermediaries. another notable pattern is the lack of conceptual distinction strategists make between the disruptions they have to overcome in their use of specialized and non-specialized intermediaries. the distinctions between specialized and non-specialized tools become more relevant to strategists when the disruptions associated with the latter become most blatant—particularly when they involve censorship. this highlights the inherent tensions of treating non-specialized intermediaries as neutral collective action platforms, when in fact they are corporate entities with social and political agendas that can differ—sometimes substantially—from those of advocacy organizations, and will not hesitate to implement technological architectures or policies to support their agendas. this tension can often put activists in the awkward position of treating some of the very platforms on which they depend as targets of their advocacy efforts. but aside from blatant instances like censorship, the general attitude among respondents toward disruptions stemming from technical or policy choices of information intermediaries is to treat them as inevitable consequences of using these tools, to be sidestepped, hacked, or simply endured because “there’s nothing else like it” or they see a need to “go where people are.” interviews indicated a certain disconnect between how practitioners of online advocacy view private information intermediaries, and various concerns articulated by internet scholars and policy experts. given the increasingly important role that the internet plays as a platform for political communication and participation, it would be beneficial to bridge this gap. if current trends hold, non-specialized private information intermediaries—particularly social networking services—should become even more important as collective action platforms. this means that the technological architectures and policies these corporations enact will increasingly dictate what activists can and cannot do online to further their goals. references denardis, l. (2014). the global war for internet governance. new haven: yale university press. nielsen, r. k. (2011). mundane internet tools, mobilizing practices, and the coproduction of citizenship in political campaigns. new media & society, 13(5), 755-771. doi: 10.1177/1461444810380863 selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation: byron, p., albury, k., pym, t., race, k. and mccosker, a. (2019, october 2-5). trust in friendship: lgbtq+ young people and hook-up app safeties. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. trust in friendship: lgbtq+ young people and hook-up app safeties paul byron swinburne university of technology kath albury swinburne university of technology tinonee pym swinburne university of technology kane race university of sydney anthony mccosker swinburne university of technology background & method digital media research commonly explores the use of social media platforms and dating/hook-up apps separately, and this can imply distance between social and sexual communication practices. exploring how friendships enfold into lgbtq+ young people’s use of dating/hook-up apps, this paper troubles that delineation. many dating/hook-up apps allow users to indicate that they’re seeking friends, and friendship-seeking in apps for queer men has been discussed (castañeda 2015; chan 2017; fitzpatrick et al. 2015). few have considered this beyond apps specific to queer men, however, or how existing friendships influence dating/hook-up app use. in late 2018, we ran workshops with lgbtq+ young people (18-35 years) about negotiating safety in dating/hook-up apps. four workshops were held in sydney and regional new south wales (2 each), split between users of apps like grindr or her (2 each), and involving 23 participants. discussion of friendship featured in all workshops, mostly relating to four key themes: the safety of having mutual friends with potential dates/hook-ups; making friends through apps; friends’ involvement in safety strategies; and friendship support for app-use negotiation. mutuals the assurance of having mutual friends with potential dates/hook-ups was commonly discussed. the presence of ‘mutuals’ was typically established through apps such as tinder, though some participants complained about tinder not always showing mutual friends. when seeking same-gendered partners on tinder, having mutuals also helped participants to determine if a match was actually queer. participants engaged in a variety of what kane race has discussed as ‘cross-platform practices’ to establish infrastructures of intimacy and support that were capable of preventing unwanted risks and enabling pleasure (2017, 179-80), but these were heterogeneous and far from uniform. some participants noted the value of instagram links on app profiles as a way to get more information about the person and check for mutuals. one group (female, urban) agreed that there was greater safety in accessing mutuals through tinder, rather than sharing instagram accounts which can feel like “an invasion of privacy.” chelsea (regional) suggested that having mutuals is as good as knowing the person: “normally if i don't know them – mutual friend wise – i'll video call them [before agreeing to meet].” elsewhere, participants spoke of finding and meeting people through non-dating platforms such as instagram, facebook, and twitter. here, mutual friends served a central role in shaping dating practices and cultivating a greater sense of safety. making friends several participants indicated that they’ve used apps to make friends. max (non-binary, regional), for example, spoke of the value of meeting other trans people on tinder: “it's pretty fucking scary being out as trans [here]… so being able to meet other trans people on tinder, to just be friends with them is really good.” sometimes making friends through dating apps was unintentional, and sometimes these connections were more difficult to define than simply sexual or friend-based, perhaps combining elements of both. amy (urban): i had my first hook up on tinder, which turned into a facebook and instagram connection. i say connection, as opposed to friendship, because we've never seen each other again, but we're still friends and she sent me nudes via email. amy indicated that she became friends with many tinder matches. in the other urban group (for users of grindr and similar apps), ben expressed sadness about no longer being able to see his friends naked on tumblr. this movement from discussing friends on dating apps and other social media illustrates how friendships extend into spaces traditionally deemed sexual (e.g. tumblr naked selfies) through networked media practices. friends on stand-by many participants (particularly female) commonly told their friends about the dates they were going on and sometimes shared their location or had friends ‘on stand-by’. anna (regional) spoke of sport (which she hated) as her secret code with friends: “so if i send them a thing like ‘how is the football going?’ they know to call me.” among male participants, safety arrangements were less common, and telling one’s friends about a hook-up for precaution often depended on one’s ‘gut feeling.’ charles (urban) noted that if he felt uneasy about a hook-up he’d still probably go through with it, but would also send a location screenshot to a friend. female participants were less inclined than others to meet at someone’s home. for them, meeting in public was discussed as normalised, but they also noted that they were less likely than their straight female friends to have their friends on stand-by. tessa (urban): my straight girlfriends, when i said i was dating again, they're like, ‘oh, when you're going on dates do you need us to text you? do you need a phone number? do you need an emergency just in case?’ i was like, ‘what?’ friend support for app use several participants spoke of friends helping them set up their profile, including kat (regional): “it's good when you're just starting out to have somebody to ask those questions.” participants also discussed giving advice to friends on their photos and profiles. dan (male, regional) stated: “it is a sweeping generalisation but i have to help my straight friends a lot more with their profiles than gay friends.” max (non-binary) agreed, adding: “there's something wrong with straight men's perception of their dating app profiles” and that their photos are “always blurry.” zoe (regional) pointed out that rather than teaching friends how to use apps – since they’re not difficult and most people know the format – support tended to relate more to the different cultures of each app. in the same workshop, kat discussed getting tips from friends about how long to wait until a connection moves to a meet-up. conclusion this paper focuses on friendship as an organising force in young people’s dating/hookup app practices, and presents the case for greater attention to the porousness of media sites commonly defined as social (e.g. instagram) or sexual (e.g. grindr/tinder). participants demonstrate that trust in friendship is far greater that trust in the apps themselves, and so this is called upon, at many levels, to negotiate app use. notably, ‘mutuals’ offer greater feelings of safety, and the overlap between friendship and sexual connections is apparent in these data, as per further discussion about 'sliding into dms'. importantly, participants who were not cisgender men had greater concern for safety, and thus more knowledge on how to negotiate apps (and dating) safely, particularly through their friendships. references castañeda, jgm. (2015) grindring the self: young filipino gay men’s exploration of sexual identity through a geo-social networking application. philippine journal of psychology 48(1), 29-58. chan, ls. (2017) ambivalence in networked intimacy: observations from gay men using mobile dating apps. new media & society 20(7), 2566-2581. fitzpatrick, c., birnholtz, j., & brubaker, j. r. (2015) social and personal disclosure in a location-based real time dating app. paper presented at the 48th hawaii international conference on system sciences (hicss), kauai, hi. race, k. (2017) the gay science: intimate experiments with the problem of hiv. new york: routledge. microsoft word wang.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): wang, w.y. (2014, october 22-24). searching guangzhou: regionalizing china’s weibo. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. searching guangzhou: regionalizing china’s weibo wilfred yang wang queensland university of technology the proliferation of weibo (micro-blog) services in china has attracted rich scholarly and media attention in recent years. this twitter-like service allows its users to share messages of up to 140 chinese characters. moreover, users can share visual images and video, attach urls, and re-post and ‘like’ messages that they find interest in. weibo was first introduced by sina.com in 2009. other major online providers, such as netease, tencent and sohu have also launched their own weibo (sullivan, 2012). by the end of december 2013, weibo services in general had 280 million users in (cnnic, 2014). for the purpose of study, the term ‘weibo’ only refers to sina weibo. many commentators focus on weibo’s prominent role in state-public contentions. while the political dimension is not to be disputed, learning about how a region’s (or city’s) distinctiveness intersects with new communication technology can offer an alternative perspective to explore digital media. this essay proposes a ‘regional approach’ to rethink about china’s weibo. inspired by sun and chio’s project of regionalizing chinese media (2012), instead of viewing china’s internet as a singular whole, the aim here is to explore how regional identities intersects with new media technologies. the economic reforms underpins the processes of regionalization and decentralization are the basic rationales of china’s development, where inter-regional differences are encouraged and facilitated (goodman, 1994). tim oakes (2000, p.670) further argues that comparing to ‘the nation-state’, ‘‘the local’ and ‘the regional’ are now regarded as more salient scales for asserting cultural identity’. guangzhou is then not merely an administrative unit, but being the capital city of guangdong, the first region to launch china’s economic reform, guangzhou’s transformations and experience over time offer the realm to manage one’s sense of self and belonging. weibo intersects with this identification process and mediates the tension between the region and the nation. two national projects in recent chinese history merit attention to contextualize weibo in guangzhou: the project of economic reform and the project of national identity. these two projects come hand in hand as economic reasons can justify the legitimacy of a national identity that is constructed by the ccp, and it can be achieved through ‘standardization’. the policy of tuipu (推普), ‘promoting mandarin’, has been one of the most consistent and determined policy by the ccp since the 1950s (wang, 2001). guangzhou media, however, were largely exempted from this policy as the government was hoping the preservation of cantonese media would attract hong kong investors during the 1980s (xinhua, 2010). this is no longer the case today as the mainland economy is increasingly independent from hong kong’s investments. in july 2010, the guangdong provincial government proposed to replace cantonese broadcasting on guangzhou’s major television networks with mandarin. the proposal triggered public anger and a street protest was organized on weibo on 25 july 2010. the provincial government was forced to drop the proposal. it is not new for weibo to articulate local disputes, but the intersections between ‘guangzhou characteristics’ and weibo’s technical features was intriguing. for example, the majority of weibo posts were typed in cantonese expressions. the freedom of tying and language choice on weibo became the critical practice that has gathered the identity solidarity for the protest. weibo’s function of video sharing also made cantopop songs (from hong kong) to flourish during the protest and became the ‘protest anthems’ to distinguish cantonese and mandarin culture. the use of the language, music and other cultural resources intersects with weibo’s technical aspects of connectivity, networking, sharing and visualization. the performance of identity was both personal and political: it was politically subversive because it confronted the government will of tuipu; it was personal because it speaks to guangzhouers’ culture and daily life. while weibo’s technologies allow the mobilizations, it was the recognitions of cultural identity that connects the otherwise unrelated individuals to share a common course. this protest provides an interesting lead to think about regional specifics of the chinese internet rather than seeing online protest and discontent merely as ‘class action’ or ‘generational shift’. instead, the specific cultural uniqueness and social transformations, such as the cantonese language and its proximity to hong kong, guide weibo politics and culture. informed by the above observations, i have conducted another longitudinal study by collecting weibo posts over a period of twelve months (20 july 2012 to 30 july 2013) from a weibo group: ‘eat, drink, play, fun in guangzhou’ (edpf). the group mainly provides news and information about leisure and entertainment in guangzhou. the study thus aims to explore how weibo intersects with local identity through the realm of everyday lives. two major findings merit attention. first, weibo’s networking function such as ‘accounts that we both have followed’, and ‘my followers have also followed’ sections indicate the ‘mutual-following’ and ‘mutual-promotion practices’ between city groups and their followers. edpf does not present itself as the only and exclusive ‘local group’ to its followers; instead, it recommends other weibo groups that provide useful information about guangzhou lives. it seems like weibo groups, such as edpf, attempt to formulate a network of identity that its algorithmic networking function helps its users to recognize the online presence of their geo-identity, and to develop a sense of belonging to the city. second, local identity is scoped by weibo’s function of ‘visualisation’. visual images or audio materials are attached to nearly every collected sample in this study. visual materials set the ‘boundaries’ of identity and it helps making identity visible and tangible to people. visualization in this case, suppresses imaginations by creating ‘identity boundaries’. this essay briefly reflects on the approach of regionalizing weibo. the regional approach aims to explore how geo-identity intersects with digital technologies. while i make a case of guangzhou here, i mean to put forth a possible way to rethink china’s internet. through guangzhou, we can learn more about the revitalization of subnational regions within china’s great firewall, and how weibo helps to articulate the renarration of a region, which can potentially become the re-narration of a nation (china). references “china’s internet a giant cage”, the economist, 6 april 2013, retrived on 30 october 2014, from http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21574628-internet-was expected-help-democratise-china-instead-it-has-enabled. cnnic. (2014). the 33rd statistical report on internet development in china. china internet network information center. retrieved on 21 february 2014 from http://www.cnnic.cn/hlwfzyj/hlwxzbg/hlwtjbg/201401/p020140116395418429515.pd f goodman, d. s. (1994). the politics of regionalism: economic development, conflict and negotiation. in d. s. goodman, & g. segal, china deconstructs politics, trade and regionalism (pp. 1-20). london and new york: routledge. sullivan, j. (2012). a tale of two microblogs in china. media, culture & society, 34(6), 773789. oakes, t. (2000). china's provincial identities: reviving regionalism and reinventing "chineseness". the journal of asian studies, 667-692. sun, w., & jenny, c. (2012). introduction. in w. sun, & j. chio, mapping media in china region, province, locality (pp. 3-12). usa and canada: routledge. wang peiying. (2001). discussing the regulations in the constitution of 'nation wide promotion of putonghua' (lun xianfa guanyu 'guojia tuiguang quanguo tongyong de putonghua' de kuiding). the journal of beijing college of politics and law, 27, 9-11. xinhua. (2010, 07 09). proposal for news in mandarin angers guangzhou citizens. retrieved 05 09, 2013, from xinhua news: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/201007/09/c_13392543.htm selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): grill, g. (2020, october). researching online labor strike and protest prediction technology. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. researching online labor strike and protest prediction technologies gabriel grill university of michigan introduction social media platforms have been lauded for enabling and organizing social movements both online and offline. yet in contrast to these hopeful imaginaries are authoritative efforts to surveil and control social media activity at scale and in near-real time using advanced techniques from data science (tufekci, 2017). this has manifested for instance in recent government-funded research to predict us protests following the election of president trump in 2016 (renaud et al., 2018). this work is part of an emerging computer science research field focused on online “civil unrest prediction” dedicated to forecasting protests across the globe (e.g. indonesia, brazil, uk, venezuela and australia). researchers often draw upon established data science techniques such as event detection and prediction, but also approaches specifically tailored towards surveilling social movements are conceived. besides furthering the academic knowledge-base on civil unrest and protests, the works in this field envision to support a variety of stakeholders with different interests: governments, the military and law enforcement driven by securitization, techno-optimistic promises of efficiency and possibilities for pro-active/preemptive security interventions (hälterlein & ostermeier, 2018; vogel et al., 2016); industries driven by economic interests to anticipate labor organizing and other disruptions, e.g. to avoid delays across supply chains or to develop new insurance products; human rights organizations interested in making offline protests across the globe more visible to broader publics and/or to detect/predict human rights abuses connected to them while understaffed. the variety of, also conflicting, interests vested in this research, data and technology across different sectors highlights complex tensions and a malleability of the technology. this paper is part of ongoing work concerned with mapping the recent history of civil unrest prediction on social media platforms as well as an analysis of associated technologies, discourses and power relations. this analysis is based on documents (bowen, 2009) composed of scholarly literature and other public online artifacts or materials discussing/detailing applications for companies, governments or other actors. since in this area few details are known about technologies and their uses, e.g. due to company and government secrets, i hope this work can give interesting new perspectives through analyzing publicly available research papers, which in some cases have also been a basis for the founding of spin-off companies. i think this work is potentially valuable to activists and could contribute to a needed public debate on the role of protest surveillance in democratic societies. my research approach is grounded in situational analysis (clarke et al., 2017) as i study networks of positions, discourses, technologies, institutions and other actors which situate, construct and stabilize civil unrest prediction practices. the approach further involves coding, theme extraction, mapping and critical discourse analysis (hoffmann et al., 2018; mullet, 2018). discussion these recent trends in protest social media surveillance are not new and can be considered a continuation of long-standing risk assessment efforts to anticipate disruption and unrest. several research efforts and products that target protests in countries with emerging and developing economies can also be understood as building upon long histories of scientific experimentation and surveillance on marginal populations and colonialism (murphy, 2017). the technological approaches of research i investigated varied in terms of machine learning methods, types of targeted events, accuracy and forecasting timeframes (from several hours to days, and in some cases weeks). in alignment with the underlying big data ideology, some prediction systems employed a great variety of different data sources. early examples of online protest prediction research were based on blog posts to study e.g. “muslim reaction” (colbaugh & glass, 2010, p. 40) and predict “successful mobilization and protest events [..] that became large and self-sustaining”. contemporary research on online social data was focused more on platforms, such as twitter, facebook and tumbler. social media users were framed by some researchers as mechanistic public data generators from which valuable information could be extracted for certain means, e.g. referring to the practice as reading “public and accessible [..] open source data” (agarwal, 2017, p. 2) from “human-sensors” (p. 2) to acquire information on the offline world. this view both dehumanizes users and activists framed as sensors and aims to justify research on the basis of data being publicly available, which is problematic stance (boyd & crawford, 2012). perspectives of protestors were often not considered or discussed by researchers, instead protests were often framed as risks to be controlled or anticipated. most researchers and companies framed protests or labor strikes as sources of disruptions to be diverted for security and economic reasons, which is certainly a controversial and problematic position because of the central and protected role of protests in democracies. one company for instance referred to their system as a “shitstorm insurance” (dia insurtechs, 2018), thereby concerningly framing those who voice grievances as a “shitstorm”. if protests lose power for disrupting daily life and generating attention, then their purpose may be defeated or at last challenged. in turn the goal of generally reducing “disruptiveness” shared by some in this line of research and product development, can be considered as authoritative and problematic in the context of democratic participation. furthermore, technologies anticipating the forming of social movements and/or detecting planning activates online, may matter significantly to information campaigns aimed at “drowning critical posts in a sea of other topics” (tufekci, 2017, p. 237) to undermine reach and organizing. still, prediction in this context is a highly ambiguous task which in turn also creates possibilities to evade this algorithmic gaze. references agarwal, s. (2017). open source social media intelligence for enabling government applications: extended abstract. acm sigweb newsletter, summer, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3110394.3110397 bowen, g. a. (2009). document analysis as a qualitative research method. qualitative research journal, 9(2), 27–40. https://doi.org/10.3316/qrj0902027 boyd, d., & crawford, k. (2012). critical questions for big data: provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon. information, communication & society, 15(5), 662–679. clarke, a. e., friese, c., & washburn, r. s. (2017). situational analysis: grounded theory after the interpretive turn. sage publications. colbaugh, r., & glass, k. (2010). early warning analysis for social diffusion events. 2010 ieee international conference on intelligence and security informatics, 37– 42. https://doi.org/10.1109/isi.2010.5484778 dia insurtechs. (2018). dia tv | digital insurance agenda. http://www.digitalinsuranceagenda.com/pagina-dia-tv.php?keyword=prewave hälterlein, j., & ostermeier, l. (2018). special issue: predictive security technologies. european journal for security research, 3(2), 91–94. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41125-018-0034-z hoffmann, a. l., proferes, n., & zimmer, m. (2018). “making the world more open and connected”: mark zuckerberg and the discursive construction of facebook and its users. new media & society, 20(1), 199–218. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816660784 mullet, d. r. (2018). a general critical discourse analysis framework for educational research. journal of advanced academics, 29(2), 116–142. https://doi.org/10.1177/1932202x18758260 murphy, m. (2017). the economization of life. duke university press. http://read.dukeupress.edu/lookup/doi/10.1215/9780822373216 renaud, m., korolov, r., mendonça, d., & wallace, w. (2018). social network structure as a predictor of social behavior: the case of protest in the 2016 us presidential election. xviii international conference on data science and intelligent analysis of information, 267–278. tufekci, z. (2017). twitter and tear gas: the power and fragility of networked protest. yale university press. vogel, k., balmer, b. l., weiss evans, s., kroener, i., matsumoto, m., & rappert, b. (2016). knowledge and security. mit press. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): johnson, m. (2020, october 28-31). disability and mental health as a professional live streamer. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. disability and mental health as a professional live streamer mark r johnson phd department of media and communications, university of sydney introduction: live streaming twitch.tv is the dominant market leader in the broadcast of live user-created video content – primarily, but not exclusively, the play of video games ‒ over the internet. in 2016 twitch broadcasted over half a million years of video content, produced by over two million regular ‘streamers’, to an audience well in excess of 100 million people (twitch, 2017a). pires and simon (2015, p. 225) define live streaming as a platform or practice through which ‘anyone can become a tv provider’. such terminology gives some hint as to the potentially revolutionary nature of the platform, taking an activity such as television broadcast out of the hands of economically powerful actors and handing it to ordinary individuals. this is similar to the analysis put forward by cunningham and craig (2016, p. 5412), who call twitch ‘social media entertainment’, representing the blurring of traditional forms of broadcast media with the rapid back-and-forth of conversation between streamers and viewers. at one end, there are streamers broadcasting for the first time from their bedrooms, viewed by perhaps a handful of individuals. at the other are professional streamers with top-of-the-range broadcasting equipment, watched by tens of thousands at any one time and millions over longer periods, and who can comfortably bring in six-figure incomes. a core element of successful streams is the ability for viewers to talk directly to streamers through a facility known as ‘twitch chat’ or simply ‘chat’, which allows streamers to immediately reply to viewers. such a shrinking of the distance between media producer and media consumer, and the centrality of this responsiveness to the success of the phenomenon, highlights the profound newness and wider importance of live streaming in a rapidly changing media ecosystem. equally, by providing opportunities in the digital economy to thousands at a rate expanding every day, it is also of great interest for scholars of digital labour, digital work, and the digital economy. disability, technology, and streaming despite a growing body of scholarly literature addressing the phenomenon, questions of inclusion and exclusion on the platform have been relatively scarce. scholars have considered the place and presentation of gender, sex and sexuality on the platform (witkowski, 2011) and also the dynamics of race on twitch (gray, 2017), all of which have shed significant light on inequalities and privilege in live streaming. by contrast, however, questions of disability, mental health, and physical illness in live streamers have not yet been explored. in turn, scholarship on people with these conditions in the digital economy and digital inclusion has not yet addressed this major new form of online behaviour. contemporary scholarship therefore shows that disability entails a complex web of ‘social, political and material disadvantage’ (lupton & seymour, 2000, p. 167) rather than simply a question of ‘health’ or ‘ability’, and that technological solutions – however well-intentioned – are far more complex than offering a simple objective or positivistic ‘answer’. given these elements, twitch is an interesting site for exploring the intersection of disability and technology: the platform is very clear about its desires for inclusion (twitch, 2017b), yet predicated on a deeply new and underexamined media technology which is complex, demanding, and technically and socially sophisticated. as such, in this paper i offer the first sustained scholarly exploration of the economic and inclusion opportunities for people with disabilities, physical health issues, or mental health issues afforded by ‘live streaming’ on the twitch platform (johnson, 2018); from this point on i use the broader term ‘chronic conditions’ to refer to all of these. in doing so i will explore the extent to which digital inclusion can lead to social inclusion for people with disabilities; how the digital economy and digital entrepreneurship through live streaming present opportunities for empowerment; and the potential roadblocks and hurdles along such a path. research project to do so i begin with a review of existing literature in three areas: the ‘digital economy’; the relationship between (dis)abilities, health and technology; and twitch and the live streaming phenomenon itself. i then move to a discussion of methodology, which consists primarily of drawing upon a corpus of over 100 interviews with successful live streamers on twitch, alongside ethnographic data from both online and offline locations. i then proceed to my central analysis, which i divide into two sections. i first explore the positives of the streaming experience for those with chronic conditions, primarily community and inclusion, especially noting the distinctive kinds of streams that these broadcasters have been able to create on the platform. i then consider the negatives, especially in terms of the unique challenges that individuals with chronic conditions might face in the process of live streaming, created through intersections between the social expectations and material form of twitch, and ‘real world’ health. the paper then uses these findings to assess the economic and entrepreneurial importance of these two aspects, and conclude by weighing up the value of live streaming to individuals with chronic conditions. by developing these discussions from interview and ethnographic data, i analyse how disability and health intersect with the major new media practice of live streaming and the opportunities in the digital economy that it affords. through these three enquiries i argue that twitch offers a way to provide digital opportunities for people with chronic conditions, but one where complex differentiations and hierarchies nevertheless continue to manifest. all streamers with chronic conditions asked to assess the ‘balance’ fell firmly on the side of the positive effects over the negative effects, in line with previous findings about streamers’ rationalisations of the working pressure of the career (johnson & woodcock, 2017). although live streaming is the most contemporary of these, its immense growth and the numbers for viewers and producers demonstrates it cannot be overlooked. live-streaming looks set to be the ‘next big thing’ in digital media, and it thus the opportunities and inequalities it presents demand attention. references cunningham, s., & craig, d. (2016). online entertainment: a new wave of media globalization? international journal of communication, 10, 5409–5425. gray, k. l. (2017). ‘they’re just too urban’: black gamers streaming on twitch. in j. daniels, k. gregory, & t. mcmillan cottom (eds.), digital sociologies (pp. 355–367). bristol: policy press. johnson, m. r. (2018). inclusion and exclusion in the digital economy: disability and mental health as a live streamer on twitch. tv. information, communication & society, 22(4), 506-520. johnson, m. r., & woodcock, j. (2017). ‘it’s like the gold rush’: the lives and careers of professional video game streamers on twitch. tv. information, communication & society, 22(3), 336-351. lupton, d., & seymour, w. (2000). technology, selfhood and physical disability. social science & medicine, 50(12), 1851–1862. pires, k., & simon, g. (2015). youtube live and twitch: a tour of user-generated live streaming systems. 6th acm multimedia systems conference, portland, oregon, 225– 230 twitch. (2017a). audience. twitch. retrieved from http://twitchadvertising.tv/audience/ twitch. (2017b). twitch cares: mental health support & information. twitch. retrieved from https://help. twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/2904486-twitch-cares-mental-healthsupport-information witkowski, e. (2011). following ms_fabulous: women, live-streaming, and do-ityourself visibility in e-sports. proceedings of the annual meeting for the digital games research association, hilversum, netherlands, 14–17. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): john, n., agbarya, a. (2020, october). social media and religious identity change among muslim arab women in israel. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. social media and religious identity change among muslim arab women in israel nicholas john department of communication and journalism, the hebrew university of jerusalem, israel aysha agbarya department of communication and journalism, the hebrew university of jerusalem, israel this study investigates the interface between heightened religiousity among muslim arab women in israel, and their social media use. based on this case, we ask what the main dilemmas and changes in social media use are among people whose identity is in flux, with an emphasis on backstage processes of decision making. we highlight the adoption of new kinds of rules for digitally mediated communication, and expose various turning points as the research participants became more religious. a fair amount has been written about the use of new media for religious practice in general, and religious identity formation. new media have enabled different forms of religious practice (campbell and evolvi, 2019) and have changed the way religious identity is formed (lovheim, 2013; burroughs and feller, 2015). scholars have paid particular attention to the way users present their religious identity online (bobkowski and pearce, 2011), and also to male-female relations (for example see al-saggaf and begg, 2004). these negotioations between religious roles and social media use are discernable among muslim women. for example, their outward appearance and in particular their wearing of the hijab is part of how they represent their self and their religious identity (baulch & pramiyanti, 2018). also, they may sometimes remove digital footprints that lead back to a past identity by deleting texts, photos, or ties with other users (in another context, see haimson et al., 2016). these issues come up in this study, though our contribution derives from our focus on the way decisions are made backstage, rather than on the presentations of self themselves among muslim women as they become more religious. to study social media decision making during identity change, fifteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with muslim women aged 19-26 who are, or have been, social media users, who live in israel, and who have become significantly more religious than they had prevoiusly been. the interview included questions about their interactions agbarya, a. and john, n. (2020 october). social media and religious identity change among muslim arab women in israel. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. digitally mediated and face-to-face with family and friends, and religious and other authorities. the main issue discussed in the interviews was the use of social media during the process of identity change, including the deployment of unsocial behaviours referring to acts such as unfriending and unfollowing (lopez and ovasca, 2013) in order to restructure their social environment. the findings show two different logics of social media use in times of religious identity change. the first is unsurprising and familiar, whereby we see people building new and supportive ties while breaking hostile ties. this enables users to create a supportive, empathetic and empowering social circle online (for example fox and warber, 2015). the second logic which we find more interesting relates to decision making based on the religious rules newly adopted by respondents. this kind of decision making is not driven by a desire for personal satisfaction, which we might see as central to the experience of social media use, but is rather based on the need to adhere to religious edicts, as perceived by the user. we can see this played out in relation to two sets of practices. first, the dilemma of maintaining or breaking ties with male users was raised by most of the interviewees, who said that they broke online ties with men as they became more religious. the religious requirements for breaking such ties were mentioned in the interviews in terms of the necessity to maintain boundaries between men and women. moreover, though, some interviewees saw some of their ties with men, and their romantic potential, as a threat to their identity change. some interviewees said that they asked for help from others in breaking ties, or felt obliged to explain at length their decision to male friends. second, change to religious identity was accompanied by changes to interviewees’ online past. respondents said that they had deleted posts that no longer represented their identity, and deleted old photos of themselves in which they were not wearing a hijab. these procedures of past abandonment involved closing social media profiles at times, mostly instagram profiles. they deleted these images partly because they show parts of their bodies which are forbidden to be shown according to islamic laws. indeed, the removal of digital traces was as important to the interviewees as acts of identity building, such as creating a new self-presentation by publishing religious texts and photos that display their new identity. for muslim women, visual self presentation is a crucial component of their identity and is subordinated to religious rules. the removal of digital traces has been mentioned in the literature as an individual decision in service of the self (haimson et al., 2016), but here it is a religious obligation that even causes inner conflict for users who feel that they should sacrifice meaningful ties in order to follow newly adopted rules. communication technologies are used not only to present identity, but also play a role in its formation and transformation. the women in this study refer to social and unsocial acts online as driven by religious rules, and as a part of the change they are going through. moreover, religious identity change involves a change in logics of social media use, tie management, content creation and deletion. these online behaviors and decisions are not only motivated by personal preferences but are also dictated by religious rules. the very fact that these acts and dilemmas are visible to us is a result of paying special attention to identities in flux. agbarya, a. and john, n. (2020 october). social media and religious identity change among muslim arab women in israel. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. agbarya, a. and john, n. (2020 october). social media and religious identity change among muslim arab women in israel. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. bibliography al-saggaf, y., & begg, m. m. (2004). online communities versus offline communities in the arab/muslim world. journal of information, communication and ethics in society. baulch, e., & pramiyanti, a. (2018). hijabers on instagram: using visual social media to construct the ideal muslim woman. social media + society, 4(4), 2056305118800308. bobkowski, p. s., & pearce, l. d. (2011). baring their souls in online profiles or not? religious self-disclosure in social media. journal for the scientific study of religion, 50(4), 744-762. burroughs, b., & feller, g. (2015). religious memetics: institutional authority in digital/lived religion. journal of communication inquiry, 39(4), 357-377. campbell, h. a., & evolvi, g. (2019). contextualizing current digital religion research on emerging technologies. human behavior and emerging technologies. fox, j., & warber, k. m. (2015). queer identity management and political self-expression on social networking sites: a co-cultural approach to the spiral of silence. journal of communication, 65(1), 79-100. doi:10.1111/jcom.12137 haimson, o. l., brubaker, j. r., dombrowski, l., & hayes, g. r. (2016, may). digital footprints and changing networks during online identity transitions. in proceedings of the 2016 chi conference on human factors in computing systems(pp. 2895-2907). acm. lopez, m. g., & ovaska, s. (2013, september). a look at unsociability on facebook. in proceedings of the 27th international bcs human computer interaction conference(p. 13). british computer society. lövheim, m. (2013). young people, religious identity, and the internet. in religion online (pp. 67-82). routledge. doing your homework standlee final upload selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): standlee,a. (2018, october 10-13 doing your homework: the use of social media as a friendship filter. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. doing your homework: the use of social media as a friendship filter alecea standlee gettysburg college introduction today, a proliferation of new communication technologies has reshaped the foundations of social interaction. for young adults who were born in the midst of the current technological age, social media and information distribution technologies and practices are part of normal everyday social interaction, even within their intimate lives. recent scholarship on the impact of such shifting social practices has identified important patterns in how technologies are utilized as part of social life, and increasingly such scholarship has also identified some of the profound implications of such transformations (masip, suau-martínez, & ruiz-caballero, 2017). among the most visible and important of these implications is the evidence of the increasing partisan nature of information consumption, sometimes referred to as echo chambers or filter bubbles (masip, suau-martínez, and ruiz-caballero 2017; sunstein 2017). this paper expands this work to consider how the use of social media as a filter in the establishment of friendship networks among college students in offline spaces, shapes the composition of such social networks. this work is situated within the significant body of social research considering the consequences of techno-mediated cultural integration among the peer groups of young adults. we know that friendships and peer association play a significant role in the development of life long social networks which in turn, shape access to social resources (su and chan 2017). further research suggests that the inter-textual and multi-model structure of communication technology allows for social integration, instant access, centralization, continuous contact and shared imaginaries that foster a sense of group solidarity (raacke and bonds-raacke 2015). however additional work suggests that these technologies and practices make it easier to filter information, allowing individuals to limit their exposure to news and information to like-minded data sources (pariser 2011; sunstein 2009, 2017). the consequences of such techno-mediation of social networks are profound. some scholars have found a degree of social group homogeneity in social media spaces (seder & oishi, 2009), and this may have impacts on offline relationships as well, as this research shows. other scholars argue that in fact, these filtering practices may be reshaping core social behaviors (sunstein 2017), and thus have wide ranging social consequences. methodology this project focuses on how college students integrate technological communication use into their social lives and considers new patterns of network formation due to the use of such technologies. research questions of particular interest include: • what techno-social behaviors are practiced by college students with regard to the establishment and maintenance of friendship networks? • how do such behavior impact offline social networks, both with regard to establishment and persistence of social networks? methodologically, this paper utilizes collected interview data on 52 participants, between the ages of 18 and 24. the interviews themselves were between about 45 and 90 minutes long and tended to be around one hour on average. in addition, it includes extended ethnographic field work conducted in online social media sites, utilizing the emerging methodological techniques of digital ethnography. findings the college students who participated in this study rely on complex techno-social communicative processes to establish and maintain interpersonal relationships. within this cultural environment participants experienced feelings of connection and intimacy, engaged in interactional social processes, conformed and resisted social norms, in short, they participated in genuine social interactions and cultural production. the establishment of a new friendship almost always takes part at least partially on social media, as texting, meeting and hanging out all work together to lead to a friendship. one key aspect of this noted by the participants is the practice of social “background checks” or evaluating potential friends online digital footprint prior to committing even a casual friendship. all but three participants acknowledged the importance of evaluating participants based on social media profiles, before seeking out deeper relationships. the logics behind the need for such research were varied, but “safety,” “shared attitudes,” and ‘having something to talk about,” were the most commonly cited motivations for participants. this project allowed for the identification of three key patterns within the qualitative data: • first, the practice of “doing homework” or conducting social media-based evaluations of social and political positionality shaped decision making about whether or not to pursue and maintain peer friendships among college students in this study. • secondly, a narrative of safety and security was central to the behavioral logics expressed by a plurality of research participants, when asked to evaluation their own motivations. additional logics included social normativity, relationship efficiency and personal enjoyment of the practice. • finally, this behavior is understood by participants to lead to political and social attitude homogeneity within social networks, which is seen as a desirable outcome for a majority of participants. conclusions interests and opinions generally bind people closer or pull them apart in face-to-face interactions, yet without technological intervention, the amount of effort that is necessary to identify such similarities or differences results in a median level of social intimacy (boase and wellman 2006). increasingly, ample data is available that suggests that filtering based on shared political and social views is a concern with regard to the distribution of news media and data (bozdag and hoven 2015; flaxman, goel, and rao 2016). the consequences of this behavior may include intellectual and behavioral fragmentation. this project is limited in scope and non-generalizable but suggests an emerging practice among college students that could have significant social and cultural consequences. the technologically enhanced practice of social filtering in offline relationships, has the potential to increase social fragmentation and partisan divides. other scholars (sunstein 2009), have elicited the potential social and political consequences of these fragmentation, and this work suggests that interpersonal relationships may also be impacted. the consequences of such fragmentation are becoming increasingly evident in social and political contexts across the globe, with increased radicalization and the decline in social civility in both national and transnational contexts. references boase, jeffrey, and barry wellman. 2006. “personal relationships: on and off the internet.” in the cambridge handbook of personal relationships, edited by anita l. vangelisti and daniel perlman, 1st ed., 914. cambridge university press. bozdag, engin, and jeroen van den hoven. 2015. “breaking the filter bubble: democracy and design.” ethics and information technology 17 (4): 249–65. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-015-9380-y. flaxman, seth, sharad goel, and justin m. rao. 2016. “filter bubbles, echo chambers, and online news consumption.” public opinion quarterly 80 (s1): 298–320. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfw006. masip, pere, jaume suau-martínez, and carlos ruiz-caballero. 2017. “questioning the selective exposure to news: understanding the impact of social networks on political news consumption.” american behavioral scientist, may, 0002764217708586. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764217708586. pariser, eli. 2011. the filter bubble: what the internet is hiding from you. penguin books limited. raacke, john, and jennifer bonds-raacke. 2015. “are students really connected? predicting college adjustment from social network usage.” educational psychology 35 (7): 819–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/01443410.2013.814195. su, chris chao, and ngai keung chan. 2017. “predicting social capital on facebook: the implications of use intensity, perceived content desirability, and facebookenabled communication practices.” computers in human behavior 72 (july): 259–68. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.02.058. sunstein, cass r. 2009. republic.com 2.0. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. 2017. #republic: divided democracy in the age of social media. princeton: princeton university press. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): chen, y., wen, c. (2019, october 2-5). the impact of attitudes towards government and corporations on trust in technology. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the impact of attitudes towards government and corporations on trust in technology yi-ning katherine chen department of advertising, national chengchi university chia-ho ryan wen department of advertising, national chengchi university introduction public fear of emerging technologies in taiwan is not confined to conspiracies about the government and corporations; people are also worried that scientific experts do not fully expose possible perils, seeing that their research and development are funded largely by either corporations or the government, which inhibits them from fulfilling their responsibility to adequately inform the public. for example, taiwanese people are concerned that ai will in fact exacerbate unemployment and be used against political dissidents, and also that man-made radio frequency electromagnetic fields (rf-emf) give rise to cancer and neurological morbidity (su, 2019). as a result, our study aims to understand the social disjuncture between public opinion and science, looking deeper into the reasons behind the long-term distrust of the government, corporations as well as science community, and discussing the influence of the media theoretical framework the theory of motivated reasoning proposes people tend to make conclusions by biasedly selecting and trusting things that reconcile with their previously held viewpoints and political beliefs in particular. when facing controversial issues, people barely assess the relevant facts and evidence rationally. on the contrary, their inherent political beliefs influence how they interpret new information through “selective exposure, attention, comprehension, and recall” (taber et al., 2009; nisbet et al., 2015). the contextual thesis argues it is not science itself but how science is employed to greatly uphold policymaking colliding with individuals’ identity, values, or interests that repels conservatives. for conservatives, it is “impact science” focusing on proving how cutting-edge techniques are instead holding societies and human beings 2 back that they discount. for liberals, it is “production science” dedicated to maximising and optimising the generation and output of industrial products maintaining the modern lifestyle that they distrust. furthermore, while media act as a bridge where the public can approach science community and get to know their research, the divide of ideology and trust is increasingly being widened along the way from the beginning where the media report science as well as simultaneously frame stories in accordance with their ideological stances, to audiences selecting the preferred media aligned with their ideology to access scientific issues, and finally to the end where audiences decide whether the scientists and the science are trustworthy by judging if they recognise their values through the lens of media (feldman et al., 2012; dunlap & mccright, 2011). media effects on public perceptions of science are salient. excessive emphasis on the downsides of certain sciences placed by media could be a heavy blow to public trust in science. finally, research of user behaviour commonly considers personality traits to be useful predictors. one of the widely employed tools for analysing personality traits in relation to media usage is the five-factor model raised by costa and mccrae (2008): agreeableness, openness to experience, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and extraversion. existing communication research shows that the model has principally been utilised to investigate social media usage, accompanied by demographic analyses. additionally, among the five dimensions, openness to experiences, neuroticism, and extraversion have been recognised as relatively salient predictors of social media usage by several pieces of online behaviour research (tan & yang, 2014; correa et al., 2010; zywica & danowski, 2008). based on the aforementioned concepts and theories, we present the following hypotheses and questions. h1: trust in the government is positively associated with a) trust in rf-emf, b) trust in the rf-emf science community, c) trust in ai, and d) trust in the ai science community. h2: trust in corporations is positively associated with a) trust in rf-emf, b) trust in the rf-emf science community, c) trust in ai, and d) trust in the ai science community. rq1: does attention to general news affect trust in the government, trust in corporations, trust in rf-emf, trust in the rf-emf science community, trust in ai, and trust in the ai science community? rq2: does attention to political news affect trust in the government, trust in corporations, trust in rf-emf, trust in the rf-emf science community, trust in ai, and trust in the ai science community? rq3: does attention to scientific news affect trust in the government, trust in corporations, trust in rf-emf, trust in the rf-emf science community, trust in 3 ai, and trust in the ai science community? rq4: do personality traits influence attention to news, trust in corporations, trust in the government, trust in scientific techniques (rf-emf/ai), and trust in the (rf-emf/ai) science community? results by judgemental sampling, our survey was disseminated online between april 29 and may 17 in 2019 via facebook and dcard. after deducting unfinished and unqualified feedbacks, valid feedbacks amount to 1009, with 52% from females and 48% from males. the average age is 28 (sd = 8.35). our findings demonstrate that the respondents have discrepant levels of trust when it comes to the two sciences (rf-emf and ai) and the science community developing them. second, government trust and corporation trust in general encourage participants to trust both science and its community. third, mediation effects, with government trust and corporation trust as mediators, are sought with general news and political news attention, but not with scientific news attention. fourth, general news attention mitigates science trust, while scientific news attention increases it. finally, political news attention has no significant influences on science trust, when government trust and corporation trust are not acting as mediators. institutional trust attention to news trust in science general news new media general news old media political news trust in rfemf trust in corporation s trust in governme nt scientific news trust in ai scientists figure 1. research model trust in rfemf scientists trust in ai five personality traits extraversion conscientiousnes s openness to experience agreeableness neuroticism 4 references correa, t., hinsley, a. w., & de zuniga, h. g. (2010). who interacts on the web?: the intersection of users’ personality and social media use. computers in human behavior, 26(2), 247-253. costa, p. t., & mccrae, r. r. (2008). the revised neo personality inventory (neo-pi-r). the sage handbook of personality theory and assessment, 2(2), 179-198. dunlap, r. e., & mccright, a. m. (2011). organized climate change denial. the oxford handbook of climate change and society, 1, 144-160. feldman, l., maibach, e. w., roser-renouf, c., & leiserowitz, a. (2012). climate on cable: the nature and impact of global warming coverage on fox news, cnn, and msnbc. the international journal of press/politics, 17(1), 3-31. nisbet, e. c., cooper, k. e., & ellithorpe, m. (2015). ignorance or bias? evaluating the ideological and informational drivers of communication gaps about climate change. public understanding of science, 24(3), 285-301. su, k. p. (2019, may 22). preventing ai abuse requires cooperation. taipei times, p. 8. taber, c. s., cann, d., & kucsova, s. (2009). the motivated processing of political arguments. political behavior, 31(2), 137-155. tan, w. k., & yang, c. y. (2014). internet applications use and personality. telematics and informatics, 31(1), 27-38. zywica, j., & danowski, j. (2008). the faces of facebookers: investigating social enhancement and social compensation hypotheses; predicting facebook™ and offline popularity from sociability and self-esteem, and mapping the meanings of popularity with semantic networks. journal of computer-mediated communication, 14(1), 1-34. selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 studying 'live' cross-platform circulation of images with a computer vision api: an experiment based on a sports media event carlos d’andréa universidade federal de minas gerais / capes, fapemig, and cnpq andré mintz universidade federal de minas gerais / capes introduction understanding cross-platform circulation of web contents is one of the current challenges of digital methods-oriented research. while most studies still focus on specific sociotechnical practices enacted within platforms such as facebook, instagram or twitter, scholars have highlighted the importance of going beyond what rogers (2018) referred to as a "single-platform approach". according to elmer and langlois (2013, p.50), the transition from 'web 1.0 studies' to web 2.0 cross-platform methods reveals the importance of mapping 'traffic tags' that organize the online activity. most of such studies focus on hashtags, “likes” and/or urls as 'traffic tags', consolidating a "colinked, inter-liked and/or cross-hashtagged" research design (rogers, 2018). aiming to expand this perspective, in this study we focus on the potential of visual digital objects – static images in particular – as traces of these connections. visual objects bear high potential to operate as ‘traffic tags’ due to their ubiquitous presence and their relative consistency across reproductions.. however, visual content is not retrievable through common querying mechanisms. due to what levin (2006) has referred to as the “computational opacity” of the visual, an image has to undergo several computational processes to become searchable. this is commonly defined as “reverse image search”, and it has existed on the web for at least the past decade, with services such as tineye or google’s “search by image”. in this study, we experiment with a more recent development by employing google cloud vision api – one of several cloud computing frameworks recently released for the analysis of visual content. its web detection module, in particular, pairs typical suggested citation (apa): d’andréa, c; mintz, a. (2018, october 10-13). studying ‘live’ cross-platform circulation of images with a computer vision api: an experiment based on a sports media event. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. computer vision operations with google’s search mechanism, partly performing as a more specialized batch reverse image search engine. therefore, mediated by google's "massive indexing machine" (rogers, 2018), one could, potentially, retrieve some traces of an image’s spread across the web. in this paper, we experimentally pursue this goal by attempting to track the 'live' crossplatform circulation of images shared on twitter in the context of 2018 fifa world cup final draw ceremony, held in moscow on 1st december 2017. through this empirical study, we aim to discuss the potentials and limitations of this non-verbal methodological approach. empirical study and analysis considering that twitter may be taken as an initial epicenter of online discussions regarding this kind of 'deep-mediatized' event (couldry & hepp, 2017), we extracted the images for our analysis from a dataset of 395,016 tweets collected during a three-hour period on the day of the ceremony. this data was retrieved through streaming api using a set of multilingual hashtags (e.g. #2018worldcup, #tirageausort and # 2018روسيا ). following a novel methodological protocol, at predetermined intervals during data collection we extracted the list of most shared ‘media uploads’ a sub-dataset generated by dmi-tcat tool and processed a range of them through google vision api. these iterations continued after the twitter data collection for three weeks after the event. through this process, we collected a time series of url lists pointing to pages at which – at each moment – the vision api was able to identify the presence of images matching those collected on twitter. four images approached in depth in our study: two backstage photos which portray renowned veteran brazilian player pelé using a wheelchair, surrounded by fellow sportsmen, politicians and authorities. the other two pictures are “photo-based memes” (shifman, 2014) directed at particular national publics: a photomontage featuring former italian player cannavaro made to tease chilean team, which was not qualified for the world cup; and a meme about the arabic derby between egypt and saudi arabia, which was defined by the draw (figure 1). the analysis observes the pictures’ incidence both on known social media platforms and in the open web. in a first analytical effort, the domains were taken as identifiers of 22 social media platforms occurrences of the tracked images were found in 11 of them. in a second analytical effort, the segment of url syntax (i.e., “.br”, “.uk”. or “.jp”) on the different top-level domains (tld) was taken as a relevant marker for analyzing the national and regional circulation of the pictures, given that they are commonly attributed according to the web site’s geographical location. in order to compare how the selected four popular images circulated on social media platforms and on the open web over time, streamgraph visualizations (figure 2) were created, using rawgraphs. figure 1: pictures selected from the dataset for analysis. figure 2: streamgraphs for the urls of pages with matching images categorized by social media platforms, over time. in left-right direction, top-row is relative to pictures a and b and bottom row is relative to pictures c and d. the vertical scale is not quantitatively comparable among the graphs. for each of them, it has been set to match the peak number of tracked occurrences to the height of the graph. the empirical study thus provides a meaningful substrate for discussing the specificities of the live analytical procedures adopted (marres & weltevrede, 2013). several aspects of the data may be attributed to google vision api’s operation and, thus, highlight the issue of its opacity. some of the most evident of those are: the seemingly counterintuitive decrease of the total number of urls retrieved in some of the iterations, and the late indexation of the selected pictures on social media platforms (including twitter occurrences). these seeming inconsistencies shed light onto google vision api’s role as an active mediator in our methodological design as well as raises questions regarding the implications of applying it in this kind of research. thus, taking such cautions, there are several takeouts from this study’s empirical findings, such as the possibility of going beyond language barriers and mainstream platforms in a cross-platform study. the live reverse image search allowed the observation of highly different contexts of internet use otherwise difficult to reach from the perspective of the researchers. the presence of regionally-oriented social media platforms such as weibo (china), vk (russia) and taringa (south america) and the occurrences of some specific top-level domains among open web occurrences can be pointed as the most significant examples of how geographically situated and politically oriented was the circulation of some of the pictures related to the world cup final draw. references couldry, n., & hepp, a. (2017). the continuing lure of the mediated centre in times of deep mediatization: media events and its enduring legacy. media, culture & society, 40 (1), 114-117. elmer, g., & langlois, g. (2013). networked campaigns: traffic tags and cross platform analysis on the web. information polity, 18(1), 43–56. levin, g. (2006). computer vision for artists and designers: pedagogic tools and techniques for novice programmers. ai & society, 20(4), 462–482. marres, n., & weltevrede, e. (2013). scraping the social? issues in live social research journal of cultural economy, 6(3), 313–335. rogers, r. (2018). digital methods for cross-platform analysis. in j. burgess, a. marwick & t. poell (eds.) the sage handbook of social media (pp.91-108). london: sage. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 daoudi, o. (2017, october 18-21). the saudi government reactions to youtube based programming: the content makers’ perspective. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the saudi government reactions to youtube based programming: the content makers’ perspective omar daoudi centre for cultural policy research at university of glasgow introduction: this paper examines the behavior of the saudi authorities in response to saudi youth’s production of local relevant content through the platform of youtube, from the perspective of content makers themselves. it attempts to answer the research question which concentrates on the nature of the relationship between the government and the young creative content creators of youtube. the literature review showed, for instance, (lim, 2012; khondker, 2011; and kalathil and boas, 2003) that there is a narrow range of research in the field of arab and saudi media in general but there is a particular poverty of research that attempts to offer a comprehensive perspective of young saudis' production and consumption of youtube in one of the most conservative and culturally sensitive countries, perhaps, in the world. the literature review also pointed out academic debates over the methodological approaches and limitations over the buzzword of big data where a massive number of researchers adopt the digital positivism paradigm to investigate the area of research. leading names in this context are (peng, 2012; boyd, 2007 & 2015; fuchs and dyerwitheford, 2012; and sloan and quan-haase, 2017). other studies highlighted the significate of a paradigm shift to produce critical social media theory and critical social media studies by employing rigorous traditional methods that explore new patterns, experience and meanings for the research problem. they argued that the big reliance on digital positivism produce no real meaning for the study (fuchs, 2017; golding, raeymaeckers and sousa, 2017; and manovich, 2009. based on the gap in the literature, this paper attempts to add value to this discipline by offering an empirical analysis to the research problem through the qualitative lens to explore the reality of the social worlds of the saudi youtube context. the methodology: the intent of the research was to conduct face-to-face interviews with content creators in their natural settings at the studios, in saudi arabia, in order to observe the work flow that could have offered the researcher with first-hand experience of challenges and reality of production activities for youtube. however, the visa could not be obtained which shaped the design of this study and its procedure. therefore, this study conducted ten in-depth semi-structured online interviews where they were flexible and emergent in nature which brought usefulness and quality for this study of youtube in saudi arabia. online interviews have been conducted by adopting the framework of salmons (2015) to ensure about the validity, the quality and the ethics of the procedure. the ground theory approach was adopted to explore new patterns and to allow for the emergence of new concepts for the research problem. the framework the study followed from theoretical sampling to theoretical narrative was charmaz (2014) and auerbachian and silverstein (2003). the interviews were conducted in arabic, transcribed to arabic by the researcher and then translated by a professional translator. ethical measurements were put in place. the results: firstly, the investigation found that the legal vacuum of youtube in saudi arabia has had positive and negative implications for the market. the vagueness and uncertainty has enabled young people to unleash their creativity and boost the scale and the scope of youtube based programmes but also this ambiguity has offered the government an opportunity to intervene whenever it wants to protect its interests. as a result, the paper came up with two typologies that relate to the production of online media content in a nondemocratic context. the culture of connection and the culture of exploration have been highlighted in the aforementioned discussion. secondly, young people’s behavior was to employ safe technique of self-regulation based solely on their judgement and common sense which was not always accurate as the analysis has found. thirdly, the reaction of the saudi government was subject to various factors, including the nature of content, the context and the timeframe of youtube based programmes. the research found that the authority shows a great deal of relaxation and acceptance towards youtube based programming. however, this was not always the case as the authoritarian attitude still exists in non-democratic governments. the empirical analysis has exhibited that the authority responded differently to different cases which spanned from imprisoning, blocking the episode and contacting the producer in relation to the content. the hand of government was visible in the beginning of the youtube based programmes phenomenon (2011-2013), but it became less during (20142016). finally, the research explored that there were some attempts by senior members of the royal family of saudi arabia to contain the youth and their initiatives; arguably, to minimize the critical tones of youtube based programmes. the era of 2014-2016 was marked with the decline in talk shows and critical programs in favor of the growth humorous and entertaining programmes. furthermore, the saudi young people of youtube were critical towards the middle and low agencies of state but never against the senior ranks of state such as the king. the contribution of this paper is that it adds to the debate about the behavior of authoritarian regimes towards the utilization of social media platforms by young people during peace time. it offers an insight on how globalization platforms such as youtube can pose challenges for non-democratic governments but yet how the state can respond to this challenge. this analysis has covered the attitude of the saudi government which gives an indication of general policy in the kingdom of saudi arabia. reference: • auerbachia, c and silverstein, l (2003) (2003). qualitative data: an introduction to coding and analysis. new york: new york university press. • boyd, d. (2015). social media: a phenomenon to be analyzed. social media + society. 1 (1) • boyd, d and ellison, n. (2007). social network sites: definition, history, and scholarship. journal of computer-mediated communication. 13 (1), 210-230. • charmaz, k (2014). constructing grounded theory. 2nd ed. usa: sage publications ltd. • fuchs, c. (2017). from digital positivism and administrative big data analytics towards critical digital and social media research. european journal of communication. 32 (1), 37–49 • fuchs, c and dyer-witheford, n. (2012). karl marx @ internet studies. new media & society. 15 (5), 782–796. • golding, p; raeymaeckers, k and sousa, h. (2017). social media – new challenges and approaches for communications research. european journal of communication. 32 (1), 3–5. • kalathil, s and boas, t (2003). open networks closed regimes: the impact of the internet on authoritarian rule. washington: carnegie endowment for international peace. • khondker, h. (2011). role of the new media in the arab spring. globalizations. 8 (5), 675-679. • lim, m. (2012). clicks, cabs, and coffee houses: social media and oppositional movements in egypt, 2004–2011. journal of communication. 62 (2), 231-248. • manovich l (2009) cultural analytics: visualizing cultural patterns in the era of ‘more media’. available at: http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/cultural-analyticsvisualizing-cultural-patterns. [accessed 24th february 2017]. • peng, t and et al. (2012). mapping the landscape of internet studies: text mining of social science journal articles 2000–2009. new media & society. 15 (5), 644–664. • salmons, j (2015). qualitative online interviews. 2nd ed. usa: sage • sloan, l and quan-haase, a (2017). the sage handbook of social media research methods. uk: sage. invisible internet infrastructure labor final panel submission selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 panel: (invisible) internet infrastructure labor this panel looks at information infrastructure labor in order to understand the work that is often invisible to many internet users. through this inquiry, we aim to open up the black box of the how the monolithic internet works. we aim to show how the work of some becomes invisible to others and how these labor relations produce internet infrastructure. “information labor” has historically been underexamined in studies of “information revolutions,” (blok, 2003: 5). downey has examined information labor in studies of “telegraph messenger boys” and gives a helpful framework for thinking about labor “within their internetworked institutions” in relation to occupational identities, products, changing technical systems and production of technological spaces (downey, 2002: 13). downy revealed the dual roles of messenger boys as workers and commodities that were an integral part within changing business strategies of telegraphy and telecommunication industry. information labor is not isolated in these internetworked institutions, it is involved in popular discourses about jobs and technical systems. downey’s messenger boys are examples of how one person’s work can be invisible information infrastructure to others. as downy contextualized the invisible messenger workforces in the era of telegraph and telecom, researchers are looking at various forms of online activities from a labor perspective, considering value creation and opportunities for capital accumulation in activities such as: (a) participation in communities; (b) use of google, youtube, facebook and other online social media platforms; and (c) creation of media/content (e.g. sholtz, 2012). some arguments about “digital labor” have endeavored to blur the line between production and consumption, complicating traditional labor frameworks. other arguments have centered on how “value” is created online and whether this “work” is exploitative or agentic or whether it is even “labor” at all. in general, “digital labor” includes participation in communities, social media platforms, and internet culture production, but not to the work that is involved in maintaining the underlying internet on which much of this activity happens. in this panel we aim to extend analysis of “digital labor” and “information labor” to internet infrastructure labor. scholars who write about internet infrastructure, those who sandvig calls “relationists,” note that infrastructure is often invisible, but also importantly relational — one person’s infrastructure is another person’s daily work (sandvig, 2013). while the relational framing of infrastructure can be problematically recursive, here we attempt to stabilize “infrastructure”: if we think of the internet infrastructure relationally, the concern of this panel is invisible work in internet infrastructure that facilitates the “digital labor.” we take from scholars like terranova and downey a political economy framework, and from “infrastructure studies” the imperative to “get in the guts.” we focus on specific labor in order to “make comprehensible the invisible negotiations that are producing the infrastructure” (sandvig, 2013). panelists present papers that address and are not limited to the following questions: how does internet infrastructure work become invisible? how does labor shape how the internet infrastructure works? what does a labor perspective bring to infrastructure studies? what are the social and technical divisions of labor? how are internet infrastructure laborers bound to the understandings of the internet itself? how is internet infrastructure labor bound or in opposition to traditional ideas of “class”? references aad blok, “introduction,” in uncovoring labour in information revolusions, 1750-2000 ed. aad blok and greg downey, (cambridge university press, 2003): 5 greg downey, telegraph messenger boys: labor, technology and geography, 1850-1950 (london: selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 routledge, 2002): 13. trebor sholtz, ed. digital labor: the internet as playground and factory, (london: routledge, 2012). tiziana terranova, “free labor: producing culture for the digital economy,” social text 63, vol. 18, no. 2 (2000). christian sandvig, “internet as infrastructure,” the oxford handbook of internet studies ed. william dutton (oxford university press, 2013). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa     1 laboring behind the search box shinjoung yeo university of illinois at urbana-champaign graduate school of library & information science usa yeo1@illinois.edu abstract this paper illustrates the labor processes of the search engine industry by offering analysis of emerging labor organization and occupational structures. the industry is known for the creation of and reliance on highly skilled and highly paid workers; however, it is likewise crucially dependent on a growing class of low-waged contingent workers such as quality raters who evaluate search engine results pages for proposed changes in search algorithms. moreover, the industry counts massively on an entirely different category of labor – unwaged user labor in the form of internet users themselves. these two groups’ much-needed work in the development of the industry is rendered mostly invisible and obfuscated by seemingly magical technology, but this paper will demonstrate a distinctive hierarchy and division of labor within the search engine industry labor force. keywords google; search engine industry; labor; unwaged labor; quality raters; occupational structure according to one it industry expert, the search engine is a key piece of 21st century infrastructure: “building and maintaining a search engine is so expensive and labor intensive that it requires the same kind of planning and upkeep that, say, the golden gate bridge does” (dagan, 2010). this statement defies the popular notion of the search engine industry as the emblem of the “new” information economy, which, unlike the industrial capitalist economy, needs very little in the way of human labor. yet, technology as a social process embodies human labor, and the search engine is no exception – every link on the web and each keystroke on a computer contain human labor. search engine technology is so seamlessly embedded in our daily lives, however, that it masks a whole series of complex labor processes that enable it. there is a growing interest among scholars on the implications of the social and political functions of the search engine (introna & nissenbaum, 2001; hargittai, 2003, 2004; hindman, 2008; halavais, 2009; vaidhyanathan, 2011); however, relatively little research is available on search engine industry labor processes. addressing this gap, the paper will clarify the social relations between capital and labor and offer an analysis of labor and occupational structures in the industry. the common myth of the search engine industry is that it is generally reliant on highly-skilled workers as the industry has shifted from human edited-directories to automated crawler-based technologies. yet, the need for and use of human labor have by no means been eliminated; on the contrary, it has intensified. in fact, the industry relies on an array of highly skilled and educated employees. and it has been absorbing “highly skilled” it workers – software engineers, research scientists and engineers, selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa     2 product managers, financial analysts, and the like.1 however, beneath this small segment of highly-skilled workers there are legions of low-paid contingent workers that support the industry. huws (2003) describes them as process workers who work under strict direction and tight control and are isolated from their co-workers. google, for instance, has long attributed the supremacy of its search results to its automatically configured algorithm. yet, google has acknowledged that the company hires a great number of human evaluators to pretest its algorithm (levene, 2010). they are often referred to as “quality raters” whose major tasks are to evaluate search and/or advertising “relevancy” before the company releases an alteration to its algorithm. the average salary for quality raters is $13-16/hr with no benefits or job security.2 so far, there are no official numbers on how many quality raters are employed by the industry. some claim that google employs more than 10,000 quality raters (schwartz, 2007); however, the company has so far avoided the provision of that data. while the nature of the job for quality raters is described by google as flexible and self-directed, it is tightly managed as the raters perform their tasks based on a 125-page manual of specific guidelines. quality raters are not exclusive to google or to search engine companies; they are a standardized workforce in many internet companies that rely on search as a basic function for access and revenue generation. these low-wage quality raters consist of a new category of workers and are an integral part of the search engine industry workforce. if quality raters are at the bottom of the hierarchy for wage-labor that supports the search engine business, there is an overlooked and even larger workforce that is unwaged: a great mass of user labor in the form of internet users themselves. the value of this unpaid labor has long been acknowledged by capital, and whether or not users are aware of it, if they function to valorize capital investment, they are considered productive workers (douglas & guback, 1984, p. 238). search engine firms depend on user labor for the most capitaland labor-intensive part of their work – providing feedback on algorithms, creation of content, and constant testing of new products. unwaged users work side-by-side with paid workers as they perform various tasks and their labor is systematically incorporated into production processes. for example, google changes its search-ranking algorithm 500 – 600 times annually.3 one of the numerous factors determining algorithm changes is user search activity. this activity signals google to tune the search algorithm in order to match user queries with context-appropriate advertisements. as of 2012, google had 173 million unique visitors per month, with an average of 101.5 minutes per visitor per month in unpaid labor.4 this equates to an additional 1,829,115 workers per month working full time for google – the ratio of unpaid-full-time to paid full-time is almost 1000:1. 1.8 million people are not categorized as a productive force in classical economic terms or included in the generation of gdp, but their activities are as vital as the 11,665 full time google employees in research and development – if not more so – as their activities contribute to                                                                                                                 1 see 2011 silicon valley information and communications technologies study on changing workforce in silicon valley at http://www.work2future.biz/images/documents/techstudyfullreport_03.pdf 2  the job site glassdoor lists $13-16 for the average hourly wage for quality raters/ads quality raters. see at http://www.glassdoor.com/salaries/quality-rater-salary-srch_ko0,13.htm 3 see more detailed history of google algorithm changes at http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change 4 see 2012 nielsen us web ratings at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0auzlakqqs5xpdgdjnfzedhhluxjla240wmsyzmfwbfe&outpu t=html selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa     3 google’s revenue generation. the role of this user labor in profit-making for the search engine industry is not a secret. in 2005, microsoft chairman bill gates somewhat ironically pointed out that google doesn't share ad revenues with end users who help them get the revenue, saying, “google keeps all of the money with [sic] itself” (ribeiro, 2005). in the search engine industry, there are no longer human indexers per se as search technology has become automated; however, their work has not been entirely eliminated; rather the automation has led to the emergence of a new class of low-waged workers. more importantly, the industry is able to rely on a small, highly-skilled and highly-paid workforce as it has externalized many of its labor processes by incorporating a vast pool of unpaid user labor. the search engine industry has often viewed this as the path forward for the “new” information economy in which workers are not exploited but rather are empowered, highly-paid and engaged in creative work. many celebrate this new information-based economy as the driving force behind the prosperity of workers and the building of a more egalitarian society. yet, the actual emerging labor structure and organization of the search engine industry give us quite a different story. reference dagan, k. (2010). google’s search engine is the 21st infrastructure. retrieved from http://webnomena.com/2010/06/11/googles-search-engine-is-the-21st-infrastructure/. douglas, s. & guback, t. (1984). production and technology in the communication / information revolution, media, culture & society, 6, 233-245. halavais, a. (2008). search engine society. cambridge: polity press. hargittai, e. (2003). the digital divide and what to do about it. in jones, d. (eds.), new economy handbook (pp. 822-841). san diego, ca: academic press. ———. (2004). do you 'google'? understanding search engine use beyond the hype. first monday, 9(3). retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1127/1047 hindman, m. s. (2009). the myth of digital democracy. princeton: princeton university press. huws, u. (2003). the making of a cybertariat: virtual work in a real world. new york: monthly review press. introna, l. & h. nissenbaum (2000). shaping the web: why the politics of search engines matter. the information society, 16(3), 169–185. levene, m. (2010). an introduction to search engines and web navigation. 2nd ed. hoboken, nj: wiley. ribeiro, j. (2005, december 08). microsoft to show search engine users the money. retrieved from http://www.infoworld.com/t/platforms/microsoft-show-search-engine-users-money-619. schwartz, b. (2007, july 10). google has 10,000 human evaluators? retrieved from http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/014125.html. vaidhyanathan, s. (2011). the googlization of everything: (and why we should worry). berkeley: university of california press.   selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 “platformizing” higher education: moocs and the changing labors of educators shreeharsh kelkar massachusetts institute of technology program in history, anthropology and science, technology and society usa skelkar@mit.edu abstract this paper tracks the development of an infrastructure (or a platform) for higher education. it asks: what does the platform mean to the different actors involved in its production and how is it maintained as a lived infrastructure through their labors? i investigate the changing labors of two roles in the massive open online courses (moocs) ecosystem: platform-builders (programmers and others) and educators (teachers). i suggest that the overarching vision of the mooc system means that the primary labor of platform-builders is seen to be building technical interfaces to the platform, maintaining and improving the core infrastructure as well as managing their organizational relationships to other actors. the job of course content creation is seen as the domain of educators, whose labor shifts towards issues of media production and designing assessments; in both these activities, they use their imaginations of their students as well as “data” about students understood through “analytics.” keywords platforms; internet labor; digital labor; knowledge infrastructure; cyberinfrastructure. introducing the mooc eco-system sts scholars have become broadly interested in how particular kinds of knowledge infrastructures/cyberinfrastructures are made, and how they, in fact, become infrastructures i.e. invisible, and taken for granted (bowker & star, 2000; jackson, edwards, bowker, & knobel, 2007). this paper tracks the development of an infrastructure (or platform) for higher education in the united states and abroad. it asks: what does the platform mean to the different actors involved in its production and how is it maintained as a lived infrastructure through these labors? i investigate ethnographically the changing labors of two actors in the massive open online courses (moocs) ecosystem: platform-builders (programmers and others) and educators (teachers). the seemingly precipitous advent of the massive open online course (or mooc), has brought the trend of “platforms” (gawer & cusumano, 2002) dramatically to the field of higher education, as colleges and universities have seized upon shared platforms as a way to increase flexibility and access, build economies of scale (archibald & feldman, 2010), as well as to promote pedagogical innovations. the mooc ecosystem consists of a variety of stakeholders: in terms of roles these include students, educators, programmers, media producers, employers, psychometricians, computer and “learning” scientists, among others; in terms of institutions, these include colleges and universities, tech companies and start-ups, textbook publishers, media production companies, and even advertisers. what kinds of labors by different actors produce the lived reality of the platform? i focus on edx, a mooc platform—although jointly created by mit and harvard—that functions as an independent non-profit. edx is seen by its makers as just a “publishing platform”; the creation of course content is seen as the responsibility of the individual institutions of learning affiliated to edx. practically this has been accomplished by creating separate sub-organizations within the university in charge of generating this content. thus, mit has its own internal organization called mitx (itself part of an office of digital learning) whose task it is to look for courses and materials that can be “published” on edx. (“feed the beast” was the expression used in one meeting). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 each of these sub-organizations (harvardx, mitx, berkeleyx, etc.) has several other duties. they need to create standard infrastructures for making course materials (shooting video, editing, paying professors and tas, taking care of ip issues, etc.). occasionally, when a course demands new technical infrastructure, they make a formal request to edx to develop it (for that particular course). whether such a request gets implemented—sometimes by joint work between their programmers with those of edx—depends on the relative strength of the sub-organization with respect to edx. this ecosystem is shown in figure 1. changing labors how does the development of the platform shape the labors of platform-builders (i.e. the programmers and other employees of edx), and the educators (housed in the sister institutions)? platform-builders for the technical platform-builders, the task becomes to develop standardized technical and organizational channels of communication between themselves and actors in other roles. their goal seems to be to distribute innovation, yet retain overall control. for example, consider studio, a “web-based tool that allows for the self-service authoring of courses for the edx platform.” often referred to as a cms (content management system) or an lms (learning management system), studio allows educators to create their course website i.e. arrange the lectures, quizzes and other supplementary material (and preview their work) so that it becomes ready for publishing. yet, as an edx employee pointed out in a session devoted to teaching how to use studio to educators, studio can only be used after the “hard work [of designing the class, shooting the videos, etc.] has been done.” studio provides a graphical user interface (gui) for the layout (“authoring”) of the course content. rather than using an arcane edx xml mark-up language, educators can now create their course websites in an intuitive wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) form as a “course-writing” tool, studio is a technical intervention that shifts the labor of “course writing” within the system from the platform-builders to the educators (or from edx to its sister organizations). this is seen as preparatory work for an imagined future where edx hosts hundreds of courses. in harvardx edx mitx berkeleyx the platform is the set of technical/organizational interfaces. edx responsibilities: build the technical platform provide standardized technical interfaces to other actors/roles. mitx, harvardx duties: find courses; make standardized arrangements to build courses take care of ip issues help change the technical platform by taking best suggestions to edx figure 1: the edx ecosystem. edx and its sister organizations have seemingly parallel duties: publishing and content creation respectively. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 another sense, studio is a tool of standardization. it constrains educators to act in very particular ways. it is part of edx’s branding efforts: to make all edx courses look and feel the same by blackboxing a certain range of options (multiple-choice questions, equation-based problems, etc.) for easy use. yet, it also allows non-programmers an easy way to author a course. finally, studio is also an organizational interface connecting edx with its sister organizations in a structured way. educators the labor of educators is also transformed. first, they need to become media producers, finding the resources to film and to edit video. edx takes no responsibility for these aspects; instead it is the affiliated university that will determine the kinds of labor related to filming. second, educators need to spend time “authoring” the course using studio. here, educators are mainly doing the following: (1) they are imagining their students through studio, and (2) they are also tinkering with the edges and limits of studio, constantly imagining what the possibilities of interactivity are. the conflicts in the authoring process are often a result of a clash of imaginations. to go beyond the standardized forms of expression requires educators to tinker with the boundaries of studio; to make substantially different forms of content, educators need to demand access to the innards of studio and the technical infrastructure through organizational channels. this process of authoring the course thus involves communication between three kinds of practitioners: the platform builders, the educators and the students through the technical infrastructure of studio and through the “data” and “analytics” provided by the platform itself. conclusion: what is a platform? this paper has outlined one way in which the advent of moocs has shifted the labors of platformbuilders and educators. platform-builders see their task as creating well-defined technical and organizational interfaces between themselves and other actors (in terms of different individual and institutional roles). educators become media producers and content creators, often interacting with the platform through standardized channels, and imagining their students in complex “data”-mediated ways. what might this story tell us about the lived reality of platforms? tarleton gillespie (2010) has pointed out how the idea of a platform performs a kind of discursive and ideological work, serving to align the interests of multiple, often conflicting, stakeholders. from a labor perspective, i hypothesize that the platform should be seen as an aggregation of socio-technical interfaces (formal and informal) that allow communication between actors in different institutional roles in specific ways. the creation and use of these interfaces is shaped by how the future is envisioned, and conflicts between actors are often at heart debates over the differing visions of the future and their role in it. references archibald, r. b., & feldman, d. h. (2010). why does college cost so much? oxford university press, usa. bowker, g., & star, s. l. (2000). sorting things out: classification and its consequences. the mit press. gawer, a., & cusumano, m. a. (2002). platform leadership: how intel, microsoft, and cisco drive industry innovation (1st ed.). harvard business review press. gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of “platforms”. new media & society, 12(3), 347–364. doi:10.1177/1461444809342738 jackson, s., edwards, p., bowker, g., & knobel, c. (2007). understanding infrastructure: history, heuristics and cyberinfrastructure policy. first monday, 12(6). retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1904/1786 license this article is ©2013 shreeharsh kelkar, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa locating the internet in infrastructure ashwin j. mathew university of california, berkeley school of information usa ashwin@ischool.berkeley.edu abstract the virtual space of the internet is often considered to be disjoint from the physical space of the material world. in this paper, i offer an analysis of the mechanisms through which this virtual space is actively produced over physical telecommunications infrastructure through social practices, institutions and technologies which allow location and place to be obscured on the internet. keywords infrastructure, labor, practice, governance introduction on january 27th 2011, egypt disconnected itself from the internet in an attempt to maintain control over information flows during the revolution, hoping to disrupt coordination amongst activists, and prevent the transmission of first-hand accounts and images of unfolding events. while highlighting the critical role played by protesters in the streets, international news reports called attention to the effects of social media in facilitating coordination, and dissemination of information. in this instance, and many more besides, a common theme repeats itself: the conception that the technology of the internet allows social formations and practices to transcend the limits of physical space. this is a separation which castells (2000) memorably framed as an opposition between the “space of flows” of the network society, and the geographically limited “space of places”. however, as a long tradition of literature in critical geography suggests, space is not passively occupied, but rather actively produced by through human activity (lefebvre, 1992) and patterned with spatial relationships of power (massey, 1994), with spatial fixes of capital and infrastructure needed to allow human activity to overcome space (harvey, 1999). this raises the question: what are practices and systems of power which allow the everyday experience of the internet to appear separate from the material world and the physical infrastructure through which it is produced? to address this question, i begin with a key difference between virtual and physical space, the problem of location; after all, political action via the internet can support actions against powerful actors most meaningfully when it is difficult to locate and identify those engaging in them. to understand the effect of disjuncture between virtual and physical space, between the digital and the material, we must engage with the mechanisms through which physical location is elided in the virtual space of the internet. i argue that the logic supporting this elision is built into the core technology through which the internet is constructed, the internet protocol (ip). in this paper, i will offer three important analytics of information infrastructure labor through which the politics of the internet protocol – and accordingly, the politics of the production of virtual space – may be understood: technical standards, resource allocation mechanisms and topological arrangements. 1 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa method this research is based on a study of the practices involved in managing a technology called the border gateway protocol (bgp), which is the technical standard through which networks interconnect over ip to form the internet. after all, the internet is not one network, but rather a complex system of interconnections amongst approximately 43,000 individual networks1 around the world. my research involved ethnographic fieldwork amongst communities of network administrators, analysis of technical standards documents detailing the technologies used by network administrators, and analysis of policy documents produced by internet governance organizations. i focused on meetings and communications of the north american network operators group (nanog), which is perhaps the most influential professional organizations of network administrators in the world. i also attended meetings of the internet engineering task force (ietf) which sets technical standards for the internet, and the american registry for internet numbers (arin) which is one of five regional internet registries that allocate critical internet resources (such as ip addresses) around the world. i conducted 37 interviews in person at these meetings, at my interviewees' offices, and by phone. ordering the internet in computer networking classes, internet technologies are presented as a multi-layered stack, with the physical layer at the bottom (e.g., copper wires, ethernet cables, wireless signals), followed by a networking layer (implemented as the internet protocol), above which the transport and application layers operate (providing services such as email and the world wide web). the networking layer is the first moment of abstraction from material infrastructure, representing a critical site for the work needed to stabilize and order the internet. i began my research as a series of interviews with network administrators focusing exclusively on the practices involved in managing their interconnections with other networks. my initial assumption was that i would find well-defined practices which network administrators need only implement in their networks to ensure success. while this is certainly true to a degree, i rapidly discovered that the world of network administration was far more complex than i had anticipated. my first revelation came in the form of how social this world is: to be a network administrator is to work with other network administrators to maintain systems within a network, and interconnections across networks. this is relational labor, which is as much a social relation amongst network administrators as it is a technical implementation of network interconnection: administrators establish relationships with one another as they work to interconnect their networks. in aggregate, this manifests as the community of network administrators who meet three times a year at nanog meetings, and are in constant conversation via the nanog email list. following the topological arrangements of the internet involves following these infrastructural relations. as i began to understand these practices further, and as i studied bgp in more detail, i discovered that these relations were reinforced by an expectation of trust built into the bgp technical standard (mathew & cheshire, 2010). when one network claims to a neighboring network that it can carry traffic to a particular destination on the internet, bgp offers no mechanism to reliably establish the veracity of these claims. while work is in progress to implement stronger security mechanisms, it became apparent to me through my interviews that the close-knit nature of the ietf community which originally defined these standards was in part a cause for the “trusting” nature of bgp, and the social relations that it entails. finally, i studied the management of globally unique ip address space, as a critical resource needed to make a 1 from the cidr report, http://www.cidr-report.org/as2.0/ , last retrieved march 12th 2013. 2 http://www.cidr-report.org/as2.0/ selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa network visible on the internet. the five regional internet registries (represented by arin in north america) control the allocation of ip address space around the world, with board and council members of these organizations elected by the network operators that they serve. these organizations follow the principle that ip address space is not property to be bought and sold, but rather a resource which is held in common. accordingly, ip address space is allocated by an organization's need, rather than by purchasing power, embedding the management of ip address space in social relations rather than a “free” market. conclusion as this brief account illustrates, the apparent disjuncture between physical and virtual space is made possible through the relational labor that actively produces and maintains the ip layer of the internet. this is a distributed system of social relations and practices operating the topological arrangement of the internet, anchored by centralized institutions managing common technical standards and resources. indeed, i argue that the democratic qualities often attributed to the internet are in no small part premised upon the qualities of openness and trust embedded in the institutions, practices and technologies which actively produce this global virtual space. references castells, m. (2000). the rise of the network society (2nd ed.). wiley-blackwell. harvey, d. (1999). limits to capital (2nd ed.). verso. lefebvre, h. (1992). the production of space. wiley-blackwell. massey, d. (1994). space, place, and gender. university of minnesota press. mathew, a. j., & cheshire, c. (2010). the new cartographers: trust and social order within the internet infrastructure. proceedings of the 38th research conference on communication, information and internet policy (telecommunications and policy research conference). george mason university school of law, arlington, va. 3 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 the cultural work of microwork infrastructures: hacking amazon mechanical turk lilly irani university of california, san diego department of communication usa lirani@ucsd.edu abstract this paper focuses on amazon mechanical turk as an emblematic case of microwork crowdsourcing. new media studies research on crowdsourcing has focused on questions of fair treatment of workers, creativity of microlabor, and the ethics of microwork. this paper argues that the divisions of labors made possible by sociotechnical systems of microwork also do cultural work in new media production. focusing on the story of a hackathon at a crowdsourcing conference, the paper will draw from infrastructure studies and feminist sts to examine amazon mechanical turk (amt) and the kinds of workers and employers produced through the practices associated with the system. crowdsourcing systems, i will show, are mechanisms not only for getting tasks done, but for producing difference between ‘innovative’ laborers and menial laborers – differences that build on old and gendered of divisions of labor that, through infrastructure, can be reproduced at global scales. the arrangement of immaterial workers – microworkers and the programmers who employ them – in amt suggests two complications to accounts of immaterial labor: first, immaterial labor can only be produced through material, computational and spatial infrastructures; second, the vast discursive, technological, and economic separations by which workers and amt programmers are constituted complicate hopes for solidarity among immaterial laborers. keywords crowdsourcing, amazon mechanical turk, gender, labor, infrastructure introduction ‘you've heard of software-as-a-service. well this is human-as-a-service.’ – jeff bezos announcing amazon mechanical turk in 2006 in 2006, the ceo of amazon addressed an auditorium of technologists, reporters, and professors. the (mostly) men in the room had assembled at mit – a symbolic and well-funded space of elite technological production – to hear the technology review keynote and to hear ‘what’s next;’ the mit technology review emerging technologies conference convened significant technocultural clout, torquing investments and setting agendas. bezos, known to many as an online retail wizard, spoke on stage to introduce a series of technology infrastructures that would come to be known as ‘cloud computing.’ among the centralized data storage and data processing services offered from amazon’s data centers, bezos introduced a twist on digital data services. amazon mechanical turk, would enable technology builders to farm out massive volumes of small data processing tasks, including transcriptions, image labeling, pornography categorization, and informational research tasks. the body of computers doing this work would be not legion microchips, but rather legion human workers scattered across the world. amazon’s services, in turn, would put these tasks in a an online marketplace at the price set by the client; there, thousands of people at their computers all over the world would connect to amazon to pick out and perform these tasks. like ‘cloud computing’ services more generally, mechanical turk offered immediate, on-demand provisioning of computational power accessible through computer code. in this case, however, the computational power was human. in years since, the crowdsourcing sector has grown with the appearance of a number of new companies: samasource, a crowdsourcing company that hires as a form of socioeconomic selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 development; mobileworks hires woman in india but promises living wages; cloudfactory, a company operated by americans in nepal, offers visual interfaces for ‘programming’ human data processing done by a nepali workforce. these services, along with amazon mechanical turk, assemble cognitive pieceworkers in service of employers and their computer systems. the pieceworkers work on tasks in batches; the employers can put these batches out automatedly through computer code they write. the infrastructural work of making people’s labors accessible as computerinvokable resources does ideological work in emphasizing crowdsourcing as a tool for technological innovation, rather than a new form of factory organization. related work this paper focuses on amazon mechanical turk as an emblematic case of microwork crowdsourcing. in new media studies, research on crowdsourcing and related phenomenon have interrogated how value accumulates through web and crowdsourcing practices. for example, fish and srinivasan argue that crowdsourcing systems employ low-paid or unpaid workers for work that that produces surplus value by those commissioning the work (fish & srinivasan 2011). gehl argues that the web 2.0 users essentially function as data processors, annotating and evaluating the deluge of data stored in the web’s archives; gehl argues that those who own and organize the archive deploy epistemological and financial power (gehl 2011). these authors focus on how large-scale data processing systems distribute the power to capitalize on the labors that constitute them. a second strain of work asks of the desirability and fairness of microwork created and performed in crowdsourcing systems. zittrain suggests that crowdsourcing systems create workers who often do not know the trajectories and purposes of the larger products for which they labor; the crowdsourced worker cannot, in this argument, be a self-possessed ethical actor (2009). horton surveys workers and argues that workers by and large find employers on amt to treat them more fairly than offline employers (2011). fish and srinivasan direct researchers to ask not only of contractual fairness, but of the creativity and agency workers can display in their jobs. both strains of research – that focused on accrual of value and that focused on fairness – inquire into the qualities and ethics of crowdsourced microwork. these questions are crucial but this paper takes a different tack. infrastructuring microworkers and producing hacker subjectivity at the last crowdsourcing industry conference i attended in san francisco, a number of microwork startups organized a crowdhack – an event where organizers fueled programmers with food, air conditioning, wi-fi, and electricity. several teams spent the day intensely coding, absorbing the energy of their fellow hackers, and developing prototypes of computer applications incorporating human computation. a panel of crowdsourcing company employees chose winning applications that demonstrated the potential of human computation as technological infrastructure. applications included a weather mapping service based on crowd generated weather observations, an application that asked the crowd to judge moles for signs of melanoma, and even an application that paid workers in india to go outside and remove trash from the street. coleman (2010: 52-53) argues that hacker conferences are a ‘ritual condensation and celebration of a lifeworld’ in which hacker life is lifted out of its routines, reorganized, and intensified to achieve personal transformation and group solidarity. viewing the crowdhack through this lens, we see that hackathons are not only about the production of software technologies, but also a site where masculine technological peer prodcution is staged through the infrastructuring of tens of thousands of microlaborers. assembled at the hackathon are the ‘innovators’ – the engineers, the designers; at hand but at a distance, the crowdworkers are present only when summoned as task requests and data inputs into the code the programmers write. the bodies of microworkers are not in the room. within the copresent space of the hackathon, programmers act out optimistic ‘making’ in a space where they see only their peers. the divisions and distancing of labor made possible through crowdsourcing, then, serve ideological purposes. in the extended paper, i will show how these ideological purposes are key to the appeal of crowdsourcing. distancing contingent workers behind a minimal interface or behind lines of code fits selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 them into existing organizational ethos in new media production (see turner 2009; turner 2006). this paper draws from infrastructure studies (bowker & star 1999; star & strauss 1999) and feminist sts (suchman 2006; nakamura & haraway 2003) to ask what kinds of relationships do infrastructures promise between users – here, the employers – and the infrastructural technology – here, the workers or ‘human-as-a-service’? by investigating together the workers, employers, and the technologies that make their relations possible, this paper takes a sociotechnical approach (see niederer & van dijck 2010). crowdsourcing systems, we will show, are mechanisms not only for getting tasks done, but for producing difference between ‘innovative’ laborers and menial laborers – differences that build on old and gendered of divisions of labor that, through infrastructure, can be reproduced at global scales. acknowledgments this work was supported by nsf graduate research fellowship and nsf award 1025761. thanks to six silberman, geof bowker, paul dourish, melissa mazmanian, marisa cohn, kavita philip, fred turner, and anonymous reviewers for their reading and feedback on earlier versions of this work. references bowker, g. & star, s.l. (1999) sorting things out. cambridge, ma: mit press fish, a. and srinivasan, r. (2011) digital labor is the new killer app. new media & society, 14(1): 137-152. gehl, r.w. (2011) the archive and the processor: the internal logic of web 2.0. new media & society, 13(8):1228-1244. horton, j. (2011) the condition of the turking class: are online employers fair and honest? economic letters, 111(1), 10-12. nakamura, l., haraway, d. (2003) ‘prospects for a materialist informatics: an interview with donna haraway.’ electronic book review. available at http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/interview niederer, s., & van dijck, j. (2010). wisdom of the crowd or technicity of content? wikipedia as a sociotechnical system. new media & society, 12(8), 1368-1387. star, s.l. & strauss, a. (1999) layers of silence, arenas of voice: the ecology of visible and invisible work. computer supported cooperative work (cscw), 8(1), 9-30. suchman, l.a. (2006) human-machine reconfigurations. cambridge: cambridge university press. turner, f. (2006) from counterculture to cyberculture: stewart brand, the whole earth network, and the rise of digital utopianism. chicago: university of chicago press. turner, f. (2009) burning man at google: a cultural infrastructure for new media. new media & society, 11, 7394. zittrain, j (2009) minds for sale. available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dw3h-rae3uo (accessed june 7, 2012). license this article is ©2013 lilly irani, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. (authors may use any license they prefer, or none at all.) selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 the grunt work of geek hobbyists: incentivizing administrative labor in virtual world building aleena l. chia communication and culture indiana university bloomington, indiana, usa achia@indiana.edu abstract this paper demonstrates the flows and disjunctures in intersecting systems of administrative labor, which are voluntary and networked, and which collectively sustain communities of gamers engaged in a roleplaying property in digital, tabletop, live-action forms. i will use ethnographic engagement with actors and artifacts in a variety of digital and material settings, to argue that the communicative labor of roleplaying gamers is comprised of content creation and infrastructure maintenance – the administrative grunt work of sustaining an emergent fictional world and its attendant communities of practice. accordingly, content and infrastructure, as well as its fiction and sociality, feed ambivalently off each other in asymmetric ways, taking the form of an incentive scheme that interlocks democratic and meritocratic organizational logics in contradictory yet productive ways. crucially for communicative labor debates, hobbyist paradigms adopted by geek communities of practice translate assessments about labor and expropriation into discourses about contribution and identity. keywords digital labor; ethnography of infrastructure; geek culture; massively multiplayer online games this paper addresses negotiations within gaming communities and with corporations in virtual world building as a way to assess modes of engagement based not just on competition and commodity exchange, but also on complementarity and mutual obligation. it is based on a year of participant observation with the mind's eye society, a non-profit organization of over 3500 live-action role players who participate within the same narrative continuity and who have organized nationally to negotiate with the transnational company responsible for extending a transmedia gaming property saturated with up to twenty years of affective, social, and material investments from books, television, and video games, to an upcoming mmo. participant observation and interviews at gaming and industry events in cities on the east coast, canada and iceland, as well as virtual ethnography (hine, 2000) of adjacent online communities associated with the gaming property allow me to theorize the mutual adaptations between a kind of civic subjectivity and corporate governance in and around virtual world gaming, as they unfold against post-fordist frameworks of productivity in which productive and consumptive practices and identities merge in diverse and unpredictable ways. i assess the challenges and opportunities of such a model of engagement as it develops within, through, and in relation to bureaucratic systems such as interest-based non-profit organizations and technical systems such as massively multiplayer online games. my ethnographic case suggests that members of this non-profit organization see their gaming practices as forms of civic engagement in which the spaces and rhythms of narrative worlds are tethered to the formal administrative structures and less formal practices, rituals, and networks of associational life – which collectively form the vital infrastructure of this community of practice (lave & wenger, 1991). on the one hand, this associational life is governed by frameworks of representative democracy and ideals of collective decision-making. on the other hand, these trademarked narrative worlds are built around social hierarchies designed to incentivize a spectrum of volunteer contributions vital to the npo’s functioning and identity. this associational life (puntnam, 2000) is governed by formal frameworks of representative democracy codified in organizational bylaws, ideals of collective decision-making (in relation to overall direction of the organization) codified in the membership handbook, and rules of civility and selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 accountability codified in a code of conduct. there seems to be a tension between these stated ideals and frameworks and a rigid chain of command in relation to daily operations. in addition to administrative efforts to exist as a npo, and logistical efforts to enable physical meetings of small and large scale, a lot of volunteer effort is expended on cohesive storytelling that integrates coordinators and storytellers in 51 regions, who report to 8 regional coordinators, who report to 1 national coordinator. it is this cohesive storytelling that allows members to travel to other games while participating as the same character in a consistent narrative universe. unsurprisingly, this takes layers of networked administrative tools (such as forms, briefs, reports, and databases) for standardization, systematization, and integration. this process of scaling up to their current size has been met with increasingly volunteer burnout and overall attrition the club has been shrinking for years. perhaps recognizing the immense efforts required for its existence, the organization has formal social hierarchies designed to incentivize a spectrum of volunteer contributions. this incentivization system is interesting because of its creation in associational life as reward for volunteer efforts, which is translated into power in the narrative worlds. this incentive system forms the formal currency that crosses clearly demarcated associational-narrative boundaries; a more informal currency is that of social and cultural capital which are partially validated through semi-formal practices of peer evaluation and which translate into both rank within the association and power within the narrative worlds. notably, both associational and narrative levels of engagement are distinct yet integrated, and are collectively sustained by a community of practice that uses the tensions between democratic and meritocratic governance to fuel interest and participation in its activities. these gaming practices exist within frameworks of productivity where the dichotomy of consumption and production – long problematized by scholars who described consumer capitalism as an integrative circuit where the corollary of productive labor is the national responsibility to consume (mumford, 1967) – becomes indistinct. this circuit is further integrated under post-fordist informational capitalism (bell, 1973), where cultures of workplaces in knowledge industries takes on play-like qualities such as flexibility, autonomy, (castells, 2009) and expectations of psychological fulfillment (florida, 2002). conversely, consumption takes on work-like qualities, such as repetitiveness, entrepreneurship, and promises of monetary compensation (kücklich, 2005). this hybridity sets the scene for practices of collaborative storytelling where playful work and professional play feed and flow into each other within corporate strategies, industry blueprints, sociotechnical systems, and human lifeworlds. however, according to theorists of immaterial labor, these frameworks of productivity do not simply capture flows between processes and synergies between purposes. they also attempt to contain the disparities and disconnections endemic to a capitalism which pries economic value from the interstices of consumption and production, which rationalizes all spheres of human experience, which integrates the subject burdened by the necessity of labor and responsibility of consumption more tightly into the circuits of capital, so much so that life itself is put to work (zwick et al, 2008). these tensions are however complicated by the norms of a hobby-oriented way of life adopted by self identifying science fiction, fantasy, and gaming geeks, for whom a spectrum of activities such as fan practices and multi-platform gaming entail unpaid work to be fun and require paid work to defray costs. for members of the npo, this hobby-oriented way of life is taken for granted, and renders dichotomies of labor and leisure, expropriation and exchange irrelevant. instead, geek hobbyists experience content and infrastructure as inextricable – both of which are understood not as labor or leisure, but as necessary contributions for the perpetuation of their individual and collective identities, as well as of their whole way of life. this community of practice and its engine for unpaid labor now seems to be the model for community development adopted by the game company for adaptation to their upcoming massively multiplayer game. however, tensions have arisen as the npo negotiates its place within a proprietary virtual world in which self-governance and corporate governance will necessarily overlap. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 acknowledgments this work was supported by the wenner-gren foundation’s dissertation fieldwork grant. references (arial 10, bold, aligned left, single line, 12pt before 0pt after) bell, d. (1973). the coming of post-industrial society; a venture in social forecasting. new york: basic books. castells, m. (1996). the rise of the network society. malden: blackwell publishers. florida, r. l. (2004). the rise of the creative class: and how it's transforming work, leisure, community and everyday life. new york: basic books. hine, c. (2000). virtual ethnography. london: thousand oaks. kücklich, j. (2005). precarious playbour: modders and the digital games industry." the fibreculture journal (5). lave, j. & wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. mumford, l. (1967). the myth of the machine. new york: harcourt. putnam, r. (2001) bowling alone: the collapse and revival of american community. new york: simon & schuster. zwick, d. & s. bonsu, et al. (2008). putting consumers to work: 'co-creation' and the new marketing govern-mentality. journal of consumer culture 8(2): 163-197. doi: 10.1177/1469540508090089 license this article is ©2013 aleena l. chia, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 invisible work, visible success: paraguay educa’s hidden labor for one laptop per child morgan g. ames informatics and computer science university of california, irvine irvine, california, usa aoir@morganya.org abstract this paper discusses the social and technical labor that has gone into making the one laptop per child project in paraguay a relative success, as well as some of the ongoing challenges the project faces. this labor is juxtaposed against the practice of naturalizing computer use to visitors, matching what they expect to see, but downplaying the significant and ongoing labor that must be invested in projects like this to achieve even incremental results. this juxtaposition suggests that such practices, though common in educational reform and development projects, ultimately undermine the success of these projects by not calling attention to the behind-the-scenes infrastructural investments, the realistic scope of progress, or the ongoing challenges the project faces. keywords olpc; sociotechnical infrastructure; development project; invisible labor. introduction the one laptop per child (olpc) project represents one of the largest experiments in laptop-driven learning currently underway. hailing from the mit media lab, roughly 2.5 million of olpc’s “xo” laptops are in use around the world today, 85% of them in latin america. though failing to reach its goals of hundreds of millions of laptops in use, the project is credited for launching the “netbook” movement, inspiring many spin-offs, and drawing attention to global education and development debates. in 2008, two paraguayans founded paraguay educa to bring olpc’s distinctive laptops to their country. though suffering some initial setbacks, they secured funding to purchase and distribute 4000 olpc xos to every student and teacher in ten schools in a small town 50 kilometers east of the capital asunción in april 2009. they expanded to 9000 laptops in 36 schools – all public and private schools in the area – in may 2011. in september 2008, they explained their hopes for the project in a local newspaper (abc color staff, 2008). their vision of creating technologically savvy, passionate learners with their own laptops was largely drawn from olpc’s own promotional materials (olpc staff, 2011). paraguay educa and olpc agreed in 2008 that olpc’s “xo” laptop could itself make up for the lack of local educational opportunities and produce children who are adept at the kind of mathematical and critical thinking valued in computer engineering cultures (negroponte & bender, 2007; papert, 1993). in this view, the computer itself had the power to change a learning culture via the individual interactions between itself and a child (papert, 1980, pp. 9, 37). i interrogate this vision based on ethnographic fieldwork of paraguay educa’s project in 2010. i observed classrooms several days each week, visited the homes of students, attended local meetings and events, and conducted 133 interviews in spanish and guaraní with students, parents, teachers, and other local actors. i supplemented this fieldwork with laptop usage and breakage reports, attendance records, and scores on a cognitive exam of reading and mathematics, as well as visits to the larger olpc projects in uruguay and peru. paraguay educa’s infrastructural work selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 how independent could olpc’s laptop be as an educational tool? by the accounts of researchers and journalists, the projects of 15,000 laptops in birmingham, alabama (warschauer, cotten, & ames, 2011) and 980,000 laptops in peru (cristia, cueto, ibarraran, santiago, & severin, 2012; derndorfer, 2010) have struggled from the lack of social and infrastructural investment beyond handing out the laptops themselves. in many schools in these areas the laptops are not used at all, suggesting that more is needed than just the laptops to promote learning or even use. paraguay educa chose a different path, investing in significant infrastructural resources from the start. schools lacked computers, printers, copiers, projectors, intercom systems, or even classroom power outlets before the project started. paraguay educa cooperated with local government, schools, businesses, and volunteers to install a power outlet in each classroom to charge laptops,1 a desktop computer as a “school server” (placed in a cage to prevent theft), wireless routers (also placed in cages, though this reduced their range), and wimax antennae on a narrow towers of welded steel trusses in cooperation with personal telecom, who donated connectivity to the project. paraguay was also one of the few projects that contributed to the development of olpc’s primary software distribution, led by one of the co-founders, a talented programmer. the most difficult part of the technical infrastructure to procure was laptop repair parts: olpc did not sell them, so paraguay educa purchased a small supply from uruguay, who had in turn purchased them from the manufacturer directly. because laptops were owned by students, not all could afford repair parts, and some of the more commonly broken parts, especially chargers and screens, were unavailable. social support proved more complicated. an initial teacher training session in december 2008 (paraguay educa staff, 2008) provided teachers with more training than most olpc projects, but still left them struggling with even basic operations (warschauer & ames 2010) and with few ideas for how to use the laptops in the classroom. one school director said that she and her colleagues “thought the laptops were just a toy for games,” especially when they saw their students and their own children using them to consume media off the internet, if at all. as a result, even with teacher training, the laptops were not used much during the first year. paraguay educa saw that the laptop was not by itself sparking the kinds of exploration they had hoped for, and in summer 2010 hired full-time trainers to help teachers use the xo in the classroom. having full-time trainers in every school stimulated classroom laptop usage, according to teachers’ and students’ usage reports, my own observations, and teachers’ recollections at the end of the 2010 school year. even with two adults, one experienced, in the classroom, teachers often found the laptops frustrating to use, due to broken hardware and missing software. instead of using the more innovating programs on the laptop, such as scratch or turtle art, many used programs like write or paint that could easily be replaced with pencil and paper for students who did not have a charged and working laptop in class for the lesson. rendering work invisible despite the significant amount of sociotechnical infrastructure put in place by paraguay educa for the project, the narrative that was presented to visitors was one of “natural” success. when a high-ranking official visited paraguay educa in october 2010, several months into my fieldwork, his school visit was padded with the best students across all schools and enjoyed a student-teacher ratio of less than 2:1, not the more common 20:1. his visit made apparent the problems with first impressions and staged events by providing evidence of participants’ desires to perform success to visitors. 1 olpc founder negroponte boasted in 2005 that the then-unfinished xo laptops could be charged by an integrated hand crank and even showed off a non-working mock-up with one, but the hand crank was never included on any production machine. all xo laptops i encountered were charged with ac adapters that shipped with the laptops. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 this desire in part stems from the pressure on development projects to set and then achieve unrealistically high goals. unfortunately, olpc and paraguay educa both, along with many ngos and nonprofits, are caught in a catch-22: they must set lofty, but often unrealistic, goals and to attract the interest of investors. myopic projects are often rewarded under this model, while sustained investments in the local community and the ongoing success of the project – as paraguay educa is actually providing – are not. moreover, the complexities and difficulties of projects like paraguay educa’s are hidden away, as well as the real incremental progress they are making, which would seem paltry in the face of hyperbolic promises. this research suggests another course, honestly acknowledging sites for improvement as well as the tremendous amount of work – social, infrastructural, and ideological – needed to produce even incremental social change. as ngos take on more functions formerly expected of states in many parts of the world (ferguson, 2006), moderating expectations, promoting transparency (as this research strives to do), and learning from “failures” become ever more important. acknowledgments much thanks to paraguay educa and all of the participants in paraguay for their gracious assistance throughout my research, as well as to my advisors and mentors at stanford university for guiding my investigation and analysis. references abc color staff. (2008, september 25). el proyecto “una laptop por niño” comenzará a funcionar en paraguay. abc color. cristia, j., cueto, s., ibarraran, p., santiago, a., & severin, e. (2012). technology and child development: evidence from the one laptop per child program. derndorfer, c. (2010). olpc in peru: a problematic una laptop por niño program. education technology debate. retrieved from https://edutechdebate.org/olpc-in-south-america/olpc-in-peru-one-laptop-perchild-problems/ ferguson, j. (2006). global shadows: africa in the neoliberal world order. duke university press. negroponte, n., & bender, w. (2007). the new $100 computer. world bank group. retrieved from http://www.olpctalks.com/nicholas_negroponte/negroponte_world_bank_group.html olpc staff. (2011). hardware uniqueness. olpc wiki. retrieved from http://wiki.laptop.org/go/hardware_uniqueness olpc staff. (2012). olpc principles and basic information. olpc wiki. retrieved from http://wiki.laptop.org/go/olpc_principles_and_basic_information papert, s. (1980). mindstorms: children, computers, and powerful ideas (p. 230). new york: basic books, inc. papert, s. (1993). the children’s machine: rethinking school in the age of the computer (p. 242). new york: basic books. paraguay educa staff. (2008). recursos capacitaciones. paraguay educa wiki. retrieved from http://wiki.paraguayeduca.org/index.php/recursos_capacitaciones warschauer, m., & ames, m. g. (2010). can one laptop per child save the world’s poor? journal of international affairs, 64(1), 33–51. warschauer, m., cotten, s. r., & ames, m. g. (2011). one laptop per child birmingham: case study of a radical experiment. international journal of learning and media, 3(2), 61–76. license this article is ©2013 morgan ames. all rights reserved. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 recognizing invisible infrastructure: data centers and hurricane sandy megan finn microsoft research new england usa megfinn@gmail.com ashwin mathew uc berkeley usa ashwin@ischool.berkeley.edu kate crawford microsoft research new england usa kate@microsoft.com abstract the impact of hurricane sandy in october 2012 on data centers in manhattan forced a reconsideration of internet infrastructure, its capacities and vulnerabilities. in this paper we consider data centers which were in “zone a” — the flooded parts of lower manhattan that lost electric power. data centers constitute part of the internet that is invisible to internet users, but for data center workers they are a place of . sandy revealed the extraordinary labor required to keep a data center running during a disaster, as some workers ate and slept at data centers. additionally, what data centers operators might consider infrastructure, buildings and power, became unreliable during sandy when building basements flooded, ruining back-up generator fuel pumps, and data center the operators could not get fuel. this paper considers the type of “care work” required in data centers, and analyses the unstable parts of data center infrastructures that became more visible during sandy. keywords cyberinfrastructure; data centers; labor; disasters; information labor. introduction during the peak of hurricane sandy, if you visited sites such as huffington post, gawker, or buzzfeed, you would have been diverted to emergency backups and limited temporary sites: these services were “down.” huffington post continued reporting on the storm and on the impact of the storm using other media: “we're having technical difficulties due to power outages. working to get site back up. newsroom still monitoring #sandy. will keep tweeting.”1 datagram inc. hosts parts of the huffington post website. datagram had offices located at 33 whitehall street in lower manhattan, inside of the area flooded by hurricane sandy. many buildings, including 33 whitehall lost power after hurricane sandy. it is routine for data centers to have a lot of redundancy, including redundancy of power. so after the power was shut down, datagram successfully used their backup diesel power generators. however, the generators relied upon fuel pumps and other electrical equipment that were located in the basement of the building, which was eventually flooded, cutting off all power, making it impossible for datagram to run as expected. although it was unusual for a data center such as datagram to go down, the breakage made visible the various companies, laborers, and physical infrastructures that underpin a widely read site like huffington post. the vast number and complexity of data centers is generally obscured from everyday interactions with the internet. these data centers are part of the “information infrastructure” that are “pervasive enabling resources” for the internet (e.g. bowker et al, 2010: 98). a quality of information infrastructure is its transparency. researchers have observed that information infrastructure “becomes visible upon breakdown,” suggesting that looking at infrastructures during disasters could be used as a 1  @huffingtonpost, twitter, october 30, 2012.   selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 “method” for “seeing” infrastructure (star, 1999: 382). datagram is supposed to be invisible to huffington post readers, but sandy made this data center part of the news when its power went out, as people tried to understand why typically reliable nodes of the internet were vulnerable.2 data center labor data centers are designed with the aim of never going down, or at least, to have sufficient redundancy such that any outage will not be visible. a challenge for data centers is temperature — computers both generate a lot of heat and work best at certain temperatures. both computing and cooling are costly, and data centers are often measured by how much electric power they consume in ratings such as “power usage effectiveness” or “pue.” data centers are also rated on how reliable and redundant their equipment is. for example, the highest rating for a data center is “tier iv.” a tier iv data center is said to be “2n” because it has two independent power and cooling sources. these ratings and pue highlight the design of data center facilities. beyond physical facility design, sandy showcased the centrality of human labor in keeping the data centers operable. for some data centers, there are specific procedures for acute events like hurricane sandy. remote employees of data centers may be flown to a data center location to stay at nearby hotels so that local employees did not have to leave their families and communities. this practice differed by company such that some companies relied exclusively on local staff. as we learned from our observation work at data center operator meetings, data center executives felt that getting employees to nearby hotels during sandy was not enough, as nearby roads can be blocked with trees and debris, stopping workers from getting to the data center. thus, many data center operators said that having food on hand to feed data center workers who would stay overnight during hurricane sandy was one of their main “lessons learned.” while data center operators focused on getting employees to the work sites, data center workers had work under extraordinary circumstances to keep their centers up and running. for local employees, staying at the data center meant time away from their own homes. one data center executive said, “we appreciate the commitment and dedication from our staff, many of whom have left their families and homes to keep our data centers safe and operational.”3 our research considers how the labor involved in the kind of 24-hours a day maintenance required for data centers can be understood within the history of “care work” (e.g. england, 2005) which is often gendered as ‘women’s work’, while data centers are very maledominated workplaces. the kinds of selfless dedication to the needs of others, in this case the data needs of clients and the wider internet, raises interesting new perspectives on care work and data labor. data center infrastructure the term “data center” covers many different types of companies, labor, and machine configurations. in the most abstract sense, data centers can be thought of as places that house machines — many computers that store data or serve web pages. some companies (such as google or microsoft) own their own data centers. other companies rent space for their computers in spaces owned by other companies, like datagram. and other companies, like huffington post rent the machines from datagram who rent space in 33 whitehall. if a company owned the building that their computers were housed in, they would have control over the design of all aspects of a data center, especially electrical wiring, but this is not always the case. 2  pavley, john (2012) ‘huffpost cto on how hurricane sandy took down the huffington post’, video interview, 30 october, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/30/huffpost-cto-on-how-hurri_n_2044667.html?utm_hp_ref=tw (accessed march 13 2013)     3 rich miller, “generators keep nj data centers humming,” october 30, 2012, data center knowledge, accessed november 14, 2012 from http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/10/30/generators-keep-nj-data-centersonline/. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 the relationships between the data centers and the owners of buildings, what were considered “infrastructure” by data center operators, were tested after sandy. one of the most widely discussed stories involved a building in zone a on 75 broad street that housed several data centers, including one owned by peer1. during sandy, the basement of 75 broad street was flooded. though the backup generators were on the roof, the fuel pumps were stored in the basement and so the fuel pumps did not work after the basement was flooded. customers of peer1 worked along with day laborers to carry fuel up seventeen flights of stairs for the generator.4 these workers were essentially performing part of the data center infrastructure. getting fuel for generators became a problem for data centers that were not flooded as well. ports were closed, roads were blocked, and the gas and diesel stations that were open had long lines. one company bought a fuel truck in texas, and had the driver fill the truck and drive it to the data center site, so that there was back up fuel available.5 while data centers designers spend a lot of effort considering where power is coming from, the storm asked them to reconsider the limits of infrastructure, both human and non-human, during and after a disaster event. method this paper uses multiple sources to construct an archive about what happened to data centers and their workers during hurricane sandy. we have four types of primary sources we draw from: data center discussion boards, blogs, podcasts, and the data center trade presses; and data center operator conferences. references bowker, geoffrey c., karen baker, florence millerand, and david ribes (2010). toward information infrastructure studies: ways of knowing in a networked environment.. international handbook of internet research, ed. j. hunsinger et al., new york: springer science+business media b.v. england, paula (2005). emerging theories of care work. annual review of sociology 31:381-399. star, susan leigh (1999). the ethnography of infrastructure. american behavioral scientist 43(3): 377-391. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. (authors may use any license they prefer, or none at all.) 4  alex miller and guests, “se podcast #36 – we got hit by a hurricane,” november 9, 2012, stack exchange, accessed november 14, 2012 from http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/11/se-podcast-36-we-got-hit-by-a-hurricane/   5   michael   parks,   “superstorm   sandy:   infrastructure   impacts,”   meeting   of   north   american   network   operators   group,   february  4,  2013,  orlando  florida.   invisible internet infrastructure labor final panel abstract yeo_search_engine_6_26_aoir2013 making-moocs5 ir14-material-labor-panel_mathew abstract keywords introduction method ordering the internet conclusion references irani extended abstract microwork 2 chia aoir ames aoir megan panel data centers and sandy v3 selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 more than meets the eyes: the lens of visibility in internet research panel overview the objective of this panel is to examine the analytical and empirical relevance of the “visibility lens” for internet research. just over a decade ago, media researchers have started to take a specific interest in the constitutive role of mediated visibility in the organization of social reality. for example, brighenti (2007) discussed the relevance of analyzing social phenomena through the lens of visibility as a unifying analytical category, positing its centrality in the sustainment of social processes such as recognition and control. for his part, thompson (2005) defined visibility as a doubleedged sword to showcase how it can be weaponized as a useful tool to both gain power or cause harm. he also addressed how mediated visibility afforded by digital media technologies blurred the traditional boundaries between public and private life (thompson, 2011). these reflections highlight the intricacies of in/visibility regimes. indeed, being visible can be associated with the procurement of power, while being denied visibility can be the result of social exclusion. alternatively, gaining unwanted visibility can constitute a liability, while remaining invisible can also be a privilege (myles & trottier, 2017). thus, the activation of selected in/visibilities must always be understood as being highly situated (brighenti, 2007) and cannot be understood outside of the power dynamics that sustain it (heinich, 2012; voirol, 2005). since then, there has been an increasing interest in the concept of visibility within the field of internet research. studies have so far focused on the role of mediated visibility in relation to activist engagement, political mobilization, and public debate; internet governance and policy-making; the constitution or disarrangement of publics; organizational transparency; emerging forms of gender and sexual identities; the legitimacy of work and professional identities; the production and sharing of knowledge and information; surveillance processes and related forms of vigilantism; and social relations and context collapse. overall, studies have underlined the fundamental role of visibility afforded by digital media technologies in the social recognition or exclusion of individuals, groups, and communities. they have also identified visibility and its management as being constitutive of social identities, relations, and practices among actors in a variety of fields. consequently, internet researchers have so far provided various definitions and operationalizations of mediated visibility. for example, yang (2016) defines visibility as a dual concept that can be apprehended as both a political lever for individuals and collectives, as well as a conceptual category for researchers to make sense of social reality. mediated visibility is also frequently associated with digital materiality. as such, it is sometimes used as a criterion to categorize digital media technologies regarding the control they allow for users to manage and disclose personal contents or activities (bregman & haythornthwaite, 2003; cardon, 2008; stenger & coutant, 2013). furthermore, visibility is also conceptualized as an affordance that is enabled by the functionalities of digital media technologies and enacted through their situated uses (bucher, 2012; treem & leonardi, 2013). in this panel, presenters are first invited to examine how visibility is mediated through digital media technologies by exploring a series of case studies on the social recognition of identity minorities, on the online presence of mundane work practices, on digital vigilantism, as well as on hackers and their practices of concealment. they are also encouraged to raise theoretical, methodological, and ethical issues linked to the conduction of such inquiries. then, this panel seeks to draw similarities and contrasts between each case study, as well as to discus the implications and, indeed, the relevance of formalizing the lens of visibility in the field of internet research. references bregman, a., & haythornthwaite, c. (2003). radicals of presentation: visibility, relation, and co-presence in persistent conversation. new media & society, 5(1), 117-140. brighenti, a. (2007). visibility: a category for the social sciences. current sociology, 55(3), 323-342. bucher, t. (2012). want to be on the top? algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on facebook. new media & society, 14(7), 1164-1180. cambridge: polity press. cardon, d. (2008). le design de la visibilité. réseaux, (6), 93-137. heinich, n. (2012). de la visibilité: excellence et singularité en régime médiatique. gallimard. myles, d., & trottier, d. (2017). leveraging visibility, gaining capital? social media+ society, 3(1), 2056305117691998. stenger, t., & coutant, a. (2013). médias sociaux: clarification et cartographie pour une approche sociotechnique. décisions marketing, 107-117. thompson, j. b. (2005). the new visibility. theory, culture & society, 22(6), 31-51. thompson, j. b. (2011). shifting boundaries of public and private life. theory, culture & society, 28(4), 49-70. treem, j. w., & leonardi, p. m. (2013). social media use in organizations. annals of the international communication association, 36(1), 143-189. voirol, o. (2005). les luttes pour la visibilité. réseaux, (1), 89-121. yang, f. (2016). rethinking china’s internet censorship: the practice of recoding and the politics of visibility. new media & society, 18(7), 1364-1381. 1. digital visibility and power struggles among identity minorities: can the use of social media sustain agency? mélanie millette université du québec à montréal in the past decade, digital media technologies like facebook, tumblr, or blogs have contributed to important changes in the landscape of communication, insofar as ordinary citizens and their online activities now have the potential to become massively visible. in the context of such mutations, this paper addresses the possibilities and constraints afforded by the internet to citizens who wish to gain agency as political actors and increase the visibility of their demands, ideas, and beliefs through the use of social media platforms (dahlberg, 2011). as brighenti (2010) argues, visibility is embedded in power dynamics that effectively woven the social fabric. visibility allows the creation of “objects”, the opening of possibilities, as well as the fostering of new relationships. its opposite – invisibility – can (but not always) annihilate possibilities for citizens and researchers alike, since “what is not seen is not thematized as an object in the domain of action” and the state of being “invisible is what is here without being an object” (brighenti, 2007: 328). defined as such, the realm of visibility opens the scope of constructivism: the subjective ways of looking at oneself, the ways that objects or subjects become perceptible, and the shared significations that ensue are constitutive of social reality and contribute to producing and reproducing power dynamics. in turn, this underlines the importance of understanding visibility from a political perspective as it affects the ways in which “reality” is represented, decoded, and defined. during this presentation, we will examine the possibilities that visibility allows for identity minorities who acquire it by and for themselves. specifically, we will ask: how can visibility foster or improve social recognition for minority groups of citizens and, ultimately, how can it develop agency (or fail to do so)? in the literature, studies on alternative, community, or radical media have underlined the necessity of fostering new forms of visibility for individuals and collectives who have been excluded from dominant mass media (fenton & peschanski 2007; lievrouw 2011). as we will argue, social media platforms offer possibilities to minority groups to be “heard” in the public sphere, notably by participating to the constitution of counterpublics (fraser, 1990), but also through an array of sociotechnical practices and strategies. at the intersection of social media studies (millerand et al., 2010; papacharissi, 2010; proulx et al. 2012), of reflections on mediated visibility (thompson, 2005; voirol, 2005) and of critical analyses regarding the notion of “public sphere” (fraser, 1990), we will address the power dynamics that are inherently linked to digital visibility among identity minorities and focus on how such visibility can potentially sustain agency. to examine this phenomenon, we will draw from two empirical studies. first, we will present the results from a study conducted among french-canadian groups outside of québec that are part of communities whose identity, language, and culture are minoritized. we will specifically address how these communities invest social media platforms to express, claim, and legitimized their own identities. second, we will draw from the preliminary findings of our current research on lgbtq+ communities in québec who also use social media platforms to formulate and vocalize political demands within the public sphere or, alternatively, to constitute safe spaces that allow their members to meet in restricted and controlled settings. in both case studies, we developed methods that rely on mixed data analysis, while keeping a resolutely qualitative stance. drawing from ethnographic approaches, we performed ongoing online participant observation, extracted data on various social media platforms (publications, comments, tweets, etc.), and conducted individual interviews. for this presentation, we will specifically underline the emerging similarities and contrasts between both studies’ results, which reveal how the use of social media platforms now occupies a central place in the repertoire of everyday citizen actions that are mobilized to participate politically and to “exist” socially in contemporary societies. we will discuss the various “visibilizing” strategies used by collectives who either exploit or divert the affordances of social media platforms to attain their goals, like calling out elected officials and promoting a part of their identity publicly, on the one hand, or remaining invisible to foster social support and to freely express social, political, or cultural beliefs without the fear of being persecuted on the other. indeed, our results suggest that being granted (unwarranted) visibility can also be associated with violence and oppression, which explains the development of ingenious strategies to segregate publics and generally manage digital visibility. to conclude, this presentation will also argue that, in order to truly participate in the sustainment of agency among identity minorities, digital visibility must at least respect three criteria. first, visibility must be accompanied by sociotechnical competency, which refers to a technical, cognitive, and communicative know-how that allows individuals to master and craftily exploit social media platforms (among other digital media technologies). second, digital visibility must take shape and be enacted within a specific collectivity or community. as such, individual uses of the internet that result from a minority status sometimes aim to find common folks to meet personal socio-affective needs, while others sustain relational or associative goals. these endeavours can remain rather informal and take shape through the sharing of personal testimonials, or even formally result in political organizing (like the constitution of counterpublics). third, for digital visibility to truly sustain agency, it must lead to a form of social recognition from the other(s) (honneth, 2005), by which we mean the individuals or collectives (may they be peers, elected officials, etc.) who are in a majority or dominant position. we argue that it is only when these three levels are experienced that digital visibility can positively be associated with the sustainment of agency among identity minorities. ultimately, while our two case studies may focus on very different fields, both can help us illustrate the intricacies of the power dynamics that are inherently linked to digital visibility and its enactment in contemporary societies. references brighenti, a. (2007). visibility: a category for the social sciences. current sociology, 55(3), 323-342. brighenti, a. m. (2010). visibility in social theory and social research. springer. dahlberg, l. (2011). re-constructing digital democracy: an outline of four ‘positions’. new media & society, 13(6), 855-872. fenton, n. et peschanski, j. a. (2007). mainstream media or alternative media ? in k. coyer, t. dowmunt, & a. fountain (eds.), the alternative media handbook (p. 141-162). london, new york: routledge. fraser, n. (1990). rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. social text, (25/26), 56-80. heaton, l., millette, m., & proulx, s. (2012). médias sociaux: enjeux pour la communication. puq. honneth, a. (2005). invisibilité: sur l'épistémologie de la «reconnaissance». réseaux, 1(129-130), 39-57. lievrouw, l. (2011). alternative and activist new media. cambridge, uk ; malden, ma : polity press millerand, f., proulx, s., & rueff, j. (eds.). (2010). web social: mutation de la communication. puq. papacharissi, z. (2010). a private sphere: democracy in a digital age. polity. thompson, j. b. (2005). the new visibility. theory, culture & society, 22(6), 31-51. voirol, o. (2005). les luttes pour la visibilité. réseaux, (1), 89-121. 2. sharing and accessing the mundane dimensions of work on social media: the role of mediated visibility for workers and researchers claudine bonneau université du québec à montréal viviane sergi université du québec à montréal within the field of internet studies, work, workers, and their mediated visibility have been examined either from the perspective of online surveillance, where workers’ activities and communication practices are scrutinized by their employers (fuchs et al., 2013), or from the perspective of self-branding, where visibility is the result of an explicit strategy among individuals that involves the “calculated use of social media” to gain “status and attention online” (duffy, 2017: 11) in order to showcase their potential and employability (hogan, 2010; pagis & ailon, 2017). but the visibility of work is also constructed by individuals who voluntary share the mundane and daily experience of their professional life on social media platforms, not only for the sake of promoting themselves, but also to experience, legitimatize, and criticize their own work. as we will argue in this presentation, there is much to be gained by examining what can be perceived as the ‘mundane’ experience of individuals at work. contrarily to commonly held ideas, mundanity is much more consequential than it appears. as we have argued elsewhere: “it is there that skills are developed and tested, that ideas are crafted and progressively brought to light, that solutions are devised, adjusted and deployed, that knowledge is gained, that reflexivity is sharpened and that a full spectre of emotions may be experienced” (sergi & bonneau, 2017). our initial observations led us to identify and flesh out the concept of “working out loud”, which we define as a communicative and sociomaterial practice where individuals voluntarily turn to social media platforms to narrate and show what is part of their daily work life (bonneau & sergi, 2017; sergi & bonneau, 2016, 2017). while this specific practice can be observed on enterprise social media (esm), which are corporate versions of social media platforms that are designed only for internal audiences, we argue that ‘extra-organizational’ platforms (such as facebook, twitter, and instagram) should also be examined. indeed, such platforms allow researchers and professionals alike to observe emerging practices that are not prescribed by an organization, as well as unseen aspects of more conventional occupations that do not necessarily require the use of digital technologies (like farmers, bakers, etc.). our work is inspired by alcadipani and islam (2017)’s approach which investigates materiality through visual images. in this stage of our research, we focus on instagram, which is primarily a visual social networking site (highfield & leaver, 2016). our methods rest on a qualitative ‘small/thick data’ approach (latzko-toth et al., 2017) based on digital ethnography during which we performed the manual collection of a small corpus of 150 public instagram posts. we considered posts as “holistic units” (laestadius, 2017) where images/videos, texts, emoji, and hashtags are to be interpreted together and thematically coded in an open and inductive manner. at the heart of our inquiry lies the idea that people use social media platforms to share material (like thoughts, impressions, experiences, moods, etc.) that not only relate to their personal life, but also to their working life. while researchers have so far had to ‘be there’ and spend time in a specific organization to develop a sense of its mundane fabric, nowadays working out loud practices that take place on social media platforms give us access to organizational life and to the environment in which work unfolds, alongside its spatial and material setup. such practices showcase the unfinished and ‘behind-the-scene’ aspects of work, like ongoing work processes and work in progress. they also materialize and publicize dimensions of work (affective, expressive, embodied, and aesthetic) that have so far been mostly intangible. furthermore, working out loud also makes visible what has traditionally been regarded as ‘invisible work’ (hatton, 2017; star & strauss, 1999). invisible work may refer: a) to backstage work taking place in spaces that are usually not accessible to other people than the ones performing the same tasks in close proximity, b) to “informal work processes that are not part of anybody’s job description but which are crucial for the collective functioning of the workplace” (nardi & engeström, 1999: 1), or c) to professional activities that are not formally recognized or that are devalued as being not really ‘work’. the ‘visibilizing power’ of working out loud – that is, how it can increase visibility – can indeed be efficiently put to use in cases where workers are invisibilized or marginalized, by eventually granting them legitimacy or recognition. hence, this presentation will specifically address the role of mediated visibility in the study of mundane work for both the workers who share their subjective experience at work, as they are seeing it and choosing to expose it online, and the researchers who study such discursive-material assemblages. as our results will show, the mediated visibility afforded by social media platforms to mundane work practices sustains shared reflexivity among actors and contributes to constructing and legitimizing professional identities. for researchers who study contemporary organizations and work practices in the digital age, a careful examination of the ordinary, daily experience of life at work is far from banal, as it offers a novel and relevant entry point to study a variety of organizational phenomena. in a context where work and organizations are undergoing significant changes, and where boundaries between work and non-work activities are blurred, our results show the importance of exploring how mundane aspects of work are expressed in new ways on social media platforms. finally, we will conclude this presentation by addressing the theoretical and methodological implications of pursuing such inquiries. references alcadipani, r., & islam, g. (2017). modalities of opposition : control and resistance via visual materiality. organization, 1–26. bonneau, c., & sergi, v. (2017). work-related image sharing on instagram : implication for the understanding of social media affordance of visibility. in piet kommers (ed.), proceedings of the international conference ict, society, and human beings 2017 (pp. 226–230). lisbon, portugal. duffy, b. e. (2017). (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. yale university press. fuchs, c., boersma, k., albrechtslund, a., & sandoval, m. (2013). internet and surveillance: the challenges of web 2.0 and social media. routledge. hatton, e. (2017). mechanisms of invisibility: rethinking the concept of invisible work. work, employment and society, 31(2), 336–351. highfield, t., & leaver, t. (2016). instagrammatics and digital methods: studying visual social media, from selfies and gifs to memes and emoji. communication research and practice, 2(1), 47–62. hogan, b. (2010). the presentation of self in the age of social media: distinguishing performances and exhibitions online. bulletin of science, technology & society, 30(6), 377–386. laestadius, l. (2017). instagram. in a. quan-haase & l. sloan (eds.), the sage handbook of social media research methods (pp. 573–592). sage. latzko-toth, g., bonneau, c., & millette, m. (2017). small data, thick data: thickening strategies for trace-based social media research. in a. quan-haase & l. sloan (eds.), the sage handbook of social media research methods (pp. 199–214). sage. nardi, b. a., & engeström, y. (1999). a web on the wind: the structure of invisible work. computer supported cooperative work, 8(1), 1–8. pagis, m., & ailon, g. (2017). the paradoxes of self-branding: an analysis of consultants’ professional web pages. work and occupations, 44(3), 243–267. sergi, v., & bonneau, c. (2016). making mundane work visible on social media: a cco investigation of working out loud on twitter. communication research and practice, 2(3), 378–406. sergi, v., & bonneau, c. (2017). as i see life at work: sharing work experiences on social media. in 33rd egos colloquium, sub-theme 61: viewing the unseen organization in practice. copenhagen, denmark. star, s. l., & strauss, a. (1999). layers of silence , arenas of voice : the ecology of visible and invisible work. computer supported cooperative work, (1995), 9–30. 3. “we speak out, we make ourselves visible, and we act!” vigilantism and the constitutive role of online visibility david myles université de montréal daniel trottier erasmus university based on myles & trottier (2017), the objective of this presentation is to further examine the role of online visibility in the emergence of vigilante initiatives by drawing from a canadian case study. founded in 2015, the judge beauce is a vigilante collective that claims to address québec’s “flexible laws” for child protection by identifying potential pedophiles through physical and online surveillance. today, vigilante groups increasingly use the internet to conduct their daily activities (huey et al., 2013). so far, traditional definitions of vigilantism have considered the use of force as a defining feature (johnston, 2001), while few studies have addressed how social media features that afford visibility (bucher, 2012; treem & leonardi, 2012) partly reconfigure vigilante actions and identities (trottier, 2016a). our presentation shows how online visibility is leveraged by vigilante groups not only to direct public attention toward suspects, but also to create, engage with, and solicit support from “affective publics” (papacharissi, 2014) that become increasingly sensitized to child safety. furthermore, it examines the relation between online visibility and the procurement of “policing capital” (dupont, 2004) by underlining how social media platforms allow new ways to acquire various forms of symbolic and material resources. this presentation relies on the qualitative analysis of various data that were extracted online (from november 2015 to january 2016) and converted into a pdf format manually. our dataset includes: 1) screen captures from an online blog called la clique du plateau (119 comments) and from the online forum reddit (14 comments); 2) eight news articles, as well as one radio and one television interviews with the judge’s founder; 3) screen captures of the judge’s official website; and 4) contents from the judge’s facebook page (the equivalent of 60 pages). our results first show that leveraging online visibility was key for the judge to procure economic capital, which refers to the “monetary resources” possessed by a policing entity (huey et al., 2013: 83). economic capital was accumulated through the online sale of merchandise bearing the collective’s logo (a skull with intersecting bones) or slogan (let’s protect our kids). rooted in the microeconomic model of crowdfunding (belleflamme et al., 2014), this strategy facilitated the procurement of funds that were allegedly used to finance activities. yet, the adoption of such model required for the judge to expose their fundraising activities to public criticism and, as such, also appeared to be a liability. indeed, many users expressed their disapproval on the collective’s facebook page, stating that this type of commercial endeavour was disrespectful toward victims of abuse. leveraging online visibility was also key in the procurement of social capital, what dupont (2004: 86) defines as the “social relations that allow the constitution, maintenance and expansion” of policing entities. for the judge, social capital was closely linked to economic capital, as the sale of merchandise also allowed for the creation of vigilant publics. members invested social media platforms to openly endorse the collective by publishing pictures of themselves wearing the judge merchandise. hence, our results point to a “weaponization of visibility” through acts of intimidation toward suspected pedophiles. this is a departure from other forms of self-justice that leverage online visibility to punish actions (via doxing or public shaming) that are perceived as being transgressive while enjoying a position of anonymity (trottier, 2016b). our case study also underlines how online visibility allowed for the judge to gain political capital. traditionally, political capital refers to the “ability to influence public policy and use government resources” (huey et al., 2013: 84) and understands state proximity as being exclusively positive. yet, our results point to a form of capital procurement that operates under a logic that is more horizontal than vertical. indeed, as a grassroot initiative, the case of the judge shows that political capital can be acquired by constituting affective publics (papacharissi, 2014) and not solely through proximity with the political sphere. not only was the lack of proximity with the state unproblematic; it was also instrumentalized by the judge’s members who stated that politicians did not address child safety seriously and that it was up to citizens to act by harnessing the “power of crowds” (mccosker, 2015). finally, leveraging online visibility was linked to the procurement of cultural capital, which refers to “the explanatory and actionable knowledge” that a policing entity “can mobilize, at the individual and collective levels” (dupont, 2004: 86). in our case study, we examined how the judge’s members publicly expressed conceptions of social reality based on shared beliefs, as well as how they identified the correct ways to act upon these beliefs. our results show the importance of two interrelated beliefs: 1) popular views (rather than evidenceor practice-based knowledge) regarding child abuse that focus on the dangers that represent strangers lurking in public places; and 2) the importance of performing an active citizenship. this cultural capital was materialized online through visual and structural elements reminiscent of biker culture (the use of a “crest”, the foundation of local “chapters”, etc.). while the enactment of such cultural capital online allowed for the judge to generate a network of like-minded individuals, it also proved to be a liability, as many facebook users quickly associated the collective with organized crime. while our case study shows that online visibility does allow new ways for vigilante collectives to acquire policing capital, it also demonstrates that, as a double-edged sword (thompson, 2005; brighenti, 2007), visibility is simultaneously linked with the public questioning of these organizations’ intentions by concerned citizens. in shifting our focus away from the perspective that strictly considers visibility as a form of harm for surveillance targets, we begin to understand the benefits and liabilities brought on by mediated visibility for modern vigilante groups. references belleflamme, p., lambert, t., & schwienbacher, a. (2014). crowdfunding: tapping the right crowd. journal of business venturing, 29, 585-609. brighenti, a. (2007). visibility a category for the social sciences. current sociology, 55, 323-342. bucher, t. (2012). want to be on the top? algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on facebook. new media & society, 14(7), 1164-1180. dupont, b. (2004). security in the age of networks. policing and society, 14, 76-91. huey, l., nhan, j., & broll, r. (2013). ‘uppity civilians’ and ‘cyber-vigilantes’: the role of the general public in policing cyber-crime. criminology and criminal justice, 13(1), 81-97. johnston, l. (2001). crime, fear and civil policing. urban studies, 38, 959-976. mccosker, a. (2015). social media activism at the margins: managing visibility, voice and vitality affects. social media+ society, 1(2), 1-11. myles, d., & trottier, d. (2017). leveraging visibility, gaining capital? social media use in the fight against child abusers: the case of the judge beauce. social media+ society, 3(1), 2056305117691998. papacharissi, z. (2014). affective publics: sentiment, technology, and politics. oxford university press. treem, j. w., & leonardi, p. m. (2013). social media use in organizations: exploring the affordances of visibility, editability, persistence, and association. annals of the international communication association, 36(1), 143-189. trottier, d. (2016a). digital vigilantism as weaponisation of visibility. philosophy & technology, 1-18. trottier, d. (2016b). social media as surveillance: rethinking visibility in a converging world. new york: routledge. thompson, j. b. (2005). the new visibility. theory, culture & society, 22, 31-51. 4. encrypted beneath the surface: visibility and its background nathalie casemajor institut national de la recherche scientifique sophie toupin mcgill university drawing from cultural studies and digital media studies, this presentation examines the dynamic relationship between forms of visibility and forms of concealment. its premise is that the domain of the hidden, and the ways of (self)concealment, are constructed in synergy with the ways of perceiving, interpreting, judging, and tracking down that are specific to a given context and time. each new concealment strategy creates an arsenal of tools for detection, which in turn generates new forms of concealment and visibility. thus, the art of disguise evolves with the advancement of technology, but also according to the development of social norms and relations of power. to what extent does the metaphor of visibility/invisibility articulate with that of encryption/decryption? we will explore this articulation through the example of encryption technologies (especially steganography – the art of hiding information within an image file) and anticolonial hacking during the apartheid period in south africa. concealment can be understood as a central vector in the constitution of private and public spheres (wolff, 1950). the contemporary world is criss-crossed by (seemingly) contradictory logics, where hypervisibility in the media intersects with conspiracy theories and beliefs in a hidden truth, further fuelled by the opacity of technological and financial infrastructures. shaped by big data and ever-improving algorithms, the possibilities for detecting identities and behaviours have multiplied in the digital environment (lyon, 2015). they have engendered resistance to profiling and surveillance through the extensive use of pseudonyms, message encryption systems as well as masks, make-up, and disruptive clothing aimed to deceive surveillance cameras and facial recognition software (riisgaard & thomassen, 2016). as a strategy, hiding responds to a range of needs: to protect that which is sensitive, to retain a strategic advantage, to deceive, or to avoid social disapproval or sanctions. the tactics used are equally diverse. they may include making invisible (camouflaging; brighenti & castelli, 2016), obscuring (creating confusion, diverting attention), revealing some parts in order to better hide what is essential (disguise, steganography, optical illusion; forbes, 2011) or protecting access (cryptography, censorship, and self-censorship). this tension between the desire to hide and to reveal provides a decisive key to the understanding of struggles for agency and the way they are enacted through relations of mutual anticipation. our analytical framework combines a materialistic approach to media and digital infrastructures with elements drawn from semiotic and phenomenological approaches. this framework allows to examine mediatized visibility through the relationship between the visible surface and its background. from the 1950s to the late 1980s, several literary theorists engaged in a theoretical disagreement over a short story by edgar allan poe, disputing the relationships between visibility, concealment, truth, and meaning (muller & richardson, 1988). in the purloined letter (poe, 1844), detective dupin criticizes the police for seeing “only their own ideas of ingenuity; and, in searching for anything hidden, advert only to the modes in which they would have hidden it.” furthermore, “to conceal this letter, the minister had resorted to the comprehensive and sagacious expedient of not attempting to conceal it at all.” inspired by poe’s story, lacan (1966) drew from it, in his “seminar on the purloined letter”, a reflection on truth, reality, the symbolic, and the unconscious, in which he argues that “what is hidden is never but what is missing from its place.” derrida, in the purveyor of truth, proposes a critique of lacan by questioning the “psychoanalytic deciphering” through the metaphor of “the nakedness of hidden meaning.” equating veil, text, and fabric, he suggests that the same material simultaneously conceals and shows. this relationship between the visible surface and the “invisible lining” (merleauponty, 1968) situates visibility in relation to a background; but, as larkin (2013: 336) points out, “what is background for one person is a daily object of concern for another”. moving away from the literary and postmodernist discussion, we situate our analysis in the context of digital media and disguise strategies. on a technical level, this relationship between visible surface and concealment is well illustrated by the case of steganography, or “covered writing”. steganographic techniques allow to identify redundant bits in a cover digital image, select a subset of such bits and replace them with data from a secret message. in this case, the visual surface stands as a deceiving screen, hiding sensitive information in the background code of the image file (forbes, 2011; shell, 2012). on a social level, this articulation between visibility and concealment can be observed in hacking networks, as our presentation will underline. in particular, the use of cryptography, hacking, and phone phreaking techniques in anti-colonial struggle(s) allowed freedom fighters to communicate and organize secretly in their attempt to dismantle colonial and apartheid regimes. the steps that were necessary to configure both technologies and social realities for use in a specific context and underground situation was such that the articulation between visibility and concealment needed to be carefully thought through. drawing from these case studies, we will propose to understand the notion of visibility in relationship with strategies of active concealment. the processes of encryption/decryption we analyze in these case studies show that the borders that delineate and define what is “the background” of the visible realm are always technically, socially, and historically situated. references brighenti, a. m., & castelli, a. (2016). social camouflage: functions, logic, paradoxes. distinktion: journal of social theory, 17(2), 228-249. derrida, j., domingo, w., hulbert, j., & ron, m. (1975). the purveyor of truth. yale french studies, (52), 31-113. forbes, p. (2011). dazzled and deceived: mimicry and camouflage. yale university press. lacan, j. (1966). le séminaire sur la lettre volée. écrits, 1, 19-75. larkin, b. (2013). the politics and poetics of infrastructure. annual review of anthropology, 42, 327-343. lyon, d. (2015). surveillance after snowden. john wiley & sons. merleau-ponty, m. (1968). the visible and the invisible: followed by working notes. northwestern university press. muller, j. p., & richardson, w. j. (1988). the purloined poe lacan, derrida & psychoanalytic reading. poe, e. a. (1844). “the purloined letter,” the gift: a christmas, new year, and birthday present, carey & hart. riisgaard, l., & thomassen, b. (2016). powers of the mask: political subjectivation and rites of participation in local-global protest. theory, culture & society, 33(6), 7598. shell, h. r. (2012). hide and seek: camouflage, photography, and the media of reconnaissance. mit press. wolff, k. h. (1950). “the secret and the secret society,” in the sociology of georg simmel, glencoe, the free press, 301–378. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 gerrard, y. (2017, october 18-21). ‘if you’re going through something difficult, we’d like to help’: the limitations of hashtag logics in pro-eating disorder content moderation. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org ‘if you’re going through something difficult, we’d like to help’: the limitations of hashtag logics in pro-eating disorder content moderation. ysabel gerrard university of sheffield paper rationale social media companies loudly encourage their users to ‘share’ content about themselves. but they are much quieter about how they moderate problematic posts and why they choose to do so (see gillespie, 2015). platforms often make decisions about moderation when they face public pressures, such as accusations that they host proeating disorder (pro-ed) content. this is precisely what happened in february 2012, when a huffington post writer published a widely read exposé on the ‘secret world’ of tumblr’s thinspiration blogs (gregoire, 2012). by may of 2012, tumblr along with instagram and pinterest had publically announced its plans to minimize the spread of pro-ed content. to do this, the three platforms issue public service announcements (psas) when users search for troubling terms, like #proana and #thinspiration, and instagram also blocks results for certain hashtag searches. using pro-ed content as a case study, this paper addresses the problems of hashtag logics in decisions about, and discussions of social media content moderation. it explores how: (1) pro-ed content can still be found without using the hashtag as a search mechanism; (2) users learn to recognize and signal each other as pro-ed in the absence of hashtags, and given the vulnerability of their posts to user-driven forms of moderation like flagging (see crawford and gillespie, 2016), and (3) platforms’ recommendation systems suggest pro-ed content to users despite policing. this makes hashtag moderation a minor, perhaps even ineffective intervention, if indeed platforms should intervene at all. instagram, pinterest and tumblr have joined a longer debate about mediated depictions of disordered and typically young, female, and white bodies (see bordo, 2003), following the standards set by older social networking sites (snss) like myspace and xanga, and web hosts like yahoo! (see dias, 2003). but what made the 2012 iteration so unique was the way the platforms chose to intervene: through hashtag moderation. hashtags are an appealing point of intervention for various reasons. they are convenient tools for aggregating relevant content between users outside of each other’s follower/followee networks (see schmidt, 2014), they circumvent the difficulties of algorithmically tagging visual imagery to categorize it as ‘pro-ed’, and they help commercial content moderators to interpret posts within the ‘seconds’ (roberts, 2017) they have to decide whether it should stay or go. but hashtag moderation has produced a partial way of understanding how pro-ed content circulates on platforms. these limitations are reflected in popular media discussions, as the press use the hashtag as shorthand for a larger and more complex issue. for example, a buzzfeed writer argues that images of ‘bony torsos and skeletal limbs’ are easily findable on social media ‘thanks to popular hashtags like #anorexia, #ana, and #thinspiration’ (lee, 2016). the hashtag also plays an oversized role in recent research on eating disorders and social media. it is used as a tool for data collection (see ging and garvey, 2017), and for understanding how users evade instagram’s hashtag ban (see chancellor et al, 2016). research methods this paper explores how pro-ed content circulates beyond the hashtag. it responds to recent scholarly calls for more methodological approaches to obtaining untagged content (see bruns et al, 2016; d’heer et al, 2017). it asks how we locate pro-ed content without relying on in-platform hashtag searches; a ‘methodologically difficult’ (bruns et al, 2016, p.21) question that required some innovation. i began my research by creating new accounts on instagram, pinterest and tumblr to avoid algorithmic bias. i took a platform-specific approach to sourcing content, influenced in part by light et al’s (2016) app walkthrough method. instagram, for example, has several levels of content moderation (see suzor, 2016). although it does not return results for certain hashtag searches, the platform does not ban searches for users with pro-ed terms in their usernames or profile bios. similarly, tumblr allows its users to ‘follow’ certain terms like ‘proana’ and ‘promia’, despite issuing psas on tag searches. it then presents users with relevant content through their algorithmically organized dashboards. pinterest allows users to save images to their ‘pin boards’. after creating some of my own boards, the platform recognized me as a ‘pro-ed user’ and began recommending such content to me via email and as i browsed the site. in short, it algorithmically presented me with the very same content it tries to moderate. using these platform-specific techniques, i collected 2162 posts from 272 instagram, pinterest and tumblr accounts. in this paper, i discuss both the posts and the methods used to obtain them, highlighting the limitations of hashtag logics in understanding how pro-ed content circulates on social media. references bordo, s. (2003). unbearable weight: feminism, western culture, and the body. 10th anniversary edition. berkeley: university of california press. bruns, a. and burgess, j. (2015). the use of twitter hashtags in the formation of adhoc publics. in n. rambukkana. (ed.), hashtag publics: the power and politics of discursive networks (pp. 13-28). new york: peter lang. bruns, a., moon, b., paul, a. and münch, f. (2016). towards a typology of hashtag publics: a large-scale comparative study of user engagement across trending topics. communication research & practice. 2(1). 20-46. chancellor, s., pater, j.a., clear, t., gilbert, e., and de choudhury, m. (2016). #thyghgapp: instagram content moderation and lexical variation in pro-eating disorder communities. cscw ’16 proceedings of the 19th acm conference on computersupported cooperative work & social computing. [online]. available at: http://www.munmund.net/pubs/cscw16_thyghgapp.pdf [accessed: 6th december 2016]. crawford, k. and gillespie, t. (2016). what is a flag for? social media reporting tools and the vocabulary of complaint. new media and society. 18(3). 410-428. dias, k. (2003). the ana sanctuary: women’s pro-anorexia narratives in cyberspace. journal of international women’s studies. 4(2). 31-45. d’heer, e., vandersmissen, b., de neve, w., verdegem, p. and van de walle, r. (2017). what are we missing? an empirical exploration in the structural biases of hashtag-based sampling on twitter. first monday. 22(2). doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v22i2.6353. gillespie, t. (2015). platforms intervene. social media and society. 1-2. doi: 10.1177/2056305115580479. ging, d. and garvey, s. (2017). ‘written in these scars are the stories i can’t explain’: a content analysis of pro-ana and thinspiration image sharing on instagram. new media and society. 1-20. doi: 10.1177/1461444816687288. gregoire, c. (2012, 9th february). the hunger blogs: a secret world of teenage ‘thinspiration’. huffington post. [online]. available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/08/thinspiration-blogs_n_1264459.html [accessed: 12th july 2017]. lee, s.m. (2016, 14th april). why eating disorders are so hard for instagram and tumblr to combat. buzzfeed. [online]. available at: https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephaniemlee/why-eating-disorders-are-so-hard-forinstagram-and-tumblr-to?utm_term=.qj0vjpzpk#.gayq5emea [accessed: 13th august 2017]. light, b., burgess, j. and duguay, s. (2016). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media and society. 1-20. doi: 10.1177/1461444816675438 roberts, s.t. (2017, 8th march). social media’s silent filter. the atlantic. [online]. available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/commercialcontent-moderation/518796/ [accessed: 28th september 2017]. schmidt, j. (2014). twitter and the rise of personal publics. in k. weller, a. bruns, j. burgess, m. mahrt and c. puschmann. (eds.), twitter and society (pp. 3-14). new york: peter lang. suzor, n. (2016, 17 september). how does instagram censor hashtags? medium. [online]. available at: https://digitalsocialcontract.net/how-does-instagram-censorhashtags-c7f38872d1fd [accessed: 29th july 2017]. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): oquendo, j., & porter, l. (2019, october 2-5). the ecology of latinx twitter. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the ecology of latinx twitter jacqueline oquendo louisiana state university lance porter louisiana state university abstract twitter is a conduit of culture – a miscellany of networked communities where participants reinforce and/or dismantle socially constructed ideas and narratives. for nearly a decade, studies on the uses and gratifications, and sociality of cultural and/or ethno-racial driven networks in the u.s. have emerged. this body of literature is interdisciplinary and discusses black twitter (brock, 2012; florini, 2013; sharma, 2013; clarke, 2014; lee, 2017), and to a much lesser extent, asian-american twitter (lopez, 2016). largely, research on latinx twitter is scarce (novak, johnson, & pontes, 2016; slaughter, 2016; rosenbaum, 2018) – a significant gap given that latinx is the nation’s largest minority group, standing at 18% of the u.s. population (pew research center, 2017). despite epitomizing diversity, u.s. media often describes latinx monolithically. however, the pan-ethnic represents over 21 nationalities, and a host of european and indigenous languages, in which regional dialects are blended with african tongues to varying degrees. we take the position that prior to conducting behavioral focused analyses on latinx twitter, the network’s ecology must be defined. this means, to understand how the network of tens of ethnicities and heritages self-organizes. therefore, this study purposefully augments existing scholarship by exploring latinx twitter’s ecology. upon conducting a content analysis, and one-on-one interviews with six women (18-24 years old) of latinx heritage, inclusive of afro-latinx identity, we identify three major ecological themes: (1) seeking latinx twitter; (2) mega network versus sub-networks; and (3) implications for monolithic narratives. method the existing gap in research on latinx twitter drove our inductive approach using grounded theory. a random sample (n=600) of tweets posted between 2016 and 2018, and that use the hashtags #latinxtwitter, #mexicantwitter, and/or #centralamericantwitter was pulled using crimson hexagon – a software tool that provides researchers with access to content in twitter’s public sphere. our content analysis was conducted manually. additionally, we spoke to six women who selfidentified as latinx or afro-latinx (18-24 years old), and also attend a predominately white institution (pwi) in u.s. south. our recruitment efforts included an emailed screener sent to several campus-wide listservs, each managed by one of the institution’s campus-wide cultural organizations. our screener included asking respondents two questions specific to cultural heritage. collecting data about heritage is crucial to this study for two reasons. first, it dismantles the practice of treating pan-ethnic as a monolithic group. second, it creates room for afro-descendientes and afro-latinx visibility among our pool of interviewees. what is your hispanic or latinx heritage? please check all that apply. a. mexican b. puerto rican c. cuban d. colombian e. salvadorian f. dominican g. other (please specify): ________ h. prefer not to answer do you consider yourself an afro-descendiente or afro-latinx? a. yes b. no c. i’m not sure d. prefer not to answer all interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim for playback and accuracy. our analysis was conducted using corbin and strauss’ (2008) constant comparative method of qualitative analysis. we began by coding fragments of data to familiarize ourselves with potential themes. next, we dived deeper into the data by completing line-by-line coding, followed by, axial coding themes to collapse similarities, uncover differences, and detect relationships. finally, we scaffolded our findings into a theoretical model of emergent themes – one that serves the purpose of the study (and supported by salient quotes as evidence of findings.) results our analysis results in three major ecological themes: (1) seeking latinx twitter; (2) mega network versus sub-networks; and (3) implications for monolithic narratives. we find that latinx twitter is a growing network that can be challenging to locate. descriptions of how interviewees came to find latinx twitter reveals their heavy reliance on platform settings and/or ui components as part of their search strategies. for example, several sought to follow twitter users whose system language was set to spanish. they treated the language in which the profile was set as indicator of probable latinx heritage. also, all interviewees used a flag emoji to signify their heritage and/or nation of origin, and assumed that other tweeters used the symbol for the same purpose. for research purposes, we cannot consider the presence of a flag emoji as confirmation of heritage or ethnicity. with that said, worthy of note is that our content analysis does show that emoji flags were heavily used across posts and profiles that used one or more of our specified hashtags. from the analysis, latinx twitter emerged as a mega-network. that is, an umbrella network which encompasses sub-networks. here, ethnicity and heritage serve as group affiliations – each one demarcating space for participants to opt-in or out of in-group and/or cross-cultural interaction. in other words, the mega-network serves as a townhall of sorts, and sub-networks are participatory member groups whose formation is country and/or region specific (e.g., #mexicantwitter, #centralamericantwitter, etc.) one can enter latinx twitter through the mega-network, or by way of a sub-network. all serve as standalone points of entry. reflective the pan-ethnic’s diversity, some sub-networks communicate in more than one language. among our participants, four women were bilingual (i.e.; spanish and english) and two were monolingual (i.e.; english only). all bilingual speakers report tweeting in english and spanish; sometimes using a single language or both languages within a single post. this includes instances of spanglish, a third and distinct use of language. further, we find instances of posts written in additional languages, such as, portuguese and french. the implications for monolithic narratives are considerable. by way of self-organization, participants do not see themselves as members of a monolith. they clearly explained their perceptions on why subgroups are demarcated by nationality and/or ethnic affiliation – with the most commonly stated as the need to establish visibility and agency amongst an enormous pan-ethnicity consisting of, sometimes competing, latinx groups located within the u.s. and abroad. several participants emphasized sub-networks’ ability to promote a cause, disseminate news and knowledge, and/or negotiate credit for cultural production. discussion based on our content analysis and qualitative interviews, we find that latinx twitter’s ecology supports: • negotiating credit for cultural production between sub-networks • disseminating ethno-racial news and knowledge • creating meaning-making (lamont, 2000) and collective memory (assmann, & czaplicka, 1995; confino, 1997). as a participatory network of networks, we believe that latinx twitter’s ecology illustrates the culture and sociality of stratifying heritage over race (roth, 2012). its depth of intersectionality (crenshaw, 1991) straddles multiracial, multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual, and transnational identities and frontiers (de bot, & stoessel, 2002; eleta, & golbeck, 2014). from an afro-latinx perspective, latinx twitter can be a resource for increasing visibility, affirming identity, and building community. furthermore, studying the ecology of latinx twitter is crucial for understanding how its participants – largely representative of the largest minority group in the u.s. – discovered and self-organized the twittersphere. future opportunities for researchers include investigating the adherence to (or resistance of) politics of gratitude (rodriguezsilva, 2013); and dismantling the stereotypical and monolithic narratives that the media so often uses to characterize members of the latinx pan-ethnic. references afolabi, n. (2009). afro-brazilians: cultural production in a racial democracy. rochester, ny: university of rochester press. assmann, j., & czaplicka, j. (1995). collective memory and cultural identity. new german critique, (65), 125-133. doi:10.2307/488538 brock, a. (2012). from the blackhand side: twitter as cultural conversation. journal of broadcasting and electronic media, 56(4), p. 529-549. corbin, j., & strauss, a. (2008). basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory (3rd ed.). thousand oaks, ca, us: sage publications, inc. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452230153 confino, a. (1997). collective memory and cultural history: problems of method. the american historical review, 102(5) p. 1386-1403. crenshaw, k. (1991). mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. stanford law review, 43(6), 1241-1299. doi:10.2307/1229039 clarke, m. d. (2014). to tweet our own cause: a mixed-methods study of the online phenomenon “black twitter” (doctoral dissertation). retrieved from https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/ indexablecontent/uuid:1318a434-c0c4-49d2-8db477c6a2cbb8b1 de bot, k., & stoessel, s. (2002). introduction: language change and social networks. international journal of the sociology of language, 2002(153), 1–7. retrieved from http://libezp.lib.lsu.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=tru e&db=sih&an=8941516&site=eds-live&scope=site&profile=eds-main eleta, i., & golbeck, j. (2014). multilingual use of twitter: social networks at the language frontier. computers in human behavior, 41, 424–432. https://doiorg.libezp.lib.lsu.edu/10.1016/j.chb.2014.05.005 florini, s. (2013). tweets, tweeps and signifyin’: communication and cultural performance on “black twitter”. television & new media. retrieved from: http://tvn.sagepub.com/content /early/2013/03/07/1527476413480247.abstract. how the u.s. hispanic population is changing. (2017). pew research center. retrieved 21 march 2018, from http://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2017/09/18/how-the-u-s-hispanicpopulation-is-changing/ lamont, m. (2000). meaning-making in cultural sociology: broadening our agenda. contemporary sociology, 29(4), p. 602-607. lee, l. a. (2017). black twitter: a response to bias in mainstream media. social sciences, 6(1), 26. lopez, l. k. (2016). asian american media activism : fighting for cultural citizenship. new york : new york university press, [2016]. retrieved from http://libezp.lib.lsu.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=tru e&db=cat00252a&an=lalu.4612873&site=eds-live&scope=site&profile=eds-main novak, a. n., johnson, k., & pontes, m. (2016). latinotwitter: discourses of latino civic engagement in social media. first monday, 21(8). retrieved at http://firstmonday.org/ojs/ index.php/fm/article/view/6752/5604 rodriguez-silva, l. m. (2013). abolition, race, and the politics of gratitude in late nineteenth-century puerto rico. hispanic american historical review 93(4), 621657. rosenbaum, j. e. (2018). constructing digital cultures: tweets, trends, race and gender. new york and london: lexington books. roth, w. (2012). race migrations: latinos and the cultural transformation of race. stanford, ca: stanford university press. sharma, s. (2013). black twitter? racial hashtags, networks and contagion. new formations, 78(summer), p. 46-64. slaughter, s. (2016). #trumpeffects: creating rhetorical spaces for latinx political engagement. latin americanist, 60(4), p. 541-576. retreived from https://doiorg.libezp.lib.lsu.edu/10.1111/tla.12095 selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): dugmore, h. (2019, october 2-5). misinfodemics’— unpacking the core narratives of multinational food and drink companies’ online marketing campaigns and their role in creating doubt about the causes of obesity in developing countries. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ‘misinfodemics’— unpacking the core narratives of multinational food and drink companies’ online marketing campaigns and their role in creating doubt about the causes of obesity in developing countries harry dugmore school of journalism and media studies, rhodes university, grahamstown, south africa the affordances of social media on smartphones (smsp) creates a particular confluence of interactivity, immediacy, intimacy, measurability and scale, that, especially when combined with traditional marketing platforms, transforms audiences into more active agents in marketing campaigns (dunlop, freeman, & jones, 2016; yadav, joshi, & rahman, 2015). getting people talking, sharing, liking and clicking, i.e. more involved in the marketing of products, helps sales and, for multinational food and drink companies, there are clear links between significant recent shifts to greater spend on social media marketing, and increased youth consumption of highly refined snack foods and sugar-sweetened beverages (ssbs) (brownbill, miller, & braunack-mayer, 2018; hernández-chávez, velasco-bernal, aguilarmenéndez, & bolado-velázquez, 2017; liu & lopez, 2016), even as overall consumption of ssbs, in many more developed countries, is falling (brandmiller & barclay, 2017; chaloupka, powell, & warner, 2019) but at the same time, multinational companies are also waging more existential battles against a growing public awareness of the harm their products cause via their contribution to rising overweight and obesity levels globally(du, tugendhaft, erzse, & hofman, 2018; nestle, 2018). multinational food companies have long been involved in challenging the science that links consumption of their products to the epidemiology of non-communicable diseases (ncds) in both developing and developed world(limb, 2015). as with climate change denial campaigns and attacks on the science on the harmful effects of tobacco products, these campaigns are multifaceted and multinational, seeking mostly to promote the mistrust of ‘authority’ and to obscure, confuse and ‘muddy the waters’ to ward off both public policy responses (especially ‘sugar taxes (backholer, blake, & vandevijvere, 2017) and labelling requirements(mandle, tugendhaft, michalow, & hofman, 2015)) and dampen consumer disquiet about consuming their products. this paper explores in particular how so-called ‘big food’ multinationals combine their traditional ‘sell more product’ marketing, via the relatively new overlay of their multiple social media channels, with a ‘our products are harmless’ defences via both attempts to influence the understanding of the science and their attempts to engage and shape, via social media, public discourses around health, eating, weight gain and excess kilojoule consumption-related disease. led by coca-cola, the industry has tried to frame these debates around issues of ‘energy balance’ and highlight their role in promoting healthy activities on the exercise side of the balanced(ruskin, stuckler, serôdio, barlow, & mckee, 2018). multinational drink companies, for example, almost all sponsor sports at different levels, and, as this paper argues, with a growing focus on children and young adults(bragg, roberto, harris, brownell, & elbel, 2018) to reinforce their dual messages of the desirability of their products and that a key affordance of exercise (or a less sedentary lifestyle) is the ability to consume (and enjoy) more of their products. highlighting issues of urbanisation, increases in youthful screen time (ironically as these companies ramp their often-compelling content driven social media marketing strategies) and other sedentary-behaviours, their messaging seeks to absolve their products from responsibility for individual and population-level gains in weight. this misinformation is implicated in the epidemic of over and under nutrition in both developing and developed countries.(ramachandran et al., 2018) the broader research project that this paper draws upon argues that this marketing takes place in the context of these companies aggressive shift of production capacity to the developing world, and a particular emphasis on selling more ssbs (and other snack products) into african countries, and into poorer regions in asia and central and south america(jacobs, 2017). drawing on global political economy perspectives to explain these shifts, the paper explores how, in all these areas, social media on smart phones (for most africans, for example, social media is only accessed via smart phone (evans, 2018; poushter, 2015) is emerging as a key marketing channel for food and drink companies, as they artfully combine intimacy and interactivity of social media with ‘third party endorsement’ by consumers/audiences/digital social media users themselves to build trust, succeeding (in part) in simultaneously challenging the science of obesity and also in accelerating the infusion of ssbs into everyday diets and even into everyday identities of people in developing countries. drawing on a wide range of recent theorising on the affordances of social media and mechanisms for the spread of misinformation in general and health misinformation in particular(buchanan, kelly, yeatman, & kariippanon, 2018; centola, 2013; dunlop et al., 2016; hanitzsch, hanusch, & lauerer, 2016; tatlow-golden et al., 2017), and using both thematic content analysis as the initial method and augmented this with audience reception study methods (with focus groups of university student consumers of these products in lagos, nigeria and grahamstown, south africa), this paper explores how these companies’ social media marketing combines with their marketing in more traditional channels to tease out how both the ‘our products are harmless’ and the ‘buy our products now’ messages articulate with each other and how they resonate, or not, with selected youth audiences. references backholer, k., blake, m., & vandevijvere, s. (2017). sugar-sweetened beverage taxation: an update on the year that was 2017. public health nutrition, 20(18), 3219–3224. bragg, m. a., roberto, c. a., harris, j. l., brownell, k. d., & elbel, b. (2018). marketing food and beverages to youth through sports. journal of adolescent health. doi:10.1016/j.jadohealth.2017.06.016 brand-miller, j. c., & barclay, a. w. (2017). declining consumption of added sugars and sugar-sweetened beverages in australia: a challenge for obesity prevention. american journal of clinical nutrition, 105(4), 854– 863. brownbill, a. l., miller, c. l., & braunack-mayer, a. j. (2018). the marketing of sugar-sweetened beverages to young people on facebook. australian and new zealand journal of public health, 42(4), 354–360. buchanan, l., kelly, b., yeatman, h., & kariippanon, k. (2018). the effects of digital marketing of unhealthy commodities on young people: a systematic review. nutrients. doi:10.3390/nu10020148 centola, d. (2013). social media and the science of health behavior. circulation, 127(21), 2135–2144. chaloupka, f. j., powell, l. m., & warner, k. e. (2019). the use of excise taxes to reduce tobacco, alcohol, and sugary beverage consumption. annual review of public health, 40(1), annurev–publhealth–040218– 043816. du, m., tugendhaft, a., erzse, a., & hofman, k. j. (2018). sugar-sweetened beverage taxes: industry response and tactics. yale journal of biology and medicine, 91(2), 185–190. dunlop, s., freeman, b., & jones, s. c. (2016). marketing to youth in the digital age: the promotion of unhealthy products and health promoting behaviours on social media. media and communication, 4(3), 35. evans, o. (2018). connecting the poor: the internet, mobile phones and financial inclusion in africa. digital policy, regulation and governance , 20(6), 568–581. hanitzsch, t., hanusch, f., & lauerer, c. (2016). setting the agenda, influencing public opinion, and advocating for social change. journalism studies, 17(1), 1–20. hernández-chávez, p., velasco-bernal, a., aguilar-menéndez, p., & boladovelázquez, b. (2017). social media marketing on popular sugarsweetened beverages facebook and twitter pages in mexico. in the faseb journal (vol. 31, pp. 640.38–640.38). retrieved from http://www.fasebj.org/content/31/1_supplement/640.38.abstract jacobs, a. (2017). how big business got brazil hooked on junk food. new york times. retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/16/health/brazil-obesitynestle.html limb, m. (2015). scientists take first steps to form united front over interactions with global food industry. in bmj (online) (vol. 351). liu, y., & lopez, r. a. (2016). the impact of social media conversations on consumer brand choices. marketing letters, 27(1), 1–13. mandle, j., tugendhaft, a., michalow, j., & hofman, k. (2015). nutrition labelling: a review of research on consumer and industry response in the global south. global health action, 8(1). nestle, m. (2018). unsavory truth: how food companies skew the science of what we eat. new york: basic books. poushter, j. (2015). smartphone ownership and internet usage continues to climb in emerging economies [for pew research center]. global attitudes & trends. ramachandran, d., kite, j., vassallo, a. j., chau, j. y., partridge, s., freeman, b., & gill, t. (2018). food trends and popular nutrition advice online implications for public health. online journal of public health informatics, 10(2) ruskin, g., stuckler, d., serôdio, p., barlow, p., & mckee, m. (2018). science organisations and coca-cola’s “war” with the public health community: insights from an internal industry document. journal of epidemiology and community health, 72(9), 761–763. tatlow-golden, m., verdoodt, v., oates, j., jewell, j., breda, j. j., & boyland, e. (2017). a safe glimpse within the “ black box ”? ethical and legal principles when assessing digital marketing of food and drink to children. public health panorama, 3(4), 613–621. retrieved from http://www.euro.who.int/en/publications/public-health-panorama/journalissues/volume-3,-issue-4,-december-2017 yadav, m., joshi, y., & rahman, z. (2015). mobile social media: the new hybrid element of digital marketing communications. procedia social and behavioral sciences, 189, 335–343. aoir2018, eberwein & gerard-wenzel selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): eberwein t and gerard-wenzel c (2018, october 10-13). memory of the future? digital archives in public service media. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. memory of the future? digital archives in public service media tobias eberwein austrian academy of sciences, vienna, austria corinna gerard-wenzel alpen-adria-universität klagenfurt, austria questions public service media (psm) produce the most different audiovisual products, which they either preserve for legal reasons, to re-use for their own purposes, or for financial gain (snoeren, 2016). however, they also store audiovisual broadcasts with distinct social and cultural intentions. in the individualized, differentiated and polarized societies of today, social cohesion is under pressure – a trend that is further aggravated by the increasingly fragmented use of media. under these circumstances, building up common societal goals, interests and identities – or a collective ‘cultural memory’ (erll and nünning, 2008) – becomes all the more important. technological innovations and digitization open up new possibilities for generating cultural memory, as data can be stored and made accessible more easily. this is particularly important for psm because they have to fulfill a remit of education and cultural diversity, among other things – and are able to provide large amounts of texts, images and audiovisual materials on a noncommercial basis. however, in their daily work, psm archives encounter various legal restrictions and ethical problems. for example, while it is not new that audiovisual materials potentially infringe copyrights or personal rights of others, the digital storage and duplication of such materials reinforces these problems, as recent discussions about the ‘right to be forgotten’ show (see e.g. ausloos, 2012). the public interest in creating common identities by open and publicly accessible archives thus often directly opposes the personal integrity of individuals. what ethical problems and legal restrictions are digital archives by psm across europe currently facing? to what extent do these issues hinder the generation of cultural memory? what strategies are psm in different journalism cultures pursuing to overcome the obstacles? to answer these questions, a three-step research design was applied in a comparative international study that combines cultural theory and empirical communication research with the perspectives of media ethics and media law. theoretical background the study finds a theoretical starting point in the concept of cultural memory that can be defined as the tradition in us, which is transmitted via generations over texts, pictures and rituals and affects our worldview (assmann, 1995). it consists of two components (assmann, 2008): communicative memory is shorter, often comprising only a few generations, and is limited to oral and written communication on a daily life base. by contrast, cultural memory, in a narrower sense, represents objectivized culture and is marked by its distance from daily life. digitization makes the public availability of audiovisual content for everyone possible. this also influences the functions and practices of media archives. while traditional archives in an analogue media world used to focus on the conservation of media, online archives prioritize access for users (pajala, 2010). however, cultural memory requires institutions of preservation, while communicative memory is non-institutional – and is not formalized or stabilized by material symbolization (assmann, 2008). hughes (2015) considers that it is a necessary requirement that public institutions provide for publicly available data und media. however, access alone is insufficient. additionally, the possibility of use and re-use in education and research is required. public service media are the perfect place to realize these aims, as they affect collective identity building (hagedoorn, 2013). therefore, the creation of cultural memory can be described as one of the central functions of psm in a digital network society. however, these goals of cultural memory and safe-guarding public access are thwarted by the individual interests of the producers of the audiovisual archive, the broadcaster itself, and the people that are the subject of, or appear in, the audiovisual material (contributors). methods in order to illuminate this conflict between public and individual interests, a three-step empirical research process was realized in four different european countries that represent a range of political, social, economic and cultural dimensions of media systems (see hallin and mancini, 2004): the united kingdom, finland, the netherlands and austria. the study combined document analysis, problem-centered interviews and database-driven case studies: in a first step, basic data about the archives of the psm organizations were collected via desk research, which included an evaluation of the relevant scientific literature, relevant copyright and media laws on the national and on the european level, the broadcasters’ websites as well as various internal documents (such as editorial and archiving guidelines, codes of conduct, etc.). second, problemcentered interviews with up to five representatives of each broadcasting organization (e.g. archivists, ombudsmen, journalists, representatives of the legal department, etc.) were conducted, in order to shed light on the question of how the legal and ethical implications affect archiving routines – and how this impacts on the aim of generating cultural memory. the interviews made it possible to identify and systematize examples of archived contents that illustrate ethical and legal problems, which were then, in a third step, assessed in detail. for this purpose, the archive catalogues of the different broadcasters were searched for specific cases, which could eventually be evaluated on the basis of the previously collected background knowledge. findings the paper highlights various tensions between personal rights and collective interest in the process of creating cultural memory in the digital age: one of the main transformations in archiving that digitization has brought about is the way in which the material is publicly accessed and the proportion of the material that is publicly accessible. digital archives certainly make it easier to store content – and are thus a valuable asset for public service media in their attempt to fulfill their public remit. however, digitization has also caused significant risks for psm archives, such as technical sustainability and long-term availability of formats, copyrights and personal rights issues. for the daily working process, digitization has changed the role and selfesteem of the archivists, as their work goes beyond simple documentation and they are now more concerned with issues of quality and ethics. at the same time, the role of journalistic actors as content producers is also in transition, as one additional challenge they have to face now is the fact that the consent of the contributors appearing in the program has to be much wider, also containing any cases of publication on the internet. the paper describes these and similar challenges in detail – and concludes with proposals for media policy. references assmann, j (1995) collective memory and cultural identity. cultural history/cultural studies spring/summer 1995: 125–133. assmann j (2008) communicative and cultural memory. in: erll a and nünning a (eds) cultural memory studies. an international and interdisciplinary handbook. berlin, new york: de gruyter, pp. 109–118. ausloos j (2012) the ‘right to be forgotten’ – worth remembering? computer law & security review 28(2): 143–152. erll a and nünning a (eds) (2008) cultural memory studies. an international and interdisciplinary handbook. berlin, new york: de gruyter. hagedoorn b (2013) television as a hybrid repertoire of memory. new dynamic practices of cultural memory in the multi-platform era. view. journal of european television history & culture 2(3): 52–64. hallin dc and mancini p (2004) comparing media systems. three models of media and politics. cambridge: cambridge university press. hughes l (2015) the public has a right to memory. our beeb. the future of the bbc. available at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourbeeb/lorna-hughes/public-has-right-tomemory. pajala m (2010) television as an archive of memories? cultural memory and its limits on the finnish public service broadcaster’s online archive. critical studies in television 5(2): 133–145. snoeren j (2016) archiving the airwaves. accountability of the dutch public broadcasting system. master thesis, university of amsterdam, nl. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): ramizo, g. (2019, october 2-5). trust under trial: the effect of surge pricing on trust toward ride-hailing platforms in manila. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. trust under trial: the effect of surge pricing on trust toward ride-hailing platforms in manila godofredo ramizo jr oxford internet institute, university of oxford introduction ride-hailing platforms such as uber and grab provide popular yet controversial transport alternatives to manila, the philippine’s capital and a megacity with deficient public transport system, crowded city trains, and exploitative taxis. these ride-hailing platforms use algorithms which optimally match user demand and driver supply to provide origin-to-destination conveyance. this is made possible by an essential feature called surge pricing whereby standard fares are algorithmically increased by a multiplier during certain conditions, incentivising drivers to meet user demand. however, during direct experience of ride-hailing platforms in metro manila for 8 months in 2016, i glimpsed a puzzle: many users distrust surge pricing since it results in higher fares, and yet this distrust over such an integral feature had minimal bearing on their persistently positive attitudes such as trust toward ride-hailing platforms. current literature on the link between digital platforms such as ride-hailing platforms and pro-technology attitudes such as trust generally focus on the global north (mittendorf 2017). the smaller number of empirical work on platform trust in the global south (soegoto 2018) does not yet explain why trust for platforms persists amid problematic platform features that may foment distrust. hence, this paper investigates two related questions: first, how do attitudes on surge pricing influence trust toward manila’s ridehailing platforms? second, why do attitudes on surge pricing influence trust of ridehailing platforms the way they do? to accommodate various understandings of trust among study participants, this paper adopts the conventional usage of trust, defined by the oxford dictionary as a “firm belief in the reliability, truth or ability of someone or something.” methods i conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 30 respondents from manila, who were gathered through purposive sampling from facebook groups of ride-hailing users. out of 133 interested participants, 22 were selected while maximising variability in home location, place of work, and frequency of use, among others. these 22 interviews and the 8 interviews from the pilot study were analysed through nvivo using detailed eclectic coding. findings and analysis out of 30 interviewees, 8 interviewees do not see issues in surge pricing as cause for concern. in contrast, 22 interviewees (73%) showed distrust toward surge pricing because it causes exorbitant prices, its computation and triggers are not fully understood, and is unfairly triggered even when there is no traffic congestion. however, in the end, only two interviewees distrust ride-hailing apps due to their firm distrust of surge pricing. everyone else have justifications which neutralise their negative perceptions of surge pricing, preventing any spillover toward their overall trust of ridehailing apps. reasons behind the persistence of trust can be categorized into four themes: rational choice explanations twenty-four respondents reason that their empirical experience indicates that using manila’s conventional transport modes would be much more difficult and timeconsuming. hence, ride-hailing apps remain more advantageous despite any perceived injustice from surge pricing. acceptance of limited transparency the presence of particular kinds of information in the app is enough to assuage 18 respondents even if the undisclosed information are needed to determine negative welfare impacts. even if they note the algorithm’s opacity, these respondents are satisfied just seeing the sum of surge price before booking because it sets their expectations. the issuance of receipts also reassures interviewees, even if the receipt only shows the total fare, and not the computation of all components. this non-rational thinking reveals a cognitive bias: in contexts where users know information to be incomplete, these users overvalue the disclosed information and undervalue the undisclosed information despite having some awareness that the latter is necessary to gauge fairness and welfare impact. perceived control thirteen interviewees acknowledge the opaque computations and exorbitant costs as potential problems in surge pricing. yet they view their choice to click the button to “book a ride” (or not) as “having control”, which – in their view – nullifies any potential negative effect from prices that are perceived as unfair. for example, when asked whether the problems he sees in surge pricing are a big issue, an interviewee responds, “not really. because i can choose not to book.” likewise, respondents feel that the app does not try to “dictate” nor “overpower” them. it simply provides a choice, which can be ignored if unfavourable. however, not choosing to press the “book a ride” button only removes from their gaze the potentially unfair prices, but does not eliminate the potential injustice in the underlying system. again, this appears to be a cognitive bias where control of the superficial is perceived as control of the substantive, thereby giving users a false sense of control over potentially unjust situations. “that’s how the app works”: a variant of system trust for twenty-six interviewees, distrust of surge pricing was negated by justifications rooted in the ideational appeal of technological systems. of these users, 16 explained that the use of automated algorithms justifies the suspension of doubt and the persistence of trust. for 22 respondents, while surge-pricing can appear unfair or exorbitant at first glance, it is part of a technological system with its own peculiar workings. it matters less to them whether surge pricing is transparent and fair, only that it is normal and therefore legitimate. for example, a respondent complains that his trip home could reach exorbitant surge prices, and yet he says, “although… that’s expected. that’s how the app works. so, that’s all.” this process is similar to what luhmann (1989) calls system trust, which describes the tendency of people to possess an optimistic pro-system bias and assume that an impersonal system is predictably working and following formal safeguards. however there is a key difference here. in contrast to an optimistic pro-system bias, these interviewees believe that some undesirable experiences such as the risk of unfair surge pricing are also normal “parts of the system.” therefore, it is a bias that may legitimate valid problems in the technological system. conclusion and relevance despite the impetus for distrust arising from surge pricing issues, trust for ride-hailing platforms persisted among respondents. persistence of trust is partly due to users’ rational calculations: their experiences indicate that ride-hailing platforms provide net benefits despite the possibility of unfair surge pricing, especially when faced with the disagreeable alternative of using manila’s poor transport infrastructure. however, the persistence of trust was also due to cognitive biases among respondents, as reflected in constructs such as acceptance of limited transparency, perceived control, and a variant of system trust. looking beyond the empirical context of manila, the cognitive biases revealed by the data increase our understanding why trust in technological contexts may persist when besieged by distrust. the findings are also important because unscrupulous technology actors can use these cognitive biases to purposely instill trust on less than meritorious grounds, and hold a firm grip of users’ trust even as they begin to harbor healthy skepticism over fairness and transparency. references luhmann, n. 1989. vertrauen. ein mechanismus der reduktion sozialer komplexitat. stuttgart: enke. mittendorf, christoph. 2017. “the implications of trust in the sharing economy – an empirical analysis of uber.” in proceedings of the 50th hawaii international conference on system sciences, 10. soegoto, herman. 2018. “trust and loyalty level of online transportation users.” in . atlantis press. https://doi.org/10.2991/icobest-18.2018.12. aoir2018-submission selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): woodbridge, k. (2018, october 10-13). not suffering fools gladly: crafting prosocial community in online multiplayer minecraft. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. not suffering fools gladly: crafting prosocial community in online multiplayer minecraft kenzie woodbridge royal roads university, british columbia institute of technology play is a central, social, constructive, and transformative human activity and formalized play in the form of games and game playing is a ubiquitous feature of twenty-first century social life. seven hundred million people worldwide play games online with others (spil games, 2013). for most, the social aspects of multiplayer games are at least as important as the gameplay (ducheneaut & moore, 2005; ducheneaut, moore & nickell, 2007; wang & wang, 2008; ratan, chung, shen, williams, & poole, 2010; whippey, 2010; kaye & bryce, 2012; o’connor, longman, white, & obst, 2015; potts, 2015, osmanovic & pecchioni 2016). online multiplayer games function as the modern equivalent to pubs, parks, or community centers (williams, ducheneaut, xiong, yee, & nickell, 2006; ducheneaut et al., 2007) where players come together casually and find social learning (ducheneaut & moore, 2005; banks & potts, 2010; ratan et al., 2010), social interaction (lee-leugner, 2013), and even community (cole & griffiths, 2007; ducheneaut et al., 2007; poor & skoric, 2014; o’connor et al., 2015, riordan & scarf, 2016). if a community is a social group in which members experience a pleasurable sense of belonging and significance (mcmillan & chavis, 1986), then online gaming spaces are an importance source of community for many people of all ages and from all parts of the world. however, game social spaces range from supportive and kindly (williams et al., 2006; ratan et al., 2010; whippey, 2010; kaye & bryce, 2012; o’connor et al., 2015) to hostile, violent, and bullying (ballard & welch, 2015). prosocial online multiplayer game communities should be available to those who desire them. the central question in this research is this: if it can be established that a multiplayer minecraft server offers a prosocial community experience, how and why is that prosocial community constituted? this suggests three avenues of investigation. first, how do server design, gameplay, and interaction impact prosocial community experiences and to what extent can those elements encourage altruism, empathy, and helping? second, what moderation strategies make prosocial community more likely or sustainable? third, how important are individual players, their motivations, and shared social learning to the prosociality of a community? to answer these questions, i have taken an interpretive, qualitative, twophase approach to my research. methods in this research, my site of analysis has been minecraft multiplayer culture and my methods—virtual ethnography and interpretive phenomenological analysis (ipa)—fit within the interpretive paradigm. this is appropriate because the concept at the heart of this research, community, itself exists primarily as an interpreted phenomenon. in the first phase i applied the ethnographic practice of participant observation to playing minecraft in two multiplayer servers selected for their apparent prosocial qualities. this observation totaled 140 hours. i then inductively coded my observations and experiences, and analyzed them through the lens of mcmillan and chavis’ (1986) community theory. in the second phase, i conducted five in-depth phenomenological interviews with players i had encountered in the first phase and analyzed those interviews using ipa. cultural knowledge gained during the first phase provided a rich contextual backdrop for understanding and interpreting participants’ specific phenomenological experiences. conclusions given online games’ centrality in modern sociality, the social climate of those spaces is important. understanding how prosocial community is created and maintained is important, both for the players who spend their time and energy there, and for society as a whole. my expectation for this research was that although player motivation would be an important factor in determining whether a server was prosocial in orientation, design factors such as whether or not a game server preferenced mob-killing over construction would also have a significant influence on the prosociality of a server. however, it is clear from this research that it is the prosocial orientation of players and the commitment, social skill, and integrity of server moderators that is most key to creating and maintaining a prosocial gaming environment. although game design can support prosociality, game design factors appear to be much less important overall, as prosocially-oriented players make more prosocial choices regarding whether and how to engage with less prosocial game design and content. as a result, for individuals wishing to create prosocial minecraft communities, it is attracting the right players—and refusing entry to the wrong ones—that is most important. this research explores all of these factors in more depth, and also investigates what criteria prosocial players use to choose a server. references ballard, m. e., & welch, k. m. (2015). virtual warfare: cyberbullying and cybervictimization in mmog play. games and culture. advance online publication. doi: 10.1177/1555412015592473 banks, j., & potts, j. (2010). towards a cultural science of videogames: evolutionary social learning. the journal of cultural science, 3(1), 1-17. retrieved from http://www.culturalscience.org/journal/index.php/culturalscience/article/download/38/68 cole, h., & griffiths, m. d. (2007). social interactions in massively multiplayer online role-playing gamers. cyberpsychology & behavior, 10(4), 575-583. doi: 10.1089/cpb.2007.9988 ducheneaut, n. & moore, r.j. (2005). more than just ‘xp’: learning social skills in massively multiplayer online games. interactive technology & smart education, 2, 89-100. retrieved from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.212.5985&rep=rep1&ty pe=pdf ducheneaut, n., moore, r.j., & nickell, e. (2007). virtual “third places”: a case study of sociability in massively multiplayer games. computer supported cooperative work, 16, 129-166. doi: 10.1007/s10606-007-9041-8 kaye, l.k. & bryce, j. (2012). putting the “fun factor” into gaming: the influence of social contexts on experiences of playing videogames. international journal of internet science, 7(1), 23-27. retrieved from http://repository.edgehill.ac.uk/4313/1/putting_the_fun_factor_into_gaming._the _influence_of_social_contexts_on_experiences_of_playing_videogames.pdf lee-leugner, j. (2013). youth, gaming, and the network society: exploring the agentic potential of gameplay in minecraft (master’s thesis). retrieved from http://summit.sfu.ca/item/12866 mcmillan, d.w. & chavis, d.m. (1986). sense of community: a definition and theory. journal of community psychology, 14(1), 6-23. doi: 10.1002/15206629(198601)14:1<6::aid-jcop2290140103>3.0.co;2-i o’connor, e.l., longman, h., white, k.m., & obst, p.l. (2015). sense of community, social identity and social support among players of massively multiplayer online games (mmogs): a qualitative analysis. journal of community & applied social psychology, 25, 459-473. doi: 10.1002/casp.2224 osmanovic, s., & pecchioni, l. (2016). beyond entertainment: motivations and outcomes of video game playing by older adults and their younger family members. games and culture, 11(1-2), 130-149. doi: 10.1177/1555412015602819 poor, n., & skoric, m. m. (2014). death of a guild, birth of a network: online community ties within and beyond code. games and culture, 9(3), 182-202. doi: 10.1177/1555412014537401 potts, a. (2015). ‘love you guys (no homo)’. critical discourse studies, 12(2), 163-186. doi: 10.1080/17405904.2014.974635 ratan, r.a., chung, j.e., shen, c., williams, d., & poole, m.s. (2010). schmoozing and smiting: trust, social institutions, and communication patterns in a mmog. journal of computer-mediated communication, 16, 93-114. doi: 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2010.01534.x riordan, b. c., & scarf, d. (2016). crafting minds and communities with minecraft. f1000research 2017, 5(2339), 1-6. doi: 10.12688/f1000research.9625.1 spil games. (2014). 2013 state of online gaming report. [corporate report] retrieved from http://auth-83051f68-ec6c-44e0-afe5bd8902acff57.cdn.spilcloud.com/v1/archives/1384952861.25_state_of_gaming_ 2013_us_final.pdf wang, c. & wang, c. (2008). helping others in online games: prosocial behavior in cyberspace. cyberpsychology & behavior, 11(3), 344-346. doi: 10.1089/cpb.2007.0045 whippey, c. (2010). community in world of warcraft: the fulfillment of social needs. totem: the university of western ontario journal of anthropology, 18(1), 49-59. retrieved from http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/totem/vol18/iss1/15 williams, d., ducheneaut, n., xiong, l., yee, n., & nickell, e. (2006). from tree house to barracks: the social life of guilds in world of warcraft. games and culture, 1(4), 338-361. doi: 10.1177/1555412006292616 selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 evolvi, g., golan, o., martini, m., scott, s., vaisman, c. (2017, october 18-21). religious networked publics: seeking authenticity by digital means. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. religious networked publics: seeking authenticity by digital means giulia evolvi ruhr-universität bochum oren golan university of haifa michele martini university of haifa sasha a. q. scott queen mary university of london carmel vaisman tel aviv university introductory statement in recent years, religious communities have increasingly adopted social media tools for devotional activities. drawing on boyd (2010) and papacharissi (2014), this panel will suggest that collective faith-based use of social networking sites (snss) can be framed as “religious networked publics”. we contend that these public formations advance an online sense of imagined belonging by users, as well as restructure existent religious communities through socio-technological affordances. currently, users and religious entrepreneurs are expanding the meaning of authentic experiences of faith. these innovators are challenging well-established forms of representation and authority for believers. accordingly, religious networked publics aspire to approach the divine through various online platforms: apps, live-streaming of holy sites, blogs and more. for example, rather than visiting church, users can turn to live-streaming, or instead of performing a ritual – apps can become a viable instrument to fulfill users’ devotional praxis. in this session, we aim to present current data on ways of approaching traditional and established religious practices online. more specifically, 2 throughout this panel we thread the question: how is the authentic relation to the divine negotiated by users through their engagement with digital technologies? the first presentation addresses the stormy civic discourse on the burkini ban in france, which reverberated globally, and gained fervent attention within social media platforms. on these platforms, the speaker found that key civic concepts concerning religious freedom and islamophobia were intensely discussed to form a religious networked public that bridges muslim identities, particularly from europe and the us, and ultimately renegotiates the aesthetic traits of an authentic religious behavior. the second presentation addresses religious networked publics that share an interest in holy places and ongoing worship. more specifically, the study focuses on catholic livestreamed religious media and its meanings for emergent groups of monastic webcasters. utilizing walter benjamin’s discussion on the reproduction of authenticity through visual media, the presentation investigates how worldviews of religious networked publics are shaped and negotiated by live-streaming media, which are currently produced and disseminated by religious institutions. the third speaker pivots the panel’s discussion to focus on the transference of religious praxis to a technological sphere underscoring its socio-technological affordances. through a case study of confessional apps, this study questions how religious authenticity and authority is interpreted by religious networked publics in relation to practices of faith that have a computational agent that supplements, and perhaps substitutes, the capacity of religious clergy. the presenter will conclude by discussing how the replacement of a priest with the silent logics of algorithmic automation has profound implications for the authoritative power of confession as a transformative ritual. the final contributor will further the discussion of socio-technological affordances and technologies-of-the-self by offering a phenomenological analysis of religious ritual apps. the presentation contends that the smartphone functions as a hypermaterial ritual object, which embeds the virtual with its material properties. in line with the previous presentation, this study argues that the religious experience can nowadays be authentically performed using technological devices. thus, ritual apps raise ontological and theological questions on the metaphysics of the sacred and the authority to mediate it, which the speaker interprets in light of the theological differences on the issue of the representation of the divine, and highlights the different discourses of authenticity that are triggered by the embedded properties of new media tools. to conclude, this panel will offer a new conceptualization of religious activity over snss through the new framing of “religious networked publics”. a term that integrates past discussions of networked publics, and their social-technological proclivities, with the scholarly studies of religious activity online. we suggest that this conceptual framing can be viewed as supplementing other scholarly discussions of online religion and an opportunity to reflect on past conceptual frameworks including that of “online religious communities” or other terms such as “mediatization”, “e-religion” or the more recent “third spaces” (karaflogka, 2006; hjarvard, 2008; hoover and echchaibi, 2012; campbell, 2010). 3 by adding this framework, panelists suggest the use of “religious networked publics” to discuss the meanings of new media virtuality with regard to religion. this is to say, understand the construction of a collective imagination that is afforded by new media platforms for devotional behavior. an understanding that can elucidate key concepts in the sociology of (online) religion such as authenticity, religious identity and authority. references: boyd, d. (2014, c2010). it’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens. yale university press. campbell, h. (2010). when religion meets new media. routledge. karaflogka, a. (2006). e-religion: a critical appraisal of religious discourse on the world wide web. routledge. hjarvard, s. (2008). the mediatization of religion: a theory of the media as agents of religious change. northern lights: film & media studies yearbook, 6(1), 9-26. hoover, s., & echchaibi, n. (2012). the ‘third spaces’ of digital religion. finding religion in the media, 5. papacharissi, z. (2014). affective publics: sentiment, technology, and politics. oxford university press, usa. * * * extended abstracts: 1. re-mediating the “burkini” muslim women’s networked digital discourses giulia evolvi, ruhr-universität bochum religious digital practices mirror trends of religious change through dynamic interactions, resulting in what campbell defines “networked religion” (2012). characterizes of networked religion include the creation of networked communities and identities, articulations of non-traditional authorities, convergent practices and connections between online and offline religion. different religious groups increasingly use the internet as a space that contributes to the thickening of the religious experiences, thus creating “third spaces” and are generative of hybrid religious identities (hoover and echchaibi, 2014). this research explores how digital practices helped to articulate transnational networks of muslim women discussing the role of head-covering (hijab) in relation to 2016 french “burkini ban”. the so-called burkini, bathing suit that covers body and head created for 4 muslim women who want to dress modestly, has been banned from french beaches as it is supposedly unsafe and unhygienic, a symbol of terrorist ideologies, and a perpetuation of women’s oppressions. however, the burkini ban received criticisms worldwide for being islamophobic; a picture of a hijab-wearing woman forced to undress on a beach by four policemen became viral on the internet and contributed to kindle reactions of muslim women. this research analyzes the creation of networked identities and communities and the negotiation of authorities that accompanied these reactions. hijab: a semantically complex practice because the quran does not contain specific information about the practice of veiling, the muslim veil is often subject to meaning negotiations that makes it “semiotically overcharged” (tarlo, 2007, p. 135). while certain muslim women report to wear the hijab for cultural or political reasons, in france and other european countries head and face-covering have been banned because considered symbols of terrorism and gender inequality, connoting muslim women as both submitted victims and threats for western values (bilge, 2010). material objects help the creation of religious communities based on shared aesthetic practices in allowing the mediation of the religious experience (meyer, 2010). in the case of the veil, its materiality functions as medium to visibly mark the belonging to the muslim community, but also gets re-mediated through circulation of images and discourses in digital spaces. this research looks at how muslim women re-mediate their experiences with the hijab and focuses on the following questions: which are the predominant themes muslim women employed to talk about veiling? how does the internet allowed for the self-representation of muslim women in relation to the burkini ban? exploring muslim women’s voices online the internet can become a venue for muslim women in western contexts to discuss fashion and the meanings of the hijab, but also a “safe space” to address stigmatization, create counter-publics against stereotypes, and organize activism (echchaibi, 2013; vis, van zoonen, & mihelj, 2011). because french authorities that issued the burkini ban did not take into account muslim women’s viewpoints, it is important to analyze the emergence of digital discourses where muslim women are producers rather than subjects of the conversation; in order to do so, this research takes into account 17 videos and 49 news and blog articles –all against the burkini ban – created and circulated in french and english by a total of 60 self-identified muslim women, prevalently based in europe and north america. the material is explored through a qualitative analysis that takes into account both the written and spoken content, images and graphic styles. freedom, family, and fashion the analysis shows that the internet is, for certain muslim women, a venue to counteract stereotypes about the burkini and islam in general. while the women come 5 from different linguistic and geographical contexts, they similarly report experiences of being muslim in the west and create narratives that point to three common themes: firstly, descriptions of the material characteristics of the burkini connote it as practical for swimming and similar to a diving suit, as well as apt for sun protection. pictures of women swimming and surfing with their burkini counteract the idea that it is “unsafe” or “unhygienic,” but rather gives hijab-wearing women freedom to participate in leisure activities in a non-segregate way. secondly, digital discourses refuse connections between burkini and terrorism by explaining that islamic fundamentalists would not allow women to enjoy themselves on the beach. the non-threatening character of burkini-wearing women is enhanced by circulation of narratives and images of them conducting a fulfilling family life. thirdly, muslim women discuss feminism by claiming their rights to choose to cover, criticizing also the hypersexualization of female bodies in western culture. through pictures of women that wear veils in fashionable styles, such narratives connote burkiniwearing women not as “submitted” subjects, but rather as women that cover their bodies feeling feminine and, in certain cases, empowered. conclusion: digital religious authorities, communities, identities the practices of re-mediation of pictures and narratives about the burkini exemplify how the internet allow muslim women to create alternative narratives as they can not only express themselves beyond social stereotypes and generalizations, but also gain agency on how they want to visually present themselves, discuss the material aspects of the burkini, and normalize the presence of the hijab in western contexts. these practices allow for the articulation of networked religion in-bewteen offline materiality and online performances. while the narratives analyzed do not speak for all muslim women, they show how for certain hijab-wearing women the internet is a space of articulation of authorities, communities, and identities. the meaning of veiling is in this case not entrusted in institutional religious authorities, but relies upon the personal interpretation of women who wear it. these women form a transnational community based on shared narratives and aesthetics that virtually came together to show mutual solidarity in response to the burkini ban. the internet functions as a “third space” of identity formation, where women perform unthreatening and hybrid identities in showing that they are able to live within western societies while being muslim. in negotiating their head-covering practices women tend not to mention islamic institutions and sacred texts in their narratives, as they frame burkini in terms of practical issues, personal choices, and modest fashion. therefore, the analyzed discourses show how the internet becomes a space where muslim women can form a networked public that has agency in determining which aspects of their religious material practices and visual presences they wish to show, going beyond both social stigma and institutionalized religion. references 6 bilge, s. (2010). beyond subordination vs. resistance: an intersectional approach to the agency of veiled muslim women. journal of intercultural studies, 31(1), 9–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/07256860903477662 campbell, h. a. (2012). understanding the relationship between religion online and offline in a networked society. journal of the american academy of religion, 80(1), 64–93. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfr074 echchaibi, n. (2013). muslimah media watch: media activism and muslim choreographies of social change. journalism, 1464884913478360. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884913478360 hoover s and echchaibi n (2014) media theory and the third spaces of digital religion. essay. retriever from: https://thirdspacesblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/third-spaces-and-media-theoryessay-2-0.pdf meyer, b. (ed.). (2010). aesthetic formations: media, religion, and the senses (2009 edition). palgrave macmillan. tarlo, e. (2007). hijab in london: metamorphosis, resonance and effects. journal of material culture, 12(2), 131–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183507078121 vis, f., van zoonen, l., & mihelj, s. (2011). women responding to the anti-islam film fitna: voices and acts of citizenship on youtube. feminist review, 97(1), 110–129. https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2010.29 2. live-streaming the sacred: online construction of authenticity and the religious experience oren golan, university of haifa, israel michele martini, university of haifa, israel in recent years, major religions have embraced live-streamed media for outreach to their own religious communities and to new audiences. from the jewish western wall in jerusalem to islam’s kaaba in mecca and beyond, live-streamed video images of many religious sites are being webcast, either during specific religious events or with continuous 24-hour feeds. religious believers view such live-streamed religious media not only in the privacy of their homes, but also on monitors situated in public places such as shops, hospitals, and retirement communities, as well as in religious venues (e.g. churches, mosques, religious youth centers). the innovation of live-streaming is embraced by key religious organizations and ngos such as aish hatorah (jewish), the diocesan association of tarbes and lourdes (roman catholic) and makkah-live (islamic). the proliferation of institutional live-feeds for religious purposes raises the question of how user worldviews are shaped and how meaning is negotiated by live-streaming mediated communication from religious institutions. 7 we contend that exploring the meanings of live-streaming images of holy sites can shed light on the viewership, participation, and overall meanings of rituals and public gatherings in the information age. in addition, we suggest that exploring this question can illuminate the mechanisms by which religious live-streaming restores the centrality of holy sites in the religious imagination and provides traditional denominations a pathway for global outreach. to investigate the meanings attributed to live-streaming, we draw on walter benjamin's renowned discussion of art's aura and authentic meaning in the age of mechanical reproduction. we suggest that engaging benjamin's reasoning will allow a conceptual framing of the mediation between holy sites and believers, as viewed by media entrepreneurs. for this purpose, we focus on a monastic catholic operation, namely the collaborative efforts in the holy land between the franciscan order and the brazil-based canção nova movement. the franciscan order is the community of friars to whom the catholic church entrusted the mission of guarding the holy sites and the canção nova is a monastic community of technology-savvy believers whose evangelical ministry is operated through means of social communications. the joint efforts of the two groups have yielded a massive volume of media production as well as the construction of livestreaming feeds from sacred sites in the holy land. through their media operations, the canção nova has started up and now currently operate one 24/7 streaming site in nazareth and are also actively pursuing additional sites in jerusalem and bethlehem, all of which offer opportunities to explore the emergence of religious live-streaming as it occurs. the study focused on live-streaming production between 2015 and 2017. a mixedmethod approach was designed which drew upon ethnographic data gathered during fieldwork, including participant observations and interviews. (1) participant observations and in-depth interviews – attending ceremonies in monasteries and prominent holy sites in the holy land with significant video production activity, all of which form the basis for the streaming operations at hand. the lion’s share of the study's findings was gleaned from 25 in-depth interviews with franciscan and canção nova members, mainly volunteers, monks, and clerics who serve as webmaster production staff, on topics relating to live-streaming productions. interviews included questions such as: • how does the visual character of live-streaming fit your evangelizing mission? • how does the global nature of live-streaming fit in with your evangelizing mission? • does the online broadcasting of religious rituals enhance their importance? • are there religious limitations to filming rituals and holy sites? • can an online feed convey holiness? how? • do religious groups compete for leading roles in representing the holy land? • in the long run, will live digital media become part of the official (legitimate) christian practice? 8 (2) exploring digital footprints franciscan and canção nova productions were reviewed. familiarity with this content supported the discussions with webmasters and enriched the understanding of the objectives and media productions of the interviewees. findings revealed three facets that frame webmasters' underlying mission: 1. evangelizing youth pushing the boundaries of religious socialization to fit the media-saturated environments of contemporary youth. 2. establishing affinity towards the holy land – among contemporary populations, forging a sense of closeness to sacred locations of the biblical narrative. 3. maintaining constant presence of the transcendental – generating a readily accessible experience of engaging with sites that utilize new media tools to mediate the divine. the first, 'evangelizing youth,' is a key concern of clerics, who aim to approach the younger generation by adjusting to their digital literacy, fostering a sense of aweinspiring engagement with the biblical narrative, and ultimately enabling a connection with the numinous, in otto's terms (1916). the second, 'establishing affinity towards the holy land', reveals webmaster perspectives on live-streaming as an unfiltered channel for believers to engage in an experience that is traditionally available only to pilgrims and clergy who visit the ultimate in holy places. finally, the third, 'maintaining constant presence of the transcendental', reveals web operators' desire to facilitate a global and omnipresent experience of users relating to the divine. they do so by offering a contemplative channel that believers can access through everyday devices such as smartphones and tablets, can use to meditate on live-streamed images, and ultimately to invoke god's intervention to act in the world. drawing on walter benjamin, we suggest a theoretical model that elucidates how the video feed mediates the aura of the holy site by evoking a proximity to the sacred. accordingly, we observe a twofold impact of live-streaming. on one hand, the feed establishes a holy site as a center of worship and highlights the privileged relationship that exists between the clergy and the site. on the other hand, live-streaming enables the rise of webmasters as sources of secondary authority who can shape the online experience of users. their authority is perhaps unexpected, but it is legitimized when they deliver live-streamed video feeds of well-established holy sites. accordingly, in the presentation we aim to discuss how live-streaming connects believers with the divine and elucidates live-streaming’s capacity to construct a sense of authenticity while transforming the religious experience, establishing secondary authority in the catholic world, and ultimately propel religious change in the contemporary information society. 3. algorithmic absolution: the case of catholic confessional apps 9 sasha a. q. scott, queen mary university of london, uk introduction when confession: a roman catholic app was launched in 2011 it was met with a mix of sarcasm and suspicion in the press and was widely derided as inauthentic. yet the app remains popular and similar applications have proliferated with the same structural format: progressive stages of sorrow, confession, absolution and penance that follow the structural form and function of traditional rites of the sacrament of penance. in stark contrast these apps have received enthusiastic support from catholic communities online and an imprimatur from bishop kevin rhoades, the first of its kind. confession as a social ritual remains relevant and these formal apps sit within a larger body of confessional platforms whereby users admit to moral deviations with varying degrees of anonymity, publicity and inferred notions of absolution and reconciliation. however, the moral dimensions of the ritual of confession combined with the computational processing of user input mark confessional apps with a particular significance. accordingly i argue that these emergent practices are not substitutions of established forms but rather adaptations and renegotiations: of traditions, authenticity, authority and meaning. the question of confessional apps reveals a series of wider issues about the relationship between religion, digital media and culture as reflected in a rich and growing body of literature (campbell 2005; cheong et al. 2012; connelly 2012; lundby 2012). the paper presents a case study of catholic confessional apps that covers their design, marketing, and user feedback from review forums. my thinking moves between two parallel trajectories. the first is concerned with human perception: how is the app (and by proxy the algorithm) understood by users? how, if at all, does computational agency factor into how the app is used, how it is perceived, and how it is incorporated into everyday religious practice by users. i draw upon discussions groups to see how users self-report their experience of the app, observing that for most the computational is not even considered an issue: it is very rarely questioned and negative feedback is reserved to the reporting of technical problems (as opposed to ethical ones). the second line of thinking considers how we should conceptualise the algorithm in terms of the role it plays in this most intriguing of contexts. authenticity and authority in the context of religious practice, authenticity has two meanings that we must account for here: first, authenticity is a category through which to judge whether or not certain ‘objects’ are a legitimate part of a religious system. these can be symbols, beliefs, locations, rituals, etc. secondly, it is a category with which to judge the participants in religious activity (radde-antweiler 2013). in other words, is the system authentic, and is the experience authentic? the second of these questions is relatively simple to address. the data is clear; users report an authentic experience over and again. as with any ritual, the prescriptive validity stems from participation itself; the ritual is deemed authentic because the wider catholic community knows intimately the intention and the 10 content of the ritual. additionally, users are observed to create their own authentication strategies; they have different ways of explaining, justifying, and integrating the apps into daily life and worship. each must find their own way to navigate the sometimes brutal juxtaposition between technology and the ancient rituals of confession, in a process heidebrink (2007) calls “individual rituality”. questions of authenticity are often problematic because when grounded in defunct dichotomies between the ‘online’ and ‘offline’. turkle’s (1995) argument that the virtual is ‘mere simulation’ simply does not hold true. these are not ‘places’ we ‘go’ online. they do not have an http:// or www prefix. they are embedded in our mobile devices, developed to be personal aids for personal practices. for the religious user, authenticity is simply what they understand to be a part of their own religious practice. religious authority is in many ways as nebulous an idea as that of authenticity. what is really unarguable is that authority is performative, discursive and highly contextual (cheong 2012a). what is certain is that the convergence of digital media with religion reflects an expansion of religious practices that results in new agents to account for in questions of authority. it is here that our attention turns to silent role of algorithmic agency. locating the algorithmic at the heart of any computational artefact is an algorithm: a set of mathematical procedures for transforming input data into output data. it sounds innocuous, yet algorithms are a key governing logic in society with ‘the power to enable and assign meaningfulness’ (langlois 2013). the case of confessional apps has a particular veracity because of the significance of the human agent the algorithm is replacing: the catholic priest. hardware and software are essentially meaningless machines until they have data to process, constituting the two halves of the ontology of the world according to computers (manovich 1999). we must stop and consider this in the computational sense: an a confessional app this data is constituted by the moral deviations of the user: our individual and evolving catalogue of sins, recorded in perpetuity, and reduced to a series of zeros and ones. an algorithm, at its most basic, functions as data-questionprocess-return. if the input data in neutral, we can assume the return will be neutral. if the input data is moral, by definition the process return will have moral implications. in theological terms a priest acts in persona christi – in the person of christ – during the sacrament of penance. the priest receives from the church the power of judgement over the penitent, as a direct bridge between man and god with the power of reconciliation. no matter how they are marketed people are using these apps in a way that replaces the priest with a computer programme in a manner that reassigns the transformative authority of ritual to a binary processing algorithm. whilst these specific applications are – computationally speaking – relatively basic, they represent a much wider trend in which algorithms are now located in the moral and ethical dimensions of everyday life. 11 references campbell, h., (2005). spiritualising the internet. uncovering discourses and narratives of religious internet usage. online–heidelberg journal of religions on the internet: volume 01.1 special issue on theory and methodology. cheong, p.h. (2012) authority. in: campbell, h.a. ed., 2012. digital religion: understanding religious practice in new media worlds. routledge. pp. 72-87. cheong, p.h., fischer-nielsen, p., gelfgren, s. and ess, c., (eds) (2012). digital religion, social media and culture. perspectives, practices and futures. peter lang, new york. heidbrink, s., (2007). exploring the religious frameworks of the digital realm: offlineonline-offline transfers of ritual performance. masaryk ujl & tech., 1, p.175. langlois, g., (2013). participatory culture and the new governance of communication the paradox of participatory media. television & new media, 14(2), pp.91-105. lundby, k., (2011). patterns of belonging in online/offline interfaces of religion. information, communication & society, 14(8), pp.1219-1235. manovich, l., (1999). database as symbolic form. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 5(2), pp.80-99.
 radde-antweiler, k., (2012). authenticity. in: campbell, h.a. ed., 2012. digital religion: understanding religious practice in new media worlds. routledge. pp.88-103. turkle, s., (1995). life on the screen: identity in the age of the internet. new york, simon and schuster. 4. hypermateriality and authenticity: the smartphone as a religious ritual object carmel vaisman, tel aviv university, israel. introduction the discourse involving the authenticity of online religious rituals is almost entirely based on the perception of the internet as an immaterial space. online rituals were often questioned as being a mere simulation or a reproduction of something “real” (hill-smith 2009, radde-antweiler 2008). macwilliams (2004) found that people's perception of the “virtual” determined their judgment on the authenticity of online rituals. 12 virtuality is understood as a realm of representations (heim 1993) or a potentiality, an ideal immaterial dimension of reality (deleuze 2002), rooted in practices of imagination and art-based illusions in the history of religious rituals (macwilliams 2004). however, in spiritual matters the ideal and the immaterial might be an advantage. an ideal space, free of the constrains of a dense globalized urban space, could be better suited to support ritual practice (taylor 2003). according to kapferer (2006) religious ritual is in itself a virtual technology: it is highly symbolized and representational, and its function is to virtualize a dimension of actuality. indeed, technopagans preferred cyberspace over nature since they perceived it as a doorway to the astral plain (o'leary 1996) and thus closer to divinity and in a better position to mediate the sacred. in the last decade, ritual practice has extended to the mobile phone. although both the computer and the mobile phone are internet-based, the affordances of the latter are not places we "go" to (scot 2016) and are not included in the discourses of "cyberspace", "online", or the "virtual". digital religion scholarship has merely begun to engage religious apps, mainly offering initial typologies (wagner 2012, campbell et al. 2014). a recent study is noted for demonstrating that apps raise novel transgressive challenges to traditional religions, such as replacing the moral authority of a priest with an algorithm (scot 2016). this paper contributes to this preliminary body of research, offering a phenomenological analysis of popular religious ritual apps from various religions and spiritual practices. the analysis draws on three years of experience of international students from various religious backgrounds at tel aviv university tasked with preforming digital rituals during a semester. the paper argues that the smartphone functions as a hypermaterial ritual object, embedding the virtual with material properties, thus discourses of virtuality that seem outdated or exclusive to spatiality, remain relevant to ritual apps. doing religion on the mobile phone mobile phones were used for religious purposes such as receiving and sending prayers, confession, and absolution, since the inception of text messaging services (bell 2006). upon providing internet access, they also became a conduit for sacred texts on the go (bell 2006). however, mobile phones were not merely an extension of the internet. their mobility and constant proximity to the body has allowed it access to additional facets of ritual practice and challenged the boundary between the sacred and the profane. schwartz (2010) demonstrated how the camera phone has occupied a ritual role in hassidic judaism, redefining sacred space-time and allowing for their summoning at will, in potential conflict with jewish ritual logic. furthermore, gps location technology enabled religious assistance such as pointing to the direction of mecca/jerusalem (bell 2006). mobile phones were also material cultural objects, often customized and decorated with religious symbols (hjorth and kim 2005). the advent of smartphone apps engendered an explosion of religious mobile services. wagner (2012) provided an initial typology of religious apps: prayer, ritual, 13 sacred text, religious social media, self-expression, and focus/meditation. wagner's main concern is the individualization of religion and the challenges that the apps present to religious authorities and traditional means of determining authenticity. campbell et al. (2014) expanded this typology to eleven categories based on a sample of 488 religious apps. however, scot (2016) argues such categories almost always overlap, thus this taxonomy oversimplifies the more interesting questions we could be asking. indeed, scot's (2016) case study of a catholic confession apps' automated absolution of sins is a manifestation of wagner's (2012) worry that confession apps might replace the role of the priest, bringing digital religion research to the posthuman threshold. the hypermateriality of the smartphone both the computer and the smartphone are material objects, yet the spatial metaphor of the internet obscures the materiality of the computer. similarly, the bodily proxy and transitional object metaphors of the smartphone stress its handheld materiality while obscuring the virtual quality of its apps. a phenomenological analysis of ritual apps demonstrates that by "transforming" into various ritual objects, smartphone affordances are repurposed to interact with the displayed images, embedding the virtual with material-like properties. the paper argues ritual apps invite a different discourse of authenticity that does not invoke the virtual as immaterial but rather as a different kind of material, digital-material (hayles 2002). the paper offers a different criteria for taxonomy based on the digital-material interface metaphors the apps invoke. ritual apps raise ontological and theological questions on the metaphysics of the sacred and the authority to mediate it. for instance, if the sacred resides in the text and not in the material that stores it, why can't one be sworn with a bible app? if the purpose is to focus the attention on the divine, does it really matter if one's fingers move over the wooden, glass, or plastic beads of a rosary/mas'baha/malla or slide over animated beads onscreen? in conclusion, the paper interprets this challenge in light of the theological differences on the representation of the divine. the jewish bible is rife with examples of representations that are tasked to mediate the divine but end up replacing it altogether, which might serve as a warning for the potential of such a technology to be idolized and become a religion (e.g. campbell and la pastina 2010). references bell, g. (2006). no more sms from jesus: ubicomp, religion, and techno-spiritual practices. in p. dourish & a. friday (eds.), ubicomp 2006, lncs 4206 (pp. 141–158). berlin, germany: springer-verlag. campbell, h., & la pastina, a. (2010). how the iphone became divine: new media, religion and the intertextual circulation of meaning. new media & society, 12(7), 11911207. campbell, h.a., altenhofen, b., bellar, w., cho, k.j. (2014). there’s a religious app for that! a framework for studying religious mobile applications. mobile media & communication 2(2): 154–172. 14 deleuze, g. (2002). the actual and the virtual. in: parnet, c. (ed.), dialogues ii. new york: columbia university press. pp. 112-115. hayles, n. k. (2002). writing machines. cambridge: mit press. heim, m. (1993). the metaphysics of virtual reality. new york: oxford university press. hill-smith, c., (2009). cyberpilgrimage: a study of authenticity, presence and meaning in online pilgrimage experiences. the journal of religion and popular culture, 21(2), pp.6-6. hjorth, l. and kim, h. (2005). being there and being here: gendered customising of mobile 3g practices through a case study in seoul. convergence 11: 49–55. kapferer, b. (2006). virtuality. in theorizing rituals: issues, topics, approaches, concepts. edited by kreinath, j., snoek, j. and stausberg, m., (pp. 671-684). boston: brill. macwilliams, m. (2004) ‘virtual pilgrimage to ireland’s croagh patrick’, in l. dawson and d. cowan (eds) religion online: finding faith on the internet, new york: routledge, 223–38. o'leary, s. d. (1996). .cyberspace as sacred space: communicating religion on computer networks. journal of the american academy of religion 64, p. 781-807 radde-antweiler, k, (2008) ‘virtual religion: an approach to a religious and ritual topography of second life’, online – heidelberg journal of religion on the internet, 3(1). schwarz, o. (2010). 'praying with a camera phone: mediation and transformation in jewish rituals', culture and religion, 11(3): 177-194. scot, s. (2016). algorithmic absolution: the case of catholic confessional apps. online – heidelberg journal of religion on the internet, 11. taylor, j. (2003). cyber-buddhism and the changing urban space in thailand. space and culture 6(3): 292–308. wagner, r., (2012). you are what you install: religious authenticity and identity in mobile apps. in: campbell, h.a. ed., 2012. digital religion: understanding religious practice in new media worlds. routledge. pp.199-206. a good life critical feminist approaches to influencer ecologies (spir) (1).pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): arriagada, a., banet-weiser, s., bishop, s., duffy, b. e., entwistle, j., glatt, z., rocamora, a., sobande, f. & wissinger, b. (2020, october). a good life? critical feminist approaches to influencer ecologies. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. a good life? critical feminist approaches to influencer ecologies arturo arriagada universidad adolfo ibáñez sarah banet-weiser london school of economics and political science sophie bishop kings college london brooke erin duffy cornell university joanne entwistle kings college london zoë glatt london school of economics and political science agnès rocamora london college of fashion francesca sobande cardiff university elizabeth wissinger the city university of new york panel overview social media platforms are widely lauded as bastions for entrepreneurial selfactualisation and creative autonomy, offering an answer to historically exclusive and hierarchical creative industries as routes to employability and success. crystal abidin defines influencers as “everyday, ordinary internet users who accumulate a relatively large following on blogs and social media through the textual and visual narration of their personal lives and lifestyles” (2016, p.3). in 2020, influencer content can lie on a spectrum of amateur to highly professional; mythologies about influencers’ independence have also been complicated as we catch glimpses of managers, photographers and pr teams. social media influencers are envied by audiences as having achieved ‘the good life’, one in which they are able to ‘do what they love’ for a living (duffy 2017). this is augmented by the supposed ‘authenticity’ of self-presentation as it also hinges on personal disclosure, capturing domestic life and ‘backstage’ moments. despite this ostensive accessibility and relatability, today’s high-profile influencer culture continues to be shaped by ‘preexisting gendered and racial scripts and their attendant grammars of exclusion’ as sarah banet-weiser (2012) argued in the early days of socially mediated entrepreneurship (p. 89; see also bishop, 2017). in western contexts only a narrow subset of white, cis-gender, and heterosexual youtubers, instagrammers, tiktokers, and twitch streamers tend to achieve visibility as social media star-creators, and celebratory discourses of diversity and fairness mask problematic structures that exclude marginalized identities from opportunities to attain success. perhaps not surprisingly, the lack of diversity among the digital creator community fails to register in popular culture, shrouded as it is by cheering assertions about internetenabled diversity and the well-worn promise of meritocracy. a key aim of this panel is thus to draw attention to marginalized creator communities and subjectivities, including women, non-white, and queer creators, all of whom face higher barriers to entry and success. the panelists, moreover, draw attention to new systems of inequality emerging at the interface of technology and creative industry, including platform algorithms and technological tools that purport to scout out “brand friendly content”, that exacerbate other forms of inequality that have deep roots in the media and cultural industries (gill, 2013). more broadly, by taking seriously both the practices and discourses of social media influencers, the panellists aim to challenge popular denigrations of influencers as vapid, frivolous, or eager to freeload. we locate such critiques in longstanding dismissals of feminized cultural production (levine, 2013) and argue, instead, that we need to take seriously the role of influencers in various social, economic, and political configurations. in this manner, we capture more about the various ways users try to wield the power of these platforms, however lopsided these attempts may be. these collected analyses reveal the complexity of financial co-optation, where users are both rewarded and punished for taking risks, speaking out, and being ‘real’ for their followers, according to a capricious calculus whose contours are opaque to many. consequently, these papers draw out moments of political and social intent however muddied they become as they engage with the economic imperatives of platforms. this panel offers new research that makes significant interventions into the ongoing conversation about influencer ecologies. to that end, this interdisciplinary panel utilises critical feminist methods that emphasize diverse forms of value and meaning-making, to explore the culture of influencers within the wider contexts of marketing, education, politics, and family life. we reject claims examining influencer cultures is niche; as life is increasingly lived contingent to social media platforms, influencer cultures offer glimpses into how our identities and outputs will become increasingly commodified. references abidin, c. (2016). “aren’t these just young, rich women doing vain things online?”: influencer selfies as subversive frivolity. social media+ society, 2(2), 2056305116641342. banet-weiser, s. (2012). authentic™: the politics of ambivalence in a brand culture. new york, ny: nyu press. bishop, s. (2017). beauty for girls, pranks for boys–it’s the same old gender stereotypes for youtube stars’. the conversation, 4. gill, r. (2013). inequalities in media work. in behind the screen (pp. 189-205). palgrave macmillan, new york. duffy, b. e. (2017). (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. new haven: yale university press. levine, e. (ed.). (2015). cupcakes, pinterest, and ladyporn: feminized popular culture in the early twenty-first century. university of illinois press. algorithmic influencer management tools: a feminist critique of peg and the eye sophie bishop kings college london introduction this paper explores two proprietary algorithmic influencer management tools designed to support marketers in selecting influencers for marketing campaigns. influencers are categorised and ranked according to subjective judgements of ‘brand safety’. tools deepen surveillance of influencer content by advertising stakeholders, who hope to predict and manage the likelihood of influencer ‘scandals’, and to hegemonize influencer behaviour more broadly. for example, l’oreals chief digital officer, cedric dordain, told the drum ‘we want more detail about the background of the influencers. from what they've posted in the past – not just on instagram but on any social platform and any website or blog or forum’. the risk-management software sold within influencer marketing industries is in line with often discriminatory risk-management software used across sectors, such as hr (gray & suri, 2019) or healthcare (eubanks, 2017). both software levy historic data from influencer profiles and campaigns to support automated decision-making processes. firstly i consider peg, a uk-based influencer marketing tool enabling stakeholders to identify brand-safe influencers. secondly, the eye is a custom application designed by ‘marketing services and media company’ stylehaul using their proprietary data to ‘help brands see who the best influencers for their campaign’. stylehaul ceased operations in 2019, and it is unclear what became of the eye (launched in 2017). the tool remains a valuable case study, however, as its operations are comparable with competitors such as traakr, upfluence, and mavrck. this paper seeks to provide a theoretical and conceptual framework for understanding how brand safety is predicted and measured using digital tools in marketing industries. this framework synthesises feminist critiques of ostensibly participatory influencer industries (abidin, 2016; duffy, 2017; oh & oh, 2017) with close attention to critical algorithmic studies (bucher, 2018; cheney-lippold, 2017; gillespie, 2017). i demonstrate how value-laded algorithmic judgements map onto well-worn hierarchies of desirability and employability, originating from systemic and historic bias along the lines of class, race and gender. methodology often the fetishization of the complexity of algorithms is a ‘red herring, a piece of information that distracts from the other’ (bucher, 2018: 44). there are no guarantees that cracking open the black box will reveal secrets or make the roots of bias or discrimination visible in algorithmic systems. there is methodological opportunity in studying the ancillary content that surrounds algorithms and their formations; including ‘press releases, conference papers on machine learning techniques… media reports, blog posts’ in addition to other texts and resources (bucher, 2018: 61). thus, my methodology involved gathering background information about peg and stylehaul including white papers, about us pages, marketing and press guidance, podcasts, trade press coverage and conference presentations. i negotiated access to peg for one month, and used the ‘walkthrough method’, combining sts and cultural studies approaches to systematically analyse peg’s ‘technological mechanisms and embedded cultural references’ (light, burgess, & duguay, 2018: 882). i walked-through the peg platform as a brand, interrogating its features, options and guidelines. data gathered was coded for information about the tools and their expected use (for brands, influencers, management), representations of algorithmic processes and information about categorisation, predictions and ranking cultures. despite the clear limitations of being unable to reveal how algorithmic tools work, the patchwork approach employed in this paper can demonstrate how such tools are conceived, sold and embedded within marketing industries and promotional cultures. findings i concentrate on three primary findings: i consider how discrimination manifests within both peg’s brand safety and audience consistency scores, and in stylehaul’s measurement of influencer face shape. taken together, these examples illustrate how bias becomes baked into software, and how this impacts influencers’ employment opportunities and broad visibility. peg gives each influencer a ‘brand safety’ score, measuring instances of profanity in an influencers’ video metadata (titles, tags) and spoken words in video content using language processing. it is clear that peg’s algorithms cannot measure context or attend to sustained and intricate intersections of raced, class and gendered identity within social life. for example, the word ‘queer’ is coded as profanity, lowering brand safety scores. this categorisation speaks to a longstanding sexualisation of queer people, in addition to the more recent examples of the demonetization of lgbtq+ content on youtube. similarly n*gger is coded as a naughty word, a decision that shows how minority groups can be penalised for reclaiming words that have historically been used against them. peg measures a like/dislike ratio, designed to anticipate creator scandals. in practice, it measures an audience’s tolerance for creator behaviours. for example, gaming vlogger pewdiepie’s use of anti-semitic language has been widely profiled, yet he has high audience consistency score of 9/10. indeed, influencers whose brands are built on being controversial tend to have very consistent like/dislike ratios, a positive metric for their overall safety score. this score is not measuring how offensive or unjust an influencers’ content is in context. rather, measuring dislikes from a creators’ own audience is a proxy for measuring that audience’s tolerance of such content. backlash is uneven. it is important to recognise that women and people of colour are more vulnerable to trolling attacks that diminish an audience consistency score and overall safety score, both used by brands make recruitment decisions. finally, for the eye the ‘the shape of a creator’s face impacts post performance more than any other facial characteristic measured’. although stylehaul do not outline their methodology for measuring face shape (or other characteristics) they show a positive correlation between facial characteristics and beauty campaign success. in one test ‘heart shaped faces performed best’. through social media content, influencers’ face shapes are algorithmically processed and categorised. in this vein, the eye reveals an underlying influencer ‘aesthetic economy’, showing the value of the right look (entwistle, 2002). the eye’s categorisations reveal how raced definitioms of beauty underpin participation in influencer industries. mythologies of creativity and democracy, that ‘anyone can be a fashion blogger’ have informed the development and professionalisation of influencer industries (duffy, 2017: 4). although the promise of creative participation is intoxicating, algorithmic tools used by gatekeepers can revealing the practical barriers for those hoping to make it as influencers, and creative labourers more broadly in the uk and beyond. references abidin, c. (2016). “aren’t these just young, rich women doing vain things online?”: influencer selfies as subversive frivolity. social media+ society, 2(2), bucher, t. (2018). if...then: algorithmic power and politics. oxford university press. cheney-lippold, j. (2017). we are data: algorithms and the making of our digital selves. new york university press. duffy, b. e. (2017). (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. yale university press. entwistle, j. (2002). the aesthetic economy: the production of value in the field of fashion modelling. journal of consumer culture, 2(3), 317–339. eubanks, v. (2017). automating inequality: how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor (first edition). st. martin’s press. gillespie, t. (2017). algorithmically recognizable: santorum’s google problem, and google’s santorum problem. information, communication & society, 20(1), gray, m. l., & suri, s. (2019). ghost work: how to stop silicon valley from building a new global underclass. oh, d. c., & oh, c. (2017). vlogging white privilege abroad: eat your kimchi ’s eating and spitting out of the korean other on youtube: vlogging white privilege abroad. communication, culture & critique, 10(4), 696–711. beyond the black/white binary: “interracial” vlogger culture and prospective “mixed” micromicroinfluencers francesca sobande cardiff university introduction contemporary marketplace contexts are inherently shaped by structural racism and colonial legacies which propel the commodification of people, places and cultures (johnson et al., 2019). as it exists within a broader consumer culture which is steeped in intersecting inequalities and oppression, influencer culture is always a site and source of power struggles that reflect and reveal socio-political hierarchies entangled with capitalism. therefore, influencer culture—from viral tiktok trends to the vlogs of youtubers—are mediated by a market logic that, i argue, is tethered to what hooks (1992) refers to as white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. approached from this perspective, in this paper i analyze the content of vloggers whose self-brands stem from their (re)presentations of being in an ‘interracial’ relationship. this analysis addresses how whiteness functions in the construction of ‘interracial’ couple vlogger brands, in ways linked to issues concerning gender, sexuality and parenthood. more specifically, i study what depictions of the offspring of such vloggers and their parenting of their children suggest about the racial dynamics of vlogger culture—especially the appeal of ‘micromicroinfluencers’ (abidin, 2015; 2017). methodology using critical technocultural discourse analysis (ctda), which is a ‘multimodal analytic technique for the investigation of internet and digital phenomena, artifacts, and culture’ (brock, 2018: 1012), i interpretively analyze the content of 20 high-profile ‘interracial’ couple vloggers—such as jamie and nikki, the rush fam, adannadavid, slicenrice and kkandbabyj. ctda ‘decenters the western deficit perspective on minority technology use to instead prioritize the epistemological standpoint of underrepresented groups of technology users’ (brock, 2020: 2). thus, such a holistic analytic approach which involves treating ‘technology as discourse, practice, and artifact’ (ibid.) is attuned to the agentic, strategic and creative ways that racialized people use digital media and technology—including as vloggers. drawing on critical race and digital studies (benjamin, 2019; noble and tynes, 2016; noble, 2018), black cyberfeminism (gray, 2015), abidin’s (2018) research on internet celebrity, and the work of burgess and green (2009) on youtube, i analyze the vlog content of ‘interracial’ couples that involve a black and a white spouse, the vlog content of ‘interracial’ couples that do not involve white people, as well as online comments accompanying all of these vlogs. tacking back and forth between the content of the vloggers under review and the online comments that they yield, i examine the explicit and implicit ways that issues regarding race and racism are made manifest in this digital environment. overall, i explore how depictions of, allusions to, and the visual absence of white people and structural whiteness operate in the context of these vlogs, the branding of ‘interracial’ couple vloggers, the online discourse that surrounds them, and, by extension, consumer culture in general. findings eschewing dualistic binaries of blackness and whiteness, i study how a range of racial identities, as well as related experiences of coupledom, parenthood and childhood, are portrayed in the content of ‘interracial’ couple vloggers and the digital discourse that they are located within. in doing so, i account for how gender norms and heteronormative ideals play out in these vlogs in ways inextricably linked to race and a market logic underpinned by demand for palatable depictions of so-called ‘diversity’. i explicate the potential marketability of such couples’ ‘mixed-race’ and often lightskinned children, including what connected vlog activity illustrates in relation to the (inter)racial dynamics of vlogger culture and ‘micromicrocelebrity’ (abidin, 2015). my paper accounts for the omnipresent nature of a structurally white gaze in many facets of influencer culture, by considering how some ‘interracial’ couple vloggers leverage their proximity to whiteness and gear their content towards a so-called ‘postracial’ audience—in ways that are demonstrative of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. this work offers a contribution to studies of vlogger and influencer culture by articulating and unpacking often unacknowledged racial dynamics, and elucidating how aspects of ‘micromicrocelebrity; (abidin, 2015) are moulded by a market appeal associated with racial ‘mixedness’. references abidin, c. (2015). ‘microcelebrity: branding babies on the internet’ m/c journal 18(5). retrieved from http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1022 abidin, c. (2017). ‘#familygoals: family influencers, calibrated amateurism, and justifying young digital labor’. social media + society, 3(2), 1–15. abidin, c. (2018). internet celebrity: understanding fame online. bingley: emerald. benjamin, r. (2019). race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. cambridge: polity press. brock, a. (2018) ‘critical technocultural discourse analysis’. new media & society, 20(3), 1012–1030. brock, a. (2020) distributed blackness: african american cybercultures. new york: new york university. burgess, j. and green, j. (2009). youtube: online video and participatory culture. cambridge: polity press. gray, kishonna l. (2015). ‘race, gender, and virtual inequality: exploring the liberatory potential of black cyberfeminist theory.’ in rebecca lind (ed.) produsing theory in a digital world 2.0: the intersection of audiences and production in contemporary theory, pp. 175–190. new york: peter lang. hooks, bell. (1996). reel to real: race, sex and a class at the movies. new york: routledge. johnson, g.d., thomas, k.d., harrison, a.k. and grier, s.a. (2019). race in the marketplace: crossing critical boundaries. cham: palgrave macmillan. noble, s.u. and tynes, b.m. (eds.) (2016). the intersectional internet: race, sex, class, and culture online. new york: peter lang. noble, s.u. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york: new york university press. ‘you don’t dress like a mum!’ instagram ‘style mums’ challenging the fashionable ideal joanne entwistle kings college london elizabeth wissinger the city university of new york this paper examines instagram style mums in the uk and moms in the us (for the sake of stylistic brevity, we refer to our sample as ‘mums’ throughout) and how they articulate their desire to be identified both as a mum and ‘fashionable’ self. outside the fashion elite’s control, how do these style mums perform fashion/style and what space is opened up for alternatives to the fashionable ideal? these mums’ ‘authenticity’ challenges the ‘homogenizing logic’ (findlay et al., 2019: 24) of the fashion image, displaying a more inclusive fashionable aesthetic on instagram. with a critical awareness of the limits of the platform, our visual and textual analysis revealed clear attempts to carve out new spaces in fashion for ‘mums’ amidst latent forces pulling for marketable behaviors. context the social media literature has yet to examine the instagram style mum. work on ‘mumpreneurs’ (ekinsmyth, 2013; 2014; eikhof, 2013; orgad, 2019) tends to treat fashion as a background issue. the media and communication analyses have noted the presence of mums on instagram, but their primary focus is young women using these platforms for entrepreneurial gain as ‘lifestyle influencers’ and ‘microcelebrities’ (abidin, 2016; marwick, 2013; senft, 2008) within the rise of ‘instafame’ (marwick, 2013) and ‘entrepreneurial self-branding’ (duffy and hund, 2015) and ‘aspirational labor’ (duffy 2017). fashion studies’ exclusive focus on celebrity ‘influencers’ has not surprisingly found instagram colonised by big brands and aesthetics very similar to mainstream fashion (findlay et al., 2019). methodology for our analysis, we chose ‘ordinary’ instagrammers who identify as ‘mum,’ and pair it with ‘style’ or ‘fashion,’ i.e., model outfits and display their bodies on a regular basis, to see how their displays potentially challenge the fashionable ideal. searching mama style, mum or mom style, style mum or mom, fashion mom, fashion mama, we found accounts which feature mum/mom, and/or fashion or style as part of their moniker for example, @astylemum or @fashionmumof40. all feature motherhood and fashion as part of their ‘feed.’ to capture a wider range of instagrammers than just celebrities, our protocol sampled 24 uk and us mums using launchmetrics’ categorisation of four ‘tiers’ of ‘influencers,’ from ‘celebrity’ (over 1.5 million); ‘mega’ (between 501k-1.5million); ‘macro’ (between 101-500k); to ‘micro’ (between 10-100k). for the mums with under 10k followers we added a fifth tier, ‘nano’ influencer, which allowed us to observe demographics and aesthetic sensibilities different from the mainstream. we chose instagram because “recent industry reports suggest that 93% of influencer campaigns include instagram, about twice as many as youtube or facebook,” (williams, 2018, as quoted in omeara, 2019:3). our sample is diverse in terms of age, race, body size (compared to ‘normal’ fashionable instagrammers): all are over 30, some are in their 40s, and 10 are nonwhite. theoretical framework we analyzed our data through several lenses. to track patterns of taste inside the industry which reproduce the (fashionable) habitus, we use bourdieu’s (1984; 1993) field analysis, layered with practice theory, which enables analysis of how aesthetics are maintained through working practices and institutional structures (i.e., histories of sizing and modelling norms) (volonte, 2019). the emerging literature on ‘platformatization’ (gillespie 2010; 2017; duffy et al., 2019) is utilized to see how “platform” enables providers to appear neutral and apolitical, hiding the fallibly human labour shaping the algorithm behind the scenes. findings the very juxtaposition of ‘mum’ or ‘mom’ with ‘fashionability’ or ‘style’ implicitly challenges ideals within fashion through an ongoing ‘identity performance’ (rocamora 2011:411) foregrounding the complex and contradictory articulation between ‘motherhood’ and ‘fashion.’ pushing the limits of fashion ideals, self-termed “style mums” often showcase older, curvier bodies, transformed by motherhood. for example, @motherofdaughters clemmie hopper noted, “when i tell people i’m a mum of 4 their usual reaction is ‘you don’t look like a mum and you don’t dress like one either!’ what does a mum even look and dress like? …motherhood shouldn’t define you…” (11 december 2017). similarly, @mothering.it states, “i feel so nervous about posting this bikini snap; i’m 5 months postpartum with my fourth child and this holiday i was no way “bikini ready”’ (4 may 2019). style mums also articulate motherhood through style by narrating their identities as mums through techniques of ‘mum style.’ these ‘techniques’ offer commentaries on motherhood not afforded in fashion media, giving voice to mums traditionally not seen in fashion editorials (older, larger, black, or indeed all three). mixed race uk mum natalie @stylemesunday clearly challenges the fashion and beauty industries, through seeking to ‘normalise cellulite and stretch marks, different body types and different abilities.’ these ‘techniques’ of mum style engage in practices anathema to fashion – highlighting bargain shopping, a mum ‘uniform’, and unpolished images of their daily lives: ‘standard mum uniform today. these mom jeans are so comfortable! they’re from good old @primark’ (@thriftyyorkshiremum 11 february 2019). many or our mums pose against the backdrop of ordinary domestic life, kitchens with messy work surfaces, or bedrooms with washing in the background. throughout, we found a careful balancing act between projecting a quasi-glamourous life and ‘authentic’ depictions of motherhood. while the fashionable ideal was both challenged and reproduced through photographic conventions and practices specific to ‘mum style,’ notions of ‘authenticity’ competed with the pull towards commercialization, similar to findings in the social media literature. the paradoxical nature of ‘mum’ and style, however, positioned our respondents in ways that allowed for clear provocations to the fashion’s ‘homogenizing logic,’ which merit further research. references: abidin, c. 2016 “visibility labour: engaging with influencers’ fashion brands and #ootd advertorial campaigns on instagram” media international australia, 161(1), 86–100. bourdieu, p. (1984) distinction, new jersey: routledge. duffy, b.e. (2017) (not) getting paid to do what you love. new haven: yale university press. duffy, b. e., & hund, e. (2015). ‘“having it all” on social media: entrepreneurial femininity and self-branding among fashion bloggers.’ social media + society, 1(2), 1– 11. duffy, b.e., et al. (2019) “platform practices in the cultural industries,” social media + society, oct-dec: 1–8. eikhof, d.r., carter, s., and summers, j. (2013) ‘“women doing their own thing”’ international journal of entrepreneurship, 19(5), 547 564. ekinsmyth, c. (2014) ‘mothers’ business, work/life and the politics of “mumpreneurship.”’ gender, place & culture, 21(10), 1230-1248. ekinsmyth, c. (2013) managing the business of everyday life: the roles of space and place in ‘mumpreneurship’. international journal of entrepreneurial behaviour, 19(5). findlay, r. and de perthuis, k. (2019) “how fashion travels: the fashionable ideal in the age of instagram,” fashion theory, 23(2), 1-24. gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of ‘platforms.’ new media & society, 12(3), 347–364. gillespie, t. (2017) “the platform metaphor, revisited” http://culturedigitally.org/2017/08/platform-metaphor/ [accessed 2/18/20]. marwick, a.e. (2013). status update. new haven: yale university press. omeara, v. (2019) ‘weapons of the chic,’ social media + society, oct-dec. 2019: 1– 11. orgad, s. (2019) heading home, new york: columbia university press. rocamora, a. (2011) “personal fashion blogs,” fashion theory, 15(4), 407-24. senft, t. (2008). camgirls. new york: peter lang. volonté, p. (2019). ‘the thin ideal and the practice of fashion.’ journal of consumer culture, 19(2), 252–270. williams, r. (2018) ‘study: 93% of influencer campaigns use instagram.’ mobile marketer. retrieved from www.mobilemarketer.com/news/study-93-of-influencercampaigns-use-instagram, 2/20/20. ed-fluencers: subjectivities of learning and labor in social media training programs agnès rocamora london college of fashion brooke erin duffy cornell university arturo arriagada universidad adolfo ibáñez introduction in early 2020, jake paul—the buzzy american youtuber known for his frat boy antics and patently offensive humor—announced the launch of the “financial freedom movement,” a $19.99/month educational platform targeting social media star wannabes (leskin, 2020). paul’s pitch to young digital aspirants, namely that they could learn to be “financially free from the 'societal cookie cutter life' 9-5 jobs we are all told to have," invoked the well-worn narrative of entrepreneurial meritocracy—one that, crucially, elides the patterned inequalities that structure success in the social media and technology industries `(marwick, 2013; noble and roberts, 2019). perhaps not surprisingly, analysts dismissed paul’s pseudo-instructional initiative as a scam; it was, after all, not the first time paul tried to make inroads into content creator training (leskin, 2020). others, meanwhile, called attention to paul’s unabashedly antieducation tack (yap, 2020). such critiques notwithstanding, we contend that such “edfluencer” programs (the name of paul’s initial training course) index a confluence of factors in social media, education, and employability that deserves further critical attention. indeed, a staggering number of influencer/creator training initiatives have been launched in recent years, ranging in scope from creator-run programs like paul’s to international franchises like social star creator camp to annual conferences like ignite influencer marketing bootcamp and vidcon. similarly, higher education institutions across the world have started offering potential graduates courses on various aspects of digital marketing. the curricula have a kaleidoscopic range of course offerings: “influencer marketing,” “image consulting,” “e-commerce,” “fashion trends,” and “algorithms and analytics,” among others. the popularity of these programs can be understood against the backdrop of wider popular culture’s tendency to fetishize social media careers (duffy & wissinger, 2017) as well as persistent debates about the marketisation of higher education. together, these orchestrated activities work as resources through which forms of knowledge and expertise are commercialized and exchanged in order to create reputation across digital platforms. at the same time, institutionalized forms of knowledge and expertise around careers, creative expression, and celebrity produce subjectivities of learning and labor. more broadly, these ideals participate in the production and reproduction of the figure of the ideal worker of neoliberalism. whilst much attention has been paid to labour (including digital labour) in the creative industries, the issue of the ways labour is shaped and defined by education has been somewhat overlooked. the present paper attends to this gap in the literature on creative industries and digital labour by examining the cultural, economic, and political dimensions of influencer educational programs. given the cultural embeddedness of educational debates in particular geographic contexts as well as the global-local nexus of influencer labor, we focus on three social media educational markets: the united kingdom, chile, and the u.s. we do this by analyzing a group of institutions that sell influencer marketing courses, asking questions such as: how do different countries embrace influencer marketing and the skills required to achieve it? what are the ideological contexts that configure this industry of knowledge? who do these programs say about digital labour and the role and values of education in the formation of future workers? by deploying a critical lens, we are especially attentive to questions about idealized worker subjectivities in terms of gender, race, class, age, and ethnicity. methodology our in-progress study draws upon a qualitative textual analysis of course websites promoting influencer/creator education programs across chile, the united kingdom, and the u.s. we analyzed 9 courses per country, using a strategically selected distribution of 3 university courses, 3 private (non)-university courses, and 3 online courses (n=27). we identified those courses combining online research, using keywords like “social media courses,” “influencer courses,” “digital marketing courses,” and “social media and content creation” for each country. the unit of analysis was the content of each course’s website, including but not limited to its general description, the content of each course, and the expected results and benefits communicated to prospective students. the qualitative coding schema was guided by the preliminary observation of the data where different categories of analysis emerged. we used a grounded theory approach by combining data collection and analysis (glasser & strauss 1967) in order to refine the concepts and categorical themes presented in the analysis. we supplement this with data from in-depth interviews with both aspiring influencers and influencer marketing managers. summary of findings thus far, our analysis of data has yielded the following preliminary themes: 1) technology--specifically social media platforms-and the values and/or meanings given to technical skills versus knowledge of the cultural and aesthetics of particular sites. 2) knowledge, or the way each course frames the value of learning and then encourages the application. often, the courses encouraged a sort of continued upkeep of platform knowledge while reaffirming the value of less evergreen ideals (i.e., creating “valuable content.”) 3) labour, or what kind of work is represented by a content creator, and the abilities required to do it properly. while some courses cast courses as a way to learn “competences for the production and management of digital communication projects,” others emphasized less tangible modes of work (such as building relationship). 4) expertise, or what kind of values and meanings are attributed to being qualified or certified on a set of abilities by an institution. here we pay particular attention to the types of laboring subjectivies who get cast as “experts,” particularly those that reproduce inequalities (bishop, 2020). by exploring these themes in particular cultural-geographic configurations, we address how influencer labour is defined and represented as well as the kind of self that is imagined and promoted in educational discourses. references bishop, s. (2020). algorithmic experts: selling algorithmic lore on youtube. social media+ society, 6(1), 2056305119897323. cunningham, s. and craig, d. (2019). social media entertainment: the new intersection of hollywood and silicon valley. new york: new york university press. duffy, b. e., & wissinger, e. (2017). mythologies of creative work in the social media age: fun, free, and “just being me”. international journal of communication, 11, 20, 111. glaser, b., & strauss, a. (1967). the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. marwick, a. e. (2013). status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. new haven, ct: yale university press. noble, s., & roberts, s. (2019). technological elites, the meritocracy, and postracial myths in silicon valley. leskin, (2020, february). p. youtuber jake paul is trying to cash in on teaching fans how to become influencers — two years after his first project failed. business insider. retrieved from: https://www.businessinsider.com/jake-paul-financial-freedommovement-influencer-school-edfluence-team-1000-2020-2 yap, a. c. (2020, february 15). youtuber jake paul launches entrepreneur how-to platform, financial freedom movement. variety. retrieved from: https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/youtube-jake-paul-launches-financial-freedommovement-1203505286/ are you advertiser and family friendly? productive ambivalence, economies of visibility and the political potential of feminist youtubers zoë glatt london school of economics and political science sarah banet-weiser london school of economics and political science introduction of all the social media platforms that have garnered attention in the past decade for the promises of widespread access for ordinary individuals, perhaps none has achieved the kind of visibility as youtube. as the second most popular website in the world, preceded only by its parent company google, youtube has accumulated over 1.9 billion logged-in users each month, 500 hours of content uploaded every minute, and over 1 billion hours of content watched daily (youtube 2019). here, entrepreneurial content creators are harnessing the platform to build their own brands within the emerging social media entertainment industry, or sme (cunningham and craig 2019). feminist content is a well-established genre on youtube, in which creators post political and social commentary on topics such as intersectionality, politics, gender and sexual identity alongside comedic, lifestyle, and personality-driven fare. while looking to advance feminist cultural agendas, these creators are situated within an economy of visibility (banet-weiser 2018), incentivized to adopt certain norms and trends if they wish to garner likes, views and subscribers. these creators exist within the cultural context of popular feminism. popular feminism is part of a larger context of what catherine rottenberg has called “neoliberal feminism,” where corporateand media-friendly feminist expressions achieve a heightened visibility, and expressions that critique patriarchal structure and systems of racism and violence are often obscured (banet-weiser 2018; bishop 2018; rottenberg, 2014; mcrobbie, 2009). in other words, many of these creators both advance and profit from popular feminism: brand-safe feminist discourses that dovetail comfortably with neoliberal agendas. seeing and hearing a safely affirmative feminism, in spectacularly visible ways often eclipses a feminist critique of structure; the visibility of popular feminism on youtube is important but it often stops there, as visibility. that said, the platform has also provided a cultural space for more marginal groups and radical left-wing politics to flourish; the visibility of diverse, lgbtq and gender-fluid identities on youtube far outstrips its broadcast media counterparts. in this paper, we aim to complicate the dominance of popular feminism online by asking: to what extent are professional youtube content creators able to present more radical versions of feminism, or else pushed to fit into neoliberal brand culture in order to gain visibility and income? as with every development of a new technology, a utopic/dystopic discourse frames youtube’s creation and reception and, we argue, as many have about emerging media technologies, this framing does not help push us forward to a more nuanced analysis of the cultural impact of youtube. here, we attempt such a nuanced analysis by positioning feminist youtube content within what burgess and green (2018) have called a ‘cultural system’, one that both provides openings and foreclosures for specific kinds of cultural and political participation. specifically, we theoretically frame our analysis within the popular feminist economies of visibility and, following feminist theorists clare hemmings and lauren berlant, an interrelated theoretical analytic of productive ambivalence, to analyse content creators in a cultural, economic and social context of popular feminism. we see this kind of political ambivalence in a battle with what banet-weiser has called an economy of visibility. economies of visibility describe the ways in which visibility of particular identities and politics, such as gender, race and sexuality, circulate on multiple media platforms. while this visibility is important for public awareness, it also potentially becomes an end in itself, where “visibility is all there is” (banet-weiser, 2018). methodology as an offshoot of a broader 4-year ethnographic project looking at the lived experiences and labour of youtube content creators, we identified 40 prominent feminist content creators, ranging from ‘brand-safe’ and heteronormative on the one hand to more queer and radical on the other. we then carried out content analysis of their videos as well as participant observation of these creators across platforms (including youtube, twitter, instagram and patreon), paying attention to their cultural positionality, content style/topics, income streams and modes of address to their audiences. findings while recognizing that there are blurred boundaries between political ambivalence and economies of visibility, we nonetheless analyse feminist youtubers within this typology, finding that while there are some similar messages across different feminist youtube channels, there are also those that are seeking increased recognition and visibility within a capitalist framework, and some who are better characterized as politically ambivalent, more complex and contradictory. only certain feminist expressions and politics on youtube easily merge with market logics, whilst other more marginal identities face additional obstacles. nowhere is this marginalization made clearer than in the ongoing struggles that lgbtq+ youtube creators have had with their content being demonetised and age restricted due to not being “advertiser and family friendly”. we tease out the tensions, identifications and disidentifications within the analytics of political ambivalence and economies of visibility by investigating some popular contemporary feminist creators on youtube (ash hardell melanie murphy, contrapoints and kat blaque) as they navigate two intersecting approaches to feminist content creation: 1) transactional: working within a popular feminist economy of visibility concurrent with capitalist logics, and 2) transformational: the ambivalent process of attaining visibility within youtube’s attention economy as a route to radical social change. the work of feminist content creators on youtube is complex and we resist a reductive explanatory frame here. our point in analysing these videos as transactional or transformational is not to say that there are defined borders that separate these two aspirations, but rather to say that it makes more sense to think about the feminist politics of youtube creators within a framework of political ambivalence. youtube has been celebrated by many as a platform that has enabled far more diverse screen representations of race, gender and sexuality than television and film media, as is undoubtedly the case. however, feminist youtube creators have to navigate what are often contradictory pressures in order to gain visibility and earn a living, such as appealing to commercial brands whilst simultaneously maintaining authenticity and relatability with their audiences. rather than insist that feminist content creators are either enabling or inhibiting feminist politics, or rather than insist on the certainty of feminist politics on youtube, we follow hemmings in her resistance to the notion that such politics can be completely “knowable.” references banet-weiser, s. (2018). empowered: popular feminism and popular misogyny. durham, usa: duke university press. bishop, s. (2018). ‘anxiety, panic and self-optimisation: inequalities and the youtube algorithm’. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies. 24:1, pp. 69-84. burgess, j. and green, j. (2018). youtube: online video and participatory culture. cambridge, uk: polity press. cunningham, s. and craig, d. (2019). social media entertainment: the new intersection of hollywood and silicon valley. new york: new york university press. hemmings, c. (2018). considering emma goldman: feminist political ambivalence and the imaginative archive. london, uk: duke university press. mcrobbie, a. (2016). be creative: making a living in the new culture industries. cambridge, uk: polity. rottenberg, c. (2018). the rise of neoliberal feminism. new york, usa: oxford university press. youtube. (2019). ‘youtube for press’ [online]. youtube website, 13th august. retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/intl/en-gb/yt/about/press/ aoir2018-submission-template selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): zargarian voices empowered: iranian women and weblogs . (2018, october 10-13) paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. voices empowered: iranian women and weblogs tannaz zargarian york university voices empowered: iranian women and weblogs in 1998, access to the internet—the digital realm—created a unique space encompassing both public and private structures of iranian society. this realm offers a new language and new forms of communication, identity, community, political debate, and public participation (rheingold, 2000). beginning in 2001, the accessibility and affordability of both digital technologies and the internet, followed by the availability of the farsi language in the unicode system, increased the use of cyberspace among iranians (amir-ebrahimi, 2008). along with the availability of the farsi language, platforms such as “weblogistan” led blogging to become one of the most popular online activities among iranians. while institutionalized gender roles and customary law (urf) are the most important elements in restricting women’s emancipation in the public and private realms, the digital space altered the meaning of constraint and shifted the boundaries of the public and private realms by allowing iranian women to seek an independent identity and self-determination (graham, et al., 2010). young iranian women began to embrace weblogs as a unique public space suitable for new forms of self-expression, self-disclosure, and communication (amir-ebrahimi, 2008). women gained access to a technology that did not contain the censorship of traditional mass media, hence the internet unveiled iranian women’s voices by circumventing customary practices and institutionalized gender roles (skalli 2006, amirebrahimi, 2008, p. 98). the broad theme of this paper is analysis of the discourse of feminism and gender equality among iranian women and the potential for and limitations of equal rights awareness and practice. theoretically, i draw upon minoo derayeh’s theory “i act therefore i am” (2010). derayeh’s theory argues that iranian women “challenged gender-based discrimination and focused on women’s procedures for developing an independent identity,” which then “created opportunities for women to raise their voices and take action as a means to self-liberation” (derayeh, 2010, p. 151). taking a critical textual feminist approach and focusing on actions, i explore how iranian female university students adopted the weblog as a new tool to quest for their emancipation and brings forth the voices of female university students from different disciplines. weblogs serve as an educational tool that creates a forum for dialogue and communication that breaks the restrictive gender-oriented rules imposed upon iranian women by urf (customary law) and the patriarchal elements in higher education and the public realm (van de donk, 2004, p. 5). quest for equality in weblogs this study divided the weblogs written by 35 iranian female university students into two categories: experiences in higher education including academic achievements, and personal daily experiences as female students. with respect to their academic experience, the women explicitly elaborated on their personal academic performance, achievements, participation, and learning experiences. they shared their goals and plans for pursuing higher education by discussing available educational options, steps they had taken, and obstacles that they encountered. the webloggers also discussed their individual academic participation in related activities such as conferences, workshops, volunteer work, and paid temporary student work. moreover, they turned weblogs into an informative communication tool to share information regarding scholarly articles, their field of study, available degrees at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and the procedure for continuing education at a higher level. iranian women adopted online information sharing as a tool to subtly challenge gender inequality within higher education. the absence of the discourse of gender inequality in a patriarchal educational system that has been cultivating institutionalized gender policies to restrict women’s access to higher education might perplex one’s understanding of these women’s awareness of gender inequality in relation to education. however, applying the theory of “i act therefore i am” revealed that these women are aware of gender inequality in higher education, but they challenge it by ignoring and resisting the existence of institutionalized gender inequality and discrimination. adopting non-traditional independent gender identity, they expound their achievements, level of knowledge, future academic goals, and autonomous decision making in their pursuit of higher education. the students’ voiced their narration of successes as well as their autonomous academic actions in the public realm. their narration conveys their empowerment and challenges the patriarchy by changing the direction of “i act” in sharing their achievements. furthermore, they challenge customary law and institutionalized gender roles by voicing their experiences and knowledge as a form of empowerment through weblogging. they problematized the issue by declaring their autonomous and independent identity as a student instead of holding their expected relational identity as daughter, wife, sister, or mother. therefore, the unique selfexpression of online activities combined with their educational accomplishments in the real world made explicit statements regarding gender equality unnecessary. while women’s participation in higher education facilitated their access to social equality in some areas, with respect to personal daily experiences, the weblogs identify women’s struggle with discrimination and restrictive gender roles in their everyday interaction. in other words, gender inequality continues to obstruct women’s emancipation during their university years. the bloggers’ personal non-academic narration contained memories of sexual harassment such as offers from their professors in exchange for passing grades, blackmail by male students, and discriminatory attire laws such as mandated hijab in some universities. some weblogs shared details of being denied entry onto university campuses due to clothing or makeup. moreover, bloggers discussed limitations and restrictions on their interaction with the opposite sex and the negative perception sometimes associated with being a female university student. raising their voices through self-disclosure and sharing allowed these women to gain an opportunity for public awareness and personal support through communication and dialogue while breaking the silence about forbidden matters in the digital realm. feminism and cyber-feminism among iranian women iranian women’s participation in cyber-feminism, for the purpose of emancipation, constructed a neutral environment with less governmental and societal surveillance and with the potential for empowerment through personal narration (batmanghelichi & mouri, 2017). however, traditional societal values still impose some limitations on the digital realm. the paradox between traditional values of silence, invisibility, piety, and subordination, mixed with the modern expectation of public activity, assertiveness, and education limit and empower women simultaneously (haghighat, 2014). conclusion the emergence of the digital realm, as a new and unique public space with dialogical elements, has allowed women to unveil and share their personal narration, and it has provided women with a crucial venue for an autonomous and anonymous quest for their rights. in the context of “i act therefore i am,” analysis of the weblogs confirms that the majority of these iranian female university students are challenging gender-based discrimination by voicing their academic achievements, knowledge, and empowerment along with their daily experience of university life. as evidenced in the blogs, the feeling of empowerment was significantly lower in the women’s daily personal experiences than in their academic experiences, but the bloggers still benefited from the weblogs by expressing their daily frustrations with gender inequality. the quest for rights continues for these women despite ongoing challenges in the real world and in the digital realm. the digital realm has become a tool for all women and many women’s voices remain veiled as not all iranian women support an autonomous voice in the digital realm. references amir-ebrahimi, m. (2006). conquering enclosed public spaces. cities, 23(6), 455-461. amir-ebrahimi, m. (2008). blogging from qom, behind walls and veils. comparative studies of south asia, africa and middle east, 28(2), 235-249. batmanghelichi, s. &. (2017). cyberfeminism, iranian style: online feminism in post2009 iran. feminist media histories, 3(1), 50-80. derayeh, m. (2006). gender equity in iranian history. new york: edwin mellen press. derayeh, m. (2011). the myths of creation and hijab: iranian women, liberated or oppressed? alam-e-niswan, 18(2), 1-21. derayeh, m. (2014). de-hyphenate and de-theorize my voice: i act, therefore, i am. international journal of liberal arts and social science, 2(3), 99-108. gajjala, r. (2005). cyber selves: feminist ethnographies of south asian women. altamira press. graham, m., & khosravi, s. (2010). reordering public and private in iranian cyberspace: identity, politics, and mobilization. identities, 9(2), 219-246. haghighat, e. (2014). iran's changing gender dynamics in light of demographic, political, and technological transformations. middle east critique, 23(3), 313-332. irandataportal. (2016). retrieved from iranian center for statistics: http://irandataportal.syr.edu/socio-economic-data/statistical-yearbook jones, s. (1997). virtual culture: identity and communication in cybersociety. london: sage. mehran, g. (1999). lifelong learning: new opportunities for women in a muslim country (iran). comparative education, 35, 203. moghaddam, v. (2000). transnational feminist networks collective action in an era of globalization. international sociology, 15(1). mohanty, c. t. (2003). feminism without border: decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. duke university press. najmabadi, a. (1993). veiled discourseunveiled bodies. feminist studies, 10, 487518. nouraei-simon, f. (2005). wings of freedom: iranian women, identity, and cyberspace. in i. f. nouraei-simon, on shifting ground (pp. 61-79). new york: feminist press. rheingold, h. (2000). the virtual community: homesteading on the electronic frontier. cambridge: the mit press. shavarini, m. k. (2005). the feminization of iranian higher education. international review of education , 51(4), 329-347. shirazi, f. (2012). information and communication technology and women empowerment in iran. telematics and informatics, 29, 45-55. skalli, l. h. (2006). communicating gender in the public sphere: women and information technologies in the mena. . journal of middle east women’s studies, 2(2). sreberny, a., & khiabany, g. (2010). blogistan: the internet and politics in iran. london: i.b. tauris. taheri, j. (2011). areas of iranian women's voice and influence. in r. &. bahramitash, gender in contemporary iran: pushing the boundaries . routledge. van de donk, l. n. (2004). cyberprotest. london and new york: routledge. title 1 new media, new logics: power and participation among activists in southern stockholm jakob svensson karlstad university sweden jakob.svensson@kau.se abstract this paper discusses the implications of the increasing use of social networking sites for political participation emerging outside parliamentary arenas. the paper is empirically based in a (n)ethnographic study of a network of middle-class activists in aspudden and midsommarkransen (southern stockholm). they were engaged in issues such as saving the local bathhouse, lobbying for a cultural centre, preserve green areas and the quality of life in the attractive and well-located sister suburbs. the studies in southern stockholm suggest that an increase of social networking sites develops a new kind of network logic underlining identity negotiation as a motivator for political participation. this logic contributes to rationalized practices for expressions of affinity, which in turn disciplines the individual users to connectedness with like-minded people in the neighbourhood through continuous practices of updating. keywords political participation; network logic; late modernity; social networking; updating i used to share an apartment in aspudden, just two subway stops south of the stockholm inner city island of södermalm. this is a very pleasant suburb with some old architecture, green areas and access to the waterfront. together with neighboring midsommarkransen, aspudden is arguably the oldest suburb in stockholm. young couples with 2 babies, largely populate these neighborhoods, having left the inner city when starting a family. this is illustrated by the large number of cafés, populated with mums chatting and sipping lattes together, while their babies sleep in the trolleys next to them. one day at the end of april 2010 i got a message sent to me via facebook suggesting i should sign an online petition against the plans to demolish the old community-run (but cityowned) bathhouse two blocks away from where i lived. i was also suggested to join the action group to save the bathhouse. recently having enjoyed the thrills watching the horror movie jaws in the pool area, on an inflatable mattress with a drink in my hand, my feelings towards the bathhouse and the different activities organized there were very positive. hence i signed the petition, and also joined the facebookgroup and added many of the members as my friends. i also started to follow the twitter feeds, read the bathhouse blog as well as signing myself for two shares in the bath house for 10 000 sek each. in spite of the protests the bathhouse was destroyed. but what remained was a network of activists that later formed the group söfö (södra förstaden, the southern suburb) that has continued to act mostly against development plans in the suburbs, in order to preserve green areas, playgrounds as well as lobby for turning an abandoned fire station into a cultural centre or some kind of non-commercial meeting place. in academia, the rise of new media has been accompanied by a large number of claims of its impact on society and political participation. since production and distribution of information are becoming more accessible to everyone, citizens are increasingly able to communicate directly with one another. therefore some argue that we are witnessing the growth of a participatory culture that will fundamentally change citizenship practices (see jenkins, 2006; bruns, 2008; shirky, 2009). dystopian descriptions of an increasingly skeptical, distrusting and inward-looking citizenry (boggs, 2000; bauman, 2001) is today countered by numerous accounts of a rising network society1 1 van dijk (2006: 20) defines the network society as a social formation with an infrastructure of social and media networks enabling its mode of organization on all levels (individual, group and societal). claimed to flatten out governance hierarchies and distributing power (rheingold, 2002, p. 163). in network societies, action coalitions are claimed to rather rely on loose, non-hierarchical and open communities of participants often making use of new technology for communication and coordination (bruns, 2008, p. 362). the internet is argued to afford possibilities for both reflexive identity negotiation and political mobilization (van dijk, 2000, p. 36). hence, the internet has been conceived of both as a tool for more lifestyle-based participation as well as a remedy for contemporary disinterest in parliamentary politics. 3 but how to say anything useful of emerging forms of political participation without lapsing into futurology or engaging in the uncritical painting of democratic utopias? my answer has been to conduct a (n)ethnographic inspired case study of the network of activists2 it is commonplace to claim the strong links between media and democracy to the extent that they can no longer be understood as two different domains. with developments of theories of mediatization and media logics, to which political spheres adapt, media is not only linked to politics and power, but also described as sites out of which power and politics are exercised (street, 1997; kepplinger, 2002; altheide, 2004; hjarvard, 2008). this brings attention to a double-sided process in which the media emerges as an independent institution with a logic of its own that other social institutions have to accommodate to (hjarvard, 2008, p. 113). in the in southern stockholm. studying these activists i found that power had not disappeared with the rise of network types of organizations, media and communication. rather what i found was a shift from more tangible and easily observable hierarchical power structures to more nontransparent relations of power. the rise of social networking sites and its access from mobile and hand-held computing devices, seems to encourage or even demand a social negotiation of the political self. by following twitter accounts, joining e-mail and sms-lists, ningand facebook-groups, activists became updated on the activities in the neighborhoods and could engage if interested. new media practices both made it easier and seemed to push participants to engage in activities. hence, this paper will not only echo popular accounts of the mobilizing potential in communities of equals and like-minded people using digital technology (see rheingold, 2002; shirky, 2009), but to ground this in a critical analysis of power and discipline (foucault, 1994). i will argue that a kind of network logic is imposing behavioral patterns of reflexive updating and self-disclosure, disciplining activists to engage. to do this i will start by referring to ideas of media logic and how to evolve these into a concept of network logic. this section will be followed by an account of the (n)ethnographic inspired methodology used to study of the activists in southern stockholm. the paper will then continue with a thematic retelling of my experiences and findings in aspudden and midsommarkransen, themes that will return in the following analysis where theories of power, discipline and identity in late modernity will be used to understand the findings. new media, new logics 2 i use the term activist to refer to political actors outside the parliament, but with an outspoken political aim hence delineating activists from political actors within parliamentary institutions and actors within popular culture spheres, not primarily set up for political or citizenship purposes (see svensson, 2011a). 4 domain of politics, politicians have to adhere to the dramatization style in media discourses, the increasing prominence of short sound bites, visuals and entertainment formats (kepplinger, 2002; altheide, 2004, p. 294). hence, political life in its broadest sense has become situated within the domain of media (street, 1997). what is happening today is that the media, whose logic political institutions adhere to, is changing profoundly. discourses of new media have been around us for some time. but what is new media? according manovich (2001, pp. 20-37) new media refers to the convergence between computer and media technologies and are based principles of numerical representation, modularity, automation and variability. the principle of numerical representation implies that media has become programmable. the principle of modularity means that media may be manipulated by discerning, assembling, adding or removing pixels, polygons, voxels et cetera. the principle of automation makes programming and manipulating media easier and more accessible to ordinary citizens with the consequence that media are constantly in progress, with an endless variability to it. this to the extent that we today may simulate realities/ fictions and communicate through time and space through a sort of tele-presence (manovich, 2001, pp. 137, 164). other characteristics that are often referred to as new are greater possibilities for convergence, interactivity, continuity, content that is individually stored and individually produced, and more personalized forms of media content (see leaning, 2009, ch. 2). many of us think of the internet and digital communication platforms when thinking of new media. in the 1990s the internet progressively grew in popularity and the role of the digital computer shifted from being a particular technology to a filter for all culture, a form through which all kinds of material were mediated (manovich, 2001, p. 64). the internet has now been around for over two decades, but what is often considered as new, is developments towards mobile access to the internet (rheingold, 2002) and web 2.0. (leaning, 2009, p. 30), often referred to as social media and online social networking. the definition of snss (social networking sites) is useful here. ellison & boyd (2007, p. 2) defines them as different from other sites because they allow the user to articulate their social networks and making them visible to other users. snss are thus web-based services allowing individuals to create a (semi)public profiles, connecting this profile to other users (often self-selected), whose contacts in turn will be made accessible by the service (ellison & boyd, 2007, p. 2). through snss the internet has established itself as the main locus for mediated communication and socialization among the young crowd (as recent studies from sweden has indicated, see medierådet, 2010). this leads to structural, architectural and social developments with its own significance beyond 5 the technical aspects of digitalization (leaning, 2009, p. 6). in other words, the internet is altering the way we live, socialize and it is shaping the way things get done, providing access of information and providing us with new tools for arranging and taking part in all sorts of activities, encounters and social agency (dahlgren, 2009, p. 152). a major difference from older media platforms, i would argue is the amount of activity demanded of the user. snss require the user to be more active, actively search for the kinds of information, entertainment friends and linkages he or she wants. bruns (2008, p. 14) argues that to be a user already implies a more active role than being a consumer. in this way, the user is also taking part in producing (or produsing as bruns cleverly labels it) information, entertainment and spheres for social interaction. i whish to contribute with a more critical perspective as a counter weight to the popular conception of the internet as a media-form that affords user empowerment (see leaning, 2009, p. 40). while the internet no doubt opens up new arenas of citizen activities, these arenas are dependent on the network structure, how it is constituted and managed (sassi, 2000, p. 91). in this way technology structures our choices and even preferences (street, 1997, p. 34). in other words digital communication technology will have a disciplining effect on its users, something i whish to label as network logic. my argument is thus based on deductive reasoning, when the overall media and communication landscape change, media logics will also evolve, and then politics and participation will be adapting to new circumstances bringing about new types of political engagement and citizenship practices. media logics should not be understood here as in a causal lineage between media and political institutions. instead it is more accurate to conceive of these as in mutual and dialectic relationships to each other (see also leaning, 2009). notes on methodology i have followed the action group for saving the bathhouse, later söfö, from early 2010 both online and offline. söfö largely consists of loosely affiliated neighbours, many who have kids in the same school or kindergarten or live close to each other. the community-run (and owned) cinema tellus serves as a natural meeting place for söfö. this is where offline meetings take place and many in the core group also work in their free time. online communication is mostly done through their facebookand ning-page. during the battle for the bathhouse, the action group also used a blog, a twitter feed as well as an sms-list to disseminate information. during the battle the group used a facebook-group 'save the aspudden bathhouse' (rädda aspuddsbadet). when the bathhouse had been demolished and 6 söfö created, the group used a facebook-page the southern suburb (södra förstaden). ning is a website where you can create your own social network focused around a specific issue or group. söfö did create a ning-site for their community where members had their own profiles, could connect and message each other as well as starting discussions, groups and forums within the site (see fig. 1). figure 1: my profile page at the söfö ning-site. digital technology and social networking sites are neither neutral, nor do they have inherent capacities for social organization and change (coleman & blumler, 2009, p. 10). technology and society evolves in tandem (svensson, 2011a), hence new media and communication technologies should be understood from its uses and social contexts. these technologies are constructed, maintained and given meaning through a range of complex and social processes (coleman & blumler, 2009, p. 10). to avoid an essentialist, causal or technical deterministic study, it is important to inquire into how and under which circumstances technology is used. causal models of explanation are potentially misleading since it is impossible to isolate internet and media use from other social practices and determine what 7 causes what (anduiza, 2009). a case study bypasses such problems. when focusing on a case, the web sites to study are almost given in advance, and researchers may concentrate on events and practices in a more empirically constructive manner (gerodimos & ward, 2007, p. 118). case studies are most often generalizing in their aim. in this case the choice of activists to study is not based in choosing a representative case out of which generalizations can be made. rather the choice is made for ethnographic reasons, through having lived and shared experiences with the group and the circumstances they found themselves in. thus the results of this study may not be applied to political participation in general. but the results will point to interesting aspects of political participation in digital late modernity that i believe will resonate in similar settings. the overall aim is to understand political participation in the particular setting of activists in southern stockholm. through this understanding the purpose is also to contribute to a discussion of power and participation in emerging network societies. this study is inspired by both ethnoand nethnographic methodology. in a nethnographic study we are released as researchers from the physical place to conduct observations in a virtual context on communities that can be understood as social in its character (berg, 2011, p. 119). the aim of nethnographic research is to understand the social interaction taking place online, hence a focus on user-generated information flows (berg, 2011, pp. 120). the nethnographic approach thus suits the aims of this paper since i am studying how activists used facebook, ning, twitter, sms and the blog, the information flow they initiated and took part in. doing nethnography i followed the activists on all their different media platforms, took field notes and screenshots when i observed something i deemed particularly interesting. i used their snss (social networking sites) as archives of information (see berg, 2011, p. 126), but i have also created my own archive with screenshots since data and interactions on snss are instantaneous and may be changed or disappear. as a participant researcher, i have participated in discussions on ning, facebook and the bathhouse blog, commented on postings and retweeted tweets and forwarded invitations et cetera. nethnography is different from ethnography in its exclusive focus on net-based social environments. the physical absence is compensated by different textual and figurative representations, which gives the user larger possibilities to reflect on, test and review different ways of action before they become part of the social interaction (berg, 2011, p. 121). this also requires the user to make an active and conscious effort when presenting her-self online. here 8 we can distinguish between asynchronous postings, allowing for greater reflection and planning (for example on the bathhouse blog and on söfös ning-group) and synchronous postings, happening in real time (through the twitter feed and sms-list, see berg, 2011, p. 127). nethnography works well in combination with a more traditional ethnographic method, especially since the online and offline world mutually influence each other (van dijk, 2006, p. 39). this was especially the case in southern stockholm with the activists both using online media and communication platforms to communicate as well as meeting, discussing and acting offline. the observations and interventions online have thus been complemented with continuous offline interactions and participations in activities (such as meetings, discussions, lectures et cetera). i have also conducted five in-depth interviews (approximately 90 minutes each) with five different activists during 2010 and 2011. findings connectedness and responsiveness observing and talking to activists in southern stockholm it becomes evident that they use digital media in general and facebook in particular to connect to issues and people with similar opinions. one young student tells me that he is against the expansion of cars and motor traffic in the stockholm region. he has therefore joined several groups on facebook against highway constructions. hence, whenever he logs in to his facebook-account he will be updated on what is going on concerning these issues. similarly a middle-aged green party politician and it-technician told me that he joined söfös ningand facebook-group in order to get in contact with the group and to become informed about their various activities. this is the same reason why i joined the facebook-group to save the bathhouse and started to follow the action group on twitter. from that moment i was connected to the cause and information concerning the issue started to flow towards me as soon as accessed the internet. during the battle for the bathhouse there was a wide range of different ways to connect to the cause and to the core people in the action group. besides the blog, the twitter-feed, facebook-group and sms-list, they action group organized a festival (see fig. 2), different cultural activities and produced a song that were spread on facebook and youtube. 9 figure 2: the poster for the support festival to save the bathhouse during the battle for the bathhouse, the sms-list as well as the twitter-feed served to inform the followers directly of the happenings around the bathhouse. for example if there was a new decision made in the city council, if the police had been there or what kinds of cultural activities were taking place in the bathhouse. this information also seemed to push followers to 10 react and to take part in activities. some people i talked to outside the bathhouse during the police eviction of activists who had camped inside, implied that they felt compelled to come when the action group called for their participation. one young mother phrased it as if she had no choice than to come and show her support for the cause and the activists camping inside. also the young student describes a kind of request inherent in the information sent out by the action group. this invoked what he describes as a kind of duty to respond. he felt he ought to go down to the bathhouse and join the activists on place, in order to show for them and others his support. hence, it seems that to connect to a cause and to other activist also tacitly implies that you should respond to the information and requests generated by this connectedness. updating the practice of sharing is often referred to and praised when discussing political participation online. from what i experienced following the activists in southern stockholm i would rather use the term updating. when asking the student how he should proceed if for example the city would close a bicycle path or plan to build a new highway (issues that he cares for), he says that he would first of all start a facebook-group in order to update his network on what was going on and to see if there was any interest among his connections there. similarly a female artist, entrepreneur and student in her 30s tells me that she uses facebook because of an urge to tell her friends and connections what is going in and happening in her different projects. the constant updating process is the right way to accomplish things, you have to be hyperactive she says to me. a middle-aged mother and part of the core of the action group, underlines the importance of updating practices during the battle for bathhouse. in the beginning important documents were uploaded on the bathhouse blog. later the twitter-feed and sms-lists were pivotal. for example one activist read on the responsible politicians blog that the sportand leisure committee would take the decision to demolish the bathhouse during their next meeting. this information was immediately sent out on the sms-lists and the twitter-feed together with a call for an emergency meeting. at that meeting it was decided to guard the bathhouse twenty-four/seven. from then on, the bathhouse guards started to manage the smslist and twitter-feed in order to update and quickly mobilize activist to protect the bathhouse from the police. during the final stages of the battle there were a lot of text-massages going out, both on sms, twitter and facebook. the importance of updating is not only to inform the network on what is happening, but also to be updated in the sense of being informed on what is happening in your different 11 networks. the young student, interested in reducing cars and motor traffic in the stockholm region, tries to follow the decision-making processes concerning these issues, especially by following green blogs and joining facebook-groups. in this way he is updated on what is happening with the issue. when asking him what kinds of discussions is taking place on these facebook he says that there is not so much discussions as there is information and updatings on political decisions and committee statements. hence snss do not seem to contribute to deliberation, rather what is going on is practices of updating among like-minded people. the student further tells me that he would not have known about the plans to destroy the bathhouse if it was not for the internet. maybe he had been able to read some in the newspaper but he would never been able to get as much information on the issue as he got from the bathhouse blog. and this blog-information made him act. first he attended a meeting and later he sign up on the sms-list and from then on he also tried to responded calls sent out on that list. the green party politician claims that if he is not constantly updated on what is happening on the söfö ning-group it is easy to slip out. he tells me that it is sometimes difficult to start a discussion thread online, and if you have not followed the thread for a while you are left behind. some activists i talked to describe a reluctance to join an online discussion that they had not followed or maybe had not all the information about. reasons for this were that they did not want to risk stating the obvious or repeating things that already had been mentioned. this reasoning suggests that some activists felt they had to be updated otherwise their information might not be accurate and they might be left behind. i also recognize this urge to update in my own behavior, how i during the battle of the bathhouse where checking my facebook and twitter several times an hour in order to follow what was going on. identity and reputation observing the different profiles of söfö activist on the ning-site it becomes obvious that a lot of what is going on is identity negotiation and maintenance. the groups and forums they participate in and the kinds of photos they upload can all be conceived of as material in their identification processes. this is even more the case when observing their facebookprofiles where even more space is allowed for linking to all different kinds of people, causes, brands and popular culture, whereas the ning-site is more group-specific. the student underlines the importance to join political groups on snss online not only to get updated, but also to show support, to tell to the members in the group that you are with them and to show for 12 your friends and network connections that you support this cause. this was indeed one reason why i joined the facebook-group to save the bathhouse. the activists in the söfö network nurtured a political identity as active and involved. the green party politician tells me that he has always been interested in acting for change and that he cannot avoid writing to the city planning office when he reads about development plans he does not approve of. he cannot just sit with his arms crossed and do nothing. he describes his participation in the activities both as an ego-thing but with an idealistic component. similarly the middle-aged mother talks about her engagement in söfö and cinema tellus as creating an environment she likes and wants to promote. she tells me she is not interested in shopping, she is interested in doing things together with her neighbours, such as showing movies and running a community café. also the student talks about his political activism in different organizations as something he likes to do. he tells me he prefers going to meetings and debates instead of playing badminton or soccer. by being engaged in different activist groups, he conceives of himself as part in the formation of a new way of approaching politics. he wants to promote a society where people feel more included. it is obvious that i am studying people who see their activism as a part of their identity, as a kind of lifestyle. observing the different activities online, what seem to be at stake are processes of identification through the positioning yourself within the peer network. this is illustrated when talking to the artist. she describes what seems to me as a strategy of commenting. she tells me that she comments a lot on friends’ postings on facebook. her rule is that all of her comments should consist of some kind of feedback that also contributes with something, for example a link to an interesting article et cetera. she conceives of herself as a fire starter, and that she always comes to occupy the centre of attention in projects she gets involved in, a centre that she then uses to promote different projects and issues that she is involved in. she tells me that before taking part in an activity she makes sure that her friends know what she is doing, for example through a status update on facebook. she also checks who else is going to participate in the activity, adds them as friends and if they already are friends perhaps make a comment on their facebook-wall. in this way it will be easier for her to connect with them when seeing each other at the event. hence in order to keep her position in the network she has to connect, comment and update. similarly the green party politician claims that you have to be continuously updated on the discussions and happenings in the network otherwise your information might not be accurate and then you have to renegotiate the position in the network. 13 hence it is not only exchanges of information that is going when söfö activists log in to their computers, they are also negotiating their social place within the network. power and discipline in digital late modernity identity and reputation having described the experiences and findings in southern stockholm i will now turn to the analysis of them, embedding the findings in theories of power and participation in digital late modernity3 arendt (1998/1958, p. 41, 49) noticed that already the public realm in ancient greece was reserved for individuality and permeated by a spirit where everybody had to distinguish him or herself. today this public realm has largely moved online. who to text message, who’s posting to comment on, and how to respond to messages and postings are used by young people as “the raw material for identity and group-shaping activities” (rheingold, 2002, p. 25). in my own work i have labeled expressive rationality as the motivational force in digital late modernity (see svensson, 2011b). with the increasing possibility of identity on snss, a kind of do it your self-biographies emerges, especially online (see hodkinson 2007, pp. 627628; . it is common to conceive of our time as late modern (giddens, 1991; beck, 1995; bauman, 2001). dahlgren (2006) characterizes late modernity by identifying two interrelated cultural processes: dispersion of unifying cultural frameworks and individualization. the first refers to the increasing pluralization, fragmentation and nichification of society along lines of ethnicity, media consumption, cultural interests, lifestyles, interests, tastes et cetera. individualization refers to lacking a sense of social belonging, a process where communities, personal relationships, social forms and commitments are less bound by history, place and tradition (miller, 2008, p. 388). in other words, the collective and the traditional has faded in importance in favor of the individual identity formation project (giddens, 1991). however, selfrealization is an elusive goal since it can hardly be achieved once and for all. thus the making and molding of the self becomes a continuous and never ending process (milller, 2008, p. 388). this underlines reflexivity as a dominant theme in late modernity. reflexivity means that we consider our selves and our practices from different perspectives, always re-considering previously acquired knowledge. it is especially our life choices and individual identities that are continuously being scrutinized, redefined and subject to our reflections (giddens, 1991). 3 by labelling our time as digital late modernity i whish to underline that societal and cultural changes in late modernity are happening at the same time as we experience a technological shift towards digitalization. 14 livingstone, 2008). this is one reason behind observing processes of identity negotiation and maintenance on facebook and ning. the need to feel connected to an issue, evoking some kind of citizen identity, has proven to be an important incentive for communication on websites set up by political institutions (see hilts & yu, 2010). hence, choices of arenas and topics for political participation are to a large extent reflexively chosen since it is increasingly likely that we will update our different networks on our engagement. individualization is in this sense not only the liberation of the individual from social regulation of modern institutions (family, church, social movements) but also a demand for supplying our biographies, to import our selves into our biographies through our own actions (beck & beck-gernsheim, discussed in leaning, 2009, p. 76). in this sense a kind of network logic is disciplining the activists in southern stockholm to practices of reflexive updating and self-expression. the network logic underlines late modern processes of identification and reflexivity. a continuous emphasis of the self as something that can be managed bears upon the individual to such a degree that the self becomes a reflexive project (giddens, 1991, p.32). it thus seems that the late modern self, anxiously trying to confirm who she really is, uses snss both to monitor her identity as well as testing it in front of selected others (peers). this takes the form of reflexive connectivity and reflexive responsiveness when making links to other users public (as well as causes, organizations, brands) and hence freeloading on their supposed connotations, connotations to which we whish to tie images of our selves (see donath & boyd, 2004). from this perspective it is not surprising that green party sympathizers engage in battling extensions of the highway and trying to save forests and green areas. rheingold (2002, pp. 35-37) claims that at the core of collective action is reputation, something that lays in-between self-interest and altruistic goods. this is illustrated by activists using their participation for identity purposes but also referring to an idealistic component. according to bruns (2008, p. 84) contribution to online communities build individual status. being recognized as the originator of interesting new content or as key facilitators of the sharing (updating) process could be conceived of as individual rewards (bruns, 2008, p. 249), important for constructing and maintaining an identity as active and involved. a retired media entrepreneur tells me that he will at least get a tombstone, referring to his fellow pensioners who just sit and complain while he is having fun, hanging out with smart and interesting people more than half his age. listening to him as well as the middle-aged mother socializing with her neighbours in the community-run cinema and café, it becomes evident that a social element in participatory practices are intertwined with identity, lifestyle and reputation. 15 taking social aspects of participation in southern stockholm into account as well as values of connectedness and responsiveness, dystopian illustrations of late modern individualization of individuals as isolated islands (see bauman, 2001) or the online as an illusion of community with users becoming more individualized with increasingly personalized portfolios of sociability (hodkinson, 2007, p. 629), misses the point. the individual and community are not in a dichotomized relation to each other. the activists in southern stockholm are autonomous and dependent on each other at the same time. on the different media platforms they negotiate themselves, and incorporate other activists and causes into this negotiation. this underlines a form of networked individualism (see castells, 2001, pp. 129-133). hence online communication is not so much about narcissistic self-absorption as it is about embedding the self within the peer group (see also livingstone, 2008). we are thus talking about identity through connectedness. concerning reputation it becomes important to study whether the highly esteemed contributors are also automatically positioned as the undisputed and indisputable leaders, in other words whether reputation is transformed into power (see bruns, 2008, p. 314). obama was retweeted more than any other democratic politician during the campaign because he was the democrats’ candidate for president. newcomers trying to relate to originators and frequent contributors, in other words the core of the political community, illustrate reputation turned into power in political communities online. for example, when i joined the online battle against the destruction of the bathhouse, i soon realized who belonged to the core of the group, not only through observing who was posting messages but also whose postings were retweeted and echoed by thumbs up on facebook. in hindsight, i also realize that i became part of this by posting encouraging entries on the facebook-page for certain members’ and not others, rather retweeting some activists’ messages than others. by echoing popular arguments, i was not only showing my sympathy for the participatory and expressive values of the activist group, but i also reinforced these values and reinforced the authority of certain other active group members. it could be argued that reputation systems are important to filter out anomalous participants and to highlight those who are seen as most creative, exciting and active (bruns, 2008, p. 329). in this way reputation, social filtering and peer-power is linked to each other (see also rheingold, 2002, p. 114). my argument, though, is that reputation not always relies on merit but also on status and hence masks relations of power. 16 the urge to connect, respond and update according to foucault (1994/1973, pp. 52, 57) we are in the midst of a disciplinary society. what is constitutive of this society is that power is exercised through disciplining, normalizing power and the knowledge-power formations that support these largely discursive practices. the control of individuals started to be performed by a series of authorities and networks of institutions of surveillance and correction (foucault, 1994/1973, p. 57). disciplining should be understood as increasingly controlled and rationalized processes of adjusting activities, communication networks and power relations (foucault, 1994/1982, p. 339). power is a type of relationship between people, not properties of individuals or collectives as such, influencing others’ actions rather than acting immediately upon others (foucault, 1994/1979, p. 324). hence through the exercise of power people are disciplined to act in certain ways, in turn structuring the field of further possible actions (foucault 1994/1982, p. 343). today new technology such as e-mail, sms and snss make large networks are possible. large number of people in connected societies has devices that will enable them most of the time to link to places, objects and people (rheingold, 2002). given the increasing mobility of communication platforms and mobile access to internet though smart-phones, expressions and maintenance of network connections have the possibility to take place all the time. following the experiences in aspudden and midsommarkransen i would argue that a central aspect of the emerging network logic is that it disciplines us to be constantly updated in two different ways – to update the network of our doings, thoughts and feelings as well as to be updated of the doings in the network. in order to know what is going on in your networks, you need to be updated. during the battle for the bathhouse the sms-list as well as the twitter-feed served to connect the followers directly to the happenings around the bathhouse. but continuous communication does not only lead to instantaneous information. in the case of the activists in southern stockholm, inherent in this information was a kind of request or a demand to act. networks of peers and like-minded people also influence our decisions because they work as a filter (see anderson, 2006, p. 108). life choices seem to be multiplying and the responsibility for making the right choices is increasingly put on the individual when modern institutions loose in relevance. in late modern societies, every citizen can construct her own custom lifestyle and select her ideology from a large number of choices (manovich, 2001, p. 42). we are thus experiencing an ever-expanding range of elective identities on offer together with the ease with witch they may be embraced or rejected. this can be liberating (see becks treatment on subpolitics, 1995) but also loaded with stress about making the right choices. 17 when tradition and modern institutions become less prominent we need other guiding mechanisms and this is where our networks are having influence over our decisions and us. the network has become an increasingly important filter, through which the activists take part of information and conceive of the world. through networks they reflexively organize their social life, interact with each other, share and get information. hence the internet and mobile accesses make it easier to connect to like-minded people with similar interests in their vicinity. and it becomes easier to tailor and filter what kind of information on what issues and from whom that will reach them. but informing us about the variety of choices and what others before us have done with these choices, the network also functions as peer pressure (anderson, 2006, p. 174). in this way, pictures of like-minded peoples’ and peers’ likes and dislikes together with aggregated past choices and behaviors make us anticipate our future needs and wants (hands, 2011, p. 128). hence, needs might be created with this information. to be successful online, you need to master a new form of sociability, through management of your friends and network connections and through continuously updating, negotiating and maintaining an attractive self on as many stages as possible in order for peers and like-minded people to visit your profile and leave comments (see livingstone, 2008). practices of updating illustrate a kind of power that reveals itself in the continuous preoccupation with expressing and negotiating our selves and our positions, as well as interpreting others through the production, maintenance and sustenance of network visibility. social control today would be the constant monitoring/ supervision of both oneself and others through practices of updating. foucault’s discussions of power can be applied remarkably well in digital arenas. he outlines a form of power that makes individuals into subjects, ties them to their identity by conscience and self-knowledge (1994/1982, p. 331). in other words the late modern reflexive subject is, following foucault, a result of a form of power exercised upon it. the individuals over whom power is exercised are those from whom the knowledge they themselves produce is extracted and used in order to control them (foucault, 1994/1973, p. 84). the central question to deal with today is thus to decide what shall be public and to whom. this decision is to a large extent put in the hand of the everyday internet user. this is a balancing act on what to publish or not in order to avoid this information being used to control you but at the same time keep your social place in the network and manage a continuous identity. studies have shown that working class kids are not as successful as middle class kids in using snss for enhancing capital(s) (this indicating a second digital divide, see, hargittai & hinnant, 2008). 18 the implication on politics and participation of values of connectedness and responsiveness through practices of updating would be that we tend to reveal our political interests to a larger extent online than offline. event though the middle-aged mother, the young student and the middle-aged artist where not outspoken sympathizers of any political party, their facebook networks were to a large extent updated on their opinions and what issues they were engaged in. an american study from the 2008 presidential campaign showed that twenty percent of the survey sample had discovered the political interests of their friends by using snss (zhang, johnson, seltzer & bichard, 2010, p. 80). this seems to counter eliasoph’s (1998) well-known ethnographic study of american volunteers, where she contends that people tend to avoid politics. through a network logic, in which updating practices are highly valued, users are to a less extent shying away from making their political opinions visible to others. the possibility for quick reaction, easy reach of local (and global networks) has turned the internet and mobile technology into efficient channels for social movements, political protest and mobilization as the study in southern stockholm underlines (see also heller, 2008, p. 35). the power of digital communications, networks and mobile technology is a limitless snowball effect made possible by the design and structure of modern digital communications (hands, 2011, p. 3). the uprisings in arab countries demonstrate the sheer power of cumulative connections. in this way network society is a society of coordinated movements of movements (hands, 2011, p. 105, see also shirky, 2009). rheingold (2002) talks about smart mobs in this context, groups of people who are able to act together even though they do not know each other. the bathhouse action group is an example of a smart mob, made possible because the activists carried with them devices with both communication and computing capabilities. carrying mobile devices with access to the internet and computing capabilities also made the activists easier to engage. take for example the student who says that he participates more in debates and information meetings because he joined different facebook-groups and follows certain blogs. the green party politician would not have known about söfö and their different activities if he had joined the ning-group. by following these groups, blogs and lists the activists were updated on the different activities in the neighbourhood and could engage if interested and suitable. in other words, by making sure they were updated, they also made themselves engagable. referring to heidegger, hands (2011, p. 25) describes activists as being on standby. i like this expression because it captures what i have come across in aspudden and midsommarkransen. a lot of inhabitants are on standby, not least during the height of the battle of the bathhouse when quick mobilization was of outmost importance. when asked about his 19 political engagement nowadays, the student describes his engagement as sleeping but that he follows the debate closely (updating) concerning the issues that are important to him and his identity. in other words, he is on standby. when something happens he is ready to write to politicians, attend a meeting or a demonstration. with the internet the possibilities to involve people increase, not the least since many activists are on standby, waiting to find the right circumstances to engage, favorable circumstances for reflexive updating and identity negotiation and maintenance. we should not underestimate the disciplining effects of the emerging social practices online. it is almost as if snss would pressure us to be updated. when the green party politician talks about the bathhouse blog as something that could be followed, he also implies that he had to follow it in order to know what happened and to become informed about the different activities there. to be updated here is also intertwined with the demand for reflexive selfpresentations in late modernity. this disciplines us always to be ready to respond, connect and update. the artist talks about her online channel as something that has to be used in order to update her network, to get things done and get attention for it. self-disclosure, to update the network on your doings and engagements, is thus equally important to gain trust and achieve authentic and contingent relationships with others in the network. this leads to an everincreasing need for self-clarification, social validation and relationship development that is satisfied through acts of self-disclosure (miller, 2008, p. 389). this is one reason to focus on an emerging network logic in order to underline that these practices also carries with them a logic based in other kinds of norms and values to which we have to position our selves. discussion in this paper i hope to have established that relations of power are at work even when activists use media and communication platforms that are supposed to be more equal and horizontal. however, one question remains unanswered. who or what is benefiting from power mechanism pushing us to reflexive updating, identity negotiation and maintenance? power relations are rationalized through different logics operating in different contexts. for example, social control was used at the end of the 18th century in relation to the formation of capitalist society as a way to protect economic wealth (foucault, 1994/1973, p. 69). the question is what social control is used for in network societies? these are questions that remain to be thoroughly addressed, but to end this paper i would like to offer some reflections on these issues. 20 identity, subpolitics and recognition are often used as positive notions when trying to understand politics in late modernity. however identity is also connected to capitalism in ways that might not always be considered positive. the most obvious cases are through acts of consumption and advertising where identity and lifestyle are tightly connected to things that we are made believed we have to buy in order for us to negotiate that particular identity or that particular lifestyle. consumer society offers to the subject a range of choices from which to create biographies of the self (miller, 2008, p. 388). identity becomes a vehicle for how the capitalist system can penetrate the life-world and vice versa. and technology makes this possible by smoothing over alienations and antagonisms through highlighting consumer distractions (hands, 2011, p. 33). hence, from a normative horizon, hands (2011, p. 103) sees a problem using identity as a primary component in digital late modernity, given that many identities’ positions are actually created by capitalist systems to begin with. in this way it can be argued that expressive rationality and reflexive participation becomes part of the coordinated system of interdependence of capitalist societies, capitalism constituting the power mechanism pushing us to reflexive updating, identity negotiation and maintenance. at least this is the case when the negotiation of political identities not only requires participation in different activities, but it is also connected to things that have to be purchased. i would suggest though that the uses of commodities in which meanings and lifestyle values are invested, are more prominent when negotiating social place and identity among youth peer groups on snss than when negotiating political identities on activist groups online. i do believe that activist and political identities are not as embedded in the capitalist logic to the extent that hands argues. in contrast many political identities are based in antagonism towards unjust distribution of wealth and a will to change society since equality is embedded into the very meaning of the political (see svensson 2011a). according to hands (2011, p. 38) technology is increasingly open for local change and adaptation. this then implies that technology very well may well be used to counter a capitalist logic. important as it is not to be too negative, as critical scholars we need to be aware of the potential hegemonic embrace of network logic into a larger capitalist logic. technology is not neutral; it is constantly evolving in a dialectical relationship with society and culture. and it is within capitalist societies that technology now is evolving. commercial interests may very well be able to capitalize on the goods created by online communities and innovations. 21 acknowledgments i would like to thank the wahlgrenska foundation for financial support, humanit and karlstad university for giving me time for research and oriol poveda for valuable comments and proofreading. references altheide, d. (2004). media logic and political communication. political communication, 21, 293-296. anderson, c. (2006). the long tail – how endless choice is creating unlimited demand. london: random house business books. anduiza, e. (2009). the internet, election campaigns and citizens: state of affairs. quaderns del cac, p. 5-12. arendt, h. (1998). the human condition. 2nd edition. chicago: the university of chicago press. bauman, z. (2001). the individualized society. cambridge: polity press. beck, u. (1995). att uppfinna det politiska; bidrag till en teori om reflexiv modernisering. göteborg: daidalos. berg, m. (2011). netnografi. in g. ahrne & p. svensson (eds.). handbok i kvalitativa metoder. malmö: liber. boggs, c. (2000). the end of politics. corporate power and the decline of the public sphere. new york: guilford press. bruns, a. (2008). blogs, wikipedia, second life, and beyond. from production to produsage. new york: peter lang. castells, m. (2001). the internet galaxy: reflections on the internet, business and society. oxford: oxford university press. coleman, s. & blumler, j. (2009). the internet and democratic citizenship: theory practice and policy. new york: cambridge university press. 22 dahlgren, p. (2006). civic identity and net activism: the frame of radical democracy. in l. dahlberg & e. siapera (eds.). radical democracy and the internet. london: palgrave macmillan. dahlgren, p. (2009). media and political engagement. citizens, communication, and democracy. new york: cambridge university press. donath, j., & boyd, d. (2004). public displays of connection. bt technology journal, 22(4). eliasoph, n. (1998). avoiding politics: how americans produce apathy in everday life. new york: cambridge university press. ellison, n., & boyd, d. (2007). social network sites: definition, history and scholarship. computer-mediated communication, 13(1). foucault, m. (1994). truth and juridical forms. in j. d. faubion (ed.). power essential works of foucault 1954-1984, vol. 3. london: penguin books. foucault, michel (1994). omnes et singulatim. in j.d. faubion (ed.). power essential works of foucault 1954-1984, vol. 3. london: penguin books. foucault, michel (1994). subject and power. in j. d. faubion (ed.). power essential works of foucault 1954-1984, vol. 3. london: penguin books. gerodimos & ward, j. (2007). rethinking online youth civic engagement: reflections on web content analysis. in b. d. loader (ed.). young citizens in the digital age: political engagement, young people and new media. london: routledge. giddens, a. (1991). modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age. cambridge: polity press. hands, j. (2011). @ is for activism. dissent, resistance and rebellion in a digital culture. new york: pluto press. hargittai, e. & hinnant, a (2008). digital inequality. differences in young adults uses of the internet. communication research, 35(5), 602-621. 23 heller, m. (2008). global and european information society. in p. ludes (ed.). convergence and fragmentation. media technology and the information society. bristol: intellect. hilts, a. & yu, e. (2010). modelling social media support for elicitation of citizen opinion. msn’10, june 13, toronto, canada. hjarvard, s. (2008) the mediatization of society a theory of the media as agents of social and cultural change. nordicom review, 29(2), 105-134. hodkinson, p. (2007). interactive online journals and individualization. new media & society. 9(4), 625-650. jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture. where old and new media collide. new york: new york university press. kepplinger, h. m. (2002). mediatization of politics. theory and data. journal of communciation, 972-986. leaning, m. (2009). the internet, power and society: rethinking the power of the internet to change lives. oxford: chandos. livingstone, s. (2008). taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: teenagers’ use of social networking sites for intimacy, privacy and self-expression. new media & society, 10(3), 393-411. manovich, l. (2001). the language of new media. cambridge: mit press. medierådet (2010). unga & medier 2010. fakta om barns och ungas användning och upplevelser av medier. stockholm: kulturdepartementet. miller, v. (2008). new media, networking and phatic culture. convergence the international journal of research into new media technologies, 14(4), 387-400. rheingold, h. (2002). smart mobs, the next social revolution: transforming cultures and communities in the age of instant access. cambridge: basic books. 24 sassi, s. (2000). the controversies of the internet and the revitalization of local political life. in k. hacker & j. van dijk (eds.). digital democracy. issues of theory and practice. london: sage. shirky, c. (2009). here comes everybody. how change happen when people come together. london: penguin books ltd. street, john (1997). remote control? politics, technology and “electronic democracy”. european journal of communication, 12, 27-42. svensson, j. (2011a). theorizing citizenships in late modern ict societies. triple c. forthcoming svensson, j. (2011b). the expressive turn of citizenship digital late modernity. jedem – ejournal of edemocracy, 3(1), 42-56. van dijk, j. (2000). models of democracy and concepts of communication. in k. hacker & j. van dijk (eds.). digital democracy. issues of theory and practice. london: sage. van dijk, j. (2006). the network society. 2nd edition. london: sage. zhang, w., johnson, t. j., seltzer, t. & bichard, s. l. (2010). the revolution will be networked. the influence of social networking sites on political attitudes and behaviour. social science computer review, 75-92. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 rantasila, a. (2017, october 18-21). nuclear fear and loathing – commenting news about fukushima daiichi disaster on facebook. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. nuclear fear and loathing – commenting news about fukushima daiichi disaster on facebook anna rantasila university of tampere the triple meltdown at fukushima daiichi nuclear power plant in japan in march 2011 was major global news, and it galvanized publics both online and offline. much of the discussion and comments about the disaster that went on in social media was a far cry from the deliberative discourse often associated with public debate. instead, what surfaced were threads filled with myriad negative emotions: worry, anger, and fierce disagreement – even in finland, roughly 8000 kilometers removed from japan. this paper examines facebook comments on news about the fukushima daiichi disaster. in particular, i am interested in how affect circulates in networked publics of social media, and how it may divide publics as well as unite them. the ongoing study presented in this paper draws from the concepts of networked and affective publics, and investigates how these concepts come together with the discussion about fukushima daiichi on facebook that centered on content produced by professional mainstream journalism. empirical data and theoretical offsets the empirical data of the study consists of 54 facebook updates with a news item about the fukushima daiichi disaster made by finland’s seven major news outlets’ public profiles between march 11 and april 30 2011, and comments attached to the updates. the amount of updates made by an individual media ranged from 11 posts to just three during the examination period. the comment threads varied in length from just one or two short messages in one post to more than fifty lengthy comments in the other, covering altogether hundreds of individual comments. the theoretical portion of the study focuses on two concepts: networked public (boyd 2010) and affective public (papacharissi 2014; 2015). the paper examines facebook commenters on mainstream media pages as a type of an networked, affective public and explores how these definitions come together in a situation that also reflects a type of hybrid media system in the making (chadwick 2013; papacharissi 2015), with mainstream media, ordinary people, and political actors coming together around the volatile topic of a nuclear power plant disaster. moreover, the paper investigates how commenters circulate affect while discussing the news about fukushima daiichi nuclear disaster in facebook. of particular interest is how affect can create both senses of community and senses of animosity (cf. paasonen 2015; papacharissi 2014) within the same discussions. in this paper, i thus looks at affect as intensities, sensations and impressions that are created in encounters between bodies, texts and technology (paasonen 2015, 28). these intensities can be mediated, and while they are experienced as deeply personal, they are also social, cultural, and historical (ahmed 2004; paasonen 2015; wetherell 2015). as paasonen (2015, 28) argues, affective intensities drive and attach people to online discussions, inviting them to stay on and revisit sites and threads. in addition, as ahmed (2004; cf. paasonen 2015, 28; wetherell 2012) has pointed out, affect may also stick to signs, bodies and objects. following ahmed’s (2004) and paasonen’s (2015) argument, i suggest that this affective stickiness can be seen as a crucial feature in formation of affective, networked publics. in other words, what draws people to and keeps them engaged with discussions online may have to do with sticky affect that appears to fuel the very much non-deliberative debates of various networked publics. research frame the aim of this study is twofold. first, it examines how affect is constructed and circulated in the networked, affective publics of facebook in the context of fukushima daiichi nuclear disaster. the empirical material of the study is analyzed qualitatively, by using the idea of affective stickiness (ahmed 2004; paasonen 2015) as a key concept. the study aims at uncovering some of the ways in which affect becomes formulated in text, and how it sticks and circulates in textual interactions between the commenters. second, it explores the wider implications these findings and results from previous studies may have in terms of online debate and journalism in the current situation, where the contemporary hybrid media system can be understood as in some ways more complex and more volatile than six years ago. the comments about fukushima daiichi disaster on facebook provide an interesting and fruitful context in which to study affect in networked publics for several reasons. firstly, a dramatic, major global news event that involves an already contested topic (in this particular case: nuclear energy), can be argued to invite affective publics into being (cf. papacharissi 2015). in the case of finland, the fukushima daiichi disaster coincided with an already heated parliamentary election campaign period and brought nuclear energy policy back to national agenda. moreover, for many, the disaster reignited old memories of chernobyl disaster of 1986. second, studying comments written about fukushima daiichi disaster outside of japan can help us to understand how affect in affective, networked publics can become tied to national political and cultural contexts, while simultaneously circulating in a global media system. third, the heated debate of affective publics of 2011 can give us a retrospective view on how both the hybrid media system and political discussion online have since evolved. expected results the study provides new insight on how affect accumulates and circulates in networked publics in facebook. in addition, the study provides new information on how affective publics may simultaneously be cohesive and divisive, global and local. furthermore, the study tests out ways to study affective, networked publics in ways that help us to understand the current situation where traditional journalism and political debate appears to be under threat by an alternate version of reality. references ahmed, s. (2004). the cultural politics of emotion. edinburgh university press: edinburgh boyd, d. (2010). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in papacharissi, z. (ed.) (2010). a networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites, routledge: new york, pp. 39-58. chadwick, a. (2013). hybrid media system: politics and power. oxford university press: oxford paasonen, s. (2015). a midsummer’s bonfire: affective intensities of online debate. in hillis, paasonen & petit (eds.) (2015). networked affect. mit press: massachusetts, pp. 27-42. paasonen, s. (2011). carnal resonance. affect and online pornography. mit press: massachusetts papacharissi, z. (2014). affective publics. sentiment, technology, and politics. oxford university press: oxford papacharissi, z. (2015). toward new journalism(s). affective news, hybridity, and liminal spaces. journalism studies 16:1, 27-40, doi: 10.1080/1461670x.2014.890328 wetherell, m. (2012). affect and emotion. a new social science understanding. london: sage. wetherell, m. (2015). trends in the turn to affect: a social psychological critique. body & society 21:2, pp. 139–166, doi: 10.1177/1357034x14539020 selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): hurcombe, e. (2019, october 2-5). trolling for engagement: australian legacy news outlets seeking audience interaction metrics on facebook through deliberately divisive content. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. trolling for engagement: australian legacy news outlets seeking audience interaction metrics on facebook through deliberately divisive content edward hurcombe digital media research centre, queensland university of technology introduction news-reading publics are co-evolving with dominant social media platforms such as facebook (nielsen & schroder, 2014). the operational practices of legacy news outlets are transforming in tandem with these publics, as well as in relation to platform logics (caplan & boyd, 2018), meaning organizational principles and algorithmic valuing regimes (van dijck & poell, 2013). this paper empirically investigates how two prominent australian news outlets – abc news and news.com.au – operate according to what i term a social media logic of “engagement”, a concept which builds upon van dijck & poell’s notion of a social media logic of “popularity” (2013). focusing on the operations of these outlets on facebook within a period of three weeks in early 2018, these findings suggest that outlets pursuing engagement can act in deliberatively divisive ways. such divisive practices should be considered as a form of trolling: deceptive and faux-naïve actions seeking discord in online spaces. background the “logics” framework has been useful in examining the ways in which internal governing principles effect how individuals and organisations behave on platforms. van dijck & poell have previously argued that platforms are guided by a logic of “popularity”, meaning the filtering processes on platforms that valued and promoted more “liked”, “shared”, and “followed” posts and users over others in facebook newsfeeds. however, “popularity” does not accurately capture filtering processes on facebook, as the platform does not value and promote that which is purely “popular”. instead, it is that which is most engaged with – the word “engaged” reflecting a multitude of feelings, sentiments, and reactions – given high prominence in newsfeed hierarchies. facebook reaction buttons are notable indicators of a social media logic of engagement. reaction buttons were introduced to facebook in early 2016, following product design 2 director geoff teehan declaration that “not everything in life is likable” (2016). facebook’s shift towards multiple reactions has changed how users express themselves and how they respond to content and other users on the platform. moreover, comments have always expressed differing reactions. sharing content is also not necessarily an endorsement. allowing for “sad” or “angry” reactions, as well comments and shares of varying sentiments, to all be quantifiable metrics that determine visibility on platforms has meant that a logic of “popularity” is not wholly accurate. it is beneficial, thus, to investigate how the need for engagement effects the practices of news outlets which are increasingly dependent on facebook for monetizable audiences. methods manual digital methods, including close readings of select posts, were used to investigate how outlets’ desire to maximize audience attention and interaction metrics effects their operations on facebook. to do so, this research examined facebook pages from two of australia’s largest news outlets, abc news and news.com.au, between 21 march 2018 – 10 april 2018. this three week period was chosen because the ideas of this paper were developed around this time. within this period, i collected all the posts from each page, which amounted to 44 posts in total. i stored screenshots and archived hyperlinks for each post in an evernote file. one year post initial data collection, the engagement metrics for each post were tabulated and analyzed. from the 44 posts that i collected, i strategically selected six posts of varying levels of engagement for closer textual analysis (mckee, 2003) below. this manual approach was adopted due to the limitations of facebook’s api. attempts at using automated digital methods to collect and analyse complete post data faced difficulties. most notably, when i tested facebook data collection and analysis tool netvizz (reider, 2013), it returned incomplete post data. when preparing this paper, i also discovered that facebook now lacks a search post function on pages, which makes it difficult to retrieve older posts from pages with high output. these difficulties raise ongoing concerns around transparency on platforms more broadly. preliminary findings two of abc news and news.com.au’s most engaged posts during this period usefully illustrate the ways that the outlets sought audience attention and interaction metrics. for news.com.au, a post on 26 march 2018 reported on a recent australian cricket scandal. it included a humorous image of the memoir of steve smith, then-captain of australia’s men’s team, found in a book shop’s “true crime” section. at the time, smith was accused of ball-tampering. the post received over 7,500 reactions (the top three being “like”, “haha”, “love”), over 1,400 shares, and over 2,800 comments. for abc news, the page’s most popular post during 21 march – 10 april was an easter-themed opinion piece declaring that “jesus wasn’t white: he was a brown-skinned, middle eastern jew”. the post received over 4,800 reactions (top three being “like”, “haha”, and “love”), over 1,000 shares, and over 1,180 comments. in comparison, most posts during this period received up to 100 reactions and 20 comments. 3 additional results further suggest that outlets are utilizing controversial topics in pursuing engagement. a number of other articles that i collected during this period also tapped into contemporary cultural, social, and political sites of conflict around race, gender, and environmentalism. for instance, an abc news article reported on an extreme weather event, and asked readers whether the event could be “attributed to climate change”: the distanced and objective language seemingly being used to provoke doubt. another abc news article reported that “political correctness was ‘stifling australian cinema’”, the post caption stating that “australia’s film industry has seemingly withdrawn into a safe space”. both “political correctness” and “safe space” are terms with considerable prominence in online right-wing discourse, their use likely intending to provoke negative sentiments. a news.com.au article reported on a blackface incident at a local football club, where a “group of blokes out on the beers” sparked “outrage” online. the “blokes” descriptor appeared to cast doubt on the offensiveness of their actions, and seemingly aimed to provoke negative feelings about the “outrage”. another news.com.au reported on a transgender athlete qualifying for a women’s weightlifting event. the article quotes transphobic comments from “rival federations”. the comment sections of these articles were politically combative, and, in the case of the athlete article, characterized by transphobic sentiment. these posts received varying levels of engagement. based on these preliminary findings, this research finds that the affordances and logics of facebook appear to enable and encourage forms of deliberatively divisive practices when outlets pursue engagement, and therefore visibility. although sensational and polarizing news content are not new (phillips, 2015: 95), these practices seem to intensify and transform when users can directly react and respond to the article and to each other, and when visibility is an algorithmic reward determined by such engagement. trolls are those that deceive other users of their intentions, and seek to sow discord for their own purposes (phillips, 2015: 15-17). thus, it is beneficial to think about a potentially emerging practice of news “trolling”, as it appears that news outlets are adopting faux-naïve, as well as deliberately incendiary, practices in order to satisfy facebook’s logic of engagement. references caplan, r., & boyd, d. (2018). ‘isomorphism through algorithms: institutional dependencies in the case of facebook’, big data & society, 5(1), 1–12. mckee, a. (2003). textual analysis: a beginner’s guide. london: sage. nielsen, r. k. and schrøder, k. c. (2014) ‘the relative importance of social media for accessing, finding, and engaging with news’, digital journalism, 2(4), 472–489. phillips, w. (2015). this is why we can’t have nice things: mapping the relationship between online trolling and mainstream culture. cambridge, ma: mit press. reider, b. (2013). ‘studing facebook via data extraction: the netvizz application.’ websci ’13: proceedings of the 5th annual acm web science conference, pp. 346355. van dijck, j., & poell, t. (2013). ‘understanding social media logic’, media and 4 communication, 1(1), 2–14. microsoft word duffy-ir.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): duffy, b. e. (2015, october 21-24). the labor of visibility: gendered selfexpression in the social media imaginary. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the labor of visibility: gendered self-expression in the social media imaginary brooke erin duffy temple university abstract from fashion bloggers and beauty vloggers to virtual stylists and digital tastemakers, legions of enterprising young women are flocking to social media platforms with aspirations of capitalizing on their passion projects. increasingly, their digitally mediated activities entail projections of what banet-weiser (2012) has called “the post-feminist self-brand,” which recasts self-expression and mediated visibility as conduits to female empowerment. despite significant attention to the texts and contexts of gendered selfbranding in recent years, further insight is needed to better understand the cultural implications for female social media producers. this paper draws upon in-depth interviews with digital content creators to explore the ambivalences and contradictions inherent in discourses of self-branding, authenticity, and social sharing. after mapping out the role of “ordinary people” in contemporary media culture, i address particular manifestations of “authenticity” and “realness” in the intersecting contexts of postfeminist and digital media milieus. i then present interview data to show how a mode of gendered unpaid work—the labor of visibility—increasingly structures activity in the social media imaginary. introduction against the backdrop of the pervasive cult of entrepreneurship that has evolved in tandem with the internet economy, countless young women are utilizing social media in hopes of monetizing their “passion projects.” elsewhere, i have described the activities of female fashion bloggers, beauty vloggers, and diy producers through the framework of aspirational labor: “a form of (mostly) unpaid work that (1) participants believe has the potential to pay off in terms of future social/economic capital; and (2) ensures that female content creators remain immersed in the public circulation of commodities” (duffy, 2015, p. 60). although their creative activities vary in form and scope, aspirational laborers are often compelled to project themselves according to what banet-weiser (2012) has called “the post-feminist self-brand,” which constructs self-expression and mediated visibility as paths to female empowerment (p. 64). narratives of “ordinariness” are quite central to post-feminist self-branding activities and are symptomatic of the ubiquity of “authenticity” appeals in contemporary media and promotional culture. “real people” in popular culture academic inquiries into discourses of “realness” in popular culture have abounded over the last decade as scholars attempt to conceptually locate reality tv, docudramas, and user-generated content in the context of profound shifts in the economies, technologies, and markets of media production and consumption (duffy, 2009; banet-weiser, 2012; grindstaff, 2002; turner, 2006). reality tv has emerged as a particularly compelling site for researchers interested in mediated representations of “real people,” and a central line within this literature explores the myriad ways these representations are imbued with ideologies of gender, race, class, and sexuality (e.g., grindstaff, 2002; skeggs, 2009). the so-called “democratization” of culture enabled by internet technologies has coincided with a heightened emphasis on public self-expression; the web 2.0 era, in particular, has been guided by an ethos of “authenticity” (marwick, 2013). the authenticity ideal dovetails well with post-feminist narratives of individual expression and bodily display (banet-weiser and arzumanova, 2013; genz, 2014). as banet-weiser (2012) argues of female youtube life-casters: the labor of self-branding is thus economic in the sense that it relies on conditions of production of advanced capitalist societies, and it is cultural in that it invokes a more diffuse, immaterial labor that creates new cultural norms and outlooks about the ‘authentic’ self (p. 72). despite the insight of this scholarship, more research is needed to understand the cultural experiences of female social media producers in their own voices. method data for this project come from a sample of in-depth interviews that i conducted with 45 female social media producers (i.e., personal style bloggers, beauty vloggers, diy designers) between 2013-2015. interviews were semi-structured, and topics included participants’ backgrounds and expertise; career interests and aspirations; online and offline interactions with social media participants; processes of content creation, distribution, and promotion; and self-presentation strategies. after the interviews were transcribed, the content was coded and analyzed using a grounded theory approach (glaser & strauss, 1967/2009). additionally, in order to understand the ways in which current and future digital media producers are socialized into the aspirational labor force, i drew upon a diverse series of blogger manuals and professional resources, including career manuals, online resources and support groups, and career guidance included in the blogs/vlogs themselves. key findings: authenticity, expression, and the labor of visibility as part of the governing social media logic of visibility, creative authors are compelled to create and maintain a conspicuous public persona. in fact, the professionalization resources i examined often state that social media success hinges on—as the header emblazoned on the back of one blog manual reads—put[ting] yourself out there. during interviews sessions, bloggers similarly referred to “get[ing] one’s name out there,” “putting it all out there,” and “getting yourself out there” as foundational elements of garnering an audience or landing a full-time gig. this aim was articulated through the display of presumably private moments and sentiments with current and potential followers. indeed, in the genres of social media production examined in this study, the ideal of mediated visibility called for a dissolved boundary between one’s personal and professional lives in a way that assumed a traditionally feminine subjectivity. this binary framed how carrie understood the self-presentation of a “good” blogger: one who is able to balance the personal and professional with great agility. as she continued, “being personal so people can feel like they’re actually…your friend almost when they read your blog, but also not too outwardly open where you’re trying too much.” directives to self-commodify one’s personal life generated a great deal of ambivalence among my interviewees. some young people, such as full-time fashion blogger becky, felt that this mode of public sharing was an accepted, and even gratifying, aspect of the profession. of the “documentary-style” of the fashion blogger persona, she explained, “ [bloggers] are our own brand, and we kind of essentially have to sell our lifestyle. and so – yeah, there’s like a lot of work, i guess, that goes into different things… where i really document my personal life.” here, becky highlights the labor that goes into maintaining a digitally mediated persona. other informants explained the pressure they felt to express themselves according to a pre-defined script. noting how blogs are a “personal extension of yourself,” leah discussed the task of sharing intimate details of her personal life: “as i go on in life, i might be interested in different things…maybe i’ll have a baby, i don’t know if i’ll blog about that; i don’t know if that’s on brand for me or if i’d want to keep it private.” leah thus expressed anxiety that a deeply personal experience—motherhood—might create a rift with the social media persona (“on brand”) she had created over the last halfdecade or so. in other instances, participants spoke more generally about the demand to broadcast their personal lives to mediated publics. style blogger kia was quite forthcoming about the personal stakes of a social media career. “one of the biggest cons i would say is that you always have to be on. even when you’re taking a vacation, you can’t be like, “okay, instagram’s just not going to be part of my life for a week.” she proceeded to describe her honeymoon, when she still faced the pressure to maintain her social media persona. for kia, maintaining a division between personal and professional life is filled with tension; she added, “it’s just a very fine line to walk.” of course, not everyone was as responsive to the market logic of compulsory visibility. naomi confessed that one of the reasons she waited so long to launch a blog was because she was “a little intimidated by the idea of putting myself on the internet.” she acknowledged that the statement may seem peculiar for someone in her position—an aspiring model used to being in front of the camera; however, there was a level of personal disclosure that made her feel more vulnerable in the blogosphere. grace, meanwhile, abandoned her blogging project because of the discomfort she felt from the self-disclosure obligation. as she shared, “i felt too self-conscious to do it; i feel like you have to really be, like, out there and want to pursue it. so, yeah i think that’s where i didn’t want to… continue [blogging], is when i didn’t want to, like, promote myself and take a bunch of pictures.” mediated visibility was particularly insidious for jenna, as it exacted a high toll on her feelings of self-worth. as she confessed: “i’ve never been more overly concerned about my body than when i was a blogger. [the experience] very much turned me into this [person who was suddenly] like, ‘oh my god, i need to lose weight.’” comments such as this reveal how the much-vaunted imperative to “put oneself out there” is fraught with contradiction as social media producers must carefully tow the line between visibility and vulnerability, particularly as female producers who publish content in highly public digital spaces. while bloggers of all stripes are susceptible to online criticism and harassment, fashion and beauty bloggers may be easy targets of internet trolls because of their collective culture of “putting themselves out there.” conclusion while women have long been compelled to express themselves intimately as part of a gendered confessional culture (illouz, 2007), the ascension of social media has coincided with renewed emphases on (female) self-expression and sharing. these imperatives seem to fit comfortably with post-feminist logics of self-branding and entrepreneurialism; however, they require participants to perform the labor of visibility. like other forms of “free labor” that power the digital media economy (e.g., terranova, 2000), the labor of visibility does not often provide material compensation; yet, it is unique in its potential social and psychological consequences. indeed, what must be acknowledged is the extent to which this mode of “visibility” exposes young women to a level of public scrutiny that can double back and dampen their self-worth. at its worst, this takes the form of online trolling and cyber-bullying. while narratives of pubic/private blurring help to normalize this behavior and its potential consequences, it is precisely this bleeding together of one’s professional and personal spheres that makes social media creators vulnerable to mediated publics. references banet-weiser, s. (2012). authentic™: the politics of ambivalence in a brand culture. new york: new york university press. banet-weiser, s. & arzumanova, i. (2012). creative authorship, self-actualizing women, and the self-brand. in c. chris & & gerstner, d. (eds.), media authorship (pp. 163-179). new york: routledge. duffy, b. e. (2010). empowerment through endorsement? polysemic meaning in dove's user-­‐‑generated advertising. communication, culture & critique, 3(1), 26-43. duffy, b. (2015). amateur, autonomous, and collaborative: myths of aspiring female cultural producers in web 2.0. critical studies in media communication, 32(1), 48-64. genz, s. (2014). my job is me: postfeminist celebrity culture and the gendering of authenticity. feminist media studies, (ahead-of-print), 1-17. gill, r. (2008). culture and subjectivity in neoliberal and postfeminist times. subjectivity, 25: 432–445. glaser, b. g., & strauss, a. l. (1967/2009). the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. nj: transaction publishers. grindstaff, l. (2002). the money shot: trash, class, and the making of tv talk shows. chicago: university of chicago press. illouz, e. (2013). cold intimacies: the making of emotional capitalism. hoboken, nj: john wiley & sons. marwick, a. e. (2013). status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. new haven: yale university press. skeggs, b. (2009). the moral economy of person production: the class relations of selfperformance on ‘reality ‘television. the sociological review, 57(4), 626-644. terranova, t. (2000). free labor: producing culture for the digital economy. social text, 18(2), 33-58. turner, g. (2010). ordinary people and the media: the demotic turn. london: sage publications. me 2020-09-01 crime investigations of 'child abuse material' aoir2020-submission.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 recommended citation: eneman, marie (2020) crime investigations of ‘child abuse material’ challenges and opportunities posed by digital technology, the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers (aoir). dublin, ireland. crime investigations of ‘child abuse material’ challenges and opportunities posed by digital technology marie eneman department of applied it, university of gothenburg, sweden e-mail: marie.eneman@gu.se introduction sexual abuse and sexual exploitation are some of the most awful acts that a child can be exposed to and constitute serious crimes (eneman, 2005). the increased digitalisation of society has profoundly changed the circumstances for people with a sexual interest in children to engage in the production, distribution and consumption of child abuse material. in addition, digital technologies enable contact and communication with other like-minded individuals sharing the same sexual interest in children and also facilitate new forms of getting in contact with children (potential victims) (davidson & bifulco, 2018). child abuse material (sometimes also referred to as child pornography) refers to documented material depicting the sexual abuse and/or sexual exploitation of a child (or children). the presence of child sexual abuse and child abuse material in our society constitute serious, global and growing challenges for law enforcement agencies, not least due to technological innovations and advancements. emerging technologies has allowed the production, distribution and consumption of child abuse material to evolve from a concealed and often expensive activity into something that today can be accessed easily, rapidly, anonymously and in many cases at no cost. another unique and serious consequence with the use of digital technologies is that even in cases where the offender is caught, the victim identified and the criminal case successfully prosecuted, the harm to the victim i.e. the child involved continues since the material is circulating and remains accessible which leads to further revictimatisation (eneman, 2010; davidson & bifulco, 2018). virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 virtual event. the use of these new technologies should by no means be seen as additional channels the harnessing of digital technologies in relation to child abuse material has profoundly changed the nature of the problem, creating a new, more serious and complex situation. the involved technologies could however be described as double-edged, since the technologies can be used (misused) for criminal activities such as production, distribution and consumption of child abuse material – and also be used by law enforcement agencies to detect and investigate these crimes. law enforcement authorities are today using digital technologies for crime prevention, detection and investigations. the overall purpose with this study is to explore the practices where crime investigations of child abuse material occur within the swedish police authority. this research in progress paper will reflect on what challenges and opportunities police officers do encounter when investigating child abuse material in relation to digital technology? the involved technology will be investigated in relation to technological affordance (faraj & azad, 2012) and empirically the study is based upon qualitative interviews with 15 police officers (czarniawska, 2008). legal response the legal responses to child abuse material vary greatly between different jurisdictions. the complex problems and challenges regarding legal and societal response towards child abuse material has however been recognized and placed upon the political agenda in many countries (murray, 2016; akdeniz, 2016). the fight against child sexual abuse which includes child abuse material is a priority for the european union (eu). the european parliament and the council have both called for further concrete action to develop strong and comprehensive responses to these crimes covering both offline and online context. the european union, council of europe and united nations have created international instruments that attempt to achieve a legal harmonization of national laws to more effectively reduce the distribution and availability of child abuse material (eu, 2020). the current swedish legislation (the swedish code of statutes, the penal code, chapter 16, crime against public order, 10 a §) criminalises the creation, distribution and possession of ‘child pornography’, including fictitious ‘child pornography’ through its formulation ‘anybody that depicts a child in a pornographic image’, ‘distribute such image’ or ‘possess such image’. the prohibition of such depiction does not include drawings or paintings produced for artistic merit. swedish legislation has, compared with for example england and wales, been slow to tackle the technological developments and challenges (murray, 2016; eneman et al, 2010). the creation and distribution of ‘child pornography’ was made an offence 1980 in sweden. in the discussion of regulation related to ‘child pornography’ one should be aware of the swedish debate that took place in the beginning of 1990s about the criminalisation of the possession of child pornography. this debate was dominated by arguments concerning important human rights, on the one side of the right of the child and on the other side anxiety regarding limitations on constitutional rights of freedom of expression. similar tensions can be found in the ongoing debate regarding the introduction and use of technological regulation such as internet filtering (also called internet blocking) of illegal and harmful content (hm government, 2019; eneman, 2019). the possession of ‘child pornography’ became a criminal offence in 1999 in sweden. in 2010, sweden extended the possession offence to also cover the act of viewing child pornography online (even when the files were not deliberately downloaded).. a serious flaw with the swedish legislation regarding ‘child pornography’ refers to its location in the swedish code of statutes, the penal code, chapter 16, 10 a §, which governs crimes against public order, law (2010:399). i strongly suggest that the legal definition should be changed to replace the term ‘child pornography’ with for example ‘child abuse material’ and that the offence should be moved from ‘crime against public order’ to the section with ‘sexual offences’. concluding reflections the aim of this paper was to reflect on what challenges and opportunities police officers do encounter when investigating child abuse material in relation to digital technology. the results from this study contributes to the existing research with empirical insights from the investigation practices within the swedish police authority. the police constitute an interesting and relevant case since we can learn how the logic that shapes the requirements of public authorities also affects and regulates the way the employees (police officers, digital forensics etc) organise themselves as a legal authority. the concept of affordance (faraj & azad, 2012) acted as a valuable theoretical lens to better understand the features of the involved digital technologies – its potential affordances promoting or constraining interaction with human actions (gibson, 1979). by using the concept of affordance to investigate the involved technologies and the swedish police and its crime investigation practices of child abuse material, the results show that there are technological, organisational and legal dimensions regulating these practices. the preliminary findings indicate that emerging technologies cause both challenges and opportunities for police officers when investigating crimes such as child abuse material. some of the most obvious challenges refer to the existence of child abuse material in our society and accordingly the large number of investigations often containing a huge volume of seized material (images and films). in addition, some of the offenders have become increasingly sophisticated in their use of technologies (including encryption and privacy-enhancing technologies etc), which cause even further challenges for police officers to detect and investigate these crimes. many crime investigations of child abuse material are time-consuming due to a number of aspects such as large volumes of material (images and films) and the use of advanced technologies. other challenges and dilemmas refer to prioritization and resources. the organisational context and conditions affect how the crime, and the related investigation work, is prioritized and allocated resources. low priority could to some extent be explained by the legal definition of the offence, its location in the penal code and relatively low penal value. the result shows that there is a significant variation between different regions regarding clear instructions, routines and procedures on how to conduct investigation of child abuse material, which further indicates that the investigation work can be strongly dependent on individual police officers’ professional discretion. new technologies appear to pose complex challenges for the police officers. the results indicate that there is a significant variety and even a lack of adequate digital competence among the police officers and thus resources such as digital forensics plays a crucial role for the investigations. the digital technologies enable possibilities such as the ability to use technological tools to detect and also as part of the investigation work. today they use a number of technological tools such as software and databases to examine, sort, categories the material and also for victim identification (database used for international collaboration). the ability to use technological tools to examine, sort, categorise and identify victims provides several positive effects such as time-saving investigations, improving the quality and also improving the work environment for the police officers – since the time they are exposed to this illegal and harmful material is reduced. furthermore, child abuse material is a global challenge and crime often including different jurisdictions – which on the one hand complicates investigations but on the other hand digital technologies provide features facilitating both national and international collaboration. references akdeniz, y (2016) internet child pornography and the law: national and international responses, routledge. czarniawska, b (2008), organizing: how to study it and how to write about it, qualitative research in organizations and management, vol. 3 no. 1, pp. 4-20. davidson, j & bifulco, a (2018) child abuse and protection: contemporary issues in research, policy and practice, routledge. eneman, m (2019) internet filtering: a solution to harmful and illegal content?, proceedings of 2019 ieee smartworld, ubiquitous intelligence & computing, advanced & trusted computing, scalable computing & communications, cloud & big data computing, internet of people and smart city innovation, uk. eneman, m (2010) developing child protection strategies: a critical study of offenders’ use of information technology for the sexual exploitation of children, doctoral thesis, university of gotheburg, sweden. eneman, m (2005) the new face of child pornography, in human rights in the digital age, cavendish publishing, uk. european commission, com(2020) 607 final, brussels, 24.7.2020, eu strategy for a more effective fight against child sexual abuse. her majesty: online harms white paper (2019) available at: www.gov.uk/government faraj, s & azad, b (2012) the materiality of technology: an affordance perspective. in nardi & kallinikos (eds) materiality and organizing: dsocial interaction in a technological world. oxford university press. gibson, j. j. (1979) the ecological approach to visual perception.reading, ma: houghton mifflin. murray, a (2016) information technology law: the law and society, oxford university press. microsoft word ir16-template_eklund.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): eklund, l. (2015, october 21-24). linking online and offline social life through digital gaming. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. linking online and offline social life through digital gaming lina eklund stockholm university introduction prominent in the debate on digital technologies and social relationships is the division between online and offline. this debate is often focused on the argument of offline as ‘real life’ and online, as virtual. in the literature this is expressed as a tradition of separating virtual from physical (williams 2006); studying digital technologies, e.g. games or social network sites, as virtual spaces in their own right without connecting them to physical places (crawford 2012). online, in this perspective, people are more equal as anonymity and partial-anonymity work as equalizers, stripping people of the physical characteristics that otherwise divide. yet research has increasingly shown how online and offline life is inherently intertwined the techno-utopian discourse on online freedom still affects how the internet is understood (e.g. slater 2002; morley 2003; williams 2006; lehdonvirta 2010; shen & williams, 2011). researchers have in response to this called for more studies looking at social processes as not only either/or relationships between offline and online, but as dynamic flows grounded in agents’ everyday lives (williams 2006). research that connects online and offline and how social relationships play out in these interconnected spaces is required if we are to fully understand the effect of the digitalization of sociality (slater 2002; williams 2006; crawford 2012). in light of this, the study at hand reports on the results of a research project running from 2008-2013. during those years social digital gaming, both online and offline, was investigated. two main data sets were collected, an interview study containing in-depth individual and group interviews with 41 dedicated swedish gamers engaged in a vast array of digital games. results from this led to a batch of survey questions included in a nationally representative survey “swedes and the internet” (see findahl, 2011), using a simple random sample, answered by over 2600 swedes aging from 12 to 100 years old. sweden is one of the leading countries in the digitalization process affecting societies worldwide (bilbao-osorio, dutta and lanvin, 2013)—where internet use is almost universal except among the very young and the very old (almost 100% among 12-55 year olds (findahl, 2014)), and digital gaming is widespread (findahl, 2011). ideally one can imagine comparing different national contexts instead of focusing on a single country. on the other hand, this can be considered a strength of the study, the relatively homogenous sample population allows us to compare results from the two data sets. building on previous research showing that digital gamers interact with a broad mix of people while gaming and that gaming is far from an isolated social space (see taylor, 2006; consalvo, 2009; shen & williams, 2011) this study investigates the linkage between online and offline by looking at the relationships gamers have with their coplayers. the aim is to shed light on the connections between online and offline life by analysing digital gaming using a relational sociological perspective. relational sociology focuses on understanding the dynamic ebb and flow of social relationships between actors, and how these shape social world(s)1. emirbayer (1997) argues that attention to relations offers a perspective where researchers can see how the world unfolds as processes in an increasingly moving world. by exploring connections between people this study shows how intimately linked online and offline life is in the everyday lived experiences of digital gamers. at the same time a clear paradox is experienced as users express an ideal of the global internet, reducing boundaries between people. yet this ideal is not realised in peoples’ practises. the study contributes with both in-depth understanding of how online and offline life is connected in practice but also suggests how to theoretically, in a relational perspective, understand online life’s intimate connection to the offline. results through qualitative analyses of interview data and quantitative exploration of the survey data the results reveal aspects of social game-play with a focus on relations and interactions between gamers, both online and offline. results show how gaming can be understood as relational, coming to be in interactions between gamer, co-players, and game. what this implies is what it means to play is intimately linked to interactions with both games and other players, furthermore, how gamers experience playing, even the same game, varies depending on with whom they play. more concretely results demonstrate how co-players such as family members, out-of-game friends, internet friends, and strangers shape the experiences and motivations of gaming. while informants subscribe to a techno-utopian ideology heralding free, borderless interaction, individuals’ actual practise supports glocalized ties between users blending online and offline into one social world. playing with strangers is furthermore, not primarily a social activity on par with playing with friends, but rather relaxed leisure free of social obligations. while enjoying the freedom which comes from playing with strangers gamers still often limit this type of social play; particularly strangers seen as dissimilar to themselves are avoided. the techno-utopian ideology hides a concrete practise that reinforces cultural boundaries and material realities based on offline relationships and cultural values. moreover, different game structures promote play with different co-players and provide a designed fundament that acts as an anchor for the maintenance and creation of 1 social world here implies an arena featuring some organization and shared activity for members. an individual simultaneously belong to a multitude of social worlds that can be more or less interlinked. (strauss 1978). different types of relations. a game joins people together with a shared purpose, offering structural foundation for relationship work. offline friends/family allows additional embedding of social norms supporting both sociable interaction as well as instrumental aspects of attaining game goals. for individuals not sharing an offline setting the more similarities on both a macro level, such as country of origin or language, and micro level, such as age and life-stage, the easier the creation of stable social groups is perceived to be. finally the study lifts up the case of female gamers, a group still struggling for acceptance in game culture. while women tend to play alone to a greater degree than men, when they play with others they are more restricted through relations to co-players in opportunities for play. how to play is intimately linked not only to values and discussions in online gaming culture but also to female gamers’ relations with individuals online or in their physical proximity; both known and unknown. particularly in interaction with male gamers whom they share everyday life with gendered gaming expectations and online identities are negotiated and realized. the conclusions offer a relational perspective that puts focus on the constant flux of relations that gamers, and internet users in general, engage with online. these relations connect different social worlds, both online and offline. relations shape expectations and experiences of online life and ultimately ground it in offline relations and cultural values. at the same time structures matter; the design of games and other online platforms offer a distinct flavour to social experiences and create possibilities for interaction online. different design of different platforms allows different relations to take hold and be realized. design limits what can and cannot be done and is thus a base for how sociality online can be realised. yet structures gain meaning and different usages in a social context of various interactions between individuals. references bilbao-osorio, b., dutta, s. and lanvin, b. (eds.) (2013). insight report: the global information technology report 2013: growth and jobs in a hyperconnected world. world economic forum: geneva. crawford, g. (2012). video gamers. london: routledge. emirbayer, m. (1997). manifesto for a relational sociology. american journal of sociology, 103(2):281–31 findahl, o. (2011). swedes and the internet 2011. world internet institute: gävle findahl, o. (2014). swedes and the internet 2014. world internet institute: gävle morley, d. (2003). what's 'home' got to do with it? contradictory dynamics in the domestication of technology and the dislocation of domesticity. european journal of cultural studies, 6(4): 435-458 lehdonvirta, v. (2010). virtual worlds don’t exist: questioning the dichotomous approach in mmo studies. game studies, 10(1): online shen, c. and dmitri w. (2011). unpacking time online: connecting internet and massively multiplayer online game use with psychosocial well-being. communication research, 38(1): 123-149 slater, d. (2002). social relationships and identity on-line and off-line. in lievrouw & livingstone (eds.) handbook of new media: social shaping and consequences of icts (pp. 533-543). london: sage publications inc. strauss, a.l. (1978). a social worlds perspective. studies in symbolic interaction, 1: 119-128. williams, d. (2006). on and off the net: scales for social cap microsoft word tildenberg-tekobbe.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): tildenberg, k. & tekobbe, c. (2014, october 22-24). the things we can’t say in selfies -– narrating the self through gpoy, reactiongif and ‘current status’ images. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the things we can’t say in selfies – narrating the self through gpoy, reaction-gif and ‘current status’ images katrin tildenberg tallinn university cindy tekobbe arizona state university we are surrounded by the ‘powerful and seductive’ (rose, 2001, p.10) images art, ads, icons, comics, family albums, memes and selfies. the ease of exchanging pictures in the digitally saturated environment of ubiquitous camera-phones makes the communicative potential of images incredibly high. this paper explores the selection and posting of gpoy (gratuitous picture of yourself), gif (graphics interchange format) and ‘current status’ images [from now on referred to as gpoy] commonly used in social media as acts of meaning making and belonging. theoretical context in our previous work, we have focused on selfies as narrative acts and signifiers of community belonging. selfies can be bring a sense of control, allow to reclaim one’s sexuality and act as tokens of belonging. others have shown selfies to act as identity explorations (avgitidou, 2003), which can be both empowering and commodifying (lasén and gómez-cruz, 2009, hjorth, 2006; koskela, 2004; schwarz, 2010). in looking at visual dialogues through gpoy, we are inspired by gergen’s (2009) work on relational being, which emphasizes the stories of belonging over stories of being. according to his approach, the self is where various relations meet, and in order to be meaningful, we need an existing ‘tradition of coordination between your utterances and my responses’ (gergen, 2007, p. 366). this nod towards ‘rules of intelligibility’ (riessman, 2008) necessary for any meaningful communication to happen, invites the concept of genres (cf. bakardjieva 2006). luders, proitz & rasmussen (2010) suggest people need genres in ‘becoming meaningful’, and to make sense of communication. can we consider speaking in gpoys an emerging personal media genre? does it build on the existing genres of self-portraiture or those of pictography? are gpoy selfreflexive, or should they be understood as icons? based on gergen’s use of the concept of carnival, i suggest that gpoy, like carnival, ‘permits the individual to acknowledge and poke fun at the incredulity inherent in trying to align so many discordant potentialities for identity’ (papacharissi, 2012, p. 835). methodical context we will look at how a community of nsfw (not safe for work) selfiers on the social media platform, tumblr, use gpoy to interact with others and tell stories about themselves. we are interested in how these visual narratives, using third party photos or screen grabs from film and animation, are repurposed by people who have an alternative way of visual and textual self-expression online. we rely on visual narrative analysis (cf. rose, 2001, riessmann, 2008) [vna], in this case, we focus on the story of re-production of images (unlike selfies, these are not images my participants have produced) or a story of production of visual self-narratives. this means finding the gifs and images tagged or captioned as gpoy or ‘current status’ in my fieldnotes and thematically analyzing them to suss out the narratives they are mostly used for. we then follow with case based vna of how two of our informants (katie and rachel) do visual self-narration via gpoy. results and discussion we suggest that gpoys, reaction gifs and ‘current status’ images are an emergent personal use genre (bakardijeva, 2006; luders, proitz & rasmussen, 2010) of self narrative for my participants. gpoy are used when informants need to make identity or belonging claims that are at odds with some of their other potentialities for identity. in simpler terms, one turns to self-narration via gpoy when one assumes that their narrative might be (a) stigmatizable; (b) at odds with the community based rules of social-exchange, (c) an impression-management tool for identity potentials we are less confident about. gpoy based visual self-narration is, thus, a result of identity work (alvesson, ashcraft & thomas, 2008). due to space constraints of this paper, we will just give an overview of findings. reaction gifs are mostly used as responses the bloggers found insulting or ridiculous. they are usually reserved for interactions with strangers / people one does not consider to be within their tumblr. community, and are an alternative to aggressive or rude utterances, which are generally not endorsed in this particular community. gpoy and ‘current status’ images (or gifs) are used interchangeably, with some informants preferring one label to the other, while others use gpoy and ‘current status’ intermittently. it should be mentioned that gpoy as an acronym and a meme has a rich history on the internet in general, and on tumblr specifically, thus its use might be related to the particular person’s online experience. our informants often use gpoy and ‘current status’ to construct a specific (often explicitly sexual) strand of self-narrative and to show that in a favorable, aesthetically pleasing and cute way. it can be seen as a preemptive attempt to avoid stigmatization of said sexual identities. another common use of gpoy and ‘current status’ images are pleas for support. throughout tiidenberg’s fieldwork, many of the informants have reported that they don’t want to ‘seem whiny’ or complain too much on their blogs, gpoy and ‘current status’ offer a way to release tension and ask for compassion in a way that doesn’t undermine one’s overall identity work towards being seen as coherent, positive and distinct (alvesson, ashcraft & thomas, 2008). not all tumblr users employ these in their visual narratives. for example rachel (41) relies on gpoy for conflict communication and critical / ironic selfreflexivity. for her, it seems to be a tool of relating to her own vulnerability from arms length. for katie (31) however, communicating in gpoy is a genre of selfexpression and impression management for some of her sexual identities (sexual ‘little’ / ‘bunny’) and for managing emotional stress and seeking compassion (which, incidentally, is concurrent with the sexual little head space). communicating in gpoy thus emerges as a coherent genre at the service of identity work. it has a specific role within one’s other personal genres and selves. references alvesson, m., ashcraft, k. l., and thomas, r. (2008). “identity matters: reflections on the construction of identity scholarship in organization studies.” organization, 15:5-28. avgitidou, a. (2003) performances of the self. digital creativity, 14(3): 131-138. bakardjieva m (2006) domestication running wild. from the moral economy of the household to the mores of a culture. in: berker t, hartmann m, punie y and ward k (eds) domestication of media and technology. maidenhead: open university press, 62–79. gergen, k. j. (2007) relativism, religion, and relational being. common knowledge, 13:2-3, 362 – 378 gergen, k.j. (2009) relational being: beyond self and community, new york: oxford university press. hjorth, l. (2006) ‘being mobile: in between the real and reel,’ paper presented at asian pop and mobile cultures conference, gwangju, 28-29 october http://www.cct.go.kr/data/acf2006/mobile/mobile_0101_larissa%20hjorth.pd f koskela, h. (2004) ‘webcams, tv shows and mobile phones: empowering exhibitionism,’ surveillance & society, 2(2/3): 199-215. lasén, a., and gómez-cruz, e. (2009) ‘digital photography and picture sharing: redefining the public/private divide,’ knowledge, technology & policy, 22(3): 205–215. luders, m., proitz, l., & rasmussen, t. (2010). emerging personal media genres. new media & society, 12(6), 947–963. doi:10.1177/1461444809352203 papacharissi, z. (2012). kenneth j. gergen, relational being: beyond self and community, international journal of communication, 6, 834–837. rose, g. (2001). visual methodologies. an introdution to the interpretation of visual materials. london, thousand oaks, new delhi : sage publications. schwarz, o. (2010) ‘on friendship, boobs and the logic of the catalogue: online selfportraits as a means for the exchange of capital,’ convergence, 16(2): 163-183. radices aoir final.pdf � 6hohfwhg�3dshuv�ri��$r,5������ 7kh���v̵w��$qqxdo�&rqihuhqfh�ri�wkh� $vvrfldwlrq�ri�,qwhuqhw�5hvhdufkhuv� 'xeolq��,uhodqg���������2fwrehu������ � � � $�7$/(�2)�7:2�7:,77(56"�,'(17,)<,1*�%5,'*(6�%(7:((1� /$1*8$*(�%$6('�7:,77(563+(5(6� � )hol[�9lfwru�0�qfk� /hleql]�,qvwlwxwh�iru�0hgld�5hvhdufk�_�+dqv�%uhgrz�,qvwlwxw� �� /xfd�5rvvl� ,7�8qlyhuvlw\�&rshqkdjhq� � � 7udqvqdwlrqdo�gljlwdo�sxeolf�vskhuhv�� 5hfhqw�joredo�srolwlfdo�ghyhorsphqwv�±�vxfk�dv�%uh[lw��wkh�uhwuhdw�ri�wkh�86$�iurp�wkh� 3dulv�$juhhphqw��ru�pdvv�pljudwlrq�gxh�wr�kxpdqlwduldq�fulvhv�±�duh�dffrpsdqlhg�dqg� lqioxhqfhg�e\�frppxqlfdwlrq�wkdw�vsdqv�dfurvv�erughuv�ri�qdwlrqdo�sxeolf�vskhuhv�� 'hvslwh�hduo\�surplvhv�ri�d�joredo�sxeolf�vskhuh��txhvwlrqv�zkhwkhu�dqg�krz�rqolqh� phgld�fuhdwh�d�joredo�vsdfh�wkdw�vxvwdlqv�d�gholehudwlyh�glvfrxuvh�ri�qdwlrqdo�dqg�joredo� lqwhuhvwv�rq�wkh�flwl]hq�ohyho��uhpdlq�xqghuvwxglhg�gxh�wr�wkh�frpsoh[lw\�dqg�wkh�frvwv� ri�uhvhdufk�zlwk�wkh�dssursuldwh�jhrjudsklfdo�uhsuhvhqwdwlyhqhvv���+lqvnd� � %dxfkrzlw]���������� $gguhvvlqj�wklv�lv�hvshfldoo\�uhohydqw�iru�wkh�(xurshdq�8qlrq��zklfk�lv��odqjxdjh��dqg� fxowxuh�zlvh��d�prvw�glyhuvh�joredo�srzhu��5hfhqwo\��wkh�(8¶v�xqlw\�dqg�srolwlfdo�lqwhjulw\� kdv�vxiihuhg��diihfwlqj�lwv�vrfldo��srolwlfdo��dqg�fxowxudo�frkhvlrq��7klv�lv�dovr�gxh�wr� srodulvhg�sxeolf�rqolqh�glvfrxuvhv�zlwklq�dqg�ehwzhhq�frxqwulhv��zklfk�duh�vrphwlphv� hyhq�dfwlyho\�pdqlsxodwhg���%dvwrv� �0hufhd����������7khuhiruh��dq�ryhuylhz�ri�sxeolf� rqolqh�frppxqlfdwlrq�eh\rqg�qdwlrqdo�erughuv�dqg�odqjxdjh�eduulhuv�lv�hvvhqwldo�� � 6xjjhvwhg�&lwdwlrq��$3$���0�qfk��)��5rvvl��/���������2fwrehu���������$̵�7doh�2i�7zr�7zlwwhuv"�,ghqwli\lqj� %ulgjhv�%hwzhhq�/dqjxdjh�%dvhg�7zlwwhuvskhuhv���3dshu�suhvhqwhg�dw�$r,5�������7kh���w̵k ��$qqxdo� &rqihuhqfh�ri�wkh�$vvrfldwlrq�ri�,qwhuqhw�5hvhdufkhuv��'xeolq��,uhodqg��$r,5��5hwulhyhg�iurp� kwws���vslu�drlu�ruj�� virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 virtual event � 7klv�sdshu�frqwulexwhv�wr�wklv�ryhuylhz�e\�h[sorulqj�orqj�whup�uhodwlrqv�ehwzhhq�wkh� ,wdoldq�dqg�*hupdq�wzhhwlqj�7zlwwhuvskhuh��zkloh�dgguhvvlqj�wkh�iroorzlqj�uhvhdufk� txhvwlrqv�� �� :kdw�lv�wkh�ryhudoo�vwuxfwxuh�ri�wklv�elolqjxdo�qhwzrun"� �� $uh�wkhuh�eulgjhv�ehwzhhq�wkhvh�odqjxdjh�frppxqlwlhv�lq�wkh�irup�ri�vlqjoh� dffrxqwv�dqg�krz�fdq�wkh\�eh�ghvfulehg"� �� $uh�wkhuh�eulgjhv�lq�wkh�irup�ri�jurxsv�dqg�zkdw�duh�wkh\�wzhhwlqj�derxw"� � )ljxuh��� ��)rufh�gluhfwhg�od\rxw��)rufh�$wodv�����%dvwldq�hw�do�����������ri�wkh�,wdoldq� �sxusoh����*hupdq��rudqjh��iroorz�qhwzrun�vdpsoh��1rghv�vl]hg�e\�ehwzhhqqhvv� fhqwudolw\���%udqghv���������� 7kh��,wdoldq�*hupdq�7zlwwhuvskhuh�lv�hvshfldoo\�lqwhuhvwlqj�ehfdxvh�lw�uhiohfwv�pxfk�ri� wkh�(8¶v�frpsoh[lw\��lwv�odqjxdjh�frppxqlwlhv�duh�ri�frpsdudeoh�vl]h��vkduh�vhyhudo� qdwlrqdo�erughuv��ehorqj�wr�gliihuhqw�odqjxdjh�idplolhv��suhyhqwlqj�pxwxdo� xqghuvwdelolw\���dqg�wkh�frxqwulhv�lqyroyhg�h[klelw�glvwlqfw�fxowxudo�gliihuhqfhv��zlwk� � *hupdq\�dqg�,wdo\�riwhq�ehlqj�uhihuuhg�wr�dv�h[hpsodu\�&hqwudo�dqg�6rxwkhuq�(xurshdq� vwdwhv��uhvshfwlyho\�� 0hwkrg�dqg�3uholplqdu\�5hvxowv� :h�exlog�rq�dq�lqqrydwlyh�qhwzrun�fudzolqj�vwudwhj\�iru�odqjxdjh�edvhg�7zlwwhu�iroorz� qhwzrunv���0�qfk�hw�do�����������:h�ghyhorshg�lw�ixuwkhu�wr�frpelqh�vwuhqjwkv�dqg� plwljdwh�zhdnqhvvhv�ri�udqn�ghjuhh���6dodpdqrv�hw�do�����������vqrzedoo���*rrgpdq�� ��������dqg�iruhvw�iluh�vdpsolqj���/hvnryhf� �)dorxwvrv����������7khuhe\��zh�froohfw�d� vdpsoh�ri�wkh�ehvw�frqqhfwhg�dqg�fhqwudoo\�srvlwlrqhg�dffrxqwv�lq�wkh�,wdoldq�*hupdq� 7zlwwhuvskhuh��:lwk�����udqgrp�dffrxqwv�dv�vhhgv�iru�hdfk�odqjxdjh�dqg����� fudzohuv��zh�dfklhyhg�d�vhhg�srro�vl]h�ri�ryhu���ploolrq�dffrxqwv�dqg�froohfwhg�d� qhwzrun�vdpsoh�ri��������qrghv�zlwklq�rqh�gd\�dv�d�ihdvlelolw\�vwxg\��zklfk�wklv� devwudfw�lv�edvhg�rq��2xu�frqihuhqfh�frqwulexwlrq�zloo�gudz�rq�vhyhudo�prqwkv�ri�wkh� rqjrlqj�froohfwlrq�� � )ljxuh��� ��)rufh�gluhfwhg�od\rxw��)rufh�$wodv�����%dvwldq�hw�do�����������ri�wkh�,wdoldq��ohiw���� *hupdq��uljkw��iroorz�qhwzrun�vdpsoh��1rghv�vl]hg�e\�3djh�5dqn���%ulq� �3djh���������� &rorxuhg�e\�prgxodulw\�pd[lplvlqj�foxvwhuv�� (dfk�dffrxqw�lv�dvvljqhg�wr�d�odqjxdjh�edvhg�rq�lwv�wzhhwv��7kh�uhvxow��ylvleoh�lq� )ljxuh�� ����ghprqvwudwhv�wkh�xvhixoqhvv�ri�wkh�phwkrg�dv�d�srzhuixo�h[sorudwru\�wrro�� 7kh�*hupdq�sduw�ri�wkh�qhwzrun�fohduo\�uhiohfwv�hduolhu�uhvxowv�rq�wkh�*hupdq�7zlwwhu� � 6skhuh���0�qfk�hw�do�����������,q� �)ljxuh�� ���wkh�fdofxodwlrq�ri�3djh�5dqn�uhyhdov�d� vwulnlqj�surplqhqfh�ri�wkh�&dwkrolf�3rsh��$�ylvxdolvdwlrq�ri�ehwzhhqqhvv�fhqwudolw\� vxjjhvwv�wkh�eulgjlqj�txdolw\�ri�vrffhu��qdpho\�whdpv�sod\lqj�lq�wkh�&kdpslrqv� /hdjxh��h�j���$&�0lodq��%ruxvvld�'ruwpxqg��dqg�-xyhqwxv�7xulq���)ljxuh�� ���erwwrp���dv� zhoo�dv�frqqhfwlrqv�ehwzhhq�srolwlfdo�foxvwhuv�ri�erwk�odqjxdjhv�e\��iruphu��phpehuv� ri�wkh�(xurshdq�3duoldphqw��vxfk�dv�0duwlq�6fkxo]���)ljxuh�� ���fhqwuh���:kloh� ehwzhhqqhvv�fhqwudolw\�douhdg\�surylghv�lqirupdwlrq�derxw�wkh�eulgjlqj�fkdudfwhu�ri� vlqjoh�dffrxqwv��zh�dovr�zloo�xvh�eulgjlqj�fhqwudolw\���+zdqj�hw�do����������wr�lghqwli\� eulgjlqj�dffrxqwv�pruh�hiihfwlyho\�� � )ljxuh��� ��)rufh�gluhfwhg�od\rxw��)rufh�$wodv�����%dvwldq�hw�do�����������ri�wkh�,wdoldq��ohiw���� *hupdq��uljkw��iroorz�qhwzrun�vdpsoh��1rghv�vl]hg�e\�ehwzhhqqhvv�fhqwudolw\� �%udqghv����������&rorxuhg�e\�prgxodulw\�pd[lplvlqj�foxvwhuv�� $w�d�phvr�ohyho��wkh�gdwd�doorz�wr�dqdo\vh�krz�gliihuhqw�foxvwhuv�lq�wkh�qhwzrun�duh� frqqhfwhg�dfurvv�erwk�olqjxlvwlf�grpdlqv��6wduwlqj�iurp����foxvwhuv��lghqwlilhg�wkurxjk� /rxydlq�prgxodulw\�rswlpl]dwlrq���%orqgho�hw�do�����������zh�kdyh�dqdo\vhg�krz�pdq\� olqnv�ohdylqj�wkh�foxvwhuv�frqqhfw�wr�*hupdq�ru�,wdoldq�vshdnlqj�dffrxqwv���)ljxuh��� vkrzv�wkh�shufhqwdjh�ri�rxwjrlqj�frqqhfwlrqv�gluhfwhg�wr�,wdoldq�ru�*hupdq�dffrxqwv� iru�wkh�qrq�lvrodwhg�foxvwhuv��1 �����lq�uhodwlrq�wr�wkh�qxpehu�ri�phpehuv���7kh�odujhvw� foxvwhuv�vhhp�wr�eh�frqqhfwhg�zlwk�rqh�olqjxlvwlf�grpdlq�zkloh�vpdoohu�frppxqlwlhv� vkrz�d�gliihuhqw�ehkdylrxu�frqqhfwlqj�erwk�zlwk�,wdoldq�dqg�*hupdq�vshdnlqj�dffrxqwv�� � 2xworrn� 7kh�ilqdo�sdshu�zloo�suhvhqw�wkh�uhvxow�ri�vhyhudo�prqwkv�ri�gdwd�froohfwlrq�irfxvlqj� vshflilfdoo\�rq�wkh�uhodwlrq�ehwzhhq�wrslfv�glvfxvvhg�zlwklq�wkh�foxvwhuv�dqg�wkhlu� frqqhfwlylw\��:kloh�wkh�sdshu�zloo�eh�olplwhg�wr�wkh�vwxg\�ri�wkh�*hupdq�,wdoldq� 7zlwwhuvskhuh��wkh�phwkrgv�fdq�hdvlo\�eh�h[whqghg�wr�pruh�frxqwulhv�rshqlqj�xs�qhz� dyhqxhv�ri�hqtxlu\�uhjduglqj�pxowl�odqjxdjh�sxeolf�vskhuhv�dv�zhoo�dv�wkh�frqqhfwlrqv� dqg�iorzv�ri�lqirupdwlrq�ehwzhhq�qdwlrqdo�sxeolf�vskhuhv��� � )ljxuh��� ��)udfwlrq�ri�hdfk�foxvwhu¶v�rxwjrlqj�frqqhfwlrqv�wrzdugv�*hupdq�ru�,wdoldq� dffrxqwv��6l]h�uhsuhvhqwv�wkh�srsxodwlrq�ri�wkh�foxvwhu��-lwwhu�kdv�ehhq�dgghg�wr�wkh�sorw� wr�pdnh�ryhuodsslqj�qrghv�ylvleoh�� � 5hihuhqfhv� %dvwldq��0���+h\pdqq��6��� �-dfrp\��0����������*hskl��$q�rshq�vrxufh�vriwzduh�iru� h[sorulqj�dqg�pdqlsxodwlqj�qhwzrunv���,&:60 ��� kwws���zzz�dddl�ruj�rfv�lqgh[�sks�,&:60����sdshu�ylhz3'),qwhuvwlwldo����)rux p������ � %dvwrv��0��7��� �0hufhd��'����������7kh�%uh[lw�%rwqhw�dqg�8vhu�*hqhudwhg� +\shusduwlvdq�1hzv���6rfldo�6flhqfh�&rpsxwhu�5hylhz������ ��������±���� kwwsv���grl�ruj�������������������������� %orqgho��9��'���*xloodxph��-��/���/dpelrwwh��5��� �/hiheyuh��(�����������)dvw�xqiroglqj�ri� frppxqlwlhv�lq�odujh�qhwzrunv��� kwwsv���grl�ruj���������������������������3������ %udqghv��8����������$�idvwhu�dojrulwkp�iru�ehwzhhqqhvv�fhqwudolw\���-rxuqdo�ri� 0dwkhpdwlfdo�6rflrorj\��� kwws���zzz�wdqgirqolqh�frp�grl�dev����������������[�������������� %ulq��6��� �3djh��/����������7kh�dqdwrp\�ri�d�odujh�vfdoh�k\shuwh[wxdo�:he�vhdufk� hqjlqh���&rpsxwhu�1hwzrunv�dqg�,6'1�6\vwhpv������ ���������±����� kwwsv���grl�ruj���������6�������������������;� *rrgpdq��/��$����������6qrzedoo�6dpsolqj���7kh�$qqdov�ri�0dwkhpdwlfdo�6wdwlvwlfv��� �� ���������±�����-6725��kwwsv���zzz�mvwru�ruj�vwdeoh��������� +lqvnd��0��� �%dxfkrzlw]��6����������&dq�vrfldo�phgld�idflolwdwh�d�(xurshdq�sxeolf� vskhuh"�7udqvqdwlrqdo�frppxqlfdwlrq�dqg�wkh�(xurshdql]dwlrq�ri�7zlwwhu�gxulqj� wkh�(xur]rqh�fulvlv���6rfldo�0hgld���6rflhw\����� ������������������������ kwwsv���grl�ruj�������������������������� +zdqj��:���.lp��7���5dpdqdwkdq��0��� �=kdqj��$����������%ulgjlqj�fhqwudolw\��*udsk� plqlqj�iurp�hohphqw�ohyho�wr�jurxs�ohyho���3urfhhglqj�ri�wkh���wk�$&0�6,*.''� ,qwhuqdwlrqdo�&rqihuhqfh�rq�.qrzohgjh�'lvfryhu\�dqg�'dwd�0lqlqj���.''������ �����kwwsv���grl�ruj������������������������� /hvnryhf��-��� �)dorxwvrv��&����������6dpsolqj�iurp�odujh�judskv���3urfhhglqjv�ri�wkh� ��wk�$&0�6,*.''�,qwhuqdwlrqdo�&rqihuhqfh�rq�.qrzohgjh�'lvfryhu\�dqg�'dwd� 0lqlqj������±�����kwwsv���grl�ruj������������������������� 0�qfk��)��9���7klhv��%���3xvfkpdqq��&��� �%uxqv��$����������:donlqj�7kurxjk�7zlwwhu�� 6dpsolqj�d�/dqjxdjh�%dvhg�)roorz�1hwzrun�ri�,qioxhqwldo�7zlwwhu�$ffrxqwv�� $u;ly������������>&v@���kwws���du[ly�ruj�dev������������ 6dodpdqrv��1���9rxgljdul��(��� �<dqqdnrxgdnlv��(��-����������$�judsk�h[sorudwlrq� phwkrg�iru�lghqwli\lqj�lqioxhqwldo�vsuhdghuv�lq�frpsoh[�qhwzrunv���$ssolhg�1hwzrun� 6flhqfh ����� ����������kwwsv���grl�ruj���������v���������������\� � �� � selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  suzor,  n.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  the  responsibilities  of  platforms:  a  new   constitutionalism  to  promote  the  legitimacy  of  decentralized  governance.  paper  presented  at  aoir   2016:  the  17th  annual  conference  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.   retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org. the  responsibilities  of  platforms:  a  new   constitutionalism  to  promote  the  legitimacy  of   decentralized  governance     nicolas  suzor   queensland  university  of  technology  (qut)     the  ways  in  which  platforms  are  governed  matters.  platforms  mediate  the  way  people   communicate,  and  the  decisions  they  make  have  a  real  impact  on  public  culture  and  the   social  lives  of  their  users.  the  extent  to  which  this  is  true  is  obscured  by  the  discursive   work  undertaken  by  platforms  to  distance  themselves  from  the  suggestion  that  they  do   any  'governing'  at  all  (gillespie  2010).  but  platforms,  of  course,  are  not  neutral.  their   architecture  (lessig  2006)  and  algorithms  (gillespie  2014)  shape  how  people   communicate  and  what  information  is  presented  to  participants.  their  policies  and  terms   of  use  are  expressed  in  formally  neutral  terms  but  the  powers  they  provide  are  carefully   wielded  and  selectively  enforced  (humphreys  2007).  their  ongoing  governance   processes  are  shaped  by  complex  socio-­economic  (van  dijck  &  poell  2013)  socio-­ technical  (crawford  &  gillespie  2014)  structures,  and  the  interplay  of  emergent  social   norms  (taylor  2006).       platforms  are  also  increasingly  being  coopted  in  public  regulatory  projects.  nation   states  around  the  world  are  coming  to  the  realization  that  the  only  effective  and  scalable   way  to  regulate  the  actions  of  people  on  the  internet  is  through  online  intermediaries   (goldsmith  &  wu,  2006).  copyright  law  provides  the  most  developed  example;;  notice   and  takedown  procedures  under  the  us  digital  millenium  copyright  act  are  almost  a  de   facto  rule  of  large  western  platforms;;  google  alone  now  receives  over  65  million   takedown  notices  for  its  search  engine  results  from  copyright  owners  (google  inc,   2016).  building  on  the  success  of  copyright  law,  governments  are  increasingly  requiring   online  intermediaries  to  do  more  to  respond  to  privacy  claims,  to  disclose  information   about  their  users  and  to  block  access  to  content  they  deem  objectionable  or  unlawful.     civil  society  groups,  too,  are  seeing  some  success  in  influencing  the  governance  of   private  networks.  the  discourse  is  increasingly  framed  in  the  recognition  that  private   firms  “should  address  adverse  human  rights  impacts  with  which  they  are  involved”   (united  nations,  2011).  this  new  language  of  'responsibility'  (ruggie,  2008)  has  been   adopted  by  disparate  global  groups  of  state  and  non-­state  actors  in  debates  over   freedom  of  speech,  rights  of  individual  privacy,  and  rights  to  be  free  from  harassment   and  abuse  (citron,  2014;;  unesco,  2014).  pressure  on  intermediaries  is  steadily   mounting  from  all  sides,  including  civil  society  groups  that  are  actively  lobbying  for   intermediaries  to  resist  obligations  that  would  limit  freedom  of  speech  (e.g.  kiss,  2014;;   iprc  2014;;  global  network  initiative  2012).       in  legal  terms,  however,  the  ways  that  online  intermediaries  are  governed  matters  very   little.  the  terms  of  the  social  contracts  between  operators  of  platforms  and  their  users   are  formalised  as  legal  contracts  that  most  commonly  allocate  a  great  deal  of  power  to   the  operators.  because  terms  of  service  are  thought  of  as  private  contractual  bargains,   the  law  has  no  established  language  through  which  to  understand  where  the  limits  on   private  platform  governance  ought  to  be  drawn  (suzor  2011).  in  legal  terms,  the   discretion  of  the  platform  owner  is  practically  absolute.  the  language  of  constitutional   rights  –  freedom  of  speech  and  association,  requirements  of  due  process  and  natural   justice,  rights  to  participate  in  the  democratic  process  –  has  almost  no  application  in  the   'private'  sphere;;  constitutional  law  applies  only  to  'public'  actions  (berman  2000).       in  this  paper,  i  propose  that  the  legitimacy  of  the  ways  in  which  the  users  of  platforms   are  governed  should  be  evaluated  against  the  principles  of  the  rule  of  law.  in  particular,   i  suggest  that  we  should  care  deeply  about  the  extent  to  which  private  governance  is   consensual,  predictable,  equal,  and  fair.  the  primary  requirement  of  legitimacy  for  legal   systems  is  that  power  is  not  exercised  arbitrarily  (dicey  1959,  p.188).  in  this  limited,   procedural  sense,  there  is  good  reason  to  believe  that  the  rule  of  law  is  a  universal   human  good  –  that  all  societies  benefit  from  restraints  on  the  arbitrary  or  malicious   exercise  of  power  (tamanaha  2004).     in  order  to  ground  the  analysis  of  the  legitimacy  of  contractual  governance  documents,  i   examine  the  legal  terms  and  conditions  of  fifteen  of  the  largest  english-­language  social   media  platforms.  each  contract  was  analyzed  to  identify  the  extent  to  which  they   provided  protections  for  due  process  interests  of  users.  in  all  cases  examined,  the  terms   of  service  provided  broad,  unfettered  discretion  to  platform  owners.  this  is  a  serious   failing  from  the  perspective  of  the  rule  of  law.  like  constitutional  documents,  terms  of   service  grant  powers;;  but  unlike  constitutions,  they  rarely  limit  those  powers  or  regulate   the  ways  they  are  exercised.       i  argue  that  a  new  constitutionalism  is  needed  to  protect  substantive  and  procedural   rights  in  a  decentralized  regulatory  environment.  existing  conceptions  of   constitutionalism  –  the  appropriate  limits  of  regulatory  power  –  are  insufficient  in  this   context  (black,  1996).  recognizing  that  intermediaries  always  exercise  some  degree  of   regulatory  control  over  their  networks,  i  argue  that  some  level  of  decentralization  of   governance  is  both  inevitable  and  desirable.  it  will  become  increasingly  important,   however,  to  ensure  that  private  platforms  enforce  rules  in  a  manner  that  is  regular,   transparent,  equally  and  proportionately  applied,  and  fair  (fitzgerald,  2000;;  suzor,   2011).  this  paper  seeks  to  progress  this  debate  by  providing  a  framework  to  evaluate   the  legitimacy  of  platform  governance  in  practice.     acknowledgements  and  funding     a/prof  suzor  is  the  recipient  of  an  australian  research  council  decra  fellowship   (project  number  de160101542).     references     black,  j.  (1996).  constitutionalising  self-­regulation.  the  modern  law  review,  59(1),   24–55.  doi:10.1111/j.1468-­2230.1996.tb02064.x.     crawford,  k.,  &  gillespie,  t.  (2014).  what  is  a  flag  for?  social  media  reporting  tools  and   the  vocabulary  of  complaint.  new  media  &  society,  1461444814543163.   http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814543163.     citron,  d.  k.  (2014).  hate  crimes  in  cyberspace.  cambridge,  massachusetts  ;;  london,   england:  harvard  university  press.     dicey,  a.v.,  1959.  introduction  to  the  study  of  the  law  of  the  constitution  10th  ed.,   london:  macmillan.     fitzgerald,  b.  f.  (2000).  software  as  discourse:  the  power  of  intellectual  property  in   digital  architecture.  cardozo  arts  &  entertainment  law  journal,  18,  337.     gillespie,  t.  (2010).  the  politics  of  “platforms.”  new  media  &  society,  12(3),  347–364.   doi:10.1177/1461444809342738.     gillespie,  t.  (2014).  the  relevance  of  algorithms.  in  t.  gillespie,  p.  j.  boczkowski,  &   k.  a.  foot  (eds.),  media  technologies:  essays  on  communication,  materiality,and   society  (pp.  167–193).  cambridge,  massachusetts:  the  mit  press.     global  network  initiative.  (2012).  principles.  available  at:   https://www.globalnetworkinitiative.org/principles/index.php  [accessed  june  2,  2015].     goldsmith,  j.  l.,  &  wu,  t.  (2006).  who  controls  the  internet?:  illusions  of  a  borderless   world.  oxford  university  press  us.     google  inc.  (2016,  february  29).  copyright  removal  requests  –  google  transparency   report.  retrieved  march  1,  2016,  from   https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/.     humphreys,  s.  (2007).  “you’re  in  our  world  now”:  ownership  and  access  in  the   proprietary  community  of  an  mmog.  in  s.  v.  d.  graaf  &  y.  washida  (eds.),  information   communication  technologies  and  emerging  business  strategies  (p.  76).  hershey,  pa:   idea  group  pub.     iprc,  2014.  charter  of  human  rights  and  principles  for  the  internet,  internet  rights   and  principles  coalition.  available  at:  http://internetrightsandprinciples.org/wpcharter/   [accessed  february  18,  2015].     kiss,  j.  (2014,  march  12).  an  online  magna  carta:  berners-­lee  calls  for  bill  of  rights  for   web.  the  guardian.  retrieved  from   http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/12/online-­magna-­carta-­berners-­lee-­ web.     lessig,  l.  (2006).  code  (version  2.0).  new  york:  basic  books.     ruggie,  j.  (2008).  protect,  respect  and  remedy:  a  framework  for  business  and   human  rights.  innovations:  technology,  governance,  globalization  3,  189.     suzor,  n.  (2011).  the  role  of  the  rule  of  law  in  virtual  communities.  berkeley  technology   law  journal,  25,  1819.     tamanaha,  b.z.,  2004.  on  the  rule  of  law:  history,  politics,  theory,  cambridge:   cambridge  university  press.     unesco.  (2014).  fostering  freedom  online:  the  role  of  internet  intermediaries.   retrieved  from  http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0023/002311/231162e.pdf.     united  nations.  (2011).  guiding  principles  on  business  and  human  rights.  retrieved   from  http://www.ohchr.org/documents/publications/guidingprinciplesbusinesshr_en.pdf.     dijck,  j.  van,  &  poell,  t.  (2013).  understanding  social  media  logic.  media  and   communication,  1(1),  2–14.     selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 hoyng, r.. (2017, october 18-21). transparency as rupture: open data and the datafied society of hong kong. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. transparency as rupture: open data and the datafied society of hong kong rolien hoyng lingnan university of hong kong this paper deals with open data and the datafication of governance in hong kong. it addresses contestations over “transparency” as a techno-political construction that is embodied in, and performed by, the infrastructures and techniques of data-centric governance. transparency is a site of negotiating distributions of cognition and perception in the context of transformations of citizenship and governance in the datafied society. i specifically inquire into the infrastructures, protocols, techniques, and practices of open data, which promises to simultaneously enhance government accountability and stimulate data-driven “smart” governance. accordingly, i look at techno-political organizations of data and data infrastructures that support particular modes and distributions of cognition and perception (halpern 2014; hayles 2014; kitchin 2014), which i distinguish as two data regimes respectively revolving around “representation” and “prediction.” i furthermore situate these issues in the larger institutional and political context of hong kong. the relevance of locating this case study in hong kong is that hong kong brands itself as an ict hub and ranks rather highly on smart city indexes. yet at the same time the process of adapting open data is (structurally) incomplete, disruptive, and disrupted in the encounter with residual rationalities of statecraft. hong kong as a special administrative region of china helps us think about datafication and open data in relation to the transgressive processes of accommodating neoliberalism through an array of exceptions (ong 2006). yet the case of hong kong also provides a glimpse of the possibilities for intervention and open data activism. to focus on adaptation means that the datafied society does not present itself as a fait accompli, in other words, fully operational and all-encompassing. rather, adaptation induces instances of (experienced) failure, disruption, and deferment; it generates contradictions, interferences, and articulations between co-existing data regimes and multifarious political rationalities (cf. chan 2013). on the one hand, such instances are recuperated and normalized as intrinsic to “disruptive” technological innovation and testbed “smart” urbanism. yet, on the other hand, these moments might offer possibilities for imagining more radical notions of transparency and secrecy. in this paper, “disruption” functions as a methodological device to explore the politics of datafication and open data. rather than appropriating disruption as a revelatory moment undoing the “black-boxing” of technology per se, my aim is to rethink the politics of transparency and secrecy in more complex terms, oriented onto distributions of particular data regimes and the contradictions and articulations between them (birchal 2015). i deploy mixed methods including interviews with actors, participatory ethnography, and analysis of policy documents and technical literature. looking at particular material architectures, formats, protocols, and interfaces as i encounter them in hong kong, i try to detect how their operation poses continuities and schisms in comparison to the analysis of design in historical and social studies of technology and medium theory. to elaborate, the two data regimes of “representation” and “prediction” enactment particular “fields” of visibility: organized articulations of strategies, techniques, and discourses (halpern 2014). first, the data regime of “representation” provides cognition and perception in terms of oversight and transparency. ordering data (capturing, aggregating, and organizing) forms part and parcel of ordering society. data forms evidence for what exists “out there” and affords referential, descriptive capability. hence, it is supposed to assist in the production of knowledge and truth. this paper explores in what ways open data means the distribution of the representative gaze and reflects on assumptions that partaking in this mode of perception constitutes a democratic virtue and moral good. second, the data regime of prediction orients perception and cognition onto diagnosis of potential and the prediction of tendencies. rather than depicting the world, at stake is modeling the world. the technological ability to constant update in response to new data is considered a benefit supporting intervention in shifting patterns and trends (andrejevic 2013). distribution of this mode of perception and cognition induces society’s mediation by algorithmic data processing techniques. this paper explores in what ways open data advances the predictive gaze and how it positions citizens or users who are on the one hand interpellated into positions of predictive perception and cognition and, on the other hand, subjected to dataveillance and techniques of algorithmic processing. rather than recognizing data regimes in an ideal-typical fashion, my main question is about the contradictions, interferences, and articulations that the co-existence of the two regimes of data expediency bring forth in the particular context of hong kong. this focus underscores open data’s paradox of promising fortified transparency and accountability, while simultaneously advancing covert forms of modulation, control, dataveillance, and concentrations of cognition. i argue that open data involves decisions over the boundaries of the datafiable. open data is in fact “bordered data,” whereby the limited coverage of data correspond to state territoriality (or the terrain of statecraft), but the real question is often what lies beyond. if transparency and secrecy co-constituted, something escapes the particular constructions of transparency in open data (birchall 2015). for instance, if the government opens up certain datasets, does this enable the public scrutiny of statecraft or does it merely benefit the expansion of what easterling (2015) has called extrastatecraft by non-governmental institutions that do not open their own “proprietary” datasets? how do data and data infrastructures mediate citizens’ relation to privatepublic governance? in what ways do datasets and digital infrastructures become the sites of neoliberal exceptions to the law, for instance through “regulatory sandboxes” for innovators? and, to what extent are open data activists able to not just reclaim public scrutiny over statecraft and governance by the state, but in fact contest the “bordering” of data—the decision over the borders of open data--itself? and, following a more speculative turn, what would it take to intervene into the effects of predictive perception and cognition on society? should transparency always be the goal, or does secrecy have its merits too? references marc andrejevic. 2013. infoglut: how too much information is changing the way we think. new york: routledge. birchall, clare. 2015. “’data.gov-in-a-box’: delimiting transparency.” european journal of social theory. 18(2): bratton, benjamin. 2015. the stack: on software and sovereignty. cambridge ma: mit press. chan, anita say. 2013. networking peripheries: technological futures and the myth of digital universalism. cambridge ma: mit press. easterling, keller. 2015. extrastatecraft: the power of infrastructure space. london: verso. halpern, orit. 2014. beautiful data: a history of vision and reason since 1945. durham: duke university press. hayles, n. katherine. 2014. “cognition everywhere: the rise of the cognitive nonconscious and the costs of consciousness.” new literary history 45 (2): 199-220. kitchin, rob. 2014. the data revolution big data, open data, data infrastructures and their consequences. los angeles: sage. ong, aiwha. 2006. neoliberalism as exception. durham: duke university press selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 !"##$%&$'()*&+&*,-(./0/12(3+"45+--6(37(.89:;6(<=&,>$?(@ab17(!"#$%&'()#*#+$,#-./##0$!"#$ 1&2*3'"(4#$25$2$!((6$(-$,#5753248#$(4$3"#$9(.*4#:$3($%.*('#7(0+c$?(c?$%$-&$'(+&(/,de(89:;2(fg$(:h&g( /--"+i(),-4$?$-=$(,4(&g$(/%%,=*+&*,-(,4(d-&$?-$&(e$%$+?=g$?%7(j$?i*-6(k$?5+-l2(/,de7(e$&?*$m$'(4?,5( g&&c2nn%c*?7+,*?7,?#7( 3+&o+(3+"45+--( (/"%&?*+-(/=+'$5l(,4(!=*$-=$%(+-'(/ic$-a/'?*+ap-*m$?%*&l ( 3i+#$-4"?&( ( !"#$%&'()*!!5+?&cg,-$6(5,>*i$(5$'*+6(?$4"#$$(%&"'*$%6(q"+i*&+&*m$(*-&$?m*$r%( !+,--.'$*!s,?(?$4"#$$%(4?,5(=?*%*%(?$#*,-%(*-(&g$(t*''i$(u+%&6(%5+?&cg,-$%(g+m$( c?,m$-(&,(>$("%$4"i(,-(&g$*?(o,"?-$l(&,(+-'(&g?,"#g(u"?,c$7(fg$(c+c$?(c?$%$-&%(?$%"i&%( 4?,5(+-(*-&$?m*$r(%&"'l(r*&g(!l?*+-(?$4"#$$%(rg,(+??*m$'(*-(/"%&?*+(*-(89:@(,-(g,r(&g$l( +=&"+iil("%$'(&g$('$m*=$%(,-(&g$(5,m$7(d&(>$=,5$%(+cc+?$-&(&g+&(%5+?&cg,-$%(+?$(-,&( ,-il(c?+#5+&*=(&,,i%6(>"&(+=&"+iil(=g+-#$(c,r$?(?$i+&*,-%(>$&r$$-(?$4"#$$%(+-'(>,&g( %5"##i$?%(+-'(+"&g,?*&*$%7( !/012!12#!-.))!#3&(,)!,4(&g$(=,5c+?+&*m$il(r$+i&gl(5*''i$(=i+%%(,4(!l?*+6(+(-$r(cg$a (-,5$-,-(>$=,5$%(4,?(&g$(4*?%&(&*5$(i+?#$il(m*%*>i$(*-(#i,>+i(5+%%(5$'*+2(e$4"#$$%(*-a (&$-&il("%*-#(%5+?&cg,-$%(v ( >$(*&(,-(&g$(%g,?$%(,4(k?$$=$6(,-(&g$(5,m$(&g?,"#g(&g$(j+ia (w+-(%&+&$%(,?(r+*&*-#(4,?(c+c$?%(*-(%,5$(x$%&(u"?,c$+-(=*&l7(/%(&g$(%5+?&cg,-$(r+%( ,?*#*-+iil(=,-=$*m$'(+%(+-($yc$-%*m$(i*4$%&li$(#+'#$&(4,?(?*=g(="%&,5$?%(+-'(g+%(-$m$?( =$+%$'(&,(g+m$(&g*%(*5+#$6(5+-l(u"?,c$+-%(',-z&(+cc?$=*+&$(%$$*-#(?$4"#$$%(g,i'*-#( &g$%$('$m*=$%(*-(&g$*?(g+-'%(rg*i$(+ccil*-#(4,?(+%li"57(j"&(&g$(+44,?'+-=$%(,4( %5+?&cg,-$%(',(-,&(?$%&?*=&(&g$('$m*=$%(&,($-&$?&+*-5$-&("%$7(<-(&g$(=,-&?+?l[(?$4"#$$%( 5+w$(*-m$-&*m$il("%$(,4(&g$(%5+?&cg,-$%z("-*m$?%+i(4"-=&*,-%(&,(5$$&(&g$*?(4"-'+5$-&+i( -$$'%(+%(>$%&(+%(c,%%*>i$ ( #*m$-(&g$(%g$$?(-$=$%%*&l(&,(#$&(+i,-#(,-(m$?l(i*&&i$(?$a (%,"?=$%7( ( /i&g,"#g(q"$%&*,-%(,4($5c,r$?5$-&(+-'(5,>*i$(=,55"-*=+&*,-(g+m$(>$$-(c?$m+i$-&( 4,?(q"*&$(%,5$(&*5$(r*&g(?$#+?'(&,(%"=g(=,-=$c&%(+%(i,=+i(=,55"-*&l('l-+5*=%(.$7#7( !m$-%%,-(\(x+5+i+(]+?%%,-6(89:@1 ( ,? ( &?+-%-+&*,-+i(+-'('*+%c,?*= ( $m$?l'+l(i*4$ ( .$7#7( 3*56(89:@[(t+'*+-,"(\(t*ii$?6(89:816(*-4,?5+&*,-(+-'(=,55"-*=+&*,-(&$=g-,i,#l(.d)f1 ("%$ ( ,-(&g$(5,m$(,4(.4,?=$'1(5*#?+-&% ( *%(+(m$?l(?$=$-&(cg$-,5$-,-(.%$$(x+ii6()+5c>$ii( \(^+->$w6(89:@[(%$$ ( +i%,(_,?%&(\(f+li,?6(89:`[(<*+?a+>+i(\(e$*c%6(89:8[(0,-a+-$%*(\( ]$"?%6(89:`17(d-(,?'$?(&,(i$+?-(5,?$(+>,"&(&g$(+cc+?$-&il(=?"=*+i(?,i$(,4(%5+?&cg,-$%(4,?( ?$4"#$$%(,-(&g$*?(o,"?-$l(&,(u"?,c$6(r$(=,-'"=&$'(%$5*a%&?"=&"?$'(*-&$?m*$r%(r*&g(!l?*a ( +-(?$4"#$$%(rg,(+??*m$'(*-(/"%&?*+(*-(89:@7(fg$(%&"'l(%g,r%(&g+&("-'$?($y=$c&*,-+i(=*?a( ="5%&+-=$%(i*w$($%=+c*-#(+(=?*%*%(?$#*,-6(&g$(%5+?&cg,-$(c?,m$%(&,(>$(+-l&g*-#(>"&(+( #+'#$&7(d-'$$'6(5,%&(*-&$?m*$r$$%(=,"i'-z&(*5+#*-$(g+m*-#(5+'$(&g$(o,"?-$l(r*&g,"&( &g$(g$ic(,4(&g$*?(%5+?&cg,-$7(fg$l(?$i*$'(,-(*&(&,(=i+*5(&g$*?(?*#g&(,4(+%li"5(+#+*-%&(+ii( ,''%(v(*-=i"'*-#(&g$(?$i$-&i$%%(u"?,c$+-(i$#*%i+&*,-(4,?=*-#(?$4"#$$%(*-&,(c"?%"*-#(*ii$a( #+i(r+l%7(( fg$(?$%"i&%(*-'*=+&$(&g+&(&g$(%5+?&cg,-$(&+w$%($44$=&(,-(&g?$$(i$m$i%2(s*?%&6(*&(*%(g$ic4"i( +%(+(=,ii$=&*,-(,4(c?+#5+&*=(&,,i%(v(i*w$(4i+%gi*#g&6(k0!(-+m*#+&*,-6(=+5$?+(,?(cg,&,( %&,?+#$(v(+ii(=,-&+*-$'(*-(+(%*-#i$('$m*=$(5+w*-#(*&(?$'"-'+-&(4,?(&g$(,r-$?%(&,(&+w$( +''*&*,-+i(&,,i%(,?(>$i,-#*-#%(,-&,(&g*%(cgl%*=+iil('$5+-'*-#(+-'('+-#$?,"%(&?*c7(/=a( =,?'*-#il6(?$4"#$$%(c?$c+?$(&g$*?(%5+?&cg,-$%(*-(+'m+-=$6($7#7(>l(',r-i,+'*-#(,44i*-$( 5+c%(,?(%$+(=,-'*&*,-%(+cc%6(>l(&+w*-#(cg,&,%(4?,5(g,5$(+-'(4+5*il(+%(r$ii(+%(,4(&g$*?( !l?*+-(db(',="5$-&%(*-(=+%$(&g$(c+c$?%(#$&(i,%&(*-(&g$(t$'*&$??+-$+-(!$+(,?(%&,i$-(>$a( =+"%$(,4(&g$*?(g*#g(>i+=w(5+?w$&(c?*=$7(( !$=,-'6(&g$(%5+?&cg,-$(#*m$%(?$4"#$$%(+"&,-,5l7(jl(+cc%(+-'(,-i*-$(%$?m*=$%6(?$4"a( #$$%(g+m$(c$?5+-$-&(+==$%%(&,(*-'$c$-'$-&(*-4,?5+&*,-(?$%"i&*-#(*-(r+l%(&,(=g$=w( rg+&(&g$l(r$?$(&,i'6(i*w$(&g$(%$+(=,-'*&*,-%(rg$-(%5"##i$?%(+?$($+#$?(&,(+%%"?$(&g$( t$'*&$??+-$+-(!$+(r*ii(>$(=+i57(fg$(=,--$=&*,-(&,(,&g$?(?$4"#$$%(4"?&g$?(',r-(&g$(?,+'( 5,?$,m$?(#*m$%(?$4"#$$%(&g$(5$+-%(&,(#$&('$&+*i$'(+'m*=$(+-'(#"*'+-=$(,-(g,r(&,( 5+w$(&g*%(%&?$-","%(o,"?-$l(&g?,"#g("-w-,r-(=,"-&?*$%7(fg*%(+ii,r%(?$4"#$$%(&,(+m,*'( &?,">i$(&,(+(i+?#$($y&$-&6(+-'(i$&%(&g$5(+=&(5,?$(*-'$c$-'$-&il(,4(+"&g,?*&*$%(+-'(%5"#a( #i$?%(+i*w$7(x*&g(?$#+?'(&,(&g$*?(4+5*i*$%(+-'(?$i+&*m$%6(+==$%%(&,(>,&g(i,=+&*,-a>+%$'( %$?m*=$%(+-'(5,>*i$(5$%%$-#$?%(ci+l%(+(=?"=*+i(?,i$(+%(&g*%($-+>i$%(?$4"#$$%(&,(,?#+-a( *a$(&g$5%$im$%(rg*i$(,-(&g$(5,m$6(&g"%(?$'"=*-#(&g$(?*%w(,4(i,%*-#(?$i+&*m$%(+5*'%&(&g$( =g+,%(,-il(&,(>$(%$c+?+&$'(4,?(i,-#(l$+?%(&,(=,5$(v(+(4+&$(5+-l(?$4"#$$(4+5*i*$%(*-( ,&g$?(&*5$%(+-'n,?(*-(,&g$?(ci+=$%(g+m$(&,(4+=$7(]*w$r*%$6(r*&g(%5+?&cg,-$%(?$4"#$$%( =+-(c$?5+-$-&il(%&+l(*-(&,"=g(r*&g(&g,%$(&g$l(g+'(&,(i$+m$(>$g*-'(*-(!l?*+(#*m*-#(?$4"a( #$$%(+i%,(&g$(5$+-%(&,(%&+l(=i,%$(&,(&g$($m$-&%(*-(&g$*?(g,5$(=,"-&?l(>l(*-'$c$-'$-&( ?$c,?&%(4?,5(c$,ci$(&g$l(&?"%&7(( fg*?'6(&g$(+44,?'+-=$%(,4(&g$(%5+?&cg,-$(=,5>*-$'(r*&g(&g$(?$4"#$$%z(=,??$%c,-'*-#( "%$(c?+=&*=$%(*-'$$'(=g+-#$(c,r$?(?$i+&*,-%(>$&r$$-(*-'*m*'"+i%(+-'(+"&g,?*&*$%7(e$4"a( #$$%(r*&g(%5+?&cg,-$%(',-z&(g+m$(&,(%&+?&(4?,5(&g$(%=?+&=g(,-il(&,(5+w$(&g$(%+5$(5*%a( &+w$%(+%(&g,%$(?$4"#$$%(c?$=$'*-#7(fg$l(+?$(c$?5+-$-&il(=,--$=&$'(&,(4i,r%(,4(*-4,?a( 5+&*,-(+-'(c$,ci$(.%$$(+i%,()+%&$ii%6(89991(*-(&g$(4,?5(,4(&g$($yc$?*$-=$%(+-'(&g$( w-,ri$'#$(+=="5"i+&$'(>l(&g,"%+-'%(,4(?$4"#$$%7(fg$(w-,ri$'#$(*%(-,&(,-il(i*5*&$'(&,( c+%&($m$-&%(>"&(*-=i"'$%("c'+&$%(,-(&g$(&g*-#%(#,*-#(,-(%*5"i&+-$,"%il(*-(,&g$?(ci+=$%6( +&(,&g$?(>,?'$?%6(*-(,&g$?(=,"-&?*$%7(fg*%(w-,ri$'#$(=g+-#$%(c,r$?(?$i+&*,-%(5,%&('*a( ?$=&il(+%(*&(#*m$%(?$4"#$$%(,c&*,-%(&,(+=&6(+-'(?$'"=$%(&g$(*-4,?5+&*,-(%"c$?*,?*&l(>,?'$?( =,-&?,i%(+-'(,&g$?(+"&g,?*&*$%("%$'(%&?+&$#*=+iil7(fg$(%g*4&(>$=,5$%(+i%,(m$?l(c+ic+>i$( *-(&g$(=+%$(,4(&g,%$(rg,(*-&$-'(&,(5+w$(+(c?,4*&(,"&(,4(?$4"#$$%($7#7(>l(,44$?*-#(5,-$l( =g+-#$(,-(,m$?c?*=$'(?+&$%7(d-%&$+'(,4(o"%&(+==$c&*-#(&g$(=,-'*&*,-%6(?$4"#$$%(=+-( =g$=w(&g$(+=&"+i(?+&$%(,-(&g$*?(%5+?&cg,-$%(&,(&g$-(5+w$(&g$*?(=i+*57( !,(*-(&g$(=+%$(,4(?$4"#$$%6(&g$(c,&$-&*+i(,4(%5+?&cg,-$%(+%("-*m$?%+i('$m*=$%(&,(+=&"+iil( =g+-#$(c,r$?(?$i+&*,-%(+-'(&g"%(i*4$(%&,?*$%(>$=,5$%(+cc+?$-&(,-=$(5,?$7(_$?$6( %5+?&cg,-$%(+?$($5c,r$?*-#(&,,i%(&g+&(#*m$(-$r(i$m$i%(,4(+#$-=l(&,(c$,ci$(*-(%&+&$%(,4( $5$?#$-=l7(/i&g,"#g(*&(*%(&g$(=,--$=&*m$(c,r$?(,4(&g$(d-&$?-$&(&g+&(i*$%(>$-$+&g($+=g( +-'($m$?l(,-$(,4(&g$(?$4"#$$%z(c?+=&*=$%6(*&(*%(,-il(>l(%5+?&cg,-$%(+%(5,>*i$('$m*=$%( &g+&(&g*%(c,r$?(=+-(+=&"+iil(>$(+cci*$'(*-(%"=g(=?*&*=+i(%*&"+&*,-%(&g+&(,4&$-(=,5$(r*&g( '*44*="i&(=,-'*&*,-%7(x$(c?,>+>il(g+m$(,-il(>$#"-(&,(#?+%c(&g$(4"ii(5$+-*-#(,4(+(5,>*i$6( =,--$=&$'($m$?l'+l(i*4$(4,?($m$?l,-$(*-(&g*%(r,?i'7(( 4#5#'#67#)! )+%&$ii%6(t7(.899917(!"#$*75#$(-$3"#$4#3)(*;$5(87#3:$<=4+$#+>?>(<y4,?'6(p737(+-'(t+i'$-6( p7!72(x*i$laji+=wr$ii7(( ( _,?%&6(_7(/76(\(f+li,?6(u7(j7(.89:`17(fg$(?,i$(,4(5,>*i$(cg,-$%(*-(&g$(5$'*+&*,-(,4(>,?a '$?(=?,%%*-#%2(+(%&"'l(,4(_+*&*(+-'(&g$(b,5*-*=+-(e$c">i*=7(!"#$@.53*26724$9(.*426$(-$ @43"*('(6(/:a$=b.816(:@@a:h97( ( 3*56(c7(.89:@6(b$=$5>$?(d:17(t,>*i$(cg,-$(4,?($5c,r$?5$-&e(ki,>+i(-+--*$%(*-(0+?*%7( c#+72a$d.63.*#$e$1(87#3:a$fg.`16(@8@a@df7(( ( t+'*+-,"6(t7(\(t*ii$?6(b7(.89:817(c7/*237(4$24+$h#)$c#+720$!*2454237(426$i2&767#5$24+$ j(6:&#+72>$g$r(c,?w2(e,"&i$'#$7(( ( <*+?a+>+i6(076(\(e$*c%6(p7(b7(.89:817(t*#?+&*,-(+-'('*+%c,?+(*-(&g$(+#$(,4(*-4,?5+&*,-( +-'(=,55"-*=+&*,-(&$=g-,i,#*$%7(9(.*426$(-$%3"478$24+$c7/*237(4$13.+7#5a$fg.f16(:ddda( :ddb7(( ( 0,-a+-$%*6(!76(\(]$"?%6(37(.89:`17(<-('*#*&+i(=?,%%*-#%(*-(u"?,c$7(d*(5574/50$9(.*426$(-$ c7/*237(4$e$d.63.*#a$b<:16(da887( (( !m$-%%,-6(^76(\(x+5+i+(]+?%%,-6()7(.89:@6(b$=$5>$?(f17(!*&"+&$'($5c,r$?5$-&2(t,a( >*i$(cg,-$%(c?+=&*=$%(+5,-#(5+?w$&(r,5$-(*-(3+5c+i+7(c(k76#$c#+72$e$d(&&.4782l$ 37(4a$m<816(89@a8897((( ( x+ii6(t76()+5c>$ii6(t7<7(\(^+->$w6(b7(.89:@17(!l?*+-(?$4"#$$%(+-'(*-4,?5+&*,-(c?$=+?*a &l7(h#)$c#+72$e$1(87#3:>(/'m+-=$(,-i*-$(c">i*=+&*,-7(',*2(:97::hhn:`;:```b:@@f:f;h( h89:;a9ba:`i7( selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): davis, m. (2019, october 2-5). ‘fascism is the new hip’: online anti-publics and postnormative democracy. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ‘fascism is the new hip’: online anti-publics and post normative democracy mark davis university of melbourne in the past decade there has been a notable convergence across the far-right political spectrum. groups known for their white supremacist ideology have been talking about climate science. groups that seek to promote ‘men’s rights’ have joined forces with white supremacist groups under the banner of the alt right. some sections of the alt right have taken up the anti-vaccination cause. such groups, i argue, can be understood as belonging to a loose-knit, diverse online ‘anti-public sphere’, populated by overlapping ‘anti-publics’ such as the ‘alt-right’, white supremacist groups, ‘men’s rights’ groups, anti-climate science groups, and ‘neoreactionary’ or ‘dark enlightenment’ groups, among others. this is a heterogenous space of often fractious social interaction where discourse routinely flouts traditional democratic norms, such as normative ‘public sphere’ conventions of rational-critical deliberation, rules of evidence and argumentation, and requirements for truthfulness, reciprocity, mutuality, and so on, over and above the ways in which democratic debate is properly passionate (papacharissi, 2016) or agonistic (mouffe, 2013), in order to advance its ideological causes. the paper will build on earlier theorisations of anti-publics by mckenzie wark (1997) and bart cammaerts (2007). wark identifies the emergence of the us citizen militia movement and the waco, texas siege of 1993 as a key symbolic moment in the development of anti-publics that he argues arose as a product of a habermasian ‘legitimation crisis’ whereby significant numbers of people had lost faith in democratic processes. according to cammaerts neo-nazi and fundamentalist movements and ‘negationism, (verbal) gay bashing, blatant racism, promotion of hatred, violence and other essentialisms’ (2007: 87), are examples of anti-publics ‘going against the basic values of democratic culture’ (2007: 74). such anti-publics, according to cammaerts, are ‘counter-hegemonic’ (2007: 73) in that not only are they detached from the dominant public sphere but because they actively oppose basic democratic norms and institutions. this is now true, i argue, not only of far-right militia groups in the us and hate groups in europe, but of a much wider array of groups that explicitly seek to destabilise and undermine democratic standards and conventions. online anti-publics, i will argue, pose a different order of challenge to publicity than counterpublics (fraser, 1992; negt and kluge, 1993), since rather than demand democratic reform or inclusion they attack the very conditions of democratic possibility, including the trust networks that underpin such possibility, as outlined in the conference themes. nor are anti-publics agonistic in the sense that, as chantal mouffe (2013) has argued, democratic practice is often rightly fractious. rather, they are antagonistic and understand politics as a battle to be won at any cost, using means such as disinformation campaigns, standover and bullying tactics such as organised trolling and doxxing, and in some cases physical violence, to achieve their ends. while routinely dismissed as aberrant and extreme, the growing influence of online antipublics reflects developments in mainstream political discourse that include the mainstreaming of right-wing populism and anti-other and anti-elite sentiment, as were made manifest in the 2016 #brexit vote and in the role played by far-right groups in supporting the election in 2016 of donald trump as us president. such developments, along with the rise of far-right politics across europe and the return of ‘strongman’ politics in the international arena, belong to a broader transition towards what i call ‘post-normative democracy’ whereby traditional democratic systems and norms have become deeply compromised. this includes the normalisation of race politics across the west via attacks on groups such as immigrants, indigenes and refugees, attacks on human rights conventions, the normalisation of differential regimes of global citizenship (ong, 2006), attempts to undermine legal processes, attacks on the media and journalists, attempts to shore up subvert gains made by marginalised groups such as women and lgbtqi+ people, and systematic attempts to undermine trust in institutions, as seen, for example, in the systematic promotion of disinformation about climate science. the connection between this post-normative politics and anti-publics prompts urgent research. the paper will show how anti-publics play a role in fomenting postnormative democratic politics amidst growing fears about creeping authoritarianism and neo-fascism, and how to advance this cause far right groups have sought to appropriate the mantles of iconoclasm and subcultural ‘cool’ from the left, as evidenced in claims such as that made by white supremacist andrew anglin (2015) that ‘fascism is the new hip’. to make its case the paper will take a qualitative approach based in five brief case studies. examples are given of anti-public discourse used by white supremacist groups, ‘men’s rights’ groups, anti-climate science groups, neoreactionary groups, and extreme anti-vaccination groups, to demonstrate close similarities in their discourse. through close reading and discourse analysis the paper will demonstrate how anti-public discourse often takes an approach based in the privileging of first-person experience over expert knowledge, in attacks on others and ‘elites’, and in the valorization of essentialist understandings of race, gender, and ability, as a basis for social ordering. the paper will also briefly consider the historical background for the growing influence of anti-publics and emergence of post-normative democracy that include a background of economic failure and collapsing social contracts, growing inequality, declining public trust in institutions, advancing ‘democratic decay’ (daly, 2018) and a growing sense that liberal democracy has failed (fenton, 2018). developments in the media that have played a role include the disintermediation of traditional forms of media gatekeeping and the new digital hegemony of algorithmic gatekeepers (daniels, 2018), the surplus of information, its lack of verifiability, and proliferation of conspiracy logics (andrejevic, 2013), and the development since the 1960s of a right wing media sphere with its own codes, values and ways of knowing, that stretches from televangelism to fox news, from outlets such as breitbart news, to bulletin boards such as 4chan. references andrejevic m (2013) infoglut: how too much information is changing the way we think and know. new york: routledge. anglin a (2015) anonymous cuckolds attack virtually non-existent kkk, media celebrates. in: daily stormer. available at: http://www.dailystormer.com/anonymous-cuckolds-attack-virtually-non-existentkkk-media-celebrates/ (accessed 14 november 2016). cammaerts b (2007) jamming the political: beyond counter-hegemonic practices. continuum: journal of media & cultural studies 21(1): 71–90. daly tg (2018) searching for democracy 2.0 without losing democracy 1.0. available at: https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/searching-for-democracy-2-0-withoutlosing-democracy-1-0 (accessed 21 january 2019). daniels j (2018) the algorithmic rise of the “alt-right”. contexts 17(1): 60–65. fenton n (2018) fake democracy: the limits of public sphere theory. javnost the public 0(0): 1–7. doi: 10.1080/13183222.2018.1418821. fraser n (1992) rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actual existing democracy. in: calhoun c (ed.) habermas and the public sphere. cambridge, ma: mit press, pp. 109–142. mouffe c (2013) agonistics: thinking the world politically. london and new york: verso. negt o and kluge a (1993) public sphere and experience: analysis of the bourgeois and proletarian public sphere. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. ong a (2006) neoliberalism as exception: mutations in citizenship and sovereignty. durham, n.c: duke university press. papacharissi z (2016) affective publics and structures of storytelling: sentiment, events and mediality. information, communication & society 19(3): 307–324. wark m (1997) black thunder. in: bayliss s and holt s (eds) transit lounge. sydney: craftsman house, pp. 180–184. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): mwaura, j. (2019, october 2-5). #resisthudumanamba: kenyan government at a crossroad. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. #resisthudumanamba: kenyan government at a crossroad job mwaura, doctoral fellow, department of media studies, university of the witwatersrand, johannesburg, south africa introduction in the past few years, kenya’s digital landscape has transformed and this has been made possible by proliferation of the usage of digital technologies. recently, the government rolled out a national integrated identity management system (niims) which is meant to capture biometric and geographical data (gps). biometric data in this case include fingerprints, hand geometry, earlobe geometry, retina and iris patterns, voice waves and deoxyribonucleic acid (dna) among other things in digital form. the mandatory registration will generate a unique identifier for every citizen called huduma number (service number). the introduction of this huduma number has generated uproar amongst citizens both in online and offline spaces and a campaign dubbed #resisthudumanamba emerged. this paper will therefore examine the following issues: what has contributed to the decline of trust, if any, between the government and its citizens when digital technologies are involved? what are the actual sentiments given for and against in the introduction of huduma number? what are the underlying reasons for continued digital registration of kenyans? data ownership in kenya telecommunication companies in kenya, such as safaricom are the largest owners of consolidated data in kenya on kenyans. this is data is captured in sim card registration and in the security cctv project safaricom was contracted to do by the government . the government on the other hand has been trying in the last few years to not only own data but also use data for e-governance. various laws have been amended and new ones created to cater for these digital developments. methods this research will be a qualitative research study. data was generated from social media sites (twitter and facebook), as well as blog posts and newspaper articles. a discourse analysis of the events around #resistshudumanamba in these sources was done so as to answer the research questions. twitter data from (15th feb – 27th feb 2019) with hashtag #resisthudumanamba was scrapped using tags and the initial analysis, including data clean-up was done using nvivo software. data from blogposts, newspaper articles and relevant government documents was also analysed. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): mwaura, j. (2019, october 2-5). #resisthudumanamba: kenyan government at a crossroad. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. thematic analysis of discourses on #resisthudumanamba in the #resisthudumanamba online campaign, several reasons emerged from the online discussion as the reason why citizens called resistance to register for the new identity system. 1. corruption a series of corruption within the government has been a common thing and citizens were getting fed up with them. in the case of huduma namba as a government project, it flaunted all the procurement laws since there was no adequate needs assessment, planning and budgeting did not undergo public participation. according to media sources the piloting phase of this project required 6 billion kenya shillings (about usd 60 million). the government was not clear on how much more was used during the actualization of the project that was activated worldwide. basic procurement stages involve pre-tendering phase, tendering phase and post tendering phase. huduma namba required procurement of registration gadgets and personnel. none of these underwent any procurement procedure as stipulated in procurement act and finance act of kenya. the repercussions of not procuring the gadgets came to light much later. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): mwaura, j. (2019, october 2-5). #resisthudumanamba: kenyan government at a crossroad. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. fig. 1 a tweet showing displeasure with the procurement procedure during #resisthudumanamba 2. presence of external institutions the presence of multi-national companies in kenya’s technology environment has over the past years been treated with suspicion. cambridge analytica, for instance, had a strong presence during kenya’s elections period in 2013 and 2017, where it was reported to have manipulated public discourses in favour of certain candidates. most of the multi-billion tenders involving infrastructural projects such as roads, railways, and housing projects are awarded to foreign companies. a few years ago, huawei, a chinese multinational was awarded a tender to install closed-circuit television cameras in three cities in kenya – nairobi, mombasa, and kisumu in what was the first project of the government surveillance program. 3. fatigue of constant registrations and surveillance registration of persons has always been considered a colonial issue. as mentioned earlier, registration of persons in kenya can be traced back to 1915 at the height of colonialism when the native registration ordinance, as a piece of legislation, was created by the colonial administration. the legislation required individuals of 16 years or older to be issued with a small piece of paper that was locked in a metallic pocket and hang on the neck like a dog collar, and later came to be known as kipande. the colonial government used this kind of identification to curtail freedom of movement and monitor the labour supply of the native africans. in essence, the kipande was a surveillance tool for an indentured labour system which enabled the settler economy to suppress wages. thus, this form of identification was seen to selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): mwaura, j. (2019, october 2-5). #resisthudumanamba: kenyan government at a crossroad. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. resemble a badge of slavery and sparked bitter protests. in the #resisthudumanamba online protest, individuals considered huduma namba as a modern form of kipande system. fig.2 : a tweet comparing the huduma namba to the kipande system with all these issues in mind and an existing level of fatigue with all these forms of registration traced back from the colonial era, online protesters considered it exhausting to have to register afresh for the huduma namba. protesters saw this as a neo-colonial issue. the ideas in the huduma were similar to the ideas of the colonial government. an era that citizens wanted to forget. 4. privacy, surveillance, and policing issues huduma namba was also established without existing laws on data protection and privacy issues. the existing laws are fragmented in various acts and policy papers. in 2018, the kenyan government signed into law the computer and cybercrime act. however, this law did not comprehensively deal with privacy violations, surveillance and censorship issues that exist in the country. among other issues in the act, it criminalizes interference with computer systems by third parties; the distribution of child pornography and online harassment like bullying and stalking; and the production of fake publications. the penal code and the kenya information communication acts, where other ict-related laws are found, do not cover data protection and surveillance issues for huduma number. in late 2019, the government developed huduma bill which made it mandatory for citizens to access government services selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): mwaura, j. (2019, october 2-5). #resisthudumanamba: kenyan government at a crossroad. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. conclusions and recommendations this paper aimed at highlighting the main conversation that prompted the #resisthudumanamba online protests. the case of #hudumanamba also reveals how the government continues to act with impunity. in essence, huduma namba can be a successful program if done with an orderly and systematic way. the following recommendations could be useful. i. they ought to first establish comprehensive legislation governing such biometric registrations. a. the legislation should aim at protecting the public good b. the public should be involved in deciding on the content of the legislation. ii. the government should ensure that the procurement of such gadgets for biometric legislation is done with adherence to the existing laws to ensure quality iii. legislation of citizens should be done in a manner that ensures that there is no discrimination of individuals based on their religion, ethnicity, geographical location, class and references gagliardone, i., & stremlau, n. (2011). digital media, conflict and diasporas in the horn of africa. open society foundations. kanyinga, k. (2009). the legacy of the white highlands: land rights, ethnicity and the post-2007 election violence in kenya. journal of contemporary african studies, 27(3), 325–344. mukhongo, l. l. (2014). negotiating the new media platforms: youth and political images in kenya. triplec: communication, capitalism & critique. open access journal for a global sustainable information society, 12(1), 328–341. tomchak, a.-m. (2015, january 22). #freespeechstories: arrested for a tweet. bbc news. microsoft word aoir2017-submission-template-final.docx selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): wittkower, d.e. (2017, october 18-21). disaffordances and dysaffordances in code. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. disaffordances and dysaffordances in code d.e. wittkower old dominion university code, understood in this paper in the broad sense of ‘architecture’ (lessig, 2006), implicitly contains an idea of its user through its interfaces and affordances. code may hold a prejudicially normative idea of its users, excluding some persons in a way which rises to the level of discrimination—as winner (1980) influentially argued, using the compelling example of robert moses’s choice to design some overpasses in new york city low enough to prevent public transportation buses from routes which would have allowed the poor to use beaches which moses wanted to reserve for the more economically privileged. in winner’s analysis, however, while the discriminatory effect is attributed to the technology—he argues that ‘artifacts have politics’—the attributes of the technologies leading to discriminatory effects are not analyzed in terms of their nonaffordances. this analysis is needed in order to distinguish (a.i) unavoidable exclusionary design and (a.ii) unproblematic exclusionary design from (b) problematic exclusionary (discriminatory) design. to illustrate the first case: (a.i) it certainly does not seem discriminatory to design clothing for female gender-normative self-presentation, even though doing so does actually exclude the majority of uses by the majority of male users, since exclusionary design in this case merely reflects a mutually exclusive construction of proper functions (millikan, 1987). similarly, in the second case, (a.ii) designing for a certain range of dress sizes, while not unavoidable due to the context of use as in the previous case, seems unproblematic so long as the designer’s choice is not part of a systemic structure of exclusion—so long as other designers produce “enough and as good,” as the lockean proviso (locke, 1988) has it. this is very different from a case wherein design is (b.i) directly exclusionary of relevant users, as in the case of a job application required to be submitted through software which does not accommodate screen readers for the visually impaired, or (b.ii) indirectly exclusionary through the recapitulation of existing prejudices or the global failure to produce enough and as good among service providers, as in non-optional gender and sexuality binarism in social network or dating site profiles, or the famous and emblematic case of the (white) “flesh-colored” crayon and adhesive bandage. this paper puts forth a theory of non-affordances which allows for distinguishing unproblematic exclusionary code from problematic and discriminatory code, which is described as either discriminatory through disaffordances or through dysaffordances. the term “disaffordance” has been used previously in the theory of affordances (gee, 2007, 2008; gibson, 2014; marcus, 2015), but only very infrequently, without a robust definition, and not in connection to issues of justice. the term “dysaffordance” is proposed here for the first time to my knowledge. disaffordances and dysaffordances are illustrated with a series of technologies conceptualized under divisions taken from ihde’s human-technics relations (1990) and with reference to latour (1992, 1999). examples include calendars, résumés, stairs, strollers, kitchen counters, hand-tools, user profile data entry fields, predictive algorithms in search and advertising, virtual reality imaging methods, game play structures, and air conditioning. through discussion of these examples, disaffordances are defined as technologies that fail to recognize differential embodied experiences that correspond to attributes constitutive of group and individual identities including race, gender, disability, and religion. examples of disafforances include failures to program for access by disabled persons, and organization of calendars in ways which require those practicing non-christian faiths to both reveal potentially sensitive personal information and to suffer loss in opportunities for career advancement in order to maintain their perceived religious duties. dysaffordances, by contrast, are defined as not only failing to recognize identity-related differences (as in disaffordances) but as actively forcing non-normative-conforming users to misidentify themselves in order to gain material or social access to the commodities and services provided through these technologies. examples of dysaffordance include real-name policies which require users to self-identify in ways constrained by governmental regulations which may not conform to social identities, gender and sexuality data entry binarisms, and game character attributes which force female players to either play as male characters or adopt the feminized game-play to which female characters are often relegated, acting in supporting roles (e.g. healers, archers) to masculinized or male-gendered lead player-characters. the theorization of disand dysaffordances provides three distinct benefits over leaving non-affordances as an untheorized mere lack of affordance. first, this theorization allows for the identification of thresholds where non-affordances become issues of ethics and justice, allowing for stronger, clearer arguments about the need to reform discriminatory code. second, the identification of this threshold allows us to see how disand especially dysaffordances not only participate in but sustain and actively construct exclusionary normativity (e.g. white normativity, male normativity, heteronormativity, bi-erasure, ableism, etc.), showing that code is not merely a cultural carrier but plays an active role in the social construction of deviance. third, the identification of this threshold allows designers to better identify issues in code during its initial formulation. references gee, j. (2007). pleasure, learning, video games, and life: the projective stance. in m. knobel & c. lankshear (eds.), a new literacies sampler. new york: peter lang. gee, j. (2008). video games and embodiment. games and culture, 3(3–4), 253–263. gibson, j. (2014). the ecological approach to visual perception: classic edition. new york: psychology press. ihde, d. (1990). technology and the lifeworld: from garden to earth, bloomington, in: indiana university press. latour, b. (1992). where are the missing masses? the sociology of a few mundane artifacts. in w. bijker & j. law (eds.), shaping technology/building society: studies in sociotechnical change. cambridge: cambridge university press. latour, b. (1999). a collective of humans and nonhumans: following daedalus’s labyrinth. in b. latour, pandora’s hope: essays on the reality of science studies. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. lessig, l. (2006). code: version 2.0. new york: basic books. locke, j. (1988). two treatises of government. cambridge: cambridge university press. marcus, l. (2015, 13–17 july). ecological space and cognitive geometry. in k. karimi, l. vaughan, k. sailer, g. palaiologou, & t. bolton, proceedings of the 10th international space syntax symposium. london: space syntax laboratory. millikan, r. (1987). language, thought, and other biological categories. cambridge, ma: mit press. norman, d. (1999). affordance, conventions, and design. interactions, 6(3), 38-43. norman, d. (2013). the design of everyday things: revised and expanded edition. new york: basic books. winner, l. (1980). do artifacts have politics? daedalus 109(1), 121–136. aoir2018 final submission selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 hand, m. (2018, october 10-13). recalibrating daily life: synchronizing, coordinating, and scheduling through smartphones. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. recalibrating daily life: synchronizing, coordinating, and scheduling through smartphones martin hand queen’s university, canada background there is considerable research on contemporary time and temporality, focusing on changing infrastructures, experiences, and practices associated with networked and mediatized life (agger, 2011; couldry & hepp, 2017; keightley, 2013; wajcman, 2015; wajcman & dodd, 2017). research has illuminated the changing temporalities of work and home (gregg, 2011), shifting rhythms of practice and problems of coordination (southerton, 2009), and new temporalities of disadvantage encountered in everyday life (sharma, 2014). at the level of critical cultural analysis, such temporal demands appear to produce new anxieties, pushing people to take individual responsibility for coordinating increasing numbers of ‘de-synchronized’ activities. this paper argues that people are becoming ‘habituated’ (chun, 2016) to new modes of synchronization and coordination largely through smartphones. smartphones are highly significant material objects that people live with, but also bafflingly complex conduits for a vast array of interconnected media-practice constellations. the paper argues that smartphones are temporalizing devices, like calendars, clocks, and cameras, but they have become recursive elements within almost every other social practice, potentially altering the temporal qualities of those practices, their coordination, and the temporal data produced as a result. this paper examines individual framings and experiences of temporal management via smartphone applications. it asks: to what extent and in what ways do configurations of smartphones and scheduling applications intervene in and restructure the temporality of practices and people’s experiences of time? method the paper draws upon in-depth semi-structured interview material with professional urban and suburban householders (n=25), individuals transitioning to retirement (n=20), and university students (n=25) to examine how a range of temporal expectations are perceived, articulated, and negotiated in practice. interviews included talking through temporal data of many kinds on personal devices. the guiding analytic questions were: where do identifiable expectations about temporal synchronization, coordination, duration, reciprocity, and productivity come from? what are the relations between institutionally defined and subjective experiences of temporal ordering? does data produced through daily activities alter the temporal contours of those activities? are social actors reorienting themselves in-time, in relation to mediatized temporal expectations? participants discussed the organization of mundane daily activities, strategies of temporal negotiation and management, emotional and material divisions of labour, feelings about temporal experience, perceptions of and expectations about time, and so forth. findings: recalibrations this preliminary qualitative analysis identifies four emerging modes of temporal management. following sharma (2014), these are expressed here as ‘recalibrations’, stressing the ways in which different temporal demands are encountered, involving alternative efforts to synchronize different elements of daily life through interconnected smartphone anchored applications. all participants spoke of temporal change and adjustment in relation to devices and apps, but with quite different emphases. managing precariousness for some participants, especially those working multiple ‘casual’ jobs, or in uncertain part-time service work, specific scheduling applications (e.g. shiftworker) are used to manage several interlocking forms of precariousness, including finance, shift patterns, and health. this often involves considerable individual orchestration of time in the face of changing institutional demands. scheduling apps construct colour coded patterns requiring continual adjustment – recalibration – where there is no routine. as such, for many participants, life is a sequence of shifting time slots. all activities must be accurately ‘timed’, to be scheduled. without these apps, the work would still be precarious, but it becomes intensely calibrated and organized here – which impinges on much of the day, and transforms other activities into visual temporalized data. synchronizing (to) the times of others others are trying to manage broader interconnected systems of synchronization, operating via the smartphone, that pull together multiple environments (work, home, cars), people (co-workers, children, partners, friends), and practices (administration, eating, exercise, driving) daily. intense forms of recalibration are taking place here, as schedules across multiple locations are ‘synced’, organizing the sequencing of activities and flows of people. there are multiplying systems (e.g. work office, mobile office, family calendars) with different temporalities that require collective orchestration. it is not only that work bleeds into leisure, but that successful coordination increasingly involves datafication, in turn tending toward continual adjustment. life here is a successful meshwork of coordinated scheduling systems, mixing mono and poly chronic temporal practices. temporal self-disciplining many younger participants (though not exclusively) enact the always-on, fluid, chronoscopic time discussed in much of the literature, but always in relation to specific linear projects of self-disciplining and ‘improvement’. the use of scheduling applications in conjunction with self-tracking devices and applications produces an intense focus on the present, but aimed at a future (fitter, more organized, productive) self. the temporality here is figured as individualized productivity through comparative data analytics (vs. friends, relatives). bodily discipline is coupled with episodic multiplication, where each discrete temporal moment ‘produced’ by the app is an opportunity for ‘achievement’. for some, friendships are maintained through scheduling. life here is a series of goal-meeting actions, where continual data about the self becomes a key resource for self-analysis. filling in future time for others, there is far more (often normative) clarity about temporal boundaries and what should be scheduled or unplanned. although the same devices and applications are present, they have a far less central role in the coordination of daily life. there is a related ambivalence about temporal data, or the ‘fear’ of ‘wasting time’. when the established patterns of days, weeks, months are not subject to chronic uncertainty, or complex planning and orchestration, there are other temporalities that take precedence, such as being ‘open’ to events and surprises. this can often be due to changes in life circumstances (separation, children leaving, etc.), or simply the security of privilege, enabling a self-conscious ‘taking’, ‘wasting’, and ‘filling in’ of time. life here is the emptying out of temporal obligations. discussion these findings suggest that some broad dimensions of contemporary mediatized temporality – speed, acceleration, feeling ‘pressed for time’ – become materialized in people’s daily lives in complex ways that increasingly require individual coordination. however, there are multiple sources of temporal expectations, from the changing demands of precarious work to an increased number of children’s activities. the interview data tells us a lot about a series of habits in formation, about how people with different classed and gendered temporal advantages adjust to complex temporalities, and how they are materialized in smartphone apps and varied connected systems. this is mostly experienced as an intensification of broader shifts in temporal demand, which is at the same time being ‘produced’ through efforts to synchronize daily life. references agger, b. (2011) ‘itime: labour and life in a smartphone era’, time & society, 20(1): 119-136. chun, w. h. k. (2016) habitual media: updating to remain the same, cambridge, ma: mit press. couldry, n. hepp, a. (2017) the mediated construction of reality, cambridge: polity. gregg, m. (2011) work’s intimacy, cambridge: polity press. keightley, e. (2013) ‘from immediacy to intermediacy: the mediation of lived time,’ time & society, 22(1): 55-75. sharma, s. (2014) in the meantime, durham, nc: duke university press. southerton, d. (2009) ‘re-ordering temporal rhythms,’ in e. shove, f. trentmann, & r. wilk (eds.), time, consumption and everyday life, oxford, uk: berg, pp. 56 73. wajcman, j. (2015) pressed for time, chicago, il: chicago university press. wajcman, j. dodds, n. (2017) the sociology of speed, oxford: oxford university press. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 knight, j., bowman, n., banks, j., primack, b., shensa, a., colditz, j. (2017, october 18-21). what’s on my mind: using social media to discuss stressful situations. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. what’s on my mind: using social media to discuss stressful situations jennifer knight west virginia university nicholas d. bowman west virginia university jaime banks west virginia university brian primack university of pittsburgh ariel shensa university of pittsburgh jason colditz university of pittsburgh anecdotes abound cautioning against too much engagement with social media (sm)— fueled by scientific evidence which suggests time spent with sm is positively associated with depression and negatively associated with well-being and life-satisfaction (kross et al., 2013; lui et al., 2016). due to sm users’ tendencies to convey idealized selfpresentations, people who use facebook longer believe that life is less fair, and other people have better, happier lives (chou & edge, 2012). however, such studies rarely explore how people are using sm in ways that could potentially alleviate depressive symptoms. for instance, depressed adolescents openly disclose their feelings and offer encouragement to others with depression on anonymous sites (radovic, blackwood, & miller, 2015) as well as on conspicuous sites where they are strongly connected to their followers (e.g., snapchat, authors). these social support seeking behaviors can alleviate stress by making one feel cared for and validated (cobb, 1976). sm is well-suited for this since it eliminates temporal and geographical restrictions on interactions and reduces self-disclosure barriers (blight, jagiello, & ruppel, 2015). extant literature largely ignores that people might use sm to discuss stressors and emotions in order to receive support, in the service of their mental health. we sought to understand (rq1) what types of stressful and emotional situations do people discuss on sm? method participants were n = 1,593 college students who responded to a larger online survey about mental health and sm use, and answered an open-ended question: “can you describe for us the type(s) of stressful or emotional situations that you typically discuss on social media?” average response length was m = 10.69 words (mdn = 6; sd = 16.42). data was cleaned to remove n = 374 blank responses and n = 19 nonsensical responses, resulting in n = 1,200 cases. participants were primarily white (n = 893, 74.4%), m = 22.39 years (sd = 6.35), with n = 392 males (32.7%), n = 788 females (65.7%), and n = 20 (1.7%) non-binary gender. participants reported their most-used sm platforms: facebook (n = 451, 37.6%), snapchat (n = 355, 29.6%), twitter (n = 210, 17.5%), and instagram (n = 184, 15.3%). our unit of observation was an utterance (complete thought, marked by punctuation, capitalization, and/or double spaces), and a total n = 1414 utterances were coded. units were analyzed using emergent thematic analysis (clarke & braun, 2014) to assign codes to each utterance, collapsed into categories to develop themes. we coded random subsamples until reaching saturation at n = 104 responses and n = 52 codes; participants' responses were coded with multiple themes if multiple utterances existed. results codes were combined into 10 unique themes, with their definitions, frequencies, and sample utterances given in table 1; the distribution of themes differed significantly from random (10% distribution), χ2(9) = 113.8, p < .001, cramer’s v = .283. discussion the most common theme was to refrain from discussion, as many believe sm are not appropriate venues for discussing stressful situations. this supports the perceived positivity bias that exists on sm, which is key because if people believe negativity is inappropriate on sm, this could diminish social support seeking (tong & westerman, 2016). school/work, daily personal struggles, and relational conflict all contained venting—a common motivation for sm use, particularly for people without offline support networks (baker & moore, 2008). less frequent discussions included deaths/illness and large scale global issues, acknowledging that people emotionally connect on sm during these times (brubaker, kirvan-swaine, taber, & hayes, 2012). humorous complaint posts turned unpleasant situations into funny ones, potentially to receive support without breaking politeness norms (mcgraw, warren, & kan, 2014). serious emotional struggles were rare, partially due to relatively low levels of depression in our participants (assessed as a separate project, cf. author). missing people & places might be prompted by the “fear of missing out” (alt, 2015). lastly, vaguebooking contained ambiguous requests for support, driven by communication privacy management, as some people will not divulge personal details but still want social support benefits (child & starcher, 2016). in light of debates surrounding sm use and depression, it is worthwhile to consider the different ways sm might be used relative to mental health, like discussing emotional situations that could incite depressive symptoms. our data, while restricted to a collegeaged population, suggests that although many users avoid these discussions, a variety of stressful topics were still shared on sm. notably, the current study did not explore the impact of these discussions on enhancing (or damaging) users’ mental state, so future research could examine the relative impact of these discussions on seeking social support and addressing depressive symptoms like chronic stress. we also encourage a granular look at potential differences in discussions as a function of one’s preferred sm platform, or the social structures therein. overall, this study highlights the importance of examining users’ interactions on sm to fully understand the sm-mental health link. a—a references alt d (2015). college students’ academic motivation, media engagement and fear of missing out. computers in human behavior, 49, 111-119. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2015.02.057 baker jr & moore sm (2008). distress, coping, and blogging: comparing new myspace users by their intention to blog. cyberpsychology & behavior, 11, 81-85. doi:10.1089/cpb.2007.9930 blight, m. g., jagiello, k., & ruppel, e. k. (2015). “same stuff different day:” a mixedmethod study of support seeking on facebook. computers in human behavior, 53, 366373. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2015.07.029 brubaker jr, kirvan-swaine f, taber l, & hayes g.r. (2012). grief-stricken in a crowd: the language of bereavement and distress in social media. proceedings of the sixth international aaai conference on weblogs and social media, 42-49. child jt & starcher sc (2016). fuzzy facebook privacy boundaries: exploring mediated lurking, vague-booking, and facebook privacy management. computers in human behavior, 54, 483-490. chou ht & edge n (2012). "they are happier and having better lives than i am": the impact of using facebook on perceptions of others' lives. cyberpsychology, behavior and social networking, 15, 117-21. doi:10.1089/cyber.2011.0324 clarke v & braun v (2014). thematic analysis. in encyclopedia of critical psychology (pp. 1947-1952). new york, ny: springer. cobb s (1976). social support as a moderator of life stress. psychosomatic medicine, 38, 300-314. liu yl, sidani je, shensa a, radovic a, miller e, colditz jm, hoffman b, giles lm, & primack ba (2016). association between social media use and depression among u.s. young adults. depression and anxiety, 33, 323-331. doi:10.1002/da.22466 kross e, verduyn p, demiralp e, park j, lee ds, lin n, et al. (2013) facebook use predicts declines in subjective well-being in young adults. plos one, 8, 1-6. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0069841 mcgraw pa, warren c, & kan c (2014). humorous complaining. journal of consumer research, 41, 1153-1171. doi:10.1086/678904 radovic a, blackwood an, & miller e (2015). “it's your twitter, so you can just say how you feel”: how adolescents with depression and their parents use social media. journal of adolescent health, 56, s23. doi:10.1016/j.jadohealth.2014.10.047 tong st & westerman dk (2016). relational and masspersonal maintenance: romantic partners’ use of social network websites. proceedings of 49th hawaii international conference on system sciences. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): kim, yr. (2017, october 18-21). imagining transnational virus in the digital sphere: a case study of zika virus during 2016 rio olympic games. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. imagining transnational virus in the digital sphere – a case study of zika virus during 2016 rio olympic games young rim kim university of michigan, ann arbor introduction how do the public imagine contagion? the objective of this research is to examine how infectious disease is represented and articulated in the digital sphere. in today’s globalized society, contagious disease is transmitted in an extremely fast and widespread level, becoming a huge threat to the public health of global citizens. such increased sense of shared threat, which is one of the consequences of globalization, is also related to the weakening legitimation of nation-states as they no longer have the capacity to entirely protect their citizens from such unpredictable and uncontrollable crises (appadurai, 1996). in this sense, disease outbreaks are global events that are deeply intertwined with the issues of globalization, cultural identity, and national security, by heavily influencing on how these concepts are socially constructed. in order to explore such research question, this study closely reads the sign and symbols that construct how contagion can be imagined on the digital sphere. chavez (2017) has theorized ‘disease-scapes,’ which indicates the building up of signs that represent germs, plagues, parasites and various diseases that are bundled with material and corporal forms. he argued that such disease-scapes that are attached to the immigrant bodies were largely circulated, and constructed meanings about immigrants as threat to the nation. these images gain power through their circulation and variation, and become used to justify political action, such as surveillance, policing, and laws governing the conduct of (im)migrants. extending such notion of diseasescape, this study focuses on the building of disease-scape on a particular site: facebook live videos. recent studies are showing that social media, especially facebook is reshaping the ways people consume news, by operating as major pathways to news (anderson & caumont, 2014). major news media, such as the new york times, cnn, and wall street journal, have their own public pages on facebook, creating a digital space where the readers can voluntarily interact with the news by writing comments. cnn, especially, actively exploited facebook’s new functions, such as live videos, to deliver the liveliness of the scene and directly receive and respond to people’s questions regarding the news. thus, this paper considers cnn’s facebook live videos as sites where discourses are on making, by staging the public perception of risk and transforming the meaning of liveness within the dynamics created by the video content, interface, and comments. conducting ‘critical techno-cultural discourse analysis’ (brock, 2016) to this object of study, the paper explores what kinds of narratives and metaphors of disease outbreaks are constructed over the facebooksphere and analyze how does this meaning-making process is structured in the online space. method the study selected the zika outbreak in 2016 as a case study. this is an interesting case to observe due to its coincidence with the olympic games that have taken place in rio de janeiro, brazil. since brazil was one of the epicenters of the outbreak, there was a worldwide concern on holding the olympics in rio. within this context, this paper examines how the zika outbreak is conceptualized on facebook, particularly during the rio olympics, in relation to the cultural, social implications of globalization. while the olympics are framed as a symbol of global unity, it is also a time when there is a heightened sense of national identity and patriotism among global nations. hence, it is meaningful to observe how a global infectious disease such as zika is narrated in terms of the legitimation of nation-states and security issues, when the idea of global citizenship and cosmopolitanism are pursued. cnn posted a number of facebook live videos about the zika outbreak during the olympic season. each video entailed more than 1000 comments, and around 4000 reactions. out of the videos, 7 of them that actively discussed about both the zika virus and the olympic games were collected as corpus of the study and conducted critical techno-cultural discourse analysis, which is a multimodal analytic technique for the investigation of internet and digital phenomena, artifacts, and culture” (brock, 2016). through this methodology, this paper investigates the video contents, the interface of facebook live, and the user comments together, because they work in a constitutive fashion in constructing the discourse of the outbreak. findings and argument the fact that the videos were streaming on real time heightened a sense of urgency, since it meant that what would happen next in the video is completely unpredictable. the video’s raw, low quality, hand-held visual components also contributed to the liveliness of the event. moreover, the amateurishness of the content provides more sincerity, as the audiences feels as if they are actually witnessing the things that are going on in the outbreak region, that has not gone through newsroom editing. also, an important feature of facebook live interface is real-time comments. while the viewers watch the video, they were simultaneously exposed to other viewers’ comments that are uploaded at real-time. the page gets updated every second, posting the most recent comment on the top. therefore, the viewers are continuously asked to do high level of multi-tasking, which involves watching the video, reading the comments every second, and responding to it. the instantaneous update of the comments that displays the speed of their accumulation heightens the sense of urgency of this issue, as it visualizes people’s anxiety that can potentially increase one’s own. more importantly, as people were watching the video and the comments at the same time, both work in a constitutive fashion in constructing the discourse of the outbreak. in other words, it can be suggested that viewer’s simultaneous, instantaneous, and capricious interaction with the multiple components of the ‘text’ shapes his or her understanding of the event as a combined result of the content provided by cnn, the viewer’s participatory actions, and the facebook live interface’s particularities. when examining the comments, circulation words that re-appropriated the conventional framing of immigrants and gave them new meanings was commonly observed. while considerable number of comments was blaming the citizens of outbreak nations for entering the united states and spreading the virus, which are exemplary articulation of conventional metaphors of immigrants as disease weakening and even killing the body of nation, many pointed out the fact that the zika virus is mostly transmitted through mosquitoes, which are impossible to be quarantined or contained. commenting that “mosquitoes cannot travel across borders,” the metaphors also frequently borrowed trump’s quotes during his presidential campaign, and revised them such as “build a net, and make mosquitoes pay for it,” and “total and complete shutdown of mosquitoes entering the united states until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” these quotes reflect that the commentators are imagining the contagion in relation to the previous disease-scapes; however, they are articulated in the form of satire and parody, which are provided as new means to ridicule the discourse of presidential campaigns and current state of affairs. it can be also suggested that the commentators are conducting oppositional reading of the previous metaphors, by pointing out the impossibility of containment strategies on global contagions in our contemporary world. while containment and securitization operations emphasized the imagined boundaries between nation-states and heightened the sense of national identity, these comments show the cases in which such reterritorialization of an infectious disease has failed. also, metaphors that framed olympic athletes’ bodies as the medium of transmission and as a threat to the body of nation were frequently detected. this also shows a transformation of the conventional metaphors on disease, as the operation of ‘othering,’ which indicates the marking of boundary between healthy ‘us’ and unhealthy ‘others,’ becomes blurred. while the conventional metaphors worked in order to emphasize the category of ‘good citizens’ and ‘bad citizens,’ the meaning of boundaries are more complicated and obscured in this case. therefore, the athletes are portrayed as scapegoats of politics and false ideals of global citizenry and cosmopolitanism. references appadurai, a. (1996). modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. anderson, m. & caumont, a. (2014). how social media is reshaping news. pew research center. retrieved from http://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2014/09/24/how-social-media-is-reshaping-news/ brock, a. (2016). critical technocultural discourse analysis. new media and society. p119. chavez, l. (2017, february 9-10). disease-scapes: circulation of visual and discursive images framing immigrants as a medical threat to the body of the nation. paper presented at circulating health: mediatization and the mobilization of medical subjects and objects. berkeley, california. microsoft word shifman.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): shifman, l. (2014, october 22-24). the cultural logic of photo-based meme genres. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the cultural logic of photo-based meme genres limor shifman hebrew university of jerusalem as bottom-up vernacular creations, internet memes may potentially assume an endless array of forms. in reality, however, memes tend to follow specific formulas, or genres. in this paper, i explore the cultural logic underpinning a particular set of meme genres: those that are based on photographs. the main question that i address focuses on cultural continuity: how do contemporary meme genres relate to previous photographic genres? i examine the multifaceted relations between three prominent meme genres (reaction photoshops, stock character macros, and photo fads) and the genres that i see as their predecessors: iconic photos, stock photography, and vernacular photography. i show how, in each of these cases, meme genres subvert fundamental assumptions and practices associated with well-established photographic types. based on patterns common to all three dyads, i suggest two novel framings of photo-based meme genres, highlighting their functions as modes of hypersignification and as futureoriented photography. the three memetic genres explored in this paper vary greatly in terms of their content, form and stance: (1) reaction photoshops are collections of images created in response to memetic photos (author, 2013b): a small group of photographs that provoke extensive creative reactions (e.g. the situation room). (2) stock character macros are image macros (namely images superimposed with text) that refer to a set of stock characters representing stereotypical behaviors. for example, sheltering suburban mom is a conservative hypocrite who preaches one thing and practices another. (3) photo fads are staged photos of people who imitate specific positions in various settings. planking, for instance, involves lying face down with arms by one’s side in unusual settings. while each of these meme genres has many cultural roots, in this paper i focus on what i see as their main "generic ancestors": iconic photos, stock photography, and vernacular photography. iconic photos and reaction photoshops iconic photos, according to hariman and lucaites', are "photographic images produced in print, electronic, or digital media that are widely recognized, are understood to be representations of historically significant events, activate strong emotional response, and are reproduced across a range of media, genres, or topics" (2002, p.366). images such as the iwo jima flag raising or the "tank man" at tiananmen have served, over the years, as powerful anchors in the construction of collective identities. on the face of it, iconic images seem to bear many similarities with memetic photos: both genres are simultaneously widely known and rare; and in both power stems from people’s reactions. yet a second look would reveal that memetic photos depart from iconic images in two fundamental aspects. while iconic images, in their essence, are about capturing primary truths, memetic photos (at least in political contexts) often highlight these "truths'" construction. they deal with the ways in which politicians stage-manage, manipulate, or even fabricate reality. another site of difference related to sacredness. whereas an aura of sacredness hovers around iconic images, memetic photos are associated with the mundane. even when they describe major events, they tend to veer away from the main happening. stock photographs and stock character macros as bulk images used by a commercial industry for a wide array of purposes, stock photographs are designed not to stand out. images such as the "slim young executives gathered rapturously around the screen of a laptop computer" or the "smiling parents and children frolicking in the surf of a beach" constitute, according to paul frosh (2013, p. 132), a ubiquitous yet often invisible part of our visual environment. "stock character macros" resemble "stock photos" to a great extent. in both genres, photos are used not as indexes of specific people or historic events, but as visual manifestations of stereotypes. moreover, both genres represent abstract concepts fundamental to human behavior, such as "successes". but there are also deep differences between them. while stereotypes constitute the bread and butter of this industry, they operate in its deep background, concealed from consumers' eyes. contrarily, in stock character macros the process of stereotype production often becomes the issue (milner, 2012). a further difference relates to the nature of the concepts underscoring these genres. while the vast majority of concepts featured in stock photos are positive, stock character macros deal with human flaws. vernacular photography and photo fads vernacular photography, (also labeled also as "amateur photography" and "everyday photography"), focuses on photos taken by ordinary people as part of their daily lives (burges, 2007). such photos often represent idealized images of social relationships, showing "happy couples" or "united facilities". this positive mode of representation is often tied to the role vernacular photos play in memory work. since such photos act as material embodiments of life narratives, people aspire to present favorable self-images in them (chalfen, 1987). photo fads can be understood as a new sub-genre of vernacular photography. yet while these fads feature ordinary people in their everyday lives, they seem to subvert some of the most fundamental norms underscoring vernacular photography. if the latter is about relationships, photo fads are individual-centered. while amateur photos are used as memory enhancers, photo fads are utterly a-historic: no relevant happening occurred before or after the moment the photo was taken. conclusion so far, i have discussed the three generic dyads – and the cultural logics constituting them – discretely. by way of conclusion, i will explore their shared attributes. these overarching principles can be organized into two frames: meme genres as modes of hypersignification and as future-oriented photography. meme genres as hypersignification. a striking difference between photographic and memetic genres relates to their use of signs. the rhetorical power of all three photographic genres has to do with representational truth. whether the represented entity is a zeitgeist (iconic photos), a concept (stock photography) or social relations (vernacular photography), the direct link between the signifier and the signified is unquestioned. yet meme genres tend to expose the communicative strategies concealed in more traditional photographic genres. this function echoes what goldman and papson (1996) conceptualize as hypersignification in advertising, a phase in which advertisers started to create sophisticated ads that revealed the "backstage" of their own industry, turning the code itself into a sign. similarly, photo-based meme genres tell us something about the mechanisms of signification: they are more about the process of meaning making than about meaning itself. as such, they can be read as critical reflections of well-entrenched cultural conventions associated with commemoration, stereotyping, and self-presentation. meme genres as future-oriented photography. the notion that photos arrest the flow of time by capturing "dead moments" is fundamental to many theories of photography. in these works photography is conceived as a technology geared towards the past: it is the medium through which histories are narrated. yet photo based meme genres represent a transition from death to life and from past to present. memes are all about mutation, or change: the memetic photo is a living object, since, by definition, it never stays still. this feature inherently impacts upon temporality, as photos are increasingly becoming the raw material of future images. once a memetic photo is shot, numerous offspring are waiting in its imagined womb. the question hovering above this process therefore does not relate to the past but to the future –not "what does this photo represent?", but "what will its next version be?". instead of looking backwards, we are in a constant state of anticipation for the sequel. references burgess je (2007) vernacular creativity and new media. phd thesis, queensland university of technology, australia. chalfen r (1987) snapshot versions of life. bowling green ohio: bowling green university press. frosh p (2003) the image factory: consumer culture, photography and the visual content industry. oxford, uk: berg. hariman r and lucaites jl (2002) performing civic identity: the iconic photograph of the flag raising on iwo jima, quarterly journal of speech 88: 363-92. milner rm (2012) the world made meme: discourse and identity in participatory media. phd thesis, university of kansas, us. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 arora, p., hügle, a., konig, r., pridmore, j., schafer, m., stevens, h. (2017, october 18-21). data-driven models of governance across borders: assessing participation, inclusion and convergence in the digital era. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. panel title: data-driven models of governance across borders: assessing participation, inclusion and convergence in the digital era participants: payal arora, anika hügle, rené könig, jason pridmore, mirko t. schäfer, and hallam stevens. overview we have come quite a distance from chris anderson’s “end of theory” euphoria for big data at the helm of decision-making for the betterment of society (2008). today, numerous scholars have critiqued data-centrism in policy-making and practice (for example, boyd and crawford 2011). hannah arendt argues that governance has repeatedly fallen victim to the “utterly irrational confidence in the calculability of reality” (1972). however, we are also witnessing a number of social innovations across the world that are strategically leveraging on digitization to enable a more transparent, inclusive and representative form of political enactment. these social experiments promise to break away from traditional modes of institutional practice and offer instead a more vibrant form of democratic engagement, empowered by the affordances of “datafication.” this panel critically assesses the nature and role of data emerging from new forms of information and communication technologies in the shaping of social order. each paper in this panel evaluates the particulars of select social innovations posited to strengthen policymaking and citizen activism in the digital era. the papers that make up this panel move beyond polarizing dialectical perspectives by illuminating the ways in which databases have enabled newer forms of mobilization and solidarity but have equally allowed for novel and hitherto unimagined operations of state and corporate power. we aim for a more nuanced and complex understanding of how a multiplicity of social actors come to play in the makings of public service in the big data era. the first paper examines two new models of governance emerging in the global south – the social credit system in the people’s republic of china and the biometric identity system in india. each promises to consolidate public services and citizen identities for social good. the second paper analyzes the opening of government data in singapore through the website data.gov.sg. it examines the motivations behind such opening of data and assesses the extent to which it enables citizen and civil society action. the third paper examines the emergence of data-driven cities in the netherlands, comparing amsterdam, utrecht, eindhoven, and dordrecht. a fourth paper focuses on user experiences in relation to mobile privacy in the united states and the netherlands. it focuses on everyday negotiations and the participation of citizen/consumers in the production of different forms of data within these two countries. the final paper turns attention to the role of “citizen conferences” in germany and proposes new approaches to policy-making that emerge from both digital and material engagements. the studies in these papers are situated in diverse models of policy-making, governance, and/or activism across borders. they address the datafication of publics, spaces and social interactions. thereby, this panel opens up a conversation on global templates of databased governance through the lens of participation, inclusion and convergence. this is occurring within increasingly networked publics, raising questions for instance about privacy in context (see for instance nissenbaum 2009), divides between digital and material practices or online-offline distinctions, the potentials for urban-digital commons, and the embeddedness of value laden systems, particularly with regard to their enculturation across different (political, social, and economic) contexts. by comparing examples emerging from different national and political circumstances, we hope to illuminate the diverse potentialities and valences of big data. moreover, these panels examine both top-down and highly centralized efforts to mobilize data, alongside citizen-driven, bottom-up data-collection schemes. by placing these cases side-byside, we hope to show the vastly divergent possibilities and meanings of data work, as well as suggesting some limitations of data’s democratic potential. references anderson, c. (2008). the end of theory: the data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete. wired, 23 june. https://www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-theory/ arendt, h. (1972). crises of the republic. new york: harcourt brace jovanovich. boyd, d. and k. crawford (2011). six provocations for big data. a decade in internet time: symposium on the dynamics of internet and society, 21 september. available at ssrn: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1926431 nissenbaum, h. (2009). privacy in context: technology, policy, and the integrity of social life. stanford university press. paper 1: emerging databased democracies in china and india author: payal arora democracy is not just an ideal but also an aspiration, a just system of governance, and a model of what a ‘good’ society looks like. democracy at its most basic is the rule of the majority, the rule of the commoners, and it was the most successful political idea of the 20th century. today however, democracy as we know it is under serious threat. the political climate today reveals how the old champions and power centers of the west such as the united kingdom and the united states are moving towards non-inclusive and even discriminatory social policies, defying the packaged dream called democracy. what we see in the last decade is entrenched oligarchy that has resulted in what thomas piketty has shown us is an astonishing widening of social and economic inequality (2014). as these nations become inward looking, nostalgic of a fictional monochromatic past of a non-diverse state, nations beyond the west have gained credence in promoting alternative models of governance for the common good. this paper critically examines two new models emerging from the global south, specifically india and china, enabled by new digital technologies. the first model, the biometric identity initiative known as the aadhaar project in india is an ambitious and historically unprecedented databased model of governance. major news outlets such as the bbc endorse this effort as they report how the poor, “with no proof to offer of their existence will leapfrog into a national online system, another global first, where their identities can be validated anytime anywhere in a few seconds” (rai, 2012). the goal of the project is to provide a unique identification number (uid) to each of the 1.2 billion indian citizens through the capturing of their fingerprints, iris scans, and photographs. this consolidated digital identity will serve as a primary portal through which citizens can gain access to all government services such as welfare, banking and rationing of food for those on the margins of society. it aims to bring all of the undocumented poor into the system. r. s. sharma, the secretary of the department of electronics & information technology in india declared that, “digital india is not for rich people . . . it is for poor people.” (arora, 2016, p. 1684). there is some truth to this claim. it is a fact that majority of india’s citizens lack any form of identity such as a passport or a resident permit, making it difficult to disseminate welfare benefits to the masses. intermediaries have capitalized on this by using fake identities to siphon off much of the $60 billion in welfare benefits earmarked for the poor. it is no wonder that this project stands as a contemporary crusader against corruption. however, numerous challenges inundate this process including privacy and human rights violations, duplications and weak institutional measures against data breaches. the second model emerges from china. china has a vision of a good society and a good citizen and is in the midst of creating a unified digital system to foster this vision. by 2020, china intends to institute the social credit system. by combining the citizens’ financial records, online shopping data, social media behavior and employment history, the system will produce a ‘social credit’ score for each citizen. this rating system will be used to measure the citizens’ trustworthiness. each citizen will earn ‘credit’ through good behavior, online and offline. this will directly affect their access to all kinds of public services including the nation’s financial credit system. in essence, it is a value-embedded system meant to encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior. this system can get highly discriminatory as the scanning of social media accounts can sentence people to unemployment, slow internet connectivity, and travel visa bans based on them liking a dissenting post or being friends with those who don’t share the state’s values (markey, 2016). technology companies that do not comply with these ‘ethics’ could be extensively fined for supporting so-called immoral and indecent content. by looking at democracy’s three core dimensions the socio-political, the economic and the legal, and how big data intersects with them, this study analyzes the following questions in the context of india and china: does digitization of citizen data reduce or entrench discrimination? is the internet enabling a more level playing field by helping citizens circumvent old intermediaries of power? how are these systems ensuring security for their citizens? through content analysis of news articles, government websites and reports, and popular citizen and activist blogs from january 2016 to december 2016, this paper reveals a complex narrative that goes beyond the typical western lens of authoritarianism and state surveillance. in cultures such as in india and china where the notion of privacy is foreign to their language and their social practice and where individuality holds a different value, these new models of governance serve more as a promise than a threat. this paper reveals how these data-based governance systems are celebrated by many for their efficacy, empowerment, innovation and for their propositions of alternative social justice among multiple local and foreign actors. by juxtaposing these emerging systems of databased democracies against the normative values from western models that privilege privacy, this study reveals the crossroads we are at when it comes to what constitutes as global participation, convergence and social inclusion in this digital age. references arora, p. (2016). bottom of the data pyramid: big data and the global south. international journal of communication, 10, 1681–1699. markey, d. (march 16, 2016). the socialist network: why china’s proposed credit rating system is anything but credible. retrieved from the brown political review website: http://www.brownpoliticalreview.org/2016/03/the-socialist-network-why-chinas-proposed-credit-ratingsystem-is-anything-but-credible/ piketty t. (2014) capital in the twenty-first century. belknap press, cambridge, ma. rai, s. (2012, june 6). why india’s identity scheme is groundbreaking. retrieved from the bbc website: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-18156858 paper 2: visions of smart cities and civil participation author: mirko t. schäfer the labels “big data” and “smart cities” promise social progress through technological advancement. applying novel means of data collection and analyses is expected to provide new insights that improve public administration, stimulate civic participation and advance economic prosperity (mayer-schönberger and cukier 2013; townsend 2013). however, as global innovative entrepreneurs penetrate with their services the realm of the public sphere (e.g. facebook), public space (e.g. airbnb, nextdoor, or uber), education (e.g. udacity, or coursera) and health care (e.g. google health), traditional public service media and public administration bodies alike face a serious questioning of their legitimacy and sovereignty (van dijck, poell, and de waal 2016). next to these challenges, many more – often profane – challenges arise from lack of data literacy to issues of application (van den hoven 1998) while the general attention is focused on the silicon valley developers of big data applications, small and medium businesses, maker spaces, hacker labs and individual programmers are also developing promising solutions. in the netherlands, many municipalities already developed smart cities initiatives and are actively seeking ways to exploit data practices for cost-efficient management, for improving quality of life for residents, and for stimulating local and national entrepreneurial activities (kist 2015; krianotis 2016; vereninging van nederlandse gemeenten 2015). often these initiatives are experimental and explorative. they have an impact on the local level, both in terms of generating economic activity and in terms of finding solutions to local problems. but beyond that, these smart city initiatives are valuable because they contribute to a city’s new digital infrastructure (e.g. big data management) and its public management’s and citizens’ big data literacy skills. with the current tendency towards a more accountable and transparent government and the rapid development of technological possibilities, many open data initiatives on both a local and a national level have been initiated (lathrop and ruma 2010; wohlers and bernier 2015). these data initiatives are symptomatic for the emergence of what has been called amongst other things a “datafied society” (schäfer and van es 2016). cities in the netherlands are eager to implement data practices for more efficient public management. from large cities like amsterdam (number 1 of the 85 largest municipalities in nl) or utrecht (number 4) to smaller ones like dordrecht (number 23) or hollands-kroon (number 85), public administrations are keen to invest in data practices. the size of the investment varies as does their vision of what a smart city is and which role technology, governance and the residents might play. the smart cities initiatives carried out in these cities, initiated explorative projects to develop data-driven applications for public management. apart from some platforms for knowledge transfer, such as the g4 cio summit for information managers of the four leading cities, little exchange and opportunity for comparative analysis and exchange of experiences has been developed. this paper exploratively investigates the smart city initiatives of four cities in the netherlands (different in size, political representation in the council, and budget for the development of data practices). the authors have worked for the past three years closely with various municipalities through carrying out commissioned research projects on data issues. this ethnographic angle provided deep insight into the smart cities activities, the challenges and the opportunities that emerged. it provided the authors with rich data about the various actors of change that drive these initiatives. this paper also compares the different visions for a smart city as formulated in policy papers, interviews with officials and the project descriptions of the explorative smart city projects. our findings indicate that the development of data-practices and the realization of the so-called smart city is asymmetrically distributed. the vision of what a smart city constitutes is different and ranges from top-down governance to inclusive approaches where various stakeholders are invited to participate. the citizens appear in these visions as clients who can expect public management to be nothing more than cost-effective facility management or as participants in co-creating opportunities for education, sustainability, economic prosperity and political participation. data practices are inherently political. citizens and their social interactions, their movements in urban space, their consumption of goods, services and energy are all recorded in data. the work with these data is inherently political and can constitute significant impact on the personal livelihood. our paper shows how municipalities are aware of this significance and how they address it, opening up possibilities for a socio-political debate about our data and our cities. references kist, r. (2015) amsterdam gaat met big data de toeristendrukte te lijf. nrc.nl. nrc, last modified july 20, accessed october 31, 2016, https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2015/07/20/amsterdam-gaat-met-big-data-detoeristendrukte-te-lijf-a1495782. krianotis, l. (2016) amsterdam gaat illegale airbnb's aanpakken met 'big data'. nos, last modified february 15, accessed october 31, 2016, http://nos.nl/artikel/2087106-amsterdam-gaat-illegale-airbnb-saanpakken-met-big-data.html. lathrop, d. and l. ruma, eds (2010) open government: collaboration, transparency, and participation in practice. sebastopol, ca: o'reilly media, inc. mayer-schönberger, v. and k. cukier (2013) big data: a revolution that will transform how we live, work, and think. new york, ny: houghton mifflin harcourt publishing company. schäfer, m. t. and k. van es, eds. (2016) the datafied society: studying culture through data. amsterdam: amsterdam university press. townsend, anthony m (2013) smart cities: big data, civic hackers, and the quest for a new utopia. new york, ny: w.w. norton & company. van den hoven, m. j. (1998) moral responsibility, public office and information technology. in public administration in an information age, edited by i. th m. snellen and w. b. j. h. van de donk, 97-112. amsterdam: ios press. van dijck, j., t. poell, and m. de waal. (2016) de platform samenleving: strijd om publieke waarden in een online wereld. amsterdam: amsterdam university press. vereninging van nederlandse gemeenten (2015) hoe kunnen gemeenten big data inzetten in veiligheidsdomein? vereniging van nederlandse gemeenten, last modified may 22, accessed october 31, 2016, https://vng.nl/onderwerpenindex/veiligheid/veiligheidsbeleid/nieuws/hoe-kunnen-gemeentenbig-data-inzetten-in-veiligheidsdomein. wohlers, t. e. and l. l. bernier (2015) setting sail into the age of digital local government: trends and best practices, edited by christofer g. reddick. vol. 21. new york: springer. paper 3: the governance of mobile privacy: data production and user experiences in the netherlands and united states author: jason pridmore the development of ubiquitous, almost universally available, and accessible forms of mobile and interconnected computing have positively affected the efficiency, convenience, and enjoyment of people’s everyday lives. at the same time, however, these connections and devices increase the potential for more pervasive forms of digitally mediated surveillance as they produce more and more data. these data are made available to media companies, marketers, governments, employers, and internet service providers (isps). privacy – as implemented in policies, data protection frameworks, personal practices and privacy-enhancing technologies – can therefore be viewed as a conglomeration of strategies employed to counter the detrimental consequences such surveillance enables and a means of governing participation, inclusion and convergence. in order to mitigate potential harms and concerns arising from increased mobile surveillance, individuals may employ various privacy practices – not as an antidote to surveillance (stalder, 2002), but as a means for limiting the reach of surveillance. at the same time, technological advances have shifted evaluations of privacy “problems” from general concerns about personal information and identity theft to concerns about data control, data security, data processing, and data secrecy (van der ploeg, 2005). each of these foci come with different perspectives on what is at stake, what actions should be taken, and how such actions can achieve positive change. for example, privacy as data control focuses on ensuring users have the means necessary to set limits on the use of their personal data, whereas seeing privacy as data security focuses attention on encryption technologies. more recently, accounts of privacy as contextual integrity (nissenbaum, 2009), though valuable, remain problematic given how rapidly contexts shift, particularly in relation to mobile technologies and platforms. this paper focuses on the development of clearer policies and practices for governing mobile privacy issues based on empirically examining everyday practices. the focus on mobile technologies is motivated by the recognition that the defining features of contemporary society are its social, physical, and intellectual mobility (pierson, 1973). participation in contemporary life increasingly demands a high level of mobility and is coupled with the fundamental assumption that individuals are granted the right to explore new physical and intellectual terrain relatively free from intrusive oversight by governmental or private entities. this entails a crossing of multiple borders, including geographic, social, economic, cultural and political borders. without these freedoms, we cannot understand our world or develop the awareness and competencies necessary for effective participation in social, economic, cultural, and political life. smartphones, tablets, and other mobile connected devices have become the primary channel through which individuals connect with, explore, and understand the world around them; consequently, it is critical to protect and understand the data that are being produced through the everyday use of these devices and how these might be made thus preserving individual freedoms as well. this paper is based on a mix of research methods, including interviews, focus groups and survey analysis that has been completed in both the netherlands and the united states. the paper traces out our initial findings into mobile users’ mental models of privacy and how this might further inform governance practices regarding the production of citizen/consumer data. these are evaluated alongside the perceived social costs (e.g., interpersonal and institutional surveillance), affordances (e.g., ubiquitous communication, facilitated social coordination), and (un)anticipated byproducts (e.g., routine upkeep of profiles and configuring settings) associated with the pervasive use of mobile technologies. given the ubiquity of these practices and the effects of cultural contingencies on these practices, this paper focuses on experiences in the netherlands and the united states with specific regard to health care data and messaging services. the findings indicate a series of daily negotiations that people make with regard to their production of data and participation in groups that produce data including sensitivities to issues of privacy. these citizen/consumers rely upon both technological and physical configurations to ensure their own personal privacy is maintained. that is, citizen/consumers utilize practical and technical affordances to limit the potential infringement of their privacy. simultaneously they reflectively consider their own production of data and how this may affect their own experiences. the findings also demonstrate that there is a relationship between awareness of privacy and how these impact conscious and unconscious decision making on a daily basis. most importantly, the immediacy of government and consumer surveillance seems to be rather limited, but energies are instead focused on interpersonal connections and the (potential negative) effects such data may have on these relationships. what we begin to see in this work is how both conceptual models and practical implementations that pertain to the digital self reiterate certain tensions between privacy, disclosure, mobility and surveillance in the us and europe. furthermore, our findings from this research can begin to provide insights and guidance to help designers embracing the privacy by design framework (ipc, 2011) as well as more explicit governance capacities by legislative bodies. given the increased participation of data production within various sites, how and why citizen/consumers choose to participate or reveal certain information about themselves or their communities, or engage with public or commercial bodies, becomes increasingly pertinent. references nissenbaum, h. (2009) privacy in context: technology, policy, and the integrity of social life. stanford university press. pierson, g. w. (1972) the moving american. allied publisher. stalder, f. (2002) privacy is not the antidote to surveillance. surveillance & society, 1(1), 120–124. van der ploeg, i. der. (2005) biometric identification technologies: ethical implications of the informatization of the body. biometric technology & ethics. retrieved from http://www.danishbiometrics.org/admin/files/policy_paper_1_july_version.pdf paper 4: lay perspectives on big data: insights from citizen conferences in germany authors: rené könig and anika hügle successful governing of complex technologies requires decision-makers to be equipped with substantial expertise. this is particularly challenging for democracies, as expertise follows rather exclusive principles which may conflict with the inclusive ideas of democracies and the way they are organized (fischer, 2009). as scholars have argued, the “reflexive modernity” (beck, 1992; giddens, 1990) faces self-induced risks, which became obvious with the various environmental threats caused by industrialization. in this context, experts are not just needed to tackle the problem; they themselves become part of the problem. at the same time, they often cannot provide sufficient answers to give clear and reliable guidance and society is left with vast uncertainty. since the 1960ies the interdisciplinary field of technology assessment (ta) has emerged to find new perspectives on this increasingly pressing issue and to provide decision-makers with options for actions beyond technocratic expert-based concepts. one frequently used approach is to involve citizens through participatory technology assessment (pta). over the last few decades, a number of pta formats have been developed and applied in different contexts on various subjects. they differ in the way they are designed and how they are incorporated (or not) in the political system. generally pta can be regarded as a “qualitative (scientific) method for determining the attitudes, interests, and patterns of argumentation used by laypersons with regard to complex issues of science and technology policy” (hennen, 2012, p. 40). in contrast to e.g. opinion polls, pta follows a much more discourse-oriented approach in order to unravel the rationality of laypersons without pressing them into the tight format of a survey. in the digital era, such lay perspectives may be particularly relevant for at least two reasons: 1. the growing impact of technology on society: technology is increasingly not just a subject of but also a tool for governance. already today, big data influences which information we get to see, which prices we pay, who we connect with (to name just a few examples). while we do not know, how exactly this will evolve in the future, it seems evident that technology’s deep impact on our lives is only getting bigger. therefore, there is also a growing need to involve the affected citizens in the related decision-making. 2. the growing expert-lay divide: the increasing proximity and ubiquity of technology has not necessarily bridged the gap between experts and laypersons. instead, technology is often “black-boxed” by hiding its complexity from the user as it is done for example through the “platformization of the web” (helmond, 2015). the technical backend usually remains inaccessible for ordinary users (due to intentional barriers raised by the developers or a lack of knowledge on the user side). democratic societies need to consider this knowledge gap by broadening the perspectives beyond the technocratic point of view of experts. this contribution discusses how pta may help to develop options for actions for decisionmakers that are grounded in the reality of laypersons. it draws on insights from three citizen conferences (a specific format of pta) conducted in germany in 2016 as part of a larger project on the societal impact of big data. the project combined different methods and disciplines to get an encompassing perspective on this complex issue, involving working groups from sociology, political science, economics, law and ethics, using e.g. expert workshops, surveys and a representative opinion poll. the three cities were selected by considering different geographic and demographic factors in order to achieve a certain heterogeneity. since this method is qualitative and aims at a discourse-oriented format, the group size has to be limited and true representativeness cannot be achieved. instead, the goal is rather to gain an understanding of typical lines of argumentation and rationales. this also requires that citizens with very different backgrounds participate. for that purpose, a random sample of adults was invited by letter (1,500-3,000 per city). on average 0.8 % of the invited participated (overall 63 persons). all three conferences were held within one day and each one addressed three topics, which were discussed in small groups guided by trained moderators. the topics were carefully selected and involved results from a previously conducted expert workshop aiming at identifying the most pressing societal issues connected to big data. the challenge here was to narrow down the very broad topic, so that it could be efficiently discussed, while also giving citizens enough room for their own thoughts. the topics were framed along three questions: 1. who is responsible – the state or the individual? 2. who is in control? is our behavior manipulated? 3. who decides? human or computer? the citizens received a short text in advance, outlining the main issues behind these questions. each group developed a list of shared perceived risks and opportunities, which was then presented and discussed together at the end of the day. this contribution will present and analyze the main results from the citizen conferences. furthermore, the lessons learned from applying pta on the complex issue of big data will be discussed on a broader level with regard to the theoretical background outlined above. references beck, u. (1992). the risk society: towards a new modernity. sage: london. fischer, f. (2009). democracy and expertise: reorienting policy inquiry. new york: oxford university press. giddens, a. (1990). consequences of modernity. cambridge: polity press. helmond, a. (2015). the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready. social media + society, 1(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080 hennen, l. (2012). why do we still need participatory technology assessment? poiesis & praxis, 9, 27– 41. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10202-012-0122-5 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): brough, m., literat, i., & ikin, a. (2020, october). “good social media?”: underrepresented youth perspectives on the ethical and equitable design of social media platforms. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “good social media?”: underrepresented youth perspectives on the ethical and equitable design of social media platforms melissa brough california state university, northridge ioana literat teachers college, columbia university amanda ikin california state university, northridge introduction: social media, design, and the online experiences of underrepresented youth although youth of color, youth from lower socioeconomic brackets, and young women are among the heaviest users of social media technologies (pew, 2018), their voices are almost entirely absent from current conversations about ethical design. further, we know much less about their particular experiences and perspectives on these platforms; such an understanding is a prerequisite to designing ethical software that responds to the diverse needs of its users and avoids universalizing the assumptions and priorities of elite technology designers (primarily white, male adults; see united states department of labor, 2018). this study examines underrepresented youth perspectives on their own digital technology use, as a way to inform more ethical and equitable design of social media platforms. research is increasingly engaging the question of social media design in relation to user experiences, particularly for non-dominant groups (e.g. literat & brough, 2019; noble, 2018; massanari, 2017), and a growing number of researchers and designers are calling for more “ethical software” to address concerns of equity and ethics. in terms of a more specific focus on youth, while researchers have examined variations in youth social media use based on identity markers like race, gender, sexuality or socioeconomic status, a closer investigation of the role of social media design in regard to the particular experiences of non-dominant youth in these online spaces is largely missing. this research adds a nuanced, youth-specific perspective to our current understanding of these dynamics by centering the voices and experiences of youth themselves. in contrast to the historical association of “universal design” with equity in the humancomputer interaction field (see, e.g. dix, 2009), we contend that centering difference and drawing attention to the subjective viewpoints of designers and users is crucial to more ethical and equitable technology design. thus, we do not offer a singular, normative definition of what constitutes “ethical software” or “good social media,” but rather investigate these concepts through the eyes and voices of underrepresented youth. methods our data consists of in-depth semi-structured interviews and youth-guided “think aloud” tours (livingstone & sefton-green, 2016) of their social media practices, conducted with a group of twenty-five undergraduate students at a hispanic and asian american, native american, and pacific islander serving institution in the southwestern united states. participants were recruited using fliers, email announcements, and in-class announcements. requirements for participation in the interview process included being over the age of 18; identifying as low-income (and/or being a recipient of a state university grant, cal grant, or federal pell grant for college tuition) and/or belonging to one or more historically underrepresented groups; using social media; and not currently being a student of the researchers. interested students were asked to complete an online survey about their demographic background and digital media use, which we used to assess whether the student fit the parameters of the research. a total of 60 students filled out the survey, out of which 49 met the study criteria and were invited to participate in an interview. twenty-five students completed interviews, which each lasted approximately one hour. seventy-two percent of interview participants identified as low or lower-middle income, and eighty-eight percent of participants reported receiving a state university grant, cal grant, or federal pell grant as part of their financial aid package. sixty-eight percent of participants identified as female. fifty-six percent identified as hipanic or latinx, sixteen percent as african american or black, twelve percent as asian or asian american, eight percent as middle eastern, four percent as white, and four percent as mixed race. data was analyzed using an interview-based thematic analysis process that involved transcribing, multiple rounds of coding and note-taking, and consolidation into larger themes (magnusson & merecek, 2015). findings and discussion our findings illustrate how young people perceive and experience empowering and disempowering aspects of social media design. interviewees expressed a palpable sense of underrepresentation in the digital technology design sector and noted several ways in which design elements of social media can exacerbate a sense of inadequacy.the negative implications of user profile design and popularity rating systems that encourage conformity were found to be of particular concern for lowincome youth, youth of color, and other underrepresented groups. on the flip side, interviewees felt that social media could in some instances also be used to counter negative images of under-represented youth and raise awareness. interviewees additionally felt that social media can be used to connect with others like themselves, or to build social capital, and provided several specific examples of this. it was noteworthy that most of the interviewees expressed acceptance of the fact that social media platforms’ commercial aims tend to trump designers’ ethical obligation to users. it was not possible to discern from this data whether this was more a reflection of the interviewees’ sense of ethics, or of a general and widespread acceptance of the hegemony of capitalist ideals in the united states. nonetheless, interviewees did have concrete recommendations or requests for social media designers that pertained to the wellbeing of users. young people’s desires for exposure to more positive content was palpable; some also called for social media designers to find ways to curb hate speech on their platforms. they also frequently cited the need for greater transparency in how user data is utilized. several interviewees felt that social media platforms would better serve them if they included features to help limit excessive time spent on them, and most interviewees had at least a vague sense that social media is designed to capitalize on users’ psychological and cognitive vulnerabilities to maximize time spent on the platform. in surfacing underrepresented youths’ experiences with social media, we heed nagy and neff’s (2015) call to consider the affordances of social media as “imagined affordances,” emerging at the intersection of the materiality of the technology with users’ and designers’ perspectives, attitudes and expectations. our study advances their theory of “imagined affordances” by illustrating how social media functionalities combine with users’ perceptions and expectations to shape affordances along distinct identity markers. underscoring that technological affordances do not result solely from design or materiality, our findings show how the affordances of social media appear (and are used) differently depending on one’s intersectional identity. references dix, a. (2009). human-computer interaction. in l. liu & m.t. ozsu (eds), encyclopedia of database systems (pp. 1327-1331). new york: springer us. literat, i., & brough, m. (2019). from ethical to equitable social media technologies: amplifying underrepresented youth voices in digital technology design. journal of media ethics 34(3), 132-145. livingstone, s., & sefton-green, j. (2016). the class: living and learning in the digital age. nyu press. massanari, a. (2017). # gamergate and the fappening: how reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. new media & society, 19(3), 329346. magnusson, e., & marecek, j. (2015). doing interview-based qualitative research. cambridge, ma: cambridge university press. nagy, p., & neff, g. (2015). imagined affordance: reconstructing a keyword for communication theory. social media+ society, 1(2), doi: 2056305115603385. noble, s. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york: nyu press. pew research center (2018, feb. 5). social media fact sheet. retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/social-media/ united states department of labor, bureau of labor statistics (2018). labor force statistics from the current population survey. retrieved from https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 driscoll, k., lingel, j., warfield, k., møller, k., markham, a. (2017, october 18-21). making sense of life in 2017 metaphors of the internet. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. making sense of life in 2017 metaphors of the internet panel consists of papers by: kevin driscoll university of virginia jessa lingel university of pennsylvania katie warfield kwantlen polytechnic university kristian møller it university of copenhagen annette n markham aarhus university in 1998, annette markham proposed a framework of the internet as a tool, as a place and as a way of being. in the introduction of her book “life online: researching real experience in virtual space” she wrote: “i wanted to know why people spent so much time online. i wondered what cyberspace meant to them, how it affected or changed their lives. i wanted to know how they were making sense of their experiences as they shifted between being in the physical world and being in these textual worlds created by the exchange of messages, where they could re-create their bodies, or leave them behind. ” in the 20 years since the publication of this research, various metaphors have helped us make sense of and explain our experiences with and in digital, web, internet-mediated, or technologically saturated contexts. cyberspace and the electronic frontier gave way to the information superhighway. the net became the world wide web, which morphed into social network sites, convergence culture and networked publics. as the internet has become more mobile and ubiquitous, it is predominantly explained as a way of being. studying the metaphors that are commonly used in scholarly, professional, legal and popular discourse can create important insights about the tropes of “truth” (burke 1945/1969), and about how people and groups make sense of their experience and the world. as lakoff & johnson (1980) remind us, each metaphor highlights certain aspects of situations and simultaneously obscures other alternatives. as various metaphors of the internet thrive or dwindle, these both illuminate and distort what we notice about different phenomena (morgan 1986/1997). “as our metaphorical conceptualizations of the term “internet” become more concrete,” markham wrote in 2003: “walls of meaning are constructed around us, reifying a box that we will be asking ourselves to think outside of in the future.” this panel brings together five short presentations that engage with the original metaphorical framework to examine various commonly invoked metaphors about networked technologies and publics, their conceptual and methodological implications, and how these change over time. we also critically examine how markham’s framework might remain a useful heuristic for categorizing experience or be extended and expanded. paper 1 examines the interplay of metaphor and memory among long-time internet users during times of breakdown and crisis. for long-time users, the internet has shifted over two decades from voluntary to compulsory, peripheral to central, marvelous to mundane. do people who witnessed these transitions make different sense of the internet than more recent adopters? in moments of conflict or injustice, some long-time users invoke a narrative of decline, harkening back to an idealized past internet, presumed to be more open, egalitarian, or exciting than the present. what can we learn from these expressions of loss? how might they illustrate the sense-making habits of long-time internet users? paper 2 also engages with shifts and changes in time, asking what the implications of predominant metaphors of internet are for how its egalitarian possibilities are invoked, resisted and experienced. the author compares early political metaphors of the internet to contemporary ones, contrasting the rhetoric of democracy with that of mobs and trolls. based on research with countercultural groups the author then turns to spatial metaphors of the internet as a means of fostering community and civic dialogue. although spatial metaphors have been critiqued as being reductive and naive to important differences in how geography asserts itself online, the author argues that a nuanced understanding of online space as hospitable to civic discourse can recuperate the democratic potential of life online. paper 3 challenges the prominent metaphorically laden concept of “platform vernacular” by examining a non-dominant platform vernacular among gender non-conforming tumblr users. it goes on to literally flesh out and spatially inflate the aspects of vernacular that focus on affordances and location. the author engages deeply with the metaphor of social media as place. the focus on the metaphor of place continues in paper 4, but we shift from the metaphoric framework as a lens through which to explore and explain people’s lived experience, and focus on the implications metaphors have for methods of studying the internet. the authors analyze three ethnographic methods (“walk-through”, “go-along” and “scrolling back”) that use metaphors of mobility as their organizing principle. critical discourse analysis shows how each method makes use of metaphors pertaining to both “media-as-tools” and “media-as-places”, and how these configure the methods to become more or less oriented towards flows of media use, negotiations of access, and media as mnemonic devices in everyday life as well as the research situation. paper 5 uses the metaphoric framework and the methods of critical metaphor analysis to study the rhetorical functions of the internet of things within the smart city discourse. the authors of this paper suggest conflicting perceptions of the internet of things, whereby it is framed in popular discourse as a way of being but implemented at the level of city infrastructures as a tool, or more specifically a conduit for information transmission. finally, we have a commitment from annette markham to read the papers in advance and chair the session. references burke. k. (1945/1969). four master tropes. in a grammar of motives. university of california press. lakoff, g., & johnson, m. (1980). metaphors we live by. chicago: university of chicago press. markham, a. (1998). life online: researching real experiences in virtual space. walnut creek, ca: altamira press, markham, a. 2003. metaphors reflecting and shaping the reality of the internet: tool, place, way of being. paper presented at the conference of aoir in toronto, canada, october 2003. available from: http://markham.internetinquiry.org/writing/markhamtpw.pdf morgan, g. (1986). images of organization. beverly hills: sage publications. chicago memory and metaphor: narratives of decline among long-time internet users kevin driscoll university of virginia in the late 1990s, metaphors functioned as sense-making devices for internet users experimenting with new forms of computer-mediated communication. building on her ethnographic work in life online (1998), annette markham identified three interrelated classes of metaphors in the discourses of net enthusiasts—tool, place, and way of being—each of which reflected a different orientation toward the socio-technical assemblage termed “the internet” (2003). twenty years later, the internet is receding into the background of everyday life, but the need for sense-making metaphors remains. the autobiographical micro-narratives of long-time users provide glimpses of metaphors in flux amid changing technical and political conditions. in first-person accounts circulating on social media, long-time internet users tend toward narratives of decline, nostalgia, and loss. markham developed her three-part metaphorical framework at a conjuncture in which the visibility of the internet in popular culture outpaced hands-on access for most americans. in 2001, approximately one-half of american adults reported accessing the internet but only a tiny minority reported subscribing to a home broadband service (pew research center, 2017). meanwhile, these same americans had been regaled for nearly a decade with stories of the internet as a technical marvel, economic opportunity, social revolution, and moral threat. a sample of time cover stories illustrates the extent to which the internet permeated everyday talk: from the “info highway” in 1993, to the “cyberporn” panic in 1995, dot-com “golden geeks” in 1996, and the “death of privacy” in 1997. beyond these sensational headlines, numerous stories circulated about friendships, romances, collaborations, and support groups forming on the net. with these narratives in the background, markham described her early experiences and expectations of the internet and its growing user population as “astounding” and “extraordinary” (markham, 1998, pp. 16–17). at the turn of the century, the internet seemed charged with unknown possibility. twenty years later, the sense of wonder that characterized early encounters with the internet appears scarce. with the increasing availability of wireless internet connections, broadband access is nearly universal across many different socio-economic segments of the u.s. population, particularly those that intersect with higher incomes, more education, or a white racial identity (pew research center, 2017; rainie, 2017). perhaps because of this high rate of adoption, many of the routine bureaucratic aspects of life in a post-industrial nation-state have shifted to the internet. in comparison to the fantastical multi-user environments that markham described in 1998, typical uses of the internet in 2017 seem quite dull: reading the news, solving a crossword puzzle, shopping for household goods, or arranging meetings with coworkers. furthermore, in popular media, the internet seems to oscillate unpredictably from the mundane to the menacing. the same platform used to file income taxes is said to facilitate waves of terrorism, harassment, fraud, and propaganda. returning to the time archive, we find alarming cover stories about the “secret web where drugs, porn and murder hide online” in 2013 and a failed e-government initiative described as a “nightmare” in 2014. what is striking about this recent sample, however, is how infrequently the internet is mentioned, a contrast that reflects the internet’s domestication. the net beats a quiet retreat into the quotidian. long-time users, that is, people who have accessed the internet routinely since 1997, are in a unique position relative to the transformation of the internet from ballyhoo to banality. while nearly all american adults have been exposed to ideas and arguments about the internet since the early 1990s, only long-time users may temper these narratives with first-hand experience. long-time users bore witness to several translations in the cultural position of the internet: from voluntary to compulsory, peripheral to central, marvelous to mundane. for the long-time user, the interleaving of computer-mediated communication and human society is neither taken-for-granted nor natural. and while these transitions unfolded over the course of many years, long-time users are only occasionally prompted to reflect on the changes they have experienced. it is in these moments of self-reflection that we find clues regarding the changing meaning of metaphors over the past two decades. this paper focuses on two types of discourses that implicitly invite long-time users to reflect on their experience of the internet over time: nostalgia and failure. in the first case, long-time users may feel inspired to share a personal recollection of the early net after encountering its representation in popular culture. these first-person narratives accumulate in social spaces on the web, from the popular press and youtube to niche messageboards dedicated to retrocomputing or fandom (e.g., the subreddit dedicated to halt and catch fire). the second type of discursive event follows moments of breakdown or crisis related to the internet itself. the specific provocations vary—from a mass-scale leak of personal data to the moral panic over “fake news”—but, again, we find first-person histories of the early net in circulation alongside news coverage of these events. in both the cases of nostalgia and failure, the narratives of long-time users depict the early net as a kind of golden age; an electronic eden in which users were free to play and experiment in relative safety. as one characteristic comment reads, “[this] brings back some fond memories. [back then,] the worst thing that would happen was that call waiting would knock me offline!” around the same time that markham was preparing life online, arthur herman published the idea of decline in western history, an intellectual history seeking to understand the common belief that western society is perpetually in decline, either through slow decay or by impending disaster (2014). herman argued that the tradition of “declinism” might be fundamental to modernity in the west, an inversion—but not a refutation—of the idea of progress. in his sweeping style, herman asserted, “every theory of progress has also contained a theory of decline” (p. 13). for our purposes, herman’s book provides a broader historical context for the long-time user who experienced the internet as a revolutionary way of being and now laments the passing of her salad days. in herman’s reading of european revolutions of the 19th and 20th century, the ecstasy of revolution is unsustainable; a momentary break followed by a return to the ordinary or, worse, the equal-and-opposite reaction of repression and violence. as long-time users grapple with the domestication of the internet, their metaphors must adapt. at the same time, we may wish to speculate about the experience of more recent adopters. does the internet still offer a sense of excitement and decline? or, was there a unique revolutionary moment in the internet’s past that is now beyond reach? references herman, a. (2014). the idea of decline in western history. free press. markham, a. n. (1998). life online: researching real experience in virtual space. walnut creek, ca: altamira press. markham, a. n. (2003). metaphors reflecting and shaping the reality of the internet: tool, place, way of being. presented at the 4th annual conference of the association of internet researchers (aoir), toronto, canada. pew research center. (2017, january 12). internet/broadband fact sheet. retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/ rainie, l. (2017, february 9). digital divides – feeding america. retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2017/02/09/digital-divides-feeding-america/ from democracy to populism: political metaphors of life online jessa lingel university of pennsylvania early narratives (from journalists, industry leaders, policy makers and academics) about the internet emphasized its democratic potential, where the web was imbued with rhetoric of individual choice, fostering tolerance and exposure to diversity. markham (1998) has pointed out the ways in which the internet has been conceptualized as a tool, and in a political narrative, early internet discourse positioned the web as a tool of democracy. these narratives emphasized democratic capacities of self-reliance (in terms of gaining knowledge about how to use digital technology), universal access to knowledge (or at least, universal to those with a modem), and tolerance (through exposure to diverse viewpoints). this hype can be (and indeed has been) critiqued for advancing hyper-individualist narratives that ignored experiences of race, gender and privilege (chun, 2006; nakamura, 2001), and for failing to recognize the ways that differences in geography and privilege can be sharpened rather than reduced by online connectivity (burrell, 2012). while some of these early promises have endured, particularly in neo-liberal narratives of self-promotion (marwick, 2013), recent political turmoil such as the 2016 presidential election has led technophiles as well as technophobes to ask whether the web has delivered on promise of tolerance, selfdetermination and diversity (kreiss, 2016). given concerns of algorithmic sorting and extremist rhetoric, has the web in fact delivered a populist public over a democratic tool? this paper begins by characterizing early and contemporary political metaphors of the internet, contrasting rhetoric of democracy with contemporary outcomes of populism. for the purposes of this extended abstract, i have condensed this analysis into the table below, noting that my thinking on populism has been shaped by work from laclau, mouffe, and panizza (in panizza, 2008). when we think about how the web was initially characterized as a tool of democratic progress (e.g. in projects like one laptop per child, see warchauer and ames, 2010), this connection leverages association with the internet as a diy tool for self-improvement and autodidactic learning that can moreover foster tolerance by connecting users to people across the globe who are fundamentally different. when we think about the political implication of the internet in 2017, the (often panicked) rhetoric that emerges highlights the extremism of content, the hypersegmentation of publics and the uneven virality of amplifying some voices over others. democracy populism elected representatives leader as demagogue presumed equality between citizens ethic of binaries and relativism faith in system rejection/mockery of system web as promised web as delivered diy ethic of self-reliance, individual creativity connections and content determined or facilitated by algorithms geography irrelevant geography reinforced, both in terms of access and hyper-local content exposure to diverse ideas, backgrounds hyper segmentation and siloes with these diverging narratives in mind, i compare longstanding metaphors of online citizenship as democratic with contemporary debates on mobs and trolls (phillips, 2011). i argue that these disparate symbols can help parse complex shifts in general expectations of what the internet is meant to do for its many online publics. much of what i’ve just described relies on characterizations and hype, which risks eliding important nuances of life online. trolls have always existed on the internet (dibbell, 1998) and life online can still be and often is wonderfully democratic. by sketching these contrasting views, my goal is not to polarize further the politics of internet discourse, but rather to tease out the underlying logics of the online publics that have emerged as populist, and to think about possibilities for recuperating their democratic potential. drawing on fieldwork with countercultural groups who rely on the internet for a sense of togetherness, i discuss how countercultural communities have worked to maintain a sense of shared identity among a diverse group of constituents, socio-technical models they've developed for mitigating internal conflict, and tensions between mainstream platforms and marginalized identities. in particular, i propose a return to thinking about online life as a form of place-making. it’s significant that markham (1998) described the internet as place rather than space cultural geographers (e.g. massey, 2005; tuan, 1977) have conceptualized the former as a physical location and the latter as a convergence of material setting, social context with a temporal history. spatial metaphors for the internet have been problematic for as long as they’ve been popular. from web sites to page visits, our language for talking about online interactions is heavily indebted to metaphors of space. critiques of these metaphors arose almost as quickly as the technologies themselves (e.g. druick, 1995; harrison & dourish, 1996; stefik, 1997) but they endure in ways that have consequences for thinking about how online publics form and embrace or reject certain political relationships. looking at the tensions surrounding countercultural publics and online place-making, i draw out possibilities for thinking about how groups have developed practices and policies for hospitable dialogue. life online will always be contentious, no platform can be all things to all people, and no set of policies can ensure peaceful interactions all of the time. but in evaluating changing metaphors for participation in online publics, it becomes possible to reimagine the web we want, less as a political tool as more as a place for dialogue and diversity. references burrell, j. (2012). invisible users: youth in the internet cafés of urban ghana. cambridge, ma: mit press. chun, w. h. k. (2006). control and freedom: power and paranoia in the age of fiber optics. cambridge, ma: mit press. dibbell, j. (1998). my tiny life: crime and passion in a virtual world. new york, ny: holt. druick, z. (1995). the information superhighway, or the politics of a metaphor. bad subjects, 18. retrieved from http://bad.eserver.org/issues/1995/18/druck.html graham, m. (2013). geography/internet: ethereal alternate dimensions of cyberspace or grounded augmented realities. the geographical journal. retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2166874 harrison, s., & dourish, p. (1996). re-place-ing space: the roles of place and space in collaborative systems. in proc. of cscw ’96. retrieved from http://www.dourish.com/publications/1996/cscw96-place.pdf kreiss, d. (2016). social media did not give us trump and it is not weakening democracy. culture digitally. retrieved from http://culturedigitally.org/2016/11/social_media_trump/ markham, a. n. (1998). life online: researching real experience in virtual space. lanham: altamira. marwick, a. e. (2013). status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. new haven, ct: yale university press. massey, d. (2005). for space. thousand oaks, ca: sage. nakamura, l. (2001). race in/for cyberspace: identity tourism and racial passing on the internet. reading digital culture, 226-235. panizza, f. (ed.) (2008). populism and the mirror of democracy. new york, ny: verso press. phillips, w. (2015). this is why we can't have nice things: mapping the relationship between online trolling and mainstream culture. cambridge, ma: mit press. stefik, m. (1997). internet dreams: archetypes, myths, and metaphors. cambridge, ma: mit press. tuan, y. f. (1977). space and place: the perspective of experience. u of minnesota press. warschauer, m., & ames, m. (2010). can one laptop per child save the world's poor?. journal of international affairs, 33-51. “it’s just a different circle of friends one place or another”: affordance hacking and the construction of place via trans selfies on tumblr katie warfield kwantlen polytechnic university sloppy, wet and tactile metaphors abound in annette markham’s book life online (2003). chinese food boxes splayed in her office, what terri senft describes as “computer butt” after eight hours in front of a screen, the physical discomfort of waiting for a response from an awkward interview subject, the tossing and catching of virtual balls and eating of virtual ice creams. i find incredible parallels between markham’s material-affective descriptions because after working with young people who share images of their bodies on social media platforms for over three years, i see the same importance of the metaphors of place and being—what i’m aligning with matter and affect—even today, 20 years later online. and the thing that perhaps holds most true to me between annette’s work and mine is not the distinctiveness of these concepts, but rather their messy, slippery, wet and entangled nature. being online is not a matter of hard edges and clear boundaries; it’s a matter of slippery squishiness, boundary and border crossing, entanglement and chaos, and inversions and instability. in this paper i pick up on annette’s metaphor of place, adopted by herself and her participants, to describe being online. i want to staple my chapter here onto her metaphor, but i also want to rework it a bit. i want to suggest that place, when it comes to social media for the group of trans people i worked with last year, is constructed via— and again to use markham’s words—a combination of social media tools and ways of being. in other words place, tools, and ways of being are all entangled and inseparable. the impetus for this idea came as a result of a lengthy open-ended questionnaire completed by 62 transgender and gender non-conforming users who regularly post selfies to tumblr. the metaphor of place came up again and again for this group of people, when it came to explaining the proliferation of their selfies on tumblr as opposed to other social media platforms. the sense of place emerged as a sweet entanglement of the embodied experience of these particular users amidst the particularities of the supportive platform culture, and through the creative use of tumblr’s particularly malleable affordances, which led to my participants describing tumblr as a comfortable and safe place. while i deeply want to share the narratives of place described by my participants, i am attentive and cautious of my own position as a cis-gender female researcher who is attempting to narrate the lived experiences of this cohort of transgender and gender non-conforming tumblr users. i draw from theory on transgeographies to discuss some of the particular lived experiences of the participants of my study. transgeographies places special attention on the lived embodied experiences, often via narratives, of transgender and gender non-conforming people’s embodied experiences of space and place (browne, 2010). although transgeographies mostly narrates the experiences of physical built spaces, as mentioned, the narratives of my participants described tumblr very much as a built space—and here i draw on the words of the participants—a “safe space”, a “place”, and “home”. alongside quotes of the lived experiences of users, i entangle the writings of transgeography theorists to describe the embodied and experience of tumblr as space in order to attend to the spatial and experiential elements that gave rise to such metaphors of place. and so, alongside the quotes of the lived experiences of users, i entangle the writings of transgeography theorists to show how the experiences of my participants working in and through social media places, are extremely similar to the experiences of trans folks working in and through the built spaces within transgeography theory. in other words, working with the narratives of gender non-conforming people we can see that discourses on gender, materiality (via affordances), and affect (via practices of platform culture) are first, not neutral phenomena and second, trans-constituted working in a networked, slippery and messy, entangled way to enable or disable people’s potential to exist in online places just as they work together to enable or disable existence in offline places. findings the participants of my research described their bodily and affective interaction with a combination of the platform affordances (hackability of the affordances) and the platform culture were primarily what contributed to the appeal of tumblr as a comfortable and safe place to be and share their images online. affordance hacking what is specific about tumblr’s design and what my participants mentioned again and again as appealing is the malleability of the design interface as opposed to interfaces that offer little malleability for play, creativity, and what i call “affordance hacking”. instead of terming creative use of affordances “misuse”—which privileges the platform and platform designers as the ones defining how an affordance ought to be used, i suggest we conceive of this process as affordance hacking wherein the participants of this study often creatively and innovatively used affordances subversively and against their intended design to produce platform vernaculars. affordance hacking describes the act of creatively and intentionally re-appropriating interface affordances for specific needs. platform culture the platform culture on tumblr should be seen not simply as the congregation of people who support certain ways of being in a static environment, but rather the platform culture emerges with and alongside the practices of affordance hacking and creative use and misuse of the platform. conclusion in this paper i work through experiential quotes that describe this slipperiness where young trans and gender non-conforming people describe communities via the affordance hacking (material-discursive), community by their emotional support (discursive-affective), and the creative platform vernaculars that have been adopted by the group like reblogging selfies (material-affective). the metaphors that markham names as ways of life, tools, and place and as being messy and muddled and entangled in life online 20 years ago aren’t that much different from the experiences of my participants, and perhaps, transgeographies and trans theory, precisely because of their intimate and rapt attention on the entanglement of affect, materiality, and discourses, can offer insight into how we should study the experience of any life online. references browne, k., nash, c. j., & hines, s. (2010). introduction: towards trans geographies. gender, place & culture, 17, 5, 573–577. gibbs, m., meese, j., arnold, m., nansen, b., & carter, m. (2014). # funeral and instagram: death, social media, and platform vernacular. information, communication & society, 18, 3, 255–268. gibson, j. j. (1986). the ecological approach to visual perception (1st ed.). united states: erlbaum, lawrence associates. markham, a. (2003). metaphors reflecting and shaping the reality of the internet: tool, place, way of being. paper presented at aoir, toronto, canada, october 2003. gillespie, t., jordan, t., mcveigh-schultz, j., & neff, g. (2012). affordances, technical agency, and the politics of technologies of cultural production. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 56, 2, 299–313. walking through, going along, scrolling back: metaphors of mobility in contemporary media ethnographic methods kristian møller it university of copenhagen introduction conceptualized as a space, the internet develops architectures, boundaries, and multiple entry and exit points. (markham, 2003: 7) there are different ways of making and remembering routes, and there is variety in how what might be called the ‘aspect’ of the body is formed: exploring, wandering, foraging or approaching a goal, for example. (lee & ingold, 2006: 75) since life online (markham, 1998) came out 20 years ago, it’s object of study has transformed and expanded to such a degree that the category of “online” on its own seems less and less analytically relevant. though more and more aspects of everyday life can be said to become mediatized (jansson, 2013), and media weaving ever more tightly into the fabric of everyday, it is not the case that they have simply disappeared out of sight. personal struggles of negotiating different social digital spheres as contexts collapse (marwick & boyd, 2014) in new and surprising ways is one example of media being anything but invisible. here it seems valuable to revisit markham’s exploration of the metaphors used to describe the internet, that is, as a “tool”, a “place” and a “way-of-being” (markham, 2003). markham points out that the metaphors are complexly related and “both invoke and foster divergent ways of making sense of computer-mediated communication.” (ibid.: 2) metaphorical configurations not simply descriptive and explanatory, but part of the sense-making processes that constitutive the social impact of a given media technology. whereas markham’s interest in the book drifts towards how everyday lives with media are made sense of, this presentation turns towards media methodologies. in social constructivist epistemology there is no meaningful way to understand meaning making without taking into account the perspective from which it is constructed. in other words, methods make sense with metaphors too. purpose and approach the presentation focuses on media ethnographic methods that use metaphors of mobility as their organizing principle. this reflects the influence of the mobility turn in social geography on studies of media. as the second introductory quote shows, metaphors of mobility allows for the qualities of a given embodied orientation towards a media environment to be described. place-making with media is thus not only approached through metaphors of architecture and boundaries, but also through styles and purposes of orientation. (jørgensen, 2016: 42) the purpose of the presentation, then, is to expose how each method opens up different aspects of materiality, embodiment and interaction. i focus on three methods: “walk-through” (light, el. al., 2016), “media go-along” (jørgensen, 2016) and “scrolling back” (robards & lincoln, 2016; forthcoming). through critical discourse analysis (wodak & fairclough, 2004) i examine how each method makes use of metaphors pertaining to both “media-as-tools” and “media-as-places”. this sheds light on what aspects of media materiality and symbolic meaning that the different metaphorical configurations allow the researcher to become sensitive to. the metaphor of mobility in media research the mobility turn in human geography has deeply impacted media ethnography. becoming sensitive to mobilities is among other things to acknowledge that meaning arises in the complex interplay between bodies experiencing, dwelling in, and moving through spaces. in media research this works both on a metaphorical level, to describe media interface interactions, and concretely, when personal mobile media are used while bodies traverse built environments. broadening the concept of mobility to include navigations of media environments, makes available the concepts’ analytical potentials to many different levels of media analysis. one may then examine the ways in which bodies are mobile with media technology at hand. urry and büscher identify the mobile research entity as “practices of seeing, imagining, remembering, formulating places” (urry, 2009: 110). material: the “walk-through”, “go-along” and “scrolling back” methods the walk-through is a “technique to systematically and forensically step through various stages of app registration and entry, everyday use, and discontinuation of use.” (light, et. al., 2016: 1) thus the app focuses on the examination of media materiality and does so by integrating into the description the flows of experience and the particular embodied perspective they pertain to. questions of perspective and materiality are also central in the media-go-along method, in which “research participants give verbal and visual tours, framed by the researcher’s discursively constituted invitations for orientation.” (jørgensen, 2016: 32) with the mobility metaphors of going along and touring, the aspects of interactivity between researcher and participant as that of an insider and an outsider negotiating access is highlighted. similarly, the scroll back method centers on tour-giving, but does so in relation to media that provide an “activity stream” or “timeline” that allows the user and researcher to scroll back in personal time and biographical representation. the scroll back method also centres the participant not just as research subject, but as active co-analyst in the research process (robards & lincoln 2016). scrolling back connects the digital labor that it takes to go back, take a trip down memory lane. the “backtracking” of movement brings the person into vistas of environments that through their resemblance with the contexts in which personal experience has unfolded, become mnemonic devices that spur storytelling and memory work (kuhn, 2010). conclusion and perspectives by way of the three cases, it is clear that methods are configured through use of metaphors to become more or less oriented towards flows of of media use, negotiations of access, and media as mnemonic devices in everyday life as well as the research situation. in light of mobile media integrating into “ways-of-being” (markham, 2003). finally, broadening the scope, this paper reflects on how some difficulties of working with ‘big data’ may be thought of as a metaphorical crisis. references jansson, a. (2013). mediatization and social space: reconstructing mediatization for the transmedia age. communication theory, 23, 279–296. jørgensen, k. m. (2016). the media go-along: researching mobilities with media at hand. mediekultur: journal of media and communication research, 32, 60, 18– 18. kuhn, a. (2010). memory texts and memory work: performances of memory in and with visual media. memory studies, 3, 4, 298–313. lee, j., & ingold, t. (2006). fieldwork on foot: perceiving, routing, socializing. in s. coleman, & p. collins (eds.), locating the field: space, place and context in anthropology (pp. 67-85). oxford: berg publishers.light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2016). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society. markham, a. n. (1998). life online: researching real experience in virtual space. altamira press. markham, a. 2003. metaphors reflecting and shaping the reality of the internet: tool, place, way of being. paper presented at aoir, toronto, canada, october 2003. marwick, a., & boyd, d. (2014). networked privacy: how teenagers negotiate context in social media. new media & society, 1–17. robards, b. and lincoln, s. (2016) making it ‘facebook official’: reflecting on romantic relationships through sustained facebook use. social media + society. robards, b. and lincoln, s. (forthcoming) uncovering longitudinal life narratives: scrolling back on facebook. qualitative research. urry, j., & büscher, m. (2009). mobile methods and the empirical. european journal of social eory, 12, 1, 99-116. wodak, r., & fairclough, n. (2004). critical discourse analysis. qualitative research practice: concise paperback edition, 185-202. life in the smart city: a metaphor analysis of predominant discourses around the internet of things annette n markham aarhus university introduction metaphors matter. what are the predominant metaphors shaping our experience of urban life in the 21st century, particularly as it involves so-called ‘smart’ city technologies and even more specifically, “internet of things?” this paper critically analyses the metaphors used in eu policy documents to consider the possibilities and trajectories embedded in the internet of things discourses. like others in this panel, this paper builds from markham’s (2003) framework “tool, place, and way of being” to explore smart city discourse. by looking closely at how people describe the internet (and related technologies) metaphorically, we can better understand where conflicts of meaning and policy arise. we can readily identify possible metaphor conflicts in recent debates. for example, if the proponents of net neutrality describe the internet as a place but the opponents describe the internet as a service, these provide competing domains for argument. if the eu considers digital data to be an extension of the self, and the us describes data as units of information exchanged for social media services, whose definition should be the foundation for international legal frameworks? if a person conceptualizes their actions online to be using a tool, but facebook calls it sharing, how might these differences cause conflicts when it comes to privacy? many metaphors compete for attention in smart city and iot discourses (c.f., nientied, 2016). in 2003, annette markham extended her 1998 framework, invoking classic language from metaphor and rhetorical theory: what paths of action and response are encouraged through the use of particular discursive frames? what paths are cut off or discouraged? our discursive choices in talking about internet and communication technologies have actual and meaningful consequences on the shape and perception of these technologies. more importantly, as our discursive frames become more embedded in everyday language, alternatives are shut out, cut off, and left behind. she suggested that as we get more embedded in digital technologies, or as they become more ubiquitous, it increasingly becomes a way of being. “it is a transparent state wherein the self, information technology, everyday life, and other are vitally connected, co-existent. technology does not hold a position as object outside the agency of the human. rather, the categories are collapsed, to varying degrees” (markham, 2003, p. 11). within this metaphor, everyday situations are “intertwined with their various technologies” and people “tend to experience life and technology on the same plane, without making vast distinctions between the two or by conceptualizing life as essentially mediated by technology… .in a sense, this category could be marked by its absence as a conscious frame of reference” (p. 11). in this paper, we argue that smart city discourse is deeply invested in not just using the metaphor of way of being, but promoting this as the predominant way the internet should be experienced. framing internet of things through the metaphor of way of being neutralizes and naturalizes it, soothing potential critique before it is voiced. what behaviors, relations, and values are encouraged or discouraged when city leaders or international governing agencies like the eu commission talk about the internet of things? what definitions are being invoked when people use the phrase “internet of things” or its acronym “iot?” what definitions are implied or stated directly when using iot as an embedded metaphor within larger metaphors associated with smart cities or the more recent shift, smart and agile cities? once we identify patterns at the direct level of discourse (where the metaphors are used directly in sentences), we can then explore more deeply some of the underlying metaphors, which operate indirectly (are not used directly in the sentence). on the surface, the metaphor “smart” city may be brushed aside as a buzzterm, but it functions rhetorically to indicate that the city is like a living being with a brain that is capable of cognitive thought that has reasonably high intellectual value. at the “deep structure” level of discourse, as smith & eisenberg (1987) note, root metaphors operate. these “rich summaries of interpretive frameworks… are often unobtrusive with regard to their frequency of usage in ordinary discourse” (pp. 368-9). for example, the root metaphor “infrastructures are organisms,” is not something we say in a typical conversation, but we reference it by other phrases and it guides our thinking even as we are mostly unconscious of its presence. we may say “the economy is healthy,” “the city is resilient,” or use the terms agile and flexible to indicate the wellbeing of a body, which invokes an underlying metaphor that the city is a living being. many conversations around iot never define it. we see efforts to combat this continuing ambiguity with clearer definitions (greengard, 2015) or popular discussions of metaphors (“apotheosis of connectivity,” “reality transducer,” “omniscience engine,” “global neural network,” and “hivemind platform”) that could potentially be helpful for understanding iot (danaher, 2016). methodology and materials for analysis this study is grounded in rhetorical criticism methods of conducting metaphor analysis. it draws on classic conceptual metaphor frameworks (e.g., lakoff & johnson, 1980; reddy, 1979; schön, 1979), all of whom use different methods, specifically, but offer useful parameters for looking for figure/ground relations in texts. in this paper, we are examining smart city discourse over the past decade, primarily within the eu context. we have a strong corpus of policy documents, regional meeting transcripts, journalistic reports, and conference programs. we use rhetorical criticism methods to analyze texts (e.g., foss, 1992; gozzi, 1999; smith & eisenberg, 1987). preliminary findings our preliminary findings show that although citizens are being encouraged to live within a framework of the internet and iot as a “way of being,” most internet of things metaphors within policy texts frame internet as a “tool”: a swift conduit for data transmission. this functionalist, almost mechanistic metaphor is at conflict with the more unobtrusive, malleable metaphor way of being. this research adds analytical depth to more anecdotal studies of metaphors around smart cities, to explore potential conflicts between surface and root level frameworks for understanding. we believe it will help us understand why iot discourse doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to laypersons and city planners alike. references danaher, j. (2016). five metaphors for the `internet of things. blog. accessed 28 february 2017 from: https://algocracy.wordpress.com/2016/03/05/fivemetaphors-for-the-internet-of-things/ foss, s. (1989/2009). rhetorical criticism: exploration and practices. waveland press. greengard, s. (2015). the internet of things. mit press. gozzi, r. (1999). the power of metaphor in the age of electronic media. hampton press. lakoff, g. & johnson, m. (1980). metaphors we live by. university of chicago press. nientied, p. (2016). metaphor and urban studies-a crossover, theory and a case study of ss rotterdam. city, territory and architecture, 3, 21. reddy, m. j. (1979/1993). the conduit metaphor: a case of frame conflict in our language about language. in a. ortony (ed.), metaphor and thought, 2nd edition (pp. 138-164). cambridge university press. schön, d. e. (1979/1993). generative metaphor: a perspective on problem-setting in social policy. in a. ortony (ed.), metaphor and thought, 2nd edition (pp. 137163). cambridge university press. smith, r., & eisenberg, e. (1987). conflict at disneyland: a root metaphor analysis. communication monographs, 54, 4, 367-380. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): bitman, n. (2020, october). 'don't create an online image that you can't keep up outside': mediating invisible communicative disabilities on social network sites. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 'don't create an online image that you can’t keep up outside': mediating invisible communicative disabilities on social network sites nomy bitman department of communication and journalism, the hebrew university of jerusalem internet use among disabled people has long been studied in the context of mediated communication, assistive technologies, social inclusion, and participation (alper, 2017; ellis & kent, 2011), with a focus on social network sites (henceforth, sns) (alper & haller, 2017). across these studies emerges a techno-optimist discourse, marked by a prevalent assumption that the internet is empowering and liberating for disabled people. this assumption is largely based on the user's lack of physical body online which ostensibly results in a split between material and online identities and presentations of self (baym & markham, 2009; turkle, 1995). this assumption is problematic because it overlooks, perhaps due to a reproduction of ableist power relations, critical analyses of disability as a distinct identity category which suffers from social inequality (goggin, 2017; nakamura, 2002). this ableism is reflected in the perception of disability as a barrier to people’s authentic expression offline, and a corresponding idealization of the internet as a conduit that enables users to 'leave the disability behind' (bowker & tuffin, 2002). ableism in this context implies that disability should be ignored, rather than serve as a natural component of one’s online self. it has profound implications for the mediation of disability to able-bodied users. this ongoing study addresses that gap by examining how disabled users mediate their lived experience on social media. specifically, it explores the conscious, narrativebased decision-making process through which they create online personas. since the exposure of disability on media can lead to stigmatization (bitman & john, 2019), i focus specifically on the understudied context of invisible disabilities that are clinically considered as related to communication. these types of disability can be potentially concealed offline, but they are especially “manageable” on visually-dominant sns platforms, thus providing a fruitful perspective on how disabled individuals actively create an online self. through a process of purposive sampling, i recruited 11 stutterers, 7 high-functioning autistics, and 11 hard of hearing individuals, all of whom have active sns profiles, by contacting relevant national organizations, community leaders and past interviewees. i conducted 31 in-depth interviews and collected 7 diaries documenting interviewees' sns use. both interview transcripts and diaries were analyzed thematically. findings suggest that individuals’ personal relationship with their disability indirectly shaped perceptions of their social environment and influenced how they performed their disabled identity online and offline. thus, interviewees who related positively to their disability, both as an individual identity and as a membership in a community, often had a more diverse social environment online, that included both able-bodied and disabled friends. as a result, they expressed a more realistic, complex, and honest performance of disability. for example, such interviewees would post personal notes highlighting nuances of discrimination in their everyday lives. conversely, interviewees who perceived disability as a hurdle in everyday interactions with able-bodied people, tended to avoid sharing their disability online due to a perception that sns are mostly constituted by able-bodied people. the combination of personal discomfort and its projection on the digital social environment resulted in creating and maintaining online personas more akin to those of able-bodied users. sns friends from 'the offline world' often made disabled users feel subjected to social surveillance. rather than experiencing freedom from social stigmatization, many interviewees felt that they had to 'pass' as able-bodied communicators in their online expression. stutterers are a case in point. generally, stutterers tended to have an ambivalent relationship with the disability label, certainly more so than autistics and hard of hearing users. falsely perceived as able to control speech disfluency (st. pierre, 2013), the struggle of this group is often minimized. since they face negative social feedback about their speech disfluency, many stutterers feel obliged to assume a quiet and introverted demeanor, which leads to frustration about their inability to express their true personality. although the dominance of the written word makes sns ostensibly accessible for stutterers, i found that “authenticity” posed a barrier. interviewees described a pressure to align their online persona and communicative style with their offline one, forcing them to craft a more introverted version of themselves. as explained by simon: "when your disability is invisible, you can be whoever you want in social media; whether it is the authentic you or just a posture. but at the same time, you know that when you're 'outside' you have to keep maintaining that posture, which may be impossible". this authenticity barrier was intensified given a common recognition of sns, facebook in particular, as media environments that either idealize disabled life (as reflected in the 'supercrip' theme which highlights the extraordinary achievements and dispositions of disabled people) or victimize it (as reflected in the theme of the disabled person who unjustly 'pretends to be miserable'). thus, users with an invisible communicative disability are faced with a double bind: the demand for authenticity limits their online persona to what people recognize as their physical attributes; at the same time, what is considered as 'authentic' by general snss' able-bodied users is informed by dichotomous representations that fail to reflect the complex lived experience of disability. by considering the social and material aspects of social media platforms, and the communicative difficulties and opportunities stemming from online and offline visibility, this research challenges the still dominant binary of dis/abled bodies, and offers a fluid understanding of the performance of disability on sns. challenging prevailing conceptions of the internet as accessible, empowering and liberating, this study suggests that the mediation of lived experiences of disability is limited by ableist conceptions of the digital sphere. this research thus contributes to the theoretical understanding of disability performance on social media as part of a wider discussion on online identity construction. references alper, m. (2017). giving voice: mobile communication, disability, and inequality. cambridge, ma: mit press. alper, m., & haller, b. (2017). social media use and mediated sociality among individuals with communication disabilities in the digital age. in ellis, k., & kent, m. (eds.), disability and social media: global perspectives (pp. 133-145). new york, ny: routledge. baym, n. k., & markham, a. n. (2009). introduction: making smart choices on shifting ground. in a. n. markham & n. k. baym (eds.). internet inquiry: conversations about method (pp. vii-xix). thousand oaks, ca: sage. bowker, n., & tuffin, k. (2002). disability discourses for online identities. disability & society, 17(3), 327-344. bitman, n., & john, n. a. (2019). deaf and hard of hearing smartphone users: intersectionality and the penetration of ableist communication norms. journal of computer-mediated communication, 24(2), 56-72. ellis, k., & kent, m. (2011). disability and new media. new york, ny: routledge. goggin, g. (2017). disability and digital inequalities: rethinking digital divides with disability theory. in m. ragnedda & g. w. muschert (eds.) theorizing digital divides (pp. 69-80). london, uk: routledge. nakamura, l. (2002). cybertypes: race, ethnicity, and identity on the internet. new york, ny: routledge. pierre, j. s. (2013). the construction of the disabled speaker: locating stuttering in disability studies. in c. eagle (ed.) literature, speech disorders, and disability: talking normal (pp. 17-31). new york, ny: routledge. turkle, s. (1995). life on the screen: identity in the age of the internet. new york, ny: simon and shuster. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): dehghan, ehsan. moon, brenda. keller, tobias. graham, timothy. bruns, axel, and angus, daniel. (2020, october). investigating bots and coordinated influence campaigns in twitter discussions of the 2019-20 iran protests. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. investigating bots and coordinated influence campaigns in twitter discussions of the 2019-20 iran protests ehsan dehghan digital media research centre, queensland university of technology brenda moon digital media research centre, queensland university of technology tobias keller digital media research centre, queensland university of technology timothy graham digital media research centre, queensland university of technology axel bruns digital media research centre, queensland university of technology daniel angus digital media research centre, queensland university of technology introduction twitter is a vital platform for organizing, coordinating, and amplifying voices during protests all around the world, especially in non-democratic countries (tufekci 2017). yet, not only does this platform allow minorities and protesters to have a voice and be heard, but also to spread propaganda, sow discord, and crowd out genuine voices – sometimes even through the use of social bots (shao et al. 2018). although twitter is a globally used platform for protest movements, many studies focus on english-speaking and democratic countries representing the so-called west. only a very few studies focus on the middle east and, if so, limit their investigation to the english content (e.g. featherman 2015; thieltges et al. 2018). we overcome this research gap and investigate the persian-, english-, and arabicspeaking actors and content during twitter discussions of the 2019-20 protests in iran. in november 2019, a sudden increase in fuel prices triggered a series of protests spreading to 21 iranian cities. although the protests started in reaction to the price hike, demands and slogans soon took an anti-regime turn, and some protests led to violent riots. the internet was shut down for over 100 hours, and different sources estimate the number of fatalities between 300 (amnesty international 2019) and 1500 (reuters 2019). this work-in-progress paper examines the first-hand accounts and wider perspectives involved in the discussions of the protests on twitter. the particularities of the iranian context both online and offline make this a significant and timely investigation into the interrelationship of social media and democracy in this unique context. our study investigates the composition, themes, and discourses involved in the complex domestic and international tensions in the twitter discussion of the 2019-20 protests in iran. given the increasing debate and attention to misinformation campaigns and the increasing identification of bots originating from iran and saudi arabia by social media platforms (france-presse 2019; owen jones 2020; roth 2019), we first map the twittersphere revolving around the iran protests and detect key clusters (rq1), and, second, focus on the evidence of the presence of bots, bot networks, and coordinated misinformation campaigns and political astroturfing (keller et al. 2019) in these clusters (rq2). method we collected tweets discussing iran protests using a range of keywords and hashtags, in persian, english, and arabic. in total, 5,560,247 tweets were collected from 757,927 accounts, between 13/11/2019 and 19/01/2020. we relied on botometer to detect social bots within this dataset (e.g. varol et al. 2017). botometer is a machine learning algorithm that detects accounts that behave or look similar to known suspicious accounts (davis et al. 2016; yang et al. 2019). the tool has been used to study political discussions from a variety of global contexts (e.g. broniatowski et al. 2018; keller and klinger 2019; shao et al. 2018). we manually reviewed a subset of the account classifications to ensure the accuracy of botometer in our context. to answer rq1, we visualised the retweet network. we then identified the largest 20 clusters and qualitatively investigated the twitter profiles of the top users (highest degree) in each cluster to identify its political position. to answer rq2, we focus on the bot scores from botometer to identify those clusters in the retweet network that show suspiciously high levels of automated accounts. findings our investigation of the retweet network (figure 1) indicates strong homophilous networks of users formed around ideological, political, and discursive interests. these clusters in the network reproduce the linguistic, regional, and political affiliations of users discussing iran protests. for instance, there are distinct clusters formed around retweets by pro-regime accounts, anti-regime groups such as the supporters of the pahlavi dynasty, the militant anti-regime organisation mek, reformists, journalists and news organisations, and users from various arabic-speaking countries. figure 1: retweet network showing distinct clustering tendencies our preliminary results indicate a strong presence of bots in two of the largest clusters (figure 2). botometer assigns a ‘botness score’ between 0 (human) and 1 (bot) to each account it assesses. while most ordinary accounts received botness scores of 0.3 or below, figure 2 shows that two clusters in the network contain an unusually high proportion of accounts with scores of 0.5 or higher. interestingly, these clusters reflect antagonistic political affiliations—one consists mainly of pro-regime iranian accounts (23,755 accounts), the other of anti-regime accounts tweeting in arabic (14,052 accounts). figure 2: botness scores for the 20 largest clusters. an arabic-tweeting cluster (red) and a pro-iranian regime cluster (orange) show suspiciously high botness scores discussion and future steps the next steps in this study will be to extend this analysis to the networks of @mentions and @replies, each of which reveals different dynamics. we will also use computational discourse analysis to examine the topics and themes discussed by each of the major clusters in the network, to investigate the dynamics of this complex interaction environment. this study enhances our knowledge of the persian, arabic, and english-speaking actors and communities taking part in the public debate on iran protests. preliminary results indicate the presence of several communities, each of which represents the discussion from its own discursive positions. two of the clusters—interestingly each with hyperpartisan political positions—show a high level of automated activity. such results have direct implications for democratic projects in the region, showing the presence and spread of state-sponsored coordinated activities online. the broader findings from this study will therefore also be valuable for understanding digital activism, protests, and political communication in authoritarian and semi-authoritarian contexts. references amnesty international. 2019. “iran’s authorities carrying out vicious post-protest crackdown.” amnesty international. retrieved february 27, 2020 (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/12/iran-thousands-arbitrarilydetained-and-at-risk-of-torture-in-chilling-post-protest-crackdown/). broniatowski, david a., amelia m. jamison, sihua qi, lulwah alkulaib, tao chen, adrian benton, sandra c. quinn, and mark dredze. 2018. “weaponized health communication: twitter bots and russian trolls amplify the vaccine debate.” american journal of public health 108(10):1378–84. davis, clayton a., onur varol, emilio ferrara, alessandro flammini, and filippo menczer. 2016. “botornot: a system to evaluate social bots.” proceedings of the 25th international conference companion on world wide web www ’16 companion 273–74. featherman, chris. 2015. discourses of ideology and identity: social media and the iranian election protests. new york ; london: routledge, taylor & francis group. france-presse, agence. 2019. “twitter blocks accounts linked to saudi ‘state-backed’ manipulation effort.” the guardian, december 20. keller, franziska b., david schoch, sebastian stier, and junghwan yang. 2019. “political astroturfing on twitter: how to coordinate a disinformation campaign.” political communication 1–25. keller, tobias r., and ulrike klinger. 2019. “social bots in election campaigns: theoretical, empirical, and methodological implications.” political communication 36(1):171–89. owen jones, marc. 2020. “saudi arabia’s bot army flourishes as twitter fails to tame the beast.” middle east eye. retrieved february 27, 2020 (http://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/despite-twitter-culls-riyadhsdisinformation-network-still-going-strong). reuters. 2019. “special report: iran’s leader ordered crackdown on unrest ‘do whatever it takes to end it.’” reuters, december 23. roth, yoel. 2019. “information operations on twitter: principles, process, and disclosure.” retrieved february 27, 2020 (https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/information-ops-ontwitter.html). shao, chengcheng, giovanni luca ciampaglia, onur varol, kai-cheng yang, alessandro flammini, and filippo menczer. 2018. “the spread of low-credibility content by social bots.” nature communications 9(1):4787. thieltges, andree, orestis papakyriakopoulos, juan carlos medina serrano, and simon hegelich. 2018. “effects of social bots in the iran-debate on twitter.” arxiv:1805.10105 [cs]. tufekci, zeynep. 2017. twitter and tear gas: the power and fragility of networked protest. new haven ; london: yale university press. varol, onur, emilio ferrara, clayton a. davis, filippo menczer, and alessandro flammini. 2017. “online human-bot interactions: detection, estimation, and characterization.” arxiv:1703.03107 [cs]. yang, kai-cheng, onur varol, clayton a. davis, emilio ferrara, alessandro flammini, and filippo menczer. 2019. “arming the public with artificial intelligence to counter social bots.” human behavior and emerging technologies 1(1):48–61. aoir2020 extended abstract spir.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 the internet as a series of analogies: the power play of imperfect metaphor in internet governance chelsea l. horne american university aram sinnreich american university introduction in 2006, alaskan senator ted stevens became a laughingstock and enduring meme for arguing during legislative deliberations that the internet could be understood as "a series of tubes" and “not a big truck" (belson 2006). the unintended humor of his analogies was ridiculed as evidence that this older lawmaker was too out of touch with modern communications technology to effectively govern them. yet the episode itself can be understood as evidence of a larger truth—one that both exculpates stevens somewhat and underlines a broader challenge for internet governance: namely, that nearly all internet laws and regulations necessarily rely on imperfect metaphor and analogy to keep them in accordance with pre-digital law and constitutional principles, and that even lawmakers and judges with considerable expertise in the field must also rely upon these figurative language. furthermore, because analogies and metaphors are fundamentally interpretive, rather than indexical reflections of the things they describe, their use in internet governance amplifies the risk that the prevailing laws and regulations will overdetermine their application in a way that benefits some users over others, and some uses over others. the internet, in other words, is like a series of analogies. critical framework just as researchers must critically examine how “lively” and “uncanny” machines shape our daily lives, scholars must also investigate the “wild west” of the rhetorical framing of analogies used as a power lever to control the discourse surrounding these technologies. the public imaginary is both like a breeding ground and competitive arena with biases baked into it. the creation and adoption of metaphors, analogies, and other figurative language represent the inherent biases of stakeholders, wielded as a form of virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): horne, c., sinnreich, a. (2020, october). the internet as a series of analogies: the power play of imperfect metaphor in internet governance. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. weaponized language on the internet governance battleground (kurbalija 2016; levy & hwang 2015). metaphors permeate daily life, framing our conversations and helping shape the way we think and behave (lakoff & johnson 1980). as such, metaphors and analogies have become critically important in guiding policy discussions (sinnreich 2013). more than just an artistic flourish to emphasize a point in governance and policy debates, the mass amplification of a metaphorical rhetoric— “a series of tubes,” “data is the new oil,” or “cookies are like business reply cards”—facilitates the dominance of certain viewpoint. a real danger of these seemingly elegant, sometimes cutesy, and often overly simplistic analogies, is their pervasiveness, permeability, and long life. after all, the internet as a "series of tubes” is still referenced in conversations of net neutrality today. moreover, the avant garde war for control of a technological metaphor indicates the power of the metaphor in framing public discourse. the wide scope of metaphors for the same technology also represents a fundamental difficulty in understanding new emerging technologies in policy and governance discussions. arguing from analogy in legal cases is widely used to “fill the gap between facts and rule” (weinreb 2005). these rhetorical comparisons seek to translate the digital into analog as a way to facilitate understanding and also to help streamline the matter of performing legal gymnastics to apply outdated, pre-internet legislation to the rapidly evolving legal challenges of today. however, these metaphors do more than merely translate for purposes of clarification, they transform and mold perspectives in a politically charged power move. this paper asks: when are certain analogies/metaphors adopted in terms of internet governance? how are they used or weaponized in internet governance and policy discussions? how do different stakeholders use, adopt, and amplify certain figurative rhetoric? what are the interests served by these adoptions? methodology this paper will construct a taxonomy of metaphors, analogies, and similar figurative rhetoric applied in discussions of internet governance and new/existing technologies. applying a top down approach, searching google books for comparisons to what “the internet is like,” this study determined a list of common recurring metaphors: • water metaphors • geographic/road metaphors • colonialism/expansion metaphors • biological/natural metaphors • sociopolitical metaphors • media metaphors • food metaphors • library metaphors • innovation metaphors • drug/medicinal metaphors • the internet as unknowable except through metaphor next, considering the breadth and variety of metaphors in use, this paper will focus on three case studies of internet governance applied to us law: section 230 of the communication decency act (cda), the digital millennium copyright act (dmca), and the computer fraud and abuse act (cfaa). the corpus of analysis for these three acts will focus on active policy and governance decision makers and so will include case law, congressional records, congressional hearing transcripts, and news media articles. the purpose is to examine how certain metaphors become adopted over others, determine possible biases towards certain framing of technologies, and to investigate the interests served by metaphor adoptions. regarding section 230, in a public workshop addressing the current role of 230 in nurturing innovation or fostering unaccountability, attorney general barr stated, “no longer are tech companies the underdog upstarts; they have become titans of us industry” (opening remarks 2020). barr added that when proposing legislative fixes, it is necessary to “ensure that the proposed cure is not worse than the disease.” here, barr frames the players within a sociopolitical metaphor and the law within a medicinal metaphor, both of which position tech companies and section 230 negatively—“titans” and “disease” respectively. interestingly, when pitched with potential changes to section 230, proponents of the current law often retorted with the metaphor of “death by ten thousand duck-bites,” referencing the pivotal 2008 roommates.com case, where the expression was first introduced. conclusions as scholars critically explore the “lively” machines that have become entwined in our daily lives, scholarship must also examine the rhetorical devices applied as a means to translate and transform the public’s understanding of digital technology. through a comprehensive examination of the analogies created, implemented, and amplified throughout the multistakeholder model of internet governance, this paper will provide a taxonomy of the figurative rhetoric used to guide public and political knowledge of technology. the implications of this research into the role of analogy as a proxy for political power may have profound impact in the governance, policy, and regulation of lively machines. the act—and art—of using analogies, metaphors, and other forms of figurative language in internet governance moves beyond an attempt to merely translate new technology through analog terminology. rather, it becomes the governance battlefront where power struggles over these very technologies play out. in other words, in this game of metaphorical, multi-sided tug-of-war, whichever side controls the analogy has a power grip on the internet governance, regulation, policy, and public discourse of the technology. references attorney general william p. barr delivers opening remarks at the doj workshop on section 230. (2020, february 20). retrieved from https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-generalwilliam-p-barr-delivers-opening-remarks-doj-workshop-section-230. belson, k. (2006, july 17). senator's slip of the tongue keeps on truckin' over the web. the new york times. retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/17/business/media/ 17stevens.html. kurbalija, j. (2016). an introduction to internet governance (7th edition). diplo foundation. lakoff, g., & johnson, m. (1980). metaphors we live by. university of chicago press. levy, k., & tim hwang, t. (2018, april 7). 'the cloud' and other dangerous metaphors. the atlantic. retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/the-cloudand-other-dangerous-metaphors/384518. sinnreich, a. (2013). the piracy crusade: how the music industry’s war on sharing destroys markets and erodes civil liberties. university of massachusetts press. weinreb, l. (2005). legal reason: the use of analogy in legal argument. cambridge university press. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): eadon, y. (2020, october). illuminati(ng) the search process: theorizing the research practices of “alternative” or “controversial” research. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. illuminati(ng) the search process: theorizing the research practices of “alternative” or “controversial” research yvonne m. eadon university of california, los angeles approaching the study of conspiracy theorizing as an academic can be epistemically and methodologically tricky. few studies tackle the topic using participant-centered interviewing, as many individuals whom scholars may want to call conspiracy theorists understandably eschew the label.1 the project outlined in this abstract will theorize the research practices of individuals who look into topics that have been labeled “conspiracy theories,” using participant-centered grounded theory interviewing methods. many prominent conspiracy theorists frequently employ the phrase “do your own research,” as a kind of call to action: kony rowe, creator of the 9/11 truth film loose change, responded to accusations that his film contained inaccuracies with the following statement: “we know there are errors in the documentary, and we’ve actually left them in there so that people discredit us and do the research for themselves.”2 rob brotherton quotes the notorious david icke, propagator of the theory that all powerful figures are secretly humanoid lizards: “the conspirators leave subtle symbols of their plot lying around, icke says, and ‘when you know what you’re looking for, it starts jumping out at you.’”3 many such well-known conspiracy theorists at once emulate academic rhetoric and subvert it, challenging its epistemic authority.4 emma a. jane and chris fleming have characterized conspiracy theorizing as a kind of “folk sociology.”5 on the whole, however, academics, journalists, politicians, and non-conspiracists, often dismiss people they perceive as conspiracy theorists out of hand by virtue of the supposed 1 jaron harambam and stef aupers, “‘i am not a conspiracy theorist’: relational identifications in the dutch conspiracy milieu,” cultural sociology 11, no. 1 (march 1, 2017): 113–29, https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975516661959. 2 david aaronovitch, voodoo histories: the role of the conspiracy theory in shaping modern history (new york, ny: riverhead books, 2010), 14. 3 rob brotherton, suspicious minds (new york, ny: bloomsbury sigma, 2015), 227. 4 jaron harambam and stef aupers, “contesting epistemic authority: conspiracy theories on the boundaries of science,” public understanding of science 24, no. 4 (may 1, 2015): 466–80, https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662514559891. 5 emma a. jane and chris fleming, modern conspiracy: the importance of being paranoid (new york, ny: bloomsbury academic, 2014), 11. danger and ignorance of their ideas.6 such dismissiveness is itself risky, however, as recent research suggests that ostracizing such “conspiracist” individuals may result in their unwillingness to approach or believe sources that may contradict their epistemic approach(es).7 this paper asks: is there indeed a certain kind of research style that can be attributed to individuals looking into conspiratorial topics? or are there many kinds of research practice extant within research communities that form around so-called “conspiratorial,” alternative, or controversial topics? previous scholarship has examined how conspiracy theories spread online;8 addressed the question of what conspiracy theorists believe and why;9 asked whether or not conspiracy theorizing is a reasonable form of sense-making;10 and characterized the socio-cultural effects of conspiracy theories.11 yet, the research practices of those who explore topics that have been labeled “conspiracy theories,” remain under-examined and under-theorized. existing at the convergence of three interdisciplinary areas of scholarship—the study of conspiracy theory/ies, information seeking and behavior (e.g., research practices), and archival studies--this project will present preliminary dissertation research. the data will come from in-depth, qualitative interviews with individuals who regularly conduct research into one of three topics: the assassination of john f. kennedy, the 1947 incident in roswell, new mexico, and the missing 411 phenomenon. interviews are semi-structured, addressing participants’ experiences of different modes of research: within a research community, in isolation (by themselves), and with the help of a reference archivist or librarian, among others that may emerge. this paper will also feature reflexive grounded theory analysis of my own feminist standpoint as a researcher and interviewer. some conspiracy theory scholarship discusses “conspiracy theorists” as a group of individuals whose epistemological orientation to their topics of interest is relatively homogenous, antithetical to that of the researcher, and often, inherently wrong. as a feminist qualitative researcher using grounded theory interviewing methods, my methodological priorities revolve around putting participants at the center of the research process, and recognizing and reconciling power imbalances in the course of data gathering.12 in such a way, and with the help of interview participants, i have 6 jack braitch, conspiracy panics: political rationality and popular culture (albany, new york: state university of new york press, 2008), 20. 7 r. kelly garrett, daniel sude, and paolo riva, “toeing the party lie: ostracism promotes endorsement of partisan election falsehoods,” political communication 0, no. 0 (october 11, 2019): 1–16, https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2019.1666943. 8 alice marwick and rebecca lewis, “media manipulation and disinformation online” (data & society research institute, may 15, 2017), https://datasociety.net/output/media-manipulation-and-disinfoonline/. 17-20. 9 viren swami et al., “conspiracist ideation in britain and austria: evidence of a monological belief system and associations between individual psychological differences and real-world and fictitious conspiracy theories,” british journal of psychology 102, no. 3 (2011): 443–63, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.2010.02004.x. 10 matthew r.x. dentith, the philosophy of conspiracy theories(new york, ny: palgrave macmillan, 2014), 14-18. 11 karen m. douglas and robbie m. sutton, “the hidden impact of conspiracy theories: perceived and actual influence of theories surrounding the death of princess diana,” the journal of social psychology 148, no. 2 (april 1, 2008): 210–22, https://doi.org/10.3200/socp.148.2.210-222 12 adrienne trier-bieniek, “framing the telephone interview as a participant-centred tool for qualitative research: a methodological discussion,” qualitative research 12, no. 6 (december 1, 2012): 630–44, https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794112439005. come to the conclusion that it is inappropriate—even potentially harmful—to refer to interview participants as “conspiracy theorists,” or even “conspiracists,” as i have done in previous work. rather, i now refer to them as “people who research topics that have been labeled ‘conspiratorial,’” or, much more succinctly, “researchers.” to discuss the type of research they engage in, or the topics themselves, i will use the term “alternative” or “controversial.” why the need to avoid the terms “conspiracy theorist” and “conspiracy theory”? these terms are complex, delicate, and often ill-defined. at its broadest and most basic, a conspiracy involves a group of people planning something in secret. a conspiracy theory is any speculation about an event that alleges conspiratorial causes for that event.13 following this, a conspiracy theorist can be considered to be anyone who alleges that a conspiracy has taken place. this seems straightforward at first glance, but the term has become so loaded in modern parlance that its sociocultural signifiers bear examination. many scholars who study conspiracy theorizing, including such canonical voices as richard hofstadter14 and karl popper,15 discuss the topic as though it is inherently problematic. other scholars, like lance dehaven-smith and matthew r.x. dentith, question this stance. certainly, politicians and other powerful figures can and do weaponize the pejorative nature of the label “conspiracy theorist,” by branding critics and dissenters as such. according to dehaven-smith, using the label as a general putdown for people who are mistrustful or critical of government can damage the proper functioning of democracy. such rhetoric is based in the notion that elected officials never collude. both dehaven-smith and dentith argue that not all conspiracy theories should be labeled as such or considered on equal footing—instead, each theory must be considered and analyzed on a case-by-case basis, according to the evidence presented in support of it.16 these two approaches to the study of conspiracy theory are repeatedly identified by scholars in the field: dentith himself designates the former camp as generalists and the latter as particularists. thomas milan-konda designates the former as the “negative” camp, which sees conspiracy theorizing as primarily a psychological issue, and the “positive” camp, which sees it as a primarily sociological issue.17 klein et al. likewise differentiate between the “monological” viewpoint and what they call the “iceberg model.” the monological viewpoint considers conspiracy theorists as a group that can be evaluated according to shared socio-psychological characteristics, whereas the iceberg model suggests that conspiracy theorists who fit the monological viewpoint are just the tip of the iceberg--below the surface lie those who are much more epistemically and psychologically heterogeneous.18 6 dentith, the philosophy of conspiracy theories, 15. 14 richard hofstadter, “the paranoid style in american politics,” in the paranoid style in american politics and other essays (new york, ny: random house: vintage books, 2008). 15 karl popper, the open society and its enemies: the high tide of prophecy: hegel, marx, and the aftermath, 5th ed., vol. 2 (london, uk: routledge, 1974). 16 matthew r.x. dentith, “when inferring to a conspiracy might be the best explanation,” social epistemology 30, no. 5–6 (2016): 572–91, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2016.1172362. 17 milan konda, conspiracies of conspiracies, 5. 18 colin klein, peter clutton, and vince polito, “topic modeling reveals distinct interests within an online conspiracy forum,” frontiers in psychology 9 (2018), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00189. many generalists, including hofstadter9 and sunstein and vermeule,10 have gestured toward the notion that conspiracy theorists seek information in unique ways. hofstadter11 suggests that the way in which “paranoid” individuals conduct research works against expanding their worldview, and in fact isolates them even further from differing viewpoints. sunstein and vermeule12 argue similarly that the online environment has enabled conspiracists to form “epistemologically isolated groups or networks.” however, the authors make this assessment without any meaningful research into such communities. are all research communities that form around socalled “conspiratorial” topics epistemically isolated, as sunstein and vermeule assume they must be? or is there regular engagement with outside and/ or challenging viewpoints? seeking information outside of one’s research community is an exercise in vulnerability for all researchers, but especially for those who research topics that have been labeled “conspiratorial.” it is thus doubly important for information professionals and reference personnel to build trusting relationships with such researchers. of particular import as i explore this topic during the covid-19 pandemic: how might trust between reference personnel and researchers be built in the online environment? is it even possible to do so? further, how might the unique research practices of these populations contribute to a more nuanced understanding of information seeking as epistemically diverse? references aaronovitch, david. voodoo histories: the role of the conspiracy theory in shaping modern history. new york, ny: riverhead books, 2010. braitch, jack. conspiracy panics: political rationality and popular culture. albany, new york: state university of new york press, 2008. brotherton, rob. suspicious minds. new york, ny: bloomsbury sigma, 2015. dentith, matthew r.x. the philosophy of conspiracy theories. new york, ny: palgrave macmillan, 2014. douglas, karen m., and robbie m. sutton. “the hidden impact of conspiracy theories: perceived and actual influence of theories surrounding the death of princess diana.” the journal of social psychology148, no. 2 (april 2008): 210–21. https://doi.org/10.3200/socp.148.2.210-222. garrett, r. kelly, daniel sude, and paolo riva. “toeing the party lie: ostracism promotes endorsement of partisan election falsehoods.” political communication 0, no. 0 (october 11, 2019): 1-16.https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2019.1666943. harambam, jaron, and stef aupers. “contesting epistemic authority: conspiracy theories on the boundaries of science.” public understanding of science 24, no. 4 (may 1, 2015): 466–80.https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662514559891. harambam, jaron, and stef aupers. “‘i am not a conspiracy theorist’: relational identifications in the dutch conspiracy milieu.” cultural sociology 11, no. 1 (march 1, 2017): 113–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975516661959. hofstadter, richard. “the paranoid style in american politics.” in the paranoid style in american politics and other essays. new york, ny: random house: vintage books, 2008. jane, emma a., and chris fleming. modern conspiracy: the importance of being paranoid. new york, ny: bloomsbury academic, 2014. klein, colin, peter clutton, and vince polito. “topic modeling reveals distinct interests within an online conspiracy forum.” frontiers in psychology 9 (2018). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00189. marwick, alice, and rebecca lewis. “media manipulation and disinformation online.” data & society research institute, may 15, 2017. https://datasociety.net/output/media-manipulation-and-disinfo-online/. milan konda, thomas. conspiracies of conspiracies: how delusions have overrun america. chicago, il: university of chicago press, 2019. popper, karl. the open society and its enemies: the high tide of prophecy: hegel, marx, and the aftermath. 5th ed. vol. 2. london, uk: routledge, 1974. sunstein, cass r., and adrian vermeule. “conspiracy theories: causes and cures*.” journal of political philosophy17, no. 2 (2009): 202–27. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9760.2008.00325.x. swami, viren, rebecca coles, stefan stieger, jakob pietschnig, adrian furnham, sherry rehim, and martin voracek. “conspiracist ideation in britain and austria: evidence of a monological belief system and associations between individual psychological differences and real-world and fictitious conspiracy theories.” british journal of psychology102, no. 3 (2011): 443–63. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.2010.02004.x. trier-bieniek, adrienne. “framing the telephone interview as a participant-centred tool for qualitative research: a methodological discussion.” qualitative research 12, no. (december 1, 2012): 630–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794112439005. microsoft word the challenges of weibo for data-driven digital media research.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 the challenges of weibo for data-driven digital media research jing zeng queensland university of technology jean burgess queensland university of technology axel bruns queensland university of technology introduction data generated via user activity on social media platforms is routinely used for research across a wide range of social sciences and humanities disciplines. the availability of data through the twitter apis in particular has enabled new modes of research, including in media and communication studies; however, there are practical and political issues with gaining access to such data, and with the consequences of how that access is controlled. in their chapter ‘easy data, hard data’, burgess and bruns (2015) discuss both the practical and political aspects of twitter data as they relate to academic research, describing how communication research has been enabled, shaped and constrained by twitter’s ‘regimes of access’ to data, the politics of data use, and the emerging economies of data exchange. this conceptual model, including the ‘easy data, hard data’ formulation, can also be applied to sina weibo. this paper builds on this model to explore the practical and political challenges and opportunities associated with the ‘regimes of access’ to weibo data, and their consequences for digital media and communication studies. we argue that in the case of weibo and in the chinese context, the politics of data access can be even more complicated than in the case of twitter, which makes academic scholarship relying on ‘big social data’ (burgess & bruns, 2012) from this platform more challenging. weibo and weibo studies the word weibo means ‘micro-blog’ in chinese, and therefore weibo is often considered to be ‘like twitter, only for china’. there are a number of micro-blogging platforms in china, but this paper will focus on sina weibo (hereafter to referred to as weibo), suggested citation (apa): zeng, j., burgess, j., & bruns, a. (2015, october 21-24) the challenges of weibo for data-driven digital media research. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. launched in 2009 by one of china’s biggest internet portals, sina corp. weibo has more than 500 million registered users and 61 million daily active users (cnnic 2014). as the larger social and media ecology in china changes, the role of weibo in chinese society and the wider chinese-speaking diaspora continues to evolve. in its early years, weibo was largely used by people in mainland china to share everyday or ‘trivial’ content (yu et al. 2011: 8). mirroring the parallel legitimization or ‘de-banalisation’ process that twitter went through (rogers, 2014), from 2012 the weibo platform was visibly associated with various forms of user-led activism, leading observers to speculate on the platform’s political potential in addition to its more mundane, everyday uses (hassic, 2012; chan et. al., 2012). since 2013, as the result of the chinese communist party’s dramatic escalation of its efforts to tighten its control over weibobased communication (guo & ying, 2015), as well as the competition from other social media services in mainland china, chinese internet users are no longer as active in micro-blogging platforms as they previously were (cncc, 2014). however, its apparently declining influence within china does nothing to diminish weibo’s significance as an object of study – indeed its history and evolving social role make it an even more dynamic site for digital media research, but the current state of the art in weibo scholarship leaves much to be desired. compared to twitter, weibo scholarship in general is still at a preliminary stage of development, with notable limits on both the diversity of topics and the standardization of methods. much of the work on weibo in international journals is dominated by institutions outside mainland china: language barriers continue to deter mainland scholars from publishing in english. as a result of this lack of connectivity and knowledge exchange, western weibo scholarship is very concerned with political issues understood ‘from the outside’, particularly those related to the possible ‘democratizing’ potential of weibo in relation to assumed democratic deficits associated with the chinese state and its censorship regime (e.g. king et al. 2014; zhu et al. 2013; ng & landry 2013). these are important issues (albeit at risk of oversimplification), but the sociocultural role of weibo and the range of uses to which it is put are far richer and more diverse than such approaches would suggest. more chinese research on weibo made more accessible to international scholars would be beneficial to internet studies in general, since chinese microblogging and other everyday digital media use is such an important part of the global ecology of social media, and not only ‘in china’. likewise, western scholars wishing to explore the applicability of hypotheses and findings in the context of chinese microblogging need to develop a better sense of the platform’s structure, affordances, and potential for datadriven research. as part of this movement towards more globalized digital media and communication research, this paper sketches out the possibilities and challenges of translating methodologies from twitter research to weibo. as a modest first step, it focuses on comparing the academic affordances of twitter data and weibo data. technical challenges the application programming interfaces (apis) of major social media platforms are designed primarily to enable third-party developers to invent new applications of and for the platforms in question, within terms set by and aligned with the business models of the companies that own and provide them. they are also crucial tools for researchers to access social media data – they are therefore important mediators of digital media research. twitter offers three types of apis: 1. the streaming api, which provides a continuous stream of new posts matching criteria set by the researcher; 2. the search api, which can retrieve a limited number of historical tweets matching given criteria (often used in combination with the streaming api); and 3. the rest api, which provides programmatic access to author new posts and to read a user’s profile and timeline. although weibo’s apis do not use the same typology, in terms of functionality they were very similar to those offered by twitter, at least at first. from 2012, weibo began to commercialize its apis, however, and it has increasingly enforced restrictions on data crawling, imposing both ip-based and account-based rate limiting. these strategies are also widely used by other social media platforms, but weibo’s restrictions are among the most severe. additionally, it introduced fees for the use of some of its apis. researchers requiring access to large sets of weibo data will need to pay either weibo itself or one of its 19 licensed data resellers (weibo, 2015). only one such company provides weibo data to researchers outside china (ibid.). as a result of these monetization strategies, only a limited number of weibo api functions can still be accessed for free by academic researchers. we now turn to provide further explanation of what weibo apis can and cannot do, with comparison to twitter apis. while twitter’s streaming api is the most widely used data collection source for twitter scholars (gaffney and puschmann, 2014), in the case of weibo, researchers can query weibo’s public timeline api to obtain the latest available posts. however, while twitter’s streaming api keeps pushing posts to the user as new content becomes available, a single request of weibo’s public timeline api returns a maximum of only 200 posts. to retrieve a ‘stream’ of (presumably) real time posts from weibo, multiple requests are needed. given weibo’s increasingly tough restrictions on data-crawling, this process is highly inefficient and cumbersome. across platforms, search apis are widely used when studying micro-blog-based discussion on a specific event or topic. however, weibo’s search api is no longer available for the public. for the same task that twitter’s search api can accomplish, weibo researchers may need to reverse-engineer their own search mechanisms from scratch. first, they need to generate a long list of user ids, encompassing hundreds of thousands (e.g. fu et. al. 2013) and sometimes even millions of individual accounts (guo et. al., 2013). second, they need to capture all of these accounts’ posts, in order to generate a large, topic-independent corpus of user-generated content. finally, they are then able to conduct keyword searches on this self-generated corpus of posts. one could use the user-timeline api to access numerous users’ timelines, but now weibo only allows its api users to crawl their own timelines. an alternative way to crawl other users’ timelines on a large scale is through crawling the researcher’s own friends’ updates. this is to say, researchers may need to set up a number of ‘dummy’ accounts, and use these accounts to follow target users. most datadriven weibo research requires the ongoing addition of new people to follow in order to enlarge the sample size. earlier, this could be done through weibo’s add-friend api. unfortunately, the add-friend function is now also no longer freely available. now one may have to use some other more technically demanding mechanism to complete this task. for example, researchers could build automated tools to add friends to their accounts through the platform’s web interface. this example demonstrates that, while weibo continually tightens up its api access, it still remains technically possible to get around the obstacles. however, the consequence is an increasingly high technical barrier for data collection, and a lock-out of those researchers who have limited financial and technical support. this story is not unique to weibo, because the twitter api is becoming increasingly commercialized and restrictive as well (burgess & bruns, 2015). the difference, however, is in the frequency and transparency of how the two platforms change their rules of the game. geopolitical challenges when studying weibo, it is also essential to take the geopolitical context of this platform into consideration, because the communist party of china has had an active, interventionist role in weibo’s launch, boom, and recent decline. in 2009, after a number of violent riots in china’s uyghur region, the chinese government shut down most social media sites operating in the country, including twitter and facebook. this became a direct factor leading to the birth of made-for-china social media sites: only one month after twitter had been blocked in china, sina corp launched its micro-blogging product weibo, which quickly became the most popular social media site in the country. the relationship it has with chinese authorities (benney, 2014) has been an important factor contributing to weibo’s success. from the very beginning, for instance, it worked closely with the state to censor information on the site. however, the political atmosphere around china’s internet has changed since xi jingping came into power. the new administration has taken a series of measures to ‘clean up’ china’s internet1. as some early weibo studies indicate, the chilling effect of such regulations is real and measurable (fu & chaun, 2013; ford, 2015). the political atmosphere in china not only restricts academic freedom in terms of what kind of weibo research can be done from inside china, but also impacts on what data can be obtained. for example, there is a long and still growing list of banned search terms on weibo (qiang, 2011; king et al., 2013). academic data collection can be adversely affected by the complexity and uncertainty of such censoring practices on weibo. for studies related to politically sensitive topics, the effect of content censorship is most direct. for example, in 2012 the state shut down the comments feature on weibo for several days in an attempt to suppress information about the bo xilai incident. a more recent case are the occupy hong kong protests. during these protests, beijing tried to censor all non-official information on weibo that related to the events. according to a censorship monitoring project at the university of hong kong, weiboscope2, the rate of posts removed from the system reached its 2014 peak during this period. 1. since 2012, users are required to register their real identity with the service. from 2013, a five-strikes-and-out rule will see anyone posting five tweets on "sensitive" subjects have their account suspended. from the same year, weibo users can be jailed for posting false information if it is forwarded more than 500 times or viewed over 5,000 times. 2. for details of this project, please refers to fu, k., chan, c., & chau, m. (2013). assessing censorship on microblogs in china: discriminatory keyword analysis and the real-name registration policy. internet computing, ieee 17(3): 42-50. data integrity challenges data integrity problems arise in the first place from the weibo apis’ sampling methods. there is no documentation concerning the percentage of full public posts that weibo’s public timeline api provides (in the case of twitter’s streaming api, we know that the total volume of results returned is limited to one percent of the total current volume of global twitter activity at that moment). zhu et al.’s (2012) study estimates that 1.7 to 10 percent of the full public timeline data become available through weibo’s public timeline api. since this estimate is rather broad and there is limited scholarship exploring this issue, we still know very little about how much data we can actually retrieve from weibo’s public timeline api. the second problem with weibo’s public timeline api is that the data is not randomly selected. because there is a few minutes’ delay between the time a post is published and the time it becomes available on the public timeline, it is suspected that the data on the public timeline may have been manipulated. for instance zhu et al.’s (2012) study suggests that censorship has been applied over what can be displayed on weibo’s public timeline, as it is found that certain posts with sensitive keywords do not appear on the public timeline but are still shown on users’ individual timelines. this lack of knowledge regarding the weibo apis’ sampling methods can have severe impacts on the reliability and generalizability of studies. of course the issue of sample bias is not unique to research drawing on weibo data. researchers have found evidence showing that twitter’s ‘random’ streaming api has biases as well. however, the body of twitter scholarship generally indicates that efforts have been made to identify sources of possible bias in the sampling process. for instance, morstatter (2013) finds that twitter’s streaming api appears to have a bias toward tweets that may have more value for research. by contrast, in the case of weibo, there is little scholarship dealing with this issue apart from examining the impact of content censorship on weibo’s api sampling. more comprehensively exploring the issue of data integrity with respect to sampling is therefore an opportunity for weibo researchers. spam is a further issue affecting data integrity in weibo research. in its the quest for advertising revenues, weibo corp shapes the user experience design of the platform towards consumption and entertainment, which in turn relies on user growth and visitor numbers. perhaps because of this, the company has demonstrated little commitment to removing the large proportion of spam and fake accounts on the platform (yu et al., 2012; cheng et al., 2013; fu & chau, 2013). this “artificial inflation” (yu et al., 2012) of user activity on the platform is closely aligned with the company’s interests, especially since it launched its ipo in the u.s. in 2014. for scholars, the very high proportion of spam on weibo complicates the conclusions about public communication that can be drawn from weibo data. cheng et al.’s (2013) research indicates that certain types of spam can be detected with algorithms that examine users’ following patterns; on the other hand, spam is simply part of the communicative ecology of weibo and it may not always be desirable to ‘clean’ it from the sample. finding accessible ways of identifying and, if necessary, removing spam is a further opportunity for weibo researchers. conclusion exploring china’s social media landscape is essential for developing a better understanding of the global media ecology. therefore, the discussion of weibo’s potential should not be restricted to its hypothetical democratizing effect, but be better grounded in openly available, data-driven research drawing on a combination of rigorous and reliable, quantitative, qualitative and critical approaches. this article has discussed how ‘hard’ access to and research-oriented usage of weibo data can be compared to twitter – but ‘hard data’ and ‘easy data’ are, of course, relative terms. even though there are increasingly high technical and economic barriers of access to weibo data, weibo is still relatively open and accessible compared to other chinese media. as it is one of a handful of windows through which we can spot the dynamics of chinese social media platforms – which collectively host the world’s biggest online population –, an important next step is to develop the means for institutions or researchers with access to large-scale data to make their data, methods and code available to other researchers, without putting themselves or weibo participants at risk. existing examples of such initiatives include the work of fu and chan (2013) and ding et al. (2013), projects which have made their data available for scholars in the field. references benney, j. (2014). the aesthetics of chinese microblogging: state and market control of weibo. asiascape: digital asia, 1(3), 169-200. retrieved from http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/2214231212340011. burgess, j., & bruns, a. (2012). twitter archives and the challenges of ‘big social data’ for media and communication research. m/c journal 15(5). retrieved from http://www.journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewarticle/561 burgess, j., & bruns, a. (2015). easy data, hard data: the politics and pragmatics of twitter research after the computational turn. in g. langlois, j. redden, & g. elmer (eds.),compromised data: from social media to big data. bloomsbury, london. (in press) chan, m., wu, x., hao, y., xi, r., & jin, t. (2012). microblogging, online expression, and political efficacy among young chinese citizens: the moderating role of information and entertainment needs in the use of weibo. cyberpsychology, behavior, and social networking, 15(7), 345-349. retrieved from http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/cyber.2012.0109. cheng, b., fu, j., & zhen, m. (2013). detecting zombie in sina microblog: a machine learning approach. international journal of advancements in computing technology, 5 (2): 612-620. retrieved from http://www.aicit.org/ijact/ppl/ijact2070ppl.pdf. china internet network information center (cnnic). 2014. statistical survey report on the internet development in china. retrieved from http://www1.cnnic.cn/idr/reportdownloads/201404/u020140417607531610855.p df ding, c., chen, y., & fu, x. (2013). crowd crawling: towards collaborative data collection for large-scale online social networks. proceedings of the first acm conference on online social networks, boston, massachusetts, usa. ford, c. a. (2015). china looks at the west: identity, global ambitions, and the future of sino-american relations. lexington: university press of kentucky. fu, k., chan, c., & chau, m. (2013). assessing censorship on microblogs in china: discriminatory keyword analysis and the real-name registration policy. internet computing, ieee 17(3): 42-50. retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6459495 fu, k., & chau, m. (2013). reality check for the chinese microblog space: a random sampling approach. plos one 8(3). retrieved from http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0058356 gaffney, d., & puschmann, c. (2014). data collection on twitter. in k. weller, a. bruns, j. burgess, c. puschmann, & m. mahrt (eds.), twitter and society (pp. 55-68). new york: peter lang. guo, z., huang, j., he, j., hei, x., & wu, d. (2013). unveiling the patterns of video tweeting: a sina weibo-based measurement study. in m. roughan & r. chang (eds.), passive and active measurement (vol. 7799, pp. 166-175): springer berlin heidelberg. guo, b., & jiang, y. (2015). analyzing the coexistence of emerging transparency and tight political control on weibo. the journal of international communication, 21(1), 78-108. retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13216597.2014.998700. hassid, j. (2012). the politics of china's emerging micro-blogs: something new or more of the same? apsa 2012 annual meeting paper. retrieved from http://ssrn.com/abstract=2106459. king, g., pan, j. & roberts, m. e. (2013). how censorship in china allows government criticism but silences collective expression. american political science review, 107(02), 326-343. retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0003055413000014. king, g., pan, j., & roberts, m. e. (2014). reverse-engineering censorship in china: randomized experimentation and participant observation. science, 345(6199). retrieved from http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/1251722. li, y., gao, h., yang, m., guan, w., ma, h., qian, w. &yang, x. (2013). what are chinese talking about in hot weibos? arxiv: 1304.4682: 546-557. retrieved from http://arxiv.org/pdf/1304.4682.pdf. morstatter, f., pfeffer, j., liu, h., & carley, k. m. (2013). is the sample good enough? comparing data from twitter's streaming api with twitter's firehose. arxiv: 1306.5204. retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.5204. ng, j. q., & landry, p.f. (2013). the political hierarchy of censorship: an analysis of keyword blocking of ccp officials’ names on sina weibo before and after the 2012 national congress (s)election (june 15, 2013). eleventh chinese internet research conference, 2013, forthcoming. retrieved from http://ssrn.com/abstract=2267367. qiang, x. (2011). the battle for the chinese internet. journal of democracy, 22(2), 4761. retrieved from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jod/summary/v022/22.2.xiao.html. rogers, r. (2014). debanalising twitter: the transformation of an object of study. in k. weller, a. bruns, j. burgess, c. puschmann, & m. mahrt (eds.), twitter and society (pp. ix-xxvi). new york: peter lang. weibo (2015) list of data trader partners. retrieved from http://open.weibo.com/wp/partner. yu, l., asur, s., & huberman, b. a. (2011). what trends in chinese social media. arxiv: 1107.3522. retrieved from http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/chinatrends/china_trends.pdf yu, l., asur, s., & huberman, b. a. (2012). artificial inflation: the true story of trends in sina weibo. paper presented at the 5th sna-kdd workshop ’11, san diego, calif. retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.0327. zhu, t, phipps, d., pridgen, a., crandall, j. r, & wallach, d. s. (2012). tracking and quantifying censorship on a chinese microblogging site. arxiv: 1211.6166. retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.6166. zhu, t., phipps, d., pridgen, a., crandall, j.r., & wallach, d.s. (2013). the velocity of censorship: high-fidelity detection of microblog post deletions. arxiv: 1303.0597. retrieved from http://arxiv.org/vc/arxiv/papers/1303/1303.0597v1.pdf. microsoft word 698-451-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 user or not, forever an endorser: ftc regulation of online endorsement and content control matthew t. bray colorado state university united states mattbray31t@gmail.com abstract this study aims to explore possible shortcomings and future applicability of the ftc revised guides concerning the use of endorsements and testimonials in advertising. the federal trade commission issued the guides in 2009 to address issues surrounding online endorsement in an effort to maintain standards of advertising practice in new media. this study reviews the original purpose of the guides and how well that purpose has been upheld in accordance with the cases and rulings the guides have been applied to. this study concludes that the ftc has yet to clarify ambiguities surrounding the concept of a bona fide user, message appropriation, and content control. keywords advertising; commercial speech; ftc; online; endorsement online regulation of advertising launched in 1994, internet advertising has grown near twenty-five percent each year (cross, 2010). this rapid expansion has blurred the lines of commercial speech in ways that would have been unimaginable to previous generations of media professionals and researchers. not only has the internet opened up and expanded new methods for reaching an audience, it has fundamentally changed the way consumers and advertisers interact. sparked by the open nature of the web and consumers having the ability to create content, “the editorial power of advertisers is radically smaller than in traditional media” (lessig, 2008, p.63). due to the proliferation of online use by consumers and advertisers, in 2009 the federal trade commission updated its guidelines concerning endorsement and testimonial that had remained unchanged since 1980. the ftc revised guides concerning the use of endorsement and testimonials in advertising (hereinafter guides) was an attempt to gain a modicum of control over online commercial speech. this study aims to evaluate the validity of the attempt by addressing the followings: (1) how the ftc has addressed the issue of control over messages concerning a bona fide user, (2) who is in control of commercial speech content online, and (3) how well the original purpose of the guides has been served. furthermore, the study is designed to explore the implications of the guides on regulation of commercial speech online. this study uses traditional qualitative legal analysis of cases and rulings from january 2010 to february 2013 where the revised ftc guides have been applied. a lexisnexis search was conducted as well as reviewing past cases and rulings from the ftc website. the included cases may not represent all of the actions taken by the ftc during the time period described, nor is it the goal of this paper to describe each of the rulings and compliances. rather, the goal of this study is to analyze the instances where ambiguities in the guides have, or have not, been resolved. the study findings suggest that based on the low number of cases the guides have been applied to, the ambiguities surrounding the issues of bona fide users and control of content online, now that users are able to appropriate new meaning from messages, have yet to be resolved. first, there is an issue regarding the legitimacy of the guides. was it or is it necessary to regulate online commercial speech with the guides? the 2009 guides were updated under the assumption that selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 given new technologies enabling advertisers and their endorsers to disseminate messages to the public, the public should be protected from deceptive and misleading advertisements online (federal trade commission, 2010). the guides were created with zero prior complaints, issued by consumers or the ftc, concerning online endorsements and testimonials (cross, 2010). the guides were a preventative measure to account for adapting technologies where the line can be blurred in terms of what content is commercial and what is actual opinion generated by consumers. due to the low number of cases in which it has been applied to suggests that the guides may not be effective in regulating online endorsement and commercial speech. the bona fide user, message appropriation and control of content one issue that has yet to be dealt with concerns the “bona fide user”. historically speaking, mandating that endorsers were bona fide users throughout the use of the advertising message worked fairly well. in this sense, television advertisements, and the like, were composed of “fleeting” messages that could be pulled from use when the endorser was no longer a bona fide user. from an advertising perspective, this gave the creators of these messages more control over, and more readily compliance with, the ftc guides stipulating that the endorser must be a bona fide user throughout the life of the message; simply because they could stop running the advertisement. this study argues that applying that same rationale concerning the bona fide user online no longer makes sense because of the loss of control over the messages and the nature of linking and permanent content online. mandating that an advertiser must stop benefiting from an endorsement message after the endorser is no longer a bona fide user of the product, brand or service cannot be enforced because the advertiser and the endorser do not control their content online. they can comply in the sense that the advertiser can stop posting material with the endorser attached, but that only covers messages that are produced after the endorser is no longer a bona fide user. previous online messages cannot be deleted, nor can they be stopped from spreading from user to user; the messages themselves become appropriated to where the consumer now has the control over the content. as online users appropriate the commercial speech, “the importance of the original message changes” (lessig, 2008, p.60) in a way that cannot be anticipated, nor controlled online. up to this point, the ftc has yet to address this ambiguous issue; thus it is still up for debate regarding where the primary responsibility lies for these messages. the ftc has made it clear that if a blogger, who is classified as an endorser under the guides, makes a deceptive or unsubstantiated claim, both the blogger and advertiser could be held responsible for the statements made (cross, 2010). in this case, advertisers have little control over the actual content of the ‘advertisement’ itself; yet they are held to the same standard as the person who made the claims. in this view, the advertiser still controls the message from a regulatory standpoint but according to online culture, the advertiser has very little control over what statements have been made. classifying bloggers or online content creators as an endorser propels them from private to public; the statements they make are held to the same standard as the advertiser. here again, ambiguities still surround the issue of who is control of the content and who is ultimately held accountable. implications the importance of this work stems from continuing ambiguities in the 2009 guides. the fact that the guides were somewhat vague concerning the issues described above is not inherently a shortcoming of the guides themselves. as the ftc investigated claims surrounding online endorsement, the guides should have become clearer by evaluating the rulings and sanctions placed on the specific cases or compliances. however, this study finds many of the ambiguities that were originally questioned in 2009 still persist. this means, although the guides themselves are not “rules” in the sense that there is no automatic fine for violation (digital media law project, 2010), the ambiguities may continue to have a negative impact on advertising practices and online consumers. this study contributes to the field of internet research by providing a deeper understanding of the legal stipulations placed on both advertisers and endorsers and their current trends. the study also sheds selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 additional light on the concept of control in online speech regulation by exploring the interplay between the social practices of online speech and the government attempt to regulate them. acknowledgments a special thank you and debt of gratitude is owed to dr. minjeong kim of colorado state university. it was with her encouragement and guidance that this research was possible. references lessig, l. (2008). remix, making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. (pp. 60-63). new york: penguin press. digital media law project. (2010, april 29). publishing product or service endorsements. retrieved from http://www.dmlp.org/search/node/publishing product or service endorsements federal trade commission. (2010, june). the ftc's revised endorsement guides: what people are asking. retrieved from http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus71-ftcs-revised-endorsement-guideswhat-peopleare-asking cross, l. b. (2010). "results not typical": the impact of the federal trade commission's new guidelines for endorsements and testimonials. . whittier law review, 32(1), federal trade commission. (2010-2013). commission actions. retrieved from http://www.ftc.gov/os/actions.shtm license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc 3.01 karsgaard, macdonald, &amp hockenhull 2020 twitter&#39s toponymic politics.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 karsgaard, c., macdonald, m., & hockenhull, m. (2020, october). rename and resist colonial extraction: twitter’s toponymic politics. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. rename and resist colonial extraction: twitter’s toponymic politics carrie karsgaard university of alberta maggie macdonald university of toronto michael hockenhull it university of copenhagen canada, known to many indigenous peoples as turtle island, has seen a surge of (re)naming and land acknowledgement, which draws attention to indigenous stewardship and territories, which have been overwritten through colonial mapping and naming practices. renaming is not limited to physical spaces, but it also occurs virtually. on twitter, profiles of users are free-form and can be associated with “official,” colonial names like vancouver or ottawa. however, twitter’s open location field also enables users to situate themselves by indigenous place names or locations suggesting anticolonial positioning, such as “secwepemcul’ecw” and “occupied syilx territory.” our project explores subversive (re)naming practices on twitter to address: what is the nature of indigenous and anti-colonial toponymic identification among twitter users in canada? writing together as two settler scholars and another from denmark as a stranger to the lands discussed in this paper, ours is an attempt to engage toponymic resistance in an everyday, virtual, social space where we participate as relations, citizens, creators, information sharers, and fellows outside of institutional boundaries. a focus on toponymy rather than identity is also an opportunity to consider “place-based solidarities” (snelgrove, dhamoon, & corntassel, 2014, p. 14) that unsettle settler colonialism on twitter. settler colonialism and virtual toponymy critical toponymy identifies how naming practices are slippery, insofar as they appear neutral or natural, when in reality they relay hegemonic structures and are mechanisms of classification and control (rose-redwood et al., 2010). in settler-colonial contexts, toponyms are tools of erasure, where colonial toponymy overwrites epistemologies, languages, histories, and relationships, so as a resurgent practice, place naming can be an assertion of ongoing indigenous presence on the land (apihtawikosisˆan, 2016), articulating indigenous knowledge systems, cultures, and connections to place. we argue that geographic information systems (gis), standardized domain naming, and other virtual locative technologies function similarly to what rose-redwood et al. (2010) term “calculable spaces”; they may be used to regulate representation and communication, and be used for data gathering and social control. platforms have become infrastructures of communication, and social media networks in particular provide a discursive space, embedded in public life and informing our sociopolitical experience (plantin et al. 2018, van dijck et al., 2019). the boundaries and affordances of platforms are key to understanding them as infrastructures in relation to social life. twitter’s free-form location field is a technological affordance that allows for greater scope than pre-set calculable locations or gis. rather than static and standardized, twitter’s malleable and emergent naming options creates opportunities for politically resistant expression, affording users possibilities for anti-colonial toponymy. methodology we apply a digital methods approach (rogers, 2013), which repurposes the tools embedded in platforms for social research. to narrow our sample, we focused on profiles of twitter users who tweeted about the trans mountain pipeline, a controversial infrastructure project that conflicts with many indigenous people’s lifeways, sovereignty, and claims to land. pipeline-associated tweets were extracted via the digital methods initiative-twitter capture and analysis toolset (borra & rieder, 2014) from 26 june 2018 to 7 july 2018, totaling 27,000 tweets from 13,000 users. we sorted user profile locations to identify tweets produced by users situated in various locations in canada, which we then manually sorted according to indigenous and anti-colonial identifiers in the broadest sense, resulting in a subset of 576 tweets. to be identified as indigenous or anti-colonial, a toponym utilized an indigenous language, referenced an indigenous territory (whether indigenous or state-defined), drew attention to colonial relations, or resisted colonial naming practices. utilizing this smaller data set, we developed an untypology of patterns of resistant naming practices and land acknowledgement on the platform. un-typology of twitter toponyms not only do twitter users make use of the free-form field for indigenous and anticolonial place names, but they do so in ways that defy simple and artificial categorization, capturing multiple ways of conceptualizing location. most location identifiers reference indigenous territories and lands, such as “k'omoks/pentlatch territory” and “muwekma ohlone land,” at times modified by the terms “ancestral” or “traditional,” which allude to the historic and enduring nature of indigenous territories. some draw attention to the connection between territory and specific indigenous groups, through phrases that bind land with human communities, like the “traditional territories of the snuneymuxw people.” the connections between culture, land, and knowledge can be seen where territories are indicated in indigenous languages, such as “xʷməθkʷəy̓əm” (musqueam). in a number of cases, users link territory with multiple peoples whose territories overlap, as in “musqueam, tsleil waututh, and squamish territory.” a noticeable number of users list colonial and indigenous toponyms together, as in “lekwungen territory/victoria,” marking the coexistence of indigenous and colonial authority. the intermingling of state and indigenous toponyms evidences how lands are at once demarcated for colonial governance and also remain homelands for occupied peoples. colonial relations are made explicit by referencing treaties or lack thereof on specific lands. by listing “treaty 6,” for instance, users indicate legal relations between indigenous people and the government of canada (though the nature of these relations is contested). modifying an indigenous territory with the word “unceded,” as in “unceded secwepemc territory,” twitter users also draw attention to the absence of a treaty in a particular region, indicating illegal dispossession of land from indigenous peoples. other toponymic identifiers focus on the theft and occupation of indigenous lands with such modifiers as “stolen,” “occupied,” and “colonized.” some users locate themselves as “settlers” or “guests,” drawing attention to their own positions in relation to both particular territories and the settler state. taken together, these examples highlight ways users leverage the free-form location profile field for resurgent and resistant anticolonial ends. we are interested here in the representational and infrastructural significance of how users take up toponyms— finding evidence that for twitter users, location is not merely spatial. in the tiny space of the location profile field, users capture the relational, historical, political, culturolinguistic, legal, and cosmological nature of land and location. such a rich representation makes plain by contrast the colonial nature of platform affordances which rely on structural categories for data gathering, management, analysis, and surveillance through sanctioned place names or gis. the challenges we experienced in sorting, naming, and analyzing toponyms are in conflict with such managerial tactics and evidence a small, but welcome, reprieve from centralized surveillance and classification on social media. references apihtawikosisˆan (chelsea vowel). 2016. beyond territorial acknowledgments. retrieved october 4, 2016 from http://apihtawikosisan.com/2016/09/beyond-territorial-acknowledgments/ borra, e. & rieder, b. (2014). programmed method: developing a toolset for capturing and analyzing tweets. aslib journal of information management, 66(3), 262-278. plantin, j.-c., lagoze, c., edwards, p. n., & sandvig, c. (2018). infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook. new media & society, 20(1), 293–310. rogers, r. (2013). digital methods. mit press. rose-redwood, r., alderman, d., & azaryahu, m. (2010). geographies of toponymic inscription: new directions in critical place-name studies. progress in human geography, 34(4), 453-470. snelgrove, c., dhamoon, r. k., & corntassel, j. (2014). unsettling settler colonialism: the discourse and politics of settlers, and solidarity with indigenous nations. decolonization: indigeneity, education & society, 3(2). van dijck, j., nieborg, d., & poell, t. (2019). reframing platform power. internet policy review, 8(2). vieira.aiortoupload   1   kate vieira, assistant professor english department university of wisconsin, madison kevieira@wisc.edu appropriating new communication technologies in migrants’ home communities: a case study from brazil article: abstract this paper presents preliminary results from an ongoing qualitative study of the impact of migration on the uptake of new technologies in transnational migrants’ home communities, namely jaú, brazil. migration scholars have documented how transnational migration is often undertaken to pay for children’s or family’s formal education. yet migration itself has its own pedagogy, one that is at once technological, social, and cultural. a crucial part of this “pedagogy of migration” involves family members learning new technologies to communicate with loved ones abroad. this study traces the uptake of these technological and pedagogical remittances in one community to find that such remittances are often exchanged for cultural capital and career advancement in local economies. keywords transnational, migration, communication, pedagogy, remittance, brazil project overview there are many motivating factors for transnational migration (massey et al., 1993), but among them is the pursuit of better life through educational opportunities for migrants’ families who stay behind (nobles, 2011). to this end, migrants often remit money to family to provide for private schools and school supplies (levitt, 2001). yet less considered is the pedagogical impact of migration itself, party of which includes the learning and teaching of new communication technologies to negotiate migrants’ absence. how are transnational communication techniques taught and learned? and what impact does such informal education have on the wider uptake and use of the internet in migrants’ home communities? this paper presents preliminary results from a qualitative study that answers this question relevant literature two strands of research inform this study. first, literacy scholars have begun to examine the pedagogy of transnational communication technologies from the perspective of migrant youth. lam and rosario-ramos (2009), for example, find that transnational youth in the u.s. use the internet to negotiate ethno-linguistic identity. second, migration and communication scholars have considered how families and children use internet technology to communicate, developing their relationships in line with the affordances and limitations of particular media (mandiou and miller, 2012; parreñas, 2005). while the first strand of research addresses pedagogy, it does not address migrants’ home communities. and while the second strand addresses migrants’ home communities, it does not centrally account for pedagogy. the present study fills this gap, theorizing transnational digital literacy pedagogy in informal, non-school spaces. methods this paper draws from a qualitative study conducted with migrants’ home communities in jaú, brazil. the outmigration of brazilians has corresponded historically with a rise of internet technologies for writing (approximately 1980’s to the present) (margolis, 1994), making it an ideal site for the study of networked technologies in a migratory contexts. jaú, a small manufacturing city with a population of approximately 130,000, has a moderate rate of out-migration, allowing the researcher to track the role of migration-related technology remittances as they develop alongside communication practices that are perhaps uninfluenced by migration. in jaú, one can see where the influence of migration on internet use starts and stops.   2   my preliminary findings are based on 15 completed oral history interviews, one to three hours in length, with brazilian migrants’ family members, which took place both in jaú, brazil and from the researcher’s institution in the u.s. over skype. these interviews covered three central themes: first, i elicited information about how family members communicated with migrants, including personal letters, emails, phone calls, chats, online video conferencing. second, i elicited participants’ memories about how they learned to use such technologies, such as when they first remember using a computer. finally, i asked participants to describe how they used internet communication technologies in their daily work and personal lives. i analyzed these interviews using grounded theory methodologies (charmaz, 2006). my coding categories included: how particular technologies contribute to feelings of proximity or distance; the material and practical means by which migrants sponsored family members’ learning of new communication technologies (such as by giving them a computer and/or teaching them how to use it); the way that transnational communication technologies permeated local interactions and professional goals. findings and discussion this paper offers three central findings: first, communication technology is often viewed by participants as a material part of an exchange relationship. for example, many received computers as gifts from abroad. this gift giving, however, also entails an implicit exchange: that family members will learn to use the technology to communicate with more frequency. the exchange of communication technologies and pedagogies, however, does not end with this reciprocal gift giving. it is passed around locally, leading to the second finding: those who received computers initially from migrants abroad took on what i am calling the role of the “post office.” they often became hubs of internet connectivity that attracted neighbors and other community members. migrants’ family members often taught neighbors how to use particular technologies—gchat or msn chat, for example. such lessons contributed to participants’ cultural capital, allowing them to call on these neighbors for reciprocal favors. finally, for many, their family members’ migration coincided with increasing local pressure to use computers and internet technologies specifically for work. the desire to maintain contact with family and the challenges of competing in an information economy inter-animated each other, pushing participants to the forefront of technological innovation in their workplaces. i call this technological and pedagogical remittance “writing remittances” to highlight its connection with older literate practices of letter writing, to emphasize its exchange value, and to distinguish it from other from other brazilian remittance practices (siqueira, 2008). the writing remittance sent from migrant to family member, then, is on one hand, dispersed locally, and on the other hand, taken up to forward participants’ own social standing. such findings have two central implications. they corroborate madianou and miller (2012) and rhacel parreña’s (2005) findings that communication technologies are socialized in accordance with their context. but they go further, to show how transnational migration can motivate the dispersal of technological knowhow. such a conclusion links new communication technologies to older ones in the history of mass migration. historian david gerber (2006), for example, documents how migrants in the late 1800s to the u.s. had to teach family members to address envelopes to send through the nascent international post. just as the movement of people may have contributed to the rise of mass literacy via letter writing in the early late 19th and early 20th century (henkins, 2007; lyons, 2013), it also may be contributing to the rise of mass internet literacy in our current moment. the second implication follows from the first: that migration scholars must broaden our understanding of educational remittances. money for tuition may be crucial in the lives of children and family left behind. but engaging with internet technologies used to communicate with a distant loved one may also contribute to the upward social mobility that motivated migration in the first place. works cited charmaz, k. (2006). constructing grounded theory: a practical guide through qualitative analysis. london: sage. gerber, d. (2006). authors of their own lives: personal correspondence in the lives of nineteenth century british immigrants to the united states. new york: new york university press.   3   henkins, d. (2007). the postal age: the emergence of modern communications in nineteenth century america. chicago: university of chicago press. lam, w.s.e and rosario-ramos, e (2009). “multilingual literacies in transnational digitallymediated contexts: an exploratory study of immigrant teens in the u.s.” language and education (23.2):171-190. levitt, p. (2001). the transnational villagers. berkeley: university of california press. lyons, m. (2013). the writing culture of ordinary people in europe, 1860-1920. cambridge: cambridge university press. madianou, m. and miller, d (2012). migration and new media: transnational families and polymedia. london and new york: routledge. margolis, m. (1998). an invisible minority: brazilians in new york city. new york: simon and schuster. massey, d. et al. (1993). “theories of migration: a review and appraisal.”population and development review 19(3): 431-466. nobles, j. (2011). “parenting from abroad: migration, nonresident father involvement, and children’s education in mexico.” journal of marriage and family 73(4): 729-746. parreñas, r. (2005). children of global migration: transnational families and gendered woes. palo alto: stanford university press. siqueira, s. (2008). emigrants from governador valadares: projects of return and investment. in c. jouët-pastré, l. j. braga, and c. suárez-orozco (eds.) becoming brazuca: brazilian immigration to the united states. (pp. 175-194). cambridge, ma: harvard university, david rockefeller center for latin american studies.   selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 frost-arnold, k. (2017, october 18-21). how an epistemology of ignorance maintains wikipedia’s gender gap. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. how an epistemology of ignorance maintains wikipedia’s gender gap karen frost-arnold hobart & william smith colleges, usa this paper argues that an epistemology of ignorance helps to maintain wikipedia’s gender gap, despite continued efforts to promote gender balance. wikipedia’s ‘gender gap’ refers to the consistently low numbers of women editing wikipedia, relative to the general population. it is estimated that between 9% and 16% of wikipedians are women (hill and shaw 2013; wikimedia foundation 2011). as i have argued elsewhere, wikipedia’s gender gap has several negative epistemic consequences, including undermining wikipedia’s reliability, limiting the scope of topics covered, and spreading misleading truths (frost-arnold forthcoming). several projects are underway to address the problem (cf. cohen 2011; “wikipedia:wikiproject countering systemic bias”; “wikipedia:wikiproject women in red”). despite these efforts over the course of several years, the gender gap remains a persistent problem. this paper draws on the epistemologies of ignorance literature and research in hci to uncover some of the wikipedian social norms, design features, and background socio-linguistic structures that stymie attempts to close the gender gap. the epistemologies of ignorance literature is based on the premise that ignorance is not a simple absence of knowledge, but an active production that can be systematically maintained through norms, practices, habits, ideologies, institutional structures, etc. (cf. sullivan and tuana 2007). this paper identifies three aspects of wikipedia’s epistemology of ignorance through which knowledge of wikipedians’ gender (and their gendered experiences as editors) is precluded and sometimes actively silenced. first, wikipedians espouse informal and formal norms of conduct and content inclusion that are generally viewed as gender-neutral, but which in fact facilitate ignorance of gender-based harassment and exclude content related to women. for example, consider the wikipedian slogan “don’t stick beans up your nose” (or “beans” for shorthand). this refers to an informal behavioral norm against preemptively admonishing wikipedians for bad behavior. as menking and erickson (2015) discovered in interviews with women wikipedians, the “beans” norm (in conjunction with others, such as “deny recognition [to trolls]”) discourages women from discussing details of the gender-based harassment they experience on wikipedia. additionally, other formally neutral norms for content inclusion, i.e., the notability guideline and verifiability policy, functionally exclude content related to women and people of color (backer 2015; stephenson-goodknight 2015). this illustrates a common feature of an epistemology of ignorance: reliance on formally neutral norms without addressing the ways in which, given the social context in which the norms operate, they produce bias and ignorance (cf. young 1990). second, wikipedia’s commitment to online anonymity means that wikipedians’ gender identities are not readily accessible to those who develop tools to combat the gender gap. this limits their ability to tailor solutions to the specific needs of women wikipedians who are at risk of leaving the project. one example is the useful snuggle tool that was designed by researchers to improve mentoring of newcomers to wikipedia (halfaker, geiger, & terveen 2014). despite the fact that this tool was developed based on feminist principles and was created, in part, to deal with the gender gap, snuggle does not take the gender of the newcomers into account. this is not surprising, since newcomers do not need to provide any information about their gender when they edit wikipedia, so there is no way for snuggle to provide that information to mentors. but this shows that the design of wikipedia itself is based on an epistemology of ignorance—it precludes knowledge about the gender of wikipedians. thus, this feature of wikipedia limits what snuggle can accomplish by preventing snuggle from quickly identifying and helping newcomers who may be targets of gender-based harassment. third, the socio-linguistic structures of english gendered pronouns limit the knowledge that can be attained by another promising solution to the gender gap. passing on is an experiment that uses reader-sourcing to create wikipedia content to increase the coverage of women’s biographies (matias, diehl, & zuckerman 2015). as readers browse women’s obituaries in the new york times and learn about gender disparities in the times’ coverage, content and resources are added to wikipedia that can be used to create more biographies of notable women. this is an innovative solution, but it depends on gendered pronoun appearance in the times for identifying subjects. as the researchers acknowledge, this limits passing on’s ability to identify trans and gender non-conforming people who may be referred to with incorrect pronouns in news coverage, or who may use alternative pronouns (matias n.d.). of course, passing on has to be designed with some way to identify women in the times, and gendered pronouns are a standard linguistic practice in english for identifying the gender of subjects. but this is where an epistemology of ignorance approach is helpful. it shows how this cultural and linguistic practice functions, in the context of this experiment, to exclude many trans and gender non-conforming people from the knowledge disseminated by wikipedia. thus, this paper outlines some of the sources of ignorance of gender that surround wikipedia and attempts to remedy its gender gap. by understanding how knowledge of gender and gender-based harassment is erased, silenced, and precluded, we can better understand the scope of wikipedia’s gender problem. with this understanding, we can design more effective tools for solving the problem. this paper concludes with some suggestions for solutions. methodology methodologically, this is a project in social epistemology of the internet. while the theoretical tools are primarily philosophical in nature, the paper also draws on research in hci to analyze particular tools and experiments aimed at correcting the gender gap. to make it accessible to an interdisciplinary audience, the paper will begin with an introduction to the literature on epistemologies of ignorance and the issues of diversity within wikipedia. references backer, a. (2015) “afrocrowd—bridging the multicultural gap,” wikiconference usa, october 10, 2015, washington, dc. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkhbg9v5wni>. [february 27, 2017]. cohen, n. (2011) “define gender gap? look up wikipedia’s contributor list,” the new york times january 30, 2011. <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/business/media/31link.html?_r=0>. [december 14, 2015]. frost-arnold, k. (forthcoming) “wikipedia,” in the routledge handbook of applied epistemology, d. coady & j. chase (eds.). new york: routledge. halfaker, a., geiger, r.s., & terveen, l.g. (2014) “snuggle: designing for efficient socialization and ideological critique,” in proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 311-320). acm. hill, b.m., and shaw, a. (2013) “the wikipedia gender gap revisited: characterizing survey response bias with propensity score estimation,” plos one 8(6): e65782. matias, j.n. (n.d.) passing on. <http://passingon.natematias.com/>. [february 25, 2017]. matias, j.n., diehl, s., & zuckerman, e. (2015) “passing on: reader-sourcing gender diversity in wikipedia,” in proceedings of the 33rd annual acm conference extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1073-1078). acm. menking, a., & erickson, i. (2015) “the heart work of wikipedia: gendered, emotional labor in the world's largest online encyclopedia,” in proceedings of the 33rd annual acm conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 207210). acm. stephenson-goodknight, r. (2015) “women…it takes a village” wikiconference usa, october 10, 2015, washington, dc. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkhbg9v5wni>. [february 27, 2017]. sullivan, s. and tuana, n. (eds.) (2007) race and epistemologies of ignorance, albany, ny: suny press. wikimedia foundation (2011) wikipedia editors study. <https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=file%3aeditor_survey_repor t_-_april_2011.pdf&page=1>. [february 27, 2017]. “wikipedia:wikiproject countering systemic bias” (n.d.) wikipedia. <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/wikipedia:wikiproject_countering_systemic_bia s>. [february 27, 2017]. “wikipedia:wikiproject women in red” (n.d.) wikipedia. <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/wikipedia:wikiproject_women/women_in_red> . [october 16, 2015]. young, i. (1990). justice and the politics of difference. princeton, nj: princeton university press. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 butt, m. (2019, october 2-5). “i never use headsets”: women, wariness, and hypervigilance for the inevitability of online harassment in gaming culture. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “i never use headsets”: women, wariness, and hypervigilance for the inevitability of online harassment in gaming culture mahli-ann butt university of sydney extended abstract the gaming community has been contoured by divisive issues around the exacerbation of sexism, racism, and harassment. these tensions culminated in 2014 in the shape of #gamergate: a decentralised online harassment campaign against women and feminism in gaming (chess & shaw 2015). this ongoing feminist ethnography has emerged from an imperative to create interventions into the increasing normalisation of online and offline harassment (consalvo 2011; humphreys 2017). in it, this research analyses the affective labour (hardt 1999) of how people navigate and ‘cope’ with discrimination in gaming cultures. this work-in-progress research is based on data collected from fieldwork of offline gaming spaces, online digital ethnography, surveys, and semistructured interviews, so as to develop a more nuanced understanding of participants and the roles afforded to marginalised groups in gaming and online cultures. from game developers and public industry events, to private domestic homes shared by people who play videogames with their partners, this research project contextualises and compares ‘social’ gaming spaces and interrogates how the imminent threat of ‘online’ harassment influences ‘offline’ gaming spheres and relationships, and vice versa. the theoretical framework entangles the public-private and online-offline spheres of gaming, and ties together three concepts: affective networks (the balances, structures, and mediations of power), affordances (the delineation of the limitations and abilities of power to impact and be impacted) and gender dynamics (the influences of powers such as gender roles imposed by societal norms). using critical identity theory, the research takes an intersectional, existential-poststructural feminist, and contextuality focused approach (c.f. de beauvoir 2010/1949; jackson 2012; shaw 2013). its approach privileges the experiences of its participants by building analysis on the historical and cultural marginalisation of women in gaming (abbate 2012; kirkpatrick 2012). conducting ethnography across domains affords an observation of how people ‘game’ the divide of online-offline and public-private spaces to navigate discrimination and harassment. rising in 2014, gamergate is a decentralised online harassment campaign against minority voices in gaming which operates under the guise of being ‘a crusade against unethical games journalism’ (massanari 2015, 6) which continues to intensify a heightened climate of hostility especially felt by women and minorities (cross 2014; golding & van deventer 2016). where harassment against women in gaming has been expected and normalised, it has become increasingly crucial to conduct feminist research and investigations into potential interventions against the toxic masculinity of gaming (consalvo 2011; salter & blodgett 2012; chess & shaw 2015, 209-210; kidd & turner 2016, 119-121). this paper will present vignettes of the larger research project of how online harassment has coloured people’s lived experiences, through thick-descriptions of indepth semi-structured interviews conducted with 7 women who play videogames with their romantic partners. these interviews gesture towards a rich complexity of affective relationships at the nexus of gaming, romantic relationships, and the everyday lived experiences of women. this paper critically examines the dynamics of how the increasing normalisation and public gamification of online harassment impacts women’s engagement with gaming, as well as how ‘online’ harassment may invade into their intimate relationships and domestic ‘private’ spheres. focusing on the interplay of gender and relationship dynamics constructs a framework which apprehends gaming as a culture situated within wider social contexts, rather than one which is insulated or segregated from everyday lived experiences. previously, theorists have suggested that the restructuring of experiences through technology (papachrissi 2010; jenkins et al. 2015), such as ‘networked publics’ (boyd 2010), reshape how women engage with their habitus (bourdieu 1977) through the increase of affordances. however, this research will critique these assumptions by focusing on technological affordances as also being shaped by offline practices (c.f. massumi 2002; terranova 2004; steinkuehler 2006; dyer-witherford & de peuter 2009; salter & blodgett 2012; shaw 2014). as such, gamergate is exemplary of how engagement and harassment ‘online’ floods into the ‘offline’ experiences of women in their everyday lives. to avoid bringing attention to their gender, harassment, and unwanted confrontations, women are hypervigilant. in similar ways to self-defence tactics, women constantly avoid using headsets to communicate with other players, keep clear of conversations about playing videogames, and minimise the performance of their femininity in public gaming spaces. this vignette puts forth findings on how women are constantly modulating their gender and gaming practices in limited ‘modes’ that are afforded to them in the limitations of ‘gamer’ culture under the thumb of seemingly inevitable online harassment. references abbate, j. (2012) recoding gender: women’s changing participation in computing. cambridge ma: mit press. boyd, d. (2010) “social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications.” networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites (ed. zizi papacharissi), 39-58. bourdieu, p. (1977) outline of a theory of practice. cambridge ma: cambridge university press. chess, s., and shaw, a. (2015) “a conspiracy of fishes, or, how we learned to stop worrying about #gamergate and embrace hegemonic masculinity.” journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 208-220. cross, k. (2014) “empire of dirt: how gamergate’s misogynistic policing of ‘gamer identity’ degrades the whole gaming community.” feministing. available at http://feministing.com/2014/10/23/empire-of-dirt-how-gamergates-misogynistic-policingof-gamer-identity-degrades-the-whole-gaming-community/ consalvo, m. (2011) “confronting toxic gamer culture: a challenge for feminist game studies scholars.” ada: a journal of gender and new media technology 1(1). doi:10.7264/n33x84kh. available at http://adanewmedia.org/2012/11/issue1-consalvo/ de beauvoir, s. (2010) the second sex. translated by constance borde and sheila malovany-chevallier, london: vintage. first published as le deuxième sexe, paris: editions gallimard, 1949. golding, d. and van deventer, l. (2016) game changers. melbourne: affirm press. hardt, m. (1999) “affective labour.” boundary 2, 26(2), 89-100. available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/303793 humphreys, s. (2017) “on being a feminist in games studies,” games and culture, (online first). available at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1555412017737637 jackson, m. (2012) lifeworlds: essays in existential anthropology. chicago: university of chicago press. jenkins, h. mizuko, i., and boyd, d. (2015) participatory culture in a networked era: a conversation on youth, learning, commerce and politics. cambridge uk: polity press. kidd, d. and turner, a.j. (2016) the #gamergate files: misogyny in the media. in a. novak and i. jamillah el-burki (eds.) defining identity and the changing scope of culture in the digital age, 117-139. hershey pa: information science reference. doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-0212-8. kirkpatrick, g. (2012) “constitutive tensions of gaming’s field: uk gaming magazines and the formation of gaming culture 1981-1995.” game studies, 12(1). available at http://gamestudies.org/1201/articles/kirkpatrick massanari, a. (2015) “#gamergate and the fappening: how reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures.” new media & society. doi:10.1177/1461444815608807. massumi, b. (2002) parables for the virtual: movement, affect, sensation. durham: duke university press. papacharissi, z.a. (2010) a private sphere: democracy in a digital age. cambridge uk: polity press. salter, a. and blodgett, b. (2012) “hypermasculinity & dickwolves: the contentious role of women in the new gaming public.” journal of broadcasting & electronic media 52, 401-416. doi:10.1080/08838151.2012.705199. shaw, a. (2013) “on not becoming gamers: moving beyond the constructed audience.” ada: a journal of gender, new media, and technology, 2. shaw, a. (2014) gaming at the edge: sexuality and gender at the margins of gamer culture. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. steinkuehler, c. (2006) “the mangle of play.” games and culture 1(3), 199-213. doi:10.1177/1555412006290440 terranova, t. (2004) network culture: politics for the information age. pluto press. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): tomlinson, c. (2019, october 2-5). disappointing and being disappointed: video game player trust in each other. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. disappointing and being disappointed: video game player trust in each other christine tomlinson university of california, irvine extended abstract video games often serve as a means of relaxation and enjoyment, but many factors become obstacles in the way of this goal. specifically, there are a variety of reasons that players have grown to feel uncomfortable with one another. online, video game consumers are frequently in positions where they need to rely on each other, but also need to assess the level of safety in these encounters. while previous work has focused a great deal on gendered hostilities, this project finds that the general population of players have concerns related to negative interactions. furthermore, while seen as unacceptable, these encounters have become largely normalized. when it comes to trust, the fact that many players begin their multiplayer habits through already established friend networks should create a more comfortable space (taylor, 2006, 2008). however, this does not exclude or reduce the possibility of expanding those networks. the majority of online players make new friends in online game settings and many are even comfortable sharing private information with these new online ties (cole & griffiths, 2007; bourgonjon, vandermeersche, de wever, soetaert, & valcke, 2015). in addition to reinforcing old bonds and making new ones, the presence of teambased gameplay encourages more cooperative behaviors and experiences (greitemeyer & cox, 2013). still, negative interactions happen frequently among players, including trolling or grief play and cheating – methods of harassing or dishonestly overcoming other players (taylor, 2006; nardi, 2010). these interactions commonly produce negative results due to players exploiting, harassing, or reinforcing a sense of hierarchy among each other (ruben & camm, 2013). women have also been noted as receiving interactions like these much more frequently than men (kuzenkoff & rose, 2012). to better understand these dynamics among video game players, i use qualitative methods to collect data through 54 interviews and approximately 1900 posts from five online gaming forums. three of these forums are focused on women. in interviews, players are asked about their experiences with and perceptions of people in gaming culture. for online forum posts, live conversations and targeted searches for specific terms related to gender, hostility, and online play are used to analyze how players talk about multiplayer situations and toxicity in the gaming community. both interviews and online forum data are coded for themes and patterns. for many players, trust in gaming is not something that comes easily. the majority of players in interviews and online forums report feeling like they cannot necessarily play certain games or genres without encountering toxicity or harassment. the types of harassment discussed range from hearing people generally saying unpleasant things over the microphone to being told to commit suicide for not being up to par in terms of their skill. these hostilities do take on gendered appearances as well. women discuss circumstances where they are assumed not to be good enough at games and have been approached by male players who want to explain how everything works. additionally, women note many instances of sexualized harassment. these behaviors include tendencies for male players to flirt with, make suggestive comments to, or solicit female players. it also includes male players telling female players to “get back in the kitchen” or service their male partners sexually. this can have devastating effects, with the stress and pressure of playing with a team – even those comprised of people the player knows – becoming so burdensome that emotional breakdowns can happen because harassment is anticipated and players feel they cannot live up to expectations. interestingly, while women discuss very targeted and specific kinds of harassment, they report receiving less of it than men. this is likely due to the fact that they are more prone to avoid multiplayer games to begin with because of concerns over the reportedly toxic experiences that women have. men frequently get a later start with being driven to avoid particular games or game genres to try to evade harassment. this happens after initially encountering it, with league of legends being the most frequently cited example. however, multiplayer games in general are shunned by many players regardless of gender because of these concerns. for instance, players note that they have been dissuaded from pursuing multiplayer play because of being judged for their skill in previous multiplayer attempts. these behaviors have largely become expected. the majority of players in interviews and online forums discuss multiplayer experiences as predictably negative. if this is the case, why would players continue to play multiplayer games? online forum discussions illuminate a possible contributing factor: players have just come to accept toxicity. in several forum posts, on both general and women-focused forums, players recall days of cooperation and support with other players. on the forums specifically, users discuss what can possibly be done, with most giving up hope that the community can change, citing toxicity as how things work now. beyond this, players also lack trust in companies to do anything, regularly mentioning that reports seem to do nothing to alleviate the issues or reduce hostile interactions. overall, players have come to build a sense of general distrust in the gaming community. players anticipate harassment and mistreatment, with an understanding that this is how the culture is currently constructed. feeling defeated, attempts to brainstorm solutions are typically shut down and most players appear to either accept it and stay quiet or give up on particular genres or games all together. this should be of concern for the video game industry, as this greatly affects their sales, but also to us as the public. with the growth of video games as a form of leisure for many, and the potential negative effects of hostility and toxicity from other players, this is putting many who want to explore video games as a hobby at risk of stress outcomes and a general breakdown in trust when it comes to many aspects of gaming. references bourgonjon, j., vandermeersche, g., de wever, b., soetaert, r., & valcke, m. (2016). players’ perspectives on the positive impact of video games: a qualitative content analysis of online forum discussions. new media & society, 18(8), 1732-1749. cole, h., & griffiths, m. d. (2007). social interactions in massively multiplayer online role-playing gamers. cyberpsychology & behavior, 10(4), 575-583. greitemeyer, t., & cox, c. (2013). there's no “i” in team: effects of cooperative video games on cooperative behavior. european journal of social psychology, 43(3), 224228. kuzenkoff, j. h., & rose, l. m. (2012). communication in multiplayer gaming: examining player responses to gender cues. new media & society 15(4):541-556. nardi, b. a. (2010). my life as a night elf priest: an anthropological account of world of warcraft. ann arbor: university of michigan press. rubin, v. l., & camm, s. c. (2013). deception in video games: examining varieties of griefing. online information review, 37(3), 369-387. taylor, t. l. (2006). play between worlds: exploring online game culture. cambridge: the mit press. taylor, t. l. (2008). becoming a player: networks, structure, and imagined futures. in y. b. kafai, c. heeter, j. denner, & j. y. sun (eds), beyond barbie & mortal kombat: new perspectives on gender and gaming (pp. 50-64). ma: mit press. microsoft word aoir2017_sept27.docx selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): dremljuga, r.-r. (2017, october 18-21). the disconnected that remain connected: practising partial disconnection in the digital age. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the disconnected that remain connected: practising partial disconnection in the digital age ramona-riin dremljuga aarhus university introduction this paper explores managing connectivity through disconnecting practice, or more specifically, quitting some (social) media platforms while continuing to use other communication tools and information systems. as the intersections between media, technology and our daily lives continue to increase, it seems to be more and more difficult to quit using new technologies. by studying the lived experience of seventeen individuals who, after having actively used the tool or platform, deliberately leave their account to distance themselves from the platform’s services or its other users, i argue that selecting to disconnect from some media is not equal to becoming disconnected. instead, alternative structures for connectivity are discovered and created. there are some common generalizations about people practising disconnection that are fed by stories in popular media. typical assumptions refer to the elderly who are disconnected because they don’t understand new technologies, people in rural areas who are cut off from otherwise available online infrastructures, and teenagers who disconnect because they’ve been cyberbullied or otherwise hurt online. research points to other groups that opt out, including people who cut themselves off from technology or media as a means of resistance (c.f., portwood-stacer, 2012) and people who are or become disconnected for economic, demographic or cultural reasons (c.f., wyatt, 1999; wyche & baumer, 2016). others have studied managing online connections and relationships via disconnection as a way of keeping a distance with selected connections in their networks (c.f., karppi, 2010; light, 2014). based on similar studies and assumptions, we could expect non-users, passive users, and quitters to have a clearly stated reason for their withdrawal from the online media platform or technology. even though people are socially, culturally, or politically influenced in their disconnecting practice, i question whether the practitioners are aware of the motivation to their rather uncommon act. thus, i focus on the practices of opting out and the findings that emerge from the lived experience of disconnection in the digital age and not on specific reasons per se. methodology this paper presents partial findings from a larger study of people, who self-identify as selectively disconnected – meaning, they have left from a social media platform while continuing to use their other social media account(s). a snowball sampling strategy was used, following the guidance of qualitative research techniques for locating people who might be otherwise difficult to find (tracy, 2013). the approach is influenced by constructivist grounded theory (charmaz, 2006), which enables the researcher to engage in constant comparison of emerging concepts until a level of saturation is reached where we are not learning any more about the situation. this also demonstrates a theoretical sampling (c.f., charmaz, 2006), since the aim is to explore a particular type of disconnection, regardless of participant demographics. findings there are some prerequisite settings for selective disconnection. the relevance of online and offline networks is reported to have a crucial role in ‘enabling’ this type of disconnection but not in making the decision to disconnect. the assumed cost and consequences of disconnecting are compared to the ‘real price’ of the experience afterthe-fact, guiding participants to discover the appropriate conditions for selective disconnection. the subjectively calculated ‘cost-efficiency’ of disconnecting varies across experiences, depending on the self-perceived relevance of the network to the disconnecting individual. the generally assumed cost of disconnection is not reflected in the lived experience of selective disconnection. the experience of partial disconnection is described as rewarding and positive, in contrast to the rather negative main discourses of disconnecting (e.g. social rejection and fomo). instead of arguing with the common generalizations, the disconnected justify the fallacious perceptions of disconnection induced by the remaining users in their network. the controversy remains unsolved as the real experience is poorly discussed, with the main assumptions left unchallenged in wider discussions. ‘new school’ and ‘old school’ tools are used to manage connectivity without the renounced platform. in search of alternatives, other ways for getting in touch with the networks are not created after-the-fact, but chosen from the already used platforms. the affordances of existing technologies are discovered and twisted to tailor appropriate workarounds that fit to the users’ ‘real needs’. while appropriating their own use of social media, the disconnected often make other users aware of the alternatives for remaining connected without the most habitual platforms or features. the idea of networks becoming more valuable for users as its population grows is challenged. the disconnected point to a need for connection management that becomes relevant when being connected with such vast networks as today’s social media scene. instead of appropriating a platform or just agreeing to its settings, people are willing to give up their online connections to a network if the pre-set structure of the interface and the social norms that complement its use conflict with their personal preferences. conclusion disconnection is often perceived as a negative response to technology, or a desire to escape. when we look below the surface level of anecdotes and popular media explanations, we find nuance. the practitioners of disconnection make calculated or spontaneous decisions about how they want to experience digital culture, not necessarily escape from it. as they are pushed to find alternatives for technologysupported connection that fit better with their needs and personal preferences, the disconnected find workarounds or learn to settle with less. consequently, while denying a system, a new structure for staying connected is created based on other available tools are used prior to disconnecting. although the participants don’t self-identify their actions as a part of some new movement or supporting some form of activism, their absence can be considered as an indirect political attitude and criticism towards the current tools and affordances of the networks and platform(s) they are stepping out and off from. references charmaz, k. (2006). constructing grounded theory: a practical guide through qualitative research. london: sage. karppi, t. (2014). disconnect.me: user engagement and facebook (doctoral dissertation). light, b. (2014). disconnecting with social networking sites. new york: palgrave macmillan. portwood-stacer, l. (2012). media refusal and conspicuous non-consumption: the performative and political dimensions of facebook abstention. new media & society, 15(7), 1041-1057. tracy, s. j. (2013). qualitative research methods: collecting evidence, crafting analysis, communicating impact. hoboken, nj: wiley-blackwell. wyatt, s. (1999). they came, they surfed, they went back to the beach: why some people stop using the internet. conference paper for society for social studies of science ’99. san diego, ca, usa. wyche, s. p., & baumer, e. p. s. (2016). imagined facebook: an exploratory study of non-users’ perceptions of social media in rural zambia. new media & society. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): rogerson, m.j., gibbs, m, smith, w. (2017, october 18-21). exploring the digital hinterland: internet practices surrounding the pursuit of “offline” hobbies. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. exploring the digital hinterland: internet practices surrounding the pursuit of “offline” hobbies melissa j. rogerson interaction design lab, the university of melbourne martin gibbs interaction design lab, the university of melbourne wally smith interaction design lab, the university of melbourne introduction the practice of boardgaming is thoroughly material, with abundant pawns, cubes, cards, dice, tiles and other game components contained within the box. however, this rich material engagement is surrounded by a “digital hinterland” of online practices that sits behind and frames the way that boardgamers experience games and gaming. although boardgames are, increasingly, playable in digital form (rogerson, gibbs, & smith, 2015), in this paper we focus on the digital practices that surround offline play but are not themselves play. using the example of boardgamegeek.com, we demonstrate that these practices provide an environment for knowledge-sharing, collaboration and cooperation (blau, 2011) in which participants accrue a form of gaming capital (consalvo, 2007). we extend these findings to show that similar practices exist for other offline hobbies, notably reading (goodreads.com) and yarn crafting (ravelry.com). method we conducted eleven semi-structured conversational interviews with serious leisure boardgamers (stebbins, 2015) in the usa, europe and australia, aged from mid-20s to early-60s. four were female, seven male, and all worked or were retired from whitecollar jobs. all were regular participants on boardgamegeek. through questions like “what do you like about playing games?” and prompting, we sought to understand their motivations – what attracted them to the hobby, and what they enjoyed about gaming – as well as the ways in which they engaged with their hobby, both in person and online. all interviews were transcribed verbatim and were analysed using thematic coding (cote & raz, 2015) informed by our engagement with the boardgaming hobby. after we identified five key digital practices, we visited the goodreads and ravelry websites to determine whether and how they appeared. findings although several participants described playing boardgames as an explicitly non-digital practice, and despite the deeply embedded materiality of these games (rogerson, gibbs, & smith, 2016), the internet is central to boardgamers’ description of their engagement with their hobby. like ravelry.com (hellstrom, 2013; hudson, 2010) and goodreads.com (naik, 2012), boardgamegeek is an information world containing “social norms, social types, information behavior, information value, and boundaries.“(worrall, 2013, p. 2). unlike ravelry or goodreads, however, which focus on the generally solitary hobbies of reading (nakamura, 2013, p. 239) or crafting, playing boardgames is already inherently social. boardgamegeek, like ravelry and goodreads, extends that sociality from the immediate game environment to the broader practices of researching, collecting, cataloguing, discussing and tracking. researching: participants research games on boardgamegeek, often in preparation for large events such as the spiel fair in essen, germany. they may read reviews, download rules, watch user-contributed play-through videos or listen to podcasts. research builds and supports the gamer’s emic knowledge and informs wise purchasing. similarly, goodreads allows users to browse for recommendations and to read book synopses and reviews, and ravelry provides encyclopaedic information about yarns and projects, or things that can be made. each site offers a form of filter which privileges friends’ contributions over those of unrelated participants; this is most overt on goodreads. collecting: as boardgame fans, many of our participants spend several thousand dollars a year on their hobby, acquiring, selling and trading games. boardgamers know not only how many games they own but also how their collection compares to other gamers’: “it’s about 350 games. … talk to the average person, they think that’s a lot of games! talk to my friends, they’ll say that’s a drop in a bucket!” (p6). gamers maintain wishlists of wanted games; similarly, both ravelry and goodreads offer a ‘wanted’ function, in the form of the ‘queue’ and ‘want to read’ options. the collection is as much about the items that will be collected or created as it is about those which are currently owned; woods (2012, pp. 134-135) has suggested that this collecting and curation is itself a form of play. cataloguing: boardgamegeek offers a number of ways to catalogue a game, which include a detailed description including the date purchased and vendor as well as the price paid and specific edition owned. similarly, ravelry users are able to relate their “stash” of yarns to possible projects, and goodreads users can add books to “shelves”. all three sites offer some form of tagging, as well as the facility to browse others’ catalogues, and distinguish between owned items and those which are used (read/played/crafted). discussing: through discussing games, rating and ‘commenting’, forum postings, formal reviews, and user-curated ‘geeklists’ which link a number of games to a specific theme, boardgamegeek users collaborate to co-create meaningful crowd-sourced descriptions of games, and present themselves as knowledgeable members of the community (stenros, paavilainen, & mäyrä, 2009; woods, 2012). elsewhere, rogerson et al. (2015) have described how these online practices can fundamentally change the offline experience even for those who do not engage online. participants on all three sites value the opportunity to engage with “like-minded souls” (p1) but also value the rich data that is generated by the active members, most prominently including ratings. tracking: lastly, participants seek to demonstrate and quantify their participation in their hobby: “since 2006 i've been using boardgamegeek to write down all the games that i've played” (p8). another participant logged her games played using an app, “keeping stats on which games i’ve played, how many games i’ve played, and who i’ve been playing with.” (p2). these statistics are uploaded to boardgamegeek, where they can be browsed and interrogated, by the creator and by others. similarly, goodreads participants participate in reading “challenges”, and ravelry users track the progress of their projects. conclusion based on interviews with hobbyist boardgamers, we identified a digital hinterland that surrounds and supports the explicitly material practice of boardgaming. being a boardgamegeek is not simply about playing games; in accruing gaming capital, users engage with a specific set of digital practices that support and enable material acts of play, and that invite users to co-create emic information about games and the gaming hobby, even when the user themself sees their engagement with boardgames as a rejection of technology. through reviewing the functions of goodreads and ravelry, sites that support the traditionally non-digital hobbies of reading and yarn craft, we have extended our findings to show that these practices are not specific to boardgaming but that similar practices are found across a variety of traditionally non-digital hobbies. acknowledgements melissa rogerson’s work was supported by an australian government research training program scholarship and by the microsoft research centre for social nui. references blau, i. (2011). e-collaboration within, between, and without institutions: towards better functioning of online groups through networks. international journal of ecollaboration, 7(4). consalvo, m. (2007). cheating : gaining advantage in videogames. cambridge, ma: mit press. cote, a., & raz, j. g. (2015). in-depth interviews for game research. in p. lankoski & s. björk (eds.), game research methods: an overview (pp. 93-116). halifax: etc press. hellstrom, m. (2013). knitting ourselves into being: the case of labour and hip domesticity on the social network ravelry. com. (master of arts), victoria university of wellington, wellington. hudson, t. p. (2010, october 6-9). spin artists, and how the internet fuels the art yarn movement. paper presented at the textile society of america 12th annual symposium. textiles and settlement: from plains space to cyber space, lincoln, nebraska. naik, y. (2012). finding good reads on goodreads: readers take ra into their own hands. reference & user services quarterly, 51(4), 319. nakamura, l. (2013). “words with friends”: socially networked reading on goodreads. pmla, 128(1), 238-243. doi:doi:10.1632/pmla.2013.128.1.238 rogerson, m. j., gibbs, m., & smith, w. (2015). digitising boardgames: issues and tensions. paper presented at the digra 2015; diversity of play, lüneburg, germany. rogerson, m. j., gibbs, m., & smith, w. (2016, may 07 12). “i love all the bits”: the materiality of boardgames. paper presented at the chi 2016, san jose, ca, usa. stebbins, r. a. (2015). the interrelationship of leisure and play: play as leisure, leisure as play leisure studies in a global era, doi:10.1057/9781137513038 stenros, j., paavilainen, j., & mäyrä, f. (2009). the many faces of sociability and social play in games. paper presented at the proceedings of the 13th international mindtrek conference: everyday life in the ubiquitous era, tampere, finland. woods, s. (2012). eurogames: the design, culture and play of modern european board games. jefferson, nc, and london, uk: mcfarland & company, inc, publishers. worrall, a. (2013). "back onto the tracks": convergent community boundaries in librarything and goodreads. paper presented at the 9th annual social informatics research symposium: the social informatics of information boundaries, 76th asis&t annual meeting, montreal, canada. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  giglietto,  f.,  valeriani  a.,  iannelli,  l.,  rossi  l.,  dvir  gvirsman,  s.,  zeng,  j.,   chan,  c.,  fu,  k.,  farkas,  j.,  schou,  j.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  researching  misleading  information  within   hybrid  media  ecologies.  where  we  are  and  where  we  are  going.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the   17th  annual  meeting  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from   http://spir.aoir.org. researching  misleading  information  within  hybrid  media   ecologies.  where  we  are  and  where  we  are  going panel  description on  friday  november  13,  a  group  of  coordinated  attacks  hit  paris  causing  more  than   130  victims.  the  frantic  moments  following  the  first  fragmented  news,  the  spread  of   rumors  and  the  wide  media  coverage  of  the  following  days,  highlighted  all  the  strength   and  fragility  of  an  hybrid  media  system  in  which  new  and  old  media  logics  compete  and   integrate. during  the  hours  following  the  attacks,  we  have  witnessed  the  spread  of  testimonies   published  on  social  media  and  widely  diffused  by  legacy  media,  we  have  observed  the   events. contemporary  information  ecologies,  by  simplifying  processes  of  production  and   circulation  of  news,  could  also  facilitate  the  diffusion  of  false  information  and/or   unverified  news.  in  this  context,  new  digital  elites  (i.e.  bloggers,  social  media  power   users  etc.),  legacy  media  actors  and  non-­elites  are  still  in  search  of  a  strategy  for  real   time  verification  and  debunking. previous  studies  emphasized  the  importance  of  echo  chamber  effects  and  "confirmation   bias"  (the  tendency  to  consider  true  information  that  confirms  what  we  already  believe   eventually  proved  to  be  false,  have  contributed  to  shape  the  representation  of  those   emergence  of  forms  of  cooperation  aimed  at  supporting  the  search  for  the  missing  and   we  have  participated  in  the  ritual  of  collective  mourning  with  the  hashtag  #prayforparis.   at  the  same  time,  however  we  have  also  read  numerous  reports  that,  although  true)  as   the  cognitive  process  that,  at  the  same  time,  makes  misinformation  easy  to  spread  and   difficult  to  debunk.  peer  networks  play  an  important  role  as  a  source  of  confirmation  or   disconfirmation  of  rumors.  as  a  result,  homophilic  and  polarized  communities  represent   a  fertile  ground  for  disinformation.  recent  studies  also  pointed  out  the  combined  effect   of  "confirmation  bias"  and  online  communities  often  characterized  by  a  high  degree  of   homogeneity.   while  widely  analyzed  from  different  disciplines,  both  the  studies  on  spread  of  rumors,   and  false  or  misleading  information  still  lack  that  level  of  conceptual  coherence  that   would  allow  different  approaches  and  academic  backgrounds  to  fruitful  collaborate.   recognizing  this  limit,  several  defining  attempts  have  been  carried  on. by  pinpointing  the  limits  of  existing  predominantly  actor-­oriented  taxonomies  when   applied  to  hybrid  media  ecologies,  the  first  paper  in  this  panel  introduces  an  alternative   process-­based  classification  that  distinguishes  between  “mis-­information”  (where  a  false   information  generated  by  a  third  actor  is,  in  a  short  run,  picked  up  and  diffused  by   mainstream  media,  without  verification  and  producing  legitimization),  “pseudo-­ information”  (where  “alternative”  media  sources  produce  information  aimed  at  correcting   the  mainstream  media  system  by  giving  voices  to  alternative  takes  on  reality  considered   not  adequately  represented  by  traditional  media)  and  “fake-­information”  (in  which  media   actors  specialized  in  the  production  of  false  information  injects  fake-­news,  mainly  within   social  media  ecologies  for  propaganda,  to  get  attention  and  clicks,  to  earn  revenues   from  online  ads). the  three  following  papers  further  elaborate  on  each  of  those  category: by  presenting  a  new  model  of  news  flow  in  the  hybrid  media  ecologies,  the  second   paper  in  this  panel  will  dig  deeper  and  shed  more  light  on  the  processes  behind  “mis-­ information”  with  a  specific  focus  on  the  effects  of  the  sns  proliferation  on  news   production,  and  especially  on  the  quality  and  diversity  of  the  information  presented. the  third  paper  in  this  panel  discusses  the  role  played  by  social  media  as  platforms   where  news  as  well  rumours  circulates  in  response  to  a  lack  of  transparency  on   mainstream  media.  the  empirical  analysis  of  the  conversations  originated  on  weibo  by   the  2015  devastating  explosions  in  tianjin  -­  northern  china  -­,  highlights  an  alternative   take  on  the  beneficial  role  of  “pseudo-­information”  as  a  form  of  counter-­power  against   the  ruling  regime  in  authoritarian  contexts. the  fourth  and  last  paper,  presents  the  findings  from  a  multi-­sided  online  ethnographic   study  of  12  danish  facebook  pages  that  during  2015,  claimed  to  be  run  by  radical   islamists  living  in  denmark  and  through  aggressive  and  violent  language,  proclaimed   that  muslims  in  the  country  were  plotting  to  destroy  the  danish  society  from  within.   contents  created  by  this  orchestrated  campaign  of  “fake-­information”,  received   thousands  of  comments  the  majority  of  which  contained  counter-­aggression  towards  not   only  the  page  admins  but  also  muslims  and  immigrants  in  general.  this  massive  user   attention  turned  the  pages  into  sites  of  aggression  and  xenophobia,  making  them  part  of   a  much  larger  discursive  struggle  to  define  the  ‘’truth’’  about  muslims  and  immigrants  in   the  country. combined,  these  papers  explore  some  of  the  ways  in  which  theoretical  and  empirical   scholarly  investigations  can  open  up  paths  for  a  new  cross-­disciplinary  research  agenda   on  the  spread  of  misleading  information  in  contemporary  hybrid  media  ecologies.   a  new  taxonomy  for  misleading  information  circulating   within  hybrid  media  ecologies fabio  giglietto università  di  urbino  carlo  bo augusto  valeriani università  di  bologna laura  iannelli università  di  sassari luca  rossi it  university  of  copenhagen introduction following  an  initial  phase  where  early  adopters  believed  that  structural  differences  and   diffuse  interactivity  could  have  saved  online  news  from  the  spread  of  misleading   information,  it  is  now  largely  acknowledged  that  the  internet  can  be  an  even  more   powerful  potential  means  of  disinformation  than  traditional  mass  media  (floridi,  1996).   while  the  problem  of  disinformation  endangers  various  subjects  (from  health-­related   information  to  scholarly  communication)  it  appears  to  be  of  paramount  importance  when   it  affects  news,  political  communication  or  other  topics  relevant  for  the  development  of     contemporary  public  sphere  (dahlberg  2001).   despite  widely  recognized  as  a  crucially  important  issue  for  the  future  of  our   democracies  and  therefore  widely  studied  from  different  disciplines,  disinformation  still   lacks  a  commonly  accepted  unique  definition  and  clearly  described  typologies.  starting   from  an  up  to  date  and  in  depth  cross-­disciplinary  literature  review,  the  paper  introduces   a  new  taxonomy  of  disinformation  based  on  three  distinct  processes:  mis-­information,   pseudo-­information  and  fake-­information.     processes  of  misleading  information considering the centrality of the concept of good information for healthy functioning democracies, is not surprising that both the spread of rumors, and false or misleading information in general attracted a wide and very diversified academic attention. this body of literature can be traced back to the stream of post-ii-world-war studies on the effects of media on public opinion. in their seminal work, allport and postman (1946) identified "the basic law of rumor" declaring that rumor strength (r) will vary with the importance of the subject to the individual concerned (i) times the ambiguity of the evidence pertaining to the topic at hand (a), or r ≈ i × a. while the definition clearly suggests the coexistence of a psychological and a cultural dimension, disciplinary specialization has led to studies mainly focused on either one or the other aspect and a general lack of conceptual coherence (rojecki & meraz, 2014). nevertheless, most of the studies agrees on underlying [1] the importance of "confirmation bias" (the tendency to consider true information that confirms what we already believe true) as the cognitive process that, at the same time, makes misinformation easy to spread and difficult to debunk (nyhan & reifler, 2010; weeks, 2015) and [2] the role played by peer networks as a source of confirmation or disconfirmation of rumors (southwell, 2013). as a result, homophilic and polarized communities represent a fertile ground for disinformation (lewandowsky, ecker, seifert, schwarz, & cook, 2012). more recent studies also pointed out the combined effect of "confirmation bias" and online communities often characterized by a high degree of homogeneity (bode & vraga, 2015; silverman, 2015). existing  literature  contains  several  attempts  of  defining  exhaustive  and  useful   classifications  (fallis,  2015).  the  ephemeral  nature  of  such  taxonomies  and  the   confusion  characterizing  the  definitions  of  specific  genres  of  misleading  information   circulating  within  information  ecologies  is  most  probably  the  result  of  the  instability  and   never-­ending  transformations  of  such  ecologies.   the  paper  propose  a  new  taxonomy  for  genres  of  misleading  information  that  fits  better   with  contemporary  hybrid  media  systems,  (chadwick  2013)  i.e.  ecologies  of  news   where  older  and  newer  media  technologies,  genres,  norms,  behaviors,  and   organizational  forms  are  highly  intertwined.   defining  a  new  taxonomy  is  the  first  step  to  properly  address,  theoretically  and   empirically,  an  issue  that  is  emerging  as  one  of  the  very  crucial  problems  characterizing   contemporary  political  and  social  environments. most  of  the  taxonomies  proposed  so  far  are  based  on  the  distinction  between  false   information  resulting  from  honest  mistakes  (often  defined  as  misinformation)  and  the   one  resulting  from  deliberate  intention  to  deceive  (disinformation).  however,  in   contemporary  hybrid  media  ecologies,  circulation  of  (false)  information  is  the  result  of  a   process  involving  an  highly  diverse  plethora  of  actors  who  are  very  unlikely  to  be  all   guided  by  the  same  rationale  (and  by  the  same  awareness  of  information’s  fallacy).   for  this  reason,  while  an  exclusively  “actor-­oriented”  taxonomy  may  be  inadequate  to   meaningfully  describe  real  everyday  cases,  a  process-­oriented  one  could  the  very   nature  of  contemporary  (dis)information  reality. on  these  premises,  we  developed  the  following  tripartite  process-­oriented  taxonomy: 1)   “mis-­information”  as  a  process  where  a  false  information  generated  -­  deliberately   or  not-­  by  a  third  actor  is,  in  a  short  run,  picked  up  and  diffused  by  mainstream   media.  mainstream  media  are  increasingly  relying  on  online  sources  to  feed  their   news-­streams,  however  the  process  of  verification  sometimes  fails  resulting  in   the  spread  of  unverified  rumors.  once  legitimated  by  the  first  mainstream  media,   the  rumor  is  often  picked  up  by  other  media  referencing  the  first  media  as  a   source  thus  often  avoiding  further  verification.  such  legitimization  generate  a   mis-­information  cascade  potentially  involving  all  other  actors  in  the  hybrid  media   system.   2)   “pseudo-­information”  as  a  process  where  “alternative”  media  sources  (online  and   offline)  produce  false  information  aimed  at  correcting  the  mainstream  media   system  by  giving  voices  to  alternative  takes  on  reality  considered  not  adequately   represented  by  traditional  media  (e.g.  pseudo-­science  and  conspiracy  theories).   such  contents  are  initially  shared  within  homophilic  communities  already   supporting  such  vision  of  reality,  however,  facilitated  by  social  media  and  fueled   by  the  the  wide  distrust  toward  traditional  media,  these  information  eventually   circulate  also  outside  of  these  echo-­chambers.   3)   “fake-­information”  as  a  process  in  which  media  actors  specialized  in  the   production  of  false  information  injects  fake-­news,  mainly  within  social  media   ecologies,  to  get  attention  and  clicks,  to  earn  revenues  from  online  ads.  injecting   fake-­news  can  also  be  motivated  by  satire  (as  in  the  case  of  the  onions),  by  the   desire  to  damage  a  competitor  or  for  propaganda.  by  contradicting  existing   expectations  and  adopting  a  sensationalistic  style,  “fake-­information”  can  attract   users  who,  frequently,  recirculate  them  on  their  feeds  without  reading  the  whole   stories.   following  a  brief  presentation  of  the  existing  literature  and  leveraging  on  real  cases,  the   paper  will  discuss  the  main  limitations  of  current  taxonomies  when  applied  to  hybrid   media  ecologies  and  how  the  proposed  one  overcomes  those  limitations.     references allport,  g.  w.,  &  postman,  l.  (1946).  an  analysis  of  rumor.  public  opinion   quarterly,  10(4),  501–517.  http://doi.org/10.1093/poq/10.4.501 bode,  l.,  &  vraga,  e.  k.  (2015).  in  related  news,  that  was  wrong:  the  correction  of   misinformation  through  related  stories  functionality  in  social  media.  the  journal  of   communication,  65(4),  619–638.  http://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12166   chadwick,  a.  (2013).  the  hybrid  media  system:  politics  and  power.  oxford  university   press.   dahlberg,  l.  (2001).  computer-­‐ mediated  communication  and  the  public  sphere:  a   critical  analysis.  journal  of  computer-­‐ mediated  communication,  7(1),  0-­0.     10.1111/j.1083-­6101.2001.tb00137.x. fallis,  d.  (2015).  what  is  disinformation?  library  trends,  63(3),  401–426.   http://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2015.0014 floridi,  l.  (1996).  brave.  net.  world:  the  internet  as  a  disinformation  superhighway?.   the  electronic  library,  14(6),  509-­514.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/eb045517 lewandowsky,  s.,  ecker,  u.  k.  h.,  seifert,  c.  m.,  schwarz,  n.,  &  cook,  j.  (2012).   misinformation  and  its  correction:  continued  influence  and  successful  debiasing.   psychological  science  in  the  public  interest:  a  journal  of  the  american  psychological   society,  13(3),  106–131.  http://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612451018   nyhan,  b.,  &  reifler,  j.  (2010).  when  corrections  fail:  the  persistence  of  political   misperceptions.  political  behavior,  32(2),  303–330.  http://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-­010-­ 9112-­2 rojecki,  a.,  &  meraz,  s.  (2014).  rumors  and  factitious  informational  blends:  the  role  of   the  web  in  speculative  politics.  new  media  &  society.   http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814535724 silverman,  c.  (2015).  lies,  damn  lies,  and  viral  content.  how  news  websites  spread   (and  debunk)  online  rumors,  unverified  claims,  and  misinformation.  tow  center  for   digital  journalism. southwell,  b.  g.  (2013).  social  networks  and  popular  understanding  of  science  and   health:  sharing  disparities  (1st  ed.).  baltimore,  md,  usa:  johns  hopkins  university   press.  retrieved  from  http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2564778 weeks,  b.  e.  (2015).  emotions,  partisanship,  and  misperceptions:  how  anger  and   anxiety  moderate  the  effect  of  partisan  bias  on  susceptibility  to  political  misinformation.   the  journal  of  communication,  65(4),  699–719.  http://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12164 the  new  flow  of  news  flow  in  a  hybrid  media:  how  social  network   sites  transform  news  organizations  and  citizens’  political   behaviour shira  dvir  gvirsman   tel  aviv  university abstract politically  informed  citizens  are  considered  pillars  of  the  democratic  regime.  yet,   traditional  news  consumption  has  steadily  declined  as  of  late.  thus,  knowledge  gaps   between  citizens  have  arisen  (prior,  2005),  endangering  informed  democratic  processes   and  participation.  to  accommodate  the  changed  landscape,  news  organization  and   news  production  are  undergoing  profound  changes.  this  talk  points  to  the  emergence  of   such  a  fundamental  shift  in  news  distribution  according  to  which  professional  news   organizations  are  partnered  with  digital  social  network  sites  (snss)  as  sources  of   political  information.  news  organizations  have  embedded  social  plugins  (e.g.,  tweet  and   share  buttons)  into  their  news  websites,  thereby  establishing  a  direct  connection  with   snss.  this,  i  argue,  creates  a  new  –and  categorically  different  –  model  for  news   distribution.  the  media  industry  is  relying  on  a  new  economic  model  in  which  users  are   no  longer  acting  solely  as  consumers,  but  rather,  as  a  new  type  of  distributors,  blurring   the  distinction  between  consumers  and  producers.  for  the  first  time,  the  carefully   maintained  barriers  between  news  organizations'  outlets  and  individuals’  social   networks  shook  and  crumbled,  transforming  of  news  into  a  ‘social’  commodity.  under   such  conditions,  misinformation  can  be  distributed  much  faster  and  much  easier  than   ever  before.           theoretically,  this  change  demands  scholars  to  re-­think  their  conceptualization  of  media   environment  and  the  models  describing  the  distribution  of  political  information  among   citizens.  most  studies  probing  the  issue  of  how  citizens  get  informed  point  to  two  main   sources:  political  discussions  with  other  people  and  traditional  news  consumption  (e.g.   ahn,  huckfeldt,  &  ryan,  2010;;  prior,  2005).  yet,  today,  these  two  areas  are  becoming   increasingly  interconnected.  this  is  yet  another  example  for/of  media  convergence[1]:   an  on-­going  long  term  process  that  created  a  world  in  which  it  is  no  longer  feasible  to   differentiate  between  mass  communication  and  inter-­personal  communication  (castells,   2013;;  walther  et  al.,  2010).  thus,  creating  a  hybrid  media  environment.  it  goes  to   reason  that  in  such  an  environment  -­  where  traditional  hierarchies  as  less  pronounced  -­   misinformation  will  be  by  considered  equally  credible  by  users.  accordingly,  users  are   missing  some  of  the  conventional  cues  separating  between  rumors  and  misinformation   and  corroborated  news  stories.         past  theoretical  models  of  news  distribution  assumed  some  type  of  vertical  logic  where   news  organizations  create  content  and  then  distribute  it  to  audiences  (although  several   models  do  account  theoretically  for  news  distribution  among  audiences.  bennett  &   manheim,  2006;;  bimber,  2003;;  hindman,  2008).  i  contend  that,  due  to  the  merging  of   news  production  and  social  media,  and  the  creation  of  a  new  hybrid  media,  news   distribution  today  is  better  described  by  a  new  model  based  on  horizontal  network  logic   (bennett,  freelon,  hussain,  &  wells,  2012).    as  a  result,  news  flow  is  changing  since   snss  are  not  governed  by  standards  of  professional  journalism,  but  rather  by  the   strength  of  social  ties.  by  implication,  this  transformation  is  bound  to  have  a  significant   social  impact  on  having  an  informed  citizenship  and  on  citizens'  political  behavior.   consumers  receive  different  blends  of  information,  governed  by  unprofessional  curators   –  their  snss  ‘friends’.  the  quality,  and  more  importantly  heterogeneity  of  this   information,  eventually  impact  their  political  behavior  and  beliefs  (slater,  2007;;  thorson   &  wells,  2015).  in  a  past  pre-­networked  environment,  professional  standards  stood  in   the  way  of  misinformation  distribution,  or  served  as  a  trustworthy  alternative.  however,   when  news  flow  is  governed  by  social  ties,  new  rules  apply.  under  such  conditions,   virality  and  ‘shareability’  may  play  a  more  dominant  role  in  comparison  to  the  source.     generally,  the  suggested  model  underscores  how  political  engagement  and  strength  of   political  identity  contribute  to  the  emergence  to  two  types  of  consumers/actors:  those   acting  as  distributors  -­  bridging  between  news  sites  and  snss,  and  those  who  are   immersed  in  their  social  network  and  rely  on  it  as  a  sole  provider  of  news.  the   suggested  model  delineates  the  long-­term  effects  of  these  network  roles  with  regards  to   political  beliefs,  identity,  knowledge  and  participation  (stroud,  2011).  namely,  it   addresses  the  possibility  of  a  political  reinforcing  process  (slater,  2007),  brought  by  the   social  aspects  now  attached  to  news  (knobloch-­westerwick  &  meng,  2011).         in  this  talk  i  will  outlines  a  model  of  news  distribution  and  consumption,  which  takes  into   account  the  proliferation  of  snss  with  respect  to  the  following  important  issues:  (1)   what  are  the  effects  of  the  sns  proliferation  on  news  production,  and  especially  on  the   quality  and  diversity  of  the  information  presented?  (2)  what  characterizes  sns   audiences?  (3)  what  longitudinal  effects  will  the  distribution  and  consumption  of  news   via  snss  have  on  citizens'  political  knowledge,  behavior  and  beliefs?   while  these  developments  are  in  their  early  stages,  snss  are  rapidly  gaining   dominance,  radically  changing  news  consumption.  therefore,  it  is  imperative  to  capture   this  phenomenon  at  the  outset  and  to  explore  its  evolution  via  longitudinal  research.   this  will  enable  us  to  point  to  future  trajectories  of  news  production  and  consumption.   more  so,  by  radically  changing  scholarly  conceptualization  of  media  consumption  and   production,  a  more  precise  understanding  of  media  influence  on  citizenship  can  be   achieved.     references ahn,  t.,  huckfeldt,  r.,  &  ryan,  j.  b.  (2010).  communication,  influence,  and   informational  asymmetries  among  voters.  political  psychology,  31(5),  763-­787. bennett,  l.,  freelon,  d.  g.,  hussain,  m.,  &  wells,  c.  (2012).  digital  media  and  youth.  in   h.  a.  semetko  &  m.  scammell  (eds.),  the  sage  handbook  of  political  communication   (pp.  127-­137):  sage. bennett,  l.,  &  manheim,  j.  b.  (2006).  the  one-­step  flow  of  communication.  the   annals  of  the  american  academy  of  political  and  social  science,  608(1),  213-­232. bimber,  b.  a.  (2003).  information  and  american  democracy:  technology  in  the  evolution   of  political  power:  cambridge  university  press. castells,  m.  (2013).  communication  power:  oxford  university  press. hindman,  m.  (2008).  the  myth  of  digital  democracy:  princeton  university  press. holbert,  r.  l.,  garrett,  r.  k.,  &  gleason,  l.  s.  (2010).  a  new  era  of  minimal  effects?  a   response  to  bennett  and  iyengar.  journal  of  communication,  60(1),  15-­34. knobloch-­westerwick,  s.,  &  meng,  j.  (2011).  reinforcement  of  the  political  self  through   selective  exposure  to  political  messages.  journal  of  communication,  61(2),  349-­368.   doi:10.1111/j.1460-­2466.2011.01543.x prior,  m.  (2005).  news  vs.  entertainment:  how  increasing  media  choice  widens  gaps  in   political  knowledge  and  turnout.  american  journal  of  political  science,  49(3),  577-­592. slater,  m.  d.  (2007).  reinforcing  spirals:  the  mutual  influence  of  media  selectivity  and   media  effects  and  their  impact  on  individual  behavior  and  social  identity.   communication  theory,  17(3),  281-­303. stroud,  n.  j.  (2011).  niche  news:  the  politics  of  news  choice:  oxford  university  press. thorson,  k.,  &  wells,  c.  (2015).  curated  flows:  a  framework  for  mapping  media   exposure  in  the  digital  age.  communication  theory,  n/a-­n/a.  doi:10.1111/comt.12087 walther,  j.  b.,  carr,  c.  t.,  choi,  s.  s.  w.,  deandrea,  d.  c.,  kim,  j.,  tong,  s.  t.,  &  van   der  heide,  b.  (2010).  interaction  of  interpersonal,  peer,  and  media  influence  sources   online.  in  z.  papacharissi  (ed.),  a  networked  self:  identity,  community,  and  culture  on   social  network  sites  (pp.  17-­38).  london:  routledge. webster,  j.  g.  (2008).  in  j.  turow  &  l.  tsui  (eds.),  the  hyperlinked  society  (pp.  23-­ 37).  ann  arbor:  the  university  of  michigan  press. [1]  media  convergence  “  describes  the  move  towards  fully  integrated  media  delivery   system”  (webster,  2008,  p.  23) can  online  rumour  be  a  social  good  in  an  authoritarian  state?  a   case  study  of  rumour  on  sina  weibo  after  the  2015  tianjin  blasts jing  zeng queensland  university  of  technology chung-­hong  chan university  of  hong  kong king-­wa  fu university  of  hong  kong introduction on  12  august,  2015  a  series  of  explosions  in  tianjin,  northern  china,  devastated  large   areas  of  the  region  and  killed  over  a  hundred  people.  due  to  the  lack  of  transparency   after  the  incident  on  mainstream  media,  social  media  such  as  weibo  became  the  major   platform  where  news  as  well  rumours  about  the  blast  were  circulated  by  chinese   netizens.  rumours  on  social  media  during  crises  have  long  been  studied  in  the  field  of   internet  research,  but  most  of  these  studies  emphasise  the  negative  effects  of  rumour,   and  therefore  focus  on  how  to  control  and  detect  them  (castillo,  mendoza,  &  poblete,   2011;;  shah  &  zaman,  2011).  however,  this  study  explores  whether  or  not  rumours  can   be  beneficial  to  the  general  public  by  analysing  the  impact  of  rumour  as  a  counter-­power   against  the  authorities. theoretical  background  and  research  objectives drawing  upon  classic  rumour  theories,  rumour  is  understood  as  unofficial  information   that  results  from  collective  uncertainty  in  the  society  when  reliable  information  is  not   available  (shibutani,  1966;;  rosnow,  1991;;  kapferer,  2013,  difonzo  et  al.,  1994).  since  it   is  characterized  as  an  ‘unofficial  source’  but  not  an  ‘incorrect’  one,  rumour  can  be  a  form   of  pseudo-­information  (anonymous,  2016)  that  by  definition  can  true,  informative,  and   beneficial  to  the  public.  furthermore,  the  definition  of  rumour  leads  to  questions,  like   who  is  the  official?    who  has  the  authority  to  speak?  this  makes  rumour  particularly   political  and  can  be  known  as  a  grassroots’  protest  in  an  authoritarian  state  (hu,  2009).   as  kapferer  (1990)  states,  ‘a  rumour  constitutes  a  relation  to  authority’  (2013,  p.14).  this   relation  between  rumour  and  authority  enables  researchers  to  use  rumour  as  a  lens  to   explore  how  weibo-­based  “rumour  public”  (peterson  &  gist,  1951)  challenge  the   legitimacy  of  the  ruling  party.     in  accordance  with  kapferer’s  (2013)  rumour  theories,  the  political  significance  of  rumour   is  two-­fold:  (1)  rumour  re-­establishes  the  transparency  of  power  and  (2)  constitutes   counter-­power.  drawing  on  this  framework,  this  study  explores  the  political  impact  of   rumour  using  these  following  research  questions:     rq1:  to  what  extent  did  rumour  pressure  the  chinese  government  to  become  more   transparent  about  the  tianjin  blasts  incident?   rq1.1:    what  were  the  major  rumours  surfacing  on  weibo  during  this  incident?   rq1.2:  how  did  the  chinese  government  responded  to  these  rumours?     rq2:  what  are  the  impacts  of  the  chinese  government’s  rumour  management   strategies?  do  they  have  counter-­effect  that  stimulate  more  discussion  over  the  issue,  or   there  is  evidence  of  chilling  effects?     research  design  and  findings three  data  sets  were  collected  and  used  in  this  study,  and  the  details  are  summarized  in   the  table  below:   [insert  table  1  here]     content  analysis  (rq  1.1)     to  identify  major  rumours  around  tianjin  blasts,  we  conducted  a  content  analysis  of  data   sets  of  rumour  rebuttal  posts  (rr),  and  weiboscope  set  (ws)  that  consisted  of  posts   that  have  been  removed  from  the  system.  by  doing  so,  14  rumours  were  identified.    with   this  result,  we  selected  posts  related  to  each  rumour  from  three  datasets,  the  basic   statistics  of  which  are  presented  in  table  2.   [insert  table  2]   clustering  analysis  rq1.2   with  findings  from  content  analysis,  we  further  assess  how  the  chinese  government   responded  to  different  rumors  through  clustering  analysis.  the  probabilities  of  topical   weibo  appearing  in  the  (ws)  and  (rr)  set  were  adjusted  by  the  general  interest  in  that   topic  as  reflected  by  the  probability  of  topical  weibo  in  the  search  set.  the  log  odds   ratios  (log  or)  were  calculated  for  each  topic  in  each  set  with  the  following  formula:           the  log  or  for  each  topic  in  the  ws  set  and  ar  set  was  plotted  in  figure  1.  then  we   explored  the  source  of  heterogeneity  in  the  or  with  agglomerative  hierarchical   clustering  (hastie,  tibshirani,  &  friedman,  2013).    results  are  presented  in  figure  2.     [insert  figure  1  here]   [insert  figure  2  here]     in  general,  the  topic  can  be  grouped  into  three  clusters  (figure  2)  and  they  were  “highly   refuted  and  maybe  censored”  (red  topics),  “casually  refuted  and  casually  censored”   (black  topics)  and  “let  the  public  talk  about  them”  (green  topics).       time  series  analysis  –  rq  2   we  used  lead-­lag  analysis  to  explore  if  the  authority’s  rumour  response  led  to  a  decline   of  discussion  or  whether  it  actually  had  counter-­effects  that  stimulated  the  public  to   discuss  more  about  the  issue.  for  each  topic,  the  lead-­lag  associations  between  daily   number  of  posts  in  all  three  datasets  were  studied.  findings  are  summarized  in  figure  3.     [insert  figure  3  here] 4.  discussion research  question  1   our  findings  show  evidence  that  the  weibo-­based  rumours  effectively  pressure  the   government  openly  respond  to  rumour  public’s  concern  around  the  blasts.  most  of   rumours  surfaced  on  social  media  during  the  tianjin  blasts  challenge  official  information   about  this  incident,  or  criticize  the  local  authority  for  mismanagement  and  corruption.   findings  from  clustering  analysis  and  time  series  analysis  reveals  the  vast  majority  of   rumours  identified  in  this  study  received  received  government’s  official  response  on   weibo  within  24  hours.  this  suggests  that  social  media-­based  rumour  effectively   pressure  the  authority  to  reveal  information  that  may  otherwise  be  hidden  from  the   public.  moreover,  these  findings  also  suggest  during  this  incident  that  the  authorities   mostly  rely  on  official  accounts  (e.g.  police  department)  to  refute  rumours,  rather  than   censorship.     research  question  2   maintaining  social  stability  is  high  on  the  chinese  government’s  agenda.    earlier  studies   found  that  the  authorities  either  comfort  the  public  through  selectively  responding  to   pressure  from  the  netizens  (zheng,  2007;;  yang,  2009),  or  suppress  online  discussion   through  vigorous  censorship  (luo,  2014).  however,  our  findings  suggest  that  the   official’s  rumour  debunking  did  not  lead  to  declines  in  the  public’s  discussion  over   controversial  issues.  our  time  series  analysis  result  reveals  that  the  official’s  rumour   rebuttal  posts  on  weibo  actually  stimulate  more  discussion  over  the  issue.  for  all  six   topics,  the  rr  dataset  time  series  was  positively  correlated  with  future  level  of  sr   dataset  time  series  in  five  topics  with  the  exception  of  “local  media”.  therefore,  the   increase  in  ar  activities  on  online  rumours  was  associated  with  an  increase  in  general   discussion  of  these  six  rumours.     moreover,  there  is  little  evidence  suggesting  that  online  censorship  had  chilling  effects   over  weibo  users’  sharing  of  rumours.  for  corruption  related  rumours  (“ruihai”  and   “officers”  topics),  censorship  leads  to  more  discussion  over  the  issue.  for  “pollution”   and  “volunteers”,  the  future  ws  set  time  series  was  positively  correlated  with  the  rr  set   time  series.  this  means  that  the  censorship  activities  lagged  behind  the  general   discussion,  indicating  a  pattern  of  information  suppression.  in  spite  of  this,  the  general   public  still  talked  about  those  topics  and  therefore  we  did  not  observe  consistent  chilling   effects  of  such  information  suppression  attempts.    the  chilling  effect  was  observed  only   in  the  topic  of  “casualties”  in  which  the  censorship  activities  were  associated  with   reduced  level  of  activity  in  the  general  discussion  on  the  same  day.   conclusion this  paper  has  discussed  the  potential  of  rumour  to  constitute  a  counter-­power  against   the   ruling   regime   in   authoritarian   contexts.   we   analysed   how   the   rumour   public   on   weibo  use  rumour  to  challenge  the  official  information  around  the  tianjin  blasts  incident,   and  how  the  authorities  responded  to  it.  our  findings  show  that  weibo  users  formed  an   effective  counter-­power  to  challenge  the  official  discourse  during  this  incident. references castillo,   c.,   mendoza,   m.,   &   poblete,   b.   (2011).   information   credibility   on   twitter.   in   proceedings   of   the   20th   international   conference   on   world   wide   web   (pp.   675-­684):   acm.     difonzo,   n.,   bordia,   p.,   &   rosnow,   r.   l.   (1994).   reining   in   rumors.   organizational   dynamics,   23(1),   47-­62.       friedrich,  j.  o.,  adhikari,  n.  k.,  &  beyene,  j.  (2007).  inclusion  of  zero  total  event  trials  in   meta-­analyses  maintains  analytic  consistency  and  incorporates  all  available  data.  bmc   medical   research   methodology,   7(1),   1.       fu,   k.-­w.,   chan,   c.-­h.,   &   chau,   m.   (2013).   assessing   censorship   on   microblogs   in   china:   discriminatory   keyword   analysis   and   the   real-­name   registration   policy.   internet   computing,  ieee,  17(3),  42-­50.   anonymous  (2016).  a  new  taxonomy  for  misleading  information  circulating  within   hybrid  media  ecologies.  paper  proposal  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual   meeting  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.     hastie,  t.,  tibshirani,  r.,  friedman,  j.,  &  franklin,  j.  (2005).  the  elements  of  statistical   learning:  data  mining,  inference  and  prediction.  the  mathematical  intelligencer,  27(2),   83-­85.       kapferer,  j.-­n.  (2013).  rumors:  uses,  interpretations,  and  images:  transaction   publishers.     luo,  y.  (2014).  the  internet  and  agenda  setting  in  china:  the  influence  of  online  public   opinion  on  media  coverage  and  government  policy.  international  journal  of   communication,  8,  24.       peterson,  w.  a.,  &  gist,  n.  p.  (1951).  rumor  and  public  opinion.  american  journal  of   sociology,  159-­167.     rosnow,  r.  l.  (1991).  inside  rumor:  a  personal  journey.  american  psychologist,  46(5),   484.       shah,  d.,  &  zaman,  t.  (2011).  rumors  in  a  network:  who's  the  culprit?  information   theory,  ieee  transactions  on,  57(8),  5163-­5181.       shibutani,  t.  (1966).  improvised  news:  a  sociological  study  of  rumor:  ardent  media.     shumway,  r.  h.,  &  stoffer,  d.  s.  (2010).  time  series  analysis  and  its  applications:  with   r  examples:  springer  science  &  business  media.     yang,  g.  (2009).  the  power  of  the  internet  in  china:  citizen  activism  online:  columbia   university  press.     zheng,  y.  (2007).  technological  empowerment:  the  internet,  state,  and  society  in   china:  stanford  university  press.     hu  yong.  (2009).  rumour  as  social  protest.  communication  and  society,  9   tables and figures table 1. summary of datasets used in this study description data collection method keyword time frame number of posts data set 1 search result (sr) general posts related to the incident collected from weibo search page crawler ‘tianjin’ (天 津) ‘explosion’(爆 炸) 12 – 26 aug. 109099 data set 2 rumour rebuttal posts (rr) posts that are used to refute rumour by official accounts, collected from weibo search page crawler ‘tianjin’ (天 津) ‘rumourrebuttal’ （辟谣） 12 – 26 aug. 1744 data set 3 weiboscope data (ws) posts related to tianjin blasts that are removed from the system weiboscope ‘tianjin’ （天 津） ‘explosion’ （ 爆炸） 12 – 26 aug. 464 table 2. basic statistics of each rumour topic rumour abbreviation posts in search result posts in weiboscope dataset posts in 辟谣 dataset total number of posts air-pollution air 1669 30 809 2508 casualty cas 1081 25 573 1679 dead fish df 460 5 0 465 ruihai background rh 252 33 84 369 officer off 184 11 66 261 local media lm 128 54 184 366 foam after rain far 92 8 0 100 “burn down” effect bde 63 0 52 115 volunteer vol 42 14 401 457 fake call for help fch 36 0 637 673 health consequence hc 29 0 103 132 traffic tra 7 0 604 611 cnn cnn 0 31 581 612 chaos cha 0 0 162 162 figure 1: tree diagram of clusters figure 2: log odds ratios for each topic in the weiboscope (ws) set and rumour-rebuttal (rr) set, with the colors of topic short names denote cluster membership. figure 3: the lead-lag associations between weiboscope set time series, rumour-rebuttal set time series and search set time series in six topics cloaked   facebook   pages  and   xenophobic   propaganda:   exploring   the  computational  architecture  of  fake-­information   johan  farkas it  university  of  copenhagen   jannick  schou it  university  of  copenhagen   introduction throughout  2015,  a  number  of  danish  facebook  pages  became  sites  of  racism  and   political  struggle.  these  pages  all  claimed  to  be  run  by  radical  islamists  living  in   denmark,  and  through  aggressive  and  violent  language,  they  proclaimed  that  muslims  in   the  country  were  plotting  to  destroy  the  danish  society  from  within.  this  plot  would  be   effectuated  through  systematic  violence,  rape  of  women,  and  exploitation  of  the  danish   welfare  system.  in  the  end,  the  goal  of  this  destructive  agenda  would  be  to  turn  denmark   into  an  islamic  state  under  sharia  law.  these  posts  received  thousands  of  comments   and  shares  from  danish  facebook  users.  the  majority  of  which  contained  counter-­ aggression  towards  not  only  the  page  admins  but  also  muslims  and  immigrants  in   general.  this  massive  user  attention  turned  the  pages  into  sites  of  aggression  and   xenophobia,  making  them  part  of  a  much  larger  discursive  struggle  to  define  the  ‘’truth’’   about  muslims  and  immigrants  in  the  country.  on  average,  each  page  only  existed  for   about  a  week,  as  users  would  report  them  to  facebook  for  violation  of  their  hate  speech   policies.  yet,  following  each  of  these  deletions,  new  and  almost  identical  ones  would   emerge  using  slightly  different  names,  images,  and  rhetoric.  this  pattern  –  consisting  of   an  on-­going  cycle  of  pages  being  created,  hateful  content  being  disseminated,  users   reacting,  and  facebook  deleting  the  pages  –  recurred  several  times  throughout  2015. the  biggest  problem  with  this  recurrent  chain  of  events  was  that  the  facebook  pages  at   the  centre  of  it  all  were  forgeries.  the  authors  were  not  extreme  islamists  as  they   claimed.  rather,  the  pages  had  been  created  in  order  to  deliberately  spread  fake-­ information  (anonymous,  2016)  about  muslims  in  denmark,  create  hostile  anti-­ immigration  imaginaries  and  provoke  facebook  users  to  join  the  xenophobic  spectacle   of  hostility.  the  pages  were  what  we  –  following  an  appropriation  of  daniel’s  (2009,   2014)  concept  of  cloaked  websites  –  define  as  cloaked  facebook  pages. based  on  the  findings  from  a  multi-­sided  online  ethnographic  study  of  12  cloaked   facebook  pages,  this  paper  seeks  to  address  the  complex  ways  in  which  fake-­ information  on  social  network  sites  is  shaped  through  the  interrelation  of  social  and   technological  processes.  in  the  context  of  our  case,  we  specifically  ask:  how  can  we   understand  the  deliberate  dissemination  of  fake-­information  through  facebook?  and   what  role  does  the  appropriation  of  facebook’s  computational  architecture  play  in  the   shaping  of  cloaked  facebook  pages? background “before  the  internet”  daniels  (2014)  argues  “we  relied  on  a  system  of  gatekeepers  such   as  editors,  publishers,  broadcasters,  and  librarians,  all  of  whom  mediated  information  for   knowledge  seekers’’  (p.  143).  while  these  gatekeepers  have  certainly  not  been   dispensed  with  within  the  current  media  ecology,  they  have  nonetheless  been   reconfigured  or  supplemented  by  the  emergence  of  the  internet.  according  to  daniels,   this  shift  in  who  acts  as  gatekeepers  “opens  new  opportunities  for  a  wider  range  of  ideas   to  be  shared  by  a  broader  array  of  groups  and  individuals,  and,  at  the  same  time,  it   raises  some  disturbing  questions  about  how  we  acquire  and  verify  knowledge’’  (ibid.).   while  daniels  did  not  frame  her  observation  in  this  way,  what  essentially  seems  to  be  at   stake  is  not  just  the  reconfiguration  of  the  individuals  acting  as  gatekeepers,  but  also  a   reconfiguration  of  the  underlying  technological  infrastructures  through  which  information   is  mediated.  what  has  changed,  in  other  words,  is  not  just  the  role  of  human  actors  but   the  whole  communication  ecology.  in  our  view,  this  also  means  that  if  we  are  to   understand  the  “disturbing  questions’’  prompted  by  new  media  technologies  –  in  this   case  how  the  facebook  pages  in  question  managed  to  deceive  thousands  of  users  –  we   must  include  the  computational  architecture  of  the  platform,  its  software,  algorithms,  user   interfaces,  and  so  on  (van  dijck,  2013),  in  our  analysis. rather  than  merely  a  neutral  tool,  facebook  is  designed  to  support  very  particular  forms   of  communicative  interaction  and  circulation  of  content.  as  bucher  has  argued,  these   material  conditions  makes  ”[s]ocial  networking  sites  …  essentially  designed  and   programmable  spaces  that  encourage  the  user  to  carry  out  specific  actions”  (2012:   480).  in  this  context,  van  dijck  (2013)  has  observed  that  facebook  has  in  general  been   eager  to  demand  transparency  and  openness  from  their  users,  while  at  the  same  time   being  reluctant  to  live  up  to  such  ideals  as  a  company.  what  happens  ‘behind  the   scenes’  is  generally  rendered  invisible  to  the  average  user  (van  dijck,  2013;;  langlois   and  elmer,  2013).  the  relation  between  page  administrators  and  users  seems  to  be   fuelled  by  an  equally  asymmetrical  distribution  of  transparency  and  power  (schou  et  al.,   2015;;  lillqvist  et  al.,  2015).  facebook’s  computational  architecture  allows  admins  to   remain  completely  anonymous,  delete  any  comment  on  their  page  without  the  authoring   user  being  notified,  and  block  specific  users  making  them  unable  to  provide  any   (additional)  comments.  as  lillqvist  et  al.  (2015)  have  shown,  this  hierarchical  structure   has  proven  to  be  highly  beneficial  for  commercial  companies  using  facebook  pages,  as   it  allows  them  to  seem  participatory  and  democratic,  while  at  the  same  time  having   extensive  control  over  the  content  on  their  pages. utilizing  facebook’s  computational  architecture  to  spread  fake-­information in  the  case  of  the  cloaked  facebook  pages  discussed  in  this  paper,  the  technology-­ supported  hierarchy  also  proved  to  be  highly  beneficial  for  the  dissemination  of  fake-­ information.  across  the  cloaked  pages,  the  admins  utilized  facebook’s  computational   architecture  in  order  to  remain  completely  anonymous  and  out  of  sight,  and  users  had   no  way  of  knowing  who  was  actually  behind.  based  on  this  anonymity,  the  admins  could   then  deceive  and  manipulate  users  by  tactically  utilizing  pictures  and  graphics  stolen   from  other  sources,  providing  hyperlinks  to  existing  muslim  organisations,  and,  most   importantly,  removing  all  comments  that  expressed  scepticism  towards  the  validity  of   the  source.  the  latter  was  performed  in  such  a  way  that  the  admin(s)  would  extensively   monitor  the  user  comments  across  the  different  pages  and  remove  any  content  that   expressed  scepticism  towards  the  authorship  claimed  by  the  pages.  furthermore,  users   making  such  comments  would  get  permanently  blocked  from  making  any  additional   comments.  this  moderation  of  comments  was  performed  in  order  to  allow  for  the   narrative  of  radical  islamism  to  be  presented  without  any  contestation:  it  was  essentially   a  way  of  continuously  legitimizing  the  fake-­information  spread  by  the  page.  what   remained  visible  were  only  the  comments  that  did  not  dispute  the  validity  of  the  source,   yet  often  engaged  in  aggression  and  racism.  for  users  entering  these  pages,  this  made   it  even  harder  to  see  through  the  deception. conclusion overall,  based  on  a  number  of  empirical  examples  from  the  cloaked  facebook  pages,   the  paper  argues  that,  in  order  to  understand  the  production  and  dissemination  of  fake-­ information,  it  is  imperative  to  take  the  computational  architecture  of  new  media   platforms  and  the  potential  hierarchies  they  support  into  account.  if  we  are  to   understand  fake-­information  within  the  current  media  ecology,  it  is  insufficient  to  merely   analyse  the  (fake-­)information  in  and  of  itself.  the  study  of  fake-­information  in  the   internet  age  requires  a  focus  on  the  multiple  ways  in  social,  technological  and  political   processes  overlap,  interact  and  connect.   references bucher,  t.  (2012).  the  friendship  assemblage:  investigating  programmed  sociality  on   facebook.  television  &  new  media  14(6)  479–493. daniels,  j.  (2009).  cloaked  websites:  propaganda,  cyber-­racism  and  epistemology  in   the  digital  era.”  new  media  &  society  11(5)  659–683. daniels  j  (2014).  from  crisis  pregnancy  centers  to  teenbreaks.com:  anti-­abortion   activism  ’  s  use  of  cloaked  websites.  in  martha  mccaughey  (eds.),  cyberactivism  on   the  participatory  web,  pp.  140-­154.  routledge. anonymous  (2016).  a  new  taxonomy  for  misleading  information  circulating  within   hybrid  media  ecologies.  paper  proposal  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual   meeting  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir langlois,  g.  and  elmer,  g.  (2013).  the  research  politics  of  social  media  platforms.   culture  machine  14:  1–17. lillqvist,  e.,  louhiala-­salminen,  l.  and  kankaanranta,  a  (2015).  power  relations  in   social  media  discourse:  dialogization  and  monologization  on  corporate  facebook   pages.  discourse,  context,  and  media.  doi:  10.1016/j.dcm.2015.11.001 schou,  j.,  farkas,  j.  and  hjelholt,  m.  (2015).  the  double  conditioning  of  political   participation:  grassroots  politics  on  facebook.  conjunctions:  transdiciplinary  journal   of  cultural  participation  2(2)  29-­47. van  dijck,  j.  (2013)  the  culture  of  connectivity:  a  critical  history  of  social  media.   oxford:  oxford  university  press. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 eklund, von essen and jonsson. (2017, october 18-21). to be or not to be on the internet: a multidimensional tool for studying anonymity online. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. to be or not to be on the internet: a multidimensional tool for studying online anonymities lina eklund uppsala university emma von essen stockholm university fatima jonsson stockholm university introduction anonymity on the internet has become a contentious issue; it protects freedom of speech on one hand yet hampers accountability of for example crime or harassment on the other. traditionally anonymity has been construed as a dichotomy, you are anonymous or you are not; this is too limiting a definition online. researchers have thus called for new ways of understanding anonymity on the internet (kennedy 2006; nissenbaum 1999). as to our knowledge, the literature within and across fields presents no coherent view of anonymity online and this conceptual vagueness limits progress in the research field. we argue that online anonymity is a complex process that exists in various forms, regulated and defined by various actors. in this study we 1) draw on the multidisciplinary literature concerning online anonymity 2) derive at a multi-layered conceptual model for studying online anonymity that follows closely on previous research on what people actually do online, and 3) explore the complexity as different facets of anonymity interact and interlink by drawing on two empirical examples, online auction sites and massive multiplayer gaming. method we engage with work on anonymity from the authors’ home fields of sociology, economics, and computer and system sciences and draw on swedberg’s (2012) theorizing methodology for creating new theory in the social sciences. we start with empirical facts and (1) observe, (2) name, (3) build, and (4) complete a model (see table 1). our conceptual model is a taxonomy guiding future researchers’ work when studying online anonymity. table 1: illustration of methodological structure, inspired by swedberg (2012) results we suggest that anonymity on the internet needs to be investigated in plural— anonymities. our results point to three structures and three main facets of anonymity that together make up online anonymity. the elements are not mutually exclusive, nor dichotomous. the functional form, i.e. the relationship between the facets can differ depending on context studied. structures · state legal, commercial regulations and code include rules and regulations guiding behaviour in connection to revealing personal information on the internet both on a state/intra-state level as well as corporate level (e.g. eulas). regulations works on a macro level shaping structures affecting anonymity among individuals by creating laws, and legal/normative frames within which various online platforms are designed and managed. facets · factual anonymity pertains to information about individual persons. this can take the form of actively or non-actively withholding or revealing identifiers e.g. name, social security number, or ip-address; or quasi-identifiers that together can indicate a single person. factual anonymity can take three main forms: being unknown (traditional notion of anonymity), pseudonymity (having at least a semi-stable pseudonym that can be followed across one or multiple platforms), and nonymity (being completely known). · social anonymity relates to how individuals interact with each other based on group membership and expectations thereof. in-group or out-group membership affect interaction. among in-group members we see trends towards affirmative interaction and between out-group members in worst case scenario discrimination and harassment. · physical anonymity pertains to how digital interaction is embodied, but so in various complex ways that, sometimes, affect the information transferred between individuals and resulting emotional reactions. illustration 1: visual representation of the online anonymities model showing relationship and interactions between structures (exterior) and facets (centre) empirical examples an individual can thus perceive themselves as more or less anonymous on the levels of factual, social, and physical anonymity; and these levels are shaped by the three structures. we will show, by the empirical examples below, that online anonymities work on different levels, and that various anonymities are at stake depending on social and platform context. example 1: reputation on online auction sites a person creates an account on an online auction site legally controlled by regulations concerning selling and buying. many auction site designs and user terms favour nonymity between auction site and seller in order to keep individuals accountable and minimize fraud. users agree to these terms when registering on the site. in the buy/sell interface users are known via self-chosen pseudonyms kept constant in part due to a reputation system. buyers might treat a seller differently depending on signals of social group memberships. sellers might have a username, have information in sales description, or have a picture that indicate the seller’s social identity (e.g. selling used women’s clothes described as not fitting the seller anymore or have a picture wearing the clothes); which shape buyer actions due to in-group or out-group behaviour. the physical anonymity makes trust harder in this situation so reputation systems etc. are established as e.g. handshakes are not possible. however, after completed auctions, but before payment, buyer and seller’s factual identities are revealed to each other and these will contain more or less information about social groups. this can affect how users give feedback in the reputation system, which in turn has economic consequences, such as lower sales future prices. example 2: social interaction in online gaming an online player registers a credit card to play an online game and agrees upon the user terms. while no legal regulations control anonymity while playing the company is obligated by national law to keep this personal information safe and takes appropriate precautions. the player relinquishes factual anonymity to the company, indeed it is a prerequisite to play. the same player might not care to tell other players their offline name but are playing under a pseudonym known from other online games (they are factually pseudonymous to other players). the player ends up in a guild of likeminded individuals, people who talk the same language and who are of a similar age. from interactions, other players puzzle together the image of a white, male westerner, and thus treat the player accordingly. yet the player might have experienced the game as homophobic and is hiding a queer sexuality. the player is thus partly social anonymous. the player has put significant effort into constructing an avatar that represents his embodied presence in the game. this avatar ‘feels’ like himself and it shapes his experiences in the game-world. in the guild players use a voice chat system and during play emotions run high, transferred via emotional cues. these emotions affect individual instance of interaction and play differently than text-based interaction. conclusions the traditional way of defining anonymity as being nameless is not enough when talking about anonymity online. anonymities can be seen as processes guided by regulations on a state legal and commercial scale as well as code level, which relies heavily on our own perception of being anonymous along factual, social, and physical lines. we argue that we should talk about anonymities instead of anonymity. references kennedy, h. 2006. beyond anonymity, or future directions for internet identity research. new media & society 8(6):859–76. doi:10.1177/1461444806069641. marx, g.t. 1999. what’s in a name? some reflections on the sociology of anonymity. the information society 15(2):99–112.doi:10.1080/019722499128565. nissenbaum, h. 1999. the meaning of anonymity in an information age. the information society 15(2):141–44. doi:10.1080/019722499128592. swedberg, r. 2011. theorizing in sociology and social science: turning to the context of discovery. theory and society 41(1):1–40. doi:10.1007/s11186-011-9161-5. 2020 aoir extended abstract.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): karlsen, f. (2020, october 28-31). digital detox camp: values and motivations for engaging in digital disconnect. the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event 27 / 31 october 2020. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. digital detox camp: values and motivations for engaging in digital disconnect faltin karlsen kristiania university college introduction media users increasingly express ambivalence about their own media consumption, often related to ubiquitous media technology such as the smartphone and social media (syversen 2020). this has fostered public debates about the need to cut down on media use, and more research on the topic has been requested (woodstock 2014, ytrearne and das 2019). in order to understand the growing trend of disconnection as a cultural and social phenomenon and more than a sum of individual choices and selfhelp practices, we conducted an analysis of the digital detox inspired camp for grownups underleir, which has been arranged in norway annually since 2014. the aim was to study what kind of norms and values that had motivated participants to take part in this temporary media hiatus. methods and material the main empirical material stems from a field study of the camp underleir in 2019 where two researchers conducted participatory observation on a four-day field trip. we had informal talks with 30 of the participants – of a total of around 50 – and conducted in-depth interviews with three participants and one of the organizers. the initiative to the camp came from one of the participants of the norwegian social network site underskog, and we included material from this site about the camp from the inception in 2014 to the sixth installment in 2019. this combination of material gave us the opportunity to contextualize this particular camp event, providing us with an outline of how norms, rules, and activities evolved over time. field notes, the interviews and online data was coded and analysed in nvivo. theoretical framework the main theoretical approach for this analysis is media domestication theory with special attention to the concept reverse domestication. in contrast to the domestication process where new media technology is "tamed", reverse domestication implies cognitive processes and practical strategies involved when distancing from media technology (karlsen and syvertsen 2016). guidelines and media norms underleir is inspired by the u.s. based camp, camp grounded, and has adopted many of their rules, aiming to enhance a positive and relaxing atmosphere (sutton 2017). rules directed toward media technology have informal formulations such as "don't be online" because "it is so incredibly difficult to play with someone while simultaneously checking facebook." the official camp rules have been relatively stable over time but were still part of an ongoing negotiation among participants. we observed also instances where rules were transgressed, such as people using their smartphone to google for information. in some cases, this created a tension between experienced participants and newcomers defending their breach as exceptions, arguing that retrieving "static" information was not in breach with the spirit of the rules. the general impression was that participants had different interpretations of the underlaying intentions of the rules, what sort of activities they were meant to inspire, and what values they promoted. organised activities time and space according to domestication theory, how much time and space (referred to as objectification and incorporation) a new medium is allowed to occupy in the household is part of the normative process of domesticating new media technology (silverstone and hirsch 1992). accordingly, temporal and spatial aspects are important for the reverse process (karlsen and syvertsen 2016). at underleir, routines and activities were predominantly regulated by elements other than media. while the participants could choose freely what to spend their time on, the majority engaged in some forms of organised activities during the day, such as yoga, crocket play, and fishing, or prepayed courses with professional instructors on activities such as wood cutting and jammaking. as many of the participants didn't wear watches the meals served as temporal guidelines signaling when activities had to stop. the participants were also split up from their activities, preventing formation of groups. since no one, at least officially, could communicate digitally, the participants were prevented from orienting themselves about coming activities, and the meals become an important hub for exchanging information about changes in program, to raise suggestions for coming activities and other vital information. normative boundaries the restrictions on media use at underleir, including legacy media like television, radio and newspapers, played an important role in the experience of being separated from the outside world. it was a noticeable absence of information about current affairs and no discussions about trump's presidency, brexit or other hot topics, at least as we witnessed. however, as the rule negotiation and smartphone use show, the barrier to the outside world had certain breaches, and they were not arbitrary. information were in certain circumstances regarded as acceptable to approach, while communicating with the outside world would imply too much of a transgression. the wealth of activities being offered also served as an inexhaustible well of stimulating input, much like how smartphones and laptop may otherwise do. several of the participants expressed reminiscent of their childhood holidays or camp experiences where the social life was intense and "the summers seemed endless" as one informant expressed it. findings underleir illustrates how practical, social, and normative aspects may be interwoven when media use is reversed or altered. normatively speaking, the digital detox experience was tied to broader sets of values, including an aim for a more creative, authentic life and a quest for mental wellbeing and the ability to focus. many participants stated that the opportunity to engage in creative activities, and to be social in a friendly setting, was just as important as the absence of media. when media abstention was explicitly mentioned many participants explained that engaging in physical activities gave them a sense of focus and flow they weren't able to experience in their daily life when digital media was available. this was coupled to the value of being able to engage more deeply in a subject, compared to the "shallowness" of media use. it was further described as an opportunity to have more "authentic" experiences than the media could offer. in many ways, the norms described by the participant mirror general media debates and traditional concerns for media. in addition to this, however, the participant clearly also expressed the importance of being in a creative space where you could play and have fun, reminiscent of earlier times with less demands and pressure. in this sense, the camp simply provided an opportunity to escape stressful jobs and the demands of adult life, just as much as a life without digital media. references karlsen, f., & syvertsen, t. (2020). you can’t smell roses online: intruding media and reverse domestication. nordicom review, 37(s1), 25-39 silverstone, r. & hirsch, e. (eds.) (1992). consuming technologies: media and information in domestic spaces. london and new york: routledge. sutton, t. (2017). disconnect to reconnect: the food/technology metaphor in digital detoxing. first monday, 22(6). syvertsen, t. (2020). digital detox: the politics of disconnecting. emerald group publishing. woodstock, l. (2014). “media resistance: opportunities for practice theory and new media research,” international journal of communication, volume 8, number 19, pp. 1,983–2,001 ytre-arne, b., & das, r. (2019). an agenda in the interest of audiences: facing the challenges of intrusive media technologies. television & new media, 20(2), 184-198. microsoft word ir16-template-final.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): appigani, t., jones, s., watson-manheim, m.b., & welch, e. (2015, october 21-24). social media in the workplace. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. social media in the workplace timothy patrick appignani university of illinois chicago steve jones university of illinois chicago mary beth watson-manheim university of illinois chicago eric welch arizona state university though social media usage crosses the spectrum of age, race, and occupation there are still prohibitions about its use in the workplace. our research maps the relationship between workers and their use of social media, for work and personal purposes based on results from a completed survey of 3,000 non-faculty staff at a large midwestern university. early research on the adoption of new media in organizations began in the 1990s with studies of email and other cmc finding that new media forms altered social dynamics within organizations (schmitz & fulk, 1991) particularly by affecting the social influence of strong users (haythornwaite & wellman, 1998). in the years that followed research focused on social media usage by organizations primarily dealing with external relations. the media usage under study was either for marketing (kaplan & haenlein, 2009; kietzmann, hermkens, mccarthy & silvestre, 2011), constituent development and community usage (lovejoy & saxon, 2012; thackeray, neiger, smith & vanwagenen, 2012), or customer relations (singh peszynski, 2013). when looking at how organizations use social media for internal organizational communication distinctions must be drawn between what leonardi, hyusman & steinfeld designate public platforms of social media (e.g. facebook, twitter) and the private platform social media that are designed specifically for a firm’s employees to use for their workplace communication. these private social media are known as ‘enterprise social media’ and though they are meant to represent a professionalized version of popular social media, they tend to borrow popular social media’s format and functionality (2013). by examining the impact of social media use at the level of individual users engaged in a variety of job types across a university campus our research will help to expand the current research landscape on social media, which is dominated by literature focused on either organizational social media or enterprise social media. organizational social media is the use of “public” social media sites for organizational purposes and enterprise social are in-house “private” social media that are designed and implemented by companies seeking to maximize productivity in a contained fashion. the samples researchers use to study these social media are largely comprised of it professionals and key decision makers. while this scholarship is useful for organizations seeking to understand how to maximize productivity, or how new media technologies affect workplace dynamics, it neglects the habits of workers across the spectrum of the modern workplace, where social media may play different roles for workers with different job types, backgrounds and workplace roles. with this in mind we crafted a survey inclusive enough to capture a large data set allowing us to provide a descriptive analysis of the relationship between social media usage and contemporary workers of various types. we hope to refocus scholarship away from static comparisons of social media integration for specific worker types and towards more dynamic studies of how social media affects the workplaces of a broader population. we collected quantitative survey data from individuals in different administrative positions at a large midwestern u.s. university in 2014 about the use of social media technology in the workplace both for work and non-work purposes. the primary objectives were to understand: 1) the extent of social media use in the organization and the purpose of this use, 2) how employees use the tools to manage and integrate or separate work and non-work activities, 3) how social media networks coincide (or not) with an individual’s work network 4) what implications there are for collaboration and other work-related outcomes. as shown in figure 1, the orienting framework for our research recognizes that individuals utilize social media applications in many different social contexts. our aim is to understand how the use of social media might be influencing work related outcomes such as access to information and network ties, as well as the impact on boundaries between professional and personal life. figure 1: conceptual overview of study the survey consisted of four major sections: work, professional social network, technology use, and outcomes. we first sought to understand the individual respondent’s work. what are the specific tasks and broader focus of the individual’s professional activities? respondents were asked to characterize their work in terms of common university administrative activities, e.g., student support, budget management, and procurement. further, the instrument sought to elicit the complexity of the work drew upon morgeson & humphrey (2006) to assess complexity, information processing, problem solving, etc. a key survey goal was to characterize the network of individuals that each respondent collaborates with and the characteristics of collaborators. for example, are network connections within the same or different college, organization, and/or profession? how does the respondent utilize social media to maintain or expand their professional and social networks? also of importance was the respondent usage of technology, specifically social media applications, as well as other collaboration technologies such as google docs. the survey queried participants on both personal and professional usage. additionally, we assessed where usage occurs (home or work), with whom, and for what purpose (e.g. arranging meetings, or report writing). the survey also measured a variety of job satisfaction indicators. we use several established protocols, including but not limited to ones reported in spector (1985). data analysis is currently underway but preliminary results indicate considerable use of social media for work purposes (40% of respondents) and, more so, for personal reasons (73%). among people who use social media for work, there is significant use of facebook (63%), with somewhat less use of twitter (37%) and google plus (17%). a response rate of 24% implied a strong interest in this research topic and initial results indicate that those who utilize social media at work use a variety of collaboration applications. in our presentation we will discuss the results and the theoretical consequences of our findings, as well as plans to deploy the survey in other countries and organizational settings, and avenues for further research. references haythornthwaite, c., & wellman, b. (1998). work, friendship, and media use for information exchange in a networked organization. journal of the american society for information science, 49(12), 1101-1114. kietzmann, j. h., hermkens, k., mccarthy, i. p., & silvestre, b. s. (2011). social media? get serious! understanding the functional building blocks of social media. business horizons, 54(3), 241-251. leonardi, p. m., huysman, m., & steinfield, c. (2013). enterprise social media: definition, history, and prospects for the study of social technologies in organizations. journal of computer�mediated communication, 19(1), 1-19. lovejoy, k., & saxton, g. d. (2012). information, community, and action: how nonprofit organizations use social media*. journal of computer�mediated communication, 17(3), 337-353. morgeson, f. p., & humphrey, s. e. (2006). the work design questionnaire (wdq): developing and validating a comprehensive measure for assessing job design and the nature of work. journal of applied psychology, 91(6), 1321. schmitz, j., & fulk, j. (1991). organizational colleagues, media richness, and electronic mail a test of the social influence model of technology use.communication research, 18(4), 487-523. singh, m., & peszynski, k. (2013). organisational value of social technologies: an australian study. electronic journal information systems evaluation volume,16(4). thackeray, r., neiger, b. l., smith, a. k., & van wagenen, s. b. (2012). adoption and use of social media among public health departments. bmc public health, 12(1), 242 a lot of words here. a lot of words here. a lot of words here. a lot of words here. a lot of words here. a lot of words here. a lot of words here. a lot of words here. a lot of words here. a lot of words here. a lot of words here. a lot of words here. a lot of words here. a lot of words here. a lot of words here. a lot of words here.   selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): haytin, s., & livio, o. (2019, october 2-5). "what we cannot speak about we must tweet": trust among israeli twitter users with depression. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. "what we cannot speak about we must tweet": trust among israeli twitter users with depression sofia haytin university of haifa oren livio university of haifa theoretical background research on trust in online environments has demonstrated the centrality of trust for virtual sociality, the ways in which trust arises, and the consequences of both the emergence of trust and its associated risks (de laat, 2008). while the affordances of different internet platforms lead to different manifestations of trust and personal exposure, it appears that despite customarily having little information about their potential audiences, participants in online environments such as blogs often assume others to be worthy of intimacy that is indeed reciprocated, resulting in a generalized climate of mutual trust (smith, 2016). at the same time, the complexities of sharing private information lead individuals to different negotiations of the public/private divide, ranging from the avoidance of disclosing information and attempts to limit exposure to specific audiences, to more radical attempts to reveal everything in an act of "empowering exhibitionism" (koskela, 2004). a specific type of online environment that has been studied extensively is that of internet-based support groups for individuals suffering from various illnesses. research on such groups has demonstrated that given high levels of sincerity and self-disclosure, they offer participants information, medical help, and emotional support (van udenkraan et al., 2008). to date, most studies have focused on internet forums and social media groups devoted to specific physical diseases, and in which some forms of hierarchy exist (e.g., group moderators). in recent years, however, some studies have begun investigating the emergence of "communities"-of-sorts developing "naturally" in the more dispersed, unstructured, a-hierarchical spaces of social media platforms such as twitter (naslund et al., 2016). in this study we examine the development of trust among israeli twitter users with depression. we seek to complicate existing research by studying an unstructured, spontaneously emerging "community" composed of individuals with a mental disorder, which has developed on a social media platform characterized by affordances different from those commonly examined to date. we also focus on a different national/cultural context than the frequently studied north american/european environments. method unlike the immensely popular facebook (75% of israelis are active users), twitter in israel (4.3% penetration rate) has been largely ignored by social media scholars. it is precisely this perceived "failure," however, that has enabled it to become a breeding ground for self-defined outsiders, who have created a distinct discursive space in which non-hegemonic voices are more prominent. our study is based on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with eight twitter users with depression (four women, four men, ages 21-47). interviews were conducted face-toface, with the participants' anonymity guaranteed. participants were asked about their social media practices and perceptions of twitter, particularly regarding the platform's role in dealing with their depression. interviews were transcribed and qualitatively analyzed using atlas.ti software, based on the identification of recurring themes as related to our focus on the development and implications of trust. findings while twitter shares certain affordances with other internet platforms characterized by "assumed trust" (de laat, 2008), our participants were generally more cautious and displayed more "inferred trust." users described a learning process whereby their initial participation in the social network was based on passive lurking or tweeting faux pas, followed by more "appropriate" participation, characterized mostly by in-the-moment emotional status updates, only after they had been socialized to the platform's dominant modes of engagement. "[at first] i would retweet a lot," explained one user, "and then, like everything in twitter, a million people would tell you 'don't retweet so much.' so today i try, like, ok, you don't really need to retweet that because you don't want to flood." while trust was not simply assumed a priori, once inferred it became a central facet of users' perception of twitter and its unique supportive role in their lives. users repeatedly contrasted twitter with other social media, particularly facebook, portraying twitter as a counter-public to the more popular-yet-shallow network. as one user explained: "facebook feels like a mall, and everything i say there feels like it's in a sea of noise and artificial fluorescent lights. twitter feels somehow quieter." users likewise used positively connotated terms such as "home," "lifeline," and "sanctuary" to refer to twitter. constructed as the "anti-facebook," twitter has become a unique echo chamber in which people with depression feel they can present their authentic selves to an empathetic, non-judgmental community of similar outcasts: "on twitter no one belongs anywhere, but that's the common denominator: not belonging"; "it's a very anarchist network of people with worldviews that are (…) not mainstream"; "it's knowing that there are some people out there, a few, ok, but the few that do understand me and know what i'm talking about." at the same time, the platform's expectation of profound authenticity paradoxically leads some users to avoid tweeting about positive experiences. "it's hard for me to write about good things that happen to me," said one user. "i'll tell my friends, i don't need to tell twitter." another noted sarcastically: "when someone writes about her perfect relationship (…) i'm like, 'hey, lady, it's twitter here! you're not supposed to write that you're happy. what do you mean, you found love? delete your account!'" the cordoning off of twitter as antithetical to the outside world also led some users to experience a crisis of trust when online/offline borders became hazier. as one user explained, "meeting people from twitter added a lot to my life but made twitter itself a space that is less safe." finally, a fascinating link emerged between users' psychological sense of social reclusiveness and their sense of political isolation, for which twitter similarly provided a shared haven. while we did not raise the issue of political identity ourselves in interviews, it was raised by nearly all participants. as one user noted: "[on twitter] for the first time people around me talked about their emotional states very clearly, and were also very leftist. it was really a support group. apart from friends i also got a political community." another user said: "we're a small hotbed of poor leftists there, similar mental conditions [and] openness to different things." in the contemporary israeli political climate, in which leftists are increasingly ostracized, finding a like-minded, trustworthy community is extremely important. here too, it is twitter's lack of popularity that renders it a refuge in which resistant opinions may be expressed with little fear of exposure to the wider public. references de laat, p. (2008). online diaries: reflections on trust, privacy, and exhibitionism. ethics and information technology, 10, 57-69. koskela, h. (2004). webcams, tv shows and mobile phones: empowering exhibitionism. surveillance & society, 2, 199-215. lachmar, e., et al. (2017). #mydepressionlookslike: examining public discourse about depression on twitter. jmir mental health, 4(4). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc5666224/ naslund, j., et al. (2016). the future of mental health care: peer-to-peer support and social media. epidemiology and psychiatric sciences, 25, 113-122. smith, g. (2016). theorizing media cultures: the politics of watching and being watched. in h. tumber & s. waisbord (eds.), the routledge companion to media and human rights. london: routledge. van uden-kraan, c., et al. (2008). empowering processes and outcomes of participation in online support groups for patients with breast cancer, arthritis, or fibromyalgia. qualitative health research, 18, 405-417. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): robards, b., churchill, b., vivienne, s. & byron, p. (2019, october 2-5). social media use among young lgbtiq+ people in australia. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. generational differences in social media use, gender identity, and sexuality among young lgbtiq+ people in australia brady robards monash university brendan churchill university of melbourne son vivienne rmit university benjamin hanckel kings college london paul byron swinburne university over the past twenty to thirty years, the internet has come to serve as a key channel for communicating, connecting, and engaging in civic participation. for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer or questioning (lgbtiq+) people, who continue to experience disproportionate health risks and high rates of discrimination (leonard et al. 2012), the significance of the internet as a social resource is further magnified (hanckel and morris 2014). while digital social spaces have evolved, many of the motivations for using these platforms remain the same. different platforms offer different opportunities to connect with queer peers and others, for discussing, documenting and exploring sexuality away from heteronormative spaces (hillier et al. 2010, o’neill 2014). from text-based ‘virtual’ worlds and discussion boards of years gone by, through to contemporary sites and apps such as facebook, instagram, twitter, snapchat, tumblr, youtube, reddit, tinder, grindr and her, the digital social media landscape is now more complex than ever. what new challenges and opportunities does this evolution present? this paper draws on data from the scrolling beyond binaries study, centred on a national survey of 1,304 young lgbtiq+ australians. we present key findings from the study in two parts: (a) differences across our four age cohorts of our young respondents (16–20, 21–25, 26–30, 30–35) in terms of their identities (gender and sexuality) and the social media platforms they use; and (b) the argument that the internet continues to be significant for our respondents for social connection and learning. in doing so, we explore the complex and evolving ways in which young lgbtiq+ people use and thus (re)produce digital social spaces, returning to nina wakeford’s (2000 [1997]) consideration of ‘cyberqueer spaces’. diverse genders & sexualities our two younger cohorts (16-20 and 21-25) were more likely than our older two cohorts to identify as non-binary when it comes to gender: 21% of our 16-20 year old cohort, and 26% of our 21-25 year old group, compared to 14% of the 26-30 group 9% of the 31-35 group. in addition to providing gender options female (45% of respondents overall), male (26%), and non-binary (19%), we also invited respondents to complete an open-ended field to name their own gender identity. 9% of our respondents made use of this field, with the most common responses being gender-fluid, agender and trans. tracing the antecedents of non-binary identities across generations in archives or public records is thwarted by the fact that these categories have not previously been available, despite the likelihood that gender-diverse people have long existed. through categorisation they are inevitably folded in normative forms. what is clear, however, is that ‘cyberqueer’ spaces (with tumblr being a prime example) have become central for the forming of connections and the discovery of a common language, a sub-cultural knowledge, by which to describe the non-binary, fluid, and trans experiences of gender. like gender, when it comes to sexuality, our older respondents were more likely to identify with a more ‘long-standing’ and binary category like lesbian, gay, or homosexual: 48% for the 31-35-year-old cohort, compared to 27% for the 16-to-20year-old cohort. in fact, more of our youngest respondents (16-20) identified as bisexual than they did as lesbian or gay. as with gender diversity, a movement away from binary sexual identities is reflected in other recent australian studies. hillier et al. (2010, p. 27) found their female respondents identified as bisexual (42%) rather than lesbian (39%), and in byron et al.’s study (2017, p. 17), more young people identified as bisexual (32.3%) than lesbian (21.5%) or gay (18.5%). a large number of participants in byron et al.’s (2017) study also identified as pansexual (19.1%) and asexual (9.2%). differences in platform use there are also clear differences in patterns of social media use in our four age cohorts. generally, the use of almost all platforms declines for each subsequent older cohort, with some exceptions. facebook (97%), youtube (84%) and instagram (70%) are commonly used platforms for all of our respondents. there were, however, significant differences in other platforms. there was an age gradient in the use of apps like snapchat and tumblr, where usage was highest among younger cohorts. snapchat, for instance, was used by 80% of our 16-to20-year-olds, but by just 34% of our 31-to-35year-old cohort. reddit use was also higher for the middle cohort (almost one-quarter of 21-to-25-year-olds and 21% of 26-to 30-year-olds) but lower among our youngest and oldest cohorts (13% of 16-to-20-year-olds and 16% of 31-to-35-year-olds). there are also interesting patterns of use of hook-up and dating apps across our age cohorts. overall, tinder was the most popular, with 21% of respondents using it, followed by grindr (11%), okcupid (7.5%), her (6%), and scruff (5%). when we combine these apps and instead divide them into categories that allow for multiple sexual orientations or interests (like tinder or okcupid) versus apps that are more specific for gay men or women (like grindr, her, scruff, and hornet) there is an evident age gradient. the youngest cohorts in this study were more likely to use platforms such as tinder, happn and bumble that allow for users to engage with more than one sex (e.g. happn allows for users to ‘find’ men and women). in contrast, the older cohorts were more likely to use targeted hook-up/dating apps like grindr or her. this significant difference in usage may reflect the historical development of hook-up and dating apps, where apps like grindr and scruff were amongst the first hookup/dating apps available, preceded by dating sites specifically for gay men, like gaydar (see light et al. 2008). this difference may also reflect the fluidity in sexuality and sexual preferences of users at younger ages, in which apps that allow for more ‘choice’ appear preferable. for us, one of the key points this age gradient points to is evidence of the changing patterns in the way young people describe their own gender and sexual identities, and how digital media might map to these changing conceptualisations and the evolution of cyberqueer spaces. references byron, p., et al., 2017. ‘you learn from each other’: lgbtiq young people’s mental health help-seeking and the rad australia online directory. sydney, nsw: western sydney university & young and hanckel, b. and morris, a., 2014. finding community and contesting heteronormativity: queer young people’s engagement in an australian online community. journal of youth studies, 17 (7), 872–886. doi:10.1080/13676261.2013.878792 hillier, l., et al., 2010. writing themselves in 3: the third national study on the sexual health and wellbeing of same sex attracted and gender questioning young people. melbourne, vic: australian research centre in sex, health and society, la trobe university. leonard, w., et al., 2012. report. in: private lives 2: the second national survey of the health and wellbeing of glbt australians, australian research centre in sex, health & society, latrobe university, 1–75 , available online: https://www.glhv.org.au/sites/default/files/privatelives2report.pdf. light, b., fletcher, g., and adam, a., 2008. gay men, gaydar and the commodification of difference. information technology & people, 21 (3), 300–314. https://www.glhv.org.au/sites/default/files/privatelives2report.pdf https://www.glhv.org.au/sites/default/files/privatelives2report.pdf o’neill, m., 2014. transgender youth and youtube videos: self-representation and five identifiable trans youth narratives. in: c. pullen, ed. queer youth and media cultures. new york, ny: palgrave macmillan, 34–45. wakeford, n., 2000 [1997]. cyberqueer. in: d. bell and b. m. kennedy, eds. the cybercultures reader. abington: routledge, 401–415. title 1 citizen journalism and its democratic potencial -brazilian case studies: viva favela and índios online raquel gomes de oliveira universidade federal da bahia brazil raqgomes@yahoo.com.br abstract this paper aims to reflect on citizen journalism and its democratic potential through an exploration of brazilian case studies. what is the importance of users’ participation in online news media? in the case of citizen journalism, does a larger number of ordinary civic voices effect a difference in the quality of a society’s democracy? here, it is pertinent to consider the efforts that have provided the means of communication to this plurality of voices as they have enabled the social inclusion of citizens by training them in the use of new information and communication technologies. this work presents two experiences of citizen journalism that exist specifically in brazil and concern communities considered excluded from the political system. the first, viva favela, is an online community representing low-income communities. the second, índios online, is a virtual indigenous community. through the exploration, observation, and description of these two cases, the paper analyzes the experience of participatory journalism. to do this, we must understand that localized experiences of citizen journalism could have significant implications for the use of new technologies and for the challenges of democracy more generally. keywords citizen journalism, participation, democracy 2 i do not seek to know the answers, i try to understand the questions confucius as soon as journalism came to prominence on the internet, a series of definitions and variations gained currency as descriptors of this new means for communication. since then, the journalistic process has found itself in ever-closer proximity to its audience. the internet, as a new journalistic medium, has affected a reformulation of the means by which news is transmitted and has transformed the user into an active agent in the process of news production. names for this new participatory process are varied, but among the most common are: citizen journalism (bowman and willis, 2003), participatory journalism (nguyen, 2006), open source journalism (leonard, 1999), grassroots journalism (gilmor, 2004) and networked journalism (jarvis, 2006). much of the literature about citizen journalism from authors such as lacy, duffy, riffe, thorson, and fleming (2010) relates three aspects: the exploration of the internet’s potential for citizen journalism, the description of the nature of citizen journalism, and the characteristics of websites used by citizen journalists. nip (2006) affirms that the potential of the internet to advance democracy has attracted a lot of research, but that specific studies of the ways in which online news organizations can play a role in a democracy remain to be performed. this paper’s importance stems from its focus on that point. according to nguyen, “by tapping the power of the web and other new media to transform itself from mere news consumers into `prosumers’, the public as the traditional underdog in the news and information flow has created a new information order and paved the way for a potentially better democracy” (2006, p. 19). the inquiry for this paper emerges from these ideas. what is the importance of users’ participation in online news media? in the case of citizen journalism, does a larger number of ordinary civic voices affect a difference in the quality of a society’s democracy? here, it is pertinent to consider the efforts that have provided the means of communication to this plurality of voices as they have enabled the social inclusion of citizens by training them in the use of new information and communication technologies. however, this line of thinking raises a number of other questions. aren’t we entitled to ask whether this diversity of voices – this pluralism associated with new technology – has truly brought some power to the citizens that have come to express themselves through these channels? what type 3 of effect and exchange of ideas is generated by one’s participation in forums, chat rooms, and online commentary? has the increased visibility of minorities via these outlets benefited the public interests of those communities? what use might social networking sites like facebook, twitter, and youtube have in terms of augmenting democracy? the questions are many and to reflect them the paper presents two experiences of citizen journalism that exist specifically in brazil and concern communities considered excluded from the political system. the first, viva favela, is an online community representing lowincome communities. the second, índios online, is a virtual indigenous community. these are examples of citizen journalism that have existed for more than five years, and which are gaining visibility. the methodology of this paper as it pertains to the case studies is based on qualitative analysis. through the exploration, observation, and description of these two cases, the paper analyzes the experience of participatory journalism. the website is the central node of the network that connects people to other nodes and other resources essential to the success of projects. thus, it is necessary to propose a broad field of study in the hope of answering questions raised by the experience of pioneers in the field of citizen journalism as a whole. to do this, we must understand that localized experiences of citizen journalism could have significant implications for the use of new technologies and for the challenges of democracy more generally. in order to make known and establish possible points of comparison, the paper presents an analysis of both projects’ respective histories, their website formats, their administration and partners who have supported and enabled their projects, the content produced by each and the repercussions of this content, as well as the participation and empowerment of citizen journalists through these sites, the use of forums and social networks, and the efforts in place to monitor the information published. in this way, it became possible to evaluate how these websites and their users might contribute to participatory journalism online and what effects they might have for the challenges of democracy. 1. after all, what is citizen journalism? irrespective of specific differences in journalistic words about participation, this paper aims to show that technology and the internet have facilitated participation on the internet where people are now able to create, transform, and share information. the reason for choosing the 4 expression ‘citizen journalism’ in this paper is its wide dissemination and applicability for studying the websites that we analyzed. this expression has attained value by use; it designates only part of the new web journalism phenomenon. according to glaser (2006), “the idea behind citizen journalism is that people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the internet to create, augment, or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others”. users of these sites are named citizen journalists, a well-known denomination that deserves additional clarification. dan gilmor (2010) talks about the possible names of these new media creators. he argues that the expression ‘citizen journalism’ arose at a time of scarcity, when few people had this role; he argues further that this is more than a semantic dilemma. the author raises other issues, such as protection laws, which aim to protect informers and journalists that are aware of corporate and government mismanagement. gilmor also suggests that while digital media has become omnipresent and more people communicate and collaborate online, individuals may produce content of journalistic value, although few of these people think of themselves as journalists. david rosman (2010) contends that practicing unpaid collaborators working regularly (citizen journalists) should also be considered ‘professionals’ if they met the requirements of the formally recognized press. he argues that many reject this idea, and base their definition on the traditional oxford dictionary1 definition in that payment is required to be defined as a professional. if this was the case we would be unable to associate the word citizen to the profession of a journalist. the merriam-webster2 the idea is whether content produced by citizen journalists, with or without a professional journalist as an editor/mediator, is able to create spaces that foster democracy. thus, i use the expression citizen journalism for that type of journalistic work where citizens extends this meaning: the word ‘professional’ as an adjective is “(1): characterized by or conforming to the technical or ethical standards of a profession (2): exhibiting a courteous, conscientious, and generally businesslike manner in the workplace”.in this perspective, if any citizen prepares himself for a task and improves while practicing this activity, then he may be considered a citizen journalist. 1 http://oxforddictionaries.com/view/entry/m_en_us1280978#m_en_us1280978 2 http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/professional http://oxforddictionaries.com/view/entry/m_en_us1280978#m_en_us1280978� http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/professional� 5 participate actively by providing opinions, producing, editing, and publishing text or hypermediatic content. 2. the potential of citizen journalism for democracy the key to solving the polemic around the expression ‘citizen journalism’ and its association with the challenges of this work – and of perceiving its democratic potential – may be the word ‘citizen’. a definition of citizen may be easily found in any dictionary, as “one entitled to the rights and privileges of a freeman, a member of the state”. to this definition feliks gross (1999) adds the statement that "citizenship is an articulation of an inclusive political association and common culture that unites all inhabitants of diverse ethnicity, religion or race" (1999, p.13). thus, "all members are therefore members of a political community, the state. the state is an association of citizens, all free and all having the same rights and respective duties." in a wellworking democratic state, ethnic diversity is a source of strength, cultural wealth and creativity. the effectiveness and success of the civic state depends on the proper balance between the civil society and the state" (gross, 1999, p.128). this definition underlies our decision to choose experiences of citizen journalism in two long-time socially disfavored communities. it is important to underline that these examples belong to different orders, although they are comparable. in the case of índios online, we are speaking of ethnically defined communities, whereas viva favela comprises individuals from socially and economically disfavored communities. in the former, citizens define themselves by their ethnic origin; in the latter, citizens belong to communities that may or may not be part of something present at their birth, and where they may change their social class if the opportunities and means for such become available. although these communities have distinct features, both are examples of citizen diversity in a state. thus, more than understanding citizen journalism as a concept, we may perceive it as a current phenomenon on the internet that competes with – or in the best cases associates with – the traditional media consisting of professional journalists. it may be thought, therefore, that individuals use journalistic tools – specifically digital journalism – to create, produce, and distribute content of interest to a community in their social and political dimension or status as citizens with rights and duties in a democratic system. 6 the press established itself in 1900 as an independent social force for democracy in countries with different legal systems. however, the idea of journalism as a fourth state or a counterpoint and watchdog of the governing powers (aguinaga, 1988, p.25) is threatened by a purely market concept of enterprises. thus, if journalism is thought of as an institution, it becomes essential for democratic societies, because it is able to serve the common interest. “and it does so often better than other institutions with the same purpose, such as politics.” (gomes, 2009, p.70). gomes points out that public interest may be presented by this means of expression and also in other terms that foster ideas of common interest and citizenship; these may become objects of what journalism provides to society. this is where the ‘public’ needs to be taken into account; in this context, public means the civil sphere and public interest – people’s right to know about topics of their concern. journalism would assure the existence of free public opinion and recognition and satisfaction of interests pertaining to the civil sphere. service in the public interest, however, is not an absolute principle of journalism; demand for varied and specialized information creates a need for increasing and diversifying the forms of journalism. digital journalism opens the possibility of revitalizing traditional journalism and its principle of defending the public interest. by being interactive, it is closer to the “public”, to “common people,” to society, and may therefore foster dialogue among the media, citizens, and government, thereby motivating civil participation and democracy. in the web 2.0 – a phase of the internet that tim o’reilly (2005) characterizes as being mainly “a participative architecture” – the horizontal conversational environment among users and communications media allows citizen journalism to raise the ideas of ‘power’ and gains for democracy. this moment supports the idea that “there is a public, a sphere of citizenship, that needs to find free channels for expression, to establish a presence vis a vis the state and society. the freedom of channels of expression, therefore, would be a condition for sovereignty” (gomes, 2009, p.72). online journalism that fosters participation could bring these manifestations into forums, comments in news and blogs, or news and content produced by citizens themselves. citizen journalism opens the possibility of even more forceful communication channels for society to express itself freely, as these channels do not depend on the politics and interests of the gatekeepers. 7 on the other hand, citizen journalism initiatives – a fertile field for manifestations by citizens – may not necessarily be journalistic communication channels, as the idea of journalism evokes a commitment to be neutral, objective, and impartial (although we realize the difficulties of encountering these criteria in traditional journalism). adghirni (2005, p. 271) states “the field of journalism is important in the social world because it has true monopoly over large scale production and dissemination tools of events that may affect other fields.” we may consider this statement valid for the web 2.0 where journalistic corporations no longer command monopolies, and where citizens have created their own media that interferes with the agenda of the conventional media. but without means of mass communication, is social media able to produce and disseminate widely events that could affect other fields and have a relevant role in democracy? the issue that gomes raises “the matter of public interest in the theory and practice of democracy consist of making sure that the interest of the civil sphere and the public may affect political decision making” (2009, p. 79) is similar for both traditional and citizen journalism. are there any advantages for the latter? it may be said that citizen journalism is more pro-civic than traditional journalism because the former democratizes communication. it is easy to think that citizen journalism is more democratic because it facilitates participation; but the concept of more horizontal participation – more people participating meaning more democracy – is a shallow idea of democracy. we need to consider and discover whether the initiatives of citizen journalism do in fact increase civil power, strengthen a society of rights and freedom, and increase pluralism and minority power, all of which are important for a democratically relevant digital initiative. (gomes, 2010). 8 3. presenting the case studies 3.1 viva favela figure 1: viva favela website. 9 since 2001, viva favela has trained correspondents in its own workshops or in partnerships with other social projects, ‘culture points’3 website content is distributed by rss, twitter, , courses, training schools in communications, and volunteer work by communications professionals. the workshops teach editing for the internet, photography, video editing, audio editing, multimedia production, and video making. 4 facebook,5 orkut,6 and a youtube channel7. viva favela has a large support structure for this project, and has developed an extensive network of partners8 3points of culture does not have a single model. a common feature to all of these points is cultural crosssectionalism and shared public/community management. points of culture aims to strengthen cultural actions that have been developed previously by sectors that have historically been excluded from public policy; it creates the means for alternative and autonomous economic development in support of communities. in brazil and overseas, which has enabled the project to grow and attain visibility. partners may provide funding, exchange technology and methods, partnering for media and training (exchanging or reproducing/divulging content), and cultural partnerships. 4 http://twitter.com/vivafavela 5 http://www.facebook.com/pages/viva-favela/110787784145 6 http://www.orkut.com.br/main#community?cmm=33684890 7 http://www.youtube.com/user/vivafavela 8 funding partners (current): petrobras; ministry of culture/ lei de incentivo à cultura)/programa cultura viva; support from the norwegian church ain/od. funding partners (founding): unesco and globo.com. technology and method exchange partnerships: overmundo institute, piraí digital, serpro, elluminate,* pontão de cultura digital circo voador, pontão da eco, alliance for youth movements. training partnerships: escola de cinema darcy ribeiro, observatório de favelas/ escola de fotógrafos populares da maré, instituto overmundo, ponto de cultura o som das comunidades, pontão de cultura digital circo voador, pontão da eco, ponto de cultura “fazendo a diferença em paquetá”, the new school (new york), coaxo do brejo. media partners exchange or reproduction/dissemination of content: jornal expresso, tv morrinho/ projeto morrinho, imagem do povo. cultural partnerships: the ghetto film school (new york), lentes dos sonhos. international partners: viva favela also promotes a cultural exchange program since its inception, in a partnership with peter lucas, a professor of media and human rights, new york university and the new school, us. every year students from new york visit the project and work as volunteers in rio de janeiro. http://twitter.com/vivafavela� http://www.facebook.com/pages/viva-favela/110787784145� http://www.orkut.com.br/main#community?cmm=33684890� http://www.youtube.com/user/vivafavela� http://www.kirkensnodhjelp.no/en/� http://www.vivafavela.com.br/www.brasilia.unesco.org� http://www.vivafavela.com.br/www.globo.com� http://www.institutoovermundo.org.br/� http://www.institutoovermundo.org.br/� http://www.institutoovermundo.org.br/� http://www.elluminate.com/� http://www.ghettofilm.org/index.html� 10 3.2 índios online figure 2: índios online website. 11 índios online is a project that aims to overcome digital divides. it was started in 2004 – coordinated by the thydêwá ngo, which partnered with a private enterprise to create an internet connection, to buy computers and to create the índios online website to facilitate information and communication among seven native indian nations9 in 2008 the work of índios online was given several awards that recognized its work. . the goals of the índios online network are to facilitate access to information and communication for several native indian nations, to stimulate intercultural dialogue, to encourage native indians themselves to study native indian cultures, to recover, preserve, update, value, and disseminate native indian cultures, to foster respect for differences, to learn and reflect on contemporary native indians, to make files about native indians (texts, pictures, videos) available over the internet for brazil and the world, to supplement and enrich native indian multicultural school education, and to qualify native indians from different ethnic groups to assure their rights. a point of culture was formed in 2005 in a partnership with the ministry of culture; in 2007 the network included four new native indian groups. a native indian coordinator was elected in 2006, paving the way for the autonomy of the índios online network. índios online had a modern design and focused on autonomy. it became a network that was coordinated and updated by native indians, having started as a project for overcoming digital divides. it then developed into a social inclusion project that uses ict to divulge the culture, issues, and difficulties of native indians, and to inform, make demands, and learn about the reality of other native indian communities. 10 9 kiriri, tupinambá, pataxó-hãhãhãe, tumbalalá na bahia, xucuru-kariri, kariri-xocó em alagoas and pankararu in pernambuco. 10 prêmio arede 2008 award, editorial moment. semifinalists of the experiências de inovação social award 2008, of the w. k. kellogg foundation and cepal. prêmio ludicidade do ministério da cultura 2008. prêmio top social 2008 (advb/ba abap/ba e acb). in 2009 the program celulares indígenas was launched; it distributed 60 mobile phones to 60 native indians of 24 different indian nations in brazil, with the goal of fostering plurality and enabling native indians to use this device as a tool to promote cultural diversity, social justice, and a culture of peace. native indians are free to autonomously publish and share information – 12 videos, pictures, text – on the índios online website and on youtube.11 the portal can also be followed on twitter.12 índios online started as a project coordinated by an ngo; today it is an autonomous network that is managed by native indians themselves. the thydêwá ngo and other entities are partners according to information in the website, índios online is a network for communication that provides opportunities and fosters the freedom of native indians belonging to brazilian and non-brazilian native peoples. it encourages native indians to freely express their opinions, and to become ethnic journalists, cyberactivits, and protagonists of their culture, history, mores, and traditions, and to share these with other peoples and nations. 13 a team of students from several universities, funded with donations from the pew charitable trusts and the knight foundation, have conducted research in this field since 2007 to quantitatively analyze citizen journalism in the united states. they have confirmed that that came in to support this project. at present, índios online adopted shared management – a project for expanding the network – where participating native indians are equally important in decisions concerning the network; there is no single general coordinator, and eight native indians of different nations manage the network jointly. the project consisted of 500 native indians belonging to 25 ethnic groups that have participated in the last six years. 4. comparing chaos by studying and comparing these cases, it is possible to understand the intertwining paths that arise from such initiatives, showing their contributions to democracy. 4.1 partnerships and support both projects arose because of an initiative from a non-governmental organization; they grew with support from private companies and the federal government. the two efforts are considered cultural points that were selected by public tenders to recover, preserve, foster, and disseminate cultural manifestations from several regions of brazil. public support – as well as that of other partners – is often vital for these initiatives to survive. 11 http://www.youtube.com/user/índiosonline 12 http://twitter.com/índiosonline 13 índios online has a partnership with the thydêwá ong, ministery of culture (cultura viva), ministery of communications (gesac), oi futuro institute and the secretary of science, technology and innovation of bahia (secti). http://www.youtube.com/user/indiosonline� http://twitter.com/indiosonline� 13 citizen media activities are on the rise. after empirical studies of about sixty citizen portals, however, one of the authors reported that the most significant hurdle against the success of citizen journalism is that websites lack funding from foundations, professional journalists, or supported links in the traditional media. these websites are generally supported by personal motivation, and disappear when this goes away (thorson, 2010). if the flow of financial resources does cover costs and generate profit to improve the structure, correct inevitable mechanical failures, and technological obsolescence, the enterprise will fail. according to this view, projects should meet these costs, whether by local partnerships, voluntary work, government incentives, or community support, cover structural and maintenance costs, and share tasks among the website managers. different ambits of society need to become involved to consolidate, maintain, and expand such activities; such initiatives may thus stand a chance to help strengthen democracy by bringing other voices into the media ecosystem. índios online and viva favela differ significantly with regards to support and partnerships, repercussions in the structure of the portal, and visibility. viva favela benefits from much more support and partnerships than índios online, and therefore produces a higherquality portal with more information and diversified content, and is present in more social media. 4.2 social representation the issue of community identity (souza leal, 2006) deserves more thought, particularly because there is a huge difference between being poor and being a native indian – between an ethnic-social status and a disfavored social and economic condition. our focus here is to perceive these internet portals as opportunities for these minorities to freely communicate their self-representations. thus, the study cases have found in the internet an opportunity to change the image that society has of these two communities, images that have grown out of mass media representations. in the case of the viva favela portal, it is divulging the fact that the slum (favela) is not a place of violence and drug trafficking only, as is usually portrayed in newspapers, soap operas, and movies. índios online portrays native indians as people that are part of society as professionals in several areas, and who struggle to preserve their culture, tradition, and land. 14 it is an opportunity for community members to represent themselves on the website through content about their communities (text, video, or audio), to debate the issues and the culture of these places, and to add their voices by connecting with similar realities. 4.3 acting as citizen journalists the portals we studied, with interesting news for these communities posted mostly by their own members, reflect the idea of citizen journalism. participants and contributors to these sites, however, are not concerned whether what they are doing is journalism or not. they want to tell their stories, to describe what is going on in their communities, and to show their own language and narrative in the internet. the important point in this article is freedom of expression for these channels. portals as channels for communicating freely and democratizing information is the proposition of the índios online website, in which there is no mediation by professional journalists before publishing content; the native indians themselves are responsible for producing and publishing content on the portal. in contrast, viva favela has a content editor, a professional journalist that decides what should and what should not be published. the publishing criteria are simple – content themes (text, pictures, audio, or video) or announcements of services and events should pertain to lowincome communities, and should abide by the website’s editorial policies. viva favela provides opportunities for denouncements; but the right to answer is given if these are made against institutions, groups, or individuals, and an explanation is given that “listening to the other side” is a basic rule of ethical, responsible, and quality journalism, and also of democracy. these participation and publishing issues are included in the rules for using the website14 14 ; índios online contains no rules for participating, but only asks users to register, as happens in the viva favela. the content editor of viva favela is also responsible for editing the texts for orthography and grammar before publishing. this is not done in the índios online website, which does not have professional journalists; text is published as the native indians express themselves, which make idiomatic errors rather obvious. http://www.vivafavela.com.br/regras%20de%20uso 21.07.10 http://www.vivafavela.com.br/regras%20de%20uso� 15 4.4 overcoming digital and social divides it is clear that the main purpose of índios online is to include native indians from local communities in the ‘global village’ by connecting the remaining and dispersed brazilian native indian communities to defend their rights. because there are no professional journalists involved, expression is freer and easier for participants – they know that the website is made by them for themselves. other non-native persons can participate in the website and the project as volunteers. índios online seeks partners and support to bring the internet to other native indian peoples, to improve the technical aspects, for technical support, and to improve the ability to use computers. there is a concern in both initiatives to train collaborating users through workshops on the production of text, audio, and video. índios online teaches how to use the telephone to connect to the web, and how to produce and publish audiovisual content on the website and on the youtube channel. this is an important aspect for overcoming digital divides, as providing access is not enough; citizens need to be trained to use ict. internet access is the starting point for overcoming the digital divide; the next challenge is to overcome social divides, which requires information and training. both projects contribute to this goal. a statement by luiz carlos díaz (in franco, 2009) – of gentedeapie, an independent digital training project in venezuela – on inclusion projects and training may be applied to these brazilian experiences. the idea is that if these projects have an effect on democracy, it is by training ‘infocitizens’. citizens exist if they are informed, which provides a reference of a nation, the ability to learn what is going on, and to produce information. díaz adds that ‘infocitizens’ are better audiences for traditional communications media, who wish further information, who want more, and will not accept less. as ‘infocitizens’ learn how to seek information, how to edit and publish content, we will have more empowered citizens. another important aspect of computer literacy is, in the case of índios online, a differentiated proposition to overcome the digital divide by using computers and mobile phones for mobile internet access. this type of access is growing and becoming a common path for using and consuming information and the internet. inclusion of these native indian peoples into the digital world is more advanced compared to people that have access to the internet (computers or mobile devices) but that remain apart from society by not having been encouraged or not feeling able to use the internet. 16 4.5 politics and democracy the rules for using viva favela are transparent, and it is not linked to any political party. clearly electoral content is excluded, although political news is published and commented on; except when it defends political parties, or has commercial aims, or any type of advertisements. political themes may be found on both portals, especially if they are of interest to these communities. political issues are more obvious on the índios online portal, and are expressed as demands, denouncements, and debates that may result in petitions and manifestations such as visits to congress, or the noteworthy episode in which a team of funai (national foundation for native indians) was held by the potiguara people. this news was not widely published in the mass communications media, but was shown in several blogs and in the índios online portal15 the portal is a channel that contains links to other sites where these petitions are hosted; some of these sites are more structured than others, and yield different results. the petition to save the xingu river and to stop construction of the belo monte as an opportunity to explain this action. after the funai employees were captured in the são francisco village, a team was sent to negotiate their freedom. they were only released after a negotiating committee heard the demands and promised to act on them, which was made official in a document. this is an example of how mobilization yielded a result for native indian communities; the portal was important to organize these communities, to provide visibility to this initiative, and for native indians to express and represent themselves without being intermediated by the conventional media. the action was successful because in this case the native indian communities did not require the implications of society. however, mobilization requiring more people than are found in native indian communities does not attain expected results. this is what happens with petitions and undersigned documents with various objectives that are published on the índios online portal. 16 15 see news: hydroelectric dam has its own website, with links to blogs, the petition, and most of the main social networks (facebook, twitter, youtube, and delicious). in spite of these links to social networks, few native indians – if any – use these social media. http://www.índiosonline.org.br/novo/povo-potiguara-faz-refens-funcionarios-da-funaibrasilia/ (14.09.2010) 16 http://www.xinguvivo.org.br/ http://www.indiosonline.org.br/novo/povo-potiguara-faz-refens-funcionarios-da-funai-brasilia/� http://www.indiosonline.org.br/novo/povo-potiguara-faz-refens-funcionarios-da-funai-brasilia/� http://www.xinguvivo.org.br/� 17 a further less successful example for mobilizing society was the petition against a restructuring initiative of funai17 viva favela deals with topics of general interest to the public. there is much on citizenship that is relevant for communities, such as health and education, and information about social and cultural events. the portal does not aim to mobilize people for such evident social and political causes as those in índios online. but viva favela also exploits its potential for mobilizing people, as in the news “niteroi cries for help”, – this could be found in a specific public service web that makes public petitions available for free. the petition, which was created on 17 january 2010, was visited 1,236 times and contained only 107 signatures on 09.05.2011. not even the native indian communities seemed interested. 18 such distribution of information, which goes beyond the website itself, is relevant for political purposes such as adhesion to petitions in support of the tupinambá de olivença people (for demarcating land) and the opará campaign (native indian peoples defending the são francisco river) in índios online. which denounced that five months after rains had caused significant damage to the city there were still communities at risk, and asked for help. these sites have supported digital democracy by providing access to information and by becoming able to mobilize people. 4.6 online social networks these websites use social networks as allies to inform and mobilize as many people as possible. both have profiles in twitter and videos in youtube. viva favela also distributes its content by rss, on facebook, and on orkut. distributing content on digital social networks has become a necessity for any form of internet communication that wishes to divulge its content, strengthen its brand, and attract visitors to the websites. digital social networks are the most efficient method for sharing news, information, and opinions. 19 online social networks are also important for generating information flows about these initiatives, and to provide visibility to these websites. for example, it is important to disseminate cultural events in slums (favelas) through social networks to provide visibility to partners or projects and to reach more people, who may feel motivated to participate in 17 http://www.abaixoassinado.org/abaixoassinados/5543 18 http://www.vivafavela.com.br/materias/niter%c3%b3i-pede-socorro 19 http://www.apoinme.org.br/ http://www.abaixoassinado.org/abaixoassinados/5543� http://www.vivafavela.com.br/materias/niter%c3%b3i-pede-socorro� http://www.apoinme.org.br/� 18 workshops and to become collaborating users of viva favela. they can then assure and increase essential support and partnerships for surviving and for extending the website/project. looking at the profile of these portals on social networks, one can see that they are rarely used. one of the reasons for this is that information in these profiles is often not updated. it is important for information flows in these communication channels to be adequately and constantly used so that these tools gain strength as social networks that connect and generate bonds among users. 4.7 participation on websites there is little participation of índios online users on forums or through comments; those that participated were the native indians themselves who are also citizen journalists. the chat service was empty when we analyzed it. the forum in the viva favela website is used for the agenda of the multimedia magazine, and as such works well. viva favela encourages three types of interaction: publishing of content, comments about such content, and voting20 viva favela, compared to índios online, is able to motivate more participation of citizen journalists (from low income communities or not). possible explanations are the subjects covered in viva favela are broader interests than those treates in índios online. moreover, viva about content. it is clear that users interact more by vote than commenting. comments are usually sparse, and are often absent after news and content; when present, these comments are laudatory. thus, opinions are exchanged, but these initiatives do not use or develop democratically configured participative spaces to foster debates and deliberation. it is important to say that slum dwellers produce quality content; there are also many communication studies undergraduates or graduates who publish their content about the slums (favelas). this is evidence of how the portal involves not only citizens living in slums but also other sectors of society, which tends to raise the quality of the content and increase the visibility of viva favela. a more in depth study about these citizen journalists could verify if the majority of published content is in fact published by people living in low income communities. 20 the home page of viva favela shows an article, a video, an image gallery, and audio content. these are selected electronically based on the number of votes given within the last two days. thus, a given content may be on the home page with relatively few votes if most of these votes were given within the past two days in that section. in each section, content is shown by publishing order. in the "most votes" item, on the left of the page, content is shown by voting order, irrespective of the section. 19 favela has a more open administrative and communications policy, a large number of supporting partners (brazilian and international), collaborating communications professionals, professional journalists managing the website, and an ngo that supports the project. the philosophy of índios online differs in that they are not funded by an ngo (which is only a partner), it has no professional journalists among its staff, and there are fewer supporters, all of which is evident in the structure of the website. 5. final comments the conclusions about both experiences may seem similar, as this is an exploratory analysis that did not aim to measure the democratic content of these initiatives. thus, the potential of these contributions suggest significant gains for citizens, namely: including minority voices in the digital world, providing access to information of interest to communities, configuring a space (website) bringing visibility to these minorities, offering a place for debates (to a certain extent), interconnecting citizens in similar conditions, and organizing possible mobilizations of communities to defend their rights. these observable aspects may guide future research, such as empirical studies where quantitative methods support qualitative approaches. thus, the questions that gave rise to this exploratory and preliminary study could become testable hypotheses. an answer to the initial question: “what is the importance of users’ participation in online news media? in the case of citizen journalism; does a larger number of ordinary civic voices affect a difference in the quality of a society’s democracy?” we should say that more voices are not enough for quality democracy. this is clear when we look at digital journalism, which opens opportunities for users to participate. however, these consuming users and collaborators of newspapers that belong to communications groups are part of an information society, and produce little in a deliberative sense when participating in such media. what is clear about the users of these websites is that there is more than merely having a channel of expression. here we answer the first issue, the importance of participating: it is both to communicate and to access information. these projects are the means by which users may produce content about their lives, needs, wishes, and problems in their communities – themes of possibly common interest. they gain the opportunity to link with other citizens that have similar problems, and by having information and being able to organize, can defend certain causes, denounce more often and demand more. 20 a further potential gain for democracy is the possibility of building an identity that is not commonly divulged in professional communications media. citizen journalists are writing and presenting themselves (who they are or what they represent) and what they want from society by posting multimedia content in websites such as viva favela and índios online. there are more voices, which are heard and that bring others into these communities. there are a few remaining issues: to what extent does society perceive this visibility and mobilization? for instance, how does the public power relate to the issues that these communities denounce? the path to these answers suggests that the cases we studied could reach better results if the potential of social networks was used more effectively and if they had more access to conventional media. as with all cases studies, it is difficult to reach general conclusions from specific experiences. the challenge of reflecting more widely, and the fact that citizen journalism is still a recent form of journalism over the web, suggest that its potential is still far from being fulfilled. this refers both to citizen journalism as a form of social communication on the internet, and especially as a tool for strengthening citizens and democracy. based on these reflections, there is no doubt that citizen journalism may bring positive results for democracy, regardless of whether it is a type of journalism or not. it is potentially a relevant communications channel among citizens, the media, and governments, which can be developed and explored further. acknowledgments the author thanks the colleagues of the department of communication and contemporary cultures at the universidade federal da bahia, specially dr. wilson gomes for the suggestions that improved the quality of this work; capes (coordenação de aperfeiçoamento de pessoal de nível superior) for the scholarship; association of internet researchers ir 12.0 conference (seattle 2011) for the opportunity to present this work and mr. stephen clarke for the english revision. 21 references adghirni, z. (2005). actas do iii sopcom, vi lusocom e ii ibérico. volume iv campos da comunicação. universidade da beira do interior, p. 271. retrieved from http://www.livroslabcom.ubi.pt/pdfs/actas%20vol%204.pdf aguinaga, e. (1994). esencia del periodismo: la periodificación. universidade complutense de madrid, 1988. in: souza, jorge pedro. as notícias. porto: universidade fernando pessoa. briggs, a. & burke, p. (2004). uma história social da mídia – de gutenberg à internet. rio de janeiro: jorge zahar editor. brum, m. s.. (2004). a construção da identidade de favelado a partir de suas relações com o estado. klepsidra revista virtual de história. retrieved from http://www.klepsidra.net/klepsidra19/favelado.htm bruns, a. (2008). blogs, wikipedia, second life, and beyond: from production to produsage. new york: lang publishing. deuze, m.; bruns, a., neuberger, c (2007). preparing for an age of participatory news. journalism practice. 1(3), 322-338. retrieved from http://eprints.qut.edu.au/9785/1/9785.pdf foucalt, m. (1982) microfísica do poder (3rded.). rio de janeiro: graal. franco, g. (2009). el impacto de las tecnologías digitales en el periodismo en la democracia de la américa latina y em el caribe. austin:open society fundacion, p.18. friendeland, l; a. (2003). public journalism: past and future. dayton, oh: kettering foundation press. gilmor, d. (2006). we the media: grassroots journalism by the people, for the people. new york :o´reilly. gilmor, d. (2010). who's a journalist? does that matter? retrieved from http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/08/26/who_is_a_journalist/index.html http://www.livroslabcom.ubi.pt/pdfs/actas%20vol%204.pdf� http://www.klepsidra.net/klepsidra19/favelado.htm� http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/08/26/who_is_a_journalist/index.html� 22 gomes, w. (2006). apontamentos sobre esfera pública política. in: maia, r. c. m.; castro, m. c. p. e. (eds.). mídia, esfera pública e identidades coletivas (pp. 56-59).. belo horizonte: editora ufmg. gomes, w. (2011). participação política online: questões e hipóteses de trabalho. in: maia r.; wilson, g.; marques, j.(org.) internet e participação política no brasil. porto alegre: sulina. glaser, m. (2006). your guide to citizen journalism. mediashift. retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/09/your-guide-to-citizen-journalism270.html gordon, j. (2007) the mobile phone and the public shere: mobile phone usage in three critical situations. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 13, 307-319. jarvis, j. (2006). neworked journalism. retrieved from www.buzzmachine.com/2006/07/05/networked-journalism lacy, s.; duffy, m.; riffe, d.; thorson, e.; fleming, k. (2010). citizen journalism web sites complement newspapers. newspaper research journal, 31( 2). maia, r. c. m.; castro, m. c. p. e. (ed.) (2006). mídia, esfera pública e identidades coletivas. belo horizonte: editora ufmg. nguyen, an. ( 2006). journalism in the wake of participatory publishing. australian journalism review, 28(1), 143-155. nip, j. (2006) exploring the second phase of public journalism. journalism studies, 7, 212 – 236. retrieved from http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~jour/documents/joyce/exp_2th_public_j.pdf rosen, j. (1994). making things more public: on political responsibility of the media intellectual. critical studies in mass communication, 11, 352-388. rosen, j. (1997). public journalism as a democratic art. public journalism theory and practice -lessons from experience. dayton: kettering foundation, p. 3-24. rosman, d. (2010).despite not being paid, citizen journalists are still professionals. missouri online. columbia, november 10. retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/09/your-guide-to-citizen-journalism270.html� http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~jour/documents/joyce/exp_2th_public_j.pdf� 23 http://www.columbiamissourian.com/stories/2010/11/10/david-rosman-citizen-journalists-arealso-professional-journalists/ ruusunok, l. (2006). public journalism and public sphere. in public sphere(s) and their boundaries. university of tampere journalism research and development centre. retrieved from http://www.uta.fi/laitokset/tacs/papers0506/ruusunoksa.pdf souza leal, b. (2006). a comunidade como projeto identitário. in: r. c. m. maia, m. c. p. e. castro (ed.). mídia, esfera pública e identidades coletivas (pp. 183-192). belo horizonte: editora ufmg. thorson, e. (2010) community journalism. the state of the news media: an annual report on american journalism. special report. retrieved from http://stateofthemedia.org/2010/specialreports-economic-attitudes/community-journalism/ tumber, howard (2001). democracy in the information age: the role of the fourth state in cyberspace. in: webster, frank (ed.). culture and politics in the information age: a new politics? (pp. 17-31). londres: routledge.. http://www.columbiamissourian.com/stories/2010/11/10/david-rosman-citizen-journalists-are-also-professional-journalists/� http://www.columbiamissourian.com/stories/2010/11/10/david-rosman-citizen-journalists-are-also-professional-journalists/� selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): guzmán, c. (2020, october). layers of “networked privacy”: stor(y)ing on the internet? the praxis and ethics of online queer latin american cabaret archives. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. stor(y)ing on the internet? the praxis and ethics of online queer latin american cabaret archives carina guzmán university of toronto my doctoral research includes the design and implementation of an online archive and digital exhibit of the community materials of two mexico city-based collectives which i was a member of. the first is meras efímeras, dedicated to organizing lesbian nightlife events such as dance parties and cultural soirées, and the second, which emerged from within meras efímeras is burlesquimeras a queer neoburlesque troupe (both active approx. 2005-2012). some of these materials were born-digital, while other analogue ephemera will be digitized. digital photographs and social media certainly existed in the years meras efímeras and burlesquimeras (meb) were active, but it was before the two were seamlessly integrated through the ubiquity of smartphones and unlimited data plans–at least in the mexican context. most materials have been preserved by community members in what scholars have theorized as queer archives constituted by the clutter or messiness associated to transfeminist, queer and often migrant lives (cowan, 2012; manalansan, 2014). in the process of producing the meb archive, i am weaving a conversation between said scholars and latin american thinkers who also theorized the concept of messiness, as well as others such as relajo, magic, civil society and utopia (aínsa, 1984; cerutti guldberg, 1989; monsiváis, 1998a, 1998b; portilla 1986; quijano, 1993). through this conversation, i propose a specifically queer and latin american form of archival preservation, custodianship and digital praxis i call “stor(y)ing” mi desmadre (mexican slang for “my mess”). “stor(y)ing” mi desmadre collapses the trans-feminist and queer (tfq) community member’s ability to store ephemera and other materials afforded by mi desmadre, with the historical narrative that mi desmadre enacts by merely/queerly existing. “stor(y)ing” begins when someone holds on to ephemera and keeps it in that messy corner of a closet or hard drive. the next steps of “stor(y)ing” happen when, usually after several years of fostering mi desmadre, they get together with other community members to constitute a formal collection available for consultation, with varying degrees and modes of institutional help. almost implicit in the collaboration between tfq communities and archival institutions is the latter’s expectation (or demand) that digitized/digital materials be available for consultation through public-facing online platforms. the call for open-access means the now formally-archival materials that were created and circulated within the “integral audiences” and “queer negotiated intimacy” of a tfq community of artists and show-goers will be available for the first time not only outside that context, but to the general public of the internet (cowan & rault, 2018). this inevitably raises ethical questions about the transfer of the risk of queer existence and queer nightlife in latin america to the internet; questions that archival institutions are not necessarily concerned with (cowan, 2020; cowan & rault, 2018). in the case of the meb project, i have partnered with the cabaret commons critical practice and exhibition place (cabaretcommons.org); an initiative that is deeply concerned with tfq community ethics of “onlining” archival material. in conversation with the cabaret commons team and co-directors, we have worked hard on understanding and translating to the online sphere the public, but not open to just any public, dynamic and ethic of care present in meb events, like in so many other tfq nightlife communities in the american hemisphere (cowan, 2020). one key conclusion we have come to is that the meb archive will have password-restricted access. only those who have contributed materials to the digital archive--in other words, community members who were once present in the nightlife spaces and shows--will (by default) be granted the password. third parties will have to request access to the online collection. additionally, there will be a public-facing exhibition of ethically selected materials to inaugurate the archive. lastly, i would like to share the issues i am currently thinking through with my compañeras of meras efímeras and burlesquimeras and the cabaret commons team: a) how to handle access requests to the password-restricted archive and b) what ethical criteria should we apply to select material to include in the public-facing digital exhibit (beyond, of course, having consent from the creator or people who appear in the material). the following are some questions and considerations we’re thinking through in this process: • what would justify access to the online archive? • if a third party is granted access to the online archive, how can we control what they use the materials for? • how will we sustain the labor of processing requests? • will there be a single person in charge of processing requests? a committee? should all contributors be consulted? • in terms of selecting and getting permission to include materials in the online exhibit, the dynamic of friendship may have an impact: • for instance, if i approach a friend requesting their consent to show an image in which they appear, our relationship may make it uncomfortable for them to say “no”. • on the other hand, our friendship could avoid other types of discomfort and potential community ethical breaches. that is, in many cases we can avoid requesting consent to include an image of someone and their ex, given our familiarity with the community history of hookups and break-ups. • i recently launched a call on my facebook for people to send material for the archive and exhibit. we decided to ask people for archival materials, but also works they could create now to remember those events such as memes, collages, stories, etc. sources (based on video script) aínsa, f. (1984). tensión utópica e imaginario subversivo en hispanoamérica. anales de la literatura hispanoamericana, 13, 13–35. cerutti guldberg, h. (1989). de varia utópica (ensayos de utopía iii). publicaciones universidad central. cowan, t. l. (2012). “i remember. . . i was wearing leather pants”: archiving the repertoire of feminist cabaret in canada. in l. m. morra & j. schagerl (eds.), basements and attics, closets and cyberspace: explorations in canadian women’s archives (pp. 65–86). wilfrid laurier university press. cowan, t. l. (2020). x-reception: remediating trans, feminist, and queer performance art. in k. brown (ed.), the routledge companion to digital humanities and art history (pp. 155–166). routledge. cowan, t. l., & rault, j. (2018). onlining queer acts: digital research ethics and caring for risky archives. women & performance: a journal of feminist theory, 28(2), 121– 142. hartman, s. v. (2008). venus in two acts. small axe: a caribbean journal of criticism, 26, 1–14. hartman, s. v. (2019). wayward lives, beautiful experiments: intimate histories of social upheaval. w. w. norton & company. manalansan, m. f. (2014). the “stuff ” of archives. radical history review, 120, 94– 108. monsiváis, c. (1998a). la noche popular: paseos, riesgos, júbilos, necesidades orgánicas, tensiones, especies antiguas y recientes, descargas anímicas en forma de coreografías. debate feminista, 9(18), 55–73. monsiváis, c. (1998b). los espacios marginales. debate feminista, 17(may), 20–38. muñoz, j. e. (1996). ephemera as evidence: introductory notes to queer acts. women & performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2, 5–16. navarrete linares, f. (2011). los orígenes de los pueblos indígenas del valle de méxico. unam & instituto de investigaciones históricas. navarrete linares, f. (2018). historias mexicas. universidad nacional autónoma de méxico, instituto de investigaciones históricas : turner. portilla, j. (1986). fenomenología del relajo, y otros ensayos. fondo de cultura económica. quijano, a. (1993). modernity, identity, and utopia in latin america. boundary 2, 20(3), 140–155. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): carah, n., angus, d., smith, a. (2019, october 2-5). critical simulation: investigating the work of machine vision in visual social media culture. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. critical simulation: investigating the work of machine vision in visual social media culture nicholas carah school of communication and arts, the university of queensland daniel angus digital media research centre, queensland university of technology adam smith school of communication and arts, the university of queensland abstract social media are in the midst of an emphatic visual turn (highfield & leaver 2016), characterised by the convergence of everyday visual expression with professional creative practice and advertising. the advertising-driven business models of social media platforms increasingly depend on automation. platforms’ use of machine vision is a key frontier in the algorithmic classification of culture. machine vision algorithms automatically classify and misclassify faces, expressions, objects, and brand logos in the images users create and share. images shared by platform users form vast databases used to train these same algorithms. despite widespread use by social platforms, machine vision is poorly understood and accounted for in the study of everyday visual cultures. in this paper we detail a critical response to the use of automation in visual social media, called critical simulation. we outline a critical simulation framework, the ‘image machine’, focussed firstly on instagram. the image machine comprises an instagram data harvester, and open-access machine vision toolbox that allows digital humanities researchers to interrogate the inner workings of these algorithms and analyse their visual (mis)classifications. in this paper we showcase results from the image machine applied to images emanating from a major australian music festival, splendour in the grass. this case examines not only how machine vision classifies and operates on culture, but also how these techniques are being operationalised within the advertising model and promotional culture of platforms like instagram. we argue that the commercial application of machine vision is interdependent with the participatory culture of platforms like instagram. introduction the vernacular production of images of everyday life is integral to the commercial model of platforms like instagram (burgess 2015, banet-weiser 2012, abidin 2016). participants do the everyday work of incorporating commercial experiences, object and logos into the stories they tell about themselves. a critical, and often under-examined, aspect of this relationship is that the everyday production of images is critical to training the machine vision classification of the platform itself. as humans translate their lived experience into expressions, images and video on platforms, they are also building a vast set of algorithmic training data. that data is used to train and tune deep neural networks to recognise features and patterns in the images we create. the advertising-driven business models of visual social media platforms depend on automated, algorithmic processes, including the use of computational models to automatically classify images, a process called ‘machine vision’. for machines, images are ‘part of an operation’ (farocki 2004), raw material to be sorted and classified for defined ends (andrejevic 2013). a t-shirt graphic might be linked to a brand name that can feed into an operation: for example, the delivery of an advertisement to a particular user. these machine vision systems both exploit and run counter to everyday cultural practices: for platforms, understanding images’ meanings and representational qualities is not as important as learning how they can be used to nudge behaviour and shape cultural tastes (packer 2013). despite widespread use by social media platforms, machine vision is poorly understood and accounted for in the study of everyday cultures; and machine vision techniques are yet to be embraced as part of the methodological repertoires of digital humanities. we contend that if instagram is a key site in the ‘biggest experiment of classification in human history’ (crawford 2018), then we must develop conceptual and methodological approaches for understanding its machine vision architecture and capacity to use machines to operate on, and organise, our cultural experience. our response is to critically simulate the machine vision architectures of visual social platforms. in the first instance, critical simulation involves building open-access software that use algorithms comparable to those used by the platform of interest. critical simulation moves the digital humanities beyond employing computational tools to simply describe platform features or patterns of use, to also ‘look under the hood’ (turow 2012). once these algorithms are implemented, the next move in critical simulation is to examine how they intervene in culture, and how participants understand and creatively navigate cultural settings that are partly organised by machines. in the case of instagram, bringing the inner workings and outputs of machine vision algorithmic decision making into dialogue with instagram users allows us to better examine and reflect on how machines operate on and categorise everyday visual cultures (carah & angus 2018). critical simulation allows us to ask what kinds of new relationships are forming between vernacular practices and machine classification, including how everyday participation in visual social media also helps to train machine vision systems, and how human and nonhuman processes are interrelated in the production of digital culture. computational critical simulation framework the “image machine” the image machine is a critical simulation framework comprised of a number of modular software components that can be adapted to different visual social platforms, and machine vision architectures. the instagram data gathering module was developed in a manner that is not reliant on the use of instagram’s now deprecated platform-specific application programming interface (api). this module allows the gathering of public images and metadata using hashtag, or geolocation queries. we use puppeteer to interact with instagram.com, intercepting and saving responses to requests that the page’s javascript initiates, making it tolerant to regular changes to instagram’s web interface. the image machine contains a machine vision sandbox that allows the integration of many standard ‘supervised’ and ‘unsupervised’ classification algorithms. supervised approaches involve training algorithms to recognise pre-defined features, such as the presence of people, objects, logos, or text inside an image (see figure 1). unsupervised approaches involve training a machine to inductively recognise latent features in a data set, here these could be the use of colour, composition, or other distinctive image creation practices e.g. instagram filters. unsupervised approaches are crucial to developing a critical account of how machines determine patterns in cultural archives independent of human judgments about culture (andrejevic 2013). platforms like instagram, netflix and spotify use unsupervised approaches to organise cultural material by identifying otherwise imperceptible connections, such as the nuanced beat structure and sonic topology of songs (van den oord et al. 2013). the image machine can strip all unnecessary identifying information (e.g. user handles), as well as automatically blur faces in images for ethics purposes. once gathered, images are processed by machine vision algorithms for analysis and interpretation. in figure 1 the detectron supervised algorithm, developed and used by facebook throughout the mid-2010s (“detectron,” 2018), has identified bottles in an image returned using the query #tgif. in such a configuration the image machine can mimic the fundamentals of platform approaches to machine vision, despite the smaller scale of data we are using to train our algorithms. figure 1: the image machine can gather and process images from instagram to simulate how supervised machine vision can segment branded objects (e.g. brands of beer) within an image, each highlighted using a different coloured ‘mask’. results the first application of the image machine is to a major australian music festival, splendour in the grass. the music festival splendour in the grass was selected as a temporally and geographically bound research site that features a combination of music performances, art installations, fashion, and brand activations. each year, the festival also generates a large feed of images on instagram, shared by the organisers, attendees, bands, artists, sponsoring brands and associated influencers. brands build large interactive installations at the festival which, to use the terminology of marketers, are intended to be ‘instagrammable’. to road-test the image machine, we gathered 265,000 images posted to instagram using hashtags associated with the festival, and then categorised them using both supervised and unsupervised classifiers. this case enables us to undertake a preliminary exploration of how not only how machine vision classifies and operates on culture, but also how these techniques are being operationalised within the advertising model and promotional culture of platforms like instagram. we argue that the commercial application of machine vision is interdependent with the participatory culture of platforms like instagram. references abidin, c. (2016). visibility labour: engaging with influencers’ fashion brands and #ootd advertorial campaigns on instagram. media international australia 161(1): 86100. andrejevic, m. (2013). infoglut: how too much information is changing the way we think and know. routledge: london. banet-weiser, s. (2012). authentictm: the politics of ambivalence in a brand culture. new york: nyu press. burgess, j. (2015). from ‘broadcast yourself’ to ‘follow your interests’: making over social media. international journal of cultural studies, 18(3): 281-285. carah, n., & angus, d. (2018). algorithmic brand culture: participatory labour, machine learning and branding on social media. media, culture & society, 40(2), 178–194. crawford, k. (2018). ‘trouble with bias’ the 31st annual conference on neural information processing systems (nips 2017) keynote presentation. retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggzwiipkram detectron. (2018, january 23). retrieved from https://github.com/facebookresearch/detectron farocki, h. (2004). phantom images. public, 29. highfield, t., & leaver, t. (2016). instagrammatics and digital methods: studying visual social media, from selfies and gifs to memes and emoji. communication research and practice, 2(1): 47-62. packer, j. (2013). epistemology not ideology or why we need new germans. communication and critical/cultural studies, 10(2-3), 295-300. turow, j. (2012). the daily you: how the new advertising industry is defining your identity and your worth. yale university press: new haven. van den oord, a., dieleman, s., & schrauwen, b. (2013). deep content-based music recommendation. in proceedings of neural information processing systems 2013 (nips 2013), 2643-2651. venema lobinger a new standard of proof.pdf selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 a new standard of proof? discourses on visual data after the 2017 g20-protests rebecca venema università della svizzera italiana katharina lobinger università della svizzera italiana a broad body of literature has described contemporary societies as “surveillance societies” or “surveillance cultures” (lyon, 2007, 2017) and has expanded on the implications of an increasing “datafication” of society (hintz, dencik & wahl-jorgensen, 2019) and dataveillance (van dijck, 2014). these concepts attend to a profound transformation in state-corporate-citizen-relationships and in how society is ordered, decisions are made and citizens are monitored through data. so far, the role of visual data and visual analysis in these processes has seldom been discussed in detail. however, visual data, the combination of visual representations of e.g. persons, their physical and facial traits with metadata, and advancing algorithmic and facial recognition tools for their analysis are ubiquitous and can provide particularly rich insights. this also makes them a paramount example for key tensions in datafied societies between security and surveillance on the one, and data protection and privacy on the other hand. both, potentials and possible problems of ubiquitous visual technologies, extensive amounts of images and videos taken and shared and facial recognition tools seem myriad. one the one hand, they may be valuable for identifying terrorists or finding a missing child and can thus open up new opportunities for public security policies and law enforcement. on the other hand, these new avenues can also be considered a significant threat to data protection and fundamental human rights like privacy. not at least, problems of accuracy and biases have been found in the performance of face recognition technologies (boulamwini, 2018), which raise the significant question of how much to trust algorithms and the classifications they perform. overall, this calls for further insights into 1) the intersections of datafication, dataveillance, and visual communication and 2) how different authorities and stakeholders legitimate and contest the collection of visual data and their algorithmic analysis in the political and public realm. suggested citation (apa): venema, r., & lobinger, k. (2019, october 2-5). a new standard of proof? discourses on visual data after the 2017 g20-protests. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the police investigations after various violent confrontations between police forces and protesters, riots, and lootings during the g20-summit 2017 in hamburg are an intriguing and rich case study for this purpose. first, law enforcement is considered a key site for understanding the politics of the datafied society (hintz et al. 2019). second, visual data and algorithmic analytical tools played a pivotal role in this case. hamburg’s police collected more than 100 tb of visual data that was analyzed with the help of videmo, a third-party face detection and face recognition tool. moreover, the police launched a european-wide public search for which more than 100 pictures of suspects were published online. what is particular for the g20-prosecutions is that they triggered diverse controversial public and political debates. this allows gaining insights into practices of visual data collection and analysis and into how they were discussed in news media coverage, in ad hoc and hashtag publics and among different state authorities and political decisionmakers. drawing on a qualitative content and discourse analysis, the present study first compiles information about how visual data was produced and collected, stored and analyzed. second, it traces how these practices were legitimated and contested. materials for the analysis are (a) two expert’s reports by the commissioner for data protection in the city of hamburg (b) minutes of fifteen committee hearings and three parliamentary debates, (c) six official police press communiqués. moreover, we analyzed (d) 95 articles published in regional and high-circulation national print and online news media and on a blog and news website. for the heated debate on the public search, we additionally (e) collected and analyzed tweets (n=267) with the hashtag-combination #g20 / #nog20 and #öffentlichkeitsfahndung (public search). findings show that photographs and videos used in the investigation process were taken for different initial purposes. state and corporate-produced visual data stemming from cctv cameras in public transportation services and stations were complemented with photographs and videos taken by journalists and by private individuals. hamburg's police had asked the public to upload images on a dedicated platform, which also allowed for anonymous uploads. in total, the visual data covered large parts of public life in the inner city of hamburg during the summit days. during the analysis, digital faceprints of all identifiable persons in the dataset were stored. the general media coverage was mostly concerned with the public search and the publication of suspects' pictures online. even though visual data and algorithmic analytical tools played a pivotal role in the prosecution process, the concrete practices by which visual data were collected and analyzed remained rather invisible or obscure in the general media coverage. in the expert’s reports, parliamentary debates, leftist local and online news media, in turn, they were discussed extensively. trust thereby emerges as a multilayered key issue. first, we see strong affirmations of trust in technologies, algorithms, and the information and evidence they are able to provide. hamburg's criminal investigation department praised the wealth of visual data and specifically the algorithmic and facial recognition software tools as an immense forensic advantage, “uncharted technological territory” and “a new standard of proof”. visual data and the algorithmic tools are thus characterized and legitimized as powerful, objective and specifically trustworthy tools. second, we see that practices of visual data collection and analysis triggered fundamental concerns about the role and the trustworthiness of police authorities in datafied societies. hamburg's data commissioner and various liberal politicians expressed fundamental concerns regarding the ethical, social and legal implications of the concrete data collection and the analyses. they criticized the indiscriminate collection, storage and analysis of digital faceprints of thousands of people and characterized it as an infringement to informational selfdetermination and privacy by police authorities. consequently, they urged for a comprehensive legal regulatory framework to prevent police authorities to take significant steps towards a surveillance and police state. taken together, the findings prompt fundamental challenges for society and tasks for critical research. the possibility to visually cover and track public life in large parts of a city and the highly critical attitudes towards police authorities underline the necessity to ‘bring the visual’ into debates on datafication, dataveillance, and surveillance, their implications for social life and a broader discussion on how we want to live in a datafied society. moreover, the strong affirmation of trust in visual data and facial recognition tools expressed by hamburg’s criminal investigation department is a call for further studies on tools, their logics and the (political) contexts in which they are developed to be able to understand and critically assess the analytical steps applied. this input is urgently needed as the use of algorithmic tools was a pivotal and far-reaching step in the g20-investigations but remained a blind spot in the general media coverage. references boulamwini, j. (2018). limited vision: the undersampled majority. fullpaper presented at the annual conference of the international communication association (ica), may 24-28, prague. hintz, a., dencik, l., & wahl-jorgensen, k. (2019). digital citizenship in a datafied society. cambridge: polity press. lyon, d. (2017). surveillance culture: engagement, exposure, and ethics in digital modernity. international journal of communication, 11, 824–842. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/5527/1933 lyon, d. (2007). surveillance studies: an overview. cambridge: polity press. van dijck, j. (2014). datafication, dataism and dataveillance: big data between scientific paradigm and ideology. surveillance & society, 12(2), 197–208. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v12i2.4776 selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): von essen, e. and jansson, j. (2018, october 10-13). cyberhate and the risk of being exposed. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. cyberhate anonymity and the risk of being exposed emma von essen swedish institute for social research, stockholm university department of economics and business, aarhus university joakim jansson department of economics, stockholm university research institute of industrial economics introduction the digitalisation of our daily lives alters ways of civic discussions, which ultimately can affect our economic and social decision making. the traditional speakers’ corners we now find in anonymous discussion forums online rather than on public squares. a crucial aspect of freedom of expression is anonymity, but anonymity is a contentious matter (e.g. nagel and frith 2015). on the one hand more anonymity enables individuals to discuss without fear of repercussions, but on the other hand, anonymity can lead individuals to involve in hateful writings threatening other’s freedom, due to lack of accountability. today online discussion forums are infamous for hate and harassment, and this disturbs how we take part in discussions. also, much of the hate and harassment is directed against women and marginalized groups (e.g. citron 2014). to find effective policies when combating hate online, understanding the empirical link between anonymity and hate is vital. this paper aims to quantify how anonymity links to writing hateful content in online. the literature on the economics of transparency is diverse, theoretical and empirical research suggests that less transparency can give benefits as well as losses depending on the context (acquisti et al. 2016). there is a lack of quantitative research joining anonymity and hate online. to our knowledge, there is only one previous paper and they investigate changes in offensive language caused by a real name policy in korea (cho et al. 2012). the main advantage of our study is that our design has a control and treatment group, which to partly avoids self-selection on non-observables. the context of our study is discussions on political topics at the swedish discussion forum flashback (similar to reddit), where anonymity between end-users and between platform and user is an enforced rule. the forum is one of the most significant discussion platforms in sweden. we elicited text from three sub-forums encompassing discussions about political topics: feminism, immigration and domestic policy. participation in these discussions is likely to have an impact on individual decision making, about for example voting. political topics are previously known to attract hate (cheng et al. 2017; citron 2014). as a first step, we use a supervised machine-learning model to predict hateful content. then we test how an unexpected exogenous change in anonymity affects hateful posting, using a so-called difference in difference model. in september 2014, the identity of one-third of the flashback accounts registered before march 2007 was unexpectedly in the hands of journalists, and the journalists did publicly expose the identities of handful individuals. this event creates a quasi-experiment, using accounts that are registered before march 2007 as a treatment group, and as a control group, we use accounts registered after march 2007. data collection and empirical strategy we scraped the posts from all threads in the three sub-forums. the sample, we restricted to the period from january 1, 2012, until december 31, 2016. a research assistant manually classified posts from a random subset of the threads. the entries were classified by whether it contained hateful writings and whether the hate was directed towards foreigners, females and feminists or others (classifications are inspired by cohen et al. 2014). we use a simple bag of words model to make the text quantifiable and produce three logistic lasso prediction models. the three models is used to predict hate in the full data set. to quantify the link between anonymity and hateful speech we used the predicted hate from the lasso models to estimate the differences in changes of hateful writing before and after the event comparing the experimental and control group (see hansen et al. 2014 for a similar methodology). results our full sample comprises roughly 48 000 users and 1 980 000 entries. the share of hateful content is 7 %, whereas the percentages of entries with hate against foreigners and females is 16 % and 14 % respectively. these shares are similar for the treatment and control group. turning to the event, we find that an unexpected decrease in anonymity leads to a lower share of hateful posts in the discussions. the treatment group has about 1.5 percentage point lower probability of writing hateful comments in the post period compared to the control group. however, when we look at the hate directed towards specific groups, we find the share of hate against foreigners to decrease, whereas the share of misogyny increases. the changes are both in the number of hateful entries and the number of total entries. restricting the sample to users registered before the event, we see confirm that results are not driven by inflow or outflow of users. to probe further into the findings, we look at the users we can follow before and after the event. here, we find no effect in changes of the amount of misogynistic posts, but changes in the number of hateful entries against foreigners. the shares are however unaltered. to understand why we find an increase in the share of misogyny as well as no decrease in the amount of misogynous entries when looking at individuals we can follow, we also assess if users substitute hate. indeed, we find that decreased hateful entry towards foreigners is partly substituted with increased hate against females. discussion our study contributes to the current policy debates on how to combat online hate. we quantify the link between anonymity and hateful content and find that reduced anonymity leads to reduced hate in online discussions about political topics. the effect seems to be driven by a combination of a decline in writing hateful posts, a decrease in the number of non-hateful posts and a substituting hate against foreigners with hate against females. one possible explanation for the substitution is that hate against foreigners is associated with previous convictions of hate speech in sweden. our results open up for an exciting avenue of research on how to understand different types of hate online. our results support the conclusion that a real name policies will not be effective in combating hateful content online, since it may create adverse effects for example substitution of hate from one target group to another. also, a real name policy may decrease the general discussion activity. fewer individuals that discuss politics online could lower political accountability (strömberg 2015). references acquisti, a., taylor, c., & wagman, l. (2016). the economics of privacy. journal of economic literature, 54(2), 442-92. citron, d. k. (2014). hate crimes in cyberspace. harvard university press. cho, d., s. kim, and a. acquisti (2012). empirical analysis of online anonymity and user behaviors: the impact of real name policy. in system science (hicss), 2012 45th hawaii international conference on, pp. 3041:3050. ieee. cohen, k., johansson, f., kaati, l., & mork, j. c. (2014). detecting linguistic markers for radical violence in social media. terrorism and political violence, 26(1), 246-256. hansen, s., mcmahon, m., & prat, a. (2017). transparency and deliberation within the fomc: a computational linguistics approach. the quarterly journal of economics. van der nagel, e., & frith, j. (2015). anonymity, pseudonymity, and the agency of online identity: examining the social practices of r/gonewild. first monday, 20(3). strömberg, d. (2015). media and politics. economics, 7(1), 173-205. microsoft word aoir2017_v5.docx selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): ogden, j., halford, s. & carr, l. (2017, october 18-21). maintaining the web: web archiving, labour and the internet archive. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. maintaining the web: web archiving, labour and the internet archive jessica ogden university of southampton susan halford university of southampton les carr university of southampton introduction web archives – including social media archives – have become a critical resource for accessing historical snapshots of the web. beyond the increased promotion of web archives as a source for scholarly research, a growing number of examples point towards the use of web archives as tools for political accountability (e.g. politwoops1); to provide temporary access points during times of restricted web access (e.g. during the 2013 us government shutdown2); and to reconstruct deleted domains (e.g. ben-david’s (2016) work on the former yugoslav top-level domain3) – to name a few. growing concerns and public debates over the trustworthiness of online media have positioned both web archiving and web archives as necessary and legitimate sources in the face of an ever-shifting ‘ephemeral web,’ political unrest and algorithmically-generated access to web-based information. in practice, web archiving initiatives have spanned from the large-scale activities of national libraries and archives, the internet archive and the work of networked communities such as archive team, to the individual efforts of scholars creating web archives for their own purposes. however, the processes undertaken to produce these vast and longitudinal resources are not well understood, and are often projected as uncontroversial technical solutions to the failings of web architecture. the ways in which practices and tools shape the nature of collection and access strategies – e.g. the 1 https://www.politwoops.eu/ (accessed: 27/09/2017) 2 http://blog.archive.org/2013/10/02/governmentblackout/ (accessed: 27/09/2017) timing, frequency and length of collection – are under-documented, along with the motivations and meaning-making activities that drive archival practices. these aspects of collection and access present problems related to the use of web archives and the ways in which web archives are interpreted and understood as archival sources. whereas an abundance of technical research exists around developing tools and improving the efficiency and quality of web archival captures, little research exists around the interactive nature and structuring effects of human, algorithmic and automated agents in decisions around how, what and when to archive. this research contends that these (often) undocumented activities and practices are critical for interpreting the affordances of web archives and the types of claims made possible by their use. here web archives are positioned as contingent constructions that inherently rely on the work of web archivists (as both networked human and non-human agents) to transform and preserve the web(s) into archived snapshots. drawing on downey’s (2014) work on the materiality of ‘information labour,’ here the concept of web archival labour is explored to encompass these practices and highlight the ways in which web archivists shape and maintain the preserved web. methodology and findings this research uses an ethnographic approach to explore the mechanisms and circumstances surrounding the collection and maintenance of web archives at multiple sites of production. this paper presents the preliminary analysis of a study carried out at the internet archive (‘the archive’), a private, non-profit digital library that has been archiving the web since 1996. a combination of non/participant observation, documentary sources and interviews were conducted over the course of four weeks in collaboration with web archivists, engineers and managers at the archive. in the case of observations, ethnographic records were made of non/participation activities with the aim of providing the basis for ‘thick descriptions’ of practice. observation pro-forma were not used however, details surrounding the actors (participants), artefacts/objects (technologies, tools) and activities were recorded in an effort to produce an ethnographic account. interviews were used in combination with observations as a mechanism for clarifying existing ethnographic records and focusing subsequent observation activities. the interviews took a semi-structured approach using a combination of descriptive, structural and contrasting questions in direct response to the answers provided by informants within the context of the interview. all data was transcribed which provided the basis for domain and thematic analyses, to produce a model of significant components of web archival practices at the archive. contrary to popular narratives surrounding the archive that have emphasized abundance over more selective approaches to archiving, the data points towards a complex system of internal ‘hybrid crawling’ strategies for prioritising which web assets to collect. in recent years the archive has begun to leverage their extensive existing archives for understanding networked linking behavior in an effort to balance the breadth and depth of crawling activities, whilst discovering new sources (e.g. websites linked from twitter and wikipedia) for identifying websites to crawl based on measures of popularity, ‘novelty’ and those sites that are in danger of going offline. the team has devised multiple mechanisms for identifying different types of ‘undesirable domains,’ including rule-based link pattern-matching and the development of ‘gamified’ tools for the manual curation of pornography and ‘domain squatter’ services. collectively, these efforts can be seen as knowledge work, or what downey (2014) calls the ‘high value labour' that goes into the production of information. these activities, seen in combination with other knowledge practices around the prioritisation, development and maintenance of technologies for web archiving by archive staff all have ramifications for how web resources are actively transformed into archived, offline-online versions of their former selves. and as the global wayback machine currently provides access to 273 billion webpages from over 361 million websites – often inaccessible elsewhere – these editorial decisions have a tangible impact on not only the fidelity of archived captures, but indeed whether or not certain parts of the web are preserved at all. by observing the assemblages of practice and labour that drive web archiving (in this case at the internet archive), this research underscores some of the explicit and implicit values placed on practice by practitioners. a focus on labour acknowledges the constraints of automation towards a wider recognition of the ‘maintenance work’ required to sustain the complex sociotechnical relationships (arnold 2016) between the creation, access and use of web archives. web archival maintenance work (as an aspect of labour) can then be conceptualised as a place where the values of archivists are again ordered and re-articulated (e.g. through tool development and bug fixing, quality assurance work or the continuous selection and capture of particular ‘high priority’ domains). here, by foregrounding the structure and agency of web archivists – as individuals, organisations, collectives, algorithms and code – a discussion of labour enables an exploration of the power relations that underpin widespread assumptions about what is collected, who is responsible for collecting and maintaining the ‘collective memory’ of the web(s), for whom and for what purpose. this opens the door for further work examining the digital geographies and emergent inequalities of web archival labour, as an inherently time and place-based set of activities that enable and constrain participation, tool development and uptake, selection of domains and more. going forward, this research indicates the importance of understanding web archiving both for the wider field of internet researchers and social scientists interested in the politics of web-based information. references arnold, hillel. 2016. ‘critical work: archivists as maintainers’. august. http://hillelarnold.com/blog/2016/08/critical-work/. ben-david, anat. 2016. ‘what does the web remember of its deleted past? an archival reconstruction of the former yugoslav top-level domain’. new media & society 18 (7): 1103–19. doi:10.1177/1461444816643790. downey, gregory j. 2014. ‘making media work: time, space, identity, and labor in the analysis of information and communication infrastructures’. in media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society, edited by tarleton gillespie, pablo j. boczkowski, and kirsten a. foot, 141–65. cambridge, massachusetts; london, england: mit press. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): giglietto, f., checcaglini, c., mazzoli, l. (2016, october 5-8). binge watching the algorithmic catalog: an analysis of twitter’s reaction to the launch of netflix italia. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. binge watching the algorithmic catalog: an analysis of twitter’s reaction to the launch of netflix italia fabio giglietto università di urbino carlo bo chiara checcaglini università di urbino carlo bo lella mazzoli università di urbino carlo bo introduction following the end of september announcement, the on-demand streaming service netflix was officially launched in italy on 22 october 2015. started as a us based online renting service for movies, netflix is nowadays an innovative and global svod (subscription video-on-demand) platform that recently turned into a producer of original contents. longly awaited by local fans of tv series, the launch of the platform in the italian market expanded the existing growing offer of tv content providers. the main players in the pre-netflix italian television landscape were: free-to-air digital terrestrial television/dtt (rai and mediaset channels, la7), digital satellite subscription channels (sky), svod platforms (infinity by mediaset, chili tv, sky online). while entering a rich market of existing established players, the launch of netflix allowed the italian audience to experiment for the first time some of the exclusive features that made the service popular worldwide. on the one hand, netflix made bingewatching (watching more than one episode in one sitting) easier by advancing to the next episode in the series and skipping unnecessary recaps. on the other hand, while also allowing to search and browse the catalog by genres, it default to a radically new metaphor of finding and discovering contents based on the algorithmic analysis of viewer’s preferences and tastes. while a constantly growing amount of literature is dedicated to both aspects, the launch of netflix in the peculiar italian market and the conversations it sparkled on social media, represent an extraordinary opportunity to study the ways viewers expected, reacted and made sense of those innovative features in the aftermath of the launch. framed in the existing literature on binge-watching and algorithms, the study presents the results of a content analysis on twitter’s conversations sparkled by the launch on netflix italia (n=17,623). the study is part of a broader research effort aimed at understanding the italian audience of serial narratives. it is thus informed by the results of this ongoing project and specifically by the findings of a national cati+cami survey on a representative sample of italian adults (n=1,021) carried on between 20th of january and 2nd of february 2015). italians and tv series before netflix around half of the italian population watch tv series. the large majority declared to use their traditional tv set to do so, however over half of the young adults (18-24) said they also consume series on their computers or mobile device. the viewing style also points out a generational divide with young adults more frequently seeking to watch entire seasons (76%), to binge-watch (70%) and re-watch episodes (48%). nevertheless, binge-watching was already practiced during early 2015 by over half of italian audience of tv series (52%) regardless their age. about a quarter of them used home videos (dvd, blu-ray) to watch tv series and 28% declared to have streamed or downloaded episodes (either legally or not) from the internet (osservatorio news-italia, 2015). the popularization of binge-watching these results confirm that digital technologies have simplified content circulation (jenkins, ford, green, 2013) and interpersonal connections (baym, 2010). in this scenario, expert viewers and fans have gained means and tools to express and share their interests. fan practices have increased their visibility compared with more ordinary audience routines (andò marinelli, 2012): binge-watching as viewing experience had been previously linked to dvd box sets and specific fandoms, but it gained popularity among tv series enthusiasts through irregular practices such as online streaming and download, especially when local networks programming policies fail to fulfill viewers’ demand. under this perspective, we can consider the popularization of binge-watching as one of the consequences of the normalization of fandoms, part of a landscape where cult tv, quality tv and fans are common concepts and commercially valuable (jenner, 2015). binge-watching via netflix takes the reconfiguration of viewership time and space on a new level, because it frees tv consumption from physical support and specific locations. the algorithmic catalog the practice of binge-watching is further simplified by the way netflix allows their subscribers to find and discover new contents. unlike traditional internet vod platforms that tend to organize their contents by browsable genres, netflix employed an innovative algorithm that analyze user's taste in order to recommend contents specifically tailored to the user. as most of the algorithms behind platforms such as google, facebook and amazon, the details about netflix’s recommendation system are secret. however, most of those algorithms affect our culture. for this reason, the discourses around the issue of social algorithms accountability are becoming prominent (lazer, 2015; gillespie, 2014). in 2006, netflix launched a public contest aimed at improving their existing recommendation engine. analyzing the online conversations among the engineers taking part to the netflix prize, hallinan and striphas observed the traces of an ongoing process of reinterpretation of the meaning of culture itself (2016). starting from these premises, we formulated the following research questions: rq1. how the italian audience on twitter (largely early adopters) made sense of the bingewatching facilitating feature offered by netflix? and rq2. what was the first reactions to the algorithmic catalog in a population mainly accustomed to find contents by browsing genres? methodology dataset consists of 36,976 tweets (45% retweets, 0.6% @replies) created by 22,635 unique contributors between 10/20/2015 and 10/24/2015 and containing the official hashtag #ciaonetflix, a mention to the official twitter account of netflix italia (@netflixit) or the generic term netflix in tweets written in italian language. due to the known limits of twitter free api, the dataset was purchased from sifter, a web service that, in partnership with gnip, provides search and retrieve access to every undeleted tweet in the history of twitter. in order to address our research questions we designed a strategy for a content analysis of all original tweets (neither retweets or @replies) in our dataset (n=17,623). leveraging on existing literature, we developed a codeset consisting of the following non mutually exclusive categories: description example1 time & space readjusting the daily routine for binge-watching i think there’s no better thing than watching a good show on netflix at night #smallpleasures a whole week at home.. spending time this way watching narcos netflix news how to use netflix, url, articles about netflix and its functioning netflix in italy, everything you need to know about it [url] catalog opinions about the catalog everyone talking about #netflix lack of series, and what about the lack of movies? ridiculous catalogue competitors mentioning a competitor my favourite tv series: one on infinity, one on netflix, one on sky. i think i’ll subscribe to torrent aesthetic objects mentioning specific content god bless netflix. #daredevil device mentioning devices and technologies related to netflix enjoy netflix with sony consoles [url] 1 tweets originally in italian. subjective reactions personal points of view about netflix: -emotional pov: uppercase, exclamation points, emphasis marks; reports: anedoctes halleluja! #ciaonetflix pizza and #netflix tonight at the time of writing, the content analysis is still in progress. it is carried on by two of the three authors after a training-phase on a sub-set of 200 randomly selected tweets not included in the final dataset. the training phase resulted in an acceptable level of intercoder agreement (krippendorff's alpha = 0.82). the paper will discuss the results of the content analysis in the context of existing literature. references andò, r., marinelli, a. (2012). dal textual poacher al like/dislike. quale valore dare all’«engagement» delle audience 2.0?. comunicazioni sociali, 2, 347-357 baym, n.k. (2010). personal connections in the digital age. cambridge: polity press brunsdon, c. (2010). bingeing on box-sets: the national and the digital in television crime drama. gripsrud, j. (ed.), relocating television: television in the digital context. london: routledge, 61–75 gillespie, t. (2014). 9 the relevance of algorithms. media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society, 167. jenkins, h., ford s., green j. (2013). spreadable media: creating value and meaning in a networked culture. new york, london: new york university press jenner, m. (2015). binge-watching: video-on-demand, quality tv and mainstreaming fandom. international journal of cultural studies, online, 1–17 hallinan, b., & striphas, t. (2016). recommended for you: the netflix prize and the production of algorithmic culture. new media & society, 18(1), 117–137. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814538646 lazer, d. (2015). the rise of the social algorithm. science, 348(6239), 1090–1091. aoir2018-every word you just said is wrong final selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): blodgett, b. & salter, a. (2018, october 10-13). “every word you just said is wrong”: online rage and inclusivity in disney franchise fandom. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. "every word you just said is wrong": online rage and inclusivity in disney franchise fandom bridget blodgett university of baltimore anastasia salter university of central florida abstract the months leading up to the release of disney franchise films the last jedi (december 2017) and black panther (february 2018) were marked by speculation, concern, and fervor in equal measures from the established fan communities of star wars and marvel. both franchises have been associated with toxic geek masculinity, a performed, communal hypermasculinity marked by exclusionary practices and rhetoric (salter & blodgett, 2017). by centering either non-white or non-male characters as leads in roles traditionally dominated by cisgender white men, both films became centers for toxic discourse and targeted campaigns aimed at disrupting their commercial success. in this paper, we will situate these case studies as emblematic of the changing discourse of geek fandom spaces, and its intersections with white supremacy and misogyny. toxic geek masculinity in online spaces the growing visibility of toxic geek masculinity has been studied through a number of cases: most notably, the gamergate movement (organized by an ex-partner as an attack on a woman whose games achieved critical attention, but quickly escalating to target a number of women in game design and games communities) became a central rallying point for both misogynist and white supremacist trolling and harassment (chess & shaw, 2015; massanari, 2017; braithwaite, 2016). while the discourse of hypermasculinity in geek-centered communities, and indeed more broadly online, significantly predates that incident (salter & blodgett, 2012; kendall, 2002), the increased organization and visibility of exclusionary and violent rhetoric from within these spaces has led to wider attention. these films share qualities that make them ideal for a comparative case study: both are films with established fanbases invested in the success of the franchise, but accustomed to certain models of representation. while the last jedi does center nonwhite actors in major roles (and includes a notable sequence where no white men are on screen for a considerable time), it has ultimately not attracted the same attention from white supremacists as marvel’s black panther. demographically, black panther is nearly the opposite of previous films in the franchise, which have primarily featured black characters in sidekick roles--not as stereotyped as previous superhero franchises, but very far from leading roles (claverie, 2017). methods this article is a case study analysis of the fan discourse and social media centered attempts to disrupt the success and perceived viability of these two major franchise films. given both the attempts by participants to conceal their objectives or authenticity, and the situated nature of these attacks on platforms including twitter, metacritic, and rotten tomatoes, it is necessary to examine them contextually and consider the influence of the platforms and their affordances on the discourse (yin, 2003). as the film’s releases were relatively close in temporal proximity, the examined discourse spans october 2017 to february 2018. sampled primary texts include news articles, blog posts, tweets, and fan reviews. case study: the last jedi and black panther after reviewing the discourse from october 2017 to february 2018, we inductively categorized as relating to one of three themes: rejection of the film as a text; and threats to cast members, creators, or fans of the film. rejection of the film was the most widespread in both: as of february 28, 2018, a petition by henry walsh hosted on change.org to "have disney strike star wars episode viii from official canon" has nearly 100,000 signatures united by the call to "let us keep our heroes" (walsh, 2017). criticism of black panther, by contrast, frequently includes a rhetorical move of suggesting the film is only achieving critical success because of its cast or resorts to outright racist language: didn't care for it, lieing [sic] about how good this is because of racial emotional pride is the only logical answer. i want my $14 back, was not worth it and my 2 friends felt the same way. $14 bucks thats almost a case of beer right there! :( (youtube comment, february 25, 2018) black panther 2: rise of the cotton pickers... may of 2020!! you heard it here first (youtube comment, february 28, 2018) in both cases, the same facebook group (entitled “down with disney’s treatment of franchises and its fanboys”) organized an event and claimed credit for efforts to lower the audience score of the film, explaining to one reporter that they were responding to disney’s attempt to “shove sjw messages down our throats” (plante, 2018). the most disturbing and widely reported campaign to disrupt one of the films through violence was targeted at black panther. on the day of the film’s release, a number of messages appeared throughout social media featuring apparent attacks on white attendees of the premiere: i went to see #blackpanther with my gf and a black teenager shouted ‘u at the wrong theater’ and smashed a bottle on her face (twitter, @asianwifehaver, february 16, 2018) these types of tweets featured images pulled from existing violence (in the case of the above tweet, the image was sourced from the documentation of a domestic battery), and while they were quickly debunked the stories continued to circulate (romano, 2018). conclusion the incredible commercial success of black panther cannot be denied: only a few weeks into its run, the film was declared a domestic success, passing all but a few previous marvel hits in the box office (mendelson, 2018). both films suffered from a marked discrepancy in audience ratings versus general critical acclaim on rotten tomatoes which may have impacted their success, but it is difficult to measure any impact of these campaigns on potential viewers (mendelson, 2018). references braithwaite, a. (2016). it’s about ethics in games journalism? gamergaters and geek masculinity. social media+ society, 2(4), 2056305116672484. chess, s., & shaw, a. (2015). a conspiracy of fishes, or, how we learned to stop worrying about# gamergate and embrace hegemonic masculinity. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 59(1), 208-220. claverie, e. (2017). ambiguous mr. fox: black actors and interest convergence in the superhero film. the journal of american culture, 40(2), 155-168. kendall, l. (2002). hanging out in the virtual pub : masculinities and relationships online. university of california press. retrieved from http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520230385 massanari, a. (2017). # gamergate and the fappening: how reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. new media & society, 19(3), 329346. mendelson, s. (2018, february). box office: 'black panther' tops 'spider-man,' will pass 'wonder woman' today. forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2018/02/27/box-office-black-panther-topsspider-man-will-pass-wonder-woman-today/#18c8b0517646. plante, c. (2018, february). ‘the last jedi’ rotten tomatoes hacker targets ‘black panther.’ inverse. https://www.inverse.com/article/40800-black-panther-rottentomatoes-dc-fan-hacker-event. romano, a. (2018, february). racist trolls are saying black panther fans attacked them. they’re lying. vox. https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/2/16/17020230/blackpanther-movie-theater-attacks-fake-trolls. salter, a., & blodgett, b. (2012). hypermasculinity & dickwolves: the contentious role of women in the new gaming public. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 56(3), 401-416. salter, a., & blodgett, b. (2017). toxic geek masculinity in media: sexism, trolling, and identity policing. springer. walsh, h. (2017). have disney strike star wars episode viii from the official canon. change.org. https://www.change.org/p/the-walt-disney-company-have-disney-strikestar-wars-episode-viii-from-the-official-canon. yin, r. k. (2003). case study methodology r.k. yin (2003, 3rd edition). case study research design and methods. sage, thousand oaks (ca)..pdf. in case study research: design and methods (pp. 19-39-106). selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 ciccone, v. (2020, october). life, culture, and subjectivity in the software industry: the discourse of “full selfhood” among tech professionals. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. life, culture and subjectivity in the software industry: the discourse of “full selfhood” among tech professionals vanessa ciccone london school of economics and political science (lse) background in the midst of rhetoric about the emancipatory, democratizing potential of online platforms that dates back to the founding of the world wide web by tim berners-lee, my research investigates subjectivity among the people behind the platforms. scholars such as safiya umoja noble (2018; 2013), rena bivens and oliver haimson (2016), and judy wajcman (2010; 2015) have exposed the significant role that homogenous workforces play in inequities that materialize on platforms themselves. additionally, ruha benjamin (2019) has revealed how workplace discourses about so-called neutral tech for “all” users are connected to decision-making that further excludes marginalized groups on online platforms. considering the ubiquity of online platforms, and the power that many platform-based companies hold, little ethnographic research has uncovered precisely how inequities, or their common antonym inclusions, are negotiated by employees in these everyday settings. it should be noted that by “platforms” i refer to online spaces and services that “host public expression, store it on and serve it up from the cloud, organize access to it through search and recommendation, or install it onto mobile devices” (gillespie 2017, 1). my research focuses on professional settings in the software industry involved in the development, maintenance, and/or optimization mobile applications. with the present study i investigate a specific industry discourse related to how professional contexts within software are addressing “inclusion” within their workforces. specifically, it has become commonplace for software organizations in north america to celebrate the notion that individuals can bring their “full” selves to work, a sentiment echoed in cultural discourses about inclusion at work. such discourses offer a particularly compelling promise about creating space for employees who are underrepresented within homogenous workforces, yet, i argue that these initiatives can have unintended consequences. specifically, calling people to bring their “full” selves to professional settings can present multiple challenges in contexts that have largely been built for people who occupy a privileged positionalities. this topic is significant to examine in the north american tech industry. not only does this sector wield considerable influence over its users, it has also celebrated informal, playful professional settings as that which help to facilitate bringing the “full self” to work. that is, having areas to play, relax, and rejuvenate oneself are thought help create space for people to bring their “full” selves to work. while perhaps well-meaning, i argue that this discourse has a range of consequences for everyday inclusions and inequities. the aim of the present paper is to begin to investigate how the discourse about “full selfhood” is negotiated among professional, salaried employees working at software companies. methods using an intersectional framework, the present study draws from data from recent ethnographic fieldwork at professional software settings in canada including at a workplace, large-scale conferences and multiple industry events, analyzing the discourse of “full selfhood” within the sector. the study applies thematic analysis to data collected from several months of participant observation and interviews in toronto and vancouver. my sources of data include field notes, interview transcripts, and a collection of various online communication among professionals working in the software sector. please note that my specific field sites, interviewee identities, and related details will remain confidential, and i have altered certain details to protect the confidentiality of the people and sites involved. moreover, the findings reflect my multi-sited fieldwork rather than a single site or group. findings and discussion the push for tech companies to incorporate fun and leisure at work as seen in games rooms, health and wellness, and onsite exercise facilities encourages employees in the industry to celebrate work as a core aspect of their subjectivities, and purports to create space for them to bring their “full selves” to the workplace and other professional spaces. yet, while the individuals i studied were often called to be their “full selves” in the online and offline settings of their places of work and throughout the broader industry, this could be a frustrating discourse, in particular for those who were underrepresented. relatedly, several people reported feeling angst associated with navigating informal professional contexts, which i argue reflects a double bind for those who are not part of the dominant group within this sector. on the one hand employees were attempting to show that they were bringing their “full selves” to work, yet, at the same time, the selves that were most valued were those that tended to easily “fit in” within the industry. moreover, the software industry includes professional settings in which people work at a phrenetic pace in an “always on” culture, and are at times expected to cultivate online profiles that include followers from public and private spheres of their lives. in such contexts, performing subjectivity can be an exhaustive process that involves continuous assessment, further complexifying how to perform the self. i argue that there is a deep, albeit unintentional, paradox within this discourse. specifically, it calls subjects to perform “full selfhood” within spaces that are dominated by privileged identities, and in which “ideal” subjectivities often correspond to these positionalities. thus, this discourse leads to tensions surrounding the subjectivities individuals are called to have, and those they are able to take up and sustain, which bears down upon self-understanding with political consequences. considering the retention issues found within the north american tech sector for underrepresented groups, discourses concerning subjectivity can have a meaningful influence on the ways of being that are constructed as desirable within the industry. this relation between industry culture and subjectivity is a less widely understood aspect of “inclusion,” and one that could open up important insights for workplace (in)equities. moreover, this topic also relates to how power circulates within online platforms. as benjamin (2019) argues, technologists inscribe judgements into the platforms they work on, while the erroneous assumption circulates around these tech products being somehow neutral. what such an assumption overlooks is the fact that technologists are social beings working within societies structured by white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy, rather than being isolated actors free from judgements (ibid). norms around subjectivity in professional software settings can influence the judgements that become coded within platforms themselves. references benjamin, r. (2019). race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. cambridge, uk: polity. bivens, r. & haimson, o. l. (2016) baking gender into social media design: how platforms shape categories for users and advertisers. social media + society, 2(4), 1-12. 10.1177/2056305116672486 gillespie, t. (2017). regulation of and by platforms. in j. burgess, t. poell, and a. marwick (eds.) sage handbook of social media. london: sage. noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york: new york university press. noble, s. u. (2013). google search: hyper-visibility as a means of rendering black women and girls invisible. invisible culture: an electronic journal for visual culture, (19). wajcman, j. (2015). pressed for time: the acceleration of life in digital capitalism. chicago: the university of chicago press. wajcman, j. (2010). feminist theories of technology. cambridge journal of economics 34(1), 143-52. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): carter, m, gibbs, m. witkowski, e. (2017, october 18-21). understanding esports spectatorship: players, fans, recruits. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18 th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. understanding esport spectatorship: players, fans, recruits martin gibbs computing and information systems, the university of melbourne marcus carter media and communication, the university of sydney emma witkowski media and communications, rmit university introduction while there is a significant body of academic research into esports practice – the performance, play, professionalization and appeal of competitive digital gaming – there is comparatively little on esports spectatorship. little is known about the nature of media consumption around this emerging practice beyond the importance of livestreaming (both casual and competitive play) principally based on the twitch.tv platform (witkowski, 2012). weiss and schiele (2013, based on 2008 data) studied the reasons for watching esports, finding that competition, challenge and escapism were positively correlated, but only examined esports engagement in comparison to playing video games. cheung and huang (2011) found that esports consumption motivations aligned with those of traditional sports. taylor and witkowski (2010) highlight how everyday play intermingles with esports spectatorship as a seamless part of gaming practice. a more recent (n=880) survey by hamari and sjöblom (2016) using ‘the motivations scale for sports consumption’ (trail and james, 2001) found that escapism, acquiring knowledge and enjoying aggression were the key motivational factors associated with the frequency of watching esports. hamari and sjöblom also found that there was no correlation between player’s (self-perceived) skill and watching frequency, and that drama was not correlated with viewing motivations, a finding we believe is due to the current nature of esports media. in this paper we report on a study of esports spectatorship in australia. we identified three primary spectator types – players, fans & recruits – who have substantially different engagements with esports. correlating with prior work, players were drawn to viewing esports and engaging with third-party content that assisted their pursuit of expertise in the game they played. fans were more likely to engage with multiple esports titles and player/team personalities across multiple and integrated digital media outlets, and were characterised by an interest in physically attending tournaments, while recruits, primarily non-players of esport titles but ‘gamers’, engaged with esports stories during notable tournaments and when encountered on social media and content sharing sites like reddit.com. research approach we conducted 18 semi-structured interviews with a breadth of esports spectators (aged 16-48), recruiting participants via the university campus, a gaming café and at the 2016 ‘oz comic-con’ in melbourne. interviews were structured around 6 key questions which provided insight into (1) the breadth of ways that australian esports spectators engage with esports, (2) how they were initially involved, (3) how they engage with traditional sports (if any), (4) in what ways people pay money for esports, (5) the importance of tournament attendance to esports spectatorship in australia, and (6) interest in australian specific esports content. engaging with esports what is clear from this study and our prior work is that while the amateur play of esports games drives engagement, ongoing esports spectatorship and engagement (online and at physical tournaments) is intertwined with broader video game culture and engagement. player engagement with esports media is driven by the ‘metagame’ and the way digital games are frequently ‘patched’ by the developer. in this use, the ‘metagame’ refers to what tactics and styles of play are currently popular. competitive play – particularly team-based – requires an understanding of the metagame to best anticipate player strategies and play accordingly. p1 (24/m) noted that “keeping up with the metagame” and “trying to understand how changes would change the way i have to play” drove them to third-party sites to engage with esports content. the video game live-streaming platform ‘twitch.tv’ is the dominant medium for live esports spectatorship, with all but one participants having used twitch at some stage. engagement of this type is thus typically at home in the domestic environment via pcs or mobile devices. of note in this regard is the fact that participants often did not differentiate between watching competitive esports tournaments live and watching competitive esports players live while they practiced, educated, entertained and interacted to build a fan base. looking for top-streamers by games was often the method cited for this type of engagement. for players, such practices are opportunities to learn how to improve their play, while fans utilize such streams to follow, support and learn about different competitors. as noted by prior work that has studied esports players, it is through practices like these that competitors are required not just to be highly-skilled at the game, but also at entertainment. recruit-spectators were less likely to engage with live-content at home, generally because it was often not pitched to their level of knowledge. video-on-demand (vod) content via sites like youtube was also a prevalent form of engaging with esports. players sought out vod content that highlighted specific expert plays or curated highlights of large tournaments. fans sought out a different genre of vod content and were drawn to live content for shared, social experiences. recruits sought out vod content specifically targeted to outsiders with little understanding of the drama or content. beyond watching esports matches, spectators (primarily fans) engaged with esports through following teams, players, esports competitions and news sites on social media (primarily twitter and facebook) “to stay in the loop” (p14, 27m). it is our impression that fan spectators routinely and regularly engage with a wider variety of esports content than player spectators. a common criticisms of existing esports media was that they currently “only learn about teams when they arrive at the tournament, you don’t know their backstory” (p2/23f) which can often render tournament finals uninteresting when the best known teams are eliminated. thus, by seeking out information about players and tournaments fans are trying to build allegiances and relationships with esports players that better contextualise and inform their spectator experience of livetournaments. acknowledgements we would like to thank naomi robinson, robert fordyce and david cumming for their assistance with this project. we acknowledge the support provided by the melbourne network society institute and the melbourne school of engineering, the university of melbourne. references cheung, g. and huang, j. (2011) starcraft from the stands: understanding the game spectator. in proceedings of the acm sigchi conference on computer-human interaction, vancouver, canada. acm press, pp. 763-772. hamari, j. and sjoblom, m. (2016). what is esports and why do people watch it? internet research 26(4). taylor, tl and witkowski, e. (2010) this is how we play it: what a mega-lan can teach us about games. in proceedings of the 5h international foundations of digital games conference, monterey, ca., usa. acm press, pp. 195-202. trial, g. and james, j. (2001) the motivation scale for sport consumption: assessment of the scale’s psychometric properties. journal of sport behaviour 1(24) weiss, t. (2011) fulfilling the needs of esports consumers: a uses and gratifications perspective. in proceedings of the 24th bled econference, bled, slovenia, pp. 572-580. weiss and schiele (2013) virtual worlds in competitive contexts: analyzing esports consumer needs. electronic markets 23(4): 307-316 witkowski, emma. (2012) inside the huddle: the phenomenology and sociology of team play in networked computer games. phd diss., it university of copenhagen, denmark. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): morgenstern, m. (2020, october). “tumblr told me…”: the political and methodological significance of conceptualizing social media platforms as living actors. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “tumblr told me…”: the political and methodological sigificance of conceptualizing social media platforms as living actors michelle morgenstern university of virginia this paper takes up the question of how “platform” can be understood when it comes to studies of digital discourse. i posit that this is an empirical and ethnographic question, rather than a purely theoretical one. regardless of how scholars theorize social media platforms, the people interacting with those technologies already have their own emic conceptualizations of what that technology is and how it functions — and those understandings shape their social media experiences. this paper aims to explore the stakes of such local conceptualizations. i argue that many of tumblr.com's most active users conceptualize the social media platform as a living actor, a dynamic and agentive figure with whom these young people interact. attending to this particular understanding of tumblr-as-actor is crucial because it has so intimately shaped the processes by which my research participants have come to take up new political-ethical commitments and identities through their engagement with the platform. accordingly, i suggest that new methodological approaches for the study of digital discourse are required if scholars are to truly take seriously an understanding of platform as agentive figure. the arguments in this paper emerge from ethnographic research conducted from 20132018 among a network of 208 young bloggers who credit tumblr with shaping, as one research participant put it, “like all of my politics and morals and views about what the world should be like”. i bring together participant-observation, semi-structured interviews, and “behind-the-screen” video journals to trace the political and methodological significance of conceptualizing tumblr as an actor. i see studies of digital discourse as predominantly built on two distinct understandings of what a social media platform fundamentally is and how it functions: 1) platform as a technology that organizes communication, where interactions occur on a social media platform; and 2) platform as a technology that mediates and transforms communication, where interactions occur through a social media platform. speaking to the first, scholars describe how social media platforms facilitate communication across temporal and spatial boundaries (baron 2013); create virtual spaces to “inhabit” (angouri & sanderson 2016); function as a semi-public “fish bowl” space where unseen audiences can observe and contexts are flattened (chayko 2008; marwick & boyd 2011); and generate novel formations of connection (zappavigna 2011). scholarship building on the second understanding explores how platforms provide a range of constraints and affordances that can be taken up to achieve familiar interactional goals (west & trester 2013), make certain linguistic practices more visible or easily accomplished (squires 2014), and sometimes even create seemingly entirely novel linguistic phenomena. i argue, however, that neither of these understandings of platform reflect how my research participants discursively frame tumblr. tumblr is articulated neither as a technology that organizes communication nor as a technology that transforms communication, but rather as a technology that participates in communication. they describe themselves as communicating not on, not through, but with tumblr. in these young people’s narratives, tumblr is discursively constructed as a person who directly acts upon and interacts with them. the platform is addressed directly (“you need to chill, tumblr!”), described as having agency and influence (“tumblr made me think about a lot of things but mostly social justice and my eyebrows”), and portrayed as author and interlocutor (“tumblr says…”, “tumblr told me”). despite being authored by single user among millions, content circulating the platform is consistently attributed to and engaged with as if “tumblr” were a singular actor — an imagined figure composed of a cohesive set of qualities. scholars of the internet have done careful and essential work in questioning undifferentiated imaginaries of social media platforms in our analyses, arguing instead for analytic approaches that move away from exactly the sorts of understandings of platform my research participants are articulating (akkaya 2014; miller 2016). yet tumblr is regularly cast as a singular and significant character in the narratives that many of its most active users tell. to ignore that would fail to capture an integral element of their experiences. those very same constructs that academics productively challenge are nevertheless constructs that often have meaning and are of consequence for people’s engagements with social media. i argue that through linguistic practices of alignment and disalignment with the imagined figure of “tumblr”, my research participations utilize this conceptualization of platform as a living actor, one characterized by a particular set of beliefs and behaviors, to articulate their own political-ethical commitments and identities. this understanding has further implications for methodological approaches to studying digital discourse. joel sherzer points out that “the context” of discourse includes “the immediate, ongoing, and emerging actualities of speech events” (1987: 296). this raises the question: what constitutes the emergent actualities of a speech event in online contexts where discourse unfolds asynchronically, but is nevertheless experienced by interlocutors in an embodied moment? i argue that within a framework where a platform is understood as a living actor, it is the interaction between user and platform that constitutes the speech event. however, one of the key conundrums of digital discourse analysis is the researcher often only has access to what is on their own screen. newsfeeds unique to each individual mediate the use of most new social media platforms, replacing earlier structures where visitors shared the same view. the content on a user’s public-facing page is therefore an increasingly inadequate window into their interactions. to address this, i argue for the use of audio-visual screen capture technologies that concurrently record the content on a screen alongside the bodies of users themselves for analyzing such interactions. i suggest that multimodal discourse analysis facilitated by such technologies can reveal the in-the-moment production of the speech event — the interaction between user and platform. this paper does not argue for defining all social media platforms as living actors. rather, i aim to show that regardless of how scholars theorize social media platforms and other technologies, people hold their own folk theories about the technologies they use and those theories shape their actions and experiences. this paper provides a case study for the empirical, theoretical, and methodological importance of taking such emic understandings seriously. references akkaya, aslihan. 2014. ”language, discourse, and new media: a linguistic anthropological perspective." language and linguistics compass 8, no. 7 285-300. angouri, jo, and tessa sanderson. 2016. “‘you'll find lots of help here’ unpacking the function of an online rheumatoid arthritis forum." language & communication 46: 1-13. baron, naomi s. 2013. “do mobile technologies reshape speaking, writing, or reading?” mobile media & communication 1 (1): 134-140. chayko, mary. 2008. portable communities: the social dynamics of online and mobile connectedness. new york: suny press. miller, daniel, elisabetta costa, nell haynes, tom mcdonald, razvan nicolescu, jolynna sinanan, juliano spyer, shriram venkatraman, and xinyuan wang. 2016. how the world changed social media. london: ucl press. sherzer, joel. 1987. “discourse-centered approach to language and culture." american anthropologist 89 (2): 295-309. squires, lauren. 2014. ”from tv personality fans and beyond: indexical bleaching and the diffusion of a media innovation." journal of linguistic anthropology 24 (1): 42-62. west, laura, and anna marie trester. 2013. "facework on facebook." discourse 2: 133-154. zappavigna, michele. 2011. ”ambient affiliation: a linguistic perspective on twitter." new media & society 13 (5): 788-806. aoir proposal proposal for ir 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 investigating teacher voice through blogs: policy, practice, and local knowledge kiersten greene cuny graduate center united states kgreene@gc.cuny.edu abstract teachers, especially those working in high-poverty, urban school districts, are given little if any voice in contemporary policy formation. prevailing policies often ignore teachers’ professional experience, and instead place heavy constraints on teachers’ classroom practice, squelch professional decision-making, and limit the possibility of effectively implementing pedagogies aimed at ensuring the success of all students. educational historians posit that the absence of teachers’ voice in the policymaking process is largely due to the traditional isolation in teaching. this paper asserts that blogs written by teachers offer a way to share expertise and local knowledge with policymakers. the main objectives of this paper are to 1) offer an alternative to the enduring, counterintuitive practice of educational policymaking, and 2) explore blogs written by teachers as a way to “see” into the classroom. keywords teachers; education; policy; blogs; practice lost in the shuffle: locating teacher voice in the blogosphere k-12 public school teachers are provided little if any voice in the construction of education policy. whether at the federal, state, or local levels, teachers’ opinions, local knowledge, and expertise count for naught in the policymaking process (apple, 2006; ingersoll, 2003; ravitch, 2010; tyack & cuban, 1995; rousmaniere, 1997). the absence of teachers’ expertise in policy decisions can be attributed to several factors, among them the traditional isolation of the teaching work environment—which has historically provided practitioners with little opportunity to connect with other practitioners or policymakers—and the paucity of forums in which teachers can speak openly, without reprisal from administrators. blogs, which have proven an enduring mode of communication for more than a decade, provide one forum in which teachers can share local knowledge. this paper reports the voices of some new york city teachers via blogs they write in order to understand 1) how k-12 teachers make sense of the conditions of their daily work, and 2) how their understanding of their daily work offers practical suggestions for future school reform and policymaking. the alleged failure and seeming immobility of american public schools has been a focus of educational researchers and policymakers for the last century. from complex systems of accountability and testing to progressive teaching methods and the incorporation of technology, school reforms have presented endless prescriptions and innovations in schooling over the last several decades; however, the conditions of teachers’ work have remained largely unchanged for the last near century (apple, 2006; spillane & jennings, 1997; elmore, 1980; tyack & cuban, 1995; rousmaniere, 1997; spencer, 1996). as cuban puts it, “the journey of school reform is a story of constant adaptation” (p. 453) that leaves a faint outline of the true story in its wake: on a day-to-day level in the school classrooms, hallways, lunchrooms, and yards, new york city teachers [in the 1920s] talked with each other about their problems and about their visions of how to create better-functioning schools. but they talked into an echoing silence, the validity of their perspective ignored by those who controlled their working conditions (rousmaniere, 1997, p. 2). proposal for ir 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 for ingersoll (2003), “teachers’ individual troubles in the workplace are neither unique nor isolated, but are really public issues, invisibly but indelibly shaped by the larger societal and organization contexts in which they lie” (p. 4). despite research that points to the importance of practitioner input in the policymaking process, teachers still face the “echoing silence” of the 1920s (tyack & tobin, 1994; rousmaniere, 1997), and traditional practices of schooling that often prevent reform success remain “remarkably durable” (cuban, 1988, p. 341). as online connections in virtual spaces proliferate, so do the possibilities for data collection and research. this paper asserts that blogs can help reveal how teachers resist and reproduce these invisible, adaptive forces, and what implications there are in their daily experiences for future policy creation, implementation, and evaluation. methodology 2.0: a thematic analysis of public, anonymous new york city teacher blogs as is often the case, web searches can “produce pages of results that need a final human filtering stage to remove spurious matches” (wilkinson & thelwall, 2011, p. 390), and indeed the initial stage of research required filtering through hundreds of blogs in order to identify ones appropriate by this study—authored by new york city teachers. while 154 blogs were identified as potentially useful for this study, 139 were eliminated for various reasons (i.e., authored by non-teachers, focused on content rather than daily experience, non-new-york-city teachers, etc.), the most important of which being lack of anonymity. the resulting 14 blogs analyzed in this study are anonymously written and publicly available. due to the sensitive nature of the blogs’ content, only anonymous blogs were analyzed. using in-depth visual and thematic analysis as the main methodological approach, 14 blogs identified for the study were analyzed over the course of four academic years, fall 2008–spring 2012. building on the work of kate rousmaniere (1997), who studied the conditions of new york city teachers’ work in the 1920s, the following themes were identified: • adaptive resistance: teachers adapt to the conditions of their work, in order to meet the expectations of policies by any means necessary • contradictory policies: teachers are expected to achieve professional goals without necessary supports • administrative obstacles: teachers often find their work in contradiction to administrative decisions and directives • surveillance: teachers write about being constantly watched, often resulting in punitive, rather than supportive administrative measures • resources / funding / training: overwhelmingly, teachers write about a lack of resources, funding, and training that prevent them from achieving the expectations of their daily work • lack of voice: teachers write about not being heard and having few outlets for professional question, concerns, and advice • escalation of work: teachers point to an ever-increasing work load that prevents them from meeting the expectations of their daily work the following table (figure 1) displays the distribution of the above themes across the blogs in the study: proposal for ir 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 once themes were identified, the authors of blogs analyzed for the study were contacted for feedback on the major findings, in order to triangulate the data. at the time of this proposed paper, analysis for this second phase of the study is not yet available; however, it will be by the time of the conference in october. conclusions: next steps and the need for further research based on this study, teachers have a wealth of information to share, and already do so electronically via blogs, when it comes to feedback around policy creation, engagement, and implementation. this study provides a foundation upon which to build future research that examines the voice of teachers in the context of policymaking and reform. sturken and cartwright, who write about visual culture theory, assert that “every day, we engage in practices of looking to make sense of the world” (2009, p. 9). as online communication proliferates, so do opportunities to stop, look, and listen, both alone and as part of a community: “we are increasingly invited to experience the mundane routines of our everyday lives through screens or information translated from those screens. although we perform some of these activities alone, most involve participation with, or simply the presence of, other people” (sturken & cartwright, 2009, p. 223). the record of these everyday activities and routines provides a record that is “frequently identical to the ‘actual experience’ studied” (waskul, 1996, p. 137), and “narrative researchers need to confidently assert their contributions to, their interventions in, and their transformations of social science scholarship” (chase, 2010, p. 231) over the years, few if any school reforms have addressed or sought to overcome the challenges that accompany working in a school environment that intensifies with each new policy for teachers to enact. policy changes are often and mistakenly treated as isolated, neatly packaged events or entities, even though practitioners and participants live nested, interconnected, complex lives (darlinghammond, 2006; berliner, 2006); and, as i argue, policies are chiefly the creation of one-sided, dictatorial dialogues in which teachers have little opportunity to share their expertise. this study supports the argument that as online connections in virtual spaces proliferate, so do the possibilities for data collection and research, and specifically, that blogs written by teachers should be considered in research on educational policy. references apple, m. (2006). educating the “right” way: markets, standards, gods, and inequality. new york: routledge. berliner, d. (2006). our impoverished view of educational research. teachers college record, 108(6), 949-995. chase, s. (2010). narrative inquiry: multiple lenses, approaches, voices. in luttrell, w. (ed.). qualitative proposal for ir 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 educational research: readings in reflexive methodology and transformative practice (208-236). new york: routledge. darling-hammond, l. (2006). securing the right to learn: policy and practice for powerful teaching and learning. educational researcher, 35(7), 13-24. elmore, r. (1980). backward mapping: implementation research and policy decisions. political science quarterly, 94(4), 601-616. ingersoll, r. (2003). who controls teachers’ work? power and accountability in america’s schools. cambridge: harvard university press. ravitch, d. (2010). the life and death of the great american school system: how testing and choice are undermining education. new york: basic books. rousmaniere, k. (1997). city teachers: teaching and school reform in historical perspective. new york: teachers college press. spencer, d. a. (1996). teachers and educational reform. educational researcher, 25(9), 15-17, 40. spillane, j. p. & jennings, n. e. (1997). aligned instructional policy and ambitious pedagogy: exploring instructional reform from the classroom perspective. teachers college record, 98(3), 459-481. sturken, m., & cartwright, l. (2009). practices of looking: an introduction to visual culture. new york: oxford university press. tyack, d., & cuban, l. (1995). tinkering toward utopia: a century of public school reform. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. waskul, d., & douglass, m. (1996). considering the electronic participant: some polemical observations on the ethics of on-line research. the information society, 12(2), 129-139. wilkinson, d., & thelwall, m. (2010). researching personal information on the public web: methods and ethics. social science computer review, 29(4), 387-401. © 2013 kiersten greene selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): suetzl, w. (2017, october 18-21). beyond the digital swarm? byung-chul han’s critical media pessimism. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. beyond the digital swarm? byung-chul han’s critical media pessimism wolfgang suetzl school of media arts & studies, ohio university byung-chul han and digital media the work of the korean-german philosopher byung-chul han has recently received increasing attention in media studies, particularly in continental europe and the spanish-speaking world. with his two first books appearing in english translation (by erik butler) in 2015, and five more in 2017 alone, his thinking can be expected to become more widely received among english-speaking scholars. han was born in soeul, korea, where he first studied engineering, accommodating his father’s wish to become an engineer. in germany han studied philosophy, german literature, and theology in freiburg and munich. he obtained his phd in 1994 with a thesis on stimmung (mood) in heidegger and taught at basel and karlsruhe before becoming a professor at the berlin university of art in 2012. han is among the most widely read cultural theorists in germany, with his books addressing aspects of culture with an undeniable currency and part of many people’s everyday experience, ranging from the dilemmas of life under neoliberalism to the crisis of freedom, from the pressures of permanent engagement to the disappearance of eroticism, from the rise of psycho power to new forms of exploitation. his minimalist style (manifest both in simplicity and clarity in writing, as well as in the small size of most of his books) are other factors that have combined to secure him a wide readership; indeed, the brevity and plainness of his writing make him a very different writer than fellow-germans like adorno, bloch, or heidegger, feared by many readers for the heaviness and sometimes obscurity of their language. but han’s writing is also beset by a what appears to be a certain repetitiveness. he gives the same questions many different variations across his publications, something readers looking for information, or even lines of argument leading to clear-cut conclusions or constructive alternatives might find challenging. yet not of these characteristics of han’s writing are coincidence, the are manifestations of a rootedness in buddhist aesthetics and ethics, they are a practice of the art of lingering, itself the title of one his books (2017e). the purpose of this paper is to examine the contributions of han’s thinking to critical theories of digital communication networks. a review of han’s work on digital communication must start with the recognition that only the smaller part of this work is explicitly on media, whereas the larger part other aspects of contemporary culture that are, however, often relevant to understanding digital media in as much as these are also a product of contemporary culture. digital media, in addition to be an object in themselves, are often seen as enhancing already existing, and usually problematic, cultural phenomena. rooted in continental philosophy (with heidegger and hegel figuring prominently) as well as east asian philosophy, a large part of han’s philosophical writings concerns aesthetics (2014, 2016a, 2016b), political philosophy (2005a, 2005b, 2014), and east asian philosophy (2002a, 2007, 2011), although his popular (and best-selling and translated) books are more concerned with a cultural criticism, including media criticism, that draws on philosophical as well as literary sources (rather than being itself of a philosophical nature). as alain badiou writes in his foreword to the agony of the eros (2017d), han’s work proves “utterly absorbing because of its unlikely combination of philosophical rigor and a wealth of far-ranging sources” (badiou 2017, p. viii). han began to write for a larger audience in the late 1990s, when he also began to have an influence in the art theory discourse (tollmann, 2011), and with his 2013 digitale rationalität und das ende des kommunikativen handelns (“digital rationality and the end of communicative action,” 2013b, as yet untranslated) he presented the first book on media and communication. digital media audiences: the disempowered swarm while the study of mediated communication has long worked with a mass society concept of an digitally networked and mobile communication has encouraged adoption of a cybernetic model of active users, sometimes centering on the concept of the swarm. the swarm has tended to be associated with “intelligence” and “autonomy,” examples of such a positive application of the structural model of the swarm include its use in mediated activism (tactical media) and social movement media (holmes, 2007; sauter 2014, sützl 2015), but it has also been key in recent media theories that have undertaken a crossover between biology and media technologies (parikka 2010, thacker 2011). as parikka points out, swarms, lacking an overarching principle of unity, remain politically ambivalent (parikka 2010, pp. 47-48). han sees the “digital swarm,” users interacting with each other in a network, as the successor of the mass, but rather than considering the politics of the swarm as merely ambivalent, he sees in it neither intelligence nor the possibility of political action. according to han, while masses require a loss of individual identity in forming a collective, a swarm is incapable of forming a collective voice and remains limited to producing noise (however trending that noise may be). the structural properties of the swarm itself make it impossible that it ever forms a “we.” swarms merely amount to a politically sterile ansammlung (accumulation), and never become an versammlung (an association or assembly). swarms form fleeting patterns and not enduring formations, and consequently, unlike the marching masses that have been able to form effective political movements, no political energy wells up from the volatile multi-directional movements of swarms, there is power in masses, but not in swarms (p. 12). a related thesis regarding the internet refers to the type of public created by it. here, han argues that the web (he implicitly refers to web 2.0) does not constitute public space at all, and that therefore no habermasian discourse is possible in it. but unlike eli pariser’s thesis of the filter bubble and personalization (pariser 2012), han believes that its deterioration is due to a centrifugal power of dispersal, not to a narrowing of a user’s horizon by a filter bubble. this centrifugal power is the result of the very isolation and individualization that users undergo in a swarm, failing forever to form a collective “we” capable of communicative action. (2014b, p. 9) instead, information is produced in and communicated to private spaces (p. 12). as a result, citizens inhabit an “opinion society” that no longer has a use for ideology, and ideological institutions such as traditional political parties disintegrate. han asks whether the web, where no discursive rationality can exist, might model a “pre-communicative, pre-discursive rationality” that might even generate more justice and more democracy than habermasian communicative rationality (2013b, p. 19). in order for this to be possible, a paradigm shift towards a “digital materialism” needs to occur (p. 19), where rationality is no longer established through communication, and there is perhaps no rationality at all. demediatization: from representation to copresentation according to han, when digital networks—unlike traditional mass media—do not generate a public, and when the “windows on a computer communicate with other windows” then “media such as blogs, twitter and facebook demediatize communication.” (2017b, p. 16). digital media do away with representation, which gives way to “presence, or copresentation.” a political system such as representative democracy will suffer from this erosion of representation that such media drive. han names the german pirate party as an example for this development. while digital media do away with the professional journalist in the strong sense, they equally undermine the position of the politician and eventually the political process itself: the flattening of temporal experience into an extended presence and the drive towards transparency, according to han, makes the future, the time of the political disappear: “transparency is ruled by presence and the present tense” (2017b, p. 18). but politics, as a strategic action, needs intransparent spaces, where “dissonant opinions or unusual ideas” can be voiced safely. han’s criticism of the “digital swarm” is of interest in terms of understanding the “public sphere” (or lack thereof) in digital media, and any possibility of effective protest or dissent that does not immediately enhance the conditions against which it is directed. however, in his criticism of transparency, han does not consider another subject that he has written on, power, and that the distribution of transparency in a political system is a result of power: the former eastern german state, for example, had a population transparent in relation to an intransparent government. it is not transparency per se that is the problem, but how and by whom it is controlled. because han does not consider that, it is easy for him to overlook that this question of control and distribution is also crucial in digital media, where a great deal of opacity exists in media corporations (for example, the secrecy around source codes and algorithms, mckelvey 2014 ), who can therefore operate strategically, while transparency is required from users. han applies foucault’s panopticon to both people and government, so that is transparency makes it impossible for a government to govern (given constant and real time media scrutiny and the risk of whistleblowing) and for citizens to exercise their freedom in a democratic and meaningful way (given their lack of privacy). this would point to an erosion of the political itself through a generalization of transparency in contemporary culture, a development that han sees as aided by the digital media. han addresses it in his critique of neoliberalism, a recurrent theme in many of han’s books, under the title of psycho power (2014b, 2017b). neoliberalism and the erosion of alterity taking issue with foucault’s attempt to describe biopolitics as the politics of neoliberalism, han considers neoliberalism as a mutant form of capitalism no longer primarily concerned with biological, somatic, bodily realities. (2014b, p. 39) in order to increase productivity, neoliberalism does not seek to overcome bodily resistance, but it instead optimizes psychological and mental processes. bodily disciplining yields to mental optimization. the body is released from the immediate production process and becomes the object of aesthetic and health optimization. while following stiegler in his critique of foucault, han takes issue with stiegler’s emphasis on the role of television as a neoliberal psycho-technology. in han’s view, stiegler does not honor the fundamentally different communication structure of the internet and of social media. however, according to han, neoliberalism makes massive use of digital media and it does so because the neoliberal political model is not that of biopolitics but of psycho-politics. neoliberalism completely usurps what foucault calls the technolgies of the self. “neoliberalism’s technique of rule ensures that the individual voluntarily manages itself in ways that it maps the power context, while interpreting it as freedom. self-optimization and subjection, freedom and exploitation fall together in one.” (2014b, p. 42) “it is not the suppression of freedom that maximizes productivity and efficiency, but its exploitation.” (2016c, p. 25) “liking” and the violence of positivity in topologie der gewalt (2012), han describes digitally mediated culture as one where positivity dominates in such a way that it constitutes its own violence. because (in contrast to baudrillard’s immunological model of conflict) the violence of positivity knows no negative form, that would infiltrate, infect or invade one’s body or psyche (2012, p. 87), and because it is exhaustive rather than exclusive, it is not accessible to direct perception. (2015b, p.16-17). in fact, missing negativity leads to its own pathologies, including “bulimia, binge watching and binge eating,” (p. 25) all of which are symptoms of a post-viral violence, the violence of positivity against which no immunological response can be applied. illnesses such as depression, adhd, and borderline personality are not “infections, but infarctions.” (2015b, p. 1) further, according to han, the lack of negative thresholds in digital media causes an excess of information incapable of informing and sustaining prolonged discourse. by the same token, radical otherness, as a phenomenon of negativity, and eventually experience itself—dependent on distinction—become less and less possible. where hegel’s phenomenology of the spirit is a phenomenology of pain, the phenomenology of the digital is a phenomenology of “liking” (2013b, p. 70), of replacing difference with pleasant variety. digital communication as practiced on social media, according to han, creates a “chain reaction of likeness” (2015b, p. 2), it “prolongs the same” (2017a, p. 22) and opens an “inferno of the same” (2015c, p. 2), a “terror” and “proliferation” of the same. but it is this inferno that communication reaches its highest velocity because it no longer is challenged by any negative thresholds of negativity, any forces of resistance that would stand in its way. the faster and more effortless digital communication circuits function, the more user data and informational capital they generate. sameness, it could be concluded, is a perfect business model for big data digital media. communication media as the form of neoliberal power across many of his media writings han also argues that the lack of negative thresholds renders digital dissent a-political by limiting it to the ephemeral. this political neutrality is itself an economic opportunity exploited by the digital industry: positivity can be economized, whereas the expression of negativity cannot. this would explain why user engagement must be a top priority of every online business: negative behaviors such as absence or passivity do not yield any data. neoliberal power, han concludes, therefore takes on the “the form of a communication medium” and “consists to increase the likelihood of the ‘yes’ vis-à-vis the possibility of the ‘no.” (2013b, p. 11). saying no in public—protesting—in those circumstances takes the form of a short-lived “indignation” that never develops into an effective public discourse. protest movements such as the spanish indignados and the german wutbürger (“enraged citizens”) might be considered expressions of this development, eventually benefitting those populist political groups that move into the void left by the traditional parties (as in the cases of afd and pegida in germany; dempsey 2011, lutz 2016). given that theory, in as much as it implies selection, is also a phenomenon that works with negativity, (2015b, p. 6), han argues that theoretical work, which always implies a determination what is or what has to be, is being made redundant by the big data industry and data driven neo-positivist scholarship. here, the data themselves perform the any modeling function, without being able to perform the discriminating excluding function of theoretical work. why-questions—critical questions—seem outdated and ideological in the face of data-based positive statements of what is (2013b, p. 99). “for anderson, theory is a construct—an auxiliary instance that compensates for a lack of information. if enough data are available, no theory is needed.” (2017a, p. 75) big data and transparency beyond this erosion of theory that could follow from the rise of big data, the massive amounts of data allow the prediction of behaviors and this is represents one of the ways in which the power of a neoliberal, post-democratic politics takes on the form of communication media. han describes big data as generating a new surveillance apparatus, one that is different from bentham’s panopticon: it is more insidious and more efficient. while the panopticon model it still bound by a perspectival optics that cannot avoid dead angles, the digital surveillance of big data is non-perspectival and therefore eliminates this dead angle. as a consequence, the gaze of big data surveillance can penetrate the psyche itself (2014b , p. 78), and forms part of the psychopower of neoliberalism. transparency is therefore a “neoliberal dispositive” (2012a, p. 19) with the simple purpose of turning everything outward, where it can take on a positive form of information and generate economic value. it is in the outward sphere that it can become information, a positive form whose lack of interiority allows it to circulate regardless of context. the circulation of information can therefore be accelerated at will, with secrets or otherness representing obstacles to circulation and being subject to dismantlement. the type of society thus created han calls society of transparency, and in it, democracy becomes a zuschauerdemokratie, a spectator democracy of citizens turned consumers. the demand for transparency, in han’s view, is does not concern political decisionmaking processes (that no consumer would be interested in), but it is a scandalmongering demand for unmasking, revealing, and exposing the behaviors of politicians (2012a, p. 21). users reveal information about themselves voluntarily, without being forced to do so, making data protection laws (which a government that might wrest data from citizens against their will or without their knowledge) irrelevant. when freedom is the vehicle of exploitation, the result is a crisis of freedom itself. big data, according to han, thus represents herrschaftswissen, a type of knowledge serving the exercise of rule. each dispositive and each technique of rule produces its own devotional objects that materialize and stabilize the ruling system, and in the case of neoliberalism, the chief devotional object is the smartphone. “an object of subjectification, it functions like a rosary […] a like is a digital amen […] by clicking ‘like’ we subject ourselves to the digital power context” (2012a, p. 23). once there, in the inferno of sameness, it is also impossible to experience the other as the other. “we tap, swipe, or flick the other away so that our own mirror image will appear instead.” (2017a, p. 25) we use smartphones also for play, and to han, this general erosion of alterity is also present in gamification (2014b, p. 70). play is no longer the other of work, but becomes part of a process of subjectification where the non-productive disappears. this disappearance is not experienced as a loss because games are fun. however, games function with a time structure of immediate success and reward, things that need time to mature cannot be gamified. gamification works against time-consuming (but necessary) processes such as dealing with conflict (2016c, p. 35) buddhist critique of positivity a recurring subject in han’s writing is his criticism of excessive positivity in western culture, manifest in social media and its “liking” culture, as well as in the culture of neoliberalism and its performance-oriented “i can do it” attitude. negative thresholds that would interfere with the smooth and rapid circulation of digital data are not part of the dominant neoliberal reality. this criticism is already present in han’s two main philosophical points of reference, hegel and heidegger, but even more so to han’s writings on eastern philosophy. the positivity of western conceptual thinking as well as scientific methods stands in stark contrast to buddhist notions such as “religion without god,” “emptiness,” “dwelling nowhere,” “nobody” (all chapter titles in han’s book on zen buddhism, 2002a). negativity here does not signal a lack, a condition to be remedied or exploited, but rather a mediation of being in the sense of the shared being that heidegger (and jean-luc nancy after him) calls being-with, (german mit-sein) and buddhism simply refers to as freundlichkeit (amicability). consequently, the emptiness od buddhism “de-internalizes the i into a rei amicae that opens itself like a guest house,” han writes (2002a, p. 115). by contrast, substance, to han the basic concept of western thought, signals the identity and sameness of beings, a drive of beings towards themselves, “substance is filled with itself, with its own” (p. 44). han shows how this friendly buddhist nihilism, the de-interorization that never becomes pure externalization has its parallels, but also its opposites, in the thinking of hegel, leibniz, heidegger, and other master thinkers who struggle with the nature and limitations of the western idea of the self. hegel, for instance, represents a thinking of absolute self always poised against another equally seeking to position him/herself as absolute self. he calls this “archaic hostility” (2002a, p. 117) in the contemporary context, han therefore differentiates between friendliness as a communicative form that seeks to overcome this archaic hostility, resulting in people helping each other in self-presentation or selfexpression, and an “archaic friendliness” that draws pleasure form an absence of self, of selflessness (not to be understood in a moral sense, p. 119). negativity as a friendly space would be the opposite of what occurs on some social media, where friending is not a de-interorization, not a withdrawal from the own self, but the opposite: the self grows, as an individualized self, with every new “friend,” post, share, like etc., that is why one can be a youtube star, for example, why social media are important branding tools, and why consensus can be effortlessly by popularity. conclusions han’s work on has been compared to first generation frankfurt school scholars for its media pessimism (dow 2015, p. 305) and dismissed as “apocalyptic” (dow 2015, p. 310) or as “pop philosophy” (piegsa, 2015). my own reading results in a more complex picture. han’s theorems on media are philosophically grounded, and they focus on and examine problems in the media that have also been problems of philosophy (alterity, being, and power). in doing so, his criticism remains connected, throughout his work, to a radical critique of neoliberalism and the way digital media support the neoliberal agendas of performance-oriented subjectification and post-democratic de-politization. identifying the criticism of digital communication with a criticism of neoliberal power is what makes han’s thinking different from media pessimists who have followed the lineage of cultural critics such as neil postman, e.g. nicholas carr. han’s criticism remains rooted in a critique of power that is a critique of capital, but also of the technics of capital. han opens up a path of critical enquiry that may challenge an increasingly dominant approach to digital media research as mere analysis. through its critique of neoliberal power, it may help identifying the limits to sustained critical discourses that exist within social media. han’s writings are a plea for the rehabilitation of hypotheses and modelling vis-à-vis pattern recognition based on large amounts of data, and as such they contain a vindication of a type of work that has their home in academic research and theorizing rather than in analytical lab work). furthermore, han’s engagement with the question of alterity may inform both research on online social relations as well as the significance of digital media in the formation of polities. in fact, the question of alterity, and the various angles form which han tackles it is a core question to mediated communication and the extent to which otherness is behind this concern with positivity. han shows that the ways in which we study digital media in the west is often itself driven by positivity and has a hard time separating itself from the neoliberal mainstream. digital data themselves contain no critical element; critical thinking, on the other hand, depends on an acknowledgement and an embracing of negative phenomena of alterity. it makes it possible to understand extreme online phenomena such as hate speech and cyberattacks as part of a dialectical process of hyper-positivity. a second potentially interesting contribution is the relationship between the power model of neoliberalism and the drive for positivity. this could be part of a better understanding of the type of power the internet gives rise too, where we are now beginning to see that the equation between empowerment and online access is too simple, and that digital communication is one modality in which neoliberal power operates, taking on the forms of ease and convenience, never alienating the entrepreneur-user, the customer-citizen. han may be among the foremost thinkers who have brought eastern philosophies in a dialogue with western thinking in ways that go beyond mere interculturality. the roots that some of his thought has in buddhist thinking are strong and real, and he brings eastern and continental philosophies in a dialogue that may help disentangle the study of digital media from the values and assumptions that guided the californian technology pioneers. these values survive in dominant media corporations such as google and facebook. where han is the most “eastern” in his writing, he is a strong position to contribute to a real critique of power in digital media that rather than simply generating more data. absence, emptiness, forgetting, nowhereness etc. could be added to a list of critical terms in media studies. han’s thinking is most doubtful where it takes on a nostalgic or idealistic form, often expressed in phrases like “no more” or “no longer,” or “today …” presenting changes in digital technology as a lamentable deterioration of culture. there are also times when he seems to get carried away by poetry for example, and even when he states (gresser, 2015) that there can be no solutions (german lösungen), only redemption (erlösung). in the context of zen buddhism and the ways in which it seeks to overcome the limits of conceptual thought this is probably acceptable, but it marks a line where his thinking risks losing relevance to scholarship. to complete this initial and cursory review of han’s work and its relevance to the study of digital media, it is necessary to read his popular and translated short books in conjunction with his more extensive and rigorous philosophical works (2002, 2005a, 2005b, 2012, 2011, 2014b), and in particular his works on eastern philosophy. that these works are currently not available in english presents limit to a wider critical use of han’s thinking in media studies, although one that is extraneous to the arguments presented in the work itself. references badiou, a. (2017). foreword: the reinvention of love. in the agony of eros (pp. vii– ix). cambridge: mit press. dempsey, j. (2011, may 16). “enraged citizens” movement rattles german politics. new york times, p. a7. deseriis, m. (2017). technopopulism: the emergence of a discursive formation. triplec (cognition, communication, co-operation): open access journal for a global sustainable information society, 15(2), 441-458. dow, r. (2015). muchedumbre, artes y política: byung-chul han y las racionalidades comunicativas contemporáneas. palabra clave, (2), 305. https://doi.org/10.5294/pacla.2015.18.2.1 garcía triviño, f. (2016). las metamorfosis de la sociedad actual: comentarios sobre los tres libros de byung-chul han. cuadernos de proyectos arquitectónicos, (0), 6, 112-115. gresser, i. (2015). trailer: müdigkeitsgesellschaft bung-chul han in seoul / berlin. fridolfing: absolut medien. retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmtfkgbzeys guldin, r., & wool, c. (2016). on flusserian methodology and terminology. flusser studies, (22), 1–21. han, b.-c. (1999a). heideggers herz. zum begriff der stimmung bei martin heidegger (1996th ed.). münchen: fink, wilhelm. han, b.-c. (1999b). martin heidegger. eine einführung. münchen: utb, stuttgart. han, b.-c. (1999c). todesarten. philosophische untersuchungen zum tod. münchen: fink, wilhelm. han, b.-c. (2002a). philosophie des zen-buddhismus. stuttgart: reclam. han, b.-c. (2002b). tod und alterität. münchen: fink. han, b.-c. (2005a). hegel und die macht. ein versuch über die freundlichkeit. münchen: fink han, b.-c. (2005b). was ist macht? stuttgart: reclam. han, b.-c. (2005c). hyperkulturalität. kultur und globalisierung. berlin: merve. han, b. c. (2006). gute unterhaltung. berlin: vorwerk 8. han, b.-c. (2007). abwesen: zur kultur und philosophie des fernen osten. berlin: merve. han, b.-c. (2011). shanzhai: dekonstruktion auf chinesisch. berlin: merve. han, b.-c. (2012a). topologie der gewalt. berlin: matthes & seitz. han, b.-c. (2012b). transparenzgesellschaft. berlin: matthes & seitz. han, b.-c. (2013a). bitte augen schließen: auf der suche nach einer anderen zeit. berlin: matthes & seitz. han, b.-c. (2013b). digitale rationalität und das ende des kommunikativen handelns. berlin: matthes & seitz. han, b.-c. (2013c). im schwarm. ansichten des digitalen. berlin: matthes & seitz. han, b.-c. (2014a). duft der zeit: ein philosophischer essay zur kunst des verweilens. bielefeld: transcript verlag. han, b.-c. (2014b). psychopolitik. neoliberalismus und die neuen machttechniken. frankfurt (main): fischer. han, b.-c. (2015a). die errettung des schönen. frankfurt: fischer han, b.-c. (2015b). the burnout society. stanford: stanford university press. han, b.-c. (2015c). the transparency society. stanford: stanford university press. han, b.-c. (2016a). agonie des eros. berlin: matthes & seitz. han, b.-c. (2016b). close-up in unschärfe: bericht über einige glückserfahrungen. berlin: merve. han, b.-c. (2016c). die austreibung des anderen: gesellschaft, wahrnehmung und kommunikation heute. frankfurt: fischer. han, b.-c. (2017a). in the swarm: digital prospects. cambridge. mit press han, b.-c. (2017b). neoliberalism and new technologies of power. london: verso. han, b.-c. (2017c). saving beauty. london: polity. han, b.-c. (2017d). the agony of eros. london; cambridge, ma: mit press. han, b.-c. (2017e). the scent of time. london: polity han, b.-c. (2017f). the expulsion of the other. society, perception and communication today. london: polity hartmann, s. (2014). wutbürger. hameln: cw niemeyer holmes, b. (2007). swarmachine. retrieved february 26, 2017, from https://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/07/21/swarmachine/ kelly, k. (1994). out of control: the rise of neo-biological civilization. reading, mass: addison-wesley. lutz, a. (ed.) (2016). wutbürger. berlin: distanz. manuel orozco, j. (2015). de la sociedad del cansancio a la sociedad del aburrimiento. un estudio del pensamiento de byung-chul han. estudios: filosofía, historia, letras, verano 2015(113), 169–193. mckelvey, f. (2014). algorithmic media need democratic methods: why publics matter. canadian journal of communication, 39(4), 597-613. pariser, e. (2012). the filter bubble. how the new personalized web is changing what we read and how we think. new york: penguin. piegsa, o. (2015). essays über schönheit: können daten pornografisch sein? spiegel online. retrieved from http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/literatur/die-errettungdes-schoenen-von-byung-chul-han-so-schoen-glatt-a-1046457.html roncallo dow, s. (2015). crowds, arts and politics. byung-chul han and the contemporary communicative rationalities. palabra clave, 18(2), 305–311. https://doi.org/10.5294/pacla.2015.18.2.1 sauter, m. (2014). the coming swarm. ddos actions, hacktivism, and civil disobedience on the internet. london: bloomsbury academic. sützl, w. (2015). street protests, electronic disturbance, smart mobs. dislocations of resistance. in m. näser-lather & c. neubert (eds.), traffic. media as infrastructures and cultural practices. (pp. 220–232). leiden: brill rodopi. tollmann, v. (2011). der terror der positivität. interview with byung-chul han. springerin, (4), 22–26. xavert, h. (2016). ja, ich habe afd gewählt. bekenntnisse eines wutbürgers. wenning, m. (2014). shanzai: dekonstruktion auf chinesisch. by byung chul han. philosophy east & west, 64(1), 264–266. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 dobles-ferris, m., garcia, m., green, k., o’connell, c., & van de wiele, c. (2020, october). the hidden blueprint: a dissection of the technological footprint on living systems. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the hidden blueprint: a dissection of the technological footprint on living systems michele ferris-dobles the university of illinois at chicago chad van de wiele the university of illinois at chicago kristina green the university of illinois at chicago melina garcia the university of illinois at chicago carrie o’connell the university of illinois at chicago introduction the proliferation of technological systems which permeate, and often dominate, human sociological systems is ripe for critical exploration. the purpose of this panel is to investigate the myriad ways in which technology has encroached upon—and, arguably, engineered—human behaviors, once considered the domain of psychological and biological outcomes. additionally, this panel will offer critical insight into how disproportionate and otherwise ethically skewed technological influence may be mitigated at the point of creation in order to restore balance between tech consumer and tech creator. topics in this panel span human migration, algorithmic encoding, human-machine communication, datafication of the human subject, glitch technology, and ai-based prediction. this panel will investigate ways in which technology has converged with human systems, often unquestioned, and offer analysis into the potential consequences of this convergence, as well as potential solutions for alleviating the omnipresence of technical sovereignty on living systems. specific panel presentations discuss: • the inorganic digital footprint that mitigates the tangible human footprint of human migration. • the pitfalls of cybernetic prediction and the corrosive nature of ai-based prediction. • the nature of human-machine communication, as documented by interactions with amazon go. • normalization of gender, as evidenced by algorithmic determination in spotify suggestions. • the emancipatory power of “breaking” the black box of participatory technology. each panel topic identifies technology as the basis for living systems at the sociocultural level. for example, multiple papers investigate how algorithms seek to manage, mitigate, and encourage human behavior, while others look at the physical technological infrastructure which guides the flow of human migration. the overarching goal of each paper encourages the end-user to take a deeper look at the symbiotic relationship between digital infrastructure and living systems in order to critically examine the consequences of convergence without critical oversight. each paper in this panel also identifies a humanistic concept that interrogates the blurring between natural and artificial, human and machine, agency, and autonomy. post-humanism requires scholars to reconsider what it means to be human and forces a critical inquiry about why, how, and under what circumstances machines can or should replace or augment human actors, and the extent to which machines can be made to act responsibly. for example, as displaced populations are forced from their nation-states, the ethical implications that those migrants of diaspora may tailor their migratory routes to current technological infrastructure must be considered. as we evolve towards engineering more scalable communication networks capable of harnessing the allegiance of a wide swath of the population based on geographic proximity, we mustn’t neglect to consider that these networks are driving human behavior as much, if not more, than they are supporting it. similarly, when considering the hidden philosophical blueprint that prescribes predictive artificial intelligence, we mustn’t neglect to consider the assumptions which belie this philosophy, and the subsequent impact the systems derived from that philosophy which seek to predict the patterns of our human behavior. these research topics identify the importance and relevance of scholarship in the area of human-machine communication and advocate for their inclusion in the conceptualization, prototyping, and creation of ethical robotic and ai technologies. increasingly, humans find themselves socializing with intelligent agents and robots at home, in schools, and at work. further, humans often do recognize the extent to which technological systems drove human behavior. this panel offers a glimpse into the necessary, provocative, and timely discussion about hmc and the role of critical scholarship in shaping technologies of the future. as technology progresses, we find ourselves on the precipice of social and cultural evolution in which the illusory real disguised as “user-friendliness” becomes more and more ubiquitous in design theory. in many respects, the trajectory of the modern-day internet suggests that rather than heading towards emancipation (what user-friendliness promises)--we are headed closer to invisibility. each of these panels reveals a mechanism by which we may peek into the constructs of our techno-social reality, as so that we may mitigate the dangers of such invisibility. communication technologies and human migration: moving beyond the narrative of the ‘connected migrant’ michele ferris-dobles the university of illinois at chicago communications technologies have become ubiquitous tools in our lives. they have been designed in ways that they blend with our bodies and surroundings, and weave into our social fabrics. social relations are no longer confined to face-to-face interactions and we cannot separate our offline and online worlds. they have become ordinary (scannell, 1995), habitual (moores, 2005), domesticated (haddon, 2006), pervasive (farman, 2011), and an infrastructure of our ‘every day’ (plantin et al., 2018). they are part our day-to-day routines (schegloff, 1986) and rituals (carey, 1989); and in many ways we feel we can’t live without them (plantin et al., 2018). this reality has also permeated the processes of human migration. it can be argued that communication technologies have radically changed the ways migrants experience identity, belonging, affection, information sharing, decision-making, and social networking (brinkerhoff, 2009). the ubiquity of the smartphone during the processes of human migration has made it part of the ‘digital infrastructure of movement’ (gillespie et al., 2018; latonero & kift, 2018) were “social media, mobile apps, online maps, instant messaging, translation websites, wire money transfers, cell phone charging stations, and wifi hotspots have created a new infrastructure for movement as critical as roads or railways” (latonero, 2015 as cited in gillespie et al., 2018; p.2). in this regard, we cannot conceive contemporary migration without communication technologies, as “media do not just add a new dimension to the phenomenon of migration—they transform it altogether” (madianou 2014; p. 323). traditionally, in the context of human migration, communication technologies have been broadly understood as resources (awad & tossell, 2019). in this manner, the smartphone has been referred to as a ‘lifeline’ (gillespie et al., 2018) and as a lifesaving device (barros, 2017) for the migrants. this ‘utilitarian’ approach, particularly in the cases when people are fleeing extreme situations of violence and poverty, has identified the smartphone as a device which is directly linked to life/death situations—in multiple forms. for instance, communication technologies in the context of migration are associated with safety and survival, as they afford migrants information, navigation tools, and regular communication contact across geographical distances with their family and acquaintances; which have implications on their migratory routes and decisions (witteborn, 2015; gillespie et al., 2018). from an intimate approach, the mobile phone allows affective family and social networks to take place across geographical distances, which are vital for the wellbeing of both the migrants and their loved ones who remain at their countries of origin; this influences the peoples’ decision to migrate and where to migrate (madianou & miller; 2012) on the other hand, the smartphone also stores personal data and information that can put the migrants at risk, as they create new ways of surveillance, exploitation, and violence (gillespie et al., 2018). in this matter, in the context of migration, the utilitarian affordances associated with the smartphone range from safety, protection, and survival; to risk, danger, and death. this paper argues that the ‘utilitarian’ approach which focuses mostly on the positive and negative consequences of the use of the mobile phone, oversimplifies the complex interconnections between human mobility and communication technologies. ignoring the imaginaries, symbolic meanings, and infrastructures behind the—materiality, functionality, and utility—of the mobile phone, does not allow us to comprehend the complexities that have made the smartphone a ubiquitous device in the context of human migration. this paper applies the “imagined affordances” (nagy & neff, 2005) and an infrastructural (peters, 2009) theoretical approaches to explore: what have allowed the smartphone to become a pervasive device which shapes the processes of human mobility? how does the context of migration structure the ‘imagined affordances’ of technology? which are the structures, systems, and arrangements (political, financial, legal, military, sociotechnical) that allows the smartphone to permeate almost all the processes of migration in the world? by exploring the contemporary case of central american migration to the united states, this paper argues that by examining the “imagined affordances” beyond the materiality and utility of the mobile phone, we can gain new insights about the uses and meanings that go beyond those designed by the developers of the technology; and that instead are created by the needs, expectations, and perceptions of the migrants. and that by researching the mobile phone as an infrastructure, we can acquire understandings of how bigger actors and systems are linked to the processes of mediated migration. what is lost/gained when in the context of migration, human and machine become reducibly object, yet irreducibly other? this is a question that can only be tackled if we move beyond the ‘utilitarian’ approach, which has dominated academia, media representations, humanitarian discourses, and political narratives. migration is part of the history of humanity. for centuries people have been developing and using different means and strategies to be able to move across borders, to unite with their loved ones, and to flee situations of danger to survive. the narrative of the ‘connected migrant’ that through the use of the smartphone makes its migratory journey a ‘smart migrant journey’’ (awad & tossell, 2019); ignores the resilient capacity that humans have, especially those in vulnerable situations, to be creative, to resist, and overcome multiple boundaries. in this sense, reducing mediated migration to a ‘utilitarian’ approach reinforces a colonial narrative where one can “see traces of the colonial discourse of the european savior” in the “celebratory discourse on the affordances of technology for refugees” (witteborn 2018; p.22). in other words, the ‘utilitarian’ approach has political consequences. by looking at the infrastructure and the ‘imagined affordances’, one can understand why some people who are migrating can gain freedom from disconnecting (witteborn 2018) and why sometimes connectivity feels as an imposition rather than a choice (awad & tossell, 2019). for many years’ academics, journalists, and activists have been questioning if communication technologies are either good or bad for the migrants and their families. this paper claims that there is no definitive answer to this question; and that instead there is need for a more complex conceptualization of the role of communication technologies in the context of migration. one that aims to understand the migrants and their families not only in relation to their precarity and needs. one that acknowledges the resilience and creativity of this group of people, who will migrate—with or without— connectivity. references awad, i., & tossell, j. (2019). is the smartphone always a smart choice? against the utilitarian view of the ‘connected migrant’. information, communication & society, 1-16. doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2019.1668456 barros, g. (2017) central americans refugees: protected or put at risk by communication technologies? forced migration review, october 2017, university of oxford, refugee studies centre. brinkerhoff, m. (2009) digital diasporas, engagement and transnational identity. cambridge press. carey, j. w. (1989). communication as culture: essays on media and society. boston: unwin hyman. farman, j. (2011). mobile interface theory: embodied space and locative media. new york: routledge gillespie, m., osseiran, s., & cheesman, m. (2018). syrian refugees and the digital passage to europe: smartphone infrastructures and affordances. social media+ society, 4(1), 2056305118764440. haddon, l. (2006). the contribution of domestication research to in-home computing and media consumption. the information society, 22(4), 195-203. latonero, m. (2015, december 27). for refugees, a digital passage to europe. thomas reuters news. retrieved from http://news. trust.org/item/20151227124555-blem7/ latonero, m., & kift, p. (2018). on digital passages and borders: refugees and the new infrastructure for movement and control. social media+ society, 4(1), 2056305118764432 madianou, m. (2014). polymedia communication and mediatized migration: an ethnographic approach. in k. lundby (ed.), mediatization of communication (pp. 323– 248). berlin, germany: de gruyter. madianou, m., & miller, d. (2012). migration and new media: transnational families and polymedia. routledge. moores, s. (2005) media/theory. london: routledge nagy, p., & neff, g. (2015). imagined affordance: reconstructing a keyword for communication theory. social media+ society, 1(2), 2056305115603385. peters, j. d. (2015). infrastructuralism: media as traffic between nature and culture. in m. näser-later & c. neubert (eds.), traffic: media as infrastructures and cultural practices (pp.31–49). brill rodopi. plantin, j.-c., lagoze, c., edwards, p. n., & sandvig, c. (2018). infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook. new media & society, 20(1), 293–310. scannell, p. (1995). ‘for a phenomenology of radio and television’. journal of communication, 45(3), 4-19. schegloff, e. a. (1986). the routine as achievement. human studies, 9(2-3), 111-151. witteborn, s. (2015). becoming (im)perceptible: forced migrants and virtual practice. journal of refugee studies, 28, 350–367. witteborn, s. (2018). the digital force in forced migration: imagined affordances and gendered practices. popular communication, 16, 21–31. primed prediction: a critical examination of the consequences of exclusion of the ontological now in ai protocol chad van de wiele the university of illinois at chicago the primary purpose of this paper is to explore the shortcomings of modern-day applications of norbert wiener’s cybernetic prediction—the theoretical foundation of ai—particularly in terms of capture technologies that remain ubiquitous as a method of data collection for feeding such systems. i argue that such data are not impartial or necessarily explanatory, but rather evidence of third-order simulacra, simulation, as conceptualized by jean baudrillard (1994). taking a comparative historical approach, this paper examines what cybernetic prediction, as outlined by wiener, excludes; namely, an attendance to the complex ontological now. secondly, this paper explores the potential social consequences associated with predictive technologies predicated on a cybernetic theorem that fundamentally excludes myriad contingencies in favor of more easily quantifiable categories of data. cybernetics, at its core, is the acute science of subjective choice reduction as a means of avoiding entropy, which makes such categorization attractive. as faucher argues, ‘cybernetics does not drive toward the ultimate truth or solution, but is geared toward narrowing the field of approximations for better technical results by minimizing on entropy’ (2013, 206). yet, as modern applications of algorithmic and ai-based risk assessment systems illustrate, the (counter-cybernetic) push towards determining a predicted ‘truth’ or ‘solution’ has achieved the opposite, partly due to the reliance upon categories of data— rather than a variety—as the heuristic which guides machine learning. critically, this process and the technical systems that facilitate prediction closely align with what philip agre (1994) describes as capture. according to agre (1994), capture serves as both a linguistic metaphor (opposite the visual metaphors of surveillance, as articulated by orwell and foucault) and material process of tracking used to characterize the institutional, technical logic whereby human activities are captured and represented, or tracked, within sociotechnical systems. the point of simulation, in the sense that it serves as a blueprint for prediction, is to model possibilities of human behavior relating to the social/cultural. however, at what point does simulation become just a more consumable way of saying, ‘shaping behavior through technology’? as malik (2010) argues, ‘control in the cybernetic sense does not mean absolute control of every detail. it is more like steering, directing and guiding’ (33). to aid in this guidance requires a broad brush applied to cull information into categories. unfortunately, the data upon which these systems operate are often biased, woefully incomplete, or simply unqualified. for example, in the sentencing of convicted criminals, factors beyond the individual’s crime—such as broader recidivism rates based on socioeconomic and demographic data—are used to predict the likelihood an individual may be a repeat offender, thereby influencing sentencing (hillman 2019). accordingly, it is fair to question whether such potential ‘predicted’ behavior is primed via the algorithmic encoding of emotional triggers weiner believed encouraged behavioral repetition. complicating the relationship between information input and predictive outcomes is the problem of data categorization that is foundational to capture technologies. for example, as applied to risk assessments for criminal offenders, a qualitative understanding of the perpetrator, as well as those individually particular antecedents which may have factored into the commission of a particular crime, are secondary (if considered at all) to the broad categories within which a perpetrator may fall. data such as age, race, and socioeconomic status are far more valuable to the cybernetic game because they may be reduced to easily quantifiable statistics. the propensity for aibased, cybernetic systems to prime (i.e., ‘prune’) human behavior has been explored by several scholars, albeit in different ways: from reproducing essentialist social categories and magnifying their attendant (institutional, economic, etc.) disparities, to transposing notions of risk and the institutional handlings thereof. in coming to terms with chance, for instance, oscar gandy jr. (2009) describes cross-sector technologies of ‘rational discrimination’ that ‘facilitate the identification, classification and comparative assessment of analytically generated groups in terms of their expected value or risk’ (55). such techniques, leveraging actuarial risk models and statistical evidence for purposes of prediction, serve to emphasize and reify race as an essential category (via proxy measures; see also harcourt, 2015). as the science of control or prediction of future events and actions, cyberneticians are practitioners of gestalt psychology, attempting to make sense of a seeming chaotic world around them (halpern, 2014). the ideas of communication and control, when applied to human behavior, thus theorize and re-envision systems, both sociological and biological. as this paper argues, however, such prediction is a narrow, selfreferential system of feedback that ultimately becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy girded by the psycho-social effects of the very chaos it seeks to rationalize. because cybernetic prediction focuses on what has been and what will become, rather than what is, the very foundation of cybernetic prediction is incomplete. as halpern (2014) notes, even wiener understood that not all forms of information (such as metaphorical representations, connotative meaning, denotative descriptions, etc.) could be recorded into cybernetic systems, thereby making the foundation of prediction wholly incomplete if we are to understand that humans are cultural creations as much as they are agents of neurotransmission. today, we find ourselves within such a technological future—defined by the increasing entropy of systems—that wiener warned against. among the myriad public and private domains within which ai-based systems prime human behavior, perhaps the most consequential and ethically questionable is the criminal-legal system: in the u.s., algorithmic decision-making programs, predictive policing applications, and targeted/anticipatory surveillance technologies have become standard fare. wiener recognized the potential for human actors—governments, militaries, and other cultural hegemons—to leverage the power of the learning machine against its citizenry, and cautioned as much. to mitigate such domination—both of the machine and the human actors who seek to leverage its power, wiener (1989) heeds that ‘we must know as scientists what man's nature is and what his built-in purposes are, even when we must wield this knowledge as soldiers and as statesmen; and we must know why we wish to control him’ (182). it is not just the scientist, he notes, that should be responsible for our new technological future, but also the anthropologist and philosopher, if we are to prevent such an entropic reality. references agre, p. e. (1994). surveillance and capture: two models of privacy. the information society, 10(2), 101-127. baudrillard, j. (1994). simulacra and simulation. university of michigan press. faucher, k. x. (2013). metastasis and metastability: a deleuzian approach to information. rotterdam, nl: sensepublishers. gandy, jr., o. h. 2009. coming to terms with chance: engaging rational discrimination and cumulative disadvantage. farnham, uk: ashgate publishing. halpern, o. (2014). beautiful data: a history of vision and reason since 1945. duke university press. harcourt, b. e. 2015. risk as a proxy for race: the dangers of risk assessment. federal sentencing reporter, 27(4), 237-243. https://doi.org/10.1525/fsr.2015.27.4.237 hillman, n. l. (2019). the use of artificial intelligence in gauging the risk of recidivism. the judges' journal, 58(1), 36-39. malik, c. 2010. ahead of change: how crowd psychology and cybernetics transform the way we govern. frankfurt, de: campus verlag. wiener, n. 1989. the human use of human beings: cybernetics and society. london, uk: free association books. super-big market-data: a walkthrough approach to amazon go kristina green the university of illinois at chicago in their aware home prototype design, kidd and colleagues (1999) conceptualize a in their aware home prototype design, kidd and colleagues (1999) conceptualize a ‘smart’ home environment where human occupants and automated, wireless technologies collaborate with one another to “produce an environment that is capable of knowing information about itself and the whereabouts and activities of its inhabitants” (p. 1). in many ways, this ‘living laboratory,’ relocated the networked infrastructures, digital communication tools and informational organizing principles from the workplace to the home. more than two decades removed from the aware home imaginary, the scale of ‘smart’ environments has moved beyond the confines of the home into cities the world over. for example, an hour’s drive from seoul, songdo represents a sustainable, high tech city and “modernist paradigm in urban design” (halpern, 2015). according to halpern (2015), songdo city planners at cisco “envision the world as interface, an entire sensory environment where human actions and reactions, from eye movement to body movement, can be traced, tracked, and responded to in the name of consumer satisfaction and work efficiency…” (p. 3). this research project conceives of the world as interface and interrogates digital extractive points that knowingly and unknowingly exist all around us. using imagined affordances (nagy & neff, 2015) as a theoretical framework, this project investigates how sensor-fusion technologies are understood within commercial smart environment that, according to marx (2016), can be classified as “high technologies” of surveillance. marketed as “the future of shopping” for time-impoverished urban residents, amazon go is a new amazon endeavor of cashierless convenience stores. a total of 25 amazon go stores have opened in cities across the united states–including chicago, seattle, new york, and san francisco–since december 2016 (burgess, 2018; coldewey, 2018; fleishman, 2018; he, 2017; keeling, 2019; liedtke & pisano, 2019; tillman, 2019; zumbach, 2018). here’s how the stores work: customers download the amazon go mobile app and scan their unique qr code upon entering one of the amazon go stores. like scanning a commuter pass at a subway station, the mobile app opens a turn-stop and shoppers can choose from a selection of food, beverages, meal kits, and convenience store items. amazon go’s own branded items includes everything from ready-to-cook meals for two to premade sandwiches, yogurts, chocolate bars, and even amazon go souvenir water bottles and coffee mugs. the stores can be described as boutique convenience stores with the added bonus of tens-of-thousands of dollars’ worth of floor-to-ceiling ‘high’ technologies (marx, 2016) hidden among grocery coolers and display cases. an internet search of amazon go yields dozens of reports by journalists and bloggers who recycle the phrase “just walk out” technology directly from amazon's press releases and promotional material. in reality, however, the just-walk-out shopping experience is powered by advances in human action recognition (har, chen, jafari, & kehtarnavaz, 2017; gravina, alinia, ghasemzadeh, & fortino, 2017). thus, from songdo to chicago, a “special class of spatial products…designed to provide ubiquitous physical computing infrastructure” (halpern, 2015, p. 3) has arrived. amazon go represents an ideal case study for investigating human-machine communication (hmc) in the wild (see guzman, 2019). an important prerequisite for case studies are that the topic of interest must offer a contemporary snapshot of something both old and new, historical and contemporary. in other words, case studies are said to be the preferred method when the case under investigation represents a “a fluid rendition of the recent past and the present, not just to present” (yin, 2017, p. 43). case studies necessitate a mixed-method approach. therefore, this panel presentation details findings from 30 semi-structured interviews conducted with 15 people who have visited and shopped at amazon go stores in-person, as well as 15 others who have only read or heard about amazon go from the news media or others. the first key finding from these interviews suggests that the direct experience of shopping at amazon go in-person did not predict a better technical understanding about how a cashierless store works. shoppers and non-shoppers alike were equally knowledgeable, only having a vague understanding of the technology at play. for those who visited in-person, many emphasized its time-saving affordances but largely overlooked how. with that said, most shoppers and non-shoppers were able to accurately infer that cashierless-ness necessitated information about store merchandise, the whereabouts of consumers, and the virtual exchange of money through their mobile device. second, amazon go remediates familiar conventions from urban design–namely public transit conventions like turn-stops or sliding doors. why is this significant? it means people necessarily have to be able to pay-to-play. even in instances when visitors had no intention of making a purchase and just wanted to explore for “the novelty of amazon,” their entrance was predicated on their method of payment from the start. interestingly, visitors who made no purchases, received a receipt in the amount of $0, and for those who did make purchases, many reported losing track of their spending, only to find out once they had already left the store. third, amazon go also remediates our sense of surveillance, safety, and sociality. shoppers described feeling “exposed,” “on display,” and “creeped out” by the high-tech convenience store setting. many also noted that without stopping to pay with a cashier or self-checkout machine, they felt as though they were stealing. shoppers and nonshoppers also described feeling conflicted in terms of sociality: on the one hand, “sometimes it’s nice to not interact with others.” however, many worried that this makes for an increasingly lonely and isolated world. finally, only 2:30 participants interviewed were aware of the ghost work that makes amazon go appear to seamlessly function. that’s right, sensor fusion in amazon go is not entirely automated and relies on assisted machine learning and a team of people who validate the accuracy of these algorithms on the back end. most participants defined automation as a technical process that does not require human intervention and concluded that amazon go represents an automated shopping experience. however, they were largely unaware of the workers that make this illusion possible. references burgess, m. (2018, january 22). the technology behind amazon’s surveillance-heavy go store. wired uk. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/amazon-go-seattle-uk-store-howdoes-work chen, c., jafari, r., & kehtarnavaz, n. (2017). a survey of depth and inertial sensor fusion for human action recognition. multimedia tools and applications, 76(3), 4405– 4425. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-015-3177-1 fleishman, g. (2018, january 21). checking out amazon go, the first no-checkout convenience store. fast company. https://www.fastcompany.com/40518124/amazongo-store-opening gravina, r., alinia, p., ghasemzadeh, h., & fortino, g. (2017). multi-sensor fusion in body sensor networks: state-of-the-art and research challenges. information fusion, 35, 68–80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2016.09.005 halpern, o. (2015). beautiful data: a history of vision and reason since 1945. duke university press. he, x. (2017, january 11). will amazon go win the war between computer vision and rfid in retail? idtechex. https://www.idtechex.com/research/articles/will-amazon-gowin-the-war-between-computer-vision-and-rfid-in-retail-00010463.asp keeling, b. (2019, march 4). amazon to open third cashierless store in san francisco. curbed sf. https://sf.curbed.com/2019/3/4/18250596/amazon-go-san-francisco-sfshopping-location kidd, c. d., orr, r., abowd, g. d., atkeson, c. g., essa, i. a., macintyre, b., mynatt, e., starner, t. e., & newstetter, w. (1999). the aware home: a living laboratory for ubiquitous computing research. in n. a. streitz, j. siegel, v. hartkopf, & s. konomi (eds.), cooperative buildings. integrating information, organizations, and architecture (pp. 191–198). springer berlin heidelberg. liedtke, m., & pisano, j. (2019, february 18). it won’t stop with amazon go: many retailers are shopping for ways to get rid of checkout lines—chicago tribune. chicago tribune. https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-amazon-go-cashierlessstores-20190212-story.html light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881–900. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 marx, g. t. (2016). windows into the soul: surveillance and society in an age of high technology. university of chicago press. nagy, p., & neff, g. (2015). imagined affordance: reconstructing a keyword for communication theory. social media and society, 1(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603385 tillman, m. (2019, february 18). what is amazon go, where is it, and how does it work? pocket-lint. https://www.pocket-lint.com/phones/news/amazon/139650-what-isamazon-go-where-is-it-and-how-does-it-work yin, r. k. (2017). case study research and applications: design and methods. sage publications. zumbach, l. (2018, september 17). “just walk out shopping”: amazon go opens first chicago location of its cashierless convenience store—chicago tribune. chicago tribune. https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-amazon-go-opens-chicagostore-0917-story.html “thank you, next”: an exploration of organic vs. automated networks a call for intentional design melina garcia the university of illinois at chicago to date, digital media studies have focused on the effects of technology mediating our lives. from the arab spring to the #metoo movement we have witnessed web 2.0 applications mediating interactions amongst disenfranchised communities that have resulted in overthrowing governments and exposing toxic patriarchal industries. however, these platforms have also hosted the rise of alt-right and neo-nazi publics, thus giving a renewed life to a culture of hate, violence, and sadism. until now these investigations have focused on the impact of technology mediating interactions amongst human actors, but what happens when technology is the main actor forging connections amongst us? what happens to life when the human is removed, and technology automates our interactions? this is the central theme that this project wishes to address. in 2018 vox journalist, kaitlyn tiffany, reported that for three of the past four years, spotify's most streamed music artists of the year were all men (december 2018). this is particularly strange given the current success of so many women music artists. for example, in 2019 ariana grande simultaneously held billboard's top three top 40 hits - a feat not achieved since the beatles in 1964. kasey musgraves won the 2018 grammy album of the year and in 2017 cardi b released the first female rap single to reach number one since 1998. so why are spotify's most streamed music and content predominantly produced by male artists? well, spotify claims this is "how 191 million people around the world stream music and content". however, recent algorithm bias studies suggest that web 2.0 systems, like spotify translate “old forms of social segregation” by “recognizing patterns in input data” (apprich, chun, cramer, and steyerl, 2019, p.128). the following paper presents a comparative network analysis between an organic and automated network to further understand the impact of designing sociotechnical systems that promote patterns of similarity versus difference. spotify is a swedish audio streaming platform that services 207 million users in 19 countries (fleischer & snickars, 2017). as of 2017, it supports over two million artists, which suggests that the application offers a longtail range of options (anderson, 2004). recent findings, however, reveal a steep power law in which most artists report low popularity scores. artist popularity scores are algorithmic measurements that compare artists by dividing their total number of streams by the number of streams of the most listened to artist (south, 2018). observing power laws is not a new phenomenon in network science. most studies report that the top 10 to 20 % of actors command the network's attention and visibility (drezner & farrell, 2008; barabasi & albert, 1999; perline, 2005; newman, 2003; barabási, 2002). on spotify, 66.5% of the artists have a popularity score below 5 (south, 2018). the presence of these power laws and spotify's reputation for producing maledominated charts indicate that more is at play than just the way users interact with the platform. ultimately it begs the question: to what extent does the platform contribute to producing male-dominated charts? homophily--a social network science axiom that suggests that segregating into groups in which our neighbors look and think like us is natural-informs the current design of web 2.0 platforms, like spotify (mcpherson, smith-lovin, & cook, 2001) . as a result, sociotechnical systems propagate current hegemonic structures such as historically male dominated markets like the music industry. to understand the extent to which the current design of sociotechnical systems promotes existing power structures this investigation performed a comparative network analysis between the organic 2018 hiphop collaboration network and spotify’s automated related artist network. whereas the actors forge the connections themselves in organic network, tie formation is informed by algorithmic calculations in automated networks. both organic and automated networks are known to promote homophilous connections, however, past studies suggest that offline hegemonic norms become magnified online (boyd & ellison, 2008) therefore offline networks that promote connections among male actors offline will promote even more homophilous male connections online. this study produced several interesting findings including. first, it found that the prominent actors in each network differed significantly in terms of popularity score. these popularity score differences suggest that the process of forming connections between actors in an organic network differ from those in an automated one. secondly, homophilous and heterophilous connections were positively correlated with artists’ gender. lastly, statistically significant homophilous male connections were observed in spotify’s related hip hop artist network but not in the organic network. these empirical results suggest that networks automated by non-human actors promote more male homophilous connections than typically found in a network where connections are forged by humans. these findings align with previous algorithm bias studies which suggest that we need to reevaluate the passive nature that we project onto these sociotechnical systems. ultimately, this paper calls for an era of intentional design in which sociotechnical systems are intentionally designed to promote diversity and treated as active participants in the digital ecology. references anderson, c. (2004, october 1). the long tail. wired. retrieved december 5, 2016, from https://www.wired.com/2004/10/tail apprich, c., chun, w., cramer, f., and steyerl, h. (2019). pattern discrimination. minneapolis: lüneburg: university of minnesota press; meson press. barabási, a.-l. (2002). linked: the new science of networks. cambridge, ma: perseus pub barabasi, a.l. and albert, r. (1999) ‘emergence of scaling in random networks’, science, 286(5439): 509–12. boyd, d. m., & ellison, n. b. (2008). social network sites: definition, history, and scholarship. journal of computer-mediated communication, 13(1), 210–230. drezner, d. w. and farrell, h. (2008). introduction: blogs, politics and power: a special issue of public choice. public choice, 134(1–2): 1–13. fleischer, r; snickars, p (2017): discovering spotify. a thematic introduction. cu 9(2), pp. 130–145. available online at http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se/v9/a10/cu17v9a10.pdf , checked on 4/12/2018 mcpherson, miller, lynn smith-lovin, and james cook. (2001). birds of a feather: homophily in social networks. annual review of sociology 27:415–44. newman, m. (2003). the structure and function of complex networks. siam review, 45(2): 167–256. perline, r. (2005). strong, weak and inverse power law. statistical science, 20(1): 68– 88. south, t. (2018). network analysis of the spotify artist collaboration graph. australian mathematical sciences institute. 1-12. tiffany, k. (2018, december 06). why are all of spotify's most-streamed artists men? vox. retrieved from https://www.vox.com/the breaking the “black box”: exploring the philosophical parallels between epic theatre and modern digital interface carrie o’connell the university of illinois at chicago in recent years, the increasing invisibility of the machinations of digital interfaces through the process of “black-boxing” has obscured the functionality of systems infrastructure for the sake of user-friendliness. in this paper, i argue that this process of obfuscation is similar to the 19th century theatrical concept the fourth wall, which encourages audience connection through deception. when the fourth wall is present, the illusory “real” is showcased at the expense of ontological reality through a suspension of disbelief on the part of the consuming audience. similarly, the interfaces through which we engage the digital world today obscure system functionality for the sake of ease of use, but at what cost? as epic theatre emerged in the 20th century to disrupt the illusion of the fourth wall, so too have modern scholars of media history encouraged a dismantling of the illusory distance between human interlocutor and digital tool as a means of techno-social emancipation from the technical infrastructures which shape the modern human condition. in this paper, i argue that a qualitative approach to science and technology studies that mirrors the tenets of epic theatre is methodologically justified. as masson (2017) notes, humanistic researchers today are often too “in awe” of the digital tools at their fingertips, and often “succumb to scientism” in their research by biasing towards the allure of tech, or “big data,” rather than fully investigating their merits. through the artistic technique of ostranenie, or defamiliarization, we can recalibrate scholarly objectivity to see these tools not just for their power, but full influence in shaping social systems. scholars in various fields have argued that one of the great merits of digital tools is their capacity for ostranenie, for ‘making strange’ our objects of study – and by the same token, for calling into question our most profound assumptions about them (manovich 2017). breaking the wall between illusion and reality is integral, not just for understanding theatre productions, but understanding our current place in a highly techno-social society. as kochhar-lindgren (2005) assesses: “this is where we today exist: on the (in)calculable line between the two domains, the organic and its other, as the ontological lines that demarcate values shift, forever shattering,” (p. 123). perhaps it is time for a reset back to an era in which artificial conduits of representation and the ontological reality they reflect are once again distinguishable, if emancipation is to be encouraged. to appeal to audiences and make the experience more meaningful (not just entertaining), the 19th century stage became what theatre historian bryant-bertail (2000) calls a “sociological laboratory” that dissected the human condition in the same manner modernist contemporaries like freud had dissected the human mind, or darwin dissected myriad species. similarly, our modern digital tools--particularly those which connect us to the internet--have also become a sociological laboratory or sorts. as nick couldry and andreas hepp argue in their 2017 book the mediated construction of reality, our modern human condition has been datafied--meaning every morsel of human behavior that takes place in the digital realm can be extracted, categorized, dissected for meaning, then exploited for capitalist purposes. for emerson (2014) and durham peters (2014), any emancipatory power users may have from this exploitation lies in our ability to understand the systems which collect this information. in other words, if we want to understand how we are being datafied, and therefore commodified, then we must break the fourth wall of the black box and tinker with the systems innards once again. originators of the epic theatre tradition, which challenged the reign of naturalism, brecht and piscator sought to, similarly, upend the traditional form of deceptive storytelling by “breaking” the fourth wall and engaging the audience, once again, in a tangible way. to accomplish this, showcasing the inner-workings of stage technology in a visible was necessary. both piscator and brecht echo walter benjamin’s (1936) postulation that the mechanization of art counteracted the passivity of perception. by showcasing the functionality behind the scenes, in other words, we might be once again engaged in the process. through what brecht called the “estrangement effect,” audiences could be distanced from the artform by a disruption of presentation--a reflexive “glitch,” as emerson (2014) might call it--rather than be drawn in by the seduction of verisimilitude. the philosophical undercurrent of this method is that if we know we are watching art unfold, we are more likely to cognitively process that art, rather than simply be passively entertained. to the champions of epic theatre, this process of estrangement and defamiliarization allowed the audience fuller understanding of the connotative meaning of a subject through a bastardization of its tangible signifier. today, the digital tools we use are a kind of “sociological laboratory” in their own respect. to correct course and return our relationship with digital tools back to one of a more equal power balance, emerson (2014) argues that we reimagine interface-asthreshold; in other words, what serves as “interface” between user and tool should no longer be seen as simply entry points of connection. rather, by exploring the physical artefacts at our fingertips, we may gain a better understanding of how systems operate in order to make sense of their function and the creative relationship between user and tool. one way explore interface-as-threshold is to expose the power of tools by highlighting their disfunction, or “glitch.” philosophically in line with the modernist concept of reflexivity, by showcasing the flaws created by the medium / tool (i.e. a double exposure of a single photographed image presented as the final artwork) the audience is reminded of the point of production, thus making complete defamiliarization from the process of production implausible. when the information intake is disrupted by the “glitch,” the audience is unable to simply digest the encoded dominant hegemonic narrative of a representation. since they are reminded of the tools via their presence in the final artefact, a participatory cognitive process for decoding intended meaning is necessary. in this respect, emerson takes a page from brecht and piscatero in that she calls for exposing the mechanizations behind the process in order to understand their function. by exploring the functional aspects of a system, we are reminded of the medium, as well as our relationship to it. the imbalance fueled by the connective deception of “user-friendliness” is nothing new, but--rather--a re-imagining of the theatrical concept of the fourth wall. this concept, which woos the audience into a suspension of disbelief, presupposes what happens onstage is reality masked by an invisible interface between audience and action--the removed “fourth wall” in an imagined room represented by the tangible barrier created by the proscenium arch over the stage. as naturalistic as the form (acting style or set design) may be, what happens onstage is never objective reality any more than the data that is birthed from our contemporary interactions with digital tools is objective. what we call user-friendliness today--in large part a design bias towards form over function--is similar to the tactics used on the 19th century naturalistic stage. references benjamin, w. (1936). the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. visual culture: experiences in visual culture, 144-137. bryant-bertail, s. (2000). space and time in epic theater: the brechtian legacy. rochester: camden house. couldry, n. & hepp, a. (2017). the mediated construction of reality. cambridge: polity press. durham peters, j. (2014). the marvelous clouds. chicago: the university of chicago press. emerson, l. (2014). reading writing interfaces: from the digital to the bookbound. minneapolis: the university of minnesota press. kochhar-lindgren, g. (2005). technologics: ghosts, the incalculable, and the suspension of animation. albany: state university of new york press. manovich, l. (2017). cultural analytics, social computing and digital humanities. in the datafied society (p. 55–68). amsterdam university press. masson, e. (2017). humanistic data research: an encounter between epistemic traditions. in the datafied society (p. 25-38). amsterdam university press. aoir 2018 fat platforms selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 towards fairness, accountability, and transparency in platform governance robert gorwa university of oxford background algorithms, especially those of the machine learning variety, are playing an increasingly significant role in modern life. billions of people interact every day with complex algorithmic systems like google’s search engine (pagerank) or facebook’s news feed (edgerank), and algorithmic decision-making is now being deployed in high-stakes domains such as policing, finance, and healthcare (ananny & crawford, 2016). galvanized by the constant flow of “algorithmic war stories” that illustrate how bias and discrimination can be exhibited by these systems (edwards & veale, 2017), a growing community of social and computer scientists has been working to establish actionable frameworks for accountable algorithms and fair machine learning, often summarized as fairness, accountability, and transparency in machine learning, or fat-ml (barocas & selbst, 2016). a similar line of research has yet to be pursued in the emerging area of platform governance, a body of work that addresses technology “platforms” as socio-technical systems and political actors that engage in private governance (gillespie, 2017; denardis & hackl, 2015). through their design decisions, terms of service, and content policies, platforms intervene in social and political activity (gillespie, 2015). these policies not only influence what users see and do, but they also can have broader social and political implications: most recently, facebook, google, and twitter have been accused of playing a problematic role in the lead up to the 2016 us election, with critics claiming that their policies enabled the malicious use of targeted advertising, propaganda, and automated accounts (“bots”). given that, as caplan and boyd (2018: 2) observe, “conversations around algorithmic accountability often center on facebook and google,” there is an unexplored nexus between the algorithmic accountability literature and the platform governance literature. focusing on platforms – not just how they are governed, but also how they themselves govern (gillespie, 2017) – offers insight into several important questions for fat-ml scholars. how can fairness, accountability, and transparency be truly achieved when suggested citation (apa): gorwa, r. towards fairness, accountability, and transparency in platform governance. (2018, october 10-13) paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http:// spir.aoir.org. the overarching structures within which these algorithms are embedded may not be fair, accountable, or transparent? likewise, the algorithmic accountability literature has much to offer those interested in contemporary technology platforms. for instance: what do we now demand from algorithms, that we do not similarly demand from the corporate entities that deploy them? a fat framework for platforms combining insights from political theory, political philosophy, and international relations with the burgeoning algorithmic accountability and fair machine learning literatures, this paper will seek to present a novel perspective on platform governance. i set out to answer the following question: to what extent is fairness, accountability, and transparency a useful framework for thinking about platform governance? focusing on facebook as a case study, and drawing on a variety of qualitative data collected in 2018 – participant observation in a multi-day “policy deep dive for researchers” organized by facebook executives, as well as interviews conducted with current and former facebook policy employees – this paper will critically analyze facebook’s policy practices within a fairness, accountability, and transparency framework. i also explore how facebook employees themselves discursively conceptualize the notion of fairness, accountability, and transparency in their day-to-day work. preliminary findings & arguments i generally find that fat provides an imperfect but useful heuristic for thinking about questions relating to social media policy, while also serving as an important normative goal as to what platform governance should strive to achieve. thinking explicitly about fairness, transparency, and accountability can yield interesting insights into how the policy processes of platforms really function in practice. for example, facebook employees appear to exhibit a deep desire that their policies be considered “fair,” in the narrow context of non-discrimination across individual users. in content moderation, facebook strives for reproducibility and consistency in moderation, meaning that the same content posted by two users would be equally likely to be either pulled down or left online moderators, despite the difficulty of achieving this in practice. however, facebook policy teams have more difficulty with a broader notion of fairness, one that involves balancing individual rights to expression against possible societal, macro-level harms spread across a population. (should facebook, in the context of hate speech, consider “white” as equivalent to other minority groups, given the historic patterns of discrimination within the united states? see angwin and grassegger, 2017). investigating accountability suggests that facebook policy processes are responsive to the public in certain ways (especially public backlash and “pr fires,” which could be said to constitute a narrow form of “public accountability”), but ultimately are limited in their accountability to the public due to their corporate structure and incentives. the paper explores facebook’s recent (and ongoing) efforts to become more transparent, while also showing how facebook policy is a kind of “black-box,” with the effect that process of policy decision-making, and the motives and goals behind these policies are not transparent or clear to the users who are directly affected by them. the modern social media ecosystem involves the interplay of a multitude of varying (and often competing) public and private interests, making platform governance both incredibly complex and important. significant issues are at stake: as denardis and hackl (2015: 9) argue, the core functions of social media platforms are “simultaneously related to several conditions of democracy: how people receive news; the articulation of relationships and associations; access to knowledge; and spaces for deliberation about issues of public concern.” the questions raised in this paper – effectively, how these decisions are made, and whether it is possible to make them in a less problematic manner – are important ones for the internet research community. the inner workings of platforms are still not well understood, and as annany and crawford (2016: 10) explain, “a system needs to be understood to be governed.” this paper hopes to provide an empirical jumping off point for what promises to be a major area of research, debate, and discussion in the years to come. references ananny, m., & crawford, k. (2016). seeing without knowing: limitations of the transparency ideal and its application to algorithmic accountability. new media & society, 1461444816676645. barocas, s., & selbst, a. d. (2016). big data’s disparate impact. cal. l. rev., 104, 671. binns, r. (2017). fairness in machine learning: lessons from political philosophy. journal of machine learning research, 81 (2018 conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency), 1–11. caplan, r., & boyd, danah. (2018). isomorphism through algorithms: institutional dependencies in the case of facebook. big data & society, 5(1), 2053951718757253. denardis, l., & hackl, a. m. (2015). internet governance by social media platforms. telecommunications policy, 39(9), 761–770. edwards, l., & veale, m. (2017). slave to the algorithm? why a “right to an explanation” is probably not the remedy you are looking for. duke law & technology review, 16(1), 18–84. gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of “platforms.” new media & society, 12(3), 347–364. gillespie, t. (2015). platforms intervene. social media + society, 1(1), 2056305115580479. gillespie, t. (2017). governance of and by platforms. in j. burgess, a. marwick & t. poell, eds., the sage handbook of social media. los angeles, ca: sage. angwin, j. & grassegger, h. (2017, june 28). facebook’s secret censorship rules protect white men from hate speech, but not black children. propublica. retrieved from https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-hate-speechcensorship-internal-documents-algorithms selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): mckie, i., & narayan, b. (2019, october 2-5). communicating a trustworthy online organisational identity with chatbots. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. communicating a trustworthy online organisational identity with chatbots indra mckie university of technology sydney dr bhuva narayan university of technology sydney introduction conversational bots, otherwise known as chatbots, operate within the fourth industrial revolution as a client-facing form of ai. they are communicative interfaces that mimic human conversation to deliver information in a highly personalised way. the user experience of chatbots can change the way individuals, groups and organisations define themselves online (whitley, gal & kjaergaard, 2014). this paper discusses the opportunities in building an online identity via chatbots, with emphasis on harnessing the properties of chatbots that can develop trust with users. currently, organisations are limited to the properties and affordances of web browsers, search engines and social media to communicate a “shared symbolic representation” (gioia, 1998). this paper focuses on the organisational identity of a university library, and details both opportunities and vulnerabilities in establishing trust with users through chatbots. background the theme for this year’s aoir conference is trust, and how this “techno-emotion” (svedmark, 2016) shapes our culture and actions on the internet. as organisations assume an online presence to globalise their agenda and existence, a ‘shared symbolic representation’ (gioia, 1998) is curated across the expanse of the internet. traditionally, transcendence from a physical human entity into an online identity includes the creation of multiple web domains, web pages, email and social media accounts. some examples include, but are not limited to: logos, videos, style guides, articles and advertisements. overall, in establishing an online organisational identity, a vast amount of internet collateral is produced to attract users to their beliefs. unfortunately, due to the archival nature of browsers, search engines and social media, content is buried under layers of activity. the result of organisations communicating their message through websites and social media is that fragments of human knowledge are lost, under-accessed and made ineffective (carlson, 2003). users are assumed to have a competent enough level of digital literacy to independently navigate through our unregulated systems. next, users are weighted with the decision-making process of evaluating information and the sources or bodies that provide it. information overload is a term used to describe a situation where a person is overwhelmed and cannot process any informative or communicative messages, only to terminate or decrease their ability to process information (beaudoin, 2008). conceptual framework investigation of the form and functionality of chatbots is vital to understand why developers aim to mimic humans, emotion and dialogue to enhance the users’ experience of chatbots. conversation is now the object of design (folstad & brandtzaeg 2017), developers no longer need to shove the entirety of an organisation’s goals and beliefs into a navigational bar, instead information can be retrieved at a point of need by anticipating the user’s goals via conversation. all chatbot interaction is contained to a central chat interface, where users express an information need and receive instant feedback users are no longer ticket #348 or the 6th person in line when seeking help from organisations. users can quickly search for information using culturally-based language conventions, and the chatbot can present information as highly contextualised messages. hyperlinks, instructional videos and calendar invitations can be presented to the user as the chatbot ‘mimics intelligent conversation.’ (abdul-kader & woods, 2015, p.71). ‘the interface simply provides the access to the underlying database’ (manovich, 2007, p.45), for underneath every chatbot is a library of items containing an intent, utterances and a response. if each item is stored in the database as equals, their context is erased, only to be re-deciphered and given meaning by the end user. chatbots retrieve information in an anti-narrative sequence (manovich, 2007), thus the conversational interface must rely on the constitution of an artificial personality to establish a consistent user experience. this user experience is dictated via the dynamic relationship between the “designed humanness” and “perceived anthropomorphism” in conversational ui design (smestad, 2018). by designing personality and social roles into our chatbots we create new characters, or new identities. constitution of personality as a method to increase perceived consistency and trust helps users to develop confidence in automated bots and their decisions (alaieri & vellino, 2016). however, there are also reasons for users to develop a distrust towards chatbots. to many, the technical skill needed to develop and understand how these machines work is out of reach. thus, lack of transparency can lead to many assumptions regarding malicious activity such as privacy threats (chung, et al., 2017), ethical misconduct (alaieri & vellino, 2016), or out of control self-learning bots such as microsoft’s antisemitic tay (neff & nagy, 2016). by 2020, we will be conversing with chatbots more than our spouses or partners (deloitte, 2018) and by 2022, chatbots have been estimated to save businesses around 8 billion dollars as either a supplement or replacement of human workers (smestad, 2018). as chatbots become increasingly popular we will find ourselves speaking to artificially intelligent beings in our home, work and school lives. our social relationships with them and thus the social identities we build and design for chatbots will ‘shape the essences of who we are, and regulate our identities, values, feelings and moods’ (gilbert, 2005, p.299) – and especially our techo-emotions such as trust. findings in our study, first year undergraduate students, the largest cohort with a shared university experience was identified as a prime audience for the chatbot. chatbots were thought to be able to address library anxiety and would suit their last-minute information-seeking behaviours. drawing from a range of online and face to face student and librarian interactions, we referred to q&a forums, consultation records, student personas, and live chat transcripts to inform conversational design, harnessing pre-existing data to populate the chatbot. due to the polysemic nature of language we needed to creatively frame different information needs in the chatbot’s training dataset; for example, the word ‘book’ was linked to multiple goals of the students: find a book, book a room, or reference a book. reflecting on the research, we found that framing the chatbot towards a particular audience was important in building trust. our trust as developers on the chatbot was tested as building the agent required lots of resourcing and time. as well, we found that it was difficult to incentivise human staff to trust in the success of the chatbot. the findings of this ongoing study will be of interest to organisations who plan to develop a chatbot as part of their internet communications strategy. references abdul-kader, s. & woods, j., 2015. survey on chatbot design techniques in speech conversation systems, international journal of advanced computer science and applications, vol. 6, no. 7, pp.72-80. alaieri, f. & vellino, a., 2016, ‘ethical decision making in robots: autonomy, trust and responsibility’, in agah a., cabibihan j., howard a., salichs m., he h. (eds) social robotics. icsr 2016, springer pp. 159-168. beaudoin, c., 2008, ‘explaining the relationship between internet use and interpersonal trust: taking into account motivation and information overload’, journal of computermediated communication, vol. 13, pp.550-568. carlson, c., 2003, ‘information overload, retrieval strategies and internet user empowerment, the good, the bad and the irrelevant, helsinki, finland, 3-5 september 2003. chung, h., iorga, m., voas, j., & lee, s., 2017, ‘alexa, can i trust you?’, computer, vol. 50, no. 9, pp. 100-104. deloitte digital 2018, chatbots point of view, deloitte, viewed 26th february 2018, <https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/deloitte/nl/documents/deloitteanalytics/deloitte-nl-chatbots-moving-beyond-the-hype.pdf, 2018>. folstad, a. & brandtzaeg, p., 2017, ‘chatbots and the new world of hci’, interactions, vol. 24, iss. 4, july-august, pp. 38-42. gilbert, p. 2005, ‘social mentalities: a biopsychosocial and evolutionary approach to social relationships’, in baldwin, m. (eds) interpersonal cognition, guilford press, new york, pp.299-333, isbn: 1-59385-112-x. gioia, d. 1998, ‘from individual to organizational identity’, in d. whetten & godfrey, p. (eds) identity in organizations building theory through conversations, sage, thousand oaks, ca, pp. 17-31. manovich, l. 2007, ‘database as symbolic form’ in vesna, v. (eds), database aesthetics: art in the age of information overflow, university of minnesota press, london, pp.3960, isbn: 0816641188. neff, g. & nagy, p. 2016, ‘talking to bots: symbiotic agency and the case of tay’, international journal of communication, vol. 10, pp. 4915-4931. svedmark, e., 2016, becoming together and apart: technoemotions and other posthuman entanglements, faculty of social sciences, department of informatics, umeå university, sweden. whitley, e., gal, u. & kjaergaard, a., 2014, ‘who do you think you are? a review of the complex interplay between information systems, identification and identity’, european journal of information systems, vol.23, pp.17-35. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 zhao, l. and john, n. (2019, october 2-5). the concept of sharing in chinese social media. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the concept of ‘sharing’ in chinese social media luolin zhao school of new media, peking university nicholas john department of communication and journalism, the hebrew university of jerusalem, israel in the context of the internet, the concept of ‘sharing’ is a central and powerful metaphor (john, 2013, 2016; kennedy, 2016). it reflects and constructs the ideal type of relations between users—relations based on honesty, mutuality and openness. however, the semantic spheres of meaning that give ‘sharing’ its contemporary force are profoundly western and rooted in the english language. the concept of ‘sharing’ as used in western social network sites (snss) ‘works’ because it appeals to a sense of equality, because it refers to the digital transfer of information, and because it is a cultural type of talk (carbaugh, 1989) through which we know ourselves and others; in other words, it appeals to a certain self and makes assumptions about how that self knows itself and maintains ties with others. this self has been defined as a ‘therapeutic self’ (füredi, 2004). yet this does not necessarily apply outside western cultures, raising the possibility that work on ‘sharing’ to date is western centric and should be dewesternized (see esp. park & curran, 2000; waisbord & mellado, 2014). indeed, as argued in cross-cultural pragmatics (wierzbicka, 2003), language encodes cultural differences; thus, even though american and chinese social media users appear to be doing more or less the same things online—posting content, writing messages, uploading videos, etc.—the fact that their participation has different names—sharing in the us, and fenxiang in china—implies that it may also have different meanings. fenxiang and gongxiang—the mandarin words for ‘sharing’—are central words in the context of chinese social media and have profound socio-cultural connotations, though different meanings and implications. with over 2,000 years of history, gongxiang is closely related to confucian thought and has been employed continuously by chinese rulers as the term for a political ideal of harmony, while at the same time it has more recently become the technical word for sharing in computing fields (time-sharing, file sharing, etc.). fenxiang, on the other hand, refers to sharing on an interpersonal level, its meaning having shifted from physical division to communication (somewhat like the english word ‘sharing’; see john, 2016). it has also come to refer to the communication of one’s feelings in the therapeutic mode, starting from when china began to import therapeutic practices from the west in the 1990s (hsuan-ying, 2018). given quite separate processes of language development, along with different construals of selfhood in the west and china (yan, 2017), we ask: what connotations do the mandarin equivalents of ‘sharing’ bring with them to the sphere of social media? how do they reflect the chinese context, and how, historically, have they come to discursively construct social media in china? following john’s (2013) study of changes to the word ‘sharing’ in english-language snss, this study also uses web archive analysis to understand the historical transformation and the current role and rhetoric of fenxiang and gongxiang in the context of the chinese internet. we used the wayback machine to gather historical data from 32 chinese snss to track changes to the deployment of fenxiang and gongxiang by the snss themselves in their self-descriptions and explanations of what one can do on the site. we first located the earliest archived front page of each sns, then downloaded screenshots through to may 2018. over 5,000 screenshots of those archived web pages were analyzed and coded. we find that the chinese translations for sharing—fenxiang and gongxiang—are indeed both keywords in chinese snss. since 2006, fenxiang has become the umbrella word to denote participation in snss, which overlaps with john’s findings about the word ‘sharing’ being adopted by snss most intensively around 2005-2007. most sites established after 2008 launched with fenxiang in their taglines or self-descriptions. its usage is close to sharing in western social media, and displays similar trends to ‘sharing’ in that over time it begins to appear with fuzzy objects of sharing, such as ‘your life’, and with no object of sharing (see john, 2013). gongxiang, on the other hand, which is the other translation for ‘sharing’, has a twofold meaning. while it is normally used for its technical meaning in contexts such as file-sharing, it is also deployed in snss’ mission statements regarding their ultimate goal of building a harmonious community. however, despite some similarities with the western notion of ‘sharing’, fenxiang and gongxiang actually draw on chinese versions of selfhood and relations between the self, others and society, as well as reflecting the interplay between the individual, social media, and the state (liu, 2011; yang, 2012; zhang, 2018). in both cases, our observations of ‘sharing’ on chinese snss resonate with the notion of “the divided self”, understood as the concomitance of a collectivist self and an individualized self in postreform china (kleinman et al., 2011), and relate to the deep roots of the words in mandarin. what we ultimately see in fenxiang/gongxiang is the convergence and mystification of social media platforms’ interests and responsibilities: chinese snss attempt to attract users while adhering to state discourses. positioned between the state and individual users, snss seek to maintain a harmonious cyberspace in compliance with the duty of corporate citizenship, while at the same time attracting users and motivating them to produce ever more content and data in accordance with the snss’ commercial aims. the rhetoric of fenxiang/gongxiang enables them to do just this. associated with positive values such as friendship, joy, wonder, and knowledge, the rhetoric of fenxiang encourages users to post positive content and to foster positive relationships. likewise, appropriated by the state as a political ideal of harmony, gongxiang extends desirable prospects but also unavoidable responsibilities to social media companies. while for users gongxiang represents a form of resource sharing, platforms adopt its rhetoric to display their compliance with the state. in this way, fenxiang and gongxiang become the lens through which to observe the subtlety, complexity and idiosyncrasies of the chinese internet. references carbaugh, d. (1989). fifty terms for talk: a cross-cultural study. in s. ting-toomey & f. korzenny (eds.), international and intercultural communication annual (vol. 13, pp. 93-120). füredi, f. (2004). therapy culture: cultivating vulnerability in an uncertain age. london: routledge. hsuan-ying, h. (2018). from psychotherapy to psycho-boom: a historical overview of psychotherapy in china. in d. e. scharff (ed.), psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in china (pp. 1-30). london: routledge. john, n. a. (2013). sharing and web 2.0: the emergence of a keyword. new media & society, 15(2), 167-182. doi:10.1177/1461444812450684 john, n. a. (2016). the age of sharing. cambridge: polity. kennedy, j. (2016). conceptual boundaries of sharing. information, communication & society, 19(4), 461-474. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2015.1115888 kleinman, a., yan, y., jun, j., lee, s., & zhang, e. (2011). deep china: the moral life of the person: univ of california press. liu, f. (2011). urban youth in china: modernity, the internet and the self. new york, london: routledge. park, m.-j., & curran, j. (2000). de-westernizing media studies: psychology press. shi-xu. (2014). chinese discourse studies. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. waisbord, s., & mellado, c. (2014). de-westernizing communication studies: a reassessment. communication theory, 24(4), 361-372. wierzbicka, a. (2003). cross-cultural pragmatics (2nd ed.). berlin, new york: mouton de gruyter. yan, y. (2017). doing personhood in chinese culture: the desiring individual, moralist self and relational person. the cambridge journal of anthropology, 35(2), 1-17. yang, g. (2012). a chinese internet? history, practice, and globalization. chinese journal of communication, 5(1), 49-54. zhang, l. (2018). cultivating the therapeutic self in china. medical anthropology, 37(1), 45-58. aoir2020-submission-revised final 389.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 kerr, a., barry, m. and kelleher, j. d. (2020, october). social expectations of ai and the performativity of ethics. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. social expectations of ai & the performativity of ethics prof. aphra kerr maynooth university dr. marguerite barry university college dublin prof. john d. kelleher technological university of dublin this paper explores societal expectations of artificial intelligence (ai) in the eu, the uk and ireland over the past decade. it combines analysis of public documents and a small-scale public survey to identify key actors, mechanisms and discourses shaping societal expectations of ai and driving the focus on ethics and ai. literature review this study is informed by the sociology of expectations within science and technology studies (sts). expectations are statements that say something about the future (pollock and williams, 2016, van lente, 2012, borup et al., 2006). formal expectation mechanisms include foresight and research prioritisation exercises deployed by governments, consultancy firms and companies to rationalise future innovation investment. informal expectations are “images, statements and prophecies” (van lente 2012:772) from experts and non-experts which circulate through social networks and the media. in the construction of expectations, different actors draw from, and add to, the repertoire of visions that shape the expectations around a technology and drive its innovation dynamic. previous studies identify three ‘forces’ of expectations: raising attention and legitimising investment; coordinating networks of companies and research institutions; and providing heuristic guidance and direction to research and innovation (van lente 2012: 773-774). expectations are ‘performative’ in the sense that they may prompt certain social actions. mackenzie (2008:17) distinguishes between two types of performativity: ‘generic’ performativity is when theoretical models, language or approaches are adopted but do not change things in practice, and ‘effective’ performativity is when the models, language or approaches make a difference in the real world. ai has had an undulating history of societal expectations and the current period can be viewed as a third period of growth in ai. as in each of the earlier cycles, it has a distinct technological trigger. this time the trigger is machine learning and big data. methodological framework this study used a mixed methods approach: a thematic analysis of public documents to identify the key actors, formal and informal mechanisms shaping societal expectations of ai and a small-scale public survey to explore public expectations of ai and ethics. using theoretical sampling we identified 41 documents on ai research and policy published by the ec or other actors in the uk and ireland since 2011. this sample included 7 types of actors: international consultancies (e.g. mckinsey); public agencies; academic and expert reports; public surveys; professional associations (e.g. ieee) and media statements by workers and whistle-blowers. a full list of the documents is available here. a face to face administered survey of 164 individuals visiting a science gallery provided an opportunity to explore expectations of ai and ethical ai amongst a sub-section of the public. respondents came from 25 different countries with diverse occupational backgrounds. more than half felt that they had some or good levels of familiarity with ai. findings our analysis identified a range of positive and negative expectations of ai and the emergence of a discourse on ethics and ai since 2016. the document analysis identified a narrow range of positive expectations including ‘cost reductions’ and increased ‘efficiency’ from ai innovations in services across formal consultancy, expert and government reports. a small number of international consultancies were influential in shaping core definitions and concepts. we also identified negative expectations of ai issued by whistle-blowers, the media and public surveys. these documents focussed on dataveillance, data misuse and the working conditions of content and community moderators. by 2016 formal public and professional reports directly addressed negative expectations of ai, and included efforts to develop ethical guidelines founded on european values and research on ethical ai. most offered little operational detail. significantly, the survey respondents’ expectations appeared to be shaped more by informal mechanisms including media stories and films rather than by formal mechanisms or everyday experience of using ai systems. they viewed automation and efficiency as both the top negative and positive aspects of ai. ai was viewed positively when it could be used to help or serve humans, but negatively when control was ceded to it. they were concerned with large scale societal impacts (e.g. job losses, dehumanisation and inequality) rather than everyday questions. further, respondents had difficulty conceptualising abstract ethical principles and values. they ranked privacy, transparency, safety and security as top ethical concerns but these issues varied by domain. they believed that it was possible to design ethical ai, but that both public and private actors should be responsible and accountable for negative ai impacts. discussion the sociology of expectations helps to identify the range of actors attempting to shape our expectations and the direction of ai innovation. there is currently a divergence between expectations of ai and current practices in its application. formal public and private sector documents are used to justify significant investment in ai, but they say little about the practical technical, social and ethical challenges faced in different contexts. the emergence of a significant discourse on ethics and ai in 2016 appears to be a response to high-profile stories about the misapplication and misuse of ai. our findings point to shared societal expectations that we can design ethical ai (or a european approach to ai) and that developers (especially academic ones) will behave ethically. however, ethics and ai is challenging. ethical issues are difficult to address in practice, they can vary from domain to domain, these is uncertainty about who should provide oversight, and it is unclear how to enforce accountability for negative impacts. if our scientifically literate or interested members of the public have difficulty grasping abstract ethical issues, we need to carefully consider how workers and the public will fare when tasked with designing, deploying and using these systems. societal expectations that we can create ‘ethical ai’ currently acts as a generic discourse for reassuring investors, governments and users. it is crucial that we move beyond this to effective solutions to specific challenges, including how data is used by ai systems, the conditions under which human workers develop and deploy ai, and the differentials impacts of ai systems on users. the gap between societal expectations of ethical ai in discourse and its practical development will remain until we accept the limitations of ai in complex social contexts and recognise that non-technological solutions, such as robust governance mechanisms and empowered human workers, are required to make ai work ethically. the latter is as much a social and regulatory question as an ethical one. a full paper is available in big data and society. references borup, m., brown, n., konrad, k. & van lente, h. 2006. the sociology of expectations in science and technology. technology analysis & strategic management, 18, 285-298. mackenzie, d. 2008. an engine, not a camera. how financial models shape markets, cambridge, ma, mit press. pollock, n. and williams, r. 2016. how industry analysts shape the digital future, oxford, oxford university press. van lente, h. 2012. navigating foresight in a sea of expectations: lessons from the sociology of expectations. technology analysis & strategic management, 24, 769-782. van lente, h., spitters, c. and peine, a. 2013. comparing technological hype cycles: towards a theory. technological forecasting and social change, 80, 16151628. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): heemsbergen, l., & molnar, a. (2019, october 2-5). vpns and encryption as boundary objects of the internet. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. vpns and encryption as boundary objects of the internet: (mis)trust in the translation(s) luke heemsbergen, deakin university adam molnar, waterloo university introduction how do users come to trust vpns? how do they understand end-to-end encrypted messaging technologies? how can we discern what these objects are as they tack back and forth between metaphor and technical processes to garner usership and critique? this paper aims to answer these questions by considering vpns and e2e encryption as boundary objects of the internet pertinent to a study of (dis)trust in the system. our aim is to follow star’s (2010: 603) clarification of boundary objects as entities that people act towards (or with) in relation to their own communities of practice. we follow star’s call to further explore the ‘tacking’ back and forth of such objects as both symbolic and technical objects within internet-space. our contribution adds to the literature in three ways, the first is empirical, unpacking vpns and e2e encryption as boundary objects, which is novel for the literature. the second is through an exegesis of boundary objects ‘on’ the internet to consider conceptualizing objects ‘of’ the internet, which opens a fruitful reconfiguration of star’s work for internet research. and lastly, it sheds light on the ways that competing and sometimes contradictory symbolic registers of technology have profound implications for socio-material practices online. existing research literature in the five years leading to this paper’s writing, citations to boundary objects have more than tripled in literatures categorized as communication and media studies, cultural studies, and film, television and digital media (dimensions 2019). this trajectory is owing to a revitalized consideration of the work of susan leigh star (see bowker et al., 2016) translated from science and technology studies, while also showing how the concept of boundary objects proves useful to conceptualize and configure the various experiential objects that come into existence via technological practices acted upon and through digital, networked and as consequence polysemic worlds. a sample of recent research utilizing boundary objects that is of interest to internet researches includes news and technology nexus in terms of process, participation and curation (lewis and usher, 2016), digitization and mixed document authorship (huvila, 2019), floss documentation (østerlund and crowston, 2019), humor online (gal, 2018), and charting discourses of power legitimization via competing images of the internet itself (shepherd, 2018). what is perhaps missing from this corpus is a distinction of and reflection on how these objects may be thought as of the internet; artefacts that are sung into existence from and through distinct online cultures, practices and needs of internet use(rs), as they tack back and forth between their technical ontologies and metaphorical claims. methodology for aoir we lend such research towards how such objects come to be (dis)trusted, and then policed and politicized (see rancière and corcoran, 2006: 29-30). in this way, the paper returns to the ethos of star’s work by considering a feminist approach to technology studies, which for star, linked lived experience, technologies, and silences (in olsen, 2007: 227) in ways that proved political. our work enables boundary objects to, more than explicate functional processes within communities, consider sociotechnical relationships made through them (star, 2010) and the extent that these objects are facilitative or inhibitory (fox, 2011) of cross-boundary communication. thus, our discussion considers: contexts from which a boundary object is embedded (commercial, cultural, etc), the ways in which it is interpreted, and explanations that assert some intrinsic or essential property of the object that explains its performance. our methods to do so present a ‘work in process’ that synthesize the strengths of discourse analysis for internet related phenomenon (brock, 2018) and the experiential phenomenological modes of inquiry that have more recently brought to life through walkthrough methods (light, burgess, & duguay, 2018). this is not to discount notable differences across apps and their effects; peculiarities of interface (poulsen, 2018) and affordances can have a profound impact on use cases and social outcomes. yet, (lack of) user interfaces in vpns demonstrate how infrastructural change ‘of’ the internet have effects that are not apparent to users in hci terms alone. discussion our work on encryption follows the polysemic tacking from math (cryptography); encryption as technical process (cryptanalysis); encryption in/as ecommerce; encryption activism; encryption as ‘going dark’; and encryption law. note here the tacking from technical to metaphorical, and then back to technical transverses and is transfigured through competing domains of power and meaning: we start in technical mathematics and computer science and end in technical legal scholarship. uncovered through this tacking are forces of politics and policing (rancière and corcoran, 2006) that shape and shift meaning making through communities of practice linked to the various interpretive objects identified. likewise for vpns we consider interpretations of the object as they flow through protocols (eg. sstp); virtual private networks as system; anonymity and privacy devices; speech acts; commercial/market ecosystems; malware. note here how issues of (dis)trust offer competing valences in respect to the object itself and the systems that the object is acting upon. how users interpret the object says much about how they situate trust in relation to the policing/political actions that the object acts upon. for instance, technical definitions of malware and some vpn products intermesh (ikram et al., 2016) on technical standpoints, while users (dis)trust each in dichotomous ways that uphold political-economic (or break down socio-political) systems. our discussion on vpns and encryption brings to light how users of internet objects come to trust them for what they are and what they do, and the extent these trusts are misplaced in relation to the connective polysemy (gal, 2018) that boundary objects provide as larger ecosystems. here, among other normative/political pressures, we again find a unique ability of internet-based boundary objects to ‘tack’ back and forth from abstract to technical in a way that concurrently translates meaning across communities to engender (mis)trust. for instance, trust in mathematics belies mistrust in application deployment, the existence of nefarious geopolitical actors, and so on. future work on a more systematic appraisal of discourses around these boundary objects, including public policy and market voices is warranted through extension of our methods. conclusion our work suggests the back and forth ‘tacking’ of abstract to concrete does not just manifest as a universal and singular, but is made manifest from multiple community vantage points. this complexification shows how digital objects of the internet feed and are fed by multiple use cases and relational practices across commercial, security, rights based, and identity practices that they underpin, undercut or act upon. users trusting the politics of one case may miss a need to police the other; we conclude by contextualizing these concerns for future research ‘of’ the internet. references bowker gc, timmermans s, clarke ae, et al. (2016) boundary objects and beyond: working with leigh star: mit press. brock, a. (2018). critical technocultural discourse analysis. new media & society, 20(3), 1012-1030. fox nj. (2011) boundary objects, social meanings and the success of new technologies. sociology 45(1): 70-85. gal n. (2018) ironic humor on social media as participatory boundary work. new media & society: 1461444818805719. huvila i. (2019) authoring social reality with documents: from authorship of documents and documentary boundary objects to practical authorship. journal of documentation 75(1): 44-61. ikram m, vallina-rodriguez n, seneviratne s, et al. (2016) an analysis of the privacy and security risks of android vpn permission-enabled apps. proceedings of the 2016 internet measurement conference. acm, 349-364. leigh star s. (2010) this is not a boundary object: reflections on the origin of a concept. science, technology, & human values 35(5): 601-617. lewis sc and usher n. (2016) trading zones, boundary objects, and the pursuit of news innovation: a case study of journalists and programmers. convergence 22(5): 543-560. light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881-900. olsen j-kb. (2007) philosophy of technology : 5 questions, [erscheinungsort nicht ermittelbar]: automatic press. østerlund c and crowston k. (2019) documentation and access to knowledge in online communities: know your audience and write appropriately? journal of the association for information science and technology. poulsen, s. v. (2018). becoming a semiotic technology–a historical study of instagram's tools for making and sharing photos and videos. internet histories, 2(1-2), 121139. rancière j and corcoran s. (2006) hatred of democracy: verso london. shepherd t. (2018) discursive legitimation in the cultures of internet policymaking. communication culture & critique 11(2): 231-246. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): siibak, a. & otsus, m. (2020, october). “you either love it immediately, or you hate it”. reflections and experiences of estonian employees with microchip implants. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “you either love it immediately, or you hate it” reflections and experiences of estonian employees with microchip implants andra siibak university of tartu marleen otsus university of tartu new applications and smart devices enable employers to collect enormous quantities of employees’ personal data and to do so within a reasonable time and with inexpensive means (ogriseg, 2017). in addition to prediction and flagging tools, remote monitoring and time-tracking, gamification and algorithmic management (mateescu & nguyen, 2019), for the last decade, employers have also experimented with the use of radio frequency identification (rfid) microchips as additional tools for monitoring employee activities (michael & michael, 2013; smith, 2008). in fact, research indicates that during the last decade employers around the world (e.g. usa, mexico, sweden, belgium, estonia) have started to implant employees with microchips (esfola, 2018; petersen 2019). initially microchips were used to track livestock and pet animals for their proper identification (khan, 2015). today, however, chips are being injected into human bodies worldwide for a variety of reasons, such as personal recreational use, research and medical applications (ip, michael & michael, 2008). although, scholars (gauttier, 2019) have referred to potential new benefits microchips provide, e.g. paying for purchasing, triggering computers and printers, opening doors, etc.; many different problems have also been identified; e.g. a persons’ privacy may severely be infringed upon (smith, 2008). thus, regardless the fact that some scholars (pierce et al. 2013) have argued, that in the workplace context employee surveillance and monitoring could actually lead to beneficially effects for the workplace in case the employees are aware of the surveillance; more recent studies (mousa 2015) suggest monitoring can lead to the increase of stressors for the employees and thereby decrease workplace morale. even though scholars have theorized upon different ethical and legal concerns (rodriguez, 2019; ogriseg, 2017) regarding employee microchipping, empirical scholarship (petersen, 2019) which would reflect upon the experiences and opinions of microchipped employees themselves is still currently lacking. thus, as pointed out by irp, michael and michael (2008), there is not enough insights about the opportunities and risks microchipped employees associate with the technology. in order to fill this gap in literature, in autumn 2019, we decided to carry out semistructured individual interviews with microchipped employees (n=14) from six different organizations in estonia so as to explore their reasoning for accepting microchip implants from their employers and the potential benefits and problems they associate with the technology. relying on the diffusion of innovations theory (doi) by everett rogers (1962 [2003]) the current presentation aims to trace the five steps of the innovation-decision process our interviewed employees underwent when adopting to microchip implants. we decided to rely on rogers’ (2003) theory as it has become a popular theoretical framework in the area of technology diffusion and adoption (ismail, 2006; stuart, 2000; dooley, 1999). participants in our sample were found through a snowballing method. first, we contacted the two organisations who have gathered some media attention due to their microchipping practice and requested the management to distribute our invitation to contribute to our study. our final sample consisted of 11 males and 3 females (n=14), all of whom had been carrying microchip implants in their hand from 6 months up to four years, with a median of two years. our analysis indicates that social reinforcement from one’s colleagues played an important role in the formation of attitudes and beliefs our interviewees acquired about microchip implants. in fact, innovators within one’s organization, were considered most influential for spreading awareness and knowledge about the microchips. the ease of use and the opportunity to carry the chip on oneself at all times were perceived as the main relative advantages of the microchip implants. at the same time, some interviewees believed the innovation to be compatible not only with their own individual needs and values but also with the existing values and overall culture of their organisations. in short, our interviews also reveal a strong element of homophily existing within the social system both on the organisational as well as interpersonal levels. for example, employees who decided to get a microchip implant were considered to be more loyal and dedicated as well as more in sync with the overall goals and values of the organisation; whereas the employees who rejected the innovation were viewed as less motivated and not as invested in their organisatios. although social reinforcement by colleagues played an important role in their decisions, all our interviewees stressed that they were voluntary adopters of the innovation i.e. they perceived the idea of implanting a microchip to be the result of their own free will and did not feel pressured by anyone. furthermore, our interviewees were totally unconcerned about the potential problems microchips could pose and wholeheartedly believed in the value of trade-off between convenience and privacy, referring to the negativity and scepticism they had experiences as “irrational paranoia”. still, all our interviewees believed that microchipping should always be a voluntary thing and no employee should ever be persuaded or pressured into getting a microchip by their employer. references esfola, m. j. p. (2018). bar coded at work. an analysis of the european privacy and data protection legal frameworks regarding the hypothetical use of rfid implants for workers’ surveillance, university of tilburg. gauttier, s. (2019). ‘i've got you under my skin’ – the role of ethical consideration in the (non-)acceptance of insideables in the workplace. technology in society. doi:10.1016/j.techsoc.2018.09.008 ip, r., michael, k. & michael, m. g. (2008). the social implications of humancentric chip implants: a scenario `thy chipdom come, thy will be done'. collaborative electronic commerce technology and research (pp. 1-11). spain: ieee computer society. mateescu, a. & nguyen, a. (2019). workplace monitoring & surveillance. available from: https://datasociety.net/wpcontent/uploads/2019/02/ds_workplace_monitoring_surveillance_explainer.pdf (accessed 15.07.2019). michael, k. & michael, m. g. (2013). the future prospects of embedded microchips in humans as unique identifiers: the risks versus the rewards. media, culture & society, 35(1): 78 –86. doi: 10.1177/0163443712464561 moussa, m. (2015). monitoring employee behaviour through the use of technology and issues of employee privacy in america. sage open, 5(2). ogriseg, c. (2017). gdpr and personal data protection in the employment context. labour & law issues. doi:10.6092/issn.2421-2695/7573 petersen, m. (2019). the swedish microchipping phenomenon. london: emerald. rodriguez, d. a. (2019). chipping in at work: privacy concerns related to the use of body microchip (rfid) implants in the employer-employee context. iowa law review, 104(3):1581–1611 rogers, e. (2003). diffusion of innovations. new york: free press. smith, c. (2008). human microchip implantation. journal of technology management & innovation, 3(3): 151-160. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation: halegoua, g. & lingel, j. (2017, october 18-21). invisibility and hypervisibility: failures of imagination in urban broadband networks. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. invisibility and hypervisibility: failures of imagination in urban broadband networks germaine halegoua university of kansas jessa lingel university of pennsylvania introduction connectivity has become a hallmark of post-industrial society, with both corporate leadership and policy makers promoting social cohesion through online access. this ethos of connectivity typically manifests in “digital divide” initiatives, where policymakers are often concerned with the supply-side of internet access in the form of infrastructure efforts or computing centers. as a whole, digital divide initiatives have been critiqued for the determinist implication that simply providing online access can overcome a complex array of structural inequalities (graham, 2011; warschauer & ames, 2010). more narrowly, policies about internet access as a public good are not just about providing a resource, but about making that resource visible, usable and accessible. in our investigation of urban internet access projects as invisible versus hypervisible, we examine how imaginations of internet access and modes of infrastructure control critically reshape both the meaning of public and of connection. we approach the study of connectivity as a public good through the juxtaposition of inactive networks that are buried under the streets and have always been “turned off, ” with activated networks that are “turned on” and prominently displayed on city streets. in our consideration of invisible connection, we focus on “dark fiber” networks that are purposefully constructed as inactive and are effectively invisible. in contrast, we consider wifi enabled digital kiosks that provide free internet access to pedestrians, drawing attention to the public-ness of infrastructure provision. these case studies highlight the shifting parameters of inclusion in both imagined urban communities and imagined internet publics. through an ethnographic and archaeological analysis of hypervisible and invisible networks, this project investigates what is at stake in “our digital rights to the city” (shaw & graham, 2017). dark fiber dark fiber refers to privately-owned fiber optic networks that have always been “dark” or “turned off.” throughout the 1990s, telecommunications companies were contracted to lay internet-ready cables across the united states, and many companies over-invested in anticipation of increased public demand. in metropolitan areas across the us, only a fraction of the installed cable is activated. although members of the public are often ignorant of dark fiber until it is lit, these networks are not entirely forgotten. on the contrary, these fiber networks are for sale or lease to internet service providers (isps) who can light and extend them for residential, commercial, or government use. broadband activists are enthusiastic about the potential of dark fiber for more equitable internet provision (crawford, 2016), although the purchase of dark fiber networks for public use is still rare. recent federal “dig once” policies and high-profile smart city initiatives have generated attention to city streets as spaces where technologies for internet access need to be installed anew, rather than a space that has already been outfitted with digital infrastructure that just needs to be turned on. the persistent invisibility of dark fiber networks alongside highly visible initiatives that frame city streets as sites for digital access, complicate institutional investments and understandings of public connectivity. if the streets are already paved with digital infrastructure, why not invest in activating these networks? why choose to keep these networks “turned off” and what are the understandings of internet access that drive these decisions? linknyc in 2016, new york city (in partnership with companies like qualcomm and google) transformed 7500 of the city’s payphones into a mutli-faceted hub of digital technology support. linknyc kiosks (called links) are free to use and originally provided four key functions free of charge: a usb charger, a wifi hotspot, phone calls (provided by vonage) and a web browser. within six weeks of their launch, links became controversial, largely because of the free web browser. reports emerged about people watching porn and playing loud music late at night. residents and shops complained about homeless people hanging out in front of links for hours. a distinctly moral dimension emerged in this battle over legitimate versus illegitimate uses of links, where the manhattan borough president “likened turning off the browsers to the decision during the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s to block pay phones from accepting calls” (mcgeehan, 2016). eventually, linknyc bowed to pressure to address the perceived misuse of its services, and has shut off the web browsers while they work with the city to find a solution. research questions and methodological approach influenced by theories of infrastructure and urban media archaeology our project maps both the physical and discursive infrastructures of dark fiber and linknyc in order to identify policy challenges and identify how publics are imagined in urban environments. our analysis is guided by several key questions: • dark fiber networks and corporate-supported wifi kiosks both require the privatization of public connectivity. in comparing invisible and hypervisible wifi networks, what are the implications of blurring boundaries between public utilities and private ownership? • what policies and imaginations of public connectivity allow a wealth of dormant networks to remain “off”? how do these policies compare to those that shape the design and activation of hyper-visible digital access points? • are either of these cases really serving urban communities? if so, which populations and uses are imagined as part of these publics? in both case studies, we concentrate on the class-based encodings and the privatization of public space and utilities. we argue that these encodings reconfigure how the internet and the city street are and are not public, who is supposed to be using these utilities, and who gets to decide their use. we employ multiple methods to study infrastructural entanglements or the ways that digital infrastructures become embedded within physical and social environments. in particular, we combine mattern’s (2015) “urban media archaeology” with parks’ (2013) call for mapping and fieldwork for exploring materialist histories and infrastructure ownership models. in addition, we conduct ethnographies of infrastructure (see star (1999) and larkin (2013)), which account for different socio-cultural conditions that shape meaning, affect, and experience of infrastructure. our project compares maps and master plans for dark fiber networks and links in the new york metropolitan region with demographic data about the areas in which these networks are installed. we have already conducted on-the-street interviews with link users while web browsers were still available. moving forward, we will re-visit these sites, as well as sites where dark fiber is buried under the sidewalk. at its root, these debates are about two kinds of publics: who gets to use the internet and who gets to use the street, where the stakes involve thinking about what kinds of behaviors are viewed as appropriate, and whose uses will win as this technology stabilizes. as dark fiber networks lay in wait for institutions who can pay to turn them on, the space beneath urban streets are filled with potential public connectivity controlled by private entities. by analyzing linknyc as a public spectacle of connectivity and the buried potential of dark fiber networks, this paper re-envisions the street as a contentious space where the constitution of publics, both as civic and as internet users, are discerned and debated. references crawford, s. (2016). you didn’t notice it, but google fiber just began the golden age of high-speed internet access. backchannel. retrieved from http://bit.ly/2knp4kw graham, m. (2011). time machines and virtual portals: the spatialities of the digital divide. progress in development studies, 11(3), 211-227. larkin, b. (2013). the politics and poetics of infrastructure. annual review of anthropology, 42(1), 327–43. mattern, s. (2015). deep mapping the city. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. mcgeehan, p. (2016, sept. 16). free wi-fi kiosks were to aid new yorkers. an unsavory side has spurred a retreat. the new york times. retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/15/nyregion/internet-browsers-to-be-disabled-onnew-yorks-free-wi-fi-kiosks.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphoneshare&_r=0 parks, l. (2013). earth observation and signal territories: studying u.s. broadcast infrastructure through historical network maps, google earth, and fieldwork. canadian journal of communication, 38, 285–307. shaw, j. & graham, m. (eds.) (2017). our digital rights to the city. london: meatspace press. star, s. (1999). the ethnography of infrastructure. american behavioral scientist, 43(3), 382-391. warschauer, m., & ames, m. (2010). can one laptop per child save the world's poor?. journal of international affairs, 64(1), 33-51. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): standlee, a. (2020, october). under the watchful eye: users’ perceptions of online privacy and surveillance. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. under the watchful eye: users’ perceptions of online privacy and surveillance alecea standlee, ph.d. gettysburg college, united states of america introduction this project seeks to contribute to the question, “how do internet users navigate data privacy in a digitally surveilled online world?” i augment this ongoing discussion by examining the perceptions and practices concerning privacy and self-representation in digital spaces among young adults, 18-22. this qualitative work utilizes in-depth interviews of college students in the united states to collect both behavioral and attitudinal patterns. specifically, i consider the impact of the strategic interventions of corporate and governmental platforms to collect, distribute, and utilize individual level data on research participants’ information consumption, individual identity representation, and group affiliation. a preliminary analysis of the data finds participants engage in narrative rationalizations to help them navigate the cultural expectations of online engagement within a surveilled environment. patterns of strategic selfrepresentation are shaped by such rationalizations and justifications, including a fundamental shift in what the concept “privacy” means in an online world. review of the literature this cross-disciplinary work is situated within sociological social psychology and communication theory frameworks that consider the techno-mediated cultural integration of contemporary culture (bazarova, 2014). much existing scholarship focuses on privacy literacy, which identifies the degree to which social media participants, in particular young adults, understand the ways in which surveillance occurs (choi, park & yung, 2018). other work focuses on shifting social practices, and details how communication technologies are embedded in daily social life (trepte, 2015). scholars have identified significant consequences to this embedment, including specific transformations in the experience of privacy and surveillance among diverse populations (engle, 2013). privacy and technological interventions into “private life” are of concern to researchers, who focus on the relationship between technological communication and intimate social life (lambert, 2013). this project seeks to contribute to emerging scholarship on the social impacts of market-driven data collection and digital surveillance in the economically developed world (delli carpini, 2019; milne, 2015). the intersection of these two areas of scholarship has the potential to give us a better understanding of not only how young adults perceive and manage online privacy, but also the cultural and policy implications of data privacy rights. methods working with two student researchers during the 2018-2019 academic year, we conducted semi-structured interviews of undergraduate college students to collect behavioral and attitudinal data about their online behaviors. specifically, the interviews focused on how students manage privacy and self-representation online, within a culture of digital surveillance. research questions included: 1. to what degree do college students understand contemporary patterns of corporate and governmental surveillance as a part of their online social world? 2. what strategic usage patterns, regarding platforms and information distribution, are impacted by individual level understanding(s) and expressions of the concept of privacy? the 70 interviews were comprised of college students age 18-22. participants were 59% women, 37% men, and 4% “other.” additionally, 72% identified as white, and 28% as non-white. the interviews lasted between 45 and 90 minutes long, averaging one hour. data was transcribed, coded, and analyzed to identify narrative patterns. findings the participants of this study live within a complex techno-social environment, shaped by both end-user expectations and profit-driven corporate frameworks. they expressed feelings of connection and intimacy, engaged in interactional social processes, and conformed and resisted social norms. in short, they participated in genuine social interactions and cultural production, online. yet this environment is situated within a profit-driven data collection and marketing system that provides detailed and comprehensive information to governments, corporate industries, political organizations, and many other interested parties. individual experiences and social networks online coexisting within a profit-driven and governmental surveillance marketplace result in complex social norms and individual responses. due to recent journalistic visibility, participants found themselves to be increasingly informed about the nature of online surveillance and their own position within the system. as with any system, response and management of this information varied, but common themes emerged. student research participants discussed their use of privacy controls and risk assessment in their self-disclosure. when structural controls were perceived to be inadequate or excessively restricting by the students, the behavioral controls took a rhetorical turn. participants rationalized their responses to surveillance and privacy, redefining and adapting their perceptions of the concepts to create a positive self-narrative. this project identified four key patterns: • participants are conscious of surveillance online but not always clear who is watching. the audience is generally perceived to be other end-users. while there is an awareness of corporate or governmental surveillance, it is less well understood. • how participants make sense of surveillance varies. typical responses include rejecting the idea that surveillance happens to them, the idea that such surveillance is desirable as a form of protection, apathy at the system, or the development of strategies for personal data management. • adaptive strategies to online surveillance frequently emerged in which participants engage in strategic self-presentation, platform management and controls, or working within the system. • other participants engaged in resistance. strategies typically take the form of “messing” with the system or withdrawal. this project found that the greater participants awareness of data collection, the more they desired to manage access to their personal data. specifically, participants who indicated the highest awareness typically responded with adaptive strategies to online surveillance. these strategies include creating a carefully controlled online identity to fit a particular self-representation narrative, limited posting and sharing of information, or using vpns and web browser controls to limit data collection. often, they used a combination. other participants discussed resistance stratagems to maintain online privacy, but did so with a sense of fatalism, acknowledging them to be largely ineffective with current us public policies. this qualitative project is limited in scope and is not intended to be perceived as generalizable. however, it does suggest that we are in the midst of a significant cultural transformation around the experience of privacy, and the acceptance of organizational surveillance. research participants seem to create a conceptual understanding of privacy rooted in the strategic control of information. this transformation is just the latest example of how the internet continues to reshape contemporary culture, online and off. such transformations must be addressed by scholars and policy makers in order to provide a framework for institutional and governmental bodies. references bazarova, n. n., & choi, y. h. (2014). “self-disclosure in social media: extending the functional approach to disclosure motivations and characteristics on social network sites.” journal of communication, 64(4), 635–657. retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12106. choi, h., park, j., & jung, y. (2018). “the role of privacy fatigue in online privacy behavior.” computers in human behavior, 81, 42–51. retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.12.001. delli carpini, m. (2019). digital media and democratic futures (first edition). philadelphia, pennsylvania: university of pennsylvania press. engel, m. (2013). what should go on the internet?: privacy, freedom, and security online (updated edition). dayton, ohio: national issues forums. lambert, a. (2013). intimacy and friendship on facebook (2013 edition). houndmills, basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. milne, g. (2015). digital privacy in the marketplace: perspectives on the information exchange (first edition). new york, new york: business expert press. trepte, s. (2015). “social media, privacy, and self-disclosure: the turbulence caused by social media’s affordances.” social media + society, 1(1). retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115578681. aoir2018-submission napoli updated abstract revised selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 how is social media gatekeeping different? a multiplatform comparative analysis of the new york times peter andringa duke university david duquette duke university deborah l. dwyer university of north carolina at chapel hill philip m. napoli duke university petra ronald microsoft research introduction news audiences are fragmented across different media platforms (pew research center, 2016). consequently, individual news organizations simultaneously disseminate their content across different media. each of these media has different user bases, interface characteristics, and distribution systems. given these substantial differences, the dynamics of the gatekeeping process – and the news values that guide this process – vary across different media technologies/platforms. as audience attention migrates from older to newer platforms (such as social media), it is important that we understand how the nature of the news that is disseminated – and thus consumed – may be different from the news disseminated through more traditional means. this study addresses these issues through a comparative gatekeeping analysis of the new york times. for this case study, two month’s worth of times front page, home page, and facebook page story output was comparatively analyzed across dimensions such as story quantity, story duplication, hard versus soft news, and content diversity, in suggested citation (apa): andringa,p., duquette,d., dwyer,d, napoli,p., ronald,p. (2018, october 10-13 hatred of/and democracy: how is social media gatekeeping different? a multiplatform comparative analysis of the new york times. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. an effort to determine how the nature of the news that is prioritized for news consumers differs between the social media context and older contexts. the times provides an interesting cross-media comparison. for its decision-making regarding which of the over 300 stories produced each day to post to facebook, the times utilizes a self-developed bot called blossom, which “predicts how articles or blogposts will do on social and also suggests which stories editors should promote by drawing from enormous stores of data, including information on story content and performance metrics such as facebook post engagement” (wang, 2015; ellett, 2017). journalism scholars, critics, and industry professionals have raised concerns about the diffusion of algorithmic decision-making into various aspects of the production, dissemination, and consumption of journalism (bell & owen, 2017). however, largely absent from these discussions have been comparative empirical analyses that examine if/how algorithmically assisted editorial outcomes differ from traditional, humangenerated editorial outcomes. research questions rq1: to what extent do the number of stories displayed differ across the times’ front page, home page, and facebook page? rq2: to what extent is there story duplication across the times’ front page, home page, and facebook page? rq3: how do the times front page, home page, and facebook page differ in terms of their ratios of hard to soft news? rq4: how does story type diversity differ across the times’ front page, home page, and facebook page? method two month’s worth of story metadata was gathered from the times’ and facebook apis in the spring of 2018. only stories appearing on the front page, home page, or the main times facebook page were included in the analysis, under the logic that each of these contexts represents a mechanism to showcase the most relevant news of the day. for each story, the metadata includes the section in which the story appears in the print/online version of the paper, as well as story abstracts. these story section categories serve as the basis for the diversity analysis. story abstracts were content analyzed by a trained coder using established criteria for categorizing individual stories as either hard or soft news. intercoder reliability, utilziing krippendorff’s alpha, was .86. results rq1: number of stories table 1: number of stories by platform platform stories avg. stories/day front page 1085 18.08 home page 2162 36.03 facebook page 3152 52.53 6399 rq2: story duplication table 2: story duplication platform percentage (n=4332) front page only 5.79 home page only 19.55 facebook page only 36.66 front page and home page 1.89 front page and facebook page 7.64 home page and facebook page 18.74 front page, home page, and facebook page 9.72 rq3: hard/soft news table 3: hard versus soft news platform hard news (%) soft news (%) front page (n=1085) 80.97ac 19.03 home page (n=2139*) 74.57bc 25.43 facebook page (n=3219*) 74.87ab 25.13 χ2 = 19.1747 (p < .01) * only individual stories were coded as hard/soft articles like daily briefings and news quizzes are not included in the above numbers. a t = 4.10, p < .01. b t = .25, p > .05. c t = 4.07, p < .01. rq4: story diversity table 4: top four story type concentration ratios platform story category share (%) front page (n=1085) u.s. 27.94 world 19.30 business 10.94 new york 9.38 total: 67.56ab home page (n=2192) u.s. 20.48 world 13.32 opinion 11.82 business 7.44 total: 53.06ac facebook page (n=3246) u.s. 22.40 world 17.71 business 7.64 opinion 6.87 total: 54.62bc a t = 7.92; p < .01. b t = 7.48; p < .01. c t = 1.13; p > 05. table 5: story type diversity across platforms platform hhi front page 1360.78 home page 791.94 facebook page 920.98 conclusion to summarize, the new york times showcases almost as many stories per day via facebook as it does on its front page and home page combined. from a duplication standpoint, less than ten percent of the stories analyzed appear across all three platforms, indicating that, as gatekeeping mechanisms for showcasing the most newsworthy content, these platforms are operating somewhat differently in terms of individual story selection. from a hard/soft news standpoint, the times home page and facebook page were equivalent in maintaining a proportion of about 75% hard news; compared with about 80% for the front page. these results contradict the notion (at least within the context of the times) that social media-disseminated news is likely to have a softer orientation than news showcased on other platforms. the degree of consistency across platforms suggests a fairly uniform commitment to hard news, even if the specific stories showcased differ across platforms. finally, in terms of story type diversity, the times home page exhibits the greatest story type diversity, followed closely by the facebook page. far less story type diversity was exhibited on the times front page, suggesting that a narrower set of news values is being employed there in terms of the types of stories, subject matter-wise, that merit showcasing. that being said, the most prominent story types are fairly consistent across platforms. going forward, it would be useful to build on this case study of a single news organization and conduct an analysis that applies this methodology to a large sample of publications. such an expansion (if it were extensive enough) would allow for the investigation of whether outlet characteristics (organizational size, revenue model, ownership characteristics, etc.) bear a significant relationship to any of the crossplatform content similarities and differences investigated here. references bell, e., & owen, t. (2017). the platform press: how silicon valley reengineered journalism. retrieved from https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/platform press-how-silicon-valley-reengineered-journalism.php ellett, j. (2017, july 27). new ai-based tools are transforming social media marketing. forbes. retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnellett/2017/07/27/new ai-based-tools-are-transforming-social-media-marketing/#459b0c8169a2 pew research center (2016). the modern news consumer. retrieved from http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/the-modern-news-consumer/ wang, s. (2015, august 13). the new york times built a slack bot to help decide which stories to post to social media. nieman lab. retrieved from http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/08/the-new-york-times-built-a-slack-bot-to-help decide-which-stories-to-post-to-social-media/ selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): newton, g. (2020, october). the ‘search-for method’: examining instances of support in facebook groups for donor-conceived people. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the ‘search-for method’: examining instances of support in facebook groups for donor-conceived people giselle newton university of new south wales, australia introduction this work in progress outlines the ‘search-for method’, a practical user-led tool for discussing instances of participation in facebook groups. this paper reports on initial findings from applying the ‘search-for method’ to semi-structured interviews with administrators and members (n=30) of facebook groups for donor-conceived people from across australia. more specifically, i examine how the tool enabled participants to lead discussion around social aspects of support and discuss how their support needs changed over time. the interviews focused on facebook groups for donor-conceived people, make up one component of a multi-method doctoral study exploring australian donor-conceived adults’ experiences, views and support needs. background there are estimated to be 20,000-60,000 donor-conceived people in australia. limited research has been conducted internationally that foregrounds the perspectives of donor-conceived people and few empirical studies have explored the meanings ascribed to negotiating everyday life as a donor-conceived adult. social media platforms have provided new opportunities for donor-conceived people to access information about gamete donors, the biological relatives of donors, and donor siblings. within the field of donor conception, recent studies have explored how media platforms are being used to link donor siblings through donor sibling registries (hertz & nelson, 2018) and facebook groups for mothers of donor-conceived children (andreassen, 2018). however, limited research has considered the role of peer support and communitybuilding between donor-conceived people in online contexts. with the advent of facebook groups for donor-conceived people over a decade ago, this study considers how donor-conceived people create supportive relationships with peers through social media and how this form of social support may contribute to donor-conceived people’s health and wellbeing. the ‘search-for method’ the ‘search-for method’ was designed as a tool for qualitative interviews and involves inviting participants to search for their name in the search bar of a facebook group, thereby retrieving data of all instances they have posted in the group. participants are asked to scroll through retrieved posts and narrate what they recall about specific instances. the interviewer may probe the participant to discuss reactions, comments, suggestions or support from other members of the group and elaborate on how other members’ responses made them feel. this method builds on approaches to user-led platform exploration in qualitative research such as the ‘walkthrough method’ (light et al., 2018), a practical tool for systematically mapping applications and the ‘media goalong method’(jørgensen, 2016), a mobile ethnographic method in which participants verbally sketch an online environment as they navigate it. in the same vein, the ‘scroll back method’ by robards & lincoln (2017) is an approach to examining participants’ digital traces longitudinally via their facebook timelines. the ‘search-for method’, described in this paper, adapts the ‘scroll back method’ from a method to explore individual histories on facebook timelines to a method for examining how individual’s experiences of facebook groups are shaped by other members. applying the ‘search-for’ method to facebook groups for donor-conceived people in this study, the semi-structured interviews began with general discussion about the facebook groups for donor-conceived, exploring participants’ impressions of and contributions to these groups. the ‘search-for method’ was adopted in the final stage of interviews as a tool for eliciting concrete examples of participation in the groups with the aim of investigating how support was enacted by peers. while donor-conceived members of facebook groups have diverse needs, common concerns that arise in facebook groups for donor-conceived people include queries about how to find donors or donor siblings, how to interpret dna connections from commercial dna testing platforms, how to navigate relationships with newfound genetic relatives and how to reform policy and legislation on donor conception. as the needs of donor-conceived people shift over time, the ways members use facebook groups change accordingly. in the interviews, participants scrolled through their digital archives narrating personal stories from different periods throughout their membership in the group. the ‘search-for method’ enabled the participant and researcher, as co-analysts, to track and examine specific instances of participation and interaction in the group. more broadly, this approach illustrated how individual and collective donor-conceived identities emerged and evolved with and through online group platforms. in doing so, it provided a framework for understanding sociality between peers longitudinally. empowering participants to lead interviews; protecting participant privacy user-led methods for platform exploration, such as the ‘search-for method’, empower participants to lead the discussion of their experiences and disrupt the hierarchy between researcher and participant in the interview setting. like many closed facebook groups, facebook groups for donor-conceived people have rules governing the sharing of information posted. in the ‘search-for method’, the researcher is not directly accessing the group, rather the experiences participants share are up to their discretion, allowing them to retain ownership over their digital data. by scrolling through content on their own device, participants could decide how to frame their own stories of support and whether to disclose sensitive information or omit experiences they did not wish to discuss. this sense of control is particularly important in research on sensitive issues and has been found to be beneficial in research with young people (albury & byron, 2016; marston, 2019). however, at times scrolling can be confronting when upsetting or forgotten memories are recalled, or when digital traces do not align with the participants recollection (robards & lincoln, 2017). thus, researchers must take additional care in relation to the kinds of probing undertaken in interviews and have briefing and debriefing protocols in place with information on services participants can access if they experience discomfort or distress. conclusion facebook groups represent an important resource for donor-conceived peers to access information, seek advice and share their experiences with their peers. this paper has outlined the ‘search-for method’, a practical approach to analysing participation and interactions on facebook groups longitudinally. in this paper the ‘search-for method’ was applied to the context of facebook groups for donor-conceived people to determine how participants made sense of their digital archives and reflected on the social support available through facebook groups. through employing the ‘search-for method’, the participants and researcher were able to co-analyse concrete instances in which they reached out to the group and the set of responses and reactions to their post. this paper contributes to understandings of how digital affinities and peer intimacies develop in facebook groups longitudinally. references albury, k., & byron, p. (2016). safe on my phone? same-sex attracted young people’s negotiations of intimacy, visibility, and risk on digital hook-up apps. social media + society, 2(4), 205630511667288. andreassen, r. (2018). mediated kinship: gender, race and sexuality in donor families. routledge. hertz, r., & nelson, m. k. (2018). random families: genetic strangers, sperm donor siblings, and the creation of new kin. oxford university press. jørgensen, k. m. (2016). the media go-along: researching mobilities with media at hand. mediekultur: journal of media and communication research, 32(60), 18. light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881–900. marston, k. (2019). researching lgbt+ youth intimacies and social media: the strengths and limitations of participant-led visual methods. qualitative inquiry, 11. robards, b., & lincoln, s. (2017). uncovering longitudinal life narratives: scrolling back on facebook. qualitative research, 17(6), 715–730. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): wilken, r., humphreys, l., polson, e., norum, r., witteborn, s., halegoua, g., frith, j., richter, j. (2020, october). digital placemaking. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. panel abstract: digital placemaking rowan wilken rmit university lee humphreys cornell university erika polson university of denver roger norum university of oulu saskia witteborn the chinese university of hong kong germaine halegoua university of kansas jordan frith clemson university jacob richter clemson university this panel introduces and critically examines the concept of “digital placemaking” as practices that create emotional attachments to place through digital media use. as populations and the texts they produce become increasingly mobile, such practices are proliferating, and a striking array of applications and uses have emerged which exploit the affordances of mobile media to foster an ability to navigate, understand, connect to, and gain a sense of belonging and familiarity in place. the concept of digital placemaking is both a theoretical and applied response to the spatial fragmentation, banal physical environments, and community disintegration thought to have accompanied the speed and scale of globalization. the increasing mobility of people, goods and services, information, and capital contribute to the impression of a world in flux where the “space of flows” dominates the “space of places,” while at the more personal scale, multiplying public and private uses of digital media have produced varied discourses on the potential for these practices to dissociate or liberate users from co-present environments. the implication of these perspectives is that our collective sense of place has been disrupted, leaving people unsure of their belonging within conditions and boundaries that seem increasingly fluid. while it is imperative to attend to the shifting social, economic, and political conditions that give rise to such concerns, it is also necessary to recognize the many ways people actually use digital media to negotiate differential mobilities and become placemakers. papers in this panel address the concept of digital placemaking through a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives to investigate the lived experiences of assorted communities with disparate social and economic power. with contributions from scholars working in media, communication, anthropology, and information studies, we demonstrate how digital media can facilitate social and geographic boundary crossing while encouraging new ways of placing ourselves—symbolically, virtually, or through co-located presence. the panel demonstrates how digital media constitute new methods for experiencing physical locations, expressing differential mobilities, and how users participate in narrating a sense of place into being. two papers directly address placemaking in terms of how digital media participants experience physical places. adopting a theoretical approach to analysis of digital media, “communicating place” interrogates cresswell’s theories of place as applied to three prominent mobile media platforms: instagram, snapchat, and waze. this presentation sets the foundation for the remainder of the panel by exploring the ways that place is something continually enacted and negotiated across multiple levels of digital media engagement. next, “placemaking ‘experiences’” explores strategies that airbnb “experiences” hosts employed to effectively move their experiences online during the first months of the covid19 lockdowns. the authors locate the embodied role of the local ‘host’ as key to connecting people to digital place. linking the focus on distinctive engagements with digital media to expressing mobilities of marginalized or underrepresented populations is “digital place as preemptive measure” and “korean foreign travel selfies.” the first paper engages with the tension between migrant agency in place-making and the datafication of the migrant and migration processes. practices like biometric registration and visual tracing on social media locate the migrant in physical, social, and legal place. databases, social media profiles, and computational analytics create narratives that arrest “mobility” as a geospatial certainty through the logics of identification and location. in the latter paper, the author argues that when read as digital placemaking practices, selfies become salient to producers and audiences as political expressions of one’s place in the world. their article re-examines the selfie as an empowering, mobile means for producing place-identity and spatial habitus among korean females travelling alone abroad despite misogynistic reactions to these young females’ experiences of mobility and globalization. the final paper unites the panel’s themes by addressing mobile experiences of locations through digital storytelling as artistic, oppositional, and pedagogical practice. in “reconstructing place,” authors examine how students utilize the locative media app, geotourist, to encourage others to experience their campus through participatory counternarratives, or the ability to use locative media for new forms of digital placemaking that counter dominant histories and dominant stories told about a place. the unique yet interrelated conditions of mobility addressed here focus on the matrix of mobile technologies, mobile texts, and processes of large-scale as well as personal movements. by focusing on issues surrounding mobile rights and risks associated with migration, creative tactics within the social and mobile media of travelers, and contested mobilities based on social power and access to digital infrastructures, we illustrate the breadth and depth of the theoretical contributions of our digital placemaking framework. drawing from a diversity of approaches and methods, each paper illustrates how utilizing digital placemaking to research global and local experiences of place uncovers novel socio-cultural-technical tactics and forces that coordinate, govern, and express mobilities within digital infrastructures and imaginaries. communicating place through mobile social media – materiality, meaning, practice rowan wilken rmit university lee humphreys cornell university introduction within media and communication scholarship, place has come to be regarded as a somewhat problematic yet compelling and still very relevant concept. while our experience of place has long been understood as having been transformed by our use of media and communications technologies (meyrowitz 1985), place, at the same time, remains of enduring importance, and is regarded more recently as especially important for understanding our engagement with mobile technologies. ethnographic and phenomenological studies of mobile devise use practices have demonstrated “the significance of mobile technologies in asserting the importance of place as both a geoimaginary and socio-cultural precept” (hjorth, 2008, p. 93). indeed, as the philosopher jeff malpas points out, the mobile device “is as much tied to place as any other phenomenon, and what it brings about is not a separation from place, but rather a change in the way place is experienced, or better, in the particular way in which place is configured, and the modes of engagement that are operative within it” (malpas, 2012, p. 31). mobile media and communications technologies, and the services they support, are in fact “part of new ‘place-making projects’” (agnew, 2011, p. 328). communicating place through mobile social media in this paper, we extend the above lines of argument by examining the particular ways that place is configured in and through mobile device use, and the precise modes of engagement associated with three specific mobile social media applications: instagram, snapchat, and waze. in examining place and place-making in relation to these three apps, we draw on and adapt tim cresswell’s (2009) tripartite understanding of place as something that is experienced through the combination and interplay of three elements: materiality (the material structures of place), meaning (the meanings that are ascribed to and associated with place), and practice (how what people do is associated with the meanings that a place might have). rather than consider each in isolation, our interest here is in how these three are combined in the production of place. our argument in this paper is that place is not a thing that is merely recorded through these platforms. rather, place is something that is continually enacted, negotiated and renegotiated across multiple levels of media engagement. we trace this process in relation to materiality, meaning, and practice. by materiality, we mean an examination of the material conditions (affordances) and experiences of each of the three services. drawing inspiration from recent work on social media app research methods (leaver, et al., 2020; light et al., 2016; highfield and leaver, 2016; robards & lincoln, 2017), we engage directly with the interfaces of the three apps to examine their “technological mechanisms” (light et al., 2016, p. 882) in order to understand how each service guides users and shapes user experiences of place. in addition, by materiality, we are also interested in examining the immediate as well as wider supporting material infrastructures of each of these three services, and the platform and political economic arrangements that underpin and sustain them (van dijck, 2013; wilken, 2019). with respect to meaning, we examine how instagram, snapchat, and waze engage in the conception or meaning-making of places. we argue, such platforms conceive of places fundamentally as venues or brands (d’silva et al., 2018; boy & uitermark, 2017; kuehn, 2016). finally, with regard to practice, we trace end-users’ experiences of place as social relations and as events. we argue practice reveals how place is socially and temporally determined by users’ engagement with these platforms. these end-user engagements are then re-enrolled back into these services in complicated ways. with respect to waze, for instance, we are interested in understanding how this dynamic mapping and social media service acts as a mediator to create place-based and spatial meanings by translating between and inviting movements of users, vehicles, supporting ad programs, and so on (lammes, 2017). digital place-making as interconnected socio-technical forces in looking at these multiple levels of media engagement, our larger argument is that digital place-making, as it occurs through services such as instagram, snapchat, and waze, is realized through the combination and interconnection of all three of the aforementioned elements. materiality, meaning, and practice are mutually constituted. to paraphrase tim cresswell (2009), the material experiences of these three services is made by people doing things according to the place-based meanings they might wish these services to evoke and register. the meaning-making by the platforms themselves and practices of users can create tensions. practices also may or may not conform to the expectations that come with material affordances and the “technological mechanisms” of these services. digital place-making becomes both the product of and subject to these interconnected socio-technical forces. references agnew, j. a. (2011). space and place. in: j. a. agnew and d. n. livingstone (eds), the sage handbook of geographical knowledge, sage. boy, j. d. & uitermark, j. (2017). reassembling the city through instagram. transactions of the institute of british geographers, 42, 612-624. cresswell, t. (2009). place. in: r. kitchin and n. thrift (eds), international encyclopedia of human geography, 169-177. elsevier. d’silva, k., noulas, a., musolesi, m. et al. (2018). predicting the temporal activity patterns of new venues. epj data science, 7(3), https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-018-0142-z highfield, t. & leaver, t. (2016). instagrammatics and digital methods: studying visual social media, from selfies and gifs to memes and emojis. communication research & practice, 2(1), 47-62. hjorth, l. (2008). being real in the mobile reel: a case study of convergent mobile media as domesticated new media in seoul, south korea. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 14(1), 91–104. kuehn, k. m. (2016). branding the self on yelp: consumer reviewing as image entrepreneurship. social media + society, october-december. leaver, t., highfield, t. & abidin, c. (2020). instagram: visual social media cultures. polity press. lammes, s. (2017). digital mapping interfaces: from immutable mobiles to mutable images. new media & society, 19(7), 1019-1033. light, b., burgess, j. & duguay, s. (2016). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881–900. malpas, j. (2012). the place of mobility: technology, connectivity, and individualization. in: r. wilken and g. goggin (eds), mobile technology & place, 26-38. routledge. meyrowitz, j. (1985). no sense of place: the impact of electronic media on social behavior. oxford university press. robards, b. & lincoln, s. (2017). uncovering longitudinal life narratives: scrolling back on facebook. qualitative research, 17(6), 715-730. van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. oxford university press. wilken, r. (2014). places nearby: facebook as a location-based social media platform. new media & society, 16(7), 1087-1103. placemaking ‘experiences’ during covid-19 erika polson university of denver roger norum university of oulu introduction in the contemporary global economy, consumer aspirations—and the market offerings that fuel them—have shifted from the accrual of material goods to the pursuit of experiences. this has been referred to as the “experience economy,” in which spending shifts from buying to doing, and digital and social media are at the core of how these experiences are accessed, lived out, and shared. much of this new market is based on the logics of digital placemaking, through which physical places become sites to be consumed, produced, and reproduced via the creation of an experience. a stand-out example is airbnb’s creation of “experiences” in 2016, which offers excursions with locals that aim to enable tourists to experience immersion into a destination rather than just a visit (weise, 2018). when covid-19 was declared a global pandemic, travel was halted along with much of the experience economy. how could people buy experiences out in the world if they could not be in a place to experience them? airbnb swiftly adapted the product by reaching out to successful hosts around the world, to encourage and assist them in moving their experiences online, where they would be marketed and delivered through the company’s new product, online experiences. this collection of live, online interactive sessions are delivered over zoom by various ‘hosts’ for small groups of ‘guests.’ the initial collection of two dozen or so experiences grew to over 200 by early may. the vast majority of these experiences make use of a particular place, and the host’s location in that place, as the essence of the experience itself. digital placemaking and embodied experience drawing from concepts of place as being constituted through both social relations (massey, 1994) and communication (caldas-coulthard & iedema, 2008), and stretching far beyond bounded definitions of location based on longitude and latitude, scholars increasingly find that digital and social media can connect and embed humans in place. emerging research strands have considered how networked, geo-locative, and mobile media modulate and/or create new forms of offline place; examples include the creation of hybrid spaces or realities (de souza e silva, 2006; hjorth & richardson, 2017) and a sense of embeddedness in place that can develop through wayfinding (halegoua, 2020) or geo-social interactions during frequent mobility (polson, 2016). this brings us to consider the importance of embodiment in conceiving of place and placemaking, as lived experience of the body in place (caracciolo, 2014). thinking about embodiment as lived experience points to the final node in our digital placemaking framework: the role of experience in relation to place. farman (2015) points out that mobile media may be used to produce a meaningful, embodied experience in place; rather than seeing embodiment as a result of how well a technology can simulate reality for a user, he argues it stems from how, through the mediated experience, users go beyond the screen to interact with (and experience) the places that surround them. cresswell (2020) posits a meaningful ‘sense of place’ might be based on shared experiences and that experience “is at the heart of what place means” (117). we explore this interweaving of meaning-making in relation to place (through social relations, communication, embodiment, and experience) as digital placemaking through analysis of the airbnb website (content, form, and visual representations), as well as participatory observation of seven online experiences across europe, africa, and south america, and host interviews. importantly, this placemaking does not occur organically but is part of a strategic set of practices undertaken in a gig economy milieu by hosts working under the umbrella of a large and powerful company with global reach. the ‘host’ as digital medium airbnb’s original experiences site read, “one of a kind experiences, hosted by locals,” and the local hosts and their local expertise were marketed as embodiments of authentic cultures, histories, and social connections. for example, a dj offered a musical history tour of havana; an “indigenous cook” taught how to make mole in mexico city; a “local guide” led a desert adventure in oman. each experience located a so-called authentic aspect of a local culture in the body and abilities of the local ‘host’. each day, these locals—whose localness was sold with beautiful photos, emotional language, and a user-friendly interface on the airbnb website—helped paying guests connect to that locality. to quickly create online experiences, airbnb trained hosts on the technology (e.g. zoom, mobile camera devices) and assisted with design and marketing strategies. many hosts are supporting multiple families in a village or funding their ngos, and this creates immense pressure to succeed in the effort to “switch to online,” while still helping people feel as if they were “there, together, in person,” as one host explained it. we noted the following strategies used by hosts to transport participants and create an emplaced experience: use of narrative devices (e.g. sharing life histories and telling stories while moving through space), locative signs (e.g. language, music, and imagery), sensory cues (closeup camera shots of textures, or of hands reaching and touching things, as well as audible background noise), formal properties (e.g. knowing when to employ professional versus handheld/chaotic camera angles) and virtual sociality (engaging participants in the conversation). wilken and goggin (2012) argue that place is “central to how embodied, technologically mediated mobile social practice is understood” (18), and we’ve found that these practices are also central to placemaking. considering the places that are being made in online experiences, at issue is not how close the new products are to the in-person, irl experiences from which they were derived; rather, the question is through which means the experiences give meaningful and memorable moments of connection with another part of the world. as arbiters of these momentary, ephemeral encounters, the hosts and their manifold strategies to substantively engage end-users are at the crux of digital placemaking. while technology is the conduit, the hosts are the gateways, the mediums, the media. references caldas-coulthard cr and iedema r (eds) (2008) identity trouble: critical discourse and contested identities. new york: palgrave macmillan. caracciolo m (2014) the experientiality of narrative: an enactivist approach. berlin: de gruyter. cresswell t (2020) place. in thrift n and r kitchin (eds), international encyclopedia of human geography, vol. 10. oxford: elsevier, pp. 117-124. de souza e silva a (2006) from cyber to hybrid: mobile technologies as interfaces of hybrid spaces. space and culture 3: 261–278. farman j (2015) stories, spaces and bodies: the production of embodied space through mobile media. communication research and practice 1(2): 101-116. halegoua, g. (2020). the digital city: media and the social production of place. new york: nyu press. hjorth l and richardson i (2017) pokémon go: mobile media play, place-making, and the digital wayfarer. mobile media & communication 5(1): 3–14 massey, d (1994) space, place & gender. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. polson, e. (2016). privileged mobilities: professional migration, geo-social media, and a new global middle class. new york: peter lang. wilken r and goggin g (2012) mobile technology and place. new york, ny: routledge. digital place as preemptive measure: the datafication of forced migrants saskia witteborn the chinese university of hong kong research on migration and technology has illustrated the importance of social media and digital devices for migrants to create a sense of place while being on arduous journeys and while settling down (andrade & doolin, 2016; awad & tossell, 2019; borkert, 2018; dekker et al., 2016; gillespie et al., 2016, 2018; leurs, 2016; smets & leurs, 2018; van liempt & zijlstra, 2017; wilding & gifford, 2013; witteborn, 2015, 2018, 2019). at the same time, research has highlighted how migrants and migration processes are increasingly datafied, from digitized borders to digital identity systems, challenging the notion of migrants as digital agents and raising the issue of data privacy and digital rights for those with limited political, legal, and civic protection (e.g. gillespie et al., 2016; dijstelbloem & broeders, 2016; latonero & kift, 2018; latonero et al., 2019; witteborn, 2020). within the migration literature, forced migrants (asylum seekers and refugees) have received special attention since 2015 and have been shown to position themselves through technology as sociocultural and political beings-in-place (alencar 2018; fisher, 2018; maitland, 2019). through technology, the people can speak from a cultural and social position that transcends the label “asylum seeker” and a discourse of essentialized ascriptions like being poor and uneducated. however, as maitland (2019) has argued, there are limits to self-presentation and construction of place. digital place increasingly creates problems for the displaced. censorship (maitland, 2019), misinformation (borkert et al., 2018; latonero et al., 2018), and the criminalization of social media content and usage for asylum claim determination are examples (brekke & brake stalver, 2019). as mentioned previously, migrants experience privacy violations through hacked databases or collection of their personal information without their full consent (maitland & bharania, 2017; latonero et al., 2019; witteborn, 2020). in sum, locatability through technology and data has become an essential part of place-making digital and embodied for those crossing borders and needs to be examined as such. digital locatability, here, refers to computational data gathering, processing, and machine/human interpretation practices, with the consequence of verifying people in place and time and/or authenticating humans as a category. while the example of asylum seekers is by no means comprehensive, it should be robust enough to extend it to other legally and socio politically marginalized populations crossing space, including the homeless, sanspapier, or poor migrant workers. the research first explores the place-making literature on migration to show its conceptual biases, including digital agency, followed by a discussion of digitally locating migrants in place. two practices – biometric registration and visual tracing on social media – are analyzed through ethnographic data and through the eyes of asylum seekers to illustrate how their datafied representation shapes physical and social placemaking. data materials were gathered through personal interviews with asylum seekers and refugees in germany and participant observations of digital practices of the displaced. overall, the study highlights how the datafied representation of humans is key to verification and authentification with socio-legal consequences. data have emerging potentiality (simondon, 1989) as they amplify emotional ways of being of asylum seekers such as fear and construct a biographical narrative, which in turn enables predictability by national and transnational entities (amoore, 2011). the study concludes that within the thickening contexts of datafied personal and collective lives, human narrative as an epistemic mode of being and relating gains renewed importance, interfering and engaging with an algorithmic logic which constructs the human as a category within a binary data story. selected references alencar, a. (2018). refugee integration and social media: a local and experiential perspective. information, communication & society, 21(11), 1588-1603. amoore, l. (2013). the politics of possibility. risk and security beyond probability. durham: duke university press. borkert m, karen ef and eiad y (2018) the best, the worst, and the hardest to find: how people, mobiles, and social media connect migrants in(to) europe. social media + society 4(1), 1-11 doi:10.1177/2056305118764428. brekke, j.p., & balke, s.a. (2019). social media screening: norway’s asylum system. forced migration review, 61(june), 9-11. broeders, d., & dijstelbloem, h. (2016). the datafication of mobility and migration management: the mediating state and its consequences. in i. van der ploeg & j. pridmore (eds.), digitizing identities: doing identity in a networked world (pp. 242260). london: routledge. farraj, a. (2011). refugees and the biometric future: the impact of biometrics on refugees and asylum seekers. columbia human rights law review 42(3), 891941. fisher, k.e. (2018). 5: information worlds of refugees. in c. maitland (ed.) digital lifeline? icts for refugees and displaced persons (pp. 79-112). cambridge, ma: mit press. gillespie, m., ampofo, l., cheesman, m., faith, b., iliadou, e., issa, a., & skleparis, d. (2016). mapping refugee media journeys, smart phones and social networks. milton keynes, uk: the open university. kloppenburg, s., & van der ploeg, i. (2018). securing identities: biometric technologies and the enactment of human bodily differences. science as culture, 29(1), 5776. latonero, m., & kift, p. (2018). on digital passages and borders: refugees and the new infrastructure for movement and control. social media + society. leurs, k., & smets, k. (2018). five questions for digital migration studies: learning from digital connectivity and forced migration in(to) europe. social media + society. polson, e. (2016). privileged mobilities: professional migration, geo-social media, and a new global middle class. new york: peter lang. shah, n. (2019). the cog that imagines the system: data migration and migrant bodies in the face of aadhaar. in k. smets, k. leurs, m. georgiou, s. witteborn, and r. gajjala (eds.), the sage handbook of media and migration. thousand oaks: sage. witteborn, s. (2020). data privacy and displacement: a cultural approach. journal of refugee studies. online first. witteborn, s. (2018). the digital force in forced migration: imagined affordances and gendered practices, popular communication, 16(1), 21-31. witteborn, s. (2011). constructing the forced migrant and the politics of space and place-making. journal of communication, 61(6), 1142–1160. witteborn, s. (2015). becoming (im)perceptible: forced migrants and virtual practice. journal of refugee studies, 28(3), 350-367. korean foreign travel selfies as contested placemaking practices germaine halegoua university of kansas introduction typically, the selfie is associated with celebrity and self-promotion through bodily display or a means for inviting acknowledgement and attention from others. senft and baym note that there is an unnecessary and ineffectual over-reliance on psychological analyses of selfies as narcissistic, showcasing emotional or mental instability, body dysmorphia, and low self-esteem in lieu of more sociologically and culturally nuanced examinations (senft & baym, 2015). however, many scholars counter these assumptions by focusing on the ways in which selfies are constructive articulations of identity and agency (abidin, 2016; highfield & leaver, 2016; rettberg, 2014). as tiidenberg explains, selfies allow us to exert control over how we are seen and to construct our identity through the people, places, and activities that we imbue with value (tiidenberg, 2018). the composition of the image, mise en scene, situation, and location photographed indicate aesthetic and ontological choices that reveal values, social positionality, and identity performance of the person taking the selfie (harrison, 2004; hess, 2015; wargo, 2015). when read as a digital placemaking practice, the selfie becomes salient to producers and audiences as a political expression of one’s place in the world. traces of placemaking practices can be found in the activities and texts of selfie producers but only appear in the margins of scholarly analysis. this paper re-examines the selfie as a means for producing place-identity and spatial habitus and argues that thinking about selfies as placemaking practices inform the productive and potentially empowering nature of this photographic practice. what type of emplacement and place attachment is produced through selfies? what geopolitical work do selfies do? how do selfies circulate meanings of place and identity through the presence and presentation of bodies? selfies and placemaking an emerging body of literature has begun to interpret selfies in relationship to digital placemaking with much of this work engaging with the concept of the “spatial self”, or instances where individuals document, archive, and display their experience or mobility within space and place to represent or perform aspects of their identity to others (gibbs et al., 2015; humphreys, 2018; saker, 2016; schwartz & halegoua, 2014). while social media users may form an image and expectations of a particular place based on their perception of people who have been there (redi et al., 2015), social media users also monitor and critique others’ selfies as inappropriate or inaccurate. social media users police collective meanings of place through attempts to publicly delegitimize others’ selfies as placemaking practices. critiques and backlash against these images construct the status of the people in the photos (the selfie producers) as outsiders that actively or unwittingly resist or disrupt dominant structures of feeling or reputation, decorum of place, and imaginations of who “ought” to be in a given location. selfies that celebrate one’s presence within a particular place, but that are contested or ridiculed by other social media users discredit the role of certain people as placemakers, and confirm social hierarchies and hegemonic meanings of mobility. korean foreign travel selfies this paper analyzes a case study in which the visual culture and digital placemaking practices of selfies are represented and critiqued. since the early 2000s, south korea has experienced a boom in international travel among women in their 20s and 30s with the number of women travelling alone for leisure and educational opportunities substantially increasing as well (kim, 2012). concurrently, korean demographers and popular press outlets continually report dwindling marriage and birth rates, high youth unemployment, and precarious job opportunities and job security for college graduates. reports from organizations like the korean women’s development institute have noted growing misogyny among young and middle-aged men where women become targets for frustration around cultural shifts and economic precarity or competition (lee, 2017). some of this “gender war” has played out in online spaces such as public discussion boards, blogs, and social media sites. although heavily moderated, sites like naver and instagram as well as the notoriously politically incorrect forum, ilbe, evidence traces of violent misogyny toward korean women. several organizations have been tracking the effects of online sexist ideologies, stereotypic and misogynistic comments, and pornographic images on women’s digital participation and find that such images, language and behavior tend to silence women online and increase withdrawal from online activities (lee, 2017) . within this social context, “foreign travel selfies” shared on platforms such as instagram and naver blogs that document korean women’s excursions to foreign countries have become sites of virulent public criticism. through textual and discourse analysis of the images and criticism faced by korean female nationals who travel abroad alone, i examine the vernacular creativity, representations of place and mobility, and tensions that emerge regarding expressions of the “spatial self” online. not only are critiques of these images couched in consternation and frustration over the financial capital and conspicuous mobility enjoyed by women during a period of economic precarity, but online comments also evidence efforts to police women’s bodies as well as their experiences of globalization, cosmopolitanism, and locational capital. references abidin, c. (2016). “aren’t these just young, rich women doing vain things online?”: influencer selfies as subversive frivolity. social media + society, 2(2). gibbs, m., meese, j., arnold, m., nansen, b., & carter, m. (2015). #funeral and instagram: death, social media, and platform vernacular. information, communication & society, 18(3), 255–268. harrison, b. (2004). snap happy: toward a sociology of ?everyday? photography. in s. hillyard (ed.), seeing is believing? approaches to visual research (vol. 7, pp. 23–39). emerald group publishing limited. hess, a. (2015). the selfie assemblage. international journal of communication, 9(0), 18. highfield, t., & leaver, t. (2016). instagrammatics and digital methods: studying visual social media, from selfies and gifs to memes and emoji: communication research and practice, 2(1), 47–62. humphreys, l. (2018). the qualified self: social media and the accounting of everyday life. mit press. kim, y. (2012). female individualization? transnational mobility and media consumption of asian women. in y. kim (ed.), women and the media in asia: the precarious self (pp. 31–52). palgrave macmillan uk. lee, s. (2017). status of online sexism and measures for improvement. korean women’s development institute. redi, m., quercia, d., graham, l. t., & gosling, s. d. (2015, may 28). like partying? your face says it all. predicting the ambiance of places with profile pictures. association for the advancement of artificial intelligence. rettberg, j. w. (2014). seeing ourselves through technology : how we use selfies, blogs and wearable devices to see and shape ourselves. palgrave macmillan uk. saker, m. (2016). foursquare and identity: checking-in and presenting the self through location. new media & society, 1461444815625936. schwartz, r., & halegoua, g. r. (2014). the spatial self: location-based identity performance on social media. new media & society, 1461444814531364. senft, t. m., & baym, n. k. (2015). selfies introduction: what does the selfie say? investigating a global phenomenon. international journal of communication, 9(0), 19. tiidenberg, k. (2018). selfies : why we love (and hate) them. emerald publishing limited. wargo, j. m. (2015). “every selfie tells a story …”: lgbtq youth lifestreams and new media narratives as connective identity texts. new media & society. reconstructing place, one locative voice at a time jordan frith clemson university jacob richter clemson university places are filled with stories, with histories that shape how people understand their world. as doreen massey (2005) puts it, places are unique sets of trajectories—each with a story—coming into contact. however, just as much as places are defined by their histories, they are also shaped by the histories that are forgotten, or far too often, actively suppressed through dominant narratives (farman, 2015). after all, dominant media of spatial, public memory—e.g. plaques and public monuments—often reproduce dominant narratives of a place, narratives created by the powerful. these places then become core to how people live their lives and how they relate to a broader understanding of their place in the world. this project examines how digital media can be deployed through locative technologies to push back on dominant spatial narratives and make places more polyvocal in consequential ways. or to put it different, we explore how locative media can bring lives and stories back to the history of a place. the method we use to examine place-making practices through locative media is a pedagogical intervention at a university in the southeastern united states. on the surface, this university is typical of many u.s. universities. the campus is in a small, semi-rural college town. the town revolves around college life; the flows of people and business tend to flow with the typical u.s. academic schedule. and like many universities in the southeastern united states, the history of the university is inextricably tied to the history of oppression and slavery. less than a quarter of a kilometer from the authors’ offices, the campus quad has a building that is still has “plantation” in its name. campus buildings are built on top of old slave quarters, a stockade to house convicted laborers, and a cemetery where slaves were buried. and going back even further, the land the university sits on was originally inhabited by indigenous cherokee peoples. like many universities in the u.s, this is a place built on a history of oppression. the university has a few plaques in place, but few students know of the history of the place outside of the university-approved narrative. few know they may attend classes on land that was slave quarters or go to meetings in a building built on a base of bricks built by slaves. they have little perspective on the lives lived in this place, the voices silenced through dominant narratives. consequently, this project intervenes in the public understanding of the place in the classroom by helping students develop what we call participatory counternarratives: the ability to use locative media for new forms of digital placemaking that push against dominant histories and dominant stories we tell about a place. to develop these participatory counternarratives, we had students in multiple classes use the mobile application geotourist. geotourist is a locative application that enables people to geotag information, map the information, and upload audio files that describe specific locations. people can then either access the maps online, or they can use the mobile application to physically walk from place to place to experience the audio narration in the specific location it describes. students were required to study the history of their university and create a counter-map to the dominant historical narratives found in the place. for example, one group created a walking tour of the locations important for the indigenous people driven from the land. other groups created walking tours of the university’s history of slavery to point out where exactly that history took place and how those narratives have been essentially erased through “progress.” this presentation will examine that work and how these interventions impacted how students understood the places that shape their daily lives. and while our project includes pedagogical dimensions, we do not position this as an explicitly pedagogical article. rather, we explore the concept of participatory counternarratives more broadly to include any intervention—whether in the classroom or not—that engages with digital placemaking by creating locationbased texts to add new voices to how places are socially constructed. to situate our pedagogical intervention within existing research, we first explore the concept of hybrid space, which refers to how digital and physical have merged in many cases (de souza e silva, 2006; frith, 2015). in other words, digital information now shapes how people know the physical world, just as their location shapes the digital information they access. relatedly, we then engage with the growing literature on spatial annotations (angus, 2010; farman, 2013; frith, 2015; humphreys & liao, 2011; løvlie, 2011), a term that refers to the ability to create location-based narratives through various forms of locative media. these narratives can include everything from locative fictionalized storytelling to locative audio tours to location-based reviews through applications like yelp or foursquare. in fact, ben russel’s (1999) headmap manifesto, a prescient late-1990s artistic statement about the potentials of locative media, focused on how spatial annotation could remake place through locative digital media. twenty years ago, he wrote there are notes in boxes that are empty every room has an accessible history every place has emotional attachments you can open and save you can search for sadness in new york (p. 3). our paper examines those accessible histories—those empty boxes filled with geotagged notes—through a pedagogical intervention. our ultimate goal is to provide concrete account of how locative media can enable novel forms of digital placemaking that push back against dominant narratives and shift the stories told of a place. though the making of a place is never perfectly egalitarian or democratic, the potential for digital tools to pluralize the stakeholders capable of being involved in the narrative annotation of a place opens up possibilities for initiatives such as the participatory counternarratives outlined here to tell better, more inclusive stories. this presentation will be just one of those stories. references angus, a. (2010). urban tapestries contexts. de souza e silva, a. (2006). from cyber to hybrid: mobile technologies as interfaces of hybrid spaces. space and culture, 3, 261–278. frith, j. (2015). smartphones as locative media. polity press. farman, j. (2013). the mobile story: narrative practices with locative technologies. routledge. farman, j. (2015). stories, spaces, and bodies: the production of embodied space through mobile media storytelling. communication research and practice, 1(2), 101–116. https://doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2015.1047941 frith, j. (2015). writing space: examining the potential of location-based composition. computers and composition, 37, 44–54. humphreys, l., & liao, t. (2011). mobile geotagging: reexamining our interactions with urban space. journal of computer mediated communication, 16, 407–423. løvlie, a. s. (2011). annotative locative media and g-p-s: granularity, participation, and serendipity. computers and composition, 28(3), 246–254. massey, d. (2005). for space. sage: london. russel, b. (1999). know your place. headmap: location aware devices. technooccult. http://www.technoccult.net/wp-content/uploads/library/headmap-manifesto.pdf selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): fagerjord, anders. (2019, october 2-5). spotify and netflix as innovations: streaming media history in light of innovation theory. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. spotify and netflix as innovations: streaming media history in the light of innovation theory anders fagerjord department of linguistic, literary and aesthetic studies, university of bergen introduction streaming services such as spotify and netflix have taken over large portions of the market for music and audio-visual entertainment worldwide, and in april 2018, music streaming had surpassed physical sales in revenue worldwide (ball & auchard, 2018), challenging and possibly destroying established industries. the events that led to this innovation has not yet been charted, however. most writers who have studied streaming services have included some parts of their history, but the different industries have not yet been compared. this paper is a study of the history of streaming media services under the lens of innovation theory. innovation theory is a broad area, covering studies of individuals, organisations, and networks, often from systems or economic perspectives, including studies of history, strategy, and policy studies (fagerberg, 2006). central authors include schumpeter and his use of marx’s concept “creative destruction” (schumpeter, 2010), von hippel, who wrote about “user innovation” (von hippel, 1988), and christensen (1997) with his very influential concept of “disruption”. method in this ongoing study, we collect and systematize the findings of earlier histories of streaming technology under the lens of systems-oriented innovation theory (edquist, 2006). to date, we have consulted about 50 papers, chapters and book-length studies. these are contextualised with other histories of computer development (e.g., friedman, 2017). results streaming services are similar to most innovations in that “what we think of as a single innovation is often the result of a lengthy process involving many interrelated innovations” (fagerberg, 2006). in the current literature, we see described many different stories of parts of what is now known as streaming. one storyline is the idea itself: music and video on demand is a very old idea, imagined since the invention of the telephone (fagerjord et.al., 2010; williams, 1975) another history is the many different technologies have been used in attempts to realise this idea. compression technology is one important factor, and major milestones were the inventions of mp3 (1991-93) and aac (1997) encoding of music files, and h.263 and h.264 for video (1996 and 2003). these file formats were popularised in part by companies such as apple and adobe, and made use of by companies such as napster, apple, youtube, and pirate bay. a history of streaming technology must also include infrastructure such as broadband cable networks and mobile networks for telephony and data traffic, important devices such as apple’s iphone that launched the smartphone revolution (snickars, 2012), but also the enormous increase in computer power, exploded by the use of networked server clusters running hadoop and similar software (friedman, 2017). for music, the history is focussed on the “pirate wars” between music sharing systems and record companies, often described as reconciled by itunes music, spotify, and others (spilker, 2017). histories of netflix tend to focus on its algorithmic recommendation engine (arnold, 2016; madrigal, 1 january 2014; smith-rowsey, 2016; finn, 2017) and changes in consumer behaviour, although binge-watching was described already in the age of vhs video, (jenner, 2016). interestingly, youtube tends to be described as its own genealogy (burgess & green, 2009; prelinger, 2009; snickars & vonderau, 2009; levy, 2011) although a few have connected it to the general television industry (evens & donders, 2018; van dijck, 2013; lotz, 2017). discussion streaming media is not one innovation, but a collection of many. although it certainly is a technology shift, the most important event is probably that of aligning rights management. music, television, and film has been, and continue to be quite different industries with different organisation, business models, distribution, and rights management. these differences can be seen in the different kinds of offering in different services: music services have comprehensive, and quite similar catalogues, while television and film sites compete with unique material. although innovation theory is a vast field, outsiders to its literature tend to focus on “disruption”. it is interesting to note that streaming services hardly can be considered disruptions by christensen’s original definition of small firms catering to small niche markets with initially inferior technology. streaming services are also a telling example of the role of technology in media change: technology alone cannot explain the differences we see between the music and television streaming services, as they are historically rooted in different organisations, business models, regulatory policies and use, including pirate practices. references arnold, s. (2016). netflix and the myth of choice/participation/autonomy. in k. mcdonald & d. smith-rowsey (eds.), the netflix effect: technology and entertainment in the 21st century (pp. 49-62). new york: bloomsbury. ball, t., & auchard, e. (2018, c). music streaming overtakes physical sales for the first time -industry body. reuters.com. retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/music-sales/music-streaming-overtakes-physicalsales-for-the-first-time-industry-body-idusl8n1s143h burgess, j., & green, j. (2009). youtube: online video and participatory culture. cambridge: polity. christensen, c. (1997). the innovator’s dilemma: when new technologies cause great firms to fail. cambridge, massachusetts: harvard business review press. edquist, c. (2006). systems of innovation: perspectives and challenges. in j. fagerberg & d. c. mowery (eds.), the oxford handbook of innovation. new york: oxford university press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199286805.003.0001 evens, t., & donders, k. (2018). platform power and policy in transforming television markets. cham: palgrave macmillan. fagerberg, j. (2006). innovation: a guide to the literature. in j. fagerberg & d. c. mowery (eds.), the oxford handbook of innovation. new york: oxford university press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199286805.003.0001 fagerjord, a., maasø, a., storsul, t., & syvertsen, t. (2010). high risk, strong belief: images of the future in the media industry. nordicom review, 31, 3-16. retrieved from http://www.nordicom.gu.se/common/publ_pdf/325_fagerjord%20et%20al.pdf finn, e. (2017). what algorithms want: imagination in the age of computing (kindle ed.). cambridge, massachusettes: mit press. friedman, t. l. (2017). thank you for bering late: an optimist’s guide to thriving in the age of accelerations. london: penguin. jenner, m. (2016). is this tviv? on netflix, tviii and binge-watching. new media & society, 18(2), 257-273. doi:10.1177/1461444814541523 levy, s. (2011). in the plex: how google thinks, works, and shapes our lives (kindle ed.). new york: simon & schuster. lotz, a. (2017). portals: a treatise on internet-distributed television. ann arbor, mi: michigan publishing. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9699689 madrigal, a. c. (2014). how netflix reverse engineered hollywood. the atlantic. prelinger, r. (2009). the appearance of archives. in p. snickars & p. vonderau (eds.), the youtube reader (pp. 268-274). stockholm: mediehistoriskt arkiv. schumpeter, j. a. (2010). capitalism, socialism and democracy. routledge: london. smith-rowsey, d. (2016). imaginative indices and deceptive domains: how netflix’s categories and genres redefine the long tail. in k. mcdonald & d. smith-rowsey (eds.), the netflix effect: technology and entertainment in the 21st century (pp. 63-79). new york: bloomsbury. snickars, p. (2012). a walled garden turned into a rainforest. in p. snickars & p. vonderau (eds.), moving data: the iphone and the future of media. new york: columbia university press. snickars, p., & vonderau, p. (2009). introduction. in p. snickars & p. vonderau (eds.), the youtube reader. stockholm: mediehistoriskt arkiv. spilker, h. (2017). digital music distribution: the sociology of online music streams. london: routledge. van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media (kindle ed.). oxford: oxford university press. von hippel, e. (1988). sources of innovation. new york: oxford university press. retrieved from https://ssrn.com/abstract=2877276 williams, r. (1975). television: technology and cultural form. new york: schocken. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): taffel, s. (2019, october 2-5). trusted machines? machine learning, morethan-human speed and dead labor in platform capitalism. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. trusted machines? machine learning, more-than-human speed and dead labor in platform capitalism sy taffel massey university decision making machines are today ‘trusted’ to perform or assist with a rapidly expanding array of tasks. indeed, many contemporary industries could not now function without them. nevertheless, this trust in and reliance upon digital automation is far from unproblematic. this paper combines insights drawn from qualitative research with creative industries professionals, with approaches derived from software studies and political economy to critically interrogate three ways that digital automation is currently employed and accompanying questions that relate to trust. firstly, digital automation is examined as a way of saving time and/or reducing human labor, such as when programmers use automated build tools or graphical user interfaces. secondly, automation enables new types of behavior by operating at more-than-human speeds, as exemplified by high-frequency trading algorithms. finally, the mode of digital automation associated with machine learning attempts to both predict and influence human behaviors through recognizing patterns in computationally analyzable datasets, as epitomized by personalization algorithms within social media and search engines. when exploring questions surrounding trust and digital automation, it is important to recognize the extent to which numerous contemporary industries are functionally dependent upon the labor-saving affordances of digital automation. for example, automatic focusing, metering, and flash compensation are routinely employed by photographers on location. when editing photos, image blending, stitching, perspective correction, and a range of presets, plug-ins, actions and looks are similarly employed to automate workflows to save time. when presenting their work online, automated tools are used to build websites, integrate them with corporate social media platforms and perform search engine optimization. these heavily automated tools allow photographers to work as agile, flexible, creative entrepreneurs. a homologous situation exists in game design, whereby game engines present a set of automated tools that allow independent developers to produce games at a scale that would otherwise be impossible. these technologies are trusted to the point of being essential for these people’s livelihoods. this is identified as a positive marker of identity by many of these creative workers, whilst also embodying a number of traits associated with neoliberalism (mould 2018). these technologies are trusted as reliable ways of saving time and therefore money, but a critical examination of how these tools are located within a broader techno-cultural context of precarity, competition and commodification – what bernard stiegler (2017) describes as hyper-proletarianization – raises questions about the desirability of these dependencies. arguably this continues the long history of automation displacing human action into what karl marx described as ‘dead labor’, productive activity which is amenable to social exploitation. at the same time, trusting forms of automation associated with more-than-human speed can lead to spectacular failure. emblematic of this are the high frequency trading (hft) algorithms that today account for approximately half of all stock market trades. hft systems execute tasks “that no human could ever hope to attempt” (beddington et al. 2012); whereas it takes a human around 200 milliseconds to even perceive a change, hft algorithms execute trades in just a few milliseconds. hft systems execute huge volumes of trades and although each transaction produces miniscule profits, the massive number of minute quantities adds up to significant amounts, while greatly increasing the overall volume of financial exchanges (toscano 2013). hfts have contributed to the formation of ‘flash crashes’; episodes where enormous sums have been wiped off the value of global stocks. within these episodes hft algorithms not only contribute to the crashes’ speed, they also behave ‘erratically’, buying ‘stub quotes’ that are not intended to be purchased, and never would be by human traders. when decision-making machines deviate from desirable behaviors, they often do so in ways that differ from human errors. furthermore, the speeds that hfts operate at entail that real-time governance is impossible. automating tasks can often mean a higher statistical success rate when compared to human labor, but humans are quite good at knowing where, when and why human errors are likely to occur. conversely, automated systems make errors that appear inexplicable and yet can have enormously significant consequences, such as wiping hundreds of millions of dollars off the value of stocks in just a few minutes. these systems are ‘trusted’ insofar as they are relied upon, but they increase systemic instability and the likelihood of catastrophic ‘black swan’ events which raises serious questions as to whether this trust is misplaced. one of the key questions surrounding the implementation of machine learning-based systems surrounds their lack of transparent decision-making. unlike other digital systems, which follow rules that are explicitly written for the computational system to follow, machine learning systems and neural networks construct their own modes of categorization. effectively, they learning to recognize patterns within training data they are given, and subsequently apply them to real-world data. as the process of fitting patterns is devised by the computational system itself, the underlying logic is often completely opaque to humans; we have no way of knowing exactly how the machine has arrived at a decision (bridle 2018). while these nonhuman systems are more accurate than expert humans in many cases, increased accuracy does not equate to infallibility, and when machine learning algorithms underfit and overfit patterns based upon training data serious issues arise. even when these systems function as designed, they often reproduce pre-existing social and cultural forms of discrimination but do so under the guise of technocratic objectivity, effectively preventing a critical examination of structural inequities whilst promoting homophily (chun 2018). as safiya noble (2018:47) articulates, “automated decision-making systems are disproportionately harmful to the most vulnerable and the least powerful, who have little ability to intervene in them.” addressing these systemic problems requires more than just reprogramming particular algorithms, it entails addressing the neoliberal technocultural context that produces them. while different forms of creative machines are increasingly trusted to underpin industries, culture and society, there are a range of reasons why we should query the desirability of increasing dependence on and trust in these technologies as they are currently employed. these for-profit, corporate-controlled tools performatively reproduce a neoliberal worldview. discussing misplaced trust in digital automation frequently conjures an imagined binary opposition between humans and machines, however, this reductive fantasy conceals the far more concrete conflict between differing technocultural assemblages composed of humans and machines. across the examples explored in this talk, what emerges are numerous ways in which creative machines are used to perpetuate social inequalities. references beddington, j., furse, c., bond, p., cliff, d., goodhart, c., houstoun, zigrand, j.-p. (2012). foresight: the future of computer trading in financial markets: final project report. bridle, j. (2018). new dark age: technology and the end of the future. new york: verso books. chun, w. (2018) “queering homophily” in apprich. c, chun, w., cramer, f., and steyerl h. pattern discrimination: minneapolis: university of minnesota press. mould, o. (2018). against creativity: new york: verso books. noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism: new york: new york university press stiegler, b. (2017). automatic society: the future of work: john wiley & sons. toscano, a. (2013). gaming the plumbing: high-frequency trading and the spaces of capital. mute magazine, 16 selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): mitchell, p., leszczynski, a., zook, m., blankenship, j., mcgrane, c., hjorth, l., wilken, r., & thomas, j. (2019, october 2-5). geolocation: locating trust in digital platforms and economies. panel presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. geolocation: locating trust in digital platforms and economies peta mitchell queensland university of technology agnieszka leszczynski western university matthew zook university of kentucky, geography joe blankenship university of kentucky, geography caitlin mcgrane rmit university larissa hjorth rmit university julian thomas rmit university rowan wilken rmit university panel overview many of our quotidian digital practices are thoroughly mediated by digital location, including the ways in which we make our ways across cities; how we consume products, services, and content; and how we participate on social media. simultaneously, it has been estimated that up to 80 per cent of big data productions are spatial—i.e., they include a locational component (see leszczynski & crampton 2016). both of these phenomena are underwritten by the ways in which digital location—or simply geolocation—has become an established fixture of digital devices, platforms, and economies: gps chips are native components of smartphones; digital platforms routinely extend geotagging capabilities to users; mobile apps organize content and user experiences around map-based interfaces; and ‘disruptive’ market actors such as uber and airbnb rely on geolocation affordances as a core component of their services. to date, much of the public and academic conversation about geolocation has converged around privacy concerns arising from the ways in which individuals’ highly sensitive personal location data is continuously harvested, captured, generated, disclosed, hacked, and repurposed within a networked ecosystem of connected devices, sensor-seeded environments, third-party applications, and a burgeoning data brokerage industry organized around the purchase and resale of personal location data trails, often without users’ knowledge or consent (e.g., kitchin, 2015; leszczynski, 2017; light et al., 2018; mims, 2018; mitchell & highfield, 2017; valentineo-devries et al., 2018). yet the narrow focus on these geoprivacy issues has obscured the key role that geolocation, as a central component of data and digital media, has in securing and eroding trust in digital platforms and economies, both materially and discursively. this panel starts from the premise that geolocation is both a ‘technology of trust’ (withers 2018, p. 490)—or a sociotechnical agent by which digital systems present and build themselves as trustworthy—and a social relation of trustworthiness. this panel brings together papers that engage with geolocation and (mis)trust in both of these senses of sociotechnical agents and social relations of trust in digital systems, with an emphasis on platforms and economies. [paper 1] fleshes out the panel’s overarching premise by empirically identifying, across a range of platforms, the ways in which geolocation affordances, technologies, and location-based services are being leveraged to actively build trust in digital platforms. in doing this, this paper makes the case for geolocation as a central, though often overlooked, technology of trust leveraged by platforms and functioning as a vital assemblant of ‘platform affects’ around trust, security, and risk. [paper 2] turns its focus to the locations and spatialities of blockchain-enabled cryptocurrencies. through mapping and analysing the emerging geographies of cryptocurrency, this paper reveals how these crypto-geographies are thoroughly entangled with formations and practices of trust—and its uneven development—in the digital (crypto)economy. in its close analysis of uber’s recently launched ‘safety toolkit’, which enables users to share their real-time location with trusted contacts, [paper 3] pulls focus both to the particular social relations of trust engendered in and through location-based services designed for trust and the gendered affective labour that navigating this ‘careful surveillance’ entails on the part of users. deleted: . once again foregrounding geolocation as a ‘technology of trust’, our final paper in this panel examines how maps and map data have long underpinned the development of human trust in and control of vehicles. particularly in the case of autonomous vehicles [paper 4] maintains, geolocation is not simply a ‘layer on top of autonomous vehicle systems’, but is ‘integral to their operation [and] crucial to the future trustworthiness—or otherwise—of these systems’. references kitchin, r. (2015). continuous geosurveillance in the “smart city”. dis magazine. http://dismagazine.com/dystopia/73066/rob-kitchin-spatial-big-data-andgeosurveillance/. lee, m. k. (2018). understanding perception of algorithmic decisions: fairness, trust, and emotion in response to algorithmic management. big data & society. doi: 10.1177/2053951718756684. leszczynski, a. (2017). geoprivacy. in kitchin r., wilson m. w. & lauriault, t. p. (eds.) understanding spatial media (pp. 235-244). sage. leszczynski, a. & crampton, j. (2016). spatial big data and everyday life. big data & society 3(2). doi: 10.1177/2053951716661366. light, b., mitchell, p., & wikström, p. (2018). big data, method and the ethics of location: a case study of a hookup app for men who have sex with men. social media + society, doi: 10.1177/2056305118768299 mims, c. (2018, march 4). your location data is being sold—often without your knowledge. wall street journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/your-location-data-isbeing-soldoften-without-your-knowledge-1520168400 mitchell, p. & highfield, t. (2017). mediated geographies of everyday life: navigating the ambient, augmented, and algorithmic geographies of geomedia. ctrl-z: new media philosophy 7. http://www.ctrlz.net.au/journal/?slug=mitchell-highfield-mediatedgeographies-of-everyday-life valentineo-devries, j., singer, n., keller, m. h., & krolik, a. (2018, december 10). your apps know where you were last night, and they’re not keeping it secret. new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/location-data-privacyapps.html?action=click&module=top%20stories&pgtype=homepage withers, c. w. j. (2018). trust – in geography. progress in human geography 42(4): 489–508. doi: 10.1177/0309132516688078 1. geolocation, trust, and platform affects agnieszka leszczynski western university peta mitchell queensland university of technology this paper engages the intensifying incorporation of digital location data, interfaces, and affordances as pervasive features of digital platforms by positioning geolocation as a vital assemblant of ‘platform affects’. we theorize platform affects as collective and individual orientations of attunement, predisposition, and/or incentivization towards participating on, remaining within, and/or returning to platforms. trust and security are two key instrumentalities that work to so invest users in digital platforms by making these systems “‘[feel] right’” to users (pink et al., 2018, p. 3). as we demonstrate in this paper, digital location affordances, utilities, and services have emerged as indispensable technics and discursive agents by which platform affects of security and trust are assembled for and by digital platforms, extending to users “a sense of control in [spaces] of uncertainty” that resolves for them ambiguities about participating on, using, or repeat engaging with digital platforms (pink et al., 2018, p. 3). trust is also, inherently and inescapably, connected with risk. trust is not an absence of risk but rather presupposes the existence of and the need to negotiate risk. as niklas luhmann (1979) puts it in his major theoretical work trust and power, ‘trust is not concerned with knowing the essential truth about a matter but […] with the fact that the taking of the risk involved has proved itself in social life and thus becomes a motivating force, which yields further attestation’ (p. 76). the increasingly well-publicised risks to user privacy that attend geolocation (e.g., mims, 2018; valentineo-devries et al., 2018) can therefore be seen, almost paradoxically, as effectively underpinning rather than simply undermining these platform affects of security and trust. drawing on empirical examples, we foreground geolocation as one of the central, though often overlooked, sociotechnical agencies leveraged and operationalized by platforms to materially realize and discursively present themselves as trustworthy. in positioning geolocation as something used to engender trust in data and platforms, we simultaneously mobilize theories and approaches that foreground the affective, social, and interactional aspects of trust in order to draw attention to trust’s geolocational dimensions. by the latter, we refer to what withers (2018) has recently referred to as ‘thick relationships’ ... ‘grounded in a complex of overlapping iterated interactions’ (hardin, 2002: 21), either within a small and perhaps geographically proximal community or, over distance, in persons with whom we have reason to trust. this is to hint at two expressions of trust’s geographical dimensions – its making in social groups and its inscription over space. it also alerts us to the key issue of trustworthiness. (p. 494) withers begins the work of bringing geolocation and trust into the same frame, raising key questions about the relationships between the two. and yet, while withers (2018) calls for further evaluation of the “ways in which trust and trustworthiness are secured – the ‘technologies of trust’” (p. 490), he does not address the very contemporary ways in which trust is secured in and through geolocative technologies and platforms. elsewhere, within digital media studies, emerging research has focussed on the complex arrangements of trust built and negotiated between users, digital platforms, and algorithms (e.g., lee, 2018; ostherr et al., 2017; pink et al., 2018). importantly, this body of work advances an understanding of trust as first and foremost affective – it “entails feeling and knowing enough to be able to take the next step” forward in the moment (pink et al., 2018, p. 3). this pursuit of something that ‘feels right’ in the “space of uncertainty” characteristic of networked platform ecologies is “part of how we live with data” and digital systems more generally (pink et al., 2018, p. 3). yet here, too, the particular role of geolocation in assembling these arrangements remains to be addressed. we address this significant gap by empirically identifying the ways in which geolocation affordances, technologies, and location-based services are being leveraged to actively build trust in digital platforms and in data. these material and discursive practices include leveraging geolocation for purposes of digital securitization (securing digital transactions), authentication (verification of identity), care (ensuring safety), and trustworthy sociality (trust in digitally-brokered social interactions). we provide realworld examples of each of these operationalizations of geolocation in service of securitization, authentication, care, and trustworthy sociality to substantiate our heuristic. in so doing, we cast geolocation as an instrumentality that organizes affects of security and trust for digital systems and digital economies. through engaging the intersections of geolocation and digital platforms via an analytic of affect, this paper provides specificity and explanatory power to not only the “dynamics driving the integration of geographic information into the digital economy” (alvarez león 2016, p. 1), but also to the affective and emotional dynamics of how we, both individually and collectively, are mobilized and incentivized to continuously engage—and reengage— with digital systems as part of our everyday life practices. references alvarez león, l.f. (2016). property regimes and the commodification of geographic information: an examination of google street view. big data & society 3(2): 1-13. doi: 10.1177/2053951716637885. lee, m. k. (2018). understanding perception of algorithmic decisions: fairness, trust, and emotion in response to algorithmic management. big data & society. doi: 10.1177/2053951718756684. luhmann, n. (1979). trust and power. trans. of vertrauen (1973) and macht (1975). trans. h davies, j. raffan, & k. rooney. john wiley and sons. mims, c. (2018, march 4). your location data is being sold—often without your knowledge. wall street journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/your-location-data-isbeing-soldoften-without-your-knowledge-1520168400 ostherr, k., borodina, s., bracken, r. c., lotterman, c., storer, e., & williams, b. (2017). trust and privacy in the context of user-generated health data. big data & society. doi: 10.1177/2053951717704673. pink, s., lanzeni, d., & horst, h. (2018). data anxieties: finding trust in everyday digital mess. big data & society. doi: 10.1177/2053951718756685. valentineo-devries, j., singer, n., keller, m. h., & krolik, a. (2018, december 10). your apps know where you were last night, and they’re not keeping it secret. new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/location-data-privacyapps.html?action=click&module=top%20stories&pgtype=homepage withers, c. w. j. (2018). trust – in geography. progress in human geography 42(4): 489–508. doi: 10.1177/0309132516688078 2. crypto-geographies: locating the technical and social dimensions of blockchain matthew zook university of kentucky, geography joe blankenship university of kentucky, geography in less than a decade blockchain-based cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin have gained worldwide attention due to their astronomical and volatile values as well as their aspirations to replace state-based fiat currencies with decentralized systems of algorithmic governance and trust (nakamoto, 2008). much less well understood is the spatiality of these new financial systems and how they contribute to shifting patterns of wealth accumulation, trust and market exchange. to address this gap, this paper locates core cryptocurrency functions within code/space and ongoing processes of financialization. in addition to addressing fundamental questions about the locations of cryptocurrency operations, this paper also asks, what material and organizational factors contribute to these geographies? and how are locations integrated within upstream and downstream operations such as software development and icos? by studying the spatial and digital organization of these new practices this paper provides much needed insight on how cryptocurrencies contribute to the location and practice of trust within economies, currencies and finance. conceptualizing cryptocurrencies via financialization and code/space aalbers (2017) defines financialization as the "...increasing dominance of financial actors, markets, practices, measurements and narratives, at various scales, resulting in a structural transformation of economies, firms (including financial institutions), states and households." as a conceptual framing, financialization focuses on how financial logics shape social, cultural and spatial practices that ultimately manifest in firms’ and individuals’ economic behavior (hall, 2012; lai, 2017). this paper focuses on the spatial propagation of the financial logics of cryptocurrencies and which places and actors are entangled. to empirically measure these geographies of cryptocurrencies, this paper draws upon kitchin and dodge’s (2014) theory of code/space in which software and materiality come together in the production of space, blending human and software decisions. this intertwining of software and materiality is readily evident in blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. these code/spaces enroll technical structures (blockchain miners) that tied to material inputs (electricity and computer hardware) as well as social inputs (attention, labor, trust, icos, etc.). for example, computer miners running proof-of-work algorithms rely on computational power to solve the hash encryptions (de vries, 2018) and as cryptocurrencies gained monetary value, a hardware-driven, energy intensive arms race emerged. the key role of electricity results in geographies based on energy costs, manifesting in massive chinese computer networks organized around state subsidized power (fairley, 2017) and malware designed to hijack computer cycles from personal computers (lau, 2017). an example of social input shaping the geographies of cryptocurrencies is the labor (by developers, exchange owners and entrepreneurs) which creates and uses blockchain systems. while blockchain developers have largely clustered in the usa and europe (friedlmaier et al., 2017), the code/spaces of engagement rely heavily on digital communication—chat, email, message boards, video calls—to create networks spanning the globe (castells, 1996) contrasting to previous patterns of tech-based startups (storper, 1997). closely tied to these configurations are evolving regimes of regulation that help shape the locational decisions of cryptocurrency activities. states and central banks are still coming to terms on how to treat cryptocurrencies, e.g., are they assets, securities or something else, and this drives firms structures and geographies. analyzing cryptocurrency geographies the spatial organization of cryptocurrencies is relatively unknown as there are no comprehensive data repositories on the locations of its activities even as it spreads globally. to address this gap, this paper analyzes and visualizes three cryptocurrency geographies essential building trust and functionality in the system: computer miners, attention to cryptocurrencies and blockchain developers. • mapping cryptocurrency miners: computer nodes or miners on which blockchain and encryption protocols run are central to cryptocurrencies. this paper’s builds upon the bitnode (2018) technique supplemented by web crawling of available mining pool apis to create a list of all miners for the bitcoin network. standard ip geolocation services will determine the location of miners at a range of accuracies from country to city level. because power cost is an important driver of miner locations (fairley, 2017) this paper tests the extent to which electricity pricing is correlated to miners’ locations. • locating attention to cryptocurrencies: attracting and selling attention is central to many business models (wu 2017) but for cryptocurrencies garnering attention and engagement is a key input to building trust and value. attention, is a limited resource and understanding where attention manifests (karpick 2010) offers key insight on the spatiality of cryptocurrencies. using a global database of geotagged social media since this paper uses tweets and profiles based on a curated list of cryptocurrency keywords to identify attention to cryptocurrencies across scales. • finding blockchain developers: existing literature (garcia et al., 2014) suggests that the geographies of the labor behind the development of blockchain are remarkably diffuse. project work is organized and conducted remotely via global networks contrasting to previous patterns of localized agglomerations based on labor, cultural practices, knowledge or capital (storper, 1997). to trace the geographies of blockchain developers this project uses two publicly available sources: linkedin profiles and github project profiles to create a database of blockchain developers. using these bespoke datasets this paper presents a series of mappings (cartographic and relational) to highlight the often-unseen geographies of software and information technology practices (see graham et al, 2015 for a similar approach). with these visualizations the paper casts light on this new shadowy yet growing system of global finance is organizing itself and unevenly building trust in new currencies and connecting locations around the world. bibliography references aalbers, m. b. (2016). corporate financialization. international encyclopedia of geography, 1-11. castells, m. (1996). the rise of the network society. wiley blackwell. de vries, a. (2018). bitcoin's growing energy problem. joule 2(5): 801–805. fairley, p. (2017). feeding the blockchain beast. ieee spectrum 54(10): 36–59. friedlmaier, m., tumasjan, a., & welpe, i. m. (2017). disrupting industries with blockchain: the industry, venture capital funding, and regional distribution of blockchain ventures. available from ssrn: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2854756, garcia, d., tessone, c.j., mavrodiev, p., & perony, n. (2014). the digital traces of bubbles: feedback cycles between socio-economic signals in the bitcoin economy. journal of the royal society: interface 11: 1–8. graham, m., sabbata, s., & zook, m. (2015). towards a study of information geographies: immutable augmentations and a mapping of the geographies of information. geo: geography and environment. doi:10.1002/geo2.8/epdf hall, s. (2012). geographies of money and finance ii financialization and financial subjects. progress in human geography 36(3): 403–411. karpick, l. (2010). valuing the unique: the economics of singularities. princeton: princeton university press. kitchin, r., & dodge, m. (2014). code/space: software and everyday life. cambridge, ma: the mit press. lai, k. (2017). financialisation of everyday life, in: clark, g.l., feldmann, m., gertler, m.s. & wojcik, d. (eds) the new oxford handbook of economic geography, oxford: oxford university press lau, h. (2017). browser-based cryptocurrency mining makes unexpected return from the dead. symantec blogs. https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threatintelligence/browser-mining-cryptocurrency, nakamoto, s. (2008). bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. retrieved from: https://bitcoin.org/ storper, m. (1997). the regional world: territorial development in a global economy. guilford press. wu, t. (2017). the attention merchants: from the daily newspaper to social media, how our time and attention is harvested and sold. london: atlantic. 3. locating women’s safety in uber’s “safety toolkit” caitlin mcgrane rmit university larissa hjorth rmit university smartphones are very much part of everyday (deloitte, 2016). they operate in a paradoxical manner—at sometimes empowering, other times exploiting, sometimes personal, other times corporatised—highlighting some of the key practices of datafication (van dijck, 2014). they are vehicles for what melissa gregg calls context bleed (2011)—creating new forms of “mobile intimacy” and informal labour practices. they are also both companion and witnesses to changing relationships between intimacy, informal labour and data. these paradoxes are amplified in the case of gendered use whereby they can be both affective tools for protection (cumiskey & brewster, 2012) and surveillance (frith, 2015). as data and everyday life become entangled, we start to see different modes of affective labour coming to the forefront. affective labour is typically characterised as emotional work women are forced to do to make people feel at ease (hochschild, 1983), including smiling or ignoring their own discomfort for the sake of others. these practices become normalized and domesticated in, and through, smartphones (fortunati, 2011). as part of the rise of datafication in everyday life through the smartphone has been the default role of gps. locative media, deployed through smartphones, are shaping new understandings of space (de souza e silva & frith, 2012), surveillance (humphreys, 2013, 2011) and rethinking privacy (gazzard, 2011). although scholars have examined corporate and governmental surveillance in an age of big data (e.g. farman, 2011; andrejevic, 2006, 2013; lupton, 2016), new forms of social surveillance (marwick, 2012) amongst families or couples creates an additional—and, to date, underresearched—overlay of everyday practices (hjorth et al., 2017; leaver, 2017). for example, we know little about the ways locative media practices relate to privacy, intimacy and surveillance, and how these experiences play out in terms of gendered labour. how do locative media overlays in everyday life shape, and are shaped by, women? and how is affective labour recalibrated through these experiences and practices? these questions are particularly pertinent when thinking about locative media apps such as uber (hjorth et al., 2018). this paper focuses on gendered affective labour and locative media in the context of uber end-users. previous research has found that uber drivers feel they must constantly be “friendly” while working, performing particular modes of affect (anderson, 2016; rosenblat & stark, 2016), but little is known about the affective labour of uber passengers. in particular, we investigate the norms and procedures of uber’s “safety toolkit”. uber’s “safety toolkit” includes a number of measures aimed to increase the feelings of safety for end-users. these included an “emergency button” to contact authorities, and “trusted contacts” to share real-time location. while these can be interpreted as “careful surveillance” practices (hjorth, richardson, & balmford, 2016), they also suggest that the trade-off for improved safety is increased surveillance. “careful surveillance” refers to the ways we carefully and deliberately watch those who are subject to our care (hjorth, richardson, & balmford, 2016). however, as smartphones and location data can be used for surveillance (frith, 2015), these practices are intended to create affective labour for uber users because the platform cannot be trusted to adequately protect them. uber frames the “safety toolkit” as careful surveillance on a user-to-user basis, however this assumes passengers should trust uber to protect and manage their data. in its privacy policy, uber states it prevents fraud by sharing user data with third parties, but does not provide further details (uber, 2019). without knowing exactly how and why uber is collecting their data, users cannot assume their privacy is being protected. instead of users unquestioningly placing trust in uber, there needs to be closer scrutiny of uber’s data practices. in this paper we discuss uber’s “safety toolkit” to unpack how it profits from user data and trust in their safety features. we then explore ethnographically how uber’s affective labour is perceived by women end-users. do women feel safe? what constitutes “feeling” safe? what are the invisible and tacit multisensorial dimensions that constitute those feelings and affects? deploying interviews, scenarios of use and application, we explore some of the paradoxical ways women are experiencing uber and its affective labour. references anderson, d. n. (2016). wheels in the head: ridesharing as monitored performance. surveillance & society 14(2): 1477–1487. andrejevic, m. (2013). infoglut: how too much information is changing the way we think and know. new york: routledge. cox, j. (2019). i gave a bounty hunter $300. then he located our phone. motherboard. retrieved from https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nepxbz/i-gave-a-bountyhunter-300-dollars-located-phone-microbilt-zumigo-tmobile cumiskey, k. m., & brewster, k. (2012). mobile phones or pepper spray. feminist media studies 12(4): 590–599. doi:10.1080/14680777.2012.741893 deloitte. (2016). mobile consumer survey 2016: the australian cut. retrieved from https://www2.deloitte.com/au/en/pages/technology-media-andtelecommunications/articles/mobile-consumer-survey-2016.html de souza e silva, a., & frith, j. (2012). mobile interfaces in public spaces: locational privacy, control, and urban sociability. new york: routledge. fortunati, l. (2009). gender and the mobile phone. in l. hjorth & g. goggin (eds.), mobile technologies: from telecommunications to media (pp. 23–34). new york: routledge. fortunati, l. (2011). icts and immaterial labor from a feminist perspective. journal of communication inquiry 35(4): 426–432. doi:10.1177/0196859911417713 frith, j. (2015). smartphones as locative media. cambridge, uk: polity press. goldenfein, j. (2017). australia’s privacy laws gutted in court ruling on what is ‘personal information’. the conversation. retrieved from https://theconversation.com/australiasprivacy-laws-gutted-in-court-ruling-on-what-is-personal-information-71486 gregg, m. (2011). work's intimacy. cambridge, uk: polity. hjorth, l., horst, h., & pink, s. (2018). privacy at the margins. international journal of communication 12. retrieved from https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/7050 hjorth, l., richardson, i., & balmford, w. (2016). careful surveillance and pet wearables: at home with animals. the conversation. retrieved from https://theconversation.com/careful-surveillance-and-pet-wearables-at-home-withanimals-63883 hochschild, a. (1983). the managed heart. berkeley: university of california press humphreys, l. (2011). who's watching whom? a study of interactive technology and surveillance. journal of communication 61(4): 575–595. doi: 10.1111/j.14602466.2011.01570.x humphreys, l. (2013). mobile social networks and surveillance: users’ perspectives. in a. jansson & m. christensen (eds.), media, surveillance, and identity: a social perspective (pp. 109–126). new york: peter lang. jacks, t. (2019). female ride-share drivers campaign for safer working conditions. sydney morning herald. retrieved from https://www.smh.com.au/business/workplace/female-ride-share-drivers-campaign-forsafer-working-conditions-20180718-p4zs96.html khosrowshahi, d. (2018). getting serious about safety. retrieved from https://www.uber.com/newsroom/getting-serious-safety/ leaver, t. (2017). intimate surveillance: normalizing parental monitoring and mediation of infants online. social media + society 3(2): 1–10. levine, y. (2018). google’s earth: how the tech giant is helping the state spy on us. retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/dec/20/googles-earth-how-thetech-giant-is-helping-the-state-spy-on-us location forum (2013). location data privacy: guidelines, assessment & recommendations. lupton, d. (2016a). the diverse domains of quantified selves: self-tracking modes and dataveillance. economy and society 45(1), 101–122. reply all (2019). robocall: bang bang. retrieved from https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/135-the-robocall-conundrum rosenblat, a., & stark, l. (2016). algorithmic labor and information asymmetries: a case study of uber’s drivers. international journal of communication 10: 3758–3784. doi:10.1111/tsq.12101 uber. (2019). privacy policy. retrieved 1 february, 2019 from https://privacy.uber.com/policy/ valentineo-devries, j., singer, n., keller, m. h., & krolik, a. (2018, december 10). your apps know where you were last night, and they’re not keeping it secret. new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/location-data-privacyapps.html?action=click&module=top%20stories&pgtype=homepage van dijck, j. (2014). datafiction, dataism and dataveillance: big data between scientific paradigm and secular belief. surveillance & society 12(2): 197–208. 4. autonomous vehicles, maps & trust julian thomas rmit university rowan wilken rmit university autonomy, in vehicles as elsewhere, involves predictive, decision-making functions, requiring large amounts of data and information. autonomous vehicles now work constantly to locate themselves and other objects in their immediate environments. these vehicles also need to make decisions in real time, which requires a high level of on-board processing capacity, and a practical division of processing labor between the car and the cloud. local processing is highly sophisticated, as autonomous vehicles rely on machine learning and deep learning to recognize proximate objects. these aspects of the vehicle’s “machinic complex”—the integral roles of data acquisition and management, and local processing—may be strongly associated with autonomy, and the transformation of cars into decision-making machines. in this paper, we use the example of mapping to argue that these capacities are not unique to the emerging technologies of autonomous vehicles, but that they constitute a vital, yet largely neglected, aspect of the contemporary “automobility system” (urry, 2007, p. 115). in our account, maps are not only essential to autonomous vehicles for their role in their operation, but also for their governance, political economy, and trustworthiness. maps are critical devices for accountability and transparency in autonomous systems— but their significance in this respect is not new. in this paper, we develop our argument in two steps. in the first part of this paper, we provide some historical context by tracing a series of key points in the development and gradual incorporation of maps into automobiles in order to explain the central place that this particular kind of data has had in the development of human trust and control of vehicles, and now in autonomous vehicles. a contemporary history of cars and maps cartographic information and communication in the form of road maps, atlases and directories were an essential in-car accessory from the very earliest days of automotive transport (akerman 2006). these maps—as well as other media, such as photo-auto guides, which combined textual and other instructions with landscape photography and maps in published books (thielmann, 2016)—were both sources of vital information and eloquent symbols of the power and possibilities associated with mobility. maps were necessary because automobiles were entirely dependent on the existence of special road infrastructures—a widely-recognized limitation of the new technology of automobiles—but they conveyed great capabilities for long range travel and urban convenience. the mechanical control of maps was seen as a necessary early step in enhancing the control of motor vehicles. in-car mechanized maps, or mechanical guidance systems, appear early in this history. the jones live-map from 1911, for example, consisted of a turntable slowly rotated by a gear train connected to one of the vehicle wheels by a flexible shaft. related technology appeared, ca.1930, in the form of the italian-made iter avto. this was a dash-mounted device containing a scrolling paper map that was loaded into the system to correlate with a specific route. a major step towards the development of modern, digital in-car navigation systems came with the creation of the automatic route control system (arcs) that was designed in 1970-1971 by the us-based command systems corporation. arcs was the “first autonomous route guidance system to use an on-board digital computer with digitized maps and map-matching software in conjunction with a dead-reckoning subsystem” (french, 2006, p. 272) that used its map-matching software to “correlate the apparent vehicle route with the actual route map stored on a digital tape cartridge” (p. 272). commercially released in-car navigation systems began to emerge from the early 1980s, using dead reckoning (newcomb, 2013). perhaps the key change occurred in 2000 when more accurate gps services for non-military use were permitted (ceruzzi, 2018). this led to the proliferation of navigation-focused gps-driven technologies, first in the form of portable devices developed by tomtom, garmin and others, and later as apps for smartphones (newcomb, 2013). in the face of many well-known failures, cars have progressively and continuously integrated mapping, increasingly sophisticated display technologies, and autonomy over the last four decades, with considerable evidence of user acceptance and dependence. maps and autonomous vehicles building on the historical analysis, in the second section of this paper we position maps and maps data—alongside other rapid technological innovations related to mobile and autonomous vehicle navigation (including lidar), and vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems—as crucial to the successful development of trust in increasingly autonomous vehicles. our argument in this section of the paper is that maps, and the data streams they generate and combine with, are not a layer on top of autonomous vehicle systems—they are integral to their operation and human use. they are also likely to be crucial to the future trustworthiness—or otherwise—of these systems. precision maps are vital at the orientation and decision stages of autonomous vehicle operation. they enable vehicles to make critical predictions. the particular challenge for driverless cars, as autonomous vehicle development pioneer sebastian thrun explains, is to “map the environment while simultaneously determining the [car’s] position relative to this map” (thrun & leonard, 2008, p. 872). “key enablers” in responding to this challenge are what thrun and leonard refer to as “simultaneous localization and mapping” (slam) processes (p. 871), whereby the vehicle operates as a communication platform to combine, in real-time, finely granulated precision maps information to orient the vehicle, with supplementary perception data generated from the vehicle’s arrays of sensors, and with both sets of data continually interpreted and acted upon, then reinterpreted and acted upon, etc., by the decision-making processor. as vehicles have acquired more autonomous capabilities, they have also become specialized mapping machines, both with and without direct human involvement. for this reason, maps have become increasingly strategically and operationally important for the transport and communications platforms of the near future. references akerman, j. r. (2006). twentieth-century american road maps and the making of the national motorized space. in akerman, j. r. (ed.) cartographies of travel and navigation (pp.151–206, 321–330). chicago: university of chicago press. ceruzzi, p. e. (2018). gps. cambridge, ma: mit press. french, r. l. (2006). maps on wheels: the evolution of automobile navigation. in akerman, j. r. (ed.) cartographies of travel and navigation (pp. 260–290, 343–346). chicago: university of chicago press. newcomb, d. (2013). from hand-cranked maps to the cloud: charting the history of incar navigation. wired, april 10. https://www.wired.com/2013/04/history-in-carnavigation/ thielmann, t. (2016). linked photography: a praxeological analysis of augmented reality navigation in the early twentieth century. in gómez cruz e and lehmuskallio a (eds.) digital photography and everyday life: empirical studies on material visual practices (pp. 160–185). routledge: london. thrun, s. & leonard, j. j. (2008) simultaneous localization and mapping. in siciliano b and khatib o (eds.) springer handbook of robotics (pp. 871–889). berlin: springerverlag. urry, j. (2007). mobilities. cambridge: polity selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 lehto, m., hynnä, k., light, b., cassidy, e., tudor, e. (2017, october 18-21). digital networks, digital pub(l)ics (2): gender, sex, embodiment. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. digital networks, digital pub(l)ics (2): gender, sex, embodiment panel description the digital networks, digital pub(l)ics panels (two panels in total) develop a critical conversation around the themes of intimacy, sexuality and embodiment and explore the ways in which these concepts are experienced, invoked and interrogated by different groups, communities and individuals in digital contexts. speaking to the theme of the 2017 conference, the papers collectively identify, map and seek to understand the formation of publics constituted through paradigms and practices of gender and sexuality. in this panel, scholars come together to explore the manifold ways in which digital publics and social networks are formed around the politics, pleasures and practices of gender, sexuality and embodiment. in the first paper, the author utilises a specific incident – the criticism of breastfeeding ‘in public’ – to explore the formation of a feminist online counter-public. mapping the movement of images, texts and bodies through different forms of space, the author articulates how affect adheres to these objects and becomes a binding force in the development of social media responses to such objects. recognising that normative and resistant politics are rarely discrete entities, the author examines how the online protest against a finnish celebrity served to support women’s rights to exist in public while simultaneously performing homophobia. issues concerning behaviour in public, access to publics, and public performances of gender link the first paper to the second, which similarly focuses on images shared via online social networking platforms. in this paper the author builds on existing scholarly work on ‘selfie culture’ in order to interrogate the performance of self on instagram. focusing specifically on non-normative bodies, the author examines the texts and images connected via the #goldenconfidence hashtag in order to draw attention to the strategies of resistance that users enact online. this resistance is two-fold, responding as it does to both the denial of fat sexuality within the public sphere and also to the public disapproval of sexualised selfies. through textual analysis approaches, the author investigates how the affect of pride is performed and circulated via folksonomic networks. in the third paper, the attention to gender continues, while the specific focus shifts from women in public to men in networks. the authors of the second paper draw upon detailed in-depth interviews with men to provide fresh insight into how men navigate online social networks to perform work, leisure and wellbeing. the authors respond to previous scholarship that has either focused exclusively on gay and bisexual men, or has investigated heterosexual masculinity within the confines of specific platforms. seeking to intervene in this critical landscape, the authors take a holistic approach to men’s use of digital and social media in order to map the multiple meanings contained within everyday digital interactions. the research points to the freedoms that men experience online, while also identifying how the historical (self)censorship of men has migrated to digital space. this censorship pertains to issues of health and wellbeing, and reveals the discursive limits of peer-based online networks. finally, in the fourth paper, the author seeks to disrupt conventional thinking around the ‘smoothness’ of digital network, once again paying particular attention to issues of gender and sexuality. drawing on research that examines the experiences of queer men in russia, the author appropriates the notion of ‘desire lines’ in order to provoke a critical interrogation of network culture that reveals the discontinuities of digital environments. these discontinuities represent an opportunity to recognise the heteronormative investments woven into contemporary understandings of the network, whereby smoothness might best be understood as a flattening down, and a smoothing out of difference and divergence. the digital lives of queer russian men offer an opportunity to disrupt this logic and, in doing so, acknowledge the ways in which we might queer trajectories and challenge (digital) hegemonies. while speaking to their own specific case studies, these the four papers work in concert to produce a coherent, critically-engaged and methodologically diverse conversation regarding gendered and sexual publics. in doing so, they signpost both the boundaries of such publics, and the methods by which non-normative folk are challenging such boundaries. paper 1: bare flesh and sticky milk: an affective conflict over public breastfeeding mari lehto university of turku on january 1st, 2016 finnish celebrity fashion stylist and tv presenter teri niitti took a photograph of a woman breastfeeding on a finnair flight ready for takeoff. he then published it on facebook, instagram and twitter. in the accompanying text he asked women to cover up their breastfeeding in public and added the following hashtags: #breast #breastfeeding #mothers #publicbreastfeeding #opinion #decency #firstclass #businessclass #finnair #feelfinnair #newyork #mothers #scarf. social network sites gather different collections of people depending on the situation and the network mediates the interactions between members of the public. the types of publics that get together on particular sites and the types of publics that such sites support are deeply affected by the mediated nature of interaction. (marwick & boyd 2011, 25.) through technological networks niitti’s post moved from an unmediated public of a plane, where the audience is structurally defined, to networked publics of social media where the audiences are unknown and unpredictable. while niitti was travelling from helsinki to new york, the update was moving through different sites and gained a lot of negative attention. some people were responding directly to niitti but many initiated their own discussion threads on facebook, twitter and a number of discussion forums. most commentators were defending women’s right to nurse in public and criticized niitti for posting a picture of an intimate situation without permission. he was also accused of hypocrisy for being disgusted when the female breasts were used for their “real purpose” while simultaneously objectifying women in his work as a stylist. by using hashtags like #publicbreastfeeding niitti probably caught the attention of audiences that would normally not follow him on social media. mothers and the so called “lactivists” took notice and started to post breastfeeding pictures on instagram with a hashtag #teriniitti or #teriniittistyling as a form of protest. relatively fast the situation escalated to personal attacks. niitti was verbally abused for being gay and some of the commentators even wished for him to die. after landing, and becoming aware of the storm he had caused, niitti deleted the post and made his instagram account private. he later apologized for his lack of judgement but during the next 48 hours and more the post aroused fury and heated conversations all over social media becoming a subject of attention in finnish traditional media as well. how did teri niitti’s homosexuality become an object of negative affect and how did social media negotiate the appropriate public presentation of the female body? drawing on feminist theorizations of affect, i address these questions through an analysis of a single thread of 370 comments on finnish discussion forum vauva.fi (baby.fi), which is highly popular also outside parenting circles. the thread’s communication is very antagonistic in its emphasis on expressions of anger, disgust and resentment. many are expressing their outrage towards niitti or the whole debate. some are accusing publicly nursing women of exhibitionism while others are defending public breastfeeding. many of the comments discuss the limits of appropriate exposure of flesh while some others connect niitti’s anti-breastfeeding message to his homosexuality and his presumed disgust towards the female body. the thread’s angry, critical, sarcastic and provocative expressions reflect feminist scholar sara ahmed’s (2004) account of the way emotional responses align subjects with and against others (rossi 2010, 88; ahmed 2004a, 32). for ahmed (2004, 90), stickiness is “an effect of the histories of contact between bodies, objects, and signs”. lunceford (2012, 41) suggests that by nursing in public, women violate codes of decorum as they are refusing to work within the system. despite of how the contemporary experience of mothering in euro-american settings has become increasingly child centered, and how heavily breastfeeding is promoted (hays 1996; faircloth 2014), social attitudes on the practice of public nursing vary widely. in addition, even though the anonymous online posts are circulating affects through recognizable representations, in the uses of networked media affective intensities accumulate in such complex ways that their qualities can be hard to distinguish and their intersections difficult to specifically determine (paasonen 2015, 29; 2011, 231–240). like paasonen (2015, 30) points out, social media users are generally driven by a search for intensity and the stickiness of a discussion thread depends on intensities it affords. human lactation in itself is a very sticky subject and when sexuality is thrown to the mix things gets even stickier. this process of affective expression is characteristic to networked publics of social media where the gathering and the behavior of audiences can be hard to predict. i argue that the affective dynamics of online discussions on embodiment and sexuality instigate aggressive and provocative performances and affective language due to historical and cultural context. the signs get more affective, the more they circulate (ahmed 2004, 45). the debate that took place was a typical social media chain reaction in which publicity is difficult to control, and where different discourses encounter each other. i further argue that the affective circulation involved in the case of teri niitti made visible how normative speech on gender and sexuality becomes articulated in the era of social media. references ahmed, s. (2004) ‘the cultural politics of emotion’. routledge. faircloth, c. (2014) ‘militant lactivism? attachment parenting and intensive motherhood in the u.k. and france’ hays, s. (1996) ‘the cultural contradictions of motherhood’. yale university press. nousiainen, a. (2016) ’teri niitti joutui kohun silmään: kun some suuttuu, väkijoukko lynkkaa ihmisen muutamassa tunnissa’. helsingin sanomat, kuukausiliite. available at http://www.hs.fi/kuukausiliite/art-2000002884432.html (accessed 20th february, 2017). lunceford, b. l. (2012) ‘naked politics. nudity, political action, and the rhetoric of the body.’ lexington books. marwick, a. e. & boyd, d. (2011) ‘the drama! teen conflict, gossip, and bullying in networked publics’ paper presented at the oxford internet institute decade in internet time symposium, september 22. paasonen, s. (2015) ‘a midsummer’s bonfire: affective intensities of online debate’. in k. hillis, s. paasonen and m. petit (eds.), networked affect. cambridge: mit press, 27–42. rossi, l-m. (2010) ‘daughters of privlidge: class, sexuality, affect and the gilmore girls’. in m. liljeström & s. paasonen (eds.), working with affect in feminist readings: disturbing differences. routledge, london, pp. 85-97. paper 2: #goldenconfidence: pride and sexuality in body positive selfies kaisu hynnä university of turku in the popular media selfies are often treated as a source of anxiety and distress. the visual genre is understood as an emblem of vanity or narcissism of today’s culture (for ex. gregoire, 2015). careless selfie takers, falling off cliffs (foxnews.com, 2016) or destroying priceless statues (miller, 2014) in their attempt to catch the perfect selfie, are seen to pose a threat to their own safety, as well as to that of others. another worry, feeding into the moral panic around selfies, are girls and young women taking sexually provocative selfies and posting them online. in this panic laden scenario, girls and women are seen simultaneously as helpless, ignorant victims of social media and of the people using their selfies for sexual pleasure, and as narcissistic individuals interested only in their looks and in becoming instafamous (for ex. free, 2016). however, as cultural studies scholars focusing on selfies have pointed out, selfies are a multifaceted genre taken up by people of various backgrounds and identities, for various reasons (senft & baym, 2015). the motivations for taking a selfie may be political or activist, for example, (see for ex. nemer & freeman, 2015; baishya, 2015), countering the popular belief that all selfie takers are simply expressing vanity or egocentricity. following senft & baym (2015: 1589), i understand selfie as a gesture or a message transmitting feelings in the form of a photograph, and often accompanied by hashtags that make the selfie’s meanings clearer. in body activist and body political contexts, the affect aimed to transmit is usually pride. pride has been seen critical in the emancipation of marginalized groups (halberstam, 2005), although the concept has faced critique as well (for ex. murray, 2008). this paper focuses on selfies posted on instagram with the hashtag #goldenconfidence. a typical #goldenconfidence selfie represents a 20-something (most often white) woman posing for the camera in her underwear or in some fashionable gear. her body is larger than the idealized female body seen in mass media and general public. #goldenconfidence represents the so called body positive movement providing space for bodies of all shapes and sizes (see for ex. sastre, 2014). other popular hashtags, related to body positivity, and often used together with #goldenconfidence, include #effyourbeautystandards, #beautybeyondsize, and #fatgirlsbewinning. #goldenconfidence is understood as an empowering public, centered on the affect of pride, but also as a networked public where affects remain unstable. affects – understood both as social and corporeal sensations that are always in motion (ahmed, 2004) – are decoded from the visual objects of selfies, as well as the texts linked to the pictures. although an isolated selfie, depicting a smiling, full-figured woman posing topless for the camera while covering her nipples with her other hand, for example, may be understood as a visual manifestation of nothing but pride, the accompanying texts complicate this understanding. the woman posing for the picture explains her decision for posting it in the following way: ‘i've had this picture saved in my drafts for a while, and i was scared to post it. i have a tough relationship with the rolls on my stomach, and anytime they show in pictures, i always delete them. but i took a second to think about it, today. this is me, the body that i have worked so hard to love and accept. there's no hiding it, and i shouldn't have to. i'd be doing a disservice to myself and the women who look at me and my body for inspiration to present a constantly edited depiction of myself. so here i am. rolls and all.’ (person 1.) i interpret person 1’s hesitation to post the selfie as a signal of how difficult affect pride is to accomplish, since affects are by nature sticky and certain objects (and bodies) are more laden with ‘positive’ affects (ahmed, 2004). the paper discusses (hetero)sexuality as a recurrent element of pride in body positive movement and #goldenconfidence selfies. the discussion is made relevant by the repeated denial of fat sexuality in mainstream public (harjunen, 2006), but also by the general disapproval of sexually laden selfies. in the case of #goldenconfidence selfies, sexuality can be seen as an activist element working to challenge the prejudices towards fatness. i argue that for subjects discriminated and marginalized in the general public, selfies emphasizing the attractiveness of one’s body may be powerful vehicles of empowerment. this is something that the critique on postfeminism and sexual imagery (for ex. gill, 2007) has failed to recognize. since selfies do not work in isolation but are part of a networked public, the paper also looks at the dynamics of affects in reception. the comments received for the above described #goldenconfidence selfie on instagram vary in their stances. while one commentor says: ‘you look so good...beautiful and very sexy’ (person 2), another one asks: ‘is this even healthy?’ (person 3). the dialogue is scrutinized as crucial in expressing, maintaining, and encountering pride and sexuality in #goldenconfidence selfies. references ahmed, s. (2004) the cultural politics of emotion. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. baishya, a. (2015) ‘#namo: the political work of the selfie in the 2014 indian general elections’ international journal of communication 9(1), pp. 1686–1700. foxnews.com (2016) ‘death by selfie: man falls off a cliff at machu picchu while posing for a photo’. [online] available at: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/07/01/death-byselfie-man-falls-off-cliff-at-machu-picchu-while-posing-for-photo.html (accessed 22nd february, 2017). free, c. (2016) ‘washington dad hilariously recreates his teen daughter’s provocative selfies so she’ll ‘tone it down’’. people. [online] available at: http://people.com/bodies/dad-of-washington-teen-striking-a-pose-to-mimic-herprovocative-selfies/ (accessed 22nd february, 2017). gill, r. (2007) ‘postfeminist media culture: elements of a sensibility’. european journal of cultural studies 10(2), pp. 147–166. gregoire, c. (2015) ‘study links selfies to narcissism and psychopathy’. the huffington post. [online] available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/12/selfiesnarcissism-psychopathy_n_6429358.html (accessed 22nd february, 2017). halberstam, j. (2005) ‘shame and white gay masculinity’. social text 23(3–4), pp. 219–231. harjunen, h. (2006) ‘käsityksiä lihavan naisen seksuaalisuudesta’. kinnunen, t. & puuronen, a. (eds.) seksuaalinen ruumis. kulttuuritieteelliset lähestymistavat. helsinki: gaudeamus, pp. 183–197. miller, d. (2014) ‘selfie destruction: idiotic student snaps leg off valuable 19th century statue after sitting on its knee to take a perfect selfie’. mail online. [online] available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2584415/student-destroys-statue-trying-selfiesitting-knee.html (accessed 22nd february, 2017). murray, s. (2008) the ‘fat’ female body. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. nemer, d & freeman, g (2015) ‘empowering the marginalized: rethinking selfies in the slums of brazil’. international journal of communication 9(1), pp. 1832–1847. sastre, a. (2014) ‘towards a radical body positive. reading the online ‘body positive movement’’ feminist media studies 14(6), pp. 929–943. senft, t. & baym n. (2015) ‘what does the selfie say? investigating a global phenomenon’ international journal of communication 9(1), pp. 1588–1606. paper 3: men and networked life ben light university of salford elija cassidy queensland university of technology in this paper, we draw upon in-depth interviews conducted with 10 men, focussing upon their everyday experiences of networked digital media and the relationships they see existing between digital media and masculinity. our analysis attends to the nature of human and non-human power in the digitally mediated gendering of men. our interviews highlight the following common themes in participants’ discourse: difficulty reconciling their understanding of masculinity with their own performance of identity and behaviour, both online and off the tendency to frame themselves as variously non-interested, reluctant and non-users in terms of their participation with networked digital media environments (often despite quite extensive engagement levels) a perception that digital media are creating both opportunities for more variation in the range of possible masculinities available to men as well as increased gender based pressures surrounding what it means to be a man (although the perceived breadth of these possibilities and extent of regulation was different across interviewees) the integral role of the gendered politics of platforms in archiving, circulating, repurposing, shaping and finding of masculinities through non-human actors such as interfaces, functions and algorithms. within our interviews with men, we have gained insights into these common perspectives via exploring digital media use and the gendered nature of work, leisure, wellbeing and sex. in relation to work, we focus on the nature of technology at work and work based social networking performances and practices. in terms of leisure, where the digital plays a part, we attend to the dynamics of online shopping, digital gaming and online sports fandom. our focus on wellbeing centres around the gendered nature of interactions, or lack thereof, amongst men when discussing such matters as relationship concerns, fathering, fitness and different health conditions. finally, we attend to the area of sex, and explore men’s perceptions of dating, porn and sexual practices such as sexting. the context of this work is a distinct lack of attention to the links between certain men and digital media over the past 20 years. that is not to say no research in this area exists, but from the overview we provide here we can see certain distinct themes and, as a result, this allows us to point to areas needing more attention. the strongest theme in present research of the digital where men, the construction of gender and sexuality and networked life is concerned is that relating to gay men. early examples include studies of the role of internet relay chat in facilitating sexual connection, social connection and identity work for gay men (campbell, 2004; shaw, 1997), taiwanese gay academic’s use of internet chat rooms as useful political devices (yang, 2000), and the use, of the now defunct, french minitel system by gay men (livia, 2002). work also reported on the potential sexual health interventions online for gay men (bolding et al., 2004). over the last ten years, studies of gay men’s use of digital media have continued a focus upon social and sexual connection but expanded to take note of the contradictions and complications regarding the construction, representation and enactment of gay men’s life online – for example (cassidy, 2016; dowsett et al., 2008; elund, 2013; light, 2016; light et al., 2008; mowlabocus, 2010; race, 2015; roth, 2015). work has also continued that seeks to evaluate health interventions for men who have sex with men via contemporary locative media such as grindr (burrell et al., 2012). over the last 20 years, a further strand of work is present, though much smaller. this work focuses, predominantly, though not exclusively, on heterosexual masculinities and digital media. this work also has an element of the sexual included within it, though nowhere near as much as that associated with gay men. for example, there have been studies of dating, web camming, cybersex and online porn (attwood, 2009; kibby & costello, 1999). much less attention has been given to the arenas of work (erikssonzetterquist & knights, 2004; kendall, 2002), social connection (siibak, 2010) and play (burrill, 2010). following the small scale, but in-depth interview based approach of connell (2005), we add to this literature through a study of the networked life of men. together our findings respond to the existing literature in the area by expanding the range of digital technologies and contexts for understanding the gendered lives of men. references attwood, f. (2009). `deepthroatfucker' and `discerning adonis': men and cybersex. international journal of cultural studies, 12(3), 279-294. bolding, g., davis, m., sherr, l., & hart, g. (2004). use of gay internet sites and views about online health promotion among men who have sex with men. aids care, 16(8), 993-1001. burrell, e., pines, h., robbie, e., coleman, l., murphy, r., hess, k., . . . gorbach, p. (2012). use of the location-based social networking application grindr as a recruitment tool in rectal microbicide development research. aids and behavior, 16(7), 1816-1820. burrill, d. a. (2010). die tryin' video games, masculinity, culture. new york: peter lang. campbell, j. e. (2004). getting it on online: cyberspace, gay male sexuality and emboddied identity. new york: harrington parker press. cassidy, e. (2016). social networking sites and participatory reluctance: a case study of gaydar, user resistance and interface rejection. new media & society, 18(11), 2613-2628. connell, r. w. (2005). masculinities. cambridge: polity. dowsett, g. w., williams, h., ventuneac, a., & carballo-diéguez, a. (2008). `taking it like a man': masculinity and barebacking online. sexualities, 11(1-2), 121-141. elund, j. (2013). masculinity, mass consumerism and subversive sex: a case study of second life’s ‘zeus’ gay club. sexualities, 16(3-4), 423-444. eriksson-zetterquist, u., & knights, d. (2004). stories about men implementing and resisting new technologies. new technology, work and employment, 19(3), 192-206. kendall, l. (2002). hanging out in the virtual pub: masculinities and relationships online. berkeley: university of california press. kibby, m., & costello, b. (1999). displaying the phallus: masculinity and the performance of sexuality on the internet. men and masculinities, 1(4), 352-364. light, b. (2016). producing sexual cultures and pseudonymous publics with digital networks. in r. a. lind (ed.), race and gender in electronic media: challenges and opportunities (pp. 231-246 ). london: routledge. light, b., fletcher, g., & adam, a. (2008). gay men, gaydar and the commodification of difference. information technology and people, 21(3), 300-314. livia, a. (2002). public and clandestine: gay men's pseudonyms on the french minitel. sexualities, 5(2), 201-217. mowlabocus, s. (2010). gaydar culture : gay men technology and embodiment in the digital age. farnham: ashgate. race, k. (2015). ‘party and play’: online hook-up devices and the emergence of pnp practices among gay men. sexualities, 18(3), 253-275. roth, y. (2015). “no overly suggestive photos of any kind”: content management and the policing of self in gay digital communities. communication, culture & critique, 8(3), 414-432. shaw, d. (1997). gay men and computer communication: a discourse of sex and identity in cyberspace. in s. jones (ed.), virtual culture: identity and communication in cybersociety (pp. 133-146). london: sage publications ltd. siibak, a. (2010). constructing masculinity on a social networking site: the case-study of visual self-presentations of young men on the profile images of sns rate. young, 18(4), 403-425. yang, c.-c. (2000). the use of the internet among academic gay communities in taiwan: an exploratory study. information communication and society, 3(2), 153-172. paper 4: desire lines: queering movements in mediaspace matilda tudor södertörn university background the internet and the digitalization of interpersonal communication have in many ways re-drawn the map of queer living, and revolutionized possibilities for same-sex desiring subjects to connect beyond social and geographical constrains. queer media studies illuminate strong connections between digital environments and everyday life (e.g. phillips & o’ riordian eds., 2007; pullen & cooper eds. 2010; wakeford, 2002; brown, maycock & burns, 2005; shaw, 1997; campbell, 2005; mowlabocus, 2007; 2008; 2010a; tsang, 2000; kim et al, 2001), where the online and the offline is sometimes said to be in a “symbiotic relationship” (mowlabocus, 2010a). as much writing interested in postmodern geography, this legitimately points at new possibilities for “continuity” across spaces, brought about through digitalization (e.g. appadurai, 1990; bauman, 2015; castells, 1996; giddens, 1990). that means concepts such as “flow” (e.g. castells, 1996; deuze, 2012) and “convergence” (jenkins, 2004) largely discussing digital media use as integrated aspects of everyday practices and social identity. but at the same time, queer desire is commonly experienced as “discontinuous” within heteronormative contexts (ahmed, 2006), as the subject has to leave the main sociospatial tracks in order to find her sexual object choice. “the closet” further puts queer existence in a constant state of “ambivalence” towards the wider public (sedgewick, 1990) and for many serves to segment spheres of living in non-intact but highly conflicting ways. it seems then, that queer online media practices also call for attention towards “discontinuities” or “ruptures” within theories of media-space. further, such ruptures are likely to become even more evident when queer expressivity and mobility are undermined by juridical restrictions and public tensions. therefore, contemporary russia seems a productive starting point for discussions of how queer people actively navigate mediaspace; taking turns; choosing paths; time and space-shifting, in order to administrate more complicated aspects of everyday living. that include discussions of how for example the “online/offline divide” (even if only a discursive construct) organizes user experiences of safety and discretion; how online surveillance is understood in relation to other panoptic systems (foucault, 1977) during juridical and political persecution; and what forms of agency may be nurtured through digital media practice when negotiating restrictions in space. presentation in this presentation i discuss central themes from my dissertation project, focusing on how queer online media becomes integrated with the dialectic of the closet, by queer male russians. hence i recognize queer online media practices as part of ongoing contestations over shared space at different scales (massey, 2005). at stake here are always attempts at control; the mobility of bodies; and social identities. seeing the technical and the social as fundamentally co-constituted, i elaborate on the concept of “desire lines” (originally developed within the field of urban planning) to describe off-tack erosions in media –space (couldry & mccarthy, 2003) making room for non-normative subjectivities. inspired by sara ahmed’s (2006) queer phenomenology i thereby discuss how locative technologies used by queer men orient users in the world by mapping out objects of desire, and negotiate the contours of queer existence in relation to the local and the global. however, discontinuities, bumps and dis-orientation commonly occur at points where desire lines cross or assimilate with formal pathways in brute and contradictory ways. whereas others have argued for the disappearance of media from our active awareness within a mediatized world (deuze, 2012), such discontinuities across media-space often constitute moments when media rather appears. with examples from my field work among russian queer men in saint petersburg, my presentation will illuminate this lack of “flow” between the online and the offline; between devices and forums; as well as between spatial identities within the mediatized imaginary. this way i aim to discuss the limitations of digital media’s ability to reorganize the spatiotemporal, and the sometimes acute distinction between the symbolic and the material in mediaspace as well as the online and the offline. references ahmed, sara (2006) queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. durham & london: duke university press appadurai, arjun (1990) “disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy”, in public culture, 2(2) pp. 1-24 bauman, zygmunt (2005) liquid life. cambridge: polity brown, graham; maycock, bruce & burns, sharyn (2005) “your picture is your bait: use and meaning of cyberspace among gay men”, journal of sex research, 42:1, 63-73 campbell, john edward (2005) “outing planetout: surveillance, gay marketing and internet affinity portal”, in new media and society, 7(5), 663-683 castells, manuel (1996) the rise of the network society (the information age: economy, society and culture, volume 1). malden, ma: blackwell publishers, inc couldry, nick & mccarthy, anna (2004) mediaspace:place, scale and culture in a media age. new york: routledge deuze, mark (2012) medialife. cambridge & malden: polity press giddens, anthony (1990) the consequences of modernity. cambridge: polity press jenkins, henry (2006) convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york & london: new york university press kim, a. a., kent, c., mcfarland, w., and klausner, j.d. (2001) “cruising on the internet highway”, in journal of aids 28(1): 89-93 massey, doreen (2005), for space. sage publications ltd mowlabocus, sharif (2007) “outside the latex: hiv, sex, and the online barebacking community” in o'riordan, kate & phillips, david j. p. (eds.) (2007) queer online: media technology & sexuality. new york : peter lang publishing inc. mowlabocus, sharif (2008) “revisiting old haunts through new technologies: public (homo)sexual cultures in cyberspace”, in international journal of cultural studies, vol. 11(4):419-439 mowlabocus, sharif (2010a), gaydar culture: gay men, technology and embodiment in the digital age. surrey: ashgate publishing limited phillips, david j. p. & o’riordan, kate (eds.) (2007), queer online: media, technology & sexuality. new york: peter lang pullen & cooper (eds.) (2010) lgbt identity and online new media. new york & london: routledge sedgewick, kosofsky, eve (1990) epistemology of the closet. berkeley, calif.: university of california press shaw, d.f. (1997) “gay men and computer communication: a discourse of sex and identity in cyberspace”, in virtual culture: identity and communication in cyberspace. s.g. jones (ed.) london: sage, 133-145 tsang, d. (2000), “notes on queer ‘n’ asian virtual sex” in bell, david & kennedy, barbara (eds.) the cybercultures reader. london: routledge wakeford, nina (2002), “new technologies and cyber-queer research”, in handbook of lesbian and gay studies. diane richardson, steven seidman (eds) microsoft word 805-552-1-pb.docx 1     the social media overture of the pan-european anti-acta protest: an empirical examination of coordination in connective action dan mercea, the university of gothenburg, sweden; universite catholique de lille, france, dan.mercea@gmail.com andreas funk, the hague university of applied sciences, the netherlands, a.funk@hhs.nl paul nixon, the hague university of applied sciences, the netherlands, p.g.nixon@hhs.nl (please do not quote without permission from authors) abstract this paper proposes an empirical model designed to operationalize the notion of digitally and loosely coordinated collective action as proposed by the recent theory of connective action. specifically, it examines the capacity for coordination of the expressive participation that is characteristic of connective action proposing that it may be divided into a capacity for motivational coordination and a capacity for resource coordination, respectively. these two dimensions of coordination may enable us to discern how individual motives and collective goals can become aligned through posts on social media. the paper provides preliminary findings that support the two dimensionality of coordination. key words: social media, connective action, coordination, acta in the current political climate marked by deep economic transformation, social upheaval is fast becoming a preferred avenue for voicing angst and opposition to austerity and the retrenchment of the welfare state (castells, 2012). the latest instalments of street protests that have swept the european continent from greece to france and spain, bulgaria to the uk have signalled a deep preoccupation of the european citizenry with social justice whilst also underscoring the centrality of horizontal digital media in sparking and fanning protest. not least, protest has been directed at preserving the existing scope of digital media for unencumbered information and communication, as witnessed in the cross-national mobilisations against the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement (henceforth acta). with this paper, we seek to investigate an ostensible process of loose coordination with facebook and twitter, which were both used in the pan-european protests against acta. the starting point for this analysis is a three-fold question: what were the topics, the participatory scope and the purpose of the communication that ensued on 29 facebook event 2     pages (4309 post) as well as under the twitter hashtags #stop acta, #acta (19,000 tweets), two weeks ahead of the last europe-wide anti-acta demonstrations of 9 june 2012? in what follows, the investigation concentrates on the first element of this research question. the paper references an on-going project which will tackle all three elements of the question. literature study there are three streams of literature that inform this study. the first derives from social movement scholarship and alerts investigators to the pivotal position of activist organisations in fostering mobilisation in collective action by way of incentivising prospective participants. this line of argumentation draws on olson’s (1965) theory of collective action which has been critiqued for failing to acknowledge the contingency of the social interaction that allows for an equilibrium to be reached between individual motives and collective goals (baldassari, 2009:394). second, and in response to this apparent tension in collective action, it has been posited that social actors are increasingly finding in icts the means to choreograph their collective action absent the coordination of movement organisations (flanagin et al., 2006; bennett & segerberg, 2012). third, attention has centred on social media, alluded to being an environment where formal organisational structures and organisational mobilisation networks melt into loose networking and decentralised coordination processes (bennett, 2003; halvorsen 2012). yet, the contribution to mobilisation of social media and icts more widely is disputed (verhulst & walgrave, 2009; tufekci & wilson, 2012) as the scope for mediated mobilisation beyond organisational networks remains limited (2009: 475). however, there seem to be two distinct theoretical possibilities that invite further evidence-based investigation on social media. first, the question of a quantifiable net contribution to mobilisation may miss on a qualitative shift in the social interaction that prefigures collective action, now progressively more intense on social media. thus, bennett and segerberg (2012) make the distinction between collective and connective action. the latter is an expressive form of participation that hinges on individual acts of sharing “political demands and grievances…in very personalized accounts” (2012:742). the personal nature of individual contributions, however, does arguably not impede the capacity for coordination towards collective action. such coordination is made possible by the technology itself which becomes a networked organizational structure (2012:750). as no operationalization of coordination is provided in bennett and segerberg’s (2012) paper, we suggest that a grounded understanding of the concept is a prerequisite to extending the theorization of connective action. we conceive of two dimensions to coordination: motivational coordination and resource coordination. the former, motivational coordination, we envisage as an expression of one or more of the following constituents of an individual’s motivation to part-take in collective action: instrumental motives, identity motives, groupbased anger motives and ideological motives (van stekelenburg and klandermans, 2010). 3     the latter, resource coordination, can best be described with reference to mccarthy and zald’s (1977:1216) resource aggregation, the pooling of requisite means for collective action (material and non-material, e.g. money and labour but also information that may facilitate participation). these two dimensions, we would posit, can enable us to discern how individual motives and collective goals may be aligned through expressive participation in connective action. the empirical study and preliminary findings to scrutinize the two dimensions of coordination we examined the communication on facebook and twitter with the aim to map out the function (harlow, 2011) of the expressive participation witnessed in the run-up to the 9 june 2012 anti-acta protest actions. the term function is used to refer to an inductively determined purpose of a facebook or twitter post. the posts were coded inductively to represent to the full range of topics touched in the communication (zhang & wildemuth, 2009; harlow, 2011). a probabilistic sample of facebook and twitter posts was drawn from the data at a 99 per cent confidence level and a confidence interval of +/3 per cent (n = 3094). coding commenced with reliability testing by three independent coders on a subsample representing a standard 10% of the sampled units (neuendorf, 2002; n =342). below we report preliminary findings from the reliability coding. table 1: function of facebook, twitter posts code code descriptor frequenc y (n/%) krippendorf ’s alpha personal opinion statement a post expressing a value judgment on the acta agreement or an anti-acta action. 104 (23%) .90 recruitment agency a post asking group members to co-opt others into participation in a protest (including antiacta) action. 8 (2%) .86 call to action a post inviting the participation of group/hashtag members in a protest (including anti-acta) action 53 (12%) .85 participation priming a post referencing preparations to attend a protest (including anti-acta) action. 9 (2%) .84 personal communicatio n a post that is a comment unrelated to acta and anti-acta actions. 85 (19%) .83 factual information a post that provides uncommented information on an anti-acta action, other protest actions or the acta agreement. 165 (37%) .82 request for information a post that seeks details regarding an antiacta action, the acta agreement or other unrelated aspects. 14 (3%) .73 solidarity a post that expresses praise and/or support for an anti-acta action and/or participants in it. 10 (2%) .8628 4     note: the total count of coded units (n=448) is higher than the size of the reliability sample (n=342) because posts were amenable to multiple coding. table 1 summarizes the findings from the coding process. traces of motivational coordination were found in posts expressing solidarity and in calls to action. solidarity posts extolled participation in protest actions and a sense of belonging to a protest movement against acta. calls to action communicated urgency about the need for widespread involvement in protest actions against acta. the two varieties of posts thus appeared to be an early validation of the motivational dimension of coordination, albeit one that hinged on the expression of a shared identity with participants in the anti-acta movement and the assertion of the necessity for collective action against the agreement. posts pertaining to resource coordination were far more common. they either relayed uncommented information that allowed users to update themselves on the protest movement or included commentary which digested the news about anti-acta protests and the fate of the agreement. particularly posts (e.g. maps, directions, instructions on what to wear, the weather forecast) that would allow users to prepare their participation seemed to closely encapsulate the notion of a coordination resource. in the end, information, commentary and priming materials constituted a collective cache of resources that would expedite individual participation. these early findings begin to provide some support for the two-dimensionality of coordination in connective action. subsequent analysis that builds on these findings will probe the robustness of these dimensions by means of an exploratory factor analysis. further, by means of a connected concept analysis we will provide insights into the network characteristics of the social media ecology we have studied. references: baldassari, d. (2009) collective action. in peter hedstrӧm & peter bearman, the oxford handbook of analytical sociology, oxford: oxford university press. bennett, w. l. (2003) “communicating global activism”. information, communication & society, 6 (2), 143-168 bennett, w.l. & segerberg, a. (2012) the logic of connective action. information, communication & society, 15 (5), 739-768. castells, m. (2012) networks of outrage and hope: social movements in the internet age, cambridge: polity. flanagin, a.j., stohl, c., bimber, b. (2006) modelling the structure of collective action. communication monographs, 73 (1), 29-54. halvorsen, s. (2012) beyond the network? occupy london and the global movement. social movement studies, 11 (3-4), 427-433. 5     harlow, s. (2011) social media and social movements: facebook and an online guatemalan justice movement that moved offline. new media & society, 14 (2), 225-243. mccarthy, j.d. & zald, m. (1977) resource mobilization and social movements: a partial theory. american journal of sociology, 82 (6), 1212-1241. neuendorf, k. a. (2002) the content analysis guidebook, thousand oaks, ca: sage. olson, m. (1965) the logic of collective action: public goods and the theory of groups, cambridge, ma: harvard university press postmes, t & brunsting, s. (2002) collective action in the age of the internet: mass communication and online mobilization. social science computer review 20 (3), 290301. segerberg, a., bennett, w.l. (2011) social media and the organization of collective action: using twitter to explore the ecologies of two climate change protests. the communication review, 14 (3), 197-215. tufekci, z. & wilson, c. (2012) social media and the decision to participate in political protest: observations from tahir square. journal of communication, 62 (2), 363-379. verhulst, j & walgrave, s. (2009) the first time is the hardest? a cross-national and crossissue comparison of first-time protest participants. political behavior, 31 (3), 455-484 zhang, y., wildemuth, b.m. (2009) “qualitative analysis of content”, in b.m. wildermuth (ed.) applications of social research methods to questions in information and library science, westport, ct: libraries unlimited, [online] available at: http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~yanz/content_analysis.pdf (21 may 2011), 1-12. microsoft word seko_ir16_final_july31.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 the body in pain online: exploring digital affect through user-generated suffering yukari seko, ph.d. sshrc postdoctoral fellow self-injury and emental health lab department of psychology university of guelph abstract images of self-inflicted pain propose a dilemma for current thinking on the visual representation of suffering. as online platforms increasingly host a myriad of unfiltered, user-generated images of pain, the question as to how these images shape our imagining of violence, suffering and trauma takes on a pressing significance. drawing on a series of interviews with the producers of self-injury imagery, as well as visual narrative analysis of tumblr images and gifs themed self-injury, this paper explores how online images of suffering help place viewers into the skins of similar others and virtually embody the others’ pain as their own. the potential of affective connectivity self-injury images entail calls into question the shareability of other’s pain beyond apparent material shareability of digital imagery. introduction three decades ago, elaine scarry (1985) stated that pain refuses to be shared. unlike love, fear, hunger, or other emotional, perceptual, and somatic states, pain is fundamentally confined to an individual, thus uniquely unimaginable and unshareable. for scarry, pain can only be imperfectly expressed through the visual, and viewers experience it only in a surrogate and voyeuristic manner. three decades later, scarry’s argument is still relevant, yet takes on renewed significance as online platforms increasingly host a myriad of unfiltered, user-generated images of pain. hostages beheaded or burned alive by masked militants, teens sexually assaulted and videorecorded by their classmates, and suicides broadcasted live over the internet (so-called “deathcasting”) are among such images that force us to bear witness to other’s suffering hitherto hidden from public view. to date, most discussions on the visualized suffering have focused on the violence against others, captured by, leaked to, and circulated by the mass media. critical thinkers have concerned with the ethical implications of using and re-circulating such suggested citation (apa): seko, y. (2015, october 21-24). the body in pain online: exploring digital affect through user-generated suffering. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. images for political and pedagogical projects, as the visuals may distance viewers from the embodied experience of the sufferers and even let viewers feticize others’ pain (e.g. sontag, 2003; butler, 2009; dauphinée, 2007). however, there are as yet few critical explorations into how online imagery, especially user-generated images of self-inflicted pain generate new ways of imagining violence, suffering, trauma and death. how do pains portrayed by lay people inform our understanding of human suffering? what if the body is injured, photographed, and uploaded online by the very person inhabiting it? photographs of self-injury (si) are among those enigmatic images that propose a dilemma for current thinking on the visual representation of (self-inflicted) suffering. although si has long been described as a symptom of mental disorder and thus seldom made appearance outside clinical settings, the advancement of online publication platforms has spurred the proliferation of si imagery online. researchers and clinicians have expressed concern that user-generated si content, especially graphic portrayal of self-wounding, may be detrimental to those who access it (whitlock et al., 2006; baker & lewis, 2013), while mass media has focused predominantly on potential risks of such content. method in response to dominant psychomedical and popular media approach, this paper employs a critical and interdisciplinary perspective to identify how si images are actually perceived by those who self-injure and whether these visuals enable or disable the imagining of others’ pain. the following discussion draws on empirical findings from a series of semi-structured online interviews with 17 producers of si images conducted via email and chat, as well as in-depth visual analysis of 300 si images uploaded on a micro-blogging network, tumblr. findings thematic analysis of participants’ narratives reveals that the si images often mobilize empathy and a sense of community among those who self-injure. for some image producers, photographs of their wounds and scars carry an exquisite memory of selfwounding that invite similar others to share their struggle. when they see others’ si images online, the visible similarity enunciated by the photographed bodies serves not only to evoke the awareness of the invisible struggle behind the wounds, but also to raise solidarity with the photographers. participant narratives indicate that these images are often interpreted as a “visual proof” of the fact that there are others out there who have inscribed similar wounds onto their bodies, which allow them to alleviate a sense of isolation, alienation and fear. moreover, si photographs are sometime conceived as a substitute for si itself, especially when the viewers are triggered but not able to carry out si due to situational constraints (e.g. when they are at school or at work). some participants interpret si images as “a placebo” that offer a catharsis and vicarious relief and thus help them curb the urges to actually self-injure. for these people, si photographs help place themselves into the skins of others and virtually experience the pain to mitigate mental distress and agony. discussion/conclusion narratives of si image producers indicate a potential of painful images to facilitate embodied experience among viewers. first photographed then circulated over digital network, hitherto pathologized bodies of self-injurers are transformed into the social currency (van dijck, 2008) to be shared, vicariously felt and empathized. unique affordances of online imagery are of particular relevance to this context: once uploaded, they become persistent, replicable, scalable, searchable (boyd 2010), and thus capable of soliciting affect among asynchronous spectators. with these new affordances and the resultant sociality of images, si has entered into public imagination via a multitude of online voices, which potentially makes the pain of others imaginable and sharable – at least among those who share the same mental and physical pain. in so doing, the images transform the owners of self-harmed bodies, who have normally been represented by others (usually medical experts), into agents of their own images. this also suggests a potential of these images to be used for raising social awareness and mobilizing community efforts toward reduction of stigma and discrimination associated with si. however, once shared online, si photographs can go outside the intimate circle of selfinjurers. it is yet uncertain if the self-inflicted pain can have the same affective impacts on those who do not share the same experience and how witnessing self-inflicted suffering impacts the subject positions of the spectators. this paper concludes by questioning how online imagery of pain can be ethically used to counteract unshareability of pain and to stimulate active thought beyond apparent material shareability of digital imagery. references baker, t. g., & lewis, s. p. (2013). responses to online photographs of non-suicidal self-injury: a thematic analysis. archives of suicide research, 17(3), 223-235. boyd, d. (2010). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in z. papacharissi. (ed.). networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites. new york: routledge, pp. 39-58 butler, j. (2009). frames of war: when is life grievable? brooklyn, ny: verso dauphinée, e. (2007). the politics of the body in pain: reading the ethics of imagery. security dialogue, 38(2), 139-155. scarry, e. (1985). the body in pain: the making and unmaking of the world. oxford: oxford university press. sontag, s. (2003). regarding the pain of others. new york: farrar, strauss & giroux. van dijck, j. 2008. digital photography: communication, identity, memory. visual communication, 7(1), pp. 57-76. whitlock, j. l., powers, j. l., & eckenrode, j. (2006). the virtual cutting edge: the internet and adolescent self-injury. developmental psychology, 42(3), 407-417. selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): cahill, t.j. (2018, october 10-13). the structural role of user class in chat interactions on twitch. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the structural role of user class in chat interactions on twitch tiernan j. cahill boston university background twitch.tv is a live video streaming platform with more than 100 million monthly visitors connecting to 2.2 million channels (twitch, 2017). in 2014, it was the fourth-largest source of u.s. internet traffic (macmillan & bensinger, 2014). twitch is also relevant globally, with 79% of traffic coming from outside the u.s. (similarweb, 2018). in taiwan, one-fifth of the population are active users (shu, 2015). twitch is organized around user-generated video streams, which typically show the streamer’s screen as they play a video game. the stream is accompanied by a chat room, in which viewers can offer discussion, commentary, feedback and suggestions. the platform structure of twitch undermines conventional typologies such as the tripartite framework of players, commentators, and spectators proposed by cheung and huang (2011) to describe e-sports communities: streamers will often commentate on the game as they play (smith, obrist, & wright, 2013; walker, 2014) and spectators will often use the chat room to comment both on the game and on the streamer’s performance (nascimento et al., 2014). hamilton, garretson, and kerne (2014) have argued that twitch channels are participatory communities, building on the tradition of irc chat rooms by adding a rich, shared experience. yet there remain divisions within the twitch user base: while viewers may offer advice, it is still up to the streamer to play the game and guide the core experience (walker, 2014). within the chat room, privileges are accorded to moderators and paid subscribers of the channel, which may affect their status and influence (hamilton et al., 2014). after being purchased by amazon in 2014, “prime” members may also access certain premium features on twitch (snider, 2016). this study aims to offer a quantitative framework for analysing user interactions in twitch chat rooms. of particular interest is the potential stratification of user groups and how this interacts with the economic concerns of the platform, of the performers, and of the general user base. methods an initial convenience sample of six twitch streams was taken in november and december of 2017. criteria for selection were a listed primary language of english, a concurrent viewership of between 300 and 1500, and a listed activity related to video games. the chat for each stream was logged for a period of two hours using chatty (version 0.8.7). chat logs were automatically coded using twitch-chat-net (version 0.1.1), a utility developed for the purposes of this research, which parses usernames and chat messages using an adaptive dictionary-based method to produce a list of users who are active in the chat, along with their user class, and a list of directed interactions between users. these lists were used to generate complete network models of the directed interactions between users in each chat room. each node of the network represents a user who is active in the chat and an edge is placed between the sender and receiver of each message, weighted by the number of messages sent in each direction. results network models were analysed in terms of three different measures of nodal centrality: closeness, betweenness, and degree. these are typically interpreted as user-level indices of connectedness, control, and involvement, respectively (kouznetsov & tsvetovat, 2011; prell, 2012). for each index, there were significant ( = .05) differences between the centrality of moderators and other users, and between subscribers and non-subscribers. notably, there were no significant differences in the centrality of twitch prime users. this suggests that being a moderator or channel subscriber is associated with higher levels of social engagement and status within the community, whereas being a prime member has only a negligible effect. user classes were also analysed using the e-i index of homophily. homophily refers to the principle that actors that share characteristics will be more likely to form relationships (mcpherson, smith-lovin, & cook, 2001). indices of all user classes supported a tendency towards homophily; however, the magnitude of this effect varied substantially. in most networks, homophily was weakest amongst moderators, consistent with their outwards-facing role in the community. discussion the observed differences in nodal centrality suggest that the act of paying for access may not reflect an intent to engage socially in that space, whereas overt expressions of affiliation may have more weight in this regard. given that revenue from subscriptions is directed towards a particular channel, and that the icon indicating a subscriber in chat is unique to each channel, rather than the generic prime icon, it may be that paying to subscribe to a channel is more akin to supporting a favoured artist than to paying a simple fee for content. the centrality of subscribers in chat discussions demonstrates the ways in which monetization and social stratification complement one another in participatory communities: there may be competitive advantages, as well as cause for concern, in monetization strategies that leverage specific group affiliations and social status to attract and retain paying users. the observation of homophily on the basis of user class is significant in that it indicates that homophilous tendencies may emerge over the course of relatively short-term, ephemeral interactions. in contrast to past research, there are very few social cues on twitch that allow users to ascertain many traits, such as race, class, and gender. yet, it appears that homophily may nonetheless result from status cues as innocuous as an icon next to one’s username. the non-probabilistic nature of the preliminary sample gathered for this analysis limits the generalizability of the findings. as such, the next step will be to develop a more systematic sampling method for the platform. combined with the tools and workflow developed in this initial stage, this will permit the analysis of twitch chat interaction at a more comprehensive scale. references cheung, g., & huang, j. (2011). starcraft from the stands: understanding the game spectator. in chi 2011 (pp. 763–772). vancouver, canada: acm. https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979053 hamilton, w. a., garretson, o., & kerne, a. (2014). streaming on twitch: fostering participatory communities of play within live mixed media. in chi ’14 (pp. 1315– 1324). toronto, canada: acm. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557048 kouznetsov, a., & tsvetovat, m. (2011). social network analysis for startups. boston, ma.: o’reilly. macmillan, d., & bensinger, g. (2014, august 26). amazon to buy video site twitch for $970 million. the wall street journal. new york, ny. mcpherson, m., smith-lovin, l., & cook, j. m. (2001). birds of a feather: homophily in social networks. annual review of sociology, 27, 415–444. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.27.1.415 nascimento, g., ribeiro, m., cerf, l., cesario, n., kaytoue, m., raissi, c., … meira, w. (2014). modeling and analyzing the video game live-streaming community. in laweb 2014. ouro preto, brazil: ieee. https://doi.org/10.1109/laweb.2014.9 prell, c. (2012). social network analysis: history, theory, and methodology. london, uk: sage. shu, c. (2015, october 22). twitch coo kevin lin on the potential of taiwan’s gaming industry. techcrunch. similarweb. (2018). twitch.tv. retrieved march 1, 2018, from https://www.similarweb.com/website/twitch.tv smith, t., obrist, m., & wright, p. (2013). live-streaming chages the (video) game. in euroitv ’13. como, italy: acm. https://doi.org/10.1145/2465958.2465971 snider, m. (2016, september 30). twitch prime expands amazon, twitch synergies. usa today. twitch. (2017). audience. retrieved march 1, 2018, from http://twitchadvertising.tv/audience/ walker, a. (2014). watching us play: postures and platforms of live streaming. surveillance and society, 12(3), 437–442. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 infancy within advertising platform: young children experiences on a video-sharing website. amanda aggio massey university this paper investigates how young children experience digital advertising platforms. specifically, it focuses on young children's participation in the youtube app as part of an advertising mechanism that captures and profits from their views and attention. an innovative trans-disciplinary bridge between digital labour studies, biopolitics theory and qualitative research on children online has been developed to achieve this aim. children going online at progressively earlier ages raises questions around what they are experiencing in the virtual world (chaudron, 2015). platform capitalism such as google alphabet and facebook profit from data collected about digital media use. in the advertising platform, revenue is generated mostly not through raw data, but rather on the analysis of personal data made by unrevealed algorithms which is sold to advertisers. this process of making a profit based on user information leads to issues around trust and the confluence of surveillance and profit. most of the internet users do not have access to the data collected on them, as well as the algorithm’s rationale that constantly offers outcomes. for instance, the quantification of children’s practices on digital platforms feed algorithms that model online contents which further influence children’s lives. this interference places algorithms as a biopolitical tool for capitalism over children’s attention (lupton, 2016). precisely, digital visual technologies operate directly on the body of individuals when it creates new perceptive models and new flows of visual information (crary, 1992). this biopower that captures attention and that governs life itself is what rules biopolitics, which cannot be dissociable from the capitalist economy (foucault & hurley, 1998; rose, 1999). the studies of platform capitalism build on questions around the persistence of marxist concepts such as surplus labour, surplus value, and labour exploitation within the economy of digital platforms. in the platform economic context, the class structure is different from the class structure offline, and the central difference is that on the internet there is no restriction of age. within the digital advertising platform, children are putting their senses and attention to work for corporations via free access to services and contents to accumulate data and profit strategically. suggested citation (apa): aggio, a. (2019, october 2-5). infancy within advertising platform: young children experiences on a video-sharing website. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 it is valuable to note that children’s participation in the media as part of a profit mechanism is not a novelty; the idea of television audiences as a commodity, and the relationships between advertisers, audiences and broadcasters were widely discussed in the 1980s and 90s(smythe, 1981). however, digital media, especially mobile devices, have taken this commodification to a completely new level. for instance, previous generations of young children grew up watching tv, an apparatus adjusted by an adult and shared with others through a single device. mobile technology, on the other hand, is most often used by a single person and can be manipulated even by an infant. even considering that young children’s use of mobile devices is parent-directed in some ways [e.g., parents selecting children’s apps or children experiencing them with parents (arrow, 2017)], there is still a ‘babysitting’ aspect to media. in new zealand, 82% of children under 4 years old spent time in a room where the television was turned on even if they are not watching it, and over three-quarters of them (77%, n=4729) use digital technologies other than television on a usual day (morton, 2017). further, research shows that children are going online at younger ages. in the united states of america, 95% of families with children aged 8 and under have a smartphone (up from 41% in 2011), and the average amount of time spent with digital devices daily has increased from 5 minutes in 2011 to 48 minutes in 2017. the percentage of children that have their device rocketed from <1% in 2011 to 42% in 2017. most importantly, 72% of these children spent their time with media watching videos (sense, 2017). one cannot deny that digital technologies have brought new possibilities to domains such as education and health. some educational apps have proved to be useful in teaching contexts and social relationships, as well as being helpful in health problems like cognition disorders. for instance, literacy apps like letterworks can help children with reading (d'agostino, rodgers, harmey, & brownfield, 2016), and the game pokemon go has increased daily physical activities of those using it (althoff, white, & horvitz, 2016). however, it is important to consider and examine the underlying economic models through which these applications and services operate in order to grasp elements of their functioning that are not necessarily immediately obvious to the children who use them (beller, 2006; fuchs, 2010a). the susceptibility of young children allows for potential risk factors that should not be overlooked. i am undertaking qualitative research that is examining the role of children, and their understanding of this role, within the political economy of digital platforms. the extent to which parents/caregivers and teachers are knowledgeable about the models of data mining, statistical profiling and corporate profit-generation that occur within this digital environment is also being investigated. this investigation merges critical and empirical analyses of the virtual context and discursive contents through selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 interviews and observation. ultimately, this work aims to encourage dialogue between parents, schools, and authorities about children’s welfare online. references althoff, t., white, r. w., & horvitz, e. (2016). influence of pokémon go on physical activity: study and implications. journal of medical internet research, 18(12). doi:10.2196/jmir.6759 arrow, a. f., b. (2017). digital technologies in the literate lives of young children. in c. j. m. a. w. arrow (ed.), literacy in the early years: reflections on international research and practice (pp. 221-238). singapore: springer, singapore. beller, j. (2006). the cinematic mode of production attention economy and the society of the spectacle. hanover, n.h.: dartmouth college press. chaudron, s. (2015). young children (0-8) and digital technology: a qualitative exploratory study across seven countries. va, italy. crary, j. (1992). techniques of the observer : on vision and modernity in the nineteenth century. cambridge, mass.: mit press. d'agostino, j. v., rodgers, e., harmey, s., & brownfield, k. (2016). introducing an ipad app into literacy instruction for struggling readers: teacher perceptions and student outcomes. journal of early childhood literacy, 16(4), 522-548. foucault, m., & hurley, r. (1998). the history of sexuality. volume 1, the will to knowledge. harmondsworth: penguin. fuchs, c. (2010a). labor in informational capitalism and on the internet. the information society, 26(3), 179-196. doi:10.1080/01972241003712215 selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 lupton, d. (2016). the quantified self. malden, ma: polity. morton, s. (2017). growing up in new zealand. new zealand: auckland university. rose, n. s. (1999). powers of freedom : reframing political thought. cambridge: cambridge university press. sense, c. (2017). the common sense census: media use by kids age zero to eight. smythe, d. (1981). dependency road: communications, capitalism, consciousness, and canada. norwwod, nj: praeger. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 performing (in)justice: the contentious politics of digitally mediated visuals in the past decade, internet research has been marked by several studies addressing the digitally mediated nature of sociopolitical contentions in contemporary societies (tufecki & wilson, 2012; papacharissi, 2010), often insisting on how digital media technologies afford new ways for citizens to perform (in)justice in a connective (bennett & segerberg, 2012) or reticular (castells, 2015) fashion. yet, if (in)justice and its performance are indeed increasingly digitally mediated, they are also increasingly visually mediated. the consideration that visuals play a constitutive part in mediating sociopolitical contentions is not new; key insights have already been provided in the fields of visual politics (bleiker, 2018), visual culture (mirzoeff, 1999) and visual sociology (grady, 1996). these literatures invite researchers to move beyond text and pay attention to visual elements that are simultaneously the reflections and producers of important sociopolitical contentions. indeed, visuals have politics, as their depictions (how and what they show or hide) and their intentions (what they aim or forfeit) are never neutral but always constructed and often productive. visuals have politics because of the contentious processes through which they come to be and because of the material incidences they generate. on the one hand, visuals can be emancipatory when they allow marginalized groups to counter the hegemonic discourses promoted by the mainstream media or the state in which they no longer trust; on the other, they can also contribute to social injustices by reaffirming or reproducing power dynamics already at play. in this panel, presenters are invited to reflect on the specific role of digital affordances and platform politics in sustaining the construction, circulation, and productiveness of politically contentious visuals (bohr & sliwinska, 2018; mortensen, 2017). thus, in digitally mediated contexts, how are visuals produced and what forms of (in)justice can they perform? in the recent years, internet scholars have started to address this question, notably, when studying the cultural and sociopolitical implications of internet memes (milner, 2016; shifman, 2014). taking memology as a starting point, panelists are invited to reflect on the many forms that digitally mediated visuals can assume (memes, graphs, pictures, icons, symbols, posters, graffiti, etc.) both across and beyond online platforms, as well as to examine their political nature and productiveness. thus, this panel will ask: 1) how do digitally mediated visuals enact forms of (in)justice?; 2) what potentials or limitations do digitally mediated visuals generate for scholars who wish to understand broader sociopolitical contentions?; and 3) what conceptual and methodological tools should (internet) scholars employ to study the contentious politics of digitally mediated visuals (and with what ethical implications)? to answer these questions, this panel brings together a transdisciplinary group of researchers (media and communication, international relations, cultural studies, discourse theory) in the hope of fostering rich discussions across disciplinary traditions. as shown below, panelists address a variety of sociopolitical topics across social media platforms (whatsapp, instagram, facebook, twitter), as well as across territories and cultures, topics that include: black justice movements in the us; sexual racism in latin america and southeast asia; conflicts over the representations of death in the middle east; and transnational movements for trans rights activism. while these papers all engage with internet research to investigate the contentious politics of digitally mediated visuals, they do so by drawing on several perspectives that seek to challenge hegemonic conceptions and discourses (decolonial studies, queer and feminist theories, non-western literatures, literatures from the global south, etc.). they also mobilize a series of qualitative or hybrid methods that track the trajectories of digitally mediated visuals to better understand their biographies and sociopolitical productiveness in the situated context of their emergence, methods that are of particular interest for the field of internet studies given the ongoing critiques formulated against emerging trends in the automated visualizations of big (visual) data. references bennett, w. l., & segerberg, a. (2012). the logic of connective action: digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. information, communication & society, 15(5), 739-768. bleiker, r. (ed.). (2018). visual global politics. routledge. bohr, m., & sliwinska, b. (2018). the evolution of the image: political action and the digital self. routledge. castells, m. (2015). networks of outrage and hope: social movements in the internet age. john wiley & sons. grady, j. (1996). the scope of visual sociology. visual studies, 11(2), 10-24. milner, r. m. (2016). the world made meme: public conversations and participatory media. mit press. mirzoeff, n. (1999). an introduction to visual culture. london: routledge. mortensen, m. (2017). constructing, confirming, and contesting icons: the alan kurdi imagery appropriated by #humanitywashedashore, ai weiwei, and charlie hebdo. media, culture & society, 39(8), 1142-1161. olesen, t. (2015). global injustice symbols and social movements. springer. papacharissi, z. (2010). a private sphere: democracy in a digital age. polity. shifman, l. (2014). memes in digital culture. mit press. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 lewis, k. (2019, october 2-5). operationalizing digital activism: the enduring image of trayvon martin in the struggle for social justice. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. operationalizing digital activism: the enduring image of trayvon martin in the struggle for social justice kelly lewis digital media research centre, queensland university of technology introduction digitally mediated images that reveal overt acts of racist violence and brutality inflicted on black bodies have become a persisting feature of contemporary visual culture in the us. this presentation explores the role digitally mediated images play in contemporary activism within popular social justice movements and examines how visual social media facilitate new ways of “resocializing the political” (fenton, 2016). i do so through a case study on the 2012 killing of 17-year-old black male trayvon martin, in sanford, florida, us. in his death, trayvon has become the martyr for a new generation of black activism (gambino & laughland, 2015); his unjust killing served as the catalyst that gave rise to popular unrest through the #justicefortrayvon campaign and brought into being a national conversation about police brutality, gun violence, and systematic racism against black people that led to the black lives matter (blm) movement in 2013. the premise of this presentation is that digitally mediated images not only perform representational or illustrative functions but are also operationalized – as instruments and agents in activist practice, as products and producers of sociopolitical work – to render acts of police brutality and racial injustice visible in new ways, through which they create social identifications, antagonisms, and political contentions as part of their operational dynamics. #justicefortrayvon: operationalizing (in)justice the objective of this presentation is to examine how trayvon’s image has been 1) appropriated posthumously in visual social media, 2) discursively placed in conversation with these movements, and 3) transformed across time as a contemporary vernacular of resistance and resilience in the ongoing struggle for black social justice in the us. to do so, i employ the term “operative image” (farocki, 2004) to argue digitally mediated images of trayvon not only reflect sociopolitical realities, but play a performative and constitutive role in creating sociopolitical events and contentions. this transpires through processes of digital materiality and memetic trajectories where images frequently spread beyond the original forms and intentions of their producers, often lewis, k. (2019, october 2-5). operationalizing digital activism: the enduring image of trayvon martin in the struggle for social justice. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. operating against them in counter narratives. through this framework, i investigate how images and their visual variations (herein collectively referred to as “images”) are discursively constructed (repoliticized) and spread (resocialized) through the affordances of digital technologies to galvanize and mobilize individuals as part of an affective operation: the struggle for justice. i do this by establishing how digitally mediated images are not simply ‘showing things’, rather, they are ‘doing things’. these effects are operationalized through communicative practice that entangles acts of commemoration, identity politicization, and activist mobilization to challenge dominant discourses and traditional ways of doing politics. “trayvon lives on”: the enduring image on instagram this study relies on a discursive and iconographical analysis of manually selected instagram posts containing the hashtag #trayvonmartin across a seven-year period (2012 –2019). combining the scroll back method (robards & lincoln, 2017) with online observation i chronologically traced the trajectory of images generated in response to trayvon’s killing. i selected posts (1819 images with textual commentary) for qualitative analysis on the basis of their recurrence and resonance. this data collection shows trayvon has been depicted in portrait photographs and several variations including memes, artistic interpretations, and digital images of street protest. through this i investigate the ways dominant and reoccurring digitally mediated images are operationalized – at different times, by different actors and in relation to different events – to perform radically different communicative action. emergent practices in digital visual activism in the aftermath of trayvon’s killing numerous images of him were disseminated memetically online, across mainstream and social media, and offline, through embodied protest and creative appropriation. results show these images seldom remained stable in their visual form and highlight how trayvon’s image became a site of struggle that shifted between competing narratives – both commemorative and contentious – that alternatively focused on depicting trayvon as a saintly child victim, black thug, everyday youth, or venerated martyr. to explore how these tropes emerged i traced the communicative practices and visual processes through which trayvon’s identity was posthumously transformed. results point to the importance of identity-based discourses such as “we are all trayvon martin”, “trayvon could have been (me) (my son)”, or “am i next” in building emotional narratives of shared precarity (butler, 2009) and in the performance of affective expressions that invite collective identification and connection between dispersed audiences (papacharissi, 2016). results also indicate the visual construction of trayvon as a socially recognizable identity and a resonant, yet contested, cultural subject operates through shared visual narratives and markers that blend iconographic genres (activist culture, religious traditions, art history, and black visual culture). this suggests digitally mediated visuals become cultural products and political resources for social actors who operationalize them in acts of creative resistance and protest. as such, trayvon’s imagery becomes an operative framework through which other vulnerable and targeted bodies interpret, and perform resistance against, police brutality, racism and systematic violence against black people in contemporary america as a shared and embodied experience of precarity. lewis, k. (2019, october 2-5). operationalizing digital activism: the enduring image of trayvon martin in the struggle for social justice. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. future directions for research the production and circulation of posthumous images depicting victims of unjust violence have emerged as recurring communicative practices within contemporary transnational activism, and reflects a new and ritualized protest dynamic: the digital mediation of death and martyrdom as a trope of resistance and solidarity. extant literature addresses how images of unjust violence are used in environments of conflict, war, insurgency and counterinsurgency, yet, primarily abounds in journalism, media culture, and political visual communication. internet research (freelon et al., 2016) identifies the prominence and influence of digitally mediated visuals (with textual commentary) in spreading activist discourse on social media. yet, big data approaches and textual analysis largely dominate the field (highfield & leaver, 2016). future qualitative approaches that facilitate deeper understandings of nuanced and emerging communicative practices – through native contextuality, temporal sensitivity, and agile observation – are needed. this analysis raises important implications for internet researchers by establishing digitally mediated images are part of an operative process that has significant consequences: beyond representing contentious events, they critically restructure power relations, affect how discourses spread and dominant narratives are constructed (or challenged), and are operationalized to recruit bodies in collective action. studying their operations in emerging configurations of contention and resistance – beyond western contexts – is a critical site for inquiry in digital activism and visual politics research. references butler, j. (2009). frames of war: when is life grievable? london; new york: verso. farocki, h. (2004). phantom images, public, 29, 12-22. fenton, n. (2016). digital, political, radical (1st ed.). oxford: polity press. freelon, d., mcilwain, c., & clark, m. (2016). beyond the hashtags: #ferguson, #blacklivesmatter, and the online struggle for offline justice (research report). center for media & social impact. gambino, l. & laughland, o. (2015, february 28). three years after trayvon martin, a new civil rights movement grows in strength. the guardian. [online]. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/27/trayvon-martin-new-civil-rightsmovement-grows-strength highfield, t. & leaver, t. (2016). instagrammatics and digital methods: studying visual social media, from selfies and gifs to memes and emoji. communication research and practice, 2(1), 47-62. lewis, k. (2019, october 2-5). operationalizing digital activism: the enduring image of trayvon martin in the struggle for social justice. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. papacharissi, z. (2016). affective publics and structures of storytelling: sentiment, events and mediality. information, communication & society, 19(3), 307-324. robards, b., & lincoln, s. (2017). uncovering longitudinal life narratives: scrolling back on facebook. qualitative research, 17(6), 715-730. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 berents, h. (2019, october 2-5). sharing images of children’s death: politics and digital mediation of posthumous icons. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. sharing images of children’s death: politics and digital mediation of posthumous icons dr helen berents school of justice, queensland university of technology images of suffering and dead children are ubiquitous in representations of and engagements with situations of conflict or crisis. this presentation places media studies and visual politics in conversation with feminist international relations to offer theoretical insights on politically contentious images and takes seriously the circulation of images of dead children within spaces of public discourse. encounters with global politics are saturated in the visual. pollock argues that “[m]ediatized culture disseminates images of gross, persistent, dehumanizing agony caused by political violence and economic greed” (2012, p. 71). mediatized cultures draw on many forms of visual media; this presentation focuses on photography and still visual images that are shared via twitter. images of children are iconic (berents, 2016), a synecdoche for understanding a political event (moeller, 2002). they draw on stereotypes about childhood to illustrate a conflict or crisis. considering their ubiquitous nature – in part facilitated by social media platforms that allow the circulation of images without the filter of editorial desks – it is crucial to consider how the production and sharing of digitally mediated images of dead children become a way for actors to politically engage in conflicts or crisis. this presentation examines how dead children circulate digitally as posthumous icons that mediate political discourse. it does this by examining the potential role of social media discourses in shaping political contentions. i examine two cases in which images of dead children rapidly spread on social media: the death of syrian refugee toddler alan kurdi on a turkish beach in 2015, and the deaths of nine-month-old alyousef twins in the gas attack on khan sheikhoun, syria in 2017. both these cases prompted affective responses, but also contestation over appropriateness of sharing (olesen, 2018). they both also prompted broader political considerations. to theorize these implications, this presentation analyses three key frames: the politics of images, the politics of visualizing childhood, and the politics of how they circulate via social media technologies. berents, h. (2019, october 2-5). sharing images of children’s death: politics and digital mediation of posthumous icons. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. firstly, a consideration of images of suffering children must be situated within a broader understanding of the role of images. images are an affective site of politics. an attention to images of children sits within a tradition that recognizes that images are a form of representation, and that such representations both shape political and social spaces, but are also sites of politics themselves (bleiker, 2001; shapiro, 1988). feminist and postcolonial scholars argue for the vital need for attention to self-reflective practices about positionality and privilege inherent in the production and circulation of these images. sontag famously noted that photographs of the subjects of violence continues colonial practices of “exhibiting exotic—that is, colonized—human beings” in ways that are “oblivious to the considerations that deter such displays of our own victims of violence” (2003, p. 65). how these images are produced and shared must be critically evaluated in terms of our own differentiated positions of privilege and positionality (berents, 2019, p. 7). secondly, which children are seen, where they appear, and when they are mourned also tells us a lot about how we perceive conflicts. rarely asked to speak, their bodies become symbols of injustice or cruelty. kate manzo notes that the use of images of children in this way has a long colonial history (2008, p. 636). such images can be understood as ‘icons’ (hariman and lucaites, 2007) that are constructed through public discourse (mortensen, 2017). there is a hierarchy of childhood, evident in how these images are chosen for publication, and circulated, whereby certain kinds of bodies are able to be photographed in agony or violence, and others are not depicted (berents, 2019, p. 11). thirdly, the nature of social media technologies affords for images to no longer be limited and directed to one audience, but to circulate globally. for example, while twitter is a transnational platform, discourses on twitter are still contained in different networks, with different audiences. when an image ‘goes viral’ as kurdi and the alyousef twins did, these conversations often encounter each other in challenging and contested ways. while “networked publics” (boyd, 2010) facilitate mass dissemination of information, what spreads remains dependent on the (uneven) underlying social structure of the network (marlow, 2005). additionally, these discourses are not limited to twitter – nor do they always originate on twitter – but are part of a broader assemblage of media, politics, culture and emotions that co-create and perpetuate certain narratives and framings within a global context. to consider these three frames jointly, this presentation draws on established methodologies for visual research. bleiker advocates “drawing on multiple, diverse and even incompatible methods” (2015, p. 877) to tease out the political and social complexities of images. his proposed approach for considering the politics of images draws on rose’s work on visual methods (2016). this presentation focuses on two sites identified by rose: that of circulation and audiencing to tease out the ways in which these images reflect uneven global power relations and contested political and social engagements (rose 2016, 24-47). it explores the compositional and social modalities of these images in turn, through these two sites. berents, h. (2019, october 2-5). sharing images of children’s death: politics and digital mediation of posthumous icons. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. together, this exploration of particular cases, and attention to particular sites and modalities guide this presentation’s two questions: what are the implications of the increasing ubiquity of visual representations children’s deaths? and how do online platforms impact the uneven power relations and global social and political contestations over these kinds of images? the role that social media play in constructing and circulating images of children’s death and suffering as contested affective objects deserve closer scrutiny. references berents, h. (2016). “hashtagging girlhood: #iammalala, #bringbackourgirls and gendering representations of global politics” international feminist journal of politics. 18(4), 513-527. berents h. (2019). “apprehending the ‘telegenic dead’: considering images of dead children in global politics’. international political sociology. online-first bleiker, r. (2015). “pluralist methods for visual global politics”. millennium. 43(3), 872890. boyd, d. (2010). “social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications.” in networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites, edited by papacharissi, z., 39-58. new york: routledge. hariman, r., and lucaites, j. l. (2003). “public identity and collective memory in us iconic photography: the image of ‘accidental napalm’.” critical studies in media communication. 20(1), 35-66. manzo, k. (2008). “imaging humanitarianism: ngo identity and the iconography of childhood”. antipode. 40, 637. moeller, s. d. (2002). “a hierarchy of innocence: the media’s use of children in the telling of international news”. press/politics. 7(1), 36-56. mortensen, m. (2017). “constructing, confirming, and contesting icons: the alan kurdi imagery appropriated by #humanitywashedashore, ai weiwei, and charlie hebdo.” media, culture, and society. 39(8), 1142-61. berents, h. (2019, october 2-5). sharing images of children’s death: politics and digital mediation of posthumous icons. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. olesen, t. (2017). “memetic protest and the dramatic diffusion of alan kurdi”. media, culture & society. 40(5), 656-672 pollock, g. (2012). “photographing atrocity: becoming iconic?” in batchen, g., gidley, m. miller, n. k., and prosser, j. (eds). picturing atrocity: photography in crisis. london: reaktion books gillian. r. (2016). visual methodologies: an introduction to the interpretation of visual materials. london: sage. shapiro, m. (1988). the politics of representation: writing practices in biography, photography and policy analysis. madison: university of wisconsin press. sontag, s. (2003). regarding the pain of others. london: penguin. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 myles, d. and lewis, k. (2019, october 2-5). injustice symbols and their digital mediation in posthumous trans rights activism. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. injustice symbols and their digital mediation in posthumous trans rights activism dr david myles digital media research centre, queensland university of technology kelly lewis digital media research centre, queensland university of technology introduction since 2008, 2982 murders of trans and gender-diverse persons have been reported globally (tmmp, 2018). in response to this ongoing violence, there has been a surge in sociopolitical protests among activists to highlight the injustice of these deaths. while trans rights activism is not new, the development of digital media has transformed how groups mobilize transnationally and demand justice (o’riordan, 2005). this presentation investigates the role that mourning and commemoration play in contemporary trans rights activism and examines how digital media sustain the development of these collective practices. to do so, we explore three case studies where the unjust death of a trans person was mobilized politically: jennifer laude, who was murdered by an american soldier in 2014 and whose death sparked protests for lgbtq+ rights and against us military presence in the philippines; hande kader, a turkish activist who was raped and burnt in 2016 and whose death sparked the international #handekadersesver twitter campaign; and marsha p. johnson, a black american trans rights activist who died from uncertain circumstances in 1992 and who has been the source of increased lgbtq+ mobilization since the release of a 2017 netflix documentary. the right to mourn: mediating injustice symbols digitally as argued by butler (2009), grief is not always about emotional containment or coping mechanisms; rather, it can sustain important acts of resistance that make death politically productive. by engaging in collective acts of mourning and commemoration, trans rights activists and their sympathizers challenge dominant conceptions surrounding whose lives are deemed ‘grievable’ (butler, 2009). these practices constitute acts of resistance as they contest systemic forms of violence and redress relations of power by claiming the right of trans persons to matter. our objective is to myles, d. and lewis, k. (2019, october 2-5). injustice symbols and their digital mediation in posthumous trans rights activism. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. show how these acts are performed through the development of shared communicative practices that often produce and circulate posthumous visuals. our main argument is that trans rights movements increasingly construct ‘injustice symbols’ that are digitally mediated and used as strategies for political mobilization. injustice symbols often relate to specific individuals set in situations where unjust suffering or precarity is representative of broader sociopolitical contentions (olesen, 2015). likewise, the deaths of jennifer, hande, and marsha were all framed by activist groups as unjust events that illustrate transnational patterns in trans rights abuse. these commemorative practices not only contribute in humanizing queer subjects but also make grief politically potent by transforming these subjects into global injustice symbols. for this presentation, we examine the role of digitally mediated memes in constructing posthumous symbols. memes have become a reoccurring practice of visual politics and are increasingly employed for sociopolitical resistance (shifman, 2014). political memes aim to bypass the control shared by the state and mainstream media over the production and dissemination of authoritative content. thus, memes that depict or symbolize the deceased become key resources for expressing state distrust and for conducting resistance against censorship (shifman, 2014). political memes become particularly potent in contemporary activist cultures when they harness digital media features, like hashtags, which play a significant role in constituting ‘affective publics’ posthumously (papacharissi, 2015). as our analysis shows, each case study depicts the use of contextual hashtags that come to symbolize local grievances, while also underlining the use of prevalent hashtags (#translivesmatter, #justicefor…, etc.) that situate the production of posthumous visuals within a transnational movement for trans rights. jennifer, hande & marsha: a comparative analysis this research consists of a comparative case study that relies on the manual collection of a small dataset (latzko-toth et al., 2017). we opted for this qualitative and crossplatform method because of its adaptability; indeed, opting to trace the trajectories of visual elements made the pre-identification of a specific terrain or platform difficult. for each case, rather than focusing our analysis on a single platform, we identified key visual elements depicting or symbolizing the deceased. we then tracked these elements’ recurrence on multiple platforms (twitter, instagram, facebook), in mainstream media (television, documentaries, newspapers) and in street demonstrations (on paper posters, on graffiti), as well as documented their variations and political re-appropriations over time. visual trends in posthumous trans rights activism while our case studies bring up and are shaped by important local issues (like pronationalist filipino sentiment, turkish anti-secularism, or anti-black and queer police brutality in the us), the construction of these killings as injustice symbols also depicts trends in trans rights activism. in each case, ritualized forms of visual practices emerged posthumously as a motif of resistance and commemoration by using images of the deceased alongside hashtags like #justiceforjennifer, #justiceforhande, and myles, d. and lewis, k. (2019, october 2-5). injustice symbols and their digital mediation in posthumous trans rights activism. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. #justiceformarsha as an indication of solidarity, whether that injustice relates to the nature of the committed crimes (the particularly brutal killings of jennifer and hande for example) or to the inability of the legal system to treat these deaths fairly or effectively. the injustice lies in the consideration that transphobia played a direct (i.e. being a trans woman gets you killed) or indirect (i.e. sex work makes you more vulnerable to violent crimes) role in these deaths. to contest, join, and bring visibility to these injustices, activists developed shared communicative practices that gradually (re)constructed jennifer, hande, and marsha as champions who symbolize the grievances of the lgbtq+ movement, practices in which posthumous visuals played key organizing, affective, and deliberative functions. queering online death studies our analysis raises important implications for online death studies. so far, much of the literature has focused on proximal or collective forms of loss to understand how digital media have blurred the boundaries traditionally established between privacy and publicness, while often downplaying the politics of mourning (myles et al., 2019). there also seems to be a significant divide in internet studies between: a) death and mourning; and b) activism and political mobilization. this raises important issues regarding the presence of biases toward death in western literatures, as the belief that mourning rituals and acts of political resistance ought to be studied separately assuredly comes from a place of white and cisheteronormative privilege. thus, scholars who study online death and mourning would gain by engaging with queer and non-western literatures to shine a light on their own biases toward death and mourning whether or not they work on activism or queer deaths, as the question of who is allowed or denied the right to mourn or be mourned is always already political. references butler, j. 2009. frames of war: when is life grievable? london: verso. latzko-toth, g., bonneau, c., & millette, m. (2017). small data, thick data: thickening strategies for trace-based social media research. the sage handbook of social media research methods, 199-214. myles, d., cherba, m. & f. millerand. (2019). situating ethics in online mourning research: a scoping review of empirical studies. qualitative inquiry, 25(3), 289-299. o’riordan, k. (2005). transgender activism and the net: global activism or casualty of globalisation. in de jong, w., shaw, m. & n. stammers (eds). global activism, global media, london: pluto press, 179-193. olesen, t. (2015). global injustice symbols and social movements. new york: palgrave macmillan. myles, d. and lewis, k. (2019, october 2-5). injustice symbols and their digital mediation in posthumous trans rights activism. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. papacharissi, z. (2015). affective publics: sentiment, technology, and politics. oxford university press. shifman, l. (2014). memes in digital culture. cambridge: mit press. trans murder monitoring project. (2018). tmm update trans day of remembrance 2018. [online]. https://transrespect.org/en/tmm-update-trans-day-of-remembrance2018/ selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 cabalquinto, e. c. b. (2019, october 2-5). the curated life of an online bride: unpacking the paradoxical visualization of agentic femininity on youtube. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the curated life of an online bride: unpacking the paradoxical visualization of agentic femininity on youtube dr earvin charles b. cabalquinto school of communication and creative arts, deakin university digital communication technologies have played a crucial role in connecting migrants with their homeland. in the context of philippine migration, previous studies have showcased how migrants utilize an array of mobile devices and networked communication platforms in sustaining long-distance relationships (madianou & miller, 2012; parreñas, 2005). however, a research gap exists in unraveling how migrants utilize online platforms to exercise agency across networked and intimate spaces by developing visual content. in the landscape of philippine female migration, and its transformation through the affordances of digital media technologies, this presentation examines how the visual construction of the gendered, racialized and class-based body of a filipina ‘marriage migrant’ on youtube enacts sociocultural contentions over agentic femininity within the broader context of global interracial marriages. ultimately, i argue that these contentions shape the provision of ‘lived activism’ (bonifacio, 2009) of migrant women into a constrained, negotiated and consumerist modality. as part of a broader project that investigates the mediation of intimacy through matchmaking platforms among filipino women, this presentation unravels how rhaze, a filipina migrant, exercises agentic femininity by curating and displaying her intimate relationship with her australian husband on youtube. rhaze was chosen as a case study for this presentation for two reasons. first, her youtube channel, simply rhaze, is one of the most popular youtube channels showcasing a filipina migrant in australia. since 2012, it has amassed a following of more than 450 thousand subscribers and garnered over 85 million views. second, rhaze, as a lifestyle and beauty vlogger, capitalizes on visibilizing her intimate relationship with her australian partner, which typically draws viewers and subscribers, as well as negative audiences. in one of her most viewed videos, she talks about how she met her australian partner through the dating website filipino cupid, which paved the way for her migration to australia through a partner visa and subsequent marriage to her partner in 2017. cabalquinto, e. c. b. (2019, october 2-5). the curated life of an online bride: unpacking the paradoxical visualization of agentic femininity on youtube. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. rhaze’s love story received coverage across media channels including abs-cbn, one of the largest television networks in the philippines. to date, her youtube channel offers over 1000 videos situated across a variety of genres, including makeup tutorials, q&as, confessional talks, travels, and so forth. ultimately, i argue that the playfulness and creativity of rhaze’s digitally mediated visuals embody the paradoxes of global interracial marriages, as accessed and interpreted by a ‘digital intimate public’ (dobson, robards, & carah, 2018). for this presentation, i mobilize rhaze’s youtube channel as a case study to understand how she uses a visual-based platform to counter dominant depictions of filipino women in mainstream media, as well as explore some of the paradoxes that these depictions entail in terms of agentic femininity and citizenship. in the first instance, i critically reflect on agentic femininity as a strategy to challenge the stigma surrounding the representation of non-white women in interracial relationships. historically, filipino women have been stereotyped as ‘mail-order brides’ or as women from poor socioeconomic backgrounds, who usually marry white men to migrate overseas and escape poverty. these women are normally ‘ordered’ through catalogues and letters (tolentino, 1996). in australia, the influx of filipino marriage migrants increased during the relaxation of the white australia policy (espinosa, 2017). filipino women have since become susceptible to discrimination and ‘cultural othering’ in physical spaces (aquino, 2018; espinosa, 2017; roces, 2003) or through the media as prominently reflected in the representation of a filipina in priscilla queen of the desert (laforteza, 2006). ultimately, the stigma of mail-order brides has become synonymous to non-white (bonifacio, 2009; roces, 2003). despite such contentions, filipino marriage migrants still assert their agency in many ways (bonifacio, 2009; roces, 2003). i argue that visual productions on youtube can be understood as ‘lived activism’, or as practices that allow migrant women to navigate the structural barriers they face within interracial relationships (bonifacio, 2009). in this specific case, rhaze first depicts herself as a professional, educated, tech savvy, and proactive woman, an image that undermines the stereotypical depiction of a mail-order bride. second, she showcases her ability to forge networks with other filipina women, who are also married to australian men. this arrangement provides her the ability to deal with life overseas. third, she speaks tagalog to remain grounded in her filipino identity (bonifacio, 2009) and establish connection to her viewers. lastly, she exudes confidence in interacting with her australian husband in various situations. by depicting these different personal capacities online, she exerts agency and establishes authenticity (raun, 2018) to constitute intimate publics and counter dominant racial and gender narratives. yet, as my analysis points out, rhaze also often performs emotional and affective labor, depictions which align with heteronormative systems in ways that reaffirm how online performances and their visual depictions are highly gendered (banet-weiser, 2012; duffy, 2017). these performances can also be understood as being the results of conformity to a form of sexualized citizenship that is often bestowed upon migrant cabalquinto, e. c. b. (2019, october 2-5). the curated life of an online bride: unpacking the paradoxical visualization of agentic femininity on youtube. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. women (espinosa, 2017). in this specific case study, as a migrant woman, rhaze seemingly repays the gift of australian citizenship by delivering affective and reproductive labor in a patriarchal household (lam & yeoh, 2004). paradoxically, to navigate a constrained space warrants an agentic femininity that positions neoliberal subjectivity in a market economy (banet-weiser, 2015). a sense of empowerment is operationalized through the commodification and visual depiction of everyday life and of an intimate relationship. as such, a migrant bride who moves across physical and networked spaces can be placed in paradoxical situations that are both enabled and constrained by networked and marketized environments. references aquino, k. (2018). racism and resistance among the filipino diaspora: everyday antiracism in australia. routledge: london. banet-weiser, s. (2015). keynote address: media, markets, gender: economies of visibility in a neoliberal moment. communication review, 18(1), 53-70. doi:10.1080/10714421.2015.996398 bonifacio, g. l. a. t. (2009). activism from the margins; filipino marriage migrants in australia. frontiers a journal of women's studies, (3), 142. dobson, a. s., robards, b., & carah, n. (2018). digital intimate publics and social media: towards theorising public lives on private platforms. in a. s. dobson, b. robards, & n. carah (eds.), digital intimate publics and social media. 3-27. switzerland: palgrave macmillan. espinosa, s. a. a. (2017). sexualised citizenship: a cultural history of philippinesaustralian migration. gateway east, singapore: palgrave macmillan. laforteza, e. (2006). what a drag! filipina/white australian relations in the adventures of priscilla queen of the dessert. acrawsa e-journal, 2(2), 1-18. lam, t., & yeoh, b. s. a. (2004). negotiating ‘home’ and ‘national identity’: chinesemalaysian transmigrants in singapore. asia pacific viewpoint, 45(2), 141-164. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8373.2004.00235.x cabalquinto, e. c. b. (2019, october 2-5). the curated life of an online bride: unpacking the paradoxical visualization of agentic femininity on youtube. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. madianou, m., & miller, d. (2012). migration and new media: transnational families and polymedia. abingdon, oxon: routledge. parreñas, r. s. (2005). long distance intimacy: class, gender and intergenerational relations between mothers and children in filipino transnational families. global networks, 5(4), 317-336. raun, t. (2018). capitalizing intimacy: new subcultural forms of micro-celebrity strategies and affective labour on youtube. convergence, 24(1), 99-113. roces, m. (2003). sisterhood is local: filipino women in mount isa. in n. piper & m. roces (eds.), wife or worker?: asian women and migration. 71-100. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. tolentino, r. b. (1996). bodies, letters, catalogs: filipinas in transnational space. social text, (48), 49-76. doi:10.2307/466786 selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 matamoros-fernández, a. and estrada-grajales, c. (2019, october 2-5). misogyny on whatsapp: examining the metaphor of ‘dirt’ in memes about venezuelan migrant women in colombia. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. misogyny on whatsapp: examining the metaphor of ‘dirt’ in memes about venezuelan migrant women in colombia dr ariadna matamoros-fernández digital media research centre, queensland university of technology dr carlos estrada grajales civil engineering and built environment, queensland university of technology women as scapegoats of the venezuelan migration crisis this presentation examines the contentious politics involved in the creation and sharing of whatsapp memes about venezuelan migrant women in colombia. we first examine the xenophobic trope “migrant as pollutant” (cisneros, 2008) articulated through these visual contents to then argue that such memes are actually generators of “dirt” in shared spaces. venezuela is experiencing deepening sociopolitical and economic unrest due to the deterioration of internal and external political relations, and a significant drop in the country’s oil production. this has created a humanitarian crisis with a shortage of essential supplies, economic hyperinflation, and the forced migration of more than 3 million citizens (unhcr, 2018). a majority of migrants have fled to colombia – leading to an unprecedented spike in sociopolitical tensions – with some venezuelans becoming targets of dehumanizing rhetoric, including sexists, misogynistic and xenophobic contents that circulated on digital platforms among other spaces (guerrero duque, 2018). while much international attention is focused on venezuela’s political unrest, there is scarce information about how social and political contentions play out against migrant venezuelan women in colombia, who are currently subjects of violence (bustos & granados, 2019; zulver, 2019). venezuelan women crossing into colombian cities have been attacked on the grounds of being “dirty foreigners” (zulver, 2019). this taps into the long-running xenophobic trope of portraying migrants as physically and morally polluting society (cisneros, 2008), and into the misogynist trope of holding female matamoros-fernández, a. and estrada-grajales, c. (2019, october 2-5). misogyny on whatsapp: examining the metaphor of ‘dirt’ in memes about venezuelan migrant women in colombia. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. bodies to be “improper interference” in public spaces (koning, 2014). in this presentation we appropriate these xenophobic and misogynistic tropes to argue that the practice of creating and sharing discriminatory memes about venezuelan women on whatsapp constitutes material “dirt”, and that they culturally pollute shared spaces, especially because memes also migrate from private groups to other more public platforms like facebook pages and twitter. to study this, we collect whatsapp memes for discussion during interviews with colombian organizations involved in promoting migrant’s and women’s rights. these memes ‘humorously’ portray venezuelan women both as ‘dirty’ and as provoking libidinous impulses among men. the visual contents depict female bodies as hypersexualized and link migrant women’s flesh to the moral and physical pollution of the space. we argue that these sociotechnical depictions of venezuelan female bodies are highly discriminatory and awaken “gendered fears of pollution” (koning, 2014). we are also interested in examining, through interviews with ngos and organizations working with women and migrants in colombia, how everyday engagements with these memes have the potential to disrupt ‘microspaces’ of conviviality (wessendorf, 2016) between venezuelan immigrants and colombian neighbors. memetics, online misogyny, and whatsapp digital media platforms aggravate existing patterns of online misogyny and introduce new abusive dynamics against women (dragiewicz et al., 2018). evidence also suggests these same platforms are useful tools for responding to sexism and abuse (southworth et al., 2005). while there is research on the specific dynamics of online misogyny on reddit, twitter, youtube, 4chan and 8chan (massanari, 2015; marwick & lewis, 2017), literature has disregarded how misogyny and abuse against women unfold in other platforms with high penetration rates in developing countries. this is the case of whatsapp, which has emerged as one of the world’s fastest-growing platforms and is the preferred app in countries including india, indonesia, brazil, colombia, and south africa. in colombia, whatsapp is the most used platform with levels of 90% penetration (mintic, 2018). whatsapp usage includes interpersonal communications, collaborative work, the spreading of commercial or political contents, and, in some cases, the circulation of negative and harmful messages and content. whatsapp groups, which allow personal connections and conversations between up to 256 users, facilitate a brevity of collective sociability positioning the app more as a social network than a simple text-messaging service. analysis of online misogyny must examine the sites where everyday online socialization happens in a specific national context; which in colombia inevitably includes whatsapp. we propose to study how memetic media contributes to normalizing long-standing biases in society (milner, 2016) in the platformspecific context of whatsapp and within colombia. matamoros-fernández, a. and estrada-grajales, c. (2019, october 2-5). misogyny on whatsapp: examining the metaphor of ‘dirt’ in memes about venezuelan migrant women in colombia. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the need for new methods to study encrypted apps methodological challenges exist for studying the flow of visual contents on whatsapp, which this project seeks to address. currently, whatsapp has been studied using traditional methods mainly, including interviews, surveys, and ethnographic research. whatsapp’s end-to-end encryption does not allow researchers access to content shared on the app. we propose a method to collect data on whatsapp that has already been tested by news outlets to fact check the circulation of misinformation (hazard owen, 2018). our method involves the set-up of a whatsapp account, which serves as a depository of memes. we circulated the number of this account through our whatsapp networks in colombia, and received memes on a regular basis during our one-month data collection period (february 2019). any whatsapp user willing to participate was able to send memes to the researchers’ whatsapp account. while this presentation does not claim that the data collection is representative of all memes shared on whatsapp about venezuelan migrant women in colombia, its method aims to collect enough memes (more than 100) to elaborate a taxonomy. the visual content collected will serve as material for discussion in semi-structured interviews with relevant ngos representatives and journalists working on women’s rights and digital technologies in colombia, which constitutes the second phase of our data collection for this project. references bustos, n., & granados, i. (2019, february 27). georgina pérez: “ser de venezuela no me hace ni mejor ni peor persona.” el espectador. cisneros, d. (2008). contaminated communities: the metaphor of “immigrant as pollutant” in media representations of immigration. rhetoric & public affairs, 11(4), 569-601. dragiewicz, m., burgess, j., matamoros-fernández, a., salter, m., suzor, n. p., woodlock, d., & harris, b. (2018). technology facilitated coercive control: domestic violence and the competing roles of digital media platforms. feminist media studies, 18(4), 609-625. guerrero duque, n. (2018, april 11). ya estuvo bueno con los memes de las venezolanas. vice. hazard owen, l. (2018, june 1). whatsapp is a black box for fake news. verificado 2018 is making real progress fixing that. nieman lab. matamoros-fernández, a. and estrada-grajales, c. (2019, october 2-5). misogyny on whatsapp: examining the metaphor of ‘dirt’ in memes about venezuelan migrant women in colombia. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. koning, a. d. (2014). gendered fears of pollution: traversing public space in neoliberal cairo. in e. dürr & r. jaffe (eds.), urban pollution: cultural meanings, social practices. 103-122. berghahn books. marwick, a. e., & lewis, r. (2017). media manipulation and disinformation online. data & society. massanari, a. (2015). #gamergate and the fappening: how reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. new media & society, 19(3), 329-346. milner, r. m. (2016). the world made meme. mit press. mintic. (2018, march 20). cuáles son las redes sociales que más se usan en su región? mintic. southworth et al. (2005). a high-tech twist on abuse: technology, intimate partner stalking, and advocacy. violence against women online resources. unhcr. (2018, november 8). number of refugees and migrants from venezuela reaches 3 million. unhcr. wessendorf, s. (2016). settling in a super-diverse context: recent migrants’ experiences of conviviality. journal of intercultural studies, 37(5), 449-463. zulver, j. (2019, february 26). at venezuela’s border with colombia, women suffer extraordinary levels of violence. the washington post. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): kligler-vilenchik, n. & literat, i. (2017, october 18-21). formative events, networked spaces, and the political socialization of youth. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. formative events, networked spaces, and the political socialization of youth neta kligler-vilenchik ioana liteart introduction and theoretical framework the 2016 us elections brought into sharp relief the question of citizens’ relationship towards politics, with a particular concern for young people. while much scholarship over the past two decades has been concerned about the disengagement of youth from political life (e.g. zukin et al., 2006), other scholars have been pointing at a revitalization of civic life, one occurring in unexpected places, such as online communities where young people come together around shared interests and passions (e.g. bennett, 2008; jenkins et al., 2016). this scholarship emphasizes new ways in which young people enact voice and agency in networked spaces, ones characterized by sociability, creativity, and self-expression. while there has been optimism about new avenues for youth to find their way into civic life, the more worrying tendency this research has pointed at is a reluctance of many young people to engage in traditional, partisan politics, which is perceived as dirty, divisive and out-of-touch (jenkins et al., 2016). this article engages this divide, to examine to what extent young people’s participation in networked spaces can also extend into constructing a productive relationship with traditional politics. we focus on youth because they are avid participants in online networked spaces (boyd, 2014), and because youth is a time period of particular significance for political socialization (youniss et al., 2002). formative political events that occur during one’s youth often carry particular significance, and may come to shape one’s political perceptions for life (mannheim, 1952). we thus examine youth responses to the results of the 2016 us elections, as a potential formative political event. we look at these responses across a variety of networked spaces catering to youth—spaces that are not devoted to politics, but rather revolve around shared interests and passions. if the 2016 us elections are a potential formative event for young people that may shape their connection to traditional politics, we ask how they experienced this event on networked spaces, and what kind of relationship to traditional politics ensues. method we examine youth participation in three networked spaces: knowyourmeme (a site dedicated to meme production), pixilart (an online pixel drawing site), and scratch (a platform for programming games and animations). these cases represent networked spaces that cater to youth, facilitate creative expression, and are not explicitly civic / political. on each of these sites, we examined youth activity during two weeks following the 2016 us elections (november 8-22). to focus on election-related content, we used certain search words (e.g. election, trump, donald, clinton, hillary). we examined both artifacts--memes, games, art--and the discourses around them, in comments and reactions. in our analysis of the material, we used grounded theory (glasser & strauss, 1967) to identify recurring concepts, and coalesce these into characterizing themes. here we focus on one central theme that characterizes each case study in terms of the relationship youth construct with traditional politics. findings knowyourmeme: spectatorship, skepticism and cynicism in relation to election results on knowyourmeme, young people responded to the election results cynically. the elections were experienced in a form of spectatorship, reflecting a skepticism towards the political process, and even towards the role that memes played in the elections. the election of trump was interpreted by some users--to varying levels of seriousness--as having been caused by the memes themselves: “we’re actually gonna meme him into the white house now holy shit” (justanime, november 9) “she [clinton] just got memed out of pennsylvania” (thelegendofmeth, nov 9) it’s unclear to what extent knowyourmeme users are referring to the power of memes to elect the us president jokingly. elsewhere, online-savvy trump supporters have expressed the belief that it is their production and spread of online memes that has won trump the election (chace, 2017). alongside this belief, other users critiqued the election campaign as having been focused too much on memes—the notion of some knowyourmeme users that “the meme has gone too far”. pixilart: emotional responses to politics and an acknowledgement of youth’s limited agency the pixilart case study offered a safe space for young people to express emotionally-loaded responses to the election results, which included much concern about implications for minorities. eeyoreisreal writes: yeah, i definitely cried a bit. (…) basically this election ended up justifying racism, discrimination of gay people and sexual abuse. there are some white boys at my school who’re now harassing hispanics and muslims (…) this is so f’ing screwed up. while youth passionately discuss the elections on pixilart, many voices underscore youth’s limited agency, and encourage a somewhat passive acceptance of the new status quo. fresno (17) underscores this when she writes: for those of you saying that they’re going to canada or something you aren’t going anywhere: you have school tomorrow. scratch: creating media as catharsis vs. fear of speaking out our scratch case study showed youth creating and sharing media as a creative outlet for political frustrations, yet at the same time expressing worry and concern about the potential consequences of political critique. many of the games that young scratch participants created in the aftermath of the election have a strong cathartic nature, including numerous games where players physically assault trump’s avatar. at the same time, some of the comments on election-related games show significant fear and uncertainty regarding the potential consequences of criticizing trump, e.g.: cherry078: if i can suggest something, make trump blow up when he touches the cement border (i hope trump doesn’t see that i wrote this) responses by peers on the site don’t mitigate these concerns but rather further recommend caution and suggest that trump might punish dissenters. this serves to exacerbate youth concerns about political expression online. discussion: youth online political socialization around the 2016 us elections in addition to the political socialization factors of schools, family, and community organizations (andolina, jenkins, zukin & keeter, 2003), networked spaces offer young people outlets that, particularly during prominent political events, can also become loci for political socialization. these spaces are important for young people to express their hopes, fears and frustrations with their peers, and to do so while using various preferred modes of expression. but they can also be places where political cynicism, fear or despair can be amplified. this fear or uncertainty might also lead youth to self-censor, and we have seen examples of posted political content that was removed in the weeks after the elections. a fear of speaking out has significant implications for youth political socialization. these findings underscore the importance of listening to young people where they’re at, but also of civic education programs that take into account the preferred modes of expression and participation of young people (see jenkins et al., 2006). references andolina, m.w., jenkins, k., zukin, c. & keeter, s. (2003). habits from home, lessons from school: influences on youth civic engagement. ps: political science and politics, 36(2), 275280. bennett, w. l. (2008). civic life online: learning how digital media can engage youth. cambridge, ma: mit press/macarthur foundation. boyd, d. (2014). it’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens. new haven, ct: yale university press. chace, z. (2017). meme come true (podcast segment). this american life. available: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/608/the-revolution-starts-at-noon glasser, b.g., & strauss, a.l. (1967). the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. chicago, il: aldine publishing co. jenkins, h. et al. (2006) confronting the challenges of participatory culture. macarthur foundation reports on digital media and learning. jenkins, h., et al. (2016). by any media necessary: the new youth activism. new york: nyu press. mannheim, k. (1952). the problem of generations. essays on the sociology of knowledge. oxford, ma: oxford university press. youniss, j., bales, s., christmas-best, v., diversi, m., mclaughlin, m. & silbereisen, r. (2002). youth civic engagement in the twenty-first century. journal of research on adolescence, 12(1), 121-148. zukin, c., keeter, s., andolina, m., jenkins, k., and delli carpini, m.x. (2006). a new engagement? political participation, civic life, and the changing american citizen. new york: oxford university press. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): lawson, c. (2017, october 18-21). “meanwhile i’m over here butt naked on cnn”: a multiplatform discourse analysis of the leslie jones hack. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “meanwhile i’m over here butt naked on cnn”: a multiplatform discourse analysis of the leslie jones hack caitlin e. lawson university of michigan introduction from the moment director paul feig announced the all-female reboot of ghostbusters in october of 2015, the film and its castmembers became the target of online attacks from male fans who resented its apparent feminist bent. leslie jones, who played one of the four female leads, received the brunt of the online harassment. following the film’s release, (now former) breitbart editor milo yiannopoulos posted a review of the film that singled out jones as “the worst of the lot,” describing her as “spectacularly unappealing, even relative to the rest of the odious cast,” in particular for her “flat-as-apancake black stylings” (yiannopoulos, 2016). his racist, sexist, anti-feminist review added fuel to the already sizeable fire of fanboy hatred for the film, and many of them set their sights on jones as the main culprit. in late july, jones temporarily left twitter due to the barrage of hatred, and then on august 24, 2016, jones's personal website was hacked and flooded with images of the slain gorilla, harambe, photos of her driver's license and passport, as well as explicit photographs stolen from her icloud account. this harassment and the discourses that circulated around it provide a provocative case study for better understanding how digital platforms, specifically twitter, and celebrity culture become spaces where ideological battles over race, sexuality, and gender take place. through a multiplatform discourse analysis of the leslie jones hack, this project examines the connections between platform vulnerabilities and the vulnerabilities of women of color, as well as the links between the rise of the alt-right and the mainstreaming of racist, misogynistic trolling behaviors. three themes emerged as most salient in the discourse. the first were messages of support for jones alongside indictments of the trolls and hackers who attacked her. the second was the need for increased governance on twitter in order to protect users like jones. the third theme drew connections between jones’s treatment as a woman of color and the political climate emerging around the rise of donald trump and the alt-right. overall, this case study builds on the work of digital studies scholars to further explore the connections between digital platforms, systematic inequalities, trolling, and a resurgence in militant conservatism. relevant literature this paper draws from and contributes to the growing body of literature analyzing what emma jane (2014) terms “e-bile” (p. 541). contextualizing this instance of harassment within a long history of online hate (e.g. dibbell, 1994; pfaffenberger, 1996; shepherd et al, 2015), i build in particular on whitney phillips’s (2015) arguments about the connections between trolling and mainstream culture. she argues that “trolls are born of and embedded within dominant institutions and tropes, which are every bit as damaging as the trolls’ most disruptive behaviors… online trolling is par for the mainstream cultural course" (p. 8). indeed, the connection between supposedly subcultural acts of online harassment and mainstream culture/politics has never been clearer. the links between yiannopoulous, breitbart, the alt-right, president trump, and the united states’ regression to increasingly institutionalized racism, misogyny, and xenophobia evince phillips’s arguments. this case study helps us map a moment when these subcultural behaviors were becoming more dominant and provides a microcosm through which to understand the interconnectedness between digital platforms, politics and politics, race, and gender. research design my research design for this project draws on a qualitative interpretation of jean burgess and ariadna matamoros-fernández’s (2016) multiplatform issue mapping. i focus on “issue publics,” tracking this controversy across platforms and qualitatively analyzing themes and media texts/objects associated with each issue and sub-issue. in order to understand the issues that arose around the jones hack, i mapped and tracked the controversy across platforms and analyzed the key media objects associated with the hack, as well as samples of conversations that emerge among these issue publics. in sampling and mapping this controversy, i follow the discourse analytic method used by andrea braithwaite (2016) in her analysis of #gamergate. like braithewaite, “my path through this material most closely resembles the ‘snowball’ approach,” following the links between social media, online news, youtube, newspapers, magazines, etc. in order to demonstrate the most salient features of the controversy rather than provide an exhaustive account of all media objects related to the hack (p. 3). the resulting data set is drawn from twitter, youtube, network television, online news and commentary sites, newspapers, and magazines. findings through this multiplatform discourse analysis, three key themes emerged. the first, most dominant theme consisted of messages of support. these supportive, affirmative messages were primarily found on twitter and articles that linked back to prominent tweets. fans and colleagues of jones started the hashtags #loveforlesliej and #standwithleslie, and in the days following the hack, thousands of supporters tweeted and retweeted antagonism for the hackers alongside positive messages to and about jones. however, the incident also garnered support for milo yiannopoulos; following news of the hack, as well as yiannopoulos’s ban from twitter earlier in the summer, #freemilo trended on twitter, with users defending his actions and sentiments. discursively, the hack resulted in entrenchment among both sides. a second key theme that emerged was the need for intervention, either on a selfregulatory or legislative level. jones herself continually contextualized her statements in the need for technological or legal intervention, in her appearances on late night talk shows (late night with seth meyers, 2016), skits on saturday night live (saturday night live, 2016), and the emmy awards (hope, 2016). here we can see that mainstream discourse echoes debates amongst scholars and policymakers about the appropriate ways to address online harassment and abuse. the final themes that emerged most strongly were the connection between politics and politics. online thinkpieces and twitter users frequently forged linkages between rise of the alt-right and this instance of misogynoir. beyond contextualizing the incident in systemic issues of racism and sexism, users explicitly connected the abuse to the rise of the alt-right; for example, naral president ilyse hogue tweeted, “if u think harassment of @lesdoggg & rise of @realdonaldtrump r coincidental, u aren't paying attn. @amandamarcotte” (2016). conclusions overall, the discourse around leslie jones’s hack evinces the mainstreaming of two phenomena: academic and policy discourse around online harassment, and the supposedly subcultural trolling culture that frequently aligns with the alt-right. while other instances of online harassment have garnered significant media attention (namely #gamergate), the hatred toward jones surfaced at a cultural and political tipping point, speaking to larger political divides within the united states. in this case, the support provided by the issue public around this incident resulted in backlash from members of the alt-right. it fed into their performance of victimization, allowing them to flip the discourse and frame themselves as oppressed and disadvantaged. alt-right trolls exploited the vulnerabilities of twitter and icloud, trading on the ethics of free speech to harass and attack, defending what they see as increasingly vulnerable “traditional” values of masculinity and conservative politics. however, their fight is against power structures that are discursive rather than structural; white men are still far more powerful than women of color, and conservative politicians now control all three branches of the united states government. but the dominance of progressive, intersectional feminist values in social media and mainstream media discourse around this incident fed the altright’s perceptual fallacy, throwing into stark relief the growing chasm between “real” and “fake.” references braithwaite, a. (2016). it’s about ethics in games journalism? gamergaters and geek masculinity. social media+ society, 2(4), 2056305116672484. dibbell, j. (1994). a rape in cyberspace or how an evil clown, a haitian trickster spirit, two wizards, and a cast of dozens turned a database into a society. ann. surv. am. l., 471. hope, clover. (2016, september 18). “leslie jones asks the emmys accountants why no one protected her twitter account.” jezebel. retrieved from http://jezebel.com/leslie-jones-asks-the-emmys-accountants-why-no-one-prot1786782564 hogue, ilyse [@ilyseh]. (2016, august 24). “if u think…” [twitter status]. retrieved from https://twitter.com/ilyseh/status/768552911097954305 late night with seth meyers. (2016, july 22). leslie jones on her twitter trolls [video file]. retrieved 20 february 2016 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kxhu_yzlg8 pfaffenberger, b. (1996). “if i want it, it’s ok”: usenet and the (outer) limits of free speech. the information society, 12(4), 365–386. https://doi.org/10.1080/019722496129350 phillips, w. (2015). this is why we can’t have nice things: mapping the relationship between online trolling and mainstream culture. mit press. saturday night live. (2016, october 3). mr. robot snl [video file]. retrieved 20 february 2016 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz-mcjha6ak shepherd, t., harvey, a., jordan, t., srauy, s., & miltner, k. (2015). histories of hating. social media + society, 1(2), 2056305115603997. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603997 yiannopoulos, m. (2016, july 18). teenage boys with tits: here’s my problem with ghostbusters. breitbart. retrieved from http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/18/miloreviews-ghostbusters/ selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 \suggested citation (apa): lastname, firstinitial. (2018, october 10-13). the effects of information production process on experience and evaluation. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the effects of information production process on experience and evaluation yonit rusho university of haifa, israel; shenkar, israel daphne r. raban university of haifa, israel introduction research to date on the value of information has mostly focused on the consumption side of information, namely, that consumers need to experience information in order to evaluate it. when it comes to digital media, users have multiple roles as audiences, consumers and producers. in this context, materiality is applied to assess the role that technological components play in the interaction between user and digital media (mollen, saariekoto & kleut, 2016). the concurrent consumption and production of information raises questions as to the influence of information production on information value perception. to this end, we conceptualize the information production process. in order to research the influence of information production on value perception, we examine the influence of the conceptual production model on the visible structures that form our informational experience and evaluation. the fundamental assumption in this research is that value perception may change as a result of engaging in production. this assumption comes from recent research which coined the “ikea effect”, which showed that value perception increases when people engage in making physical objects (norton, mochon & ariely, 2012). this study applies the ikea effect theory from the physical world to the production of digital information goods. we examine the relations between producing, consuming, experiencing and evaluating information. furthermore, this study examines the boundaries of value perception for producers of information. boundaries are explored by varying the experience intensity, which is represented by several levels of collaborative production. rationale in order to research the effect of information production and consumption on value perception, information in this research is considered as an economic good, which can be transferred, has some utility (usefulness), is capable of having an economic value attached to it (bates, 1990) and is an experience good (van alstyne, 1999). for example, a book, a song or a software are considered as information goods. lievrouw (2014) refers to materiality as the usefulness and usability attributes of objects. raban (2007) emphasizes the subjective nature of value perception by suggesting that the value of information perceived by a user is dynamic. from an economic aspect, the subjective perception of information causes a gap between the amount consumers are willingness-to-pay (wtp) for a good and the payment sellers are willing to accept (wta) (raban & rafaeli, 2006). similarly, we expect the price a consumer agrees to pay for a book will be lower than the price that the author, who is the producer of the book, would be willing to accept in order to sell it. information production is a value-added process and is defined in this research as a five-stage cycle, earlier suggested by kotonya and sommerville's (1998) as a software production conceptual model: (1) specification (2) design (3) implementation (4) validation (5) evolution. figure 1 presents the model for information production and is the basis for the production activity in the current study. fig. 1: the process of information good production in order to research the effect of information production on value perception, following are the research hypotheses: h1: production experience of information is associated with higher perceived value post experience than consumption experience h2: value perception post production is higher than before the production h3: high intensity level of experience causes a negative relationship between value perception and level of experience method an experiment included a web-based assignment, where information experience (consumption or production of information) was controlled. 651 participants took part in a set of 16 independent experiments. subjective information value before experience (measured by wtp for consumers and wta for producers) and perceived information value post experience were measured. the change in value perception was calculated based on the observed variables. in the assignment participants were asked to display their knowledge regarding web accessibility regulations and implementation. participants were randomly assigned to one of the following groups: single consumer/producer, information evaluation before/after experiencing information, peer-producers in various numbers. in the consumption experience group, participants read a brochure with information about web accessibility. in the production experience group, participants created the same information described above. in the peer-production group, participants saw a listing of virtual peers and a voting mechanism reflecting group decisions. wtp and wta bids were collected based on the incentive-compatible bdm method mechanism (becker, degroot & marschak, 1964). bdm enables the extraction of true private values, by informing consumers about the existing of a (random) hidden market price. the assurance of paying or receiving market prices promotes truthful bidding of private subjective values for objects of trade. results (1) producers evaluate the information after the experience higher than consumers (p=.001. consumers: n=41, average value: 299, std. deviation: 512. producers: n=48, average value: 1653, std. deviation: 2581) (2) a statistically significant effect p=.000 was found between subjective value before and after production (before production: n=52 average 245; after production: n=27 average 1653); (3) value perception measured before the production by a single producer is lower than value perception by peer-producers (p=.001. single producer average value: 27.245. average value by a producer in a group of 3 peer-producers: 918.57; p=.000. average value by a producer in a group of 27 peer-producers: 1005.40; p=.008. average value by a producer in a group of 243 peer-producers: 808.32). h3 was accepted while also revealing a boundary of value perception. figure 2 displays the relation between number of collaborators on value of information: fig. 2: perceived values measured in peer-production tasks before and after experience discussion the "ikea effect” for information goods shows that production affects value perception. meaning, labor put into production process is translated to perceived value of information. consequently, information production has a greater impact than merely selling a good that was not self-made and greater value than in purchasing in addition, crowdsourcing is more valued than the labor of individual producers when measured before production. after production, crowdsourcing devalues information. references bates, b. j. (1990). information as an economic good: a re-evaluation of theoretical approaches. mediation, information, and communication. information and behavior, 3, 379-394. becker, g. m., degroot, m. h., & marschak, j. (1964). measuring utility by a single‐ response sequential method. behavioral science, 9(3), 226-232. dourish, p., & mazmanian, m. (2011, june). media as material: information representations as material foundations for organizational practice. in third international symposium on process organization studies (p. 92). kotonya, g., & sommerville, i. (1998). requirements engineering: processes and techniques wiley publishing. lievrouw, l. a. (2014). materiality and media in communication and technology studies: an unfinished project. media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society, 21-51. mollen, a., saariekoto, m., & kleut, j. (2016). intersecting audience activities: an audience studies perspective on the materiality of design, platforms and interfaces. participations, 13(1), 360-373. norton, m. i., mochon, d., & ariely, d. (2012). the ikea effect: when labor leads to love. journal of consumer psychology, 22(3), 453-460. raban, d. r. and s. rafaeli (2006). "the effect of source nature and status on the subjective value of information." journal of the american society for information science and technology 57(3): 321-329. rafaeli, s., & raban, d. r. (2003). experimental investigation of the subjective value of information in trading. van alstyne, m. v. (1999). a proposal for valuing information and instrumental goods. proceedings of the 20th international conference on information systems, pp. 328-345. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): arriagada, a., siles, i. (2020, october). not natural, nor neutral: the cultural configurations of social media affordances within chilean influencer industry. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. not natural, nor neutral: the cultural configurations of social media affordances within chilean influencer industry arturo arriagada universidad adolfo ibáñez (chile) ignacio siles universidad de costa rica introduction this paper explores the configurations of social media’s affordances within the chilean influencer industry. we argue for situating affordances within a wider context in which the features of platforms acquire particular meanings. our analysis focuses on two dynamics. on the one hand, we examine how the chilean influencer industry is shaped by a technological frame (bijker, 1995) that structures the valence of affordances. we show that affordances are not “naturally” or “neutrally” imagined by actors but rather culturally located within technological frames that shape the discourses, values, and practices from which they obtain cultural meaning. on the other hand, we analyze how affordances provide a material support for the temporal and spatial expansion of technological frames. thus, cultural contexts and platforms’ features mutually constitute each other in ways that have not always been recognized in the scholarly literature about affordances. we situate negotiations about what it means to be an influencer in chile, the role of intermediaries (e.g. branding agencies), communication with followers, and the global influencer industry as part of this mutually constitutive relationship. situating technological affordances within “technological frames” affordances are usually understood as “possibilities for action” that individuals perceive as they interact with artifacts in given contexts (evans et al., 2017, p. 36). the term “affordance” allows understanding how individuals’ sense of agency and the properties of objects mutually configure each other. evans et al. (2017) identified three main conceptual inconsistencies in how this concept is used in the scholarly literature. first, affordances are neither object nor feature. secondly, affordances are not an “outcome” of an interaction between users and technologies. thirdly, affordances are not fixed or binary categories but rather variable across different uses and technological features. affordances are not objective. users can thus interpret them in different ways. nagy & neff (2015) showed that affordances are “imagined” by users who variously incorporate the material qualities and technological properties defined by designers. scolere et al. (2018) noted that the self-branding practices of content creators in different social media platforms are characterized by how people imagine what platforms are for, their audiences, and perceptions of the self. in this paper, we argue that the ways in which users “imagine” these affordances is neither inevitable nor culturally neutral. we argue for situating affordances within what bijker (1995) called “technological frames”, that is, the set of “problem-solving strategies, theories, and testing practices […] [that shape] the way in which members of a [...] social group interact, and the way in which they think and act” (p. 264). actors in particular contexts thus imagine affordances as they negotiate specific technological frames. method data for this project come from in-depth semi-structured interviews with 35 social media influencers based in santiago, chile. similar to other studies about digital content creators practices (duffy 2017), in-depth interviews allowed to explore how users imagine technological affordances. our sample was mostly women (n= 26) and a few of men (n= 9), all college-educated. interviews were conducted in person and recorded with participants’ consent. interviews topics included people’s backgrounds and expertise; practices of content creation, distribution, and promotion; self-presentation strategies; and their relationships with brands and branding agencies. interview transcripts were coded and analyzed using a grounded theory approach. key findings: the cultural configurations of social media affordances a specific technological frame shapes how individuals imagine and act on the affordances of social media in this circuit or network of actors. this technological frame is built around the idea of “authenticity”. all informants emphasized the “need” to be spontaneous and authentic in front of their audiences. this discourse works as an ideal that allows them to distinguish themselves from other content creators like “egobloggers”—people whose content is a form of self-promotion through stylish pictures. this technological frame also constrains the actions of people by imposing demands on those who adopt it. for instance, influencers consider that agencies impose certain beauty standards for the promotion of brands and products. thus, they negotiate with agencies the type of content they will promote as part of a campaign. as javiera, a fashion influencer explains: “a brand might buy you an article, but what i do is making that article fun for my followers. that brings the brand closer in the most natural possible way, not being so aggressive in the end”. to meet this exigence, influencers employ specific rules, including how many posts or pictures they can share daily. content creators in chile envision the affordances of social media platforms as a means to achieve the demands imposed by specific ideas of how to be an influencer. there are also demands associated with interactions with followers. for example, chilean influencers feel the pressure to answer all the direct messages (dm) they receive on instagram, as a form of “relational labor” (baym 2015). informants said they can receive more than 40 messages every day and feel pressured to answer them immediately to keep their audiences loyal to their content. influencers portray audiences as “consumers” that need permanent attention and who always have the final word. a key in how influencers play the “visibility game” (cotter 2019) is how they imagine the role of algorithms in shaping their exposure to audiences, catching audiences’ attention, and obtaining reactions (e.g. in the form of comments, “hearts” or “likes”). as valentina, a fashion influencer, describes: “if you are not uploading content constantly, (instagram’s algorithm) punishes you… before that you upload your picture and you can see it immediately, but now depends on the number of people who ‘likes’ the picture and my kind of followers”. finally, chilean influencers work constantly to draw the attention of audiences on multiple platforms. in so doing, they imagine the affordances of each platform in distinct ways. for them, twitter allows more “informal” communication. instead, they consider instagram to be central: it is the platform that “all the people are watching”, as a person described it. accordingly, they see instagram’s affordances as opportunities for “curation” that requires to create different styles of content. in their view, facebook affords opportunities to aggregate audiences. in this way, affordances materialize certain interpretations of technologies and thus become a key in the expansion of certain technological frames in the global south. conclusion chilean influencers draw on a technological frame to make sense of what it means to be a content creator. this technological frame enables and constrains specific actions and imaginations of the affordances of social media. it provides an ideal of how to be an influencer, which is anchored around credibility, authenticity, and spontaneity. this technological frame “imposes” demands to content creators in relation to the industries, brands, and intermediaries with which they work. at the same time, affordances provide a material support for technological frames that allow them to travel through space and time. in this way, neoliberal ideas of technology and the self find fertile ground in chile. these affordances function as resources that allow obtaining the ideals of certain technological frames. in this way, technological frames and affordances are mutually constitutive. references baym, n. k. (2015). connect with your audience! the relational labor of connection. the communication review, 18(1), 14–22. bijker, w. e. (1995). of bicycles, bakelites, and bulbs: toward a theory of sociotechnical change. cambridge, mass: mit press. bucher, t., & helmond, a. (2018). the affordances of social media platforms. in j. burgess, a. marwick, & t. poell (eds.), the sage handbook of social media (pp. 233– 253). london: sage. cotter, k. (2019). playing the visibility game: how digital influencers and algorithms negotiate influence on instagram. new media & society, 21(4), 895–913. duffy, b. e. (2017). (not) getting paid to to what you love. new haven: yale university press. evans, s. k., pearce, k. e., vitak, j., & treem, j. w. (2017). explicating affordances: a conceptual framework for understanding affordances in communication research: explicating affordnces. journal of computer-mediated communication, 22(1), 35–52. nagy, p., & neff, g. (2015). imagined affordance: reconstructing a keyword for communication theory. social media + society, 1(2), 1-9. scolere, l., pruchniewska, u., & duffy, b. e. (2018). constructing the platform-specific self-brand: the labor of social media promotion. social media + society, 4(3). selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 sun, y., graham, t., broersma, m. (2017, october 18-21). public deliberation and civic engagement in public health politics: everyday political talk about public health issues on chinese bbs forums . paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. public deliberation and civic engagement in public health politics: everyday political talk about public health issues on chinese bbs forums yu sun university of groningen todd graham university of leeds marcel broersma university of groningen extended abstract unlike citizens in western countries where they could participate in civic organizations, voting and formal forums to engage in public health politics, it’s difficult for ordinary chinese citizens to articulate their concerns about health issues through civic organizations or other formal means of political participation. before 2000s, chinese health policies were made almost without public discussions. the outbreak of sars in 2003 exposed a lot of flaws in public health sector. until then, healthcare-related problems have become salient in chinese public arena. in 2009, the public was invited to participate in the policy-making process of healthcare reform. in the making of national healthcare reform in 2009, the internet played a helpful role to engage the general publics. however, the online portals only provided citizens chances to offer feedback to the government’s health policies without engaging them in broader process of citizen deliberation (kornreich et al., 2012). besides, those online consultation channels were limited to well-off citizens from urban areas, excluding those less privileged, such as rural population and unemployed urban residents (balla, 2014). due to the lack of physical spaces and limited online spaces for participation, chinese citizens tend to participate in politics through informal networks of relations formed in arenas outside the official space. in informal spaces of everyday life, citizens may be able to circumvent heavy censorship of participatory activities in their everyday conversations. with the narrow space opened up for ordinary people to participate in health policy-making, the internet-based informal communications in the setting of everyday life may create a public space for ordinary citizens to discuss public health issues and to negotiate with the established order in public health politics on a broader scale. moving beyond the formally political spaces, this paper zooms in the internetenabled everyday life spaces to see how disorganized ordinary citizen actors in public health politics use internet to practice their individual agency as well as how they negotiate with the established power structure at the micro level in their everyday talk about public health issues. by focusing on everyday political talk about health issues, this paper not only examines the deliberative quality of those online political talk but also shed some light on other modes of civic engagement they trigger to explore what a kind of public sphere everyday political talk about health issues constitute on the internet in the chinese context, is it of more deliberative values in habermasian sense or demonstrating other possibilities of political engagement? this study empirically explores how ordinary chinese citizens engage in public health politics through everyday online political talk about health issues and whether it serves as a way to strengthen the public’s position in health governance. specifically, it attempts to address this question by examining the way average citizens talk about health issues online and how it is intertwined with aspects and practices of everyday life, proving us a glimpse, at the micro level, into the lifeworld (its informal associations and interpersonal communications) – a glimpse into the process of cultural reproduction, social integration and socialization (habermas, 1987, 138-139). in doing so, the research does not only focus on conventional patterns of online participation but also the social and private practices that enable the participants to act together more effectively, hence generating a more vibrant civic culture. a comparative study of everyday political talk across three different chinese online forums was conducted to better understand how ordinary chinese citizens talk about public health issues in different contexts. the three forums were selected based on their distinct features, ranging from an explicitly political forum, through a forum mixing politics with private life matters to a non-political forum. such an approach allows for a comparison of political talk in the realm of public health between and across political, non-political, and mixed forums, providing more insights into the nature of everyday political talk in the heterogeneous chinese internet. the analysis was guided by a two-level coding scheme which included: a normative assessment of the deliberativeness of such online political talk and an examination of other modes of civic practices. this coding scheme was created to answer: 1) what is the deliberative quality of the everyday political talk about public health issues ? 2) what other modes of civic practices those talk triggers, enhancing ordinary citizens’ civic agency and amplifying their civic life? through comparative content analysis, the research found, first, ordinary citizens were more capable of influencing the agenda of public discussion in the online spaces outside of the political realm. second, the peripheral online space mixing politics with private characteristics, not the explicitly political space nor the completely non-political space either, was the place where citizen deliberation about public health issues was arising in the current political context of china. third, although the less formal political talk on the forums was far from being ‘deliberative’ as habermas envisioned, it functioned as an extension of the formal public sphere, which engaged more fully with disorganized people in the society and facilitated empowering them in public health politics in multiple ways at the micro level. in general, the findings show the context or aim of the forums and their role in bridging the political with the personal jointly determined the nature of political talk on each forum. meanwhile, under-organized ordinary chinese citizens are offered more opportunities to practice their citizenship as serial citizens in the spaces more embedded in the context of everyday life. lastly, we argue such informal discussions about public health issues offered a negotiating space for the general public to engage in the politics of public health, incorporating the lay citizens including the socially less advantaged into the political process in the context of china. in the everyday space, newly capable serial civic groups were assembling online from the loosely organized ordinary citizens. they developed their own communicative power, civic skills and public agency via everyday political talk about public health issues on the internet, finding a way to engage in public health politics. these changes will, somehow, facilitate the cooperative and collective process of solving public health problems and strengthening the public’s position in the broader deliberative system in the realm of public health. references brown, k. (2014). china and habermas's public sphere. open democracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/kerry-brown/china-and-habermass-public-sphere. accessed 28 april 2016 balla, s. j. (2014). health system reform and political participation on the chinese internet. china information, 28(2), 214-236. habermas, j. (1987). theory of communicative action (trans. thomas mccarthy). (vol. 2, lifeworld and system: a critique of functionalist reason). boston, ma: beacon press. kornreich, y., vertinsky, i., & potter, p. b. (2012). consultation and deliberation in china: the making of china's health-care reform. china journal, (68), 176-203. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): boxman-shabtai, l. (2015, october 21-24). user-generated parody as negotiation over meaning: a typology of frame alignment in musical renditions. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. user-generated parody as negotiation over meaning:a typology of frame alignment in musical renditions lillian boxman-shabtai northwestern university the practice of parodying music videos is becoming increasingly widespread, to the extent that parodies now generate, on aggregate, more revenue than “official” material (ifbi digital music report, 2014). the wealth of the youtube parody scene extends beyond such tangible rewards: for researches interested in audience engagement, this sphere presents unique opportunities for gauging mechanisms of interpretation. whereas past observations about the activity of audiences in the process of meaningmaking (e.g., fiske, 2010; liebes & katz, 1994) were based mainly on ethnographic explorations, the migration of audiences to web-based platforms generates digital “interpretive traces” (shifman, 2013) left by active cultural consumer-producers. the goal of this paper is to delineate practices of meaning-making in creative spheres by applying the notion of "frame alignment" (snow, rochford, worden, & benford, 1986) to user-generated parodies. frames are bits of information that are made noticeable, memorable and meaningful to audiences (entman, 1993). this concept has been used to describe how information is shaped in the news and in other institutional settings (e.g. kinder & iyenger, 1989). however, framing is also something that occurs outside the realm of traditional gatekeepers. specifically, reception studies in participatory culture contexts (jenkins, 2006) can evaluate how user-generated-content reframes mainstream media frames. addressing a common critique about the hyper-sexualization of female musicians in the music industry (lieb, 2013), in this paper i focus on how parodists align with frames pertaining to sexuality and gender roles in popular music videos. traditionally defined as a genre that criticizes the text it imitates (hutcheon, 2000), “parody” is often used nowadays to describe what jameson (1990) labeled as "pastiche”, namely, the use of familiar references for the inducement of uncritical pleasure. youtube consumerproducers may be using parody critically to exemplify resistance; they might be also engaging in uncritical pastiche or remixing that reproduces the ideological structure manifest in the source material. two research questions thus guide this paper: how do parodists reframe the texts they render? do they demonstrate resistance to dominant gender ideologies in the process? method the corpus of this study consists of 100 videos imitating 20 pop-music singles that ranked on the top of billboard's hot 100 for 2009-2013. for each year in this period, i selected the four highest-ranking singles (two by male musicians and two by female musicians). then, i sampled five renditions for each single from the results youtube’s search engine yielded for a string that combined the single’s title with the keyword “parody”.1 a modified version of shifman's (2013) framework for meme analysis was used as a basis for a qualitative content analysis. shifman's model consists of three axes of textual probing: content, form and stance. the content dimension relates to the ideas and ideologies conveyed in a text. the form dimension relates to the physical incarnation of the message. stance was operationalized as the existence of a critical approach to the original's ideas and ideologies. building on this initial breakdown, i clustered the parodies in light of snow et al's (1986) theory of frame alignment. the theory relates to the alignment of individual and institutional interpretive frameworks in the mobilization of social movements. however, i argue that its description of how interpretive schemes travel from one source to another can be useful for an analysis of popular culture in a production-as-interpretation context. frame alignment is thus defined as the degree of linkage between mainstream music videos and individual, parodic interpretations. findings elements of content, form and stance in the parodies investigated converged along five types of interpretative configurations: frame bridging, frame extension, referential frame transformation, rhetorical frame transformation, and frame abandonment (see table in appendix). frame bridging refers to the reproduction of an existing frame, yielding a parody congruent with the original's content and stance. such parodies present little critical distance from the original, and demonstrate, instead, creativity in form. for example, a parody of justin timberlake's mirrors introduced a mash-up of the original music video with a scene from the pixar animation up in which the main protagonist reflects on the life he shared with his deceased wife. this juxtaposition echoes the sentimentalromantic tone of the single's lyrics and the music video's narrative construction. frame extension involves broadening the boundaries of the frame presented in the music video to encompass new, albeit thematically related, meanings. for instance, a minecraft parody for bruno mars' when i was your man depicts a protagonist's regret for failing to secure a weapon for the protection of a fellow gamer, resulting in his 1 in other words, the criterion for including a rendition in the sample was its identification as “parody” by the video’s creator. unfortunate death. mars's frame of devotion and love is extended, uncritically, to articulate a feeling of platonic camaraderie. frame transformation describes the process of frame-reversal. two distinct types of reframing were identified in the corpus. in the first, labeled as referential re-framing, the referent presented in the original video is rearticulated to suggest a meaning that contrasts the original's content. in the context of the videos sampled, this practice was often evident in submissive depictions of femininity and gender relations. for instance, a parody of roar presented a katy perry imitation as an obsessive stalker, thus reversing the original video's message of female empowerment. rhetorical re-framing involved a critical exposure of the original's composition and aesthetics. this form of reframing corresponds with the definition of parody as a genre aimed at commenting critically on other texts, and is typically executed by utilizing a close-rendition of the original. for example, several parodies of lorde's royals reconstructed the style and sequence of the music video while inserting new scenes and lyrics to comment about its shortcomings, such as lorde's zombie like appearance, the video's dullness and the racist approach implied in the song's lyrics. finally, frame abandonment denotes a practice of non-alignment. parodies in this category used musical and stylistic elements of the original as a "shell" to which unrelated meanings were cast. for instance, several parodies abandoned the theme of love/relationships in the singles they imitated and used the musical soundtrack to construct narratives about aluminum foil, zombie attacks and s'mores. conclusion the use of frame-alignment as a means to conceptualize practices of meaning-making has proven useful in providing a nuanced understanding of the relationships between interpretation and production in interactive web-platforms. the taxonomy suggested in this paper sheds light on the wide range of meaning-making strategies youtube parodists utilize in their creative responses to mainstream media. furthermore, this taxonomy addresses two conceptual problems that underline the active audience tradition (morley, 1992). first, although “activity” and “resistance” are often used interchangeably in the evaluation of audience responses, morley questions whether the activity of interpreters necessarily denotes ideological resistance. in this study, activity was held constant: youtube parodists are essentially active in their reworking of texts, which often requires considerable amounts of time and resources. however, the results of this study indicate that activity is not equivalent to ideological resistance. most of the renditions analyzed – those categorized as bridging, extending and abandoning the original frame – did not incorporate a critical stance towards the music video they rendered. second, the concept of resistance is in itself problematical when appreciating response: if resistance is conceptualized as the opposition to a text's encoded ideology, what can we make of cases where people resist counterhegemonic/subversive texts? this study has found that singles that challenged traditional gender roles often prompted parodies that reaffirmed patriarchal stances in their critique of the original. thus, critical resistance to a particular text may just as well enforce dominant social ideologies as undermine them. references entman, r. m. (1993). framing: toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. journal of communication, 43(4), 51–58. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.14602466.1993.tb01304.x hall, s. (1980). encoding/decoding. in s. hall, d. hobson, a. love, & p. willis (eds.), culture, media, language: working papers in cultural studies, 1972-79 (pp. 128– 138). london: hutchinson. hutcheon, l. (2000). a theory of parody: the teachings of twentieth-century art forms. urbana: university of illinois press. jameson, f. (1990). postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. durham: duke university press books. jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york: new york university press. kinder, d. r., & iyenger, s. (1989). news that matters: television and american opinion. chicago: university of chicago press. liebes, t., & katz, e. (1994). the export of meaning: cross-cultural readings of dallas new york: oxford university press. lieb, k. (2013). gender, branding, and the modern music industry: the social construction of female popular music stars. new york: routledge. morley, d. (1980). the “nationwide” audience: structure and decoding. london: bfi. morley, d. (1992). populism, revisionism and the “new” audience research. poetics, 21(4), 339–344. http://doi.org/10.1016/0304-422x(92)90012-r radway, j. a. (1991). reading the romance: women, patriarchy, and popular literature. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. shifman, l. (2013). memes in a digital world: reconciling with a conceptual troublemaker. journal of computer-mediated communication, 18(3), 362–377. http://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12013 snow, d. a., rochford, e. b., jr., worden, s. k., & benford, r. d. (1986). frame alignment processes, micromobilization, and movement participation. american sociological review, 51(4), 464–481. http://doi.org/10.2307/2095581 appendix: table 1. taxonomy of frame alignment in music video parodies frame bridging frame extension referential frame transformation rhetorical frame transformation frame abandonment definition the reproduction of a frame into a new text extension of frame's original boundaries to encompass new meanings referential components in original frame reversed to convey opposite meaning rhetorical components in the original frame exposed and ridiculed original material used as a "shell" to which unrelated meanings and frames are cast content similar broadened twisted/reversed metacommunicative un-related stance uncritical uncritical thematic critique textual critique, critique of artist uncritical salient form closerendition spin-off spin-off close-rendition spin-off selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): liao, t. (2019, october 2-5). how does crystal know? folk theories and trust in predictive algorithms that assess individual personality and communication preferences. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. how does crystal know? folk theories and trust in predictive algorithms that assess individual personality and communication preferences tony liao university of cincinnati introduction recent research on algorithms has focused on predictive and hyper-personal algorithms which aim to assess an individual’s psychometric attributes, such as personality, attitudes, and preferences (gou, zhou, & yang, 2014; warshaw et al., 2015). while the accuracy of these predictive algorithms is still unknown, users are increasingly becoming aware of these algorithms and their use in behavioral advertising (rader & gray, 2015; ur et al., 2012). given this increased awareness, there has been some emerging research into people’s responses to algorithms, specifically what kinds of folk theories and assumptions they have for how they work (devito, gergle, & birnholtz, 2017; eslami et al., 2016; gillespie, 2014; rader & gray, 2015). while some of these studies have examined how people react to a personality algorithms making predictions based on social media posts (gou, zhou, & yang, 2014; warshaw et al., 2015), these were recommendation programs created by researchers. this study builds on that work by examining a real world deployment of these technologies and how people respond to those profiles. this study focuses on crystal knows, a company that algorithmically generates personality profiles, often unbeknownst to an individual. crystalknows founded in 2015, crystalknows claims to have the world’s largest personality platform. without explicitly asking users, crystalknows automatically generates a personality profile for certain users through an algorithm that captures and sorts public data online. the profile includes a set of personality indicators as well as recommendations for how to communicate and interact with this person (e.g., don’t use lengthy formal language, etc.). while recent work has broadened our understanding of people’s folk theories about algorithms (eslami et al., 2016; rader & gray, 2015; warshaw et al., 2015), this study builds on this line of research in important ways. first, much of the existing work has focused on people’s perceptions of algorithms in systems where people are actively contributing information. crystalknows is an algorithmically generated profile generated across platforms which users may not have knowingly or intentionally entered information. second, while initial studies have found that people tend to trust algorithmic personality recommendations, they have also found that most perceive them as creepy, and worry about who has access to them (warshaw et al., 2015). unlike other algorithmic services that make declarative statements about personality, crystalknows goes further by actively making predictions and recommendations for how best to communicate with an individual. they also offer in-depth reports about how people might work together, and how a person (and groups of people) would perform under certain work environments. given the emerging creation of these profiles, this study asks the following research questions: rq1) how do people perceive the accuracy of algorithmically generated profiles that were created without their prior knowledge? rq2) how do people rationalize their past online practices and sources of information that contribute to and enable the algorithmically generated profile? rq3) how do people perceive the appropriateness of communication recommendations that the algorithm makes about them? methods participants were recruited at a university in the midwest united states. we first asked for their permission to search their names in the crystalknows database. if they gave consent, we checked to see if their profiles existed on the site. only participants who already had a pre-existing profile were invited to participate. they were given their crystalknows profile (figure 1) to review before participating in a semi-structured interview. interviews (n=31) were audio-recorded, transcribed and entered in the qualitative data analysis program dedoose. (figure 1) findings folk theories about information sources because crystalknows does not reveal how they obtain their data, participants constructed their own theories for where their profile information came from, based on the specific recommendations offered and their own speculation. here there was a combination of fear of algorithms as all-knowing and some personal reflection about their social media presence that these algorithms are drawing from. rationalization about recommendations many of the most interesting responses occurred when people were asked why they thought the algorithm produced a particular recommendation (e.g. include as much information as possible when messaging x person). based on limited evidence, they would construct complex scenarios and volunteer personal practices or instances where they may have developed certain communicative habits to explain the accuracy of the algorithm, building on a theory of these algorithms as all encompassing. fear/concern about creation and use of algorithmic profile when asked about how they felt about the existence of this profile and certain entities using their information, many expressed concern. while with advertising, people could revel in the small mistakes that the algorithm made, these could become significant points of worry and potentially discrimination if used to determine hiring practices and team construction (e.g. x may become introverted in high-pressure environments). conclusion while early work in folk theories of algorithms like the personal engagement theory (feed curation based on total interactions), global popularity theory (total number of likes/comments), and others are specific to social media newsfeeds (eslami et a., 2016), crystalknows poses a different set of questions about individual psychometric algorithms, and these different responses build on our existing understanding of perceptions of algorithms. given their increasing use, there needs to be more work examining these algorithmic personality profiles and how people respond to algorithmic predictions about themselves without their consent (warshaw et al., 2015). crystalknows is selling their profiles as a tool for advertising firms as well as companies making hiring decisions or forming teams. it is important to know what the algorithm produces, how people think they are generated, and whether they trust the system that makes these predictions. references devito, m. a., gergle, d., & birnholtz, j. (2017, may). algorithms ruin everything:# riptwitter, folk theories, and resistance to algorithmic change in social media. in proceedings of the 2017 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 3163-3174). acm. eslami, m., karahalios, k., sandvig, c., vaccaro, k., rickman, a., hamilton, k., & kirlik, a. (2016, may). first i like it, then i hide it: folk theories of social feeds. in proceedings of the 2016 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 2371-2382). acm. gillespie, t. (2014). the relevance of algorithms. media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society, 167. gou, l., zhou, m. x., & yang, h. (2014, april). knowme and shareme: understanding automatically discovered personality traits from social media and user sharing preferences. in proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 955-964). acm. rader, e., & gray, r. (2015, april). understanding user beliefs about algorithmic curation in the facebook news feed. in proceedings of the 33rd annual acm conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 173-182). acm. ur, b., leon, p. g., cranor, l. f., shay, r., & wang, y. (2012, july). smart, useful, scary, creepy: perceptions of online behavioral advertising. in proceedings of the eighth symposium on usable privacy and security (p. 4). acm. warshaw, j., matthews, t., whittaker, s., kau, c., bengualid, m., & smith, b. a. (2015, april). can an algorithm know the real you?: understanding people's reactions to hyperpersonal analytics systems. in proceedings of the 33rd annual acm conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 797-806). acm. microsoft word aoir2019-meetup_longabstract_final.docx selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 observing the tech, using meetup data to study the evolution of iot rossi luca, it university of copenhagen matteo magnani, uppsala university davide vega d’aurelio uppsala university obaida hanteer, it university of copenhagen meetup and the iot space the study of the relation between online groups and offline relationships has a long and fruitful tradition and highlighted the complex dynamic that takes place in the formation of communities and in the emergence of “alloy” social capital (xie 2008). while it is certainly possible to claim that all social networking applications and social media could be used to support offline meeting and interactions, the specific class of event-based social networks has been developed with this specific goal. (liu, x. et al. 2012). eventbased social networks (ebsns) allow users to propose social gatherings and to share and related information. usually ebsns also enable users to create groups that will, more or less regularly organize similar events (ricken, barkhuus, jones 2017). beyond facilitating the practical organization of events ebsn allow the discovery of a critical mass of likeminded individuals often in geographical proximity. among the existing ebsns, meetup is probably the most famous. meetup exists in multiple countries and currently counts more than 323.000 groups and over 39 million members (meetup 2018). while meetup has received less research than other osns, there are several studies that have focus on the organizational and relational issues (ricken, barkhuus, jones 2017), have tried to measure and predict the future success of meetup groups (pramanik et al. 2016), as well as the relation between online and offline interactions (sessions 2010). this paper proposes to use meetup data to study the emergence and the evolution of the technological trend commonly known as internet of things (iot). iot has sparked a wide enthusiasm worldwide and it has often been described as a revolution that is affecting every aspect of our lives from wearable technologies to smart cities (valerio 2015). due to this wide range of envisioned applications the discourse about iot often moved away from the more technical aspects to touch upon topics such as legal frameworks, financial costs and, more recently, ethical and privacy concerns (lee, choi & kim 2017). while it is undeniable that iot has generated a lot of enthusiasm, it should also be acknowledged over the years we have seen multiple definition of what is actually an iot technology spanning from “intelligent objects” to “global network infrastructure” and “interaction of information” (lee, choi & kim 2017). grounding our research on the data describing a qualitatively selected set of iot-related european meetup groups, this paper will answer the question: how has the iot space evolved over the years? data the focus of the project is the european iot. to start mapping the space a part of the research team has inspected all the meetup groups found searching for iot (and related keywords) and filtering the results for european groups. if the groups matched the expected criteria they were added to our dataset. this resulted in 220 meetup groups. using the meetup apis, for each group in the dataset several information were retrieved (geographical location, list of members, self-provided description of their topics of interest, and creation date). additionally, for each event created by the groups, we gathered additional information (expected number of participants, venues, date) as well as for each member of the groups (name, topics of interest and geographical location). the final dataset consists of 220 groups, 32967 members and 2386 events from 2011 until now (jan 2019). results in this final section we will briefly introduce the results of the analysis that will be further developed in the final paper. the geographical information associated with the meetup data allows us to visualize the geography of iot-related groups in europe (figure 1) and well as the geographical distribution of the members (figure 2). while figure 1 allows us to estimate the size of the various national iot scenes and to identify london as the most important hub, figure 2 shows an interesting dynamic. the members of the european iot groups selflocate themselves all over the world. this suggests that users might join meetup groups because of a temporally limited interest (maybe there were temporally based in europe for work) and remain members of these groups even when the initial condition disappears. figure 3. monthly number and (expected) attendance of iot events in europe figure 1. geographical distribution of iot groups in europe (size represent the number of members) figure 2. geographical distribution of the members of the european iot meetup groups. meetup data allows also a longitudinal exploration of the european iot scene. figure 3 shows the temporal evolution of the iot event since 2011. until 2014 events were relatively few (less than 20 per month) and were expected to attract few people. this dramatically changes after 2015 when we see the emergence of many big events. it should be noted that even if the visualization seems to suggest a decline in the number of events this could be due to the presence of partial incomplete data for 2019. another aspect that can be explored is the thematic evolution of the iot space. thanks to the topics of interests listed by the iot-related groups when they are created,we can visualize the evolution of “proximal” topics of interest. figure 4 shows how specific keywords emerged strongly during recent years (e.g. cryptocurrency) while others that were present in the early years have largely disappeared (e.g. arduino). it should be noted that in order to make figure 4 readable have been reported only the keywords that were used by at least 5 groups created that year. figure 4. keyword used to describe the related interests of iot groups over the years the presented visualizations offer a glimpse of the possible analysis that can be done on the longitudinal evolution of the iot space using meetup data. the preliminary results, that will be detailed in the final presentation, suggest the presence of clearly identifiable european hubs for iot development but a worldwide crowd of users. from a temporal perspective the meetup data shows how iot exploded in 2015 and how it might have peaked in 2017. within this period of time iot has not been a “stable technology” but as evolved incorporating, within its area of “related topics” new and emerging technologies such as cryptocurrency or cloud computing. references liu, x. et al. (2012). event-based social networks: linking the online and offline social worlds. proceedings of the 18th acm sigkdd international conference on knowledgediscovery and data mining (2012), 1032–1040. mok, k. y., shen, g. q., & yang, j. (2015). stakeholder management studies in mega construction projects: a review and future directions. international journal of project management, 33(2), 446-457. pramanik, s., gundapuneni, m., pathak, s., & mitra, b. (2016, march). predicting group success in meetup. in tenth international aaai conference on web and social media. ricken, s., barkhuus, l., & jones, q. (2017, june). going online to meet offline: organizational practices of social activities through meetup. in proceedings of the 8th international conference on communities and technologies (pp. 139-148). acm. sessions, l. f. (2010). how offline gatherings affect online communities: when virtual community members ‘meetup’. information, communication & society, 13(3), 375-395. valerio, p. (2016). is the iot a tech bubble for cities?: with more cities joining the smart city revolution and investing in sensors and other iot devices, the risk of a new tech bubble is rising. ieee consumer electronics magazine, 5(1), 61-62. xie, b. (2008). the mutual shaping of online and offline social relationships. information research, 1(3) microsoft word aoir2018_nieborgyoungjoseph_def.docx selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): nieborg, d. b., young, c. j., joseph, d. (2018, october 10-13). app imperialism: the political economy of the canadian app store. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. app imperialism: the political economy of the canadian app store david b. nieborg university of toronto chris j. young university of toronto daniel joseph university of toronto every day, more than 300 new game applications are released through apple’s ios app store, which seems to signal a democratization of cultural production. however, research on app development points towards the many challenges faced by developers (mosemghvdlishvili & jansz, 2013). while billions of dollars are spent in app stores around the world, the distribution of app downloads, revenue, and profit is highly concentrated. on a platform level, there is a clear case to be made about “platform imperialism” (jin, 2013), as two us companies own and operate the main app stores: apple’s ios app store and google’s play store. can the same be said for app development? are us developers also dominating national app stores, resulting in app imperialism? as little is known about the location of successful app developers and their parentcompanies, this paper offers an exploratory political economic analysis of canada’s ios app store. we focus on game apps because they are consistently the most downloaded and highest revenue-generating app category. our aim is to determine if canadian app developers are effective in creating economic value, which we measure as the ability to generate revenue, within their own national app store. or, do apps mimic platform level economics and is value predominantly captured by us companies? to explore these questions, we draw on a financial dataset that offers monthly title-level revenue data of apps sold in the canadian app store. given the size of our dataset our initial analysis offers just a small, temporal and regional snapshot of the app store’s political economy. our analysis, however, does gesture towards the broader critical material issues as it develops theoretical and empirical work related to platform capitalism and app diversity. platform power our analysis is rooted in critical political economic thought and covers three areas of interest: commodification, structuration, and spatialization (mosco, 2009). app stores are the starting point for a new cycle of production in the commodification of content through in-app-purchases and advertising. the process of structuration raises questions at the heart of democratic communications: diversity of sources, content, and ultimately, exposure (napoli, 1999). spatialization, then, questions the regional nature of cultural production and circulation by analyzing the geopolitical clustering of corporate ownership. taken together, these processes point towards the unequal distribution of capital, power, and equity in the wider cultural industries. recent work on “platform capitalism” reaffirms this accumulative logic by acknowledging the outsized position of power of a small group of us platform owners (srnicek, 2016). despite the clear macro-economic picture painted by srnicek and others, there is a paucity of empirical research into the political economy of national app stores. therefore, we analyze the plight of canadian app developers. while app stores exhibit a large degree of source diversity (i.e., a high number of active app developers), we expect that platform-driven winner-take-all effects result in a continuation, if not intensification of the processes outlined by mosco (2009). that is, in the canadian app store we expect to see a large degree of corporate concentration and an outsized presence particularly of us companies. app store economics one of the reasons to focus on the canadian game industry is because it seems successful in creating economic value with almost 600 active studios in prolific communities in toronto, vancouver, and montreal (entertainment software association of canada, 2017). yet, historically, regions outside of the us, western europe, and japan, have never been able to translate economic value creation into value capture. for decades profits have flown from local developers to global publishers in the us, the uk, france, and japan (johns, 2006). to gain insight into the ability of canadian app developers to capture value, we used longitudinal financial data furnished by market research company superdata research. given the exploratory nature of our work and the vastness of the full dataset, we culled a smaller snapshot offering monthly, title-level revenue that covers april 2015 and 2016, months we consider average. we found that revenue distribution for game apps was highly disproportionate: the top50 captured over 75% ($10.2 million in april 2015) and 77% ($11.3 in april 2016) of game app earnings. note that our data only includes direct revenue, such as the sale of premium games and in-app-purchases. this purposely excludes advertising revenue, which is generated outside of the app stores through a vast and complex ecosystem of third parties. using these two monthly rankings as a measure for value creation and capture, we then qualitatively coded and analyzed both lists for app-level geographical diversity based on: 1) the listed developer or publisher on the app store and its country of origin, 2) the credited (i.e. actual) developer and country of origin, and 3) the parentorganization of the credited developer and their country of origin. to verify a listed developer or publisher, credited developer, and parent-organization, company information was gleaned from canadian app store pages, developer and publisher websites, news sources, government company registries and the apps themselves. america first, canada last our initial results reveal that the canadian app store is overwhelmingly underrepresented by canadian-made games and overrepresented by developers, publishers, parent-organizations, and intellectual properties (ip) from the us. in his work on platform imperialism, jin (2013) points towards ip licensing by us companies as an example of platform power. indeed, all the canadian developers in our corpus produced games based on foreign-owned ip. for example, in april 2015 we located only two canadian developers and no canadian parent-organizations. both developers, bight games and blammo games inc., were owned by large us publishers. april 2016 painted a similar picture. all titles by canadian developers worked with licensed ips, such as the simpsons and kim kardashian. taken together, these findings suggest that while the app store is an important area of economic growth for canadian cultural production, any potential growth is predominantly captured by us-owned companies. japanese, chinese, and south korean-owned holding companies trail far behind in terms of value capture. more so than many other western countries, canadian policy makers have been proactive for decades in supporting canadian-made cultural content, including games. our exploratory findings challenge the impact of such policies in an ecosystem dominated by us conglomerates that have shown a consistent ability to leverage their high capital position to acquire local studios. while our corpus is limited, it does clearly confirm long-held views of the pervasiveness of us cultural content in canada. ultimately, our paper is meant as a first step towards a broader empirical enquiry into questions surrounding app diversity and the political economy of app stores. by doing so, we aim to contribute to research on the platformization of cultural production (nieborg & poell, 2018) as well as, by building on the shoulders of critical canadian media scholars, to the ‘material turn’ within internet research. references entertainment software association of canada. (2017). essential facts about the canadian video game industry. retrieved from http://theesa.ca/wpcontent/uploads/2017/10/esac2017_booklet_13_digital.pdf jin, d. y. (2013). the construction of platform imperialism in the globalization era, 11(1), 145–172. johns, j. (2006). video games production networks: value capture, power relations and embeddedness. journal of economic geography, 6(2), 151–180. mosco, v. (2009). the political economy of communication (2nd ed.). los angeles: sage. mosemghvdlishvili, l., & jansz, j. (2013). negotiability of technology and its limitations. the politics of app development. information, communication & society, 16(10), 1596– 1618. napoli, p. m. (1999). deconstructing the diversity principle. journal of communication, 49(4), 7–34. nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society, 146144481876969. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769694 srnicek, n. (2016). platform capitalism. cambridge: polity press. microsoft word dmca and digital legal vernaculars.docx selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): conti, o. (2016, october 5-8). the dmca and digital legal vernaculars. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the dmca rulemaking and digital legal vernaculars olivia conti university of wisconsin-madison introduction the dmca rulemaking is a process that occurs every three years in which the u.s. copyright office considers exemptions to section 1201 of the digital millennium copyright act, which prohibits the circumvention of drm (digital rights management, or the “locks” on digital content). during this process, the copyright office invites industry groups, ngos, and the public to argue for exemptions for legitimate non-infringing uses. in this paper, i look at the dmca rulemaking as a venue for the development and exhibition of vernacular legal expertise, a process by which everyday people—those outside of legal and lawmaking roles—gain legal knowledge in specific areas. i argue that the dmca rulemaking process is a venue for individuals to collaboratively share and shape their vision for a fairer intellectual property regime. however, the rulemaking process also reveals a complicated vision of digital citizenship, where individuals argue for rights within a u.s. framework while simultaneously envisioning themselves as sovereign digital citizens. in my broader study, i use rhetorical analysis to examine the ways in which everyday people argue for their rights online, and how these arguments are indicative of vernacular legal expertise. i merge this rhetorical analysis with perspectives from science and technology studies and the legal field in order to illustrate how the ways in which law and technology are discussed and reconfigured by laypeople can have a constitutive effect on future legislation. context while much has been written about the dmca itself, the 1201 rulemaking process has not been widely studied. this is due in part to the fact that it is somewhat anomalous compared to other rulemakings, because the dmca rulemaking receives a significant amount of comments written by everyday people seeking exemptions (whereas other rulemakings may be dominated by industry groups, expert submissions, or form letters). for this reason, some scholars (yackee and yackee, 2006) studying rulemaking processes exclude the dmca as an anomaly. however, others, such as gabriel michael (2014) argue that it is this precisely why the dmca rulemaking should be studied more closely – it represents a salient issue for everyday people. in this paper as well as my larger study, i argue that the dmca rulemaking reveals the law as rhetorically constituted and allows a space for everyday citizens to intervene, through discourse, in the legal structures that govern them. many scholars studying both onand offline phenomena have noted the ways in which laws originate within everyday experiences and cultural practices (braman, 2006; hasian, 2000) in the case of the dmca rulemaking, when ngos such as the electronic frontier foundation (eff) form coalitions with grassroots actors, legal arguments can be combined with vernacular narratives about the specific impacts of the dmca. what results is a distillation process whereby the fragmentation of online discourse can be both filtered and clarified into coherent requests for exemption, while still maintaining a vernacular character. as gabriella coleman (2009) has noted, many technologists and software engineers become active in “legal tinkering”—a process by which they construct new legal meanings and theories of free speech—because the law requires a similar set of skills to working with computer language (421). intellectual property activism, while not the exclusive realm of engineers, attracts a similarly literate and impassioned collective of citizens who have found that restrictive anti-circumvention laws interfere with their day-to-day lives in some way. analysis this study examines the publically available records from the 2015 rulemaking, which includes several rounds of public comment as well as the copyright office’s final ruling. several common threads run across all of these documents. most importantly, perhaps, is the sense of ownership that individuals feel towards their devices and software. this is deeply tied to the belief that ownership permits an all-encompassing set of rights, which are in turn tied to the idea of citizenship. a common theme that i have found throughout my work on digital rights is the discursive evolution of technological principles (like drm) into rights issues, a process that is certainly evident in the dmca proceedings. in past years, groups like the electronic frontier foundation have teamed up with remixers to add an exemption for video and audio remixing for the purpose of critique. these efforts derived from the ways that individuals were using technology in their day-to-day lives, and culminated in the successful passage of 1201 exemptions. in the 2015 rulemaking, many writing individual comments individuals frame themselves as good citizens, and they see the limitation of their abilities to circumvent drm on devices that they own to be fundamentally in violation of their rights as both us citizens and property-owners. one exemplary comment in this vein invokes the right to own and use property as one sees fit, concluding with “this is a liberty that should be self evident in our democratic republic whose supreme law is the u.s. constitution” (“combined comments,” 212). yet, despite their appeals to a distinctly american set of rights, the second strongest theme among the public comments is a mistrust of the government and an invocation of digitally-literate citizens as a powerful and sovereign collective. many of the public comments also indicate that users do not believe the government will listen to everyday individuals over corporations and other moneyed interests. for example, one comment reads: “… it's time the us administration started doing what it's consistently failed to do for decades, which is to act for the people” (“combined,” 36). regarding corporations, the sentiment is similarly pessimistic. commenters believe that companies’ strict insistence on anti-circumvention is an act of greed and can see little logical basis for companies to prohibit customers from circumventing drm for the purposes of seemingly innocuous activities such as backing up media, use in a classroom, or fixing something that is broken or outdated. thus, while citizenship and property are linked in a distinctly american way, many arguments also bolster the notion of the internet as a sovereign territory that governments fundamentally cannot control. the commenters have a sense that their citizenship confers upon them particular rights, yet they inherently mistrust the citizenship-granting body of the state, favoring instead the laws of the “electronic frontier.” many comments evoke a sense of inevitability, saying that a “line in the sand” has to be drawn, that everyday people have had enough, and that the boundless possibilities for innovation online will prevail. conclusion as isin and ruppert (2015) argue, the digital citizen is defined by making rights claims online. in this sense, commenters in the dmca rulemaking assert themselves powerfully as digital citizens. however, given that the rulemaking process is grounded in u.s. law, the commenters also assert a sort of “dual citizenship,” invoking their rights as americans alongside their fundamental mistrust of the united states government and their unshakeable faith in the forward march of digital progress. this, i claim, illustrates the role of vernacular legal expertise in the dmca rulemaking. as individuals encounter law and policy and gain more fluency in the law, the ways in which they argue for their rights have a distinctively vernacular character, bringing together traditional and nontraditional legal perspectives. in a proceeding like the 1201 rulemaking, these vernacular rights claims can lead directly to changes to the law. references braman, s. (2006). change of state: information, policy, and power. cambridge: mit press. coleman, g. (2009). “code is speech: legal tinkering, expertise, and protest among free and open source software developers.” cultural anthropology 24 (3), 420-454. “combined comments (1408) received through digital right to repair website” (2015). section 1201: first round of comments | u.s. copyright office. retrieved from https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/06/ hasian, marouf (2000). legal memories and amnesias in america’s rhetorical culture. boulder: westview press. isin, e., ruppert, e. (2015). being digital citizens. london: rowman & littlefield international. michael, g. (2014). “politics and rulemaking at the copyright office.” journal of information technology & politics 11(1), 64-81. yackee, j.w., yackee, s.w. (2006). “a bias towards business? assessing interest group influence on the u.s. bureaucracy,” the journal of politics 68(1), 128– 139. selected papers of #aoir2019:  the 20​th​ annual conference of the  association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 bots among us: prevalence, influence, and roles of automated accounts in the german twitter follow network felix victor münch leibniz institute for media research | hans-bredow-institut (hbi) cornelius puschmann leibniz institute for media research | hans-bredow-institut (hbi) ben thies leibniz institute for media research | hans-bredow-institut (hbi) axel bruns queensland university of technology background social bots are undermining trust in social media. they spread low-credibility content (shao et al., 2018), so-called fake news (vosoughi, roy, & aral, 2018), and spam (bruns et al., 2018). however, most research analyses data based on the active sharing of links, keywords, or hashtags rather than assessing the longer-term presence of bots as an integral part of platforms. to address this gap, we present what to our knowledge is the first study that assesses the prevalence, influence, and roles of automated accounts in a twitter follow network on a national scale: the german-speaking twittersphere. this work in progress allows us to analyse the long-term structural role, impact, and possible audience of bots beyond the context of single events and topics. suggested citation (apa): münch, f.v., puschmann, c., thies, b., bruns, a. (2019, october 2-5). ​bots among us: prevalence, influence and role of automated accounts in the german twitter follow network​. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20​th​ annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. method to collect a follow network of the most central accounts in the german-speaking twittersphere, we use the rank-degree method, a graph exploration method that is able to identify the most influential spreaders within complex networks (salamanos, voudigari, & yannakoudakis, 2017). as this walk-based technique only requires node-local information, we were able to adapt it as a data mining method using the cost-free standard twitter api only. figure 1: comparison of the distribution of follower counts in our sample (blue) and the complete german account data from 2016 (red). so far, we have compiled a network of more than 200,000 accounts and 840,000 edges. a detailed description of our collection method and more insights into the sample quality will be part of forthcoming publications. a preliminary comparison of our sample with a benchmark dataset (comprising the details of all twitter accounts who had set their interface language to german in 2016) shows that our sample contains an influential sub-population with large (figure 1), recently active (figures 2 & 3) audiences. as shown by münch (2019), a sample of the most followed accounts in the australian twittersphere sufficed to identify densely connected topical clusters, overall reflecting results from the full dataset. therefore, we assume that our sample allows to identify long-lasting topical sub-publics which reflect the macro-structure of the german twittersphere (figure 5). figure 2: comparison of the activity distribution of statuses per day in our sample (blue) and the complete german account data from 2016 (red). to identify bots, we employ the botometer api (​https://botometer.iuni.iu.edu/​), which returns a score between 0 and 1 that indicates the probability of an account to be automated. botometer is based on bayesian statistics and a set of machine learning approaches that take over 1,000 features into account (varol, ferrara, davis, menczer, & flammini 2017). it represents one of the most widely used methods to identify bots in academic research today. our network sample and the automation scores allow us to localise bots within topical clusters, to assess their potential influence (by in-degree, page rank, harmonic closeness centrality, betweenness centrality, and k-coreness), and to qualitatively assess the role of the most central bots. https://botometer.iuni.iu.edu/#!/api figure 3: distribution of the date of the last status by accounts in our sample. preliminary findings as the data collection and classification is ongoing, we can only discuss preliminary findings. when presenting this paper, we will have concluded our analysis. overall, using an automation score threshold of 0.75, we find that 11% of all accounts in the data classified so far (n = 91,000) meet this criterion (figure 4). all of these accounts have a comparably low page rank and in-degree (figures 6 & 7). most bots are concentrated in a cluster dominated by pr and marketing accounts (red in figure 5) or in isolated bot-nets (figures 6 & 7). the cluster dominated by political and news accounts (purple/black in figure 5) remains largely unaffected. qualitatively examining central bots we find that many of them are benign and/or inactive. for example, the ​verified​ account of the german a-capella band wise guys (​https://twitter.com/wise_guys​) was automated, but only shared their blog posts until they split up in 2017. https://twitter.com/wise_guys figure 4: distribution of automation probability of accounts as determined by botometer. conclusion within the influential population of our sample, automated accounts are prevalent at a percentage that confirms estimates of other analyses. varol et al. (2017), for example, estimate that 9% to 15% of the active twitter population are automated. however, based on their low centrality and cluster locations, bots seem to have a low potential to spread information outside of commercial contexts. spot testing confirms that inactivity leads to high botometer scores. our estimate of bot prevalence will likely drop when we account for this. also, not all automation is malignant, but, for example, helps content creators to serve several platforms at once. this indicates that bots have only a low negative impact on the german-speaking twittersphere. however, the most sophisticated bots will likely remain absent from our study, as false negatives. trolls and semi-automated accounts necessitate further research. figure 5: detail of a network visualisation of the german twittersphere sample with topical sub-clusters of nodes, coloured by selected groups identified via modularity maximisation. size of nodes is proportional to pagerank. links are hidden. (layout based on force-atlas 2 with lin-log-mode and no-overlap applied as implemented in gephi 0.9.2.) outlook our new sampling approach for large-scale follow networks combined with the bot-detection api of botometer is also promising in other contexts: for example, twitterspheres based on other languages. we will publish the code for collecting the data necessary for this analysis under an open source license. for this dataset, our approach opens further avenues of enquiry, such as the long-term monitoring of automated accounts in the german twittersphere, including content analyses of their activities. figure 6: detail of follow network with automation probabilities represented by colour from blue (0) to red (1). figure 7: overview of follow network with automation probabilities represented by colour from blue (0) to red (1). the red clusters in the upper and lower left corners have been identified as bot-nets. references bruns, a., moon, b., münch, f. v., wikström, p., stieglitz, s., brachten, f., & ross, b. (2018). detecting twitter bots that share soundcloud tracks. in ​proceedings of the 9th international conference on social media and society smsociety ’18​. copenhagen, denmark: acm press. ​http://doi.org/10.1145/3217804.3217923 münch, f. v. (2019). ​measuring the networked public – exploring network science methods for large scale online media studies​. queensland university of technology. retrieved from ​https://eprints.qut.edu.au/125543 salamanos, n., voudigari, e., & yannakoudakis, e. j. (2017). a graph exploration method for identifying influential spreaders in complex networks. ​applied network science​, ​2​(1), 26. ​http://doi.org/10.1007/s41109-017-0047-y shao, c., ciampaglia, g. l., varol, o., yang, k.-c., flammini, a., & menczer, f. (2018). the spread of low-credibility content by social bots. ​nature communications​, ​9​(1). http://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-06930-7 varol, o., ferrara, e., davis, c. a., menczer, f., & flammini, a. (2017). online human-bot interactions: detection, estimation, and characterization. in international aaai conference on web and social media​. retrieved from https://aaai.org/ocs/index.php/icwsm/icwsm17/paper/view/15587/14817 vosoughi, s., roy, d., & aral, s. (2018). the spread of true and false news online. science​, ​359​, 1146–1151. ​http://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap9559 http://doi.org/10.1145/3217804.3217923 https://eprints.qut.edu.au/125543 http://doi.org/10.1007/s41109-017-0047-y http://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-06930-7 https://aaai.org/ocs/index.php/icwsm/icwsm17/paper/view/15587/14817 http://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap9559 selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): staudt willet, k. b. & willet, b. d. (2018, october). looks who’s talking: using human coding to establish a machine learning approach to twitter education chats. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org look who’s talking: using human coding to establish a machine learning approach to twitter education chats k. bret staudt willet michigan state university brooks d. willet birch wayfinders, llc introduction twitter has become a hub for numerous organized conversations related to education. twitter participants contribute very short posts (i.e., limited to 280 text characters or less) called tweets which can be indexed and tracked with hashtags—a word or phrase preceded by a hash (i.e., “#”) symbol. there are many different types of educational conversations on twitter, denoted by hashtags and organized by affinities including geography (e.g., #miched for the u.s. state of michigan), academic subject (e.g., #sschat for social studies education), and school level (e.g., #elemchat for elementary education). researchers have used a number of theoretical frameworks to conceptualize what is happening in and through these educational conversations, describing them as communities of practice (e.g., britt & paulus, 2016) and professional learning networks (e.g., carpenter & krutka, 2014)—sites for teacher professional development (xing & gao, 2018). although some phenomena, such as the volume of tweets posted with an educational hashtag, are easy to measure, it is difficult to analyze the characteristics of tweet content that would be expected as evidence of a community of practice or professional development. toward this end, we studied #edchat—one of the oldest and busiest twitter educational hashtags—to examine the content of tweets for evidence of professional purposes. method and results in a prior study, the first author used a twitter archiving google sheet (hawksey, 2014) to collect tweets containing the text “#edchat” from october 1, 2017 to june 5, 2018, resulting in a dataset of 1,228,506 unique tweets from 196,263 different contributors. starting with the a priori categories used in carpenter and krutka’s (2014) survey study on how and why educators use twitter for professional purposes—which included (a) sharing and acquiring resources, (b) collaborating with other educators, (c) networking, (d) giving and receiving emotional support, (e) communicating with students, (f) communicating with parents, (g) providing in-class activities for students, (h) providing out-of-class activities for students, (i) participating in twitter chats, (j) backchanneling, and (k) everything else (i.e., “other”)—the first author conducted three stages of humancoded content analysis. this qualitative work produced a final codebook, which the first author used to sort a stratified random sample of 1,000 tweets into four emergent, inductive categories: tweets demonstrating evidence of different professional purposes related to (a) self, (b) others, (c) mutual engagement, and (d) everything else. purposes related to self included self-promotion and establishing reputation; purposes related to others included increasing the visibility of peers as well as sharing content and tips; purposes related to mutual engagement included networking, collaborating, disagreeing, and providing emotional support; and the everything else category included just that: tweets whose purposes were unclear, neutral, didactic, or off-topic. overall, we found about 65% of the tweets in our #edchat sample demonstrated purposes related to others, about 25% demonstrated purposes related to self, and less than 4% of tweets demonstrated purposes related to mutual engagement. thus #edchat could be considered a good conversation space to establish one’s own reputation or discover resources from others, but not an ideal space for meaningful dialogue. these #edchat findings are not generalizable to all of twitter; #edchat is just one of many educational conversations. blumengarten, hamilton, murray, evans, and rochelle (n.d.) maintain a list that, as of august 2018, contained 339 different twitter education chats. to compare educators’ purposes for contributing to these different conversations, we need a better approach. our initial method was too time intensive—it would be untenable to collect tweets from 339 hashtags and conduct human-coded content analysis of a random sample from each hashtag. therefore, we are developing a scalable computational model. we used the caret r package (kuhn, 2018) to build a multiclass logistic regression classifier to categorize tweets into one of the four categories from our earlier work: purposes related to (a) self, (b) others, (c) mutual engagement, and (d) everything else. during the initial study, we found that certain machine-coded tweet types (e.g., original posts, retweets, self-retweets, modified tweets, “via” tweets, “thanks” tweets, replies, extended posts, directed posts, and self-referential posts) and certain keywords (e.g., “should,” “daily,” “worth,” “how to,” “tips”) tended to be associated with certain professional purposes. these observations provided an initial set of features that we added to an input matrix for our classifier. we also identified features related to tweet content, such as sentiment and word count, as determined by rinker’s (2018) sentimentr r package; and hashtags, hyperlinks, and images. other features were related to tweet metadata, such as retweets, replies, and likes, as well as keywords in the tweeter’s profile. we divided our 1,000 previously coded tweets into a training set (n = 600), a development set (n = 250), and a test set (n = 150). conclusion the anticipated product of this work—a successful, generalizable machine learning model—would help educators and researchers quickly evaluate twitter educational hashtags to determine where they might want to engage. for example, pre-service teachers—with specific, contextual questions—might want to participate in a conversation whose purposes are more aligned with mutual engagement; in contrast, a mid-career in-service teacher—seeking to establish their reputation and expand their network—might prefer a conversation whose purposes tend more toward self or others. participants are already selecting twitter educational hashtags based on affinities such as subject area and geography; our work will allow them to also factor in the observed purposes of these conversations. our machine learning model will improve the understanding and evaluation of the purposes demonstrated in each of the 339 known twitter education conversations. although machine learning techniques are still rare in educational research, studies such as xing and gao’s (2018) work have begun to demonstrate the utility of data mining in our field. we believe this current project will similarly contribute new methods worthy of consideration by educational researchers. references blumengarten, j., hamilton, c., murray, t., evans, c., & rochelle, j. (n.d.). twitter education chats [web resource]. retrieved from https://sites.google.com/site/twittereducationchats/education-chat-official-list britt, v. g., & paulus, t. (2016). “beyond the four walls of my building”: a case study of #edchat as a community of practice. american journal of distance education, 30, 4859. carpenter, j. p., & krutka, d. g. (2014). how and why educators use twitter: a survey of the field. journal of research on technology in education, 46, 414–434. hawksey, m. (2014). tags: twitter archiving google sheet (version 6.1) [computer software]. retrieved from http://tags.hawksey.info kuhn, m. (2018). caret: classification and regression training (version 6.0-80) [r package]. retrieved from https://cran.r-project.org/package=caret rinker, t. (2018). sentimentr: calculate text polarity sentiment (version 2.3.2) [r package]. retrieved from https://cran.r-project.org/package=sentimentr xing, w., & gao, f. (2018). exploring the relationship between online discourse and commitment in twitter professional learning communities. computers & education, 126, 388-398. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 linaa jensen, j., bruns a., graham, t., angus, d., larsson, a.o., stromer-galley, j., rossini, p. zhang, f. (2019, october 2-5). a decade of social media elections – a cross-national perspective. panel presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. a decade of social media elections – a cross-national perspective jakob linaa jensen, danish school of media and journalism axel bruns, tim graham, daniel angus, digital media research center, queensland university of technology anders olof larsson, kristiania university college and westerdals ict jennifer stromer-galley, school of information studies, syracuse university, patricia rossini, department of communication and media, university of liverpool, feifei zhang, school of information studies, syracuse university panel overview social media has been a part of election campaigns for more than a decade. correspondingly, a number of country-specific studies have been conducted of the use of facebook and twitter in national and local election campaigns. until recently, there has been a lack of longitudinal studies; however, larsson & moe (2016), lilleker, jackson, & koc-michalska (2016), and bruns and moon (2018) all discuss the role of social media in two or more election campaigns within the same country. cross-national studies are not frequent either, but enli et al. (2013) and moe & larsson (2013) are examples of studies that compare countries in western europe and australia. in this panel we combine longitudinal and cross-national studies of social media in election campaigns, expanding the time span as well as number of countries compared to former studies. the four papers present longitudinal studies, covering multiple election cycles from four different countries: australia, the united states of america, denmark and sweden. by including these cases we focus on countries considered to be “first movers” when it comes to the digitization and internetization of the political life. as such, they are “most similar cases”. however, they also have different political systems: the us and australia are characterized by a westminster system dominated by a few large parties and a tradition of strong confrontation between government and opposition, whereas denmark and sweden are multi-party systems with a tradition of collaboration and coalition governments. further, the countries’ media systems, as defined by hallin & mancini (2004), differ significantly; the us is characterized by a commercialized american media system with little role for public service broadcasters, denmark and sweden have very strong public service media, and australia has elements of both these systems. technologically, the four countries might be similar, but politically and in terms of media systems, they differ. thus, studies of the four countries form a diverse yet solid set of cases for exploring the growing (and changing) role of social media in national elections. the papers address such issues by various methods and perspectives, from large-scale big data analyses of tweets to content analyses of facebook pages and surveys among citizens. from different angles, the four papers circle around the same topics: do social media contribute to narrowing or widening the often-discussed gap between citizens and politicians? does the increasing use (and changing character) of social media in election campaigns facilitate increased trust or rather a radicalized and more negative discourse? and do citizens feel more empowered and enlightened in a democratic sense? the australian case study is based on a comprehensive analysis of interactions around candidates’ twitter accounts, drawing on state-of-the-art methods. it stretches across three election cycles. it presents new evidence both on the use of twitter in political campaigning in australia, and on the public response to this use, not at least in the light of the overall context of a decline in trust towards the political system, in australia and elsewhere. the us case study examines negativity, incivility, and intolerance expressed by candidates running for governor in 2014 as compared with 2018. in between those two election cycles, the united states had the remarkable presidential campaign of 2016, with an unprecedented volume and style of negative campaigning unseen in modern campaigning. this study thus asks whether the 2018 candidates were more negative and uncivil than their counterparts who ran in 2014. results will illuminate the nature of political incivility and whether there is a coarseness of political discourse in the united states. the danish case study is based on surveys of citizens’ internet use / social media use across four elections, covering a time span of 12 years. it adds to an understanding of the growing use of social media but more importantly it investigates how citizens experienced effects of social media as tools for agenda-setting and efficacy, the latter understood as increased reflection and enlightenment. the swedish case study covers three swedish national elections, in 2010, 2014 and 2018. the research question is: how are viral posts from political parties on facebook changing over time? by answering that question, the author can track the consequences of increased platformization of politics as well as an increased targeting towards the needs and wants of the audience, through what some will call populism. the studies all cover more or less the last decade. this represents a time span during which social media have matured and have come to play an increasing role in citizens’ daily lives. the contributions are interesting country-based case studies in themselves, but through this panel we seek to engage the audience in a discussion of the developments expected for the coming years. references bruns, a., & moon, b. (2018). social media in australian federal elections: comparing the 2013 and 2016 campaigns. journalism & mass communication quarterly, 95(2), 425–448. enli, g., larsson, a., kalsnes, b., skogerbø, e., moe, h., bruns, a. & rossi, l. 2013. ‘social media and elections: the use of twitter in the 2013 campaigns in italy, australia, germany, and norway’. aoir selected papers of internet research, 3. larsson, a.o., & moe, h. (2016). from emerging to established? a comparison of twitter use during swedish election campaigns in 2010 and 2014. in a. bruns, g. enli, e. skogerbø, a.o. larsson, & c. christensen (eds.), the routledge companion to social media and politics (pp. 311-324). new york: routledge. lilleker, d.g., jackson, n., & koc-michalska, k. (2016). social media in the uk election campaigns 2008-2014: experimentation, innovation, and convergence. in a. bruns, g. enli, e. skogerbø, a.o. larsson, & c. christensen (eds.), the routledge companion to social media and politics (pp. 325-337). new york: routledge. moe, h., & larsson, a. o. 2013. ‘untangling a complex media system: a comparative study of twitter-linking practices during three scandinavian election campaigns’. information, communication & society, 16(5), 775-794. trust us, again? twitter campaigning strategies in the 2019 australian federal election axel bruns digital media research centre, queensland university of technology tim graham digital media research centre, queensland university of technology daniel angus digital media research centre, queensland university of technology introduction australia has experienced substantial political instability at the federal level for more than a decade: since 2007, it has experienced six changes of prime minister, four of which were brought on not by the results of federal elections, but by personal and policy disagreements within the major parties. as a consequence of this unprecedented level of internal disunity, long-term policy-making agendas have often been sidelined by short-term factional machinations, and overall public trust in politicians from all sides, and in democracy as such, has declined to an all-time low (evans et al. 2018). meanwhile, a range of minor parties and independent candidates have emerged to exploit this disruption and present themselves as trustworthy alternatives to the established parties. as australia approaches its next federal election, likely to take place in may 2019, these minor party and independent candidates will likely target marginal electorates (where the sitting member does not hold a strong majority, and may be susceptible to challenge); conversely, the centrist australian labor party and conservative coalition of liberal and national parties will be working to regain the trust (and votes) lost through their internal rancour and disarray of the past twelve years. social media will play a critical role in their campaigning: overall, australians are comparatively early and enthusiastic adopters of social media (sensis 2017), and more than half use social media as a key source of news (newman et al. 2018: 127); more specifically, social media have played an important role already during previous federal election campaigns in 2013 and 2016 (bruns 2016; bruns & moon 2017), and politics is a persistently prominent topic on platforms such as twitter in australia (sauter & bruns 2015). building on and extending an established methodological approach, this paper investigates the use of twitter in the 2019 australian federal election campaign. it examines the activities of political candidates, with a particular view towards their efforts to reposition themselves as trustworthy, as well as the engagement of ordinary twitter users with these candidate accounts, in order to identify campaigning strategies and assess their effectiveness. the results of this work also extend the data gathered in previous federal election campaigns, to produce a longitudinal dataset across the 2013, 2016, and 2019 elections. method following the approach employed in bruns (2017) and bruns & moon (2018), we capture the tweets posted by all officially declared federal candidates, as well as any tweets directed at their accounts (as @mentions or retweets), for the duration of the official campaign (typically 6-8 weeks to the election date). we generate a range of standard metrics as equivalent to the previous studies (including data on tweeting activity and tweets received per candidate and per party); these indicate the candidates’ level of social media effort as well as the (supportive as well as adversarial) public interest received. further, we examine networks of interaction amongst candidate accounts (to show strategies of mutual support and coordinated antagonism within and across parties) and between candidates and the general public. we extend the methodology of previous work by undertaking hypothesis testing of tie formation between these different actors. we use an approach known as exponential random graph modelling (robins et al. 2007) to test and validate assumptions about what structural forces might be driving network formation on twitter during the election campaign. extending previous approaches, we also apply machine learning techniques to surface the key topics within the tweets by and at the candidates, and trace topical change over time. we use social semantic network analysis (angus & wiles 2018) to examine the degree of topical overlap between key participants and participant groups (e.g. public, politician, party member), and structural topic models (stm) as our core topic modelling approach to summarise the large corpus of tweets into a small number of ‘topics’ for analysis (roberts et al. 2013). stm extends the conventional topic model analysis of the tweet content to include document-level covariates, such as candidate party affiliation, author type (e.g. candidates, ordinary users, or media outlets), and the change of topics over time. this enables a further investigation of the underlying campaign themes and strategies employed by each party and candidate, and not least also their engagement with questions of trust: in politics and politicians in general, as well as in their ability to manage key elements of government ranging from the economy to border control. stm also provides an opportunity to assess the extent to which the themes promoted by the candidates are addressed and adopted by ordinary users, or to which these users engage with the candidates around other topics. our longitudinal analysis over the course of the campaign provides insights into the evolution of particular public debates; further comparisons with the 2013 and 2016 data also show whether in spite of the general turmoil in australian politics these policy themes have remained broadly stable. finally, we also apply sentiment analysis techniques to the tweets by and at candidates to assess the emotional tone of these debates over time and examine the use of positivity and negativity by specific candidates and their parties. for this analysis we use the sentistrength algorithm (thelwall et al. 2010), to assign each tweet a sentiment score ranging from extremely negative (-5) to extremely positive (+5). this approach has been used in previous studies of political tweets (vilares et al. 2015), and sentistrength is currently the state-of-the-art for sentiment analysis of twitter data (koto & adriani 2015). expected results in keeping with the ethos of aoir conferences, the project presented here is work in progress, as the election itself will take place in may 2019. however, our previous studies of federal and state elections in australia have already demonstrated the feasibility and value of the approach outlined here. in particular, our reliance on a population of political candidates’ twitter accounts has already been shown to generate a substantially more diverse dataset than the more standard approach of tracking election-related hashtags or keywords can produce: australian politics hashtags such as #auspol or #ausvotes attract only a very narrow, self-selecting subset of those users who may discuss the federal election on twitter, and not all political candidates will use them. by contrast, our approach captures all tweets by all candidates who operate public twitter accounts, enabling a straightforward comparison of their tweeting activities across individuals and parties. it also captures all public tweets directed at these candidates’ accounts, and while tweeting at candidates still involves a certain degree of self-selection, these tweets represent a considerably larger and more diverse subset of the australian twittersphere than the corresponding hashtag datasets. in combination, then, our approach here produces substantial new evidence both on the use of twitter in political campaigning in australia, and on the public response to this use. by interfacing with previous studies that used equivalent methodologies, it adds to a longitudinal observation of social media campaigning strategies that stretches across three federal election cycles, and serves to complement other such longer-term work (e.g. larsson & moe 2016; lilleker et al. 2016). references angus, d., & wiles, j. (2018). social semantic networks: measuring topic management in discourse using a pyramid of conceptual recurrence metrics. chaos: an interdisciplinary journal of nonlinear science, 28(8), 085723. doi:10.1063/1.5024809 bruns, a. (2017). tweeting to save the furniture: the 2013 australian election campaign on twitter. media international australia, 162, 49–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x16669001 bruns, a., & moon, b. (2018). social media in australian federal elections: comparing the 2013 and 2016 campaigns. journalism & mass communication quarterly, 95(2), 425–448. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699018766505 evans, m., stoker, g., & halupka, m. (2018). australians’ trust in politicians and democracy hits an all-time low: new research. the conversation, 5 dec. 2018. https://theconversation.com/australians-trust-in-politicians-and-democracy-hits-anall-time-low-new-research-108161 koto, f., & adriani, m. (2015). a comparative study on twitter sentiment analysis: which features are good? in c. biemann, s. handschuh, a. freitas, f. meziane, & e. métais. lecture notes in computer science, vol 9103. paper presented at natural language processing and information systems (nldb 2015), passau, germany (pp. 453-457). larsson, a.o., & moe, h. (2016). from emerging to established? a comparison of twitter use during swedish election campaigns in 2010 and 2014. in a. bruns, g. enli, e. skogerbø, a.o. larsson, & c. christensen (eds.), the routledge companion to social media and politics (pp. 311-324). new york: routledge. lilleker, d.g., jackson, n., & koc-michalska, k. (2016). social media in the uk election campaigns 2008-2014: experimentation, innovation, and convergence. in a. bruns, g. enli, e. skogerbø, a.o. larsson, & c. christensen (eds.), the routledge companion to social media and politics (pp. 325-337). new york: routledge. robins, g., pattison, p., kalish, y., & lusher, d. (2007). an introduction to exponential random graph (p*) models for social networks. social networks, 29(2), 173-191. newman, n., fletcher, r., kalogeropoulos, a., levy, d.a.l., & nielsen, r.k. (2018). reuters institute digital news report 2018. oxford: reuters institute for the study of journalism. http://media.digitalnewsreport.org/wpcontent/uploads/2018/06/digital-news-report-2018.pdf?x89475 roberts, m., stewart, b., tingley, d., & airoldi, e. (2013). the structural topic model and applied social science. in c. burges, l. bottou, m. welling, z. ghahramani, & k. weinberger. advances in neural information processing systems 26 (nips 2013). paper presented at advances in neural information processing systems (nips) workshop on topic models: computation, application, and evaluation, lake tahoe, nevada, united states (pp. 1-20). sauter, t., & bruns, a. (2015). #auspol: the hashtag as community, event, and material object for engaging with australian politics. in n. rambukkana (ed.), hashtag publics: the power and politics of discursive networks (pp. 47–60). new york: peter lang. sensis. (2017). sensis social media report 2017: chapter 1 – australians and social media. melbourne: sensis. https://www.sensis.com.au/asset/pdfdirectory/sensissocial-media-report-2017.pdf thelwall, m., buckley, k., paltoglou, g. cai, d., & kappas, a. (2010). sentiment strength detection in short informal text. journal of the american society for information science and technology, 61(12), 2544–2558. vilares, d., thelwall, m., & alonso, m.a. (2015). the megaphone of the people? spanish sentistrength for real-time analysis of political tweets. journal of information science, 41(6), 799-813. the rise of negativity on facebook and twitter in u.s. political campaigns jennifer stromer-galley school of information studies, syracuse university patricia rossini department of communication and media, university of liverpool feifei zhang school of information studies, syracuse university negative campaigning has long been a concern in u.s. politics. several studies over the years have content-analyzed television advertising by presidential candidates between 1960 and 1996, and most suggest a general increase in negative messaging over time (jamieson, waldman, & sherr 2000; johnston & kaid 2002; for an exception, see geer 2006). campaigns have now expanded their campaign communication online to social media platforms like facebook and twitter. moreover, with the election of donald trump and his anti-normative tweets (stromer-galley 2019), as well as the overall remarkable volume of negativity by the presidential candidates in 2016 (fowler, rideout & franz 2017), this study aims to understand whether there is a trend of increasing negativity on campaigns’ free public social media accounts. we define and analyze negativity in three ways: (1) attacking opponents (including candidates, opposing political parties, or institutions and actors, such as government, the news media or specific journalists) on their policies or character but in a civil way; (2) attacking opponents in an uncivil way via name calling or other demeaning language; (3) attacking opponents in intolerant ways, such as through misogynistic or potential racist speech. negativity and incivility online have been the subject of over three decades of research. scholars have raised the concern that incivility undermines the democratic potential of the internet to foster healthy political discussion (papacharissi 2004), moreover uncivil discourse seems a pervasive feature of online discussion (coe, kenski, & rains 2014; reagle jr 2016). the 2016 presidential election seemed to further normalize uncivil discourse with the candidacy of donald j. trump. his rhetoric was remarkable for using personal and demeaning attacks on his opponents and institutions, such as the news media (stromer-galley 2019). concerns have been raised the trump’s candidacy has lead to a greater coarsening of public messages, and that social media features, like twitter’s limited number of characters, constrain messages in ways that lead to bald and blunt expressions. moreover, twitter, in particular, seems to feed an “outrage culture” where people use twitter to incite anger and passion rather than engaging in thoughtful and careful discussion (sobieraj & berry 2011). to pursue this question of increased negativity in online campaigning, we analyze the facebook and twitter accounts of candidates who ran for governor in the united states in 2014 and compare that to candidates who ran for the same office in 2018. our hypothesis is that the heightened negative messaging on social media during the presidential campaign of 2016 has created a cultural environment where it is acceptable to attack, demean, and call names of candidates’ opponents. we also hypothesize that campaigns will be more incivil and intolerant on twitter than on facebook, given that twitter tends to be publicly and journalist-facing and with a shorter message environment that seems to active outrage culture (sobieraj & berry 2011), while facebook tends to be used to activate supporters and mobilize them to action. to pursue this research, we collected and analyzed facebook and twitter accounts from candidates who ran in 2014 and in 2018 for the office of state governor. this is an executive level office, similar to the presidency, but at the state level rather than the federal level. in 2014, we collected the campaign tweets and facebook posts of all major-party candidates, 72 in total, who ran for governor in 2014 in 36 states. in 2018, we collected all major party candidates, 64 in total, who ran in 32 states. our analysis is focused on the general election period, which is roughly the last 10 weeks of the campaign period. we use supervised machine learning to classify messages on three dimensions of negative messaging: attack, incivility, and intolerance. these categories were adopted from jamieson, waldman, and sherr (2000), and from rossini (in press). to start, we developed a codebook for the classification of attack messages (as part of a larger set of categories, including advocacy messages and calls to action), and trained students on the codebook. we then developed a gold-labeled training corpus to build the attack algorithm. given the relative sparseness of uncivil and intolerant social media messages, we used the hatebase lexicon to tag and oversample potentially negative messages to generate a gold-labeled training set for algorithm development on those categories. we use the python-based machine learning toolkit scikit learn for algorithm development. measures of the accuracy of our classifications of attack messages suggest an accurate and reliable measure (twitter: precision = 0.83, recall = 0.74; f1 = 0.78; facebook: precision = 0.87, recall = 0.76, f1=0.80). incivility and intolerance coding are still in process, but preliminary work on classifying the public’s political messages on facebook and twitter suggest we can achieve a comparable level of validity and reliability for incivility and intolerance. we will classify all of the messages by the candidates and conduct statistical analysis and compare the two campaign seasons to test whether there is a significant increase in attack, incivility, and intolerance in political campaign messages on facebook and twitter, and we will compare facebook and twitter messages. the results from this study will inform research on the coarsening and increasing antinormative discourse that seems to be pervading political and social life in the united states. the work will help us understand whether top politicians’ discourse may be having an effect on the decorum of discourse by political campaigns of lesser races. finally, this work will contribute to our understanding of platform affordances and how they may further shape the nature of political discourse. references fowler, e. f., rideout, t., & franz, m. m. (2017). political advertising in 2016: the presidential election as outlier? the forum, 14(4). doi: 10.1515/for-2016-0040. geer, j. g. (2006). in defense of negativity: attack ads in presidential campaigns. chicago, il: university of chicago press. jamieson, k. h., waldman, p., & sherr, s. (2000). eliminate the negative? defining and refining categories of analysis for political advertisements. in j. thurber, c. nelson, & d. dulio (eds.), crowded airwaves (pp. 44–64). washington, dc: brookings institution press. johnston, a., & kaid, l. l. (2002). image ads and issue ads in u.s. presidential advertising: using videostyle to explore stylistic differences in televised political ads from 1952–2000. journal of communication, 52(2), 281–300. doi:10.1093/joc/52.2.281 rossini, p. (in press) disentangling uncivil and intolerant discourse. in boatright, r.; shaffer, t.; sobieraj, s.; young, d. (eds). a crisis of civility? contemporary research on civility, incivility, and political discourse. routledge. sobieraj, sarah, and jeffrey m. berry. 2011. “from incivility to outrage: political discourse in blogs, talk radio, and cable news.” political communication 28, no. 1: 19-41. stromer-galley, j. (2014). presidential campaigning in the internet age. new york, ny: oxford university press. social media, trust and efficacy citizens’ experience of the role of social media in four danish election campaigns 2007-19 jakob linaa jensen danish school of media and journalism social media play an increasing role in election campaigns in most democracies. barack obama’s victory in the 2008 american presidential election made many speculate that social media had a decisive role for the outcome. however, as demonstrated by cogburn & espinoza (2011) social media played a great role in obama’s recruitment and mobilization of new voters during the primaries, whereas for the presidential election itself old media, most notably tv, still played a dominant role. social media, like other technologies, might have over-estimated impact in the short run but under-estimated impact in the long run. social media use is increasing at a massive speed, also in election campaigns. for instance, during the danish 2007 national election campaign, five percent of citizens accessed social media for purposes related to the election campaign. in 2015 the corresponding figure was 65 percent. in the coming 2019 election it is expected to be even higher. but do social media have a corresponding impact on the election campaign, on agendasetting and ultimately the election outcome? such effects are hard to measure and conclusions might be only tentative (see for instance gibson & mcallister 2006; hoff 2010). when looking at election campaigns from the outside, one might claim that social media have personalized the election campaign and enhanced the focus on politicians rather than on politics (enli & skogerbø 2013). further, the use of social media contribute to a more personal relation between voters and candidates, although they do not seem to have contributed to a more deliberative democratic debate (linaa jensen 2014). in this paper, we focus on citizens’ experienced effects of social media in four danish election campaigns, taking the point of departure in the concept of efficacy. methods among the best ways to measure effects of campaigns are to ask those involved, citizens and politicians about their perceived effects. interviews and surveys are common methods. where interviews are in-depth and qualitative, it is impossible to ask enough people to draw a broad picture, for instance of social media effects in the general voter population. here surveys come at hand. although somehow reductive, by asking a large number of respondents, the impact of subjectivity or bias is reduced and one can get at least a general overview. besides, surveys are easier to replicate, allowing for longitudinal analysis. further, survey data are more standardized and surveys can be replicated over time. this paper is based on data from four consecutive danish national elections, in 2007, 2011, 2015 and 2019 (not held at the time of submission). by replicating the research design and most questions in four consecutive surveys the data provides us with a unique time series analysis of the citizens perception of social media in election campaigns across a time span of twelve years. the participants were recruited through online panels. n was 970 in 2007, 1973 in 2011, 3589 in 2015 and we have agreed on app. 2000 in 2019. the average response rate has been between 25 and 35 percent, similar to other online surveys. we have used stratified sampling to attract an adequate number of participants in all demographic categories. despite that, women, foreigners and those with less than nine years of schooling were slightly underrepresented and in the final data set data were weighted in order to be representative for the general voter population. the surveys are designed and managed by a research group for which the author has been in charge and cover broader topics than discussed here, where i focus particularly on social media and perceived effects. preliminary findings as mentioned, the 2019 election is not yet held at the time of submission but will take place no later than june 18th, according to the danish constitution. the survey is already designed and ready to launch right after the election. in this section, we reflect on issues and findings from the first three surveys and discuss some expected findings in the survey yet to come. in general, citizen use of social media related to the election campaign has been increasing from 5 percent in 2007 to 30 percent in 2011 and 65 percent in 2015. we expect the figure to be even higher in 2019. however, “social media use” is a diversified phenomenon. “likes”, visiting and following politicians’ and parties’ on facebook and twitter and political quizzes and tests account for most of the social media activity, what halupka (2014) has defined as "clicktivism", informal and non-obliging online political participation. however, an increasing number of citizens use social media as a gateway to news, through links to stories shared by media, political actors and other users. thus, social media have come to play a crucial role in the election news cycle and thus they form important arenas for campaigning for political parties. especially the 2015 election campaign was a breakthrough for “second screens” in election campaigns; citizens followed and engaged in on facebook and twitter while watching tv debates prior to the election. in all surveys, respondents were asked to evaluate the importance of the internet in general and social media in particular, compared to for instance tv and newspapers. tv is still regarded as the most important medium even though the gap from the internet narrows as time goes by. in 2011, social media overtook radio and in 2015 newspapers, illustrating the central role of social media in the 2015 election campaign. despite importance, social media are met with skepticism, still lagging behind both tv, radio and newspapers in terms of trustworthiness. we address this issue in more detail in the 2019 survey with new questions on the attitudes towards social media that might have changed in a negative direction after cambridge analytica and other scandals. next comes the questions on social media effects on citizens. in the surveys, we framed questions based on “efficacy”, or “subjective political competence” (barnes & kaase 1979; almond & verba 1963). the concept addresses respondents’ experience of democratic capability and knowledge. in all four surveys efficacy as a latent variable is measured through seven manifest statements, based on a likert scale. by comparing the answers we can measure the impact of social media for efficacy over time. among the findings, between 11 and 20 percent state that social media have had an effect on their opinions, slightly increasing over time. there are similar limited effects of social media on democratic competence, respondents stating that social media have made them more well informed. on the other hand, there is an increasing share replying that social media do not contribute to a qualified debate. as such effects over time are mixed. in sum, the paper provides a longitudinal study of social media use, agenda-setting effects and experienced efficacy across four elections, contributing to the literature and to the debate on the role of social media in the future of democracy. references almond, g. a., and s. verba (1963). the civic culture: political attitudes and democracy in five nations. princeton: princeton university press. jensen, j. l. (2014). online deliberation and beyond? a time-based and comparative study of danish political debates online. mediekultur: journal of media and communication research, 30(56). barnes, s. & m. kaase (1979). political action – mass participation in five western democracies. beverly hills: sage publications. cogburn, d. l. & espinoza-vasquez, f. k. (2011). from networked nominee to networked nation: examining the impact of web 2.0 and social media on political participation and civic engagement in the 2008 obama campaign. journal of political marketing, 10 (1-2). enli, g. s., & skogerbø, e. (2013). ‘personalized campaigns in party-centred politics: twitter and facebook as arenas for political communication’. information, communication & society, 16 (5), 757-774. schwartz, s. a. (2015). ‘campaigning and contestation: comments on politicians’ facebook pages during the 2011 danish general election campaign’. social media+ society, 1(2), 2056305115622480. “fear and loathing on facebook? tracking the rise of populism and platformization in viral political facebook posts anders olof larsson kristiania university college and westerdals ict the relationship between technological developments and societal change continues to be a common theme in communication research. comparably recent changes in the digital realm have often led to premonitions of increased opportunities for citizen empowerment in relation to power elites (olsson, 2016) – premonitions whose roots often can be found in reflections emanating from musings regarding technological developments in the pre-digital era (enzensberger, [1970] 2003). indeed, authors have suggested that digital opportunities such as social media would be especially suited to increase the interaction between citizens and their elected officials (lüders, følstad, & waldal, 2014, p. 448), and while political campaigns still tend to mainly focus on traditional media such as television (hansen & kosiara-pedersen, 2014), the slow but steadily increasing influence of social media platforms like twitter or facebook during political campaigns in a series of countries cannot be ignored. authors have pointed out that studies on digital campaigns have developed primarily on two distinct trajectories (nielsen & vaccari, 2013). first, the ‘supply’ variety of scholarship into this theme is typically focused on whether and how political actors make use of digital media (e.g. b. a. bimber & davis, 2003; foot & schneider, 2006; vergeer, 2012). such studies have generally found what is often referred to as the normalization hypothesis suggesting larger actors offline prevail also online to hold true over its competing equalization hypothesis – which suggests that less established actors would balance the competition by utilizing digital technologies – although some evidence exists that the degree to which these hypotheses can or cannot be confirmed fluctuates over time (gibson & mcallister, 2015). second, ‘demand’ type studies are generally geared towards assessing the impact of political campaigns in various ways, such as gauging the relationship between taking part of political information and subsequently engaging in some way – by means of voting for a particular political actor, or by means of engaging and thus “amplifying” (zhang, wells, wang, & rohe, 2017) the content posted by such actors to online platforms (b. bimber, 2003; williams & gulati, 2012). the study presented here takes the latter perspective and seeks to trace the development of such citizen demand in relation to posts made on the facebook pages of political actors during three swedish national elections – undertaken in 2010, 2014 and 2018. while digital platforms like facebook make it possible for political actors to communicate directly with citizens without having to engage with the gatekeeping functionalities of traditional media, there appears to be a dearth of knowledge regarding what types of content as provided by political actors becomes popular or even viral (nahon, hemsley, walker, & hussain, 2011) among potential voters – and how this popularity varies over time. with 76 % of the population using facebook (davidsson, palm, & mandre, 2018), and with such high shares of use remaining comparably persistent since the launch of facebook (nordicom, 2013), sweden appears as a suitable context in which to study the development of citizen demand for political content during political campaigns. the featured longitudinal approach also seems appropriate given the multitude of studies that focus on these issues during a single political campaign. as pointed out by stromer-galley et. al. (2018), the temporal nature of campaigning needs to be assessed further. indeed, trends come and go, also with regards to political campaigning. as such, our current efforts utilize data from the three previously mentioned elections to trace the development of two tendencies that have recently gained the attention of political communication scholars. first, we look at populism – defined here as a style of political campaigning. second, we are interested in the ways in which tendencies of platformization – the ways in which political parties adapt their messages to fit with the features of the platforms they use to campaign. these two tendencies are further discussed and will help to inform the research question for the paper at hand: how are viral posts from political parties on facebook changing over time? as such, our primary interest lays here in uncovering if content characterized by these tendencies ‘works’ – if it becomes comparably popular – and, as a result of this, what repercussions such popularity might have for future political campaigning efforts and indeed the democratic system as such. references bimber, b. (2003). information and american democracy: technology in the evolution of political power: cambridge univ press. bimber, b. a., & davis, r. (2003). campaigning online : the internet in u.s. elections. new york, n.y.: oxford university press. davidsson, p., palm, m., & mandre, å. m. (2018). svenskarna och internet 2018. retrieved from https://www.iis.se/english/ enzensberger, h. m. ([1970] 2003). constituents of a theory of the media. in n. wardrip-fruin & n. montfort (eds.), the new media reader (pp. 259–276). cambridge, ma: mit press. foot, k. a., & schneider, s. m. (2006). web campaigning. cambridge, mass.: mit press. gibson, r. k., & mcallister, i. (2015). normalising or equalising party competition? assessing the impact of the web on election campaigning. political studies, 63(3), 529–547. doi:10.1111/1467-9248.12107 hansen, k. m., & kosiara-pedersen, k. (2014). cyber-campaigning in denmark: application and effects of candidate campaigning. journal of information technology & politics, 11(2), 206–219. doi:10.1080/19331681.2014.895476 lüders, m., følstad, a., & waldal, e. (2014). expectations and experiences with mylabourparty: from right to know to right to participate? journal of computermediated communication, 19(3), 446-462. doi:10.1111/jcc4.12047 nahon, k., hemsley, j., walker, s., & hussain, m. (2011). fifteen minutes of fame: the power of blogs in the lifecycle of viral political information. policy & internet, 3(1), 633. doi:10.2202/1944-2866.1108 nielsen, r. k., & vaccari, c. (2013). do people “like” politicians on facebook? not really. large-scale direct candidate-to-voter online communication as an outlier phenomenon. international journal of communication; vol 7 (2013), 2333–2356. nordicom. (2013). nordicom-sveriges internetbarometer 2012. retrieved from gothenburg: http://www.nordicom.gu.se/?portal=mr&main=info_publ2.php&ex=386 olsson, t. (2016). social media and new forms for civic participation. new media & society, 18(10), 2242-2248. doi:10.1177/1461444816656338 stromer-galley, j., zhang, f., hemsley, j., & tanupabrungsun, s. (2018). tweeting the attack: predicting gubernatorial candidate attack messaging and its spread. international journal of communication, 12. vergeer, m. (2012). politics, elections and online campaigning: past, present . . . and a peek into the future. new media & society, 15(1), 9-17. doi:10.1177/1461444812457327 williams, c. b., & gulati, g. j. j. (2012). social networks in political campaigns: facebook and the congressional elections of 2006 and 2008. new media & society, 15(1), 52-71. doi:10.1177/1461444812457332 zhang, y., wells, c., wang, s., & rohe, k. (2017). attention and amplification in the hybrid media system: the composition and activity of donald trump’s twitter following during the 2016 presidential election. new media & society, 0(0), 1461444817744390. doi:10.1177/1461444817744390" selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): gray, j & suzor, n. (2019, october 2-5). algorithmic copyright enforcement on youtube: using machine learning to understand automated decision-making at scale. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. algorithmic copyright enforcement on youtube: using machine learning to understand automated decisionmaking at scale joanne gray queensland university of technology nicolas suzor queensland university of technology this paper presents the results of an investigation of algorithmic copyright enforcement on youtube. we use digital and computational methods to help understand the operation of automated decision-making at scale. we argue that in order to understand complex, automated systems, we require new methods and research infrastructure to understand their operation at scale, over time, and across platforms and jurisdictions. technology companies play a major role in governing the internet. the rules of platforms, content hosts, search engines, and telecommunications providers govern how we interact with each other, and they shape the possibilities and nature of public discourse (gillespie 2018). there is increasing global concern about how the decisions of internet and telecommunications companies impact on human rights. governments around the world are learning how to influence intermediaries to control the flow of information, often in ways that skirt or avoid constitutional protections for fundamental rights (elkin-koren and haber 2016). meanwhile, many worry that platforms are not taking sufficient care to protect their users from harm (suzor et al. 2018), prevent the spread of hate and disinformation, or to protect the interests of marginalised groups (citron 2014; marwick and lewis 2017; caplan, hanson, and donovan 2018; duguay, burgess, and suzor 2018). copyright enforcement provides a useful case study of automated decision-making because, in digital media networks, automated tools for detecting copyright infringement are widespread and relatively sophisticated. the operation of these systems, however, is often opaque, and platforms are frequently criticised for unduly silencing legitimate speech through their copyright takedown processes (urban, karaganis, and schofield 2016). content id and copyright notice-and-takedown requests play an extremely important role in regulating the content that is visible on youtube, but there is no easy way to understand how these systems operate. we use youtube takedowns as a case study to develop and test an innovative methodology for evaluating automated decision-making. first, we built technical infrastructure to obtain a random sample of 59 million youtube videos and to test their availability. the initial sample of youtube videos is derived from youtube’s search api (‘list’ endpoint). the sample is built by requesting, every ten seconds, 50 videos that were published in a ten second window one minute prior. we then use web-scraping to check the availability of each video two weeks after it was first published, and log whether it was removed, as well as the reason that youtube gives for its removal. in our sample, 508,406 (1.2%) were unavailable because of a copyright claim (including approximately 80,000 that were geoblocked in the country where our server is based). next, we sought to better understand the types of videos that are being removed from youtube. we used topic modeling techniques (latent dirichlet allocation) on the title and description metadata of 20,000 videos to develop an initial understanding of the main types of content that are blocked. we developed and assessed a series of topic models at varying degrees of granularity. as a first step in developing an initial methodology, we did not seek to comprehensively categorise the broad range of videos into an exclusive set of categories. instead, we selected five well-defined clusters of content that lend themselves to further computational analysis: gameplay videos, full movies, live sports broadcasts, tutorials on game cheats and copy control circumvention, and highlight clips from popular media. these categories are particularly interesting since they map onto major controversies over automated copyright enforcement. in the third stage of our work, we trained a machine learning classifier to identify videos in each of these categories across our dataset larger. we made use of state of the art natural language processing techniques, including the newly released bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (bert) (devlin et al. 2018). bert provides sentence-level representations trained on massive corpora of wikipedia articles and books. we use a transformer attention-based deep learning model to perform classification on youtube video titles and descriptions, and undertook several rounds of active learning to train the classifier (we ultimately manually labeled approximately 5000 videos to develop an adequate training set). at the time of writing, we have been able to achieve over 93% accuracy on test data. we deployed the trained model to categorize our entire random sample of 59 million youtube videos. we validated the model's results by manual review and performed inter-coder reliability checks. in the coming weeks, we will analyse the factors that appear to influence decisions to block content across different categories, as well as changes over time since late 2016. we will make use of statistical learning methods (multinomial logistic regression and support vector machines) to examine the relationship between categories, variables in the metadata that youtube exposes (duration, genre, likes, dislikes, and so on), and takedown rates. these methods enable us to examine the characteristics of videos that are most likely to be removed through dmca notices, content id removals, and terms of service enforcement. this interdisciplinary research provides an initial case study in developing black-box methodologies (pasquale 2015) to understand the operation of automated decisionmaking at scale. we reflect on the utility of different computational approaches to understanding content moderation systems, and seek to identify opportunities for further work that leverages close qualitative analysis in conjunction with large-scale computational processing. this work provides the methodological base for further experimentation with the use of deep neural nets to enable large-scale analysis of the operation of automated systems in the realm of digital media. we hope that this work will improve understanding of a useful and fruitful set of methods to interrogate pressing public policy research questions in the context of content moderation and automated decision-making. references caplan, robyn, lauren hanson, and joan donovan. 2018. “dead reckoning: navigating content moderation after ‘fake news.’” data & society research institute. https://datasociety.net/pubs/oh/dataandsociety_dead_reckoning_2018.pdf. citron, danielle keats. 2014. hate crimes in cyberspace. cambridge, massachusetts ; london, england: harvard university press. devlin, jacob, ming-wei chang, kenton lee, and kristina toutanova. 2018. “bert: pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding,” october. https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805v1. duguay, stefanie, jean burgess, and nicolas p. suzor. 2018. “queer women’s experiences of patchwork platform governance on tinder, instagram, and vine.” convergence, june, 1354856518781530. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856518781530. elkin-koren, niva, and eldar haber. 2016. “governance by proxy: cyber challenges to civil liberties.” brooklyn law review 82 (february): 2016. gillespie, tarleton. 2018. custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. 1st edition. new haven, ct: yale university press. google. n.d. “content removals due to copyright.” google transparency report. accessed october 3, 2018. https://transparencyreport.google.com/copyright/explore?hl=en. marwick, alice e., and rebecca lewis. 2017. “media manipulation and disinformation online.” data & society research institute. https://datasociety.net/output/mediamanipulation-and-disinfo-online/. pasquale, frank. 2015. the black box society. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. suzor, nicolas p., molly dragiewicz, bridget harris, rosalie gillett, jean burgess, and tess van geelen. 2018. “human rights by design: the responsibilities of social media platforms to address gender-based violence online.” policy & internet. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.185. urban, jennifer m., joe karaganis, and brianna l. schofield. 2016. “notice and takedown in everyday practice.” ssrn scholarly paper id 2755628. rochester, ny: social science research network. http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2755628. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): fridman-naot, d. & ribak, r. (2017, october 18-21). the expert and the networked public: professional and amateur wedding photographers in the facebooked wedding. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the expert and the networked public: professional and amateur wedding photograhers in the facebooked wedding dina fridman-naot department of communication, university of haifa rivka ribak department of communication, university of haifa a typical middle class wedding in israel is documented by roughly 3000-6000 still photos taken by friends, family, service providers and professional photographers, uploaded and shared throughout the ceremony, and archived thereafter in various online, offline and printed photo albums. conceiving of the wedding as a paradigmatic site of cultural production and reproduction, this paper explores the practices through which professional photographers distinguish themselves from amateurs just as digital photography became ubiquitous (hand, 2013), and has seemingly levelled the playing field. amateur (or citizen) photography has severely affected professional photographers. reflecting on the crisis in employment and work conditions of photojournalists, kleinavraham and reich conclude that while the implementation of digitization did not cause the situation, it did precipitate a negative synergy between photojournalists' "old and new weaknesses" (2016:429). the deskilling they describe – a new weakness – entails a transition from subtle to crude skills, namely from "capturing publishable frames under pressure of uncertainty" to "walking and driving" (440) or merely attending. drawing on interviews with ten wedding photographers and ten newlywed couples, as well as facebook pages of wedding photographers and newlywed groups, we will suggest that as independent, "artisanal photographers" (frosh, in press) whose livelihood depends on direct sales to the market, wedding photographers managed to distinguish themselves from the networked public of amateur photographers and overcome this impending crisis through professional, technological and artistic upskilling. expertise: the wedding photographers are recognized for the quality of their pictures. only the photographer's pictures will find their way into the printed photo album of the wedding. similarly, the newlyweds refer to guests' expectation to receive professional photos which they then upload as their profile pictures. thus, although most wedding guests would use their telephone cameras during the event; and although other suppliers – the dj, the stylists and notably the "magnet photographer," hired to shoot small portraits of the guests and hand them out to them as mementos – would also document the event and upload their pictures, it is the professional photographer who accompanies the bride or the couple throughout the wedding day (and indeed long before that), who is solely responsible for documenting the wedding ritual, and who coaches the couple through the daunting labor of curating and archiving the immense output in the days and months that follow. but what the newlyweds appreciate most are the photographer's friendship and the "chemistry" that ties them together. as one bride posted on her photographer's page, "my photographer and my husband were the best choices i made. from the first day we knew we were fortunate, but we didn't realize how much! we didn't just have a great photographer but a dear friend." since the photographers' work is displayed on facebook, the encounter with them is devoted to evaluating the potential bond: "i tell the couple on our first meeting that they should see how they get along with me and if there is no chemistry they shouldn't take me since it affects the results." thus providing professional photography is just one of the photographer's missions – coaching the bride and groom through the trials and tribulations of their wedding events is no less important, and indeed although they sign a business contract with the photographer, the couples define him or her as a friend. in the paper, we elaborate on the forms this neoliberal artisanal photography takes as photographers' work becomes intertwined in prolonged emotional labor (hochschild, 2003), and as an expanding social network – arguably, an economic circuit (zelizer, 2006) of sorts – is required for securing the current and future jobs. equipment: the photographers must always stay (at least) one step ahead of the amateurs. our exploration was intrigued by an nyt piece on "unplugged weddings" that invited the guests to attend the ritual and "bear witness" in a nostalgic appeal for unmediated authenticity.1 as we went along, a local report featured a wedding documented by the professional photographer's cellphone camera alone.2 these very different low-tech accounts – man bites dog stories that indicate the growing technological sophistication of the field – underscore, at the same time, professional photographers' imperative to maintain a technological advantage. and they do. the photographers use a dedicated, visible camera that marks them as professional ("the guests see someone with a big camera and assume he is one of the professional photographers" even when it is an inconsiderate guest who harms the professionals' reputation); men photographers used go-pro, drones and selfie-bottle cameras as well. in the paper, we suggest that although these technologies – especially when used in ensemble – are important for creating a professional edge, it is the 1 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/fashion/the-i-dos-unplugged-this-life.html 2 http://www.mako.co.il/women-wedding-magazine/articles/article-d970d2983ec5e41006.htm amateurs' cellular cameras that feed and indeed dominate the public network, whereas the quality photographs of the professional photographer end up in more private collections such as the printed photo album and offline data storages. aesthetic: the newlyweds and the photographers aspire to authentic, spontaneous, "simple" documentation. while this can be accomplished by most amateurs, only professional photographers master the broader range of styles that is in fact required for the successful documentation of the wedding. thus a crucial element of the event is the ritual, wherein the photographer is expected to produce a prescribed set of images (in a jewish wedding these would include putting the band on the bride's finger, drinking from a wine glass and displaying the ketubah; see shandler, 2009). another crucial component is family group portraiture – "the only thing i continue to stage," as one photographer admits: family photographs "are where the photographer is measured." the natural-staged photograph is another specialty of the professional photographer. bridal photos are particularly prone to reality shows' rhetoric (engstrom, 2008) of staged behind-the-scenes: "my friend helped me wear the gown. she closed the buttons and left one open. we went out to the photographer who waited in the living room, and he shot her closing the top button of my dress." but decisive moments (à la cartierbresson) are staged under the chuppah as well: "i tell the couple, when you reach that moment when he lifts your veil, take your time and experience that moment." in the paper we propose that free, spontaneous photography is where the professional photographer slightly loses ground (see larsen, 2005). professional photographers' spontaneity is by definition assumed, since they are commissioned to produce it. photos taken and uploaded by the networked public of amateurs are, by contrast, "authentic" in that as guests, they presumably experienced a moment or an angle that made them take out their cameras and document that singular instant. further, whereas the friended professional photographer knows only to tag the couple, friends can tag each other such that, ironically, metadata serve as indicators of contrived v. authentic spontaneity. references engstrom, e. (2008). unraveling the knot. journal of communication inquiry, 32(1), 6082. frosh, p. (in press). photography as a cultural industry. handbook of photography. hand, m. (2012). ubiquitous photography. polity. hochschild, a. r. (2003). the managed heart. uc press. klein-avraham, i., & reich, z. (2016). out of the frame. new media & society, 18(3), 429-446. larsen, j. (2005). families seen sightseeing. space and culture, 8(4), 416-434. shandler, j. (2009). jews, god, and videotape. nyu press. zelizer, v. (2006). circuits in economic life. economic sociology, 8(1), 30-35. microsoft word 792-540-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 the circuit of culture: a useful theoretical model for studying social media emily keats department of journalism and technical communication, colorado state university usa emily.keats@gmail.com abstract this theoretical examination illustrates the applicability of the circuit of culture to studying social media. literature that uses the theory of self-presentation for understanding social media and its users abounds. while goffman’s (1959) presentation of self is an appropriate theoretical approach to the analysis of social media, it focuses primarily on the concept of identity and how users elicit or hide particular aspects of it depending on the self they want to project. because online environments are multifaceted sites of meaning construction and exchange, examining them with a more diverse and encompassing model is critical. the circuit of culture is a five-part model that can be used to provide a rich understanding of a cultural phenomenon. this paper offers evidence for why the circuit of culture is a strong model to apply when investigating social media as well as offers suggestions for future research areas. keywords: circuit of culture; social media; production; consumption introduction social media environments are multifaceted domains in which meaning is constructed and exchanged. examining the activities that take place in these spaces requires the use of a diverse and encompassing theoretical framework. in a given social media environment, there is more to understand than simply how a user engages in self-presentation. erving goffman’s (1959) work concerning the presentation of self has been used abundantly to examine digital domains such as vlogs, youtube, and other web spaces (see griffith & papacharissi, 2009; papacharissi, 2002; schau & gilly, 2003; trammell & keshelashvili, 2005; wesch, 2009). additionally, facebook and myspace (tufecki, 2008) as well as the production of a “cyberself” through participation in multi-user domains (muds) (robinson, 2007) have also been examined by employing goffman and symbolic interaction theory (si). the aforementioned studies illustrate the wealth of literature that draws primarily on self-presentation and si theory. the time has come to use a theory beyond the scope of self-presentation in digital media studies. the purpose of this theoretical examination is to showcase the circuit of culture and its applicability to studying social media phenomena. the circuit of culture the circuit of culture was used by du gay, hall, janes, mackay and negus (1997) in their study of the sony walkman. they explored the walkman by examining the five moments included in the model: identity, production, consumption, representation and regulation. the circuit has been used predominately in cultural and media studies (see acosta-alzuru & kreshel, 2002; carvalho & burgess, 2005; han & zhang, 2009; keats, 2012; scherer & jackson, 2008; soar, 2000; taylor, demont-heinrich, broadfoot, dodge & jian, 2002). a major goal of this model is to illustrate the interconnections between the moments to understand how they can be articulated simultaneously. realizing that these distinct moments co-facilitate the construction and exchange of meaning is one of the main benefits to using this model to examine cultural phenomena. see figure 1 for a visual representation of the model. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 figure 1. circuit of culture (du gay et al., 1997). keats (2012) used the circuit to examine haul videos on youtube. briefly, a haul video is a short video in which the producer showcases his or her (often the producers are young girls or women) purchases from a recent shopping trip to the mall or favorite retailer. taylor et al. (2002) used the circuit to investigate issues regarding the napster legal case (an online music-sharing site), while han and zhang (2009) used it to understand the influence a celebrity blogger had in mitigating a national cultural clash that involved starbucks. the aforementioned studies successfully present a full picture of the phenomenon under study because the circuit of culture necessitates the understanding of more than a singular concept or construct and how they overlap when in play. “the model focuses on how the value and meaning of cultural phenomena are created, maintained, and transformed throughout various sites, moments and practices” (taylor et al., 2002, p. 608). social media environments have illustrated the interconnections between production and consumption given that consumers can now produce content to be consumed by other participants in the environment. the freedom and flexibility afforded in such locales identifies a need to more closely examine the roles of consumer and producer and the circuit provides a strong theoretical framework for doing so. producers as consumers / consumers as producers within the haul video trend, it is argued that corporate producers first imbed their products with an intended meaning and/or use; this product is then purchased by a hauler because it may represent one or more aspects of the identity he or she have and/or are striving to present. next, the hauler moves from his or her status as a consumer to that of a producer by creating and posting a video that showcases recent purchases. finally, the video is consumed by youtube viewers and likely commented on which generates a digital discussion about a host of topics, many of which are related to presentation of self, appearance, body image, and consumption habits (keats, 2012). what emerges here is a cyclical pattern that is more easily understood by employing the circuit of culture to understand how given moments are interrelated – specifically the overlap of the consumer and producer roles. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 taylor et al. (2002) note the need to reconfigure the model in a way that accounts for the converging roles of producers and consumers. within napster, users (i.e., those who consumed the music for free) also produced it by “ripping” material from cds and providing it to others (taylor et al., 2002, p. 620). further, because users did not have to pay for the content, the power dynamics between consumers and producers shifted. producers once held the power of distributing music, but a site like napster put a lot more power in the hands of the consumer. while producers at the corporate level were once solely in charge of creating messages for mass consumption, consumers who engage in social media environments now have a great deal of power in how such messages are received and reproduced. social media provide a platform for participants to reproduce content they deem meaningful. power is taken away from the original producer in the sense that this act of reproduction may create a new form of meaning or use very different from what was originally intended. the circuit of culture helps to make these distinctions apparent. the examples from keats (2012) and taylor et al. (2002) provide two solid studies that illustrate the importance of carefully considering the roles of producers and consumers in new media environments. both authors specifically addressed social media and highlighted the ways in which consumers and producers can hold both positions simultaneously. moreover, these studies demonstrate that while some adaption may be needed, the circuit of culture continues to prove useful for studying social media. conclusion when studying any social phenomenon or occurrence, one could argue that the overarching goal of the researcher is to present the most thorough and accurate picture possible. the circuit of culture is an excellent tool to employ when trying to reach such a goal. although the circuit may come across as a complex and slightly intimidating theoretical model, its use can allow a researcher to make powerful observations and claims. the goal of this paper is to illustrate the applicability of the circuit to studying social media. trends such as youtube haul videos, pin boards on pinterest, photographs on instagram or political tweets on twitter, encompass the assemblage of production and consumption as well as meaning creation and exchange—all of which can be thoroughly explored by using the circuit. as has been discussed by acosta-alzuru and kreshel (2002), champ (2008), and keats (2012), the circuit of culture is a strong framework to apply when the goal is to generate a rich understanding of meaning construction, exchange, and reproduction. the interconnectedness of the moments that comprise this model allow for more broad and sophisticated analyses. topics for future research using the circuit of culture include examining social interaction and the social networks of people that are at play in online environments. further, websites such as pinterest and youtube haul videos illustrate the need to further explore copyright, authorship, production and consumption as these areas continue to blur in digital domains. references acosta-alzuru, c., & kreshel, p. j. (2002). i'm an american girl ...whatever that means: girls consuming pleasant company's american girl identity. journal of communication, 52(1), 139-161. doi: 10.1111/j.1460-2466.2002.tb02536.x carvalho, a. & burgess, j. (2005). cultural circuits of climate change in the u.k. broadsheet newspapers, 1985-2003. risk analysis 25(6), 1457-1469. doi: 10.1111/j.1539 6924.2005.00692.x champ, j.g. (2008). horizontal power, vertical weakness: enhancing the “circuit of culture.” popular communication (6), 85-102. du gay, p. (1997). introduction. in p. du gay (ed.), production of culture/cultures of selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 production (pp. 1-10). thousand oaks, ca: sage. du gay, p., hall, s., janes, l., mackay, h., & negus, k. (1997). doing cultural studies: the story of the sony walkman. london: sage, in association with the open university. goffman, e. (1959). the presentation of self in everyday life. new york: anchor books. griffith, m. & papacharissi, z. looking for you: an analysis of video blogs. first monday 15(1). han, g., zhang, a. (2009). starbucks is forbidden in the forbidden city: blog, circuit of culture and informal public relations campaign in china. public relations review (35), 395-401. keats, e. (2012). exploring haul videos on youtube: a collective case study approach. (master’s thesis, colorado state university). papacharissi, z. (2002). the presentation of self in virtual life: characteristics of personal home pages. journalism & mass communication quarterly (79)3, 643-660. robinson, l. (2007). the cyberself: the self-ing project goes online, symbolic interaction in the digital age. new media & society, 9(1), 93-110. doi: 10.1177/146444807072216 schau, h.j. & gilly, m.c. (2003). we are what we post? self-presentation in personal web space. journal of consumer research 30(3), 385-404. scherer j., jackson, s. j. (2008). cultural studies and the circuit of culture: advertising, promotional culture and the new zealand all blacks. cultural studies/critical methodologies, 8(4), 507-526. doi: 10.1177/1532708608321577 soar, m. (2000). encoding advertisements: ideology and meaning in advertising production. mass communication and society, 3(4), 415-437. taylor, b. c., demont-heinrich, c., broadfoot, k. j., dodge, j., & jian, c. (2002). new media and the circuit of cyber-culture: conceptualizing napster. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 46(4), 607-629. trammell, k.d. & keshelashvili, a. (2005). examining the new influencers: a self presentation study of a-list blogs. journalism & mass communication quarterly, 82(4), 968-982. tufecki, z. (2008). can you see me now? audience and disclosure regulation in online social network sites. bulletin of science, technology and society 28(1), 20-36. wesch, m. (2009). youtube and you: experiences of self-awareness in the context collapse of the recording webcam. explorations in media ecology 8(2), 19-34. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): banks, j., edwards, a., edwards, c., guzman, a., jobin, a., lewis, s. c., spence, p., & westerman, d. k. (2017, october 18-21). posthuman publics: emerging research in human-machine communication. panel presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. posthuman publics: emerging research in human-machine communication jaime banks west virginia university autumn edwards western michigan university chad edwards western michigan university andrea l. guzman northern illinois university anna jobin university of lausanne seth c. lewis university of oregon patric r. spence university of central florida david k. westerman north dakota state university panel overview in both its academic and lay uses, the word “public” has referred to “people,” and has done so for centuries (oxford english dictionary, 2017). publics first assembled together in physical spaces and then in digital spaces (e.g., rheingold, 2001), and as many aoir scholars have documented, technology has played an integral role in the formation, evolution, and dissolution of publics (e.g., papacharissi, 2014). in this panel, however, we look at a different role for technology in relation to publics, chiefly when information and communication technologies themselves gain increased agency, transitioning from things we communicate through to social actors we communicate with. from an aristotelian perspective (c. 350 b.c./1907), publics of varying scale emerge when speech (or logos) binds people together. how might publics emerge when some interlocutors are not people, exactly, but other types of social agents? in particular, how might interactions among human and machine agents contribute to the composition and dynamics of publics, especially as individuals come to identify as (and with) publics through such dyadic interactions? as digital interlocutors (such as siri and alexa, among other popular communicative agents) come to “stand in” for people in communication contexts, how do such interactions—i.e., human-machine communication (hmc)—reveal publics that are not entirely (or even mostly) human in character? moreover, what do these shifts in the construction of publics mean for how publics convene and coordinate, in ways transparent or opaque? these questions become increasingly important as social machines—in particular, networked machines—become key actors in contemporary life. this panels seeks to explore these questions at individual, dyadic, and institutional levels, attending to direct communications among various human and technological agents. in particular, this panel includes four papers reporting empirical findings with implications for the emergence of publics through human-machine communication. paper 1 presents data from a study examining how social machines may be individually perceived as moral agents, and how that moral agency may beget senses of interpersonal attraction and trust across task-, social-, and play-focused interactions. paper 2 builds on work suggesting that humans prefer and expect human-human dyadic communication; it presents findings from a study of how humans draw on familiar scripts for novel human-robot interactions and deal with expectancy violations. paper 3 moves beyond individuals and dyadic interactions to address commercial dynamics in the emergent of sociotechnical publics, as advertisers make sense of opaque algorithms and translate them toward client service. finally, paper 4 addresses artificial intelligence in the context of journalism, analyzing 60 years’ worth of trade-press discourse to explain how machines have been framed in relation to news production and distribution—and how such frames may correspond with different assumptions of how publics, of various kinds and configurations, might engage with news. together, these reports offer empirical data with implications for better understandings of how sociotechnical publics may emerge from—and be hindered by—perceptions of, interactions among, and representations of humans and machines. references aristotle (1907). the history of animals (d.w. thompson, trans.). london: john bell. oxford english dictionary (2017). public. retrieved from https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/public papacharissi, z. (2014). affective publics. oxford, uk: oxford university press. rheingold, h. (2001). the virtual community: homesteading on the electronic frontier. cambridge, mass.: the mit press. panel paper 1: toward a posthuman public: perceived moral agency and trust in social machines -jaime banks feelings of trust are understood to be central to whether humans engage social technologies (hancock et al., 2011)—from spam and chatbots to digital assistants and consumer robots. current perspectives on human-machine trust are rooted in assessments of the functional reliability of the machine as a tool for human ends—that is, faith that the machine will perform its assigned tasks. notably, however, social machines are increasingly designed to go beyond mere tool-oriented tasks to engage in interpersonal relational tasks. for instance, the upcoming social robot “buddy” is touted as a companion robot that “connects, protects, and interacts” with families, runs on an “emotion engine,” and is said to democratize robotics through its open source platform (blue frog robotics, n.d.). such machines may enmesh human understandings of how to engage technologies with those associated with engaging humans (spence, westerman, edwards, & edwards, 2014). that such machines are designed for social interaction calls to question the ways that human adopters may (not) see them as social agents, and so trust them according to human social standards. in other words, to what extent do feelings of trust in machines rely on the assessments of social reliability? core to this reliability is the perception of moral agency—the degree to which a machine is seen as having a moral system, acting based on that system, and taking responsibility for its actions (banks, 2017)—which may fluctuate based on the emotions and reasoning inherent to functional and social tasks (cf. greene & haidt, 2002). building on emerging work in this domain (banks, 2017) linking the perceived moral agency of social machines to feelings of interpersonal trust and attraction, this paper reports initial findings of a study on how functional and social reliability may coalesce in a human-machine interaction context that requires one or both forms of reliability. specifically, the study experimentally explored the phenomenology of an interaction in which human individuals (n = 20) were asked to engage in one of three types of short interactions with the social robot “cozmo” (anki, n.d.). participants first completed an online survey with demographic questions, as well as assessments of existing attitudes toward social machines, in general. following, they came into a lab environment and were randomly assigned to engage in a task interaction (in which the robot will take commands, e.g., following control commands to navigate an obstacle course), a social interaction (in which the robot will engage in a friendly exchange, e.g., having a brief conversation via a wizard-of-oz arrangement), or a playful interaction (which requires both task and social reliability, e.g., playing a game of keepaway). following the interaction, subjects participated in a semi-structured interview exploring their experience with the robot. the interview first attended to first impressions, feelings about the interaction, and strategies for interaction before advancing to questions about agentic functioning, perceptions of morality, and broad questions of trust in relation to the interaction context and future similar interactions. interview data was subjected to emergent thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2014) to identify patterns within and across conditions. initial findings suggest that the interaction context does play a role in the perception of machine moral agency. this engaging in undirected social interaction attended to cozmo’s emotional expressiveness and trying to determine how it functioned; those in the directed task condition focused on potential morality through sensing and learning, as well as on the robot’s ‘obeying’ of commands and potential utility in their lives; those in the play condition focused on nonverbal responses to win/loss game outcomes as cognitive anchors for cozmo’s potential morality (i.e., he responds poorly to losing, suggesting he knows losing is bad, therefore he may be able to understand that some things are bad). overall, most participants suggested they didn’t think cozmo was a moral being but offered scenarios in which he could possibly be. overall, most participants suggested that they would trust cozmo in social, task, and play contexts, although in a limited fashion; some suggested that trust in the robot would be similar with trust in a person—they would have to spend time with it first. references anki (n.d.). meet cozmo [web site]. https://anki.com/en-us/cozmo banks, j. (2017, may). morality in the machine: perceived moral agency of, trust in, and attraction to anthropomorphic agents. paper presented at the 2017 humanmachine communication preconference to the annual conference of the international communication association, san diego, ca. blue frog robotics (n.d.). about buddy [web site]. http://www.bluefrogrobotics.com/en/buddy/ clarke, v., & braun, v. (2014). thematic analysis. in encyclopedia of critical psychology (pp. 1947-1952). springer: new york. greene, j., & haidt, j. (2002). how (and where) does moral judgment work? trends in cognitive sciences, 6(12), 517-523. hancock, p. a., billings, d. r., schaefer, k. e., chen, j. y., de visser, e. j., & parasuraman, r. (2011). a meta-analysis of factors affecting trust in humanrobot interaction. human factors, 53(5), 517-527. larzelere, r. e., & huston, t. l. (1980). the dyadic trust scale: toward understanding interpersonal trust in close relationships. journal of marriage and the family, 42(3), 595-604. mccroskey, j.c., & mccain, t.a. (1972, nov.). the measurement of interpersonal attraction. paper presented at the annual convention of the western speech communication association, honolulu, hi. spence, p. r., westerman, d., edwards, c., & edwards, a. (2014). welcoming our robot overlords: initial expectations about interaction with a robot. communication research reports, 31(3), 272-280. panel paper 2: will the human-to-human interaction script hold?: examining initial interactions between humans and social robots -autumn edwards, chad edwards, david k. westerman, & patric r. spence across a variety of contexts and relationships, people increasingly encounter digital interlocutors and machine agents “standing in” for other people in communication processes. instances of human-machine communication (hmc) often involve interaction between people and social robots or automated software bots. in these situations, social robots are “not a medium through which humans interact, but rather a medium with which humans interact” (zhao, 2006, p. 402, emphasis added). despite the increase in encounters with social robots, people generally assume that their communication partners will be other humans. previous experimental communication research has demonstrated that individuals face greater uncertainty and anticipate less liking and social presence when they face an interaction with a social robot versus a human partner (edwards, edwards, spence, & westerman, 2016; spence, westerman, edwards, & edwards, 2014). the expectation of, and preference for, communication with another human has been termed the “human-to-human interaction script” (edwards, edwards, spence, & westerman, 2016; spence, westerman, edwards, & edwards, 2014). importantly, both studies focused on individuals’ anticipated interactions with a partner. spence and colleagues (2014) performed an experiment in which participants were simply told they would be interacting with either another person or a social robot. edwards and colleagues (2016) incorporated a two-time measurement model to establish a baseline of communication expectancies and added visual priming of the conversation partner to eliminate individual variance linked to discrepant mental pictures of social robots or human beings. the results of the two studies provide evidence that people operate on the basis of a human-to-human interaction script that leads them to expect greater difficulty relating to a robot. however, research has not yet examined two critical questions that would further test and elaborate the human-to-human interaction script: (a) do people remain more uncertain and experience less liking and social presence from a machine partner even after an initial interaction? and (b) to what extent do individuals employ the same communication scripts in an initial conversation with a social robot as in an initial conversation with another person? kellerman (1992) argued that communication is largely an automatic process of using social scripts. cognitive script theory (abelson, 1976, 1981; schank and abelson, 1977) maintains that people use mental representations, or cognitive scripts, of everyday events that influence perceptions and actions when making choices regarding actions in the future. “right or wrong, people rely on social models (or fluidly switch between using a social model with other mental models) to make the complex behavior more familiar and understandable and more intuitive with which to interact. we do this because it is enjoyable for us, and it is often surprisingly quite useful" (bezereal, 2003, p. 168). scripts help specify what actions one will perform in a situation (kollar, fischer, & hesse, 2006). new experiences allow people to develop more efficiency in their use of social scripts. in other words, the response to the new experience is incorporated as an update for the next time the script is needed. kellerman and colleagues found remarkable consistency in people’s scripts for a firsttime conversation with another student (95% consistency in topics and topic changes). our recent studies, along with those of several other researchers (e.g., kim, park, & sundar, 2013; lee, park, & song, 2005; lee, peng, jin, & song, 2006; park, kim, & del pobil, 2011), have extended the media equation and computers are social actors (casa) paradigm from their original application to computers to robots, to demonstrate that people view robots as real and engage robots with social perceptions and responses similar to those used with other humans. in an effort to reconcile the observed human-to-human interaction script with the larger predictions of casa, this study will examine whether and to what extent those similarities apply to the content of scripts used in initial encounters between people and social robots. as intelligent machines grow in prominence, it will be increasingly important to identify how social scripts between humans and social robots will be formed and used (powers & kiesler, 2006). we will present the results of an experiment designed to examine the similarities and differences in (a) the scripts individuals employ for a first interaction with a person versus a social robot and (b) their reactions in terms of uncertainty/expectancy effects, liking, and social presence. references abelson, r. p. (1978). script processing in attitude formation and decision making in j.s. carroll and j.w. payne (eds.), cognition and social behavior, erlbaum, hillsdale, nj. abelson, r. p. (1981). psychological status of the script concept. american psychologist, 36, 715. breazeal, c. (2003). toward sociable robots. robotics and autonomous systems, 42, 167-175. doi: 10.1016/s0921-8890(02)00373-1. edwards, c., edwards, y, spence, p. r., westerman, d. (2016). initial interaction expectations with robots: testing the human-to-human interaction script. communication studies, 67(2), 227-238. doi: 10.1080/10510974.2015.1121899 kellerman, k. l. (1992). communication: inherently strategic and primarily automatic. communication monographs, 59, 288-300. doi:10.1080/03637759209376270 kim, k. j., park, e., & sundar, s. s. (2013). caregiving role in human–robot interaction: a study of the mediating effects of perceived benefit and social presence. computers in human behavior, 29, 1799-1806. kollar, i., fischer, f., & hesse, f. w. (2006). collaboration scripts a conceptual analysis. educational psychology review, 18, 159-185. doi: 10.1007/s10648006-9007-2 lee, k. m., park, n., & song, h. (2005). can a robot be perceived as a developing creature?. human communication research, 31, 538-563. doi: 10.1111/j.14682958.2005.tb00882.x lee, k. m., peng, w., jin, s.-a., & yan, c. (2006). can robots manifest personality?: an empirical test of personality recognition, social responses, and social presence in human-robot interaction. journal of communication, 56, 754-772. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2006.00318.x park, e., kim, k. j., & del pobil, a. p. (2011). the effects of a robot instructor’s positive vs. negative feedbacks on attraction and acceptance towards the robot in classroom. in social robotics (pp. 135-141). springer berlin heidelberg. powers, a., & kiesler, s. (2006, march). the advisor robot: tracing people's mental model from a robot's physical attributes. in proceedings of the 1st acm sigchi/sigart conference on human-robot interaction (pp. 218-225). acm. doi: 10.1145/1121241.1121280 schank, r. & abelson, r. (1977). scripts, plans, goals, and understanding: an inquiry into human knowledge structure. hillsdale, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates. spence, p. r., westerman, d., edwards, c., & edwards, a. (2014). welcoming our robot overlords: initial expectations about interaction with a robot. communication research reports, 31(3), 272-280. 10.1080/08824096.2014.924337 zhao, s. (2006). humanoid social robots as a medium of communication. new media & society, 8, 401-419. panel paper 3: advertisers and algorithms: translating between tradition and technology -anna jobin much like in traditional media contexts, the advertising business is a key source of revenue in digital media industries, although its place and role within particular markets is highly variable. the specificities of digital advertising arise not only from the characteristics of the medium—namely access to an abundance of new metrics and the possibility of personalized targeting (turow 2013) —but also from a modified industry structure that privileges vertical integration. as a consequence, digital platforms such as facebook and google provide user/usage data to online advertisers as well as all relevant software. notably in search ads, google holds a de facto monopoly position, supplying the relevant keywords, the keyword ratings (lee 2010) as well as the algorithmic software to manage both. this paper looks at how online advertisers make sense of their interaction with unknown algorithms they professionally depend on from a sociological angle. based on empirical data it suggests that their sensemaking is conditioned by their role as intermediaries between platforms and (potential) clients. interacting with algorithms computational systems have become pervasive, leading to invisible algorithms being entangled with many aspects of human life. as „cultural objects embedded and integrated within a social system“ (cheney-lippold 2011, p. 167) algorithmic codes and interaction therewith must be studied in the context of the lived world of the social actors. this paper takes a closer look at google adwords, a crucial subset of the company’s main revenue generating algorithmic system, and at the key users interacting with it: online advertisers. these advertisers—digital agencies, marketing managers, account planners etc.—are often overlooked, because the focus lies mostly on either ‘users’ or on ‘platforms.’ however, google relies heavily on online advertisers and their specialized understanding of digital audience metrics as well as specific market logics to generate revenue. although online advertisers often have specialized knowledge about google adwords, they interact with a dynamic algorithmic system mostly outside of their control. their ads, co-created with google adwords algorithms, will be displayed to specific publics based on metrics provided by google. advertisers do not know the details of how the algorithms work, nor when they change, and they depend heavily on the information they are given by google. this shows that online advertising is a result not only of knowledge and data, but also of a set of narratives by specific actors. in order to better understand interaction with algorithms it is therefore crucial to take into account what participating stakeholders make of it (cf. also gillespie 2014). this paper presents an analysis of how advertisers interpret and make sense of unknown algorithms they professionally depend on. method and analysis because the interpretivist aim is to understand the meaning advertisers give to their actions, a qualitative approach based on semi-directive interviews has been deemed most coherent. it is crucial to note that ‘advertisers’ comprises a population of people with many different occupations, job titles and descriptions, and calling them 'advertisers' is a simplification. however, due to their common activity of interacting with google adwords algorithms their professional denomination is secondary for this study. for the analysis of the interviews with advertisers, particular attention is given to aspects related to sensemaking on the one hand and categorizations on the other hand, both being, of course, related (cornelissen 2012). which categorizations are mobilized to create meaning? are these categorizations shared, i.e. 'institutionalized', or do they vary greatly between individuals? analyzing what people are referring to when they make sense of unknown algorithmic systems helps uncovering which 'meanings' have been institutionalized—and are, reciprocally, being institutionalized and legitimized through their taken-for-granted use. in what ways are people contributing to legitimize certain meanings or, on the contrary, questioning them? understanding shared meanings reveals the lens through which people are invited to make sense of algorithms. translating automated systems for an outside public based on these qualitative interviews, this paper shows that online advertisers perform crucial work for platforms because they have to translate between traditional advertising approaches and technological specificities for (potential) clients. they are intermediaries between dominant digital platforms and other publics and their narratives, and the discursive work they attempt to achieve, are indicative of the different publics they address. this is why, in some contexts, advertisers underline the existence of automated algorithmic systems whereas, in other contexts, they minimize the impact of such systems. these discursive strategies can be explained in view of the conclusion that online advertisers have to act as both experts and mediators. references cheney-lippold, j. (2011). a new algorithmic identity soft biopolitics and the modulation of control. theory, culture & society, 28(6), 164–181. cornelissen, j. p. (2012). sensemaking under pressure: the influence of professional roles and social accountability on the creation of sense. organization science, 23(1), 118–137. gillespie, t. (2014). the relevance of algorithms. in t. gillespie, p. j. boczkowski, & k. a. foot (eds.), media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society (pp. 167-193). cambridge: mit press. lee, m. (2011). google ads and the blindspot debate. media, culture & society, 33(3), 433–447. panel paper 4: what artificial intelligence means for journalism and its publics: linking historical and contemporary discourse -seth c. lewis & andrea l. guzman algorithms and automation play a growing role in the production, distribution, and consumption of news, altogether shaping what publics understand about the world through news accounts. perhaps typifying this development is the rise of automated journalism, or stories produced not by human authors but written by machines (carlson, 2015; montal & reich, 2016). indeed, algorithms are responsible for producing tens of thousands of stories that fill online news sites, even from leading news organizations such as the associated press. these news articles are limited mostly to topics that have structured data associated with them, such as sports results and financial earnings reports—events with algorithm-ready data from which to produce stories based on preformatted themes. but opportunities for automated augmentation grow apace: for many news companies, the question is not if but when and how content becomes automated (lecompte, 2015). but while automated journalism (sometimes called “robot journalism”) has received much attention at trade conferences and in recent research (e.g., graefe, 2016; linden, 2017), it is but one manifestation of artificial intelligence (ai) in journalism. just as significant are related developments in machine-learning techniques for automatic filtering of social media content, algorithmically assembling news feeds, and personalizing news flows across platforms (e.g., see thurman et al., 2016). together, these developments in ai broadly—not merely in automation alone—complicate understandings about who (or what) is a journalist, and when, how, and why journalistic functions might be replaced or augmented by machines. unlike previous instances of digital technology in journalism, artificial intelligence is distinct because it situates machines in the role of humans—that is, it does not enable human activity so much as ostensibly replace or redefine it. research questions and study purpose what is needed is a more historically grounded interpretation of ai in the context of journalism. how, if at all, has the journalism field, in its trade-press discourse, dealt with matters of ai—that is, of algorithms, automation, and related processes and products? toward what purposes and in whose interests have such discursive constructions developed over time? and, in the present rush to developed automated forms of journalism, how is ai being articulated by various stakeholders, such as technology companies developing such tools on the one hand and editors and newsrooms engaged in deploying such tools on the other? ultimately, given the public-facing role that journalism is believed to play in society, how is the role of publics positioned in the context of such conversations about algorithms, automation, and the future of news? for example, how might distinct visions of ai in journalism correspond with different visions of the public (cf. anderson, 2011), and thus different understandings of how publics, of various kinds and configurations, could and should engage with news at the intersection of human and machine. background: toward quantification and automation in journalism ai, generally defined as encompassing the development of computing systems that perform tasks normally associated with humans, is linked to broader trends in data and society. in recent years, rapid advances in the collection, storage, and analysis of digital trace information have accelerated the study of human activity and expression via largescale datasets (kitchin & mcardle, 2016). these developments, in turn, have fueled the growth and influence of database-backed algorithms, or programmatic sets of rules that structure much of our mediated world: from what we see and experience on the likes of facebook and google (gillespie, 2014), to how determinations are made about job prospects and loan applications (o’neil, 2016). this turn toward data-centric quantification—and algorithms and automation particularly as key modes of information production and circulation—is reflected in all media and information domains, but particularly so in journalism (coddington, 2015). a forum of news editors worldwide has identified automated journalism as a top newsroom trend (graefe, 2016), and technology providers across many countries are developing algorithms to deliver automated news in multiple languages (dörr, 2015). from limited research, what we know so far about automated journalism is that audiences may not be able to discern between humanand robot-written news (clerwall, 2014), and the consequences for journalistic labor, authority, and other professional issues require further study (carlson, 2015). while automated journalism is not replacing human reporting in any significant way so far, developments in ai point toward emerging questions about the social role of journalism as a longstanding facilitator of public knowledge. what, in effect, does ai mean for journalism’s people and processes, norms and values, and community orientations and obligations? research has yet to explain not only how ai is being applied in journalism but why— around what definitions, in whose interests, and toward what purposes. moreover, research is needed to link older conversations in this vein, from the earliest manifestations of automated printing and computerized journalism in the 1960s and 70s, with contemporary discussion about “robot reporters.” methods and analysis this paper takes up that task by qualitatively analyzing a large body of journalism tradepress discourse over a 60-year period, focusing on mentions, historically and contemporaneously, of artificial intelligence (e.g., algorithms, automation, robots/bots, machine learning, etc.) in the particular context of news production and distribution. following anderson’s (2013, p. 1005) call for “a sociological approach to computational journalism,” this paper uncovers the genealogy of discussion around ai as reflected across a range of sites and publications that embody the trade-press universe for journalism (cf. powers, 2012), with an emphasis on how such technologies are implicated in journalism’s representations of and relationships with publics. references anderson, c. w. (2011). deliberative, agonistic, and algorithmic audiences: journalism's vision of its public in an age of audience transparency. international journal of communication, 5(0), 529-547. anderson, c. w. (2013). towards a sociology of computational and algorithmic journalism. new media & society, 15(7), 1005-1021. carlson, m. (2015). the robotic reporter: automated journalism and the redefinition of labor, compositional forms, and journalistic authority. digital journalism, 3(3), 416-431. clerwall, c. (2014). enter the robot journalist: users’ perceptions of automated content. journalism practice, 8(5), 519-531. coddington, m. (2015). clarifying journalism’s quantitative turn: a typology for evaluating data journalism, computational journalism, and computer-assisted reporting. digital journalism, 3(3), 331-348. dörr, k. n. (2015). mapping the field of algorithmic journalism. digital journalism, 4(6), 700-722. gillespie, t. (2014). the relevance of algorithms. in t. gillespie, p. j. boczkowski, & k. a. foot (eds.), media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society (pp. 167-193). cambridge: mit press. graefe, a. (2016). guide to automated journalism. new york: tow center for digital journalism, columbia university. kitchin, r., & mcardle, g. (2016). what makes big data, big data? exploring the ontological characteristics of 26 datasets. big data & society, 3(1), 2053951716631130. linden, c. (2017). decades of automation in the newsroom: why are there still so many jobs in journalism? digital journalism, 5(2), 123-140. lecompte, c. (2015). automation in the newsroom. nieman reports 69(3): 32-45. montal, t., & reich, z. (2016). i, robot. you, journalist. who is the author? digital journalism, 121 (online first, published ahead of print). o’neil, c. (2016). weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. new york: crown publishing group. powers, m. (2012). "in forms that are familiar and yet-to-be invented": american journalism and the discourse of technologically specific work. journal of communication inquiry, 36(1), 24-43. thurman, n., schifferes, s., fletcher, r., newman, n., hunt, s., & schapals, a. k. (2016). giving computers a nose for news. digital journalism, 4(7), 838-848. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): lames, s., hjorth, l., richardson, i., jungnickel, k., hickey-moody, a., (2020, october). rescripting failure: the reflexive stories that fieldwork tells. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. rescripting failure: the reflexive stories that fieldwork tells sybille lammes leiden university larissa hjorth rmit university ingrid richardson rmit university kat jungnickel goldsmiths, university of london anna hickey-moody rmit university brief introductory statement researching everyday media practices is a messy and tricky business fraught with uncertainty. in this panel the authors ask how stories of failure, especially during fieldwork, can be rethought as a meaningful emergent method and approach. how can we productively reframe failure as a core part of the research process that cannot be subsumed into the telos of a success story after the research has been completed? how does failure work in research? our approach takes a different stance from dominant stories in the tech industry and geek economy, where failure is often represented in linear, heroic, gendered and individualistic ways, retrospectively rendering mess as instrumental to success. similarly, within academia there are many research processes in which failure is instrumentalised or obscured—from writing up fieldwork into neatly packaged casestudies, to causal accounts of effective intervention. progress narratives of knowledge production have been subject to much debate and criticism. what has been less discussed is how failures work as sometimes uncontainable aspects of research praxes—how they are endemic to the process of data collection and analysis, materializing while in the field. in this panel we suggest that these experiences are core to the thickness of fieldwork—they disclose the messiness and dynamics of the social, and should be included in the stories we tell. this panel aims to liberate discussion about failure to render it visible and core to understanding the politics and ethics of fieldwork and the research process. through a series of stories from our fieldwork, we seek to further critical understanding of methodologies and techniques of failure, and argue for our obligations as researchers to talk about what happens when things go wrong. media screens and companion animals: ethnographic failure in more-than-human contexts larissa hjorth rmit university ingrid richardson rmit university failure is inherent to fieldwork and qualitative methods. it is part of the iterative process. and yet, it is often the case that significant moments of resistance, recalcitrance, and communicative breakdown are rendered invisible or smoothed over in ethnographic analysis. in this paper we discuss our media fieldwork in the domestic context, and how documenting and interpreting the behaviour of companion animals in the home became crucial to understanding digitally mediated kinship and household intimacies. the pets tested our methods and revealed the many inadequacies of human-centric approaches and analytical tools. here, we consider the challenging and productive role of failure in the ethnographic process, and how listening to the field—especially when it involves more-than-humans—requires us to rethink methodology, research questions and ethics, and explore the meaning of failure beyond human precepts. when we first entered homes to study mobile games and mobile media practices, we envisaged our project would focus on humans and the various modes of interaction and co-presence networked screens afford. yet as our research progressed, it became clear that in many homes, humans and their pets are intimately entangled in various forms of digitally mediated kinship. pets were often the first members we encountered as we approached a participant household. humans were often quick to introduce them as part of their household—they are household ‘members’, if not equal to then at least as present, and integral to meaning-making and affectivity, as other household members including children. we thought we were asking questions about human and media dynamics in the domestic sphere, yet animals kept getting in the way. mobile media and touch screen interfaces became a conduit of playful interaction between humans and their companion animals, affording a unique mode of co-located yet mediated intimacy. we have observed cats playing with ipads, birds strutting back and forth across keyboards and mimicking digital sounds, dogs watching television or participating in video calls, and pets of all kinds intervening in, modifying and disrupting humantechnology relations. such encounters left us unable to ignore the significance of human-animal media relations, yet also posed a significant challenge in terms of developing effective modes of data collection and analysis, and appropriate conceptual tools of interpretation. animal-media relations exposed the limitations—and often the outright failure—of our methodological approach. animals don’t engage with screens like their human counterparts. they get it “wrong”. in some homes, pet residents had overt and intentional relationships with media, and in almost all these cases, they used and played with devices “improperly”: sitting and sleeping on them, nibbling, scratching, and licking them. but in this “wrongness” we can learn much about the excesses and potentialities of haptic media for our embodied being in the world. the significance of human-animal relations has been the focus of a number of multispecies theorists, including donna haraway (2003, 2008), anne galloway (2016), hanna wirman (2012, 2014), joanna zylinska (2014), rebekah fox (2006) and others. their research can be understood as part of the turn away from ‘anthropocene’ approaches, problematizing human-centric approaches to ontology, agency, design and ethnographic research. these authors engage new methods that push against anthropocentric interpretive frameworks. for interdisciplinary scholar wirman (2012, 2014), our definitions of play have been limited by their human-centric focus despite the affordances for much more complex understandings. wirman’s work identifies the need to take account of ‘doing haptic play wrongly’. when we open up the field for understanding touchscreen media practices to non-human animals, we must acknowledge that this involves more than ‘knowing’ hands, as such scenarios of use incorporate a variety of other embodied intentionalities. it can also open up possibilities for interpreting functional devices (such as robotic vacuum cleaners) as playful objects. the playful practices we observed during our research demonstrate how games not only extend social attachment processes but also offer different platforms for playful agency across human and nonhuman activities. playfulness often characterizes our interaction with domestic animals, and the haptic dimension of ipads and tablets affords new modalities of cross-species engagement. as interfaces for ambient play, mobile media are unlike television and computer screens, as they involve a synesthetic merging of touch, hearing, and vision. as many of our households revealed, haptic screens have opened up new ways of sharing and playing with our pets. understanding the multisensorial dimensions of haptic play is pivotal if we are to fully interpret the complexity of haptic interface usage: practices that can be more-than-human and move beyond the eye-hand-screen circuit of sensory perception. what our fieldwork taught us was the need to redefine digital kinship to include animals. through the relationality of pets and humans in and around media devices we can better understand how the household is rendered a cartography of affective play. we can consider how kinship as a complex notion involving understandings of care and surveillance is being reworked through digital assemblages. as rebekah fox suggests, “pet-human relationships cross understandings of the human-animal divide through the embodied intimacy of their everyday relations, revealing the importance of animals in everyday human social interactions and conceptions of family, kinship and domesticity.” (2006, 532). by reframing our research within a multispecies approach, we become better equipped to capture these intimacies and kinship relations in the context of domestic media use. this paper reflects upon how human and non-human relationality occurs in and around domestic media and the attendant ramifications for how media research is configured and the techniques that are deployed. through selected scenarios of use, we will explore some of the diverse and emergent modes of haptic play that involve a combination of senses and body parts (human and nonhuman) and challenge our normative expectations of screen use. tuning in to some of the failures of human centric ethnography, and accounting for animal engagement with haptic screens, quite radically changes how we understand and define play and games as conduits of intimacy and embodied affect. as homes increasingly become a site for playful media practices across species, and we deploy ethnography or in situ observation as a research method, we find ourselves humbled by the data. close consideration of actual practices, in all their variation, often works to highlight the gaps and limitations of our assumptions, with humbling effects. taking a deliberately unassuming approach that deviates from human-centred thinking, pushing against methodological limits, and deliberately exploring ethnographic failure becomes especially important in the age of the anthropocene. focusing on humananimal-technology relations, and how they are transforming our ways of being-athome—that most familiar and mundane of places—is one decentring strategy that seeks to productively challenge sedimented ways of seeing and knowing. references fox, r. (2006). ‘animal behaviours, post-human lives: everyday negotiations of the animal-human divide in pet-keeping.’ social and cultural geography 7, no. 4 (2006): 525–537. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360600825679. galloway, a. (2016). ‘more-than-human lab: creative ethnography after human exceptionalism.’ in the routledge companion to digital ethnography, edited by l. hjorth, h. horst, a. galloway & g. bell. new york: routledge, pp. 470–477. haraway, d. (2003), the companion species manifesto: dogs, people and significant otherness. chicago: university of chicago press. haraway, d. (2008) when species meet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. wirman, h. (2012). ‘nonhuman animal players: overcoming speciesism in cultural studies of digital game play.’ paper presented at crossroads in cultural studies, sorbonne nouvelle university and unesco, july 2–6, 2012. wirman, h. (2014). ‘games for/with strangers—captive orangutan (pongo pygmaeus) touch screen play.’ antennae, no. 30 (winter 2014): 105–115. zylinska, j. (2014). minimal ethics for the anthropocene. london: open humanities press. inventive failure: what can be learnt from reconstructing lesser-known patents kat jungnickel goldsmiths, university of london. failure is a popular topic of research. it has long been a source of study in fields such as cultural and media studies, sociology and anthropology, science & technology studies (sts), privacy and surveillance, art, theatre, film and political science. when things go awry, breakdown or rupture they can lead to valuable insights into the mundane mechanisms of social worlds (latour and woolgar 1986; michael 2006; star 1999; hawkins 2006). for instance, susan leigh star (1999) has argued that essential infrastructures, such as for water or electricity, are often overlooked and underappreciated until something goes wrong; breakdown reveals behind-the-scenes activities ordinarily taken for granted. yet, while failure is a familiar topic of research, failure in and as a tactic of research is far less valued. research failure in the form of mess, mistakes and mishaps rarely feature in finished scholarly work. more often, failure is erased from the final polished argument. as christine hine writes: “our methodological instincts are to clean up complexity and tell straightforward linear stories, and thus we tend to exclude descriptions that are faithful to experiences of mess, ambivalence, elusiveness and multiplicity” (2007, 12) in this paper i discuss a study that combines both – it explores (and questions) failure as a topic and uses methods that embrace ambiguity and invites the unknown into analysis. the project is an erc funded project “politics of patents (pop): re-imagining citizenship via clothing/wearable tech inventions 1820-2020”. clothing is a fascinating barometer of socio-cultural and political change. from swimsuits to spacesuits, clothing directly connects social life to the political world as such is central to changing ideas around the politics of gender and identity, mobility, power relations, inclusion and exclusion. pop is interested in understanding how inventors create new forms of clothing that might be seen to resist, subvert or disrupt social and political norms and beliefs, and in the process, bring new expressions of citizenship into being. central to our approach is the idea that clothing is a means through which citizens, and changing ideas around citizenship, are made observable and material through time. we ask: how are different bodies clothed in different discourses over time? what can clothing inventions reveal about hegemonic norms and beliefs? what kinds of citizens do clothing inventions make? might it be possible to summon into the present lesserknown and non-normative accounts of inventiveness from the past? failure features throughout this project. first, we are interested in patents for inventions that few know about. while they were successfully patented, they were potentially never made and perhaps never left the archive/registry. these are often considered failures. yet, while they may not have radically changed dominant hegemonic narratives of the period, they nevertheless put forward alternative narratives around citizen rights and responsibilities, belonging, inclusion and exclusion. we are curious about the ways these inventors and inventions might be seen as ‘providing alternatives, possible sources for the development of new kinds of practices, narratives about belonging to and participating in society’ (holston 1995, 48). second, pop approaches the study of invention using inventive methods. because patents are an experiment in embodied problem solving, we analyse patent text and images and ialso re-make artefacts by closely following the step-by-step instructions provided by inventors in their patents. this process of ‘making things to make sense of things’ (jungnickel 2018) involves paying close attention, using ethnographic methods, to researching, sewing and wearing artefacts. what we discover in the process of reconstructing garments is a multiplicity of possibilities. there is no way of knowing exactly what the inventor intended, even equipped with their detailed instructions. we make mistakes and take tangents and use more than one version to think with and about the differences between them, and the choices potentially made by the inventor. also, taking these artefacts (back) out “in the wild”, in talks and interactive workshops and by inviting people literally into the research further thickens ethnographic data (callon and rabeharisoa 2003). this approach builds on a long history of reproduction/replication methods in the history of science and sts. some researchers have cooked from the archives (nicosia and connell 2014) while others have reconstructed iconic historic electrochemistry/magnetic experiments (cavicchi 2008; eggen et al 2012). while diverse, this work shares common interest in exploring theoretical and tacit knowledge in and through practice. they recognize that not all data can be written or visualised; research is also messy, embodied and sensory. these methods recognize mistakes, tangents and failure as important parts of the knowledge production. following the work of gender/queer researchers, we attempt to think with and through failure in patent research as a way of seeking out and embracing alternatives; a way of seeing interruptions, noise and things that don’t seem to work or fit that challenge normative and linear conventions. halberstam’s theory of “queer failure’ helps in this task. it offers ways to ‘think about ways of being and knowing that stand outside of conventional understandings of success” (2011, 2). in a similar way, kornstein (2019) approaches tech failure through bodies and practices that fail to fit conventional categories, and argues that this approach “disrupts binaries not only of masculinity/femininity, but also of disclosure/ concealment, transformation/ stability, and truth/fiction” (2019, 681). overall, this paper explores how pop approaches failure in multiple ways and attempts to unsettle assumptions built into ideas around citizenship, embodied normativity and digital archives/classification systems. by reclaiming failure, in multiple forms, the project seeks to “escape the punishing norms that discipline behaviour and manage human development” and complicate the “clean boundaries between… winners and losers” (halberstam 2011, 3). references callon m. and r. vololona (2003). research “in the world” and the shaping of new social identities. technology in society 25: 193–204. cavicchi, e. (2008). ‘historical experiments in students’ hands: unfragmenting science through action and history’. science & education 17: 717–49. eggen, p., l. kvittingen, a. lykknes, and r. wittje (2012). ‘reconstructing iconic experiments in electrochemistry: experiences from a history of science course’. science & education 21 (2): 179–89. halberstam, j. (2011). the queer art of failure. duke university press. hawkins, g. (2006). the ethics of waste: how we relate to rubbish. rowman & littlefield. holston, j. (1995). ‘spaces of insurgent citizenship’. planning theory 13: 35–51. jungnickel, k. (2018). ‘making things to make sense of things: diy as practice and research’. in the routledge companion to media studies and digital humanities, edited by j. sayers, 491–502. london and new york: routledge. kornstein, h. (2019). ‘under her eye: digital drag as obfuscation and countersurveillance’. surveillance & society 17 (5): 681-698. latour, b., and s. woolgar (1986). laboratory life. princeton university press. michael, m. (2006). technoscience and everyday life, the complex simplicities of the mundane. london: open university press. nicosia, m., and a. connell (2020). ‘cooking in the archives’. https://rarecooking.com/. star, s.l. (1999). ‘the ethnography of infrastructure’. american behavioral scientist43 (3): 377–91. fraud with failure: playful methods in the field sybille lammes leiden university in this paper the intricate relation between play and failure in the field will be discussed, with a specific focus on digital technologies and collaborations that were part of two cases studies: a playful walking experiment in oxford, and the development of the mobile app playfields. both case-studies were collaboratively developed as to experiment with playful methods in the field. they failed in ways that were sometimes scripted and sometimes unintended and could lead to pause, reflection and new approaches. in this paper i will analyse the levels of failure that occurred and to what extent these could be viewed as productive epistemological and ontological instances. this will contribute to how we can understand the reciprocal relation between play and failure in fieldwork, especially when it involves the use of digital technologies, such as mobile phones, gps tracking devices and digital cameras in a collaborative setting. as a specification and follow-up of what has been called innovative methods (lury and wakeford 2012) this paper wants to further develop the notion of playful methods as an approach to and during fieldwork. this refers to fieldwork in which playful approaches are used that give space to ambiguity in research, thus also opening the door to risky, tricky, unscripted and misunderstood situations. such glitches and trip-ups can lead to a deeper insight in underlying concepts and assumptions. furthermore, as with all methods, playful methods go further than describing social realities (law 2004), but also produce them in unexpected, creative and imaginary ways. playful approaches allow us to step out of a direct functionality or a wish of a direct or specific outcome. this is close to what donna haraway recently says about play: “(i)t’s not a matter of direct functionality. we need to develop practices for thinking about those forms of activity that are not caught by functionality, those which propose the possible-but-not-yet, or that which is not-yet but still open” (weigel 2019). so, this paper takes the assertion of play scholar sutton-smith a step further that “all forms of play are transformations of one or other of four basic modes by which we know the world”: copying, analysing, foreseeing, and synthesing (b. sutton-smith 1970). it adds to that play can also create worlds (sicart 2018) and that failure allows us to identify how the world can and cannot be thought differently. similar to what kücklich has claimed about unorthodox play, it “enables us to identify blind spots in our research perspectives and thus discover new avenues of inquiry (…) and can help us recognize flaws in our theoretical models, which are so often built upon the experience of playing by the rules, rather than breaking them“(kücklich 2007, 357). that playful methods in particular have the potential to invite failure in the field, has to do to with their resonance as (non)practices. indeed, as game scholar jesper juul pointed out in the art of failure: an essay on the pain of playing video games (2013) it would be wrong to simply understand playing games in terms of fun, as play is far more related to experiences of pain, frustration and failing to resolve this pain. in this paper i will push this claim a bit further, by proposing that this is not only an important part of games, but also of play in the field and the methods employed in situ. in this presentation i will concentrate on two playful fieldwork experiences that were fraud with failure. one was a playful exercise, the time machine in which we invited peers to traverse oxford in the role of certain academics, resulting in different trajectories and stories. this project was a failure on many levels, amongst which a paper, footage, that we wrote and that never got published, also because of a failure in collaboration and interdisciplinarity. the second is a mobile app we as the playful mapping collective developed called playfields that took failure to the heart in how it asked students to engage with fieldwork. both the app as well as the collective are now lying dormant, as happens to so many devices, app, games that we as academics develop together for impact and research. this is one level of failure that i would like to discuss further. other ways of failing that emerged from these cases that i will analyse are: failure of technologies, cheating, tinkering and not taking play seriously. the overarching questions that lies underneath this paper are: how do contemporary playful methods allow for and encourage failure? how can we conceptualise the relation between methods, play and failure? can this give an impetus to a different approach to playful methods, that goes further than the game mechanics of winning or loosing as for example used in gamification? by engaging with these questions this paper wants to make a case for including failure and play as possible parts of methods. this can be informative for (collaborative) fieldwork, but also for other research, ranging from ai (e.g. creative indicators in machine learning), data sprints and the use of (digital) research tools. it allows to open up spaces for ludo-epistomologies (glas and lammes 2019; cf. ‘anarcho-epistomologies’, feyerabend 1993) which can enable us to do, (for)see, produce and analyse social realities differently. references feyerabend, p. (1993). against method. verso books. geertz, c. (1972). ‘deep play: notes on the balinese cockfight’. daedalus 101 (1): 1– 37. glas, r, and s. lammes (2019). ‘ludo-epistemology: playing with the rules in citizen science games’. in the playful citizen: knowledge, creativity, power, 217–34. amsterdam: aup. juul, j. (2013). the art of failure: an essay on the pain of playing video games. mit press. kücklich, j. (2007). ‘homo deludens: cheating as a methodological tool in digital games research’. convergence 13 (4): 355–67. law, j. (2004). after method: mess in social science research. london: routledge. lury, c., and n. wakeford (2012). inventive methods: the happening of the social. routledge. sicart, m. (2018). ‘quixotean play in the age of computation’. american journal of play 10 (3) sutton-smith, b (1970). ‘the playful modes of knowing.’ (unpublished) sutton-smith, b. (2001). the ambiguity of play. cambridge. mass.: harvard university press. weigel, m. (2019). ‘feminist cyborg scholar donna haraway: “the disorder of our era isn’t necessary”’. the guardian 20. digital agency and the authorship of failure anna hickey-moody rmit university digital platforms and devices fail us consistently. in so doing, they demonstrate agency in ways that even their developers do not understand. my fieldwork data collection relies on digital storage, and uses particular digital applications. both these processes are marked out by glitches for which there is no immediate answer. these inconsistencies are a digital agency which is impacted further by design problems with apps i use for data collection. some apps can only be licensed to an id for a limited number of times, and apple refuses to make similar ids. using my own id for extra ipads in a moment of desperation, i once created a data monster of new research animations and photos of a family visit, aspects of fieldwork data meshed in with my life data. i spent days trying to untangle this collection of images. these are only some of the ways digital platforms and devices come to shape how we research while we research with them. building on my recent work on experiences of failure the gendered research assemblage (hickey-moody 2019), i argue that thinking critically about digital agency matters in supporting the work of emerging feminist digital ethnographers, who likely have similar experiences of feeling a failure, experiences that are not yet discussed in the existing literature on digital methods. i argue that digital agency is gendered and is part of the algorithmic worlds in which feminist digital researchers work. as such, we need to develop our own archives of the roles played by digital agency in the production of experiences of failure in research assemblages. references hickey-moody, a. (2019). ‘ways of knowing failure’ mai: feminism and visual culture: https://maifeminism.com/three-ways-of-knowing-failure/ re-valuing platforms, reclaiming the local aoir panel final (1).pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): gekker, alex and sam hind. (2020, october). re-valuing platforms, reclaiming the local (panel). papers presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. re-valuing platforms, reclaiming the local (preconstituted panel) alex gekker university of amsterdam sam hind siegen university this panel brings together emerging scholarship that challenges the contemporary hold of major platforms over public and private life. it critically questions the scope, valence, and embeddedness of platforms in the everyday, challenging (commercial) platformization as the new normal. we attempt to offer new ways of managing, changing and co-opting platforms for the benefit of end-users rather than proprietors only. to this end, the panel discusses and debates 'non-market' approaches to tackling social and environmental effects of platforms. it is designed to build on recent work within infrastructure, platform and critical data studies to suggest alternative approaches to the neoliberal ordering of economic life. a central question is whether the data streams monetized by “big tech” can be harnessed for public, democratic, or socialist ends; in doing so, bringing them 'in house' and into competition with big tech itself. in other words, the panel takes a “protocological” (galloway 2004) resistance approach, in appropriating the methods of algorithmicand data-governance occurring under platformization, and utilising them at the regional (state) or (hyper-)local (city, city block) level. moreover, it seeks to highlight examples of successful community-based and cooperative instances of platformization. looking at the seemingly ruthless efficiency of google, apple, facebook, amazon and microsoft (gafam) in the extraction of value through digital means, the panellists ask: what would resistance look like if we use the economic and infrastructural strategies levied against us? the first paper gives a comprehensive overview of the issues at the heart of corporate platformization, asking why it is so hard to develop sustainable alternatives once major platforms come to dominate the field. it examines large global platforms and their competitors through the lens of markets, infrastructures and finance capital, arriving at an assessment of the pre-conditions for effective alternatives in public infrastructures. tackling the question of “alternatives” from a different angle, the authors of the second paper distance themselves from gafam as a model to be challenged or emulated. instead, they draw on long-term fieldwork within communities and sectors that experiment with locally owned/governed platforms, offering new ways of dealing with questions of labour and welfare under “actually existing platformization”. the third paper explores further the lesson learned from local governance, emphatically bringing the spatial and urban back into question of governance. by looking at the telephone as its virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 central case, it unpacks the multi-stakeholder tangle of ownership and value in urban spaces to offer a role for citizens in technological governance, which the platform discourse seemingly excludes. finally, the last paper reflects on some of the points raised in the previous papers to envision centralised decision-making as a potential way forward. it re-visits the socialist calculation debate –on whether centralised planning is a viable market alternative to re-envision uber’s price-surge technique as a template for non-market decision making mechanism, where local stakeholders incentivise platforms to incorporate communal values. the panel is intended as a theoretical component to a pre-conference workshop within aoir 2020, that seeks participants who have (or desire) practical experience of developing, trialling, and implementing such approaches at a variety of scales – but particularly from the regional (state, interurban etc.) to the local (municipality, town etc.) and down to the ‘hyper-local’ (company facility, airport, university campus etc.). the panel thus builds on the case studies, participant experiences, and warnings of the workshop to suggest conceptual pathways into re-thinking and re-working platforms and the public value contained therein. references galloway, a. r. (2004). protocol: how control exists after decentralization. mit press. winner takes all: why is it so difficult to develop sustainable alternatives to dominant platforms? thomas poell university of amsterdam david nieborg university of toronto introduction with few exceptions, platform ecosystems are highly concentrated markets. in the west, us-based companies—alphabet-google, apple, facebook, amazon, and microsoft—manage their own ecosystems and have made inroads into controlling and shaping the global internet infrastructure (couldry & mejias 2019; srnicek 2017). as a result, these companies increasingly steer the flow of public information while disrupting vital institutions and industry sectors, including education, health care, journalism, and transportation. this conflicts with key public values, undermining socio-economic equality and democratic processes, as well as the quality of public services (van dijck, poell & de waal 2018). in the light of these challenges, there is a strong need for local, ‘commons-based’, ‘non-proprietary’ alternatives to dominant platform corporations (benkler 2006). ideally, such alternatives have a public benefit mandate, operate outside the bounds of finance capital, and function akin to public utilities instead of controlling proprietary data infrastructures. around the globe there have been a wide range of efforts to develop alternatives to current manifestations of platform power (scholz 2016). important examples are the privacy-oriented search engine duckduckgo, the ad-free social network ello, the alternative software ecosystem publicspaces, the local nonprofit ridesharing platform rideaustin, or the ethical holiday rental initiative fairbnb.coop. these and many other non-profit platforms provide viable alternatives to the dominant commercial platforms. yet, many of these alternatives have not been able to scale up their operations or have disappeared altogether. this paper examines why it has been and will continue to be difficult to nurture sustainable alternatives to incumbent platforms. building on research in platform studies, political economy, and business studies, we argue that dominant platform companies benefit from powerful network effects, from economies of scale when it comes to infrastructural investments, and ready access to finance capital (constantinides, henfridsson & parker 2018). markets as business scholars and economists have pointed out, digital platforms can be seen as “multi-sided markets”, which mediate between end-users and a wide variety of “complementors” or third parties, including content producers, service providers, advertisers, data intermediaries, etc. (constantinides et al 2018). such markets are subject to powerful network externalities or effects, which assume that the value of one side increases (direct effects) when additional actors join the network, or increases the value of the other side in the market (indirect effects). indirect effects are a unique property of multi-sided markets. for example, the more drivers join a ride-hailing service, such as uber or lyft, the more attractive the platform becomes for riders, who will have near-instant access to their next ride. consequently, in market sectors that benefit from internet connectivity, such as ride-hailing, hospitality, or virtually every sector of the cultural industries, network effects are particularly strong, crowding out competitions as a result. while these dynamics inherently benefit incumbents, they do not necessarily preclude alternative platforms to enter a market or from attracting endusers and complementors. that is to say, network effects may equally benefit commons-based alternatives, such as wikipedia or similar decentralized, peerproduced platforms. the challenges for alternatives only become fully apparent when looking at infrastructures and finance capital. infrastructures recent work in platform and software studies has demonstrated that dominant platform companies are evolving into large scale infrastructures, which require institutional actors to operate in corporate-owned ecosystems (van dijck et al. 2018; plantin et al. 2018). for example, login functionalities provided by facebook and google have become key modes of identification, platform data analytics are essential for targeting end-users, while cloud hosting by amazon, microsoft, and google have become indispensable for offering online content and services. operating under a unified corporate umbrella, leading platform companies operate a range of such interrelated services. because of their ubiquity, their accessibility in terms of economic and transaction costs, and a general lack of non-proprietary substitutes, alternative platforms are inevitably drawn into incumbent platform infrastructures. this has major implications. platform services, from data analytics and login to app stores and cloud hosting, have commercial values and objectives baked into them, fundamentally shaping how alternative platforms can operate. as research on civic engagement and activism has demonstrated, commercial platform architectures tend to sit in tension with the objectives and values of alternative projects (poell 2014; milan 2015). similarly, for cultural production to be viable in the platform economy requires business model alignment and infrastructural integration with incumbent platforms (nieborg & poell 2018). finance capital consequently, any genuine alternative requires significant capital investments to rival the accessibility, scale, and reliability of corporate platform infrastructures. as different infrastructural services—identification, data analytics, search, etc.—are closely entangled, a range of alternative platform services will need to be developed, designed on the basis of public values rather than commercial objectives. it is particularly challenging to do so in competition with dominant platform companies. these companies typically operate in concentrated markets, allowing them to siphon of excess rents (i.e. profits). together with ready access to finance capital, corporate platforms can acquire or price out competitors. unlike non-profit platforms, corporate platforms can cross-subsidize their own services, using profits from one business line to prop up loss leading yet essential infrastructural services. facebook or google’s login services, for example, do not generate any profit, but are vital elements of the data and advertising infrastructures of these companies. by cross-subsidizing them, they solidify their position in the platform ecosystem. so far, alternative public platforms have mostly been developed in isolation by local or national actors. for sustainable alternatives to emerge, it is vital that regional or global consortia of public institutions and ngos invest in a range of connected, publicly-owned infrastructural services, including but not limited to identification, hosting, data analytics, and mapping. such a public infrastructure would allow alternative platforms to operate in correspondence with key public values. and crucially, the linkages between alternative platforms in a shared public infrastructure would trigger network effects that enable such initiatives to scale up quickly and become sustainable in the long-term. references benkler, y. (2006). the wealth of networks: how social production transforms markets and freedom. yale university press. constantinides, p., henfridsson, o., & parker, g. g. (2018). introduction—platforms and infrastructures in the digital age. information systems research, 29(2), 381–400. couldry, n., & mejias, u. a. (2019). the costs of connection: how data is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism. stanford university press. milan, s. (2015). when algorithms shape collective action: social media and the dynamics of cloud protesting. social media + society, 1(2). nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society, 20(11), 4275–4292. plantin, j-c., lagoze, c., edwards, p. n., & sandvig, c. (2018). infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook. new media & society, 20(1), 293–310. poell, t. (2014). social media and the transformation of activist communication: exploring the social media ecology of the 2010 toronto g20 protests. information, communication & society, 17(6), 716–731. scholz, t. (2016). platform cooperativism. challenging the corporate sharing economy. rosa luxemburg stiftung. srnicek, n. (2017). platform capitalism. polity. van dijck, j., poell, t., & de waal, m. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford university press. reassembling the social (state): platform localism and actually existing platformization eva mos university of amsterdam niels van doorn university of amsterdam what if, instead of starting with gafam platforms and asking how their datafied exploits can be democratically reclaimed at the local level (as the panel organizers propose), we recalibrate our perspective by focusing on locally owned/governed platforms and asking how these participate in the ordering of economic, social, and political life? one critical advantage of such an approach is that it redirects our attention away from globally hegemonic corporate platforms and towards emergent practices of what we – building on brenner and theodore (2002) – call “actually existing platformization”: experimental and sometimes makeshift initiatives that congeal around the platform as a programmed site of market-making and value creation, as well as an aspirational model for (re)organizing society from the ground up. while such local initiatives have proliferated over the past few years, they have thus far received little scholarly scrutiny (for exceptions, see poderi, 2019; falco and kleinhans, 2018; ansell and miura, 2018; scholz and schneider, 2016). another advantage is that this approach problematizes presumed oppositions between “market” and “non-market”, “public” and “private”, and indeed between “local” and “global”, pushing platform critique beyond its penchant for such dichotomies. as we will argue and demonstrate, “platform localism” is a phenomenon whose aspirations and impacts have a global reach, while actually existing platformization is a practice happening in arrangements where private and public interests become entangled through market-based interactions. once citizens and local governments are encouraged to act as “produsers” of goods and services and build their own (platform-based) social infrastructures in collaboration with incumbent and start-up market actors, it also becomes harder to distinguish neoliberal reason and governance from its alternatives. moreover, rather than simply existing in resistance to or in competition with big tech, we contend that platform localism has a more ambiguous structural relation with platform capitalism, one that ranges from dissociation via (mutual) dependency to complementarity. this paper derives its arguments from the findings of a 5-year research project (currently in its third year) examining how platforms rearrange relations between market, state, and civil society actors. through a cross-national comparative ethnography and policy analysis, the project investigates the variegated and multi-scalar impacts of platformization on three large cities in the global north. for the occasion of this panel, we discuss two cases of platform localism – or actually existing platformization – that have grabbed the attention of our research team: platform cooperatives and postwelfare platforms. platform cooperatives operate – in the vision of its main architect and promotor – at the forefront of a newly emerging “solidarity economy” (scholz, 2016: 11), while sitting “squarely at the intersection of values and markets, organizing and business, community institution and economic engine” (hoover, 2016: 108; see also sandoval, 2019). as cooperatively run businesses, the main aim of platform cooperatives is to leverage platform-based technologies for the common good, empowering workers and (their) communities by creating a platform economy in which the data-driven means of market-making and value production are owned as well as governed collectively. post-welfare platforms, meanwhile, operate in the institutional space shaped by ongoing welfare state retrenchment and attendant experimentation with local, community-based social services provisioning (turunen and weinryb, 2019; schou and hjelholt, 2019). these initiatives, which match elderly citizens to local volunteers or coordinate municipal welfare services, likewise seek to exploit the affordances of digital platforms while at the same time drawing on existing resources and infrastructures – both public and private; material and immaterial. while our paper will discuss the crucial differences between platform cooperatives and post-welfare platforms, we emphasize their similarities and argue that both can be understood as symptoms of what scholars have variously called “community capitalism” (van dyk, 2019) and “neoliberal communitarianism” (van houdt and schinkel, 2013). both notions point to the rise of “community” as the primary social entity tasked with taking responsibility for, and absorbing the risks/costs associated with, reproductive labor and social reproduction more generally (see also muehlebach, 2012). platform cooperatives and post-welfare platforms are each driven by the belief that communities, possibly in collaboration with local market and state actors, can solve the dual crises of precarity and social reproduction by seizing on the platform as at once a sophisticated technology and a social model predicated on market logics. platform localism is thereby imagined to “unlock” operational efficiencies, (small-scale) network effects, and other forms of value that can be harnessed for the survival and flourishing of the common good rather than shoring up corporate dominance. yet we also show how scenes of actually existing platformization are rife with (unacknowledged) social tensions, inequalities, and a chronic lack of resources. rather than solving the democratic and reproductive deficits at the local level, post-welfare platforms and platform coops are sites where questions about who belongs to a particular community, who gets to shape notions of the “public interest” and the “common good”, and who can participate are being contested – although they are more often problematically disregarded. finally, this also raises issues with respect to who is enabled to derive value from platform-governed local transactions and who is excluded, or included predominantly as input for purposes of data extraction and valorization. these issues are particularly pertinent in cases where platform localism is materially supported by the software infrastructures of incumbent state and/or market actors. in such cases, rules and agreements concerning data ownership, governance, and exploitation play an especially critical role, given the risk of data-based surveillance and predatory activity. we thus conclude with a reflection on the extent to which (and modes through which) actually existing platformization “from below” both challenges and perpetuates the inequities at the heart of platform capitalism. references ansell, c. & miura, s. (2019) ‘can the power of platforms be harnessed for governance?’ public administration, available (online first): https://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12636 brenner, n. & theodore, n. (2002) ‘cities and the geographies of “actually existing neoliberalism”.’ antipode, 34(3): 349-379. falco, e. & kleinhans, r. (2018) ‘digital participatory platforms for co-production in urban development: a systematic review.’ international journal of e-planning research, 7(3): 52-79. hoover, m. (2016) ‘what we mean when we say “cooperative”,’ in scholz & schneider (eds) ours to hack and to own, pp. 108-112. muehlebach, a. (2012) the moral neoliberal: welfare and citizenship in italy. chicago: university of chicago press. poderi, g. (2019) ‘sustaining platforms as commons: perspectives on participation, infrastructure, and governance.’ codesign, 15(3): 243-255. sandoval, m. (2019) ‘entrepreneurial activism? platform cooperativism between subversion and co-optation.’ critical sociology. available (online first): https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920519870577 scholz, t. (2016) ‘platform cooperativism: challenging the corporate sharing economy.’ rosa luxemburg stiftung, new york office. available: https://eticasfoundation.org/wpcontent/uploads/2019/03/scholz_platform-cooperativism.pdf scholz, t. & schneider, n. (2016) ours to hack and to own. new york: or books. schou, j. & hjelholt, m. (2019) ‘digital state spaces: state rescaling and advanced digitalization.’ territory, politics, governance, 7(4): 438-454. turunen, j. & weinryb, n. (2019) ‘organizing service delivery on social media platforms? loosely organized networks, co-optation, and the welfare state.’ public management review. available (online first): https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2019.1619805 van dyk, s. (2018) ‘post-wage politics and the rise of community capitalism.’ work, employment and society, 32(3): 528-545. van houdt, f. & schinkel, w. (2013) ‘a genealogy of neoliberal communitarianism.’ theoretical criminology, 17(4): 493-516. the many lives of platforms: governance in times of platform urbanism through an open business models’ perspective shenja van der graaf university of twente mehdi montakhabi free university of brussels in today’s climate to ‘smarten up’ our cities we navigate landscapes not only of bricks and mortar, but also of data and algorithms (graham, 2020). it thus may not come as a surprise that attention is drawn to concerns underpinning ‘participation’ and ‘datafication’ paralleled by shifting modes of governmentality and governance, arguably, further deepening the neoliberal project (kitchin et al., 2018; rossi, 2019). it is precisely at this intersection that this paper is set. it puts a ‘public value’ perspective forward and departs from the premise that public value is changing and, particularly, public organisations need to engage with systemic change in the ‘platform era’ in new ways, where ‘the platform’ has become a prevalent and powerful term for the way contemporary society organizes and understands itself (cusumano et al., 2019; gillespie, 2010). talking about what this new future might look like cannot happen without the input of a multi-stakeholder and ecosystem perspective, including citizens (or, users) and a collective understanding of what is valued, thereby highlighting the dynamics of making ‘platforms’ more responsible and sustainable in the public’s interest. ultimately, through the development of a framework for open business models (chesbrough, 2006), this paper seeks to yield insight into the dynamics of a seeming shift in the ethos and logic of city governance in the ‘platform’ age (cf. mansell and steinmueller, 2020). this blurring between physical and digital boundaries of the city are both part of, and produced by, the digital platforms that, today, are implicated in the structures that shape everyday life in the city, and play a key role in giving rise to novel needs for, and practices of public space engagement (coletta and kitchin, 2017). ‘the platform’ has become a prevalent and powerful term for the way contemporary society organizes and understands itself. while in the various literatures, ambiguity remains in defining the specifics of digital platforms, the term is associated with so-called platform companies like facebook, google and uber, and commonly used to point to its penetration into the heart of society disrupting markets, labour relations, transforming social and civic practices as well as affecting democratic processes (van dijck et al., 2018; gillespie, 2018; srnicek, 2017). with this advent of ‘the platform’ and adjacent logic of ‘platform urbanism’, critical attention in media and urban studies (and beyond) is urgently seeking to grasp what is going on, thereby highlighting, arguably, a fetishization of data and the overlooking of human elements and agency in urban processes (barns, 2020; mattern 2017; van der graaf and ballon, 2019). this is not new as research into the history of media has shown that when public and intellectual concerns over state, commercial, or media power are high, and when new technologies emerge, critical attention is rightly drawn to the platform’s (or, media’s) ideological influence on and/ or economic exploitation of users. in other words, claims about users (or, audiences), in times of profound changes, go handin-hand with reasserting rather rigid accounts of power that tend to downplay, or preclude users and the significance of their everyday life (katz, 1980; livingstone, 2019). precisely such concerns warrant the investigation into the framing of citizen roles as, interestingly, the majority of platform-based initiatives in the urban context assert to be ‘citizen-focused’ or ‘citizen-centric’, which is, at the same time, arguably, being challenged by a data-centred discourse and focus on the collection of (intimate) information that can speak on behalf of citizens. across the diverse range of methods for datafying citizens, their values, rights, self-governance and so forth have so far not been much vigorously considered, and hence, critically reflecting on this trend, this paper’s contribution is threefold. it aims: 1) to examine the citizens' participation in governance endeavours; 2) to identify the attention for the value and responsibility dimensions of platform governance; and, 3) to study novel institutional practices of governance at a time of myriad blackboxed systems, owned and operated by various companies, while little is known about what organisational and management commitments are embedded within them or how new forms of (communal) organisation emerge through their use. in order to do this, the focus is on platform business models as they dictate (private and public, for and non-for-profit) actors’ roles and all this entails as the underlying layer behind platforms’ economic, social, and environmental ‘behavior’ (magretta, 2002). in doing so, examining platforms’ business models yields insights into their governance. although all platforms are built on open business models (fehrer, woratschek, and brodie, 2018), they do not use collaborative models in the same way. identifying and classifying open business model(s) behind a platform facilitates the investigation of behavior, potential harms, sensitive stakeholder groups, sustainability, and appropriate policy measures. several classifications are proposed in the literature for open business models (frankenberger, weiblen, and gassmann, 2013; kortmann and piller, 2016), yet a perspective on studying governance cannot be easily distilled in the literature. to bridge the identified gap, and to get insights regarding platforms’ governance in a way to support public values (mazzucato and ryan-collins, 2019), a framework is developed to classify several types of open business models. positioning a platform’s business model in this framework gives insights regarding their governance. more specifically, this study explores differences between (open) business models vis-a-vis what makes their governance different. applying a mixed methods approach (tashakkori and teddlie, 2003), it first develops a three-dimensional framework for open business models by following a multi-stakeholder and ecosystem perspective. guided by this framework, the research systematically analyzes several platforms with (potential implication for, or) relevance to ‘city governance’. data is collected based on secondary sources which follows prior empirical research on business models (cf. zott and amit, 2008). cases' business models are positioned in the proposed framework and then the gathered data is analyzed with cluster analysis techniques to develop a taxonomy for platforms’ governance through identifying and classifying their open business models. accepting this, the findings subscribe to a distributed accomplishment perspective of multistakeholder practices, (self)-governance, and ‘platform politics’ underpinned by the objective of responsibility and sustainability dimensions of the role of ‘platforms’ in public service delivery. references: barns, s. (2020) platform urbanism: negotiating platform ecosystems in connected cities. singapore: palgrave macmillan. chesbrough, h. (2006). open business models: how to thrive in the new innovation landscape. harvard business press. coletta, c., and kitchin, r. (2017) algorithmic governance: regulating the ‘heartbeat’ of a city using the internet of things. big data & society, doi: 10.1177/2053951717742418 cusumano, m.a., gawer, a., and yoffie, d.b. (2019) the business of platforms: strategy in the age of digital competition, innovation, and power. new york: harper business. fehrer, j. a., woratschek, h., & brodie, r. j. (2018). a systemic logic for platform business models. journal of service management. frankenberger, k., weiblen, t., & gassmann, o. (2013). network configuration, customer centricity, and performance of open business models: a solution provider perspective. industrial marketing management, 42(5), 671-682. gillespie, t. (2010) politics of “platforms”. new media & society 12(3), pp. 347–364. doi:10.1177/1461444809342738 gillespie, t. (2018). regulation of and by platforms. in j. burgessa. marwick & t. poell the sage handbook of social media (pp. 254-278). 55 city road, london: sage publications ltd doi: 10.4135/9781473984066.n15 graham, m. (2020) regulate, replicate, and resist – the conjunctural geographies of platform urbanism, urban geography, doi: 10.1080/02723638.2020.1717028 katz, e. (1980). on conceptualising media effects. studies in communication 1, pp. 119–41. kitchin, r., cardullo, p., and di feliciantonio, c. (2018) citizenship, justice and the right to the smart city, doi: 10.31235/osf.io/b8aq5 kortmann, s., & piller, f. (2016). open business models and closed-loop value chains: redefining the firm-consumer relationship. california management review, 58(3), 88108. livingstone, l. (2019) audiences in an age of datafication: critical questions for media research. television & new media, 20(2), pp. 170–183. magretta, j. (2002). why business models matter. harvard business review, 80(5), 8692. mansell, r., & steinmueller, w. e. (2020) advanced introduction to platform economics. elgar advanced introductions series. edward elgar publishing ltd. isbn 9781789900620 mattern, s. (2017) code and clay, data and dirt: five thousand years of urban media. minneapolis. london: university of minnesota press. mazzucato, m., & ryan-collins, j. (2019). putting value creation back into ‘ public value ’: from market-fixing to market-shaping. ucl institute for innovation and public purpose, 24. rossi, u. (2019) ‘fake friends: the illusionist revision of western urbanology at the time of platform capitalism’, urban studies. doi: 10.1177/0042098018821581. srnicek, n. (2017) platform capitalism. cambridge: polity press. tashakkori, a., & teddlie, c. (eds.). (2010). sage handbook of mixed methods in social & behavioral research. sage. van der graaf, s. and ballon, p. (2019) navigating platform urbanism. technological forecasting and social change, 142, pp.364-372. van dijck, j., poell, t., and de waal, m. (2018) the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford: oxford university press. zott, c., & amit, r. (2008). the fit between product market strategy and business model: implications for firm performance. strategic management journal, 29(1), 1-26. infrastructural socialism: digital feedback and nonmarkets alex gekker university of amsterdam, netherlands sam hind siegen university, germany in this paper we address the growing interest in the socialist calculation debate (davies 2019; morozov 2019; cottrell and cockshott 1993) by proposing the notion of infrastructural socialism. in an age variously characterized by platform capitalism (srnicek 2016), surveillance capitalism (zuboff 2015) or infrastructural surveillance (gekker and hind 2019), we propose to move on from diagnosing the present condition, to articulating a possible future. in this, we discuss the potential of leveraging digital infrastructures of major technology companies for the public good, beyond narrow usership or customer base. this article adds to wider discussion of digital rights to the city (shaw and graham 2017; cardullo, di feliciantonio and kitchin 2019), the rise of platform urbanism (barns, 2019; 2020), and more specifically, the provision of common ownership of digital data and platforms (de lange 2019). however, in distinction to the valorization of decentralized forms of data production, sharing and use typical of debates around open platforms and initiatives such as wikipedia and openstreetmap; or the advancing of experimental, partial or otherwise liberal or ‘weak’ articulations of citizenship or common-ing, this paper returns to the question, and possibility, of centralized planning and decision-making. thus, it speaks directly to recent polemical work on the unintentionally ‘socialist’ underpinning of corporate infrastructures and logistics (phillips and rozworski 2019). we attempt to explicate these abstract concerns with reference to traffic congestion as precipitated by the burgeoning use of ridesharing and navigation apps (bliss 2019; macfarlane 2019; brown 2020). particularly, following morozov’s (2019) call to design ‘non-markets’ and develop digital ‘feed back infrastructure’, we examine uber’s ‘surge-pricing’ mechanism as a possible locus for the non-profit allocation of resources, and with it a re-centralized public transportation system. or, in other words, the possibility of bringing data streams and their associated distributive mechanisms ‘in house’. this is not to advocate a version of an “ubercity” (leszczynski and kitchin, 2019) where speculative market mechanisms redefine citizenship into consumerism, but rather raising the possibility of using such data-streams in non-market setting. our departure is the automation of labour, logistics and monetary flows exhibited by the most successful digital platforms. in particular, gafam (google, amazon, facebook, apple and microsoft) have utilized a combination of massive data collection, personalization, and machine learning to effectively anticipate user desires; acting in (semi-)monopolistic fashion and comprising ‘the’ or ‘a’ market, in totality (nieborg and helmond 2018). as phillips and rozworski point, the calculative infrastructures that underpin gafam is reminiscent of the socialist experiments in planned economies but for the fact it seems to be working. one of the principal hurdles identified in the 1920s to centrally-planned (i.e. non-market) economies was the practical impossibility of communicating and calculating inputs (raw materials) and outputs (finished goods) across all industries, instantly or ‘automatically’. arguments advanced by liberal economists at the time (mises and hayek) suggested that the market was best able to reflect the value of goods automatically through a simple price mechanism, predicated on competition between market actors. the central claim was that this ‘true’ valuation could only be communicated quickly and confidently through the market; any centralized planning system was technologically and computationally impossible; at least within any reasonable timeframe. yet real-time proprietary data streams (user data, sensor data, object data) enable gafam and others to deliver a range of services; enabling the communication of various kinds of information automatically. this data informs the allocation of resources (raw materials, labor), the distribution of goods (consumer products, machine parts), the optimization of processes (user identification, payment, inventory updates), the streamlining of operations (production, quality control), as well as the general maintenance of the infrastructures themselves. moreover, the delivery of these services is actually dependent on internal centralized decision-making and planning; not the market or market actors. this challenges the liberal argument made in the 1920s in support of market pricing, raising the question of whether they can be turned for ‘good’ (daly, devitt and mann 2019). in this regard, morozov (2019) suggests that the two main outcomes of data feedback is the optimization of existing markets and the solving of social problems (housing, transportation, employment). similarly, andrejevic (2019) emphasizes the necessary surveillant component of data infrastructures, allowing for control through prediction and mitigation rather than coercion and punishment. our paper asks whether the optimization of existing data ‘loops’ can be detached from their current function (generating profit for monopoly tech firms) to communicate and calculate other forms of value (gerlitz 2016; stark 2009), while avoiding digital manifestations of 20th century state surveillance. references andejevic, m. (2019) automating surveillance. surveillance and society. 17 (1/2): 7-13. barns, s. (2019) negotiating the platform pivot: from participatory digital ecosystems to infrastructures of everyday life. geography compass 13(9): e12464. doi: 10.1111/gec3.12464. barns, s. (2020) platform urbanism: negotiating platform ecosystems in connected cities. geographies of media. palgrave macmillan. doi: 10.1007/978-981-32-9725-8. bliss, l. (2019) navigation apps changed the politics of traffic. citylab. available: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/11/future-of-transportation-trafficnavigation-apps-google-maps/601684 [accessed 20 february 2020]. brown, e. (2020) the ride-hail utopia that got stuck in traffic. the wall street journal. available: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ride-hail-utopia-that-got-stuck-in-traffic11581742802 [accessed 20 february 2020]. cardullo, p., c. di feliciantonio, and r. kitchin (2019) the right to the smart city. bingley: emerald. cottrell, a. and w. p. cockshott (1993) calculation, complexity and planning: the socialist calculation debate once again. review of political economy. 5 (1): 73-112. de lange, m. (2019) the right to the datafied city: interfacing the urban data commons. in p. cardullo, c. di feliciantonio, and r. kitchin (eds) the right to the smart city. bingley: emerald, 71-83. daly, a., s. k. devitt, and m. mann (2019) (eds.) good data. amsterdam: institute of network cultures. davies, w. (2018) (ed.) economic science fictions. london: goldsmiths press. gekker, a. and hind, s. (2019) infrastructural surveillance. new media & society. 0 (0): 1-23. gerlitz, c. (2016) what counts? reflections on the multivalence of social media data. digital culture and society. 2 (2): 19-38. leszczynski, a. and kitchin, r. (2019) the seduction of ubercity. in m. graham, r. kitchin, s. mattern, and j. shaw (eds) how to run a city like amazon, and other fables. meatspace press, 1179-1195. macfarlane, j. (2019) your navigation app is making traffic unmanageable. ieee spectrum. available: https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/your-navigationapp-is-making-traffic-unmanageable [accessed 20 february 2020]. morozov, e. (2019) digital socialism? the socialist calculation debate in the age of big data. new left review. 116/11: 33-67. nieborg, d. and a. helmond (2018) the political economy of facebook’s platformization in the mobile ecosystem: facebook messenger as a platform instance. media, culture & society. 41 (2): 196-218. philips, l. and m. rozworski (2019) people’s republic of walmart: how the world’s biggest corporation are laying the foundations for socialism. london: verso. shaw, j. and m. graham (2017) our digital rights to the city. london: meatspace press. srnicek, n. (2016) platform capitalism. cambridge: polity. stark, d. (2009) the sense of dissonance: accounts of worth in economic life. princeton, nj: princeton university press. zuboff, s. (2015) big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization. journal of information technology. 30 (1): 75-89. microsoft word aoir2018-final-tweet-lengths.docx selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): mitchell, l. (2018, october 10-13). mo’ characters mo’ problems: online social media platform constraints and modes of communication. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. mo’ characters mo’ problems: online social media platform constraints and modes of communication lewis mitchell school of mathematical sciences, the university of adelaide, sa 5005, australia joshua dent school of mathematical sciences, the university of adelaide, sa 5005, australia joshua v ross school of mathematical sciences, the university of adelaide, sa 5005, australia introduction this paper explores a foundational change to one of the world’s largest social media platforms: twitter’s doubling of its character limit to 280 characters on 7 november 2017. this arguably represents the most significant change to an individual’s everyday experience of this platform since its inception in 2006. twitter argued that this change made it “easier to tweet”, with individuals “less time editing their tweets in the composer” and that the “timeline reading experience should not substantially change” (rosen 2017). we test these claims quantitatively, by applying natural language processing techniques as well as mathematical modeling approaches to a large dataset collected before and after the change. our results show that the average timeline reading experience did in fact change significantly after the change, and reveal a surprisingly long “reaction time” of the twitter-using population to this exogenous change to the communication medium. we postulate that this behavior is rooted in human psychology, and explain how our findings are consistent with previous experimental studies of mental perceptions of text lengths. data collection and methodology we analysed an existing dataset comprising 540 million english-language tweets (after filtering as below), collected using twitter’s decahose feed (10% of all public tweets) between 1 september 2017 and 12 january 2018. to focus on the change in behavior by individuals when writing tweets we filtered out all tweets containing urls, and in order to apply natural language processing techniques we considered only english language tweets (as determined by twitter’s automatic language detection algorithm and stored in the metadata for each tweet). to test whether the “timeline reading experience” changed after 7 november, we computed the average flesch-kincaid grade level (kincaid et al. 1975), which estimates an approximate (us) grade level indicating the readability of a document, for all tweets per day. to explore how individuals’ writing changed before and after 7 november, we fit a statistical model to the daily distribution of tweet lengths. this model assumed a stochastic generative process whereby individuals would author a tweet of random length l, drawn from a 2-parameter length distribution f(l; 𝜇, 𝜎); if 𝓁 > lmax (i.e., if the individual wrote a tweet longer than the perceived character limit, lmax = 140 or lmax = 280) they would “edit” their tweet such that the final message length was l = lmax – 𝓁, where 𝓁 was drawn from a 1-parameter distribution g(𝓁; 𝜆i). we modeled individuals’ observed delay in adapting to the longer character length lmax through a parameter p controlling the probability of using lmax = 140 or lmax = 280. we performed model selection using akaike’s information criterion (aic) to determine the most appropriate distributions f and g, and used approximate bayesian computation (abc) (e,g., toni et al. 2009) to obtain posterior estimates of the parameters 𝜇, 𝜎, 𝜆i, p. results figure 1 shows that the average flesch-kincaid reading grade clearly increased by approximately half a grade after the character limit change (indicated by the vertical line), with a change-point analysis (lavielle 2005) showing a significant change in the standard deviation of the signal at this same time. interestingly, despite the increased character length a substantial drop in average tweet reading level was observed around new years eve 2017. future work could explore whether this is an annual trend or not, the language features driving the change, and cultural reasons underlying why this particular holiday (rather than, e.g., christmas) exhibits such a stark decrease in linguistic complexity. figure 1: average tweet flesch-kincaid reading level before and after twitter’s character limit change (vertical line). oct 2017 nov 2017 dec 2017 jan 2018 4.8 5 5.2 5.4 5.6 5.8 6 av er ag e fl es ch -k in ca id re ad in g gr ad e consistent with the literature (szell et al. 2015), aic model selection on a range of message length distributions (poisson, negative binomial, lognormal, sichel) selected a lognormal distribution as the best model for the majority of the tweet length distributions, both before and after the character limit change. figure 2 shows one such model fit, for 21 november 2017, 2 weeks after the change. figure 2: model fits to the tweet length distribution. the difference between the observed distribution of tweet lengths and the expected lognormal fits for (a) 100 < l < 140 and (b) 240 < l < 280 provides estimates of the proportions of individuals who either (a) unnecessarily self-edited their tweets based on a perceived maximum length of 140 characters, or (b) found that the new 280 character limit to still be insufficient and self-edited their tweet. these proportions are shown in figure 3, for the period after 7 november 2017. 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 tweet length l 0 1 2 3 4 5 n um be r o f t w ee ts 104 data full model fit fitted lognormal distribution figure 3: estimated proportions of self-editors. note that the overall proportion stays roughly constant. we remark on a number of interesting findings revealed by this analysis. first, the estimated proportion of individuals apparently not realizing that the character limit increased after 7 november 2017 is surprisingly high, with over 5% of the twitter-using population continuing to exhibit behavior consistent with a perceived 140-character limit a week after the change. indeed, it appears to take at least 3 weeks for this proportion to equilibrate, with still a slight downward trend in january 2018. this suggests a surprisingly long response time for this population, with individual behavior taking weeks or possibly months to adjust to changes in the medium. furthermore, the decrease in this proportion is approximately balanced by an increase in the estimated proportion of users self-editing their tweets back from 280 characters. this produces a roughly constant proportion of around 8% of the population being “dissatisfied” with the increased character limit. while this has clearly decreased from the dissatisfaction level of 22% reported by szell et al. (2014) for the previous 140character limit, it is substantially more than the 1.7% they estimated if the character limit were increased to lmax = 256. this, coupled with the change in average flesch-kincaid reading grade (figure 1), suggests a shift in individual behavior induced by the exogenous change to the medium of communication. discussion these results provide the first empirical evidence for a shift in individual communication and linguistic evolution on the twitter online social network after the 7 november 2017 character limit increase. while limited to a single platform, our results are consistent with the findings of other authors performing similar studies across multiple online media (szell et al. 2015, sobkowicz et al. 2013). 06-nov-2017 04-dec-2017 01-jan-2018 0 0.02 0.04 0.06 0.08 0.1 0.12 0.14 es tim at ed s el f-e di t p ro po rti on (a) lmax = 140 (b) lmax = 280 total in particular, the agreement we found between the data and a lognormal distribution (figure 2) is striking. what is it about twitter (and other online communication media) that appears to give rise to this distribution, regardless of constraints on message length? gros et al. (2012) suggest that neurophysiological constraints in perceiving multiple forms of information limit the ability to produce new information, which ultimately gives rise to multimedia files being lognormally distributed. sobkowicz et al. (2013) provide experimental evidence for internet post lengths, that perceived differences in the times taken to assimilate information and then write new content leads to lognormal distributions, a consequence of the weber-fechner law in psychology. our results provide further observational evidence for this theory. finally, we remark that a key ingredient for this analysis was the use of generative mathematical models, coupled with efficient bayesian parameter estimation algorithms (abc) to quantify the not-directly-observable proportions of “dissatisfied” individuals on twitter. we argue that mathematical models present to the modern internet researcher a powerful alternative exploratory methodology for "big" social media datasets, and that such computational methods empower a deeper understanding of the human and social processes underlying the patterns observed in large-scale internet research. references gros, c., kaczor, g., & marković, d. (2012). neuropsychological constraints to human data production on a global scale. european physical journal b, 85(1), 28. kincaid, j. p., fishburne, r. p. jr, rogers, r. l., & chissom, b. s. (1975). "derivation of new readability formulas (automated readability index, fog count and flesch reading ease formula) for navy enlisted personnel". research branch report 875, millington, tn: naval technical training, u. s. naval air station, memphis, tn. lavielle, m. (2005). using penalized contrasts for the change-point problem. signal processing. 85(august), 1501–1510. rosen, a. (2017). tweeting made easier. twitter developer blog, 7 november 2017. url: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2017/tweetingmadeeasier.html sobkowicz, p., thelwall, m., buckley, k., paltoglou, g., & sobkowicz, a. (2013). lognormal distributions of user post lengths in internet discussions a consequence of the weber-fechner law? epj data science, 2(1), 2. szell, m., grauwin, s., & ratti, c. (2014). contraction of online response to major events. plos one, 9(2), e89052. toni, t., welch, d., strelkowa, n., ipsen, a., & stumpf, m. p. h. (2009). approximate bayesian computation scheme for parameter inference and model selection in dynamical systems. journal of the royal society interface, 6(july), 187–202. microsoft word 817-563-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 the genesis of crisis communication in twitter: from witnesses to gatewatchers luca rossi it university copenhagen denmark luca.rossi@uniurb.it elisabetta zurovac university of urbino carlo bo italy elisabetta.zurovac@uniurb.it giovanni boccia artieri university of urbino carlo bo italy giovanni.bocciaartieri@uniurb.it (note: please do not include author names in the initial submission. if accepted, we will ask you to upload a version with author names included.) abstract during crisis events individuals look for information and try to share useful content or testify their own experience through social media. the research for valuable information is, relies largely on information provided by news agencies and official actors. this collective behavior leads, on a given amount of time, toward the emergence of gatewatching activities where digital media are used to reshare and to control information. this paper will investigate how this phenomenon emerge looking at the twitter conversations produced during the first five hours after the earthquake that struck emilia romagna region in italy on may 20th 2012. we have been able to detect, in the early user-led phase of the phenomenon, what kind of messages were produced and how user-produced communication results in different network structures. keywords crisis communication, twitter, social media analysis, social network analysis introduction aim of this work is to investigate dynamics of information spreading in twitter during the first 5 hours of the earthquake in emilia romagna – italy (20th may 2012). focusing on the very beginning user-led phase of the phenomenon, we investigate which type of users and which type of messages filled the information gap and, by then, what happened when traditional media came on stage. existing research previous twitter research on crisis communication shows how there are many different communication strategies played by different type of users and how those users interact in many different ways in times of crisis (huges and palen 2009, bruns and burges 2012). other research shows how geo-coded tweets can provide useful insight in order to understand both users’ behaviors and the event itself (earle et al. 2010, guy et al. 2010, sakaki et al. 2010, longueville et al. 2009) research on news spreading activities (mendoza and poblete 2010) showed how users make a “quality check” recognizing true claims or false rumors and how errors might be corrected (sutton et al. 2008), while recent approaches worked on a comparative research on a large number of case studies (bruns and stieglitz 2012) to show how events can present stable and comparable usage pattern dataset the twitter dataset has been collected using an ad-hoc version of yourtwapperkeeper software. the monitoring activity on the #terremoto hashtag started on may 5th 2012 well before the actual earthquake and ceased on jan. 1st 2013. although the very large dataset we are focusing on messages produced on may 20th from 4:00 am to 9:00 am. this is, for the goals of this paper, of paramount importance in order to be able to understand the dynamics taking place in the very few hours after a crisis event that have not been, mainly due to the technical difficulties of acquiring data starting from time zero, largely studied. the dataset counts 24121 tweets produced by 11219 distinct selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 users. the total amount of tweets contains, as expected for this kind of event, a large quantity of retweets (13252), a smaller quantity of reply messages (1819) and a fairly large quantity of messages containing link to external resources (8067). from digital witnesses to gatewatchers basic indication of the type of users’ communicative intentions might be obtained by observing the nature of the messages (tweet, retweet, replay), which are all shown in figure 1. what can easily be noticed is that the ratio between retweets and tweets changes over time showing a proportional growth of retweeting activity compared with a less intense tweeting activity. bruns and stieglitz (bruns and stieglitz, 2012) show how by plotting the percentage of urls in tweets against the percentage of retweets in the overall data set it is possible to detect two specific clusters of hashtag case: breakingnews events and media events. the first cluster is characterized by collaborative gatewatching practices (bruns, 2005), while the second is defined by the backchannel chatting arising from a shared media event. from a temporal dynamic perspective it is observable an evolution in the earthquake messages (figure 2): from witnessing the event to clearer pattern of crisis communication (higher presence of retweets containing external links). we then adopted a sna approaches to study the network produced by the retweet activity and focused our attention on the presence of a giant component made of users connected to one another through the figure 1: tweet, retweets and single users per hour. figure 2: percentage of retweets and percentage of tweets containing urls. size of the bubble is proportional to the number of messages. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 retweeting of each other’s messages thus creating a more or less stable group of what we have defined gatewatchers. in previous research (mislove et al. 2007) the analysis of giant component has been used to determine the behaviour of the largest fraction of the network containing both highly active and gregarious users. nevertheless in our specific case the giant component (gc) contains mainly the most active users, in fact the giant component itself is composed by a relatively small fraction of users (37%) but it contains the largest part of edges (96%). these data result in a higher average degree for the nodes belonging to the gc (1,62) compared to the whole network average degree (0,62). as it can be observed in figure 3 the clustering coefficient computed on the whole rt network quickly grows up to 0,030 and then slowly stabilizes at approximately 0,034. this stabilization occurs approximately at t = 8 that means exactly 2 hours after the event, the same time when we have detected the change in users’ behaviors from witnessing activity to gatewatching activity. reading the tweets we have manually encoded 21937 tweets defining seven categories based on their content and assigned one to each tweet in order to observe aggregate evolution of messages. the categories we have defined are the following: tell; information; ask; tweet consciousness; assumption; ironic; complaints. at the beginning users started tweeting messages containing a poor level of information mainly based on their personal experience due to the lack of official information. after the initial shock, they started looking for information on websites and reported these external links in their tweets, or added photos and videos made with the aim of providing evidence acting as a sort of reporters. simple users, which represent the largest part of users, structured their tweets to be more and more similar to the official news language. since information was not provided by the media organizations, had to be produced by the users themselves. in the time slot from 06:00 a.m. to 07:00 a.m. it is assumable that the news media started broadcasting and this is observable by the growth of retweets, that starting from this point can rely on trustable sources to share information. number of messages relative to tell, tweet consciousness, complaints and ironic categories increase. we have interpreted this as a sign of the need to narrate the human side of the crisis (tell, ironic) when news media took back their official role, but it does not mean that the news are just given and shared by the users: they check the quality of the content (complaints) and try to preserve this quality even underlining mistakes made by the users who retweeted messages without checking if they were correct (tweet consciousness). conclusions figure 3: evolution of the clustering coefficient over time (time frame 15 mins). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 our analysis stressed the dynamic aspect of the phenomenon by analyzing the data with a fine level of temporal detail. the major discovery is that, while previous research stressed how users used twitter during crises event mainly as a gatewatching platform, we are claiming that this is undoubtedly true focusing on the whole event but this emerges after first moment when users mainly witness the event. another aspect that we have discovered is that while the usage of twitter evolves moving from witnessing to gatewatching a concurrent evolution happens in the structure of the retweet network leading to the emergence of a stable weakly connected cluster within the network. in our dataset this phenomena takes place after the second hours when we face at the same time a rise in the ratio between retweets and tweets and the emergence of a highly active giant component. references bruns, a. 2005. gatewatching (digital formations). berlin: peter lang. bruns, a., burgess, j. e., crawford, k., and shaw, f. 2012. #qldfloods and @qpsmedia: crisis communication on twitter in the 2011 south east queensland floods. brisbane qld australia: arc centre of excellence for creative industries and innovation, queensland university of technology. retrieved from http://eprints.qut.edu.au/48241/ bruns, a., and stieglitz, s. 2012. quantitative approaches to comparing communication patterns on twitter. journal of technology in human services, 30(3-4), 160–185. de longueville, b., smith, r. s., and luraschi, g. 2009. omg, from here, i can see the flames!: a use case of mining location based social networks to acquire spatio-temporal data on forest fires. proceedings of the 2009 international workshop on location based social networks, 73–80. earle, p. 2010. earthquake twitter. nature geoscience, 3(4), 221–222. guy, m., earle, p., ostrum, c., gruchalla, k., and horvath, s. 2010. integration and dissemination of citizen reported and seismically derived earthquake information via social network technologies. advances in intelligent data analysis ix, 42–53. hughes, a. l., & palen, l. 2009. twitter adoption and use in mass convergence and emergency events. international journal of emergency management, 6(3), 248–260. mendoza, m., poblete, b., & castillo, c. 2010. twitter under crisis: can we trust what we rt? proceedings of the first workshop on social media analytics, 71–79. mislove, a., marcon, m., gummadi, k. p., druschel, p., & bhattacharjee, b. 2007. measurement and analysis of online social networks. proceedings of the 7th acm sigcomm conference on internet measurement: pp. 29–42. sakaki, t., okazaki, m., & matsuo, y. (2010). earthquake shakes twitter users: real-time event detection by social sensors. proceedings of the 19th international conference on world wide web, 851–860. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under cc by-nc. aoir2018-final-paper-meese selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): meese, j. (2018, october 10-13). citizen or consumer? the right to data access in the european union and australia. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. citizen or consumer? the right to data access in the european union and australia james meese university of technology sydney introduction this paper examines what data is made available for people to access on social media platforms, analyses the practicalities and potential uses of this data and compares the key differences between conceptualising data access as a consumer right versus a fundamental right of digital citizenship (mccosker et al., 2016; daly, 2016). it features early stage findings from a research project that explores whether the provision of data access addresses concerns that have emerged with regards to data collection by private and public actors and the analytic possibilities engendered by “big data” (see boyd and crawford, 2012). literature review i take the european union’s general data protection regulation (gdpr) (regulation 2016/679) as a point of departure. citizens within the boundaries of the european union recently secured the right to data access under this framework. chapter 3, article 15 (1) states that “[t]he data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller […] access to the personal data”. the right works in conjunction with article 20, which provides a right to data portability, meaning that consumers can request their data in “a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format”, like an excel .csv file. these rights apply to any organisation that collects data and so apply equally to airlines, pizza shops, cloud services and social media platforms (vanberg and ünver, 2017). at first glance, the benefits of this right are apparent. while organisations collect vast amounts of data from consumers, this data is often held at one remove from individuals (tene and polonetsky, 2012). subsequently, a right to data access stands as one way of reversing the otherwise unidirectional process of data extraction that typifies contemporary life. however, some privacy scholars have critiqued the increased focus on data access rights. while daniel solove (2013, p. 1893) generally supports data access, he questions the extent to which people can “self-manage” their privacy and argues that for a variety of reasons, “privacy self-management impedes its ability to achieve its goal of giving people meaningful control over their data”. more directly, helen nissenbaum (2017) critiques omer tene and jules polonetsky (2012) (amongst others) and contends that data collection needs to be regulated with interventionist policies, suggesting that a data access right will not solve the fundamental issues surrounding extensive data production and collection. methods and contribution this paper makes two interventions in the above debate. firstly, it analyses the extent to which data access and portability addresses some of these foundational concerns around privacy by examining how social media companies have responded to the incoming gdpr regulations. i outline what levels of access social media platforms provide and assess the portability of the data provided through detailed case studies of twitter and facebook. this involves an analysis of each platform’s current data access policies and processes, an examination of what sort of data is made available as well as a brief historical account of how data access has been treated on both platforms. findings will reveal whether twitter and facebook’s current data access regimes are comprehensive and operate as the basis of a functional privacy management strategy. secondly, it offers a conceptual intervention through a comparative analysis of the divergent approaches two jurisdictions take to data access. i compare the gdpr with an ongoing debate around the introduction of a consumer data access right into australian law. whereas european union treats privacy law “as a fundamental right anchored in interests of dignity, personality, and self-determination” (schwartz and peifer 2017, p. 123), australia has a comparatively weak privacy law (lindsay, 2005) and as a result is treating the emerging issue of data access as a consumer rights issue. this paper will assess how these divergent legal foundations and public discourses alter the conceptualisation and enacting of the data access right (and digital rights more generally). conclusion this paper provides a timely examination of a right that has emerged in response to the increased datafication of society (see boyd and crawford, 2012). as well as offering a detailed analysis of how social media platforms have responded to the data access provisions within the gdpr, the comparative analysis of the eu and australia shows that significantly different legal foundations can animate this right, ultimately presenting two starkly different visions of internet users as either consumers or citizens. the paper suggests that despite its limitations, the eu right provides enough agency to “data subjects” to be of use to citizens in other jurisdictions. as a result, the paper contends that consumer-oriented approaches to digital rights are likely to be flawed and need to be challenged in favour of a substantive vision of digital citizenship. the competing trajectories of the data access right underline the fact that this tension between viewing people as either consumers or citizens is still ongoing and has a real impact on prospective law reform efforts. the project also speaks to the growing recognition of data’s materiality (coté, 2014). organisations, governments and most critically, everyday people no longer view digital data as “a wholly immaterial phenomenon” (lupton 2017, p. 1603). the emergence of the data access right shows that individuals expect personal data to be something that can be made material, accessed and handled with relative ease. as a result, governments increasingly have to legislate with reference to data’s materiality. this study of the data access right offers an account of how legal frameworks and corporate policies have started to (sometimes reluctantly) recognize the materiality of data. references boyd, d. and crawford, k 2012, ‘critical questions for big data: provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon’, information, communication & society, vol. 15, no. 5, pp. 662 679. coté, m 2014, ‘data motility: the materiality of big social data’, cultural studies review, vol. 20, no. 1, p.121 – 149. daly, a 2016, private power, online information flows and eu law: mind the gap, bloomsbury publishing, london. lindsay, d 2005, ‘an exploration of the conceptual basis of privacy and the implications for the future of australian privacy law’, melbourne university law review, vol. 29, no. 1, pp.131 – 178. lupton, d, 2017, ‘feeling your data: touch and making sense of personal digital data’, new media & society, vol. 19, no. 10, pp.1599-1614. mccosker, a, vivienne, s and johns, a (eds.) 2016, negotiating digital citizenship: control, contest and culture, rowman & littlefield international, london. nissenbaum, h 2017, ‘deregulating collection: must privacy give way to use regulation?’, viewed 12 february 2018, available at ssrn: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3092282. schwartz, p and peifer, k 2017, ‘transatlantic data privacy law’, the georgetown law journal, vol. 106, no. 1, pp. 115 – 179. solove, d 2012, ‘introduction: privacy self-management and the consent dilemma’. harvard law review, vol. 126, no. 7, pp.1880 – 1903. tene, o and polonetsky, j 2012, ‘big data for all: privacy and user control in the age of analytics’, northwestern journal of technology and intellectual property, vol. 11, no. 5, pp. 240 – 273. vanberg, a and ünver, m 2017, ‘the right to data portability in the gdpr and eu competition law: odd couple or dynamic duo?’, european journal of law and technology, vol. 8, no. 1, viewed 12 february 2018, http://ejlt.org/article/view/546/726. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): robards, b., lyall, b., moran, c., burgess, j., wilken, r., mccosker, a. & senft, t. (2019, october 2-5). data selves: trust, control and self-representation in digital society. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. data selves: trust, control and self-representation in digital society brady robards monash university benjamin lyall monash university claire moran monash university jean burgess queensland university of technology (qut) kath albury swinburne university of technology rowan wilken royal melbourne institute of technology (rmit) anthony mccosker swinburne university of technology terri senft macquarie university a considerable amount of personal data is now collected on and by individuals: footsteps on fitbits, screen time in apple’s ios, conversations on dating apps, sleeping patterns in baby tracker apps, and viewing habits on netflix and youtube. what value do these data have, for individuals but also for corporations, governments, and researchers? when these data are provided back to users, how do people make sense of it? what ‘truth claims’ do quantified personal data make? how do we navigate anxieties around datafied selves, and in what ways are bodies rendered visible or invisible through processes of datafication in digital society? in this panel we explore these questions through four papers centered on the notion of the “data-selfie.” data-selfies take different forms, including but not limited to: • visuals that reference the “status” or “progress” of a user’s physical body, as in 3-d scans, or charts generated by self-monitoring apps for health and fitness. • visuals that reference the remapping of photographic self-expression to biometric, corporate and state surveillance, such as airport facial recognition check points that ask flyers to pose for a selfie, or sex offender databases that now contain images first posted to hook up apps by consenting teenagers. • representations of the embodied or commoditized self, produced not as standalone expression, but as conversational prompts that encourage qualitative, “story-driven” data, in the interests of pedagogy, therapy, activism, etc. • profiles that reference users as “targets” whose chief value is the metadata they generate. using proprietary algorithms, platforms mine this metadata—which can include information about a users’ device, physical location, and their activities online—categorizing it for internal use, and selling it to third parties interested in influencing the consumer, social and/or political preferences of the “targets” in question. in paper 1, robards, lyall and moran develop a new conceptualisation for understanding how individuals reveal themselves through their own quantified personal data. they call this the ‘confessional data selfie’. drawing on a sample of 59 examples from the top posts in subreddit r/dataisbeautiful, they argue that the confessional data selfie represents an aspect of one’s self, through visualisations of personal data, inviting analysis, eliciting responses and personal story-telling, and opening one’s life up to others. in paper 2, burgess, albury and wilken take a political economy of communication approach to analyse the data markets of dating apps. they consider three cases: grindr, match group (parent company of tinder), and bumble. drawing on trade press reportage, financial reports, and other materials associated with the apps and publishers in question, they point to the increased global concentration in ownership of dating app services and raise questions about the ways in which dating apps are now in the ‘data business’, using personal data to profile users and monetise private interactions. in paper 3, mccosker reports on experiences of ‘data anxiety’ among older people in australia. mccosker draws on data literacy workshops, home-based interviews and focus groups with older internet users, that led to discussions of control over personal data, control over social interactions, and the resulting implications for exposure, openness, and visibility. also key to this study was the taking and sharing of selfies in a closed facebook group, serving as the starting point for reflections on these various experiences of control. many of these older participants questioned whether or not ongoing participation in social media and broader data structures were ‘worthwhile’. this raises broader questions about the extent to which users are willing to sacrifice control over personal data or the feeling of control in order to participate and be visible. finally, in paper 4, senft asks: when is the face data? moving from examples of ‘deepfake’ video exhibitions to google art as a repository of ‘face-data’ as cultural and social capital, senft goes on to examine how notions of face-as-data apply to individuals living with the neurological condition of autism. can facial recognition apps help people with autism to read and decode human expressions? taken together, these four papers each engage with questions about the relationship between personal data and broader structures of power and representation: from corporations like grindr and tinder using dating app data to profile users, to google using uploaded selfies to train facial recognition algorithms; through to re-purposing and narrativising personal data as part of practices of self-representation; and the feelings of anxiety, unease or creepiness that accompany the increased datafication of personal identity. self-representation is also a key recurrent thread in these papers, from confessional data selfies as acts of revelation through personal quantified data, through to the photographic selfie as a research exercise that prompts discussions of control and data privacy. paper 1 – confessional data selfies brady robards, benjamin lyall & claire moran (monash) ‘data selfies’ are representations of one’s self through typically quantitative data. for example, self-tracking devices from fitbit and apple collect data automatically, producing visualisations of activity such as steps taken, hours slept, heart rate, calories burnt, and so on. these data selfies can be shared with friends, as part of a competition, or for personal reflection, but what is common is that they tell a story. in this paper we explore practices around what we are calling ‘confessional data selfies’ as shared on the reddit forum r/dataisbeautiful. on this subreddit, with more than 13 million subscribers, redditors share often complex, intimate, highly detailed quantitative self-representations of their lives, many of which include a confessional quality. we draw on an analysis of the top 1000 posts made to r/dataisbeautiful as of september 2018. reflecting on the way data records draw on traditions of christian confession (rettberg 2014: 4-6), we identified 59 post that met our definition of a ‘confessional data selfie’: a visual representation of one's self (or some aspect of one's life), told through quantified data, that reveals or 'confesses' something. to channel senft and baym (2015), we asked: what do these confessional data selfies say? we undertook closer analyses of these 59 posts, coding them into twelve categories grouped under three broad themes: routine management, families and relationships, and body rhythms. routine management was the biggest group of confessional data selfies (n=27), with 9 selfies revealing technology use (eg. “network visualization of my twitter followers and their followers. almost three years after her passing, my late girl friend is still my strongest connection”), 7 on study patterns (“graph of my gpa per semester in college”), 6 on money and personal finances (“i have been tracking my net worth for more than 3 years during college and after”), 3 detailed ‘life-logging’ selfies (“every hour of my 2016 charted by category”), and 2 posts that tracked physical location (“6 months of where i've spent my nights after starting a new job”). while often mundane, these ‘routine’ posts matched typical self-tracking practices in creating a data-derived ‘mirror for the self’ (lomborg and frandsen 2016, 1021). the next two broad themes had an equal number of posts. data selfies on families and relationships (n=16) were some of the most highly upvoted posts in the subreddit, with 9 on relationships (“heart rate when my wife asked for a divorce”), 4 on children (“my daughters sleeping patterns for the first 4 months of her life”), and 3 on dating practices (“my 180 days of lesbian online dating”). we made a distinction between ‘relationships’ and ‘dating’ in coding, as posts about relationships usually documented these longitudinally, whereas posts about dating were on (often unsuccessful) courtship experiences. there was considerable cross-over in some categories, such as with this post: “network visualization of my twitter followers and their followers. almost three years after her passing, my late girl friend is still my strongest connection”. we coded this under technology use, because that was the topic being depicted, but clearly the relationship dimension became integral to this data selfie and its appeal, attracting 26,606 upvotes and 330 comments. according to lambert (2016: 75), relationship tracking (through digitally-quantified means) appropriates psychotherapy by framing emotional analyses as integral to relationship success but ultimately fails to link these (83). the subreddit ratifies this argument, and data selfies that confessed or revealed something about a relationship the agony of separation, the patterns of text message exchange, even word frequency analyses of emails tended to attract the most upvotes and comments. our third and final broad theme was body rhythms (n=16). within this theme were 9 posts on health (“my weight loss over 126 weeks”), 4 on sleep (“my wife and i finally have my 18 month old on a consistent sleep schedule! data from the month of april”), 4 on sport (“failing to run the paris marathon under 4:00:00. i've tried to animate how i did...”), and 2 on masturbation (“my masturbation habits for the last 3 months visualized”). in many ways, these ‘body rhythm’ posts are typical of expressions of mainstream fitness-tracking practices in the era of the ‘second fitness boom’ (millington 2016): a boom mediated by digital technologies like apps, exergames and wearables, which reify self-discipline under ‘healthist’ discourses. in these data selfies, bodily selfsurveillance meets ‘risk’ and becomes a moral concern (esmonde & jette, 2018: 2), further adding to the confessional nature of personal disclosures (reigeluth 2014, 252; fotopoulou 2018, 150) on r/dataisbeautiful. a significant finding from our analysis of these data selfies is the heavily gendered nature of the subreddit and the confessional data selfie as a practice. only 8% of the data selfies in our sub-sample of 59 were clearly women (n=5). most data selfies were by men (n=38), a further 9 were coded as ‘probably men’, and there were 6 posts where we were unable to discern gender. we ask: in what ways might the confessional data selfie be accessible to men in ways that photographic selfie-work has been coded as feminine? (see, for instance, tiidenberg & cruz 2015). the confessional data selfie appears to attempt to present its author in a kind of unbiased, ‘self laid bare’, transparent way. the confessional data selfie represents an aspect of one’s self, invites analysis, elicits responses and personal story-telling, and following the style of the quantified self networked publics (smith and vonthethoff, 2016) opens one’s life up to others. in theorising the confessional data selfie, we follow senft and baym (2015: 1595), who themselves draw on frosh (2015), to suggest that ‘rather than inviting voyeurism, selfies show a “self enacting itself” and invite spectators to reflect on the “very instability of the term ‘self’”... selfies invite viewers to think of identity “between the self as an image and as a body, as a constructed effect of representation and as an object and agent of representation”’. references esmonde, k. & jette, s. (2018) assembling the ‘fitbit subject’: a foucauldiansociomaterialist examination of social class, gender and self-surveillance on fitbit community message boards. health. doi: 10.1177/1363459318800166 fotopoulou, a. (2018) ‘from networked to quantified self: self-tracking and the moral economy of data in a networked self and platforms, stories, connections ed. zizi papacharissi. new york: routledge: 144-159. frosh, p. (2015) ‘the gestural image: the selfie, photography theory, and kinesthetic sociability’, international journal of communication, 9(2015): 1607-1628. lambert, a. (2016) bodies, mood and excess: relationship tracking and the technicity of intimacy. digital culture and society 2(1): 71-88. doi: 10.14361/dcs-2016-0106 lomborg, s & frandsen, k (2016) ‘self-tracking as communication’. information, communication & society 19(7): 1015-1027. doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2015.1067710 millington, b. (2016) fit for prosumption: interactivity and the second fitness boom. media culture and society 38(8): 1184-1200. doi: 10.1177/0163443716643150 reigeluth, t. (2014) why data is not enough. surveillance and society 12(2): 243-354. doi: 10.24908/ss.v12i2.4741 tiidenberg, k. & cruz, e. g. (2015). selfies, image and the re-making of the body. body & society, 21(4), 77–102. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x15592465 rettberg j w (2014) seeing ourselves through technology. hampshire: palgrave macmillan. senft, t. & baym, n. (2015) ‘what does the selfie say? investigating a global phenomenon’, international journal of communication, 9(2015): 1588-1606 smith, g. & vonthethoff, b. (2017) health by numbers? exploring the practice and experience of datafied health. health sociology review 26(1): 6-21. doi: 10.1080/14461242.2016.1196600 http://dx.doi.org/10.14361/dcs-2016-0106 http://dx.doi.org/10.14361/dcs-2016-0106 https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x15592465 https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x15592465 paper 2 dating apps as data markets jean burgess (qut), kath albury (swinburne) & rowan wilken (rmit) numerous and widely used, dating apps collect and connect detailed personal data across platforms they might use facebook for authentication; import images from instagram; and integrate cultural consumption data from spotify, for example. they are therefore important actors in the digital media environment’s broader logics and economies of datafication (helmond 2015). they are a key site of user data commodification (steheling et al. 2018), and also of user creativity and resistance with respect to data cultures (david & cambre 2016; wang 2018; zhao 2018). however, as yet we know remarkably little about the corporate structures behind these apps, how economic value is attributed to and extracted from dating app data, and how these data are monetized. in addressing this gap, we build on the established and well-tested political economy of communication approach (hardy 2014; janet wasko 2004; mosco 1996), which has been applied not only to the analysis of regulated broadcast media industries, but has already also been partially adapted to addressing the distinctive challenges of studying search, mobile, locative, and social media industries (van couvering 2011; goldsmith 2014; frith 2015; albarran 2013). we apply it to the data markets of dating apps by examining three cases: grindr; match group (parent company of tinder); and bumble. we draw on trade press reportage (corrigan 2018), financial reports, and a range of ancillary materials associated with the apps and publishers in question. each of these three firms is at a different stage of development (grindr and match group are established businesses; bumble is a growth-phase start-up) and they operate at different scales (grindr and bumble are stand-alone businesses, match group is a large, publicly listed parent company). however, they converge when it comes to revenue generation: all of them rely in some way on the monetization of user data, including through data profiling and targeted advertising as part of their “freemium” business models – various combinations of advertising-supported free services and paid subscription services. our examination of grindr and bumble also highlighted a subtle trend toward diversification into data-driven media and lifestyle services. through data-mining and analysis of chat transcripts, grindr was able to identify that its subscribers were using the app for social purposes other than organising hook-ups, e.g. seeking travel and accommodation advice, and general socialising. bumble, meanwhile, pursued what it refers to as an “omni-channel approach” by offering data-reliant “friendfinder” functions and business contact matching (becoming the “linked-in for women”). our analysis of these cases also reveals increased global concentration in ownership of dating app services, which is dominated by match group, spark networks, global personals, the meet group, and badoo, mirroring trends in social media ownership more broadly. we observe a trend towards the accumulation of large, diverse portfolios of dating apps from which user data can be extracted, aggregated, and used for microtargeting of ever smaller niches a sign that such companies are increasingly in the data business as much as they are in the dating services business. this emerging business model seeks to capitalise on post-demographic processes of market segmentation, whereby dating app platforms (and their parent companies) “work to multiply, quantify and in turn deepen processes of segmentation by incremental adjustments to interface design, affordances and subsequent cultures of use” (mccosker 2017), as well as through their overall suite of offerings. understanding these issues is vital if we are to make sense of the data markets that form around dating apps, understand the implications of the monetization of and trade in such highly sensitive personal data, and help to enhance public understanding of these developments. the paper concludes by sketching out some of the ways that our political economy of dating services approach can also be usefully integrated with app and software studies more generally. already, various interface methods approaches (dieter et al. 2018; light et al. 2018; møller jørgensen 2016) involve not only the close reading and critical analysis of design features and logics, but also an investigation of the app’s “environment of expected use,” including its operating model, which would be significantly enhanced by the inclusion of a political economy of data markets, data sharing, and business ownership structures. drawing on our experience in conducting projects that engage directly with dating app users, we show how the identification and analysis of such data structures and flows is not only useful for critical scholars, but can also can be integrated with participatory research activities – such as mapping ‘data journeys’ (bates et al 2016) – that aim to uncover the ‘data selves’ that are constructed and exploited by dating apps, and to enhance data literacies among ordinary users. references albarran, alan b. (ed.), the social media industries. new york: routledge, 2013. bates, jo, yu-wei lin, and paula goodale. “data journeys: capturing the socio-material constitution of data objects and flows.” big data & society 3.2 (2016): 2053951716654502. corrigan, thomas f. “making implicit methods explicit: trade press analysis in the political economy of communication.” international journal of communication 18 (2018): 2751-2772. david, gaby, and cambre, carolina, “screened intimacies: tinder and the swipe logic”. social media + society 2, no. 2 (2016): 1–11. dieter, michael, gerlitz, carolin, helmond, anne, tkacz, nathaniel, van der vlist, fernando, and weltevrede, esther, “store, interface, package, connection: methods and propositions for multi-situated app studies.” working paper series | no. 4 | 2018 collaborative research center 1187 media of cooperation. frith, jordan, smartphones as locative media. cambridge: polity, 2015. goldsmith, ben, “the smartphone app economy and app ecosystems.” in the routledge companion to mobile media, edited by gerard goggin and larissa hjorth, 171-180. new york: routledge, 2014. hardy, jonathan. critical political economy of the media. london: routledge, 2014. helmond, anne, “the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready.” social media + society (2015). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080 light, ben, burgess, jean, & duguay, stefanie. “the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps.” new media & society 20, no. 3 (2018): 881-900. mccosker, a. (2017). data literacies for the postdemographic social media self. first monday 22(10): https://uncommonculture.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7307 møller jørgensen, kristian, “the media go-along: researching mobilities with media at hand.” mediekultur: journal of media and communication research 60 (2016): 32-49. steheling, miriam, vesnic-alujevic, lucia, jorge, ana, and maropo, lidia, “the cooption of audience data and user-generated content: empowerment and exploitation amidst, produsage and crowdsourcing.” in the future of audiences: a foresight analysis of interfaces and engagement, edited by ranjana das and brita ytre-arne, 7999. heidelberg: springer, 2018. van couvering, elizabeth, “navigational media: the political economy of online traffic.” in the political economics of media: the transformation of the global media industries, edited by dwayne winseck and dal yong jin, 183-200. london: bloomsbury academic, 2011. wang, shuaishuai, “calculating dating goals: data gaming and algorithmic sociality on blued, a chinese dating app.” information, communication & society (2018). doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2018.1490796 wasko, janet, “the political economy of communication.” in the sage handbook of media studies, edited by john downing, denis mcquail, philip schlesinger, and ellen a. wartella, 309-329. thousand oaks, ca: sage, 2004. zhao, bo, “detecting location spoofing in social media: investigations of an emerging issue in geospatial big data,” 2018, dissertation presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree doctor of philosophy in the graduate school of the ohio state university, graduate program, ohio state university, usa. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f2056305115603080 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f2056305115603080 https://uncommonculture.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7307 https://uncommonculture.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7307 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2018.1490796 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2018.1490796 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2018.1490796 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2018.1490796 paper 3 ageing with digital technology: data literacies and heuristic selfies anthony mccosker (swinburne) as the downside to the increasing value and burgeoning collection of personal data from internet use, data anxiety defines and, in many ways, shapes the digital participation and literacies gap disproportionately affecting older people. this paper reports on part of a research project with older internet users that aimed to better understand differences in use and literacies – an emerging ‘participation divide’ – related to uneven outcomes of internet use (davis et al., 2018; hargittai and walejko, 2008). older internet users face particular challenges to digital inclusion that are not well understood. our project devised a method for developing digital literacies that focused on use of social media and digital storytelling. in the process we uncovered the central importance that data anxiety plays for reluctant older internet users. we worked with groups in two local government areas in melbourne, australia (n=22, average age 73). the core aim was to both articulate and intervene in tensions around agency, control and social identity in the face of growing data anxiety amongst older internet users. this paper targets the specific question: what personal data investments are made through the act of engaging with particular platforms and participating in digital society? in one part of the project, we devised a workshop technique using selfies as a heuristic device – that is, as a means for provoking reflection and discussion about boundaries around social media use and associated data anxieties. this method adapts work by albury et al. (2017) to use selfies as a discovery tool for understanding tensions regarding social connection and self-presentation. in addition to literacies workshops, research methods involved home-based interviews and focus groups over a threemonth period in 2017. participants were grappling to differing extent with low confidence, skills and abilities – digital literacies – but also with their capacity to understand, negotiate and control the personal data associated with their newly active use of social media – data literacies. digital literacy is often understood as an adaptive set of abilities, skills and knowledge about the operation, and cultures of digital media use (jones and hafner, 2012; van deursen and van dijk, 2010). because the participants had limited language to express their data anxieties, we used the selfie exercise to surface and interrogate key concerns while building new strategic communication skills. the notion of data literacies has been defined previously as the capabilities that enable ‘individuals to access, interpret, critically assess, manage, handle and ethically use data’ (calzada prado and mazal, 2013), but this seems increasingly challenging in our complex and often opaque data environments. what degree of data literacy would enable older internet users or others who are digitally disconnected to better navigate and gain some control over the digital tools and platforms that might benefit them socially and economically? asking workshop participants to take and share selfies to a closed facebook group helped to isolate and challenge particular tensions, competencies and knowledge about the way social media activity and interactivity is entwined broadly with core platform metrics: profile data, activity and interactivity, and personal visibility, or degrees of publicness (mccosker, 2017). when we explored difficulties with and concerns about social media use in interviews, three main themes emerged. we found that the same mechanisms that drive social media’s core metrics, analytics and data-based business model are those that generate the most anxiety for our older participants. first, and the most common anxiety or difficulty with social media use involved personal data control. this involved concerns about financial information and security, and personal information understood in a range of ways but always concerning control over profile data as a means of controlling access to personal assets. one account captured the tension resulting in reluctance to engage actively online: it's just the fact that on the one hand i believe in total openness, and on the other hand i believe in being a protector of data. i know the different situations but the different parts of me and i'm reacting quite differently to these circumstances. there's not really a logic to it. it's an instinctive thing. i just say, why do i need to reveal that information about myself? (henry) a second common theme involved deep uncertainty about control over interaction. for example: well, it's not the fear of social media. it's the fear of the implications of the handle of social media. that i might say something that i wish to be said in private, but other people repeat it. i know you can go private and things like that. but you have no control over what other people may want to repeat. and this is a fear of mine. (rumbles) third, the issue of visibility control concerned two aspects of the flow of information and personal data through active engagement with social media. many of the participants suggested they had undertaken careful boundary work around exposure of personal or intimate detail through profiles and posts, and remained skeptical of those who they felt gave too much information about their lives. harry had previously preferred to use whatsapp or viber because he felt that facebook was too public, ‘more open’. when sharing their selfies through facebook, participants were overwhelmingly focused on how to control access and exposure, the degree of openness, and hence visibility: it brought it home to me when we did our little workshop just the other day, because – you know how we got onto facebook, we created an account… when i put my photo up, within half an hour i had five people commenting on the photo. and i thought – hang on a second, i was under the impression that this photo was part of a closed group. (rose) while these anxieties are well known and expected of a platform like facebook, with its complicated privacy settings, controls, and interactions with data brokers and advertisers, they connect with core targets of the platforms’ data capture strategy, and in the process signal those hard to articulate aspects of personal digital trace and data exposure that are important targets for addressing data literacies and the persistent participation gap. by the end of the workshop program, many participants were still questioning whether their personal investment in these data structures was worthwhile. references albury, k. et al. (2017) ‘the selfie course: more than a mooc’, in bennett, r. & kent, m. (eds). massive open online courses and higher education. (168-183) london, routledge. calzada prado, j. and marzal, m. á. (2013) ‘incorporating data literacy into information literacy programs: core competencies and contents,’ libri, 63(2), 123–134. davis, h., mccosker, a., bossio, d., & schleser, m. (2018). ‘60+ online: enhancing digital inclusion of seniors via mobile digital stories and social media participation.’ the journal of community informatics, 14(1), 38. hargittai, e., & walejko, g. (2008). ‘the participation divide: content creation and sharing in the digital age.’ information, community and society, 11(2), 239-256. jones, r. h., & hafner, c. a. (2012) understanding digital literacies: a practical introduction. routledge, london. mccosker, a. (2017) ‘data literacies for the postdemographic social media self’. first monday, 22(10). van deursen, a., & van dijk, j. (2010) measuring internet skills. international journal of human-computer interaction, 26(10), 891–916. paper 4 when the face is data terri senft (macquarie) what does it mean to trust the face as data? how do we know the judgments we make from this data are accurate or ethical ones? from courtship rituals to courtroom practices, the face has long served as the terrain for battles over trust. existing academic literature about the face-as-data spreads across the fields of neuroscience, medicine, psychology, sociology, art, business and law. today, interest has moved into the fields of computational vision, machine learning, interface design, and biometric policy. this paper attempts to synthesize disparate conversations about desires, anxieties, challenges, and politics we face when conceptualizing face-as-data by way of four theorists of the face, and four contemporary cases: british artist gillian wearing’s recent “deepfake” video exhibition; google art’s “selfie” app; a recent effort to use facial recognition technologies to diagnose autism in children; and an app designed to help the 2% of the world’s population who cannot engage in everyday facial recognition. the paper begins with british artist gillian wearing's recent "deepfake" video exhibition, in which she mapped her face to a series of random bodies (beer, 2018). the commercial appeal of wearing's project--which contrasts sharply with current political anxiety around deepfakes (beer, 2018)—requires some unpacking. for this, the paper turns to erving goffman's (1967) argument that although the face is experienced as personal property, its primary utility is as a social image. special attention is paid to goffman's arguments regarding "face-work" as the social glue to which personal trust and political order adheres. continuing the thread of face as social image and artistic currency, the second case this paper explores involves google arts & culture: a wildly popular phone application that compares selfies uploaded by users to museum portraits in google art's database. (held, 2018) here, the paper considers how google art encourages users to circulate face-data as cultural and social capital, extending goffman’s thoughts on face-work to include “immaterial labor” on the internet. to consider how the selfies used for google art comparisons generate fiscal capital (for google, for social media platforms the app 'results' are posted on?, for third parties purchasing the meta-data generated by users as they upload images), the paper turns to deleuze and guattari's (1987) argument that rather than a reflection of subjectivity, the face is better understood as a frame for subjectification under capitalism. the third and fourth cases in the paper explore how notions of face-as-data affect and apply to individuals living with the neurological condition of autism. this section begins with a project at duke university that purports to diagnose autism in children by showing them videos on a smartphone and recording their facial reactions (bates, 2018). it then moves to consider a series of phone apps designed to teach facial recognition: a skill that many members of autistic community reporting finding difficult or impossible. here, arguments about the face as a site of subjectification are overlaid with the work on emmanuel levinas, who theorized the face first and foremost as "representative of our inability to fully capture and control the other (black, 2011: 20)." ). neurologists tell us that we process facial recognition in the amygdala, a part of the brain that also helps establish rapid emotional responses like trust. in child development circles, neurotypical children are often assessed by their ability to recognize faces, which helps them make determinations about which people to trust (ewing, 2015). they are also expected to reflect these things on their own faces as expression (interest, engagement, etc.) by contrast, the “selfies” of neurologically atypical children (in this case, those with compromised or damaged amygdala) fail to meet these conditions, and their condition is read as lack. where the duke project maps faces to data in the name of diagnosing autism, facial recognition apps help users learn to mimic what 'normal' people experience as natural processes of facial identification—from the face of the other to the mind of the other. it can also help us raise interesting questions. there is now a fair amount of research asserting that most people can make accurate social judgements about others in a very short period. however, explains alexander todorov, neuroscientists tend to define “accurate” social judgements as those that map to existing social consensus. he reminds us: “the fact that people agree that a person looks untrustworthy does not mean that the person is actually untrustworthy” (todorov, 2009: 829). continuing in the vein of interrogating accepted wisdom, the paper ends by reconsidering what we gain and lose by trusting the face as a singular entity tied to a particular sort of expressive self, rather than a substitutable and communal set of data in the service of what jodi dean terms “selfie communism." the paper concludes by considering the activist possibilities of dean's observation: "to be common and reproducible is a characteristic of each of us, a realization we enact with every selfie and hashtag, even when we may not be fully aware that we are doing it (dean, 2016)." references bates, karl. 2018. "mobile app for autism screening yields useful data pilot study finds app easy to use, liked by parents." duke today. 1 june 1. online at https://today.duke.edu/2018/06/mobile-app-autism-screening-yields-useful-data beer, jeff (2018) "this new deep fake video is both advertising and a work of art." fast company. online at https://www.fastcompany.com/90279597/this-new-deep-fakevideo-is-both-advertising-and-a-piece-of-art black, daniel (2011) "what is a face?" body & society. vol. 17(4): 1–25. dean, jodi (2016) "images without viewers: selfie communism." 1 february. foto liquid photography museum. online at https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/stillsearching/articles/26420 deleuze, gilles and felix guattari (1987) a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, trans. brian massumi. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. https://today.duke.edu/2018/06/mobile-app-autism-screening-yields-useful-data%0b%0d https://today.duke.edu/2018/06/mobile-app-autism-screening-yields-useful-data%0b%0d https://today.duke.edu/2018/06/mobile-app-autism-screening-yields-useful-data%0b%0d https://today.duke.edu/2018/06/mobile-app-autism-screening-yields-useful-data%0b%0d https://www.fastcompany.com/90279597/this-new-deep-fake-video-is-both-advertising-and-a-piece-of-art%0b%0d https://www.fastcompany.com/90279597/this-new-deep-fake-video-is-both-advertising-and-a-piece-of-art%0b%0d https://www.fastcompany.com/90279597/this-new-deep-fake-video-is-both-advertising-and-a-piece-of-art%0b%0d https://www.fastcompany.com/90279597/this-new-deep-fake-video-is-both-advertising-and-a-piece-of-art%0b%0d https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/articles/26420%0b%0d https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/articles/26420%0b%0d https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/articles/26420%0b%0d https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/articles/26420%0b%0d edkins, j. (2015). face politics. new york: routledge ewing, l, caulfied, f. et al. (2015) appearance-based trust behaviour is reduced in children with autism spectrum disorder. autism vol. 19(8) 1002–1009
 goffman, erving (1959) the presentation of self in everyday life. new york: anchor. goffman, erving (1967) "the face" in interaction ritual. new york: doubleday. held, amy (2018) “google app goes viral making an art out of matching faces to paintings.” npr. 15 january. online at https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwoway/2018/01/15/578151195/google-app-goes-viral-making-an-art-out-of-matchingfaces-to-paintings lévinas, emmanuel and philippe nemo (1985) ethics and infinity. duquesne university press. todorov, a. pakrashi, m. oosterhof, n. (2009) “evaluating faces on trustworthiness after minimal time exposure.” social cognition, vol. 27, no. 6, 2009, pp. 813–833. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/15/578151195/google-app-goes-viral-making-an-art-out-of-matching-faces-to-paintings%0b%0d https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/15/578151195/google-app-goes-viral-making-an-art-out-of-matching-faces-to-paintings%0b%0d https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/15/578151195/google-app-goes-viral-making-an-art-out-of-matching-faces-to-paintings%0b%0d https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/15/578151195/google-app-goes-viral-making-an-art-out-of-matching-faces-to-paintings%0b%0d https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/15/578151195/google-app-goes-viral-making-an-art-out-of-matching-faces-to-paintings%0b%0d https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/15/578151195/google-app-goes-viral-making-an-art-out-of-matching-faces-to-paintings%0b%0d selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): cumming, d, rogerson, m.j. (2019, october 2-5). the situated hinterlands of online gaming practices paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the situated hinterlands of online gaming practices david cumming interaction design lab, the university of melbourne melissa j. rogerson interaction design lab, the university of melbourne introduction previous work has established the existence and research interest of a “digital hinterland” (rogerson, gibbs & smith, 2017) – online practices surrounding enthusiasts’ engagement with a material hobby. this paper extends this notion to consider how online-gaming practices are framed by activities held in material spaces. through the esports bar spectatorship experience, we describe how attendance substantiates and supports fans’ relationship with their fandom. drawing on literature about esports experiences and hobbyists’ practices, we show that shared time and place, attendance, behaviours, and their contribution to an individual’s gaming capital (consalvo, 2007) are important elements of this situated hinterland. the transformation of professional competitive play into spectacle (taylor, 2012) is at the core of esports. while characterised as an online activity, large, intricately-staged esports events are produced and spectated in material settings like stadiums (cumming, 2018) and broadcast online using streaming platforms like twitch. spectators contribute to this spectacle (carter & egliston, 2018; van ditmarsch, 2013): at live stadium events, spectators impart an energy that provides “meanings and social importance to activities” (taylor, 2012), impacting the spectating experience for both inperson and remote spectators. method we conducted an ethnography over five months at a melbourne-based esports bar. we attended the bar for approximately three hours at a time, three times a week, for a total of over 100 hours of observation. we recorded field notes for each session, participated in spectatorship, and held formal and informal conversations with patrons and staff. linking our observations to the concept of the ‘hinterland’ highlights the embeddedness of online and offline activities in understanding how spectatorship at the bar worked to strengthen the bond between fans and their fandom. findings our findings highlight the situated nature of participation in esports spectatorship. both time and place were important to participants, driving both their attendance at events and the accrual of gaming capital through that attendance. time and place the esports spectators in this study were frequently focused on an event, for example, the international 8 (ti8). this landmark dota 2 tournament was streamed live via twitch to the bar’s many large screens. this real-time streaming was important to participants, allowing them to vicariously experience and participate in the event whilst it happened. bar patrons had to account for timezone differences between ti8 host city vancouver and melbourne, attending the bar from the early hours of the morning into the early afternoon. despite these inconvenient hours, the bar remained packed throughout the event. the bar provided a focal point for patrons’ engagement, whilst the real-time nature of the experience was critical to participation and enjoyment. attendance this situated connection to time and place drives the value placed on attendance or presence at an event. this leads aficionados to travel to events, frequently at considerable expense and inconvenience. travel to international events is costly. even for local events, the effort required to attend can be considerable. participants invest time in travelling to the event, adjusting work and home timetables to accommodate real-time events, to enjoy an enhanced experience of the event as a member of a group. this aligns with broader practices of sports (kurtzman & zauhar, 2005; weed & bull, 2009) and media tourism (connell, 2012; parmett, 2016) and evokes practices of other serious leisure groups. lax and mackenzie (2019) discuss a ‘gacha’ gamer1 who travelled from japan to the uk to attempt to obtain a premium king arthur character by purchasing in-game gacha at the legendary king’s purported grave2, and rogerson, gibbs and smith (2019) describe boardgamers’ valorization of key hobbyist events. sports fans share this strong identification with places, for example lord’s cricket ground in london, which is seen as the “home of cricket” (cardwell & alli 2014), and fans of media franchises visit key filming locations and places mentioned in texts (jewell & mckinnon, 2008; tzanelli & yar, 2016). shared behaviours for enthusiasts who cannot or choose not to attend an event, local alternatives offer another possibility for attendance. although these events lack the prestige and authenticity of the main event (cardwell & alli, 2014; lamont, 2014), they nevertheless provide an attendance experience beyond the mundane (weed, 2007). participants’ experience of ti8 was not inherent to the bar itself. rather, spectators produced their own experience based on their expectations of what such an experience would entail, drawing on behaviours performed by the crowd depicted on the live-stream. through the engagement of spectating rituals and replication of observed behaviours, they were reterritorialised by spectators in the bar (deleuze & guattari, 1988). rather than exactly replicating the stadium experience, they appropriated and produced key characteristics of it in their own local context, creating a distinct yet, from the patrons’ perspective, authentic experience. gaming capital this shared, partisan experience offers intrinsic benefits of enhanced enjoyment as well as a feeling of belonging and exclusivity (weed, 2006). urry (2002) describes the act of “collecting places”. the gathering of artifacts and stories from event attendance can be used to retell experiences and demonstrate strong commitment to a hobby. throughout the night, spectators of ti8 reminisced about watching other esports events at the bar as social boundaries dissolved. by the end of the event it was clear that the shared communal experience of watching ti8 at the bar would become a part of the patrons’ accrued gaming capital; several groups discussed how they would boast to their nonattending friends about “missing out”. conclusion this paper describes how attendance at an esports bar demonstrates commitment to the esports fandom. while fans engage in spectatorship in the bar, it is the elements surrounding the spectatorship which attract gaming capital. with the bar offering a local alternative for spectatorship, travel to and attendance at the bar offers a sense of exclusivity and camaraderie. patrons partook in a shared experience, which could later be retold to others to demonstrate commitment to the fandom. whereas rogerson, gibbs and smith (2017) demonstrate that a digital hinterland of online practices frames material boardgaming experiences, this paper shows that a situated hinterland encompassing time and place surrounds and extends the online practices of esports spectatorship. such findings demonstrate that hobbies should not be characterised as solely online or material; they are informed by engagement beyond their origin. references cardwell, d., & nazia, a. (2014). nostalgia at the boundary: a study at lord's cricket ground. in t. baum, & b. richard (eds.), tourism and cricket: travels to the boundary. channel view publications. carter, m., & egliston, b. (2018). audiencing on twitch. in abstract proceedings of the 2018 digra international conference, turin, italy connell, j. (2012). film tourism–evolution, progress and prospects. tourism management, 33(5), 1007-1029. consalvo, m. (2007). cheating : gaining advantage in videogames. cambridge, ma: mit press. cumming, d. (2018). understanding the experience of australian esports spectatorship. digra 2018 proceedings of the 11th digital games research association conference, turin, italy. deleuze, g., & guattari, f. (1988). a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. bloomsbury publishing. jewell, b., & mckinnon, s. (2008). movie tourism—a new form of cultural landscape? journal of travel & tourism marketing, 24(2-3), 153-162. kurtzman, j., & zauhar, j. (2005). sports tourism consumer motivation. journal of sport tourism, 10(1), 21-31. lamont, m. (2014). authentication in sports tourism. annals of tourism research, 45, 117. lax, g.l., & mackenzie, m. (2019). against all odds: desire and monetisation in japanese mobile games. digraa 2019: what's next?, sydney, australia. parmett, h.m. (2016). it's hbo: passionate engagement, tv branding, and tourism in the postbroadcast era. communication and critical/cultural studies, 13(1), 3-22. rogerson, m.j., gibbs, m., & smith, w. (2017). exploring the digital hinterland. aoir 2017, tartu, estonia. rogerson, m.j., gibbs, m., & smith, w. (2019). understanding the travel motivations of game hobbyists. digraa 2019: what's next?, sydney, australia. taylor, t.l. (2012). raising the stakes: e-sports and the professionalization of computer gaming. mit press. tzanelli, r., & yar, m. (2016). breaking bad, making good: notes on a televisual tourist industry. mobilities, 11(2), 188-206. urry, j. (2002). the tourist gaze. london: sage. van ditmarsch, j.l. (2013). video games as a spectator sport. (master's thesis). utrecht: utrecht university. weed, m. (2006). the story of an ethnography: the experience of watching the 2002 world cup in the pub. soccer & society, 7(1), 76-95. weed, m. (2007). the pub as a virtual football fandom venue: an alternative to ‘being there’?. soccer & society, 8(2-3), 399-414. weed, m., & bull, c. (2009). sports tourism: participants, policy and providers (2nd ed.). oxford: butterworth-heinemann. 1 ‘gacha’ games, popular in japan, are digital games which offer a monetised mechanic based on the ‘gacha’ machines where players attempt to win a capsule toy. analogous to loot boxes, gacha provide characters and other items that assist players and may be required for progression. 2 https://twitter.com/hinata5dx/status/1035921881839411201 https://twitter.com/hinata5dx/status/1035921881839411201 https://twitter.com/hinata5dx/status/1035921881839411201 selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): kant, t. (2019, october 2-5). algorithmic women’s work: the labour of negotiating black-boxed representation. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. algorithmic women’s work: the labour of negotiating black-boxed representation tanya kant university of sussex introduction: made in data increasingly, commercial web platforms seek to algorithmically categorize their users into complex yet dividuating datasets: users are profiled as ‘male’ or ‘female’, ‘married’ or ‘single’, ‘first-time buyers’ or ‘renters’ or any number of other demographic segments, who are then inferred to interested in ‘dogs’, ‘cats’, ‘small kitchen appliances’, ‘feminism’, ‘maternity’, the list similarly goes on. critical approaches theorise the ways in which the social subjects profiled are not just reflected in data but might be performatively constituted by them: such processes create ‘algorithmic identities’ (cheney-lippold, 2017, 5), and ‘database subjects’ (jarrett, 2014, 27). this paper takes forward claims that the ‘algorithmic self’ plays a powerful role in how identity is constituted, yet considers this constitution as a black-boxed, market-driven form of commodification (kant, 2020). i argue that under the proprietary logics of the contemporary web, ‘algorithmic identities’ function as value-generating constellations that unequally and opaquely distribute the burdens of being constituted in data. this paper will ask: how do platforms such as facebook and google value their users as datafied, profit-generating subjects? are all data subjects valued equally, or are some more equal than others? finally, what can the ‘user herself’ know, and indeed trust, about her algorithmic constitution, and what kind of ‘force relations’ (bucher, 2016) do such forms of knowledge production create outside of the algorithm at the level of everyday representation? the paper considers these questions through the examination of a particular identity demographic: the algorithmically inferred ‘female’, based in the ‘uk’, ‘aged 25-34’. though other algorithmic profiles certainly exist (and generate their own critical problems), i use this particular template of subjectivity to explore issues of representation, black-boxing and user trust from a gendered perspective. i centre on the topics of women’s fertility and pregnancy, specifically analysing the online targeted ad campaigns of clearblue pregnancy tests and the natural cycles contraception app. i have chosen these campaigns because both have generated controversy in some form. clear blue pregnancy test ads have been met with a plethora of negative reactions online – with those who have been delivered the ad calling it ‘annoying’, ‘insulting’ and ‘inescapable’ on twitter threads and reddit forums. ads for the natural cycles contraceptive app do not have seem to have created the same user-generated scorn, yet were temporarily banned by the asa (advertising standards authority) following complaints of unplanned pregnancies among app users. these controversies, i argue, are underpinned by issues surrounding gender representation that emerge in part because of the black-boxing which occurs in personalised advertising. i argue that black-boxing occurs at two stages in this process: firstly when the subject is computationally constituted as female (i.e. in the database) and secondly when the user herself is delivered the ads informed by her algorithmic identity (i.e. at the interface). this black-boxing creates implications for user trust, representation and labour, as i explore below. methodology and indicative findings this paper combines audience reception with political economy to ascertain how the fertile female is a) made in data and b) comes to confront the ‘user herself’ (gillespie, 2014) through personalised advertising. i chart my attempts to obtain delivery statistics that show exactly how many social media users have seen these ads, how many times they have seen them, and how these users were deemed to interested in fertility products. as scholars such as brunton and nissenbaum (2015) have noted, obtaining commercial datasets has been historically been difficult or impossible: the proprietary imperative of commercial data aggregators means that it is only those who are willing to work with the logic of commerce that have been awarded access to data. my endeavours to ‘get at’ fertility datasets have (at the time of writing) proved similarly unsuccessful: despite requests from clearblue and natural cycles, google, facebook, ispot analytics, neilsen and comcast (some of the actors that might have access to such statistics), i have been unable to obtain any statistics. perhaps most notably, industry regulators such as the advertising standards authority do not have access to such data, despite the fact the natural cycles app ads were banned in the uk for a short time. though unsurprising, the black-boxing of such processes can be analysed as more than just an issue of ‘transparency’ – i will argue that confronting such ads opens up critical questions regarding how representation can be theorised when ad delivery is so individualised, ephemeral and hard to trace. critical framework and indicative discussion i consider cheney-lippold’s (2017) claim that being made in data might be politically liberating: cheney-lippold argues that because algorithmic ‘identity is beholden to algorithmic fit, not the disciplinary confines of political identity’ (2017: 66), the algorithmic self might be considered open to ‘post-identity politics’. thus, to be algorithmically identified as ‘male’ when one is cultural identified as ‘female’ reconstitutes not just users’ selfhood but can perhaps productively redefine normative categories of identity in themselves. i consider this claim from a market-driven perspective, arguing that though datafication might potentially destabilise established socio-cultural markers of gender, the marketisation of such data means that the algorithmic ‘female’ comes to be constituted through ideologically entrenched notions of the body that complicate data’s potential as wholly abstract means of categorization. i will explore cheney-lippold’s claims alongside bucher’s work on the ‘algorithmic imaginary’ (2016). bucher employs the term to describe the ways in which users themselves understand, interpret, and engage with the algorithms they encounter on a day-to-day basis but do not ‘know’ the inner mechanics of. she proposes that ‘what the algorithm does is not necessarily ‘in’ the algorithm as such’ (2016, 40) but rather is constituted partly through the imaginaries of the users that encounter the computational. i consider the ways in which the ‘algorithmic imaginary’ intersects with representations of fertility, through audience responses that suggest web users know they are being targeted, but mistrust the ways in which they are constituted in data. turning to theorisations of digital ‘women’s work’, i propose that confronting one’s datafied self as a ‘fertile female’ constitutes a form of immaterial labour (jarrett, 2015). i argue that consuming female-specific ads should be considered algorithmic women’s work – wherein the experience of being algorithmically profiled as ‘female’ both commodifies user interactions and imposes an unequal burden of socio-technical classification. though we might be data, the ways in which users are constituted as data subjects is distributed differently – and unequally – in web users’ everyday engagements. black-boxing must be critiqued not just from the perspective of privacy invasion but from the perspective of representation, in order to understand how personalised advertising might constitute forms of subjectivity, that for some, come with a heavy ideological burden. references brunton, f. & nissenbaum, h. (2015) obfuscation: a user’s guide to privacy and protest. massachusetts: mit. bucher, t. (2016) ‘the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms’, information, communication & society, 20:1, pp30-44, doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154086 cheney-lippold, j. (2017) we are data: algorithms and the making of our digital selves new york: new york university press. jarrett, k. (2015) feminism, labour and digital media: the digital housewife, london: routledge. kant, t (2020) making it personal: algorithmic personalization, identity and everyday life. new york: oxford university press. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 hagen, s, de keulenaar, e, peeters, s, tuters, m, willaert, t, wilson, j. (2020, october). transcoding between hyper-antagonistic milieus: studies on the cross-platform relations between radical political web subcultures. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. transcoding between hyper-antagonistic milieus: studies on the cross-platform relations between radical political web subcultures sal hagen university of amsterdam emillie de keulenaar simon fraser university kings college london stijn peeters university of amsterdam marc tuters university of amsterdam tom willaert vrije universiteit brussel jack wilson university of warwick this panel brings together research into the hyper-antagonistic politics and crossplatform relations of radical web subcultures, focused primarily on the u.s. context in the mid to late 2010’s. the papers share a concern with vernacular practices of “fringe” platforms favoured by an insurgent far-right movement and their relations to more “mainstream” social media. these fringe platforms engage in the production and propagation of vernacular artefacts often described as “memes”. derived from an earlier and arguably outdated paradigm in evolutionary biology, the meme metaphor is not particularly attuned to the relationality of the material “milieus” in which they are developed, adopted, and used. in an effort to describe these practices without falling back on biological or epidemiological metaphors, the papers in this panel engage with the concept of “transcoding between milieus” (deleuze & guattari 1987, p. 322). deleuze and guattari describe milieus not as “unitary”, but rather as coded by multiple “transversal” processes. according to this vitalist materialist philosophy, “not only does the living thing continually pass from one milieu to another, but the milieus pass into one another”, such that “one milieu serves as the basis for another” (1987, p. 313). the papers in this panel thus describe a mutually shaping relationship between the material affordances and the vernacular practices of given fringe platforms, using “transcoding” to conceptualize how these practices in turn overlap across different “strata” of the web. all of the papers furthermore share data-driven empirical approaches that use historical datasets from a variety of social media platforms in order to study patterns of shared political identity amongst online strangers engaged in perpetual antagonism – what we refer to as “hyper-antagonistic milieus”. such hyper-antagonism is best exemplified by the far-right activity emanating from the imageboard 4chan, which all the papers in this panel use datasets from, ranging from 2014 to the present. the first paper conducts an empirical analysis on a cultural conflict between 4chan and tumblr in 2014. it considers a series of cross-platform “raids” as a microcosm for elements that would later be provocatively framed as at the basis of an “online culture war”. the second paper focuses on a different cross-platform relationship: between 4chan and youtube. it does so through a case study of the “kekistan” meme, an imaginary country of aggrieved denizens of the “deep vernacular web” who jokingly consider themselves as being at war with “politically correct” liberal culture. in lieu of framing this relationship in terms of propaganda or quasi-biological metaphors, the paper theorizes a relationship of transcoding between the platforms in which 4chan’s vernacular culture serves as the model. the penultimate paper looks at the crossplatform prevalence of specific vernacular terms originating on 4chan/pol/ as occurring in the comments and articles of breitbart news, a media outlet whose significance has been connected with the trump campaign’s successful agenda setting in the 2016 election. in comparing these milieus from the period around the election, the paper interrogates whether the spread of /pol/’s vernacular may also indicate the spread of its hyper-antagonistic politics into a more mainstream space of political discussion. the final paper explores the cross-platform presence of fringe cultural artefacts after the “deplatforming” measures taken by platforms such as youtube in 2019. in response to academic and journalistic reports about the effectiveness of deplatforming, it takes a temporal view before and after such measures in order to trace the migration of content to alternative platforms such as bitchute, gab, and voat, as well their possible reappearance or “replatforming” on mainstream platforms. to this end, instead of following banned micro-celebrities, the paper studies the cross-platform robustness of vernacular, fringe, and hyper-antagonist discourse. taken together, the panel offers a comprehensive assessment of a moment in time when participatory culture seemed to have taken a turn towards the reactionary; how it got there, how it reverberated across the web, and how involved platforms have tried to respond. references deleuze, g, guattari, f. (1987). a thousand plateaus. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. remembering the 2014 tumblr-4chan raids: a data-driven microhistory of online politicization through crosssubcultural conflict sal hagen university of amsterdam on 9 june 2014, a post on a tumblr blog read: “join us on july 4th to celebrate our freedom and independence from racists by shutting down 4chan” (shutdown4chan, 2014). that independence day, several tumblr users answered the call. armed with loving messages and cute pictures of cats, the aim was to “detoxify” 4chan’s infamous /b/ “random” board, known for its nihilistic trolling subculture, shock value, and memes (phillips, 2015). according to vernacular web historians (internet historian, 2017), tumblr’s efforts were futile, merely invoking the collective retribution of 4chan’s users: several tumblr tags associated with gender and fandom were spammed with gore and hardcore porn. the “2014 4chan-tumblr raids”, as the event came to be known, features a dramatic twist: not a tumblr user, but someone from 4chan’s /pol/ “politically incorrect” board, now infamous for its white supremacism, was allegedly behind the tumblr post that kickstarted the controversy. the utopian outlook that once framed “twitter revolutions” a decade ago has at the dawn of the 2020’s been eclipsed by the increased influence of malicious media manipulators and far-right antagonists. while a growing body of work addresses the techno-cultural dynamics at the root of this shift (marwick & lewis, 2017; phillips, 2018; benkler, faris, & roberts, 2018), the historical role of anonymous and pseudonymous online subcultures in this shift remains understudied. how exactly did these communities manage to dramatically (re)configure their often relatively apolitical subcultural practices towards political ends? what role did extremists, like those on /pol/, have in radicalising more politically ambivalent communities? to touch on these questions, this paper asks what the tumblr-4chan raids can retroactively teach us about the political crystallisation of online subcultures halfway through the 2010s. historically, the paper scrutinises 2014 and 2015 as an alleged inflection point when anglo-american online subcultures “got political” (bernstein 2015; beran 2019). many accounts position gamergate, a series of events leading to the harassment of feminist games journalists, as a pivotal turning point in the unification and far-right shift of various online subcultures (phillips, 2018; beran, 2019, p. 136-9). without necessarily diminishing gamergate’s influence, this paper aims to present a more nuanced genealogical account of the alleged politicisation of online subcultures in the mid-2010s. it positions the 2014 tumblr-4chan raids as an alternative microcosm that already featured many of the elements that would later attain greater visibility on a much larger scale, including the leaderless and “ironic” style of politics of the so-called “alt-right” in 2016 and 2017 (heikkilä, 2017; hawley, 2017) and the covert presence of white supremacists within seemingly tongue-in-cheek conflict (marwick & lewis, 2017). this study first conducts a quantitative, data-driven analysis using datasets from the three spaces directly involved in the 2014 raids: tumblr, 4chan/b/, and 4chan/pol/. responding to the call by phillips, coleman, and beyer to “accurately map the repeated, fractured, reconfiguring mobilizations emerging from anonymous and pseudoanonymous spaces” (2017), the paper maps the 2014 raids as a “‘born digital’ sociocultural controversy” following burgess and matamoros-fernández’s study on gamergate (2016). drawing from the digital method of issue mapping (rogers, 2013; rogers, sánchez-querubín, & kil, 2015), the study engages in a “transcoding between milieus” (deleuze & guattari, 1987) by visualising and interpreting networks of hyperlinks and cross-mentions between tumblr, /b/, and /pol/. while some data-driven studies exist on these three spaces individually, this paper is methodologically unique in offering a “cross-subcultural microhistory”. it will operationalise existing and contested popular-academic narratives on the antagonistic relationship between tumblr and 4chan, notably by nagle (2017) and beran (2019). it will also be the first data-driven research into 4chan/b/ within this timeframe. after mapping the event, the research then engages with the question: how can the raids be read as invoking political identification within the three milieus? specifically, it concerns how discourse surrounding the raids can be seen to articulate political sensibilities. the paper does so by drawing from mouffe’s notion of “the political”, which is concerned with “collective forms of identification” that deal “with the formation of ‘us’ as opposed to ‘them’” (2013, p. 15), and such subjectivity is attained through “insertion in discursive/affective signifying practices, involving words, affects and actions” (2013, p. 71-3). in doing so, it aims to explain how politically divergent subcultures, whether they be progressive, reactionary, or seemingly nihilistic, can act co-constitutively, in turn challenging the notion of “subculture” as predominantly constructed by its opposition to a “mainstream” culture. references benkler, y., faris, r., & roberts, h. (2018). network propaganda: manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in american politics. oxford: oxford university press. beran, d. (2019). it came from something awful: how a toxic troll army accidentally memed donald trump into office. new york: all points books. bernstein, j. (2015). in 2015, the dark forces of the internet became a counterculture. buzzfeed news. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/in-2015-the-dark-forces-of-theinternet-became-a-countercult#.phaqpldjy burgess, j., & matamoros-fernández, a. (2016). mapping sociocultural controversies across digital media platforms: one week of #gamergate on twitter, youtube, and tumblr. communication research and practice, 2(1), 79–96. deleuze, g., & guattari, f. (1987). a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. minnesota: university of minnesota press. fairclough, r, mulderrig, j, & wodak, r. (2006). critical discourse analysis. in discourse studies: a multidisciplinary introduction, edited by teun van dijk, 357–79. london: sage publications ltd. hawley, g. (2017). making sense of the alt-right. new york: columbia university press. heikkilä, n. (2017). online antagonism of the alt-right in the 2016 election. european journal of american studies, 12(2). internet historian. (2017). the tumblr-4chan wars. [video]. youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svjwxhcnzcu marwick, a., & lewis, r. (2017). media manipulation and disinformation online. [report]. data & society. https://datasociety.net/pubs/oh/dataandsociety_mediamanipulationanddisinformationo nline.pdf miltner, k. m. (2014). “there’s no place for lulz on lolcats”: the role of genre, gender, and group identity in the interpretation and enjoyment of an internet meme. first monday, 19(8). mouffe, c. (2018). for a left populism. london: verso. nagle, a. (2017). kill all normies: the online culture wars from tumblr and 4chan to the alt-right and trump. winchester: zero books. nissenbaum, a., & shifman, l. (2017). internet memes as contested cultural capital: the case of 4chan’s /b/ board. new media & society, 19(4), 483–501. phillips, w. (2015). this is why we can’t have nice things: mapping the relationship between online trolling and mainstream culture. cambridge: mit press. phillips, w. (2018). the oxygen of amplification: better practices for reporting on extremists, antagonists, and manipulators online. [report]. data & society. https://datasociety.net/wpcontent/uploads/2018/05/1_part_1_oxygen_of_amplification_ds.pdf phillips, w., beyer, j., & coleman, g. (2017). trolling scholars debunk the idea that the alt-right’s shitposters have magic powers. motherboard. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z4k549/trolling-scholars-debunk-the-ideathat-the-alt-rights-trolls-have-magic-powers rogers, r. (2013). digital methods. cambridge: mit press. rogers, r., sánchez-querubín, n., & kil, a. (2015). issue mapping for an ageing europe. amsterdam: amsterdam university press. shutdown4chan. (2014). #shutdown4chan [tumblr post]. #shutdown4chan. https://shutdown4chan.tumblr.com/post/88296900118/its-time-to-shutdown-4chanorgjoin-us-on-july deep vernacular web transcoding: a comparative analysis of the hyper-antagonistic “kekistan” meme on youtube and 4chan in 2017 marc tuters university of amsterdam with trump’s inauguration, posters to the subcultural web forum 4chan imagined themselves as victors in “the great meme war”. in this period, the appearance of “fashy” (or fascist) memes within social media feeds was tied up in the rise of a new type of online ultra-nationalistic political movement referred to as the “alt-right”. this paper offers a historical investigation of one such “alt-right” meme: kekistan. in 2017, a contingent of trump supporters – drawn together by a dark sense of humour – imagined themselves as the citizens of the fictional nation state of kekistan at war with the forces of liberal political correctness. while having initially developed on 4chan, on youtube, dozens of kekistan-theme channels emerged, as for example in the genre of “protest larping” videos, in which trump supporters would antagonize their opponents by flying the flag of kekistan whose design was clearly based on that of the nazi’s reichskriegsflagge. this paper will trace a narrative arc of how the use and meaning of this “meme” transformed over time and across platforms, as well as offering an historical perspective onto a cross section of user-generated “alt-right” web culture – from a period of time when the movement appeared ascendant. using “kekistan” as a query to compile a historical corpus of 4chan posts and youtube videos from this period – many of which the platform has since censored – the paper will present a snapshot of a relatively brief moment in time when a “deep vernacular web” subculture associated with 4chan exploded into public view. the paper conceptualizes this cross-platform phenomenon in terms of deleuze and guattari’s concept of “transcoding between milieus” (1987 p. 322), according to which “[e]ach milieu has its own code”, and transcoding scrutinises “the manner in which one milieu serves as the basis for another” (313). as opposed to assuming a one-way “dissemination” of a propagandistic message from 4chan as the source to youtube as the target, this concept allows the paper to describe a conversation between the platforms. (this conversational aspect is, for example, demonstrated by the finding that youtube is by far the most linked-to platform in the 4chan dataset and that many of the early kekistan-themed videos within youtube appear to summarise discussions that had taken place on 4chan.) recounting this cross-platform narrative arc offers a framework for describing how the vernacular practices and technical affordances of 4chan constitute a local “code” that serves as the basis for a transcoding relationship between the platforms. the paper argues for this as a more useful concept than alternative and commonly used metaphors, whether drawn from the legacy of mass communications studies (propaganda), or else borrowed from evolutionary biology (memes) or epidemiology (viruses). as extremism watchdogs organizations remarked at the time, kekistan may be understood as a cultural artefact of the so-called “alt-right”. although never particularly coherent as a movement, in 2017 the term “alt-right” was used to refer to a broad network of actors drawn together in their mutual shared opposition to encroachments on “free speech”, whether by campus officials, social media platforms, or simply “the establishment”. whilst sharing some of the same rhetorical techniques of populists, the “alt-right” can also be understood as a communication style that was marked by an unrelenting and extreme type of antagonism combined with a sophisticated use of vernacular web culture. it was particularly associated with 4chan’s “deep vernacular” subculture, in which speech and action are governed by peculiar axioms such as “poe’s law”, which obscures a speakers’ intent behind the veils of “dissimulative identity play” (de zeeuw & tuters, 2020). together, these qualities led historians of american conservatism to refer to the “alt-right” as a “genuinely new phenomenon” (hawley, 2017, p. 50). through deleuze and guattari’s conceptual lens, this paper considers 4chan’s “deep vernacular” subculture as a kind of template for the “alt-right’s” supposed novelty. whether in the form of memes, slang expressions, links to videos, or whole narrative constructs (such as in the case of “kekistan”), individual 4chan posters use a technique of “nebulous othering” to negotiate a sense of belonging to an anonymous, ephemeral, and essentially chaotic community, through the practice of collectively mocking a vague enemy (tuters & hagen, 2019). 4chan is often framed as “influencing” other parts of the web, and nowhere is the idea of 4chan’s influence greater than within 4chan itself. while such myths of influence have been studied in relation to earlier “hacktivist” and “trolling” subcultures emerging from 4chan’s /b/ board, as the paper discusses, the myth of kekistan was primarily the product of 4chan’s “politically incorrect” discussion board, /pol/, which came to eclipse /b/ in popularity in the mid-2010’s and which is commonly associated with the emergence of the “alt-right” (hawley, 2017). even though one cannot be sure about the identity of anonymous posters on 4chan, experts have long believed the sites’ demographics to be “primarily white, male and somewhat privileged”. while the problem of “toxic technoculture” has become increasingly recognized in the years since “gamergate” with its well-known attacks on female games journalists and feminist media studies scholars, the issues of misogyny has arguably long been present in culture of webforums. as such, the analysis considers kekistan as a transcoding of the a subculture typically associated with the “underground” milieu of forums and comment sections, to much more public and “mainstream” milieus – as, for example, well captured in the image, common in 2017, of young men flying the flag of kekistan in mocking counter-protests at anti-trump demonstrations. in dialogue with these types of characterizations of the artefacts of the “alt-right”, through empirical analysis the paper asks: how did kekistan mean different things at different points and in different milieus? in spite of its manifest absurdity, the paper argues that kekistan is significant as a case study for how, for a brief period of time, a long-stand subcultural web imaginary became enlisted in the service of a new mode of “hyper-antagonistic” political speech which opposed the pure people of the “deep vernacular web” against a corrupt and gerontocratic elite, associated with the forces of “political correctness”. the paper thus considers how a subcultural style with its roots in 4chan served to unify otherwise disparate actors (including trolls, white nationalists, and bored teenage boys) in a humorous type of protest that briefly served to gloss over real ideological differences between these actors – a coalition that would become increasingly untenable in the course of 2017. in the context of broader discussions concerning the strategic appropriation of web subculture to advance a far-right agenda, the paper aims to communicate the relative nuance of these milieus and the transcoding between them, at a moment in time when the “alt-right” still appeared ascendant. references de zeeuw, d, & tuters, m. (2020). teh internet is serious business: on the deep vernacular web and its discontents. cultural politics 16(2). deleuze, g, guattari, f. (1987). a thousand plateaus. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. hawley, g. (2017). making sense of the alt-right. new york: columbia university press. tuters, m., & hagen, s. (2019). (((they))) rule: memetic antagonism and nebulous othering on 4chan. new media & society, 1461444819888746. “keep pushing new slang”: tracing the spread of extreme political vernacular from 4chan/pol/ to breitbart news stijn peeters university of amsterdam tom willaert vrije universiteit brussel fringe internet platforms such as 4chan and other imageboards are often positioned as the “birthplace of memes” (ludemann, 2018), or places where vernacular artefacts are produced that “cross over” to other platforms. through their vernacular production, such fringe platforms can then have a profound impact on popular culture and politics despite their relative obscurity. in this paper, we empirically study whether the vernaculars of one of these spaces – the extremely vitriolic “politically incorrect” sub-forum of 4chan, /pol/ – indeed has meaningful external impact, in this case on the comment section of breitbart, a right-wing news site that was found to have played a significant agendasetting role in 2016 u.s. presidential elections (benkler, faris, & roberts, 2018). we argue that a cross-over, or “transcoding”, of /pol/’s vitriolic vernacular would mark an expansion of its hyper-antagonistic politics to the more mainstream breitbart. there is some reason to suspect that a cross-over from /pol/ to elsewhere may be happening, as /pol/ but also other fringe platforms like it – e.g. gab or parts of reddit – have become associated with an increasingly popular (far) right-wing political discourse. as an antisemitic and white supremacist space (ludemann, 2018), /pol/ has also been associated with terrorist attacks in the united states, canada, and new zealand. while it is relatively obscure, /pol/ is an interesting object of study in that the phrases, images, and stereotypes initially developed there sometimes move beyond the confines of 4chan to find broader cultural uptake. the appropriation of “pepe the frog” is perhaps the most (in)famous recent example of this pattern, when in the mid 2010’s it became an icon for the “alt-right”. other examples that have resonated beyond /pol/ itself are qanon (the idea of an enigmatic figure claiming to be a white house insider; hagen et al., 2019), pizzagate (a crackpot conspiracy theory; tuters et al., 2018), as well as much of the vocabulary associated with the “manosphere” (marwick & caplan, 2018). while pepe is arguably the most famous example of /pol/’s cultural (re-)production, it is far from the only one. from antagonistic slang (“cuck”, “redpilling”, “normies”) to endless variations on the classic antisemitic “happy merchant” caricature, /pol/ is a heavily vernacular space characterised by rapid linguistic and cultural innovation. what these innovations generally have in common is that they reflect a vitriolic far-right ideology, based on a “nebulous other” that is pitted against a mostly white, male, traditionalist identity (tuters & hagen, 2019). the platform’s cultural production then is largely concerned with antagonistically articulating this other through the use of caricatures, slurs, and conspiracy theories. the extreme nature of the linguistic innovations on /pol/ is especially of concern when considering their potential to take root elsewhere. at the same time, one cannot however assume that their original valence will remain intact, since processes of translation are at work, as shown by the recent appropriation of pepe as a symbol of the civil protests in hong kong, which seemed devoid of “alt-right” connotations. with this in mind, less ambiguous artefacts, for example vitriolic phrases and racial slurs, may be more likely to remain their “original” valence. this paper empirically studies the circulation of far-right linguistic artefacts between platforms. we compare two large datasets of comments posted on /pol/ and breitbart news using methods borrowed from computational linguistics. like /pol/, breitbart rose to prominence in the context of the 2016 presidential elections in the united states. it has been described as a harbinger of the “alt-right” and a place where conspiracy theories are cultivated (davis, 2019). it thus presents a place where ideas and vernacular from /pol/ may resonate. our central research question therefore is whether we can find evidence of /pol/’s extreme vernacular spreading to breitbart, and whether this constitutes the spread of /pol/’s politics. we investigate this by tracing the occurrences of vernacular typical for /pol/ on breitbart. if /pol/’s culture does indeed resonate on breitbart, one would expect to see phrases or words that are popular on /pol/ to also appear and grow in popularity there, in a similar context. our dataset comprises 20 months of comments, centred around the 2016 u.s. elections. if we do find evidence of 4chan’s vernacular spreading, this could constitute what is popularly referred to as “widening the overton window”, i.e. the practice of making hitherto taboo topics fair game for discussion. as such, the discourse on breitbart – a site with a far larger reach than /pol/ – could then be characterised as becoming more extreme. we extract relevant case studies from these large datasets by first extracting words that occur relatively often in either dataset. we are especially interested in “neologisms” here, i.e. words that do not occur in standard dictionaries (in this case, the google ngrams corpus), marking vernacular and linguistic innovation. a significant majority of these neologisms that first appear within our data are found to occur on 4chan before they occur on breitbart, indicating that /pol/ indeed functions as an incubator of vernacular that then circulates to other platforms. next, we qualitatively zoom in on a small number of case studies from these neologisms that occur on /pol/ first. here we are especially interested in words that clearly “spike” in popularity in breitbart after they have first become popular on 4chan. examples of these include “borealis”, a white supremacist phrase referring to northern europe; “kalergi”, a reference to the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory; and “lugenpresse”, a classic fascist term referring to supposedly untruthful mainstream media. these case studies, in which we qualitatively explore the context in which the terms are used as well as around which events they were used particularly often, complement the larger quantitative data analysis. together, they show that indeed the circulation of /pol/produced phrases and words extends to other platforms; and that, even though the “milieu” they are adopted in is different from /pol/, many of these phrases remain unambiguously hateful, antagonistic, or otherwise “extreme”. this indicates that /pol/’s reputation as an incubator of extreme politics is warranted, and that the imageboard could potentially have a significant impact on discourse beyond 4chan itself. references benkler, y., faris, r., & roberts, h. (2018). network propaganda: manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in american politics. oxford: oxford university press. davis, m. (2019). a new, online culture war? the communication world of breitbart.com. communication research and practice, 5(3), 241–254. hagen, s., de zeeuw, d., peeters, s., jokubauskaitė, e., & briones, á. (2019). understanding normiefication: a cross-platform analysis of the qanon conspiracy theory. digital methods initiative wiki. https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/dmi/winterschool2019normiefication ludemann, d. (2018). /pol/emics: ambiguity, scales, and digital discourse on 4chan. discourse, context & media(24), 92–98. marwick, a. e., & caplan, r. (2018). drinking male tears: language, the manosphere, and networked harassment. feminist media studies, 18(4), 543–559. tuters, m., & hagen, s. (2019). (((they))) rule: memetic antagonism and nebulous othering on 4chan. new media & society, 1461444819888746. tuters, m., jokubauskaitė, e., & bach, d. (2018). post-truth protest: how 4chan cooked up the pizzagate bullshit. m/c journal, 21(3). alt-tech, alt-media, alt-right: far-right milieus and alternative media diets after the 2019 “summer of deplatforming” emillie de keulenaar simon fraser university kings college london jack wilson university of warwick historically, facebook, twitter, and youtube have used the argument of affording their users “free speech” as both a selling point as well as a means to distinguish themselves as being democratic, “participatory” alternatives to mass media (langlois, 2013). in the past half-decade, these platforms have however taken on a more proactive role of moderating their user base and content following myriad controversies – including harassment campaigns (jeong, 2019), the fake news-mediated dissemination of conspiracist narratives (venturini et al., 2018), and inter-ethnic violence up to and including genocide (mozur, 2018). furthermore, this has manifested in the implementation of anti-hate speech measures intended to prevent incitement to hatred or violence towards specific nationalities, sexualities, genders, or ethnic and religious groups (gordon, 2017). indeed, mainstream platforms now have many strategies to contain hate speech, from demoting content in recommendations and search results (constine, 2019) to redirecting users to educational material in an effort to “deradicalize” them (the redirect method, 2016). thus far, the primary method in the attempt to “sanitise” content has been “deplatforming”. deplatforming is the banishment of users and deletion of their content for hate speech and related offenses. this approach has embedded these platforms in ongoing battles of ideas as to what constitutes an offence to racial, gender, and other identities, how to protect such identities from discrimination, and where to delimit the boundaries of free speech. this practice has sparked fierce resistance from the deplatformed users themselves – particularly with those who identify with political positions on the right. particularly in the anglo-american context, these aggrieved users (or former users) often assert that these platforms operate as part of a conspiracy concerned with censoring ideas rather than offensive speech (rogers, forthcoming). media and scholarly research on deplatforming has mainly studied the effectiveness of such measures, and – considering that figures like the breitbart columnist milo yiannopolous or the influential conspiracy theorist alex jones “mellowed” their hitherto “extreme” political language and that their audience has thinned (rogers, forthcoming) – such studies have given reason to believe that deplatforming is an effective strategy for policing hate speech and protecting users from radicalisation (chandrasekharan et al., 2017). however, studies on the effectiveness (and ethics) of deplatforming have yet to engage with deplatforming’s effects beyond this initial migration to alternative platforms. although it is unlikely that alternative platform ecologies will constitute a real alternative to mainstream platforms (roose, 2017), this paper poses two claims: that they nonetheless constitute a substantial alternative media diet for users in mainstream social media platforms, and that, as such, they work not in isolation but in tandem with mainstream platforms as co-dependent “milieus” (deleuze & guattari, 1987, p. 313). that these alt-tech milieus emerge at all suggests a certain robustness and ideological momentum on the part of these hate-driven communities, even if their overall numbers have diminished. the ongoing presence of such milieus is not addressed in scholarship that has focused – to date – on deplatformed individuals (rogers, forthcoming). we hypothesise that while deplatforming may initially diminish the size of a deplatformed milieu, those that remain may be – or may become – more engaged, and in this sense deplatforming may actually work to reconstitute and cohere these communities. while the former is a well-known claim (ohlheiser, 2016), we further hypothesise that deplatforming can also energise a circulation of the deplatformed content across various milieus. this post-deplatforming circulation can occur as a “migration” to alternative platforms, as evidenced by a re-appearance of several banned neo-nazi youtube videos on bitchute, archive.org, and other alternative media websites (oilab, 2019). further, removed content may be the subject of reconstitution, or “replatforming”, on the platform it was initially banned from. both allow the removed content to be consumed and exchanged on mainstream platforms again, whether as hosted by the platform itself or in the form of external urls and other exchanged objects. to engage with these hypotheses, we propose a two-phased study drawing from digital methods (rogers 2013). firstly, we map the migration of deplatformed youtube videos after its 2019 “summer of deplatforming”, when the video service deleted thousands of red-flagged channels and videos (oilab, 2019). can we see the deplatformed videos move to alternative milieus, and if so, where do they appear? as a basis for this is a corpus of metadata, including video titles, of thousands of far-right youtube videos gathered in late 2018. we first map which videos and channels are still hosted on youtube today by requesting their present status through the youtube api. then, for the deleted videos, we query their metadata 1) on search engines to extract domains and map the breadth of alternative websites, 2) on bitchute and alternative media websites to inquire their prevalence on alternative platform ecologies, and 3) on the archival websites archive.org and archive.is to investigate possible survival as archived content. the second stage entails identifying whether the surviving content eventually re-appears or “replatforms” on mainstream websites. we use the base corpus of deplatformed youtube metadata, as well as derivative “natively digital objects” (rogers 2013) as found on alternative platforms (such as alternative video titles or archive.org urls), and query this back on youtube, as well as in reddit posts and tweets. by identifying which videos re-appeared, the aim is to arrive at a fine-grained mapping of deplatformed content by not only tracing where they “migrate” but also if and where they “replatform”. references chandrasekharan, e., pavalanathan, u., srinivasan, a., glynn, a., eisenstein, j., & gilbert, e. (2017). you can’t stay here: the efficacy of reddit’s 2015 ban examined through hate speech. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 1(cscw), 1–22. constine, j. (2019). instagram now demotes vaguely ‘inappropriate’ content. techcrunch. http://social.techcrunch.com/2019/04/10/instagram-borderline/ deleuze, g., & guattari, f. (1987). a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. minnesota: university of minnesota press. gordon, g. s. (2017). atrocity speech law: foundation, fragmentation, fruition. oxford: oxford university press. hagen, s., burton, a., wilson, j., & tuters, m. (2019). infinity’s abyss: an overview of 8chan. oilab.eu. https://oilab.eu/infinitys-abyss-an-overview-of-8chan/ jeong, s. (2019). zoë quinn. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/15/opinion/gamergate-zoe-quinn.html langlois, g. (2013). participatory culture and the new governance of communication: the paradox of participatory media. television & new media, 14(2), 91–105. mozur, p. (2018). a genocide incited on twitter, with posts from myanmar’s military. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmarfacebook-genocide.html ohlheiser, a. (2016). banned from twitter? this site promises you can say whatever you want. washington post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theintersect/wp/2016/11/29/banned-from-twitter-this-site-promises-you-can-say-whateveryou-want/ oilab. (2019). 4chan’s youtube: a fringe perspective on youtube’s great purge of 2019. oilab.eu. https://oilab.eu/4chans-youtube-a-fringe-perspective-on-youtubesgreat-purge-of-2019/ rogers, r. (2013). digital methods. cambridge: mit press. rogers, r. (forthcoming). deplatforming: following extremist internet celebrities to telegram and alternative social media. european journal of communication. roose, k. (2017). the alt-right created a parallel internet. it’s an unholy mess. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/technology/alt-right-internet.html the daily beast. (2017). daily stormer site moves to dark web after shutdown. the daily beast. https://www.thedailybeast.com/daily-stormer-site-moves-to-dark-web-after shutdown the redirect method. (2016). the redirect method. http://redirectmethod.org venturini, t., bounegru, l., gray, j., & mauri, m. (2018). a field guide to ‘fake news’ and other information disorders. ssrn. http://fakenews.publicdatalab.org/ selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 cornelius, k. (2017, october 18-21). the role of standard form contracts in an information society and smart contract future. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the role of standard form contracts in an information society and smart contract furture kristin b. cornelius university of california, los angeles introduction 2017 was said to be the “year of the smart contract” (gilson, 2017)—a technology praised as having the potential to revolutionize the future (cassano, 2014), smart contracts are based on an idea proposed by nick szabo in 1994 that describes a set of protocols that make use blockchain technology (like bitcoin) to create small, automated ‘machines,’ which execute easily automated transactions with cryptocurrencies. they utilize “immutable, unstoppable, and irrefutable computer code” that, due to being tamper and revision proof, are said to be able to replace centralized governance and third party institutions (szabo, 1996), the goal of many blockchain proponents (wall, 2016). since their successful implementation with the ethereum blockchain in 2015, smart contracts have recently been adopted by microsoft, intel, and more than two dozen banks (foley, 2017) and have been at the center of discussions for several national and international governments institutions and the entire, worldwide financial industry. while smart contracts seemingly promise an a decentralized, networked environment similar to the ideal information society proposed by castells (1996, 2007), smart contracts (and blockchain more generally) suggest that technology can enforce the “same rules for everyone,” rather than just facilitate a platform. although smart contracts may not substitute standard-form contracts (sfcs) in a 1:1 ratio, their similarities to many types of sfcs is apparent and should be explored. further, since sfcs tend to appear “routine” and “superficial,” the unequal position of the adherent (often users), including a lack of negotiating power and significant impact on user freedoms, is often masked in a digital environment, which only benefits drafters (denardis, 2012). thus, this project looks critically at possible implementations of smart contracts, suggesting this analytical view is needed so as to ensure the inequities of previous sfcs are not codified into this new technology. issues: standard form contracts and tos agreements a common feature of commercial relationships, standard-form contracts (sfcs) have been a product of organized commerce in some fields (e.g. marine shipping, banking) for many centuries, and in others (e.g. mass production industries) more recently as a modern form of a business service contract for consumers (sales, 1953; burke, 2000). defined as legal agreements that contain written, fixed terms in advance of a person using a service, sfcs account for the vast majority of contracts—it is estimated that more than 99% of all contracts used in commercial and consumer transactions are sfcs (patterson, 2010). modern sfcs have many positives: they encourage trade by increasing transactional efficiency, and decrease transaction costs through reduced negotiation (hillman and rachlinski, 2001). however, sfcs have also been questioned for their potential abuses as they leave one party (i.e. the adherent, or the entity who is being served) subject to the will of the other (i.e. the drafter, or the entity providing the service). hence, as sfcs are “accompanied by inequality of bargaining power,” it is much more likely that they will be “used as instruments of economic oppression” (mulcahy, 2008). one relevant example that can be used as a case study of sfcs’ inequities is the current genre of terms of service (tos) that appears either as a link in the margins of webpages (browsewrap) or as a step that requires explicit agreement (clickwrap) (moringiello & reynolds, 2007). what is constituted as agreement in these settings is far from the traditional “meeting of the minds” description previously used to determine the status of a contract (preston and mccann, 2011). moreover, combined with lack of negotiating options and commonly used mandatory arbitration clauses, this form tends to prompt a “private conversation” between drafters and courts (horton, 2009). additionally, overbroad, legally prosecutable descriptions of ‘authorized use’ are allowed under the outdated provisions of the computer fraud and abuse act (cfaa), such as in the current aclu case which aims to protect researchers from being charged with normal activity (e.g. data scraping or ‘test’ accounts), citing a ‘chilling effect’ from these contractual affordances (i.e. sandvig v. lynch, 2016). analysis if we apply these issues from digitizing tos agreements to smart contracts, we can draw some early parallels. ‘agreement’ for smart contracts takes many forms, including digital signatures or commitment to the block; however, smart contracts have the potential to have a wide variety of functions and could be between two individuals, two firms, or even between two other smart contracts. one example of ‘agreement’ that could be used to replace arbitration takes the form of a ‘consensus’ implemented by some smart contract applications, where token holders are chosen at random to vote on issues, similar to juries; yet due to the incentives to participate, often these votes are not objective (othman, 2017). additionally, as some scholars have began to note, the proponents of smart contracts may be overlooking some of the previous social mechanisms in contracts, such as ‘good faith clauses’ or purposefully vague terms that allow for future renegotiation between the two parties, which are difficult to implement in code into this new environment (levy, 2017). lastly, older policies like the sarbanesoxley act (2002) which applies to the destruction and alteration of business records, could, like the cfaa, be applied in a similarly overbroad way if each smart contract transaction is determined to be a record, which could have prosecutable consequences for average users. thus, in the networked, information society, as the issues of sfcs have only been exacerbated as tos have retreated from paper contracts to conspicuously hidden hyperlinks, and critical work needs to be done to ensure smart contracts do not replicate these inequities. references burke, j.a (2000). “contract as commodity: a nonfiction approach,” seton hall legislative journal. cassano, j. (2014). “what are smart contracts? cryptocurrency’s killer app.” fast company. retrieved from: https://www.fastcompany.com/3035723/app economy/smart-contracts-could-be-cryptocurrencys-killer-app castells, m. (1996). the rise of the network society, the information age: economy, society, and culture, vol. i. oxford: blackwell publishers. castells, m. (2007). “communication, power and counter-power in the network society” international journal of communication (1), p. 238-266. denardis, l. (2012). the global war for internet governance. new haven: yale university press. foley, m. jo. (2017). “microsoft, intel, banks form enterprise ethereum blockchain alliance.” zd net. retrieved from: http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-intelbanks-form-enterprise-ethereum-blockchain-alliance/ gilson, c.. (2017). “lightning’s elizabeth stark: 2017 will be the year of smart contracts.” the cointelegraph. retrieved from: https://cointelegraph.com/ news/lightnings-elizabeth-stark-2017-will-be-the-year-of-smart-contracts hillman, r. a. and j. j. rachlinski. (2001). “standard-form contracts in the electronic age.” available at ssrn: https://ssrn.com/abstract=287819 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.287819 horton, d. (2009). the shadow terms: contract procedure and unilateral amendments. ucla law review. 605. levy, k. c. (2017). “book-smart, not street-smart: blockchain-based smart contracts and the social workings of law.” engaging science, technology, and society (3), p. 1-15. moringiello & reynolds. (2007). survey of law of cyberspace: electronic contracting cases 2006-2007. the business lawyer, vol. 63. othram, abraham. (2017). “smart contracts will need human juries.” financial times. retrieved https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/07/11/2191240/guest-post-smartcontracts-will-need-human-juries/ from patterson, m. r. (2010). standardization of standard-form contracts: competition and contract implications, william & mary law review 52(2). preston, c. & eli w. mccann. (2011). unwrapping shrinkwraps, clickwraps, and browsewraps: how the law went wrong from horse traders to the law of the horse. byu journal of public law. vol. 26. sales, h.b. (1953). “standard from contracts.” the modern law review. vol. 16(3). p. 318-342. szabo, n. (1996). “smart contracts: building blocks for digital markets.” alamut. retrieved from http://www.alamut.com/subj/economics/nick_szabo/smart contracts.html mulcahy, l. (2008). contract law in perspective, 5th ed. new york : taylor & francis. n.a. (2016). “sandvig v. lynch — challenge to cfaa prohibition on uncovering racial discrimination online.” aclu. retrieved from: https://www.aclu.org/cases/sandvig-v-lynch-challenge-cfaa-prohibitionuncovering-racial-discrimination-online wall, larry. (2016). "smart contracts" in a complex world.” federal reserve bank of atlanta. retrieved from: https://www.frbatlanta.org/cenfis/publications/ notesfromthevault/1607 final upload_aoir.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): kaun, a., velkova, j., laaksonen, s., delfanti, a., logsdon, a., stiernstedt, f., lehtiniemi, t., ruckenstein, m. (2020, october). in the shadows of the digital economy: the ghost work of infrastructural labor. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. in the shadows of the digital economy: the ghost work of infrastructural labor what does digital piecework have in common with laboring in the warehouse of a large online shopping platform? how is data cleaning related to digitization work and ai training in prisons? this panel suggests bringing these diverse ways of laboring in the digital economies together by considering these practices as infrastructural labor that takes the shape of shadow work (illich, 1981) and ghost labor (gray & suri, 2019). in recent years, critical infrastructure studies have turned our attention to the social practices and the work that goes into developing, building, repairing and maintaining infrastructures of communication (parks and starosielski, 2015). susan leigh star (1999) has pointed to the importance of making visible the ordinary work that is involved in infrastructure building and maintenance, including the labor of janitors and cleaners (see also parks & starosielski, 2015). sarah t. roberts (2019) investigates the casualized labor of content moderators in social media spaces in a global context. this includes studying the work that emerges with and through media infrastructures such as downey’s study of telegraph messenger boys between 1850 and 1950. like the messenger boys, the cases of digital labor considered in this panel constitute examples of emerging forms of work at the intersection between automation and physical labor, forms of work that combine machine labor with human labor and human labor that makes machine automation possible in the first place. the integration of analyses of labor with questions of infrastructure, hence, points to the socio-technical character of infrastructures and that they always have to rely on human productive activity. work and labor in modern, capitalist society imply power, authority and possibility for resistance, and these dimensions are crucial for understanding why and how infrastructures are realized and how they work. infrastructure labor is ambiguous. it is both visible and invisible depending on the specific tasks and their inherent power relations (leigh star & strauss, 1999). it includes both manual and cognitive labor. it is geared towards innovation as well as repair, maintenance and servitude. the individual contributions discuss diverse forms of infrastructural labor ranging from data practices to make and keep data clean (paper 1), human extended machine labor at warehouses (paper 2), digitization and media work at prisons (paper 3) and prisoners training ai (paper 4). through bringing this range of practices together, the panel aims to paint the contours of infrastructural labor at the margins of digital economies pointing towards forms of alienation and resistance that have long been part of labor relations, but that are renegotiated in the context of emerging technologies within digital economies that need human labor to be sustained and further innovated. references gray, m. l., & suri, s. (2019). ghost work. how to stop silicon valley from building a new global underclass. boston, ma: houghton mifflin harcourt. leigh star, s., & strauss, a. (1999). layers of silence, arenas of voice: the ecology of visible and invisible work. computer supported cooperative work, 8, 9-30. parks, l., & starosielski, n. (2015). introduction. in l. parks & n. starosielski (eds.), signal traffic: critical studies of media infrastructures (pp. 1-27). urbana: university of illinois press. roberts, s.t. (2019) behind the screen: content moderation in the shadows of social media. new haven: yale university press. illich, ivan (1981). shadow work. boston: marian boyars. extended abstracts cleaning data: the socio-technical construction of order in the digital economy julia velkova linköping university salla-maria laaksonen university of helsinki data has become the ‘raw’ material used to produce value in the digital economy, and turned into an object around which many fields of scientific and economic activity constitute themselves (ruppert et al., 2017; kitchin, 2014). data, however, is never raw, as lisa gitelman famously formulated. instead, it is collected, curated, mined and analyzed, and simultaneously constantly re-imagined through social and cultural practices. in short, data needs human care at various stages of its lifetime. in this paper we explore the cultural practices and social understandings of cleanliness that emerge at distinct infrastructural layers of the digital economy at which data-related practices are performed. critical data studies have previously acknowledged the centrality of various forms of processing involved in data practices (beer, 2019; kitchin, 2014). a much discussed form of data processing and cleaning has been identified at the level of social media content where human labour is central for removing inappropriate content (gillespie, 2018; ruckenstein & turunen, 2019). at the production level, infrastructure studies have problematised the energy-intense labour of machines in coal-powered data centres, which enable data processing, but with significant consequences for the environment, local communities and urban infrastructure (hogan, 2018; velkova, 2016). hence, symbolic cleanliness and environmental pollution have emerged as categories that define data practices in terms of labour, value and care. this paper extends these debates by ethnographically engaging with the social and technological practices of ‘cleaning’ data at two infrastructural layers of its production as a commodity in platform capitalism—in data centres and in data analytic companies. theoretically, we develop our discussion of cleanliness drawing upon perspectives from sts and anthropology on the cultural work and significance of ordering and classification (douglas, 1966/2002; bowker & star, 2000). as douglas (2002) wrote, dirt is a relative category which offends against a desired order. it destabilises that order by introducing internal contradictions to a social system, confronting it with its own anomalies, engendering understandings of danger. likewise, practices of classification (bowker & star, 2000) represent a mechanism to align different agendas and form relationships between disparate actors. examining different understandings that cleanliness takes within data analytics companies and data centres offers the possibility to see how the labour of keeping data clean aligns and synchronises different parts of the digital economy. empirically, we draw on ethnographic data and interviews collected in four finnish social media analytics companies and within two data centres located in finland. the analytics companies varied in size and stage, but all employed computational text mining methods instead of using mainstream platform metrics. the data centres were operated by a global platform data giant and a collocation service provider. in all sites, data were collected during one-week-long participatory observation periods, during which detailed field notes and visual material was collected, and altogether 23 informants were interviewed across the sites. our findings illuminate the centrality of cleanliness in data practices, and the variety of social and economic ends to which cleanliness is mobilised. in the context of social media analytics the idea of cleaning data emerges as strongly connected to enabling economic value creation. cleaning encompasses either filtering the data (i.e. leaving only relevant and valuable parts) or enriching the data (i.e., using sophisticated methods to extract information, such as recognizing named entities or analysing the sentiment). these practices are hidden from the public sight and from the customers to whom the analysis of data is being sold: they are part of the rehearsed ‘magic’ of technology (bowker & star, 2000). both filtering and enriching work to prepare the data for future uses and simultaneously work to generate those desired futures for the data use. cleanliness is essential; the function of the analysis is to detach the messy original context, put the data in order in a new, cleaner context, and to generate and sell a sense of control. hence, cleanliness is about reduction and removal of anomalies which are either not regarded profitable, or could disturb a dominant logic towards which analysis and value production from data is being geared (cf douglas, 2002). data is also being maintained clean at the very physical, elemental level, within the industry-scale production infrastructures that provide the computational power for data processing -data centres. the cleanliness of data in this context takes two dominant orientations. first, it defines the temporal mode of producing value from data, by organising computing equipment that underpins data analytics to uphold a factory ideal of uninterrupted production (cf. noble, 1986). to achieve this ideal, the natural and human environments from within servers compute data are constantly purified to secure incessant computation; incoming air is filtered from dust, floors and cables are scrubbed and kept sterile, diesel generators are kept meticulously clean. second, the sterility of the physical environment where data computation takes place has also a discursive function, to frame data within a collective vision of future-oriented data-driven industrial production. in difference from the social media analytics context where data is omnipresent, in the data centre, data is invisible. the physical space of its computation and ordering is similar to that of many other industrial processing factories, such as power plants or chair assembly factories. yet, the cleanliness of the space produces a sense of modernity for the workers, and of belonging to a digital future that they are invisibly maintaining. taken together, the different forms and orientations that cleanliness takes in our empirical contexts point to a logic of infrastructural alignment of data processing practices. in this logic, the human work of cleaning in contexts of data processing organises temporally data practices turning them into a continuous form of production, which is then also ordered symbolically and discursively. this form of ordering produces the 'factory sublime' (nye, 2007) that surrounds data, a sense of awe and astonishment around digital industries under transformation. the seeming purity of computation environments as well as the urge to produce clean data reflect and reinforce the belief in the value of data processing, legitimising it both for the market, for the local communities, and for the workers who labour in these facilities. references: beer, d. (2019). the data gaze. london: sage. bowker, g., & star, s. l. (2000). sorting things out. mit press. douglas, m. (2002). purity and danger. london: routledge. hogan, m. (2018). big data ecologies. ephemera 18(3), 631–657. gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet. new haven: yale university press. noble, d. (1986). forces of production: a social history of industrial automation. new york: oxford university press. nye, d. (2007). american technological sublime. cambridge, mass.: mit press. kitchin, r. (2014). the data revolution. london: sage. ruckenstein, m. & turunen, l. (2019). re-humanizing the platform: content moderators and the logic of care. new media & society, 1461444819875990. ruppert, e., isin, e., & bigo, d. (2017). data politics. big data & society, 4(2), 205395171771774. velkova, j. (2016). data that warms: waste heat, infrastructural convergence and the computation traffic commodity. big data & society 3(2), 1–10. humanly extended automation, or the future of work seen through amazon patents alessandro delfanti university of toronto in the last few years, the multinational corporation amazon has contributed to anxieties about automation through a series of innovations that aim at reducing its reliance on living labour. amazon stores the commodities it sells through its e-commerce websites in hundreds of gigantic warehouses, or fulfillment centers (fcs), located at the periphery of major urban areas across the world. each employs thousands of workers who manually store or retrieve the commodities customers purchase through the website. management uses amazon’s massive digital infrastructure to capture worker knowledge about warehouse inventory and thus organize the labour process downstream, as well as to control and discipline workers (delfanti 2019). yet while today’s fcs require masses of workers performing physical and repetitive tasks, the introduction of new robots which move shelves or pack boxes generated news attention as a harbinger of automation, ultimately pointing to a future “lights out” warehouse populated only by machines. exploiting their public nature, i strategically use patents owned by amazon to take a glimpse at technology that the corporation may one day introduce in its fulfillment processes. the design stage is a major step through which the relationship between machines and humans materializes, and studying it helps unearth the political and contested nature of technology. but a closer look at the thousands of patents owned and submitted by amazon suggests that humans are not about to disappear from warehouses anytime soon. indeed, many portray a warehouse floor in which machines increase worker surveillance and work rhythms, for example in the case of a bracelet used to capture data from and provide feedback on workers’ movements. others, such as task allocation algorithms or sensors that analyze available space in shelves, seem to aim at segmenting the labour process and thus increasing the corporation’s ability to increase the productivity of its workforce. visors and wearable technologies that capture data from workers’ activities incorporate this knowledge into machinery and use it to rationalize the labour process in an ever more pervasive form of digital taylorism. for example, data extracted from workers’ activity is used to train robots. patents materialize the company’s desire for a technological future in which humans extend machinery and become its living and sensing appendages. we refer to the new relationship emerging from such technologies as a form of humanly extended automation. the concept derives from a foundational 1960 essay on humancomputer interaction, in which american psychologist and computing pioneer j. c. r. licklider imagined forms of automation in which human operators serve the technology, which he called “humanly extended machines.” the idea of machines extended by humans also flips mcluhan’s famous idea of media as extensions of human senses and organs (1964). instead, amazon’s patents imagine humans as extending machinery’s ability to perceive, learn from, and act upon the environment. by adopting licklider’s definition, we propose that amazon’s future warehouse automation may further marx’s idea of workers being reduced to the “conscious organs” of machinery in a future automatic factory in which “it is the machine which possesses the skills, it is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own” (1973: 693). in an industrial era dominated by the steam engine, as in marx’s time, workers provided physical input, for example feeding raw materials to machinery, digital machinery feeds on workers’ mental and sensory operations as much as their muscle. rather than representing the liberated cognitive power of the multitude, here marx’s general intellect should be seen as “capital’s accumulated machinic capacities, excised from social human labour” (dyer-witheford et al. 2019). we identify three key forms in which the continued presence of humans and the increased digitization of their work in the warehouse manifests as humanly extended automation. first, machines surveil workers and control and intensify their labour. this is based on increased machinic control over workers, decomposition and taskification of their activities, and further automation of managerial functions. second, automation captures and datafies workers’ activities and tacit knowledge to recursively improve in a form of taylorism that optimizes not just human work but machinic processes too. third, humanly extended automation is based on a division of labour between humans and robots in which workers are increasingly exchangeable with automated technology and intervene mostly to make up for robots’ shortcomings. this paper is based on content analysis from over 200 patents issued to amazon in the last five years and targeting technology related to inventory management and warehousing. it is built around three bodies of theory. first, marxist theory including early italian operaismo authors such as mario tronti (1966) and raniero panzieri (1961) contextualizes the role of technology in production processes. second, feminist technology studies authors such as judy wajcman (2017) or atanasoski & vora (2019) allow to nuance issues of power distribution and the ways in which worker bodies are invisibilized in patents. third, social theorists such as john urry (2016) and barbara adam (2000) help me analyze the extent to which patents grant ontological status to futures that are produced and traded, although not materially present. as they work to sustain and improve the digital infrastructure that makes their labour possible, workers contribute to shaping an increasingly machinic future workplace. through myriads of sensors and other devices, workers will act and sense on behalf of amazon’s technological infrastructure. once incorporated into ever-evolving machinery, datafied worker activities and knowledge may provide the foundations for the automation of further processes. borrowing from a patent, one can safely assume that “it is inevitable [...] that the paths of the robots and humans working in the warehouse will cross.” the authors of this patent are concerned because “direct contact between the human workers and the robots [...] can be problematic, and a maintenance issue for the robots” (stubbs 2018). i am rather concerned with new technology’s potential to create maintenance issues for the workers, as they face ever-innovated forms of inequity and are increasingly subordinated to machines, as dreaded by 1960s operaismo and 2010s feminist technology studies alike. references adam, b. (2000). foreword. in brown et al. (eds) contested futures, pp. xii-xiii, ashgate. atanasoski n & vora k (2019) surrogate humanity. race, robots, and the politics of technological futures. durham: duke university press. delfanti, a. (2019). machinic dispossession and augmented despotism: digital work in an amazon warehouse. new media & society, online. dyer-witheford, n., kjøsen, a.m., and steinhoff, j. (2019) inhuman power. artificial intelligence and the future of capitalism. london: pluto press. licklider, j.c.r. (1960) man-computer symbiosis. ire transactions on human factors in electronics 1, pp. 4-11. marx k (1973) grundrisse. new york: penguin mcluhan m (1964) understanding media: the extensions of man. new york: mcgraw hill. panzieri r (1961) sull’uso capitalistico delle macchine nel neocapitalismo. quaderni rossi 1: 53-72. stubbs, a., et al. (2018). system and methods to facilitate human/robot interaction, united states patent no. us 9,889,563 b1 urry j (2016) what is the future? london: polity. wajcman, j. (2017) automation: is it really different this time? the british journal of sociology, 68(1), 119-127. logged in and locked up? digital labor in prisons anne kaun södertörn university alexis logsdon university of minnesota libraries fredrik stiernstedt södertörn university digital workers can be locked out—or choose to log out—from digital platforms. but there’s a class of digital workers who cannot log out from their platforms because they’re locked up. incarcerated workers are largely overlooked in research on labor in general and digital labor in particular, but they have long contributed to crucial societal infrastructures, including media and digital infrastructures. from leased workers building the railway in the us to constructing the canal systems in sweden, prisoners’ labor has been widespread as an important part of value production. in the current day, part of the labor conducted by incarcerated individuals is related to the production, repair and maintenance of media devices and media infrastructures constituting what we call prison media work (kaun & stiernstedt, 2020). additionally, prisoners are increasingly providing labor to state agencies, including libraries and state archives, in order to produce digitized records for preservation, research, and recreation (logsdon, 2019). in other contexts, prisoners are producing valuable training data for artificial intelligence and machine learning (see fourth presentation in the panel). work and productive labor are central aspects of prison life. prisons have accordingly been called “factories behind bars” (lebaron, 2008) and torsten eriksson, the former director general of the swedish prison and probation service, in a debate book on penal ideals in sweden quotes the motto of the architectural committee of the correctional services “we build the factory first and then the prison that belongs to the factory” (eriksson, 1966; see also nilsson, 2017). in the postwar period in sweden, factory work and prisons were imagined as closely integrated and to provide “meaningful” work as an important part of the penal logic. the idea of integrating work into the prison everyday life was translated into modern prison architecture in sweden around that time and big “factory prisons” such as hall and kumla were built. industrial work in the prison context developed rapidly after the second world war and was increasingly integrated into rehabilitation programmes for prisoners. the work conducted by prisoners has historically ranged from assignments for internal purposes such as simple administration, laundry, cleaning and cooking, to work assignments for external companies and public institutions. the work in prisons as well as convict leasing has been addressed, though not extensively, earlier (davis, 2003; gilmore, 2007; mancini, 1996; nilsson, 2017). what has been underexplored so far is a specific part of prison work that relates to media or what we call prison media work. this includes the construction of crucial media-related infrastructures such as laying cables, producing parts of infrastructures such as electronic equipment, envelops and mail bags for the postal system as well as maintenance work on such infrastructures for example repair shops for television and radio sets and the dissembling of obsolete devices (conrad, 2011). because the labor conducted by prisoners most often includes manual labor that does not require specific or extensive training to perform, few have considered the relationship between prison labor and media work. however, of the three categories that the swedish prison and probation services has used to organize prison labor throughout the 20th century – namely, agriculture, forestry and industry – industrial work conducted within prisons has often included media work. today, this production has its developed own brand, made in prison, to market its products. in the us, prisoners are employed to digitize newspapers for state archives, yearbooks, and genealogical records, adding a deeper layer to already obscured labor of digitization of the cultural record. we conceptualize prison media work in similar terms as kelly gates has done for – ironically police media labor that encompasses among other things “the work of wearing cameras is transformed into scalable, infrastructural labor, and where the individual videos and embodied work activities involved in digitally recorded policing become valuable objects of exchange in the police media economy” (gates, 2015). gates’ conceptualization and investigation of police media labor provides also an important taxonomy that allows to develop a typology of prison media work: “like most forms of media work, the media labor that the police perform is simultaneously immaterial and material, cultural and technical, mental and manual. far from providing individual police workers with an empowering creative outlet for self-expression, it requires a repudiation of creative subjectivity, by and large serving the risk-management needs of police organizations and policing as an institution. it also serves the direct and indirect aims of a variety of interconnected industries—a set of aims and connections that require further research.” (gates, 2015) we argue that prison media work ranges from material to immaterial work, from technical to cultural and from manual to cognitive work. in the analysis, we show the historical movement from material to immaterial, from technical to cultural and from manual to mental work. prison media work as empirical phenomenon and theoretical conception extends ongoing debates on work and labor in media studies that have focused on questions of creativity (hesmondhalgh & baker, 2011), exploitation (qiu, 2016) and hidden precarious labor (mayer, 2011). this presentation draws on empirical research conducted in the us and european context concerning digital labor of prisoners. bringing together research on historical forms of prison media work in the swedish context with explorations of contemporary digital labor in us-american prisons, this presentation develops insights on digital labor in prisons beyond national jurisdiction and prison regimes. we conceptualize the digital labor conducted as a) industrial-like, repetitive work and b) the work of being tracked generating data as a resource of digital infrastructures. digital pieceworkers on platforms such as mechanical turk and upwork work isolated and disconnected from each other forestalling political organization. digital labor in prisons takes this alienation and invisibility to its extreme. consequently, we argue that although the prison context has often been considered as fundamentally outside of mainstream society, the logics of digital labor in prisons are the dark mirror of labor under surveillance capitalism. references kaun, a. & stiernstedt, f. (2020). prison media work: from manual labor to the work of being tracked. media, culture and society. onlinefirst https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0163443719899809 conrad, s. m. (2011). a restorative environmental justice for prison e-waste recycling. peace review, 23(3), 348-355. doi: 10.1080/10402659.2011.596071 davis, a. (2003). are prisons obsolete? new york: seven stories press. eriksson, t. (1966). kriminalvård på anstalt [corrections in the institution]. in j. freese (ed.), kriminaliteten och samhället [criminality and society]. stockholm: bokförlaget aldus/ bonniers. gates, k. (2015). the work of wearing cameras: body-worn devices and police media labor. in r. maxwell (ed.), routledge companion to labor and media. london: routledge. gilmore, r. w. (2007). golden gulag: prisons, surplus, crisis and opposition in globalizing california. berkley: university of california press. hesmondhalgh, d., & baker, s. (2011). creative labour: media work in the three cultural industries. london: routledge. lebaron, g. (2008). captive labour and the free market: prisoners and production in the usa. capital & class, 32(2), 59-81. logsdon, a. (2019). ethical digital libraries and prison labor? digital library federation forum. mancini, m. (1996). one dies, get another: convict leasing in the american south 1866-1928. columbia: university of south carolina press. mayer, v. (2011). below the line: producers and production studies in the new television economy. durham: duke university press. nilsson, r. (2013). from learning to labour to learning to self-control: the paradigmatic change in swedish prison policy. journal of scandinavian studies in criminology and crime prevention, 14(sup1), 24-45. qiu, j. (2016). goodbye islave: a manifesto for digital abolition. urbana: university of illinois press. prisoners training ai tuukka lehtiniemi university of helsinki minna ruckenstein university of helsinki the history of capitalism can be told as a history of constantly transforming new things into cheap resources. data has been called “the next big cheap” (pendergrast, 2019), something separated from its original context, reinvented as a commodity, and absorbed within the capitalist production system. drawing from critical research on political economy, data has been examined as a new form of capital, and dataveillance as the method and online platforms as the apparatus of data production. however, data are rarely usable without human input, as recent examinations of task-based “ghost work” (gray & suri, 2019) remind us. hidden human labour is involved in producing, labeling and editing data – necessary tasks for transforming data into a commodity. platforms like amazon mechanical turk successfully turn human piecework into an ondemand, machine-accessible resource for data production. data becomes the next big cheap only by means of re-organising a more traditional big cheap, human labour. we examine an unconventional case of task-based human labour in data: prisoners labeling finnish-language data for an ai firm. with a focus on data labour, we argue against connotations of machinic intelligence that operate without human involvement. the imagined absence of people in thinking about ai limits our capacities to think of how such systems operate, shape and transform human lives, human labour, and organisational structures. we use prison labor as a starting point for exploring the collaborations and frictions around ai by re-establishing the human as a critical component in human-machine relationships. we base our discussion on interviews with prison administration, the ai firm and prison workers, as well as on observations of labeling work by prisoners. the closed prison is characterised by high safety requirements, vulnerable position of the prisoner-workers, unequal power relations and extreme control. while the prison is a high-tech environment in terms of security and surveillance, prisoners in closed wards have limited, controlled or no access to computers and information networks. the work of training ai introduces computers – seen as highly charged and suspicious objects – in the prison environment, raising security concerns among prison guards. prison labour is, therefore, an extreme example of ghost work, in which low-tech workers perform high-tech work in a digitally deprived environment. as such, we argue, it offers a fringe-case for thinking about questions related to human data labour that might not become visible in other contexts. for the ai firm, prison labour is a strike of genius. while technologies for ai training are by now fairly easy to come by, in some cases finding human workforce to do the training is difficult. a nordic welfare state is characterised by a limited supply of workers who have the necessary finnish language skills and yet are willing to perform low-paid on demand data generation tasks under precarious employment conditions. prisons appear as an ideal frontier of expanding ghost work: cheap and untouched by competitors. using prison labour to train ai appears as yet another form of capitalism’s exploitation of the underprivileged. the finnish prison system, however, does not treat prison labour as punitive. instead, careful consideration is given to its rehabilitative aspects. in concrete terms this means that the prison administration views some of the most marginal prisoners in closed wards – women in male prisons, sex offenders, and youngsters – as ideal candidates for training the ai. labeling data is seen as a promising area of rehabilitative work for these groups also because at least in theory the work is easily organised, safe, and doable in closed wards and solitary cells. unlike typical finnish prison labour, such as packaging, sewing, woodwork and folding laundry, training ai appears forward-looking and future-oriented. in terms of rehabilitation, computer-based work is hoped to support prisoners in their eventual return to civilian life. for prisoner-workers, training ai is one among freely chosen tasks and provides a very modest income (4,26 euros per day), slightly better than what, for instance, the packaging work provides. while those at the outside likely consider data labeling as simple and menial, reading and annotating can nevertheless be more interesting, cognitively challenging and rewarding than the alternatives. our empirical case offers a multisited view to the current ghost work landscape, reminds of its local and situational variations, underlining the importance of exploring its organizational arrangements. the case pushes us to see beyond the ai, to question how humans are participants in maintaining automated services, as objects of data collection and processing, in making sense of data and making decisions about data, and in implementing decisions. the case highlights how the organisational arrangements of ai training both work with and interfere in political-economic incentives and pressures, such as platformization (srnicek, 2017) and the cascading logic of automating data production, processing and use (andrejevic, 2016), which often seem omnipresent and incontestable. here we follow seminal research that highlights not only human involvement in technological processes, but how humans are involved and thereby implicated in such processes (suchman 1987). ultimately, the organisational environment and everyday arrangements around ai-related tasks determine whether they are just and ethically robust. while prison labour might seem like straightforward exploitation – which it also often is – our case highlights other aspects such as new forms of rehabilitation and new opportunities for closed ward prisoners. the case also points towards a curious form of techno-optimism, rarely found in a closed prison, where technology is more conventionally an apparatus of control rather than opportunity. references andrejevic, m. (2016). theorizing drones and droning theory. in a. zavrsnik (ed.), drones and unmanned aerial systems. legal and social implications for security and surveillance, 21–44. cham: springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3319-23760-2 gray, m. l., & suri, s. (2019). ghost work. how to stop silicon valley from building a new global underclass. boston, ma: houghton mifflin harcourt. pendergrast, k. (2019). the next big cheap. real life, november 25. https://reallifemag.com/the-next-big-cheap/ suchman, l. a. (1987). plans and situated actions: the problem of human-machine communication. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. srnicek, n. (2017). platform capitalism. cambridge, uk: polity press. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): ferris-doubles, m. (2019, october 2-5). central american migration: trusting the mobile phone to cross borders. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. central american migration: trusting the mobile phone to cross borders michele francis ferris-dobles university of illinois at chicago extended abstract mobile phones have become ubiquitous tools for hundreds of thousands of central american migrants in their transit from their home countries towards the united states (u.s). carrying a mobile phone and having access to the internet has become a priority to many migrants during their journey as these tools allow them to communicate with their family and acquaintances who might assist them during their migratory process. central american migrants invest a significant amount of their limited budget in mobile phones and internet coverage plans because they feel that access to communication provides them with security. they use social networking sites, like facebook, and instant messaging applications, like whatsapp, to contact relatives to transfer money, and to reach people who can provide them with useful information regarding routes and shelters. they also are increasingly using apps like google maps to locate themselves while in transit in unknown regions (barros, 2017). communication technologies and mobile phones provide for this group of people feelings of safety and closeness. migrants trust that in times of crisis, these mobile devices and services might allow them to have instant communication with their relatives who are thousands of miles away and across national borders. according to the international federation of red cross and red crescent societies, giving access to information and technology to migrants should be of equal importance for humanitarian assistance as providing food, water, and shelter (barros, 2017). the central american u.s corridor is the largest and most concentrated migratory area in the world (massey et al. 2003). between 10 and 12 percent of the central american population has left their birth countries to migrate towards the u.s (sandoval, 2017). there are numerous reasons why so many people decide to relocate and travel this distance of more than 3,000 miles mostly by walking. some of the factors that cause forced migration in the region are institutional and gang violence, territorial dispossession, and unemployment (batalova, 2017). one must consider the fact that this is the region with the highest rates of murder and gang violence per capita in the world, as well as the latin american region with more social inequality and corruption (sandoval, 2017). this situation of severe social exclusion has provoked a massive exodus of central american people towards the u.s for decades. while they are crossing through the mexican territory, central american migrants face hazardous situations of extortion, torture, and kidnapping, as well as abuse and violence from the organized crime and the mexican migration authorities (feldmann et al. 2018). this context puts the migrants in a situation of extreme vulnerability and danger, which makes the mobile phone the most accessible and dependable device to achieve a sense of security. central american migrants are trusting and relying on these technologies for making decisions, creating networks, sharing information, and for connecting with other people (ros, 2010) these communication technologies are not only changing traditional patterns of migration, they are also enabling and inducing migration by providing feelings of trust, closeness, and safety (barros, 2017). there is a growing body of academic work that analyses the uses of mobile phones, social media, and communication applications during the processes of migration (alonso & oiarzabal, 2010; ross, 2010; brinkerhoff, 2010). there is a lack of research in regards to which are the central infrastructural and economic arrangements that have taken place that allows central american migrants to have internet access and to use the same mobile phone and plan across national borders. by applying methods of historical qualitative research and using a media archeological approach, i employ durham peters (2009) theory of infrastructuralism to investigate which are the major infrastructural transitions that have allowed contemporary migrants to use the same mobile phone and plan and to have internet coverage across multiple national borders during their journey? how have these shifts enabled, induced, changed, and determined new ways and patterns of migration? i apply elements from the theoretical frameworks of sociology of economic migration and sociology of globalization (sassen,1998) to argue that the implementation of free trade agreements between central america and the u.s in the 2000s did not only provoke the reorganization of labor in the region, but they also transformed the telecommunication infrastructures from being public utilities into profitable commodities run by private transnational corporations. i argue that the privatization of telecommunications imposed by the central american free trade agreement with the u.s (cafta), has allowed multinational telecommunication corporations to operate and implement their infrastructure across national borders; which allows them to offer "borderless" mobile phone plans which embed and enables emotions of trust, safety, and closeness that have crucial impacts in the ways migration takes place nowadays. i conclude that these infrastructural shifts have not only allowed mobile phones to change the traditional migratory patterns, but they are also creating a profitable business for a few private transnational telecommunications corporations. my conclusion presents a central paradox which is, that at the same time that the global capital promotes and enables a “borderless” world through the use of communication technologies which in turn promote emotions of trust, safety, and closeness, the nation state borders are becoming more harsh, surveilled, and rigid for the migrants who are constantly harassed, detained, and persecuted. references alonso, a. and oiarzabal, p. j. (2010). diasporas in the new media age: identity, politics, and community. university of nevada press. barros, g. (2017) central americans refugees: protected or put at risk by communication technologies? forced migration review, october 2017, university of oxford, refugee studies centre. batalova (april 2, 2017). migration policy institute. www.migrationpolicy.org brinkerhoff, a. (2010). migration, information technology, and international policy. in alonso, a., & oiarzabal, p. j. (eds) diasporas in the new media age: identity, politics, and community. (pp.19-38) university of nevada press. feldmann, andreas e. xóchitl bada and stephanie schuetze. 2018. new migration patterns in the americas: challenges for the 21st century. new york: palgrave, 1-24. fiddian-qasmiye, elena, gil loescher, kay long, and nando sigona. 2014. introduction. in the oxford handbook of forced migration, fiddian-qasmiye, elena, gil loescher, kay long, and nando sigona eds. oxford: oxford university, 1-19. massey et al. (2003) in new migration patterns in the americas: challenges for the 21st century. new york: palgrave (2018) mezzadra, s and neilson, b (2013) border as a method. duke university press. u.s peters, john durham. "infrastructuralism: media as traffic between nature and culture." traffic: media as infrastructures and cultural practices (2015): 29-49. ros, a. (2010). interconnected immigrants in the information society. in alonso, a., & oiarzabal, p. j. (eds) diasporas in the new media age: identity, politics, and community. (pp.19-38) university of nevada press. sandoval, c (2017). exclusion and forced migration in central america: no more walls. san jose, costa rica: springer. sassen, saskia. “the de facto transnationalizing of immigration policy” in globalization and its discontents. essays on the new mobility of people and money. new york: the new press. 1998. pp.5-30 siles, i (2018): the internet as a transnational project: connecting central america through computer networks (1990–1996), internet histories walsh (2018) new migration patterns in the americas: challenges for the 21st century. new york: palgrave weiner (1993) "stability, security, and migration." international security 17 (3): 91-126. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): tully, b. (2019, october 2-5). labour and digitization paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. labour and digitization tully barnett flinders university, australia when in 2011 san francisco artist andrew norman wilson stood outside google’s digitization services (or “scanops”) building at its mountain view, california headquarters, filming what would become the 11 minute “workers leaving the googleplex”, he was following an instinct that something really interesting was happening at the intersection of the corporate organisation of labour in the cool new world of web 2.0 and the cultural objects in its grip. he’d noticed that the workers entering and exiting the building next door had different working conditions to the majority of the workers at the site and discovered they were working on the secretive google books mass digitization project. he’d noticed that compared to the majority of google employees who, he said, were white or asian, these employees were mostly black or latinx. he’d noticed they drove their own cars rather than using the google shuttles, that they didn’t have access to other legendary google privileges such as the cafes, bike hire, free cinema viewings, celebrity speakers, foosball tables, onsite gym. they wore yellow google employee badges, different to the white badges of full-time employees, red badges for contractors and green for interns. he hadn’t noticed yellow badges amongst any other google employee group (an wilson 2016). and the next day he was fired (wilson an 2016). the labour conditions that underpin the google books mass digitization project are built on secrecy and exploitation, on different classes of worker, and yet, at least in its early days, the google print (later renamed google books) project sounded like the utopian dream of a company whose sole purpose was to make everybody’s lives better (mcgregor 2014). these tensions are a big part of what makes it to the surface in the arresting hand scans curated in, amongst other places, krissy wilson’s “the art of google books”, a project that uses tumblr to bring together an enormous number of diverse scan errors and oddities in the google books project. the scan errors reveal the complexities that the smooth surface of the digital scanner and its products elide. other actors in the digitization network include the often crowdsourced and volunteer labour for ocr text correction for example the distributed proofreaders, the national library of australia’s trove volunteers program, the use of gamification to procure ocr corrections, student media labour in digital projects (mayer and horner 2016). this paper considers the often invisible, contingent, omitted or assumed labour involved in digitization projects, using thinking from critical infrastructure studies (liu 2016; smithies 2017), new media studies, media archaeology (parikka and richterich 2015) and creative labour (banks 2017; eikhof 2017). jerome mcgann reminds researchers of the important task at hand “to surveille and monitor this process of digitization” (2013, p. 276) in order to understand its implications for cultural objects, for human relations with cultural objects and for interpretation and meaning making, and for preservation and access. this monitoring must take into account the broader systems and infrastructures within which digitization occurs, the policy and commercial factors, the labour conditions of people involved in the digitization process, the assumptions bound up in the platforms in which the digitized objects are packaged for consumption. these are questions that require an interdisciplinary perspective. in pursuing this aim, this paper responds to mcgann’s call within the context of a developing cultural history of mass digitization projects underpinned in the first instance by a better understanding of the human investments of time and labour in different components of the projects (fuchs 2016; rossiter 2016). i explore the usefulness of applying work from the emerging field of critical infrastructure studies (smithies 2017; liu 2016; drucker and svensson 2016) to the examination of digitization as more than a technical function but rather as a cultural practice. i argue that critical infrastructure studies offers a lens through which to question the foundations of knowledge production processes. the concept of cultural infrastructure allows us to develop an understanding of the cultural object as the multifaceted container of different kinds of labour, energy, focus and so on. for parks and starosielski (2015) “a focus on infrastructure brings into relief the unique materialities of media distribution – the resources, technologies, labour, and relations that are required to shape, energise and sustain the distribution of audio-visual signal traffic on global, national, and local scales” (p.5). this holds true for digitization work. to parks and starosielski’s focus on the audio-visual, we can easily extend these concepts to textual, literary and informational objects. this approach provides a way to talk about the interrelation of objects, people and labour within a sociocultural and political context. james smithies emphasises the relationality of infrastructure when he talks about “material culture, knowledge and practice” (2017, p. 114) operating in a relational context. smithies cites dourish and bell (2011) who argue that “[i]nfrastructure itself is a relational property; it describes a relationship between technology, people, and practice” (dourish and bell, 2011, p. 28; smithies 2017, p.114). and jennifer edmond highlights the interrelation between people and infrastructure in and beyond the digital humanities, arguing that people are at the centre of the knowledge infrastructure (2015). notions of the particularities of digital labour of all kinds are central to developing a more comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted nature of digital cultural objects, both born-digital and digitized. using google books as a case study, this paper argues that increasingly digitized cultural experiences need to take into account the broader conditions behind the production of cultural infrastructure. references banks, mark. creative justice: cultural industries, work and inequality. pickering & chatto publishers, 2017. cordell, ryan. "" q i-jtb the raven": taking dirty ocr seriously." book history 20.1 (2017): 188-225. dourish, paul, and genevieve bell. divining a digital future: mess and mythology in ubiquitous computing. mit press, 2011. edmond, jennifer. “collaboration and infrastructure”. a new companion to digital humanities (eds susan schreibman, ray siemens, and john unsworth). wiley blackwell, oxford, 2016:54-65. eikhof, doris ruth. "analysing decisions on diversity and opportunity in the cultural and creative industries: a new framework." organization 24.3 (2017): 289-307. fuchs, christian. "digital labor and imperialism." monthly review 67.8 (2016): 14. holley, rose. "trove: innovation in access to information in australia." ariadne 64, 2010. liu, alan. ‘drafts for against the cultural singularity.’ hcommons doi 10.17613/m6ss3b, 2016. manoff, marlene. "the materiality of digital collections: theoretical and historical perspectives." portal: 6.3 2006: 311-325. mattern, shannon. code and clay, data and dirt: five thousand years of urban media. university of minnesota press, minneapolis 2017. mayer, vicki, and jocelyn horner. "student media labor in the digital age: medianola in the classroom and the university." the routledge companion to labor and media (2016): 242-251. mcgann, jerome. "coda: why digital textual scholarship matters, or philology in a new key." the cambridge companion to textual scholarship, 2013: 274-88. mcgregor, hannah. "remediation as reading: digitising the western home monthly." archives and manuscripts 42.3, 2014: 248-257. parikka, jussi, and annika richterich. ‘a geology of media and a new materialism. jussi parikka in conversation with annika richterich. digital culture & society 1.1 (2015): 213-226. parks, lisa, and nicole starosielski, “introduction” in parks and starosielski eds. signal traffic: critical studies of media infrastructures. university of illinois press, 2015. rossiter, ned. software, infrastructure, labor: a media theory of logistical nightmares. routledge, 2016. smithies, james. the digital humanities and the digital modern. london. palgrave macmillan. 2017. thylstrup, nanna bonde. the politics of mass digitization. mit press, 2019. wilson, andrew norman, “workers leaving the googleplex” available artist’s website http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/workersgoogleplex.html wilson, andrew norman, “the artist leaving the googleplex” eflux, journal #74 june 2016 https://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-artist-leaving-the-googleplex/ wilson, krissy “the art of google books” tumblr , 2011-2018, http://theartofgooglebooks.tumblr.com/about selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 literat, i., kligler-vilenchik, n., middaugh, e., felton, m., fan, h., lee, a., clark. l.s., and jimenez, c. (2020, october). studying youth online political expression: empirical findings and methodological considerations. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. panel: studying youth online political expression: empirical findings and methodological considerations ioana literat teacher’s college neta kligler-vilenchik hebrew university ellen middaugh san jose state university mark felton san jose state university henry fan san jose state university ashley lee stanford university lynn schofield clark university of denver carlos jimenez university of denver introduction to the panel we are living through a highly politicized time, with deep divisions foregrounding the significance and importance of political expression and dialogue. youth have been at the forefront of these important conversations, in both academic research and in the popular press. on the one hand, we are seeing a resurgence of activism and engagement among youth (bond, chenoweth & pressman 2018; deal 2019), who are using online platforms to express themselves politically in rich and creative ways (graef 2016; jenkins et al., 2016). on the other hand, deep concerns have emerged about “some of the darker sides of networked media engagement” (boyd, 2017, n.p.), including the spread of misinformation, increased polarization and politically motivated bullying among youth (rogers, 2017). if we see youth as active agents in their own political socialization (youniss, mclellan & yates, 1997), the ways they actively express and negotiate their civic identities online (jenkins et al., 2016) offer rich possibilities for understanding how we can best support them as civic actors. the research presented in this panel aims to move beyond a simplified depiction of youth as either idealized political role models (e.g. greta thunberg or the parkland youth) or, conversely, as apathetic and politically disengaged. in light of the conference theme exploring what it means to have a life mediated by the internet, we place emergent and senior scholars studying youth and online political expression in dialogue with one another to discuss both findings and particular considerations brought up by internet research (franzke et al., 2020), and especially internet research involving youth (livingstone & third, 2017). by encouraging researchers and audience members to reflect on the epistemological, ethical, and practical aspects of their own research, we aim to identify new questions for further study as we seek to understand the evolution of youth and online political expression. the first presentation (literat & kligler-vilenchik) reviews findings from a cross-platform study utilizing a mixed methods approach to explore youth online political expression and cross-cutting political talk on tiktok, instagram, and youtube. these presenters discuss their findings in relation to the challenges and opportunities they encountered when identifying and analyzing youth-generated cross-platform data. the second presentation (middaugh, felton & fan) highlights findings from a social discourse analysis of twitter and reddit threads on youth-centric issues of immigration (daca) and environmental issues (plastic pollution) to identify how the intersection of issue, platform and aims of discourse shape the characteristics of online civic discourse. this presenter discusses the challenges she encountered when creating both a codebook and coding scheme for data analysis. the third presentation (lee) highlights findings emerging from a series of ethnographic interviews with young people in a comparative study exploring online youth political expression in democratic and non-democratic contexts. this presenter discusses challenges of qualitative research when working with young people, especially marginalized youth, who utilize hidden forms of expression to engage in politics. considers the role of gender and intersectional identity in online humorous political expression through a case study of a u.s. black muslim teen’s tiktok posts. the fourth presentation (clark & jimenez) presents findings from a youth participatory action research (ypar) project that involved researchers and youth in the creation of “productive disruptions” designed to disrupt and productively reframe conversations about racism and injustice. the presenters explore how adults can partner with political newcomers to both support and to better understand youth online political engagement. our joint video aims to generate discussion for future research into the study of youth political expression online. references bond, k., chenoweth, e., & pressman, j. (2018, april 13). did you attend the march for our lives? here’s what it looked like nationwide. washington post. retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/04/13/did-you-attendthe-march-for-our-lives-heres-what-it-looked-like-nationwide/ boyd, d. (2017). learning all the wrong things. keynote lecture presented at the digital media & learning conference, irvine, ca, 2017. retrieved from https://dml2017.dmlhub.net/live/ deal, j. (2019, november 18). youth political engagement and hope ahead of the 2020 election (harvard public opinion project). harvard political review. retrieved from https://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/youth-political-engagement-and-hope-aheadof-the-2020-election/ franzke, a., bechmann, a., zimmer, m., ess, c., & the association of internet researchers (2020). internet research: ethical guidelines 3.0. retrieved from https://aoir.org/reports/ethics3.pdf graef, e. (2016). youth digital activism. in youth civic engagement: united nations world youth report. new york, ny: united nations, pp. 95-107. jenkins, h., shresthova, s., gamber-thompson, l., kligler-vilenchik, n. and zimmerman a. (2016). by any media necessary: the new youth activism. new york: nyu press. livingstone, s., & third, a. (2017). children and young people’s rights in the digital age: an emerging agenda. new media & society 19(5), 657–670. rogers, j. (2017). teaching and learning in the age of trump: increasing stress and hostility in america’s high schools. ucla’s institute for democracy, education, and access. retrieved from https://idea.gseis.ucla.edu/publications/teaching-and-learningin-age-of-trump youniss, j., bales, s., christmas-best, v., diversi, m., mclaughlin, m. & silbereisen, r. (2002). youth civic engagement in the twenty-first century. journal of research on adolescence, 12(1), 121-148. youth collective political expression as prompted by popular culture: a social media cross-platform analysis ioana literat, ph.d. teacher’s college neta kligler-vilenchik, ph.d. hebrew university introduction: social media, popular culture, and youth political expression the centrality of social media as a space for youth self-expression (boyd, 2014) presents a valuable opportunity to study their political expression in naturally occurring contexts. yet the variance in how different platforms afford or constrain political expression (e.g. lane et al., 2018; stromer-galley, bryant & bimber, 2015) points at the importance of cross-platform approaches, including ones focusing on the social media platforms most popular with youth today. when youth political voice occurs naturally, in their preferred spaces, it is often contextualized within young people’s areas of interest (jenkins et al., 2016). in the current us context, when political polarization is at peak levels, there is a need to understand how to best encourage political dialogue that reaches productively across party divisions (kahne & bowyer, 2017). contextualizing politics within popular culture— as is often done on social media—may serve as a shared symbolic resource that can engage youth. here, we investigate this potential by examining the role of popular culture in stimulating youth political expression and discussion in the social media spaces most popular with youth. methods to do so, we undertake a comparative, cross-platform analysis of youth interaction across political differences on three social media platforms (youtube, instagram and tiktok), chosen due to their popularity with youth and their shared emphasis on visual/audio-visual content. across these platforms, our case study revolves around the concept of building donald trump's proposed border wall within the popular videogame fortnite. this idea has become a popular internet meme, manifested across social media platforms and through different text genres; tracking it across three platforms allows for an insightful cross-platform analysis of political expression and discussion. to holistically understand these dynamics, we combine in-depth qualitative and quantitative content analysis of 6,398 comments posted on the six top commented artifacts across platforms. for quantitative content analysis, we developed a codebook to code comments for political content, political view (pro-trump, anti-trump, or unclear/neutral), politeness, and civility. for threads, we also coded for cross-cutting political talk. comments and artifacts were then analyzed qualitatively, using a grounded theory approach. findings and discussion our analysis showed that popular culture content—here, the world of fortnite— prompted significant political expression on both tiktok (with 44% political comments) and youtube (40%), and to a lesser extent on instagram (4%), likely shaped by platform norms. across platforms, youth contextualized their political stances through connections to the imaginary fortnite world, which enabled them to praise, criticize, or mock donald trump, while metaphorically conveying their views about a policy issue— the proposed border wall with mexico—and its ramifications. at the same time, the resulting picture of political expression and dialogue is fairly bleak, with little cross-cutting exposure, and a general lack of productive cross-cutting dialogue. even the symbolic resources from the world of fortnite (e.g. avatar skins, construction of walls) were often used in disparaging ways to enforce social stereotypes (e.g. of mexicans or immigrants vs “real americans”), in contrast to the more idealized view of the civic imagination (jenkins et al., 2016). our cross-platform analysis thus suggests that the bridging potential of popular culture interacts with the divisive potential of cross-cutting political talk; and that the way this plays out is shaped by the content, norms, and affordances of different social media platforms (see figure 1). while our cross-platform approach was exploratory, we did find notable differences between the platforms in the extent to which they spurred political comments, the political orientation of these comments, and the resulting crosscutting talk. the most striking case here is instagram. while the instagram artifacts were of a political nature comparable to the artifacts on the other platforms, it seems that the norms and affordances of instagram exerted a depoliticizing influence. we therefore conceive of these elements as shaping—though not determining—resulting youthcross-cutting political talk as prompted by popular culture. figure 1. the interplay between popular culture, cross-cutting political talk and social media in shaping youth online political expression and conversation elaborated methodological discussion in this panel, in addition to our findings, we would like to discuss pertinent methodological considerations that came up in our study, and that are relevant to researching youth political expression on social media. one key consideration surrounded the creation of our corpus for analysis. a crossplatform analysis of political discussion required a case that is 1) politically-relevant, 2) clearly youth-oriented, and 3) appears on each of the three sites. in practice, however, identifying content that fit all three criteria was challenging. to address all three points, we tried to identify political texts emanating from youth popular culture, which led us—after much searching—to the popular meme imagining the construction of trump’s border wall within fortnite. at the same time, focusing on this case study brought up challenges in terms of generalizability, e.g., in terms of considering to what extent our insights are shaped by the particular context of fortnite. from a data analysis perspective, our mixed-methods design shows both strengths and weaknesses. on the one hand, the quantitative coding aided our qualitative analysis, as it enabled us to split the corpus of comments by political vs. non-political content, and within political content, to look separately at trump supporters, opponents, and their cross-cutting conversations. the two approaches were thus complementary: the quantitative analysis provided a birds-eye-view of the data and hinted at cross-platform differences, while the qualitative analysis allowed us to understand this data holistically. however, due to the comments’ relation to specific media artifacts, the quantitative analysis did not allow us to generalize to all (political) expression on these platforms, but only to hint at areas where cross-platform differences may occur. finally, we can question how our chosen methods shaped our conclusions in regard to youth political expression on social media. our study design sought out content connecting popular culture and politics, which obviously represents only a subset of youth expression online – yet our method does not allow investigating how common it in fact is. conceptually, we argue popular culture might serve as symbolic resources that allow even non-politically engaged youth to connect to politics and participate in discussions around political topics. yet our approach still puts a focus on those youth who choose to express themselves politically and enter these conversations, leaving open the question of how to study and understand the youth whose voices are not represented. references boyd, d. (2014). it’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens. new haven: yale university press. jenkins, h., shresthova, s., gamber-thompson, l., kligler-vilenchik, n. and zimmerman a. (2016). by any media necessary: the new youth activism. new york: nyu press. kahne, j., & bowyer, b. (2017). educating for democracy in a partisan age: confronting the challenges of motivated reasoning and misinformation. american educational research journal, 54(1), 3-34. lane, d. s., das, v., & hiaeshutter-rice, d. (2018). civic laboratories: youth political expression in anonymous, ephemeral, geo-bounded social media. information, communication & society, 1-16. stromer-galley, j., bryant, l. & bimber, b. (2015). context and medium matter: expressing disagreements online and face-to-face in political deliberations. journal of public deliberation 11(1), article 1. building productive online civic discourse: examining the intersection of platform, issue and individual aims ellen middaugh, ph.d. mark felton, ph.d. henry fan, ph.d. san jose university participation in public discourse has long been understood as critical to the ongoing project of democratic renewal. discourse allows us to connect and coordinate with those with aligned views and understand, negotiate or compete with those with divergent views. accordingly, educators view these as habits and skills to be encouraged and supported in youth (hess & mcavoy, 2014). as public discourse moves online, we must understand how this shift changes the practice of public discourse and what understandings and skills are needed for youth to participate as informed, ethical and empowered citizens. research provides mixed portraits of online public discourse. social network sites have been found to facilitate connections between those with shared political interests, creating opportunities to quickly connect one’s own political concerns to a larger public (bruns & burgess, 2015), which may increase access to relevant information, strengthen political identity, and provide opportunities to engage in collective action. simultaneously, numerous studies have responded with concerns about the quality of online civic discourse amongst everyday citizens, particularly as it relates to the prevalence and impact of incivility, misinformation, and polarization, all factors which can hinder participation in discourse and inhibit engagement with those with divergent views (e.g. alcott et al, 2019; vraga et al, 2015; dubois & blank, 2018). these studies suggest persistent presence of incivility and misinformation, with mixed findings on prevalence and impact, and mixed findings regarding polarization. at this point, research can provide educators with a set of evidence-based possibilities and challenges to guide their work with youth. however, the practice of intentionally cultivating productive online discourse requires more specific information about what such discourse looks like and the conditions under which it is most likely to occur. to address these needs, this study uses social discourse analysis of social media threads on youth relevant civic issues to identify “productive” examples of online civic discourse and examine factors that support the emergence of dialogue. this study is phase i of a multi-phase design research study, which will culminate in the implementation and research of an undergraduate course to support students in cultivating online civic dialogue about social issues, coinciding with the us presidential election. method this phase of the study relied on a grounded theory approach, appropriate for the discovery and identification of new theoretical distinctions. we began with the basic question of, “where do we see evidence of productive online discourse emerging?” the first step of the sampling process involved an exploratory review of multiple platforms (e.g. instagram, tiktok, youtube), threads of high profile young activists (e.g. mari copany, emma gonzalez), and issues (e.g. gun control, tuition reform, immigration, unemployment) during which time the authors kept field notes of observations of pertinent qualities of discourse, such as dialogic aims of participants, appearance of transactive dialogue, qualities of exchanges. from there, we narrowed our focus to identifying cases with exchanges where 2+ people responded to each other and our sampling to social media threads on two youthrelevant issues (immigration/daca & environmental protection/plastic pollution) from two different platforms (twitter and reddit). the issues were chosen for their relevance to youth in the study location and their potential to provide useful analytic contrast (based on observations during the exploratory step). platforms were chosen for the presence of transactive dialogue during the exploratory step and their contrasting features and affordances for supporting transactive dialogue. both authors engaged in axial coding of an initial subset of data focusing on the identification of of transactive dialogue (berkowitz & gibbs, 1983) or dialogue in which participants engaged with each other’s reasoning. authors deductively examined tweets and reddit posts for the presence of dialogic moves (e.g. critique, elaboration, metadialogic commentary) informed by author 2’s previous coding of face-to-face dialogue, democratic aims (e.g. mobilizing action, building coalitions, debating issues) informed by on author 1’s prior research on youth online civic practices, and dialogic qualities (e.g. use of evidence, outrage language, escalation or dismissiveness) informed by both. additionally, the authors coded inductively, revising the coding system to account for emerging phenomena, for example @ing other users to expand the conversation, offering identity disclosure to establish credentials or affiliation. exploratory analysis of potential data sources and iterative axial coding of the initial subset of data yielded useful insights, shared below, regarding how to better define “productive” online civic discourse and factors that enable such discourse. in the final version, findings from systematic deductive coding of the corpus of data using social discourse analysis will be shared to compare the qualities of discourse emerging between platform & issue. findings & implications the findings thus far highlight a few important considerations for identifying and cultivating productive online civic discourse. for example, the dialogic aims of public discourse (information seeking, influence, affiliation, dialogue, debate, mobilization) varied, with implications for how we define “productive” online discourse. the conversationals requirements for maintaining an intensive dialogue or debate differ from those of engaging in discourse to influence the public narrative or strengthen affiliative ties. additionally, platform matters, with different platforms providing different levels of support for the varied dialogic aims identified. twitter and reddit were chosen intentionally for their organizational differences, so findings of differences in the ease of identification of transactive dialogue are not surprising, but when placed in juxtaposition with dialogic aims provide greater clarity about how individuals might approach and make decisions about their own participation in online public discourse. the contrast between dialogue about immigration/daca vs. environmentalism/plastic pollution also suggests that certain issues may provide more leverage for initiating and elaborating transactive dialogue. the final version of the paper will build on these insights and provide results from the deductive coding to illustrate examples of conversational characteristics that align with transactive dialogue in each condition (issue x platform). extended methodological discussion one strength of this study is the development of a detailed coding system to enable analysis of how social dynamics and contexts of discourse (e.g. the intersection of issue, platform and dialogic aim) intersect to facilitate or hinder the emergence of transactive dialogue and use of evidence and the conversational strategies that individuals employ to manage these dialogues. the discussion will focus on how the sampling and coding approach provides analytic advantages as well as more precise guidance for educators and how this approach may also cut off opportunities to identify important new phenomena in online civic discourse. references alcott, h., gentzkow, m. & chuan, y. (2019). trends in the diffusion of misinformation on social media. research and politics, 1–8. berkowitz, m. w., & gibbs, j. c. (1983). measuring the developmental features of moral discussion. merrill-palmer quarterly, 29:4, 399-410. bruns, a. & burgess, j. (2015). twitter hashtags from ad hoc to calculated publics. in n. rambukkana (ed.) hashtag publics: the power and politics of discursive networks dubois, e. & blank,g. (2018). the echo chamber is overstated: the moderating effect of political interest and diverse media. international journal of communication, 729-45. hess, d. & mcavoy, p. (2014). the political classroom: evidence and ethics in democratic education. routledge press. vraga, e., thorson, k., kligler-vilenchik, n. & gee, e. (2015). how individual sensitivities to disagreement shape youth political expression on facebook. computers in human behavior, 45: 281-89. media activism below the radar: youth and hidden resistance in the digital age ashley lee, ph.d. stanford university study context and rationale around the world, young people are leveraging social media to engage with political issues outside the confines of traditional public institutions (e.g. voting). initially, this shift seemed to signal enormous potential for democratic renewal globally, with the emergence of new political actors and new modes of political engagement. while the rise of networked public spheres presents new opportunities for youth who were previously excluded from formal channels of political participation, digital platforms may also subject youth to surveillance, censorship, and other forms of repression. this study investigates how young people in three countries—canada (a strong democracy), the united states (a democracy under stress), and cambodia (a non-democracy)— leverage social media for political participation. drawing on in-depth interviews and surveys with 91 young activists (ages 18-30), i examine how young activists incorporate social media tactics into their political repertoires, as they navigate the emergent dynamics of state and corporate surveillance in the digital world. emerging studies suggest a necessary rethinking of traditional notions of citizenship and political participation, particularly in light of alternative and creative avenues offered online (e.g. bennett, 2008; bennett & segerberg, 2012; kahne, middaugh & allen, 2015; jenkins et al., 2016). a considerable amount is known about social media tactics young people use in liberal democracies under the conditions of free press and healthy civil society (e.g. clark & marchi, 2017; jenkins et al., 2016; literat & kligler-vilenchik, 2018). however, to build a more diverse account and theory of participatory politics, it is necessary to take a more inclusive approach that considers youth in different social, political contexts. methods i conducted 91 in-depth interviews with youth who considered themselves to be politically active across the three countries. in all three countries, i used purposive sampling, targeting diverse youth, ages 18-30, who are actively engaged in social movements and contentious politics. since i was interested in understanding social media practices and lived experiences of digitally active, civic-minded youth, i selected young media activists who use (or have used) social media extensively across a spectrum of contentious politics and issues, in various roles. in all, my sample for each country consisted of diverse youth from a broad range of racial and socio-economic backgrounds. each interview lasted, on average, 90-120 minutes. the interviews and short surveys were conducted after obtaining informed consent from the participants. with permission from the participants, the interviews were recorded with a digital audio recorder and transcribed in full, some by the author and the majority by transcribers and speech recognition software. the interviews incorporated social media walkthroughs, in which participants were invited to walk me through their social media profiles and talk about media artifacts they created as part of their activism. the survey included items about the respondents’ present and past political activities (both online and offline), as well as values, motivations, attitudes, and beliefs that underlie their participation patterns. data collection and analysis took place in tandem, and analytical strategies were modified as new data and analyses became available. in line with the analytical strategy of the grounded theory, i developed coding categories inductively and refined them in parallel with data analysis (charmaz, 2006; glaser & strauss, 1967). findings and discussion i find that even in democracies like the united states and canada, for individuals along various axes of marginalization (e.g. political, social), public displays of political action do not capture the full range of political expression on social media. my analysis shows how young people strategically adopt social media tactics that keep their political acts partially or wholly hidden, in response to the pressures of state, corporate, and social surveillance. this phenomenon of “flying under the radar” is particularly salient among youth in the repressive regime (cambodia) who adopt hidden tactics (e.g. using coded images) on social media to engage in contentious politics without being caught or sanctioned by the government. these findings offer insights into how young activists seek to exert influence on public issues using social media in highly contentious, highrisk political climates. further, i find that in this moment of increasing inequality and polarization, even in liberal democracies, many young people, especially those from marginalized groups, adopt indirect, hidden tactics that are comparable to those i found in the non-democratic country (cambodia). this study develops conceptual and analytical tools to highlight the voices of subaltern communities that have been obscured by the more traditional focus on public spaces and forms of participation. elaborated methodological discussion in addition to my empirical findings, i will discuss methodological considerations that came up in my study. in particular, i discuss opportunities and challenges associated with the interviews and social media walkthroughs. during the interview, participants were invited to walk me through their social media profiles, and talk about media artifacts they created as part of their activism. i use this method to observe participants’ everyday use of social media platforms and understand the ways in which participants may appropriate social media platforms for their own political purposes. a key strength of this method is allowing the researcher to be attentive to young people’s own understandings and reasons for their political expression and actions. i also discuss how the walkthrough method might be employed in an ethical way while respecting the confidentiality and privacy of participants. bibliography bennett, w. l. (2008). changing citizenship in the digital age. in w. l. bennett (ed.), civic life online: learning how digital media can engage youth (pp. 1-23). cambridge, ma: mit press. bennett, w. l. & segerberg, a. (2012). the logic of connective action. information, communication & society, 15(5): 739-768. charmaz, k. (2006). constructing grounded theory: a practical guide through qualitative analysis. thousand oaks, ca: sage. clark, l. s. & marchi, r. (2017). young people and the future of news. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. glaser, b., & strauss, a. (1967). the discovery of grounded theory. chicago, il: aldine. jenkins, h., shresthova, s., gamber-thompson, l., kligler-vilenchik, n., & zimmerman, a. (2016). by any media necessary: the new youth activism. new york, ny: nyu press. kahne, j., middaugh, e., & allen, d. (2015). youth, new media, and the rise of participatory politics. in d. allen & j. s. light (eds.) (2015). from voice to influence: understanding citizenship in a digital age (pp. 35-58). chicago, il: university of chicago press. literat, i. & kligler-vilenchik, n. (2018). youth online political expression in non-political spaces. learning, media & technology 43(4): 400-417. creating productive disruptions: employing media-rich ypar for critical digital literacy development among young teens lynn schofield clark, ph.d. carlos jimenez, ph.d. university of denver introduction: this paper develops the concept of media rich youth participatory action research (ypar) by reviewing a project that brought together researchers, university students, and junior high aged young people to explore the incorporation of tiktok and instagram into a communication campaign designed to address systemic racism. the concept builds on youth participatory action research methodologies, which are rooted in critical race approaches that emphasize the development of local rather than expert knowledge and have grown out of efforts to challenge neoliberal educational interventions (cammarota & fine, 2010). the intergenerational team developed a working definition of what we came to call productive disruptions: stories or posts that challenge a dominant narrative, raise awareness about an important issue, and help disrupt and productively reframe a conversation (jimenez 2020). social media has proven to be an important entry point to political engagement for political newcomers (clark & marchi, 2017; jenkins et al., 2016; literat & kligler-vilenchik, 2018). this paper therefore contributes to discussions of youth online political engagement by exploring how such engagement came to occur and what was learned about engagement among newcomers to politics who were between the ages of 14 16 years old. method the authors of this paper partnered with the bridge project, an after school enrichment program that provided academic and leadership development support in ypar programs for school-aged bipoc and white young people living in economically precarious neighborhoods. in the productive disruptions project that took place in the summer of 2020, we recruited 10 young people, most from bridge. there were 8 females and 2 males. they identified as black (3), asian (3), latinx (1), white (3), and 2 identified with the lgbt community. most lived in denver’s most economically precarious communities. several had struggled with mental and cognitive challenges. these young people worked with 5 university-age mentors who identified as white (4) and latinx (1), with 1 identifying with the lgbt community. each of these young people had participated in a course that introduced them to critical race pedagogies and critical race media criticism (ramirez, 2020). they also met with 6 universityand graduatelevel researchers 4 males, 2 females who identified as white (4), latinx (1), and mixed race latinx and white (1). all of the mentors and members of the research team were trained in recognizing power, privilege, and oppression, and participated in weekly sessions of accountability that included discussions of lived and systemic racism and reflections on our own privileges and biases. the group of 21 participants met multiple times each week over zoom for the 16-week project. during the first 8 weeks, the research team and young people shared and discussed examples of social media posts that they believed were particularly compelling statements about racism. the murder of george floyd took place in the fifth week of these meetings, and thus they began focusing intensely on sharing #blacklivesmatter events, videos, and other materials. they discussed what they liked about the posts and what they believed that the creators of those posts might have hoped that viewers would do in response to the posts, questions that came to form the rubric by which they evaluated the creations that they, their peers, and their mentors created on a weekly basis after the mentors joined them in the 7th week. we then created joint accounts under the name of youth productive disruptors (@youthdisruptors) on twitter, instagram, and tiktok so that young people could share their creations yet preserve their anonymity. this strategy addressed both youth and caregiver concerns about the need to limit the potential for online harassment and surveillance, as young people did not use their own accounts although they could repost from the joint account to their own account if they chose. findings and discussion as the rash of armed counterprotests at 2020 #blacklivesmatter events and as police shootings of black men at those events have demonstrated, young people of color face heightened risks that they will encounter state and police-sanctioned violence and harassment when engaging in political activities (lee, 2018; philimon, 2020). bipoc young people are also more likely than their white peers to be cynical about existing political systems (gordon & taft, 2011). they also have heightened concerns about surveillance, and for good reason (carbado, 2017; fine et al., 2003). but even with these risks, some bipoc young people still express a great deal of interest in engaging in political participation (hope et al., 2016). our work affirmed prior research that has found that young black, indigenous and people of color (bipoc) in the u.s. face numerous barriers to engaging civic and political action. we found that the young people we worked with were especially drawn to productive disruptions that presented knowledge from feminist, black, and intersectional identity perspectives. they recognized that productive disruptions worked best when they were consistent with the social media genre, and they appreciated the use of humor. however, their greatest energy was devoted to sharing information with their peers. what surprised us was a preference for detailed infographics among several youth, as this departed from the familiar social media genres. what also surprised us was the need for discussions about avoiding cultural appropriation, which led to thoughtful reconsideration and more sensitive productions. conclusion many young bipoc and white young people from economically precarious neighborhoods will experiment online without adults. but for young people who face the greatest barriers to political participation, our research found that adults can play a key role. we can create brave spaces of support that allow for discussing our own experiences with racism, discrimination, and privilege both off and online that then inform research. we can help young people think through the ownership limitations and business models of tiktok, instagram, and twitter as well as how to avoid harassment and negative consequences, for example by creating collective online accounts that preserve anonymity. and we can leverage our ages and positions to connect young people to the policymakers who might otherwise be beyond their reach, which will be a topic for our future research thanks to the policymakers who took note of the productive disruptions produced. we argue that it is important to explore participatory methodological efforts in the context of internet and social media research for a number of reasons. first, participatory methodologies have been particularly important among communities of color, as they center the lived experiences of those communities and are grounded in the belief that unearthing, articulating, and leveraging community-based knowledge is foundational to transforming social inequalities in the contexts of those communities (friere, 1970). second, by foregrounding issues of lived racial experiences, the traditions of participatory methodological work have long addressed ethical issues of race in research, such as how white researchers, as well as all of those conducting research in the settings of predominantly white institutions (pwi), can best live out commitments to mutuality and respect in relation to the practices of generating and sharing research findings(bailey et al., 2019). third, as participatory methodologies create bridges between “expert” and “local” knowledge, we argue that they hold promise in relation to the rethinking of existing “expert” theories: in this case, those of how and why black, indigenous, and other young people of color might or might not participate in online political action, and the role that researchers of predominantly white institutions might play in these processes as they also seek to understand them. such work is mandated within contemporary critical approaches to decolonizing and radicalizing research(bonilla-silva, 2017; fanon, 2007; mackey, 2016). as an approach that has garnered interest among those in critical media literacy studies (mihailidis, 2018; ramasubramanian, 2016), it is important to place into dialogue with scholarship on race and internet studies (benjamin, 2019; brock, 2020; florini, 2019; gray, 2014; jackson, bailey & welles, 2019; lu & steele, 2019; nakamura & chow-white, 2013; noble, 2018) (benjamin, 2019; brock, 2020; florini, 2019; gray, 2014; mcilwain, 2019; nakamura and chow-white, 2013; noble, 2018). this methodology is limited, as noted in other research that has interrogated the failures as well as the promises of the ypar model (see burke et al., 2017; clark, 2016), and who have noted the need to avoid sensationalism and oversimplification (soep, 2014). nevertheless, we believe that this methodology does hold promise for reframing questions of bipoc youth involvement in online political engagement, and may also provide support for young people who want to make a difference in our communities and our world. references: bailey, j., steeves, v., burkell, j., regan shade, l., ruparelia, r., & regan, p. (2019). getting at equality: research methods informed by the lessons of intersectionality. international journal of qualitative methods, 18, 160940691984675. https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406919846753 benjamin, r. (2019). race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. polity. bonilla-silva, e. (2017). racism without racists: color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in america, fifth edition. rowman & littlefield publishers. https://rowman.com/isbn/9781442276239/racism-without-racists-color-blindracism-and-the-persistence-of-racial-inequality-in-america-fifth-edition burke, k. j., greene, s., & mckenna, m. k. (2017). youth voice, civic engagement and failure in participatory action research. the urban review, 49(4), 585–601. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-017-0410-4 cammarota, j., & fine, m. (2010). revolutionizing education: youth participatory action research in motion. routledge. carbado, d. w. (2017). from stopping black people to killing black people: the fourth amendment pathways to police violence. california law review, 105(1), 125–164. clark, l. s. (2016). participant or zombie? exploring the limits of the participatory politics framework through a failed media-rich youth participatory action research (ypar) project. the information society, 32(5), 343–353. clark, l. s., & marchi, r. (2017). young people and the future of news: social media and the rise of connective journalism. cambridge university press. fanon, f. (2007). the wretched of the earth. grove/atlantic, inc. fine, m., freudenberg, n., payne, y., perkins, t., smith, k., & wanzer, k. (2003). “anything can happen with police around”: urban youth evaluate strategies of surveillance in public places. journal of social issues, 59(1), 141–158. https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-4560.t01-1-00009 florini, s. (2019). beyond hashtags: racial politics and black digital networks. new york university press. friere, p. (1970). pedagogy of the oppressed. herder and herder . gordon, h. r., & taft, j. k. (2011). rethinking youth political socialization: teenage activists talk back. youth & society, 43(4), 1499–1527. https://doi.org/10.1177/0044118x10386087 hope, e. c., keels, m., & durkee, m. i. (2016). participation in black lives matter and deferred action for childhood arrivals: modern activism among black and latino college students. journal of diversity in higher education, 9(3), 203–215. https://doi.org/10.1037/dhe0000032 jenkins, h., shrestova, s., gamber-thompson, l., kligler-vilenchik, n., & zimmerman, a. (2016). by any media necessary. nyu press. http://nyupress.org/books/9781479899982/ lee, a. (2018). invisible networked publics and hidden contention: youth activism and social media tactics under repression. new media & society, 20(11), 4095–4115. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818768063 literat, i., & kligler-vilenchik, n. (2018). youth online political expression in non-political spaces: implications for civic education. learning, media and technology, 43(4), 400– 417. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2018.1504789 lu, j. h., & steele, c. k. (2019). ‘joy is resistance’: cross-platform resilience and (re)invention of black oral culture online. information, communication & society, 22(6), 823–837. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1575449 mackey, j. (2016, september 13). a racial autobiography of race in social science spaces: reflections of my early understandings of race and racism. harvard kennedy school journal of african american policy. http://hjaap.hkspublications.org/2016/09/13/a-racial-autobiography-of-race-in-socialscience-spaces-reflections-of-my-early-understandings-of-race-and-racism/ mihailidis, p. (2018). civic media literacies (1 edition). routledge. nakamura, l., & chow-white, p. (2013). race after the internet. routledge. noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york university press. philimon, w. (2020, july 7). black americans report hate crimes amid black lives matter gains. usa today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/07/07/black-americans-report-hatecrimes-amid-black-lives-matter-gains/3259241001/ ramasubramanian, s. (2016). racial/ethnic identity, community-oriented media initiatives, and transmedia storytelling. the information society, 32(5), 333–342. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2016.1212618 soep, e. (2014). participatory politics: next-generation tactics to remake public spheres (1 edition). the mit press. microsoft word de souza e silva-developing a mobile games database-developing a mobile games database.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): de souza e silva, a., glover-rijkse, r. (2021, october). developing a mobile games database: tracing interdependencies among early mobile games. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. developing a mobile games database: tracing interdependencies among early mobile games adriana de souza e silva north carolina state university, usa ragan glover-rijkse methodist university, usa today, it is increasingly common to see people walking around the streets, sitting on a bus, or hanging out at cafes and restaurants, playing games on their phones. these games allow people to play almost anywhere, anytime, independent of a tethered internet connection. for this reason, mobile games have become woven into the fabric of daily life, as individuals carry their phones with them on-the-go, squeezing in moments of play or setting aside specific playtimes. since the release of the iphone 3g and the app store in 2008, the number of mobile games has increased substantially, reflecting what mäyrä (2015) refers to as a growing and increasingly complex genre. nevertheless, mobile games are not new; they have been around since at least the 1970s, serving as ground building components of today’s ludic and digital cultures. despite their significance, early mobile games pose challenges to research. the earliest mobile gaming platforms, like mattel football and nintendo game & watch, were handheld electronic consoles. although many of these games were popular at their time of inception, they are often no longer on the market,1 making them difficult or expensive to acquire. by the 1990s, mobile phones also became important platforms for mobile gameplay—with games like tetris and snake being redesigned for mobile phones. however, these games became unplayable with the release of new operating systems and, similar to handheld consoles, these mobile phones can be difficult and expensive to acquire. finally, in the early 2000s, several media artists, startup companies, and academic researchers started to experiment with mobile devices, such as mobile phones and pdas, as interfaces for game play (flintham et al., 2001; sotamaa, 2002; wagenknecht & korn, 2016). however, these early games were often unavailable to the general public because they were restricted to small research or artistic circles. in addition, since the nature of these games was generally ephemeral (i.e., they were 1 except on third-party stores for used items, like ebay. played during a specific timeframe in a specific location, and then disappeared), it is difficult to find documentation or historical accounts about them, unless a researcher knows specifically how to search for them with exact titles, keywords, and creators. collectively, these challenges limit our knowledge about the history of mobile games and make it difficult to identify correlations between contemporary and early mobile gaming cultures. with the goal to provide a research resource for those interested in gaming and digital cultures, we have developed an online, publicly searchable database of early mobile games developed between 1975 and 2008. this database offers game scholars, students interested in games, and game enthusiasts a centralized repository where they can search for games by using a wide range of criteria, such as title, time frame, genre, type of connectivity, number of players, place of development, authors, and hardware. the database also provides a map that shows the geographic location of where the searched games were developed, displays popular press and scholarly articles written about the games, and suggests related games. by combining search criteria, users are able to trace new correlations and interdependencies among games that otherwise might not be evident. users can also suggest new games and information to the database, contributing to the robustness of this resource. understanding and researching the history of mobile games is relevant because mobile games link digital culture and urban mobility, and they promote different types of sociability. scholars have been looking at the intersection of mobile games and society for quite some (de souza e silva & sutko, 2009; ermi & mäyrä, 2005; hjorth & richardson, 2014), exploring issues such as how place and space are co-constructed through game play, and how, when, and for what reasons people move while playing games. however, research into the history of mobile games is limited, with a few important exceptions (chess & paul, 2019; jull, 2009; mäyrä, 2015; parikka & suominen, 2006). this raises the question: how can researchers better trace the history and correlations among early mobile games? in this paper, we first discuss our process for developing a historical database of mobile games, emphasizing the interdependent relationship between theory and practice. the database emerged from our theoretical and historical inquiry about the role of mobile games in culture and society. however, during the process of conceptualizing and developing the database, we refined those theories and relationships (and building the database was in itself an exercise in theory-building). through this process, we developed an understanding about the connections among early mobile games, adding nuance to the categories used to define them. second, we discuss interdependence as a value for research, more broadly. this database was developed in collaboration with scholars/practitioners across disciplines and its future robustness depends on the ability to crowd-source information that is scattered across the web and in archives. we argue that the pursuit of interdependence, rather than independence, helps to fuel research, widen our perspectives, and disrupt normative frameworks guiding research. it is our hope that the database will significantly improve the process of researching mobile games by centralizing information about these games. we anticipate that this project will not only increase interest in the study of mobile games for game studies scholars and internet researchers but will also serve as a historical record for an increasingly meaningful aspect of culture and social life. references chess, s., & paul, c. a. (2019). the end of casual: long live casual. games and culture, 14(2), 107-118. de souza e silva, a., & sutko, d. m. (eds.). (2009). digital cityscapes: merging digital and urban playspaces. new york: peter lang. ermi, l., & mäyrä, f. (2005). player-centred game design: experiences in using scenario study to inform mobile game design. game studies. flintham, m., benford, s., humble, j., tandavanitj, n., adams, m., & row-farr, j. (2001). i like frank: a mixed reality game for 3g phones. submitted to ieee computer graphics and applications. hjorth, l., & richardson, i. (2014). gaming in social, locative and mobile media: palgrave macmillan. jull, j. (2009). a casual revolution: reinventing video games and their players. cambridge, ma: the mit press. mäyrä, f. (2015). mobile games. the international encyclopedia of digital communication and society, 1-6. parikka, j., & suominen, j. (2006). victorian snakes? towards a cultural history of mobile games and the experience of movement. game studies, 6(1). sotamaa, o. (2002). all the world's a botfighters stage: notes on location-based multiuser gaming. paper presented at the proceedings of computer games and digital cultures conference. wagenknecht, s., & korn, m. (2016). hacking as transgressive infrastructuring: mobile phone networks and the german chaos computer club. paper presented at the proceedings of the 19th acm conference on computer-supported cooperative work & social computing. microsoft word witte-vision, knowledge, power.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 vision, knowledge, power: erowid.org and the “trip report” john james witte university of iowa the invention of lsd in 1938, and its eventual discovery as a psychoactive agent in 1943, spawned decades of debate and experimentation among intellectual dissidents in america and europe.despite this proliferation of talk, media scholar, diana slatterly aptly describes the discursive history of lsd in her essay “psychadelics: my problem discourse,” as a discourse “of the unmentionable by the disreputable about the unspeakable”. these formidible obstacles don’t seem to have stopped anyone from discussing the substance. it’s spawned at least one literary genre: the “trip report”. from albert hoffman’s first account of his legendary bicycle ride, to the writings of drug luminaries like timothy leary and aldous huxley, trip reports have striven to describe the indescribable. they’ve provided guidance to those curious about psychedelia, and they’ve provided a forum for drug users to document their personal revelations. the genre has, in fact, become one of the sturdiest and most common types of writing on the internet. whole sections of older communities like well and usenet are dedicated to the posting of trip reports, and the tradition has continued onto newer forums like reddit and 4chan. both lsd and the internet have rather ignominious beginnings as military technologies. friedrich kittler’s injunction that all media is just “the misuse of military technology” forms an enormous part of the narratives around both entities. yet, i would like to resist the narrative of military invention, here, to show the shared history that both hallucinogens and digital media share in the american counterculture of the 1960’s and 70’s. the geographical and cultural connections between this centralized northern california drug scene and the birth of the american tech industry have been well documented. that san francisco simultaneously spawned silicon valley and, until 2003 produced 95% of the nation’s lsd is more than mere coincidence. fredrich turner’s 2006 history of the bay area underground, from counterculture to cyberculture, tracks the techno-utopianist and former “merry prankster”, stewart brand, and the foundation of his whole earth catalogue. the catalogue was inspired by nasa’s 1966 release of history’s first photo of earth from outer space, which brand hoped would inspire a sense of unity and cybernetic connection among humanity as a whole. it would go on to form an important cultural role in the birth of popular computing. suggested citation (apa): witte, j. (2015, october 21-24). vision, knowledge, power: erowid.org and the “trip report”. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. it’s from this discursive context that the website erowid.org emerged. referred to as “the wikipedia of drugs”, erowid stepped in to the role of the medical expert by providing reliable medical and legal advice to those interested in mind-altering substances. although the website is clearly oriented primarily toward hallucinogens, it includes sections on wide variety of “psychoactives”, broadly defined. this means there are entries on “legal highs” like kratom, datura, and nutmeg, as well as unexpected entries on coffee, alcohol, lucid dreaming, meditation, honey, and even an account of a black widow spider bite. there’s a clear argumentative edge to the inclusion of these entries: demystifying the complicated relationship between perception and the processes that might alter that perception. in the legal context created by the discursive history of mind altering substances, this means troubling the definition of a “drug”. the site’s founders have claimed that they see their role primarily as librarians, although their role in managing the medical information appears to be more active than that title would suggest. they’ve arranged toxicology reports for many substances themselves, as well as organizing pre-existing information, making them more agential in their curatorial duties. most of this work is invisible to users of the website, though, with the “vaults” appearing as a unified collection of documents. many of these vaults include articles, media clippings, and, of course, trip reports. so, why include trip reports on this website? during the 1966 senate hearing, dr. stanley yolles spoke of the need for lsd-related education, but claims that the possibility of widespread education is precluded because the dangers associated with lsd are too “esoteric”. trip reports are an attempt at creating that esoteric education. in many ways, trip reports are an unusual epistemological situation. these aren’t “real” experiences, they’re internal states. but they’re internal states that come from a common catalyst for those involved: one isn’t simply looking out the same window at the same time as one’s compatriot; the similarities are both internal and biological. so, how much do psychonauts have in common with one another? is it possible to communicate the hallucinogenic experience? j.l austin tells us that knowledge arises from a combination of acumen and opportunity, or the exercise of our judgment in “propitious” circumstances. knowledge, in other words, is contingent but not non-existent. so what can we “know” when we’re in altered states? when we’re neither in a propitious situation, nor in full control of our ordinary judgment, can we still know anything? and more importantly, can we communicate that knowledge? the kind of expertise in which erowid traffics is knowledge of the interior. trip reports are linguistic acts meant to delineate experiential data, and are therefore a function of austinean judgment. it’s in the trip reports where the ultimate politics of the site are determined. while it may be tempting to see erowid as a defacto anti-authoritarian project, given its discursive context, its politics are perhaps harder to parse. in his lectures at the college de france, michel foucault describes the ubiquity of hashish and opium among psychiatrists after the 1840’s. for him, this drug use served two authoritarian purposes: one was austinean, in that it allowed psychiatrists to determine sincere madness from its simulation. the other was transcendental. “the psychiatrist will be able to say: i know the law of your madness, i recognize it precisely because i can reconstitute it in myself” (foucault 213). trip reports, then, can play a potentially authoritarian role, as what foucault calls “pastoral power”. the erowid archive represents an underanalyzed area of media research for a number of reasons. while participation is a given in most theories of new media, many authors seem to have returned to a one step media flow when the effectiveness of the internet’s organizational properties is under discussion. rather than assuming a passive audience of media consumers, we should be looking at technological and rhetorical circuits that constitute the interior world as well, the discursive exterior. through a close reading of this singular genre of new media cultural production, and, specifically, the archive accessible through erowid.org, i hope to theorize some of the peculiarities of writing on the internet, writ large. references austin, john langshaw, and geoffrey james warnock.sense and sensibilia.vol. 83. new york: oxford university press, 1964. bost, matthew. "the unruly pharmacy: expert opinion and the management ofpublic debate over lsd." argumentation & advocacy 49.3 (2013). erowid, earth, ed. erowid: documenting the complex relationship between drugs and humans. web. 15 dec 2013. foucault, michel. psychiatric power: lectures at the college de france, 1973--1974. vol. 1.macmillan, 2008. slattery, diana reed. "psychedelics: my problem discourse." configurations 16.2 (2008): 283-296. turner, fred. from counterculture to cyberculture: stewart brand, the whole earth network, and the rise of digital utopianism. university of chicago press, 2010. united states. drug enforcement administration.lsd in america. 1995. web. kneidinger-mueller_track yourself and share with us copy selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 track yourself and share with us. digital self-tracking as a social practice. bernadette kneidinger-müller university of bamberg, germany introduction mobile and wearable digital devices connected to the internet are not only communication and information tools but become more and more important for the selfmonitoring of individual life habits. self-tracking, also referred to as life-logging, quantified self or personal informatics, describes “the practice of systematically recording information about one’s diet, health, or activities, typically by means of a smartphone, so as to discover behavioral patterns that may be adjusted to help improve one’s physical or mental well-being” (oxford dictionary). the presentation intends to show why self-tracking can be seen as an expression of how the “rules” of the internet can change the way how personal data is handled. self-tracking from a sociological perspective the self-tracking “hype” does not appear from nowhere; in fact it can be seen as a reflection of technological and social changes. self-tracking confirms the cultural expectations of the importance of self-awareness, reflection and responsibility and gives the users tools for managing themselves and improving their lives (lupton 2014a: 12). therefore, many sociologists use foucauldian perspectives (foucault 1988) to analyze self-tracking practices as an expression of a contemporary selfhood (cf. selke 2014: 191f, elliott 2013). self-tracking can help people feel more control of their lives (li et al. 2010; choe et al. 2014; nafus & sherman, 2014; ruckenstein 2014) and reduce latent fears (selke 2014: 184), especially in a world in which traditional social structures disappear (lupton 2014b: 4). elliott resumes that the new individualism of late modern societies goes along with a reinvention of the self and the body (elliott 2013). the social dimension of self-tracking monitoring features of one´s life and using the data for self-reflection is nothing new. long ago people like to store memories and life data in journals or diaries or record body related data (swan 2013: 85). some people are still using pen-and-paper recordings but today these methods are amplified by a growing range of digital selftracking tools (fox & duggan 2013). especially the digitalization of self-observation data amplifies the ways of sharing such individual life data using various forms of computermediated communications and online platforms (nafus & sherman 2014). therefore, self-tracking may not be analyzed as an individual practice but have to be seen as a suggested citation (apa kneidinger-müller, b. (2016, october 5-8). track yourself and share with us. digital self-tracking as a social practice. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. profound social and communicative practice (lupton 2014b: 1f, selke 2014: 185, lomborg & frandsen 2015). despite a body of literature is beginning to emerge that addresses the social, cultural and political dimensions of self-tracking (lupton 2013,2014a,b, nafus & sherman, 2014; ruckenstein, 2014), only a few studies analyze motivational factors for self-tracking systematically. according some of these rare studies, important reasons for using selftracking tools are the wish to become aware of one’s own behavior, make better decisions and change behaviors to optimize one’s life (li et al. 2010, choe et al. 2014). furthermore, the sharing of self-tracking data in the context of social online or offline interactions has hardly been explored. the research questions this paper will attempt to close the mentioned research gap and give a more detailed insight in motivational and social factors of self-tracking practices. answers should be given to the following research questions: rq1: what are the motivations for different forms of digital self-tracking? rq2: what are people doing with their self-tracking data? rq3: how do self-tracking data become part of social interactions? the empirical project these questions will be answered using the findings of a two-step qualitative study of 28 german self-tracking users. in a first step, a diary study, all participants documented for one week all forms of self-tracking practices including details about sharing, location, motivation, used application etc. of every self-tracking activity. in a second step, the participants are asked in guided interviews about their experiences of and motives for using self-tracking practices including their sharing behavior of the data. for the further analysis, the diary and the interview data are combined and their implications for a better understanding of the life-tracking practices are discussed. the findings indicate that more than half of the interviewees share at least some of their self-observation data with others. the main motivations for sharing self-tracking data are self-presentation and getting support, social validation and advices from others. furthermore data sharing is experienced as a way of archiving personal data. less important appear the motivation of social comparison or a habitual sharing behavior. nevertheless people who share self-tracking data appreciate getting social reactions to their individual data that become part of the self-evaluation process. on contrary, those users that use selftracking data strictly in private, show less competitive motives for self-tracking activities and in general less personal interest in the collected data than the sharers. additionally, the perception of privacy strongly depends on the monitored aspect. areas that are experienced generally as something quite intimate or sensitive such as financial, sleep or diet data are less frequently shared that data about athletic performances, media usage, social interactions or visited locations. references choe, e. k., lee, n. b., lee, b., pratt, w., & kientz, j. a. (2014). understanding quantified-selfers' practices in collecting and exploring personal data. paper presented at the proceedings of the 32nd annual acm conference on human factors in computing systems, toronto. elliott, a. (2013). the theory of new individualism'. in: r. tafarodi (ed.). subjectivity in the twenty-first century: psychological, sociological, and political perspectives. cambridge: cambridge university press: 190-209. foucault, m. (1988). technologies of the self. in l. martin, h. gutman & p. hutton (eds.). technologies of the self: a seminar with michel foucault. london: tavistock: 16-49. fox, s., & duggan, m. (2013). tracking for health. washington, dc: pew research center. li, i., dey, a., & forlizzi, j. (2010). a stage-based model of personal informatics systems. paper presented at the proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems, atlanta. lomborg, s. & frandsen, k. (2015). self-tracking as communication. information, communication & society, online first. doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2015.1067710 lupton, d. (2013). understanding the human machine. ieee technology & society magazine, 32(4): 25-30. lupton, d. (2014a). self-tracking modes: reflexive self-monitoring and data practices. paper for the ‘imminent citizenships: personhood and identity politics in the informatic age’ workshop, 27 august 2014, anu, canberra. lupton, d. (2014b). self-tracking cultures: towards a sociology of personal informatics. proceedings of the 26th australian computer-human interaction conference: designing futures, the future of design. december 2-5 2014, sydney, australia. nafus, d., & sherman, j. (2014). this one does not go up to 11: the quantified self movement as an alternative big data practice. international journal of communication, 8: 1785-1794. ruckenstein, m. (2014). visualized and interacted life: personal analytics and engagements with data doubles. societies, 4(1): 68-84. selke, s. (2014). lifelogging als soziales medium? selbstsorge, selbstvermessung und selbstthematisierung im zeitalter der digitalität. in j. jähnert, & c. förster (eds.): technologien für digitale innovationen. interdisziplinäre beiträge zur informationsverarbeitung. wiesbaden: springer: 173-200. swan, m. (2013). the quantified self: fundamental disruption in big data science and biological discovery. big data, 1 (2): 85-99. microsoft word aoir2017-paper1.docx selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): milan, s. (2017, october 18-21). digital traces and bottom-up data practices. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. please note that the ideas sketched in this paper are developed further in milan, s. (2017). political agency, digital traces and bottom-up data practices. international journal of communication 11(2017), 1–21. digital traces and bottom-up data practices stefania milan university of amsterdam & university of oslo social media have changed the way individuals and groups mobilize and organize for collective action. they force users to give up data in order to participate, acting as agents of datafication of interpersonal connections and interactions and imposing their own “logic” made of specific norms, mechanisms and economies (van dijck & poell, 2013). not surprisingly, this bears important consequences for the agency—both factual and perceived—of social actors. this theoretical paper understands datafication as a productive force in order to explore how activists largely reliant on social media for their activities can leverage datafication and mobilize social media data in their tactics and narratives. “data” here refers to social-media data, that is to say the set of records produced by users in their actions and interactions on social networking services, including hashtag usage, “likes” and mentions. combining social movement studies with critical media theory and platform studies, this theoretical contribution explores how activists largely reliant on social media for their sense-making and organizing activities exploit datafication in its own right. it plays with the notion of digital traces as a heuristic tool to understand the dynamics between platforms and their users. defining digital traces as the “fragments of past interactions or activities” (reigeluth, 2014, p. 250), it follows such traces as they are critically activated by political actors. social media create subjectivities that orient themselves towards the algorithm—in other words, users are trained to think of themselves with (what they believe is) the logic of the subtending algorithms (agre, 1994). as “tangible” hints at the functioning of social media, digital traces become primary sites of user intervention. i distinguish six agency-producing mechanisms supported by social media, which corresponds to six ways in which users can engage with digital traces to advance their goals. in so doing, the paper foregrounds human agency and the meaning-making activities of individuals and groups, and contributes to the study of “the variable ways in which power and participation are constructed and enacted” (couldry & powell, 2014, p. 1) in bottom-up data practices. after reflecting on the materiality and discursiveness of digital traces, and on the notion of political agency vis-à-vis the datafied self, the paper explores data traces as agency machines contributing to produce visibility, arguing that digital traces can work as producers of political agency—both perceived and factual. #1. digital traces make the unseen visible. while they certainly do not make algorithms visible, they make explicit the materiality of social media and render somewhat evident (however not transparent) their mechanisms of meaning production. by allowing users to get a glimpse of the datafication they enable, digital traces offer unprecedented possibilities for users with a political agenda to directly engage with the medium. they contribute to mobilize social-media data, turning them into a contested terrain of imagination and practice. they empower users to produce their own data inscriptions to leverage such mechanisms (e.g., popularity by measurement) in view of supporting their goals. while the middlemen are not neutralized, users experience a renewed sense of self-sufficiency and empowerment—no matter how untruthful and misleading. in sum, by participating to make the possibilities visible, digital traces contribute to boost the perceived political agency. #2. digital traces activate the intimate and the mundane. supporting and emphasizing emotional bonding, social media platforms prompt users to share private and ordinary aspects of their life that have traditionally been excluded from political action, facilitating the incorporation of the intimate and the mundane into the activists’ narratives and action repertoire. the mediation of everyday technologies like smartphones eases the interpenetration of political activism and daily life, and the individualized temporality of engagement with digital traces transforms the process of meaning making into an intimate affair. these dynamics set in motion a process of coproduction of meaning that approximates identity building, although it is centered on the private dimension. #3. digital traces are narrative builders. they engage users in conventions specific to each platform (e.g., hashtags), which identify distinct “grammars of action” that “formalize the interaction patterns” (agre, 1994, p. 109). by productively interacting with these set grammars, activists can involve social-media data points in a process of interpretations and creation, turning “raw” information into collective narratives—no matter how scattered or simplified. digital traces can be appropriated to foster a narrative form of agency, or “the capacity to create stories on social media … in a way that is collective and recognized by the public” (yang, 2016, p. 14). these stories become collective, with two outcomes: digital traces might contribute to make meanings actionable, as they partake in creating a plot that resembles recognizable narrative forms, and can favor the connection amid the online storytelling and the offline copresence. #4. digital traces allow for the live-historicizing of the activist experience. as experiential medium, social media give voice to the activists’ subjective experience, meeting the needs of today’s “experiential movements” (mcdonald, 2004). by making possible the instant live reporting from protest actions, they allow for the livehistoricizing of the activist experience, which equals narrating a story and rendering it historical, and both bear the empowering effects that derive from live storytelling (polletta, 2006). by emphasizing the performative component of activism, digital traces contribute to mythologize collective actions and emotions. although altered by obscure algorithms, the mechanisms of mediated collective memory, including the dimensions of time and co-presence (or the lack thereof), represent an additional playground for activists. #5. digital traces allow for the recognition and involvement of like-minded others. they contribute to promote and show(case) collectivity, by drawing attention to (and making tangible) the participation, networking practices and clustering together of activists and bystanders. digital traces intervene in three ways: they facilitate the discovery of popular meanings and activities, by emphasizing lower-common denominator storylines; they appeal to others, summoning potential activists, by means of, e.g., underscoring affective involvement (papacharissi, 2015), and positive emotions above all; they invite these others to participate in the co-production of the collective narrative, rapidly including them into the public of a given page, group or list (cf. yang, 2016). this “function” of digital traces shows distributed agency in action, where the task of “calling in” is equally divided between humans, actively pursuing new audiences, and material actors, algorithmically contributing to the challenge. #6. digital traces promote self-reflexivity by curation. agency is linked to reflection (couldry, 2014), and self-reflection empowers individuals to become a movement, freeing them from constraining social norms and roles (touraine, 1995). social media, hosting much of today’s socio-cultural production, enhance self-reflexivity by inviting, through engagement with digital traces, the curation of social-media data, or the selecting filtering and redistribution of relevant content. activists have the chance to iteratively “look inwards and to experience their own existence” (touraine, 1995, p. 282) through the lenses of the platform and its publics. stretching kelty’s concept beyond its original context, these exercises of self-reflexivity approach those “recursive publics” busy “maintaining the means of association through which they come together as a public” (2008, p. 28). the rise of temporary data publics this article reflected on how datafication may support users’ agency, asking whether and how activists can appropriate social media data to “meet their own ends” (couldry, 2014, p. 892). it placed collective action in the material of social media platforms, foregrounding their discursiveness and materiality, and focused on bottom-up data practices in view of understanding how social media data are mobilized in tactics and narratives. it explored how digital traces contribute to “rematerialize” the meanings produced by social actors, rendering partially visible the meaning-making mechanics inscribed in social media. but while making visible does not equal real power over those dynamics, social actors can reappropriate digital traces and the mechanisms of their creation to try to recuperate their perceived agency. as marres (2012) noted, users are “transformed from ordinary actors, caught up in habitual ways of doing, into participants—or at the very least, ‘implicants’—in problematic assemblages” (p. 48). these interventions by “participant-implicants” contribute to the creation of “new rationalities and alternative social imaginaries around datafication” that “connect system and experience in new ways” (baack, 2015, p. 8). these six ways in which digital traces act as agency machines contribute to create temporary data publics. “data publics” typically emerge with data-analytic practices and the related data infrastructure, which act as mediators and contribute to the reconfiguration of expertise and social knowledge (ruppert, 2015). these publics are brought to life by social media data because they depend on the data to render visible (and popular) tenuous identities and transient viewpoints for which visibility is a necessary condition for existence. they are performed as they are articulated in relation to and hinge on the mechanisms of social media platforms for their own survival. but they are also inherently performative—that is, they aim to change the reality they are describing. in other words, they are bearers of perceived agency that comes into being through everyday devices. they are temporary because they are continuously assembled and reassembled by contingent action, both human and algorithmic. yet, no matter how evanescent and transitory, these temporary data publics activate some form of political agency and enhance in particular the subjective interpretation of that agency—very often with real-world consequences. references agre, p. e. (1994). surveillance and capture: two models of privacy. the information society, 10, 101–127. baack, s. (2015). datafication and empowerment: how the open data movement rearticulates notion of democracy, participation, and journalism. big data & society, july-december, 1–11. couldry, n. (2014). a necessary disenchantment: myth, agency and injustice in a digital world. the sociological review, 62(4), 880–897. couldry, n., & powell, a. (2014). big data from the bottom up. big data & society, 1(2), 1–5. kelty, c. m. (2008). two bits: the cultural significance of free software. durham and london: duke university press. marres, n. (2012). material participation. technology, the environment and everyday publics. basingstoke, uk: palgrave macmillan. mcdonald, k. (2004). one as another: from social movement to experience movement. current sociology, 52(4), 575–593. papacharissi, z. (2015). affective publics sentiment, technology, and politics. oxford: oxford university press. polletta, f. (2006). it was like a fever: storytelling in protest and politics. chicago: university of chicago press. reigeluth, t. (2014). why data is not enough: digital traces as control of self and selfcontrol. surveillance & society, 12(2), 243–254. ruppert, e. (2015). doing the transparent state: open government data as performance indicators. in r. rottenburg, s. e. merry, s.-j. park, & j. mugler (eds.), a world of indicators: the making of governmental knowledge through quantification (pp. 127–150). cambridge: cambridge university press. touraine, a. (1995). critique of modernity. oxford: basil blackwell. van dijck, j., & poell, t. (2013). understanding social media logic. media and communication, 1(1), 2–14. yang, g. (2016). narrative agency in hashtag activism: the case of #blacklivesmatter. media and communication, 4(4), 13–17. final selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 heemsbergen, l. (2018, october 10-13). secret killers “after wikileaks”: mapping, evolutions, and taxonomy of radical leaking. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. secret killers “after wikileaks”: mapping, evolutions, and taxonomy of radical leaking luke heemsbergen deakin university introduction this paper is concerned with mapping experimentations of online leaks projects that followed wikileaks. the period of initial popularisation/infamy of wikileaks (2006-2015) correlates with an emergence of over 90 less-known radical online disclosure projects. these used anonymity and encryption as part of a networked socio-technological construct to empower publicity with an ethos similar to early wikileaks: anonymously uploaded secrets will be widely shared. as greenberg (2012) summarised the thinking of the time, “this machine kills secrets”. yet, this radical transparency machine was a decentralised and widely disparate ecosystem in terms of project make-up, afforded practices, and efficacy. scholarship on specific projects inspired by wikileaks in that time period (see coleman, 2014; heemsbergen, 2014: for work on anonleaks for example), new formations of online journalistic practice dependent on ‘megaleaks’, (woodall, 2017) and theoretical work on the methodologies of digital disclosure (hansen and flyverbom, 2015) exist in the literature. yet, systematic study of the leaks ecosystem itself and its (transnational) materiality remains underdeveloped. this paper offers empirical representation of the evolution of leaks projects “after wikileaks” through interpretation of various observable socio-technical vectors to build a taxonomy of online leaking. it also maps the visible interrelationships between sites via social network analysis (sna) to rather surprising results. beyond documenting evidence towards a socio-technical taxonomy of leaks sites, discussion of our findings considers how an ecology of digital leaks served (and severed) normative ties to problematic equations of ‘transparency’ and democracy (flyverbom, 2016; hansen and flyverbom, 2015) in the digital world. specifically, we offer a critical assessment of leaks sites’ radical disclosures though a frame of governmentality and agonistic and algorithmic (heemsbergen, 2016; ananny and crawford, 2016) democracy. methodology the provenance of the paper’s claims follows from mixed methods that combine interpretive open coding of empirically observable and measurable characteristics of leaks sites with social network analysis (sna) of those same sites’ makeup and relations (n:94). open coding offers a way to evoke clusters of specific socio-technical practice including affordances tied to the materiality of user and technical practice as well as vectors such as self-identified thematic focus (issue, region, etc.) and measures of publication efficacy for each site. these observations lead to taxonomy of leaks sites that cluster to groupings from which unique and sometimes agonistic normative governmental functions can be inferred. we use taxonomy over typology to reference the data-driven clustering and lack of ideal type (smith, 2002) within the agonistic ecology. further insight is given by mapping sites’ relations to each other through sna. our sna identifies the year with the highest number of active leaks sites and finds interlinks via employment of various digital methods initiative tools. gephi is used for visualisations and measures to determine discernible patterns within the network based off the algorithmic work of blondel (2008). if nothing else, the sna offers unique visibility to how leaking sites were organised and structured in ways not previously reported. methodologically, the work links media theory with democratic concerns of governmentality through the materiality of online leaks sites practice. it utilises methods that combine and contrast algorithmic insights of sna with ‘traditional’ social science coding and categorisation to better interpret data and infer their normative political implications. understanding the materiality of leaks practice from this perspective opens for analysis how governmentality functions through digital disclosure mechanisms that are embedding in society and critiques what this means democratically. an archeology of leaks sites before wikileaks imagined (blacknet) or real (liveleaks) is interesting, but outside scope. assessing the extent certain leaks sites successfully dominate media discourse over others remains tricky insofar as causation and correlation become conflated. nevertheless, this project produces nuanced findings of the life and death of secret killers “after wikileaks”. findings at a macro level, an ecology of leaks sites blossomed and died. as of 2017 only a handful of sites remained online (regardless of their efficacy) from the original 94. we also note that that over 90% of the sites thematically coded as ‘mimics’ of wikileaks in form and function failed to produce any new data at all and were subsequently abandoned; the purchase of decentralised radical transparency as governance (heemsbergen, 2016) remains questionable in decentralised material practice. considering the lack of visible connectivity and community between sites may offer some insight towards why so many sites individually failed. the outliers that persist offer cogent lessons towards the ability of internet-based media practice to construct protoinstitutions of governance (skelcher et al., 2013) linked to agonistic democratic theory. meso trends produce valuable insight to how leaks sites’ socio-technical materiality shape their political efficacy and normative goals. for instance, some sites offered democratic value through crowdsourced re-mediation of already leaked data, while others eschewed the traditional ethics of whistleblowing-leaking and incorporated active hacking elements to garner new data. other emergent clusters include the leaks-as-aservice software-only models (think securedrop) that are increasingly being used by major media companies. this says nothing of the reactionary state-based ‘leaks’ sites that communicated state security as the reason for accepting anonymous data in explicit opposition to an ethos of public disclosure. taken together, a nuanced picture of a leaks ecology emerges from the data. we can see the ethos of a single actor of radical transparency evolve into a diverse transnational web of material leaking and publishing practices. our full paper concludes with consideration of how the public information created by the diverse ecology of sites tested the limits of radical democratic theory that media (dahlberg, 2011) and government (wingenbach, 2011) scholars rely on for emergent proto-institutions to revitalise shapes of democracy. bibliography ananny m and crawford k. (2016) seeing without knowing: limitations of the transparency ideal and its application to algorithmic accountability. new media & society: 1461444816676645. blondel vd, guillaume j-l, lambiotte r, et al. (2008) fast unfolding of communities in large networks. journal of statistical mechanics: theory and experiment 2008(10): p10008. coleman g. (2014) hacker, hoaxer, whistleblower, spy: the many faces of anonymous: verso books. dahlberg l. (2011) re-constructing digital democracy: an outline of four 'positions'. new media & society 13(6): 855-872. flyverbom m. (2016) transparency: mediation and the management of visibilities. international journal of communication 10: 110-122. greenberg a. (2012) this machine kills secrets : how wikileakers, cypherpunks and hacktivists aim to free the world's information, new york: dutton. hansen hk and flyverbom m. (2015) the politics of transparency and the calibration of knowledge in the digital age. organization 22(6): 872-889. heemsbergen l. (2016) from radical transparency to radical disclosure: reconfiguring (in) voluntary transparency through the management of visibilities. international journal of communication 10: 14. heemsbergen lj. (2014) designing hues of transparency and democracy after wikileaks: vigilance to vigilantes and back again. new media & society. skelcher c, sullivan h and jeffares s. (2013) hybrid governance in european cities: neighbourhood, migration and democracy: palgrave macmillan. smith kb. (2002) typologies, taxonomies, and the benefits of policy classification. policy studies journal 30(3): 379-395. wingenbach ec. (2011) institutionalizing agonistic democracy: post-foundationalism and political liberalism: ashgate publishing company. woodall a. (2017) media capture in the era of megaleaks. journalism: 1-14. ir16 the wilderness online final w header selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 the wilderness online: how interactivity is changing music videos on the internet michelle c forelle annenberg school of communication and journalism university of southern california video games are like video clips…the game is the youth saving himself from the threat of domination posed by the industrialized world. the computer is the means of this threat and the means of resisting it: mtv is the product of capitalism and the means of resisting it (fiske 76) for john fiske, mtv was the ultimate post-modern playground. a 24-hour kaleidoscope of sight and sound, it denied the signified by giving all the power to the signifier (fiske). writing in 1986, only five years after the birth of the channel, fiske’s writing has proved prescient; in this essay, he compares the endless stream of music videos to video games, as both offer the opportunity for resistance while still constraining it. if this is true for each medium separately, what then can be said about their confluence? what power do music videos hold when they have moved off the television airwaves into the tubes of the internet, and have begun to incorporate the same ambivalent interactivity of video games? what is the power of the interactive music video? this paper explores interactive music videos as a new area for academic inquiry. it provides a history of music videos leading up to the ascendance of interactive music videos, and then explores a series of projects to illustrate the range of approaches the genre covers. finally, the paper produces a brief analysis of the genre, meant more to stimulate future, more focused analyses than to represent an exhaustive review of the field. music videos, then and now there is no broad consensus on what moment could be called the birth of the “music video.” music has been a fundamental element of cinema since sound films first became possible – the very first “talkie” was al jolson’s the jazz singer (1927), a musical. musical performances were a television staple from very early on, sold in blocks to fill gaps in television programming as early as the 1950s (austerlitz 15). the beatles and other major acts of the 1960s and 1970s shot promotional videos for their suggested citation (apa): forelle, m. (2015, october 21-24). the wilderness online: how interactivity is changing music videos on the internet. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http:// spir.aoir.org. forelle 2 songs to supplement their live appearances. the beatles’ efforts are often considered the first examples of the modern music video: clips that were not simply straightforward recordings of the band’s performance, but short films that, as saul austerlitz puts it, “engage[d]…with the artistic potentialities of the form” (20).1 however long and circuitous their past, most scholars of music videos plant their flag at the birth of mtv, the first twenty-four hour music video channel, and the company that revolutionized the music video industry. from its debut in 1981, mtv generated a demand for music videos that had the music industry had never seen before. not only did this demand generate more revenue for the music industry, it also provided fertile ground for the birth of a new genre, complete with its own conventions and clichés, as well as a roster of star directors (gondry, jonze, romanek, etc.) who continuously challenged them. in spite of this richness, by the mid-1990s, the music video boom had begun to taper off. in a competition to push the boundaries of bigger and better, music videos budgets had exploded, while the revenue they brought in declined. unable to compete with more moderately budgeted scripted shows, or the even lower-budget reality programs that became mtv’s new calling card, music videos were relegated to the after hours or the spinoff channels. the novelty of music videos had worn off. fans used to listening to their music on demand (via records, cassettes, or, later, cds) grew frustrated with the limited control they had over how they could view music videos. music videos had always been a risky investment – they generated no revenue on their own, but were rather expected to attract revenue through the sales of advertising spots, an arrangement that became increasingly untenable. in a happy historical coincidence, this decline occurred just as networked computer technologies had begun to reach a point of mainstream saturation and sophistication capable of handling the uploading and viewing of short videos. p2p filesharing programs had already begun to revolutionize the music industry, but as bandwidth expanded, people began to share not just songs but the music videos for them across these networks. the new social media phenomenon, particularly the popular site myspace, gave fans a place to showcase their favorite videos. video hosting site youtube quickly became a clearinghouse for music videos, with the genre accounting for one of the largest categories on the site (burgess and green 44). the internet became the new twenty-four hour music video channel, except this channel was on-demand, responsive and participatory. with the internet, the last ten years have been a music video renaissance. the broadly accessible nature of youtube has allowed smaller-budget videos to make a bigger impact than ever before. one notable example is the indie rock group ok go. the group had produced some moderately popular singles off their first album, complete with some regular airplay on mtv for their professionally produced music 1 for a longer and more detailed discussion of the history of music videos, see austerlitz, “music video in fugue,” money for nothing: a history of the music video from the beatles to the white stripes, and kinsley, “form: a short history of the music video,” we used to wait: music videos and creative literacy forelle 3 videos. when they released their second album, they recorded choreography to their song “a million ways” they had planned to use during live shows on video, and distributed it to fans, who then shared it with other fans across the internet (siegel). in june 2005, acknowledging the video’s popularity, the band included a link to the video on their official website; by august 2005, the video had over 500,000 views, and by november the number had increased to 3 million (garrity). building off the success of “a million ways,” ok go recorded and released another low-budget video for their single “here it goes again,” which received over 1 million views in its first week (garrity). maura edmond identifies “here it goes again” as a “watershed moment” that “confirmed, for anyone who might not have yet realized it, that the natural home for music videos had moved from television to the internet” (306). this is not just because of the opportunities the internet opened to smaller acts, but also because of the opportunities it opened to fans. the popular “music video” category on youtube is populated not just by official music videos released by artists, but also by fan-made covers, remakes and remixes. furthermore, artists have taken advantage of the affordances of the internet beyond youtube, often hosting their new music videos on sites specifically designed to promote that single. as saul austerlitz puts it, the internet did not kill the music video – it mutated it (221). interactive music videos one of the most high-profile interactive music videos is the wilderness downtown (hereafter referred to as twd), a website released by canadian band the arcade fire for their 2010 single, “we used to wait.” designed in partnership with google, the project was a way for google to show off the interactive capabilities its browser, chrome, offered in html5, the recently released update to html (“chrome experiments: the wilderness downtown”). the website asks users to input the address of their childhood home. multiple screens appear in time with the music, some taking the viewer on a tour of their hometown using google streetview images from google maps, while others show a silhouetted individual running through suburban streets. users can interact with flying birds and leave messages to their past selves on a postcard, whose highly stylized, generative typeface evokes trees extending their willowy branches. the video was widely acclaimed, both for its wistful aesthetics, which reflect the nostalgic tone of the song, and for its technical complexity. in 2011, the project became the first music video to earn a prestigious cannes cyber lion grand prix award. scholar rebecca kinskey describes it as having “tapped into a zeitgeist shifting distinctly from viewers as audience to viewers as users and coauthors of digital experience” (8). time magazine called it “the first video that truly harnesses the digital age – and one of the most personal you’ll ever watch” (sanburn). forelle 4 fig. 1: the wilderness downtown, 2011, dir. chris milk for director chris milk, twd was a project that embraced the full interactive potential of the internet that the move to youtube had somehow ignored: “i knew a bit about the capabilities of html5 and have always had a preoccupation with technology. i wanted to delve deeper, to see what else it could do. the technology becomes the palette that you make the artwork with, your palette and your paint.” (kiss) in spite of, or perhaps even because of, its position as one of the first major interactive music videos to use html5, twd’s interactive affordances are remarkably broad. the bulk of the video revolves around the entering of the address, which already creates a unique, personalized experience for each user. the postcard at the end of the video allows users to write in two ways, either by using their mouse to scrawl out letters, or using their keyboard to type them out. even the landing page from the site, where the user types in her address, presents a bit of subtle interactivity: in the background are flocks of birds that respond to the movements of the user’s mouse, flapping away to avoid it. in 2014, pop artist pharrell williams (commonly referred to by his first name only) released his own interactive music video, to a similar barrage of praise. 24 hours of happy (dir. we are from la; hereafter referred to as 24h), the project for his single “happy,” won multiple awards, ranging from internet excellence (the webby awards) to advertising (the clio awards). in this video, fans can scroll through 24 hours of footage, in which actors of all shapes and sizes dance along to an endless loop of the song. the interface for the song lines up each clip with a specific time of day, so putting the cursor at 6am pulls up a clip of someone dancing at sunrise, while putting it at 9pm shows an actor dancing at night. in contrast to twd, this is a very limited mode of interactivity. the only way to manipulate the video is by changing what time of day you want to see. forelle 5 fig. 2: 24 hours of happy, 2014, dir. we are from la the manipulation of the visual elements of a video may be, by far, the most common approach to an interactive music video, but it is not the only one. predating even the arcade fire’s iconic video, in 2009 california indie rockers cold war kids released an internet-only video for their single, “i’ve seen enough” (dir. sam jones). the website features each of the four members of the band playing the song on their own separate track. by clicking on buttons over the musicians, the user can toggle through four instrumental options for each of them: for example, the drummer can be playing either a traditional drum set, a small logic board, a tambourine, or a pared-down drum kit. in this way, the user can mix her own version of the song. the visuals are spare, but the aural possibilities are plentiful. fig. 3: “i’ve seen enough,” 2009, dir. sam jones while the vast majority of interactive music videos use the conventional tools of interactivity available to computers – the mouse/mousepad and the keyboard – a few forelle 6 notable projects have experimented with other inputs. the arcade fire released a “dance activated” video, sprawl2 (2011, dir. vincent morisset) for their single “sprawl ii (mountains beyond mountains)”, in which users could control the tempo of the dancers on the screen by waving their hands faster or slower in front of their webcam. in 2013, the arcade fire took this idea a step further by involving multiple devices. their interactive video for “reflektor,” (dir. vincent morisset) their first single off their 2013 album of the same name, allowed the use of a smartphone to manipulate the images that appeared on the computer screen. shot in haiti, the video told the story of a “young woman who travels between her world and our own” (“just a reflektor”). after opening the website on their computer, viewers are asked to open a specific url on their smartphones, which then allows the computer to read the location of the smartphone in front of the computer’s webcam. by moving the smartphone in physical space, the viewer can manipulate the images on the screen in different ways depending on the scene, and in some scenes the viewer themselves is projected into the video (via what the webcam is recording). fig. 4: sprawl2, 2011, dir. vincent morisset fig. 5: reflektor, 2013, dir. vincent morisset interactive, emphasis on the “active” from this small sampling, we can see that the chimerical nature of interactive music videos can frustrate many traditional approaches to media criticism and analysis, and thus require a new, hybrid approach. on the one hand, these projects are still very much the intersection of sight and sound that has been explored since the early days of mtv (frith et al.; vernallis). on the other hand, those sights and sounds are now subject, inasmuch as the algorithms and computer programs allow, to active engagement from audiences. here it is worth distinguishing this analysis from the active/passive dichotomy found in some media theories. as cultural scholars such as john fiske and henry jenkins have shown, so-called “passive” audiences of such media as television and film are often very “active,” both in their reception of the content, and their use of it. early scholars of music videos hailed the medium as offering particularly rich opportunities for such active engagement, citing the impressionistic and fragmentary style of these videos as being remarkably open to audience interpretation and resistant readings (harvey; fiske; hall, quoted in grossberg). my use of the phrase “active engagement” refers not to the reception or use of the material, but the very experience of it. interactive music videos allow users to forelle 7 actively alter the nature of the very material itself as they are viewing it. to use stuart hall’s model of encoding/decoding, with interactive music videos we can say that the audience is no longer simply left to decode a finished project – instead, encoding and decoding happen simultaneously, as the user decodes both the material on offer and the options for interaction, and encodes new material through that interaction (to then be decoded again). there is a tempting normative assessment underneath many of these observations: that interactive music videos with more limited affordances for interactivity are more indicative of a narrow, perhaps cynical drive to sell a product, while those with more expansive affordances truly invite the co-production of an artistic experience or other more genuine modes of audience engagement. however, the rich body of research on conventional music videos on the internet indicates the reality may not be so cut and dry. burgess and green point out that music videos on youtube (and, thus, their ability to be embedded on other social networking sites) are important tools for communicating identity on the web (50–51). furthermore, as mentioned before, the confluence of the increased availability of video hosting via youtube and the accessability of tools of video production (via webcams, camera phones, free editing software, etc.) has produced an explosion of user-generated music videos in the last two decades. many of these videos are individuals performing music themselves, but many are fans emulating or remixing videos their favorite artist has recently released. this is particularly common with music videos that feature dancing. the global reaction to pharrell’s video for “happy” is an illustrative example. in addition to putting up the interactive website 24 hours of happy, pharrell released a four-minute-long music video on youtube, a clip show of the dancers featured on the website. the internet proliferated with videos of fans dancing along, including from countries where dancing is prohibited: a group of seven young iranians were eventually arrested and sent to prison for producing and distributing their version of the “happy” video, shot in tehran. conventional music videos have been, and continue to be, a dialogical site of identity formation, expression and resistance. the question remains as to whether interactive music videos can serve the same purpose. by inviting such specific forms of engagement – click here, type there, use your webcam in this way – it could be that interactive music videos obligate certain kinds of interpretation while proscribing others, making it difficult to create remixes or parodies of these projects. moreover, the approximate technology used to produce conventional videos is fairly broadly available; while there are of course differences between professional-grade digital cameras and your run-of-the-mill camera phone, the camera phone is just as capable of capturing moving images as the professional camera. the same is not true for the technology required to produce many interactive videos, whether it be certain technological skills, such as the sophisticated coding capabilities required by many of these projects, or access to certain resources, as with the arcade fire’s partnership with google to get access to their maps application. this puts emulation, the ability to remake the video, out of reach for most fans. forelle 8 as an overview, this paper is unable to delve into whether fans feel interactive music videos are indicative of a more genuine connection with their favorite bands, or whether they feel the format constrains their opportunities to respond or remix. this could be a rich avenue of inquiry for a future project. however, what is clear is that this new genre is prompting these and other questions about the nature of new media genres emerging on our digital, networked platforms. if the move from television to the internet mutated the genre of music videos, perhaps this new movement is another radical step in that evolution. references “24 hours of happy.” dir. we are from la. perf. pharrell williams. 2014. web. “a million ways.” dir. trish sie. perf. ok go. 2005. web. austerlitz, saul. money for nothing: a history of the music video, from the beatles to the white stripes. continuum, 2007. print. burgess, jean, and joshua green. youtube: online video and participatory culture. 1 edition. cambridge  ; malden, ma: polity, 2009. print. “chrome experiments: the wilderness downtown.” chrome experiments. n.p., n.d. web. 6 july 2015. edmond, maura. “here we go again: music videos after youtube.” television & new media 15.4 (2014): 305–320. web. fiske, john. “mtv: post-structural post-modern.” journal of communication inquiry 10.1 (1986): 74–79. jci.sagepub.com.libproxy2.usc.edu. web. frith, simon et al. sound and vision: the music video reader. london; new york: routledge, 1993. print. garrity, brian. “running start: ok go jogs some serious digital sales on back of web buzz.” billboard 9 sept. 2006: 22–23. print. grossberg, lawrence. “on postmodernism and articulation an interview with stuart hall.” journal of communication inquiry 10.2 (1986): 45–60. jci.sagepub.com.libproxy1.usc.edu. web. hall, stuart. “encoding, decoding.” the cultural studies reader. ed. simon during. new york: routledge, 2007. print. harvey, lisa st clair. “temporary insanity: fun, games, and transformational ritual in american music video.” journal of popular culture 24.1 (1990): 39. print. "here it goes again." dir. trish sie. perf. ok go. 2006. web. forelle 9 "i've seen enough." dir. sam jones. perf. cold war kids. 2009. web. “just a reflektor.” dir. vincent morisset. perf. the arcade fire. 2013. web. 1 aug. 2015. kinskey, rebecca. we used to wait: music videos and creative literacy. cambridge, ma: mit press, 2014. print. the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation reports on digital media and learning. kiss, jemima. “interactive filmmaker chris milk on the new frontier of the web.” the guardian. 18 march 2013. web. 29 july 2015. sanburn, josh. “the 30 all-time best music videos.” time. web. 6 july 2015. siegel, robert. “of ‘a million ways’ to be popular, ok go finds one.” npr.org 30 aug. 2005. web. 1 aug. 2015. "sprawl2." dir. vincent morisset. perf. the arcade fire. 2011. web. "the wilderness downtown." dir. chris milk. perf. the arcade fire. 2011. web. vernallis, carol. experiencing music video: aesthetics and cultural context. new york: columbia university press, 2004. print. suggested citation (apa): giglietto, f., righetti , n., marino, g. (2020, october). detecting coordinated link sharing behavior on facebook during the italian coronavirus outbreak. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 detecting coordinated link sharing behavior on facebook during the italian coronavirus outbreak fabio giglietto university of urbino carlo bo nicola righetti university of urbino carlo bo giada marino university of sassari the basic law of rumor in their classic essay “an analysis of rumor”, gordon allport and leo postman postulated their basic law of rumor (1946). much in the fashion of other contemporary works of the time, the law is expressed as a mathematical formula stating that “the amount of rumor in circulation will vary with the importance of the subject to the individuals concerned times the ambiguity of the evidence pertaining to the topic at issue” (1946, p. 502). following days of constant coverage of the coronavirus outbreak in china, on friday 21, 2020 italian citizens woke up with the news of the first native infected patient, lacking any apparent link with china, who was hospitalized in serious conditions. one of the most high-impact types of data void is that fueling a sudden response to a breaking news case (golebiewski & boyd, 2018). thus, the importance of a topic rich in ambiguity (e.g. the origin of contagious, dubious transparency of data reported by china’s authorities, etc.) and lacking evidence (e.g. brand new unknown virus, no vaccine or effective drugs) suddenly spiked the general attention on news about that specific topic (fig. 1). suggested citation (apa): giglietto, f., righetti , n., marino, g. (2020, october). detecting coordinated link sharing behavior on facebook during the italian coronavirus outbreak. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 fig. 1 normalized news story percentage of coronavirus or covid-19 or "2019ncov" news stories in italy and the united states (courtesy of mediacloud) given what postulated by the aforementioned law, a spike of interest on an ambiguous topic multiplies the amount of rumors in circulation. as a corollary, we also expect a corresponding spike in the amount of activity performed by social media actors willing to manipulate the media (marwick & lewis, 2017). against this backdrop, we designed a study aimed at observing, under this peculiar condition, the behavior of a set of facebook pages, groups, and verified public profiles networks identified during previous studies (authors, 2019) for the way they coordinated their posting strategy to spread problematic information (jack, 2017). coordinated link sharing behavior coordination can be defined as the act of making people and/or things involved in organized cooperation. according to several scholars, it is a distinctive mark of users’ participation in digital spaces (bruns et al., 2013; jenkins, 2006; shirky, 2008), and plays a key role in online participatory culture (jenkins, 2008). activists benefited from the opportunity provided by the internet for building online communities and coordinating their actions (bennett & segerberg, 2012) for good purposes, but the same strategies and infrastructures can also be employed by malicious actors (jenkins, ito, boyd, 2015; marwick & lewis, 2017). social media, as many scholars have shown, can be used to influence political behavior through coordinated disinformation campaigns in which participants pretend to be ordinary citizens (online astroturfing) (zhang, carpenter, & ko, 2013). with a specific reference to facebook, a recent study (authors 2019) has spotlighted patterns of coordinated activity aimed at fueling online circulation of specific news stories before suggested citation (apa): giglietto, f., righetti , n., marino, g. (2020, october). detecting coordinated link sharing behavior on facebook during the italian coronavirus outbreak. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 the 2018 and 2019 italian elections, an activity called by the authors “coordinated link sharing behavior” (clsb). more precisely, clsb refers to the coordinated shares of the same news articles in a very short time by networks of entities composed by facebook pages, groups, and verified public profiles. this strategy represents a clear attempt to boost the reach of content and game the algorithm that presides over the distribution of the most popular posts (author 2019). noticeably, cbls has been proven to be consistently associated with the spread of problematic information: overall, urls belonging to problematic domains blacklisted by italian fact-checkers organizations were, before the 2018 and 2019 italian elections respectively, 1.79 (95% ci [1.08, 2.96]) and 2.22 (95% ci [1.35, 3.67]) times more likely to be shared in coordinated than in non-coordinated way (fig. 2). moreover, the coordinated entities are far more likely to be included in the blacklist of facebook entities compiled by avaaz (fig. 3) (authors, forthcoming). fig. 2. proportion of problematic domains shared by coordinated and noncoordinated entities. on the right the risk ratio (rr) values, all statistically significant. suggested citation (apa): giglietto, f., righetti , n., marino, g. (2020, october). detecting coordinated link sharing behavior on facebook during the italian coronavirus outbreak. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 fig. 3. proportion of problematic entities included in the coordinated and noncoordinated entities. on the right the risk ratio (rr) values, all statistically significant. coordinated networks during the coronavirus italian outbreak the uncertainty related to the coronavirus outbreak is a unique chance for malicious actors to leverage the anxiety of online publics to reach their goals, filling the information void with problematic content. considering the association between coordination, media manipulation, and problematic information, the entities involved in coordinated online activities represent a privileged perspective on these phenomena. moreover, while a certain amount of attention is paid to coordinated behaviors during a longer timespan, usually in the run-up to relevant political events, less is known about these efforts in relation to single breaking-news incidents. the spike of attention on covid-19 produced, therefore, a unique opportunity to analyze clsb. relying on the list of coordinated entities identified in the above-mentioned studies, we used the crowdtangle api to collect all the posts including urls they published between 21 and 24 february 2020. the query resulted in a dataset of 12,502 unique urls shared 22,900 times. by using the method we developed to identify clsb, we detected 26 networks composed of 124 entities. based on this data, against the backdrop of the literature and the already conducted studies, this proposal will discuss coordinated link sharing behavior in the context of suggested citation (apa): giglietto, f., righetti , n., marino, g. (2020, october). detecting coordinated link sharing behavior on facebook during the italian coronavirus outbreak. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 the coronavirus outbreak informational void, analyzing network mutations over time and the content strategies used to exploit the ambiguity associated with the topic. references allport, g. w., & postman, l. (1946). an analysis of rumor. public opinion quarterly, 10(4), 501–517. bennett, w. l., & segerberg, a. (2012). the logic of connective action. information, communication and society, 15(5), 739–768. bruns, a., highfield, t., & burgess, j. (2013). the arab spring and social media audiences: english and arabic twitter users and their networks. the american behavioral scientist, 57(7), 871–898. golebiewski, m., & boyd, d. (2018). data voids: where missing data can easily be exploited. data & society, 29. authors (2019, september 20). understanding coordinated and inauthentic link sharing behavior on facebook in the run-up to 2018 general election and 2019 european election in italy. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/3jteh authors (forthcoming). it takes a village to manipulate the media: coordinated link sharing behavior during 2018 and 2019 italian elections. information, communication & society. jack, c. (2017). lexicon of lies: terms for problematic information. data & society. https://datasociety.net/output/lexicon-of-lies/ jenkins, h. (2008). convergence culture: where old and new media collide (revised ed). new york university press. jenkins, h., ito, m., & boyd, d. (2015). participatory culture in a networked era: a conversation on youth, learning, commerce, and politics. john wiley & sons. marwick, a., & lewis, r. (2017). media manipulation and disinformation online. data & society. https://datasociety.net/pubs/oh/dataandsociety_mediamanipulationanddisinfor mationonline.pdf shirky, c. (2008). here comes everybody: the power of organizing without organizations. penguin press. zhang, j., carpenter, d., & ko, m. (2013). online astroturfing: a theoretical perspective. https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2013/humancomputerinteraction/generalpresentat ions/5/ suggested citation (apa): giglietto, f., righetti , n., marino, g. (2020, october). detecting coordinated link sharing behavior on facebook during the italian coronavirus outbreak. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): skardzius, k. (2020, october). monetizing relationships: streaming alone with all of your friends. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. monetizing relationships: streaming alone with all of your friends karen skardzius york university background and context the last few years have seen massive growth in the popularity of livestreaming video games. the most prominent livestreaming platform twitch.tv reports that nearly 10 million unique users access their site each day to watch just over 2 million unique streamers, for an average of 106 minutes each (twitch, 2017). streamers use this platform to broadcast a diverse range of entertainment content they produce, from playing video games of all genres, to competitive gaming, to creative activities like cooking or painting, to editorial and news content. for some, producing/viewing livestreams is a way of engaging in fan culture or sharing their interests with friends (consalvo, 2016). for others, it is an avenue into the realm of professionalized gaming (t.l taylor, 2018). streaming is quickly becoming one of the major conduits through which video game information and culture travel. perhaps twitch.tv says it best, “if it’s a big deal, you’ll find it on twitch. and if you’re not on twitch you’re missing out” (twitch, 2017). this paper is derived from a larger project that examines the experiences of women who livestream video games on the twitch.tv platform. to date, much of the research that has been done in the area of streaming is concerned with streamers who have a large following and/or derive their main source of income from streaming. rather than directing more attention to those streamers who have attained ‘success’ as twitch would frame it, this study is centered around a group of streamers unique from those who are typically the focus. the main goal of the project is to answer the following questions: what is it like to livestream for women and why do they do it? who is being promoted in this space and how? in what ways are women supported as streamers (or not)? how might streaming become more accessible to women? study design to answer these questions, i examined twitch’s policies in detail; i maintained my own twitch channel for 2 weeks; i purposively sampled 50 twitch channels run by women, then recorded and analyzed 90 minutes of each of their streams in three 30-minute segments. i also conducted five semi-structured interviews with women who stream on twitch. interviews ranged from 60-90 minutes each. to analyze the recordings, i took detailed notes and selectively transcribed portions of each recording. then i used the qualitative software nvivo to organize data into themes through several rounds of coding. all interviews were transcribed and analyzed similarly. for the purposes of this paper, i am focusing on the theme of monetizing relationships. when asked about why they started streaming, everyone i interviewed talked about wanting to meet people who played the same games they did, about making new friends, and that they were already playing games anyway so they might as well do it with other people. although their initial goals were not necessarily to turn their gaming hobby into a full-time job, each of them referred to the appeal of getting paid to play. this is in keeping with nancy baym’s (2017) argument that the relationship between work and leisure has become more complicated with the advent of social media, and further that the “commodification of intimacy” (hochschild, 1985) “increasingly includes an expectation that people use always-on media to turn their selves into products and personal relationships into career opportunities” (baym, 2017, relating in the gig economy, para. 6). each of the streamers also talked about having, at some point, attempted to grow their channel, to trying to attain partner status, and while maybe not fully supporting themselves through twitch, at least aspiring to make more money. brooke erin duffy (2017) writes about this kind of work as aspirational labour. she explains aspirational labour as “a mode of (mostly) uncompensated, independent work that is propelled by the much-venerated ideal of getting paid to do what you love. as both a practice and a worker ideology, aspirational labor shifts content creators’ focus from the present to the future, dangling the prospect of a career where labor and leisure coexist” (p. 4). for two of the streamers i interviewed, streaming is their full-time career, for the other three it is not, and yet for all of them monetization of the platform holds a lot of sway in how they use twitch (and are used by it). twitch promotes itself using the language of “community”. for example, they tell users, “watch what you love, connect with streamers, and chat with tons of communities” and they tell potential streamers, “bring your passions; we’ll help you build a community around them” (twitch, 2020). the streamers i interviewed also talked about community and friendship extensively. this made me wonder, what happens when money and technology play central roles in facilitating our connections to others? i found that the ideas of community and friendship become messy and complicated through twitch, even when making money isn’t a primary motivation for a streamer. in this paper i discuss some of the ways monetization (or the possibility thereof) can influence the way people think about and/or treat each other through twitch. first, i discuss the ways monetization influences community building. second, i discuss some of the implications of paying for attention. third, i discuss the pressure streamers feel to perform a particular kind of authenticity around monetization. finally, i will discuss how monetization creates friction and competition between streamers. conclusion this work contributes the perspectives of 5 women whose experiences have been largely overlooked by existing research about streaming, as well as the analysis of another 50 twitch channels run by women from diverse backgrounds and streaming interests. these findings demonstrate that the monetization features available to streamers and the everyday practices that have emerged through twitch centered around monetization have a lot of influence over how people relate to each other, even for those streamers who are not trying to monetize their channels. the body of the submission should be formatted according to the following: arial font, size 12, single space, left align throughout, double space for new paragraph. references baym, n. k. (2018). playing to the crowd: musicians, audiences, and the intimate work of connection. nyu press. consalvo, m. (2016). player one, playing with others virtually: what’s next in game and player studies. critical studies in media communication, 34(1), 84-87. duffy, b. e. (2017). (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. yale university press. hochschild, a. r. (1985). the managed heart: commercialization of human feeling university of california press. taylor, t. l. (2018). watch me play: twitch and the rise of game live streaming. princeton university press. twitch. (2017). about. twitch.tv. retrieved august 28th, 2017 from https://www.twitch.tv/p/about/. twitch. (2020). about. twitch.tv. retrieved january 20th, 2020 from https://www.twitch.tv/p/en/about/. tweeting the elections in belgium pieter verdegem selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 tweeting the elections in belgium. an analysis of s ocial and traditional cross-media patterns. pieter verdegem dept. of communication sciences ghent university belgium pieter.verdegem@ugent.be evelien d’heer iminds mict ghent university belgium evelien.dheer@ugent.be peter mechant iminds mict ghent university belgium peter.mechant@ugent.be abstract mass media have traditionally functioned as an intermediary system between society and political institutions. the rise of social media potentially reconfigures relations between citizens and politicians and challenges traditional media’s position. via the analysis of twitter traffic during the 2012 local election in belgium, this study aims to provide insight in the way different actor types (i.e. politicians, citizens and journalists) and different media outlets (i.e. social and traditional media) are embedded in the twittersphere. we acknowledge the platform serves as an extension, rather than an alternative for the mainstream media, with high-end twitter users being mostly established (media) figures. cross-media linkages often include audiovisual media, both social and traditional media. to conclude, pathways for future research are outlined. keywords twitter; cross-media; mass media introduction the complexity and intertextuality of the media manifold complicates the role of media studies, compared to the fairly closed media system of the nineteenth century. without too optimistic expectations, we acknowledge an emerging ‘network’ sphere of journalistic practice (heinrich, 2011), driven by this digital media environment and socio-economic contingencies, characterized by a decentralization and non-linearity of news flows. in similar vein, the concept of post-broadcast democracy (prior, 2006), referring to a constellation of mobile, interactive publics that use mass media content as raw material to play with and perform upon via multiple channels and platforms. as people’s engagement with political content gets more fragmented, this possibly affects the strategies of political actors, media organizations, the course of elections and engagement with one’s political life in general (wilson, 2011). although the internet has not undermined leading news organizations (curran, fenton, & freedman, 2012), social media platforms, such as twitter, deal with and distribute (mass media) content in varying and often innovative ways. the flows of communication, and related, the flows of influence, are multi-directional and create an ‘ambient’ news environment (hermida, 2010). consequently, the public, media and political agenda are more complexly related to one another. this study aims to provide insight in the way different actor types (i.e. politicians, citizens and journalists) and different media outlets (i.e. social and traditional media) are embedded in the twittersphere. data collection focuses around the local elections in belgium, held on 14 october 2012. the upsurge in twitter traffic and mass media coverage provides an interesting opportunity to investigate how multiple media and actors are related to one another. methodology via the use of the twitter streaming api, we collected a corpus of 44.610 tweets, between 3 and 21 october 2012, with the 14th of october as election day. selection of the messages was based on the official hashtag related to the local elections in the dutch-speaking part of belgium (i.e. ‘#vk2012’). the 44.610 twitter messages correspond to 12.655 users who were participating in the debate on the local elections. the adoption of twitter by the dutch-speaking community in belgium lags behind selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 other social network sites. twitter follows fourth in line with 14%, after facebook (59%), youtube (26%) and netlog (17%). twitter usage is on the rise though, with a 6.5% increase compared to 2010 (iminds-ilab.o, 2011). data collection was performed using the yourtwapperkeeper application, an open source software suite that allows harvesting and archiving of tweets, here according to the ‘vk2012’ hashtag. the downloadable cvs-files were used for more advanced analyses using excel, spss and the open source visualization tool, gephi. main findings twitter traffic before, on and after election day based on the analysis of twitter traffic on a daily base, we are able to provide a chronological overview of activity during the election period. from the 3th of september up until one week before election day (14 october 2012), daily twitter traffic does not exceed 200 messages a day. two peaks were found during that period, i.e. the publication of the list numbers in the flemish mainstream media and election day in the netherlands. the week before election day, we notice a steady rise in twitter traffic as well as an increase in mass media coverage, more specifically audiovisual reporting on the elections. the 14th of october, a peak in user activity is found, which far exceeds twitter messages sent before and after election day. overall, this is a returning pattern, also found by other research on twitter activity during election period, e.g. in sweden (larsson & moe, 2011) and in australia (bruns & burgess, 2011). the most active and most visible actors in the twittersphere the identification of the most active users in the debate further allows us to define the position of and relation between journalists, citizens and politicians. when we elaborate on the ten most active users in the debate (in terms of singleton messages, i.e. no retweets), we notice the prominence of established media organizations and political actors. one national and two regional traditional media outlets were amongst the most active contributors, often including hyperlinks in their messages with reference to the website. concerning political parties, both right wing (flemish nationalists) and left wing politicians are represented. based on the visualization software gephi, interaction patterns between political parties/politicians, media/journalists and citizens can be demarcated. top users can be defined in terms of indegree (@replies received) or addressivity by multiple users. on the other hand, outdegree (@replies sent), refers to the expressivity towards multiple users. the actors receiving a lot of messages differ from the actors sending a lot of messages. the top ten receivers are all established or elite actors (i.e. politicians and media actors), whereas the top senders are primarily citizen-users. hence, we acknowledge a onedirectional communication flow, from non-established to established actors. two-way communication between different actor types is rare and inter-party communication is rather absent as well. cross-media connectivity: hyperlinks and hashtags twitter potentially fulfills a gatewatching function (bruns, 2005), through the sharing, linking or highlighting of particular stories via hyperlinks or hashtags. in our sample of 44.610 twitter messages, about 20% or 9201 url’s were found (referring to 6950 unique url’s). categorization of the most frequent hyperlinks shows most hyperlinks refer to social media (n= 3774), although traditional outlets are well represented as well (n= 3112). concerning social media, we notice audiovisual material (e.g. youtube and twitpic) far exceeds more textual sources (e.g. blogs). references to traditional outlets contain fairly equal amounts of audiovisual and print outlets. concerning audiovisual material, the public service broadcaster vrt holds the dominant position and for print media, it’s the quality newspaper titles that are most represented. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 in addition to hashtags referring to politicians or political parties (n= 2763) and municipalities (n= 2513), we found a moderate amount of hashtags related to traditional media outlets (n= 902). here, audiovisual material far outnumbers references to newspapers, which relates to the spikes in twitter traffic we found during particular televised events or debates. again, the public service broadcaster vrt and its news and current affairs programs in particular, are often referred to. discussion this study takes into account multiple twitter conventions (@replies, hyperlinks and hashtags) to understand the characteristics of the twitter election debate and contributes to the existing literature on twitter usage in an election context. traditional media outlets embrace twitter as a means to extend their reach beyond traditional content platforms. for politicians, it provides an extra or alternative information channel towards citizen-voters and bypass the mass media to push their agenda to the public. the content of the messages as well as a time aspect should enable to grasp agendasetting influences. the demarcation of the three different actor types shows that communication flows in a onedirectional manner. the prophecy of an open and decentralized sphere is somewhat countered by the high visibility of (i.e. addressivity towards) established actors and high activity of non-established actors towards these established actors. to conclude, we emphasize to focus on twitter’s role within the broader media ecology, with particularly strong connections with audiovisual content of traditional as well as social media outlets. references bruns, a. (2005). gatewatching: collaborative online news production. new york: peter lang. bruns, a., & burgess, j. (2011). #ausvotes: how twitter covered the 2010 australian federal election. communication, politics & culture, 4(2), 37-56. curran, j., fenton, n., & freedman, d. (2012). misunderstanding the internet. new york: routledge. heinrich, a. (2011). network journalism. journalism practice in interactive spheres. new york: routledge. hermida, a. (2010). twittering the news: the emergence of ambient journalism. journalism practice, 4(3), 297308. iminds-ilab.o. (2011). digimeter report 4. gent: iminds-ilab.o. larsson, a., & moe, h. (2011). studying political microblogging: twitter users in the 2010 swedisch election campaign. new media & society, 14(5), 729-747. prior, m. (2006). post-broadcast democracy: how media choice increases inequality in political involvement and polarizes elections. cambridge: cambridge university press. wilson, j. (2011). playing with politics: political fans and twitter faking in post-broadcast democracy. convergence, 17(4), 445-461. title independent podcasting as a specific online participative subculture: a case study of montreal’s podcasters 1 independent podcasting as a specific online participative subculture: a case study of montreal’s podcasters mélanie millette université du québec à montréal. canada millette.melanie@courrier.uqam.ca abstract based on a theoretical framework grounded in a sociological analysis of usage and the subculture paradigmatic approach of cultural studies, this paper analyzes the socio-cultural dynamic of online participation through the use of a technological device in a digitally literate community, namely independent podcasters. i argue that independent podcasting should not be understood as either a form of ‘radio-to-go’ or a simple online delivery system. drawing on data collected in a three-year period of research within the montreal (canada) podcasting community, i propose that independent audio podcasting is a specific form of online participation, with its own subcultural logic and a unique ‘style’ that is completely different from the institutional and traditional radio model. to present the specificity of the podcasting subculture, this paper demonstrates how a podcast’s distinctive style is formed, through a singular level of familiarity among users, the subversion of lexical radio conventions and the influence of djing and blogging on podcasters’ practices. this paper illustrates the stylistic repertoire of montreal’s independent podcasters based on an online practice on the fringe of the mainstream media production model, specifically with regard to commercial radio. keywords podcasting; independent podcasting; usage; subculture. 2 introduction podcasting is poorly represented in the field of internet studies. while there are plenty of studies on blogs, social networking sites and online video practices, audio podcasting remains largely neglected. since the advent of this form of online contribution around 2004, only a few scattered studies have examined it. some research depicts podcasting as a means of “broadcast on demand” that public and commercial radio stations should adopt to increase their audiences (ofcom 2004; o neill 2006; murray 2009). other research dwells on the individualized nature of the broadcast (self-adapted broadcast) which makes it a type of “personalized media” (berry 2006, p.156). while these scientific contributions explain some aspects of podcasting, they tend to focus on technical characteristics and broadcasting conditions, leaving aside the entire social and cultural experience of the podcaster. this is exactly what this paper will attempt to remedy. i argue that podcasting should not to be understood as either a form of ‘radio-to-go’ or a simple online audio delivery system. drawing on data collected in a threeyear period (2006-2009) of research within the montreal (canada) podcasting community1 one original aspect of this study lies in the fact that podcasters and the meaning they attach to their practices are at the very heart of the research method. the methodology used to conduct this study was inspired by the grounded theory approach, and i took an observer/participant position in the community. as a participant, i created and actively updated , i propose that independent audio podcasting is a specific form of online participation, with its own subcultural logic that is completely different from institutional and traditional radio production. i will begin this paper with a brief review of the literature, which will allow me to provide a portrait of podcasting as seen by other researchers. i will reveal repetitions and tensions within these definitions to demonstrate the need to consider independent podcasting as a different practice from internet radio broadcasting. i will then present an exhaustive definition of “independent podcasting” based on my observations and as defined by the podcasters interviewed. podcasting will be presented as a participatory usage that is at the heart of a web subculture that is closely related to the practices of djing and blogging. 1 i did this study for my master’s thesis (see millette, 2009). a second segment of the study is currently underway. this segment is an enquiry conducted at uqam’s labcmo (cmo.uqam.ca) into the social forms of internet contribution. the project is directed by professor serge proulx; professor lorna heaton is conducting a case study on a botanical wiki (telabotanica), mary jane kwok choon is studying the use of facebook by two ngos in mauritius, and i am doing a third case study on independent podcasters and the linkage between their individual and group contributions. 3 a personal blog which i referenced in my signature when i commented on podcasters’ blogs. i also participated in podcaster activities, including podcamps and informal meetings. i assiduously listened to multiple podcasts and left comments on podcasters’ blogs and facebook profiles. as an observer, i conducted two rounds of interviews with 15 podcasters: the first round was exploratory, while the second was semi-directed. to complement this methodological design, i meticulously analyzed three podcasters’ audio material, which means that i undertook an audio analysis of their three last audio podcasts and an in-depth website examination. from radio-to-go to broadcasting: what is podcasting? as i mentioned earlier, there is little literature on podcasting, and in what little exists podcasting is understood primarily as an “innovative means of broadcasting” that combines mobility, content available online and rss feed subscription (see berry 2006; o’neill 2006; delys & foley 2006; ofcom 2004, among others). in these studies, podcasting is painted in broad strokes and includes: 1) radiophonic content rebroadcast online (for example, rebroadcast of a program initially broadcast by hertzian waves) 2) original content created by radio stations and institutions for broadcast online (such as cbc.ca’s radio 3 portal and radio-canada.ca’s bande à part) 3) original creations of independent amateurs in a widely cited article, richard berry reports that when it comes to podcasting, “content is king” because it is the content that dictates the form of the final production (2006, p.153). this also helps make podcasting an ideal “niche media” (ibid.). for berry, the customized and customizable aspect of the relationship with the media is an essential part of podcasting: we listen to content that deals with the topic of our choosing, at the time of our choosing, in the place of our choosing. sterne, morris, baker and freire (2008) suggest that we look at podcasting as an alternative online broadcasting practice. their analysis is more sensitive to the social characteristics, the historical-technological context and the media and cultural implications of podcasting. these mcgill university researchers slot podcasting into the evolutionary line of amateur musical practices, related in particular to the development of recording and sound processing technologies (sterne et al. 2008, p.6). the presence of an independent podcaster in 4 professor sterne’s team – jeremy morris, one of the voices of the montreal anglophone podcast midnight poutine, a podcast that covers montreal’s alternative music scene – appears to have helped create an image of podcasting as an alternative practice closely related to the development of amateur and semi-professional studio equipment. murray focuses on the specific media practices that podcasting is helping to launch, both in terms of the listeners’ personal programming (‘self-scheduling’) and for corporations that want to spread their brand image to younger audiences (murray 2009). bull’s work on the culture of mobile listening adds to our understanding of podcasting by explaining how the mobile listening allowed by digital players like ipods creates an “audio bubble” (2005). if we look at these studies on podcasting as a whole, we see tension between the technologically centred definition of podcasting, seen primarily as an on-demand or rss feed broadcasting method, on one hand, and the idea that podcasting has subversive potential as an alternative practice, on the other. this quote clearly illustrates this tension: a podcast is simply an audio file, along with rss xml tags, and applications that poll and download these files. the combination allows users to have programs automatically delivered to their mp3 players, and producers to have self-published, syndicated radio shows. institutional broadcasters acting quickly to exploit the rapid uptake of this technology are still grappling with the ramifications for content and, so far, most large broadcasters simply reversion broadcast content for mp3 download. but individual podcasters are challenging commercially driven notions of appropriate radio content and the immersive, sustained listening conditions podcasting promotes prime it to carry on certain of the traditions of long-form ‘radiophonic works’ (delys & foley 2006, p.131). while these studies provide useful input to help frame podcasting, they tend to reduce it to its technical contingencies and the issue of broadcasting. my main reproach for them is that they do not systematically differentiate between the independent podcaster’s process, which implies specific usage, and the content broadcast on the internet by commercial or public radio. the study i am presenting here looks explicitly at how the practice of independent podcasting is specific and must be understood as such. independent podcasting i will argue here that it is appropriate to refer to ‘independent podcasting’ when we are talking about the production of original audio content in a non-institutionalized setting by one or more people who create it for pleasure, with no editorial filter imposed by a third party, and 5 broadcast it over the internet. you will note that i avoid using the word ‘amateur’; although this label may well be useful in our understanding of independent podcasting as different from institutional podcasting (which we could qualify as ‘professional’), it seems to me that it limits our analysis to the duality of amateur vs. expert. furthermore, while independent podcasting is indeed practised by amateurs, they nevertheless develop considerably technical expertise, in the handling of microphones, the use of editing software, and the integration of various broadcasting strategies through social media, for example (twitter, facebook and blogs, etc., are often used). the communications skills developed by users are also notable, as demonstrated by the podcasters’ improved hosting techniques as their practice advances2 in the podcasting community . podcasters develop very advanced communicational and technical expertise. 3 2 this progress is especially obvious among ‘senior’ podcasters with several years of podcasting experience. one of the podcasters interviewed even admitted having withdrawn his first podcasts from his site because he was embarrassed for his current listeners to hear his early offerings. 3 i use the word ‘community’ in the full sense of the word: podcasters demonstrate real commitment to their practice and to other podcasters. they know each other, and during the research period, there were regular meetings of podmtl where podcasters get together for a drink, to talk with each other and meet listeners. , the rising popularity of web broadcasting has elicited discussions about the distinctive (or otherwise) nature of podcasting as they themselves see it. one of canada’s podcasting pioneers, marie-chantale turgeon, wrote a blog post on the subject back in 2005: what "real" podcast is or could be: [...] -personal -the podcaster talk [sic] about his personal life, feelings, emotions. -expression of one's mind -with spontaneity -improvise, explore the unknown which is of course what brings in innovation -portable -available in any time and space -free -directly connected to the web -organic and alive, can start or stop at any time -actual (rss delivers news about a new post or show in the minute it is online) [...] 6 following the publication of this post, several commenters discussed the characteristics of ‘real podcasting’ in contrast with web re-broadcasting of radio content. in the comments section, turgeon clarifies that some of the characteristics she attributes to podcasting are shared by radio: spontaneity, for example. but it is nevertheless evident that even though radio hosts are free to improvise on the air, their discourse is limited by certain constraints: air time, sponsors and advertisers, as well as the station’s brand image, to mention just a few. this discussion among users, listeners and podcasters following turgeon’s post zeroes in on the image podcasters have of their practice and the general definition suggested by studies on podcasting: there is something in independent podcasting that goes beyond the technical. during my research, a podcaster expressed this very sentiment of specificity with regard to his media practice by comparing podcasting to film. he also repeated the analogy in his personal blog: […] webcast radio programs are not podcasts. not even slightly? no, not even slightly … it’s like pretending that a birthday video i shot in 1994 is a film. yes, i am using the same technology (more or less), but i am not following the rules of the seventh art. it’s the same for people who claim to be podcasting but replicate radio station rules. a podcast is just a vulgar audio file captured in an rss feed (laurent lasalle, mes paroles s’envolent, post on october 22, 2008 – the emphasis is his, the translation is ours). in other words, it is not a direct step from holding a camera to making a film. likewise, broadcasting an audio file over the internet is not podcasting. to make a film, you need to adopt codes and develop a process that goes far beyond simply wanting to immortalize a birthday party: you have to develop a message and include the use of the camera in a much larger process of meaning. this is where the concepts of usage and subculture can be helpful in understanding the practice of independent podcasting. usage and subculture drawing in part on the ideas of michel de certeau (1990), the sociology of usage defines ‘usage’ as a daily life practice endowed with specific meaning for the user, which includes the micro-social aspect of the situation as well as the constraints and innovative possibilities of the technical device (breton & proulx 2006). it is not the instrumental use of a 7 technical tool, but a complex and situated usage through which the user develops cognitive and technical competencies (proulx 2008). to clarify, let’s say that when we are talking about usage, the relationship with the technical tool is the opposite of charlie chaplin’s relationship with the industrial assembly line in modern times. with usage, the action is accompanied by understanding and produces meaning. the term ‘usage’ in relation to web ‘contribution’ or ‘production’ becomes “contributive usage” (proulx 2009) or “produsage” (bruns 2008). that is that say that through usage, the user posts or modifies online content by commenting, tagging, broadcasting and discussing on the web. independent podcasting is a contributive and expressive usage that leaves media footprints other users can interact with. the communication that unfolds among podcasters and between podcasters and their audiences is a crucible for referents and specific codes about the practice and its themes (music, alternative culture, local cultural life). in the discussions of montreal podcasters and their listeners, we observed recurring references to urban and local geography. for example, podcasters generally mention the place where they record (on their balcony, in a particular café or park) and places they have gone without necessarily taking the time to explain the exact location. one podcaster assumes that his listeners know him well enough to realize that the café lézard he mentions is a café on masson street in montreal, near his place, because he has already mentioned it elsewhere in his blog and podcast. the same is true for the people the podcasters mention. each podcast develops a stylistic repertory marked by references (places, people, activities, preferred themes, musical style), and a sense of complicity grows between the podcaster and the listeners because they share the meaning of these codes. it is through the development of this shared repertory and the sharing of these meanings around the practice that the subculture is established. a ‘subculture’ exists in tension with a dominant culture, not ‘under’ it in terms of hierarchical subordination but rather on the fringes of and in reaction to it (clarke et al. 1976). a subculture emerges in the specific context where a group of people share specific values and experiences, often unconventional and unusual, that do not correspond to those embraced by the dominant culture: their specific relationship with the world is the platform for the development of a repertory (lifestyle, but also habits, shared values) that attests to their specific experience (clarke et al. 1976; clarke 1976; hebdige 2008 [1979]). in their usage, the podcasters i observed talk about their own experience, and their remarks are generally anchored in their personal situation. without being systematically 8 personal in the sense of ‘intimate’, the podcasters’ remarks are personalized and unique because they are deeply entwined with their own experience and personality. indeed, podcasting stands out as a structuring usage in the identity of the podcasters interviewed. they report their practice proudly and use it to describe themselves. in most cases, they use podcasting as an outlet and forum for personal expression where they can give free reign to their passion for music and creativity. this is a recurring motif in the usage of podcasting: making a podcast for the pleasure of self-expression without bowing to the editorial filter of a gate-keeper. in fact, in the case of montreal podcasters, authenticity is one of the guiding values vital to the expression of the subcultural logic. this shows through in the approach: the process must be authentic and acknowledge the podcaster’s subjectivity. in terms of form, it is not uncommon to hear ambient noise that attests to the ‘real life’ of the podcaster, such as the fridge motor starting up, a siren in the distance or the hubbub of the café where the podcaster is recording. podcasting as a participative online subculture independent podcasting exists in tension with the dominant culture of commercial radio. some reports suggest that younger listeners are increasingly turning away from commercial and public radio, especially because of the repetitive programming on these stations and the presence of advertising and self-promotion (see ofcom 2004 and o’neill 2006, among others). independent podcasting seems to follow a similar logic: podcasters are disappointed fans of traditional radio who have seized on the opportunity provided by podcasting to create the audio media experience of their desires. most of the podcasters interviewed said they never listen to commercial radio, and one said that if he really had no other options, he would tune in to university radios, such as cism, the université de montréal radio station that has an fm license with a mandate to air emerging music. musical programming is the crux of the podcasters’ disappointment with commercial radio: they lament a repetitive repertory that does not reflect their personal taste (see millette 2009 for details and ofcom 2004 for similar results). independent podcasting as we observed it is similar to djing in that the integration of music is extremely structuring. in both the creation of an audio signature unique to each podcaster and the narrative aspect and building of atmosphere, pieces and jingles are used to create an original auditory experience in which the podcaster takes into account the development of the audience’s listening experience (millette 2009, p.101-102). independent podcasting is also linked to a whole series of contributive usages of the internet, including blogging and participating in social networking sites, especially facebook 9 and twitter. all of the podcasters listened to and interviewed for this study had at least one blog and many also had facebook and twitter accounts4 4 in this regard, i should mention that these results date back to 2009. the use of facebook and especially twitter is far more widespread now. the practices of podcasters who already had a facebook profile have become more sophisticated in the last three years: some have created a facebook page specifically for their podcast. . they generally use the blog as a central broadcasting point for the podcast and subsequently relate the information on facebook, twitter, etc. blogging contributes to the stylistic repertory of the podcast by rounding out the audio universe with visual and textual support. independent podcasting is thus an online participatory subculture expressed through a specific practice but connected to other contributive usages online. podcasters make use of a tangle of media, choosing different usages to make different types of contributions. this tangled usage and technological convergence bears out observations on “participatory culture” (jenkins 2006; bruns 2008). independent podcasting is one of the participatory subcultures that have emerged with the rise of web 2.0 tools and practices. the subculture of independent podcasting unfolds around a specific usage of the internet which serves as a means of expression for the podcaster and exists in tension with traditional radiophonic culture, especially that of commercial radio. conclusion bruns posits that contributive usage on the internet, which he calls “produsage,” provides an alternative route to the production of media content: “the environments of what we describe as produsage now often offer credible alternatives to and sustained competition for established industries and their products” (2008, p.4). for him, these usages constitute a system that is gaining in credibility, becoming more refined through the efforts of the community and setting itself up as potential competition for the traditional media. i would further qualify these ideas by pointing out that contributive usages are often drowned in a flood of ‘spam’, advertising and pornographic content. furthermore, independent productions of mediocre quality are sometimes broadcast, highlighting the technical and communicational expertise users need to acquire for contributive usages to constitute a real alternative to the traditional media model. because not just anybody can participate in this ‘participatory culture’: to establish a real voice in digital space, users must hone their ‘usage’ of web platforms in order to fully communicate the message they want to broadcast. 10 despite this, independent podcasting as i observed it presents an articulate and lively response to traditional radio. by developing a participatory subculture where their interest in and expression of music are at the heart of the media usage, podcasters offer an alternative that may not be ‘competitive’ in terms of the market (independent podcasting is still far from mainstream), but that is definitely legitimate and diverse in terms of content and format. as sterne et al. put it, “while podcasting is neither a complete break from broadcasting nor part of any kind of revolution, it is the realization of an alternate cultural model of broadcasting” (2008, p.2). i have tried to provide a nuanced portrait of independent podcasting as a contributive usage that has sparked an online subculture. i focused on the fact that independent podcasting deserves to be considered as a different media modality than radio re-broadcast on the internet or institutional podcasting. to support my argument, i drew on a case study of montreal podcasters, illustrating a few of the specificities of the practice of independent podcasting. podcasters succeed in broadcasting creative and unique audio content by anchoring themselves in authenticity, communicating personalized discourse, sharing specific stylistic codes and acquiring extensive technical expertise. for research purposes, convergent and hybrid media practices like independent podcasting create new lines of interaction with media content, and these generate new research issues, in terms of both the questions we ask and the methods required to answer them. for example, the relationship with mobility is a blind spot in studies of podcasting. how does the mobility and decontextualization of the audience shape the specificity of these internet usages? how do they influence the way users create content? these and other similar questions provide avenues of interest for future studies. references berry, r. (2006). will the ipod kill the radio star? profiling podcasting as radio. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 12(2), 14362. breton, p., & proulx, s. (2006). l’explosion de la communication à l’aube du xxie siècle. montreal: boréal. bruns, a. (2008). blogs, wikipedia, second life, and beyond. from production to produsage. new york: peter lang. 11 bull, m. (2005). no dead air! the ipod and the culture of mobile listening. leisure studies, 24(4), 343-355. clarke, j., hall, s., jefferson, t., & roberts, b. (1976). subcultures, cultures and class. in stuart hall & tony jefferson (eds.). resistance through rituals -youth subcultures ln postwar britain (pp. 9 -79).. london-melbourne-sydney-auckland johannesburg: hutchison. clarke, j. (1976). style. in stuart hall & tony jefferson (eds.). resistance through rituals youth subcultures ln postwar britain (pp. 175-191). london-melbourne-sydney aucklandjohannesburg: hutchison. de certeau, m. (1990). faire avec : usage et tactiques. in l’invention du quotidien : les arts de faire. paris: gallimard, p. 50-68. delys, s., & foley, m. (2006). the exchange: a radio-web project for creative practitioners and researchers. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 12(2), 129-135. hebdige, d. (2008 [orig. 1979]). sous-culture le sens du style. paris: la découverte. hebdige, d. (1983). posing... threats, striking... poses – youth, surveillance, and display». the subcultures reader. ed. ken gelder. london and new york: routledge. p. 288-298. jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture where old and new media collide. new york – london: new york university press. millette, m. (2009). usages contributifs d’internet : le podcasting indépendant et le sens de son style. m.a. thesis, université du québec à montréal. retrieved from: http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/3853443/millette2009_memoirema_podca stingindependant.pdf?awsaccesskeyid=akiaigqicemj5uhtffwa&expires=131621161 0&signature=xhqm5uoecgnxdtiethbam%2binkbw%3d murray, s. (2009). servicing self-scheduling’ consumers. global media and communication, 5, 197-219. 12 ofcom (office of communication – uk). (2004). the ipod generation. devices and desires of the next generation of radio listeners [powerpoint slides]. retreived from: http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/radio/reports/ipod_gen/ o'neill, b. (2006). cbc.ca: broadcast sovereignty in a digital environment. convergence : the international journal of research into new media technologies 12(2), p. 179-197. proulx, s. (2009, may). form of user s contribution in online environments: mechanisms of mutual recognition between contributors. paper presented at the good, the bad and the challenging – the user and the future of information and communication technologies, copenhagen, denmark. proulx, s. (2008, july). la sociologie des usages, et après? congrès international des sociologies de langue française (aislf). “sociologie de la communication” task force, istanbul, turkey. ragusa, a. t., chan, a., & crampton, a. (2009). ipods aren’t just for itunes. information, communications & society, 12(5), 678-690. sterne, j., morris, j., brendan baker, m., & moscote freire, a. (2008). the politics of podcasting. fibreculture journal, 13. retrieved from: http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue13/issue13_sterne.html#top turgeon, m., (2005, august 11). vu d’ici / seen from here. what ‘real’ podcasting is or could be. retreived from: http://mcturgeon.com/blog/2005/08/11/what-is-real-podcasting/ directory of podcasts cited mes paroles s’envolent. podcast and independent blog by laurent lasalle. http://mesparolessenvolent.com/ midnight poutine. blog (group, written by several contributors) and independent podcast on urban life and montreal culture. podcast by jeremy morris, alias jer. http://www.midnightpoutine.ca/ vu d’ici / seen from here. blog, former podcast and independent videocast signed by mariechantale turgeon. http://www.mcturgeon.com/ selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): van der nagel, e (2019, october 2-5). sunsets and memories: how we bury and mourn dead platforms. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. sunsets and memories: how we bury and mourn dead platforms emily van der nagel monash university media have become vital to constructing individual and collective memory, an ongoing process of making sense of one’s life (humphreys 2018; van dijck 2007). on social media, people create media traces when they post photos, text, and links. these media traces form what martin hand (2016) calls a ‘living archive’, as they form a dynamic collection of actions, often spread across many platforms. these traces are meaningful for those who create, share, and look back on them. they also provide important evidence for how people engage with social media over time. for example, brady robards and siân lincoln have conducted a research project in which participants scrolled back through their own facebook timeline and reflected upon the life narratives contained within the platform (robards & lincoln 2016; lincoln & robards 2016). although we trust that these platforms are designed as memory machines, to keep track of our actions (and even, in the case of facebook, serve them back to us year by year as reminders), what happens when these media traces disappear? persistence is a key affordance of social media (boyd 2014), and there is a perception that once something is on the internet, it remains there forever (bossewitch & sinnreich 2013). but not all platforms stay active. some are, to borrow a business term, ‘sunsetted’: they are shut down by their owners, or simply expire. this paper investigates how social media platforms end, and how people remember them after they are gone. situated within a wider field of scholarship around digital memory, remembering, archiving, and nostalgia, this research project combines a thematic analysis of the final posts made about platforms with a survey of social media users who remember a platform that no longer exists. i analysed sunset posts from 20 social media platforms, including anonymous confession app secret, bulletin board imzy, and location-based social networking website gowalla. i found sunset posts to be a specific genre: they were most often signed off by the ceo of the company that ran the platform, and drew on intimacy strategies like framing their platform in terms of nostalgia, using emotive language, and calling its users a ‘community’. my thematic analysis of sunset posts revealed them to be formulaic: they usually comprised one or more of ten distinct elements, including a summary of the platform’s notable accomplishments, an announcement that it was closing, a reason for this, expressions of gratitude and regret, and a gesture towards the future for the company or its employees. these sunset posts are designed to spark a sense of loss, as they are marking the end of the platform’s existence. they also aim to engender trust, as the people involved in running the platform often move on to new ventures, and want the users of the sunsetted platform to join them. in appealing to users invested in the platform, sunset posts ask people to remember them. platform sunsets would have been considered a positive aspect of internet culture by viktor mayer-schönberger (2009), for whom forgetting is an important human experience. he argues that digital technologies have shifted the norm from forgetting to remembering, as these technologies can capture and store so much information. he suggests it may be beneficial if digital information had expiry dates. another perspective comes from videogame studies. mia consalvo and jason begy (2015) documented the sunset of the massively multiplayer online game faunasphere, which was closed despite the anger and sadness of many players, who attempted to preserve aspects of the game and its network of players by taking screenshots of gameplay and forming facebook groups to keep in touch. consalvo and begy raise an important point about how platform owners conceive of them: most platforms do not have final plans, as they are designed to be persistent. all this leaves a gap in our knowledge: how do users of sunsetted social media platforms remember them? do people actively take steps to preserve some of their media traces, or do they let them get deleted along with the platform? are some platforms more important as memory machines than others? this paper will also present the second phase of this project: a survey of people who used a platform that no longer exists. responses will undergo a thematic analysis to identify common themes and patterns in terms of remembering, nostalgia, archiving, and forgetting. as social media platforms are a relatively new form of media, this research project aims to gain an understanding of how people shift from platform to platform, and how media traces and platforms are remembered and forgotten. references bossewitch, j & sinnreich, a 2013, ‘the end of forgetting: strategic agency beyond the panopticon’, new media & society, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 224–242. boyd, d 2014, it’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens, yale university press, new haven. consalvo, m & begy, j 2015, players and their pets: gaming communities from beta to sunset, university of minnesota press, minneapolis. hand, m 2016, ‘persistent traces, potential memories: smartphones and the negotiation of visual, locative, and textual data in personal life’, convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, vol. 22, pp. 269–286. humphreys, l 2018, the qualified self: social media and the accounting of everyday life, mit press, cambridge. lincoln, s & robards, b 2016, ‘editing the project of the self: sustained facebook use and growing up online’, journal of youth studies, vol. 19, pp. 1–14. mayer-schönberger, v 2009, delete: the virtue of forgetting in the digital age, princeton university press, princeton. robards, b & lincoln, s 2016, ‘making it “facebook official”: reflecting on romantic relationships through sustained facebook use’, social media + society, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 1–10. van dijck, j 2007, mediated memories in the digital age, stanford university press, stanford. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 amit-danhi, er. (2020, october). tmi? information rhetoric types in digital political visualizations. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. tmi? information rhetoric types in digital political visualizations eedan amit-danhi hebrew university of jerusalem the creation of a data visualization entails the transformation of data into visual information, through visual encoding (cairo, 2019). while the visualization process is inevitably subjective, designers are often taught to remain as true to the data as possible, in order to reduce the level of subjectivity embedded in the visualization (tufte, 1983; cairo 2019). as such, data visualizations are considered a transitional mode between data and information, which allows users agency in acquiring knowledge. this is largely based on the "wisdom hierarchy" (dikw), a conceptual framework that envisions learning as a linear process in which data is the most objective and wisdom is the most subjective. while definitions of the four dikw components vary, the first three are deeply entwined: data are defined as unorganized observations without context or interpretation; information is data that has been processed and contextualized; and knowledge is a mixture of "information, understanding, capability, experience, skills and values" (p. 174). wisdom remains under-defined (rowley, 2007). however, in the informationally-overloaded landscape of social media, in which users are in an ongoing state of evaluating and curating their information environment, the linear nature of a "wisdom hierarchy" is due for re-evaluation. when information is available in unprecedented abundance, the notions of data 'purity' is elusive (eppler, 2015). thus, this study aims to create a new framework for the definition of information that will provide a better understanding of its rhetorical role in digital culture. i explore these issues through election visualizations. in recent years, social media has seen an exponential rise in the use of political visualizations, using diverse graphic forms to convey a wide range of political messages (amit-danhi & shifman, 2018). recent works on contemporary visualizations suggest that while most still adhere to traditional standards (kennedy et al, 2016; kennedy & hill, 2018), political visualizations allow designers to stray from them, by visualizing non-data (values and opinions) and by embedding data visualizations in non-pedagogical graphic contexts (e.g. decorations, photography, iconic imagery, art) (amit-danhi & shifman, 2018; 2020). while these studies have pointed at some key attributes of contemporary visualizations, the types and roles of information in these formats have so far evaded systematic analysis. therefore, this study seeks to define the types of political information that are visualized, in order to answer the wider question of what is the rhetorical role of 'information' in contemporary digital political visualizations? methods based on a sample of all visualizations posted to facebook by the top four candidates in the 2016 us presidential election (trump, clinton, cruz and sanders; n=252), i addressed the research question in three stages. first, i reviewed pre-existing information and data typologies. combined with grounded analysis informed by literature, this review led to the identification of three main attributes of visualized information, conceptualized as foundation, building-blocks and structure (see figure 1). second, i classified the units in the sample according to the model, aiming to identify recurrent combinations. finally, i identified five types of political visualized information rhetoric, which combine distinct sets of informational attributes into two main rhetorical modes. visualized information: types and rhetoric the model (figure 1) suggests that visualized political information is comprised of three layers. first, a foundation onto which information is built, which includes three possible formulations: 'factual evidence' – grounded in verified data; 'estimation' – projections based on factual data; and 'fantasy/nightmare' – imagined data. second, the building blocks, or the components of data (numeric, temporal, spatial, symbols and notions). and finally, the contexts that prepare data to be visualized, divided to three data analysis-structures (aggregation, grouping, highlighting/epitomizing). the model addresses informational attributes which have so far been excluded: fantasies, estimations, notions, symbols and epitomizations – all of which contribute to the ability to encompass all the attributes of visual informational communication on social media. an overarching analysis of the categorized data according to the model led to the identification rhetorical categories, which culminated in the identification of two main rhetorical modes for visualized election information on twitter. candidates can unveil a hidden or unknown truth about the world, based on present or past-oriented 'traditional' data (see figures 2 and 3), or lead their followers in collective imagining of a future, based on estimations (figure 4) and fantasies (figure 5). conclusions this study’s findings demonstrate the change visualization communication has undergone in the new digital setting in which they thrive. a classic information visualization teaches us about the world by remaining "true" to the original data. as such, it is geared towards the past and present, and grounded in factual evidence. however, when placed in an information-saturated and overloaded environment, the differences between data and information are questioned, and "clean" data is almost unattainable. thus, the rhetorical agility required for modern political campaigning seems to muddle the axiomatic distinctions of dikw. the amalgamation of political and digital settings allows candidates to convey new forms of visualized information, based in notions and fantasy, rather than the empirical observation and evidence with which visualizations are traditionally associated. bibliography amit-danhi, e. r., & shifman, l. (2020). off the charts: user engagement enhancers in election infographics. information, communication & society, 1-19. amit-danhi, e. r., & shifman, l. (2018). digital political visualizations: a rhetorical palette of an emergent genre. new media & society, 20 (10), 3540–3559. cairo, a. (2019). how charts lie. ww norton & company. eppler, m. j. (2015). information quality and information overload: the promises and perils of the information age. in l. cantoni & j. a. danowski (eds.) communication and technology, 5, 215. kennedy, h., & hill, r. l. (2018). the feeling of numbers: emotions in everyday engagements with data and their visualization. sociology, 52(4), 830–848. kennedy, h., hill, r. l., aiello, g., & allen, w. (2016). the work that visualization conventions do. information, communication & society, 19(6), 715–735. rowley, j. (2007). the wisdom hierarchy: representations of the dikw hierarchy. journal of information science, 33(2), 163-180. tufte, e. r. (1983). the visual display of quantitative information. graphics press: cheshire, connecticut. figure 1: informational rhetoric: a conceptual model figure 2: sanders' family act visualization (rewind) figure 3: clinton's marriage equality visualization (report). figure 4: sanders' scoreboard nh poll visualization figure 5: cruz's metaphorical vision for us-israel relations microsoft word ellcessor-sick girls.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 vile pornography, sexual miscreants, and electronic stalkers – policy discourses of youth internet safety nathan w. fisk university of south florida across the generations of youth who have had access to information technologies, prevalent media and legislative discourses have taken as their object the protection of children as they go about playing, communicating and working online. as thomas (1998) asks, “if the goal of law enforcement is to 'protect' us from high tech hoodlums, as is so often claimed, the question remains: what is it that is being 'protected'? and what does it mean to be 'protected'? what are the 'positive effects' of protection?” (p. 386). in the case of internet safety, legislative and media discourses have variously figured youth and information technologies relative to the future of the nation – producing and reconstituting spaces, technologies and individuals. cyberspaces, digital natives, floods of vile content, and shadowy internet predators are produced through these discourses, grounded in conceptual resources made possible by varying patterns of technology adoption and use. the protection of youth online requires an intertwining of childhood and technological development, bounding off youth from various forms of behavior, content, and predatory individuals. legislative and media images of an information based economy of the future striate technological spaces into more efficient spheres of childhood development, producing a workforce which will in turn develop and support the information technologies of the 21st century. in 1994, writing a letter to a constituent apparently concerned about issues of content and crime online, senator jim exon stated that: all americans look forward to the arrival of new telecommunications technology. families will gain new options for communication and entertainment and students will gain easy access to a wealth of knowledge. at the same time, recent stories of computer and telecommunications technologies being used to transmit pornography, to engage in “electronic stalking” and to engage children in pornographic or indecent electronic conversations send shivers up the spine of all families... as i said in my statement introducing the decency amendments, the information superhighway should not become a 'red light district.' (1994) exon's statement outlines a particular vision of “new telecommunications technology,” “students,” and the nation, presented alongside these dangers otherwise unregulated technological spaces might pose to society. in so doing, he marks out a variety of suggested citation (apa): fisk, n. (2015, october 21-24). vile pornography, sexual miscreants, and electronic stalkers – policy discourses of youth internet safety. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. potential problems which would go on to draw national attention – notably stalking, sexual predation, and pornography. however, only one would truly capture the attention of the media and other legislators in 1994, in this instance that of cyberporn. the construction of particular “panics” over youth internet safety are strategic – they emerge as the widespread adoption of particular forms of technology make possible particular governing productivities, both in terms of conceptual availability and material affordances. put more simply, social patterns of technology adoption and use make possible forms of “panic,” which in turn set the conditions for various forms of governance. as such, the various concerns over youth internet safety can be contextualized within the broader, disjointed shift from disciplinary society (foucault, 1977) to societies of control (deleuze, 1992), undergirded by the adoption of information technologies. read in such a way, legislative attempts to protect youth online – variously supported by forms of media coverage – become visible as exploratory moves to harness the productivities of control technologies. nunes (1999) notes that, “metaphors [of cyberspace] do not just organize space; they create a space, or more accurately, they substantiate cyberspace as a virtual topography,” through metaphors of information technology, media reports and legislators produce forms of cyberspace, moving from the smooth virtuality of the teenage hacker scare through to the striated information highways of the cyberporn and predator panics. fundamentally, the problematization of teenage hacking in the 1980s by legislators and the media was not a response to the broad range of computer crimes perpetrated by both adults and youth. instead, the response represented an intersection of anxieties surrounding youth and technology in a pattern which would be similarly reproduced throughout the history of internet safety. personal computers – and by extension the youth who used them – were largely underdetermined by the adults purchasing them for use in the family home. both a product and reinforcement of these anxieties, wargames and the media coverage surrounding the 414 gang provided a widely accessible narrative through which to conceptualize computer technologies and a generation of youth for the first time. while earlier narratives of adult computer crime held little relevance for middle class and affluent households, the relative lack of understanding around youth computer use both made possible worst-case narratives of the teenage hacker, and demanded some form of adult intervention. these narratives discursively constituted a computerized generation in a lawless computerized space relative to adults being left behind in the “real world,” necessitating legislative territorialization as part of a process to establish the computer world as a safe space for commerce and private communication. similarly the ineffectual move by legislators to bound off pornographic content through the cda was not one of moral panic. instead it becomes an initial, stumbling foray into the harnessing the new potentials and productivities made possible by the internet as a control technology, using the operative codes of disciplinary power. further, by developing highly controversial legislation addressing a widely publicized media issue, public attention was drawn to the issue of pornographic and obscene content online. between the stable regulatory effort of cipa – demonstrating the willingness of the state to filter public information systems – and the public statements of gore and clinton, an image of appropriate parenting practice was placed into circulation. it became clear that even with successful legislation, parents would play an important role in the supervision of online spaces, and developers of filtering technology would provide the tools through which to facilitate such supervision. as guins (2008) describes: in line with the instrumentalist view of technology, the state and the market take a “hands-off” approach that refines their role as supplier of tools legislating to enable through self-regulation. in our hands is placed a beneficent technology that will enable parents to exert more control over culture with ease and automatic results... security resides in the home and in the hand of parental control. (p. 44) while, undoubtedly, the legislative efforts of senators exon and grassley were sincere, the failure of the cda simply “works” with the distribution of filtering technologies into the home as part of the broader assemblage of internet safety. references deleuze, g. (1992). postscript on the societies of control. october, 59, 3–7. exon, j. j. (1994, august 9). item #491 communications decency amendments. retrieved from http://www.exonlibrary.com/pdf/ip103con.pdf foucault, m. (1977). discipline and punish : the birth of the prison (1st american ed.). new york: pantheon books. guins, r. (2008). edited clean version: technology and the culture of control. u of minnesota press. nunes, m. (1999). virtual topographies: smooth and striated cyberspace. cyberspace textuality: computer technology and literary theory, 61–77. thomas, d. (1998). criminality on the electronic frontier: corporality and the judicial construction of the hacker. information, communication & society, 1(4), 382. doi:10.1080/13691189809358979 selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): sefton-green, j., pandya, j., pangrazio, l. & hendry, n. (2019, october 2-5). platform pedagogies: learning, authorizing and validating trust in education. panel presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. panel: platform pedagogies: learning, authorising and validating trust in education julian sefton-green deakin university jessica zacher pandya california state university natalie ann hendry deakin university luci pangrazio deakin university introductory statement in recent years, the concept of a platform has gained traction as a way of explaining new kinds of economic, social and civic structure. originally used to describe a specific interface or website, the idea of a platform has come to stand for the ways that digital services and online participation operate through an integrated array of back-end services and analytics as well as a series of user-facing affordances and interactions across devices/screens that are platform agnostic. the platform thus brings together how an individual at a micro level might, for example, make a purchase, communicate with others, post an opinion, utilise a service and so on, with the socio-technical infrastructure which allows the state and commercial entities that run such platforms to monitor (surveil), harvest, and monetise the aggregated value of such data-driven interactions. whilst most of the literature focuses on the emergence of transnational platforms mainly based in the us (google/alphabet, amazon, facebook et cetera), scholarship has also examined the rise of china’s social credit system (liang, das, kostyuk & hussain, 2018) or indeed the ways that platforms are now monopolising hitherto discrete market sectors (like pearsons in education or steam/valve in gaming). 2 this panel investigates the pedagogic dimension of these platforms thus drawing on older theoretical traditions that use pedagogy as a way of describing and explaining the relationships between individual and society, agency and structure (paper 1). we want to explore what it means to conceive of the relationship between people and their platforms as a pedagogic relationship; and how such conceptualisations might advance study of platforms in general (paper 4). additionally, using the term pedagogy in its more specifically educational sense the panel will explore the relationship between learning, schooling and education systems (at different levels) as they are now moving into and across emerging platforms (papers 2 and 3); thus, advancing scholarship about the uses of platforms in education in general. platforms, we argue, standardise and seek to offer a relationship of trust over time with their “citizens”. platforms working with families, schools or in higher education feed off the authority and trust that pertains between citizens and these institutions. however, the platformisation of education (van dijck, poell & de waal, 2018) may contain other kinds of risks for students and their families, thereby introducing the need for new forms of validation. by thinking about activities in and across a series of platforms in terms of pedagogic relationships, where trust is placed in authority, the panel will explore the mechanisms by which digital interactions take forms of social trust and yet expose people to forms of dataveillance beyond ways that any membership or participation suggests in its initial contract. these digital interactions may compel pedagogies that evoke discomfort, loss and constraint as they ‘manage student experience’ rather than invite learning relationships. the panel comprises early mid-career and senior scholars who have come together through an international collaboration working on platform pedagogies. together they have backgrounds in cultural studies, media communication, initial teacher education and preparation, critical data science and learning sciences. a mixture of theoretical and empirical studies enable the panel to address fully ways in which pedagogy might be said to be coming platformized even as it explores the platformization of education. references liang, f., das, v., kostyuk, n., & hussain, m. m. (2018). constructing a data-driven society: china’s social credit system as a state surveillance infrastructure. policy and internet, 10(4). van dijck, j., poell, t., & de waal, m. (2018). the platform society. oxford, uk: oxford university press. 3 conceptualising our relationship with online/digital platforms in terms of pedagogy julian sefton-green school of education, deakin university, australia issue and research questions this paper attempts to theorise user interactions, activity and relationships with digital platforms in terms of pedagogy; and to consider the political social and educational implications. the concept of pedagogy tends to occupy an intermediate position in explanations for the operation of power (parker, 2000). however, in the context of discussion about how platform interactions recalibrate understandings of individual agency and structural determinism – especially in relationship to datafication and surveillance (van dijck, 2014)– pedagogy offers a nuanced explanation to account for perspectives of both interaction and control. pedagogy additionally provides a vocabulary and a model of how control is exerted/negotiated to explain both the learning of trust (e.g. murphy-graham, & lample, 2014) and the ways that trust (or the deferral of risk) is built into the operation of platforms. critical framework the use of the term platform has grown in recent years to suggest a closed, programmable, proprietary online site that can be accessed across many different devices (from desktops to mobile phones) and which builds relationships, interactions and data about those interactions within its system( gillespie, 2010; plantin, lagoze, edwards, & sandvig, 2018). recent scholarship suggests that these platforms are manifestations of contemporary forms of capitalism (srnicek, 2016; zuboff, 2019). yet these approaches to the study of platforms conceptualise the platform–user relationship significantly in terms of structural determinism focusing on how the asymmetric/unequal relationship between the platform and the individual effectively interpellates people through datafication with constraining consequences. indeed, the harvesting of seemingly unconscious (or unintentional) data behaviours and their repurposing as commodified surplus (zuboff, 2019) seems to represent a form of "mind control" and manipulation that bedevilled earlier interpretations of ideology as an explanation for power for the last 150 years. whilst there are exceptions to research investigating the possibilities of resisting or negotiating how platforms frame use and interaction (bucher, 2018), to date these have not been imagined as a form of pedagogic power. as a theory of power, pedagogy (the structural relationship surrounding teaching and learning) shows how what actually happens as people "learn" the behaviours and actions that reflect dominant ideological positions. bernstein (bernstein, 1973;1990, 2000) showed that it is the processes of pedagocization (how human activity becomes framed as authorized school knowledge) with its control over forms of knowledge and language that validate unequal power relations especially that of trust in authority. understanding the interplay of pedagogic authority with its attention to the ways that knowledge is framed and classified and what bourdieu called "symbolic 4 violence"(bourdieu & passeron, 1990)points not just to the processes by which people become incorporated in their contemporary social order but the huge range of affordances that shape, support and prohibit such modes of subjectification. finally, the neo-institutionalist concern with world schooling(baker, 2014)shows how the wider success of pedagocization into hitherto unschooled domains (sefton-green & erstad, 2018)offers a template to make sense of how pedagogic regimes work. relevance to wider conference themes how then might theories of pedagogy help make sense of the power of platforms? how can a theory of pedagogy help us disentangle questions of trust, control, agency and power? i suggest two avenues of analysis. first, a theory of pedagogy directs attention to the processes by which users learn behaviours, language, modes of interaction, meanings and indeed subscribe to the risks, benefits, comforts and values of the platform. following ethnographies of algorithmic identities (bucher, 2018), facebook (miller et al., 2016), or affinity learning (ito et al., 2018) i suggest it is generative to look at forms of participation and interaction as modes of learning. this perspective not only gives insight into the pleasures and rewards of belonging and participating on platforms but also helps us understand the amount of work making sense of how to participate, how to behave and how to engage with each other across platforms. this avenue of enquiry also includes ideas of thinking what is at stake as people progress through and across different platforms at different stages of their lives both suggesting some notion of stepped progression and core "platform skills" at the same time as the platforms themselves are seeking to “balkanize” and increasingly control their citizens lives. the second avenue of enquiry examines how the spread of platforms and their successful incorporation of compliant subjects should be seen in terms of the wider spread of pedagocization (sefton-green & erstad, 2018) into everyday life. this perspective helps us understand how forms of digital control and surveillance not only command absolute authority (a key theme in bourdieu and bernstein) but mitigate trust through forms of depersonalized algorithmic abstraction. understanding the spread of platforms and the compliant behaviours they enact can profitably be understood as the apotheosis of the "totally pedagogicized society” (tyler, 2004) as much as contemporary political appeal is framed in terms of surveillant control(zuboff, 2019). above all, pedagogy offers spaces for political intervention, reform and change promising at least some semblance of control by people over these technologies, possibly offering more trust in forms of politics we now feel we have lost. references baker, d. (2014). the schooled society: the educational transformation of global culture. stanford: stanford university press. bernstein, b. (1973). class, codes and control: theoretical studies towards a sociology of language. london: harpercollins. bernstein, b. (1990). class, codes and control: the structuring of pedagogic discourse v. 4 (class, codes and control, vol 4). routledge. 5 bernstein, b. (2000). pedagogy, symbolic control and identity. london: rowman & littlefield publishers. bourdieu, p., & passeron, j.-c. (1990). reproduction in education, society and culture. london: sage. bucher, t. (2018). if, then: algorithmic power and politics. new york: oxford university press. gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of ‘platforms. new media and society, 12(3), 347-364. ito, m., martin, c., pfister, r. c., rafalow, m. h., salen, k., & wortman, a. (2018). affinity online: how connection and shared interest fuel learning (connected youth and digital futures)., 228. miller, d., costa, e., haynes, n., mcdonald, t., nicolescu, r., sinanan, j. et al. (2016). how the world changed social media (why we post). ucl press. murphy-graham, e., lample, j., learning to trust: examining the connections between trust and capabilities friendly pedagogy through case studies from honduras and uganda. int. j. educ. dev. (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.ijedudev.2014.01.001. parker, j. (2000). structuration milton keynes: open university press. plantin, j. c., lagoze, c., edwards, p., & sandvig, c. (2018). infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook. new media & society, 20(1), 293-310. sefton-green, j., & erstad, o. (2018). learning beyond the school: international perspectives on the schooled society london:. routledge. srnicek, n. (2016). platform capitalism. polity press. tyler, w. (2004). silent, invisible, total: pedagogic discourse and the age of information. in j. muller, b. davies, & a. morais (eds.), reading bernstein, researching bernstein (pp. 20-28). london: routledge. van dijck, j. (2014). datafication, dataism and dataveillance: big data between scientific paradigm and ideology. surveillance & society, 12(2), 197-208. zuboff, p. s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power (main ed.). profile books. 6 teachers’ use of apps and platforms: an empirical study jessica zacher pandya college of education, california state university, long beach, usa issue and research questions research in science and technology studies, anthropology, and increasingly in education is now focusing on the effects of living in a posthuman, cognitive capitalist world in which techno-rational policy decisions are made with increasing reliance on aigenerated data about student and teacher performance (lawn, 2013; means, 2018; peters & bulut, 2011). one visible but under-examined phenomenon in this area is the use of apps and platforms by teachers in k-12 classrooms. teachers can monitor classroom behaviour, collect information about student progress, and share information with parents with apps like class dojo, active classroom, and parentsquare, as well as via larger platforms like beachboard. education researchers and academics who prepare future teachers have recently begun to examine the ways these platforms may be shaping new methods of classroom behaviour management and changing the way teachers and parents communicate. for instance, one popular app, class dojo, allows teachers to mass-message all parents in the class, or message parents individually. parents in turn can message the teacher (though not other parents). teachers can include photos and videos in their messages to show school activities or children’s work. teachers frequently use it as a behaviour management tool in lieu of more old-fashioned methods, and much of the emerging work on class dojo and similar apps focuses on their behaviour management functions. some of this research examines the efficacy of the app for behaviour management vs. paper and pencil methods (cf. krach, mcreery, & rimel, 2017). other research is beginning to focus on the extent to which the app’s underlying socialemotional focus “reinforces and rewards students for behaviours that are becoming the basis for emerging school accountability systems” (williamson, 2017, p. 3441). what we do not yet know is how teachers are engaging with these apps in practice, and what theories teachers hold about app use. i have examined teachers’ use of apps and platforms of all varieties because of their proliferation. i have asked three kinds of questions: 1) practice: what do teachers use apps and platforms for? how regularly do they engage with the apps in and out of school? how are their app use practices reshaping their behaviour management and/or home-school communication practices? 2) conceptual: what are teachers’ conceptions of the apps themselves? what is their understanding of where the apps come from, why they are using them, why they chose one app over another? and 3) data-related: to what extent do teachers think about the data their practices are generating? do they understand who owns the data, and what rights they, their students, and their students’ parent have vis a vis data ownership, sharing, and privacy? do they attend to any of the privacy settings of the apps they use? 7 methodological framework this project uses qualitative interview methods to investigate teachers’ self-reported practices and perceptions (future ethnographic work will address classroom practice). i conducted over 30 long form, semi-structured interviews with teachers from kindergarten to 8th grade (middle school in the us), using a snowball sampling procedure (weiss, 1994). taking a grounded theory approach to both initial and subsequent analysis and theory-building (glaser & strauss, 1999), i engaged in a process of simultaneous data collection and analysis, pursuing emergent themes (described below) and, eventually, inductively constructing categories (charmaz & belgrave, 2013) of practice, teacher awareness, and teacher data use that i describe below. findings and relevance to wider conference themes my interview and research questions focused on practice, conceptual knowledge, and understandings of data. findings from analysis thus far suggest three main findings, with many implications for educator preparation and classroom and home-school life. the first of three main themes was utility: teacher participants focused on the ways they used apps to enhance their existing practices, from behaviour management to sending out flyers and information to parents. most teachers saw the apps they used as easily accessible tools in a self-fulfilling manner, because teachers only repeatedly or regularly used apps that were easy for them to use. many reported using apps initially for one purpose and learning additional uses of an app over time, but the vast majority only consistently used apps that were easily adoptable into their daily teaching practices. they learned about the apps from a range of sources: professional development in and out of their school sites, as well as referrals from colleagues, friends, and family members. they judged the utility of each app for how it made their work lives more streamlined. the second main finding is that teachers did have somewhat vague concerns with privacy and data ownership, but those were mitigated in their minds by school districts’ vetting of apps. that is, they understood that there are implications to, for instance, sharing photos of groups of children with all parents in a class, but they believed their use of those photos was covered in parent permissions (given to the app itself) and by the official nod given such apps by their school districts. for example, few teachers had read the user agreements parents sign, and most believed the ways they shared images was harmless and, indeed, beneficial to students and parents. teachers also seemed to believe that, since they had put their trust in their school district about privacy and safety, parents should do the same in turn (putting their trust in teachers, who had invited them to use the apps). the third finding is about teachers’ framings of access and inclusion. in the cases of apps that connected teachers with families or parents, teachers tended to see parents who used the apps as good at parent participation, and, conversely, those who did not choose to use the apps as uninterested or uninvolved with their child’s schooling. there was little mention of access issues like having a smartphone or being able to use the app in languages other than english (teachers generally thought all parents had 8 smartphones at the least, and they also seemed to think that apps would work in multiple languages). there was also little consideration of parents’ technological skill level, including either the sense that parents were put off by the technology itself, that they might opt out because of insufficient data security. these findings speak directly to the conference theme of trust at a granular level, in the practices of end users, and should offer conference attendees insight into the role of trust in teachers’ and parents’ practices. references glaser, a. & strauss, a. (1999). the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research (2nd ed.). new york, ny: transaction publishers. krach, s. k., mccreery, m. p., & rimel, h. (2017). examining teachers’ behavioral management charts: a comparison of class dojo and paper-pencil methods. contemporary school psychology. lawn m (ed.) (2013). the rise of data in education systems: collection, visualization and use. oxford: symposium. means, a. (2018). platform learning and on-demand labor: sociotechnical projections on the future of education and work. learning, media and technology, 43 (3), 326-338. peters, m. a., & bulut, e. (2011). cognitive capitalism, education and digital labor. bern, switzerland: peter lang us. weiss, r. (1994). learning from strangers: the art and method of qualitative interview studies. new york: the free press. williamson, b. (2017). decoding classdojo: psycho-policy, social-emotional learning and persuasive educational technologies, learning, media and technology, 42:4, 440453, doi: 10.1080/17439884.2017.1278020 9 trusting the expertise of the learning management system natalie hendry school of education, deakin university issue and research questions higher education institutions in australia have embraced a range of commercial education products, alongside in-house learning platforms, to provide a ‘digital learning environment’ for students and staff. these include customised or integrated products such as moodle, blackboard, canvas, sakai and brightspace, as well as google or microsoft suites to manage online seminars or file sharing. in this way, products like learning management systems (lms) may be examples themselves of digital platforms or embedded as sites or tools within more extensive institutional platforms that combine marketing, timetabling, finance, student management and operational functions. this paper considers pedagogy as a practice (or practices) in closed, cloud-based platforms for learning and teaching – or learning management systems – at higher education institutions. these lms are expanding at scale and speed in higher education (coopman, 2009), and institutions in australia are amassing learning design teams to develop, design, manage and measure lms use by staff and students alike. this paper outlines taken-for-granted pedagogical norms that emerge from lms teaching. i argue that lms coerce constraining pedagogies from educators. these pedagogies shift the expertise of teachers working (both in the classroom and/or in digital encounters), with students, to the learning design expertise of teams of multidisciplinary developers and designers and the learning platform structure itself. this paper does not posit on-campus teaching against lms teaching (and thus does not reiterate earlier arguments regarding distance education). rather, i articulate the pedagogical practices that lms teaching impels, my discomfort with how they constrain teaching and learning, and what other pedagogical traditions may offer to reimagine future teaching beyond the lms. i consider this in light of increasing obligations towards institutional measures of ‘student engagement’ and the international higher educational market. critical framework as an emerging research project, this paper draws on my own and colleagues’ reflections from engaging as a community of practice (wenger, 1998) to explore platform pedagogies. my thinking about lms is marked by sadness and loss; teaching in an lms marks a loss of uncertainty, flexibility, experimentation and relationship that is centred in my teaching practice, mostly in the context of initial teacher (or pre-service teacher) education programs. my practice is enriched by feminist, community and critical pedagogy theories of learning and teaching and my training in community health 10 education first as a peer educator, then as a workshop facilitator and trainer schooled in feminist workshop methods. here, i outline three of the pedagogical implications of lms that this emerging project has encountered: the structures of lms, surveillance and the instrumentalization of collaboration. first, the technological and interface structures of lms constrain pedagogical decisions for both teachers and students. as coopman (2009) stresses, ‘the ways in which course materials are presented and accessed — and who gets to present what and when — form a key component in the online classroom.’ the lms replicates itself each semester, each year. content is digitally transported into a new interface, fresh with a new layout for the new year. the replication of content frames teaching as ‘updating’ content, regardless of changing student contexts. this homogenises learning and redirects teaching towards content delivery. lms structure learning as a practice of management even as they conceal this relationship in favour of discourses of digital collaboration and anywhere-learning. the learning experience is managed through institutional branding and templates and is guided by instruction that borrows theory from learning design approaches that ignore the rich histories of many different pedagogical traditions. second, professional teams of digital learning staff measure and monitor the success of learning design activities through the surveillance of both student and teacher ‘engagement’. engagement, for learners, is enacted at the level of visible data: the panels of ‘participation metrics’ that announce participation via the quantifiable minutes spent on each platform, page, tool or file. the capacity for surveillance relies on the closed nature of the lms system. both student and teacher commitment to learning is quantified by these metrics and meeting ‘minimum’ standards for lms teaching e.g. introductory videos, prompt replies to discussion board questions. each closed platform operates as another university campus – some naming and coding their online lms platform as a campus – that restricts outsiders or community engagement through the management of accounts, passwords and server restrictions. this sits at odds with the openness of the internet, ‘its most radical and pedagogically viable feature’ (morris and stommel, 2015, p. 168). the closed system also regulates and shapes material lives of its teacher users. in one australian institution, for example, casual lecturers and tutors may not work across multiple institutions as it jeopardises the university’s ownership of intellectual property given the ease of downloading ‘entire courses’. (of course, this has explicit consequences for those academics working in an increasingly insecure and casualised job market.) finally, my third illustration attends to practices of ‘collaboration’ on lms, where collaboration is instrumentalised as ‘posting’ and ‘responding’ to content (and perhaps more importantly, lurking and ‘listening’ to draw on crawford’s [2009] concept). this occurs at the site of the discussion board or forum which becomes championed as a symbol of connection and social participation. at the level of pedagogical practice – 11 what we actually do as educators and why – the promises of lms and its discussion boards fall short. relevance to wider conference themes how then does pedagogical expertise emerge through cloud-based platforms for teaching and learning? or rather, who is the expert teacher? these three pedagogical implications of lms, and no doubt others, make expertise invisible as pedagogical decisions are dispersed through digital teams and the lms’ structure and affordances. the expertise shifts from teachers and students (who rarely contribute to the structure or process of the lms, beyond evaluation data at the end of courses) to the lms and the teams that support it’s taken-for-granted roll out and ongoing upgrades. at the same time, these decisions may be obliged by lms teams and the structure of the lms, but equally the pedagogical implications of lms are embedded in institutional governance. this includes learning and teaching committees and leadership teams, policies related to teaching, assessment and enrolment, and the broader global context of competitive digital learning markets. in this way, trust in lms teaching is not a practice for teachers or students. how then can we move to critique the ‘expertise’ and pedagogical practices of lms? what is beyond the lms? how might other pedagogical traditions and practices – digital or not – enrich and inspire this thinking? references coopman, s.j. (2009). a critical examination of blackboard’s e-learning environment. first monday. 14(6). https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2434 crawford, k. (2009). following you: disciplines of listening in social media. continuum, 23(4), 525–535. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304310903003270 morris, s.m., & stommel, j. (2015). the course as container: distribute learning and the mooc. in p.c. layne & p. lake (eds.), global innovation of teaching and learning in higher education wenger, e. (1998). communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. 12 pedagogies for platform participation: exploring the productive tension between trust and distrust luci pangrazio, school of education, deakin university, australia issue and research questions in this paper i report on an educational project that sought to develop young people’s critical understandings of platform mechanisms (van dijck et al., 2018). the pedagogical approach drew on the productive tension between trust and distrust (benamati et al., 2010) to support young people to evaluate critically how platform mechanisms, such as datafication, personalisation and commodification, shape their interactions and participation on the platform. social media platforms are integral to maintaining and extending social relationships for most young people today. they provide opportunities to experiment with identities; discover information; learn; engage with civic and political life; and generally, make sense of growing up (lincoln & robards, 2017). for many young people social media are no longer something they ‘use’, but rather a fabric woven into all aspects of day-today life. while it is important for young people to trust the platform in order to take advantage of the benefits on offer, blind trust can lead to increased risk of media manipulation, profiling and heightened surveillance. the educational program trialled in this project sought to prevent these risks by increasing the student participants’ technological knowledge of how platforms operate. platform mechanisms are complex. the interface covers over much of the complexity and many of the mechanisms are ‘black-boxed’ or hidden from view, meaning educational programs need to be tailored specifically to the structure of platforms. drawing on platform studies (langlois & elmer, 2013; van dijck, 2013; van dijck et al., 2018) and digital literacies (avila & pandya, 2013; pangrazio, 2016) for key concepts and content, the educational program sought to exploit the productive tension between trust and distrust to develop young people’s understandings of platform mechanisms, while also acknowledging the prosocial opportunities they offer. methodological framework the aim of this study was to investigate the critical understandings of platform mechanisms teenagers have and how they might be developed in relation to their platformed identities. drawing on the findings of a larger one-year program involving 84 young people (aged 12-14 years) and four teachers, the paper addresses the following questions: 13 1. what social media platforms do young people use? 2. what do young people know about platform mechanisms? 3. how effective was the program in developing young people’s understanding of platform mechanisms? the evaluation required a methodology that was sensitive to how the program was delivered and received in school contexts. to achieve this balance the evaluation design adopted a mixed method approach, involving preand post-program surveys, post-program focus-group discussions and observations of the program in action. interviews with participating teachers were also conducted. this yielded fine-grained insights into the experiences, perceptions and attitudinal changes of participating students and teachers through qualitative data gathering approaches, as well as broad sweep data on how participants’ knowledge and understanding had changed. findings the pre-program survey revealed that 67 out of the 84 young people had social media accounts, with youtube, snapchat and instagram by far the most popular platforms. while the young people had heard of many terms associated with platforms (i.e. algorithms, data metrics, personalisation), most were unsure about what these meant and their function. none of the teachers and students had participated in a program like this before and all could see the need to understand how platform mechanisms shape digital participation. indeed, the findings accord with concerns of scholars (mihailids, 2018; boyd, 2017) who argue that current digital and media literacies are not addressing the technological features of platforms and how this shapes user participation. the program was broken up into three main sections: the first encouraged young people to critically reflect on platform practices and identities; the second developed understandings of platform structures and mechanisms, drawing on topical issues to demonstrate concepts (i.e. fake news, data profiling); and the final section supported the student participants in making good decisions for platform participation, particularly in regard to complex issues such as online coercion and content sharing. findings indicate that the young people significantly increased their understanding of key concepts, (i.e. echo chamber, algorithms, personalisation, fake news and online coercion) as a result of participating in the program. these would help them to navigate the platform more critically in the future. fake news and digital identities were considered to be the most valuable topics addressed in the program. despite increased critical awareness of platform mechanisms, the findings indicate the program was limited in initiating more critical platform practices and behaviours. this can be explained in two ways. first, platform practices and behaviours are still strongly influenced by social practices and networks. second, the consequences of platform mechanisms often remain nascent to users through a process of what langlois and elmer (2018) call ‘impersonal subjectivation’. these findings suggest a more iterative 14 and cumulative approach might have more success; however, this would take much longer than could be achieved in the timeframe of this program. relevance to wider conference themes developing knowledge of how platform mechanisms shape content and participation helped student participants to navigate a productive line between trust and distrust of the platform. given the benefits of platforms for young people’s futures, abandoning platform participation is not a realistic solution. instead a pedagogy that fosters a healthy distrust, while at the same time exploring how platform mechanisms might be exploited to achieve personal needs, is far more productive. while the findings reveal the overall effectiveness of the program, there were several limitations to the study. first, the evaluation relied on student participants self-reporting their knowledge of key concepts. second, while the same resource materials were provided to participating teachers, each teacher took a different approach, meaning that concepts and content were scaffolded differently. the paper concludes with three recommendations for future research into pedagogies of platform participation. first, as platform participation is as much social as technological, programs should include opportunities for young people to collectively reflect upon platform mechanisms. second, an iterative approach in which key concepts and ideas are revisited in subsequent years will have more success in actually changing behaviour and practices. finally, subsequent stages of the program might consider helping young people understand the ‘new relational politics’ (langlois & elmer, 2018) of platforms in the broader digital economy. references avila, j., & pandya, z. (2013). critical digital literacies as social praxis: intersections and challenges. new york: peter lang publishing inc. boyd, d. (2017). did media literacy backfire? data & society: points. retrieved from https://points.datasociety.net/did-media-literacy-backfire-7418c084d88d langlois, g., & elmer, g. (2013). the research politics of social media platforms. culture machine, 14, 1-17. langlois, g., & elmer, g. (2018). impersonal subjectivation from platforms to infrastructures. media, culture and society, 1-18. doi:o0r.g1/107.171/0771/60314634434731781881188374 lincoln, s., & robards, b. (2017). editing the project of the self: sustained facebook use and growing up online. journal of youth studies, 20(4), 518-531. mihailidis, p. (2018). civic media literacies: re-imagining engagement for civic intentionality. learning, media and technology, 43(2), 152-164. 15 pangrazio, l. (2016). reconceptualising critical digital literacy. discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, 37(2), 163-174. doi:10.1080/01596306.2014.942836 van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. new york: oxford university press. van dijck, j., poell, t., & de waal, m. (2018). the platform society. oxford, uk: oxford university press. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested  citation  (apa):  blasiola,  s.,  lampinen,  a.,  lehmuskallio,  a.,  schwartz,  s.,  &  uski,  s.  (2016,   october  5-­8).  the  rules  of  engagement:  managing  boundaries,  managing  identities.  panel  presented  at   aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  meeting  of  the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.   retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.   other  people’s  privacy:  a  case  study  of  the  ashley   madison  data  breach     stacy  blasiola   university  of  illinois  at  chicago,  usa     when  it  comes  to  privacy  rules,  previous  research  has  shown  that  individuals  are   capable  of  articulating  expectations  and  norms  in  regards  to  the  appropriate  accessing   of  information.  nippert-­eng  (2010)  offers  the  example  of  a  woman’s  purse:  it  is   generally  acknowledged  that  one  does  not  look  through  a  woman’s  purse  without   permission.  when  this  norm  is  violated,  the  victim’s  anger  is  corroborated  by  others  who   can  easily  acknowledge  that  a  privacy  violation  has  occurred,  and  there  may  be  social   consequences  for  the  violator.       when  private  data  is  hacked  and  made  public  through  data  dumps,  however,  there   appears  to  be  less  concern  for  the  social  norms  that  direct  behaviors  towards  others’   information.  in  august  2015  users  of  the  infamous  ashley  madison  service,  a  site   intended  to  facilitate  affairs  between  married  people,  found  themselves  to  be  the  victims   of  a  massive  privacy  breach.  a  hacker  group  called  the  impact  team  released  all  of   ashley  madison’s  internal  documents  online  for  the  world  to  see,  including  the  profile   and  financial  information  of  the  site’s  users.  individuals  affected  by  the  hack,  journalists,   and  curious  onlookers  all  engaged  in  searching  through  the  data.  whereas  previous   high-­profile  hacks  have  used  personal  information  to  target  highly  visible  people,  the   2015  ashley  madison  hack  had  in  its  crosshairs  otherwise  ordinary  individuals—that  is,   despite  their  having  allegedly  joined  the  site  for  the  purpose  of  having  an  affair.   nevertheless,  we  can  learn  much  about  current,  and  possibly  shifting,  privacy  norms  by   investigating  the  justifications  of  those  who  access  stolen  data,  and  how  those  data  are   put  to  use.       privacy  theorists  recognize  that  privacy  is  a  social  norm  that  is  culturally  situated   (altman,  1975;;  nissenbaum,  2010;;  petronio,  2002).  individuals  rely  on  knowledge  of  an   assumed  audience  (goffman,  1959)  and  on  contextual  clues  to  determine  the   appropriateness  of  information  disclosure  (nissenbaum,  2010).  conceived  this  way,  the   value  of  privacy  can  be  expressed  hierarchically  as  a  function  of  other  social  norms.   nissenbaum  (2010)  explains  that  in  a  doctor’s  office,  privacy  is  highly  valued  because  of   legal  and  societal  norms  that  privilege  information  that  is  shared  between  doctor  and   patient.  however,  recent  notions  of  networked  privacy  have  highlighted  the  concern  that   both  context  and  audience  can  be  difficult  to  discern  or  control  in  today’s  networked   publics  (marwick  &  boyd,  2014)  because  “even  if  a  user  makes  a  picture  available  to   only  three  friends,  these  friends  can  easily  disseminate  it  further.  whether  or  not  they  do   so  is  not  predicated  upon  their  access  to  the  picture,  but  their  shared  social  norms  and   ties  to  the  picture-­provider”  (p.  1064).       starting  from  the  assumption  that  privacy  is  highly  valued  by  individuals,  empirical   research  has  asked  whether  and  to  what  extent  privacy  norms  have  changed  with  the   rise  of  networked  communication.  recent  privacy  research  typically  focuses  on  social   network  sites  and  takes  a  discloser-­centric  approach.  that  is,  it  investigates  the  things   people  consider  before  they  post  (vitak,  blasiola,  patil,  &  litt,  2015),  the  audience  they   imagine  and  whether  there  is  concern  about  an  unintended  audience  (litt,  2012),  the   strategies  they  use  to  share  personal  information  in  such  a  way  that  is  neither  offensive   to  certain  audience  members  (hogan,  2010),  or  that  will  not  be  understood  by  others   (boyd  &  marwick,  2011).       while  these  studies  have  gone  a  long  way  to  challenge  the  privacy  paradox  (acquisti  &   gross,  2005)  of  the  early  2000s,  by  centering  analysis  on  disclosers  of  information,   these  studies  reveal  little  about  the  norms  that  govern  information  acquisition,   particularly  when  the  recipient  of  information  is  actively  engaging  in  a  privacy  violation.   in  fact,  previous  studies  take  for  granted  that  unintentional  disclosures  and  unforeseen   audiences  are  not  themselves  the  results  of  privacy-­related  behaviors  by  the  acquiring   party.       the  purpose  of  this  study  is  to  flip  the  conception  of  privacy  as  a  discloser-­centered   process  and  evaluate  privacy  norms  from  the  opposite  perspective,  from  the   perspective  of  those  who  access  information.  it  begins  with  the  following  assumption:   the  decisions  of  individuals  to  access  another’s  information  reveals  as  much  about   privacy  norms  as  does  the  decision  by  the  discloser  to  share  the  information  in  the  first   place.  it  uses  twitter  discussions  of  the  ashley  madison  hack  to  address  the  following   research  questions:     rq1:  how  are  data  from  the  ashley  madison  hack  used?     rq2:  what  justifications  do  people  give  for  violating  the  privacy  of  ashley   madison  users?     data       the  data  were  historically  acquired  from  twitter.  the  date  range  focuses  on  the  first  two   weeks  of  the  hack,  august  18  –  august  31,  2015,  when  it  was  prominently  featured  in   the  mainstream  media.  the  goal  in  data  collection  was  to  collect  any  english  language   tweet  that  was  discussing  the  ashley  madison  hack,  so  both  hashtags  and  keywords   were  used  in  the  query  (see  table  1).  the  data  pull  resulted  in  approximately  700,000   tweets.     analysis     first,  i  will  conduct  a  conversation  analysis  to  identify  which  prominent  actors  and  which   prominent  messages  rose  to  significance.  additionally,  i  will  conduct  a  qualitative   discourse  analysis  (qda)  (fairclough  1995,  2000;;  van  dijk  1997)  to  offer  a  richer   explanation  of  the  findings  that  emerge  from  the  twitter  conversation  analysis.  the   purpose  of  the  qda  is  to  identify  “systematic  links  between  texts,  discourse  practices,   and  sociocultural  practices”  (fairclough,  1995,  p.  17).  the  qda  will  shed  light  on  the   social  and  cultural  justifications  given  for  accessing  stolen  information  that  clearly   violates  the  privacy  of  the  individuals  in  the  hack.         keyword   "ashley  madison"   #ashleymadison   #ashleymadisonhack   #amhack   "impact  team"     table  1.  twitter  keywords  for  ashley  madison  hack  study.       discussion     the  results  of  this  analysis  will  help  to  sketch  out  the  normative  construction  of  privacy’s   value  in  relation  to  other  cultural  values.  as  more  and  more  information  becomes   networked,  and  susceptible  to  massive  leaks,  understanding  justifications  for  privacy   violations  is  essential  in  moving  towards  more  complete  privacy  frameworks.  as  the   barriers  to  accessing  personal  information  become  easier  to  break,  “the  only  guarantee   against  such  things  may  be  shared  social  norms  and  social  ties”  (boyd  &  marwick,   2014,  p.  1064).         references     acquisti,  a.,  &  gross,  r.  (2006).  imagined  communities:  awareness,  information   sharing,  and  privacy  on  the  facebook.  in  g.  danezis  &  p.  golle  (eds.),  privacy   enhancing  technologies  (vol.  4258,  pp.  36-­58):  springer  berlin  heidelberg.     altman,  i.  (1975).  the  environment  and  social  behavior.  belmont,  ca:  wadsworth.     boyd,  d.,  &  marwick,  a.  (2011).  social  steganography:  privacy  in  networked   publics.  paper  presented  at  international  communication  association,  boston,   ma.     fairclough,  n.  (1995).  media  discourse.  london:  bloomsbury.     goffman,  e.  (1959).  the  presentation  of  self  in  everyday  life.  garden  city,  ny:  anchor.     hogan,  b.  (2010).  the  presentation  of  self  in  the  age  of  social  media:  distinguishing   performances  and  exhibitions  online.  bulletin  of  science,  technology  &  society,   30(6),  377-­386.       litt,  e.  (2012).  knock,  knock.  who's  there?  the  imagined  audience.  journal  of   broadcasting  &  electronic  media,  56(3),  330-­345.       nippert-­eng,  c.  e.  (2010).  islands  of  privacy.  chicago:  university  of  chicago  press.     nissenbaum,  h.  (2010).  privacy  in  context.  stanford,  ca:  stanford  law  books.     petronio,  s.  (2002).  boundaries  of  privacy:  dialectics  of  disclosure.  albany,  ny:  state   university  of  new  york  press.     van  dijk,  t.  a.  (1997).  discourse  as  social  interaction.  london:  sage.     vitak,  j.,  blasiola,  s.,  patil,  s.,  &  litt,  e.  (2015).  balancing  audience  and  privacy   tensions  on  social  network  sites:  strategies  of  highly  engaged  users.   international  journal  of  communication,  9(20).           teachers’  experiences  of  boundary  turbulence:     the  case  of  wilma  in  finnish  high  schools     airi  lampinen   mobile  life  centre,  stockholm  university     asko  lehmuskallio   university  of  tampere     introduction     the  introduction  of  icts  into  school  life  reorganizes  social  relations  between  teachers,   pupils  and  parents.  we  present  a  case  study  of  finnish  high  school  teachers’   experiences  of  a  widely  implemented  social  network  system  called  wilma.  our  analysis   focuses  on  (1)  how  teachers  regulate  interpersonal  boundaries  in  the  presence  of  this   system  and  (2)  how  they  cope  with  challenges  that  the  introduction  of  such  a  system   causes.  based  on  a  qualitative  study  with  interviews  and  a  detailed  exploration  of   wilma,  we  will  depict  how  the  system  acts  as  a  nexus  in  organizing  work  and  social   relations  at  school,  while  also  creating  boundary  turbulence.     privacy  management  and  boundary  turbulence     we  build  on  altman's  (1975)  and  petronio's  (2002;;  2013)  work  on  boundary  regulation   and  privacy  management.  altman  (1975)  depicts  boundary  regulation  as  a  dynamic   process  of  trying  to  achieve  the  right  amount  of  interaction.  here,  privacy  is  understood   as  a  dialectic  process  where  too  little  interaction  leads  to  social  isolation  and  too  much   to  feelings  of  crowding  and  intrusion.  petronio  (2002)  has  taken  this  work  further  in   communication  privacy  management  theory  (cpm)  which  focuses  explicitly  on  how   individuals  and  groups  regulate  the  revealing  or  concealing  of  private  information.  here,   privacy  turbulence  refers  to  moments  where  boundary  expectations  have  been   disrupted,  and  privacy  rules  have  to  be  re-­negotiated  (petronio,  2002).     recently,  cpm  has  been  applied  to  understanding  social  media,  with  studies   concerning  blogging,  social  network  site  usage,  and  online  dating  (for  a  short  review,   see  petronio,  2013).  we  contribute  to  this  line  of  research  with  a  focus  on  the  role  a   social  network  system  plays  in  teachers’  privacy  management  in  the  context  of  school   life  –  an  organizational  setting  where  the  introduction  of  social  media  tools  is  disrupting   longstanding  work  practices.  our  analysis  explores  the  ways  in  which  wilma  acts  as  a   medium  for  interpersonal  communication  and  how  it  alters  the  circumstances  in  which   teachers  regulate  interpersonal  boundaries.     case  study:  wilma  in  finnish  high  schools     our  case  study  focuses  on  wilma,  an  online  social  network  tool  and  database  program   that  is  widely  implemented  in  finnish  schools.  wilma  has  become  a  central  coordinating   tool  in  school  settings.  wilma’s  functions  are  categorized  towards  helping  to  organize,   report,  and  share  information  related  to  everyday  life  at  school.  the  system  provides   one-­to-­one  and  one-­to-­many  communication  channels  between  different  stakeholders  at   school,  including  teachers,  pupils,  and  the  pupils'  parents.  teachers  use  the  software   both  for  gathering  data  about  pupils,  as  well  as  for  communication  with  other  teachers,   pupils,  and  parents.  pupils  can  access  their  own  data  and  communicate  with  school   representatives.  parents  can  access  their  children’s  data  and  use  wilma  to   communicate  with  teachers.  instead  of  allowing  users  to  add  friends  and  thus  determine   whom  they  interact  with,  as  is  typical  of  social  network  sites,  wilma  establishes  an   online  social  network  for  each  user  based  on  their  role  in  the  social  world  of  the  school.     in  our  study,  we  explore  wilma  in  detail  to  gain  insight  into  the  impact  wilma  may  have   on  teachers'  boundary  regulation.  our  field  notes  include  depictions  of  what  types  of   actions  wilma  allows  for  and  encourages  as  well  as  our  reflections  on  how  values  and   objectives  are  built  into  the  system.  these  observations  are  complemented  with  a  set  of   eight  individual,  semi-­structured  interviews  with  finnish  high  school  teachers.  the   interviews  were  centered  on  the  increasing  use  of  icts  as  a  part  of  school  life  and  the   perceived  effects  this  had  on  teachers’  professional  practice,  on  their  leisure,  and  on   their  relationships  with  pupils  and  pupils’  parents.  the  interviews  were  conducted  in   finnish,  audio-­recorded,  and  transcribed  verbatim.  they  are  being  collaboratively   analyzed  by  the  authors  through  an  iterative,  material-­driven  process.  in  the  following,   we  discuss  initial  key  findings.     boundary  turbulence  in  schools     wilma  can  be  used  by  teachers  to  sort,  organize,  and  thus  discipline  the  work  and   actions  of  the  student  body,  helping  teachers  in  achieving  the  goals  of  the  work   assigned  to  them.  in  this  way,  wilma  can  support  teachers’  authority.  at  the  same  time,   the  system  seems  to  challenge  a  central  way  of  maintaining  authority:  keeping  distance   to  students.  wilma  includes  communication  features  known  from  social  network  sites   that  are  used  in  leisure  settings,  such  as  instant  messaging.  this  calls  into  question   earlier  ways  of  distance  keeping.  for  example,  according  to  our  interviewees,  students   tend  to  use  more  informal  language  in  communicating  with  teachers  via  wilma,  and  they   contact  teachers  more  easily  than  their  counterparts  in  the  past.  as  a  result,  teachers   feel  a  need  to  upkeep  their  social  distance  towards  students,  and  seek  new  ways  for   doing  so.     wilma  facilitates  communication  between  teachers  and  parents,  too,  significantly   changing  how  they  can  contact  each  other.  in  the  past,  both  had  to  rely  on  notebooks   carried  by  students  between  home  and  school,  on  phone  calls  made  to  the  school’s   landline  during  office  hours,  and  on  occasional  in-­person  meetings.  wilma  facilitates   contact,  and  gives  both  parties  easier  access  to  each  other.  again,  medium-­specific   differences  in  ways  of  communication  call  for  novel  coping  strategies.  our  interviewees   felt  that  some  parents  used  the  novel  communication  possibilities  too  eagerly,  sharing   excessive  details  about  matters  unrelated  to  school,  while  others  were  considered   insufficiently  interested  in  everyday  school  life,  to  the  point  that  the  teachers  we   interviewed  assumed  these  guardians  to  mainly  ‘click  through’  reports  about  their   children,  instead  of  actually  engaging  with  the  contents.     wilma,  together  with  other  icts,  is  used  both  at  work  and  in  domestic  settings.   teachers  use  both  their  personal  devices  and  those  provided  by  the  school  to  do  so.  a   variety  of  devices,  and  with  them  access  to  work-­related  systems,  are  carried  between   home  and  work,  enabling  teachers  to  work  more  from  home  than  in  the  past.  the   flexibility  this  provides  was  welcomed  by  most  interviewees,  but  on  the  downside,  others   had  felt  compelled  to  take  somewhat  radical  measures  to  manage  the  boundaries  of   professional  and  personal  life,  including  giving  up  internet  access  at  home.  still  others   tended  to  use  wilma  at  school,  drawing  a  clear  line  between  life  at  work  and  at  leisure.   in  choosing  to  manage  their  wilma  load  during  office  hours,  some  teachers  felt  that  they   ended  up  missing  out  on  social  breaks  and  informal  collegial  discussions.     conclusion   our  analysis  focused  on  wilma,  an  ict  system  that  is  embedded  into  the  everyday  of   finnish  high  school  teachers.  we  observed  teachers’  need  to  create  novel  boundaries   regarding  professional  and  personal  life  in  response  to  the  introduction  of  wilma  and  the   changes  the  system  brings  about  in  the  social  dynamics  of  school  life.  these  initial   findings  support  the  more  general  argument  that  the  introduction  of  icts  to  schools   should  not  be  assessed  only  in  utilitarian  terms  of  efficiency  gains  or  lowered  costs,  but   also  in  how  and  with  what  implications  such  changes  create  boundary  turbulence.     references     altman,  i.  (1975).  the  environment  and  social  behavior.  privacy  –  personal  space  –   territory  –  crowding.  monterey,  ca:  brooks-­cole  publishing  company.     petronio,  s.  (2002).  boundaries  of  privacy:  dialectics  of  disclosure.  albany,  ny:  state   university  of  new  york  press.     petronio,  s.  (2013).  brief  status  report  on  communication  privacy  management  theory.   journal  of  family  communication,  13(1),  6–14.         political,  public,  and  proud!  what  we  can  learn  from  the   minority  of  citizens  who  experiment  with  political   communication  on  facebook     sander  schwartz   it  university  of  copenhagen,  denmark     it  is  perfectly  normal  for  the  average  citizen  to  avoid  political  discussion  in  public,  even   in  small  crowds  (see  for  instance  eliasoph,  1998  and  mutz,  2006).  besides  the  social   discomfort,  people  may  also  avoid  political  issues  because  of  an  apathetic  political   nature  (dahlgren,  2009)  or  a  homogenization  of  crowds  according  to  the  spiral  of   silence  theory  (noelle-­neumann,  1984).  studies  confirm  that  discussing  political  issues   on  facebook  is  not  common  behavior  (hampton,  rainie,  lu,  dwyer,  shin,  &  purcell,   2014;;  hoff,  jensen,  klastrup,  schwartz,  &  brügger,  2013).  a  semi-­public  setting  like   facebook  is  often  described  as  a  complex  space  where  social  groups  are  constantly   converging  in  way  that  can  results  in  context  collapse  (marwick  &  boyd,  2014).     however,  while  the  majority  may  choose  to  avoid  political  issues  on  social  media,   research  can  gain  important  insight  from  understanding  the  active  people  that  challenge   these  norms.  this  minority  of  people  represents  the  visible  political  debate  on  facebook   that  the  majority  of  people  may  encounter.  some  of  these  may  even  serve  important   roles  as  opinion  leaders  on  facebook  as  suggested  by  enjolras,  karlsen,  steen-­ johnsen,  and  wollebæk  (2013).       this  study  argues  that  individuals  can  get  some  advantages  from  going  against  the   norm  and  being  political  in  public  on  facebook.  the  politically  active  individuals   included  in  this  study  went  through  complex  reflexive  processes  based  on  their  public  or   semi-­public  activities.  though  this  process  may  not  improve  the  public  debate  in  and  of   itself,  it  appears  to  be  a  healthy  civic  process  for  the  individual.  it  may  explain  some  of   the  motivation  behind  the  engagement.  this  study  argues  that  political  individuals  on   facebook  are  challenging  the  dominating  privacy  norms,  but  they  are  doing  so   purposefully  in  a  playful  and  experimental  manner  that  may  increase  internal  efficacy   and  political  reflexivity.       the  data  for  this  study  is  based  on  in-­depth  and  longitudinal  observation  of  facebook   profiles,  focus  groups  and  individual  interviews  with  ten  danish  citizens  who  used   facebook  occasionally  for  sharing  political  opinions.  the  subjects  were  carefully   selected  after  an  analysis  of  the  complete  list  of  all  citizens  who  commented  on  party   leaders  facebook  pages  during  the  danish  general  election  of  2011.  in  the  selection   process,  emphasis  was  on  ensuring  diversity  in  age  (19-­47  years),  sex  (male/female)   and  political  leanings  (left-­wing  or  right-­wing).  it  was  also  important  that  none  of  the   subjects  were  currently  engaged  in  professional  politics,  and  that  they  did  not  exhibit   extreme  political  behavior.  in  other  words  the  purpose  of  the  selected  individuals  was  to   study  mundane  political  activity  by  citizens  on  an  everyday  basis.  the  subjects  agreed   to  connect  with  the  researcher  on  facebook  in  order  to  access  facebook  activity  on  the   profile  both  live  for  about  a  year  (2014-­15)  and  in  retrospect  going  back  four  years  to  the   election  in  2011.  political  activity  on  facebook  was  archived  (with  permission)  by  the   researcher  and  focus  groups  and  individual  interviews  were  transcribed  for  further   thematic  and  qualitative  analysis.     the  study  revealed  that  each  participant  in  the  study  went  through  complex  reflexive   processes  when  engaging  with  their  personal  social  network  on  facebook  in  the   process  of  sharing  own  political  views.  many  of  the  participants  did  not  feel  that  their   political  activity  changed  the  minds  of  their  audience.  in  other  words  they  did  not   express  a  clear  sense  of  external  efficacy  that  could  explain  the  motivations  for  sharing   political  views.  on  the  other  hand  the  analysis  of  activity  and  motivation  for  sharing   seemed  related  to  a  sense  of  internal  efficacy,  i.e.  increased  reflexivity,  improved   rhetoric,  nuancing  of  arguments  etc.  individuals  where  guided  by  a  political  agenda   usually  consisting  of  a  small  set  of  issues  that  determined  their  public  communication   and  reactions  on  social  media.  these  issues  would  often  trigger  affective  reactions  that   increased  a  sense  of  urgency  for  public  communication.  (see  also  papacharissi,  2015).     from  this  study  a  model  is  developed  to  explain  the  process  from  private  thinking,  to   public  thinking  and  finally  public  communication  (see  figure  1).  public  communication   can  generate  new  reflexivity  through  feedback  from  active  audiences  in  the  individual   facebook  networks.  this  may  lead  to  occasional  context  collapse  if  a  family  member  or   colleague  engages  in  the  political  debate  in  an  undesirable  manner.  while  this  is   inhibiting  political  communication,  it  may  also  create  more  constructive  and  respectful   debates  between  peers  of  people  that  need  to  maintain  social  relations  outside  of   facebook.  the  participants  of  this  study  explained  how  they  made  strong  efforts  to   improve  their  own  factual  reporting  and  their  manner  of  writing  after  instances  of  context   collapse  in  their  own  personal  semi-­public  on  facebook.     figure  1.  from  private  thinking  to  public  communication       these  politically  active  citizens  balance  a  fine  line  between  social  harmony  and  political   provocation  as  they  experiment  with  public  political  communication  in  each  their  own   personal  public  of  facebook  friends.  this  study  present  the  concept  of  a  ‘personal   public’  defined  by  a  fine  balance  between,  on  the  one  hand  a  relative  sense  of  security   in  the  private  networks  from  limited  exposure,  while  on  the  same  time  giving  the   individual  a  sense  of  being  in  public.  the  publicness  is  defined  from  the  sense  of   relative  diversity  through  the  mass  of  the  people,  even  though  it  may  technically  be  a   type  of  a  private  sphere  (see  papacharissi,  2010).  in  the  personal  public  each  individual   engages  with  a  range  of  complex  audience  concepts  such  as  the  imagined  audience   (marwick  and  boyd,  2010),  the  active  audience  (litt,  2012)  and  concepts  such  as  the   lowest  common  denominator  (hogan,  2010).  this  paper  builds  on  earlier  studies  but   presents  a  variety  of  new  audience  understandings  and  cooping  methods  that  the   individual  implement.  the  study  calls  for  a  greater  nuance  in  line  with  other  studies   (davis  and  jurgenson,  2014).     the  conclusion  of  this  paper  is  that  converging  contexts  on  facebook  create   opportunities  for  testing  public  performance  and  opinions  that  may  help  the  individual  to   reflect  on  opinions  and  improve  arguments.  this  reflection  is  partly  internal,  but  also   social  in  the  public  communication  process  with  an  active  audience.  the  paper  does  not   suggest  that  public  debate  necessarily  improves  from  this,  but  instead  it  suggests  that   research  should  consider  the  individual  gains  from  engaging  in  public  political   communication.     references   dahlgren,  p.  (2009).  media  and  political  engagement.  new  york:  cambridge  university   press.     davis,  j.  l.,  &  jurgenson,  n.  (2014).  context  collapse:  theorizing  context  collusions  and   collisions.  information,  communication  &  society,  17(4),  476–485.   http://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2014.888458     eliasoph,  n.  (1998).  avoiding  politics.  cambridge,  u.k.:  cambridge  university  press.     hampton,  k.n.,  rainie,  l.,  lu,  w.,  dwyer,  m.,  shin,  i.,  &  purcell,  k.  (2014).  “social   media  and  the  ‘spiral  of  silence.’  pew  research  center,  washington,  dc.       hoff,  j.,  jensen,  j.  l.,  klastrup,  l.,  schwartz,  s,  &  brügger,  n.  (2013).  internettet  og   folketingsvalget  2011.    public  report.  copenhagen:  danske  medier.     hogan,  b.  (2010).  the  presentation  of  self  in  the  age  of  social  media:  distinguishing   performances  and  exhibitions  online.  bulletin  of  science,  technology  &  society,   30(6),  377–386.       litt,  e.  (2012).  knock,  knock.  who’s  there?  the  imagined  audience.  journal  of   broadcasting  &  electronic  media,  56(3),  330–345.       marwick,  a.  e.,  &  boyd,  d.  (2010).  i  tweet  honestly,  i  tweet  passionately:  twitter  users,   context  collapse,  and  the  imagined  audience.  new  media  &  society,  13(1),  114– 133.       marwick,  a.  e.,  &  boyd,  d.  (2014).  networked  privacy:  how  teenagers  negotiate  context   in  social  media.  new  media  &  society.     noelle-­neumann,  e.  (1993).  the  spiral  of  silence  (2nd  ed.).  chicago:  university  of   chicago  press.     papacharissi,  z.  (2015).  affective  publics:  sentiment,  technology,  and  politics.  oup   usa.     papacharissi,  z.  (2010).  a  private  sphere:  democracy  in  a  digital  age.  polity  press.           profile  work  for  preserving  privacy  on  social  network   sites     suvi  uski   university  of  helsinki,  finland     introduction during   the   past   decade   the   social   dynamics   of   self-­presentation   have   changed   dramatically   due   to   social   network   site   (sns)   contexts   that   encourage   their   users   to   draft   user   profiles   to   express   their   identities.   user   profiles   such   as   on   facebook,   instagram,   and   twitter,   repeat   similar   architecture   including   profile   picture,   name,   personal  information  and  a  wall  for  public  social  interaction.  from  a  technology  research   perspective   these  sns   profiles   have   increased   the   need   to  manage   one’s   privacy   in   novel  ways   in  order  not   to  mistarget  one’s  disclosures  (e.g.,  marwick  and  boyd,  2014;;   lampinen,  2014).  furthermore,  from  a  social  psychological  perspective,  management  of   one’s  privacy  can  be  viewed  also   from  an   identity  perspective.   in  order   to  understand   the  link  between  privacy  and  identity  this  paper  exploits  the  concept  of  profile  work  (e.g.,   uski  and  lampinen,  2014)  and  explains  the  changed  dynamics  of  self-­presentation  that   create  a  threat  towards  one’s  networked  privacy  (marwick  and  boyd,  2014)  in  terms  of   authenticity.     to   begin   to   discern   the   differences   between   face-­to-­face   and   sns   self-­presentation,   there  are  three  key  changes  in  social  dynamics  induced  by  an  sns  profile  (uski,  2015).   the  first  addresses  the  role  dynamic:  the  role  presented  in  an  sns  is  now  a  meta-­role,   touching  several  social  circles  (e.g.,  context  collapse).  a  second  dynamic,   temporality,   posits   that   all   actions   one   takes  with   an  sns   profile   are  managed   so   as   to  maintain   consistency  considering  the  past,  present  and  future  (e.g.,  van  dijck,  2013).  a  final  core   change   is   found   in   the   communication   realm,   where   the   mediated   nature   of   the   interaction  means  that  social  cues  are  different  and  asynchronous  –  all  these  compared   with  how  goffman  described  self-­presentation  in  face-­to-­face  interactions  in  1959.       prolonged  identity  performance   when  the  three  dynamics  merge  in  sns  contexts,  self-­presentation  is  directed  toward  a   prolonged   identity   performance,   which   is   a   non-­traditional   phenomenon   in   ordinary   people’s   lives   and   social   psychology.   prolonged   identity   performance   with   these   changed   social   dynamics   is  manifested   in   several   challenges   facing   self   and   identity.   for   instance,  overlapping   identities,   identity  development,  coherence  and  consistency,   and   the   “realness”   of   the   self   may   be   threatened.   these   threats   comprise   the   psychological   array   of   conditions   that   follow   subjectively   experienced   violations   of   privacy.   in   the   following,   the   efforts   individuals   invest   in   preserving   their   networked   privacy  are  elaborated  with  help  of  two  main  concepts:  profile  work  and  authenticity.     profile  work     the   changed   dynamics   of   self-­presentation   seen   when   sns   user   profiles   enter   the   picture   do   have   an   impact   on   the   efforts   that   users   invest   in   managing   their   presentations.   the   more   a   profile   functions   as   a   stage   for   prolonged   identity   performance,   the   greater   the   self-­presentational   challenges   it   introduces   for   the   performer.   the   notion   of   self-­presentation   can   depict   the   phenomenon   with   only   a   limited   amount   of   clarity   in   delineation   of   the   dynamics   and   challenges   sns   user   profiles   induce,   hence   the   concept   of   profile   work   is   exploited   to   enhance   the   understanding  of  creation  and  maintenance  of  a  prolonged  identity  performance  on  an   sns.       the  aim  of  profile  work  is  the  same  as  that  in  self-­presentation:  presenting  a  truthful  but   ideal   self   to   others   (goffman,   1959,   44).   sns   user   profiles   offer   their   users   great   opportunities   to  express   themselves  but  also  an  excessive  amount  of  control  over   the   cues  one  wishes  to  present  (stern,  2008).  however,  not  everyone  is  actively  presenting   all   the   time.  a  great  deal  of   time  spent   in  snss   is  around  watching  others.  the  sns   user  profile  has  potential  to  induce  and  maintain  public  self-­awareness  (buss,  1980)  by   offering  a  concrete  image  of  the  performer  to  audiences  to  interpret  (fenigstein,  1979).     as   a   concept,   profile   work   draws   together   the   performer’s   experience   and   visible   actions.   profile  work   is   about   control   and   access,   though   the   users   engage   in   profile   work  also  when  they  do  not  have  control.  they  might  worry  about  their  sns  presence  in   many   ways,   a   fact   highlighting   that   this   is   not   a   lightweight  matter   for   the   individual.   every   act   of   publishing   in   one’s   profile   involves   profile   work;;   however,   the   concept   extends  further,  to  the  mental  effort  that  may  or  may  not  result  in  observable  updates  or   other  publications.  thinking  about  publishing  but   then  not  going   through  with   it  would   count  as  profile  work.       it   is  worth   reiterating   that   profile  work  need  not   leave  any   traces.  a   relevant   study  of   users’  self-­censorship  on  facebook  has  found  that  people  often  censor  their  initial  ideas   about   what   to   publish   (das   &   kramer,   2013).   in   addition,   thoughts,   feelings,   and   reasoning  related  to  one’s  profile  are  profile  work  and  are  part  of  the  overall  process  of   self-­presentation   in   one’s   life.   the   visible   acts   or   marks   in   the   profile   are   only   to   be   considered  the  tip  of  the  iceberg.       in   sns   context   (lampinen,   2014;;   ellison   et   al.,   2007;;   marwick   and   boyd,   2014;;   stutzman   &   hartzog,   2012),   it   is   necessary   to   explicate   that   profiles   function   as   platforms  for  social  interaction  and  that  one’s  profile  content  is  accumulated  in  a  manner   encompassing   collaborative   practices,   however,   profile   work   represents   subjective   experience  of   these  collaborative  operations   in  managing  one’s  privacy.  for   instance,   when  an  audience  member  posts  to  a  performer’s  profile,  the  performer  conducts  profile   work  in  evaluation  of  whether  the  content  posted  supports  the  identity  performance.  if  it   does  not,  profile  work  is  undertaken  for  judging  how  to  cope  with  the  unsuitable  content.       profile  work  for  authenticity     prolonged  identity  performance  induces  several  challenges  facing  self  and  identity.  as   acknowledged  in  the  context  of  internet  research,  the  two  contexts,  sns  and  offline,  do   operate  in  the  same  reality  of  a  user  experiencing  them.  consequently,  one  of  the  main   realities  is  that  sns  user  profiles,  viewed  as  prolonged  identity  performances,  are  more   or   less   integrated   into   the   offline   world.   in   the   framework   of   sns   profiles,   these   two   contexts  are  brought  together  is  the  shared  audience:  the  social  realm.  for  instance,  if   one’s  facebook  connections  go  beyond  facebook  as  well,   the  authenticities  must  be   able  to  hold  in  both  contexts.  users  need  to  cope  in  two  competing  contexts  at  the  same   time;;  they  need  to  engage  in  profile  work  to  balance  these  two  contexts.  davis  (2014)   concludes  that  in  the  sns  “the  self  is  the  object  of  triangulation,  and  self-­triangulation  is   accomplished  when  online  identity  performances  and  offline  identity  performances  point   to,  and  reflect,  the  same  self.”  this  idea  of  self-­triangulation  is  a  good  tool  to  understand   the  prolonged  identity  performance  in  sns  profile   in  relation  to  the  social  realm  where   the   performer   operates.   with   respect   to   triangulation   of   self,   profile   work   draws   the   attention  to  the  prolonged  identity  performance  that  anchors  the  triangulation  to  the  sns   user  profile.       based  on   these   ideas   the   subjective   networked  privacy   can  be   viewed  as  a   result   of   successful   profile   work   in   order   to   manage   the   presentations   given   to   one’s   social   realm.  given  the  three  changed  dynamics  of  self-­presentation  the  latest  trends  in  snss,   such   as   snapchat   and   periscope   nurture   the   idea   that   shorter   identity   performances   decreases   the   needed   amount   of   profile   work,   and   thereby   increases   experienced   privacy.  for  instance,  on  periscope  the  user  profile  does  not  include  user’s  history  and   the   communication   is   less  mediated   than   on   a   facebook   profile.   this   kind   of   turn   in   sns   profile   features   will   help   users   to  maintain   their   authenticities   within   their   social   realms.       references     buss,  a.  h.  (1980).  self-­consciousness  and  social  anxiety.  freeman.     das,  s.,  &  kramer,  a.  (2013,  july  8  –  july  10,  2013).  self-­censorship  on  facebook.   paper  presented  at  the  seventh  international  aaai  conference  on  weblogs  and  social   media.     davis,  j.  l.  (2014).  triangulating  the  self:  identity  processes  in  a  connected  era.   symbolic  interaction,  37(4),  500–523.       ellison,  n.,  heino,  r.,  &  gibbs,  j.  (2006).  managing  impressions  online:  self-­ presentation  processes  in  the  online  dating  environment.  journal  of  computer-­mediated   communication,  11(2),  415–441.       fenigstein,  a.  (1979).  self-­consciousness,  self-­attention,  and  social  interaction.  journal   of  personality  and  social  psychology,  37(1),  75.       goffman,  e.  (1959).  the  presentation  of  self  in  everyday  life.  new  york:  anchor.     marwick,  ae.  and  boyd,  d.  (2014).  networked  privacy:  how  teenagers  negotiate  context   in  social  media.  new  media  &  society,  first  published  on  july  21.   doi:10.1177/1461444814543995.     lampinen,  a.  (2014).  interpersonal  boundary  regulation  in  the  context  of  social   network  services.  (phd),  university  of  helsinki.           stern,  s.  (2008).  producing  sites,  exploring  identities:  youth  online  authorship.  in  d.   buckingham  (ed.),  youth,  identity  and  didital  media  (pp.  95-­118).  cambridge:  mit   press.     stutzman,  f.,  &  hartzog,  w.  (2012).  boundary  regulation  in  social  media.  paper   presented  at  the  proceedings  of  the  acm  2012  conference  on  computer  supported   cooperative  work,  february  11–15;;  seattle,  washington.       uski,  s.  (2015).  profile  work  for  authenticity:  self-­presentation  in  social  network   services.  (phd).  university  of  helsinki.     uski,  s.  and  lampinen,  a.  (2014).  social  norms  and  self-­presentation  on  social  network   sites:  profile  work  in  action.  new  media  &  society,  july  17.     van  dijck,  j.  (2013).  ‘you  have  one  identity’:  performing  the  self  on  facebook  and   linkedin.  media,  culture  &  society,  35(2),  199-­215.     selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): neill hoch, i. (2019, october 2-5). thanks svetlana: privacy, trust, humor and the russian psyop on tumblr. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. thanks svetlana: privacy, trust, humor and the russian psyop on tumblr indira neill hoch concordia college, moorhead minnesota, usa on march 24th, 2018, tumblr account holders received a mass email informing them that 84 user accounts had been terminated. these 84 accounts were determined as “linked to internet research agency or ira (a group closely tied to the russian government) posing as members of the tumblr community.” those receiving the email from tumblr were identified as having “followed one of these accounts linked to the ira, or liked or reblogged one of their posts.” what followed was a list of the 84 terminated accounts, and all usernames known to be utilized by these accounts. on tumblr, someone can change their username near-instantly, and doing so is common practice. it’s not at all unusual for one blogger to cycle through five, ten, twenty names, while maintaining their followers. it’s the person behind the account who is important, not the username. and, it turns out, the fact that on tumblr the person is who you follow, is what the ira exploited. this study uses a combination of multimodal discourse analysis (bateman, 2008; holsanova, 2012; jewitt, 2009; levine & scollon, 2004) and qualitative interview materials to make an initial attempt at understanding the response to the russian psyop as conducted on tumblr. it is critical that we, as technologically-oriented, civically concerned communication scholars, understand the technical and social mechanisms that allowed russian interference on social media platforms to be perpetuated, and not only on the most popular and visible sites, such as facebook and twitter, but more niche platforms as well. tumblr remains comparatively under-researched compared to other platforms, but if the ira took the time to customize their operations to each specific platform, we, are obligated to take the same care in understanding their digital tactics and how they were tailored. interview materials originate prior to the announcement, and were conducted from september to november 2017, as part of a larger project aimed towards understanding the socio-technical interaction between the tumblr platform and users through a social construction of technology (scot) framework (bijker, hughes, & pinch, 1989). in these interviews, privacy concerns were discussed at length, as well as tumblr’s perceived incompetence when coding and maintaining a platform. because participants maintained relatively little faith in the digital architecture of tumblr, they instead largely managed their privacy by carefully considering who they followed and who followed them. when deciding what bloggers to follow, a sense of personal connection to the people they followed was crucial. this centrality of “knowing” who they followed (while almost never knowing the blogger in a face-to-face context) is key for understanding how the russian accounts must resemble “real” people, in order to gain followers and thus traction on tumblr. the posts and reblog chains under analysis either 1) originated with ira-linked account, “lagonegirl,” and were reblogged after “her” blog was deleted, or 2) were humorous responses to the psyop revelation. these posts were collected the week following the march 24th, 2018 announcement. usernames listed as ira-linked included “addictedtoblackk,” “blackness-by-your-side,” “blacktolive,” “postingwhileblack,” “blacklivesmatterusa,” and “blackprideworldwide.” as can perhaps be gleaned from this list of names, many of these ira accounts were specifically “posing as members” of the black, politically engaged, tumblr community. lagonegirl was one of these users, posing as a black woman. unlike the ads on facebook purchased from suspicious origins (kim et al., 2018) or micro-targeting efforts by cambridge analytica, the russian psyop on tumblr took a drastically different format. rather than targeting specific users through ad-buys (something that may not even be possible on tumblr, which is often derided for absurdist ads with no relation at all to the user base), the ira accounts instead posed as people. lagonegirl wasn’t focused exclusively on politics, or the charade of being a black woman. she originated and reblogged a mix of humor, social justice, and everyday occurrences that any other user running a “personal” blog on tumblr might. trust and a sense of authenticity was crucial for interview participants in order to understand the blogs they were following and the people behind those blogs. furthermore, it was participants’ lack of trust in tumblr specifically that led them to rely so intensely on feeling a personal connection (whether real or imaginary) to the person behind the blog. one participant, e, answered the question of whether or not they followed blogs they had no particular connection to as such, e: mm not really? i think every blog i follow i feel some kind of connection to, even if its just a familiar "oh hey this person finished knitting that laceweight shawl! good for them" when i see them on my dash theyve all become part of the landscape of my dash tumblr users who had followed, liked, and/or reblogged posts from ira-linked accounts were assured in the march 24th email they weren’t “in trouble,” and that they didn’t “need to take any action if you don’t want to.” but while tumblr deleted the blogs in question, they made the decision to not delete reblogs of their posts to other accounts, allowing users to continue to “curate your own tumblr to reflect your own personal views and perspectives.” it was left up to the individual tumblr user to decide if they wished to delete posts originating from these accounts from their own blogs. thus, posts by lagonegirl and other ira-linked accounts continued to circulate. tumblr users responded to the reveal of the russian “psyop” with a mix of disbelief, humor, and accusations. lagonegirl had posted a mixture of affirmations, humor, and political content to “her” blog, and following the ira announcement “her” posts were reblogged with additional jokes and addendums, or commentary of a more serious nature, as tumblr users could now analyze “her” political posts (including a number of posts critical of presidential candidate hillary clinton) through a new lens. figure 1. lagonegirl was an inspiration to us all. interview materials offer clarity to how lagonegirl and other ira-linked blogs became part of the “landscape” of so many tumblr dashboards seamlessly, while the multimodal analysis of posts offers insights into how deception was maintained and later parodied. the trust that users revoked from tumblr as a technical platform, and instead placed in their own personal assessment of individual bloggers, emphasizes the sophistication of the psyop on tumblr, and how interference programs cannot wholly be remedied by tighter regulation on advertising content on select platforms. references bateman, j. a., (2008). multimodality and genre: a foundation for the systematic analysis of multimodal documents. london: palgrave macmillan. bijker, w.e., hughes, t.p., & pinch, t. (1989). introduction. in w. e. bijker, t. p. hughes, & t. pinch (eds.). the social construction of technological systems: new directions in the sociology and history of technology. (pp. 9-16). cambridge, ma: mit press. holsanova, j., 2012. new methods for studying visual communication and multimodal integration. visual communication, 11(3), 251-257. jewitt, c. (2004). multimodality and new communication technologies. in p. levine, & r. scollon, (eds.) discourse and technology: multimodal discourse analysis. (pp. 196-207) washington d.c: georgetown university press. kim, y. m., hsu, j., neiman, d., kou, c., bankston, l., kim, s. y., ... & raskutti, g. (2018). the stealth media? groups and targets behind divisive issue campaigns on facebook. political communication, 35(4), 515-541. levine, p., & scollon, r. (eds.). (2004). discourse and technology: multimodal discourse analysis. washington d.c: georgetown university press. aoir submission selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): johnson, m. r. & woodcock, j. (2018, october 10-13). the socio-technical entanglements of live streaming on twitch.tv. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the socio-technical entanglements of live streaming on twitch.tv mark r johnson university of alberta jamie woodcock oxford university introduction the website and platform twitch.tv is the overwhelming market leader in the live broadcast (“streaming”) of user-created videos over the internet, known primarily for the streaming of video game play. in both 2016 and 2017 over two million people regularly broadcast on the platform, resulting in over a million years of video content in total viewed by over one hundred million people (twitch, 2017). streamers range from those broadcasting for their own amusement to friends, to those who do so as their full-time job (approximately several thousand individuals). central to the success of the platform is the potential for broadcasters and viewers to talk directly to one another (sjöblom and hamari, 2016) through a feature known as “twitch chat” – a chat window that appears alongside video broadcasts. this shrinks traditional distances between media producers and media consumers, generating a newfound responsiveness for those consuming twitch broadcasts who find themselves able to talk directly with broadcasters, and therefore influence the broadcast itself (taylor, 2016). the deep newness of this phenomenon, alongside the many elements that constitute it, make it an important site for studying digital labour, co-production, and gaming culture. as such, in this paper we focus on three elements of the conference theme: the shifting political and creative economies of streaming media, in our case twitch; social media, platforms, podcasts, and actors in online networks; and the materialities of data, in our case a million years of video content. research questions and framework in an interdisciplinary study grounded in both science & technology studies and the sociology of work, this paper explores the entangling of the technical and social dimensions of the twitch phenomenon. specifically, we are interested in how these elements shape streamer labour, audience engagement, and twitch’s wider position in contemporary media production. in the first case, we explore the nature of the current technological moment that has contributed to the emergence of live streaming: development in computer hardware required to play, live-record, and live-broadcast, video content; the rapid growth in internet speed (within the global north) which allows for the upload, transfer and download of video data; and shifts in media consumption away from traditional television and cinema toward online services, of which twitch is one (johnson & woodcock, 2017). we also note that the ever-expanding library of games (leisure opportunities) one might play, combined with the contraction of leisure time emblematic of contemporary capitalism, has led to a desire to view games one does not oneself have the time to play. each of these trends has shaped twitch, and we seek to trace these trends and explore the elements of the live streaming platform they have enabled, created, influenced, or determined. in the second case, we explore social elements that affect the dynamics and texture of live streaming: how these disparities in technical hardware and knowledge have shaped the geographical locations of broadcasters and streamers; how the emergence of live streaming has affected the popularity of certain kinds of games, especially independent or “indie” games and ”esports”; and the increasing convergence, in only the past two or three years, between games broadcast, games play, traditional media broadcast, and games culture. we therefore look to produce a critical engagement with the sociotechnical networks that have developed over the last decade to not just allow for the possibility of streaming, but to position it at a place within gaming culture and changes in gaming as a pastime that have enabled such a rapid growth and sudden ubiquity. methodology in this paper we combine original interview and ethnographic data. in the first case, we draw upon semi-structured interviews with over one hundred professional streamers on the twitch platform, lasting between ten minutes and one hour. ethnographically, we draw on data from both online and offline investigations. the authors recorded at least one hour of observation from over two hundred twitch channels, aiming to maximise the demographic variation in those observed and focusing on the work being performed by the broadcasters in question. to this we add offline ethnographic observation at almost a dozen gaming events in the united kingdom, united states, germany and poland in the past two years. findings in seeking to understand the labour and work of twitch streamers, audience interest and engagement with in the platform, and twitch’s broader position in contemporary media production, we offer three findings in this paper. firstly, that although much of the appeal of twitch for aspiring professionals lies in the promise of an “easy living”, twitch is actually a profoundly challenging career path, requiring aspirants to work immensely long hours for long periods of time, restructure their personal and family lives, potentially damage their health and relationships, and compete with millions of others for a tiny sliver of potential success at the apex of the platform (johnson, 2018). this situation is created through both the technical and social elements of live streaming, which together encourage extreme levels of competition, time commitment, mental effort, and a sense of being “always on” and always available to one’s fans (woodcock & johnson, in press). secondly, that audiences find twitch so compelling due to the shortening of distances between broadcasters and viewers, made possible by both the technical elements of the platform (live, video broadcast, fast internet speeds, chat windows, and so forth) and the social elements: a set of norms and practices that encourage direct engagement with viewers, the creation of new forms of interaction unique to the platform, the broadcaster-led gamification of twitch to encourage viewer interest, and overall a deep proximity between digital celebrities and digital consumers contingent upon twitch’s sociotechnical network. thirdly, that twitch’s technological and social entanglements are, above all else, unique – although other live streaming platforms exist, the ubiquity (and the attendant competition and labour dynamics) of twitch make it both synonymous with live streaming, and quite unlike any other live streaming platform. twitch combines social and technical elements of internet technology and internet culture in ways never before brought together, and as such – given the scope of its influence and growth – its socio-technical entanglements merit close scholarly attention. as such, twitch is an exemplary example of “transnational materialities” emerging on the internet, through which individuals across the globe are bound together, in previously unknown ways, through the combination of both new technologies and distinctive social practices. references johnson, m. r. & woodcock, j. (2017). ‘‘it’s like the gold rush’: the lives and careers of professional video game streamers on twitch.tv, information, communication and society, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2017.1386229. johnson, m. r. (2018). inclusion and exclusion in the digital economy: disability and mental health as a live streamer on twitch.tv. information, communication and society, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2018.1476575. sjöblom, m. and hamari, j. (2016) why do people watch others play video games? an empirical study on the motivations of twitch users, available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2779543 taylor, n. (2016). ‘now you’re playing with audience power: the work of watching games’, critical studies in media communication, 33(4): 293-307. twitch (2017). ‘audience’. twitch, available online at: http://twitchadvertising.tv/audience/. woodcock, j. & johnson, m. r. (in press). the affective labor and performance of live streaming on twitch.tv. television and new media. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 firth, j., farman, j., oppegaard, b., meyer, j., wilken, r. (2017, october 18-21). the temporality of mobile media. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. panel title: the temporality of mobile media jordan frith jason farman brett oppegaard joseph meyer rowan wilken description scholarship on mobile media has often focused on the relationship between mobile media and space/place, including studies on locative technologies (frith, 2014), socialspatial coordination (ling, 2004), proximity (oppegaard & rabby, 2015; wilken and goggin, 2013), absent presence and telecocooning (gergen, 2002; habuchi, 2005) and place-making (farman, 2010). from sarah sharma’s (2012) perspective, the focus — possibly an overemphasis — on spatial dynamics in locative and mobile media not only relies on the most simplistic analysis of the media, but also “risks aligning the field too closely with the logic of the market.”[i] drawing on the work of harold innis, she goes on to argue that such an overemphasis on the spatial dynamics of mobile and locative media plays into the centralizing characteristics of imperial powers: “civilizations that emphasize space over time tend to be imperial powers, involved in the conquering of space at the expense of the maintenance of culture over time.”[ii] building off sharma’s provocations, this panel focuses on several aspects of mobile technologies where mobility and time intersect in the most fundamental of ways. as we will discuss in our talks, the dominant focus of mobile media studies has been on spatial impacts. while this research has certainly been useful to move the field forward, it has resulted in a disproportionate focus on space over time, or spatiality over temporality. consequently, the vast majority of work on locative media—and even most of the work on voice and texting—tends to ignore the temporal impacts of mobile media adoption. this panel seeks to flip that relationship by devoting four talks to the oft-neglected interrelations between mobile media and temporality. the first presentation focuses on an established form of mobile communication: text messaging. the talk draws from a large-scaled study performed in the united states and japan to argue that waiting is key to the social impacts of text messaging, with temporality structuring how people communicate and understand their relationships mediated through text messages. the second presentation then shifts to a newer type of mobile media: the location-based social media service yik yak. that presentation uses qualitative data to analyze how the location-based social feeds of yik yak become a way to access the “pulse” of a city by merging spatiality and temporality to reveal rhythms of college life. the latter two presentations also focus on location-based social media. the third looks at design elements, arguing that quantitative research into mobile practices, while valuable and often essential, can elide the messy everyday practices of mobile users. through field work performed on a location-based hawaiian art application, the presentation argues for an increased focus on how time shapes the practices of locative media users and should play into mobile application design. the final presentation builds on the first three by approaching temporality and spatiality through the business side of location-based services. the presentation analyzes foursquare and banjo to examine how app developers seek to capture data about temporal rhythms to both improve and monetize their product. the four presentations in this panel provide a unified focus on the temporality of mobile media. together, we focus on the how the delay and waiting shapes text messaging, how locative media reflect temporal rhythms, how designers can account for temporality in location-based applications, and how rhythm analysis can help understand data collection practices of app developers. taken as a whole, we believe this panel will be a valuable addition to existing conversations surrounding smartphone technology and help provide a different perspective on how time shapes our engagement with emerging mobile media. references farman, j. (2012). mobile interface theory. new york, ny: routledge. frith, j. (2015). smartphones as locative media. london, england: polity press. gergen, k. (2002). the challenge of absent presence. in j. katz & m. aakhus (eds.), perpetual contact: mobile communication, private talk, public performance (pp. 227–241). new york, ny: cambridge university press. habuchi, i. (2005). accelerating reflexivity. in m. ito, d. okabe, & m. matsuda (eds.), personal, portable, pedestrian: mobile phones in japanese life (pp. 165–182). cambridge, ma: mit press. ling, r. (2004). the mobile connection: the cell phone’s impact on society. san francisco, ca: morgan kaufman. oppegaard, b., & rabby, m. (2015). proximity: revealing new mobile meanings of a traditional news concept. digital journalism, 4(5), 621-638 sharma, s. (2012). it changes space and time! introducing power-chronography. in communication matters: materialist approaches to media, mobility and networks. new york: routledge. wilken, r., & goggin, g. (eds.). (2013). mobile technology and place. routledge. abstract 1: texting and time: the emotional experience of waiting in mobile media culture by jason farma a contemporary phenomenon that started with teens in japan is called kara mail or “blank messages.” these are blank text messages — simply an empty text bubble that pops up on the recipient’s mobile phone — that are usually sent between close friends or romantic partners. when someone sends one of these text-less messages, the significant other is expected to send back a blank text message with as little time elapsed as possible. the idea behind these messages is that a partner should always be paying attention, anticipating one of these blank messages. some expect that a response in the form of an identical blank message should come no more than 10 seconds after the initial one is sent. here, there is seemingly no content to these messages; however, the message in these blank texts is time. the messages take on meaning based on how long a person is left waiting for a response. time, especially when time is spent waiting, is a significant experience in intimate relationships. this has been true throughout history and is pronounced in our mobile era in which teens and college students are using text messages to communicate, keep connected, and coordinate. we send text messages and wait for a response. we send emails. we wait for a response. we post pictures and wait for likes. our social lives are spent waiting because our media are designed to let people respond when they get a chance. it always has been understood that waiting is an in-between time; but what if waiting is the very thing that has been shaping us throughout history? as technologies have advanced throughout history and made our wait times shorter, we see that the act of waiting in each era tells us an incredible amount about a culture and how it understood human connection, intimacy, and knowledge. looking at our own contemporary uses of text messages offers some key insights about how waiting is shaping our relationships with one another. this presentation looks at the emotions linked with waiting in mobile culture. our findings are drawn from three studies of college students in north america and japan. from boredom to anxiety, from stress to obligation, the emotional components of asynchronous media directly contribute to both the interpretation of messages and to communication practices, such as how quickly someone decides to respond. we began our research with the simple question: what are the emotional experiences that accompany the time between sending and receiving mobile messages? we decided to start with a small, qualitative study that dug deeply into the personal experiences of a few students at the university of maryland, college park. our follow-up studies included a national study of college students in the united states and canada at 16 colleges and universities, as well as a study of college students in tokyo, japan. for our initial small study, the diversity of uses, contexts, and expectations around time lag were extraordinary. of the eight students who completed our study, we found very little overlap in how they used their devices for mobile messaging, where and when they texted, and what they thought of to be standard times to respond and receive a response from the people they communicate with. what emerged was a rich tapestry of examples that opened up for us the range of uses college students engage on a daily basis. our national study in north america (n=212) consisted of 30 questions broken into four specific themes: demographics, use, relation, and expectations of mobile messaging, a smaller version of our qualitative study around the last five text messages received, and a narrative-based section asking participants to respond to particular instances of mobile messaging. the study conducted in tokyo took place at waseda university with 40 undergraduates and at tokyo university with 25 undergraduates. the preliminary data shows interesting trends about expectations surrounding response times with mobile messages. context — relationship status, events surrounding the message exchange, and norms for message response rates for that specific relationship — was the most important factor in how a person responded to time lag in a message exchange. in addition, some the separate studies showed similarities. a vast majority of respondents reply and expect a reply within 30 minutes, with a large majority of those expecting responses in less than 10 minutes. mobile messaging was also the dominant choice for contact, support, emotion, and coordination among respondents. wait times that exceeded the expectations for a specific relationship led to significant emotional responses, with students feeling “rejected,” “extremely unimportant,” and “worried that they said something wrong and have damaged the relationship.” one of the more telling data points in our study was the choice of messaging platform respondents used in their message reporting. in our national study in north america, 116 said that they use text messaging (with an additional 14 imessage, which, for all intents and purposes, can be considered the default “text” for iphone), which is a significant number of users of the native messaging platform on mobile devices. however, in japan, 100% of the students surveyed used the line platform. one key distinction between north american platforms and line is that students in japan are unable to turn off “read receipts;” that is, line requires users to see if their message has been delivered or not. in terms of waiting, this shifts things significantly for these students. they use two terms that highlight this shift: midoku-through (which means “not yet through” or “not yet delivered”) and kidoku-through (which means “already delivered”). typically, a student’s anxiety about a message that has not been responded to does not begin until the message is kidoku-through. until the message is read, several students said, “i could wait forever for their response,” and “it’s important to have patience” until the recipient reads the message. after the message is kidokuthrough, their wait time expectations are very similar to those of students in the united states and canada. line picks up where the kara mail blank messages left off; now, students exchange stickers on the platform with one another, expecting a return sticker from their partner with as little time elapsed as possible. time has always been a part of the content of mobile messaging, but text messages at this moment in time are especially poignant examples. line was started shortly after the 3/11 disaster at fukushima when many of japan’s residents were unable to reach their loved ones over phone or by social media. a lack of response during this moment of crisis launched a platform that continues the significance of time for mobile messaging and the sustaining of social relationships. the study of waiting for messages is an important avenue into understanding the relationship between social intimacy, technology, and spatial dynamics. it reveals the power inherent in how different people wait differently (or are expected to wait differently). it reveals the seams of social relationships and how our mobile technologies weave themselves into those relationships in ways that highlight our expectations of how social time is practiced. abstract 2: the time and place of locative social media by jordan frith much of the initial excitement surrounding the internet revolved around its impact on space (see benedikt, 2000; castells, 2000). social commentators at the time spoke of “a world of digital sensation” (heim, 1993, p. 93), “free from the constraints of geography” (wilken, 2008, p. 39). negroponte (1995) predicted a future in which people would “socialize in digital neighborhoods in which physical space [was] irrelevant” (p. 6). friendships in this new environment were expected to emerge through a confluence of interests rather than proximity (baym, 2015). the famous “no more there” commercial run by mci in 1994 (“no more there,” 1994) captured the zeitgeist when it imagined the internet dismantling the social barriers of distance. while the internet’s broader impact is unquestionable, the suggested effect on physical space was never fully realized. physical space still matters as much as it ever did (massey, 2005). after all, the rise of social networking sites has seen people’s online connections resemble their offline, spatially bound, networks rather than the more spatially dispersed interest-based sociability of chat rooms or muds (boyd & ellison, 2008). many digital applications (often referred to as locative media) are now specifically designed to connect people to their physical surroundings and shift content as people move through space (wilken & goggin, 2015). the ‘power of the internet’ has accordingly been harnessed “to facilitate connections between people based on geographic proximity” (humphreys, 2010, p.763-764). the gps functionality of smartphones means that digital information can now be tethered to specific locations, just as it can be accessed on the move. for de souza e silva (2006) this intermingling of physical world environments with digital space has produced what she refers to as ‘hybrid space.’ as saker and evans (in press) suggest, this ‘hybrid space’ “[gives] rise to new embodied experiences and social connections in place” (p. 2). however, research has often neglected how the increased hybridity of our spaces impacts individual experiences of time. this presentation reports on qualitative research into the practices of one specific locative application: yik yak. launched in 2013 by a pair of college graduates (shontell, 2015), yik yak quickly became somewhat of a phenomenon with young people (hess, 2015). the founders raised well over $60 million usd in venture capital funding and earned a valuation of over $400 million usd within a year of the application’s creation (shontell, 2015). based on the design of earlier location-based applications like whisper and secret, yik yak allowed users to anonymously publish and read short posts (though the application made a slight shift towards optional persistent identities in 2016). at the same time, yik yak represents a different type of anonymity than sites like 4chan because of its engagement with physical proximity. the posts, or “yaks” as they are commonly called, people can see are determined by their physical location. in denser areas, only posts made within a 1 ½ mile radius are available. in less dense areas, the radius can range up to 10 miles. after the data collection for this study was completed, yik yak also added a “base camp” from which people can post to regardless of their location and optional avatars. yik yak has been the topic of much debate. for the most part, discussions have revolved around the anonymity the application affords its users and controversy-related context of cyberbullying, racism, and generally unpleasant discussion threads (dewey, 2014; mahler, 2015; stone & kingkade, 2014). the other main focus has been on yik yak’s influence on how people experience space, echoing a growing body of research into locative media and place (frith, 2015). however, far less research has been published on how locative media both impact and reflect upon temporal dynamics. consequently, this presentation uses data collected from six months of ethnographic research and interviews with 18 yik yak users, to analyze how locative applications like yik yak can impact the temporal as well as the spatial. while the presentation will address both spatiality and anonymity, the primary focus is on how people use yik yak to access a “pulse” of the city that reflects the temporal rhythms and inflows and outflows of residents. the data presented in the talk will focus on how the yik yak feed becomes a lifeline into the rhythms of the college town where the research was conducted. as i will show, the feed slows and speeds up depending on the schedules of college students; the content reflects the temporal patterns of college life (e.g. posts about finals during finals week, parties on the weekend, and so forth). the temporal in these cases cannot be separate from the spatial. the main argument of this presentation is that locative applications like yik yak, by bounding content based on physical proximity, also open up new opportunities to view the movement of time within small slices of physical location. as i show through the analysis of yik yak, information accessed through the internet is increasingly shaped by physical location, requiring exploratory research into how digital information becomes a new type of “lens” through which people engage with both the temporality and spatiality of their surroundings (dourish & bell, 2011). references baym, n. (2015). personal connections in the digital age (2nd ed.). cambridge, ma: polity press. benedikt, m. l. (2000). cyberspace: first steps. in d. bell & b. m. kennedy (eds.), cybercultures reader (p. 29). new york: routledge. boyd, danah, & ellison, n. (2008). social network sites: definition, history, and scholarship. journal of computer-mediated communication, 13(1), 210–230. castells, m. (2000). the rise of the network society. oxford, uk: blackwell. de souza e silva, a. (2006). from cyber to hybrid: mobile technologies as interfaces of hybrid spaces. space and culture, 3, 261–278. dewey, c. (2014). how do you solve a problem like yik yak? the washington post. retrieved october 16, 2015, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theintersect/wp/2014/10/07/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-yik-yak/ dourish, p., & bell, g. (2011). divining a digital future. cambridge, ma: mit press. frith, j. (2015). smartphones as locative media. london, england: polity press. heim, m. (1993). the metaphysics of virtual reality. oxford, uk: oxford university press. hess, a. (2015). the upside of yik yak. slate. retrieved october 16, 2015, from http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/users/2015/03/yik_yak_the_anonymous_m essaging_app_with_a_terrible_rep_is_actually_pretty.html mahler, j. (2015). who spewed that abuse? anonymous yik yak app isn’t telling. the new york times. retrieved october 16, 2015, from http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/09/technology/popular-yik-yak-app-confersanonymity-and-delivers-abuse.html massey, d. (2005). for space. london, uk: sage. negroponte, n. (1995). being digital. new york, ny: vintage books. no more there. (1994). youtube. retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njhrpbjpoo0 saker, m., & evans, l. (in press). everyday life and locative play: an exploration of foursquare and playful engagements with space and place. media, culture & society. shontell, a. (2015). how 2 georgia fraternity brothers created yik yak, a controversial app that became a ~$400 million business in 365 days. business insider. retrieved october 16, 2015, from http://www.businessinsider.com/the-inside-story-of-yik-yak2015-3 stone, a., & kingkade, t. (2014). racist posts on yik yak prompt university protest. the huffington post. retrieved february 10, 2015, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/24/colgate-university-protest-racist-yikyak_n_5875106.html wilken, r. (2008). mobilizing place: mobile media, peripatetics, and the renegotiation of urban places. journal of urban technology, 15(3), 39–55. wilken, r., & goggin, g. (eds.). (2015). locative media. london: routledge. abstract 3: timeliness, duration, chronology, and mobilization: exploring potentially valuable aspects of temporal capital in locative media research by rowan wilken designers of place-based mobile experiences now are creating – as hjorth (2013) described them – the first distinctive new forms of 21st-century media. the holy grail of this pursuit has become “a reliable measure of the events occurring in the stream of consciousness over time” (hektner, schmidt, and csikszentmihalyi, 2007, p. 6; karnowski, 2013). such temporal concerns of mobile media, though, get intermingled within the chaotic real-life practices of users. much quantitative research fails to fully acknowledge or investigate the messiness of these mobile moments. instead of fixed and nonporous borders, these moments often arouse overlapping factors related to user engagement, making them slippery to quantify. mobile experiences meanwhile can extend far beyond the limits of traditional print or broadcast concepts, particularly in fluid response to the timely needs of individual motives, goals, and conditions in any situation. yet in practice, many mobile-app designers still operate within a limited broadcast mindset, envisioning the smartphone as a small television set or ereader, rather than a generative new medium, just waiting for people to realize its possibilities. once the potent mobile medium choice has been made, locative designers refine predictions of their likely users and use-case scenarios as well as have to pick the features within the medium to best support those activities (whether using audio, video, still photography, animation, text, haptic sensations, etc., or any of those in combination). these designers also ideally need to decide when those media artifacts are triggered and in what places and at what lengths, initiating which types of interactions. these compositional opportunities are unprecedented. in these situations, devices of countless types (smartphones, tablet computers, smartwatches, wearables of all sorts, etc.) can connect people and the world’s storehouse of information – instantaneously curated to the most fine-tipped of interests – with all sorts of objects, settings, and situations. this happens in simultaneous, multifaceted, and overlapping real-time dynamics amalgamating place, mobility, knowledge, and technology. such complexity meanwhile is fueled and shaped in real time by sociability motivations. the focus of this presentation will be in-situ examinations of time through related variables under the purview of mobile-media designers and researchers, including timeliness, duration, chronology, and mobilization. in this mobile frame, time can be precisely accounted for – through accurate and behind-the-scenes app analytics – and converted into weights of engagement to create a mobile-media currency of sorts. in other words, when all of the world’s media is competing for a person’s attention on the same delivery system – i.e., a smartphone – the capital generated becomes related to what gets chosen and – maybe most significantly – for how long. so how do we investigate and understand this temporal currency to better comprehend what is happening (and predict what could happen with better practices)? worthy of a methodological debate is the idea that when we reach the limits of neo-positivist reductionism (and strict isolation of variables), messier qualitative and action-research methods might take us through the final stretch. or vice versa. but first, we still need more clarity about what exactly needs to be studied, and how, which creates a need for more formative field experiments. this presentation, grounded in the past eight years of related in-situ fieldwork, will deconstruct and discuss key time-related aspects that have arisen in a new research project exploring interactive mobile-app discourse. these issues have implications beyond their specific context – about public art in the state of hawaii as experienced through the research-focused and grant-funded manoa public art app – and this presentation will raise and explore significance of these factors, including: timeliness – from a traditional broadcast or print media perspective, timeliness is about information being “new,” but that newness level relates primarily to the production cycle (when the media was produced and released) rather than when an audience member wants it, based on interest or context. old news, in this construct, is information that already has been circulating in the public sphere for some amount of time, from a few hours to a few days, depending on perspective. in mobile-media contexts, though, timeliness can relate to “new” information, like breaking-news alerts, but also to just-intime prompts within the environment that could lead to questions and contextual learning that feels just as timely and relevant to the mobile learner. the mpa research project included experimentation with physical environment prompts and alignment with the mobile media provided. duration – museum studies fieldwork often focuses on duration, or time on task, to try to understand an audience member’s engagement with an exhibit or artifact. generally speaking, the more time with the media, the more engaged a person is considered to be. mobile devices constantly offer countless distractions and options, at the fingertips, but they also offer a discreet tracking system that can capture the duration a person is engaged with a piece of mobile media, without the need for a researcher watching with a clipboard. the mpa project experimented with various types of media sources to record and analyze engagement with these experiences. chronology – mobile stories can be both linear and nonlinear, in terms of a narrative but also in relation to the ways in which the audience discovers and interacts with media sources through the mobile device, including when and where. cognitive load matters, as the mobile device competes for an audience member’s attention with the physical setting, its sights and sounds and smells, and the other mobile apps available within a swipe of a hand. using different approaches to narrative chronology, the mpa project experimented with not only what information to provide users and where but also when and in what sequence. mobilization – when in place, and engaged, users can be prompted with mobile design to do activities with their devices that they would not have done otherwise, including sharing information with friends and family. besides the clear marketing potential, this type of engagement needs further exploration to determine what kinds of activities are easily prompted, what kinds of activities can have social benefits, what kinds of activities can lead to more place/issue engagement, etc., with the ultimate goal of mobilizing a user to do more, whatever that “more” turns out to be. that “more” essentially is a request for more time, and the mpa project experimented with types of those requests to see what might be successful (or not). in summary, this presentation will illustrate and discuss various efforts to explore time from a design perspective, through an action-research approach. these formative experiments were intended to open new paths of discovery in the field of locative media design by focusing on time-oriented concepts. references: hektner, j. m., schmidt, j. a., and csikszentmihalyi, m. (2007). experience sampling method: measuring the quality of everyday life. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. horst, h. a. (2013). the infrastructures of mobile media: towards a future research agenda. mobile media & communication, 1(1), 147-152. karnowski, v. (2013). befragung in situ: die mobile experience sampling method (mesm) handbuch standardisierte erhebungsverfahren in der kommunikationswissenschaft (pp. 235-247): springer. abstract 4: tracing diurnal patterns and “event anomalies”: a rhythmanalysis of mobile location-based services by brett oppegaard & joseph meyer in this paper, i explore the importance of the temporal to the data extraction and monetization efforts of location-based mobile social networking (lmsn) and search and recommendation services, such as foursquare (its offshoot swarm) and banjo. a key concern for these firms, i will argue, is to develop software systems that extract data from everyday, routinized uses of their apps to develop an understanding of the spatial and temporal patterns that form around their use – and, even more importantly, of temporal deviations from these patterns. the conceptual framework that anchors and gives structure to this examination is the lefebvrian notion of “rhythmanalysis”. as lefebvre (2010, p. 15) writes, “everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time, and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm”. rhythms have been understood to take many forms and to operate at a variety of scales and durations, such that complex social rhythms are interwoven with cyclical “natural” rhythms (days, nights, seasons, etc.) and with what lefebvre (2010, p. 8) designates as “linear” rhythms, which he associates with “human activity” as embedded in everyday life. additionally, and importantly, rhythms, are understood as always “multiple, complex”, sometimes harmonious, but often “dissonant” (edensor & holloway, 2008, p. 484) – or, in lefebvrian terms, they are both cyclical and linear, but just as commonly characterized by “eurhythmia”, “arrhythmia”, and “polyrhythmia” (lefebvre, 2010, p. 16). rhythmanalysis is useful, edensor (2009, p. 3) argues, for exploring place interdependencies and how they “are always in a process of becoming, seething with emergent properties, but usually stabilized by regular patterns of flow that possess particular rhythmic qualities whether steady, intermittent, volatile or surging”. for software developers of lbsn applications, app use is approached as forming around “bundles of rhythms”; paying close attention to these “bundles” or “braiding of rhythms” (edinsor & holloway, 2008, p. 484) is productive “in order to grasp the natural or produced ensembles” (lefebvre, 2010, p. 20) that result from them, whether these be steady or intermittent, or volatile or surging. in their recent book, location-based social media: space, time and identity, leighton evans and michael saker (2017) pay explicit attention to the importance of time to our daily engagements with location-based mobile social networking (lbsn) applications, and how the temporal is structured into the very design of these apps. evans and saker argue that well-known lbsn apps, like foursquare and its offshoot swarm, work to combine the past and the future in end-user experience of the present. this is to say that these apps seek to “shape the present both through a ‘bringing-forth’ of past events [by recalling past places and times recorded through earlier check-ins] and project the user to the future through the possibility afforded to the user to record and log their movement and temporal location” (evans & saker, 2017). fundamental to the success of the integration of past, future and present within these lbsn apps, is affording users the ability to record their daily movements, on the one hand, and then of translating these movements, on the other hand, into “events” that detail where a user has been, when they have been there, and what they were doing there (evans & saker, 2017). striving to understand the complicated ways that places function as “symphonies of events” (wunderlich, 2009, p. 54) is therefore clearly of direct interest to lbsn software developers. however, arguably of even greater interest to them is capturing and being able to interpret data concerning asynchronous or anomalous activities – that is, aberrations or spikes in the temporal-locational activities and rhythms, those moments of being “out of time”, as they are registered through social media activity. such interest is clearly evident in the work of data scientists working for the new york based lbsn and search and recommendation stalwart, foursquare (the case of the las vegas based social media data analytics firm, banjo, will also be examined in the full paper). foursquare’s enduring efforts to come to terms with the significances of established rhythms (and deviations from them) are most clearly evident in the published computer science literature co-authored by the firm’s chief data scientist, blake shaw. in one paper, shaw and colleagues report on a software system they developed (later to become the foursquare explore feature) that “detects events that are anomalous by leveraging machine learning and past historical data” (sklar, shaw & hogue, 2012). while foursquare determines whether a place is “trending” by measuring the number of venue check-ins within a given time, their longer-term aim is to capture “large deviation from historical behavior”, or what they call “off-trending” (sklar, shaw & hogue, 2012) – in subsequent patent filing documentation, this is also described as “event anomaly” (skibiski et al., 2013). taking this further, within a later published paper, shaw and colleagues report on work conducted during hurricane sandy that drew from a range of social media sources to model diurnal activities “to provide alerts and indications when patterns are disrupted”, concluding that their ability to do this successfully carried “immediate implications for event detection systems” (grinberg et al., 2013). my contention in this paper (to be expanded upon in the spoken version), is that rhythms – which naturally the enroll the spatial and the temporal – are of abiding interest to lbsn firms. this is for the simple reason that it is within the complicated polyrhythms of daily life that app use is generally situated. the present main monetization efforts of foursquare (and of banjo) are dependent upon their ability to interpret high-volume location-sensitive data in (or close to) real-time. to do this successfully requires an attunement not just to geodata but, increasingly, to the less tangible yet arguably richer store of knowledge, motivations, behaviours, social connections, and so forth, that are part-and-parcel of diurnal and other human rhythms, and which, as we have seen, involve both repetition and the much harder to capture yet particularly revealing rhythmic disruptions or unexpected moments (“the element of the unforeseen”). references edensor, t. (2009). introduction: thinking about rhythm and space. in t. edensor (ed.) geographies of rhythm: nature, place, mobilities, and bodies (pp. 1-18). farnham: ashgate edensor, t. & holloway, j. (2008). rhythmanalysing the coach tour: the ring of kerry, ireland. transactions of the institute of british geographers, 33(4), 483-501. evans, l. & saker, m. (2017). location-based social media: space, time and identity. houndmills, basingstoke, hampshire: palgrave macmillan. grinberg, n., naaman, m., shaw, b. & lotan, g. (2013). extracting diurnal patterns of real world activity from social media. paper presented at seventh international aaai conference on weblogs and social media. http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/icwsm/icwsm13/paper/view/6087 lefebvre, h. (2010). rhythmanalysis: space, time and everyday life. trans. s. elden and g. moore. london: continuum. skibiski, g., et al. (2013). event identification in sensor analytics. u.s. patent no. 8,620,624 b2. sklar, m., shaw, b. & hogue, a. (2012). recommending interesting events in real-time with foursquare check-ins. paper presented at the 6th acm conference on recommender systems. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2366028 wunderlich, f.m. (2009). the aesthetics of place-temporality in everyday urban space: the case of fitzroy square. in t. edensor (ed.) geographies of rhythm: nature, place, mobilities, and bodies (pp. 45-57). farnham: ashgate. microsoft word harvey-passion, pipelines, and precarity-passion, pipelines, and precarity.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): harvey, a. (2021, october). passion, pipelines, and precarity: working lives in games from the perspective of higher education. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. passion, pipelines, and precarity: working lives in games from the perspective of higher education alison harvey university of leicester introduction: future gamesworker identities for years, academics and journalists have proclaimed a crisis of gameswork, detailing the ‘destruction’ of the lives of those in this creative workforce, and wondering when the ‘breaking point’ of professional game design, premised on crunch, work limbo, and churn, would come. still it was only fairly recently, at the march 2018 game developers conference, typically a heavily corporatized event, that a large-scale discussion of unionization was staged, leading to the formation of game workers unite. while collective organizing in games is going global, with branches forming from france to australia to south korea, these developments are outpaced by increasingly transnational dynamics of outsourcing and automation (fung, 2016; hunteman & aslinger, 2013; kerr, 2016), threatening to devalue and even eliminate already highlycompetitive jobs in ‘cool industries’ of ‘passionate’ workers (neff, wissinger & zukin, 2005). this paper considers these global contradictions and tensions through analysis of a group heavily implicated in visions of the future of gamesworkstudents in formal games education. while within game studies there has been sustained interest in the production of this form and labour relations therein, the shape and role of games higher education remains underexplored. the existing scholarship indicates that these formal sites of training tend to cultivate the still-largely young, male, and passionate fanworkforce on which games depend (deuze, martin & allen, 2007; consalvo, 2008; chia, 2019). furthermore, these contexts are vital in the formation of future gamesworker identities that are conservative, uncritical, and risk-adverse, despite pervasive discourses of creativity and innovation linked to them (harvey, 2019). vitally, however, the question of how these norms relate to shifting work realities has yet to be explored. discourses of diverse talent in games despite the relative lack of research, the higher educational context and the role students as future working subjects play within not only the games workforce but the creative industries more broadly is significant. as subjects within games discourse, students in higher education are symbolically and discursively important, representing to policy-oriented stakeholders the promise of the national industry’s growth, productivity, and sustainability in the form of ‘talent’ (livingstone & hope, 2011). here, higher education institutions (hei) are seen as important sites for addressing ‘skills shortages’ and acting as ‘feeders’ of human capital to the sector. national industries become ‘talent hubs’ while educators must concern themselves with watertight ‘talent pipelines’ enabling large ‘talent pools’. the legibility of this approach to gamesworkers before their entry into the industry can be seen in the ongoing dominance of the talent discourse across the mission statements and activities of major trade bodies such as ukie, advocacy groups including european women in games and bame (black, asian, and minority ethnic) in games, and charity organizations like the british games institute, which has to date organized two summits focused on games education. talent discourse is also not distinct from discussion of a still male dominated industry documents referencing talent in games often affix ‘diverse’ before the term, communicating awareness of distinctly homogenous workforces while placing responsibility on educational institutions to address pernicious exclusion. overall, the variable metaphors that become attached to ‘talent’ provide a set of images and discourses productive of flows of capital in the british context as demonstrated by the transfuzer and uk games fund programmes. simultaneously, it is a perspective that simplifies and flattens the experiences, contexts, and lived realities of students and other educational stakeholders in hei. i focus on these very experiences to better understand how formal games education contributes to the formation of professional identities that are conservative, uncritical, and risk-adverse, which is significant given that qualifying for degrees in higher education contexts has become an increasingly mandatory criteria in job postings since it was identified as an entry point into gameswork (deuze, martin & allen, 2007). ongoing engagement with education in games is vital for understanding how the future of this creative sector is shaped and structured for its future workers. learning to work in games the project on which this paper is based addresses these questions, based on critical thematic analysis of qualitative research in 5 uk-based hei offering suites of games programmes at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. the mixed methods approaching to exploring these education programs include 49 semi-structured interviews with students instructors, and administrators, observations of the working contexts of these participants including labs and exhibitions, and discourse analysis of institutional promotional materials and policy and trade documentation related to higher education in the uk. the case study institutions were selected from a broad range of universities offering games courses for geographic diversity, and diversity of participants was also prioritized in recruitment though ultimately the majority of those who contributed to the study were white british males. i explore how the normalization of the above-mentioned professional identities are in some part based on how students in games higher education are exposed to ideas about what working in games looks like. a picture of gameswork is formed from various sources across these programmes, including instruction from those working in or previously employed by well-known firms, internships and placements within game companies, and extra-curricular activities such as game jams and networking events enabling meetings with professional game workers. as a complement to these professionalizing or ‘employability’ activities, students also describe learning about the less favourable elements of gameswork such as crunch, gender pay gaps, curtailed career lengths, and harassment from news media and online discussions. beyond these increasingly mainstream narratives, instruction within games programmes often overtly refers to the punishing realities of both ‘getting into’ the industry given the highly competitive nature of most open positions and the brutal expectations normalized for workers once they are in the role (harvey, 2019). based on these norms in games teaching, student working futures are configured in terms of movement and spatiality, evoking particular affective attachments to locale and myths of freedom as well as distancing from factors such as the impacts of brexit, highprofile media coverage of precarity in games, the normalization of transnational work configurations, and decreasing game job opportunities in the uk. in my research with ‘gamesworkers in becoming’, students reveal deep anxieties about labour and the industry, but also hopeful narratives about the possibilities afforded by flexibility and transnational flows of production. indie work in particular is seen as affording opportunities for creative freedoms but also as a route into the mainstream triple-a industry, an ultimately conservative approach akin to the functioning of hope labour in online social production (kuehn & corrigan, 2013). myths of freedom are significant for how these young people navigate their working futures and they also inform the subjectivities that are cultivated in discourses about games work, particularly given ongoing emphasis on the diversification of the labour force. in my discussion i conclude by noting what these imaginaries signal for other digital industriesthe failure of presuming education as part of a pipeline to work presents its own challenges and constraints. references chia, a. (2019.) “the moral calculus of vocational passion in digital gaming.” television & new media, 20(8), pp. 767-777. consalvo, m. (2008.) “crunched by passion: women game developers and workplace challenges.” in beyond barbie & mortal kombat: new perspectives on gender and gaming. edited by yasmin b. kafai, carrie heeter, jill denner and jennifer y. sun. cambridge and london: mit press, pp 177-191. deuze, m., martin, c.b. & allen, c. (2007.) “the professional identity of gameworkers.” convergence, 13(4), pp. 335353. fung, a. (2016.) “redefining creative labor: east asian comparisons.” in precarious creativity: global media, local labor, edited by m. curtin & k. sanson. berkeley: university of california press, pp. 200214. harvey, a. (2019.) “becoming gamesworkers: diversity, higher education, and the future of the game industry.” television & new media, 20(8), pp. 756-766. hunteman, n. b. & aslinger, b. (eds.) (2013.) gaming globally: production, play and place. basingstoke: palgrave. kuehn, k. & corrigan, t.f. (2013.) “hope labor: the role of employment prospects in online social production.” the political economy of communication, 1(1), pp. 9-25. kerr, a. (2016.) global games: production, circulation and policy in the networked era. new york and london: routledge. livingstone, i. & hope, a. (2011.) “next gen: transforming the uk into the world’s leading talent hub for the video games and visual effects industries.” nesta. https://media.nesta.org.uk/documents/next_gen_wv.pdf neff, g., wissinger, e. & zukin, s. (2005.) “entrepreneurial labor among cultural producers: ‘cool’ jobs in ‘hot’ industries.” social semiotics, 15(3), pp. 307-334. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): hakim, j., møller, k., florêncio, j., murphy, d., race, k., pienaar, k., & lea, t. (2019, october 2-5). chemsex: digital, chemical and communal infrastructure of disinhibition. panel presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. chemsex: digital, chemical and communal infrastructure of disinhibition since the early days of digital media studies, it has been widely understood that trust in digital technologies has been indispensable for the operation of queer communities (campbell, 2004; correll, 1995; mowlabocus 2010). in networking otherwise spatially disparate subjects whose desires fall outside heteronormative acceptability, digital infrastructures have become key sites in contemporary gay culture where the everyday fight for queer life is struggled over. more broadly, disinhibition plays a central role in queer world-making: letting go of fear and coming “out”; “losing yourself” through dancing; and by chemically altering your state of mind through alcohol and drug consumption. recently practices like these have been transformed through the everyday use of digital media platforms. this panel explores such ‘digital infrastructures of disinhibition’ through a sexual practice that has attracted significant attention over the last decade: ‘chemsex’, when gay and bisexual men use locative social media such as hook-up apps to organise group sex encounters where the recreational drugs crystallized methamphetamine, ghb/gbl and/or mephedrone are consumed. to fully understand the emergence of chemsex this panel argues that we must turn our attention to the multiplicity of technologies that sustain it. chemsex is a socio-sexual practice that to an overwhelming degree is constructed, negotiated, enacted, maintained and critiqued via digital platforms. specifically, news media outlets have been instrumental in the spread of a chemsex panic. hook-up apps are key to facilitating chemsex encounters because they allow for instant access to nearby subjects who can join the chemsex event; and porn platforms lend their affordances to its visual consumption. at the same time as digital media intervenes in chemsex subjectivity, so do the above mentioned drugs. instead of treating the “effects” of media and drugs on the participating bodies as separated elements, this panel explores what can be achieved analytically if we think of them as co-constituting chemsex. to do so we conceptualize contemporary gay sociability as depending on digital, chemical, and communal infrastructures (race, 2018); as an upshot of the ways media, medicine and recreational drugs, but also material social spaces like gay clubs, are practiced, policed and transformed. here, trust is understood as emerging in relation to the affordances of digital platforms, media discourse on chemsex, the chemical capacities of drugs to produce altered states, and the physical space in which men can have or negotiate sex. concretely, the individual panel contributions explore the role of digital infrastructures at a variety of scales and sites. in their paper, jamie hakim understands chemsex in the uk as a response to the neoliberal assault on gay men’s collective modes of being after the 2008 financial crisis. in interviews with 15 gay and bisexual men, they discovered that gay men were using digital platforms such as grindr, spotify, uber and porn sites to create affectively intense chemsex encounters because the night life spaces where they had historically ‘felt together’ had closed due to gentrification. moving to look at the ways chemsex is part of digital visual culture and the platformification of it, kristian møller’s paper uses visual ethnography to study chemsex visual and communicative culture on the porn platform pornhub.com, and an online conferencing service. they find normative and counterpublic trust-risk chemsex configurations at play and suggests these are often at odds and that the different digital affordances iframe what kinds of pleasures can be had in materially significant ways. on the basis that contemporary financial capitalism attempt to calculate futures algorithmically, joão florêncio’s paper investigates the openings chemsex encounters us to imagine. using speculative pragmatism (race, 2018), the paper examines “pig play” – a formation that resists the notion of trust being undone by all kinds of violation, to argue that certain kinds of boundary-breaking are key to understanding chemsex sociabilities and intimacies and that chemical alterations play a performative part in this process. finally, in their paper, dean murphy, kane race, kiran pienaar & toby lea consider how prep – drugs to prevent acquiring hiv infection – is making new realities for those who had previously been unable to participate in the kinds of sexualised drug use and digital spaces and practices associated with chemsex. moving beyond the commonplace concerns of health discourse, the paper suggests that prep is now part of chemsex realities and is transforming how chemsex matters and to whom. in doing so, they affirm rather than disavow the moralistic framing initially used to disqualify prep from respectable discourse. references campbell, j. e. (2004). getting it on online. cyberspace, gay male sexuality, and embodied identity. new york: routledge. correll, s. (1995). the ethnography of an electronic bar: the lesbian cafe. journal of contemporary ethnography, 24(3), 270–298. mowlabocus, s. (2010). gaydar culture: gay men, technology and embodiment in the digital age. farnham: ashgate. race, k. (2018). the gay science: intimate experiments with the problem of hiv. london & new york: routledge. chemsex: digitally-mediated queer modes of trust during the post-2008 conjuncture jamie hakim university of east anglia, uk over the last decade the uk has witnessed the growth of chemsex. this paper seeks to understand why. it does so by approaching chemsex ‘conjuncturally’ (hall et. al., 1978) and situating it within its historically specific conjunctural relations – ideological, technological, social, cultural, political and economic. in using this approach, and by drawing on original interviews with 15 men who have engaged in chemsex, this paper argues that chemsex is best understood as a digitally mediated ‘queer mode of trust’ between gay and bisexual men that has emerged precisely in response to historical conditions where trust has been all but eroded by neoliberalism’s continued hegemony in the uk after the 2008 financial crisis. chemsex was first reported to the uk’s national health service in sufficient numbers to warrant a coordinated response in 2011 (bourne et al., 2014). this places its emergence within the post-2008 conjuncture. beginning with the failure of the neoliberal economic system in the 2007/2008 financial crisis, this conjuncture has been defined by neoliberalism’s redoubling as a hegemonic project under the sign of ‘austerity’; or the ideological insistence on competitive individualism as the privileged mode of being in the world to legitimate the movement of wealth redistributed to labour during post-war social democracy back to capital (harvey, 2005) through the erosion of the welfare state. this post-2008 redoubling of neoliberalism is unthinkable without the digital. the widespread use of web 2.0, social media platforms, smartphones and 3g/4g accessibility during this period has endowed neoliberalism with new methods of capital accumulation and labour exploitation (srnicek, 2017) that, in the context of uk austerity, have directly contributed to a steep increase in structural inequality. at the same time digital media have also been used to resist neoliberalism– e.g. their use in anti-austerity political organisation (gerbaudo, 2018). it will be argued in this paper that chemsex provides an example of digital media being used to offer a reprieve from neoliberalism in how they have offered a group of people left alienated by neoliberalism’s assault on their collective modes of being, the means to ‘feel together’ (gilbert, 2013) in affectively intense, and otherwise difficult to experience, ways. though practiced by gay and bisexual men throughout the uk, the majority of chemsex activity has been mostly concentrated in london (bourne et. al., 2014). like digital media, both gay men and london have been particularly important to neoliberalism’s struggle for hegemony. since the 1990s, gay men have been successfully incorporated into the neoliberal project, on the condition they relinquish the collective organising that formed the basis of queer politics in favour of marriage and consumption as the only legitimate forms of sociality (duggan, 2003). london has played a similarly central role to neoliberalism’s hegemonic efforts. margaret thatcher’s deregulation of the financial markets in 1986 reinvigorated the city’s economy after its post-industrial decline contributing to the opening up of previously depressed parts of london to gentrification. one of the chief victims of london’s gentrification has been the city’s lgbtq+ nightlife scene. between 2006 and 2017 there has been 58% reduction in the amount of the city’s lgbtq+ spaces (campkin and marshall, 2017), significantly diminishing the physical spaces where these communities have collectively gathered. during the same time period geo-locational smartphone hook-up applications, such as grindr (2009-) and scruff (2010-) – whose platforms network spatially proximate users and allow them to send each other texts and images – have become one of the most popular ways for gay and bisexual men to organise their sexual, romantic, and social lives. it is in the convergence of these historical processes that we find the conditions of possibility for the emergence of chemsex. hook-up apps have provided gay and bisexual men with tools to organise collective encounters at precisely the time that collectivity as both a political ideal to strive for, as well as the physical spaces in which it might flourish, are under assault by neoliberalism’s post-2008 redoubling. in this sense, we see digital media being used to offer a reprieve from neoliberalism’s continued struggle for hegemony. that chemsex is a desire for collectivity that has been actualized by digital media, became clear through the interviews i have conducted with men who engage in chemsex. one of the surprising findings from the interviews was that sex was not the only focus of a chemsex encounter. the overriding effect of consuming chemsex drugs was a ‘loss of inhibitions’. this loss of inhibitions did lead to uninhibited group sex but it also led to intimate group conversation, dancing and collectively browsing the internet, whether that be for music to listen to, pornography to watch or more men to invite over to the session. it was the fact of being together in affectively intense, sexual and nonsexual ways, that gives chemsex its specificity. chemsex, therefore emerges as a particular manifestation of race’s assemblage of chemical, digital and communal infrastructures that provides ways of feeling together for a group of people left alienated by both neoliberalism’s interpellative address as well as its assault on the material spaces in which they have historically gathered. in making this argument, this paper also contributes to wider debates on the relationship between hook-up apps and neoliberalism. some scholars have argued that by extending market logics to the field of intimacy hook-up apps have become tools of neoliberal subjectification (e.g. roach 2015). the use of hook-up apps in the context of chemsex shows the opposite can also be true. bearing this in mind, recent popular media debates that distrust the ability of gay and bisexual men to use hook-up apps to forge ‘authentic’ intimacy miss the bigger picture. if some gay men have been positioned as ideal neoliberal subjects, and the ideal form of relationality under neoliberalism is competitive individualism and therefore an ontological distrust of the other, it is neoliberalism that constrains the formation of relationships of trust between gay men and not the hook up apps they use to form them. in the context of chemsex then, hook-up apps can be seen as a site where digitally mediated modes of queer trust are produced, during a moment whose conjunctural arrangements make the formation of trust all but impossible for everybody. references bourne, a., et al. (2014). the chemsex study: drug use in sexual settings among gay & bisexual men in lambeth, southwark & lewisham. london: sigma research, london school of hygiene & tropical medicine. available from: www.sigmaresearch.org. uk/chemsex [accessed 23 october 2015]. campkin, b., and marshall, l. (2017). lgbtq+ cultural infrastructure in london: night venues, 2006–present. available from: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/urbanlab/docs/ lgbtq_cultural_infrastructure_in_london_nightlife_venues_2006_to_the_present. pdf [accessed 16 september 2017]. duggan, l. (2003) the twilight of equality?: neoliberalism, cultural politics and the attack on democracy. boston, mass.: beacon press. gerbaudo, p. (2018) the digital party: political organisation and online democracy. london: pluto press. gilbert, j. (2013). common ground: democracy and collectivity in an age of individualism. london: pluto press. hall, s., et al. (1978). policing the crisis: mugging, the state and law and order. basingstoke: macmillan. harvey, d. (2005). a brief history of neoliberalism. oxford: oxford university press. roach, t. (2015) "becoming fungible: queer intimacies in social media." qui parle: critical humanities and social sciences, 23 (2): 55-87. (counter)public chemsex imaginaries on a porn platform and a video conferencing service kristian møller it university of copenhagen, denmark chemsex as a practice mobilises intense affect. in the media, it typically operates as an ‘unhappy object’ (ahmed, 2009) to which fear of death, biomedical anxiety of pureness, and narratives of trauma sticks. conversely, engaging in the disinhibition that chemsex promises constitutes a counterpublic (warner, 2002) that works to defy the recurring problematization of chemically enhanced erotic encounters (macfarlane, 2016). this paper approaches the ways chemsex is practiced with digital media, and how the digital porn and communication platforms for circulating representations affect the formation of an erotic chemsex imaginary. notably, anxieties, risk, and modes of trust are not absent from chemsex practices and imaginaries, but rather co-constitutive of its pleasures. by focusing on mediated chemsex i seek to avoid the containment of it as a social phenomenon that only works on certain queer bodies made vulnerable due to some presumed trauma or moral weakness. instead the paper reveals the erotic imaginary of chemsex and what it makes digitally available for playful consumption to a range of people and publics wider than that suggested by the ongoing medical, digital, and sexual panic focusing on “problematic” use (platteau et al., 2019). the paper compares how chemsex imaginaries unfold on the sometimes do-it-yourself (diy) porn platform pornhub, and on a conference call service (service name redacted of ethical concerns). further, by studying mediated chemsex we gain insight into presumably the ways in which chemsex practically figures in the most people’s lives: not, or rarely, in physically co-present encounters of chemsex, but as synchronous or asynchronous mediated experiences that may or may not involve using drugs yourself. with media playing such a big part in chemsex’ social life we should consider how the different digital infrastructures provide the means for chemically enhanced sexual practice to become visible and consumed by anyone with internet access, while also activating the semantic and distributive capacities of those infrastructures to allow for disinhibited pleasures to emerge in the first place. ideals of trust are key to understanding the separation of distinct chemsex imaginaries. to savransky, trust is not one thing that is either there or not there, felt by its presence or absence. rather he asks that we explore what “different modes of thinking trust in, that is […] the risks they take” (savransky, 2017, p. 25). thus, ideals of what bodies and bodily states are worth investing trust in, are central to both normative and counterpublic chemsex imaginaries. this paper argues that media infrastructures significantly configure what kinds of trust-risk that can circulate, and consequently, the kinds of erotic chemsex expressions that are presented and consumed. building from this perspective this paper asks how different modes of feeling trust-risk emerge, and how they work on the body to allow it to feel pleasure consuming some kinds of representations of chemical disinhibition while denying itself others. i follow kane race’s distinction of chemical and digital infrastructures (race, 2018) the chemical infrastructure of crystal meth, that is, its chemical formulation, the form it take, its geographical, distribution, and its modes of entering the body, allows for certain risks to be taken and pleasures to be felt. these risks and pleasure can be affective, social, viral, normative or something else. at the same time digital infrastructures allow for certain risk/pleasure-configurations of drug taking to be circulated, gain traction and become erotic objects. methodology the paper follows paasonen’s proposition the platformization of porn requires careful attention to the multiple transformations emerging with these infrastructures (2011). analytically i break down the two platforms into their microsystems (van dijck, 2013), focusing on technology, users, governance, and content (ibid., p. 28). methodologically, the walkthrough method (light, burgess, & duguay, 2018) is used to generate material sustains analysis that cuts across these microsystems. the material then will include platform content moderation strategies, the (in)visibility of interactivity afforded, audio-visual genre variations, the framing work done by titles and playlists, and the social erotic consumption done in the comments sections. the paper finds that two major trust-risk chemsex configurations are at play: one informed by a normative public imaginary positioning chemical disinhibition as immoral and always dangerous, and on the other hand a counterpublic imaginary in which chemical disinhibition is a source of kinship and exploration of what bodies can do and feel. the counterpublic imaginary is able to inform erotic consumption of chemsex representations in part because of the infrastructural resistance towards the circulation of normative discourse. practically, the conference call service, its points of access, and visual communicative affordances, achieves this by having access rely on the unreliable process of finding the forum, understanding of coded language, somewhat cumbersome downloading of software, and then, once in, having users face many-to-many visibility thus becoming invested in discretion. this way the infrastructure configures trust-risk so that the counterpublic erotics of smoke entering the lungs and needles penetrating the skin, can be enacted and consumed. on pornhub the asynchronous engagement with video clips forms the material basis of the chemsex imaginary, along with their naming, tags, playlists organisation, and the comments that users leave. by pseudonymization of users, the infrastructure acts to establish a space in which issues of trust between users are made unimportant. however, normative public (dis)trust in chemical disinhibition can also be seen circulating and modulating the audio-visual-textual semantic structures on offer, for example when users express disgust at depicted practices. references abrahamsson, s., bertoni, f., mol, a., & martín, r. i. (2015). living with omega-3: new materialism and enduring concerns. environment and planning d: society and space, 33(1), 4–19. ahmed, s. (2009). happiness and queer politics. world picture, 3, 1–20. light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881–900. macfarlane, a. (2016). sex, drugs and self-control: why chemsex is fast becoming a public health concern. journal of family planning and reproductive health care, 42(4), 291–294. https://doi.org/10.1136/jfprhc-2016-101576 paasonen, s. (2011). carnal resonance: affect and online pornography. mit press. platteau, t., pebody, r., dunbar, n., lebacq, t., & collins, b. (2019). the problematic chemsex journey: a resource for prevention and harm reduction. drugs and alcohol today. race, k. (2018). the gay science: intimate experiments with the problem of hiv. london & new york: routledge. savransky, m. (2017). the wager of an unfinished present: notes on speculative pragmatism. in speculative research (pp. 43–56). routledge. van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. oxford university press. two regimes of trust: gay men, viral porn and molecular prostheses joão florêncio university of exeter, uk we’re living in viral times; ours is a time of contagion. as tony sampson writes in his book virality: contagion theory in the age of networks, “the networked infrastructures of late capitalism are interwoven with the universal logic of the epidemic” (sampson 2011, p. 1-2). deeply connected to contemporary biopolitics and modes of digital sociability, virality also underpins new forms of wealth creation and accumulation sustained by 21st-century media, whilst at the same time (paradoxically, perhaps) presenting a political threat through the risk it carries of “contagious overspills” that may undo borders, nation states, institutions, ontologies, and subjectivities (ibid., p. 2). this paper draws from interviews with gay men working within and outside the porn industry, as well as from a critical engagement with depictions of (or allusions to) both antiretroviral and chemsex drugs in online pornography, in order to explore how that “universal logic of the epidemic” has actualised these two very different drug-taking regimes amongst subsections of the gay population; two drug regimes that—i argue— also imply two very different and yet co-dependent regimes of trust. defined by sampson as “contagious relationality” (ibid., p. 3), in the age of memes, “fake news,” hacking, epidemics, ecological and financial crises, global migration flows, antiretroviral drugs, youtube and pornhub, virality is at the centre of contemporary forms of both control and liberation (ibid., p. 5-6). whilst, on the one hand, it sustains the logics of 21st-century biopolitics (antiretrovirals, hygiene, cyber security, id and ageverification systems, etc.), on the other it also has the ability to disrupt state-sanctioned subjectivities and social assemblages, a capacity that resides in its ability to facilitate unforeseen flows of desire and affect (gay chemsex parties organised through grindr and facilitated by uber, biohacking, citizen journalism, wikileaks, anonymous, the “arab spring,” the “yellow vest movement,” etc.). echoing deleuze and guattari’s analysis of capitalism as a machine that decodes flows of desire only to then recode them towards its ultimate goals of capital accumulation and production for production’s sake (deleuze & guattari 1987), the logics of virality identified by sampson are also behind recent developments in forms of sexual sociability practiced by gay men, and mediated by online environments and biochemical molecular prostheses. falling under the broader umbrella of what’s come to be known as “pig play”—with “pig” emerging as the “existential refrain” (guattari 1995; 2011) that often frames the subjectivities of the gay men who take part in them—those forms of sexual sociability involve sexual risk-taking, the intentional violation of perceived boundaries between self and other, and a discovery and embrace of the porosity, penetrability, and leaky nature of bodies gendered as male. what is interesting for the purpose of this paper, is how those gay male sexual behaviours appear to have emerged in tandem with an increase in the uptake of two very different drug regimes amongst growing sections of the gay population: on the one hand, highly-active antiretroviral therapies (haart) used either for management or prophylaxis of hiv infection; and, on the other, a very different sort of “combination regimen” comprised of recreational drugs like crystal methamphetamine (“tina”), gamma-hydroxybutyric acid (ghb) or mephedrone (“mcat,” “meow meow”) that fuel what’s come to be known as “chemsex.” it is then no surprise that the sexual practices associated with “pig play” have often reached public debate qualified with terms like “epidemic” (kagan 2015; florêncio 2016; giorgetti et al 2017). with that context in mind, and drawing from existing critical studies of the biopolitics of antiretroviral drugs (dean 2015; race 2001; 2009; 2018) and of the ways in which the development of biomedicine has recoded our understandings of the human body (preciado 2013), i will map the complex relationship between risk and trust that is being played out in the sexual lives of 21st-century gay men and mediated by online gay porn. in an attempt to rescue narratives of risk and trust away from contemporary financial capitalism’s algorithmic attempts to calculate futures, turning them instead into creative modes of speculation on potentially-dawning queer futures that may move us away from the “quagmire of the present” (muñoz 2009, 1; savransky 2017), i explore how the regimes of trust associated with antiretroviral and chemsex drugs queer modern perceptions of the male body as impermeable and self-enclosed (grosz 1994; shildrick 1997; longhurst 2001; cohen 2009; chen 2012), and how the online mediation of the sexual practices they have come to catalyse can modulate new “carnal horizons of possibility” (paasonen 2018, 8), new futures for our bodies understood as the “interfacing of visual, semiotic, libidinal, and biochemical prosthetic flows” (florêncio 2018, p. 282). references chen, m. (2012). animacies: biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. durham and london: duke university press. cohen, e. (2009). a body worth defending: immunity, biopolitics, and the apotheosis of the modern body. durham and london: duke university press. dean, t. (2015). “mediated intimacies: raw sex, truvada, and the bio politics of chemoprophylaxis.” sexualities 18(1/2): 224–246. deleuze, g. and f. guattari (1987). a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. minneapolis and london: university of minnesota press. florêncio, j. (2016). “chemsex: why is gay sex causing straight panic?” the conversation uk, april 12, 2016. https://theconversation.com/chemsex-why-is-gay-sexcausing-straight-panic-56541. florêncio, j. (2018). “breeding futures: masculinity and the ethics of cummunion in treasure island media’s viral loads.” porn studies 5(3): 271–285. giorgetti et al (2017). “when ‘chems’ meet sex: a rising phenomenon called ‘chemsex’.” current neuropharmacology 15(5): 762–770. grosz, e. (1994). volatile bodies: toward a corporeal feminism. bloomington and indianapolis: indiana university press. guattari, f. (1995). chaosmosis: an ethico-ethics-aesthetic paradigm. bloomington and indianapolis: indiana university press. guattari, f. (2011). the machinic unconscious: essays in schizoanalysis. pasadena: semiotext(e). kagan, d. (2015). “‘re-crisis’: barebacking, sex panic and the logic of epidemic.” sexualities 18(7): 817–837. longhurst, r. (2001). bodies: exploring fluid boundaries. london and new york: routledge. muñoz, j. (2009) cruising utopia: the then and there of queer futurity. new york and london: new york university press. paasonen, s. (2018). many splendored things: thinking sex and play. london: goldsmiths press. preciado. p. (2013). testo junkie: sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era. new york: the feminist press. race, k. (2001). “the undetectable crisis: changing technologies of risk.” sexualities 4(2): 167–189. race, k. (2009). pleasure consuming medicine: the queer politics of drugs. durham and london: duke university press. race, k. (2018). the gay science: intimate experiments with the problem of hiv. london and new york: routledge. sampson, t. (2011). virality: contagion theory in the age of networks. minneapolis and london: university of minnesota press. savransky, m. (2017). “the wager of an unfinished present: notes on speculative pragmatism.” in alex wilkie, martin savransky and marsha rosengarten (eds), speculative research: the lure of possible futures, 25–38. london and new york: routledge. shildrick, m. (1997). leaky bodies and boundaries: feminism, postmodernism and (bio)ethics. london and new york: routledge. ‘before prep, and now…it’s like different worlds’: ontologies of chemsex dean murphy university of sydney, australia kane race university of sydney, australia kiran pienaar monash university, australia toby lea catholic university of applied sciences, germany, & university of new south wales, australia in the period following the approval of the combination antiretroviral drug truvada for hiv pre-exposure prophylaxis (prep) by the us food and drug administration, several actors sought to denigrate both the idea and use of prep on the basis of its imputed association with, or production of, sexual pleasure and uninhibited ‘hedonism’. ‘let’s be honest: [prep]’s a party drug’, michael weinstein, president of the aids healthcare foundation of los angeles, famously declared. this figuration of prep can be read against a backdrop in which the historical associations between gay sex and pleasure, drugs and death are both highlighted and problematised (bersani, 1987). in this paper we explore the possibilities that emerge when we take the risk of affirming weinstein’s claim. we argue that this approach may lead to certain practical benefits and pragmatic insights about prep’s use, meaning, identities and effects. it might also make gay sex and drug practices more intelligible, and easier for participants to acknowledge and think about. if the identity of drugs is understood to emerge, like other technologies, in association with the networks in which they are embedded, then the role that prep is beginning to play in sex ‘partying’ might be seen not as something to be avoided, but rather something that might provide greater clarity about the stigmatised, criminalised and intensively demonised sex, drug and digital practices that constitute chemsex events. as kane race (2018) has argued, digital infrastructures have transformed sexual practices and relations among men, and produced new ways of negotiating hiv risk, many of which involve antiretroviral-based subjectivities and knowledges. in this paper we explore how prep is mediating chemsex for hiv-negative men. in particular, we conceive chemsex in terms of an ‘event network’, a term that emilie gomart and antoine hennion (1999) coined to think about the arrangements put in place to enable certain passionate attachments (to music and/or to drugs) to emerge. inherent in this approach is a shift in attention away from the human subject, the chemsex participant, as the orchestrator of sovereign action, and towards chemsex, conceived of as a conjunctural event, i.e. a ‘concrete activity whose modes, practices and dispositifs can be described… [and] in which the relevant subjects, objects and social groupings are co-produced’. our analysis draws on interviews with gay and queer participants who use prep, part of a larger sample of lgbtq participants who use various medications and drugs to transform aspects of their sexual and/or gender experience. over 20% of hiv-negative men in australia’s key urban centres of sydney and melbourne report that they are currently taking prep (holt et al., 2018). this growing use of prep represents an important opportunity to analyse the transformations in gay sexual and digital practices and cultures that are currently taking place. participants in these interviews attributed a range of effects to the antiretroviral drugs that comprise prep, including effects that biomedicine and regulatory authorities rarely consider or acknowledge. in particular, they often reported that using prep had reduced their anxieties about hiv infection and had opened up the possibility of participating in practices they had previously avoided. the suggestion that prep can reduce concerns about hiv corresponds with the findings of other studies (gafos et al., 2018; koester et al., 2017). in this paper, we venture that prep may be transforming sex in more significant ways. notably, for a number of participants, trust in prep’s effectiveness has transformed sex into something different from what it had been prior to taking prep. in this sense, analogies can be drawn between prep and a range of other drugs consumed by gay men in sexual settings, including recreational drugs, which – like prep – are roundly problematised for their purported ‘disinhibitory’ effects (race, 2009, p. 176). hiv-negative participants in our study described how prep provided an opportunity for them to seek out and participate in chemsex activities, typically arranged via hookup apps and other digital devices. for some participants, new interests and attachments to chemsex emerged only after commencing prep, while for others (such as those who had engaged in sexualised drug use previously) prep enabled a different attachment to chemsex – one less concerned with vigilance (of practices, and of sexual partners), thereby enabling the drugs usually associated with chemsex to work ‘better’. the sense of control or trust invoked by prep users can be distinguished from the control or selfmastery commonly associated with the sovereign figure of the neoliberal subject, however (race, 2017; stengers & latour, 2011). rather, trust/control is emergent; emerging from particular arrangements or event-networks. gommart and henion (1999) argue that active work is undertaken, and particular arrangements are put in place, for participants to be ‘moved’ and give effect to their passions. similarly, we found our participants engaged in a process of making particular social and material arrangements to enable a ‘letting go’; through this process they became prepared to be affected in particular (though not always predetermined) ways. chemsex encounters can be approached, in other words, as entailing specific kinds of abandonment and dispossession, created through actions that are intricate and regularised enough to allow participants to ‘let themselves go’. neither prep, not chemsex, are stable; they are intra-active phenomena (barad, 2003). what is emerging now, we argue, is not simply ‘more chemsex’ but new ontologies of chemsex, which are themselves in a process or state of constant transformation. references barad, k. (2003). posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. signs, 28(3), 801-831. bersani, l. (1987). is the rectum a grave? october, 43: 197–222. gafos, m., horne, r., nutland, w., bell, g., rae, c., wayal, s., . . . mccormack, s. (2018). the context of sexual risk behaviour among men who have sex with men seeking prep, and the impact of prep on sexual behaviour. aids and behavior. doi: 10.1007/s10461-018-2300-5. [epub ahead of print] gomart, e., & hennion, a. (1999). a sociology of attachment: music amateurs, drug users. the sociological review, 47(s1), 220–247. holt, m., lea, t., mao, l., kolstee, j., zablotska, i., duck, t., . . . prestage, g. (2018). community-level changes in condom use and uptake of hiv pre-exposure prophylaxis by gay and bisexual men in melbourne and sydney, australia: results of repeated behavioural surveillance in 2013–2017. the lancet hiv, 5(8), e448–e456. koester, k., amico, r. k., gilmore, h., liu, a., mcmahan, v., mayer, k., . . . grant, r. (2017). risk, safety and sex among male prep users: time for a new understanding. culture, health & sexuality, 19(12), 1301–1313. race, k. (2009). pleasure consuming medicine: the queer politics of drugs. durham & london: duke university press. race, k. (2017). thinking with pleasure: experimenting with drugs and drug research. international journal of drug policy, 49, 144–149. race, k. (2018). the gay science: intimate experiments with the problem of hiv. london & new york: routledge. stengers, i., & latour, b. (2011). thinking with whitehead: a free and wild creation of concepts. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. microsoft word ir16-template-final.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 the telecom industry effort to deregulate ip-enabled services through creation of a digital imaginary gwen shaffer california state university long beach introduction this study explores how major phone and internet providers transformed public perception of voice-over internet protocol (voip) deregulation by associating it with widely supported ideas—including net neutrality, job creation and technological innovation. these concepts, which frequently clash with the actual intent of the legislative proposals, have become central to the “digital imaginary” created by the telecommunications lobby. their representation provides insight into how culturally symbolic phrases are used to legitimize anti-consumer policies and evoke universal themes. the digital imaginary conceived by the telecommunications industry also obfuscates technological realities. by mid-2015, about 36 states had adopted legislation that eliminates or reduces the authority of local and state agencies to regulate voip telephone services (lichtenberg, 2014; lichtenberg, personal communication), which transmit voice communications digitally. legislators in a handful of other states have introduced similar measures. some deregulation legislation goes so far as to bar state public utility commissions (pucs) from regulating all “ip-enabled” services. given that ip is the fundamental protocol for transmitting data packets across the internet, the potential reach of the legislation is enormous—which explains the intense interest from both industry and consumer advocates. in fact, california’s voip deregulation bill was characterized as one of the most heavily lobbied measures in the state during 2012 (modesto bee, 2012). significance of the research ideological clashes, disparate cultural values and political fissures are at the core of all policy debates. by examining the discourse surrounding policy decisions, we gain an understanding of the interplay between power and meaning that is operationalized on a daily basis. legislation is a form of symbolic communication meant to send a message to lawmakers and their constituents. suggested citation (apa): shaffer, g. (2015, october 21-24). the telecom industry effort to deregulate ip-enabled services through creation of a digital imaginary. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. in fact, law is language. as gibbons (1999) writes, “the legal system puts into action a society’s beliefs and values” (p. 156). additionally, language can be a strategic resource enabling politicians and special interests to obtain and hold power (hudson, 1978). lessig (1999) expands on this idea for the digital age with his mantra, “code is law.” he points out that rules are artifacts reflecting the values and intentions of those who design them. when corporations control the code, these values may be inconsistent with the public interest. theoretical framework and methodology this study applies critical discourse analysis (cda) to examine how power and authority influence digital technology policies. cda merges the critical tradition in social analysis with language studies, and asks basic questions such as, how do powerful groups control public discourse and what are the consequences of such control (van dijk, 2003)? although the cda approach lacks a unified theoretical framework, this study is influenced by a research direction laid out by fairclough (2013). in his view, cda must go beyond a focus on discourse and semiotics to analyze “relations between semiotic and other social elements” (fairclough, 2013, p. 179). in broad terms, a cda critique begins with a social problem. it then identifies the discursive dimension to the problem, including all relevant texts—which may encompass documents, videos, conversations, etc. the researcher then analyzes those texts with the goal of illustrating how power and other social structures come into play. finally, the researcher shows how the discourse connects to this larger power system. i identified 36 state bills introduced between 2009 and march 2015 that included language proposing to lessen or eliminate state oversight of voip services. i then obtained not only the legislative measures themselves, but also searched for related media coverage, press releases, written hearing testimony, and stakeholder comments. i located these texts through state government websites, individual news outlet archives, advocacy organization websites (of both proponents and opponents of deregulation), and dozens of keyword searches in google. press articles were also identified through the lexis-nexis database of major national newspapers. i also searched organization websites for blog posts, newsletter articles and policy statements relevant to reducing or eliminating state oversight of voip or ip-enabled services. these websites ranged from those hosted by free-market advocates like the heartland institute, to those hosted by consumer advocacy groups such as aarp and the utility reform network. after closely reading the compilation of texts, i analyzed and coded them according to 1) structure and 2) substance. the structural analysis was aimed at understanding the flow of the arguments—as arguments emerged upon introduction of measures, during legislative debates, and after passage of laws. another goal of the structural analysis was to gain an understanding of where/from whom message frames originated. according to cda, social context plays a key role in how people receive a message (van dijk, 2003). these links consider discourse as social information, and recognize that discourse is a communally shared product (ruiz, 2009). the telecom industry’s strategy to convince the public of consumer benefits included incorporating claims directly into legislative language, into hearing testimony and into editorials. presumably, messages delivered in these formal contexts had greater influence than the same words casually spoken. findings many voip deregulation bills reference the need to “modernize” existing policy—a concept consistent with the telecom industry’s digital imaginary. for instance, arkansas’ senate bill claims to “eliminate outdated, unnecessary, and burdensome laws and regulations.” florida’s bill promises to remove “obsolete” regulations. michigan lawmakers deregulated voip in 2011 when they adopted the telecommunications modernization act. the phrase “modernization” tends to be associated with superiority, such as states that are wealthier and more powerful. additionally, modernity is sometimes considered a synonym for democratization and progress. this analysis also identified “economic growth” as part of the digital imaginary created by voip deregulation supporters. georgia called its law the “telecom jobs and investment act.” new york lawmakers asserted that voip deregulation would allow rural residents to “connect to a new world of remote job opportunities.” in rhode island, pending legislation states that voip deregulation is necessary to “promote the creation of new jobs.” this framing exploits a pervasive belief that the private sector is more capable than government when it comes to solving economic challenges. it also assumes “the free market” will result in wealth trickling down to generate jobs. this study also identified “innovation” as an overriding theme in the digital imaginary surrounding state voip deregulation bills. the sponsor of kentucky’s legislation testified his bill would create a regulatory environment that encourages “investment in new technologies.” during a connecticut house hearing, an industry representative testified that voip regulations burden companies “eager to deliver innovative products and features.” language adopted by proponents of voip deregulation suggests that state oversight threatens america’s venerable history as home to inventions as diverse as the light bulb and the airplane. finally, voip deregulation supporters routinely frame it as critical to protecting net neutrality and expanding broadband access—another aspect of the digital imaginary devised by telecom companies. an industry consultant characterized california’s bill as “a glorious victory for internet freedom” and necessary to prevent “would-be regulators from tinkering with the mechanics of the internet.” a verizon lobbyist proclaimed that massachusetts’ proposal would encourage “deployment of broadband technology.” by repeatedly alluding to digital inclusion and an open internet, supporters of voip deregulation imply that reforms provide not just broadband connectivity, but also the positive externalities associated with access—such as professional and educational opportunities. conclusion ip is ushering in changes in communications technology. this provides an opening for state legislatures to alter the rules—with massive implications for both consumers and isps. because telecommunications involve dynamic and complex technologies, the industry is able to create a “digital imaginary” to support its agenda. specifically, at&t, verizon and cable companies have seized on the move to ip technologies as an opportunity to push lawmakers to eliminate their “carrier of last resort” obligations. references coombe, r. (2001). is there a cultural studies of law? in toby miller (ed.) a companion to cultural studies. malden, ma: blackwell publishers, pp. 36-62. fairclough, n. (2013). critical discourse analysis and policy studies. critical policy studies, 7 (2), 177-197. gibbons, j. (1999). language and the law. annual review of applied linguistics, 19 , 156–73. lessig, l. (1999). code: and other laws of cyberspace . new york, ny: basic books. modesto bee, (2012, june 18). bill would keep regulators away from voip. retrieved from http://calopinion.com/2012/06/modesto-bee-bill-would-keep-regulatorsaway-fromvoipproviders/ lichtenberg, s. (2014). telecommunications update: 2014 . http://www.narucmeetings.org/presentations/16%20telecommunications%20update%2 02014.pdf national regulatory research institute. retrieved from http://www.nrri.org/web/guest/home?p_auth=mr9uajsh&p_p_auth=vtknno9h& p_pid=20&p_p_lifecycle=1&p_p_state=exclusive&p_p_mode=view&_20_struts_ action=%2fdocument_library%2fget_file&_20_groupid=317330&_20_folderid=0 &_20_name=12601 ruiz, j. (2009). sociological discourse analysis: methods and logic. forum: qualitative socialresearch, 10 (2), article 26. retrieved from http://www.qualitativeresearch. net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1298/2882#g32 van dijk, t. (2003). critical discourse analysis. in d. schiffrin, d. tannen, and h. hamilton (eds.), the handbook of discourse analysis (pp. 352-371). malden, ma: blackwell publishing selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): tavmen, g. (2019, october 2-5). "open data means business": when monetary potential in open data usurps aspirations for accountability and transperancy in the smart city. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. "open data means business": when monetary potential in open data usurps aspirations for accountability and transperancy in the smart city güneş tavmen king's college london following the common criticism that smart cities are top-to-bottom, neoliberal, and technocratic corporate-led ambitions (mcneill, 2015; söderström et al., 2014; hollands, 2015; wiig, 2015), open data has become pivotal in transforming smart city discourses into 'citizen-centric ones (also see kitchin, 2014 and barns, 2016) despite a lack of understanding its limitations, and political and contingent nature (worthy, 2015). for example, in 2013, in the first smart city plan prepared by the greater london authority (gla), open data was considered crucial in order to foster citizen engagement (see coleman, 2013); hence it is described as a “unique approach” in which “the citizen comes first” (foth et al. 2016). that was due to the assumption that when everyone can freely access, share and use data instead of being locked in silos, it would automatically change top-to-bottom smart cities. partly due to being critically under-theorised (kitchin, 2014a), the concept of open data is often conflated with ‘open government’, hence laden with the same kind of expectations such as increased citizen participation and government transparency (yu & robinson, 2012). prior to being incorporated into smart city discourses, open data had become a matter of governmental strategy for many european countries and the usa since the late 2000s (huijboorn and van den broek, 2011). the uk has been one of the pioneers and indeed drivers of open data initiatives on both domestic and international scale as reflected on its position at the summit of the global open data rankings for consecutive years (e.g. open data barometer), regardless of the specific ideological complexion of successive uk governments. according to ruppert (2015), ogd became an essential performance indicator together with the “transparency agenda”: in 2011, the coalition government promised a “transparency revolution” that would enable an effective open data ecosystem, and would yield, in david cameron's terms, “a whole army of effective armchair auditors” (worthy, 2015: 789). however, a big shift in the discourse occurred during the conservative liberal democrat coalition government during the aftermath of the financial crisis as a result of which open data has been “economised” (brown, 2015). accordingly, it was in 2012, when tim berners-lee and nigel shadbolt received a generous funding to establish the open data institute (odi) to work on unlocking the business value of open data. since then, the odi has become an established authority on open data not only in the uk but also internationally. my intervention with this paper is to show how open data is mobilised as an apparatus (foucault, 1980) that is a benign economic tool within governance. in order to address open data as a governmental apparatus, i look into discursive and non-discursive formations that are often embedded in a system of dispersion, yet within an order of relationality and regularity (foucault, 1977: 38). for foucault (1977: 45), to understand the emergence of an apparatus, one should investigate the relation that exists between institutions, economic and social processes for what makes up a discourse is not a privileged object but dispersed objects. as such, the object of this paper is not open data per se, but the ways in which open data is located within smart city governmentality as a form of conduct. this is to say, this paper approaches open data as an apparatus within the implementation of an entrepreneurial and technocratic smart city agenda instead of being a tool to enhance transparency and accountability for london. to this end, after a brief overview of how open data (movement) emerged in a historical context, i will then continue to show to what ends it has been adopted and endorsed by the uk public bodies from 2009 and onwards, and show how the transformation in open data discourse from transparency and accountability to "raw material for innovation" took place. through this historical lineage, i will be able to provide a background to the circumstances under which the odi was established and has become a nondiscursive practice itself by developing, reiterating and materialising the dominant open data discourse in the context of smart city. my findings on the odi are the result of a close study of the organisation. to do that, i attended their public events that i identified as relevant to smart cities between late-2014 to mid-2017, interviewed an employee, and audited a number of policy documents pertaining to them. consequently, i argue that there has been a significant lack of institutionalised effort in delivering civic opportunities to progressive ends as a result of the overwhelming monetary potential emphasis despite once open data was advocated to enhance democracy. in doing so, i will foreground the political nature of open data despite the open data advocates' claim that open data movement is above ideologies and politics (bates, 2012, 2013), therefore has been an “overly polite” one that chose to collaborate closely with consecutive governments instead of contesting them (steinberg, 2016). references barns s (2016) mine your data: open data, digital strategies and entrepreneurial governance by code. urban geography, 37(4): 554-571 bates j (2012) "this is what modern deregulation looks like": co-optation and contestation in the shaping of the uk's open government data initiative. the journal of community informatics 8(2). bates j (2013) the domestication of open government data advocacy in the united kingdom: a neo-gramscian analysis. policy and internet 5(1): 118-136. brown w (2015) undoing the demos: neoliberalism's stealth revolution. masachusettes: the mit press. foth m, hudson-smith a and gifford d (2016) smart cities, social capital, and citizens at play: a critique and a way forward. in: f. x. olleros & m. zhegu, eds. research handbook on digital transformations. cheltenham: edward elgar publishing, pp. 203-221. foucault m (1977) the archaeology of knowledge. london: tavistock publications. foucault m (1980) the confession of the flesh. in: gordon c (ed) power/knowledge. prentice hall, pp.194 228. kitchin r (2014) opening up smart cities: a report on the smart city expo world congress. in: the programmable city. available at: http://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/progcity/2014/11/opening-up-smart-cities-a-reporton-the-smart-city-expo-world-congress/ (accessed 30 november 2014). mcneill d (2015) global firms and smart technologies: ibm and the reduction of cities. transactions of the institute of british geographers. ruppert e (2015) doing the transparent state: open government data as performance indicators. in: rottenburg r, merry se, park s-j and mugler j (eds) a world of indicators: the making of governmental knowledge through quantification. cambridge: cambridge university press: pp. 127-150. soderstrom o, paasche t and klauser f (2014) smart cities as corporate storytelling. city, 18(3): 307-320. steinberg t (2016) over-politeness is the fatal flaw in the open data movement. available at: https://civichall.org/civicist/over-politeness-is-the-fatal-flaw-in-the-opendata-movement/ (accessed 28 april 2016). wiig a (2015) ibm's smart city as techno utopian policy mobility. city: 258-273. worthy b (2015) the impact of open data in the uk: complex, unpredictable, and political. public administration 93(3): 788-805. yu h and robinson d (2012) the new ambiguity of 'open government'. (february 28, 2012). ucla law review discourse 52(11): 178-208. microsoft word music-industry-for-second-upload.docx selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): ryan bengtsson, l., fast, k. and ferrer cornill, r. (2017, october 18-21). share! like! create! how fan labor is cultivated and practiced in the contemporary music industry. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. share! like! create! how fan labor is cultivated and practiced in the contemporary music industry linda ryan bengtsson, karlstad university karin fast, karlstad university raul ferrer cornill, karlstad university when the band one direction released their sixth album “made in the a.m.” they marketed it through several joint events within different digital platforms. they used google streetview to create a fictional room, in which fans discovered new material and share it within their social networks using #madeintheam. in a joint event with twitter they launched a 24-hour competition, asking which “country” loves one direction the most. the 10 countries that were able to mobilize the most twitter-activity on their country’s hashtag during a set period of time were rewarded with their own one direction emoji. just before the album release one direction joined with apple music to stage an international competition that ran across several social media platforms and offered fans the chance to win tickets to an exclusive performance by the band. connecting the music industry with media platforms combining social media happenings and live events, the campaign mobilized fans be part of the marketing of the album. recently the music industry has struggled with how to make profit in times of illegal downloading, streaming, and spotifycation. one overarching strategy developed in response is to rely on consumer engagement, making the one direction campaign a contemporary example of transmedia marketing involving multiple platforms simultaneously. the willingness of the music industry to use transmedia marketing is related to its potential to foster consumers’ engagement in brand experiences across several content platforms (cf. jenkins, 2006). like other actors in the entertainment industries, labels and artists are increasingly interested in exploring the potentials of transmedia entertainment and how consumers – without payment – contribute to the production and circulation of content across and beyond media platforms. in this paper, we understand online consumer engagement as a form of labor that reconfigures users as digital publics. since much of this labor is paid for in affect rather than money, such labor has been recognized as a form of free labor (se for example andrejevic, 2008; baym 2009; fuchs, 2014; fast, 2012). but the one direction campaign also illustrates the spatial qualities of such campaigns through the diversity of initiatives taken to mobilize consumers to perform different actions and move between different media platforms. while both transmedia marketing and free labor have been subjected to many studies very few studies address the spatiality of both of these phenomena (though see e.g. stork’s [2014] “transmedia geography” and “performance space” of the glee franchise). spatial metaphors offer both a way to represent and visualize the movements of the consumers, as well as to understand how marketing campaigns construct immersive worlds where free labor is promoted and exploited. using spatial metaphors also enables a methodological approach to transmedia marketing, positioning actions and actors in relation to each other in time and space. we develop the concept of transmediascape to refer to such contexts, a term directly inspired by appadurai’s (1996: 35) ‘scape’-metaphor, which accentuates the global flows of people, technology, capital, media content, discourses, and ideas. indeed, we suggest that the music industry purposely constructs digital narratives that spill over from one media platform to another forming transmediascapes. this paper explores how music consumers perform and act within music marketing campaigns, posing the question: how do music consumers navigate across the transmediascapes constituted by marketing campaigns? in this study we follow the music audience movement within the promotional campaign of one internationally known artist, capturing the audiences’ actions and interactions by using the artist’s hashtag and additional hashtags specified by the campaign. a network analysis allows us to map how the audience moves through the campaign in time and space, and how the prepared trails guide the consumer to various media platforms (e.g. from the official website, to instagram, to spotify, etc.) it is important to note that the analysis includes the trails that run from online to offline spaces, or from virtual to physical places (e.g. from facebook to festival site, or vice versa). however, we also seek to understand users engagement in the production of content, and how this content is then recirculates within the campaign. thus we have chosen a nethnographic approach to the campaign material. the quantitative material guides us to instances where content production occurs, allowing a close study of these specific events. thus this is an exploratory study, following the case study approach (yin, 2003), to approach one specific campaign in depth by adopting a multi-method approach rooted in digital methods (se for example kozinets 2009; hjort & sharp 2014). our preliminary results indicate that consumers within the music industry are mobilized as they assemble consumer affect and promote physical as well as virtual fan movement. the consumer follows a path constructed by the marketing campaign, making consumers migrating between various spaces located in different platforms. we identify audience engagement in these events and how audiences both produce and share content with the campaign as well as within their own networks – thus giving the campaign access to their social media networks and their productions. we also detect instances of resistance, where the audience use the hashtag or distributed material in a way that was not intended by the campaign. finally, our paper also contributes with methodological development where acknowledging the spatial dimensions of free labor and transmedia marketing provide an analytical approach to media consumers within the contemporary transmediascapes. this paper primarily contributes to the suggested conference theme “ spaces and places for digital publics”. references andrejevic, m. (2008). watching television without pity: the productivity of online fans. television & new media, 9(1), 24-46. appadurai, a. (1996). modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. baym, n. k. (2009). amateur experts: international fan labor in swedish independent music. international journal of cultural studies, 12(5), 433–449. fast, k. (2012). more than meets the eye: transmedial entertainment as a site of pleasure, resistance and exploitation. diss. karlstad: karlstad university press. fuchs, c. (2014). digital prosumption labour on social media in the context of the capitalist regime of time. time & society, 23(1), 97-123. hjorth, l & sharp, k 2014, 'the art of ethnography: the aesthetics or ethics of participation?'. visual studies, 29(2) 128-135 jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york: new york university press. kozinets, r.v. (2009) netnography: doing ethnographic research online. sage publications stork, m. (2014). the cultural economics of performance space: negotiating fan, labor, and marketing practice in glee’s transmedia geography. transformative works and cultures, 15. yin, r.k. (2003). applications of case study research. (2nd ed.) london: sage. case study research: design and methods zeiser, a. (2015). transmedia marketing: from film and tv to games and digital media. crc press. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): balanzategui, jessica. (2019, october 2-5). examining the “elsagate” phenomenon: disturbing children’s youtube content and new frontiers in children’s culture”. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. examining the “elsagate” phenomenon: disturbing children’s youtube content and new frontiers in children’s culture jessica balanzategui swinburne university of technology contemporary children are turning to online video streaming as an “alternative for tv” (ha 2018, 1) in increasing numbers (see australian communications and media authority 2017, 20-22). in addition, us-based global video streaming platforms, primarily youtube and netflix, are becoming “more influential in screen production ecologies” when it comes to children’s content (potter 2017a, 22). yet, as increasing numbers of children consume much of their video content outside of the legacy media spaces of film and television, serious concerns are being raised in policy, advocacy (centre for digital democracy, 2018), and journalistic (bridle, 2017) discussions around the globe because many new children’s video streaming genres are not “child-appropriate” according to extant definitions and guidelines, such as the internationally endorsed children’s television charter. alarms have been raised in relation to new genres on youtube in particular. for instance, in an influential journalistic exposé, james bridle (2017) argues that youtube content seemingly aimed at child-viewers is tantamount to “a kind of infrastructural violence” against children’s wellbeing, a point echoed in many other recent long-form journalistic investigations (see for instance orphanides 2018). public concerns about the strange approach to children’s content exhibited by various youtube genres have become so prevalent that the neologism “elsagate” is now commonly used in media reportage to describe the scandal. the term references the disney character “elsa” from the popular animated children’s film frozen (2013), who often features in unnerving, child-oriented youtube content, represented through either low quality digital animation or in liveaction via adult performers wearing cheap “elsa” costumes. in such content, elsa is depicted alongside other popular characters from different family media franchises: in particular, spider-man and elsa often appear as a romantic couple. the content depicts such characters interacting in mundane but often comedic or surreal domestic scenarios, engaging in romantic relationships, violently assaulting each other, and/or performing various bodily functions. as jean burgess (2018) recently suggested in a keynote presentation for the australian academy of the humanities, “commercial children’s media is converging with the platform logics of the ‘ambivalent internet’”, which has driven a moral panic about whether or not parents can trust video streaming platforms to deliver children’s content. this paper aims to articulate why particular youtube genres raise potent cultural anxieties about the role of youtube in children’s culture, and the effects and child appropriateness of youtube content. the paper contends that the child-oriented youtube genres at the centre of the elsagate controversy re-position extant cultural boundaries of childappropriate content – boundaries which in some cases have long been enshrined in policy and standards guidelines – in ways that trouble culturally ingrained ideological distinctions between child and adult culture. deploying theoretical frameworks drawn from childhood studies, i argue that the concerns that dominate the “elsagate” phenomenon – including the role of algorithms in distributing and producing children’s content (bridle, 2017), and the presence of adult performers playing perverse versions of familiar children’s characters in “character mash-up” videos (weiss, 2017) – circulate around a dissolution of the carefully calibrated “public value” (potter, 2015) framework that has long underpinned industry and policy approaches to children’s content in numerous countries. the analysis reveals that across the reportage on the elsagate phenomenon, anxieties constellate around the opaque motivations and intentions behind the production of these new children’s genres (brandom, 2017). furthermore, reportage consistently dwells on parents’ and adult commentators’ belated awareness of these unfamiliar, “bizarre” (popper, 2017) genres popular with children, and suggests that children value this content for reasons that are unclear to adult guardians. thus, “disturbing” (sudebar and yate, 2017) children’s youtube content interrupts traditional power balances and interplays between children’s media industries, parental mediation strategies, and “child-effects”: young children’s agency over their own consumption choices and influence on parental media practices (bulck et al, 2016). the research presented has two components. the first component combines discourse and thematic analysis of journalistic investigations into inappropriate children’s content on youtube in order to identify the genres that have provoked the most public concern, and to illuminate the key anxieties that consistently underpin reportage about disturbing new children’s genres. this research also traces the origins and development of the elsagate phenomenon through a comprehensive collation of reportage about disturbing children’s youtube content. the second component features a genre studies textual analysis of the youtube content itself in order to identify the recurring narrative structures, tropes, and aesthetics that shape these new children’s genres. this component deploys rick altman’s semantics/syntactics approach to genre analysis, which is a valuable tool for the identification of new genres because it aims to identify textual patterns. the semantics, or “building blocks” of genre (1984, 10), include character types, aesthetic traits, iconography, and settings. the syntactics, or “meaning-bearing structures” (altman, 11) of a genre, are the “constitutive relationships” (10) into which a genre’s semantics are arranged. the content analyzed includes videos and genres mentioned repeatedly across the elsagate reportage, with between thirty and fifty videos analyzed in each genre category (such as “character mash-up” videos) in order to identify common thematic, structural, and aesthetic patterns. the paper will illustrate how children’s genres on youtube that have been deemed disturbing or bizarre in journalistic commentary align with and deviate from children’s genres in public and commercial children’s media. in addition, the paper will highlight how these genres introduce new iconography, themes, and narratives into the terrain of children’s culture which challenge longstanding demarcations between children’s and adult’s culture. the paper will show that this rapid shift in children’s cultural forms – a shift orchestrated not by the institutional mechanics of public and commercial children’s media industries, but by children’s own consumption patterns and navigation of algorithmic content recommendation trends – in part fuels the moral panic surrounding the elsagate phenomenon. references altman, r. 1984. “a semantic/syntactic approach to film genre.” cinema journal, 23 (3), p. 6–18. australian communications and media authority. 2017. “children’s television and multiscreen behaviour.” canberra. australian government: department of communications and the arts. 2017. “australian and children’s screen content review consultation paper.” canberra. brandom, russell. 2017. “inside elsagate, the conspiracy-fueled war on creepy youtube kids videos.” the verge. bridle, j. 2018. “how peppa pig became a video nightmare for children.” the guardian. bridle, j. 2017. “something is wrong on the internet.” medium. bulck, j van den, custers, k & nelissen, s. 2016. “the child-effect in the new media environment: challenges and opportunities for communication research.” journal of children and media 10(2), p. 30-38. burgess, j. 2018. “what fake peppa pig videos can teach us about trust.” keynote: trust and its discontents workshop, australian academy of the humanities, melbourne, september 28. centre for digital democracy et al. 2018. “request to investigate google’s youtube online services and advertising practices for violating the children’s online privacy protection act.” complaint filed to federal trade commission. washington. ha, l. 2018. “youtube as a global online video portal and an alternative to tv” in ha, l (ed). the audience and business of youtube. lanham: lexington books. p, 116. orphanides, k.g. 2018. “children’s youtube is still churning out blood, suicide and cannibalism.” wired. popper, b. 2017. “youtube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children.” the verge. potter, a. 2017a. “regulating contemporary children’s television: how digitisation is reshaping compliance norms and production practices.” media international australia 163(1), p, 20-30. potter, a. 2015. creativity, culture and commerce: producing australian children’s television with public value. bristol: intellect. sudebar, a & yates, w. 2017. “the disturbing youtube videos that are tricking children.” bbcnews. weiss, g. 2017. “youtube’s latest bizarre trend has adults dressing up in spider-man and elsa costumes.” tubefilter. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): arriagada, a., badger, a., bertolini, a., bonhomme, m., ferrari, f., graham, m., huws, u., ustek-spilda, f., taduri, p., srinivasan, j. (2020, october). taming platform capitalism: struggles from the global north meet struggles from the global south. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. taming platform capitalism: struggles from the global south meet struggles from the global north arturo arriagada universidad adolfo ibáñez (chile)/fairwork foundation adam badger oxford internet institute/fairwork foundation alessio bertolini oxford internet institute/fairwork foundation macarena bonhomme universidad diego portales (chile)/fairwork foundation fabian ferrari oxford internet institute/fairwork foundation mark graham oxford internet institute/fairwork foundation ursula huws university of hertfordshire funda ustek-spilda fairwork foundation pradyumna taduri international institute of information technology bangalore janaki srinivasan international institute of information technology bangalore the world over, platforms are reorganising labour markets, reshaping how work is managed, and providing the pre-conditions for new forms of organising and resistance (woodcock & graham 2020; ravenelle 2019; rosenblat 2019). at this moment of disruption, platforms are evading labour market regulation designed for a different model of work. this means that, everywhere from chile to california to cambodia there are stories of exploitation and struggle. these stories describe the role algorithms play in the organization of labor, offering workers higher levels of flexibility and autonomy. nevertheless, these technological infrastructures work as mechanisms of control, resulting in low payment, social isolation, and overwork (wood, et. al 2018). thus, platform workers can be paid below minimum wages, and have to shoulder all of the risk associated with the work that they do without regulations that resolve those tensions. this panel brings together scholars whose work seeks to tame platform capitalism understanding how the lives of platform workers are affected by digital platforms. research on platform labor has been mostly done in the global north, as well as in relation to global platforms like uber or amazon (rosenblat 2019; scholz 2016). thus, the panelists, moreover, explore how the lives of platform workers can be improved within the global platform economy by analyzing workers’ subjectivities in relation to platforms and the impact of technologies in job quality. to achieve this, this panel brings together scholars from global north and south countries that will map the complexities and subjectivities of platform workers in order to tame platform capitalism. we present a set of articles that address: (1) regulatory resistance that clarifies and redefines the rules that platforms need to abide by; (2) bottom-up resistance of platform workers who seek to organize, subvert, and build alternatives; (3) the ways that action research can support either of those initiatives to ultimately tame some of the worst excesses of platform capitalism. in order to bring approaches from the south into conversation with approaches form the north, the panelists aim to challenge popular ideas that platform capitalism is a “onesize-fits-all” phenomenon. we locate such ideas in longstanding dismissals of global south research in relation to platform capitalism (woodcock & graham 2020) arguing, instead, that we need to take seriously the subjectivities of workers in a comparative perspective. it is our hope that this session provides the beginning of a larger programme of work that seeks to foster horizontal collaboration between scholars and activists who seek to tame platform capitalism. references ravenelle, a. (2019). hustle & gig: struggling and surviving in the sharing economy. california: university of california press. rosenblat, a. (2019). uberland: how algorithms are rewriting the rules of work. california: university of california press. scholz, t. (2016). uberworked and underpaid: how workers are disrupting the digital economy. new york: polity. woodcock, j. & graham, m. (2020). the gig economy: a critical introduction. london: polity. taming algorithms one code at a time: worker resistance strategies against automated decision making systems funda ustek-spilda fairwork foundation fabian ferrari oxford internet institute/fairwork foundation mark graham oxford internet institute/fairwork foundation alessio bertolini oxford internet institute/fairwork foundation adam badger oxford internet institute/fairwork foundation introduction algorithms and autonomous decision-making systems play a central role in how work is organised in platform economies around the globe. from allocation of work to determination of salaries or eligibility for access to health care, algorithms sort, assign, allocate and manage labour. yet, the understandability and explainability of algorithms is not straight-forward and often not even technically possible (annany and crawford 2016; powell et al. 2019). consequently, workers are often unclear about the terms and conditions of their work; such as when and how much work they will be assigned and how much they will be bringing home at the end of the month. this uncertainty, however, is often presented as flexibility and employees having wider control on their hours and terms of work; and ultimately achieving greater work-life balance (graham et al. 2017). as a result, it becomes workers’ responsibility to seek work and ensure that they have enough to meet their needs, rather than their employer’s. similarly, it becomes workers’ responsibility to find a solution when they are not able to work due to illness, care needs or simply when platforms go out of business. put simply, rather than employers’ or social protection systems’, it is workers’ choice and obligation to figure out ways of survival in platform economy. when things go wrong, it is then not the market forces or the erosure of the welfare state, but the workers themselves are to blame, for not making the right choices, for not managing resources well or for failing to be entrepreneurs that take the initiative. against this background, we examine the ways in which workers cope with the uncertainty they face in platform economies and especially with the unexplainability and seeming unaccountability of the decisions that govern their labour. we approach this through a critical data studies perspective, and seek to understand how workers respond when the basic tenets of their labour are increasingly quantified, automatised and gamified through opaque user interfaces, personalised incentive structures and automated employment relations. theoretical discussion our focus is on the bottom-up resistance strategies and coping mechanisms of platform workers. power of the powerless, covert and overt survival strategies and subaltern forms of resistance have been widely studied in the literature (scott 1985, de certau 1984, bain & taylor 2000). while we also build on these strands of literature, in this paper, we shift the focus to a conceptual framework that has not yet been applied to understand contested labour relations in contemporary platform capitalism: care ethics. there are important reasons for this shift. on the one hand, the theoretical lens of care ethics provides a powerful way of engaging with the power relations that shape decision-making at a wider level, beyond individual dimensions. it introduces relationality as a core concern and signifies that care exists not only with respect to individuals and things; but also through and within them. this means that platforms, their funders as well as regulators, tax agencies and the workers exist in certain configurations of relations to one another and one resistance strategy might unlock or block a variety of these configurations. second is that, care ethics is an ethical framework and we explore the ethical positioning of expecting workers to resist, alter and change platform economy rather than regulations, laws and other national authorities. we seek to understand where ‘care’ lies in this web of relations: the wellbeing of the workers of platform work, or the well-being of business. in order to do this, we use puig de la bellacasa’s (2017) framework for care ethics and analyse workers’ possibilities and capabilities of dissent, resistance and survival in platform economy through the lens of three analytical foci: thinking with, dissenting within and speaking for; especially when the focus of companies and their investors remain solely on scaling up or otherwise facing ‘game over’ in the markets in which they operate in. in “thinking with”, we explore workers’ practices of interpersonal sensemaking: moments in which they come together and explore and develop collective strategies against the platforms they work for. in “dissenting within” we explore day-today covert and overt activities that defy, object to and subvert decisions platforms take about workers. lastly, in “speaking for”, we explore workers’ opportunities to be able to collate, bring together and present collective voices to the platforms. in all these aspects, we study both how workers’ organise themselves to change their conditions of work that they find unfair; and how the platforms respond to them. methods the data for this paper comes from a collaborative, multi-site ethnographic fieldwork in india, south africa, and germany as part of the fairwork project (graham & woodcock 2018). our data includes interviews and participant observations with both workers in the platform economy and platforms themselves. in addition, it involves quantitative data collected from the platforms and photographic and video evidence collected from workers during strikes; screenshots of their payments and incentive structures and automatised and non-automatised responses they receive from the platforms regarding their work. interview transcripts and other data are then coded to understand and pay attention to possibilities of worker resistance in platform economy. key findings thinking with we find that workers are increasingly aware of the fact that decisions about their work are taken autonomously through the interface of the apps they use to access their work on the platforms, and this is why, they often feel powerless to challenge the decisions that are taken about them, including id blocks, non-payment even after a task is complete or losing incentive structures after a dispute even when it gets resolved in their favour. because these apps are also personalised, with personal features, language functionalities, incentive structures, they find it difficult to relate to the experiences of others on the platforms even though overall they face similar difficulties regarding finding and accessing work, getting orders, and managing their communication with the platform and the customers. we show that for workers who do not have opportunities to see others at work (e.g. domestic workers), thinking with and developing strategies for resistance against platforms become ever more difficult. dissenting within from creating fake user profiles to be able to complete pre-set incentive requirements to chasing down surveillance cameras to prove to platforms that they have completed a task, we find that workers develop various innovative strategies to deal with the everyday workings of autonomous decision-making systems and to dissent within. here, we also show, however, these strategies quickly get figured out by the platforms and workers’ way of sharing this information/strategies with other workers in the platforms remain very limited; thereby also limiting wider resistances to be formed. speaking for in this section, we pay particular attention to what happens when workers form and demonstrate collectives, speaking for the problems they face in their work. we analyse how platforms respond to strikes and other collective voicing of disquiet. we note that platforms often respond by throwing the baby with the bathwater: that workers get punished whether or not they partook in a strike as workers in a particular city and district all get penalised, if a strike happens in an area. we note that the automatisation possibilities of blocking ids, incentives and payment methods enable this “all or none” approach taken by platforms. conclusion in conclusion, we argue that workers develop innovative strategies to cope with the increasingly automated decisions platforms make about them, and this is their way of ‘taming platform capitalism’. nevertheless, we also show that workers’ abilities to ‘game the system’ remain very limited, as platforms hold an invincible advantage in data and resources, and when they feel they are losing this advantage, they pack up and move to other markets where they continue to hold it. workers’ ways of taming platform capitalism are by no means equivalent to sustained resistance or even worker power in the traditional sense. in fact, they entail serious risks for workers: a normalization of gamified modes of labour control and potential failures to enact long-term social infrastructures of solidarity. this is why we argue for the need for establishing fairness standards for the platform economy (graham and woodcock 2018). references ananny, mike, and kate crawford. 2018. ‘seeing without knowing: limitations of the transparency ideal and its application to algorithmic accountability’. new media & society 20 (3): 973–989. bain, p. and taylor, p., 2000. entrapped by the ‘electronic panopticon’? worker resistance in the call centre. new technology, work and employment, 15(1), pp. 218. de certeau, m., 1984. the practice of everyday life. berkeley: university of california press. graham, mark, and jamie woodcock. 2018. ‘towards a fairer platform economy: introducing the fairwork foundation’. alternate routes: a journal of critical social research 29: 242–253. graham, mark, vili lehdonvirta, alex wood, helena barnard, isis hjorth, and david peter simon. 2017. ‘the risks and rewards of online gig work at the global margins’. oxford: oxford internet institute. powell, alison, arnav joshi, paul-marie carfantan, georgina bourke, ian hutchinson, and annalisa eichholzer. 2019. ‘understanding and explaining automated decisions’. ssrn scholarly paper id 3309779. rochester, ny: social science research network. puig de la bellacasa, maría. 2017. matters of care: speculative ethics in more than human worlds. university of minnesota press. scott, j. c. 1985. weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance. new haven: yale university press. reinventing the welfare state: digital platforms and public policies ursula huws university of hertfordshire introduction drawing on extensive empirical research in 13 european countries, and framed in a perspective informed by feminist political economy, this presentation argues that in the context of digitalisation and globalisation the 20th century normative model of employment is no longer fit for purpose. this model is firmly embedded in a broader conception of the welfare state which, in turn is strongly linked to notions of national sovereignty and cannot therefore by redesigned in isolation from the broader systems and institutions which govern economic and social redistribution within any given state. it proposes a reinvention of the welfare state to make it suitable for the 21st century. this reinvention revisits the 20th century goals of equality, social cohesion and protection from penury and looks critically at how they could be achieved in the context of globalisation. it does not just propose new forms of income redistribution and new rights for workers but also how public bodies can take advantage of the positive potential of platform technologies to deliver new kinds of services that do not just promote these goals but also those of gender equality and addressing the climate emergency. results research carried out between 2016 and 2019 by the university of hertfordshire, funded by the european foundation for progressive studies (feps) and the trade union confederation uni-europa (huws, spencer, coates and holts, 2019) found that work for online platforms was not only widespread across the 13 european countries surveyed but also growing very rapidly. the number of people in the uk who said they did work obtained via an online platform at least once a week doubled from an estimated 2.8 million people to an estimated 5.8 million (from 4.7% to 9.6% of the adult population) during this 3-year period. platform work represents less than 10% of all income for the largest group of platform workers in all countries, with only a small minority saying that it constitutes all their income. this minority did nevertheless grow in the uk (the only country for which we have trend data) from 5.2% in 2016 to 9.4% in 2019. despite this, the typical picture is one where the income from platform work is used to top up earnings from other sources. people were turning to the internet to make money in other ways too: over the same period the proportion of people renting out rooms via online platforms such as airbnb went up from 8.2% to 18.7% while those selling self-made products via platforms like etsy rose from 10% to 20.2%. the main driver of this phenomenal growth appears to be poverty. during a period when earnings have been falling in real terms or, at best, stagnating for most working class people, and austerity policies have been biting hard, they have been looking for any source of income they can find to make ends meet. one of the most important mechanisms for doing this before the financial crisis – credit – has been much less available and the online economy has become an increasingly important resource to tap into. most platform workers report doing more than one kind of platform work. those doing driving or delivery work range from 1.4% (in the netherlands and sweden) to 12.3% (in czechia) of the adult population but in the uk this proportion increased from 1.5% to 5.1% between 2016 and 2019. in every country the proportion doing this kind of platform work is exceeded by those doing more hidden types of platform work providing household services in other people’s homes. this ranges from 2.4% in sweden to in 11.8% czechia. by far the most common type of platform work is carried out virtually, using online means. consistent with the fact that such work is normally obtained via global platforms, it is unsurprising that by far the highest use of location-independent online platforms is found to be highest in precisely those countries where average earnings (measured in us $ equivalents) are lowest in real terms, confirming the importance of poverty as a driver to taking up platform work. the surveys also found a clear link between the use of online platforms to deliver locationally-dependent services (such as driving, food delivery and household services) and time poverty. those most likely to be users of such services are more likely than average to be working full-time. platform workers providing local services are also major users of them. platforms can thus be seen as part of a market solution to the problem of the household ‘time squeeze’ forming part of a rapidly-growing and self-reinforcing trend – a vicious cycle whereby the need for extra income leads to working longer hours leaving less time available for housework, driving a greater use of platforms which, in turn increases precarious work still further, the surveys additionally found a widespread and rapidly growing use of the digital organizational and management practices associated with platform work across other sectors of the economy, extending beyond the scope of direct work for these platforms. in 2016 one uk adult in ten reported using an app or website to be informed of new tasks but by 2019 this had more than doubled to 21.0% of the adult working-age population. in each case, barely half of these workers were platform workers. the use of apps or websites to record work done rose over the same period from 14.2% to 24.6%. the majority of people reporting these practices were not platform workers. nearly a quarter (24%) of adults surveyed also reported having their work rated by customers, of whom nearly half (11.7%) were not platform workers. conclusion the general ‘platformization’ of work evidenced in these findings can be seen as the culmination of a series of converging trends that reached critical mass in the years following the financial crisis (huws, 2017). across all sectors of the economy, primary, secondary or tertiary, whether previously classified as public or private, formal or informal, manual or white-collar, high or low skilled, this emerging model introduces a range of common features whose combined impact is large enough to justify the proposition that a new paradigm of work is in creation, representing the final dissolution of the normative model that emerged in developed economies in the third quarter of the twentieth century. in this new model, as well as experiencing reduced legal protection and low earnings, workers are increasingly managed via online platforms, monitored indirectly and expected to produce measurable outcomes. in a curious paradox, work is increasingly formalised even while it becomes less predictable and more precarious, with workers having to resubmit themselves repeatedly for employment, funding, promotion or inclusion in a particular team, and required to respond at short notice to unpredictable demands for work. this ramifications of this development are huge, since it creates major mismatches between the realities of the labour market and other aspects of social and economic life including welfare systems, labour and consumer regulation and time regimes. in short, the emergence of this new model calls for a complete redesign of the welfare state. this presentation argues that such a redesign cannot be achieved by attempting to reverse the developments that have taken place in recent decades or tweak existing institutions, but requires a return to the underlying principles of redistribution and equality that underpinned the 20th century welfare state and the creation of new rights and new services to develop a model that is suitable for the conditions of the globalized, digitally-enabled economy of the 21st century. the ideas proposed here include a new universal charter of workers’ rights and a radical reform of the tax and benefit systems to provide an earnings safety net that is genuinely redistributive. they also include recommendations for the development of innovative new uses of platform technologies that put them under more democratic control, enabling them to be used to deliver digitally-enabled services in both the public and private sectors in a manner that helps to rationalise energy use and reduce waste in line with environmental goals. here, there is a particular focus on services that can support a positive work-life balance, breaking the vicious cycle in which financial poverty drives time poverty, thus contributing to gender equality and a general improvement in the quality of life. references huws, u., n.h. spencer, m. coates & k. holts (2019) the platformisation of work in europe: results from research in 13 european countries, brussels: foundation for european progressive studies. huws, u. (2017) 'where did online platforms come from? the virtualization of work organization and the new policy challenges it raises' in p. meil and v. kirov (eds) the policy implications of virtual work, palgrave macmillan: 29-48 weapons of the weak in a digital age? the case of food delivery workers in bangalore, india pradyumna taduri international institute of information technology bangalore janaki srinivasan international institute of information technology bangalore based on a study of the organization of work on a leading food delivery platform in india, this paper will examine the range of ways in which workers have adapted to their platform-based routines, including by subverting aspects of its working. on-demand food delivery platforms in india have now been in operation for about five years. despite media reports that have started to highlight the working conditions of platform workers, the legal framework within which platforms operate in india is unclear. moreover, formal organisation among workers is also relatively rare and varies across different sectors. however, we argue that even without explicit political action, workers have been resisting, subverting and coping with the conditions of platform work, including the technology platform itself, using the “weapons of the weak” (scott, 1985). in the paper, we highlight everyday acts of resistance as workers make their way through the food delivery process. we argue for a need to recognize the significance of these individual acts of resistance by workers, especially in view of the barriers to formal organization. introduction since ola's inception in 2011 in india, on-demand platforms have grown many fold in the last decade. outside of ride-hailing services such as ola, on-demand platform services including food-delivery, couriers, bike taxis, and domestic services, have all found acceptance in urban india. while these platforms offer a source of livelihood in indian cities (surie and koduganti, 2016), critics contend that platforms across the globe do this by circumventing existing labour regulations, and by misclassifying workers as partners or independent contractors (de stefano, 2016). despite media and researchers highlighting the poor working conditions of platform workers in recent years, there has been little legislative or state action to address these concerns. since 2017, organized resistance by workers, including en-masse logouts, has grown (khanna, 2018; tiwary, 2019) but continues to face barriers. in this paper, we examine how individual workers have been routinely undertaking strategic acts of resistance even prior to such explicit, and collective acts of resistance. the everyday weapons of food delivery workers based on an ethnography of peasant action in malaysia in the late 1970s, scott argues that “subordinate classes throughout most of history have rarely been afforded the luxury of open, organized, political activity” (scott 1985). instead, his analysis foregrounds the everyday forms of symbolic resistance carried out by the peasantry. scott proposes that these acts of “foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance” that stop short of outright collective resistance are the preferred weapons of relatively powerless groups because they require little planning, draw on implicit understandings and informal networks, represent a form of individual self-help; and avoid any direct, symbolic confrontation with authority. while based on a peasant culture that is far removed from platform work, we nevertheless find scott’s lens useful for analyzing the actions of platform workers in bangalore. if we treated only such organized collective action as resistance, we risk assuming that workers buy into the present logics of the platform economy or see no means to resist them. the “weapons of the weak” understanding, we find, allows us to appreciate everyday forms of symbolic resistance, including their potential to shape acts of more organized resistance in the future. we use this lens to analyse worker experiences on a leading food delivery platform drawn from a previous study (taduri 2019). that study was based on participant observation of food delivery work and semistructured interviews with workers of the platform in bangalore. we examine how workers interact with digital and human actors to resist and create opportunities at the expense of the platform. the worker application is at the heart of food delivery platform work. it tracks workers’ whereabouts and monitors worker activity on the platform. this data is used to generate metrics that determine incentives and power algorithms to manage the assignment of orders. in addition to these digital artifacts, workers also encounter other human actors while resolving order assignments, picking up orders at restaurants, and the actual delivery of orders at customer locations. resisting an algorithmic boss in the platform we studied, workers' daily schedules are structured by an incentive system. for workers to earn daily and weekly incentives, three key requirements must be met. first, workers must remain logged into the application for a fixed duration. second, workers must earn a minimum amount. third, workers may only reject one order a day. these restrictions allow the platform to control workers’ availability and where they work. workers, however, have found a way to game this incentive system along both these parameters. ● availability: food delivery work spikes during breakfast, lunch and dinner, with periods of low demand and oversupply of workers in between. in response, some workers choose to confine themselves to locations far away from restaurants. this allows them to engage in other activities while remaining logged in, since it is unlikely for the allocation system to assign orders to workers far away from restaurants. thus, workers resist the requirement of availability. ● location: restaurants on food delivery platforms vary in their popularity and time taken to prepare food. furthermore, being constantly logged in allows the platform to “throw workers around the city”. workers respond to this by strategically logging out of the application and quickly navigating to the restaurant(s) and location of their choice to be available for orders. ● creating opportunity through surveillance blind spots: as the intermediary between restaurants, workers and customers, the platform aims to command all aspects of the delivery process. workers have found gaps within the platform’s surveillance to create opportunities for themselves. first, workers have formed alliances with restaurant employees who cater to delivery orders. to save time waiting at restaurants to pick up orders, workers rely on such alliances to provide them first priority in a long line of workers waiting for delivery. second, workers create opportunity by leveraging the platform payment policy that allows payment post-delivery in cash. workers masquerade as customers and order food that they have no intention of paying for. after they (or a fellow worker) receive the “fake order” for food, and the food is picked up from the restaurant, the ‘customer’ cancels the order or shuts off their phone, leaving the worker with the food. workers may then negotiate to divide up the food between themselves and the ‘customer’. the transaction catches the platform off-guard, with the platform unable to immediately verify the events and actors involved. while there may be several reasons to "fake" an order, sharing a meal at the expense of the platform is one of the few explicit ways to game an inflexible algorithm for some. our goal with these examples was to understand how workers cope with, resist and subvert the food delivery process as envisioned by management and as designed into the technological interface. they fight for the choice of place, time and type of work to perform by subverting the commands of an algorithmic boss. highlighting these weapons of the weak in the digital era can help us appreciate that the mere absence of outright collective resistance may not always indicate that workers are in step with management control. references de stefano, v. (2016). the rise of the ‘just-in-time workforce’: on-demand work, crowd work and labour protection in the ’gig-economy. ssrn electronic journal. khanna, s. (2018). striking workers a consequence of failed business models. livemint.com. scott, j. c. (1985). weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance.yale university press. surie, a., & koduganti, j. (2016). the emerging nature of work in platform economy companies in bengaluru, india: the case of uber and ola cab drivers. e-journal of international and comparative labour studies, 5(3). taduri, p. (2019). delivering consent: work games in on-demand food delivery platforms. masters thesis. international institute of information technology bangalore. tiwary, a. (2019). more troubles for india’s zomato as food delivery drivers go on strike. krasia, september 17. migrants and platform work in chile: moving between precarity and invisibility macarena bonhomme universidad diego portales (chile) arturo arriagada universidad adolfo ibáñez (chile) introduction the gig economy is the digital economic model that has transformed forms of work and labour relations, and has expanded access to the labour market for at least seven million workers globally (graham & woodcock, 2018). this economy, which has had an accelerated growth in recent years, constitutes a broader category of non-standardized and informal jobs that provides income opportunities, but which in turn has been highly criticized for the precarisation, commodification and fragmentation of work (wood et al., 2018), as well as for the risks involved, as predatory intermediaries, social isolation and discrimination (graham, lehdonvirta, et al., 2017). thus, the confusing nature of definitions of job quality or ‘decent work’ in policy and theoretical debates (burchell et al., 2013) becomes even more evident with these new labour configurations. this paper aims to contribute to clarify such a debate through qualitative research methods that address the perceptions of those who most participate in these platforms in santiago, chile: migrants from latin america and the caribbean. in the context of the recent social explosion and several protests in chile, resulting from the profound inequality existent, it is urgent to investigate the social implications of this economy that is the digital continuation of the neoliberal capitalist model, reproducing the precarisation of work through increasingly sophisticated and invisible forms. migrants, precariousness, and the gig economy under the misleading idea of ‘independent’ and ‘collaborative’ work are hidden the precariousness of a system that displaces labour risks and costs towards the figure of the ‘worker’ (drahokoupil & piasna, 2017), who has no security or guarantees in case of accidents, and that together with the great fluctuation of labour demand and the uncertainty it entails, increases inequality in the labour market (graham, hjorth, et al., 2017). however, one of the advantages of gig work is the low entry barriers that allow traditionally excluded sectors to gain access (drahokoupil & piasna, 2017), as is the case with migrants. this is particularly relevant for latin american and caribbean migrants in chile, who have faced in recent years increasingly restrictive immigration policies that have made their immigration status to remain uncertain, which has dramatically impacted their access to the labour market and formal jobs (bonhomme, 2020). thus, digital platforms provide a vital way to work and make a living while they settle down in the host country. empirical studies reveal abuses and violations of labour rights, such as low wages, long unregulated working hours, and high levels of stress (graham, lehdonvirta, et al., 2017) and risk (graham & woodcock, 2018). above all, higher levels of racial and gender exclusion and discrimination faced by workers from both platforms (the product of algorithms) and clients (adams & berg, 2017; beerepoot & lambregts, 2015; galperin & greppi, 2017). according to galperin and greppi (2017), information frictions in traditional labour markets are exacerbated on digital platforms, resulting in discrimination based on country of origin: migrant workers are less likely to obtain contracts. in other countries of the global south, workers have experienced the negative effects of these platforms (anwar & graham, 2019). methods our in progress study draws draws upon a collaborative, multi-site ethnographic fieldwork in santiago, chile, as part of the fairwork project (graham & woodcock 2018). our data includes in-depth interviews and participant observations with workers in the platform economy (n: 18). interview topics included the strategies to relate with the app, the strategies displayed to each other in order to resist the organization of work and discriminatory practices by apps, and the type of information they share amongst their peers. we used a grounded theory approach by combining data collection and analysis (glasser & strauss 1967) in order to refine the concepts and categorical themes presented in the analysis. interview transcripts and other data are then coded to understand and pay attention to possibilities of worker resistance in platform economy. preliminary results thus far, our analysis of data has yielded the following preliminary themes. we examine the strategies gig workers have to resist the constraints and negative impact that these platforms have in their labour conditions as well as in the legal implications working in these platforms have, in the case of apps that are forbidden (i.e. uber). preliminary results have shown that social media networks have been key for facing these everyday struggles and continue doing their work. migrant workers support each other through informal organized groups on what’s app or facebook. they share information to facilitate their activities in order to avoid been inspected by the police and regulators, especially in the case of uber drivers. we analyse how the platforms that operate outside the law are validated by the workers through these resistance strategies due to the lack of regulations in this sector. furthermore, how for migrant workers especially, relying on these strategies is mainly due to their migratory condition and the limited working opportunities they have in the traditional labour market. references adams, a., & berg, j. (2017). when home affects pay: an analysis of the gender pay gap among crowdworkers (ssrn scholarly paper id 3048711). social science research network. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3048711 anwar, m. a., & graham, m. (2019). does economic upgrading lead to social upgrading in contact centers? evidence from south africa. african geographical review, 38(3), 209–226. https://doi.org/10.1080/19376812.2019.1589730 beerepoot, n., & lambregts, b. (2015). competition in online job marketplaces: towards a global labour market for outsourcing services? global networks, 15(2), 236–255. https://doi.org/10.1111/glob.12051 bonhomme, m. (2020). making ‘race’ at the urban margins: latin american and caribbean migration in multicultural chile [phd thesis]. goldsmiths, university of london. burchell, b., sehnbruch, k., piasna, a., & agloni, n. (2013). the quality of employment and decent work: definitions, methodologies, and ongoing debates. cambridge journal of economics, 38(2), 459–477. https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/bet067 drahokoupil, j., & piasna, a. (2017). work in the platform economy: beyond lower transaction costs. intereconomics: review of european economic policy, 52(november-december), 335–340. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10272-017-0700-9 galperin, h., & greppi, c. (2017). geographical discrimination in digital labor platforms. in m. graham (ed.), digital economies at global margins. mit press. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2922874 graham, m., hjorth, i., & lehdonvirta, v. (2017). digital labour and development: impacts of global digital labour platforms and the gig economy on worker livelihoods. transfer: european review of labour and research, 23(2), 135–162. https://doi.org/10.1177/1024258916687250 graham, m., lehdonvirta, v., wood, a., barnard, h., hjorth, i., & simon, d. p. (2017). the risks and rewards of online gig work at the global margins. oxford internet institute, university of oxford. https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/blog/new-reportthe-risks-and-rewards-of-online-gig-work-at-the-global-margins/ graham, m., & woodcock, j. (2018). towards a fairer platform economy: introducing the fairwork foundation. alternate routes: a journal of critical social research, 29. http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/article/view/22455 wood, a. j., lehdonvirta, v., & graham, m. (2018). workers of the internet unite? online freelancer organisation among remote gig economy workers in six asian and african countries. new technology, work and employment, 33(2), 95–112. https://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12112 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): neumayer, c., rossi, l., & jensen, m.s. (2020, october). disruptive humor: a citizen perspective in social media images from mass protests. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. disruptive humor: a citizen perspective in social media images from mass protests christina neumayer university of copenhagen luca rossi it university of copenhagen minna s. jensen independent researcher introduction a humorous photograph of a man holding up a sign and walking through the protests against the g20 summit in hamburg is one of the most shared tweets posted during the anti-capitalist welcome to hell demonstration taking place on 6 july 2017. instead of a protest slogan, however, the handwritten sign says: “i am a local resident, and i am just going to edeka [german supermarket chain]”. various photographs of the man taken in different places are shared prominently in social media feeding into the narrative of the g20 protests. this is only one of the various images and videos from the protests that humorously juxtapose everyday activities with protest scenes such as burning barricades as well as police in full gear. while previous research has shown that activists, police and institutional media alike share their perspectives from political protests in social media (neumayer, rossi & karlsson 2016; neumayer & rossi 2018), these seemingly neutral perspectives on the actual conflict have received relatively little attention. humorous images from conflict in social media have mainly been studied as memes (e.g., bayerl & stoynov, 2015; jensen, neumayer & rossi 2020). in this research we ask which role such images play for the representation of political protest in social media. data collection and methods to do so, we collected tweets (n=678.946) based on protest hashtags #nog20, #blockg20, #nog20hh, #welcometohell, #w2h, #g20ham17, #g20protestwelle, #g20hh17, #g20hh2017 and #smashg20 from the g20 demonstrations in hamburg in the time period 6 (18.00) to 8 july 2017 (18.00). we extracted a retweet network and we performed a community detection observing how the main cluster where either connected with media actors, the police or activists. furthermore, we coded the tweets that received 80 or more retweets for the presence of visual content and, in case of visual content, for its humorous or non-humorous nature. we also identify narratives in relation to the protests in these images and including contextual material linked to the images (such as articles from news media), we further analyzed 20 humorous image tweets. disruptive humor in twitter images from protest out of 198 tweets that received more that 80 retweets, 128 had a visual content. the majority of those with a visual content had a non-humorous content (97 vs 31). nevertheless, as visible from figure 1, humorous content receives more retweets. figure 1: retweets received from humorous and non humorous visual content. (tweets with > 80 retweets). we find that while we can detect communities around user accounts of activist collectives, media institutions, and authorities (such as the hamburg police), we cannot observe a network centered around user accounts of residents of hamburg. this suggests that as seemingly neutral humorous perspectives these images do neither take the side of the activists or the authorities. rather, they seem to be shared across various communities in the network. yet, some of the images coded as humorous are among the most frequently shared tweets based on number of retweets and mentions. through a narrative analysis of the most frequently shared humorous image tweets, we find that the humor in the images was mainly achieved through the juxtaposition between the everyday life of citizens (such as shopping or cooking) being disrupted by the mass protests and particularly conflicts between protesters and authorities (such as burning barricades, riots, police in full gear). these images gain a high level of visibility within the social media logic (poell & van dijck, 2015), as they do not take sides in the conflictual situation between protesters and authorities and use humor combined with strong visuals. they represent a form of connective witnessing (mortensen, 2015) from the perspective of residents of the city of hamburg. yet, unlike images that bear witness of violent police action, they do not take sides in the conflict but are seemingly neutral. they represent the ambiguity of digital media culture (phillips & milner, 2018) of these images produced by residents of hamburg to make visible how their everyday life is disrupted by the conflictual protests. yet, they also convey the narrative of being just for the lulz (fun, laughter, or amusement), while they at the same time become part of the representation of conflictual events. this is amplified by news media such as der stern magazine (wachter, 2017) taking up the social media images and investigating and reporting about the story behind the comedian holding up the sign (see introduction). while these images might be posted and shared as a humorous dealing with the conflicting situation by residents in hamburg (see jensen et al. 2020, for similar observations), we argue that these seemingly apolitical images and videos shared across communities, still play a disruptive role in the narrative about political protest. users are perhaps more inclined to share these humorous juxtapositions in social media than political messages, as they do not actively take sides and cater the ambiguous humor in internet culture. the privileging of humorous content over political action or violent imagery, however, might push activists’ grievances in the background and make activists’ actions appear as disruptive to the everyday life of residents of hamburg. doing so, they delegitimate the actions and grievances of the activists by pushing the disruption of their everyday lives in the foreground and the burning barricades seemingly in the background. the juxtaposition stresses the barricades as an important element of the visual narrative of disruption but detached from the political grievances that they should express. with these findings, this research contributes to our understanding of how the logics of social media might influence narratives of contemporary protests. it also contributes by focusing on the role seemingly apolitical humorous images might play in the representation of protest in social media and turns our attention towards the seemingly apolitical sharing of these images by citizens. references bayerl, p. s., & stoynov, l. (2016). revenge by photoshop: memefying police acts in the public dialogue about injustice. new media & society, 18(6), 1006-1026. jensen, m. s., neumayer, c., & rossi, l. (2020). ‘brussels will land on its feet like a cat’: motivations for memefying# brusselslockdown. information, communication & society, 23(1), 59-75. mortensen, m. (2015). connective witnessing: reconfiguring the relationship between the individual and the collective. information, communication & society, 18(11), 13931406. neumayer, c., rossi, l., & karlsson, b. (2016). contested hashtags: blockupy frankfurt in social media. international journal of communication, 10(22), 5558–5579. neumayer, c., & rossi, l. (2018). images of protest in social media: struggle over visibility and visual narratives. new media & society, 20(11), 4293-4310. phillips, w., & milner, r. m. (2018). the ambivalent internet: mischief, oddity, and antagonism online. john wiley & sons. poell, t., & van dijck, j. (2015). social media and activist communication. in: atton, c. (ed). the routledge companion to alternative and community media (pp.527-537). london: routledge. wachter, d.s. (2017, 7 july). "nur kurz zu edeka" – mit diesem schild begeistert ein comedian das netz. der stern. available at: https://www.stern.de/politik/g20---nur-kurzzu-edeka----mit-diesem-schild-begeistert-ein-comedian-das-netz-7527956.html selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): west, s. m. (2017, october 18-21). do ciphers have politics?: discourses of the digital rights movement in the crypto wars 2.0. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. do ciphers have politics?: discourses of the digital rights movement in the crypto wars 2.0 sarah myers west usc annenberg school for communication and journalism encryption is a technical process that has become imbued with tremendous social and political value. it is a critical part of the infrastructure of the internet, making it possible to safely and securely transmit messages across the network. encryption technologies are behind every credit card transaction, bluetooth connection, and mobile phone call made by billions of users worldwide. like other forms of infrastructure, encryption could be seen as boring and mundane, “singularly unexciting” (star, 1999). despite this, encryption technologies have attracted a tremendous amount of attention in recent years due to debates over whether and under what conditions digital information should be allowed to be encrypted. these debates center on a contestation over two incompatible readings of the sociopolitical value of encryption: on the one hand, historical associations of encryption with the state, and on the other, more contemporary interpretations of encryption as a form of protection against mass surveillance. this paper seeks to tease out these divergent associations within the crypto wars 2.0 – a term intended to evoke a similar policy debate in the 1990s. i attend particularly to the development of a discourse associating encryption with human rights between the 90s and present day, exploring its politics through participant observation at digital rights conferences and interviews with privacy advocates, policy officials engaged in the debate, and technologists working on encryption projects. in so doing, i aim to describe the development of a new political imaginary for encryption in the networked age, one which seeks to redistribute power away from institutions and back to individuals. encryption has always been deeply intertwined with power: in the words of one scholar of cryptography, its purpose “is to help those already in power remain in power or those without power attain it” (ellison, 2008, 284). over its long history, this power has commonly been that of the state; many achievements in cryptography were arrived at under the auspices of military intelligence agencies seeking to translate skills in mathematics and technology into weapons that exploit the weaknesses of adversaries. as early as the fifth century b.c., herodotus made claims that the advantage of secret writing helped save greece from being conquered by the persian king xerxes (singh, 1999). george washington utilized substitution ciphers and invisible ink to manage his network of spies during the revolutionary war (rose, 2006), and the decipherment of the zimmermann telegram enabled great britain to push the united states out of its neutrality and in to world war i (kahn, 1967). the invention of public key encryption in the 1970s marked a change in the power dynamics of encryption. this method of encrypting a message without requiring the sender and receiver to know one another was an invention of academic cryptographers, not intelligence agencies. it broke the government monopoly on control of cryptographic technology, opening up the field and facilitating private sector usage of powerful new encryption techniques. it also invigorated a discourse among cryptophiles, who began envisioning new and radical uses for encryption (levy, 2001). the work of these cryptophiles, who came to call themselves the cypherpunks, laid important groundwork for the encryption movement of today. in a manifesto, cypherpunk co-founder timothy c. may reflected: “just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions” (may, 1993). he envisioned the democratic potential of encryption to flatten out power structures, redistributing power away from government institutions and toward individuals. similar ideas are expressed in calls for ubiquitous encryption by privacy advocates opposing mass surveillance. for example, in a recent speech director of the open technology institute kevin bankston said encryption “…protects us both from the maelstrom of an insecure internet and the 1984 of an unconstrained state that can see into every nook and cranny” (bankston, 2015). may’s vision can be seen refracted in this discourse; encryption is a tool to bolster the rights of individuals in the face of growing incursions on their privacy by powerful actors – not just intelligence agencies, but also corporations engaged in surveillance capitalism. other actors involved in the debate associate encryption with the protection of fundamental human rights. a key text in this discussion is the 2015 report by the united nations special rapporteur on free expression, which argued that encryption helps to lower barriers to the free flow of information and creates a zone of privacy necessary to make free expression possible (kaye, 2015). this dimension of the discourse places less emphasis on the rights of individuals, and more on the capacity of communities to develop the kinds of spaces necessary to for free expression (d. kaye, author interview, 2017). both of these perspectives are active within the discourse of the digital rights community, and are at work in shaping the implementation of encryption both in law and in code. cypherpunks both past and present are remarkably cognizant of the idea that “artifacts have politics” (winner, 1980). their work is imbued with the sense that the architecture of technologies would lead to certain constructions of power and authority; indeed many of them believed they were participating in a project that would bring forth major social and political change. my analysis thus concludes with the ways in which the construction of law and code by the cypherpunks aims to achieve particular sociopolitical consequences (winner, 1991). references bankston, k. (2016). a tale of two dystopias: order and chaos on the electronic frontier. keynote address, the frontiers of cybersecurity policy and law conference at the robert s. strauss center for international security and law, university of texas at austin law school. coombs, a. w. m. (1983). the making of colossus. annals of the history of computing, 5(3): 253. ellison, k. (2008). cryptogrammatophoria: the romance and novelty of losing readers in code. eighteenth century fiction, 20(3): 281-305. the guardian. (2016, aug. 31). encryption: fbi building fresh case for access to electronic devices. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/31/encryption-fbi-building-freshcase-for-access-to-electronic-devices. kahn, d. (1996). the codebreakers: the comprehensive history of secret communication from ancient times to the internet. new york: scribner. kaye, d. (2015). report on encryption, anonymity, and the human rights framework. office of the high commissioner, united nations human rights council. http://www.ohchr.org/en/issues/freedomopinion/pages/callforsubmission.aspx kaye, d. (2017, feb. 22). personal interview. kehl, d., wilson, a. and bankston, k. (2015). doomed to repeat history?: lessons from the crypto wars of the 1990s. open technology institute. https://static.newamerica.org/attachments/3407-125/lessons%20from%20the%20crypto%20wars%20of%20the%201990s.882d6156d c194187a5fa51b14d55234f.pdf levy, s. (2001). crypto: how the code rebels beat the government – saving privacy in the digital age. new york: penguin group. may, t. c. (1993). the crypto-anarchist manifesto. activism.net. https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html rose, a. (2006). washington’s spies: the story of america’s first spy ring. new york: bantam books. singh, s. (1999). the code book: the science of secrecy from ancient egypt to quantum cryptography. new york: doubleday star, susan leigh. (1999). the ethnography of infrastructure. the american behavioral scientist, 43(3): 377. winner, l. (1980). do artifacts have politics?. daedalus, 121-136. winner, l. (1993). upon opening the black box and finding it empty: social constructivism and the philosophy of technology. science, technology, & human values, 18(3), 362-378. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): frizzo-barker, j. (2020, october). women in blockchain. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. women in blockchain: discourse & practice in the coconstruction of gender & emerging technologies julie frizzo-barker simon fraser university blockchain dreams of peer-to-peer decentralization echo the cybernetic tradition of signal processing or the spiritualist tradition of telepathy in the age-old pursuit of the “dream of direct communication” without the hassles of imperfect, complex human mediation (swartz, 2017, p. 90). but as scholars of communication, and science and technology studies (sts) have argued, technological innovations consist of more than algorithms and artefacts. they reflect continuities and disjunctures in social and organizational arrangements (mackenzie & wajcman, 1999; boczkowski & lievrouw, 2008). as an emerging technology, blockchain’s definition, development, and diffusion are still in flux. and like many other technology spaces, blockchain has a gender problem. according to a recent study of 100 blockchain startups, only 14% of employees were women, and among those just 7% were in leadership roles (custer, 2018). in its short history as the decentralized technology beneath cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin (nakamoto, 2009), blockchain’s male-dominated sphere has fueled stereotypes such as the ‘bitcoin bros’ (bowles, 2018). blockchain is rooted in the sociotechnical infrastructures of the finance and technology industries it purports to disrupt. in one extreme example of crypto culture at its worst, at a recent north american bitcoin conference in miami, three of the 88 speakers were women and the event concluded with a party at a strip club (primack, 2018). in response to blockchain’s stark gendered and racial inequities, advocacy groups and social networks such as crypto chicks, she256, black women blockchain council, and diversity in blockchain have emerged. at the local level, burgeoning meetups for women in blockchain present accessible opportunities for women at various levels of expertise to network and advance in the space (griffith, 2018). in may 2018, the “women on the block” conference showcased the expertise of 50 women blockchain experts who spoke on raising capital, creating startups, and legal issues, with proceeds 2 going toward a charitable fund to support education for women and girls in technology. here we see evidence of blockchain working as a “convening technology” (baym, swartz & alarcon, 2019), galvanizing diverse stakeholders to converge and envision alterative approaches. i conducted a technofeminist (wajcman, 2004) discourse analysis based on 30 semistructured interviews with women who work in blockchain, located in vancouver, seattle, toronto, ottawa, new york, berlin, and dubai, as well as participant observation at 17 blockchain meetups and conferences. the gendered discourses and practices surrounding blockchain provide a productive site for examining the social construction of technologies (pinch & bijker, 1987), and more specifically the gendered social shaping of technologies. for example, at the outset of this study, a simple webbased search for local meetups yielded a list of gendered gatherings, including “bitcoin gentlemen’s club” and “crypto witch futurist brunch.” in overt and subtle ways, individuals are hailed toward or repelled away from participating in certain tech spaces. the theoretical lens of technofeminism strikes a balance between technophilia and technophobia, “to explore the complex ways in which women’s everyday lives and technological change interrelate in the age of digitization” (wajcman, 2004, p. 6). this approach challenges the prevailing discourses of technologies like blockchain as neutral and value-free. i examine gender not as a rigid analytic category, but a fluid one whose meaning emerges in social contexts as it is created and recreated. viewed through this lens, the things interviewees do (practices), and the ways they talk about those things (discourses) expose the material/symbolic relationships between gender and blockchain in the earliest stages of this emerging technology. scholars have urged that “more attention should be directed at cases where women are active users and designers [of icts]; even if these are not the ‘majority cases,’ they are important within a strategy for developing new perspectives on gender and ict” (lie, 2006, p. 170). the goal of my study is not to answer questions such as, “why aren’t there more women in blockchain?” or “how can we attract more women into blockchain?” rather, i examine the sociotechnical relations surrounding blockchain, through several discursive frames as exemplified through meetups and conferences. these frames include: the dominant “gender-blind meritocracy” frame evident in most male-dominated events, the genderconscious “lean into blockchain” frame seen at ‘by women, for women’ events, and finally the “intentional inclusion” frame seen at ‘by women, for all genders’ events. i analyzed gender equity initiatives at blockchain events through the discursive frames above. my findings indicate that women’s participation in blockchain spaces can simultaneously enable and constrain their identities and experiences. for example, “women in blockchain” panels at male-dominated blockchain conferences are often experienced by women in the space as hollow, performative gestures of diversity, since they highlight panelists primarily based on gender as opposed to tech expertise. in contrast, events and networks designed ‘by women, for women’ serve as important spaces of resistance and support, for many women curious about entering the field as well as experienced practitioners. in addition, ‘by women, for all genders’ events showcase women’s expertise and rally the support of male allies in order to bring greater equity to the space at large. they highlight gender equity based on a broader sense of sustainability and social justice, as opposed to the technological and economic 3 imperatives that fuel blockchain development, market share and adoption, within the other discursive frames. my study explores gender and blockchain meetups as an example of broader sociotechnical shifts occurring with the rise of diversity and inclusion consciousness in tech at present. references baym, n., swartz, l., & alarcon, a. (2019). convening technologies: blockchain and the music industry. international journal of communication, 13(0), 402–421. bowles, n. (2018, february 25). women in cryptocurrencies push back against ‘blockchain bros.’ new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/25/business/cryptocurrency-women-blockchainbros.html boczkowski, p., & lievrouw, l. a. (2008). bridging sts and communication studies: scholarship on media and information technologies. in e. j. hackett, o. amsterdamska, m. lynch, & j. wajcman (eds.), the handbook of science and technology studies (pp. 949–977). mit press. custer, c. (2018). blockchain’s gender divide: a data story—longhash. retrieved february 24, 2020, from https://en.longhash.com/news/blockchains-gender-dividea-data-story griffith, e. (2018). for women in cryptocurrency, a new effort to grow their ranks. wired. retrieved april 6, 2018, from https://www.wired.com/story/for-women-incryptocurrency-a-new-effort-to-grow-their-ranks/ lie, m. (2006). a cultural studies approach to gender and ict. in e. m. trauth (ed.), encyclopedia of gender and information technology (pp. 166–171). idea group inc (igi). mackenzie, d., & wajcman, j. (eds.). (1999). the social shaping of technology (2 edition). mcgraw hill education / open university. nakamoto, s. (2009, may 24). bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. https://web.archive.org/web/20140320135003/https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf pinch, t., & bijker, w. e. (1987). the social construction of facts and artifacts: or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit from each other. in w. e. bijker, t. p. hughes, t. pinch, & d. g. douglas (eds.), the social construction of technological systems: new directions in the sociology and history of technology (pp. 17–51). mit press. primack, d. (2018). bitcoin conference ends at a strip club. axios. https://www.axios.com/bitcoin-conference-stripclub-1516983254-35e78aad-ee304872-bfe6-13190dd46061.html 4 swartz, l. (2017). blockchain dreams: imagining techno-economic alternatives after bitcoin. in m. castells (ed.), another economy is possible: culture and economy in a time of crisis. john wiley & sons. wajcman, j. (2004). technofeminism. polity. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): mannell, k., plaut, e., kania-lundholm, m. & a. beattie. (2019, october 2-5). doubt and disengagement: technologies and practices of digital disconnection. panel presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. doubt and disengagement: technologies and practices of digital disconnection introductory statement when people distrust media systems, one response is to disconnect. this emergent theme within internet research encompasses technologies, practices, discourses, and politics of disconnection. burgeoning scholarly interest in these areas has been partly driven by recognition that media and communication scholarship has traditionally overlooked such issues due to its long-standing focus on forms and technologies of connection. it has also been driven by recognition of the changing nature of people’s everyday engagement with online and digital media. as networked communication technologies become ubiquitous, finding ways to connect––whether to technologies, ideas, or each other––is less the challenge; rather, is it finding ways to manage, limit, and resist connections that is most urgent. to further these discussions of disconnection, this panel draws together four investigations into technologies and practices of digital disconnection. in response to the conference theme ‘trust in the system’, each paper interrogates a different form of disconnection and considers the various elements of trust and/or mistrust that are entangled with these phenomena. the first two papers focus on forms of disconnection that center around avoidance. the first paper takes up the problem of digital propaganda and the associated declining trust in online media systems. it considers how forms of informational avoidance might open new spaces for resistance to propaganda and misinformation. the second paper considers the challenge of managing personal availability in a context where mobile communication––particularly messaging apps––create expectations of continual availability. it investigates the partly duplicitous practices that young adults use to avoid other people without causing relational tension or conflict. in both papers, languages broadly conceived (including programming languages) 2 provide the central mechanism for disconnection. the first proposes strategic illiteracies as a way out of the double-bind caused by growing mistrust in media systems, as scepticism leads either to acceptance of conspiracy or to an impossible program of exhaustively vetting information. drawing on parallels with anti-colonial resistance to literacy in colonizers’ languages, the paper proposes strategic illiteracy as an alternative to digital literacy initiatives––suggesting that avoidance may provide a means of mitigating misinformation without the burden of developing impossible levels of expertise. the second paper analyses language drawn from interviews with young adults about their messaging practices, outlining a range of discursive strategies that participants deployed to limit their availability to others. the paper argues that these discursive avoidance practices were enabled by a system of implicit interpersonal trust that gave participants confidence that their strategies would be understood and respected by others. the remaining two papers consider how neoliberal discourses of self-improvement are involved in the impetus to disconnect and shape the forms that disconnection takes. in contrast to the first two papers, where disconnection is understood through linguistic processes and metaphors, the disconnections in these papers are based around consumption choices and technology design. the third paper argues that, in many cases, digital disconnection is incorporated into the neoliberal capitalist system rather than resisting it. the paper outlines how forms of disconnection that are enacted through conspicuous consumption (or non-consumption) are premised upon a logic of cool refusal, where modes of resistance become choices within a market. the fourth paper takes up these arguments via a case of the anti-distraction app siempo. drawing on interviews and the app-walk-through method, the paper interrogates the features within siempo, unpacking how their design relates to the app’s promise of emancipation from smartphone addiction. it argues that the app is ultimately less about breaking connections and more about redirecting online behaviours towards aspirational ends. both papers view these forms of disconnection as, at least partly, a reflection of growing distrust in dominant modes of technology design, specifically their cognitive impacts. in response, the disconnective practices and technologies discussed in these papers place their trust in individualised solutions. both papers consider the grounds on which this trust is founded and question the individualisation of large-scale social problems, both in terms of effectiveness and implications for equality. taken as a whole, this panel raises important questions about the viability and politics of various forms of disconnection. it contributes to scholarly debate around disconnection by considering new forms of disconnection, their role in our contemporary media environment, and the forms of trust and mistrust they reflect. 3 ‘strategic illiteracies’: computational propaganda and the legacy of resistance to orthographic imperialism ethan plaut university of auckland, new zealand there is no easy fix for computational propaganda. some solutions, such as legislation, function at the level of structural reform to untrustworthy media systems. at the level of the individual, vast amounts of funding, effort, and hope have been invested in education-based initiatives to help people parse, navigate, and participate in our mediated public. some even suggest that “education is the only antidote to fake news” (davies, 2018). this article considers the possibilities and limitations of these educational initiatives, which are broadly understood as ‘literacies’, and proposes an alternative approach of ‘strategic illiteracies’. many things have been called literacies: cultural literacy, visual literacy, critical literacy, television literacy. computer literacy was big in the 1980s. later came internet literacy, procedural literacy and computational literacy (leu, kinzer, coiro, & cammack, 2004; vee, 2013). these literacies are proposed as solutions to many problems, and in some specific contexts, they may be effective (e.g., jeong, cho, & hwang, 2012). this paper is focused on the problems of digital propaganda and two distinct pedagogical movements against it. first, “media literacy” programs teach laypeople media skills including evaluation of messages in terms of origin, intention, facticity, and other ostensible qualities. second, “computational literacy” and “computational thinking” go beyond the ability to code, arguing for computation as a general method of problem solving. our trust in media systems can be used against us, but so can our distrust. media literacy initiatives that teach people to distrust what they read online cut multiple ways. this may lead to better-informed citizens in many cases. unfortunately, independent research is often burdensome or impracticable for individuals. if media literacy initiatives teach people to trust their own ad hoc investigations (often simply google searches) more than they trust journalists and other professionals, we risk exacerbating the collapse of trust brought about by disinformation (boyd, 2017, 2018). conspiracy theories, which promise dramatically unmasked truths, similarly prey on this phony sophistication (andrejevic, 2013, pp. 111–135). members of the public cannot develop the expertise and devote the resources to conduct serious investigations into the issues of the day. likewise, training journalists in computation may better equip them to handle certain problems, but computational literacy is not a panacea for our propagandized newsmedia ecosystem. under certain conditions, digital literacies movements may even make journalists’ problems worse. 4 when computational propaganda seeks to overwhelm, confuse, and simply exhaust, perhaps ‘literacies’ are not the right response. herculean efforts to make sense of nonsense precisely play into the hands of propagandists. the sophistication and volume of computational propaganda may in some sense be new, but people can draw on strategies developed long ago for resisting media that threaten to overwhelm culture. while resistance to technological literacies may be derided as ludditism and philistinism, this paper proposes ‘strategic illiteracies’ as a different lineage of thought and action. the assumption that literacy is a basic skill — and therefore neutral, a useful tool whatever your values — makes it a perfect placeholder or metaphor for other skills, technical and otherwise (wysocki & johnson-eilola, 1999). but this naïve concept of literacy masks its power relations. throughout history, people have protected their cultures by resisting not only foreign tongues but also foreign alphabets. this has been especially true with alphabets associated with imperial power, from the greek alphabet in classical antiquity (colvin, 2014) and chinese characters across east asia (takayama, 1995) to the latin alphabet later used by british, spanish, french, and other colonial powers to subjugate indigenous and other local cultures around the world. by refusing to learn colonizers’ languages and alphabets, people have cultivated these ‘strategic illiteracies’ to resist domination and protect their own culture. to analyse this counterintuitive notion that problematic media might be met not with additional literacies, but with a strategic lack thereof, this paper turns to the economic concept of ‘commitment devices’ or ‘ulysses pacts,’ ways in which we constrain our own future actions (e.g., elster, 1979, 2000; schelling, 1984). for example, people use retirement savings to prevent themselves from spending. similarly, people use specialized software to block their own access to social media and avoid distractions (plaut, 2015). strategic illiteracies are peculiar and profound ulysses pacts, forms of ‘strategic ignorance’ (carrillo & mariotti, 2000) that go beyond mere transactions to existential resistance, ways we choose to think and be — or not. it isn’t always necessary or right to understand the world in someone else’s terms, through someone else’s media. but it can be hard to resist. of the situation in india, aijaz ahmad writes: “one cannot reject english now, on the basis of its initially colonial insertion, any more than one can boycott the railways for the same reason” (1994, p. 77). digital media approach this infrastructural stage. neither individuals’ technical literacies nor their rejection thereof will fix untrustworthy systems. having reached this conclusion, though, people might at least be relieved of the unrealistic expectation that they learn to make sense of nonsense. references ahmad, a. (1994). in theory: classes, nations, literatures. london: verso. 5 andrejevic, m. (2013). infoglut: how too much information is changing the way we think and know. routledge. boyd, danah. (2017, january 5). did media literacy backfire? retrieved april 4, 2018, from https://points.datasociety.net/did-media-literacy-backfire-7418c084d88d boyd, danah. (2018, march 9). you think you want media literacy… do you? retrieved april 4, 2018, from https://points.datasociety.net/you-think-you-want-medialiteracy-do-you-7cad6af18ec2 carrillo, j. d., & mariotti, t. (2000). strategic ignorance as a self-disciplining device. the review of economic studies, 67(3), 529–544. cazden, c., cope, b., fairclough, n., gee, j., & al, et. (1996). a pedagogy of multiliteracies: designing social futures. harvard educational review; cambridge, 66(1), 60. colvin, s. (2014). a brief history of ancient greek (1 edition). chichester, west sussex ; malden, ma: wiley-blackwell. davies, h. (2018, february 19). why education is the only antidote to fake news. new statesman. retrieved from http://tech.newstatesman.com/guest-opinion/educationantidote-fake-news elster, j. (1979). ulysses and the sirens: studies in rationality and irrationality. cambridge, england: cambridge university press. elster, j. (2000). ulysses unbound: studies in rationality, precommitment, and constraints. cambridge, england: cambridge university press. jeong, s.-h., cho, h., & hwang, y. (2012). media literacy interventions: a meta-analytic review. journal of communication, 62(3), 454–472. jewitt, c., & kress, g. r. (2003). multimodal literacy. p. lang. leu, d. j., kinzer, c. k., coiro, j. l., & cammack, d. w. (2004). toward a theory of new literacies emerging from the internet and other information and communication technologies. theoretical models and processes of reading, 5(1), 1570–1613. plaut, e. r. (2015). technologies of avoidance: the swear jar and the cell phone. first monday, 20(11). schelling, t. c. (1984). self-command in practice, in policy, and in a theory of rational choice. the american economic review, 74(2), 1–11. takayama, k. p. (1995). adaptation and resistance to chinese literary hegemony: korea and japan. international journal of politics, culture, and society, 8(3), 467–488. 6 vee, a. (2013). understanding computer programming as a literacy. literacy in composition studies, 1(2), 42–64. https://doi.org/10.21623/1.1.2.4 wysocki, a. f., & johnson-eilola, j. (1999). blinded by the letter: why are we using literacy as a metaphor for everything else? passions, pedagogies, and 21st century technologies, 349–68. 7 ‘sorry just saw your message!’: discursive strategies for disconnecting via mobile messaging apps kate mannell university of melbourne, australia scholars have recently begun to focus on how people not only connect through online platforms, but also limit and withhold connections (light, 2014; karppi, 2018; morrison & gomez, 2014). ben light (2014) for instance, demonstrates how using social media platforms involves disconnective practices, such as stalking other users and restricting the visibility of posts, as much as it involves connective practices, such as friending, liking, and sharing. while these disconnective practices are enabled by social media platforms, they also resist the imperative to connect that underpins the plaforms’ design. research suggests that disconnective practices may be especially significant within young adults’ use of mobile messaging apps, such as facebook messenger and whatsapp. firstly, young adults are typically heavy users of mobile messaging (lenhart, 2012). further, the ubiquity of mobile devices has led to an expectation that people are continually available, which, in turn, means that people must actively work to manage their availability to others (ling, 2016; burchell, 2017a; 2017b). as typically heavy users of messaging, young adults must continually work to manage their mobilemediated availability to others. lastly, being able to limit availability to friends can be important to the wellbeing of young adults. research by hall and baym (2012), for instance, found that when young people were unable to limit their mobile contact with friends it could produce negative feelings of over-dependence and entrapment. accordingly, the expectations of continual availability scripted into mobile communication together with the relational implications of mobile connections in the lives of young people, suggest that disconnective practices will be especially significant within young adults’ use of messaging apps. to better understand how young adults navigate these complex conditions, this paper investigates the discursive strategies they use when messaging in order to avoid or delay interactions with friends. these discursive strategies include using written text, images, and silence as tools for resisting and reducing connections. to understand these practices, the paper draws on data from an in-depth interview study of young adults use of messaging apps. for this study, 24 young adults (13 female, 11 male) were interviewed twice over a period of six months. they were also asked to provide a sample of messages that were then used as a prompt within the interviews. participants were aged between aged 18-30 and were living in melbourne at the time of the interviews. 8 the findings from these interviews reveal five key discursive strategies for limiting and reducing connection: vagueness, closers, deception, dissuasion, and silence. vagueness refers to the practice of sending intentionally ambiguous messages as a means of controlling availability; closers refers to techniques used to end a conversation; deception refers to the practice of lying when accounting for past or future unavailability; dissuasion refers to the use of language to dissuade an interlocutor from continuing a conversation; and silence refers to the practice of not responding to a message as a means of enforcing boundaries. these categories are not mutually exclusive––for instance, a person might use vagueness when being deceptive. the strategies can also be used in combination with other technical or temporal mechanisms for restricting availability, such as changing notification settings or altering the speed of reply. analysing these practices through goffman’s (1956; 1967) frameworks of impression management, face-work, and ritual interaction highlights the often delicate interpersonal dynamics involved in using discursive strategies to limit and reduce connections. it demonstrates that discursive strategies are not just ways of reducing connection but are always attempts to do so in a manner that is tactful––that protects the face of the person using the strategy and the face of the person it is directed toward. for instance, when sending minimal messages to discourage a reply (dissuasion) participants were often trying to signal disinterest without having to engage in forms of explicit rejection that may be hurtful to others or reflect poorly on them. that is not to say, however, that these strategies are without risk or were always successful in my participants’ accounts: tact can be ignored, fronts can be challenged, and attempts at impression management can fail. while driven, in part, by relational dynamics that are also present in face-to-face interaction, the accounts of my participants demonstrate that these discursive strategies are also shaped by the affordances of mobile devices and messaging apps. for instance, messaging’s lack of meta-textual cues––like tone of voice or facial expression––results in a semantic instability that often causes misunderstandings. participants were highly aware of this semantic instability and, when using vagueness to control their availability, they strategically leveraged it to create messages that could be interpreted in multiple ways. similarly, when using deception to account for their unavailability, participants described drawing on the asynchronicity of messaging, which gave them time to craft a viable excuse, and the lack of meta-textual cues, which made is easier to carry out the lie as they did not have to control their voice or body language. the success of these discursive strategies often relied on systems of trust. participants described the importance of implicit agreement between friends that managing mobile availability was difficult, and that discursive strategies for doing so would not be challenged. this is akin to goffman’s (1959, p. 230-233) descriptions of the collusion 9 between performer and audience, whereby the audience accepts and supports a performance even when they aware that it is face-saving front. audience collusion was particularly evident in participants’ descriptions of being on the receiving end of the same discursive strategies that they employed. they described recognising that their interlocutor was trying to save face, in the same manner that they often did, and leaving space for them to do so successfully by not interrogating or undermining the discursive strategies they had deployed. these discursive strategies reveal that, contrary to popular characterisations of young adults as hyper-connected, many young adults have a range of connectionmanagement techniques that they use to reduce their connections to others. furthermore, these techniques are often supported by broader social agreements about the difficulty of managing availability and the importance of discursive strategies in doing so tactfully. references burchell, k. (2017a). everyday communication management and perceptions of use: how media users limit and shape their social world. convergence, 23(4), 409-242. doi:10.1177/1354856517700382 burchell, k. (2017b). finding time for goffman: when absence is more telling than presence. in t. markham & s. rodgers (eds.), conditions of mediation: phenomenological perspectives on media (pp. 185-196). new york: peter lang goffman, e. (1967). interaction ritual. new york: anchor books. goffman, e. (1956). the presentation of self in everyday life. new york: anchor books. hall, j., & baym, n. (2012). calling and texting (too much): mobile maintenance expectations,(over) dependence, entrapment, and friendship satisfaction. new media & society, 14(2), 316-331. doi:10.1177/1461444811415047 lenhart, a. (2012). teens, smartphones & texting. pew internet & american life project 21, 1-34. available at: http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/03/19/teenssmartphones-texting/ light, b. (2014). disconnecting with social networking sites. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. ling, r. (2016). soft coercion: reciprocal expectations of availability in the use of mobile communication. first monday, 21(9), doi:10.5210/fm.v21i9.6814 10 morrison, s. l., & gomez, r. (2014). pushback: expressions of resistance to the “evertime” of constant online connectivity. first monday, 19(8). doi: 10.5210/fm.v19i8.4902 11 cool refusal: rejecting digital technology in late capitalism magdalena kania-lundholm uppsala university, sweden this paper asks what it means to disconnect from online media in a society where networked digital technologies (icts), including social media, permeate all spheres of social life. more specifically, it explores the notion of online disconnection, also referred to as media refusal (portwood-stacer, 2012). disconnection here is understood as both disconnection from particular digital devices or social media platforms as well as the broader discourse about whether people have a ‘right to disconnect’. these forms of disconnection exist in relation to connection as a possibility (light, 2014, hesselberth, 2017). they are also responses to the culture of connectivity––of being ‘always on’–– that results in so-called information fatigue and overload, and is linked to an array of concerns about people’s health and well-being. due to growing pressures to resist the culture of connectivity, individuals are increasingly expected to manage and restrict their connections, often through practices of online disconnection. in this paper, i locate the practices and discourses of disconnection within the context of cool capitalism defined as the “incorporation of disaffection into capitalism itself” which constitutes the front region of neoliberal culture (mcguigan, 2009). cool capitalism refers to the cultural aspects of the current dominant, post-fordist model of capitalism and can be understood as transition from the mid-twentieth century organized capitalism to the global neoliberal capitalism. this transition can also be understood in terms of the changing role between technology and society and the shifting relationship between humans and technology. the previously dominant industrial technology was mainly legitimized by instrumental rationality and technological reason (habermas, 1970) and was at the center of social planning, control and progress. however, the rise of digital, networked technologies marked the emergence of the “new spirit of capitalism” and the “connexionist world” (boltanski and chiapello, 2005). such a shift also placed technology at the center of individual empowerment and emancipation. the transition from organized capitalism and industrial technology towards global neoliberal capitalism and networked technology has contributed to shifting conceptualisations of the relationship between humans and technology. while the industrial period can be described in terms of utilitarian “man versus machine” logic, the current period is marked by a networked logic that is characterized by a flattened and non-hierarchical distinction between humans and technology (fisher, 2010). in this context, technology receives an elevated status. it is framed by the techno-rational and techno-deterministic discourses that view technology not only as beneficial, but also as inevitable and desireable. in this context, emerging individual models of achievement, especially for young people, include the ideal of the neoliberal self, which combines the entrepreneurial spirit with consumer sovereignty (mcguigan, 2014). i argue that, similar to the way cool became incorporated into everyday life and global neoliberal capitalist mainstream, cool refusal is an ideology not just about media resistance (syvertsen, 2017), but is also a culturally and historically specific moment of 12 individual coping in the era of neoliberal hyperconnectivity. the ideology of cool refusal is underpinned by a logic that encompasses three main interconnected aspects of social life: lifestyle choices, workplace strategies, and consumption patterns. this is to say that coolness is strived for and achieved mainly through conspicuous consumption of disconnective and/or analogue devices and conspicuous non-consumption of online media (portwood-stacer, 2012, thorén et al, 2017). consequently, it becomes incorporated into the cultural mainstream in a manner similar to the way that notions of authenticity, self-empowerment and individuality inform the neoliberal self. in this way, for instance, temporary quitting of social media can be understood not as a political act but rather as self-management technique aiming to achieve higher productivity and efficiency (fish, 2017, sutton, 2017). the logic of cool refusal implies that the acts of seemingly resistive and disaffected potential become incorporated in the capitalist modus operandi. by proposing the concept of cool refusal, and analysing its underlying logics, this paper aims to contribute to the rapidly growing body of research that makes an attempt to understand online disconnection and media refusal as an inherent element of media (dis)engagement in the digital age. finally, i suggest that in the context where disconnection is increasingly commodified and omnipresent, disconnection is becoming ‘the new luxury’ that only some can afford. this is especially the case in contexts where connection comes at the price of compromising one’s privacy and autonomy, which are increasingly subjecting to corporate power and data exploitation (karppi, 2018, couldry & meijas, 2019). the question of whether “the right to disconnect” becoming new type of privilege will produce new forms of social and digital exclusion remains open for scholarly investigation. references boltanski, l. chiapello, e. (2005). the new spirit of capitalism. london: verso couldry, n., meijas, c. (2019). the cost of connection. how data is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism. stanford: stanford univ. press fish, a. (2017). technology retreats and the politics of social media. triplec, 15(1), 355-369. fisher, e. (2010). media and capitalism in digital age: the spirit of networks. new york: palgrave habermas, j. (1970). technology and science as “ideology”, in: toward a rational society. boston: beacon press hesselberth, p. (2017). discourses on disconnectivity and the right to disconnect, new media & society, 20(5), 1994-2010. karppi, t. (2018). disconnect. facebook’s affective bonds. minnesota univ. press light, b. (2014). disconnecting with social networking sites. palgrave macmillan 13 mcguigan, j. (2009). cool capitalism. london: pluto press mcguigan,j. (2014). the neoliberal self. culture unbound, (6): 223-240. portwood-stacer, l. (2012). media refusal and conspicuous non-consumption: the performative and political dimensions of facebook abstention. new media & society (5), 1-17. sutton, t. (2017). "disconnect to reconnect: the food/technology metaphor in digital detoxing", first monday, 22(6). syvertsen , t. (2017). media resistance. protest, dislike, abstention. london: palgrave macmillan thorén, c., edenius, m., eriksson lundström, j., kitzmann, a. (2017). the hipster's dilemma: what is analogue or digital in the post-digital society? convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, online first. doi: 10.1177/1354856517713139 14 setting your own tempo: disconnective features that enable digital disengagement alex beattie victoria university of wellington, new zealand this paper responds to bivens and hasinoff’s (2018) call to uncover technology features that resist dominant structural systems. the ‘attention economy’ is a dominant socio-economic system underpinning digital technology that degrades user trust by driving undesirable hyper-connectivity. at a micro-level, the attention economy incentivizes software developers to create habitual technological experiences that glues users to their screens (alter, 2017). at a macro-level, the attention economy commoditizes user attention and reorganizes the internet into a persuasive advertising platform (wu, 2016). moreover, the attention economy purportedly amplifies arduous communicative norms, such as fear of missing out (fomo) and the burden of constant availability (lanier, 2018) which has been linked to increased rates of loneliness, anxiety or depression (reer et al., 2019) and losses in focus and productivity (carr, 2011; foot, 2014). i offer an empirical investigation of ‘disconnective features’––technical features that resist the attention economy and disconnect users from the internet––and ‘disconnective technologies’––internet jammers, productivity applications or technologies that disconnect users from the internet. while disconnective features and technologies, prima facie, appear to be oxymoronic by requiring users to connect to technology in order to disconnect from technology (hesselberth, 2018), i position disconnective features and technologies as extensions of what ben light (2014) calls ‘disconnective practices’: actions within the network (such as unfollowing someone on facebook) that untie users from connective possibilities when using networked information communication tools. i analyse a disconnective technology called siempo, an android launcher application that aims to break smartphone addiction and reform the attention economy. co-founded by social entrepreneur and technology designer andrew dunn, siempo offers several disconnective features that enable users to disconnect from their device. in this paper i ask: what disconnective features does siempo deploy to facilitate user disconnection from the network, and secondly, what are the cultural implications when disconnection is technically produced or enabled via a smartphone application? using a mix of the walkthrough method (light et al., 2016) and a semi-structured interview undertaken with siempo co-founder andrew dunn in september 2018, i outline two disconnective features of siempo. the first is batched notifications: a software protocol that disconnects the user by customizing do not disturb functionalities to delay the transmission of information across the network and ensure the end user receives notifications on a ‘tempo’ or schedule of their choice. batched notifications represent an interactive aspect of software that has largely been overlooked by media studies. recent application or platform studies approaches (see helmond, 2015; dieter et al., 2018) suggest network connections as entry points to studying software applications. by analysing a disconnective feature such as batched 15 notifications, i reveal the opposite: the nuances in which network connections can be severed, delayed, or otherwise disconnected for the benefit of the end user. this offers an alternative perspective on software functionalities––one that captures instances where people seek refuge from networks or even desire network infrastructure to temporarily fail. this perspective opens up new possibilities for a more comprehensive and critical approach to platform and infrastructure studies. the second disconnective feature i describe as ‘plain packaging’, where iconography, branding, and other cues that encourage the use of flagged or ‘addictive’ applications are stripped from the interface. addiction experts justify plain packaging on the basis that branding on cigarette packets appropriates people’s attention and primes them to keep smoking (wakefield et al., 2013). the plain-packaging of the siempo interface draws upon similar psychology to create a uniform and dull interface designed to disincentivize smartphone use. to this end, i argue that siempo reveals two distinct modes of disconnective features: an actual intrusion between connections on the internet, and a fabrication of disconnection, where no interference with network connections is undertaken, but rather, users are incentivized to disconnect from their device by the deployment of psychological design. the use of psychological design to fabricate disconnection shifts the operation of disconnection onto the end user. there are, however, implications when incentivizing disconnection via self-management techniques. as a technology of the self (foucault, 1988) siempo encourages users to manage themselves as self-regulated and autonomous but, critically, productive agents. the cultural implications of disconnection via a technology of the self, i argue, is the transformation of disconnection into something that is less to do with breaking connections per se, and more about the redirection of online behavior for productive or healthy purposes, or otherwise selfoptimal ends. more broadly, a consequence of self-regulating smartphone behavior is the individualisation of the social problem of the attention economy and associated pervasive digital distractions. references alter, a. (2017). irresistible: why we can’t stop checking, scrolling, clicking and watching. london: the bodley head. bivens, r. & hasinoff, a. a. (2018). rape: is there an app for that? an empirical analysis of the features of anti-rape apps. information, communication & society. 21(8), 1050-1067. carr, n. (2011). the shallows: what the internet is doing to our brains. new york: w. w. norton & company. dieter, m., gerlitz, c., helmond, a., tkacz, n., van der vlist, f. & weltevrede, e. (2018). store, interface, package, connection methods and propositions for multi-situated app studies [white paper] working paper series, no. 4, august 2018, collaborative research center 1187 media of cooperation, retrieved from https://www001.zimt.unisiegen.de/ojs/index.php/wps1187/article/view/29 16 foot, k. (2014). the online emergence of pushback on social media in the united states: a historical discourse analysis. international journal of communication, 8, 1313–1342. foucault, m. (1988). technologies of the self. in: l. h. martin, h. gutman & p. h. hutton (eds.), technologies of the self: a seminar with michel foucault. amherst: the university of massachusetts press, 16-49. hesselberth, p. (2018). discourses on disconnectivity and the right to disconnect. new media & society, 20(5), 1994–2010. helmond, a. (2015). the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready. social media + society. doi: 10.1177/2056305115603080 lanier, j. (2018). ten arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now. london: the bodley head. light, b. (2014). disconnecting with social networking sites. houndmills, basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. light, b., burgess, j. & duguay, s. (2016). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps, new media & society, 20(3), 881-900. reer, f., tang, w. y., & quandt, t. (2019). psychosocial well-being and social media engagement: the mediating roles of social comparison orientation and fear of missing out. new media & society, online first: doi: 10.1177/1461444818823719 wakefield, m. a., hayes, l., durkin, s. & borland, r. (2013). introduction effects of the australian plain packaging policy on adult smokers: a cross-section study, bmj open, 3(7). doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2013-003175 wu, t. (2016). the attention merchants: the epic scramble to get inside our heads. new york: alfred a. knopf. microsoft word 739-489-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 transitioning in thailand online jillana enteen northwestern university j-enteen@northwestern.edu abstract this paper argues, via transnational cyberculture studies and the examination of english language websites generated in thailand marketing gender-related surgeries, that both sexuality and gender are diffuse sets of social, political, and interpersonal expectations with particular histories and effects. it shows three distinct websites generated in thailand to attract western medical tourists by depicting bodies in transition: both from the perspectives of sex/gender surgeries and transnational travel. the shifting strategies and multiple translations deployed by the thai medical tourism industry via an online presence, which have been compiled in a database that spans three years, are suggested through these three representative websites. keywords cyberculture studies, gender/sexuality studies, queer theory, transnational communication, medical tourism, thailand, internet studies booking surgeries in thailand on world wide web medical tourism sites transnational cyberculture studies highlights the importance of legal and social control over sexualities and normative, albeit highly differentiated among cultures, gender roles for individual nations, and brings to the fore the problems with both understandings of sexuality as sexual practices and presuming gender is a fixed, legible set of affects. this paper will show, through the examination of english language websites generated in thailand marketing gender-related surgeries, that both sexuality and gender are diffuse sets of social, political, and interpersonal expectations with particular histories and effects. in this talk, i will explain the potential of “trans” theory to suggest a crucial way of thinking through the circumstances undergirding transnational cyberculture studies. to do this, i examine how thailand’s burgeoning medical tourism industry reassignment surgery is produced as a product available in thailand for international consumption via internet communication in ways that reflect thai notions of “trans” as body modification according to one’s own desire and financial means rather than western ideals of complete, pre-ordained, sexual reassignment surgery. thailand has expert plastic surgery—more sexual reassignment surgeries take place here than any other country—iran is second in the world—yet sex reassignment in total is not the goal of most hospital visitors. instead, people choose how, when and where to transition and what requires transmodification—in terms of their personal choice and their pocketbooks. this marks a site where a non-teleological process of body modification may be performed. westerners may book a visit through online tour operators, and full disclosure about doctors and their qualifications are advertised on plastic surgery hospital websites. most people do not go to these hospitals to transition from one sex or one gender or one ethnicity (here i am referencing eyelid surgery) or one location—transition takes many forms and suggests a multiple range of trajectories with or without endpoints. it is from this angle that i find “trans” a particularly promising point for thinking through and about cyberculture in a way that includes globalization, transnationality, nation, race, ethnicity, borders, bodies and communication on the internet, and from this perspective it is clear that although the english language is beyond deployed to attract westerners to thailand, the influence of thai beliefs remains strong. a small picture of a larger trend: selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 the work that i examine comes from a database i have collected between june 2010 and june 2013 that captures websites in english that promote, advertise, or offer gender confirmation surgery, broadly conceived, in thailand. the database captures the sites as we’ve been able to note their emergence as well as cataloguing a past that is incomplete, but reaches as far back as 2004. overall, the database represents websites present between june 2007 and june 2013. these websites—now over 180 in number--are by and large captured and categorized, and changes have been tracked between june 2012 and june 2013. the website database is supplemented by interviews with webmasters, surgeons that host clinics advertised online, and medical tourism providers located in bangkok. these interviews were conducted between 2011 and 2013. this paper is a small piece of a larger project that surveys the rise of medical tourism to thailand and its transnational and local effects. references aizura, aren. the romance of the amazing scalpel: race, affect and labor in thai gender reassignment clinics.” the transgender studies reader 2 ed. susan strykker and aren aizura. forthcoming 2013. wilson, ara. “ foreign bodies and national scales: medical tourism in thailand.” body & society (2011) 17: 121 doi: 10.1177/1357034x11400923. database of thai websites collected between 2009 and 2013 that range from 1998-june 15 2013. personal interviews conducted with doctors, surgeons, clinic workers and webmasters in thailand between dec 2011 and january 2012. aoir2019-einarsonleong final.pdf selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): lastname, firstinitial. (2019, october 2-5). paper title. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. call me maybe: social expectations and trust associated with calling cecilie einarson pérez telenor group lorian leong telenor group mobile communications in scandinavia the accessibility of smartphone devices in mature markets like sweden allow for an interesting exploration into youth smartphone cultures. mobile devices insert themselves into the everyday lives of youth, from school hours, homework time, and leisure-time. significant research has examined the emerging social norms surrounding mobile phone usage and youth culture, particularly focusing on telephony’s core services from 1997-2005: mobile telephony and sms in norway (ling, 2001) and youth culture among norwegian teens (laegran 2003). recent research has focused on behaviours surrounding specific mobile communications applications, as they relate to areas of intimacy (møller and nebeling 2018), self-presentation and stigma (leong 2016), and personal expression (fortunati 2005). yang et al examined transitioning from textual to mobile calling as progressive mediums indicative of intimacy (2014). this research focuses on the cusp of communication through traditional mobiles (telephony and sms) and internet apps. although both involve voice and text, informants revealed distinctions between traditional and internet communications, establishing hierarchies in relation to intimacy and functionality, and sentiments around types of voice and text communication mediums. crucially, this research delves into the level of trust in communications mediums and interpersonal relationships. this analysis examines how people communicate with each other based on perceived levels of trust and intimacy, and how technology becomes implicated and configured in those new systems of trust. methods this paper draws on qualitative research conducted in stockholm from 2016-2017 with 47 young people between the ages of 1222. both individuals and groups with strong social ties were recruited for the study. all participants took part in semi-structured indepth interviews, and participants recruited as part of a group also took part in semistructured focus groups. in addition to reducing the imbalance of power between the interviewer and interviewee (montell 1999), focus groups with some of the informants' peer groups confirmed norms individual informants expressed in 1:1 interviews as norms in practice. this research was conducted as part of a greater study intended for a division of telenor group examining behaviors and attitudes relating to communication among youth in sweden. judgement call: don't call us, we'll call you impromptu voice calls via telephony marked two distinct user groups: strangers and strong ties. informants discussed similarly opposing views of traditional telephony, as a medium for both communication with strangers (government services, utility companies), becoming part of what ling calls the “broader social metabolism” (ling 2012) and for very close friends. for almost all informants, the fear, annoyance, and uncertainty of telemarketers and unknown numbers became a recurring theme. telephony was also increasingly perceived by informants as a medium where strangers and telemarketers would reach them. bertel (2013) notes danish teens’ trust in online maps that verification is not needed, suggesting a level of “taken for grantedness” (ling 2012). telephony, one of the older forms of technologically-mediated voice communications, among proved the opposite. informant attitudes pointed to a decay of trust in the medium of telephony (not necessarily voice calling), one so easily abused by unknown callers. to manage this, the majority of informants used the number identification app truecaller or searched the number in online phone directories afterwards. this was all done to create a better sense of security in connection to receiving calls. it was commonly understood that impromptu telephony calling from known contacts was one of urgency. there was an implicit trust among younger users that telephony was used for urgent situations, often deemed “serious” by informants. calls from both strong and weak ties were perceived as urgent calls (barring few and exceptional cases for whom calling had become the norm), where weaker ties calling indicated something even more grave due to the abnormal nature of the behaviour. all contacts were therefore entrusted not to abuse this line of communication. for impromptu, synchronous communication of less severity, users were expected to use other communications apps like snapchat. who calls the shots? considered an intrusive form of communication phone numbers were not shared amongst weak ties/acquaintances, and instead reserved for close friends and family members whom were trusted to know of and to adhere to these codes. as noted by boase and wellman (2006) synchronous communication can be perceived as demanding, leaving the respondent little flexibility to reply at their own convenience. however, intimate friends can slowly chip away at these established codes until new ingroup standards are created, like the case with henrik’s friend johan: “in the beginning, it felt strange when johan called. it was like, ‘what has happened now?’ it must be something serious, but now we’re used to it. he never sends messages.” here henrik illustrates johan’s breaking of two social codes: impromptu calling for serious matters and not sending messages before social calls. scheduled voice calls were coordinated through text first. this mitigated the urgency nature of impromptu telephony, indicating the motivation (and lower level of importance). shorter phone calls were used for micro-coordination purposes to negotiate time and space, as first noted by ling (2001) usually if texting became too cumbersome. however, they were understood as expected calls given the context of existing textual communication, thus maintaining social codes. while informants had shared expectations surrounding general norms of functionality of calling, individuals expected their wider network to have specific time-based and spacebased knowledge of their schedules as part of their norms. contacts ought to know their own individual rules and are trusted to adhere and abide by them, including convenient times to call. while individuals can eventually accept aberrant and “anti”social behaviour, acceptance is premised upon high levels of established intimacy. references bertel, troels fibæk. 2013. "“it’s like i trust it so much that i don’t really check where it is i’m going before i leave”: informational uses of smartphones among danish youth." mobile media & communication 1 (3): 299– 313. fortunati, leopoldina. 2005. "mobile telephone and the presentation of self." in mobile communications: re-negotiation of the social sphere, edited by rich ling and per e. pedersen, 203-218. london: springer-verla london limited. laegran, anne sofie. 2003. "escape vehicles? the internet and the automobile in a localglobal intersection." in how users matter the co-construction of users and technologies, edited by nelly oudshoorn and trevor pinch, 81-102. cambridge: the mit press. ling, rich. 2012. taken for grantedness: the embedding of mobile communication into society. cambridge, ma: mit press. —. 2001. "the diffusion of mobile telephony among norwegian teens: a report from after the revolution." presented at icust. paris, france. møller, kristian, and michael nebeling. 2018. "bleeding boundaries : domesticating gay hookup apps." in mediated intimacies: connectivities, relationalities, proximities, by michael nebeling petersen, katherine harrison, tobias raun rikke andreassen, pp. 208223. london: routledge. montell, francis. 1999. "focus group interviews: a new feminist method." nwsa journal 11 (1): 4471. wellman, barry, and jeffrey boase. 2006. "personal relationships: on and off the internet." in the cambridge handbook of personal relationships, by perlman d and vangelisti al, 709–723. new york: cambridge university press. yang, chia-chen, b bradford brown, and michael t braun. 2014. "from facebook to cell calls: layers of electronic intimacy in college students' interpersonal relationships." new media & society 16 (1): 5-23. microsoft word dworkinetal_aoir2018_spir selected papers of #aoir2018:  the 19th annual conference of the  association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10‐13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): dworkin, j., brar, p., & hessel, h. (2018, october 10-13). when the teacher becomes the student: youth impact on parent technology use. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. when the teacher becomes the student: youth impact on parent technology use jodi dworkin, ph.d. university of minnesota pooja brar, m.s. university of minnesota heather hessel, ph.d. university of minnesota we are only beginning to understand the ways in which young people are introducing technologies into the family system and how that is impacting family relationships. at this research stage, what seems clear is that face-to-face communication does not translate directly to the online context, and online communication is not completely replacing in-person communication. youth and parents continue to report frequent inperson and phone communication (e.g., connell & dworkin, 2012). despite the lack of existing research considering the bi-directional relationships between technology use and family relationships, it is reasonable to expect that family relationships impact, in complex ways, how youth and parents use online media. to advance the field, we need a deeper understanding of family relationships in the context of changing communication technologies. researchers must begin to ask different questions using novel methodologies. the current study is designed to consider youth impact on parent technology use using family-level data. socialization theory socialization theory describes how children internalize rules and norms from family, teachers, and media. consistent with this perspective, most family studies on the uses and effects of media and communication have focused on how parents influence their children. socialization however, is a bidirectional and reciprocal process in which not only are children socialized by their parents, but also actively socialize their parents (nelissen & van den bulck, 2017). despite there being many examples of this reciprocal process as part of the trajectory of normal adolescent development (for example, youth introducing music into the family system), researchers have lagged behind in the exploration of this dynamic. children are active agents in the family, who can both intentionally and unintentionally influence parents (crouter & booth, 2003; kuczynski, 2003). children socialize their parents into the use of media, which includes devices, as well as applications and tools such as texting. method the current study used a sample of youth (37% female; m age=17.3 years) and parents (54.6% female; m age=41.5 years) recruited from the same family. parents were recruited online via mturk, an online labor market; parent participants were asked to forward an invitation to participate to their youngest adolescent or young adult child. participants were recruited from the u.s. and india; 98 parent-child dyads participated (34 from the u.s.; 64 from india). measures in addition to reporting on demographic information, parents and children reported how often they used a variety of technology tools on a likert-type scale from 1 (never) to 6 (several times a day). six measures of technology use were considered in the current study: 1) general use to look for information, read news, and use online tools (general use), 2) audio or video calls (calls), 3) texting, instant messaging, discussion boards, or email (text), 4) sending or receiving audio or video files, and photos (audio and visual), 5) create or maintain blogs, microblogs, or websites (blogs), and 6) social networking sites (snss). results first, a series of descriptive statistics, correlations, and t-tests were computed. for both indian and u.s. families, parent and youth use of all tools were positively correlated (p<.01).child age (but not parent age) was positively correlated with child general use, child and parent calls, and child texting (p<.05). t-tests revealed significant differences between u.s. and indian families: child reports of general use (t(1,91)=-2.76, p=.007), parent (t(1,88)=-4.61, p=.000) and child (t(1,90)=-2.18, p=.032) reports of calls, parent (t(1,89)=-2.33, p=.022) and child (t(1,86)=-2.41, p=.018) reports of texting, parent (t(1,86)=-5.65, p=.000) and child (t(1,89)=-3.21, p=.002) reports of blogs, and parent reports of audio and visual (t(1,89)=-2.36, p=.020) were significantly higher among indian families. child report of snss was significantly higher among u.s. youth (t(1,91)=2.21, p=.029). next, a series of six linear regression analyses were conducted with parent technology use as the dependent variable. parent age, child age, parent gender, child gender, and country of origin were entered in the first step; child technology use was entered in the second step. for general use (β=0.197, t=2.334, p=.022), texting (β=0.536, t= .853, p=.000), and sns (β=0.450, t=3.468, p=.001), only child use was significant in the full model, accounting for 6.0%, 27.0%, and 12.5% of the variance in parent use, respectively. in the analyses for audio and visual, country of origin (β=2.127, t=2.404, p=.019) and child use (β=0.504, t=4.616, p=.000, child use accounted for 18.4% of the variance in parent use) were significant in the full model. being from the u.s. was associated with greater parent use. similarly, in the analyses for blogs, country of origin (β=0.504, t=4.616, p=.000) and child use (β=0.528, t= 5.977, p=.000, child use accounted for 21.4% of the variance in parent use) were significant in the full model. being from the u.s. was associated with greater parent use. in the analyses for calls, child age (β=0.225, t=2.228, p=.028), parent gender (β=-1.363, t =-2.249, p=.027), country of origin (β=2.003, t=3.171, p=.002), and child use (β=0.336, t=3.370, p =.001) were significant in the full model. child use accounted for 8.4% of the variance in parent use. being female, from the u.s., and for children being older was associated with greater parent use. discussion despite the small sample size in the current study, it is quite clear that child technology use is strongly associated with parent use, even when considering the diversity of ways individuals use technology – child use accounted for more than 20% of the variance in parent use of technology to create or maintain blogs, microblogs, or websites, and use of technology for texting, instant messaging, discussion boards, or email. new technologies that are introduced to the family system are a source of social change, whose effects are mediated by the ways in which the media are processed by individual family members. family stability will be determined by how the family system responds to these changes that are brought into the system by youth (rudi et al., 2015). socialization theory is one lens that moves the field towards better understanding the bidirectional relationships between parents and children. future research should use longitudinal data to explore how children impact parents’ technology use over time – how that influence changes with age, sociohistorical time and place, and life transitions. longitudinal data would also allow for deeper exploration of the conditions under which children and parents mutually influence each other’s technology use and the influence of this complex dynamic on family relationships. finally, future research should consider how children’s use of technology impacts parent technology use across cultures. references connell, j., & dworkin, j. (2012). college students’ information and communications technology (ict) use with parents. journal of the association of higher education parent/family program professionals, 2(2), 2-17. crouter, a. c., & booth, a. (2003). children’s influence on family dynamics: the neglected side of family relationships. lawrence erlbaum: mahwah, nj. kuczynski, l. (2003). beyond bidirectionality: bilateral conceptual frameworks for understanding dynamics in parent-child relations. in l. kuczynski (ed.), handbook of dynamics in parent-child relations (pp. 1-24). thousand oaks, ca: sage. nelissen, s., & van den bulck, j. (2017). when digital natives instruct digital immigrants: active guidance of parental media use by children and conflict in the family. information, communication & society, 38, 1-13. rudi, j. h., dworkin, j., walker, s. k., & doty, j. l. (2015). parents' use of information and communications technologies for family communication: differences by age of children. information, communication and society, 8(1), 78-93. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): hartmann, m. jiménez, c., coates, j., norum, r. (2020, october). socializing the networked individual: considering mobile socialities. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. panel abstract / socializing the networked individual: considering mobile socialities maren hartmann university of the arts, berlin carlos jiménez university of denver jamie coates university of sheffield roger norum university of oulu recognition of the central role of mobilities as a factor in social relations (see sheller & urry, 2006; urry, 2007) has grown alongside daily use of networked mobile media, and led to a spatial or mobility turn in media and internet studies (e.g. falkheimer & jansson, 2006; moores, 2012). however, although early contributions in this area considered the changing social situation—looking, for example, at how varying levels of the social were affected as the mobile phone was adopted into everyday life— connections between mobilities and mobile communication field were not theorized or adequately recognized (some such as fortunati & taipale, 2017; keightley & reading, 2014; and morley, 2017 have begun to do so). this panel adds the question of emerging and changing socialities to that broader nexus of mobilities and mobile communication, using the emerging concept of “mobilie socialities” (hartmann et al, 2018; hill et al. forthcoming, 2021). “mobile socialities” demarcates a new constellation of media scholarship that seeks to encapsulate human subjectivities of media as they are embedded in human processes, structures and experiences of mobility and sociality. the concept speaks to and critically builds upon notions of ‘networked individualism’ (rainie & wellman, 2012), ‘network sociality’ (wittel 2001) and ‘mediated mobilism’ (hartmann 2013) to conceptualize productive ways of studying the social lives inherent in digitally mediated structures, subjectivities and practices of mobility. if sociality (see long & moore, 2012) has always been as much about self as it has about others (e.g. communities), in becoming mobilized and digitalized, both individual and community find new roles and new relationships forged between them. a mobile sociality also facilitates conceptualizing a new sociality of objects, new materialist forms that are embedded in networks and in relations where the objects’ own mobility or immobility is fundamental to how humans engage with them. the four ethnographic papers on this panel develop this emerging concept by critically addressing important topics including migration, experience, temporality, and precarity. in addressing the phenomena of people on the move and the role (or not) of mobile media in everyday instances of mobility, these papers begin to fill empirical gaps in studies of mobility and mobile communication, as well as the power dynamics of emerging forms of the social in mobile times. the first paper, “mobile figures unplugged,” considers the three-year (plus one day) ‘wandering years’ undertaken by journeymen in europe to develop their crafts and get to know the world. the author shows how this low-tech journey is nonetheless socially networked, and argues that the wandering craftsman’s “highly mobile, but also highly disconnected… form of mobility serves the basis for reconsidering and further developing understanding of the mobilities / mobile media and communication / socialities triangle.” the second paper, “picture a day laborer’s memobilia,” presents an ethnographic study in denver, colorado of another mobile figure, the day laborer, who in the context of this study is most likely to be a latino immigrant. the laborers use their smartphones to establish ‘digital archives’ that are deployed differently depending on the need to connect to home, work, and the social. next, “imagining informal economies in sino-japanese contexts,” studies how young chinese expats in japan use social media to trade goods through chinese networks around the world. considering the tensions generated by chinese peoples’ increasing mobility and financial strength, the author explores how sociality and power relations change across different scales of geography, mobility, and media. finally, “re-presentation: temporality and mobile sociality,” uses digital ethnography to investigate the role played by temporality in the socialities of travelers. the author demonstrates how real-time social media updates by travelers alter sociality through a constant need to re-present the self at individual moments. the papers in this panel use a variety of ethnographic studies, undertaken in diverse geographic and mediated contexts, to contribute to a broader understanding of networked media and sociality by differing types of ‘mobile figures.’ references falkheimer, j. & jansson, a. (eds) (2006). geographies of communication: the spatial turn in media studies. gothenburg: nordicom. fortunati, l. & taipale, s. (2017). “mobilities and the network of personal technologies: refining the understanding of mobility structure,” telematics and informatics, 34: 560–568. hartmann, m. (2013). “from domestication to mediated mobilism,” mobile media & communication, 1(1):42-49. hartmann, m.; hill, a.; & andersson, m. (2018). symposium on mobile socialities. lund university. hill, a.; hartmann, m; & andersson, m. (forthcoming, 2021). the routledge handbook on mobile socialities. keightley, e. & reading, a. (2014). “mediated mobilities.” media, culture and society, 36(3): 285-301. moores, s. (2012). media, place and mobility. houndmills, basingstoke, hampshire: palgrave macmillan. long, n. & moore, h. (eds). 2012. sociality: new directions. oxford: berghahn. morley, d. (2017). the cell phone, the migrant and the container box. london: routledge. rainie, l. & wellman, b. (2012). networked: the new social operating system. boston: mit press. sheller, m. & urry, j. (2006). “the new mobilities paradigm.” environment and planning a, 38(2):207–226. wittel, a. (2001). “toward a network sociality,” theory, culture & society, 18(6): 51– 76. mobile figures ‘unplugged’: the traveling craftsperson maren hartmann university of the arts, berlin introduction this paper considers a little-studied area of mobile lives: the “wandering years” (called ‘the walz’ or ‘tippelei’ in german), an 800-year-old tradition. originally practiced all over europe, it is now mostly upheld in the german-speaking countries, as well as denmark and france. the countries travelled, however, have become global. the basic idea is that craftsmen and -women, known as the gesellen, or journeymen, leave their hometowns after finishing a three-year apprenticeship to begin travels that last for three years and one day. during this journey, they are expected to work and thereby learn new aspects of their craft, new skills—and get to know themselves and the world. they offer their services in exchange for food, shelter and a negotiable wage. several rules and traditions guide this journey, many of which are related to questions of sociality, mobility, and questions of media. as based both in tradition and contemporary times, as highly mobile, but also highly disconnected, the wandering craftsman’s form of mobility serves the basis for reconsidering and further developing understanding of the mobilities / mobile media and communication / socialities triangle. mobile figures mobility has been analysed through different figures over the years, as rosenberg and shannon (2018) point out, citing the nomad, pilgrim, tourist and flaneur. these figures reflect and represent understandings of and embodiments of certain kinds of freedom (and restrictions), certain kinds of social rules and norms (and their upheaval). hence, the ideal of mobility-as-freedom is a one-sided view. rosenberg and shannon refer to kesselring (2006) to contrast autonomy and heteronomy as well as production and adaptation as different aspects of the same processes. the flaneur, for example, is much more independent financially than the nomad, but at the same time, the flaneur is bound to the city and specific environments (such as the passage), while the nomad can travel anywhere anytime. the pilgrim—who is spiritual and often adheres to certain pre-given rituals—has a different justification (at least in past times) than the tourist, who primarily consumes. my claim with regard to mobile figures is twofold: a) additional notions are necessary to access the mobile figure (kind and speed of movement; social structures; mediation and media use, etc.) and b) other figures might be needed. here we concentrate on the journeyman as a rather unknown mobile figure. the journeyman: networked but unplugged the combination of work and travel, of travelling and experience is by far not new – indeed, it has always been part of certain work traditions. however, when settlement became more widespread and work more differentiated, it became less common. some kinds of work, however, remained mobile throughout: the shepherd is one example, the wandering priest another (winter, 2006). the travelling journeymen and -women have existed for a long time, dating back to the 15th (some state the 13th) century, when the population began to grow and competition amongst craftspeople became fiercer. the solution was simple: send the young people on a longer journey where they could learn additional skills, could get to know the world and at the same time offer fairly cheap labour along the way. by and by, the journey began to be shaped by rituals that later turned into traditions; these include a particular outfit, piercing the ear with a nail, the specific length of the journey (three years and one day), the use of a travel diary, and the method of return. the whole idea of travelling craftspeople is based on sociality. while one tends to travel alone, there are many meeting points, rituals and other aspects that are built on the idea of a close-knit community which takes one on board, teaches one the trade, helps wherever and whenever necessary and generally guides the process. journeyman sociality is characterised by traditions, forms and customs that everyone has to learn and later pass on to the next. this social network is one that cannot simply be entered, but instead entry needs to ‘earned’ (finish the apprenticeship, express an interest, meet people and have your interest checked, utter interest more precisely, find supporters that will introduce you officially, make it known and begin the rituals that officially let you become part of this community). even after entry, it is important to stay in touch with your community, to regularly attend the meetings (and again perform certain rituals that you are taught) and to generally adhere to what is expected. at the same time, the daily doings and the travels themselves are characterised by great freedom (an aspect that most journeypeople emphasize). it is a sociality expressed in practice – enacted every day. it is also, crucially, a community based in oral communication. although media representations tend to romanticize the journeymen-culture, an increasingly important aspect of the romanticization focuses on their lack of digital media during the walz. this is one of the rules around the walz journey: no phones (mobile phones, smartphones or similar devices) are allowed. it is clearly fascinating for media reports since this rule seems – on first sight – anachronistic. yet it has clear implications, which will be discussed in detail in this paper: the organisation of the social network and of work, etc. needs to take place through other means – hence the oral communication focus. family and friends who were left behind in the home-town (or elsewhere), cannot easily be contacted. one wandering woman reported gathering a bit of loose change every couple of weeks to be in touch with her mother from a phone booth. the journeyman may gather a bit of loose change to use a phone booth, or visit one of the remaining internet cafés or a public library to send email or look up information, but while connectivity of this kind is possible, it’s difficult. but it is not only public perception that makes the non-use of mobile phones a central aspect of the journey. a carpenter, asked what he fears most about beginning the walz, states that he will probably miss his phone and ‘dr. google’ most. a journeywoman (a seamstress/dressmaker), when asked about the most unusual aspects of going on the walz, immediately answers that leaving behind the smartphone is the most unusual aspect of her journey. with experiences such as these, however, where liberation from the current connectivity norm is hailed, it might not be the brotherhoods as much as the passage of knowledge and experience from senior to junior journeymen/-women that allows this rule to continue. in fact, disconnection could become one of the defining characteristics of the modern walz where both sociality and mobility are possible without the extent of mediation now common. in a world where digital detox is either bought as a temporary escape from quotidian perils or ordered from above in larger companies, the idea of a three-year-long freedom might become a trademark. references kesselring, s. (2006). pioneering mobilities: new patterns of movement and motility in a mobile world. environment and planning, a 38: 269-279. rosenberg, e. & shannon, k. (2018). introduction: im/mobility: connecting disciplines. geography research forum, 38: 1-16. winter, carsten (2006): die medienkulturgeschichte des christlichen predigers von den anfängen bis heute. entstehung und wandel eines mediums in kommunikativkulturellen vermittlungsprozessen. wien: nausner & nausner verlag. on a day laborer’s digital mobile memories carlos jiménez university of denver day laborers stand on street corners, at hardware stores, or other hidden areas in cities across the world and they are the basis of what scholars call the “gig-economy” (friedman, 2014). the gig-economy, however, is closely tied to vast digital networks and platforms, which facilitate work agreements so that people don’t have to meet face to face. digital technologies have given order and prestige to variations on day labor, which has taken over such work as taxi driving, food delivery, dog walking, and much more. while the mobile provides a unique and somewhat stable form of income, there are also personal and innovative uses that go overlooked. the day laborers in the study were overwhelmingly latino immigrants seeking manual laborer (construction work; farm work; movers) who must be ready to go to work on a moment’s notice, and be physically present and available. such day labor differs from gig-economy labor and entails a different type of life world and work ethic that does not rely on an online profile or resume, but instead on being visible and ready to rush an employer’s car early in the morning. if day laborers are not using their mobile phones to seek out work on digital platforms, then how are they using them? i argue that a day laborer’s “digital archive,” functions as a source of self-empowerment as it includes personal memories and connections, supports identity formation, highlights their work skills, and enables self-improvement or self-reparation (turkle 1995). anna reading’s concept of “memobilia” specifically seeks to understand the contours of digital memory on mobile phones. reading’s concept specifically captures the wide range of mobile phone memories that include communications and multimedia data that are “deeply personal and yet instantly collected through being linked to a global memoryscape of the world wide web” (2009, p. 81). while reading highlights the ease with which digital memories can be archived and distributed, i look at a population whose memories largely stay on the device. a pioneering study by baron et al. on mobile phones and day laborers in seattle, washington found that ict’s “help[ed] immigrant day laborers maintain links with their past and their roots, offer tools to navigate their present needs, and help them build future plans and aspirations” (2014, p. 107). baron argued that the mobile phone served as a source of connection to friends, family, and the world, but also to employers and a steady income. building upon this research, i’ve carried out 15-months of ethnographic field work at centro humanitario (september 2017-january 2019), a day labor center in denver. in this study, we observed day laborers use their mobile phone cameras to produce a set of images and videos that documented the work they did as well as their everyday lives. this media ultimately coalesced into a digital archive of day laborers’ experiences and memories. recently, the research has collected data on four areas of a day laborers’ phones. over four separate structured interviews, each lasting 60 minutes, we go over every photo taken, text messages, call log, and apps used. many day laborers use their mobile phones to document their work. they capture their daily work by photographing or video recording the material progress they make on projects and the outcome of their physical labor. since most day laborers subsist on one-day-at-a-time verbal contracts, their work would be lost without such recordings. given this, the day laborer’s mobile phone camera becomes a valuable resource that can be used to document the labor they perform or spaces they inhabit. for some, taking a photo is involves a desire to remember, but for day laborers it involves creating credibility, having a visual track record of one’s labor, and using that record to get consistent work. in terms of the personal and affective, day laborers use mobile phone cameras to take pictures of things that they want to remember, or that they find beautiful, or impressive. for some day laborers. the overwhelming presence of mexican-style seafood in their photo archive reveals the importance of food and leisure in their lives. for others, the mobile phone highlights the importance of health with photos memorizing the foot powder, trail mix, or vitamins they don’t want to forget. they also use them to establish visual connections to distant places and people, whether their hometowns in mexico, a youtube video from indonesia, or new friends in the mexico. when i asked day laborers whether they knew these individuals prior to their online friendship, they said no, which is similar to burrell and anderson’s work where ghanaians sought out strangers or weak connections (2008). for the day laborers in denver, however, they were long distance and one-way conversation, as these images illustrate, but the conversations offer the day laborers a necessary connection. the digital archive of a day laborer is filled with images of things they have touched, fixed, worked on, or that they want to remember, and of distant worlds and contacts. the result is a day laborer digital archive that has a several purposes. first, it is practical; day laborers need to find work and showcase their valuable skills and experiences via their digital portfolio to current or future employers. second, the archive is symbolic: what is stored on their phones helps day laborers to continuously rethink and reimagine their identities and lives. these images may range widely and include photos of other people’s houses, of other people’s broken (but now fixed things), of voluptuous “untouchable” women, and of long distance one-way connections to people and places. if dominant society views day labor as an unskilled general workforce that has a very limited socio-economic mobility, their digital archives create a counternarrative. the digital archive filters and stores the day laborer’s greatest hits (their flexibility and experiences at work), but also provides a personalized space of digital accumulation and connection. references baron, l.f., neils, m. and gomez, r. (2014). crossing new borders: computers, mobile phones, transportation, and english language among hispanic day laborers in seattle, washington. j assn inf sci tec, 65, 98-108. doi:10.1002/asi.22949 burrell, j., & anderson, k. (2008). “i have great desires to look beyond my world”: trajectories of information and communication technology use among ghanaians living abroad. new media & society, 10(2), 203–224. doi:10.1177/1461444807086472 friedman, g. (2014). workers without employers: shadow corporations and the rise of the gig economy. review of keynesian economics, 2(2), 171–188. https://doi.org/10.4337/roke.2014.02.03 reading, a. (2009). memobilia: the mobile phone and the emergence of wearable memories. in save as … digital memories (pp. 81–95). palgrave macmillan, london. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230239418_5 turkle, s. (1995). life on the screen: identity in the age of the internet. simon & schuster. imagining informal economies in the sino-japanese context: a mobile socialities approach jamie coates university of sheffield the circulation of economic ‘things’, such as gifts (mauss, 1954), money (simmel, 1950) or commodities (marx, 1976), is a cornerstone of how early theorists came to think about movement and social relationships alongside their imaginative consequences. they were in many senses an early theorisation of media as much as economics. historically these forms of circulation have been portrayed as distinct from each other and operating at different scales. the gift was classically personal or a defining feature of small scale socialities, whereas money and the commodity typified the grand scales of the ‘modern’ era. as anna tsing has argued however (tsing, 2013), the distinction between these scales and systems often requires considerable imaginative leaps and practices of sorting, suggesting that approaches which trace the effort that goes into ‘scaling’ transactions and circulation will help us understand the workings of human imagination. within this paper, i draw on ethnographic observations of informal digital economies between china and japan to conceptualize how a mobile socialities approach contributes to our understanding of imagination in transnational contexts. in particular, i ask how we might reconcile the emphasis on ‘flat’ interpersonal socialities typical of ethnographic mobile media research, with the way these socialities are often imagined as representing national, inter-national and global political-economic relations. from a mobilities perspective, it is the movement of various phenomena that constitutes place (ingold, 2007) affording different modes of (im)mobility as imagination (n. salazar, 2011; n. b. salazar & schiller 2016). the sino-japanese context exemplifies a mobilities approach as it is entangled with everyday circulations of people, things and practices. there are over 750,000 chinese nationals living in japan, and a significant number of naturalized japanese citizens from china. coupled with nearly 10 million visitors in 2019, major trading relations and media flows, these various mobilities, from overseas study to overseas trade, have created a context where on an everyday level, japan and china increasingly resemble a transnational social field. i explore the practice of daigou (代购) among young chinese people in japan, which is a term for a range of informal social media-based trading practices among chinese networks around the world. while there is a growing body of literature showcasing what daigou is and how it is creating new possibilities for mobile young people (martin, 2017), i focus on the imaginative consequences of this system of digitally mediated transnational trade. i contrast the imaginaries and relationships afforded by the practice of daigou with the wider media representation of informal economies in the sinojapanese context. from japanese washlet toilet seats to cosmetics and luxury brands, flows of goods from japan to china have become a common way for students, tourists and migrants to turn a small profit while overseas. in particular, during the recent coronavirus outbreak the buying and posting of japanese facemasks to china became a heated political issue on japanese twitter, broadcast media, and among chinese migrants’ wechat discussions in japan. the politicization of these digital informal economies reflects the everyday frictions generated by chinese peoples’ increasing mobility and economic heft in northeast asia. informal digital economies and their media representation operate at different scales, both the scale of interpersonal network socialities (wittel 2016), and the scale of a national ‘imagined community’ (anderson 1991). a mobile socialities approach allows us to trace the clash between differing (im)mobilities and scales (eriksen 2016), which can be found at the interstices of social media and broadcast media. the practice of daigou, as a form of mediated mobile sociality, is portrayed as errant and dangerous in japanese broadcast media, taking vital commodities out of the japanese market through informal means. in this framing, it is portrayed as clashing with the immobile imaginary of japan as a bounded nationstate and market, whose integrity must be protected from seemingly immoral economic practices. chinese people in japan are both producers of, and caught within, this clash of scales, resulting in negative media portrayals and stigmatisation. their own responses, however, also reflect an effort to contest how differing practices and scales are represented. from informal trade as a ‘gift’ to the japanese economy, to accessible commodities as a ‘right’, chinese migrants make strident arguments for the morality of their informal economic practices. their mobile practices and their resultant socialities are thus also imaginative and moralizing acts. transnational socialities and media have long been associated with imagination as a practice that shapes regional and global relationships (appadurai 1996). yet, depending on the field and discipline, different scales of imagination have been emphasised over others. a mobile socialities framework allows for a more granular approach to understanding different practices of imagination because of its emphasis on tracing materially grounded relations that transgress multiple scales. mediated through the movement of people, technologies, and content, a mobile socialities approach ins some senses harks back to classic economic anthropology. yet, its relevance is by no means out of date. considering imagination from a mobile and materially grounded perspective is all the more pertinent in the digital era, where technologies make sociality scalable in new ways (miller et al. 2016). the distance and speed of content spread means the shared symbols we use today circulate in new ways, algorithmic clustering of groups and interests ensure that those we see as having something in common with cluster in new ways, and the line between formal and informal economic relations has blurred and transformed. i show how a mobile socialities approach allows us to trace the way people imagine informal economies in multiple ways and at multiple scales. references anderson, benedict. 1991. imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. new york: verso. appadurai, a . 1996. modernity at large. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. eriksen, thomas hylland. 2016. overheating: an anthropology of accelerated change. pluto press. ingold, tim. 2007. lines: a brief history. routledge. martin, f. (2017) rethinking network capital: hospitality work and parallel trading among chinese students in melbourne, mobilities, 12:6, 890-907 marx, karl. 1976. capital: volume 1. penguin/ new left review. mauss, marcel. 1954. the gift: forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies. translated by ian cunnison. new york: w.w. norton. miller, daniel, elisabetta, costa, nell haynes, tom, mcdonald, razvan nicolescu, jolynna, sinanan, juliano, spyer, shriram, venkatraman, and xinyuan, wang. 2016. how the world changed social media. london: ucl press. salazar, noel. 2011. “the power of imagination in transnational mobilities.” identities: global studies in culture and power 18. salazar, noel b., and nina glick schiller. 2016. regimes of mobility: imaginaries and relationalities of power. routledge. simmel, georg. 1950. the sociology of georg simmel. simon and schuster. tsing, anna. 2013. “sorting out commodities: how capitalist value is made through gifts.” hau: journal of ethnographic theory 3 (1): 21–43. wittel, andreas. 2016. “toward a network sociality:” theory, culture & society, june. https://doi.org/10.1177/026327601018006003. re-presentation: temporality and mobile sociality in the new economy roger norum university of oulu the forms, tempos and rhythms of time are ever-present in representations and experiences of contemporary socio-cultural life. consider modern experiences characterised by these terms: slow food. fast company. real time. live-streaming. stop action. slofie. the necessarily mediated temporalities of contemporary experience are ubiquitous. time is now an entity that is played with, contested, amplified and reconfigured through a range of human and techno-social processes. what do these new perceptions, imaginations, experiences and practices of time do to our selves in the moment? this paper seeks to explore, through ethnographic example, the roles played by time in the process of producing and presenting a given experience to others through the affordances of social media. this talk investigates the role played by temporality in the socialities of mobile experience through ethnographic research on the social media practices of mobile individuals. in so doing, it aims to explain how time alters sociality through its mediation by digital platforms that co-opt representations and subjectivities of individual moments in new ways. after speaking broadly about theoretically aligning contemporary work on temporality, mobility and the digital presentation of self, i will illustrate a series of ethnographic examples: twitter posts with real-time commentaries from followers; a blog post from a travel writer; and live-streamed travel experiences on tiktok. discussing social media use by these travelers perpetually in motion, i will demonstrate how sociality and the digital are mediated by the specific temporalities linked to the particular affordances of various platforms. the core question i am to answer in this talk is: how does temporality alter the socialities of mobile experience and what are the socio-cultural effects on the self of the socialites produced from these novel engagements with time? i will argue that digital mobile practices in the experience economy do not merely alter how time and space (or temporal and spatial experience) are encountered and felt; they are now in many ways the new bar for what constitutes human experience itself. i frame temporality through the emerging concept of ‘mobile socialities’ (hill et al. forthcoming) as a means of bridging the temporal structuring processes and everyday lives of transient individuals and communities with shifts in the relevance and importance of place and place-making concomitant with mobile practice. in rewriting the rules for how the present is understood, lived and represented, digital practices reconfigure how humans experience the limitations of time and space – entities whose understandings are already in part ruptured by the hypermobility rampant throughout contemporary mobile practice. mediated hypermobility – which spans the planet and can inform everyone on it that you are there and there and there – becomes the consummate mode of living out a worldview emblematic of the phrase carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero (“seize the day, put very little trust in tomorrow”). in other words: there is only present. however, to be ushered into being, this present must be presented, which is to say, that in contemporary social life, lived experiences are only turned into present moments through their re-presentation. the concept of mobile socialities works here as a frame for considering the new temporalities of reproduction, distribution and dissemination of text and the real-time, discursive engagement around such texts that connect disparate individuals separated by distance but brought together by the time/space-bending connectivities of digital technologies. being social has always been as much about self as it has about others (e.g. communities), but in becoming mobilized and digitalised, both individual and community have new roles and new relationships forged between them. with the rise of so-called experiential travel, changes in the production, consumption and mediation of such experience have shifted the focus from travel as place/destination to travel as self-fashioning/self-dissemination. many travellers no longer hit the road solely to have a memorable bucket list adventure in a given destination, or as james clifford (1986) has suggested, travel is not (or perhaps no longer) merely about going places; it is a conceptual and geographic displacement intended to catalyse consciously enriching experiences. one also now travels in order to share the experiences one anticipates having there, documenting, narrativising and broadcasting memories in specific mediated forms to be consumed, digested and commented upon by others. travellers today are often compelled to regularly emote their lives in situ through different media platforms. these online ‘selves’ can (and ought to) be regularly maintained and supplemented with additional media, and people apologise if they have not updated their blogs or made current their facebook timelines. while these self-presentations are qualitatively different than how people have thought and written about their lives ten or twenty years ago, the specific temporalities of such experience have also become key to how they are both produced and consumed. as the separation between consumer consumption and production becomes cloudy, the traveller evolves into a ‘prosumer’ (charitsis 2016): a ‘prosuming self’ who creates value through a life broadcast via travel, and a ‘prosumed self’, an active and entrepreneurial subject governed to produce data and content that bring value for large media corporations through engagement with various platforms. this ‘communicative capitalism’ (dean 2010) relies on the appropriation and exploitation of the active participation of users who create content, interact with each other, develop and cultivate relationships, and provide suggestions, recommendations and solutions. as such, changes in the production, consumption and mediation of mobile experience have ‘de-placed’ the doing of travel – shifting it from a phenomenon bound up with place and destination to one focused on the self and its dissemination (there’s probably a pun somewhere on the horizon to this end that plays with “the present” and “re/presentation”). within this i critically address simanowski’s (2017) arguments about how the subjective experience of the present itself is constructed to be withering away on account of our seemingly new penchant for structuring, capturing and fixating “moments” of experience. at the same time, as moments of experience are able to be captured and fixed, thereby losing their immediacy, fluidity and fragility, the subjective experience of the present itself begins to erode (simanowski 2017). references charitsis, vassilis. 2016. ‘prosuming (the) self’, ephemera: theory & politics in organization 16(3): 37-59. clifford, james. 1986. ‘introduction: partial truths’. in james clifford and george e. marcus (eds), writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography. berkeley: university of california press, 1-26. collins, samuel gerald, and matthew slover durington. 2014. networked anthropology: a primer for ethnographers. london: routledge. dean, jodi. 2010. blog theory: feedback and capture in the circuits of drive. cambridge, ma: polity. simanowski, roberto. 2017. facebook society. new york: columbia university press. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): dehghan, e. (2019, october 2-5). in each other we (strategically) trust: the discursive networks of trust in twitter discussions of immigration in australia. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. in each other we (strategically) trust: the discursive networks of trust in twitter discussions of immigration in australia ehsan dehghan digital media research centre, queensland university of technology introduction this study investigates the discourses around the topic of immigration in the australian twittersphere, especially with regards to the discursive role of trust in the dynamics of the debates. being a predominantly immigrant country, with approximately a third of its population born overseas, australia has always been engaged with discussions about immigration in one form or another. in recent years, these discussions have revolved around the immigration policies of the country and its treatment of refugees and asylum seekers in offshore detention camps. furthermore, the discourse of immigration in australia has also been influenced by the global rise of anti-immigration discourses, and the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in europe. the data for this project was collected using trisma—the tracking infrastructure for social media analysis—which is an ongoing collection of tweets by australian twitter users (bruns et al., 2016). i used a range of immigration-related keywords, phrases, and hashtags to collect a corpus of 1,029,156 tweets posted between february and october 2018. the keywords used for the data collection were chosen so they cover a range of different perspectives and discourses about immigration, such as generic discussions of the topic, debates over offshore detention camps, anti-immigration sentiments, and so on. this study employs a mixed-methods approach, drawing from social media analytics, network analysis, corpus linguistics, and discourse analysis. the analysis starts from the broader communicative patterns and practices (e.g. use of hashtags, link-sharing patterns, etc.) to provide a bird’s-eye view of the discursive environment. following this, i employ social network analysis to identify the networked publics and the discourses involved in the debate, and examine the flows of information between the identified clusters. upon identifying the various communities and discourses, i perform a qualitative analysis of tweets posted by each community, first using keyword analysis (baker, 2004) to identify the salient features, themes and topics in each discourse, and then investigating subsets of tweets by each community from a discourse-analytical and discourse-theoretical (carpentier & de cleen, 2007) perspective. to further supplement the classification of accounts and discourse communities, this project draws from the clusters of users identified in the map of the australian twittersphere, which is a network analysis of follower/followee relationships among approximately 250,000 best globally connected australian twitter users (bruns, moon, münch, & sadkowsky, 2017). findings with regards to information sources disseminated in the dataset, the examination of urls posted in the dataset points to the presence of divergent patterns in link-sharing by the various communities involved in the debate. although mainstream and wellestablished media outlets are shared by the majority of accounts in the dataset, the more explicitly partisan discourse communities in the australian twittersphere, such as the clusters of ‘progressive politics’ and ‘hard-right politics’ (bruns, 2017), rely more on information sources with more explicit political leanings. the cluster of hard-right accounts, for instance, widely disseminates links to media outlets and websites such as breitbart, infowars, sputnik news, and anti-islam websites such as jihadwatch. on the other hand, there is a high level of sharing urls to left-leaning outlets (hurcombe, burgess, & harrington, 2018; park, fisher, fuller, & lee, 2018) such as buzzfeed, junkee, and the guardian among the ‘progressive politics’ cluster. although this finding cannot conclusively point to users’ trust in certain information sources, it could potentially indicate the strategic performance of trust, through which users decide to share certain links, and avoid circulating others. pew center’s survey similarly shows how at times users share disinformation despite knowing what they are sharing is fake (mitchell, barthel, & holcomb, 2016). the same partisanship is also evident from the range of secondary hashtags used by the various communities involved in the discussion. although all communities use the more topical and broader hashtags in their discussions (e.g. #auspol or australian politics, #immigration, etc.), they often juxtapose these with the more explicitly partisan discourse markers, such as #bringthemhere (hashtag used in the campaign against offshore detention camps) or #stoptheboats (hashtag used in support of the detention camps). additionally, secondary hashtags are also used interdiscursively to recontextualize different discourses vis-à-vis the debate over immigration in australia. for instance, the ‘progressive politics’ cluster almost exclusively focuses on domestic issues, such as the offshore detention camps, indigenous rights, and other political issues in australia. on the other hand, the ‘hard-right community’ extensively uses hashtags referring to international contexts, such as the refugee crisis in europe, donald trump’s travel ban and/or us–mexico wall, and the like. examining the networks of retweets and @mentions, it is evident that twitter users strategically choose their own ‘crowd-sourced elites’ (papacharissi, 2015) as opinion leaders and curators of the debate. in this sense, each discourse community amplifies their discourse through giving more visibility to the tweets and users they collectively trust as their opinion leaders on the platform. however, collectives of users also actively form alliances with other discourses involved in the broader discursive environment, through the use of affordances of twitter, such as retweets. for the ‘progressive politics’ community, for instance, these strategic alliances form through retweeting actors from the indigenous-rights and law communities, and international public figures promoting refugee rights. on the other hand, the ‘hard-right politics’ cluster actively engages with well-known international ultra-conservative and far-right figures, in order to amplify their voice and interdiscursively connect their political stance with the broader global discursive environment. qualitative investigation of the discourse of each community also supports the findings of the previous stages of the analysis. each community in the debate draws from their own discourses, symbolic resources, and perspectives in their argumentation regarding the topic of immigration. this often involves interdiscursive references to other topics and discourses perceived as relevant to the notion of immigration by each community. while the ‘progressive politics’ cluster frames the topic from the perspective of human rights and focuses on closing offshore detention camps, the ‘law’ cluster intensifies the legal aspects of the discussion, focusing on how the treatment of refugees in the offshore detention camps is unconstitutional. on the other hand, the hard-right community often brings the discourses of terrorism and national security to the front, arguing for stricter immigration and asylum policies, usually from an anti-islam perspective. interdiscursive references to islam and terrorism are frequently present in the discourse of the hard-right, while they are almost absent from the discourse of other communities in the dataset. conclusions overall, this study shows the complexities involved in considering the notion of ‘trust’ in the social media environment. the findings of this research show how the act of trusting is in itself a discursive strategy, in that users strategically choose what and who to trust, whose discourse to amplify, and which actors to actively avoid. using the affordances of the platform, users form calculated networks of discursive alliances to form an agonistic space (mouffe, 2013) within which they can amplify their voice, while at the same time maintaining their antagonism (laclau & mouffe, 2001) against the rival discourses. references baker, p. (2004). querying keywords: questions of difference, frequency, and sense in keywords analysis. journal of english linguistics, 32(4), 346–359. bruns, a. (2017). echo chamber? what echo chamber? reviewing the evidence. 6th biennial future of journalism conference. bruns, a., burgess, j., banks, j., tjondronegoro, d., dreiling, a., hartley, j., … sadkowsky, t. (2016). trisma: tracking infrastructure for social media analysis. bruns, a., moon, b., münch, f., & sadkowsky, t. (2017). the australian twittersphere in 2016: mapping the follower/followee network. social media+ society, 3(4),. carpentier, n., & de cleen, b. (2007). bringing discourse theory into media studies: the applicability of discourse theoretical analysis (dta) for the study of media practises and discourses. journal of language and politics, 6(2), 265–293. hurcombe, e., burgess, j., & harrington, s. (2018). what’s newsworthy about ‘social news’?: characteristics and potential of an emerging genre. journalism. laclau, e., & mouffe, c. (2001). hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics (2nd ed). london ; new york: verso. mitchell, a., barthel, m., & holcomb, j. (2016, december 15). many americans believe fake news is sowing confusion | pew research center. retrieved february 26, 2019, from http://www.journalism.org/2016/12/15/many-americans-believe-fake-news-issowing-confusion/ mouffe, c. (2013). agonistics: thinking the world politically. verso. papacharissi, z. (2015). affective publics: sentiment, technology, and politics. oxford ; new york, ny: oxford university press. park, s., fisher, c., fuller, g., & lee, j. y. (2018). digital news report: australia 2018. news & media research centre, university of canberra. sameshima_katz_shariff_dietzel selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 novel, educational and legal responses to technologyfacilitated sexual violence pauline sameshima lakehead university rebecca katz mcgill university shareen shariff mcgill university christopher dietzel mcgill university abstract the three panel presenters and session chair are co-researchers in a seven-year research partnership—involving 28 educational institutions, 25 co-investigators,15 community partners, and 50+ students—that aims to address sexual violence in physical and virtual forms in university contexts across canada and internationally. the project specifically seeks to address, dismantle and prevent sexual violence by means of multi-sector partnership solutions across the fields of education, law, policy, arts, popular culture, health care, management, news and social media. using the methodological framework of parallaxic praxis (sameshima et al., 2019), the team looks at a phenomenon from different perspectives by using varied methodological processes as well as a range of rigorous methods of encoding, decoding, and rendering data; and establishing post-qualitative possibilities for generating and mobilizing knowledge to broader audiences. the juxtaposition of renderings (constructions made from deep analysis of the phenomena such as papers, presentations, artworks, and other artefacts), when presented together, manufacture a dynamic agency between works capturing intertextualities, aporias, choruses, and a poesis that arise in the coalescence of the unassimilated, individual investigations. in this panel, an overview of the larger project and the significant milestones in the first four years specifically related to internet technologies will be provided. drawing from multi-perspectives, the second presenter 1 suggested citation (apa): sameshima, p., katz, r., shariff, s., dietzel, c.,(2020, october). novel, educational and legal responses to technology-facilitated sexual violence. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. will address image-based sexual abuse and copyright in canada, and the third will share data collected from this project in the form of excerpts from an epistolary novel. the session demonstrates how multi-modal investigations and dissemination offer possibilities for extending knowledge production. panel outline responding to sexual violence—a regrettably widespread problem in the early 21st century—requires broad cultural shifts and efforts of many stakeholders. the relevance of certain disciplines or practice areas, such as criminal law and applied social sciences like social work or psychology researching this phenomenon, may be more immediately apparent; however, sexual violence pervades many, if not all, aspects of our society. sexual violence has increasingly found a home on the internet, which houses and amplifies misogyny, homophobia and transphobia, racism, and other intersecting forms of discrimination (shariff, 2017). kircaburun and griffiths (2018) report the positive relationship between dark personality traits such as machiavellianism, psychopathy, narcissism, sadism, and spitefulness with problematic internet use (piu). piu has been described as internet dependency, internet addiction, and internet use disorders (kuss, et al., 2014). further, the internet facilitates gender-based and sexuality-based harm through online and in-person interactions (henry & powell, 2016). the internet additionally allows for what suler (2005) refers to as the ‘online disinhibition effect’, when social expectations and inhibitions are loosened in internet-mediated interactions compared to expectations when in face-to-face communications. the relaxation of inhibition exaggerates and creates new challenges related to cyberbullying, discrimination, and consent, such as image-based sexual abuse (i.e., revenge porn) and sexual harassment. how can digital communities address technology-facilitated sexual violence? how do formal systems like education, psychology, and law implement interventions that minimize such violence? this panel draws from danah boyd’s (2010) concept of ‘networked publics’ to consider how internet-goers confront such violence, and also applies interdisciplinary frameworks and arts integrated approaches to explore deeply rooted cultural beliefs, quotidian practices, and identity politics; and further, to propose institutional responses. the session presenters scrutinize social systems in an effort to reorient services, pedagogical approaches, and interpersonal relations toward an ethics of care. acknowledging that sexual violence is a complex, deep-rooted issue that requires a multi-faceted approach, the presenters explore the possibilities of change from multiple perspectives, including through interdisciplinary approaches, disciplinary interventions, innovative methodological approaches, various support services, and online communities. presenters will recommend strategies for addressing sexual violence that are evidence-based, culturally-sensitive, and interdisciplinary. following cultural communication theorist stuart hall’s (1973) work on encoding and decoding, the varied ways researchers encode data allow for the varied possibilities of decoding or generating new creative responses to data. as such, this session highlights 2 novel and interdisciplinary work that aims to better understand the role of the internet in abusive attachments, and improve institutional supports, public education, and legal responses to sexual violence related to online contexts. the first presentation in this panel features the principal investigator in the research partnership noted above. it describes in more detail the milestones of the partnership’s first four years, as well as its methods and goals. this presentation canvases the legal obligations incumbent on institutions to address and prevent sexual violence, both on and off-line. the second presentation addresses a narrower branch of law and its potential application to one sub-category of online sexual violence, ‘revenge porn.’ this presentation considers copyright law’s utility in mitigating revenge porn in which victims see their selfies exploited by others. the presenter discusses the relevance of copyright law in canada and internationally, and presents preliminary findings from canadian case law. finally, the third presentation shares excerpts from an in-progress epistolary novel that highlights themes on digital identity creation in tandem with online disinhibition effects, patriarchy and nostalgia's contributive role in online abuse, and the semiotic slip of meanings and words in text-based environments. the three panelists demonstrate how the juxtaposition of non-assimilated research investigations offer unique possibilities for extending knowledge production. references boyd. d. (2010). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in a networked self (pp. 47-66). routledge. hall, s. (1973). encoding and decoding in the television discourse. university of birmingham. retrieved from https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/documents/collegeartslaw/history/cccs/ stencilledoccasionalpapers/1to8and11to24and38to48/sop07.pdf henry, n., & powell, a. (2018). technology-facilitated sexual violence: a literature review of empirical research. trauma, violence, & abuse, 19(2), 195-208. kircaburun, k., & griffiths, m. d. (2018). instagram addiction and the big five of personality: the mediating role of self-liking. journal of behavioral addictions, 7(1), 158 170. sameshima p., maarhuis, p., & wiebe, s. (2019). parallaxic praxis: multimodal interdisciplinary pedagogical research design. vernon press. shariff, s. (2017). navigating the minefield of sexual violence policy in expanding “university contexts.” education & law journal, vol. 27.1 (1-17). (37-58). suler, j. (2005). the online disinhibition effect. international journal of applied psychoanalytic studies, 2(2), 184-188. 3 https://vernonpress.com/book/441 https://vernonpress.com/book/441 https://vernonpress.com/book/441 panel speaker 1 navigating legal and educational policy dilemmas of online sexual violence: impacts through multi-sector partnership shaneen shariff mcgill university rationale and background the proliferation of sexually offensive communication including cyberbullying; intersecting threats of sexual, misogynist, homophobic and racist physical violence; non-consensual distribution of intimate images, online extortion; sexist and homophobic jokes, demeaning and modified photographs on social media (“online sexual violence”) has, over the last two decades, resulted in significant dilemmas for legislators and educational policy-makers (backhouse, et al., 2015; patel, 2014; garcia & vemuri, 2017). the challenge comes in balancing free expression rights versus public safety, given that social media intermediaries are generally reluctant to take down offensive posts. educational administrators are hesitant to discipline alleged online perpetrators regardless of whether they are from the institutional community, arguing that they should only realistically be held responsible for monitoring conduct/misconduct on campus (blinded). this is further complicated when generations of students (genx,y,z) are growing up in an era of officially sanctioned on-and-off-line hate, fake news and protectionism. researchers observe that online sexual violence often translates into physical space playing out as sexual assault and rape in extreme cases (garcia & vemuri, 2017; benedict, 1993). online sexual violence has spread insidiously and globally, often with devastating consequences to young people, especially young women (wolak et al., 2018). institutional responses need to be proactive, informed and cohesive to reduce and prevent sexual violence (backhouse et al, 2015). focus of presentation this presentation clarifies institutional legal responsibilities on-and-off-line, explaining that north american courts have long established an obligation for educators to respond to cyberbullying and online sexual violence if there is a nexus to the university community (“university context”) (blinded). dilemmas that confront public policy makers in an online society evolving too rapidly for laws to keep up will be highlighted. this presentation introduces a multi-disciplinary, multi-partnered research partnership that adopts an innovative, collaborative approach to sexual violence. the project is funded for 7 years by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada (sshrc) for $2.5 million dollars, together with partner contributions of 138% of that amount. 4 this project has grown out of the pi’s significant research on sexual violence and cyberbullying; addressing the intersections of law and education; and increasingly blurred lines between free expression rights, safety, censorship, privacy, protection and civic responsibility. with 28 university partners; 25 co-investigators; 15 community partners and 50+ students engaged, this project is poised towards developing broad, deep and sustainable impacts in society that are centered on community engagement and agency, and collaboration with multi-sector partners from education, law, arts, media, health care and management. this presentation will focus on the milestones achieved in this project in its first four years. methodological framework the partnership uses multi-disciplinary and mixed-methods as part of three subprojects, addressing three areas: project a: law and policy: how do educational and legal institutions create barriers to reducing sexual violence and what are the legal responsibilities of universities to prevent it? project b: how do social media and popular culture tacitly condone sexual violence and how can they be mobilized to effect change? project c: how does the news media tacitly condone sexual violence and how can it be mobilized to effect change? at the heart of these projects is emphasis on the need for non-arbitrary, evidence-based policies, procedures that adhere to due process and procedural fairness; and integrated, multi-disciplinary educational programs and curricula that reclaim the role of schools and universities to educate not only their own students, but ultimately greater society. specifically, our methodologies include: project a: law and policy: • climate studies of sexual violence were distributed to 24 universities in canada and 4 international universities. based on a pilot study completed at mcgill university in 2018, a survey of 28 universities is now being launched. • literature reviews and critical legal literacy including legal case law and statutory analysis; criminal justice reform and analysis of civil law responses culminating in two white papers for university administrators. project b: role of arts, activism and popular culture • enhancing student and public engagement through dialogue and the arts (theatre; art galleries, music lyrical analysis). we have developed theatre productions, hosted art exhibits engaging feminist artists from several communities; videos, documentaries, animation, and workshops (buckingham & sefton-green, 1994). project c: role of news and social media 5 • critical media analysis of media reports to analyze ways in which framing of news stories on sexual violence re-victimize and provide enhanced platforms to trolls and sexual violence perpetrators (hoeschmann & poyntz, 2012). student mentorship committee: the success of this project involves the engagement of students whereby the phd students work with masters and undergraduate students to drive and engage in research; write and co-publish papers and co-present at international and national conferences; collaborate with arts and media institutions and take on internships with sector partners. conclusion and implications during our first four years we have achieved significantly more milestones than expected at the outset, and this is due to the student leadership, ownership and passion for addressing sexual violence in ways that draw on student perspectives and experiences. the creative combined aspects of theatre, arts and law provide a unique and interesting approach to the issues, enabling ally-ship of males who may adhere to patriarchal, androcentric perspectives. the project addresses homophobia and transgender experiences, and we are embarking on research on the extent and impacts of sexual violence on young people with disabilities in educational contexts. we have a doctoral study underway of the experiences of international students with sexual violence, providing a broad overview. our approach shows greater promise of informed, non-arbitrary and isolated responses to sexual violence, that we hope to share with delegates at the conference. references backhouse, c., mcrae, d., iyer, n. (2015). report of the task force on misogyny, sexism, homophobia in dalhousie university faculty of dentistry. retrieved from: http:// www.dal.ca/content/dam/dalhousie/pdf/cultureofrespect/dalhousiedentistrytaskforcereport-june2015.pdf buckingham, d., & sefton-green, j. (1994). cultural studies goes to school: reading and teaching popular media. taylor & francis. benedict, h. (1993). the language of rape. in e. buchwald, p. r. fletcher, & m. roth (eds.), transforming a rape culture (pp. 101–105). milkweed. garcia, c., & vemuri, a. (2017). theorizing “rape culture”: how law, policy and education can support and end sexual violence. education & law journal, 27(1), 1-17. hoechsmann, m., & poyntz, s.r. (2012). media literacies: a critical introduction. wileyblackwell. kelly, l. (2013). surviving sexual violence. john wiley & sons. 6 patel, a. (2014, october 30). 460,000 sexual assaults in canada every year: ywca canada. huffington post canada. retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/ 2014/10/30 sexual-assault-canada_n_6074994.html? shariff, s. (2017). navigating the minefield of sexual violence policy in expanding “university contexts.” education & law journal, vol. 27(1), 37-58. shariff, s. (2015). sexting and cyberbullying: defining the line on digitally empowered kids. cambridge university press. sheppard, c. (2010). inclusive equality: the relational dimensions of systemic discrimination in canada. mcgill-queen’s press-mqup. wolak, j., finkelhor, d., walsh, w. a., & treitman, l. (2018). sextortion of minors: characteristics and dynamics. journal of adolescent health, 62, 72-79. panel speaker 2 revenge porn and copyright: a preliminary study of canada’s legal landscape rebecca katz mcgill university introduction sexual violence, including ‘revenge porn’, has become common on the internet, with severe adverse impacts on victims. legal systems like canada’s are playing catch-up with this challenge. civil lawsuits and criminal prosecutions, including under a new criminal code provision, offer canadian victims some recourse; however, copyright law has been touted elsewhere as an unexpected addition to victims’ legal toolkit. given the harms of ‘revenge porn’ and the frequent difficulty of getting these images removed, additional tools are welcome. this presentation first reviews the problem of ‘revenge porn’ and the relevant topography of canada’s legal landscape. it then addresses the presenter’s preliminary findings on canadian copyright’s relevance. methods the presenter conducted a case law search in the canlii legal database. combinations of the search terms “intimate images,” “nude,” “sexting,” “revenge porn,” “copyright,” “cyberbullying,” and “infringement” were searched. finally, the presenter analyzed relevant parts of canada’s copyright act. background revenge porn, a term which has been criticized for victim-blaming and/or obscuring incidents where images are created without victims’ knowledge or consent (mcglynn et al., 2017), is one form of image-based sexual abuse (maddocks, 2018; mcglynn, 7 rackley & houghton, 2017). image-based sexual abuse (ibsa) can occur, among other scenarios, when a partner, former partner, or third-party distributes or posts a sexual photo of a person without their consent (haynes, 2018). victims of this exploitation experience adverse impacts similar to those experienced by sexual assault victims, including trauma, victim-blaming, and harassment (bates, 2017). while challenging to determine the prevalence of ibsa, a meta-analysis found rates ranging from 0.5% to 42% (walker & sleath, 2017). overall, research has shown that ibsa is a concern among teens and young adults, that victims can be any gender, and that sexual minorities and other marginalized persons may face higher risks (henry & powell, 2019 walker & sleath, 2017). legal landscapes concern about ibsa has inspired legal responses. canada’s child pornography laws can be used to prosecute perpetrators when victims are under eighteen (bailey & hanna, 2011), but are inapplicable to adult victims. in 2015, however, canada’s parliament amended the criminal code and adopted a new offense of non-consensual distribution of intimate images, regardless of the victim’s age (criminal code, s. 162.1). likewise, victims have used several civil causes of action to sue perpetrators for damages in canadian courts, including breach of confidence and invasion of privacy actions (haynes, 2018; slane, 2013). unfortunately, even successful prosecutions or lawsuits against perpetrators may not remove harmful images from the internet. us law provides broad immunity for web hosts for user-submitted content, with exceptions for child pornography and for copyright infringement of which the host receives notice (folderauer, 2014; penney, 2013). canadian law likewise offers internet services immunity. for example, canada’s copyright act requires only that service providers and search engines receiving notice of infringement forward the notice to the subscriber allegedly responsible (copyright act, s. 41.25(1)). nonetheless, copyright law has been proposed as another tool for victims of ibsa who created the images themselves (folderauer, 2014; lee, 2019). commenters have pointed to the relatively low barriers to submitting a copyright takedown notice to a web host, who, under us law, is expected to remove the infringing content (folderauer, 2014; levendowski, 2014). findings in canada, creators of works automatically hold copyright; no registration is required to assert one’s rights. further, selfies could meet the low threshold needed to be copyrighted (see e.g. cch canadian limited v. law society of upper canada, 2004 scc 13). these factors could help victims of ibsa whose self-created images are being exploited. moreover, it seems unlikely that canada’s fair dealing provisions, with their narrow list of lawful purposes, could protect ibsa in which perpetrators misuse victims’ selfies. 8 as of this writing, the presenter found no canadian case law in which copyright claims were used to address ibsa. none of the search terms yielded reported cases where a victim made a claim in copyright. the search string “cyberbullying and copyright” yielded one case, in which plaintiffs requested that the defendant’s copyrights in cyberbullying posts be transferred to them (clancy v. farid, 2018). the substantive issues in that case have not gone to trial, and no judgement respecting the copyright question has been issued. further, those facts have limited relevance to ibsa victims who hold copyright in selfies, though a precedent transferring the copyright may help victims of other online harassment. discussion while no cases reported in canlii use copyright to address ibsa, this does not mean that copyright is irrelevant in this context. it is possible that unreported cases, or cases in other databases, make this connection. further, copyright notices are submitted to a web host or service provider—not a court. while applicable law is a thorny issue in copyright matters, it is possible that victims, including canadians, are already filing notices. that remedy may be especially effective against us-based platforms, such as the social media giants, which have formal takedown procedures. however, these practices are difficult to observe using case law data. this research is significant as an exploratory study of whether copyright has been used to help canadian victims of ibsa. future research should explore other databases and address the uses of copyright to combat ibsa in other jurisdictions, where such actions may have been pioneered. empirical work with stakeholders about their knowledge of legal tools is also desirable, as copyright and other legal actions may be poorlyrecognized by the public. references bailey, j., & hanna, m. (2011). the gendered dimensions of sexting: assessing the applicability of canada’s child pornography provision. canadian journal of women and the law, 23(2), 405–441. bates, s. (2017). revenge porn and mental health: a qualitative analysis of the mental health effects of revenge porn on female survivors. feminist criminology, 12(1), 22–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/1557085116654565 clancy v. farid, 2018 onsc 7482 copyright act, r.s.c., 1985, c. c-42 criminal code, r.s.c., 1985, c. c-46 folderauer, k. m. (2014). not all is fair (use) in love and war: copyright law and revenge porn comment. university of baltimore law review, 44(2), 321–340. haynes, j. (2018). judicial approaches to combatting revenge porn: a multijurisdictional perspective. commonwealth law bulletin, 44(3), 400-428. 9 https://doi.org/10.1177/1557085116654565 https://doi.org/10.1177/1557085116654565 henry, n., flynn, a., & powell, a. (2019). image-based sexual abuse: victims and perpetrators. trends & issues in crime and criminal justice, march 2019(572), 1-19. lee, y. h. (2019). delivering (up) a copyright-based remedy for revenge porn. journal of intellectual property law & practice, 14(2), 99–111. https://doi.org/10.1093/jiplp/jpy122 maddocks, s. (2018). from non-consensual pornography to image-based sexual abuse: charting the course of a problem with many names. australian feminist studies, 33(97), 345–361. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2018.1542592 mcglynn, c., rackley, e., & houghton, r. (2017). beyond ‘revenge porn’: the continuum of image-based sexual abuse. feminist legal studies, 25(1), 25–46. https:// doi.org/10.1007/s10691-017-9343-2 penny, j. (2013). deleting revenge porn. policy options. retrieved from https:// policyoptions.irpp.org/fr/magazines/vive-montreal-libre/penney/ walker, k., & sleath, e. (2017). a systematic review of the current knowledge regarding revenge pornography and non-consensual sharing of sexually explicit media. aggression and violent behavior, 36, 9–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2017.06.010 panel speaker 3 making love—the simulacra of consent pauline sameshima lakehead university framed within the research methodology of parallaxic praxis (sameshima et al., 2019), this presentation panel positions three speakers together with the deliberate aim to trouble the boundaries of research disciplinarity, funds of knowledge, and research modality while studying the same phenomenon. this panelist focuses on identity construction, attachment development, and critical cultural and curriculum theory, using excerpts from an epistolary novel in process. specifically, slippings in semiotic signs (i.e., words having different meanings) and precession of simulacra (baudrillard, 1994; i.e., the development of representations of the real) are basis points for how internet communication promotes mutability of identities and meaning-making. the epistolary format is used because genre and form have the power to offer readers experiences that appear believable and valid (kvale, 1995). the rendering of research determines the reach of the audience and is “the main vehicle through which our scholarship becomes known and, for that matter, widely accepted or rejected by peers” (cole and knowles, 2001, p. 122). excerpts feb 21--sent 10 https://doi.org/10.1093/jiplp/jpy122 https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2018.1542592 https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2018.1542592 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-017-9343-2 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-017-9343-2 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-017-9343-2 https://policyoptions.irpp.org/fr/magazines/vive-montreal-libre/penney/ https://policyoptions.irpp.org/fr/magazines/vive-montreal-libre/penney/ https://policyoptions.irpp.org/fr/magazines/vive-montreal-libre/penney/ https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2017.06.010 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2017.06.010 dear james, of course, i’m not going to use your real name in the book. ha! i just realized i was talking about james, the name you wanted, not your real-real name on our joint royal bank account. it is interesting i suppose. i think of you as james. i say “i love you, james.” when i use your passport name, you’ve said i sounded stern, not as loving. no one knows i call you james. is that a red flag? i’ve wondered about naming, how research participants choose their pseudonyms, how people mask their names online, create new identities, say things they would never say if people knew who they were. cancel culture is real. do you remember when we made up names for each other? was that the first lie? or was it when you said you were single when you weren’t? you hardly use the name you made up for me. you always call me darling. i think it’s because you have no name for me. maybe my name never mattered to you, or maybe the word “darling” means way more to me than you. or maybe you use “darling” for everyone secretly. the time you left your phone on the counter with your messages app open, i saw that you had named me r2000, a reference number, from the short story i made up about us. you gave me a name like a unit model, not like when you said you were infatuated with her because she looked like a model. you actually said that to me? you wanted to text me secretly, leave no trace so you made up names for us. that first day, making up names seemed fun, not permanent. feb 22--sent dear james, i’ve got a name for the book! making love-changing the world. what do you think? i was talking about making, how creative generation and gifting builds relation and love and thus changes the world. also, it refers to generating love, trying to get people to love us, that causes us to create fake selves, idealized selves, and this is what is changing the world in a dark way. the fake self is like a simulacrum. i’m going to copy my explanation here for you. i used it in last week’s grad class blog. a simulacrum is a representation of something that becomes the perceived real. baudrillard’s (1994) opening in simulacra and simulations recounts an allegory by luis borges in which cartographers map out the empire with so much detail, the replication is mistaken for the original. over time, as the map and territory coalesce in decay and the inhabitants no longer know the difference between the map and the territory, they find themselves disoriented. precession of simulacra refers to the constructed symbol or sign eclipsing or preceding and even determining the original. (sameshima, 2017, p. 3) it’s really about creating a fake identity. people present this ideal self that appears so much better than who they really are. i think baudrillard’s work aptly explains that when the fake self is successful, then it’s really easy for the base to become veiled or lost. 11 feb 23 unsent dear james, i just read twenge and campbell’s (2009) the narcissism epidemic. various studies confirm correlations between self-esteem, narcissism and internet use (kircaburun & griffiths, 2018). higher levels of narcissism are positively associated with facebook use (walters & horton, 2015) specifically with the number of self-focused sends about the self and larger numbers of facebook friends (mckinney, kelly & duran, 2012). this all makes sense. narcissistic personality disorder includes the creation of a false self, a simulacrum of the true self because the authentic self is not deemed valuable or good enough. the presented false self is much shinier, armoured. march 15 unsent dear james, i did one of those online surveys. i am the perfect match for the narcissist. saeed (2019) says that high achieving intelligent people are often victims of narcissists because of soft and flexible boundaries. being open minded, non-judgemental and questioning are usually deemed admirable traits, but these are exactly the traits that make me vulnerable. did you open the link i sent? it’s on the ipsos global trends survey (emes, 2017). the survey says there is a shift toward nostalgia and tradition, and a slowing movement toward more liberal attitudes. this seems backwards to me. in response to the statement: the role of women in society is to be good mothers and wives, there was a significant increase in agreement in 12 of the 22 countries surveyed on this measure. do you know what this means? it’s saying that the world is moving toward more traditional conservative stances. i suppose it’s not that surprising. the world wants more stability. i suppose stability of an impostered identity is foolish to ask for when we keep developing our relationships and identities online. references baudrillard, j. (1994). simulacra and simulation (s. f. glaser, trans.). university of michigan press. cole, a. l., & knowles, j. g. (2001). qualities of inquiry. in l. neilsen, a. cole & j. g. knowles (eds.), the art of writing inquiry. backalong books. 12 emes, c. (2017). ipsos global trends. the changing role of women. global trends 2020. https://www.ipsosglobaltrends.com/the-changing-role-of-women/ hall, s. (1973). encoding and decoding in the television discourse. university of birmingham. https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/documents/college-artslaw/history/cccs/ stencilled-occasional-papers/1to8and11to24and38to48/sop07.pdf mckiney, b. c., kely, l., & duran, r. l. (2012, april). narcissism or openness?: college students’ use of facebook and twitter. communication research reports, 29 (2): 08-118. https://doi.org/10.1080/08824096.2012.666919 kircaburun, k., & griffiths, m. d. (2018). the dark side of internet: preliminary evidence for the associations of dark personality traits with specific online activities and problematic internet use. journal of behavioral addictions, 7(4), 993–1003. https:// doi.org/10.1556/2006.7.2018.109 kvale, s. (1995). the social construction of validity. qualitative inquiry, 1(1): pp. 19-40). doi:https://doi.org/10.2174/13816128113199990617 twenge, j. m., & cambell, w. k. (2009). the narcissism epidemic. atria. sameshima, p. (2017, december). post-truth simulacra: inviting mutable meaningmaking. journal of the canadian association for curriculum studies, 15(2), 1-5. sameshima p., maarhuis, p., & wiebe, s. (2019). parallaxic praxis: multimodal interdisciplinary pedagogical research design. vernon press. saeed, k. (2019). emotional abuse and 7 signs of covert narcissism. https:// kimsaeed.com/2015/05/02/emotional-abuse-and-covert-narcissism/ walters, t. w., & horton, r. (2015). a diary study of the influence of facebook use on narcissism among male college students. computers in human behavior, 52: 326-330. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.05.054 13 https://www.ipsosglobaltrends.com/the-changing-role-of-women/ https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/documents/college-artslaw/history/cccs/stencilled-occasional-papers/1to8and11to24and38to48/sop07.pdf https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/documents/college-artslaw/history/cccs/stencilled-occasional-papers/1to8and11to24and38to48/sop07.pdf https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/documents/college-artslaw/history/cccs/stencilled-occasional-papers/1to8and11to24and38to48/sop07.pdf https://doi-org.ezproxy.lakeheadu.ca/10.1080/08824096.2012.666919 https://doi.org/10.1556/2006.7.2018.109 https://doi.org/10.1556/2006.7.2018.109 https://doi.org/10.2174/13816128113199990617 https://jcacs.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jcacs/article/view/40336/36281 https://jcacs.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jcacs/article/view/40336/36281 https://jcacs.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jcacs/article/view/40336/36281 https://vernonpress.com/book/441 https://vernonpress.com/book/441 https://vernonpress.com/book/441 https://kimsaeed.com/2015/05/02/emotional-abuse-and-covert-narcissism/ https://kimsaeed.com/2015/05/02/emotional-abuse-and-covert-narcissism/ https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.05.054 references aoir2019-submission final revised jd am.pdf selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 the visceral embodiment of digital pleasures introductory statement this panel explores digital pleasures through entanglement of bodies and digital technologies. it focuses on the digital structures and affordances that facilitate seeking, receiving and giving pleasure. the panel brings together four presentations, all of which speak to the central conference theme by considering how the architectures that afford digital pleasures also raise attendant questions of trust and risk in digital systems. we analyse the ways in which intimacy is not only interactive, but also profoundly embodied. haraway’s work in particular highlights the importance of taking seriously the nexus of human bodies and technologies and attending to the ways in which technologies not only deliver and mediate pleasure, but potentially expand upon our capacity to experience it. to date the research corpus has largely focused upon the micro-social interactions of digital intimacies (dobson, robards, and carah 2018). this emphasis on relational intimacy puts the body into the background of the digitally mediated encounter and limits the ways in which we can talk about embodiment, sex and pleasure online. this panel is a timely body of work which draws together important threads in internet research, that is how the body, pleasure and digital spaces are closely intertwined. our arguments are predicated on two conceptual apparatuses: affordances (davis and chouinard 2016) from science and technology studies (sts) and role-taking (mead 1934) from social psychology. in the opening paper, davis sets a theoretical frame that moves beyond evaluations of veracity and authenticity to consider the variability and subjectivity of mediated pleasure (mediated pleasure: sts meets social psychology). this framing concretises visceral and ephemeral experiences. we argue that mediated practices engage the body as a site of pleasure and embodied affective intensity. within this frame, we suggest that digitally mediated pleasures, while widely consumed, still have a hint of the ‘fringe’ or ‘subversive’. to understand trust and risk, we argue that we need to understand both the ways in which people use digitally mediated space for a variety of practices and the architecture of these spaces. our empirical papers consider different types of digital pleasure from sex to drugs and sound. the first empirical paper argues that physical proximity is not a necessary condition of sex or sex work. cam workers trade in erotic pleasures that are, by definition, mediated and remote. as a sex work practitioner, advocate, and public scholar, the patella-rey paints a suggested citation (apa): smith, n., davis, j., maddox, a., patella-rey, p. (2019, october 2-5). the visceral embodiment of digital pleasures. panel presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 picture of carefully crafted intimacies that are driven by and result in pleasurable sexual encounters. distinctly, digital drugs are evoked through binaural beats. they are an emergent property of the affordances of audio technologies and human bodies in which the human body converges as a socio-technical assemblage through which pleasure is experienced. maddox and barratt argue that despite the obvious implications for harm reduction there is also the potential for a moral panic (cohen 2002; young 1971) surrounding the ways that these digital pleasures move bodies beyond the bounds of social control. similarly, asmr becomes tangible as an emergent property of human and technical assemblages. the primary attraction of asmr is the embodied, physical pleasure of sound. smith argues that while asmr does trade partly in relational intimacy, its affective stickiness (ahmed 2004) comes from physical pleasure. embodied pleasure is intrinsic to the human condition, and digital media is deeply embedded in contemporary life. how these intersect is a key piece of the puzzle of what it means to be human in contemporary society. we argue that embodied pleasures are under researched in the social sciences and there is a lack of literature that considers the role that technology plays in the affordance of pleasure despite its imbrication with these practices. references ahmed, s. (2004). the cultural politics of emotion. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. cohen, s. (2002). folk devils and moral panics (3rd ed.). new york, london: routledge. davis, j. and chouinard, j. (2016). theorizing affordances: from request to refuse, bulletin of science, technology and society, 36(4): 241-246. doi: 10.1177/0270467617714944.and dobson, a.s., robards b.r., and carah, n. (2018). digital intimate publics and social media. switzerland: palgrave macmillan s haraway, d (1991). "a cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialistfeminism in the late twentieth century". in d. haraway, simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature. london: routledge. mead, g. h. (1934). mind, self and society, vol. 111: chicago: university of chicago press. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 young, j. (1971). the drugtakers. london: paladin. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 mediated pleasure: sts meets social psychology jenny davis the australian national university pleasure is intrinsically embodied. nerve endings, synapses, blood flow, and body fluids are recruited by aural, visual, olfactory, tactile, gustatory, and vestibular encounters. physical co-presence between bodies and stimuli is not a precondition for pleasure’s activation. rather, pleasure can be mediated and indirect. this is evidenced by historical markets for meditative recordings that induce relaxation, phone sex operators that excite, and cooking shows that bring salivary glands alive. digital technologies, in turn, have exploded as conduits of pleasure. asmr, food porn, sex camming, and digital drugs, alongside pimple popping, massage videos, and the pleasurable-by-design ‘ping’ of social media notifications together show a warm and fleshy relationship between people, platforms, and machines (allen 2017, garcia-argibay, santed and reales 2018, jones 2016, smith and snider 2019, versace et al. 2018). the aim of this paper is to give theoretical grounding to the phenomenon of digitally mediated embodied pleasure. digitally mediated pleasure is a visceral entanglement between technology and subjectivity. i suggest theorizing digitally mediated pleasure through two conceptual apparatuses: affordances from science and technology studies (sts) and role-taking from social psychology. affordances refer to the ways technical design features enable and constrain social outcomes (gibson 1986, norman 1998). role-taking is a classic concept from social psychology that refers to putting the self in another’s position (mead 1934) through processes of empathy and perspective taking (davis and love, 2017). affordances and role-taking converge to provide a social reading of technical systems through which bodily pleasure is achieved in the context of indirect, mediated, impersonal, and remote stimuli. affordance analysis of digitally mediated pleasure investigates how design architectures open and constrict pleasurable bodily experiences. the mechanisms and conditions framework of affordances (davis and chouinard 2016) is particularly useful in this regard. the mechanisms and conditions framework approaches technical artifacts as dynamic and variable in their effects. under this model, artifacts request, demand, encourage, discourage, refuse and allow particular user capabilities and related social outcomes. how a given artifact affords varies across subjects and circumstances. the mechanisms and conditions framework can chart the technical features that support and constrain pleasurable experiences, for whom, and under what conditions. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 role-taking makes sense of mediated pleasure as a process by which subjects transport the self into an imagined body, with visceral effect. role-taking incorporates cognitive processes of perspective taking and affective processes of empathy. perspective taking entails imagining what the other thinks and feels. empathy entails a subject feeling with the other, moved by the other’s emotions (davis and love, 2017). digitally mediated experiences of pleasure can thus be read as embodied role-taking. those who experience pleasure through digital configurations of sensory stimuli are placing themselves in the heart, mind, and/or flesh of another in ways that elicit bodily response. this “other” may be an avatar, a person on a screen, or even the imagined self. weaving together role-taking and affordances, the following question emerges: what are the social and technical conditions that facilitate embodied role-taking? answering this question requires a baseline assumption of variability in both affordances and role-taking. this variability bears out through theoretical and empirical advances in sts and social psychology. technical features afford differently for different subjects and across circumstances (davis and chouinard, 2016). similarly, some subjects role-take more effectively than others (love and davis 2014). concretely, this assumption of variability indicates that some subjects will experience digitally mediated embodied pleasure with great ease, while others will not experience it at all; some technical features will elicit embodied pleasure more readily, others with more difficulty, and these will vary across persons and situations. digitally mediated pleasure thus starts from a place of experiential diversity at the intersection of technologies, bodies, and social psychological processes. from this intersection we can address questions about the conditions under which pleasure manifests, does not manifest, and takes diverse form. bringing together theories of sts and social psychology provides a scaffold for understanding phenomena—such as digitally mediated pleasure—for which the technical and visceral intertwine. the structural and dynamic nature of the conceptual tools selected herein—affordances and role-taking—sidestep questions of veracity and authenticity with regard to mediated pleasure and instead, attend to questions about how it all works, for whom, and under what circumstances. such questions are critical as subjects pursue pleasure through technical means, entrusting deep intimacies to remote content creators, mass-produced devices, and corporate supported platforms. references allen, m. (2017). "sean parker unloads on facebook: "god only knows what it's selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 doing to our children's brains."." retrieved: 02/23/2019). (https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on facebookgodonlyknowswhatitsdoing-to-our-childrens-brains-1513306792-f855e7b4 4e99-4d608d51-2775559c2671.html) davis, j.l and love, t.p. (2017). "self-in-self, mind-in-mind, heart-in-heart: the future of role-taking, perspective taking, and empathy." pp. 151-74 in advances in group processes: emerald publishing limited. davis,j.l. and chouinard j.b.. (2016)."theorizing affordances: from request to refuse." bulletin of science, technology and society 36(4):241-48. garcia-argibay, m., santed, m.a. and reales, j.m. (2018). "efficacy of binaural auditory beats in cognition, anxiety, and pain perception: a meta-analysis." psychological research:1-16. gibson, jj. (1986). the ecological approach to visual perception: lawrence erlbaum associates. jones, a. (2016). "“i get paid to have orgasms”: adult webcam models’ negotiation of pleasure and danger." signs: journal of women in culture and society 42(1):227-56. love, t.p. and davis, j.l. (2014). "the effect of status on role-taking accuracy." american sociological review 79(5):848-65. mead, g.h. (1934). mind, self and society, vol. 111. chicago: university of chicago press. norman, d.a. (1998). the design of everyday things. london: mit. smith, n. and snider, am. 2019. "asmr, affect and digitally-mediated intimacy." emotion, space and society 30:41-48. versace, f., frank, d.w., stevens, e.m., deweese, m.m., guindani, m. and schembre, s.m. (2018). "the reality of “food porn”: larger brain responses to food‐related cues than to erotic images predict cue‐induced eating." psychophysiology:e13309. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 intimacy with strangers: a study of digitally mediated relationships in sex cam modeling pj patella-rey university of maryland sex is an intrinsically embodied act that, paradoxically, is flourishing on the screens of our digital devices. in particular, sex camming has become a thriving industry. cam models and their clients interact across a range of platforms including specialized sites and conventional social media. the shared sexual experience between cam models and clients is at once intimate, physical, and mediated. through interviews with models working in the pornography industry, i examine the way digital mediation not only enables, but at times deepens, embodied pleasure and emotional connection. discussion of the growing role of digital technology in our lives has often centered on fears that “real” intimate relationships are being undermined by substituting them with something inferior, simulated, and shallow. for example, turkle’s (2012: 12) best-seller alone together, pivots on the question: “does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters, of any kind?”. earlier research (tracing back to a 1998 study by kraut et al.) repeatedly sought to explore whether the supposed substitutions of online interaction for offline interaction left us feeling more isolated. these fears about the real being supplanted by simulation also carry over into the sexual sphere. mcglotten (2013: 2) observed that “utopian cyberspace discourses… were always tempered by technophobic panics that turned on questions of intimacy, especially of the more carnal sort.” but, as many researchers have noted (e.g., baym, 2015; wellman and rainie, 2012; stone, 1994; dibbel, 1993), people can and do experience meaningful and intimate interactions mediated through digital technologies, and, for some users, this also extends to sexual interactions. while most often, digitally-mediated intimacy is experienced with the people we also interact with offline, sometimes, intimacy emerges in relationships that exist exclusively online. part of the difficulty in understanding these interactions is that intimacy is assumed to be closely tied to both proximity and familiarity. but, theoretical work by simmel and others suggests that social and spatial distance can facilitate their own unique forms intimacy. conversations with strangers on buses or airplanes may exemplify the sort of intimacy that can emerge in low-stakes relationships (de sousa, 1991). sex work researchers studying stripping and prostitution suggest that client-provider selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 interactions are also instances where this sort of “bounded” intimacy can occur (bernstein, 2007; frank, 1998). in these cases, intimacy occurs while people are physically proximate, despite social distance (i.e., weak ties) between them. based in interviews with 33 sex cam models, my research examines interactions on cam sites where clients and providers are (at least, initially) both physically and socially distant from one another. despite these conditions, my respondents overwhelmingly report deep intimacy with some clients—both in terms of information disclosure (zelizer 2005, 2000; simmel, n.d./1950) and in terms of mutual affirmation (baym, 2018; beebe et al. 2010). most cam models do not interpret distance as an obstacle to overcome but as something that facilitates these relationships. in fact, models often employ sophisticated “distancing strategies” (sanders, 2005; brewis and linstead, 2000) to maintain safe and comfortable separation, even as they seek to deepen sexual and emotional intimacy. this suggests that intimacy and proximity can exist in a dialectical relationship that is far more complex than what many tech researchers and commentators have assumed. despite a lack of physical proximity, bodily pleasure obviously remains central. cam sites do, in fact, afford an intimate knowledge of the bodies of providers and also, often, clients. many clients pay to have their bodies scrutinized by purchasing "cock ratings" from providers. also, common practices like remote controlled sex toys and the purchase of used clothing add a dimension of indirect or virtual touch to the experience. more crudely, the same is true of "cum tributes" were a viewer ejaculates on the image of a provider (sometimes produced for that purpose). these examples demonstrate how digital mediation affords not only social connections but also unique kinds of back-and-forth interactions between bodies. references baym, n. k. (2018). playing to the crowd: musicians, audiences, and the intimate work of connection. nyu press. baym, n. k. (2015). personal connections in the digital age. 2nd edition. john wiley and sons. beebe, s. a., beebe, s. j., and redmond, m. v. (2010). interpersonal communication: relating to others. 6th ed. boston: pearson. bernstein, e., (2007). temporarily yours: intimacy, authenticity, and the commerce of sex. chicago: university of chicago press. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 brewis, j., and linstead, s. (2000). ‘the worst thing is the screwing’(1): consumption and the management of identity in sex work. gender, work and organization, 7(2): 84-97. de sousa, r. (1991). “love as theater.” the philosophy of “erotic” love. eds. r.c. solomon and k. higgins. lawrence: university of kansas press. dibbell, j. (1993). a rape in cyberspace or how an evil clown, a haitian trickster spirit, two wizards, and a cast of dozens turned a database into a society. village voice, 471. frank, k. (1998). the production of identity and the negotiation of intimacy in agentleman's club'. sexualities, 1(2): 175-201. kraut, r., patterson, m. et al.(1998). internet paradox: a social technology that reduces social involvement and psychological well-being? american psychologist, 53(9): 1017-1031. mcglotten, s. (2013). virtual intimacies: media, affect, and queer sociality. new york, new york: suny press. rainie, l., and wellman, b. (2012). networked: the new social operating system. mit press. sanders, t. (2005). ‘it's just acting’: sex workers’ strategies for capitalizing on sexuality. gender, work and organization, 12(4), 319-342. simmel, g. (n.d./1950). “the isolated individual and the dyad.” the sociology of georg simmel. free press, new york, pp.118-144. simmel, g. (1906). "the sociology of secrecy and of secret societies." trans. albion w. small. american journal of sociology 11: 441-498 stone, a. r. (1994). split subjects, not atoms; or, how i fell in love with my prosthesis. configurations, 2(1): 173-190. turkle, s. (2011/2017). alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other. new york: basic books. zelizer, v. a. (2005). the purchase of intimacy. princeton, nj: princeton university press. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 zelizer, v. a. (2000). the purchase of intimacy. law and social inquiry, 25(3): 817848. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 digital drugs: embodied social practices, platform affordances, and research directions alexia maddox deakin university monica barratt social and global studies centre, rmit conjoint, national drug and alcohol research centre, unsw sydney this paper discusses and situates the emerging phenomenon of i-dosing and digital drugs. i-dosing is the experience of consuming digital drugs that are engendered through binaural beats and bodily practices. they are accessed through platforms such as audio/visual social media such as youtube and soundcloud and music streaming apps such as apple music. the paper will do two things, it will examine the bodily practices of i-dosing in which the digital artefact and the body harmonise to evoke the pleasure of drug taking. this discussion seeks to move beyond a critique of how platforms shape embodied pleasure to the transformed third space that emerges through the digital-body instrument. secondly it will examine the politics that pleasures from consuming digital drugs provokes. i-dosing is the sonic consumption of binaural beats, some of which are designed to engender the embodied experience of recreational drugs. garcia-argibay, santed and reales (2018) describe binaural beats as a perceptual phenomenon that occurs when presenting two tones separately to each ear that slightly differ in their frequency. laliberty (2017) extends this definition to note that the listener will also hear a psychoacoustically engendered third tone which is purported to “entrain” brain waves and incite cognitive and mental states. he observes from this phenomenon that the beat does not exist external to its listener, but only in the passage between the body and audio object. in their recent meta-analysis garcia-argibay et al. (2018) found growing evidence that binaural-beat exposure is an effective way to affect cognition. this finding suggests some potential of this audio technology as a digital drug and that the body is co-involved in both creating and experiencing the effect. the term i-dosing appears to be marketing terminology derived from the platform idoser, which first launched in 2005. i-doser is an internet application for purchasing audio content that is claimed to simulate specific mental states through the use of binaural beats, some of which are named after prohibited recreational drugs (fawzi and mansouri 2017; laliberty 2017). bhatia et al. (2016) in their description of the selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 rising phenomenon of digital drugs suggest that this is the ‘dark side’ of binaural beats, in which people may reach a subconscious state by listening to these beats. within the geo-cultural context of their work, fawzi and mansouri argue that i-dosing is a serious growing issue for their community in saudi arabia. digital drugs are currently defined by cornford and lichtner (2014) from an sts perspective as ‘drugs that are both dependent on and substantially constituted by multiple digital representations and connections, and whose use and effectiveness is strongly mediated through digital means’. this socio-material approach moves beyond the ‘drugs as a technology and technology as a drug’ (walsh 2011) conceptualisation prevalent within the literature on the intersections of the internet and drugs. we argue however that this definition needs further refinement to encompass the practice of i-dosing through the removal of material caveats. in this paper we suggest that the definition of digital drugs can be expanded to address the role of binaural beats in psychologically simulating the experience of drugs through auditory modes of delivery and their imbrication with uses of social media and smart device applications. to this end, we consider the literature connected to technologies for mood enhancement (wadley 2016) and draw upon the work of kane race (2017) to incorporate thinking on drug use and embodied pleasure. these associations across complementary literature raise questions of trust in the platform, trust in the drug design and composition, and trust in the experience. in addition, considerations of vulnerability to psycho-social risks are raised by the possibility of recreational tinkering with brain waves to achieve states of embodied pleasure. in order to articulate relationships between drug use, binaural beats, the body and the platform, we situate this paper within research exploring the affordances of the internet upon access to drugs. we also consider the ways that people who use drugs engage with online drug discussion for identity building, trip reports, harm reduction and community experience through text-based websites, such as online forums (barratt and lenton 2013), and audio-visual social media such as youtube (manning 2013). previously, we have explored how the affordances of the internet have facilitated drug access, such as through drug cryptomarkets (barratt et al. 2016, barratt and maddox 2016, maddox et al 2016). in that study, we interviewed people who used cryptomarkets to purchase drugs in order to understand its impact on their drug use trajectories. during these interviews, a participant shared their drug-related creative works, including a soundcloud link to short music tracks based upon binaural beats they had composed while affected by the novel substances methoxetamine and 4fluoroamphetamine and 3-4 methylenedioxymethamphetamine (mdma, ‘ecstasy’). selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 in this paper we present a profile of this participant’s use of drugs, their socio-cultural referents, and their emobidied relationships to binaural beats, creativity and mindstate induction. the analysis will then be used to frame an ensuing discussion of the embodied pleasure that emerges through platform-to-body entrainment. we examine the bodily practices of i-dosing in which the digital artefact and the body harmonise to evoke the pleasure of drug taking, which we refer to as platform-body entrainment. references bhatia, p., rasal,s., shelar, s.t. and mulik, v.t, (2016). binaural beats “amenable or not”, international journal of current research, 8(08): 35960-35962. barratt, m. j., and lenton, s. (2013). “drugs and the internet”. in a. ritter, t. king, and m. hamilton (eds.), drug use in australian society. 272-293. melbourne: oxford university press. barratt, m. j., and maddox, a. (2016). “active engagement with stigmatised communities through digital ethnography”. qualitative research. 16(6): 701–19. doi:10.1177/1468794116648766. barratt, m. j., lenton, s., maddox, a., and allen, m., (2016).”’what if you live on top of a bakery and you like cakes?’drug use and harm trajectories before, during and after the emergence of silk road”. international journal of drug policy, september 2016 35:50-57 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo. 2016.04.006 cornford, t. and lichtner, v. (2014) “digital drugs: an anatomy of new medicines.” in: doolin, b, lamprou, e, mitev, n and mcleod, l, (eds.) information systems and global assemblages. (re)configuring actors, artefacts, organizations. ifip wg 8.2 working conference on information systems and organizations 2014, 11-12 dec 2014, auckland, new zealand. springer verlag. 146-162. isbn 9783662457078 fawzi, m. m., and mansouri, f. a. (2017). “awareness on digital drugs abuse and its applied prevention among healthcare practitioners in ksa.” arab journal of forensic sciences and forensic medicine (ajfsfm), 1:6. garcia-argibay, m., santed, m. a., and reales, j. m. (2018). efficacy of binaural auditory beats in cognition, anxiety, and pain perception: a meta-analysis. psychological research. doi:10.1007/s00426-018-1066-8 i-doser.com want to get high? (2019, 18 february). retrieved from http://www.idoser.com selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 laliberty, r. (2017). ‘audio acid: affective design and the psychoacoustic trip’, journal of sonic studies, 14. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/291802/291803/0/23 [accessed 18/02/2019] maddox, a, barratt, m, lenton, s, and allen, m., (2016), 'constructive activism in the dark web: cryptomarkets and illicit drugs in the digital ‘demimonde’', information communication and society, 19(1): 111-126. doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2015.1093531. manning, p. (2013) “youtube, ‘drug videos’ and drugs education”, drugs: education, prevention and policy, 20(2):, 120-130, doi: 10.3109/09687637.2012.704435 race, k. (2017). “thinking with pleasure: experimenting with drugs and drug research”. international journal of drug policy, 49, 144–149. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2017.07.019 wadley, g. (2016). “mood-enhancing technology”. proceedings of the 28th australian conference on computer-human interaction. 326-332. acm. https://people.eng.unimelb.edu.au/gwadley/pubs/wadley(2016)moodenhancingtech nology.pdf walsh, c. (2011). “drugs, the internet and change”, journal of psychoactive drugs, 43(1): 55-63, doi: 10.1080/02791072.2011.566501 the curious case of asmr: sound, pleasure and mediation naomi smith federation university selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 the asmr (autonomous sensory meridian response) community is organised around watching and creating videos of soundscapes that may induce ‘tingling’ physiological responses. in addition to the physical tingling sensation, definitions of asmr created by the community focus on the state of relaxed euphoria it induces. these definitions further state that asmr is triggered by small and otherwise mundane noises, including whispering, soft talking, typing, tapping, and crinkling sounds. with its focus on the mundane and often overlooked sounds of everyday life, such as crinkling, tapping, typing, and brushing, asmr highlights the ways in which embodied and pleasurable affective moments inhabit the small spaces of social life. the internet has enlarged these small spaces and allowed for asmr to be named, defined and circulated as an embodied, pleasurable and intentional affective experience constructed through sound. asmr has flourished in the digital space afforded by youtube (burgess et al. 2009). the ability to search, personally archive, and stream related videos suggested by youtube has meant that the platform was a natural fit for the growing online community, allowing users to discover new asmr content through the videos suggested by youtube’s recommender system. the comments sections of youtube also allows watchers to provide feedback to the asmr artists about ‘good’ triggers, as well as providing content creators with a way to track the popularity of their videos (mardsen 2012). these engagements produce a seemingly endless archive of possible asmr triggers and actively refine the concept of asmr itself. this research focused on understanding how asmr is defined by the community that produces it, and by extension how we understand asmr as a social phenomenon. these two research aims guided our sampling and analytic strategy. as it is not possible to watch every asmr video produced, we focused our initial sampling on popular and active asmr artists with youtube channels. we have focused on asmr artists with a strong public profile and a large online following, specifically those who have given media interviews and participate in raising the public profile of asmr. from this group, we further analysed selected videos that directly describe the sensation of asmr (as opposed to focusing on inducing it) or discuss asmr sensitivity or immunity. this content seeks to explore and explain how asmr ‘works’ and provide an ‘oral history’ of asmr online before it became a recognisable community on youtube. the introduction of mediation to the asmr experience highlights how digital technologies can be used to recreate and transmit embodied affective responses. the digital technologies implicated in asmr have provided a space for it to emerge as a mediated and asynchronous experience by design, mediated by non-human agents, and like a film, re-watched and (re)experienced, again and again. embodied affective experiences online are not static sites of engagement, but rather selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 transmitted, circulated and shared. as ahmed (2004: 45-46) argues, they are “not contained within the contours of the subject.” rather they exist outside and between users’ subjectivities. the digitally mediated space that asmr inhabits encourages us to think of asmr as an ‘affective genre’ (berlant 2008) located within structures of feelings (williams 1977). it also calls attention to the ways in which affect may be inorganically structured through digital technologies and the objects that are used to create asmr, demonstrating that objects can “generate and transmit affects themselves” (ash 2015: 85). the implication of the non-human in embodied, affective pleasures is also consistent with scholars (e.g. kunstmans 2012: paasonen 2015) who emphasise the sensory qualities of digital affectivities and intensities. experiences such as asmr provide us with a way to read senses and by extension the body, back into digitalised affectivities, as new media and digitisation expand the senses and the capacities of the biological body (clough 2008). the digital space of the internet functions then as a “site of translation” (ash 2015: 87), where affective pleasures can be “produced and translated into different states and forms for different purposes”. the intimate, embodied, affective experience produced by asmr is not a site without tension and risk. in order to create and maintain the asmr community, viewers and the creators of asmr content engage in boundary work or boundary policing; a practice which has long been noted (e.g. erikson 1996) as central to the maintenance of communities, both on and offline. in online spaces such as the asmr community, boundary policing, or boundary work can take a variety of forms. asmr artists frequently emphasise that the asmr experience is not intended for sexual pleasure, focusing instead on relaxation, stress and anxiety management (andersen 2015: 692). the ‘tingling’ physiological response that comprises asmr and the intimate, personal nature of the videos often means that asmr is interpreted as sexual or erotic. however, the community’s focus on the neuroscience of asmr as deep relaxation, and more closely linked to meditation, is a way of foreclosing erotic interpretations. while this is partly due to the stigma that surrounds sex work, it is also a practical decision for asmr creators. positioning asmr as relaxing, not sexual or erotic allows asmr artists to continue to monetise their asmr work while avoiding legislation like sesta that holds online publishers liable for the content on their sites. sound provides insight in ‘reciprocal affective and emotional relations between bodies, objects, places and ideas’ (doughty et al. 2016: 39), and asmr is one such example of how sounds, as mediated by digital spaces like youtube, co-create selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 embodied affective intensities. asmr demonstrates the complexities that surround the intersections of pleasure embodiment, and digital mediation. the complex ways in which affect works through and with digital technologies illuminate the “‘not yet’ of a body’s doing” (gregg and seigworth 2010: 4). references ahmed, s. (2004). the cultural politics of emotion. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. andersen, j. (2015). ‘now you’ve got the shiveries affect, intimacy, and the asmr whisper community’, television and new media, 16(8), 683–700. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476414556184 ash, j. (2015). ‘technology and affect: towards a theory of inorganically organised objects’, emotion, space and society, 14, 84–90. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2013.12.017 berlant, l. (2008). the female complaint: the unfinished business of sentimentality in american culture. durham and london: duke university press. burgess, j., green j., jenkins h., and j. hartley (2009). youtube: online video and participatory culture. cambridge, uk: polity. clough, p. (2008). ‘the affective turn: political economy, biomedia and bodies’, theory, culture and society, 25(1): 1-22. doi: 10.117/0263276407085156. doughty, k., duffy, m., harada, t. (2016). ‘practices of emotional and affective geographies of sound’, emotion, space and society, 20: 39–41. doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2016.06.007 erikson, k. (1966). wayward puritans: a study in the sociology of deviance. new york: john wiley gregg, m. and seigworth g. (2010). the affect theory reader, durham and london: duke university press. kuntsman, a. (2012). introduction, in a. karatzogianni and a. kuntsman, digital cultures and the politics of emotion: feelings, affect and technological change, pp 1-21, new york palgrave macmillian. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 marsden, r. (2012). ‘maria spends 20 minutes folding towels:” why millions are mesmerised by asmr videos’, independent, july 20, available at: www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/maria-spends-20minutes-folding-towels-why-millions-are-mesmerised-by-asmr-videos-7956866.html (accessed 10 august 2017). paasonen, s. (2015). a midsummer’s bonfire: affective intensities of online debate, in s. paasonen, k. hillis, and m. petit (eds.) networked affect, cambridge, mass.: the mit press, pp.43-58. aoir2020-submission-reliving memories-final.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): kopelman, s. & frosh, p. (2020, october). reliving memories (over and over again): gifs, moving photography and the smartphone album. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. reliving memories (over and over again): gifs, moving photography and the smartphone album sara kopelman the hebrew university of jerusalem, israel paul frosh the hebrew university of jerusalem, israel among the most popular and essential smartphone applications are photo-apps. these applications not only enable the seamless display of both still and moving images in smartphone photography albums but even create new looped images from stills taken by the user. this shift potentially changes the temporal experience of everyday digital media from linear temporality to looped, cyclical time, promoting a present tense made visible not through instantaneous capture (photography) or sequential unfolding (film and video), but continual recurrence. this theoretical paper uses the advent of the gif as a key product of smartphone photo albums to re-conceptualize the temporal and mnemonic structures of everyday digital photography. the relation between visible movement and the perception of time guides this paper's focus on the smartphone photo album. while pre-digital photo albums functioned only as vehicles of image-organization and presentation, contemporary smartphone albums also enable – and even initiate – the creation of seemingly new kinds of domestic photography such as ‘moving photographs’ or ‘animated photographs’. the character of these visual products and the processes of their creation vary across operating systems. the android photos application, for instance, notifies users with offers to animate their sequences of photographs almost immediately after they are taken, turning them into gifs – the digital image file format which plays a segment of movement for a few seconds in an endless loop (eppink, 2014). in parallel, apple has made ‘live photos’ the default photography mode of the iphone camera app: this captures 1.5 seconds of video before and after pressing the button to take a photo, and can be looped through the app to create a gif. both google’s and apple’s systems radically disrupt the conventional assumptions of photography theory regarding photography’s relations with time. pre-digital photography theory postulated a key distinction between a photograph and a movie or video: the photograph is static; the movie is characterized by duration. whereas the photograph was associated with an absolute past, an instantaneous ‘what-has-been’ (barthes, 1981) frozen and detached from its own unfolding, moving images were associated with temporal progression (bazin, 1960; deleuze, 1986; baker, 1996). more recent work, however, has altered photography theory’s view of the still’s inherent pastness, conceptualizing smartphone photography as ‘present’ and ‘live’ for two reasons: first, though perceived as still, the digital photograph is actually a high-speed continuous projection of multiple static images (rubinstein & sluis, 2013); second, photographs are increasingly shared instantaneously across digital networks that connect interlocutors across space in the present, and which are experienced as ‘live’, rather than (or as well as) across time (frosh, 2019). nevertheless, the smartphone image in such accounts still has no experienced duration. this is where the ‘moving photographs’ of the smartphone photo album transform photographic representation, shifting it from past immobility to a continuous present. more importantly, it is a present whose continuity is created by endless recurrence. the gif file eliminates the linearity of past-present-future because of its perpetual looped temporality, constituting a hybrid between photographic still and film or video. the endless loop does not produce a pause in looking at the flow of the present, nor does it ‘stab’ the viewer through absorption into a specific element, as barthes claims the photograph does. conversely, however, while the gif does show movement, it is usually less smooth than the flow of a video (depending on the number of frames per second) and it also lacks sound. as a result, the repetitive movement of the gif constructs a generalized impression of an event as an artificial duration without development, rather than the structured narrative of an event as a temporal unfolding. the looped movement eliminates the ‘telos’ from past events, which gives a kind of mythical (but also mechanical) infinity to photographed memories. it is as though the gif‘s looped movement functions as the visible incarnation of ‘habit-memory’, defined by bergson (1988) as the functional training of memory for the purpose of automating present actions (such as learning text by heart), and which is not recalled as an image of a particular past event. it also makes culturally visible, in its very form as a perpetually recurring computational image, chun’s (2008) designation of the ‘enduring ephemeral’ as a central characteristic of computational memory: the gif’s looped temporality continually repeats the past as an automated movement of disappearance and reappearance in the present. everyday smartphone photo-apps therefore come under the principle of time-based looped movement, potentially promoting a technologized ‘desire for endlessness’ (hoelzl & marie, 2015) in our visualizations of everyday moments. the emergence of the gif in the smartphone album thus invites us to reflect on the nature of memory and temporal experience at the cultural level. despite radical changes in photographic technologies and practices, much everyday contemporary photography is still dedicated to users’ biographical milestones, such as birthdays, weddings, births, trips, graduation, etc. (van dijck, 2008; keightley & pickering, 2014). however, digital photography’s capacity for instant, inexpensive and virtually unlimited replication enables sequences of multiple images to replace the single analog photograph as a sacred object of memory. this multiplicity produces a large number of shots for a single event even when taken from the same angle or shooting location (augmented by the long click function that allows for high-speed photographing). additionally, our private mobile devices are used for the production, processing, distribution and viewing of images across live digital networks (cruz & meyer, 2012): the smartphone enables a cycle of mutual circulation between the consumption of social media and the uploading of images to social media. smartphone albums – which organize and display images but also initiate temporally novel photographic formats – are at the heart of these complex intersections between continuities in mnemonic practices and techno-cultural transformations. references baker, g. (1996). photography between narrativity and stasis: august sander, degeneration, and the decay of the portrait. october, 76, 73-113.� barthes, r. (1981). camera lucida: reflections on photography, trans. richard h. new york: hill and wang. bazin, a., & gray, h. (1960). the ontology of the photographic image. film quarterly, 13(4), 4-9.� bergson h. (1988). matter and memory, trans. paul n.m. and palmer w.s. new york: zone books. chun, w. h. k. (2008). the enduring ephemeral, or the future is a memory. critical inquiry, 35(1), 148-171.� cruz, e. g. & e.t. meyer (2012) creation and control in the photographic process: iphones and the emerging fifth moment of photography. photographies, 5(2): 203-221. deleuze, g. (1986). cinema 1: the movement-image, trans. tomlinson h. and habberjam b. minneapolis: university of minnesota.� eppink, j. (2014). a brief history of the gif (so far). journal of visual culture, 13(3), 298-306. frosh, p. (2019) the poetics of digital media. cambridge: polity. hoelzl, i., & marie, r. (2015). softimage: towards a new theory of the digital image. intellect books. � keightley, e., & pickering, m. (2014). technologies of memory: practices of remembering in analogue and digital photography. new media & society, 16(4), 576593.� rubinstein, d., & sluis, k. (2013). the digital image in photographic culture: algorithmic photography and the crisis of representation. in the photographic image in digital culture (pp. 36-54). routledge.� van dijck, j. (2008). digital photography: communication, identity, memory. visual communication, 7(1): 57–76. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 felt, j. m., bakardjieva, m., and dumitrica, d. (2017, october 18-21). the mediatization of leadership: grassroots digital facilitators as organic intellectuals. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the mediatization of leadership: grassroots digital facilitators as organic intellectuals mylynn felt university of calgary maria bakardjieva university of calgary delia dumitrica erasmus school of history, culture and communication scholars of both resource mobilization theory and new social movement theory recognize leadership as integral to traditional social movements (mccarthy and zald, 1987; melucci, 1989; morris & staggenborg, 2004). for staggenborg, “movements need leadership and vision in order to create the collective action frames, organizational vehicles, and strategies and tactics necessary for ongoing and effective campaigns” (2012, p. 187). following global protest movements of 2011, some now characterize movements relying on social media as horizontal and leaderless (bennett and segerberg, 2013; castells, 2012). does leadership in social media activism indeed disappear or does it take on new characteristics? gerbaudo (2012) suggests that the current protest cycle is characterized by ‘soft leadership’ in which certain participants play a key role in producing a ‘choreography of assembly’. whether due to an organizational shift to networks over bureaucracies or due to a change in values, many social movements in the current protest cycle are not characterized by visible leadership. this is not a novel, social-media related development. melucci writes of this as early as 1996 “the formal roles of leadership within an organizational structure in recent movements has been at least partially delegitimized” (1996, p. 344). this creates a dilemma for participants. there is a need for leadership to sustain action but since leadership is devalued, it can create interpersonal tension. melucci sees the “relationship with power and asymmetry” as a major challenge to contemporary movements and one that is “not easily solved.” this tendency is further exacerbated in the current cycle of contention where the initiation, framing and coordination of collective action have relied heavily on digital and social media. it appears that organizational hierarchies have transformed into flat networks, and the media infrastructure has taken over much of the work of leadership. where have all the leaders of collective action gone in the digital age? this paper seeks to intervene in current debates by closely analyzing three different cases of civic mobilization and collective action in canada that have employed social media as key instruments. in each case study we ask the questions whether any manifestations of leadership can be found, and if so, what are the characteristics and typical practices of leaders operating in the digital media environment. as activists increasingly organize through social media, do these movements truly flatten to horizontal organizations? if, on the other hand, contemporary movements continue to rely on some forms of leadership, what is its nature? this paper undertakes an in-depth analysis of data obtained through interviews, event observations and analysis of media content related to three canadian cases of civic mobilization of different scale, all of which strategically employed social media: the provincial mla playdate, the national murdered and missing indigenous women campaign, and the canadian response to the international refugees welcome movement. what attributes, competencies, skills, and practices distinguished the individuals and groups that played key roles in the inception and ongoing organization of these movements? how can their role (or roles) be defined, if not as traditional organizational leadership? the paper uses gramsci’s notion of the “organic intellectual” and bourdieu’s (1991) model of the “political field” to propose a conceptual framework for understanding the role of these organizers as political discourse-producers, sociometric stars and organic intellectuals. unlike traditional, professional intellectuals such as lawyers, teachers, doctors, etc., organic intellectuals emerge from within communities with grievances (strine, 1991). consequently, they are better positioned to make counter-hegemonic claims with their personal experience and connections to the groups asserting collective action. as parents of school-aged children, as indigenous women and relatives to murder victims, as immigrants and the children of immigrants, many of the grassroots facilitators of local mobilizations for these cases fit the criteria of gramsci’s organic intellectual. these leaders acted strategically to make claims and were personally accountable for generating the necessary material and human resources. even when tied to larger, formalized organizations for coordination, they worked autonomously as impactful grassroots organizers with the unique knowledge background of their impacted community and thus acted with greater affective resonance in making claims and mobilizing constituents. in the digital media environment, these organic intellectuals were not only able to articulate ideas adequately capturing the social situation and the position of the disaffected; they also acted as experienced and competent navigators of the expressive and disseminative possibilities afforded by the communication apparatus. they were able to effectively target their messages and elicit a powerful response. their status in the digitally enabled social networks was that of sociometric stars and critical nodes in which numerous connections among actors, both inside and outside the movement, intersected. ultimately, the organizers of the mobilizations under study were successful in infiltrating the political field, typically the domain of institutional players, with discourses collaboratively produced in the exchanges among grassroots citizens. by looking closely at the three cases through the lenses offered by these concepts, we identify the specific competencies, strategies and styles that characterize mediatized civic leadership. references bettencourt, b. a., dillmann, g. and wollman, n. (1996), the intragroup dynamics of maintaining a successful grassroots organization: a case study. journal of social issues, 52: 169–186. bennett, w. l. & segerberg, a. (2013). the logic of connective action: digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. new york, ny: cambridge university press. boehm, a., staples, l. (2006) grassroots leadership in task-oriented groups: learning from successful leaders, social work with groups, 28(2), 77-96. bourdieu, p. (1991). language and symbolic power. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. castells, m. (2012). networks of outrage and hope: social movements in the internet age. malden, ma: polity press. gerbaudo, p. (2012). tweets and the streets: social media and contemporary activism. new york, ny: pluto press. gramsci, a. (1989). prison notebooks.the intellectuals. in gottlieb, r. (ed.) an anthology of western marxism: from lukacs and gramsci to socialist-feminism. new york, oxford: oxford university press. kezar, a., gallant, t. b., & lester, j. (2011). everyday people making a difference on college campuses: the tempered grassroots leadership tactics of faculty and staff. studies in higher education 36(2), 129-151. doi: 10.1080/03075070903532304 mccarthy, j. d. & zald, m. n. (1987). social movements in an organizational society. oxford: transaction books. melucci, a. (1989). nomads of the present. london: radius hutchinson. melucci, a. (1996). challenging codes: collective action in the information age. new york, ny: cambridge university press. morris, a. d., & staggenborg, s. (2004). leadership in social movements. in d. a. snow, s. a. soule, & h. kriesi (eds.), the blackwell companion to social movements (pp. 171-196). malden, ma: blackwell publishing. rainie, l., wellman, b. (2012). networked: the new social operating system, cambridge, ma: mit press. staggenborg, s. (2012). social movements, 2nd ed. don mills, on: oxford university press. strine, m. s. (1991). critical theory and ‘organic’ intellectuals: reframing the work of cultural critique. communication monographs 58(2), 195-201. doi: 10.1080/03637759109376223. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): basu, m. (2020, october). chudi (bangles), bindi, aur hijab will bring along inquilab (revolution): anti-patriarchy within anti-fascist movements and the desire for a new political in india. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. chudi (bangles), bindi, aur hijab will bring along inquilab (revolution): anti-patriarchy within anti-fascist movements and the desire for a new political in india maitrayee basu london college of communication – university of the arts london aya zanana ka zamana, hai zanana ka zamana, khub pakaya ghar mai khana, inquilab ko hai pakana the age of women has arrived, it is the age of women, long have we cooked in kitchens at home, it is time to cook up the revolution aim and scope the lines above are from slogans performed by zanana ensemble, a women’s group of performing-protestors in delhi (personal video, jan 2020). it illustrates the centrality in reportage and social media representations of both urban and rural women in the protests against the citizenship amendment act in india (e.g. the suno india show, 2020, mar 8). this paper looks at discursive interventions online and protests against political and social injustices against women in india within the wider protests against the citizenship amendment act which erupted in december 2019 and continues to evolve at the time of writing. in attempting to classify some modes of publicness on digital media platforms that are prevalent amongst women resisting the oppressions of living under an authoritarian regime that overlaps with traditional patriarchal structures, this paper explores the radical potential of spheres of affect which challenges representative authority and questions “who” has the right to construct the political. theoretical approaches the main aim of this research is to explore the potential that these publics in affective spheres present as a political force. theoretically, this paper builds links between ambient citizenship and desire for the political from berlant (2011), and fraser’s (2007, 2020) work on the possibilities of ‘post-westphalian’ transnational public spheres, to contemplate some possibilities of transnational solidarities solidifying in networks of effective social justice and action. it also draws upon works like gajjala, 2019, which expand upon the particularities of gendered diasporic digital publics beyond the public and domestic binaries. combining these theoretical approaches, i enquire what are the radical potentials stemming from intimate public spheres (berlant, 2008, 2011), and how can these be scaled up beyond these spheres to construct a transnational public sphere. berlant (2008) premises the origins and conventions mass-culture mediated intimate public sphere in the united states within the assumption that women have experiences that are shared by others, no matter how different their lives are. for example, in the lines by zanana ensemble quoted above, the assumption that indian women are leaving their traditional unpaid domestic roles to start protests strategically forward the view that these women are first-time protestors with very little experience as political (as well as economic) actors. whilst these lines interpellate women to step outside their traditional roles, which is assumed to be shared, it also strategically distances them from the corrupt influences associated with the public sphere. in this research i will discuss different discourses emerging around women’s experiences through this lens whilst attempting to theorise the potential that feminist movements might possess to forge transnational solidarity. methodology this paper employs digital ethnography on twitter, where i as the researcher act as a participant observer. instead of utilising the more popular hashtag-analysis or keyword search methods used to study social movements and online protest cultures, this paper does a qualitative longitudinal analysis of manually-collected tweets from user-timelines (similar methods explored in gerrard, 2018, and brooker et al., 2018) of twelve indian activists, researchers and journalists who actively tweeted about the protests. the data is analysed using discourse analysis and close reading methods. my own closeness to the issues these users tweet about, for, and against, is based on my own personal and professional experience of being a user with an interest in indian feminism and left wing politics on the platform. in order to maintain critical distance as an ethnographer, i have only selected users whom i have never met in real life. all tweets collected are from public profiles; moreover, the data i have collected for my study exclude tweets that are obviously conversational, and not public, although the difference is blurred on a platform like twitter. as some topics these users discuss are intimate (although public) like self-harm or rape, in my paper i anonymise the users, as well as paraphrase the tweets. in my analysis, i am especially interested in the strategic ways in which ‘events’ that publics mobilise around might be constructed out of an accurate prediction or ‘intuition’ (pedwell, 2019) regarding the ‘other’ not just by actors on the right of the political spectrum, but also increasingly by those on the left. these ‘events’ might rely on the deployment of a mode of crisis, interpellating certain others to react in a visceral way very quickly. for example, a twitter thread by a feminist activist containing details of her own experience of being raped by a friend was posted as an anecdotal evidence of the disbelief certain women face when subjected to a patriarchal legal and social system. the intensely abusive responses to this thread then became further evidence in her write-up of this issue, positing it as a shared concern for women, for an online publication. this strategy seems to pose a challenge to the mainstream media industries’ control over mediating public opinion and mobilisation around certain ‘events’. conclusion and contribution one of the main contributions of this research is that it moves away from the tendency of cultural studies, discourse analysis and textual analysis studies, that focus on discourses around ‘events’, to discursively constructed environments. it also adds to past research on digital publics in social movements by extolling the impassiveness of intimate publics. in contrast to studies that would measure the impact or effectiveness of digitally mediated activism, this paper highlights the work involved in constructing these imaginary spaces of relations through an accurate prediction or ‘knowing’ of others within affective public spaces, as well as in more or less strategic performances of belonging and citizenship. finally, with empirical focus on publics from the global south in building a framework to understand transnational social movements, this paper contributes to a growing body of literature (e.g., bagchi, 2014) that dislodge some of the euro-american assumptions about the nature of public spheres and its relationship to activist networks, civic society, media industries, etc. that are not homogenous across the globe. references: fraser, n. (2020, 2013) fortunes of feminism: from state-managed capitalism to neoliberal crisis. verso books: london, new york. fraser, n. (2007) transnationalizing the public sphere: on the legitimacy and efficacy of public opinion in a post-westphalian world. theory, culture and society. 24(4): 7-30. bagchi, s. ed. (2014) beyond the private world: indian women in the public sphere. primus books: delhi. berlant, l. (2011) cruel optimism. duke university press: durham. pedwell, c. (2019) digital tendencies: intuition, algorithmic thought and new social movements. culture, theory and critique. 60(2): 123138. gajjala, r. (2019) digital diasporas: labor and affect in gendered indian digital publics. rowman and littlefield: london. gupta s. (2019) indian student protests and the nationalist–neoliberal nexus. postcolonial studies. 22 (1): 1-15. gerrard, y. (2018). beyond the hashtag: circumventing content moderation on social media. new media & society, 20(12), 4492–4511. brooker, p. et al. (2018) researching with twitter timeline data: a demonstration via “everyday” socio-political talk around welfare provision. big data & society. doi: 10.1177/2053951718766624. the suno india show (2020) nationwide caa protests led by women are an antithesis to hindutva politics – neha dixit. 8 mar. accessed online: https://www.sunoindia.in/the-sunoindia-show/nationwide-caa-protests-led-by-women-are-an-antithesis-to-hindutva-politicsneha-dixit/ basu, m. (2020) personal video of protest. delhi. jan, undated. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): martens, m., de wolf, r., berendt, b., de marez, l., (2019, october 2-5). trust in deconstructed recommender systems case study: news recommender systems. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. trust in deconstructed recommender systems case study: news recommender systems marijn martens imec-mict-ugent ralf de wolf imec-mict-ugent bettina berendt ku leuven lieven de marez imec-mict-ugent extended abstract increasingly, algorithms play an important role in everyday decision-making processes. driven by big data and new technologies (e.g. deep learning), it is argued that they are the “power brokers in society” (diakopoulos, 2015). recommender systems, specifically, are algorithms that serve to influence end-users’ decision-making (e.g. what to read, who to befriend, who to rent to…). the power embedded in such algorithms is only expected to intensify as implementations are widespread, grow in number and context (o’neil, 2016). the companies that develop and produce these are not neutral, but have an economic goal and specific vision on how society should operate (e.g. facebook wants to make the world a more “open and connected” place) (hoffman, johnson, bradshaw, & underbrink, 2013). in this regard, boyd and crawford (2012) claim that the data used in these algorithms doesn’t speak for itself, rather, they speak the story the companies would like to tell. indeed, these algorithms should never be trusted blindly. social scientists have focused on biases that arise when algorithms are implemented in everyday life: black people who are perceived as gorillas by image recognition software, criminal justice risk assessment algorithms that are racially biased against black prisoners, and job recruitment algorithms that have gender bias (barocas & selbst, 2016). following seavers’ (2017) categorization, these scholars looked at algorithms in culture, which he compared to rocks in a cultural stream. the rocks could shape the flow of the stream and the stream could erode the rocks as two distinct entities. gillespie (2016), however, argued that we should not only look at the impact of algorithmic outcomes, but treat the algorithms themselves as producers of information with cultural value. indeed, so called ‘trending algorithms’, for example, “matter also because they come to be culturally meaningful: points of interest, ‘data’ to be debated or tracked, legible signifiers of shifting public taste or a culture gone mad, depending on the observer“ (p.64). gillespie saw algorithms becoming culture, building further on seavers’ metaphor; algorithms, according to gillespie, could be seen as a water pump, feeding water to that cultural stream. earlier, gillespie (2014, p.169) had urged researchers to “not conceive of algorithms as abstract, technical achievements”, but instead they should “unpack the warm human and institutional choices that lie behind these cold mechanisms”. in other words, he called on researchers to look at the inner workings of how an algorithm is created and maintained. kitchin (2017) calls this the socio-technical assemblage of algorithms composed of collective human practices. seaver (2017) argues for treating algorithms as culture. extending his metaphor of a river, the algorithms are no stones or pumps, but rather the water itself making up the cultural stream. despite the many academics that are joining the debate to denounce the bias, opaqueness and unfairness often found in these algorithms, little empirical research has invested in treating algorithms in its full socio-technical assembly as culture (beer, 2017; boddington, 2017; bostrom & yudkowsky, 2011; crawford, gray, & miltner, 2014). bucher (2017) uses the notion of algorithmic imaginary to better understand how humans are “thinking about what algorithms are, what they should be, how they function […]” (p.40). experiences are central in her understanding of algorithms. seaver (2017), however, points out that we shouldn’t talk about (the experience with) one algorithm, but rather algorithmic systems, as algorithms are not “stand-alone little boxes” but rather big intertwining systems. inspired by both authors, we argue that we need to decouple the different aspects of these algorithmic systems in order to better understand how they are imagined by end-users. in other words, we strive to understand a deconstructed algorithmic imaginary, by demystifying the imagined processes that shape an algorithm in the minds of the end-users. we therefore strive to understand how they imagine the different components of the socio-technical assembly, what assumptions they make, and how they trust recommender systems. over the years, trust has been studied by many scholars in numerous contexts of technological innovation. the field of study, however, predominantly researches trust in relation to the adoption of new technologies (rogers, 2004; schaefer, chen, szalma, & hancock, 2016). following the paradigm of “algorithms as culture”, trust (or the willingness to be vulnerable (hoffman et al., 2013)) is of interest because it gives an insight into how people perceive the algorithmic system, rather than to boost adoption. furthermore, to fully understand a someone’s trust in an algorithm, we need to understand how that person trusts the different parts of the socio-technical assembly of algorithmic systems. currently, social network sites (sns), private companies (e.g. google, apple…) and news outlets are putting ever more effort into personalizing news using news recommender systems (nrs). nrs organize, select and aggregate news to influence the decision-making of an end-user without a transparent explanation on the process (e.g. google news, flipboard and facebook timeline). therefore, we focus our study on the end-users of these nrs. we put forward the following empirical research questions: what assumptions do people have about the socio-technical assembly of a news recommender system? (rq1) how do people (dis)trust the socio-technical assembly of a news recommender system? (rq2) to answer these research questions, we are currently conducting in-depth interviews with 25 end-users of nrs. we are targeting end-users who encounter nrs in their daily life and mainly use their smartphone or computer to access (digital) news through aggregators, sns or websites. furthermore, we make use of an online recruitment survey to ensure a varied sample in terms of the kind of news user (frequency & news topic interest) and socio-demographic features (gender, age, education). during the interview we use probes (outputs of some nrs), general questions and probing techniques (e.g. “sum up all actors you think are involved to produce an output”, “try to make links and give goals to the different actors”, q-sort on trust of actors…) to enable respondents to better think about the socio-technical assembly of a nrs and how they (dis)trust the different components. references barocas, s., & selbst, a. (2016). big data’s disparate impact. california law review, 104(1), 671–729. http://dx.doi.org/10.15779/z38bg31 beer, d. (2017). the social power of algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1216147 boddington, p. (2017). towards a code of ethics for artificial intelligence. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60648-4 bostrom, n., & yudkowsky, e. (2011). the ethics of artificial intelligence. cambridge university press, 39(1), 56–57. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mpmed.2010.10.008 boyd, d., & crawford, k. (2012). critical questions for big data. information, communication & society, 15(5), 662–679. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2012.678878 bucher, t. (2017). ‘machines don’t have instincts’: articulating the computational in journalism. new media & society, 19(6), 918–933. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815624182 crawford, k., gray, m. l., & miltner, k. (2014). big data| critiquing big data: politics, ethics, epistemology| special section introduction. international journal of communication, 8, 10. diakopoulos, n. (2015). algorithmic accountability. digital journalism, 3(3), 398–415. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2014.976411 hoffman, r. r., johnson, m., bradshaw, j. m., & underbrink, a. (2013). trust in automation. ieee intelligent systems, 28(1), 84–88. https://doi.org/10.1109/mis.2013.24 o’neil, c. (2016). weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy (first edition). new york: crown. seaver, n. (2017). algorithms as culture: some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems. big data & society, 4(2), 205395171773810. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717738104 selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 kwanda, f.a. & lin, t.t.c. (2019, october 2-5). fake news during natural disaster: information flow, news ppactices and fact-checking in indonesia. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. fake news during natural disaster: information flow, news practices, and fact-checking in indonesia febbie austina kwanda national chengchi university trisha. t.c. lin national chengchi university introduction during natural disasters, people in the past relied on the latest updates from mass media news. however, the presence of digital media had altered the way people seek and consume news and information, which challenges professional journalism (van der meer, verhoeven, beentjes & vligenthart, 2016; tandoc jr., jenkins & craft, 2018). unlike news media, social media lacks the gatekeeping process of messages, which is likely to increase the virally diffusion of fake news. as indonesia is one of the largest social media countries with low digital literacy and fading media trust, rampant fake news influenced people’s perceptions and attitudes. during a disaster aftermath at palu city, indonesia in september 2018; fake news proliferated and news media tried to curb their dissemination to avoid negative impacts on the public. in this study, fake news is defined as the intentional and unintentional production and dissemination of false information on social media (kaur et al., 2018; waisbord, 2018; klein & wueller, 2017). the aim of this study is to address existing gaps on lacking scholarly research about fake news in non-political and asian contexts, along with examining news practices of indonesian media when handling disaster fake news. conceptual framework the hierarchy of influences (hoi) model by reese and shoemaker (2016) was utilized as a theoretic basis to examine the individual, routine, organization, and social institutions levels of news professionals. this study examines the four levels (individual, routine, organizational, and social institutions), but the social system level was not the scope, yet relevant to provide contextual insights in indonesia. literature reviews show that the country is currently one of the largest social media nations, yet its people tended to have low literacy, a politically polarized nation, and a decline in media’s trust (mokhtar, 2019; “kepercayaan publik terhadap media”, 2018). methodology employing a mixed-method approach (web-observation and interview), this study will answer the following rqs: rq 1: how were the information flows and patterns of post-palu disaster fake newsrelated-information mediated by indonesian news media? rq 2: how did news professionals from traditional affiliated media and independent media handled post-palu disaster fake news through their newsroom practices? it first observed the information flows and patterns of three types of post-palu disaster fake news (i.e., aftershock, religion-related organization, and baby adoption) within september 28, 2018 to october 27, 2018, based on result from google trend analysis. through a purposive and snowball sampling, seven respondents from three identified news media during observations (kompas.com, medcom.id, and tempo.co) were selected to analyze how different media types are likely to affect fake news practices at four hoi levels. the first two media are affiliated with traditional media which are closely related to business and political forces, whereas the third is an independent media. interview results were thematically analyzed with 10 codes and 18 sub-codes identified in the hoi model and existing literatures. the codes include individual level (i.e., personal trait and professional value), the routine level (news gathering, processing, distribution, and fact-checking), the organizational level (i.e., editorial policy and organizational culture), and social institutions (i.e., government and independent factchecking). some subcodes were identified through the re-examining the recurrent themes at interview data. results based on observation data, the first two cases (aftershock and religion-related) false information exhibited news media published clarifications after official statement. both cases were considered as high-risks, the first case was linked to disaster, while the second case involved a religious organization. only the last case (baby adoption) was standard journalism where news media went to clarify the information and reported the facts. however, information flow was only complex and lengthier when controversial (e.g. religion) was involved, corroborating the idea of a saturated beliefs-polarized nation. next, interview results showed that handling (non-controversial) fake news were heavily influenced by newsroom policies. decisions on which fake news to debunk were risksbased. while low risk fake news was treated as standard journalistic processes, highrisk controversial fake news tends to be treated cautiously. despite respondents sharing similar individual level values as trusted and capable journalists, similar to western journalism, under scrutinization, these values are different in practice. at a routine level, all three media exhibited a similarity of needing official statements, especially when handling high-risk fake news, even at the cost of timeliness. however, these newsrooms also had different writing angles, ranging from glossing over clarifications to educating the public. simultaneously, organizational characteristics (ownership and news orientation) heavily influenced how disaster fake news was handled. online media with traditional affiliation tended to avoid from controversial fake news (i.e., political or sensitive issues). meanwhile, independent online media exhibited a more liberal standpoint and expressed skepticism towards government’s information, noting that fact-checking should only be conducted by journalists. independent online media emphasized on factchecking as part of their effort in combating fake news. fact-checking was also conducted by the first two media, but was not overly emphasized by them during interviews. discussion regardless of the fake news context, clarifying or debunking fake news by indonesian media does not necessarily equate to fact-checking. fake news were not always handled by newsroom’s own means but instead might rely on re-stating what the government had confirmed. hence, this brings up the arguments of newsrooms extending government’s agenda, and the independence of news media regardless of public preference (polarization). another argument could also stem from the idea that fact-checking is relatively new and journalists were only introduced to it in recent years. additionally, the need to have official sources to legitimize news content seems to be a common practice in indonesian newsrooms (hanitzsch & hidayat, 2012; steele, 2011). each unique approach is shaped by the media background, editorials, and promoted by their organizational culture. despite the end goal was to debunk fake news, each newsroom has their own professional approach/interest. for example, avoidance of certain controversial issues in the name of peach journalism, promoting owner’s interest in relations to providing disaster aids, and promoting coverage balance. references hanitzsch, t., hidayat, d, n. (2012). journalists in indonesia. in weaver, d. h., willnat, l. (ed.), the global journalist in the 21st century (36-51). new york, ny: routledge kaur, k., nair, s. s., kwok, y., kajimoto, m., chua, y. t., labiste, m. d., . . . thanh, l. (2018). information disorder in asia overview of misinformation ecosystem in india, indonesia, japan, the philippines, singapore, south korea, taiwan, and vietnam. journalism and media studies centre the university of hong kong. retrieved from https://jmsc.hku.hk/2018/03/research-intoinformation-disorder-in-asia/. kepercayaan publik terhadap media sosial pada 2018 turun. (2018, may 15). retrieved from https://databoks.katadata.co.id/datapublish/2018/05/15/kepercayaan-publikterhadap-media-sosial-pada-2018-turun. klein, d. o., & wueller, j. r. (2017). fake news: a legal perspective. journal of internet law,20(10), 1-13. mokhtar, f. (2019, april 15). the big read: religion, fake news take centre stage as divided indonesia goes to the polls. retrieved from https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesiaelections-key-issuesreligion-fakenews-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 reese, s. d., & shoemaker, p. j. (2016). a media sociology for the networked public sphere: the hierarchy of influences model. mass communication and society,19, 389-41-. doi:10.1080/15205436.2016.1174268 steele, j. (2011). indonesian journalism post-suharto: changing ideals and professional pratices. in sen, k., hill, d.t. (ed.), politics and the media in twenty-first century indonesia (85-103). abingdon, oxon: routledge tandoc, e. c., jenkins, j., & craft, s. (2018). fake news as a critical incident in journalism. journalism practice,1-17. doi:10.1080/17512786.2018.1562958 van der meer, t. g. l. a., verhoeven, p., beentjes, j. w. j., & vliegenthart, r. (2017). disrupting gatekeeping practices: journalists’ source selection in times of crisis. journalism, 18(9), 1107–1124. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884916648095 waisbord, s. (2018). truth is what happens to news. journalism studies,19(13), 18661878. doi:10.1080/1461670x.2018.1492881 https://jmsc.hku.hk/2018/03/research-into-information-disorder-in-asia/ https://jmsc.hku.hk/2018/03/research-into-information-disorder-in-asia/ https://jmsc.hku.hk/2018/03/research-into-information-disorder-in-asia/ https://jmsc.hku.hk/2018/03/research-into-information-disorder-in-asia/ https://jmsc.hku.hk/2018/03/research-into-information-disorder-in-asia/ https://jmsc.hku.hk/2018/03/research-into-information-disorder-in-asia/ https://jmsc.hku.hk/2018/03/research-into-information-disorder-in-asia/ https://jmsc.hku.hk/2018/03/research-into-information-disorder-in-asia/ https://jmsc.hku.hk/2018/03/research-into-information-disorder-in-asia/ https://jmsc.hku.hk/2018/03/research-into-information-disorder-in-asia/ https://jmsc.hku.hk/2018/03/research-into-information-disorder-in-asia/ https://jmsc.hku.hk/2018/03/research-into-information-disorder-in-asia/ https://jmsc.hku.hk/2018/03/research-into-information-disorder-in-asia/ https://jmsc.hku.hk/2018/03/research-into-information-disorder-in-asia/ https://jmsc.hku.hk/2018/03/research-into-information-disorder-in-asia/ https://jmsc.hku.hk/2018/03/research-into-information-disorder-in-asia/ https://jmsc.hku.hk/2018/03/research-into-information-disorder-in-asia/ https://jmsc.hku.hk/2018/03/research-into-information-disorder-in-asia/ https://jmsc.hku.hk/2018/03/research-into-information-disorder-in-asia/ https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-elections-key-issues-religion-fake-news-jokowi-prabowo-11445946 https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884916648095 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): cousineau, l.s. (2020, october). displaced discussion: the implications of reddit quarantine and the movement of theredpill to self-hosting. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. displaced discussion: the implications of reddit quarantine and the movement of theredpill to selfhosting luc s. cousineau university of waterloo we rely on social media companies to manage content on our behalf. from hosting our pictures to curating our feeds, these companies do as much (or more) to manage content we do not see as the content that we do see. for years, writers and researchers like sarah roberts (2019), safiya noble (noble, 2018), and tarlton gillespie (2018) have written about commercial content moderation, biased algorithms, and the embedded politics in platforms. they have exposed how companies manage us and our content, often unbeknownst to users. but what happens to communities managed by site moderation schemes when they remain committed to operating as a group? especially when those groups hold views steeped in misogyny and male supremacist discourse? men’s groups online have long been users of digital technologies to help them unite geographically disparate membership (borton, 2017; munn, 2019). using early textbased communication services and forums, men’s rights groups grew their numbers through community and direct connections. however, maintaining websites and forums requires human, economic, and commitment capital, so it is far easier (and cheaper) to use existing hosted platforms, but gives up some measure of control (plantin et al., 2016). reddit.com is a social media site with huge volumes of content hosted on their platform, and imported from other providers. in moderating that content, reddit must consider its users, investors, corporate oversight, and its own brand identification as a place for free speech. at the user level, reddit engages community moderators; uncompensated volunteers that manage communities and rules, delete posts, and ban users as a way to maintain individual sub-community standards. at the site-wide level, reddit employs two types of broad content management over its sub-communities: banning and quarantine. reddit has banned communities (called subreddits) from the site (reddit does not publish a list, but some of note include: r/the_donald, r/fatpeoplehate, r/watchpeopledie, and r/beatingwomen). however, reddit will often quarantine bad-actor communities before instituting a ban. quarantine leaves these communities operational on the site, but hides them from regular users with an extra click-through acknowledgement, and stops their content from appearing in searches. this approach is reddit’s way of censuring the group without censoring the group. quarantined groups can still post, act, and talk, but tucked away in a sort of bad-actor closet. reddit is an established site of counterpublic community action. sub-reddits like r/menrights, r/degradeebonythots, and (the now defunct) r/the_donald expound, in turn, anti-feminist, deeply racist and misogynist, and (sometimes) violent right-wing ideologies. along with the various posts, links, and outside content, reddit communities support millions of words of user discussion, including hate and violence. while bans have been shown to reduce hate speech (chandrasekharan et al., 2017), quarantine and individual user sanctions seem to have mixed effects on user behaviour (myers west, 2018; shen & rose, 2019). however, sub-communities are policed, at least in part, by their exposure to the community at large (hui & buchegger, 2009). so what happens to communities quarantined or otherwise limited on reddit? some may turn toward other platforms, including self-hosting. this work uses data from a digital ethnography of r/theredpill, a subreddit dedicated to “discussion of sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men.” data collection included community post and comment observation, and using website capture tools to systematically capture the landing page and top-rated posts over a period of three months. analysis used a technofeminist lensing (wajcman, 2004) and community theory (cohen, 2001), and included review of the captured pages and posts/comments, as well as researcher field notes from community observation. data collection began in fall 2019, and continued to summer 2020. r/theredpill was quarantined in september of 2018, and has since engaged in regular discussion about the movement of community discussion and forums away from reddit to their own site, www.trp.red. the push for this move was renewed in october 2019 with the introduction of new community standards by reddit, and again in february 2020 with minor changes to the way individuals can (and can not) access content on the subreddit. the development of www.trp.red as a forum and discussion site to mirror reddit’s functionality is linked, at least in part, to the limiting of the community through reddit’s quarantine scheme. given the dispersed nature of the internet, coupled with the quasianonymous nature of reddit, it is difficult to prove that users that choose to leave reddit migrate elsewhere, however, in the case of r/theredpill, users and moderators actively post about and encourage the move to their own platform, and share usernames between the sites. while a r/theredpill exodus might meet the needs of reddit as a business (having secured hundreds of millions of dollars, and is investigating an ipo), progressively limiting communities and pushing them out also limits the potential dampening of contentious speech and regressive social attitudes that comes with wider public pressure to conform. when we push contentious communities out of the public eye, there are fewer checks and balances to limit moves towards extremism. beyond a discussion of simply allowing versus limiting speech, the case of r/theredpill provides an opportunity to engage in a discussion about whether progressive sanction is the right way to manage the intersection of counterpublic views with the needs of tech firms, especially in a sector where the division between public and private feels in flux. this paper hopes to further that discussion using a community that is less generally associated with hate speech, and can therefore exist on the margins of acceptability. references borton, d. (2017). masculinity and misogyny in the online locker room: subcultural identity work in the title: men’s rights movement [m.a., indiana university of pennsylvania]. http://search.proquest.com/docview/1944007399/abstract/ca6df543874a4821p q/1 chandrasekharan, e., pavalanathan, u., srinivasan, a., glynn, a., eisenstein, j., & gilbert, e. (2017). you can’t stay here: the efficacy of reddit’s 2015 ban examined through hate speech. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 1(cscw), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3134666 cohen, a. p. (2001). the symbolic construction of community (transferred to digit. pr). routledge. gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. yale university press. hui, p., & buchegger, s. (2009). groupthink and peer pressure: social influence in online social network groups. 2009 international conference on advances in social network analysis and mining, 53–59. https://doi.org/10.1109/asonam.2009.17 munn, l. (2019). alt-right pipeline: individual journeys to extremism online. first monday, 24(6). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i6.10108 myers west, s. (2018). censored, suspended, shadowbanned: user interpretations of content moderation on social media platforms. new media & society, 20(11), 4366–4383. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818773059 noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. nyu press. plantin, j.-c., lagoze, c., edwards, p. n., & sandvig, c. (2016). infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook. new media & society, journal article, 1461444816661553. roberts, s. t. (2019). behind the screen: content moderation in the shadows of social media. yale university press. shen, q., & rose, c. (2019). the discourse of online content moderation: investigating polarized user responses to changes in reddit’s quarantine policy. proceedings of the third workshop on abusive language online, 58–69. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w19-3507 wajcman, j. (2004). technofeminism. polity. microsoft word poell, nieborg & van dijck platform power & public value aoir2018.docx selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): lastname, firstinitial. (2018, october 10-13). paper title. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. platform power & public value thomas poell university of amsterdam, netherlands david nieborg university of toronto, canada josé van dijck utrecht university, netherlands introduction over the past decade, a small group of very large digital platforms have emerged, controlled by a few major corporations. in the west, five high-tech us companies stand out: alphabet-google, apple, facebook, amazon, and microsoft (gafam). these companies increasingly shape the flow of public information, and they disrupt key institutions and industry sectors, including education, health care, journalism, and transportation (van dijck, poell & de waal 2018). critics argue that there is a lack of transparency in how these platforms operate (pasquale, 2015). more importantly, these interventions are considered potentially in conflict with key public values, undermining socio-economic equality, democratic processes, and the quality of public services (scholz, 2016). while it is clear that major platform companies have accrued unprecedented amounts of financial resources, technological expertise, and valuable data, it has not yet been systematically examined how they exert power. this paper offers an analytical framework to critically examine the power relations that structure the online platform ecosystem. building on our multi-disciplinary research, we propose an analytical vocabulary to examine the material relations among platforms, institutions and users, illustrated by a few examples. a more precise insight in the workings of platform power is an important first step to better align the governance of the online ecosystem with vital public values. infrastructural services the starting point of our framework is a ‘relational understanding’ of power. power is not something that is held by a particular actor, but it both emerges from and structures unequal relations between actors (emirbayer, 1997). following this understanding of power, we focus on the relations between the five leading platform corporations and the many other digital properties (i.e. platforms, websites, and apps) that populate the platform ecosystem. particularly striking is that a growing number of digital properties are integrated with, and increasingly dependent on, what we call, the infrastructural services offered by the gafam platforms. these services include: advertising networks, login services, cloud hosting, app stores, payment systems, data analytics, video hosting, geospatial and navigation services, search functionalities, operating systems, and more recently, artificial intelligence (ai) services. such infrastructural services allow a wide variety of companies — from small local news outlets developing apps, to large sectoral platforms, such as airbnb and uber — to make their products and services available online, attract and target users, analyze their activities, and generate revenue. it is through the ubiquitous integration and consistent use of these infrastructural services that platform power emerges and is consolidated (plantin et al. 2018). to demonstrate how such power relations can be analyzed, the paper highlights two key infrastructural services: app stores and ad networks. both services constitute multisided markets, which define the institutional and economic relations between gafam platforms, millions of companies, and billions of users (evans & schmalensee, 2016). in this market configuration, a platform company owns and operates infrastructural services, which brings together different actors or ‘sides’ in a market, including companies, public institutions, and users. starting with app stores, as prototypical multisided markets they facilitate transactions between the users of mobile media and app developers. app stores are infrastructural as they offer a standardized, techno-economic architecture for app developers. to reach billions of mobile media users, app developers have to go through either apple’s ios app store or google’s play store. to survey how platform power emerges through app stores, two initial levels of analysis open up. first, there is the question of market entry and distribution. apple in particular follows a set of subjective and opaque submission guidelines. this allows the company to reject or (arbitrarily) remove any apps it deems offensive or unnecessary from the app store. while notably hard to investigate, greater insight into this issue can be gained through developer interviews or by surveying apps that are published and rejected. second, app stores operators have full control over which apps are featured in their storefronts. investigating regimes of platform visibility requires a sustained effort that draws on developer interviews, digital methods, and financial analysis in order to investigate which apps are featured when and, potentially, why. compared to app stores, advertising networks operate on a less visible level, but they are an equally entrenched and consolidated infrastructural service. the market for digital advertising is dominated by facebook and google, who aggregate users, and connect these with advertising intermediaries, content developers, ad publishers, and advertisers. investigating power relations in advertising networks starts with a deeper understanding of the emerging facebook/google duopoly, each of which follows a distinctive data strategy (bechmann, 2013). drawing on a mix of digital methods, financial analysis, and interviews with industry informants, two levels of analysis emerge. first, there is the question pertaining to data-collection, which can be explored through api analysis to determine facebook and google’s data collection partners, a review of company documentation to gain insight in the type of data collected, and a software studies approach that tracks platform integration into third-party digital properties. second, more challenging is the issue of data-processing and data flow analysis. facebook and google have data of billions of users, which allow these companies to offer unprecedented, real-time targeting capabilities. while it is nearly impossible to open the black box of platform data processing, it is possible to gain insight into manifestations of the ‘metric power’ of platforms (beer, 2016), by examining data services such as facebook’s ‘lookalike audiences’. governing the platform ecosystem the analysis of two exemplary infrastructural services is a first step towards a refined taxonomy of platform power relations, much needed to develop guidelines for the governance of the platform ecosystem. current legislatory and legal frameworks are ill equipped to govern online activities because they are based on traditional distinctions between economic sectors (i.e. transport, news, education), while online infrastructures are sector-agnostic. indeed, the power of global platform companies emerges both between infrastructures and sectors, and across sectors, creating path dependency and algorithmic lock-in. antitrust laws or consumer protection laws, for instance, can no longer be solely based on ownership relations; they need to take into account the above-discussed infrastructural services in which dependency relations are generated through data flows and analytics, guidelines, standards, review processes, hierarchies of visibility, etc.. moreover, most legal systems relate to national or supra-national governing bodies, while platforms are global operators that tend to ignore national and regional boundaries. consequently, they often bypass the democratic processes upon which legal frameworks are build. rendering transparent the power relations through which platforms govern online ecosystems is a first step towards governing platforms. references bechmann, a. (2013). internet profiling: the economy of data intraoperability on facebook and google. mediekultur: journal of media and communication research, (55), 72–91. beer, d. (2016). metric power. palgrave macmillan. emirbayer, m. (1997). manifesto for a relational sociology. american journal of sociology, 103(2), 281-317. evans, d. s., & schmalensee, r. (2016). matchmakers. the new economics of multisided platforms. harvard business review press. pasquale, f. (2015). the black box society. the secret algorithms that control money and information. harvard university press. plantin, j. c., lagoze, c., edwards, p. n., & sandvig, c. (2018). infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook. new media & society, 20(1), 293-310. scholz, t. (2016). uberworked and underpaid: how workers are disrupting the digital economy. john wiley & sons. van dijck, j., poell, t. & de waal, m. (2018). the platform society. public values in a connective world. oxford: oxford university press. aoir20 demand manuscriptformatted submitted-id.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): bowman, n. d., & banks, j. (2020, october 28-31). extending gaming demand: subjective experiences of cognitive, emotional, physical, and social videogaming requirements. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. extending gaming demand: subjective experiences of cognitive, emotional, physical, and social videogaming requirements nick bowman texas tech university jaime banks texas tech university videogames involve players as co-creators of on-screen events (wellenreiter, 2015) and this interactivity drives enjoyment (grodal, 2000). although interactivity is inherent to videogames, it is variably perceived by users (stromer-galley, 2004). through both inherent and perceived involvement, interactivity is best considered a demanding process taxing players’ limited attentional resources (fisher et al., 2018). videogaming demand includes at least four dimensions (bowman et al., 2018): cognitive (processing of game logics/tasks), emotional (affective responses to game events/outcomes), physical (managing controller inputs/interfaces), and social (responding to human/nonhuman actors). these dimensions have been validated through quantitative empirical data analysis as the video game demand scale (vgds, bowman et al. 2018). however, a critical limitation of theory-driven scale instruments is their predetermined meaning of a construct. however, people may experience a phenomenon in ways not accounted for in a metric’s grounding theory. toward better understanding demand phenomenology as it unfolds in the player-game relation (cf. vargas-iglesias & navarrete-cardero, 2019), we explore (rq1) what factors are prevalent in gamers’ recollections of videogaming demand? method we performed secondary analysis of open-ended participant data made publicly available by bowman et al. (2018; https://osf.io/x5jch/, with permission). the original study comprised gamers (a) writing essays of recent gaming experiences and (b) writing virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 virtual event short essays on “how [cognitively/emotionally/physically/socially] demanding” that experience was (table 1), as (c) well evaluating the videogame experience on various dimensions (including vgds; those analyses published by the original authors). the published dataset included n = 660 participants (demographic details reported in bowman et al., 2018). table 1. descriptive results of participants’ open-ended demand responses. # of responses word count m (sd) 95% ci lower | upper word count median cognitive demand 629 41.65a (30.30) 39.28 | 44.02 33 emotional demand 608 38.24a (26.44) 36.14 | 40.34 33 physical demand 611 24.64b (18.54) 23.17 | 26.11 19 social demand 601 40.30a (29.45) 37.95 | 42.65 33 note: subscripts indicate means that differ significantly from each other (p �������� the demand-recall essays were subjected to semantic network analysis to identify themes (i.e., induced word clusters) using leximancer 4.51 (https://info.leximancer.com/; smith & humphreys, 2006). a complete accounting of the analysis (including data processing, software settings, data/output files, and analysis narrative) is available online: https://osf.io/fv7jt. results induced themes are presented here in brief, with more granular details in the linked supplements; findings are also visually summarized in figure 1. figure 1. semantic network analysis of player’s discussion of videogame demands. cognitive demands emotional demands physical demands social demands note: full-sized images are available in the linked supplemental files for this abstract. for cognitive demand, four themes emerged: coordination, requirements to enact strategies based on dynamic in-game information sources; persistent engagement, requirements to constantly monitor and organize information; throttling, making deliberate decisions to control how much thought-effort is made toward desired outcomes; relativity, awareness of in-game challenges in relation to the game’s design. for emotional demand, five themes emerged: cooperative fallout, reactions to stressors of playing with others; narrative engagement, attachment to or investment in unfolding stories; social hedonics, expressing joy of co-playing (especially victories); agitation, reactions to surprising disruptions of gameplay events. surprisingly, two discrete emotions emerged as distinct themes: anger (usually when losing) and sadness (generally at in-game narrative turns). for physical demand, five themes emerged: embodied action, discrete body movements often focused on eye-hand coordination; controller manipulation, engaging handheld devices; quick precision, quick input and controller response relative to eventdriven player needs. discrete themes were also present for familiar physical control modes: pc controls such as keyboard-and-mouse setups, and thumbs in reference to manipulating handheld controllers. for social demand, five themes emerged: social structures, interpersonal/group communication dynamics related to the game; social (un)realism, non-human characters and considerations of their perceived (lack of) “humanness;” interdependence, the necessity of coordination for co-playing; single-player sociality, characterizations of playing with others compared to playing alone; and contingency, the interdependence dynamics of in-game social dialogue. discussion current explications of videogaming demand (such as those informing vgds; bowman et al., 2018) rely on theoretical suppositions to define the cognitive, emotional, physical, and social demands, which may not necessarily engage all possible player perceptions of what games require of them during play. findings of the present study support previously theorized demand dynamics, but also indicate nuances not unpacked in those theory-driven analyses. with cognitive demands, our analysis largely comports with the original work, as players were primarily concerned with mental efforts associated with processing and making sense of in-game information—largely ludic concerns. similarly, the present findings for physical demand aligned largely with original operationalizations, as players were keenly concerned with the fine-motor skills and tangible controller efficiencies required to engage videogames (the “golden hands” heuristic; see parisi, 2015). player experiences diverged more noticeably for emotional and social demands. concerning emotional demands, analysis supports the focus on eudaimonic, narrativedriven emotional states (oliver et al., 2015). in addition, more basic emotional demand (missed in original theorizing) also emerged: players reported intense, discrete, emotional “highs and lows” tied to gameplay performance, often magnified in the presence of others. for social demands, this analysis revealed a compelling departure from vgds. when players recalled human gaming partners, social demand corresponded mostly with interpersonal and organizational communication characteristics: interdependence dynamics, negotiating personalities, negotiating roles. when players discussed game-character partners, they talked more about feeling or lacking a “human-like” connections with them. a critical take-away here is that, although both human and non-human others are socially demanding, the ways in which that demand is felt by players seems categorically different. future work would benefit by focusing on in situ videogame play, as well as a more granular analysis of demands as a function of game genre or content. gamer experience as well as social identification as “a gamer” might also influence felt demands, as well as other cultural, demographic, and psychographic factors relevant to gaming preference, playstyle, and performance. references bowman, n. d., wasserman, j., & banks, j. (2018). development of the video game demand scale. in n. d. bowman (ed.), video games: a medium that demands our attention (pp. 208-233). routledge. fisher, j.t., huskey, r., keene, j.r., & weber, r. (2018). the limited capacity model of motivated mediated message processing: looking to the future. annals of the international communication association, 42(4), 291-315. grodal, t. (2000). video games and the pleasures of control. in d. zillmann & p. vorderer (eds.), media entertainment: the psychology of its appeal (pp. 197-213). lea. oliver, m. b., bowman, n. d., woolley, j. k., rogers, r., sherrick, b., & chung, m-y. (2015). video games as meaningful entertainment experiences. psychology of popular media and culture, 5(4), 390-405. parisi, d. (2015), a counterrevolution in the hands: the console controller as an ergonomic branding mechanism. journal of games criticism, 2(1). smith, a.e., & humpreys, m.s. (2006). evaluation of unsupervised semantic mapping of natural language with leximancer concept mapping. behavioral research methods, 38, 262-279. stromer-galley, j. (2004). interactivity-as-product and interactivity-as-process. the information society, 20(5). 391-394. toh, w. (2019). a multimodal approach to video games and the player experience. routledge. vargas-iglesias, j.j., & navarrete-cardero, l. (2019). beyond rules and mechanics: a different approach for ludology. games and culture. microsoft word 703-455-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 the mystery of the hidden gamer: women, leisure, and hidden object games shira chess university of georgia usa schess@uga.edu abstract hidden object games are a rarely remarked upon subgenre of casual gaming. this lack of larger discussion is understandable: the games have seemingly repetitive play, predictable storylines, and subtle variations between them. this paper identifies deeper meaning and context to the hidden object game, by considering how the games create corollaries between women’s leisure in the real world and the activities of the game world. through analyzing the game play and narrative, i illustrate how the hidden object game constructs an ambiguous form of leisure that replicates domestic and emotional labor. ultimately, this paper identifies the woman player as “hidden” through the game’s complex modes of subjectivity and player embodiment. keywords internet gaming; hidden object; women; gender and gaming introduction hidden object games are a rarely remarked upon subgenre of casual gaming. this lack of larger discussion is understandable: the games have repetitive play, predictable storylines, and subtle variations between them. but hidden object games also are capable of helping us learn more about their audiences. for instance, consalvo (2009) writes about how players of return to ravenhearst, use more “hardcore” gameplay styles to troubleshoot solutions. through this lens the following considers ways that hidden object games constructs prescriptive play, particularly for women through both game play and narrative. big fish games is one of the largest online portals of casual gaming, and publisher of several hidden object games. while the subgenre was not necessarily originally intended for women audiences (johnson, 2010), the narrative style and genre implications of romance and mystery certainly attempt to appeal to this audience. hidden object games include series such as mystery case files (produced by big fish), time mysteries, and surface (though there are hundreds of games that are not at all part of a larger series). the games are often mysteries where the player investigates crimes through a series of puzzles. in order for narratives to progress, players solve puzzles and locate items in cluttered landscapes and rooms full of “hidden” objects. i illustrate how the procedural rhetoric of the games and the narrative expectations help establish hidden object games as a subgenre meant for women. women & leisure the subgenre can be best contextualized by research previously done on women and leisure. researchers have learned that women’s leisure often varies from men’s leisure, often fitting into small snippets of time. in many cases, women feel that they have no leisure time at all, or have conflicted feelings about their relationship to leisure (deem, 1987; wearing, 1998; aitchison, 2003). work and the domestic sphere play a large role in how much leisure time a woman has, as well; hochschild (1989) argues that many women take on a so-called “second shift” where they are tasked with working both full time jobs in an office and full time jobs in the domestic sphere, making leisure difficult. with this lens, chess (2012) argues that casual gaming, because of its ability to fit into small snippets of time, aligns with how many women already approach leisure. similarly, she illustrates that casual games such as diner dash reinforce complexities regarding women and leisure. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 the multiple meanings of the hidden object puzzle hidden object games, similarly, help to reinforce a complex mode of leisure through game play practices. many scenes in these games take place in large, cluttered rooms (seemingly organized by hoarders) full of “missing” objects that the player, as detective, must sort through. once a hidden object has been found, it disappears from the larger image. at its core the hidden object mechanic is not a puzzle so much as a cleaning mechanic—the player is cleaning a messy room in an effort to bring order to a chaotic situation. cleaning, as a leisure activity, helps establish a complicated relationship between work and leisure in the game world. by considering the interactions of hidden object games, they begin to have several possible alternative meanings, particularly in terms of maintaining a kind of domestic order. at the same time, the space can never be fully “cleaned”—only certain objects can be selected and removed from the environment. this simple mechanic, thus, implies an endless cleaning experience with little resolution or satisfaction. similarly, to progress narrative flow, players pick up objects throughout the game world and must use them in larger puzzles. for example, in the game surface: the noise she couldn’t make, the player must cross water at one point. in order to cross the water, she must have previously picked up an ironing board, found elsewhere in the game. while the player might pass thousands of other representations of boards in a variety of locations in the game, it is not until she puts the ironing board in the correct location that she can move on to the next set of puzzles. this kind of puzzle combines a macguyver-esque logic (i.e., using things in ways other than their originally intended purposes) while simultaneously limiting the player to specific solutions. the inevitability of these mechanisms does not imply the best possible solutions, but rather, the most inconvenient solutions to complex physical problems. hidden narratives also worth considering, there are specific narrative conventions built into the subgenre. while the overall scope of the games vary wildly (some take place in our current world, some in fantasy worlds, and others in the past or future) the setup of the hidden object games are almost all strikingly similar. the player functions as an outsider to a place where a mystery must be solved through combing through frozen-in-time geographic locations in order to find a series of physical and textual clues. the games inevitably involve some kind of victim—often women or children, but also sometimes an entire town of victims. for example, the ravenhearst series has the player uncover the gothic tale of an abusive husband, whose ghostly wife (and, later, children) must be freed. surface: the noise she couldn’t make puts the player in the role of a psychic who must venture into the mental space of a critically injured and mentally ill woman, in order to save her life. while grim tales: the stone queen does not have a specific female victim, the game involves rescuing an entire town. thus, the job of the player is about rescuing others, but also often involves emotional labor. discussed by hochschild (2003/1983) emotional labor requires an individual to sublimate their own emotions and take on the burdens of another person’s emotional state. according to hochschild, emotional labor is primarily supplied by female labor. thus, by solving unsolvable mysteries of victims and hearing their pitiable narratives, the player is constantly doing the work of emotional labor: fixing problems of those who cannot help themselves. at the same time the player is invisible within the story—both literally and figuratively. the hidden object game is almost always without avatar—the player’s embodiment on screen is invisible—even when using tools to solve puzzles, the tool floats mid-air in a ghostly way. yet, in a figurative sense, the player is still invisible—she arrives after the crime or tragedy has already taken place, solving mysteries for people who cannot see nor appreciate her. the player’s invisibility makes her emotional labor fruitless—there is no personal gratification in solving mysteries—her invisibility makes her incapable of recognition. in the hidden object game, the most hidden thing is the player, herself. conclusion: the hidden player selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 through trading domestic labor for play while tapping into emotional labor, the hidden object game becomes a complex form of prescriptive play for women. just as the “hidden player” nicely summarizes the player’s subjectivity and embodiment within the majority of hidden object games, the woman player of the hidden object game becomes a kind of “hidden player.” this hidden element occurs within the gaming industry (where the hidden object game is rarely discussed or acknowledged) but also as a corollary to women’s limited leisure practices in the real world. hidden object games perform this task literally, enfolding hidden play in the game world via play that can be easily stopped and started, much like all women’s leisure. big fish game’s slogan is, “a new game every day!” underlying this slogan is an invitation to the gamer—always be playing, but always be playing as the invisible purveyor of domestic and emotional labor, within the mechanics of the everyday. references aitchison, c.c. (2003). gender and leisure. london: routldege. bogost, i. (2007). persuasive games: the expressive power of videogames. cambridge, ma: mit press. chess, s. (2012). going with the flo: diner dash and feminism. feminist media studies 12(1): 83-99. consalvo, m. (2009). hardcore to casual: game culture return(s) to ravenhearst. proceedings from icfdg 2009. deem, r. (1987). all work and no play: the sociology of women and leisure. london, england: open university press. hochschild, a.r. (1989). the second shift. new york, ny: penguin books. hochschild, a.r.. (2003). the managed heart: commercialization of human feeling. berkeley: university of california press. (original work published in 1983.) johnson, n. (2010). a history of hidden object games: an interview with big fish’s jeff hayne. examiner.com. retrieved from http://www.examiner.com/article/a-history-of-hidden-object-games-an-interview-withbig-fish-s-jeff-haynie wearing, b. (1998). leisure and feminist theory. london: sage publications. api and beyond detecting coordinated behaviours in facebook interactions around political news stori.pdf   selected papers of #aoir2019:   the 20 th annual conference of the   association of internet researchers   brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019     api and beyond: detecting coordinated behaviours in facebook interactions around political news stories fabio giglietto university of urbino carlo bo nicola righetti university of urbino carlo bo giada marino university of urbino carlo bo this proposal is a follow-up of the project “mapping italian news media political coverage in the lead-up to 2018 general election” (mine). mine aimed at creating a comprehensive map of the political news coverage created by the italian online news media in the lead-up to 2018 general election. the project collected 84,815 news stories published by over 4,000 news sources shared on facebook in the six months before the elections, monitoring in real time their engagement (number of shares, reactions and comments). the final report of the project (giglietto et al., 2018) highlighted how the populist narrative dominated the news (both in terms of volume of coverage and facebook engagement) in the run-up to the italian elections, and pinpointed the diverging patterns of facebook interactions employed by different partisan communities (particularly those related to populist parties) to amplify the reach of the content aligned with their worldview by sharing news stories on social media, while trying to reframe, through comments, the negative coverage of the party they support. these insights led to further questions concerning the nature of the observed diverging patterns of facebook interactions around political news. in particular, we wondered if the observed patterns were the result of a spontaneous grassroots effort, i.e. the consequence of a combination of non-coordinated individual actions, or instead of a strategically organized attempt to manipulate the online news media landscape in order to game platforms algorithms in support of specific viewpoints, candidates and parties. despite several studies have already pointed out the systematic use of bots and fake accounts in electoral campaigns (bastos & marcea, 2018; bessi & ferrara, 2016; tucker et al. , 2018), few studies directly focused on strategically coordinated online behaviours aimed at hacking the attention economy on facebook. social media like facebook have increasingly become sources of information for the citizens (e.g. pew research center, 2018). it is thus crucial to understand to what extent social media users are exposed on facebook to news-stories amplified or suggested citation (apa): giglietto, f., righetti, n., & marino, g. (2019, october 2-5). api and beyond: detecting coordinated behaviours in facebook interactions around political news stories paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org.   selected papers of #aoir2019:   the 20 th annual conference of the   association of internet researchers   brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019     criticized through authentic and inauthentic coordinated behaviour (gleicher, 2018) with the aim of twisting the perception of public opinion and, in turn, influence the behaviour of professional journalists and other citizens. data originally collected for mine during 2018 via publically available facebook api proved useful to identify the patterns, but fall short of providing compelling evidence on the nature of these behaviours. in order to shed some light on this question, we thus requested and obtained access to two additional datasets directly provided by facebook and made available through the social science one (sso) initiative . 1 informed by the results of mine 2018 project (giglietto et al., 2018; giglietto, righetti, marino & rossi, 2019) and by the existing literature on echo-chambers (garrett, 2009; sunstein, 2001; vaccari, 2013), news preferential exposure (bakshy et al. , 2015; messing & westwood, 2014;), attention economy and strategic amplification (philips, 2018; webster, 2014; zhang et al. , 2017), we thus designed a set of hypothesis articulated in three areas: a) the first area pertains to the social infrastructure. the main hypothesis is that an organized effort may have employed an existing network of facebook pages and groups aimed at facilitating certain collective behaviour. higher percentages of news-stories shares performed by pages and groups (as opposed to personal profiles) may thus be a sign of a coordinated behaviour; b) the second area employs insularity (a measure developed for mine of the extent to which an online news source is exclusively shared by actors affiliated to a specific online partisan community) to understand at what extent shares and comments without-clicks (interactions performed on a shared news-story based on the information displayed by facebook title, part of the blurb rather than after reading the article) are affected by this characteristic of the news source. higher percentages of interactions-without-click on overall interactions may be a sign of coordinate behaviour; c) lastly, the exposure to news stories area addresses the frequency and typology of views of certain content. both facebook algorithms and the structure of the user’s social networks affect exposure. we hypothesize that due to the combination of these factors, news-stories published by insular online news sources are shown more frequently to a single user and more prominently (top news-feed slot) than other news stories. in this paper, the authors present the measures developed to address the research questions articulated in the three areas with respective findings. although based on 2018 general election and 2019 european election in italy, the results will be discussed in a broader context with the aim to shed light on the opportunities provided by sso datasets to identify coordinated inauthentic behaviours on facebook. the research findings are presented in the report “understanding coordinated and inauthentic link sharing behavior on facebook in the run-up to 2018 general election and 2019 european election in italy” (giglietto, righetti & marino, 2019; available at 10.31235/osf.io/3jteh ). 1 url share dataset and crowdtangle api described in depth at https://socialscience.one/.   selected papers of #aoir2019:   the 20 th annual conference of the   association of internet researchers   brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019     references bakshy, e., messing, s., & adamic, l. a. (2015). exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on facebook. science, 348(6239), 1130-1132. bastos, m., & mercea, d. (2018). the public accountability of social platforms: lessons from a study on bots and trolls in the brexit campaign. philosophical transactions of the royal society a: mathematical, physical and engineering sciences, 376(2128), 20180003. bessi, a., & ferrara, e. (2016). social bots distort the 2016 us presidential election online discussion. faris, r., roberts, h., etling, b., bourassa, n., zuckerman, e., & benkler, y. (2017). partisanship, propaganda, and disinformation: online media and the 2016 u.s. presidential election. retrieved from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3019414 garrett, r. k. (2009). echo chambers online?: politically motivated selective exposure among internet news users. journal of computer-mediated communication, 14(2), 265-285. giglietto, f., iannelli, l., rossi, l., valeriani, a., righetti, n., carabini, f., ... & zurovac, e. (2018). mapping italian news media political coverage in the lead-up to 2018 general election. available at ssrn 3179930. giglietto, f., righetti, n., marino, g., & rossi, l. (2019). multi-party media partisanship attention score. estimating partisan attention of news media sources using twitter data in the lead-up to 2018 italian election. comunicazione politica, 20(1), 85-108. giglietto, f., righetti, n., & marino, g. (2019, september 20). understanding coordinated and inauthentic link sharing behavior on facebook in the run-up to   selected papers of #aoir2019:   the 20 th annual conference of the   association of internet researchers   brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019     2018 general election and 2019 european election in italy. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/3jteh gleicher, n. (december 6, 2018). coordinated inauthentic behavior explained. available at facebook newsroom: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/12/inside-feed-coordinated-inauthentic-behavior / messing, s., & westwood, s. j. (2014). selective exposure in the age of social media: endorsements trump partisan source affiliation when selecting news online. communication research, 41(8), 1042-1063. marwick, a., & lewis, r. (2017). media manipulation and disinformation online. new york: data & society research institute. pew research center. (2001). americans still prefer watching to reading the news – and mostly still through television. annual report. washington, dc:. amy mitchell. phillips, w. (2018). the oxygen of amplification. new york: data & society research institute. sunstein, c. r. (2001). echo chambers: bush v. gore, impeachment, and beyond. princeton, nj: princeton university press. tucker, j., guess, a., barberá, p., vaccari, c., siegel, a., sanovich, s., stukal, d., & nyhan, b. (2018). social media, political polarization, and political disinformation: a review of the scientific literature. available at ssrn: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3144139 vaccari, c. (2013). from echo chamber to persuasive device? rethinking the role of the internet in campaigns. new media & society, 15(1), 109-127. webster, j.g. (2014) the marketplace of attention: how audiences take shape in a digital age. cambridge, ma: the mit press.   selected papers of #aoir2019:   the 20 th annual conference of the   association of internet researchers   brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019     zhang, y., wells, c., wang, s., & rohe, k. (2017). attention and amplification in the hybrid media system: the composition and activity of donald trump’s twitter following during the 2016 presidential election. new media & society, 1461444817744390. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): duffy, b., miltner, k., wahlstedt, a. (2020, october). policing “fake” femininity: anger and accusation in influencer “hateblog” communities. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. policing “fake” femininity: anger and accusation in influencer “hateblog” communities brooke erin duffy cornell university kate miltner university of edinburgh amanda wahlstedt columbia university while social media influencers are held up in the popular imagination as savvy and selfenterprising cultural tastemakers, their requisite career visibility opens them up to intensified public scrutiny and, in some cases, networked hate and harassment. key repositories of such critique are influencer “hateblogs,” community-oriented sites that seem to blur the boundaries between critique and cyber-bullying. crucially, the term “hateblog” is more closely related to the colloquialism “hater” than to the more formal designation of hate speech; “hateblogs” thus provide a space for audience-participants to mock and critique their targets for stated purposes of amusement and satisfaction (miltner, 2017). as such, the activities of hatebloggers can be situated in the wider context of media anti-fandom (e.g., click, 2019; gray, 2005; harman & jones, 2013; marwick, 2013; mcrae, 2017). amid the pervasive culture of social media fame, hateblogs have emerged as especially vibrant—and vitriolic—sites for communities of anti-fans to collectively police the activities of highly visible instagrammers, youtubers, and the like. it is perhaps not surprising, given the inhospitable treatment of women in digital public spaces (sobieraj, 2018), that hateblogs overwhelmingly target women and other marginalized groups. yet, in contrast to the much-publicized hate campaigns waged by male-dominated communities (e.g., the targeting of leslie jones by the gamergate community), sites like get off my internets (gomi), gossipguru, and tatlelife are predominantly administered and populated by women. as such, conventional frameworks of misogyny (e.g., banet-weiser, 2018) don’t aptly explain their underlying power dynamics. instead, the gender-coded nature of hateblogs likens their content to feminized gossip, which has historically functioned to define societal norms through shared intimacy (meyers, 2010). to this end, forbes’ (in)famously identified gomi one of the “best sites for women in 2013,” dubbing it “the antidote to mommy blogs…[with] endless commentary, criticism and gossip on a web of lifestyle, fashion and mommy bloggers (casserly, 2013). to critics, however, hateblogs are venues for those with “crazy obsession[s]” (gross and chen, 2012) to engage in online abuse and cyber-bullying, which can exact a profound toll on targets (van syckle, 2016). these totalizing perspectives articulate different aspects of—and perspectives on— the hateblog phenomenon; yet they fail to fully acknowledge their cultural ambivalence within a fraught moment of socially mediated feminine self-enterprise. indeed, we contend that both the “crazy obsession” of hateblogging participants and the gossipy normativity of the blogs themselves are in service of the same ends, namely to critique the perpetuation of unattainable norms of feminine success in the digital economy. here we invoke gray (2005), who suggests that anti-fandom is “a mode of engagement with text and medium that focuses heavily on the moral and the emotional, seeking in some ways to police the public and textual spheres” (p. 841). hateblogs, we argue, can be understood as “moral texts” (gray, 2005) that provide insight into contemporary anxieties about fame, femininity, and careerism. this project analyzes “hateblog” anti-fan community get off my internets (gomi) which targets women social media personalities almost exclusively. gomi was selected because of the size of its community as well as its dominance within the hateblog space. we qualitatively analyzed 150 hateblog posts (also known as “snarks”) across gomi’s site. snarks were drawn from 10 forums: five focused on fashion and beauty influencers and their respective brands, while the remaining five were dedicated to lifestyle influencers, whose brand often spanned fashion, travel, design, fitness, etc. these forums were chosen based on their popularity on gomi, defined by the number of unique snarks each forum contained. this ranged from 3,394 to 861 unique comments in each thread. the critiques of influencers that circulate on hateblogs, while numerous, center on influencers’ perceived duplicity or “fakery'' in regards to their career, relationships, and personal appearance. together, these accusations cast specific influencers as deceitful, avaricious, and lazy charlatans who unfairly profit off of ersatz performances of perfection. as moral discourses, these critiques aim at scrutinizing and dismantling the tropes of entrepreneurial femininity (duffy and hund, 2015). more broadly, we argue that the anger expressed through hateblogging may be understood as form of displaced feminine rage. indeed, while such expressions may be deployed in discussions of individual influencers and their performances of specific feminine ideals, it is ostensibly rooted in broader sociocultural critiques connected to gendered expectations relating to authenticity, labor, and privilege. in other words, the influencers who are targeted by hateblogs act as standins for structural critiques of seemingly “new” venues for women’s employment that reproduce problematic, limiting ideals of femininity, domestic life, and the possibility of “having it all.” but while hatebloggers’ purport to disillusion us by exposing the artifice of social media, their expressions do little for progressive gender politics, enacted as they are as a form of horizontal misogyny (mckenna et al., 2003) that can cause genuine distress among its creator-targets. we thus conclude by highlighting the limitations of this expressive act— one that seeks to liberate women from gendered constraints while simultaneously engaging in gendered forms of symbolic violence. references banet-weiser, s. (2018). empowered: popular feminism and popular misogyny. duke university press. casserly, m. (2013). the 100 best websites for women, 2013. forbes. retrieved from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/meghancasserly/2013/08/20/the-100-best-websites-forwomen-2013/#5fcf5e8057c8 click, m. (ed.). (2019). anti-fandom: dislike and hate in the digital age. nyu press. duffy, b. e., & hund, e. (2015). “having it all” on social media: entrepreneurial femininity and self-branding among fashion bloggers. social media+ society, 1(2), 2056305115604337. grose, j. and chen, a. (2012). the terrible, fascinating world of hate blogs. the awl. https://www.theawl.com/2012/10/the-terrible-fascinating-world-of-hate-blogs/ gray, j. (2003). new audiences, new textualities: anti-fans and non-fans. international journal of cultural studies, 6(1), 64-81. marwick, a. e. (2013). status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. yale university press. mckenna, b. g., smith, n. a., poole, s. j., & coverdale, j. h. (2003). horizontal violence: experiences of registered nurses in their first year of practice. journal of advanced nursing, 42(1), 90-96. mcrae, s. (2017). “get off my internets”: how anti-fans deconstruct lifestyle bloggers’ authenticity work. persona studies, 3(1), 13-27 meyers, e. a. "women, gossip, and celebrity online: celebrity gossip blogs as feminized popular culture." cupcakes, pinterest and ladyporn: feminized popular culture in the early twenty-first century (2015): 71-92 miltner, k. (2017). "is hateblogging harassment? examining the boundaries of online antagonism". international communication association, 68th annual conference. san diego, ca. june 2017. sobieraj, s. (2018). bitch, slut, skank, cunt: patterned resistance to women’s visibility in digital publics. information, communication & society, 21(11), 1700-1714. van syckle, k. (2016, january 21 ). 'it put me on antidepressants': welcome to gomi, the cruel site for female snark. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jan/21/gomi-blog-internet-commentswomen aoir2020-final submission-aug.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 whose sharedplans? scripts, collaboration, and feminist ai research rachel bergmann microsoft research introduction critical and feminist histories of computing have begun to explore the way race, class, gender, culture, and other social factors have shaped the development of computing technologies, and how these technologies in turn help construct and enforce cultural and social norms. recent histories (hicks 2017; rankin 2018) frame the history of computing as deeply embedded in a web of social, political, and cultural forces which have shaped the labour forces, forms of access, and imaginaries surrounding computing technologies. this paper aims to offer a supplement to these critical histories and build on the growing body of “critical ai studies” literature that considers particular artificial intelligence (ai) techniques and technologies in terms of their sociocultural contexts and implications. approaching ai historically offers a way to consider algorithms and ai technologies beyond their technical specifications, instead analyzing them as complex sociotechnical assemblages shaped by material, geographic, political, and social forces. feminist ai protocol using a technofeminist framework (wajcman 2004), i examine a network of women in ai research who together expanded the range of methodologies and disciplines usually included in ai in the 1980s and 1990s. barbara grosz and candace sidner, two of these women, developed a concept called sharedplans (grosz & sidner 1986) that challenged more masculine approaches to dialogue systems. borrowing from michelle murphy’s (2012) concept of protocol feminism, i argue these women had a feminist ai protocol, a collection of methods and practices rooted in community, interdisciplinarity, and care. i analyze these women in the history of ai research as complex, politically imperfect characters. i outline the sets of practices and techniques they used in their research objectives, scientific method, areas of specialization, and involvement in academic service. i consider their significant contributions to both ai research and creating spaces for women in computer science. i also consider the ways their social contexts limited the extent to which their protocols offered more radical epistemological imaginings of a feminist approach to ai. suggested citation (apa): bergmann, r. (2020, october) whose sharedplans? scripts, collaboration, and feminist ai research. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir, 2020. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. method i draw on scholarship in critical algorithm studies and feminist sts, which has provided frameworks to uncover and challenge the assumptions and values which have been foundational to scientific and technological research (e.g., haraway 1990). using humanistic and documentary methods, i analyze published and unpublished documents, interviews, conference proceedings, white papers, and departmental reports. i analyze the publications of barbara grosz and candace sidner, the two authors of sharedplans, and situate their work within broader intellectual currents at the time within ai and in other disciplines. i consider how their theoretical approach in this period resonated with contemporaneous work produced in feminist theory and sts. i support this analysis with biographical interviews with barbara grosz and other ai researchers, conducted from summer 2019 through fall 2020. findings & implications i outline an assemblage of techniques, values, and practices that illustrate a feminist ai protocol rooted in community, interdisciplinarity, and care. sharedplans helped create the infrastructure for a computer dialogue system that could go “off-script” and it was grounded in a philosophy of language as action. grosz and sidner approached their research philosophically, using frameworks from philosophy and speech act theory (searle 1969, 1980) to frame dialogue as fundamentally collaborative. sharedplans helped deconstruct certain notions of individualism and research methods that focused too narrowly on normative scripts, tasks, and utterances (schank & abelson 1977). instead, their research methods were grounded in the diverse goals and desires of real users. grosz advocated for the metaphor of a team or partnership to describe the relationship humans and ai systems ought to have— and the systems computer scientists ought to design. outside research, many of these women spent their academic careers advocating for feminist issues in the computer science community (grosz 1991; sidner 1982). in many ways, their approaches to ai align with feminist and critical sts work circulating simultaneously (adam 1993, 1995; akrich 1992; woolgar 1990). in other ways, this network of researchers enacted their ai protocol from within the particular set of cultural and epistemological parameters of their computer science departments. sharedplans built collaborative capability into existing work on intelligent agents, but this model was contained within limits of rational agency and self-interest. these parameters limited how radical the epistemological interventions of grosz and her collaborators could have been. conclusion paying attention to the limits of sharedplans helps shed light on particular epistemic norms within the history of computing technologies and clarifies the kinds of commitments necessary for creating feminist technologies in solidarity with other movements. to conclude, i consider feminist internet’s “feminist alexa” chatbot to imagine a feminist ai research agenda rooted in intersectionality, anti-imperialism, and suggested citation (apa): lastname, firstinitial. (2020, october). paper title. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. anti-capitalism. the project's design decisions emphasize the way claims to truth and knowledge are historically contingent, socially and culturally mediated, and shaped by prior experiences. there remains an urgent need to reflect on how to build feminist ai technologies that make room for and include many different standpoints. references adam, alison. “a feminist critique of artificial intelligence.” european journal of women’s studies 2, no. 3 (august 1995): 355–77. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/135050689500200305. _____. “gendered knowledge — epistemology and artificial intelligence.” ai & society 7, no. 4 (december 1, 1993): 311–22. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf01891414. akrich, madeleine. “the de-scription of technical objects.” in shaping technology/ building society. studies in sociotechnical change, edited by wiebe e. bijker and john law, 205–24. cambridge, massachusetts: mit press, 1992. https://halshs.archives ouvertes.fr/halshs-00081744. feminist internet. “designing a feminist alexa: an experiment in feminist conversation design.” ual creative computing institute. accessed april 17, 2019. https:// drive.google.com/file/d/1virit8dia9muhvd-xfccccuqcujrhmoo/view? usp=drive_open&usp=embed_facebook grosz, barbara j. “report on women in the sciences at harvard. part i: junior faculty and graduate students.” faculty of arts and science committee on the status of women. cambridge, massachusetts: harvard university, february 13, 1991, 1-36. grosz, barbara j. and candace l. sidner. “attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse.” computational linguistics 12, no 3 (1986): 175-204. haraway, donna. simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. 1 edition. new york: routledge, 1990. hicks, mar. programmed inequality: how britain discarded women technologists and lost its edge in computing. cambridge, ma: mit press, 2017. murphy, michelle. seizing the means of reproduction: entanglements of feminism, health, and technoscience. duke university press, 2012. rankin, joy lisi. a people’s history of computing in the united states. cambridge, massachusetts: harvard university press, 2018. schank, roger c., and robert p. abelson. scripts, plans, goals, and understanding: an inquiry into human knowledge structures. new york: psychology press, 1977. searle, john r. “minds, brains, and programs.” behavioral and brain sciences 3, no. 3 (september 1980): 417–24. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x00005756. suggested citation (apa): lastname, firstinitial. (2020, october). paper title. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. searle, john. 1969. speech acts: an essay in the philosophy of language. cambridge university press, cambridge, england. sidner, candace. “on being a woman at mit: or, how to miss the stumbling blocks in graduate education.” association for women in mathematics newsletter, february 1982, 13–17. wajcman, judy. technofeminism. cambridge; malden, ma: polity, 2004. woolgar, steve. “configuring the user: the case of usability trials.” the sociological review 38 (1990): 58–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954x.1990.tb03349.x. suggested citation (apa): lastname, firstinitial. (2020, october). paper title. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. microsoft word hackl-truvada promoting gay promiscuity or ending the hiv stigma differences-truvada promoting gay.doc selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting ofthe association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): hackl, a.m and t.p newman (2015, october 21-24). truvada: promoting gay promiscuity or ending the hiv stigma? the new york times and the advocate as facilitators of online debates around the hiv prevention pill. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. truvada: promoting gay promiscuity or ending the hiv stigma? the new york times and the advocate as facilitators of online debates around the hiv prevention pill andrea m. hackl american university todd p. newman american university abstract in communication scholarship, a number of studies address the role of online commenting platforms in allowing for debates on issues of public interest. in consideration of the important roles of underlying policy designs in shaping these debates, the current study assessed differences in online reader perceptions around the hiv prevention pill truvada on the mainstream news platform, the new york times, and the lgbt platform, the advocate. the study’s results suggest that readers of both platforms were primarily concerned with the medical and scientific implications of truvada. moreover, readers of the new york times were significantly more likely to frame the issue in terms of political/economic concerns, while readers of the advocate were significantly more likely to frame the issue in terms of medical/science concerns. the paper’s conclusion will discuss implications of these results for future research and preventative health strategies.   introduction according to the centers for disease control and prevention (cdc), more than 1.2 million people in the united states are living with hiv infection, with almost 1 in 8 being unaware of their infection (cdc, 2015). among the groups at greatest risk for hiv infection are gay and bisexual men of all races and ethnicities. it is estimated that 50,000 individuals are diagnosed each year with hiv, while in 2012 close to 14,000 individuals diagnosed with aids died (cdc, 2015). 2 in july 2012, the food and drug administration (fda) approved truvada, a controversial pill regimen promising to significantly lower the risk of hiv infections among high-risk groups (park, 2012). while some celebrated the pill as a scientific breakthrough that could put an end to hiv, others expressed skepticism, with prominent aids activists michael weinstein (2014) and larry kramer (2014) becoming vocal opponents. the public divide over the new hiv prevention strategy was also reflected across the news media, with a huffington post headline calling truvada “the most celebrated, mistrusted little pill in the world” (shapiro, 2014). the twenty-first century was not only significant in terms of breakthroughs in hiv prevention, but also entailed the emergence of new communication and information platforms that have had significant impacts on the journalistic profession, free expression, and access to information. for example, the rise of online news and blogs has significantly altered how individuals access news and information. individuals now have the opportunity to not only access news and information from mainstream news media sources (e.g., the new york times), but can also access a wide range of special interest and community-related news platforms, such as lgbt news media (e.g., the advocate). moreover, digital media not only increased the number and type of choices for media content, but also afforded individuals with new ways to engage with news and information. one of the most significant ways in which this type of user engagement manifests is through the ability for users to directly comment on news items online. as some scholars note, science communication now includes not only the media’s published materials, but also online comments (shanahan, 2010). as a result, many scholars have documented the role of commenting platforms in fostering democratic discussion (e.g. freelon, 2015). other researchers have examined user comments as a way to identify public sentiment on different health and science issues (e.g., len-rios, bhandari, & medvedeva 2014), as well as the effects of comments on individual perception and opinion (anderson, brossard, scheufele, xenos, & ladwig, 2009). the current study examines the nature of online comments to news coverage on the hiv prevention pill truvada, allowing for an assessment of how different members of the public view the relevance of the pill within the context of their lives. specifically, this study seeks to identify potential differences in public sentiment by analyzing news articles and corresponding comments from the mainstream news media platform the new york times and the lgbt news platform the advocate. seeking to understand the role of online platforms as “infrastructure of free expression” (balkin, 2009), the study also discusses how policy designs like real name requirements may impact public expression around truvada. in order to assess differences in reader perceptions, all articles discussing truvada between may 1, 2014 and october 31, 2014 were accessed through the platform’s online archives, including the population of comments associated with each article. this six-month period in 2014 allowed for the analysis of public sentiment related to discussion forums facilitated on both platforms. in a discussion series titled, “is prep a good way to fight h.i.v. infections”, the new york times published commentaries from aids activists such as michael weinstein as well as other activists and health 3 professionals. on the lgbt news platform, the advocate, a forum titled “31 days of prep” included articles written by health professionals, community members, and science journalists. based on a deductive literature review as well as an inductive review of a sample of comments posted to articles, this study relies on an original coding framework to examine different frames of reference among commenters. based on these findings, this paper seeks to provide a framework for future research on media coverage of aids/hiv prevention, as well as the social, cultural, and political representations that develop around the drug. in addition, the paper makes several recommendations for journalists and their work in communicating preventative health strategies to the public. news media frames helping us understand public health debates this study seeks to advance the current literature by focusing not only on the frames of reference journalists adopt in their coverage on public health issues, but by further examining how reader perceptions align or differ with the news platforms’ framing. studies focusing on framing as a theoretical construct frequently refer to frames as the “central organizing idea or story line that provides meaning to an unfolding strip of events […]. the frame suggests what the controversy is about, the essence of the issue” (gamson & modigliani, 1994, p.376). in the news media, framing occurs on both the side of media production and media consumption. for example, the organizational and structural factors of the media system as well as the individual characteristics of the journalist can impact the framing of news content. as audiences receive frames from the media, individuals internalize these frames to help them understand the issue at hand (scheufele, 1999). while some scholars describe this process in terms of frame accessibility, or salience (zaller, 1992), most scholars observe that individuals rely on a more deliberative process. rather than uncritically adopting these views, audiences actively weigh frames and their implications as they relate to their pre-existing interpretations and schema (scheufele & tewksbury, 2007). in scholarship on media framing, a number of studies have focused on how framing and narratives presented in news media help the public understand public health issues and intervention strategies. as part of “risk reporting”, media coverage of hiv/aids “requires interpretive judgment in the face of technical uncertainty and scientific disagreement” (nelkin, 1991, p.294). in the early days of the epidemic in the 1980s, hiv/aids was primarily considered a “gay disease” resulting in little coverage in mainstream news media (e.g., gross, 2001; kinsella, 1989). mainstream news media also came under attack by the emerging hiv/aids movement for publishing questionable scientific information around hiv transmission (epstein, 1996; streitmatter, 1995). it was not before the mid 1980s when scientists concluded that the virus now coined hiv could impact the larger population that the virus became part of the mainstream media agenda (e.g., santa cruze bell, 2006). a rise in media coverage also resulted from the news that movie legend rock hudson had lost his life to aids (kinsella, 1989). rather than a focus on “high-risk groups” and their “immoral behavior” that had characterized early news coverage (nelkin, 1991), media started adopting an “innocent victims” frame, focusing on hiv transmission among children and those that had been infected through 4 blood transfusions (gross, 2001; nelkin, 1991). in a study conducted among a sample of australian print media, brown (et al., 1996) demonstrate how both the “innocent victims” narrative and the “presumably gay villain” narrative was used in the same context to discuss doctor-to patient transmission. in addition to shaping narratives about those impacted by the hiv virus, studies also show that scientific and medical concerns like hiv transmission were of significant concern in the media discourse (e.g., brodie et al., 2006), with journalists adopting different strategies to communicate scientific findings to the public. while schwartz and murray (1996) conclude that the news media discourse painted a pessimistic picture about the disease by ignoring key findings and research and making alarmist generalizations, cohen (1997) emphasizes the positive outlook of news media in discussing the future of hiv prevention. comments sections as forums of debate in the digital public sphere, media audiences are no longer mere consumers of media content, but expect communication platforms to allow for user engagement and interactivity (jenkins, 2006). as news media platforms started publishing content online, comments sections to news article created new ways for readers to engage in deliberation. while some consider commenting platforms as reflective of critical components of the public sphere (e.g., ruiz et al., 2011), comments sections also allow journalists to receive constant reader feedback (ksiazek et al., 2014). at the same time, opportunities for user engagement have been found to generate more user traffic, supporting the advertising-driven business models of media companies (ksiazek et al., 2014; loke, 2012). while user comments may constitute challenges to the quality standards of the journalistic profession, (diakopolous & naaman, 2011), they have become a central feature of the online news experience. in scholarship, news commentary has produced a wide range of studies that are primarily concerned with civility and politeness on commenting platforms. a frequently cited example for the analysis of online discussion is papacharissi’s (2004) study on deliberation in political forums. the scholar concludes that the discourse was overall polite and civil, thus suggesting the promise of democratic discussion online. papacharissi’s work, however, also emphasizes that uncivil comments pose a challenge to norms of democratic discussion. following up on this research, anderson (et al., 2009) presented research participants with manipulated comments to news articles on nanotechnology, concluding that uncivility in comments sections can reinforce political polarization. issues of uncivil and toxic debates have also prompted a scholarly debate on the role of real name requirements in fostering online civility. a study comparing the debate around immigration in a sample of anonymous and non-anonymous comments to news articles, for instance, finds that real name identification was significantly more likely to generate a civil discourse (santana, 2013). the study’s results are consistent with an analysis of comments posted to the technology news site techchrunch (omernich& owsley sood, 2013). in an effort to disallow anonymous user commentary, the site had switched to a commentary platform created by facebook. based on a content analysis of news 5 comments posted before and after the news site switched to the non-anonymous platform, the scholars find that opportunities for anonymous speech generated more user comments. at the same time, anonymous comments were less likely to satisfy quality and relevance measures. while these studies suggest that real name requirements may foster a more civil discourse, an inability to comment anonymously also raises the distinct question of whether real name requirements may prevent some from participating in online debates. discussing the multiple governance functions performed by social media platforms, denardis and hackl (2015) suggest that real name requirements can pose a threat to political activists and vulnerable communities like lgbt people. similarly, a lack of anonymity could prevent vulnerable groups from weighing in on comments sections. given the sensitivity of the issue of hiv prevention in general and the hiv prevention pill more specifically, an inability to comment anonymously could exclude many critical voices from the debate. while the current study does not primarily focus on the issue of civility in debates around hiv prevention, it is critical to understand the importance and potential impacts of real name requirements on online debates. acknowledging the critical role of real name requirements in fostering or constraining debates, the study will place the issue of online commenting within the context of user policies. news comments, issue framing, and public sentiment while news media discourse is a central aspect in the formation of individual perception and public opinion, journalists and their framing of an issue are similarly influenced by public opinion. studies that examine the relationship between online news and public opinion rely on several methodological and theoretical frameworks. few studies, however, describe the interactive process between journalistic frame-building and individual frame-setting. zhou and moy (2007) provide one of the few studies documenting this process. the authors analyzed news articles and user comments related to a local trial involving two peasants and a businessman. their findings suggest that early on in the coverage of the issue, commenter frames dictate media frames, but as coverage continues, news media frames become less influential on the frames used for online discourse. while the authors note that the low level of media and government trust in china may not allow for a generalizations of their findings to western media systems, the study does provide an elaborate example of the interactive process of framing in online environments. while the zhou and moy study provides a novel framework for the interaction between online news and user comments, most studies only examine the association between online news articles and user comments. relying on content analysis of health related news articles, holton et al. (2014) examine the relationship between news frames and commenters’ frames through the framework of episodic/thematic frames established by iyengar (1991) and gain/loss frames established by tversky and kahneman (1981). the authors find that news articles employing thematic frames were more likely to prompt users to focus on negative health outcomes in their comments, while episodic frames were more likely to generate personal comments. using a similar framework, suran et al. (2014) expand upon the study of holten et al. (2014) to identify how the 6 health related topic of a news article affects user responses. the authors find that users relied on different frames of reference depending on the health topic. while these studies focused on quantitative content analysis, other studies rely on mixmethodological approaches to examine the relationship between online news articles and user comments. for example, in their analysis of news articles and user comments on scientific evidence related to breastfeeding, len-ríos et al. (2014) use the framework of social representation theory first established by wagner and hayes (2005) to understand how user comments construct meaning around the issue. based on this framework, the scholars assess how individuals anchor certain concepts through their personal experiences.the authors also employ a traditional content analysis through the framework of the integrative model of behavioral prediction (fishbein, 2009), which identifies variables associated with whether people engage in health behaviors. overall, the authors find that user comments focus on personal experience, in contrast to the journalistic focus on scientific evidence. the current study seeks to contribute to this emerging field of scholarship by investigating how readers of the mainstream news platform the new york times and the lgbt-related platform the advocate differ in their framing of the hiv prevention pill truvada. based on content analyses of news articles and comments published during a six-month period, the study investigated the extent to which reader framing corresponded with the frames presented on the respective platforms as well as potential cross-platform differences in reader framing. about this study the current study examined differences in news media narratives and reader perceptions around the hiv prevention pill truvada on the mainstream news platform the new york times and the lgbt platform the advocate. qualitative analysis of news articles and quantitative content analysis of a representative sample of news comments were conducted to examine (a) how news media and their readers made sense of truvada as well as (b) the extent to which the readers of these platforms differed in their framing of the hiv prevention pill. based on these methodological approaches, the study addressed the following key research questions: (1) to what extent did online comments on the mainstream news platform, the new york times, and the lgbt news platform, the advocate, around the hiv prevention pill truvada correspond with frames presented on the respective platforms?; and (2) to what extent did commenters on the new york times and the advocate differ in their framing of the prevention strategy? about the news platforms while the new york times (nyt) is among the international opinion leaders (the new york times company, 2014), the advocate is considered the “world’s leading gay news source” (here media, 2014). the platforms differ in their user policies around user comments. the new york times (2014) does not require real name identification, but moderators monitor comments. in addition to several restricted forms of speech like vulgar and obscene speech, user policies maintain that “while most comments will be 7 posted if they are on-topic and not abusive, moderating decisions are subjective” (nyt, 2014). verified commenters, referring to those commenters with “a track record of highquality comments” are not subject to moderator reviews before posting their comments (nyt, 2015). commenting on the advocate requires real name identification based on facebook’s commenting feature. sample design news articles and reader comments were analyzed between may 1, 2014 and october 31, 2014. the time frame allowed for the analysis of news media narratives and reader comments during several key moments in the truvada debate. in may, 2014, the cdc recommended truvada for hiv prevention. shortly after, aids activists larry kramer and michael weinstein publicly spoke out against the prevention strategy, bringing the debate around the hiv prevention pill into the mainstream. during the selected time frame, both news media platforms also devoted debate forums to truvada. in the new york times’ “room for debate” series, activists and public health advocates weighed in on the truvada debate. in the advocate, the glaad award winning series “31 of prep” presented the perspectives of public health professionals, activists as well as individuals and couples that had adopted truvada as prevention strategy. during the selected time frame, fifteen articles in the new york times and thirty-four articles in the advocate discussed truvada.1 altogether, 669 comments in the new york times and 557 reader comments in the advocate responded to the coverage of the news platforms. after removing duplicates and irrelevant comments, 555 reader comments for the new york times and 390 comments for the advocate remained. these comments were manually retrieved from the platforms’ online archives. a representative sample of 200 the new york times comments and 206 the advocate comments were drawn for the study’s analysis.2 coding categories the paper’s analysis is based on three overarching frames that were established based on a thorough analysis of relevant literature as well as the analysis of several key articles. the “political/economic” frame assessed the extent to which readers primarily placed truvada in political or economic context. examples for these kinds of comments are reader perspectives discussing the affordability of truvada or questioning the economic relationships between the truvada manufacturer gilead and doctors. the “medical/science/health” frame assessed the extent to which reader comments focused on the science behind the hiv prevention pill or discussed truvada in context of other prevention strategies. examples include reader comments supported by scientific evidence or comments emphasizing the need for an hiv vaccination rather than a prevention pill. reader comments coded as “social/cultural” emphasized the larger 1 of the fifteen articles in the new york times that discussed truvada, only seven articles provided commenting platforms. two articles posted in the advocate did not generate any comments. 2 since the number of user comments on each article were not equal, a proportional sampling procedure was used to determine the adequate number of comments to draw from each article. after calculating the proportionate sample, every other comment within each article was selected.     8 societal and cultural implications of truvada. examples for comments coded under this frame include references to the aids epidemic of the 1980s as well as the extent to which the pill could lead to a change in sex practices within the gay community. all reader comments were mutually exclusive and coded based on the primary frames used in each comment. inter-coder reliability to ensure inter-coder reliability, two coders analyzed a sub-sample of fifty reader comments from both the new york times and the advocate. after familiarizing themselves with the coding categories, each of the coders analyzed the subset of comments and discussed questions and potential modifications to coding categories. inter-coder reliability was calculated using the online tool recal (http://dfreelon.org/utils/recalfront/). after the coders reached satisfactory inter-coder reliability (political/economic frame: 0.73, medical/science/health: 0.59, social/cultural: 0.61), one of the coders analyzed the 202 new york times comments and the other coder analyzed the 206 advocate comments. results: commenters primarily placing truvada in medical and scientific context in the selected time frame, fifteen articles in the new york times discussed the hiv prevention pill. a majority of these articles adopted the medical/science frame in the discussion of the hiv prevention pill (ten articles, sixty-seven percent), while social/cultural (three articles, twenty percent) and political/economic concerns (two articles, thirteen percent) were considered less relevant. altogether, thirty-four articles in the advocate discussed the hiv prevention pill, with most articles placing the hiv prevention pill in “medical/science” context (twenty-one articles, sixty-one percent). while “socio/cultural” framing was predominant in nine articles (twenty-six percent), only four articles (thirteen percent) placed the debate in “political/economic” context. consistent with the overall focus on the new york times coverage, the platforms’ users were primarily concerned with the medical and scientific implications of truvada (seventy-five comments, thirty-seven percent). in contrast to the platforms’ issue framing, readers were more likely to place truvada in a political and economic context (sixty comments, thirty percent), rather than a social or cultural context (fifty-five comments, twenty-seven percent). twelve new york times readers adopted other issue frames (six percent). similar to the new york times findings, both the majority of articles and user comments on the advocate focused on medical/scientific concerns. overall, 113 readers (fifty-five percent) of the advocate considered truvada an issue of medical/scientific concern. however, unlike commenters on the new york times, commenters on the advocate were more likely to focus on social/cultural concerns rather than political/economic concerns. thirty-nine readers (nineteen percent) primarily framed the debate as one of political/economic concern, while social/cultural concerns were at the forefront of the truvada debate for forty-nine readers (twenty-four percent). only five advocate (two percent) readers adopted other issue framing in discussing the hiv prevention pill. 9 significant cross-platform differences in framing truvada in addition to investigating the prominence of issue themes on each platform, this study also identified cross-platform differences. results suggest several significant differences between the comments posted to the new york times and the advocate. readers of the advocate were significantly more likely to adopt medical/science issue frames in discussion of truvada (p< 0.05), while readers of the new york times were significantly more likely to adopt political/economic frames in their online discussion (p< 0.05). no statistical difference exists across platforms in regards to the social cultural frame, although new york times readers were slightly more likely to place truvada in this context. representations of truvada on the new york times in addition to the quantitative content analysis, this study also focused on the themes that emerged from commenters on each platform. on the new york times, for example, those placing truvada in medical/science context frequently argued that the hiv prevention pill did not protect from other sexually transmitted diseases. for example, in response to the article “ask well: aids and truvada” jerome w. (2014, june 15) commented: if a guy takes truvada daily as recommended for maximum protection against contracting hiv, that drug offers no protection against hepatitis c (for which there is no immunization option), which is transmitted via the same pathways as hiv. and then of course there are such challenging infections as drug-resistant gonorrhea. if their hepatitis b immunization is not up to date, that is an added risk. this is a tough mine field to navigate, especially when the mines don't explode, but can lead to disability and death almost silently. in addition to concerns over the potentials of drug resistance, readers like bill bauer (2014, june 18) also expressed concerns about the possible side effects of the hiv prevention pill: this is all very well, but there is another very important factor that should be made clear to every user. truvada has a nasty side effect that has affected two of my friends so far: it can cause serious kidney disease. in affected individuals it causes elevation in creatine [sic] levels and calcium based kidney stones. if it is not stopped at once upon development of these symptoms, the kidney damage can be irreversible. to refute concerns over truvada’s potential side effects, some readers discussed their own experience with their prevention pill: “i must wonder if you are mistaken, i am on truvada for six years now as part of my treatment. i note no side effects from it, and truvada has long been considered a very-low-side-effects medication [...]” (jeton ademaj, 2014, may 15). some readers also commented that resources should rather be directed at advancing other prevention strategies: 10 while i am glad that this alternative to condoms has been deemed safe and effective by the cdc, i fear that any push for a vaccine or cure will be relegated to the back (very back) burner. call me cynical, but for this extremely expensive medication there is now a captive body of guys that will be taking it for life. will it ever go generic in this country? will any hiv meds ever go generic in this country? (mine currently retail at $2300 a month.) with all of that money coming in, is there any real incentive for gilead or others to be at work on a one time, universal fix? what do you think? (michael, 2014, may 16) to support these arguments, some commenters also presented findings from research studies on truvada and drew comparisons to other preventative measures like the birth control pill. those considering the hiv prevention pill an issue of political/economic concern frequently discussed the affordability of the prevention measure and the burden for taxpayers. a reader identifying as rob (2014, july 3), for example, raised the question of “who is going to pay the $1400 a month for this drug? it seems to me that it is a tad unfair to saddle the taxpayer with this expense when for just a few bucks a month you can buy 30 condoms.” others also questioned the economic motives of the pharma industry in releasing new hiv prevention methods: this prevention method costs 1,000 times as much a condoms, by some estimates $350,000 to prevent one infection. who is going to pay? taxpayers, evidently. i don't see big pharma gilead cutting down on profits or not using prep as a means of extending its patent monopoly. (artwit, 2014, july 3) others believed that public funding was justified to curb hiv infections. in response to commenter artwit’s comment, a reader responded that: truvada will be off patent in far less than 48 years. and, within 10 years or so we'll have a vaccine, or another less expensive alternative. so, $350,000 is too high an estimate. but, more importantly, all of society benefits if hiv infections become extremely rare. do we regret spending many millions to eliminate the risk of polio? why should we not be equally willing to pay to eliminate risk of aids. (barry, 2014, july 6) again, several readers drew comparisons to other prevention measures to justify the costs of truvada. a user identifying as dc (2014, september 17), for example argued that “[...] clearly the reason people are concerned are the costs. if the drug was as much as birth control, people won't be as up in arms about it as birth control. every moral has its price.” those placing the hiv prevention pill in social/cultural context frequently argued that the prevention measure would lead to promiscuity within the gay community. in an alarmist comment, reader jean (2014, may 15) pointed: i saw a 20-year-old at a bathhouse in new orleans last month passing out truvada at an orgy, because he knew there were hiv-positive 11 people there he and his friends wanted to have sex with and no way were they doing that stupid condom thing. doesn't get much more "party drug" than being passed out at a party, now does it? other users like jbailey (2014, november 2) argued that the debate should not only focus on gay men: [...] i do not like the singling out of gay men. sure anal sex is the riskiest sex when it comes to hiv infections, but that goes for everyone not just gay men. when their mentioned it gives heterosexuals the idea that they are somehow immune for this deadly disease, and that's not the message that should be conveyed in mass media. some responses that framed truvada as an issue of social/cultural concern also placed the pill in discussion of the hiv/aids epidemic of the 1980s/90s: it is unfortunate that the response of mr weinstein, mr kramer and likeminded advocates who lived through the darkest days of the epidemic in this country to the promise of prep is to double down on fear. [...] i did not live through the 80s the way these gentlemen did. i did live through the 90s and the 00s, and i can assure you that the side-effect of a reliance on condom-based safer sex in the era where hiv is no longer a death sentence (and just to be clearwe're happy no one needs to die from hiv anymore, right?) is the resurgent epidemic we are currently experiencing. we have the medical means to prevent additional transmission of hiv. how many more gay men, other men who have sex with men, and transgender persons need to be infected before we have a story full enough to satisfy you, mr kramer? do you know what evidence you are demanding? (tel, 2014, june 18) representations of truvada on the advocate similar to the new york times, several dominant themes emerged from commenters on the advocate. for example, many of the comments that focused on the medical and scientific implications of truvada focused on the argument that it is an appropriate and necessary measure to prevent hiv infection: [...] thank you for your 20th century perspective, however there are now multiple theoretical models for viral cures, which were not conceivable even in late 1999.furthermore, hiv does not even truly need a cure to be eradicable...it simply needs to be made non-transmissible, that technology exists now. (jetonademaj, 2015, october 25) scott gisborne no, we aren't treating "sexuality in a sense like a disease." we are treating a disease like a disease. there are now multiple ways to prevent this 12 disease, hiv, from both killing and spreading. that is a wonderful thing. (jody wheeler, 2014, october 14) other comments on the medical and scientific implications had a more cautious tone. these include themes that questioned the ability of individuals to follow the guidelines of the regimen as directed, including taking truvada in tandem with other prevention measures such as condoms. however, several other themes emerged with more serious concerns, including side effects of taking the drug: this article also does not address the side effects and how difficult prep is on your body. not to mention how difficult it is to find a doctor willing to prescribe it. prep is difficult to get and more so to maintain, and requires constant medical supervision. i think it's great but i worry about the long term effects on patients. (jeanelle klein, 2015, october 15) likewise, a similar theme that emerged within the medical and science frame includes the concern that the drug will not prevent other infectious diseases: pointless if you consider that prep does nor prevent other opportunistic sexual disease transfers. under many circumstances hiv is transmitted with these diseases. (diederik pretorius, 2014, december 26) several themes also emerged among the commenters that focused on the social/cultural implications of truvada. these include sexual promiscuity, the stigmatization surrounding the drug, and specific emphasis on different socioeconomic and ethnic groups. for example, the themes of sexual promiscuity and the stigmatization surrounding the drug often overlapped: good informative article. i don't know why there would be a stigma to taking prep? seems sensible to me. some folks just like to judge even in the gay community. (john m eschenbaum, 2014, october 6) the lazy way! just like with smoking and other health risk. don't do the crime if you are not willing to take responsibility. i have never understood why gay men risk their health and lives for sex? and then expect health insurance to pay for 20 years of treatment [....] (arthur b raleigh, 2014, october 13) several of the commenters also directed their comments at highlighting how the drug will affect individuals of different ethnic and socioeconomic status, including the transgender population. the majority of comments that focused on specific groups highlighted how the drug targets young gay men: hiv: new cases down, gay males still overrepresented the rate of new hiv cases has fallen about 6 percent over the last five years, but remains stubbornly high in some demographic groups, including gay and bisexual males, a federal 13 report says. (bradford mcintyre, 2014, november 6) some are irresponsible therefore no one should be given the responsibility? how far do you take that? 18-21 yr olds are immature, uninformed, inexperienced and irresponsible, therefore we shouldn't let them vote? 18, 19 and 20 yr olds can give up life and limb in the military, but we don't let them drink alcohol. is that the model? how do we decide is worthy of prep? or do you think hiv prevention is a waste of resources altogether if we don't all do it the way we've always done it (which has led to a steady 50,000 new infections every year)? (sheldon campbell, 2014, october 24) i'm neg and your poz. who's prevention failed? i failed on your behalf? we're the same age. an absolute lie to make this a generational thing. if anything it's reversed. i'm younger than all but one of the guys profiled in these "31 (or 29 or whatever. they can't seem to keep up. something indicative of this whole cult) days of prep".odd for you of all people to take pot shots at the older generation. (andrew jones, 2014, october 14) finally, those primarily concerned with the political/economic implications of truvada generally focused on the costs associated with the drug as well the relationship between the pharmaceutical industry, doctors, and the advocate. for example, many commenters were optimistic about the cost of the drug, suggesting that the price of the pill is justified and that the price of the pill will eventually come down: it's actually cheaper to prevent hiv than to treat it. also, truvada comes off us patent in 2020. it's already being sold for pennies-a-pill in third-world countries. (jody wheeler, 2014, august 13) my insurance company, humana, approved payment of the drug even before i got the rx. for it. it is much cheaper to pay for the drug than pay for the expenses if i get aids. (ron health, 2014, october 26) others, however, were less optimistic and argued that the cost was not justified nor was it adequately covered by insurance: would any of these 35 advocates for prep like to pick up the monthly bill for $1200 since my health plan won't cover one red cent? probably not and i make too much money to qualify of gilead's assistance. (shawn ochampaugh, 2014, october 25) a 30 day supply of truvada is $1300. that is not a minor consideration, where is the pressure to make this drug more affordable? (debra carroll-beight, 2014, october 27) 14 besides from the comments focused on costs associated with the drug, the other dominant theme that emerged within the political/economic frame focused on the relationship between the pharmaceutical industry, doctors and the advocate: one of the west hollywood doctors mentioned in the above advocate piece is on the propublica list as having received gifts from three companies in 2013. (2014 data not available of course.) patients should be asking what doctors might be receiving in the way of gifts or incentive from manufacturers and representatives. (darrell emile, 2014, october 25) great, now let's watch all the other sexually transmitted diseases skyrocket. condoms do more than just stop hiv. genital warts anyone!? congrat's the advocate on winning all the pharma sponsorship over the past month that's enabled you to run these articles. (lee matthews, 2014, october 30) be sure to check out my post at my fb campaign site entitled, truvada's gilead gave how much $ to hiv groups? let's follow the gilead money and see where it leads us, and ask if aids groups that are receiving bucks from the pharma giant are deploring the high price of their drugs. (petrelis for supervisor 2014, 2014, november 1) discussion and conclusion examining sentiments around truvada expressed in online comments, the current study investigated how the public makes sense of the controversial hiv drug truvada. building on past research that examined sentiment in online comments and their correlation with news article framing, this study analyzed both the prominence of different issue frames in reader comments as well as cross-platform differences. comparing differences in reader framing on the mainstream news platform the new york times and the community-based platform the advocate, the study’s results not only seek to make a significant contribution to research in science communications, but also have implications for news media and their role in communicating preventative strategies to different publics. the study’s results suggest that the news platforms did not significantly differ in their framing of the hiv prevention pill, with the medical and scientific issue frame being the most prevalent across both platforms. consistent with the news platforms’ framing of truvada, commenters primarily placed the prevention pill in medical and scientific context. despite these similarities in news media and reader framing, several significant differences emerged. for example, commenters on the advocate were significantly more likely to adopt the medical/scientific frame, while commenters on the new york times were more likely to adopt the political/economic frame. while this study did not account for the analysis of audience composition for each of the platforms, one possible explanation for these differences in media framing could be related to the underlying differences between the news platforms. for example, past research indicates that health related news items tend to induce audiences to offer personal experiences in their comments (secko, talalka, dunlop, kingdon, & amend 2011). given that the 15 advocate is a community-based website with a focus on lgbt news and audiences, commenters may be more open and comfortable than new york times readers in sharing personal experiences as well as health related concerns. however, some evidence contradicts this claim. suler (2004) explains how individuals are more likely to self-disclose when real name requirements are not required -a phenomena known as the online disinhibition effect. on the advocate platform, users are required to sign in via facebook, while the new york times does not require real name requirements. future research should examine how these differences, including type of news platform as well as technical design characteristics, influence reader’s comments. these results also have significant implications for preventative strategies presented in news media discussions around hiv/aids and other public health concerns. inviting doctors and other health professionals to weigh in on their discussion forums, both news platforms at the center of this study understand the importance of making scientific findings accessible for their readers. news platforms need to continue to work with medical professionals, scientists and other public officials to help different publics better understand the science behind hiv prevention. past research highlights the significant role of scientists and other experts in helping the public understand controversial science issues (nisbet & scheufele, 2009). scientists need to take this role serious and actively work with public institutions as well as mainstream and community media to find ways to engage different publics in public health discussions. the study’s results suggests that the new york times readers were also concerned about the high costs of truvada and the potential burden for taxpayers. news platforms should also weigh the costs of hiv prevention against hiv/aids treatment. especially on the community-related platform the advocate, commenters used their own experience with truvada to discuss side effects and related issues with the hiv prevention pill. debates discussing the personal experiences of those adopting truvada as preventative strategy present yet another possibility to make hiv/aids prevention more accessible for the public. while the current study is unique in its research design and analysis, the study has several limitations and implications for future research. for example, the current study did not account for opinion valence, an important aspect that needs to be addressed in future research. further, the current study only assessed primary framing in reader comments. in order to investigate the full range of sentiments around the hiv prevention pill, future research should also assess secondary frames adopted in both news media and corresponding comments. this study also only focused on news articles and comments associated with prep and the drug truvada. this approach overlooks other news media debates that may focus on different aspects of hiv/aids prevention. in addition, this study focused on only two news platforms -the new york times and the advocate. these audiences may be more engaged in public health debates, significantly limiting the study’s generalizability. finally, this study used a single comment as the unit of analysis, not accounting for the number of comments per commenter. the study also did not account for users who may have used both platforms to weigh in on the debate. despite these limitations, the study makes a significant contribution to scholarship on science communications by providing first insights into online debates around the hiv prevention pill truvada.   16   references anderson, a. a., brossard, d., scheufele, d. a., xenos, m. a., & ladwig, p. (2009). the “nasty effect:” online incivility and risk perceptions of emerging technologies.journal of computer-mediated communication, 19(3), 373-387. balkin, j. m. (2009). the future of free expression in a digital age.pepperdine law review, 36(2), 427-444. brodie, m., hamel, e., brady, l. a., kates, j., & altman, d. e. (2004).aids at 21: media coverage of the hiv epidemic 1981-2002. menlo park, ca: the henry j. kaiser family foundation. brown, j., chapman, s., & lupton, d. (1996). infinitesimal risk as public health crisis: news media coverage of a doctor-patient hiv contact tracing investigation. social science & medicine, 43(12), 1685–1695. centers for disease control and prevention. (2015). basic information about hiv and aids. retrieved from: http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/ cohen, j. (1997). the media's love affair with aids research: hope vs. hype.science, 275(5298), 298-299. denardis, l. & hackl, a.m. (2015). internet governance by social media platforms.telecommunications policy. diakopoulos, m., &naaman, m. (2011).towards quality discourse in online news comments.cssw ’11: proceedings of the acm 2011 conference on computer supported cooperative work, 133-142. new york, ny: acm. epstein, s. (1996). impure science: aids, activism, and the politics of knowledge. berkeley, ca: university of california press. fishbein, m. (2009). an integrative model for behavioral prediction and its application to health promotion. in r. diclemente, j. r. a. crosby, & m. c. kegler (eds.), emerging theories in health promotion practice and research (2nd ed., pp. 215-234). san francisco, ca: john wiley. freelon, d. (2015). discourse architecture, ideology, and democratic norms in online political discussion. new media & society, 17(5), 772-791. gamson, w. a., & modigliani, a. (1994).the changing culture of affirmative action. in p. burstein (ed.), equal employment opportunity: labor market discrimination and public policy (pp. 373-394). hawthore, ny: walter de gruyter inc. gross, l. (2001).up from invisibility: lesbians, gay men, and the media in america. new york, ny: cambridge university press.here media. (2014). company profile. retrieved from http://www.heremedia.com/company holton, a., lee,, n., & coleman, r. (2014). commenting on health: a framing analysis of user comments in response to health articles online. journal of health communication: international perspectives, 19(7), 825-837. iyengar, s. (1991).is anyone responsible?: how television frames political issues. university of chicago press. 17 jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture. where old and new media collide. new york, ny: nyu press. kinsella, j. (1989). covering the plague: aids and the american media. brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. kramer, l. (2014, june 18). we don’t know the full effects of truvada yet. the new york times. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/06/17/is-prep-a-good-way-to-fighthiv-infections/we-dont-know-the-full-effects-of-truvada-yet ksiazek, t. b., peer, l., &lessard, k. (2014). user engagement with online news: conceptualizing interactivity and exploring the relationship between online news videos and user comments. new media & society. len-ríos, m. e., bhandari, m., &medvedeva, y. s. (2014).deliberation of the scientific evidence for breastfeeding online comments as social representations.science communication, 36(6), 778-801. loke, j. (2012). public expressions of private sentiments: unveiling the pulse of racial tolerance through online news readers' comments. howard journal of communications, 23(3), 235-252. nelkin, d. (1991). aids and the news media.the milbank quarterly, 69(2), 293-307 the new york times. (2015). verified commenters. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/site/usercontent/verified/verifiedcommenters.html#verified-no-moderation the new york times. (2014). help – comments. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/site/usercontent/usercontent.html the new york times company. (2014). our history. retrieved from http://www.nytco.com/who-we-are/culture/our-history/#1835-1880 nisbet, m. c., &scheufele, d. a. (2009). what’s next for science communication? promising directions and lingering distractions.american journal of botany, 96(10), 1767-1778. omernick, e., & owsley sood, s. (2013). the impact of anonymity in online communities.proceedings of international conference on social computing,526 – 535. alexandria, va: institute of electrical and electronics engineers papacharissi, z. (2004). democracy online: civility, politeness, and the democratic potential of online political discussion groups. new media & society, 6(2), 259283. park, a. (2012, july 17). truvada: 5 things to know about the first drug to prevent hiv. time magazine. retrieved from http://healthland.time.com/2012/07/17/truvada-5-things-to-know-about-the-firstdrug-to-prevent-hiv/ ruiz, c., domingo, d., lluísmicó, j., díaz-noci, j., meso, k., &masip, p. (2011). public sphere 2.0?the democratic qualities of citizen debates in online newspapers.the international journal of press/politics, 16(4), 463-487 18 santana, a. d. (2013). virtuous or vitriolic.the effect of anonymity on civility in online newspaper reader comment boards.journalism practice, 18(1), 18-33. santa cruze bell, j. (2006). framing the aids epidemic: from “homo” genous deviance to widespread panic. in l. castañeda& s. b. campbell (eds.), news and sexuality: media portraits of diversity: media portraits of diversity (pp. 95-110). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. scheufele, d. a. (1999). framing as a theory of media effects. journal of communication, 49(1), 103-122. scheufele, d. a., & tewksbury, d. (2007). framing, agenda setting, and priming: the evolution of three media effects models. journal of communication, 57(1), 9-20. schwartz, j., & murray, d. (1996). aids and the media. public interest, 125, 57-71. secko, d. m., talalka, s., dunlop, m., kingdon, a., & amend, e. (2011). the unfinished science story: journalist-audience interactions from the globe and mail’s online health and science sections. journalism, 12, 814-831. shanahan, m.-c. (2010). changing the meaning of peer-to-peer? exploring online comment spaces as sites of negotiated expertise. jcom: journal of science communication, 9(1), 1-13. shapiro, l. (2014, december 1). the most celebrated, mistrusted little pill in the world. huffington post. retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/01/prep-hiv-truvada_n_6185028.html streitmatter, r. (1995). unspeakable: the rise of the gay and lesbian press in america. collindgale, pa: diane publishing. suler, j. (2004). the online disinhibition effect.cyberpsychology& behavior,7(3), 321326. suran, m., holton, a. e., & coleman, r. (2014). topical punch: health topics as drivers of idiosyncratic reader responses to online news. journalism & mass communication quarterly, 91(4), 725–739. tversky, a., &kahneman, d. (1981). the framing of decisions and the psychology of choice.science, 211(4481), 453-458. wagner, w., & hayes, n. (2005).everyday discourse and common sense: the theory of social representations. houndmills, england: palgrave macmillan. weinstein, m. (2014, june 18). truvada can’t make us let our guard down. the new york times.retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/06/17/is-prep-a-good-way-to-fighthiv-infections/truvada-cant-make-us-let-our-guard-down zaller, j. (1992). the nature and origins of mass opinion. new york: cambridge university press. zhou, y., & moy, p. (2007). parsing framing processes: the interplay between online public opinion and media coverage. journal of communication, 57(1), 79-98.   selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): takahashi, m., hames, s. alpert, e., & bruns, a. (2019, october 2-5). the qut digital observatory project: building a trusted data infrastructure ffor social media research. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the qut digital observatory project: building a trusted data infrastructure for social media research marissa takahashi sam hames elizabeth alpert digital observatory, institute for future environments, queensland university of technology, brisbane, australia axel bruns digital media research centre, queensland university of technology, brisbane, australia introduction trust is fragile. the 2018 facebook and cambridge analytica debacles highlighted how data harvested from social media platforms can be used not only for commercial purposes but also for political manipulation. this incident and the widespread discussion around it further demonstrated the following issues: unethical data collection enabled by a platform; unethical use of data for corporate and political interest; and unethical data sharing by an academic. research needs to be credible to maintain social license. data is the lifeblood of research. for research to remain credible, research needs to remain fundamentally ethical and research methods comprising data collection and data analysis need to be robust, transparent, repeatable, and auditable. such methods alone cannot create credibility, but research data infrastructure design and implementation can provide a foundation for credibility by addressing these fundamental processes. social science research has traditionally relied on data collection methods such as surveys, interviews, and ethnographic observations. however, an increasing proportion of human life is being mediated by online platforms, with 2.3 billion active users on facebook and 326 million active users on twitter (statista 2019). social media data collection and analysis have become imperative for researchers interested in various phenomena playing out in these new media. this paper discusses the current state and 2 issues of social media data collection and describes the digital observatory’s approach to establishing a credible and trusted research data infrastructure. social media data collection and methods researchers have employed various means for collecting social media data. this ranges from obtaining data from platforms like facebook and twitter via an application programming interface (api) or third-party tools to collecting data manually (e.g. copyand-paste into spreadsheets or other databases), to create a corpus for their research. alongside data collection, there are also a variety of emerging analytical methods developing in conjunction with traditional approaches. there are many research studies that use twitter data. approaches in these studies can be classified as: platform studies, hashtag studies, and population studies. platform studies look at the twitter platform as the object of study and examine its use, adoption, and affordances. hashtag studies use datasets collected by specifying the relevant hashtags and are easy to collect. however, hashtag datasets are unable to capture the wider communicative activities around the topic or event described by the hashtag. bruns (2018) describes these studies as “analogous to listening to only one side of a multi-sided phone conversation.” population studies address the limitations of hashtag studies by collecting data from a curated population, for example within a specific geographic location. studies using collections such as the australian twittersphere (bruns, et al. 2014) provide the necessary context and benchmark information that is not available from hashtag studies. a major challenge with such large-scale population studies is the massive data collection effort needed. social media data collection issues the credibility and quality of research output depend on the quality of data collected and the suitability of the analytical methods. there are policy and regulation issues relating to data collection from digital platforms. first, many platform providers operate as closed domains. access to these platforms’ apis has become increasingly difficult, especially after the cambridge analytica debacle. second, governments have established stricter regulations such as the general data protection regulation (gdpr) in the european union in 2018 to protect citizens’ privacy and rights over their personal data. there are also existing laws on reporting breaches and data sovereignty. furthermore, there are methodological issues relating to social media data collection. first, the fractured approach to data collection, typically building on one-off processes using ad-hoc software tools, is neither robust nor repeatable. the software tools effectively function as black boxes, and researchers are therefore not privy to their limitations (e.g., legal, technical, and terms of service) and how these affect the data quality. second, when the collection method is not transparent, the characteristics of the data collected in terms of randomness, representativeness, and completeness cannot be determined. these unknowns will have a major influence on the analytical methods that can be applied and the quality of insights that can be derived. lastly, while 3 there is the option of purchasing twitter data via gnip, the costs are usually not affordable for academic researchers (gaffney & puschmann 2014). to address the data collection issues mentioned above, the trisma (tracking infrastructure for social media analysis) project designed, built, and operated a ‘big social data’ infrastructure for multiple platforms (bruns 2018). there were four challenges with the trisma project: technical, coordination, maintenance, and methods. the technical challenges involved in gathering, processing, and storing such large datasets were significant. in addition, the multi-institutional nature of the project naturally generated substantial coordination overheads. additional challenges include the maintainability of the complex architecture necessary to operate such a facility, the lack of documentation common to prototypes, and changing platform apis. finally, the analytics methods required to use the trisma data remain emergent and experimental. building a trusted data research infrastructure the digital observatory (do), building on the trisma project, aims to address the challenge of building a trusted platform that makes it possible to collect data responsibly, ethically, and securely. the do aims to accomplish this via a two-pronged approach: technological and procedural. the technological approach means making conscious design decisions to build data collectors that are reliable, maintainable, and respectful of the platforms they gather from, and of the authors of data on those platforms. the procedural component involves structuring the do processes around our guiding principles: being an active facilitator and not just a passive data provider. the do takes an infrastructure approach to address the issues arising from the fragmented approach to research methods mentioned before, and to ensure robustness, transparency, repeatability, and auditability. firstly, it has learned from trisma and redesigned and rebuilt that prototype into production-grade software using professional software development best practice, increasing reliability and maintainability. secondly, the centralised approach to data collection provides scalability and reduces the duplication of data collection and processing work that happens across research institutions. finally, the provision of continuous support for the platform, which is necessary but tangential to the conceptual workflow of researchers, allows researchers to focus more on the intellectual challenges of their research. this paper will outline the successes as well as the challenges arising in the design and development of the new digital observatory platform. we also outline the risks and strategies for mitigating these risks. we anticipate that once the do platform has been developed and is in a steady state of operation, the next major challenge will be to extend the platform with innovative analytical methods. 4 references bruns, a., burgess, j., & highfield, t. (2014). a ‘big data’ approach to mapping the australian twittersphere. in advancing digital humanities (pp. 113-129). palgrave macmillan, london. bruns, a. (2018). a multi-institutional approach to ‘big social data’: the trisma project. paper presented at aoir 2018, montréal, canada. gaffney, d., & puschmann, c. (2014). data collection on twitter. in weller, k., bruns, a., burgess, j., mahrt, m., & puschmann, c., eds. twitter and society. 55-67. peter lang, new york. statista. (2019). most popular social networks worldwide as of january 2019, ranked by number of active users (in millions). retrieved 28 february 2019, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-ofusers/ selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): mccann, h. & southerton, c. (2019, october 2-5). fangirls and fake news: digital ethnography and the affects of fandom. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. fangirls and fake news: digital ethnography and the affects of fandom hannah mccann university of melbourne clare southerton aarhus university introduction with the development of various digital platforms, participating in fandom has transformed from a niche practice to a mainstream activity that forms an integral part of daily life for many young people (gray, sandvoss and harrington 2017). this paper draws on a digital ethnography conducted via twitter, of a controversial subnetwork of fans of boyband one direction known as “larries”. through digital ethnographic methods, we explore how – in contrast to their controversial popular media framing – the practices of larries create a space in which new and unexpected desires, identities, intimacies and relations are constituted. we use this study to consider the benefits of undertaking qualitative digital ethnographic work and discuss the affective flows of digital networks on social media that might remain obscured by other digital methods. the larry fandom is built around imagining a romantic relationship exists between one direction band members harry styles and louis tomlinson, referred to by the portmanteau “larry”. imagining relationships between celebrities is a controversial practice known in fan communities as “real person slash” (rps). for this practice larries have been framed within popular media as “tin hat” conspiracy theorists (jones 2016). sites such as junkee, vox and buzzfeed have called larries “truthers” (romano 2016) and “conspirators” (romanoff 2018) who inhabit a “post-truth” world (carvan 2018). given this “fake news” framing, our study sought to examine whether a more complex and nuanced understanding of the fandom was possible, particularly regarding the relationships and community building that might occur in this fandom. digital ethnography and ethical considerations our digital ethnography consisted of observation, participation, and interviews, in order to gain an embedded understanding of digital practices (hine 2015, simonetto 2016). we set up an account on twitter for the project in order to conduct observations and interviews. we quickly found that searching via hashtags on twitter did not lead us to accounts – the controversial nature of the fandom means that they avoid using easily identifiable hashtags given the public scrutiny that they have been subject to. instead, we spent approximately two months reading about and learning the language of the fandom which included emojis and other coded signifiers. between march and july 2018, we followed approximately 490 public accounts dedicated to the larry fandom, keeping a fieldnote diary. the purpose of ethnographic observation is “to investigate, experience and represent the social life and social processes that occur in that setting” (emerson, fretz and shaw 2001, 352). we also conducted semi-structured interviews with seven active users, via direct messenger, maintaining the digitally mediated ways that fans interact in this space (kazmer and xie 2008). setting up our research account required complex ethical considerations around explicit identification of the project while still allowing for embedding within the fan community. furthermore, while some scholars argue that with publicly available reflections online “the only restriction is not to misquote” (hoser and nitschke 2010, 186), others suggest that there are more complex expectations of privacy in these spaces (busse and hellekson 2012). given the controversial nature of the fandom, where fear over misrepresentation is heightened, we deferred to de-identification as a key strategy, and the need for consent for the replication of any direct materials. findings our study revealed the ways that the larry fandom establishes a semi-private space on the seeming public twitter platform, continually building collective knowledge by circulating images, gifs, and old tweets, as well as through the use of highly specific insider language. the space was dynamic, subject to sudden activity following news or discussions initiated from within. as caitlin byrne notes, “[the] continual, communal sharing and shaping of information makes social media a fascinating area of study for qualitative researchers” (2017, 799). indeed, we found that the micro-blogging specifics of twitter, and its repetitive and re-circulatable content dimensions that are both textbased and visual, make it an ideal space within which to conduct digital ethnography as it necessitates attunement to the affective flows of the space. conducting observations on a daily basis over an extended period as regular fans would, we became privy to the highs, lows, excitement, and tensions of the group, that may be otherwise obscured through analysis such as “crowd dynamics” (arvidsson 2014). previous research has found that the focus of fandoms can act as a kind of “cultural resource” for fans (stevenson 2009). similarly, our findings suggest that friendship, trust, and a sense of intimacy is made available through the larry fandom. indeed, the fandom appears to provide a resource for celebrating non-normative sexualities, without necessitating participants to personally identify their own sexuality. in other words, the larry fandom provides a space to celebrate sexuality, without drawing strict identity boundaries. furthermore, while some regard the fandom as “conspiracy theorists”, the practices of these fans reveal challenges to heteronormative representations of celebrities and subversion of expectations of the desires of fangirls. this raises questions about what might be missed in studying controversial groups at a macro level only, given the quality of the practices of the group – whether “fake news” or not, these fans represent a challenge to the dominant (sexual) paradigm. references arvidsson, a. (2014, october 22-24). collaborative crowding, a digital ethnography of adolescent fan cultures on twitter. paper presented at the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea. retreived from http://spir.aoir.org. busse, k. and hellekson, k. (2012). “identity, ethics, and fan privacy.” in fan culture: theory/practice, katherine larsen and lynn zubernis (eds.), newcastle: cambridge scholars publishing, 38-56. byrne, c. (2017). “anonymous social media and qualitative inquiry: methodological considerations and implications for using yik yak as a qualitative data source.” qualitative inquiry, 23(10) 799–807. carvan, tabitha. 2018. “one direction, fake babies and the problem with celebrity conspiracy theories.” junkee, april 17. http://junkee.com/celebrityconspiracy-theories/154327 emerson, r., fretz, r. and shaw, l. (2001). “participant observation and fieldnotes”. in handbook of ethnography, paul atkinson, amanda coffey, sara delamont, john lofland & lyn lofland (eds.), sage, 352-368. gray, j., sandvoss, c. and harrington, c.l. (2017). fandom: identities and communities in a mediated world. new york: new york university press. hine, c. (2015). ethnography for the internet: embedded, embodied and everyday. london: bloomsbury publishing. hoser, b., and nitschke, t. (2010). “questions on ethics for research in the virtually connected world,” social networks, 32: 180-186. jones, b. (2016). “‘i will throw you off your ship and you will die’: death threats, intra-fandom hate and the performance of fangirling.” in seeing fans: representations of fandom in media and popular culture, ed. lucy bennett and paul booth, 53–65. london: bloomsbury. kazmer , m. m. & xie, b. (2008). “qualitative interviewing in internet studies: playing with the media, playing with the method.” information, community and society, 11:2, 257-278. romano, a. (2016). “larry stylinson, the one direction conspiracy theory that rules the internet, explained.” vox, 18 april. https://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11384118/larry-stylinson-one-directionconspiracy-theory romanoff, z. (2018). “a journey into the dark heart of celebrity relationship conspiracy theories.” buzzfeed, 3 july. https://www.buzzfeed.com/amphtml/zanromanoff/celebrity-conspiracy-theoriesharry-styles-louis-tomlinson simonetto, d. (2016). “expanding our methodological toolbox: the‘ place’ of twitter in the ethnographic endeavor.” qualitative sociology review, 12(1): 98–112. stevenson, n. (2009). “talking to bowie fans: masculinity, ambivalence and cultural citizenship.” european journal of cultural studies, 12(1): 79-98. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): bvickery, j. (2017, october 18-21). mapping the affordances and dynamics of activist hashtags. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. mapping the affordances and dynamics of activist hashtags jacqueline ryan vickery university of north texas internet studies scholars critically pay attention to identifying and analyzing the affordances of particular information communication technologies (icts) and digital media platforms. in addition, they examine the affordances of particular mediated spaces that are created and accessed via icts. understanding affordances allows us to consider – and to a certain extent manipulate – the benefits, consequences, and effects of icts and platforms. the ability to shape desired outcomes and uses of platforms is an essential aspect of activist movements that seek to use icts and networked publics to enact positive social change. this paper builds upon previous research about the communicative and organizational affordances of platforms (boyd, 2010; bruns and burgess, 2015; highfield and leaver, 2015; treem and leonardi, 2012), in order to identify and analyze the particular affordances of the hashtag within the context of activism and networked publics. the use of hashtags has become a popular way for activist movements to create public dialog and shape social and political outcomes (papacharissi, 2014). hashtags are searchable and facilitate conversations between otherwise disconnected users on a particular platform. these basic affordances are integral to the organizational and public function of the hashtag. yet, when we consider the activist potential of hashtags, we also must examine the communicative and participatory affordances of the hashtag itself, as well as the dynamics facilitated by such affordances. i limit my analysis to the use of collective storytelling activist hashtags on twitter because it is one of the most popular spaces for hashtag activism at the intersection of identity politics (steiner and eckert, 2017). two, the use of activist-driven collective storytelling via twitter hashtags is a strategy for drawing attention to otherwise overlooked demographics and marginalized experiences (williams, 2015). drawing from theories of (digital) communication, i explain how the hashtag functions as a unique digitally networked artifact with at least three distinct affordances: curational, polysemic, and memetic. these affordances encapsulate two dynamics with which activists must contend: duality within communities of practice and a multiplicity of articulated selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): bvickery, j. (2017, october 18-21). mapping the affordances and dynamics of activist hashtags. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. subjectivities. mapping out the potentials of each of these affordances and dynamics is an essential step for activist movements seeking to harness the positive potential of hashtags for social change. far too often well-intended activist hashtags get co-opted in ways that are antithetical to the intent of the movement; understanding the affordances and dynamics of the hashtag itself can help activists create and utilize them in advantageous ways. affordances curational twitter is a curational platform in which users often respond to or distribute news, images, and links they did not create, but rather they retweet or quote others’ tweets. hashtags afford curational modes of participation. the ability to retweet a story attached to an activist hashtag affords users the ability to engage in legitimate peripheral participation (lave and wenger, 1991), whereby novice users add value to the space via low levels of participation. in this case, people who curate hashtags amplify the cause without necessarily adding their own story to the stream. polysemic activist hashtags are polysemic in that they are open to multiple interpretations (fiske, 1987). users can interpret hashtags in ways that fit with their cultural worldviews and personal experiences. polysemy is both a strength and a limitation: the openness affords opportunities for different people to appropriate the meaning as it fits within their own story, however, the openness also means the original goal or intent of the hashtag can evolve beyond recognition or even in ways that are contradictory the original goal of the hashtag. memetic combining the curational and polysemic affordances, hashtags function as memes that are open to interpretation, invite participatory remix, and easily spread throughout a platform (knobel and lankshear, 2007). coleman refers to online memes as viral catchphrases that are “under constant modification by users” (p. 109). hashtags are memetic catchphrases that are easily and constantly appropriated, co-opted, and selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): bvickery, j. (2017, october 18-21). mapping the affordances and dynamics of activist hashtags. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. leveraged in contradictory and complimentary ways. in the context of activism, reinsborough and canning (2010) claim that memes are an essential aspect of storybased activism. similarly, i argue that hashtags function as activist memes. dynamics duality duality describes the productive opposing forces that drive change and creativity within communities of practice. a duality is a “single conceptual unit that is formed by two inseparable and mutually constitutive elements whose inherent tensions and complementarity give the concept richness and dynamism” (wenger, 1998, p. 66). the four dualities wenger identifies are participation-reification (concerned with meaning), designed-emergent (focuses on tensions of time, but here can focus on tensions of intent), identification-negotiability (concerned with who has the power to negotiate and interpret goals and meaning), and local-global (boundaries that meet the needs of the community). duality is a lens for analyzing the dynamics of activist hashtags that when combined with the curational, polysemic, and memetic affordances highlights the contradictions, ambivalences, and tensions underlying activism and participation within networked publics. multiplicity of articulated subjectivities as a fragmented, asynchronous, and networked platform, twitter – and participation in collective activist storytelling via hashtags – affords opportunities for individuals to articulate particular subjectivities that are brought into being via the practice of sharing a hashtag. sharing personal stories alongside the use of a collective hashtag facilitates affective identification among strangers and promises a sense of belonging (papacharissi 2014). individuals who publically share personal stories via collective hashtags articulate a particular subjectivity that is at once private and public, one that is deeply personal but imbued with political potential. the use of activist hashtags within networked publics invites ephemeral, temporal, and fragmented participation as an identify signifier that is read and understood within a particular online community. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): bvickery, j. (2017, october 18-21). mapping the affordances and dynamics of activist hashtags. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. conclusion the paper concludes with a brief analysis of the feminist hashtag #whyistayed – a collective storytelling activist hashtag intended to draw attention to the complexities of intimate partner violence to elucidate the affordances and dynamics of the hashtag within a networked public. references boyd, d. (2010). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in z. papacharissi (ed.), a networked self: identity, community, and culture, 39-58. routledge. bruns, a. and burgess, j.e. (2015). the use of twitter hashtags in the formation of ad hoc publics. in n. rambukkana (ed.) hashtag publics: the power and politics of discursive networks, 47-60. peter lang. coleman, g. (2012). phreaks, hackers, and trolls and the politics of transgression and spectacle. in m. mandiberg (ed.), the social media reader, 99-119. nyu press. fiske, j. (1987). television culture. methuen & co. ltd. highfield, t. and leaver, t. (2015). a methodology for mapping instagram hashtags. first monday, 20(1). knobel, m. and lankshear, c. (2007). a new literacies sampler. peter lang. papacharissi, z. (2014). affective publics: sentiment, technology, and politics. oxford university press. reinsborough, p. and canning, d. (2010). re:imagining change: how to use storybased strategy to win campaigns, build movements, and change the world. pm press. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): bvickery, j. (2017, october 18-21). mapping the affordances and dynamics of activist hashtags. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. steiner, l. and eckert, s. (2017). the democratic potential of feminist twitter. in r.a. lind (ed.). race and gender in electronic media: content, context, culture, 213230. routledge. treem, j.w. and leonardi, p.m. (2012). social media use in organizations: exploring the affordances of visibility, editablility, persistence, and association. communication yearbook, 36, 143-189. wenger, e. (1998). communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. cambridge university press. williams, s. (2015). digital defense: black feminists resist violence with hashtag activism. feminist media studies, 15(2), 341-344. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18 th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): koltsova o., koltcov s., nikolenko s., alexeeva s., nagornyy o. (2017, october 18-21). finding and analyzing judgements on ethnicity in the russian-kanguage social media. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18 th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. finding and analyzing judgements on ethnicity in the russian-language social media olessia koltsova national university higher school of economics sergei koltcov national university higher school of economics sergey nikolenko steklov mathematical institute, russian academy of sciences national university higher school of economics svetlana alexeeva st.petersburg state university national university higher school of economics oleg nagornyy national university higher school of economics introduction the ability of social media to rapidly disseminate judgements on ethnicity to wide publics and to influence offline inter-ethnic conflict (chan et al. 2015) creates demand for the methods of monitoring of ethnicity-related online content, in particular for instruments of its automatic mining from large data collections (burnap & williams 2015). in this context, russia, a multi-ethnic country with a large migrant population, has received relatively little attention from researchers (bodrunova et al 2017; bodrunova et al. 2015). in this paper we seek to measure the overall volume of ethnicity-related discussion in the russian-language social media, to compare public attention to different ethnic groups, and to develop an approach that would automatically detect various aspects of attitudes to those ethnic groups. data from our previous research (bodrunova et al 2017) we know that attention to in-russia ethnicities is much lower than that to nations boasting of global or regional influence (first of all, to americans, germans, ukrainians and jews, but also to many european nations). we therefore limit our research to ethnic groups “indigenous” to post-soviet space. we develop a comprehensive list of ethnonyms (nouns and bigrams referring to representatives of ethnic groups) using a large number of sources, such as russian census 2010, and the list of ethnophaulisms (pejorative ethnonyms). this list of more than 3,600 units embraces 100 ethnic groups all of which occur in our sample of posts from 80,000 random users of the most popular russian sns vkontakte. importantly, we place 17 ethnophaulisms into separate ethnic groups (because, first, if placed together they would pull the scores of this group down, and, second, most of the time such words are not completely synonymous – thus, “khach” may include some or all caucasian ethnic groups). next, we acquire a dataset from a social media aggregator that includes all texts from a two-year period from all russian-language social media in which at least one of the keywords occurs (2,850,947 texts after cleaning). given that russian language social media produce several million messages daily, this is a tiny fraction of the entire volume which clearly shows a low interest of the general public in this topic. volume of attention toward ethnicities in total, 53.3% of messages contain more than one ethnic group, with maximum being 67. furthermore, mean length of messages with ethnonyms is much higher than that of the vkontakte random sample (354 words compared to 16.7) and 56.2% of texts contain more than 100 words. this suggests that while the vast majority of messages in social media are everyday small talk, texts related to ethnicity are often elaborated discussion pieces, often with inter-ethnic comparisons. ten most frequent ethnic groups include russians, ukrainians, jews, slavs, asians, europeans, as well as two largest muslim minorities in russia – tatars and chechens. however, we find substantial regional differences. some regions in russia are national republics named after their “titular” ethnic groups; when ranked by the share of mentions in respective regions, such ethnic groups on average gain 60 positions compared to their positions in the general frequency list. method for automatic detection of attitudes we therefore make a sample where we overrepresent rare ethnic groups and obtain 7,181 texts with most ethnic groups represented by 75 texts. we get each text coded by three independent persons. our questions include: general interpretability of a text, relevance to the topic of ethnicity and to a number of other topics, presence of an ethnonym, general positive and negative sentiment, presence of inter-ethnic conflict or positive interaction, general attitude to the ethnic group, whether the ethnic group is presented as inferior/superior, victim/aggressor, dangerous/safe, and whether the text contains a call for violence toward the group. we then train a number of classifiers (logistic regressions) to “teach” the computer to automatically detect sentiment and other aspects of attitudes to ethnic groups. we examine only those aspects that have produced enough data for training classifiers. as the values of the predicted variables (e.g. “what is the general attitude of the author to the given ethnic group?”) are means of coders’ assessments, they are often noninteger, and therefore they have been grouped into two or three categories depending on the number of values the respective variable could originally take. next, we break the collection into a training set (90%) and a test set (10%) repeating this procedure 100 times and each time training the classifier on the larger set and testing it on the smaller set. finally, we calculate a number of traditional quality metrics for each predicted variable (table 1). online ethnic attitudes and their prediction we find that both general sentiments and general attitude get predicted fairly well (the latter being a three-class task). the positive end is filled in with ethnic groups that have virtually assimilated into the russian nation (indigenous siberian and ural ethnicities). the negative end, apart from being dominated by various ethnofaulisms, presents a much more complicated picture. traditionally, caucasian groups are thought to arouse the most negative attitudes, followed by central asians, while ukrainians, belorussians and moldovans are hardly perceived as “other” ethnic groups at all (bessudnov 2016). however, here we see that various central asians take the lead in negativity. as for caucasians, it is they who most often write for themselves – that is, produce their own discourse which is most likely to shift their scores up. finally, ukrainians are among most negatively represented because of the recent military conflict. positive inter-ethnic conflict, though seemingly well-predicted, is often lost by the algorithm as a rare event. finally, relevance of the text to the topic of ethnicity is least well predicted and in fact has caused the largest difficulties for the coders. we conclude that more hand-coding is needed for a more fine-grained analysis and prediction, and this is what is being performed at the moment. table 1. quality of automatic classification of users’ texts on ethnicity does the text contain: texts binarization / trinarization avg precision avg recall avg f1 avg accuracy general negative sentiment 6,674 <0.3=0; =>0=1 0.75 0.75 0.75 74.67+1.50 general positive sentiment 6,688 <0.3=0; =>0=1 0.74 0.75 0.74 75.1+1.69 general attitude to an ethnic group 5,970 <1.3=0; [1.3;2.35]=1; >2.35=2 0.63 0.67 0.63 66.54+1.74 inter-ethnic conflict 6,701 <0.3=0; =>0=1 0.75 0.75 0.75 75.22+1.60 positive inter-ethnic interaction 6,711 <0.3=0; =>0=10.80 0.83 0.80 0.80 82.80+1.58 topic of ethnicity 5,970 <0.8=0; =>0.8=1 0.67 0.67 0.67 66.81+1.82 references bessudnov, a. (2016). ethnic hierarchy and public attitudes towards immigrants in russia. european sociological review, 32(5), 567–580. bodrunova, s. s., koltsova o., koltcov s., nikolenko s. (2017) who’s bad? attitudes toward resettlers from the post-soviet south versus other nations in the russian blogosphere. international journal of communication, [s.l.], v. 11, p. 23, aug. 2017. issn 1932-8036. available at: <http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/6408>. date accessed: 28 sep. 2017. bodrunova, s. s., litvinenko, a. a., gavra, d. p., & yakunin, a. v. (2015). twitterbased discourse on migrants in russia: the case of 2013 bashings in biryulyovo. international review of management and marketing, 5(1s), 97–104. burnap, p., & williams, m. l. (2015). cyber hate speech on twitter: an application of machine classification and statistical modeling for policy and decision making. policy & internet, 7(2), 223–242. chan, j., ghose, a., & seamans, r. (2016). the internet and racial hate crime: offline spillovers from online access. mis quarterly: management information systems, 40(2), 381–403. http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/6408 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / -31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): franzke, a., ess, c. (2020, october 28-31). legal and ethical perspectives on (big) data, platforms, ai and algorithms. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. legal and ethical perspectives on (big) data, platforms, ai and algorithms aline shakti franzke university duisburg-essen charles melvin ess university of oslo panel rationale and organization since its inception, the association of internet researchers (aoir) has fostered critical reflection on the ethical and social dimensions of the internet and internet-facilitated communication. these ethical foci are clearly evoked throughout the thematics of the aoir 2020 conference call, beginning with power, justice, and inequality in digitally mediated lives; life, sex, and death vis-à-vis social media; and political life online. concomitantly, simon rogerson, chief editor of the journal of information, communication and ethics in society (jices), describes jices as aiming to “…promote thoughtful dialogue regarding the wider social and ethical issues related to the planning, development, implementation and use of new media and information and communication technologies.” the journal thereby offers “necessary interdisciplinary, culturally and geographically diverse works essential to understanding the impacts of the pervasive new media and information and communication technologies.” jices and aoir thus share central interests in the ethical and social dimensions of the internet and internet-facilitated communication, and are now collaborating to highlight aoir conference presentations and papers via publication in jices. as part of this collaboration, we collect here four papers that address these shared interests – with a specific focus on legal and ethical aspects of big data. presuming their acceptance and presentation at aoir 2020, the papers will be revised especially in light of critical responses received there for inclusion in a special issue of jices devoted to showcasing aoir ethics work. paper 1, towards a political theory of data justice: a public good perspective, draws on critical data studies and three major political theories of the public good, aiming to synthesize interdisciplinary research on the uses and regulations of digital data in public and political spheres. the authors develop a normative framework outlining the potential public good functions of big data and the necessary normative requirements for the state’s rightful collection of large-scale big data, arguing for the state’s central role in harnessing large-scale big data to ameliorate digital inequalities and deepen democracy. they offer principles of justice that should guide the regulatory framework of data collection and usage. paper 2, google and facebook vs rawls and lao-tsu: how silicon valley’s utilitarianism and confucianism are bad for internet ethics, critiques the tech giants’ defense of their collection and use of personal data as a questionable consequentialism – one that is further entwined with a confucian-style hierarchical decision-making. such consequentialism is easily critiqued: predicting the consequences of acts – in this case, of technological development, adoption, and practices such as online data collection – is demonstrably difficult, if not intrinsically impossible. the paper closes by demonstrating a viable alternative to silicon valley’s utilitarian hegemony through rawlsian ethics and taoist rebuttals of confucianism. paper 3, the jurisprudence of datafied law, addresses the growing use of data profiles and algorithmic “decision-making” processes in making legal decisions regarding criminal sentencing, parole, bail, and other jurisprudential outcomes. the rule of law queries the capacity of such systems to adequately address the tension in all democratic systems between autonomy and equity. the basic assumptions in such systems also evoke basic questions, i.e., whether such profiles are measurements of static, inherent qualities of the individual, or rather a dynamic social metric against which the subject can assess and potentially improve herself. the latter forces further questions as to the proper role of the state in adopting the datafied tools of “surveillance capitalism” to encourage liberal social orders. paper 4, a systematic literature review of ethical code of conduct in the field of internet research, notes that since 2017, a broad range of documents concerning the ethics of ai, algorithms and big data have proliferated. these documents have mostly focused on basic values, such as autonomy, privacy and transparency. other approaches focus more on technological processes, such as the moments of data collection, analyses and disemination. this paper provides an extensive literature review and thereby maps the existing landscape of ethical guidelines for these technologies. a total of 90 documents published between the 2017-2020 are analyzed and organized into a taxonomy. the paper addresses three central questions: how are existing guidelines designed? what types of ethical reasoning do they follow? what sorts of ethical schools are represented? both individually and collectively, then, these papers directly take up the central interests shared between aoir and jices in the ethical and social dimensions of the internet and internet-facilitated communication. they offer new insight on legal and ethical aspects of contemporary technologies, some of which will have specific implications for internet research ethics. paper 1: towards a political theory of data justice: a public good perspective chi kwok university of toronto ngai keung chan cornell university suggested citation: kwok, c., & chan, n. c. (2020, october). towards a political theory of data justice: a public good perspective. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. introduction big data simultaneously enables the state's ability to improve its governance for the improvement of people's living conditions and its ability to abuse its power which threatens the privacy and freedom of democratic citizens. the issue becomes more complicated when we account for the ownership and consent of big data (nissenbaum, 2017). it is under this context that boyd and crawford (2012) posed two central questions about the relations between big data and politics: (1) whether big data can become a public good that is beneficial to people’s well-being and good life, and (2) whether the state should be granted the right to collect big data. these questions still lack a systematic answer in existing big data literature. with qualification, this paper answers yes to these two questions: big data can be a public good, but the state can only legitimately use and collect them when it fulfills normative conditions of transparency, fairness, and democratic legitimacy. the contributions of this paper are threefold: first, it develops an interdisciplinary political theory of data justice by connecting three major political theories of the public good (market failure, basic rights, and democratic) (e.g., kohn, 2020) with empirical studies about the functions of big data (christin, 2020), thus offering a distinctive perspective explicating why big data should be considered as a public good. second, it systematically defends the state’s right to collect big data from a public good perspective. third, it offers a normative framework to qualify the conditions under which the state’s right to collect big data for beneficial public purposes can be regarded as legitimate. following lane et al. (2014), our primary goal is to consider the requirements of justice for “government officials seeking to use big data to serve the public good without harming individual citizens” (p. xi). theories of the public good and the state’s collection of big data we examine three major approaches of the public good (market failure, basic rights, and democratic) (kohn, 2020) to explain why big data should be regarded as a public good. the market failure approach: this approach suggests that when goods are widely beneficial to the public and yet are not profitable, the inability of the market to provide these goods to a sufficient degree renders the state a legitimate reason to provide them (kohn, 2020). consider, for example, real-time traffic data. they could inform drivers to avoid traffic congestion and thereby improving road safety, but it would only be widely used by drivers when the data are freely available to them. the basic rights approach: shue (1996) argues that goods related to physical security and basic subsistence—because of their paramount significance to the good life of individual citizens—ought to be provided and guaranteed by the state. consider the example of pandemic data. the centers for disease control and prevention in the united states has long been collecting data regarding the spread of various diseases and have used these data to advise people to take appropriate preventive measures. big data for public health purposes can significantly improve prediction speed and precision (ginsberg et al., 2009), and hence better protect the lives of many. the democratic approach: this approach points out that “public goods are goods that provided by the ‘public’ (e.g., the state) to the ‘public’ (e.g., citizens or residents)” (kohn, 2020, p.4) for the sake of deepening democracy. an example is that some local governments in the u.s. collaborate with civic technology firms, such as seeclickfix and public stuff, to provide convenient ways for citizens to share data and concerns over local infrastructural problems directly to local governments. such initiatives not only strengthen local governments' understanding of communal needs, but also incentivize citizens to actively participate in local governance (graeff, 2018). towards a political theory of data justice the paper proposes three central principles of justice in the regulation of the state’s collection and uses of big data. the principle of transparency and accountability: a central worry about the state’s collection of big data is that the processes might infringe on individual citizens’ privacy and freedom (e.g., nissenbaum, 2017). transparent and open processes open possibilities for public surveillance (e.g., the media and civil society) of the state, thus reducing the chance of the state’s abusive use of big data. the monitoring of the state’s uses of big data requires an active contentious civil society where misbehaviors of the state would be publicly exposed. thus, the principle requires the state to not only make its own processes of data collection transparent, but also to provide a favorable legal infrastructure for activism against data abuse. the principle of fairness: the state’s collection and uses of big data rely on public finance, and the design of what and how data should be collected is never neutral (eubanks, 2018). different designs will result in different social and political groups being benefited. this principle requires the state not only to justify the uses of big data by explaining how it can benefit the public, but also to reasonably explain how the design of data collection does not unfairly skew towards advantaged groups and will not result in negative externalities that harm disadvantaged groups. the principle of democratic legitimacy: a democratic state’s collection and uses of big data can only be legitimate when it is democratically authorized. given that today’s governments are increasingly reliant on big data for governance (desrosières, 2002), it is even more urgent to avoid the state becomes a technocracy (habermas, 2015) in which political problems are deemed the area belongs to political experts who are capable of understanding and harnessing the power of big data. an ability to see processes of data collection visible is not equated with an ability to know how they work and should be regulated (ananny & crawford, 2018). therefore, the principle requires not only democratic authorization, but also the massive nurturing of data literacy. a democratic people cannot hold the state accountable to its data abuse and cannot meaningfully authorize the state’s collection and uses of big data without understanding what big data is and how it operates. references ananny, m., & crawford, k. (2018). seeing without knowing: limitations of the transparency ideal and its application to algorithmic accountability. new media & society, 20(3), 973-989. boyd, d., & crawford, k. (2012). critical questions for big data: provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon. information, communication & society, 15(5), 662-679. christin, a. (2020). what data can do: a typology of mechanisms. international journal of communication, 14, 1115-1134. desrosières, a. (2002). the politics of large numbers: a history of statistical reasoning. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. eubanks, v. (2018). automating inequality: how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. new york: st. martin’s press. ginsberg, j., mohebbi, m., patel, r. et al. (2009). detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data. nature, 457, 1012-1014. graeff, e. (2018). evaluating civic technology design for citizen empowerment. (unpublished doctoral dissertation). mit, cambridge, ma. habermas, j. (2015). the lure of technocracy. cambridge, uk: polity. kohn, m. (2020). public goods and social justice. perspectives on politics. advanced online publication. doi: 10.1017/s1537592719004614 lane, j., stodden, v., bender, s., & nissenbaum, h. (eds.) (2014). privacy, big data, and the public good: frameworks for engagement. new york, cambridge university press. nissenbaum, h. (2017). deregulating collection: must privacy give way to use regulation? retrieved from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3092282 shue, h. (1996). basic rights: subsistence, affluence, and u.s. foreign policy (2nd ed.). princeton, nj: princeton university press. paper 2: google and facebook vs rawls and lao-tzu: how silicon valley’s utilitarianism and confucianism are bad for internet ethics morten bay university of southern california suggested citation: bay, m. (2020, october). google and facebook vs rawls and lao-tzu: how silicon valley’s utilitarianism and confucianism are bad for internet ethics. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. extended abstract the proposed paper presents an argument in favor of a rawlsian approach to ethics for internet technology companies (den hoven & rooksby, 2008; hoffman, 2017). ethics statements from such companies are analyzed and shown to be utilitarian and teleological in nature, and therefore in opposition to rawls’ theories of justice and fairness. the statements are also shown to have traits in common with confucian virtue ethics (ames, 2011; nylan, 2008). in contrast to popular perception, american moral philosopher john rawls did not always denounce consequentialism. he wrote that not taking “consequences into account in judging rightness” would be “irrational, crazy” (rawls, 1971, p. 30). rawls’ critique of utilitarianism, rather, concerned the extent to which utilitarianism relies on consequentialism and also that it is teleological (rawls, 1971). hence, viewing the technology ethics and guidelines presented by internet corporations through a rawlsian lens raises the question: what is more teleological than companies such as google, facebook, and their associated platforms, whose business models entail collecting personal user data and making predictions based on these data? their stated telos is to use the collected data to improve user experiences on services offered to the public for free, and to make contributions to a range of public goods from health care to national security through predictive data analytics. of course, the data sets are also used to predict the effects of commercial and political advertising, which optimizes the companies’ shareholder profits (zuboff, 2015, 2019). that the justification for the data collection is presented as the benefits outweighing the harms for the biggest number of people demonstrates the teleological and utilitarian approach taken by these technology companies. the companies’ ethics statements are often superficial guidelines with very little adherence to actual ethical practice or theory (microsoft, 2019; pichai, 2018). by using what the corporations appear to believe are ethical “buzzwords”, these ethics statements often resemble confucian virtue ethics, in that they present virtues to be adopted without rooting these virtues in empirical knowledge, ethical theory or presenting a solidly reasoned argument for them (separating them substantially from the virtue-based technology ethics presented by ess (2011) and vallor (2016)). similar to confucius presenting the ethical necessity of virtues such as order and propriety as somewhat self-evident, the virtues proposed in tech company ethics statements are contextless and theoretically unmoored (wong, 2012). the ethics practices of technology companies share a characteristic with confucian virtue ethics in that the companies enforce strictly hierarchical decisionmaking (healey & woods, 2017). the above-mentioned statements and practices are all contingent on the perceived ability of the technology companies to accurately predict the consequences of their actions and the effect of their products. this confidence in predictions coupled with quasi-confucianist virtue ethics is yet another demonstration of teleological utilitarianism. employing an applied ethics method, public ethics statements from google, microsoft, and facebook are analyzed using the work of two opponents of teleological utilitarianism and confucianism, john rawls and lao-tzu. more than two thousand years apart, rawls and lao-tzu both made compelling and strong arguments against employing conjectures about the consequences of decisions and actions as the foundation for decision-making (lin et al., 2013; vuong et al., 2018). lao-tzu, likely a pseudonym, did so in the classic taoist text tao te ching, which also contains simple rebuttals of several confucian virtues. several arguments emerge from the perspectives of these two philosophers that call the prediction-heavy, teleological and consequentialism-based ethics approach of technology companies into question, including the demonstrable difficulty associated with achieving high accuracy in forecasts of technological development, adoption, and practices such as online data collection (meade & islam, 2006). after showing how the tech industry’s utilitarian-confucian hegemony clashes with rawlsian ethics and taoism, these schools of thought are demonstrated as viable alternatives in the construction of technology ethics. the paper argues that these philosophies are particularly viable when considering the ethics of internet-related technologies, as the communicative, interactive, and participatory nature of the online realm is, arguably, dominated by rapid change. the speed with which the torrents of changes and transformations flow and thereby constitute the internet’s many domains is not the only thing that makes prediction difficult. as popper (1945) famously pointed out, a constant increase of human knowledge logically leads to a decreased predictability and a heightened risk of unintended consequences being the outcome. in combination, the speed of change, the production of new information, and the proliferation of the latter, makes the internet a phenomenon characterized much more by unpredictability than, for example, some examples of hardware development. the paper concludes by arguing how these factors demonstrate that rawlsian, deontological ethics can be a viable alternative to utilitarianism in technology ethics, perhaps even in combination with elements of taoist thought. references ames, r. t. (2011). confucian role ethics: a vocabulary. chinese university press. den hoven, j., & rooksby, e. (2008). distributive justice and the value of information: a (broadly) rawlsian approach. information technology and moral philosophy, 376. ess, c. (2011). ethical dimensions of new technology/media. the handbook of communication ethics, 204–220. healey, k., & woods, r. h. (2017). processing is not judgment, storage is not memory: a critique of silicon valley’s moral catechism. journal of media ethics, 32(1), 2–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/23736992.2016.1258990 henricks, r. g. (2000). lao tzu’s tao te ching: a translation of the startling new documents found at guodian. columbia university press. hoffman, a. l. (2017). beyond distributions and primary goods: assessing applications of rawls in information science and technology literature since 1990. journal of the association for information science and technology, 68(7), 1601–1618. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23747 lin, l.-h., ho, y.-l., & lin, w.-h. e. (2013). confucian and taoist work values: an exploratory study of the chinese transformational leadership behavior. journal of business ethics, 113(1), 91–103. meade, n., & islam, t. (2006). modelling and forecasting the diffusion of innovation – a 25-year review. international journal of forecasting, 22, 519–545. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijforecast.2006.01.005 microsoft (2019. our approach: microsoft ai principles. microsoft. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ai/our-approach-to-ai nylan, m. (2008). the five"confucian" classics. yale university press. pichai, s. (2018, june 7). ai at google: our principles. google. https://www.blog.google/technology/ai/ai-principles/ popper, k. (1945). the poverty of historicism, iii. economica, 12(46), 69–89. rawls, j. (1971). a theory of justice. harvard university press. vallor, s. (2016). technology and the virtues: a philosophical guide to a future worth wanting. oxford university press. vuong, q.-h., bui, q.-k., la, v.-p., vuong, t.-t., nguyen, v.-h. t., ho, m.-t., nguyen, h.-k. t., & ho, m.-t. (2018). cultural additivity: behavioural insights from the interaction of confucianism, buddhism and taoism in folktales. palgrave communications, 4(1), 1– 15. wong, p.-h. (2012). dao, harmony and personhood: towards a confucian ethics of technology. philosophy & technology, 25(1), 67–86. zuboff, s. (2015). big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization. journal of information technology, 30(1), 75–89. zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. profile books. paper 3: the jurisprudence of datafied law dan l. burk university of california, irvine suggested citation: burk, d. (2020, october). the jurisprudence of datafied law. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. introduction data profiles drawn from blended private and public digital surveillance are increasingly taking a role in legal decisions regarding criminal sentencing, parole, bail, and other jurisprudential outcomes. (1, 2) substantive and procedural critiques have been leveled at the of deployment of such datafied law, posing questions regarding accuracy, due process, and oversight. (2, 3) however, surprisingly little has been said regarding the jurisprudential implications of such practices. in particular, there has been little discussion of the fit between values assumed in algorithmic analytics and values embodied by the legal institutions that might employ them. consequently, in this paper, i begin to map out certain core jurisprudential problems raised by algorithmic profiling within the legal system. in particular, i explore the challenges such algorithmic metrics pose for fundamental liberal values of autonomy and equality. algorithmic accuracy legal algorithmic scoring has already been the focus of substantial analytical censure. much of this negative critique has been couched in the language of accuracy, or in reciprocal language of bias. commentators on algorithmic legal metrics worry that data profiles will reflect an inaccurate portrait of the subject, either by being incomplete, or by incorporating the social indicia of past prejudices. (4, 5) such concerns are by no means unfounded; surveillance studies warn us that an assembled data profile is not, and indeed cannot ever be, a fully accurate representation of the subject – no model of real phenomena can by definition ever be as informationally complete the subject of its representation. (6, 7) neither are such concerns trivial; they are of particular salience where algorithmic training data, analytic data, or algorithmic modelling may reflect or reinscribe racial, ethnic, or other subordinated minority status. (1, 7) jurisprudentially, the accuracy argument may raise concerns grounded in the ethical bases for legal judgment, which are typically couched in terms of dessert or utility. inaccurate bases for judgment may be unjust from the standpoint of autonomy by invoking undeserved sanctions or creating a legal status that does not fit the character of the individual. simultaneously, an inaccurate basis for judgment may be inefficient from a utilitarian standpoint as invoking sanctions or creating a legal status unrelated to desired behavioral outcomes. interrogating datafied judgments the argument from algorithmic accuracy rests upon the assumption that predictive analytics measure a defined quantity in the universe; that measuring a criminal defendant’s risk of recidivism or risk of flight is an exercise equivalent to measuring the defendant’s height – either correct or incorrect, perhaps within error bars of a few millimeters. i discuss three jurisprudential consequences that flow from this assumption embedded in the algorithmic metric. first, because the algorithmic score appears objective, any positive or negative change will likely be attributed to the character or actions of the individual being scored rather than to bias, feedback, or variance in the algorithm. (7) algorithmic metrics appear to objectively reflect chosen behavior, and so become an ethically significant indicator of individual character. algorithmic calculation thus precipitates a shift from measurement to judgment, and from actuarial judgment to legal consequence. this suggests that algorithmic legal metrics, whether or not intended to be dispositive in a legal decision, will be accorded greater weight than they merit. second, the generation of algorithmically tailored legal standards highlights a latent tension that exists in all democratic systems, between the values of autonomy and equity: each individual is to be valued for his or her own distinctive personhood, but at the same time all are to be treated equally before the law. (8) democratic regulation becomes illegitimate when it is arbitrary, but may be equally illegitimate when impersonal and calculated – too much personal variation violates democratic principles of equality, but too little violates liberal principles of autonomy. (9) an “unjust” legal regime may mean a regime that undervalues either the former or the latter. legal standards accommodate some of each value, but finally, i suggest that algorithmic metrics raise questions regarding legal governance grounded in determinism or in autonomy. different strategies are implicated depending upon the jurisprudential model of the subject, and whether the data profile is believed to measure a quality of the subject that should be regarded as static or dynamic. regarding the algorithmic determination as a measure of a static, inherent quality supports a theory of utility or of dessert. deontologically, the subject may be said to deserve whatever state of character the algorithm indicates; consequentially, remedies directed to static characteristics may be most efficient at encouraging or deterring behaviors. but if such traits are considered dynamic, open to self-inspection and alteration, as opposed to external punishment or reward, then the algorithmic score offers a mechanism of assessment and a goal for sanctioned improvement. this is of course the type of manipulation that yeung has cautioned against as “hypernudging.” (10) and although behavioral rehabilitation is a recognized value of some types of adjudication, this use of algorithmic metrics raises a separate set of questions as to whether the of “surveillance capitalism” are legitimate tools of state authority. (11) conclusion by illuminating the discontinuities between the values assumed by predictive analytics and those assumed in liberal legal institutions, this paper makes several novel contributions to the literature on law and algorithmic governance. first, it draws together several disparate strands of literature on the social and normative implications of algorithms to offer a framework for assessment of such technologies in the context of legal adjudication. second, it shows that the current debates over the accuracy of predictive legal metrics overlook core issues surrounding their use in the legal system, suggesting the inadequacy of conventional liberal curatives such as algorithmic transparency or due process. finally, the paper elucidates the treatment of algorithmically determined profiles as either dynamic or static personal characteristics, and shows how such models implicate the current discussion over algorithmic manipulation that have been primarily directed toward private rather than public actors. these findings point the way to a more complete and fruitful discussion regarding propriety of deploying of algorithmic legal metrics. references (1) margaret hu, algorithmic jim crow, 86 fordham l. rev. 633 (2017). (2) sonia katyal, private accountability in the age of artificial intelligence, 66 ucla l. rev. 54 (2019). (3) danielle keats citron, technological due process, 85 wash. u. l. rev. 1249, 1256 (2008). (4) solon barocas & andrew d. selbst, big data’s disparate impact, 104 cal. l. rev. 671 (2016). (5) danielle k. citron & frank pasquale, the scored society: due process for automated predictions, 89 wash. l. rev. 1 (2014). (6) kevin d. haggerty & richard v. ericson, the surveillant assemblage, 51 brit. j. soc. 605 (2000). (7) marion fourcade & kieran healy, seeing like a market, 15 socio-econ. rev. 9, 24 (2017) (8) wendy brown, wounded attachments, 21 pol. theory 390 (1993). (9) hans christoph grigoleit & philip maximillian bender, the law between generality and particularity – potentials and limits of personalized law in data economy and algorithmic regulation: a handbook on personalized law (christoph busch & alberto de franceschi, eds., forthcoming 2020). (10) karen yeung. ‘hypernudge’: big data as a mode of regulation by design, 20 info. comm. & soc’y, 118 (2017). (11) shoshana zuboff, the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power (2019). paper 4: a systematic literature review of ethical codes of conduct in the field of internet research aline shakti franzke university duisburg-essen suggested citation: franzke, a.s. (2020, october). a systematic literature review of ethics codes of conduct in the field of internet research. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. purpose – as big data and artificial intelligence/machine learning proliferate, calls for ethical reflection emerge. ethics guidelines play a central role in this respect. while quantitative research on the ethics guidelines of ai has been undertaken by jobin et al., systematic qualitative analysis of the ethics guidelines pertaining to ai/big data has remained lacking. design/methodology/approach – aiming to bridge this research gap, this paper analyses 85 international ethics guideline documents from academia, ngos and corporate backgrounds, published between the year 2017-2020. findings – for meaningful ethics guidelines it is necessary to define underlying ethics approaches, to explicate values and possible harms. therefore, virtue ethical approaches are recommended. originality/value – the paper provides fine-grained qualitative insights into the architecture of ai guidelines, which may prove beneficial for developers, academics and regulators. keywords – artificial intelligence, ai ethics guidelines, virtue ethics paper type – extended abstract __________________________________________________________________ introduction the question of how to engage with ethical principles in the design, implementation and usage of ai is not only frequently discussed across the media and by policymakers, but is also at the centre of a mushrooming debate in academia. robust quantitative research has shown that ethics guidelines for ai prioritise the values of transparency, justice and fairness, non-maleficence, responsibility, beneficence, freedom and autonomy, trust, sustainability and dignity (jobin et al. 2019, p. 395). some have raised concerns that these principles are insufficient for ensuring ethical ai (mittelstadt 2019). the broad field of stakeholders and developed tools make it difficult to oversee the principles and categories involved (morley et al. 2019). the entanglement between ethics and business has been highlighted (hagendorff 2019, p.107). it has also been pointed out that both technical implications are frequently missing in ethics guidelines and their legal enforcement has been lacking (hagendorff 2019, p.111). most recently, the normative requirements that arise from these ethics guidelines have been highlighted (stahl, ryan, 2020). an extensive qualitative analysis of existing ethics guidelines of ai, however, has been missing. such an analysis is not only of interest to the academic debate but also to regulators, who seek to determine the soft influence ethics guidelines might or might not have. the guiding interest of this paper is: what can be observed when one examines the extant ethics guidelines of ai in a qualitative manner? method algorithm watch, crowdsourced a global inventory of ai ethics guidelines ( https://inventory.algorithmwatch.org/). this list was used as a starting point. 167 articles from the years 2017-2020 have been extracted. after studying title, abstracts and the entire guidelines, a total amount of 85 was finally included in the qualitative analysis. specific values and observations regarding the architecture of the document have been noted for each entry. findings the findings can be grouped into three categories: 1) theoretical a) what is meant by ethics in the sample? guidelines frequently use the term ethics without further clarification about what school of ethics informs this usage or what is understood by it. differing examples, however, can be found (e.g.: https://www.cnil.fr/sites/default/files/atoms/files/cnil_rapport_ai_gb_web.pdf) b) what is meant by specific values in the sample? values are introduced without specifying how to define them, creating something of a “value monoculture”. while privacy is frequently mentioned, only a handful of guidelines address de facto privacy breaches and the implications of these in the lives of those affected (e.g. https://ec.europa.eu/futurium/en/ai-allianceconsultation, https://www.montrealdeclaration-responsibleai.com/the-declaration) c) utilitarian dominance if there is any indication of a moral tradition, it is almost invariably a utilitarian one (f.e: https://www.accenture.com/gb-en/company-responsible-ai-robotics) d) “dialogical” absence in most of the approaches dialogical, deliberative elements are missing. deliberative group focused processes, however, would help to dismantle open questions about how to put ethics into action (e.g. https://dataschool.nl/de/deda/) 2) individual level e) what kind of specific harm is imagined in the sample? if guidelines speak about harm, frequently they don’t specify what kind of harm could actually occur, or what the specific dangers of unethical ai would be (exceptions are: https://fpf.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/fpf-automateddecision-making-harms-and-mitigation-charts.pdf). f) who might be excluded? if datasets are referred to, there is often no clear indication about what kind of groups of people might be excluded (exception: https://i.unu.edu/media/cs.unu.edu/page/4453/unumacau_data_marginalization_flyer.pdf). 3) institutional and regulative level g) how to follow-up new findings and implement ethical reflection into institutional settings? frequently there is no indication of how to operationalise the findings of the ethics reflection in follow-up steps (exception: https://theodi.org/wpcontent/uploads/2019/07/odi-data-ethics-canvas-2019-05.pdf). h) how to regulate the use of big data analysis? there is on the whole no indication of how to contact legal entities and report on possible findings or discovered “to do’s” within ethics reflection (exception: https://ec.europa.eu/futurium/en/ai-alliance-consultation). discussion these qualitative findings provide a contribution to the discussion on the meaningful design and use of ethics guidelines of ai. without a clear understanding of the underlying approach to ethics, and the definition of values, ethics guidelines risk to legitimize common practice in the respective field of application, to conceal political positions, to function solely as a public relations strategy and to be without consequences. for example, speaking about privacy alone without specifying what we exactly is meant by it is not sufficient. undoubtedly, the current difficulty lies in the details of how values could be operationalized. however, even though this point is important, it oversees the necessity for ethical dialogue and deliberation. ethics guidelines at their best serve to stabilize and distil standards, point toward opaqueness and establish best practices. in order to establish these, more virtue ethical approaches to ethics guidelines of ai, which are sensitive to the specific context could be helpful because they entail more deliberative understandings of what it means to do ethics. references accenture (2020). responsible ai and robotics: an ethical framework. last accessed: 28.8.202. online: https://www.accenture.com/gb-en/company-responsible-ai-robotics algorithm watch (2019). ai ethics guidelines: a global inventory. last accessed: 28.8.2020. online: https://inventory.algorithmwatch.org/ data protection authority (cnil) (2017). how can humans keep the upper hand?: the ethical matters raised by algorithms and artificial intelligence. last accessed 28.8.2020. online: https://www.cnil.fr/sites/default/files/atoms/files/cnil_rapport_ai_gb_web.pdf eu high-level expert group on artificial intelligence (8.4.2018). ethics guidelines for trustworthy ai. last accessed 29.8.2020. online: https://ec.europa.eu/futurium/en/aialliance-consultation franzke, a., muis,i., schäfer,t (2017). data ethics decsions aid. last accessed 28.8.2020. online: https://dataschool.nl/de/deda/ future of privacy forum (2017). unfairness by algorithm: destilling the harms of automated decision making. last accessed 29.8.2020. online: https://fpf.org/wpcontent/uploads/2017/12/fpf-automated-decision-making-harms-and-mitigationcharts.pdf hagendorff, t. (2020). the ethics of ai ethics: an evaluation of guidelines. minds and machines, 1-22. jobin, a., ienca, m., & vayena, e. (2019). the global landscape of ai ethics guidelines. nature machine intelligence, 1(9), 389-399. mittelstadt, b. (2019). principles alone cannot guarantee ethical ai. nature machine intelligence, 1-7. morley, j., floridi, l., kinsey, l., & elhalal, a. (2019). from what to how: an initial review of publicly available ai ethics tools, methods and research to translate principles into practices. science and engineering ethics, 1-28. odi (2019). data ethics canvas. last accessed: 28.8.2020. online: https://theodi.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/odi-data-ethics-canvas-2019-05.pdf ryan, m., & stahl, b. c. (2020). artificial intelligence ethics guidelines for developers and users: clarifying their content and normative implications. journal of information, communication and ethics in society. thinyane,m & christine, d. ( 2019). a typological framework for data marginalization: identifying forms of marginalization and exclusion in data-intensive ecosystems. united nations university institute in macau. last accessed: 28.8.2020. online: https://i.unu.edu/media/cs.unu.edu/page/4453/unumacau_data_marginalization_flyer.pdf universite de montreal (2017). declaration for a responsible development of ai. last accessed 29.8.2020. online: https://www.montrealdeclaration-responsibleai.com/thedeclaration selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 kiel,  p.  (2016,  october  5-­8).  the  emerging  practices  of  the  collective  afterlife:  multimodal  analysis  of   websites  for  post-­mortem  digital  interaction.  paper  presented  at  aoir  2016:  the  17th  annual  meeting  of   the  association  of  internet  researchers.  berlin,  germany:  aoir.  retrieved  from  http://spir.aoir.org.   the  emerging  practices  of  the  collective  afterlife:   multimodal  analysis  of  websites  for  post-­mortem   digital  interaction   paula  kiel   london  school  of  economics  and  political  science     introduction     this  paper  offers  to  deploy  scheffler’s  notion  of  the  collective  afterlife  in  order  to   conceptualize  and  explore  newly  emerging  websites  enabling  the  planning  and   preparing  of  post-­mortem  online  interactions.  this  paper  presents  an  analytical   framework  for  conducting  multimodal  analysis  of  websites  as  units  of  analysis  adapted   from  pauwels’s  six-­step  framework  for  multimodal  analysis.  the  framework  is   exemplified  through  the  analysis  of  6  websites  dedicated  to  enabling  post-­mortem  digital   interaction.  specifically,  this  paper  explores  the  cultural  specificities  of  such  practices   and  the  ways  in  which  they  are  constructed.     death  online  research  and  post-­mortem  digital  interaction   in  the  past  5  years  research  on  death  and  digital  media  has  significantly  evolved.  along   with  on  going  developments  and  emergence  of  death-­related  practices  using  digital   media  so  have  scholars  increasingly  addressed  the  questions,  meanings  and   implications  that  such  practices  raise.  this  body  of  research  stems  from  a  variety  of   perspectives  and  disciplines  and  addresses  a  wide  range  of  issues  such  as  the  legal   implications  of  death  in  a  digital  age,  changes  in  practices  of  mourning  and  grieving,   online  businesses  offering  funerary  services,  and  the  online  realization  of  the   psychological  model  of  continuing  bonds  (doka,  2012;;  gotved,  2014;;  walter,  hourizi,   moncur,  &  pitsillides,  2012)  to  name  a  few.  in  spite  of  this  broad  scope  of  research,   there  is  very  little  attention  (if  any  at  all)  paid  to  the  emerging  practice  of  planning  one’s   own  online  activities  and  interactions  post-­mortem.  this  project  offers  to  contribute  to   the  understanding  of  this  emerging  practice.       the  phenomenon  at  issue  is  defined  as  platforms  dedicated  for  planning  post  mortem   online  activity  and  presence.  these  are  websites  that  are  designed  explicitly  to   encourage  users  to  think  about  and  imagine  the  world  once  they  are  gone,  and  enable   to  create  ways  for  them  to  be  active  online  in  that  world.  for  instance,  the  website   deadsocial.org  enables  users  to  create  messages  that  will  be  posted  on  facebook  in   the  future  according  to  the  timing  indicated  by  the  users.  thus,  a  user  could  create   birthday  wishes  that  will  be  posted  on  facebook  in  many  years  to  come,  enabling  her  to   be  part  of  the  online  communicative  event  of  birthdays  of  loved  ones  long  after  her   death.     these  websites  do  not  deal  directly  with  death  in  the  sense  of  an  actual  recent  death   (unlike  platforms  related  to  memorialization  or  support  for  grieving  for  instance),  but   rather  with  death  as  a  concept  and  with  accepting  one’s  mortality.  in  order  to   conceptualize  these  practices  i  would  like  to  offer  scheffler’s  notion  of  the  collective   afterlife  (2014).       the  afterlife  conjecture   in  his  book  death  and  the  afterlife,  samuel  scheffler  (2014)  presents  an  unusual   understanding  of  the  afterlife.  scheffler  discusses  the  notion  of  afterlife  not  in  terms  of   the  survival  of  the  soul  after  one’s  death,  but  in  terms  of  the  continued  lives  of  human   beings  and  the  existence  of  humanity  after  one’s  life  ends.  this  is  what  scheffler   regards  as  the  collective  afterlife.  his  main  argument,  or  what  he  calls  the  afterlife   conjecture,  contends  that  this  belief  in  the  prosperity  of  human  kind  is  essential  for   individuals  to  live  a  value-­laden  life  and  perceive  of  things  as  mattering.  by  presenting   two  thought  experiments,  scheffler  argues  that  individuals  ultimately  care  more  about   the  survival  of  humanity  (and  depend  on  it  for  constructing  and  understanding  value)   than  they  do  about  that  of  people  they  know  or  even  about  their  own.       the  assurance  entailed  in  the  notion  of  a  collective  afterlife,  enables  individuals  to  deal   with  their  own  mortality  by  personalizing  the  future  of  which  they  will  not  be  a  part.  that   is,  believing  that  humanity  will  remain  long  after  one  will  cease  to  exist,  enables   individuals  to  imagine  the  future  without  them  (and  even  without  their  loved  ones)  thus   finding  comfort  to  the  fact  of  their  mortality.  to  a  great  extent,  the  websites  described   above  can  be  understood  as  enabling  users  to  prepare  and  think  about  their  collective   afterlife.  although  scheffler’s  thesis  has  some  significant  flaws,  it  nonetheless  provides   a  useful  framework  for  conceptualizing  the  above-­described  websites  from  a   perspective  that  is  outside  the  scope  of  dying  or  mourning.  one  of  the  main   weaknesses  in  scheffler’s  thesis  is  that  it’s  extremely  universalistic.  it  lacks  any   consideration  of  additional  social,  psychological  or  other  factors  in  the  approach  of   individuals  to  the  fact  of  their  mortality  and  the  potential  role  of  this  notion  of  collective   afterlife.  this  paper  will  address  the  cultural  specificity  related  to  the  practice  of  planning   for  the  collective  afterlife.       multimodal  analysis  of  a  collective  afterlife   this  project,  therefore,  uses  scheffler’s  notion  of  the  collective  afterlife  in  order  to   conceptualize  and  explore  websites  designed  for  post-­mortem  digital  presence  and   interaction.     the  corpus  of  this  paper  is  comprised  of  32  websites  dedicated  to  post-­mortem  digital   interaction.  search  was  conducted  using  three  search  engines:  google,  bing  and   yahoo!  search.  the  exclusion  criteria  was  comprised  of  two  conditions:  (1)  messages   created  by  users  are  sent  at  some  point  in  the  future  after  they  die,  and  (2)  the  websites   explicitly  encourage  users  to  think  about  these  future  messages  in  the  context  of  the   world  they’d  leave  behind  them  once  they  die.1       first,  a  functional  typology  is  presented  based  on  two  categories:  (1)  the  variety  of   forms  of  presence  enabled  by  the  website  (range  functions  offered  to  users)  and  (2)  the   degree  of  presence  attributed  (based  on  criteria  of  modes  of  representation  and  time-­ scope  of  service).  three  main  prototypes  are  discussed:  websites  focusing  on  social   and  emotional  closure;;  websites  focusing  on  administrative  online  and  offline  closure;;   and  websites  focusing  on  social  presence  and  participation.     secondly,  pauwels’s  (2012)  multimodal  framework  for  analysis  of  websites  as  cultural   expression  was  adapted  for  in-­depth  as  well  as  comparative  analysis  of  6  websites  (2  of   each  prototype).  this  framework  is  comprised  of  six  stages,  moving  from  descriptive   quantitative  assessment  to  in-­depth  analysis  of  each  website,  by  exploring  the  different   modes  being  used  (intra-­modal)  as  well  as  the  relationships  between  modes  (cross-­ modal).     specifically,  this  paper  looks  into  the  cultural  specificities  in  which  individuals  are  invited   to  imagine  and  personalize  their  futures  after  their  own  death.  the  incorporation  of   varying  temporalities  into  communicative  events  is  also  explored  in  characterizing  how   these  practices  are  constructed  on  the  websites  at  issue.               references     doka,  k.  j.  (2012).  foreword.  in  c.  j.  sofka,  k.  r.  gilbert,  &  i.  n.  cupit  (eds.),  dying,   death,  and  grief  in  an  online  universe:  for  counselors  and  educators  (pp.  xi–xiv).   new  york:  springer  publishing  company.     gotved,  s.  (2014).  research  review:  death  online  -­  alive  and  kicking.  thanatos,  3(1),   112–126.     pauwels,  l.  (2012).  a  multimodal  framework  for  analyzing  websites  as  cultural   expressions.  journal  of  computer-­mediated  communication,  17(3),  247–265.     scheffler,  s.  (2014).  death  and  the  afterlife.  new  york:  oxford  university  press.     walter,  t.,  hourizi,  r.,  moncur,  w.,  &  pitsillides,  s.  (2012).  does  the  internet  change   how  we  die  and  mourn?  overview  and  analysis.  omega:  journal  of  death  and   dying,  64(4),  275–302.     1 thus for, instance, general apps such as “vuture” that enables users to send future messages in general contexts, were excluded. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): henderson, m. j., shade, l. r., & mackinnon, k. (2020, october). every click you make: algorithmic literacy and the digital lives of young adults. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. every click you make: algorithmic literacy and the digital lives of young adults monica jean henderson university of toronto leslie regan shade university of toronto katie mackinnon university of toronto critical digital literacy comprises subsets of mediumand content-related skills necessary for digital privacy and digital citizenship. frameworks for defining and evaluating digital literacy proliferate in academia and policymaking (eshet, 2012; nichols & stornaiuolo, 2019; pangrazio, 2016; pangrazio & selwyn, 2019; van dijk & van deursen, 2014). however, in a networked climate subsumed by dataveillance, algorithmic bias, political bots, and deep fakes (burkell & gosse, 2019; shepherd & henderson, 2019; west, 2019; zuboff, 2019), these frameworks need to be updated. algorithms may be the greatest determinant in sociopolitical online interactions and information gathering (bucher, 2018; noble, 2018), and without a multivalent literacy of algorithms, nuanced understandings of digital privacy and digital citizenship may be unachievable. we therefore propose ‘algorithmic literacy’ become an essential element for digital literacy in young adult media education. it is a common misconception that young people aged 18-29, or ‘digital natives’, automatically demonstrate advanced digital skills simply because they grew up during a time of rapid digitalization. several researchers have debunked this misconception to highlight how intersectional aspects of gender, ability, and socioeconomic status are stronger predictors of low digital literacy than age (helsper & eynon, 2010; li & ranieri, 2010; livingstone & helsper, 2007; west, kraut, & chew 2019). we agree, and argue that assumptions of digital fluency are damaging for educational programming and policy development surrounding youth digital engagement, negatively affecting the digital lives of young adults. following a tradition of participatory (rather than protectionist) research about youth privacy online (boyd, 2014; chen, poland, & skinner, 2007; livingstone, 2008; rodríguez & brown, 2009; smith, shade, & shepherd, 2017), our research foregrounds young adults’ practices and perspectives on algorithmic culture in order to co-develop a framework for algorithmic literacy. our paper shares findings from a participatory project co-designing an algorithmic literacy toolkit with young adults as co-researchers and participants. this research was hosted by the jackman humanities institute scholars in residence (sir) program at the university of toronto, an intensive four-week residency promoting undergraduate research. alongside our students as co-researchers, we created a curriculum focusing on reviewing the current critical scholarly literature, policy, and popular discourse on algorithms. due to covid-19, the program was moved to an online format where we met every morning on zoom to discuss the readings, meet with invited speakers, and brainstorm ideas for the toolkit. after two weeks of intensive research, our student coresearchers met amongst themselves to devise a sustainable, ‘living-document’ type of toolkit. the process began with the development of a mission statement which centres the empowerment of social sciences and humanities students to engage in tech justice. the toolkit followed, comprising a website (thealgorithmicyou.com), an instagram page (@thealgorithmicyou), and a medium blog (@thealgorithmicyou). reflected in the name, the algorithmic you, the toolkit uses an intersectional lens to facilitate peer-oriented ‘self-discovery’ of how algorithmic mechanisms shape and produce interactions in the everyday lives of young adults. this project is done in conjunction with the equality project, a sshrc partnership that is dedicated to the creation of new knowledge about young people’s use of networked spaces, with an emphasis on privacy and equality issues. the development of an algorithmic literacy toolkit interacts meaningfully with the mandate of the partnership, in its engagement with the lived experiences of young adults to co-create a toolkit that addresses the needs and concerns of their peers. this model of digital literacy development resembles projects like project information literacy’s “the algorithm study” (https://www.projectinfolit.org/algo_study.html) or the unbias project’s “fairness toolkit” (https://unbias.wp.horizon.ac.uk/fairness-toolkit/), both of which build tools that engage university students in digital interventions. this research makes several contributions to the scholarly field of internet research. first, it provides a participatory model for digital skills development. second, we demonstrate how centering young adults’ perspectives in the research process and in the algorithmic literacy toolkit can both a) empower youth to conduct critical investigations into today’s central issues of dataveillance, internet wellbeing, and artificial intelligence/machine learning, and b) encourage them to take personal and collective ownership over their digital privacy. reorienting algorithmic literacy within the youth perspective also helps build a foundation for healthy internet futures. finally, our key output, the algorithmic literacy toolkit, is an easily spreadable resource for use across public education, media literacy, and internet safety, and privacy networks. we argue that centering youth in internet research has transformative potential for predisposing what our digital lives will look like in the pivotal years to come. references boyd, d. (2014). it’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens. new haven, ct: yale university press. bucher, t. (2018). if...then: algorithmic power and politics. oxford, uk: oxford university press. burkell, j., & gosse, c. (2019). nothing new here: emphasizing the social and cultural context of deepfakes. first monday, 24(12). chen, s., poland, b., & skinner, h. a. (2007). youth voices: evaluation of participatory action research. canadian journal of program evaluation, 22(1), 125-150. eshet, y. (2012). thinking in the digital era: a revised model for digital literacy. issues in information science and information technology, 9, 267-276. eubanks, v. (2012). digital dead end: fighting for social justice in the information age. cambridge, ma: mit press. helsper, e. j., & eynon, r. (2010). digital natives: where is the evidence? british educational research journal, 36(3), 503–520. li, y., & ranieri, m. (2010). are digital natives really digitally competent?—a study on chinese teenagers. british journal of educational technology, 41(6), 1029-1042. livingstone, s. (2008). taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: teenagers’ use of social networking sites for intimacy, privacy and self-expression. new media & society, 10(3), 393-411. livingstone, s., & helsper, e. (2007). gradations in digital inclusion: children, young people, and the digital divide. new media & society, 9(4), 671-696. nichols, t. p., & stornaiuolo, a. (2019). assembling “digital literacies”: contingent pasts, possible futures. media and communication, 7(2), 14-24. noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression. new york, ny: new york university press. pangrazio, l. (2016). reconceptualising critical digital literacy. discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, 37(2), 163-174. pangrazio, l. & selwyn, n. (2018). ‘personal data literacies’: a critical literacies approach to enhancing understandings of personal digital data. new media & society, 1(2), 419–437. rodríguez, l. f., & brown, t. m. (2009). from voice to agency: guiding principles for participatory action research with youth. new directions for youth development, 2009(123), 19-34. smith, k. l., shade, l. r., & shepherd, t. (2017). open privacy badges for digital policy literacy. international journal of communication, 11, 2784-2805. shepherd, t., & henderson, m. j. (2019). digital literacy in digital policy. canadian journal of communication policy portal, 44, 51-56. van dijk, j. a. g. m., & van deursen, a. j. a. m. (2014). digital skills: unlocking the information society. new york, ny: palgrave macmillan. west, m., kraut, r., & chew, h. e. (2019). i'd blush if i could: closing gender divides in digital skills through education. equals skills coalition. paris, france: unesco. west, s. m. (2019). data capitalism: redefining the logics of surveillance and privacy. business & society, 58(1), 20–41. zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. ny: publicaffairs books. extended-abstract.pdf selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 1 work in progress: the european "right to be forgotten" – legal and technical challenges of search engines complying with the right to erasure jan rensinghoff, tobias gostomzyk technische universität dortmund, germany florian m. farke, markus dürmuth ruhr university bochum, germany introduction the new european right to erasure (‘right to be forgotten’) in art. 17 of the general data protection regulation (gdpr) of the european union (eu) grants eu citizens the right to demand the erasure of their personal data from any data processor. this obligation applies, for example, to webshops, social networks, and news sites. even search engines can be responsible for processing personal data. search engines are in a special position because they allow their users to quickly search a large part of the world wide web for a specific topic or name within a fraction of a second. at the same time, they also potentially endanger people’s rights because of their power to determine which search results they deliver and which not. furthermore, search engines allow family members, neighbors, or employers to search the web for personal data about almost everyone quickly. a recent study shows that three out of four german internet users already searched for their name via search engines and every fifth even once a month1. the right to be forgotten therefore is the legislative answer to the uncontrolled spread of personal data through the internet – at least on the eu level. this right aims to help people regain control over the distribution of personal data. 1 bitkom research survey, available in german. retrieved february 20, 2019 from https://www.bitkom.org/presse/presseinformation/grosse-mehrheit-der-internetnutzer-googelt-sichselbst.html suggested citation (apa): rensinghoff, j. & farke, f(2019, october 2-5). work in progress: the european "right to be forgotten" – legal and technical challenges of search engines complying with the right to erasure. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 2 the “right to erasure” and its legal framework even with the right to erasure, it is not necessary to delete all objected personal data. there are no static criteria when personal data should remain on the internet, and when the data controller has to delete it. however, the decision to remove data does not only affects the data subject. it also can influence the general public, which has a right to distribute and receive data without interference. it also can have an impact on the data source because of their interest in being found by search engines. many websites rely on the revenue through advertisement and therefore on visitors brought to them by search engines. hence, there is a need to examine any claim to remove search results and to balance conflicting rights. google was the first search engine operator that was required to take care of this problem after a court decision (google vs. aepd, 2014). thus, they set up an “advisory council to google on the right to be forgotten” in 2014. this advisory council established a list of criteria determining when to delete personal data and when to keep it online. furthermore, google started to publish an annual transparency report2 providing insights into their decision-making process regarding the right to erasure. catalog of criteria concerning the right to be forgotten on search engines google’s advisory council and their transparency report reveal a handful of criteria that are – at least potentially – involved in the decision-making process: 1. source of the data 2. the topicality of the data 3. the importance of the data for the general public 4. the sensitivity of the data for the affected data subject 5. whether the affected data subject deliberately published the data all of these criteria can either promote or hinder the appearance of personal data in search results. they could be useful for machine-aided reasoning regarding the right to be forgotten. machine-aided reasoning on the right to be forgotten search engines are gateways to the web for many people. hence, they are probably more often than other internet services confronted with deciding whether an individual’s privacy outweighs the public’s interest to lawful access to information or another legal asset. unlike google, not every search engine operator may have the resources to review every single request to delete search results appropriately. this lack of resources makes decisions unpredictable and random. however, it is also not entirely clear how google’s review process works. 2 google transparency report. retrieved february 20, 2019 from https://transparencyreport.google.com/ 3 none of the operators of the most used web search engines (i. e., google, bing, yahoo!, baidu3) can or want to disclose how they conduct the reviews precisely. their transparency reports contain some insights but are far from being a manual for a review process. we try to reverse engineer the process, from receiving deletion requests, through analyzing and assessing them, to deriving a decision. to reconstruct the process, we gather and analyze the publicly available information about the deletion request review process of search engines, e. g., from their transparency reports. we identify subtasks in the process that can be (partially) automated and those that require human intervention. these tasks range from checking the identity of the requester to assessing the relevance of the search results for the public. to automate some of the subtasks, we use machine learning techniques that we trained with examples published by search engines. finally, we plan to model the whole process to estimate the chances of success to remove search results of a given person. the approach we are working on is to help search engine operators and individuals to assess and decide whether search results may have to be deleted or not. our idea is to have a system that gives suggestions on how to decide, but a human still needs to make the final decision. however, we think this will make this process more comprehensible and transparent. related work researching the automation of legal issues is not entirely new. the idea to model legal reasoning dates back to the 1970s when scholars began to develop systems for giving advice, do legal analysis, and to construct arguments (rissland, 2003). backes et al. (2015) introduced a framework for automated reasoning on privacy case law. the framework consists of formal descriptions and algorithms for reasoning tasks like the extraction of norms or deducing whether an action is legal or not. it requires the translation of all case information needed for the reasoning into a set of formal rules. they designed their framework to be agnostic from the underlying legal system but focus on us privacy regulations like hipaa or coppa and therefore on case law. focusing on the right to be forgotten of the gdpr, tiwari et al. (2018) implemented and extended the reasoning framework of backes et al. (2015). they introduced a similarity measure to determine the similarity of cases and to allow to decide new but slightly different cases in an automated way. furthermore, they implemented the framework using first-order logic to evaluate its run time performance. 3 worldwide desktop market share of leading search engines from january 2010 to october 2018. retrieved february 20, 2019 from https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/desktop/europe 4 references google spain sl and google inc. v agencia española de protección de datos (aepd) and mario costeja gonzálezm, case c-131/12. (court of justice of the european union 2014). retrieved february 20, 2019 from https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legalcontent/en/all/?uri=celex:62012cj0131. rissland, e., ashley, k., & loui, r. (2003). “ai and law: a fruitful synergy”. artificial intelligence, 150 (1-2), 1-15. retrieved february 20, 2019 from https://doi.org/10.1016/s0004-3702(03)00122-x. backes, m., bendun, f., hoffmann, j., & marnau, n. (2015). “pricl: creating a precedent, a framework for reasoning about privacy case law”. in international conference on principles of security and trust, 2015. retrieved february 20, 2019 from https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46666-7_18. tiwari, a., bendun, f., & hammer, c. (2015). “a formal logic framework for the automation of the right to be forgotten”. in security and privacy in communication networks. retrieved february 20, 2019 from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328096597_a_formal_logic_framework_for_ the_automation_of_the_right_to_be_forgotten. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): devitt, s., mann, m., daly, a. (2019, october 2-5). principles of good data. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. principles of good data s.kate devitt defence science & technology group monique mann deakin university angela daly strathclyde university introduction in recent years, there has been an exponential increase in the collection, aggregation and automated analysis of information by government and private actors that disproportionately disadvantages the underrepresented, marginalized and unheard. in response to this there has been significant critique regarding what could be termed ‘bad’ data practices in the globalised digital economy. examples include the australian centrelink ‘robo-debt’ action by the australian government that affected thousands of vulnerable australians (medhora, 2019, feb 28) or ongoing investigations into facebook’s use of private consumer data (shechner & secada, 2019, feb 22). considerations of ‘bad data’ practices often only provide critiques rather than engaging constructively with a new vision of how digital technologies and data can be used productively and justly to promote social, economic, cultural and politically progressive goals. in this paper we consider the fundamentals of good data to increase trust. we begin by conceptual considerations of the nature of ‘data’ and ‘goodness’ before defending fifteen principles of good data under four banners: community, rights, usability & politics in order to ultimately progress a more just digital economy and society. what is data? grasping the nature of data and information assists understanding how information systems have been built, as well as how they ought to be designed and managed. amongst a plethora of definitions of data and information, we align our principles with the data information knowledge wisdom (dikw) model (ackoff, 1989). dikw puts ‘data’ at the bottom of an epistemological hierarchy beneath information, knowledge and wisdom (zins, 2007). we accept the premise that all levels of information depend on an active agent. that is to say, information without an agent to believe something or to do something is either not information at all, or if it remains information, serves no purpose or value. building on the dikw model ‘data’ can be interpreted as a component of an overall epistemic spectrum of information, a lower, more raw, unprocessed epistemic level of information, or a term being used as a proxy for the whole dikw model. when evaluating data’s ‘goodness’, it is worth considering which of these three uses is applicable. when we use the term ‘data’ in this paper we mean it as a term being used as a proxy for the whole dikw model. what is good? how can data can be ‘good’? goodness can be a property of a thing, a service, a method, an event, a system, a process, a judgment, a sensation, a feeling or a combination of these. to identify ‘good’, we could suppose that there are moral facts (see parfit 2011; scanlon, 2014). agreement on moral facts enables standards, policies, practices and frameworks to improve information systems and communicate expectations. however, given the limits of our knowledge of moral facts (should they exist) and in light of colonial and post-colonial data practices (arora, 2016; connell, 2007) we assume a hybrid moral theory—where we allow that some moral facts may be objective (e.g. ‘tolerance’ or ‘openness’) and others relative (e.g. wong, 1984). a hybrid theory allows respect for cultural diversity and demands case-by-case determinations of goodness. by promoting a hybrid account, we are prepared for disagreement about what is good and assume that the discovery of moral facts (if they do exist) is non-trivial and unresolved. we advocate an ethic of active seeking, openness and tolerance to diverse views on ‘the good’ particularly consultation with the underrepresented, marginalised and unheard. principles of good data good data, particularly knowledge and wisdom in the dikw model, contribute to understanding and justify progressive political action by collectives. ‘good data’ is thus situated from an ethical perspective to progress society, rather than simply satisfying an epistemic goal to inform. therefore, we connect good data with political action and social justice. building on our analysis of ‘good data’ we present 15 principles organised under four pillars: community, rights, useability, politics: community: good data must be orchestrated and mediated by and for data subjects (principle 1), including communal sharing for community decision-making and selfgovernance (principles 2 and 3). rights: good data should be collected with respect to humans and their rights and the natural world (principle 4). usability: good data is usable and fit for purpose (principle 5); consensual, fair and transparent (principles 6, 7 and 8), and must respect interpersonal relationships (principle 9). good data is dependent on context, and with reasonable exceptions, should be open and published, revisable and form useful social capital (principle 10). politics: good data reveals and challenges the existing political and economic order (principle 11) so that data empowered citizens can secure a good democracy (principles 12, 13, 14, and 15). conclusion our research into ‘good data’ encourages data optimism beyond minimal ethical checklists and duties—thus our aim is supererogatory. we recommend good data principles to progress political and social justice agendas such as citizen-led data initiatives, accepting ‘good enough’ data to achieve aims. the aim is to dismantle existing power structures through the empowerment of communities and citizens via data and digital technologies. moving away from the body of critique of pervasive ‘bad data’ practices by both governments and private actors in the globalised digital economy, we paint an alternative, more optimistic but still pragmatic picture of the datafied future. references ackoff, r. l. (1989). from data to wisdom. journal of applied systems analysis, 16(1), 3-9. arora, p. (2016). the bottom of the data pyramid: big data and the global south. international journal of communication 10, 1681-1699. cadwalladr, c. (2018, may 8). uk regulator orders cambridge analytica to release data on us voter. the guardian. retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/uknews/2018/may/05/cambridge-analytica-uk-regulator-release-data-us-voterdavid-carroll connell, r. (2007). southern theory: the global dynamics of knowledge in social science. crows nest, australia: allen & unwin medhora, s. (2019, february 18). over 2000 people died after receiving centrelink robot-debt notice, figures reveal. triple j hack. retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/2030-people-have-died-afterreceiving-centrelink-robodebt-notice/10821272 shechner, s. & secada, m. (2019, february 22). you give apps sensitive personal information. then they tell facebook. the wall street journal. retrieved from https://www.wsj.com/articles/you-give-apps-sensitive-personal-information-thenthey-tell-facebook-11550851636 parfit, d. (2011). on what matters, volume 2. oxford: oxford university press scanlon, t.m. (2014). being realistic about reasons. oxford: oxford university press. wong, d.b. (1984). moral relativity. berkeley, ca: university of california press zins, c. (2007). conceptual approaches for defining data, information, and knowledge. journal of the american society for information science and technology. 58(4), 479-93. abstract aoir a typology of globally spread humor publish.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): nissenbaum, a., freud, d. & shifman, l. (2020, october). humor without boundaries? a typology of globally spread humor on twitter. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. humor without boundaries? a typology of globally spread humor on twitter asaf nissenbaum hebrew university of jerusalem, israel david freud hebrew university of jerusalem, israel limor shifman hebrew university of jerusalem, israel humor is an intrinsically local phenomenon. many studies have shown that what people laugh about is tailored to specific cultural, linguistic, and political conditions (davies, 1990). however, the rise of digital media created a global humorous sphere, where comic items – which are always authored in some local setting – cross national and linguistic borders and gradually form globally shared themes and ideologies (shifman, levy, & thelwall, 2014). while studies have examined the features of global humor in relation to localization or cross-cultural dynamics (boxman-shabtai & shifman, 2015; laineste & voolaid, 2017), none, to date, have systematically analyzed the features characterizing the humor globally distributed through social media. in other words, we still know very little about what typifies global digital humor in itself. the current paper addresses this gap by studying comic items that were spread on twitter by users of many languages. since the scope of such an inquiry is vast, we narrowed it down by focusing on a tenet of both humor and social media discourse: the notion of failure. the association between humor and failure goes back to bergson (1900) whose semina work describes how laughter emerges from human misconduct. the notion of failure is also engrained in the content produced 100 years later by social media users, be they socially awkward americans (milner, 2016) or chinese selfproclaimed “losers” (szablewicz, 2014). building on literature about humor, globalization, and failure, we ask: what types of failure are embedded in the usergenerated humor that reaches worldwide distribution, and how are they associated with notions of identity in global culture? virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 method in order to study global social media humor, we sampled twitter using keywords indicating humor in english, german, spanish, and arabic. each language was captured through a dedicated server for one whole year using the dmi-tcat scraping tool (borra & rieder, 2014). the resulting corpus, including a few hundred million tweets, was narrowed down to items that were shared by users of over 20 different languages. since the actual text of the tweets was primarily english, language orientation was indicated through the interface language chosen by the users (bruns & stieglitz, 2013). the corpus was then reduced further to tweets that include visual media (images or videos). these tweets were analyzed by two coders to indicate: 1) whether they are humorous; and, if so, 2) how the humorous message is delivered and what social identities are represented in it (krippendorff’s inter-coder reliability test values ranged between 0.720.84). this phase resulted in a final corpus of 734 humorous tweets which have been retweeted about 3.3 million times. in addition to the quantitative overview, we qualitatively analyzed a subset of 143 tweets (shared in 30 languages or more), attempting to uncover the types of failure and the cultural representations embedded in the texts. findings our findings indicate that global user-generated humor is focused primarily on what can be termed “the universal” rather than on specific aspects of different localities. while a set of widely spread humorous texts could be expected to include mentions of various country-specific identities as well as ethnic or political humor, the corpus largely exhibits no sense of place. this is evident in the quantitative analysis through the focus on physical (rather than verbal) humor which appears in almost 90% of the items. the qualitative analysis indicated that the corpus featured five types of failure ranging from the personal and concrete to the societal and abstract. interestingly, each category of failure also included an appropriate form of redemption turning possible tragedy into actual comedy. these five types were characterized as follows (see appendix for examples): 1. physical failure – a large group of videos featured elements that resemble cinematic slapstick humor but executed by amateurs (and not necessarily on purpose). such humor often marks the failure to perform basic of human behavior, but it is balanced by showing participants as daring or courageous either in their attempts at impressive feats or in their carefree and unimpeded attitudes. 2. failure in maintaining face – these items deal with failures of self-presentation by displaying a private “backstage” or unattractive behavior. however, this is mitigated by foregrounding the quality of authenticity, i.e., being true to yourself rather than maintaining a false appearance of successfulness. 3. failure in social relations – these items focused on unsuccessful dynamics with others and feelings of incompatibility in social situations. they are redeemed by evoking sympathy, as displays of such failures invite feelings of identification or commiseration. 4. failure in intercultural relations – in this category the notion of failed social relations is broadened to address failed intergroup relations in the global age. such texts present the failure of integrating in a global world, not understanding how it operates or your own position within it. it is redeemed by communicability, namely the ability to create connections on a basic human level that compensates for cross-cultural misunderstandings. 5. failure to create meaning – these texts, which are the most abstract of the typification, rely on nonsensical humor that avoids referential meaning but is redeemed through communality; its shared enjoyment is more important than any literal message being communicated. conclusions overall, we found that global humor charts the meaning of human failure in the digital age as a balancing act: while individuals fail miserably in the most fundamental aspects of life ranging from basic daily functions to the assignment of abstract meanings, shared laughter through social media offers collective ways of overcoming such failures. our findings also show that global user-generated humor functions as a liminal space, seeming to exist both everywhere and nowhere at once. by building on globally recognizable content and situations, it is able to evoke empathy or identification from broad, heterogeneous crowds without committing to specific identities. global digital humor can therefore be seen to bridge a cultural gap between a faceless globality and a provincial locality. while easy to reinterpret within local contexts due to its concern with universal experiences, it nevertheless resonates a sense of comfort achieved through the collective laughter of a globally shared culture. references bergson, h. (1900). laughter an essay on the meaning of the comic. urbana, illinois: project gutenberg. retrieved from www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4352 bruns, a., & stieglitz, s. (2013). towards more systematic twitter analysis: metrics for tweeting activities. international journal of social research methodology, 16(2), 91-108. borra, e., & rieder, b. (2014). programmed method: developing a toolset for capturing and analyzing tweets. aslib journal of information management, 66(3), 262-278. boxman-shabtai, l., & shifman, l. (2015). when ethnic humor goes digital. new media & society, 17(4), 520-539. davies, c. (1990). ethnic humor around the world. bloomington, in: indiana university press. laineste, l., & voolaid, p. (2017). laughing across borders: intertextuality of internet memes. the european journal of humour research, 4(4), 26-49. milner, r. m. (2016). the world made meme: public conversations and participatory media. cambridge, ma: mit press. shifman, l., levy, h., & thelwall, m (2014). internet jokes: the secret agents of globalization? journal of computer-mediated communication, 19(4), 727-743. szablewicz, m. (2014). the ‘losers’ of china’s internet: memes as ‘structures of feeling’ for disillusioned young netizens. china information, 28(2), 259-275. appendix 1. physical failure 2. failure of maintaining face 3. failure in social relations 4. failure in intercultural relations 5. failure in creating meaning selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): bridges, l. (2020, october) material entanglements of community surveillance networks & infrastructural power. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. material entanglements of community surveillance networks & infrastructural power lauren bridges annenberg school for communication, university of pennsylvania introduction since amazon acquired ring inc. in february 2018 for an estimated $1 billion, they have secured over 1,400 partnerships with law enforcement agencies who have access to consenting ring users’ feeds and publicly available content uploaded to neighbors–– the social media crime-reporting app. neighbors is marketed by ring as “your community coming together to keep you safe and informed” (neighbors by ring apps on google play, n.d.) and is a free for anyone to use and participate in, regardless of whether you own a ring product or not. although neighbors is an “opt-in” application and users choose to upload content, ring can disclose any content captured on a ring device to law enforcement that complies with a warrant or is considered a “reasonable government request” (cericola, 2020). while there is anecdotal evidence of reduced petty crime and solving local policing cases, privacy advocates are concerned about the potential for abuse of civil liberties in discriminatory community surveillance networks, like neighbors, that are predicated on a false sense of increased security (stanley, 2019) and are prone to the “policing of race in residential space” (kurwa, 2019). these kinds of neighborly surveillance practices encourage “solutions” that far outstrip the infraction and escalate minor incidents into (potentially fatal) encounters with law enforcement (gilliard, 2020). examples gleaned from local posts, reviewed for this paper, included someone stealing a pot plant from a neighbor’s stoop, to which commenters replied calling the person a “low life”, “useless scum”, a “pos”, and “pathetic”. similar moments of collective rage erupted over two kids dumping a mattress at the edge of someone’s property, a young teen charging her phone on someone’s front porch, and two youths making out on someone’s bench, which had neighbors invoke racialized and classed condemnations and encouraged the poster “call the cops”. ring have also filed patents to incorporate the use of facial recognition technology in the cameras that could be applied to live feeds and recorded content. if automated, facial 2 recognition on community surveillance feeds could alert law enforcement to a crime as it occurs and identify the perpetrator in real-time. although facial recognition is not currently part of ring’s offerings, amazon’s facial recognition program, rekognition, and other competing vendors such as clearview ai are already being widely used by law enforcement agencies, including ice, who once they have access to communityuploaded clips through the neighbors app, could apply the facial recognition technology to the feeds retroactively. over-surveilled and under-represented much important work has already been done to expose the “racializing assemblages” (weheliye, 2014) of community-police surveillance networks and the fallibility of facial recognition technology (benjamin, 2019; browne, 2010, 2015; buolamwini & gebru, 2018). this work highlights the paradox of the white-washed machine vision, which at once enacts the hyper-surveillance of black and brown bodies in order to control, constrain, and codify according to the surveillant police-state, while simultaneously underrepresenting people of color in training data sets. it presents the demand for transparency in service of the control society, while serving opacity when demands are made of its services. joy buolamwini calls this the “coded gaze” of artificial intelligence (ai), ruha benjamin (2019) says it is part of the “new jim code”, while simone browne (2015) explains this as a process of digital epidermalization drawing from fanon to explain the digital imposition of race on the body. luke stark (2019) has likened facial recognition to the plutonium of ai, where the “racializing effects are so potentially toxic to our lives as social beings that its widespread use doesn’t outweigh the risks.” there are endless examples of “data violence” (hoffmann, 2018), which expose the racialized and gendered biases that proliferate algorithmic logics. a review of comments on the neighbors app will quickly confirm such moments of data violence where unknowing subjects are gendered, classed, and racialized by their condemning neighbors. however, this paper seeks to move the focus away from individual actions of bigotry towards the infrastructural backbone, made up of discourses and fixtures, which not only makes these interactions possible, but actively produces systems of inequality. this paper asks, what are these community surveillance infrastructures producing? who do they serve? and how are they materially and discursively constructed? understanding ring as infrastructural power legal scholar, frank pasquale (2019), has proposed a periodization schema for ai research, where the first wave of research focused on the need to diversify data inputs to achieve more accurate outputs, while the second wave is concerned with structural forces, issues of governance, and power inequities endogenous to societies of control. in line with second wave concerns and wary of the dangers of “predatory inclusion” (taylor, 2019), this paper argues for an critical infrastructural approach that attends to the “complex material formations that operate at multiple scales”, recognizes 3 the “interconnections of media infrastructures with other systems”, addresses “difference and uneven conditions” which shape infrastructures, as well as the “labor, maintenance, and repair” required to sustain them (parks & starosielski, 2015). as protests against systemic racism and police violence erupted around the united states, spurred by the murder of george floyd and breonna taylor and exacerbated by the disparate effects of the global pandemic on communities of color, amazon has doubled its net profit year over year to $5.2 billion since 2019 (faulkner, 2020) and jeff bezos has added $87 billion to his personal fortune since january 2020 (toh, 2020). ring cannot be viewed in isolation of its entangled corporate owner, which relies on an ever-expanding infrastructural network, including surveillance of their highly prized package delivery service. ring is more than individual community members installing sensors and cameras that extend beyond their properties into public spaces; it is the blurring of boundaries between police work and civilian surveillance, the reliance on obscured digital infrastructures that hide their labor and material supply chains, and expansion of amazon’s vast infrastructural power. laleh khalili (2018: 915) defines infrastructural power as an assemblage of “practices, discourses, physical fixtures, laws and procedures” with the aim of (re)producing capitalist relations. this infrastructural power relies on private tech partnerships with law enforcement, community buy-in that more surveillance will improve safety, free labor from neighbors uploading content, discourses of fear and paranoia, a vast network of physical fixtures such as sensors and cameras willingly installed by civilians, and laws that allow warrants and other “reasonable government requests” to access recordings. if the house judicial committee hearings on antitrust give us any insight into how this market power is built and wielded, amazon ceo jeff bezos said it best in an internal company email about the pending acquisition of ring: “to be clear, my view here is that we’re buying the market position – not technology. and that market position and momentum is very valuable.” in addition to posts on ring’s social media app neighbors, i reviewed over 100 product reviews on review websites better business bureau (bbb), sitejabber, trustpilot, and amazon’s marketplace. both sitejabber and trustpilot, the two sites with star ratings, rated ring 1.4 and 1.6 out of 5 stars respectively, while amazon’s reviews ranged from 4.2 to 4.6 for different ring products. the complaints shared a number of common themes including issues with connectivity, instances of hacking, and feelings of “bait and switch” where users could not access their recordings without signing up for expensive on-going subscriptions called “protection plans”, all of which provide ample evidence on how amazon’s infrastructural power negatively affects customers. looking vertically into ring’s supply-chain you’ll find familiar oem’s like foxconn, a taiwanese manufacturer, who are infamous for the exploitative and abusive labor practices (condliffe, 2018). these oppressive labor regimes are reproduced throughout the amazon supply-chain seen in their staunch opposition to labor unions and crackdown on whistle-blowers (palmer, 2020), the dangerous conditions in warehouses and fulfilment centers (heater, 2020), and their restrictive non-compete clauses, which many have argued rob workers the right to practice 4 their trade where they want (jaret & vaheesan, 2019; novet, 2020; vaheesan, 2018). this paper aims to highlight the complex human and non-human entanglements that constitute community surveillance networks in order to move towards an infrastructural understanding of ring products so that we may more effectively evaluate the social and material costs of such systems. this analysis reveals how each node in the supply-chain network is entangled with histories of settler-colonialism, racialization and gendered inequities. bolstered by developments in cloud computing, concealing the human and nonhuman supply-chains, these systems are never detached from material inputs; rather, they are embedded in vast infrastructural systems and complex transnational supply chains powered by logics of extraction, circulation and accumulation of capital. further research is crucially needed to understand the political ramifications of such private infrastructures that are taking on increasingly central roles in public governance, policing, and community networks. references benjamin, r. (2019). race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. polity. browne, s. (2010). digital epidermalization: race, identity and biometrics. critical sociology, 36(1), 131–150. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920509347144 browne, s. (2015). dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. duke university press. buolamwini, j., & gebru, t. (2018). gender shades: intersectional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification. machine learning research, 81, 1–15. https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/gender-shades-intersectional-accuracydisparities-in-commercial-gender-classification/ cericola, r. (2020, february 14). ring neighbors is the best and worst neighborhood watch app. new york times. https://thewirecutter.com/blog/ring-neighbors-app-review/ chun, w. h. k. (2009). introduction: race and/as technology; or, how to do things to race. camera obscura: feminism, culture, and media studies, 24(1), 7–35. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-2008-013 condliffe, j. (2018, june 11). foxconn is under scrutiny for worker conditions. it’s not the first time. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/11/business/dealbook/foxconn-workerconditions.html faulkner, c. (2020, july 30). amazon doubled its profit during a pandemic. the verge. https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/30/21348368/amazon-q2-2020-earnings-covid-19coronavirus-jeff-bezos 5 gilliard, c. (2020, january 9). caught in the spotlight. urban omnibus. https://urbanomnibus.net/2020/01/caught-in-the-spotlight/ heater, b. (2020, may 22). an eighth amazon warehouse employee has died from covid-19. techcrunch. https://social.techcrunch.com/2020/05/22/an-eighth-amazonwarehouse-employee-has-died-from-covid-19/ hoffmann, a. l. (2018, april 30). data violence and how bad engineering choices can damage society. medium. https://medium.com/s/story/data-violence-and-how-badengineering-choices-can-damage-society-39e44150e1d4 jaret, a., & vaheesan, s. (2019, december 19). non-compete clauses are suffocating american workers. time. https://time.com/5753078/non-compete-clauses-americanworkers/ justice, a. e. for c. (2020, february 19). amazon employees share our views on company business. medium. https://medium.com/@amazonemployeesclimatejustice/amazon-employees-share-ourviews-on-company-business-f5abcdea849 kurwa, r. (2019). building the digitally gated community: the case of nextdoor. surveillance & society, 17(1/2), 111–117. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v17i1/2.12927 neighbors by ring—apps on google play. (n.d.). retrieved march 2, 2020, from https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ring.neighborhoods&hl=en_us novet, j. (2020, june 11). amazon is suing a cloud employee who left for google, rekindling the debate over non-compete agreements. cnbc. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/11/aws-case-against-worker-who-joined-googlereignites-non-compete-debate.html palmer, a. (2020, may 4). amazon engineer quits after he “snapped” when the company fired workers who called for coronavirus protections. cnbc. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/04/amazon-engineer-resigns-over-companys-treatmentof-workers.html parks, l., & starosielski, n. (eds.). (2015). signal traffic: critical studies of media infrastructures. university of illinois press. pasquale, f. (2019, november 25). the second wave of algorithmic accountability. law and political economy. https://lpeblog.org/2019/11/25/the-second-wave-ofalgorithmic-accountability/ stanley, j. (2019, september 10). should you buy a ring doorbell camera? american civil liberties union. https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillancetechnologies/should-you-buy-ring-doorbell-camera stark, l. (2019, april). facial recognition is the plutonium of ai. xrds, an acm publication. https://xrds.acm.org/article.cfm?aid=3313129 6 taylor, k.-y. (2019). predatory inclusion. n+1, fall(35). https://nplusonemag.com/issue35/essays/predatory-inclusion/ toh, m. (2020, august 27). jeff bezos is now worth a whopping $200 billion. cnn. https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/27/tech/jeff-bezos-net-worth-200-billion-intlhnk/index.html vaheesan, s. (2018, july 19). how contemporary antitrust robs workers of power. lpe project. https://lpeproject.org/blog/how-contemporary-antitrust-robs-workers-ofpower/ weheliye, a. g. (2014). habeas viscus: racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human. duke university press. wolfe, e., & ries, b. (n.d.). a hacker accessed a family’s ring security camera and told their 8-year-old daughter he was santa claus. cnn. retrieved march 2, 2020, from https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/12/tech/ring-security-camera-hacker-harassed-girltrnd/index.html suggested citation (apa): bridges, l. (2020, october 27-31). material entanglements of community surveillance networks and infrastructural power. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers. aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. aoir 2018 abstract final selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): zimmer, m, kritikos, k, vitak, j, kumar, p, and liao, y. privacy boundaries and information flow solipsism in the personal fitness information ecosystem. (2018, october 10-13) paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. privacy boundaries and information flow solipsism in the personal fitness information ecosystem michael zimmer1, katherine kritikos1, jessica vitak2, priya kumar2, and yuting liao2 1university of wisconsin, usa 2university of maryland, usa introduction fitness trackers are an increasingly popular tool for tracking health and physical activity (safavi & webb, 2016). the miniaturization and ubiquity of smartphone and mobile sensors mean that a single device can track several aspects of a user’s behavior (e.g., steps taken, floors climbed, heart rate, and calories burned). these data points, referred to as “personal fitness information” (pfi), reveal novel insights about users’ physical activity, health, and personal habits (crawford, lingel, & karppi, 2015). the benefits of these devices hinge on ubiquitous data collection and the algorithmic processing of pfi. one early study found that fitbit users wear their devices continuously, even while sleeping or showering, and have seemingly acquiesced to the device’s requisite automated collection of pfi (patterson, 2013). the pfi generated from fitness trackers, however, also contains potentially sensitive information that third parties may access in contexts that users do not anticipate. for example, court cases now regularly include evidence gleaned from fitness trackers (alba, 2016) and medical and insurance providers increasingly seek access to fitness tracker data (farr, 2017), leading privacy advocates to warn of an emerging “medical surveillance system” (farr, 2015). given increased occurrences of third-party access to pfi, researcher have begun exploring how users balance the benefits of using fitness trackers with the privacy risks of sharing highly detailed data streams about their physical activity. in general, fitness tracker users do not express many privacy concerns about pfi collection (gorm & shklovski, 2016). motti and caine (2015) surmise users’ lack of concern stems from a lack of awareness regarding how companies’ collection of granular data about users over a long period of time can compromise privacy. few regulations exist to constrain companies from sharing user data with third parties, and the u.s. food and drug administration (fda) recently announced it would lower some regulatory barriers for several technology companies – including those who design fitness trackers – to develop platforms for medical uses, such as screening pfi for medical conditions and potentially sharing that data with doctors (farr, 2017). this paper generates a more complete picture of users’ experiences with fitness trackers and how they manage pfi privacy boundaries. specifically, we argue while fitness tracker users take steps to manage privacy boundaries (petronio, 2002), they also succumb to “information flow solipsism” (proferes, 2017), meaning that while users might understand the primary technical functions and features of their fitness trackers, they are broadly unaware of “how the technology operates at a broader techno-cultural or socioeconomic level” (proferes, 2017, p. 10). our findings suggest that, largely due to the affordances of fitness tracker user interfaces and platforms, users are broadly unaware of how companies might collect and aggregate their pfi. methodology our mixed-methods approach involved a survey and semi-structured interviews. participants were recruited through emails to a random sample of 6,000 employees at two american public universities. they were invited to complete an online survey if they were at least eighteen years old, owned a smartphone, and currently used a fitbit or jawbone device. respondents could also indicate their willingness to participate in a follow-up interview. we received 363 valid completed surveys. from the completed surveys, we used criterion sampling (patton, 2005) to identify a subset of interviewees, and created four categories of users based on their relative (high vs. low) internet technology skills and their (high vs. low) general privacy concerns. during spring 2017, we interviewed 33 people across the two universities, with six to 11 people from each of the four possible categories. interview transcripts went through multiple levels of coding in the qualitative analysis program dedoose. summary of findings the majority of survey respondents (96%) used a fitbit device, and most (71%) reported wearing it every day. most respondents, however, had very limited knowledge of the companies’ data tracking and retention policies: 73% did not know whether fitbit or jawbone sold their data and 66% were not sure who owned their data. further, 85% of respondents did not know how long companies stored the data, and 89% were unsure where their data was stored besides the device. viewing our broader results through petronio’s (2002) communication privacy management (cpm) theory, we see how users’ conceptualizations of ownership, privacy rules, and turbulence surrounding their pfi influence how they manage privacy boundaries. participants largely did not see pfi as sensitive, and most interviewees expressed only minimal privacy concerns related to their pfi: one-third of interviewees simply responded “no” when asked whether they had any tracker-related privacy concerns. some admitted to being largely unaware of any broader privacy issues related to using a fitness tracker, while others recognized they may need boundaries to manage the flow of their pfi, but they did not think pfi was sensitive enough to require them to define the contours and rules of such boundaries. many interviewees expressed general ambivalence about the flow of their pfi, such as: i don’t think there’s that much information out there that really would hurt me if anybody knew about it. i don’t think there’s anybody that’s going to take my pattern of heart rate and go with and do anything to me. where are you going to get that? maybe that’s just i’m a trusting person or maybe that’s i’m naïve, but unless i have a reason for thinking or knowing that something’s going to hurt me, i don’t care. as a result, few respondents noted making changes to their default privacy settings, perhaps a result of the limited privacy controls provided on the mobile apps most participants used to interact with the fitness tracking ecosystem. while some participants may have sought to maintain ownership of their pfi and establish “thicker” privacy boundaries, the platform’s affordances limited their ability to do so as granular control of data flows and visibility is only possible via the web interface, yet few respondents indicated ever visiting the platform’s web site to view data or adjust settings. many could not remember adjusting their privacy settings at all, and assumed the default settings were still in place and trusted that their privacy was sufficiently protected as a result. for example, “i just assume i think that the protections are in place, the firewalls are in place that are going to protect me. i don't know why.” as proferes (2017) notes in his study of twitter users, “[i]nformation flow solipsists may … be more broadly unaware of what happens to the information they produce beyond the ‘real-time’” (p. 10). our findings suggest the dangers of information flow solipsism extends to fitness tracker users, where users might feel content with their management of privacy boundaries related to their pfi, while failing to understand how personal fitness information flows beyond their device lead to unanticipated privacy risks. acknowledgements this research was funded by the national science foundation under grant no 1640640. references alba, a. (2016, april 19). police, attorneys using fitness trackers as court evidence. new york daily news. retrieved october 27, 2017, from http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/police-attorneys-fitness-trackerscourt-evidence-article-1.2607432. crawford, k., lingel, j., & karppi, t. (2015). our metrics, ourselves: a hundred years of self-tracking from the weight scale to the wrist wearable device. european journal of cultural studies, 18(4–5), 479–496. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549415584857. farr, c. (2015, april 9). weighing privacy vs. rewards of letting insurers track your fitness. npr.org. retrieved october 27, 2017, from http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/04/09/398416513/weighingprivacy-vs-rewards-of-letting-insurers-track-your-fitness. farr, c. (2017, september 27). fda helps apple, alphabet and samsung in long-term health care bets. cnbc.com. retrieved october 27, 2017, from https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/27/fda-helps-apple-alphabet-and-samsung-inlong-term-health-care-bets.html. gorm, n., & shklovski, i. (2016). sharing steps in the workplace: changing privacy concerns over time. in proceedings of the 2016 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 4315–4319). new york, ny, usa: acm. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858352. motti, v. g., & caine, k. (2015). users’ privacy concerns about wearables: impact of form factor, sensors and type of data collected. in 1st workshop on wearable security and privacy (pp. 1–15). retrieved from http://fc15.ifca.ai/preproceedings/wearable/paper_2.pdf. patterson, h. (2013). contextual expectations of privacy in self-generated health information flows (pp. 1–48). presented at the tprc 41: the 41st research conference on communication, information and internet policy, arlington, va: tprc. retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2242144. patton, m. q. (2005). qualitative research. in encyclopedia of statistics in behavioral science. hoboken, nj: john wiley & sons, ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/0470013192.bsa514. petronio, s. (2002). boundaries of privacy: dialectics of disclosure. albany, ny: suny press. retrieved from http://www.sunypress.edu/p-3659-boundaries-ofprivacy.aspx. proferes, n. (2017). information flow solipsism in an exploratory study of beliefs about twitter. social media + society, 3(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117698493. deridder_dhaenens_duguay_ferris_paasonen selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 intimacies and digital media infrastructures sander de ridder ghent university frederik dhaenens ghent university stefanie duguay concordia university lindsay ferris university of oxford susanna paasonen university of turku the breadth of what it means to study intimacies in the context of media has changed significantly in recent years because of current technological, social, and cultural changes. the shift from one-to-many to many-to-many communication infrastructures has multiplied the institutional, technological, and symbolic dimensions that need to be taken into account when inquiring into sexuality, gender, intimacy and media, cultures and communications. the digitization of intimacies – which refers to changing attitudes, experiences, and practices to intimacy because of digital media – demands that scholars look beyond the well-established frameworks to study intimacy and media, expanding their methodological and theoretical perspectives in order to fully comprehend intimate life-worlds and the digital. the contributions in this panel are seeking to advance the understanding of the experiences and politics of intimacy and diversity in the context of the materiality of digital media (including affordances, algorithms, and the politics of social media platforms and data). it wants to make a theoretical, conceptual, and empirical contribution to the field by exploring how techno-cultural and socioeconomic aspects of digital media infrastructures are intertwined with intimacies. the contributions to this panel are inquiring into diverse digital media platforms (facebook messenger, dating applications and a specific focus on tinder and the video-sharing platform youtube), exploring feelings, identities, visibilities and normativities surrounding the spheres of intimacy and gender. the transformation of intimacies because of digital media infrastructures is traditionally valued in either positive or negative terms, the contributions to these panel seek to rework these assumptions. examples of distinctly positive claims are presumed increases in digital safe spaces where sexual minorities can interact (e.g., on gay dating apps such as grindr), and ideas that digital media are providing new and more opportunities for voicing non-normative gender identities (e.g., on video-sharing platforms such as youtube). an example of a negative claim is that the internet also increases sexual risks, particularly for children and young people. the panel wants to move beyond anecdotal evidence and moral claims by developing analytical approaches that understand the material complexities of digital media in relation to people’s intimate life-worlds. therefore, the contributions to this panel are using various in-depth research methodologies such as textual analysis, interviews and ethnography. using thick descriptions allows to expose the often unseen digital media infrastructures that run underneath, through, and in the background of intimacies. by conceptualizing the emerging struggles that are inherent to the accelerating digitization of intimacy, we want to explore what is changing/continuing. if digital media infrastructures are important to people’s intimacies, there is a need to engage with the question of how and why they matter. do the techno-cultural and socioeconomic aspects of digital media create flourishing and diverse sexual life-worlds and as such allow more fluid sexual imaginaries? how are sexual displays strictly regulated on different platforms, while they are at the same time widely shared? how do people value seeking intimacy trough digital media, and why is it often problematized? how do digital mainly genres constructing genders? engaging with these questions, the panels seeks to provide rich and textured insights, as well as initiate further debate on the multiple relations between people’s intimacies and digital media infrastructures. paasonen, s. (2018, october 10-13). gloryholes in the infrastructures of intimacy. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. glory holes in the infrastructures of intimacy susanna paasonen university of turku ubiquitous connectivity through apps and social media is not merely an instrumental, mediating factor or “the channel” in and for intimate attachments but a sociotechnical affordance that supports and modulates them (cf. wilson 2016, 249; author 2018). everyday lives are lived, and intimacies surface and wither, in networks composed of human and nonhuman actors in ways that are far from being metaphorical. these networks both facilitate and condition the myriad forms that sexual titillations, desires, attachments and experimentations continue to take. these infrastructures are corporate by default, and the data that user exchanges generate function as key resource and fuel within the overall economy of social media. bringing together this notion of social media as socio-technological infrastructures of intimacy together with the rather literal figure of the glory hole, this paper sets out to address the ubiquitous yet ambivalent place of sexual displays and exchanges in social media. it argues that the seeming incompatibility between corporate codes of appropriate content and conduct, as articulated in services’ terms of use, and the routinely sexual, inappropriate lines that exchanges between users take results in the dynamics of peek-a-boo where sexual user-generated content is both filtered and flagged out of public view and permanently present on and facilitated by backchannel exchanges. using the example of the dick pic as prime example, this paper then inquires after their politics of visibility and invisibility within the infrastructures of social media. glory holes are user-generated and communally maintained infrastructural features of public sex, as in the context of anonymous gay male bathroom sex (on cottaging, see light 2016; wilson 2016, 254). carved onto walls meant to separate people in various degrees of undress, they allow for occasions “of mutual enjoyment and affective intensity among otherwise unlikely intimates or partners” (race 2014, 7). glory holes allow for both physical contact and pleasures of looking and being seen. with glory holes, i am here however not referring to subversive hacking that give rise to instances of sexual freedom and unruliness rupturing corporate framework in social media. rather, i argue that, in addition to being knowingly sought out and crafted by users, they come inbuilt in the services used. social media services’ terms of use are formulated in accordance with values and norms compatible with the desires of advertisers and the corporate public image that the platform wishes to uphold. this involves a ban on publishing sexually explicit content on facebook or instagram but does not extend to private exchanges through facebook messenger or whatsapp owned by the same company. in this sense, messenger functions as the glory hole in the architecture of facebook. paasonen, s. (2018, october 10-13). gloryholes in the infrastructures of intimacy. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. glory holes facilitate exchanges cutting through presumed divides between the public and the private – as in the privacy of a booth in a public bathroom that the hole turns into a shared space. such encounters can be sought out in eager anticipation but a penis may also well intrude into one’s booth unanticipated and undesired. the case is similar with the dick pic as a symbolic depiction of genitalia that has gained something of ubiquitous presence on social media. dick pics are used as instruments of visual harassment in organized trolling campaigns and misogynistic personal attacks against, sent to potential sexual partners and displayed as advertisements of corporeal assets on dating apps, as well as shared for the purposes of humour, diversion and selfexploration (e.g. tiidenberg and cruz 2015; author & al. forthcoming). journalistic accounts of women fighting back harassment by publishing the unsolicited dicks pics from social media backchannels have been abounding, as have tumblr galleries dedicated to the art of the dick pic. like penises sticking through glory holes, dick pics can be solicited or unsolicited, objects of pleasure or aversion, instruments for violence and intimacy in contexts straight and queer. while self-shooting facilitated by mobile phones has, in combination with the ease of sharing the outcome, fuelled dick pic creation and the overall cultural presence of such imaging practices, it would be erroneous to consider them as unique to the current moment. dick pics were sent for decades in readers’ letters to porn magazines for the thrill of them being potentially published and as standard features in gay online dating well before the uses of apps (author & al. forthcoming). their social circulation has accelerated in networked media both in terms of volume and the diverse ends that they are put into. special spaces are allocated for dick pics in social media, from platforms such as tumblr and twitter allowing for the public sharing of sexual content to the backchannel options of messenger, whatsapp and snapchat. following lauren berlant (2000, 4), intimacy is a matter of “connections that impact on people, and on which they depend for living”. considered as an infrastructure of intimacy, social media affords and shapes connections and disconnections as ones involving more than merely human parties: devices, apps, platforms and algorithms all impact on people, and they are all depended on for living. as ara wilson (2016, 270) points out, the prefix “infra” means “below” in ways indicating default invisibility or hiddenness. a critical focus on infrastructures of intimacy makes it possible to map out the avenues designed for their construction – such as facebook relationship statuses, hearts, tags and backchannel exchanges – as ones of varying default visibility. exchanges through the glory hole of messenger generate user data similarly to any other user activities on facebook. as part of site and app architecture, the backchannel contributes to flows of user data allowing for its increased granularity, yet without offending third parties and commercial partners with any potential sexual explicitness. since sexual interests and exchanges drive social media traffic, blocking them completely out would not only be impossible but bad for business. deployed in the context of social media, the figure of the glory hole then shifts attention away from the intentions and experiences of people – as in instances of sending and receiving dick pics – towards the infrastructures that make such exchanges possible by design. paasonen, s. (2018, october 10-13). gloryholes in the infrastructures of intimacy. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. references berlant, lauren. 2000. intimacy: a special issue. in lauren berlant (ed.), intimacy. chicago: university of chicago press, 1–8. light, ben. 2016. producing sexual cultures and pseudonymous publics with digital networks. in rebecca ann lind (ed.), race and gender in electronic media: content, context, culture. london: routledge, 231-246. race, kane. 2015. speculative pragmatism and intimate arrangements: online hook-up devices in gay life. culture, health & sexuality 17, no. 4: 496-511. tiidenberg, katrin and cruz, edgar gómez. 2015. selfies, image and the re-making of the body. body & society 21, no. 4: 77–102. wilson, ara. 2016. the infrastructure of intimacy. signs: journal of women in culture and society 41, no. 2: 247-280. duguay, s., & ferris, l. (2018, october 10-13). the digital lesbian imaginary: investigating (im)permeable boundaries of sexual identity on tinder. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the digital lesbian imaginary: investigating (im)permeable boundaries of sexual identity on tinder stefanie duguay concordia university lindsay ferris university of oxford introduction there are women looking for women on the app that are not interested romantically in women. that’s why there is a certain aspect of trying to look queer when you’re on your tinder profile. – jane (23, united kingdom) there’s a three-stage thing to how confident i am that they’re gay. if they have the but nothing else, then i’m like, “maybe.” and if they have the and then they have [facebook] ‘likes,’ like [gay bars], then i’m like, “probably.” but if they’re like outright, “oh, i like girls” or they slip in that they’re gay somewhere, i’m like, “yep.” – danaë (19, australia) jane and danaë are referring to their difficulty discerning the sexual identity of others on tinder, a popular dating app primarily marketed to heterosexual users. while individuals can change their search criteria to “men seeking men” and “women seeking women”, this paper explores the insufficiency of these settings for women who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (lgbtq) in their search for female-identified partners. the “women seeking women” setting allows for the formation of a public among lgbtq women but this public is permeable to predatory men, couples, and heterosexual women. in response to this intrusion, lgbtq women send clear signals of sexual identity to each other. they reference cultural symbols associated with lesbian identity, constructing a digital lesbian imaginary that makes their attraction to women easily recognizable. while this digital lesbian imaginary enables lgbtq women to meet through a mainstream dating app, it also poses restrictions to the more fluid sexual and gender identities these women present in other publics. digital and lgbtq imaginaries the concept of “digital imaginary” comprises the many ways that cultural referents combine with technological infrastructures to create new possibilities. with regard to shifting forms of communication, hess and zimmerman (1999) refer to “transnational digital imaginaries” as “suspended somewhere in-between the material realisitive of the current political era and our collective ability to radically reimagine different ways of thinking about, producing, and interfacing with visual works” (p. 150). they further describe the digital as refiguring “past/future traces,” viewing digital media as opening duguay, s., & ferris, l. (2018, october 10-13). the digital lesbian imaginary: investigating (im)permeable boundaries of sexual identity on tinder. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. possibilities for creating future cultural meanings – locally and across nations – while also drawing on current and past media and politics. building on this perspective, miller’s (2014) speculative collection of imaginary apps illustrates how mobile apps are often software instantiations of metaphors and cultural tropes. extending conceptualizations of technological affordances, nagy and neff (2015) define imagined affordances as emerging “between users’ perceptions, attitudes, and experiences; between the materiality and functionality of technologies; and between the intentions and perceptions of designers” (p. 5). our paper uncovers these imagined aspects of tinder’s infrastructure, as they combine with user intentions and cultural references to construct or transgress boundaries of sexual identity. this paper also invokes imaginaries relating to stigmatized sexual identities. lgbtq individuals have long operated in opposition to the heteronormativity of mixed spaces, signaling sexuality to each other in varying and covert ways (green, 1997). for women attracted to women, these signals are ever shifting but align with particular fashion, behavior, politics, and co-situation within lgbtq spaces to constitute an archetypical lesbian identity. it is through these cultural references and signals that lgbtq women construct imagined, mutually shared sexual identities. as sexual identity becomes increasingly mediated, these signals also draw on digital features and functions, involving textual styles, email signatures, emoji, and images as digitally embodied references to sexual identity (e.g. correll, 1995). methods this paper combines findings from two similar studies of lgbtq women’s use of tinder. one author interviewed ten women in australia and canada while the other author interviewed seventeen women in the united kingdom (uk). during these semistructured interviews, participants led the researcher through their tinder profiles and various apps screens, following procedures similar to jørgensen’s (2016) media goalong method. taken together, these 27 participants varied in age from 19 – 35, sexual self-identification (e.g., lesbian, gay, queer, pansexual, homoflexible), and gender identity. although all were female-identified, several identified as genderfluid, presenting varying degrees of masculinity or femininity. since the interviews followed a similar structure and criteria for participant recruitment, analyzing them together allows for the triangulation of findings (hammersley, 2013). while these studies present a transnational analysis of lgbtq women’s tinder experiences, their focus on westernized countries presents both a limitation and opportunity for future research with regard to extending our findings to other cultures and locations. findings and discussion upon selecting “women seeking women” on tinder, our participants viewed themselves as entering a separate public for lgbtq women. elizabeth (26, uk) described a scarcity of physical meeting places for lgbtq women, noting that “apps like this, where you have to swipe to meet people, were the places where [women she knew] met.” duguay, s., & ferris, l. (2018, october 10-13). the digital lesbian imaginary: investigating (im)permeable boundaries of sexual identity on tinder. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. despite this utility, participants expressed frustration with deceptive profiles belonging to men or couples soliciting sexual messages, photos, and hookups. julia (28, australia) recounted multiple run-ins with “catfishing” users, who she described as “someone who’s a fake, a guy pretending to be a girl or something.” subtler than catfishing accounts were the women jane references in the opening quote, who were “bi-curious” or looking for friends. to contend with the permeation of these users, participants played what alex (21, uk) called the “guessing game of who is legitimately gay and who is not.” participants signaled their “legitimately gay” sexual identity by combining tinder’s imagined affordances with symbols of an imagined, shared lesbian identity. they referenced lesbian-associated popular culture, such as the television show orange is the new black, and – through tinder’s visual emphasis and connection with facebook – displayed lesbian fashion, affiliation with lesbian-related locales, and symbols including the emoji. alex identified others’ sexual identities “mostly through stereotypes,” an approach that resonated with most participants. despite interchangeably referencing gay, lesbian, queer, and other sexual identities in interviews, participants’ combination of tinder’s imagined affordances with longstanding references to lesbian culture instantiated a digital lesbian imaginary on tinder. those who did not present these signals were subject to questioning from other women over their intentions. chloe (27, uk), who describes herself as “queer femme,” explained, “it’s frustrating when people ask me if i identify as straight when clearly i don’t.” the widespread practice of incorporating tinder’s features to quickly signal lesbian identity contributed to the erasure of other identities in this public. these findings highlight how a dating platform’s infrastructure and user practices combine to narrow the diversity of representational norms rather than allowing for more fluid sexual imaginaries. references correll, s. (1995). the ethnography of an electronic bar: the lesbian cafe. journal of contemporary ethnography, 24(3), 270–298. green, j. (1997). language: polari. critical quarterly, 39(1), 127-131. hammersley, m. (2013). what is qualitative research? london: bloomsbury. hess, j., & zimmermann, p. r. (1999). transnational digital imaginaries. wide angle, 21(1), 149–167. jørgensen, k. m. (2016). the media go-along: researching mobilities with media at duguay, s., & ferris, l. (2018, october 10-13). the digital lesbian imaginary: investigating (im)permeable boundaries of sexual identity on tinder. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. hand. journal of media and communication research, 60, 32–49. miller, p. d. (2014). preface. in p. d. miller & s. matviyenko (eds.), the imaginary app (pp. ix–xv). cambridge, ma and london: mit press. nagy, p., & neff, g. (2015). imagined affordance: reconstructing a keyword for communication theory. social media + society, 1(2), 1–9. de ridder, s. (2018, october 10-13). dating and datafication: feelings of technological dependence. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. dating and datafication: feelings of technological dependence sander de ridder ghent university dating applications on smartphones (e.g. tinder, happn, grindr) are based on the automated accumulation, sorting and interpretation of data; they allow people to connect. as they are becoming increasingly popular to use, dating apps are embedded into many people’s everyday intimate connections. the automation of data processing is a significant evolution in the social construction of intimacy, which is becoming increasingly dependent on media technologies and its institutions (couldry and hepp, 2017). as dating apps are domesticated into the everyday lives of people, these “personal digital data assemblages” (lupton, 2016) are deeply meaningful, constituting affective, sensory and practical infrastructures that are making intimate connections possible (pink et al., 2017). this contribution is interested in the personal and experiential ways dating apps both emerge and are implicated into people’s intimacies. drawing on ethnographic research in the city of london (kitchin and dodge, 2011; pink, 2009), involving 10 young adults between 18 and 30 years old, this presentation focuses people’s affective attachments to the presence of dating apps in their everyday life worlds. the data consists of deep conversations with participants (lasting between 90 minutes up to two hours), focusing on the cognitive and emotional aspects of datafication; how they are experienced between human interpretation and particular algorithmic processes, but also in relation to the environment such as the cosmopolitan context of london. it draws on how intimate and sexual lives in large cities is, by default, characterized by intense (digital) communication, difference and diversity, but also loneliness and continuous change. drawing on the european cultural studies tradition of audience research (ang, 1985; morely, 1992) this contribution does not seek to merely understand people’s individual affective attachments to direct uses of dating applications, but rather aims to grasp the datafication of intimacy as a collective experience among people living in shared temporal and spatial life worlds. lynn jamieson’s (2011) description of intimacy, she explores intimacy from a perspective of “global change” and within “cross cultural contexts”, is used as a conceptual lens. for jamieson, intimacy refers to “the quality of close connection between people and the process of building that quality”; which allows this contribution to ask the question of how people value the datafication of dating and intimacy in relation to building intimacy and closeness. the participants in this ethnographic study had arrived in london for less than four years, sharing the experience of being a university student or a young professional. the participants responded to a call which was distributed by a major london university to students and recent graduates. the call invited people who wanted to share stories about de ridder, s. (2018, october 10-13). dating and datafication: feelings of technological dependence. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. dating applications, stating they could be a current user of dating applications or not, as shown in the following fragment from the call. “participants can be those who love using dating applications, hate them, need them, have been using them, or maybe never will. you can be a ‘heavy’ daily consumer, or not; maybe these apps are very present in your life-world, without you using them (but you still have something to say about them).” the findings and discussions draw on five participants that were actual users of dating applications, two participants that had been using dating applications but stopped using them, and three who never used dating applications but had many things they wanted to share about them. a primary way for understanding the collective experiences that bounded each participant together was a reflection on their needs (in various degrees and in diverse constellations) to build close intimate connections in london. those that used dating apps were able to have an always available connected presence with potential close connections, securing them from destabilizing feelings of loneliness; as such dating apps are seen as providing a sense of “ontological security” (giddens, 1994). dating app users valued the datafication of dating because it allowed them to accommodate to their various needs; from carefully using match making algorithms to find ‘the one’, to seeking casual (sexual) encounters afforded by playful matching games based on nearby location and a profile picture. the datafication of dating means that seeking intimate connection is organized by an “objectification contract” (wark 2017); algorithms provide a service accommodating various needs for intimate connection that users must learn to navigate. those participants that did not use dating apps morally disapproved of such an objectification contract (it threatened “authentic intimacy”), or some argued the datafication of seeking intimacy is simply “too intense” to navigate. i argue how these moral opinions on datafied dating are related to how non-users of dating apps were overwhelmed by a feeling of dependence on dating apps; they felt as having no choice anymore but to commit themselves to an objectification contract organized by dating applications. the feeling of being overwhelmed by the ubiquitous presence of dating apps was connected to how not using dating applications means not having the ontological security they provided to people that did use them. dating applications are being seen as necessary resources to navigate closeness in cosmopolitan london. this contribution concludes with making a theoretical contribution. when the participants argued they felt dependent on the logic of data processing to find intimacy, this was connected to having strong (negative) moral opinions on the use dating applications. such feelings of dependence are showing how datafication processes matter greatly in the intimate lives of people. moreover, these feelings of dependence are illustrative of the cultural power of datafication processes; it shows how they are reshaping the values of what building “good” intimacies means in deeply mediatized societies. de ridder, s. (2018, october 10-13). dating and datafication: feelings of technological dependence. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. references ang, i. (1985) watching dallas: soap opera and the melodramatic imagination. london: methuen. couldry n. and hepp a. (2017) the mediated construction of reality. cambridge: polity. giddens, a. (1994) modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age. cambridge: polity press. jamieson, l. (2011). intimacy as a concept: explaining social change in the context of globalisation or another form of ethnocentricism? sociological research online 16(4). http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/15.html kitchin r. and dodge m. (2011) code/space. software and everyday life. london: the mit press. lupton d. (2016) foreword: lively devices, lively data and lively leisure studies. leisure studies 35(6): 709-711. morely, d. (1992) television, audiences and cultural studies. london: routledge. pink s. (2009) doing sensory ethnography. london: sage. pink s. sumartojo s, lupton d, et al. (2017) mundane data: the routines, contingencies and accomplishments of digital living. big data & society 4(1): 2053951717700924. wark, m.k. (2017) general intellects. new york, ny: verso. dhaenens, f. (2018, october 10-13). (un)covering masculinities in cover song videos. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. (un)covering masculinities in cover song videos frederik dhaenens ghent university even though the practice of covering popular songs is far from new, the increased availability of accessible video capture software and the ability to upload home-made videos on video sharing websites has encouraged music fans and aspiring amateur performers to share their cover song videos. the popularity of the practice, however, has led to the development of an internet genre with its own set of normative conventions (kavoori 2011). to understand the gendered dimensions and meanings of this practice, i conducted a qualitative study that explored the way gender is being articulated in the songs, videos and on the platform. taking notice of the fact that many young men produce cover songs videos of mainstream pop songs in domestic spaces, i examined how young male amateur performers negotiate these stereotypically ‘feminine’ spaces, media texts and practices. as popular music scholars (biddle & jarman-ivens, 2007) have demonstrated, popular music culture is heavily gendered. different discursive practices ensure that a hierarchical gender order is upheld in popular music culture, demonstrated in the underrepresentation of women in various branches of the music industry or the gendering of genres and music instruments. a glaring contrast is the way pop and rock are framed and experienced as opposites, shaping pop music as categorically feminine and rock masculine (coates 1997). yet, what happens to the reiteration of gender hierarchies when we take into account the practice of cover songs in itself and its mediation on and transformation via youtube? to this end, i conducted a qualitative analysis of the youtube channels of five cisgender amateur performers. the selection was based on the following criteria: the performers are engaged in producing cover song versions of ‘popular’ music artists; they produced at least ten videos; they vary from one another in terms of popularity and professionalism. even though the selection has no intention in being fully representative, it allows to understand the diverse and similar ways masculinity is being negotiated in the popular media practice. drawing on the results of this analysis, i argue in this paper (a) why the genre of cover song videos may be able to challenge a hegemonic masculine ideal (connell, 2005) and (b) how this practice and platform enables, shapes and restrains the performance and representation of masculinities. to understand how gender is negotiated in the internet genre of the cover song video, i start by pointing out how cover songs are able to highlight the gendered dimension of popular music culture. the value of a cover song resides in the artistic interpretation. even though the alterations may vary, it is considered crucial that the cover song features an explicit recognition and negotiation of the original song. a common alteration concerns gender, where men perform songs by women and vice versa (plasketes, 2005). the gender bending in cover songs should not be taken lightly, as halberstam (2007) pointed out how cover songs may be an importance source for dhaenens, f. (2018, october 10-13). (un)covering masculinities in cover song videos. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. queerness. she considers that covering allows one to revisit a musical past to look for modes to articulate queer affect and resistance to heteronormativity. she stresses that cover songs should not per se be an ironic appropriation as cover artists often express a sincere affection and respect for the originals even though they reimagine the song by altering genre, lyrics or singing voice. the ability of cover songs to deconstruct the gender order resonates well with taylor’s (2012) perspective on popular music culture to reach out to people who are unable to express their sexual or gender identities in their everyday-lives. whereas nonnormative identities are generally repressed in public, popular music culture offers various means for self-identification and community formation around nonnormative gender and sexual identities. besides more obvious genres such as coming out videos and slash fiction videos, i argue that the cover song video genre demonstrates taylor’s argument through its challenges to a hegemonic masculine ideal, despite the creation of normative conventions. amateur performers on youtube are aware of its potential to transform them into stars (kavoori 2001). achieving symbolic capital thus depends on choices involving the regulating and marketing of the self, which van dijck (2013) underscores as something young people experience as normal in their everyday-lives. like with any identity profile on social media, amateur performers present a paradoxical identity. on the one hand, they stress the authenticity of them being as ordinary as their own followers and fans but, on the other, claim control over how they represent themselves ‘as authentic’, which involves the choice of songs, setting, outfits, attitude and the amount and kind of biographical snippets they share. the choices made are not random. they result from careful negotiations of what kind of authentic identity the performers want to portray, often based on the practices of other producers of cover song videos. yet, these shared conventions does not imply a similar performance of masculinity. looking at the young male performers in our sample, we notice a variety of masculinities. even though the sample consists of cisgender men, they perform divergent masculinities that are situated on a continuum between queer masculinities and more traditional masculinities. yet, none of them reiterates a masculinity that is legitimated in contemporary western society as superior to other men or women. nor are they engaged in policing the masculinity of other performers or fans. they welcome praise on their music and looks by male and female fans. further, even though few men explicitly represent themselves as queer or part of the lgbtq community, many cover songs by openly lgbtq artists such as sam smith or troye sivan, perform in ‘feminized’ spaces such as the living room or bedroom, and rarely underscore a heterosexual identity. last, the platform offers a space for young men to represent nonnormative masculinities through music and cover song videos while the videos on their own provide representations to audiences who are looking for role models who do not adhere to a hegemonic masculine ideal. even though the masculinities correspond to what van dijck has described as paradoxical, with a performance of a sincere and fragile masculinity in a domestic setting as the videos’ main trope, they nonetheless help establishing processes of identification. as many comments to the youtube videos reveal, their active audiences applaud the various expressions of masculinity. few dhaenens, f. (2018, october 10-13). (un)covering masculinities in cover song videos. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. attack the musical capacities, personality and masculinity of the performer and those who do are being reproached by fierce defenders. despite the corporate capitalization on the free labor of these performers and the normative self-regulation of authenticity within social media spaces, internet genres create potentialities where ordinary people are allowed to embody a fragility that acts as a vehicle for the embodiment of inclusive and queer masculinities. references biddle, i. & jarman-ivens, f. (2007) “introduction: oh boy! making masculinity in popular music,” in f. jarman-ivens & i. biddle (eds) oh boy! masculinities and popular music, new york and abingdon: routledge, pp. 1-17. coates, n. (1997) “(r)evolution now? rock and the political potential of gender,” in s. whiteley (ed.) sexing the groove: popular music and gender, abingdon and new york: routledge, pp. 50-64. connell, r.w. (2005) masculinities, 2nd edn, berkeley and los angeles: university of california press. halberstam, j. (2007) “keeping time with lesbians on ecstasy,” women and music: a journal of gender and culture, 11: 51-58. kavoori, a. (2011) reading youtube: the critical viewers guide, new york: peter lang. plasketes, g. (2005) “re-flections on the cover age: a collage of continuous coverage in popular music,” popular music and society, 28(2): 137-161. taylor, j. (2012) playing it queer: popular music, identity and queer world-making, bern: peter lang. van dijck, j. (2013) “‘you have one identity’: performing the self on facebook and linkedin,” media, culture & society, 35(2): 199-215. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): eberwein, t. (2020, october). watching the watchdog: online discourses about media frauds. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. watching the watchdog: online discourses about media frauds tobias eberwein austrian academy of sciences / alpen-adria-universität, vienna, austria background: potentials and pitfalls of narrative journalism theoretical and practical justifications of journalistic storytelling stress its potentials for creating a truthful and authentic account of social reality – a necessary prerequisite for journalism in order to live up to its role as a public watchdog (e.g., schmidt 2019). at the same time, however, narrative approaches to journalism are a regular cause of considerable criticism, particularly when they contribute to blurring the sacred boundaries between fact and fiction (underwood 2013). public discussions about the mandate of narrative journalism are often triggered by fraud scandals such as the ones provoked by pseudo-reporters janet cooke or jayson blair in the u.s., and tom kummer or claas relotius in the german-speaking world (e.g., jones patterson & urbanski 2006; reus 2004). the proposed paper uses the relotius case as a starting point for a systematic analysis of the responsibility of narrative journalists in an age of “fake news” and post-truth politics – and the question of how they can be held to account in the online realm. the relotius case and its implications for internet research for many colleagues, claas relotius counted as one of the most talented journalistic storytellers of his generation. he contributed to the most renowned print media in the german-speaking world, most notably to the news magazine der spiegel, for which he not only wrote a regular column (“eine meldung und ihre geschichte”, engl. “a news item and its story”), but also brought to perfection the so-called reconstructive reportage – a specific narrative genre that has been flourishing in the magazine for at least a decade. in december 2018, aged 33, he received the german “reporterpreis”, the most prestigious national award for narrative journalism, for the fourth time – an unprecedented achievement. less than three weeks later, it became known that he had fabricated many of his texts, either completely or partly. after admitting his all too careless fusion of fact and fiction, relotius returned his awards and resigned from his job at the spiegel. although this revelation developed into one of the biggest german media scandals of the recent years and triggered a massive outcry, also in international media, the case still lacks a systematic analysis from the academic perspective. this deficit is all the more deplorable because the relotius case could not only contribute to an ethical reflection about the potentials and pitfalls of narrative journalism in the digital age. it also raises the issue of how narrative journalists as public watchdogs can be held to account themselves: while journalistic contents are usually free from direct state control in most democratic societies, the idea of professional self-regulation (e.g. with the help of press and media councils) has become a well-accepted principle of journalistic quality management (e.g., frost 2000). however, its effectivity is often put into question – not only in the light of recurring fraud scandals (campbell 1999). criticism of journalistic self-regulation has paved the way for a discussion of possible benefits of a public social control of journalism in the online realm, e.g. through media watchblogs and critical media observation via social media (fengler et al. 2014). until today, however, it is unclear in how far such online instruments of media accountability can really improve the discourse about journalistic quality in a sustainable manner. research methods the paper attempts to close this research gap with the help of an empirical multimethod study. while an extensive literature review and 13 problem-centered interviews with journalistic storytellers are helpful to highlight and systematize the specific benefits and the ethical challenges of narrative journalism in the german-speaking world and beyond, a comparative analysis of the discourses about the relotius case in professional journalistic online media, on the one hand, and non-professional media watchblogs, on the other hand, makes it possible to juxtapose different attributions of responsibility and suggested consequences for practical journalism. the discourse analysis covers a time span of twelve months after the revelation of the scandal surrounding claas relotius (december 2018 to november 2019) and includes a selection of ten german-language and ten international websites that contributed to the discussion of the case. selected results the multi-method study allows for a differentiated assessment of web-based media accountability processes in general and the relotius case in particular: the review of research from the fields of literary and journalism studies demonstrates that stylistic devices of fiction have a long history in german narrative journalism – and, in many cases, they are an effective means for increasing the truthfulness of journalistic writing. the problem-centered interviews with senior reporters show that spiegel has used and promoted such techniques for years – most importantly with its concept of the reconstructive reportage. the discourse analysis focusing on the public debate following the revelation of the scandal points out that spiegel’s editorial board, on the one hand, reacted to the case in a professional manner, by opting for complete transparency in its treatment of the fabrications; on the other hand, however, its reaction also displays a clear lack of self-criticism, because the fictitious techniques that caused relotius’ downfall are – to some extent – common practice in the magazine’s narrative pieces. interestingly, the empirical results display clear differences in the online discourses initiated by professional journalists and by non-professional watchbloggers. while many professional commenters prioritize the individual faults of claas relotius as a “pathological” liar and primarily recommend reforms on the newsroom level (such as better fact-checking and new ombudsman positions) as a consequence, nonprofessional commenters stress erroneous trends on the macro-level of the journalism system and diverge with regard to recommended measures. a juxtaposition of the professional and non-professional online discourses reveals a bias for both points of view, thus illustrating typical limitations of both journalistic self-regulation and external public control. the results are reflected from a normative perspective and, thus, also contribute to the development of a responsible substantiation of journalistic storytelling beyond popular phrases such as “fake news” and “lying press”. references campbell, a. j. (1999). self-regulation and the media. federal communications law journal, 51(3), 711-771. fengler, s., eberwein, t., mazzoleni, g., porlezza, c., & russ-mohl, s. (eds.) (2014). journalists and media accountability. an international study of news people in the digital age. new york etc.: peter lang. frost, c. (2000). media ethics and self-regulation. london: longman. jones patterson, m., & urbanski, s. (2006). what jayson blair and janet cooke say about the press and the erosion of public trust. journalism studies, 7(6), 828-850. reus, g. (2004). mit doppelter zunge. tom kummer und der new journalism. in bleicher, j. k., & pörksen, b. (eds.), grenzgänger. formen des new journalism (pp. 249-266). wiesbaden: vs. schmidt, t. r. (2019). rewriting the newspaper: the storytelling movement in american print journalism. columbia: university of missouri press. underwood, d. (2013). the undeclared war between journalism and fiction. journalists as genre benders in literary history. new york: palgrave macmillan. rebranding religion on youtube: salafism and ‘third spaces’ abstract this paper presents an analytical challenge to the study of salafism after the 2011 arab spring. with the help of mass media, self-identified salafists in the united kingdom construct an increasingly politicized form of salafism that diverts from historical salafi movements in being global, multicultural, and applying the language of postmodernity. using evidence from the youtube channel salafimedia, i challenge the categorization of salafism as an anti-modern islamic revivalist group. i demonstrate that salafimedia’s construction of islam uses “in-betweenness” of islamic revivalism and islamic reformation, or a third space, creating a new type of salafism. in this third space, the dialectical relationship between the message of salafism and the channel’s platform allows for the creation of an islam that is both modern and a return to the origins of islam. keywords youtube, third spaces, salafism, rebranding of islam, dawah (outreach) salafimedia and the rebranding of islam islamic reformation and islamic revivalism (see smart & denny, 2013) have been two hot-button topics in western media, especially after the emergence of new forms of salafism after the 2011 arab spring. while islamic reformation is often treated as favorable due to its adaptation to western norms, the islamic revival of salafism is feared to bring back an ancient and anti-modern form of islam that could threaten western society. however, in face of salafists' increasing usage of mass media, how do we analyze a form of salafism created through the media? a prime example is the youtube channel salafimedia, which was created in 2009 with the aim to promote monotheism (tawheed) and strict adherence to the qur’an and sunnah upon the understanding of the righteous predecessors (salaf al-salih) or the first generations of muslims after the prophet muhammad (see also meijer, 2009). according to the website, salafimedia's main concern is outreach (dawah) and the target audience is male muslims in the uk and internationally, who are addressed as brothers. as of february 28th, 2013, there are 908 subscribers and 60,661 views of the channel’s shows, interviews, news, lectures, and other “top quality programming,” which are designed produce the best insight to islam. salfimedia identifies as the most authentic and most modern muslim community (ummah), as demonstrated in their most recent video posting, entitled the new salafimedia rebrand video 2013: 4th year relaunch. describing their new identity as rebranded and salafism as a brand indexes marketing or business strategies – a new brand usually sells a new outlook. furthermore, employing the metaphors of "rewriting the script" and "going back to the drawing board" further communicates the members’ desires to reorganize and change their story, more so since they increasingly have to respond to accusations of radicalization by the uk government. salfimedia becomes a platform for social action and their beliefs become politicized. the rebranding video has two parts: the first part presents action sequences and special effects that accompany important messages. for instance, the video begins with the image of a lion, later explained by “may allah make us have the roar of a lion, with the heart of a lion.” text runs through the screen, urging the audience to “believe in it, live by it, be ready to die for it,” where it refers to the promise of allah, the call, or the revelation. in the transition to the second part, a wild black horse gallops over a dark, war-torn, post-apocalyptic world accompanied by lightening flashes, symbolizing both the destruction of a corrupt world and the renewal and power through salafi islam. in the second part, four lecturers scold an imaginary muslim audience about having forgotten the core message of the prophet muhammad from 1400 years ago. for special effects, superimposed animations of gunshots are fired through the screen and followed by explosions. the men project salafism as “the truth and nothing but the truth” and they tell their followers that they are the best ummah. especially prominent are the speakers’ repeated calls to “enjoin the good and forbid the evil,” highlighting the binary oppositions between the salafis (the good) and the western unbelievers or kufar (the evil). only through a radical reorientation to the way of the salaf can the global ummah regain agency, strength, power, and victory. the video is an urgent wake-up call for misguided muslims. my analysis shows that salafimedia is neither an islamic revivalist nor a reformist movement. on one hand, it is revivalist because it clings to the way of the salaf, despite accusations of being anti-modern and oppressive. on the other hand, it differs greatly from salafist norms before the 2011 arab spring that are very much anchored in territory, ethnicity, nation, kinship, or tribe. all four men insist that they are “not a group," nor do they support any uk based islamic group or organization. instead, they call on the ummah to “leave off all groups, deviant sects, and parties.” the audience is encouraged to solely identify with the salaf and to background other possible identity categories, such as ethnicity, nationality, or denomination. this allows new salafis to circumvent mosques or islamic centers that might not accept them so readily. the modern educated islamic activist defies the traditional muslim legal scholars (ulama). olivier roy, a scholar on islamic practice, links this type of deterritorialization of islam to the growing number of muslims living in western non-muslim countries, which spreads specific forms of religiosity, including neo-fundamentalism, a renewal of spirituality, and an insistence on islam as a system of values and ethics. assuming that this is the case and that "religiosity" is more important than "religion," we can see commonalities between the creed of salafimedia and contemporary reformed religions, such as christianity. it is not surprising that the basic ways to get to the truth in salafism are embedded in postmodern religiosity that foregrounds an inward-looking and personal relationship with god (see also stadlbauer, 2013). feelings of being in touch with god are more important than closed scriptural interpretations that developed over centuries. this privatization of faith has been seen in numerous evangelical and charismatic movements. roy claims that "islam cannot escape the new age of religions or choose the form of its own modernity" (p. 6). in sum, the productive and creative modes of religious meaning-making through an internet platform complicate the analysis of contemporary salafist movements. what is clear is that salafimedia is not a digital extension of a “real” salafi community. instead, the youtube platform creates third spaces (hoover & echchaibi, 2012) in which individualized “true” islam can thrive outside the confines of corruptible human interpretations by the ulama. it creates a decentralized, egalitarian, and multicultural community, aligning with precepts of postmodernity. in this space, both the ultra-orthodox salafist doctrine and the youtube channel platform are in a dialogical relationship and promise easy, direct, and unmediated access. the former grants direct access to the qur’an, sunnah, and hence to god as the highest authority. similarly, the youtube platform grants free and quick access to animated messages. the controversial rhetoric of salafimedia fits well with this platform that is known for presenting revolutionary, innovative, and authentic ideas. the youtube channel creates new possibilities for the actualization of belief that not only defy opposing “real” and “unreal” communities, but also should make us wary of classifying new salafi movements as anti-modern or not, revivalist or not, or reformist or not. instead, rebranding might be a better analytic concept. references hoover, s. & echchaibi, n. (2012) the ‘third spaces’ of digital religion. the center for media, religion, and culture, university of colorado at boulder. boulder: colorado. meijer, r. (ed.) (2009). global salafism: islam's new religious movement. new york: columbia university press. roy, o. (2004). globalized islam: the search for a new ummah. new york: columbia university press. smart, n. & denny, f. (2013). islamic modernism and islamic revival. atlas of the world’s religions, second edition. oxford islamic studies online. retrieved from http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/article/opr/t253/e9. stadlbauer, s. (2013). purity, faith development narratives, and the resignification of islamic ritual. narrative inquiry, 22:1. neo-pagans online: an example of third space abstract the relationship between religion and media opens today a wide range of possibilities of expression and new ways of living one’s spirituality. i analyze some neo-pagan and wiccan presences (like the website www.wicca.com, the celtic connection) on the web to show how new spiritualties based on ancient rituals and beliefs can use internet to enhance connections and to create new spaces of action. i utilize the concept of third space in relation to digital cultures and their capacity to create new environments; working with this framework, i analyze online aesthetics, authority, in-between-ness as well as construction of virtual selves and communities. keywords neo-paganism; wicca; third space; rituals neo-pagans online in my analysis of neo-pagan websites i take into consideration two main features. the first one is the capacity to transpose online an offline world, that is, create virtual communities that mirror groups of physical persons in different geographical places; this help them practice and gain knowledge of a new religion that is often stigmatized in the offline world. the second one is the creation of a new set of practices and actions entirely online. examples of this are virtual communities that practice rituals online through chat-rooms, blogs or second life and engage in relationships that are only on the web. in this case they also create a new concept of body and nature, different from the offline neo-paganism. in particular, some interesting features are present in the website i analyze, the celtic connection (www.wicca.com). the website does not refer to a particular wicca church, but apparently he was creating by a group of people whose desire was to have an online place to exchange and provide information about faith and beliefs. the celtic connection includes various webpages based on different traditions, like celtic, native american, shamanism, as well as information about meditation, animal guides, crystals. it is also linked to a “magical shop” where people can buy on-line goods and books, and which is structured in an amazon-like fashion. in the blog and on the facebook page many people interact with each other to describe their spirituality and gaining more information, since in many case they seem not to have an offline community to refer to. this is a case of how they use the web to enhance their faith and also as a third space of exchange and creation of meaning. resistance in on-line neopaganism neo-paganism is not an institutionalized movement and, even if there are some recognized churches and books, it does not have clear structures of authority or a corpus of sacred texts. the manifestations of online neo paganism i analyze imply resistance in the sense that they are not part of any mainstream religion and they are often stigmatized in the offline world. there is no dichotomy between mainstream neo-paganism versus marginalized one; rather, the dualism is between the structure of established traditional religions, like christianity, and a more personal and non-codified spirituality that characterizes neo-paganism. in this perspective, internet gives the possibility to create new meanings and new spaces where spirituality can be experienced in a way that is outside the mainstream view of religious rituals and practices of the society. the resistance can also be found, from another perspective, in various websites against neo-paganism, for example christian blogs that alert parents against the potential danger of having a neo-pagan child. in the online world, neo-pagans operate a process of appropriation of spaces and meanings that are not possible in the same way in the offline communities. they create an aesthetic of imagined distant places where they can live their spirituality and they sometimes perceive that their identity can be fully disclosed only on the internet, where they do not encounter opposition and resistance of mainstream religions. methodology and theoretical framework for the methodology, the work is primary based on a content analysis of internet websites and forums, especially the celtic connection. i also take into account other manifestations of neo-paganism online, like for example second life communities and videos that show rituals on youtube. also, my analysis includes a reception study with interviews of neo-pagans that practice their spirituality both in the online and offline world. the findings are that the neo-pagan scenario is heterogeneous in its relationship with the internet. some groups refuse to practice their rituals and spiritual encounters online, because they want to be constantly in contact with the ‘real world’ and with nature, a fundamental feature of this religion. on the other hand, some neo-pagans consider the internet and the web as a different plan of reality and consequently a tool to enhance their spirituality, a magic space where they can create new ways of connecting with their religiosity. this is also linked to the idea of “technopagans”, people that create and perform their religiosity online. even if the aim of my study is to engage primary with people that live their faith both online and offline, i also take into account these forms of spirituality as an example of marginal third space. as for theoretical frameworks, i engage with the definition of third space to explain how neo-paganism creates an internet hybrid space in-between real and imagined places. i employ birgit meyer’s concept of ‘aesthetic formations’ to explain the process of community formation in relation to internet and religion. within this framework i explore how neo-pagans live the web as something with not only an abstract component, but they take into account also the material dimension of the computer and the technological tools that they use to connect with other believers. in this way it is possible to account for the transposition of the relationship with body and nature, central to neo-paganism, in an online world. i also use lev manovich’s concept of synthetic reality to explain neo-pagan spirituality on the web. according to my findings, neo-pagans do consider their activity on the internet as real, even if it is in a different context than the physical world. reality is not split between the categories of online and offline, but creates a fluid process where believers’ identities and spiritualties can evolve and create new features and spaces. references websites “the celtic connection”, www.wicca.com “jaguarmoon cyber coven”, www.jaguarmoon.org “the pagan library”, www.paganlibrary.com books and articles berger, h., ezzy, d. (2009) mass media and religious identity: a case study of young witches, journal for the scientific study of religion 48(3):501–514 bittarello m.b. (2008) shifting realities? changing concepts of religion and the body in popular culture and neopaganism, journal of contemporary religion, 06 may cowan, d. (2005) cyberhenge : modern pagans on the internet , 2005, routledge, new york cowan, d. (2005) “online u-topia: cyberspace and the mythology of placelessness”, journal for the scientific study of religion 44(3):257–263 heelas, p. (1996) the new age movement: the celebration of the self and the sacralization of modernity review. stuart a. wright. cambridge: blackwell, 1996 hojsgaard, m. warburg, m. (2005) religion in cyberspace, routledge, oxon, 2005 hoover, s. schonfield clark, l. (2002) practicing religion in the age of media, colombia university press, new york, 2002 hume, l. (2008) creating sacred space: outer expressions of inner worlds in modern wicca, journal of contemporary religion, 25 jun knopf. c. (2007) participatory communication practices in dianic wicca: witchcraft as third wave feminist action, for the national communication association 2007 conference in chicago, il. knott, k. (2005) spacial theory and method for the study of religion, uk equinox publishing ltd manovich, l. (2001) the language of new media, cambridge, mass: mit press. markham, a. (2008). the methods, politics and ethics of representation in online ethnography. in denzin, n. and lincoln, y., (eds.), handbook of qualitative research. thousand oaks, ca.: sage, 793-820. meyer, b. (2009) aesthetic formations : media, religion, and the senses, new york : palgrave macmillan, 2009 o’leary, s. cyberspace as sacred space: communicating religion on computer networks, journal of the american academy of religion. shawn a. (2002). technophilia and nature religion: the growth of a paradox, religion, 32:4, 303-314 york m. (2010) new age commodification and appropriation of spirituality, journal of contemporary religion, 02 aug neda: religious manifestations of a digital martyr abstract in analysis of the death of neda agha-soltan, a young iranian protester killed on amateur video in 2009 protests of the contested iranian presidential election, this case study seeks to understand how she has become an iconic figure. her death, the nature of it and the response to it, have caused devotion to her, not unlike marian devotions in both christianity and islam. through an examination of visuality and death, visual piety and gendered representations of female martyrs and religious figures, this case study examines how the third spaces, facilitated by the internet and mobile technologies, allow for the formation of new religious manifestations. keywords religion; digital media, youtube, new media, re-mediation introduction in 2009 iran went through a tumultuous summer. following the contested results of the presidential election between mir houssein mousavi and mahmoud ahmadinejad, thousands of people, young and old, men and women poured into the street; their silence ringing out as a protest against the abuses of the islamic republic. this was the green movement. in the face of a largely peaceful protest, that made careful use of islam in order to give the government little reason to condemn the movement either rhetorically or legally, the iranian state responded with unexpected force and violence making the images of this violence a call to action for change (varzi, 2011). it was during these peaceful protests that the basij military took to the streets, killing the “beauty” of the green movement that evolved in the days following the election (for neda, 2011). through these protests and the use of new media the world became captivated by an image of a woman dying on june 20, 2009. neda agha soltan was a young woman participating in the protests that day. she walked down the street with her music teacher, her head scarf wrapped around her pony tail, a visor blocking the sun from her eyes. she was shot in the heart and a mobile phone camera captured the graphic way she died in a 47 second video that was subsequently posted to youtube and aired by news stations all around the world (hejazi, 2011). neda: why she captivated the digital world a google search of the name “neda” will link you to graphic images of a young woman bleeding to death on the street, her gaze locking with the camera lens, as though to invoke our attention and our emotion. each of the videos of her death has over one million page views (wounded girl dies in front of camera, 2009). the response to this powerful imagery was immediate. in the days following her death neda was called or referenced by the media as everything from “martyr,” and “angel of freedom,” to “pillar of the movement,” “symbol of struggle,” “symbol of goodness,” “the youtube martyr,” “we are neda,” and “our angel” (neda, 2009; burns &eltham, 2009). through analysis of eight youtube videos that were created in response to the original video of the murder, we can see that neda went from being a “referential image to an iconic image symbolizing a greater cause and struggle” (stage, 2011). of the youtube videos analyzed, several themes appear. one is the language that appears in each of these tributes to evoke a certain degree of emotion. many of the videos refer to neda as an angel and martyr. she is an icon commemorated in poem, image and song. the songs and poems call out to neda as a symbol of peace and a prayer for the dissidents, as well as using her image to represent an ancient persian ideal of secularism or an islam “which your poets dreamed” about (“neda”, 2010; a poem for neda agha-soltan, 2009). zelizer (2010) uses neda’s image to elaborate on how powerful images implicate the viewer in what they see. by giving the viewer a sense of being a bystander in a murder, the video of neda elicits an emotional and visceral response that has thus given her an eternal life on the web. the digital realm gives roland barthes concept of third meaning, in which viewers understand not just literal and informational meanings but also symbolic ones, a new place to thrive (zelizer, 2010). in the case of neda, the digital response is indicative of a place in which bystanders = witnesses to her death can express the symbolic significance that transcends the pure informational qualities of the video. as one blogger stated, access to neda’s death gave american’s access to their own humanity (zelizer, 2010). the video of neda as she is about to die makes sense because it pushes the subjunctive nature of the visual; the visual “situates action within the hypothetical” thus adding uncertainty to the images and making them so they can reappear and resurface in different contexts (zelizer, 2010). neda’s video and image has done just that. in addition to the youtube tributes to her, there have been masks and posters made that carry slogans such as “we are all neda” and “we are all one neda, we are all one calling” (wearealloneneda.wordpress.com, 2010). these physical manifestations of neda allow protesters and supporters around the world to embody their protest against the iranian regime and injustice against humanity (stage, 2010). third spaces and neda it is important to add to this discussion the way the creation of a “third space,” through the internet and mobile technologies, contributed to the creation of a martyr and angel and gave a platform for many mourners around the world to express new forms of religious devotions. in today’s society sacred spaces exist beyond the brick and mortar confines of churches, mosques and synagogues. the dimensions of space are no longer confined to the body, space “is also a mental or conceptual dimension, one which may float free of any physical mooring, but which uses the notion of space metaphorically and may provide a means of imagining and giving expression to human possibility, cultural difference, the imagination itself, as well as social relations” (knott, 2005). religion as expressed through digital technology allows for a space in which power relations are able to shift and change. as fisher (2010) highlights, twitter, protest networks and other aspects of what he calls the “infosphere” allowed for open communication that picked up where news fell off during the iranian elections. "protestors in 2009 have been much more successful in engaging with an infosphere, metaphorically floating above the streets. twitter provided a relatively easy yet powerful means of passing information while maintaining degrees of anonymity. the ability to combine credibility and anonymity was important as this struggle played out over months rather than three days” (kamalipour, 2010). this engagement creates a third space in which protestors can openly express their thoughts, passions and hopes without the confines of an oppressive regime. this does not mean that the online environment is the third space; rather, the online environment facilitates the creation of a third space which can develop social capital through its transnational ability to bridge communication across cultures and imaginations. not only is this third space a place for recognition of and devotion to the sacred, they also contribute to the sacrilization of images, things and beliefs that may not have otherwise been so. conclusions and points for discussion this paper skims the surface of the importance of neda, her death and the resulting imagery and devotion to her iconic status. it does however provide a starting point for analysis of how third spaces use the internet to enable the creation of new religious figures that while being emergent are based on historical religious ideals that are ingrained in digital users. while the iranian government seeks to argue to this day that neda was either killed by protestors or by the western powers that be, the truth of her murder as well as justice for it was determined via a collective memory of a transnational community online. references aghvami, m. (2009). "persian bloggers : exile, nostalgia and diasporic nationalism". theses and dissertations, paper 505. airbornetoxicevent (writer). (2010). neda. youtube. alijahani (writer). (2009). neda agha soltan, killed 20.06.2009. youtube. amaster87 (writer). (2010). remembering neda agha-soltan. youtube. anonymous (writer). (2009). wounded girl dying in front of camera, her name was neda. youtube. burns, a., & eltham, b. (2009). twitter free iran: an evaluation of twitter's role in public diplomacy and information operations in iran's 2009 election crisis. record of the communications policy and research forum 2009, 12. deghati, r. (2009). we are all one neda documentaries, h. (2011). for neda, 2011 fathi, n. (2009). in a death seen around the world, a symbol of iranian protests. [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/world/middleeast/23neda.html]. the new york times. retrieved from the new york times website: habib, r. (writer). (2009). a poem for neda agha-soltan. youtube. hejazi, a. (2011). the gaze of the gazelle. london, uk: seagull books. kamalipour, y. r. (2010). media, power and politics in the digital age. plymouth, uk: rowman & littlefield publishers, inc. khan, s. (1998). muslim women: negotiations in the third space. signs, 23(2), 463-494. kia, a. a. (2008). iranian youth online: identity between traditional and modern lifestyles. [article]. 3cmedia: journal of community, citizen's & third sector media & communication(4), 28-36. knott, k. (2005). spatial theory and method for the study of religion. temenos, 41(2), 31. mcauliffe, c. (2007). a home far away? religious identity and transnational relations in the iranian diaspora. global networks, 7(3), 307-327. doi: 10.1111/j.1471-0374.2007.00171.x mikemcpd (writer). (2009). neda agha-soltan. youtube. morgan, d. (1998a). domestic devotion and ritual: visual piety in the modern american home. art journal, 57(1), 9. morgan, d. (1998b). visual piety. los angeles, california: university of california press. mortensen, m. (2011). when citizen photojournalism sets the news agenda: neda agha soltan as a web 2.0 icon of post-election unrest in iran. global media and communication, 7(1), 4-16. doi: 10.1177/1742766510397936 nafisi, a. (2010). empathy for iran's women. npq. doi: http://www.digitalnpq.org/archive/2010_fall/09_nafisi.html naghibi, n. (2011). diasporic disclosures: social networking, neda, and the 2009 iranian presidential elections. project muse, 14. neda speaks. (2009) neda, w. a. (writer). (2009). we are neda. youtube. soukup, c. (2006). computer-mediated communication as a virtual third place: building oldenburg’s great good places on the world wide web. new media & society, 8(3), 421-440. doi: 10.1177/1461444806061953 stage, c. (2011). thingifying neda: the construction of commemorative and affective thingification of neda agha-soltan. culture unbound, 3, 19. doi: http://www.cultureunbound,ep,liu.se tahmasebi-birgani, v. (2010). green women of iran: the role of the women's movement during and after iran's presidential election of 2009. constellations, 17(1), 78-86. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8675.2009.00576.x taylor, w. b. (1984). the virgin of guadalupe in new spain: an inquiry into the social history of marian devotio. american ethnologist, 24. tiami20 (writer). (2009). in memory of neda agha soltan. youtube. varzi, r. (2011). iran’s french revolution. the annals of the american academy of political and social science, 637(1), 53-63. doi: 10.1177/0002716211404362 wojcik, d. (1996). "polaroids from heaven": photography, folk religion, and the miraculous image tradition at a marian apparition site. the journal of american folklore, 109(432), 129-148. wolf, e. r. (1958). the virgin of guadalupe: a mexican national symbol. the journal of american folklore, 71(279), 5. zelizer, b. (2010). about to die: how news images move the public. new york: oxford university press. ! "! digital media and the protestant establishment : reflection on the theological approach to digital space of the new media project !"#$%&!''&()*! ! #$%!$&'()*+!),!-*)(%'(./(&'0!&'!1%%23+!&/(%*4)5%/!4&($!($%!$&'()*+!),! 0%1&.!./1!0%1&.!(%6$/)3)7+8!#$%!9*).1!6&*6:3.(&)/!./1!.22*)2*&.(&)/!),! ;:($%*<'!4*&(&/7'=!,)*!&/'(./6%=!$.'!9%%/!%/.93%1!9+!($%!&/5%/(&)/!./1! 1&''%0&/.(&)/!),!0)5.93%>(+2%!2*&/(&/78!?/!.11&(&)/=!@5./7%3&6.3!-*)(%'(./('!&/! ($%!a/&(%1!b(.(%'!$.5%!.6(&5%3+!%023)+%1!0.''!0%1&.=!':6$!.'!*.1&)=!,&30=!./1! (%3%5&'&)/!&/!)*1%*!()!%c2./1!&/,3:%/6%!)/!d0%*&6./!0.''!6:3(:*%!./1!2:93&6! '2$%*%!ef%/1%*'$)(=!ghhij!f))5%*=!gh""j!k))*%=!"llmj!n)'%/($.3=!ghhop8!q)(&/7! ':6$!&/(%*(4&/%1!$&'()*+!),!-*)(%'(./(&'0!./1!0%1&.!(%6$/)3)7+=!($&'!2.2%*! %c23)*%'!($%!r:%'(&)/!),!$)4!($%!:'%!),!1&7&(.3!0%1&.!&'!6)/6%2(:.3&s%1=! &0.7&/%1=!./1!*%2:*2)'%1!&/!($%!k.&/3&/%!-*)(%'(./(!1&'6):*'%!./1!4$%($%*!&(! ,.&3'!&/!:/1%*'(./1&/7!./+!.'2%6('!),!1&7&(.3!'2.6%=!9+!3))t&/7!&/()!($%!q%4!k%1&.! -*)u%6(!9.'%1!.(!a/&)/!#$%)3)7&6.3!b%0&/.*+!&/!q%4!v)*t=!.!3)/7(&0%!&/,3:%/(&.3! 6%/(%*!),!-*)(%'(./(!#$%)3)7&6.3!@1:6.(&)/8!! #$%!2*)u%6(!.'2&*%'!()!$%32!k.&/3&/%!./1!3&9%*.3!6$:*6$%'!*%($&/t!($%&*! *%3.(&)/'$&2!()!1&7&(.3!0%1&.!9+!3))t&/7!.(!.!5.*&%(+!),!6.'%'8!#$%!*%'%.*6$%*! ./.3+s%1!/&/%(+>)/%!2)'(!93)7'!./1!'&c!6.'%!'(:1+!*%2)*('!2*)1:6%1!9+!($%! ! g! 2*)u%6(<'!*%'%.*6$%*'!,*)0!k.+!gh""!()!w./:.*+!gh"g=!:23).1%1!)/!&('!4%9'&(%"8! ?/!)*1%*!()!./.3+s%!($%!-*)(%'(./(!($):7$('!)/!1&7&(.3!0%1&.!./1!($%&*!*%3.(&)/!()! *%3&7&)/=!($%!2.2%*!%09*.6%1!.!/%4!4.+!),!($&/t&/7!1&7&(.3!'2.6%8!d66)*1&/7!()! f))5%*!./1!@6$6$.&9&!egh"gp=!1&7&(.3!'2.6%!7%/%*.(%'!x&/>9%(4%%/>/%''!e28!lp=y! ')0%($&/7!9%+)/1!($%!6)/6%2(:.3!./1!($%!2$+'&6.3=!($%!2*&5.(%!./1!($%!2:93&6=! &/'(&(:(&)/'!./1!&/1&5&1:.3=!6)00)1&(&%'!./1!.:($%/(&6&(+=!%09)1&0%/(!./1! 5&*(:.3&(+=!./1!.:($)*&(+!./1!.:()/)0+8!b%6)/1=!1&7&(.3!'2.6%!$.'!&('!)4/! .%'($%(&6=!7%/*%=!./1!'(*:6(:*&/7!6.2.6&(&%'!($*):7$!/%4!0%1&.!(%6$/)3)7&%'!./1! ($%&*!%/.93&/7!2*.6(&6%'!e28!"op8!;.'(3+=!2%)23%!&0.7&/%!/%4!0)1%'!),!*%3&7&):'! &1%/(&(+=!2*.6(&6%=!./1!6)00:/&(+!./1!.'!&,!($%&*!&0.7&/.(&)/!&'!6)023%(%3+! .66)023&'$%1!./1!4)*t&/7!($%!4.+!&(!'$):31!&/!($%!'2.6%8!#$%!$+9*&1&6!./1!3:1&6! 2)''&9&3&(&%'!),!($%!.%'($%(&6!),!($%!1&7&(.3!'2.6%!.*%!1%%23+!*))(%1!&/!($&'!x.'>&,> /%''!e228!gg>gip8y! ?/!($%!./.3+'&'=!,):*!6%/(%*%1>($%0%'!4%*%!,):/1z![&*'(=!($%*%!4%*%! )5%*,3)4&/7!4)**&%'!.9):(!($%!1%63&/%!),!'2&*&(:.3!1&'6&23&/%!':6$!.'!0&/1,:3/%''=! 7%/:&/%!'.35.(&)/.3!%c2%*&%/6%=!./1!6)00&(0%/(8![)*!&/'(./6%=!1&'(*.6(&)/!4.'! *%7.*1%1!.'!($%!t%+!2*)93%0!.*):'%1!9+!\$*&'(&./'<!$%.5+!:'%!),!/%4!1&7&(.3! ')6&.3!0%1&.8!b%6)/1=!1%'2&(%!&('!6)/6%*/'!.9):(!1&'(*.6(&)/=!($%!q%4!k%1&.! -*)u%6(!6%3%9*.(%1!($%!:/&5%*'.3&(+!),!1&7&(.3!'2.6%!&/!($.(!])1<'!(*./'6%/1%/6%! ./1!&00./%/6%!6):31!9%!,):/1!&/!($%'%!6$.*.6(%*&'(&6'!),!1&7&(.3!'2.6%8!#$&*1=!($%! 6%3%9*.(&)/!),!:/&5%*'.3&(+!),!1&7&(.3!'2.6%!3%1!()!($%!%c2%6(.(&)/!),!/%4!t&/1'!),! 6)00:/.3!*%3.(&)/'$&2!./1!6)00:/&(&%'!4$%*%!./+9)1+!6):31!2.*(&6&2.(%! &**%'2%6(&5%!),!7%)7*.2$&6.3!3)6.(&)/!./1!(&0%8!^&7&(.3!'2.6%!./1!/%4!')6&.3! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! "!$((2z__93)78/%40%1&.2*)u%6(.(:/&)/8)*7! ! `! 0%1&.!/%(4)*t'!4%*%!*%7.*1%1!.'!.!')*(!),!$+2%*3&/t%1!6)//%6(&)/!4&($!)($%*'! ./1!])1=!4$%*%!($%!&1%.3!),!\$*&'(&./!6)00:/&(+!4.'!2.*(&.33+!,:3,&33%18![):*($=! ($%!6*&'&'!),!.:($)*&(+!*%6%&5%1!.!7*%.(!.((%/(&)/!&/!($%!2*)u%6(8!b:*2*&'&/73+=! $)4%5%*=!($%!2*)u%6(!&/(%*2*%(%1!($%!6*&'&'!),!')3%!./1!2)4%*,:3!6$.*&'0.(&6! 3%.1%*'$&2'!.'!($%!2)(%/(&.3!6$./6%!()!*%.3&s%!($%!&1%.3!),!2*&%'($))1!),!.33! 9%3&%5%*'8!! a$.(!.*%!($%!%c23&6&(!./1!&023&6&(!.'':02(&)/'!.9):(!($%!/.(:*%!),!1&7&(.3! 0%1&.!./1!($%&*!*%3.(&)/!()!*%3&7&)/b!d/1!4$.(!1)!($%'%!.'':02(&)/'!&023+b!!! [&*'(=!($%!2*)u%6(<'!*%'%.*6$%*'!&/!7%/%*.3!(%/1!()4.*1!($%!.33%7%1! &/'(*:0%/(.3!.22*).6$!()!1&7&(.3!0%1&.!($.(!$.'!1)0&/.(%1!')!0:6$!),!2:93&6! ./1!3.+!1&'6):*'%'!.9):(!($%08!?/!($&'!5&%4=!1&7&(.3!0%1&.!&'!/)(!.!1%'(&/.(&)/=!9:(! ($%!4.+!()!7%(!()!.!1%'(&/.(&)/8!#$&'!&'!.!5%*+!2*.70.(&6!5&%4j!)/%!($.(!'6$)3.*'!),! 1&7&(.3!0%1&.!4):31!':77%'(!&7/)*%'!0)*%!2*),):/1!&023&6.(&)/'!),!($%'%! 1%5%3)20%/('8!?/'(*:0%/(.3&'0!&'!.3')!%5&1%/6%1!&/!($%!-*)u%6(<'!,)6:'!)/!($%! 6)/(*&9:(&)/!),!1&7&(.3!0%1&.!()!),,3&/%!6)00:/&(+8!a$%/!($%!-*)u%6(<'! *%'%.*6$%*'!.*7:%!($.(!/%4!0%1&.!'$):31!9%!:'%1!&/!)*1%*!()!9:&31!6)00:/&(+=! ($%+!0%./!),,3&/%!6)00:/&(+8!#$%+!.'':*%!($%&*!*%.3=!2$+'&6.3=!./1!),,3&/%! 6)00:/&(+!6.//)(!9%!e)*!'$):31!/)(!9%p!*%23.6%1!4&($!)/3&/%!6)00:/&(+8!d! 2)''&93%!x.'>&,>/%''y!&'!'2:*/%1!4$%*%!($%!6)00:/&(+!0%09%*'!0.+!.6(!x.'!&,y!&(! 4%*%!*%.3!./1!2$+'&6.3!&/!1&7&(.3!'2.6%!'$.2%1!9+!/%4!0%1&.8! b%6)/1=!($&'!&/'(*:0%/(.3!e/)(!1&.3%6(&6.3p!.22*).6$!()!1&7&(.3!0%1&.!&'! 1%*&5%1!,*)0!($%&*!2*%':22)'&(&)/!.9):(!($%!*&7&1!'%2.*.(&)/!9%(4%%/!)/3&/%!./1! ),,3&/%=!(%6$/)3)7+!./1!$:0./8!#$%!*%'%.*6$%*'!2*%':22)'%!($.(!(%6$/)3)7+!&('%3,! &'!/%:(*.3=!./1!($.(!&('!7))1!)*!9.1!:'.7%!1%2%/1'!)/!2%)23%!4$)!:'%!&(8!d7.&/=! ! i! (%6$/)3)7+!&'!)/3+!./!&/'(*:0%/(!,)*!$:0./!./1!&(!&'!/)(!*%6)7/&s%1!($.(!0%1&.! (%6$/)3)7+!./1!2%)23%!0&7$(!&/(%*.6(!4&($!%.6$!)($%*j!,)*!%c.023%!($.(!2%)23%! 1%5%3)2!(%6$/)3)7+!,)*!'2%6&,&6!2:*2)'%'8!?/!($%&*!:/1%*'(./1&/7!),!1&7&(.3!0%1&.! ./1!&('!*%3.(&)/!()!')6&.3!*%3.(&)/'=!($%*%!&'!/)!x&/>9%(4%%/>/%''y!4$&6$!1&7&(.3! 0%1&.!0.+!7%/%*.(%!9%(4%%/!)/3&/%!./1!),,3&/%=!(%6$/)3)7+!./1!$:0./8!!! #$&*1=!($%*%,)*%=!(%6$/)3)7+!./1!)/3&/%!'2.6%!.*%!6)/'&1%*%1!()!9%!0%*%3+! 6*%.(%1!./1!:'%1!9+!9.1!)*!7))1!2%)23%!&/!0)'(!),!($%'%!6.'%!'(:1&%'8!?/!($&'!'%/'%=! 1&7&(.3!'2.6%!(%/1'!/)(!()!9%!6)/'&1%*%1!()!$.5%!&('!)4/!.:()/)0):'!3)7&6!./1!,)*6%! ()!'$.2%!3&5%1!%c2%*&%/6%=!2*.6(&6%=!./1!6:3(:*%!)/!&('!)4/8!#$%!7))1!)*!9.1!:'.7%!),! /%4!0%1&.!(%6$/)3)7+!./1!1&7&(.3!'2.6%!&'!($):7$(!()!9%!1%(%*0&/%1!)/3+!9+!($%! 2%*,)*0./6%!),!%09)1&%1!),,3&/%!2%)23%!)*!6)00:/&(&%'!4$)!:'%!($%08!^&7&(.3! '2.6%!&'!(*%.(%1!.'!0)*%>)*>3%''!/%:(*.3=!4$&3%!&('!)4/!3)7&6'!./1!.%'($%(&6'!4$&6$! 6./!'$.2%!3&5%1!%c2%*&%/6%=!2*.6(&6%=!./1!6:3(:*%=!.*%!)5%*3))t%18!! brief suggestions for the new media project’s theorization of digital media would be apposite in conclusion. first, the research objects for examining the protestants’ digital media use need to be beyond the institutionalized and denominational ones. the relative stability and solidity of the organized churches they examine can limit the chance for the project to find its own logic and aesthetic, “as-ifness”, and “in-between-ness” that digital space may generate. however, there is a large, fluid, and evolving digital space where a wide range of old traditions, new traditions, non-traditions, hybridic traditions, and aggressively "anti" traditions, are finding a place (hoover and echchaibi, p. 3). new media project will need to broaden their research objects up to non-organized, non-denominational, and hybridic individuals and communities who use new media. ! m! second, the new media project needs to transform its understanding of media which has been confined to the legacy media model focusing on media effects and their instrumental use. new media technology, to some extent, generates new and hybrid rituals, communities, and ultimately social relations ef))5%*=!ghhcj!k%+%*=! ghhlp. without fundamental scholarly interest in social theories, including media, identity, and culture theories, the project would keep having a difficulty in understanding what really happens in digital space and in adequately dealing with digital space. the project researchers may only say what aspects of new media the christian individual should accept or refrain from. their analysis, in this regard, remains only instructional. their analyses of and strategies to deal with digital media are not practical even though their interests in new media and digital space are clearly practical. for this purpose, the new media project will need to undertake more rigorous scholarly investigations into digital space and new media itself. ! c! +),-)'%./012& & +''34&/$5&6.7)8-"4&& f%/1%*'$)(=!f8!eghhip8!!"#$%&'()"*(+,-./(0,-(1*2324(5*/%#(#&/(6,&2*-7#)%7*( 87#&'*.%6#.(63.)3-*9!!\$&6.7)z!a/&5%*'&(+!),!\$&6.7)!-*%''8!! f))5%*=!b8!eghhcp8!:*.%'%,&(%&()"*(5*/%#(;'*8!;)/1)/z!n):(3%17%8! f))5%*=!b8!egh""p8!k%1&.!./1!($%!&0.7&/.(&)/!),!*%3&7&)/!&/!6)/(%02)*.*+!73)9.3! 6:3(:*%=!83-,<*#&(1,3-&#.(,0(=3.)3-#.(!)3/%*2>(?@abc>(d*6*ef*-=!c"h>cgm8! f))5%*=!b8!d!@6$6$.&9&=!q8!egh"gp8!#$%!e($&*1!'2.6%'e!),!1&7&(.3!*%3&7&)/=! ^&'6:''&)/!2.2%*=!#$%!\%/(%*!,)*!k%1&.=!n%3&7&)/=!./1!\:3(:*%8!! k%+%*=!f8!eghhlp8!;*2)"*)%6(0,-e#)%,&24(5*/%#>(-*.%'%,&>(#&/()"*(2*&2*29!q%4!v)*tz! -.37*.5%!k.60&33./8!! k))*%=!;8!e"llmp8!!*..%&'(g,/4(;e*-%6#&(-*.%'%,&(%&()"*(e#-$*)<.#6*(,0(63.)3-*8!q%4! v)*tz!gc,)*18!! n)'%/($.3=!k8!eghhop8!;e*-%6#&(h-,)*2)#&)2(#&/(ij(%&()"*(?klm28!q%4!v)*tz!-.37*.5%! k6k&33./8! ! 9$7".$"7&:"4'#.8"& $((2z__93)78/%40%1&.2*)u%6(.(:/&)/8)*7! !! third spaces panel 2 short papers seung soo_ir 14.0 conference selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): morris, j.w., s. murray, e. razlogova, m. stanfill, and j. sterne, (2018, october 10-13). where, when, and how is digital sound? panel presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. when, where, and how is digital sound? jeremy wade morris, in discussing podcast archiving, notes that internet archives like the wayback machine have had much more focus on preserving visual and text content than sound. internet research has similarly traditionally had less engagement with sound than with other forms of digital content. this panel seeks to contribute to ongoing work to bring sound studies and internet studies into better conversation with each other, taking digital sound as a common object and examining it in different cases and through different methods to provide a richer understanding of the role sound plays in shaping our online experiences. the papers coalesce around their common object of inquiry, digital sound, providing depth of understanding about the subject matter by approaching from different directions. moreover, the papers help to illuminate each other by taking different approaches to common themes. morris and stanfill raise key questions about who tends to be included and excluded in circuits of production as well as whose digital sound tends to be seen as valuable. papers by morris, stanfill, and sterne and razlogova all ask about how, despite rhetorics of democratization and variety, forms of digital sound may be becoming standardized through technological and social means. the morris and murray papers call attention to the ways the specific affordances of particular digital production technologies shape (though do not determine) the kinds of production that become prevalent in a given moment. there are also methodological convergences: papers by sterne and razgolova and murray both take as their object of inquiry technology makers, and papers by stanfill and murray both use press coverage as the site of investigation. finally, the papers by stanfill and murray ask questions about what people believe is socially proper or correct in the case of digital sound. in these ways, this panel represents both an important contribution to our understanding of contemporary issues in digital sound as well as relating to broader questions central to internet research. enelyaoronar podcastre: archiving the promises of a disruptive format jeremy wade morris university of wisconsin-madison as the popular press and industry insiders have noted (blattberg, 2014; roose, 2014; sillesen 2014), we are in the midst of a "golden age of podcasts": a cultural moment where the choice for ambitiously and artfully produced digital audio abounds, and where new voices and listeners connect daily through earbuds, car stereos, home speakers, and office computers. there are now over 300,000 podcast feeds and close to 8 million individual episodes in over 100 languages. there's a podcast on almost every subject imaginable, from popular shows like s-town and radiolab to lighter fare like the wrestling podcast wrestlespective or shows that cover social issues like sexuality, identity, race or politics, (e.g. strange fruit, this week in blackness, etc.). in 2016, an estimated 57 million americans listened to podcasts every month (edison, 2016). apple, the leading distributor of podcasts, counted 10 billion streams and downloads in 2016 alone (washenko, 2016). this is not, however, podcasting's first "golden age". the format's longer history includes several moments where there were hopes and promises this online format might upend traditional forms of media production and distribution. when podcasting emerged in the early 2000s, and as it grew over the decade, the format was consistently heralded for giving listeners greater control to time-shift and place-shift audio, while relatively inexpensive digital media tools opened up the power of broadcasting to a much wider segment of producers and users and expanded the diversity and quantity of available audio content online (berry 2006, crofts et. al 2005, newitz 2005, terdiman 2004). yet despite the recent explosion of interest in podcasts, two decades' worth of repeated reports of podcasting's value, and growing academic attention to the study of sound (e.g. sound studies), the sounds of this online format's past and present remain mystifyingly difficult to analyze. qualitative audio analysis often has to be done in realtime (or longer) and quantitative analysis is usually done only after the audio has been transcribed to text. the sounds of podcasting's booming audio culture thus remain relatively closed off as a research resource, far less usable than text as a source of information or insight. podcasts are also shockingly vulnerable, despite how ubiquitous, free and available they appear; podcast feeds end abruptly, cease to be maintained, or become housed in proprietary databases, like itunes, which are difficult to search with any rigor. as the industry grows in popularity, professionalization and commercialization also threaten to streamline production and limit podcasting's democratic diversity and accessibility. we know from studying the histories of film, television, and radio that the early productions of any medium are invaluable texts but that they are also the ones with the greatest risk of being lost. we know this is doubly true for web-based digital objects, which bring new challenges for saving, locating and retrieving data over time (brügger, 2010). saving new sounds this paper documents one effort to save these new sounds: a database i have been building called podcastre (short for podcast research). currently the site (http://podcastre.org) tracks over 1300 podcast feeds, and indexes and stores over 250,000 audio files, along with all the associated metadata from the rss feeds. the web interface allows users to search the database via keyword (e.g. title, author, description elements, etc.). there are also several thousand interactive transcripts which allow users to find specific keywords within individual episodes (e.g. election, isis, hamilton, etc.) and narrow their search results accordingly. while the database provides a departure point from which to launch a more thorough investigation of the history of the format, it also raises a number of significant challenges regarding saving and researching digital audio. there's the incredible inconsistency of podcast metadata, which comes via both rss feeds and the id3 tags within the audio files themselves, both of which depend on which platform hosts the podcast and which program was used to created it. there's also the instability of the object itself…podcasts are no longer static audio files like they were in podcasting's early years. technologies like dynamic advertising and dynamic insertion mean that the audio file itself can change periodically over time. beyond these technical questions, there are the more serious cultural questions the database raises about what to save (which voices, which sounds) and how to go about doing so; it's easy to automate scraping the most popular podcasts but sourcing the more marginalized more independent shows is a much more manual affair. in this paper, i will use the database as a starting point for a discussion about the challenges digital and web audio presents for preservation, though i also want to reflect on what podcasts tell us about the web's rich sonic past and present; an aspect of its history that is often overlooked in more visually-focused attempts to archive the web (e.g. the wayback machine). preserving promises it remains an open question whether or not podcasting's early hopes and promises have been realized. podcast listening, for example, still skews male, and towards younger, whiter, and more urban and affluent audiences. similarly, podcast production struggles to live up to the highly democratized form of audio production it was meant to be; the most critically acclaimed and top-rated podcasts are often similar in style and tone, showcasing a culturally homogenous representation of the field. given the optimism and hope surrounding podcasting as a platform for giving voice to a wide number of perspectives, there is a critical need to facilitate more rigorous quantitative and qualitative work on the medium, both as a new format and as a potentially transformative cultural practice. rather than dismissing podcasting as simply another over-hyped web 2.0 technology, this paper and the project it describes takes seriously the claim that podcasting could represent the realization of an alternate cultural model of broadcasting (sterne et. al. 2008). considering the countless lost recordings of early radio shows or silent films, podcastre aims to avoid the same fate for podcasts, whether professionally-produced shows or the hundreds of thousands of amateur podcasts that are being produced in our communities. by providing a platform for sophisticated and rigorous analysis of this emerging yet vulnerable media format, i hope to show that what today's podcasters are producing will have value in the future, not just for its content, but for what it tells us about audio's longer history, about who has the right to communicate and by what means (sterne et. al. 2008). we may be in a "golden age" of podcasts but if we're not making efforts to preserve and analyze these resources now, we'll likely find ourselves in the same sonic conundrum many radio, film or television historians now find themselves: writing, researching and thinking about a past they can't fully see or hear. references berry, r. (2006). will the ipod kill the radio star? profiling podcasting as radio. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 12, 143-162. blattberg, e. (2014, november 19). the podcast enters a new golden age. digiday. retrieved from http:// digiday.com/publishers/nielsenes-rise-podcast/ brügger, neils (ed.). 2010. web history. new york: peter lang crofts, s., dilley, j., fox, m., restsema, a., & williams, b. (2005). podcasting: a new technology in search of a business model. first monday, 10, 1-20. edison research (2016). the podcast consumer 2016. retrieved from http://edisonresearch.com/the-podcast-consumer-2016. newitz, analee. 2005. "adam curry wants to make you an ipod radio star." wired, march, 111-113. roose, k. (2014, october 30). what's behind the great podcast renaissance? new york magazine. sillesen, l. b. (2014, november 24). is this the golden age of podcasts? columbia journalism review retrieved from http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/is_this_the_golden_age_of_ podc_1.php?pagedall# sthash.bz13l2b8.dpuf sterne, j., morris, j. w., baker, m., & moscote freire, a. (2008). the politics of podcasting. fibreculture, 13. washenko, anna. (2016, 9 december) apple saw 10 billion podcast downloads and streams in 2016. radio and internet news. retrieved from: http://rainnews.com/applesaw-10-billion-podcast-downloads-and-streams-in-2016/ sample, remix, and mashup for me, but not for thee: digital music production at the intersection of race and the law mel stanfill university of central florida there has much enthusiasm about the potential for participatory digital culture to reshape who can speak and be heard (jenkins 2006; lessig 2008). however, only sometimes do people think of forms of transformative digital creativity as legitimate or socially appropriate. i argue that in the case of digital music production, who does what to whom—whether sample, remix, or mashup—matters quite a lot. particularly, i step into the space between yew and monroy-hernández’s (2014) argument that remixers serendipitously find content to appropriate and brøvig-hanssen’s (2017) description of how mashup can contest social inequality to argue that excitement over participatory culture has been insufficiently attentive to the role of historical and ongoing structures of inequality such as the history of white appropriation of black music. through an analysis of popular press conversations, this paper interrogates which instances of digital music production in remix, mashup, and sampling, building on whose work, by whom, are considered socially legitimate or creative, and which are considered theft. through this analysis, i answer the broader question of who gets to be an “artist” being “copied” and who’s just raw material. previous work the current research builds on three bodies of literature. the first considers how law enables or constrains technology. scholars have argued that sometimes law overrides technology, legally preventing uses that are technologically possible (boyle 2008; gillespie 2007; petersen 2015), and other times technology is used instead of law to control behavior (gillespie 2007; lessig 1999), or even to exceed the letter of the law (favale 2014; gillespie 2007; tushnet 2014), making legally permissible actions technologically impossible. this work shows that the relationship of law and technology is not simple but rather must be interrogated. the second body of work underpinning this paper considers how contemporary beliefs struggle to account for diverse forms of remix creativity. on one hand, these are beliefs built into law: “legal conceptions of musical creativity derive from practices within western classical music traditions that had become increasingly dominant by the end of the nineteenth century” (arewa 2013, 70), protecting music that can be notated on a score and systematically disregarding other forms. on the other hand, these are popular beliefs, as shown by the interviews with everyday people in aram sinnreich’s (2010) work on configurable culture. a third area of research interrogates how marginalized groups find their creativity socially and legally devalued. as barron notes, “musical genres associated primarily with african-american musicians—especially rap, jazz and the blues—have been especially difficult to reconcile with legal thinking organized around the category of the musical work” (barron 2006, 33), because the way law thinks about music “limits its capacity to accommodate non-western and non-classical music as music” (barron 2006, 31). culturally, as sinnreich (2010, 206) notes, “mash-ups tend to follow a more traditional european structural logic, while hip-hop and turntablism tend to follow a more traditional afro-diasporic structural logic. in a word, mash-ups are coded as ‘white,’ while hip-hop is coded as ‘black,’” and this has important bearing on their social legitimacy. this tendency is also, from the other direction, why african-american and indigenous traditions have seemed free for white and western artists to pillage. methods drawn from a larger project that computationally analyzes trends in the news coverage of digital music production in remix (48,217 stories), mashup (23,163), and sampling (152,517) from 2009-2014, this project focuses on the random sample of .1% of the stories that was human-coded and used to train the model. using discourse analysis, i examine when and how these forms of digital music production are socially considered creative, original, copying, and/or legal. findings preliminary analysis suggests several themes in the popular conversation around digital musical production like remix, mashup, and cover songs. first, the stereotype of black criminality endures—biz markie was famously told ‘thou shalt not steal’ by a judge over sampling in 1991, and such arguments are still with us. second, there is a trope of white genius, similar to hesmondhalgh’s (2006) criticism of how moby’s sampling of blues recordings was treated as his creativity alone. third, colonial “discovery” of things other people knew about before persists as white artists bring indigenous and african diaspora music into the white mainstream. fourth, the ideology of the isolated author who creates from nothing—a trope that artificially identifies some culture as raw material rather than artistry—is still very strong despite widespread belief in a democratizing era of remix creativity. conclusion ultimately, i argue, popular conversations about digital music production show that inspiration, reuse, or remix from someone else’s work can legitimately be done only to those figured as raw material and only by those figured as capital-a artists. when black artists sample someone else’s work, it’s “theft.” when white folks like the rolling stones or eric clapton copy blues sounds or moby samples blues recordings, it’s “homage.” arewa (2013, 80) notes that “borrowings from blues highlight in some ways in which acts of appropriation, which are endemic and essential elements of culture, may have fundamentally different meanings depending on context.” this paper traces out that interrelationship between meaning and context using the digital music production cases of remix, mashup, and cover song. references arewa, olufunmilayo b. 2013. “making music: copyright law and creative processes.” in a companion to media authorship, edited by jonathan gray and derek johnson, 69– 87. new york, ny: john wiley & sons. barron, anne. 2006. “introduction: harmony or dissonance? copyright concepts and musical practice.” social & legal studies 15 (1): 25–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/0964663906060972. boyle, james. 2008. the public domain: enclosing the commons of the mind. new haven, ct: yale university press. brøvig-hanssen, ragnhild. 2017. “musical recycling: mashup aesthetics and authorship.” aoir selected papers of internet research 6. https://spir.aoir.org/index.php/spir/article/view/1289. favale, marcella. 2014. “death and resurrection of copyright between law and technology.” information & communications technology law 23 (2): 117–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/13600834.2014.925631. gillespie, tarleton. 2007. wired shut: copyright and the shape of digital culture. cambridge: massachusetts institute of technology press. hesmondhalgh, david. 2006. “digital sampling and cultural inequality.” social & legal studies 15 (1): 53–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/0964663906060973. jenkins, henry. 2006. convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york, ny: new york university press. lessig, lawrence. 1999. code: and other laws of cyberspace. new york, n.y.: basic books. ———. 2008. remix: making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. new york: penguin. petersen, jennifer. 2015. “is code speech? law and the expressivity of machine language.” new media & society 17 (3): 415–31. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444813504276. sinnreich, aram. 2010. mashed up: music, technology, and the rise of configurable culture. amherst: university of massachusetts press. tushnet, rebecca. 2014. “all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again: innovation in copyright licensing.” berkeley technology law journal 29 (3): 1447–88. yew, jude, and andrés monroy-hernández. 2014. “harnessing serendipity: a study of accidental creative collaboraotins in two online remixing communities.” aoir selected papers of internet research 4. https://spir.aoir.org/index.php/spir/article/view/1002. artificial intelligence and the politics of media aesthetics: the case of online music mastering jonathan sterne mcgill university elena razlogova concordia university this paper offers an extended case study of landr, a montreal company that uses machine learning (branded as “artificial intelligence”) to automate music mastering and create a platform strategy around it. we argue that 1) landr extends some of the standardizations of sound media aesthetics first developed for music recommendation and recognition engines; 2) landr’s success is defined in part by limiting the problems it is trying to solve while finding ways to market new uses for its products, thus offering a new chapter in the history of mastering, a set of audio techniques that has evolved alongside the history of audio formats; 3) landr therefore offers an early test case for ai’s effects on other media industries, showing that industries that are highly concentrated and whose work is mystified for everyday users are especially susceptible to automation; and, finally, 4) landr also offers an early test case for arguments about ai and labour, showing its effects on the labor force can be uneven and contradictory, shaped by the specific contours and limits of the industry rather than the “impact” of ai itself. scholarly context recent critical scholarship on artificial intelligence has focused on four main areas: labor and automation, bias and inclusion, rights and liberties, and ethics and governance (campolo et al, 2017). yet commercial applications of ai (which really rebrand a specific type of ai, machine learning) has been notably successful in a fifth area: media aesthetics. as wide range of scholars have argued, the standardization of media aesthetics over the long twentieth century has shaped the look, sound, and feel of mediated experience for most users (sterne, 2012; bratton, 2016; murray, 2018). standardization cuts both ways: it provides clear protocols for interoperability and circulation while also creating barriers to entry, opportunities for market concentration, and limits on artistic expression (bowker and starr, 1999; mulvin forthcoming). in sound media aesthetics specifically, practical, tacit knowledge has remained valuable as recording technologies and audio formats evolved, and may yet persist in the machine learning and black-boxed algorithm era (horning). our study aims to bring problems of media aesthetics into the critical conversation about ai, and problems introduced by ai into the critical conversation about media aesthetics, while also contributing to ongoing discussion in both these fields. additionally, our project contributes to the burgeoning intersection of sound studies, popular music studies, and new media studies by considering how these fields are bound up “transsectorially,” where innovations in one field of technology or practice wind up shaping and conditioning another (théberge 1997, born 2013, brøvig-hassen and danielsen, 2016). methods for this paper, we used a range of methods drawn from the cultural study of technology (slack and wise, 2014) and science and technology studies (gillespie, boczkowski and foot, 2014). as participant observers, we visited landr headquarters, participated in music mastering sessions, and spent time with musicians and mastering engineers who were connected with landr in one way or another (novak, 2013). we conducted long-form interviews with the co-founder of landr, justin evans, as well as a number of professional mastering engineers and musicians (pinch and trocco 2002). we also spent time in online forums, following discussions among musicians and engineers regarding landr (massenari 2015). we constructed a critical history of mastering technologies and techniques (sterne 2012). one of us spent many hours actually working with the sound engine and the interface, as well as subjecting the same material to “non-ai” mastering by working mastering engineers (chapman and sawchuk, 2012). finally, we also analyzed landr as a self-described “platform” for mastering, considering its operational protocols, interface, and self-presentation online-treating each of these elements as rhetorical and political, rather than merely functional (gillespie 2010, chun 2011). bibliography born, g. (2013). introduction -music sound and space: transformations of public and private experience. in g. born (ed.), music, sound and space: transformations of public and private experience (pp. 1–70). cambridge: cambridge university press. bowker, g. c., & star, s. l. (1999). sorting things out: classification and its consequences. cambridge: mit press. bratton, b. (2016). the stack: on software and sovereignty. cambridge: mit press. brøvig-hanssen, r., & danielsen, a. (2016). digital signatures: the impact of digitization on popular music sound. cambridge: mit press. campolo, a., sanfilippo, m., whittaker, m., & crawford, k. (2017). ai now 2017 report. retrieved from https://ainowinstitute.org/ai_now_2017_report.pdf chapman, o. b., & sawchuk, k. (2012). research-creation: intervention, analysis and “family resemblances.” canadian journal of communication, 37(1). https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2012v37n1a2489 chun, w. h. k. (2011). programmed visions: software and memory. cambridge: mit press. gillespie, t.,, boczkowski, p., & foot, k.a. (2014). media technologies: essays on communication, materiality and society. cambridge: mit press, 2014. gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of “platforms.” new media and society, 12(3), 347– 364. horning, s. (2015). chasing sound: technology, culture, and the art of studio recording from edison to the lp. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press. massanari, a. l. (2015). participatory culture, community, and play: learning from reddit. mulvin, d. (forthcoming). proxies: the cultural work of standing in. cambridge: mit press. murray, s. (2018). bright signals: a history of color television. durham: duke university press. novak, d. (2013). japanoise: music at the edge of circulation. durham: duke university press. pinch, t., & trocco, f. (2002). analog days: the invention and impact of the moog synthesizer. cambridge: harvard university press. slack, j. d., & wise, j. m. (2014). culture and technology: a primer, second edition. new york: peter lang. sterne, j. (2012). mp3: the meaning of a format. durham: duke university press. théberge, p. (1997). any sound you can imagine: making music/consuming technology. hanover: wesleyan university press. usable soundscapes: ui sounds, mobile media, and the delicate nature of attention sarah murray university of michigan noisy but useful? ui sounds in mobile media if hearing is the perception of sound, but listening is the conscious choice to attend to it, then the goal of a user experience (ux) sound product designer is to build a soundtrack of digital life that inverts this relationship. while we tend to place social judgment on those who hear but don’t listen, digital sound is often a carefully constructed inverse: meant to be listened to, but not heard. or, as will littlejohn, sound design director at facebook explains, “we are not in the service of being noticed” (introcaso, 2017). this paper considers how designers and users of ui sounds on mobile media platforms negotiate the space between necessity and noise, and how that negotiation takes shape in different cultural contexts and geographies. to avoid notice in digital flows of attention is a particular design challenge. sound interfaces composed for mobile platforms are built to curate responsiveness, but must also negotiate the thin line between being helpful and being annoying. user interface (ui) sounds must quite literally strike the right chord – or beep – that captures and redirects attention without disrupting its flow for the connected user. as littlejohn notes, sound in the “real world” of the mobile everyday is vastly different than the sounds of contained narrative worlds like film and television. beeps, rings, and vibrating hums must accommodate our movement through routinized life; these sounds must be usable enough to make their presence justifiable, but not so present that users choose to tune out. at the same time, sound affords a modicum of control for the connected, mobile body in exchange for a certain type of datafied feedback – to notify, to remind, to mute, or to demarcate the lines between public and private is also an agreement to be tracked, registered, and tuned in to particular modes of measurement and quantified participation. part of a larger project on “necessary noise” and digital selfhood (e.g., silencing social media, designing affective alarm systems, curating notifications) this paper focuses exclusively on the ui sounds of mobile media devices and platforms. i suggest that soundtracks and “sound families” of beeps and tones emerge from material design decisions and user strategies that negotiate a number of tensions – that between being attended to and being annoyed, between the care structures of good design and the imperatives of attention economies, and between the intimate universality of branded sounds (e.g., apple’s ringtone) and the personal soundscapes created by users. the sounds that emerge are a result of the affective, economic, and material negotiations of market-driven attention on digital platforms, the place of sound in the mundane movements of the everyday, and the subjective nature of taste cultures and personal histories. beyond sound “effects” while there is substantial work on sound design in narrative and entertainment media (collins, 2008; weis and belton, 1985; lobrutto, 1994) and recent survey work on the uses and effects of sound in mobile media applications (lu, et al, 2009), this project contributes to current scholarship on the critical understanding of sound as a built and negotiated landscape of everyday media practice (sterne, 2012; bull, 2001, 2014). i bring together literature on the attention economy (fairchild, 2007; hearn, 2010; crogan and kinsley, 2012; bucher, 2012) and usability theory in design studies (norman, 2004; garrett, 2010; ankerson, 2018), two areas where sound in the digital context has not been thoroughly considered and that come to necessary light when we take sound seriously as a site of designed media interaction. this paper addresses questions such as: how and when does digital sound become noise? how is this connected to the imperatives of attention economies of clicks, likes, impressions, and other measurable modes of participation and non-participation? how is a highly subjective experience like the affective response to sound anticipated, managed, and cared for in the design of ui sounds and in the negotiated use of them as affordances? ultimately, i argue that sound in the mobile everyday must be general enough to be recognizable, but personal enough to feel worthy of our attention. methods the integration of theories of usability into sound product design results in helpful sonic interfaces intended to create a consistency of experience (i.e., keeping your sonic family of beeps “on brand”) and to reduce sonic interference in your day. at the same time, users create their own version of a usable soundscape by making dozens of sound design decisions through muting/silencing, setting notifications, prompting voice assistance, and customizing movement with music and podcasts. to capture the inevitable gulf between designed ui sounds and how they are taken up, i draw from published interviews with sound designers at digital media companies (google, twitter, facebook, apple) and combine this with results from a short survey on sound uses in mobile media. works cited bull, m. (2001). the world according to sound: investigating the world of walkman users. new media & society, 3(2), 179-197. bull, m. (2005). no dead air! the ipod and the culture of mobile listening. leisure studies, 24(4), 343-355. collins, k. (2008). game sound: an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of video game music and sound design. mit press. crawford, k. (2009). following you: disciplines of listening in social media. continuum, 23(4), 525-535. lu, h., pan, w., lane, n. d., choudhury, t., & campbell, a. t. (2009, june). soundsense: scalable sound sensing for people-centric applications on mobile phones. in proceedings of the 7th international conference on mobile systems, applications, and services (pp. 165-178). acm. plotnick, r. (2013). signal and switch: a cultural history of the push-button interface (doctoral dissertation, northwestern university). sterne, j. (ed.). (2012). “sonic imaginations.” in the sound studies reader. routledge, 1-17. introcaso, james (writer and producer). (2017, december 11). “#30 the bleeps, the sweeps, and the creeps!” twenty thousand hertz [audio podcast]. retrieved from https://www.20k.org/episodes/the-bleeps-the-sweeps-and-the-creeps. tuuri, k., mustonen, m. s., & pirhonen, a. (2007). same sound–different meanings: a novel scheme for modes of listening. proceedings of audio mostly, 13-18. garrett, j. j. (2001, 2010). the elements of user experience: user-centered design for the web and beyond. pearson education. norman, d. a. (2004). emotional design: why we love (or hate) everyday things. basic civitas books. weis, e., & belton, j. (eds.). (1985). film sound: theory and practice. mcgill-queen's press-mqup. lobrutto, v. (1994). sound-on-film: interviews with creators of film sound. greenwood publishing group. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): setianto, y. (2019, october 2-5). trusting twittersphere as a genuine political debate? the case of indonesian election hashtags. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. trusting twittersphere as a genuine political debate? the case of indonesian election hashtags yearry panji setianto department of communication studies, sultan ageng tirtayasa university abstract this research in progress explores how political discussion on indonesian twittersphere could provide a genuine conversation on debates related to the upcoming 2019 national election in indonesia. taking the case of the presidential and parliamentary election in the upcoming april 2019, the author uses social media data on twitter to investigate whether the discussions are heavily lean into digital public sphere or more dominated by political buzzer and bots. the author examines this by creating twitter network maps based on hashtags related to the election. most of the hashtags analyzed could attract hundreds of small communities, created mini-publics, which in turn shows the degree of willingness of the indonesian social media users to participate in this practice of digital citizenship. qualitative observations on the selection of the most significant actors within the network and the words they posted are employed to understand if the conversations were not led by either dominant political actors or political buzzers/bots, and thus, suggest the citizens’ honest form of political communication. despite the limitations of studying twitter data, the author suggests that by taking a closer attention to how political conversation in non-english/western political environment, this study might provide valuable insights on the development of genuine utilization of (and trust on) the social media platforms for political engagement. key words: online politics, elections, indonesia, twittersphere, social network analysis research background indonesia is the most muslim populous country and the third largest democracy in the world. for this reason, scholars study the democratization process in this country, which gradually shifted from its three decades of suharto’s authoritarian period to the more politically open environment during the reformation era in 1998 (aspinall, 2014; liddle, 1985). yet, many aware that not only the last election in 2014 became the most divided political momentum for indonesian politics—where a civilian joko widodo (or jokowi) won over a former general and suharto’s in-law prabowo subianto. both candidates are re-running for the 2019 presidential election, contributing to the more divided society. the tension between the two opposing parties are more heated within the digital political sphere, especially when the supporters of both candidates regularly creating various hashtags to promote their interest. using this background, this paper aims to further investigate (rq) to what extent that online political discussion on twitter can be considered as a genuine form of political expression within the context of the 2019 indonesian national election? the internet was one of the determinants of the collapse of the suharto’s regime in 1998. through the online circulation of foreign news, analysis and tutorials on organizing mass demonstration via mailing list apakabar—moderated in the united states and its content was provided by indonesian dissents, the internet offered unexpected political power to ordinary citizens to oppose the authoritarian regime (hill & sen, 2000). following suharto’s downfall, the indonesian society are enjoying a free political environment and little control from the government to the digital sphere. on various occasions, indonesians are relying upon online and social media to perform their digital citizenship. nevertheless, lim’s (2013) study shows how indonesian social media users tend to engage in digital political activity only and being reluctant in joining any political movement offline. this does not mean that online political affairs could not influence real-life politics. when jakarta’s governor basuki tjahaja utama or ahok’s political speech on youtube was edited and resulted in the accusation of blasphemy against islam, many online protests among indonesian muslims had turned into massive rallies demanding a trial for ahok. the study of social media use for political purposes has becoming more common. notably started with the study of the united states’ 2008 presidential election (larsson & moe, 2012), many scholars are interested in examining how twitter is used to amplify political messages by political parties/candidates, the publics, or events (bruns & highfield, 2013; burgess & bruns, 2012; elmer, 2013). jungherr (2016) found that there are at least 127 research on twitter and political campaign published in various englishbased academic publications but only one study uses indonesian politics as the research context. this shows that little attention given by scholars to non-english political context on the study of twitter, especially on the use of hashtags related to election. method the author follows hashtags related to the 2019 indonesian presidential election campaign, mainly four months before the election (on april 2019). here, the author will only include the analysis of three major hashtags: #debatpilpres2019 (meaning: the 2019 presidential election debate), #shutdownjokowi and #uninstallbukalapak (uninstall an indonesian e-commerce platform bukalapak since its ceo was said to be prabowo’s supporter). data is retrieved trough twitter’s public api using nodexl software several hours following the hashtag became a trending topic. using this method, the author could obtain around 18,000 tweets per hashtags. the network of tweets is visualized using gephi to identify the interactions and communities. analysis surrounding the event of second presidential candidate debates on february 17, 2019 there were at least 116,000 tweets posted using hashtag #debatpilpres2019 which include 11.814 nodes with 23.484 edges. using modularity feature, 1.2666 clusters or online community within the networks are identified (figure 1). figure 1. the network of #debatepilpres2019 the overall of the structure of the network is heavily relied on two presidential candidates @jokowi and @prabowo (with 2,883 and 1993 in-degree connections respectively) accounts, whereas @greenpeaceid (the greenpeace indonesia’s twitter account with 1178 in-degree connections) came to the surface only because the topic of debate was about environment. however, it can be argued that the importance of @greenpeaceid within the network also reflects the nature of the conversation where many of the tweets posted tried to exhibit a more rational argument by bringing/mentioning the environment issue within their posts. interestingly, several national media organizations’ accounts are found to be visible on the conversation— meaning that they are still being used as major reference by the indonesian netizens while they are talking about the political debate. on the second hashtag, #shutdownjokowi the use of tweets tends to be more associated with prabowo’s supporters who use their messages to attack jokowi. for instance, twitter accounts like @marierteman and @anonlokal are found to be two most significant actors within the network (based on the network’s degree calculation); who are also frequently posts tweets using similar/related hashtags supporting prabowo. interestingly, the second largest community identified is quite distance with the first group—it is worth mentioning that this community is led by @rokhmatlabib from hizbut tahrir indonesia (islamist radical group) (figure 2). figure 2. the network of #shutdownjokowi on contrary, on the third hashtag #uninstallbukalapak, jokowi’s supporters attack @bukalapak and its ceo @achmadzaki (figure 3). overall, while both hashtags are mainly used as a negative campaign tools against each opposing candidate, the messages posted on twitter are mostly organic, meaning they are not posted by bots; although there are some cases where the posts came from political buzzers or prabowo’s and jokowi’s hardliners. this practice indicates that many of both-side of the supporters are collaborating, trusting each other in delivering the same political messages in criticizing their political enemies. figure 3. the network of #uninstallbukalapak in addition, while tweets that came from political buzzers are visible in those hashtags, there is little evidence that the conversation became skewed toward the messages that were initiated by them. also, the activity of political bots (identified both using botomoter application as well as a qualitative closer examination whether the account is ‘human’ or bot through its activity on a certain period of time) has been limited throughout the analyzed hashtags. by taking these into consideration, the author suggests that there is a higher chance that the indonesian social media users are still eager to articulate their political opinion on twitter since they are still trusting that this platform could offer ‘genuine’ conversation on various national political issues. conclusion taken the examples from these three hashtags, it is evident that the indonesian netizens are still eager to participate in political talks on twitter, either to support their political leaders or to criticize the opponents. the involvement of numerous accounts on various election-related issues/hashtags also indicates citizens’ level of trust in using the platform, engaging with other users, mentioning and referring to media organizations accounts. one of the reasons, the author argues, is that not many tweets on the networks came from bots or political buzzers but genuinely came from the supporters and ordinary citizens. indeed, a longer observation (for months, or year perhaps) and more in-depth qualitative analysis on more diverse hashtags should better evaluate whether this argument is consistent within the case of indonesian political sphere on twitter. references aspinall, e. (2014). indonesian politics in 2014: democracy’s close call. bulletin of indonesian economic studies, 50(3), 347-369. bruns, a., & highfield, t. (2013). political networks on twitter: tweeting the queensland state election. information, communication & society, 16(5), 667–691. burgess, j., & bruns, a. (2012). (not) the twitter election: the dynamics of the #ausvotes conversation in relation to the australian media ecology. journalism practice, 6(3), 384–402. elmer, g. (2013). live research: twittering an election debate. new media & society, 15(1), 18–30. hill, d. t. & sen, k. (2000). the internet in indonesia’s new democracy. democratization, 7(1), 119-136. jungherr, a. (2016). twitter use in political campaigns: a systematic literature review. journal of information technology & politics, 13(1), 72-91. larsson, a. o. & moe, h. (2011). studying political microblogging: twitter users in the 2010 swedish election campaign. new media & society, 5, 729-747. liddle, r. w. (1985). suharto’s indonesia: personal rule and political institution. pacific affairs, 58(1), 68-90. lim, m. (2013). many clicks but little sticks: social media activism in indonesia. journal of contemporary asia, 43(4), 636-657. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): copland, s,. (2019, october 2-5). reddit quarantined: consequences of dealing with distrust in social media platforms through restricting engagement. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. reddit quarantined: consequences of dealing with distrust in social media platforms through restricting engagement simon copland australian national university extended abstract large social media companies have come under increasing pressure to regulate the often abusive, misogynistic, racist and homophobic language that occurs on their platforms. coordinated campaigns of online abuse, often blamed on the architecture and platform politics of social media sites (massanari, 2017), have become a matter of trust for social media platforms, whose role as a facilitator of public debate has been called into question. in response social media companies have become more active in regulating and banning particular users and channels. for example in 2018 a number of large social media companies banned the high-profile conspiracy theorist alex jones and his platform infowars from their platforms (hearn, 2018). but do these efforts, designed in part to reinstitute trust in the capacity of social media to be spaces of inclusivity and deliberative debate, have the desired outcome? or, do they create unintended consequences which have the capacity to make issues of online abuse and bigotry worse? using affordances theory, this paper studies the revamping of the quarantining function of the social news sharing site reddit to examine the consequences of increased regulation of content on social media sites. affordances is a term that has become a central analytical tool within the study of social media. as davis and chouinard (2016, pg. 242) argue, an “affordance refers to the range of functions and constraints that an object provides for, and places upon, structurally situated subjects”. affordance theory takes a relational approach toward technology (faraj & azad, 2012), examining the relational structures “between an object/technology and the user that enables or contains potential behavioural outcomes in a particular context.” (evans et al, 2016, pg. 36). affordance theory analyses both technical and social elements of a technology, finding middle ground between technological determinism and social constructionism. davis and chouinard (2016) provide categories to allow us to understand how affordances work. this framework of mechanisms and conditions define the different ways in which the functions of an artefact shape the usage of that artefact. davis and chouinard propose that affordances request, demand, allow, encourage, discourage, and refuse. this paper uses the mechanisms and conditions framework to examine how the revamp of the quarantine function on reddit shaped usage of the site by affected users, as well as how users adapted their own behavior to deal with new restrictions. reddit announced a revamp of their quarantine function in late september 2018 (u/landoflobster, 2017). reddit operates via ‘subreddits’; discussion boards based on particular themes or topics. a quarantined subreddit cannot generate revenue, does not appear on reddit’s front page, nor on other non-subscription-based feeds. quarantined subreddits can only be found via typing in the direct url or searching via a search engine. finally, when users attempt to subscribe to a quarantined subreddit a warning is displayed requiring the user to explicitly opt-in to view content. quarantines are designed to halt participation within and growth of subreddits without banning them outright (copland, 2018). this paper studies the reaction to the quarantining of two large subreddits that form part of the online ‘manosphere’, r/braincels and r/theredpill. while not explained explicitly by reddit these subreddits were quarantined primarily due to misogynistic language and behavior. this has resulted in coordinated campaigns, in particular by the moderators of r/theredpill, to have the quarantine overturned. the paper uses qualitative and quantitative data to understand the consequences of the quarantining of these two subreddits. first, a quantitative analysis of subreddit data is conducted to examine the use of these subreddits before and after the quarantine. comprehensive submission and comment data has been collected of these two subreddits using the reddit api. this data is used to study user activity on these subreddits prior to and post the implementation of the quarantine in order to determine whether it had its intended impact. secondly, qualitative analysis is conducted of posts related to the quarantining within these subreddits. qualitative analysis in particular studies how users, moderators and commenters reacted to the quarantining and how it shaped their perception of reddit. furthermore this analysis examines how users adapted to the quarantine, either via changing their practices on reddit or through shifting to new, less regulated, sites. the paper uses an affordances framework to analyse this data in order to understand the consequences of the quarantine on these subreddits. quarantining results in a shift in the affordances of reddit, in this instance resulting in greater discouragement of activity on particular subreddits. the paper uses the mechanisms and conditions framework to study the response to these changing affordances, examining how shifts in the affordances of reddit shaped behavior and activity of particular subreddits. the mechanisms and conditions framework is particularly valuable as it also allows for an understanding of how users adapt to and counteract particular site affordances, which is particularly relevant in this case. in doing so the paper argues that while the quarantining of r/braincels and r/theredpill lessoned activity and growth of these subreddits, it also resulted in significant backlash, increasing distrust in the platform. this, the paper argues, has the potential to result in long term harm, fostered primarily through growing distrust in social media platforms. the paper theorises that the quarantining of these subreddits had two unintended consequences. first, it increased distrust in reddit from subreddit moderators and users, leading to a breakdown of the relationship between users and the site. this has resulted in these subreddits feeling like communities under siege and separate from the broader reddit community. this is likely to have resulted in a further refusal to become party to broader reddit etiquette and moderation practices, practices which likely moderate abusive language. second, the quarantining of these subreddits has likely pushed users to external sites. in particular, following the quarantining, moderators of r/theredpill have pushed users to their site trp.red, while r/braincels users are likely to move to the site incels.co. these sites have significantly less moderation that reddit, contain less diverse views, and are more likely to contain abusive and misogynistic language. while quarantining has taken some abusive and misogynistic discourse off reddit itself it has not eliminated it, instead pushing it to more extreme platforms. while reddit has discouraged particular behavior on their site, through these two actions users have adapted to the shifts in affordances shaped by this quarantining. while this is likely to have shifted behavior on reddit, quarantining has not shifted overall behavior and language on social media sites in general. instead it has increased distrust in reddit and other larger social media platforms pushing users to less regulated communities. this reduces the capacity to engage users by moderating their action and behavior through requirements to suit the norms of large platforms. large social media companies have worked to build trust in their sites in recent years, increasingly banning and severely restricting users from participating on their sites due to abusive and misogynistic, racist and homophobic language. while this has short term benefits on particular platforms, using an affordances framework this paper argues that these actions have unintended consequences. these consequences can result in a further radicalization of actions and beliefs, furthering distrust in the online sphere. references copland, s. 2018. “reddit quarantined”. cyborgology. https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2018/10/29/reddit-quarantined/ davis, j., and chouinard, j. 2016. “theorizing affordances: from request to refuse”. bulletin of science, technology & society, 36(4): 241 248 evans, s., pearce, k., vitak, j., and treem, j. 2017 “explicating affordances: a conceptual framework for understanding affordances in communication research.” journal of computer-mediated communication 22: 35 – 52 faraj, s., and azad, b. (2012) the materiality of technology: an affordance perspective. in leonardi, p.m., nardi, b.a., and kallinikos, j (eds.), materiality and organizing (pp. 237 258). oxford: oxford university press hearn, s. (2018) facebook, apple, youtube and spotify ban inforwars’ alex jone, the guardian, available online: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/06/apple-removes-podcastsinfowars-alex-jones massanari, a. 2017. "gamergate and the fappening: how reddit's algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures." new media and society 19 (3):329-346. doi: 10.1177/1461444815608807. u/landoflobster. 2017. “revamping the quarantine function.” reddit, available online: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/9jf8nh/revamping_the_quar antine_function/ . microsoft word 845-589-1-pb.docx selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa the curious case of confession bear: analyzing anonymity and online memes jacqueline ryan vickery, ph.d. university of north texas denton, tx jacqueline.vickery@unt.edu andrew j. nelson, m.f.a. university of north texas denton, tx andrew@andjson.com abstract “advice animals” are popular user-created, image-based (.gif), online meme formats. the memes include a humorous image of an animal juxtaposed with text offering advice and/or making a joke. one such example is known as “confession bear”, which features a sad looking malayan sun bear “confessing” to something silly, shameful, taboo, or embarrassing. confession bear was first circulated through the online community reddit and was intended to be humorous. however, users unexpectedly started creating and sharing more serious confessions involving topics such as rape, abuse, and addiction. these more serious confessions juxtaposed with the “confession bear” image spurred lengthy in-depth conversations on the reddit message boards about the validity, authenticity, and appropriateness of such confessions. some users argued advice animals were not “supposed” to be serious, claiming these confessions were an inappropriate use of the form; as such, some users attempted to police the participatory culture created by the production of image-based memes. others sought to find the “truth” in the claims; some argued the confessions were false and therefore inappropriate, while others defended the confessions as authentic, and therefore appropriate. this paper argues anonymity allows users to appropriate and repurpose humorous image-based memes in ways that simultaneously challenge and reproduce hegemonic culture. keywords memes, anonymity, reddit, reappropriation introduction as the broadest definition, memes refer to cultural norms, behaviors, and practices. biologist richard dawkins first coined the term meme to refer to anything not biologically “wired” into human behavior; that is, it refers to the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena (dawkins, 1976). applying the concept of memes to the internet, coleman (2012) defines online memes as, “viral images, videos, and catchphrases under constant modification by users, and with a propensity to travel as fast as the internet can move them” (p. 109). additionally, memes are embedded within a culture that enables participation and remix (lessig, 2008; jenkins, 2006; gasser and ernst, 2006). in their study of online memes, knobel and lankshear (2007) found that many memes “were not passed on entirely ‘intact’ in that the meme ‘vehicle’ was changed, modified, mixed with other referential expressive resources, and regularly given idiosyncratic spins by participants” (p. 208); in other words, the memes were remixed, reappropriated, and repurposed. as part of a broader remix culture (lessig, 2008), memes are not typically beholden to authorship, but rather facilitate and encourage anonymous participation (davison, 2012). davison refers to these as nonattribution memes, in which the lack of author (foucault, 1984) enables generative practices and renders the form highly malleable. in accordance with davison, we also argue anonymity affords participants the freedom to appropriate and reconfigure meaning in unanticipated and at times potentially transgressive ways. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa one subset of image-based memes is known as “advice animals”. the image macro series follow a distinct format in which a humorous looking animal is placed in a square with short text at the top and bottom of the square (see figures 1-4).1 figure 1 advice animal dog figure 2 socially awkward penguin 1 according to knowyourmeme.com, advice animal images began september 7, 2006, and a subreddit for advice animals was created on reddit december 7, 2010. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa figure 3 foul bachelor frog figure 4 advice animal raccoon / "call me maybe" meme confession bear is one example of an advice animal macro image meme started in 2012. it includes a sad looking black malayan sun bear learning on a log juxtaposed with text “confessing” to something humorous, unexpected, taboo, controversial, or embarrassing (figs. 5-7).2 some are silly and humorous, while others focus on (perceived) deviant sexual acts and fantasies. however, alongside these forms are other more serious confessions related to addiction, rape, violence, racism, homophobia, and abuse (see fig. 8-13). these “inappropriate” and potentially transgressive confession bears serve as the focus on this paper. 2 on june 21, 2012 redditor f-18bro submitted a post to reddit titled, “i have a lot of weird stuff that i’d like to be able to confess to reddit so i can get it off my chest, so i made confession bear” [sic]. the macro image meme gained rapid popularity on reddit, twitter, tumblr, and various humor websites (knowyourmeme, 2013). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa figure 5 confession bear example figure 6 confession bear example figure 7 confession bear example selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa figure 8 confession bear perpetrator example figure 9 confession bear victim example figure 10 confession bear racist example selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa figure 11 confession bear serious example figure 12 confession bear victim example figure 13 confession bear xenophobic example selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa looking at the evolution of confession bear memes, we pose the following research questions. rq1: to what extent can the appropriation of the confession bear meme be considered transgressive? rq2: what is the significance of anonymity in facilitating users’ re-appropriation of confession bear memes? methodology & theoretical framework we viewed hundreds of confession bear memes posted to quickmeme.3 our sample for analysis includes confession bear images that confessed something unexpected and serious, defined as: a) confessions (as opposed to fantasies) b) that alluded to lived experiences c) with reference to trauma, suffering, violence, or pain, or explicit xenophobic confessions that d) were not intended to be interpreted humorously.4 we identified a sample of confession bear images that fit our criteria (see figs. 8-13 for examples). from a theoretical perspective, we are interested in how remix culture enables unexpected appropriation of malleable forms such as macro image memes and how anonymity simultaneously affords and contains the transgressive potential of confessions. as such, we turn to stuart hall’s (1994) notion of dialectic cultural struggle in order to analyze how confession bear demonstrates hall’s idea of “double movement”, that is containment and resistance vis-à-vis hegemonic culture. macro image memes are virtually limitless in terms of malleability, yet they are not without (socially enforced) boundaries. findings & discussion we argue anonymity and remix allows users to transgress social boundaries, for instance by allowing victims of violence, rape, and homophobia, to share their stories in an unexpected and “inappropriate” space. in this way, users appropriate the “funny” confession bear meme by challenging its form and conventions, but also their own positions as silenced victims. although confession bear encourages taboo confessions, victim narratives transgress social boundaries that attempt to contain and silence victims. however, users’ reactions and comments on the message boards also attempt to contain the form and meaning of the meme itself, and by extension police and silence the victim narratives. we found that the reddit community a) doubted users’ confessions, b) attempted to seek the “truth” or c) argued the confessions were an inappropriate use of the meme. as such, we argue that memes such as confession bear simultaneously challenge and reproduce the transformative nature of confessions. the fragmented and anonymous form of confession bear does not preclude the possibility of individual liberation (via therapeutic narratives), but we contend that the lack of context frames the confessions as fragmented personal narratives, rather than part of broader social narratives (macaulay and magnusson 2009). 3 quickmeme archives macro images and also provides templates for users to create their own macro image. as of march 2013 there are more than 98,000 confession bear memes. 4 we excluded confessions that were explicitly sexual in nature when the intent was to share a fantasy or desire rather than a traumatic or explicitly xenophobic experience. for example, we did not include confessions such as, “i really like it when my girlfriend does (fill in the blank with a sexual act)”. although these sometimes led to conversations on the reddit message boards as to whether these were actual confessions or not (and thus rather they were an appropriate use of confession bear or not), for the purpose of our analysis we did not include them. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa however, alongside victim narratives there are also confession bear memes that explicitly confess racist, homophobic, sexist, and other xenophobic beliefs and anxieties in serious ways not presumably intended to elicit a laugh. these confession bears were personalized confessions that contribute to the larger societal problems, but in a fragmented, decontextualized, and disembodied space without repercussions or justice. thus, the confessions appear transgressive, yet are simultaneously contained within the decontextualized and anonymous borders of the meme itself. significance what is significant is that the separation of form, confession, and experience fails to address the broader societal and cultural problems that led to the traumatic experiences and secrets in the first place. additionally, anonymity negates a call to action on the part of the viewer. as macaulay and magnusson, (2009) write, “the silence encoded in written discourse is also telling: by encouraging the submission of unspoken secrets, anonymity may reinforce suppression, exhibiting disembodied, silent confessions. borders are therefore not resisted but contained” (p. 97). there is no call to action, perpetrators are not identified nor held responsible (despite confession), and viewers can easily dismiss the confessions as merely personal rather than symptomatic of larger social issues. yet, at the same time, the otherwise unspoken confessions are heard and discussed by the reddit community, thus generating conversations and propelling discourses into a more public space. anonymity provides the means through which users can appropriate memes for fragmented, personalized, confessions and address injustices and anxieties. nonattribution macro images such as confession bear enable remix and participation that simultaneously resist and contain hegemonic culture. references coleman, e. g. (2012). phreaks, hackers, and trolls and the politics of transgression and spectacle. in m. mandiberg (ed.), the social media reader. new york: new york university press, pp. 99119. davison, p. (2012). the language of internet memes. in m. mandiberg (ed.), the social media reader. new york: new york university press, pp. 120-136. dawkins, r. (1976). the selfish gene. oxford: oxford university press. foucault, m. (1984). what is an author?. in p. rabinow (ed.), the foucault reader. new york: pantheon books. gasser, u. and ernst, s. (2006). from shakespeare to dj danger mouse: a quick look at copyright and user creativity in the digital age. berkman center research publication no. 2006-05. available ssrn: http://ssrn.com/abstract-909223. hall, s. (1994). notes on deconstructing ‘the popular’. in j. storey (ed.), cultural theory and popular culture. england: pearson education limited, pp. 442-453. jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york: new york university press. knobel, m. and lankshear, c. (2007). new literacies: everyday practices & classroom learning. open university press. lessig, l. (2008). remix: making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. new york: the penguin press selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa macaulay, m. magnusson, k. (2009). from souvenir to social movement: postsecret, art, and politics. young scholars in writing, 1, pp. 91-99. license this article is ©2013 authors, and licensed under creative commons attribution-noncommercialsharealike 3.0 unported. microsoft word johnson_the case of the missing fair use_aoir2016.docx selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 suggested citation (apa): johnson, a. (2016, october 5-8). the case of the missing fair use: a multilingual history and analysis of twitter’s policy documentation. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the case of the missing fair use: a multilingual history and analysis of twitter’s policy documentation amy johnson massachusetts institute of technology click through to the policy page of twitter and the navigation sidebar will offer you two separate categories: general policies and advertiser policies. the default opens to general. here are links to everything from the twitter rules to the username squatting policy to the child sexual exploitation policy to fair use. fair use, that is, if you’re accessing the page from an english-language setting. if you access it in japanese, spanish, or polish—in fact, any language except english, the fair use policy never even appears in your sidebar menu. however, if, for whatever reason, you are determined to see what the policy looks like in arabic, you can force the system to display the page by opening the fair use policy in english and then switching your language setting to arabic. when you do, it shows you the english-language document with a short line in arabic appended to the top: sorry, this article is not available in your language. at the same time, twitter’s parody policy—and in us law parody is not only a matter for freedom of speech doctrine, but is famed as a fair use exception category—appears across 10 of the available languages of twitter’s policy documentation, roughly 1/3. the copyright policy exists in 8 languages, or 1/4. what’s going on here? this paper traces the history of twitter’s policy documentation, across languages and time. drawing on sts scholarship, legal studies, and the growing field of corporate language policy and planning, i examine the language hierarchies—and the social and political assumptions they carry—embedded in twitter’s policy documentation. i focus particularly on twitter’s fair use and parody policies and their various iterations. many of the languages twitter offers include only minimal documentation—thus, for example, in suomi, swedish, and vietnamese only the twitter rules document exists. the fair use document, however, is missing even from those languages that have extensive, otherwise comprehensive coverage, such as french, german, and spanish. nor is it available in the similarly comprehensive japanese documentation, even though some japanese-language twitter users have actively created their own convention— #twremix—to addresses issues that overlap with fair use. nor is the fair use document available in hebrew, korean, or polish, though the legal systems of israel, south korea, and poland all employ fair use doctrines. for comparison, among english-language countries, the us legal system is the only one that employs a fair use doctrine. (there are, however, many other english-language countries that use fair dealing concepts; fair dealing is mentioned briefly in the fair use policy, but otherwise not covered in twitter’s policy documentation.) it would be easy to dismiss this as simply born of twitter’s us origins: the site’s english-language documentation reflects us law. it is a subtle contribution to a long argument about whether fair use is an affirmative right or a legal defense. but the plight of fair use documentation contrasts sharply with that of the parody policy. the parody policy—which protects not only parody, but also newsfeed, commentary, and fan accounts—appears a direct descendent of us fair use case law. and the parody policy exists in english, french, italian, german, spanish, japanese, portuguese, korean, turkish, and arabic. so why does fair use languish linguistically? or, what makes the parody policy so special? this paper takes up both questions, arguing that fair use is intentionally eliminated from documentation translation due to the alignment with (us) government that such translation would de facto suggest. despite twitter’s bold ‘country withheld content policy’—a policy which pairs jurisdiction-specific censorship with continued availability outside that jurisdiction, and introduced a nonjurisdictional worldwide setting—translating fair use asserts governance one step too far. the parody policy, however, as a descendent of both fair use doctrine and conversations the founders of twitter had before twitter even existed, flourishes. parody holds a special significance for policymakers at twitter. a number of twitter’s early policymakers themselves acquired parody accounts, which they enthusiastically embraced. in 2013, twitter’s s-1 filing for public trading status offered parody—as a form of social commentary—as a key part of twitter’s “value proposition to users” (98). further, unlike fair use, parody has a murkier legal existence marked by repeated failed attempts to define it. it is thus available as a space for leadership and platform-guided governance in a way that fair use is not. stepping back, what, then, do the processes of translating—or not translating—policy documentation reveal about the boundaries between law and platform policy and how they may be changing over time? and, too, what does this suggest about opportunities for legalistic innovation through deliberate crafting of platform policy? this paper draws on a multilingual archive of twitter’s documentation and accounts of formative exchanges that predate twitter; interviews with twitter employees in san francisco, tokyo, and dubai; participant observation at twitter offices; and a historical corpus of media articles in english, japanese, and arabic that offer local contextualization of the changes in twitter’s documentation. the paper shows that 1) twitter’s iconic product and its policies are translated (developed, updated) at different times. 2) platform policies are not equal in their policyness. and 3) platform policies select bodies of law and align platforms to these bodies of law, in varying degree and depending on specific legitimation practices. references angouri, jo. 2014. multilingualism in the workplace: language practices in multilingual contexts. multilingua 33 (1-2): 1–9. angouri, jo, and marlene miglbauer. 2014. ‘and then we summarise in english for the others’: the lived experience of the multilingual workplace. multilingua 33 (1-2): 147– 172. coombe, rosemary j. 1998. the cultural life of intellectual properties: authorship, appropriation, and the law. duke university press books. condren, c., j.m. davis, s. mccausland, and r.a. phiddian. 2008. defining parody and satire: australian copyright law and its new exception. media arts and law review 13(3): 273–292. foster, mariko. 2013. parody’s precarious place: the need to legally recognize parody as japan’s cultural property. seton hall journal of sports and entertainment law 23(2): 313–344. ganea, peter, and christopher heath. 2005. economic rights and limitations. in japanese copyright law: writings in honour of gerhard schricker. kluwer law international: 51–76. hurmerinta, leila, niina nummela, and eriika paavilainen-mäntymäki. 2015. opening and closing doors: the role of language in international opportunity recognition and exploitation. international business review 24(6): 1082–1094. jeong, sarah. 2016. the history of twitter’s rules. motherboard. jan 14. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-history-of-twitters-rules accessed feb 29, 2016. lessig, lawrence. 2004. free culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity. penguin. leval, pierre n. 1990. toward a fair use standard. harvard law review 103(5): 1105– 1136. mahili, ifigenia. 2014. ‘it’s pretty simple and in greek…’ global and local languages in the greek corporate setting. multilingua 33 (1-2): 117–146. melewar, t.c., and john saunders. 1999. international corporate visual identity: standardization or localization? journal of international business studies 30(3): 583– 598. schmid, stefan, and thomas kotulla. 2012. to standardize or to adapt? – a comprehensive review and assessment of the literature. in markteintrittsstrategien: dynamik und komplexität, ed. by joachim zentes. gabler verlag. 51–93. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): abidin, c. (2017, october 18-21). towards a theory of cross-media networked microcelebrity: of bedrooms, blogsites, broadcasts, and boardrooms. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. towards a theory of cross-media networked microcelebrity: of bedrooms, blogsites, broadcasts, and boardrooms crystal abidin jönköping university & curtin university cross-media networked microcelebrity it has been almost ten years since the concept of microcelebrity was coined by theresa senft (2008) to describe a communicative practice and self-branding labour wherein internet users fashion themselves as prolific personalities with commodifiable value. as the industry has matured, elite microcelebrities have honed themselves to become influencers (abidin, 2015), a cross-platform, highly commercial, extensively selfnarrativized form of branding that bridges across physical and digital spaces. influencers are impacting traditional media industries, including television (hamedy, 2016), cinema (hamedy, 2015), and publishing (naughton, 2016). they are among the world’s most influential teenagers (kembrey, 2014), being fastest-selling debut novelists (collison, 2014), and recognized by traditional awards (collins, 2016) and internetnative ones (influence asia, 2017). they have even stimulated updates in tax laws (the nordic page, 2011) and advertising guidelines (drake, 2016). yet, most of these recent developments have been limited to popular press coverage rather than scholarly inquiry. as the influencer phenomenon is evolving quicker than scholarship can keep up, a major gap in the field of microcelebrity studies is the connection between microcelebrities and legacy media. more specifically, what begs theorizing are the networked relationships between the three ecologies of internet personalities (i.e. transient virality, people who become memes, microcelebrities, and influencers), digital estates of the media (i.e. internet-native publishing outlets and the internet presence of legacy media), and traditional old media (i.e. television, cinema, and radio). while some scholars are beginning to investigate the dispersal of celebrity value across platforms and populations (hearn & schoenhoff, 2015), this paper explicitly maps out the structural, cultural, and social institutions that connect these three ecologies in relation to spatiality and temporality, through a theory of cross-media networked microcelebrity. methodology and typology to understand the networked flows among virality, celebrity, and commerce across the attention economy (goldhaber, 1997) of internet personalities, digital estates of the media, and traditional old media, i draw on six brief case studies from the last six years to illustrate the key (micro)celebrity pathways that have emerged globally. as an anthropologist, i draw on traditional ethnography with personal experience from fieldwork with influencers, and digital ethnography wherein i trace the historical and discursive journey of the case studies on various media (postill & pink, 2012). through grounded theory (glaser & strauss, 1967), i build a theory of cross-media networked microcelebrity. regrettably, these case studies are overtly white and anglo-centric; although this is not a function of the researcher’s intentional choice, it does serve as a commentary on the types of bodies and forms of microcelebrity that are accorded higher visibility in the media, and the forms of value (such as shame as spectacle or borrowed celebrity) ascribed to them. the six types are: 1) eyewitness virality: television news interviewees, many of whom are victims of the incidents being covered, who attain overnight fame through the news networks who curate and disseminate their sensational and memorable eyewitness accounts on social media as humour and clickbait. case study: michelle dobyne of “ain’t nobody got time for that” fame (2016). 2) face of memes: ordinary people, many of whom are accidentally captured with compromising expressions or gestures, who become iconic memes that while in high circulation, do not attach to their (attempted) self-branding nor translate into more permanent microcelebrity. case study: kyle craven of “bad luck brian” fame (2012). 3) spotted and groomed: everyday users, many of whom are children or teenagers, whose unexpectedly viral videos on social media are rebroadcast and amplified on television talk shows, and are invited as guests on talk shows before being groomed to run their own recurring segments on the talk show. case study: sophia grace and rosie of the “ellen degeneres show” fame (2011). 4) politicized posterchild: young children, many of whom share politicized content on social media, who have become branded by the media as the “face” of a movement, but who maintain their high visibility on social media without celebritizing themselves or being subsumed by legacy media. case study: bana alabed of “tweeting from aleppo” fame (2016). 5) borrowed influence: influencers, many of whom are the elite of their subgenres, who are invited to participate in or helm sections of traditional media outlets in order for legacy media to capitalize on influencers’ internet-native audiences to amplify their (fading) presence and relevance. case study: munahhirzi of “youtube to suria” fame (2012). 6) weaponized microcelebrity: microcelebrities, many of whom produce ambivalent content with the prowess to polarize public opinion, whose content is made viral and spectacular through traditional media’s disproportionate coverage, such that their fame and content can be weaponized and borrowed as a placeholder for various causes. case study: pewdiepie of the “wall street journal anti-semitic accusations” fame (2017). contribution this paper extends current scholarship on microcelebrities by shifting away from culturally-specific empirical case studies and platform-specific silos to theorize the production, consumption, circulation, and cooptation of microcelebrity across old and new media. by attending to how internet personalities, digital estates of the media, and traditional old media borrow from, capitalize on, and collaborate and compete for viewership and attention, we can understand the lifecycle, use value, discardability, and respectability politics involved in the field of microcelebrity studies. references abidin, c. (2015). “communicative <3 intimacies: influencers and perceived interconnectedness.” ada: a journal of gender, new media, & technology 8. doi: 10.7264/n3mw2ffg collins, s. (2016). “perth pop star troye sivan wins two public-voted aria awards.” perth now, 24 november. http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/western-australia/perth-pop-startroye-sivan-wins-two-publicvoted-aria-awards/newsstory/f4ebd9db72ff4087dda81cb0527ff97b collinson, a. (2014). “zoella’s book girl online outsells jk rowling.” bbc, 3 december. http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/30305855/zoellas-book-girl-online-outsells-jkrowling drake, s. (2016). “ftc is cracking down on failure to disclose influencers’ connections.” forbes, 29 june. https://www.forbes.com/sites/samanthadrake1/2016/06/29/ftc-is-crackingdown-on-failure-to-disclose-influencers-connections/#41bac3d61790 glaser, b. g., and strauss, a. l. (1967). the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research, chicago, aldine publishing company goldhaber, m. h. (1997). “the attention economy and the net.” first monday 2: 4-7. http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/519/440 hamedy, s. (2015). “youtubers on the big screen: a look at upcoming digital films with online stars.” los angeles times, 22 july. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-digital-stars-featuremovies-smosh-bad-night-20150722-story.html ———. (2016). “tyler oakley dropped by ‘the ellen degeneres show’ to celebrate ellentube.” mashable, 3 june. http://mashable.com/2016/06/02/tyler-oakley-ellen-degeneresellentube/#sxhvumr_rkqc hearn, a., and schoenhoff, s. (2015). “from celebrity to influencer: tracing the diffusion of celebrity value across the data stream.” pp. 194-212 in a companion to celebrity, edited by p. david marshall and sean redmond. john wiley & sons. influence asia. (2017). “creating tomorrow’s positive influence.” influence-asia.com. https://influence-asia.com/ kembrey, m. (2014). “troye sivan makes time magazine’s list of most influential teenagers.” the sydney morning herald, 15 october. http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/troye-sivan-makes-time-magazines-list-ofmost-influential-teenagers-20141015-116o60.html naughton, j. (2016). “margaret zhang fuses fashion and modern australia in new photo book.” the huffington post, 8 september. http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2016/09/07/margaret-zhang-fuses-fashion-andmodern-australia-in-new-photo-b/ postill, j., and pink, s. (2012). “social media ethnography: the digital researcher in a messy web.” media international australia 12(145): 123-134. senft, t. m. (2008). camgirls: celebrity & community in the age of social networks. new york: peter lang publishers. the nordic page. (2011). “tax authorities clamp down on bloggers.” the nordic page, 14 february. http://www.tnp.no/norway/economy/2203-tax-authorities-clamp-down-onbloggers selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): tyler, q., (2021, october). influencer culture & algorithmic apartheid on gay instagram. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. influencer culture & algorithmic apartheid on gay instagram tyler quick, university of southern california introduction critical research on social media influencers has concluded that influencers’ status is always contingent upon laboring to meet followers’ demand for “performances-of-self,” as well as making these performances available and visible (e.g. see baym 2018, duffy & hund 2019, duguay 2019). however, few have addressed the role that algorithms play in determining which influencers might be made visible, and therefore how platform design can predetermine who may attain influencer status. this project seeks to address this gap in the research by providing critical ethnographic insights into what is colloquially referred to as “gay instagram.” “gay instagram” is a term deployed by gay men to describe the social milieu and algorithmicallydetermined field of visibility in which gay men produce and consume content intended for consumption by other gay men. while such content varies, gay instagram has become increasingly understood by gay men as a space that has “morphed from being a social network for friends to a sea of semi-nude ‘influencer’ accounts” (scher 2019). gay men who have interacted with homoerotic content on instagram frequently report being subjected thereafter to images of “instagays”—popular gay influencers who specialize in homoerotic self-representation—in their promoted content and on the “explore page,” oftentimes to the extent that this content eclipses all other kinds (see image 1). what this makes clear to me is that the algorithmic processes that mediate whose content is made visible in order to sate instagram audiences’ scopophilic desires image 1 conceptualize the supply and demand of homoerotic imagery in a manner that compounds existing social biases and further privileges the visibility of the white, western, and wealthy gay person. methodology: my work draws upon rob kozinets’ (2020) “netnographic” approach to online field work. such an approach combines best practices from a number of methods and disciplines to provide a data-rich description of expansive and unwieldy online phenomena such as mine. throughout a period of three years, i maintained an instagram account through which i produced and disseminated my own homoerotic content, interacted with followers and other content creators, and observed trends in the production and consumption of homoerotic content. during this time, i maintained a “field notes” journal that included my written observations, along with over two thousand posts produced by others that i collected, coded, and categorized, screenshots of “algorithmic audits” (brown et al. 2021) i performed, aggregated social media data collected from social blade, and over one hundred articles collected from popular and lgbtq press coverage of “instagays” and “gay instagram.” however, as a queer scholar, i am suspicious of attempts to “redeem” ethnography (see cornejo 2019), especially in digital circumstances. applications like instagram are designed to respond rapidly to new input data, leaving even a single instagram user’s experience of the app liable to change drastically in the span of a day. as such, even methods like “algorithmic audits” can only definitively demonstrate the appearance of a specific output in response to input variables that are proprietary information and thus unknowable (seaver 2019; 2021). i mention this not to disparage my research, but rather to state an ideological position: observational methods can only describe subjective experiences of social media. however, as a member of the community i am studying, my subjective experience, albeit ungeneralizable, is in its own way representative of my phenomenon. by coupling it with a discourse analysis of media coverage of my phenomenon, and a wealth of data provided by analyzing comments, interviewing influencers, etc., i offer a multi-perspectival, interdisciplinary account of instagram. seeing as a definitive account is impossible, such will have to do for now. data summary: once instagram has determined that a user is interested in homoerotic content, that user can almost always expect the overrepresentation of white, mostly american instagays on their “explore page,” in the promoted content featured on their feed, in the suggested accounts to follow when they follow new people, and, if they are already following instagays, at the top of their feed whenever they log onto the app. in fact, when i created a second instagram account on a different device as a sort of experiment to see if a change in ip address or identity might affect the content made visible to me, my explore page became saturated with white, american instagays after only three days of interacting with instagays’ accounts. whenever i followed nonwhite or non-american instagays, many of the suggested accounts that appeared underneath the influencer were white and/or american, this suggests that in such circumstances instagram interprets general demand for homoeroticism as “colorblind” (arguably an act of racial discrimination itself, see bonillasilva 2003) and responds by merely supplying it with the most popular instagays, who are invariably western and white or white-passing. moreover, in the instances in which i followed white instagays, i almost never was suggested to follow people of color. in fact, at times i would often be suggested white gay men’s accounts with relatively few followers, but who were socially or romantically connected to popular white instagay accounts. this all leaves the impression that when determining the content best-suited to supply demand for homoeroticism, instagram’s algorithmic infrastructure is most likely to guide gay men toward accounts who bear the most “affinity” (mahapatra 2020) with the most popular accounts, which often in practice means those accounts already within influencers’ social environments. conclusion: the seeds for stratification along national and racial lines among the instagay class along racial and national lines were long ago sown, as the input data determining affinity and thus visibility is already marked by disproportionate demand among (western) gay men for white homoeroticism, i.e. sexual racism (see han & choi 2018). however, this is not the only manner by which instagram’s platform design determines algorithmic visibility for aspiring influencers. the data i present above (and in far greater depth in this presentation), suggests that “affinity” can also be determined through engagement between accounts, i.e. an account frequently engaged with by an instagay is more likely to be made visible to his followers. in effect, determinations of the most desirable homoerotic content are made through a variety of methods that make access to visibility an unequal enterprise on instagram. for many reasons, white elites in western metropolises are made more visible to instagram users, even when others could conceivably fulfill their same representational function, troubling the notion that influencer status can be attained through an individual’s “labor” without algorithmic assistance. references: baym, n. (2018). playing to the crowd: musicians, audiences, and the intimate work of connection. new york: nyu press. bonilla-silva, e. (2003). racism without racists: color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the united states. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. brown, s., davidovic, j., & hasan, a. (2021). the algorithm audit: scoring the algorithms that score us. big data & society, 8. christin, a. (2020). the ethnographer and the algorithm: beyond the black box. theory and society, 49 (5-6), 897– 918. cornejo, g. (2019). travesti dreams outside in the ethnographic machine. glq, 25 (3), 457–482. duffy, b., & hund, e. (2019). gendered visibility on social media: navigating instagram’s authenticity bind. international journal of communication (online), 4983–5002. duguay, s. (2019). “running the numbers”: modes of microcelebrity labor in queer women’s self-representation on instagram and vine. social media + society, 5 (4), 1-11. han, c., & choi, k. (2018). very few people say “no whites”: gay men of color and the racial politics of desire. sociological spectrum, 38 (3), 145–161. kozinets, r. (2020). netnography: the essential guide to qualitative social media research (3rd edition). los angeles: sage. mahapatra, a. (2020, december 16). on the value of diversified recommendations. retrieved from https://about.instagram.com/blog/engineering/on-the-valueof-diversified-recommendations scher, a. (2019, february 22). are sexy gay instagram accounts fueling disordered eating? nbc news. retrieved from https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbcout/are-sexy-gay-instagram-accounts-fueling-disorderedeating-n974036 seaver, n. (2019). knowing algorithms. in j. vertesi, d. ribes, et al. (eds) digitalsts: a field guide for science & technology studies. princeton university press, 412-422. seaver, n. (2021). seeing like an infrastructure: avidity and difference in algorithmic recommendation. cultural studies (ahead-of-print), 1–21. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): stark, l and hoey, j. (2019, october 2-5). the ethics of emotion in ai systems. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the ethics of emotion in ai systems luke stark microsoft research jesse hoey university of waterloo introduction computational analyses of psychological and behavioral data pertaining to human emotional expression have a surprisingly long history (dror, 2009), an underappreciated diversity of methods (boehner, depaula, dourish, & sengers, 2007; schröder, hoey, & rogers, 2016), and an increasingly critical role in social machine learning (ml) and artificial intelligence (ai) applications (davies, 2017; stark, 2018). speculative and science fiction is replete with questions regarding the emotional lives of artificial beings. yet contemporary, quotidian, narrow ai/ml technologies are most frequently used by social media platforms for modeling and predicting human emotional expression as signals of interpersonal interaction and personal preference (bucher, 2016). these analytics are now being deployed in domains as varied as hiring, personal health and wellness, customer service, border security, and, as part of a broader category of “digital phenotypes” (jain, powers, hawkins, & brownstein, 2015), in digitally mediated mental health treatment and prevention (brandt & stark, 2018). while the ethical and social impacts of ml/ai systems have of late become major topics of both public discussion and academic debate (barocas & selbst, 2016; boyd & crawford, 2012; johnson, 2018), the ethical dimensions of ai/ml analytics for emotional expression have been under-theorized in these conversations. emotional expression and machine analysis here, we make several contributions to the emerging critical literature on the ethics of ai/ml systems. the paper first taxonomizes systems for tracking and modeling human emotional expression through the types of data they collect (d. kim, frank, & kim, 2014). many such systems seek to model emotional interactions through “digital phenotyping,” the analysis of biosignals, including optical data (such as facial movement, gait, or infrared emanation); audio data (such as the vocal tone and cadence) (jain et al., 2015); haptic and physiological data (such as skin conductivity, blood flow, and body velocity) (picard, 2000); others examine semantic signifiers of emotional expression, including written words, graphic means such as emoji and emoticons, and other representations of human feeling) (alashri et al., 2016). as part of our review, we also describe a novel method for modeling human social and emotional interactions computationally: bayesian affect control theory or bayesact (schröder et al., 2016). developed out of collaborations between sociologists and computer scientists, it combines affect control theory, a form of structural symbolic interactionism (lively & heise, 2004), with bayesian probabilistic decision theory. we draw on this taxonomy to consider the ethical challenges posed by ml/ai human emotion analysis (desmet & roeser, 2015). one such challenge is that data on human emotional expression imperfectly reflect human emotions themselves – complex, culturally specific yet broadly recognizable signals of core human subjectivity. as such, these data are representative of multiple elements of human subjective experience, both denoted imperfectly and quantified partially. models extrapolated from these data claim a descriptive power that is also a prescriptive power, forcing individuals to adjust their own attitudes to conform to an “objective” measure of emotional expression that is in fact partial, artificial, and potentially detached from lived experience. a second ethical challenge concerns the ways in which subjectivity and the status of the human individual are inextricably tied to longstanding theories of ethical decisionmaking. given the ways emotion and other intuitive processes are understood to play a central role in ethical and moral judgments (prinz, 2004), the digital remediation of emotional expression has the potential to shift normative frameworks for decisionmaking based on the values of technology firms, not of individuals as users and citizens. emotions and ethical tensions in ai based on these analyses, we elucidate how a focus on emotional expression as a component of ml systems highlights conceptual tensions within current ai/ml ethics discourses. these include, first, how a focus on emotional expression as a component of ai/ml analysis demonstrates the broader tendency of ai/ml research to perform de facto human subject research without attendant awareness of or attention to the ethical complexities of such experimentation (brandt & stark, 2018). second, attempts to quantify and standardize measures of emotional expression illustrate the conceptual difficulty in constituting shared ethical or normative guidelines around ai/ml systems because of what nagel terms “the fragmentation of value” (nagel, 1979) and the challenge of developing widely shared intersubjective norms. finally, the analytics of emotional expression highlight human emotion’s centrality not just to ethical ai/ml systems, but also to these system’s broader mediating effects on social and political community and cohesion through their everyday use. we ground the fourth and last portion of the paper – preliminary recommendations around both policy and design -in recent applied work on virtual agents in two areas: cognitive assistive technologies for persons with dementia that are functionally and emotionally aligned with their target users, and facilitator agents in social networks aimed at promoting efficient and inclusive group processes. we draw on these case studies to consider the ethical implications of emotional ai in practice. references alashri, s., kandala, s. s., bajaj, v., ravi, r., smith, k. l., & desouza, k. c. (2016). an analysis of sentiments on facebook during the 2016 u.s. presidential election (pp. 795–802). presented at the 2016 ieee/acm international conference on advances in social networks analysis and mining (asonam), ieee. http://doi.org/10.1109/asonam.2016.7752329 barocas, s., & selbst, a. d. (2016). big data’s disparate impact. california law review, 104, 671–732. http://doi.org/10.15779/z38bg31 boehner, k., depaula, r., dourish, p., & sengers, p. (2007). how emotion is made and measured. international journal of human-computer studies, 65, 275–291. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2006.11.016 boyd, d., & crawford, k. (2012). critical questions for big data. information, communication & society, 15(5), 662–679. http://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2012.678878 brandt, m., & stark, l. (2018). exploring digital interventions in mental health: a roadmap. in a. shaw & d. t. scott (eds.), interventions (pp. 167–182). bern, switzerland: peter lang. bucher, t. (2016). the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 30–44. http://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154086 davies, w. (2017). how are we now? real-time mood-monitoring as valuation, 10(1), 34–48. http://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2016.1258000 desmet, p. m. a., & roeser, s. (2015). emotions in design for values. in j. van den hoven, p. e. vermaas, & i. van de poel (eds.), handbook of ethics, values, and technological design (pp. 203–219). dordrecht: springer. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6970-0_6 dror, o. e. (2009). afterword: a reflection on feelings and the history of science. isis, 100(4), 848–851. jain, s. h., powers, b. w., hawkins, j. b., & brownstein, j. s. (2015). the digital phenotype. nature publishing group, 33(5), 462–463. http://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3223 johnson, d. g. (2018). ai, agency and responsibility: the vw fraud case and beyond. ai & society, 0(0), 0–0. http://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-017-0781-9 kim, d., frank, m. g., & kim, s. t. (2014). emotional display behavior in different forms of computer mediated communication. computers in human behavior, 30, 222– 229. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2013.09.001 lively, k. j., & heise, d. r. (2004). sociological realms of emotional experience. american journal of sociology, 109(5), 1109–1136. http://doi.org/10.1086/381915 nagel, t. (1979). the fragmentation of value. in mortal questions (pp. 128–141). cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. picard, r. w. (2000). affective computing. cambridge, ma: the mit press. prinz, j. j. (2004). introduction: piecing passions apart. in gut reactions: a perceptual theory of emotion (pp. 1–11). oxford, uk: oxford university press. schröder, t., hoey, j., & rogers, k. b. (2016). modeling dynamic identities and uncertainty in social interactions. american sociological review, 81(4), 828–855. http://doi.org/10.1177/0003122416650963 stark, l. (2018). algorithmic psychometrics and the scalable subject. social studies of science, 48(2), 204–231. aoir2018-submission-brekke final selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 brekke, a. (2018, october 10-13). spreading the word: tracing the affective ecology of digital oral stories. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. spreading the word: tracing the affective ecology of digital oral stories anjuli joshi brekke university of washington this project explores the potential of creating, sharing and listening to oral stories online to open affectively charged spaces for listening across difference. while scholars have explored the potential of more visual forms of new media, podcasts and other oral storytelling forms have been largely under theorized (edmond, 2015). with its wide influence and popularity across several platforms (radio, podcasts, apps), the storytelling project storycorps provides a useful case study to analyze various modes of producing and circulating personal narratives and to examine how these narratives operate within larger discursive structures surrounding difference. whereas difference is often deemed a challenge to be overcome or a static component of identity to be acknowledged on a superficial level, drawing from joseph (2017) this project uses difference as an oppositional term. listening across difference means moving beyond including more voices to expose the power differentials between them and to demand equity. this project is significant because it highlights the boundaries and possibilities of storytelling as a way to connect with others. the boundaries remind us of the persistence of structures of marginality that limit the seemingly democratic practices of storytelling in a digital age; the possibilities gesture to the power of minoritized voices to disrupt entrenched narratives. drawing together recent work on affect from rhetorical studies, cultural studies and new media studies, this project uses textual analysis to trace the affective resonance of storycorps conversations shared online. affect is a useful tool when analyzing the movement and potential of personal narratives across platforms because it provides a means of conceptualizing the non-causal dispersal of emotioned energy that is both virtual and material, that flows between individual and collective identities. affective responses are not yet tied to larger ideological narratives. when listening to a stirring piece of music, for example, tears may begin to well in our eyes without us being able to pinpoint a logical connection between the sound and the response it elicits. while reading online responses to storycorps pieces and talking to listeners, people repeatedly allude to that heightened affective resonance, that welling of the eyes, when they hear the crack in the storyteller’s voice or the hushed intensity marking a shift in the narrative. i am interested in how this affective attunement morphs as these stories circulate online. the forty-minute conversations may, but do not necessarily, generate a networked reaction where a moment of affective resonance in the story is distilled down and propelled through the various storycorps channels, through radio, podcast, and apps, creating emotioned patterns of response from users. in her discussion of the formation of digital affective publics, papacharissi (2014) argues that affective processes online “mix fact with opinion, and with emotion, in a manner that simulates the way that we politically react in our everyday lives” (p. 27). online storytelling, she notes, involves the mixing and convergence of disparate content through links and shares and likes “to affectively represent subjectivities” (p. 27). in a world in which we are increasingly able to tailor the technologies that surround us to echo back our own voices and worldviews, we seem less willing to slow down and listen deeply to the voices of those whose presence risk placing our tidy worlds into turmoil. the echo chambers that trap us often lead to myopic understandings of our past and present that mute competing voices. in this project, i look at storycorps initiatives featuring the voices of marginalized communities and how the materiality of the various platforms invites different forms of affective interactivity that either opens or closes possibilities for listening across difference. structure this project uses textual analysis to map three intersecting storycorps platforms. i compare the types of narratives that appear on these platforms, the audiences that have access to them, and the reception to stories across platforms by analyzing online user comments and other digital means of response such as sharing, liking, and tweeting. in order to limit the scope of this project, i analyze stories from the following storycorps initiatives: griot (archive of african american voices), historias (archive of latinx voices) and storycorps outloud (archive of lgbtq voices). analysis of each platform acts as a separate chapter: 1) storycorps stories edited and broadcast through a partnership with national public radio’s morning edition. these short, professionally edited storycorps pieces often succeed in eliciting a strong affective response from listeners. my analysis of user responses online, however, suggests that listeners are more likely to assimilate the affective resonance of these stories into a preconfigured ideological landscape rather than create a rupture that opens space for questioning and change. the short highly edited clips crafted for mass broadcast largely focus on a harmonious and sentimental narrative closure that does not seem to provide enough context to alter beliefs and behaviors. 2) the storycorps podcast. the storycorps podcast spends more time providing context, follow-up interviews with participants, and highlighting some points of unresolved tension. the podcast often ties clips from storycorps conversations to larger structural themes, drawing connections between various participant experiences and helping the listener see, or rather hear, patterns of systemic oppression. the medium of podcasting differs from both radio and visual forms of digital storytelling to engender unique types of embodiment. the portability of podcasts and apps enables an embodied experience of moving through the world enmeshed with the stories being told. the podcast, however, has a smaller listenership than the stories broadcast on npr’s morning edition, and because of its length is less likely to be shared and circulated online, limiting its potential reach. 3) the storycorps me app. this app gives storytellers the greatest control over the narratives being recorded and published online. these amateur recordings often include awkward pauses and an aura of uncertainty. in contrast to the affective hit of the professionally edited storycorps segments featured on both npr and the podcast, recordings from the app often generate discomfort as the difficult process of working through difference is made palpable. i am often the first or second person to hit listen to the uploaded recording, and thus the ability of these voices to spur deep listening among wider publics is highly unlikely. still, i contend that the existence of the app, a technology that encourages the act of sitting together with a friend or family member to engage in these difficult conversations, facilitates a space of deep listening, even if that space only extends to the individuals who take part in the activity. through tracing the movement of personal narratives across various platforms, this study analyzes the relationality of listening, how we listen, and how this listening structures affective relations across difference. i analyze the significance of how the various storycorps affective ecologies operate to either open spaces for listening and dialogue around thorny issues of power and difference or displace such dialogue by foregrounding universality and harmony in a way that elides difference. references edmond, m. (2015). all platforms considered: contemporary radio and transmedia engagement. new media & society, 17(9), 1566-1582. joseph, r. (2017). what's the difference with "difference"? equity, communication, and the politics of difference. international journal of communication, 11, 3306-3326. papacharissi, z. (2014). affective publics : sentiment, technology, and politics (oxford studies in digital politics). new york, ny: oxford university press. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): chia, a. (2017, october 18-21). game analytics and participatory efficacy. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. game analytics and participatory efficacy aleena chia indiana university introduction in 2009, a panel of players from the massively multiplayer online game (mmog) eve online took the stage at a fan convention. they gave a presentation outlining what they had done in the past year to advocate for the interests of fellow players to the company that developed the mmog. the panel was elected into their role as consumer delegates by players, through voting systems provided by the company. the panel defended their efficacy as delegates by presenting the percentage of issues they raised on behalf of their constituents, which prompted the company to redesign the game’s mechanics, interface, or environments. a moderator hired by the company for the event emphasized the significance of the delegation: “there’s a larger context to this: this is the first kind of democratic experience that has been developed by a gaming company or i think any kind of company to have elected representatives from within the customer base. so all those who vote … [are] participating in a social experiment, and i think you are kind of privileged to be the first participants in the embryo of the twenty-second century democracy.” eve online did not invent the use of democratic experiences in entertainment contexts. hartley (2008) informs that audience voting in reality television formats are part of longstanding “plebiscitary industries” that include audience measurement firms, media monitors, and opinion pollsters, which sample, bundle, scale up, process, and represent the demos to itself. peters (2001) maintains that such quantitative forms of collective self-knowledge are vital to public spheres where geographical scale and social complexity exceed individual experience. eve’s consumer delegation is part of an ascendant form of democracy. however, this is less because of the delegation’s vaunted electoral processes, and more because of their legitimation of “datafied” forms of collective self-knowledge that are not aggregated from players’ opinions and choices, but are extracted from game analytics. on the one hand, customer feedback such as user forums, surveys, and focus groups are established channels for consumers to communicate their sentiments to corporations. on the other hand, game analytics is a consumer research method that uses statistical analysis, predictive modeling, optimization, and forecasting to analyze telemetry data on player behavior gathered from game clients (el-nasr et al., 2013). digital games are inherently surveillance infrastructures, which have been repurposed by online game companies to gather information about player behavior directly from client applications (o’donnell, 2014; kline et al., 2003). game analytics continues a long history of “commercial research” that has sought to rationalize production, sales, and distribution through household interviews, opinion polls, retail indices, and audience measurement (elmer, 2003; beniger, 1986). phenomenological feedback and game analytics are distinct regimes of knowledge that are leveraged by media producers and consumers for control over product development. how do consuming populations and governing corporations deploy these corroborating and competing regimes of knowledge towards a kind of "citizen efficacy": the influence and impact of citizens over the governance of their society (taylor, 2006)? within civil society, citizen efficacy refers to how the “will of the people” translates into binding collective decisions about how matters of public concern are defined, prioritized, and resolved by governments. mechanisms for citizen efficacy in democratic regimes include elections, referenda, and public discourse. within mmogs, this can be interpreted as participatory efficacy: how the collective will of participants translates into changes to game architecture, rules, or content. mmogs are non-linear media forms that change with every fix, update, and expansion (humphreys, 2005). these changes have social, political, and economic ramifications for eve’s fractious player groups, who vote to have their interests represented to developers. this paper demonstrates how consumer delegates represent their constituents by using the logics of game analytics to translate player interests into representative samples for the game publisher. this paper argues that “representativeness” operates as a boundary object (star, 2000) in delegates’ player advocacy and corporate consultancy, in order to provisionally realize the founding vision of co-creation. this is a vision of mutual benefit from relations of increased dialogue, transparency, access, and accountability between consumers and corporations (prahalad and ramaswamy, 2005), which is usually unevenly realized (banks, 2013). the uneven realization of cocreation is further skewed by consumers’ asymmetrical access to game analytics as a regime of knowledge for citizen efficacy. the interpretive flexibility of “representation” allows delegates to mediate inconsistencies of meaning that reside in the social worlds of players and developers. at the boundary between consumer research and political representation, game analytics provides shared standards of scale and objectivity that synchronizes the goals of corporate efficiency and participatory efficacy. method this argument is based on the qualitative analysis of meeting minutes from biannual summits between consumer delegates and developers of eve online, a space-themed mmog with over half a million subscribers. over a thousand pages of minutes have been published over seven years of summits. delegates are sponsored to attend these three-day summits with development teams that are held biannually at the company’s headquarters in iceland. the publication of these summit minutes (with redactions to protect trade secrets) fulfill a conditional promise of transparency and accountability the company made to its players. instead of staged acts, these minutes are analyzed as performative documents that are linguistic means of world-making. this analysis is supplemented by developer interviews and participant observation at two fan conventions, which are supplemented by video recordings of the convention’s events over an additional four years, promotional texts, customer relations communications, and press reports. significance this study foregrounds the mounting political stakes of algorithmic opacities and information asymmetries as media analytics dominate the way publics come to know and talk about themselves. participatory and citizen efficacy relies on deliberative processes, which are weakened by these opacities and asymmetries that now dominate mediated forms of public discourse. boundary objects such as “representativeness” must be clarified in popular as well as public culture, in order to discriminate intentioned discourse from datafied proxies of intention. references banks, john (2013), co-creating videogames (bloomsbury publishing). beniger, james (2009), the control revolution: technological and economic origins of the information society (harvard university press). el-nasr, m seif, drachen, anders, and canossa, alessandro (2013), 'game analytics', new york, sprint. elmer, greg (2003), profiling machines: mapping the personal information economy (mit press). hartley, john (2008), 'reality and the plebiscite', television truths (blackwell publishing ltd), 126-60. humphreys, sal (2005), 'productive players: online computer games' challenge to conventional media forms', communication and critical/cultural studies, 2 (1), 37-51. kline, stephen, dyer-witheford, nick, and de peuter, greig (2003), digital play: the interaction of technology, culture, and marketing (mcgill-queen's press-mqup). leigh star, susan (2010), 'this is not a boundary object: reflections on the origin of a concept', science, technology, & human values, 35 (5), 601-17. o'donnell, casey (2014), 'getting played: gamification, bullshit, and the rise of algorithmic surveillance', surveillance & society, 12 (3), 349. peters, john durham (2001), '" the only proper scale of representation": the politics of statistics and stories', political communication, 18 (4), 433-49. prahalad, coimbatore k and ramaswamy, venkat (2004), 'co-creation experiences: the next practice in value creation', journal of interactive marketing, 18 (3), 5-14. taylor, charles (2007), 'cultures of democracy and citizen efficacy', public culture, 19 (1), 117. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 jenson, j., skardzius, k., & de castell, s. (2019, october 2-5). playing while female: re-reading identity fixations in overwatch. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. playing while female: re-reading identity fixations in overwatch jennifer jenson the university of british columbia karen skardzius york university suzanne de castell the university of british columbia introduction & context in early 2019, overwatch professional player, “ellie” quit playing just weeks after having been named to one of the teams seeded into the professional league. the harassment cited as a reason to leave was related especially to whether or not “ellie” was truly “female”. not much later, ellie was revealed (and confirmed by blizzard, the parent company of overwatch) to be an account created by a male player (tassi, 2019). this paper sets out to map the controversy that ensued from a self-styled “social experiment” of playing while female. this paper brings this current “revelation” into conversation with past, more fully embodied/manufactured identities to better understand why this case is particularly important to internet studies. to this end, we begin by briefly describing some earlier, more familiar cases of people revealed to be someone other than, in online spaces, they said they were. then, we further outline the instance of ellie: its uptake by mainstream media, prominent youtubers and twitch streamers, and its discussion on internet forums like reddit and 4chan. paying particular attention to the ways these discussions frame the “trick” played in disguising ellie’s ‘true’ identity (singular), we suggest that this kind of case has always been galvanized by an underlying conviction that the best gamers are always and only men, and one contribution internet scholarship can make here is to show how these discursive patterns are unhelpful in understanding contemporary identificatory politics and practices in online spaces. in the early landscape of what was once known as the “information superhighway” were publicly reported instances of faked identities in “cyberspace”. one particularly famous case discussed at length by transhuman, cyberspace scholar a. rosanne stone (1991), recounts the “case of the cross-dressing psychiatrist,” a crippled, house-bound woman who amassed, for those early days, quite the community of online friendships. she is later revealed as a fraud – an able-bodied, male psychiatrist – and stone explores the community’s outrage, hurt and betrayal that he wasn’t who he pretended to be online. ellie as “social experiment” fast forward nearly a quarter of a century, and here is the case of “ellie”. for the proposed paper we examined mainstream media reports of ellie in news sites including forbes, kotaku, and the washington post, reddit and 4chan posts, and youtube and twitch commentary. due to abstract length constraints, we briefly overview and analyze just a fraction of that commentary explored in more depth in the paper. on december 21st, 2018 the overwatch contenders team “second wind” announced via twitter that ellie was joining their roster for the upcoming season, without identifying ellie’s legal name. shortly after, reddit posts, tweets, and youtube videos emerged that speculated about ellie’s ‘real’ identity. some players assumed ellie was cheating (a woman could not be that skilled), others that “ellie” was actually an alternate account of an existing top500 male player. high-profile professional player “dafran” flatly dismissed the idea that ellie could be a woman, telling his twitch viewers on-stream that “someone is playing this account and ellie is talking right beside him”. shortly after, on december 22nd, 2018 ellie tweeted a screenshot of someone encouraging others to dox them. the screenshot read: “people in contenders need their first and last name leaked pretty much right? ... it’s doxing time. not for malicious intent. just to figure shit out”. the toxic chatter around ellie prompted several high-ranking female players to publicly recount their own experiences of toxicity and sexism while playing overwatch. one player who goes by, fareeha tweeted about some of the typical comments she is confronted with after saying hello in voice chat, for example, “when did ur bf boost you”, “how much did you pay for that [account]”, and “whats ur snapchat” – all of which contributed to the community’s ongoing debate about the importance of identity in overwatch. in early january 2019, second wind tweeted that “due to some unforeseen reactions” ellie was stepping down from the team. journalism outlets like kotaku (grayson, 2019) and the mary sue (hale-stern, 2019) quickly picked up on the ellie story situating it in the broader context of hyper and toxic masculinity, misogyny, and harassment of female players in esports and gaming more generally. however, on january 4th, popular streamer, aspen, announced to her viewers that the ellie account was actually being played by punisher, a top500 male player. punisher and a female collaborator had been working together to create ellie. the result? mainstream media outlets publishing pieces about ellie’s ‘false identity’, the misogyny and gender inequity in esports, and the likely ramifications of this deception (ezerberger, 2019). nearly every piece concluded that this controversy ‘set women back’ or would make it more difficult for women to enter the professional esports arena in future. conclusion paul tassi (2019), writing for forbes, states: “i am the most concerned about the takeaway that many will believe future attempts to “expose” female players in the future will now be considered justified because of the ellie situation.” that is certainly true, players who identify as women, as many of them recount, have their skills and abilities challenged over and over again. however, we argue that it is important to view ellie’s ‘deception’ as yet another in a long line of people who adopt a different identity online. it remains the case that there are plenty of skilled women who play overwatch, and that they will continue, as they have for many years across many multiplayer games, to either hide their identity or have their identity challenged more frequently the more skilled they are. what is troubling here, including in the significant media coverage on ellie, is that it wouldn’t even merit commenting on if not for the hegemonic view that men are more skilled. perhaps less a “social experiment”, as her creator was reported to have claimed after the fact, and more just another brief instance of manufactured non-normative identity. returning to stone, what was so radical about her argument, both then and almost 25 years later, is that she was exploring how identities shift and multiply, online and off. far from being a ‘setback’ for women, ellie reinforces how much is at stake for women in competitive leagues like overwatch – for those who did not already know that. however, it’s the larger challenge to “gender as usual” that her brief appearance presents to mainstream and niche media that best demonstrates its importance of this case for internet researchers. references erzberger, t. (2019, january 7). ellie ‘social experiment’ a setback for women in esports. espn online. accessed february 28, 019 from: http://www.espn.com/esports/story/_/page/overwatchelliecolumn/ellie-socialexperiment-setback-women-esports grayson, n. (2019, january 3). overwatch pro quits over after harassment over whether she was really playing. kotaku. accessed february 28, 2019 from: https://kotaku.com/overwatch-pro-quits-after-harassment-over-whether-she-w1831468560 hale-stern, k. (2019, january 4). female overwatch player quits after nonstop harassment and i for one am schoked. accessed february 15, 2019 from: https://www.themarysue.com/female-overwatch-pro-quits-harassment/ stone, a. r., 1991. will the real body please stand up?: boundary stories about virtual cultures. in m. benedikt, ed. cyberspace: first steps. cambridge: the mit press, pp. 81-118. tassi, p. (2019, january 6th). overwatch’s fake female player ‘ellie’ scandal is the mess that keeps on giving. forbes. accessed february 17, 2019 from https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2019/01/06/overwatchs-fake-female-player-elliescandal-is-the-mess-that-keeps-on-giving/#411be54328a0 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): dibella, s. (2020, october). the uncertain decorum of online identification: a study in qualitative interviews. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the uncertain decorum of online identification: a study in qualitative interviews samuel dibella cypurr collective this study explores the ethics and motivations of online identification—how and why people collect and publish identifying information about others online. in seven interviews, activists, internet users, advocates, and journalists were asked about their investigative practice and how they viewed the ethics of deanonymization. using ethnographic interviewing techniques and a thematic analysis inspired by grounded theory, i describe respondents ’investigations and compare them to existing theories in surveillance studies, online anonymity, and digital vigilantism. ultimately, the interview results did not follow models of digital vigilantism and doxxing, and i caution against using those terms to apply to cases like those described in this study. i also make suggestions for how these results could augment theoretical models of anonymity, particularly how respondents ’ investigative techniques and backgrounds lead them to different moral commitments. digital privacy debates often center around data handling by powerful actors—companies and countries. in parallel, researchers have been discussing online harassment, especially in massive, organized campaigns, and the mental-health harms they cause (lenhart et al. 2016). but collecting identifying information is also within grasp of the everyday internet user. a tide of digital information has made loss of anonymity an ordinary occurrence on the internet. with social media data, public records, and tools like satellite imagery and reverse-image searching, people can easily trace the online activities of friends, acquaintances, coworkers, or strangers. these ways of learning about people depend on unofficial sources and the unknowing complicity of others (whoever shared the information initially). in the current iteration of internet life, there’s little vocabulary for describing group privacy responsibilities or for deciding what you should do with someone else’s information. the differing vulnerabilities people have online, based on gender, race, citizenship status, or economic class, make it hard to assume what will or won’t harm another person (gangadharan 2017). asking for permission to post photos to social media is common now, even as it has become normal to look up the personal or professional social media accounts of someone you’ve just met. the norms for using identifying information are still evolving as internet communities adapt digital investigative techniques to their own ends. methodology to answer the questions above, i used qualitative interviews to uncover how investigators view their work, ethics, and effects. after my initial literature review, i didn’t think i could use theory to design the interview study—i couldn’t find theories that precisely covered the area of research. because i wanted to describe resulting data rather than infer from them, i thought an inductive analysis would work well. so, i employed the methodology of grounded theory to guide my work. with its attention to process and causality and its aim to “create” theory rather than test hypotheses (dey 2004), i saw affinity between grounded theory and my research questions. i view my resulting study design as in line with gabriella coleman’s (2010; 489) call for researchers to “provincialize” culture in digital media: “showing how, where, and why [digital media] matters is necessary to push against peculiarly narrow presumptions about the universality of digital experience.” my interviews started with a convenience sampling of respondents who were closest to my initial area of interest, doxxing and deanonymization. as interviews progressed, i used purposive sampling to fill in gaps where i thought i needed more material. for example, i made sure my later interviews included archivists and activists, because i was curious how their outlook would reflect in their practice, in comparison to the journalists i spoke with earliest. this practice is consistent with “theoretical sampling” in grounded theory, where researchers continually refine their sampling choices as they collect data (charmaz 2006; 96). the interviews comprised 10 hours of audio split over seven respondents. respondents lived or worked in the united states, the united kingdom, or singapore, and most were journalists, hackers, activists, researchers or advocates (several in some combination). all respondents had practiced online investigations for at least several years, including investigators who identified people outside of work. because of the duration of their practice, all investigators had adjusted their approaches to investigation and publication since they started. results investigators had a hard time balancing their moral obligation to release time-sensitive information with the lengthy work of trying to ensure no harm would result from publication. in many cases, they viewed remaining silent as unethical; they felt the knowledge they had about impending harms or the contribution they could make to government transparency compelled them to speak. but that doesn’t mean they were certain about the choices they made—respondents stressed that their decisions about presentation and anonymization were case-specific. they might make different decisions, given the opportunity. this study demonstrates the problems that arise when people collect and share personal information online. investigators used a variety of means, including digital and physical sources, to identify people online, and they were motivated by curiosity, the requirements of their work, and their sense of justice. their efforts to preserve anonymity were mostly confined to people peripheral to their investigation, although they also took care to prevent their work from causing online harassment. investigators used collaboration mostly for the publication of their results, although they had difficulties with the differing technical ability of their collaborators and audiences. as a result, they were protective of how their work was interpreted and tried to avoid publishing speculation to preserve their legitimacy and prevent online harms. the small sample size limits the scope of this study, but i hope it is an indicator of fruitful directions for future research in internet ethnography, as well as a helpful example for theories of internet culture. anonymity underpins many social interactions, but it’s easily revoked. the act of online identification is fraught, because of all the harms it can cause. but it’s also normal on the internet, since so much identifying information is freely available to those with internet access. the infrastructure of the internet enables lateral surveillance and sousveillance, not just mass surveillance, and the investigators i interviewed all had to adapt their existing ethical standards to this new domain. normative ethics in privacy policies and regulation have received a lot of attention, but i hope these interviews show that applied ethics on the internet deserves more social science study. we need to talk more about how privacy and anonymity are performed socially—what their role is and how people decide to preserve or puncture them. references charmaz, kathy. 2006. constructing grounded theory. london: sage publications. coleman, gabriella. 2010. “ethnographic approaches to digital media.” annual review of anthropology 39 (1): 487–505. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104945. dey, ian. 2004. “grounded theory.” in qualitative research practice, by clive seale, giampietro gobo, jaber gubrium, and david silverman, 81–94. gangadharan, seeta peña. 2017. “the downside of digital inclusion: expectations and experiences of privacy and surveillance among marginal internet users.” new media & society 19 (4): 597–615. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815614053. lenhart, amanda, michele ybarra, kathryn zickuhr, and myeshia pricefeeney. 2016. “online harassment, digital abuse, and cyberstalking in america.” data & society. https://datasociety.net/blog/2017/01/18/online-harassment-digital-abuse/ final aoir 2020 layers of networked privacy.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 layers of “networked privacy”: context collapses across relations, technologies, institutions, and data jeeyun (sophia) baik university of southern california introduction informational privacy means an ability of individuals to self-determine their information flow by controlling the data’s whereabouts (westin, 1966). the understanding of privacy has constantly evolved as new communication technologies introduce a set of problems that go beyond traditional settings one’s privacy is expected (igo, 2018). “networked privacy” (boyd & marwick, 2011; marwick & boyd, 2014) is one of the frameworks that theorize what privacy looks like in the digital era characterized by popular social media platforms. marwick and boyd (2014) suggest considering “ongoing negotiation of contexts…[where] contexts regularly blur and collapse” (p. 1063) in the networked new media environment. while “networked privacy” as suggested by marwick and boyd (2014) provides a useful lens to analyze privacy challenges arising with new media in terms of horizontal privacy–privacy of individuals from other individuals like family members or friends (quinn & epstein, 2018), it does not address vertical privacy– privacy of individuals from institutions such as government or corporations. this paper seeks to expand the “networked privacy” framework, identifying different areas of “context collapses” in the current networked information environment. it includes the original dimension of (1) interpersonal relations and additional layers of (2) technologies, (3) institutions, and (4) data. by doing so, this study teases out multiple layers of networked contexts that complicate privacy and regulations thereof in recent years. that is, the extended framework is aimed to more holistically investigate the moments “collision of information norms” occurs (marwick and boyd, 2014, p. 1054). marwick and boyd (2014) emphasize that “information norms and contexts are coconstructed by participants and frequently shifting” (p. 1064), and we are at a critical juncture where information norms are becoming enshrined in privacy regulations in different parts of the world including the eu’s gdpr (general data protection regulation) and the ccpa (california consumer privacy act) in the u.s. as such, understanding complex layers of context collapses can shed light on the legal grey areas that would need further examination and sophistication. suggested citation (apa): baik, j. (2020, october). layers of “networked privacy”: context collapses across relations, technologies, institutions, and data. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. method the study collected u.s. news media articles published between january 2018 and june 2020: the period encompasses key moments such as the cambridge analytica scandal and enforcements of gdpr and ccpa. i collected news on digital privacy published by the 2018 u.s. top newspapers via mediacloud, which resulted in 5,874 articles. i sampled 300 articles for close qualitative examinations: the first top 150 articles were selected based on facebook share counts, and the remaining 150 articles were solicited by randomly selecting 5 articles from each month during the 30-monthlong period. i conducted a critical discourse analysis (cda) (fairclough, 2013) on the sampled articles, exploring any layers/moments of “context collapses” with regard to privacy. findings and discussion the key component of the original “networked privacy” framework is (1) networked relations. people are connected to others coming from separate contexts on digital platforms. for example, even if a teenager posts about one’s school drama on facebook expecting only friends would respond, a concerned family member may go on to reply (marwick and boyd, 2014). digital platforms usually provide different privacy settings to their users, but the settings would vary across all the people one is networked with, challenging the person’s particular expectation of privacy. basically, the management of self-presentation goes through a “context collapse” as diverse relationships merge in one digital platform. in this regard, the news coverage was presenting issues such as online revenge porn and digital surveillance of students by parents and schools. a context of an interpersonal action can be misappropriated online in other contexts, reinforced by power dynamics. the original “networked privacy” concept also points out that privacy can be violated by “a system’s technical architecture” (marwick and boyd, 2014, p.1062). for instance, a platform’s default privacy setting may be frequently changing and challenge one’s boundary management. my analysis of news coverage suggests that privacy issues around such technical elements are not limited to one platform’s architecture. the layer of (2) networked technologies instead includes partnerships among companies as to a feature (e.g., one can simultaneously upload to instagram, facebook, twitter, and tumblr) or a business model (e.g., sharing of user data among partners), or mergers between companies (e.g., facebook acquired instagram), all of which create a deeply networked technical architecture individuals may likely find hard to navigate. the growing entanglement of data practices between the private and the public sectors introduces another type of “context collapse” around (3) networked institutions as well. states have long collected data about citizens for the sake of governance, yet the scale and type of data they obtain and use are far encroaching on personal data garnered by private companies. a “market for consumer data” has been created across institutions by data brokers partnering with both the private sector and state agencies (crain, 2018, p. 99). the cambridge analytica scandal in 2018, covered heavily in my dataset, was a sensational case that showed the unprecedented extent personal data collected by a private firm can be used by political actors supposed to serve public interests. moreover, it is not necessarily a piece of personally identifiable information (pii) these networked institutions look for; what matters is (4) networked data gleaned from lots of individuals (tisne, 2018). that is, the “economic value of personal data is largely realized in the aggregate” when “data points are linked together through data analytics” (cinnamon, 2017, p. 615). people are generally targeted for their membership in specific social groups, rather than for their purely individual identities (eubanks, 2018). therefore, one type of personal data collected in a specific context is put together with the other types of personal data captured in a separate context, creating a “context collapse” again. conclusion privacy is a “collective value” as it can be guaranteed when all the people have “a similar minimum level of privacy” (regan, 1996, p. 213). rethinking the framework of “networked privacy,” i argue, can help us better ensure the similar minimum levels of privacy across relations, technologies, institutions, and data. as we negotiate the rules to protect data privacy along various regulatory efforts, the extended concept of networked privacy could provoke conversations in privacy rulemaking to identify the multi-layered networked privacy harms emerging in different context collapses. references cinnamon, j. (2017). social injustice in surveillance capitalism. surveillance & society, 15(5), 609–625. crain, m. (2018). the limits of transparency: data brokers and commodification. new media & society, 20(1), 88–104. eubanks, v. (2018). automating inequality: how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. st. martin’s press. fairclough, n. (2013). critical discourse analysis: the critical study of language. routledge. igo, s. e. (2018). the known citizen: a history of privacy in modern america. harvard university press. maier, d., waldherr, a., miltner, p., wiedemann, g., niekler, a., keinert, a., pfetsch, b., heyer, g., reber, u., häussler, t., schmid-petri, h., & adam, s. (2018). applying lda topic modeling in communication research: toward a valid and reliable methodology. communication methods and measures, 12(2–3), 93– 118. marwick, a. e., & boyd, danah. (2014). networked privacy: how teenagers negotiate context in social media. new media & society, 16(7), 1051–1067. quinn, k., & epstein, d. (2018). #myprivacy: how users think about social media privacy. proceedings of the 9th international conference on social media and society, 360–364. tisne, m. (2018, december 14). it’s time for a bill of data rights. mit technology review. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612588/its-time-for-a-bill-of-datarights/ westin, a. f. (1966). science, privacy, and freedom: issues and proposals for the 1970’s. part i--the current impact of surveillance on privacy. columbia law review, 66(6), 1003–1050. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): cayari, christopher. (2019, october 2-5). collaborative video logs: virtual communities of practice and aliveness in the music classroom. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. collaborative video logs: virtual communities of practice and aliveness in the music classroom christopher cayari purdue university, west lafayette, indiana online learning and community on youtube educational researchers have explored how youtube and the practices of its users can be incorporated into the classroom. hung’s (2011) use of vlogs in an english for specific purposes undergraduate course revealed that vlogging allowed for reflection through visual representations, self-evaluation, professional development, and peer learning. creating youtube-inspired video activist documentaries in a grade 8 classroom helped students develop a critical eye for news reporting, social awareness, and online media (lin and polaniecki, 2009). while practices associated with creation for the medium could be applied to the classroom, juhasz (2008) found challenges when attempting to conduct an entire class on youtube including publicly available lectures, class discussions, and homework responses. the students had to combat negative feedback from non-student youtube users, and technical issues for students were troublesome and time consuming. my previous research has led to findings that suggested vlogging in small groups, or collaborative vlogs (cvls), can lead to powerful social and educational outcomes that develop a community of learners who work together to construct knowledge and relationships (cayari & fox, 2013; fox & cayari, 2016). wenger’s (1998) social learning theory has been explored in online music learning contexts where communities of practice (cops) construct meaning, develop practices, form communities, and establish identity through virtual interactions (waldron & veblen, 2009). within my classroom as a higher education instructor, i wanted to critically examine how cvls could be used to develop cops by considering how asynchronous video smallgroup discussions developed what wenger, mcdermott, and snyder (2002) describe as aliveness, a concept that often leads to vibrant, self-driven learning communities. the seven design principles of aliveness that could be applied to develop cops were: design for evolution, open a dialogue between inside and outside perspectives, invite different levels of participation, develop both public and private community spaces, focus on value, combine familiarity and excitement, and create a rhythm for the community (p. 51). the guiding question for this study was, “how might a cvl exhibit aliveness and thus be conceived as a cop within music courses?” method i assigned cvl projects to students in seven courses at three large public universities in the midwest united states, in which self-selected groups of four to seven students each posted on their assigned day of the week to have an asynchronous discussion. the project lasted four to 12 weeks depending on the course. students were asked to fill out a one-page reflection on the project as their final assignment, and these reflections served as data. each reflection included 11 questions about experiences throughout the project regarding the following topics: what vloggers would do the same and different if they were to do the project again; favorite and disliked aspects of the project; perceived educational implications; future plans for vlogging; suggestions for improving the project in the future; how the project affected their group dynamic; and assessment of themselves and their group members. while focusing on students’ video products would have provided interesting data, written reflections offered an opportunity to understand students experiences firsthand, rather than collecting data through observing videos and then ascertaining what might have been going on in groups. reflection responses were assigned a priori codes based on the seven principles of aliveness, and 2,382 points of interest were identified from the reflections. data were analyzed by code and grouped (emerson et al., 2011) to gain a better understanding of the presence or absence of each principal. synopsis of findings and discussion examples from all seven aliveness principles became apparent as cops formed in most cvl groups. the first principle, design for evolution, was exemplified through students’ perceived freedom to choose topics of discussion, adapting technology and media to meet their needs, and an evolving selfand group-identity. principle two, dialogue between inside and outside perspectives, was seen through how individual vloggers brought unique experiences representing their outside perspectives. additionally, the relationships developed and conversations had within each cvl fostered an insider perspective through a camaraderie students demonstrated in their conversations online, which also extended to the classroom. aliveness allowed for differing levels of participation (principle three) as students were able to choose how much energy and time they put into the project, as long as they fulfilled the requirement to post on their assigned day. varying levels of participation allowed students to pursue the learning outcomes they wanted, which included but were not limited to technological, leadership, musical, and communication skills. the fourth principle required students to consider the public and private spaces cvls and the classroom afforded. choices were given on whether to publish or privatize youtube channels. students also found that the technologies and physical spaces in which they collaborated influenced how they learned and created within their small groups. students had to consider the values they found in the cvl process. value, the fifth principle, was found for some in vlogging, technology, discussing, music, creativity, enjoyment, self-reflection, relationships, and learning. the sixth principle dealt with fostering familiarity and excitement. attitudes toward cvls evolved throught the projects’ timelines. students identified how cvls, while unfamiliar, held aspects of familiarity—for example, youtube, vlogging, and conversing with friends. familiar aspects along with the novelty of trying something new with technology and getting a grade for participation led to excitement for learning. the final principle of developing a rhythm manifested within cvl groups, which allowed students—or perhaps required students—to experience a flow and momentum for learning and online content creation. cvls display promise as a versatile pedagogical tool that could be designed to suit the needs of almost any course or community, not just musical classrooms. by encouraging students to discuss important topics through asynchronous video posting, cvls may exhibit the cop principles of aliveness and flourish to help students learn, develop their own voices, and find a support system of collaborators. references cayari, c., & fox, h. l. the pedagogical implications of the collaborative video log. 2013 annual proceedings: on the practice of educational communications and technology, 351-363. fox, h. l., & cayari, c. (2016). graduate students’ readiness and perceptions of the pedagogical application of collaborative video logs. techtrends, 60(6), 585-590. hung, s.-t. (2011). pedagogical applications of vlogs: an investigation into esp learners’ perceptions. british journal of educational technology, 42(5), 736-746. juhasz, a. (2008). why not (to) teach on youtube. in g. lovink & s. niederer (eds.), video vortex reader: responses to youtube (pp. 133-140). amsterdam, nl: institute for network cultures. lin, c., & polaniecki, s. (2009). from media consumption to media production: applications of youtube in an eighth-grade video documentary project. journal of visual literacy, 28(1), 92-97. waldron, j., & veblen, k. (2009). learning in a celtic community: an exploration of informal music learning and adult amateur musicians. bulletin of the council for research in music education, (180), 59-74. wenger, e. (1998). communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. new york, ny: cambridge university press. wenger, e., mcdermott, r. a., & snyder, w. (2002). cultivating communities of practice: a guide to managing knowledge. boston, ma: harvard business press. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): johnson, m. r.; woodcock, j.; bowman, n.; partin, w. & jackson, n. (2020, october 28-31). sociality and monetization on live streaming platforms. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. sociality and monetization on live streaming platforms mark r johnson phd university of sydney jamie woodcock phd the open university nick bowman phd texas tech university will partin university of north carolina at chapel hill nathan jackson university of new south wales introductory statement this panel presents an overview of ongoing research into online “live streaming” platforms, which offer the live broadcast of individuals’ activities primarily but not exclusively digital gameplay over the internet to potentially massive worldwide audiences. the largest platform in this area (on which we focus) is twitch.tv, already the 30th most-viewed website in the world, with comparable platforms boasting large viewing numbers in china, korea, and japan. marking live streaming out from other forms of online media is the potential for rapid back-and-forth communication between “streamers” and their potentially tens of thousands of concurrent viewers, with often only a few seconds of time lag. equally, much of this communication is tied to impressive volume of altruistic financial support from loyal viewers, with the most successful of the world’s several thousand full-time professional live streamers bringing in several million usd per year. live streaming is a major growing interdisciplinary area of internet research, drawing primarily on media studies but also scholars from psychology, sociology, human-computer interaction, and political economy. in turn it has begun to build a presence within platform studies, game studies, and social media research, given the complex nature of the phenomenon cutting across many traditional definitions of media forms and online media-related behaviours. the four papers here will each cover an element of understanding live streaming platforms, moving from foundational theory into sociality and consequently into the monetization of these same social practices by both the platform and the live streamers who make a living on it. specifically, the first talk addresses itself to the sociality of live streaming, which unlike most traditional video media formats enables a rapid live exchange of comments and conversation between live streaming producers and consumers, both enabled by and in turn shaping the affordances of these platforms. the second, third and fourth papers then turn to addressing the monetization of such emerging social behaviours and their entanglements with affective labour on the platform. the second paper presents an overview and first typology of monetization methods in live streaming, focusing in particular on the gamified and “gamblified” elements of making money through the practice, as well as how these practices have evolved through a three-way dialogue between viewers, “streamers”, and platforms. the third paper builds on this by examining in detail the on-platform currency of marketleading platform twitch, known as “bits”, and how the platform captured donations from viewers through the implementation of this currency system. the fourth and final paper will then further develop these critical enquiries into monetization methods and platform dynamics by presenting a number of extremely contemporary developments in this area on twitch, exploring new the routes for capital flow enabled by new platform infrastructures and technological systems. in spite of the size and impact of live streaming platforms, the phenomenon remains relatively alien to many scholars when compared to more traditional and studied forms of social media. drawing on a diverse range of theoretical perspectives including platform studies, science and technology studies, labour studies and discourse analysis, these papers represent numerous directions of enquiry at the forefront of live streaming research. we now proceed to outline the abstracts for the four constituent talks in this panel (three included in video upload). the social demands of live streaming platform audiences nick bowman, texas tech university whether one is live-streaming to an audience approaching zero or an audience approaching tens of thousands (or more; taylor, 2018), technologies that allow us to broadcast ourselves have brought the social history of gaming to the fore. videogames can be played in isolation, but the technology has a broad and deep social history (bowman, et al., 2013; lin et al., 2018). the earliest gaming technologies were designed with multiple human players in mind (as technological limitations did not allow for simulated intelligent opponents). games moved quickly into spectated social places, such as bars and taverns—the first pong game was so stuffed with coins that they jammed the machine’s internal mechanisms (computer history museum, n.d.). more youth-oriented video game arcades developed through the 70s and 80s, much to the chagrin of concerned teachers and parents, but fostering a thriving socio-cultural scene around gaming. advances in network technologies allowed these social structures to carry over to digital spaces, encouraging some to refer to videogames as third places of discourse (steinkuehler & williams, 2006). at the start of the 21st century, most every home gaming console, personal computer, and portable gaming platform allows for both co-located and networked social play. in this discussion, i examine how gaming-oriented social behaviours have moved onto the twitch.tv platform, and how the infrastructure of the platform both shapes and is shaped by the fundamentally social dimension of much gaming behaviour. perhaps harkening back to their early spectated sociality, game streaming on platforms like twitch has emerged as a deeply social aspect of gaming (hamari & sjoblom, 2017). although surprising to some who presume the primary entertainment value of video games to be their interactivity, live-streaming video games satisfies one of the core competencies of the earliest gaming developers: the content is “entertain(ing) to the onlooker” (graetz, 1981). the success of game live streaming platforms demonstrates that there is just not just a market for more carefully-curated gaming videos, such as those on youtube, but also one where live spectatorship and back-and-forth communication are central. consalvo et al. (2018) conceptualized tandem play to describe the entertainment derived from audiences watching others play: platforms (such as twitch) provide and encourage tandem play through direct chat functions through which viewers can help out or suggest things to the streamer. this affordance of the platforms marks them out fundamentally from a one-to-many model of youtube gaming videos. in a real sense, streaming audiences can be either synchronous or asynchronous (lin et al, 2018) depending on individual platforms or settings within a particular platform, allowing audience sociality to be variably relevant to the streamer’s and the player’s own end goals. from the perspective of interactivity-as-demand (bowman, 2018), we can unpack how game streamers—those performing for others—are influenced by the experience of using streaming platforms and navigating their infrastructures. beyond critical discussions of monetization and playbor practices associated with streaming (cf. woodcock & johnson, 2019), the mere presence of audiences facilitated by streaming platforms change how games are experienced, sometimes felt as a form of labor and other times, a performative act of pleasure. for example, zajonc (1969) argues for a social facilitation effect by which the presence of spectators during performance can dramatically impact said performance. bowman et al. (2013) tested this, finding that inperson gaming audiences significantly increased a gamer’s performance at first-person shooters (when compared to gamers playing in isolation). when replicated using twitch.tv (synchronous streaming) and youtube (asynchronous streaming), we were not able to replicate the social facilitation effects—suggesting that mere presence effects might not transfer to digital audiences common to game streaming. future work might work to more specifically capture platform elements that foster explicit and active spectatorship, with the potential to impact gaming performance in myriad ways. notably, even the audience’s experience with a game stream can be influenced by the presence of others—a phenomenon known as the intra-audience effect by which the affective experience of spectatorship is colored by one’s perceived affective response of others (hocking et al., 1977). in other words, audience pleasure (or displeasure) is boosted when other audience members also express enjoyment (or otherwise). interactivity appears to be a central component of twitch's operation as a platform, as live chat provides an avenue for spectators to communicate their impressions of the stream to the streamer and each other, thereby contributing to this intra-audience effect (lin et al., 2018). scholars already engage the social dynamics of game streaming, and this work has greatly informed how we understand social interactions in these places, for example as motivators for engagement (hilvert-bruce et al., 2018) as well as barriers to participation (such as the dominance of gendered language in streaming spaces; ruvalcaba et al., 2018). a (social) demand perspective augments these perspectives extending our focus beyond social interactions and exchanges, and to the psychologically demanding experience of sociality in these spaces. as with the earliest video games, game streaming allows players of various skills to publicly perform their videogame play. platforms facilitating this play, including twitch, affect the social arrangements of players and non-players as both reflections of and departures from videogame play’s historical sociality. how live streamers on twitch.tv monetize and gamify their broadcasts mark r johnson, university of sydney & jamie woodcock, the open university this paper presents an overview of economic behaviour on dominant market-leading live streaming platform twitch.tv. specifically, we are interested in how live streamers profit from their activities monetization on the platform, and how they often do so through the implementation of game-like interfaces, competitions, or concepts gamification which are highly effective in this space. we begin by reviewing relevant literature on both twitch (pires & simon, 2015; johnson & woodcock, 2017; ask et al, 2019; etc) and platforms (gillespie, 2010; srnicek, 2017; etc), followed by a description of our data and methodology which draws on interview and ethnographic techniques. over the past four years we have conducted over 100 semi-structured interviews with live streamers of both professional and semiprofessional status. the majority of respondents were in their twenties and from the united states, although nationality was diverse, with most of our respondents hailing from other global north countries (primarily canada and within europe), but also a significant number from the global south (especially south america), in a ratio of approximately five to one. around seventy percent of our interviewees were in their 20s, with almost thirty percent in their 30s, and only one or two younger or older than those categories. this interview data is coupled with ethnographic findings from several hundred hours of observation at live streaming events attended in person in the us, uk, germany and poland, and from 200 live streams viewed each for at least one hour. this ethnographic engagement allows us to see something of the performance of work that streamers perform in their daily activities, which is highly comparable (woodcock & johnson, 2019) to other publicfacing performative jobs (cf. duffy, 2017) which mobilise affect and emotion, such as fashion (e.g. wissinger, 2007) or blogging (e.g. bruns, 2008). by combining interview data and ethnographic work, we are thus able to achieve both a detailed look into the lives and actions of particular streamers, and a broader assessment of the culture arising around live streaming and the affordances of streaming platforms, and in this case how these shape monetization models. the core of the paper then addresses seven core monetization methods we identify for live streaming. subscriptions entail a guarantee to give a monthly amount to a streamer in exchange for the visual distinction of one’s username on twitch. donations and “cheering” entail either giving the streamer money directly via paypal, or donating through twitch, during which the platform takes a cut of the money, but viewers get automatic recognition of their donations. advertising entails running adverts for corporate products on one’s channel. sponsorships are secured by many live streamers with games companies or other brands, who offer free products or promotion in exchange for highlighting their wares during particular broadcasts. competitions and targets involve encouraging buy-in from viewers in the hope of winning an individual or global prize. unpredictable rewards for financial support are the sixth method, drawing on the psychology of gambling and games of unpredictability more broadly to keep people donating in the hope of recognition. finally, the implementation of monetary “channel games” represent a gamification of the twitch platform itself, highly appropriate given its primary user market. we cover each monetization technique in turn, considering what elements of the platform encourage them, how streamers act, how viewers act, and how elements of gaming culture have been skillfully monetized by entrepreneurial live streamers – yet within boundaries and confines laid out by twitch. in particular, we focus on practices that exist both within and beyond the governance of the platform itself: this analysis of twitch examines how these economic dynamics influence, and are influenced by, the political, social and cultural relationships of live streaming. the monetization models emerging here have important implications for the entrepreneurial (generally young) individuals trying to build new online careers, as well as for how other platforms (or people on platforms) may choose to monetize. on twitch itself, meanwhile, the striking profitability of the most successful streamers and twitch as a whole make it is crucial to interrogate who is winning and losing in financial terms, and why, and how the role of money brushes up against the inherent playfulness of a platform dedicated (primarily) to gaming. we argue that such a wide variety of monetization methods is possible because the platform is relatively devoid of explicit rules or regulations preventing streamer behaviours, allowing for consistent innovation and change within the broader structure of the live stream. this has led to an ongoing relationship between the platform and its streamers which is both iterative – things are regularly changing and progressing and becoming ever more “optimised” (cf. partin, 2019) – and recursive – as both parties are influencing the behaviours of the other. the laxity of these restrictions is such that streamers can even run games of chance of debatable legality, although the length of time this situation will continue unabated, or without capture by the platform, remains to be seen. equally, the norms of twitch for both its streamers and its viewers contribute significantly to this profusion of monetization methods: viewers are consistently eager to support their favourite streamers and be rewarded (non-financially or financially) in exchange, while aspiring streamers think nothing of encouraging as many donations from their viewers as possible. the exchange of money is built so deeply into both the infrastructure and the culture of live streaming that new monetization methods are welcomed by broadcaster and consumer alike. alongside all of this, the games focus of twitch also makes it an environment filled with viewers who are highly comfortable with digital play of all different kinds, and thus both able and willing to engage with some of the more gamified monetization methods we have outlined here. bit by (twitch) bit: from ‘platform envelopment’ to ‘platform capture’ will partin, university of north carolina at chapel hill as the literature on platforms—defined, in their broadest sense, as digital infrastructures that facilitate interactions between users while also producing and collecting data on these interactions (van dijck, poell, & de waal 2018)—has grown over the last decade, scholars in a variety of fields have begun to address questions of how platforms evolve as technological objects. though scholars have long recognized that the technical features of platforms are constantly in flux, the actual processes and trajectories by which platforms evolve over time are comparatively understudied (helmond, nieborg, & van der vlist, 2019). by problematizing how platforms evolve—that is, by seeing certain modalities of change not as natural or inevitable, but as being shaped by specific contexts—it becomes possible to ask questions about on whose terms and to what effects the technical evolution of platforms occurs. this paper theorizes “platform capture” as one way that platforms accrue new features though complex interaction with other actors in a platform ecosystem. platform capture, in my definition, denotes a process in which (1) complementors within a platform marketplace, such as software developers who create applications using boundary resources like apis, create new features that produce new value for a platform ecosystem by extending its capabilities; (2) platform owners create first-party versions of these features that direct new value to themselves; (3) third-party tools are forced into competition against first-party offerings in a platform marketplace that is biased towards its owners. platform capture describes a cycle in which the technical architecture of platforms evolves through the exploitation of power asymmetries between platform owners and dependents, raising questions about the monopolistic tendencies of platform ecosystems. taken purely as a description of actions by platform owners, platform capture has much in common with what scholars of strategic management call platform envelopment (eisenmann, parker, & van alstyne 2010). yet whereas scholars in this tradition tend to see platform envelopment as a business tactic, this article offers a more critical eye on this practice by reading it in the context of david nieborg and thomas poell’s (2018) notion of the platformization of cultural production, a framework that synthesizes insights on platforms not only from business studies but also critical political economy and software studies. this holistic framework systematizes inquiry into platforms to make their impacts on cultural production more visible. by rethinking platform envelopment as platform capture via poell and nieborg’s framework, it becomes possible to connect this process to broader concerns about the accumulation of power and influence in the information technology sector, as well as technology firms’ role in producing, maintaining, and exploiting widespread precariousness in contemporary capitalism. to illustrate platform capture, i consider the history of donation management tools on twitch, an amazon-owned platform that hosts user-generated broadcasts of live video game play. not only is twitch an important spot for understanding “social media entertainment” (cunningham and craig 2019), i argue that it is a useful point for studying how platform architectures gradually acquire new features over time in complex interactions with their dependents. taking as a given that platforms “evolve via a complex interplay among users, technologies, infrastructures, organizational structures, and various social, cultural, and economic practices” (nieborg & helmond, 2019: 125), i adopt a holistic view of twitch that does not reduce its technical evolution to a single cause, but, rather, sees that process as taking place within and through a broader platform ecosystem that does only include twitch, but also the viewers, streamers, and application developers who engage with the platform in various ways. likewise, this paper also draws upon textual boundary resources from developers working with twitch, professional streamers’ public statements on donation tools, and twitch's own announcements. this approach reveals that, like facebook’s own growth into a platform-as-infrastructure, twitch’s own evolution as a technical architecture has been an incremental process, not a revolutionary one, but still evidences twitch’s gradual consolidation of power and influence over its ecosystem. in particular, i demonstrate how the financial precariousness of cultural producers on the platform led to the development of thirdparty donation management services, such as twitchalerts, often at significant personal or venture-backed expense (see also johnson & woodcock 2019). these were later supplemented by a first party program, twitch bits, which replicated the functionality of third-party donation management tools but was integrated directly into the twitch user interface, giving the first party-service a significant competitive advantage over thirdparty tools. while this process could be described as a kind of platform envelopment, the normative stance of scholars in strategic management renders this perspective insensitive to the power dynamics at play in development. in particular, platform envelopment, as theorized, suggests that third-party application developers become competitive with platform owners rather than being interpellated as competitors by the development of new technical features. this orientation towards platform evolution glosses over the power dynamics that are embedded in technical dependency are conditions of possibility for envelopment attacks. platform capture, by contrast, draws attention to how the power asymmetries between application developers and twitch were exploited by twitch in service of the new development of features, raising questions about the concentration of power and capital in large technology corporations and the potentially deleterious impacts on innovation, an observation that has implications far beyond twitch. capital flow and temporal politics on twitch: an examination of new features and affordances nathan jackson, university of new south wales since mid-2018, the livestreaming platform twitch has seen the advent of a number of new features influencing how users spend their time and money. in this paper, i will introduce four of these features and examine their associated social and technological affordances. namely, i will examine how they guide users to spend their money in particular ways and at particular times – that is, how they moderate capital flow – and how they demonstrate a shifting balance between the value of viewers’ time and capital in favour of the former. ultimately, i will interrogate how these features interact to add layers of complexity within and around the already complex economic structure of the platform. in this paper, i will update the taxonomy of avenues for twitch monetisation and associated gamification practices produced by johnson and woodcock (2019). i will also extend discussions of streamer practices and associated labour (johnson et al., 2019; woodcock & johnson, 2019) as streamers decide how to integrate these features into their performances without adversely affecting their relationship with their viewers (walker, 2014; taylor, 2018; sjӧblom et al, 2019). as these features affect the flow of time and capital spent on the platform, their close analysis will enable assessment of the rapidly-evolving relationships between the social behaviour, technical infrastructures, and economic imperatives of the platform. specifically, i will discuss the emergence of ‘subscription gifting’, ‘channel points’, ‘emote gifts’, and ‘hype trains’, each of which represents a new constellation of socialtechnical economic elements on the platform. in the first case, when a twitch user subscribes to a streamer, they demonstrate support for the streamer through a tiered monthly fee split between the streamer and amazon. a subscriber receives a badge for display next to their username in that streamer’s chat, as well as a suite of subscriberspecific emoticons, called emotes, for use across the platform. as suggested by the name, the oldest feature on this list – released late 2018 – subscription gifting is the ability for one twitch user to pay for a (single month) channel subscription for another. subscription gifting has both economic and social impacts, for instance acting as a gesture of welcome for newcomers. if the recipient renews their subscription, this donation becomes a source of regular income for the streamer. in this way, gift subscriptions creatively exemplify the relationship between the market-driven and gift economy elements of the digital economy (terranova, 2000). a second and newer feature, trialled in late 2019 and implemented early 2020, channel points is an opt-out feature that rewards time spent in a stream. the feature formalises pre-existing gamification practices implemented by some streamers to incentivise viewers to spend time in their streams by accumulating channel-specific currency (siutila, 2018). viewers accrue points primarily by watching, actively watching (regularly clicking a button below chat), and viewing consecutive streams. channel points can be redeemed for rewards that streamers can customise, thereby enacting creativity to encourage sustained viewing. the streamer can commit to perform specific acts, change the stream title or music playlist for points. whilst clearly emphasising the value of viewing time, the ties to capital emerge when examining the default rewards, which include the ability to unlock or modify a chosen subscriber emote for one day. this heavily complicates the existing economics of the platform and has been met with mixed reactions. some streamers openly criticise the feature, claiming it removes the need for viewers to subscribe in order to access emotes, which reduces the value of the emotes. others appreciate that this enables viewers without the means/ability to subscribe to engage more deeply as a member of the stream collective, reflecting the time that they commit to the channel. as such, channel points illuminate how heavily contested the economic structure of the platform is among users. the third feature, emote gifts, is event-based and has occurred increasingly since pride month in may 2019. during event periods, including the most recent pride month, christmas holiday period, and valentine’s day, bit donations (twitch currency) and (gift) subscriptions permanently unlock emotes from an event-themed collection for the donor, as well as gifting one of those emotes to a number of other viewers. these events impact capital flow and user engagement in three ways. firstly, they act as an incentive for viewers to spend money on the platform. this was furthered in the case of pride month, when a percentage of bit donations was committed to lgbtq youth crisis support through the trevor project. secondly, these events encourage viewers to spend more time on the platform – and in particular with more generous communities – in the hopes of earning more emotes as gifts. lastly, they encourage users to spend more money during particular times of year. this temporal influence over spending patterns extends into the final and newest feature i will present: hype trains. drawn from the streamer-driven practice of the same name, viewers are challenged to chain donations and/or subscriptions before a timer runs out. the hype train activates when a customisable number of distinct donation or subscription events occur within a particular length of time. viewers continue to ‘build hype’ by donating and subscribing until a bar above chat fills – at which point the hype train levels up. this continues until either level 5 or the timer runs out, at which point every participant receives a random level-dependent emote. again, this feature has been met with mixed responses, with some stream communities relabelling it as the ‘scam train’, solidifying the ambivalence among users towards the platform’s monetisation strategies. i draw upon data from an ongoing ethnography of twitch designed to examine the construction and performance of streaming personas. i will bring these features into conversation to emphasise their effect on user practice, the value of emotes, and the feedback loop between social practices and technological features. this will culminate in a more nuanced understanding of capital flow and the value of time on the platform, as well as users’ ambivalence towards twitch’s constant innovation in monetisation practices. references akrich, m. (1992). the de-scription of technological objects. in w. e. bijker & j. law (eds.), shaping technology/building society: studies in sociotechnical change. cambridge, ma: mit press. ask, k., spilker, h. s., & hansen, m. (2019). the politics of user-platform relationships: co-scripting live-streaming on twitch. tv. first monday, 24(7). bowman, n. d. (2018). the demanding nature of video game play. in n. d. bowman (ed.), video games: a medium that demands our attention (pp. 1-24). new york: routledge. bowman, n. d., weber, r., tamborini, r., & sherry, j. l. (2013). facilitating game play: how others affect performance at and enjoyment of video games. media psychology, 16(1), 39-64. bruns, a. (2009). the user-led disruption: self-(re)broadcasting at justin.tv and elsewhere. in euroitv’09: proceedings of the seventh european interactive television conference, leuven, belgium, june 3–5, 2009. bruns, axel . 2008. blogs, wikipedia, second life, and beyond: from production to produsage. new york: peter lang. burroughs, b. e. (2015). streaming media: audience and industry shifts in a networked society (doctoral dissertation, university of iowa). retrieved from http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1833. computer history museum (n.d.). pong. retrieved from https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/computer-games/16/183. consalvo, m., begy, j., ganzon, s. c., & scully-blaker, r. (2018). tandem play: theorizing sociality in single-player gameplay. in n. d. bowman (ed.), videogames: a medium that demands our attention. duffy, b. e. (2017). (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. new haven, ct: yale university press. egli, e., & meyers, l. s. (1984). the role of videogame playing in adolescent life: is there reason to be concerned? bulletin of the psychonomic society, 22(4), 309-312. eisenmann, t., parker, g., & alstyne, m. v. (2010). platform envelopment (working paper). harvard business school, 07. gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of “platforms”. new media & society, 12 (3): 347-364. graetz, j. m. (1981, august). the origin of spacewar! creative computing magazine. hamari, j., & sjöblom, m. (2017). what is esports and why do people watch it? internet research, 27. helmond, a., nieborg, d. b., & van der vlist, f. n. (2019). facebook’s evolution: development of a platform-as-infrastructure. internet histories, 3, 123–146. hilvert-bruce, z., neill, j. t., sjöblom, m., & hamari, j. (2018). social motivations of live-streaming viewer engagement on twitch. computers in human behavior, 84, 5867. hocking, j. e., margreiter, d. g., & hylton, c. (1977). intra-audience effects: a field test. human communication research, 3(3), 243–249. johnson, m. r., & woodcock, j. (2017). ‘it’s like the gold rush’: the lives and careers of professional video game streamers on twitch. tv. information, communication & society, 22(3), 336-351. johnson, m.r., carrigan, m, and brock, t. (2019). the imperative to be seen: the moral economy of celebrity video game streamers on twitch.tv. first monday, 24(8). johnson, m.r., woodcock, j. (2019). “and today’s top donator is”: how live streamers on twitch.tv monetize and gamify their broadcasts. social media + society, 5(4): 1-11. lin, j-s., bowman, n. d., lin, s-f., chen. s. (2019). setting the digital stage: defining game streaming as an entertainment experience. entertainment computing, 31. nieborg, d. b., & helmond, a. (2019). the political economy of facebook’s platformization in the mobile ecosystem: facebook messenger as a platform instance. media, culture & society, 41, 196–218. nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society, 20, 4275–4292. pires, k., & simon, g. (2015). youtube live and twitch: a tour of user-generated live streaming systems. 6th acm multimedia systems conference, portland, oregon, 225– 230. ruvalcaba, o., schulze. j., kim. a., berzenski, s. r., & otten, m. p. (2018). women’s experiences in esports: gendered differences in peer and spectator feedback during competitive video game play. journal of sport and social issues. siutila, m. (2018). the gamification of gaming streams. gamifin conference 2018, levi, finland, 131-140. sjöblom, m., törhönen, m., hamari, j., and macey, j. (2019). the ingredients of twitch streaming: affordances of game streams. computers in human behavior, 92: 20-28. srnicek, n. (2017). platform capitalism. cambridge: polity. steinkuehler, c. a., & williams, d. (2006). where everybody knows your (screen) name: online games as “third places.” journal of computer-mediated communication, 11(4). taylor, t. l. (2018). watch me play: twitch and the rise of game live-streaming. princeton: nj: princeton university press. terranova, t. (2000). free labor: producing culture for the digital economy. social text 63, 18(2): 33-58. van dijk, j, t poell and m de waal (2019): the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford: oxford university press. walker, a. (2014). watching us play: postures and platforms of live streaming. surveillance & society, 12(3): 437-442. wissinger, elizabeth . 2007. “modelling a way of life: immaterial and affective labour in the fashion modelling industry.” ephemera 7 (1): 250–69. woodcock, j and johnson, m.r. (2019). the affective labor and performance of live streaming on twitch.tv. television & new media, 20(8): 813-823. zajonc, r. b. (1965). social facilitation. science, 149 (269-275). selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): butkowski , c. (2020, october). paying respects, streaming affect: election day at susan b. anthony’s gravesite. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. paying respects, streaming affect: u.s. election day 2016 at susan b. anthony’s gravesite chelsea butkowski cornell university on u.s. election day 2016, the typically quiet footpaths of mount hope cemetery in rochester, ny filled with thousands of people, lined up together with yellow roses, american flags, and their smartphones in tow. they were waiting to visit the grave of the famed women’s suffragist susan b. anthony, buried there over a century prior. the 2016 election marked the first time in u.s. history that a major political party nominated a woman presidential candidate, hilary clinton. after voting in the election, local women commemorated the milestone and anthony’s suffrage activism by visiting her grave in unprecedented droves. beyond the crowd that gathered at the cemetery, however, another much larger crowd gathered to witness the event online. one of rochester’s local news stations, wroc-tv, posted a thirteen-hour livestream of the gravesite and its visitors to facebook live. yet, the broadcast’s reach extended far outside of wroc-tv’s typical local base. accruing millions of views, thousands of comments, and write-ups by dozens of news outlets on election day, the livestream became a national spectacle. as networked broadcasts, livestreams combine live video with a real-time comment feed, allowing viewers to interact with one another and the broadcaster as the event unfolds (taylor, 2018). this particular stream centers on anthony’s gravestone piled with flowers and plastered with “i voted” stickers as thousands of people “pay their respects,” posing for photos alongside it. in the liminal hours before election results materialized, viewers marveled at the lines of people assembled as far as the camera could see, cried as women visited the grave with their mothers and daughters, and debated the election among themselves. though news is closely tied to building collective memory (kitch, 2008), digital media systems and social networking sites have developed complex relationships with death and commemoration (e.g., gibson & jones, 2012). social media platforms can facilitate the construction and framing of shared personal and collective histories (humphreys, 2018), but navigating their affordances has also resulted in the development of distinctive social norms surrounding digital affect and memorialization (e.g., gianxoglou & döveling, 2018). although existing research has begun to examine how “ordinary” social media users negotiate such norms, it has rarely explored how media creators locate and represent themselves within broad historical and political narratives. the 2016 gravesite livestream records and reconstitutes the ceremony of revisiting susan b. anthony’s grave, integrating the perspectives of political institutions, broadcasters, in-person visitors, and networked audience members. i study it by drawing from frosh and pinchevski’s (2018) framework of media witnessing, which builds a digital perspective onto the ritual broadcast of televised media events (dayan & katz, 1992). the stream is fueled and framed by a collective memory of women’s suffrage and anthony’s life. it shares a particular liberal vision of u.s. american women’s history and future, which was later left unfulfilled when clinton lost the election. livestreaming is also a technically distinct medium for housing affective discourse. though it is rooted in videogaming, it has become common to stream funerals, news events, and acts of injustice (martineau, 2019), but despite its growing breadth, it is uncommon to study livestreaming outside of gaming cultures. therefore, i ask the following research questions. first, how do the media actors involved in the 2016 gravesite livestream use commemoration as a means for self-representation? second, how do the affordances of the livestreaming medium shape these practices and the collective memory that drives them? method i conducted a textual analysis of the video and comment content of the wroc-tv livestream of susan b. anthony’s gravesite on november 8, 2016. this includes both the video feed and real-time comment feed, which remain publicly available today on the wroc-tv’s facebook page. after watching two full videos to immerse myself in the material, i engaged in an iterative coding process to analyze the audiovisual and textual aspects of the entire 13.5-hour livestream. analysis four media actors differently shaped the gravesite livestream by contributing to its content and interacting with one another. in line with traditions of media events and media witnessing, i examine each of them. i argue that the livestream enabled each of these actors to represent political selfhoods through commemorative acts. first, the rochester mayor’s office systematized visiting the gravesite as an election day media event. though paying tribute to anthony’s grave was previously a small local tradition, the office used advertising, a staff of volunteer photographers, and extended cemetery hours to attract and control a historic crowd in 2016. second, the gravesite visitors, who were mostly women, modeled norms of visual selfrepresentation as the main subjects of the livestream. when each of them reached the front of the line, they almost invariably handed their phone to a volunteer and posed for a photo with the gravestone, likely to be posted to their social media accounts. akin to both voting selfies and funeral selfies (meese et al., 2015), shared practices surrounding gravestone photo etiquette developed over the course of the stream. third, john kucko, the journalist who narrated and filmed the entirety of the stream, controlled the broadcast itself. while filming and narrating, he tied national and local stories of political women together with his own autobiography as a male media professional. the nature of the live broadcast required him to repeat himself frequently and enabled him to tighten his narrative as viewers rapidly transitioned. among his most repeated narratives were susan b. anthony’s life story, descriptions of the event as “spectacular” and “non-partisan,” the visitors as “well-behaved,” and the stream as the height of his “long journalistic career.” fourth, thousands of commenters witnessed the stream and conversed directly with kucko and one another. many commenters sought information, but others told personal stories connecting them to anthony, clinton, and the election. conclusion within one contained case, the 2016 gravesite livestream illustrates how various actors can co-construct collective memory through digital means. i argue that these actors represent themselves within shared narratives of ongoing and historical political events through live interaction with one another. ultimately, i suggest that in commemorating women’s historical political action, these self-representational narratives present livestream creators, viewers, subjects as political actors. it also suggests the political potential of the medium itself. references dayan, d., & katz, e. (1992). media events: the live broadcasting of history. cambridge: harvard university press. frosh, p., & pinchevski, a. (2018). media and events after media events. media, culture, & society, 40, 135–138. doi:10.1177/0163443717726007 gibson, p. l., & jones, s. (2012). remediation and remembrance: “dancing auschwitz” collective memory and new media. essachess: journal for communication studies, 5(2), 107–131. retrieved from http://www.essachess.com/index.php/jcs/article/view/171 humphreys, l. (2018). the qualified self: social media and the accounting of everyday life. cambridge: mit press. kitch, c. (2008). placing journalism inside memory–and memory studies. memory studies, 1(3), 311–320. doi:10.1177/17506980080937961 martineau, p. (2019, july 30). now even funerals are livestreamed—and families are grateful. wired. retrieved from https://www.wired.com/story/funerals-livestreamedfamilies-grateful/ meese, j. et al. (2015). selfies at funerals: mourning and presencing on social media platforms. international journal of communication, 9, 1818–1831. retrieved from https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/viewfile/3154/1402 taylor, t. l. (2018). watch me play: twitch and the rise of game livestreaming. princeton: princeton university press. gunderson-aoir2020-submission.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): gunderson, m. (2020, october). how does it feel to be seen by a machine: lively devices in digital horror. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. how does it feel to be seen by a machine lively devices in digital horror marianne gunderson university of bergen the technology we surround ourselves with is becoming more and more autonomous. our devices know us, or try to know us, they gather data about us constantly. they use that data to draw conclusions about us, to profile us, to recognise our patterns and predict our movements and desires. so what does it feel like to be watched by a machine? how do we make sense of our present state of concurrent awareness of and obliviousness of living our everyday lives under ubiquitous surveillance? surveillance and machine vision technologies are often talked about with a certain level of unease, discomfort, or anxiety but what are the meanings and narratives through which these devices are imagined to be scary? this paper will explore these questions by analysing a selection of creepypasta stories that draw their horror from the experience of being watched by or through a machine. creepypasta is a term used to describe short internet-based horror stories often shared anonymously and copied and pasted from forum to forum. written from and for online communities out of the shared affective desire to scare and be scared, the stories have been conceptualized as digital urban legends (henriksen 2018), contemporary folklore (tolbert 2015), as an example “the digital gothic” (balanzategui 2019), or as a fourth generation of digital fiction (ondrak 2018). several articles have addressed the connections between creepypasta and technology. both henriksen (2014) and ondrak (2018) draw lines from contemporary creepypasta to the optical illusions produced by eighteenth-century phantasmagoria. furthermore, henriksen (2013) argues that the history of monsters is intimately intertwined with that of technology, and that the camera, the supposedly objective and scientific instrument, plays a crucial role in the production of the monsters that inhabit creepypasta stories. cooley and milligan (2018) show how many creepypastas explore the “nightmares of technological nostalgia” (p.197), reanimating technologies of the past and imbuing them with unsettling agency. this paper builds on this work by analysing a corpus of stories from the nosleep forum that explicitly centers the fearful possibilities brought about by the machine vision devices that permeate our everyday lives. instead of drawing on the nostalgic hauntings of obsolete technologies, these stories are populated by technologies of the present and future, such as web cameras, facial recognition apps, home security systems, ai assistants, and baby monitors. in these stories, the topic of surveillance and the experience of being watched is a pervasive theme, and quotidian devices take on a threatening presence. sometimes the threat is connected to the idea of surveillance by nefarious corporations or hostile individuals, while in other stories the horror emerges from the realization that the watcher may not be human at all. the devices’ unpredictable liveliness is emphasized, either by enabling other people or entities to extend their control over our lives, or by the devices themselves taking on a threatening agency, performing often perplexingly hostile acts. in my analysis two main themes have emerged from the technological horror of these stories, the first of which is the role of technology in mediating our access to reality and sense of truth. hayles (2018) has argued that technologies’ are taking on an increasingly active role as an interpreter and creators of meaning, and are capable of what she terms as non-conscious cognition. for example, in the story “has anyone else used expression captioner?” (iia 2016), the narrator shares his experience with what he thinks is a funny interactive meme site that uses emotion recognition to creatively add captions to selfies uploaded by its users. but then the captions become increasingly distressing and ultimately threatening, indicating that something awful will happen to the narrator in the near future. here, and in other stories like it, technical devices serve as the site of contact between human and non-human meaningmaking, as a site of co cognition between us and technical agencies. what these stories make explicit is that this co-cognition does not always go smoothly it can be antagonistic, uncomfortable, or even scary, and the resulting meanings are no longer our own. the second theme is the redistribution of agency between humans and technical agents. this is the case in the story “you’ll never even know” (m59gar 2017), the narrator discovers that all the “overlapping connected layers of observation” produced by the devices we surround ourselves with, such as phones, smart tvs, gaming consoles, kitchen devices, home security systems, link together to become something more, a nebulous entity that uses its pervasive presence to subtly sabotage people’s lives. here, to borrow terminology from jane bennett (2010), the monster manifests as the result of the agency distributed through an assemblage of technical devices and the threat is derived from the agency arising from the depth and extent of machine vision technologies’ involvement in our lives. finally, i argue that these stories function as affective articulations that reveal the anxieties that haunt our relationship with the devices with which we surround ourselves. the ways in which machine vision devices are haunted, infected or possessed, and haunt, infect or possess the lives of the narrators, bring out a cluster of fears that all revolve around how machine vision technologies mediate our relationship with reality and redistribute agency within human/machine assemblages. references balanzategui, jessica. 2019. “creepypasta, ‘candle cove’, and the digital gothic.” journal of visual culture 18 (2): 187–208. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412919841018. bennett, jane. 2010. vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. durham: duke university press. cooley, kevin, and caleb andrew milligan. 2018. “haunted objects, networked subjects: the nightmarish nostalgia of creepypasta.” horror studies 9 (2): 193–211. https://doi.org/10.1386/host.9.2.193_1. hayles, katherine. 2017. unthought: the power of the cognitive nonconscious. chicago ; london: the university of chicago press. henriksen, line. 2013. “a short bestiary of creatures from the web.” in the ashgate research companion to paranormal cultures, edited by olu jenzen and sally munt. burlington: ashgate publishing company. ———. 2014. “‘come, so that i may chase you away!’ on ghost hunts and posthuman ethics.” somatechnics 4 (1): 39–52. https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2014.0111. ———. 2018. “‘spread the word’: creepypasta, hauntology, and an ethics of the curse.” university of toronto quarterly 87 (1): 266–80. https://doi.org/10.3138/utq.87.1.266. iia. 2016. “has anyone else used expressioncaptioner.com?” reddit: nosleep. https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/4fiinb/has_anyone_else_used_expressionc aptionercom/. m59gar. 2017. “you’ll never even know.” reddit: nosleep. https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/60jorl/youll_never_even_know/. ondrak, joe. 2018. “spectres des monstres: post-postmodernisms, hauntology and creepypasta narratives as digital fiction.” horror studies 9 (2): 161–78. https://doi.org/10.1386/host.9.2.161_1. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): grandinetti, j., deatley, t., bruinsma, j., (2020, october). the dead speak: big data and digitally mediated death. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the dead speak: big data and digitally mediated death justin grandinetti university of north carolina charlotte tyler deatley north carolina state university jeffery bruinsma north carolina state university introductory statement in the following panel, we add to scholarly challenges regarding the binary distinction between life and death by examining new strategies of making productive the data of the dead. digital media and tactics of big data collection, storage, and processing blur the boundaries of human lifecycles, allowing the individual to exist as a productive part of sociotechnical apparatuses long after their corporeal demise. in colloquial discussions, life and death are often conceptualized as dichotomous; yet, complicating this distinction is a conceptualization of life and death as coextensive, as human and nonhuman bodies exist in a constant state of becoming (ingraham & rowland, 2016). clarified by rosi braidotti (2010), life itself is a relentlessly generative force that requires interrogation of human and nonhuman entanglement. the imbrication of users, technologies, data collection practices, infrastructures, platforms, digital flows, etc. contributes to an erosion of the bounded human being, giving way to a more productive, nonbinary distinction “between same and other, between different categories of living beings, and ultimately between life and death” (braidotti, 2010, p. 209). put more simply, the origins and endpoints of corporeal life and death cannot account shifting forms of existence enabled by compositions of users, data, and digital media. or, even more succinctly, “death is overrated” (braidotti, 2010, p. 212). reconceptualizing life and death requires attention to how media are relevant to organic and inorganic states of becoming. beginning with the inception of the telegraph, media allowed new forms of simultaneity, liveness, and co-presence that has been framed as ghostly and haunted (sconce, 2009). explained by dorthe christensen and kjetil sandvik (2016), “media enable us to establish, maintain and develop relations with the dead without being present in the same space–time continuum” (p. 1). accounting for contemporary social media practices, scholarship has examined how platforms enable changing discourses about birth and death (leaver & highfield, 2016), including how social media memorialization has complicated the ethics and cultural understanding of death (wright, 2014). in spaces of pervasive web connectivity, the social media subject is required to use technology to maintain the boundaries of a self, even when the distinctions between humans and data, life and death are being gradually erased (bollmer, 2016). adding to the important work of these discussions, we endeavor to rethink “the temporality of the subject such that the human is no longer constrained by death, but rather an evolving biophysical form” (ingraham & rowland, 2016, p. 10). we contend that the continued relevance of deceased user’s data necessitates reconsideration of the power dynamics, monetization, and ethics of digitally-mediated lifecycles. in this panel, we turn these insights toward an examination of death and big data— specifically, our presentations on digital data and death focus on the topics of subjectivation, consent and privacy, and commodification. reanimator: haunted data, streaming media, and subjectivity examines the process of subjectivation taking into account the haunted data and digital afterlives of streaming media. subjectivation is often conceptualized as producing a docile human subject that functions toward machines of capitalism, war, and bureaucracy; however, compositions of big data, platforms, infrastructures, and algorithms offer the possibility of a productive sociotechnical economic subject unbounded from the human body. grief by the byte: constructions of data consent, privacy, and stability in griefbots interrogates the data practices and ethics related to the creation of chatbots from the data of deceased individuals. while these so-called griefbots are framed as helpful to those grieving a lost loved one, there remain questions about consent and privacy that accompany these interactions. finally, what is dead may never die: the commodification of death in social media advertising studies how user data maintains economic value after death via networks designed to surveil, collect, and commodify the immaterial labor of the dead. the implications of an economic future largely influenced by the data of the deceased are troublesome, especially if the available data on various digital platforms eventually belongs mostly to the dead. taken together, these presentations add to an exigent focus on the relationship between life, death, digital media, and big data. references bollmer, g. (2016). inhuman networks: social media and the archaeology of connection. new york: bloomsbury academic. braidotti, r. (2010). the politics of "life itself" and new ways of dying. in new materialisms: ontology, agency, and politics. durham: duke university press. christensen, d. r., & sandvik, k. (2016). mediating and remediating death. abingdon, oxon: routledge. ingraham, c., & rowland, a. (2016). performing imperceptibility: google street view and the tableau vivant. surveillance & society, 14(2), 211–226. leaver, t., & highfield, t. (2016). visualising the ends of identity: pre-birth and postdeath on instagram. information, communication & society, 21(1), 30–45. sconce, j. (2009). haunted media: electronic presence from telegraphy to television. durham: duke university press. wright, n. (2014). death and the internet: the implications of the digital afterlife. first monday, 19(6). reaminator: haunted data, streaming media, and subejctivity justin grandinetti university of north carolina charlotte in the era of big data, information circulates long after the death of individual users in what has been termed digital afterlives (wright, 2014), data afterlives (fuller, 2009), and haunted data (blackwell, 2019). for example, öhman and watson (2019) project that there will be over 1.4 billion facebook profiles of deceased users by the year 2100, leading to questions of the dead overtaking the living online. while much of the discourse surrounding the data of the dead has centered around social media platforms, these haunted traces exist in ever-expanding forms that include streaming media. streaming platforms utilize data metrics that include what users watch, the duration of viewing, and location and device data in the creation and suggestion of content (saltzman, 2018). magnetically inscribed on servers, these data metrics “bear traces of human, material, technical, symbolic, and imaginary histories” (blackman, 2019, p. 166) that function toward the systematic digital monitoring of people or groups to regulate or govern behavior (esposti, 2014). put another way, data traces—at once living and nonliving, human and technical—are an essential element in machinic compositions that channel affective intensities, produce subjects, and enable agency. consequently, this use of haunted data challenges not only the distinction between life and death, but also the notion of the bounded, corporeal human subject. this presentation addresses the process of subjectivation taking into account the haunted data and digital afterlives of streaming media. scholarship has examined the production of the subject as socially bounded and formed via ideology (althusser, 1971), by discursive formations (foucault, 1969), or by collective assemblages (deleuze & guattari, 1983 [1972]). despite different conceptualizations of how the subject is formed, subjectivation often functions toward the engineering of “docile subjects as functional components of the sociotechnical megamachines of war, bureaucracy, and/or capital” (wiley & elam, 2018, p. 222). in considering big data and networked connectivity, however, bollmer (2016) contends that “social media produce the human as a ‘posthuman’ subject…through a deeply ingrained and ultimately quotidian belief that it is in human nature to connect and circulate flows of information and capital” (p. 5). social media, then, is part of a transformed governmentality, in which the “nodal citizen” is expected to engage in and internalize proper conduct that includes connecting and maintaining flows while simultaneously managing the definitions and limits of their own life (bollmer, 2016, p.7; 119). not only does streaming media contribute to these forms of ubiquitous user data collection, but these platforms are increasingly oriented toward social interactivity (spilker, ask, & hansen, 2018). for example, global users now stream content across a variety of platforms: the televisual and cinematic content of netflix, hulu, and iqiyi; social media streaming through facebook, instagram, and yy; and mobile-social streaming via tiktok, perisciope, and quibi. streaming, accordingly, represents a multitude of data collection that includes countless data metrics derived from user-platform interactions as well as flows of audiovisual inscription via user-uploaded content. to examine the relationship between streaming media, death, and subjectivity, i draw upon wiley and elam’s (2018) synthetic subjectivation and blackman’s (2019) hauntology. in a re-reading of deleuze and guattari’s three syntheses of subjectivation, wiley and elam (2018) position synthetic subjectivation “as a way to conceptualize subject formation as grounded in compositions of heterogeneous elements, and not in humans or hominid organisms” (p. 207). to this end, wiley and elam (2018) eschew the quotidian signifying distinction between human and technology to consider the composite body of natural-sociotechnical arrangements. simply stated, this approach to synthetic subjectivity allows for consideration of how compositions of partial objects (eyes, hands, remote controls, cables, servers, etc.) are connected, inscribed, and recognized as subject. streaming media is driven by data that, while often examined in a purely quantifiable sense, bears historical traces that are both human and non-human. blackman’s (2019) hauntology of data allows attention to how data is shaped and reshaped by the experience of user, which allows for confrontation of “specters, displacements, disjointed times, submerged events, and multiple temporalities” (p. 20). taken together, the conjunction of hauntology and synthetic subjectivation of streaming media allows examination of streaming subject untethered from reliance on living human bodies. accordingly, it is possible to conceptualize the streaming subject as more than living human beings watching, recording, uploading, and liking audio-visual content. one of the aphorisms of streaming data collection and suggestion is that platforms know the user better than they know themselves (fiegerman, 2013). streaming media channels a desire for personalized entertainment—through data-driven mechanisms, the user is imbricated into the machines of connection, recording, coding, production, and suggestion. the streaming subject certainly can be an arrangement that includes a living human individual who is expected to engage in cycles of content viewingrecording-rating and accompanying data collection. however, when accounting for the presence of haunted data, the streaming subject is no longer reliant on a body of flesh and blood, but can instead operate as an entanglement of machines, servers, datapoints, software, infrastructures, and algorithms that work toward the suggestion, creation, and engagement with streaming content. from this perspective, streaming and social media “do not inherently rely on human subjects, but rather derive economic value from anything that can maintain connections and circulations—which, consequently reduces the subject of social media to data itself” (bollmer, 2016, p. 133). this datafied subject, accordingly, is not delimited to the boundaries of the living, but instead functions as an amalgamation of data haunted by traces of human, material, and technical histories. more simply stated, while streaming media does produce sociotechnical subjects as bounded human bodies connected to audio-visual content and platform infrastructures, is it is equally important to consider the possibility of subjectivity where the human is a mere figure in the sand (wiley & elam, 2018)—where the hominid component is absent entirely, or reduced to haunted data that transcends corporeal life and death. references althusser, l. (1971). ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes towards an investigation). new york: verso. blackman, l. (2019). haunted data: affect, transmedia, weird science. london; new york: bloomsbury academic. bollmer, g. (2016). inhuman networks: social media and the archaeology of connection. new york: bloomsbury academic. deleuze, g., and guattari, f. (1983) [1972]. anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. esposti, s. d. (2014). when big data meets dataveillance: the hidden side of analytics. surveillance & society, 12(2), 209–225. fiegerman, s. (2013). netflix's data points are not the usual suspects. retrieved from https://mashable.com/2013/12/11/netflix-data/ foucault, m. (1969). the archaeology of knowledge. new york: pantheon. fuller, m. (2009). active data and its afterlives. retrieved from http://fuller.spc.org/fuller/matthew-fuller-active-data-and-its-afterlives/ öhman, c. j., & watson, d. (2019). are the dead taking over facebook? a big data approach to the future of death online. big data & society, 6(1), 1-13. saltzman, m. (2018). how to see everything netflix knows about you. retrieved from https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/saltzman/2018/04/17/you-can-see-whatnetflix-knows-you-but-you-cant-download/510782002/ spilker, h., ask, k., & hansen, m. (2018). the new practices and infrastructures of participation: how the popularity of twitch.tv challenges old and new ideas about television viewing. information, communication & society, 1–16. wiley, s., & elam, j. (2018). synthetic subjectivation: technical media and the composition of posthuman subjects. subjectivity, 11(3), 203–227. wright, n. (2014). death and the internet: the implications of the digital afterlife. first monday, 19(6). grief by the byte: constructions of data consent, privacy, and stability in griefbots tyler deatley north carolina state university this presentation seeks to examine the phenomenon of chatbots created from a deceased person’s data called griefbots. these griefbots are programmed by compiling an individual’s digital footprint from social media content, text messages, and emails to create an artificial intelligence that replicates the deceased's interaction patterns to help friends and family to work through the grieving process (villaronga, 2019). griefbots are enabled by the vast amounts of data and content referred to as digital remains; with a minimum of 1.4 billion profiles left behind on fb alone by 2100, there will be plenty of remains to draw from (lingel, 2013; öhman and watson, 2019). as whitt (2017) notes, however, our data, much like our own material bodies, is impermanent—the material infrastructure that houses that data can breakdown, degrade, or be wiped. this data fragility contrasts to the way that algorithms are often positioned by the companies that utilize them. companies such as netflix routinely articulate algorithms as a computational process that knows us better than we know ourselves (fiegerman, 2013). moreover, due to the computational nature of programming language, algorithms appear efficient, “impartial, reliable and legitimate” (kitchin, 2017, pg. 19). that data is situated as objective and reliable obscures its ephemeral nature; in actuality, this data is deeply contextual, contingent, and unstable. it is precisely this contextuality that is at the heart of griefbots. as newton (2016) says in their essay regarding a friend’s programed griefbot: you may feel less comfortable with the idea of your texts serving as the basis for a bot in the afterlife — particularly if you are unable to review all the texts and social media posts beforehand. we present different aspects of ourselves to different people, and after infusing a bot with all of your digital interactions, your loved ones may see sides of you that you never intended to reveal. in life users create messages and content with specific contexts and imagined audiences in mind (marwick and boyd, 2011). social media affordances such as searchability and indexability collapse those varying contexts across different temporalities. after death, when a user’s data is used to create a griefbot, that context collapses completely and is presented as a whole entity, user and audience wrapped together. moreover, the contingent and contextual aspect of the data used to create griefbots complicates the consent of both user and audience. how programmers reconcile and understand both context and consent when programing griefbots, as well as how platforms negotiate the ethics of this data use when creating terms of use agreements warrants further scholarly attention. this presentation, therefore, seeks to interrogate the data practices surrounding the creation and implementation of griefbots’ relationship to consent and privacy. for example, the data used to create griefbots comes both from the user generating the griefbot, and also from the other platform users with whom the original user interacts. likewise, griefbots programing is being refined to incorporate learning capabilities and creating bots that have capacities to be socially active and give off appearances of sentience (basset, 2018; savin-baden and burden, 2019). the data generated by grieving users through interaction with the griefbot will be factored into those learning capabilities and used to refine the artificial intelligence. at question then is what measures are taken to protect the data that is algorithmized to create the griefbot along with how programmers understand and gather consent with the data produced from grievers and mourners’ interactions with the griefbot. in analyzing issues of consent, privacy, stability, and impermanence of griefbots, i turn to terms of use agreements, digital editorials, and existing interviews with griefbot programmers. i seek to understand how programmers conceptualize and put into practice concerns of consent, privacy, and data stability. as kitchin (2017) argues for and mager (2015) demonstrates, interviewing algorithm programmers is essential to understanding knowledge production practices within algorithmic industries. through an examination of industry knowledge practices, we can understand how values such as consent and data stability are understood internally and instantiated into policy. scholarly literature has not addressed the way griefbot programmers understand consent and privacy through a qualitative practice such as interviewing, in turn presenting a potential fruitful gap to better ascertain the formulation of griefbots. consequently, i seek to answer how programmers see individual griefbots as stable and long-lasting, akin to digital graveyards (nansen et al, 2014). in doing so, this presentation responds to the troubling epistemology of algorithms as objective and stable through attention to how programmers understand and implement knowledge practices around consent/privacy and data stability. if the goal is to create therapeutic griefbots that assist grieving process as much as possible while maintaining an ethics that respects the consent and privacy of all involved, it matters that programmers understand the contextual and fragile nature of the data used to generate griefbots. if not griefbots may be seen as ‘true’ reflections of that person, which creates a host of different problematics if consent and privacy are not respected. references bassett, d. (2018). “digital afterlives: from social media platforms to thanabots and beyond” in death and anti-death: two hundred years after frankenstein. (c. tandy, ed.) (vol. 16). s.l.: ria university press. fiegerman, s. (2013). netflix's data points are not the usual suspects. retrieved from https://mashable.com/2013/12/11/netflix-data/ kitchin, r. (2017). thinking critically about and researching algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 14-29. leaver, t. (2013). the social media contradiction: data mining and digital death. m/c journal: a journal of media and culture, 16(2). lingel, j. (2013). the digital remains: social media and practices of online grief. the information society, 29(3), 190-195. marwick, a. e., & boyd, d. (2011). i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. new media & society, 13(1), 114-133. mager, astrid. "algorithmic ideology: how capitalist society shapes search engines." information, communication & society 15, no. 5 (april 10, 2012): 769-87. accessed december 8, 2017. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2012.676056 nansen, b., arnold, m., gibbs, m., & kohn, t. (2014). the restless dead in the digital cemetery. digital death: mortality and beyond in the online age, 111-124. newton, c. (2016, october 6). speak, memory. retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-memorial-roman-mazurenko-bot öhman, c. j., & watson, d. (2019). are the dead taking over facebook? a big data approach to the future of death online. big data & society, 6(1), 2053951719842540. savin-baden, m., & burden, d. (2019). digital immortality and virtual humans. postdigital science and education, 1(1), 87-103. villaronga, e. f. (2019). “i love you,” said the robot: boundaries of the use of emotions in human-robot interactions. in emotional design in human-robot interaction (pp. 93-110). springer, cham. whitt, r. s. (2016). through a glass, darkly: technical, policy, and financial actions to avert the coming digital dark ages. santa clara computer & high tech. lj, 33, 117229. what is dead may never die: the commodification of death in social media jeffery bruinsma north carolina state university the question of what happens to our data after we die is both exigent and complex. scholarship ranges from social media grieving practices (pennington 2011), to the effects of memory and digital existence after death (wright 2014; bollmer 2016), to the political and ethical concerns surrounding the continued engagement with dead user’s data (öhman and floridi 2018; karppi 2018; öhman and watson 2019). grief and memorialization are important emergent aspects of social media use—the empathetic drive to sustain our connection to lost loved ones is a powerful incentive for platforms like facebook to implement regulations and policies concerning the sustained interaction of deceased user accounts. however well-intentioned various companies may be in respect to the dead, the fact remains that these are platforms storing, exchanging, and selling vast amounts of data. as karppi (2018) argues about the transition of live accounts after death, “the conversion of dead user profiles into memorial accounts ‘thingifies’ the deceased, and when user profiles become things, they have not only personal or cultural value but also use-value and exchange-value” (p. 101). one of the ways in which thingification occurs is reflected in many platforms’ policies concerning memorialized accounts, including facebook and twitter, that insist on preserving the deceased’s presence while simultaneously allowing living users to continue to engage with the profile. considering the revelations of recent data breaches, the concerns about what happens with our data while we are still living may seem more pressing than the implications of what may happen with our data after we are gone. yet, the commodification of the dead has substantial implications not only for the shifting boundaries of life and death via big data, but also to notions of digital labor and the accompanying ethics surrounding data use. following terranova (2004) on the digital free labor economy and dyer-witheford’s (2015) conceptualization of cyber class construction, including its connections and limitations across the global economy, i will discuss the interest social media platforms have in storing, maintaining, and encouraging continuous engagement with dead user profiles and data. by contextualizing these burgeoning strategies of commodification, i examine the material conditions of control and surveillance to the theoretical network conditions that produce hegemonic influences and data capital from the dead. at the heart of this emergent power relation are theories of the commodification and exploitation of labor. terranova (2004) argues that cultural and technical labor we produce in digital spaces is not “developed simply as an answer to the economic needs of capital” but rather “in relation to the expansion of the cultural industries and they are part of a process of economic experimentation with the creation of monetary value out of knowledge / culture / affect” (p. 79). everything we do on a social media platform, from liking to posting to updating our privacy settings, is a potential commodity. andrejevic (2007) reconceptualizes this data capture on cloud-based platforms as a digital enclosure as a digital enclosure in which user data is “increasingly detailed and fine-grained, thanks to an unprecedented ability to capture and store patterns of interaction, movement, transaction, and communication” (p. 296). the expansion of cultural practices like mourning onto social media platforms are enclosed, surveilled, and then modified in such a way that aligns with the economic interests of the platform. there is no interest in removing the data, as users feel like they should not end interaction with a dead user’s profile after death (pennington 2011). the management of these decisions is critical, as bollmer (2016) argues that “personal information is autonomous and separate from the human body. the connection between the two is not given, but must be managed” (p. 117). although it may be sentimentality that drives the memorialization of social network profiles, social media platform policies are instead motivated by data capture, processing, and commodification. wright (2014) points to many ways in which dead user data is problematic, including the ownership of such data belonging either to the estate of the deceased or the hosting digital platform. complicating matters is that data generated by users does not remain bound to its originating platform, as seen with recent data breach scandals like cambridge analytica. accordingly, even if various platforms implement policies or procedures to “retire” older legacy accounts, the amount of data in algorithmic connection after death in circulation continues. data decay and loss are concerns that can affect the circulation of user data, but many platforms have various backups that can restore data much beyond the average lifespan of a user (cheng 2006; miller 2015). the data contribution from dead user accounts is not insubstantial when compared to live users and is a specific, targetable point from which platforms can profit. social media platforms rely on advertising to fund their production and growth, and advertising in digital environments is tied near exclusively to algorithmic engagement. algorithms do not specifically differentiate between the living and the dead and, even if they were coded to avoid dead user data, there may come a point when dead user data is the bulk of the available data online (öhman and watson 2019). accounts that are not functionally contributing new data can still be engaged with accounts that are, bridging new network connections and marketing opportunities. consequently, what emerges is not only a new relation of power in which platforms continue to exploit dead and memorialized profiles, but something even more critical. when the dead are made to provide perpetual free labor, then the networked subject becomes a continuous member of what dyer-witheford (2015) calls the cyberproletariat, or “a planetary working class tasked with working itself out of a job, toiling relentlessly to develop a system of robots and networks, networked robots and robot networks, for which the human is ultimately surplus to requirements…” (p. 15). the development of such networks, maintained by the living but being continuously fed by the dead, is now a vested interest for digital platforms. references andrejevic, m. (2007). surveillance in the digital enclosure. the communication review, 10, 295-317. bollmer, g. (2016). inhuman networks: social media and the archaeology of connection. new york: bloomsbury academic. cheng, j. (2006, october 19). panasonic creates 100gb blu-ray discs to last 100 years. arstechnica. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2006/10/8032/ dyer-witheford, n. (2015). cyber-proletariat: global labour in the digital vortex. london: pluto press. karppi, t. (2018). disconnect: facebook’s affective bonds. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. miller, r. (2015, june 30). inside facebook’s blu-ray cold storage data center. data center frontier. https://datacenterfrontier.com/inside-facebooks-blu-ray-cold-storagedata-center/ öhman, c. j., & floridi, l. (2017). the political economy of death in the age of information: a critical approach to the digital afterlife industry. minds & machines, 27, 639-662. öhman, c. j., & watson, d. (2019). are the dead taking over facebook? a big data approach to the future of death online. big data & society, 6(1), 1-13. pennington, n. (2013). you don’t de-friend the dead: an analysis of grief communication by college students through facebook profiles. death studies, 37, 617-635. terranova, t. (2004). network culture: politics for the information age. london: pluto press. wright, n. (2014). death and the internet: the implications of the digital afterlife. first monday, 19(6). microsoft word 799-547-1-pb.docx   voice in a virtual world: from resistance to appropriation lynnette g. leonard american university in bulgaria bulgaria lleonard@aubg.bg john c. sherblom university of maine united states john@maine.edu lesley a. withers central michigan university united states lesley.withers@cmich.edu abstract working in groups requires trust, openness, and immediacy. a desire for individual independence, even anonymity, can challenge that trust in virtual teams. the present study examines the predictions of media naturalness theory for the communication of virtual teams. perceptions of the communication experience (occurring along a channel spectrum from text-only to text communication with degrees of audio) are analyzed. our analysis reveals five conceptual themes (impressions of voice, identity/trust, embodiment, interaction, and openness) that show shifts over time in participant perceptions of their communicating in the virtual groups. together, these themes show a pattern of change over time in participant expectations of computer-mediated communication and particularly of their initial resistance to the use of voice and ultimate appropriation of it. keywords virtual teams; media naturalness; voice in virtual worlds organizations increasingly rely on virtual teams of workers who use technology to collaborate across geographic and organizational boundaries (derosa, hantula, kock, & d'arcy, 2004). coordinated group work requires an awareness of the activities of others, relational trust, openness, immediacy, and interdependency (schmidt, 2011). participants coordinate their activities through flexible action in an immediate situational context (blomberg & karasti, 2013). this can be difficult, especially when group members are distributed (kolfschoten, hermann, & lukosch, 2013). a desire for individual independence, even anonymity, can challenge the trust and relationships in virtual teams. does the introduction of voice, which reduces anonymity, increase group presence, influence participant experience with the medium, and change perceptions of the working relationship? much of the research into the communication of these teams relies on media richness theory, despite the fact that media richness does not account for changes over time (burke, aytes, ghidambaram, & johnson, 1999). team communication evolves as members became more familiar and comfortable with the medium (derosa, hantula, kock, & d'arcy, 2004); kock (2004, 2005) argues that media naturalness theory does a better job of explaining this transition. according to media naturalness, humans have optimized their synchronous face-to-face communication with auditory and visual cues through repeated use in evolutionary history. hence, a communication medium that is low in naturalness requires greater cognitive effort, more time to complete a task, and decreases participant physiological arousal and immediacy (derosa, hantula, kock, & d'arcy, 2004; simon, 2006). individuals, however, can learn new schema through repetition, so with experience, a computermediated communication medium becomes more efficient and natural for the user (derosa, hantula, kock, & d'arcy, 2004). naturalness has implications for the level of trust, expectations of openness, experience of immediacy, desire for anonymity, and the resistance to or appropriation of the use of voice by virtual work teams (simon, 2006). the present study examines the predictions of media naturalness theory for the communication of virtual teams. perceptions of the communication experience (occurring along a channel spectrum from text-only to text communication with degrees of audio) are analyzed. project description, method, and data during four 6-12 week project time periods (fall 2008, fall 2010, spring 2011, and fall 2011), novice participants were trained to use the program second life® to complete individual, dyadic, and group tasks. at the end of each project, a 40 minute focus group text chat was held to facilitate an honest sharing of participant viewpoints on the project offered in relationship to and building on the ideas of others (keyton, 2006; reinard, 2008). focus group texts were analyzed with the constant comparative method of thematic analysis (frey, botan, & kreps, 2000; strauss, 1987; strauss & corbin, 1990). the unit of analysis was a complete thought; a single comment could present several complete thoughts or a participant could complete a thought through several separate comments that might be interrupted by another posted comment (krippendorff, 2004). each complete thought was coded into a thematic category either by placing it into a previously created category or by creating a new category (creswell, 1998). the three authors coded each of the focus group texts individually and then together until consensus was reached for each category and project time period. next, the themes from the four project time periods were compared to identify patterns in the themes over time. discussion, implications, and conclusions our analysis reveals five conceptual themes (impressions of voice, identity/trust, embodiment, interaction, and openness) that show shifts over time in participant perceptions of their communicating in the virtual groups. together, these themes show a pattern of change over time in participant expectations of computer-mediated communication and particularly of their initial resistance to the use of voice and ultimate appropriation of it. initial impressions of voice move from a position of some resistance (for example, "i think voice chat is creepy") to acceptance ("i think if we all were on mics it would be more personal") to appropriation ("voice is needed"). participants’ self presentation of identity and trust in the presentations of others is linked to these perceptions of voice, shifting from perceptions expressed as "i don't really know who i am talking to," to "i think i would always doubt whether or not i 'knew' someone in sl," to "when my avatar represented my rl identity, it was easier to talk to people." this change corresponded with shifting views toward being identified with and embodied in one's avatar, from "we get to be cartoon characters," to statements about avatar "i" in sentiments like, "i decided to change my race" and "when i looked like the kool-aid man my interactions were more superficial" [emphasis of "i" added to text]. along with this expression of greater identity with one's avatar come assumptions about the group communication through the medium. changing expectations are expressed in a shift away from simple statements about the amount of information exchanged (for example, "there can be more information and communication presented in little time") to more sophisticated comments made about the group interaction (such as, "it was easy and hard at the same time. it was easy because it easier to be honest about your opinions, but harder because it takes longer for a response"). these changes coincide with shifts in the perception of communication openness from statements such as, "sometimes it was hard to get your point across and not sound mean at the same time" (which indicates a deficiency in the communication medium or difficulty in using it,) to statements such as, "people were generally open. there was the shield (anonymity)" and "not having to worry about being face to face made it much easier." these statements suggest an added benefit and functionality of the medium. overall, participant responses show a shift in perceptions of the communication medium in general, and the use of voice in particular, in ways that reflect and affect participant identity, feelings of avatar embodiment, and trust in the identity embodied by others through their avatars. these perceptions of identity and feelings of trust influence expectations for the group interaction and openness of expression in the group. past research shows that text-based communication makes it easier to recognize speaker identity with tags, allows simultaneous multi-threading of topics, and facilitates addressing an individual (halloran, 2011). in contrast, speaker voice identification can be confusing, group conversational interruptions more common, and addressing a specific individual more difficult. voice, however, does facilitate resolving issues of identity, co-presence, shared meaningful textcontext references, and coordinating group interactions (halloran, 2011). a perceptual shift occurs away from considering second life to be a lesser communication medium when compared to face-to-face group work and toward evaluating its communication potential and use on its own merits, articulating both its advantages and difficulties. as the use of voice in the medium becomes more familiar to participants, they become more comfortable with and less resistant to its use. they are less confused by the use of voice and experience more meaningful co-presence and group interaction, similar to the results found by halloran (2011). as that comfort level increases and resistance decreases, their attention shifts from the medium to expectations of the group members and their interactions together. that is, their concerns shift from sharing information to their group discussions, honestly expressing their ideas, and getting to know each other "differently." the use of voice in a virtual world has been appropriated by the group to achieve their communication objectives for the project. references blomberg, j., & karasti, h. (2013). reflections on 25 years of ethnography in cscw. computer supported cooperative work, 22, doi 10.1007/s10606-012-9183-1. burke, k., aytes, k., ghidambaram, l., & johnson, j. j. (1999). a study of partially distributed work groups: the impact of media, location, and time on perceptions and performance. small group research, 30(4), 453-490. creswell, j. w. (1998). qualitative inquiry and research design: choosing among five traditions. thousand oaks, ca: sage. derosa, d. m., hantula, d. a., kock, n., & d'arcy, j. (2004). trust and leadership in virtual teamwork: a media naturalness perspective. human resource management, 43(2), 219-232. frey, l. r., botan, c. h., & kreps, g. l. (2000). investigating communication: an introduction to research methods. boston, ma: allyn and bacon. halloran, j. (2011). game changer? how voip is impacting the way we play. international journal of interactive worlds, 2011, 1-27. keyton, j. (2006). communication research: asking questions, finding answers. boston, ma: mcgraw-hill. kock, n. (2004). the psychobiological model: towards a new theory of computer-mediated communication based on darwinian evolution. organization science, 15(3), 327-348. kock, n. (2005). media richness or media naturalness? the evolution of our biological communication apparatus and its influence on our behavior toward e-communication tools. ieee transactions on professional communication, 48(2), 117-130. kolfschoten, g. l., hermann, t., & lukosch, s. (2013). differentiated awareness-support in computer supported collaborative work. computer supported cooperative work, 22, 107-112. krippendorff, k. (2004). content analysis: an introduction to its methodology. thousand oaks, ca: sage. reinard, j. c. (2008). introduction to communication research. boston, ma: mcgraw-hill. schmidt, k. (2011). the concept of ‘work’ in cscw. computer supported cooperative work, 20, 341-401. simon, a. f. (2006). computer-mediated communication: task performance and satisfaction. the journal of social psychology, 146(3), 349-379. strauss, a. (1987). qualitative analysis for social scientists. new york, ny: cambridge university press. strauss, a., & corbin, j. (1990). basics of qualitative research: grounded theory procedures and techniques. newbury park, ca: sage. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 performing internet governance: the case study of youth participation in the internet governance forum efrat daskal the hebrew university of jerusalem, israel anya orlova sao paulo state university, brazil theoretical background from participation in global campaigns concerning digital rights to civil society initiatives aimed at educating people about their rights, activists' voices are being heard today, more than ever, regarding internet policy. this study focuses on one space in which these activists take part in discussing internet policy issues – the internet governance forum (igf). the igf is a multi-stakeholder forum that has convened annually since 2006 to discuss the norms and principles of internet governance. three kinds of politics shape the nature of the igf (mueller, 2010): the politics of representation (the people who participate at the igf), of agenda setting (the topics to be discussed at the igf), and of principles (norms and values within the igf). without diminishing the power of the two latter aspects, the issue of representation appears to be the crucial one, since it is the participants who eventually set the tone of the agenda and the principles of the igf. thus, the study aims to shed light on the issue by analyzing the case study of youth participation in the igf. in recent years, the perspective on children and young people has shifted from seeing them as vulnerable societal sectors who need protection to considering them active and knowledgeable social actors who can contribute to society and whose voices should be heard in all matters that affect them (livingstone, 2002; dahlgren, 2007). furthermore, today, youth are even serving as members of boards of directors and key advisory groups (zeldin & macneil, 2006). looking at the igf, due to financial, political, and educational limitations (carr, 2015; levenson, 2012), minority groups, including youth, are often excluded from participating. ever since its establishment in 2006, youth have struggled to participate and several institutionalized efforts have been made to get them involved. the most notable was the creation of the youth coalition for internet governance (ycig) in 2009 to function as a dynamic coalition aiming to promote the participation of young people in the forum. however, the effectiveness of these efforts, including the ycig, is still unclear. thus, in order to assess these youth related initiatives, and furthermore to analyze the political processes that are meant to enable young people to construct youth representation at the igf, this study asks, what are the characteristics of youth participation at the igf? methodology to answer this question, we used several research methods triangulated to produce a thick description of youth activities within the igf: content analysis of all youth-related materials from igf meetings (n=35 documents), in-depth interviews with key activists who participated in youth activities in the igf (n=5), and participatory observation conducted at igf mexico during december of 2016. the analysis of these materials yielded three major themes that will be presented as follows: (1) the vision of youth participation in the igf, (2) the difficulties youth encounter in participating in the igf, and (3) the future of youth participation in the igf. results the vision – according to the ycig declaration, the main justification for including youth at the igf relies on the concept that "the internet is a world of the young". this statement was repeated in most ycig meetings and was interpreted by ycig members in two ways. first, that today, youth is the largest group of internet users, and second, that youth have more experience in internet-related issues, thus they should have a say in internet governance. while both arguments are problematic (because youth is a transitory stage and not only young people have experience with the internet), it provided young people with the legitimacy they needed to participate at igf as an institutionalized entity. moreover, both arguments rely on the underlying assumption that youth can be considered a global social actor with unique characteristics. in addition, the ycig declaration also states two characteristics of ideal youth participation. first, "young people's involvement should be confined not only to youth-related issues," but also to other aspects of internet governance. by raising this argument, the youth aim to brand themselves as capable social actors, just like adults. second, "the involvement of young people must not [sic] genuine, not tokenistic," meaning that only authentic voices of young people should be heard in this framework. the difficulties – there are two main difficulties youth encounter at the igf that might diminish their ability to express their authentic voices. first, since young people are by default less financially stable, they need financial assistance to physically participate in the igf, which usually takes place in remote and exotic locations. one way of doing so is to be affiliated with other powerful stakeholders (e.g., civil society organizations, governments, or internet companies); but this affiliation sometimes comes with strings attached and furthermore may transform these young people into passive participants. second, in order to engage successfully at the igf, young people need to go through an extensive process of capacity building. nevertheless, this kind of guidance currently hardly exists even within the framework of ycig the future – three trends will influence the future of youth involvement within the igf: (1) the strengthening of traditional geo-political forces within the igf, manifested in the rise of national igf youth initiatives and the identity of the ycig steering committee delegates, who for the first time will be determined by their geo-political affiliation (2) the process of professionalization youth representatives go through within the igf leads them (even unconsciously) to modify their behavior, resulting in adultism; and (3) the dissolution of youth as a global actor due to the lack of any strong leadership that can unite all the different youth initiatives. the upshot of these three trends is that while youth will continue to participate in the igf, the vision of global and authentic youth participation at igf envisioned by the ycig founders is far from becoming reality. conclusions the study suggests that despite the potential for an independent and innovative youth involvement at igf, the existing limitations transform young people from genuine political participants into mere performative representatives whose sole function is to play the role of young representatives at igf. furthermore, the findings of this study also reflect how igf became a performative sphere in which internet governance is presented and ritualized but not necessarily created. while this outcome differs from the ideal vision of igf, we nevertheless conclude by highlighting the socio-political importance of maintaining igf as a performative space of internet governance. references carr, m. (2015) power plays in global internet governance. millennium journal of international studies, 43, 2640–2659. doi:10.1177/0305829814562655 dahlgren, p. (2007). young citizens and new media: learning for democratic participation. new york: routledge. levenson, n. s. (2012). ecologies of representation: knowledge, networks, & innovation in internet governance. paper presented at apsa annual meeting. retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2108671 livingstone, s. (2002). young people and new media: childhood and the changing media environment. london: sage. mueller, m. l. (2010). networks and states: the global politics of internet governance. ma: mit press. zeldin, s., & macneil, c. (2006). lessons from the field: engaging youth and adults as partners in organizational governance. national civic review, 95, 7–14. doi:10.1002/ncr.125 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2108671 selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 literat, i. (2017, october 18-21). contemporary creativity online: an examination of the interplay between art and vernacular creativity on the internet. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. contemporary creativity online: an examination of the interplay between art and vernacular creativity on the internet ioana literat teachers college, columbia university given the vastness of creative digital content from memes to remixes to collaborative fiction being produced and circulated online, the boundaries between art and non-art on the internet have become increasingly blurry. these distinctions are further complicated by the prominence of contemporary artists’ digital appropriation practices (i.e. collecting, reframing and/or remixing user-generated content), as in cory arcangel’s working on my novel, a compilation of other people’s tweets containing the title phrase, or eric oglander’s craigslist mirrors, a collection of user-submitted photographs of mirrors posted for sale on craigslist. moreover, in many cases, this indistinguishability is a core feature of the work, as in joel holmberg’s legendary account, a series of profound philosophical questions posted among the otherwise banal inquiries on yahoo answers. this paper examines the positioning of internet art vis-a-vis vernacular digital creativity, interrogating the shifting boundaries between art and (what is traditionally considered) non-art in the online environment. if a work of internet art and, respectively, of vernacular online creativity (such as a meme or a youtube mashup) live in the same space, use the same tools and address the same networked audiences, where do the key differences between them still lie and how is the relationship between them being complicated by sociocultural and technological factors? in view of the specific patterns of production and circulation that characterize the online environment, how might today’s digital creative culture make us reconsider or, conversely, reinforce our notions of “art” and “artists”? two contemporary artistic practices that illustrate the complexity of this relationship between internet art and online vernacular creativity are appropriation and, respectively, aesthetic mimicry. the first trend refers to artists appropriating and reframing found user-generated content, with the goal of repositioning it and inscribing it with new meaning. in addition to oglander’s craigslist mirrors and arcangel’s working on my novel, mentioned previously, examples of this practice are guthrie lonergan’s recent music videos, a collection/archive of found youtube videos that, as archetypal youtube content, embody our contemporary cultural zeitgeist, or penelope umbrico’s photographic installations made up of found user-generated content, such as suns from flickr or tvs from craigslist. in some of these projects, the modification involved in working with the found digital material is substantial, as in olivier laric’s 50/50, where the artist painstakingly pieces together hundreds of different performances of 50 cent's hit song "in da club" posted to youtube, recreating the entire original song. at other times, it consists solely of collection or compilation, as in craigslist mirrors or working on my novel. the second type of practice that illuminates the increasing interrelation between art and non-art on the internet is stylistic mimicry, where contemporary internet artists adopt the “subamateur” vernacular of the web (halter, 2009). while these artists generally do not integrate found user-generated content in their work, their creations imitate and thus comment on the particular aesthetics of vernacular online creativity. this type of work is exemplified by joel holmberg’s work on yahoo answers, lorna mills’ animated gifs, petra cortright or alexandra gorczynski’s webcam videos, and michael manning’s aptly titled mirroring.net, which is a collection of clickable animations of mundane objects and popular culture characters, reflecting an already outdated internet aesthetic. of course, these dynamics are not entirely new there is an important tradition of pro surfer work (olson, 2008) and embrace of amateur aesthetics in new media art (greene, 2008; tribe, jana, & grosenick, 2006). however, these practices and the implications they hold for culture and creativity are becoming increasingly significant and prevalent in today’s digital culture, as the sphere of online media is becoming saturated and the volume of vernacular online creativity keeps growing, with more and more people producing more and more content online. as critics lauren cornell and ed halter put it, “in a world in which new forms of software have made the creation of music, images, video and new software easier than ever to master, and the internet has fostered an unprecedented amount of activity in terms of showing, sharing, and remixing this work, how does the work of artists utilizing the same practices differ in any fundamental respect?” (cornell & halter, 2015, p. xxiii). in order to address these questions and examine the complex interplay between art and vernacular creativity on the internet, this paper looks at the key cultural mechanisms by which we designate creative activity as art – the ability to facilitate interpretations, to reflect the artist’s intentions and to exist within an art world (carroll, 1995) – applying them to the online environment in order to facilitate a better understanding of the relationship between internet art and online vernacular creativity. specifically, drawing on some of the key examples mentioned earlier, i analyze what kinds of aesthetic interpretations are facilitated by online art versus vernacular creativity and how these interpretations are shaped; how authorship is reflected in these works; and how the larger context of exhibition, distribution, and criticism reinforces lingering cultural hierarchies in the online realm. ultimately, the key argument made by means of this analysis is that the rise of the internet as a context and medium for widespread creative participation offers unprecedented opportunities – as well as challenges – in terms of the reassessing criteria for aesthetic evaluation in online contexts. in particular, internet artists’ appropriation practices, which comment on both the form and content of user-generated creativity, reveal a complex and complicated relationship between art and vernacular creativity online. while remix and appropriation are not new concepts specific to the digital age, there is a need to acknowledge the ways in which the internet is making these processes more prevalent in the art sphere (navas, 2012). furthermore, it is also important to note that authorship is evolving in the internet age, and becoming more distributed, modular and, often, more difficult to ascertain; as illustrated by this analysis, the impact of these cultural shifts in authorship are gradually beginning to be felt in the contemporary art world as well. the paper concludes by surveying key implications for culture and creativity particularly in regards to the changing nature of cultural development and authorship online and reflects on the ethics of these practices of digital appropriation and aesthetic mimicry, as well as the impact they might have in terms of reassessing contemporary criteria for artistic evaluation. references carroll, n. (1995). danto, style, and intention. the journal of aesthetics and art criticism 53(3), 251-257. cornell, l. & halter, e. (2015). hard reboot: an introduction to mass effect. in cornell, l. and halter, e. (eds.) mass effect: art and the internet in the twenty-first century (pp. xv-xxxiv). new york: mit press. greene, r. (2004). internet art. london: thames & hudson. halter, e. (2009, april 29). after the amateur: notes. retrieved from http://rhizome.org/editorial/2009/apr/29/after-the-amateur-notes/ navas, e. (2012). remix theory: the aesthetics of sampling. wien: springer. olson, m. (2008). lost not found: the circulation of images in digital visual culture. in cotton, c. & klein, a. (eds.) (2010). words without pictures. new york, ny: aperture foundation. tribe, m., jana, r., & grosenick, u. (2006). new media art. london: taschen. dors panel at aoir2020.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 hård af segerstad, y., bell, j., giaxoglou, k., pitsillides, s. & yeshua-katz, d. (2020, october 2-5). taboo or not taboo: (in)visibilities of death, dying and bereavement. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. taboo or not taboo: (in)visibilities of death, dying and bereavement ylva hård af segerstad (chair) university of gothenburg, sweden jo bell university of hull, uk korina giaxoglou open university, uk stacey pitsillides northumbria university, uk daphna yeshua-katz ben gurion university of the negev, israel kathleen cumiskey (respondent) college of staten island, us larissa hjorth (respondent) rmit university, australia introductory statement the notion that ‘death is a taboo’ pervades private, public and academic discourses around death, dying and bereavement in contemporary western societies. the rise of digital media within the last decades further complicates the appreciation of the stance that death is a taboo, given the increased opportunities afforded in social media environments for embracing death, fostering new intimacies with strangers and semistrangers but also for turning death into a spectacle (jakobsen, 2016). the study of death-related practices online and the tensions they raise has rapidly been growing in the interdisciplinary field of death online studies, and the members of this panel have all been contributing to this development (e.g. christensen & sandvik, 2014; hård af hård af segerstad, y., bell, j., giaxoglou, k., pitsillides, s. & yeshua-katz, d. (2020, october 2-5). taboo or not taboo: (in)visibilities of death, dying and bereavement. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. segerstad & kasperowski, 2015; giaxoglou et al., 2017; giaxoglou et al., 2018). however, in this field there is a need for developing shared conceptual and analytical frameworks and ensure methodological and theoretical robustness in line with developments in the study of social media communication. in many ways, reflections on death crystallise core norms, values, tensions and beliefs of social systems and, on a larger scale, of contemporary western societies. the study of death and communication, thus, needs to address more thoroughly the sociocultural processes around tabooisation calling attention to communicative practices, narrative and emotional ideologies, technological affordances, cultural values, identity performances, social bonding and coping mechanisms, legal matters and ethics, and technological embeddedness. there is a need to synthesize insights from death sociology and interdisciplinary death online studies in order to shape an agenda for an integrated study of the offline and the online that can capture continuities and shifts in death-related practices (see also borgstrom and ellis, 2017). organization of the panel the panel consists of three papers presented by five interdisciplinary scholars from denmark, sweden, israel and the uk. focusing on the (in)visibilities of death, dying and bereavement across contexts online and offline the papers critically revisit the ‘death is taboo’ thesis by investigating the particular conditions under which death, dying and bereavement are talked about, storied, and made socially visible and the ways in which technology plays a vital part in coping with mortality. the paper by ylva hård af segerstad, jo bell and daphna yeshua-katz, “designed to die: on the ephemerality and obsolescence of digital remains” seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the (post)human encounter with death by exploring how bereaved individuals engage with the digital remains of their deceased loved ones, and how both the digital devices themselves and their digital content constitute potential tools for coping with loss. the paper by korina giaxoglou, “life, death and taboo: technological futures of curiosity and critique” explores how practice research that works with cultural partners, like libraries, can help the public to re-imagine the future of death, providing new spaces to reflect on the role of technology in people’s lives and losses. it investigates whether death can be shifted from a taboo or private experience to an expression of self/ post-self or communities and how design futures may help people to explore an ever changing relationship between technology and the body. the paper by stacey pitsillides, “sharing the emotional self: tellabilities of death, dying and grief online”, investigates the “darker side” of tellability, focusing on practices of sharing of the emotional self in online contexts in relation to the positions they make available for networked audiences, which relates to experiences of death, dying and grief. hård af segerstad, y., bell, j., giaxoglou, k., pitsillides, s. & yeshua-katz, d. (2020, october 2-5). taboo or not taboo: (in)visibilities of death, dying and bereavement. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. following the paper presentations, our two respondents kathleen cumiskey and larissa hjorth both with extensive expertise in the field and long-time prominent members of aoir will offer comments before opening the panel to discussion with the audience. references ariès, p. (1974) western attitudes toward death: from the middle ages to the present. baltimore and london: the johns hopkins university press. borgstrom, erica and ellis, julie (2017). introduction: researching death, dying and bereavement. mortality, 22(2) pp. 93–104. christensen, dorthe reflsund and kjetil sandvik (2014) mediating and remediating death: studies in death, materiality and the origin of time. farnham, surrey: ashgate. giaxoglou, korina, döveling, katrin and pitsillides, stacey (2017) networked emotions: interdisciplinary perspectives on sharing loss online. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 61 (1), pp. 1-10. giaxoglou, korina and döveling, katrin (2018) mediatization of emotion on social media: forms and norms in digital mourning practices. social media + society 4 (1), pp. 1-4. hård af segerstad, y., & kasperowski, d. (2015). a community for grieving: affordances of social media for support of bereaved parents. new review of hypermedia and multimedia, 21(1-2), 25-41. jakobsen, michael hviid (2016) “spectacular death” proposing a new fifth phase to philippe aries’ s admirable history of death. humanities 5 (2): 19. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 hård af segerstad, y., bell, j. & yeshua-katz, d. (2020, october 2-5). designed to die: on the ephemerality and obsolescence of digital remains. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. designed to die: on the ephemerality and obsolescence of digital remains ylva hård af segerstad university of gothenburg, sweden jo bell university of hull, uk daphna yeshua-katz ben gurion university of the negev, israel introduction our lives are increasingly saturated by digital devices. mobile phones, laptops and tablets mediate our everyday engagement through social media and digital services. taking a post-humanist approach, mobile phones may even be regarded as “prostheses”, transcending the limitations of the physical human form by extending our human senses and abilities allowing for telepresence and remote communication (haraway, 2007). the devices themselves contain and connect to what can be described as the digital remains we leave behind when we die. these remains can be seen to contain the “essence” of the deceased (writings, online behaviour, photos, videos, etc.) as a result of the increasing ubiquity of digital media in our lives. in addition, the digital remains left behind by the dead may function as transitional objects (mowlabocus, 2016), helping bereaved individuals to adapt to a reality without the lost loved ones and to continue bonds (klass, silverman, & nickman, 1996; walsh & mcgoldrick, 2004). for much of the 20th century to maintain continuing bonds with deceased loved ones was regarded an indicator of pathology in grief. with the continuing bonds theory, klass et al. (1996) introduced a shift among bereavement theorists away from the emphasis on detachment and toward a willingness to include maintained connections with the deceased as a natural part of the bereavement process. walter (1996) proposed a new model of grief that allows the continued presence of the dead within people’s lives and continuous conversations with and about them. building on katherine hayles’ ideas of the posthuman, pitsillides and jefferies (2013) considered how our digital remains may take the role of legacy continuing on and engaging with the living through the construct of ‘posthumanism’. they argued that a posthumanist hård af segerstad, y., bell, j. & yeshua-katz, d. (2020, october 2-5). designed to die: on the ephemerality and obsolescence of digital remains. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. approach makes room for new conceptions of thinking about the role of the dead in society, including “the agency they still have through: memory, things they leave behind, social networks, spaces, paths: digital or otherwise.” however, as noted by walter (2015), digital remains are ephemeral. both in terms of hardware and digital content, obsolescence is built in by design. so, like our physical selves these digital remains are mortal, they are designed to ‘die’. based on interview and survey data gathered from the contexts of israel, the uk and sweden, we explore how bereaved individuals engage with the digital remains of their deceased loved ones and how both the digital devices themselves and their content constitute potential tools for coping with loss. we construct our analysis around two themes: firstly, our participants invested efforts in maintaining bonds with their deceased loved ones by continuing to engage with the left-behind devices and content. secondly, the ephemeral nature of these digital remains, highlights their fragility as the technology which sustains them eventually will become obsolete. post-humanist perspectives on continuing bonds here we refer to the ‘essence’ (spiritual, physical, emotional, psychological, social and personal) of the deceased person embodied within the digital device. we trace the idea of the technological device, including its software, data and applications, being more or less an extension of the body and the person in the post-humanist sense. digital remains seem to function as transitional objects offering the bereaved means to continue bonds; and as tools for making sense of the loss. our study examines the evolution of the deceased’s personhood on social media and other digital platforms in the wake of a suicide. the work highlights the preservation of devices and use of digital content as means for continuing bonds. one participant kept the phone and voice message of her deceased son. she felt it contained the ‘essence’ of him, preserved in the digital device. other participants deliberately kept phone numbers so they could maintain contact and send messages to the dead. they also sent private messages to the deceased via their ‘in-life’ facebook accounts which they kept on maintaining. another talked about ways in which the computer belonging to her deceased son embodied his ’spirit.’ the physical proximity of his mobile phone meant that wherever she was she could ‘conjure up’ his digital remains (photographs, videos, conversations, likes and dislikes), momentarily bringing him back to life at the click of a button. some of the bereaved parents took comfort in using the spotify lists created by their deceased young adult child in their everyday lives. they described the ways in which they felt how this connected them to their deceased child’s state of mind, highlighting how the spotify lists acts as a conduit to the dead in the posthuman sense. ephemerality and obsolescence a widow in the study continued to charge the mobile phone that belonged to her deceased husband, rami. she payed the phone bill and carried the device around with her. she also used it to post on his facebook profile, which made it look like he hård af segerstad, y., bell, j. & yeshua-katz, d. (2020, october 2-5). designed to die: on the ephemerality and obsolescence of digital remains. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. continued to post, activating a response from the dead. in life, he and his family used a joint whatsapp group to communicate. the family continued to use the group platform after his death and included him in the messages as before. however, one morning there was a new message in the group which freaked the family members out: “rami left the group.” the family gathered to find out how on earth their dead husband, father and grandpa could have left the group at this point. the app displayed the following message: “please update your whatsapp app.” apparently a missing application update on the device rami left behind lead to his sudden digital departure. and so eventually, as a result of design and function (built-in obsolescence), the technological apparatus that sustained his digital existence was superseded with new iterations resulting in his digital demise. in our discussion, we focus on the ways digital affordances the multidimensional relationship between the object, or technology, and the user enable continuing bonds between the living and the dead. we examine what is being preserved, how long it is preserved for, how it changes over time, what happens when it ‘dies’, and what this means for ‘continuing bonds’. in doing so we seek to contribute to a better understanding of the (post)human encounter with death. references haraway, d. (2007). a cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialistfeminism in the late 20th century. in the international handbook of virtual learning environments (pp. 117–158). klass, d., silverman, p. r., & nickman, s. l. (eds.). (1996). series in death education, aging, and health care. continuing bonds: new understandings of grief. taylor & francis. mowlabocus, s. (2016). the “mastery” of the swipe: smartphones, transitional objects and interstitial time. first monday, 21(10). pitsillides, s., & jefferies, j. (2013). narrating the digital: the evolving memento mori. in digital legacy and interaction (pp. 83-99). springer, cham. walsh, f., & mcgoldrick, m. (eds.). (2004). living beyond loss: death in the family, 2nd ed. living beyond loss: death in the family, 2nd ed., pp. xxv, 443–xxv, 443. new york, ny, us: w w norton & co. walter, t. (1996). a new model of grief: bereavement and biography. mortality, 1(1), 7-25. walter, t. (2015). communication media and the dead: from the stone age to facebook. mortality, 20(3), 215–232. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 giaxoglou, k. (2020, october 2-5). sharing the emotional self: tellabilities of death, dying and grief online. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. sharing the emotional self: tellabilities of death, dying and grief online korina giaxoglou, the open university, uk death is often included among the so-called ‘taboo’ topics, alongside topics relating to sex and moral indignation. sociolinguist william labov (2013), for example, argues that these topics are of limited tellability, i.e. they are less likely to be considered as worthy of being reported or storied in front of or for the sake of an audience. and yet, tellability (also sometimes known as reportability or narratability) is not an absolute property of topics. it is, rather, shaped by as much as it shapes specific contexts of talk (or text), the participants involved, and their socially and culturally-informed views of what incidents, topics, stories and “points” are deemed to be appropriate for reporting (baroni, 2011). as ochs and capps (2001) have argued, tellability constitutes a gradient dimension of narrative discourse amenable to empirical study. in cases of the telling of experiences, which exceed the maximum threshold for tellability, due to the sense that they are too personal, too embarrassing, or obscene to be shared with others, the “darker side” of tellability is brought to the fore (norrick, 2005, p. 323). this paper investigates this “darker side” of tellability, focusing on the sharing of the emotional self with a focus on experiences of death, dying and grief. as semino et al. (2012) note, death can often be felt to be untellable, even if it can be included among the experiences which are deemed to be reportable. the starting point, here, is that the (un)tellability of death, dying and grief is socially constructed in language; it is, in other words, inflected by narrative and discourse regimes, as for instance ideas or struggles, in some cases about what counts as a ‘good’ death, a ‘good’ dying or a ‘good’ grief. negotiations of (un) tellability are, thus, located within webs of visibility, power and politics (carpentier and van brussel, 2012; cromby et al., 2014), which tend to change over time (semino et al. 2012). in an age where interaction is largely mediated by digital technologies of communication, views about the reportability and (un)tellability of death, dying and grief are diversifying and changing at a fast pace in association with emerging norms and conditions of sharing on social media, which are worthy of empirical study (see giaxoglou, 2020). taking a discourse-narrative approach, this paper examines the (un)tellabilities of death, dying, and grief in different online contexts, arguing that it is important (i) to giaxoglou, k. (2020, october 2-5). sharing the emotional self: tellabilities of death, dying and grief online. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. study tellability in the plural (i.e. tellabilities), in order to avoid essentializing it as an inherent property (or not) of specific topics and (ii) to extend the study of tellabilities to shareability-ies online. the paper presents key findings from a study of selected social media events through which death, dying and grief is marked with and for networked audiences, accompanied by a consideration of social media users’ own views about the drivers and meaning of such practices. the analysis focuses on instances of negotiations of the two-sided notion of tellability (i.e. upper and lower, see norrick, 2005) and shows the different ways in which tellers orient to and negotiate the upper boundary of tellability, when they talk about or share posts relating to death, dying and grief. more specifically, i look at how tellers signal to their audiences that they are approaching a threshold of tellability and examine when (and how) they move on to breach it in the pursuit of other interactional, relational and identity purposes. the analysis of tellabilities in context is based on the empirical framework of affective positioning in story-telling (giaxoglou, 2020). affective positioning refers to the modulations of proximity or distance to (i) the death event and the dead, (ii) the (known and unknown) networked audiences, and (iii) the emotional self and it is inextricably connected to the situated emplotment of death, dying and grief. the aim of this paper is to provide empirical insights into connections between attitudes to death, dying and grief link and norms of sharing the emotional self within broader technosocial (re)configurations of the domain of visibility of topics, experiences, and emotions, often thought to be ‘private’, ‘hidden’ or even ‘taboo’. this paper builds on the body of research on the changing attitudes to the management of death (ariès, 1974; jacobsen, 2016) and its remediation online (refslund christensen and sandvik, 2014) and contributes to the empirical investigation of the popular thesis that ‘death is taboo’. references ariès, p. (1974) western attitudes toward death: from the middle ages to the present. baltimore and london: the johns hopkins university press. baroni, r. (2011) tellability. in the living handbook of narratology. available at: https://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/11.html.accessed: 24 feb. 2020. giaxoglou, k. (2020) a narrative approach to social media mourning: small stories and affective positioning. london and new york: routledge. jacobsen, m.h. (2016) “spectacular death – proposing a new fifth phase to philippe ariès’s admirable history of death”. humanities 5 (2), 19: 1-20. labov, w. (2013) the language of life and death: the transformation of experience in oral narrative. cambridge: cambridge university press. norrick, n.r. (2005) the dark side of tellability. narrative inquiry 15 (2): 323-343. giaxoglou, k. (2020, october 2-5). sharing the emotional self: tellabilities of death, dying and grief online. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ochs, e. and l. capps (2002) living narrative: creating lives in everyday storytelling. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. refslund christensen, d. and k. sandvik (2014) (eds.) mediating and remediating death – studies in materiality and the origin of time. london and new york: routledge. semino, e., z. demjen, and v. koller (2014) “‘good’ and ‘bad’ deaths: narratives and professional identities in interviews with hospice managers”. discourse studies 16 (5): 667-685. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 pitsillides, s. (2020, october 2-5). life, death and taboo: technological futures of curiosity and critique. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. life, death and taboo: technological futures of curiosity and critique stacey pitsillides northumbria university, uk the future of death is entangled in uncertainty. with technologies and human nature shifting in ways that are only just becoming apparent to us. our legacies are now blended sites of on and offline identities, that come with questions of privacy, ownership and control that are continuously being redefined both socially and legally (edwards & harbinja, 2013). online environments also provide digital versions of honouring the dead (gotved, 2014) that stimulate ethical and practical questions about the nature of death and dying. whilst our relationships are being redefined through the pervasiveness of talking to the dead on social media (kasket, 2019). beyond this, transhumanist companies like lifenaut blend the human and nonhuman (through robotics) allowing for critical reflection points on notions of immortality. in response to these trends technologies for dealing with human remains and memories sensitively, are developing at such a pace that many things thought to be fictional like: enclosing your entire digital life into a physical object; splicing your dna with a tree; and human composting are not only being researched but have become products that are currently passing through policy. the uk is an increasingly diverse society with complex-beliefs and multipleidentities, which makes it a good candidate to explore how technology is shifting public perceptions of death and dying. ecological concerns (rumble et al, 2014) and cultural shifts (davies, 2017) are also driving us towards new forms of dispersing human remains at the end of life, while the funeral industry is being placed under a tremendous amount of scrutiny around the cost and transparency of services, following the uk government’s ongoing investigation of the sector. this paper will explore how practice research that works with cultural partners, like libraries, can help the public to re-imagine the future of death, providing new spaces to reflect on the role of technology in people’s lives and losses. it will also discuss some participants reflections on a series of six installations called love after death. these installations question how future technologies and aesthetics augment our relationship to end-of-life planning – aiming to build critical conversations around these themes. pitsillides, s. (2020, october 2-5). life, death and taboo: technological futures of curiosity and critique. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. as a practice, design is well positioned to critically challenge whether we can move beyond the death-denial thesis (tradii and robert, 2019). lyn loftland’s text the craft of dying: the modern face of death (1978) explores the roots of anti deathdenial movements. she states that these movements often champion ‘talking about death’ and being ‘death positive’. however as death and dying can be difficult and sensitive topics to discuss and technological perspectives may reveal a range of other social questions e.g. privacy/ ownership of data, the contemporary focus on discussion as the primary mode of engagement may not be enough to explore the boundaries of our perceptions and taboos. additionally, talking about death does not necessarily prompt the discovery of new rituals and it may not engage the most diverse audiences (baldwin, 2017). figure 1: love after death installed at redbridge library (day of the dead) and newcastle city library (festival of social science) (2019) love after death tackles death literacy by working with libraries in london, yorkshire and newcastle (uk) expanding their role in the community as a safe and trusted spaces. it introduces people to planning end of life wishes using artistic research methods and playful diegetic prototypes (kirby, 2010) that position potential futures pitsillides, s. (2020, october 2-5). life, death and taboo: technological futures of curiosity and critique. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. (disalvo, 2009: 58) as options to be chosen. for both researchers and library staff this is explored through live methods and public testing – where design installations are used to activate critical questions around the public’s engagement with death and dying. over the six installations, participants stated that it has helped them to think critically about their own end of life choices. alongside introducing them to new choices and controversial topics like radical life extension that may be available in the future. many participants reflected on their religious and cultural identity and how the different options spoke to people of 2nd and 3rd generation british citizens with a migration background. a sample of 10 participants were interviewed in the first phase (2nd installation), which took place at redbridge library, london (2018) during dying matters week uk. 7 males 3 females were interviewed, ages ranging from 20s to 60s with a range of ethnicities and religious identities: “i think it’s important … to learn more about the funerals and how you organise what options there are now the technical is advancing, new ideas, creative… something to share with the family and community” – particpantm4 (tamil sri lankan, hindu) “firstly i was so scared but actually after talking to them i’m very positive, i gained knowledge that when you die your body doesn’t die, there are so many uses after the death of your body and life and of course technology” – particpantf9 (hindu) “i am interested in how technology may be able to preserve people’s stories so future generations will be able to access things like family history and life experience as well as marking the loss of their loved ones and bereavement” particpantm10 (anglican priest) “i’ve got a vested interest, i’m a funeral director but … what i found interesting was one of their questions whether you would like to recycle the energy from your cremation and when you can give it to a social cause which i thinks a really really good idea at the moment, the only donation from cremation is you can donate any metals that’s left… so why couldn’t there be another box saying would you like to recycle the energy from cremation.” particpantm11 (atheist) from these excerpts it is clear that technology played a key role in what they took away from this installation. by making trends online and new forms of disposal of the dead tangible choices, it helped people to gain more consciousness about their agency at the end of life and the role funeral directors play in this. these interviews begin to investigate whether death can be shifted from a taboo or private experience to an expression of self/ post-self or communities and how design futures may help people to explore an ever changing relationship between technology and the body. pitsillides, s. (2020, october 2-5). life, death and taboo: technological futures of curiosity and critique. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. references davies, d. (2017). death, ritual and belief: the rhetoric of funerary rites. bloomsbury publishing. disalvo, c. (2009). design and the construction of publics. design issues, 25(1), 48-63. edwards, l., & harbinja, e. (2013). “what happens to my facebook profile when i die?”: legal issues around transmission of digital assets on death. in digital legacy and interaction (pp. 115-144). springer, cham. gotved, s., (2014). research review: death online-alive and kicking!. thanatos. kasket, e., (2019). all the ghosts in the machine. london: robinson. kirby, d. (2010). the future is now: diegetic prototypes and the role of popular films in generating real-world technological development. social studies of science, 40(1), 41-70. lofland, l. h. (2019) [1978]. the craft of dying: the modern face of death. mit press. rumble, h., troyer, j., walter, t., & woodthorpe, k. (2014). disposal or dispersal? environmentalism and final treatment of the british dead. mortality, 19(3), 243-260. tradii, l., & robert, m. (2019). do we deny death? ii. critiques of the death-denial th selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa) allen-robertson, j. (2017, october 18-21). the uber game: exploring algorithmic management and resistance through game studies and natural language processing. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the uber game: exploring algorithmic management and resistance dr. james allen-robertson dept. of sociology, university of essex, uk introduction the algorithmic oversight, optimization and evaluation of worker performance is an increasing reality in many economic sectors. for those working within the growing economic sector known as the ‘gig’ or ‘on-demand’ economy, these algorithmic processes sit at the heart of their working day. previous research drawing on interview and forum data (kyung lee et al., 2015; rosenblat and stark, 2016) has suggested an inequity of power between the operators of an algorithmic management system, and those working under it. this inequity arises through a lack of transparency around the rules that govern their work, and a lack of options for workers to influence those rules in response to the realities of their everyday work. this paper, based on a computer-aided content analysis of 28,458 forum threads, argues that whilst gig economy workers are governed by algorithmic systems, that same system facilitates resistance. by necessitating some form of user interaction and the provision of sufficient feedback, algorithmic management apps allow workers to collaboratively develop strategies of ‘rule discovery’ to continuously update their intuitions about the often hidden rules governing their everyday activity. knowledge and agency in algorithmic systems this paper draws upon ongoing work within the social sciences on algorithmic power (beer, 2016; pasquale, 2015; gillespie, 2014; manovich, 2013), but also draws on recent work in game studies to explore the relationship between an individual user and an algorithmic construct. this comparison has become increasingly viable due to a growing body of work that approaches games as systems of interacting mechanisms or rules (sicart, 2008; wardrip-fruin, 2009; tulloch, 2014; bogost, 2007). in gaming, the full extent of the rules is not necessarily apparent to the player, but must instead be discovered through interaction with the system via the mechanisms of interaction made available to them, and the resulting responses through the given interface (wardripfruin, 2009). good game design will strategically reveal some of these rules to the player over time through their interactions. furthermore, it is these rules that govern player agency in relation to the algorithmic system. as the rules provide the player with a proscribed range of interactions, they do not simply ‘restrict’ agency but govern their agency through the selective provision of knowledge and facilitation of action within the game space (tulloch, 2014). in good game design, this governance of agency will provide the player opportunity to slowly discover the rules of the game that may not be immediately apparent, through their interactions and resulting responses (wardrip-fruin, 2009). this process of rule discovery allows the player, often through failure, to work towards mastery of the game system, improving their performance (juul, 2013). the argument presented here is that workers in the gig economy, using the small range of feedback and influence opportunities made available to them through their employer’s apps, also engage in rule discovery analogous to rule discovery in gaming. these practices often occur in an attempt to address the inequities of knowledge about, and ability to intervene in, the decision making process of the algorithmic system. methodology the paper draws on a sample of 28,458 forum threads from a major international uber driver’s discussion forum using a mix of quantitative and qualitative content analysis. data was acquired organized and analyzed using a range of available web scraping and data science packages in python. the exploration was based on a mix of qualitative and quantitative techniques. quantitative techniques such as k-means clustering, term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) weighting and collocations allowed the exploration of broad patterns such as the primary topics of discussion, and the most significant terms and phrases within those discussions. these techniques were applied both to the whole corpus of data, and to subsets of forum posts that contained keywords such as ‘algorithm’, ‘surge’ and ‘exploit’. thus, we were able to identify broad patterns of discussion across the forum and a range of significant terms and phrases related to particular keywords. this data was used to guide the qualitative component of the research which utilized concordance lists of terms and phrases to locate them in context. these lists were then manually coded using nvivo caqdas software to uncover a more nuanced understanding of driver’s experiences under algorithmic management. findings preliminary findings indicate prominent discussion of the uber algorithm with a particular focus on driver uncertainty regarding its operation. fig.1 a wordcloud of significant phrases within the subset of posts containing the keyword ‘algorithm’. significance is based on a tf-idf weighting model trained on all collected forum posts.. drivers frequently speculate on the rules and factors involved in the distribution of fares, fare pricing and the construction and influence of driver ratings on these systems. in posts where drivers specifically mention the term ‘algorithm’ the most significant terms and phrases revolved around surge pricing, the role of distance between driver and ride requests, and indicated uncertainty and discovery, for example ‘possible’, secret algorithm’, ‘maybe’, ‘guess’, and ‘algorithm determine’. as the procedures and policies regarding the distribution of fares are embedded in the black-box of uber’s algorithmic management systems, drivers engage in ‘rule discovery’, attempting to uncover the rules by which they are governed by pooling together their observations of the algorithm’s behavior to generate hypotheses. these hypotheses are then translated into behavioral strategies used to either generate greater income for themselves, or offset what drivers see as negative or unfair decision making embedded in the algorithmic ruleset. conclusion this paper provides three contributions. first the paper demonstrates the application of natural language processing techniques in the analysis of discourse within particular online spaces. secondly, the paper draws together literature on algorithmic power, with the field of game studies to provide complimentary insights into the knowledge and power relations between individuals and algorithmic systems. finally, the paper argues that whilst algorithmic management can impose inequities upon its workers, they are developing strategies for resistance and empowerment, through practices analogous to gameplay and rule discovery. references beer d. (2016) the social power of algorithms. information communication & society 10.1080/1369118x.2016.1216147. bogost i. (2007) persuasive games : the expressive power of videogames, cambridge, ma: mit press. gillespie t. (2014) the relevance of algorithms. in: gillespie t, boczkowski pj and foot k (eds) media technologies. cambridge, ma: the mit press. juul j. (2013) the art of failure: an essay on the pain of playing video games, cambridge ma: mit press. kyung lee m, kusbit d, metsky e, et al. (2015) working with machines: the impact of algorithmic and data-driven management on human workers. chi 2015. acm. manovich l. (2013) software takes command : extending the language of new media, london: bloomsbury. pasquale f. (2015) the black box society : the secret algorithms that control money and information, cambridge: harvard university press. rosenblat a and stark l. (2016) algorithmic labor and information asymmetries: a case study of uber’s drivers. sicart m. (2008) defining game mechanics. game studies 8. tulloch r. (2014) the construction of play: rules, restrictions, and the repressive hypothesis. games and culture 9:335-350. wardrip-fruin n. (2009) expressive processing : digital fictions, computer games, and software studies, cambridge, mass.: mit press. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 linaa jensen, j. (2020, october). facebook: from personal medium to mass medium – and back again? paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. facebook: from personal medium to mass medium – and back again? the use of facebook across age groups 2015-19 jakob linaa jensen, ph.d. research director of social media, danish school of media and journalism. introduction social media, most prominently facebook, has come to play an important role in everyday life of many people throughout the globe. when mark zuckerberg launched his social network site, the facebook, at harvard university in 2004 few, if any, could expect, that 15 years later in 2019 it would have 2,5 billion users and 70 billion dollars revenue, of which almost everything comes from advertising. the latter shows that facebook is far beyond the original social network site, it is a major player in the platform economy and in terms of advertising, readers and interaction, in many countries it is more important than traditional mass media. personal media vs mass media one might claim that facebook is in fact a mass medium. lüders (2008) operates with a distinction between personal media and mass media based on two axes: an institutional and interactional. by its revenue and position in the globalized media system, i will argue that facebook institutionally long ago has become a mass medium. in regard to interaction, i will argue that facebook is both; it is personal because of its interactional nature. but it is also a mass medium as it has been increasingly used by politicians, corporations and organization to communicate content to large and dispersed audiences. facebook is simply, like tv and (to a decreasing degree) newspapers an important place to be, in election campaigns, in crisis situations and in everyday life. despite facebook’s enormous role for years there have been rumors about its decline. especially, it has been claimed that the number of young users decreases dramatically (see for instance the guardian, 2008). such predictions have been hard to show in academic research and although the youngsters might use less time on the open parts of facebook and rather prefer instagram, snapchat, tiktok etc. it seems as if they have just switched to the personalized features of facebook like messenger and private groups. they don’t want to openly show themselves and discuss where their teachers and grandparents are! on the other hand, facebook seems to be more popular than ever among the grown-ups. new research from denmark shows that for those aged 40 to 59, facebook is seen as the most important gateway to news and information from organizations, local government etc., indicating that it is widely regarded as a mass medium (linaa jensen et al., 2019). research questions and method it is interesting to investigate how different age groups perceive facebook as a personal medium and a mass medium, respectively. it is even more interesting to investigate whether we can find a trajectory over time. as denmark for long has been one of the countries with relatively most facebook users and as facebook plays an important role in everyday life and the public debate, data from denmark might give good indications of facebook’s development in general. this paper is based on five consecutive surveys among danish internet users, in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 (n between 1200 and 1500 each year). i focus on the use of different parts of facebook across age groups; the personalized uses like messenger, private groups and intimate communication, versus “mass media use” like reading news, organizational and political information and taking part in nationwide debates. i also investigate different age groups’ attitudes towards facebook and whether they see it as a personal or a mass medium. analysis and findings first and foremost, i find notable differences across age groups. i also find that the differences are increasing over the years. in 2015 there were not significant differences in facebook use across age groups. in 2019 a vast majority of the youngest, aged 1830, used facebook dominantly as a personalized medium, highlighting messenger and private groups as their preferred ways of communication and interaction. the older generations have a much more diversified use, treating facebook as a personal as well as a mass medium. the group aged 40 to 59 are those who mostly use facebook as a mass medium, indicating that news reading and filtering is an important affordance of facebook. the oldest generation, however, like the young ones, see facebook primarily as a personal medium, using it for keeping in touch with family, especially grandkids. they still prefer to attend to news through traditional mass media like tv and newspapers. data also confirms another suspicion that has been found in similar research. the vast majority of facebook users are only “lurkers” (preece. et al., 2004), only reading, rather than posting or participating themselves. that also explains why suspicions that facebook is in decline might be wrong. people still read, but they don’t show, explaining why activity seems to decrease. in general, i notice a certain facebook fatigue. although the number of users is larger than ever, most age groups report that they spend less time on facebook in 2019 than in 2015. the dispersion of time consumption also increases. the most eager users spend as much (or more) time than ever, whereas the number of casual users, dropping by now and then, is on the rise. there might be many explanations behind the figures. for the young, grown up with digital media, we can see a very dedicated and conscious navigation between different media platforms, based on a logic of appropriateness and a high level of uses and gratifications (katz et al., 1973). for the rest, the increasing differences and intensities of use might be explained by bad press coverage of facebook and other social media recent years in the wake of the cambridge analytica scandal and other breaches of privacy and data protection. in sum, facebook does not seem to be going down a slippery slope, yet. the number of users is as high as ever, but they are increasingly more conscious and aware of the fallacies of social media. the grown-ups mainly see facebook as a tool to navigate the news stream and keeping in touch, the younger primarily use it for more personalized and intimate communication. these are important lessons for social media strategists, as well as for researchers framing the questions for future research. references the guardian (2008). https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/01/facebookteens-leaving-instagram-snapchat-study-user-numbers). katz, e., blumler, j. g., & gurevitch, m. (1973). uses and gratifications research. the public opinion quarterly, 37(4), 509-523. lüders, m. (2008). conceptualizing personal media. new media & society, 10(5), 683702. linaa jensen, j., r. buch, j.d. johansen, p.t. madsen & f. svith (2019). report on media development in denmark 2019: active, overwhelmed, diverted or addicted? copenhagen: danish ministry of culture. preece, j., nonnecke, b., & andrews, d. (2004). the top five reasons for lurking: improving community experiences for everyone. computers in human behavior, 20(2), 201-223. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): franzke, a., ess, c. (2020, october 28-31). theoretical and practical research ethics: three cases. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. theoretical and practical research ethics: three cases aline shakti franzke university duisburg-essen charles melvin ess university of oslo panel rationale and organization since its inception, the association of internet researchers (aoir) has fostered critical reflection on the ethical and social dimensions of the internet and internet-facilitated communication. these ethical foci are clearly evoked throughout the thematics of the aoir 2020 conference call, beginning with power, justice, and inequality in digitally mediated lives; life, sex, and death vis-à-vis social media; and political life online. concomitantly, simon rogerson, chief editor of the journal of information, communication and ethics in society (jices), describes jices as aiming to “…promote thoughtful dialogue regarding the wider social and ethical issues related to the planning, development, implementation and use of new media and information and communication technologies.” the journal thereby offers “necessary interdisciplinary, culturally and geographically diverse works essential to understanding the impacts of the pervasive new media and information and communication technologies.” jices and aoir thus share central interests in the ethical and social dimensions of the internet and internet-facilitated communication, and are now collaborating to highlight aoir conference presentations and papers via publication in jices. as part of this collaboration, we collect here three papers that address these shared interests as specifically focused on research ethics. presuming their acceptance and presentation at aoir 2020, the papers will be revised especially in light of critical responses received there for inclusion in a special issue of jices devoted to showcasing aoir ethics work. our first paper, reflecting on the ethics of mobile eye-tracking in a mixed methods research design (katja kaufman et al), addresses the social and data ethical dimensions of the increasing use of augmented reality (ar) technologies in public spaces. in a classic application of the aoir/markham mantra, “ethics is method – methods are ethics” (markham 2006), the paper describes an interdisciplinary mixed methods development project aimed at empirically researching the effects of mobile augmented reality on the perception of public space, using both georeferenced mobile eye-tracking and qualitative interviews. insisting that method innovation is always also an inherently ethical endeavor, the paper takes up a range of affiliated ethical questions, such as balancing practical implementation and ecological validity against research ethical requirements in an interdisciplinary project setting, and critically assessing the ethical challenges that emerge from the use of innovative technical instruments. the paper further addresses the ethical measures that must be taken vis-a-vis the participants, student researchers, stakeholders of the public sites, and their well-being on one hand, and the data management of mixed methods data sets, data and results dissemination and the implications of our results for societal future on the other. paper 2, the complex balancing act of researchers’ ethical and emotional capacities and responsibilities (ylva hård af segerstad), addresses these issues from the first-hand experience of a researcher-participant who, as a bereaved parent, was requested to research a closed community for bereaved parents on facebook. such communities have become increasingly prominent and important, and the paper explores the methodological, ethical and emotional challenges of undertaking such research, drawing in part on the aoir ire 3.0 guidelines. the author explores central issues of trust, critical self-reflection on one’s research methodologies vis-à-vis one’s own profoundly challenging experiences, the specific ethical and emotional demands of such participant-observation research, and the burdens and limits these impose upon the participant-researcher. specifically, informed consent in these contexts is distinctively difficult and must be reconsidered. paper 3, digital ethics and the situationist challenge to virtue ethics (bastiaan vanacker), evaluates recent interest in applying virtue ethics to the ethical questions presented by digital media – e.g., the new issues evoked by amazon’s ring doorbell: the good intentions of preventing package theft are countered by massive problems of privacy violations, copyright issues and concerns about surveillance and social justice. virtue ethics is a promising approach to novel ethical challenges: the person with the right disposition and character traits should be able to appropriately respond to novel difficulties. but virtue ethics is criticized by situationist pychologists and philosophers who point out that, at least for most of us, our moral actions are influenced more by situational factors than by our character. hence a virtue ethics model may not be the best approach to the situational uncertainties presented by digital technologies: the paper argues instead for a pragmatist, situation-based approach that takes into account how our norms and behaviors in digital spaces are shaped in reaction to ever changing events and circumstances. these three papers thus build upon and helpfully expand aoir’s signature focus on internet research ethics through two empirically-oriented papers on research ethics/methods in two specific contexts, complimented by a more theoretical exploration of virtue ethics and pragmatism. they further address the central interests shared between aoir and jices in the ethical and social dimensions of the internet and internet-facilitated communication. paper 1: reflecting on the ethics of mobile eye-tracking in a mixed methods research design katja kaufmann university of innsbruck marjo rauhala technical university of vienna niklas gudowsky-blatakes austrian academy of sciences martin rutzinger austrian academy of sciences tabea bork-hüffer university of innsbruck suggested citation: kaufmann, k., rauhala, m., gudowsky-blatakes, n., rutzinger, m. & bork-hüffer, t. (2020, october). reflecting on the ethics of mobile eye-tracking in a mixed methods research design. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. technologies that produce augmented realities (ar) and, subsequently, augmented spaces, such as smart phones, smart watches and glasses, become increasingly important for the everyday life of many people (boeckler, 2014). the societal and data ethical consequences of this development, particularly when it comes to the use in public space, are widely debated. however, social sciences until now lack appropriate methodologies to underpin these discussions with empirical data on the effects that ar actually has on people’s perception of public space (merriman, 2014; ricketts hein, evans, & jones, 2008). in an interdisciplinary mixed methods development project, we investigate how the effects of mobile augmented reality on the perception of public space can be researched by integrating the technological innovation of mobile eyetracking. mobile wearable eye-trackers such as tobii pro glasses 2 encompass video recording with a front-mounted camera, which provides a documentation of the user’s general visual frame. within this frame, the eye-tracking technology follows and records the visual fixation of attention by the person wearing the eye-tracker, allowing for an analysis of fixations, attention allocation and subsequent calculations of cognitive indexes. in addition, the device offers audio recording, an accelerometer and a gyroscope. for our study, we use two highly debated public austrian parks as research settings. in the parks, participants are asked to walk a given tour repeatedly while wearing the eye-tracker, first when using no digital media, then when using digital media thematizing the respective park in an ar smart phone app. simultaneously, gps is recorded by a gps unit. mixed method development as a research ethical endeavor while method development projects often focus on feasibility and criteria such as validity and reliability, it is rarely acknowledged that method innovation is always also an inherently ethical endeavor (markham, tiidenberg & herman, 2018; nind et al., 2013). thus, in this paper we want to bring to the fore the diverse ethical aspects of our interdisciplinary mixed method development project. we distinguish three dimensions of ethical concerns: research ethics (1) in the practical implementation of the study design, (2) with regard to data processing and management, and (3) with view to the societal implications of developing instruments to track and understand human behavior. (1) research ethics in the practical implementation of the study design research ethics need to be considered with regard to the technological capabilities of instruments involved and users foreseen. for example, mobile eye-trackers entail audiovisual recording, a feature that was highly criticized in the case of the ar device google glasses due to the invasion of privacy. how should a mobile eye-tracker then be used for research in public space? while it seems ethically appropriate to make passers-by aware of the recordings that happen, for example, by putting up signs, such announcements pose a risk to ecological validity restraining the advantage of the instrument’s mobility and its accompanying potential for research in real-world settings. similarly, the well-being of participants needs careful weighing. our research seeks to analyze the effects of digital media on the perception of highly debated public places. some existing online content contains violent scenes like brawls or police arrests; thus, the content could potentially be distressing to participants. therefore, we prepare participants with informed consent where particularly sensitive individuals are advised against participating. however, the induced self-selection process entails a potential bias towards excluding those participants that may be particularly affected by digital media, thereby preventing findings that might be most relevant in the context of this research object. further, in complex real-world problem-oriented research, single discipline’s views are most often too limited to find appropriate answers, and thus interdisciplinary discussions need to take place (decker, 2004), acknowledging that “everyone has something to contribute and to learn” (balsamo & mitcham, 2010, p. 270). further, the question of which stakeholders (not) to engage is relevant when discussing the societal implications of ar based on our results. we need to closely evaluate who qualifies as a stakeholder in this specific context. our view of intended stakeholders for public space might differ from those envisaged by political actors and city councils. (2) ethical aspects of data processing and management to protect participants from harm, researchers are advised to collect only the data that is needed. meanwhile, due to the explorative nature of method innovation, researchers might be prone to collecting as much data as possible. it is thus the researchers’ responsibility to sort, select and analyze the data in an ethical way, which is always a qualitative and highly selective process (see dewsbury, 2010). further, the study collects different types of data, ranging from personally identifiable information (pii) collected in interviews to biosensing data produced by eye-trackers that is not personally identifiable. here, participants need to be able to understand which data is collected, what happens with it, and who has access to it. striving for an open data approach where data is made available to the research community and the public, it becomes also necessary to put effort into adhering to data ethical standards, for example, in the form of metadata. (3) societal implications of developing instruments while method development aims to forward scientific research methods, the resulting methods to track and understand human behavior in increasingly technologically sophisticated ways might subsequently be applied by parties outside academia, including scenarios where instruments are misused, for example, for state surveillance. an ethical approach to method development thus needs to consider societal implications not only of the results produced by innovative methods, but also of the methods and instruments being made effective by researchers. it can be concluded that in the process of mixed methods development that integrates new technologies, research ethics remain a trade-off. it seems, therefore, all the more important for researchers to openly share their experiences and challenges in doing research ethics when engaging method development. references balsamo, a. & mitcham, c. (2010). interdisciplinarity in ethics and the ethics of interdisciplinarity. the oxford handbook of interdisciplinarity (p. 259-272). oxford: university press. boeckler, m. (2014). digitale geographien: neogeographie, ortsmedien und der ort der geographie im digitalen zeitalter [digital geographies: neogeography, media of place, and the place of geography in the digital age]. geographische rundschau, 6, 4-10. decker, m. (2004). the role of ethics in interdisciplinary technology assessment. poiesis & praxis: international journal of technology assessment and ethics of science, 2, 139-156. dewsbury, j. d. (2010). performative, non-representational, and affect-based research: seven injunctions. in d. delyser, s. herbert, s. aitken, m. crang, & l. mcdowell (eds.), the sage handbook of qualitative geography, p. 321-334. markham, a. n., tiidenberg, k. & herman, a. (2018). ethics as methods: doing ethics in the era of big data research – introduction. social media + society, 4(3), 1-9. merriman, p. (2014). rethinking mobile methods. mobilities, 9(2), 167-187. nind, m., wiles, r., bengry-howell, a. & crow, g. (2013). methodological innovation and research ethics: forces in tension or forces in harmony? qualitative research, 13(6), 650-667. ricketts hein, j., evans, j. & jones, p. (2008). mobile methodologies: theory, technology and practice. geography compass, 2, 1266-1285. paper 2: on the complexities of studying sensitive communities as a researcher-participant ylva hård af segerstad university of gothenburg, sweden suggested citation: hård af segerstad, y. (2020, october). ethical aspects of data processing and management. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. introduction in the context of a closed community for bereaved parents on facebook i explore the complexities of methodological, ethical and emotional challenges of conducting sensitive research. being a bereaved parent myself, i do this from the perspectives of both the researcher and the participant a researcher-participant, rolled into one, as it were. many aspects of contemporary every-day life is transformed with increasing digitalization. in societies where death is “the ultimate unmentionable” (mander, 2007), social media and mobile technologies offer new possibilities for grieving parents to find support online. these online communities may offer their members “digital safe-havens” acting as resources for coping with their situation (baym, 1995; yeshua-katz, 2016). the grief support community that we have studied is a closed group on facebook with some 2200 members. it is maintained and moderated by a physical grief support organization in sweden. results from our studies show that the community itself and the social support from peers are vital resources for many members. furthermore, the closed nature of the group is a prerequisite for the group to function as a safe-haven in which the bereaved parents feel secure that they will not be “judged by those unbereaved” (hård af segerstad & kasperowski, 2015). as the goal of the present paper is to explore methodological, ethical and emotional challenges, an account of the empirical material or methods used for data collection and analysis is not included. challenges of simultaneously being a researcher-participant to conduct responsible research from the perspectives of both the researcher and the research participants puts high demands on the researchers’ ethical as well as emotional capacities and responsibilities (ellingson, 2017; lammers et al 2019). the ethical guidelines proposed by the association of internet researchers stress that research ethics is not a list of checkboxes on a form to tick before undertaking a study, but a process which requires deliberation throughout study including design, data collection, analysis and dissemination (franzke et al., 2020). markham argues that methods and ethics cannot be separated ethics is inextricably intertwined with methods. studying vulnerable individuals and closed communities online further highlights the necessity for research to be case and context sensitive as well as for the researcher and the research design to be flexible and adaptive (markham & bride, 2006). in similarity with raun (2017) in his studies of mourning through photo-sharing on facebook, my own experience of loss initiated the research focus of bereaved parents’ use of social media. this functioned as a way to approach the vulnerable community with a research purpose, and constituted the prerequisite for building trust and enriching the dialogue with the community members. however, as a researcher-participant you must pay extra attention to if and how your own individual experience and assumptions might have an impact on how you frame your research, design questionnaires, conduct interviews, perform analyses and interpret and frame results, etc. as an “insider”, or a researcher-participant i was invited to conduct our studies and had gained the trust of both the organization, the administrators and community members. on the one hand, being an insider gave me access to the community, but on the other hand put very heavy demands on myself as an ethically responsible researcher on how to present the research to the members in order to honor their informed consent, but also on how to select, collect, store, manage and disseminate the data. these aspects are both connected to the sensitive topic and trust in the closed discussion group and to technological aspects such as the architecture and algorithms of facebook, and what kind of data is possible to collect. being a researcher-participant rolled into one and studying and observing an online environment which offers the social support you might be in need of yourself can have unexpected consequences: your research can in effect bar you as a bereaved parent from using the community as a resource for coping with the grief. most of the time, sharing the experience with those you study can be a resource, but sometimes utterly overwhelming. the content shared by members in the closed community, the sheer amount of intense and desperate interaction is hard to regard objectively and at times impossible to handle. both as a bereaved parent in the process of adapting to my own loss, and as a researcher, i have to take a break now and then from observing what is happening in the closed group. like the experiences svedmark (2016) reported from studying the online activities of vulnerable individuals, these affect me and stay with me. the interview situation has similar characteristics: because you are a researcher-participant, a precious connection between the interviewees and yourself as a researcher is often established which can have both emotional and methodological impact if ignored. reconsidering the notion of informed consent in our studies we have encountered bereaved who at least at one point in their grief wish us to not anonymize quotes when disseminating results, but explicitly asked us to use their names and the name of their deceased child. walter argues that, in some cases, anonymity may prove disrespectful to both the bereaved and the deceased (walter, 2017). this forces us to reexamine the notions of anonymity and informed consent, and question if vulnerable research participants (or indeed, any research participant) fully grasps what informed consent entails in the short and long run in terms of academic dissemination. hopes and expectancies of the community under study might put the researcher into a dilemma, ethical aspects of informed consent might have to be reconsidered as well as emotional challenges of engaging in and with sensitive research all of which makes for a complex balancing act. references baym, n. k. (1995). the emergence of community in computer-mediated communication. cybersociety. s. jones. newbury park, ca, sage: 138-163. ellingson, l.l. (2017). embodiment in qualitative research. routledge. franzke, a. s., et al. (2020). internet research: ethical guidelines 3.0. hård af segerstad, y., & kasperowski, d. (2015). a community for grieving: affordances of social media for support of bereaved parents. new review of hypermedia and multimedia, 21(1-2: online memorial cultures), 25-41. mander, r. (2007). loss and bereavement in childbearing, routledge. raun, t. (2017). connecting with the dead: vernacular practices of mourning through photo-sharing on facebook. in: andreassen, r., petersen, m. n., harrison, k., & raun, t. (eds.). mediated intimacies, connectivities, relationalities and proximities (pp. 193207). routledge. markham, a. n. (2018). "afterword: ethics as impact—moving from error-avoidance and concept-driven models to a future-oriented approach." social media+ society 4(3): 2056305118784504. markham, a.n. & bride, p. (2006). ethic as method, method as ethic. journal of information ethics, 2006. 15(2): p. 37-54. lammers, j c, curwood, j c, tekobbe, c, magnifico, a m, stornaiuolo, a (2019), “respectful ethical decision making: positioning the online researcher as a bearer of moral consequence”, panel presented at the association of internet researchers conference, 2-5 october, brisbane, australia. svedmark, e. (2016). "becoming together and apart: technoemotions and other posthuman entanglements." svedmark, e. and c. granholm (2018). "research that hurts: ethical considerations when studying vulnerable populations online." walter, t. (2017). what death means now:thinking critically about dying and grieving, policy press. yeshua-katz, d. (2016). "online boundary work in stigmatized groups: the case of support groups for israeli childless women." international journal of communication 10: 20. paper 3: digital ethics and the situationist challenge to virtue ethics bastiaan vanacker school of communication, loyola university chicago suggested citation: vanacker, b. (2020, october). digital ethics and the situationist challenge to virtue ethics. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. this project starts from the notion that digital ethics should be about anticipating and preventing functional shift of new technologies. by this, i mean that the challenge of digital ethics is not only to evaluate whether the proposed uses of a new technology are morally defensible, but also to point out and prevent unintended but morally dubious uses of a new technology. ess (2012) has argued that digital ethics (de) would develop along two tracks: a foundational trajectory that would explore fundamental changes to our ethical frameworks precipitated by digital technologies and, secondly, a more applied research trajectory that would deal with the expanding range of ethical problems presented to us by the proliferation of digital devices. this project is located at the intersection of these two tracks. it acknowledges the expanding range of ethical problems emerging as a result of the ubiquity of digital technology, but it also considers which ethical frameworks are most appropriate to deal with these problems (while sidestepping the question if new ethical frameworks are needed for our digital age). take for example amazon’s ring doorbell, which might have had the perfectly justifiable intention of preventing packages from being lifted from porches, but is now facing a storm of scrutiny and criticism because of privacy violations, copyright issues, and concerns about surveillance and social justice. while other forms of applied ethics (journalism ethics, legal ethics, medical ethics…) of course also deal with the unanticipated, the features of digital technologies make this task particularly challenging. in light of the challenges presented by digital technologies, this project wants to evaluate the recent interest in applying a virtue ethics framework to the ethical questions in digital communication ethics (vallor, 2016; van der sloot, 2014; borden 2007; plaisance; 2014, 2016) and interpret these efforts in light of the virtue ethics/situationism debate of recent decades. at first sight, an ethic of virtue seems to be well-equipped to handle novel ethical challenges and their unpredictability. a person with the right disposition and character traits would be able to deal with novel ethical challenges she encounters. the virtue of temperance, for example, would prevent someone from losing his temper on social media, just as this character trait would prevent him from losing his temper waiting in line at the airport. or, virtue ethicists would suggest, if that person lacks the character trait to automatically act in accordance with the appropriate virtue, she could imagine what a moral exemplar would do in such a situation, and emulate this behavior. however, over the last decades, virtue ethics have come under fire from situationist social pychologists and philosophers such as doris (1998) and harman (1999), who have pointed out that our moral actions are influenced more by situational factors than by our character, at least for the vast majority of us. they have demonstrated that most people’s moral actions lack the cross-situational and cross-temporal consistency that virtue ethics would predict. instead, social psychology experiments have shown that small and morally insignificant changes in experimental setting account for most changes in moral behavior. so-called good samaritan experiments, for example, illustrated that people were less likely to help a stranger when loud music was playing on the background or when the weather was bad, compared to situations where this was not the case (even though ethically, these changes should not matter). these objections might be even more salient in the context of online communications, where situational factors (lack of face-to-face interaction, for example) could have an even more outspoken effect on (im)moral behavior. situationists have also challenged the notion of moral exemplars on epistemological (how can i know what the exemplar would do?) ethical (what advantage does following an exemplar have over following deontological or utilitarian ethics?) and psychological (will knowing what a moral exemplar will do be enough to overcome my lower inclinations?) grounds. the relative novelty of many digital ethical dilemmas also might make it less likely that appealing to and emulating a moral exemplar would provide useful guidelines for moral actions. you may consider a person you admire as a moral exemplar, but how would you know how that person would react to smart doorbells? virtue ethicists have articulated some convincing rebuttals to this criticism by pointing out that situationists either misinterpret the studies they refer to, or operate on a flawed notion of what virtue ethics means (see sabini & silver, 2005). neverthless, the situationist criticism is generally considered to be damaging to certain articulations of virtue ethics. one of the important lessons of situationism is that when entering a situation where immoral actions might be tempting, reliance one one’s character to resist temptations might be misguided for most of us. this warning seems particularly relevant in the context of networked communication, where it is often alluring to engage in vicious arguments, doxing, copyright infringement and other anti-social behaviors. this article will investigate whether or not this situationist criticism is problematic for virtue ethics as an ethical perspective towards digital ethics. an alternative model in the form of a pragmatist, situation-based approach, that takes into account how our norms and behaviors in digital spaces are shaped in reaction to ever changing events and circumstances, rather than by immutable character traits, will be presented as a possible alternative for a virtue-based approach to digital communications. this approach, as articulated by kitcher (2014) presents a functional view on ethics, where ethical norms are developed over time and generations, as a project that has as its goal to make communal living possible. when dealing with new technologies presenting us with new questions with answers that are not obvious (“do smart doorbells violate privacy rights of passers-by?”) an approach that is rooted in pragmatism and the has taken the lessons of situationism to heart could provide a useful tool not only in determining appropriate uses for new technologies, but also in anticipating its unintended future uses. references doris, j. m. (1998). persons, situations, and virtue ethics. noüs, 32(4), 504-530. 10.1111/0029-4624.00136 ess, c. (2012). foreword: digital ethics past, present, futures. in d. heider & a. massanari (eds.), digital ethics: research and practice (pp. ix-xix). new york: peter lang. harman, g. (1999). moral philosophy meets social psychology: virtue ethics and the fundamental attribution error. proceedings of the aristotelian society, 99, 315-331. kitcher, p. (2011). the ethical project. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. plaisance, p. l. (2014). virtue in media. journalism & mass communication quarterly, 91(2), 308-325. 10.1177/1077699014527460
 plaisance, p. l. (2016). media ethics theorizing, reoriented: a shift in focus for individual level analyses. journal of communication, 66(3), 454-474. 10.1111/jcom.12230 sabini, j., & silver, m. (2005). lack of character? situationism critiqued. ethics, 115(3), 535-562. vallor, s. (2016). technology and the virtues: a philosophical guide to a future worth wanting. oxford university press. van der sloot, b. (2017). privacy as virtue. intersentia. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): savic, m. (2019, october 2-5). “i prefer to build trust” – examining parental confidence in children’s digital skills. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “i prefer to build trust” – examining parental confidence in children’s digital skills milovan savic swinburne university of technology introduction digital and social media have become deeply ingrained in youth culture and an inseparable part of daily routines for children growing up throughout the western world (robards 2012, green et.al. 2011). using digital media to construct and explore the world around them, children develop a broad repository of online practices ranging from media consumption, learning, communication, socialising, exploring identities, and even flirting (livingstone 2008, boyd 2014). positioned as “digital natives” (prensky 2001) young people are often assumed to be experts in using digital and social media. however, while they might be quick in picking up operational aspects of digital skills (helsper & eynon 2013), parents express less confidence in children’s critical and social digital skills – i.e. their abilities for strategic understanding of risks and opportunities online. this paper examines three dominant parental approaches to guiding children’s engagement with digital and social media and the development of digital skills, where they act as watchdog, chaperon, and/or collaborator. at the core of each of the identified approaches are varying degrees of trust in the child’s ability to partake in safe practices online. trust at the core of parenting approaches as previously documented, in australia and internationally, parental concerns about children’s internet activity revolve around the issues of privacy, bullying, contacts with strangers, violent or inappropriate content, etc. (sorbring 2014, boyd & hargittai 2013, green et.al. 2011). these anxieties stem from lack of confidence in the child’s ability to navigate online risks (livingstone & byrne 2018). while academic research tackled identifying and measuring digital skills (helsper & eynon 2013, van dijk & van deursen 2014), less is known how these skills are negotiated in the family. this project undertook home-based interviews, as a primary location of children’s media use, and examines parental approaches to governing children’s internet use. the presented discussion draws on interviews with (pre)teen children between 10 and 15 years old and a parent or guardian from 15 families in melbourne, australia (n=30). this paper aims to capture how confidence in children’s abilities – or varying degrees of it – affects the parent’s success in working with their children on developing safe digital practices. this is considered through three approaches displaying varying levels of trust – from complete distrust to full recognition of the child’s abilities. the boomerang effect – give trust to get trust “idea that just because you’ve been using instagram constantly for two years, it means that you understand everything about the technology is just rubbish; and it doesn’t mean you can evaluate the information, it doesn’t mean that you understand the impact of what you’re doing; they are still 13 years old, you know, i think we are giving them way more credit than they deserve, just because they know a lot about something.” across the sample, there is an asymmetrical confidence in the child’s digital competence. while parents see children as experts in navigating a platform’s affordances, features, and content creation, they doubt the children’s abilities to understand the implications and consequences of social media use. this skill discrepancy, whether perceived or real, directly affected parental didactic approaches in developing children’s digital skills. “we fight all the time. she doesn’t like me snooping around, and i don’t understand how she can have that many friends…. so, in the end, you have to be strict. black or white. because, they don’t understand. so, i have to be tough and say no!" the watchdog approach refers to the parental practices attempting to closely control all aspects of the child’s social media use. lack of trust in the child’s social and critical digital skills (helsper & enyon 2013) often leads parents to reach for restrictive practices. although rooted in the desire to improve child’s safety, the watchdog approach in fact often backfires, inflaming tension and conflict in the family. children under watchdog also are more likely to conceal their activities by creating fake and alternative accounts. “i believe very strongly that kids need to learn how to use social media when they are still willing to accept guidance, rather than turning 13 or 14 and then suddenly they are just all in.” the chaperon approach presents an alternative tactic, in which parents engage in hands-on and co-use practices with their children starting at early age, thereby supporting children’s acquisition of digital skills. chaperon parents lead the process, while gradually allowing children with more autonomy in social media use as their trust in children’s digital skills increases. ”they were almost born with technology and i was not. so there’s no way that i can be ahead of him in knowing what’s there and how to use it. if he wanted to hide things from me, he could. i mean, i’m not completely ignorant but, it’s, if it’s a hide and seeks game, he would win. so i prefer to build trust.” some parents recognised children’s expertise in creative and technical aspects of their digital skills. rather than attempting to outperform the child, they turn to the collaborative dialogic practices – the collaborator approach. here, the child’s expertise is acknowledged and unchallenged, while parents attempt to stay around and build a trust-based relationship so that the child has confidence to turn to them should they require support with their endeavor of developing social and critical digital skills. this dialogic relationship enables both sides to understand and respond to the concerns of the other. inherently, parents and children work together in meeting the growing challenge to empower children to fully utilise the benefits of their online experience. references boyd, d. (2014). it's complicated: the social lives of networked teens. new haven, usa: new haven, usa: yale university press. boyd, d., & hargittai, e. (2013). connected and concerned: variation in parents' online safety concerns. policy & internet, 5(3), 245-269. doi:10.1002/1944-2866.poi332 green, l., brady, d., ólafsson, k., hartley, j., & lumby, c. (2011). risks and safety for australian children on the internet: full findings from the au kids online survey of 9–16-year-olds and their parents. cultural science, 4(1), 1-75. helsper, e. j., & eynon, r. (2013). distinct skill pathways to digital engagement. european journal of communication, 28(6), 696-713. livingstone, s. (2008). taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: teenagers' use of social networking sites for intimacy, privacy and selfexpression. new media & society, 10(3), 393-411. livingstone, s., & byrne, j. (2018). parenting in the digital age. the challenges of parental responsibility in comparative perspective. in g. mascheroni, c. ponte, & a. jorge (eds.), digital parenting. the challenges for families in the digital age (pp. 19-30): nordicom. prensky, m. (2001). digital natives, digital immigrants part 1. on the horizon, 9(5), 1-6. robards, b. (2012). leaving myspace, joining facebook: “growing up” on social network sites. continuum, 26(3), 385-398. sorbring, e. (2014). parents’ concerns about their teenage children’s internet use. journal of family issues, 35(1), 75-96. van dijk, j. a. g. m., & van deursen, a. j. a. m. (2014). digital skills unlocking the information society: new york: palgrave macmillan us, palgrave macmillan. microsoft word jansen.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): jensen, j.l. (2014, october 22-24). the changing patterns of news – from gate-keeping to social sharing. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the changing patterns of news – from gate-keeping to social sharing jakob linaa jensen university of aarhus the supply of news is larger than ever, both due to economic developments in the media markets (e.g. the increase in commercial broadcasters) and technological innovations (e.g. the advent of the internet and the wider access to producing news for existing media operators, citizens journalists and ordinary people). further, the access to news has become ubiquitous. computers (desktops and laptops) have facilitated easy access to all kinds of news and recently, the rise of mobile phones and tablets have made it easy to access news anytime, anywhere. we live in a world of ambient news (hermida, 2010). further, the easy options of spreading, sharing, altering, modifying and even faking news, not at least through social media sites, contribute to evaporate earlier distinction between production and consumption of news. citizens can become journalists or, at least, news curators and, contrary, journalists often turn into consumers, for instance by tapping the grapevine of social media when looking for emerging news stories. although the breakthrough of citizen journalism still remains to come true, citizens play an increasing role in the news cycle by sharing, distributing, curating, commenting and even modifying news they get from elsewhere. this particularly takes place through social network sites twitter and facebook, which have become meta media for not only personal contacts but also wider societal agenda setting (linaa jensen & tække, 2013). this paper is a theoretical discussion of such issues and a first quantitative assessment of changing news patterns among danish media users. the present paper is part of a larger project, meaning across media (cmc.ku.dk) where we in other studies look at facebook and also on wider aspects of cross media use in denmark. this particular study is about sharing as an intermediary practice between production and consumption, which might fundamentally alter both. a later stage of this paper (and project) will encompass studies of news sharing practices through twitter and facebook. theoretical framework from a theoretical angle, the phenomenon of sharing can be analyzed on three levels: a macro-, mesoand microlevel. on a macro-level it is interesting whether traditional patterns of opinion leadership (see for instance katz & lazarsfeld, 1955) are changing? which media get their news shared through twitter? it might be old established mass media but similar research from australia indicates that new actors, for instance pure online media or blogs also get prominence in the social media news sphere. on a meso level, it is relevant to return to the much-debated criteria of newsworthiness (for instance as outlined by galtung & ruge 1965). news are curated, commented upon or even altered according to the opinions, beliefs and interests of those who share them. such peer-to-peer selection might differ radically from the priming of traditional mass media. the entertaining, the mundane or the profane might be a main focus when the selection is based on popularity, “likes” and “shares” rather than editorial filters. further, social media users might frame the news stories differently than journalists. one might expect that emotions and sensations rather than facts dominate because social media have “different subjects, different narrative sensibility and different pathways to capture the attention (rainie & wellman, 2014: 214). on a micro level one might ask about the motives and incentives for users to share and spread news. do they do it for intrinsic reasons, for instance the feeling of empowerment and “being important” or do they do it for extrinsic reasons, for instance the ability to affect the societal agenda? one might also expect that users take up very different roles as sharers: some might be moderators or creators, altering the news stories, some curators, sharing but also commenting, and some might be mere distributors, passing on the news without comments. the understanding of roles and motives are crucial for an indepth understanding of the citizens’ position as mediators between news production and consumption. methodology methodologically this investigation follows the three theoretical levels: macro, meso and micro. on the macro level i rely on data on the general media use among danes, of production as well as consumption and sharing. the data originate from a quantitative survey among danish media users, part of the project “meaning across media” investigating how media content travel across platforms. as such the approach is content based rather than media based, allowing us to take a first step looking at how the news cycle might be changing. i present data from this survey in my conference presentation. future methodology although data are not yet ready, i will briefly sketch the future research methodology of this project. on the meso level, i focus on the citizens and analyze their patterns of news sharing through twitter. i choose generic danish hashtags like #dkpol to identify current news stories dominant on social media in the month of may 2014 and harvest all these hashtags by twapperkeeper. the analysis is done in two steps: first, a network analysis is used to identify patterns of sharing: who are the most dominant sharers etc. next, i do a quantitative content analysis based on word count as well as manual coding in order to identify dominant topics in the news shared. hereby, we get an image of opinion leaders and other prominent participants as well as an overview of topics, which participants find worth sharing. on a micro level i focus on the individual users. by qualitative interviews i aim at understanding patterns of sharing and not at least the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for sharing news. conclusion the survey data reveal changing patterns of news consumption in denmark as well as a steady rise in the sharing of news. digital media play an important role in the news landscape but people tend to be media omnivores, rather than substituting old media with new ones. for the wider implications of the research, the findings will be the first step in a larger danish analysis of the phenomenon. further, the combination of studying macro-, mesoand micro levels is a pilot approach which might be relevant to replicate in other countries, for purposes of comparing and getting a wider picture of the changing world of news. references linaa jensen & tække (2013): facebook fra socialt netværk til metamedie. copenhagen: samfundslitteratur. bruns, a., burgess, j., highfield, t., kirchhoff, l., & nicolai, t. (2011). "mapping the australian networked public sphere".social science computer review, 29(3), 277-287. galtung, j., & ruge, m. h. (1965). "the structure of foreign news the presentation of the congo, cuba and cyprus crises in four norwegian newspapers". journal of peace research, 2(1), 64-90. hermida, a. (2010). "from tv to twitter: how ambient news became ambient journalism". m/c journal, 13(2). katz, e. & lazarsfeld, p. (1955). personal influence: the part played by people in the flow of mass communication. glencoe, ill.: free press. rainie, l & b. wellman (2012). networked: the new social operating system. cambridge: mit press. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): witzenberger, k., gulson, k., sellare, s., williamson, b., defreitas, e. (2020, october). measured education: sensing, configuring, and intervening with advanced media. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. measured education: sensing, configuring, and intervening with advanced media kevin witzenberger university of new south wales kalervo gulson university of sydney sam sellar manchester metropolitan university ben williamson university of edinburgh elizabeth de freitas manchester metropolitan university this panel sits between science, technology and society (sts), digital governance, network governance, critical data and algorithm studies. the engagement of educational research with this larger body of work stem from the entanglement of it with new forms of knowledge production and shifting sites of expertise and authority to morethan-human actors. from the storage of educational data and the application of machine learning to student management systems, to small tech companies that rely on the apis of microsoft azure and amazon web services, to advanced data sciences and the involvement of google’s tensor flow. the values, data practices, actors and the political economy of the internet are deeply interwoven with the lives of students. the first paper shows how ideas from data analytics move into education through research and businesses. the paper examines the spaces of educational trade shows and learning analytics conferences as ‘windows’ into discursive regimes to understand how the idea of measurable and re-configurable bodies is being stabilized and normalized within education. the paper presents juxtaposing thick descriptions from these events as multi-sited event ethnography in local spaces that feature transnational elements. the second paper looks at facial recognition in education. the paper problematizes the role of doubt in machine learning and its implications on different applications within education. the authors explore responses to doubt and argue that a ‘human in the loop’ to make the outputs of machine learning explainable within education contexts creates its own set of issues about machine-human relationships, including the ways in which computer vision in classrooms is part of hybrid control systems that focus on augmenting teacher control to modulate student behaviours. the third paper looks at the generation of bioinformatic policy objects. the author argues that the field of education research is undergoing significant transformation towards data-intensive and life-sensitive sciences. the author examines a series of interrelated studies in fields of behavioural genetics and genoeconomics that generate new knowledge through bioinformatic analyses of complex associations between genes and educational outcomes. the author shows how these research projects produce bioinformatic policy objects that shape implications and proposals for government education policy but are also mobilised to support policy proposals that rekindle longstanding concerns over the role of biology in eugenics and scientific racism. the fourth paper focuses on smart architecture in learning and living spaces that create a situation of ubiquitous sensation, in which environments are continuously sensed, regulated, and controlled through complex sensory ecosystems and data infrastructures. outside of the predominant imaginaries of smart architecture as mechanisms for technological optimisation and biopolitical governance that serve the neoliberal agenda, the author asks what ought to be by exploring possible modes of intervention into the technical milieu. the paper discusses examples of smart schools where the ethical and political implications of sensor data are considered, exploring the ways that digital infrastructure is meant to cultivate capacity for affective bonds between students and the built environment. what connects these papers is more than the spaces, ideas and practices that surround education. all of these papers look ideas of datafied knowledge about human life – whether in behavioural, physiological, emotional, or genetic form. the panel aims to show what critical education research can learn from other disciplines, but also how it can contribute to understand phenomena in media. the panel will show both, the ways in which developments in education are influenced by technological developments in media, business, finance, and government, but also, how it can contribute to the wider discourse around science, technology and society. reconfiguring students: stabilizing the optimizable subject kevin witzenberger university of new south wales predictive practices in k-12 education have become ordinary and education has become a site of data mining (williamson 2017), computational intervention and optimisation (gulson & webb, 2018). new internet of things (iot) technology in education combine biosensors, digital learning platforms and school surveillance systems. these new networks render education into a ubiquitous and pervasive computing environment that encompasses the lives of students. the generation of automated data collection was the first step within the ‘cascading logic of automation’ (andrejevic, 2020). it has since expanded into automated knowledge discovery (perrotta & selwyn, 2019) and automated responses with the goal to configure and reconfigure the minds and bodies of students. this paper asks how students and machines are figured together within this system of automation by looking at edtech trade shows and research conferences as ‘windows’ into ongoing discourses of the future of education. with the move from the oecd away from cognitive learning models towards social and emotional skills, particular interest is being paid to affective computing. in its simplest form affective computing is a form of computation that can recognize the emotions of its user. it ‘relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotions’ (picard, 1997, p. 3). this turn within education towards machines that can read and respond to emotions and re-configure their behaviour to optimise students’ emotional wellbeing, physical safety and performance constitute a ‘sociotechnical imaginary’, a vision of a desirable future, which is ‘collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed’ (jasanof, 2015, p. 4 emphasis added). this paper sees this imaginary as a ‘discursive regime’ (foucault, 1977) that normalizes data mining practice aimed at students and the automated feedbacks that become possible through affective computing. the paper describes what the discursive regime of automation in education entails, how and by whom it is being performed and stabilized. the paper presents fieldwork from two key spaces to better understand this discursive regime: the ‘marketplace of ideas’, and the marketplace itself. the former is the space in which the idea of biotechnologies are sold to society in academic settings (stiegler, 2014) and the latter is the space in which technologies are co-opted from the marketplace of ideas and sold by vendors to educational institutions. this approach takes inspiration from kitchin, who describes that the discursive drive towards big data solutions is often being pushed by vendors to sell big data solutions to governments (kitchin, 2014, p. 116). the author of this paper examines an international academic conference on learning analytics as the marketplace of ideas and an educational technology (edtech) trade show as the spaces in which these ideas are sold by vendors to educational institutions. both of these spaces can be considered as ‘windows’ into interlocking discourses that ‘work to produce certain atmospheres’ ‘in which the oxygen of certain kinds of thought seems natural and desirable (amin & thrift, 2013, as cited in kitchin 2014). the set of interlocking discourses around educational trade shows and where the ideas are brought to life can be seen as ‘policy events’ , as ‘[e]ducation technology agenda-setting and governance is increasingly played out through the buying and selling of goods and services’ (player-koro, bergviken rensfeldt, & selwyn, 2018, p. 685). the paper offers a thick description (geertz, 1975) through notes and visual material from passive observations (see also spanò & taglietti, 2019), marketing and research material. the juxtaposition of ethnographic fieldwork materials from different events should be understood as multi-sited event ethnography, which illustrates the practices that stabilize the discursive regime of automation in education in local spaces that feature transnational elements. while both of these sites seem to be disconnected at first, as many scholars in the field of learning analytics criticise the speed in which ideas are brought to the edtech market, and the promises that are being made by vendors, they are connected through a fundamental belief that life and learning can be measured, processed, configured and reconfigured. this becomes visible by looking at the purpose and use of technologies such as facial mood recognition, eye tracking, interaction-, process data and learning platforms within both, the commercial edtech sector and the academic learning analytics space. upon close examination, these spaces reveal that cybernetics and its ‘essential concepts have been absorbed deeply into the fabric of contemporary thought’ (hayles, 2010, p. 155). both are connected through the attempt to redefine what the bodies and minds of students are through the means of experimentation, and the assumption that ‘the phenomenon as isolated and reworked under laboratory conditions is essentially the same as the one found in 'nature' (stengers, 1997, p. 6). references amin, a., & thrift, n. j. (2013). arts of the political : new openings for the left. durham and london: durham and london : duke university press. andrejevic, m. (2020). automated media. new york: routledge. foucault, m. (1977). discipline and punish : the birth of the prison (1st american ed.). new york: pantheon books. geertz, c. (1975). the interpretation of cultures : selected essays. london: hutchinson. gulson, k. n., & webb, p. t. (2018). ‘life’ and education policy: intervention, augmentation and computation. discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, 39(2), 276-291. doi:10.1080/01596306.2017.1396729 hayles, k. n. (2010). cybernetics. in w. j. t. mitchell & m. b. n. hansen (eds.), critical terms for media studies. chicago: tne university of chicago press. jasanof, s. (2015). future imperfect: science, technology, and the imagination of modernity. in s. jasanof & s.-h. kim (eds.), dreamscapes of modernity: sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power (pp. 1 33). chicago, il: university of chicago press. kitchin, r. (2014). the data revolution : big data, open data, data infrastructures & their consequences. london: sage publications ltd. perrotta, c., & selwyn, n. (2019). deep learning goes to school: toward a relational understanding of ai in education. learning, media and technology, 1-19. doi:10.1080/17439884.2020.1686017 picard, r. (1997). affective computing. cambridge: mit press. player-koro, c., bergviken rensfeldt, a., & selwyn, n. (2018). selling tech to teachers: education trade shows as policy events. journal of education policy, 33(5), 682703. doi:10.1080/02680939.2017.1380232 spanò, e., & taglietti, d. (2019). disentangling the national plan for digital school: the micro-dis-positivity of the futura event. international journal of sociology of education, 11. doi:10.14658/pupj-ijse-2019-1-10 stengers, i. (1997). power and invention. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. stiegler, b. (2014). states of shock: stupidity and knowledge in the 21st century. malden, ma: polity press. humans in the loop: facial recognition, doubt, and education governance kalervo gulson university of sydney sam sellar manchester metropolitan university the introduction of facial recognition into classrooms is part of new ways in which artificial intelligence (ai), specifically machine learning and computer visions, is being introduced into different areas of education governance. the aim of this paper is to use the example of facial recognition to discuss the following: 1) the way that the use of machine learning involves doubt in the calculations, and that doubt has different implications depending on the application; 2) that one response to doubt is to make automation explainable (that is, what does a machine learning algorithm do?) by putting the ‘human in the loop’; and 3) to look at how humans in the loop of facial recognition applications in education contexts create new problematizations about machine-human relationships, including notions of augmentation. the introduction of ai into education governance is part of a broader realm of datafication, ostensibly aimed at improving and accelerating the production of educational knowledge, to make all problems anticipatable, measurable, calculable and solvable. research in this area has focused on: empirical studies of new data infrastructures for educational governance and new policy actors (gulson & sellar, 2019; hartong, 2018); the intensification of computational approaches to public policy work over the past decade (gilbert, ahrweiler, barbrook-johnson, narasimhan, & wilkinson, 2018); automated decision making (zarsky, 2016) and the ’bias’ towards automation (andrejevic, 2019). the paper is interested in the ways in which doubt is central to the mathematical underpinnings of machine learning and its application in governance areas. this follows louise amoore’s (2019) conceptualisation that there are technical and political roles for doubt in machine learning. first to the technical. most simply, machine learning is probabilistic. this is important in our discussion of education governance for the use of statistics has been to analyse the frequency of past events as a way to inform policy decisions. machine learning is premised on probability, and its application in education has been around predictive governance the likelihood of how likely a future event will occur and how to make decisions on that basis. what amoore reinforces, is that probability is a form of doubt, that embraces errors and inaccuracies in order for a machine learning algorithm to train and develop. the second role of doubt is political. when machine learning provides an output, when a decision is provided, whether that be about providing entry to a student to university, or in a film recommendation, amoore suggests that this decision ‘is placed beyond doubt’ (2019, p.5). the key point is that machine learning decisions are inherently uncertain but presented as authoritative. we are interested in the ways in which putting humans in the loop attempts to address the combination of the technical and political doubt. the first way is a design decision in ‘human in the loop’ machine learning, where people are involved in an iterative process of training, tuning, and testing a particular algorithm. the second is technical where another algorithm will show what is happening in a ‘black box’. the third is to have a human decide whether and in what context an algorithm is to be used. and the fourth is that the humans in the loop are also those who are not only using but are the object of the technology. what all of these instances point to is, as west, whittaker and crawford (2019) ask, ‘which humans are in the loop’? in the paper, we discuss this question through the example of facial recognition. doubt and humans in the loop are combined in facial recognition in the criticisms that the data used in training facial recognition are biased, the technology is not accurate, and people of colour are being unfairly locked out of 1-1 facial recognition systems (stark, 2019). the solution to doubt is often posed as more accurate training data. however, the problem is that inclusion is not always a solution, in that more accurate system means populations already under heavy surveillance become more accurately monitored (benjamin, 2019). we conclude the paper by examining the ways in which these issues arise in education governance. the application of facial recognition within education is expanding with multiple use values put forward such classroom use in china (e.g., for pedagogical reasons), as part of school responses to violence in the us (e.g., for safety reasons), and attendance taking in australia and sweden (e.g., for time saving reasons) (andrejevic & selwyn, 2019). our aim is to think through issues with facial recognition through the notion of a policy problematization, an approach primarily concerned with developing opportunities – creative possibilities – rather than understanding a situation as problematic that requires a single solution, often conceptualized as a ‘silver bullet’ in education policy (webb & gulson, 2015). this includes the ways in which computer vision in classrooms is a part of hybrid control systems that focus on augmenting teacher control to modulate student behaviours. our key focus in this part of the paper is on the ways in which problematising the human in the loop in machine learning may help us to understand the changing machine-human relations of education governance. references amoore, l. (2019). doubt and the algorithm: on the partial accounts of machine learning. theory, culture & society, 0(0). doi:10.1177/0263276419851846 andrejevic, m. (2019). automated media. london and new york: routledge. andrejevic, m., & selwyn, n. (2019). facial recognition technology in schools: critical questions and concerns. learning, media and technology, 1-14. doi:10.1080/17439884.2020.1686014 benjamin, e. (2019). race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. cambridge: polity. gilbert, n., ahrweiler, p., barbrook-johnson, p., narasimhan, k., & wilkinson, h. (2018). computational modelling of public policy: reflections on practice. journal of artificial societies and social simulation, 21(1), 1-14. gulson, k. n., & sellar, s. (2019). emerging data infrastructures and the new topologies of education policy. environment and planning: society and space, 37(2), 350366. hartong, s. (2018). towards a topological re-assemblage of education policy? observing the implementation of performance data infrastructures and ‘centers of calculation’ in germany. globalisation, societies and education, 16(1), 134-150. doi:10.1080/14767724.2017.1390665 stark, l. (2019). facial recognition is the plutonium of ai. xrds: crossroads, the acm magazine for students, 25(3), 50-55. west, s. m., whittaker, m., & crawford, k. (2019). discriminating systems: gender, race and power in ai. retrieved from https://ainowinstitute.org/discriminatingsystems.html webb, p. t., & gulson, k. n. (2015). policy, geophilosphy, education. rotterdam: sense publishers. zarsky, t. (2016). the trouble with algorithmic decisions: an analytic road map to examine efficiency and fairness in automated and opaque decision making. science, technology, & human values, 41(1), 118-132. doi:10.1177/0162243915605575 bioinformatic policy objects: bodies and machines in data-intensive and life-sensitive sciences ben williamson university of edinburgh the expansion of data science over the last decade has been accompanied by significant claims about the changing status of knowledge and expertise. ‘datafied knowledge production’ (thylstrup, flyverbom & helles, 2019) has been made possible by technical advances in computational statistics, data analytics, and machine learning algorithms, as well as novel expert data practices in computer science, informatics, data science and software engineering (mackenzie 2017). these technologies and practices have become extremely valuable in a wide range of knowledge-producing fields, as the data analytics industry has expanded from technical development to the media, business, finance, entertainment, government, the public sector, and research (beer, 2019). the field of education research is currently undergoing significant transformation into a field of datafied knowledge production, as new actors invested with the authority of data science have begun undertaking novel ‘big data’ studies into the embodied substrates of human learning. these developments stand to reposition education research as a datafied science, and to make human bodies and life itself into objects of education policy. this work-in-progress paper provides an examination of educational data sciences as an exemplar of the ways in which datafied knowledge production is increasingly bringing human life into the calculations of public policy and governance. according to the oecd, educational research in the 2020s should emulate the application of advanced digital technologies in the life sciences of biology, cognitive science and neuroscience in order to have relevance for policy and practice (kuhl et al, 2018). the life sciences have become increasingly ‘data-intensive’ with the emergence of advanced computational power, data analytics and machine learning (leonelli 2016; stevens, 2017). the development of datafied life sciences is also introducing ‘lifesensitive’ practices of biological, physiological and neural sensing into other diverse domains, with ‘techno-somatic real-time sensing’ technologies that can capture the ‘rhythms’ and ‘metronomic vitality’ of human bodies escaping their disciplinary enclosures to inhabit new spaces of knowledge production and governance (davies 2019). exemplifying the expansion of datafied life sciences as a mode of technosomatic knowledge production, data scientific techniques are now being applied to new research tasks and ‘automated knowledge discovery’ in education (perrotta and selwyn 2019). researchers of education and learning are seeking novel, data-intensive and life-sensitive science methods for creating policy-relevant knowledge about ‘life itself’, and exploring possibilities for its intervention and augmentation (gulson & webb, 2018). while the roles of knowledge-based technologies in educational policy and governance are well-documented (fenwick et al, 2014), pressing need remains for studies unpacking the specific apparatuses and practices of data-intensive science that are involved in producing policy-relevant knowledge. this paper takes as its empirical focus an ongoing controversy over data-intensive biological methods for educational knowledge production by examining a series of recent interrelated studies in fields of behavioural genetics (plomin, 2018) and genoeconomics (benjamin et al, 2012). based on analysis of genetic samples collected from up to a million research subjects, these studies have generated new knowledge through bioinformatic analyses of complex associations between genes and educational outcomes (attainment, test performance, achievement and non-cognitive skills), as well as longer-term socio-economic and life outcomes, and traits such as intelligence (lee et al 2018; plomin & von stumm 2018; harden 2020). such bioinformatics studies are paradigmatic of the emergence of dataintensive, life-sensitive science as a means of producing new policy knowledge in education. they are producing new kinds of bioinformatic policy objects—novel datafied renderings of human lives and bodies created in such a way to shape implications and proposals for government education policy. however, the results are also highly controversial and the subject of significant debate, with conservative commentators mobilizing the findings to support policy proposals that have rekindled longstanding concerns over the role of biology in eugenics and scientific racism. through examining the scientific work involved in educational bioinformatics studies, the paper addresses the question of what specific roles advanced computational technologies perform in the production of datafied knowledge about human life. drawing on science and technology studies (sts) research on the ways ‘bioinformation’ and ‘biodata’ are used, treated and manipulated to create knowledge (parry & greenhough, 2018), it focuses attention on relations between objects, technologies and forms of expertise in this process: human samples, bioinformatics infrastructure, laboratory hardware and software, disciplinary knowledge practices, ontologies and epistemologies, research coalitions, and funding mechanisms. the relational apparatus of bioinformatics, like other fields of datafied knowledge production, not only carries authority to ‘discover’ or ‘reveal things’ but also to ‘bring into being the very objects they are meant to describe and represent’ (ruppert, 2018, 19). as biological science has transformed into bioinformatics, ‘computers have altered out understanding of “life”’, as ‘biological objects’ have been ‘virtualized’ as codes, and ‘databases and algorithms determine what sorts of objects exist’ for analysis and knowledge generation (stevens, 2013, 5). the bioinformatic policy objects produced through datafied educational sciences are calculable, networked bodies generated through the infrastructure of biobanks, bioinformatics technologies, bio-scientific methods, and the scientific epistemologies of behavioural genetics and genoeconomics. the paper illuminates the complex human and nonhuman work involved in producing policy-relevant scientific knowledge, and the implications of data-intensive and life-sensitive sciences for how living human subjects are known and governed. references beer, d. (2019). the data gaze. london: sage. benjamin, d.j., cesarini, d., chabris, c.f. et al. (2012). the promises and pitfalls of genoeconomics. annual review of economics 4, 627–662. davies, w. (2019). the political economy of pulse: techno-somatic rhythm and realtime data. ephemera 19(3), 513-536. fenwick, t. mangez, e. & ozga, j. (eds). (2014). governing knowledge: comparison, knowledge-based technologies and expertise in the regulation of education. london: routledge. gulson, k. & webb, p.t. (2018). ‘life’ and education policy: intervention, augmentation and computation. discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education 39(2), 276-291. harden, p. (2020). investigating the genetic architecture of non-cognitive skills using gwas-by-subtraction. medium: https://medium.com/@kph3k/investigating-thegenetic-architecture-of-non-cognitive-skills-using-gwas-by-subtractionb8743773ce44 kuhl, p.k., lim, s.-s., guerriero, s. & van damme, d. (2019). developing minds in the digital age: towards a science of learning for 21st century education. paris: oecd. lee, j.j., wedow, r., okbay, a., et al. (2018). gene discovery and polygenic prediction from a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in 1.1 million individuals. nature genetics 50, 1112–1121. leonelli, s. (2016). data-centric biology: a philosophical study. london: university of chicago press. mackenzie, a. (2017). machine learners: archaeology of a data practice. london: mit press. parry, b. & greenhough, b. (2018). bioinformation. cambridge: polity. perrotta, c. & selwyn, s. (2019). deep learning goes to school: toward a relational understanding of ai in education. learning, media and technology: https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1686017 plomin, r. & von stumm, s. (2018). the new genetics of intelligence. nature reviews genetics. doi:10.1038/nrg.2017.104 plomin, r. (2018). blueprint: how dna makes us who we are. london: allan lane. ruppert, e. (2018). sociotechnical imaginaries of different data futures: an experiment in citizen data. rotterdam: erasmus university. stevens, h. (2013). life out of sequence: a data-driven history of bioinformatics. london: university of chicago press. stevens, h. (2017). a feeling for the algorithm: working knowledge and big data in biology. osiris 32, 151-174. thylstrup, n.b., flyverbom, m. & helles, r. (2019). datfied knowledge production: introduction to the special theme. big data & society, july-december: https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951719875985 affective athmospheres and smart architecture elizabeth de freitas manchester metropolitan university as luciana parisi (2017) argues, the environmental distribution of sensation between living bodies, buildings, and digital media is more than a computational network that simply processes ‘information’. these systems are capable of collecting and processing continuous streams of biometric and environmental data from buildings and their inhabitants, including data collected from fingerprint scanners, facial recognition software, surveillance cameras, movement sensors, light sensors, and wearable biosensing technologies. parisi (2009) conceptualises these architectural networks as “technoecologies of sensation” which achieve a collective nexus of sensibility and dynamic response that moves seamlessly “between organic and inorganic matter” (p. 192). dynamically mediated streams of sensory data become diffuse, elemental, and atmospheric, opening onto a massively distributed environmental sensibility rather than remaining tied to individual bodies as processers of information and perception (de freitas, 2018). it’s evident that digital life is lived in relation to sense, sensation and affect in radically new atmospheric ways (anderson & ash, 2015; burke, 2014). we are no longer dealing with nodes and connections in a network, but rather with the atmospheric conditioning of a climate of thought, sensation, and technicity (mccormack, 2018; simondon, 2017). considered as complex sensory ecosystems that operate through the ubiquitous biomediation of life processes, smart buildings have the potential to support the cultivation of an atmospheric “data-sense” that plugs directly into the “microtemporal qualities of experience” (hansen, 2015, p. 132). in this paper i focus on smart architecture and how it is producing a situation of “ubiquitous sensation”, in which learning and living environments are continuously sensed, regulated, and controlled through complex sensory ecosystems and data infrastructures (de freitas & rousell, 2018). precisely because current applications of the internet of things serve neoliberal political agendas in the context of architecture, we need to start thinking concretely about how to use sensor technologies differently for designing, modifying, and inventing learning environments that reclaim affective and somatic relationality (akawara & gins, 2002; coenen, coorevitz, & lievens, 2015). i argue that there is a need to develop artful and playful disruptions of these data infrastructures, as a way of resisting the crude materialism of smart architectural designs in which machinic matter is meant to flow naturally into the “becomingenvironment of computation” (parisi, 2017, p. 79). at the same time, i am wary that an uncritical embrace of ‘relationality’ is problematic if it functions to simply naturalize computation and support techno-governance in design and architecture (parisi, 2017). my interest in artful interventions then is not an attempt to dispel critiques of the computational logic now shaping the built environment, but to explore possible modes of intervention into the technical milieu. in attempting to think beyond predominant imaginaries of smart architecture as mechanisms for technological optimisation and biopolitical governance, i will consider the work of mexican-canadian artist rafael lozano-hemmer on “relational architecture” (lozano-hemmer, 2011, 2019). relational architecture entails experimental interventions that “expose the body and society’s receptivity to instability, fluctuation and re-imagining” (p. 87). lozano-hemmer (2005) describes how relational architecture involves a distinct shift from an imaginary of “interactivity” in which the building is meant to facilitate interaction amongst humans towards a new paradigm of posthuman technicity and flow. and yet colebrook (2019) warns us that such work can seem very naïve, or worse, entail a kind of “implicit moralism” which often seems intent on rescuing a humanity through spreading its relations, finding itself again and again in its monstrous inventions and digital stretch (p.175). celebrations of relationality can be rather self-serving ways of depoliticizing frictional encounters, failing to accept limits and incommensurables. refusing to let being ‘be’ without relation can be a way of colonizing the world with digital infrastructure, part of the ongoing colonialism of telecommunication’ revolutions. such concerns are raised here especially in light of the new biopower at stake in sensor technology and smart architecture. as gabrys (2016) explains, ‘natural’ ecologies of the planet itself are now linked through sensor technologies; hörl (2017) asserts in related fashion that we must rethink ‘general ecology’ as a term that is utterly technical. this paper will discuss some examples of smart schools where the ethical and political implications of sensor data are considered, exploring the ways that digital infrastructure is meant to cultivate capacity for affective bonds between students and the built environment. references anderson, b. and ash, j. (2015). atmospheric methods. in vannini p (ed.) nonrepresentational methodologies: re-envisioning research. london: routledge, pp. 34–51. arakawa, s. and gins, m. (2002). the architectural body. tuscaloosa: university of alabama press. burke, c. (2014) looking back to imagine the future: connecting with the radical past in technologies of school design. technology pedagogy and education 23(1): 39– 55. bbc news. (oct 6, 2016). virtual cat is newest ‘pupil’ at cambridge school. available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-37561326 (accessed 18 september 2018). colebrook, c. (2019). a cut in relationality: art at the end of the world. angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities 24(3): 175–195. coenen, t., coorevits, l. and lievens, b. (2015). the wearable living lab: how wearables could support living lab projects. in: open living lab days 2015, istanbul, turkey. de freitas, e. (2018) the biosocial subject: sensor technologies and worldly sensibility. discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education 39(2): 292–308. de freitas, e. and rousell, d. (2018) atmospheric intensities: sensing the places and times of learning through bioaffective technologies. in: affects, interfaces, events conference, aarhus, denmark, 26–30 august 2018. gabrys, j. (2016). program earth: environmental sensing technology and the making of a computational planet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. hansen, m.b. (2015). feed-forward: on the future of 21st century media. chicago, il: university of chicago press. hörl, e. (2017). introduction to general ecology: the ecologisation of thinking. in: hörl e and burton je (eds) general ecology: the new ecological paradigm. london: bloomsbury, pp. 1–75. lozano-hemmer, r. (2011). “articulated interesect.” triennale que´becoise 2011, place des festivals, muse´e d’’art contemporain de montre´ al, montre´ al, que´bec, canada. lozano-hemmer, r. (2019). atmospheric memory. manchester international festival. mccormack, d. (2018). atmospheric things: on the allure of elemental envelopment. durham: duke university press. parisi, l. (2009). technoecologies of sensation. in: herzogenrath b (ed.) deleuze guattari & ecology. hampshire: palgrave macmillan, pp. 182–199. parisi, l. (2017). computational logic and ecological rationality. in: hörl e (ed.) general ecology: the new ecological paradigm. london: bloomsbury, pp. 75–100. simondon, g. (1958/2017). on the mode of existence of technical objects (trans c malaspina and j rogove). minneapolis, mn: univocal. microsoft word tynes & peters aoir2018.docx selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): peters, c. & tynes, r. (2018, october 10-13). pursuance and the practice of de-institutionalized democracy. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. pursuance and the practice of de-institutionalized democracy robert tynes bard college claire peters the pursuance project the internet enables people to more effectively organize for the achievement of civic, social and political goals outside the conventional housing of a formal institution. in digital spaces, people can collaborate and communicate closely even if they have never met in real life (shirky 2009). formations such as telecomix and project pm show that this capability can be harnessed in the service of meaningful collective political and social actions. journalist and activist barrett brown's latest venture, a secure networking and organizing platform called pursuance, hopes to further that potential. pursuance provides a means for individuals to rapidly and effectively assemble, disassemble, and reassemble into mission-driven teams. this lessens the need for formal institutions to direct civic or political activism, thus opening a plethora of possibilities for the future of civil organizing. nevertheless, we consider whether some form of “political organization and institutionalization to be not only still necessary but even greater than before” (p. 20, hardt and negri 2017). in this light, we explore the potential of brown's endeavor, asking: how can pursuance most effectively further the practice of deinstitutionalized democracy? what can be learned from past groups that have engaged in the kind of activity pursuance aims to facilitate? pursuance is an in-development platform that combines the functions of social networking and task management to empower agile activism. its founder, barrett brown, first envisioned it as a platform that would mirror the shape of digital activist communities such as anonymous. anonymous, which is characterized by "a loose and decentralized command structure that operates on ideas rather than directives" (owen 2015), demonstrated that political activism without institutions is possible (see coleman 2014). anonymous is more of a flag than a cohesive movement different groups loosely related by a common internet culture use the name as a call to coordinated action against large institutions perceived as abusive. inspired by these dynamics, brown founded project pm, a digital research collaborative which most notably published emails from hbgary, a computer security firm that anonymous had hacked in 2011. project pm was an initiative that had no center, and was propelled by anonymous contributors. one goal was to make the intelligence contracting industry more transparent and it succeeded. pursuance aims to take digital movements a step further by providing functionalities that are attuned to their dynamics. the result, if successful, is the creation of de lagasnerie's (2017) "new political category" of individuals who are "not defined by their membership in a state, or a nation, or a territory, but rather belong to a community they have chosen for themselves: democracy" (89). that is, democracy unfettered, unbounded by the state what barrett brown calls “process democracy.” on the platform, a participant will be able to create a group focused on the achievement of a given goal, or search for and join one that aligns with their interests. the platform’s groups will have both chat and task management components which can be either visible to others who might want to work with the project or encrypted end-to-end. the platform aims to effectively balance the need for both security and collaboration among emergent organizations, especially those with a political agenda. pursuance is meant to enable many different kinds of organizational models. setting a long-term or aspirational goal, such as reversing the privatization of american prisons, is in line with more traditional forms of organization found in civic organizations and nonprofits; setting a substantive short-term goal, such as analyzing documents received through a set of freedom of information act requests, encourages the kind of initiativedriven organizational instances that make groups like anonymous so interesting. a pursuance is customizable in accordance with the needs of the group running it it can be completely lateral and transparent, or require permissions for different levels. pursuance’s vision is an ambitious one. it is conceived as a tool which will enable a paradigm shift in the way people organize. its ability to make this vision a reality will be determined by how precisely it addresses the immediate needs of its users how intuitively activists and journalists can use it as well as how accurately it parses the dynamics it aims to enable. our study analyzes the way pursuance models the activities and ideals of its intended user base and compares it to the activities of the net-based activist groups that serve as its inspiration (e.g. project pm, anonymous, telecomix). through this analysis, we intend to discern to what extent pursuance might fulfill its vision of "process democracy” and what additional steps might be needed to get it there. we interview both central and periphery members of all three organizations to understand the range of experiences in digital activist collaborations. we also examine the planned structure of the platform, through interviews with the creator, barrett brown, and the developers building pursuance (steve phillips et al.). we then compare the experiences of digital activists to pursuance’s envisioned structure, examining where pursuance will augment the digital activist's experience how it will harness the revolutionary aspects of online activism and minimize the issues that can arise. we also note where the platform has the potential to fall short, and recommend appropriate countermeasures based on our research. some of the problems we will explore include: whether pursuance presents a new episteme or merely replicates state ideology (althusser 2014; bourdieu 2015; gramsci 1971); how the mystification of "no hierarchy" can produce talk but little action, what freeman (1970) labels, "political impotence"; and the potential for infiltration and sabotage of the project altogether (see the case of sabu and lulzsec, coleman 2014). references althusser, louis (2014) on the reproduction of capitalism: ideology and ideological state apparatuses. new york: verso. bourdieu, pierre (2015). on the state. cambridge, uk: polity press. brown, barrett (2018). the pursuance project. available at: https://pursuanceproject.org coleman, gabriella. 2014. hacker, hoaxer, whistleblower, spy: the many faces of anonymous. london, uk: verso. de lagasnerie, geoffroy (2017). the art of revolt. stanford: stanford university press. freeman, jo (1970). "the tyranny of structurelessness." available at: http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm gramsci, antonio (1971), selections from the prison notebooks. new york: international publishers co. hardt, michael and antonio negri (2017). assembly. oxford: oxford university press. michels, robert (1915). political parties: a sociological study of the oligarchical tendencies of modern democracy. translated into english by eden paul and cedar paul. new york: the free press. owen, taylor (2015). disruptive power: the crisis of the state in the digital age. oxford: oxford university press. shirky, clay (2009). here comes everybody: the power of organizing without organizations. new york: penguin books. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 schwartz, a., rossi, l., (2017, october 18-21). insiders and outsiders: a comparative study of comments on facebook pages of party leaders during two danish election campaigns. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. insiders and outsiders: a comparative study of comments on facebook pages of party leaders during two danish election campaigns sander andreas schwartz roskilde university luca rossi it university of copenhagen introduction the internet has been examined thoroughly early on as a viable space for political discussion and deliberation (dahlberg, 2001; stromer-galley, 2002). recently there has been a movement towards a more pessimistic evaluation of the online space as a space of conflict and incivility (hmielowski, hutchens, & cicchirillo, 2014). the research field is still struggling with, how to analyze online discussions in a way that balances the optimistic ideals with current online practice (wright, 2012), and it is clear that there is still a great need for data-driven research that explore ways to present and measure the political discussion taking place online. much of the research on public discussions has relied on public sphere theory that emphasizes consensus seeking based on critical rational debate (dahlberg, 2007). dahlberg suggests that research should focus on whether online spaces allow for a variety of opposing critical political views, or rather contestation of the dominating discourse, instead of consensus seeking debate. he suggests that we examine this through the lens of intraand inter-contestation. from this perspective, the key to a vibrant public sphere is whether it enables critical contestation of the dominating discourse either through critical discussions between insiders (intra-contestation) and/or critical perspectives from people from opposing political groups, that is: insiders and outsiders (inter-contestation). in this paper, we examine the comments section of facebook pages of four party leaders through a coding scheme that is inspired by dahlberg’s notion of intraand inter-contestation. we do this to explore whether facebook-pages of politicians are viable spaces for a vibrant and critical debate between people from various places on the political spectrum. or whether they are more clearly one-sided spaces for political marketing, where politicians can communicate with their supporters. method this study is a quantitative content analysis of comments to the status updates of four facebook pages belonging to danish party leaders during the danish general election in 2011 and 2015. the four politicians include the two prime minister candidates on each side of the political wings as well as two smaller party leaders, also on opposite political wings. these four politicians are ideal to study because they are the only four party leaders who were in the campaign both in 2011 and 2015. we decided to do a random sample of status updates during the short campaign period and selected 20 posts from each candidate during each year that is 40 from each candidate in 2011 and 2015 totaling 160 facebook posts from all four candidates. of these posts we sampled up to 100 comments from each post chronologically. we ended up with a total of a little more than 11000 comments that were coded according to our predefined coding scheme. our coding scheme was deductively defined inspired by dahlberg’s notion of intraand inter-contestation. these two codes were defined as comments about a political issue made by either insiders arguing within the general political agenda of the politician, or political issues made by outsiders arguing outside of the general political agenda of the politician. we included two extremes on each side of his notions of contestation, which were comments without a clearly identifiable political issue but only positive (support) or negative (smear). thus, our coding scheme was divided into support, intra-contestation, inter-contestation, smear and a neutral category. two assistants completed the coding process and it was tested for inter-coder reliability at ≥ .753 according to krippendorff’s alpha, which is above the lowest accepted level of ≥ .667 (krippendorff, 2012)1. results overall it is clear that the vast majority of comments are support and praise of the politicians without any clear political content or discussion. comments defined as ‘support’ could be understood as a form of verbal likes or a type of phatic communication, because the content of the comment is not as relevant as the symbolic gesture of support and praise of the politician. in 2011 we identified about 65% of the comments as ‘support’ and in 2015 it was about 59%. around 20% of the comments in 2011 were coded as intra-contestation and in 2015 the number was slightly lower at about 16%. comments defined as inter-contestation ranged from very harsh to polite questioning by identifiable outsiders. only about 3% where identified as intercontestation in 2011 and 5% in 2015. the most negative and unconstructive comments were coded as ‘smear’. these were clearly negative and in opposition to the general political agenda of the politician, but without any relation to an identifiable political issue. the number of comments within this category was around 8% in 2011 and 14% in 2015. here we can identify a slight increase in negative comments without a relation to political issues. some of the most notable individual differences between candidates in this data are first of all anders samuelsen, who in 2011 had a very positive comment thread of about 1 the value can be significantly improved by removing the neutral code because the coders tended to disagree the most on this, but we decided to keep the neutral code for the holistic picture it provides. 80% supportive comments and only 1% smear comments. however, this could be due to the fact that he started out as a much smaller candidate in 2011, which probably meant that opposing citizens did not see a purpose of interfering as much on his facebook page. in contrast, the prime minister in 2011 lars løkke rasmussen had one of the highest numbers of inter-contestation about 5% in 2011 and 4% in 2015, and the percentage of smear was 6% in 2011 and 10% in 2015. it would be logical to assume that the biggest candidates in the campaign would also attract more critics, because critics might see a strategic purpose in focusing on the most public candidates. however, helle thorning-schmidt, who took over from lars løkke as prime minister in 2011 and defeated again by lars løkke rasmussen in 2015, only had about average percentage of inter-contestation and smear comments during both campaigns. based on this we cannot conclude that the amount of critical comments and smear is related to the size of the politician alone. table 1. comments during the 2011 election campaign table 2. comments during the 2015 election campaign references dahlberg, l. (2001). the internet and democratic discourse: exploring the prospects of online deliberative forums extending the public sphere. information, communication & society, 4(4), 615–633. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691180110097030 dahlberg, l. (2007). rethinking the fragmentation of the cyberpublic: from consensus to contestation. new media and society, 9(5), 827–847. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444807081228 hmielowski, j. d., hutchens, m. j., & cicchirillo, v. j. (2014). living in an age of online incivility: examining the conditional indirect effects of online discussion on political flaming. information, communication & society, 17(10), 1196–1211. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2014.899609 krippendorff, k. h. (2012). content analysis: an introduction to its methodology (third edition edition). los angeles ; london: sage publications, inc. stromer-galley, j. (2002). new voices in the public sphere: a comparative analysis of interpersonal and online political talk. javnost the public, 9(2). retrieved from http://javnost-thepublic.org/article/2002/2/2/ wright, s. (2012). politics as usual? revolution, normalization and a new agenda for online deliberation. new media & society, 14(2), 244–261. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 bolsover, g. jones, m, hogan, a., savage, s. bradshaw. (2017, october 18-21). computational propaganda and social media: global perspectives. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. computational propaganda and social media: global perspectives moderator: jeff hemsley, syracuse university paper #1: gillian bolsover, oxford internet institute paper #2: marc owen jones, university of exeter paper #3: alex hogan and saiph savage, etic lab paper #4: samantha bradshaw, oxford internet institute panel overview the internet was initially seen as a democratising technology that would redistribute power to networked individuals, break the control of information gatekeepers leading to more diverse information and foster an online public sphere in which networked individuals could discuss issues, reaching conclusions that would contribute to the political process (rheingold, 1993; shapiro, 2000). however, with the rise of social media, the control of online distribution channels has been concentrated into a small number of hands, with new and less accountable platforms replacing traditional media gatekeepers (lovink, 2011). as online spaces have become domesticated, their participatory potential has been undermined by colonisation by the market, censorship by organisations, states and industries, and appropriation by political and cultural elites (cammaerts, 2008). social media has become an increasingly important source of news for internet users. in the us and uk, direct entry to the website of the news provider remains the most common way of accessing online news. however, social media also takes a large chunk with 35% of people in the us and 25% in the uk accessing news via social media; in hungary, greece and brazil social media is the most common way of accessing online news with more than 50% of people accessing news via social media (newman, fletcher, levy, & nielsen, 2016). in addition to users obtaining news information on social media, users posts are also seen as important predictors of public sentiment in elections and other political issues (gayo-avello, 2012) and the social information about one’s online connections’ political opinions and intentions has been shown to influence offline voting behaviour (bond et al., 2012). this situation has created a structure ripe for exploitation. rather than becoming a place for the empowerment of networked individuals, rational debate and diverse information, recent events had pointed to the acceleration of online echo chambers and concerted efforts to distribute misleading or false information or to manipulate the online information environment for political purposes. these issues rose to a head in the 2016 u.s. presidential election, with automated accounts contributing between 20 and 25 percent of the twitter traffic about the election during the days leading up to the vote; there was evidence of much greater automation in pro-trump as opposed to pro-clinton accounts, with highly automated pro-trump activity outnumbering pro-clinton five to one. (howard, woolley, & kollanyi, 2016). by producing a large number of tweets using automation, these accounts, some of which are designed to mimic regular users, flood the public opinion environment on these platforms, play on the way that these platforms calculate popular or trending content and spread particular ideas with the force of automated technology. there have, similarly, been recent concerns about the spread of misinformation (dubbed “fake news”) online. it was widely reported that fake news stories generated more engagement on facebook than those from major news outlets during the u.s. election (silverman, 2016). prominent online platforms such as facebook, twitter and google have announced measures to tackle false information, automation and online harassment (solon & wong, 2016) (other references) and in january 2017 the uk government announced an inquiry into fake news distributed on social media (uk parliament, 2017). these issues have recently sprung into the headlines but there is still a great deal of misinformation about this misinformation. furthermore, the vast majority of discussion about these issues has focused on u.s. (and u.k.) politics, ignoring how these issues might play out in different political systems or different media systems. our proposed panel draws together four papers that address the issues of computational propaganda on social media from a global perspective and taking both citizen-centred and statecentred approaches. the first paper presents a study of the chinese state’s social media propaganda strategy that shows, contrary to established wisdom, that this strategy focuses on distraction and positive propaganda rather than attacking critics. the second paper turns attention to the middle east, documenting how anti-shia and anti-iranian hate bots have flooded conversation about political issues on twitter in gulf states, jeopardising free speech and drowning out legitimate debate. the third paper provided a grounded study of alt-right communities on 4chan in the lead up to the u.s. presidential election, providing a model of communication in these social media communities can lead to collective action and how active participants in these communities have now started to move into other political spaces, such as the french election. the fourth, and final, paper zooms out to provide a global picture of social media manipulation by state actors, comparing the size, scale and extent of this practice in the 25 countries with the highest global military expenditures. together these four papers will provide global overview of the burgeoning practice of computational propaganda, techniques of influencing human action through the manipulation of emotions and representations using automated, technological or online means. the panel will be chaired by professor phil howard, head of the computational propaganda project at the oxford internet institute. references bond, r. m., fariss, c. j., jones, j. j., kramer, a. d. i., marlow, c., settle, j. e., & fowler, j. h. (2012). a 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization. nature, 489(7415), 295–298. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11421 gayo-avello, d. (2012). ‘i wanted to predict elections with twitter and all i got was this lousy paper’ -a balanced survey on election prediction using twitter data. arxiv:1204.6441 [physics]. retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.6441 howard, p. n., woolley, s. c., & kollanyi, b. (2016). bots and automation over twitter during the first u.s. presiden tial debate. retrieved from http://politicalbots.org/wpcontent/uploads/2016/10/data-memo-first-presidential-debate.pdf lovink, g. (2011). networks without a cause: a critique of social media. cambridge, uk ; malden, mass: polity. newman, n., fletcher, r., levy, d. a., & nielsen, r. k. (2016). reuters institute digital news report 2016. retrieved from http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/digital-news-report2016.pdf?utm_source=digitalnewsreport.org&utm_medium=referral rheingold, h. (1993). the virtual community: homesteading on the electronic frontier. mit press. shapiro, a. l. (2000). the control revolution: how the internet is putting individuals in charge and changing the world we know (2nd.printing edition). new york: publicaffairs. silverman, c. (2016, november 16). this analysis shows how viral fake election news stories outperformed real news on facebook. retrieved 20 february 2017, from https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-realnews-on-facebook solon, o., & wong, j. c. (2016, december 16). facebook’s plan to tackle fake news raises questions over limitations. the guardian. retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/16/facebook-fake-news-systemproblems-fact-checking uk parliament. (2017, january 30). ‘fake news’ inquiry launched. retrieved 20 february 2017, from https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commonsselect/culture-media-and-sport-committee/news-parliament-2015/fake-news-launch-1617/ computational propaganda and the networked citizen gillian bolsover oxford internet institute extended abstract computational propaganda is a rising phenomenon to which a great deal of empirical research has been devoted. however, the field is still undertheorized and disconnected with previous academic work on propaganda and political participation. this paper will establish a definition of computational propaganda, anchored in existing theories of propaganda. drawing from this existing work on propaganda, it will argue that the landscape of propaganda has profoundly changed in the internet age and this new category of computational propaganda is necessary to draw attention to this unique phenomenon. after having established this definition of computational propaganda and the urgent need to understand how it is affecting political processes, the second part of this paper will discuss how computational propaganda interacts with different theories of political participation such as the public sphere, agonistic pluralism, monitorial or latent citizenship or ideas of ideological correctness prominent in authoritarian contexts. sectarian twitter bots, their ‘puppet masters’, and automated hate speech in the persian gulf dr. marc owen jones university of exeter, institute of arab and islamic studies internet propaganda in the gulf since the arab uprisings in 2011, social media and the internet has been a battleground for both activists and governments, who have been attempting to adapt to emerging technologies to pursue either their emancipatory or social control goal needs. the more ‘dystopian’ (to excuse the cliché) side of the debate in bahrain, which focuses on the use of internet as a device that closes avenues of free speech, has been studied extensively by various scholars and organisations (jones, 2013; marczak et al, 2014; bahrain watch 2016). this paper continues in the vein of examining how new technologies can be used as a tool to enforce hegemonic order, but focuses specifically on computational propaganda in the gulf. it finds that since 2012, twitter has been flooded with millions of automated anti-shia and anti-iranian hate bots. this study reveals that at its peak, the bots account for over 50% of tweets sent per day on the #saudi hashtag. in addition to documenting the dangers such tweeting poses to civil society, especially given escalating conflict in the region, the paper also reveals innovative ways to trace the providence of such bots by locating through investigative tracing the programmer of a specific subset of accounts operating on the #saudi hashtag. antisocial bots and puppet masters there has been increasing academic attention on the potential detrimental implications of ‘fake news’, propaganda, and twitter bots. as ferrara et al (2015) state, “while many bots are benign, one can design harmful bots with the goals of persuading, smearing, or deceiving’. indeed, ‘these bots mislead, exploit, and manipulate social media discourse with rumors, spam, malware, misinformation, slander, or even just noise’ (ferrara et al, 2015). according to shorey and howard (2016), social bots can attack activists and spread propaganda. through the use of hashtag spamming and attempted trend creation (gallagher, 2015), such bots are potentially harmful to civil society and stability as they impinge on free speech and distort the public sphere (maréchal, 2016). while efforts have been made to determine the presence of ‘bots or not’, as ferrara et al (2015) note, more effort needs to be expended in finding bot masters. if social bots are the puppets, additional efforts will have to be directed at finding their “masters.” governments and other entities with sufficient resources have been alleged to use social bots to their advantage. assuming the availability of effective detection technologies, it will be crucial to reverseengineer the observed social bot strategies: who they target, how they generate content, when they take action, and what topics they talk about. a systematic extrapolation of such information may enable identification of the puppet masters identifying the ‘puppet masters’ is an endeavor that can forge an important link between understanding bots and their masters. focusing on this connection can help shed light on the purpose of bots, and the policies and environment that facilitate their creation, whether personalistic, legislative, and ideological. the tweets and the findings this is one of the first studies that examines sectarian bots and their providence. through collecting millions of tweets on various gulf-specific hashtags between june 2016 and march 2017, and conducting process tracing using google sheets and mongod databases, this work determines the identity of the individual programmer behind the software generating the majority of bots on the saudi hashtag. it also surmises that a saudi arabian satellite company utilized this software to promote sectarian and anti-iranian discourses. in addition to finding the providence of these bots; this research determines that the volume of such accounts jeopardize free speech by; engaging in sectarian (anti-shia) discourse, promoting anti-iranian sentiment; and drowning out legitimate debate. in addition, they lionize the current leadership in saudi and tweet on hashtags that may be critical of the saudi or bahraini leadership. as a consequence of this proliferation of bots, which account for over 50% tweets on certain regional hashtags, this paper argues that twitter is becoming less and less effective as a tool for critical communication in the region, tying in with the debate about whether “twitter has become too much noise and not enough signal” (perras, 2015). similarly, this research raises questions about the effectiveness of organizations like twitter in tackling abuses to its platform in regions such as the middle east and the shortcomings of attempting to establish normative behavioral rules of bot use when dealing with unaccountable agencies (maréchal, 2016). this research also highlights the role parastatal institutions play in informational control strategies. by following concerns in repression studies of moving away from statecentric actors, this research exposes the fuzzy line between non-state and state institutions in engaging in counter-revolutionary or counter-hegemonic practices. given the existing sectarian conflict in the region, this research argues that the study of such tactics should focus not simply on the potential impact on audiences, but on what their occurrence might tell us about political dynamics and international relations in the region. references bahrain watch. (2016). “time for some internet problems in duraz”: bahraini isps impose internet curfew in protest village. retrieved from https://bahrainwatch.org/blog/2016/08/03/bahrain-internet-curfew/ burrough, b. (2016, november). how a grad student found spyware that could control anybody’s iphone from anywhere in the world, vanity fair, retrieved from http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/how-bill-marczakspyware-can-control-the-iphone ferrara, e., varol, o., davis, c., menczer, f., and flammini. a., (2015). the rise of social bots. x, x, article xx ( 201x), 11 pages. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/0000000.0000000 gallagher, e. (2015, august). mexican botnet dirty wars. presented at the chaos communication camp 2015, zehdenick, germany. retrieved from https://events.ccc.de/camp/2015/fahrplan/ events/6795.html maréchal, n. (2016). automation, algorithms, and politics| when bots tweet: toward a normative framework for bots on social networking sites (feature). international journal of communication, 10, 10. retrieved from http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/6180/1811 marczak, w., scott-railton, j., and marquis-boire, m. (2014, august 20-22). when governments hack opponents: a look at actors and technology. proceedings of the 23rd usenix security symposium. san diego, ca: retrieved from https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity14/sec14-papermarczak.pdf owen jones, m., (2013). social media, surveillance and social control in the bahrain uprising. westminster papers in communication and culture. 9(2), pp.69–92. doi: http://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.167 perras, m. cited in samuel, a. (2015). how bots took over twitter. harvard business review. retrieved from https://hbr.org/2015/06/how-bots-took-over-twitter shorey, s, and howard, p. (2016). automation, algorithms, and politics| automation, big data and politics: a research review, international journal of communication, vol. 10, 5032–5055. growth and evolution of online and real-life activism: the case of the_donald alex hogan etic lab saiph savage etic lab extended abstract in 2016 a new chapter was written by activists influenced by the rise of 4chan.org and the growth of members and activity on the alt-right and the_donald sub-reddits. informed and sometimes led by the practices and membership of their predecessors across a number of platforms, a large number of new ‘combatants’ took up the challenge of working on behalf of an attractive and implicitly disruptive ‘mainstream’ candidate for the presidency of the united states. in donald trump a large number of young people found a reason to enter into politics. the candidate, his status and message was clearly very appealing. but so too were technologies, venues and means for taking part in the ‘debate’. 4chan, social media and the internet was and is their playground and this was an opportunity unlike any before for people of their generation to engage with a subject they found appealing and in a way they could or indeed already had, mastered. the fall-out from their contribution to the success of donald trump and the consequential confusion and doubt that surrounds the role, content and future of more mainstream media is still unfolding. we present data that illustrates some of what has happened within that community since the us presidential election. our goal is to understand how the communities evolved both in terms of the change in behaviour of the members but also in the range and focus of their activities, using a framing model classifying the nature of the comments occurring on the main sub-reddits associated with the movement throughout 2016 to identify the nature, frequency and location of the active members and their contributions over time. tracking the evolution of the member’s contributions over time as the well as the growth (or otherwise) of the sub-reddits and the topics of conversation (trump, le pen etc.) as they evolved. the material for this session has been collected from a number of sources, perhaps the most important being the_donald sub-reddit itself. our data is framed by interviews with active members of the community who as new recruits in 2016 absorbed the existing 4chan/alt-right cultural values and techniques and then turned them as they rapidly evolved, to the task of supporting ‘the donald’. most importantly we can give some insight into what happened after the election, because as we are all beginning to realise, this story is far from over. using a content analysis of comments posted on the_donald, this article examines how the reddit comments were framed to mobilize collective action. such research is important given that the most critical debates of our time revolves around the “slacktivism hypothesis”: if the use of social media increases, civic engagement ultimately suffers (katz, j., michael barris, and anshul jain. 2013, halupka 2014). in recent years, we have observed that in most political movements while organizers believe that they are creating strong dialog with their audience by engaging on social media (guo, c., & saxton, g. d. 2013.) however, this rarely translates into collective action, e.g., the advancement of grassroot movements. the case of the_donald subreddit provides us with the exclusive opportunity to study the impact of social media on civic participation during one of the most extreme elections in history. our hope is that through this study we will better understand social media’s role in civic engagement, and the connection between slacktivism and modern activism. data collection and analysis trump formally announced his candidacy on june 16, 2015, becoming an official nominee on july 19, 2016 and a winner on november 9, 2016. we use google bigquery to collect 7 months of posts, and comments from the_donald sub-reddit. the data collection took a snapshot of all activity starting from june, 2016 until january 2017, allowing us to study how people participated in the political movement before, during, and after the election. our goal was to obtain a descriptive assessment of how people produced collective action. in particular, we wanted to track how active participants were of the_donald subreddit, and how they moved into other communities on reddit. two research methods were used: depth interviews and content analysis. the interviews were intended to gather the participants motives and expectations to participate in the movement and their willingness to support new related movements such as the french election. we conduct content analysis of the comments posted in the_donald sub-reddit considering gerhards and rucht’s (1992) collective action frames. we study this framing process during the different stages of the trump political campaign (before, during, and after the election). we examine how the reddit comments were framed to mobilize people and advance the political movement of donald trump. we characterize people’s participation in the_donald sub-reddit using analytical techniques focused on examining the framing of social movements. our aim is to understand the context under which this type of political campaign content gains attention and to investigate the behavioral patterns of active people on the_donald sub-reddit. in particular, we study how much popular content is attracting citizens to either: (1) discuss current events; (2) propose solutions to current problems; and (3) make calls to action. notice that these three topics allow us to study the different stages of a collective action. this analysis provides a window into how citizens are organizing collective action within a political movement and what aspect of the collective action is the one. we used upwork to hire two, college educated people to categorize the the_donald posts independently using gerhards and rucht (1992) three collective action frames: diagnostic, which define a problem or assign blame; prognostic, which detail possible solutions; and motivational, which incite individuals to act or mobilize. if disagreements existed we used a third coder to label comments upon which the first two coders had disagreed. we then used a “majority rule” approach to determine the action frame for those comments. with this approach we detected which percentage of comments were motivational or explicitly inciting people to take action during the period studied. we also counted the number of comments per participant to detect the most active participants on the_donald and tracked their activities in other reddit channels to study how the movement has started to move into other political spaces such as the french election. our work illustrates how rhythms of communication among participants of the_donald evolved over time and demonstrate that communities that emerge from a political event can sustain beyond a particular political event and evolve. we conclude by discussing possible applications of our findings for the design of future technologies for collective action references benford, robert d., and david a. snow. "framing processes and social movements: an overview and assessment." annual review of sociology 26.1 (2000): 611-639. guo, c., & saxton, g. d. 2013. tweeting social change: how social media are changing nonprofit advocacy. nonprofit and voluntary sector quarterly, 0899764012471585 halupka, max. "clicktivism: a systematic heuristic." policy & internet 6.2 (2014): 115132. katz, j., michael barris, and anshul jain. 2013. the social media president: barack obama and the politics of digital engagement. new york, ny: palgrave macmillan. global cyber troops: social media automation, manipulation, and trolling by state actors samantha bradshaw oxford internet institute global cyber troops: manipulating public opinion through political bots and state-sponsored trolling. in january 2015, the british army announced that its 77th brigade would “focus on nonlethal psychological operations using social networks like facebook and twitter to fight enemies by gaining control of the narrative in the information age” (solon, 2015). the primary task of this unit is to shape public behaviour through the use of “dynamic narratives” to combat the political propaganda disseminated by terrorist organizations. recent research and journalism has found that the united kingdom is not alone in allocating troops and funding for manipulating online political discourse (pham, 2013; chen, 2015; hunter, 2015). instead, this is part of a larger phenomenon whereby state actors are turning to internet platforms to exert influence over information flows and communication channels. cyber troops are government or military staff tasked with influencing public opinion and the behaviour of social media users. traditionally, scholars have focused on understanding how state actors conduct surveillance, censorship or politically motivated hacks against infrastructure or information (see for example deibert, 2013). in contrast, cyber troops are responsible for the promotion of government propaganda and the advancement of political ideologies. although, cyber troops will use traditional offensive cyber tactics such as hacking or surveillance to target users for trolling or harassment campaigns. however, the important distinction between cyber troops and other statebased actors operating in cyberspace is their role in actively shaping public sentiment. there are many different tools in the cyber troop arsenal available to manipulate opinions, spread propaganda and promote misinformation. one growing trend is the use of political bots to flood social media with spam and fake news during elections or contentious political events to manipulate public opinion or to inflate social media followers, likes, shares and retweets to provide a false sense of popularity (woolley 2016). scholars and journalists have uncovered instances of computational propaganda in countries such as australia (peel, 2014), iran (york, 2011), and russia (krebs, 2011). cyber troops also launch state-sponsored hate campaigns, harassment and trolling to silence political dissent and intimidate users online. some of these “troll farms” are directly a part of a government agency, such as sibgecov, part of the ministry of communication in venezuela (howard, 2015) while other troll farms operate as private government contractors, such as the agency in russia (chen, 2015). given that little is known about the differences in capacity, size, methods, and skillset of these practices in different countries, this paper conducts a cross-national study of global cyber troops. examining the 25 countries with the highest military expenditures in 2015, this paper takes an inventory of budget expenditures, staffing, organizational history, and organizational charters to analyze the size, scale, and extent to which different kinds of political regimes deploy cyber troops to influence and manipulate the digital public. data is being collected from primary and secondary sources between january 2017 and june 2017. primary sources of data are being collected from interview transcripts and observational notes with global cyber troops, and secondary sources are being collected from government publications, credible news articles, and peer-reviewed academic studies. this paper illustrates the extent to which governments are using the internet and social media platforms to spread propaganda and advance ideology. it will conclude by discussing the implications of cyber troops for democracy and the digital public sphere. references chen, adrian. (2015). the agency. new york times, 2 june. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html?_r=0 deibert, ron. (2015). black code: surveillance, privacy and censorship. mcclelland & stewart howard, m. forelle, p. howard, a. monroy-hernández, and s. savage (2015) political bots and the manipulation of public opinion in venezuela,” arxiv (25 july), at http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.07109. hunter, isabel. (2015) turkish ruling party’s social media campaigners deny being a troll army. the independent, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/turkishpresident-s-social-media-campaigners-deny-being-a-troll-army-10301599.html krebs, brian. (2011) twitter bots drown out anti-kremlin tweets. krebs on security, 11 december. http://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/12/twitter-bots-drown-out-anti-kremlintweets/ peel, t. (2013). the coalition’s twitter fraud and deception. independent australia, 26 august. http://www.independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/thecoalitionstwitterfraud-and-deception,5660 pham, nga. (2013). vietnam admits deploying bloggers to support government bbc news, 12 january. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-20982985 woolley, sam (2016) automating power: social bot interference in global politics. first monday, 21 (4). carrier wave spir final selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): sinnreich, a. & gilbert, j. (2019, october 2-5). the carrier wave principle. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the carrier wave principle aram sinnreich american university school of communication jesse gilbert dark matter media abstract hidden figures long buried beneath classic paintings by rembrandt, bruegel, and picasso are revealed through infrared and x-ray imaging, changing our understanding of cultural and social history. researchers point a camera at a bag of potato chips stored behind a wall of soundproof glass, and “eavesdrop” on the people in the room with it, by resynthesizing sound waves from the microscopic ripples on the bag’s surface. police arrest former police officer joseph james deangelo as the alleged golden state killer, decades after his horrific crimes, based on a match between dna samples and an open source genealogy website. analysis of public data from a fitness app reveals the location and movements of secret military bases in war zones such as syria and afghanistan. a state judge orders online retail titan amazon to hand over recordings of a private citizen’s household collected by its echo “smart device” as evidence in a murder trial. each of these stories has something in common: cultural and technological artifacts (a painting, an app, a bag of chips), placed into new social and institutional contexts, and with the aid of computational technologies, end up revealing far more than their creators originally intended them to, and, in many cases, more than they could have imagined. anecdotes such as these are often treated as sui generis novelties, strange episodes at the periphery of normal social, cultural and technological processes. when they are discussed within a broader context, the scope of discussion is typically limited to the particularities of the case: the forensic analysis of old paintings is presented as an unalloyed benefit to art historians; the fitness app data are interpreted as a cybersecurity threat with consequences for america’s strategic military interests; the use of amazon echo recordings in a murder case revives longstanding debates about the relative social benefits of surveillance and privacy. not only are these contexts wholly separate from one another, each is framed as contiguous with pre-digital practices and concerns. the addition of computational analysis, therefore, is relegated to little more than a new twist on an old story: forensic art history adds a new tool; military security faces a new threat. while each of these contexts is certainly appropriate for the case study in question, and each site-specific discussion deserves merit in its own right, we argue in this article that the broader principle which unites them is also worthy of investigation, and may have profound implications for media studies as a field of research, and for media as a site of social action. individually, the examples we cite may represent historical continuity within their separate spheres, but collectively they represent a distinct rupture in the relationship between media and society, and require us to reinvestigate our assumptions about culture, technology, and policy, as well as the interdependencies among them. specifically, we argue that, while anecdotes such as those we have cited are commonly understood and presented as proverbial “exceptions that prove the rule,” or what are often referred to as “edge cases,” in the parlance of engineering and law (powell, 2015), and therefore notable for their ambiguous ethics or interpretive valence, they are actually exemplary of a much broader principle that applies to all cultural artifacts, which for reasons that will become clear, we refer to as the “carrier wave principle.” the rudiments of this principle can be summarized thus: ● there is no theoretical limit to the amount and variety of knowledge that may be produced from a given cultural artifact. this may be understood as analogous to the mathematical concept of “n-way,” often used in computer science (e.g. carroll & chang, 1970; kolda & bader, 2009), to describe a limitless set of possible relationships among elements within or between data sets. ● as a given artifact is displaced temporally, geographically, and/or culturally from its origins, the tacit assumptions and omissions intrinsic to the circumstances of its production become increasingly evident, an epistemic shift that reframes the artifact not merely as a transmissive vessel for information, but as a site of inquiry itself. this n-way process is iterative and lateral, and as one episteme gives way to or competes with another (foucault, 2005), multiple “layers” of knowledge may be produced from the same artifact. ● these two interrelated conditions are immanent to mediated culture, and have been discussed, in various ways, by social theorists for thousands of years. they are both premised on a dialectical relationship between technology, on the one hand, and culture, on the other. ● the addition of ubiquitous computational processing to a globally networked communications infrastructure has “technologized” culture in a way that collapses this dialectic, eliminating the distance between production, transmission, archiving, reception, and analysis. the sociotechnical affordances of this newly synthetic cultural infrastructure have catalyzed a cascade of new epistemes, which are so numerous and diverse that they challenge the capacity of individuals, communities, and institutions to adapt. the challenges precipitated by the digitization of culture have been discussed extensively in terms related to crises of social institutions and power, including the need for “big data ethics” (boyd & crawford, 2012), the disruptions to traditional media and communications industries (craig & cunningham, 2019), and the dangers of algorithmic governance (gillespie, 2018). our aim in this article is to raise an additional crisis, which we view as causally proximate to the others: namely, that as the cultural infrastructure has become increasingly technologized, everyday users have become commensurately less capable of understanding the consequences of their actions and interactions. specifically, they are largely unaware, and uninformed, about the layers of knowledge that may be produced by any number of third parties from their creative, consumptive, and communicative practices. in short, digital technology — marketed to consumers as a tool of social progress and individual empowerment — has for the most part been designed and deployed to achieve fundamentally different ends. primary among these is the production, stockpiling, synthesis, and commercial and political exploitation of data about users (west, 2019). in this article, we argue that, in order to develop cultural competencies, practices, and institutions necessary for digital technology to deliver on its promises, we must first theorize the conditions under which it has failed to do so. references boyd, d., & crawford, k. (2012). critical questions for big data: provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon. information, communication & society, 15(5), 662-679. carroll, j. d., & chang, j. j. (1970). analysis of individual differences in multidimensional scaling via an n-way generalization of “eckart-young” decomposition. psychometrika, 35(3), 283-319. craig, d., & cunningham, s. (2019). social media entertainment: the new intersection of hollywood and silicon valley. new york: nyu press. foucault, m. (2005). the order of things. new york: routledge. gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. new haven, ct: yale university press. kolda, t. g., & bader, b. w. (2009). tensor decompositions and applications. siam review, 51(3), 455-500. west, s. m. (2019). data capitalism: redefining the logics of surveillance and privacy. business & society, 58(1), 20–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/0007650317718185 selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): hare, k. (2019, october 2-5). sensorial litter: building reflexive trust through examining digital detritus. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. sensorial litter’: building reflexive trust through examining digital detritus kathleen (kaye) hare department of language and literacy education, university of british columbia introduction this paper explores how digital media can be utilized to uncover researchers’ emotional detritus, for the purpose of reflexively examining the ways in which researchers’ own embodied experiences shape ethnographic knowledge production. in particular, i seek to advance reflexive inquiry into the ‘too intense’ experiences that can be shed or refuse/d by researchers’ bodies during fieldwork. i first draw from phenomenological embodiment theories to put forward the idea of sensorial litter to conceptualize these too intense embodied experiences. i posit that when refuse/d from the body, too intense experiences are not lost, but rather manifest materially in digital media litter (e.g., anxiety filled texts, emails to supervisors, search histories). locating three pieces of sensorial litter from my own ethnographic research, i then demonstrate the ways in which attention to this litter may add critical depth to a researcher’s embodiment-based reflexive engagements. i question – “how might examining so-coined sensorial litter help us build trust in our own reflexive practices during ethnographic research”? reflexivity in ethnographic research noted by pink (2015), reflexivity is at the core of digital/sensory ethnography, because the researcher’s own embodied experience is the lens through which ethnographic knowledge is produced. an embodied ethnographic approach requires the researcher to consider both: a) subjectivity – the ways in which embodied notions of environments, activities, experiences and knowledge are brought into research, and b) intersubjectivity – how the social interactions within a project are fully embodied and constitute events that shape the course of research (pink, 2015). challenges exist though in capturing embodied experiences through conventional reflexive methods, such as voice and field notes (mazanderani, 2017). furthermore, it can be particularly difficult for a researcher to not only capture intensely felt moments, but to engage in the self-reappraisal necessary to understand the impact of those moments on the research knowledge produced. intense embodiment sensorial litter responding to reflexivity-based challenges, i put forward sensorial litter to help articulate the ‘too intense’ moments that can occur during ethnographic fieldwork. i theoretically ground this concept in allen-collinson and owton (2015)’s phenomenological scholarship on intense embodiment. as detailed by allen-collinson & owton, intense embodiment describes moments when concentrated experiences of corporeality are triggered. i suggest, however, that that some corporeal experiences can be too intense for the body to embody and thus are refuse/d or shed by the body. for example, a researcher may experience fleeting, whirling anxious thoughts; spatial suspensions of disorientation; and voids from pushing away difficult feelings. in line with manalansan (2014), i posit that too intense experiences are not lost when shed from the body, but rather manifest materially as reclaimable ‘sensorial litter’. for example, reflexive examination of the digital media used during such moments might uncover anxiety filled texts, emails to supervisors, and notable search histories. indeed, as suggested by couldry (2012) and pink et al. (2016) – who also de-centre media in media research recognizing that media are fully embedded in activities, technologies, materialities and feelings – corporeal realities are often augmented through virtual connections. by focusing reflexive engagement on the often-ineffable aspects of fieldwork, sensorial litter provides a valuable opportunity for progressing ethnographic methods. during and through intense experiences, a researcher’s corporeal focus may shift and vary, introducing bodily information used in meaning-making processes (poyntz & hoechsmann, 2011). examination of sensorial litter can thus add critical depth to the researchers’ reflexive engagements with their own embodiment. the value of re-claiming litter i examine three pieces of sensorial litter from my own doctoral research project to demonstrate the value in re-claiming this litter. my doctoral study is a sensory ethnography on my and trainee sexual educators’ participation in a sexual health educator certificate program. sensorial litter #1: apple car play although i had intended to conduct a series of group data collection sessions at a public site, it quickly became apparent that i would be conducting mainly individual sessions for the study to proceed. when negotiating these sessions, all the participants requested we meet in their own homes, which was something i had not prepared for in advance. although i very rarely use a gps device while driving, i found myself using apple car play to provide me with directions every time i visited the participants’ homes (even though i was or became familiar with each location). i was very focused on avoiding getting ‘lost’. reflecting on this, i was likely responding to the disorientation of unexpectedly spanning a public/private research boundary. i had originally conceived the project as taking place publicly, despite the personal nature of exploring participants’ ‘felt-sense’ of sexual health educator training. i now, however, was tasked with understanding how to manage my knowledge of intimate details of participants lives: gaining in-depth understandings of socio/economic status realities, being privy to private conversations with kin, and engaging with the materiality of their homes. reflexive prompt: how does the spanning of private/public boundaries impact my perceptions of participants? sensorial litter #2: during data collection, i went through a difficult break-up with a romantic partner. this information was unintentionally and upsettingly shared within the educator course, when i became emotional during a morning “check-in” activity. at the end of the day, i found myself teary in the washroom, when three people happened to enter the space: two of my participants and a new friend. the situation settled with the two participants choosing to stay and talk to me, while the friend chose to hesitantly leave and later send a follow-up text. during our resulting talk, the participants also expressed that i could suspend the study, if desired. this incident highlights the unique bonds researchers and participants form doing body-based work. although less close as “friends”, the participants felt comfortable entering a moment of extreme emotional vulnerability with me, while the other person chose not to, perhaps feeling like an intruder. this incident further highlights the complex ways that participants and researchers negotiate different layers of identity. reflexive prompt: in what ways do the bonds formed through body-based data collection shape the research findings? sensorial litter #3: about halfway through the data collection, i became extremely focused on my academic future, despite not being set about pursuing an academic career. i researched post-doctoral programs, created reference lists of journals and conferences, searched for specific teaching opportunities, and skyped my very supportive supervisor to discuss all of my findings. i was taken aback, however, when she reminded me that i needed to be focused on my data collection at that moment. i was surprised by the supervisory re-direct, because from my perspective, i was focused on my data collection. i was trying to determine how to actualize the wide-ranging ideas emerging from the interdisciplinary project. while i re-focused on the specifics of my data collection, this orienting question remained at the back of my mind. reflexive prompt: how does working to fit within disciplinarian bounds shape the knowledge i produced out of this study? collectively, i note how sensorial litter can provide concrete entry points into the ways in which the researcher’s sensing body is perpetually in flux, shaping and re-shaping throughout fieldwork. i also argue that sensorial litter can facilitate reflexive engagement that is many-sited, intertextual, resistant to holism, and perceptive ethnographic research’s inevitable shortcomings. references allen-collinson, j., & owton, h. (2015). intense embodiment: senses of heat in women’s running and boxing. body & society, 21(2), 245–268. couldry, n. (2012). media, society, world: social theory and digital media practice. malden, ma: polity press. manalansan, m. f. (2014). the "stuff" of archives: mess, migration, and queer. radical history review, 2014(120), 94-107. mazanderani, f. h. (2017). “speaking back” to the self: a call for “voice notes” as reflective practice for feminist ethnographers. journal of international women’s studies, 17(3), 80-94. pink, s. (2015). doing sensory ethnography (2nd ed.). thousand oaks, california: sage publications, inc. pink, s., horst, h. a., postill, j., hjorth, l., lewis, t., & tacchi, j. (2016). digital ethnography: principles and practice. los angles: sage. poyntz, s. r., & hoechsmann, m. (2011). children's media culture in a digital age. sociology compass, 5(7), 488–498. final aoir2020_panel_disconnection_designs_and_desires sep 13.pdf suggested citation (apa): karppi, t., chia, a., lampinen, a., feldman, z., dieter, m., ferreira, p, & beatie, a. (2020, october 28-31). disconnection: designs and desires. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 disconnection: designs and desires tero karppi university of toronto aleena chia simon fraser university airi lampinen stockholm university zeena feldman king's college london michael dieter university of warwick pedro ferreira it-university of copenhagen alex beattie victoria university of wellington introductory statement “we can disconnect, risk less prosperity and hope jobs that are lost come back. or we can connect more, try to do more great things, try to work on even greater prosperity, and then work to aggressively share that prosperity with everyone,” mark zuckerberg the facebook ceo reportedly stated in a keynote speech at the apec, in 2016 after the election of donald trump as the president of the usa (afp 2016). zuckerberg’s statement suggests that our prosperity, conditions that make a good life, are now contingent on social media connectivity. an opposite view to zuckerberg’s statement comes from the so-called “techlash;” a criticism by journalists, users, and politicians who are asking social media platforms to account for turning users into addicts, destroying democracy, and killing privacy. in these views, the designs of social media do not bring 2 a better world for everyone but quite on the contrary, they erode the foundations of our civil society by making us vulnerable to the dissemination of fake news, spreading of political propaganda and manipulation of users through psychological modeling. the conceptual notion of disconnection is becoming central to how we negotiate the boundaries and conditions of our online existence (light 2014; syvertsen 2017; karppi 2018; brenner 2019). instead of simply seeing connection and disconnection as binaries that negate each other, the papers of our panel argue for a more nuanced understanding of how disconnection can be a force that produces new forms of connectivity and vice versa (see light & cassidy 2014). positioning disconnection as the absolute outside of connectivity would only render it incomprehensible, and that would only serve the purposes of tech companies who want to make the option disappear. thus, by focusing on the designs and desires of disconnection we aim not to ask the essentialist question of what disconnection is, but to find answers to minor questions such as what process have led to the desires to disconnect; how does something disconnect; when does it disconnect; what does it disconnect; and whose disconnection it is? the papers of this panel focus on the desires to choose to disconnect and the designs that can either satisfy or suppress those desires. zeena feldman examines how people talk about logging on and logging off by analyzing a dataset of interviews and surveys from 477 participants in 35 countries. in this study, many participants framed their networked practices as existing beyond choice. one of the implications of the study is that digital participation has become structurally necessary for users and society, calling into question the conventional frame of user agency. in other words, social media platforms have become utilities in users’ daily lives and the more integrated they become with users’ everyday, the more important the choice to control what happens online becomes. tero karppi’s paper picks up this angle and focuses on the discourses of facebook’s new off-facebook activity tool. by using the vocabulary of behavioral economics, the paper argues that while facebook’s builds tools for the users to take control of their privacy and allows them to disconnect their data flows between the platform and the advertisers, the company also nudges the users not to make that choice by setting the defaults for sharing, appealing on users’ desires for personalized content, and eventually claiming that if targeted marketing is prevented the web will no longer be free. the third paper looks at how being physically away from the technologically-infused world makes users choose to reconfigure their engagements with technology. by analyzing over 30 interviews, airi lampinen and pedro ferreira point out that being away directs the attention to what is meaningful and purposeful in connections and these perspectives can be helpful for technology design. michael dieter traces the spread of card deck methodologies from scandinavian participatory design to their prominence in contemporary behavioural and user experience design practice. this paper uses interface criticism to reflect on how card decks in design are used to drive commercial patterns of user engagement, conversion and capture and asks what kind of alternative ensembles and disconnective paths from the current configurations of platform capitalism might emerge by redirecting these formats. lastly, 3 alex beattie and aleena chia discuss the platformization of disconnection by analyzing complementarities between the light phone, a sleek mobile device with minimal “smart” functions and google’s wellbeing experiments, a branded collection of digital and analog applications that playfully frame disconnection as dilettantism. drawing from developer interviews and promotional materials, this paper proposes that by playing both sides of the techlash, tech companies use the institutionalization of ethics to reinvent the new spirit of capitalism. references afp, “facebook’s zuckerberg urges post-trump world not to ‘disconnect’,” the times of israel, november 21, 2016, https://www.timesofisrael.com/facebookszuckerberg-urges-post-trump-world-not-todisconnect/. brennen b. 2019. opting out of digital media. routledge. hesselberth p., 2018. “discourses on disconnectivity and the right to disconnect,” new media & society 20(5): 1994–2010. karppi t.. 2018. disconnect: facebook’s affective bonds. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. light b.. 2014. disconnecting with social networking sites. palgrave macmillan uk. light b. and cassidy e. 2014. ‘strategies for the suspension and prevention of connection: rendering disconnection as socioeconomic lubricant with facebook’: new media & society 16 (7): 1169–84. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814544002. syvertsen t. 2017. media resistance protest, dislike, abstention. palgrave macmillan. 4 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 on quitting social media: agency is a red herring zeena feldman king's college london in the uk, we check our smartphones, on average, every 12 minutes (ofcom 2018: 59). that’s 90 screen sessions a day, assuming we sleep 8 hours a night. in the uk, more than three-quarters of the population has at least one social media profile and facebook alone reaches 90% of us (ibid., 73). such pervasive connectivity has its critics. among them, sherry turkle warns that ‘we often find ourselves bored because we have become accustomed to a constant feed of connection, information, and entertainment’ (turkle 2015: 4). but beyond condemnation, how can we make sense of the mediated, always-on lives many of us lead? and how can we understand practices of digital disconnection therein? today’s digital platforms and the habits they enable are riddled with affective contradiction. while social networking sites and smartphone apps may offer convenience and conviviality, they can also act as gateways for anxiety, competitiveness and unwanted obligation. this paper seeks to theorise and empirically unpack the paradoxes and ambivalences around digital participation in order to challenge the normative role of ‘choice’ which animates many discussions about social media (dis)connection. tech consumers and analysts routinely claim that if users are dissatisfied with a particular digital service, they can simply stop using it. in other words, the solution is to go cold turkey and ‘just say no’. but in this paper, i argue that analysing user experiences, practices and motivations through the lens of individual agency misses the point precisely because that approach profoundly misunderstands how choice operates in contemporary digital culture. the fact that platform monopolies structure today’s communications landscape – consider, for instance, that facebook is the world’s most populated country (clement 2020) and that facebook owns both instagram and whatsapp (shead 2019) – makes clear that opting out is not a realistic option for many. this paper’s analysis of disconnection practices and its critique of user agency are grounded in the quitting social media project and its dataset of survey results from 477 participants in 35 countries, 155 ‘audience diaries’ from a participatory art installation and 12 in-depth interviews. quitting social media examined the discursive landscape of 5 digital connectivity and disconnection. it explored how people talked about the relationship between logging on and logging off. what were the ways users negotiated tensions between the pressures and pleasures of participation? how did they make sense of their continued social media use despite their frequently articulated desires – and occasional attempts – to disconnect? and why was disconnection so affectively fraught for participants when, functionally, it seemed like such an easy thing to do? here, the red herring of agency rears its head. indeed, many participants framed their networked practices as existing beyond choice. this was in part because they regarded digital participation as structurally necessary – for themselves, their social lives and their economic livelihoods. for many, digital connection was seen as essential because ‘every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on facebook and instagram […] time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing”’ (odell 2019: 15). at the same time, participants also understood social media beyond the simplistic hyperbole of headlines. rather than straightforward celebration or condemnation, users narrated their social media entanglements with nuance, habitually addressing the complexities and paradoxes of (dis)connection. it emerged that, for them, disconnecting from a service or a device was not so much a rupture in connectivity as it was a means of enabling future participation. usage stoppages were thus regarded as practices consistent with digital culture and as deeply embedded therein. among the data points that most clearly captured this pertain to how participants managed social media apps on their smartphones: 93% of survey respondents had installed a social media app on their phone, and 85% later deleting one of these apps. yet nearly 60% of respondents eventually re-installed a deleted social app. the paper concludes by mapping these findings onto the economist albert hirschman’s (1970) seminal framework for understanding organisational failure and success. in exit, voice, and loyalty, hirschman finds that consumers respond in one of two ways to perceived deteriorations in a service’s quality. they might exercise ‘voice’ and try to rehabilitate the service by taking communicative action – for example, via petitions, referenda and public consultations. or, if they have the means to do so, they might ‘exit’ the failing service and move onto an alternative. hirschman concluded that ‘the greater the availability of exit, the less likely voice will be used’. and this principle was articulated by many of my participants, who said people were free to leave if they weren’t happy with a particular platform. for them, individual action – i.e. exit – seemed the only option; no one talked about working together to make systemic change. yet my participants also acknowledged the impossibility of complete withdrawal from digital connectivity. as such, i explore how hirschman’s strategies of ‘voice’ and ‘exit’ can be rehabilitated in the context of beyond choice epistemology, where it is increasingly seen as both necessary and impossible to disconnect. 6 references clement, j. 2020. ‘number of monthly active facebook users worldwide as of 4th quarter 2019’. statistica. available at https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebookusersworldwide. hirschman, a. o. 1970. exit, voice, and loyalty: responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states. cambridge: harvard university press. odell, j. 2019. how to do nothing: resisting the attention economy. brooklyn and london: melville house ofcom. 2018. communications market report 2018. available at https://www.ofcom.org.uk/research-and-data/multi-sector-research/cmr/cmr-2018. shead, s. 2019. ‘facebook owns the four most downloaded apps of the decade’. bbc news. available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50838013. turkle, s. 2015. reclaiming conversation: the power of talk in a digital age. new york: penguin press. 7 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 off-facebook activity tero karppi university of toronto “the future is private,” claimed the message on the screen behind mark zuckerberg at facebook’s f8 developer conference in 2019. “privacy”, a notion important to users but absent from facebook’s official vocabulary (vaidhyanathan 2018: 72-73) had suddenly become the slogan of the company’s future plans. this increased awareness of privacy was likely a response to the 2018 case of cambridge analytica revelations and the 2016 psychographic profiling and targeting of voters based on facebook data, which gave rise to campaigns such as #deletefacebook demanding that users disconnect their facebook profiles. on august 20, 2019, the company gave its users the first example of what the more private future could look like in the form of the off-facebook activity tool. the off-facebook activity tool lets the user see a summary of the apps and websites that by default are allowed to send facebook information about the user’s activity. if the user so chooses, they can clear out this information from their accounts. the choice to block the data flows from particular advertisers or businesses does not stop online advertising but the company says it directly impacts the content the user sees: “you'll still see the same number of ads, but the ads you see may be less personalized to you” (facebook a). in this paper, which is based on a longer chapter in the forthcoming undoing networks book, i will draw on the work of pepita hesselberth (2018), who sees disconnection as a process that does not negate connectivity but gives rise to an outside which is immanently present. i argue that the constitution of this outside and its politicization is at the heart of the off-facebook activity tool. by utilizing a framework which mixes approaches from nudge theory and software studies, i will do a close reading on the promotional materials of the off-facebook activity tool; i will map how the tool technically draws borders between the facebook platform, its users, and advertisers by disconnecting links between them. i also analyze how the discourses that surround the tool nudge the user towards particular forms of exteriority and exclusion. in other words, when the off-facebook activity tool defines facebook’s outside it does it in practice as a function of technology, but also in the surrounding discourses. the limits of the outside are technical, social, and psychological at the same time. 8 “the best person to be in control of data is you,” the off-facebook activity tool press release declares (facebook b). the discourses of the off-facebook activity tool nudge the user to evaluate their choice to disconnect through gains and losses encouraging them to keep on using the system rather than blocking it or giving up entirely. individual control that takes the form of choice highlighted by the promotional materials has a long history in the development of privacy tools. the choice is also a central notion in richard thaler and cass sunstein’s (2008) nudge theory which comes from the field of behavioral economics. the authors argue that human behavior cannot be controlled by relying on rationality in decision-making situations, for example, through providing as much information as possible. instead, people should be nudged toward certain behaviors by modifying the environment in which choices take place. nudges ever so slightly modify the environment in order to steer individuals’ decisions. important to the effectiveness of nudge theory then is that individuals stay within the system or environment where they can be influenced: the outside becomes a non-choice. in my analysis, i focus on four instances where instead of privacy, the nudges of the offfacebook activity tool are designed to steer the individuals to choose to stay connected not only with the facebook platform but also with its practices of targeted and personalized advertising. the first nudge is the choice of default settings: as information scholars among others have demonstrated users tend not to change their defaults (shah & sandvig 2008). the second nudge aims to define the off-facebook is a space constituted by third parties such as advertisers. research however indicates that these third parties are not external to the platform but elementarily integrated with it by application programming interfaces and software development kits; third parties are what financially sustains the operation of the platform (helmond et al. 2019). rather than constituting an actual outside the off-facebook space camouflages the importance of user data for the company’s business by naming the advertisers as outsiders. the third and the fourth nudge are connected to the second one; the promotional materials make a strong argument that if the user does not allow targeted marketing, facebook and the entire web will soon no longer be free. by defaulting users, the promotional discourses imply that the user is in debt for the platform and personal data is the repayment. thus, the third nudge declares that the best way to repay is to not adjust off facebook activity settings. the fourth nudge exploits users’ tendencies for loss aversion a belief that “losses are weighted substantially more than objectively commensurate gains” (kahneman et al. 1990). in other words, the choice to disconnect and use the offfacebook activity tool is not selected until it becomes significantly more valuable than connectivity. by placing disconnection and the use of the tool as a risk to the entire free web the outside of connectivity vanishes as an impossibility. references facebook a. “how do i disconnect my off-facebook activity?”, facebook help center, accessed january 29, 2020, https://www.facebook.com/help/287199741901674?helpref=faq_content. 9 facebook b. “the best person to be in control of data is you,” facebook, accessed january 28, 2020, https://www.facebook.com/off-facebook-activity. helmond a, nieborg d.b., and van der vlist f.n. 2019. “facebook’s evolution: development of a platform-as-infrastructure,” internet histories 3(2): 123–46. hesselberth p. 2018. “discourses on disconnectivity and the right to disconnect,” new media & society 20(5): 1994–2010. kahneman d., knetsch j.l., and thaler r.h. 1990. “experimental tests of the endowment effect and the coase theorem,” journal of political economy 98: 1325– 1348, 1326. shah r.c. and sandvig c. 2008. “software defaults as de facto regulation: the case of the wireless internet,” information, communication & society 11(1): 25–46, 41. thaler r.h. and sunstein c.r. 2008. nudge: improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. new haven: yale university press. vaidhyanathan s. 2018. antisocial media: how facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy. oxford: oxford university press. 10 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 disconnecting from everyday technology use: lessons from long-term outdoor activities airi lampinen stockholm university pedro ferreira it-university of copenhagen introduction one way in which we can disconnect from networked technologies is by radically altering our engagement with, and being in, the world. in our ongoing research, we have turned to long-term outdoor activities, such as bike touring and hiking, as an empirical site that can inspire fresh ways of conceptualizing how people relate with technology. what happens to routine and habitual uses of technology in a context that is crafted to allow for the enjoyment of disconnection and away-ness from everyday life? disconnection and demands communicated through technology the outdoors as an idea has long served efforts to rethink how people relate with technology, often drawing on the idea of nature as an escape from modern life. discussions about technology use and non-use (e.g. baumer et al., 2015) point to some of the contradictions that individuals face in relating to digital technologies. harmon and mazmanian (2013) argue that discourses about disconnection pose "unreasonable expectations of agency and action on both the part of technologies and people", calling for more complicated stories of technologies and their relationships with values in conversations, publications, and future designs. connecting closely with our empirical case, harmon (2015) questions whether the overuse of technology is really a problem of technology, or rather a problem with balancing work and life. she points out that we lack a serious questioning of the ‘political economy’ of technology and work. in brief, the problem might not be overuse of technology per se, but rather how work (and the broader economic situation) put demands on us — and how those demands come to be communicated through technology. as with simmel’s famous discussion of the clock in metropolitan life, it was 11 not that the physical clock itself restructured the modern world but rather that clock time came to be used to routinize and intensify the ordinary lives of city inhabitants. case study: technology use in long-term outdoor activities instead of addressing non-use with the starting point of self-regulation, or nudging people to constrain their digital engagement, our empirical research turns to experiences of ‘being outdoors’ which are commonly experienced as being away from everyday life, including its routines, pressures, and habitual uses of technology. our goal with this research is to examine how technology use gets recontextualized and what that might imply for the theorizing of disconnection more broadly. we focused on long-term activities as we suspected these would entail a more radical reworking of both technology use and, more broadly, everyday life. we conducted in-depth, semi-structured, individual interviews with 24 participants between april 2018 and march 2019. the interviews took place over video calls whenever possible, with voice calls as a backup option. they ranged from just over 30 minutes to over three hours, with most in the range of 50-80 minutes. all interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. they are being collaboratively analyzed by the authors through an iterative, material-driven process. in the following, we discuss initial findings regarding two broad themes: (1) experiences of being away and (2) practices of managing disconnection while away. our examples here focus on bike touring. findings: managing disconnection while away firstly, the ways in which participants orient their lives and bodies towards long-term outdoor activities implies significant restructuring and reorganization of their digital ecosystems. participants often described the value of bike touring precisely in how it disrupted everyday routines by establishing others, summed by one participant, jeff, in this way: "i mean, the routine is pretty simple. you just wake up, camp, and ride all day. eat food when you need it. set up camp and just enjoy each other’s company." the forms of disconnection that participants cherished were mainly not attained through purposeful self-discipline, but rather by re-orienting routines towards activities that resist the constant use of digital technologies. the attention-seeking designs characteristic of digitally connected technologies, are out of place in the context of all-consuming yet enjoyable activities like bike touring. hence, their use simply becomes less relevant for the duration of such activities. secondly, and in line with hesselberth’s (2018) reflections on the paradoxes of disconnection, disconnection only exists in relation to being connected. we found that participants managed disconnection to create an enjoyable space of away-ness while connectivity still enabled their journeys by allowing them to accommodate important commitments while away. being outdoors was, for the most part, actively, and explicitly, designed as time away from the digital demands of social media or messaging 12 applications. while participants expressed a broad desire to disconnect, for them, outdoor experiences were not a matter of abstaining completely from technology use. rather, they sought to balance purposeful disconnection with limited connectivity. finally, bike touring, given its duration and physicality, is not an activity that can be done part-time. it forces a reorientation of most aspects of life and requires deliberate efforts to carve out space and time. technologies are designed often in ways that assume and enforce particular forms of living on their users. wajcman’s study of calendar designers in silicon valley (2019) makes a compelling argument of how the designing of time in our technologies structures and determines how we organize ourselves. bike touring provokes quite a significant split with how technologies tend to organize work and everyday lives. our participants needed to re-negotiate their digital standing, which was both a burden, but also precisely what they cherished in bike touring. considering bike touring also presents us with an opportunity to better understand – and even design for – different relations to work and disconnection. we need to challenge our assumptions on what constitutes work and how much of our work rhythms and routines are built in to the technologies we use, including those that we do not even consider to be technologies for ‘work’. conclusion outdoor activities are commonly presented as an escape from our technology-infused world. in contrast, our interviews reveal experiences that are heavily dependent on technology, both digital and not. however, digital technology is reconfigured when taken out of its ordinary, often urban and indoor, context. long-term outdoor activities are thus particularly well positioned to reveal how digital technologies can serve to lock us into traditional work rhythms but also enable breaking away from them (ferreira et al., 2019). by illustrating what happens when everyday rhythms are disrupted, these activities allow us to imagine more purposeful and diverse ways of managing (dis)connection (helms et al., 2019). acknowledgements we thank our colleagues karey helms and barry brown who have worked with us on collecting the empirical materials for this project and co-authored related publications. this work has been supported by the swedish foundation for strategic research project rit15-0046. references baumer, e. p., burrell, j., ames, m. g., brubaker, j. r., & dourish, p. 2015. on the importance and implications of studying technology non-use. interactions, 22(2), 52-56. ferreira, p., helms, k., brown, b., & lampinen, a. 2019. from nomadic work to nomadic leisure practice: a study of long-term bike touring. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 3(cscw), 1–20. 13 harmon, e., & mazmanian, m. 2013. stories of the smartphone in everyday discourse: conflict, tension & instability. in proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1051-1060). harmon, m. e. 2015. computing as context: experiences of dis/connection beyond the moment of non/use. ph.d. dissertation. uc irvine. helms, k., ferreira, p., brown, b., & lampinen, a. 2019. away and (dis) connection: reconsidering the use of digital technologies in light of long-term outdoor activities. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 3(group), 1–20. hesselberth p. 2018. “discourses on disconnectivity and the right to disconnect,” new media & society 20(5): 1994–2010. wajcman, j. 2019. how silicon valley sets time. new media & society, 21(6), 12721289. 14 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 repurposing ux design decks: interface criticism, dark patterns and the desire to disconnect michael dieter university of warwick this paper discusses an interdisciplinary research project that explores the use of card decks in user experience design (ux) practice, and the possibilities of repurposing them as a means to reflect on the problems of social media disconnection. card decks are variously used as a way to generate insights and assist with problem-solving (wölfel and merritt, 2013). they are thought to aid in lateral thinking and are increasingly used to aid innovation. from method cards from agencies like ideo (2003), seminal ‘creative constraints’ decks like brian eno and peter schmidt’s oblique strategies: over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas (1975) or decks to standardize government digital services like 18f in the united states (2015), these methodological systems have gained increasing influence with the valorisation of creativity and design as a means to address a wide array of issues. with this general trend, moreover, they have become a conduit for embedding behavioural and psychological ‘expertise’ into the design of software products and services. in this way, they have become important resources for commercial cultures of connectivity and the ‘psycho-computational complex’ (stark 2018), even while also initiating new potential modes of participation, organisation and ways of working collectively. the use of cards by artists, intellectuals and writers to produce creative work, nevertheless, has a deeper history. as media historians like peter krapp (2018) and markus krajewski (2011) have shown, these systems have long been a mainstay of intellectual equipment. while state bureaucracies and libraries have used card indexes for purposes of stabilizing knowledge, philosophers and theorists from hegel to barthes developed card systems to unsettle their established ways of thinking, serving at once as a memory device and channel for creativity based on idiosyncratic collection criteria, alongside epistemologies of play and chance. with the emphasis on innovative thinking in the enlightenment era, such document systems were typically positioned as being ‘off-the-record’ or background materials (indeed, schmidt’s precursor deck to oblique strategies was even called ‘the thoughts behind the thoughts’). in this respect, as krapp notes, cards were often considered as a ‘private infrastructure’ that remained hidden and whose presence easily troubled the image of the spontaneously original, 15 autonomous author. within networked conditions of informational production, however, these presumptions and relations have notably shifted, as these systems frequently take on a more explicitly ‘open’ and collective role. in doing so, they have been made productive as a creativity dispositif (reckwitz 2017), whilst shaping the design of software that further challenges these prior notions of invention and discovery. contemporary ux card decks, accordingly, maintain an ambiguous potential for unsettling established ways of doing and knowing that cuts across mainstream design practice. the use of cards for design can, for instance, be found in the scandinavian tradition of participatory design, where contributions from prospective users of a system are solicited through ‘pre-digital’ paper means with a commitment to democracy and agonistic exchange (gregory 2003). yet such methods are also readily apparent in design thinking paradigms, where they primarily serve to identify untapped market opportunities and reinforce new hierarchies of labour (irani 2018). the use of design pattern decks can, in a similar way, effectively assist with the dissemination of technical expertise and ‘know-how’, yet also are frequently a resource for ‘growth hacking’ and maximising user engagement in ways that encourage compulsive use and distraction (schüll 2014; lovink 2018). such decks, in other words, bring together a wide range of socio-technical issues attached to ux practice and, accordingly, additionally provide an ideal means for exploring difficult ethico-political questions for cultures of connection, while speculating on alternatives. this paper draws from two recent workshops held at the centre for interdisciplinary methodologies (cim) at university of warwick and the 2020 transmediale festival in berlin that aimed precisely to reflect on such issues in this domain of creative practice, particularly to consider the epistemologies, technologies and techniques that inform the design of captivating interface experiences. inspired by recent proposals to develop new styles of interface criticism (andersen & pold 2018; hadler & haupt 2016), the workshops considered what would it mean to retrieve the collectivising potential of such decks for purposes of negation, rather than generating the next big thing. that is, what would it mean to repurpose ‘creative’ decks for critical reflection or even collective disconnection strategies away from logics aimed at driving engagement, capturing attention and prefiguring experience? the paper will present one output from these sessions in the form of a ‘shedding-type’ card game titled disconnect! that foregrounds deceptive ux lock-in strategies known as ‘dark patterns’ and counterposes these with other well-known tropes of platform engagement (i.e. likes, follows, replies) (karppi 2018. if disconnection is understood as mouffean ‘constitutive outside’ (hesselberth 2018), then the deck is a means to discuss connective design techniques, while reflecting on desires to escape. it ultimately is offered as an invitation for further experiments in post-digital design, especially to support more empowering paths away from the current configurations of platform capitalism and its onto-epistemologies of control. 16 references andersen, c.u., and s. pold. 2018. the metainterface: the art of platforms, cities, and clouds. cambridge, ma: mit press. hadler, f. and j. haupt (eds). 2016. interface critique. berlin: kulturverlag kadmos. hesselberth p. 2018. “discourses on disconnectivity and the right to disconnect,” new media & society 20(5): 1994–2010. irani, l. 2018. ‘“design thinking”: defending silicon valley at the apex of global labor hierarchies’, catalyst journal. https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/download/29638/pdf/. gregory, j. 2003. ‘scandinavian approaches to participatory design’, international journal of engineering education 19(1): 62-74. karppi, t. 2018. disconnect: facebook’s affective bonds. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. krajewski, m. 2011. paper machines: about cards & catalogs, 1548-1929. trans. peter krapp. cambridge, ma: mit press. krapp, p. 2018. ‘paper slips: the long reign of the index card and card catalog.’ in the routledge companion to media technology and obsolescence, new york. lovink, g. 2019. sad by design: on platform nihilism. cambridge: pluto press. schüll, n. d. 2014. addiction by design: machine gambling in las vegas. princeton, nj: princeton university press. stark, l. 2018. ‘algorithmic psychometrics and the scalable subject’, social studies of science 48(2): 204-31. wölfel, c., and t. merritt. 2013. ‘method card design dimensions: a survey of cardbased design tools.’ in human-computer interaction – interact 2013, edited by p. kotzé, g. marsden, g. lindgaard, j. wesson, and m. winckler, springer berlin heidelberg, pp. 479-486. 17 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 ethics and experimentation in the light phone and google wellbeing alex beattie victoria university of wellington aleena chia simon fraser university the light phone is a monochromatic mobile device with an e-ink display and minimal smart functions that is “designed to be used as little as possible.” as a consumer electronic in its second iteration, the light phone focuses on core utilities such as calls, texts, and maps; the device eschews feeds, social media, advertisements, news and email. according to its designers, the light phone respects users’ time and attention, cultivating intentional use over infinite scrolls, happiness over connection. within this promotional imaginary, “going light” is a branded lifestyle populated by racially diverse users, art and crafts, slow food and communal meals, family and the outdoors—where the texture and tactility of the light phone blend seamlessly into a nostalgic lifeworld of roller-skates, ceramic mugs, polaroids, and vinyl records. using the problematic of disconnective experimentation, this paper compares the light phone’s brand of lightness with the ethics of balance in google’s digital wellbeing experimental apps. both these disconnective experiments are emergent from a culture of connectivity: both evoke the tactility of paper, the aesthetics of minimalism, and the affects of nostalgia. however, while google’s experiments make disconnection esoteric, the light phone experiment makes disconnection mundane. by analyzing how the ethics of disconnective experimentation are institutionally, aesthetically, and politically intertwined, this paper presents a framework for the relational assessment of different experimental interventions. this framework is informed by textual analyses of the light phone’s promotional materials and two experimental apps from google’s digital wellbeing collection by design and invention consultancy studio special projects. according to google, this collection “showcase ideas and tools that help people find a better balance with technology.” the first app “paper phone” uses an android app to create a paper version of one’s phone on a folded sheet of paper, which includes favorite contacts, maps and meetings, and even activities like recipes and phrasebooks. the second experiment 18 “envelope” is a paper sleeve that transforms the google pixel phone into a singlefunction device either for making phone calls or taking photos. this envelope must be torn open to restore the phone’s original multi-functions. according to special projects, envelope was inspired by basic phones with limited functions as a periodic alternative to a primary smartphone, which was the original rationale for the light phone. in fact, the light phone was developed through a partnership between an artist and product designer who met in a google experimental program in 2014. with these institutional links in mind, textual analyses have been contextualized by a developer interview with the light phone’s artist. google digital wellbeing experiments may have a similar look and feel as the light phone. they may even share similar institutional incubation pathways. but their temporal deployments and politics of disconnection are different. as artistic interventions, the resistive potential of both these projects lies not in overt political manifestations, but in their reconfiguration of the doable and visible by creating experiential openings for instability and ambiguity (beyes and steyaert 2011). google’s experiments such as paper phone and envelope temporally limit disconnection to a momentary gimmick, thereby inoculating criticisms about the harms of constant connectivity and reinforcing the norm of connectivity. these experiments operate under google’s digital wellbeing—tools that facilitate self-tracking and restricting screen time across a number of its devices, applications, and online platforms. this inoculation is a form of media prophylaxis, which emphasizes harm reduction through self-care discourses that shift responsibility onto the individual without addressing the underlying cultural logics and business models of attention, engagement, and advertising (mulvin 2018). by providing a platform for disconnective experiments and tools, google digital wellbeing’s message of balance through calibrated connectivity can be understood as part of silicon valley’s institutionalization of tech ethics. within this social understanding of ethics, experiments attempt to resolve critical external normative claims about the core logics of the tech industry but do so while fully embedded within those logics (metcalf, moss, and boyd 2019). by framing problems of constant connectivity within the language of tools for individual balance and calibration, google digital wellbeing centers ethics in the practices of technologists, not in social worlds or social contracts they develop technical systems for and within. these experiments rationalize the resistive potential of artistic endeavors into frameworks of organizational risk assessment. furthermore, by incorporating and inoculating against critique about the harms of constant connection, these experiments are a way in which capitalism reshapes itself into less-objectionable forms, thus increasing resistance to similar critiques in the future (boltanski and chiapello 2005). even though google’s envelope is inspired by the light phone, and both experiments operate at the margins of the culture of connection, the scale of their interventions differ significantly. envelope creates an experiential gap in the fabric of connection. the light phone turns that fabric inside out to reveal alternative configurations of time, 19 technology, and connectivity, which are mediated by class and taste. instead of the corporate logics of ethics, the light phone operates through conspicuous nonconsumption: a form of lifestyle politics drawing from consumer activism and neoliberal entrepreneurial selfhood that emphasizes creativity, empowerment, and flexibility (portwood-stacer 2013). the light phone is a world-building device that envisions a lifestyle and performs an ethos. it is an artistic intervention that creates experiential apertures for destabilizing the norms of connection. while envelope packages disconnection as a concept and an experiential lapse, the light phone evokes disconnection as a sensation that is somewhere between vision and memory. yet, as a consumer electronic with an affordable mobile coverage plan, it also has the tangibility and practicality for instantiating some glimpse of that vision in everyday life. this experimental potential is, however, entangled in the power-chronography of global circuits of digital labor (sharma 2014) and class politics of conspicuous nonconsumption. crucially, design experiments such as google’s envelope and the light phone may seem incommensurable with the culture of connectivity, yet these experiments and other contemporary disconnection practices emerge from and are constitutive of that culture. these experiments with disconnection are part of the “constitutive outside” of the culture of connectivity (hesselberth 2018). understanding and assessing the equivocality of this constitutive outside will require weighing different disconnection practices against each other to understand their connections to each other, so that we may advocate some over others. references beyes, t. and steyaert, c. 2011. “the ontological politics of artistic interventions: implications for performing action research.” action research 9, no. 1 (march 2011): 100–115. boltanski, l., and chiapello, e. 2005. the new spirit of capitalism. london ; new york: verso. hesselberth p. 2018. “discourses on disconnectivity and the right to disconnect,” new media & society. 20(5): 1994–2010. metcalf, j., emanuel moss, and danah boyd. 2019. owning ethics: corporate logics." silicon valley, and the institutionalization of ethics. social research 86(2): 449-476. mulvin, d. 2018. "media prophylaxis: night modes and the politics of preventing harm." information & culture. 53(2): 175-202. portwood-stacer, l. 2013. "media refusal and conspicuous non-consumption: the performative and political dimensions of facebook abstention." new media & society 15(7): 1041-1057. 20 sharma, s., 2014. in the meantime: temporality and cultural politics. duke university press. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): dobson, a., race, k., & o'riordan, k. (2019, october 2-5). queer de/stabilizations panel. panel presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. panel: queer de/stabilizations in and of digital cultural research this panel brings together papers that explore digital cultures, platforms, and queer and feminist theoretical and methodological research approaches. the papers in this panel each explore the kinds of approaches suited to researching queer “de/stabilizations” in and of digital culture; that is, to projects of tracing, mapping, and making, queerer worlds via digital cultural research. “trustworthy” systems are, in one important sense, systems that are relatively stable, reliable, and that work somewhat predictably. but in algorithmic digital cultures “reliability” and “predictability” are not always characteristics to be trusted: digital media scholars have, for example, examined how algorithmic systems build in, intensify, and thus stabilize a-priori discriminatory practices and cultural associations, power dynamics, and stereotypical representational meanings, thus helping to cement social inequalities via increasingly ubiquitous practices of quantification (o’neil, 2017; wachter-boettcher, 2017). o’riordan explores this phenomenon in relation to digitally extracted data on “gay” genomics and faces. on a different register, ethnographic research on youth, social media, and gender and sexuality has also evinced the kind of stabilizations of hetero-patriarchal dominant meanings of, for example, digitally shared images of bodies, as dobson highlights. important tensions arise in digital cultural research, particularly among scholars concerned with gender and sexuality, around desires to map, trace, and make manifest stable, strong, and more broadly and inclusively “trustworthy” systems, communities, and meanings in digital cultures, and the associated risks of capture and exclusion pertinent to marginalized groups and bodies, as mapped by race. the papers in this panel explore these tensions, and their implications for digital cultural research. the panel explores the synergies and tensions between some of the key analytic rubrics we wish to engage when studying digital practices, cultures, and infrastructure. how does queer theory complicate ethnographic and other scholarly approaches to digital practices and identities? what are the overlaps, disconnects, and mutual affordances between actor-network and queer theoretical approaches to queer worldmaking in digital culture, for example, as race questions? if actor-network theory supplies us with a toolbox for tracing the formation of durable, stable, and “trustworthy” worlds and realities, queer theory has always been suspicious of the exclusions and fixations that characterize the worlds, realities, and practices that disciplined subjects are led to trust. queer theorists once expressed concern about the “fragile and ephemeral” nature of queer culture, the difficulty of “entextualizing it as culture” (berlant & warner, 1998). but in the digital era, it seems, there is no difficulty entextualizing queer and other stigmatized practices, activities, and “criminal intimacies” – these are being converted into digital bits, and extracted, at an unprecedented rate and scale, as o’riordan’s research makes clear. rather, the difficulty appears to consist now in the material risks such intense processes of entextualization and extraction pose to the lives and standing of those whose practices are criminalized or otherwise sensationalized. these developments raise several questions of broad significance: rather than stabilizing those bits of digital culture that are most redolent of queer lives, attachments, and orientations, should destabilization become a critical goal? what sort of orientations or modes of attention to digital infrastructures can we adapt from queer theory, understood as a critical repertoire of destabilizing insights, tactics, methods, and performative activities? ahmed (2006) has suggested the “queering” of objects is about one’s orientation to them so that, for example, a “queer” table is one that is noticed as a table rather than simply used/acted upon. what fades into the background – and what comes curiously into view – when one adopts a queer, perverse, provocative, or playful orientation to digital participation and its material and social infrastructures? just as importantly, how might the lives of those most vulnerable to digital profiling, surveillance, intimidation, exposure, and abjection be supported in material terms? is it a matter of building associations, relations, networks, and infrastructures that are somehow more “trustworthy” for marginalized groups and bodies, as actor-network theory might propose? or does queer survival depend largely on other approaches, such as subverting digital infrastructures, evading its procedures, and scrambling the codes that presently prevail within network societies? perhaps we need to be attuned to how what seem like stable entities are already being queered constantly. what kinds of interventions, orientations, scholarly approaches, and modes of attention can we devise to query the trustworthiness of digital systems and support those who lives are made most precarious, disgusting, endangered, unbearable, or fragile in digital cultures and networked worlds? the papers in this panel each gesture towards varied possibilities of “queer de/stabilizations” in and of digital cultural research. references ahmed, s., (2006). queer phenomenology. usa: duke university press berlant, l. & warner, m. (1998). sex in public. critical inquiry 24 (2), 547-566. o'neil, c. (2016). weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. new york: crown. wachter-boettcher, s. (2017). technically wrong: sexist apps, biased algorithms, and other threats of toxic tech. new york: w. w. norton & company. re/orientations towards youth (over)sharing, (non)agency, and social media: queer approaches and de/stabilisations of gender and sexuality in youth digital cultures? dr amy dobson, curtin university this paper draws on data from two research projects exploring youth sexting practices and social understandings of gender roles around social media use in youth cultures in australia in order to explore broader methodological questions about the kind of approaches and analysis that might help to better trace, understand, and contribute to “queer de/stabilisations” of gender and sexuality in youth social media cultures in future research. the first project involved focus groups with students in years 10-12 at two high schools; the second, interviews with parents and teachers about their perceptions of gender roles and pedagogies as regards youth digital cultures. participation in social media has become near imperative for many young people. yet discourses about social media participation are still largely framed as being about the individual choices and responsibilities of users, especially young people; that is, about human agency. for marginalized youth in particular, connection via social media is often framed in terms of promises of empowerment and self-expression, if not social capital and direct mobility (dobson, carah, & robards, 2018), in line with the promises of “interactive” and “participatory” culture more broadly (banet-weiser, 2012; o’riordan, 2017). in late modern societies characterised by the prevalence of therapeutic discourses for understanding the self and subjectivity, an ability to narrate and to “show/display” the self “transparently” and “authentically” is seen as key to personal happiness (illouz, 2007), personal empowerment, and trustworthiness, particularly for young women (harris, 2004). such psychological and therapeutic discourses for understanding the self and internality dovetail with and are intensified and commodified via the kind of mass self-communication (castells, 2007) social media facilitates and mandates. i highlight, firstly, the need to understand social media participation and selfrepresentation beyond simplistic notions of human agency and choice in this context, and to conceptualize media practices of sharing, oversharing, as well as limited selfdisclosure and non-participation, as structured by existing social axes of inequality, as evidenced in existing literature on how sexuality and gender mediate young people’s use of social media (pascoe, 2011; duguay, 2014; rubin & mcclelland, 2015; albury & byron, 2014; ringrose, 2013; dobson, 2015; kanai, 2018). to take marginalization more fully into account in the current era of widespread and oft-required social media participation is to think beyond digital divides of access and literacy to how social axes of inequality and intersecting embodied identities structure “emotional intelligence and habitus” (illouz, 2007), and thus the very capacity for a kind of “transparent” selfand/or bodily revelation, as well as reflexive choices about the safety and risks involved in such. feminist psycho-social and new-materialist approaches to youth social media use are particularly helpful in complicating notions of youth participation beyond the conscious, the individual, and the human (ringrose, 2013; warfield, 2017). but where algorithmic media platforms are the communicative infrastructure, there is a need to better account for the agentic capacities of digital infrastructure itself (carah and angus, 2018). bringing psycho-social and new materialist feminist approaches more directly into conversation with the kind of approaches suggested in actor-network theory towards mapping the stabilizations of communicative and algorithmic digital infrastructure and the networks of human and non-human actancts involved in such processes could be helpful in this regard. race’s (2019) propositions about the possibilities of a “queered actor network theory” for better mapping the interplay of bodies and non-human infrastructure, or what o’riordan (2017) terms “biodigital life”, in unpredictable and possibly serendipitous digital encounters is particularly relevant here. a queered actornetwork theory might be particularly useful for tracing the human expressions as well as non-human algorithmic infrastructures that constitute youth acts of digital “attention seeking” (a phrase used frequently in the data by both young people and adults to describe digital sharing practices deemed “excessive”); for understanding assemblages of attention and attention seeking that are constituted by shifting networks of human expressions, digital inscriptions of attention, devices, and platform algorithms designed to register and channel human attention and affect. i offer some consideration the kind of questions and analytical reading of, sometimes quite explicitly sexualized, everyday youth social media participation that might be ethically mandated in this context. i suggest that in such socially striated and digitally collapsed contexts, a kind of “reparative reading” of youth social media practices (following wiegman, 2014, on sedgwick), especially acts and practices of “seeking attention”, is politically important; so too, an ethics of “queer comradery and generosity” (warner cited in albury, 2017). the kind of approach to data analysis and future research i want to suggest is one concerned, firstly, with asking where and how both the less-than-conscious and the non-human actants might “show up”, or make appearances, in data on youth social media practices, with discussion of some examples from our data. secondly, it is concerned with asking where moments or possibilities of “queer de/stabilizations”, “re-oreintations”, and other modes of attention arise, following race (2019) — around images of bodies, discourses about them and about gender roles, as well as discussions of digital objects themselves, like phones or laptops. again here, some illustrative examples are discussed. references albury, k. (2017). just because it’s public doesn’t mean it’s any of your business: adults’ and children’s sexual rights in digitally mediated spaces. new media & society, 19(5), 713-725. albury, k., & byron, p. (2014) queering sexting and sexualisation. media international australia, 153(november): 138-147. banet-weiser, s. (2012). authentictm: the politics of ambivalence in a brand culture. new york: nyu press. berlant, l., 2008. the female complaint. duke university press. carah, n., & angus, d. (2018). algorithmic brand culture: participatory labour, machine learning and branding on social media. media, culture & society, 40(2), 178-194. doi: 10.1177/0163443718754648 castells, m. (2007). communications, power and counter-power in the network society. international journal of communications. 1, 238-366. http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/46 dobson, a. s. (2015). postfeminist digital cultures: femininity, social media, and selfrepresentation. new york: palgrave macmillan. dobson, a. s., robards, b. & carah, n. (eds.) (2018) digital intimate publics and social media. new york: palgrave. duguay, s. (2014). “he has a way gayer facebook than i do”: investigating sexual identity disclosure and context collapse on a social networking site. new media & society, 18(6), 891–907. illouz, e. (2007). cold intimacies: the making of emotional capitalism. oxford: polity. kanai, a (2019) gender and relatability in digital culture: managing affect, intimacy and value. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. o'riordan, k. (2017). unreal objects: digital materialities, technoscientific projects and political realities. uk: pluto press. pasco, c.j. (2011). resource and risk: youth sexuality and new media use.” sexuality research and social policy 8(5), 5-17. race. k. (forthcoming). what possibilities would a queer actor-network theory generate? in the routledge companion to actor network theory, edited by anders blok, ignacio farias and celia roberts. ringrose, j. 2013. postfeminist education? girls and the sexual politics of schooling. new york: routledge. ringrose, j., harvey, l., gill, r., & livingstone, s. (2013). teen girls, sexual double standards and ‘sexting’: gendered value in digital image exchange. feminist theory, 14(3), 305-323. rubin, j. d., & mcclelland, s. i. (2015). ‘even though it's a small checkbox, it's a big deal’: stresses and strains of managing sexual identity(s) on facebook. culture, health & sexuality, 17(4), 512-526. warfield, k. (2017). “i set the camera on thehandle of my dresser”: re-matter-ializing social media visual methods through a case study of selfies. media and communication 5 (4), 65–74. wiegman, r. (2014). the times we’re in: queer feminist criticism and the reparative ‘turn’. feminist theory 15(1), 4-25. queer actor-network theory: can we trust sex to destabilize things? professor kane race, university of sydney ‘trust in the system’ might be said to depend on having stable and predictable arrangements in place that give people the capacity to do what they normally want or need to do. the concept of infrastructures, including the increasing array of infrastructures that involve or depend upon digital practices, has recently gained traction in queer studies that draws on actor-network theory (ant) and ‘combines material and symbolic domains, eschews technological determinism, and recognizes both systematicity and failure’ (wilson 2016, p. 249). this paper grapples with tensions and critical synergies between systematicity and failure, exploring the connections, friction, and divergences between these two branches of contemporary social and cultural theory that have become particularly prominent within studies of digital culture and networked societies: ant and queer theory.the ethnographic approach to the making of science, technology, facts, and realities that is a hallmark of ant produces different emphases and critical stances than those typically found in queer theory. ant proceeds by attending to the material associations and practical relations that transform contingent relations into durable, concrete realities. it is distinguished by the precision with which it attends to sociomaterial arrangements foucault once termed dispositifs to give them consequential form, exploring their provisional nature, contingencies, particularities and multiplicities. queer theory has a keener sense of the ways in which established institutions, norms, conventions, and narratives damage the material prospects, social standing, and overall lives of those subject to regimes of gender and sexuality (among other disciplinary categories). it takes as given, however, the overarching power of the ideological, normative, disciplinary, discursive and/or psychic structures that produce certain lives as abject, vulnerable, and suspect within prevailing social worlds on this basis. indeed, queer theory’s favoured strategies of dismantling, countering, subverting, exposing or otherwise disrupting hegemonic norms have led leading critics within its own ranks to question the field on the ‘overdetermined relationalities’ of the normative, disciplinary structures it takes as objects of critical attention (wiegman & wilson 2015, p. 10). they cite berlant and warner’s canonical essay ‘sex in public’ to suggest queer theory sets up an oppositional dynamic that neglects the complex relationalities and ‘diverse consociating nature of normativity’ and explore the possibility of queer theory without normativity. in fact ‘sex in public’ is quite clear that heteronormativity does not refer to ‘anything like a simple monoculture’ and ‘never has more than a provisional unity’ (berlant & warner, 1998, p. 552). but what is also glossed over by its critics is the seemingly flip attention to material objects and practices (‘paying taxes, being disgusted, philandering, bequeathing, celebrating a holiday, investing for the future, teaching, disposing of a corpse, carrying wallet photos, buying economy size, being nepotistic, running for president, divorcing, or owning anything “his” and “hers”). these activities are framed as material practices that ‘though not explicitly sexual, are implicated in the hierarchies of property and propriety’ dubbed heteronormativity, and their elaboration marked as ‘a project for further study’ (p. 555). queer attention to material practices is echoed in recent work by sara ahmed that conceives heterosexual privilege and racial capitalism as elaborate support systems that create a ‘buffer zone’ (2014): ‘when a whole world is organised to promote your survival, from health to education, from the walls designed to keep your residence safe, from the paths that ease your travel, you do not have become so inventive to survive’ (2014). queer theory’s concern with the arrangement and experience of sexual, gendered, racialized bodies has given it a sensitivity to certain non-human actants, the material significance of which ant has helped many fields bring more sharply into view. brian larkin defines infrastructures as ‘objects that create the grounds on which other objects operate’ before making the suggestive claim that ‘their peculiar ontology lies in the fact that they are things and also the relation between things’ (2013, p. 329). ant’s insistence on the contingency of relations among human and non-human actants might help break the stranglehold of totalization sometimes said to characterize queer theorists’ take on heteronormativity. worlds capable of sustaining queer lives are commonly considered to be composed of cultures, communities, arrangements and/or publics that queer theorists characterise as ‘fragile and ephemeral’ (berlant & warner 1998, p. 561). arguably ant could be adapted to remedy such fragility by providing insights into how stronger worlds or realities are built and sustained. but this paper takes a different approach and proposes that ant could benefit just as significantly from a better appreciation of the critical necessity and/or disruptive effects of worlds ‘assembled out of the experience of being shattered,’ as ahmed puts it (2014). queer digital networks involve something more or other than assembling a more stable and durable world for certain minoritized subjects, in other words. they make connections where ‘unexpected things can happen’ and by promoting acknowledgement of the fears and pleasures entailed in exposure to alterity, rather than eschewing such contradictions. this may involve disassembling or interfering with certain established protocols, arrangements, functions and designs: those techniques devised to keep people (and the nonhumans they are connected to) ‘in line’. deleuze and guattari make a distinction between different kinds of assemblages that may help specify what is distinctive about queer ant. specifically, they distinguish between molar (or arborescent) assemblages which they conceive as organised, hierarchized, consolidated, unified, binarized and divisible (i.e. more or less stable institutions) – and rhizomatic (or molecular) assemblages which are by contrast unpredictable, unsystematic, flexible, flighty, horizontal, non-binary and indivisible without changing their nature (i.e. ephemeral). where molar assemblages stratify, territorialize, hierarchize, binarize and subjectify, molecular assemblages involve processes of de-stratification, de-territorialization, de-subjectification, molecularization and scrambling. further, these rhizomatic structures are characterised by unpredictable ‘lines of flight’ that can be generative or perilous depending on what they connect up with in the course of such trajectories (deleuze & guattari, 1987). given the radical, anti-establishment commitments of deleuze and guattari’s politics, readers tend to invest rhizomatic and molecular processes with greater critical value, though on closer inspection all assemblages have stratifying and de-stratifying tendencies. i would contend at any rate that ant has largely focused on the emergence of molar assemblages: the construction and elaboration of actor-networks that become stable enough to produce durable technologies, effective mediations and scientific ‘facts’ – or else fail to do so, with this failure emerging as a missed opportunity or instructive example of how things go wrong. queer theory has a more conflictual and contradictory set of critical investments. its hankering for sociomaterial arrangements that better support queer lives is complicated by its sensitivity to the fact that any process of stratification or stabilization (any molar assemblage) runs the risk of producing its own misfits and shutting them out – i.e. other queers whose needs and lives are not serviced by what is set up. queer theory’s critical relation to institutions and established structures that embattle queer forms of life means that it is just as interested in disassembling the social (as it is currently constituted) as reassembling it or tracing the associations that make, reproduce and sustain it. disruption, deviation, destabilization and failure tend to be invested with some political value in this literature, rather than being framed as problems or missed opportunities as we see in ant. the paper concludes by suggesting recent framings of sex as play (paasonen 2018; race 2018). sexual play might be regarded as particularly prolific scenes of associative activities, not only because of their promiscuous and labile nature and the sheer multiplicity of the associations they can generate, but also their capacity to disorganize and reconfigure attachments, identities, relations and ontologies. references ahmed, s., (2006). queer phenomenology. duke university press. ahmed, s., (2014). selfcare as warfare.” https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/08/25/selfcare-as-warfare/ berlant, l. and warner, m., (1998). sex in public. critical inquiry, 24(2), pp.547-566. deleuze, g. and guattari, f., (1987). a thousand plateaus. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. larkin, b., (2013). the politics and poetics of infrastructure. annual review of anthropology, 42, p.327-343. latour, b. (2005). reassembling the social. london: oxford up paasonen, s., (2018). many splendored things: thinking sex and play. london: goldmsiths. race, k., (2017). the gay science: intimate experiments with the problem of hiv. routledge. wiegman, r. and wilson, e.a., (2015). introduction: antinormativity’s queer conventions. differences, 26(1), p.1-25. wilson, a., (2016). the infrastructure of intimacy. signs 41(2), p.247-280. sexuality and the (de)stabilizing capacity of algorithms professor kate o’riordan, university of sussex this paper examines the stabilization and destabilization of constructions of sexuality through algorithmic forms. it examines the construction of sexuality as identity through consumer genomics on the one hand and facial recognition on the other. the focus is on two recent controversies, emerging from co-located research communities in silicon valley. image recognition algorithms and genome sequences are produced in these sites and the ensuing circulation and consumption of these constitute new sites of address (warner, 2005; butler, 2009). these can be opened up to look at meaningmaking practices across these forms and to examine the ways in which they are generative of identities in an economy of extraction (cooper, 2011; jarrett, 2015). recently, consumer genomics company 23andme turned their attention explicitly to sexuality research (together with uk biobank and the broad institute). at the same time stanford based researchers michael kosinki and yilun wang (2017) announced the findings of sexuality research based on the capacity of the same extractive digital infrastructure. the two sites deployed very different methods, ethics, results and projections, and this paper considers how they both construct the public good in different ways. this turn to sexuality research in both the name of genomics and health research on the one hand, and in the context of marketing surveillance technologies on the other, demonstrates some constitutive contradictions in the (de)stabilization of sexuality itself. the 23andme project constructed knowledge about lgbt populations as a good, and shifted from this to a discourse about inclusion in the work place as good science. discrimination was cast as undermining the public good because of excluding great minds from the scientific endeavor. at the same time this evoked the implicit risk of excluding what they referred to as ‘nonheterosexual’ behavior from the genome itself. in october of last year results from the 23andme research were announced in terms which were careful to avoid and contest the language of the gay gene which dominated genetic sexuality research in the 1990s. andrea gann from the broad institute was very careful to stress that this work has no predictive power. this contrasts very strongly and deliberately with another piece of sexuality research announced the previous year. the kosinski and wang (2017) research has become referred to in some places as the gay face research and the amount of attention it garnered, as well as co-location, made it important that the 23andme researcher was able to distance itself from this. kosinski and wang and the researchers scraped dating sites for profile pictures of men seeking sex with men, and then cleaned the data by selecting for white, human, and clearly either male or female head shots. it constructed the public good as knowledge about the power of technology. the researcher made the case that the research was important, firstly because it provided evidence of the power of face recognition technologies and algorithms, and secondly because gay populations should be warned that they can be identified and discriminated against by hostile surveillance systems. these two examples speak to questions about extraction, digital infrastructure, stabilizations, and public good in particular ways. extraction then can be thought of as a mode of interactivity, central to life as mediation (kember and zylinksa, 2012). these forms of address construct public good in terms of decontexualized knowledge on the one hand, and responsibly contextualized knowledge on the other. the forms of extraction matter and so does the question of what moves, and what is displaced and replaced. identities are reconfigured here and stabilized in particular ways. profile photos and forms of self-representation are taken to create knowledge about how people look. forms of identity and identification are taken to construct identity categories, and readers of these texts and audiences of their address take these up in contested, furious, and affirmative ways. on the one hand this is the displacement of identity by phrenology, which extracts via representation and replaces with identity categories. on the other hand, by taking dna and attributing it to behaviors this takes from identities and replaces with potentially open and new categories of person. for example, the somewhat empty category of the non-heterosexual, which is likely to be re-read as gay in any case, or the more specific identity of the good researcher. this case as a whole extracts multiple elements via social media materials, plus dna (via saliva), and moves them into informational forms. those forms are data points, which can be measured as units and put together with results to constitute algorithms and say things about people through an address. identifying sexuality through sexual behavior points to anxieties about reproduction, which biodigital technologies promise to reconfigure so absolutely that the links between sexual acts and human reproduction might be severed. on the other hand, they promise future attachments to social orders regulated through the identification of sexual behaviors. the identification of sexual acts as traits read through both genotype and phenotype come together in these projects: the genomic research tries to deconstruct its own research question and stabilize the category of nonheterosexual, whilst the image recognition algorithm recasts gay and straight as meaningful. both offer forms of address that are momentarily stabilized through engaging publics, whether compliant or resistant. luciana parisi (2004) indicated that the biodigital was a new kind of layer or substrate in the world created from a kind of tipping point of bio-digital integration. however, we might more productively think about it as an already existing infrastructure that corporealizes information and makes materials informatic whilst temporarily stabilizing informed material movements. it is those temporary (de)stabilizations and intensifications, particularly around the question of who we think we are, and how we are captured or moved on, that makes a difference to both the present and the future of (algorithmic) identity. references butler, j. (2009). giving an account of oneself. fordham university press cooper, m (2011) life as surplus: biotechnology and capitalism in the neoliberal era. university of washington press. jarrett, k. (2015). feminism, labour and digital media: the digital housewife. routledge. kember, s. and zylinksa, j. (2012). life after new media: mediation as a vital process. mit press. kosinski, m. and wang, y. (2018). deep neural networks are more accurate than humans at detecting sexual orientation from facial images. journal of personality and social psychology. february, 114(2): 246-257 parisi, l. (2004). abstract sex, philosophy, biotechnology and the mutations of desire. continuum. warner, m. (2005). publics and counter publics. zone books. aoir2017-submission-final selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): maggs, c. (2017, october 18-21). framing wikileaks in the networked fourth estate. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. framing wikileaks in the networked fourth estate catherine maggs university of sydney introduction in 2010, the whistleblowing website and publishing organisation wikileaks came to global attention with the release of thousands of restricted u.s. military war logs from afghanistan and iraq, and hundreds of u.s. diplomatic cables. wikileaks returned recently to global headlines (and controversy) with the 2016 release of emails regarding the campaign of former democrat presidential candidate hillary clinton. it has been suggested this release played a significant role in the eventual success of donald trump in the november 2016 election. wikileaks embrace by trump and other far-right conservatives during the campaign period prompted some media discourse that wikileaks had ‘fallen from grace’ with the liberal media, angered by its perceived meddling is us politics and alleged ties with the russian state. however, as this paper demonstrates wikileaks was never ‘a darling of the liberal left’ as reported by the guardian newspaper (smith, 2016). this paper provides a historical examination of the representations of wikileaks by leading u.s. elite media. in the age of the internet and networked communications, the role of information gathering, investigation and analysis regarding the powerful has extended beyond the boundaries of traditional news organisations and professional journalists in what yochai benkler (2013) theorises as the networked fourth estate. benkler contends the emergent forms of the networked fourth estate are increasingly vulnerable to attacks from institutional media fearful of the decentralisation they represent. placing wikileaks within the context of the networked fourth estate, the paper applies a news framing analysis to investigate the dominant framing of wikileaks by the elite u.s. media to december 2010. it takes up the idea advanced by manuel castells (2009) that media has become a space where power is exercised, contested and decided. according to castells, a mainstream media presence is key in achieving widespread information distribution, saliency and the persuasion of public opinion. it is, thus, connected directly to the ability of alternative social actors to disrupt institutionalised political power relations and to influence the mainstream political public sphere. my interest in the media framing of wikileaks for this paper developed from the discursive, rhetorical attacks on wikileaks by u.s. politicians and some media, following its 2010 releases. i was influenced by benkler’s (2011) argument that wikileaks was subject to significant socio-political framing within the ‘war on terror’ in the u.s. that undermined its reputational value and restricted severely its operational capacity after amazon, paypal and others withdrew their services in december 2010. the paper analyses wikileaks’ depiction in two major political journals of record by identifying the construction and use of media frames in the editorial pages of the new york times and the washington post. we can consider elite media publications as institutionalised representative frameworks of society (couldry, 2001; van dijk, 2008). therefore, the nature and extent of their editorial coverage of wikileaks was vital to its ability to participate effectively as a radical new media actor in the networked fourth estate and to influence and persuade public opinion in the mainstream networked public sphere. methodology this study undertook a framing analysis as a form of textual analysis that identifies the discursive context for understanding elite journalists’ representations of wikileaks, the expressive elements that depict wikileaks’ political role and impact, and the reasoning devices that evaluate its legitimacy and significance as a networked political and cultural force. according to robert entman’s (2003) oft-cited definition, news framing involves “selecting and highlighting some facets of events or issues, and making connections among them so as to promote a particular interpretation, evaluation, and/or solution” (p. 417). it is a principal method by which journalists and politicians influence each other and the public. i chose to examine editorials and op-ed pieces by senior journalists and guest contributors. editorials are a newspaper’s institutional voice (hindman & thomas, 2003) and op-ed contributors are often considered experts in their field or someone with specialised knowledge or status. unlike news reporting these genres enjoy discursive freedom from objectivity norms (phelan & shearer, 2009). they are especially suited to framing analysis because they contain a mixture of evaluative propositions, factual beliefs and the causal attribution of responsibility (greenberg, 2000). the final corpus consisted of 47 texts written during the years 2006 to 2010. the coding process involved taking a critical view of frames as “as expressions and outcomes of power” (reese, 2010, p. 19), rather than benign devices that journalists rely upon to simplify complex information (scheufele & tewksbury, 2007). findings and analysis two questions guided the identification of the frames. first, does wikileaks have political legitimacy as a media organisation that contributes to political debate? second, is wikileaks acknowledged to demonstrate political counterpower — that is, do its releases have primarily important and valuable consequences? analysis of the articles generated four frames consisting of two subsets, with each subset comprising two binary frames. the transgressive frame and its binary, the legitimate frame, emerged in response to the first question. the dismissive frame and its binary, the consequential frame, emerged in response to the second question. the promotion of an interpretation of wikileaks’ as a transgressive political and journalistic entity was the dominant primary and secondary frame found in this analysis. over seventy per cent of articles using this frame appeared in response to the cablegate release, indicating the highly controversial nature of that event. the second highest occurring frame, the dismissive frame, appeared in all but one instance in the post, rather than the times, and was the predominant frame following the releases of the two sets of war logs. interestingly, more than half of the articles with a dismissive primary frame also contained a secondary transgressive frame, which reflected the leading political narrative at the time. the combination of transgressive and dismissive frames worked to discursively attack wikileaks on two levels. the dismissive frame worked at the level of content (i.e. the disclosures) and the transgressive frame worked at a structural level (i.e. wikileaks, the organisation). the times had only one occurrence of the dismissive frame, written by an op-ed guest contributor. given the times was benefitting from breaking front-page news coverage because of its relationship with wikileaks and the guardian, it is predictable the editors and staff columnists did not minimise the importance of the leaks. the legitimate and the consequential frames ascribed a positive value to the role of wikileaks or to the information it disclosed. there were a significant number (19 out of 47) of articles, overwhelmingly by the times, which used a primary consequential or legitimate frame. while these frames demonstrated the more positive attitude by the times towards wikileaks they had less rhetorical resonance and magnitude (entman, 2004) than they transgressive and dismissive frames. by that i mean they used language that was less noticeable, memorable or emotionally charged. they also lacked the prominence and repetition of the framing devices (that is, the manifest linguistic choices), which therefore decreased the saliency of the promoted interpretation. because of this, these two frames demonstrated less discursive power and therefore had less potential for reader influence. it is interesting to note the journalistic ambivalence about wikileaks, and the sometimes contradictory nature of media coverage of its activities and leaks. the post dismissed the wikileaks’ content as trivial or as having been previously reported. yet at the same time it denounced the organisation as a national security threat and a danger to innocent lives, presenting a somewhat puzzling standard. being one of wikileaks’ media partners given exclusive access to the war logs and diplomatic cables the times, predictably, did not dismiss the content as unimportant. however, its conferral of legitimacy to wikileaks as a worthwhile media actor was limited and most often contingent upon the times institutional reporting practices. this suggests a certain tension between the times asserting its authority and having this new source of network international authority, which in some ways undermines the credibility of legacy media. this paper has not examined in detail the news reporting of the wikileaks’ disclosures. however, preliminary investigations indicate that while both newspapers undermined wikileaks potential as new networked media actor in their editorial pages, the news sections continued to publish stories based on the wikileaks’ content. this disparity between the news and editorial pages suggests an uneven reckoning of wikileaks’ importance. conclusion as a technologically novel, politically reformist and internationally networked media entity, wikileaks can be considered as a form of alternative networked media that challenges hegemonic media and political power. this paper presented a historical analysis that depicted the elite mainstream media news framing of wikileaks to 2010 as transgressive and irresponsible, which delegitimised the organisation’s value to public sphere discourse and reasserted the mainstream media’s central importance in the democratic public sphere. the framing trivialised or vilified the networked counterpublic that rallied around wikileaks in the wake of the financial blockade and withdrawing of critical internet services following its cablegate release. neither newspaper explored or even recognised the possibility of wikileaks being part of a broader historical shift in the role of news media in the globalisation of communication, culture and politics. taking up castells’ notion that media is the place where power is decided, by dismissing the informational value of the disclosures, the us elite media weakened wikileaks’ capacity to exercise any political counterpower that might have meaningful consequences for policy or the mainstream networked public sphere. references benkler, y. (2006). the wealth of networks: how social production transforms markets and freedom. new haven: yale university press. benkler, y. (2011). a free irresponsible press: wikileaks and the battle over the soul of the networked fourth estate harvard civil rights-civil liberties law review, 46(2), 311-397. benkler, y. (2013). wikileaks and the networked fourth estate. in b. brevini, a. hintz & p. mccurdy (eds.), beyond wikileaks: implications for the future of communications, journalism and society (pp. 11-34). basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. castells, m. (2009). communication power. oxford: oxford university press. couldry, n. (2001). the hidden injuries of media power. journal of consumer culture, 1, 155-177. entman, r. m. (2003). cascading activation: contesting the white house’s frame after 9/11. political communication, 20, 415-432. entman, r. m. (2004). projections of power: framing news, public opinion, and u.s. foreign policy. chicago: the university of chicago press. greenberg, j. (2000). opinion discourse and canadian newspapers: the case of the chinese “boat people”. canadian journal of communication, 25(4), 517-538. hindman, e. b., & thomas, r. j. (2003). the princess and the paparazzi: blame, responsibility, and the media’s role in the death of diana. journalism & mass communication quarterly, 80(3), 666–688. phelan, s., & shearer, f. (2009). the “radical”, the “activist” and the hegemonic newspaper articulation of the aotearoa new zealand foreshore and seabed conflict. journalism studies, 10(2), 220-237. reese, s. d. (2010). finding frames in a web of culture: the case of the war on terror. in p. d'angelo & j. a. kuypers (eds.), doing news framing analysis: empirical and theoretical perspective (pp. 17-42). new york: routledge. scheufele, d. a., & tewksbury, d. (2007). framing, agenda setting, and priming: the evolution of three media effects models. journal of communication, 57(1), 9-20. smith, d. (2016, 14 october). from liberal beacon to a prop for trump: what has happened to wikileaks?. the guardian retrieved 13 september, 2017, from https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/oct/14/wiileaks-from-liberal-beacon-toa-prop-for-trump-what-has-happened van dijk, t. a. (2008). discourse and power. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. aoir18 submit selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): marler, w. (2018, october 10-13). connective ambition and creative caution among homeless users of facebook. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. connective ambition and creative caution among homeless users of facebook will marler northwestern university introduction the popularity and design of social networking sites (snss) has led scholars to ask whether any benefit can be observed for the social capital of their users (ellison et al., 2007). indeed, facebook users with more “friends” are more likely to score high on measures of social capital (burke et al., 2010). this may stem from the ease with which social media users can store latent and weak ties to tap into for future need (ellison et al., 2007; ellison, lampe, et al., 2011). in particular it matters how users engage with others on the site. for example, directed communication appears to yield greater advantage than passive consumption (burke et al., 2010). participation on social media means contending with the virtual architecture of networked publics which departs from conventional means of gauging exposure (boyd, 2011). users pursue technical and other means to balance their exposure to virtual audiences (marwick and boyd, 2014). young people approach the crafting of a social media post with a perception of what is appropriate and who they think is likely to see it (marwick and boyd, 2014). such technical and semantic sophistication may be lacking among populations with typically lower levels of skill in using computers, including older adults and those with less income and education (ellison, vitak, et al., 2011). social media thus involves its users in a balance of motivation and caution (ellison, vitak, et al., 2011). what does this balance look like in practice? i examine the case of unstably housed adults in chicago to understand how a population susceptible to social isolation and low digital skills navigate their exposure on social media. method the study is based on in-depth interviews, content analysis and participant-observation. i present two cases in this work-in-progress. vicki and eric are unstably housed, white chicagoans in their late middle age living in a mixed-income, north-side neighborhood. eric stays in a shelter while vicki has recently moved into a subsidized studio apartment. both are daily users of facebook, eric exclusively on his samsung smartphone and vicki largely on a public-access terminal at a non-profit social service agency. the study to date involves a series of three interviews with vicki and eric. i also join vicki and eric on outings where they engage the neighborhood’s homeless community in spiritual outreach and community organization, respectively. i also analyze vicki and eric’s activity on their multiple facebook accounts, assessing past activity, friend counts, posts and interactions, and pages and groups. themes are drawn from field notes, interview transcripts, and content analysis in an iterative, comparative fashion. findings a perception of facebook as a gateway to the wider world drives community organizers among the unstably housed of chicago to “friend” as many others as possible on the site, often to the detriment of their security and privacy. vicki celebrated the milestone of 1,000 friends, while eric claimed around 4,500 on his account. both refer to their local ambitions as motivation to grow their friend count. lacking a credit card and disposable income, vicki describes growing her friend count as a “sneaky-clever” means to promote the page of her homeless ministry in lieu of paying facebook to boost the page. if she can make 5,000 friends, vicki suggests, she can invite that many directly to like her page. eric similarly sees his friend count as a metric for the reach of his homeless advocacy. this leads to a rather liberal friending policy. “if someone sends me a request, no problem, i’ll accept it,” eric explains. beneath the gloss of optimism, a great deal of hassle and concern are apparent. vicki and eric each maintain multiple facebook accounts. their additional accounts are partly the result of having their primary accounts “hacked.” multiple accounts also vicki and eric to segment their virtual presence as advocates and private individuals. eric reports that his account was “hijacked” by a woman who demanded payment to restore his access. while neither eric or vicki have ideas on how their accounts were “hacked”, i observed on multiple occasions vicki sit down at a public-access computer and be pleasantly surprised to find her account already logged in. both describe a deluge of requests from strangers, including many users from outside the u.s. who ask for money or even marriage. vicki relates her consternation at having received persistent requests from an afghani man who she eventually blocked. in addition to employing this standard technical feature of the site, on her second account, vicki uses an alternative spelling of her name to conceal herself from the strangers pursuing her on her primary account. eric has four active facebook accounts under the same name. only on one does he pursue his strategy of friending as many others as possible. even on this account, he reports using profile information and friends lists as a means to determine whether those seeking to connect are “legit.” eric appears to siphon content across his accounts based on genre and propriety. one of eric’s additional accounts is dedicated to his “love of women and cars”, and another features primarily posts about medical marijuana and cooking recipes. discussion engaged in community activism for a homeless community of which they are a part, vicki and eric turn to facebook with great hope. they turn to their friend counts as a way of making sense of the technology’s potential to connect their causes to the wider world. such “connective ambition”, combined with an uncertain degree of literacy and, in vicki’s case, a reliance on public access, puts them at risk of unwanted attention and online scammers. to take control of their exposure and security, they respond with conventional, technical tactics, such as blocking requesters; conventional filtering tactics, such as probing the accounts of requesters; as well as atypical means, such as establishing multiple accounts under alternative spellings of their names. marginalized users of social media thus tailor their own strategies to balance ambition and caution in their pursuit of social connection with a cause. references boyd d (2011) social network sites as networked publics. in: papacharissi z (ed.), a networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites, new york: routledge, pp. 39–58. burke m, marlow c and lento t (2010) social network activity and social well-being. in: proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems, acm, pp. 1909–1912. ellison nb, steinfield c and lampe c (2007) the benefits of facebook ‘friends:’ social capital and college students’ use of online social network sites. journal of computermediated communication, wiley online library 12(4): 1143–1168. ellison nb, vitak j, steinfield c, et al. (2011) negotiating privacy concerns and social capital needs in a social media environment. in: privacy online, springer, pp. 19– 32. ellison nb, lampe c, steinfield c, et al. (2011) with a little help from my friends: how social network sites affect social capital processes. in: the networked self: identity, community and culture on social network sites, pp. 124–146. marwick ae and boyd d (2014) networked privacy: how teenagers negotiate context in social media. new media & society 16(7): 1051–1067. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 stolero, n., segev, e. (2017, october 18-21). “it’s not how i use it, but what i believe about it”: the role of experience in the online information seeking behavior. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “it’s not how i use it, but what i believe about it”: the role of experience in the online information seeking behavior nathan stolero tel aviv university elad segev tel aviv university introduction the way people use information technologies to fulfil their needs and promote their interests has been a central subject of study in the social sciences (case & given, 2016). although users’ perceptions seem to be a crucial starting point, this factor is very often ignored. the current study employs a qualitative approach, using 44 semistructured interviews with internet users, in order to compare the perceptions of adolescents, young adults and adults towards the information seeking process and their information seeking behavior. the theoretical contribution of this study is in reconceptualizing the role of experience with information technologies as part of the existing models of information seeking behavior. literature review information seeking behavior is a sub-field of information behavior that refers to the practice of obtaining information in different ways (case & given, 2016). when it comes to experience with information technology, most scholars refer to actual uses (kennedy, judd, churchward, gray, & krause, 2008), the confidence in technology use (caruso & kvavik, 2005), and skills or digital literacy (eshet-alkalai & chajut, 2009). recent studies questioned this definition, arguing that the experience with information technologies is not only about the actual uses, but also how users experience it (jenkins, ito, & boyd, 2015). among the very few direct references to experience in the context of information seeking, johnson and meischke (1993) examined users experience and beliefs toward information itself rather than information technologies. in this paper, we add users’ perceptions toward technologies as well, and examine both their experiences and beliefs regarding information technologies. previous studies have stressed the importance of age, along other socio-demographic factors in explaining the information seeking behavior. yet age in those studies served as a cohort to examine differences in users’ cognitive development, digital literacy, or search skills (bilal & beheshti, 2014; kuhlthau, 2004). very little consideration has been given to the fact that the different experience that each age group has with information technologies can explain much of the information seeking behavior differences. method in total 44 participants were recruited: 16 adolescents ranging from 13 to 18 (m=16.42), 14 youth ranging from 21 to 27 (m=23.4), and 14 adults ranging from 40 to 55 (m=47). the interviews investigated three broad themes: (1) participants’ experience with different technologies and their attitudes towards them; (2) participants’ perceptions of information, information seeking, and knowledge; and (3) participants’ experience of seeking and searching for information. the interviews included performing short tasks of seeking and searching information, during which participants described their thoughts and dilemmas as well as their emotions and feelings. results what is information? adolescents perceived information based on its instrumental value. information was anything that could help them achieve something else (e.g., a goal or completing a task). they often mentioned performing an intentional task, or identifying a need (problem) and looking for information about it (solution). adults perceived information as something more general. apart from goal-oriented tasks, they mentioned information as a form of entertainment. they also referred to situations where information was intentionally received. young adults displayed mixed results regarding the concept of information. negative emotions adults mentioned positive emotions as a driving force to continue their information seeking process, and negative as a reason to terminate it. adolescents, on the other hand, often reported that negative emotions rather encouraged their information seeking behavior. young adults displayed again mixed views. passive and incidental information seeking behavior when reviewing their information sources, adolescents mentioned those that keep on “popping up information” such as instant message services and social networks notifications. adolescents frequently mentioned how important passive and incidental information seeking sources are in their lives, and how much they rely on them. similarly, young adults mentioned a variety of sources on which they feel dependent. although, adults mentioned using passive and incidental information sources, they insisted that they are in control, and that they play an active role in timing the information seeking process. selection of information adults identified a specific set of tools for each task. adults were often fixed on specific tools for each task. they were not interested in trying new information sources as long as they have positive experience with the existing ones. in contrast, adolescents were almost unaware of how they choose their information sources, and had troubles describing exactly what they do. a common phrase which appeared in many interviews was “it is there and i just use it”. another reoccurring pattern among adolescents that significantly differed from that of the adults was their use of interchanging tools, and in most cases a combination of tools, for each goal. young adults reported once again on mixed practices. information evaluation in terms of criteria for information evaluation, adults adopted a narrow approach, emphasizing credibility and authoritativeness. adults relied on traditional evaluation criteria based on their experience with other media. while adolescents also mentioned credibility and authoritativeness, their perspective was broader and more sophisticated, demonstrating advanced technological experience. when heuristics on credibility or authoritativeness were not in place, they raised various other criteria, such as the identity of the source, the architecture of the website or mobile app, the perceived amount of information that it contains, the frequency of updates, and the location in search results. young adults expressed similar perceptions to adolescents. discussion overall, the different patterns emerged from the interviews suggest that the information seeking behavior of adults is much more structured. in a way they are more conservatives in their information strategies. adolescents reported on much more open and inclusive process. their choice of available ad-hoc tools allowed them greater flexibility and exposure to unexpected information, but required a more advanced and faster heuristics such as search engine ranking to evaluate the quality of information. to conclude, based on their shorter experience with information seeking processes adolescents presented a less matured understanding of information, and reported on less structured seeking behavior than adults. this practice was led by intense emotions, often depended on the algorithm, and required more sophisticated ad-hoc evaluation criteria. adults, on the other hand, reported on a more structured and conservative strategies, which they believed protected them from wasting time, and kept them in much more control over the process. the open strategies of adolescents and the narrow strategies of adults reflect their different psychological states and experience with technology, and can further affect the type of information that they are exposed to. experience is therefore a very crucial factor in explaining the different perceptions of information technologies in general and of the information seeking behavior in particular. references bilal, d., & beheshti, j. (eds.) (2014). new directions in children's and adolescents' information behavior research. bradford, uk: emerald group publishing. caruso, j. b., & kvavik, r. (2005). ecar study of students and information technology 2005: convenience, connection, control, and learning. co: educause center for applied research. case, d. o., & given, l. (2016). looking for information: a survey of research on information seeking, needs and behavior (fourth ed.). bradford, ul: emerald group publishing. eshet-alkalai, y., & chajut, e. (2009). changes over time in digital literacy. cyberpsychology & behavior, 12(6): pp. 713-715. jenkins, h., ito, m., & boyd, d. (2015). participatory culture in a networked era. cambridge: polity. johnson, j. d., & meischke, h. (1993). a comprehensive model of cancer-related information seeking applied to magazines. human communication research, 19(3): pp. 343-367. kennedy, g. e., judd, t. s., churchward, a., gray, k., & krause, k. (2008). first year students' experiences with technology: are they really digital natives? australasian journal of educational technology, 24(1). kuhlthau, c. c. (2004). seeking meaning: a process approach to library and information services. california: libraries unlimited incorporated. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): uldbjerg, s., hendry, n., gerrard, y. (2020, october). methods that move us: creativity and ethics in researching digital youth cultures. roundtable presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. roundtable: methods that move us: creativity and ethics in researching digital youth cultures signe uldbjerg aarhus university natalie hendry rmit university ysabel gerrard university of sheffield for scholars exploring digital youth cultures, creative research methods offer the potential to disrupt existing power imbalances, form empowering creative practices or closely engage with knowledge production that is dynamic, embodied and socially contextual. yet the experience of doing creative research methods poses challenges that are often underor unacknowledged in our work. in lieu of a live roundtable, we consider together what methods have we been moved to use in our research exploring digital youth cultures and creative practice work? what questions do our methods ask of us for our future creative and ethical work? signe uldbjerg in my phd research, i work with young women who have had intimate images shared non-consensually online. i came into this project from a background in sexual rights activism and i have met and talked to several persons who have been victimized by sexual violence.i have encountered various stories of victimhood; from the ruined victim who depends on the care of others, to the reconciled victim (colvin, 2019) who is healed and therefore no longer poses a problem to society. however, neither of these versions of victimhood ever seem to fit. when working with victims of digital sexual violence, i realized that they would voice similar frustrations. they are frustrated with not having their victimhood acknowledged and being told by adults to simply ‘turn it off’, or they feel trapped in the story of ruined lives telling them that the images will haunt them forever and never allow them to become active (digital) citizens again. what lacks in these positions of victimhood is personal and political agency; the right of victims to define their own positions of victimhood and become “authors of their own lives” (naples, 2003, p. 185). creating the circumstances for victims to take on political and individual meaning making calls for methods that are participatory (allow them to take control of their own stories) and experimental. in my research, creative writing became the practise through which the participants managed to shape, share and co-create their stories. victims of digital sexual violence have little representative language available to describe their experiences as young, gendered and mediated subjects and as victims. hence, we as researchers must find alternative ways to listen. i therefore ask: how can we listen to voices that do not yet exist? what methods and experiments do we need to encourage their manifestations? natalie hendry i have a complicated relationship with creative research methods. i love how creative practice research complicates my thinking and being, and draw on my own creative experiences to explore youth mental health and digital life (see hendry, 2017). in my phd project, young people engaged with an australian youth psychiatric service shared or made images related to #identity with me before we met (hendry, 2018). these images became the focus in the first meetings; we slowly talked about the challenges of anxiety and pain, not making eye contact until we built rapport together. i learnt about their imaging practices, how they curated their lives online, and how scrolling online through their social media profiles only shared so much. and yet creative practice-based research with young people is not always ethical. youth research can be driven by a desire to improve their lives, mental health or young people themselves (is this ethical or even productive?). creative practice is closely entangled with therapy—including socially and culturally specific histories of creative “care” in communities and academia—that these research methods often are interpreted as a type of therapy where young people discover and “expose” a “real” self. is this ethical? is this actually what happens in those encounters? should it? while digital practices can feel like therapy (tiidenberg, hendry & abidin, forthcoming), how might we think of what else is, or could be, produced, or changed, through creative research engagements? ysabel gerrard in my latest project, funded by a british academy small grant, i ask how young people aged 11-18 feel about anonymous secret telling social media apps. these apps include sarahah, yolo, amongst many others and invite users to confess their ‘secrets’ or to send anonymous messages to others without revealing any identifying information (see also tzlil and john, 2018). since their surge in popularity in 2014, secret-telling apps have been linked to issues like cyberbullying and have also been attributed to several young people's suicides (for example, lunden, 2019). the research combines interviews and workshops with young people (along with their parents/carers and educators) to shift away from adultand press-centred discussions of the apps' 'effects' on young people. the focus of this project – young people’s opinions on socially controversial and ‘risky’ technologies – moved me to use highly ethical methodological approaches (given that ethical issues underpin methodological choices and vice versa (buchanan, 2010; gerrard, 2020)). the workshops, for example, consisted of two tasks: (1) a design-anapp activity, where young people were asked to collectively design a new secret-telling app, and (2) an art project based on postsecret (an ongoing community art project in which people anonymously mail their secrets on a postcard to the project’s founder), where young people were asked to illustrate a postcard and write about their views on anonymous secret-telling apps. every stage of this research project – from writing the grant application to submitting journal articles – raised tricky ethical questions. i found myself asking: how do i design a creative, rewarding and safe environment for researching technology with young people? how do i include young people’s voices in this particular research agenda without causing them psychological distress (particularly in the second workshop activity, as participants were asked to reflect on their opinions about secret-telling apps)? essentially, i wanted to know how to conduct potentially risky research about notoriously risky technologies, a question no doubt shared by other aoir 2020 attendees. references buchanan, e.a. (2010). internet research ethics: past, present, and future. in m. consalvo and c. ess. (eds.), the handbook of internet studies (pp.83-108). malden, ma: wiley-blackwell. colvin, c. (2019). traumatic storytelling and memory in post-apartheid south africa: performing signs of injury. new york & london: routledge. gerrard, y. (2020). what’s in a (pseudo)name? ethical conundrums for the principles of anonymisation in social media research. qualitative research. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794120922070. hendry, n. a. (2017). social media bodies: revealing the entanglement of sexual wellbeing, mental health and social media in education. in l. allen & m. l. rasmussen (eds.), palgrave handbook of sex education (pp. 509–526). palgrave macmillan. hendry, n. a. (2018). everyday anxieties: young women, mental illness and social media practices of visibility and connection [doctoral dissertation]. rmit university. lunden, i. (2019, january 31). after bans from apple and google, sarahah debuts enoff, an ios app for anonymous feedback at work. techcrunch. available at: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/31/after-bans-from-apple-and-google-sarahah-debutsenoff-for-anonymous-feedback-at-work/. naples, n. a. (2003). feminism and method : ethnography, discourse analysis, and activist research. new york: routledge. tiidenberg, k., hendry, n. a., & abidin, c. (forthcoming). tumblr: curation, creativity and community. polity press. tzlil, s. and john, n. (2018). unpacking (the) secret: anonymous social media and the impossibility of networked anonymity. new media and society. 20(11): 4177-4194. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): ross, j. & walker, s. (2019, october 2-5). the birds and the bees online: understanding american online sex-ed sites. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the birds and the bees online: understanding american online sexed sites j. nalubega ross arizona state university shawn walker arizona state university the goal of this study is, using twitter and looking over time, what is the nature of the content of adolescent sexual health education provided by sexual health education organizations. sexuality is a critical component of adolescent development, and to aid in sexual development, the united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization (unesco), and the world health organization (who) recommends that adolescents globally have access to comprehensive sexual health education because it contributes positively their future sexual and reproductive health (unesco, 2018). in the united states, starting in 1981 with adolescent family life act (afla) sexual health education has relied heavily on abstinence-only curricula, with the goal of teaching adolescents to reduce risky sexual behaviors, such as having unprotected sex, having multiple sexual partners and young age of sexual debut by remaining sexually abstinent until marriage (dixon-mueller, 1993; saul, 1998). a review of sexual health education programs by the american council on science and public health (2009) found a lack of strong evidence showing that abstinence only programs kept youth abstinent until marriage or reduce number of sexual partners. ten years after this report, funding continues to be funneled into abstinence only education curricula, curricula that have been criticized for being heteronormative, excluding sexual minorities and promoting rigid gender roles (fine, 1988; fine & mcclelland, 2006; freeman, caldwell, bennett, & scott, 2018). one result of the continued use of abstinence only curricula has been a general decline in the provision of sexual health education in schools, a move that has pushed adolescents to online spaces to find sexual health education (buhi, daley, fuhrmann, & smith, 2009; buhi et al., 2010; holstrom, 2015). numerous studies have reviewed how adolescents search for sexual health information online but very few studies have interrogated the content of sexual health education online. looking over time and on specifically on twitter, the goal of this study is to determine; 1). how is sexual health education on twitter structured and what topics are covered? 2). how has online sexual health education over time responded to government mandates on sexual health and sexuality in general? and 3). how do organizations using twitter handle topics such pleasure and desire for underrepresented groups? to respond to the decline in sexual health education in schools, numerous organizations have created sites such as sexetc.org and scarleteen.com as an avenue to provide sexual health information to american adolescents. sexetc for example is run by answer, an organization that “…provides and promotes unfettered access to comprehensive sexuality education for young people and the adults who teach them.” (sexetc.org, 2019). given such a claim by the organization that is running this website, it is therefore important to interrogate their twitter content and the twitter content of other similar organizations to determine whether or not it meets the international standards of comprehensive sexual health education. social networking sites (sns) like twitter are an avenue that organizations have used to provide sexual health education for adolescents because adolescents, who usually have limited access to public spaces use these sites to maintain and collate social relationships (boyd, 2014). adolescents are especially attracted to online spaces for their sexual information needs because of the perceived privacy and the confidentiality afforded to them in online spaces. and though adolescents enjoy this privacy they still crave social interaction when it comes to sexual health education (holstrom, 2015). a 2018 survey by the pew research center (2018) found the of the popular social media sites among 13-17year old adolescents youtube was the most popular, followed by instagram, snapchat, facebook, and twitter. the study found that though majority of adolescents were using youtube, adolescents from low-income households tended to use facebook more than the other four sites and female adolescents using snapchat as their go-to social networking sites (pew research center, 2018). given the gender and economic differences in use of social networking sites and the different affordance of each sns, it becomes important to look across different social networking sites to see how sexual health education changes across sns and how those changes have occurred over time. using twitter, the goal of the present study is to determine how sexual health education changes between the organizations and over time. michelle fine in 1988 argued that sexual health education in america portrayed adolescent women as victims of potential male predators, with women having the undue burden of having to say no, and guard against being used (fine, 1988). sexual health education in america was able to name adolescent male desire but girls are taught to not recognize their own sexual desire, and when they recognized it adolescent women did not know how to act upon their desire (fine, 1988; tolman, 1994, impett & tolman, 2006). fine in 1988 offered an alternative argument where sexual health education should educate adolescent women towards sexual self-interest which would put an adolescent women in a rich and empowering environment safe to develop a sense of self that is not only intellectual, social, and economic but also sexual (fine, 1988). because the discourse of desire and pleasure is missing from the abstinence-only curricula, using this missing discourse provides a specific avenue to examine how organizations using twitter as a sexual health education site address topics such as desire and pleasure, especially for lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual (lgbtqia) adolescents. to conclude, this study aims to review the type of sexual health education that is targeted towards american adolescents on twitter by different sexual health organizations over time. this will provide an understanding of the type of information adolescents, especially lgbtqia adolescents are able to access online and through sns and if it indeed meets the standards set by the who and unesco. this study will provide an opportunity to discuss how affordances on twitter in particular affect the use of social networking sites as education tools and what are the advantages and limitations of using twitter as an educational tool. references boyd, d (2014). it’s complicated. the social lives of networked teens. connecticut: yale university press buhi, e. r., daley, e. m., fuhrmann, h. j., & smith, s. a. (2009). an observational study of how young people search for online sexual health information. journal of american college health, 58(2), 101–111. https://doi.org/10.1080/07448480903221236 buhi, e. r., daley, e. m., oberne, a., smith, s. a., schneider, t., & fuhrmann, h. j. (2010). quality and accuracy of sexual health information web sites visited by young people. journal of adolescent health, 47(2), 206–208. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2010.01.002 dixon-mueller, r. (1993). the sexuality connection in reproductive health. studies in family planning, 24(5), 269. https://doi.org/10.2307/2939221 fine, m. (1988). sexuality, schooling, and adolescent females: the missing discourse of desire. harvard educational review, 58(1), 29–54. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.58.1.u0468k1v2n2n8242 fine, m., & mcclelland, s. (2006). sexuality education and desire: still missing after all these years. harvard educational review, 76(3), 297–338. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.76.3.w5042g23122n6703 freeman, j. l., caldwell, p. h. y., bennett, p. a., & scott, k. m. (2018). how adolescents search for and appraise online health information: a systematic review. the journal of pediatrics, 195, 244-255.e1. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpeds.2017.11.031 holstrom, a. m. (2015). sexuality education goes viral: what we know about online sexual health information. american journal of sexuality education, 10(3), 277– 294. https://doi.org/10.1080/15546128.2015.1040569 impett, e. a., & tolman, d. l. (2006). late adolescent girls’ sexual experiences and sexual satisfaction. journal of adolescent research, 21(6), 628–646. https://doi.org/10.1177/0743558406293964 pew research center (2018). teens, social media & technology 2018. retrieved from pi_2018.05.31_teenstech_final.pdf sexetc.org (2019). about sexetc.org. retrieved from https://sexetc.org/about saul, r. (1998). whatever happened to the adolescent family life act? the guttmacher report on public policy, 3. united nations education, scientific and cultural organization (2018). international technical guidance on sexuality education. an evidence-informed approach. retrieved from https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000260770 snapchatv2 selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 "the silly pictures disappear": ephemeral social media as boundary play irina shklovski it university of copenhagen simon bruun hervik it university of copenhagen introduction in contrast to the "total recall" and "save everything" ethos of digital pioneers (bell & gemmell, 2009), recent popularity of applications such as snapchat that offer erasure of shared media by default suggests that ephemerality of digital content is important. however, little is known about what role ephemerality plays in the use of communication media (kotfila, 2014; roesner, gill, & kohno, 2014). this paper presents a study of college student use of snapchat based on observations, informal conversations, and focus group interviews. we find that students use snapchat alongside rather than instead of facebook and instagram and show that much of snapchat use can be productively interpreted as relational boundary play precisely because of ephemerality of content (nippert-eng, 2005). method the analysis presented here is based on two data sources. the first are extensive notes from observations and informal discussions with undergraduate university students at two universities in denmark conducted in 2013 and 2014, utilizing courses where the first author was not teaching and thus not in a position of power. rather, the author used opportunities during guest lectures and interactions with students during exercises. the author took extensive field notes during and after these engagements, however, none of the students will be quoted verbatim given the informal nature of the interactions. the second data source relies on focus groups conducted as part of a study on student use of social media and conceptions of sharing in march and april of 2014. the four focus groups consisted of 18 college students aged between 24 and 34 (mean of 28,7), equally split between men and women. we ensured heterogeneity among participants in how actively they used social media and in their backgrounds ranging from technical lines of study to the humanities. as students are primary population currently using snapchat and is the most studied social media user group, it makes sense to consider them first. the student experience of danish and american college students is significantly different, thus we cannot claim that our findings negate or support insights into the use of social media derived from a myriad us college suggested citation (apa): shklovski, i. & hervik, s. (2015, october 21-24) "the silly pictures disappear": ephemeral social media as boundary play. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. student samples to date. rather, our findings suggest particular ways in which mobile social media use can be interpreted. "this picture doesn't really exist" a snapchat account allows users to set only a user-name and a display name. the interface involves a list of contacts and the ability to take pictures, augment them with drawings and captions, send and receive them. these 'snaps' erase themselves from both the sender and the receiver mobiles based on the timer preset by the sender (up to 10 seconds). if the receiver uses their mobile phone to take a screenshot of the image, the sender is notified. the list of contacts has no history of communication with these contacts within the app. most students we encountered used facebook and the vast majority also used snapchat. while some students used facebook or instagram in isolation, we did not encounter anyone who used snapchat exclusively. the popularity of snapchat illustrates that users appreciate the option of ephemeral digital social interaction. snapchat was used alongside sms, media messaging and facebook posts thus clearly performing a different function. most often use of snapchat was described as silly, playful, "definitely not serious" engagement with friends enabled by ephemerality of content. students knew this ephemerality was not foolproof and discussed available workarounds for saving pictures. the silly pictures disappear the built in defaults of preservation or ephemerality do not preclude content from being saved or deleted. yet making content ephemeral where it is automatically saved or saved where it is automatically ephemeral has consequences. to our participants the default of ephemerality eased their accountability for the content they produced. "you don’t give it as much thought because the content disappears. it is not something you will linger on, revisit time and time again. it’s much more simple information about what are up to. there is something about the briefness of it that makes it fun" (f2). students explicitly noted that little of snapchat communication involved content they considered sensitive and the silly pictures were sent as snaps because they weren't considered worth saving. rather than speaking to concerns of privacy, most pointed out that there is value to immediacy of sharing low quality images, funny only in the moment of exchange. the knowledge that an image will expire freed the sender from the responsibility of producing meaningful content. snapchat as boundary play “you share pictures, where you actually think you shouldn’t see this.” (f1) and this is possible because "it [snapchat] gives a sense of this picture doesn’t really exist." (f2). the default of ephemerality that snapchat offers enables boundary play (nippert-eng, 2005) – a kind of “feeling out” of relationships and their boundaries and edges – a test of confidences. the permanence of most digital media can make "small" and "playful" communication potentially dangerous if such communication is documented and encountered out of context. snapchat allows explicit targeting of communication making it “interpersonal”, the ephemerality enabling a kind of relational play impossible in the formalization imposed on content through digital permanence. our participants also used ephemerality to limit the recipient's access to this same content outside the context of the specific communication. while conversation partners may remember the content of past snaps they had exchanged, they do not have the digital objects themselves to point to at a later date and out of context, potentially freeing users from the need to self-censor as research suggests many do in other media such as facebook (das & kramer, 2013), or phone media messages (ahern et al., 2007). the notion of ephemerality is in direct conflict with the underlying perception of permanence of digital content and its endless multiplication. snapchat users did not seem to care that this ephemerality could be easily circumvented because their behavior was based on the social contract with their relations. receivers could capture these momentary expressions, but such captures became a violation of the normative expectations of the users. conclusions in contrast to ephemerality of direct experience documentation transcends the fault of memory by fixing data produced through social interaction in physical or digital form (kotfila, 2014). this fixity can be advantageous, as individuals no longer have to rely on memory to transmit information. however, there is a loss of control of the information since once transmitted it can be re-transmitted again. this fixity also changes the meaning of mediated interaction as generating digital objects that can be read back and re-interpreted in the future and out of context. snapchat's snaps are pictures that don't really exist precisely because experimentation needs space for forgetting, a kind of protection of the future self from the playful transgressions of the past. for snapchat users, intentional data loss spells carelessness in a digital world where every action is saved and catalogued, requiring far too much forethought. references ahern, s., et al. (2007). over-exposed?: privacy patterns and considerations in online and mobile photo sharing. in proceedings of chi. acm. bell, c., & gemmell, j. (2009). total recall: how the e-memory revolution will change everything. ny: dutton. das, s., & kramer, a. (2013). self-censorship on facebook. in icwsm. erickson, i. (2010). documentary with ephemeral media: curation practices in online social spaces. bulletin of science, technology & society, 30(6), 387-397. hodson, h. (2013). what your facebook ‘likes’ really say about you. new scientist, 217(2908), 22. kalnikaitė, v., & whittaker, s. (2011). a saunter down memory lane: digital reflection on personal mementos. int. j. hum.-comput. stud., 69(5), 298-310. kotfila, c. (2014). this message will self-destruct: the growing role of obscurity and selfdestructing data in digital communication. bulletin of the american society for information science and technology, 40(2), 12-16. nippert-eng, c. (2005). boundary play. space and culture, 8(3), 302-324. roesner, f., gill, b., & kohno, t. (2014). sex, lies, or kittens? investigating the use of snapchat’s self-destructing messages financial cryptography and data security (pp. 6476): springer. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): gemini, l., brilli, s. (2020, october). between live and life: exploring the online presence of performance artists. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. between live and life: exploring the online presence of performance artists laura gemini university of urbino stefano brilli university of urbino introduction this paper explores the use of social media by italian contemporary theatre artists and companies. the study aims to explore the relational labour (baym 2018) of performance artists in tracing the boundaries between online/offline performativity and between personal self-narration and artistic promotion. through a combination of profile analysis and in-depth interviews, we want to understand how this artistic scene that always experimented on intermedial and participatory possibilities is making sense of social media. this reflection becomes crucial in the moment we are witnessing what some have called an “ephemeral turn” in digital media (haber 2019). the shift from contents permanence as a default condition, to the multiple temporalities of stories and video streams, opens a new strand of possibility for relations between social media and performativity that are to be explored. theatre and social media: between promotion and performative practices in the last decade, the use of social media in the theatre scene has fueled debates on the possibility to redefine the performer-audience relationship on a wide scale (lonergan 2015). in the context of mainstream-mainstage theatre, this possibility has been initially explored mostly through twitter. for example, with the experimentation of live-tweeting during performances with particular "tweet seats" (ahmed 2011), or through the crossmedia transfer of classic drama, as in the often-cited case of such tweet sorrow (royal shakespeare company, 2010). these cases represent an initial phase characterised by a "fascination" with the medium. however, as bree hadley (2017) analysed, the relationship between theatre and social media now concerns a much broader spectrum of meaning-making possibilities that arise around performances. in her study hadley traces at least six areas in which we can currently observe the impact of social media in the theatrical field: 1) in the use of social media for the construction of intermedial performances, 2) in the dissemination of performances, 3) in the processes of audience development, 4) for the critics’ public, 5) for documentation and archiving, and 6) in the performative aspects concerning the daily use of social media. one of the main themes framing the debate on theatre and social media is the emphasis on their democratising potential, especially on the possibility that they have to reach marginalised audiences otherwise excluded from the orbit of contemporary theatre (sant 2014; walmsley 2019). according to balme (2014), social media can amplify the range of debates developed within theatre outside the "closed circuit of subscriber audiences, professional reviewers and theatrical unions" (balme 2014, p. xi). research on the "expansive" potential of social media on theatre have produced contradictory outcomes (walmsley 2019). one problem is their actual ability to breach the calcified margins of western canons and connoisseurs’ networks. in this regard, o'neill (2014) notes in his study of shakespeare's diffusion on youtube that noneuropean adaptations are almost absent from search results without racial appellations such as "african", "asian" or "pacific". alongside the possibilities for the expansion of theatre "outside of itself", the relationship between theatre and social media is also to be observed in terms of the new forms and protocols shaping the online circulation of theatre. one example is the diffusion of theatre promotional videos (vollans 2015) for which social media represent the main distribution infrastructure. this phenomenon has to be located within the reshaping of the relationship between theatre texts and para-texts highlighted by conner (2013). this process entails an incremental centrality in the audiences meaning-making operations with those elements that are external to the performance yet becoming more persistent and searchable thanks to social networks affordances. how the daily online presence of performance artists and companies relates to the para-textual corpus of performance is still a theme barely explored by literature, but central to the present analysis. addressing this issue becomes particularly necessary, considering how the development of social media constitutes a drive towards the aestheticization of everyday life (gemini 2009), where performativity enters personal self-narrations (lavender 2016). observing this process solely as a collapse of the boundaries between performance and the mundane proves to be a short-sighted perspective, as it does not account for the way theatre artists work to establish the margins of their role within a media-based environment. as nancy baym (2018) observes in her study on how musicians manage the artist-fan relationship, the increasing use of social networks entails for artists an increasingly high level of relational work. such a task configures as a constant and demanding emotional effort to manage the frontiers between artistic work, private life and personal exposure. where the interaction with fans can no longer rely only on the boundaries provided by classic rites and infrastructures of performance (such as the stage, the concert situation etc.), performers must experiment the most appropriate ways to control the interaction. the mediatization of theatre communicative relationships, observable through social media, goes beyond the problem of including new audiences. it implies defining the relationships with users, spectators and fans, which is now likely to become an integral part of their work routines. methods given this scenario, our study asks: r.q.1: how contemporary theatre companies manage the boundaries between online promotion and artistic experimentation on the medium? r.q.2: how contemporary theatre artists manage the boundaries between online selfperformance and the performativity related to their theatre practices? to approach these questions, we conducted 1) in-depth interviews with 20 of the most significant companies of the italian contemporary theatre scene which are involved in intermedial practices and 2) a content analysis of their facebook profiles and instagram profiles, coding for each post a) object promoted (theatre performance/other activity/not promotional), b) members of the company portraited, c) work/life boundary (related to theatre work or else), d) company/community boundary (related to the company or to other colleagues work). preliminary results preliminary results show how social media interaction and content production is becoming an integrated part of performance artists’ working routines. companies position their social media activity outside a purely promotional logic. this antipromotional ethos translates to a lack of efficacy in terms of strategic communication. however, it also lays the basis for the use of social media to expand performative practices. although the interviewed companies do not exclude such a possibility, they lament their current inability in making such an attempt. lacking resources is the most quoted explanation of this failure, followed by the refusal to compromise with the constraints of online languages, and the distrust of social media to reach wider audiences. references ahmed, b. (2011) “tweet seats” come to theaters, but can patrons plug in without tuning out?. national public radio, 12 december 2011, http://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2011/12/12/143576328/tweet-seats-cometotheaters-but-can-patrons-plug-in-without-tuning-out balme, c. b. (2014). the theatrical public sphere. cambridge university press. baym, n. k. (2018). playing to the crowd: musicians, audiences, and the intimate work of connection. new york university press. conner, l. (2013). audience engagement and the role of arts talk in the digital era. new york: palgrave macmillan. haber, b. (2019). the digital ephemeral turn: queer theory, privacy, and the temporality of risk. media, culture & society, 41(8), 1069-1087. hadley, b. (2017). theatre, social media, and meaning making. cham: springer international publishing. gemini, l. (2009). stati di creatività diffusa: i social network e la deriva evolutiva della comunicazione artistica. in mazzoli l. (ed.) network effect. quando la rete diventa pop. torino: codice. 113-136. lavender, a. (2016). performance in the twenty-first century: theatres of engagement. london: routledge. lonergan, p. (2015). theatre and social media. basingstoke, hampshire : palgrave macmillan. o'neill, s. (2014). shakespeare and youtube new media forms of the bard. london: bloomsbury publishing. sant, t. (2014). art, performance, and social media. in hunsinger j. & senft t. (ed.) the social media handbook. london: routledge. 53-66. vollans, e. (2015). cross media promotion: entertainment industries and the trailer (doctoral dissertation, university of east anglia). walmsley, b. (2019). audience engagement in the performing arts: a critical analysis. basingstoke, hampshire : palgrave macmillan. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 lüders, marika. (2019, october 03-05). convenience trumps algorithms: predicting continued intention to use music streaming services. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. convenience trumps algorithms: predicting continued intention to use music streaming services marika lüders department of media and communication, university of oslo, norway a decade after the launch of spotify, music streaming services (mss) have become a default way of listening to music. their offerings to music-listeners now extend beyond abundance and availability to recommendations and curation capabilities. this paper addresses the extent to which music-listeners use the different mechanics of mss and combines theoretical approaches from technology acceptance studies, collecting/sensemaking in mss and algorithmic culture/individuation. this theoretical framework is chosen as each approach points to constructs that capture at least part of the use-value of these services, yet that have not been examined in combination. empirically, this paper builds on a mixed methods approach combining interviews and a survey on the use of mss in norway. while the results from the survey identify what factors matter more for continued intention to use these services, the interviews elucidate how different experiences covary with different practices. accordingly, i pose the following overall research question: how do patterns of using mss shape the experienced value of these services? theoretical framework and research model studies of technology acceptance and use are common in information systems research (venkatesh et al., 2012) and have also been applied for understanding antecedents predicting use of streaming services (hampton-sosa, 2017; oyedele & simpson, 2018). from these studies, two constructs are included in this study: convenience value and monetary value, where the former reflects the rhetoric of “anything anytime anywhere”. yet, these studies are limited by not addressing usevalues such as features for organizing music, and what importance personalized recommendations play. 2 while mss offer vast catalogues of music, people remain attached to their musical preferences and history. the immaterial access-based way of listening to music does not negate the seemingly inherent human desire to collect (marshall, 2014); and people still experience a need for establishing a sense of psychological ownership, for example by creating playlists (hagen, 2015; sinclair & tinson, 2017). few if any studies have tested the importance of such practices. in this study, collecting and sense of ownership is conceptualized as “will to archive”. services such as spotify, apple music and deezer attempt to distinguish themselves by offering the most accurate and relevant personalized recommendations (morris & powers, 2015; prey, 2018). communication research abounds with critical discussions of algorithmic culture and algorithmic individuation (kitchin, 2017; prey, 2018), yet few studies have examined the perceived value of such recommendations from the perspective of music listeners. finally, the study suggests that age predicts continued behavioural intention negatively. figure 1 presents the resultant hypotheses of this study. figure 1: research model with hypotheses method and measurements this study is based on interviews with 18 users of streaming services (2017/2018) and an online survey (2018). the interviews were used to develop items for the survey and to explicate findings. the sample for the survey is representative of the norwegian population and included 1511 respondents, yet only respondents who had singleor multi-subscription accounts (i.e. respondents who pay for mss) were included for testing the hypotheses (n=793). for this sub-sample mean age was 39 (sd=14.6) and 52% were male. respondents indicated whether they agreed with statements on a 5-point likert-scale ranging from 1 (completely disagree) to 5 (completely agree). the items were subjected to a principal component analysis with oblimin rotation. factors that loaded with an eigenvalue of 1 or greater and had at least three loadings using a 60-40 rule were retained. items that loaded on each factor were summed and averaged. the resultant factors explained 66.7% of the total variance after rotation. 3 convenience value was measured with four items based on oyedele & simpson (2018) (α=.87; m=4.3; sd=.57). monetary value was measured by adapting three items from venkatesh et al. (2012) (α=.92; m=4.0; sd=.84). will to archive is an invented construct based on the qualitative data and was measured with four items (α=.75; m=3.5; sd=.78). items included the importance of saving music to link music to a certain time or place, to make it easy to find music for different situation, to avoid losing track of music that matters, and to create a sense of ownership to music. algorithmic value is an invented construct based on the qualitative data and was measured with four items (α=.80; m=3.5; sd=.71). items included whether personalized recommendations included music respondents like, help respondent discover new music, include music respondents end up saving, and help respondent expand their taste in music. continued behavioural intention was measured by adapting three items from venkatesh et al. (2012) (α=.86; m=4.0; sd=.77). results and findings correlation coefficients were below the recommended threshold of .7, suggesting multicollinearity is not an issue (table 1). hierarchical regression analyses were used to test the hypotheses (table 2), with the established constructs entered in step 1 and the invented constructs and age entered in step 2. table 1: correlation matrix cv mv wta av age convenience value: cv 1 monetary value: mv .52** 1 will to archive: wta .32** .26** 1 algorithmic value: av .37** .31** .41** 1 age -.19** -.17** -.21** -.12** 1 continued behavioural intention: cbi .55** .52** .43** .33** -.34** note: **correlation is significant at the .01 level (two-tailed). table 2: results from the hierarchical regression analysis dependent variable: continued behavioural intention β p h supported? step 1 cv .34** .001 mv .37** .001 step 2 cv .25** .001 yes mv .33** .001 yes wta .19** .001 yes av .04 .202 no age -.19** .001 yes note: r2=.38 for step 1 (p<.001); δr2=.088 for step 2 (p<.001). in model 1, convenience value and monetary value account for 38% of the variation in continued behavioural intention (r2=.38). in model 2, r2 increases by 8.8%, making r2 4 .46 with a significant f-statistic of 33.15 (p<.001). this increase is accounted for by will to archive and age. the results support all hypotheses except h4: whereas algorithmic value correlates significantly with all other constructs (table 1), it does not predict behavioural intention. perceived monetary value is the strongest predictor followed by convenience value and will to archive. as expected, age is negatively associated with continued behavioural intention. the analysis of the interviews enquires why and how participants value music streaming services and in particular addresses convenience value, archiving practices and whether or not or how algorithmic recommendations matter. findings suggest that accessing music anytime and anywhere is the default motivation for using and continuing to use mss. yet the abundance of music invokes the question of ‘what to listen to?’ this problem and/or freedom of abundance is tackled by archiving and relying on algorithmic recommendations. with regard to archiving, people who invest efforts in organizing and curating their own music libraries create added value to their serviceexperience. these personal archives, whether in the form of current lists of favourites or meticulously curated collections of music, come across as safe retreats: musical spaces to rely on for ‘my music’. finally, whereas the survey did not fond algorithmic value to predict continued intention to use mss, the interviews provide more nuanced accounts and point to how the extent to which personalised recommendations are perceived to matter relates to perceptions of catering for algorithms. conversely casual listeners pay little attention to recommendations, or perhaps more accurately, do not recognize or see these as recommendations. conclusion while branding of streaming services has shifted from emphasizing convenience value to e.g. personalized recommendations (morris & powers, 2015), this study indicates that the convenience of accessing any music anytime and anywhere remains crucial for music-listeners. mss providers may regard it as a central objective to improve how content finds people. it may not matter for the service provider if most people do not grasp how these recommendations work. yet my attempt to unpack how people use, value and make sense of mss delineates how the streaming-experience is co-created by music-listeners. invested listeners get plentiful in return: they cater for and control their service-experience, yet not without simultaneously catering for the provider. references hagen, a. n. (2015). the playlist experience: personal playlists in music streaming services. popular music and society 38(5): 625-645. hampton-sosa, w. (2017). the impact of creativity and community facilitation on music streaming adoption and digital piracy. computers in human behavior, 69, 444-453. kitchin, r. (2017). thinking critically about and researching algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 14-29. 5 marshall, l. (2014). w(h)ither now? music collecting in the age of the cloud. in marshall l, laing d and frith s (eds) popular music matters: essays in honour of simon frith. farnham: ashgate, pp. 61-72. morris, j. w., & powers, d. (2015). control, curation and musical experience in streaming music services. creative industries journal, 8(2), 106-122. oyedele, a., & simpson, p. m. (2018). streaming apps: what consumers value. journal of retailing and consumer services, 41, 296-304. prey, r. (2018). nothing personal: algorithmic individuation on music streaming platforms. media, culture & society, 40(7), 1086-1100. sinclair, g., & tinson, j. (2017). psychological ownership and music streaming consumption. journal of business research, 71, 1-9. venkatesh, v., thong, j. y., & xu, x. (2012). consumer acceptance and use of information technology: extending the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology. mis quarterly, 36(1), 157-178. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 sugessted citation (apa): rivera,y, smith, k, moran, m. (2019, october 2-5). “why would someone intentionally lie?”: assessing the credibility of cancer (mis)information on facebook . paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “why would someone intentionally lie?”: assessing the credibility of cancer (mis)information on facebook yonaira m. rivera johns hopkins bloomberg school of public health katherine c. smith johns hopkins bloomberg school of public health meghan b. moran johns hopkins bloomberg school of public health word count: 1200 introduction as misinformation on social media continues to proliferate, scholars are increasingly calling for explorations of the consequences of health-related misinformation for health outcomes (chou, oh & klein, 2018; national cancer institute, 2016). recently, researchers from the u.s. national cancer institute expressed concern over how health misinformation is shared and how vulnerable populations respond to it (chou et al., 2018). understanding the role of cancer misinformation in the uptake of prevention and screening behaviors among underserved communities with high cancer burden is an important step in reducing cancer health disparities. however, engagement with cancer misinformation on social media has been understudied, and existing research on the topic focuses primarily on twitter and weibo (chen, wang & peng, 2018; park et al., 2016). yet, a recent study found that 96% of the top 100 shared health articles in 2018 were shared on facebook; 51% of those health articles had neutral to poor credibility scores (credibility coalition, 2018). as such, it is important to understand how facebook users assess the credibility of cancer screening and prevention information (cpsi) shared by their facebook friends or groups, which may include unreliable or user-generated information. this exploratory study seeks to understand how u.s. latinos assess the credibility of cpsi they engage with on facebook. this topic is in clear alignment with the conference’s theme of trust in information and will provide insight on how underserved communities navigate the current social media landscape. methods to explore this topic, we interviewed 20 latino/hispanic facebook users between the ages of 40-75 without a history of cancer. latinos were selected as a study population because they are the largest minority group in the u.s. (u.s. census bureau, 2017), avid facebook users (krogstad, 2015; nielsen, 2016), and experience high cancer incidence rates for screenable cancers linked to preventable behaviors (breast, prostate, colorectal) (american cancer society, 2015). we focused on the age range of 40-75 because it encompasses u.s. screening guidelines for the aforementioned cancers. furthermore, older americans report being less able to distinguish fact from opinion (gottfried & grieco, 2018), which may affect how they assess cpsi credibility. participants partook in semi-structured, in-depth interviews (~2hrs). after discussing their overall facebook utilization, participants accessed their facebook account alongside the researcher. upon logging in, participants entered the search term “cancer,” and walked-through 6-12 months of cancer-related posts that appeared on their newsfeed (posts sorted by “most recent” and posted by “your friends and groups”). if a participant had engaged with cpsi (i.e. liking/commenting/sharing a post; clicking on a link; reading an article; and/or watching a video), the researcher asked questions regarding if and how participants assessed the credibility of the information. when applicable, the researcher and participant watched embedded videos or clicked on any links within a post to discuss the content and process by which credibility was assessed. after discussing the posts appearing on their newsfeed, participants reacted to three standardized cpsi posts, enabling researchers to further explore perceptions of credibility with identical content. both computer screen and audio were recorded throughout the encounter. interviews are being analyzed thematically, and cpsi via content analysis. preliminary findings preliminary analyses suggest that most cpsi participants engaged with were for foods claiming cancer prevention/curative properties. participants with higher education levels were more likely to verify information via outside sources (i.e. pubmed, national cancer organizations, webmd). others looked for cues within the post to assess credibility (i.e. being shared by a reputable news agency). most, however, reported not verifying information, only doing so if they thought the information was important or relevant to them. instead, participants relied on heuristics to assess credibility – including post virality, recognizing culturally popular foods (e.g. soursop in puerto rico), and personal testimonies. others cited the credibility of the friend posting the information. lastly, some never verify information, believing that “someone must have” verified any information previously posted on facebook. we are currently viewing the recorded content participants engaged with to assess the accuracy of the claims in each post/link. this will be used to further contextualize how latinos assess the credibility of the information they consume. implications previous studies assessing cancer-related information on facebook have analyzed content on reputable cancer organizations’ facebook pages (strekalova & damiani, 2016; strekalova & krieger, 2015; kapahi-theiss et al., 2016). our findings suggest most cpsi engagement among latino adults does not come from reputable sources or cancer organizations with a facebook presence, but instead from facebook friends and groups that at times share unreliable information. these findings provide insight to important features health organizations should consider when designing social media campaigns to counteract misinformation with reputable cancer information. they also highlight the importance of developing digital literacy programs that help users navigate information shared within one’s network. furthermore, in light of recent platform-led initiatives to reduce the amount of misinformation pertaining vaccines shared on social media (i.e. pinterest banning searches; youtube demonetizing videos), these findings raise broader questions regarding facebook’s roles and responsabilities in regulating and monitoring health misinformation on its platform. references american cancer society. (2015). cancer facts & figures for hispanics/latinos 20152017. atlanta: american cancer society. chen, l., wang, x., & peng, t. q. (2018). nature and diffusion of gynecologic cancer– related misinformation on social media: analysis of tweets. journal of medical internet research, 20(10). chou, w. y. s., oh, a., & klein, w. m. (2018). addressing health-related misinformation on social media. jama, 320(23), 2417-2418. gage-bouchard, e. a., lavalley, s., warunek, m., beaupin, l. k., & mollica, m. (2018). is cancer information exchanged on social media scientifically accurate?. journal of cancer education, 33(6), 1328-1332. gottfried, j. & grieco, e. (2018, october 23). younger americans are better than older americans at telling factual news statements from opinions. pew research center. retrieved from: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/10/23/younger-americansare-better-than-older-americans-at-telling-factual-news-statements-from-opinions/ kapahi-theiss, s., burke, r. m., cory, j. l., & fairley, t. l. (2016). getting beyond impressions: an evaluation of engagement with breast cancer-related facebook content. mhealth, 2(41). krogstad, j.m. (2015, february 3). social media preferences vary by race and ethnicity. pew research center. retrieved from: http://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2015/ 02/03/social-media-preferences-vary-by-race-and-ethnicity/ murphy, s. l., xu, j., kochanek, k. d., & bastian, b. a. (2016). deaths: final data for 2013. national vital statistics reports from the centers for disease control and prevention, national center for health statistics, national vital statistics system, 64(2), 1. national cancer institute. (2016, may 10). nih funding opportunities: innovative approaches to studying cancer communication in the new media environment (r01/r21). retrieved from: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/par-16-249.html nielsen company. (2016, august 23). from the ballot box to the grocery store: a 2016 perspective on growing hispanic influence in america. the nielsen company: diverse intelligence series. retrieved from: http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports/2016/from-the-ballot-box-to-the-grocerystore-hispanic-influence-in-america.html park, s., oh, h. k., park, g., suh, b., bae, w. k., kim, j. w., ... & kang, s. b. (2016). the source and credibility of colorectal cancer information on twitter. medicine, 95(7). strekalova, y. a., & damiani, r. e. (2016). message design and audience engagement with tobacco prevention posts on social media. journal of cancer education, 1-5. strekalova, y. a., & krieger, j. l. (2015). a picture really is worth a thousand words: public engagement with the national cancer institute on social media. journal of cancer education, 1-3. u.s. census bureau. (2017, march). acs demographic and housing estimates: 20112015 american community survey 5-year estimates. retrieved from https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=acs_ 15_5yr_dp05&src=pt selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): kim, y., chen, y., liang, f., hussain, m. (2020, october). surveillance infrastructures in and for crises: a comparative analysis of china and south korea’s development of quarantine surveillance mobile applications during covid-19. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. surveillance infrastructures in and for crises: a comparative analysis of china and south korea’s development of quarantine surveillance mobile applications during covid-19 youngrim kim university of michigan yuchen chen university of michigan fan liang university of michigan muzammil hussain university of michigan introduction this article examines china and south korea’s health surveillance infrastructures that are being developed and deployed during the 2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic (covid19). by comparatively analyzing quarantine surveillance mobile applications that the chinese and south korean governments are utilizing in pandemic control, we investigate how these two different governmental regimes one authoritarian and the other democratic construct and propagate what their state-of-the-art surveillance technologies can offer to the public in moments of emergency. as china being the epicenter of the outbreak and south korea being one of the closest countries from mainland china, these two countries have been actively developing health surveillance infrastructures to monitor and control the pandemic and maintain the state. the chinese government has collaborated with technology giants like alibaba to implement the alipay health code, a color-coded classification system that is now being used in more than 200 cities (lin 2020). meanwhile, the korean government launched the “self-quarantine safety protection app” in march 2020 to enforce home isolation to suspected carriers and monitor their health statuses. through a mixture of walk-through method and situational analysis (clarke, 2005), this article aims to unpack the processes in which these technologies become developed and examine the politics around their deployment. more broadly, we argue that analyzing them offers new opportunities to investigate the relationship between state surveillance and personal privacy in the context of a national crisis. as surveillance tactics that were deemed oppressive and undemocratic in ordinary times get easily normalized in crisis situations, these moments allow us to reveal the precarious and flexible nature of surveillance and privacy while destabilizing the west-oriented, dichotomic understanding of these concepts. this article tackles this question by observing the relationship between relevant actors – the state officials, industry professionals, and general users – and various contestations/negotiations involved in the process of designing and deploying these quarantine surveillance apps. theoretical framework we approach these quarantine technologies as infrastructures that both sustain and perform the work of surveillance, containment, and management of people and viruses. infrastructure studies can lend us a theoretical lens in examining how the politics involved in the infrastructure design are translated into objects, categories, and practices of that technology (anand, gupta and appel 2018), and furthermore, influence how crises are understood and governed. in our case, these state-initiated surveillance infrastructures show us how the state inscribes the promise of stability within the technology by claiming that they can solve or at least prevent the crisis. infrastructure is also a site where different actors and politics converge: governments, corporations, activists, citizens, and objects. involving heterogeneous actors, infrastructure is often seen as “a terrain of power and contestation” (ibid. 2). in this respect, we attempt to unpack such dynamics of power among different stakeholders involved the state officials, technology companies, healthcare experts, and users by mapping out the ecosystem and collaborators of these surveillance infrastructures. lastly, literature in science, technology, and society has informed us that the classification work involved and embedded in these technologies is inherently political (bowker and star 1999). by unpacking these categorizations, we attempt to reveal how these surveillance infrastructures operate as both technologies of care and technologies of control (foucault 1978). method and findings the method of this article is two-front: 1) a situational analysis that involves mapping out key actors, debates, and events from the collected archive of first and secondary materials related to china and south korea’s quarantine apps and, 2) the “walkthrough method” (light, burgess, and duguay, 2016) of these apps. first, in terms of secondary materials, we collected mainstream newspaper coverage that has commented about these projects that were published between january 1st, 2020 and april 30th, 2020. second, we collected an archive of materials produced both by the state and corporate actors who were involved in these projects in the same timeframe. we obtained these materials via official government websites and corporate web pages. then, we mapped out the ecosystem of these projects by asking – who were the main stakeholders of these projects, who were subject to these technologies, and what data were these technologies using under what mechanism. lastly, through a comparative perspective, we looked for recurrent themes that reflect what the chinese and south korean states promise from these technologies and how they negotiate issues of surveillance and privacy when communicating about them to the public. the analysis reveals that the main stakeholders involved in these projects were not only the state departments but also private technology firms including telecommunications and platform companies. in the case of china’s health qr code, alibaba’s alipay was the central collaborator of the project, while south korea’s safety protection app was built with the help of korea’s telecom firms, which provided with real-time location data. however, it is important to note that, in the case of china, the health qr code was built upon the existing surveillance infrastructures made by the same technology firm, alipay. meanwhile, south korea’s health surveillance technologies were integrated into the existing bureaucratic system managed by the government. another major difference was concerned with whom these technologies surveil. in china, the surveillance infrastructure targeted a large scale of people in an omnipresent and compulsory manner. any people who needed to re-enter the cities were subject to this technology. in contrast, the south korean government made app installation mandatory to only those who were recommended to self-isolate, instead of all citizens. in korea’s case, the risk groups – those who were suspected of carrying the virus – were first sorted out through traditional contact tracing method, and then were subjected under app-based management. we also discovered similarities between china and korea’s quarantine surveillance infrastructures. although china’s app conducted mass surveillance when korea chose a more targeted approach, both apps involved significant moralizing work of defining “ideal” and “deviant” users. while ideal users were heavily praised by the news media as responsible, loyal citizens, those who uncompiled to the app’s orders or tried to game the system were vilified and punished. these mechanisms demonstrate that in both countries, the responsibility to manage and prevent the pandemic shifted from the government to individuals, while the power to surveil and control these people were recentered to the state-corporate nexus. we argue that establishing such structures of vilification, and the surveillance infrastructures’ promise to manage such deviant subjects, operate as vital mechanisms that contribute in naturalizing surveillance in times of crisis. references anand, nikhil, akhil gupta, and hannah appel. 2018. the promise of infrastructure. duke university press. bowker, geoffrey c, and susan leigh star. 1999. sorting things out: classification and its consequences. cambridge, ma: the mit press. clarke, adele, 2005. situational analysis: grounded theory after the postmodern turn. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. foucault michel. 1978. the history of sexuality, vol. 1: introduction. tavistock, london. light, ben, jean burgess, and stefanie duguay. 2016. "the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps." new media and society 20(3): 881-900. lin, liza. 2020. "china turns to health-rating apps to control movements during coronavirus outbreak". wsj. retrieved from https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-turnsto-health-rating-apps-to-control-movements-during-coronavirus-outbreak-11582046508 selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): baack, s. (2019, october 2-5). global, networked and collaborative’1: how the normalization of leaking shaped the identity and practice of investigative journalism. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ‘global, networked and collaborative’1: how the normalization of leaking shaped the identity and practice of investigative journalism stefan baack weizenbaum institute for the networked society & mozilla foundation from the panama papers to pan-european investigations like the migrants’ files2, we appear to witness a “golden age of global muckraking” (coronel 2016). this ‘golden age’ is driven by nonprofit organizations like the international consortium of investigative journalists (icij) that facilitate the collaboration between journalists from different countries. the resulting transnational journalism networks of today differ significantly from cross-national collaborations among journalists in the past. first, data technologies have dramatically increased their scale and degree of collaboration in recent years. transnational collaborations among journalists are increasingly datadriven operations specialized on facilitating the analysis of huge data leaks (cf. sambrook 2018). second, the media landscape in which transnational networks operate is much more dynamic. new types of media organizations, e.g. nonprofits like propublica or venture-baked startups like buzzfeed, challenge traditional notions of journalism and make the field more inclusive and diverse. by pioneering the use of data to enable investigations on ever-growing scales within a more diverse field, transnational networks help to articulate common, global standards of journalistic practices and values and shape journalism’s ability to tackle issues in an increasingly globalized and interdependent world. i will show how debates about wikileaks’ role in relation to journalism, and especially its claim to ‘be’ journalism, let news media to adopt some of the technologies and practices it introduced. the normalization of leaking by journalists took place at a technological, an organizational, and a cultural level. technologically, journalists have adopted encryption technologies and embraced whistleblower submission systems. 1 hume and abbott (2017). 2 http://www.themigrantsfiles.com/. organizationally, the normalization of leaking helped to create – or transform – national and transnational structures that facilitate collaborations across newsrooms. the organization in charge of the network primarily grants (exclusive) access to the leaked data to selected journalists and provides tools for collaborative data analysis. the most important normalization took place on the cultural level. here, journalists moved the concept of leaking away from radical transparency advocacy, and into traditional journalistic ethics and identities by emphasizing ‘responsible’, partial disclosure. this way, they established a ‘journalistic model’ of leaking that is designed to gain trust in several ways. first, journalists seek to present themselves to potential whistleblowers as trustworthy receivers of leaked materials that will expose wrongdoings without causing unnecessary harm. second, by combining responsible disclosure with a coordinated and simultaneous publication, journalists present themselves to the public as responsible and effective gatekeepers of publicly relevant information whose coverage gain broad, international attention. the normalization of leaking is relevant beyond leaking itself, as it more broadly shaped practices around ‘data-driven cross-border collaboration’. this means that the practices, organizational structures and technologies developed around leaking also shape collaborative data collection or data sharing projects like the aforementioned migrants’ files, where journalists in 15 european countries collaboratively collected data documenting how many people died in their attempt to reach or stay in europe. therefore, the ways in which leaking has been normalized is more broadly connected to advances in data journalism and automation, and it helped to foster a culture of collaboration and sharing among investigative journalists. in sum, it fundamentally affected the shape of transnational networks of investigative journalists today. the findings presented in this paper are connected to, and expand research on entrepreneurial forms of journalism and global journalism. first, it shows that parallel to the increased diversity of media organizations and ways of ‘doing journalism’ around news startups or nonprofit newsrooms, new forms of stabilizing and, to some extent, standardizing journalism practices have emerged. second, it adds to empirical research that examines how global journalism manifests in the practices and identities of journalists (cf. lindell and karlsson 2016; heikkilä and kunelius 2006; hepp et al. 2016) by showing how such practices have evolved around the normalization of leaking. to examine the future of journalism in a more globalized and datafied world, i will conclude with suggesting that media and journalism studies needs to rely more on theories and methodological frameworks that do justice to journalism’s increasingly transcultural nature. references coronel, sheila. 2016. “coronel: a golden age of global muckraking at hand.” global investigative journalism network. https://gijn.org/2016/06/20/a-golden-age-of-global muckraking/. heikkilä, heikki, and risto kunelius. 2006. “journalists imagining the european public sphere.” javnost the public 13 (4): 63–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2006.11008925. hepp, andreas, monika elsler, swantje lingenberg, anne mollen, johanna möller, and anke offerhaus. 2016. the communicative construction of europe: cultures of political discourse, public sphere, and the euro crisis. transformations of the state. london: palgrave macmillan. hume, ellen, and susan abbott. 2017. “the future of investigative journalism: global, networked and collaborative,” 29. https://cmds.ceu.edu/sites/cmcs.ceu.hu/files/attachment/article/1129/humeinvestigativej ournalismsurvey_0.pdf. lindell, johan, and michael karlsson. 2016. “cosmopolitan journalists?” journalism studies 17 (7): 860–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670x.2016.1165137. sambrook, richard, ed. 2018. global teamwork: the rise of collaboration in investigative journalism. oxford: reuters institute for the study of journalism. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2018-03/sambrook_eisbn_1802.pdf. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): karnowski, v., knop-huelss, k., & olbermann, z. (2020, october). news junkie or only accidentally informed? an in-situ study on situational types and individual repertoires of mobile news access among german young adults. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. news junkie or only accidentally informed? an in-situ study on situational types and individual repertoires of mobile news access among german young adults veronika karnowski lmu munich, germany katharina knop-hülß hannover university of music, drama and media zoe olbermann hannover university of music, drama and media mobile news consumption – a microcosmos reflecting the changes in our news behaviors over the past three decades our media ecologies have undergone a substantial transformation, not at least changing the ways in which we get in touch with the news. online media have increased the amount of news we can access in an unprecedented way, making processes of personal news curation (thorson & wells, 2016) ever more important. in addition to the amount of news, ways of access have also increased: intermediaries like search engines, news aggregators or social media have unbundled the news from their traditional formats (ju et al., 2014), providing increased opportunities for additional curation processes such as algorithmic, social, or strategic curation of news (thorson & wells, 2016). these tremendous changes must be viewed ambivalently. high hopes for more equality in the access to news and a better-informed electorate as a result (e.g., benkler, 2006) are contrasted by fears of news avoidance (marcinkowski & došenović, 2020), filter bubbles (pariser, 2011), a news-finds-me perception (gil de zúñiga & diehl, 2019), and increasing knowledge gaps (heiss & matthes, 2019), with recent empirical evidence leaning towards rather pessimistic perspectives (e.g., gil de zúñiga & diehl, 2019; heiss & matthes, 2019). however, most of the research to date focusses on one specific kind of news access, e.g., news consumption via social media, and its effects, neglecting the fact that users combine several ways to access the news throughout their daily lives, creating their individual media use repertoires (hasebrink & domeyer, 2012). or, speaking more methodologically, by focusing on specific forms of news access and their effects, we are prone to confound variance stemming from within users’ daily lives as variance between users. in order to disentangle these variances within our daily lives from differences between users, we need to analyze access to news on a situational level. being meta-media (humphreys et al., 2018), mobile media constitute an excellent microcosmos to study situational variability in news access. they accompany users throughout their daily lives (ling, 2012), providing permanent access to news in a wide variety of ways from direct access to news sites or apps, over intermediaries like news aggregators to social media (westlund, 2015). therefore, we ask: rq1: what types of mobile news access can be identified in young adults’ daily lives? as mentioned above, types of access do not merely vary between users, but also within users’ daily lives, leading to individual mobile news repertoires. hence, we further ask: rq2: which mobile news repertoires can be uncovered based on the previously identified access types? method to answer these questions, we conducted an experience sampling study (naab et al., 2019) among young adults in germany in december 2019. for two weeks, participants received three text messages per day at random points in time, directing them to a questionnaire asking whether they had read, watched or listened to news via their smartphones during the previous hour and how they had accessed these news (see fig. 1 for details on procedure and sample, table 2 for measures). data collection resulted in a hierarchical structure, with news access situations being nested in participants. results: types of mobile news access and users’ mobile news repertoires a multilevel latent class analysis (lukočienė et al., 2010) using latent gold (magidson & vermunt, 2016) firstly identified five situational types of mobile news access (see table 1). most news access types included a form of reading, with listening and watching being relevant to only one type (class 2). two access types related to direct access within a journalistic context (classes 1&5) and two to access via social media (classes 3&4). hence, situational types do reflect a broad spectrum of mobile news access (for details, see table 2). going beyond this situational level, multilevel lca also identified four types of users’ mobile news repertoires (see table 1), i.e., indicating the prevalence of situational types of mobile news access across users’ daily lives into user types. all of these mobile news repertoires combine several of the situational access types with none of the repertoires relying on only one situational access type. in addition, although these mobile news repertoires differ considerably in their combinations of situational access types, all contained at least some amount of direct access to journalistic products (for details, see table 2). discussion by focusing on the situational level of mobile news access and investigating the prevalence of situational access types within users’ daily lives to types of mobile news repertoires, we highlighted that differences within (mobile) news use should not only be studied as differences between people, but also as variances within users’ daily lives. going along with this, we also see that no mobile news repertoire in our study solely relied on news access via intermediaries such as social media. hence, we call for a more nuanced view on (mobile) news access when gauging the positive and negative effects of changes in the ways we get in touch with the news. references benkler, y. (2006). the wealth of networks: how social production transforms markets and freedom. yale university press. gil de zúñiga, h., & diehl, t. (2019). news finds me perception and democracy: effects on political knowledge, political interest, and voting. new media & society, 21(6), 1253– 1271. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818817548 hasebrink, u., & domeyer, h. (2012). media repertoires as patterns of behaviour and as meaningful practices: a multimethod approach to media use in converging media environments. participations. journal of audience and reception studies., 9(2), 757– 779. heiss, r., & matthes, j. (2019). does incidental exposure on social media equalize or reinforce participatory gaps? evidence from a panel study. new media & society, 146144481985075. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819850755 humphreys, l., karnowski, v., & von pape, t. (2018). smartphones as metamedia: a framework for identifying the niches structuring smartphone use. international journal of communication, 2793–2809. ju, a., jeong, s. h., & chyi, h. i. (2014). will social media save newspapers?: examining the effectiveness of facebook and twitter as news platforms. journalism practice, 8(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2013.794022 ling, r. s. (2012). taken for grantedness: the embedding of mobile communication into society. mit press. lukočienė, o., varriale, r., & vermunt, j. k. (2010). the simultaneous decision(s) about the number of lowerand higher-level classes in multilevel latent class analysis. sociological methodology, 40(1), 247–283. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14679531.2010.01231.x magidson, j., & vermunt, j. k. (2016). latent gold (version 5.1) [computer software]. statistical innovations. marcinkowski, f., & došenović, p. (2020). from incidental exposure to intentional avoidance: psychological reactance to political communication during the 2017 german national election campaign. new media & society, 146144482090210. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820902104 naab, t. k., karnowski, v., & schlütz, d. (2019). reporting mobile social media use: how survey and experience sampling measures differ. communication methods and measures, 13(2), 126–147. https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2018.1555799 pariser, e. (2011). the filter bubble: what the internet is hiding from you. penguin press. thorson, k., & wells, c. (2016). curated flows: a framework for mapping media exposure in the digital age: curated flows. communication theory, 26(3), 309–328. https://doi.org/10.1111/comt.12087 westlund, o. (2015). news consumption in an age of mobile media: patterns, people, place, and participation. mobile media & communication, 3(2), 151–159. https://doi.org/10.1177/2050157914563369 tables and figures figure 1. data collection procedure and sample description. •n = 95 willing participants •signed informed consent •student sample due to prevalence of mobile news consumption recruitment •n = 90 participants took part •measures: socio-demographics, and, among others, general news behavior. pre-questionnaire • invitations to short questionnaire sent out three times a day for 14 days •n = 95 participants, n = 2403 in-situ cases •measures: access to mobile news, willingness to talk about the news, time spent reading the news, credibility of the news, as well as intentions to verify the news. in-situ questionnaires •…five participants that did not fill out pre-questionnaire •…14 participants that filled out less than 14 in-situ questionnaires •…four participants that did not consume mobile news •…1651 situations without mobile news consumption data cleaning: exclusion of … •n = 72 participants (age: m = 24.12, sd = 2.06, 19–28 years) •n = 560 situations of mobile news consumption (m = 25.29, sd = 11.12 situations per participant) final data set table 1. information criteria for various cluster solutions for mobile news access type and types of mobile news repertoires. model number number of situational classes number of person-level classes ll bic npar ce 1 1 1 -2188.59 4458.44 19 0.00 2 2 1 -1804.46 3771.43 38 0.00 3 3 1 -1594.10 3431.98 57 0.00 4 4 1 -1430.02 3185.06 76 0.00 5 5 1 -1412.91 3232.10 95 0.00 6 6 1 -1405.37 3298.29 114 0.01 7 7 1 -1397.74 3364.27 133 0.00 8 8 1 -1397.19 3444.43 152 0.00 9 9 1 -1397.76 3526.84 171 0.00 10 10 1 -1392.52 3597.60 190 0.00 11 4 1 -1430.02 3185.06 76 0.00 12 4 2 -1366.66 3075.45 80 0.00 13 4 3 -1346.75 3052.74 84 0.00 14 4 4 -1336.04 3048.43 88 0.00 15 4 5 -1327.65 3048.74 92 0.00 16 4 6 -1321.42 3053.39 96 0.00 17 4 7 -1318.47 3064.60 100 0.00 18 4 8 -1317.16 3079.10 104 0.00 19 4 9 -1316.08 3094.04 108 0.00 20 4 10 -1315.07 3109.12 112 0.00 21 1 4 -2188.59 4471.27 22 0.00 22 2 4 -1744.22 3676.61 44 0.00 23 3 4 -1504.92 3292.10 66 0.00 24 4 4 -1336.04 3048.43 88 0.00 25 5 4 -1284.70 3039.83 110 0.00 26 6 4 -1263.58 3091.68 132 0.01 27 7 4 -1237.65 3133.90 154 0.01 28 8 4 -1220.93 3194.55 176 0.02 29 9 4 -1206.71 3260.20 198 0.05 30 10 4 -1186.48 3313.82 220 0.03 note: 72 participants, 560 situations. ll = log likelihood, bic = bayesian information criterion based on the number of person-level cases, npar = number of parameters, ce = classification error. procedure to determine optimal model based on (lukočienė et al., 2010). step 1: estimation of number of situation level classes. step 2: estimation of number of person-level classes with fixed number of situation level classes from step 1. step 3: redetermination of situation level classes with fixed number of person-level classes from step 2. bayesion information criterion (bic) based on the number of person-level cases. table 2. description of mobile news access types and types of mobile news repertoires based on multilevel latent class analysis. situational class 1 situational class 2 situational class 3 situational class 4 situational class 5 direct app access listening & watching social media (textual) social media (visual) direct website access relative class size 41.2% 16.9% 15.6% 14.0% 12.3% mobile news repertoires (and relative size of resp. classes)1 direct news access (34.1 %) 75.7% 8.1% 1.9% 1.4% 12.9% mixed readers (31.0 %) 20.6% 16.3% 48.1% 0.1% 14.9% visual social media and news apps (21.8 %) 28.3% 8.8% 0.1% 54.1% 8.8% listening and news apps (13.1 %) 21.9% 54.8% 0.1% 13.0% 10.3% reception mode2 reading 94.2% 0.2% 94.7% 74.6% 98.5% watching 5.8% 23.7% 5.3% 25.4% 1.5% listening 0% 75.1% 0% 0% 0% missing 0% 1.1% 0% 0% 0% point of access website (news or other) 0% 0% 0% 0% 99.7% news app 66.2% 0.1% 0.1% 0.1% 0.1% news widget of smartphone 22.9% 0% 0% 0% 0% social media 0% 0.1% 99.8% 99.8% 0.1% messenger app 4.6% 0% 0% 0% 0% e-mail (e.g., newsletter of news medium) 5.8% 0% 0% 0% 0% media library / streaming-service-app 0% 70.8% 0% 0% 0% webradio / radio-app 0% 27.9% 0% 0% 0% missings 0.4% 1.1% 0% 0% 0% social media facebook 0% 0% 53.5% 0% 0% instagram 0% 0% 2.6% 84.7% 0% twitter 0% 0% 32.0% 5.4% 0% youtube 0% 0% 0% 8.5% 0% snapchat 0% 0% 0% 1.2% 0% other 0% 0% 11.7% 0% 0% missings 100% 99.9% 0.2% 0.2% 99.9% type of website news website 0% 0% 0% 0% 83.7% other website 0% 0.1% 0.1% 0.1% 15.9% missings 100% 100% 99.9% 100% 0.4% note: 72 participants, 560 situations. dimensions measured as single selection (categorical). 1 conditional probabilities per group: when belonging to type 1, 75.7 percent of news consumption situations are type 1 situations. 34.1 percent of participants belong to type 1 (reliance on journalistic curation). 2conditional probabilities, for example: when belonging to situation class 1, the probability of that situation being comprised of accessing the news via reading is 94.2 percent. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): kininmonth, s. (2019, october 2-5). ‘marking their own homework’: trust and audience measurement in the australian digital advertising industry. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ‘marking their own homework’: trust and audience measurement in the australian digital advertising industry samuel kininmonth rmit university this paper examines how the australian advertising industry discusses trust in the infrastructures of digital advertising. the advertising industry is undergoing a major change as digital advertising is increasingly dominated by new advertising technology (adtech) players and major tech companies such as facebook and google. these new companies which rely on automated systems of ad targeting, pricing and placement to control large amounts of digital advertising inventory and offer new more ‘efficient’ ways to micro-target advertising. yet these companies have garnered reputations for misrepresenting their numbers; a problem compounded by google and facebook’s reticence to supply the means for independent audience verification such as seen elsewhere in advertising. this has led to a high degree of mistrust from australian advertisers. the australian association of national advertisers (aana, 2018) remarked that a ‘key risk for advertisers is a lack of transparency in measurement and viewability’ on digital platforms. digital advertising relies on automation to deliver and measure ads (turow, 2011). this has led to major concerns about what is often termed ‘ad fraud’. broadly, ad fraud is when ads are recorded as delivered (and presumably paid for) despite not being seen (or heard) by the advertiser’s intended target. there are myriad activities that fall under the umbrella term of ad fraud which can be undertaken by human and non-human actors (such as bots). industry-commissioned studies estimate losses to ad fraud were 6.5 billion usd in 2017 (schiff, 2017). this has led to a certain degree of skepticism and mistrust of digital advertising inventory in the industry. consolidated advertising infrastructures owned by companies such as google and facebook are also subject to mistrust within much industry discourse. facebook and google are behemoths in the digital advertising industry and often discussed as unavoidable ‘frenemies’ within the industry. neither company offers serious third-party auditing, leading many in the advertising industry to say that they are ‘marking their own homework’. this hunch has been born out in the past with facebook admitting in 2016 that it overestimated the popularity of video on the platform for two years because of a flawed metric (vranica & marshall, 2016). other parts of the advertising industry such as the multinational holding companies (wpp, publicis etc.) use this as a point of differentiation between themselves and the tech giants, claiming greater independent oversight to elicit trust from advertisers. players in digital advertising have long promoted their automated systems as being more accountable as well as more efficient than previous advertising infrastructures (turow, 2011). ad verification has a long history from the publishing of newspaper circulation data, to radio diaries to television ratings (mcfall, 2004). major companies such as nielsen offer continuous or regular audience estimates which are often discussed with a high degree of trust in the industry. at stake then, is trust in the infrastructures of audience measurement. rather than examining the veracity of claims, i examine the way different actors deploy trust in these systems to achieve particular ends. metrics are used as leverage within the highly contested space. different players within the industry offer their customers measurement technologies designed to foster trust that the right people see the right ads for the right price. the trust in these measurements is fundamental to the companies involved in digital advertising. despite the significance of digital advertising as a major economic and infrastructural part of digital media and communication, it has tended not to attract the same degree of scholarship as other parts of media and communication. much of the commendable work that has been done has tended to focus on the use of surveillance to target advertisements (cohen, 2017; turow, 2011). this is important work but there is more to be done in understanding the industry dynamics that surround surveillance. a major reason much digital advertising relies on the use of surveillance is that it may be seen to make the delivery of advertisements more reliable. more ‘targets’ and less ‘waste’ as the industry often describes it. in this paper i ask, how is trust in measurement and verification infrastructures discussed within the australian digital advertising industry? is it fair to compare businesses that distribute advertising in very different ways? i answer these questions through qualitative analysis of submissions made to the australian competition and consumer commission (accc) as part of its current digital platforms inquiry (dpi) in 2018 and 2019. i also draw on summaries of four public forums the accc held in 2018 as well as wide reading in the advertising industry trade press. this study sits within a larger project that examines the adoption of automation in the australian digital advertising landscape. stakeholders made over 60 submissions the first of round of the dpi. the accc used the first round of submissions and forums to draft a preliminary report. the accc’s preliminary report was non-committal on the subject of advertisement verification although the issue was raised in multiple submissions and the public forums. both google and facebook claim that their ads are able to be verified. this is disputed by others who note that the verification is still based on google and facebook’s data. the accc has requested further submissions from industry regarding ad verification and the second round of submissions are likely to be made public in march 2019. the final dpi report is due by june 2019. i will encompass those subsequent releases into the research on an ongoing basis and use them to better understand how the industry discusses issues ad verification and trust. this paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the debates within industry about trust and verification during industry transformation. these debates are important to see what role standards and measures play within the industry. while the infrastructures and dynamics of digital advertising are often hidden from the public gaze they have major effects on the broader media and communication they support (turow & couldry, 2018). the advertising industry exercises a great degree of economic power in digital media and understanding its structures and logics can aid researchers when examining broader concerns for internet scholars. for example issues surrounding ad verification may bleed into other possible outcomes such as greater reliance on surveillance mechanisms to track users to the point of sale or broader data sharing arrangements to enable third-party compliance. references aana (2018) submission to accc: digital platforms inquiry. retrieved from https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/australian%20association%20of%20national%20 advertisers%20%28april%202018%29.pdf cohen, j. e. (2017). the biopolitical public domain: the legal construction of the surveillance economy. philosophy & technology. doi:10.1007/s13347-017-0258-2 mcfall, l. (2004). advertising: a cultural economy. london: sage publications ltd. schiff, a. (2017). ana/white ops: ad fraud will actually go down in 2017, from $7.2 billion to $6.5 billion. ad exchanger. retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20190220020841/https://adexchanger.com/ad-exchangenews/anawhite-ops-ad-fraud-will-actually-go-2017-7-2-billion-6-5-billion/ turow, j., & couldry, n. (2018). media as data extraction: towards a new map of a transformed communications field. journal of communication, 68(2), 415-423. doi:10.1093/joc/jqx011 turow, j. (2011). the daily you: how the new advertising industry is defining your identity and your worth. new haven: yale university press. vranica, s., & marshall, j. (2016). facebook overestimated key video metric for two years. the wall street journal. retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20190220010121/https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebookoverestimated-key-video-metric-for-two-years-1474586951 selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): kaufmann, k. (2017, october 18-21). navigating a new life: syrian refugees and their smartphones in vienna. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. navigating a new life: syrian refugees and their smartphones in vienna katja kaufmann austrian academy of sciences and alpen-adria-university klagenfurt (austria) the recent refugee movement triggered by the syrian civil war has been shaped by both networked technologies and digital publics in an unprecedented way: in the propaganda and counter-propaganda of involved parties, in the response of european civil society, media, and politics, in the tactics of the refugees themselves. in fact, most refugees wouldn’t have made it to the cities of central and western europe without engaging in various forms of digital networks via their smartphones. also beyond the forced migration itself, smartphones and the connectivity they provide play a key role for refugees: the new life is characterized by the need to navigate and prevail on-site in the foreign surroundings while constantly being engaged in a multitude of digital conversations. this interrelation between networked technologies and migration has been of scholarly interest for quite some time (lim, bork-hueffer & yeoh, 2016; madianou & miller, 2012; oiarzabal & reips, 2012; witteborn, 2015). the technologies and platforms have radically changed migrants’ socially precarious situation by allowing a new quality of long-distance relationship with both family members and the home community (gifford & wilding, 2013; hunter, 2015). information and communication technologies also help in coping with the complex and often harsh conditions for migrants without legal security (charmarkeh, 2013; gordano peile & ros hijar, 2016; harney, 2013; leung, 2011; platt, yeoh, acedera, baey & lam, 2016; witteborn, 2012), especially in refugee camps (maitland & xu, 2015; wall, campbell & janbek, 2017). yet, the complete integration of smartphones and the digital means they provide into the everyday life of refugees is until now a new phenomenon. only where access to mobile networks is technically reliable and economically easily affordable as it is the case in europe’s urban areas, the digital can become deeply woven into the lives of resourcepoor refugees by using always-on smartphones as the kind of everyday companions as residents do. accordingly, the paper presents results from a qualitative interview study with syrian refugees who arrived recently in vienna, the capital of austria. it analyzes the various ways in which smartphones help refugees in navigating their new life and in facing the complexity of a foreign culture, language, social system. the smartphone as a permanently connected companion brings a new quality in solving everyday challenges: it provides on the go access to information and tools which help navigate the new surroundings geographically. gps and google maps in combination with applications for public transportation give directions to german language courses, locations of municipal administration offices or the quickest route to doctor’s practices. regarding everyday knowledge, google also proves useful in identifying regional products in the supermarket or finding equivalents for known, but unavailable ingredients. meanwhile, youtube functions as a repository for tutorials ranging from food preparation to cultural peculiarities. and as the only available networked technology, smartphones are also extensively used by refugees as an entertainment center: listening to favorite music, watching sports matches or the newest episodes of a favorite series, reading blogs and news – everything takes place on the smartphone. yet, one of the most crucial purposes of refugees’ smartphones in the new surroundings is language learning and translation. in the face of insufficient official language course capacities, the smartphone’s dictionaries, teaching apps and videos, complement or even must substitute for classroom-based courses. lacking the option to meet family members and friends in person, refugees have also established various digital practices of “doing family”: regular group exchanges of selfies reveal beloved ones’ conditions; lively chats with videos, voice messages and emoticons allow a feeling of ease and closeness; video-calls make up for other face-toface meetings as best as possible under the given conditions. the intense communicative exchange also results in vibrant digital networks of self-help: be it mother’s household remedies against a nasty european cold, solving the riddles of local asylum procedures, or counselling friends on whether to leave the country or not. where “going online” is not a prerequisite to digital communication anymore and the device is permanently connected to flows of information and people, the device’s affordances can perform new tasks. a case in point is the online status in messengers like whatsapp. lacking better means of verification, being online in whatsapp is considered by the family as equivalent to physical well-being. as some family members and friends yet live in places without reliable internet connection, the permanent availability of those refugees who have the means to stay online non-stop is expected also because it increases the chances of digital ad-hoc live communication immensely. for refugees like those in vienna, all this results in a new emotional but also very technical, material attachment to the smartphones. the dependency on the functionality of smartphones becomes thus a key characteristic of refugee life where the devices form the constant basis of everyday practices in terms of both dealing with the new surroundings and with the social mesh of relationships which has shifted to the digital sphere. references charmarkeh, h. (2013). social media usage, tahriib (migration), and settlement among somali refugees in france. refuge, 29(1), 43-52. gifford, s. m., & wilding, r. (2013). digital escapes? icts, settlement and belonging among karen youth in melbourne, australia. journal of refugee studies, 26(4), 558575. gordano peile, c., & ros hijar, a. (2016). immigrants and mobile phone uses: spanishspeaking young adults recently arrived in london. mobile media & communication, 4(3), 405-423. harney, n. (2013). precarity, affect and problem solving with mobile phones by asylum seekers, refugees and migrants in naples, italy. journal of refugee studies, 26(4), 541-557. hunter, a. (2015). empowering or impeding return migration? ict, mobile phones, and older migrants’ communications with home. global networks, 15(4), 485-502. leung, l. (2011). taking refuge in technology: communication practices in refugee camps and immigration detention. new issues in refugee research, research paper no. 202. unhcr policy development and evaluation service. lim, s. s., bork-hueffer, t., & yeoh, b. s. (2016). mobility, migration and new media: manoeuvring through physical, digital and liminal spaces. new media & society, 18(10), 2147-2154. madianou, m., & miller, d. (2012). migration and new media: transnational families and polymedia. new york: routledge. maitland, c., & xu, y. (2015). a social informatics analysis of refugee mobile phone use: a case study of za’atari syrian refugee camp. tprc 43: the 43rd research conference on communication, information and internet policy paper. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2588300 oiarzabal, p., & reips, u. d. (2012). migration and diaspora in the age of information and communication technologies. journal of ethnic and migration studies, 38(9), 13331338. platt, m., yeoh, b. s. a., acedera, k. a., baey, k. c. y., & lam, t. (2016). renegotiating migration experiences: indonesian domestic workers in singapore and use of information communication technologies. new media & society, 18(19), 22072223. wall, m., campbell, m. o., & janbek, d. (2017). syrian refugees and information precarity. new media & society, 19(2), 240-254. witteborn, s. (2015). becoming (im)perceptible: forced migrants and virtual practice. journal of refugee studies, 28(3), 350-367. witteborn, s. (2012). forced migrants, new media practices, and the creation of locality. in i. volkmer (ed.), the handbook of global media research (pp. 312-330). malden, ma: blackwell. for spir commenting cultures.docx.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020:  the 21 ​st ​ annual conference of the  association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 ‘please read the comments’: commenting cultures across platforms crystal abidin curtin university platform-specific commenting cultures an old adage about the internet goes “don’t read the comments”. it is a cynical word of caution from supposedly more experienced and savvy internet users, against a slew of negative, abusive, and unhelpful comments that are usually rampant online, stemming from trolling behaviour (phillips 2015). “don’t read the comments” has become an internet meme. alongside parody websites (i.e. @avoidcomments n.d.), trawling through the comments section in search of ludicrosity has become an internet genre in and of itself. this comprises the likes of meme factory ‘the straits times comment section’ which collates absurd comments from users on a specific newspaper’s facebook page (stcomments n.d.), as well as internet celebrity troll commentators like ‘american ken’ m (know your meme n.d.) and singaporean ‘peter tan’ (yeoh 2018), who post comments on a network of social media and fora in stealthily satirical ways that have even been co-opted for advertorials (vox 2016). such vernacular practice has in turn provoked a counter-genre of memes known as “i’m just here for the comments” (tenor n.d.), in which users closely follow social media posts mainly for the resulting discussion and engagement in the comments section rather than the actual post itself. it is on this point of departure that this panel turns its focus to commenting cultures across platforms. recent studies call attention to comment sections as hotbeds of trolling (eberwein 2019), hostility (murthy & sharma 2019), and ‘dark participation’ (quandt 2018). negativity and toxicity has prompted calls for further inquiry on “how to counter incivility in comment sections,” (ziegele et al. 2019: 17). other studies have also explored the utility of comment sections, where users post comments to raise awareness for neglected topics or mistakes in news coverage (heikkila et al. 2012), use flarf to suggested citation (apa): abidin, c. (2020, october 28-31). ​‘please read the comments’: commenting cultures across platforms​. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21 ​st​ annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 virtual event regulate hate speech on facebook (abraham 2014), to pursue the truth (eberwein 2019), and to vent frustrations (pfeffer, zorbach, & carley 2014). posting comments can also be useful for information seeking in online creative communities (monroy et al. 2011). proper attribution, or giving credit, has been found to be highly important in non-commercial creative communities (meese 2014, perkel 2016). however, unlike these case study approaches that have used specific incidents to highlight emergent user practices, this panel aligns more closely to a platform-approach – such as the study of amazon comments and reviews as a mode of quantification and conversation-making (reagle 2015) – and aims to cultivate macro perspective on platform-specific commenting cultures and ecologies. a conceptual matrix on platformed commenting cultures across our papers, this panel aims to offer a conceptual matrix for studying platformed commenting cultures, comprising of: ● structural affordances ● algorithmic cultures ● cultural, subcultural, and community practices ● optimizing, circumvention, and gaming strategies ● off-label uses the research questions we aim to address include: ● how central are comments and commenting cultures on each of these platforms? ● how do platforms prioritize comments through infrastructure and governance, and what is the impact of this on the normative culture of users? ● what are the platform circumvention and social circumvention strategies enacted by users, and how are these practices contentious or subversive? ● what methodologies and frameworks can be employed to study commenting cultures? ● what is the value of interrogating commenting cultures? the papers in this panel, we present a series of five papers that focus on a range of platforms and varieties of comment-centricity: the first paper looks at the pseudonymous nature of users on ​reddit​, whose history of comments formulates their platform profile. the paper focuses on controversial moments in which redditors are challenged on their identity and the norm of throwaway accounts. the second paper looks at ​facebook ​ groups and communities that are centered on specific topics, whose appreciative and critical comments can evolve into earnest, playful, or spiteful flaming. the paper focuses on facebook’s awarding of ‘top fan’ status that has led to practices of gamification and baiting. the third paper looks at ​9gag​ meme genres that encourage its masculine-normative user base to comment actively. the paper focuses on how insiders/outsiders are demarcated through encoding/decoding wars, and how users construct stop gaps/safe spaces for baring vulnerability. the fourth paper looks at ​tiktok ​’s automatic attribution system that points to original sources of audio content and origin creators. the paper focuses on how users use comments to assert authorship and engage in information-seeking behaviour to wrestle ownership among each other. the last paper looks at ​instagram ​’s changing commenting affordances as emblematic of shifts in social media platforms more broadly. the paper focuses on three of instagram’s core tools to understand how public commentary culture is becoming more eclectic and ephemeral. this series of papers is a pilot attempt at formulating an ecology of commenting cultures on social media more broadly. while the apps selected have been developed in and influenced by specific ideo-geographies (3 in the us, 1 in china, 1 in hong kong), and boast a range of posting types (2 text-based, 2 visual-based, 1 audio-based), future progress and extension of this research aims to focus on a more diverse range of apps especially in the global south and in non-english languages. we hope to use our aoir panel as a springboard for future collaborations. references abraham, b. 2014. “challenging hate speech with facebook flarf: the role of user practices in regulating hate speech on facebook.” ​the fibreculture journal​ 23. eberwein, t. 2019. ‘“trolls” or “warriors of faith”?: differentiating dysfunctional forms of media criticism in online comments.’ ​journal of information, communication and ethics in society​ (online first) heikkilä, h., domingo, d., pies, j., glowacki, m., kus, m., & baisnée, o. 2012. media accountability goes online a transnational study on emerging practices and innovations, (14). know your meme. n.d. ‘ken m’. ​knowyourmeme.com. meese, j. 2014. it belongs to the internet: animal images , attribution norms and the politics of amateur media production. ​m/c journal ​, ​17 ​(2), 1–6. monroy-hernandez, a., hill, b. m., gonzalez-rivero, j., & boyd, d. 2011. computers can’t give credit: how automatic attribution falls short in an online remixing community. conference on human factors in computing systems proceedings​, 3421–3430. murthy, d., & sharma, s. 2019. visualizing youtube’s comment space: online hostility as a networked phenomena. ​new media and society​, ​21 ​(1), 191–213. perkel, d. 2016. share wars: sharing, theft, and the everyday production of web 2.0 on deviantart. ​first monday​, ​21 ​(6), 1–24. pfeffer, j., zorbach, t., & carley, k. m. 2014. understanding online firestorms: negative word-of-mouth dynamics in social media networks. ​journal of marketing communications​ 20(1-2): 117-128. phillips, w. 2016. ​this is why we can’t have nice things: mapping the relationship between online trolling and mainstream culture​, cambridge; london: mit press. quandt, t. (2018). dark participation. ​media and communication​, ​6 ​(4), 36-48. reagle, j.m. 2015. ​reading the comments: likers, haters and manipulators at the bottom of the web ​, cambridge; london: mit press. stcomments. n.d. ‘the straits times comment section.” ​facebook.com. tenor. n.d. ‘im just here for the comments gifs.” ​tenor.com. vox. 2016. ‘the world’s greatest internet troll explains his craft.’ ​youtube.com, ​6 may. yeoh, g. 2018. ‘who is peter tan, the mysterious #1 commenter of st’s comments section?’ ​ricemedia.co, ​21 march. ziegele, m., naab, t. k., & jost, p. (2019). lonely together? identifying the determinants of collective corrective action against uncivil comments. ​new media and society​, 1-21. @avoidcomments. n.d. ‘don’t read the comments.” ​twitter.com. karma, throwaways, and post histories: commenting cultures on reddit emily van der nagel monash university “don’t read the comments”: criticism and gendered harm in this paper, i examine a genre of posts that call others out for inconsistent comments to argue that cohesive identities remain important on the largely pseudonymous social media platform reddit. analysing posts that reference comment histories in the subreddit r/quityourbullshit evidences a need for people to post consistent identity information. beginning with the common exhortation “don’t read the comments” means acknowledging that internet culture is often fraught. titling a report ​don’t read the comments: enhancing online safety for women working in the media​ (gender equity victoria 2019) casts comments as a vehicle for sexist harassment and abuse that undermines women journalist’s professionalism. journalist jessica valenti made a case for ending comment sections in online news, arguing that “comments uphold power structures instead of subverting them: sexism, racism and homophobia are the norm; threats and harassment are common” (valenti 2015 n.p.). a browser extension that automatically hides comment sections boasts that it “puts an additional layer of decision between the habitual scroller and the waste of attention that awaits” (drestuart 2019 n.p.). an argument by communication scholar joseph reagle that comments are the “bottom half of the web” (2015: 1) investigates comments as a reactive genre of communication that has the potential to inform and entertain, but are also easily manipulated, and can be used to harass or troll. while this broader online commenting culture is considered an often troubling territory rife with gendered harassment and of little value to blogs and news, on reddit, comments animate the entire platform. reddit: a comment-led platform culture comments on reddit appear on posts within specific subreddits, which provide contexts for conversations. comments can be upvoted, granting the user karma points and pushing the comment towards the top of the list, or downvoted, which risks the comment being hidden. reddit co-founder steve huffman introduced comments to his platform of submitted links in 2005, finding the addition immediately validating: “all of a sudden, links to articles elsewhere online became their own dynamic pages, containing discussions between real people” (huffman in lagorio-chafkin 2018: 76). reddit threads comments together, which keeps all the responses to an initial comment together, structuring the comments section and allowing conversations to splinter off into smaller discussions as comment sections grow. a number of research papers investigate the cultures of specific subreddits, framing them as a community in the process. on r/mexico, people give direct, encouraging advice in both spanish and english (glide 2018). fans of the true crime podcast serial discuss the latest episode on r/serial, but also critique the us criminal justice system (buozis 2019). a lesbian subreddit was found to explicitly accept and celebrate identity-based differences, rather than policing the boundaries of the lesbian identity (foeken & roberts 2019). active members of subreddits often share common interests and goals. but this doesn’t mean that subreddits are simply harmonious communities that exist as peaceful islands. r/quit your bullshit: reddit cultures clashing unlike social media platforms that have “real name” policies, such as facebook, redditors are largely pseudonymous. instead of a list of personal information, a reddit profile displays the most recent posts and comments someone has made. in this way, someone’s comments almost become their profile. this can lead to conversations, and even accusations, around identity. an entire genre of posts to subreddit r/quityourbullshit involves people challenging others on their reddit identities. one post to r/quityourbullshit describes the contradiction in the title: op [original poster] is saying that he was thrown in jail for six months for dna [fraudulently claiming that an amazon package did not arrive] but if you check his post history you can see that he posted something about dna just 99 days ago (gamingmaniac989 2019 n.p.). in a screenshot posted by fun11111 (2019), a redditor’s post to a question and answer subreddit, “i’m 7’1 ama [ask me anything]” was countered by another user: based on your post history you are an interesting guy. make $2m per year, grew from 6’6” to 7’11” in less than 3 weeks, you are a harvard admissions officer while only just sitting your sat, while struggling to get a drivers license despite owning several luxury cars. or you are just making shit up. checking someone’s post history for comments that contradict them or reveal some other foolishness are common enough that on meta-subreddits like r/unpopularopinion or r/theoryofreddit this is discussed as a tactic. “looking through someone’s post history to “win” an argument is stupid”, says darthkittie (2019). the distinction between r/quityourbullshit posters seeing post history as legitimate material for challenging someone on their identity, and other subreddits disparaging this as a petty tactic, shows that reddit is not a monolithic culture, but is comprised of subreddits and redditors that may hold opposing views, but often interact. when comments become essential identity information, the need for this identity to be presented coherently and consistently demonstrates that redditors are invested in a kind of pseudonymous authenticity as a foundation for their communities to be built on. references buozis, m. 2019. ‘doxing or deliberative democracy? evidence and digital affordances in the serial subreddit’, ​convergence​, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 357–373. darthkittie. 2019. ‘looking through someone’s post history’, r/unpopularopinion, reddit​, viewed 21 february 2020, https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/dypnwa/looking_through_someon es_post_history_to_win_an/​. drestuart. 2019. ‘don’t read the comments!’, ​chrome web store​, 2 january, https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dont-read-the-comments/nlhmhpppjnlbdfgebi nkgjiljipnejbe?hl=en​. foeken, e & roberts, s. 2019. ‘reifying difference: examining the negotiation of internal diversity on a (post-)lesbian subreddit’, ​sexualities​, vol. 22, no. 7–8, pp. 1268–1287. fun11111. 2019. ‘bruh the patience’, r/quityourbullshit, ​reddit​, viewed 21 february 2020, https://www.reddit.com/r/quityourbullshit/comments/dhmmd3/bruh_the_patience_you_h ave_to_have_just_to_check/​. gamingmaniac989. 2019. ‘op is saying’, r/quityourbullshit, ​reddit​, viewed 21 february 2020, https://www.reddit.com/r/quityourbullshit/comments/cxnkoh/op_is_saying_that_he_was_ thrown_in_jail_for_six/​. gender equity victoria. 2019. ‘don’t read the comments: enhancing online safety for women working in the media’, ​media entertainment and arts alliance​, 18 december, viewed 21 february 2020, https://www.meaa.org/download/dont-read-the-comments-enhancing-online-safety-for-w omen-working-in-the-media/​. glide, m. 2018. ‘¿cuáles son sus recomendaciones?: a comparative analysis of discourse practices implemented in the giving and seeking of advice on a mexican subreddit in both spanish and english’, ​current issues in pragmatic variation​, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 181–207. lagorio-chafkin, c. 2018. ​we are the nerds: the birth and tumultuous life of reddit, the internet’s culture laboratory​, piatkus, london. reagle, jm. 2015. ​reading the comments: likers, haters, and manipulators at the bottom of the web ​, mit press, cambridge. valenti, j. 2015. ‘not all comments are created equal: the case for ending online comments’, ​the guardian​, 10 september, viewed 21 february 20202, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/10/end-online-comments​. trolls, haters and conspiracy theorists: facebook commenting cultures during the australian summer of bushfire amelia johns university of technology sydney francesco bailo university of technology sydney introduction scholars have long examined how platform affordances enable user expression, social interaction, and public deliberation around key issues (hille & bakker 2014, kavada 2012) while they manipulate and constrain those expressions, orienting users toward desired forms of engagement (boyd 2010, gillespie 2019, ben-david & soren 2019). from this perspective posts that generate large numbers of reactions, comments and shares are recommended by platform algorithms, regardless of the quality of the content. scholars have examined how these platform aspects have allowed misinformation and hate speech to be spread (gillespie 2018, wooley & howard 2019). but often what happens ‘below the line’ in the comments section is overlooked, or attention goes to large coordination efforts, for example examining the russian troll farms that use bots and sock puppet accounts to manipulate conversations for the purposes of propaganda or profit in the us elections of 2016 and beyond (wooley & howard 2019). this overshadows a focus on more mundane, everyday commenting cultures and subcultures, where commenters may engage earnestly with posts to share their world-view and contest others, or use provocative tactics to hack the narrative and misdirect the reader, for example by shitposting (phillips & milner 2017) or manipulating and subverting algorithms by spamming users for purposes of activism or just mischief (phillips 2015, phillips & milner 2017). more problematically these ‘ambivalent’ cultures also extend to trolling, flaming and doxing (phillips 2015, reagle 2015) or spreading conspiracy theory, falsified information and hateful memes (wooley & howard 2019, gillespie 2018) weaponising the comments sections of news organisations and public social media sites. ​facebook’s ‘toxic’ commenting cultures in the australian summer of bushfire facebook is a platform that has become closely associated with these toxic commenting cultures. in spite of their real-name policy which some claim limits the incivility commonly associated with anonymous comment (reagle 2015: 9, ben-david & soren 2019), the platform has been associated with #pizzagate and #qanon conspiracy theories among others, with comments amplifying and boosting problem content. facebook’s recommendation algorithm has also been argued to connect far right, conspiracy theory and hate groups into networks of hate and disruption. this was demonstrated during australia’s summer of bushfires, with reports identifying facebook posts sharing conspiracy theory and climate change denialism posted in right-wing and nationalist pages and amplified out from there (ryan & wilson 2020). nonetheless reports have tended to regard the outcome of problematic commenting cultures and subcultural practices as always counter-productive to democracy, and those who share or respond to the comments are regarded as cultural dopes rather than active and literate audience members. to provide a more balanced account this paper uses a mix of computational and ethnographic methods to examine the comments sections of 6 facebook pages, 2 from online and legacy news organisations, 2 from australian nationalist and far-right pages, and 2 from the official pages of conservative politicians which were during australia’s recent summer of bushfire. the questions leading the analysis are: q1 what users/communities are found in the online conversation, and how are they connected? q2 who are the so-called ‘super-spreaders’ and what are their motivations for posting comments deemed to denigrate or misinform? q3 what folkloric elements and vernacular expressions were observed in the comments sections of popular news articles and facebook pages focused on the cause of the fires, and do commenting cultures differ according to generational difference? methodology the paper presents initial findings from a larger project which maps the diffusion of social media discussions focused on 4 contentious topics: climate change, vaccination hesitancy, immigration and lgbtiq+ issues. firstly, we used an innovative ethnographic mapping method using wikibase ( ​https://wikiba.se/​). the ethnography began with sustained observation and field note recording of the comments sections of australian legacy news postings (the guardian, abc, sbs, the australian, herald sun, sydney morning herald, daily telegraph and age newspaper). the ethnographic mapping method was used to identify relevant opinions, pages, users and personas, and to connect them through a set of themes. facebook’s recommendation algorithm was exploited to broaden out the list of pages observed, producing a non-representative sample of fringe conversations during the bushfire event. a large scale analysis of facebook interactions was then conducted by searching crowdtangle database. the search generated a list of 314,829 posts from 21,093 pages. outgoing links from the facebook pages involved in the conversation were used to cross-check against the wiki map and broaden sources, relate pages together and to identify communities around similar linked resources (e.g. videos, news articles, facebook posts). quantitative and qualitative approaches were then used to map the conversation on two different dimensions, a thematic dimension and a network dimension. these two dimensions help to answer q1 and q2 but also inform the sampling of the facebook comments. finally, we used a customised scraper to collect the comments section of the most relevant postings, parsing the body of the message, along with the username, creation time, number of reactions and relations to the other postings (i.e. “reply to”). this data was automatically coded for the presence of themes and opinions identified ​a posteriori​ based on a dictionary of key terms. a content and discourse analysis of individual comments and interactions between comments was then conducted to answer q3. the results will be discussed in this paper. references abidin, c. 2018. internet celebrity: understanding fame online, bingley, u.k: emerald publishing. boyd, d. 2010. social network sites as networked publics: affordences, dynamics, and implications. in v. papachrissi (ed.), n​etworked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites​ (pp. 39–58). new york, ny: routledge ben-david, a., & soffer, o. 2019. user comments across platforms and journalistic genres. ​information, communication & society​, 22(12), 1810–1829. gillespie, t. 2019. ​custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation and the hidden decisions that shape social media​. new haven; london: yale university press. hille, s., & bakker, p. 2014. engaging the social news user: comments on news sites and facebook. ​journalism practice​, 18(5), 563–572. kavada, a. 2012. engagement, bonding, and identity across multiple platforms: avaaz on facebook, youtube, and myspace. ​mediekultur: journal of media and communication research​, 28(52), 28–48. phillips, w. 2016. ​this is why we can’t have nice things: mapping the relationship between online trolling and mainstream culture​, cambridge; london: mit press. phillips, w. & milner, r. 2017. ​the ambivalent internet: mischief, oddity and antagonism online​. cambridge, ma: polity. reagle, j.m. 2015. ​reading the comments: likers, haters and manipulators at the bottom of the web ​, cambridge; london: mit press. ryan, h. and wilson, c. 2020. as australia burned, climate change denialism got a boost on facebook, ​buzzfeed news​, 23 jan 2020, viewed august 14: https://www.buzzfeed.com/hannahryan/facebook-australia-bushfires-climate-change-de niers-facebook wooley, s.c. & howard, p.n. 2019. ​computational propaganda: political parties, politicians and political manipulation on social media​; ny: oxford university press. ‘feels bar’ and masculine vulnerability: commenting cultures on 9gag crystal abidin curtin university 9gag 9gag is a pseudonymous social media app with integrated social media platforms and a website where users can upload and share original or external content usually focused on meme cultures. headquartered in hong kong and boasting several prolific tech industry investors, it was founded in 2008 and boasts over 150 million international users on its facebook, twitter, and instagram accounts alone. users post image and video memes that can be upvoted, downvoted, and commented on. user responses and the algorithmic blackbox decide whether posts are filed under the ‘hot’, ‘trending’, or ‘fresh’ tabs. comments too can be upvoted, downvoted, and replied to. clicking on a 9gagger’s handle reveals their homepage/feed of posts (contingent upon subscriptions and platform footprints), posts they have contributed, and posts on which they have commented or replied. however, the design of 9gag (on desktop and mobile app) focuses on individual posts rather than individual users/handles as the main site of reputation building. as such, post-specific comment subcultures and subcommunities proliferate. among the diverse genres of meme cultures, early users of 9gag would occasionally share confessions, seek advice, or pour out laments specifically pertaining to romantic relationships (figures 1 & 2). this was against the backdrop of early 9gag culture being hyper-masculine (veronica & handoyo 2016), populated by men who struggle with relationships with women (anggiarima 2013) and who are ‘forever alone’ (kusuma 2018), and having gendered communication norms that required brokerage (dewi 2017, saputri 2018). figures 1 & 2: 9gag memes about romantic failure. eventually, when 9gag streamlined its posts into over 24 different sections in early 2017, the subcategory of “relationships” became institutionalised as a bona fide content stream. this legacy of relationship chatter on 9gag has evolved into a period comment-focus genre of meme posts known as the ‘feels bar’. these come in the form of a specific image meme posted to 9gag and a title declaring that ‘the feels bar is open’ (figures 3 & 4), in which the original poster (op) invites other (male) users to make agony-aunt like confessions and disclosures in the comments section. in response, op and other users provide advice and care, and at times reciprocate with confessions of their own to foster a culture of sharing in a safe space. figures 3 & 4: the template ‘feels bar’ meme soliciting interactions in the comments section. methodology this paper interrogates the normative commenting cultures on 9gag at large, by way of juxtaposing this to the stop gap and safe space of the ‘feels bar’, which is utlilized by 9gaggers as transient and occasional counseling sessions. the data is draw from a multi-year immersion and experience of 9gag as a participant observer (2010–), and more concerted digital ethnography and content analysis of ‘hot’ posts (june 2019–). platform norms and ‘feels bar’ the key commenting norms on 9gag include: ● assumed pseudonymity ​, wherein users do not need to disclose personal information while mostly maintaining a consistent handle; at times, verification is volunteered in the form of a personal photograph revealing one’s face, often to instigate sincere reciprocity and relationship building in the comments (figures 5-7) figures 5-7: post and two comments in response to the op’s self-disclosure. ● digital dualism ​, in that interactions on the platform are taken at face value without any overt identity linkage to ‘offline’ or ‘irl’ selves; occasionally, members reveal images divulging a slice of their lives especially if they have high status in society (figures 8 & 9) in a meme format known as ‘9gaggers in the wild’ or ‘one of us’. figures 8 & 9: posts wherein ops share a ‘slice of life’ or their status in society. ● gated ‘feels bar’, ​wherein vulnerable disclosures, the soliciting of emotional support, and the provision of counseling and friendship has to be confined only within ‘feels bar’ invitations; content ‘bleeding’ by users who post ‘feels’ without first kicking off a post for others to participate/reciprocate tend to register lower engagement (figure 10), although some users may post the meme in various comments sections as suggestion that another ‘feels bar’ post is due (figure 11). figures 10 &11: post and comment about ‘feels bar’ outside of designated ‘feels bar’ posts. ● expressions of gratitude, ​wherein users who have previously benefited from the homosocial support in ‘feels bars’ return to thank others in a new standalone post; such new posts serve as bookends of personal crises that have concluded, spread awareness of the ‘feels bar’ as an important node of congregation, and celebrates the 9gag community at large (figures 12 & 13). figures 12 & 13: posts expressing gratitude for support received on 9gag through comments sections. ● comment trains, ​wherein early commentators are usually responsible for setting the tone and shape of conversation under a post, be this participating in the digital ‘feels bar’ while being in actual bars (figure 14), or shitposting ‘dank memes’ to cheer an op up through sarcastic and self-deprecating humour (figures 15 & 16). figure 14: an example of a comment train. figures 15-16: another example of a comment train. continued research the preliminary analyses (–feb 2020) presented here will be extended as the study continues and considers the potential of ‘comment’ pods, issues of misogyny and feminism, and possible inter-cultural intersectionality present in the confessional disclosures, in light of the subsequent ‘americanization’ of the site (achadiat 2013) and observed racism (kusuma et al. 2016) despite 9gag originally surging in popularity among southeast asian users from the late-2000s to mid-2010s. as the app becomes more global with an international audience, languageand culturally-specific humour norms will reshape the meme-making and commenting cultures of this space. at the time of writing, it appears that commenting cultures are slowly wrestling away attention from main posts, as users express enthusiasm towards ‘camping out’ in the comments section (figures 17 & 18). figures 17 & 18: memes depicting commenting culture overtaking posting culture. references achadiat, r. a. 2013. ‘the representation of americanization myths in the internet memes on the 9gag comedy website.’ ​passage ​1(2). anggiarima, p. 2013. ‘gender stereotypes in www.9gag.com: a discourse analysis.’ thesis, english department, faculty of letters, state university of malang. dewi, c. 2017. ‘different language styles in male and female comments on meme in 9gag.’ sarjana sastra thesis, english letters study programme, faculty of letters, sanata dharma university. kusuma, h. 2018. ‘illocutionary acts in ‘forever alone’ memes in 9gag.com website.’ sarjana thesis, universitas brawijaya. kusuma, g. n. a., w. suamajaya, and n. k. a. suwastini. 2016. ‘the identification of racism in internet meme comic at 9gag.com.’ ​jurnal pendidikan bahasa inggris undiksha ​4(2). saputri, e. r. p. l. 2018. ‘humor types and gender stereotypes found in 9gag rage comics memes.’ sarjana pendidikan thesis, english language education, faculty of teachers training and education, sanata dharma university. veronica, v., and o. f. handoyo. 2016. ‘reading masculinity on 9gag.’ ​kata kita, ​4(3). does anyone know who made this?: commenting cultures on tiktok aleesha rodriguez queensland university of technology d. bondy valodinos kaye queensland university of technology patrik wikström queensland university of technology introduction tiktok, a short video platform owned by chinese tech giant bytedance, was a breakout digital media platform in 2019. the platform hosts algorithmically recommended short videos (15-60 seconds) and affords users a variety of tools to create, share, and interact with content. tiktok also boasts a unique comment section that sets it apart from other platforms discussed in this panel. this study explores how two aspects of tiktok’s platform infrastructures, comment filtering and automatic attribution, influence comment cultures on the platform. with millions of videos being added every hour, success for tiktok creators relies on capitalizing on the latest hashtags, trendy memes, and popular audio. similar to its progenitor, lip-synching platform musical.ly, audio can be recorded alongside video, imported from tiktok's internal library of songs and clips. audio clips can also be taken directly from another tiktok user's video. in the cases of audio files taken from other users, the newly created video will display the previous creator as the original creator of the audio. tiktok’s ‘automatic attribution’ system (monroy-hernandez et al. 2011) has created issues for creators by misattributing audio to the wrong source. this, in turn, leads to a culture of information seeking (e.g. “does anyone know the name of this song?”) and asserting authorship in the comments (e.g. “hey! this is my song! like this comment [for visibility]”). comments on tiktok are moderated algorithmically that reflects prevailing conditions in bytedance’s original market, china. strict moderation of user generated content, including comments, is mandated in china (cybersecurity administration of china 2017) as part of a broader state program of shaping discourse (keane & su 2018). previous research has found obscenity and profanity to be key targets of comment censorship (song & wu 2019) in addition to video content on short video platforms (lin & de kloet 2019). in addition to commenting to engage with video content, creators, or other users, posting comments can also be useful for information seeking in online creative communities (monroy et al. 2011). proper attribution, or giving credit, has been found to be highly important in non-commercial creative communities (perkel 2016, meese 2014). the right to attribution is a protected copyright in many jurisdictions (hansmann & santilli 1998), but copyright cultures in china are much different than in the global west (montgomery 2010). china has built a much more robust copyright culture over the past two decades but communal practices and sharing culture have deep roots in chinese society (han 2018). this difference in approach to copying and attribution is evident in the fact that during the first six months of 2019, tiktok only reported removing 3345 videos due to copyright infringement (tiktok 2020), while youtube reported removing over 16 million (google 2019). in response, unique comment cultures have emerged in tiktok’s comment section. methodology to study comment cultures and attribution on tiktok, we have developed a novel scraping tool to collect video, audio, and comment data from tiktok. our scraping system uses a custom script to collect video, audio, comments, and metadata from tiktok. in march 2020, we collected a sample of 999 tiktok videos that included #fyp (for you page), a popular hashtag associated with more than 100 million posts. following our scrape, we developed initial qualitative coding themes to investigate (mis)attribution practices on the platform and through this process isolated 71 videos (with a combined total of 90,776 comments) to further explore commenting cultures on tiktok. we then conducted a grounded descriptive analysis of the comments under each isolated video to query if t commenters engage in information seeking behaviour and assert authorship, as well as, study broader patterns of commenting culture on tiktok to answer questions such as, how does it appear that the platform filters comments? initial findings and progress to date our initial findings suggest that users do indeed engage in information seeking behaviour for songs that are misattributed by tiktok’s automatic attribution system. further, we have found evidence to support that tiktok commenters use the comment section to assert authorship. our grounded qualitative analysis of videos revealed a handful of ways tiktok creators and users use the comment sections to overcome attributional issues. in one example, a tiktok creator and music producer showed up in the comments of a video that was using the creators’ audio but misattributed to another video and creator. the creator’s post claiming the audio was one of the most highly ‘liked’ comments on the video remix. in another instance, a tiktok creator uploaded a 15-second remix of a popular song that the creator ostensibly made. several users commented on the video asking the creator if they were indeed the original creator of the remix, and, if so, where they could find the full version of the song. in another example, the comment section of a video that contained a popular audio that had been remixed by several other creators was full of comments from users exclaiming that they finally found the source of the aural meme. as meme culture on tiktok is ephemeral and fast-moving, users do what they can to boost visibility of their original content and locate the source of trending content. without a strong copyright enforcement system, like that of youtube, coupled with a problematic automatic attribution system, some creators and users have no choice but to turn to the comments section to assert their original authorship and to ask others “who actually made this??” however, this information seeking behaviour is then complicated by tiktok’s comment filtration system which we observed, is unique to each user and sorted in a distinct way where the most “liked” comment doesn't necessarily rise to the top. our initial findings suggest that tiktok’s comment section is less straightforward than on other popular social media platforms and future research ought to explore this novelty. references cyberspace administration of china. 2017b. detailed regulations on the administration of internet news service [互联网新闻 信息服务许可管理实施细则]. retrieved from http://www.cac.gov.cn/2017-05/22/c_1121015789.htm google. 2019. content delistings due to copyright. retrieved from: https://transparencyreport.google.com/copyright/overview?hl=en han, d. 2018. proprietary control in cyberspace: three moments of copyright growth in china. ​media, culture and society​, 40(7), 1055–1069. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443718765929 hansmann, h., & santilli, m. 1997. authors’ and artists’ moral rights: a comparative legal and economic analysis. ​the journal of legal studies​, 26(1), 95. https://doi.org/10.1086/467990 keane, m., & su, g. 2019. when push comes to nudge: a chinese digital civilisation in-the-making. ​media international australia​, 173(1), 3–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x19876362 lin, j., & de kloet, j. 2019. platformization of the unlikely creative class: kuaishou and chinese digital cultural production. ​social media and society​, 5(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119883430 meese, j. 2014. it belongs to the internet: animal images , attribution norms and the politics of amateur media production. ​m/c journal ​, 17(2), 1–6. monroy-hernandez, a., hill, b. m., gonzalez-rivero, j., & boyd, d. 2011. computers can’t give credit: how automatic attribution falls short in an online remixing community. conference on human factors in computing systems proceedings​, 3421–3430. https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979452 montgomery, l. 2010. ​china’s creative industries: copyright, social network markets and the business of culture in a digital age​. cheltenham: edward elgar publishing. perkel, d. 2016. share wars: sharing, theft, and the everyday production of web 2.0 on deviantart. ​first monday​, 21(6), 1–24. song, y., & wu, y. 2018. tracking the viral spread of incivility on social networking sites: the case of cursing in online discussions of hong kong–mainland china conflict. communication and the public​, 3(1), 46–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/2057047318756408 tiktok. 2019, december 30. tiktok transparency report. retrieved from: https://www.tiktok.com/safety/resources/transparency-report?lang=en speaking (in) pictures and corporate curation: commenting cultures on instagram tama leaver curtin university ysabel gerrard university of sheffield introduction as van dijck (2008) argued more than a decade ago, digitisation and online networks have driven a shift in photography from being largely about memory in an analogue era, to largely about communication in a digital era. nowhere is that shift more evident than on instagram, a social media platform which centres on the communicative capacity of visuals (and, more recently, video). yet, as with all successful social media, instagram’s platform affordances have developed and changed over time, including affordances which facilitate written ​and ​visual communication in myriad forms. below, we map the changes instagram have made in users’ ability to comment on pictures around three main features: (1) the feed; (2) direct messages; and (3) stories. we then reveal the limits and politics of how instagram decides who actually gets to use these affordances in exploring the way the platform bans, blocks and ‘shadowbans’ certain users and communities. we trace the evolution of instagram’s commenting capabilities to show how the platform has helped to redefine what ‘commenting’ means on social media, by enabling (and excluding​) a broader range of communicative responses to posts than most platforms currently allow. we also consider what this means for academic researchers, who are typically not privy to some the core communicative spaces and policies the platform offers. evolving comments, changing affordances when instagram launched in 2010, photos were posted to a user’s main ​feed ​, which other users could view and subsequently like or leave a comment on. the image (usually a photograph) initially had to be taken live (not from a camera’s gallery), and could be aesthetically edited with a series of pre-defined filters. the affordances of early instagram were thus completely consistent with boyd and ellison’s (2007) now classic ‘web 2.0’ era definition of social networks as being driven by a public profile on a specific system (or platform) with each user having a visible network that can itself be traversed by other users. posting images was the main form of communication (often paired with captions and hashtags), and comments and likes were the main form of interaction for users viewing the content. it was not until 2013 – after facebook purchased the platform in 2012 (vaidhyanathan, 2018) – that instagram rolled out their ​‘direct’​ messaging service as part of the instagram app. direct was, at least, an admission that not all commentary should be publicly visible, allowing users a more private space to engage with one another. in 2015 direct was revitalized with threaded comments, and over the next few years would, after some delay, include many of the affordances of stories such as (potentially) disappearing media and including other visual elements, such as animated gifs. while instagram has been the most successful platform in popularizing the stories format, it was initially invented by, and deployed on, snapchat (rettberg, 2018). ​stories ushered in a new type of ​ephemeral​ communication in that stories disappeared after 24 hours. when instagram replicated the stories format, they did so in part to address falling engagement numbers, as users were more and more concerned with posting polished content to their main feed; the impact of stories was immediate, opening a new space which was again less about aesthetic considerations and more about the immediate commentary and communication (leaver et al, 2020). the ephemerality of stories has been key to making this affordance the largest growth space for instagram. notably, in 2019 the ability to ‘like’ content in the main instagram feed has become ​so synonymous​ with instagram as a metric or popularity based platform, that in 2020 experiments are happening across the globe in removing those ‘likes’, which will probably be permanently removed, ostensibly to make the platform friendlier for commentary once more. curtailed from commenting? bans, blocks and shadowbans as we were preparing this abstract, instagram’s ceo, adam mosseri, was accused of lying about how ‘shadowbanning’ works on the platform: the process of secretly hiding or demoting a users’ content (myers-west, 2018). in an instagram live video, mosseri claimed that shadowbanning is simply ‘not a thing’ (cook, 2020), contrary to the platform’s own public-facing policies on the de-prioritization of particular forms of content. for example, instagram says it limits ‘sexually suggestive’ posts from its algorithmically-curated explore page (instagram help centre, 2020). but at the same time, other forms of shadowbanning might have the capacity to limit online harms; for example, a search for #depression suggests #depressionhelp and #depressionawareness as the next most appropriate tags, directing users to mental health recovery communities instead of potentially harmful content (mccosker and gerrard, under review). but the lack of transparency around why and how shadowbanning and other forms of content control happen – like blocking users from posting certain comments, or banning their accounts entirely – reminds us how much power platforms have to curate the parameters of acceptability (gerrard, 2018). commenting capabilities on instagram might therefore be framed as a privilege enjoyed by its less controversial userbase, whether or not their controversiality is warranted. conclusions in 2020, instagram is a decade old, and over those ten years the platform has become emblematic of broader shifts in the social media landscape. initially its affordances were consistent with persistent profiles and public or private as a single, binary choice. with the development of direct messages and ephemeral stories, instagram has greatly diversified how users can comment and respond to one another. with more than a billion users, instagram is a locus of community, commentary and potentially political change. but the controversies around shadowbans and the seemingly inconsistent, or at least vague, application of community guidelines to restrain and remove comments from some, but not others, highlights the need for greater transparency and fuller public disclosure about who is currently able to comment on instagram, in what capacities, and how that may or may not be restricted in the future. references boyd, d and ellison, n. 2007. social network sites: definition, history, and scholarship. journal of computer-mediated communication​ 13(1). cook, j. 2020, february 25. instagram's ceo says shadowbanning is 'not a thing'. that's not true. ​huffington post​. available at: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/instagram-ceo-shadow-banning-adam-mosseri_u k_5e56359ec5b62e9dc7da552c. gerrard, y. 2018. beyond the hashtag: circumventing content moderation on social media. ​new media and society 20​(12): 4492-4511. instagram help centre. 2020. ​why are certain posts on instagram not appearing in explore and hashtag pages? ​available at: https://help.instagram.com/613868662393739. leaver, t, highfield, t and abidin, c. 2020. ​instagram: visual social media cultures​. cambridge, uk; medford, ma, usa: polity. mccosker, a. and gerrard, y. (under review). hashtagging depression on instagram: towards a more inclusive mental health methodology. myers-west, s. 2018. censored, suspended, shadowbanned: user interpretations of content moderation on social media platforms. ​new media and society 20​(11): 4366-4383. rettberg, j.w. 2018. snapchat: phatic communication and ephemeral social media.” in j. w. morris and s. murray. ​appified: culture in the age of apps ​(pp.188-196). ann arbor: university of michigan press. vaidhyanathan, s. 2018. ​antisocial media: how facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy​. new york: oxford university press. van dijck, j. 2008. “digital photography: communication, identity, memory.” ​visual communication​ 7(1):57–76. aoir2020 panel submission final.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): sundén, j., tiidenberg, k. & paasonen, s. (2020, october). platformed sex lives. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. platformed sex lives jenny sundén södertörn university katrin tiidenberg tallinn university susanna paasonen university of turku the internet has for decades been imagined as a safe space for sexual exploration and for negotiating various sexual norms (tiidenberg & cruz 2015). but with current crackdowns on sexual content on social media platforms, online venues for sexual expression are growing increasingly limited. to turn social media platforms into decorous zones void of sexuality speaks to advertising concerns based on ideas of sexual content as inappropriate and lacking in value (paasonen et al. 2019). this “deplatforming of sex” (molldrem, 2019) also results in a categorical dismissal of lgbt, queer, and kink communities who rely on digital networks for sexual self-expression, community, and belonging. given the negative impact on sexual expression on an international scale, we find it crucial to ask how sexual rights – including the rights to bodily integrity and pleasurable sexual experiences free from discrimination – can be reconciled with a social media economy ruled by conservative, u.s.-specific notions of appropriate content, as well as what other avenues may remain available. this panel builds on a recently funded research project on the geopolitics of digital sexual cultures in estonia, sweden, and finland (2020-2022) investigating three local online platforms devoted to communities around nudity and kink: iha.ee (es, est. 2007), darkside (swe, est. 2003) and alastonsuomi.com (fi, est. 2007). by investigating what could be called “digital sexual geopolitics” across nordic and baltic contexts, the project contributes to a conceptual re-centering of sexuality beyond anglocentric perspectives in studies of social media. our case studies are, in a sense, “edge cases” which partly move within sexual margins and make space for alternate ways of understanding platform sociability. contra to the de-platforming of sex, our case-studies foreground sex as the dynamics that bind users to the sites and fuel diverse engagements between them. in doing so, the three sites we examine explicitly shape ways of doing sex and outlining sexual selves, leading to the question of how sex lives become platformed. the papers in this panel – on estonian and finnish platforms devoted to communities around nudity and sex, and a swedish web-based kink community – are work in progress. they provide the first building blocks in our platform analysis and are inspired by the walkthrough method (light et al. 2018) and the notion of platforms as microsystems (van dijck 2013). for these presentations, we focus on: 1. the conceptualization of gender and sexuality as evident in platform mandated categorization in voluntary and mandatory profile information, options within the dropdown menus, search and filtering, etc. 2. articulation of acceptable sexual practices and behavior in sexual spaces as evident in platform governance texts (rules, tos, guidance on images or usernames, etc.) 3. presumptions about the publicness, explicitness and privacy of sexual expression as evident in the platform’s choices regarding the hierarchies of access and visibility (what is shown to all, what only to logged in users, what to paying customers), interface and design choices, privacy settings etc. the three walkthroughs illuminate how these sites guide their users through expressions of sexual preferences, identities and interests; how use is intended and users imagined; and how sexual norms and imaginaries structure these platforms as techno-sexual interfaces interlinking bodies, devices, and desires. this opens up three important discussions, which we feel the aoir community would both benefit from and enrich: (1) how digital platforms shape and constrain sexual expression at a political moment when the sexual dimensions of life are increasingly de-platformed and pushed out of public view; (2) how these local platforms, as notable arenas for constructing sexual meanings in these three countries, contribute to sexual cultures within the region; and (3) how our examples, when understood as social media platforms, can help to push understandings of what social media are, how they operate, and what kind of sociability they allow for. in outlining the affordances of iha.ee, darkside, and alaston suomi, our panel opens up a discussion of how sex matters in social media, how it is valued and communicated. swedish web kink between dark desires and bright outness sweden has been a sexually liberal nation in the popular imagination ever since ingmar bergman’s (1953) “the summer with monika” helped propel the notion of swedish sin. and yet, swedish sin may be everything but sinful, but rather steeped in ideas of good, healthy sex (kulick 2005). sadomasochism was de-pathologized in sweden in 2009 but is far from de-stigmatized. darkside (est. 2003) is the largest swedish bdsm network with some 250.000 members, housing everything from social and sexual networking, including members’ profile pages with a wide range of sexual preferences and kinks, diaries, image galleries, and libraries of written erotica, along with discussion groups and chats, event information, editorial material, and advertising. darkside traffics in non-normative sexualities by providing, as the site states “love and community in bdsm, kink, sex positivity, fetishism, expressions and lifestyles beyond the prison of normativity” firmly set within an ethos of risk-aware consensual kink. the question of consent within an ethnographic study of a web-based kink community not only regulates sexual practices and forms of engagement, but also permeates research ethics and data management. as consent within the bounds of gdpr with regards to sensitive and intimate matters become something that “everyone” needs to practice, bdsm communities provide important sources of knowledge of consent as something situational, provisional, negotiable, ongoing, and collaborative. against a rich black background topped with latex art, the user interface of darkside has been in so called “dark mode” since 2006. it predominantly uses dark surfaces with accents and functions in bright red. dark modes, or dark themes, are only now seeping into mainstream user interfaces, to reduce the light emitted by screens, to help reduce eye strain, and to facilitating screen use in dark environments. as leather and latex are common fetish focal points, the color choice extends and enhances kink aesthetics. the color black is emblematic of bdsm, symbolizing a darker, hidden, perhaps secret side of sexuality and desire. according to classic handkerchief codes used in gay male sexual publics, black indeed signals sadomasochism. on darkside (as well as on for example hookup apps), such signaling is instead embedded in the members’ profile pages in great detail. you need to be at least 18 years old to enter. membership is free, but there is a vip option which significantly expands your storage space for messages and pictures, along with unlimited searches and sharper matching tools with other members. according to the community rules, politeness and respect for others and what others might be looking for is key. pro-dominance, cam shows, and sex work is forbidden, and so is racism and homophobia. something like misogyny is not being mentioned, even if gender is also considered as grounds of discrimination in sweden. to play with domination and power may be difficult to reconcile with swedish ideas of gender equality and (certain kinds of) feminism, but this does of course not automatically translate into play spaces where misogyny is accepted. the omission of misogyny may not indicate a free pass, but the silence is nonetheless interesting. while the site is deeply invested in a variety of sexual norm-breaking, this community is not devoid of its own set of norms, rules, and regulations. according to site statistics from 2017, the site is male dominated (67%), as well as dominated by straight forms of sexual self-identification (63%). when it comes to gender identification and gendered sexual preferences, the choices are many and, to an extent, nuanced. departing from male and female, it goes into a wide array of trans and nonbinary gender identities. such multitude of options makes for movement within and between categories of gender in ways not limited by binary thinking and feeling. then again, sometimes gender binaries matter as erotic contrasts in ways not recognized by the platform. for example, it is impossible to identify with or mark preferences for female masculinity, or butch. and conversely, there is an eradication of queer femininity, of sissies and femmes, or even just of the girly girl more generally, of what we could call female femininity. female femininity, or femme in its queer form, is not a tautology, but a demarcation of identities and/or directionality of desire. yet, in this kink community femininity appears to be collapsed into the denominator female, as if a distinction between the two is not a variable of value. the common cultural devaluation of femininity (serano, 2007) here thus extends into and becomes enhanced by design. darkside is a space for imagination and experimentation, sociality and self-discovery, flirtations and arousal, friendships and play dates. “as long as you’re a friend of our culture, you’re warmly welcome.” the core values of the community, as explicitly expressed on the site, have to do with affirmation and mutual respect of a multiplicity of sexual expression and sexual practices, but also a striving for a world in which this sexual abundance has a self-evident place in society. darkside thus sides with bdsmactivists working for acceptance and de-stigmatization, aiming to let the light into the secret of the “dark side” of desire. publicness and privacy are negotiated in a number of ways, some of which are interestingly contradictory. on the one hand, a discretely placed link at the very bottom of the opening screen offers a safe-for-work mode which makes pictures fade somewhat and which replaces the site name “darkside” with “bromöllas knyppelförening” (the bromölla association of bobbin lace making) in bright pink, complemented by a cute kitten. while the humorous contrast between a kink community and a lace making society is not lost, this supposedly discreet layout is rather transparent and still reveals more than it hides. hence, rather than being about secrecy or discretion, the subtle fade works as an alluring invite to this underworld, as a form of web design titillation. on the other hand, platform governance documents enhance a sense of openness and outness. the more personal information you provide, the better the functionality of the site in terms of matching tools and recommendations. you are even incited to enter website addresses and handles on other social media services, as “you [then] will become more available to other members.” as a member of darkside, you are thus urged to be open with real names and identities, including encouragement to show your face in your profile picture. this exploration of darkside helps to make visible and visceral how norms guiding gender and sexuality, privacy and publicness are interlaced with platform affordances; how a web-based kink community may have an investment in maintaining a tension between sexual secrecy and a striving for acceptance in the intersection of design aesthetics, platform governance, and the feel of the community. you are invited to the “dark side” of desire, and yet prompted to reveal your face and your name. while perhaps paradoxically extending the social logics of platforms like facebook, darkside also decidedly foreground sexual desire as that which fuels sociality and drives the platform. this demands a rethinking of the value of sex in networked sociability. contradictions of desire in estonia estonian sexual culture is full of contradictions stemming from the country’s history of varying foreign rule. while ‘traditional’ peasant sexuality of the 18th century is described as relaxed about nudity and even virginity (metsvahi 2016), the first republic (est. 1920) brought a bourgeoisation of gender and sexual norms. these were interrupted by soviet faux-equality, but a ‘demographic crisis’ of the 1970s – presumed to result from early soviet ideas of women’s emancipation – restarted the promotion of traditional norms (rivkin-fish 1999). significant heteronormativity, popularity of anti-feminist sentiments, but also widespread infidelity (haavio-mannila & kontula 2003) and a continuation of the laissez-faire approach to mixed-gender public nudity (sauna culture) have been noted after the restoration of independence. this presentation analyzes iha.ee (desire.ee) – an estonian image sharing and -rating social media site (est. 2007). i focus on how the platform shapes, constrains and expresses norms of privacy, explicitness, gender, sexual orientation and appropriate sexual behavior. publicness, privacy and explicitness what one sees on the site depends less on whether one is logged in and more on the tier of one’s membership. while all galleries are public, the more explicit images (female nipples, all genitals, sex acts) are covered with a graphic, and can be viewed when one pays for a vip membership (€2.50 € 44.55 depending on period). galleries are organized by hierarchies of popularity resulting from rating by logged in users, who must have published at least one image themselves. this precludes lurkers from rating and shadow-accounts from upand downvoting content, indicating a preoccupation with norms of fairness over those of privacy. uploaded images range from face portraits to explicit images of sex, however, explicit images usually do not show faces. these visibility affordances gesture at a co-existence of practices, motivations, usergroups and intended audiences. iha.ee is used for hooking up, networking, interacting, advertising, but mostly for sharing images as part of the abovementioned practices or just for the sake of it. hence, users’ self-expression varies widely, and can be conceptualized on at least three platform afforded axes of visibility – (a) axis of privacy / publicness, (b) closetedness / outness and (c ) modesty / explicitness. for example, an image of a naked butt, not censored by the platform and visible to all without logging in, but shared with limited personal information and no face would be public, closeted and explicit. categories of gender and sexuality iha.ee’s imaginaries of gender and sexuality are concurrently narrow and crudely heteronormative, yet messy to the point of fluidity or category subversion. users are equated to their gender and age throughout the site through various design choices like color coding of usernames, mars and venus gender symbols, age in parentheses. “man,” “woman” and “couple,” are the only gender options. users can fill out an elaborate profile consisting of 6 themes (contacts, appearances, sexuality, meeting, work and leisure, and hobbies) with multiple questions and drop-down answer options. most relevant for the discussion at hand are the ‘orientation’ and ‘turn-ons’ drop-down options in the ‘sexuality’ profile section. one can only be ‘heterosexual,’ ‘gay,’ ‘bi,’ or ‘lesbian,’ and while kink is not expressly mentioned anywhere, a partial engagement with it is available via the disorienting choices in the list of turn-ons. one can be turned on by ‘sex videos, leather, latex, body paint, oils, creams, no hair, hair, sexy clothes, footwear, metal objects, sm, tattoos, group sex, striptease, uniforms,” and confusingly “starfish1.” this communicates a very particular, very partial vision of sex, pleasure and arousal, which can somewhat be expanded in a “free hand” section inviting people to define what they think makes sex ‘high quality.’ the search function allows filtering users by the previously mentioned gender and orientation categories, but also by other profile elements (age, location, body type, hair color, sexual orientation, interest, purpose of meeting, education, income etc). the categorization of users into aged, embodied, geographically and socioeconomically located men, women, and couples, who are either hetero gay, bi or lesbian is reminiscent of the personals sections in newspapers and dating sites of the 90s and early 2000s, completely ignoring the diversification some of these categories have undergone in some public discourse. however, messiness of lived experience is vernacularly practiced and not constrained by the platform. when one enters the top galleries for men or women, all users who have self-selected one of those genders, no matter whether gay, bi, lesbian, heterosexual, trans*, genderqueer or cross-dressing will appear. this forces some users to mislabel themselves, but visually subverts the heteronormativity of the profile categories. while the first few pages of the top women gallery seem normatively feminine, the top men gallery shows a range of masculinities as well as some femininity. at the point of writing this, an image posted by a person, who has categorized themselves as a male lesbian with a feminine body interested in meeting everyone (both genders, both heteroand homosexual couples) has been voted third in the top men category. rules of acceptable practices and behaviors while terms of service and privacy policy of the site are boilerplate, more specific rules and expectations are sprinkled throughout, usually at points of participation (i.e. image upload, ad posting). these tend to collapse expectations regarding self-expression and technical aspects of participation. thus, when uploading images and videos, the preferred file type, size and quality are listed, but also that it is forbidden to upload visuals with children or watermarks on them, too many similar visuals and images which go against “best practice and moral norms” – neither are explained. the visuals have to be of the uploader, and if there are other people on the image the uploader is told to solicit their consent. moderation happens before publishing, and somewhat surprisingly a gallery of the images that did not pass muster is also available for everyone’s perusal. 1 this seems to indicate being aroused by women, whose participation in sex consists of lying in bed on their backs, arms and legs akimbo finally, the site chatroom has an extended list of rules including “basic politeness and ethics,” which again, is not explained. in a medley of administrative, legal, normative and practical advice, users are reminded of freedom of speech, but “vulgar cursing, endless repetitions, all caps lock, too many colors, begging for attention, endless complaints about being bored, constantly entering and leaving the chat, insisting on private chat after being refused, purposefully insulting others, name-calling, copying usernames, advertising, and everything illegal, in particular propagating racism and drugs” is forbidden. this contradictory set of platform features, rules and affordances seems to result from practical bricolage and carry a certain (post)-soviet diy attitude. they are an amalgamation of features and rhetoric designed to concurrently meet varying needs of varying groups, regulate behaviors that have cropped up as problematic over time, while offering platform developers legal protection and plausible deniability in moral matters. naked networked sociability alastonsuomi.com (i.e. “naked finland”) is an online image gallery and social networking site launched in 2007. initially advertised as “irc gallery for adults”, alaston suomi borrowed some of its format from irc-galleria (est. 2000) that dominated the finnish social media landscape pre-facebook. the overall rationale of alaston suomi is simple: users can establish an account by submitting a photo showing their face or naked body, or both; to rate and comment on contributions from other users; to participate in “clubs”; write blogs; chat; and publish photos, animated gifs and videos. some use the site primarily for hooking up, others for the pleasure of their bodies being seen, and possibly complimented, and yet others for mixed reasons ranging from the titillations of watching to selling sex. terms of service are brief and in accordance with legal constraints: users must be over 18, they must be present in the images they publish, all people in the photos need to consent to them being published, there can be no animals in them, and the posts must not include or encourage violence or racism. “images that are copied from the web, of poor quality or inappropriate are rejected without warning!”, the site warns. the inappropriate, in this context, does not refer to the sexually explicit but to more ambivalent, ephemeral boundaries of “good taste”: “analwhore666 or bigcock1337 kinds of usernames are generally rejected”. these articulations of acceptability aim to set the overall tone for user sociability that is, on the one hand, visually and textually very much in your face, yet loosely controlled, with techniques of reporting and blocking in place. participation on the site requires free registration that needs to be approved by the admin. full participation, including private messaging, requires vip membership that can be gained through credits that can be purchased or donated by other users as signs of appreciation (one-month vip membership costs a few euros; the price of credits depends on their volume of purchase). personal profiles and albums are, however, partly open for unregistered users to browse, resulting in explicit publicness. the front page of the site includes a random selection of visual content, and menus for new, best, archived and the most popular images, the top 25 images of the week, as well as submissions from new users and those celebrating their birthdays are all openly available. top ranked posts are overwhelmingly made by women; most recent content flowing in tends to be rich in dick pics. in a small “shoutbox”, images appear with messages from users: at the time of this writing, these mainly involved shots of male genitalia with invitations to hook up. within the content submitted, people pose at home, on holiday, in nature, in summer cottages, in cars and bathrooms of different kinds. some users, especially those whose submissions tend to gain higher rankings, build on a more streamlined, instagraminspired aesthetic whereas many others simply document their erection or ejaculation in close-up. the quotidian, rather public and often playful sexual displays on alaston suomi offer something of a counterpoint to the nudity-free self-presentations and exchanges allowed on facebook, instagram or tumblr. within the increasingly antisexual ecosystem of social media, alaston suomi is an ill-fitting microsystem that assembles sociability explicitly through nudity and sex, encouraging people to show more skin (cf. van dijck 2013, 25). its pro-sex platform logic then affords considerations of commercial social media ethics irreducible to the content policies of u.s.-based social media companies that conflate sex with risk, offence and harm, foregrounding the centrality and importance of sexual communication instead. with over 101,000 registered users and over two million monthly visits (in a country of some 5,6 million people), alaston suomi supports a range of sexual exploration and interaction rubbing against considerations of sexual normalcy and “good sex” of the kind that finnish discourses of sexual health largely revolve around. registered users come in a broad age-range, within a spectrum of gender-identifications, and with diverse sexual likes, identifications, and kinks. this heterogeneity implies a default lack of normativity or boundary-building around sexual preferences, allowing for considerations of something like a national sexual counter-public within the confines of a commercial platform. like any platform, this one governs possible ways of relating and doing sexuality. a walkthrough soon demonstrates that there are only two gender options to choose from: it is impossible to register without picking one or the other and “entering the wrong gender will lead to your account being suspended immediately”. the usernames of those opting for the female gender are spelled in red, those within the male category are in blue. people with nonbinary identifications need to opt for either one or the other, with the administrative threat of suspension if this be deemed the wrong one. within this framing, users can choose to see submissions from all, those from men only, women only, men and couples, or women and couples, yet there is no menu option for marking sexual preference as such. in this binary yet horizontal space, sexual orientations or nonconforming gender identifications remain unmarked on the level of platform structure even as they are articulated in the content that users submit – as in usernames marked with “tv” or “cd” to imply cross-dressing, or in men inviting male attention to their bodies. when browsing the image galleries, users can further narrow down their options through thirteen categories within a drop-down menu: tits, asses, bodies, faces, multiple persons, tattoos, shoes, vagina, penis, intercourse, fetish, artpics and piercings. when compared to the elaborate content categories on porn aggregate sites and kink networking sites such as darkside or fetlife, these options come across as rather paltry – overtly general and sort of random – in falling short of outlining the specificities of people may be into, or search for. even though registered users can use a search function, there are no tags in use. the chosen content classifiers result in a logic and rhythm of use reminiscent of online porn use before aggregator sides grew hegemonic: looking for content within the category of “fetish”, for example, means browsing through image gallery page after another in search for something to specifically catch one’s attention. zabet patterson (2004, 109) described this dynamic as one involving the promise of immediate gratification through the abundance of available content and the simultaneous frustration involved in finding interesting content – for example, a specific pose within the circa 999,000 images uploaded on alaston suomi. a study of alaston suomi helps in mapping out different temporalities in engaging with sexually explicit content; forms of sexual sociability enabled by terms of use and platform structure; and the overall value placed on nudity and sex in what brings people together and keeps platforms in operation. the site’s default publicness further suggests of a logic of safety based on potential vulnerability: in order to be a member, one needs to submit one’s own body to the visual scrutiny of others, making membership both pseudonymous and highly embodied. references dijck, josé van (2013) the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. new york: oxford university press. haavio-mannila, elina & osmo kontula (2003) single and double sexual standards in finland, estonia, and st. petersburg. the journal of sex research 40: 36-49. light, ben, jean burgess & stefanie duguay (2018) the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society 20(3): 881-900. kulick, don (2005) four hundred thousand swedish perverts. journal of lesbian and gay studies 11(2): 205–235. metsvahi, merili (2016) talutüdruk valgustuse paistel. lisandusi august wilhelm hupeli artiklitele, tuna. molldrem, stephen (2019) big tech’s war on sex. the fight magazine. january 4, 2019. https://thefightmag.com/2019/01/big-techs-war-on-sex/. paasonen, susanna, kylie jarrett & ben light (2019) nsfw: sex, humor, and risk in social media. cambridge: mit press. patterson, zabet (2004) going on-line: consuming pornography in the digital era. in porn studies, edited by linda williams, 104–123. durham: duke university press. rivkin-fish, michele (1999) sexuality education in russia: defining pleasure and danger for a fledgling democratic society. social science & medicine 29: 801-814. serano, julia (2007) whipping girl: a transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity. emeryville: seal press. tiidenberg, katrin & edgar gómez-cruz (2015) selfies, image and the re-making of the body. body and society 21(5): 77-102. microsoft word appignani-the world according to glass-the world according to glass.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 the spectacle of spectacles tim appignani university of illinois at chicago though google glass has not yet been released in the consumer market, the release of its beta version, and the prospect of its future debut, have evoked immediate scholarly and popular response. while resistance to technological innovation is hardly unique to google glass (marvin,1997) this product has received pronounced scrutiny in the popular media since its announcement. there may be many reasons for this, but one possibility is that glass represents an intrusive technology in a society already highly concerned with the erosion of privacy (hong, 2013). undoubtedly glass signals a shift toward the embedded mobile technologies that many scholars consider unique for their ability to alter social behavior by affording networked connectivity to public and private spaces in previously unimagined ways (ling, 2012; campbell, 2013). but whether glass is perceived to be an intrusive element in public spaces, and why it may be perceived this way has not yet been studied. along with a group of researchers from the university of illinois at chicago i aimed to do just this. after interviewing a random sample of thirty respondents encountering google glass in public for the first time with my research team, i discursively read those responses as texts per ang (1985) looking for contained meanings indicating how google glass is perceived as a new element in public spaces. my research found that respondents’ primary reaction to glass was not that it represents a threat to their privacy, but that it may be a hindrance to interpersonal socialityin public or in private. given the high frequency of this response in the majority of interviews conducted by my research group, i choose to draw on the work of debord in order to consider the extent to which google glass may represent a physically manifest example of the social distortion debord theorized as “the society of the spectacle” (debord, 1967). my work adopts a critical cultural approach to address how the concerns expressed by our sample about the emergence of google glass may represent a new iteration of existing anxieties about the erosion of sociality in western society. in character my project will mirror the approach taken by kellner, whose many works on the subject have delineated the various aspects of debord’s theory of the spectacle by applying them to contemporary cultural phenomena in the cultural studies tradition (kellner, 1995, 2003a, 2003b, 2010). like best & kellner’s work (1999), my study will extend the understanding of glass beyond media itself, as frederico (2010) proscribes to apply its usage to things like space, as lamb (2010) did, and to the paradoxical conditions for modern machinery that teurlings (2013) works to understand given its multivariate functions and affordances. whereas proponents claim glass affords its users greater connectivity, a critical interpretation proffers that it affords them an artificial connectivity in lieu of presence in their already social environment. while glass allows users to share their lived experience more seamlessly, it also allows its users to remove themselves from the interaction with their environment and those in it by filtering their vision through the medium of a screen and abstracting their life experience into data being absorbed, mediated and projected back to them. as debord chiefly identifies the spectacle with vision and the moving away from touch, glass privileges vision among the senses to the detriment of the full immersion of glass wearers in the world around them. this is not surprising given that vision, debord claims, is the weakest and most easily deceived sense, and also the one that lends itself best to the conception of the spectacle as a social phenomena that prizes the appearance of things over the things themselves (debord, 1967). thus glass expedites the process of the "falsification of life" which debord believes is achieved as a result of the society of abundance that exists in western civilization where commodity fetishism runs rampant (debord, 1967). google glass illustrates this because while it does not satisfy any real need on the part of its owner, it enhances the abstracted sense of need that is today highly associated with the affordances of technological advances. as glass illustrates through its rhetoric of transforming the future, modern society has come to accept the notion that its continued development is conflated with a collective need for the development of new products that are in fact only necessary to keep us engaged with the social spectacle of technology itself. references ang, i. (2013). watching dallas: soap opera and the melodramatic imagination. routledge. best, s., & kellner, d. (1999). debord, cybersituations, and the interactive spectacle. substance, 129-156. campbell, m. (2013). ok computer. new scientist, 218(2918), 40-43. debord, g. (1967). the society of the spectacle. new york. frederico, c. (2010). debord: do espetáculo ao simulacro. matrizes, 4(1). hong, j. (2013). considering privacy issues in the context of google glass. commun. acm, 56(11), 10-11. kellner, d. (1990). television and the crisis of democracy. boulder:westview press. -----1995. media culture. london and new york: routledge. -----2001. grand theft 2000. lanham, md.:rowman and littlefield. -----2003a. media spectacle. london and new york:routledge. -----2003b. from 9/11 to terror war: dangers of the bush legacy. lanham, md.:rowman and littlefield. -----2005. media spectacle and the crisis of democracy. boulder, col.:paradigm press. -----2010. media spectacle and media events: some critical reflections. media events in a global age, 76-92. lamb, m. d. (2010). negating the negation: the practice of parkour in spectacular city. kaleidoscope: a graduate journal of qualitative communication research, 9(1), 6. ling, r. (2012). taken for grantedness: the embedding of mobile communication into society. mit press. teurlings, j. (2013). from the society of the spectacle to the society of the machinery: mutations in popular culture 1960s–2000s. european journal of communication, 28(5), 514-526. glass and the revisioning of the world steve jones university of illinois at chicago after using glass for some time, i found it valuable to embed the experience of it in theories of space and ocularcentrism that underpinned the discourse surrounding academic work on virtual reality (vr) in the 1990s (rheingold, 1991; biocca, 1992, among others), particularly within the context of work i have been doing in the area of human augmentics (ha), the merger of digital technology to augment human capabilities and senses (kenyon & leigh, 2011). ocularcentrism is essentially a given in vr. its apprehension is by way of vision and its existence owes to increasingly sophisticated computer graphics engines. one way to critique vr is to situate it within a strain of thought coursing through modernity very clearly identified by lalvani (1996) as: …the powerful privileging of vision… represent(ing) a distinctive ocularcentric paradigm, quite different from the organization of vision in previous epochs. for instance, heidegger has spoken of the ocularcentrism of the modern age as driven by a nihilism that reduces every presence to images and representations. derrida likewise views the hegemony of modern vision as an attempt to establish a metaphysics of presence. and nietzche, in turn, critiqued the progressive endeavor to subjugate reality, to overcome otherness and difference, and to make everything present to the inspection of an imperial gaze as resulting in the necessary production of a seductive illusion. (pp. 1 – 2) the context lalvani provides in his critique of photography, vision and the body illustrates the need to historically situate glass both as ocularcentric technology and part of the body. what makes glass compelling as a site for theorizing about new media of communication is that like the development of photography it intersects with the material world and social world in ways that implicate and coerce the body and mind, subject and object, virtual and real, to enter into reconfigurations of perception, presence, interaction and attention. its ocularcentric nature obscures its embededness in and imposition on multiple senses. as jonathan crary noted in regard to the deployment of the visual as subjectifying, one cannot abstract one sense from the others without consequence: spectacular power cannot be reduced to an optical model but is inseparable from a larger organization of perceptual consumption…. the full coincidence of sound with image, of voice with figure, not only was a crucial new way of organizing space, time, and narrative, but it instituted a more commanding authority over the observer, enforcing a new kind of attention. (crary, 1989, p. 102) i am particularly concerned with crary’s notion of the formation of “a new kind of attention,” echoing, as lalvani wrote, “foucault’s methodological scheme of visualization (that) provides ‘visibilities’ – ways in which things are made visible during a particular period by the dynamic of knowledge and power” (p. 25). what glass points toward, as a category of technology, and what i will explain in the proposed paper, is a new form of disciplinary assemblage, the visible, wearable, manifestation of “machinic subjectivity” (jones, 2014) that implicates us in human machine communication at the immediate intersection of our interaction with nature and with others by augmenting our sense of sight and our sense of space. i will extend carey’s argument that, “as one set of borders, one set of social structures is taken down, another set of borders is erected” (2005, p. 453) to underscore that with every augmentation there is a simultaneous diminishment. in contrast to the social, political, geographic and other borders to which carey referred, it is easier to see what is augmented than what is diminished. the question, then, is not how technologies like glass are augmenting or diminishing reality and human perception but rather: how is the world being re-visioned. references beranuy, m., oberst, u., carbonell, x. and chamarro, a. (2009). problematic internet and mobile phone use and clinical symptoms in college students: the role of emotional intelligence. computers in human behavior, 25, 1182-1887. biocca, f. (1992). communication within virtual reality: creating a space for research. journal of communication 42(4), 5 – 22. carey, j. w. (2005). historical pragmatism and the internet. new media & society 7(4), 443 – 455. crary, j. (1989). spectacle, attention, counter-memory. october 50, 97 – 107. jones, s. (2014). people, things, memory and human-machine communication. international journal of media and cultural politics 10( 3), 245 – 258 kenyon, r. v. and leigh, j. (2011). human augmentics: agumenting human evolution. ieee engineering medicine biology conference 2011, boston, ma, 30 august – 3 september. lalvani, s. (1996). photography, vision, and the production of modern bodies, albany, ny: state university of new york press. licoppe, c. and heurtin, j. p. (2001) managing one’s availability to telephone communication through mobile phones: a french case study of the development dynamics of mobile phone use. personal and ubiquitous computing, 5, 99 – 108. rheingold, h. (1991). virtual reality. new york: simon & schuster. the opacity of google glass in interpersonal contexts andrea l. guzman northern illinois university introduction google glass was marketed as a device aimed at “getting technology out of the way.” similar to prescriptive glasses that are designed to improve vision while minimizing intrusiveness, glass was intended to augment users’ views of the world without inhibiting their interaction with their environment, including other people. google pulled glass from production and distribution soon after its public release, and whether the company will reintroduce the technology remains to be seen. before glass was taken off the market, a team of researchers conducted field interviews and observations to better understand perceptions of google glass. part of the data gathered during this research project focuses on participants’ perceptions of glass in interpersonal communication contexts. in this panel presentation, i explore how participants thought glass would enter into face-to-face interactions. although glass itself has an unsure future, other companies are introducing similar wearable technologies. research regarding google glass, then, is still important because it can inform our understanding of people’s perceptions of emerging mobile technologies, particularly wearables. literature scholarship in communication and sociology stemming back to the early twentieth century has conceptualized of the role of technology in the communicative process as that of a medium through which messages pass (guzman, 2014). this model has been particularly true in computer-mediated communication (cmc) research (gunkel, 2012). however, scholars across multiple disciplines and epistemological and theoretical approaches have argued that technology is more than a medium with implications for self and society (e.g. carey, 1989; mcluhan, 2011; mumford, 2010; pacey, 1983; pinch & bijker, 1984; turkle, 1984). computers, in particular, challenge the conceptualization of new media as only serving the function of channel in communication because users can interact with digital technologies in the vernacular (turkle, 1984). through a system of natural language commands, icons, and other visual and auditory cues and messages, users can understand and control computers. within the study of communication, nass initiated a research approach that positions computers and other media as distinct actors in interpersonal exchanges (e.g. nass, steuer, & tauber, 1994; reeves & nass, 1998). within this paradigm, digital technologies are no longer channels, or only channels, but take the role of interlocutor once occupied by humans. more recently, höflich (2013) has built on reeves & nass’ (1998) media equation by proposing a revised model of communication with social robots, a term applied to multiple technologies including devices and applications ranging from mobile phones to embodied robots (sugiyama & vincent, 2013). most theories that position technologies as social actors or interlocutors are based on a dyadic model of communication. höflich (2013), however, proposes a triadic model in which technology functions as both a distinct social actor as well as a mediator of human-human communication. the communication between the humans in the same social space is affected by the presence of a digital entity. i approach google glass in this presentation through höflich’s (2013) triadic analysis. method this study is part of a larger project regarding people’s perceptions of wearables and google glass prior to adoption. a research team conducted field interviews and observations of adults in a metropolitan area of a large city in the midwest in 2014. data was collected at the same time google released its “explorer” versions of glass to select users. the study protocol included asking people about how they would or would not use google glass. participants discussed where, when, and with whom they would choose to engage with glass or would decide to refrain from using it. in analyzing the data that resulted from the field interviews, i focused on participant responses regarding interpersonal communication scenarios, defined here as one-onone or small group interactions, and analyzed how participants imagined glass entering into these social spaces. from these discussions emerge perceptions of how glass enters into interpersonal communication between co-present interlocutors. analysis and discussion many participants indicated that wearing google glass would affect their interaction with people around them. some participants thought glass could draw attention to the wearer, at least until more people adopt the technology, making him or her the center of attention. they predicted conversations regarding google glass itself would follow, particularly from people who haven’t seen or experienced glass. some people also thought glass could help them juggle conversations or tasks with other people physically present with them. however, many participants indicated that they would not use glass in conversations with others because wearing google glass would be a distraction or breach of etiquette. for example, one participant stated that the person not wearing glass would worry that the glass-wearer was not paying attention to the conversation. another participant thought that glass would be simultaneously beneficial and detrimental to interactions. this participant stated that wearing glass could be a conversation starter because it would gain people’s attention but, after that, glass would impede interaction because it would be distracting to the non-glass wearer. regarding people’s perceptions of their own interactions with glass, some participants said they would only use google glass in private settings or for personal tasks because of the attention it could draw to them in public or the disruption it could bring to their interpersonal communication. here the perceived use was not so much to communicate with others but to accomplish something or obtain information i.e. search the internet for a recipe. although glass was designed to have some of the same communication capabilities as a smartphone and other internet technologies, most participants did not list communicating with others as a glass function. overall, while some participants think glass can facilitate conversations, most people stated that glass would be more likely to disrupt interpersonal communication with others or would be more appropriate in intrapersonal communication settings. based on participants’ perceptions of glass, when a human interlocutor is wearing glass in a face-to-face interaction with another person, the technology enters into our interactions with others becoming part of the social space, creating a triadic relationship (höflich, 2013). glass is not a neutral conduit through which information passes, but an active part of the interpersonal communication taking place. as participants conceptualized it, glass, then, does not “get out of the way”; it is viewed as very much “in the way.” i conclude by discussing how people perceive glass to be opaque in a social context. although modeled after eyeglasses, google glass is viewed as more of a digital technology, similar to the mobile phone, than an ocular prosthetic. references carey, j. w. (1989). communication as culture: essays on media and society. new york, ny: routledge. gunkel, d. j. (2012). communication and artificial intelligence: opportunities and challenges for the 21st century. communication+ 1, 1(1), 1. guzman, a. l. (2014). from channel to communicator: rethinking the role of technology in communication. presented at the national communication association, chicago, il. höflich, j. r. (2013). relationships to social robots: towards a triadic analysis of media-oriented behavior. intervalla. retrieved from http://www.fc.edu/intervalla/images/pdf/4_holflich.pdf mcluhan, m. (2011). the gutenberg galaxy. university of toronto press. mumford, l. (2010). technics and civilization. the university of chicago press. nass, c., steuer, j., & tauber, e. r. (1994). computers are social actors. in proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 72–78). new york, ny, usa: acm. doi:10.1145/191666.191703 pacey, a. (1983). the culture of technology. cambridge, ma: the mit press. pinch, t.j., & bijker, w.e. (1984). the social construction of facts and artefacts: or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other. social studies of science, 14, 399-441. reeves, b., & nass, c. i. (1998). the media equation. standford, ca: csli publications. sugiyama, s., & vincent, j. (2013). social robots and emotion: transcending the boundary between humans and icts. intervalla, 1, 1–6. turkle, s. (1984). the second self. new york, ny: simon & schuster. excavating glass: how combining social construction of technology and media archeology might help theorize emerging media technologies. jason e. archer university of illinois at chicago release, retreat, reboot shortly after the release of google glass i joined a team to collect ethnographic data to capture initial reactions. at the time we started collecting data in early 2014, glass seemed to be a promising new media technology. within months, some journalists were already declaring its’ death. google ceased producing glass less than two years after first releasing the prototype. as i am writing this in july 2015, google currently plans to continue development of glass with a potential commercial re-launch in the future. the release, retreat, and potential reboot, as is popular with hollywood films, portends an interesting story about the construction of an emerging media technology but offers more. it embodies a genre of technology that intimately blurs the boundaries between bodies, screens, digital spheres, and physical spaces – intersecting other technology, literature, art, and popular discourse. imaginary mediatic progenitors shaped its’ reception and perceived use. users and spectators found the materialized form wanting. google glass is a media technology that serves as a compelling case study challenging dominant notions of media and media theory by opening novel structures and forms of communication. the question is how to make sense of google glass. heeding a call made by gillespie, boczkowski, and foot (2014) to move beyond “the obligatory rejection of technological determinism (and beyond an uncritical embrace of social constructionism)” (p. 16), i will combine approaches from sts and media studies to make sense of glass. specifically, i will begin to discuss how social construction of technology (scot) (pinch & bijker, 2012) and media archeology (ma) (parikka, 2012) could be combined to provide richer theoretical and methodological tools to explain the development of media technologies and associated forms of communication. construction as excavation the social construction of technology (scot) model developed by bijker and pinch (2012) offer insightful ways to understand the development of technologies, how some succeed over others, how they come to be meaningful in certain ways, and how these meanings shift and ultimately influence their (re)design and use. the model consists of first identifying relevant social groups that play a role in the process of the development of a technology. their early model suggested that social groups be defined by those sharing similar meanings, “attached to a specific artifact” (pinch & bijker, 2012, p. 23). by identifying groups that debate the meaning of particular artifacts, researchers can identify the debates that drive certain technologies to success and others to fail. groups usually emerge as they identify a problem ascribed to the introduction of a particular technology, whereby alternatives are suggested. in addition to identifying relevant social groups, “interpretative flexibility of a technology must be shown,” meaning “not only (is) there flexibility in how people think of or interpret artifacts but also that there is flexibility in how artifacts are designed” (p. 34). finally, the model provides a way to identify how technologies become stabilized and dominant, cutting off the potential for alternative technologies to be developed in their place. to do this, they lay out a way of mapping the debate between relevant social groups and tracking it until the debate becomes stable. relevant to this project, scot could be conceptualized to help explain the emergence of communication practices associated with particular technologies and unpack the co-shaping processes that take place. however, by focusing on the impact that relevant social groups play in the development of technologies, scot does not account for the influence that media culture plays in affording potential developments, adaptations, and uses. it is critiqued as not acknowledging the influence of larger social systems (russell, 1986). it is unable to grapple with how media cultures across space and time influence groups involved in constructing technologies. and it tends toward being uncritically socially deterministic. media archeology as defined by parikka (2012) helps fill these gaps by identifying cultural conditions for the existence and perceptions of media technologies. ma acknowledges the way media technologies and practices are folded together throughout time. it provides the tools to understand unfolding meanings ascribed to technologies that influence the construction of current media technologies in ways unconscious to designers, developers, users, and other groups. it focuses on tracing political and critical genealogies associated with media technologies to describe potential social reactions and consequences. and importantly, it insists on medium-specificity that recognizes the role of technology in affording perceptions that impact the media technology’s own social construction. in doing so it provides a corrective to the sometimes over-deterministic nature of scot. unlike technologies that have been black boxed, glass remains open to some interpretive flexibility (pinch & bijker, 2012). because researchers tend to study technologies only after their meaning and societal status have become stabilized, they often miss the debates that brought them into being in the first place and in doing so misunderstand how they are involved in and are the projects of a process of social construction. they also fail to capture the communicative practices afforded by these technologies. practices that also play a role in the construction process. by conducting ethnographic interviews and tracing debates about glass as the technology developed in the early stages, this research played a role in documenting the construction of glass as it was taking place – capturing the rich tapestry of discourse that surrounds an emerging technology that individuals do not quite know how to make sense of or what to do with. however, focusing to narrowly on the current moment precludes recognizing how the construction of glass is influenced by a tapestry of other technologies. excavation as construction media archeology helps close the scot gap by providing tools to consider glass in relation to the historical social construction of other media technologies. for example, focusing on the development of eyeglass technology provides insights into the construction of glass because glass is associated with eyeglasses in a number of conscious and unconscious ways. historical social reactions to the popularization of eyeglasses in america at the turn of the century seem to predict some of the reactions to glass recorded in our ethnographic interviews and popular media. as just one example, eyeglasses, which were originally intended as functional items to correct vision, quickly transformed into fashion objects, sometimes with little corrective value (segrave, 2011). the construction of glasses as a fashionable technology arguably influenced critiques of glass as functional, useful for specific types of jobs like those in the technology and financial sector, but unfashionable. in reaction, google quickly teamed up with the fashion industry to produce something more aesthetically appealing (wong, 2014). combining approaches developed in scot and ma recognizes emerging media technologies as co-constructed in multiple sites, by multiple social groups, at multiple times, and that the construction of one technology plays a role in the construction of other technologies. my contribution to this panel constitutes a work in progress in which i attempt to offer a more layered explanation concerning the construction of google glass, associated forms of communication, and of emerging media technologies more generally, while exploring whether “the real power of the intellectual connections between sts and media studies will ultimately be theory that moves beyond “determinisms” to capture the multifaceted complexity of technology as communication made durable” (lievrouw, 2014, p. 50). references gillespie, t., boczkowski, p. j., & foot, k. a. (eds.). (2014). media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society. cambridge, mass.: the mit press. lievrouw, l. a. (2014). materiality and media in communication and technology studies: an unfinished project. in t. gillespie, p. j. boczkowski, & k. a. foot (eds.), media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society (pp. 21–52). cambridge, mass.: the mit press. parikka, j. (2012). what is media archaeology?. cambridge, uk: polity press. pinch, t. j., & bijker, w. e. (2012). the social construction of facts and artifacts: or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other. in w. e. bijker, t. p. hughes, & t. j. pinch (eds.), the social construction of technological systems: new directions in the sociology and history of technology (anniversary edition, pp. 11–44). cambridge, mass.: mit press. russell, s. (1986). the social construction of artefacts: a response to pinch and bijker. social studies of science, 16(2), 331–346. segrave, k. (2011). vision aids in america: a social history of eyewear and sight correction since 1900 (1st edition edition). jefferson, n.c: mcfarland. wong, v. (2014, june 4). google needs a fashion legend to make glass look good. retrieved february 24, 2015, from http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/201406-04/google-glass-needs-fashion-legend-diane-von-furstenberg-to-look-good scuba diving and jackhammers: glass as masculinesensual performance indira neill hoch university of illinois at chicago paratextual explorers google glass, in its glass explorer iteration, never achieved the status of mainstream consumer product. however, the processes of purchasing, using, and developing applications for glass have been, if anything, over documented in media artefacts that are seldom carefully considered because of their peripheral nature to the glass itself. these paratexts (consalvo, 2007) include, but are not limited to, the packaging and various instruction leaflets included with glass, youtube unboxing videos, and https://developers.google.com/glass/. i consider these paratextual spaces as crucial to understanding the product that glass wished to be understood as, our imaginations of it, whether or not it ultimately lived up to this ideal. published and distributed by both google and by explorers themselves, these texts contribute to a masculine performance (butler, 1990; connell, 1995) that blends humor, consumerism, and notions of tech-savviness. our research group’s ethnographic work with glass in an urban environment reinforced these positions. perceptions about who might wear glass centered on those with financial resources, who also wished to be publically seen as tech-savvy. it is a performance of masculinity that does not rely on an explicitly male body (halberstam, 1998) and perhaps deliberately uses gender neutral language. however, these paratexts can suggest, quite deliberately, who should be using glass and how it should be used. after all, the glass packaging tells the explorer “you are a pioneer, a founder and an architect of what’s possible.” emphasis is placed on the active, creative, conquering, masculine, role the explorer may to adopt through their use of glass, instead of its originally intended position as a(n eventual) consumer electronic device. this message is printed on a stark white, 4 ½ inch by 1 ¾ inch sliver of cardstock fitted inside an equally delicate white cardboard sleeve. to say that the packaging is like that of apple products (estes, 2013) is both accurate and a bit reductionist. such statements do not convey the actual experience of interacting with the packaging. an experience that is, more and more frequently with consumer electronics, carefully orchestrated (la, 2014). filled with contrasting black-and-white components of varying textures and weights, the packaging pieces are strikingly sensuous and tactile for a product that it intended to operate largely hands-free. the matte black surface inside the lid, with white text and sketched images of how to start out using glass through its touch interfaces, is simply velvety. aesthetic labor, sensual unboxing in marketing, aesthetic labor is typically performed by women for the comfort of all genders. sectors such as retail and leisure project a feminine, or nurturing, aesthetic through the hiring of female employees (stevens, 2012). in the airline industry, where flight attendants become the product sold to the consumer (spiess & waring, 2005; warhurst & nickson, 2009; witz, warhurst, & nickson, 2003), this facilitates environments where sexual harassment and the invitation to touch is acted upon (spiess & waring, 2005). of course, glass packaging is not a flight attendant, but the invitation to touch, to feel, is marketed to the consumer through the packaging (la, 2014). isabelle olsson, lead industrial designer for glass and its packaging, describes the unboxing process as a bit of a tease. "[the frosted glass-like vellum paper] was one of the hardest things to find.” it could not be "too transparent that gives it all away, but not too opaque that you couldn't see anything" (olsson, quoted in la, 2014). glass’ packaging is an invitation to touch, to explore, and from the faq questions included in tiny gray type inside the crisp little cardboard sleeve, to operate a jackhammer, play one-on-one, or go scuba diving, but probably without wearing glass. it is a joke, but only just barely. this sensual performance is carried further in the practice of publishing unboxing videos, where the purchase of glass leads to the labor of recording and editing, which then can then be monetized by the explorer/youtube partner, albeit still through google’s ecosystem (as youtube is a division of google, inc.). being an explorer means performing labor and sharing that labor, blended with entertainment value (scholz, 2012). dan mclaughlin’s video “glass unboxing” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yliqxnivcts) is a typical example of the unboxing genre. though mclaughlin has under 3,000 subscribers to his youtube channel, his unboxing video boasts over 700,000 views. the video is ad-monetized and mclaughlin is compensated for views. through the ten minute video, mclaughlin narrates his process of taking glass out of the branded bag, going through each layer of the box, using his hands to touch, to point, to manipulate the product. he comments upon the textures of the cloth storage bag, the cardboard inserts, the ac adapter. handling of the packaging takes center stage over the product itself. where the technology may be unable to live up to expectation, there is comfort in the literal black and white linearity of glass’ presentation as product. marketing communication is simply one aspect of packaging design, and must be weighed against other concerns (for summary of packaging design research, see azzi, battini, persona, & sgarbossa, 2012). however, the prevalence of unboxing videos, particularly for specialty consumer electronics, points towards extending packaging as a marketing device beyond traditional advertising venues. your labor is beautiful “google developers (https://developers.google.com/glass/) acts as a gateway for both the experienced android developer and the beginner. consisting of dozens of subpages and branching tutorials, the site emphasizes glass as something one does. the opening image is one of the active glass user, not the developer behind a non-glass computer screen. instead one sees a white male, leaning forward, wearing a helmet and glass, complete with included attachable sunshades. it’s not scuba diving or jackhammering, but it is also not the reality of development presented on the other side of “developer overview.” with hundreds of hyperlinks, the developers site offers aid to the glass tinkerer and experienced application developer alike. in addition to the resources, lines of programing that can be copied, pasted, and modified by the app developer, there are pages that address questions of style and language. when crafting text for glassware, developers are encouraged to “be friendly.” friendliness is defined by “contractions,” use of second person (“you”) and emulating “casual conversation.” earlier, on this same page, the invisible “you” to whom the developer speaks is defined as “smart and competent,” who may be unfamiliar with both “technical jargon” and “may not speak english very well.” the developer is encouraged to write for a person they want to talk to, an absent social partner, known only through the glass. glass paratexts such as these raise questions concerning consumerism, labor, technology adoption, and gender performance. this presentation, as part of a larger glass panel, can only provide a brief overview of a few of the places these themes emerge and where they intersect with additional glass discourses. references azzi, a., battini, d., persona, a., & sgarbossa, f. (2012). packaging design: general framework and research agenda. packaging technology and science, 25(8), 435-456. butler, j., (1990). gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. new york: routledge. connell, r. (1995). masculinities. berkley: university of california press. consalvo, m. (2007). cheating: gaining advantage in videogames. cambridge, ma: mit press. estes, a. c. (2013, 16 april). google glass packaging looks a lot like apple iphone packaging. the wire. retrieved from http://www.thewire.com/technology/2013/04/google-glass-packaging-looks-lot-applepackaging/64296/ halberstam, j. (1998). female masculinity. durham, nc: duke university press. la, l. (2014, 2 november). thinking inside the box. cnet. retrieved from http://www.cnet.com/news/tech-packaging/ scholz, t. (ed.). (2012). digital labor: the internet as playground and factory. new york: routledge. spiess, l., & waring, p. (2005). aesthetic labour, cost minimisation and the labour process in the asia pacific airline industry. employee relations, 27(2), 193-207. stevens, l. (2012). “feeling bodies” in marketing: aesthetics, emotions and gender. the marketing review, 12(2), 141-159. warhurst, c., & nickson, d.p. (2009). ‘who’s got the look?’ emotional, aesthetic and sexualized labour in interactive services. gender, work and organization, 16(3), 385404. witz, a., warhurst, c., & nickson, d. (2003). the labour of aesthetics and the aesthetics of organization. organization, 10(1), 33-54. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 trott, v. (2017, october 18-21). black “rantings”: uncovering indigenous feminist writers’ online narratives in a postfeminist age. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. black “rantings”: uncovering indigenous feminist writers’ online narratives in a postfeminist age. verity trott university of melbourne in november 2014, a sketch comedy television show called black comedy aired on the australian broadcasting company and provided a witty interrogation into australian culture through the lens of indigenous australians. one of the writers and stars of black comedy is the indigenous australian playwright and actor nakkiah lui. through the series, lui, along with a group of other cowriters, humorously challenges postfeminist narratives and introduces counter narratives that highlight the issues and barriers indigenous australians face in society. in 2015, a couple of confronting polls were developed in australia by feminist organisations that kept a record of the female victims of men’s violence. the most notable, developed by the australian feminist group destroy the joint, was entitled “counting dead women 2015”, which was continued as “counting dead women 2016” in the following year. in response to this poll, indigenous feminist writer celeste liddle developed her own “counting dead aboriginal women 2015”, and later a 2016 version, as she realised indigenous women’s deaths often go unheard thus the percentage of their recorded deaths was in fact inaccurate. indigenous women, according to the national plan to reduce violence against women and their children 2010-2011, are at a much higher risk (35 times more likely) of experiencing family and domestic violence than non-indigenous women in australia. such a high statistic emphasises the pressing need to acknowledge the issues indigenous women face in society. along with this counter poll, celeste liddle has been challenging postfeminist narratives on her personal blog rantings of an aboriginal feminist, from which she rose to prominence. her work has also been published on various news outlets such as the guardian and the daily life. to further an understanding of how indigenous australian feminist writers are challenging key aspects of postfeminism, this paper examines the ways in which they use the microblogging site twitter to develop a first-hand and direct engagement with the writers’ personal views and to shed insight into how they are challenging postfeminist narratives on an everyday level. with the proliferation of intersectional hashtags created by women of colour, twitter has been identified as an important tool in the effort to develop ‘a sustained critique of white feminism’ (daniels, 2016:27; loza, 2014). while social media sites have been praised for providing alternative and liberating spaces for marginalised feminist voices (boler & nitsou, 2014; halavais & garrido, 2014; radsch & khamis, 2013; shaw, 2012), there remains a racial disparity between the voices that are elevated online (nakamura, 2002). this paper asks, how are indigenous australian feminist writers challenging aspects of postfeminism online and what are the prevailing counter narratives about women, indigeneity, and feminism? this paper borrows rosalind gill’s (2007) notion of postfeminist sensibilities and the features she identifies as constituting postfeminist discourse in its analysis of how indigenous australian feminists are challenging key aspects of postfeminism via the microblogging site twitter. in addition to challenging postfeminist sensibilities this paper also looks at how whiteness may shape and complicate postfeminist narratives and illustrates how indigenous writers are questioning the assumed whiteness inherent in much of the dialogue surrounding feminism in australia today. while gill’s analysis into postfeminist sensibilities is helpful, as she acknowledges at the beginning of her (2007) work, her critique of postfeminism is developed from an anglo-american perspective and further research into how postfeminism ‘recenters both heterosexuality and whiteness’ (25) is required. this paper examines how the perspective of indigenous australian writers may complicate gill’s critique as well as how they challenge postfeminist discourse. for this study, i conducted a discourse analysis of 800 tweets posted by indigenous australian feminist writers celeste liddle and nakkiah lui on twitter to provide an understanding of what postfeminist narratives they encounter and challenge online. i initially collected 200 tweets from each user using the excel extension nodexl. nodexl caps the collection of tweets at 200. a month later i collected another 200 tweets from each user to make up 400 tweets from each feminist writer, and 800 tweets in total. collecting over the course of a few weeks was beneficial for providing a broader insight into the types of topics and conversations they engaged with. collecting over time also meant the results were not as skewed by any particular event that might dominate conversation on twitter at the time of data collection. however, this was nonetheless a purposive sample and not designed to reflect the entirety of their network but rather to shed light on some of the issues they engaged with, the postfeminist narratives they encountered, and the ways in which they promoted their own experiences online. the paper begins with a brief outline of what constitutes postfeminism as proposed by gill (2007) and mcrobbie (2004) and highlights the inherent whiteness present amongst postfeminist discourse and the surrounding critique. in response to this centring of whiteness within postfeminist discourse, the paper documents the ways celeste liddle and nakkiah lui challenge this whiteness and draws attention to some of the prevalent concerns indigenous women face, which are overlooked in postfeminist discussions. the paper then goes on to analyse how liddle and lui, as indigenous feminist writers, challenge and complicate the specific tenets of postfeminism that gill (2007) identified. references boler, megan, nitsou, christina. “women activists of occupy wall street.” cyberactivism on the participatory web. ed. mccaughey, m. hoboken: taylor and francis, 2014. print daniels, jessie. "the trouble with white feminism: whiteness, digital feminism and the intersectional internet." digital feminism and the intersectional internet (february 16, 2015) (2015). gill, rosalind. "postfeminist media culture elements of a sensibility." european journal of cultural studies 10.2 (2007): 147-166. halavais, alexander, and maria garrido. "twitter as the people’s microphone." taylor and francis. 2014. loza, susana. "hashtag feminism,# solidarityisforwhitewomen, and the other# femfuture." ada: a journal of gender, new media, and technology 5” (2014). mcrobbie, angela. "post-feminism and popular culture." feminist media studies 4.3 (2004): 255-264. nakamura, lisa. cybertypes: race, ethnicity, and identity on the internet. psychology press, 2002. print. radsch, courtney c., and sahar khamis. "in their own voice: technologically mediated empowerment and transformation among young arab women." feminist media studies 13.5 (2013): 881-890. shaw, frances. "‘hottest 100 women’ cross-platform discursive activism in feminist blogging networks." australian feminist studies 27.74 (2012): 373-387. aoir2020panel-sept.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): buck, a.; tekobbe, c. & edwards, d. (2020, october). the internet is trash: making sense of toxic networks. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the internet is trash: making sense of toxic networks amber buck university of alabama, usa cindy tekobbe university of alabama, usa dustin edwards university of central florida, usa dumpster fire. garbage site. trash heap. the flotsam and detritus of the unfettered growth and transformation of digital life. particularly since brexit and the american presidential election of 2016, which brought this digital refuse to the forefront of public discourse, internet scholars have been coming to terms with the societal consequences of some of the issues they have been warning about for years, including online harassment, surveillance, and state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. whitney philips (2020) recently described the internet as a “toxic hellscape” in wired magazine, arguing for collective problem solving and our own agency in working together to fix the internet’s problems. lisa nakamura’s 2020 ted talk called the internet a “trash fire,” before suggesting solutions like content moderation. artist jenny odell (2019), on the other hand, has advocated for disconnection as a solution to toxic spaces and the attention economy itself. this panel brings together scholars studying distinct aspects of internet culture in order to make sense of the negative byproducts of online spaces. each presenter takes on a different topic: political internet memes, fan subcultures, and physical digital waste to consider the consequences of internet life. using distinct methodologies: case study interviews, textual studies and histories, and autoethnography, this panel considers what internet scholars can learn from the unsavory parts of the internet. buck describes and discusses their study of political meme sharing communities in the context of the 2020 north american election cycle to explore how these memes function in closed communities. buck finds that these “trash” memes can act as identity markers that serve to bolster political identity, construct community, and foster political life online. tekobbe introduces their study of the comments and discussion threads of one slash fandom facebook group a context that intersects both the “trashy” practice of writing and reading fanfiction and the hostile online detritus of social platform user interactions online exploring ways one fandom group works together to construct productive and collegial discussion and creative threads. tekobbe finds that with specific group scaffolding in place, an online space can become collaborative and self-moderating, a livable space model of positive production rather than so much garbage interactions. speaker 3, employing feminist and indigenous methodologies, tells the stories of one mining town as a microcosm for larger considerations of an embodied and embedded view of internet life and death. using a “thick”ened concept of battery life, edwards considers the long term ecological consequences of digital technology production waste. working with notions of internet waste, these presentations serve to build out a broad set of perspectives about the potential value in the trash internet, what we can learn from it, and how we can think more deeply about that which has little value or consideration in the internet life of clicks, posts, shares, likes, and follows. through these presentations, the speakers ask the audience to consider their own views of internet garbage and to think about remedies to the toxic ecologies that impact life both virtual and literal. references nakamura, l. (2020). ted talk: the internet is a trash fire. here’s how to fix it. youtube. retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/lisa_nakamura_the_internet_is_a_trash_fire_here_s_h ow_to_fix_it odell, j. (2019). how to do nothing: resisting the attention economy. melville house. phillips, w. (2020, feb 3). the internet is a toxic hellscape—but we can fix it. wired. retrieved from https://www.wired.com/story/the-internet-is-a-toxic-hellscape-butwe-can-fix-it/ selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): buck, a. (2020, october). the internet’s dank meme stash: examining political memes in interpretive communities. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the internet’s dank meme stash: examining political memes in interpretive communities amber buck university of alabama background internet memes, especially image-based macros, have become not only an established means of communication in networked environments, but also genres through which individuals make cultural meaning. scholars such as ryan milner (2016) and limor shifman (2014) have examined the centrality of memes for internet discourse. milner has described memes as “a lingua fracta for digitally mediated participation.” for shifman, while memes circulate through different internet communities, they also “shape and reflect general social mindsets” (p. 4). the ways in which memes are both collectively constructed and flexible as a delivery system for different kinds of information make them a productive avenue for academic study. as shifman (2014) argued, memes are especially popular for communication about current news events and politics. shifman identified three primary functions for political memes: 1) generated by candidate campaigns themselves for persuasion; 2) created by individuals for grassroots action; and 3) generally, serving as modes of “expression and public discussion” (p. 123). while work from shifman and milner point to the creative nature of memes to remix content and comment on current events, this work and other scholarship research and conducted before 2016 (jenkins et al., 2013) is often positive, or at least ambivalent, on the ability of memes to speak truth to power and to comment on news and political events, bringing average citizens and activists into conversation on the ways that speak back to political and media establishments. more recent work on memes has considered the ways that political memes work for exclusion rather than inclusion. ross and rivers (2017) have found delegitimization to be a common strategy in memes constructed around the 2016 u.s. presidential election. the creation and circulation of internet memes served to reduce the legitimacy of donald trump and hillary clinton as candidates, rather than to energize different communities to support them. erika sparby (2017, forthcoming) has also noted the ways that memes, and political memes in particular, reify and amplify positions rather than persuade audiences. indeed, political memes in particular have had a decidedly mixed history when it comes to persuasion. because memes work as a type of cultural shorthand, they often truncate arguments and ideas and rely on rhetorical commonplaces. ryan milner (2016) described internet memes as polyvocal systems through which multiple meanings and identities are negotiated. memes are created collectively; they become codified over time into recognizable genres and gain meaning through repetition and reinterpretation. shifman (2014) argued that some political memes can be ambiguous: liberal audiences might read them one way and conservatives another, but in many instances, memes also best make meaning in closed interpretive communities. in china, shifman (2014) noted, meme creators use creative symbolism to get images and messages past internet censors – for example, using the image of river crab to represent censorship. internet memes in closed communities recent research on fake news and disinformation in networked publics can also help scholars understand the ways that political internet memes function and circulate on social media platforms. in her examination of fake news on social media, alice marwick (2018) found that individuals share fake news as a way to signal identity. whether or not the information is true is secondary, and the circulation of such content instead signals the sharer as a member of a particular group. much of this information is shared not only through news links, but also through image-based memes. francesca tripodi (2018) has also described the ways in which conservative political groups use language in specific ways that have distinct meanings within their communities and functions to reify in-group beliefs and information sharing. more research, then, is needed on how and why individuals share political memes and how they function within and between different online communities. this study considers the motivations behind internet users' sharing and circulation of political memes within their personal networks on social media. while image macros are easy to share beyond their original context (gries, 2015), they also rely on shared knowledge and a common language to make meaning. in many ways, memes create humor within particular in-groups, though the technologies through which they are shared encourage circulation beyond those groups. methodology this study reports on qualitative interviews with social media users who frequently share political memes. the author is conducting interviews with several individuals during the 2020 u.s. presidential campaign, 15 liberal political activists in the american south (ages 19-75). the interviews contain a guided tour of users’ recent social media posts with open-ended and retrospective questions that consider individuals’ reasons for sharing political memes. these interviews are then analyzed via a coding scheme derived from the data. conclusions this study suggests that interpretive communities play a significant role in the circulation of political memes on social media through well-developed commonplaces. while much scholarship on memes emphasizes the spread of content online, this research suggests that political memes in particular also function through siloed online communities and serve as identity markers. this work contributes to continued research on political memes and their role in political identity development. references jenkins, h., ford, s., & green, j. (2013). spreadable media: creating value and meaning in a networked culture. nyu press. marwick, a. e. (2018). why do people share fake news? a sociotechnical model of media effects. georgetown law technology review, 2(2), 474-512. milner, r. m. (2016). the world made meme: public conversations and participatory media. mit press. ross, a. s., & rivers, d. j. (2017). digital cultures of political participation: internet memes and the discursive delegitimization of the 2016 us presidential candidates. discourse, context & media, 16, 1-11. shifman, l. (2014). memes in digital culture. mit press. sparby, e. m. (2017). digital social media and aggression: memetic rhetoric in 4chan’s collective identity. computers and composition, 45, 85-97. sparby. e.m. (forthcoming). meming the party divide: representations of gender and identity in political memes. enculturation: a journal of rhetoric, writing, and culture. tripodi, f. (2018). searching for alternative facts. media manipulation research initiative. new york, ny: data & society research institute. retrieved from https://datasociety.net/research/media-manipulation. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): tekobbe, c. (2020, october). putting out the dumpster fire in one “trashy online community: an ethnographic study. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. putting out the dumpster fire in one “trashy” online community: an ethnographic study cindy tekobbe university of alabama background online comments threads are fraught digital spaces, often approached with the commonplace advice to just not read them: “don’t read the comments.” commonplace opinions argue that the comments add no value to the post/article/question; that they are a waste of time and emotional energy to navigate through the garbage to the potentially valuable content; and that they are a ‘dumpster fire’ of hate, inanity, racism, sexism, xenophobia, and so on. a great deal of research that surrounds online interactions demonstrates that comments sections reflect the greater culture wars where any kind of socially constructed transgression draws fire from “trolls” who are self-charged with enforcing the cultural norms (nagle, 2017). but what if online comments threads could be places of collaboration and community building, working against that notion of garbage fires? and how specifically could these spaces/places be constructed in support of a largely strife-free community? fanfiction, specifically slash fiction, is loved by its readers and writers, while being widely disparaged by greater culture as the domain of teen girls; texts with terrible grammar and spelling; and stories with juvenile plotting and characterizations, including the infamous mary sue who is little more than a writer inserting herself into her favorite fictional spaces (ellis, 2014). in a conversation with my participants and fellow members of one slash fanfic facebook group, many identified that they did not share with anyone their interest in reading and writing slash fanfic because it was described by others as the “trash” of the internet. even as there is much scholarly writing that works against the notion that fanfic is merely trashy, the dominant narrative of socially awkward teenagers and their fan obsessions remains (gray, et al., 2007). working at the intersection of fan communities and digital rhetorics, with this project the author investigates how the community aspects of fandom – mutual support and investment of people whose relationships pivot on a shared affinity for a specific media – may translate into online moderation strategies that create collegiality in online groups, rendering comments as community-building acts rather than hostile spaces. methods in this ethnographic study, the author spends three years belonging to and engaging with a slash fanfic facebook group that through the creativity and active engagement of the moderators avoids many of the documented pitfalls of online commenting. over this time period, the author acted as an observer, a participant, and a discussion leader, maintaining a co-presence as researcher and member (pink, et al, 2016), working through the relationship and community practices of this group of more than 900 members who engaged in daily interactions without negative conflict in their comments. the researcher distinguishes negative conflict from conflicting ideas and opinions. participants had different preferences and different opinions, difference in this group is considered a feature rather than a bug, but those differences are respected and valued rather than seen as transgressive behavior in need of overt oppression/suppression. specifically, with the study, the author asks, what is different about this facebook group that it does not seem to reflect the hostility of discussions the researcher has observed in other facebook group discussion threads? how much active moderation within this group is required to maintain collegiality and civility? what kinds of community engagement activities are enacted by moderators in the group to aid in member relationship building, both as they relate to the fandom and to the members’ everyday lives? the researcher hopes that identifying how the moderators have structured and maintained their group can help inform a model of group moderation that minimizes the group conflict and takes the confrontational trash out of comments threads. findings through this study, the author finds that the slash fandom group relies both on the bonds of fan cultural relationships and careful and savvy online moderation strategies to build a productive space for members to interact without “drama” and discord. first, moderators build group identity by limiting the fandom-related discussions to a single slash “ship,” while all other discussions can be on generally any topic. second, moderators scaffold group relationships by implementing and supporting a weekly calendar of events which creates a space where group members can collaborate, cowrite, discuss, and share within a predictable framework. third, group members actively construct relationships within this framework by sharing content and asking for and expressing mutual support, which adheres to the tone and practices of the group established by the interactivity of the moderators. references ellis, e. (2014, aug 7) in defense of so-called “bad” fanfiction: shout out to sirius/remus. the mary sue. https://www.themarysue.com/in-defense-of-so-called-badfanfiction/ gray, j., sandvoss, c., harrington, c. (2007). fandom: identities and communities in a mediated world. new york university press. nagle, a. (2017). kill all normies: online culture wars from 4chan and tumblr to trump and the alt-right. zero books. pink, s., horst, h., postill, j., hjorth, l., lewis, t., tacci, j. (2016). digital ethnography: principles and practice. sage. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): edwards, d. (2020, october). battery life (and death): stories from the blasted landscapes of a copper mining town. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. battery life (and death): stories from the blasted landscapes of a copper mining town dustin edwards university of central florida, usa researchers have long paid attention to the damaging environmental effects of internet technologies. while early discussions often focused on how planned obsolescence from technology firms has led to a growing accumulation of digital waste (e.g., gabrys, 2011), more recent work has examined not only the afterlifes of digital devices but also how devices are made of materials with multi-temporal contexts of extraction, production, and circulation (e.g., cubitt, 2016; hogan, 2016; parikka, 2015; roberts, 2016; zylinska, 2017). studying broader supply chains and deeper materialities of internet technologies—especially in an internet of things era—pushes the idea of “internet life” into new dimensions. what finite materials and rare earth sources (aluminum, gold, cobalt, copper, etc.) are used to power internet life? how are particular ecologies (mining sites, data center locations, petrochemical manufacturing sites, etc.) made vulnerable to power internet life? and how are qualities of life (in humans and multispecies life) put at risk to power internet life? this paper contributes to such questions by conceptualizing a thicker understanding of “battery life”—not only does battery life exist in the everyday sense of the term, but battery life entails a deeper, more mournful sense of environmental loss and devastation in particular landscapes. methodology while distant perspectives of global supply chains and waste streams provide a certain view of such devastation, this paper engages methodological perspectives of story to offer an embodied and embedded view of internet life and death. as many scholars across fields of feminist science studies, environmental humanities, and indigenous rhetorical studies have articulated, stories do not promise to offer a static, global view from nowhere; rather, in affirming the perspectival and the partial, stories pass off and relay knowledge in situated times and places to tell us something about the worlds we inhabit (e.g., king, gubele, & anderson, 2015; haraway, 2016; tsing, bubandt, gan, & swanson, 2017). drawing on published news reports, maps, corporate documents, and local and state government archives, as well as embodied knowledge rooted in site visits, memories, and place-based experiences, this paper tells a partial story of the chino copper mine in new mexico, usa. stories from a copper mine one of the largest copper mines in the united states, the chino mine is currently owned by freeport mcmoran, the second largest producer of copper in the world and the largest publicly traded mining company on the planet. the massive, open-pit of the mine has grown so big that it swallowed the entire town of santa rita, new mexico. schools, hotels, homes, and a hospital were moved or demolished to make room for the expanding perimeter of the pit. but the expanding mine pit has done more than bulldoze a town and displace a community. years of poorly regulated mining operations have polluted groundwater and airways. though environmental oversight of the mining industry has tightened (and loosened back again) over the years, hazardous materials have been found in groundwater and plant life near the mine due to several reported spills, leaks, and ruptures. and then there are the occupational hazards and chronic health problems experienced by those laborers on the front lines—those who have consumed copper dust and handled toxic materials or those whose bodies have been crushed by heavy machinery, among other occupational dangers. as a major source of economic development and generational prosperity in an otherwise sluggish economy, the story of the mine is a complex tale of land demolition and restoration; of toxic spills and tightened environmental regulation; and of precarious labor conditions and economic development. why tell such stories? telling embedded stories of places such as the chino mine is important for internet studies research, because such stories offer visceral reminders of how life is unevenly experienced in the service of powering the lively machines that comprise the internet and its connected platforms and devices. consider, for example, how a single iphone contains about 15 grams of copper. and, of course, that number intensifies at scale: 1 million iphones contain about 15 tons of copper. there are bits of copper traveling in the pockets of people all around the world, with each gram of precious metal carrying its own unique story of how it was extracted from land and reprocessed to its current state. in our pockets and bags, then, are stories of toxic tailings, of lands blown to smithereens, and of laborers living and dying on the job. these damages, whether consciously registered or not, are always tethered to the stories researchers tell (and don’t tell) about digital devices and platforms. as internet researchers continue to investigate the confluence of digital platforms and material infrastructures, telling and listening to place-based stories of environmental harm provides thicker understandings of internet life (and death). in doing so, researchers might advocate for better sustainability practices in industries connected to what van dijk, poell, and de waal (2018) have called the platform society. as van dooren and rose (2016) argued, “telling stories has consequences, one of which is that we will inevitably be drawn into new connections and, with them, new accountabilities and obligations” (p. 89). the tale from the mine is just one story among many that internet researchers can investigate to elicit new accountabilities to make worlds more livable for a range of human and nonhuman life. references cubitt, s. (2016). finite media: environmental implications of digital technologies. duke university press. gabrys, j. (2011). digital rubbish: a natural history of electronics. university of michigan press. haraway, d. (2016). staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. duke university press. hogan, m. (2015). facebook data storage centers as the archive’s underbelly. television & new media, 16(1), 3-18. king, l., gubele, r., & anderson, j. r. (2015). survivance, sovereignty, and story: teaching american indian rhetorics. university press of colorado. parikka, j. (2015). a geology of media. university of minnesota press. roberts, s. t. (2016). digital refuse: canadian garbage, commercial content moderation and the global circulation of social media’s waste. wi: journal of mobile media, 10(1). accessed february 29, 2020 from http://wi.mobilities.ca/digitalrefuse/ tsing, a. l., bubandt, n., gan, e., & swanson, h. a. (eds.). (2017). arts of living on a damaged planet: ghosts and monsters of the anthropocene. university of minnesota press. van dijck, j., poell, t., & de waal, m. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford university press. van dooren, t., & rose, d. b. (2016). lively ethography: storying animist worlds. environmental humanities, 8(1), 77–84. zylinska, j. (2017). nonhuman photography. mit press. aoir2018 tlca-identified selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): leaver, t. and abidin, c. (2018, october 10-13). from youtube to tv, and back again: child viral video stars and media flows in the era of social media. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. from youtube to tv, and back again: viral video child stars and media flows in the era of social media a/prof tama leaver curtin university dr crystal abidin jönköping university / deakin university introduction while talk shows and reality tv are often considered launching pads for ordinary people seeking to become celebrities, we argue that where children are concerned, especially when those children have had viral success on youtube or other platforms, their subsequent appearance(s) on television highlight far more complex media flows. at the very least, these flows are increasingly symbiotic, where television networks harness preexisting viral interest online to bolster ratings. however, the networks might also be considered parasitic, exploiting viral children for ratings in a fashion they and their carers may not have been prepared for. in tracing the trajectory of sophia grace and rosie from viral success to the ellen show we highlight these complexities, whilst simultaneously raising concerns about the long-term impact of these trajectories on the children being made increasingly and inescapably visible across a range of networks and platforms. methodology this paper is an extension of two overlapping projects: one based in traditional anthropological fieldwork with microcelebrities and influencers and how some of these actors eventually groomed their own children as micro-microcelebrities (abidin, 2015); and the second, a long-term cultural studies and media analysis of how tracking devices used by parents among infants and young children impact wellbeing and notions of privacy (leaver, 2017). as such, this paper draws on an extended data set largely comprising screengrabs, archived comments, press coverage, and volumes of field notes tracking historical events that unfolded in public trajectory of young children who go viral on the internet and on the media, but also utilises data derived from an ethnographically informed content analysis of young internet celebrities and a data-driven cultural studies analysis of childhood in the age of tracking devices. this paper takes as its primary case study the trajectory and progress of cousins sophia grace brownlee (b. 2003) and rosie mcclelland (b. 2006), who went viral on youtube in 2011 at the ages of 8 and 5 for covering nicki minaj’s super bass and were subsequently groomed by the ellen degeneres show into multi-platform celebrity. networked factories of child celebrity: sophia grace & rosie sophia grace brownlee (b. 2003) and rosie mcclelland (b. 2006) are a pair of cousins from essex, england. better known on the internet as “sophia grace and rosie”, the duo went viral on youtube at ages 8 and 5 when sophia grace’s mother uploaded a video of the girls singing nicki minaj’s super bass in september 2011. the viral video was the debut post on the youtube channel “sophia grace”, and has accumulated over 52 million views as of august 2017. a month later in october 2011, the girls were invited on the ellen degeneres show to be interviewed by show host ellen and to reenact their viral performance. in a later segment, nicki minaj sprang a surprise on the girls where she appeared on stage at a last minute request to chat and sing with them. the two videos have recorded over 32 million and 122 million views respectively. so well received were the girls on the ellen degeneres show and its youtube channel that shortly after, behind-the-scenes footage of sophia grace & rosie were released on the show’s youtube channel, in a bid to capitalize upon their virality and extend the length of their appeal to the show’s audience. subsequently, the girls were subsumed into the programming of the ellen degeneres show as they represented the show at various red carpet events and starred in branded content in the youtube content vernacular of a vlog, promoting various brands and events. sophia grace & rosie eventually became a bona fide staple on the ellen degeneres show, hosting their own segment known as “‘tea time’ with sophia grace & rosie”, with eight episodes between september 2012 and may 2013. it appears that the ellen degeneres show spotted talent and viral uptake of the girls early on, inviting them to celebrate their 100 millionth view on youtube. over subsequent years, the girls would frequently be featured talking about their personal lives, the experience of britons regularly visiting america, their family lives, and the impact of their youtube success, all of which both appeared on the show and the show’s youtube channel. as the years passed and the cousins approached teenhood, it became clear that the social media presence of sophia grace was more intentionally curated and branded for a career in the (internet) entertainment industry while rosie faded into the background, evident in the structural expansion of rebranding her youtube channel to focus on sophia grace rather than the duo and starting a facebook page as “sophia grace the artist”. sophia grace’s digital estates also underwent content expansion has she began to produce her own music meet mainstream entertainment industry and collaborate with fellow internet celebrities. since turning 13 in 2016, sophia grace formally launched her influencer career by engaging in influencer content vernacular and youtube tropes including participating in internet viral trends unrelated to her music career such as the oreo challenge, engaging in the attention economy of clickbait such as q&as addressing her budding romantic life and expanding her presence in other genres on youtube such as makeup tutorials. complex media flows to some extent, the rise and popularity of the cousins can be understood as part of what graeme turner calls ‘the demotic turn’, the increasing repositioning of everyday people into the media spotlight, creating a form of celebrity via reality tv, talk shows and so forth (turner, 2013). this is reinforced by sophia grace (& rosie)’s acknowledgement of the ellen degeneres show as the springboard for their expanded and extended fame postvirality in several of their public messages. however, we argue that the media flows relating to viral children as exemplified by sophia grace & rosie are more complex. rather than ‘creating’ the fame of these children the ellen degeneres show and similar tv talk show formats opportunistically capitalize upon the social capital of such viral video children by harnessing their fame and packaging it into more accessible, commercial, and deliberate consumption bytes. the girls were viral stars before they were on tv, but the networks channeled, amplified and significantly capitalized on their emergent (viral) fame. so successful is this model of viral kid celebrity factories that the ellen degeneres show has curated its own series of adorable kids in a playlist of over 200 videos with such viral children engaging in various (commercial) activities on the show. emerging conclusions and further work viral fame online and more recognised televisual fame are increasingly blurring, with both symbiotic and parasitic relationships emerging as television networks seek to harness, and create, online attention. viral children such as sophia grace and rosie exemplify this complexity, where the televisual and online flows are multiple and complex. at the heart of these flows, though, are an increasing number of children whose amplified viral fame must be carefully positioned in commercial, social and care terms. as more and more children are featured online as proto-influencers and microcelebrities, often managed and produced by their parents, and sometimes being amplified and harnessed by more traditional media forms such as television, the rights of the children in these instances – to privacy, to self-determination and so forth (livingstone & third, 2017) – must be more robustly and transparently discussed. historically, child stars have often not fared that well after bursts of fame in the media industries; viral kids need more successful and more carefully mapped trajectories. . references abidin, c. (2015). micro-microcelebrity: branding babies on the internet. m/c journal, 18(5). retrieved from http://journal.mediaculture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewarticle/1022 leaver, t. (2017). intimate surveillance: normalizing parental monitoring and mediation of infants online. social media + society, 3(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117707192 livingstone, s., & third, a. (2017). children and young people’s rights in the digital age: an emerging agenda. new media & society, 19(5), 657–670. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816686318 turner, g. (2013). understanding celebrity (2 edition). los angeles: sage publications ltd. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 farci, m. (2020, october). there's male tears in that comment section. the discursive negotation in italian online men's groups. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. there are male tears in that comment section. the discursive negotiation of masculinity in italian online men’s groups manolo farci university of urbino carlo bo introduction in the past ten years there have been intense debates in masculinity studies about transformations in men’s behavior and their impact on gender relations. nowadays, a significant part of these debates is dedicated to trying to understand how white heterosexual masculinities are produced and buttressed in internet settings, as demonstrated by the increasing amount of works on the heterogeneous nature of the socalled manosphere. a lot of these studies rely on the premise that men’s engagement with masculine practices can be categorized into a set of typologies that shape and structure their experiences and explain their practices and behaviors. in this setting, the use of theoretical concepts such as hegemonic masculinity, hybrid masculinities, toxic masculinity, inclusive masculinity has provided an opportunity to see how the articulations of masculinity are always related to the broader systemic social structures and discourses that work to shape it. while these critical perspectives have been important in drawing attention to men’s oppressive practices across many different domains of social life, the assumption of masculinity as an overall governing force of men’s behaviors has led to overlooking how subject positioning is always constructed and negotiated in multiple and contradictory discourses that are not easily captured by structurally oriented frameworks such as hegemonic or toxic masculinity (wailing 2019; berggren 2014; beasley 2012). in response to the accumulated points of criticism against the limits of any structural theorization, the recent third development in men’s critical studies of masculinity has sought to completely overhaul the idea of masculinity (and gender) as something we purposively undertake. in these perspectives, masculinity comes to be understood as a relational process for men, something that is “done” or accomplished in the course of social interaction. in this sense, masculinity exists as a set of discursive practices which shapes the way men speak, feel and think. to some extent they are the various discourses that different domains of social life makes available for the construction of masculine identities which determines the kinds of identities they can assume. this is not to say that individuals have no freedom over their identity process. however, this freedom should be understood as a battery between several and sometimes competing discursive resources. in this study, employing the principles of critical discursive psychological approach (edley, 2001; wetherell, edley, 1999), we seek to investigates the discursive construction of masculinity in digital environment, in order to identify the various resources, in the form of established repertoires, that men use to position themselves in relation to conventional discourses of the masculine, and how masculinity both impinges upon and is transformed by those practices. to do so, we analyze the content of two facebook pages dedicated to men's rights issues, called antisessismo (antisexism) and diritti maschili – equità e umanità (men’s rights – equity and humanity). we focus on these pages because, even though their participants often perpetuate the same antifeminism rhetoric carried on by conservative men’s rights movements, at first sight their anti-sexist discourses seem to reject compulsory gender roles and promote the leftist values of equality and antidiscrimination. in this sense, these groups rely on and use competing discursive repertoires that differ from those of more ideologically oriented groups like incel or mgtow. here, the role of facebook is significant because it addresses people’s feelings of engagement, without necessitating to align with the whole ideological spectrum of men’s rights activism. using an inductive methodology (strauss, corbin 1998), the content of the posts and the user’s comments is qualitatively analyzed to find recurring themes and patterns, going back in time from the date of the analysis (april 2019) and moving forward until theoretical saturation is reached. we also conduct a qualitative digital ethnography reading and observing debates. results online social networking sites, such as facebook, have provided a new platform for men to mobilize and rework available discursive repertoires that make themselves comfortable with their male identity. anti-sexist, anti-feminist, and “pro male” groups give the chance to understand how men dispute and negotiate opinions, beliefs and world views in an attempt to destabilize and/or reaffirm essentialist notions of what is culturally allowed in terms of being man and being woman in our society our findings suggest that in these groups, masculinity is rarely negotiated or discussed but it is assumed as a common sense, providing a basis for shared social understandings. however, there is no unitary meaning to this common sense of masculinity, on the contrary, it contains many contradictory or competing arguments. individuals are positioned by discourses in the foucauldian sense, but, as our data demonstrate, these identity positions are by no means stable and consistent: users can shift between different modes of masculinity and actively re-create positions for themselves, especially in response to “trouble”. on the one hand, although “softer” and apparently “sensitive” styles of masculinity are developing within these online groups, the discursive construction of masculinity seems to reaffirm the masculine ideal of the rational, disembodied subject of the liberal tradition, and ends up perpetuating a normative gender dualism between what the west has characterized as masculine (logic, moral reasoning, conflict, individualism) and what has been, and continues to be, feminized (emotion, collectivity, cooperation, being otheroriented). this confirms how masculinities are often invisible and operate indirectly through discourses of rationality. on the other hand, if feeling at ease is the quintessential aspect of a masculine stance and constitutive of normative masculinity, men who are nervous and express their emotional discomfort represent a potential break from the reproduction of more conventional forms of masculinity. many users are not “in sync” with stereotypical male positions and need to seek out other resources in order to construct a different self-reliant subject position. in this sense, social media offer these men a set of feeling rules that they can use to translate their emotional intensities into pleasing and relatable posts, the posts that offer them a way to express their perceived displacement away from the normative and to carve out a new space in relation to changing notions of masculinity. in this context, regarding such discomfort only as a strategic call for victimhood may be counterproductive. as gotell and dutton point out (2016): denial of the realities (though unequal) of men’s victimization plays into the vilifying rhetoric of mras. thus, adopting a gender-inclusive view of victimization – overcoming the natural association of masculinity with violence, conceptualizing the violence between men as a gender problem too or accepting the invisibility of men's vulnerabilities as part of a problematic cultural conception of masculinity – may create the potential for moving beyond stagnant theorizations of men as being only either victim of or responsible to various models of masculinity(ies) and masculine practices, and to consider the varied and complex nature men may have with their engagement. references beasley, c. (2012). problematizing contemporary men/masculinities theorizing: the contribution of raewyn connell and conceptual-terminological tensions today, the british journal of sociology, 63(4), 747–765. berggren, k. (2014). sticky masculinity: post-structuralism, phenomenology and subjectivity in critical studies on men. men and masculinities, vol. 17, no 3, p. 231-252 edley, n. (2001). analysing masculinity: interpretative repertoires, ideological dilemmas and subject positions. in margaret wetherell, s. taylor, s. yates, & open university (eds.), discourse as data: a guide for analysis. sage in association with the open university. gotell, l., & dutton, e. (2016). sexual violence in the ‘manosphere’: antifeminist men’s rights discourses on rape. international journal for crime, justice and social democracy, 5, 65. strauss, a., corbin, j. (1998) basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory, london, sage publications. wetherell, m., edley, n. (2014). a discursive psychological framework for analyzing men and masculinities. psychology of men & masculinity, 15(4), 355–364. microsoft word spir-digital imaginaries-ir16.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 user’s digital imaginaries of self usurped through work: why users autonomy is at risk jacinta buchbach digital media research centre queensland university of technology (qut) this paper argues that employers are dictating standards of online behaviour that unduly restrict the ability of users to manage their imagined identities and audiences on social media. users carefully manage their personal and professional identities online and offline in an effort to avoid blurring of these domains. they exercise some degree of choice in segmenting or integrating their personal and professional domains. whilst much of the rhetoric around the management of identity in social media revolves around autonomous choice in sharing practices and the affordances and process of platforms, socially engaged employees have little control over the way they manage their personal and professional boundaries. in fact, the social media policies adopted by some organisations actively deprive users of autonomy in how they manage these domains. by conducting a legal analysis of social media policies through the theoretical lens of boundary theory, i argue that restrictive policies impede an employee’s ability to manage their identities by collapsing boundaries which facilitate further blurring of domains. these insights give rise to legal concerns about the enforceability of these policies against employees. employees are legally bound to follow social media policies which exist as either contractual terms within the employment contract or as directive guidelines in policies.1 organisations typically implement social media policies that constrain employee behaviour in an effort to minimise the firm’s legal and reputational risk. for example, many policies adopt restrictive terms in attempts to limit breaches of privacy or claims of bullying or discrimination amongst staff members.2 to avoid these risks, organisations 1 romero v farstad shipping (indian pacific) pty ltd [2014] fcafc 177, [49],[62] whether the terms have contractual or directive effect relies upon the promissory wording of the terms used. contractual terms have greater legal effect for employer damages if terms are breached. 2 andrew creed and ambika zutshi in chapter 8 ‘social media:does it generate the continuum of transparency in organisations?’in cornelius reiman, public interest and private rights in social media (chandos, oxford, 2012) 138. suggested citation (apa): buchbach, j. (2015, october 21-24). user’s digital imaginaries of self usurped through work: why users autonomy is at risk. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. often attempt to set the parameters for employee behaviour and expectations that are consistent with the organisation’s culture whilst reflecting emerging societal norms.3 the problem is, these organisational policies are inconsistent with societal norms. some policies state that employees must affiliate with their work via disclaimers on their private social media accounts. the difficulty in requiring such a disclaimer is that it restricts the user to presenting a professional self and places them within the context of the commercial marketplace of work, even when the technology is used in private and in social contexts. by regulating personal communications in this way, employers are interfering with the ability of individuals to create their online identities in ways that conflict with community expectations.4 these restrictive policies reflect expectations and norms more conducive to the work environment,5 as opposed to one’s social environment. by collapsing these boundaries, these legal policies have unintentional consequences for employee autonomy. i propose that online boundary management theory is a lens through which to enhance user autonomy and inform better policy. users manage their boundaries in the public or semi-public online domain6 by balancing their roles and responsibilities of work and life in their preference for keeping those domains separate or integrated.7 users also 3 patricia sanchez abril et al, ‘blurred boundaries: social media privacy and the twenty-first-century employee’ (2012) 49 (1) american business law journal, 63, 113-114. 4 ben light, ‘navigating work’ disconnecting with social networking sites (palgrave macmillan, 2014) 83. 5 melissa gregg, work's intimacy (cambridge and malden, polity press, 2011) 6. gregg considers facebook reflects norms of middle-class professional workplaces which encourages an adoption of tactics appropriate to the workplace into the methods and modes of socialising. others consider the concept of friendship in ‘friending’ is misplaced and made to primarily serve individual economic gains. 6 ariane ollier-malaterre, nancy rothbard and justine berg ‘when worlds collide in cyberspace: how boundary work in online social networks impacts professional relationships’ academy of management review, 2013 38(4), 645, 648. 7 ellen kossek et al, ‘work–nonwork boundary management profiles: a personcentered approach’ (2012) 81 journal of vocational behavior 112, 114. the three management styles include role identity centrality and perceived boundary control. undertake a self-assessment in how they wish to be perceived by their audience.8 the outcome of this process preserves user autonomy in how they control and manage their personal and professional domains. organisations that mandate employees present as their professional self in private online networks remove the ability of employees to choose their preference for integration or segmentation. these work disclaimers reflect a segmented approach that portrays only the user’s professional self to the exclusion of all other selves. this is problematic as employees are forced to segment audiences which not only restricts their ability to manage their own boundaries, but requires employees to engage in considerable ongoing effort and skill to avoid potential mismatches between their personal beliefs and work norms.9rather than hinder users’ boundary control and consequent behaviour, employers should be helping employees with their boundary management regarding online connections.10 this framing suggests an important shift in the legal regulation of employee behaviour and the extent to which social media policies should be able to collapse these boundaries. in mitigating for risk, employers will often have an incentive to over-reach their legitimate areas of control. in order to promote autonomy, the law needs to be at least skeptical, if not critical of these policies, and the threats they pose to personal communication. organisations constraining behaviour in this way to minimise legal and reputational risk, potentially increases legal risk if its own policies are deemed unlawful. in australia, employees have a general legal obligation to obey directions contained within the policy provided that the direction is not unlawful, is not unreasonable and falls within the scope of the employment contract.11 in legal terms, this analysis suggests that restrictive policies may not be enforceable. through the insights of boundary theory, i argue that policies that restrict the ability of users to manage their identities and how they are perceived by their audience are unlikely to fit within the scope of the employment relationship. i conclude that organisations are exceeding the limits of their control over how employees choose to manage their online identities. first, work disclaimers restrict the ability of employees to manage their own boundaries. second, restrictive social media policies may not be legally enforceable against employees. i propose that one way to 8 ariane ollier-malaterre et al, above n 6, 650. users identify as either self-enhancers or self-verifiers. 9 ibid 663. 10 ibid 664. 11 grant v bhp coal pty ltd [2014] fwcfb 3027, [130]. preserve autonomy is to remove work disclaimers from policies, or failing change, for courts to render these restrictive policies unenforceable. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 kiel, p. (2017, october 18-21). networked publics and the social construction of death, dying and bereavement in a digital age. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. networked publics and the social construction of death, dying, and bereavement in a digital age paula kiel london school of economics and political science introduction for the past two decades, as in so many other fields of our social lives, digital media has permeated the field of death, dying and bereavement. death-related online practices keep emerging, offering a range of ways of dealing with death digitally. online memorials, online support groups and grief-specific forums, expression of grief on facebook, funerals on virtual worlds, digital legacy services and post-mortem online communication are but a few examples of the variety of such death-related online practices. to a great extent many of these practices are arguably transforming the contemporary social construction of death, mainly by making death public and creating death-specific networked publics. while many scholars in the field of digital death and thanatology are fascinated with these processes, additional critical engagement with the limitations, challenges and exclusions implicated by these practices is required. by focusing on the specific practice of post-mortem online communication, this paper highlights some of these main challenges, linking them critically to some of the fundamental issues of networked publics in an increasingly digitsed media world. a shifting social construction of death during modernity the social construction of death was characterised by a tension between presence and absence: elimination of death from everyday life on the one hand, and on going presence of the deceased in daily life on the other. specifically in western societies during the 19th and 20th centuries, death increasingly became sequestrated, contained in specific times, spaces and practices, grieving was privatised, mourners were encouraged to severe themselves from deceased loved ones and death became highly excluded from everyday public life (see for instance: ariès, 1974; mellor & shilling, 1993). towards the end of the 20th century and increasingly so as the 21st century unfolds, scholars are describing a shift in the social construction of death as it becomes not only less excluded (for instance, with the emergence of the dual process grieving model, see: stroebe & schut, 1999) but potentially challenging the boundaries between life and death (howarth, 2000). new practices such as sharing grief online and creating memorialisation websites have drawn the attention of scholars fascinated with the ways in which these practices are transforming some of the core aspects of the modern social construction of death in western societies, mainly in relation to public expressions of grief and mourning, processes of enfranchisement of death and dying, enhanced forms of continuing bonds and everyday presence of death and the dead (brubaker, hayes, & dourish, 2013; gray & coulton, 2013; kasket, 2012). more extreme, perhaps, are practices of presence of post-mortem online communication. post-mortem online communication as popular predictions argue, within a few decades, facebook will have more accounts of deceased users rather than living ones. such digital remains are already becoming increasingly visible and widespread in users’ experience of online communication (see for instance: walter, hourizi, moncur, & pitsillides, 2012). in this context, newly emerging services are enabling users to prepare for their digital afterlives, and configure ways for them to be active online after their death. these services open up new possibilities for post-mortem forms of interaction by enabling post-mortem “sending” of emails, “posting” on social networking sites and even “engaging” in conversation using ai. these services explicitly encourage their users to think about their posthumous online selves and prepare their continued participation on online media. for instance, capsoole, invites users to “protect your digital being”; and safebeyond calls to “allow your digital identity to outlive you”. both services enable their users to send messages or post on facebook at a specified time after their death. what makes such practices particularly challenging to the social construction of death is that by “sending” emails or “posting” on snss, through these websites deceased individuals can be active in a manner that is “common. not particularly unique nor removed from ordinary online life” (meese, nansen, kohn, arnold, & gibbs, 2015, p. 417). most scholars in this field focus on the ways in which the incorporation of death-related practices within networked publics enable individuals to overcome the loneliness and social isolation typically imposed in the context of death during modernity. this paper, therefore, explores the limitations and exclusions implicated by these practices, focusing mainly on access, design and materiality, and the implication of such practices on both the conceptualisation as well as practices of networked publics. design and practice: affordances and limitations this paper is based on the analysis of websites dedicated to post-mortem digital interaction. search was conducted on three languages using three search engines: google, bing, and yahoo! search. the exclusion criteria was comprised of two conditions: (1) users create messages to be sent at some point in the future (2) the websites explicitly defines these future messages as meant to be sent after the user’s passing. at this stage, both active and no-longer active websites were included to account for changes and trajectories in the field. this search resulted in a corpus of 32 websites. a functional typology of the websites is presented, giving an overview of the existing services and the visible trends within this field. then, a multimodal discourse analysis of 12 websites is presented, focusing on the technological, social and cultural affordances and limitations to post-mortem online communication practices as constructed and encouraged through the websites. this includes both intra-modal (analysis of each mode of communication used on the website) as well as cross-modal (relationships between modes) levels of analysis. the analysis of the websites is then contextulaised with in depth-interviews conducted with 7 designers and founders of websites for post-mortem online communication. specifically this paper offers a critical discussion of practices of online post-mortem communication, focusing on the challenges of access, design, materiality, and trust, and linking them to the notion of networked publics and their central role in everyday contemporary life. bibliography ariès, p. (1974). the reversal of death: changes in attitudes toward death in western societies. american quarterly, 26(5), 530–560. brubaker, j. r., hayes, g. r., & dourish, p. (2013). beyond the grave: facebook as a site for the expansion of death and mourning. the information society, 29, 152– 163. http://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2013.777300 gray, s. e., & coulton, p. (2013). living with the dead: emergent post-mortem digital curation and creation practices. in c. maciel & v. c. pereira (eds.), digital legacy and interaction: post-mortem issues (pp. 31–48). london: cham springer internation publishing. howarth, g. (2000). dismantling the boundaries between life and death. mortality, 5(2), 127–137. kasket, e. (2012). continuing bonds in the age of social networking: facebook as a modern-day medium. bereavement, 31(2), 62–69. meese, j., nansen, b., kohn, t., arnold, m., & gibbs, m. (2015). posthumous personhood and the affrodances of digital media. mortality, 20(4), 408–420. mellor, p. a., & shilling, c. (1993). modernity, self-identity and the sequestration of death. sociology, 27(3), 411–431. pauwels, l. (2012). a multimodal framework for analyzing websites as cultural expressions. journal of computer-mediated communication, 17(3), 247–265. stroebe, m., & schut, h. (1999). the dual process model of coping with bereavement: rationale and description. death studies, 23, 197–224. walter, t., hourizi, r., moncur, w., & pitsillides, s. (2012). does the internet change how we die and mourn? overview and analysis. omega: journal of death and dying, 64(4), 275–302. aoir2017-digital_labor_abstract170930 selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): rensfeldt bergviken., a. (2017, october 18-21). teachers ‘liking’ their work? exploring the digital labor of networked professional publics. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. teachers ‘liking’ their work? exploring the digital labor of networked professional publics annika bergviken rensfeldt department of education, communication and learning, university of gothenburg, sweden thomas hillman department of education, communication and learning, university of gothenburg, sweden neil selwyn faculty of education, monash university, australia background social media are now an important aspect of work in most professions – including school teaching. this paper explores the growing use of organized ‘teacher communities’ on social media platforms such as facebook. these groups act as forums for teachers to discuss teaching matters, give advice, share and recommend resources, and generally sustain online public ‘professional networks’. to date, academic research has tended to frame teacher social media groups as relatively straightforward and unproblematic. rarely, if ever, are teachers’ professional uses of social media groups considered as a form of work. in contrast, this paper explores teachers’ professional social media use as a form of ‘virtual work’ (huws 2014, webster & randle 2016) and/or ‘digital labor’ (scholz 2012, fuchs & sevignani 2013). in particular, the paper examines the phenomenon of large-scale thematic teacher facebook groups. while these social media communities are usually celebrated as a means of professional learning and support, in what ways (and with what implications) should teacher facebook groups be understood as ‘work’? research questions and methods 2 our over-arching question is: in what ways – and with what outcomes is a teacher facebook group ‘work’? in more detail, the paper addresses the research questions: • what form(s) of work is taking place when teachers engage with a thematic facebook group? • who is working in a teacher facebook group? • what ‘digital labor’ practices are evident? these questions are addressed through detailed examination of one large thematic swedish facebook group interested in a specific innovation in technology-based pedagogy. the thematic facebook group examined in our project consisted of over 13,000 members. the paper mainly draws on a corpus of data collected through the facebook graph api over a three-year period. this corpus covers all postings, likes and comments – consisting of over 2,000 postings and nearly 14,000 comments. these data were analyzed through a combination of computational content analysis and detailed interaction analysis approaches. findings and discussion the paper first considers the aspects of the thematic facebook group that could be seen as professionally beneficial and/or valuable. in brief, the following characteristics emerged from our data: • in contrast to many social media spaces, the group was an online setting where norms of respectful polite exchange and affective engagement were largely maintained. • teachers saw the group as a ready means of gaining useful information and advice, and thereby develop professional knowledge. • for some participants the group clearly fulfilled a sense of community and belonging with likeminded teachers on a nationwide scale. • some members valued career-building benefits of developing a professional identity through participation in the group. the paper considers how, in these terms, the thematic group appeared to embody many of the characteristics associated with ‘light-weight’ communities of peer production (haythornthwaite 2009) – i.e. where “those with common interests or in spatially distributed teams can make tacit knowledge visible to improve their work […] practices” (gruzd et al. 2016, p.1189). the group members certainly saw themselves as pragmatic and entrepreneurial professionals who had found a beneficial means of online support. as a result, very few participants saw the group as as a form of work (let alone a problematic form of work). yet while perceived by teachers as a relatively beneficial and uncontroversial aspect of their working lives, the paper also goes on to consider a number of (largely 3 unrecognized) aspects of the facebook group that did appear to constitute disadvantaging and/or disempowering forms of digital labor. from this perspective, the paper reflects on the embedding of the thematic group within facebook’s business model of extracting surplus value from the unpaid labor of its users. also problematic is facebook’s use of the thematic group to generate surplus value from the objectification of knowledge derived from teachers’ professional experiences. here the paper argues that this lends weight to srnicek’s (2016) contention that platforms such as facebook are parasitical to other value producing industries. our analysis of usage data also points to the dependency of the group on the sustained efforts of a small clique of members. the sole group moderator was responsible for 20% of posts and 26% of comments, with another 20 core contributors responsible for the majority of remaining content production. over three years, we found only 675 participants to have posted an original contribution. in this sense, it is argued that the group functioned to make the majority of members dependent on a niche of expert others. the paper then considers how the facebook platform restricted ways that teachers were able to engage in the group as skilled professionals. this was found to occur in at least four distinct ways, i.e.: 1. facebook’s dominant mode of passive interaction with the thematic group content, with content selection determined by the platform’s algorithms rather than teacher expertise; 2. facebook’s dominant mode of most users ‘lurking’ and consuming content with little or no reciprocal exchange; 3. the way in which the thematic group functioned to discourage most participants from actively contributing their own knowledge – with most interactions lacking in substance beyond recommendations for pre-existing resources and products; 4. the notable homogeneity of content, interaction and exchange in the group – with most interactions tending toward a common deferential tone with little room for dissent, contradiction or deviation. finally, the paper highlights the role of the facebook group in extending and intensifying teachers’ engagement in work-related practices. our usage data highlight substantial numbers of teachers engaging with the thematic group while at work in their ‘face-toface’ workplaces, and therefore engaging in a near-simultaneous form of ‘double work’. conversely, we found teachers engaging with the thematic group throughout periods of the day, week and year that is considered ‘free’ or ‘leisure’ time. conclusions these findings certainly highlight the need to approach professional uses of social media in a nuanced manner and to move beyond discussions of facebook being either ‘good’ or ‘bad’; ‘empowering’ or ‘oppressive’. instead, as with any form of online 4 collective we need to make sense of the thematic facebook group in terms of “the logics that motivate and sustain it, and its personal, social, cultural and economic consequences” (baym & burnett 2009, p. 447). our findings highlight longer-term implications that these practices might have for diminished professionalism and expertise of networked teacher professional publics. discussions about professional uses of social media therefore need to better acknowledge the contradictory nature of the internet in supporting professionals to engage in collective work-related activities that “are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited” (terranova 2000, p. 37). 5 references baym, n. and burnett, r. (2009). amateur experts. international journal of cultural studies, 12(5), 433-449. crary, j. (2013). 24/7. london: verso. fuchs, c. and sevignani, s. (2013). what is digital labor? what is digital work? what’s their difference? triple c, 11(2) http://www.triplec.at/index.php/triplec/article/view/461 gruzd, a., jacobson, j., wellman, b. and mai, p. (2016). understanding communities in an age of social media. information, communication & society, 19(9), 1187-1193. haythornthwaite, c. (2009). crowds and communities. in proceedings of the 42nd hicss ‘09 (pp. 1–10). huws, u. (2014). labor in the global digital economy. new york, monthly review press. scholz, t. (2012). digital labor. london: routledge. srnicek, n. (2017). platform capitalism. cambridge: polity. terranova, t. (2000). free labor. social text, 18(2), 33-58. webster, j. and randle, k. (2016). virtual workers and the global labor market. basingstoke: palgrave. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): hamilton, h., de paoli, s., wilson, a., singh, g. (2020, october). open data platforms for a data commons: how to support the life of data beyond release. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. open data platforms for a data commons: how to support the life of data beyond release hannah hamilton university of stirling stefano de paoli abertay university anna wilson university of stirling greg singh university of stirling extended abstract as the theme of this conference suggests, the digital technologies that pervade and shape our lives have life of their own. many of these technologies are, in turn, animated by and give life to the data they consume, process and release. yet the majority of people are excluded from the production and evolution of both digital technologies and data, with control of these processes resting in the hands of large corporations and governments. our relationship with data in particular is characterised by an imbalance of power, and the liveliness of data can seem a threat rather than an opportunity. in this paper, we suggest that in order to achieve a more productive, symbiotic relationship with data, people need to be enabled to engage with it both critically and creatively. we describe a project aiming to design a system that facilitates just such engagement with open data, using waste data as a case study. the open data movement has long sought to make data more lively by making it more accessible. there is an established consensus that the availability of digital data and internet-based communication technologies should foster economic and social well-being (shirky, 2010), as well as business innovation and productivity (jenkins et al., 2013). indeed, this has been a key expectation of open data policies since the g8 open data charter of 2013. open data are expected to create new opportunities for economic activity, improve transparency and governance, and empower people to live in more creative and sustainable ways through increased knowledge. indeed, the open knowledge international links data and knowledge through their definition of open data: "knowledge is open if anyone is free to access, use, modify, and share it – subject, at most, to measures that preserve provenance and openness" (open knowledge foundation, n.d.). large quantities of data are being produced by many organisations and released openly online for other actors to use. yet despite several years of effort, the extent to which open data are animated by critical and creative interaction remains limited. some authors have argued that it is too simplistic to assume that people and other actors will simply take open data and infuse in it a new life beyond the original use (janssen et al. 2012). even if data is made available via the internet for others to reuse, it does not necessarily follow that this data will be easy to find, use or indeed be trustworthy (meijer et al. 2012). indeed, it is often unclear whether open data has a life beyond the one it was initially collected for, to the extent that some authors have described the public reuse of government data as no more than a “myth” (hellberg & hedström, 2015). one way to tackle some of the challenges surrounding open data use is via the creation of internet-based platforms designed to promote and facilitate data reuse by the public (broadly defined to encompass not only individuals but also all sorts of organisations), establishing open data as a commons, aggregating the data and offering recommender systems capable of supporting the life of data beyond its initial use and production. however, designing such platforms is not easy for a variety of reasons. firstly, it will require the platform producers to adopt at least a symmetrical approach (latour, 2005) addressing the technological problem of creating an internet-based infrastructure, collecting the data and ensuring it is interoperable whilst also and at the same time addressing the social problem of creating a healthy and active community around the platform. secondly the platform producers must tackle the challenge of facilitating education about the use of data for the many, rather than a limited number of individuals or organisations that possess specialised skills (e.g. in data analysis of visualisation) (mandinach & gummer, 2013). data commons scotland is a project that aims to create a prototype internet-based platform that not only enables access, but actively encourages increasingly sophisticated and critical use of open data, thus facilitating a life for data beyond the one of the original producer. during initial scoping research, the project team identified three major problems with existing systems: disjointedness; single-level use design, and inconsistency. the project is using the case study of waste data in scotland, with the idea that data produced by many actors (e.g. government, companies, public authorities) could then have a new life in the hands of other stakeholders, including individuals, schools, businesses and other organisations. the successful reuse of waste data could support behaviour change in a number of fields (such as circular economy or open energy), fostering collaborative, sustainable environmental awareness through data literacy. the challenge, then, is to design a system that meets not only the existing needs of multiple users, but also recognises and builds on their capacity for learning. to ensure that a range of potential users are represented in the design process, we have conducted qualitative interviews (n=31) with a number of data owners (e.g. public authorities, recycling companies) and potentially interested stakeholders (e.g. teachers, individuals) as well as data collected from two workshops. the first workshop targeted the insight of stakeholders working within the area of waste, the second on those interested in open data. the focus of both the interviews and workshops was to discover needs, values and capacities in relation to a new platform supporting the reuse of data in waste management and how such a platform needs to function, look and feel to offer maximum utility to a range of audiences. dialogues included explorations of the usefulness of certain features, e.g. recommender systems, chatbots, tools for assessing data reliability, as well as discussions on how common barriers to opening up data within the area of waste and beyond may be reduced or removed. these primary data were analysed using the methods of phenomenography (åkerlind 2012), which explicitly embraces variation rather than seeks to define typical or average experiences and understanding. the results were used to create personas and scenarios that reflect the complexities of potential users’ lives and, in particular, their values and interests (wilson et al. 2018). the scenarios emphasise that engagement with the platform might be driven by more than one interest, and that the platform itself might be designed to encourage increasingly critical and creative engagement with data. they describe how different audiences may hope to interact with an open data platform on waste, as well as describing encounters they may have that would make this process easier or more of a challenge. these scenarios have been constructed not only as a research tool but as a mechanism for communicating the needs of users to the technical partners on the project, who will be responsible for shaping the look, feel and functionality of the platform. they identify immediate challenges, particularly around issues of data reliability and confidence, and the development of mechanisms to enable nonexperts to engage with data uncertainties. our presentation thus raises questions as much as it illustrates our findings. references åkerlind, g.s. (2012). variation and commonality in phenomenographic research methods. higher education research & development, 31(1), 115-127. hellberg, a. s., & hedström, k. (2015). the story of the sixth myth of open data and open government. transforming government: people, process and policy. 9(1), 35-51. janssen, m., charalabidis, y. & zuiderwijk, a., (2012). benefits, adoption barriers and myths of open data and open government. information systems management, 29(4), 258-268. jenkins, h., green, j. & s. ford (2013). spreadable media: creating value and meaning in a networked culture. ny: nyu press. latour, b. (2015). reassembling the social—an introduction to actor network theory. oxford: oxford university press. mandinach, e. b. & e. gummer (2013). defining data literacy: a report on a convening of experts. journal of educational research and policy studies. 13(2), 6-28. meijer, r., conradie, p., & choenni, s. (2014). reconciling contradictions of open data regarding transparency, privacy, security and trust. journal of theoretical and applied electronic commerce research, 9(3), 32-44. open knowledge foundation (n.d). open definition. available at https://opendefinition.org/od/2.1/en/. shirky, c. (2010). cognitive surplus: creativity and generosity in a connected age. london: allen lane. wilson, a., de paoli, s., forbes, p., & sachy, m. (2018). creating personas for political and social consciousness in hci design. persona studies, 4(2), 2546. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): zeavin, h., baym, n., bergmann, r., sarkar, a., rintel, s., sellen, a., powers, d., bray, s., barboza-wilkes, c., alarcon, a. (2021, october). managing boundaries while working from home, 1960-present. panel presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. managing boundaries while working from home, 1960present hannah zeavin uc berkeley nancy baym microsoft rachel bergmann microsoft advait sarkar microsoft sean rintel microsoft abigail sellen microsoft devon powers temple university sierra bray university of southern california cynthia barboza-wilkes university of southern california andrea alarcon university of southern california the covid-19 pandemic has been heralded as a watershed moment for remote work, an exodus of the american workforce that will never fully reverse. as major corporations debate returning to the office full-time, and other workers press or are pressed into returning to the office, this panel situates the present realities of remote work within telework’s long history. from the paperless office to the electronic cottage, much of the focus in mainstream discourses surrounding telework has been on demonstrating the technological feasibility of leaving workers at home and workforce adaptability, with secondary celebrations of ecological soundness and potential for employment growth. discourses around the benefit of telework also frequently draw on blanket statements about what remote work affords workers—from wellness and eschewing commute times, to increasing flexibility—but do not directly take up the lived quotidian experiences of doing labor in this configuration. this panel intervenes by yoking the politics and fantasies of remote work with worker experience during work from home, especially of self-management of both individual affect, group and power dynamics, and environment. within this frame, this collection of papers suggests that, while remote work suggests a dislocation of office and home and the creation of a third space, the overlays of work and home are always top of mind for individual workers, whether in their homes with children or while traveling as “digital nomads.” the panel suggests that navigating this collapse creates a “third space,” and is a site of ever-present negotiation for workers, both individually and in social dynamics across organizations. this panel works across a number of methods including ethnography, archival research of both born-digital and traditional objects and draws on interviews and survey data. the panel points to not only how workers act in front of the screen, but what is supporting remote work off and behind it: domestic architectures, impression management, and paid and unpaid forms of domestic labor. the panel opens with a pair of papers that look at the historical development of work from home in order to situate the covid-19 pandemic and its use of remote work as both a form of rupture and as a continuation of the logics, fantasies, and environments that pre-date this massive and rapid expansion into remote work. in “home/work: the long history of the future of work,” devon powers reads the history of progress and futural narratives attached to telework, and the renovations both material and ideological to the spaces that are enfolded into remote work: home and the office. the author pays special attention to the collapse of work and home, and the creation of a third space that is actually only an expansion of an existing one—the everywhere office. in “make it work: hiding children in telework,” hannah zeavin takes up the feminization of remote work in the context of feminist theories of reproductive labor, to argue that work from home is subtended by the fantasy that, by working from home, women might “have it all”: they can do childcare and paid labor at once. the author examines how workers have negotiated this collapse of waged and unwaged labor by disappearing and hiding the visual and sonic evidence of children during work from home. nancy baym, rachel bergmann, et al look to the management of the worker’s own visibility in “video on/off: managing visibility in remote videoconferencing” with 44% of american workers suddenly home in the covid-19 pandemic. baym et al ran a five-month longitudinal diary study of meetings at a large technology company between april and august 2020, comprised of 849 employees. the paper looks at reasons for (dis)comfort with appearing on camera during work and how workers negotiate the contradictions of on and off. in “abruptly online: public employees’ adaptation to virtual communication in times of crisis," sierra bray and cynthia barboza-wilkes consider the special category of public employees and the challenges and benefits of work from home in a group of workers who had a novel relationship to working online. andrea alarcon, in “outsourcing the home: the digital nomad tactic” looks at the apotheosis of work from home in the rise of the “digital nomad.” alarcon intervenes by pointing to the unacknowledged support and costs of “nomadic life” in the city of medellin and the workers who travel and collapse the identities of tourist and laborer, and vacation with work. home/work: the long history of the future of work devon powers temple university last spring, as the covid-19 pandemic upended normalcy for millions of americans, the concept of “working from home”—doing one’s job away from a central office—went from marginal to mainstream. many commenters eagerly interpreted the shift as less a temporary response to a crisis than a critical tipping point ushering in a new, more flexible, and more decentralized future. “i predict that when the coronavirus is finally on the wane… the return to the cubicle will be slowed, and at some companies, it won’t happen at all,” explained william arruda in forbes in march 2020. with companies like facebook, slack and twitter declaring that their employees may work from home indefinitely, and big-city landlords panicked about a crash in office real estate, arruda’s claim seemed poise to come true. as clive thompson wrote for the new york times in june 2020, “for workers wondering right now if they’re ever going back to the office, the most honest answer is this: even if they do, the office might never be the same.” yet these heady declarations about revolution in american workplaces usually fail to consider that the nature of the office is constantly changing—indeed, the office has always “never [been] the same.” on the one hand, working from home—otherwise known as remote work, telework, telecommuting, homework, and many other names— has been a key part of visions of the future for decades, thus making the current advocacy for the practice less novel than it might otherwise seem. for example, in the february 1967 issue of the futurist magazine, a publication of the world future society, richard l. shetler, president of the general learning corporation, declared that “for a great many activities, the home may become the most efficient place to work”; shetler envisioned a future in which “the present pattern of morning workbound and evening homebound traffic jams will become memories of an annoying past.” alvin toffler’s 1980 book the third wave, went further, extolling the virtues of the “electronic cottage” and the home-centric society that would inevitably arise in its wake. “[t]he new production system could shift literally millions of jobs out of the factories and offices… and right back where they came from originally: the home” he wrote (toffler 1980: 194). shetler, toffler and other proponents of working from home conceived of the transition as both inevitable and beneficial: a welcome response to technology; a way to provide access to the workforce for disenfranchised populations, including working mothers and the disabled; fuel for globalization; an exercise in environmentalism; and a logical answer to the changing temporalities of work (ellison 2004: 1; toffler 1980). the current frenzy around working from home also has neglects the fuzzy distinctions between home and work that have been morphing over many decades. though currently it is common to discuss “home” and “work” as distinct spaces, clearly defined and even opposed to one another, that has not always been the case. prior to industrialization, most work was done from home; wealthy people have long had libraries or studies where work could be conducted (yuko 2020). industrialization, including public transit and automobiles, drove the rise of the central office building and, in turn, the idea that “work” and “home” were separate, often at a substantial physical distance from one another. one marker of the return of white-collar work to the home in the post-war period is the rise of the “home office,” a trend that began to take off around 1960 (bartnett 1960). over the ensuing decades, domestic spaces have continued to respond to the realities of longer workdays, dual income households, weekend work, freelancing, subcontracting, and gig work by becoming de facto workplaces, complete with desks, ergonomic chairs, and the latest communication infrastructure. as this has happened, workplaces have embraced homey touches such as comfortable furniture, prominent family pictures, and miniature refrigerators, all intended to make staying at the office longer more comfortable. rather than strictly divided, “home” and “work” are better understood as weighty signifiers engaged in a complicated, sometimes antagonistic embrace. my paper will attend to these complexities through an examination of the long history of home/work, as understood via futurist imaginaries of working. in particular, i am interested in how, why, and under what conditions the convergence of homespace and workspace have been envisioned as futuristic, innovative, or otherwise evidence of progress. three specific trends since the mid-20th century will help to frame my analysis: 1) the rise of the home office; 2) the rise of the “office home”; and 3) the rise of “third space,” or everywhere office. references arruda, william. “how coronavirus is creating a watershed moment for remote work.” forbes, march 1, 2020. https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamarruda/2020/03/01/how-coronavirus-is-creating-awatershed-moment-for-remote-work/?sh=160dc5dc2f9a bartnett, edmund. “office at home designer helps the overworked businessman.” the new york times, september 25, 1960. ellison, nicole b. telework and social change: how technology as reshaping the boundaries between home and work. greenwood publishing group, 2004. shetler, richard. “people may work in homes rather than offices.” the futurist, february 1967. thompson, clive. “what if working from home goes on…forever?” the new york times, june 9, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/09/magazine/remote-work-covid.html toffler, alvin. the third wave. new york: bantam books, 1980. yuko, elizabeth. “what happened when the office came home.” bloomberg, june 11, 2020. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-11/the-rise-fall-and-rise-of-thehome-office make it work: hiding children in telework hannah zeavin uc berkeley asked for a comment on the impeachment of the president of south korea, professor robert kelly appeared on bbc live in 2017. as he began to speak, first one young child, then a second, burst into the shot in his home office. they were quickly followed by their mother jung-a kim, who franticly pulled the children out of their father’s remote television studio. the video quickly went viral and was viewed hundreds of millions of times. it was cherished for its inadvertently comic timing but was subject to (mis)interpretations that leapt from the internet into the family’s real life: commenters sympathized with kelly, shared how often a similar situation had happened to them, chided his wife for her lapse, and racistly miscast jung-a kim as a childcare provider (or “the nanny”). the viral reception turned so heated that the family had to use security guards at their home and children’s schools for a year. beyond the vagaries of virality, the video encapsulates both the real labor and fantasies that subtend telework. kelly’s strategies for separating work from home in telework failed: his children didn’t stay put in their planned activities and his wife, who was in the midst of caring for two children, was just one step behind. the fantasy of remote work is an inherent contradiction, in which the flexibility of home work allows for the care of family and domestic space and simultaneously the home can be bracketed so that productive labor—always via the notion of suspending reproductive labor—can occur. this ideal is breached when these two spaces overtly collide; to keep the fantasy going children must be kept out of the frame (although the pandemic has relaxed the norms and feeling rules around this question somewhat, for some workers). once children are in the frame, the domestic and the office hopelessly clash in remote work (and can damage careers and become sites of quotidian shame, let alone internet stardom). kelly was able to rely on a home office, and on a partner to perform childcare, even if these strategies momentarily failed to keep his kids off screen. what of those workers without childcare? how do they manage to preserve an extra-domestic work environment within the home? in this paper, i will look at the strategies deployed from below (by individual workers) and above (from architects, corporations) to hide children during work from home, as well as the covert and overt pressures communicated to workers to do so. after opening with kelly’s video documenting a failure to separate the home from work, the paper traces attempts to do just that: from offline infrastructures to the cottage industry of consulting on professional zoom appearances that sprang up around the start of the covid-19 pandemic. the paper then offers in parallel a genealogy of those ad hoc strategies that have addressed various forms of intrusion from the domestic into remote work, read over and against the feminist and/or feminizing arguments for work from home and the structures that supposedly accommodate these forms of labor. the history and conceptualization of remote work itself implies an impossible disarticulation of space in which one is neither at work nor at home. much has been made about the loss of the “third space” (the bowling alley, the bar, the library) in covid-19 life; but many have also lost a distinction—in so far as it existed—between work and home, two spaces becoming one. in parallel, in the decades-long history of telework, dislocating labor from an office has been forecast as a necessary future and a site of liberation. working from home and eschewing the office has been heralded as an ecological necessity, good for individual wellness, and for corporate productivity. telework has additionally particularly addressed itself to women via—and despite—this contradiction of being nowhere and somewhere at once and has relied on the notion of a feminized “having it all” and the “flexibility” necessary to accomplish it, in order to collapse waged labor and domestic work, where having it all implies some form of difficult or impossible simultaneity, being everything at once in order to have everything. in order to support this oft-feminized fantasy of a freer future, with neither the full drudgery of office nor the domination of housework, domestic architectures (brooks, shanken, jacobs) and infrastructures offline have supported the possibilities of teleworking: rooms are configured to dampen sonic leak, the increase in children’s homework and after-schooling allows some separation from domestic labor and child (patton), and the home office evolves as a distinct, technologized space, to which domestic computing is introduced (nooney). telework has been coded unevenly into the very artifice of middle class homelife since the 1960s (patton, huws, duffy, gregg). these traditional physical architectures have addressed themselves to the challenge of containing the chaos of the domestic and readying individuals for productivity and work (spigel, rankin). but women faced with the realities of working from home while raising children have seen, across this history, that these physical separations are not enough. like professor kelly, these workers have seen that, pace virginia woolf, a room of one’s own is not enough—if one even has that. therefore, additional tactics have shaped the realities of work from home by women managing both the domestic and paid labor. beginning in the 1960s, women who worked together at home or were self-employed in their own kitchen table businesses deployed, as one example, tape loops of office sounds (hicks) and typewriters to transport their tele-clients to the office and cover over the sound of children who were sitting and playing nearby. in our contemporary moment, designing spaces for zoom use is only one mode of control over environments: zoom backgrounds, muting, turning the camera off, multitasking all come into play in managing the signs of home life in work. professor kelly’s viral video lets us see the deepest truth about remote work: it renders home and office indistinct without collapsing the separate and antagonistic roles of the person involved in those spaces and activities. in order to work from home, one must first disappear home from work. in order to make use of the supposed flexibility in caring for children telework promises, the children must not fully appear or exist on the clock. references brooks, gwendolyn building the dream: a social history of housing in america. new york: pantheon, 1981). duffy, brooke erin. (not) getting paid to do what you love (new haven: yale university press, 2017). gregg, melissa. work’s intimacy (london: polity press, 2011). hicks, mar. “sexism is a feature, not a bug,” your computer is on fire, eds. mullaney, philip, peters, hicks, (cambridge: mit press, 2021). huws, ursula. teleworking and gender. institute for employment studies, 1996. jacobs, james a. detached america: building houses in postwar suburbia (charlottesville: university of virginia press, 2015). lane, barbara miller. houses for a new world: builders and buyers in american suburbs 1945-1965. (princeton: princeton university press, 2015). nooney, laine society for cinema and media studies. toronto, canada. “‘the computerized home of tomorrow’: the xanadu homes and the american fantasy of privatized, computational living.” march 16, 2018. patton, elizabeth. easy living: the rise of the home office. (new brunswick: rutgers university press, 2020). spigel, lynn. “designing the smart house: posthuman domesticity and conspicuous production.” european journal of cultural studies. nov 1, 2005; 419-420. rankin, joy lisi. a people’s history of computing in the united states. (harvard university press, 2018). shanken, andrew. 194x: architecture, planning, and consumer culture on the home front (minneapolis: minnesota university press, 2009). video on/off: managing visibility in remote videoconferencing nancy baym microsoft research new england rachel bergmann microsoft research new england sean rintel microsoft research cambridge, uk advait sarkar microsoft research cambridge, uk damian borowiec microsoft research cambridge, uk abigail sellen microsoft research cambridge, uk introduction in 2020, information workers around the world were sent home to a world of pandemic videoconferencing. at the height of the shutdowns, 44% of us workers reported working from home full time (statista, 2020). within months, the teleconferencing platform zoom reported a 30-fold increase in daily downloads and more than 300 million daily meeting participants. microsoft teams meetings with video in addition to voice increased from 21% to 43% worldwide. with this rise in videoconferencing, both academic and journalistic attention turned to !zoom fatigue” (bailenson, 2021; fosslien & duffy, 2020; wiederhold, 2020). some of this fatigue may come from blurred boundaries between office and home. veijola and jokinen (2008, pp. 170-171) describe the contemporary work environment as !hostessing society,” in which feminized !care, affects, and communication are constitutive aspects of the work performances in new work.” videoconferencing from home, employees around the world faced an increased demand to allow their colleagues to see them in their private spaces, a sense of !hostessing” more literal than these scholars foresaw. how did people decide how visible to be while working from home? we argue that the work of hostessing helps us understand many of the ways people manage video visibility and gives insight into reasons it can grow so tiring. method we ran a five-month longitudinal diary study of meetings at microsoft from april-august 2020 (rintel et al., 2020). 849 employees, representing nearly all regions and organizations within the global company, wrote up to 24 diary entries each about their experiences of remote work, with an emphasis on meetings. they were given eight topics as prompts, such as productivity, interaction, multitasking, and approaches to meetings. 357 participants also responded to polls on topics like spontaneous interaction. here, we analyze responses to a poll about turning video off, and a subset of diary entries with keywords such as video, appearance, expression, face, gesture, nonverbal, voice, and others. after narrowing these entries to those about managing the writer’s own visibility, we had entries from 473 participants. we coded using an iterative process, moving between data and discussion, refining the coding categories, looking both for reasons that participants turned video on and off, and underlying logics that guide that reasoning. findings participants identified technical, cognitive, and social reasons for video use and nonuse. participants described turning video off because of poor network connections, either as a genuine reason to preserve bandwidth, or as a believable excuse when they did not want to be seen. video choices were also made to manage attention. participants turned video on to help them focus and turned if off to multitask. especially in informational meetings, participants describe turning video off to tend to their bodies and homes by moving around, taking a walk, spending time outdoors, or doing chores. participants also described three broad categories of social rationales for turning video on or off: self-presentation, managing others"#social needs, and managing the relational needs of the team. these speak to the affective work videoconferencing entails. part of the work of hostessing is ensuring that self and home are presentable. participants described themselves turning video off because of concerns about presentability. many reported leaving video off because of the state of the space they were in (see krasnoff, 2020), family interruptions, and feelings of self-consciousness regarding appearance. participants described intentional strategies to control their presence when they did turn video on. to constrain what is seen, they limited, blurred, and concealed what they did not want shared. at the far end of the spectrum of attitudes towards visibility were participants who embraced the affective labor, making significant efforts to ensure their video presence was well conveyed, including room switches for more natural lighting, proximity to routers for better video quality, tech upgrades for microphone and camera clarity. they put effort into aesthetically pleasing backgrounds, free from clutter and peppered with personal touches that could serve as conversation starters. kirsner (2020) and lerner (2020) have described the sense of speaking into a void on video. most (64%) respondents to one of our polls said they wished they could see those who turned video off to have more information about their attentiveness and reactions. participants responded to this by making themselves more visible to serve others"#social needs. they exaggerated their facial and nonverbal responses or performed eye contact by staring into their cameras. entries describe how, despite suffering in comparison to in-person meetings, video was still the best of the available options for communicating the physical and emotional cues they deeply missed. many described video as adding social and engagement value, rather than improving work efficiency or output. much as a hostess might turn on the music and fine-tune lighting, participants described using video to create particular atmospheres that would benefit the whole of the meeting. people describe using video to create atmospheres of professionalism, focus, enhanced communication, and sociality. one participant described turning their video on to !inspire others” to stay present [p837]; another used it to !break down the barriers” of geographically distributed work [p835]. the extent to which people attended to these concerns varied depending on the meeting context, individual differences, and emergent norms. they described being more likely to keep video off in large, informational meetings, or ones held outside of business hours (such as early mornings or late at night). far from unified in their perception, people varied in their preferences. in one poll, we asked participants about the relative importance of eleven possible reasons for turning video off–each of these was rated very important by some, and very unimportant by others. peer and organizational norms were also important: people reported looking to others in the meeting (particularly meeting leaders or customers) for cues on whether to use video. conclusion what appear to be simple decisions about whether to turn video on or off in meetings illustrate complex tensions between self-presentation, organizational norms, and navigating the messiness of living our domestic and work lives in one space.  in some cases, the choice to have video off is obvious: the meeting norms support it, the need to protect oneself is high, and others"#needs are not served by your video presence. in other cases, the choice to have video on is equally clear: others have their videos on, you feel confident in your appearance and your domestic context, and others will be well-served if they can see your reactions.  to turn video off as the context shifts from this first scenario toward the latter is to refuse the hostessing work of assuring your presence is aesthetically pleasing, your space inviting, and others"#needs put first. to turn it on and focus one#s visibility on attending to others as the context shifts from the latter scenario to the first is to heighten the work of that labor. whatever the future holds, it seems likely to bring plenty of videoconferencing. the informal, unpaid affective labor that eased social interactions at work will be located in the home and mediated in new ways, giving rise to new kinds of hostessing work and, with that, new kinds of fatigue. references bailenson, jeremy n. !nonverbal overload: a theoretical argument for the causes of zoom fatigue.” technology, mind, and behavior 2, no. 1 (february 23, 2021). https://doi.org/10.1037/tmb0000030.  fosslien, liz, and mollie west duffy. !how to combat zoom fatigue.” harvard business review, april 29, 2020.  kirsner, scott. !speaking coaches offer tips for sprucing up zoom meetings.” boston globe, june 15, 2020. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/06/15/business/four-publicspeaking-coaches-have-tips-sprucing-up-your-zoom-meetings/.  krasnoff, barbara. !how to use zoom to hide your mess when working from home.” the verge, march 11, 2020. https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/11/21173608/zoomvideo-conference-how-to-virtual-background-greenscreen.  lerner, adam. !how we can fill the voids of virtual rooms (zoom et al.).” medium, may 11, 2020. https://medium.com/swlh/how-we-can-fill-the-voids-of-virtual-roomszoom-et-al-1aa9dd51e866.  !remote work frequency before/after covid-19 2020.” statista research department, march 2021. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1122987/change-in-remote-work-trendsafter-covid-in-usa/.  rintel, sean, wong, priscilla, sarkar, advait, & sellen, abigail. (2020). methodology and participation for 2020 diary study of microsoft employees experiences in remote meetings during covid-19. (technical report 2020-10-fow-sim1). microsoft research. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/methodology-andparticipation-for-2020-diary-study-of-microsoft-employees-experiences-in-remotemeetings-during-covid-19/ sherman, natalie. !zoom sees sales boom amid pandemic.” bbc news. june 2, 2020, sec. business. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52884782.  veijola, soile, and eeva jokinen. !towards a hostessing society? mobile arrangements of gender and labour.” nora nordic journal of feminist and gender research 16, no. 3 (september 2008): 166–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740802279901. wiederhold, brenda k. !connecting through technology during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic: avoiding $zoom fatigue.’” cyberpsychology, behavior, and social networking 23, no. 7 (july 1, 2020): 437–38. https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2020.29188.bkw.  abruptly online: public employees’ adaptation to virtual communication in times of crisis sierra bray university of southern california cynthia barboza-wilkes university of southern california introduction bureaucracy and red tape can cause public organizations to lag behind the private sector in implementing new software and remote work setups. thus, the migration to telecommuting and the introduction to online meeting platforms during the covid-19 pandemic presented a sudden, new technological frontier for many employees in local government who had been used to working in-person for decades. this scenario causes us to consider how migrating work interactions online (e.g., formal team meetings, informal work-related conversations, or communication with city residents) may present problems and/or break down barriers for this distinctive group of employees—people who have recently (and abruptly) encountered online work setups. literature review / theoretical constructs (abridged) to shed light on the complexities of this migration of work-related communication to online spaces, we explore three spheres of literature: (1) the diffusion of technological innovations (rogers, 1995), (2) impression management in computer-mediated communication (baym, 1995; walther, 2007), and (3) affordances of information and communications technologies (faraj and azad, 2012). recent studies engaging with this scholarship have analyzed how adaptation to online work has manifested across many sectors (mayowski, rubio, and norman, 2019; pols and willems, 2011; miranda and carter, 2005), but as of 2021, only one study has explored how employees in local government have contended with telecommuting (devries, tummers, and bekkers, 2019). much still remains unknown about how sudden, forced adaptation to online work—especially in sectors unaccustomed to quick change—creates unique scenarios that result in distinct psychological and logistical challenges and benefits for employees. research questions with the above research as a theoretical lens, we explore how local government employees describe their experiences associated with work-related communication as interactions transition from in-person to virtual, with a particular focus on how they describe (rq1) their emotional experiences, (rq2) perceived challenges and (rq3) perceived opportunities in this new online environment. method in april 2020, as california initiated its first stay-at-home order in response to covid19, we launched a mixed-methods research project combining waves of survey data, 60 semi-structured interviews, and daily diary prompts from 182 people working from more than 10 municipal governments, resulting in more than 1,500 completed daily survey entries. we analyzed our longitudinal, qualitative data in two phases. first, to understand the way local government employees have adapted to telecommuting, we coded the diary data for any mentions of meetings or work interactions and used a grounded approach to identify common themes that addressed benefits, challenges, and emotional experiences related to this telecommuting adaption. second, we complemented diary codes with a thematic analysis of 60 semi-structured interviews to allow participants to tell their stories with less constraints. this analysis resulted in the following themes. findings emotional experiences (rq1) local government employees described an ebb and flow of both negative and positive emotional experiences associated with their work-related communication as their interactions transitioned from in-person to virtual. participants conveyed a range of emotions—from frustration and irritation, to excitement and delight—related to their new online work setup. respondents experienced these types of emotions as they (1) prepared for, (2) engaged in, and (3) unwound from online interactions throughout their day, showing a “before-during-and after” path of emotions associated with their online work interactions. challenges (rq2) local government employees described technical and logistical problems ranging from software and hardware issues to a lack of dedicated space at home as major sources of stress—compounded by an increased workload during the pandemic. the transition to telework professionally combined with the stay-at-home order personally created a culture in which it was assumed employees should be more accessible. with the new ease of gathering teleworkers together, employees found themselves juggling an increased quantity of meetings. they struggled to find time to prepare for each meeting and described feeling overwhelmed when they were asked to switch gears rapidly from one to the next. additionally, many participants shared challenges balancing their work schedules with those of roommates, partners, and/or children who were competing over limited computer access and quiet spaces to accommodate work or distance learning. opportunities (rq3) despite the challenges, local government employees still described a number of benefits related to the transition to telecommuting. with respect to work-related communication, some employees appeared delighted with how easily they could coordinate people’s schedules for online meetings, describing it as much less cumbersome than trying to get multiple people physically into the same room. in particular, it became easier for many employees to access and share information, given fewer scheduling and space constraints. employees also appeared to value the social connection and authenticity among colleagues in meetings. in the absence of informal side conversations in the hallways, more groups began to dedicate time to check in on one another’s well-being as an agenda item, institutionalizing practices that helped to create a sense of belonging (including bringing in therapists to engage with the teams virtually). implications we see different emotional patterns and power dynamics emerge depending on the number of people in online work-related interactions (i.e., dyads versus groups) and whom participants are communicating with (e.g., supervisors, peers, or the public). in addition, within crenshaw’s (1989) framework of intersectionality, women of color expressed more pressure to suppress negative emotions and amplify positive emotions in online interactions to avoid compounding racist and sexist stereotypes which penalize women at this intersection. what is common across demographics is how participants describe seeking autonomy, competence (both emotional and technological), and relatedness during times of crisis—psychological needs which are underexplored in relation to the topic of technology adaptation. references battaglio, r. p., belle, n., & cantarelli, p. (2021). self-determination theory goes public: experimental evidence on the causal relationship between psychological needs and job satisfaction. public management review, 0(0), 1–18. baym, n. k. (1995). the emergence of community in computer-mediated interaction. in s. g. crenshaw, k. (1989). demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics. university of chicago legal forum, 139–167. de vries, h., tummers, l., & bekkers, v. (2019). the benefits of teleworking in the public sector: reality or rhetoric? review of public personnel administration, 39(4), 570–593. faraj, s., & azad, b. (2012). the materiality of technology: an affordance perspective. in kallinikos, j., leonardi, p., & nardi, b. (eds.) materiality and organizing: social interaction in a technological world. oxford university press. jones (ed.), cybersociety: computer-mediated communication and community (pp. 138–163). thousand oaks, ca: sage. mayowski, c., rubio, d., & norman, m. (2019). encouraging faculty to teach online: leveraging rogers’s diffusion of innovation theory. academic medicine, 94(3), 452–452. miranda, s. m., & carter, p. e. (2005). innovation diffusion and e-collaboration: the effects of social proximity on social information processing. international journal of e-collaboration, 1(3), 35+. pols, j., & willems, d. (2011). innovation and evaluation: taming and unleashing telecare technology. sociology of health & illness, 33(3), 484–498. rogers, e. (1995). diffusion of innovations (4th ed.). free press. walther, j. b. (2007). selective self-presentation in computer-mediated communication: hyperpersonal dimensions of technology, language, and cognition. computers in human behavior, 23(5), 2538–2557. outsourcing the home: the location-independent worker’s tactic andrea alarcon university of southern california traditional outsourcing done by companies tends to practice the finding of not only cheap, but also good and specific skilled labor abroad. tourism, which is considered an export (cite) has worked in similar ways, with countries and destinations branding themselves in order to cater to specific niches. the local government of medellin, colombia, has been on an aggressive campaign to reinvent its international image, often written about via the narrative of a comeback kid after the cartel violence of the 80s. currently, the mayor aims to make medellin an innovation hub, using its official “commitment to innovation” to pull in foreign investment. independently yet relying on these official efforts, it has grown as a hub for location-independent workers, remote workers and digital nomads: workers who continuously travel and are popularly portrayed through laptop-by-the-beach photos on instagram. the label conjures the meeting of the always lingering telework with an unlikely cultural counterpart, the transnational backpacker. it implies the permanency of work and a work identity online, with the mobility and shifting of the body. kiener (1996) (cited by hamington, 2010) explains the gendered division in hospitality activities, with male activities as public displays of ownership and physicality, while female hospitality as domestic, religious, and ornamental. i classify as “masculine” that which the government aims to sell: modernity and the availability of infrastructure required, such as good internet connection. however, what i found to be the biggest appeal has been classified as feminized (undervalued and often underseen) work. drawing from a larger ethnographic study in medellin, colombia, started in 2018, this paper argues that as independently-located workers can work from home, and “home” can be anywhere, a hub city’s role as “hostess” becomes its identity in a transnational supply chain (tsing, 2009) of information work, replicating existing hierarchies in global work. due to the increasing fissurization of work in the “global north”, where costs of health insurance, training and office infrastructure are being shifted to individual workers (gray & suri, 2019; weil, 2020). the tactic therefore is to turn outsourcing on its head, earning in dollars or euros, yet living,and therefore spending, in poorer nations, something that we had been used to with the practice of remittances (cite). the tactic is, like much of the on-demand economy, dependent on a legislative gray area, where workers stay on tourist, health or student visas while they work for companies or clients “back home”. as lines between work and home blur, and visiting for “business” or for “pleasure” blur as well, “hospitality” gets diluted to informal arrangements (such as airbnb or furnished apartment rentals). a big question in nomad blogs and absolute requirement is the quality of connectivity. from the data i collected in whatsapp and facebook discussions, remote workers would go on occasional trips to other parts of the country, but reported unreliable internet and therefore inability to stay. medellin has the comfort of the modernity of ict infrastructure with an increasing amount of coworking and coffee shops, which were the first to suffer or close down due to covid. due to the armed conflict, colombia did not have many international visitors until the signing of the peace agreement in 2016 (sánchez, 2018), halting the establishment of a robust tourism industry. in this case then, the on-demand economy managed to insert itself directly into local life, which allows digital nomads to resemble expat immigrants, and can procure services directly from individuals rather than intermediators. care services are readily available and informally recommended; for example, the whatsapp group i have been conducting online ethnography on is called “medellin digital nomads and friends” where people ask for recommendations on everything from doctors to where to buy bbq ribs, and are replied to by either locals, or other foreigners, recommending a service. i interviewed a local whose job was to scour these groups and respond when someone asked for furnished apartments, but never post an ad. he has this job because he speaks english, and is able to take foreigners around, often befriending them . furnished apartments, he said, require much less paperwork than unfurnished ones: it is a niche market and has remained unregulated, with the only paperwork requirement being a copy of passport. rousseau observed that personality was becoming a form of capital, and in this line many of my interviewees mention the warmth, welcoming and fun colombian culture as a main appeal. hochschild (2012) coined the term “emotional labor” meant the part of a service job that requires emotions to be called up or faked to satisfy customers for a company, generally expected in the heavily female-staffed hospitality industry. given the skipping over the industry in these cases, the line between what is authentic connection, commodified culture, service work or official hospitality makes the exchange harder to account for. additionally, the arrangement of blurred lines between tourist and work traveler is mimicked by the “gig” economy and the local informal labor: many of the nomads depend on informal labor to subsidize their lifestyle, in this way it is outsourcing housework in order to work less on the maintenance of the home. for example, an undocumented, venezuelan domestic worker i interviewed had three foreign clients she had gotten via word of mouth and charges 65.000 pesos per day ($17.00), while if she also cooked she would charge 80,000 ($22.00), average local rate. in one of the whatsapp groups a nomad commented: -i have a personal chef/cleaning lady. she is basically my colombian mom. comes 7am-2pm m-f. cooks three meals. dinner i heat up. i found her through a personal recommendation, but the same person also sent me this www.hogaru.com to find these types of people she is by no means perfect, but the convenience and cost is worth it. i definitely save money by paying her and for groceries versus eating out every meal (which is what i would do). the feminized appeal of a beautiful home, beautiful women, cheap domestic work as well as cost of living allows location-independent workers to outsource their home. the case of digital nomads or location-independent workers means the informality of the ondemand economy is meeting the existing informality prevalent in many developing countries. the quality of life rises not only due to increased spending capacity, but also the time freed by having to work less and having to do less domestic work. while the mayor aims for the city to become latin america’s “silicon valley” , the actual appeal for international visit or work is the feminized labor of hostessing and commodification of what makes it “a welcoming home” for workers. references gray, m. l., & suri, s. (2019). ghost work: how to stop silicon valley from building a new global underclass. eamon dolan books. hamington, m. (2010). toward a theory of feminist hospitality. feminist formations, 22(1), 21–38. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40835342 hochschild, a. r. (2012). the managed heart: commercialization of human feeling. univ of california press. sánchez, m. m. (2018). colombia en posconflicto: ¿turismo para la paz o paz para el turismo? araucaria, 20(39), article 39. https://revistascientificas.us.es/index.php/araucaria/article/view/4914 tsing, a. (2009). supply chains and the human condition. rethinking marxism, 21(2), 148–176. https://doi.org/10.1080/08935690902743088 weil, d. (2020, april 29). new laws for the fissured workplace. the american prospect. https://prospect.org/api/content/f34e8628-89a8-11ea-9cb31244d5f7c7c6/ selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): coromina, o., matamoros-fernández, a., rieder , b. (2020, october). follow the money: a large-scale investigation of monetization and optimization on youtube. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. follow the money: a large-scale investigation of monetization and optimization on youtube òscar coromina universitat autònoma de barcelona ariadna matamoros-fernández queensland university of technology bernhard rieder university of amsterdam introduction since its launch as a video sharing website in 2005, youtube has become a dominant actor in the global media system, with a high level of social and cultural impact, reaching an audience of almost two billion active users per month (gilbert, 2018). youtube also plays the role of a platform in the economic sense, operating at the center of a multi-sided market (rochet & tirole, 2006) and capturing surplus from the intermediation between content creators, audiences, and advertisers. youtube’s business model which generated $15b of revenues in 2019 (statt, 2020) relies on millions of channels uploading videos, pursuing views and subscribers, and increasingly professionalizing their production methods to become viable businesses themselves. but since the platform first invited content creators to become youtube “partners” in 2007, allowing them to obtain a share of revenues from advertising, the rules and mechanisms for monetizing videos have changed often and sometimes abruptly, accelerating the search for other income streams. this paper draws on a critical media industries perspective (havens et al., 2009) to investigate the relationship between youtube’s evolving platform strategies on the one side and content creators’ tactical adaptations on the other. since the early days of “entrepreneurial vloggers” (burgess & green, 2018, p. 36), the monetisation features and programs the platform offers have evolved significantly, including recent additions such as double pre-roll video advertising, “join” and “clap” features, and the possibility to sell merchandising directly from the interface. the first part of our contribution will reconstruct these developments, but also discuss the increasingly strained relationships between platform, advertisers, and content creators, which first culminated in 2017, when advertisers pulled out after discovering that their ads were running on videos promoting terrorism and hate speech (fontaine et al., 2018), leading to waves of content demonetization. in a situation where advertisement rules are unstable and opaque, creators have turned to product placement, sponsorships, affiliate programs, and crowdsourcing as means to generate income. patreon has played a particularly important role, since channels dealing with sensitive topics such as politics or sexuality have mostly been excluded from direct monetization altogether. and beyond monetization lurks the broader question of how creators optimize their content and referencing strategies to “make it” on a highly competitive platform that uses dynamic algorithms to modulate visibility (cf. bishop, 2019). establishing an understanding and timeline of these developments provides context and feeds directly into a representative, large-scale empirical analysis of the “microlevel industrial practices” (havens et al., 2009, p. 235) that content creators employ to generate visibility and revenue on youtube. studying monetization and optimization on a large scale although recent studies (e.g. bärtl, 2018) have made important steps toward overall characterizations of youtube, much work remains to be done. this research draws on a larger project implementing an exhaustive breath-first crawl following subscriptions and “featured channel” connections to map a very large portion of the platform. collecting data from youtube’s web-api between november 26, 2019 and january 8, 2020 we created an exhaustive sample of over 36 million channels (rieder et al., 2020). in this paper, however, we focus on the youtube “elite” channels that have already succeeded in finding a significant audience and thus limit ourselves to the 153.770 channels with more than 100,000 subscribers, as well as the 138.340.337 videos they posted during their lifespan. for both channels and videos, we were able to collect rich metadata, which allow for a wide variety of analysis. while the youtube api provides no means to investigate monetization through advertising empirically, video descriptions contain different traces (e.g. urls) for alternative forms of income generation. we are thus able to track not only the appearance and spread of crowdfunding platforms like patreon, but also of affiliate links, merchandise stores, or e-commerce websites like etsy that focus on low-volume sellers. we pay particular attention to the question of how the progressive exclusion of videos, channels, and whole topic categories (e.g. demonetization of “made for kids” content) has affected the uptake of alternative monetization strategies and to the broader question how these strategies are distributed over algorithmically assigned channel categories (figure 1), which play an important role in how youtube governs the placing of advertising. figure 1. the distribution of 153.770 “elite” channels over youtube’s category grid furthermore, we analyze broader “optimization” techniques. this includes the evolution of both video length, one of the parameters that is said to have a strong effect on advertisement revenue, and video posting frequency, another key ingredient in a channel’s success. but it also includes practices that seek to enhance algorithmic visibility, such as metadata and category optimization, keyword stuffing, or title phrasing. controversy is another often-highlighted aspect of youtube culture that can serve as a means to generate attention. using like, dislike, and comment ratios of videos as our main indicators, we introduce a “controversiality” metric for channels that allows us to trace discord over topics and sub-communities (i.e. dense clusters in the channel network) and to connect it to the evolution of viewer numbers over time. we are thus able to both investigate controversiality as a strategy and measure its prevalence in the different niches of platform. taken together, these elements provide a broad picture of “industrialization” on youtube, that is, of the ways creators seek to develop their channels into media businesses. conclusion while this contribution cannot replace more qualitative, in-depth research into particular channels or channel groups, we hope to provide a representative picture of youtube’s elite channels and their quest for visibility and success from their beginnings up to early 2020. our method sheds light on youtube’s economic ecology and opens the door to the possibility to classify youtube channels according to their model of monetization and to analyze relationships between monetization, optimization, and topicality. references bärtl, m. (2018). youtube channels, uploads and views: a statistical analysis of the past 10 years. convergence, 24(1), 16-32. bishop, s. (2019). managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip. new media & society, 21(11-12), 2589-2606. burgess, j., & green, j., (2018). youtube: online video and participatory culture. 2nd edition. cambridge: polity press. fontaine, g., grece, c., & jimenez pumares, m. (2018). online video sharing: offerings, audiences, economic aspects. strasbourg: european audiovisual observatory. gilbert, b., (2018, may 4). youtube now has over 1.8 billion users every month, within spitting distance of facebook’s 2 billion. business insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-user-statistics-2018-5 havens, t., lotz, a. d., & tinic, s. (2009). critical media industry studies: a research approach. communication, culture and critique, 2(2), 234-253. rieder, b., coromina, o., & matamoros-fernandez, a. (2020). mapping youtube: a quantitative exploration of a platformed media system. first monday, 25(8). rochet, j-c., & tirole, j. (2006). two-sided markets: a progress report. the rand journal of economics, 37(3), 645-667. statt, n., (2020, february 4). youtube is a $15 billion-a-year business, google reveals for the first time. the verge. https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtubegoogle-alphabet-earnings-revenue-first-time-reveal-q4-2019 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): møller, k., birk jensen, m., nebeling petersen, m. (2020, october). medicalized masculinities: the digital life of substances. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. medicalized masculinities: the digital life of substances kristian møller it university of copenhagen mie birk jensen university of southern denmark tobias raun roskilde university michael nebeling petersen university of southern denmark this panel is concerned with how notions and practices of masculinity emerge in and through medical and digital infrastructures. key to our tracing of the social life of masculinity is that it does not derive (solely) from the male-identified body, but is formed, negotiated and transformed in culture, affecting all sorts of bodies and identities. here, digital media play a central role. at the same time, to understand masculinity we must also understand the role of medicine, drugs and other substances. while studies of masculinities often trace processes of either medicalization or mediatization, few interrogate it at their very intersection. doing so is the main purpose of this panel, which brings together cases that illustrate the effects the intersection of these large-scale changes in digital and medical technologies have on masculinities today. theoretically, the panel is based on the notion that society and everyday life are increasingly intertwined with and enrolled in both the logics of the health and pharmaceutical industry and in communication technology and media. femininities have long been the subjects of (bio)medicalizing (conrad 2005; clarke et al. 2010), or optimizing (hogle, 2005; schildrick, 2015) regimes, such as medical interventions into reproduction as well as beauty-enhancing work through the use of anti-age creme and other “medical” products like cosmetic surgeries etc.. it can be argued that up until the release of viagra, privileged or hegemonic masculinities (connell and messerschmidt, 2005) retained a position somewhat outside of this, meaning that masculinity work fell outside of the medical regime. but the overwhelming cultural significance of viagra can be said to mark a turning point where all masculinities started to become governed by principles founded in the medical regime. notions and practices of masculinity are part of cultures increasingly marked by deep mediatization processes (couldry and hepp, 2018), including those of the platform economy (gillespie, 2010; van dijck, 2013). thus, a range of media technologies take part in the many ways that masculinity ideals are negotiated, practiced, and felt. key academic works on men, masculinities, and media have focused on contemporary gay male sociability in dating app sex culture (mowlabocus, 2010; race, 2018), the male body in digital neo-liberal culture (hakim, 2019), and pornography (paasonen, 2011). because the language and logics of medicalization are so all-encompassing, this panel, in its effort to understand mediatized masculinity, broadly defines substances as materials entering the body that change, or are believed to change, its capacities through biochemical modulation. this allows us to consider a wide range of drugs used to modulate or enhance different aspects of the body in order to make it masculine. as such the papers cover both legalized medical products, substances that use medical signifiers to secure its value in the marketplace, and laboratory-produced illicit substances that aim to enhance sensory experience and bodily capacities. we would argue that to understand how seemingly different people of all genders are affected by notions of masculinity, tracing these substances is key. in order to study the variation in how masculinity is both mediatized and medicalized, the panel uses a range of qualitative methods. this methodological variation enables us to understand masculinity at different scales: mie birk jensen analyzes thousands of spam emails for their affective and normative production of virile masculinity; tobias raun and michael nebeling petersen use ethnographic archive analysis of youtube communities to understand peer learning and monetization of hair-loss and hair-gain products; and kristian møller uses participant observation to capture the sexual intensification in an online gay drug scene. references clarke, a., mamo, l., fishman, j., shim, j., & fosket, j. b. (2010). a theoretical and substantive introduction. biomedicalization: technoscience, health, and illness in the us, 1-44. connell, r. w., & messerschmidt, j. w. (2005). hegemonic masculinity: rethinking the concept. gender & society, 19(6), 829-859. conrad, p. (2005). the shifting engines of medicalization. journal of health and social behavior, 46(1), 3-14. couldry, n., & hepp, a. (2018). the mediated construction of reality. john wiley & sons. gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of ‘platforms.’ new media & society, 12(3), 347–364. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342738 hakim, j. (2019). work that body: male bodies in digital culture. rowman & littlefield international. hogle,l.f. (2005). enhancement technologies and the body. annual review of anthropology, 34 695-716. mowlabocus, s. (2010). gaydar culture: gay men, technology and embodiment in the digital age. routledge. paasonen, s. (2011). carnal resonance: affect and online pornography. mit press. race, k. (2018). the gay science: intimate experiments with the problem of hiv. routledge. shildrick, m. (2015). “why should our bodies end at the skin?”: embodiment, boundaries, and somatechnics. hypatia, 30(1), 13-29. van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. oxford university press. ‘potency is important for a real man’: affective readings of shame and performance anxiety in spam selling viagra and other sexuopharmaceuticals. mie birk jensen university of southern denmark in this paper, i explore the emergence of viagra spam in the nexus between online technologies and the medicalization of masculinity that make spam both possible and profitable. while spam is most often treated as a nuisance that impedes upon and infects the infrastructures of the internet, it is an integral part of everyday life online (parikka & sampson, 2009). wasting our precious time, demanding our attention, selling illicit and possibly unsafe products, spreading malware, or breaking with the regulations of advertising, spam is constituted as a threat to human health, safety and productivity (alongi, 2004; hinde, 2003; paasonen, 2011). despite continuous efforts to annihilate spam, it constitutes a significant part of all e-mail traffic across the world, with billions of spam mail being sent every day (parikka & sampson, 2009; yu, 2014). thus, spam has become an anomaly of the internet and defining of the internet itself, at once representing ‘the mundane, the banal, and the largely undesired’ in online life (paasonen, 2011: 116). as an already inherently illicit activity, spam transgresses any rules and regulations, such as those that affect the pharmaceutical market and drug advertising more generally. rather than first and foremost branding the content in a legal and aesthetic manner, spammers are focused on making it past filters, which has greatly affected the evolution of spam (guerra et al., 2010). according to yu (2014), the limitations of design also means that ‘the only thing left to appeal to the customers is the underlying component of the message, sex’ (41). thus, paradoxically, it is in so far as spam is considered a particularly undesired medium that it becomes increasingly relevant to commodify desire itself, as a ‘capitalist mediation into sexual intimacy’ (croissant, 2006: 342). it is therefore no surprise that much of the existing spam involves the sale of sexuo-pharmaceuticals, and, in spite of the pharmaceutical company pfizer’s attempts to publicly distance themselves from spam’s distribution of counterfeit viagra, spam has come to be synonymous with viagra, and vice versa. existing studies have ignited important discussions about the cultural impact of viagra, and how viagra has contributed to the medicalization of male bodies, narrowing discourse on both masculinity and sex (e.g. mamo & fishman, 2001; gurevich et al., 2018; tiefer, 2006; vares & brown, 2006). although it may be tempting to write of spam as an illicit activity that has no effect on our lives aside from it being a nuisance in our online presence, studies suggest that it also does build on, reflect and transmit gender ideologies in ways similar to regular advertising (e.g. mullaney, 2004; paasonen, 2009; yu, 2014). for example, passonen (2011) found that spam promoting pornography often reproduces heterosexual notions of desire, and mullaney (2004) emphasizes how the vast majority of spam remains directed at men, reinforcing a gendered binary between men as technologically competent and women as more ‘techno-phobic’; men as consumers of online pornography, and women as sexual objects for consumption (p. 296). however, as to date, no studies have focused on spam as an ‘engine of medicalization’ that in itself transmit and construct gendered ideologies and sexual norms concerning men’s sexual lives through the sale of sexuopharmaceuticals (conrad, 2005: 5). taking my point of departure in an online spam archive, consisting of a collection of spam e-mails sent from 1998-2018, i begin to breach this gap in research (guenter, 2010). in collaboration with stefan jänicke, assistant professor in computer science at university of southern denmark, the textual content of the archive has been organized into tagspheres (jänicke and scheuermann, 2016). these tagspheres provide an overview of some of the general tendencies in the archive, such as frequently used words over time. however, in order to avoid stripping spam of its ‘affective force’ by simply transforming it into neat numbers and quantitative visualizations, i also engage in a qualitative analysis of selected content of the spam archive (paasonen, 2011: 117). drawing on sara ahmed’s (2004) theorical insights on the circulation of affect, i explore how the erect penis becomes imbued with meaning, and in extension, how masculinity is configured around notions of shame and anxiety. i argue that in spam, the depressed, anxious, shameful, and all-together failed masculine self, sticks to the flaccid penis, whereas the chemically induced erection brings promises a bright and positive future. from here i go on to discuss how spam capitalizes on existing communication technologies in amalgamation with gendered pharmaceutical technologies for profit; in asking the possible consumer to envision a perfect, prolonged, and hypermasculine future, spammers thus take both online platforms and gendered discourse to their ‘functional extremes’ (brunton 2019: xiv). i ask what we may gain by approaching viagra spam as “frozen moments” (haraway, 1994) that give insight into changes in the medicalization of masculinity and men’s everyday lives, both online and offline, as the boundaries between human and technology are increasingly blurred. references ahmed, sara, (2004), cultural politics of emotion, edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2014. alongi, e. a. (2004). has the us canned spam. ariz. l. rev., 46, 263. brunton, f. (2019). 'spam', in n. brügger and i. milligan (eds.), the sage handbook of web history, london: sage publications limited. conrad, p. (2005). the shifting engines of medicalization. journal of health and social behavior, 46(1), 3-14. croissant, j. l. (2006). the new sexual technobody: viagra in the hyperreal world. sexualities, 9(3), 333–344. guenter, b. (2010). spam archive, retrieved february 2020 at: https://archive.org/details/untroubled_spam_archive. guerra, p. h. c., guedes, d., meira, j. w., hoepers, c., chaves, m. h. p. c., & steding-jessen, k. (2010, july). exploring the spam arms race to characterize spam evolution. in proceedings of the 7th collaboration, electronic messaging, anti-abuse and spam conference (ceas), redmond, wa. gurevich, m., cormier, n., leedham, u., & brown-bowers, a. (2018). sexual dysfunction or sexual discipline? sexuopharmaceutical use by men as prevention and proficiency. feminism & psychology, 28(3), 309-330. haraway, d. 1994. "a manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s." the postmodern turn: new perspectives on social theory: 82115. hinde, s. (2003). spam: the evolution of a nuisance. computers & security, 22(6), 474478. jänicke, s. & scheuermann, g. (2016). ‘on the visualization of hierarchical relations and tree structures with tagspheres’, in international joint conference on computer vision, imaging and computer graphics, springer, cham, pp. 199-219. loe, m. (2001). fixing broken masculinity: viagra asa technology for the production of gender and sexuality. sexuality and culture, 5(3), 97-125. mamo, l., & fishman, j. r. (2001). potency in all the right places: viagra as a technology of the gendered body. body & society, 7(4), 13-35. mullany, l. (2004). ‘become the man that women desire’: gender identities and dominant discourses in email advertising language. language and literature, 13(4), 291-305. parikka, j., & sampson, t. d., eds. the spam book: on viruses, porn, and other anomalies from the dark side of digital culture. hampton press, 2009. paasonen, s. (2009). ‘irregular fantasies, anomalous uses: pornography spam as boundary work.’, in jussi parikka & tony d. sampson (eds), the spam book: on viruses, porn, and other anomalies from the dark side of digital culture, hampton press, pp. 161-179. paasonen, s. (2011). carnal resonance: affect and online pornography. mit press. potts, a., grace, v., gavey, n., & vares, t. (2004). viagra stories”: challenging ‘erectile dysfunction. social science & medicine, 59(3), 489-499. tiefer, l. (2006). the viagra phenomenon. sexualities, 9(3), 273-294. vares, t., & braun, v. (2006). spreading the word, but what word is that? viagra and male sexuality in popular culture. sexualities, 9(3), 315-332. yu, s. (2014). sex in spam: a content analysis. international journal of criminal justice sciences, 9(1), 35. the power of hair. unravelling the audio-visual aesthetics of self-tracking on youtube tobias raun roskilde university michael nebeling petersen university of southern denmark introduction on youtube, you can find videos with men talking about and documenting their lack of and growth of hair. several products and procedures are tried out and evaluated on camera, and communities have formed around these products and problematics. the videos are interesting as late modern tales of medicalized and mediatized masculinity: men are increasingly objects of surgical and medical technologies/interventions to gain an appearance aligned with gendered, aged, bodily and sexual norms. being a man is no longer a given and self-reliant power position, thus, men too are increasingly told that they are in need of repair and improvement in order to become valuable in culture (hakim 2020: 23). we perceive the videos as part of the new ways in which men and masculinity are scrutinized and moulded in conjunction with biomedical and digital technologies. hence, we approach the youtubers as becoming in and with medical and media technology (raun 2015, 2016). we analyse a sample of amateur youtube-videos of men trying, evaluating and discussing the two most popular products: minoxidil and finasteride. our overall framing of these youtubers is in relation to the evolving field of self-tracking, and we characterise the videos as a specific genre of audio-visual self-tracking, that also draw on the selfie. we are interested in how the effects of the drug (finasteride and minoxidil) are articulated, visualized and evaluated. in other words, how are the effects of the drugs audio-visually represented by the users on youtube? and what characterises the selftracking video as a genre? method the analysis is based on a sample of 8 youtube channels, produced by individual users, who themselves use minoxidil and/or finasteride. we found the case study channels by searching on youtube for ‘minoxidil’ and ‘finasteride’ (in january 2020), sorted by the date of the upload and number of views respectively. we ended up selecting 3 youtubers making videos about minoxidil to enhance beard growth and 5 youtubers making videos about finasteride to prevent baldness. self-tracking self-tracking as a field of study is often associated with the term and the movement ‘the quantified self’. however, self-tracking as a practice and a term has a much broader meaning than the quantified self subculture. in this paper we are interested in the form of self-tracking that one willingly and knowingly subject oneself to, and which we take as a starting point for analysing the self-representational practices of the youtubers. this form of self-tracking is broadly defined as “directed at regularly monitoring and recording, and often measuring, elements of an individual's behaviours or bodily functions” (lupton 2016: 8). the genre of audio-visual self-tracking we understand the self-tracking video as an audio-visual selfie designed to represent transformation. like the selfie photograph, the self-tracking video is selfrepresentational and networked (tiidenberg 2018: 21), as the video inherently points to the person who filmed and authored the video, and is shared on social media platforms, in our case youtube. we want to elaborate on the aesthetic characteristics of the selftracking videos on youtube. the overall drive guiding these videos are an overarching desire for transformation and progress, which encompasses both the visual aesthetics as well as the visual narratives, although in different ways. we suggest an overall framing of the self-tracking videos as either momental self-tracking or longitudinal selftracking. in the figure below we have outlined the main characteristics of the two types of self-tracking videos. figure 1: defining the genre of self-tracking videos the momental video is characterized by a focus on a specific problem, body part and moment in time. often the youtuber literally uses the camera to zoom in or create a zoom effect by bringing the camera closer to the discussed area. in figure 2, a still image of richie z, he explains how the finasteride and minoxidil treatment has helped regrow his topical hair. the selfie position is presented, as richie z records himself from the front with a handheld camera. the video is recorded in one shot without any editing or graphical elements. the camera is held closely to richie z’s face, so we can see the details of the new hairs emerging at his temple area. although richie z does not actually use the zoom function of the camera, the composition of the video creates a zooming effect, due to the way in which the camera is brought close to the appointed problem area, and due to richie’s verbal and bodily pointedness, that orients us towards his hair and hairline. as a typical momental selftracking video, this video is in essence serial: although richie z starts the video by introducing himself in terms of name, age and purpose, he quickly explains, that “this is my eight month update”, and he hereby connects this video to previous videos on his channel as well as anticipated future updates. the video narratively offers a snapshot of his current appearance in a specific moment in time. the longitudinal video, on the contrary, forms a plot by unfolding a time period. the narrative structure resembles that of the bildungsroman, where the protagonist is faced with a problem (losing hair, not gaining hair), embarks on a journey (starts the treatments of finasteride, minoxidil, or a combination), and then finally is rewarded with the ultimate boon; more hair. it figures as a heroic tale of overcoming obstacles and finding peace and pride in oneself. this plot composition enables the youtuber to speak from a position of experience, that is both knowledgeable and retrospective, which is also aesthetically underscored. in figure 3, hairloss cure makes a visual juxtaposition between a former photograph and a present moving image of himself, allowing the viewer to see, compare and contrast the amount of hair, while he, in past tense, talks about the knowledge and experiences he has gained from the treatment. the juxtaposition underlines the progressing plot structure, while it also structures the temporality of the video. the longitudinal video often relies on momental videos, and sometimes functions as a summing up or conclusion on a series of momental videos. this is for instance the case figure 2: screenshot from richie z, april 27, 2020. figure 3: screenshot from hairloss cure, september 29, 2018 in jb chats’ video “finasteride month 8 results and update” (june 2, 2020), where he, in a split screen, speaks about his experiences and results in one side of the image frame, while clips from earlier videos are playing on the other side, and together form a documentation and scrutinization of the transformation enabled by the treatment. conclusion in the developed model (figure 1), we have outlined the main characteristics for the momental video and the longitudinal video, defining both the visual effects, audio-visual narrative as well as temporal organization governing them. it is our claim that these defining characteristics are the core structural principles of these self-tracking videos on finasteride and minoxidil, but that they are also applicable to other (and potentially all) forms of videos preoccupied with tracking transformation. references hakim, j. (2020). work that body: male bodies in digital culture. maryland: rowman and littlefield international. lupton, d. (2016a). the quantified self. hoboken, nj: john wiley & sons. raun, t. (2015). archiving the wonders of testosterone via youtube. transgender studies quarterly 2(4): 701-709. raun, t. (2016). out online: trans self-representation and community building on youtube. new york: routledge. tiidenberg, k. (2018). selfies. why we love (and hate) them. blingley, uk: emerald publishing. hanging out, blowing clouds: chemical and sexual experimentation in a video-mediated chemsex scene kristian møller it university of copenhagen in a google+ forum dedicated to chemsex, that is, sexual encounters between men enhanced by drug use, an embedded youtube video announces an event focusing on the pleasure of smoking methamphetamine (crystal meth). after downloading the required video conferencing app, which i due to ethical considerations do not name here, i type in the link address and click ‘attend’. while the digital service is marketed to facilitate large, much like those traditional landline call-in services, this event leverages the privacy and somewhat inaccessibility of the infrastructure to facilitate a kind of “hangout” that for legal and social reasons is hard to sustain in other, more accessible, infrastructures. when i enter the room, generic house music is pumping, and my screen is filled with small, grainy video streams of mostly naked, male torsos lid up only by the cold blue light of computer screens. browsing through the video feeds i am met with men sometimes typing, sometimes masturbating, but mostly just staring blankly at the screen. they stare past me at something or someone else. then, in the common chat, a user writes “clouds now”. knowing that this vernacular term describes the smoking of crystal meth, i scan the video grid to find his stream. as he artfully blows clouds of smoke into the air the chat erupts in appreciative comments. the above description, and the paper as such, is based on my participant observation in a week-long online event. it is deeply ‘counterpublic’ (warner, 2002), in that it consists of mostly gay men having sex with multiple partners, using illicit drugs as well as a number of media technologies, all of which marks it as well outside the ‘magic circle’ (rubin, 1984) of normative intimacy. while it is a marginal practice, this paper argues that it provides compelling case for thinking about how contemporary sexuality in a time of ‘deep mediatization’ (couldry & hepp, 2018) and ‘biomedicalization’ (clarke et al., 2003) is as much a matter of desire sticking to and traveling through digital and chemical infrastructures (race, 2018), as it sticks to and is felt by bodies. this article then, focuses on the role of these infrastructures in sustaining practice work, and making its erotics felt. from a platform (gillespie, 2010) perspective, the paper analyses how the chemical and sexual experimentation of the scene depends on users levering the video and chat technologies in order to create and access such content. these ‘techno-cultural microsystems’ (van dijck, 2013) of the platform do not emerge in a vacuum but are deeply dependent on socio-economic structures that are available or, more to the point, not available. with increasing stricter moderation of social media leading to a general deplatformization of sex, these specific events are deeply dependent on the ability of its participants to find less policed and surveilled digital infrastructures. while i suggest that the observed event is indeed part of the range of practices that we designate as chemsex, i rather seek to expand what this concept entails, that to contain the digital practice within its current boundaries. health oriented analysis may often “rush to risk” (bryant et al., 2018), which in turn contributes to an activation of moral panic scripts in popular media discourse (hakim, 2018). serving as a counterpoint, this article interrogates sexualised drug use (or drugged sexual activity) from a cultural and ethnographic perspective. to delineate the phenomenon i draw from kerryn drysdale’s work on ‘scene’ as loosely organised network of places, people, and practices, among which modes of intimacy and identification are explored and experimented with (drysdale, 2019, p. 10). from this perspective it becomes clear that online chemsex encounters are part of a larger scene of experimentation with what sexual desires and practices can emerge while using drugs. equally as important for this subscene is how the digital video infrastructure may enable its users to organize and value the participants’ presentation as more or less desirable. thus, it has specific local characteristics, leaders, and practices, all of which emerge in relationship to what the digital infrastructure affords. collective desire emerges in the relationship among mediated bodies as they access and to varying degrees also produce sexual drug performances. here i forego analysis of what constitutes production and consumption by instead looking at the qualities and ways that erotic charge flows. i focus on their variation in intensity and rhythm in order to flesh out what social drugged, sexual sociability looks and feels like in this mediated scene. preliminary findings suggest that what characterizes this chemsex scene is the copresence of and movement between om the one hand the very low-intensity engagements of participants merely looking, and on the other hand those doing elaborate erotic acts in which the performative smoking of crystal meth “clouds” produces provide the highly intense social engagement among the performer and his audience. the second major finding is that the scene is marked by a rhythmic fluctuation between these intensities. the video platform’s wealth of mediated bodies hanging out creates an expansive sense of time, that is regularly punctuated by these performances. this fluctuation does not prevail on its own, rather, careful negotiation in the chat is required to direct everyone’s attention to these smoking events. the erotic value of these moments is so important that smoking without notifying risks that you are by removed from the space by the organizing scene leaders. references bryant, j., hopwood, m., dowsett, g. w., aggleton, p., holt, m., lea, t., drysdale, k., & treloar, c. (2018). the rush to risk when interrogating the relationship between methamphetamine use and sexual practice among gay and bisexual men. international journal of drug policy, 55, 242–248. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2017.12.010 clarke, a. e., mamo, l., fishman, j. r., shim, j. k., & fosket, j. r. (2003). biomedicalization: technoscientific transformations of health, illness, and u.s. biomedicine. american sociological review, 68(2), 161. https://doi.org/10.2307/1519765 couldry, n., & hepp, a. (2018). the mediated construction of reality. john wiley & sons. drysdale, k. (2019). intimate investments in drag king cultures: the rise and fall of a lesbian social scene. springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3030-15777-7 gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of ‘platforms.’ new media & society, 12(3), 347–364. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342738 hakim, j. (2018). chemsex: anatomy of a sex panic. in t. d. sampson, s. maddison, & d. ellis (eds.), affect and social media: emotion, mediation, anxiety and contagion. rowman & littlefield international. race, k. (2018). the gay science: intimate experiments with the problem of hiv. routledge. rubin, g. (1984). thinking sex: notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality. social perspectives in lesbian and gay studies; a reader, 100–133. van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. oxford university press. warner, m. (2002). publics and counterpublics (abbreviated version). quarterly journal of speech, 88(4), 413–425. aoir2018-quitting buzzfeed for proceedings selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): bergstrom, k. (2018, october 10-13). what can “why i left buzzfeed” vlogs teach us about invisible labour? paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. what can “why i left buzzfeed” vlogs teach us about invisible labour? kelly bergstrom university of hawai’i at mānoa introduction when individuals seek out new employment of their own volition (as opposed to being fired) this usually necessitates resigning from job, colloquially known as “quitting”. previously, a person’s reason(s) for quitting might have only been shared with friends and family, but thanks to the ubiquity of social media these reasons can now be relayed to audiences far removed from their day-to-day life. in this paper i explore the growing trend of posting videos to youtube (vlogging) to explain the reasons for why an individual has quit their job, detailing a collection of 10 vlogs posted by 11 former buzzfeed employees to explain their reasons for leaving the company. founded in 2006, buzzfeed is a media company famous for its listicles (a portmanteau of list and articles) and popular youtube series (e.g. ladylike, buzzfeed unsolved, etc.) receiving 65 billion views in 2017 (spangler, 2018). this research was initially motivated by the desire to understand why the “why i left buzzfeed” videos went viral, so much so that there are now more parodies than videos made by actual ex-employees. however, in conducting this research i found that while the formulaic structure and content of the real and parody videos were striking and warrant further investigation, what was surprising was how the vlogs made by exemployees are a deliberate attempt to expose the invisible labour that is prevalent in the post-internet media industry. by posting “why i left” vlogs, former employees reclaim their authorship of creative productions previously uploaded without individual attributions and instead credited to the faceless corporate monolith of “buzzfeed”. furthermore, these vlogs act as a means to subvert notoriety earned by being a (now former) public face of buzzfeed to attract hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of viewers to announce their personal pivot and rebranding as content producers now working independently from the company that had launched them into internet fame. methods & analysis the data for this paper was collected by means of a snowball sample. data collection began by collecting links to youtube videos related to the topic of quitting buzzfeed using the keywords “quit” or “leave” and “buzzfeed”. additional videos were sought out by means of searching for videos posted by other ex-buzzfeed staff mentioned by name in the previously collected videos as well as those named in the popular press articles about employees who quit or had been fired. after watching each of the videos, i divided them into two categories: vlogs by exbuzzfeed employees and vlogs by people who had never actually worked for the company. these videos were transcribed then analyzed using thematic coding (saldaña, 2013) using nvivo 11 for windows. reclaiming authorship and rebranding setting aside the parody videos made by people who had never worked for buzzfeed (which will be discussed in a subsequent paper) the vlogs posted by former employees become an explicit attempt to pull the curtain back and reveal the invisible labour (crain, poster, & cherry, 2016) associated with creating video content for buzzfeed. i also draw on the concept of microcelebrity (senft, 2008) as a means to explain the why these videos were initially able to garner the attention that they did. i note that in recent years senft’s work has been extended in multiple directions, such as documenting the amount of “behind the scenes” labour that goes into becoming and then maintaining microcelebrity status in the tech industry (marwick, 2015) or amongst influencers (abidin, 2018) as well as the aspirational labour performed by would-be influencers (duffy, 2017). all of the ex-employees who posted “why i left” videos were at one time prominently featured in at least one of buzzfeed’s youtube channels. because they are mostly known for their on-screen presence, these former employees were typically assumed to be actors and referred to as such in media coverage or by fans who converse about their favourite buzzfeed personalities on youtube or on other social media sites. these vlogs served as a way to educate the audience about the extensive work they did behind the scenes (e.g. scriptwriting, editing) in an attempt to make clear that while they were the ones in front of the camera, they often did all the undocumented work behind the scenes to ensure the video went from idea to reality. for example, in chris lam’s vlog he sought to “set the record straight” and reclaim authorship over videos on which his name never appeared despite the company’s assurances that it would attribute producers by name moving forward, adding the attributions retroactively long after a video has outlived its viral lifespan does little to acknowledge his labour to an actual audience. in addition to emphasizing the amount of work that went into the videos they created to highlight their talents beyond acting, these vlogs also act as a way to rebrand and advertise a new post-buzzfeed venture. former employees stated they left on their own volition – the notable exception being jenny lorenzo, who had been fired for breach of contract because she appeared in non-buzzfeed video (sutton, 2016) – and all of the videos contained an explanation of what the vlogger planned to do next and why they couldn’t do that work at buzzfeed. in some cases the “why i left” video actually served as being the pilot for their new ventures, for example michelle khare produced a fully choreographed action sequence to announce she had left buzzfeed to create her own series about learning how to perform famous hollywood movie stunts. the videos shared a common theme of thanking buzzfeed for the opportunity and praising their former coworkers, but also made it clear that in order to have full creative control (and ownership) of their productions, they had to leave the company and return to independent work. implications when viewed individually, each vlog primarily serves the function to rebrand and alert fans about their new post-buzzfeed career. yet when taken together, the “why i left” videos document a concerning trend in which viral media stars are offered a steady paycheck (approximately $55k usd/year) at the cost of a non-compete clause and signing away authorship of any creative and intellectual work conceptualized during their employment. furthermore, buzzfeed would own this property in perpetuity, retaining the right to use their name and likeness even after they leave the company. contractual obligations prevented them from speaking on the subject while at buzzfeed, but in each vlog the former employee stated they returned to a precarious employment situation in order to reclaim ownership over their creative work moving forward. while perhaps not intentional, these vlogs ultimately act as a warning about the uneven playing field between employer and employee. each year buzzfeed posts record profits, and yet these vlogs illuminate how employees are actively prevented from being able to grow a personal brand beyond buzzfeed, stifling future career prospects and additional sources of income. ultimately this leaves buzzfeed employees with the option to quit or to stagnate in place, or what gaby dunn (2015) stated are ultimately the two options for a buzzfeed viral video star: “get rich, or die vlogging.’” references abidin, c. (2018). internet celebrity: understanding fame online. bingley, uk: emerald publishing ltd. crain, m. g., poster, w., & cherry, m. a. (eds.). (2016). invisible labor: hidden work in the contemporary world. oakland, california: university of california press. dunn, g. (2015, december 14). get rich or die vlogging: the sad economics of internet fame. splinter news. retrieved february 28, 2018 from https://splinternews.com/get-rich-or-die-vlogging-the-sad-economics-of-internet1793853578 duffy, b. e. (2017). (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. new haven ; london: yale university press. marwick, a. e. (2015). status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. new haven london: yale university press. saldaña, j. (2013). the coding manual for qualitative researchers (2nd ed). los angeles: sage. senft, t. m. (2008). camgirls: celebrity and community in the age of social networks. new york: lang. spangler, t. (2018, february 20). buzzfeed had 65 billion video views in 2017. but what does that mean for ad dollars? retrieved february 28, 2018, from http://variety.com/2018/digital/news/buzzfeed-65-billion-video-views-2017advertising-1202704765/ sutton, k. (2016, june 15). buzzfeed fires two amid video push. retrieved july 17, 2018, from https://www.politico.com/media/story/2016/06/non-competeagreements-buzzfeed-firings-004600#ixzz4c9qd496v aoir2020-submission-template-stevejones.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): guzman, andrea; conner, thomas; pashevich, ekaterina; jones, steve. (2020, october). human-machine communication: ethical perspectives. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. human-machine communication: ethical perspectives andrea guzman northern illinois university thomas conner university of california san diego ekaterina pashevich university of oslo steve jones university of illinois chicago panel overview digital voice assistants, social robots, artificial intelligence and progressively refined algorithms are ushering in new modes of interaction that increasingly mediates between human and machine. this panel will engage ethical questions related to those modes of interaction, ranging from discussion of automated journalism to virtual performers, digital research assistants to toys. the central concern among the papers to be presented is to probe the nature of the relationships forged between humans and machines when the latter are interlocutors and creators and not merely passive recipients of data through interaction. what new ethical issues are emerging as machines create journalism, as they create music and interact in performance, as they engage in research, as they become a part of childrens’ social circle? these questions are distinct from, but incorporate, some of the discussions and interventions that have been taking place regarding artificial intelligence (gunkel, 2012), machine learning (e.g., seyfert & roberge, 2016) and algorithmic bias (e.g., beer, 2019). research in these areas has generally considered traditional forms of interaction, such as those via keyboard, text, camera and screen, but new modes of panel interaction are occurring with devices that seek to be vocal, photorealistic, robotic, and that seek to foster interactions that can build relationships over time in increasingly anthropomorphic fashion. research in this area needs to be extended to consideration of the performative aspects of human-machine communication, and that focus is what ties these papers together. rather than consider the interactions between human and machine as isolated occurrences or mediated communication, as transmission, the aim is to examine human-machine communication as ritual, as occurring within existing contexts of communication and interaction that carry multiple, dynamic cultural meanings and values (carey, 1989). from such a perspective the ethical considerations both become more clear but also more complicated as they are situated within larger contexts of culture, history and meaning-making. references beer, d. (2019). the data gaze: capitalism, power and perception.london: sage publications, ltd. carey, j. w. (1989). communication as culture: essays on media and society. boston: unwin hyman, inc. gunkel, d. j. (2012). the machine question: critical perspectives on ai, robots, and ethics. cambridge, mass.: mit press. seyfert, r. and roberge, j. (2016). algorithmic cultures: essays on meaning, performance and new technologies. london: routledge. 1. should machines write about death? ethics in automated journalism andrea guzman northern illinois university this presentation examines the philosophical and theoretical challenges of the ethics of automated journalism. it traces current approaches to journalism ethics that are primarily grounded in existing standards for human journalists and emerging efforts to address the shift in the role of technology in the journalism process from channel to “author.” taking the question, “should machines write about death?” as provocation, i argue that existing journalism research and professional codes fall short in addressing the complication that machines as communicators pose to the ontological assumptions underlying journalism ethics. i advocate for journalism and media scholars to engage with scholarship within human-machine communication (hmc) and philosophy of technology to progress journalism and media ethics in a way that is responsive to the changing nature of technology. provocation: should machines write about death? automated journalism is the use of news-writing software to develop stories from data (carlson, 2015). this software, adopted into news organizations worldwide, develops reports, such as stories regarding sports or crime, from raw data, such as game or crime statistics. initial research has found that readers cannot distinguish between basic reports written by humans and machines (e.g., graefe et al, 2018). during a discussion regarding automated journalism and its applications in a course i teach, some students remarked that these programs should not be used to report murder because doing so would be “disrespectful.” it is disrespectful to the victim and their family because a machine would be writing about a deeply personal and human event. other students countered that there could be advantages to software producing stores about death, such as a decreased likelihood of mistakes within the story. emerging ethical questions and guidelines considering the provocation that emerged from the student discussion, i first turn to emerging research and professional codes regarding the ethics of journalism automation. experts have relied upon standards that preceded news-writing software to identify ethical issues regarding automated journalism, including bias, accuracy, and transparency (e.g., dörr & hollnbuchner, 2017). for example, the edicts of ethical journalism require journalists to act in a transparent manner, avoiding conflicts of interest and being forthright in their conduct. the transparency standard mapped onto automated journalism requires journalists to disclose the use of news-writing software to the audience (e.g., montal & reich, 2017). regarding bias, media are advised to understand the potential for bias within the design of the software more generally and the data being fed into it so as to avoid reproducing such biases (e.g., ananny, 2016). the focus regarding the ethics of automated journalism has been on integrating this software into the newsroom in ways that uphold existing standards for content and are transparent about the technology’s use. missing from discussions regarding the ethics of automated technology is debate regarding whether news-writing software should be adopted or in which contexts: such questions have been approached primarily as technological issues. ethical considerations enter into the technological debate when questions exist regarding whether the software can produce content that meets ethical standards (i.e., accurate, objective). an indirect answer to the provocation, therefore, could be found in weighing the degree to which the software produces accurate stories about death. however, emerging standards cannot provide guidance regarding the question of whether it is “disrespectful” for machines to write about human death. ontological challenge to journalism ethics next, i explain why initial research and emerging professional codes cannot fully address the provocation. ethical standards regarding automated journalism are largely silent regarding whether machines should write about death because at issue is the nature of the machine as “author.” it is a question of who, or what, is producing the content or, in communication terms, the communicator, rather than a quandary regarding the content, or message, which has been the focus of emerging standards. communication theory historically has been based on the ontological assumption that within the process of communication, people perform the role of communicator and machines occupy the role of mediator. communication and journalism ethics have been grounded in these same ontological assumptions (gunkel, 2018). in developing codes of ethics prior to the introduction of ai and algorithms, experts did not have to give consideration to the ontology of the communicator because it was assumed to always be the same, a human. the focus of journalism ethics was on developing standards for content and guidelines regarding people’s actions relative to those standards. adapting these codes to automated journalism has not resulted in consideration for the ontology of the news producer because such consideration was not initially part of these codes. what is needed to fully address the question of machines writing about death and similar questions based upon the nature of the communicator is for scholars to more firmly grapple with the ontological nature of humans and machines and their shifting role within communication. human-machine communication & philosophy of technology lastly, i explain how scholars can draw from human-machine communication (hmc) and philosophy of technology to meet the challenge of automated technologies for the study of journalism ethics. as argued by lewis et al. (2019), hmc is an emerging area of research that offers a theoretical starting point for understanding the shifting roles of humans and machines in journalism. in contrast to scholarship focused on people as communicators, hmc examines the role of machines as communicators and the implications thereof. while hmc can help scholars better understand technology as communicator, rather than mediator, a second body of work is needed to assist scholars in thinking through the shifting nature of humans and machines, and here i point them to philosophy of technology. among its many different lines of inquiry, the multifaceted field of philosophy of technology examines what technology is and the nature of humans and machines relative to one another (mitcham, 1994). working through the relevant literature in both bodies of scholarship will enable scholars to better identify and address ethical questions regarding not only existing technologies of journalism automation but also the ai-enabled applications yet to come. references ananny, m. (2016). toward an ethics of algorithms: convening, observation, probability, and timeliness. science, technology, & human values, 41, 93–117. carlson, m. (2015). the robotic reporter: automated journalism and the redefinition of labor, compositional forms, and journalistic authority. digital journalism 3, 416–431. dörr, k.n., hollnbuchner, k. (2017). ethical challenges of algorithmic journalism. digital journalism 5, 404-419. graefe, a., haim, m., haarmann, b., & brosius, h.-b. (2018). readers’ perception of computer-generated news: credibility, expertise, and readability. journalism 19, 1–16. gunkel, d. j. (2018). ars ex machina: rethinking responsibility in the age of creative machines. in a. l. guzman (ed.), human-machine communication: rethinking communication, technology, and ourselves (pp. 221–236). peter lang. lewis, s. c., guzman, a. l., & schmidt, t. r. (2019). automation, journalism, and human–machine communication: rethinking roles and relationships of humans and machines in news. digital journalism, 7(4), 409–427. mitcham, carl. (1994). thinking through technology: the path between engineering and philosophy. university of chicago press montal, t., & reich, z. (2017). i, robot. you, journalist. who is the author?: authorship, bylines and full disclosure in automated journalism. digital journalism, 5, 829–849. 2. pepper’s ghost and the ethics of augmenting reality thomas conner university of california san diego pop music stages around the world are being colonized by the digital dead. within the last decade, “holograms” of numerous deceased pop stars — including michael jackson, roy orbison, and ronnie james dio — have had their images, personas, and estate incomes resurrected via a technical display that revives a novel mode of mediated performance: projecting life-sized, seemingly 3d imagery of human bodies that appear to be screenless and present in the same space as the spectator. what are the particular messages of this medium? what, aside from the memory of a dead person, might these rituals be reviving? this paper considers contemporary “hologram” performances amid existing scholarship around augmented-reality (ar) technologies. i argue that “holograms,” broadly defined, reify and enhance essentially ideological and haunted aspects of modern media. i bring a historical case to bear on this “new” phenomenon in order to surface similarities in technical function and audience reception that should be highlighted by future scholarship around these performances. the medium is the ideology i n 2012, tupac shakur appeared at the coachella valley music & arts festival — a performance notable chiefly because the late rapper had been shot and killed 16 years earlier. shakur’s image had been digitally revived, refreshed, and reconstituted as a new technical projection onto a transparent onstage screen, where it appeared to be a present body in proportion to and duetting with human co-stars. shakur’s appearance had been promoted as a secret guest star — as a person, not a media system. responses to the initial performance (as recorded in audience tweets within the first 24 hours after the concert) conflated the spectacle as both a mediated image (“that tupac hologram”) and as a more embodied aspect of presence — as a person (“that man is fine!”), as an uncanny figure (“call him zombie tupac”), and as a specter (“i saw the ghost of tupac perform”). most responses also described the phenomenon using discourses of futurism and novelty. the technical assemblage presenting these performative phenomena is a barely modified version of a stage illusion made famous in the mid-1800s called pepper’s ghost. the original illusion arranges actors, lights, and mirrors in order to reflect the image of a person into a separate space, as if that person were present instead of absent; the 21st-century version merely substitutes digital projection and mylar to achieve the same effect. the illusion succeeds only if its technics are hidden, purposely performing the interaction as “live” and interpersonal rather than an encounter with a mediated image-object. pepper’s ghost became a popular theatrical device after its 1862 debut, but the illusion was not developed in the context of stage magic or popular entertainment; rather, it was refined at a museum of science, the royal polytechnic institution in london, in direct support of the institute’s rigorously ideological mission of social engineering. the polytechnic sought to educate britons in the ways of being modern, which meant promoting discourses of enlightenment rationalism and technoscientific superiority. the namesake of pepper’s ghost, john henry pepper, seized upon the technical illusion and performed it without the intent to deceive; pepper purposely revealed the illusion after each performance, thus demonstrating to audiences a rational and natural explanation for seemingly supernatural experiences. pepper’s change of intent, however, merely reversed the visible and invisible aspects of the experience, making clear its material origins while obfuscating its ideology. media and the spectral u-turn this paper examines these historical origins of pepper’s ghost in order to interrogate its reemergence in the 21st century as an interaction haunted by both the ghostly content of its messages and the ideological potential of its medium. first, the technical imagery of this illusion constitutes an early iteration of ar display. the broader concept of reality augmentation has been likened to the imposition of social discourses. slavoj zizek claims that ar tech simply “externalizes … the basic mechanism of ideology” and that “at its most basic, ideology is the primordial version of ‘augmented reality’” (zizek, 2017, p. 114). this is precisely how pepper viewed the presentation of his ghost, and presentday spectators should consider this particular messaging potential inherent to the medium. i connect these evaluations through the communication philosophy of vilém flusser, who not only frames these visual phenomena within a specific knowledgeproduction category called “technical imagery” but who evolves traditional apparatus theory beyond cinema to apply its ideological structures within the situated contexts of digital and virtual experiences (flusser, 1984, 2011). secondly, the technical imagery in these presentations constitutes a mediated, ritual haunting. the “spectral turn” within cultural studies has furthered the modern project of transforming ghosts from supernatural entities into conceptual metaphors (blanco & peeren, 2013; gordon, 2008) and communication scholars have examined media’s spiritualist origins and occult nature within largely metaphorical framings (carey, 1989; peters, 1999; sconce, 2000) — film seems ghostly, radio sounds like a haunting voice. i argue that these “holograms,” broadly defined, boost this spectral signal, reifying and concretizing essentially haunted aspects of modern media. the slightly transparent imagery of a “hologram” body doesn’t just seem spectral; it appears to be present before a spectator in many of the ways common to descriptions of spirits and specters across worldwide cultures, in which ghosts are not uncanny ideals but present, material actors. contemporary “holograms” call for a spectral u-turn, retreating from metaphor to reconsider the imagery anew as an embodied social actor. this discussion does not ask whether we believe in ghosts but, rather, what we might be led to believe when we see actual ghosts. references blanco, m. d. p., & peeren, e. (eds.). (2013). the spectralities reader: ghosts and haunting in contemporary cultural theory. new york & london: bloomsbury. carey, j. w. (1989). communication as culture: essays on media and society. boston & london: unwin hyman. flusser, v. (1984). towards a philosophy of photography. göttingen, west germany: european photography. flusser, v. (2011). into the universe of technical images (n. a. roth, trans.). minneapolis & london: univ. of minnesota press. gordon, a. f. (2008). ghostly matters: haunting and the sociological imagination. minneapolis & london: univ. of minnesota press. peters, j. d. (1999). speaking into the air: a history of the idea of communication. chicago: univ. of chicago. sconce, j. (2000). haunted media: electronic presence from telegraphy to television. durham & london: duke univ. press. zizek, s. (2017). incontinence of the void: economico-philosophical spandrels (nov. 7 ed.). cambridge, mass. & london: mit press. 3. robot, what do you feel? ethical design of relational robots for children ekaterina pashevich university of oslo introduction the internet of toys, a part of the internet of things, is gaining momentum (mcreynolds et al., 2017). along with smart sensors and the internet connection, some of these toys benefit from more advanced versions of robotic technologies. the fascinating emotional expressiveness of the anki’s robot cozmo shows the ambition of this industry. moreover, the pioneers of the field of social robotics often used the relatively simple electronic toys – tamagotchi, furby and aibo – to illustrate their theories (breazeal, 2002). thus, the internet of toys represents the first step towards the industry of social robots for children (peter et al., 2019). social robots are being developed for long-term emotional communication with children (breazeal et al, 2016) and are often designed to take human roles: friends, assistants, teachers, babysitters, etc. a trend can be noticed of integrating robots into children’s early social circles. robots like kaspar already help children with autistic spectrum condition develop their social skills (wood et al., 2019). there are also a number of projects with robotic tutors (vasagar, 2017). early childhood is a period of rapid social and emotional development, when children exercise prosocial behaviors (hoffman, 2000; eisenberg et al., 2016). setting robots in roles meant for humans creates a precedent of potentially acquiring social and emotional skills from communication with machines. if we allow robots being used in such roles as teachers, babysitters, peers and caregivers, how should they then be designed? and can they be designed so? the topic of this presentation is ethical design of social robots for empathic communication with children. i am searching for the necessary components, which should be present in the design of social robots so that children could still develop empathy when communicating with them. theoretical framework one of the main social skills that children develop in early childhood is empathy – the ability to feel the similar feelings to another and to understand those feelings without getting overwhelmed by them (spinrad & eisenberg, 2017, p. 2). despite the arguably significant genetic predisposition (knafo & uzefovsky, 2013), children develop empathy from the first days of life and until at least the age of 12 in social interactions with early stable contacts: parents, peers and teachers (heyes, 2018). empathy consists of affective and cognitive components, which are two separate systems in the brain (shamay-tsoory et al., 2009). affective empathy develops as a result of early emotional contagion until the age of 2 (coplan, 2011, p. 46), while cognitive empathy depends on the learned associations between the external emotional expressions and internal states: feelings, intentions, goals, desires, preferences, etc. (decety et al., 2017, p. 6). this learning happens gradually as a result of the process of role taking, mainly during cooperative peer play, which starts approximately when children enter pre-school (brownell et al., 2002). computational empathy is a relatively new area in robotics, which works on modeling empathic behavior in machines. paiva et al. (2017) and yalçın and dipaola (2020) have provided extensive reviews on the current state of the field and found three main methodological approaches: analytical, empirical and developmental. human-machine communication (hmc) field of communication studies allows for regarding technology as a communicator instead of a medium through which the message is transmitted (guzman, 2018). i discuss empathic child-robot communication as a case of interpersonal communication, where one of the communicators is a social robot simulating empathic behavior. method in order to identify the necessary components in robots for empathic communication with children, i review the theories of empathy development from psychology and neuroscience to operationalize the empathic behavior needed for the normal development of empathy. then i analyze the current computational theories of empathy from the perspective of their sufficiency for providing a satisfactory empathic communication to be used with children. results and discussion human social interaction is indispensable for the development of empathy in children, because it provides enough warmth and care for the emotional contagion, and human behavior is more complex and flexible to provide enough training material for role taking and, consequently, the development of cognitive empathy. the current computational models of empathy rarely use comprehensive empathy models. moreover, these models are only tested in short-term, restricted laboratory contexts, and their evaluation measures include: the quality and adequacy of expressed emotions, believability, social presence, friendship, anthropomorphism, and perceived intelligence (paiva et al., 2017, p. 33). to provide a satisfactory level of empathic communication when used with children, the robots should be equipped with such features as: biographical storytelling, which allows for sharing individual preferences and personal history; expressions of rich emotional palette through social cues (face, gestures, verbal, body language); intentional behavior; behavioral routines for maintaining long-term relationships; and the demonstration of memories of the relationship with the child. references breazeal, c. l. (2002). designing sociable robots. mit press. breazeal, c., dautenhahn, k., kanda, t. (2016). social robotics. in: siciliano b., khatib o. (eds.) springer handbook of robotics. springer handbooks. springer, cham. brownell, c.a., zerwas, s., balaraman, g. (2002). peers, cooperative play, and the development of empathy in children. behavioral and brain sciences, 25, 1, 28-29. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x02300013 coplan, a. (2011). will the real empathy please stand up? a case for a narrow conceptualization. southern journal of philosophy, 49, 40–65. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-6962.2011.00056.x decety, j., meidenbauer, k. l., cowell, j. m. (2017). the development of cognitive empathy and concern in preschool children: a behavioral neuroscience investigation. developmental science, 21, 3, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12570 eisenberg, n., van schyndel, s. k., spinrad, t. l. (2016). prosocial motivation: inferences from an opaque body of work. child development, 87, 6, 1668-1678. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12638 guzman, a. (2018). introduction: what is human-machine communication, anyway? in guzman, a. (ed.) human-machine communication. ny: peter lang. heyes, c. (2018). empathy is not in our genes. neuroscience & biobehavioral reviews. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2018.11.001 hoffman, m. l. (2000). empathy and moral development: implications for caring and justice. new york: cambridge university press. knafo, a., uzefovsky, f. (2013). variation in empathy: the interplay of genetic and environmental factors. in legerstee, m., haley, d.w., bornstein, m.h. (eds.) the infant mind: origins of the social brain (pp. 97–122). new york: guilford press. mcreynolds, e., hubbard, s., lau, t., saraf, a., cakmak, m., & roesner, f. (2017). toys that listen: a study of parents, children, and internet-connected toys. proceedings of the 2017 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 5197-5207). denver, colorado, may 6-11, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025735 paiva, a., leite, i., boukricha, h., wachsmuth, i. (2017). empathy in virtual agents and robots: a survey. acm transactions on interactive intelligent systems, 7, 3, article 11, 1-40. https://doi.org/10.1145/2912150 peter, j., kühne, r., barco, a., de jong, c., van straten, c.l. (2019). asking today the crucial questions of tomorrow: social robots and the internet of toys. in mascheroni, g., holloway, d. (eds.) the internet of toys. palgrave mcmillan. shamay-tsoory, s. g., aharon-peretz, j., perry, d. (2009). two systems for empathy: a double dissociation between emotional and cognitive empathy in inferior frontal gyrus versus ventromedial prefrontal lesions. brain: a journal of neurology, 132, 3, 617–27. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awn279 spinrad, t.l., eisenberg, n. (2017). compassion in children. in seppälä, e.m., simonthomas, e., brown, s.l., worline, m.c., cameron, c.d., doty, j.r. (eds.) the oxford handbook of compassion science. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190464684.013.5 vasagar, j. (2017, july 13). how robots are teaching singapore’s kids. financial times. retrieved from https://www.ft.com/content/f3cbfada-668e-11e7-8526-7b38dcaef614 wood, l.j., zaraki, a., robins, b., dautenhahn, k. (2019). developing kaspar: a humanoid robot for children with autism. international journal of social robotics, 118. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-019-00563-6 yalçın, ö.n., dipaola, s. (2020). modeling empathy: building a link between affective and cognitive processes. artificial intelligence review, 53, 2983–3006. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-019-09753-0 4. the ethics of social robots in research steve jones university of illinois chicago it is already clear that data is being collected from humans with and through computers and other devices. will the rapid dissemination of sensors, microphones, cameras, and other “internet of things” (iot) devices usher in an age of ubiquitous data collection? this paper examines the consequences of using emerging technologies to collect types of data traditionally used in social science research. advances in technologies in the realms of artificial intelligence (ai), robotics, human augmentics, and machine learning portend significant changes to the practice of social science. data collection & automation scholars have long documented and discussed that myriad technologies collect data about users (amoore and piotukh, 2016). while such techniques are common in the private sector as a means to target individual users for messaging and marketing (as was made most clear in 2018 news reports about the facebook and cambridge analytica controversy) it is not clear that academic researchers are availing themselves of such techniques for social science research, nor whether such techniques are readily available to them. they are, however, available at least to some extent. indeed, the cambridge analytica controversy had at its inception a cambridge university psychology professor who built an app that, with facebook’s permission, collected data from a personality survey. (that data was subsequently shared with cambridge analytica, a private political consulting firm, contravening facebook’s data sharing policies.) the majority of the data collected through such efforts, likely all of it, is textual, encompassing user profiles, postings, location and click-throughs. it would not be surprising to learn that the data included audio and/or video recordings, as well as location over time (via mobile data, wi-fi, or even bluetooth beacons). there are existing technologies that could expand on the type of data collected. eye tracking has long been used in industry and academic research. use of devices like microsoft’s kinect could enable collection of gestures and movements. augmented reality (ar) enabled devices could collect data via facial recognition. and, with devices like microsoft’s hololens, which incorporates a rudimentary form of emotion recognition, users’ emotional states could be recorded. deb roy used some of these techniques in the 2000s to study language development in children, deploying numerous cameras and microphones in his own house to capture his child’s development of language (roy, et al, 2006). in that scenario technology was used entirely for surveillance and not for interaction but it would now not be easy to imagine such technology in the home as an interlocutor thanks to devices like amazon alexa or jibo. indeed, instead of an app like the one employed by the cambridge university researcher, might one imagine a digital assistant, like alexa, cortana, siri, or jibo, collecting data? furthermore, might one imagine a robot collecting data? empathic robots, such as those envisioned by stahl and colleagues (stahl, et al, 2014) in an essay on responsible research innovation, may also collect physiological, internet of things (iot) and gesture data (see, e.g,, pu and colleagues’ description of a gesture recognition system that enables whole-home sensing and human gesture recognition via wi-fi signals (pu, et al, 2013)). these types of questions are at the heart of what this paper hopes to engage. research & labor indeed, important elements that were technologically not feasible to implement ten years ago, like clear speech synthesis and natural language processing (nlp), have in the meantime become widely available. it is not difficult to imagine that digital assistants could be used as interviewers that could undertake survey or focus group tasks, or otherwise engage in research involving speaking with human subjects. intelligent agents are already employed for this purpose in customer service roles via telephone and web chat. the demonstration of google duplex in may, 2018 at google’s developer conference showed just how well a digital interlocutor can mimic human conversation (and showed just as well its potential for deceit) and there is no reason to think it could not be put to use as a type of digital interviewer. it is also not difficult to imagine rolling together all of, or some combination of, the aforementioned elements, from facial and emotion recognition to location tracking (macro and micro) to nlp to speech in a social robot that can act as a researcher, or, at least, as a digital research assistant (dra). considering that social robots interact with humans in novel ways it is worth opening a debate about the use of technology as a researcher. where does one draw a line between the researcher and the researcher’s digital assistant? the question of dra analysis of data begs yet another question, namely the ownership and security of what could be private, indeed intimate, data, and deductions made from it. particularly in the case of analyses of the data it is important to consider the locus of responsibility for consequences of computer and algorithm-driven research. would a dra be responsible, for instance, for lines of critical questioning devised by its algorithm that could cause emotional harm to a human subject with which it was interacting? or would it be the developer of the dra, or developer of the algorithm, or…? it is not a simple matter to determine the locus particularly if a dra is developing its own research threads by way of machine learning. conclusion the title of this paper is meant to be provocative; it would have been simple to alter it to “can social scientists use social robots?” and describe the many ways that they could. ethical issues would still arise and be important to consider. but we are very close to, if not past, the point that machines could engage in what are rather typical activities in which social scientists engage. the provocation is not meant to be simply or merely a thought experiment but rather a call to critical discussion and debate. references amoore, louise and piotukh, volha (2016). the algorithmic life: calculative devices in the age of big data. routledge, new york, ny. roy, d., patel, r., decamp, p., kubat, r., fleischman, m., roy, b., mavridis, n., tellex, s., salata, a., guinness, j., levit , m., and gorniak, p. (2006). the human speechome project. paper presented at the 28th annual conference of the cognitive science society, july 2006. retrieved august 4, 2018 from https://www.media.mit.edu/cogmac/publications/cogsci06.pdf. stahl, b. c., mcbride, n., wakunuma, k. and flick, c. (2014). the empathic care robot: a prototype of responsible research and innovation. technological forecasting & social change, 84: 74-85. pu, q., gupta, s., gollakota, s. and patel, s. (2013). whole-home gesture recognition using wireless signals. mobicom ’13. acm doi 10.1145/2500423.2500436 aoir2018-submission-template selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 zago, g, recuero, r., soares, f.. (2018, october 10-13). political fandoms and superparticipants in political conversations on twitter. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. political fandoms and superparticipants in political conversations on twitter gabriela zago university of oregon raquel recuero universidade federal de pelotas felipe soares universidade federal do rio grande do sul introduction in this proposal, we discuss the role of superparticipants in political conversations on twitter. according to graham and wright (2013), a superparticipant is an actor that participates more than average. in the discussion forums analyzed by the authors, superparticipants helped other users by summarizing contents or setting the agenda for the debate. we believe these participants are also important in social media discussions because they give visibility to specific topics, sometimes influencing the debate. we are especially interested in users with a higher outdegree count in twitter conversations related to the brazilian political scenario, and how they affect the political debate and the information diffusion. our study aims to understand who these superparticipants are and how they influence twitter networks. we believe that these highly active users show a clear political position and intentionally act to give visibility to some topics and to reduce the visibility of others, practices that are similar to those observed among fans in popular culture. thus, we ask: who are the superparticipants? how can they influence the political conversation and information diffusion? do their activities result in the formation of political fandoms? theoretical background regarding theoretical background, we use concepts related to political polarization. sunstein (2001) calls echo chambers the like-minded political groups that have low or no contact with other views. these echo chambers might create individuals with more radicalized views and with a high difficulty in understanding other views. a similar context is described by pariser (2011), when the author analyzed the social filtering and the algorithm actions on social media. this combination might isolate users inside the filter bubbles, where they only receive like-minded information. the echo chambers and filter bubbles may cause fragmentation in political discussion. it is a threaten for the public sphere formation in these spaces since the contact with the contradictory is essential for deliberation (papacharissi, 2009; wojcieszak & mutz, 2009; fuchs, 2015). these structures tend to form what smith et al (2014) call “polarized crowds,” a social network structure based on two polarized groups with low contact between them. when the superparticipants are inside polarized groups, they tend to reinforce their thoughts, by only retweeting like-minded messages. this same pattern of behavior can be observed among fans. in this context, the superparticipant behavior is similar to fans within a fandom. several authors discuss the role of fans, anti-fans, and fandoms (jenkins, 1992, gray, 2003, fiske, 1992), and, mainly, political fandoms (erikson, 2008, sandvoss, 2013, parikh, 2012). while a fan is someone that engages deeply with a specific cultural product, fandom is a group of individuals that share the same interests, "forming a sense of collective or subcultural identity around shared tastes” (brough and shesthova, 2011, p.2). a political fandom, in this sense, would be a group of people that vehemently defend a particular political view in this case, the political enthusiasm can be seen as a form of media fandom (sandvoss, 2013). methods we use social network analysis (wasserman and faust, 1994, degenne and forse, 1999) metrics to identify: (1) modularity of the network and, thus, determine groups that lead the conversation and (2) users that receive more attention than others (higher indegree) or mention more other users (higher outdegree). while influence is mostly associated with a higher indegree, users with a higher outdegree also influence the discussion, because, as superpaticipants, they can help individual ideas to gain visibility and have an influence on the information spread within networks. we also used qualitative observation to examine these accounts and their tweets. we collected tweets related to the impeachment of the brazilian ex-president dilma rousseff in 2016 using nodexl. we selected three critical dates of the process to analyze the superparticipants and their actions. in those datasets, we identified the top 12 users with the higher outdegree, which means users that mentioned other users more frequently within each dataset. we then qualitatively analyzed the characteristics of each of those users, such as user bio, average tweets/day, amplification (how many of the recent tweets were retweets) and which types of accounts they retweeted. results by observing the top 12 users with higher outdegree in each network, we noticed some patterns and behaviors that can characterize those users as political fans. many state their political position in their profile description, while others even use a partisan image as a profile picture. most of the users have a high average of tweets (up to more than 300 tweets a day) and post mostly or exclusively retweets to other accounts with similar political views. in fact, in some cases these accounts seem automated, considering the volume of tweets and the persistence with retweeting messages with the same political views. in all the networks we analyzed, we found the formation of polarized crowds. the superparticipants with higher outdegree were always inside one of the two groups of the network, and the messages they retweeted were from users with political views similar to theirs that were also within the same group. our main finding is that these superparticipants with higher outdegree helped to shape the polarized networks by retweeting like-minded accounts, and thus are important and influence the study of polarized political networks on twitter. they act as political fans, actively engaged in giving visibility to the ideas they agree. references brough, m., shresthova, s. (2011). fandom meets activism: rethinking civic and political participation. transformative works and cultures. degenne, a., forse, m. (1999). introducing social networks. london: sage publications. erikson, e. (2008). “hillary is my friend”: myspace and politicam fandom. rocky mountain communication review. fiske, j. (1992). the cultural economy of fandom. in lewis, l. (ed.) the adoring audience: fan culture and popular media. london and new york: routledge, 30-49. fuchs, c. (2015). mídias sociais e a esfera pública. revista contracampo, 34(3), 5-80. graham, t., wright, s. (2013). discursive equality and everyday talk online: the impact of “superparticipants”. journal of computer-mediated communication. 19(3), 625-642. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcc4.12016/full gray, j. (2003). new audiences, new textualities: anti-fans and non-fans. international journal of cultural studies, 6(1). jenkins, h. (1992). textual poachers: television fans & participatory culture. routledge. papacharissi, z. (2009). the virtual sphere 2.0: the internet, the public sphere and beyond. in: chadwick, a., howard, p. n. (eds). routledge handbook of internet politics. london and new york: routledge (p. 230-245). parikh, k. (2012). political fandom in the age of social media: case study of barack obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. media@lse electronic msc dissertation series. pariser, e. (2011). the filter bubble. new york: the penguin press. sandvoss, c. (2013). torward an understanding of political enthusiasm as media fandom: blogging, fan productivity and affect in american politics. participations, 10(1). sunstein, c. (2001). echo chambers. princeton: princeton university press. smith, m.; rainie, l.; himelboim, i.; shneiderman, b. (2014). mapping twitter topic networks: from polarized crowds to community clusters. pew research center. wasserman, s., faust, k. (1994). social network analysis. cambridge: cambridge university press. wojcieszak, m. e., mutz, d. c. (2009). online groups and political discourse: do online discussion spaces facilitate exposure to political disagreement? journal of communication, 59(1), p. 40-56. aoir2018-submission-decastellskardzius selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): de castell,s., skardzius,k. (2018, october 10-13 public speech: listening to women in the videogame industry. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. public speech: listening to women in the videogame industry suzanne de castell university of ontario institute of technology karen skardzius york university background “i feel like we should be asking ourselves less what should game studios be doing to encourage women into the industry, and [more about] what could change about our culture to make women feel welcome and able to speak freely”. since the 1990s, conversations about the dearth of women working in the video game industry have centered on three topics: 1) ways to draw more women into the field, 2) the experiences of women working in the industry, and 3) the experiences of those who once worked in the industry but left (cassell & jenkins, 1998; hepler, 2017; kafai, heeter, denner & sun, 2008). while there has been considerable research on the conditions and occupational identities of video game developers, less scholarly attention has been devoted to women in games work, the barriers/obstacles and challenges/opportunities they face, or how they talk about their experiences. our study concentrates on what women employed by the industry have to say about the subject and how they are saying it. what we have found is a considerable gap between how women’s working conditions are reported in both research and popular press, and how women in the games industry speak about them “in public”. methodologically, this discourse-analytic study is guided by taylor’s (1998) five features of feminist methodology: “a focus on gender and gender inequality, a spotlight on the everyday experiences of women, reflexivity as a source of insight, an emphasis on participatory methods, and a policy or action component” (360). our research seeks to enhance women’s resources rather than exploit them. we found that the women whose viewpoints we are interested in have persistently and emphatically conveyed their frustration about having to speak so often about and for their gender. game developer brenda romero describes the problem as the “female tax”: the extra time and effort women who make games must expend in discussing gender on top of their work, whenever they engage in any type of public speaking. taking their public voices seriously, listening to what women in games have already said on this issue, led us to use existing interviews and discussions of gender and/in the games industry from various media as primary data. in other words, instead of surveying and interviewing prospective informants, this study looked to see who among the group of women who work in the games industry has already invested her time and energy to tell a public story, whether that is in a blog posting, a book chapter, a televised talk, a radio interview, or other public media, and built the foundations of the study by focusing on that sub-group. following our analysis of this data, we began efforts to contact the women included in this study for the purpose of “member checking” – both to ensure the accuracy of our representations and to offer an alternative space for discussion outside the constraints of public speech. the study includes analysis based on public accounts from 190 women working predominantly in north america. using the list of 190 names, we began looking for anything these women had said 'in public' about their work. we completed a series of internet searches, first using each woman’s name, then their name and “video games”, and finally their name and “diversity”. using the texts as a kind of “virtual interview" material, we sought to answer some basic questions: where are they currently employed? how long have they worked in the industry? what role/job(s) do they fill? what education/experience do they have? what drew them to the industry? do they talk about gender/race/sexuality, and if so how? have they had to leave a job, and if so, why? do they describe positive experiences in industry? do they describe negative experiences in industry? what do they say about diversity? excerpting both factual information and narrative passages from these texts that responded to our initial set of queries, we compiled a spreadsheet of our research ‘data’ and began an initial coding pass. we organized the data into three broad categories, conceptualized as points at either end of an 'affectivity' continuum, from affirmative and 'positive' accounts through 'neutral', ‘how things are’ descriptions, to negative and ‘critical’ accounts. next, we selectively transcribed women’s public statements and sorted data into these categories on the basis of uses of ‘keywords’: for critical accounts, we used ‘bias’, ‘harassment’, and related terms; for positive accounts, “love”, “passion” and cognates. we added to the “critical” set, “barriers/obstacles”, and to the “positive” set “challenges/opportunities”. looking at how women talked about their work in games, we found positive accounts far more frequently voiced, and voiced by more women, than critical ones. where criticism was expressed, it was most often done so in ways that ‘de-fused’ the incident described; for instance, mentions of “bias” were most often further characterized as “unconscious” or “unintentional”, a variety of what clair (2009) calls “trivialization”. rosalind gill (2014) suggests that it is through discourses and practices of power that “gender inequality has become if not unspeakable, then, extremely difficult to voice” (511). so, when searching for patterns in those texts regarding who speaks, and in what ways, about their experiences working in the games industry, it is also important to ask who does not speak, what is not said, and why. this allows us to consider women's discursive decisions as strategic ones about what and how to speak publicly of their workplace experiences. what informs and constrains those decisions? in seeking to learn about workplace policies, wages, job descriptions or working conditions, and the varied ways these may be experienced by women involved, the further question is whether and how women speak publicly about them. analyzing uses of the words ‘love’ and ‘passion’ as rhetorical devices that express “positivity”, for example, the question we pose is about what kind of work these invocations of love and passion do in women’s accounts of their experiences and conditions. most frequently invoked is a love of video games, which, while that might well be true, may also be functioning as a rhetorical means of claiming authority and rationalizing one’s rightful presence in video game-making spaces. that makes sense if indeed many women find it difficult to feel they have a ‘place’ in the games industry. not only do women frequently point out that they currently love video games, but they point out that video games have been with them far longer than their job(s) making them. while making video games because you love them makes for a logical career choice, there is also a clearly critical undertone to many of the ways this love and/or passion is talked about. game developer anna megill directly addresses the tension between pursuing a career in making games because you love them, and the costs of doing so: “yes, there’s harassment and ugliness, but the industry is also full of creative, brilliant, passionate people. we all share a love of games. don’t let bullies stop you from being part of that” (fissenden, 2014). this paper demonstrates how identifying the rhetorical constraints that public speech imposes upon what can be said about “women in games” aids us in understanding what might remain unspoken, and why. references cassell, j., & jenkins, h. (1998). from barbie® to mortal kombat: gender and computer games. cambridge, mass: the mit press. clair, robin p. (1993). the use of framing devices to sequester organizational narratives: hegemony and harassment. communication monographs, vol. 60,113-136. fissenden, emma. (november 26, 2014). game changer: developer anna megill talks representation, riven, and ragequitting. retrieved february 28, 2018, from https://www.themarysue.com/game-changer-anna-megill/. gill, r. (2014). unspeakable inequalities: post feminism, entrepreneurial subjectivity, and the repudiation of sexism among cultural workers. social politics, 21(4), 509–528. https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxu016 hepler, j. b. (2017). women in game development: breaking the glass level-cap. boca raton, fl: crc press. kafai, y. b., c. heeter, j. denner & j. y. sun. (2008). beyond barbie and mortal kombat: new perspectives on gender and gaming. cambridge, mass: mit press. romero, brenda. (2016). tedx talks. the female tax. tedxsantacruz. retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1fcy-_lox4. taylor, v. (1998). feminist methodology in social movements research. qualitative sociology, 21(4), 357-379. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): linaa jensen, j. (2019, october 2-5). the return of medieval society – control surveillance and neo-feudalism in the age of the internet. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the return of medieval society – control, surveillance and neo-feudalism in the age of the internet jakob linaa jensen danish school of media and journalism abstract: in this paper the medieval period is used as a prism to analyze and contextualize the intersection of mutual surveillance, corporate capitalism and information control. it is claimed that the interplay between big tech companies, nation states’ battle for control and citizens’ participatory surveillance, for instance exercised through social media, resembles medieval principles of feudalism and tight social control. as such, this is basically a paper discussing power related to the internet, as it turns 50 years. the main argument is that apparently distinct social phenomena related to the dominance of internet technologies share the same logics of control, surveillance and power as the feudalism that dominated medieval society. the states and big corporations both compete and cooperate, just like the states and the church in middle ages. in this paper the medieval period is used as a prism to analyze and contextualize the intersection of mutual surveillance, corporate capitalism and information control. it is claimed that the interplay between big tech companies, nation states’ battle for control and citizens’ participatory surveillance, for instance exercised through social media, resembles medieval principles of feudalism and tight social control. as such, this is basically a paper discussing power related to the internet, as it turns 50 years. neo-medievalism the idea of comparing contemporary phenomena to historical epochs is of course not new. the internet, specifically, has been compared to the victorian age with the invention of the electrical telegraph (standage, 1998) and more recently couldry & mejias (2018) has used the term data colonialism in their analysis of big tech companies’ similarities with colonial powers in the 18th and 19th century. in this paper, i use the middle ages as a prism to understand the power regime of corporations and states, based on internet technologies. although, to my knowledge, this is the first attempt to connect the internet with medieval epoch, the period has been used as an analytical tool elsewhere. the term neo-medievalism is most notably affiliated with italian sociologist and philosopher umberto eco (1986) who uses the concept to describe a literary movement where figures and texts from medieval times are used in a contemporary context. in a more narrow sense of the word, neomedievalism has also been used in political theory on international relations. cerny (1998) and bull (2002: 245-46) characterize the modern, globalized political order as similar to medieval europe, where different kinds of territorial powers, along with the church, competed for sovereignty. internet technologies as a juggernaut of informational power it is a paradox that the internet, the ultimate symbol of modernity, transparency and enlightenment facilitates logics of enclosure, censorship and social control, similar to dominant principles of medieval society. the internet is used in the service of democracy and freedom movements around the world, but it is also used by dictatorships to clamp down on activists and opposition. new media technologies liberate and educate but they are also used to narrow our horizons, create informational bubbles and, wilfully or not, make us more ignorant and less aware of worlds unfamiliar to our own. in middle ages only the privileged classes could read and write and thereby were able to control information and exercise power. today, governments battle for the same kind of control through censorship in iran and social scoring in china. western democracies are moving along the same road as big data are used for crime prediction and monitoring the citizens, as for instance in united kingdom (hintz, dencik & wahljørgensen (2018). at the same time, the “big five”, microsoft, apple, google, facebook and amazon, strive for establishing informational silos, keeping the users within their own information environment. this is not an analysis specifically of corporate capitalism and economic logics based on the internet that have already been well described by for instance fuchs (2014), chandler & fuchs (2019) and zuboff (2019). rather it is an attempt to connect the information economy and the rise of participatory surveillance, addressing the power mechanisms behind and describe the development through the frame of medieval society. three tools of neo-medieval power although i discuss these trends on a macro level, i elaborate on tools by which the neomedieval power is exercised at a micro level. three examples: disinformation. whether state propaganda, commercial messages or fake news, disinformation is systematically spread and used to manipulate scare or control, similar to superstition and religious claims in middle ages, aimed at securing and strengthening the existing social order. virtual pillories. the pillory was a central feature of medieval cities, intended for shame and social control; you did not want to be there. social media are often used as modern pillories: people are judged, often without reason or sound claims by the “social media court”, long before any formal judicial verdict is reached. the consequences are real: companies live and die based on reviews by public opinion and, even worse, teenagers have committed suicide because of online bullying. participatory surveillance. medieval society was characterised by mutual surveillance in close-knit societies. later, surveillance was institutionalized and made impersonal, for instance by panoptic technologies (foucault, 1977). such technologies were very much based on formal exercise of power by authorities. today we are returning to medieval logics of mutual surveillance where we all participate in an omnopticon (jensen, 2007), willingly, through social media and the use of google. privacy is sacrificed for convenience. the new feudalism the original free, unregulated internet has been colonized, marketed and dominated by players like the big five, apple, microsoft, facebook, google and amazon, competing for attention, consumption and money. politicians and states, afraid of loosing power and control, try to censor, control and regulate, for the bad or for the good, employing persuasive discourses of combatting terrorism, protecting citizens and creating a more efficient society. therefore attempting broad, social analyses, grounded in a historical understanding of humans and society are of utmost importance. i will argue that the medieval perspective, understanding contemporary digital, social media-savvy society through metaphors and concepts from medieval society, is fruitful in order to investigate the social and political challenges facing us as the internet turns 50 years. the main argument is that apparently distinct social phenomena related to the dominance of internet technologies share the same logics of control, surveillance and power as the feudalism that dominated medieval society. the states and big corporations both compete and cooperate, just like the states and the church in middle ages. the paper is based on my coming book on the medieval internet. the paper summarizes the main points and invite conference delegates for a discussion of the neo-feudalism of the information economy. references bull, h. (2002). the anarchical society: a study of order in world politics, 3rd edn. basingstoke: palgrave. first published by london: macmillan, 1977. cerny, p. g. (1998). ”neomedievalism, civil war and the new security dilemma: globalisation as durable disorder”. civil wars, 1(1), pp. 36-64. chandler, d., & fuchs, c. (2019). digital objects, digital subjects. london: university of westminster press. couldry, n., & mejias, u. a. (2018). data colonialism: rethinking big data’s relation to the contemporary subject. television & new media. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476418796632 eco, u. (1986). "dreaming of the middle ages," in travels in hyperreality, transl. by w. weaver. ny: harcourt brace, 1986, pp. 61–72. foucault, m. (1977). discipline and punish. new york: vintage books. fuchs, c. (2014). social media: a critical introduction. london: sage. hintz, a., dencik, l., & wahl-jorgensen, k. (2018). digital citizenship in a datafied society. john wiley & sons. jensen, j. l. (2007). the internet omnopticon: surveillance or counter-insurgency. in new publics with/out democracy (pp. 351-380). samfundslitteratur press/nordicom. standage, t. (1998). the victorian internet: the remarkable story of the telegraph and the nineteenth century's online pioneers. london: phoenix. zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. london: profile books. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): esteve del valle m., & smit, r. (2020, october). moonwalking: tracing redditors’ digital memory work on michael jackson. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. moonwalking: tracing redditors’ digital memory work on michael jackson marc esteve del valle center for media and journalism studies, university of groningen rik smit center for media and journalism studies, university of groningen in this paper, we theoretically appropriate moonwalking to describe the memory work of michael jackson enthusiasts on the subreddit /r/michaeljackson. here, fans have been sharing thoughts, feelings, video clips, stories and photographs about the so-called king of pop since the page’s creation after his death in 2009. they have been engaging in discussions about michael jackson’s private and public life and debating how this controversial celebrity should be remembered posthumously. the mnemonic practices of redditors (reddit users), we argue, share characteristics of jackson’s dance technique. on the one hand, people engaged in the public construction of michael jackson’s memory go back in time. they use their own memories or archived content to emphasize particular elements of his public or private persona. on the other hand, they continually alter how he is remembered and forgotten, depending on the context of the present, which informs and shapes this process. working michael jackson’s memory, therefore, comprises active practices that go back in time, while also going forward, constructing an ever-changing image of this star celebrity. this dialectic is at the heart of any type of mediated memory work, from personal diary writing, to journalistic remembrance and national commemorations (van dijck, 2007; zelizer & tenenboim-weinblatt, 2014). with the phrase mediated memory work, following lohmeier and pentzold (2014), we indicate the conscious and dynamic process of reconstructing the past in the present and moving it into the future through the use of media. this involves both individual efforts (only an individual is able to remember) and, what halbwachs (1992) has called “the social frames of remembrance.”, i.e. frames that are constituted by specific group dynamics and contexts, and by broader societal norms and values. these theoretical observations are empirically assessed by a content analysis of mnemonic comments and replies (n=917) posted on the subreddit /r/michaeljackson. to collect our comments and replies, we wrote a crawler using python and the python reddit api wrapper (praw) library (boe, 2020). in total, we collected 20,431 comments and replies posted between june 25, 2009 (the day the subreddit was created) and december 31, 2018. the sampling process was intended to locate those comments and replies reflecting mnemonic activity. to do so, we employed a purposive sampling method, also referred to as judgmental sampling or expert sampling (battaglia, 2008). by using this sampling method, we collected all the comments and replies posted in the subreddit r/michaeljackson containing the following words: ‘remember*’, ‘death’, ‘memory’, ‘past’, ‘anniversary’, ‘birthday’, and ‘forget*’ (the asterisk indicates multiple endings of the word). this resulted in a final sample of 917 comments and replies. the selection of sampling keywords was based on concepts frequently discussed in studies on celebrity commemoration (cf. davies, 2012). next, we captured redditors’ layered, messy and complex digital memory work through a content analysis of 917 comments and replies. the coding manual is based on the previously discussed works on the relationship between (social) media, memory and celebrity, specifically mj (burgess, mitchell & münch, 2019; davies, 2012). redditors’ comments and replies comprised the unit of analysis. the reliability scores of all the categories (except for ‘the king of pop’ category -0.55-) range between high intercoder reliability (1) and a value of 0.62 which is an acceptable level (viera & garrett, 2005). for exploratory studies like ours, these alphas are considered reliable enough to draw out and develop cautionary conclusions. our data reveals the existence of 370 individual posters who posted 510 comments and 407 replies related to the memory of michael jackson in the subreddit /r/michaeljackson. within our sample, 533 posts were labeled as having at least one mnemonic dimension. that is, 58.12 % of the posts in our sample engaged in some form of memory work, which we defined as the conscious and dynamic process of reconstructing the past in the present by means of assembling historic facts, sharing personal memories, or otherwise aiming to stabilize michael jackson’s memory. when redditors’ engage in memory work, they are mostly sharing information about mj’s persona (23.37%), immediately followed by posts and comments containing personal memories related to mj (21. 68%). only 4.19% of the comments and replies in our sample were labeled as meta-memory, those posts that are concerned with how mj should be remembered. more granularly, regarding the dimension ‘mj’s persona’, our results show that the majority of the redditors’ comments and replies are about mj as being the ‘king of pop’ (7.73 %). these are closely followed by the comments and replies about mj death (6.64 %) and physical appearance (6.26 %). indeed, our analysis shows few comments on mj’s beneficence (3.96 %) and child abuse (3.87 %). concerning the dimension ‘personal memories’, our results reveal that redditors’ online memories are clearly linked to redditors’ personal memories about mj’s recorded music (9.42 %), followed by their memories on mj’s death (4.9 %) and scandals (3 %). finally, for the dimension ‘meta-memory’, our data shows 2.4 % of the comments and replies to be related to mj’s music and dance. these are followed by 1.53 % of comments and replies about mj’s as an individual. and only 0.27 % of comments and replies refer to mj as a celebrity. the empirical part of this paper supports the theoretical observation that individual attempts to stabilize the memory on michael jackson are leading to its dynamic nature. this dialectic is at the heart of any type of memory work, but it is amplified by this subreddit’s community of memory. importantly, though, we found that redditors are not so much concerned with how michael jackson should be remembered, but rather how he is remembered by them individually. the community of memory emerging around mj on this subreddit, then, revolves around the practice of sharing personal thoughts, memories and feelings concerning mj and less so on settling on a fixed memory of him. it is a community, though, since redditors seem genuinely interested in each other’s stories, and are coming together on the subreddit to seek out each other’s personal stories, which go back in time, but simultaneously forward; redditors are moonwalking, together. references battaglia, m. (2008). purposive sample. in encyclopedia of survey research methods (ed. paul j. lavrakas) (pp. 645-647). boe, b. (2020). praw: the python reddit api wrapper. retrieved from: https://praw.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ burgess, j., mitchell, p., & münch, f.v. (2019). social media rituals: the uses of celebrity death in digital culture. in z. papacharissi (ed.), a networked self and birth, life, death (pp. 224-239). new york: routledge. davies, c. (2012). no mere mortal? re-materialising michael jackson in death. celebrity studies,3(2), 183-196. halbwachs, m. (1992). on collective memory. (l. coser, trans.). chicago: u of chicago press. kitch, c. (2000). “a news of feeling as well as fact”: mourning and memorial in american news magazines, journalism, 1(2), 171-195. lohmeier, c., & pentzold, c. (2014). making mediated memory work: cubanamericans, miami media and the doings of diaspora memories. media, culture and society, 36(6), 776-789. doi:10.1177/0163443713518574 van dijck, j. (2007). mediated memories in the digital age. stanford: stanford university press. zelizer, b. & tenenboim-weinblatt, k., eds. (2014). journalism and memory. houndmills, basingstoke, hampshire: palgrave macmillan selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 henry, c. (2019, october 2-5). designing effective online advertisements for a prevention campaign: mistrust and other barriers. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. designing effective online advertisements for a prevention campaign: mistrust and other barriers claire henry massey university, aotearoa new zealand this paper reports on the preliminary findings of a research project that is investigating the potential for online advertisements to reduce the incidence of child sexual abuse material (csam) consumption on the internet. first time or novice offenders often use search engines to look for csam, which presents an opportunity to use display advertisements (for a 24-hour sexual harm helpline) on search results to intervene before users view abuse material. this approach—currently being piloted in new zealand—aims to decrease the number of potential/novice offenders accessing csam, and increase the number seeking help and self-referring for treatment. however, achieving these outcomes crucially depends upon the use of effective images and advertisements, and yet limited research has been undertaken on the characteristics of effective media-based interventions in this context. these outcomes also crucially depend on a two-way relationship of trust: on the one hand, the advertiser’s trust in primary prevention as a strategy, in the potential of online advertising to encourage behavioral change, and in the users’ likelihood of users self-referring contacting the helpline; and on the other hand, the users’ trust—or overcoming of mistrust—in both display advertising targeted at them1 and in the advertisers themselves (when engagement may involve overcoming fears about privacy, surveillance, prosecution, or stigmatization). this paper discusses the pivotal role of trust in informing the development of csam prevention display advertisements, arguing that facilitating this two-way relationship of trust is core to the success of a prevention campaign and must be embedded into its design. to create an effective prevention advertisement in this context requires understanding an onset offender’s mindset; what qualities of the image, text, and design are likely to capture their attention and encourage help-seeking; and what barriers may exist to behavioural change and help-seeking, such as the forms of mistrust at play in navigating online spaces and responding to advertisements. the qualitative focus group methodology of this project addresses the need to understand the responses to and perceptions of test advertisements from the closest target audience: participants who have previously been concerned about their own sexually harmful thoughts or behaviour and taken a leap of faith to seek specialist help. the berlin prevention project dunkelfeld similarly shaped its successful media campaign through a pilot study in which paedophiles were asked to identify features of a media campaign that they would be likely to respond to.2 the german prevention network notes that ‘further studies on the efficacy of such interventions are necessary’, given that ‘practically no comparable data on this exists on an international level’ (https://www.dont-offend.org/story/faq2.html). in the present research project in new zealand, potential advertisements have been underpinned by an examination of the body of literature that seeks to understand the characteristics and motivations of online offenders,3 as well as literature which seeks to identify the characteristics of effective display advertisements4 and mediabased prevention campaigns.5 work in the latter area tends to focus on psas rather than static advertisements, while work on effective online advertising (primarily banner ads) emerges from fields such as marketing, and is often not as applicable for public health prevention campaigns. research on fear appeals highlight the pitfalls of using fear to motivate behaviour change,6 but there is less research on specific details of content and form in prevention advertising. by producing test images and advertisements, and discussing these in focus groups and interviews, this research is developing an evidence-base for creating prevention advertisements that will be effective in ‘nudging’ potential offenders away from csam and toward seeking therapeutic intervention—shifts that require a significant fostering of trust. how to build trust into an online advertisement has become a key question and a creative challenge within this project. in this paper, i will present the creative and collaborative processes and solutions—including the final advertisement designs—and explore how they account for the centrality of trust. this research contributes to an approach that centres trust in the user, but how likely are novice offenders to call a helpline or self-refer for preventative therapeutic treatment? and can those working toward prevention trust that online advertising is an effective tool in combatting the growing consumption of csam? the stakes are high for the efficacy of early intervention initiatives for a number of reasons, including safeguarding an open internet. this study’s approach to prevention is not focused on restriction, filters or monitoring of internet users, but instead, on using the internet’s potential to create better pathways for potential offenders to seek help. without strategic early interventions in csam consumption—and the evidence-base to enhance success—a less effective blanket approach could be resorted to in policy responses (such as increased censorship). while targeted online advertising has great potential to reach the target demographic (potential offenders) at a critical moment, the paper will suggest that careful design and a consideration of the delicate two-way need for trust are essential in developing of effective online media-based prevention campaigns. references 1 bunker, m. p., bartholomew, d. e. (2010). a multidimensional framework of web browsers' trust and distrust of banner advertisements. international journal of business information systems, 5(1), 19-33. 2 beier, k. m., & neutze, j. (2012). proactive strategies to prevent the use of child abusive images: the dunkelfeld project. in e. quayle and k. m. ribisl (eds.), understanding and preventing online sexual exploitation of children (pp. 204-227). london: routledge. 3 henshaw, m., ogloff, j.r.p., & clough, j.a. (2017). looking beyond the screen: a critical review of the literature on the online child pornography offender. sexual abuse: a journal of research and treatment, 29(5), 416-445; seto, m. (2013). internet sex offenders. washington, dc: american psychological association; price, m., lambie, i., & krynen, a. m. (2015). new zealand adult internet child pornography offenders. journal of criminal psychology, 5(4), 262-278; ray, j. v., kimonis, e. r., & donoghue, c. (2010). legal, ethical, and methodological considerations in the internet-based study of child pornography offenders. behavioral sciences & the law, 28, 84-105. 4 namin, a., hamilton, m. l., & rohm, a. j. (2017). impact of message design on banner advertising involvement and effectiveness: an empirical investigation, journal of marketing communications; atkinson, g., driesener, c., & corkindale, d. (2014). search engine advertisement design effects on click-through rates. journal of interactive advertising, 14(1), 24-30; tseng, c.-h., & huang, t.-l. (2016). internet advertising video facilitating health communication: narrative and emotional perspectives. internet research, 26(1), 236-264; klapdor, s. (2013). effectiveness of online marketing campaigns: an investigation into online multichannel and search engine advertising. wiesbaden: springer gabler. 5 niederdeppe, j., avery, r. j., & miller, e. e. n. (2018). theoretical foundations of appeals used in alcohol-abuse and drunk-driving public service announcements in the united states, 1995-2010. american journal of health promotion, 32(4), 887-896; nan, x. (2008). the influence of liking for a public service announcement on issue attitude. communication research, 25(4), 503-528; paek, h.-j., hove, t., kim, m., & jeong, h. j. (2011). mechanisms of child abuse public service announcement effectiveness: roles of emotional response and perceived effectiveness. health communication, 26(6), 534545. 6 kok, g., et al. (2018). ignoring theory and misinterpreting evidence: the false belief in fear appeals. health psychology review, 12(2), 111-125; shen, l., & dillard, j. p. (2007). the influence of behavioral inhibition/approach systems and message framing on the processing of persuasive health messages. communication research, 34(4), 433-467. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 digital political thought and the rewritable user rex troumbley, postdoctoral fellow humanities research center rice university in december 2014, a couple in twin falls, idaho made a surprising discovery after their oldest child came home from school in a sad mood. “we asked her what was wrong and she said she had been reading a book during library time and it had a few swear words in it. she really liked the book but not the swear words.”1 the tech savvy parents, wanting to protect their child from future encounters from swear words, imagined there must be an app for that, but when they discovered there was not such app in the google play store for android devices or in the itunes store for apple devices, they decided to build one. a few months later, the couple issued a press release announcing “clean reader,” an app which “delivers the opportunity of reading any book without being exposed to profanity” and gives users the ability to select “how clean they want their books to appear,” so that “readers are presented the content of a book without offensive words and phrases.” the innovative feature, the press release announces, is that clean reader gives users the ability “to preserve the context of the book, an alternative word with the same general meaning is available for each instance where a word is blocked from display.”2 the press release also excitedly announced that “clean reader has already attracted users in over 70 countries and nearly every state in the united states.”3 news of the app spread quickly, being featured on popular news sites like forbes, several articles and critical op-eds written by book 1 “clean reader: faqs,” clean reader, accessed march 30, 2015, http://www.cleanreaderapp.com/ faqs/. 2 “new mobile app hides swear words in ebooks,” accessed march 30, 2015, http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-mobile-app-hides-swear-words-inebooks-300044753.html. 3 ibid. suggested citation (apa): troumbley, rex (2015, october 21-24). digital political thought and the rewritable user. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 2 authors4 in the guardian, and celebratory review in the christian science monitor.5 and yet, after a month of availability, google reports that the app has only been installed “500-1000” times and apple ranks it among its least popular apps. despite very few installs, the app on google play has thousands of reviews such as “sick of parenting? there’s an app for that” and “an iniquitous app, promoting censorship and solving a problem which doesn't exist. all lovers of free speech should avoid this app at all costs.”6 the itunes store has similar reviews, some more detailed than others, but the review currently ranked as “the most helpful” by visitors declares, “this app is utterly reprehensible: not only is it a disturbing form of automated censorship, but worse, a misogynist form of censorship. their definition of what count as ‘bad words’ is disgustingly sexist, replacing any and every mention female anatomy, be it slang or appropriate medical terminology with one single word: ‘bottom’… according to the creators of this app: we’re all just smooth ‘bottomed’ plastic barbie dolls, our physical reality is too ‘icky’ to think about…grow up, clean readers, and realize that people, all people, are human beings, and that you cannot simply erase their existence by erasing the words used to describe them.”7 is this censorship? the developers of clean reader argue it is not censorship when they write, in response to the “surprising” reviews of the app, that users have “paid good money for the book, they can consume it how they want.”8 if i don’t like my android keyboard, i can download a different one. while apple only recently allowed third-party keyboards, there are hundreds of alterative keyboards for android i can choose from. clean reader gives users the freedom to install the app or not, select the level of language they would like it to clean (“clean,” “cleaner,” and “squeaky clean”), and android gives me the freedom to use an alternative. a recent update for the android handset even gives me the freedom to turn off the default “block offensive words” setting for the built-in voice search function. i have the freedom to choose and therefore, argues clean reader (and many other tech companies), my freedom of expression is being preserved—maybe even enhanced since technical tools are able to help me express myself better by correcting my spelling and grammar or allowing even those who might be offended by my language to still hear what i have to say. apple already showed us, as it promised in its 4 alison flood, “books without swearwords? there’s an app for that,” the guardian, accessed march 30, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/mar/16/ebooks-app-clean-reader-replaceswearwords; alison flood, “authors: end to censored versions of books is ‘victory for the world of dirt,’” the guardian, accessed march 30, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/27/clean-readerbooks-app-censorship-victory-authors-celebrate; alison flood, “joanne harris: app replacing swearwords in novels is toxic,” the guardian, accessed march 30, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/ books/2015/mar/25/joanne-harris-condemns-clean-reader-app-replacing-swearwords; cory doctorow, “allow clean reader to swap ‘bad’ words in books – it’s a matter of free speech,” the guardian, accessed march 30, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/30/allow-clean-reader-swap-bad-words-books-freespeech; sam leith, “clean reader is a freaking silly idea, but in the end you can’t stop your audience being philistines,” the guardian, saturday 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/ mar/28/clean-reader-is-freaking-silly. 5 molly driscoll, “app removes profanity from books – is it a good idea?,” christian science monitor, march 6, 2015, http://www.csmonitor.com/books/chapter-and-verse/2015/0306/app-removes-profanityfrom-books-is-it-a-good-idea. 6 “clean reader-android apps on google play,” accessed march 30, 2015, https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inktera.cleanreader. 7 “clean reader,” app store, accessed march 30, 2015, https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cleanreader/id942159952. 8 clean reader, “chefs and authors,” clean reader, march 7, 2015, http://www.cleanreaderapp.com/ blog/. 3 famous 1983 super bowl commercial introducing the macintosh personal computer, “why 1984 won’t be like nineteen eighty-four.” this project examines technical interventions into the conditions of possibility for alternative expressions and modes of thinking. in order to show how digital technologies are enabling these preventative interventions, i begin with the assumption that “expressions” and “thought” are as much about how technologies express ideas and think as it is what they talk or think about. beginning with this assumption is a useful strategy for understanding emerging techniques for regulating discourse and thought because it resists reproducing the binary of free expression vs. censorship which, while useful for explaining 19th and 20th century language regulation, cannot adequately account for digital language governance or the potential for managing a users’ political thinking digital technologies enable. additionally, this paper uses case studies dealing with the regulation of bad, taboo, and dangerous language because these expressions have tended to excite exaggerated institutional attempts to govern language and develop regulatory technologies. this paper begins with a brief survey of historical interventions into digital language, specifically the development and deployment of digital filters designed to keep children safe online. i then turn to the more difficult study of digital language control by examining technical interventions into the conditions under which expressions can be made, “pre-speech” and interventions into the “choice architecture” of digital interfaces. deleuze’s concept of the “dividual” is useful for explaining how users are managed with choice architectures. robert williams explains that dividuals, as compared to individuals, are human subjects which can be made “endlessly divisible and reducible to data representations via modern technologies of control”9 such that information about ourselves is separated from us and used in ways we cannot control. as williams puts it, “the data gathered on us through the new technologies did not necessarily manifest our irreducible uniqueness. rather, the very way that the data can be gathered about us and then used for and against us marks us as dividuals.”10 the paper concludes that new techniques for managing digital discourse focus on control and consensus, rather than prohibition and moral discipline, for separating discourse from noise and determining the political eligibility of speaking subjects (“users”). understanding these new techniques is urgent because they have the potential to radically depoliticize language regulation and diffuse resistance to cultural governance, monopolizing the creativity needed to imagine and enact alternatives. overcoding internet freedom and filtering keywords in 1994, the u.s. government decided to take the military and research network it had sponsored public—by privatizing its backbone and allowing telecommunications companies to begin building their own backbones.11 this decision not only allowed the supreme court and other government agencies to think of the internet as a privately owned, but publicly accessible medium, it also encouraged many people to imagine the internet as the “cyberspace” described 9 robert williams, “politics and self in the age of digital re(pro)ducibility,” fast capitalism, january 1, 2005, http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/1_1/williams.html. 10 ibid. 11 wendy hui kyong chun, control and freedom: power and paranoia in the age of fiber optics (cambridge, mass.: the mit press, 2008), 38. 4 by william gibson in neuromancer12 eleven years before the first web browser was developed.13 tim berners-lee, while working at the cern laboratory in switzerland, had developed three important components of what would become the world wide web; hypertext markup language (html) which allowed documents to be published and linked, uniform resource identifier (uri) which gave an address to each document, and hypertext transfer protocol (http) which allowed for links to be retrieved across the web.14 the privatization of the internet made it open to interested programmers willing to devise new applications for it and, as jonathan zittrain has carefully detailed, allowed users to produce their own content without requiring permission from internet service providers (isps).15 before the world wide web, the internet users had been capable of transmitting text and images to each other on usenet groups or peer-to-peer connections, including “ascii” art,16 pictures composed of 95 keyboard characters to form a text-based visual composition. however, with the introduction of the web in 1991 and the privatization of the internet in 1994, the wide variety of content available on the internet became a problem for states like saudi arabia, who forced all internet traffic through one gateway it managed,17 and for parents alarmed at what they imagined their children could access without supervision. in the wake of recurring moral panics over the “dangers” of cyberporn, congress passed the 1996 communications decency act (cda) to regulate internet content in much the same way the federal communications commission regulates radio and television, using many of the same arguments about the need to protect children, and criminalized nearly all “indecent” or “patently offensive” online communications. several content providers and free speech activists immediately challenged the act in court, but this time the court decided to preserve indecency. in striking down the cda, judge stewart dalzell argued that indecency proves diversity and is necessary for a healthy democracy, finding that “speech on the internet can be unfiltered, unpolished, and unconventional, even emotionally charged, sexually explicit, and vulgar—in a word, ‘indecent’ in many communities” but added that without indecency “the internet would ultimately come to mirror broadcasting and print, with messages tailored to a mainstream society from speakers who could be sure that their message was likely decent in every community in the country.”18 citing oliver wendell holmes’ famous argument that “the best test of truth is power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of markets,”19 dalzell described the presence of indecency as evidence of a well-functioning democracy. congress responded to the cda decision by passing the 1998 child online protection act (copa). like the cda, copa was brought to the court, but this time the act’s definition of “free” sites as those which consumers did not pay to access was interpreted as commercial 12 william gibson, neuromancer, 1st edition (new york: ace, 1986). 13 chun, control and freedom, 41. 14 “history of the web,” world wide web foundation, accessed january 22, 2015, http://webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-of-the-web/. 15 jonathan zittrain, the future of the internet-and how to stop it (yale university press, 2008). 16 annalee newitz, “on-the-go porn,” accessed january 22, 2015, http://www.salon.com/2001/06/04/handheld_pr0n/. 17 jonathan l. zittrain et al., eds., access denied: the practice and policy of global internet filtering (the mit press, 2008), 32. alexander r. galloway, the interface effect, 1st ed. (polity, 2012), 36. 18 cited in chun, control and freedom, 115–116. 19 ibid., 116. 5 speech not open to regulation by the first amendment. on this basis, third circuit court of appeals judge lowell a. reed jr. determined that “community standards,” which had featured so prominently in the trial of lenny bruce and several fcc rulings, were overly broad “because material posted on the web is accessible by all internet users worldwide, and because current technology does not permit a web publisher to restrict access to its site based on the geographic locale of each particular internet user, copa essentially requires that every web publisher subject to the statute abide by the most restrictive and conservative state’s community standards in order to avoid criminal liability.”20 the problem the court identified was one of identification which, in the hate speech initiatives was also a problem, but here the issue is not who is present in a total speech situation. reed refers to the inability of content publishers to identify their users. the cda and copa both included provisions for putting content “harmful to children” behind walls and, since the instrument the legislators identified as appropriate for verifying a person’s age was a credit card, that wall soon became a paywall. however, because websites could not identify a user by their geographic location, reed asserted the content producers could not regulate content according to the “community standards” rule set out by roth v. united states.21 reed’s decision, therefore, makes measuring and taking account of “community standards” the issue where brennan in roth simply imagined a community standard and then applied it. as reed puts it, “the more liberal community standards of amsterdam or the more restrictive community standards of tehran would not impact upon the analysis of whether material is ‘harmful to minors’ under copa.”22 thus, he concluded, copa was unconstitutional because “the interpretation of ‘contemporary community standards’ is not ‘readily susceptible’ to a narrowing construction of ‘adult’ rather than ‘geographic’ standard.”23 the inability to identify who might access content was, for reed, the technical barrier which make copa unconstitutional, but he added (uncharacteristically for judges in decisions), his “firm conviction that developing technology will soon render the ‘community standards’ challenge moot, thereby making congressional regulation to protect minors from harmful materials on the world wide web constitutionally practicable.”24 reed was correct to foresee that laws would be passed to regulate internet content, but the failure of the cda also supported the development of filtering technology more quickly, not rendering community standards moot so much as reifying them in code. i have written elsewhere25 that the porn industry has played a dominant role in developing commercial innovations which are now fixed features of the internet including online payment systems, live chat, pop-ups, geo-location software, spam, and traffic optimization. penthouse magazine, for example, sponsored the development of broadband by giving away free modems.26 however, early internet businesses had a difficult time figuring out how to monetize online content, especially content provided by users. the cda and copa introduced the use of credit cards for online access, but reed’s decision to strike down copa because of the “free nature of cyberspace” and the lack of “geolocation” identification technology to judge “community 20 american civil liberties union v. reno, 217 f. 3d 162 (court of appeals, 3rd circuit 2000). 21 roth v. united states, 354 us 476 (supreme court 1957). 22 american civil liberties union v. reno, 217 f. 3d 162 (court of appeals, 3rd circuit 2000). 23 ibid. 24 ibid. 25 rex troumbley, “is the internet for porn?,” internet monitor, accessed january 22, 2015, https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/internetmonitor/2013/07/02/is-the-internet-for-porn/. 26 shreya, “thank you ‘porn’! … says technology,” exhibit magazine, september 21, 2012, http://exhibitmag.com/porn-technology. 6 standards” helped spur the development of technologies to collect geographic, and many other, pieces of data in order to target advertisements, such as ethan zuckerman’s development of the “popup ad,”27 and later as we will see data collection to target drone strikes. the cda and copa were both struck down, but these legislative attempts to regulate what could be seen, said, and done online facilitated the monetization of the internet and the decisions which struck them down codified in law the internet as a “space” with content the government should keep its hands off since it was already regulated by “the invisible hand of cyberspace.”28 the first techniques used to block specific words automatically were simple programs installed on a computer designed to identify and prevent users from entering bad keywords, heuristics used to identify and manage content. what exactly constitutes a keyword is still the subject of some debate, but information retrieval systems treat keywords as terms which capture the essence of the topic of a document. in computer science, a keyword is a word that is reserved in programming languages as expressions with special meanings, expressions that cannot be used as variable names, and words which can be commands or parameters for the execution of a program. as a technology of language regulation, the keyword became useful for identifying objectionable and pornographic content or for signaling the presence of dangerous communications. however, censorship based on keywords requires that someone maintain a list of terms to block, a blacklist, which often accidentally also blocked the wrong content or could be easily circumvented, like shakespeare evading the master of revels, by using a euphemism to replace a blocked keyword. in addition to filtering keywords and packets arriving from unsecured networks, a variety of technologies have been developed by corporations to regulate digital language and help governments censor the internet. rebecca mackinnon and ronald deibert have discovered numerous instances of companies based in liberal democracies selling, and developing technology, for authoritarian regimes censoring the internet—often by repackaging filters originally designed to protect children from pornography. mackinnon, for example, found that china and several countries in the middle east “have purchased their censorship solutions right off the shelf from american companies. companies including the california-based websense, blue coat and palo alto networks, intel’s mcafee smartfilter, and the canadian netsweeper all market products that were originally developed to help households and schools shield children from ageinappropriate content.”29 indeed, cisco systems produced chinese-language brochures advertising the censorship and surveillance features of its routers and suggested their use in helping the ccp manage online content related to the banned falun gong religious group.30 in the u.s., technology companies intervening in users’ communications enjoy considerable legal protection. deibert details in black code how an update provided by cisco for one of its most popular wireless routers required users to agree to a new terms of service agreement which included the requirement that their router not be used to access or share “obscene, pornographic, 27 ethan zuckerman, “the internet’s original sin,” the atlantic, august 14, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-is-the-internets-originalsin/376041/?single_page=true. 28 lawrence lessig, code: and other laws of cyberspace, version 2.0 (basic books, 2006), 6. 29 rebecca mackinnon, consent of the networked: the worldwide struggle for internet freedom, first trade paper edition (basic books, 2013), 60. 30 ibid., 170. 7 or offensive,” and which could “infringe another’s rights, including but not limited to any intellectual property rights.”31 similarly, in 2010, t-mobile was sued for blocking text messages sent by a legal marijuana dispensary service, but the case was dismissed because while u.s. law prohibits phone companies from blocking calls using their networks, it does not prohibit blocking data sent through their networks.32 as part of an agreement with the special olympics campaign to “spread the word to end the word,” blizzard entertainment (the company responsible for the hugely popular massively multiplayer online game world of warcraft and starcraft) began replacing the word retarded with r******* in gameplay chats between users. 33 blizzard maintains it can censor these terms, and other offensive words like homosexual and transsexual, because by installing or using blizzard’s software, users agree to refrain from abusing its services and one another. corporations, sometimes sponsored by governments and sometimes for their own interests, have developed a wide array of content filtering technologies including packet filtering, deep packet inspection which looks inside packets for bad messages, ip address blocking, dns filtering and redirection, several methods for cutting off routers and hardware remotely, portal censorship removing links or visibility, denial-of-service attacks which deface websites or overload a server with repeated connection requests, and bandwidth shaping techniques which purposefully intervene in a users’ ability to access specific online content or services. states also sponsor the development of circumvention technologies to allow users to bypass or frustrate attempts at overt censorship by states or state-sponsored corporations to regulate digital language. a striking example of the influence of social structures in determining which technologies are developed is the u.s-sponsored creation of circumvention technology for use by activists in authoritarian countries to promote internet freedom. in 2009, as a result of the green revolution, congress passed the victims of iranian censorship (voice) act and the national defense authorization act for fiscal year 2010 authorized the appropriation of “$20 million for a new ‘iranian electronic education, exchange, and media fund’” which would develop anti-censorship technology.34 to mark the passage for the bill, secretary of state hilary clinton gave a now famous speech “on internet freedom” which argued “today, we find an urgent need to protect these freedoms on the digital frontiers of the 21st century…the internet is a network that magnifies the power and potential of all others. and that’s why we believe it’s critical that its users are assured certain basic freedoms. freedom of expression is first among them.”35 however, as part of the congressional debate, it was agreed that the u.s. should assist iranians in circumventing online political censorship, but not other content like pornography and many voiced concerns that if the new technology enabled access to pornography, iranians would 31 ronald j. deibert, black code: inside the battle for cyberspace (plattsburgh, ny: mcclelland & stewart, 2014), 34. 32 mackinnon, consent of the networked, 117. 33 fox van allen, “profanity filters, homophobic slurs, and blizzard’s shaky relationship with the lgbt community,” wow insider, accessed december 14, 2012, http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/01/25/profanityfilters-homophobic-slurs-and-blizzards-shaky-relati/. 34 ike skelton, “h.r.2647 111th congress (2009-2010): national defense authorization act for fiscal year 2010,” legislation, (october 28, 2009), https://www.congress.gov/bill/111th-congress/house-bill/2647. 35 bureau of public affairs department of state. the office of website management, “remarks on internet freedom,” remarks|remarks, u.s. department of state, (january 21, 2010), http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2010/01/135519.htm. 8 be less inclined to use it. 36 a compromise was made that the circumvention technology would include a blacklist of prohibited words in english and in farsi. the technology was developed, and deployed in iran, but the blacklist filter had unintended consequences, blocking for example the u.s. department of state’s online portal for its overseas missions because the url, usembassy.state.gov, includes the prohibited word ass.37 it was not “the more restrictive community standards of tehran” which led to the site being blocked, as reed’s copa decision might have it, but the deployment of american cultural standards technologized as circumvention technology to promote internet freedom in iran with contradictory results. writing with computers as manipulators of signs following pre-determined “grammatical” rules, computers are indifferent to what they are processing and also threatened by the “bad grammar” of conflicting or incomplete programming and the “bad language” of user input or errors. in an operating system, errors are managed by techniques designed to prevent a systemic crash or “exception handling.” deleuze and galloway both describe computers as systems within which ideas, and ideologies, can be modeled, tested, and deployed. in the case of grammar and spelling, computers do not attempt to correct the writer’s behavior, or discipline their writing. spellcheck in microsoft word, for example, throws bad language back to the writer with pre-programmed solutions to choose from or gives the writer the option to ignore the error and continue processing the rest of the document in much the same way microsoft windows handles an error “by passing it from one section of code—one object, often—to another, and ultimately to a block of code dedicated to exception handling.”38 in other words, rather than intervene in the grammar, or “architectural” structures, of an operating system or allowing the system to crash, exception handling intervenes in the flow of program execution. however, exception handling is not simply something which happens “inside” the computer but extends into other processes of the “real-world,” for example preventing a crash in the “workflow” of the user or breaking the flow of word-processing. exception handling will be explored again later, but here i only want to note that bad inputs from users, or user error, is managed by a system of control (checks, dialog boxes, prompts) which intervenes in the wordprocessing or language flows of a user rather than the structures (word does not rewrite itself) which mediate their expression. computer-mediated communication then is also involved in shaping the conditions of possible expressions not because they control language in order to control what can be thought about, the way for example george orwell imagined, this also means that digital technologies cannot manage or transport information without some kind of distortion. much as dictionaries remove words from their sentences and treat them as autonomous objects, making some always bad or offensive and putting them into a kind of circulation, the translation of language into information allows computers to treat words as “strings” and bundle them into autonomous objects, or “packets,” which can be put into circulation and exchanged between devices using transmission protocols. this is not simply a translation, as zittrain argues, 39 but a warping of language into information which is further distorted in order to be sent through a 36 skelton, “h.r.2647 111th congress (2009-2010).” 37 zittrain, the future of the internet-and how to stop it, 115. 38 matthew fuller and andrew goffey, evil media (cambridge, mass.: mit press, 2012), 119. 39 zittrain, the future of the internet-and how to stop it. 9 communications network as a packet. the idea that the architecture of the internet, or the ability to view the “source code” layered on top of that architecture, prevents control is what latour calls the “double click” or acting “as though technology, too, transports mere information, mere forms, without deformation”40 so that language can be treated as discrete packets of content. making spoken language into a graphic language, using an alphabet, or some other “channel” as kittler describes it,41 also involves a deformation, but proponents of “internet freedom” who describe freedom of expression online as unfettered communication guaranteed by its architecture ignore the numerous deformations which must occur as spoken language is translated into written language. digital writing involves a series of deformations as a communication is entered into computer language, treated by programs, transmitted by protocols, and displayed on an interface. the content first entered into a computer thus comes to mean and do different things depending upon how it is used or, as will be discussed later, tied to a user so their future language can be predicted. in nineteen eighty-four, orwell describes a world of language control still modeled on what deleuze calls the “old societies of sovereignty [which] made use of simple machines—levers, pulleys, clocks” where language is regulated by an authoritarian institution and therefore finds it appropriate to have his main character exploit “the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage”42 in order to avoid “newspeak” or control by the “thinkpol” thought police.43 deleuze contrasts the societies of sovereignty, or discipline societies, with “societies of control” which “operate with machines of a third type, computers”44 and “controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming case that will continuously change from one moment to the other.”45 however, writing media and writing technologies also condition or prevent different kinds of thinking because we think through these technologies. ong has pointed out, for example, that “deconstruction is tied to typography,”46 not only because it is based on textual analysis, but also because deconstructionists “specialize in texts marked by the late typographic point of view developed in the age of romanticism, on the verge of the electronic age.”47 similarly, galloway points out, post-structuralism and poststructuralist buildings like the strata center at mit designed by frank gehry “are unthinkable without the computer.”48 and yet the computer, and the computer network, does not fully explain these new techniques of language control. lessig, for example, might concede that computers deform expressions, but argue that as long as the code —which for him is law since that is where decisions once made by legislators and judges are being made—can be viewed and checked for overt and nefarious attempts to interfere with communications we can evade control. however, as chun explores in detail, “control and freedom are not opposites but different sides of the same coin: just as discipline 40 bruno latour, an inquiry into modes of existence: an anthropology of the moderns, trans. catherine porter, 2013, 218. 41 friedrich kittler, gramophone, film, typewriter, trans. geoffrey winthrop-young and michael wutz (stanford, calif: stanford university press, 1999), 124. 42 gilles deleuze, “postscript on the societies of control,” october 59 (january 1, 1992): 6. 43 george orwell and erich fromm, 1984 (charlotte hall, md: signet classic, 1950). 44 deleuze, “postscript on the societies of control,” 6. 45 ibid., 4. 46 walter j. ong, orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word, 3rd ed. (routledge, 2012), 127. 47 ibid., 160. 48 alexander r. galloway, the interface effect, 1st ed. (polity, 2012), 96. 10 served as a grid on which liberty was established, control is the matrix that enables freedom as openness.”49 as mackinnon points out, the u.s. department of state regularly sponsors the development of circumvention technology while u.s. companies produce much of the censorship technology available to states today.50 while it cannot be denied that china and iran regularly censor the internet, the internet has always been an object of control and in the u.s. is managed by a variety of increasingly sophisticated control mechanisms. following chun’s assertion that “users are created by ‘using’ in a similar manner to the way drug users are created by the drugs they (ab)use,” 51 we can say that language control is far more successful at framing users’ fears and desires than language regulation which focuses on prohibiting or moralizing those fears and desires. digital language control tracks each person’s language—good, bad, and taboo—without needing to identify that person as an individual subject whose expressions are noise or speech. instead, digital language control simply counts every expression made by every user and, as deleuze puts it, “substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a ‘dividual’ material to be controlled.”52 this data does not necessarily make us unique, but it is used in ways which are beyond our control. the use of taboo language is sometimes a problem, something to be regulated by language filters and terms of service agreements, but in computational systems of control all expressions are counted as a matter of preference. thus, the keyboard on my android phone will eventually allow me to use fuck without changing it to duck once my use of fuck is counted as part of my language preference. my keyboard, and the predictive algorithm it uses, treats me as a human subject, but the data it collects about me separates my preference from myself in ways i cannot control and my preferences are not used to identify me as irreducibly unique. reformulating shapiro’s observation that “preferences have people,”53 in this case it is more accurate to say that preferences have dividuals. to see how preferences gather dividuals, it is useful to see how what is important enough to count determines what is important enough to temporarily separate information from the noise of collected data. nudging users toward pre-dictability in 2002, the defense advanced research projects agency formed the information awareness office and launched the total information awareness (tma) program to “revolutionize the ability of the united states to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists” which, though defunded in 2003, still managed to develop data mining software used in other government agencies.54 after the snowden prism revelations, it became clear that tma had not disappeared, but became part of the nsa, fbi, and cia. a detailed study of prism is beyond the scope of this project,55 but what is significant in terms of controlling digital language 49 chun, control and freedom, 71. 50 mackinnon, consent of the networked, 106. 51 chun, control and freedom, 249. 52 deleuze, “postscript on the societies of control,” 7. 53 michael j. shapiro, methods and nations: cultural governance and the indigenous subject, new edition (routledge, 2003), 23. 54 evgeny morozov, the net delusion: the dark side of internet freedom, reprint (publicaffairs, 2012), 16. 55 a detailed survey of the mass surveilance project can be found in glenn greenwald, no place to hide: edward snowden, the nsa, and the u.s. surveillance state, 1st edition (new york, ny: metropolitan books, 2014). 11 is that the nsa had the ability to collect data directly from the nine biggest technology companies—google, facebook, microsoft, apple, yahoo, aol, skype, paltalk, and youtube.56 this was possible only because over the past decade internet companies had managed to centralize and monopolize the decentralized networks of communications and broad array of services people used online. indeed, since the nsa documents revealing these data collection sources google has purchased youtube, microsoft has purchased skype, and aol merged with time warner. surveillance is the business model of the internet, so it makes sense that the u.s. government would piggyback off the biggest internet businesses if it wanted to engage in mass surveillance. greenwald points out that surveillance of foreign heads of state is nothing new, despite the recent controversies over whether or not the nsa had tapped german chancellor angela merkel’s cellphone, but that mass surveillance of nearly all communications emanating from specific countries is new.57 competing reports have determined that mass surveillance has likely not foiled any significant terrorist threats— failing to detect adam lanza, james holmes, and the tsarnaev brothers’ planned attacks—but the programs seem unlikely to be discontinued anytime soon. chun theorizes about control and freedom as they relate to paranoia, nothing that “automatic digital storage and networks enable a postevent traceability that buttresses ‘prevention,’ for a digital mass of information can always be minded for warning signs read in, but not ‘read’ (search terms only become self-evident after an event). paranoia…thus becomes a way of generating keywords in advance—a human response to an inhuman mass of information that belies rational analysis.”58 a good example of dataveillance is used to increase user-predictability by generating keywords in advance and predicting after the event can be seen in the response of the nsa following boston marathon bombings. after the bombings, an article published in the atlantic accused the nsa and fbi of missing posts on twitter by djohar tsarnaev like “i will die young” two days before bombing the boston marathon, “stay safe” the night before, and posted a story about a victim immediately after calling it a “fake.”59 when it was discovered that airport security had failed to prevent tamerlan tsarnaev from entering the country, after russian intelligence warned he was a “radical islamist” and potentially dangerous, because his last named had been misspelled in an interagency security database, the house homeland security committee launched an investigation into the events and compiled a report. the censored report, titled the road to boston: counterterrorism challenges and lessons from the marathon bombings, describes the misspelling incident as a “lesson” to be learned, in much the same way noah webster prescribed his speller as a remedy for bad language in the classroom, and gives a detailed history of the many “early warnings” which indicate the brothers had decided to conduct the attack,60 in much the same way 19th and 20th century police detectives or mental health experts found evidence of criminal mentalities by creating biographies of a criminal’s troubled upbringing or irrational system beliefs. the evidence and reasons for the terrorist attack are found after the decision has been made. 56 ibid., 96. 57 ibid., 112. 58 chun, control and freedom, 257–258. 59 alexander abad-santos, “‘i will die young’: the eerie subtext of dzhokhar tsarnaev on social media,” the wire, april 19, 2013, http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/04/dzhokhar-tsarnaev-socialmedia-accounts/64400/. 60 “report: the road to boston: counterterrorism challenges and lessons from the marathon bombings,” accessed january 26, 2015, http://homeland.house.gov/boston-bombings-report. 12 in this case, the report found that dataveillance revealed evidence of an imminent terrorist attack and information about childhood experiences revealed evidence of terrorist intentions, supporting facts which made the committee “concerned that officials are asserting that this attack could not have been prevented, without compelling evidence to confirm that this is the case.”61 instead of questioning whether analyzing the digital emissions of users’ activities can predict terrorist attacks, the committee finds evidence that the brothers would carry out an attack and then conclude that the attack was predictable. just as we saw victorian moralists and judges regulating language by linking morality with rationality, today we see what fuller and goffey identify as a “decision support system”62 which complicates carl schmitt’s theory of the political as the ability to distinguish between friends and enemies63 since the reasons for a decision are found after the decision has been made and “mythologize decision making” by identifying an agent capable of making sovereign decisions.64 here, the committee had already assumed terrorist attacks could be predicted and so found evidence to support that assumption, but mythologized the process by creating profiles, making correlations, and compiling with would otherwise be considered circumstantial evidence. the profiling techniques used by the law enforcement and military institutions to identify threats during the cold war are being augmented with “signature” databases which mark targets for drone strikes based upon their habits and their communicative degrees of separation, known as “hops,” from known terrorists.65 the cia does not always know who it is killing or identify its targets before launching a strike. the content of the potential terrorists’ conversation, much less their mental state or intentionality, is irrelevant when deciding who the signature database marks for death. if innocents are killed, databases can be searched and evidence found to support the decision.66 a decision support system is one way to manage unpredictability, but another emerging technique is to encourage users to behave more predictably and speak according to preferred lines of diction. facebook, for example, collects data about users in order to better message them with tailored advertisements and sells the data they collect to other businesses which do the same. user data is facebook’s product, which it can only generate by getting users to keep using. one way facebook does this is by altering its choice architecture in ways which prevent users from leaving, curating posts which are not likely to offend users and make them leave, but also introducing functions like providing a snapshot of a posted article so users seeing the post will not have to leave facebook in order to see what the article is about. facebook has recently introduced the ability to buy products and suggests purchasing gifts on friend’s birthdays without having to leave the site. similarly, facebook sponsors “addictive” games like farmville and 61 ibid., 37. 62 fuller and goffey, evil media, 137. 63 carl schmitt, the concept of the political, trans. george schwab, expanded (university of chicago press, 2007), 27. 64 fuller and goffey, evil media, 132–133. 65 richard engel and robert windrem, “cia didn’t always know who it was killing in drone strikes, classified documents show,” nbc news, june 5, 2013, http://investigations.nbcnews.com/ _news/2013/06/05/18781930-cia-didnt-always-know-who-it-was-killing-in-drone-strikes-classifieddocuments-show. 66 while the number of “signature targets” is classified, the human rights group reprieve found that 41 men were targeted by name and that, in single strike attacks where some of the men were killed, the drone strike also killed at least 1,147 people as well. the u.s. department of state classified those killed after the strikes as “enemy combatants.” spencer ackerman in new york, “41 men targeted but 1,147 people killed: us drone strikes – the facts on the ground,” the guardian, accessed march 31, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/usnews/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone-strikes-kill-1147. 13 mafia wars, and provides api access for several other games, because they open users to continuous mining. the facebook mobile phone and tablet app, and the now separate facebook messenger app, not only keeps mobile users open to mining, but the terms of service agreement also allows facebook to download stored text messages, phone logs, stored contacts, lists of accounts for other services, and other data from the devices.67 the reason is, as deleuze puts it, that “disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer” the “man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network” and always producing68 or as fuller and goffey write “the regularization of expression, by contrast, is a broader tendency evident in practices of the organization of people and things as and for data in computational culture, following the general principle that structured data are more tractable to processing than unstructured data.”69 the intent of all these features is to provide facebook its product, but the choice architecture facebook has engineered also hopes to make users more predictable by framing their fears and enthusiasm, providing an outlet for “nervousness, time wasting, irritation, the ability to draw out or to dither the moment when unwanted but obligatory activities start, to combine idleness with something partially purposive…turning lives of clickwork into a yield”70 and nudging users towards behaviors or modes of communication facebook can sell. presuming that users are self-interested and rational shapes the legal and social institutions which rely upon facebook or purchase their services. if users do not behave or express themselves in a self-interested and rational way, they can be nudged into doing so using techniques of language control, making neo-liberalism seem like the only option and monopolizing creativity. when companies like google and facebook are the supporters of internet freedom, and expression is mediated through their services, the question then becomes (again following chamber’s reading of rancière): what is the possibility for a confrontation between the technical police order that keeps the “user” in their place and the logic of politics which asserts the fundamental equality of subjects “given these existing discourses?”71 expressing alternative digital politics aristotle based his theory of politics on the distinction between animals capable of speech and animals capable of only making noise. in the politics he argues that nature “has endowed man alone among the animals with the power of speech. speech is something different from voice, which is used by them to express pain our pleasure… speech, on the other hand, serves to indicate what is useful and what is harmful… humans alone have perception of good and evil.”72 in his genealogy of morality, nietzsche determined that the development of the “conscience” was conditioned by the need “to breed an animal with the right to make promises,”73 and the “bad conscience” conditioned by feeling responsible for breaking promises. 67 caitlin dewey, “yes, the facebook messenger app requests creepy, invasive permissions. but so does every other app.,” the washington post, august 4, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ theintersect/wp/2014/08/04/yes-the-facebook-messenger-app-requests-creepy-invasive-permissions-but-sodoes-every-other-app/. 68 deleuze, “postscript on the societies of control,” 5–6. 69 fuller and goffey, evil media, 111. 70 ibid., 67. 71 samuel a. chambers, the lessons of ranciere (place of publication not identified: oxford university press, 2014), 119. 72 aristotle, the politics, trans. t.a. sinclair (harmondsworth, england; new york, n.y.: penguin, 1992), 207. 73 friedrich wilhelm nietzsche, basic writings of nietzsche, modern library ed (new york: modern library, 2000), 493. 14 for nietzsche, morality required that “man himself must first of all have become calculable, regular, necessary, even in his own image of himself, if he is able to stand security for his own future… in general be able to be calculable and compute.”74 punishment was a means of creating “a memory for the human animal” the best mnemonic technique was pain.75 in order to be free to make promises, the human animal had to become “master of a free will”76 and the criminal deserving of “punishment because he could have acted differently.”77 similarly, in his genealogy of prisons and discipline, foucault found “that punishment looks towards the future, and that at least one of its major functions is to prevent crime had, for centuries, been one of the current justifications of the right to punish”78 and that punishment was in the 18th century was dependent upon a series of calculations by the criminal—the advantages one might procure from committing a crime and the disadvantages one might prevent by committing a crime—and the judge’s calculation for how much pain/punishment would fit the crime and how much the punishment might hurt others than the criminal.79 for foucault, the networked power-relations of discipline conditioned the possibility for escaping them because power-relations depend “on a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations…and it is doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible, somewhat similar to the way in which the state relies on the institutional integration of power relationships.”80 william burroughs, grandson of the inventor of the burroughs adding machine and the theorist who inspired deleuze’s conception of the control society, argued that words “do not stem from the need to communicate but rather the need to control animals capable of resistance.”81 burroughs, and norbert wiener, conceived of language as commands or what we would now call code. to explain his “scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine,”82 wiener modified the ancient greek words for kybernetike (or to govern) and kybernao (to steer, navigate or govern) to come up with “cybernetics.” wiener’s science was aimed at describing self-organizing systems and designing human institutions or machines which incorporated mechanisms for feedback and learning to govern and steer society.83 deleuze’s control society is the cybernetic society, one which steers society and also governs resistance. for deleuze, resistance is simply incorporated into the control society and thereby diffused, especially after the collapse of communism seemed to end alternatives to capitalism. as he put it in an interview with antonio negri, “you ask whether control or communication societies will lead to forms of resistance that might reopen the way for a communism understood as the ‘transversal organization of free individuals.’ maybe, i don't know. but it would be 74 ibid., 494. 75 ibid., 496–497. 76 ibid., 495. 77 ibid., 499. 78 michel foucault, discipline & punish: the birth of the prison, 2nd edition (vintage, 1995), 93. 79 ibid., 94–97. 80 michel foucault, the history of sexuality, vol. 1: an introduction, trans. robert hurley, reissue edition (new york: vintage, 1990), 96. 81 chun, control and freedom, 272. 82 norbert wiener, cybernetics: or, control and communication in the animal and the machine (cambridge, mass.: m.i.t. press, 1965). 83 norbert wiener, the human use of human beings: cybernetics and society (new york; london: da capo, 1988). 15 nothing to do with minorities speaking out. maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. they’re thoroughly permeated by money-and not by accident but by their very nature.”84 the internet is a channel of communication which is permeated by money, both in terms of access and in terms of its nature being “overcoded” by law and neoliberal fantasies as a self-regulating marketplace of ideas. computers track both good and bad behavior, good and bad language, and manage resistance by suggesting options which allow one to express oneself without crashing the system (exception handling), steer resistant subjects around bad behavior (nudge), or manage the conditions of possibility for resistance (pre-diction). these systems of control make it seem as though neoliberalism is the only option or, as william connolly recently put it, the “danger of ‘serfdom’ today…is the emergence of a regime in which a few corporate overlords monopolize creativity to sustain a bankrupt way of life…to cling to american hegemony in a world unfavorable to it…in which the ideology of freedom is winnowed to a set of consumer choices between preset options.”85 google and facebook, for example, have been enormously successful at monopolizing internet services and monopolizing creativity. both companies regularly buy out the competition or leverage their market dominance to undermine alternative innovations, effectively “colonizing the future”86 of digital political thought. the commercialization of the internet made possible by recurring moral panics related to dangerous expressions, related to cyberporn and terrorism, has given corporations an unprecedented ability to directly and indirectly shape the political subjectivity of users. the belief that people are primarily motivated by rational self-interest, a belief promoted by social scientists explaining behavior using computational models, and the idea that horizontal networks could resist hierarchies were technologized in the hardware, software, and protocols of the internet. i have suggested here that digital language controls have helped produce self-interested and rational users who made regularized expressions computational treatments of data required. these presumptions and models have been criticized for ignoring the influence of forces like modern capitalism, which help determine why self-interest87 is valued and neuroscientific findings have complicated the very idea of rationality.88 thus far, i have described “the algorithm” primarily as a sorting mechanism, but it is increasingly obvious that the human political animal is no longer the only animal capable of writing or being addressed by writing. in march 2014, following a small earthquake in southern california, an algorithm designed to write news articles faster than a human reporter automatically published a news story in the los angeles times less than 20 minutes after the quake registered on u.s. geological survey instruments.89 in 2012, a marketing professor patented a system for algorithmically compiling data into book form and used that algorithm to 84 deleuze, negotiations 1972-1990, 175. 85 william e. connolly, the fragility of things: self-organizing processes, neoliberal fantasies, and democratic activism (durham: duke university press books, 2013), 79. 86 ziauddin sardar, “colonizing the future: the ‘other’ dimension of futures studies,” futures 25, no. 2 (march 1993): 179–87, doi:10.1016/0016-3287(93)90163-n. 87 duncan k. foley, unholy trinity: labor, capital and land in the new economy (routledge, 2003). 88 william e. connolly, neuropolitics: thinking, culture, speed, 1st ed. (univ of minnesota press, 2002). 89 gregory ferenstein, “an algorithm wrote the la times story about the city’s earthquake aftershock today,” techcrunch, accessed march 18, 2014, http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/17/an-algorithm-wrotethe-la-times-story-about-the-citys-earthquake-aftershock-today/. 16 write, and sell on amazon, over 800,000 books.90 also in 2012, “bot” internet traffic exceeded human internet traffic.91 the company narrative science has also developed a book and article writing algorithm call “quill” and allows anyone to purchase a subscription to their automatic writer.92 there has been speculation that jeff bezos, the founder of amazon, plans to use quill to write for his newly acquired newspaper, the washington post,93 and one reason devices are being built with a front-facing camera is to track eye movements of readers.94 it is not hard to imagine, as morozov has done,95 that amazon might combine these technologies and rewrite books as users read them —using the front-facing camera to monitor eye movements and modifying the text to sustain the readers interest. morozov fears this will lead to an end of reading publics, and rightly so, but these developments also open new opportunities for non-human to engage in their own confrontations with the logic of policing, following rancière, asserting their own fundamental equality to human speaking or writing beings. today there are numerous agents and forces participating in language regulation. while the dictionary-writer, the moralist, the judge, the mental health expert, the corporation, and the algorithm all participate in determining whose expressions count as discourse and which expressions can be discounted as noise, each also helps condition the possibility for alternative counts, making heard what had no business being heard, and seeding political “conflict over the existence of a common stage and over the existence and status of those present on it.”96 references abad-santos, alexander. “‘i will die young’: the eerie subtext of dzhokhar tsarnaev on social media.” the wire, april 19, 2013. http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/04/dzhokhar-tsarnaev-socialmedia-accounts/64400/. allen, fox van. “profanity filters, homophobic slurs, and blizzard’s shaky relationship with the lgbt community.” wow insider. accessed december 14, 2012. http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/01/25/profanity-filters-homophobic-slurs-andblizzards-shaky-relati/. american civil liberties union v. reno, 217 f. 3d 162 (court of appeals, 3rd circuit 2000). 90 grant bunner and 2012 at 2:29 pm, “programmer creates 800,000 books algorithmically, starts selling them on amazon,” extremetech, accessed march 31, 2015, http://www.extremetech.com/ extreme/143382-programmer-creates-800000-books-algorithmically-starts-selling-them-on-amazon. 91 alexis c. madrigal, “welcome to the internet of thingies: 61.5% of web traffic is not human,” the atlantic, december 12, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/welcome-to-theinternet-of-thingies-615-of-web-traffic-is-not-human/282309/. 92 “narrativescience,” accessed march 31, 2015, http://www.narrativescience.com/. 93 “never mind jeff bezos: ‘robots’ almost took over the washington post! | bleacher report – the writers blog,” accessed march 31, 2015, http://blog.bleacherreport.com/2013/08/21/never-mind-jeffbezos-robots-almost-took-over-the-washington-post/. 94 nate hoffelder, “why the amazon smartphone might need 6 cameras, part two,” ink, bits, & pixels, accessed march 31, 2015, http://the-digital-reader.com/2014/04/13/why-the-amazon-smartphone-mightneed-6-cameras-part-two/. 95 morozov, to save everything, click here, 192. 96 jacques rancière, disagreement: politics and philosophy, 1st ed. (university of minnesota press, 2004), 26. 17 aristotle. the politics. translated by t.a. sinclair. harmondsworth, england; new york, n.y.: penguin, 1992. bunner, grant, and 2012 at 2:29 pm. “programmer creates 800,000 books algorithmically, starts selling them on amazon.” extremetech. accessed march 31, 2015. http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/143382-programmer-creates800000-books-algorithmically-starts-selling-them-on-amazon. chambers, samuel a. the lessons of ranciere. place of publication not identified: oxford university press, 2014. chun, wendy hui kyong. control and freedom: power and paranoia in the age of fiber optics. cambridge, mass.: the mit press, 2008. clean reader. “chefs and authors.” clean reader, march 7, 2015. http://www.cleanreaderapp.com/blog/. “clean reader.” app store. accessed march 30, 2015. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clean-reader/id942159952. “clean reader-android apps on google play.” accessed march 30, 2015. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inktera.cleanreader. “clean reader: faqs.” clean reader. accessed march 30, 2015. http://www.cleanreaderapp.com/faqs/. connolly, william e. neuropolitics: thinking, culture, speed. 1st ed. univ of minnesota press, 2002. ———. the fragility of things: self-organizing processes, neoliberal fantasies, and democratic activism. durham: duke university press books, 2013. deibert, ronald j. black code: inside the battle for cyberspace. plattsburgh, ny: mcclelland & stewart, 2014. deleuze, gilles. negotiations 1972-1990. translated by martin joughin. columbia university press, 1997. ———. “postscript on the societies of control.” october 59 (january 1, 1992): 3–7. department of state. the office of website management, bureau of public affairs. “remarks on internet freedom.” remarks|remarks. u.s. department of state, january 21, 2010. http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2010/01/135519.htm. dewey, caitlin. “yes, the facebook messenger app requests creepy, invasive permissions. but so does every other app.” the washington post, august 4, 2014. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/08/04/yes-the18 facebook-messenger-app-requests-creepy-invasive-permissions-but-so-doesevery-other-app/. doctorow, cory. “allow clean reader to swap ‘bad’ words in books – it’s a matter of free speech.” the guardian. accessed march 30, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/30/allow-clean-reader-swapbad-words-books-free-speech. driscoll, molly. “app removes profanity from books – is it a good idea?” christian science monitor, march 6, 2015. http://www.csmonitor.com/books/chapter-andverse/2015/0306/app-removes-profanity-from-books-is-it-a-good-idea. engel, richard, and robert windrem. “cia didn’t always know who it was killing in drone strikes, classified documents show.” nbc news, june 5, 2013. http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/05/18781930-cia-didnt-alwaysknow-who-it-was-killing-in-drone-strikes-classified-documents-show. ferenstein, gregory. “an algorithm wrote the la times story about the city’s earthquake aftershock today.” techcrunch. accessed march 18, 2014. http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/17/an-algorithm-wrote-the-la-times-story-aboutthe-citys-earthquake-aftershock-today/. flood, alison. “authors: end to censored versions of books is ‘victory for the world of dirt.’” the guardian. accessed march 30, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/27/clean-reader-books-appcensorship-victory-authors-celebrate. ———. “books without swearwords? there’s an app for that.” the guardian. accessed march 30, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/mar/16/ebooks-app-cleanreader-replace-swearwords. ———. “joanne harris: app replacing swearwords in novels is toxic.” the guardian. accessed march 30, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/25/joanne-harris-condemns-cleanreader-app-replacing-swearwords. foley, duncan k. unholy trinity: labor, capital and land in the new economy. routledge, 2003. foucault, michel. discipline & punish: the birth of the prison. 2nd edition. vintage, 1995. ———. the history of sexuality, vol. 1: an introduction. translated by robert hurley. reissue edition. new york: vintage, 1990. fuller, matthew, and andrew goffey. evil media. cambridge, mass.: mit press, 2012. 19 galloway, alexander r. the interface effect. 1st ed. polity, 2012. gibson, william. neuromancer. 1st edition. new york: ace, 1986. greenwald, glenn. no place to hide: edward snowden, the nsa, and the u.s. surveillance state. 1st edition. new york, ny: metropolitan books, 2014. “history of the web.” world wide web foundation. accessed january 22, 2015. http://webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-of-the-web/. hoffelder, nate. “why the amazon smartphone might need 6 cameras, part two.” ink, bits, & pixels. accessed march 31, 2015. http://the-digitalreader.com/2014/04/13/why-the-amazon-smartphone-might-need-6-cameraspart-two/. kittler, friedrich. gramophone, film, typewriter. translated by geoffrey winthropyoung and michael wutz. stanford, calif: stanford university press, 1999. latour, bruno. an inquiry into modes of existence: an anthropology of the moderns. translated by catherine porter, 2013. leith, sam. “clean reader is a freaking silly idea, but in the end you can’t stop your audience being philistines.” the guardian, saturday 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/28/clean-reader-isfreaking-silly. lessig, lawrence. code: and other laws of cyberspace, version 2.0. basic books, 2006. mackinnon, rebecca. consent of the networked: the worldwide struggle for internet freedom. first trade paper edition. basic books, 2013. madrigal, alexis c. “welcome to the internet of thingies: 61.5% of web traffic is not human.” the atlantic, december 12, 2013. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/welcome-to-the-internetof-thingies-615-of-web-traffic-is-not-human/282309/. morozov, evgeny. the net delusion: the dark side of internet freedom. reprint. publicaffairs, 2012. ———. to save everything, click here: the folly of technological solutionism. publicaffairs, 2013. “narrativescience.” accessed march 31, 2015. http://www.narrativescience.com/. “never mind jeff bezos: ‘robots’ almost took over the washington post! | bleacher report – the writers blog.” accessed march 31, 2015. 20 http://blog.bleacherreport.com/2013/08/21/never-mind-jeff-bezos-robots-almosttook-over-the-washington-post/. newitz, annalee. “on-the-go porn.” accessed january 22, 2015. http://www.salon.com/2001/06/04/handheld_pr0n/. “new mobile app hides swear words in ebooks.” accessed march 30, 2015. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-mobile-app-hides-swear-wordsin-ebooks-300044753.html. nietzsche, friedrich wilhelm. basic writings of nietzsche. modern library ed. new york: modern library, 2000. ong, walter j. orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word. 3rd ed. routledge, 2012. orwell, george, and erich fromm. 1984. charlotte hall, md: signet classic, 1950. rancière, jacques. disagreement: politics and philosophy. 1st ed. university of minnesota press, 2004. “report: the road to boston: counterterrorism challenges and lessons from the marathon bombings.” accessed january 26, 2015. http://homeland.house.gov/boston-bombings-report. roth v. united states, 354 us 476 (supreme court 1957). sardar, ziauddin. “colonizing the future: the ‘other’ dimension of futures studies.” futures 25, no. 2 (march 1993): 179–87. doi:10.1016/0016-3287(93)90163-n. schmitt, carl. the concept of the political. translated by george schwab. expanded. university of chicago press, 2007. shapiro, michael j. methods and nations: cultural governance and the indigenous subject. new edition. routledge, 2003. shreya. “thank you ‘porn’! … says technology.” exhibit magazine, september 21, 2012. http://exhibitmag.com/porn-technology. skelton, ike. “h.r.2647 111th congress (2009-2010): national defense authorization act for fiscal year 2010.” legislation, october 28, 2009. https://www.congress.gov/bill/111th-congress/house-bill/2647. troumbley, rex. “is the internet for porn?” internet monitor. accessed january 22, 2015. https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/internetmonitor/2013/07/02/is-the-internetfor-porn/. 21 wiener, norbert. cybernetics: or, control and communication in the animal and the machine. cambridge, mass.: m.i.t. press, 1965. ———. the human use of human beings: cybernetics and society. new york; london: da capo, 1988. williams, robert. “politics and self in the age of digital re(pro)ducibility.” fast capitalism, january 1, 2005. http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/1_1/williams.html. york, spencer ackerman in new. “41 men targeted but 1,147 people killed: us drone strikes – the facts on the ground.” the guardian. accessed march 31, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone-strikes-kill-1147. zittrain, jonathan. the future of the internet-and how to stop it. yale university press, 2008. zittrain, jonathan l., ronald deibert, john palfrey, and rafal rohozinski, eds. access denied: the practice and policy of global internet filtering. the mit press, 2008. zuckerman, ethan. “the internet’s original sin.” the atlantic, august 14, 2014. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-is-theinternets-original-sin/376041/?single_page=true. aoir2020 soyunahn.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): ahn, s. (2020, october). combining multiple disinformation countermeasures to regulate election disruptions: the south korean case. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. combining multiple disinformation countermeasures to regulate election disruptions: the south korean case soyun ahn annenberg school for communication and journalism, university of southern california overview and framework researchers, the press, and the public alike have expressed strong concerns about disinformation influencing public discourse and elections, perceiving it as a direct threat to democracy. disinformation often involve malicious use of social media to sway public opinion for certain political outcomes, in the form of intentionally fabricated information (marwick & lewis, 2017). a recent scrutiny of organized social media manipulation campaigns around the globe detected evidence of such in 70 countries in the year of 2017 and 2018 (bradshaw & howard, 2019). as a reaction, democratic countries once reluctant to restrict freedom of speech are now actively examining countermeasures to disinformation. bradshaw, neudert, and howard (2018) investigated 43 countries which implemented or proposed regulations to combat disruptive online communication since 2016, and provided a typology of measures based on four target actors. the first set of measures go after social media platforms and require them to cooperate with the state through content takedown, enhanced advertising transparency, and user data protection. second, targeting individual offenders, countries tried to criminalize disinformation and automation through a new legislation, or tried to build on existing legal frames by expanding the definition of illegal content. third, as a more civil society and citizen centric approach, media watchdog and media literacy education has been funded by multiple states. lastly, measures targeting governments included disinformation monitoring by government agencies, or an operation of cybersecurity units by the military to address foreign intervention. often times, the biggest challenge in making policy decisions to regulate disinformation is the delicate negotiation of the two competing values: protection of the public sphere from malicious actors and the protection of freedom of speech (fried & polyakova, 2018). the existing literature so far has focused more on examining the pros and cons of individual policy directions rather than providing an overview of the entire dynamics when multiples measures are combined in practice (for instance, haciyakupoglu, hui, suguna, leong, & rahma, 2018). that is due to the novelty of the problem of disinformation itself and the lack of regulation implementation cases, with most countries being still at their infancy discussing or inventing such measures. the south korean case south korea is unique in that it has operated a system dealing with disinformation for over a decade now, and in that it has a system specifically dedicated for election protection. it’s public official election act specifies a system that combines three of the four measures mentioned above, regulating online platforms, criminalizing offenders, and pervasive governmental monitoring system (kee, 2018). at the same time, this system has been criticized as largely discounting the freedom of speech in south korea (haggard & you, 2015). through scrutinizing both the legal framework and execution practices of the multiple disinformation regulatory measures in south korea, this research expands the existing literature by providing an overview of the dynamics how multiple measures cooperate, based on a real-world case analysis. no. provision name type content 10-3 cyber fair election support group governmental monitoring national election commission’s responsibility to establish and operate a cyber election support group which monitors online election act violation 82-4 election campaigns by utilizing information and communications networks criminalizing offenders, regulating platforms, governmental monitoring prohibition of disinformation spread, responsibility of providers of internet and communication services to follow the election commission’s request to delete or restriction of content that disseminate untrue facts of candidates or their families 82-6 identification of real names on bulletin boards or chatting pages, etc. of internet press agencies criminalizing offenders, regulating platforms, governmental monitoring requires internet service providers to collect personal identification information, such as their real name on official documents, for users to post election-related content on their platforms 110 prohibition of slander against candidates, etc criminalizing offenders prohibition of spreading false (or true) information about candidates and their families 250 publication of false information criminalizing offenders how false information spreading should be punished 251 slanders against candidates criminalizing offenders how slander against candidate spreading true facts should be punished table 1. current provisions in the south korean public official elections act regulating disinformation the existing legal framework regulating disinformation in south korea is based on a system of the government tightly monitoring online activities, platforms complying to the governmental supervision, and offenders being criminalized and sentenced for their malpractices. both the government of the candidate could file a case of violation, and then platforms are required to promptly take down content and offenders are arrested. in practice, for every election, the national election commission of south korea organizes an oversight board that consist of 8 institutions (korea communication commission, supreme prosecutor’s office, national police agency, national forensic service, press arbitration commission, korea internet self-governance organization, journalists association of south korea) and 5 online platforms (naver, kakao, twitter, facebook, google), who meet to discuss how to react to cyberspace election disruptions. for the 2020 general election, they agreed for the followings: a)to form a collaborative board to monitor and stop the spread of misinformation or hate speech, b)to share the personal information of the individuals who spread misinformation and hate speech, c)to create a system where platforms instantly deletes posts and submit relevant information upon requests, and d)to timely collaborate to arrest offenders. to sum, this paper demonstrates how the legal framework of south korea’s disinformation regulation combines governmental monitoring, regulating platforms, and criminalizing offenders. moreover, by looking into the practice, it shows how freedom of speech is discounted not only by individual measures, but also by the institutional settings of multiple measures combinedly operating. references bradshaw, s., neudert, l. m., & howard, p. n. (2018). government responses to malicious use of social media. november, riga: nato stratcom coe. bradshaw, s., & howard, p. n. (2019). the global disinformation disorder: 2019 global inventory of organised social media manipulation. working paper 2019.2. oxford: project on computational propaganda. https://comprop. oii. ox. ac. uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/93/2019/09/cybertroop-report19. pdf. fried, d., & polyakova, a. (2018). democratic defense against disinformation. washington, dc: atlantic council. haciyakupoglu, g., hui, j. y., suguna, v. s., leong, d., & rahman, m. f. b. a. (2018). countering fake news: a survey of recent global initiatives. haggard, s., & you, j. s. (2015). freedom of expression in south korea. journal of contemporary asia, 45(1), 167-179. kee, hyun suk. (2018). the revision of the public election law due to the spread of fake news. ajou law research, 12(3), 237-259. marwick, a., & lewis, r. (2017). media manipulation and disinformation online. new york: data & society research institute. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): büchi, m. (2020, october). towards theories of digital well-being. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. towards theories of digital well-being moritz büchi university of zurich introduction how can we live a good life both thanks to and despite the constant use of digital media? the presented framework describes the nature of and connections between three relevant phenomena – digital media practices, harms/benefits, and well-being – and creates a blueprint for explanatory theories. academia and policy makers have long attempted conceptualizing the “good life,” using various indicators to determine quality of life (diener et al., 2018). although different facets of digital media have been presumed to affect well-being, strong theories for the question of how individuals’ personal well-being relates to their everyday digital practices is missing – in particular to guide research that substitutes the moral panic, or alternately utopianism, around the use of digital media for empirical-analytical rigor and a sensitivity for the complex social/cultural, economic, and technical conditions that frame individual experience. digital media should be integrated into everyday life in such a way that they enable and support rather than detract from the achievement of personally valued goals. the relationship between digital media use and well-being notably, large internet companies – ostensibly in the business of “making information universally accessible” or “bringing the world closer together” – have started to publicly address the issue of potential negative effects (makin, 2018). for instance, google introduced an application to “disconnect when needed” and an online course that aims to help users “learn how to develop and maintain healthy tech habits” (google, 2019); facebook introduced a tool to exclude content related to a defined keyword from their feed for 30 days (facebook, 2019). however, real progress in harnessing the benefits of digital media while minimizing the harms cannot rely on a technological fix. different research traditions have dealt with the relationship between digital media use and well-being with different assumptions and definitions. findings depend on how both sides of the equation are defined and operationalized, and on a host of potential moderators and mediators for this primary relationship (see e.g., kushlev, 2018). this paper points to the need to explicate intermediary mechanisms: theoretically plausible causal chains that lead from a specific manifestation of digital practice to a relevant individual well-being outcome with some regularity. many studies assume, although rarely empirically demonstrate, beneficial effects of digital media use (e.g., digital inequality research: robinson et al., 2015). this line of research suggests that digital media use is individually beneficial, but socially problematic because its proliferation tends to exacerbate social inequalities. on the other hand, several findings can be subsumed under a countering narrative as negative impacts of internet uses on measures of personal well-being have also been demonstrated (e.g., salo et al., 2017). digital well-being is therefore here defined as the maintenance and improvement of subjective, personal well-being in a social environment characterized by the digitization of virtually all life domains and the constant abundance of digital media use options as a default (see büchi et al., 2019; gui et al., 2017). harms and benefits of digital practices in the context of structure and habitus this article offers a conceptual starting point, a way of systematizing effects at the intersection of digitization and well-being. different mechanisms become salient in different ways in people’s everyday lives. the macro-trend of digitization has been affecting virtually all life domains, entwined with three key socio-technical transformations (rainie & wellman, 2012): a turn away from small groups, the proliferation of the personalized internet, and the mobile-making of information and communication. anticipated or realized consequences of digitization at this level of analysis include increased efficiency, innovation, and transparency; but also political manipulation, privacy breaches, and growing socioeconomic inequality. with relative stability, such current macro conditions function as structural-situational constraints and opportunities for an individual. the concept of habitus helps in understanding how even highly individualized attributes such as “tastes” in one’s online uses relate to the social structure and conditions in which internet user were socialized and live their everyday lives (see bourdieu, 1977). at the micro level, personal digital practices, produced by the habitus and thus, in part, by the social structure, can yield beneficial and harmful outcomes, and ultimately impact well-being; for example, increased feelings of belongingness, convenience, or relevant information, but also stress, disinformation, or embarrassment. concrete harms and benefits at the individual level are empirically accessibility and causal mechanisms can be specified. analytically, outcomes of digital practices as concrete harms and benefits can be disaggregated to varying degrees depending on the specific empirical phenomenon and research question. importantly, beneficial and harmful consequences of digital practices are often concomitant factors – for example: an adolescent who joins a social networking site may gain gratifications from connectedness with peers and at the same time experience stress and social pressure; and in many instances there are reinforcing and bidirectional processes at play. conclusion the framework provides a set of general principles that call for the formalization of the specific manifestations and relations of digital media use to generate valid findings on their effects. in essence, there are three seemingly simple but crucial interdependencies: (1) individuals’ digital practices depend on the opportunities and constraints, situational and long-term, afforded by their social surroundings, societal conditions, and technological developments. (2) different manifestations of individuals’ digital practices lead to often concomitant concrete harms and benefits. (3) the balance between and cumulation of concrete harms and benefits affect overall well-being. future studies should focus on intermediary mechanisms between digital media use and well-being, and invoke or develop substantive theories to explain them. references bourdieu, p. (1977). outline of a theory of practice. cambridge university press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511812507 büchi, m., festic, n., & latzer, m. (2019). digital overuse and subjective well-being in a digitized society. social media + society, 5(4), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119886031 diener, e., oishi, s., & tay, l. (2018). advances in subjective well-being research. nature human behaviour, 2(4), 253–260. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-0180307-6 facebook. (2019, january 1). facebook newsroom well-being. facebook newsroom. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/tag/well-being/ google. (2019, january 8). our commitment to digital wellbeing. https://wellbeing.google/ gui, m., fasoli, m., & carradore, r. (2017). “digital well-being”. developing a new theoretical tool for media literacy research. italian journal of sociology of education, 9(1), 155–173. https://doi.org/10.14658/pupj-ijse-2017-1-8 kushlev, k. (2018). media technology and well-being: a complementarity-interference model. in e. diener, s. oishi, & l. tay (eds.), handbook of well-being. def publishers. makin, s. (2018). searching for digital technology’s effects on well-being. nature, 563, s138. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-07503-w rainie, l., & wellman, b. (2012). networked: the new social operating system. mit press. robinson, l., cotten, s. r., ono, h., quan-haase, a., mesch, g., chen, w., schulz, j., hale, t. m., & stern, m. j. (2015). digital inequalities and why they matter. information, communication & society, 18(5), 569–582. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2015.1012532 salo, m., pirkkalainen, h., & koskelainen, t. (2017). technostress and social networking services: uncovering strains and their underlying stressors. in s. stigberg, j. karlsen, h. holone, & c. linnes (eds.), nordic contributions in is research (pp. 41–53). springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64695-4_4 selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): healy, g. (2019, october 2-5). leveraging trust: youtube entertainers and the role of problem-solving in engendering trust. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. leveraging trust: youtube entertainers and the role of problem-solving in engendering trust guy hamilton healy qut negative accounts of youtube creators can dominate mainstream media dominant accounts of social media entertainers emphasise their roles as microcelebrities and influencers, with some of these accounts focusing on the negative, especially their performance of dangerous and often ‘idiotic’ stunts as part of their audience-building and sustainability (goriunova, 2012), for example the bird box and tide pod challenges. indeed a spike in youtubers ‘doing dangerous shit for views’ (weisenstein, 2019), part of the longstanding phenomenon inspired by television show jackass, (lange, 2007), belatedly forced the platform to ban such videos earlier this year. but this paper suggests that any such stereotype of widespread thoughtless creators is misplaced, and instead, leading creators are doing problem-solving that is highly valued by their fan communities, who creators report can also be thoughtful and co-creative. as quoted in turner (2012), microsoft research senior researcher danah boyd has observed, ‘the internet mirrors and magnifies the good and the bad and the ugly. authenticity interrogated through lens of problem-solving this paper asks how important is the role of trust in audience-development and thus creator sustainability, and to what extent, if any, does trust building by creators involve a formal strategy of problem-solving to better engage fans? trust in this context is that between creators and their fan communities, where trust is defined as ‘a form of belief in the reliability, truth or ability of someone or something’. cunningham & craig (2017) argue the fundamental appeal of youtubers is expressed through discursive appeals to authenticity and community, but this paper interrogates those appeals through the lens of whether problem-solving around fans’ key life problems engenders trust. evolution of “harnessing the hive” over the past decade, scholars have increasingly focused on the potential of web 2.0 technologies to enable collaborative problem-solving by ‘harnessing the hive’ (bruns, 2008), and the tremendous agency of small numbers of highly talented young people to adapt software and protocols to serve their own needs and desires (lindgren, 2011). a significant focus of these studies has been the use of web-based collaborative tools 2 to simulate global workplaces (andone & frydenberg, 2014), and better engage young teenage learners via ‘problem-solving videos’ (richards-babb, el al, 2014). lifeworld’s of creators and by extension, fans, revealed the paper adopts a mixed methods approach – in this case in-depth interviews, discourse analysis and observation at youtube creator day events to better leverage the strengths of each method, and provide triangulation of results (onwuegbuzie & leech, 2006). sample size for interviews is 20 among youtubers with an average of at least 1mn subscribers, at the most culturally significant, even artistic end of the spectrum, established tv producers and multi-channel network leaders. participant observation was also conducted at over half a dozen official youtube creator days since 2016, as well as vidcon melbourne 2017. problem-solving by progressive creators needs to be better understood this research speaks directly to at least three of the specific themes of #aoir2019: firstly, trust in our fellow internet users; second, trust in the information we encounter in our online environments; and third, trust in those who create the digital content we consume. the research is significant for three reasons: first, these creators represent contemporaneous cultural power: youtube itself attributes the ‘originality and hard work’ of creators with a new milestone: 1bn hours of youtube watched globally, daily (goodrow, 2017); second, these creators offer the opportunity to better understand an important cultural counterweight to abusive internet users who use facebook, twitter and indeed youtube to disseminate hate via ‘platformed racism’ (matamorosfernandez, 2017). third, the rise of interactive fan communities centred around and built up by social media entertainers (cunningham & craig, 2019), arguably represents a significant shift in the agency of creators and their co-creative fans, especially their mutual ability to independently articulate their problems and determine solutions collectively. as svedmark (2016) acknowledges, the world confronts ‘big questions regarding the environment, overpopulation, migration and starvation’, and in the context of the post-human, better understanding knowledge production on social media platforms that promotes ‘informed choices’ is more needed than ever. problem-solving used to build trust, sustainable livings this research is in progress, however preliminary findings suggest that problemsolving is used to build trust, which is in turn leveraged for creator sustainability. for example, joey graceffa has reported that seeing another youtuber ‘openly talking about her issues with her mom’, was the inspiration for understanding that he did not have anyone growing up that he could relate to, so motivating his youtube career (graceffa, 2015). similarly, hank green of vlogbrothers, has reported that their crash course and scishow channels were motivated by the idea of ‘performing a broader social good’ (green, 2015). this work suggests that this strategy of problem-solving is so effective at trust and audience-building for two main reasons: first, it is founded in the consistent, persistent labour-intensive work by creators of interacting with fans in the comment streams of their multi-platform small businesses; second, this labour is characterised by being co-creative with fans, thus affording creators a rich set of insights into the lifeworld’s of their fan communities, and often resulting in fan feedback-enhanced video products, and, in turn new fan ‘reaction’ videos. creators able to articulate problems, and solutions 3 artistically creative individuals are known not just for their ability to solve problems, but for their ability to articulate ‘new problems and formulate these in ways that could lead to a solution’ (livingstone, 2009; csikszentmihalyi, 2014). moreover, creativity needs to be approached less from first-generation thinking that regards creativity as a mysterious, serendipitous property possessed by gifted individuals, and more as a second-generation creativity that optimises ‘the capacity and potential of potentially everyone’ (cunningham, 2011). in conclusion, this web 2.0-enabled nexus between creators and fans is likely to be highly generative as regards problem-solving, now and into the future, and needs to be better understood. andone, d., & frydenberg, m. (2014). becoming creative creators: simulating a global workplace using computational thinking practices. in edmedia+ innovate learning (pp. 564-571). association for the advancement of computing in education (aace). bruns, a. (2008). the future is user-led: the path towards widespread produsage. fibreculture journal, (11). csikszentmihalyi, m. (2014). the systems model of creativity: the collected works of mihaly csikszentmihalyi. springer. cunningham, stuart d. (2011) can creativity be taught? and why should it be? in wright, shelagh, kieffer, john, holden, john, & newbigin, john (eds.) creativity, money, love: learning for the 21st century. creative blueprint. cunningham, s., & craig, d. (2017). being ‘really real’on youtube: authenticity, community and brand culture in social media entertainment. media international australia, 164(1), 71-81. cunningham & craig (2019) social media entertainment: the new intersection of hollywood and silicon valley. nyu press. goodrow. c., (2017). you know what’s cool? a billion hours. google, california, mountain view. retrieved from: https://youtube.googleblog.com/2017/02/you-know-whats-cool-billion-hours.html goriunova, o. (2013). new media idiocy. convergence, 19(2), 223-235. 4 graceffa, j. (2015) creator (joeygraceffa), 06 july, interview with david craig, united states in cunningham & craig (2019) social media entertainment: the new intersection of hollywood and silicon valley. nyu press. green, h. (2015). creator (vlogbrothers), 05 july, interview with david craig, united states in cunningham & craig (2019) social media entertainment: the new intersection of hollywood and silicon valley. nyu press. lange, p. g. (2007). fostering friendship through video production: how youth use youtube to enrich local interaction. in annual meeting of the international communication association (vol. 27). lindgren, s. (2011). collective problem-solving and informal learning in networked publics: reading vlogging networks on youtube as knowledge communities. in interactive media use and youth: learning, knowledge exchange and behavior (pp. 50-64). igi global. livingston, p. (2009). poincaré's" delicate sieve": on creativity and constraints in the arts. digital commons @ lingnan university. retrieved from: https://commons.ln.edu.hk/philo_sw/3/ matamoros-fernandez, a. (2017). platformed racism: the mediation and circulation of an australian race-based controversy on twitter, facebook and youtube. information, communication & society, 20(6), 930-946. onwuegbuzie, a. j., & leech, n. l. (2006). linking research questions to mixed methods data analysis procedures 1. the qualitative report, 11(3), 474-498. richards-babb, m., curtis, r., smith, v. j., & xu, m. (2014). problem solving videos for general chemistry review: students’ perceptions and use patterns. journal of chemical education, 91(11), 1796-1803. turner, f. (2012). a conversation with danah boyd, microsoft research. television & new media, 13(2), 177-185. weisenstein, k. (2019). how youtube’s ban on dangerous stunts will affect creators. vice news. retrieved from: https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/9k4epy/how-youtubes-ban-on-dangerous-stuntswill-affect-creators # aoir2018-submission-template selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa):, alacon, a, legitimating internet.org through development discourse. (2018, october 10-13) paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. legitimating internet.org through development discourse andrea alarcon university of southern california this is an amazing story about riza -a young woman on a small island where the only job for women was collecting seashells, yet she used internet.org to earn a degree in computer science. being connected means having opportunity. we're going to connect the whole world so one day everyone can achieve their full human potential -just like riza. (mark zuckerberg, 2015) this was zuckerberg’s personal post about one of the promotional videos for facebook’s internet.org initiative, launched in 2013, currently available to 100 million people. internet.org is a partnership between facebook and telecommunication companies that plans to bring affordable access to selected internet services to less developed countries, partly through data subsidies. during this time, zuckerberg released a ten-page white paper elaborating on the vision that asserts that connectivity is a "human right". the vision is an example of what jasanoff and kim (2015) called “sociotechnical imaginaries”, which, they argue, are not limited to nations, or heads of states, but can be conjured by corporations, social movements, and professional societies. digital rights advocates, critics, popular media and scholars (samarajiva 2012; galpaya, 2017) criticized the project on the grounds of violation of network neutrality, and for handpicking the internet services provided, calling it “a second-tier internet for the poor”. due to these objections india pushed the initiative out of the country in 2015. some of these issues have been addressed since then. yet the name in itself highlights the importance of discourse, since “internet.org” implies both that it is actually the internet, and that it is a non-for-profit initiative. it forms part of a larger initiative by various technology companies in conjunction with aid agencies and the un called “alliance for affordable internet”. through a critical discourse analysis of promotional videos, this paper argues that by discursively merging internet.org with connectivity, and connectivity as the key to addressing other development issues (like rural education for riza) facebook uses development discourse as a tool for legitimation of internet.org. david nye calls “micro-narratives”, stories that are not a “full-scale narrative of utopia” but are “presented as stories about a better world”. examples of the micro-narratives in these videos include education, such as computer science for riza, karmel in bangladesh who teaches children how to swim, entrepreneurship, such as marissa, trying to start her own clothing line, and paula in colombia, utilizing it for agricultural advice from an online community. zuckerberg narrates his own story in one of the promotional videos for internet.org, making the link to the larger imaginary: “i could build [facebook] because i had access to the internet and a few basic tools... if...everyone around the world has access to the same tools, then everyone is going to be able to benefit from the hard work and ideas around the world” (facebook, 2013). the link from him to the other highlighted stories, goes hand in hand with modernization and development narratives: progress is available to whoever wishes to take it. the smaller narratives, as opposed to zuckerberg’s larger claims about a connected world, ground the dream, since they finish by saying “this is happening now.” it intersects with development discourse by positioning itself as the one-way line to progress that has been associated with modernity and economic development. many scholars have spoken about the hopes, dreams and expectations attached to technology (jasanoff & kim, 2015; kling 1996; nye 1997, 2008; sturken et al 2004; turner 2010;). yet this paper aims to add to critical ictd scholarship (information, communication, technologies for development), which mainly utilizes what amartya sen called “development as freedom” as framework, arguing for greater agency to users. they argue for broadening the study of technology users in developing countries, in a way that understands them as more than “simple-minded utilitarian beings” (arora & baransky 2013), which is typical of development discourse and projects. therefore several scholars in ictd studies (arora, 2010, 2012; burrell 2016; kleine, 2011; ganesh, 2010; mitra, 2005; kavoori and arceneaux, 2006; rangaswamy & sambasivan 2011) have asked for more holistic approaches to studying technology use by people in the “global south”, including leisure and non-utilitarian uses, and position them within larger contexts. the program began by showing fully utilitarian uses such as the ones described above, yet slowly (but scarcely) moved into a few less utilitarian ones, such as checking soccer scores and gym routines. reality, scholar arturo escobar claims, has been “colonized by the development discourse” (2011, p.5) it dominates the way in which africa, asia, and latin america are represented at the global level. the development narratives are based on “imperfections or deficiencies (of capital, of technology, of knowledge… to make projects happen” (escobar, 2011, p.163). with the videos, facebook highlights the imperfections and deficiencies, of technology mostly, to make this particular project happen. riza’s video, for example, a first-person narration states the following: i live on a small island. the only job for women here is gathering seashells. but i wanted something greater for myself. so i decided to study computer science in town. i traveled by boat every day just to go to school. when i was writing my thesis there was a strong typhoon. i could not leave the island for weeks. my phone became a classroom to communicate with my group mates. we used facebook through internet.org to write our thesis… automated water billing system of culasi water district. (facebook, october 2, 2015 : riza) the video includes a shot of her on a tiny boat wearing her cap and gown, standing fierce in a rough ocean. the video’s imagery contrasts the deficiencies: remoteness, poverty, gender, with empowerment that can come from technology, perfectly fusing poverty alleviation with the techno-solution that is internet.org. the development agenda of gender empowerment and equality has been leading development discourse for more than a decade (wilkins, 2016), particularly in relationship to education. her phone “became a classroom”. we find out she is in antigua thanks to third party sources, not the video, but also, in his facebook post, zuckerberg does not explain that she was getting her degree in an it center, and internet.org was for homework coordination, further collapsing the program with the internet. “the rural development discourse repeats the same relations that has defined development discourse since its emergence: the fact that development is about growth, about capital, about technology, about becoming modern. nothing else” (escobar, 2011, p.162). the videos encompass the traditional development themes, images, and buzzwords such as maternal health, rural education, entrepreneurship, female empowerment, transnational collaboration, and in later years “partnerships” with local organizations. raymond williams states that particular combinations of words ‘establish one set of connections while often suppressing another’ (1976: 25). if, as escobar says, “reality is colonized by the development discourse” we can see how zuckerberg is merging the grander narratives of silicon valley and development, and latching on to the already legitimized and accepted understandings of what constitutes for “good”, “aid” and “progress”. references arora, p., & rangaswamy, n. (2013). digital leisure for development: reframing new media practice in the global south. media, culture & society, 35(7), 898-905. burrell, j. (2016). material ecosystems: theorizing (digital) technologies in socioeconomic development. information technologies & international development, 12(1), pp-1. escobar, a. (2011). encountering development: the making and unmaking of the third world. princeton university press. facebook. [internet.org by facebook ]. (2015, october 2 ). riza [video file]. retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/internetdotorg/videos/911610822268307/ facebook. [internet.org by facebook ]. (2013, august 30). announcing internet.org [video file]. retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/internetdotorg/videos/484896038273123/ galpaya, h. (2017). zero-rating in emerging economies. ganesh im (2010) mobile love videos make me feel healthy: rethinking icts for development. ids working paper 352. brighton: ids. mitra s (2005) self-organising systems for mass computer literacy: findings from the ‘hole in the wall’ experiments. international journal of development issues 4(1): 71–81. jasanoff, s., & kim, s.-h. (2015). dreamscapes of modernity: sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power. university of chicago press. kavoori a and arceneaux n (eds) (2006) the cell phone reader: essays in social transformation.new york: peter lang. kling, r. (1996). hopes and horrors: technological utopianism and anti-utopianism in narratives of. computerization and controversy: value conflicts and social choices, 40. nye, d. e. (1997). narratives and spaces: technology and the construction of american culture. columbia university press. nye, d. (2004) technological prediction, a promethean problem. in sturken, m., thomas, d., & ball-rokeach, s. technological visions: the hopes and fears that shape new technologies. temple university press. rangaswamy n and sambasivan n (2011) cutting chai, jugaad, and here pheri: towards a ubicomp for a global community. personal and ubiquitous computing 15(6): 553–564. samarajiva, r. (2012) facebook = internet? lirneasia. retrieved from: http://lirneasia.net/2012/05/facebook-internet/ sturken, m., thomas, d., & ball-rokeach, s. (eds.). (2004). technological visions: the hopes and fears that shape new technologies. temple university press. turner, f. (2010). from counterculture to cyberculture: stewart brand, the whole earth network, and the rise of digital utopianism. university of chicago press. the economist. (n.d.). eiu inclusive internet index. retrieved from https://theinclusiveinternet.eiu.com/explore/countries/performance wilkins, k. (2016). communicating gender and advocating accountability in global development. springer. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): burns, r, p welker. (2020, october). moral economies of open data platforms and smart cities. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. moral economies of open data platforms and smart cities ryan burns university of calgary preston welker university of calgary municipal open data platforms are currently caught in a range of tensions. they rely on an unspecified subject to analyze the data, and yet are surrounded by discourses of "empowerment" and "transparency" (barns 2016; beer 2018; dunbar-hester 2020). they are often most beneficial when approached with data science skills, yet often entail unremunerated digital labor (burns and andrucki 2020; irani 2015; schrock 2016). and they are often engaged by organizations tacking some variant of "for social good" onto their mandate the canada-wide organization data for good being a key example. to date, research has generated important insights into the political economies of data and platforms that highlight the ways they produce, mediate, circulate, and accumulate surplus and exchange value. from “data colonialism” (couldry and mejias 2019) to “platform capitalism” (srnicek 2017), this research tends to focus on material conditions under which political economies function; that is to say, for example, exchange is conceived as a trade of commodity for money, and labor is conceived as work for payment (benkler 2006; graham, hjorth, and lehdonvirta 2017). less attention has been devoted to understanding the ways moral values and sentiments are deployed to attract the digital volunteered labor subtending municipal open data platform usage. this omission disregards the discursive work of the lexicon surrounding municipal open data platforms. for instance, the term “open” itself promotes a slippage between multiple meanings, such that proponents may deploy the term for ambiguous social contributions (yu and robinson 2011). others have called into question the similar claims that open data platforms necessarily lead to “accountability” and “transparency” (burns and wark 2019; civil beat 2013; kitchin 2014). those who mobilize these moral economies are deeply situated within capitalist platform economies, and benefit from what terranova (2014, 46) terms the “free labor” of those wishing to improve their communities. recent research has shown that the deployment of moral sentiments performs important social and political functions. fassin (2012, 1) argued that “[m]oral sentiments have become an essential force in contemporary politics” to draw attention to the ways values and norms advance particular social and political agenda. further to this point, burns (2019) has shown that consumers’ altruistic feelings of aid and assistance compel many private businesses’ accumulation strategies, particularly in the context of technology development, and taylor (2016) shows that this imperative can drive datathon themes and data sources. together, these are comprise what dourish and satchell (2011) call a “moral economy”, or the production, circulation, defense, and contestation of norms, values, and sentiments. in this, dourish and satchell draw on scott’s (1976) and thompson’s (1971) arguments that “peasants” leverage moral values to secure economic well-being that is regularly lost in the marketplace move from “fair price” to “free markets”; in other words, moral values underwrite economic activity. in this presentation, we argue that hackathons, datathons, and open data platforms are constituted through moral economies that are entangled within technoscientific capitalist accumulation practices and logics. these moral economies are key ways in which digital labor is procured, and represent a core component of what for boltanski and chiapello (2018) constitutes the "new spirit of capitalism". to substantiate our argument, we draw on an ongoing long-term (4 years) ethnography into calgary, alberta's open data ecosystem. our methodology consists of a hybrid between database ethnography (schuurman 2008) and the extended case method (burawoy 1998). we show that open data platforms enroll the unremunerated labor of a range of stakeholders who comply due to the seeming altruism of such programs. we focus primarily on three contexts: a local wearables research project funneling into calgary’s open data platform, a plethora of citywide civic hacking organizations, and the broad category of city platforms like nextdoor. the practices enacted in these contexts often ultimately advance neoliberal—if not fully private—logics, but always contribute to institutions sitting uncomfortably alongside the deleterious effects of privatized urban space. put plainly, here we elucidate the ways in which moral economies of smart cities and municipal open data platforms have variegated impacts across different social groups and urban spaces. this reconfiguration of digital labor practices raises pressing concerns for the politics of claiming and remaking hybrid digital-urban forms of representation and belonging. we conclude by politicizing the fissures of these moral economies, to identify the new political strategies that they necessitate. references barns, s. 2016. mine your data: open data, digital strategies and entrepreneurial governance by code. urban geography 37(4): 554–571. beer, d. 2018. the data gaze: capitalism, power and perception. thousand oaks, ca: sage. benkler, y. 2006. the wealth of networks: how social production transforms markets and freedom. new haven, ct: yale university press. boltanski, l., and e. chiapello. 2018. the new spirit of capitalism. brooklyn, new york: verso books. burawoy, m. 1998. the extended case method. sociological theory 16(1): 4–33. burns, r. 2019. new frontiers of philanthro-capitalism: digital technologies and humanitarianism. antipode 51(4): 1101–1122. burns, r., and m. j. andrucki. 2020. smart cities: who cares? environment & planning a. onlinefirst. burns, r., and g. wark. 2019. where’s the database in digital ethnography? exploring database ethnography for open data research. qualitative research. onlinefirst. civil beat. 2013. will open data make honolulu gov’t more transparent? honolulu civil beat. http://www.civilbeat.org/2013/11/will-open-data-make-honolulu-govt-moretransparent/ (last accessed 19 may 2017). couldry, n., and u. a. mejias. 2019. the costs of connection: how data is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism. stanford, ca: stanford university press. dourish, p., and c. satchell. 2011. the moral economy of social media. in from social butterfly to engaged citizen, eds. m. foth, l. forlano, c. satchell, and m. gibbs, 21–37. cambridge, ma: mit press. fassin, d. 2012. humanitarian reason: a moral history of the present. berkeley, ca: university of california press. graham, m., i. hjorth, and v. lehdonvirta. 2017. digital labour and development: impacts of global digital labour platforms and the gig economy on worker livelihoods. transfer: european review of labour and research 23(2): 135–162. irani, l. 2015. hackathons and the making of entrepreneurial citizenship. science, technology & human values 40(5): 799–824. kitchin, r. 2014. the data revolution: big data, open data, data infrastructures and their consequences. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. schrock, a. r. 2016. civic hacking as data activism and advocacy: a history from publicity to open government data. new media & society 18(4): 581–599. schuurman, n. 2008. database ethnographies using social science methodologies to enhance data analysis and interpretation. geography compass 2(5): 1529–1548. scott, j. c. 1976. the moral economy of the peasant: rebellion and subsistence in southeast asia. new haven, ct: yale university press. srnicek, n. 2017. platform capitalism. malden, ma: polity press. taylor, l. 2016. the ethics of big data as a public good: which public? whose good? philosophical transactions of the royal society a 374: 1-13. terranova, t. 2014. free labor. in digital labor: the internet as playground and factory, ed. t. scholz, 33–57. new york: routledge. thompson, e. 1971. the moral economy of the english crowd in the eighteenth century. past & present 50: 76–136. yu, h., and d. g. robinson. 2011. the new ambiguity of open government. ucla law review discourse 59: 178–209. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): newlands, g., & lutz, c. (2017, october 18-21). so close, yet so far away: the paradox of status and distinction among instagram influencers. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. so close, yet so far away: the paradox of status and distinction among instagram influencers gemma newlands bi norwegian business school christoph lutz bi norwegian business school introduction founded in 2010 as a platform for image-based sharing among friends, instagram has recently evolved into a locus of economic activity due to the emergence of ‘influencer marketing’ (phua, 2017). in the tradition of ‘micro-celebrities’ (senft, 2008; marwick, 2013), a subset of users have become ‘instagram influencers’ who monetise their follower base by integrating sponsored ‘advertorials’ into their posts (abidin, 2016, 2017; marwick, 2015). reflecting the hierarchical nature of the platform, paid opportunities increase proportionally as influencers achieve a bigger audience. however, the economic potential of such marketing has motivated industry stakeholders to create guidelines for these paid advertorials, requiring explicit admission of compensation through appropriate hashtags such as #sp, #sponsored, and #sponsoredpost. by cultivating a façade of honesty when making product recommendations to their audiences (kozinets et al., 2010), influencers leverage their perceived intimacy and relatability into profit in a process referred to as ‘calculated authenticity’ (salisbury and pooley, 2017). as part of this ‘self-branding’, influencers largely frame their success as merely the result of self-motivated perseverance and as a decision to ‘follow their passion’ (abidin, 2014). however, framing success as a universally achievable goal obscures the offline-capital necessary for emulation (duffy & hund, 2015). further problematising the notion of universality is the widespread procurement of professional management services for account curation, including the use of professional photography (abidin, 2016, 2017). success and opportunities for sponsorship are thus largely limited to those who can afford the outlay of money and time required, continuing the internet’s ability to perpetuate offline social inequalities (duffy, 2016). in line with previous research, we propose that instagram is a highly unequal platform, reproducing or even reinforcing status hierarchies through subtle mechanisms. our particular contribution explores the paradoxical nature of the ‘instagram influencer’. becoming an influencer requires different forms of capital to succeed. however, influencers must suggest counterfactually that there is only limited distinction between them and their personal audience, maintaining the relatability and authenticity required for influencer marketing. our research questions are thus concerned with how influencers negotiate this paradox: do instagram influencers display status markers of socio-economic elevation? how do instagram influencers normalise their status markers as ordinary, maintaining relatability with their audiences? methods to address our research questions, we conducted a mixed-methods empirical investigation in february 2017, relying on user-generated data. to select monetised influencer accounts, we queried three appropriate hashtags in netlytic (gruzd, 2016): #sp, #sponsored, and #sponsoredpost. the data from #sp revealed too much noise and was accordingly excluded, leaving the data from #sponsored and #sponsoredpost. 10,000 and 4,555 instagram posts were extracted respectively. an initial sna was conducted for each hashtag and the 50 accounts with the highest indgree values were selected, excluding company accounts and bots. we then collected the ‘bio’ of each influencer as well as the quantitative data concerning number of posts, followers, and following. the visual and textual data from the most recent 12 posts was collected, compiling a total sample of 600 posts. we conducted a preliminary textual analysis for most common terms and hashtags, followed by in-depth qualitative coding of both the textual and visual data, as informed by grounded theory. findings the sna revealed a scattered structure with low density and a large number of individualized interactions (see appendix), indicating that sponsored posts on instagram are used more for broadcasting than discussion. qualitative coding of the textual and visual data revealed thematic diversity with fashion as the most popular topic, followed by lifestyle, fitness, and travel. a prominent recurring theme in the data was wide proliferation of markers of socio-economic elevation, suggestive of the offline-capital necessary to succeed. economic capital was evoked through hashtags such as #luxury and references to highend fashion brands (e.g., gucci, prada). one of the most frequently used hashtags, #ootd [outfit of the day], indicated the availability of sufficient funds to maintain a daily changing wardrobe. a recurring theme was the use of expensive professional services, especially photography. we also noted the prevalence of luxury travel as a motif across multiple categories, not limited to travel-focused influencers. “miami soon again but first munich then paris fashion week 💦💦 #miami #beachbabe #bikinigirl #miamilife #miamibeach #pool #poolparty” (@marinathemoss) cultural capital markers appeared frequently, particularly among the travel, food, and parenting influencers who revealed extensive background knowledge and distinct tastes. “i’m in toulon and up the road from here lives reynald delille […] many say he produces the best rosé in the world at his vineyard in domaine de terrebrune” (@paperboyo) influencers across categories also used certain cues to indicate their social capital. large follower numbers (median = 12,750) alongside high follower-to-following ratios (up to 1017:1) indicated elevated network positioning and high social desirability. exclusive invitations, trips, and events, as well as personal relationships with other influencers or celebrities, marked certain influencers as part of an élite social milieu that could be viewed, but not experienced by the audience. “today was insane in the best way possible! i have not stopped smiling since we got the news that my husband is now an atlanta brave” (@thegoldengirldiary) corresponding to the need for influencers to maintain relatability despite their evident status elevation, there was, however, limited ostensible distinction in the data. we did not note instances of overt snobbism or elitism. rather, sponsored posts were framed as sharing a secret among friends. influencers also engaged very directly with their followers. language such as ‘sharing’ and ‘love’ was employed and private details about life events or emotions were presented in a ‘blog’ style, to suggest a personal, almost intimate relationship. an interesting theme that arose was the concept of a ‘shared journey’, proposing that the influencer’s success was almost a joint endeavour among quasi-equal partners. “i have some major things coming up and couldn't be more excited to share with y'all soon. thanks for following along this journey with me! (dress courtesy of @shoppinkblush)” (@liveiscivil) references abidin, c. (2014). #in$taglam. in m. berry, & m. schleser (eds.), mobile media making in an age of smartphones. (119-128). new york: palgrave. abidin, c. (2016). “aren’t these just young, rich women doing vain things online?”. social media + society, 2(2), 1-17. abidin, c. (2017). influencer extravaganza. in l. hjort, h. horst, a. galloway, & g. bell (eds.), the routledge companion to digital ethnography. routledge. duffy, b.e. (2016). the romance of work. international journal of cultural studies, 19, 441-457. duffy, b.e., & hund, e. (2015). “having it all” on social media. social media + society, 1(2). gruzd, a. (2016). netlytic: software for automated text and social network analysis. kozinets, r.v., de valck, k., wojnicki, a., & wilner, s.j.s. (2010). networked narratives. journal of marketing. 74(2), 71-89. marwick, a.e. (2013). status update. new haven: yale university press. marwick, a.e. (2015). instafame. public culture, 27(1 75), 137-160. phua, j.j., kin, s.a., & kim, j.h. (2017). uses and gratifications of social networking sites for bridging and bonding social capital. computers in human behavior (2017). salisbury, m., & pooley, j.d. (2017). the #nofilter self. social sciences, 6(1), 10. senft, t. m. (2008). camgirls. new york: peter lang. appendix figure 1. network for #sponsored figure 2. network for #sponsoredpost ir16 final submission rambukkana selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): rambukkana, n. (2015, october 21-24). the hitchhiker’s guide to community: territoriality, intimacy and ownership in online spaces. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the hitchhiker’s guide to community: territoriality, intimacy and ownership in online spaces nathan rambukkana wilfrid laurier university the revolution will not be tele-tubbied. the revolution will not be pre-emptively moderated. the revolution will not need a disclaimer. the r********n will not be hidden beneath asterisks. the revolution will be announced in all languages. you will be responsible for cooking the revolution, because it will not be pre-digested for you. viva zaphoda! ~ from the first declaration of the zaphodista army of cybernautic liberation introduction: settlers of the virtual one might be tempted to juxtapose the appropriation of internet space with the uses that are made of space in and under colonialist rule. but what are the parallels here, and what meanings might be at play in such a comparison? de certeau makes a similar comparison in the practice of everyday life: spanish colonization [of] indigenous indian [sic] cultures was diverted from its intended aims by the use made of it: even when they were subjected, indeed even when they accepted their subjection, the indians often used the laws, practices, and representations that were imposed on them by force or by fascination to ends other than those of their conquerors; they made something else out of them; they subverted them from within—not by rejecting them or transforming them (though that occurred as well), but by many different ways of using them in service of the rules, customs or convictions foreign to the colonization which they could not escape. (32) according to such a pattern, the appropriators of internet space, say, the corporate owners of a web-based internet community, could be seen as the colonizers who are attempting to mould and shape the users of their websites and spaces, to make them notice certain things, buy others, exhibit certain behaviours, etc. the users of the sites and spaces would then be the colonized, a group that could be seen as having the possibility of resistance, to, as de certeau would urge and identify, “remain other within [a] system which they assimilated and which assimilated them externally[; to divert] it without leaving it” (32). all this might make for an interesting and provoking analysis, but, i think, an incomplete one. for the investors and companies that produce, manage, maintain and host websites are not colonial powers that have moved in and appropriated land to which they had no right. the politics of web spaces are often subtler and more nuanced. first, it is often the administrators of websites that go looking for external financial support to create and maintain an online presence, and not (only) power-hungry conglomerates that are mercilessly munching up anything smaller than them.1 nor is it always a simple case of a larger power sweeping down and diverting the course of a functioning community website, that would continue to exist regardless, to exploit its netizens2 to create profit. often without a corporate or commercial aspect many sites would simply cease to exist for lack of funds. as much as some may highlight the “easiness” of online community building and maintenance (e.g., albert borgmann and darin barney—see barney (2004)), in reality is it a hard and ongoing process, and besides the physical resources of computers, webspace and a physical location to house them in, there is the labour cost of maintaining a complex online environment. even with considerable volunteer workforces, often the financial demands of a sites’ maintenance are more than the resources immediately available. working with this take on the metaphor, one could alternatively see internet space as a settled space, designed and funded by certain individuals who have put an investment in that space (of both time and money) with a certain expectation of that space’s qualities and attributes. the response to any “citizens” who might demand different rights or a different understanding of what it means to occupy that space could then, justifiably, from this position, be: if you don’t like it, leave, or the slightly more poetic “vote with your feet.” a more complex situation is what occurs when a space that already has a shared past, or history—a culture of its own—then becomes subject to determinations from outside and/or above, very often resulting in a situation of conflict. the complex task of building and maintaining the infrastructure of that space is often in conflict with the complex task of building and maintaining the content or culture of that space, or, if it is preferred, its nature as a specific place. in other words, internet spaces, and more specifically community sites, are the product of a complex of interacting forces, motivations, efforts and exigencies. 1 though this happens too, as microsoft’s landmark devouring of its competitor hotmail can attest. 2 net citizens. so where does this leave us? it seems we have two notions in conflict that seem to spin around a knot of questions concerning ownership. who owns internet space, those who supply the infrastructure of a site, its material existence, the underlying code that enables it to be experienced; or those who supply its culture, its “placeness,” what makes it an experience to be contested in the first place? this is a complex issue, and this paper doesn’t contain any hard and fast solutions. what i do propose is to bring this issue into discussion, partially using the literature that has already explored the issue of internet community, from utopian (or heterotopian), and political economic, and theoretical perspectives, as well as through the lens of the on the ground micro-political debates within an internet-situated community. if we are looking to understand who is producing the space to which ownership is in question, we must first expand and explore what we mean by “production.” the method i am employing is to follow a specific website, www.h2g2.com, of which i am a member, through some of the trials, tribulations, appropriations, alterations, commercializations and finally transportations that this online community has gone through since its inception on april 28, 1999. i’m hoping that this longitudinal ethnographic grounding with help elucidate some of the more intricate power dynamics that i am trying to uncover, and to add subtlety to the current, and i think somewhat stifling, binary in the literature between “social” and “commercial” uses of the internet. a note about methodology this paper employs a longitudinal virtual ethnography (hine, 2000; silver, 2003) of the website and community surrounding the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy online (h2g2.com), with three periods of engagement in 1999, 2004 and 2015 (years 1, 5 and 19 of the guide). the paper uses discourse analysis in conjunction with grounded and participant observation, informal interviews and semi-structured themed discussion threads on site to unpack the issues that arose during each period and in conjunction with the website having three separate owners: company that originally created the site, the bbc, and most recently a new company run by one of the site’s original owners. my participant observer position will be nuanced by access to various pools of publicly available information. supplementing my status as a participant in many of the discussions i will mention, i am also referencing the collective depository of past fora that may include discussions i was not present for. in addition, i published an article3 for the h2g2post, the community’s online weekly newspaper, about the governance history of the site, soliciting forum responses that could be a part of my research. finally, in a popular discussion forum, i conducted informal online discussions with several members of the current h2g2 community on their remembrances of key events and their current opinions on the state of the site and its community—both in 2005 and again in 2015. as such, my analysis takes the form of a multi-sited ethnography as described by george marcus and christine hine and employed by david silver in some of his work on the blacksburg electronic village.4 3 for full text of this article, refer to appendix a. 4 for more information and examples of this methodology, see silver (2003), and hine “communication, community, consumption: an ethnographic exploration of an online city.” in beth kolko (ed.) virtual publics: policy and community in an electronic age. “what it is is up to us.” this attitude that harold rheingold discusses as being central to the development of the online community the well5 (43) was also a strong determinant of the electronic community h2g2.com. the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy (earth edition), or h2g2 for short, grew out of the software company the digital village’s (tdv) attempts to grow a mobile wireless information service using the conjunction of wap (wireless access protocol) technology and the vision of such a system inherent to douglas adams’s hitchhikers guide to the galaxy series.6 adams, one of the co-founders of tdv, brought not only a visionary energy to the site but, as will be explored, a particular discourse-culture7 that had been growing for decades around the reception of his writing. this peculiar conjunction allowed for unique politics to play out, as the discourse-culture around the fan community of h2g2, and that of the specific creative (and commercial) venture h2g2 embodied eventually ended up butting heads on the site’s governance and uses the site was to be put too. much more complex than binary “us versus them” narratives, where a commercial interest “corrupts” an online space devoted to some other goals or ideals, the case of h2g2 plays out a politics where there are multiple actors with valid and ethical stakes in the proceedings. by exploring these multiple connections and ambiguities, as well as the political economic history of the site over the 26 years since its inception, i hope to explore the political intrigue of h2g2 and unravel some of the meditations this case can proffer towards the often fraught issue of net governance. settling the virtual why study internet communities? there are various reasons, all of which have specific problematics, possibilities and corresponding discussants. though all of these reasons bleed into each other, i am going to lump them into three categories for the sake of argument. the fist is that of those who view the virtual or online community as an important step in the communications, social, and/or political history of the world. authors and activists such as harold rheingold and john perry barlow wish to explore the brave new world of cmc for the ways new cyberspacial spaces create new possibilities for communication—new extensions, as mcluhan might have put it, of what we are or could be. a second view, which might be called a political economic view, comprises authors who, as wellman identifies, largely belong to the second wave of internet scholars (125). looking at the “users and uses of the internet”, many authors have voiced concern over its rising commercialization. authors such as leslie shade, andrew feenberg and maria bakardjieva warn that the possibilities for internet 5 whole earth ‘lectronic link. 6 the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy is a trilogy in 5 parts that first débuted as a radio drama on the bbc, and has since translated into every form from book to feature film. it centres around an electronic book called the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, which tells you everything you would ever want to know about anything. as such a device is in fact very close to what the internet (with the combination of wifi and other wireless technology is, in fact, becoming) the synergy of this book’s global reception and the creation of the online guide is highly significant. 7 by discourse-culture i refer to social cultures and subcultures that accrue around specific discourses and hold those discourses to be central features of their identity as a group (rambukkana). community are, and might increasingly be, severely limited by encroaching commercialism and the exigencies of big business. a final significant subset within the discourse of virtual community is an ongoing conversation about the possibility of community in the realm of the virtual. as largely a response or corrective to figures such as rheingold, this occasionally vehement field of discourse contains powerful insights from figures such as darin barney, albert borgmann and hubert dreyfus that can help us shape questions about what “community” can mean to us and why we find it important to discuss online interactions in such terms.8 mythmakers and cyberlibertatians: the enthusiasts in the virtual community: homesteading on the electronic frontier, harold rheingold introduced to the world the concept of the “virtual community”: the idea of a community accessible only via my computer screen sounded cold to me at first, but i learned quickly that people can feel passionately about email and computer conferences. i’ve become one of them. i care about these people i met through my computer, and i care deeply about the future of this medium that enables us to assemble. (1) this quote situates much of rheingold’s approach to virtual communities. that people can come to feel passionately about others they have met only virtually points to the significance of this new medium. while not a replacement for other forms of sociality, it is, for rheingold (and many of the same mind), an additional form of actual sociality. his largely personal narrative unfolds his history of personally vibrant encounters over the net, from the ongoing emotional support in the parenting conference on the well (18), to the rl9 actions of concerned online friends who raised funds to help a companion who fell ill while on vacation (28), to the virtual and then actual suicide of wellite blair newman (32). the other key component of this quote is that the nature and future of the medium in which these people were able to form these strong bonds is highly significant to them. far from being a technological determinist (though sometimes accused of such), rheingold realizes the possibilities that the medium of the virtual community can enable, and accordingly is invested in the ongoing exploration of technological change: “technology doesn’t have to dictate the way our social relations change, but we can only influence change if we understand how people use technologies” (revised ed. 346). again, this points to his dominant conception of virtual communities; they are a tool that people can use to promote education, communication, and democracy, but not a guarantor of any of the above. focusing our attention on them, and using positive frames like “virtual community” as opposed to, say, “virtual mall” can performatively influence the ways people inhabit those spaces. 8 it is important to note that there are other significant fields in the discourse of virtual community such as the one in media and psychological circles around net-addiction and the one in business circles around the ways that internet communities can be used my businesses to create/expand profits, but i will not focus on these directly. for further discussion of these (and other) discursive fields around virtual communities see harold rheingold’s chapter “rethinking virtual communities” in the revised edition of the virtual community: homesteading on the electronic frontier. 9 real life. another pioneer of the early internet age was john perry barlow who, in “the declaration of the independence of cyberspace” declared the following (oft quoted and oft derided) statement: governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, i come from cyberspace, the new home of the mind. on behalf of the future, i ask you of the past to leave us alone. you are not welcome among us. you have no sovereignty where we gather. barlow’s position starts off with a radical proposition: that within cyberspace, minds can find a place to gather, to find a home. more forceful in his claims than rheingold, barlow seems to see this new space as highly transformative. although rheingold, following the early work of sherry turkle, does see the addition of a virtual social (and virtual subjective) as part of an ongoing (and eternal) transformation in “what it means to be human” (revised ed. 353), barlow stakes a claim to cyberspace and cyberspacial relations as imminently revolutionary. the prominence of this sort of claim—to an already-here, inviolate and fundamentally different “home of the mind”—echoes other, similar manifestos. esther dyson, george gilder, george keyworth, and alvin toffler of the progress and freedom foundation (a prominent us lobby group), preface their document of internet emancipation, “cyberspace and the american dream: a magna carta for the knowledge age,” with the following words: the central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter. in technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth—in the form of physical resources—has been losing value and significance. the powers of the mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things. and again, prominent columnist for wired and founder of mit’s media lab, nicholas negroponte urged us all to “be digital,” to shrug off our archaic, heavy, determined atomic bodies and invest in weightless, free moving digital selves: to focus our time and energy where intelligence lived and circulated in a “[computing that was] not about computers any more [...] but about living” (6). as hyperbolic as some of these claims no doubt appear, this effervescent excitement in experiencing the virtual social is understandable. these various mythmakers, as vincent mosco comes to call them far after the fact (17), were caught in the throes of experiencing interpersonal communication, and in fact subjectivity, in a completely new realm. the subjective experience of such a radical form of newness has always been prone to mythmaking with every new communication technology, as mosco points out in the digital sublime (117), but perhaps it is because virtual community building was such a unique experience that the mythmaking was redoubled. for the digital realm was not only an extension of communication, but also of subjectivity, and also of sociality, and also of life-organization, and also of artistic production, etc., ad infinitum. such a redoubling or extension of every conceivable thing in the world (or so it might seem) would certainly mark encroaching upon the digital, if not as a wholesale transformation of the world as we know it, then certainly of the chance or possibility of such a transformation. but the question remained, how did/do these radical potentials bear out in practice? who owns this space? the political economy perspective “does the internet contain insuperable obstacles to community, or is it a matter of user initiatives and design? we believe the latter position is correct” (feenberg and bakardjieva 14). in the introductory chapter of community in the digital age: philosophy and practice, andrew feenberg and maria bakardjieva pose this very important question. by framing virtual community as possible, they distance themselves from the perspective of impossibility that will be discussed in the next section, but that does not mean they are overly enthusiastic either. the more substantial question, from the perspective of many observing the progress of community sites on the internet becomes: as the possibility of community is a matter of design, will not the pressures of profit making, economic growth and top-down management then influence site design, limiting the ability for user initiatives to properly develop or maintain virtual communities? this is the question that is asked by many using political economic perspectives, and the answers are not optimistic. in “gender and the commodification of community: women.com and gurl.com,” leslie shade traces out the erosion and downfall into consumerism of two feminist websites. one of these is women.com, which started out in pre-web days as the dial-up service women’s wire,10 a 90 percent women, activist-leaning site that “emphasized current news and affairs and encouraged political activism. subscribers were expected to participate and interact on diverse conferences to take a role in building community content” (145). as an all purpose tool by women and for women, the site showed much potential as a thriving and (especially within the early male-dominated internet) important social network. however, a series of mergers which brought it to the web as women.com, corporate sponsorships with companies such as levis, and the increased visibility of television advertising, thrust the now increasingly coded site into the public (and corporate) eye (146). as a thriving internet community, it was seen as able to “target the ‘elusive’ female market” (146). after a brief period of high profitability when the ipo for the company swelled its share price during the infamous dotcom bubble, women.com merged with its competitor ivillage due to the exigencies of trying to make a profit: there just wasn’t enough of that particular niche-market to go around (147). and thus was the slow erosion of the specificity of women’s wire as a type of community—user-focused, feminist and activist leaning—lost in the dilution of content inherent in it becoming women.com and then the ivillage version of women.com which now more closely resembles (both in look and content) the women’s magazines with which it is partnered: “under the ownership of ivillage, women.com has certainly shifted gears, going from intelligent women’s commentary and oftentimes feminist content to a content slate concentrating on “gossip, sex & style” (148). though shade explores a further poignant example of community downsliding into commercialism, this one example can serve for all. though positive community may indeed be possible, when such communities are put on a corporate, or commercial, footing they will then be prey to the vicissitudes and priorities of the market, trends, profitability, and the top-down decision making of the owners, or more often, the owners’ corporate partners. 10 worldwide information resource & exchange. though feenberg and bakardjieva also identify this problematic trend in the actual operations of many internet community sites, they are a little more optimistic. they identify that “community-building groupware is proliferating in the context of different structures of ownership and control” (23). they propose that “research should focus [...] on how to design community-friendly networks” (4), how to make sure that the rising tide of consumerism and commodification, which does not necessarily have to preclude the existence of community, is not eclipsed by the powerful trends shade describes. the ephemeral table: the “community” debate but there are those for whom even the possibility of community in virtual space is an oxymoron. far from targeting the pressures of profit-driven design and management, they see the cyberspace itself as the main hindrance to developing community. in “the vanishing table, or community in a world that is no world,” darin barney theorizes the impossibility of virtual communities. based on the work of albert borgmann, barney posits that “the material basis of community is compromised by the dissolution of the common world of things” (42). he uses the example of table as a “thing” that is the prerequisite for all real community action and that, lacking such concrete things around which one can linger, any community we experience is merely commodity, the false consciousness of capitalism applied in the digital realm (32). though his argument for requiring focal “objects” to sustain community is well taken, in that in order for a community to thrive it must coalesce around practices roughly organized around the “things” in a person’s life (43), he is somewhat essentialist about what can come to count as a thing. things are important in barney’s conception because they matter. in that virtual objects and spaces can come to “matter” to the people that care for them, they can become the matter of a relationship or community. and, using barney’s logic, in that they can then be the focal points of practices, they become part of the world. (and this is, i think, the first insight i ever had about the virtual world, nearly 20 years ago as i explored various virtual communities spread throughout the newly flourishing world wide web: the virtual world is the real world, in every important respect.) online interaction is not “virtual interaction”, just as the people you meet online are not “virtual people,” they are real people communicating in a different modality—just as cyberspace is not a separate space, but a modality of interaction that is simply part of the world we now live in (baym xx). where barney’s logic doesn’t hold is in how he fails to attribute agency to people who feel they are part of a genuine community. it may well be that the members of that community are also in some way commodified, but that, as problematic as it is, does not make their experience of community a false consciousness. another perspective in this debate is that of hubert dreyfus who, in “nihilism on the information highway: anonymity versus commitment in the present age,” argues that “[o]n the internet, commitments are at best virtual commitments” (74). he posits that the conjunction of a current nihilistic western society and digital communication technology formulates the conditions that promote “ubiquitous commentators who deliberately detach themselves from the local practices out of which specific issues grow and in terms of which these issues must be resolved through some sort of committed action (71). in short, he argues that the anonymous and detached nature of the internet undermines the possibility of virtual community: [t]he internet, like the public sphere and the press, does not prohibit unconditional commitments, in the end it undermines them. like a simulator, the net manages to capture everything but the risk. our imaginations can be drawn in, as they are in playing games or watching movies, and no doubt, if we are sufficiently involved to feel as if we are taking risks, such simulations can help us acquire skills. but insofar as games work by temporarily capturing our imaginations in limited domains, they cannot simulate serious commitments in the real world. imagined commitments hold us only when our imaginations are captivated by the simulations before our ears and eyes. and that is what computer games and the net offer us. but the risks are imaginary and have no long-term consequences. (78) this conclusion is worth discussing because it contains an oft-utilized form of misleading argumentation. upon making an analogy between virtual communities and videogames, films and the like, he then draws conclusions in relation to such items as if they were factual traits of virtual communities. in drawing this over-strong connection, he is begging the question, presenting his argument as if it were evidence. the people that one meets via virtual communities do not cease to exist as soon as our imaginations are no longer “captivated by the simulations before our ears and eyes,” just as an interlocutor over the phone does not wink out of existence when we end a phone conversation. just because internet technology is ephemeral and often relatively anonymous, does not mean that, as dreyfus contends, “[o]n the internet, commitments are at best virtual commitments” (74). clearly, this is the limit case and does not define the entire range of possible online interactions. the notion of an ideal community space, be it on the internet, or in the actual public sphere of human interaction, is without a doubt merely a romantic notion. *** rheingold is the first to warn us that we must “avoid romanticizing the notion of community” (revised ed. 361), even going so far as to state that he preferred barry wellman’s terminology and that if he had encountered him earlier he “could have saved us all a decade of debate by calling them ‘online social networks’ instead of ‘virtual communities’” (revised 359). but rheingold is perhaps too hard on the discourse that has grown around his controversial terminology. the arguments around the nature and possibilities of community in the virtual realm, though they may sometimes seem endless, baseless or interminable, actually give us a rich and variegated field of possible approaches and problematics in our ongoing encounter and engagement with virtual sociality. it is with these various insights that i will how approach the specific case of h2g2. h2g2.com the site was conceived as open-source encyclopedia and guidebook. the basic premise was, and is, that people all over the globe could write about what they knew, from politics and philosophy, to cold remedies and hangover cures, to what pubs were good in their home towns. all this information would then be collected into one source, an online guidebook that could be accessed from anywhere as long as you had a smartphone, pda or other mobile internet-enabled device. this was all well and good, until the occupants of the site realized they could use the site’s software for more than simply creating articles and commenting upon them. the text-editors used for entering entries were also used to define virtual pubs, houses, churches, clubs, forests, beaches: a whole virtual world, with the response fora for the articles becoming conversation threads. this community aspect of the site became, in some respects and to some users, the dominant one, mainly due to how many already net-savvy technophilic hitchhiker's fans found that this was an excellent place to move in. the reaction to the homesteaders was not a negative one however, even when the traffic on the conversation forums necessitated the hiring of a community editor to manage that side of things, and the creation of new software features to cope with the demands of the community life the guide had unexpectedly garnered. however, when it appeared that many of the homesteaders were not really interested in writing articles as well, the owners of the site faced some serious decisions. unlike other sites that require a membership fee (such as the well and women.com) where, as rheingold points out, the main economic activity is selling users to each other (28), the economic plan of the guide could be seen as “selling users to third-party users”—and no-one would want to buy an information guide that mostly consisted of other people chatting. the editors of the guide eventually put out a request that those who occupy the guide as homestead also use it to write articles. it is perhaps easy to take the side of the homesteaders wanting to defend their cultural space against encroaching commercial interests, but this is hardly a simple matter of appropriation. the h2g2 community and site was being provided free of charge to a group of users who chose to use it. many felt that if people were not there to create articles and help with the larger creative vision of the guide they should go and find another virtual community to inhabit. others felt that they had a right to this space, a right to exercise creative expression in more ways than solely those laid down by the site's editors. this vision most likely came from the fact that the majority of h2g2’s researchers were already fans of douglas adams’s work, and as such were already a de facto community and did not feel the need to organize as researchers to form a community of interest (shade, pers. comm.). these issues came most sharply to bear after the site changed to reflect a more guide-centred (versus community-centred) look. h2g2.ltd when h2g2ers11 logged in on july 25th, 2000, they found themselves faced with a very different-looking site. in addition to major design changes (including new threaded viewing schemes that increased navigability), many people were distressed to find the “my homepage” button replaced by a “my page” button; the community and h2g2post links missing from the front page; banner ads; corporate advertisers listed on the main page; and the occasional amazon.com link in key articles and fora. though many of the changes were accepted without question, some raised such complaint that they were altered (e.g., the “my page” button was changed to “my space” to reflect a slight 11 this is pronounced “hootooers” by common site parlance. nuancing of attitude with respect to just what the user pages were for). but for some, these sweeping changes were the last straw. one particularly vociferous user named michael kershaw took the editors to task in a series of private emails, an act which, once it made its way onto the public fora, proved a key moment in h2g2’s community discourse. the following extended quotation from his initial post outlines the main substance of his complaints: it has worried me for a long time about the literally changing face of h2g2, it seems to me the values of independence it once prided itself on, or at least promoted, have increasingly eroded into increasing corporatisation [sic]. this is not fundamentally wrong, but the editors have been recalcitrant in making people aware of the fundamental change, and have not attempted to update site policies in recognition of this change. the following points i have tried to separate out to clarify my concerns. 1. advertising – the mainpage now has a number of ‘partners’ & advertising banners of a commercial nature, plus some guide entries have external links to corporate websites i.e. the edited entry on peter gabriel * this opens up a myriad of concerns over the editorial process turning what was essentially a non-corporate site into the recently named h2g2.ltd. * from the early days the position maintained by douglas adams and the staff of h2g2 was that this was a collective exercise in developing the earth equivalent of the fictional guide. it’s only ‘advertising’ was for non-corporate entities such as amnesty international & diane fossey gorilla fund. * given that now they are in ‘partnership’ with large corporate entities existing in complimentary fields, this does lead to the situation where editorial policy can be subverted or indeed lead by these ties. [...] 2. income streams/copyright – the creation of a number of phone ‘partners’, and the establishment of cut down version of the guide for wap technology. * as i have raised above the guide origins were primarily established as a partnership arrangement whereby the clients provided their copyrighted material for free and the guide maintained the greater whole for the benefit of all. * i contend with the development of the partnership arrangements with the phone companies that h2g2 either gets a retainer for leasing/and or preferential treatment in lieu of the hitch-hiker guide content for wap technology. as such, the terms of agreement of the guide as they stand, contributors are being taken advantage of. * if this is the case, perhaps some form of payment or incentive scheme in mechanise [sic] is appropriate for the endeavours [sic] of those whom submit entries to acknowledge their input. also, if this is the case the sites [sic] copyright statement needs to be updated to that of professional corporate entity, rather than the vagaries of the current policy. [...] 3. mainpage agenda – in recent times the mainpage has undergone an overhaul to include such categories as ‘reading the guide’, talking about the guide’ & contributions to the guide’. * the mainpage is now solely the agenda of the editors. before, the feature peta’s pecks/ world of h2g2 used to be present, allowing for readers to submit their pages & ideas. they have stated there is an opportunity for interaction by the readers, but surely some defined area set aside for reader pages is merely an act of courtesy. * i consider this is a fundamental change of policy. i am of the opinion that the editors have sort [sic] to regain control over site activities, by removing anything ‘fun’ or frivolous that the readership has to offer. they are seeking to ‘naturalise’ [sic] guide entries as the only form of reader interaction. [...] * this activity may indeed be related to the revenue streams as generated by wap technology above i.e. that by doing so, they insure themselves of having a better product to offer to potential clients 4. editors/friends – the editors consider themselves friends. * the editors in my communications have at times stressed that they are friends and hinted at why don’t we all just get along. infact [sic], this may indeed be the case, you may be friends. this however is not strictly true in relation to site activities. * despite the two community editors being drawn from the researchers numbers they are now ostensibly accountable to the sites policy and the business ties they have sort [sic]. indeed, i am sure they are willing and able to help you out in most situations, but only if it doesn’t go against the demands of h2g2.ltd and its attendant interests. * admittedly, this had grown out of the culture of h2g2 essentially being free of corporate control, but now that it is a fundamentally a corporate entity, this is founded in pure myth, so using such a term as ‘friends’ in such a way is ‘emotive’ and wrong. conclusion * i would like to say that despite some of the mindboggling [sic] accusations thrown in my general direction over the course of perusing my line of enquiry, i bear no malice for the unfounded abuse i have received. i know that there are a lot of e-commerce sites which are now facing some harsh realities since the worlds stockmarkets decided to place far more realistic evaluations on their businesses. * indeed, many of the above changes made might very well have little to do with the editors such as corporate deals, but it fundamentally doesn’t make them any less accountable when they continue to operate as if nothing has changed. (kershaw) the most significant part of this moment in the guide’s discourse is not that someone spoke up against the increasing corporatization of the site, but that the reaction to kershaw’s post was largely, though not wholly, negative. many people felt that he was over-reacting, and that they could easily deal with few banner ads, as they had learned to ignore them elsewhere on the internet. they did not feel that they were being taken advantage of, and were grateful that the site existed, largely (to their minds) for their benefit. perhaps most significantly, they felt that the non-exclusive copyright they signed when joining the site was a fair compromise for being able to write for, and be associated with, something they loved. one particularly bombastic young researcher12 responded: why did we take off peta's picks and other related miscellany from the main page? because of the idea of writing the guide was being .. well missed. many people were just using this as their homepage .. not writing a thing, making pubs and beaches and whathaveyou (not that im deriding any of these places, i love them -but the ratio of new 'them' to new guide entries was beginning to shift the whole balance of the guide) .. it was just a shift back to the grassroots of the guide is all. and the world of h2g2 is still very accesable .. its not like newbies arent pointed to it as soon as they get here. its just that the first thing they see is the articles. good. [sic] (beeblefish, post 6) and like on so many other sites a prolonged flame war was begun. in response to both sides of this argument, one particularly perspicacious user nicknamed fragilis commented that it is the community aspect that keeps many who were interested in the article writing aspect attached to the site. they stay for the community, and write for the guide, and therefore those who worked solely on the peripheral production of cultural and community content were, in fact, contributing an essential social aspect that maintained the guide: if we go back to the genesis behind h2g2's creation, it seems self-obvious that guide entries should be the primary goal. after all, this is what the site was created for to house edited guide entries. everything else has been a string of happy additions to this format, many of which came from the researchers rather than the paid staffers. 12 that is, me. some researchers prefer the happy additions to the actual edited guide. they may not even contribute to the edited guide. nevertheless, such "freeloaders" do support the minds and imaginations of h2g2's regular writers. indeed, community regulars and prolific writers are often the same. i can't think of a single case in which a member of h2g2 does not benefit the edited guide directly, or indirectly by encouraging writers and their attachment to the site. but there is another reason why entry writing must be important for the guide. the edited entries are its primary content, and they are what originally bring most people to the site. if you removed the edited guide entries, the regulars would continue to return to h2g2 but newcomers would be rare and by referral only. and there is something else as well. the edited guide is a resource that can be put into other formats to make profit. you can not put the forum and firkin, the aroma cafe, and the bruce memorial in a book and make money with them, but you can do so with many edited guide entries. this is surely not lost on the paid staffers. while i understand the reasoning behind the priority, i don't see how this priority negates any of the activities now going on at h2g2. let's use the forum and firkin as an example. the forum and firkin is not part of the edited guide, and it never will be. however, it does entertain researchers during the long wait between writing their entry and waiting for it to be approved. in many cases, researchers would permanently leave h2g2 if they were not entertained. therefore, in my mind, h2g2 should welcome the forum and firkin's role in keeping good writers attached to the site. (post 32) fragilis’s reaction did much to mediate this particular flame war, but also helped relax the antipathy towards those h2g2 members who devoted all of their time to the community aspects of the site’s production and development. it also restates the position of many site members: that they were okay that the site might turn a profit due in part to their volunteer immaterial labour (lazzarato). the ironic turn, however, that ended up taking almost everyone by surprise was that in the final analysis it was community, and not profit, that ended up being the bottom line after all. bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2 after a brief period in which much of the guide was speckled with amazon.com links in a bid to increase site profitability (a move which led many of us to believe that site was suffering financial difficulty) we were blown away by the sudden announcement that h2g2 had been bought by the bbc in february 2001. bbci, the british broadcasting corporation's online component, was overwhelmed by the demands of managing what was by that time becoming a set of fairly thriving online communities. they needed someone to manage the community aspect of their sites. as such, the community frameworks and management tools developed by the h2g2 team ended up being the most economically valuable aspect of their site. the community frameworks, more than likely, saved the site from the dotcom crash and allowed the guide to continue its work. the bbc move was not all positive, however. in addition to the ads all the user provided pictures had disappeared too, along with most of the old entries and threads which were now “hidden pending moderation.” the bbci website had somewhat stricter terms of service than the original h2g2. as a site for all ages, the guide was now subject to increased moderation, a language restriction barring offensive content, limitations in terms of discussing sexual content, as well as other restrictions such as having to contribute only in english (british broadcasting corporation 3). these restrictions led to the formation of a radical front. the zaphodista movement, a widespread movement within h2g2 that takes the metaphor of colonial rule very seriously, responded to the bbc merger with a manifesto that bears a strong resemblance to j. p. barlow’s “declaration of independence” in both its cyberlibertarian perspective, style, and tone. unlike barlow, however, the zaphodista movement (despite its rather hyperbolic citation of the zapatista movement in chiapas, mexico), was focused in its rhetoric and applied specific pressure on its various demands: less stringent moderation, a loosening of vulgarity prohibitions, non-english language support, fewer disclaimers, and restoring the ability to have outside links.13 the site managers eventually worked their way around the majority of these issues by switching to a system whereby only threads flagged as offensive by community members would be moderated, restoring outside links, and allowing some non-english spaces on the guide. though not perfect (for example, many guide members still bemoan the loss of being able to link to pictures) many feel the move to the bbc was, in fact, an addition to the guide experience. besides being able to cross-link to all other bbci/dna14 communities, the move to the bbc meant an end to banner ads, corporate partners, and amazon.com links, and seemed to have guaranteed the perpetual survival of the guide project, as well as the creation of other, similar, projects such as the book of the future, another bbc online community dedicated to the democratic, collaborative creation of a book. it also presented an intriguing conjunction: as the bbc is a public corporation, owned and operated by the british government and mostly funded by a licensing fee paid by all british citizens, the merger invites the question of whether or not having a say in h2g2 governance should, at least to british citizens, be a democratic right. not panicking ltd. the most recent change in ownership to what was by then a well-established online community was also met by complex politics balancing the need for security with wanting to reclaim the site’s original vision. in 2011, 10 years after the guide moved to bbc control, it changed ownership once again, this time to a company titled not panicking ltd., a company partially owned and run by robbie stamp, one of the founding members of the guide from its digital village days. while the site persists, it seems to be approaching what jenny korn calls a state of stasis (korn 133) where 13 the zaphodista demands are included in full detail as appendix b. 14 dna is the community hosting system for bbci which, at time of research for this section, comprised nine communities including a community devoted to creating a democratically created book called book of the future; collective, a community devoted to exchanging views on film and culture; ican!, an community activism site; a parenting site called parents music room; a world war ii site called ww2; a writer’s collective called get writing; a spiritualism and holistic healing site called 360; and the buffy the vampire slayer cult site talk buffy. the site is named in honour of douglas noel adams, which shows just how much the bbc merger effected the bbc as well as h2g2. newer content is increasingly rare and participation drops off. korn argues that such factors might be seen not as the failure of online communities or publics, but rather of such assemblages coming to a point of fruition. while this change reversed some of the compromises needed during the bbc days (such as the restriction on sexuality-themed articles) banner ads returned to the site and its users encountered other issues, such as periodic outages. while not as populated and busy as in an earlier period, the guide, persists, both in its article writing and community modes, something that is notable given its creation at such an early period in digital social life. community perspectives: revisited returning to our myriad perspectives on virtual community, it is perhaps appropriate to inquire what each of these perspectives might, in turn, have to say about the specific experience of h2g2. barney and dreyfus might contend that h2g2 is not an example of a true community. the fact that there was considerable conflict between and among various members and factions of the site might be proof positive that there is no unity in cyberspace. despite noting this somewhat essentialist formulation of what “true community” might entail, it is also worth pointing out that the virtual spaces that users collaboratively created (both among themselves and often collaboratively with h2g2 staff) functioned as “things” in barney’s sense of the term. fora, smileys that signified food and drink, textual descriptions of places, and other similar objects, act, in h2g2’s community zones, as focal objects that entice people to linger. they also require a fair deal of immaterial labour to maintain. the host of one of h2g2’s most popular forums, the atelier writes that she feels “that the atelier is a responsibility as well as a pleasure, on account of being the hostess” (asteroid lil, post 763). and as the atelier just celebrated its 16th anniversary, dreyfus’s claim about all commitments in cyberspace being virtual commitments does not bear much weight either. real people have spent years of their lives maintaining these spaces, and maintaining the virtual object that allow their communities to coalesce. another object is the guide itself, which in 2005 contained over 7,031 edited articles by 267, 926 researchers in 85 countries.15 this object, though virtual, certainly has weight and matter for those who volunteer to maintain it and make it grow. those from a political economic perspective, such as shade, feenberg and bakardjieva, might argue that in the guide’s earlier incarnations its very nature was prone to the flows and movements of its business end. though it is true that top down control of the guide and the exigencies of business had significant impact on the experience of the individual users, it is obvious by the vehement responses michael kershaw received that many regarded the commercializations of the site as a necessary evil, and felt a solidarity with the staff who they trusted to have everybody’s (including the community’s) best interests at heart. though this is perhaps true of h2g2, it is certainly not the case universally, and as such the specific findings with reference to this 15 in july 2015, there were 10,862 edited entries, with 270,155 entries overall, numbers that suggest that the overall mission of creating edited content has slowed over time, while the creation and maintenance of articles and spaces persists. site—that the staff valued community input, that they were willing to create compromises—cannot be generalized to all (or even most) such situations. but it does open a space where the top down control and/or commercialization of sites cannot be seen as a de facto negative. not all business is at the expense of community. finally, one might ask what the homesteaders, the cyberlibertarians might say in response to the final outcome of h2g2. oddly, here is where we might see a very heterogeneous response. j. p. barlow would most likely side with matthew kershaw, and in turn with the zaphodista movement, bemoaning the lack of democratic determination of (and on) the site. dyson et al., ever the fans of synergy between community and business, would likely see h2g2’s progression as a set of elegant solutions to difficult and emergent problems. negroponte might contend that the true power of the site lies in its flexible and mobile digital framework and the mobility and transportability it had as a venture. and finally, rheingold might proffer the insight that “as business transforms the nature of virtual communities, it’s worth paying attention to the way virtual communities change the nature of business” (revised ed. 344). for, the addition of bbc control of h2g2 has certainly influenced the nature and texture of the h2g2 community, but the communitarian “personality” of h2g2 infected the operations of bbc as well, helping them grow and change as a venture, enabling them to incorporate new ideas, and even alter major terms of service conditions such as their shift from preto on-demand moderation. (a change that, one could argue, is both community friendly and cost effective, as not having to moderate every single entry and post could free up much time and many resources.) rheingold ends the revised edition of his book by stating that “if online community is not a commodity, it is only because people work to make it so” (390). conclusion: situating the virtual community but what do the members of h2g2 think about the nature and state of the community aspect of the guide through the various changes? after the bbc changeover, though many still felt a strong sense of community, it is certain that some things had changed. “the guide has meant a lot to me,” writes one long-time researcher, “and i am happy for my time here, but i do think that it is not the same place it was 6 years ago” (marv the grate, post 731). though some point out that a contemporaneous recent lack of enthusiasm in the site volunteer scouts and subeditors as a major cause of change on the site (montana redhead, post 13), most point to the fact that the bbc had cut back on the number of paid staff fully devoted to the guide: [w]here there were once about half a dozen italics,16 there are now only two. if we want their attention, we really have to yell and shout. in my personal opinion, a successful community requires a sense of presence at the top. not necessarily a dictatorial one, but an entity who keeps things on track and extends a sense of belonging to all who participate. a major-domo. without that it becomes a bit 16 on h2g2 the user names of the staff members always appear in italics to differentiate their posts. as such the staff are also interchangeably referred to as italics. aimless and anarchic. i think that, in the years since the foop17, h2g2 has disintegrated into tribes. (asteroid lil, post 748) others noted this tribe mentality, feeling they felt a greater sense of community in specific enclaves on h2g2 than on the site as a whole. though this sentiment is far from ubiquitous. many said they still quite liked the h2g2 community as a whole, and many (though not all) still continued the guide project by writing and submitting articles and taking part in the volunteer schemes. one researcher commented: i don't feel h2g2 has changed for the worse. not being able to display pictures or use javascript is all just cosmetic stuff. the reduction in italic interaction with the community is nether here not there to me. they're there when they need to be and they might not tell us to go stick our heads in a pig but they will suggest that folk take a walk round the block when necessary. (amy the ant, post 757) and another noted that: it's really amazing how this community has branched out like it hason one end of the spectrum, we've got people with 100 edited entries, on the other, we've got people who have never written an entry, but have been here for years, playing games and having serious conversations. (scandrea & tracer, post 3) though there was obviously still discontent brewing in various parts of h2g2 in 2004 (a brief scan of the “who’s online” utility pointed out several members who still had “zaphodista” appended to their user names), and though there were still specific complaints about the rules and regulations of the site (such as the limited non-english language support and support of pictures), there were also positive reviews of the guide’s state, the largest of which is that it is still around after many other similar community sites have gone belly-up. while not perfect, and certainly not completely unified, h2g2 still managed to thrive under the bbc umbrella, and to support its members and their collaboratively built community. after the not panicking changeover, with a smaller community there was less organized decent to the changeover, though of course not everyone was pleased. a full accounting of these new changes and their impacts will make up the final phase of this research and will explore how longtime residents feel about the changes, the new site owners, and the trajectory and state of h2g2 in general. so how do i end this rather surface appraisal of one website and its heroic making-due with respect to both the difficulties arising out of running a website and not being able to control what people do with it, and those of using a website and not being in control of how the owners treat it? the first reflection is that the web is flexible enough to get around many problems. for example, as the bbc has tighter codes of conduct than the site previously had, articles about certain sexual matters were no longer allowed. this problem was solved by the editors by “transplanting” various articles to wikipedia and replacing them with an explanation, an apology, and a link. with the return to an 17 the “foop” refers to the morning that people went the guide only to discover it gone, only to be returned a short while later under bbc rule. the name comes from one of the hitchhiker’s books when a spaceship mysteriously disappears and then reappears making such a noise. independent status under non panicking, some articles were then transplanted back to the guide. my second reflection is that the notions of production and consumption are much more complex when matters of collaborative space creation are involved. when both the users and owners of a site are each producing something that the other is consuming (such as space on a server or a community framework) then it feels, on the ground, much more like a trade off than consumption or appropriation. finally, this brief history is a testament to the fact that virtual communities need not always sink into the mire of commercialization. though this is a unique story, the type of synergy it embodies is one that is very possible, where instead of a stronger power engulfing a weaker one and corrupting it, a balance can be struck if enough care and effort is poured into it. the hitchhikers of h2g2 present a very interesting model for internet community building. through their practices of “making do” that, like those of actual hitchhiking, take full advantage of prevailing and powerful flows, they have learned to latch on, be it to cars or corporations, to whatever will fill the needs of the moment. appendix a call for participation <http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/a3891945>. [letter run in h2g2post april 13, 2005; april 20, 2005] call for participation! what does it mean to own virtual space? who has the right to determine how a virtual space is used: is it those who developed it, those who use it, or those who own the computers it runs on? and what does development even mean in this context; is it raising the funds, doing the coding, working out the bugs, developing content, or developing social and cultural frameworks? or is it all of these? these are the issues i'm trying to explore in a ph.d. paper tentatively titled 'settlers of the virtual: community, territoriality and ownership in internet communities'. when i first conceived this idea there was only one reason i thought about and cared about these issues my experiences on h2g2. who can remember the 'my home' versus 'my space' debates; the commercialisation issue, about adding amazon.com links to threads; the communitarian versus guide researcher threads; the zaphodista movement; the foop; the move to the bbc and somewhat stricter content guidelines? moreover, who can forget them? these and countless other moments have shaped our community and our perceptions of it. i want to push some of these important reflections out into the greater world, to let those who are working on policies and plans to create or govern internet spaces be privy to the particular insights the h2g2 community has garnered through the very experience of being there in the trenches. so i'm putting out a call. this is a call for reflections, memories and poignant moments in our collective history that you think contributed to the ongoing h2g2 dialogue on ownership and community. this seems like a good time for reflection to pause and consider as another new iteration of the story that brought us together looms on the horizon. with a new generation of virtual settlers perhaps paddling along in its wake... post your thoughts here! beeblefish appendix b first zaphodista declaration (http://xxxxxx) the revolution will not be tele-tubbied. first declaration of the zaphodista army of cybernautic liberation writing from near the jungles of lacandon, chiapas, mexico1. forty-seven days our gathering place was down. you know how they talk about things moving fast in "internet time?" it is as if our beloved forum and community had been down for years. many of the people who used to count themselves as fans of the h2g2 community will likely not return. but i have enjoyed this community too much to let it go. when it reappeared in full bloom, i was thrilled. then i tried to read my old entries, which were "hidden pending moderation." then i read the new house rules. our beloved revolutionary sweetheart, the hitchiker's guide website, has been absorbed by the bbc -british bureaucracy clampdown. it appears that new guide entries will be available to read instantly, but pre-bbc entries remain "hidden pending moderation2." this proactive moderating will take time. time that you wouldn't have to lose at most other boards, forums, communities. your friends are all saving time posting on those other forums, because they don't have your loyalty to h2g2 the site, or your fanatical devotion to h2g2 the book. is it worth it? further, there will be no more vulgarity. it's not that free speech is curtailed exactly. just your vocabulary. because somewhere in merry old uk, people believe that the web should be tailored to kids, that adults should all give up their freedom so that parents and teachers do not have to take responsibility for policing children. shall we discuss what "vulgar" originally meant? it meant common. as in, the lower class. didn't you people get this all worked out of your system on tv shows like "upstairs, downstairs?" speech should be common. to classify speech as unacceptable because it is "common" is to classify people as "common," is to raise yourself up undeservedly. we are all commoners now, because all your upper class privilege are belong to us. to fight back against these ridiculous new policies, we present an unofficial h2g2 club - a new, mostly non-existent group for fans of the old h2g2 site who are displeased with the changes made by bbc. two thai/buddhist gods; one throwing water over the other zaphodistas, as obedient members of the h2g2 community, seek to struggle within the existing rules of h2g2 for a reform of the system towards more democracy, openness, away from the pre-emptive moderating and the ridiculous ban on posting urls. for the sake of the continued survival of h2g2 as a peoples' forum, these rules should be removed. since there are so many other forums where people can write what they want without waiting for it to be moderated, without worrying about posting urls, you can rest assured that frustrated contributors and visitors will not remain at a site with this slow and backwards system. these new rules are inconsistent with standards followed everywhere else on the web, and will likely prove detrimental to the survival of h2g2 when people can easily turn elsewhere. these are our demands: (okay, they're not demands really. it's not a war, and we won't do any denial-of-service attacks like the real zapatistas did. these are our heart-felt suggestions: ) 1. any page you come across that says "hidden pending moderation" is a frustration you won't experience at most other online communities. return to the system of moderation after the fact, as used by most other message boards, forums and online communities. 2. allow urls everywhere, in forum posts and contributed guide entries. if they point to something naughty, you can zap them after someone complains. that's how it works on every other forum and online community. the beeb has done allright in radio and tv, but welcome to the web. it's not like your father's oldsmedia. if you don't match the freedom and openness of other forums on the web, yours will be a ghost town before long. 3. allow all languages. are you kidding me, you desperado you? the idiocy of this policy has a certain je ne sais quoi. will segments of this page be rejected because i write viva zaphoda!? in case this is your first day on the web (and i thought beeb had a little more experience here), let me explain something else y'all failed to notice: information wants to be free. limits placed on information by sites that censor, sites that flirt with censorship (as this one now does), and sites that forbid languages, will find themselves left in the dust. if you can't let your information be free, there are many other forums that will3. anyhow, i would think you'd be disgusted at how this policy flies in the face of democracy and freedom of speech, but apparently that stuff gets lower priority than, say, making a safe place where kids can read about radio one. 4. for aesthetic purposes, will you just chill out with all the disclaimers? i don't remember there being this many on the old h2g2. here i sometimes see the same junk repeated at the top and bottom of the same page, just so everyone knows about the new house rules and policies and terms of servitude and whatever. maybe they have more weird laws in the land where you come from, but couldn't you just post the fine print and disclaimers once, buried in the "terms of service" that everyone has to read when they sign up for your service? this is how most other forums and online communities do it4. 5. bring back the "don't panic!" button. i know real estate is scarce on the front page, but if you're so worried about people needing and searching for the word "help", then put it at the bottom in your stupid fine print disclaimer or something. you're fiddling with tradition, dog gone it! (i mean, "d** **** *t!") 6. allow your readers to be adults by assuming they can survive reading a naughty word. it won't hurt us, it won't hurt your children, who probably know more versions than you by now. it won't even hurt your numbers, because everybody accepts this as normal on the web. it may hurt your aunt gertrude, but her boycott will be no great loss...and she too probably knows more versions of that word than you! by-laws of the zaphodistas can you hold up the moonlight in your palm and say, "i own you, moonlight?" no! such are the rules placed on membership to the zaphodista army. anyone may be a zaphodista who loves democracy, liberty, justice, and that scene where marvin triumphs over the tank just by talking to him. to become a zaphodista, simply call yourself one. too lazy to announce it? that's okay: you may already be a zaphodista! the following guidelines are subject to change (if anyone else joins the group besides me who is writing this): a. zaphodistas are patriotic about h2g2! we love the idea of the site, and strive for its continued prosperity. we may even be generally pleased with the past of bbc, due to their involvement with the h2g2 radio series and red dwarf and the jimi hendrix experience bbc sessions, in spite of their involvement with the h2g2 tv show and doctor who5. however, we do not support the recent changes to h2g2 made by the bbc, changes which seem to be working against the open system of the original h2g2 site. b. zaphodistas must struggle within the rules of bbc h2g2 to reform those rules. we do not seek to overthrow h2g2, but to save it from the misguided policies of silly people from another world who do not understand the way our world turns. (in case you missed the metaphor, i'm talking about bbc's experience in the "world" of radio and tv shaping their policies toward the "world" wide web.) getting ourselves kicked out probably won't help. c. if you have any pre-bbc guide entries "hidden pending moderation," by all means, update them and make them visible. each of these hidden screens is a scar on the good name of what was once a healthy and open forum. the revolution will not be tele-tubbied. zaphodistas a520769.d. eventually, h2g2 will likely allow outside graphics to be displayed on guide entries. until then, the graphic symbol of zaphodista struggle should be a broken graphic link with text message. view the source code of this page to put a similar graphic on your page. for the alt portion of the img src tag, insert whatever text you feel. x. in the course of struggling for greater democracy, liberty and justice, it may be necessary to perpetrate a little subversion within the bounds of the h2g2 system. namely, it may become necessary to move pages about the zaphodista army away from h2g2 to some other site, if they are rejected. and as the system of "official approved" guide entries becomes more and more elitist (and i would argue that they already were elitist before bbc took hold), it falls to us to support and emphasize unofficial guide entries. this section of h2g2, if it returns to the kind of shape before being tainted by bbc, is like an underground guide within the guide, entries not marked by the elitist approval of whoever these people are in charge of giving approval. z. all of the above demands and terms are subject to debate and discussion, and probably ought to be reworked by little local committees just like the ezln does, but i can't remember what they call em. anyhow, please post your ideas on the forum at the bottom of this page. join the insurgent forces of the zaphodista army of cybernautic liberation. the revolution will not be tele-tubbied. the revolution will not be pre-emptively moderated. the revolution will not need a disclaimer. the r********n will not be hidden beneath asterisks. the revolution will be announced in all languages. you will be responsible for cooking the revolution, because it will not be pre-digested for you. viva zaphoda! works cited amy the ant. “7axth conversation at lil's” post 757. online posting. 23 apr. 2005 h2g2.com. 24 apr. 2005. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/f38024?thread=625705&skip=0&show=20>. asteroid lil. “7axth conversation at lil's” post 748; 763. online posting. 23-24 apr. 2005 h2g2.com. 24 apr. 2005. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/f38024?thread=625705&skip=0&show=20>. barlow, john perry. “a declaration of the independence of cyberspace.” 8 feb. 1996. eff 20 apr. 2005. <http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/declaration-final.html>. barney, darin. “the vanishing table, or community in a world that is no world.” community in the digital age. eds. andrew feenberg and darin barney. roman and littlefield, 2004. 31-52. beeblefish. (nathan rambukkana) “call for participation.” 17 apr. 2005. h2g2post. h2g2.com. 20 apr. 2005. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/a3891945>. ---. “site policy changes.” post 6. online posting. 6 oct 2000. feedback forum. h2g2.com. 20 apr. 2005. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/f55683?thread=81890>. british broadcasting corporation “bbc.co.uk rights and responsibilities” 2004. dnahub. 13 mar. 2005. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/signon/sso_popups/rights.shtml?/h2g2/tos.html>. certeau, michel de. “making do: uses and tactics” the practice of everyday life. trans. stephen rendall. berkley: u california p, 1984. 29-42. dreyfus, hubert. “nihilism on the information highway: anonymity versus commitment in the present age.” community in the digital age. eds. andrew feenberg and darin barney. roman and littlefield, 2004. 69-82. dyson, esther, george gilder, george keyworth, and alvin toffler. “cyberspace and the american dream: a magna carta for the knowledge age.” release 1.2 22 aug. 1994. progress and freedom foundation 1 sept. 2000. <http://www.pff.org/position_old.html>. feenberg, andrew and darin barney. eds. community in the digital age. rowman and littlefield, 2004. feenberg, andrew, and maria bakardjieva. “consumers or citizens? the online community debate.” community in the digital age. eds. andrew feenberg and darin barney. roman and littlefield, 2004. 1-31. “first declaration of the zaphodista army of cybernautic liberation.” 19 mar. 2001. h2g2.com. 20 apr. 2005. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/a520769>. fragilis. “site policy changes.” post 32. online posting. 12 oct. 2000. feedback forum. h2g2.com. 20 apr. 2005. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/f55683?thread=81890&post=646572#p646572 >. hine, christine. virtual ethnography. london: sage, 2000. kershaw, michael. “site policy changes.” post 1. online posting. 12 oct. 2000. feedback forum. h2g2.com. 20 apr. 2005. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/f55683?thread=81890>. kolko, beth ed. virtual publics: policy and community in an electronic age. new york: columbia u p, 2003. korn, jenny ungbha. “#fuckprop8: how temporary communities around politics and sexuality pop up, come out, provide support, and taper off” hashtag publics: the power and politics of discursive networks.” new york: peter lang, 2015. 127-139. lazzarato, maurizio. “immaterial labour.” 1996. <http://geocities.com/immateriallabour/lazzarato-immateriallabour.html>. montana redhead. “h2g2 history and ownership/community debate.” post 13. online posting. 23 apr. 2005 h2g2.com. apr. 24 2004. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/f2072469?thread=624828>. mosco, vincent. the digital sublime: myth, power, and cyberspace. cambridge, mass: mit p, 2004. negroponte, nicholas. being digital. new york: vintage, 1995. rambukkana, nathan. “fluid stability: bisexuality and non-unary language, sexuality and identity.” m.a. thesis. trent u, 2005. rheingold, harold. the virtual community: homesteading on the electronic frontier. reading: addison-wesley, 1993. ---. the virtual community: homesteading on the electronic frontier. revised edition. cambridge: mit p, 2000. scandrea & tracer. “h2g2 history and ownership/community debate.” post 3. online posting. 15 apr. 2005 h2g2.com. apr. 24 2004. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/f2072469?thread=624828>. shade, leslie. “comments on yr paper proposal.” e-mail to the author. 11 mar. 2005. ---. “gender and commodification of community: women.com and gurl.com.” community in the digital age. eds. andrew feenberg and darin barney. roman and littlefield, 2004. 143-160. silver, david. “communication, community, consumption: an ethnographic exploration of an online city.” virtual publics: policy and community in an electronic age. ed. beth kolko. new york: columbia u p, 2003. 327-353. wellman, barry. “the three ages of internet studies: ten, five and zero years ago.” new media and society 6.1(2004): 123-129. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): neill hoch, i. (2020, october). nostalgia for the new: video game “remakes” and the limits of reflection. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. nostalgia for the new: video game “remakes” and the limits of reflection indira neill hoch concordia college, moorhead minnesota introduction: nostalgia, retrogaming, and remakes nostalgia in this paper i consider comments posted on the official trailers of final fantasy vii remake and yakuza kiwami (from the verified playstation youtube channel) as iterations of nostalgia within the context of fifthand sixth-generation digital game “remakes,” where the narrative and characters (mäyrä’s (2008) “shell”) of the original game have been retained, but the game’s engine and mechanics (mäyrä’s “core”) have been wholly replaced with modern technology. using these comments, i attempt to place responses to these games into garda’s (2013) nostalgia continuum as a way of testing the possibilities and limitations of “nostalgia” as a framework for understanding aaa remakes. nostalgia is a predominant framework through which scholars explicate retro-games (payne, 2008; suominen, 2008), “neo”-retro game development (garda, 2013; sloan, 2016), and retrogamers’ community practice (heineman, 2014; payne, 2008; swalwell, 2007). most retrogaming nostalgia literature follows jamison (1991) in that reconstructions of the past are oriented towards understanding the present and are consistently linked to commodification. considering the origin of digital gaming is traditionally placed in the 1970s, we now share almost fifty years of gaming as part of our digitally mediated lives. while “retrogaming” as a nomenclature still invokes the foundational years of arcade cabinets and the earliest consumer electronics iterations, it increasingly also includes hardware and software from the 8and 16-bit eras (garda, 2013; payne, 2008; wulf et al., 2018). scholars have attended to the linkages between “old” video games and nostalgia since the mid-2000s. it follows, then, that fifteen additional years of games should be included in what is considered “old.” the fifth-generation 32and 64-bit consoles (sony playstation and nintendo 64, among others) came to market starting in 1993 and most scholarship on gaming and nostalgia has not yet attended to fifth-generation and later titles in a substantial way. though, there has been work on how contemporary games invoke nostalgia for the historical and aesthetic past in a manner deeply influenced by the “authenticity” of film depictions (cruz, 2007; hodson, 2010; sloan, 2015). yet, aaa game publishers have begun to mine this era for titles and profit. perhaps most anticipated, the final fantasy vii remake from square enix was released in april 2020. at least, the first part was released. square enix has yet to confirm how many games players will have to purchase in order to complete ffvii remake. we do know that players will need to purchase multiple $70 usd (or more) disks in order to complete the game. less high profile, in 2016 (japan, worldwide in 2017) developer ryu ga gotoku studio released yakuza kiwami, a remake of the 2005 title yakuza. rather than remaster the game (which was later done for ps3 titles yakuza 3, 4 and 5), the studio instead opted to remake yakuza in the eighth-generation engine used for yakuza 0 and yakuza 6. rather than preserve the original game engine and mechanics, the decision was made to modernize both. while the in-game world maintained mid-2000s cultural references, social expectations, and fashions, the game itself was firmly brought into the late-2010s. unlike ffvii, yakuza titles did not experience wide success outside of japan upon initial launch. the first game’s north american release was marred by a trailer with poor quality voice acting that resulted in future titles in the series only being released with subtitles overseas (constantine, 2010). these differences in reception make for a compelling comparison. expressions and expectations of restorative and reflective nostalgia garda (2013) drawing particularly from the work of boym (2001) stresses the difference between restorative and reflective nostalgia. garda constructs a nostalgia continuum ranging from restorative “classic” games to reflective “neo” games that, rather than trying to restore perfectly the conventions and expectations of the classic games, instead look back upon “1980’s-ness, 8-bitness and 16-bitness (p. 11).” neo-games or “playable game criticism” (sloan, 2016), are a pastiche of an era, rather than an attempt at reproduction. the neo-game designer’s nostalgia is one that fosters “creativity and artistic erudition (garda, 2013, p. 10).” but the remade game does not fit neatly into this nostalgia continuum. while a youtube comment for ffvii remake exclaims “i skipped school in 1997 for the launch and i’m skipping work in 2020 for launch” implies an enduring emotional connection to the title, such nostalgia is not uncomplicatedly placed, as ffvii remake is not restorative. it’s simply not the same game as the original, most notably the battle system has been replaced in its entirety. comments on the yakuza trailer at times express giddy excitement for earlier titles becoming playable on modern consoles, while openly admitting that they did not begin playing the series until the release of yakuza 0 in 2017. suominen (2008) notes that with some frequency the most avid players of retro-styled titles and even retro-rereleases are children who never experienced these games the first time around. but yakuza’s comparatively short timeframe between initial release and remake, as well as its overall violent content, pins a different market: adults who overlooked the game ten years ago and are now experiencing an entire fifteenyear-long series in three years (between 0’s initial launch in 2017 to the release of yakuza 3, 4, and 5 remastered in 2020, seven yakuza games in total have been released or re-released for the na market). this relationship between generating a sort of “instant” nostalgia and selling multiple units to the same consumer in a short time frame appears vital. testing garda’s continuum by considering remade aaa games and their nostalgic responses in a comparative fashion pushes the adaptability and applicability of the model for incorporating more recent video game content that nonetheless plays on fond feelings for the past. our lives with digital gaming will only have a deeper history to draw from in the coming years. and, given the profitability of and depoliticization that often accompanies manufactured nostalgia (hobson, 2010), understanding the limits and possibilities of nostalgia as an analytical framework remains important as more games may take up the mantle of “retro.” references boym, s. the future of nostalgia. basic books: new york. constantine, j. (2010, march 26). tokyo beat down: the story of yakuza. 1up.com. retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20160525140414/http://www.1up.com/features/storyyakuza-franchise cruz, t. (2007). it’s almost too intense: nostalgia and authenticity in call of duty 2. loading: the journal of canadian game studies, 1. garda, m. b. (2013, august). nostalgia in retro game design. in digra conference. heineman, d. s. (2014). public memory and gamer identity: retrogaming as nostalgia. journal of games criticism, 1(1), 1-24. hodson, j. (2010). when i'm sixty-four: beatles rock band and the commodification of nostalgia. loading..., 6(10). jameson, f. (1991). postmodernism: or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. durham, nc: duke university press. mäyrä, f. (2008). an introduction to game studies. london: sage. payne, m. t. (2008) playing the deja-new: “plug in and play tv games” and the cultural politics of classic gaming. in z. whalen & l. n. taylor, playing the past: history and nostalgia in video games (pp. 51-68). vanderbilt university press: nashville. sloan, r. j. (2015). videogames as remediated memories: commodified nostalgia and hyperreality in far cry 3: blood dragon and gone home. games and culture, 10(6), 525-550. sloan, r. (2016). nostalgia videogames as playable game criticism. g|a|m|e games as art, media, entertainment, 1(5). suominen, j. (2008). the past as the future? nostalgia and retrogaming in digital culture. in proceedings of perthdac2007. the 7th international digital arts and cultures conference. the future of digital media culture (vol. 15, p. 18). swalwell, m. (2007). the remembering and the forgetting of early digital games: from novelty to detritus and back again. journal of visual culture, 6(2), 255-273. wulf, t., bowman, n. d., rieger, d., velez, j. a., & breuer, j. (2018). video games as time machines: video game nostalgia and the success of retro gaming. media and communication, (2), 60-68. ems_aoir16_final selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 201 critical making: amish innovation for community empowerment lindsay ems butler university introduction this paper identifies one communication strategy used by the amish to protect their cultural autonomy in the digital age. based on recent ethnographic fieldwork in two indiana amish settlements and artifact analyses of devices appearing in advertisements in a popular amish trade journal, this paper explores the political implications of everyday socio-technical making practices. in particular, this paper explores everyday socio-technical innovations, including professional artifacts and arrangements, which reflect and protect amish religious and cultural values in an increasingly digital economy. the innovations presented in this paper are positioned as mundane and everyday decisions and professional practices that have profound political implications for the empowerment of amish communities to resist the assimilation of their culture in mainstream society in an increasingly globally networked world. the amish have a long history of deciding which new technologies to accept and which to reject. generally a conservative religious group known for its members living premodern lifestyles, the amish do not take a hard line against all new technologies, as some may think. contrary to popular belief, the amish do not seek complete isolation from the rest of the world. like most of us, they participate in the global network society today in order to make a living, travel and maintain relationships across space. they are different from others though in that they care a great deal about the nature of their link to the global networked society. in particular, the amish aim to regulate the communication channel that connects their local community to everyone else. one way of accomplishing this is creating new information communication technologies (icts) that reflect the need to engage in the 21st century economy, yet abide by their community’s religious values. critical making is an emerging concept in science and technology studies used to study the social arrangements surrounding and hacking and diy practices. matt ratto first used the concept to “connect two modes of engagement with the world that are often held separate—critical thinking, typically understood as conceptually and linguistically based and physical “making,” goal-based material work” (2011: 253). according to carl disalvo, “‘critical making’ suggests a new form of design, through which the political qualities of an issue are materialized by participatory means” (2014: 96). while existing scholarship primarily conceptualizes critical making as an intervention orchestrated by researchers, here, following ashton (2015) making is explored as a common everyday phenomenon, embedded in an evolving sociotechnical world. this analysis, then, extends our understanding of critical making by investigating the everyday circumstances that afford and constrain creative practices and by examining how its mundane nature among a marginalized group of people contributes to their empowerment. these ideas will be used to frame amish socio-technical workarounds as made artifacts and socio-technical arrangements that come to symbolize shared beliefs and values and mark the cultural boundaries of amish communities. within this framework, it will be suggested that amish workarounds are functional and symbolic tools that act to protect amish cultural autonomy in an increasingly digital, globally connected world. this analysis builds on existing scholarship that conceptualizes critical making as an intervention orchestrated by researchers. here, making is explored as a common everyday phenomenon, embedded in an evolving socio-technical world (ashton 2015). this analysis, then, extends our understanding of critical making by investigating the everyday circumstances that enable and constrain creative practices and by examining how its mundane nature among a marginalized group of people contributes to their political empowerment. according to ratto, disolvo and others (ratto 2011; ratto et al. 2014; disalvo 2014; eglash and banks 2014, wylie et al. 2014), the focus of critical making analyses is neither the making process itself nor the politics in which such practices participate. it is the connection between these. further, drawing on the work of media materiality scholars like brian larkin (2008), the process by which these made objects enforce certain regimes or beliefs through their presence will be explored. by investigating the meanings attached to technologies, their technical functions and the social uses to which they are put will provide insights into what it is to live as a particular kind of amish subject (larkin 2008). in effect, examining particularly amish uses of technologies reveals unique, indigenous motivations that cannot be explained by market logic alone. data for this paper is comprised of two types of data: interviews with 34 amish business and church leaders conducted from 2011-2014 and content published in the plain communities business exchange (tpcbe), a national amish trade journal. most tpcbe readers do not have access to the internet and rely on mail publications to learn about and buy new products that meet their family’s needs. according to tpcbe website, the plain community business exchange, is [readers’] primary way to stay connected with happenings outside of their community. many of these people also advertise their products to other plain communities and then ship them via ups, fedex and mail. this creates a network that has been established years ago and still continues, however it is on a much larger scale in our current day and age. the networking of plain/conservative communities has always been an interesting subject and has captured a large audience. we are proud to be a part of this communication between suppliers and purchasers and hope to continue to earn their loyal support in return. thus, the appearance of these products in tpcbe ascribes a legitimacy to them and indicates for many anabaptist readers that adopting them is acceptable given church rules. products not agreeing with (general) amish socio-technical norms, are not likely to appear within this journal’s pages (e.g. an ad for an automobile, radio or tv). however, it is common to see ads for internet-disabled word processors and “plain cell phones,” which do not have the ability to text, email, surf the internet, etc. in this way, the technologies appearing in this publication communicate standards for what technologies are acceptable among amish business owners and what are not. by surveying these artifacts, the boundaries within which it is safe to innovate, repurpose and use uniquely amish technologies are also elucidated. interviews with amish church and business leaders revealed that technology non-use acts as a political mechanism for preserving amish religious values and traditions and promoting individual social and spiritual health. participants reported feeling that their collective non-use practices empowered their communities by preserving amish cultural autonomy in the digital age. this, they felt, made amish individuals less susceptible to corporate and governmental ideologies promoting individualism, conspicuous consumption, mobility, fragmentation and anonymity. a spirit of amish making throughout the industrial age and now in the information age, the amish have adhered to the tradition of making as a primary form of work. cabinet-makers, machine-builders, carpenters, buggy-makers, metal-workers furniture-makers, wood-workers and fencebuilders are common professions among amish businessmen today. generally, they learn these skills from fathers, uncles and grandfathers. among amish businesswomen (who are slowly also entering the non-domestic workforce), many have craft or fabric shops or make quilts or food items like noodles, jams and candy to sell to tourists. the continuity of this amish professional tradition is the result of shared religious beliefs articulated by the earliest amish revolutionaries in europe during the 17th and 18th centuries. these beliefs have inspired individuals to live a practical, simple and humble lifestyle for centuries. adherence to these beliefs today continues to shape occupational preferences among amish workers. while most early amish people were farmers, it was only in the last thirty years that this occupation became outmoded (hurst & mcconnell 2010). based on his observations of non-amish workers today, a minister and successful business owner felt, “people in the united states can’t make things any more. people need to humble themselves and make something useful.” this he felt would help reduce unemployment in society. these sentiments capture feelings expressed by many other participants suggesting the type of work one chooses to do should be constrained by actual (not manufactured) demand and making products by hand (if not growing them), at a small-scale, so family members can work together, is inherently more rewarding than resorting to automatic, large-scale production methods. according to many church leaders interviewed for this paper, maintaining separation between the amish and non-amish world was more important than expanding profits, power and/or efficiency. for them, the adoption of technology simply because it affords efficiency, does not fit within the worldview of an amish entrepreneur who is pursuing a vision of professional success shaped by amish values. most business owners simply wanted to have enough work to live comfortable low-stress lives while still being able to provide for their families and employees families. maintaining this separation, for them, required certain limitations on technology use. these particular ideologies contribute to the reproduction of a distinct spirit of amish making that uniquely inspires and constrains acceptable types of making done among practical amish makers. socio-technical arrangements: precarity as a symbol of amish identity noah, a business owner and minister was one of my closest informants during my fieldwork. according to him, whether or not you used a technology was less important than how you used it. during one of our many phone conversations, he told me a story about his father, who had recently passed away. noah respected and admired his father a great deal. twenty years ago, when noah was still involved in farming (today he is a successful entrepreneur who spends most of his time working as a buyer for his growing construction company), he put a gasoline engine on a corn picker. at this time, this was not an approved technology, as corn picking was to be done the slow way, in which horse and human energy powered the picking process. noah was the first in the area to do this. that year, he picked his corn and brother-in-law’s corn. they both got in trouble, he said. however, “the next year, everyone had an engine hooked to their corn picker.” as noah, explained this, he said he came by the innovation characteristic naturally. he asked his dad why he never put an engine on his corn picker. his dad said, “oh, i did that too—only once though. everyone else was husking corn by hand.” for his time, noah said, his dad was also very progressive. noah’s story about attaching a gasoline engine to his corn picker reflects a designed precarity embedded into many amish socio-technical arrangements. had noah not been amish, he would have likely gone to a farming manufacturer and bought a combine to harvest his corn more efficiently. by simply attaching a common gasoline engine to a manual corn picker, noah created a unique assemblage that could be taken apart, if necessary and was purposefully limited in its function. chuckling as he told this story, noah wondered why he always ended up being the “horse’s rear-end” that came up with innovations. in his construction company, which is only about eight years old, noah realized early on that he and his co-owners needed computerization to manage the intense growth in business. at one point he and his coowners realized that they had been underpricing goods, which resulted in a $200,000 loss. he did not have a digital organization or inventory system in place, and as their business grew, they could not keep up with what their inventory was worth. this, he said, “bit really hard.” they went through a few different solutions until settling on one that worked. first, they brought someone in to implement a computerized inventory system using a computer that was “internet-disabled” and point of sale software so that inventory counts would be up to date. this would allow the business owners to know what they sold. although, he felt this was the right solution for his business, he and his co-owners were not sure it was the best ethical or religious choice. when he originally came up with the idea to implement a computerized point of sale system, he proposed it to his fellow owners not knowing how they would react. he was the oldest among them and wanted to act when he realized the $200,000 loss. the others, to his surprise, were relieved. they agreed to incorporate the new system right away. on the day the day noah was telling me this, he received a phone call from a fellow co-owner asking what he thought about bringing on a non-amish co-owner. if they made this person a “majority owner” then they could have a more high-tech business operation, he said. this person could also bring tech savvy to the business that was sorely needed among the current owners to help implement the new computerized system. noah was in support of it. although, he realized it was a difficult choice, he wanted the business to do well and felt relieved that someone had suggested this possible solution. eventually, this solution fell through, though. noah and his colleagues eventually came up with another solution to introduce computerization and broadband connectivity to help them manage their growing business. being a minister, he realized that he could not take the lead in such an initiative, as they are expected to set a good example for others. one of his partners in the business, dan, however, was not a minister and agreed to lead the charge. soon thereafter he began buying computers and software for the business. noah felt it was possible they might start to experience pushback from someone. indeed dan’s father, a bishop, also worked at the company. although they expected pushback, they did not expect that it would come from dan’s father. when it did, noah and dan were shocked, that “he put the brakes on it.” dan’s father came to them and said, “you know, we can’t keep going like this.” according to noah, “it hit dan and i like a ton of bricks.” in order to resolve this predicament, the men came up with a solution. all of the computers and software used in the business purchased by his company were simply given to one of their external vendors although they remained physically on the desks of the employees at the company for their everyday use. according to noah, “they made a hand-shake deal.” there’s no official contract but the vendor, who has a mennonite background, is the official owner of the system, noah said. this man could come in at any time and claim the whole system as his own. noah does not see this as a possibility though because the vendor has a vested interest in the company doing well and, in order to do well the system needs to be in place. (see figure 1 below for images from the computers in noah’s business). this is yet another example of a designed sociotechnical precarity that increases uncertainty and dependence on someone else in a way that could directly affect the welfare of noah’s business. figure 1: computer monitors in noah’s business—one of noah’s co-workers has two monitors connected to his computer. he designs buildings with a computer aided design software package on the left and checks email on the right. noah explained to me that this solution had a precedent in amish ways of adopting new technologies that were seen as essential business tools for competition in today’s economy. it follows the arrangement for car ownership and use in amish communities. cars cannot be owned, but they can be used. he told me that this model has even been extended to allow amish businesses to lease vehicles for use as work tools as long as a non-amish person drove them. so, if they were rented or leased from a non-amish person and driven by a non-amish person, they could be used for work, he said. this was the same model that allowed his company to use computers that technically belonged to someone else. noah felt this arrangement was a little cumbersome and perhaps even a bit silly. he knows he needs the technology for his business to continue to succeed, but he told me he felt guilty having and using the technology. i asked him if perhaps the unique arrangements were intended to do exactly that: remind him of his values on a daily basis. because he felt guilty, maybe he was more likely to use the technology in limited ways that adhered to his religious values. he agreed this was indeed a possibility. noah’s business connects to the internet through a wireless broadband signal distributed through an antenna on a nearby silo. he pointed to it through a window while we were talking one day (see figure 2). the silo sits on an amish farm. i was curious about this arrangement. so, when i got home from my field visit, i googled, “wireless broadband” in the city where noah’s business is located and found a company called “copper wireless” that installs broadcast towers for internet signals on tall towers and silos throughout noah’s county. on the company’s website they ask, want copper on your tower or silo? it’s impossible for our engineers to find every good location to broadcast our internet services. even though we are searching everyday for new broadcast locations we might miss a few. don’t hesitate to give us a call if you own a tower over 80 ft tall or have a silo on your property (copper wireless http://www.copperwireless.net/about.html). this wireless internet signal is received via an antenna at the customer’s residence or business. in theory, it is possible for many amish folks in the county to connect to this wireless broadband infrastructure. if they subscribed to the service, they could have wifi in their home or business and access the internet via mobile device or computer. i was surprised by the materiality of this infrastructural design on two fronts. first, i was surprised that an amish farmer would agree to the installation of a wifi antenna on his property. second, i was surprised at the relative ease and invisibility of the adoption of broadband among the amish given such an arrangement. certainly, copper wireless would have non-amish subscribers who live in this area too, but much of this area is populated by amish and many of them have silos on which an antenna could be installed. certainly noah and his co-workers are not the only amish adopters of this service in the area. what perhaps surprised me most about this, is the visibility of the antenna—it is available for all to see. however, the fact that noah’s business subscribed to the service was not visible to anyone except the employees of the company. figure 2: wireless broadband antenna atop a silo on an amish farm it is likely that i only learned about the socio-technical arrangement of computer ownership and internet use in noah’s business because of the strength of my relationship with noah. others were not likely to be so forthcoming in conversations with outsiders who wanted to publish their responses to controversial questions. in fact, when entering noah’s business, computers were not in sight. the retail portion of the business appeared to abide by amish conventions, although it was hooked up to the power grid, which was visible in the adoption of electric lights. when i visited noah at work, he took me to a separate part of the building to meet with his colleagues and/or chat. they had desks with computers and monitors sitting on them in offices out of the sight of public visitors. i observed many similar examples where participants who felt they needed computers and had them on their property, used them out of the sight of the public. in other cases amish participants used internet enabled computers they did not own in public—amish patrons at the public libraries are an example. if amish individuals were not using public computers at the library—that is, they were using them at work or home—they typically did so out of the view of others as a show of respect for amish tradition (or fear of being seen owning such a device). using internet-enabled computers in public places like at the library or at school (for amish youth who attended a non-amish schools) was generally considered socially acceptable among the business and church leaders with whom i talked. however, using internet enabled mobile devices or computers in an amish business or home was not. in other cases amish business owners had employees and/or relatives who were not amish who made use of computers, software and the internet for them. these arrangements, while not ideal (not using the technology at all was the best case scenario), were generally acceptable according to church rules, as they mimicked already approved arrangements that allowed people to make use of automobiles. in many cases where amish business-owners needed to communicate with networked outside vendors, they created workarounds with approved technologies that allowed them to communicate without using email or the internet. for example, amos, a 28year-old hardware store and machine shop owner in southern indiana, did not use the internet or computers in his business. this presented problems for him because he could not look up parts numbers for his repair business any more. his suppliers no longer printed catalogs. so, he used his fax machine, which was allowed by church rules, to get information about new parts/products and place orders. in addition, he used an old catalog to find parts numbers for older parts/products. in this way, because amos did not use the internet to order parts, he cobbled a precarious solution together that enabled him to accomplish a specific goal. his solution was limited and controlled as it allowed him to utilize global information infrastructures in ways that benefitted his business, but would not open unfettered channels over which unwanted information could flow into his mind or be accessed by other members of his family (this business, like many amish businesses was on the same property as his family’s home). one day in northern indiana, i walked into a business noah mentioned to me a few times. he suggested i may be interested in interviewing someone who works there. i had the address and knew the name of the business but the outside was unmarked and completely unassuming. in fact, i could hardly figure out where the front door was. i had not called ahead or scheduled time to meet with anyone there. when i arrived, i explained to ben, the 31 year-old office manager, who i was and asked if he could answer a few questions. he welcomed me into his office which was illuminated by electric lights while he sat at a desk in front of a computer with an excel spreadsheet and his email client open. ben told me that he is one of 16 full-time employees working for his cousin who owns the business, which coordinates auctions where machine parts are sold. when the company started, their business was conducted entirely offline. the owner began his company by going into manufacturing facilities across the midwest after the operations had been moved out. according to ben, in many such facilities operations had been moved to mexico or another place where labor costs were cheaper. in their wake, however, a lot of machines and equipment had been left behind. ben’s cousin goes in and picks up the leftover equipment and machines. he parcels them out and auctions them off. today, the business is largely run online and does approximately 1.9 million dollars in sales on a popular online auction site each year. the people who work there list items on the auction site. in 2013, ben said, they listed 11,000 items online. in 2014, he planned they would list 22,000 and he thought they would grow that much again in 2015. in my conversation with ben i realized this was a highly unusual business venture for amish owners. i asked if the church had ever pushed back against what they were doing. he said, yes, at one point the church did push back against their move from offline to online auctions. in response the owner brought on two non-amish owners/investors. according to ben, they are assets to the company because they are "good numbers guys." the owner and employees meet with the non-amish owners/investors once a month or so to set goals and work together to meet them. they are not, however, involved in everyday processes. "they are more involved paper-wise and are strategic leaders," according to ben. the owner is an expert in the auction business, having run it offline before going online, so he is more involved in the day-today processes. the team is pretty well balanced and works well together, according to ben. the online part of it helped make it much bigger, he said. when the owner divvied up his portion of the company, and shared it with non-amish owners, he gained approval from the church to conduct his auction business online. this is yet another example of designed socio-technical precarity aimed at protecting amish professional traditions and religious practices, while modifying business practices that bring needed economic resources into the community. i also asked ben if they experienced any pushback from other members of the amish community because of the high-tech nature of their work. ben said, "no, you wouldn't get that [in the northern indiana settlement]. just like in the non-amish community there are people who are really good at technology and those who aren't, those who like it and those who don't, those who understand technology well and those who don't." ben was brought in as office manager because he is good at technology and maintaining an organized office. they have the technology though and do a good business. he has a 16 year-old flip phone, and internet, and computers at work. he said he has had the same phone his whole life. in his church cell phones are allowed, though. "i wouldn't take my cell phone to church or answer it at church or show it to the neighbor and say, look at what i've got’ if their church doesn't allow it. you have to use it respectfully," ben felt. according to ben, if used responsibly, technology was not a big deal. in fact, in relation to the other participants with whom i spoke, ben seemed completely unconcerned about the impact of new communication technologies on human beings. he said he sees the perspective of senior bishops who do not want new technologies coming in. ben feels these individuals do not understand new technologies. nonetheless, he felt their views were respectable. he also believed, however, that technology would keep on progressing. “sure we want to keep our close knit community together, but we also feel like you have to make the most of what you have and this is what we have.” he said, "you know, we could do this without the technology, but why would we? we're using technology in a way that doesn't conflict with our morals." in this way, ben feels that having knowledge about technology and creating limitations on use using that knowledge allows him to use technology in ways that aligns with his amish beliefs. for him, his values motivate him to use technologies in controlled and limited ways. robert, a rather conservative businessman from northern indiana, took a different approach. robert had a tourism-oriented retail business and felt it was beneficial for him to advertise to attract customers. in order to "stay away from tech as much as possible," though, he used outside vendors to do his advertising for him. in particular, he used a "print shop"—a common type of business in amish communities that produces advertising materials like fliers and catalogs. often, they might also produce books, directories and/or a popular local magazine geared to amish readers containing information about local events. the print shop robert used in northern indiana sends emails out for him. i interviewed the owner of the print shop and one of his colleagues and they explained that they were quickly entering the business of using of icts for their amish customers. robert is far from the only customer on whose behalf they send emails. this allows business-owners like robert to make use of computers, email and the internet without doing it or owning the technologies themselves. robert also utilizes the county visitor's and convention center bureau for web advertising. robert told me that he feels pressure to use the web because his customers frequently ask where they can go to buy his products online. by paying others to use advertising technologies for him, he designs a socio-technical arrangement that enables him to abide by his religious and cultural values, while acquiring the resources he needs for financial survival. in addition, he develops and maintains a mutual dependency on local external vendors he trusts. in this way, amish improvisation introduces precarity into sociotechnical arrangements. this is an acceptable externality as acts to strengthen local networks and social systems of economic support in the region. in my interview with the non-amish owner (his parents are ex-amish) of a printing company and his colleague, i learned a great deal about the various services they offered to amish businesses. many services helped them advertise their products and made the internet accessible without the clients having to own the devices or use them first-hand. for example, many of the company’s clients are wholesale furniture manufacturers who sell their products to furniture retail stores across the country. this printing company produces catalogs for furniture makers to give to retailers so they know what they produce. the retailers often ask wholesalers for a pdf version of the catalog and put it online where it is linked to the retail store’s website. in the printing shop’s discussions with some of their clients, they have suggested they help the business owner put the pdf online themselves. then, the printing company can provide the retailer a secure login, so the catalog is not open to the public. the printing company owner felt this was a necessary baby-step toward full adoption of the internet by amish businesses in his community. i asked if he felt it was inevitable that amish businesses would start moving some of their operations online. he replied, “yeah. it’s happening now.” he described a variety of precarious socio-technical arrangements involved in the services he and his colleagues provided like sending out “email blasts” for clients. for example, one furniture maker had a tradeshow coming up and wanted to send an electronic message to all of the dealers who would be at the show (his primary customer base). the printing company owner said, we used mail chimp and sent an email blast to all the dealers that are part of that show. this was a personal invitation from [the business owner] as one of the builders who was going to be there—saying come see us while you’re [at the show] and come see our new line of furniture. so, yeah, it’s happening. but it’s still not everybody. in numerous ways, the printing company acted as an intermediary or buffer between the amish and the outside world. they provided (and charged for) many services that enabled their amish customers to utilize icts without having to own them or use them themselves. the printing company’s owner’s parents left the amish church when he was one year old. he grew up with amish grandparents and speaks pennsylvanian dutch. he told me his business does well catering to the amish businesses in the area partly because he has 100 amish cousins who are business owners and he can ask them about what services are needed and which ones the community might not quite be ready for yet. because of his background, the printing company’s owner was seen as a trusted vendor and colleague among amish business owners in the settlement. his pseudo-insider status was an advantage for him in attracting the business of amish business-owners in the area and made him an ideal candidate for mediating the internet and email use of his amish customers. the print shop owner was considering a number of different services he could provide to facilitate the amish use of the internet through his company. for example, he wanted to provide a room at his office, which is located in the amish settlement, for people to come in and use computers. he would then charge individual users for the time they spent on the computer, much like at an internet cafe. because many companies have been forced to buy supplies online, he thought this would allow them to buy their supplies without owning a computer or paying for an internet connection. currently, the print shop will go online and order parts for their clients, if suppliers demand that orders be made online. this is a service for which they charge their customers. according to the printing company owner, one client has an engine repair shop and his dealers require him to order parts online. he used to be able to write out the order and fax it in. his dealers will not allow that anymore. so, now he writes them out and faxes them to the printing company where they go online and place the order for him. the printing company then charges the client a nominal fee each time they do this. in another example, the printing company makes the paper catalogs they produce for clients available to individual customers online (instead of just retailers). according to the printing company’s owner, when they do a client’s catalog, they want to make sure they have versions of the company’s photographs that also work on customers’ computer and mobile screens. the lower resolution images are used then in the online pdf of the catalog. he said, “we did that for [a client] and when we showed it [to him] we could show him exactly who opened it and who didn’t—and he was like ‘oh, wow that’s cool!’ and, in fact, we’re using him as a we’re going to set up a sample furniture website to show some of the others. and we are going to ask him if we can use his furniture to do that, and he was all excited. i have a feeling he will end up with a website because at least that’s sort of our plan.” the owner’s colleague added, “and if he does, that would be our first amish website.” according to these men, there are amish businesses in the area that have websites. one of them is even owned by a bishop, they said. when i asked about this, the owner said, “well he has a son that’s not amish a lot of times the way to get around those prohibitions of technology is to get a partner who is not amish and then it’s okay.” to further indicate the amount of change that has occurred in the area on the adoption of icts among the amish, the owner recalled an experience he had 20 years ago, when many amish businesses were extremely averse to having anything to do with the internet. at that time he was part of the local area merchants’ association. he remembered that the association was assembling their annual brochure and decided to put it online. a number of the amish businesses involved in the merchants’ association were upset by this and pulled out of it. one of those, he said, was the bishop that now has his own website. reflecting on this the print shop owner said, “so, in just 20 or 22 years he went from, ‘oh nope, i’m not even going to be a member if you do that.’ and they were just listing the businesses, to today where he has his own website for his business.” going forward, the owner feels that the competition in his own industry will be heating up as amish businesses start venturing into online commerce. among his competitors in the region, he said, “we’ve all kind of agreed that we won’t go after the other people’s customers. if they’re unhappy, they’ll come to us kind of a thing.” however, recently, a new player came onto the scene and, [they] are out there hitting all of our customers trying to get them to do websites. we found out about that and we got a bit more aggressive on it. we called up all of our customers and said, ‘we’re not saying you have to do a website, but if you do, we do websites! we’d be happy to talk to you. you don’t need to go with them. another service the printing company provides is to broadcast the local high school’s basketball games on the web. according to its owner, more and more amish young people on rumspringa have smart phones. when he was at a trade show not too long ago, a kid came up and said, ‘i used to be able to get [the broadcast of the basketball game]. why is it not working?’ he wanted me to show him how to use his smart phone so he could listen to us during that age though, it’s ok. anything goes pretty much. maybe even a little too much sometimes. in this way, amish young people are given a pass (in some cases) to own and use icts until they decide to become baptized members of the church. when they officially become members of the church, they are supposed to “give up” the devices and abide by the church’s rules. some informants mentioned that parents actually benefitted from having a son or daughter who was not yet a member of the church, as they were able to use their mobile phones or have their son or daughter email and/or go online for the family business. the day i visited the printing company they had just hired their first amish employee. the owner told me he visited another printing company in the amish settlement in holmes county, ohio to see how they did things there. when his guide led him through the design department, “it just floored me!”, he said. “they had all these macs sitting around and all these amish girls sitting there working on them doing design work.” the owner said, from the perspective of the owner there, he liked that they came in with no experience and no training because he could train them the way he wanted them trained. “so, we thought we’d give that a try.” their employee is a 15 year-old female who has completed eight years of schooling. they hired her because they feel she is very smart, but does not have much experience with computers. to start they wanted to train her to be able to make small changes in the ads in their flagship publication—a black and white advertising magazine serving the amish communities. this publication comes out every two weeks. eventually, they may ask her to design the layout and run sheet. but, they are starting from scratch with her, “she’s never used indesign,” the owner said. the other thing that constrains her professional potential is her anticipated fulfillment of amish gender roles. “she may not quit right as soon as she gets married, but when the first kid comes along, she’ll be gone. so, we’ve gone into it knowing she may only be here for 4-5 years. but maybe that’s okay,” the owner said. in my conversation with the owner and his colleague, i learned that the economic downturn of 2008-10 had a real impact on the local economy. many of the rv manufacturers, the largest employers in the area, were laying workers off left and right. i asked if this was bad for the printing company’s business too. they said, actually, it sparked new sources of revenue for us. many of the amish workers who were laid off from their work at the rv manufacturers started their own businesses. in order to acquire customers they began advertising with us, according to the owner. the number of mom and pop amish businesses in the area increases all the time and they are pushing into new areas, they said. in a rather surprising example, the owner knew of an amish business where optometric services were being provided. at this business, a licensed (non-amish) optometrist would come in twice a week to perform eye exams for customers. the amish owners did the bookkeeping and outsourced the purchase of the eyewear. they made a profit by marking up the eyewear and the optometry services. they did not make the glasses or the frames themselves. according to a printing company employee who patronized the shop, it was much cheaper than going to walmart, where he usually went for optometry services. such endeavors, according to the printing company owner and his colleague, are widespread among the amish in their area and are only increasing as individuals develop their own professional enterprises instead of working as day laborers for large factory-style manufacturers. this type of work is preferred because it enables people work at home with family members. the printing company owner once interviewed a man who started making mattresses because he was laid off for an article in a manufacturers’ catalog. while he had been making really good money at the factory, he always wanted to start a business he could pass down to his kids. but working at the factory was too easy. the man would go to work at 4 o’clock in the morning and work eight hours. then he would have the rest of the day to himself. getting laid off forced him to start the family business. today, the kids are basically running the business. the man went back to work in the factory as the economy picked up because the mattress business has not quite grown big enough for him to be engaged full time. the printing company owner told me he bought his printing business from an amishman who, he felt, “was technologically ahead of the rest of us.” because he ran printing presses, he was forced to have electricity. however, he did not get his electricity from the public grid. instead, he had solar panels, and a wind turbine. he collected electricity in huge battery packs and used it to run his business, according to the owner. his presses were pneumatic. “he was ahead of the curve. he leap-frogged over us. and he’s an amishman the solar power and the wind—that’s a big thing in the amish community,” the owner said. amish artifacts: functional symbols of amish identity in tpcbe a number of unique technological artifacts are advertised for amish business use. these devices are particularly noteworthy, as they perform certain practical functions but also help identify users as uniquely amish. in this artifact analysis, amish values become visible in the design of devices not typically seen in non-amish technologies. for example, inconvenience is a desired value in that it acts as a speed bump making it difficult for users to engage in undesirable behavior. publicity of communication instead of privacy of communication is preferred so that members of the family or local community can hold each other accountable for their actions. immobility instead of mobility is preferred, because it is seen to keep members of the family physically together instead of making it possible for them to communicate (less meaningfully) from afar. similarly, the collective instead of individual ownership of devices is seen to encourage public, visible communications so that people can hold each other accountable for their actions. and the ability to communicate emotion via face-to-face modalities is preferred over technologically mediated modalities because it is seen as better for the maintenance of strong local social network ties. the devices that appear in tpcbe, because of the publication’s widespread circulation among amish entrepreneurs, shape amish imaginations and help establish standards about what technologies are acceptable for adoption. pcfreemail in the course of my fieldwork i met business owners like daniel, a furniture maker, who had begun using a service i was aware of because it was regularly advertised in tpcbe, pcfreemail. over the years, his business contacts (primarily non-amish individuals) moved all their ordering functions online, but daniel does not use the internet or email in his business. he used pcfreemail to communicate with his dealers and other business contacts. it is a unique service popular among the amish that allows users to exchange emails via fax machine or word processor. according to a recurring full-page advertisement in tpcbe, pcfreemail “is an affordable service that allows you to use your existing fax machine or word processor to send and receive email without the need for a computer or internet connection.” it helps businesses “thrive in the computer age where email is becoming a necessary means of communication,” according to the ad. the service is explained through images that indicate a message, photograph, invoice or quotation can be sent from “their computer to your fax machine. the service receives the email, translates it into a fax and then sends it to the recipient. when a non-emailing end-user receives a message, it is automatically printed by his or her fax machine. each non-emailing user has his or her own email address so that others can send them “emails” using pcfreemail. one can also send messages through the service to others’ email addresses too. to send a handwritten or typed message through the service, one simply writes the recipient’s email address at the top of the first page then faxes the message to a dedicated access number. the pcfreemail system “instantly converts and sends your message in a professionally presented email.” (see figure 3 below) figure 3: 2014 advertisement for pcfreemail computerless email service reprinted here with the consent of plain communities business exchange. daniel also does ninety percent of his business with furniture dealers and retailers. in order to receive high-resolution images of their orders and blueprints, he designed an ad hoc communication system to solve a problem he encountered with pcfreemail: he could not receive high-resolution files using the service. to do this, he installed a printer in his office that was networked to his dealers’ computers. so, when a dealer wanted to “send” them an order, they would simply print the order to daniel’s printer, which physically sat in his office. in adopting pcfreemail, amish business owners like daniel limit the functionality of their technology, only allowing it to work for certain purposes. having pcfreemail instead of an open email connection limits the communication functionality in ways that adhere to amish values and practices: there is no connection to the public electric grid (often fax machines and printers can be run off of generators, solar and/or battery power), the unfettered internet is not accessible to users, the content of an email is not private (it is received by the service and then emailed after it has been transcribed), and a computer is not required, though a telephone line is needed for facsimile transmission. users can use the service to accomplish the necessary task of communicating with external vendors who no longer communicate via fax or snail mail. by adopting this service, users are also showing deference to amish professional convention and identity. plain computers in my fieldwork i also met people who were using devices that comprise a new and very popular genre of personal computers colloquially referred to as, “plain computers.” the first plain computer, the “classic word processor” was created by “horse and buggy” mennonite, allen hoover for use by fellow anabaptists in 2005. as the early advertisement below claims, it is “made specifically for the plain people by the plain people.” according to a 2007 article in the farm show magazine, hoover runs a pennsylvania business that retrofits wood-working tools for people who use alternative power sources, like the amish. he came up with the idea for the plain computer when other companies stopped making word processors in the late 1990s. “many plain people accept word processors,” hoover said. “computers aren’t acceptable because of their connectivity to the world through the internet, and their ability to add programs and store photographs,” the article continues. when hoover designed the classic word processor, he met with individuals from amish church groups to see what was acceptable to them. he found out that they wanted the capability to make spreadsheets, do word processing and simple drawings. “spreadsheets is the part of it that drove the whole project,” according to hoover. “amish business people use it for everything from inventory to tracking to creating receipts.” hoover also installed open source programs on the machine and locked it down so that programs cannot be added after the purchase of the device. working with computer programmers, hoover adapted the open source programs he loaded onto the machines by removing features like an address book, which connects to an email client (2007 farm show). because programs cannot be added by users, hoover installed 600 printer drivers on the machine to make sure it would successfully connect to the user’s printer, no matter the model. the classic word processor is “10 times as fast and has 100 times the memory of old word processors and it functions similar to a 5 year-old computer,” according to hoover. at an introductory price of $798, sales have been great since the word got out, he said. the classic word processor is an important amish innovation and set the bar for later indigenous ict development in its unique ability to allow users to complete typical 21st century work functions while omitting the objectionable functionalities that the amish do not want. plain computers like the classic allow an individual to write up, edit and save documents in programs like microsoft office including text based documents, spreadsheets, invoices and many are also capable of drawing things electronically and printing. however they appeal to amish customers in that they have “no modem, no phone port or internet connection, no outside programs, no sound, no photographs, no games or gimmicks,” according to the original classic advertisement. “nothing fancy. just a work horse for your business.” figure 4: 2007 advertisement in farm show magazine for the classic word processor a 2014 advertisement in tpcbe reflects a few changes to the technical specs and the socio-technical affordances listed in the device’s description (see figure 5 below). for example, in this newer device, an 8-inch display was replaced by a 12-inch display and a dual core 3 ghz processor, 4gb ram and 500gb hard drive have been added. in the new ad, the listing the limitations on internet connection, sound, images, etc. has been removed. the new product description boasts an “unequaled ‘power to cost’ ratio” and a “recognizable non-computer appearance” as noteworthy and attractive characteristics. additional information about classic word processors cannot be accessed via the web, using a simple search. however, calling local dealers for more information is possible. for yet another recent ad for the classic word processor see figure 6 below. figure 5: 2014 advertisement for the classic word processor. reprinted here with the consent of plain communities business exchange. figure 6: 2014 advertisement for the classic word processor. reprinted here with the consent of plain communities business exchange. a wide variety of other plain computers have also been developed and appear regularly in current tpcbe advertisements (2014). deskmate makes six different word processors advertised (see figrure 7 below), for example. unlike the classic, the deskmate devices run windows and quickbooks, offer local area networking capabilities and automatic backup functionality. one deskmate device looks like a regular computer, one like a laptop and one appears to be a tablet. the other three have recognizable non-computer appearances (a feature listed as desirable in the classic word processor advertisement). these two manufacturers seem to appeal to different clients, the classic is likely geared more toward more conservative amish customers and the deskmate line is likely aimed at more religiously and politically more progressive customers. figure 7: 2014 advertisement for deskmate’s word processors. reprinted here with the consent of plain communities business exchange. other examples of plain computers appearing in the pages of tpcbe include the plainbook, the pleasant, the pioneer and the guardian (see figures 8, 9, 10 and 11). figure 8: 2014 advertisement for the plainbook word processor. reprinted here with the consent of plain communities business exchange. figure 9: 2014 advertisement for pleasant word processor. reprinted here with the consent of plain communities business exchange. figure 10: 2014 advertisement for pioneer diamond data processor. reprinted here with the consent of plain communities business exchange. figure 11: 2014 image of the guardian data processor from an advertisement in tpcbe. reprinted here with the consent of plain communities business exchange. the pioneer and guardian offer a few additional features and are described as “data processors” rather than “word processors” like the others. these two offer features that help “protect” and “secure” data and information including a “custom welded and riveted aluminum case with keyswitch startup” on the pioneer. in the advertisement where the guardian appears (the picture above is just a portion thereof) the company who sells the device reports that they offer “office tech and data services” broadly. their ad reads, “we are here to help you make the transition from paper to more efficient electronic accounting. special expertise in networking and security. community businesses trust us for providing safe equipment and blocking productivity threats.” other ict artifacts in the plain computer genre appearing in tpcbe include a battery powered typewriter and a device that performs computerless email (see figures 12 and 13 below). figure 12: 2014 advertisement for battery-powered typewriters. reprinted here with the consent of plain communities business exchange. figure 13: 2014 advertisement for computerless email. reprinted here with the consent of plain communities business exchange. community conference phone line in addition to these devices, tpcbe also facilitates a free informational service made accessible via telephone called, “pcbe free information line” (see figure 14). a live presentation and discussion is arranged monthly that allows business owners to learn about a specific business related topic. often the topic of the discussion relates to a recently published article in tpcbe. previous topics for the discussions include, marketing, creating better banking relationships, preventing business fraud, economic issues, legal issues, collecting unpaid debt, workplace safety, applying biblical principles at work, and lean manufacturing techniques among others. business owners access this service by telephone on a date and time printed on the ‘contents’ page of the monthly issue. presentations and discussions are recorded and archived, making them accessible if readers/users missed, or want to revisit a topic after the fact. they are accessible to anyone who calls the phone number in tpcbe. in the non-amish world, business professionals seeking information for improving their business practices would likely go to the internet. in the absence of such resources, tpcbe itself publishes a number of articles and essays exploring such topics. to augment its written information, it also helps organize the pcbe free information line to encourage more dynamic and interactive forums for learning and business development among members of its readership. figure 14: 2014 advertisement for free information line. reprinted here with the consent of plain communities business exchange. plain cell phones in addition to the plain computers advertised in tpcbe, two basic types of plain cell phones are also advertised. the first type is specifically identified as “plain cell phones” by a telecommunications company targeting amish customers, as indicated by man wearing plain clothes in the ad and the horse and buggy in its logo. these phones are basic flip phones that have “no games, no camera, no internet, no text messaging.” also it is a free phone with no contract (see figure 15 below). in the field, many participants told me they bought their cell phones from such providers, often from companies in pennsylvania, like this one. figure 15: 2014 advertisement for plain cell phone service. reprinted here with the consent of plain communities business exchange. the second type of mobile phone appearing in tpcbe advertisements is the black box phone i discovered in my fieldwork in southern indiana. in tpcbe advertisements all of the components needed to operate a black box phone often appear for sale by one vendor. these products include various models of landline phone that are compatible with the black boxes, the black boxes that connect the phones to the cell network, the batteries and/or solar panel and accessories that power the two and bags for carrying them (see figure 16 below). in the advertisement in figure 16, it is clear that the vendor is targeting amish and conservative anabaptist religious groups in the declaration (in pennsylvanian dutch), that he or she speaks the amish native dialect, “ich kann deutsch,” or “i can speak german.” figure 16: 2014 advertisement for black box mobile telephone devices and service. reprinted here with the consent of plain communities business exchange. conclusion all of the ict services, artifacts and arrangements appearing in these advertisements act as objects that accomplish two simultaneous tasks among amish adopters: 1) they are tools that allow them to perform high-tech work functions in accordance with amish values and 2) they symbolically identify the user as particularly amish. it is important to note that the appearance of these objects in the pages of tpcbe identify them as intended for purchase and use among amish business owners. tcbe readers are likely leading new and growing enterprises through challenging and changing economic times in their local communities. many of them are early adopters in their communities because they feel pressure to adopt such devices and services in order to maintain a competitive edge in their local economies in order to ensure the accumulation of resources for their families and communities. purchasing and using the devices observed here help users perform a communicative function, often related to work. the communication the artifact or service makes possible, given the particular material qualities of the device or service, allows the user to do so while abiding by the religious, cultural and political values that tie amish people together. the methods by which these devices enable users to perform communication are similar in that they limit a user’s ability to access the internet, or outside information, they do not allow a user to accomplish entertainment-oriented communication like watching videos, taking or viewing photographs, listening to music or playing games. however, they do allow users to have telephone conversations while on the go. they allow users to draft work-related documents, keep track of inventory and create blueprints using computer aided design software among other things. in the rare case a device or service enables users to email, it does so in a way that either severely limits the functionality of the device or introduces designed socio-technical precarity. for example, the computerless email device is intended for the sole purpose of sending and receiving email. the screen is very small and it is not possible to do anything else on the machine except write and send emails. the pcfreemail service introduces designed socio-technical precarity as it requires the use of a fax machine to send and receive messages through a third party who translates and sends them to their intended recipient. additionally, the devices are also made to be visible, durable and secure. the visibility of the black box phone is instructive as it allows mobile conversations to occur, but unlike conversations via cell phone, talking on the landline connected to the black box is highly visible to others. the fact that some of the plain computers cite the fact that their device has a durable case and a “keyswitch” lock that opens the machine for use, reflect a desire for use to be visible and for data to be protected from accidental or purposeful physical destruction or intrusion. by creating and using unique artifacts and arrangements, inspired by particularly amish values, amish makers deploying a political tactic. namely, they identify themselves as particularly amish. this shows deference to amish rules, values and traditions and helps sustain amish social structures and reproduce amish identity. importantly, through idealizing the amish maker and reproducing the spirit of amish making in this new socio-technical epoch, making continues as a dominant functional activity and mundane aspect of everyday work. when viewed through a critical making lens, mundane making among the amish, as identified in the arrangements and artifacts described in this chapter, becomes a significant political move. by emphasizing the importance of continuing to create things that reflect amish values, not those of the outside world, members of amish communities remind themselves that they are different from outsiders and similar to each other. they privilege creation over consumption, which keeps ideological foci local instead of remote. this can be seen as one component of a larger strategy aimed at adapting icts for amish use in a way that allows them to acquire the resources they need to survive in the modern economy while protecting their cultural autonomy from assimilation. references (2007). word processor keeps things simple. farm show magazine, 31(2): 31. accessed online on 02.03.15 at http://www.farmshow.com/a_article.php?aid=20026. ashton, k. (2015). how to fly a horse: the secret history of creation, invention, and discovery. new york: doubleday. disalvo, c. (2014). critical making as materializing the politics of design. the information society. 30(2): 96-105. eglash, r. and banks, d. (2014). recursive depth in generative spaces: democratization in three dimensions of technosocial self-organization. the information society, 30(2): 106-115. hurst, c. e. and mcconnell, d. l. (2010). an amish paradox: diversity and change in the world's largest amish community. baltimore: johns hopkins university press. ratto, m. (2011). critical making: conceptual and material studies in technology and social life. the information society, 27(4): 252-260. ratto, m. wylie, s. a. and jalbert, k. (2014). introduction to the special forum on critical making as research program. the information society, 30(2): 85-95. the plain communities business exchange (website). accessed on 02.03.15 at http://www.plaincommunities.com/. wylie, s. a., jalbert, k. dosemagen, s. and ratto, m. (2014). institutions for civic technoscience: how critical making is transforming environmental research. the information society.32(2): 116-126. selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): tzanetakis, m., bakken, s. a., munksgaard, r. & décary-hétu, d. (2018, october 10-13). drug markets and anonymizing technologies. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. drug markets and anonymizing technologies panel overview meropi tzanetakis university of oslo & university of vienna silje a. bakken university of copenhagen rasmus munksgaard university of montréal david décary-hétu university of montréal the development and use of sophisticated networked technologies have contributed to the proliferation of drug markets on the internet. these online drug markets take advantage of social media, encryption software (e.g. tor network) and cryptocurrencies (e.g. bitcoin, monero) to conceal the identity and physical location of their users. marketplaces that ensure the anonymity of their users by implementing these two technologies are commonly named cryptomarkets. despite the variation of encryption in the online drug markets, the illegality of drugs and drug dealing makes technologically enabled anonymity an important factor among its participants. anonymizing technologies allow to mitigate risks of vendors and customers when exchanging drugs while new risks emerge. research on online drug markets has demonstrated cryptomarkets are continually growing in terms of sales volumes generated despite law enforcement interventions. moreover, previous studies have focused on the prevalence of drugs and drug users as well as implications for harm reduction policies. this series of papers proposes to expand the exploration of platforms enabling the exchange of illicit drugs on the internet in a number of directions. various papers propose different concepts for understanding cryptomarkets as social phenomena where social relationships and socio-technical practices enable economic transactions. it also sheds light on the tension between trust, anonymity and pseudonymity. the papers expand on reliability of data gathered via anonymous online interviews, drawing attention to participation of stigmatized communities. they also explore little-considered ways in which cryptomarkets govern themselves. the aim of this panel is to bring together different perspectives on online, anonymized and encryption-based markets for illegal drugs. the first paper focuses on ways in which anonymous online drug platforms govern themselves through informal coordination practices. it applies hofmann’s et al. conceptual framework of governance as reflexive coordination to cryptomarkets. thus, it addresses the processes, structures and actors that contribute to ordering these platforms. based on a longitudinal ethnographic study, this paper examines governance by cryptomarkets as an evolving negotiation process in four dimensions. it explores how cryptomarkets perform relatively stable forms of ordering despite their lack of formal regulation which enable a flourishing e-commerce business that is based on informal norms, cognitive framings and technological design. the second paper examines methodological challenges encountered when conducting encrypted online interviews with hard to reach populations. while the use of the encrypted application wickr ensures interview participants anonymity, it raises questions regarding the relation of anonymity and data reliability. doing textual based interviews also brings out multiple challenges affecting the quality of the interviews. based on 110 semi-structured interviews with online drug dealers and buyers, the paper discusses advantages and disadvantages concerning the method of encrypted textual interviews. the third paper investigates the buyer-vendor relationship from an economic sociological perspective. it argues that while mechanisms of informal social control and the reputation system reduce transactional uncertainty, a successful purchase more strongly reduces uncertainty. this situates the paper in an empirical and theoretical debate as to the antecedents of trust in illicit online markets. empirically, the paper examines the relationship between vendor’s reputation, previous transactional relations with the vendor, and buyers’ willingness to subject themselves to risk using a dataset of cryptomarket transactions. statistical analysis shows both transactional relations and reputation have strong effects on transaction values, suggesting that trust in vendors may initially be founded on public reputation and informal social control, but that ongoing dyadic transactional relations produce trust among those involved. the final paper examines the relationship between reputation, trust and continued transactions between buyers and sellers in cryptomarkets. it outlines the importance of trust as trade partners do not know each other’s motives and expectations which may include cheating or acting opportunistically, but also links the establishment of trust to technologically enabled anonymity features on illegal online markets. the paper goes on to explore how gambetta’s concept of interpreting signs and signals can produce process-based trust on anonymous market and therefore reduce uncertainties between market participants. the model presented in this paper explains the impact of past experiences, the self-presentation and the community integration of online drug dealers on the creation of bonds of trusts. these bonds of trusts are measured through successful transactions. governance by cryptomarkets for drugs meropi tzanetakis university of oslo & university of vienna christian katzenbach freie universität berlin & alexander von humboldt institute for internet and society the evolution of cryptomarkets it was only seven years ago when silk road, the first drug distribution platform of its kind, started operating on the darknet – a subset of the internet which includes hidden services (barratt, 2012). it pioneered the phenomenon of cryptomarkets by implementing the combination of anonymizing software and cryptocurrencies for making payments (martin, 2014). together both provide a basis for a socio-technical innovation with which the identity and physical location of its users are being concealed. at the same time, law enforcement (le) interventions are increasingly complicated. the term cryptomarkets refers to platforms for the sale of, among other products and services, licit and illicit drugs which can be accessed by using anonymizing software such as tor (short for the onion router). the opening of silk road was accompanied by media attention, disapproval by government authorities and law enforcement, as well as the increasing interest of scholars. only after silk road was taken down by the fbi in october 2013 did other marketplaces emerge in significant numbers, competing for market share (soska & christin, 2015). moreover, whenever single cryptomarkets close voluntarily or enforced by le, new cryptomarkets now reach similar sales levels within months. as of mid-2018, almost two dozen platforms of varying sizes and feature sets are online with vendors competing for a myriad of customers (darknet stats 2018). governance as reflexive coordination in this paper, we address governance by cryptomarkets, which is the processes, structures and actors that contribute to ordering cryptomarkets. in contrast to the governance of cryptomarkets, this is an underexplored issue in cryptomarket research and internet governance (ig) scholarship alike. for this, the recent turn in ig literature to informal modes of coordination and governance is instructive as cryptomarkets cannot rely on formal institutions and law enforcement for their internal ordering. instead of focusing on formal institutions such as the internet governance forum (igf) or icann, recent ig studies suggest to investigate how governance materializes in internet architecture, socio-technical practices, and private modes of ordering (denardis, 2012; epstein et al., 2016). this paper builds on hofmann et al. (2016)’s concept of reflexive coordination. here, governance is grounded in mundane practices of coordination but is really set in motion in ‘critical moments’. in these, the involved parties begin to redefine the situation in question as routines are challenged, contested, and displaced through acts of articulation and justification. reflexive coordination on cryptomarkets the analysis draws on a multi-sited digital ethnography conducted between 2014 and 2018. the longitudinal ethnography included eleven semi-structured face-to-face and seven encrypted online interviews with cryptomarket users, digital monitoring of cryptomarkets including alphabay, agora, dream market, nucleus and outlaw, associated discussion forums (e.g., official market forums, subreddit darknetmarkets) and scraping of market data on alphabay from september 2015 to august 2016 (described in tzanetakis, 2018). the results characterize governance by cryptomarkets as an evolving negotiation process in four dimensions (katzenbach, 2018): (1) the regulative dimension of governance addresses the provision and enforcement of formal rules. in contrast to legitimate platforms like ebay, alibaba or airbnb, actors on cryptomarkets cannot rely on formal institutions such as property rights provided by the state for formal legal economic exchange (beckert & wehinger, 2013). nor can users sue each other for contractual infringement or violating standards for product quality. in addition, actors can be prosecuted for the exchange of illegal drugs. despite these obstacles, cryptomarkets emerged as a ‘transformative criminal innovation’ on the darknet (aldridge & décary-hétu, 2014). (2) the normative dimension investigates prevalent assumptions about legitimate and illegitimate behavior in a given community. on cryptomarkets this dimension is expressed in the general terms of conditions by platform administrators stating which services or products are not allowed for sale. interestingly, the distribution of child pornographic content is deemed unacceptable since the initial silk road and regularly affirmed by different community members ever since. child pornography is negotiated as morally unacceptable as it harms innocent and vulnerable minors. (3) the technological dimension takes into account the embodiment of affordances and rules in infrastructures, devices, and algorithms relevant to cryptomarkets. similarly to legitimate e-commerce platforms, cryptomarkets need to resolve trust issues. this is achieved by implementing reputation systems (resnick & zeckhauser, 2002). they encourage consumers to rate each other, so that they can assess the quality of services and products before making buying decisions. another architectural solution for trust issues is a centralized escrow service (tzanetakis et al., 2016). it enables the administrator of a marketplace to retain the payment until all conditions of a transaction are complete. escrow also allows for an arbitration process to resolve disputes between customers and vendors. (4) the discursive dimension addresses the shared or contested understandings and framings of issues in certain contexts. in contrast to legitimate platforms, cryptomarkets face the danger of abruptly being taken down by le agencies and, hence, their users loosing funds stored in centralized escrow. in a particular critical moment, the closure of silk road was followed by a negotiation process within the cryptomarket community leading to the implementation of multi-signature escrow. with this, funds do not necessarily need to be stored centrally on any platform, but can be administrated decentralized. no central authority is required to process a payment, instead two of three public keys are required to finalize a transaction. in sum, cryptomarkets perform relatively stable forms of ordering despite their lack of formal regulation. this enables a flourishing e-commerce business that is based on informal norms, cognitive framings and technological design. by foregrounding these often less visible forms of governance by cryptomarkets, this paper also contributes to the broader discussion of internet governance. currents disputes around platform governance, privacy and copyright show that formal regulation always is complemented, challenged and substantiated by norms, discourses and technology. there’s always more than law, not only in shadow areas such as cryptomarkets. references aldridge, j., décary-hétu, d. (2014). not an ebay for drugs: the cryptomarket silk road as a paradigm shifting criminal innovation. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2436643. barratt, m. j. (2012). silk road: ebay for drugs. letter to the editor. addiction, 107: 683. beckert, j., f. wehinger (2013). in the shadow: illegal markets and economic sociology. socio-economic review, 11: 5–30. darknet stats (2018, july 20). https://dnstats.net/. denardis, l. (2012). hidden levers of internet control. an infrastructure-based theory of internet governance. information, communication & society, 15:5, 720–738. epstein, d., katzenbach, c. & musiani, f. (eds.). (2016). doing internet governance: practices, controversies, infrastructures, and institutions. special issue. internet policy review, 5(3). hofmann, j., katzenbach, c., gollatz, k. (2016). between coordination and regulation: finding the governance in internet governance. new media & society, 19: 9, 1406– 1423. katzenbach, c. (2018). there is always more than law! from low ip regimes to a governance perspective in copyright research. journal of technology law and policy, 22(1). martin, j. (2014). drugs on the dark net. how cryptomarkets are transforming the global trade in illicit drugs. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. resnick, p., zeckhauser, r. (2002). trust among strangers in internet transactions: empirical analysis of ebay' s reputation system, in m. r. baye (ed.). the economics of the internet and e-commerce (pp.127–157), emerald group publishing limited. soska, k., christin, n. (2015). measuring the longitudinal evolution of the online anonymous marketplace ecosystem. paper presented at the 24th usenix security symposium. tzanetakis, m., kamphausen, g., werse, b., von laufenberg, r. (2016). the transparency paradox. building trust, resolving disputes and optimising logistics on conventional and online drugs markets. international journal of drug policy, 35, 58–68. tzanetakis, m. (2018). comparing cryptomarkets for drugs. a characterisation of sellers and buyers over time. international journal of drug policy, 56, 176–186. doing qualitative research in online drug markets: how to balance participant’s anonymity and data reliability? silje a. bakken university of copenhagen jakob demant university of copenhagen over the last few years, the internet has become an important channel for drug dealing. it ranges from legal spice dealing on the clear web (hillebrand, olszewski, & sedefov, 2010) to social media drug dealing (demant & bakken, 2018) to encrypted darknet markets (martin, 2014). despite the variation of encryption in these markets, the illegality of drug dealing does make anonymity an important factor among the participants. complete anonymity would help avoid many of the risks when dealing with drugs, such as being discovered by the police or threatened by other market members. participating in research would also mean engaging in risky behavior, especially if it includes face-to-face interviews or phone conversations. so how can we as researchers ensure participant anonymity in research, and by that make more people interested in joining? and how does the anonymity relate with data reliability? methods this paper is based on 110 semi-structured interviews made with online drug dealers and buyers in 2017/2018. the interviews were part of a larger qualitative study of social media drug dealing in the nordic countries (denmark, norway, sweden, finland and iceland). the project also included extensive digital ethnographic research in each of the five countries. for this paper, the focus is on how we conducted the interviews and the challenges we met along the way, rather than the interview content itself. all interviewees in the social media study were offered a gift card of $40. our ethnographic research showed that wickr was the most trusted application among online drug dealing participants. we therefore chose to let the interviewees choose how they preferred doing the interviews, which could have been face-to-face, over the phone or other messaging applications. still, about 90% chose wickr, which proved to be more flexible, similar to other online messaging interviews (barratt, 2011). wickr is an encrypted messaging application where the messages have a chosen time limit, which the recipient activates when opening the text. the messages then disappear and cannot be retrieved afterwards. it is similar to snapchat, except for the encryption and that the messages are not accessible to the company owning the application (as far as we know). wickr ensured both participant anonymity and researcher protection. findings we found wickr to work well as a tool when interviewing participants of illegal activities. one advantage was that the majority of participants already knew the application from using it when dealing/buying drugs. in social media drug markets, it is common for sellers to post their wickr-username when advertising their drugs, so that people can contact them directly in a safer application than where the post is, e.g. on facebook and instagram. the participants therefore trusted wickr as it offers full anonymity and easily allows sharing their experiences with drugs and drug markets. wickr was also our main gateway to contacting dealers for interviews, which gave us valuable one-on-one communication from start. additionally, the encryption created a physical distance between the interviewee and the interviewer, offering full anonymity if the interviewee wanted to. not only did the encryption protect the interviewee from the researcher, but it also protected them against the potential risk of having legal institutions accessing the information. compared to other encrypted applications, e.g. telegram and signal, wickr does not demand a phone number or any other personal information. wickr is a messaging application people have on their phones, something that made the interview situation highly flexible. interviewees were often occupied with other activities at the time of the interview. this resulted in some interviews taking several weeks, while most lasted 3-7 hours. to ensure as many full interviews as possible, the interviewers were told to be available on wickr almost at all times when they had made initial contact with a potential participant. another successful strategy was to schedule a time for the interview, trying to do it intensively in a few hours. despite the positive sides of full anonymity in interview situations, we also met several challenges. as with any other asynchronous communication in space, one could easily be misunderstood since the tone of the voice and facial expression is not visible (opdenakker, 2006). it did, however, seem like the interviewees were used to this communication form, and the conversations went well. on the other hand, full encryption and anonymity makes it difficult to assure traditional reliability of the data collected. problems such as multiple participation and sincerity were perceived as more challenging under full anonymity than in physical or oral interviews. the interviewer had no facial expressions or tone of voice to watch out for, and the interviewees had a lot of time to rethink their answers. additionally, it was impossible to ensure a good interview situation for the interviewee, despite encouraging them to be alone and without larger distractions. conclusion using encrypted applications for interviews might be very useful, especially when interviewing on illegal or sensitive topics. it ensures anonymity and protection for both the interviewee and the interviewer. however, there are quite a few challenges that should be well thought through before starting such interviews. it is therefore necessary to do more research on these types of methods and reflect on how to make sure to conduct fruitful interviews and to reach the wanted number of interviews while maintain a good research reliability. references barratt, m. j. (202) the efficacy of interviewing young drug users through online chat. drug and alcohol review, 31(4), 566-572. barratt, m. j. & aldridge, j. (2016). everything you always wanted to know about drug cryptomarkets*(* but were afraid to ask). international journal of drug policy, 35, 1-6. demant, j. & s. bakken (unpublished) social media drug dealing in the nordic countries. hillebrand, j., olszewski, d. & r. sedefov (2010) legal highs on the internet. substance use & misuse, 45(3), 330-340. martin, j. (2014) drugs on the dark net: how cryptomarkets are transforming the global trade in illicit drugs. palgrave macmillian, uk. opdenakker, r. (2006) advantages and disadvantages of four interviewing techniques in qualitative research. forum qualitative sozialforschung/forum: qualitative social research, 7(4). beyond reputation: the effects of social relations on cryptomarket transaction values and risk-taking rasmus munksgaard university of montréal cryptomarkets and the problem of trust illicit online markets for drugs, cryptomarkets, have become increasingly integrated components of 21st century drug distribution and -consumption (aldridge & décaryhétu, 2016; barratt et al., 2014, 2016; cunliffe et al., 2017). although the ecosystem constitutes a fraction of the international drug economy, cryptomarkets have shown continual growth despite law enforcement intervention (décary-hétu & giommoni, 2016; soska & christin, 2015). trust is a precondition for a transaction to be completed, and is in an exchange context a question of the other’s future honesty (beckert, 2009; lewis & weigert, 1985). the cryptomarket literature identifies social control as the main mechanism that reduces this uncertainty and specifies two institutional mechanisms: the mediating role of marketplace administrations, providing dispute resolution and escrow services (martin, 2014), and the reputation system which allows buyer to rate vendors (hardy & norgaard, 2015; przepiorka et al., 2017). in offline drug markets, transactions are often embedded in contexts of friendship, reciprocity or community (e.g. hughes et al., 2017; jacques & wright, 2015; sandberg, 2012). recent studies have shown cryptomarket buyers tend to be repeat customers (décary-hétu & quessy-doré, 2017), and that the network structure of the cryptomarkets reflects ’buyers’ desire for trustworthy […] vendors’ (duxbury & haynie, 2017, p. 247). thus, while reputation seems predictive of economic action, the latter is still embedded in transactional-dyadic relations. however, scholars arguing that reputation is the foundation of trust on cryptomarkets have rejected trust-building through social embeddedness and institutional control in cryptomarkets (przepiorka et al., 2017). this paper empirically examines the tension between this theoretical disagreement and the new empirical findings on the social embeddedness of cryptomarket transactions. analysis, method and data the analysis is based on a dataset of cryptomarket transactions collected through webscraping, an established methodology in cryptomarket studies (e.g. aldridge & décary-hétu, 2016; christin, 2013; soska & christin, 2015; tzanetakis, 2018). the transaction is treated as the behavioral manifestation of trust which implies a risk of harm, specifically the risk of a transaction failure (morselli et al., 2017; lewis & weigert, 1985). the willingness to undertake financial risk by purchasing a more expensive product is considered an expression of trust and estimated as the outcome of three sources of trust: social/economic ties with the seller, institutional approval and reputation using multilevel linear regression controlling for between-vendor variance, product category and origin. findings modeling the value of cryptomarket transactions as a function of the three sources of trust yields a model with superior explanatory power to one based solely on either, as in previous research. further, as institutional approval and economic relations are included in statistical modelling, the effect of reputation lessens. this suggests that trust is a function of multiple sources, contrary to what the literature argues (przepiorka et al., 2017). discussion the findings demonstrate that neither reputation nor institutional approval are satisfactory explanations for why cryptomarket actors trust each other. rather, trust is contingent upon the availability of multiple sources of trust. this provides evidence for the central thesis of new economic sociology, that economic action is socially embedded in both social and economic relations and institutional contexts (granovetter, 2017; swedberg, 1997; swedberg & granovetter, 1992), despite the appearance of cryptomarket transactions being between atomized anonymous individuals. the finding that the effect of reputation diminishes as other sources of trust are included in modelling suggests that previous studies which have argued that reputation is what creates social order in online markets, both licit and illicit, have omitted key theoretical explanations with possible empirical implications (przepiorka et al., 2017; tadelis, 2016). references aldridge, j., & décary-hétu, d. (2016). hidden wholesale: the drug diffusing capacity of online drug cryptomarkets. international journal of drug policy, 35, 7–15. barratt, m. j., ferris, j. a., & winstock, a. r. (2014). use of silk road, the online drug marketplace, in the united kingdom, australia and the united states. addiction, 109(5), 774–783. barratt, m. j., ferris, j. a., & winstock, a. r. (2016). safer scoring? cryptomarkets, social supply and drug market violence. international journal of drug policy, 35, 24–31. beckert, j., & wehinger, f. (2013, 1). in the shadow: illegal markets and economic sociology. socio-economic review, 11(1), 5–30. cunliffe, j., martin, j., décary-hétu, d., & aldridge, j. (2017). an island apart? risks and prices in the australian cryptomarket drug trade. international journal of drug policy, 50, 64–73. christin, n. (2013). traveling the silk road: a measurement analysis of a large anonymous online marketplace. proceedings of the 22nd international conference on world wide web, 213–224. décary-hétu, d., & giommoni, l. (2016, 10). do police crackdowns disrupt drug cryptomarkets? a longitudinal analysis of the effects of operation onymous. crime, law and social change, 1–21. décary-hétu, d., & quessy-doré, o. (2017, 10). are repeat buyers in cryptomarkets loyal customers? repeat business between dyads of cryptomarket vendors and users. american behavioral scientist, 61(11). duxbury, s. w., & haynie, d. l. (2017). the network structure of opioid distribution on a darknet cryptomarket. journal of quantitative criminology, in print. granovetter, m. (2017). society and economy: framework and principles (1st ed.). cambridge: harvard university press. hardy, r. a., & norgaard, j. r. (2015, 9). reputation in the internet black market: an empirical and theoretical analysis of the deep web. journal of institutional economics, 12, 1–25. hughes, c. e., bright, d. a., & chalmers, j. (2017). social network analysis of australian poly-drug trafficking networks: how do drug traffickers manage multiple illicit drugs? social networks, 51, 135– 147. jacques, s., & wright, r. (2015). code of the suburb: inside the world of young middleclass drug dealers. unversity of chicago press. lewis, j., & weigert, a. (1985). trust as a social reality. social forces, 63(4), 967–985. martin, j. (2014). drugs on the dark net: how cryptomarkets are transforming the global trade in illicit drugs. palgrave macmillan. morselli, c., décary-hétu, d., paquet-clouston, m., & aldridge, j. (2017). conflict management in illicit drug cryptomarkets. international criminal justice review, 27(4). przepiorka, w., norbutas, l., & corten, r. (2017). order without law: reputation promotes cooperation in a cryptomarket for illegal drugs. european sociological review. sandberg, s. (2012). the importance of culture for cannabis markets: towards an economic sociology of illegal drug markets. british journal of criminology, 52, 1133– 1151. soska, k., & christin, n. (2015). measuring the longitudinal evolution of the online anonymous marketplace ecosystem. 24th usenix security symposium (usenix security 15), 33–48. swedberg, r. (1997). new economic sociology: what has been accomplished, what is ahead? acta sociologica, 40. swedberg, r., & granovetter, m. (1992). introduction. in m. granovetter & r. swedberg (eds.), the sociology of economic life (1st ed., pp. 1–26). oxford: westview press. tadelis, s. (2016). reputation and feedback systems in online platform markets. annual review of economics, 8(1), 321–340. tzanetakis, m. (2018). comparing cryptomarkets for drugs. a characterisation of sellers and buyers over time. international journal of drug policy, 56(0), 176–186. trade, uncertainty and trust production david décary-hétu university of montréal masarah paquet-clouston gosecure laurin weissinger oxford university trade, defined as the exchange of products and services, is an important building block of human interactions and yet, often also a risky undertaking for the parties involved. while a trade itself can be risky (topalli et al., 2002), a variety of other concerns exist due to the non ad-hoc nature of many trades. these concerns can be summed up in one crucial question: can the other party be trusted (schelling, 1984)? parties involved in a trade can seldom know their alter’s motives and expectations with absolute certainty. the literature distinguishes between the “good” and “bad” types of trade parties (gambetta, 2000). a good party is one that does not cheat or act opportunistically while a bad one does. this “good vs bad” dichotomy is a hidden property (spence, 1974) but its veil of secrecy can sometimes be lifted to some extent by interpreting the signs and signals that trade parties showcase or broadcast. signs are “dormant potential signals”, such as tattoos and signals are intentionally displayed by an actor, such as showing the tattoo to another party (gambetta, 2009). usually, the greater the perceived risk, the more trust (or precautions) through reading is required. trust is a concept that takes different meanings depending on the author and the context. for this paper, we adopt the definition by gambetta (1998, p.217) that is particularly functional in our case as we will be dealing with market interactions: “a particular level of the subjective probability with which an agent assesses that another agent or group of agents will perform a particular action, both before he can monitor such action and in a context in which it affects his own actions” the trust game in an online setting economic transactions are taking place more frequently in online settings. unsurprisingly, illicit transactions have followed the trend with online illegal markets emerging as well. products or services such as financial fraud, spamming services, computer hacking services or identity fraud products and even drugs can now be purchased through online channels. yet, although offering some interesting characteristics, the anonymity feature of online illicit markets creates a high level of uncertainty for market participants. trust is not easily produced, since any participant can act opportunistically and deceive others with high impunity (yip et al., 2013). moreover, the risk of unsuccessful transactions is increased by the lack of means to enforce agreements and the absence of quality control of products bought. uncertainty underlies each trade to the point where being a victim of a fraud or a scam is a bigger threat for illicit market participants than the threat of being arrested by law enforcement (wehinger, 2011). trust production on cryptomarkets a cryptomarket is “a marketplace that hosts multiple sellers or ‘vendors’, provides participants with anonymity via its location on the hidden web and use of cryptocurrencies for payment, and aggregates and displays customer feedback ratings and comments” (barratt & aldridge, 2016: p.1). anonymity is a necessary feature and is ensured with two technologies: the tor network and the use of cryptocurrencies. in terms of trade, just like their other online illicit market counterparts, cryptomarkets have developed sophisticated features to produce trust among trading parties. these features allow vendors to broadcast trust signs and signals and consequently facilitate the transaction process while reducing its associated costs. cryptomarket administrators have set up features that produce institution-based trust, providing information to support buyers’ decision with whom to trade with (martin, 2014). such features are set up around the vendor’s profile and provide information on the vendor’s history and proven track-record. one last interesting feature that can help trustproduction on cryptomarkets are the discussion forums associated to the trading platforms. many studies found that these forums host a living community of individuals who share a marginal sub-culture and discuss openly on drug-related subjects (maddox et al., 2016). current study for this study, the alphabay cryptomarket, the largest market at the time of the data collection, was selected. to ensure the best model fit, we decided to limit this research to a single type of drug product sold: cocaine. we chose this product because cocaine is one of the most popular products bought on cryptomarkets, according to soska and christin (2015) and, contrary to cannabis, it is considered illegal at the global level. for this study, three data collection strategies were needed to gather information from the different features offered by cryptomarkets. an automated data collection on the alphabay cryptomarket allowed us to gather information on vendors’ past experiences. a qualitative strategy in which all listings and vendor’s profiles were analyzed manually was used to assess how vendors design their online personas was used. finally, we considered the official alphabay forum to assess whether vendors in our sample interacted in the official forums. the different data collection strategies allowed us to gather a diversified set of variables with the number of transactions as the outcome of our model. each transaction is treated as a bond of trust between a vendor and a buyer. our dependent variable is the number of cocaine sales conducted by vendors in the last month. as about 42% of the sampled vendors did not conduct any sale in the past month, our dependent variable is highly skewed to the left and follows a poisson distribution. also, the dependent variable is overdispersed: the mean (xbar = 11.19) is much smaller than the variance (var=602.28). thus, the negative binomial regression is the best model, as it considers dependent variable poisson distribution while controlling for the overdispersion since the distribution parameter is a random variable. this study improves on past literature by expanding the number of variables taken into account to predict trust in online illicit markets. most important is the vendors’ profile design which was believed to play an important role in trust building but fails to reach significance in our final model. references barratt, m. j., & aldridge, j. (2016). everything you always wanted to know about drug cryptomarkets*(* but were afraid to ask). international journal of drug policy, 35, 1-6. gambetta, d. (1998). trust, the social virtues and the creation of prosperity. gambetta, d. (2000). can we trust trust. trust: making and breaking cooperative relations, 13, 213-237. gambetta, d. (2009). signaling. the oxford handbook of analytical sociology, 168-194. maddox, a., barratt, m. j., allen, m., & lenton, s. (2016). constructive activism in the dark web: cryptomarkets and illicit drugs in the digital ‘demimonde’. information, communication & society, 19(1), 111-126. martin, j. (2014). drugs on the dark net: how cryptomarkets are transforming the global trade in illicit drugs. new york, usa: springer. schelling, t. c. 1984: strategic analysis and social problems. in choice and consequence, cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. soska, k. and n. christin (2015). measuring the longitudinal evolution of the online anonymous marketplace ecosystem. proceedings of the 23rd usenix security symposium (usenix security'14). washington dc: 33 48. spence, a.m. (1974). market signaling: informational transfer in hiring and related screening processes, harvard university press. topalli, v., wright, r., & fornango, r. (2002). drug dealers, robbery and retaliation. vulnerability, deterrence and the contagion of violence. british journal of criminology, 42(2), 337-351. wehinger, f. (2011, september). the dark net: self-regulation dynamics of illegal online markets for identities and related services. in intelligence and security informatics conference (eisic), 2011 european (pp. 209-213). ieee. yip, m., webber, c., & shadbolt, n. (2013). trust among cybercriminals? carding forums, uncertainty and implications for policing. policing and society, 23(4), 516-539. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): duguay, s. (2017, october 18-21). thirst traps and #relatable vines: investigating a networked counterpublic of queer women. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. thirst traps and #relatable vines: investigating a networked counterpublic of queer women stefanie duguay queensland university of technology introduction jaxx, an undergraduate student, focuses her smartphone camera on herself in a dim bedroom. she contemplates an exchange from earlier, contorts her facial features, presses record and mimics a critical voice, “you’re going to hell” (figure 1). creating the next scene, she changes her demeanour and, while wiping make-believe tears with a rainbow flag, sarcastically exclaims, “oh no, whatever will i do? i will be going to a place surrounded by other lesbians who are horny and willing” (figure 2). she posts the video and it immediately begins to accrue likes, comments, and shares. figures 1 and 2. stills from jaxx’s vine (displayed with permission). this is just one of many 6.5-second, looping videos created by queer women on vine, twitter’s now defunct video social network. launched in 2013, the app paired this short video format with social networking features for following others, sharing videos (“vines”), and hashtagging. vine’s popularity spiked and plummeted across three years. during this time, a vibrant community of queer women gathered through lgbt (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans) hashtags, such as #rainbowgang and #allqueerhere. this paper examines platform features, content, and user experiences to better understand queer women’s digital participation and representation. using mixed methods, findings demonstrate that queer women comprised a networked counterpublic, drawn together through intimate vines and intersectional identity statements. however, vine’s shift toward passive viewing of micro-celebrities contributed to users’ eventual disengagement. background and methods this paper is part of a larger study examining queer women’s identity performances on digital platforms. focusing on queer women counterbalances the volume of literature about men who have sex with men and lgbt people in aggregate. sparse research has examined queer women’s use of older technologies (e.g. correll, 1995) but few studies investigate queer women’s use of contemporary digital media. this study attends to platforms’ influence on identity performances, building on literature drawing attention to how commercial platforms foster profitable forms of connectivity (van dijck, 2013) and intervene in everyday use (gillespie, 2015). vine is an apt case study as it presents particular affordances and queer female viners were active throughout 2014 and 2015. this research applied mixed methods, starting with a form of platform analysis – the walkthrough method (light, burgess, & duguay, 2016) – to examine vine’s sociocultural context and technological architecture. then 77 vines posted by queer women to lgbt hashtags were coded according to topic, technical conventions, and user characteristics. in-depth interviews were conducted with two viners: jaxx, featured in the introduction, who identifies as bisexual, hispanic, and neurodivergent; and chrissy, a teaching assistant who identifies as lesbian and black. interviews further elucidated findings from the content and platform analyses. departing from habermas’ notion of a unitary public sphere, fraser (1990) identified the existence of multiple publics and described ‘subaltern counterpublics’ as those “where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter discourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (p. 67). warner (2002) further conceptualised counterpublics as gathering of people in tension with a more dominant public. when paired with boyd’s (2014) notion of networked publics, as publics structured through networked technology, gatherings of platform users around counter discourses can form networked counterpublics. this study’s data show that queer women on vine produced a networked counterpublic while also contributing across identity-related publics until the platform ethos and redesign disrupted these publics. findings and discussion queer women’s vine content included affinity-building clips, narrative performances, and remixes of popular media content. clips from everyday life resembled the spontaneous and informal videos that lange (2009) has identified on youtube as “videos of affinity,” containing in-jokes and references resonating with a target audience. queer women’s vines were often video selfies, taken with the phone’s front-facing camera held in close proximity, recorded in the intimate spaces of bedrooms, bathrooms, and cars. they checked in with an imagined audience of other queer women, shared stories and rants, and spliced scenes from their favourite television or youtube episodes. many vines included sexual dancing and gestures in the genre of ‘thirst trap,’ overlaid with trap or hip-hop music, participating in platform trends and fostering sociability. these informal and intimate clips drew on the affordances of vine’s looping video format for producing intensely affective, detailed videos with a narrative arc. these vines gave rise to and sustained publics and counterpublics among queer female viners. as jaxx’s skit demonstrates, queer women’s vines also included challenges to normative identity discourses, often as narratives. these videos were frequently comedic, aiming to resonate with others through shared experiences. chrissy described this as being “relatable,” noting: “if you are not relatable…people are not going to really care because it has nothing to do with them.” aligning with calhoun’s (2016) findings that racial comedy on vine can serve as sociopolitical discourse, chrissy’s videos often spoke to queer and black audiences, frequently remixing black viners’ content. jaxx posted her videos “to bounce back at people who are ignorant” about sexuality, race, and mental health. sociocultural and technical changes on the platform affected this queer women’s counterpublic. chrissy noticed users becoming preoccupied with being “vine famous” and gaining profitable brand partnerships. viners disengaged from lgbt hashtags, as they perceived that users were no longer authentic. this coincided with platform updates, including “tv mode,” which invited users to watch videos as a continuous stream without easily accessible “share” or comment buttons. interface navigation increasingly skewed toward “featured” viners who were showcased on channels, the homepage, and in algorithmically personalised playlists. a vine representative eventually contacted jaxx saying, “if you look at the top 40 viners, they’re all white dudes and i want to see that changed,” alluding to possible partnerships. however, this step was too late – jaxx was intimidated by the dominance of white, male viners with misogynist undertones, creating a hostile space where she constantly received harassing and negative messages. she instead focused on cross-posting vines to a friendlier audience on tumblr. vine’s affordances contributed to the formation a networked counterpublic of queer women through intimate videos and critiques of normative identity discourses. however, shifts in the platform and users’ intentions toward cultivating micro-celebrity led individuals to disengage. these findings provide an understanding of queer women’s identity performances on a visual, mobile platform. further, they illuminate conditions that can foster and stifle networked counterpublics. references boyd, d. (2011). it's complicated: the social lives of networked teens. new haven: yale university press. calhoun, k. n. (2016, 5-8 october). six seconds to talk back: the emergence of racial comedy as a sociopolitical discourse genre on vine. paper presented at aoir 2016, berlin, germany. correll, s. (1995). the ethnography of an electronic bar: the lesbian cafe. journal of contemporary ethnography, 24(3), 270–298. doi.10.1177/089124195024003002 fraser, n. (1990). rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. social text, 25/26, 56–80. gillespie, t. (2015). platforms intervene. social media + society, 1(1), 1–2. doi.10.1177/2056305115580479 lange, p. (2009). videos of affinity. in p. snickas & p. vonderau (eds.), the youtube reader (pp. 70–88). stockholm: national library of sweden. light, b., burgess, j., duguay, s. (2016). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society. published online before print: 11 november 2016. doi: 10.1177/1461444816675438 van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. oxford: oxford university press. warner, m. (2002). publics and counterpublics. brooklyn, ny: zone books. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): bhandari, a, & bimo, s. (2020, october). tiktok and the algorithmized self: a new model of online interaction. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. tiktok and the “algorithmized self”: a new model of online interaction aparajita bhandari cornell university sara bimo york university introduction having been downloaded over 1.5 billion times worldwide since its release in 2017, there is little doubt that one of the fastest growing social media platforms today is tiktok. centred around video sharing, tiktok allows users to create music and lip-sync videos of 2 to 15 seconds, and looping videos of 2 to 60 seconds (williams, 2020). despite tiktok’s ever-increasing popularity, it has been the topic of little academic analysis. this project was primarily motivated by a desire to understand tiktok’s meteoric rise in use; is it simply the latest iteration of a social networking model that is found in other popular applications such as instagram, facebook, and twitter? or, does it owe its success in part to a novel interaction structure? to further elucidate this research question, we established a theoretical framework grounded in science and technology studies and communication. in these fields, work in the analysis of social media is often grounded in theories of the “self,” and has examined the manner in which social networking sites (snss) constitute sites of selfpresentation and identity management (papacharissi, 2011). traditional snss represent, underline, and intensify real world social interactions and transform them into digital equivalents. these sites are meant to provide a stage for social interaction, and guide users through this experience via certain affordances and design features: for example, users are encouraged to connect to potential friends, like, comment on, or share posts, and view other member’s profiles (boyd, 2010). in this way, snss are projects in managing sociality and negotiating self-expression through these social ties: one self-represents by engaging with one’s network within the context of the sns. in this model of sociality, the snss provide a stage for users to engage in these processes of identity management and representation. interaction and curation are ostensibly self-directed; despite the growing prevalence of algorithmically directed feeds, these sites at least claim that they provide a space for free self-representation (van dijck, 2013). while this process involves close interaction between humans and technology, the technology is intended to be mainly a tool or extension of the user’s will; the “machine” holds little life of its own. methods in this project, we examine the degree to which tiktok exemplifies this “common mode” of social media use. in order to illuminate the particular methods and mechanisms of self-representation offered by tiktok, we used the walkthrough method as described by light et al. (2018). this method, grounded in actor network theory, involves the systematic collection of data throughout various steps of app registration and entry, everyday use, and discontinuation of use in order to analyse an app in its entirety. in accordance with this method, our data collection process comprised of two distinct stages. first, the environment of expected use was established by examining the app store descriptions, white papers, and newsroom documents put forward by the app from its launch until february 2020. this was taken in conjunction with narratives put forward in media articles about tiktok. in the second stage, we conducted a technical walkthrough of tiktok. this was done in february 2020 on two different phones, using both android and iphone versions of the app. in order to analyse the everyday use of the app both of the researchers used tiktok for at least 30 minutes daily for a period of one month in 2020, and collected extensive fieldnotes, screenshots, and screen recordings. this allowed us to investigate the environment of expected use, user interface arrangement, functions and features, textual content and tone, and symbolic representations present in the app (light et al., 2018). findings and discussion in the course of this analysis, we found that the mode of sociality engendered when using tiktok differed from that offered by other prominent social networking sites such as instagram, facebook, and twitter. while similarly ego-centric and concerned with the performance and management of self-identity, tiktok rewrites the mechanisms of this process through a design that guides users in a different direction than other snss. while traditional snss tend to direct the process of self-representation along a number of social channels (i.e. users manage their identities through engagement with their network of friends, followers, etc.), tiktok is designed in a way that encourages users to interact most heavily with two alternative entities: 1. a trending algorithm which presents users with videos ostensibly catered to their personal tastes and interests, and 2. with their own content and self-representations. this results in a model of public presentation that is most heavily informed by and directed toward the individual instead of an “audience.” the experience of using tik tok is one of repeatedly engaging with one’s own self: intra rather than interpersonal connection. this effect is accomplished through tiktok’s design features and affordances, which shape user experience in a number of ways. for example: upon opening the app, users are directed toward the “for you” section; an endless feed of tiktoks curated by an algorithm specifically for the user. in addition, content creation is heavily incentivized over more distinctly social activities such as commenting, liking, or following. one of the ways in which this is done is through the design of the home screen: the size and placement of the “record” button makes it more natural for users to record and post videos than to find people to follow or comment on videos. the end result is an sns that offers a fundamentally different conception of what it means to be social. tiktok offers a site for public performance heavily built upon intrapersonal engagement, done through content creation and heavy interaction with a personalized algorithm which repeatedly confronts users with various aspects of their own personas. this model of sociality can perhaps be termed the “algorithmized self”an extension and complication of the previously discussed “networked self”; while the latter posits that the self is created through the “reflexive process of fluid associations with social circles, ” the former understands the self as deriving primarily from a reflexive engagement with previous self-representations rather than with one’s social connections (papacharissi, 2011) the user is forced to negotiate identity not by connecting to the outside world through the mechanism of the machine, but rather by engaging with “machinized” selves: the curated algorithm that presents their interests, personality, and identity to them, and the original content they create that is processed by the machine that is tiktok. in tiktok, the boundaries between user and platform are intentionally blurred; here more than ever do we see a restless machine, one with as much of a “life” as its human user. references boyd, d. (2010). social network sites as networked publics. in a networked self (pp. 4766). routledge. light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881-900. papacharissi, z. (2011). conclusion: a networked self. in a networked self (pp. 304318). routledge. van dijck, j. (2013). ‘you have one identity’: performing the self on facebook and linkedin. media, culture & society, 35(2), 199-215. williams, k. (2020, january 16). tiktok was installed more than 738 million times retrieved from https://sensortower.com/blog/tiktok-revenue-downloads-2019. 1 towards a genre analysis of online book discussion: socializing, participation and publication in the dutch booksphere peter boot huygens ing the netherlands peter.boot@huygens.knaw.nl abstract books and writers are an important subject for discussion on many web sites. book discussion on the web is a field considerably wider than the book blogs and the online reviews on booksellers’ sites that it is often identified with. it runs the whole spectrum from professional reviewers, through ‘pro-am’ and ‘traditional’ amateurs to occasional commentators. book discussion takes place on sites as diverse as newspaper sites, online magazines, individual and group blogs, general and specialized social network sites, on traditional discussion boards and book cataloguing sites. this exploratory paper attempts a genre analysis of the dutch ‘booksphere’, the collection of bookrelated sites on the web. it distinguishes between (i) site genres, which are high-level and necessarily fuzzy concepts, and a number of site facets for more precise site account, between (ii) genre of site and genre of information items on sites, and between (iii) genre of site and of sub-site. these distinctions create the conceptual apparatus for an account of the book discussion landscape and the various sites’ affordances. keywords book discussion, online genre, facets, online reviews, affordances. books and writers are an important subject for discussion on many web sites. book discussion on the web is a field considerably wider than the book blogs (steiner, 2010) and the online reviews on booksellers’ sites (domsch, 2009; steiner, 2008) that it is often identified with. it runs the whole 2 spectrum from professional reviewers, through ‘pro-am’ (leadbeater & miller, 2004) and ‘traditional’ amateurs to occasional commentators. book discussion takes place on sites as diverse as newspaper sites, online magazines, individual and group blogs, general and specialized social network sites, on traditional discussion boards and book cataloguing sites. scholarly interest in online book discussion up to now has tended to focus on individual genres, without taking into account the wider context within which discussion takes place. researchers have used the discussions as a basis for book recommendations (dietz, 2010), assessed ratings’ effects on sales (verboord, 2010) and looked into the canonizing role of webloggers as ‘public readers’ (grafton, 2010). in the present paper, i will give what is as far as i know the first attempt at an overview of the online book discussion landscape, based on the situation of the dutch-language web sphere. i will first introduce the web book discussion landscape, then discuss site genres, other site characteristics and site affordances respectively, and draw some conclusions. the size of what i will call the booksphere – the collection of book-related sites on the web – obviously precludes any attempt at complete coverage. my method of collecting sites has been simple. based on a list of relevant sites collected over time, i followed links from these sites. i tried to categorize the sites that i encountered in a number of respects. once i encountered a sort of site i had already seen a number of times, i ignored it, as i was seeking not for a representative sample but for an exploratory overview of the way the web is used for book discussion. for the purposes of this paper i limit myself to sites that are publicly accessible on the web. full participation will often require some sort of registration, but if inspection of the site’s content is limited to members i will ignore the site. sites should be either in dutch or targeted substantially towards a dutch-language audience. i exclude scholarly discussion. sites need not be exclusively concerned with books; i include lifestyle-oriented sites where books are one subject among others. the discussed books include non-fiction, but where the subject moved to areas like gardening, body care or sports i lost interest. textbooks are also out of scope. though my interest here is primarily in book discussion, i take into account other book related sites, such as book news sites and book summary sites. the reason for this is that i assume the way people discuss books, with its consequences for books’ popularity, is very much influenced by and reflected in other online book coverage. for the same reasons, i take into account both amateur and 3 expert contributions, both volunteer and more formal organizations and both commercially and noncommercially motivated writing.1 book discussion landscape it is impossible to estimate with any accuracy the size of the (dutch) book discussion websphere, be it in terms of number of sites, in number of participants or in number of postings. what is more, given the diversity of the sites and the reviews they host, the significance of an overall estimate would be very limited. some of the sites see themselves as replacing or supplementing traditional newspaper reviews, and for these sites to host 500 reviews or more is clearly significant.2 this is hard to compare with the numbers of messages on message boards, where a single message may represent no more than one turn in a conversation. still, the largest message board based book discussion site, ezzulia, contains 340000 messages written by (now) 2500 registered users. there are at least 5 other forums having close to a 100000 or more messages.3 two of the book-oriented social networking sites claim a number of ‘reviews’ (anything between an exclamation and a traditional review) around 17000 and a membership around 7500.4 from a literary perspective book discussion sites are often discussed in terms of how they compare to traditional book reviewing and how they may affect it (mcdonald, 2007). sites have been criticized for being superficial (kirsch, 2007) and for not sufficiently engaging in ‘practices of resistance’ (chaves, 2008). in a debate that has at times become quite heated, book bloggers have been accused of being untrustworthy and self-centered (bendel, 2009; weber, 2007). an exclusive focus on this question, however, is reductive. the various book discussion platforms have very different characteristics in terms of their potential for information exchange, knowledge creation, discussion and publication. to evaluate all book discussion in terms of literary criticism is to miss much of its point. however, the role of the literary critic as a gatekeeper for literary fame is well established but the significance of the phenomenon is as much in its diversity as in its numbers: the sites that host the discussions are quite diverse as to site genre, discussed book genre, sorts of discussion facilitated, and the affordances of participation. 1 all websites were checked july 10-15, 2011. 2 recensieweb (‘web of reviews’, http://www.recensieweb.nl/): 1100 reviews. literair nederland (‘literary netherlands’, http://www.literairnederland.nl/): 500 reviews. 3 numbers as reported by the forums. foreign fantasy, http://www.ff-leesclub.nl/forum/, wizard zone, http://www.wizardzone.nl/ipb/index.php?act=idx, fantasy realm, http://www.fantasy-realm.nl/forum/, pure fantasy, http://www.purefantasy.nl/forum/, and boekmeter, http://www.boekmeter.nl/forum/. 4 ‘entertainment community’ dizzie.nl (http://www.dizzie.nl/) and watleesjij.nu (‘what are you reading now’, a ‘community for booklovers’, http://watleesjijnu.nl). http://www.recensieweb.nl/� http://www.literairnederland.nl/� http://www.ff-leesclub.nl/forum/� http://www.wizardzone.nl/ipb/index.php?act=idx� http://www.fantasy-realm.nl/forum/� http://www.purefantasy.nl/forum/� http://www.boekmeter.nl/forum/� http://www.dizzie.nl/� http://watleesjijnu.nl/� 4 (rosengren, 1987; van rees, 1983). one of the reasons why the move of book reviewing to the net is interesting is the fact that much of this gate-keeping work is now done in public, and therefore amenable to study. that in the process criticism itself is changing, is another reason why research is appropriate, whether we consider the change to be a form of democratization or as a lowering of standards. from the perspective of internet studies, book discussions can be seen as user-generated content and can be studied as such. parts of the booksphere can be characterized along the lines of the produsage process described by bruns (2008).5 but book sites can’t be adequately described just in terms of the book reviews they produce. there is a number of book talk sites explicitly intended for social networking.6 5 probabilistic problem-solving, no hierarchy, granular tasks and shared content. moreover, many of the older discussion forums are social networking sites avant la lettre, and the discussions’ point is the creation and maintenance of a community just as much as the discussions’ content (ridings & gefen, 2004). discussion of books can also be a vehicle for identity work, for which weblogs perhaps provide the most suitable platform (schmidt, 2007; van dijck, 2004). on the other hand, there are also platforms that provide monetary incentives to reviewers. remarkably, among the paid reviews are those with highest social status (printed literary criticism in serious newspapers) and reviews on consumer opinion portals. one of the most fascinating aspects of the booksphere is its interconnectedness. in their profiles, members of the ezzulia forum can point to a personal web site, and among these websites we find weblogs, online book shops (self-owned or private corners in large online booksellers), profiles on general-purpose or book-focused social network sites, and writers’ sites (of members who are professional writers). book bloggers refer to other bookblogs in their blog roll. online magazines commission reviews from book bloggers. the booksphere is like a town, where each person has his own dwelling (weblog), but where people also assemble in larger buildings, to propound and listen (formal reviews), to deliberate (some forums), to chat (other forums), to be entertained (some e-zines) or to sell (bookshops). it is especially the community residing in the connections between sites that should be interesting to study from an internet research perspective (efimova, hendrick, & anjewierden, 2005; hodkinson, 2007). the present paper can be seen as a preliminary to that research. 6 such as librarything and watleesjijnu.nl (‘what are you reading now’, http://watleesjij.nu/). http://watleesjij.nu/� 5 book site genres genres, according to the definition of orlikowsi and yates (1994), are “a distinctive type of communicative action, characterized by a socially recognized communicative purpose and common aspects of form”. recognizing genre is important for efficient document processing (crowston, 2010). much of the work on internet genre has been motivated by the desire to enhance automated document processing, e.g. in information retrieval. for the purposes of this paper, however, genre is not primarily used to speed up processing of individual documents or sites, but rather to help form a highlevel overview of the booksphere as a whole. however, trying to catch all relevant distinctions in a single genre hierarchy will create an unwieldy and unusable set of categories. as has been argued by among others (crowston & kwasnik, 2004), a single set of labels is not sufficient for describing a multidimensional concept such as genre. genre includes aspects of content, purpose and form, and an independent description of the separate dimensions creates flexibility and expressiveness. a faceted classification scheme for computer mediated discourse was proposed by herring (2007). below i will propose a modified version of her classification scheme for use in describing the booksphere. this faceted description does not do away with the need for genre, however. faceted classification creates low-level, precise and detailed description; high-level and somewhat fuzzy concepts such as genre labels remain useful for orientation and navigation. assigning genre to internet sites is not a trivial undertaking, for a number of reasons. apart from the fact that individual sites are continually evolving within the context of a web that is itself very much in development, there are four main causes of genre confusion: (i) sites often consist of or contain subsites that have very different genre characteristics from the main site; (ii) researchers have often conflated ‘site’ and ‘page’ and created hybrid genre hierarchies; (iii) web sites often do not conform to a single genre but have the characteristics of a number of genres; (iv) technical platform (such as weblog) does not equal genre. we will discuss each of these difficulties in turn. i. sites and subsites: it is a very common phenomenon for a web site to consist of a number of very different subsites. in the domain under discussion the site misdaadromans (‘crime novels’) provides an example.7 7 the site contains a discussion forum, reference work-like information, book reviews, and more. i will assign the container site to the genre ‘theme site’; theme sites can contain subsites of many http://www.inejacet.nl/. http://www.inejacet.nl/� 6 different genres. the situation is encountered time and again in the book domain.8 ii. sites and pages: in analyzing the genre of internet sites, many researchers have talked about the genre of ‘web pages’. meyer zu eissen & stein (2004) e.g. place web shop and help document at the same level, as if web shops couldn’t have a help document. web pages, however, can contain multiple sorts of items (santini, 2007), and in turn many different sorts of items can form part of sites of clearly identifiable genres. the right targets for genre analysis are web (sub)sites and information items on web sites, and there is a many-to-many relation between site genres and item genres. e.g. an online bookseller (site genre) will display catalog information items, review pages, order forms, complaint forms and reviewer profile (information item genres). conversely, book reviews (information item genre) are used in online booksellers, online magazines, specialized review sites, etc. a complication is that it is not always self-evident whether a collection of pages within a site (say: reviews) can be considered to be a proper subsite within the larger site (i.e. a visually, functionally or topically distinct, reasonably coherent set of pages within a larger site). iii. multiple genres: sites can belong to multiple genres if they share the characteristics of two or more genres. an outspoken defender of this view is santini (2008). though some of the cases she mentions are better explained by modeling subsites within sites (i) or distinguishing site genre and information item genre (ii), there remain cases where two site genre labels apply. in the book domain some review sites are also ezines, such as de reactor and recensent (‘reviewer’).9 some theme sites are also home to a community, such as fantasy realm.10 a theme site can be integrated into an online bookshop, as in the case of bookseller athenaeum.11 iv. software versus genre: software platforms such as weblogs, bulletin boards and wiki’s may seem wedded to particular site genres. it is quite common, however, to see them used for multiple purposes. weblogs can be used for weblogs proper, but also for e 8 e.g. literatuurplein (‘literature square’; http://www.literatuurplein.nl/), ezzulia, and many others. 9 http://www.dereactor.org/ (‘the reactor’) and http://www.derecensent.nl/ (‘the reviewer’). 10 http://www.fantasy-realm.nl/forum/. 11 http://www.athenaeum.nl/. http://www.literatuurplein.nl/� http://www.dereactor.org/� http://www.derecensent.nl/� http://www.fantasy-realm.nl/forum/� http://www.athenaeum.nl/� 7 zines, such as pinkbullets,12 and reference sites, such as romantische boeken (‘romantic novels’).13 the chasing dreams theme site (about historical romance) maintains a bulletin board for forum discussions (the ‘native’ use of a bulletin board system) and a bulletin board that is used as a review site.14 taking into account these considerations, the site genres that i distinguish up to now are shown in table 1. table 1: book site genres genre remarks and/or examples author site there are three main varieties of author sites: sites usually created by a publisher, mainly for marketing purposes; sites created by an author to communicate with his audience; and author weblogs. sites devoted to a single author by fans i consider to be theme sites (see below). book news site site specializing in book news. example: vpro boeken.15 vpro is a public broadcasting corporation known for its willingness to experiment with internet applications. book sns social networking site with book (or entertainment) specialization. examples: international sites with dutch participants include goodreads and librarything.16 dutch examples include ‘entertainment community’ dizzie.nl (an untranslatable neologism) and boeklezers.nl (‘readers of books’), which describes itself as a ‘network for social reading’ and uses the slogan ‘discover new books and make friends’.17 buyer orientation site also known as consumer opinion platforms. examples include the international platform ciao shopping, and boekenbuzz (‘bookbuzz’) which describes itself as ‘the fun site to order books’ and ‘the community where you find everything about books’.18 the site mixes characteristics of a consumer opinion platform and a book sns. community home site created by and home to a community. an example is probably the theme site fantasy realm.19 but more research is needed to decide whether a group of people visiting a site can be called a community and the site can be called the community’s home. edition site making available an author’s work. example: de open ruimte (‘the open space’) where a son is republishing his father’s complete works.20 e-zine online magazine. 12 http://www.pinkbullets.nl/. 13 http://romantischeliefdesboeken.web-log.nl/ (‘romantic books about love’). 14 romance novels, http://www.romancenovels.nl/. 15 http://boeken.vpro.nl/. 16 http://www.goodreads.com/, http://www.librarything.nl/. 17 http://www.dizzie.nl/, http://www.boeklezers.nl/. 18 http://www.ciao-shopping.nl/, http://www.boekenbuzz.nl/. 19 http://www.fantasy-realm.nl/. 20 http://www.cornetsdegroot.com/. http://www.pinkbullets.nl/� http://romantischeliefdesboeken.web-log.nl/� http://www.romancenovels.nl/� http://boeken.vpro.nl/� http://www.goodreads.com/� http://www.librarything.nl/� http://www.dizzie.nl/� http://www.boeklezers.nl/� http://www.ciao-shopping.nl/� http://www.boekenbuzz.nl/� http://www.fantasy-realm.nl/� http://www.cornetsdegroot.com/� 8 it is hard to define what constitutes a ‘magazine’ in the online world. i define it as a frequently updated publication that answers to a concept, contains varied contents and is run by an editorial board. an example is meander, which describes itself as a ‘literary e-zine’, ‘that wants to bring literature to the notice of a wide audience and wants to provide a platform to budding authors.’21 the site is part of a larger theme site that includes a news letter and an educational site that discusses classic dutch poems. fan fiction site fan fiction is not book discussion in the strict sense, but it is still a reflection of the original books’ contents. it also affects the popularity of the original works. a dutch example is fanfic.nl.22 forum discussion forums. examples were mentioned in note 2. online book shop might either be a fully online book shop or the online counterpart of a physical bookseller or bookseller chain. the most popular online bookseller in the netherlands is the german firm bol.23 online counterpart of a physical bookseller chain is selexyz.24 organization site site mainly devoted to supporting an (offline) organization’s activities, may include some book discussion or the occasional review. print periodical counterpart to print newspaper or magazine; book reviews are often accessible online to non-subscribers. examples: newspaper nrc handelsblad and magazine de groene.25 reference work either work of encyclopedic nature or collection of data. an example of the latter is van roman tot roman (‘from novel to novel’), a site that attempts a comprehensive listing of harlequin novels, with images of the front cover and back cover text.26 wikipedia is an example of the former; another example is infonu.nl (‘infonow.nl’), a content farm (a commercial site that rewards authors based on the ad revenue their articles bring in).27 review site collection of reviews. review sites are often part of a theme site or share the characteristics of e-zines. an example of the former is the site misdaadromans mentioned earlier. an example of the latter is recensieweb, also mentioned above. summary site sites collecting book summaries especially targeting high school students. theme site multi-purpose site based on a theme, such as a literary genre (chicklit, fantasy, crime), a single author, a period, ww ii, etc. theme sites are not necessarily about books alone. weblog weblog written by (usually one) individual person(s). magazines written from a collective or corporate identity are not weblogs. webloggers may specialize in genre fiction or literature. weblogs often seem mainly targeted at supporting the writer’s reflection (e.g. boeklog).28 21 http://meandermagazine.net/. 22 http://fanfic.nl/. 23 http://www.bol.com/nl/index.html. 24 http://www.selexyz.nl/. 25 http://www.nrcboeken.nl/, http://www.groene.nl/boeken. 26 http://www.romantotroman.nl/. 27 http://www.infonu.nl/. 28 http://boeklog.info/. http://meandermagazine.net/� http://fanfic.nl/� http://www.bol.com/nl/index.html� http://www.selexyz.nl/� http://www.nrcboeken.nl/� http://www.groene.nl/boeken� http://www.romantotroman.nl/� http://www.infonu.nl/� http://boeklog.info/� 9 further book site facets the facets i will use for describing sites in the dutch booksphere are based on the facets given in (herring, 2007). some of herring’s facets do not apply, especially those concerned with medium, as opposed to what she calls ‘situation’, as all of the sites i discuss are web-based. in our case, message transmission is always asynchronous, messages are always logged, and message size is only rarely limited for technical reasons. given the fact that we limit ourselves to the book domain, other facets can be filled in with more detail (such as topic or theme). the list of facets is not expected to be complete. the facets that i will use are described in table 2. table 2: book site facets name herring code remarks participation structure s1 herring mentions aspects such as: • number of participants • configurations such as one-to-many vs. many-to-many • anonymity/pseudonymity important are also: • participants’ roles • openness to new participants participants s2 herring mentions demographic characteristics, status, computer or tool proficiency and other relevant properties. however, not all participants are natural persons, communicating as equals. many platforms are created by business or organizations, and their interests determine the sites’ possibilities. topic s4 for the book domain, relevant aspects of topic are • book content (all, main, some) • book genre • book period • number of books discussed • if a site is only in part about books: what is the wider topic? writing s5 herring uses the word ‘tone’ to cover aspects such as playfulness, formality, etc. in the context of book discussion sites it is also important to include: • argumentation type • depth of engagement with discussed books • conversational aspects activity s6 aspects of site activity are: • genre of information items (as opposed to site genre): review, discussion, comment, etc. • supported functionality: defining profiles, adding friendships, swapping books, cataloguing books, etc. • higher-level affordances. i discuss these in the following section. software platform platform can be weblog, forum, wiki or other. 10 participation structures not all participants are born equal. people participate in a certain role, and their position depends on that role, more than on the quantity of their contributions. roles to be distinguished are site owner (often the site originator, perhaps the one who foots the bill), staff (assigned a role and responsibility by owner or community), (registered) member, non-member (can read and sometimes comment) and follower (through e.g. twitter, rss or mailed newsletter). to describe a site’s functioning requires awareness of the participants’ roles (chan & hayes, 2010; preece & shneiderman, 2009). another important site characteristic is openness: is it possible for non-members to become members without having to go through a selection procedure? from the perspective of literary reviewing, the most important difference between traditional reviewing practice and online book discussion is that traditionally, writing a review was the privilege of a few, while in most online sites anyone can review. topic not all sites in the book domain devote themselves to books only. the book content facet says whether all, most or some of the content is book related. with respect to the book genre facet: book genres cannot be exhaustively listed, as communities can decide to focus on any group of books that they see fit. genres might include: all, chicklit, dutch, erotica, fantasy, fiction, general, genre (suspense, romance, etc., but not high literature), high literature, historical, historical romance, other, poetry, romance, single-author, suspense, young adult, youth. writing an examination of the practices of book discussion should take into account the type of arguments that are used in judging a book’s merits. are books judged by their emotional appeal, by their veracity, by stylistic merit? do reviewers an explicit view on what constitutes quality in literature? do they show awareness of the literary tradition surrounding a book? site genres and sites (and reviewers) differ widely in these respects. a related aspect is the prevalence of reviews (monologue) vs. discussion (dialogue). activity for herring, activities are ‘discursive means of pursuing interactional goals’. it includes information item genres, site functionalities and higher-level site affordances. i discuss affordances below. 11 the information item genre, in contrast with the site genre, applies to individual items on the site. as discussed above, sites can contain multiple sorts of items, and a single sort of item can occur on multiple sorts of sites. the information item genres that occur most regularly in the book domain are: discussion (message-board type discussion), essay, interview, news item, poetry, personal messages, publisher description (description of book as given by publisher), publisher description-plus (slightly enhanced publisher descriptions), reference work item, response (brief response to book), review, review with discussion, summary (on book summary site), video item. again, the list undoubtedly will be expanded in the future. site functionalities can be described as non-discursive means of pursuing interactional goals. for each site genre, certain functionality is expected. on a social networking site, one should be able to define profiles and probably some sort of ‘friendship’. but not all sites where users can define profiles are thereby social networking sites. functionalities that can be present are, among others: rating of books, buying / selling, cataloguing (either books read, to be read, or owned), commenting, creating profiles, creating friendships, creating subcommunities, discussion, private messaging, review rating, reviewer rating, swapping. affordances an empirical investigation into what motivates people to write about books online, let alone into their reasons for choosing one site type over another, is beyond the scope of this paper. still, sites with different characteristics provide their participants with different affordances, in the sense of a potential for action (gaver, 1991). a genre analysis would not be complete without an enquiry into the sort of actions that the various sites facilitate. the study of online genres in terms of affordances seems to be especially prevalent in the context of computer supported learning. there is also, however, an extensive literature on motivations for online activity, often in terms of gratifications sought or obtained, and gratifications tend to be formulated in terms of actions (having fun, earning money, acquiring status). an overview of motivations to produce user generated content is given in (stöckl, rohrmeier, & hess, 2007). based on this a tentative list of online book discussion affordances might be: • participation: play role in larger literary field • community: socialize, build and maintain friendships, inform others • status: publication, win recognition • self-directed: self-presentation, reflect through writing, documentation of life 12 • practical: earn money, build career there is no simple relation between the affordances listed here and the genres listed above. review sites recensieweb and de reactor show in their motto or subtitle (‘new literature. new guides’ and ‘platform for literary criticism’ respectively) the ambition of playing a role on the national literary scene.29 other review sites, such as lekkerlezen (‘delightful reading’),30 completely lack that ambition, as the name shows. genre-based theme sites such as chicklit.nl do not aspire to social relevance, while the ww ii theme site go2war2.nl certainly does.31 conclusions those looking for community features are perhaps best served by forums (ridings & gefen, 2004) and book snss (o’reilly, 2009; rutkoff, 2006). writers and readers on consumer opinion platforms too are to some extent motivated by the sense of community (hennig-thurau, gwinner, walsh, & gremler, 2004). status can probably be earned on all types of sites. while weblogs and the high-end review sites are probably the best platforms for the publication of original thought, status can also be the reward for leadership (preece & shneiderman, 2009) on other sites and can even be the result of one’s reviews being rated highly on opinion platforms (lampel & bhalla, 2007). for the self-directed affordances, blogging may be the most suitable platform (tian, 2009), especially for reflecting through writing, honing one’s writing skills and documentation of life. all platforms that facilitate personal rather than factual writing (that excludes e.g. the news sites, the reference sites and the summary sites) allow presentation of self, and participants will probably choose the genre that is most congenial to them. finally, the very practical affordance of making money is best served by becoming a professional book reviewer at a print newspaper or magazine. a step towards that goal may be writing reviews for a high-end e-zine or review site. another option would be paid ‘blogging’ for the low-end e-zines or writing for content farms or consumer opinion platforms. anyone who attempts a genre analysis of the booksphere will be confronted with the fact that, except for anecdotal evidence, most elementary information about the book discussion landscape is still missing. as yet we don’t know anything about the age and gender distribution of forum site 29 ‘web of reviews’ (http://www.recensieweb.nl/) and ‘the reactor’ (http://www.dereactor.org/). 30 http://www.lekkerlezen.net/. 31 http://www.chicklit.nl/ and http://www.go2war2.nl/recensies/. http://www.recensieweb.nl/� http://www.dereactor.org/� http://www.lekkerlezen.net/� http://www.chicklit.nl/� http://www.go2war2.nl/recensies/� 13 participants vs. web loggers. we have no idea to what extent participants in book social network sites overlap with those participating in bulletin board discussions. we don’t know whether popular fiction is discussed more or less than high literature or romantic fiction more than fantasy. we don’t know the education levels of the people visiting these sites. we don’t know why they visit the sites. books have for ages been important in the creation and transmission of knowledge, ideas and sensibilities. book reviewing and book discussion have been important elements in this culture of the book. it is hard to predict to what extent and in what form we will still read books twenty or fifty years from now. but it is likely that book discussion and book reviewing will remain relevant, and tracking changes in book reviewing as the practice moves online is important for understanding the future culture of reading. as we have seen, given the online world’s permanent state of flux a genre analysis of the booksphere is a hazardous undertaking. the genres we distinguish now may merge or split or be overtaken by others a few years from now. the value of this paper then may be primarily in having documented the present state of the dutch booksphere. however that may turn out, this genre analysis does raise some interesting follow-up questions. the following would seem promising areas for further research: (i) the sites’ audiences: demographic properties of site visitors, overlap in visitors between book sites and with other sites; (ii) the books discussed and the nature of the discussions; (iii) the effect of site events and external events on other sites of the same or different genre; and (iv) the effect of online discussions in the various site genres on sales, popularity and reputation of books and writers. all of these questions focus on the sites themselves and their effects. however, what from a research perspective may be one of the most promising aspects of book discussion sites is what they can tell us about how people read, why people read, and what reading does to them. the study of literature has in the past been dominated by non-empirical approaches, focusing on interpretation of literary works rather than on what literary reading does to readers (miall, 2006). the availability of large amounts of reader-written material detailing actual readers’ responses to books should provide a stimulus to empirical reading research. the various site genres may correspond with different strategies for dealing with the emotional and intellectual impact books can have. site affordances, like beauty, are in the eyes of the beholder, and age, character or personal history may predispose readers towards certain site genres, as they do to certain book genres (correa, hinsley, & de zúñiga, 2010). 14 references bendel, o. (2009). user-generated nonsense. literaturbesprechungen von laien im web 2.0. retrieved from http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/30/30206/1.html bruns, a. (2008). blogs, wikipedia, second life, and beyond: from production to produsage. new york: peter lang. chan, j., & hayes, c. (2010). decomposing discussion forums using user roles. proceedings of the websci10: extending the frontiers of society on-line. chaves, e. (2008). the war between n+ 1 and the elegant variation, or when production overlooks consumption in the literary political economy. fast capitalism, 4(1). correa, t., hinsley, a. w., & de zúñiga, h. g. (2010). who interacts on the web? the intersection of users' personality and social media use. computers in human behavior, 26(2), 247-253. crowston, k. (2010). internet genres. in encyclopedia of library and information science (pp. 25832596): taylor & francis london, uk. crowston, k., & kwasnik, b. h. (2004). a framework for creating a facetted classification for genres: addressing issues of multidimensionality. proceedings of the 37th annual hawaii international conference on system sciences (hicss'04) track 4. dietz, l. (2010). inferring shared interests from social networks. nips workshop on computational social science and the wisdom of crowds. retrieved from http://www.cs.umass.edu/~wallach/workshops/nips2010css/papers/dietz.pdf domsch, s. (2009). critical genres. generic changes of literary criticism in computer-mediated communication. in j. giltrow & d. stein (eds.), genres in the internet: issues in the theory of genre (pp. 221-238). amsterdam: john benjamins publishing company. efimova, l., hendrick, s., & anjewierden, a. (2005). finding 'the life between buildings': an approach for defining a weblog community. internet research, 6, 1997. gaver, w. w. (1991). technology affordances. proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems: reaching through technology. 15 grafton, k. (2010). paying attention to public readers of canadian literature: popular genre systems, publics, and canons. university of british columbia, vancouver. hennig-thurau, t., gwinner, k. p., walsh, g., & gremler, d. d. (2004). electronic word of mouth via consumer opinion platforms: what motivates consumers to articulate themselves on the internet? journal of interactive marketing, 18(1), 38-52. herring, s. c. (2007). a faceted classification scheme for computer-mediated discourse. language@ internet, 4(1), 1-37. hodkinson, p. (2007). interactive online journals and individualization. new media & society, 9(4), 625. kirsch, a. (2007). the scorn of the literary blog. new york sun. retrieved from http://www.nysun.com/arts/scorn-of-the-literary-blog/56368/ lampel, j., & bhalla, a. (2007). the role of status seeking in online communities: giving the gift of experience. journal of computer mediated communication, 12(2), 434-455. leadbeater, c., & miller, p. (2004). the pro-am revolution. london: demoso. mcdonald, r. (2007). the death of the critic. london, new york: continuum international publishing group. meyer zu eissen, s., & stein, b. (2004). genre classification of web pages. ki 2004: advances in artificial intelligence, 256-269. miall, d. s. (2006). empirical approaches to studying literary readers. book history, 9, 291-311. o’reilly, t. (2009). goodreads vs twitter: the benefits of asymmetric follow. o'reilly radar, 25, 2009. orlikowski, w. j., & yates, j. a. (1994). genre repertoire: the structuring of communicative practices in organizations. administrative science quarterly, 39(4), 541-574. preece, j., & shneiderman, b. (2009). the reader-to-leader framework: motivating technologymediated social participation. ais transactions on human-computer interaction, 1(1), 5. 16 ridings, c. m., & gefen, d. (2004). virtual community attraction: why people hang out online. journal of computer mediated communication, 10(1). rosengren, k. e. (1987). literary criticism: future invented. poetics, 16(3-4), 295-325. rutkoff, a. (2006). social networking for bookworms. the wall street journal online, 27. santini, m. (2007). characterizing genres of web pages: genre hybridism and individualization. 40th hawaii international conference on system sciences, waikoloa. santini, m. (2008). zero, single, or multi? genre of web pages through the users' perspective. information processing & management, 44(2), 702-737. schmidt, j. (2007). blogging practices: an analytical framework. journal of computer mediated communication, 12(4), 1409-1427. steiner, a. (2008). private criticism in the public space: personal writing on literature in readers' reviews on amazon. participations, 5(2). steiner, a. (2010). personal readings and public texts: book blogs and online writing about literature. culture unbound, 2(28), 471-494. stöckl, r., rohrmeier, p., & hess, t. (2007). motivations to produce user generated content: differences between webloggers and videobloggers. bled 2007 proceedings, 30. tian, q. (2009). self-presentation and social interaction on blogs: a structural equation modeling of the uses and gratifications of blogging. unpublished phd. van dijck, j. (2004). composing the self: of diaries and lifelogs. fibreculture journal, 3. van rees, c. j. (1983). how a literary work becomes a masterpiece: on the threefold selection practised by literary criticism. poetics, 12(4-5), 397-417. verboord, m. (2010). internet as publicity for cultural products. gender, genre and commercial success in the u.s. book market. annual meeting of the international communication association, jun 22, 2010. weber, k. (2007). critics versus bloggers: pen to keyboard combat. newmedia, 22. towards a genre analysis of online book discussion: socializing, participation and publication in the dutch booksphere huygens ing book discussion landscape book site genres further book site facets affordances conclusions references selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): ganito, c. & jorge, a. (2017, october 18-21). on and off: digital practices of connecting and disconnecting across the life course. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. on and off: digital practices of connecting and disconnecting across the life course carla ganito cecc/ucp ana jorge cecc/ucp in a time of ubiquitous and permanent access to the internet made available to more and more people, emergent research has focused on audiences’ practices to disconnect from the internet (kaun et al., 2014), to go offline and to remove their presence and visibility from online spaces (light & cassidy, 2014). connectivity being a central element of ‘social media logic’ (van dijck & poell, 2013), disconnecting has been analysed particularly in relation to social networking sites (sns), in the context of accounting for audience’s relationship with the technological functioning of those digital platforms (burgess et al., 2016). from criticism on digital media to acts of refusal such as closing accounts on sns or abstention from use have been understood “as a performative mode of resistance” (portwood-stacer, 2012: 1041; woodstock, 2014; syvertsen, 2017). on the other hand, discussion on the rights of the users, especially the youngest ones, has highlighted the right to remove content from the internet and to be forgotten (ghezzi, pereira & vesnic-alujevic, 2014). the power to remove content about oneself and to erase a digital footprint has been reclaimed by users and activists. data on ‘excessive use’ among young users (livingstone et al., 2014) has also highlighted the degree of control audiences feel they have over the internet use they make. so also the right to a conscious and informed use of digital technologies has been reclaimed, without addictive techniques from the industry, notably the social media (livingstone & bulger, 2014). important debates have arisen regard work and leisure time, for instance in france and in germany with the discussion of the ‘right to disconnect’ or switch off from work emails as a protection of workers against burn-outs (rodionova, 2016; hesselberth, 2017). in this paper we aim at tracking people’s practices of connecting and disconnecting in relation to their life course. as a concept, the life course refers to the age-graded, socially embedded sequence of roles that connect the phases of life. as a paradigm, the life course refers to an imaginative framework comprised of a set of interrelated presuppositions, concepts, and methods that are used to study these age-graded, socially embedded roles (mortimer & shanahan, 2004: xi). a distinction should be made between life cycle and the life course. the first approach emphasises ages and life stages, while the second puts emphasis on the transitions into those stages (allatt et al., 1987). turning points can be defined as “traditional points in a person’s life where daily rhythm and routine alter drastically due to a change in a person’s role in society” (helsper, 2010: 355). as people construct their life course through daily choices and practices life stages, which no longer follow a sequential path or individual turning-points (hareven & adams, 1982), throughout their life courses, internet users face different challenges and needs that are expressed in different relationships with technology. there is no linear progression but instead these relationships are related to their “situated knowledges” and specific locations (ganito, 2017) and keeps evolving over time and the life course (taipale, wilska & gilleard, 2017). as societies become more complex and replace biological life cycle with a sociobiological one (castells, 1996), the life course approach can account for change and complexity, more than generational analysis. our study thus analyses trajectories that are understood as sequences of roles and experiences incorporating social context and individual variation. we base the analysis of these trajectories on the principle of agency, where people construct their own life course through daily choices and practices within the limits and opportunities of given historical and social circumstances (elder et al., 2003). it is important to understand the differences in touchpoints with technology and the different affordances at each life stage. we conducted an exploratory study in portugal, to map perceptions, intentions and tactics that users of the internet develop to build offline spaces where internet access or the use of online services is suspended. we designed a survey combining questions from communications market report on disconnecting (ofcom, 2016, eu kids online and net children go mobile on excessive use (livingstone et al., 2011; mascheroni & cuman, 2014), and ‘growing up amongst screens’ (ponte et al., 2017). the survey targeted all age groups, and was distributed online, through snowball, in early october 2017. this exploratory survey allowed us to see that the perceptions of excessive use are not related to the time of use, and that it is especially young people and sole carers feel greater unease with time spent online. people feel the internet takes them time they could use for other leisure activities, more than to spend with family and friends; and that decision-related measures of disconnecting are more used than technical or consumption-related ones. references allatt, p., keil, t., bryman, a., and bytheway, b, eds. (1987). women and the life cycle. transitions and turning-points. london: macmillan press. castells, m. (1996). the rise of the network society. vol. 1. cambridge: blackwell. elder, g. h., johnson, m. k. & crosnoe, r. (2003). the emergence and development of life course theory. in: j. t. mortimer & m. j. shanahan (eds.), handbook of the life course. new york, ny: kluwer academic/plenum publishers, pp. 3-19. ganito, c. (2017). gendering the mobile phone: a life course approach. in: s. taipale, t.-a. wilska & c. gilleard (eds.), digital technologies and generational identity: ict usage across the life course. london: routledge. ghezzi, a., pereira, a. & vesnic-alujevic, l. (2014). the ethics of memory in a digital age: interrogating the right to be forgotten. london: palgrave mcmillan. hareven, t. k. and adams, k. j., eds., 1982. ageing and life course transitions: an interdisciplinary perspective. london: guilford press. helsper, e. j. (2010). gendered internet use across generations and life stages. communication research, 37(3), pp. 352-374. hesselberth, p. (2017). discourses on disconnectivity and the right to disconnect. new media & society. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817711449 kaun, a. & schwarzenegger, c. (2014). “‘no media, less life?’ online disconnection in mediatized worlds”, first monday, 19(11). http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5497/4158 light, b., cassidy, e. (2014). strategies for the suspension and prevention of connection: rendering disconnection as socioeconomic lubricant with facebook. new media & society 16, 1169–1184. livingstone, s. & bulger, m. (2014). “a global research agenda for children’s rights in the digital age”. journal of children and media, 8(4): 317–335. mascheroni, g., & cuman, a., (2014). net children go mobile: final report (with country fact sheets). deliverables d6.4 and d5.2. milan: educatt. ofcom (2017). communications market report. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/26826/cmr_uk_2016.pdf, retrieved on aug-13-2017. ponte, c., simões, j. a., batista, s., castro, teresa s. e jorge, a. (2017). "crescendo entre ecrãs: uso de meios eletrónicos por crianças (3-8 anos)". lisboa: entidade reguladora para a comunicação social. portwood-stacer, l. (2012). media refusal and conspicuous non-consumption: the performative and political dimensions of facebook abstention. new media & society, 15(7), 1041 1057. rodionova, z. (2016). french workers win ‘right to disconnect’ from work emails at home. independent.co.uk, 31 december. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-workers-right-work-life-balancedisconnect-work-email-home-a7503311.html, accessed 16 februrary 2017. syvertsen, t. (2017). media resistance: protest, dislike, abstention. cham: palgrave macmillan. taipale, s., wilska, t.-a. & gilleard, c. (2017). introduction. in: s. taipale, t.-a. wilska & c. gilleard (eds.), digital technologies and generational identity: ict usage across the life course. london: routledge. van dijck, j. & poell, t. (2013). understanding social media logic. media and communication, 1(1), 2-14. woodstock, l. (2014). media resistance: opportunities for practice theory and new media research. international journal of communication, 8(19), 1983-2001. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 djeffal, c. (2017, october 18-21). the internet of things and public administration heading for an automated smart government?. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the internet of things and public administration heading for an automated smart government? dr. christian djeffal* alexander-von-humboldt-institut für internet und gesellschaft this paper examines the impact of the so-called internet of things in public administration. first the concept of the internet of things is explained (ad i.) and application examples from the administration help to clarify what this concept is about (ad ii). these examples also show the opportunities and risks of the internet of things for the administration (ad iii). they play a legal role insofar as administrative and constitutional norms can impose motivations to introduce applications of the internet of things in the public administration as well as mandate concrete designs and create limitations (ad iv.). from the results of legal analyses, theses are formulated based on the question of the potential of the internet of things to change administration and administrative law (ad v.). in the last few years, few concepts stimulated the imagination as much as the internet of things (iot). whether it was aself-refilling refrigerator, anautonomous car, or increasingly automated industrial equipment, there was no shortage of new products and new ideas.1 the internet of things is presented as a disruptive technology that can lead to lasting change in all areas of life.2 contrary to the "industrie 4.0" concept, the official concepts in germany do not address this potential for revolution in public administration.3 the strategy of the federal government "verwaltung 2020" only * the author coordinates the research area “global constitutionalism” and manages the project “digital administrative state”. he thanks mr. julian hölzel for the translation of the text and ms. amanda kraley for proofreading it. this version is mainly based on the following german paper: djeffal (2017). 1 just look at the reports of the big trade fairs like ifa berlin. 2 anderson (2012). 3 on the level of regional councils bundesministerium des innern (2014). for the definition of the term “administration 4.0” see for example lucke (2016a, p. 183). indirectly refers to the internet of things, the egovernment laws of the federal states and the countries do not at all. nevertheless, forecasts draw a different picture. in the year 2020, the projected turnover of the internet of things in the area of public administration in germany is 3 billion euros.4 there will be over 20 billion networked things worldwide.5 increasingly, scientific inquiries are being written about a new transformation of the administration under the key words "egovernment 4.0"6, "public iot"7 or "smart government"8. following this assessment, the question arises as to whether the internet of things in the administration can and should be used from a legal point of view and what the applicable legal framework concering administrative law would be. the first legal assessments on the internet of things9 have not yet been discussed from the perspective of administrative law.10 we will also examine whether conclusions can be drawn from the transformative potential of the internet of things. i. the notion of iot there is neither consensus on the concept of the internet of things in computer science nor in other discourses. a major study by the institute of electrical and electronics engineers (ieee) identified more than 40 attempts at definition and found that deviations are often rooted in different preconceptions of the term.11 reduced to a core concept, the internet means that objects of the environment are equipped with information technology systems in a way that they are networked, identifiable, and addressable, and can make certain observations via sensors, whereas the networked system as such can react to the observations. as an illustrative example, so-called traffic control systems on federal highways can be used.12 on these streets, sensors measure traffic volume, weather conditions, and other safety-relevant circumstances. this data is forwarded to data centers, which can control traffic in real time via digital traffic signs by arranging speed limits, overtaking bans, or redirecting traffic. cyberphysical systems are much more complex and more powerful.13 they are different applications and functions of the internet of things, which are interconnected. one example of this is the networked digital control of the entire system of electricity generation (smart grid). the basic idea behind the concept of the internet of things is that information technology is not tied to human use, but that computers can increasingly make autonomous perceptions, decisions, and can execute them through 4 deloitte (2016), transport and other local administrative services are not covered by the number. 5 as compared to 4.9 billion in the year 2015. 6 (""industrie 4.0" braucht "verwaltung 4.0"," 2013) 7 flügge and fromm (2016) 8 lucke (2016c) 9 bräutigam and klindt (2015); heun and assion ; schulz and dankert (2016) 10 but see assessment of administrative sciences like schuppan and köhl (2016); flügge and fromm (2016) 11 ieee (2015). 12 bundesanstalt für straßenwesen (2015) 13 nist cyber physical systems public working group (2016). actions. although autonomy is a specific aspect of the internet of things, human participation in such processes is not excluded. iot applications can also be combined with complex algorithmic decision-making mechanisms, which is referred to as "iot analytics," especially in business contexts.14 ii. use cases in public administration examples of application from the context of administration are explained here using the concepts of the smart city and the intelligent transport system.15 1. smart city the term "smart city" refers to a city planning trend which has existed for some time, according to which the application of information and communication technologies is intended to improve the life in cities and make them more sustainable.16 the european alliance for the promotion of smart city concepts, the "smart cities & communities industrial initiative," is based on an initiative of the european commission.17 recent smart city strategies are directly or indirectly related to iot applications, as shown by the example of berlin.18 iot applications are already being used in municipal areas. in the streets of barcelona, for example, sensors generate granular statistics on the air quality of the city.19 irrigation systems of public parks and gardens are also controlled by the integration of sensor networks and thus can save costs.20 all data generated in this way can be viewed and utilized by a central point of contact in the city.21 such centralized data collection with many different applications is also planned in the south korean city, songdo; this city is extensively equipped with sensors to reduce energy and resource consumption. 2. intelligent traffic systems the implementation of so-called "intelligent traffic systems" has been planned and promoted for a number of years in the european context.22 these often rely on iot applications. an example of this is the so-called ecall system, an automatic emergency call system, which vehicle manufacturers as well as rescue services are obliged to 14 techtarget (2014) 15 for further information see flügge and fromm (2016); lucke (2016a), intelligent infrastructure is represented here picot (2015). 16 chourabi et al. (2012); caragliu, del bo, and nijkamp (2011) 17 investing in the development of low carbon technologies (set-plan) [com(2009)519] 18 senatsverwaltung für stadtentwicklung und umwelt (2016) 19 adler (2016) 20 adler (2016) 21 http: / / opendata. bcn. cat/ opendata/ en, 17.09.2016. 22 the legal framework can be found in directive 2010/40/eu of the european parliament and of the council of 7 july 2010 on the framework for the deployment of intelligent transport systems in the field of road transport and for interfaces with other modes of transport text with eea relevance implement until march 31, 2018.23 sensors in the vehicles automatically establish a telephone connection with a rescue center in case of an accident and send a text message with the most important information to the rescuers. in emergency situations, units in a vehicle communicate automatically with rescue centers. the above-mentioned traffic control systems also belong to the intelligent traffic systems. iii. practical level: opportunities and risks the internet of things affords opportunities as well as risks.24 great opportunities of the internet of things are seen in the advantages of sensor technology and the possibilities offered by data analysis and automated actions. in the field of sensor technology, it is possible to collect data automatically on a locally ubiquitous and temporally permanent basis.25 this is particularly the case when large areas or remote locations have to be observed, as it is the case for tree cadastres. another advantage of comprehensive sensor technology is that data can be collected much more accurately and granularly than with conventional instruments. iot applications enable automated reactions. for example, fire-fighting robots and drones that can act with partial autonomy are being developed at the moment. the drones can move to the source of the fire more quickly, while the robots can be used in very dangerous fires without endangering humans 26 there are various risks associated with the internet of things.27 it mitigates certain risks, but can also create new vulnerabilities.28 inherent malfunctions can have serious consequences for involved parties. for example, accidents of autonomous buses used in public transport have been reported.29 especially in these cases it can be difficult for the injured to know who is responsible for the action of the systems. sensing can also be a problem for the privacy of people whose data is being recorded.30 as far as external threats are concerned, they affect, in particular, the integrity of the systems and the security of the data stored on them.31 these attacks can render the system remotecontrollable. the systems can also be used for other activities on the internet. due to insufficient it security, iot applications, which are connected to the internet, can be 23 see the following legal acts of the union commission delegated regulation (eu) no 305/2013 of 26 november 2012 supplementing directive 2010/40/eu of the european parliament and of the council with regard to the harmonised provision for an interoperable eu-wide ecall text with eea relevance; regulation (eu) 2015/758 of the european parliament and of the council of 29 april 2015 concerning type-approval requirements for the deployment of the ecall in-vehicle system based on the 112 service and amending directive 2007/46/ec; directive 2007/46/ec of the european parliament and of the council of 5 september 2007 establishing a framework for the approval of motor vehicles and their trailers, and of systems, components and separate technical units intended for such vehicles (framework directive). 24 for a general discussion see novoselic (2016, p. 82) 25 in relation to space and time see international telecommunications union [itu] (2005, p. 2). 26 beer (2015). 27 for summaries see government office for science (p. 18); federal trade commission 28 europol (2015, p. 8) 29 ("selbstfahrender minibus: postauto unterbricht test nach unfall," 2016) 30 article 29 data protection working party (p. 9) 31 this is particularly important regarding the complexity of systems, see samsel (2016, p. 122) remote-controlled as computers. on a few occasions recently, ddos attacks made certain internet sites and services inaccessible using insecure iot systems.32 iv. legal level: motivations, limitations and design if the public administration wants to implement an application of the internet of things, law can play different roles. it can be a reason for an acquisition, but also sets limitations. finally, it can also provide guidance with regard to futureprocedures. 1. motivations by implementing iot applications, administrative tasks can be provided more effectively and efficiently. in particular, special legal obligations of maintenance such as, for example, section 3 (1) fernstraßengesetz (highway act) or general safety requirements can be fulfilled through the internet of things. even if there is no legal obligation, considerations of the best possible compliance with the law can argue for the application of automated procedures.33 there is currently no concrete legal obligation for the administration to implement iot applications. if article 14 (1) of the constitution of schleswig-holstein stipulates the guarantee of the establishment and further development of digital basic services, it can be regarded as a general duty to adopt new technologies. article 4 (f) & (g) of the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities also stipulates the safeguarding and promotion of new technologies that are appropriate for people with disabilities.34 iot applications could, to a certain extent, compensate for limitations. a legal motivation to use the internet of things is, however, particularly conceivable in the cases in which obligations to adopt the state of the art are imposed on the administration. this could be particularly the case in environmental law.35 for instance, where information systems are to be created, such as eionet in european environmental law, the introduction of specific sensors, coupled with the internet of things, promises considerable advantages.36 even from the rule of law, although it is very general, the administration is bound to act effectively; it aims at to speak with konrad hesse at the "rationalization of the general public state".37 thus the administration has to orient itself on standards of efficiency, profitability, and especially effectiveness.38 the internet of things is going to be, according to these principles, obligatory for the administration to fulfill its promises, and 32 maras (2015); böck (2016); goodin 33 for labour protection see weber and weber (2010, p. 124) 34 convention on the rights of persons with disabilities (crpd) 2515 unts 3. 35 see weber and weber (2010, pp. 118–121); for practical examples see wettstad (2008, p. 974); a real obligation could follow from art. 3 the convention for the protection of the marine environment of the north-east atlantic (ospar convention) 2354 unts 67. 36 heußner (2007) 37 hesse (1962, p. 83) see also pitschas (p. 1732) 38 schmitz (2014, p. 76); hoffmann-riem (1998, p. 18). is actually more effective and efficient than the fulfillment of tasks by humans.39 indeed, the rule of law – as well as statutory law also sets limitations to the internet of things. 2. limitations from the many legal requirements that can be taken into account during the implementation of an iot application, the law of data protection and it security are exemplified, since these are often mentioned as limitations in this context.40 a) data protection law the internet of things raises many data protection issues,41 not least because of the possibility of automatic, ubiquitous, and permanent data collection.42 in particular, the concept of personally identifiable information, the principle of necessity, and purpose limitation are to be examined. aa) applicability: personally identifiable information the decisive criterion for the applicability of the data protection law is whether personally identifiable information is being processed. however, the relevant criterion of identifiability is very controversial.43 the question is, in particular, to what extent knowledge and skills of third parties should be taken into account. according to the data protection directive, which the bundesdatenschutzgesetz (federal data protection act) is based on, "all resources which could reasonably be used either by the person responsible for processing or by a third party"44 should be taken into account. the court of justice of the european union (ecj) recently ruled that this was not the case " if the identification of the person concerned was legally prohibited or practically unviable".45 the general data protection regulation provides that “ the available technology at the time of the processing and technological developments”have to be taken into consideration.46 however, the internet of things is already seen as a viable technical development,47 because the possibility of automated, permanent and ubiquitous data 39 for further explanation of the terms efficency and effectiveness see hoffmann-riem (1998, p. 17). 40 one of many references is provided by lucke (2016a, p. 180) 41 see bräutigam and klindt (2015, pp. 1139–1140); venzke-caprarese (2015, p. 377); hofmann and hornung (2015, p. 212); for mobile applications see scholz (2014) 42 this text does not look at directive (eu) 2016/680 of the european parliament and of the council of 27 april 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data by competent authorities for the purposes of the prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offences or the execution of criminal penalties, and on the free movement of such data, and repealing council framework decision 2008/977/jha. 43 bergt (2015, p. 365) 44 recital 26 directive 95/46/ec of the european parliament and of the council of 24 october 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data. 45 ase c-582/14: judgment of the court (second chamber) of 19 october 2016 (request for a preliminary ruling from the bundesgerichtshof — germany) — patrick breyer v bundesrepublik deutschland [46]. considering that the general data protection regulation has solved the issue of identification, the judgment is still relevant because of its definition regarding “legal considerations”.ipv6 will also play an important part. a critical voice regarding this development is bergt (2015, p. 370). 46 recital 26. 47 albrecht (2016, p. 98); bräutigam and klindt (2015, p. 1140); schaar (2015, p. 43) collection raises the question of the effectiveness of anonymisation more fiercely.48 particularly with regard to iot applications and systems, several papers suggest to assume identifiability in general or at least in doubt.49 on the basis of what is technically possible hitherto, a differentiated view is preferable,50 especially in the administrative context. in the case of weather or pollen data identifiability might be denied. bb) collection and usage: principle of necessity and purpose limitation the peculiarities of the internet of things in data collection (automation, ubiquity, permanence) also have an effect in the context of justifying the collection and use of data. according to § 13 (1) bundesdatenschutzgesetz (federal data protection act), the central criterion for the collection of personal data is necessary to fulfill a task by the responsible authority. necessary is data which "the public authority could not perform the task in question without in the sense of a conditio sine qua non, not completely, not lawfully or not in an appropriate time".51 in the context of the legal fulfillment of tasks, it must be kept in mind that the measure must also be proportionate with regard to informational self-determination. an intervention is especiallydifficult when it concerns a high number of people;52 these people have not caused the intervention,53 the procedure takes place secretly or overtly54 and the data used is of particular personal relevance. this personal relevance can result from the possibility of conclusions from metadata,55 such as in the case of motion profiles.56 the federal constitutional court has also made it clear that the prerequisite for the admissibility of a measure is a clear legal definition of the purpose of data collection. the purpose also limits the possibilities of data processing as stated in § 14 bundesdatenschutzgesetz (federal data protection act). according to the case law of the federal constitutional court, the purpose of the use of the data has to be "areaspecific" and "precise".57 it is a matter of controversy in the literature to see whether this should also be the case for egovernment and big data.58 while on the one hand there is a fear of the erosion of legal safeguards, on the other hand, the principle of purpose limitation and the legal architecture behind it is being critizised as the wrong regulatory 48 article 29 data protection working party (p. 8) 49 steinmaurer (2016, p. 93); šehić, rengers, and hense (2015, p. 398) 50 venzke-caprarese (2015, p. 385) 51 gola, klug, and körffer (2015a, no. 3); stender-vorwachs (2016, no. 13) 52 bverfg, beschl. v. 12.04.2005 – 2 bvr 1027/02 – bverfge 113, 29 (53); bverfg, urt. v. 27.07.2005 – 1 bvr 668/04 – bverfge 113, 348 (383); bverfg, beschl. v. 04.04.2006 – 1 bvr 518/02 -bverfge 115, 320 (354). 53 ibid. 54 bverfg, beschl. v. 04.04.2006 – 1 bvr 518/02 -bverfge 115, 320 (353); bverfg, urt. v. 02.03.2006 – 2 bvr 2099/04 –, bverfge 115, 166 (194) . 55 article 29 data protection working party (p. 9) 56 bverfg, urt. v. 11.03.2008 – 1 bvr 2074/05 – bverfge 120, 378 (406). see also roßnagel, moser-knierim, and schweda (2013, p. 107) 57 bverfg, beschl. v. 13.06.2007 – 1 bvr 1550/03 – bverfge 118, 168 (187 f); bverfg, urt. v. 02.03.2010 – 1 bvr 256/08 -bverfge 125, 260 = dvbl 2010, 503; bverfg, beschl. v. 24.01.2012 – 1 bvr 1299/05 – bverfge 130, 151 (202) 58 for a rather broad understanding eifert (2007, p. 139); for a rather strict view roßnagel (2016, p. 564); for further references grafenstein (2016, 234 fn 2) approach. the european regulator has proposed an interesting compromise with regard to the ecall systems and future innovations. the ecall system itself is limited to the purpose of automated communication with emergency call centers, as stated in art. 6 para. 2 ecall regulation, and furthermore, there are strict anonymisation and deletion obligations. however, the manufacturers can provide a service with additional benefits on the sensor system, without the strict purpose of the ecall regulation being applicable to them.59 b) it security law if the administration uses the internet of things, it must take adequate security precautions. this general duty to secure information technology systems can be derived indirectly from article 91c (2), first sentence, of the grundgesetz (german constitution). security requirements are imposed on the administration in § 23 e-government act berlin or article 8 bavarian e-government act. various provisions such as § 9 bundesdatenschutzgesetz (federal data protection act) or article 32 general data protection regulation (gdpr), § 13 (7) and § 109 telemediengesetz (telemedia act) may lead to a general motivation to install technical and organizational safeguards.60 according to all regulations, the measures must be proportionate.61 taking into account telemediengesetz, telekommunikationsgesetz (telecommunications act) and gdpr, the state of the art must be adopted. which measures have to be adopted must be determined ad-hoc or taken from existing standards. such standards may be drawn up by the administration itself, or may come from industry associations and similar organizations.62 since the internet of things can develop its specific potential when different systems are interlinked and interoperable, some applications have also been standardized with regard to it security. in the context of introducingthe ecall systems, different standards for the safety of the systems were developed.63 if a government agency wants to implement a specific application, it can also create a security model or extend its security model beyond specific legal obligations.64 such situations, additionally, can be helpful in accruing experience for the general regulation of systems of the internet of things. this can be successful by establishing an exchange of knowledge between different authorities at different levels. such an exchange is also of great importance for the closure of security gaps. even if administration generally does not fall within the scope of section 8b (4) bsi-gesetz (act on the federal office for the security of federal 59 recital 15 directive 2007/46/ec of the european parliament and of the council of 5 september 2007 establishing a framework for the approval of motor vehicles and their trailers, and of systems, components and separate technical units intended for such vehicles (framework directive). 60 on the details see eckhart (2013); djeffal (2015); gola, klug, and körffer (2015b); for a specific example in the context of cars see rammo and holzgräfe (2014, p. 361) 61 the costs of the measure must be proportionate the aim of the system that is to be secured. 62 see for example industrial internet consortium 63 bs en 16072:2015 intelligent transport systems. esafety. pan-european ecall operating requirements; bs en 16072:2011 intelligent transport systems. esafety. pan-european ecall operating requirements 64 for such models see wehrmann, bluhm, and rink (2016, 255f); eckert (2014, pp. 35–44) information technology) and the nis directive, an information exchange will nevertheless be beneficial.65 3. design the law not only provides motivations and limitations for the implementation of internet of things in public administration, but also cancontain a mandate for design.66 such a design may also be necessary as the automation of administrative processes is so qualitatively new that it requires new regulation.67 this is not only about the lawful design of the technology, but also about understanding the steering effects and potentials of law and technology and of using them to achieve the administration’s goals.68 the design possibilities and necessities resulting from this are explained here by the example of § 35a verwaltungsverfahrensgesetz (vwvfg; federal administrative process act). a) § 35a vwvfg and its purpose § 35a verwaltungsverfahrensgesetz (federal administrative process act), which came into effect on january 1, 2017, regulates for the first time the issuance of administrative acts exclusively by automatic means.69 in the course of the legislative process for the modernization of the taxation procedure, the legislature decided not only to change the abgabenordnung (general taxation act), but also to change the general administrative procedure and the social administration procedural law.70 contrary to section 155 (4) of the abgabenordnung (general taxation act) and article 31a of sozialgesetzbuch x (tenth book of the social security act), section 35a of the verwaltungsverfahrensgesetz (federal administrative process act) requires, as a general rule, further interpretation. the purpose of the provision becomes clear, especially in the light of its genetic history. due to the parallel development, the legislator can draw on the purpose of automating tax administration. in addition to the regularly mentioned advantages, such as the efficiency and speed of the procedure, the legislator also emphasized another aspect: the procedure should not lead to a "less intensive examination and decision quality".71 the aim is to achieve a "concentration of human resources on cases which are really 65 exceptions are traffic and intelligent traffic systems, see appendix ii 2 d directive (eu) 2016/1148 of the european parliament and of the council of 6 july 2016 concerning measures for a high common level of security of network and information systems across the union 66 for the design dimension see köhl, lenk, löbel, and schuppan (2014, p. 31) 67 luhmann (1997, p. 12) see generally kaiser (2009, pp. 111–135) 68 for this interdependence see lessig (1999, p. 501); see further for the context of iot applications schulz and dankert (2016) 69 previously, there were only provisions to enable assistance by machines such as § 28 abs. 2 nr. 4, § 37 abs. 4, § 39 abs. 2 nr. 3. federal administrative process act, schmitz (2014, no. 77)siehe schmitz (fußn. 38), rdnr. 77; there were also specific regulations such as § 6a federal data protection act, art. 22 general data protection regulation, § 67b abs. 4 tenth book of the social security act, § 114 abs. 4 civil servants act. 70 see schmitz and prell (2016); braun binder (2016b) 71 federal government, draft of an act for the modernization of tax procedure, 03 february 2016, 48. necessary".72 here, automation is placed in the context of several procedures so the immediate danger of automation, namely the loss of the personal relationship between authority and addressee, is reversed. automation can not lead to less, but to more meaningful human contact. a human decision is only better if the deciding person has sufficient time and professional resources at his or her disposal. automation on the one hand and citizen orientation and humanity on the other are no longer at odds with one another. this aspect of the law’s purpose is to be referred to here as process humanization by automation. automation could thus redeem the promise of citizen orientation, which had already been linked to the digitization of the administration.73 this is part of a way of thinking that would encourage use of technology that allows for a closer exchange between citizens and the state.74 not only the internet, but also the internet of things, as a vision of increasing automation, can be of constitutional importance in this view because the newly available resources can be used to take citizens’ concerns more seriously.75 b) reservation of a legal provision as a result, the reservation of a legal provision is a "reservation to design", which calls for a "preliminary planning decision"76 to ensure the legal conformity of automated administrative procedures. the concept of legislation covers both laws and other legal regulations.77 for various legal reasons at different levels, it is assumed that on the basis of a technology assessment, the legislator must design the procedure in such a way that the procedural rights of the addressee are preserved.78 this already follows from the procedural dimension of fundamental rights, which says that fundamental rights influence procedures and organization, particularly in administrative procedure.79 from this, a "constitutional obligation" was concluded, which reaches to the point where "a specific procedure or organizational form as such" can be asked.80 how the procedure may be changed can be exemplified by § 155 (4), sentence 1, sentence 3 abgabenordnung (general taxation act).81 the tax orders specified there can be issued automatically insofar as "there is no reason to deal with the individual case by officials". further design possibilities can be derived from the provisions of the gdpr.82 article 22 of the gdpr regulates decisions based on the automated processing of personal data83 72 ibid. 73 eberle (1987, p. 473); eifert (2014, 421 fn. 4); for a critical analysis see bull (2017, p. 414). 74 pernice (2015, p. 33, 2013, p. 6) 75 see generally pernice (2015, p. 33); yet, it relates to technical and legal implementation. 76 eifert (2006, p. 127) 77 schmitz and prell (2016, p. 1276); see generally ronellenfitsch (2016, no. 56); for a broad interpretation see siegel (2017, p. 25) 78 see also schmitz and prell (2016, p. 1276) 79 80 wegweisend bverfg, beschl. v. 18.12.1968 – 1 bvr 638/64 – bverfge 24, 367 (401), dvbl 1969, 190; und bverfg, beschl. v. 20.12.1979 – 1 bvr 385/77 – bverfge 53, 30 (65 f.); for the development of jurisprudence see laubinger (1982, p. 62); schmidt-aßmann (2006, p. 995) 80 schmidt-aßmann (2006, p. 1002) 81 braun binder (2016a, p. 526) 82 regulation (eu) 2016/679 of the european parliament and of the council of 27 april 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing directive 95/46/ec (general data protection regulation) 83 lewinski (2016); martini (2017) and protects not only the interests but also the fundamental rights of the addressee.84 the 71st recital of the gdpr mentions, for example, specific information, a claim for direct intervention by a person, and a statement of the position, explanation and contestation of the decision. this means that both the individual procedure as well as the institutional and organizational aspects must be considered. it is possible to revert the "decision-making responsibility" to the administrator by means of procedural provisions, for example if the person concerned so requests.85 a transfer of the procedure to a human decision may, however, be initiated by technical presetting or by the objection proceedings, as in the case of § 155 (4) sentence 3 abgabenordnung (general taxation act). from an institutional and organizational point of view, the provision of the appropriate specialist in an authority is not a trivial problem.86 in particular, when complex algorithms make decisions, transparency and traceability of these decisions are very difficult to ensure.87 viktor mayer schönberger has therefore demanded the introduction of a new profession of algorithmics.88 beyond safeguarding of special knowledge in an authority, one can also think of placing decisions in the hands of an authority with greater independence, which could also be the task of individual protection. c) no margins of appreciation the second requirement of § 35a verwaltungsverfahrensgesetz (federal administrative process act) is that "there is neither a margin of discretion nor of appreciation." margins of appreciation, which in any case only exist within certain narrowly defined cases, are to be excluded here. the negative presupposition of the non-existence of a margin of discretion in § 35a verwaltungsverfahrensgesetz (federal administrative process act) can be interpreted abstractly or concretely. if this provision is interpreted in an abstract manner, a fully automatic decision cannot be taken into account if the legal basis of the administration confers a discretion. however, one could also ask concretely whether there is still room for discretion. this would not be the case if the authority had already exercised it. the exercise of the discretion is then the installation of the facility. a strong argument for the abstract view is that the legislator has emphasized the necessity of a human decision.89 this is consistent with a long-established view which, in principle, precludes the adoption of administrative acts by automatic bodies if the legal basis of the administration has a margin of discretion.90 the exception rule of § 31a sozialgesetzbuch ix (sgb ix; ninth book of the social security act) shows that the legal system does not generally rule out the exclusion of automated decisions. here, it is assumed that it is not necessary for every decision based on a discretionary standard 84 art. 22 sec. 2 subsec. b requires „ suitable measures to safeguard the data subject's rights and freedoms and legitimate interests”; art. 23 sec. 1 requires restriction to respect “the essence of the fundamental rights and freedoms and is a necessary and proportionate measure in a democratic society to safeguard”. 85 see generally schmidt (1971, p. 347); critically because of a lack of efficiency wieacker (1978, p. 70) 86 organisational changes are reviewed by eberle (1987, pp. 464–465) 87 reichwald and pfisterer (2016, p. 2012); rice (1953); lucke (2016b, p. 167) 88 mayer-schönberger and cukier (2013, pp. 189–192); see also hill (2015, p. 284) 89 report of the financial comittee of the bundestag, 11 may 2016, 121 90 lazaratos (1990, pp. 222–229); degrandi (1977, pp. 77–90); martini and nink (2017, p. 682) to be made by a person. this is because the rationale of the law itself shows that automation is precisely the humanization of the process and can lead to more justice if resources are better allocated.91 this was also a major reason for the modernization of the taxation procedure, since the federal court of auditors noted in 2006 that a uniform enforcement of tax law was no longer guaranteed.92 this also means that atypical cases are separated by technical measures or at the request of the addressee.93 in the case of certain tasks, the authority should also be allowed to type only specific measures without exhausting its discretion. the fact that a "pre-programmed" exercise of the discretion is not fundamentally unlawful can also be seen in the comparison to the general exercise of discretion,94 i.e. when an authority decides on the basis of typed and schematized guidelines. in general discretionary decisions, there is also the risk of ignoring atypical decisions, but they can even be indicated, in particular, for reasons of equality.95 the concrete interpretation prevents that already implemented applications have to be dismantled or based on a different legal basis and that future developments are hindered. this can be demonstrated, in particular, by the traffic control systems previouslymentioned. these may be issued as general ordinances, which are discretionary decisions according to § 45 straßenverkehrsordnung (road traffic act).96 the jurisprudence in this context has hitherto not been irked by this exercise of discretion by automatic means.97 the federal administrative court has, on the contrary, equated an algorithm-based traffic control system with a permanent administrative act, even if the traffic control system does not constantly indicate traffic signs.98 the possibility of an automated discretionary exercise would keep the german administrative procedure law open for development and innovation, for example to profit from the advantages of automated big data analytics. in the international trend, digitization of the administration is dynamic, especially in countries such as estonia and austria. faced with technical innovations, such as machine learning and self-learning algorithms, traditional notions of automating discretion might soon become obsolete. especially in the case of complex administrative decisions with many different parameters, the respective purposes of the discretion could be achieved better automatically than by human decision. for the above reasons, it is indicated not to generally prohibit an automated exercise of discretion but to leave it within the limits of the rule of law. the administration may exercise its discretion through automated facilities and design iot applications in such a way that special circumstances of the individual case are also taken into account in accordance with certain guidelines.99 91 compare polomski (1993, pp. 57–58) 92 baldauf (2016, p. 834) 93 maurer (2011, p. 147) 94 eberle (1987, p. 463); schmidt (1971, p. 352); gruber (1971, p. 64); fadavian (2016, p. 129) 95 for this argument see fadavian (2016, p. 129) 96 heß (2016, no. 3) 97 olg celle, beschl. v. 28.03.2013 – 311 ssrs 9/13 –; bverwg, urt. v. 23.09.2010 – 3 c 37/09 –, bverwge 138, 21; vg bremen, urt. v. 29.07.2010 – 5 k 56/05. 98 bverwge 138, 21; vg bremen, urt. v. 29.07.2010 – 5 k 56/05. 99 for the differences see hill (2015, p. 272) v. the internet of things as new cornerstone of public administration? after all, law can impose limitations and mandates for technological design of the application of the internet of things in public administration, but can also serve as a reason to implement such technologies. whether the introduction of automated procedures through the internet of things creates radical changes in administration and administrative law, is another question. in the following, five theses with regard to this question are to be condensed from what has already been said: 1. transition of roles for humans and the public administration an extensive application of the internet of things by the administration would mean a substantial change, because information would be collected automatically, decisions could be made automatically, and actions could be carried out automatically. on all three levels, administrative action is changing. the internet of things has thus the potential to incite a structural change of the administration: the execution of policies and laws would take place by automatic means; the enforcement would no longer be a matter of a bureaucracy that builds on people. human action focuses on programming in advance and on the follow-up of critical decisions. if things have already been attributed agency in the past,100 this agency is not only obvious and immediately perceivable through the internet of things. behind such agency there is also state authority. it is becoming more and more feasible that law enforcement is automated. all this changes what administration does and means: 2. public administration as cooperative legislator even if actions are predetermined to a high degree, in the concrete situation of the action the decision no longer lies with a human agent. human participation is then particularly concentrated on the process of programming and implementation, i.e. the "preliminary decision". this preliminary decision exercises law indeed, but also embraces a legislative component. in the process of implementation, there are opportunities but also necessities to cooperate with other actors. 3. control and communication in the public administration the introduction of iot systems creates a knowledge base for an administration of unprecedented quality.101 iot systems offer the possibility of automated, ubiquitous, and permanent collection of data. this new data base promises to positively influence the effectiveness of administrative decisions. after all, the consequences of those actions can be better screened and understood. at the same time, however, this also means the construction of considerable knowledge power and information asymmetries, 100 latour (2000, 2008) 101 novoselic (2016, p. 85) especially against other actors. by integrating data protection, freedom of information and self-restraint, the administration must find a balance here. the new information power of the administration, its changed role in the implementation of the law and related challenges to the legislator do not lack impact on the understanding of the state and the constitution in the digital age. the increased possibilities of enforcement through a broader knowledge base and more effective options for action can also have a strong repercussions on the existing legal norms. under these conditions, new consideration should be given to equity in law.102 4. changes in proceedings and structure automation also places particular demands on the administrative process. § 35a verwaltungsverfahrensgesetz (federal administrative process act) refers to special regulations, which are to be made by the legislator. in the case of an extensive introduction of iot applications, however, this could lead to a growth in regulation. the legislator will have to reflect on the adaptation of the administrative procedure and, in particular, the generalization of institutions and principles. in addition, questions will arise as to how the structures which have grown have to be adapted, from the role of the official to the federal structure of the german and european administration.103 in the course of the increased complexity and transparency of technical procedures, it will be challenging to build up expert knowledge for the administration, but also to make it accessible to the public. in this case, a competent independent authority should be considered, whose task could also be individual protection. 5. the struggle for the purpose of automation the vision of the internet of things is a vision of automation in which computers are ubiquitous and networked into the environment. such systems open up possibilities, but do not specify their use cases. an implementation in the public administration must not leave the question of the specific use case unanswered.104 in an automated system in which mainly things are acting, it seems obvious that this leads to furthering the distance between state and citizen. already the law on the modernization of the taxation procedure, however, suggests that this is not the only possible purpose. rather, the goal of automation can also be to free human resources and to redirect them where they are really needed. when iot applications are implemented with this goal, it is no longer just a matter of moving from the internet of computers to the internet of things, but the transition from an administrative machine based on people to a human administration based on machines. the combination of man and machine then ensures efficient and humane action. the promises of effectiveness and efficiency are, in this context, the building blocks of a larger project that would intentionally use the potentials of technological progress to positively influence the relationship between 102 for equity see pernice (1991). 103 the role of the federal structure is explained in köhl et al. (2014, 77ff); for a new constitutional provision enabling more cooperation see peuker (2015) 104 schliesky (2015, p. 9) citizens and their state by establishing a new quality in the communication.105 this purpose does not necessarily follow from the technology or the technical vision of the internet of things, but it is also not excluded. this humanist purpose must be sought after by actively shaping the automation of public administration. references "industrie 4.0" braucht "verwaltung 4.0": globaler wettbewerb, demographischer wandel, schuldenbremse. (2013). behörden spiegel, 29(iv), 1–2. adler, l. (2016). how smart city barcelona brought the internet of things to life. retrieved from http://datasmart.ash.harvard.edu/news/article/how-smart-city-barcelona-brought-the-internet-of-things-to-life789 albrecht, j. p. (2016). das neue eu-datenschutzrecht – von der richtlinie zur verordnung. computer und recht, 32(2), 88–98. anderson, c. (2012). makers: the new industrial revolution. new york: crown business. 14/en wp 223. baldauf, s. (2016). gesetz zur modernisierung des besteuerungsverfahrens kritische betrachtung des regierungsentwurfs. deutsches steuerrecht, 833–839. beer, k. (2015). feuerwehrroboter saffir soll im team arbeiten. retrieved from http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/feuerwehrroboter-saffir-soll-im-team-arbeiten-2541293.html bergt, m. (2015). die bestimmbarkeit als grundproblem des datenschutzrechts: überblick über den theorienstreit und lösungsvorschlag. zeitschrift für datenschutz, 365–371. böck, h. (2016). ddos: das internet of things gefährdet das freie netz golem.de. retrieved from http://www.golem.de/news/ddos-das-internet-of-things-gefaehrdet-das-freie-netz-1609-123454.html braun binder, n. (2016a). ausschließlich automationsgestützt erlassene steuerbescheide und bekanntgabe durch bereitstellung zum datenabruf: anmerkungen zu den § 88 abs. 5, § 122a, § 150 abs. 7 n.f., § 155 abs. 4 n.f. und § 173a ao. deutsche zeitschrift für steuerrecht, 526–534. braun binder, n. (2016b). vollautomatisierte verwaltungsverfahren im allgemeinen verwaltungsverfahrensrecht? neue zeitschrift für verwaltungsrecht, 960–965. bräutigam, p., & klindt, t. (2015). industrie 4.0, das internet der dinge und das recht. neue juristische wochenschrift, 1137–1142. bull, h. p. (2017). der "vollständig automatisiert erlassene" verwaltungsakt: zur begriffsbildung und rechtlichen einhegung von "e-government". deutsches verwaltungsblatt, 409–417. bundesanstalt für straßenwesen. (2015). intelligente brücke startseite. retrieved from http://www.intelligentebruecke.de/ibruecke/de/home/home_node.html bundesministerium des innern. (2014). digitale verwaltung 2020. retrieved from http://www.verwaltunginnovativ.de/de/regierungsprogramm/aktuelles_regierungsprogramm/18_legislaturperiode_node.html caragliu, a., del bo, c., & nijkamp, p. (2011). smart cities in europe. journal of urban technology, 18(2), 65– 82. https://doi.org/10.1080/10630732.2011.601117 chourabi, h., nam, t., walker, s., gil-garcia, j. r., mellouli, s., nahon, k.,. . . scholl, h. j. (2012). understanding smart cities: an integrative framework. in r. h. sprague (ed.), 2012 45th hawaii international conference on system science. (hicss) ; usa, 4 7 jan. 2012 (pp. 2289–2297). piscataway, nj: ieee. https://doi.org/10.1109/hicss.2012.615 degrandi, b. (1977). die automatisierte verwaltungsverfuegung. computer und recht. zürich: schulthess. 105 pernice (2015, p. 33, 2013, p. 6) deloitte. (2016). industrielles internet der dinge und die rolle von telekommunikationsunternehmen: hype oder vernetzte revolution? retrieved from http://www2.deloitte.com/de/de/pages/technology-media-andtelecommunications/articles/industrielles-internet-der-dinge.html djeffal, c. (2015). neue sicherungspflicht für telemediendiensteanbieter: webseitensicherheit jetzt pflicht nach dem it-sicherheitsgesetz. multimedia und recht, 716–721. djeffal, c. (2017). das internet der dinge und die öffentliche verwaltung: auf dem weg zum automatisierten smart government? deutsches verwaltungsblatt, 808–816. eberle, c.-e. (1987). die öffentliche verwaltung vor den herausforderungen der informationsgesellschaft. die verwaltung, 20(4), 459–476. eckert, c. (2014). it-sicherheit: konzepte verfahren protokolle (9th ed.). berlin: de gruyter. retrieved from http://www.degruyter.com/search?f_0=isbnissn&q_0=9783486859164&searchtitles=true eckhart, j. (2013). § 109. in t. attendorn, m. geppert, & r. schütz (eds.), beck'scher tkg-kommentar. telekommunikationsgesetz. münchen: c.h. beck (4th ed.). eifert, m. (2006). electronic government: das recht der elektronischen verwaltung. neue schriften zur verwaltungsrechtswissenschaft. baden-baden: nomos. eifert, m. (2007). zweckvereinbarkeit statt zweckbindung als baustein eines modernisierten datenschutzes. in w. gropp, m. lipp, & h. steiger (eds.), rechtswissenschaft im wandel. festschrift des fachbereichs rechtswissenschaft zum 400jährigen gründungsjubiläum der justus-liebig-universität gießen (pp. 139–152). tübingen: mohr siebeck. eifert, m. (2014). elektronische verwaltung: von der verwaltungsreform zum verwaltungsreformrecht. in p. f. bultmann (ed.), allgemeines verwaltungsrecht. institute, kontexte, system ; festschrift für ulrich battis zum 70. geburtstag (pp. 421–435). münchen: c.h. beck. europol. (2015). iocta 2015: internet organised crime threat assessment. den haag: europol. retrieved from https://www.europol.europa.eu/iocta/2015/ fadavian, b. (2016). rechtswissenschaftliche aspekte von smart government: welche rechtswissenschaftlichen fragestellungen eröffnen sich mit einem intelligent vernetzten regierungsund verwaltungshandeln. in j. von lucke (ed.), smart government (pp. 113–133). berlin: epubli. federal trade commission. internet of things: privacy & security in a connected world. retrieved from https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/reports/federal-trade-commission-staff-report-november-2013workshop-entitled-internet-things-privacy/150127iotrpt.pdf flügge, m., & fromm, j. (2016). public internet of things: das internet der dinge im öffentlichen raum. berlin: fraunhofer fokus. retrieved from https://cdn3.scrvt.com/fokus/6818ab00ef7eba71/164a55705da6/wp_public_internet_of_things_web.pdf gola, p., klug, c., & körffer, b. (2015a). § 13. in p. gola & r. schomerus (eds.), bdsg. bundesdatenschutzgesetz kommentar. münchen: c.h. beck (12th ed.). gola, p., klug, c., & körffer, b. (2015b). § 9. in p. gola & r. schomerus (eds.), bdsg. bundesdatenschutzgesetz kommentar. münchen: c.h. beck (12th ed.). goodin, d. large botnet of cctv devices knock the snot out of jewelry website. retrieved from http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/06/large-botnet-of-cctv-devices-knock-the-snot-out-of-jewelry-website/ government office for science. the internet of things: making the most of the second digital revolution. grafenstein, m. von. (2016). die auswirkungen des zweckbindungsprinzips auf innovationsprozesse in startups. in j. taeger (ed.), smart world smart law? weltweite netze mit regionaler regulierung (pp. 233–247). edewecht: olwir. gruber, f. k. (1971). verwaltungsentscheidungen vom computer: eine untersuchung der rechtlichen grenzen der automatisierten normanwendung in der öffentlichen verwaltung. münchen: eigenverlag. heß, r. (2016). § 45 stvo. in m. burmann, r. heß, k. hühnermann, & j. jahnke (eds.), straßenverkehrsrecht. münchen: c.h. beck (24th ed.). hesse, k. (1962). der rechtsstaat im verfassungssystem des grundgesetzes. in k. hesse & s. reicke (eds.), staatsverfassung und kirchenordnung. festgabe für rudolf smend zum 80. geburtstag am 15. januar 1962 (pp. 71–95). tübingen: mohr siebeck. heun, s.-e., & assion, s. internetrecht der dinge. in s. assion (ed.), zwei schritte vorwärts. die zukunft des internetrechts. tagungsband zur telemedicus sommerkonferenz 2015 (pp. 12–48). heußner, k. (2007). informationssysteme im europäischen verwaltungsverbund. tübingen: mohr siebeck. retrieved from https://books.google.ch/books?id=_twib4yturyc hill, h. (2015). scientific regulation – automatische verhaltenssteuerung durch daten und algorithmen. in h. hill (ed.), verwaltungsressourcen und verwaltungsstrukturen: vol. 30. auf dem weg zum digitalen staat auch ein besserer staat? (pp. 267–287). baden-baden: nomos. hoffmann-riem, w. (1998). effizienz als herausforderung an das verwaltungsrecht: einleitende problemskizze. in w. hoffmann-riem & hoffmann-riem-schmidt-aßmann (eds.), schriften zur reform des verwaltungsrechts: vol. 5. effizienz als herausforderung an das verwaltungsrecht (pp. 11–57). baden-baden: nomos. hofmann, k., & hornung, g. (2015). rechtliche herausforderungen des internets der dinge. in c. engemann & f. sprenger (eds.), digitale gesellschaft. internet der dinge. über smarte objekte, intelligente umgebungen und die technische durchdringung der welt (pp. 205–229). bielefeld: transcript. ieee. (2015). towards a definition of the internet of things. retrieved from http://iot.ieee.org/images/files/pdf/ieee_iot_towards_definition_internet_of_things_revision1_27may15.p df industrial internet consortium. industrial internet of things: volume g4: security framework. international telecommunications union (itu). (2005). the internet of things: executive summary. itu internet reports 2005. geneva: itu. retrieved from http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/publications/internetofthings/internetofthings_summary.p kaiser, a.-b. (2009). die kommunikation der verwaltung: diskurse zu den kommunikationsbeziehungen zwischen staatlicher verwaltung und privaten in der verwaltungsrechtswissenschaft der bundesrepublik deutschland. zugl.: freiburg i. br., univ., diss., 2007. neue schriften zur verwaltungsrechtswissenschaft. baden-baden: nomos. köhl, s., lenk, k., löbel, s., & schuppan, t. (2014). stein-hardenberg 2.0: architektur einer vernetzten verwaltung mit e-government. e-government und die erneuerung des öffentlichen sektors: vol. 15. berlin: ed. sigma. latour, b. (2000). pandora's hope: essays on the reality of science studies (2. print). cambridge, mass. [u.a.]: harvard university press. latour, b. (2008). reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory (repr). clarendon lectures in management studies. oxford: oxford univ. press. laubinger, h.-w. (1982). grundrechtsschutz durch gestaltung des verwaltungsverfahrens. verwaltungsarchiv, 73, 60–85. lazaratos, p. (1990). rechtliche auswirkungen der verwaltungsautomation auf das verwaltungsverfahren. tübinger schriften zum staatsund verwaltungsrecht: vol. 7. berlin: duncker & humblot. lessig, l. (1999). the law of the horse. harvard law review, 113, 501–546. lewinski, k. v. (2016). § 6a bdsg. in h. a. wolff & s. brink (eds.), beck'scher online-kommentar datenschutzrecht. münchen: c.h. beck. lucke, j. von. (2016a). deutschland auf dem weg zum smart government. verwaltung & management, 22(4), 171–186. https://doi.org/10.5771/0947-9856-2016-4-171 lucke, j. von. (2016b). forschungsagenda smart government: wie kann ein intelligent vernetztes regierungsund verwaltungshandeln mit hilfe von wissenschaft und forschung konkretisiert werden? in j. von lucke (ed.), smart government (pp. 159–176). berlin: epubli. lucke, j. von (ed.). (2016c). smart government. berlin: epubli. luhmann, n. (1997). recht und automation in der öffentlichen verwaltung: eine verwaltungswissenschaftl. untersuchung (2nd ed.). berlin: duncker & humblot. maras, m.-h. (2015). internet of things: security and privacy implications. international data privacy law, 5(2), 99–104. https://doi.org/10.1093/idpl/ipv004 martini, m. (2017). art. 22. in paal & pauly (eds.), datenschutz grundverordnung: ds-gvo. münchen: c.h. beck. martini, m., & nink, d. (2017). wenn maschinen entscheiden: persönlichkeitsschutz in vollautomatisierten verwaltungsverfahren. neue zeitschrift für verwaltungsrecht, 681–682. maurer, h. (2011). allgemeines verwaltungsrecht (18th ed.). grundrisse des rechts. münchen: c.h. beck. retrieved from http://ebibliothek.beck.de/default.aspx?vpath=bibdata/komm/mauhdballgverwr_18/cont/mauhdballgverwr. htm mayer-schönberger, v., & cukier, k. (2013). big data: die revolution, die unser leben verändern wird. münchen: redline. nist cyber physical systems public working group. (2016). framework for cyber-physical systems: release 1.0. novoselic, s. (2016). smart politics: wie können computergesützte it-systeme und it-netze die politische willensbildung und entscheidungsfindung unterstützen? in j. von lucke (ed.), smart government (pp. 77–96). berlin: epubli. pernice, i. (1991). billigkeit und härteklauseln im öffentlichen recht: grundlagen und konturen einer billigkeitskompetenz der verwaltung. baden-baden: nomos. pernice, i. (2013). informationsgesellschaft und politik: vom neuen strukturwandel der öffentlichkeit zur global privacy governance. hiig discussion paper series. advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2222046 pernice, i. (2015). global constitutionalism and the internet. taking people seriously. hiig discussion paper series. advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2576697 peuker, e. (2015). digitalisierung im bundesstaat. die rolle des föderalismus auf dem weg zum digitalen staat. in h. hill (ed.), verwaltungsressourcen und verwaltungsstrukturen: vol. 30. auf dem weg zum digitalen staat auch ein besserer staat? (pp. 59–86). baden-baden: nomos. picot, a. (2015). intelligente infrastrukturen – eine basis für die digitale transformation. verwaltung & management, 21(3), 114. https://doi.org/10.5771/0947-9856-2015-3-114 pitschas, r. § 42 maßstäbe des verwaltungshandelns. in voßkuhle (ed.), grundlagen des verwaltungsrechts (pp. 1689–1811). polomski, r.-m. (1993). der automatisierte verwaltungsakt: die verwaltung an der schwelle von der automation zur informationsund kommunikationstechnik. schriften zum recht des informationsverkehrs und der informationstechnik: vol. 4. berlin: duncker & humblot. rammo, k., & holzgräfe, s.-m. (2014). datenschutz bei vernetzten autos – elektronische fahrtenbücher. in j. taeger (ed.), big data & co. neue herausforderungen für das informationsrecht. tagungsband herbstakademie 2014 (vol. 2014, pp. 351–376). edewecht: olwir. reichwald, j., & pfisterer, d. (2016). autonomie und intelligenz im internet der dinge. computer und recht, 32(3). https://doi.org/10.9785/cr-2016-0313 rice, h. g. (1953). classes of recursively enumerable sets and their decision problems. transactions of the american mathematical society, 74(2), 358. https://doi.org/10.2307/1990888 ronellenfitsch, m. (2016). § 1. in j. bader & m. ronellenfitsch (eds.), verwaltungsverfahrensgesetz. mit verwaltungszustellungsgesetz und verwaltungs-vollstreckungsgesetz. münchen: c.h. beck (2nd ed.). roßnagel, a. (2016). wie zukunftsfähig ist die datenschutz-grundverordnung? dud, 40(9), 561–565. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11623-016-0658-y roßnagel, a., moser-knierim, a., & schweda, s. (2013). interessenausgleich im rahmen der vorratsdatenspeicherung. baden-baden: nomos. samsel, h. (2016). risiken der informationstechnologie. in h. pünder & a. klafki (eds.): vol. 40. schriften der deutschen sektion des internationalen instituts für verwaltungswissenschaften, risiko und katastrophe als herausforderung für die verwaltung (pp. 121–128). baden-baden: nomos. https://doi.org/10.5771/9783845278209-121 schaar, p. (2015). das digitale wir: unser weg in die transparente gesellschaft. körber-stiftung. schliesky, u. (2015). auf dem weg zum digitalen staat – auch ein besserer staat? in h. hill (ed.), verwaltungsressourcen und verwaltungsstrukturen: vol. 30. auf dem weg zum digitalen staat auch ein besserer staat? (pp. 9–32). baden-baden: nomos. https://doi.org/10.5771/9783845270098-9 schmidt, w. (1971). die programmierung von verwaltungsentscheidungen. archiv des öffentlichen rechts, 96, 321–354. schmidt-aßmann, e. (2006). grundrechte als organisationsund verfahrensgarantien. in d. merten & h.-j. papier (eds.), handbuch der grundrechte in deutschland und europa. ii allgemeine lehren i (pp. 993–1030). heidelberg: c. f. müller. schmitz, h. (2014). § 9. in p. stelkens, h. j. bonk, & m. sachs (eds.), verwaltungsverfahrensgesetz. kommentar. münchen: c.h. beck (8th ed.). schmitz, h., & prell, l. (2016). neues zum e-government: rechtsstaatliche standards für e-verwaltungsakt und ebekanntgabe im vwvfg. neue zeitschrift für verwaltungsrecht, 1273–1279. scholz, p. (2014). 6c. in s. simitis, u. dammann, & a. arendt (eds.), bundesdatenschutzgesetz. baden-baden: nomos (8th ed.). schulz, w., & dankert, k. (2016). ’governance by things’ as a challenge to regulation by law. internet policy review, 5(2). https://doi.org/10.14763/2016.2.409 schuppan, t., & köhl, s. (2016). verwaltung 4.0: modernisierungsrelevant oder alter wein in neuen schläuchen? verwaltung & management, 22(1), 27–33. https://doi.org/10.5771/0947-9856-2016-1-27 šehić, n., rengers, k., & hense, p. (2015). internet of things – predictive consumer intention im e-commerce: informationspflichten, datenschutz, sicherheit. in j. taeger (ed.), internet der dinge. digitalisierung von wirtschaft und gesellschaft (pp. 393–411). edewecht: olwir. selbstfahrender minibus: postauto unterbricht test nach unfall (2016, september 22). neue züricher zeitung. retrieved from http://www.nzz.ch/schweiz/selbstfahrender-minibus-postauto-unterbricht-test-nach-unfallld.118212 senatsverwaltung für stadtentwicklung und umwelt. (2016). smart city-strategie berlin. retrieved from https://www.berlinpartner.de/fileadmin/user_upload/01_chefredaktion/02_pdf/02_navi/21/strategie_smart_city_berlin.pdf siegel, t. (2017). automatisierung des verwaltungsverfahrens zugleich eine anmerkung zu §§ 35a, 24 i 3, 41 iia vwvfg. deutsches verwaltungsblatt. steinmaurer, k. m. (2016). big data und profiling: chancen und risiken in der datenschutzgrundverordnung. in knyrim (ed.), datenschutzgrundverordnung. praxishandbuch (pp. 91–97). wien: manz. stender-vorwachs, j. (2016). § 13 bdsg. in h. a. wolff & s. brink (eds.), beck'scher online-kommentar datenschutzrecht. münchen: c.h. beck. techtarget. (2014). iot analytics guide: understanding internet of things data. retrieved from http://searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com/essentialguide/iot-analytics-guide-understanding-internet-ofthings-data venzke-caprarese, s. (2015). internet der dinge – digitalisierung des alltags und datenschutzrechtliche auswirkungen auf den einzelnen. in j. taeger (ed.), internet der dinge. digitalisierung von wirtschaft und gesellschaft (pp. 377–393). edewecht: olwir. weber, r. h., & weber, r. (2010). internet of things: legal perspectives. berlin, heidelberg: springer. wehrmann, m., bluhm, s., & rink, d. (2016). it-sicherheit: rechtsentwicklung, bedrohungslage und schutzkonzepte. in j. taeger (ed.), smart world smart law? weltweite netze mit regionaler regulierung (pp. 247–263). edewecht: olwir. wettstad, j. (2008). monitoring and verification. in d. bodansky, j. brunnée, & e. hey (eds.), the oxford handbook of international environmental law (2nd ed., pp. 974–994). oxford: oxford university press. wieacker, f. (1978). rechtsgewinnung durch elektronische datenverarbeitung? in h. c. taschner & e. v. caemmerer (eds.), festschrift für ernst von caemmerer zum 70. geburtstag (pp. 45–71). tübingen: mohr siebeck. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): boccia artieri, g.; brilli, s; zurovac, e. (2020, october). voices from the locker room: a qualitative analysis of voice messages within italian nsfw groups. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. voices from the locker room: a qualitative analysis of voice messages within italian nsfw groups. giovanni boccia artieri university of urbino carlo bo stefano brilli university of urbino carlo bo elisabetta zurovac university of urbino carlo bo private chats and private groups play an increasingly central role in everyday communication (cruz and harindranath 2020) carrying along with them peculiar practices and issues. if on one side this “turn to the private” in digital media seems to have mitigated the panic about privacy that followed various data scandals, it also fed a new alarm. this menace is tied to the idea that something “wrong” may go on in places that elude public scrutiny and to the fact that these places are part of the everyday life thanks to messaging apps. for instance, at the beginning of 2019, in italy, several newspapers (zorloni 2019) exposed some telegram groups used for sharing illicit pornographic material, and this media attention has had the undeniable merit of bringing this topic to the political agenda, leading, on april 2019, to the approval of a law against non consensual pornography. moreover, accessing the internet through mobile devices such as the smartphone means that there is the possibility to maintain a perpetual contact (katz and aakhus 2002) with other chat members and to enjoy “not suitable for work” (nsfw) contents through the day reproducing a sort of locker room talk (vaynmana, sandbergb and pedersen 2019). however, besides the risks related to the growing number of spaces eluding public scrutiny, the pervasive presence of ims shows also that interactions with a higher level of self-disclosure such as voice messages are spreading as well through different platforms (i.e. whatsapp, telegram, instagram, facebook messenger, wechat). after a first phase where texting got over phone calls (gfds 2018), research is showing that voice messages shared within chats (könig 2019) seems to be the uprising. while a consistent volume of research on computer-mediated spoken interaction (cmsi) shreds light on the implications of synchronous voice communication (jenks 2014, jiang et al. 2019) there is still space for the investigation of the use of voice messages within instant messaging (im) platforms. the aim of this research was to investigate the relation between privacy and exposure and therefore between spectatorship and participation within italian nsfw online groups on telegram through the analysis of voice messages produced. research questions and methodology our research aims to understand the use of voice messages in nsfw group chats, where participation may involve social stigma. more specifically we look at the interactional possibilities afforded by voice messages, at the style of self-disclosure associated with them and at the emerging issues in the moderation process of audio contents (jiang et al. 2019). the choice to focus on telegram closed group chats dedicated to sharing and discussing adult entertainment follows three motivations. firstly, this kind of groups are growing in number and are subjects of a recent wave of concern within italian media outlets (bainotti & semenzin, forthcoming). secondly, these spaces are usually understood as prevalently anonymous contexts; therefore, the disclosure afforded by voices messages particularly in terms of gender recognition may acquire specific meanings. thirdly, the nature of the contents shared in these groups places the issue of moderation as central. therefore, we investigate three research questions: 1) what kind of interactions are enacted by voice messages? 2) what kind of self-disclosure is performed through voice messages? 3) which challenges emerge in the moderation of voice messages? for this research, we are carrying out a qualitative content analysis of group interactions combined with in-depth interviews with groups' moderators. although some recent studies are exploring big-data approaches in researching messaging apps (resende et al. 2019), ethnographic approaches are revealing as particularly suited in dealing with the technical and ethical limitations in studying conversations in chat apps (baulch et al. 2020; milan & barbosa 2020). we selected the groups to research from a public list of adult-oriented telegram groups provided by the principal italian website specialized in indexing telegram groups and channels. we then joined all the active groups in the list (45 groups, january 2020) and selected ten groups with the highest ratio between the number of voice messages and photos uploaded. in this way, we could have a hint of which groups presented the highest level of voice interaction. for this study, we planned three phases of the data collection. first, we engaged in listening to all the voice messages uploaded by group members. to this end, we used the "export chat history" function available to every user. we then listened to all the messages to understand the styles and functions of voice interaction. approximately more than 50 hours of voice messages were listened to by the researchers. second, we plan to perform a qualitative content analysis of voice messages, focusing on a single week of interactions in every one of the ten groups. every message will be coded considering its embeddedness in the conversation. the content analysis will look at 1) interactive function of the message (addressed to the group, addressed to a single person); 2) level of self-disclosure (if the message recounts details of the member private life); 3) topic (porn-related, group-related, etc.); 4) sonic style (whispering, normal voice, loud voice); 5) utterance situation (possible or not possible to write). third, we are going to conduct ten in-depth interviews with groups moderators, to elicit their individual use/non-use of voice messages and the moderations practices regarding audio contents. preliminary results and expected outcomes the research is still ongoing. however, the exploratory phase of the study has already suggested some circumstances that lead users to prefer using voice messages over text, gifs and static images. contingent (not being able to text) or literacy-related reasons appear less important than the need to establish affective inclusion and identification through one's own voice. members use voice messages to enhance affective inclusion, that is to mark a sub-category of top members that share a "relational oral space". moreover, voice messages serve also as a means for women to be identified as "not fake", and for all members to be identified as "not ashamed". in the next phases of the research, we expect to inspect how the moderation process act towards this gender imbalance. references bainotti, l., & semenzin, s. (forthcoming). the use of telegram for non-consensual dissemination of intimate images: gendered affordances and the construction of masculinities. social media+ society. baulch, e., matamoros-fernández, a., & johns, a. (2020). introduction: ten years of whatsapp: the role of chat apps in the formation and mobilization of online publics. first monday, 25(1). cruz, e. g., & harindranath, r. (2020). whatsapp as 'technology of life': reframing research agendas. first monday, 25(12). doi: 10.5210/fm.v25i12.10405. gfds society for german language (2018). linguistic communication in the digital world. a representative survey conducted by forsa. available at: https://gfds.de/wpcontent/uploads/2018/03/sprachliche-kommunikation-in-der-digitalen-welt-2018.pdf. katz, j. e., & aakhus, m. (2002). perpetual contact: mobile communication, private talk, public performance. cambridge university press, usa. jenks, c. j. (2014). social interactions in second language chat rooms. edinburgh university press. isbn: 978-0-7486-4948-8. jiang, j. a., kiene, c., middler, s., brubaker, j. r., & fiesler, c. (2019). moderation challenges in voice-based online communities on discord. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 3(cscw), 1-23. könig, k. (2019). narratives 2.0 a multi-dimensional approach to semi-public storytelling in whatsapp voice messages. journal für medienlinguistik, 2(2), 30-59. https://doi.org/10.21248/jfml.2019.10 milan, s., & barbosa, s. (2020). enter the whatsapper: reinventing digital activism at the time of chat apps. first monday, 25(12). resende, g., melo, p., sousa, h., messias, j., vasconcelos, m., almeida, j., & benevenuto, f. (2019, may). (mis) information dissemination in whatsapp: gathering, analyzing and countermeasures. the world wide web conference, 818-828. vaynman, m. j., sandberg, s., & pedersen, w. (2019). locker room talk: male bonding and sexual degradation in drinking stories. culture, health & sexuality. doi: 10.1080/13691058.2019.1670864. zorloni, m. (2019, jan). uscite le minorenni. wired. available at: https://www.wired.it/internet/web/2019/01/23/telegram-chat-stupro-virtuale-minoristalking-revenge-porn/ selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 paasonen, s., albury, k., stardust, z., mercer, j., mowlabocus, s., robards, b., smith, c. (2017, october 18-21). digital networks, digital pub(l)ics (1): labour, pleasure, porn. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. digital networks, digital pub(l)ics (1): labour, pleasure, porn. panel description the digital networks, digital pub(l)ics panels (two panels in total) develop a critical conversation around the themes of intimacy, sexuality and embodiment and explore the ways in which these concepts are experienced, invoked and interrogated by different groups, communities and individuals in digital contexts. speaking to the theme of the 2017 conference, the papers collectively identify, map and seek to understand the formation of publics constituted through the paradigms and practices of gender and sexuality. in this panel, scholars come together to explore the manifold ways in which pornography, historically framed as a ‘private concern’, has become a ‘public object’ in the digital age, around which new publics have formed. the shifting forms of digital porn production, involving new pornographic styles and new methods of framing pornographic texts, require us to (re)consider the political-economy of pornography and the ways in which publics produce, access and consume pornography. papers one and two directly address pornography at the point of production. in the first paper, the author challenges the notion that tube-sites, central to the distribution of digital porn today, have facilitated a democratisation of porn production. the author explores how issues of ownership and governance shape the working conditions of porn performers and undermine the potential for smaller, independent producers to succeed within the arena of commercial pornography. tubesites offer opportunities for performers and studios to share their work and communicate with their viewing public. however, such transparency and dialogue is contrasted by an opacity concerning the ownership of platforms, the regulation of content and the economic relationships that these platforms have with content producers. the challenges that such tube-sites pose for performers working outside of the mainstream becomes the primary site of investigation in paper two. in this presentation, the authors look at regulatory and financial obstacles that queer and feminist sex workers face when working within the confines of privately owned and governed porn distribution platforms. once more, the conventional rhetoric of sexual freedom and of a democratising of porn, which scholars have historically invoked when discussing netporn, is problematized, this time through empirical research. here, the authors identify the disconnection that exists between a discourse of diy and ‘domesticate’ porn production and the corporate politics that censor, restrict and discriminate against online sex work. drawing on qualitative data from australian-based research, the paper outlines the encounters that ‘local’ sex workers have with ‘global’ financial and technology companies, which seek to deny them access to digital publics. complimenting this initial focus on production, the third, fourth and fifth papers explore practices of porn consumption, once more attending to themes of labour, while also engaging with the notion of 'porn publics'. in paper three, the author interrogates the production of interactive/instructional porn texts that repurpose found pornographic material to produce a new genre of sexually representation. through an examination of ‘popper-training’ videos, the author identifies the methods by which a discourse of productivity and ‘productive leisure’ is brought to bear on the ‘unproductive’ act of masturbation. beneath the promotion of a collaborative porn experience that these remixed texts celebrate, these videos reframe pornography as an instance of neoliberal ‘scripting’ of sexual desire and sexualised bodies. in paper four, the authors consider the ways in which digital environments offer opportunities for collective consumption experiences. the paper outlines a taxonomy of public consumption in order to elucidate the manifest ways in which pornography has become a social object: something around which like-minded individuals gather. this gathering facilitates a range of interactions and rewards. in the case of collective porn appreciation, consumers share pornography in order to motivate discussions about the text (performers, sexual practices, aesthetics) and their own sexual desires. these discussions offer a space for sharing fantasies and material as well as eliciting metadata relating to the porn ‘fragments’ posted to the group. in the case of porn curation, the authors identify how subcultural capital becomes the reward for the labour invested into producing themed blogs that celebrate specific kinks and fetishes. finally, in the case of porn hunting, the paper examines how self-identifying porn addicts frame their search for porn as a form of labour and, in doing so, create a collective narrative that allows them to explain and narrativise their ‘problematic’ use of porn. finally, in paper five, the author reports on and analyses data from a large-scale survey into porn use to discuss the ways in which ‘problematic’ fantasies and desires are articulated and framed by respondents. understanding pornography as something that is always public, even when consumed in private, the author identifies how public morality shapes users’ interactions with, and explanations of sexually violent material. together, these papers offer a series of critical interventions that signpost both the collaborative aspects of digital pornography and the challenges that the current politicaleconomy of digital culture poses to notions of sexual freedom, sexual democracy and sexual publics. paper 1: porn work in the tube economy susanna paasonen university of turku drawing on a broader research project on pornography, social media, and work, this paper examines the implications of so-called tube sites for the porn industry. it asks how the work of porn is becoming redefined on the level of distribution and production as both grown increasingly centralized. by using examples connected to the market leader mindgeek in particular, it argues that this results in the simultaneous openness and opaqueness concerning the shapes and conditions of porn work. just as the traffic of views, links, and clicks connected to news items, memes, and video clips is driven through globally leading social media hubs, the traffic of online porn is increasingly centralized and organized through leading video aggregator sites. select companies therefore have considerable power to modulate the accessibility of content and the user experiences and interactions that they are willing to facilitate. with the exception of xvideos and xhamster, the key video aggregator sites of pornhub, youporn, redtube, and tube8 are owned by mindgeek (formerly manwin), a company with something of a monopoly in contemporary online porn distribution (auerbach 2014). the centralization of porn consumption on select online platforms intermeshes with the increased centralization of ownership: mindgeek alone has bought up a number of production studios (e.g. reality kings, digital playground, men.com, and brazzers) struggling with the decreased profitability of pay content. technology writer david auerbach (2014) notes that the company has put “industry members in the paradoxical position of working for the very company that profits from the piracy of their work.” the profits of pornography have shifted from production to distribution more drastically than ever to date, yet the details remain opaque. while pornhub shares its user data as catchy infographics that routinely gain broad social media circulation, there is no similar access to information concerning their business operations. the work of video aggregator sites involves tasks such as running servers and database maintenance, the management of data, and the tweaking of algorithms. as early as 2012, the managing partner of manwin characterized it as essentially a tech company (morris 2012). mindgeek’s web site introduces the company as a responsible equal opportunities employer that aims to “promote ethical and responsible behavior” in ways far detached indeed from anti-pornography definitions of the porn industry as lacking in ethical principles, trading in violence, crime, and degradation of women (e.g. reist and bray 2011). in fact the careers advertised at the company do not vary from those in other high tech companies trading in social media. while it skills, tasks, and profession form the backbone for porn distribution, content is sourced from production companies, amateurs, and uploads operating within and outside applicable copyright legislation. within this centralized yet dispersed corporate structure, the work of porn models involves precarious self-employment rather than exclusive contracts with studios that were standard up until the early 2000s (author forthcoming). porn models, from newcomers to stars, increasingly build and manage their careers through online platforms as independent entrepreneurs. the political economy of this “gig economy” builds on a reserve army of labor is “willing to perform in porn even when pay and conditions are poor” and where workers are placed “in shifting positions as entrepreneurs, independent contractors, employees, contracted and freelance managers, and producers” (berg 2016, 161). it is increasingly difficult for performers to create lucrative careers in making porn alone: money is also made from webcamming, escorting, and strip club performances managed under one’s brand maintained through social media (berg 2016). twitter in particular has grown central to how both porn studios and porn stars construct their brands and maintain relations with their fan base. at the same time, news on unethical demeanor also travel quickly, reaching journalists, performers, and fans, and damaging reputations and careers overnight. this was the case with james deen, the porn star accused of sexual violence in 2015, as it was with brazzers the following year when porn star nikki benz accused director tony t in a series of tweets for choking and stomping on her head on set and shooting a non-consensual rape scene for the studio (which she was a brand ambassador for). brazzer’s account soon grew rife with tweets defending the centrality of consent, the rights of women, and the unacceptability of violence and bullying within the industry, requests for fans to unfollow the company and to unsubscribe from their membership services. while condemning the incident, brazzers ultimate failed to take responsibility for what had unfolded on set and, consequently, for that which may unfold in their production practices more generally. the workplace assault experienced by benz reinforces the connections of porn work, violence, as articulated in anti-pornography activism at the very same time when porn companies are refashioning themselves as branches of the it sector and the creative industry (cf. mckee 2016). porn tube sites are unquestionably part and parcel of social media landscape even though the content they cater is mostly weeded out from circulation on sites such as facebook and instagram. they emulate similar business models and employ the same professionals while building their brand through clickworthy publicity stunts. this corporate self-management requires openness that is in tension with the opaqueness of the operations of productions studios owned by the very same companies. twitter offers a public platform for both brand building and for unraveling some of the opaqueness surrounding the work of porn, yet one that is differently available for porn workers. it takes stardom to create a twitter storm of any visibility and this option remains increasingly unavailable to the precarious workers in pornography’s contemporary gig economy. references: auerbach, david. 2014. “vampire porn: mindgeek is a cautionary tale of consolidating production and distribution in a single, monopolistic owner.” slate, october 23, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/mindgeek_porn_monopoly _its_dominance_is_a_cautionary_tale_for_other_industries.html author. forthcoming. berg, heather. 2016. “’a scene is just a marketing tool’: alternative income streams in porn’s gig economy.” porn studies 3, no. 2: 160–174. mckee, alan. 2016. “pornography as creative industry: challenging the exceptionalist approach to pornography.” porn studies 3, no. 2: 197–119. morris, chris. 2012. “meet the new king of porn.” cnbc, 18 january, http://www.cnbc.com/id/45989405. reist, melinda tankard and abigail bray, eds. 2011. big porn, inc.: exposing the harms of the global porn industry. melbourne: spinifex paper 2: safe for work: australian queer and feminist porn producers’ accounts of digital labour & platform governance in networked publics. kath albury swinburne university zahra stardust university of new south wales as marwick (2010) and others have observed, the presentation of self in networked publics may demand highly crafted performances of authenticity in the pursuit of personal branding. this is especially the case for sex-workers who self-identify as queer and/or feminist, who must balance their ‘authentic’ self-presentation with the demands of a commercial marketplace (ruberg 2016). this paper draws on 35 interviews with 20 australian producers of queer and/or feminist porn, 16 of whom were also performers, conducted in 2015. within these interviews, producers and performers reflected on the opportunities and challenges presented by their participation in paid and unpaid digital marketplaces. while many participants embraced porn production and distribution as a practice of self-representation and local/global community-formation, others struggled with the personal costs of developing and distributing commercially viable pornography in a digital environment where consumers are often unwilling to pay for content (stardust 2016, taormino et al 2013, young 2016). in australia, online content is regulated by the australian communication and media authority, drawing on federal guidelines for content classification (flew 2015). in the early 1990s, a range of sexually explicit digital content was produced and hosted in australia. by 2000 the broadcasting services act was amended to specifically exclude material that would be classified as ‘r18+’, ‘x18+’ or rc (refused classification) from sites registered with .au domains (hartley et al 2010). this regulatory shift caused some companies (such as abby winters) to shift production offshore, while other producers simply re-routed their locally-produced content via non-australian hosting platforms. until the mid-2000s, local debates regarding the regulation of pornography have centred on the cost of classification (which allows legal distribution in australian territories), and the interpretation of classification guidelines at state and federal levels. in this context, complaints by producers have focused on the ways that otherwise legal sex acts (such as spanking and fisting) have declared ‘unrepresentable’ according to classifier’s understanding of what might be offensive to ‘the reasonable person’ (huntley 1995). queer and feminist producers and distributors have particularly taken issue with federal classifier’s interpretation of legal definitions of ‘community standards’ (stardust 2014). advocates have argued for a less punitive approach to materials primarily produced and circulated within queer and feminist subcultures, deploying arguments that evoke warner’s (1998) conception of ‘queer counterpublics’ (with mixed success). these appeals to australian law, we suggest are founded on a claim to sexual citizenship by queer and feminist porn producers, within a broader australian public sphere (plummer 1995). however, many participants in our project focused not so much on struggles with australian regulators, but with what they regarded as arbitrary or punitive content policies on us-based hosting platforms (such as vimeo) or billing companies (such as cc bill), and ‘corporate censorship’ from companies that refused to process credit card payments for sexually explicit content. while a classification board decision must follow precedent and publish reasons for their decisions (that may later be reviewed on appeal), private regulation of online space provides little transparency in decisionmaking, and may exceed legal requirements without explanation (see gillespie 2010, crawford and gillespie, 2016). where the low barriers to access for diy digital production and distribution may initially have promised queer and feminist producers and performers access to new global networks of both profit and community-formation, they are now seen by many of our participants as equally (if not more) restrictive than australian regulatory structures. in this paper, then, we reflect on the tensions raised for independent queer and feminist porn producers who must simultaneously occupy multiple citizen/subject positions in relation to multiple publics. drawing on papacharissi’s (2010) exploration of citizenship in the networked ‘public/private sphere’, and igin and nielsens (2008) concept of ‘acts of citizenship’, we explore participant’s accounts of striving to perform the role of ethical citizen in the networked counter-public of diy queer and feminist porn cultures, while simultaneously performing as an entrepreneurial, platform-savvy ‘citizen-worker’ in the digital gig economy (berg 2016). both these roles require deep attention to digital labour in terms self-representation, and ‘authentic’ modes of sexual and political performance within networked publics and counterpublics. additionally, many of our participants reported a strong sense of accountability to queer community, and a desire to adhere to their political and ethical values not just in the process of production, but via the kinds of sexual practices they represented in their work. as one participant put it: depicting s/m practices, fisting or g spot ejaculation was important because ‘these are in my community. that’s what happens. and that’s how you fuck. or it’s one of a million ways in which you fuck’. and it was important ‘to have those opportunities to see those things represented, to understand how they work, to feel in any way that they are normal. in this context producing pornography might be understood as an act of sexual citizenship. it is also an act of labour however, and the majority of our participants were not satisfied to create porn solely as a ‘labour of love’ (ruberg 2016). where governance and regulatory guidelines are unclear and/or not subject to appeal, porn producers must self-censor, or undertake many hours of frustrating postproduction when even non-explicit (but fetishistic) images and scenes are deemed unsuitable for commercial distribution platforms. this labour, we suggest, is especially frustrating for queer and feminist producers, who implicitly strive to exceed market norms regarding ‘appropriate’ representations of sexuality and gender. to this end, corporate regulation becomes just as onerous as state classification. the difference is that the threshold test for content has moved from community standards under classification law to profitability and risk under capitalist enterprise. while sexual citizensubjects within a national public might have some grounds to appeal the former, the citizen-worker must conform to the latter, or risk take-down notices, and subsequent exclusion from both networked counterpublics, and global markets. references berg, h 2016, ‘a scene is just a marketing tool’: alternative income streams in porn’s gig economy, porn studies, vol. 3, no. 2, pp 160-174. crawford, k. gillespie, t 2016, ‘what is a flag for? social media reporting tools and the vocabulary of complaint’. new media & society. vol. 18, no.3, pp 410– 428. huntley, r, 1995, ‘queer cuts: censorship and community standards.’ media international australia. issue 78, november, pp 5-12. flew, t 2015, ‘porn, censorship, classification and free speech: global paradoxes in the governance of media content’, invited public lecture to faculty of law, humanities and the arts, university of wollongong, 1 october 2015. gillespie, t 2010 ‘the politics of ‘platforms’, new media & society, vol. 12, no. 3, pp 347–364. hartley, j, green, l, lumby, c 2010, ‘refused classification and the proposed australian internet filter. an assault on the open society’ australian journal of communication, vol 37, no. 3, pp 1-14. isin, ef and nielsen, gm eds, 2008, acts of citizenship, zed books, london. marwick, a. e. (2010) ‘status update: celebrity, publicity and self-branding in web 2.0’, department of media, culture, and communication, thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of doctor of philosophy in the steinhardt school of culture, education, and human development new york university. papacharissi, z, 2010, a private sphere: democracy in a digital age, polity, cambridge. ruberg, b, 2016, doing it for free: digital labour and the fantasy of amateur online pornography, porn studies, vol. 3, no. 2, pp 147-159. plummer, k, 1995, telling sexual stories: power, change and social worlds, routledge, london. stardust, z. 2016, ‘pornography as protest: diy porn and direct action’ in m. young (ed), the diy porn handbook: documenting our own sexual revolutions, greenery press, san francisco. stardust, z 2014, ‘‘fisting is not permitted’: criminal intimacies, queer sexualities and feminist porn in the australian legal context’, porn studies vol 1, no.3, pp 242-259. taormino, t, penley, c, shimizu, c p, miller-young, m 2013, the feminist porn book: the politics of producing pleasure, feminist press, new york. warner, m 1998, publics and counterpublics, zone books, massachusetts. paper 3: popperbate: online video collage, the neoliberal scripting of the gay pornographic body john mercer birmingham city university this presentation discusses the practice of making collage ‘popper training’ videos which involves repurposing a range of found sources, from still images to amateur video and webcam footage to extracts from commercial gay porn, with the express purpose of turning masturbation, fuelled by amyl nitrate use, into an activity that might be regarded, using the neoliberal rubric, as ‘productive leisure’ (gelber, 1999:2). the intention of the presentation is to contextualise this creative practice of (what i am describing for the sake of simplicity and consistency as) popperbate or popper training video making, to provide some conceptual orientations to situate the materials and for the analysis of the textual qualities of the videos, and to discuss the sexual scripting that they produce. the term scripting is used very deliberately here as it both has purchase as a term that is widely used in the sociological studies of sex and sexuality drawing, as it does, on the symbolic interactionism of erving goffman. scripting is a particularly useful metaphor for thinking about the ways in which the production practices in evidence in online popper training videos connect to the emergence of a popperbating ‘practice.’ in the presentation of self everyday life, (1956) what has become known as goffman’s ‘dramaturgical metaphor’ of the cultural script, and his foregrounding of the importance of ‘expressiveness’ and ‘dramatic realization’ of everyday life has been profoundly influential on subsequent scholarship particularly in the field of sexology. william simon and john gagnon for instance, used the same metaphor in the foundational study sexual conduct (1973) with their development of sexual script theory. in the case of the material that is my object of study in this presentation, scripting provides a framework for identifying and conceptualising a set of discursive and representational strategies that make meaning at three interconnected levels. scripting sexual representations: the formalising and conventionalising of a set of sexual activities as they are represented via the process of isolation and selection that is inherent in the video editing process. this is in effect the production of what i’ve described elsewhere as a ‘demotic idiom’ (mercer, 2017) of gay porn. describing/producing a sexual script: what emerges from these representational strategies is a gay sexual script or, perhaps more accurately, a gay pornographic sexual script, where one activity leads inevitably to another in a relatively linear fashion. scripting the sexualised masculine body of gay porn: this third level of scripting is especially important for me here. the representational strategies in evidence here as elsewhere across gay pornography, commercial, amateur or otherwise produces the male body as a sexual spectacle that is to be read in circumscribed (and therefore scripted) ways. the rather amorphous category of amateur porn has been written about quite extensively and continues to grow as an area of interest for scholars in the field (attwood 2007, van doorn 2010, paasonen 2010, 2011, 2014, zecca 2014, hofer 2014, ruberg 2016, mercer 2017). this breadth of critical interventions has brought a complex set of activities, texts, relations and interactions into view that have challenged simplistic assumptions about what amateur porn might be, exploring the textures of amateur aesthetics, the representational strategies of amateur porn makers, the connections between amateurism and ethical porn practices, as well as the emancipatory potentials that amateur porn offers, by responding to debates around inclusivity through representation of a plethora of social and subcultural groups, body types, ethnicities, genders and generations. much of this scholarly work is predicated on a distinctions being drawn between professional, commercial, material produced by a putative homogenous industry and the diversity and heterogeneity of amateur production practices. these categories though, as susanna paasonen (2014:33) notes, are not necessarily so easy to unpick. within this rich amateur ecology, (and i am firmly situating popperbate videos within this domain) i am identifying yet another production practice that yields results that are qualitatively different from much of the material that has previously been written about. i am mindful that popperbating is, ostensibly, a relatively obscure cultural practice and that the adjunct to this activity, the popper training videos that i am discussing here are an equally specialised and singular mode of amateur production. however, it is perhaps this particularity that motivates this intervention in a consideration of what gay porn now means in terms of thinking about what results from an amateur making practice and conditions of production and consumption where distinctions between amateur and professional, still and moving image, text and sound become blurred. references arroyo, b. (2016) ‘from flow to float: moving through porn tube sites.’ porn studies, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 308–310. attwood, f. (2007) ‘no money shot? commerce, pornography and new sex taste cultures’ sexualities. vol. 10 no. 4., pp. 441-456 burgess, j. (2006) ‘hearing ordinary voices: cultural studies, vernacular creativity and digital storytelling’ continuum: journal of media & culture studies, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 201–214 dawson, m. (2014) ‘rationalizing television in the usa: neoliberalism, the attention economy and the digital video recorder’ screen vol. 55. no. 2, pp.221-237 escoffier, j. (2007) ‘scripting the sex: fantasy, narrative and sexual scripts in pornographic film’ in kimmel, m. (ed) the sexual self: the construction of sexual scripts. nashville: vanderbilt university press. goffman, e. (1956) the presentation of self everyday life. edinburgh: university of edinburgh press. hofer, k. (2014) ‘pornographic domesticity: amateur couple porn, straight subjectivities, and sexual labour’ porn studies, vol.1. no.4. pp. 334-345. mercer, j. (2017) gay pornography: representations of masculinity and sexuality. london: i.b.tauris. paasonen, s. (2014) ‘things to do with the alternative: fragmentation and distinction in online porn’ in biasin, e, maina, g and zecca, f (eds) porn after porn: contemporary alternative pornographies. udine: mimesis press. ___________ (2011) carnal resonance: affect and online pornography. cambridge ma: mit press. ___________ (2010) ‘labors of love: netporn, web 2.0 and the meanings of amateurism. new media & society, vol.12, no.8, pp. 1297-1312. ruberg, b. (2016) ‘doing it for free: digital labour and the fantasy of amateur online pornography’ porn studies, vol.3. no.2. pp. 147-159. russo, j.l. (2009) ‘user-penetrated content: fan video in the age of convergence.’ cinema journal, vol. 48, no. 4 (summer, 2009), pp. 125-130 simon, w., & gagnon, j. h. (1986). ‘sexual scripts: permanence and change’ archives of sexual behavior, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 97-119 van doorn, n. (2010) ‘keeping it real: user-genderated pornography, gender reification, and visual pleasure’ convergence, vol. 16, no.4, pp. 411-30. zecca, f. (2014) ‘porn sweet home: a survey of amateur pornography’ in biasin, e, maina, g and zecca, f (eds) porn after porn: contemporary alternative pornographies. udine: mimesis press. paper 4: lending a helping hand: the nsfw labour of digital porn consumption sharif mowlabocus university of sussex brady robards monash university pornography is not something one usually thinks of as being consumed in public. the video revolution of the 1980s allowed pornography to go ‘indoors’, as lighter, more affordable technologies permitted the production, distribution and consumption of pornography to become ‘domesticated’ (o’toole, 1998). digital media have further extended (and eroticized) this domestication (esch & mayer, 2007; hofer, 2014) and, news stories of public porn consumption (cosslett, 2017; tighe, 2017) reaffirm the belief that consuming porn is (and should be) a private, solitary affair. meanwhile, political economic critiques of pornography often focus on the production of pornography, the conditions in which performers work and the contexts in which they perform (see hester, 2015 and wilkinson, 2017 for review). such discussions have found new traction within the context of digital pornography (mowlabocus, 2010, ruberg, 2016, lee & sullivan, 2016), yet the focus of such work continues to be on the creation of sexually explicit material, rather than on its consumption. following patterson’s (2004: 105) assertion that digital pornography is shaped ‘through a particular logic of networked computer technology’, this paper complicates understandings of both porn consumption and sexualised labour, by mapping the ways in which online pornography creates ‘networked publics’ (varnelis, 2012) of porn consumers. this mapping identifies the informal, unpaid labour that porn consumers engage in as part of their consumption. the reasons behind this labour are numerous and include 1/ the acquisition of sub-cultural capital (hebdige 1995; thornton, 1995) and social capital (ellison et al. 2007); 2/ access to new pornographic texts (slater, 1998); and 3/ the enhancement of sexual pleasure through the creation of meta-textual ‘stories’, dialogue and fantasies. drawing upon a multi-sited analysis of digital spaces dedicated to the consumption of pornography, we outline three forms of informal labour (jarrett, 2014) tied to the consumption of digital pornography. the first type of labour we identify is that of collaborative porn appreciation. this shares much in common with notions of ‘collaborative consumption’ and the sharing economy (hamari et al., 2015), and serves to increase both the individual’s and the community’s knowledge of, and access to, pornographic material. based on a content analysis of coconstructed nsfw (not safe for work) sub-reddits, we identify the co-production of meta-data relating to specific pornographic texts, which provides opportunities for community members to share sexual interests and ‘porn knowledge’. our analysis reveals the process by which porn consumers expose personal desires and sexual interests in return for ascertaining additional information on these texts. this information can include the names of featured performers and details of the production studio. given the fragmented nature of much digital porn, links to entire films or scenes may also be offered by the community in return for sharing the original text. thus, in return for sharing content with the network, sub-cultural capital can be crowdsourced and access to similar pornography, secured. the second form of labour we identify is that of porn curation. unlike the collaborative work of porn appreciation, this second form of labour is often attributed to a single individual, although networked curation always carries with it a social dimension (see zarro & hall, 2012). our analysis of porn tumblrs reveal a similar exposure of libidinal interests to that found in networked appreciation. however, this revelation is shaped by a particular intensity of consumption (paasonen, 2011), surpassing that of casual spectatorship. through the production of detailed commentaries on each text, the curator reveals their investment of time and resources into the act of pornographic consumption. the quality and quantity of this labour is then recognized and rewarded through audience praise and the submission of other items for the collection. finally, through a discourse analysis of ‘porn addiction’ narratives, we identify the inescapable work of porn hunting as a third (often unwanted) form of consumer labour. echoing research into online support networks (kantrowitz-gordon, 2013; ouellette & arcy, 2015), we identify the religio-medical discourse of the confessional (foucault, 1990) that structures these narratives. in such narratives, community members position pornography as something to be worked at, framing their consumption as a form of unavoidable labour, which they become addicted to (and which, ironically, regularly results in the loss of ‘legitimate’ labour through unemployment). our analysis reveals how the terminology of 21st century computational labour is appropriated by porn addicts in order to articulate the intensity of their addiction, together with the cost of that addiction. through this tri-partite analysis of networked porn publics, our research identifies the different forms of informal labour involved in digital porn consumption and the work that audiences undertake when consuming porn online. references coselett, r. l. (2017) ‘watching porn in public is not ok. it’s harassment’. the guardian. [online] available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/16/watching-porn-bus-publicharassment-education (accessed 10th february, 2017). ellison, n.b., steinfield, c. and lampe, c. (2007) ‘the benefits of facebook “friends:” social capital and college students’ use of online social network sites’ journal of computer-mediated communication, 12(4), pp.1143-1168. esch k, and mayer v (2007) ‘how unprofessional: the profitable partnership of amateur porn and celebrity culture’. paasonen s, nikunen k, and saarenmaa l (eds) pornification: sex andsexuality in media culture. oxford: berg, 99–111 foucault, m. (1990) the history of sexuality: an introduction, volume i. trans. robert hurley. new york: vintage. hamari, j., sjöklint, m. and ukkonen, a. (2015) ‘the sharing economy: why people participate in collaborative consumption’. journal of the association for information science and technology. 67(9): 2047–2059 hebdige, d. (1995) ‘subculture: the meaning of style’. critical quarterly, 37(2), pp.120124. hester, h. (2015) ‘after the image: labour in pornography’. laing, m., pilcher,k. & smith, n. (eds.) queer sex work. london: routledge. 32-42. jarrett, k. (2014) ‘the relevance of “women’s work” social reproduction and immaterial labor in digital media’. television & new media, 15 (1), pp.14-29. kantrowitz-gordon, i. (2013) ‘internet confessions of postpartum depression’. issues in mental health nursing, 34(12), pp.874-882. lee, j. and sullivan, r., 2016. porn and labour: the labour of porn studies. porn studies 3 (2): 104-106. mowlabocus, s. (2010) ‘porn 2.0: technology, social practice and the new online porn industry’. attwood, f., 2010. (ed.) porn. com. making sense of online pornography, new york. peter lang. pp. 69-87. o’toole, l. (1998) pornocopia: porn, sex, technology and desire. london: serpent’s tail. ouellette, l. and arcy, j, (2015) ‘live through this”: feminist care of the self 2.0.’ frame: journal of literary studies, 28 (1), pp.95-114. paasonen, s. (2011) carnal resonance: affect and online pornography. cambridge, mass. mit press. ruberg, b., 2016. doing it for free: digital labour and the fantasy of amateur online pornography. porn studies, 3(2), pp.147-159. slater, d. (1998) ‘trading sexpics on irc: embodiment and authenticity on the internet’. body & society, 4(4), pp.91-117. thornton, sarah (1995) club cultures. cambridge: polity press. tighe, s. (2017) ‘is ok to watch porn in public?’ bbc magazine [online]. available at: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38611265 (accessed 10th february 2017). varnelis, k. (2012) networked publics. cambridge, mass. the mit press. wilkinson, e. (2017) ‘the diverse economies of online pornography: from paranoid readings to post-capitalist futures’ sexualities [pre-print] 0(0): 1-18. zarro, m. and hall, c. (2012). ‘exploring social curation’. d-lib magazine, 18 (11/12), p.1. paper 5: dangerous desires, fantasies and forbiddings: exploring porn consumption clarissa smith university of sunderland a project undertaken by psychologist brett kahr (2008), using a representative survey of 19,000 uk adults, found that 90% of men and 60% of women have viewed pornography at some time. 29% fantasise about playing a dominant role during sex; 33% fantasise about playing a submissive role during sex; 4% fantasise about being violent towards someone else; 6% fantasise about violence being done to them by someone else. many people enjoy submissive fantasies but the reasons for such enjoyment are complicated and its meanings and significances are disparate (see corie, 2013 and bergner, 2013 for useful case studies). there is little systematic academic research on consumers of ‘mainstream’ or ‘ordinary’ pornography, and even less on the particular interests in fantasies of rape, even as such fantasies form the basis of many kinds of narrative from formula romances (such as mills & boon/harlequin) through cinema and television, and ‘high culture’ literature. representations of rape and sexual violence constitute a significant part of the phenomenon of ‘extreme cinema’. this presentation will draw on research with more than 5,000 self-identifying consumers of online pornography and in particular those respondents who ‘confess’ to enjoying ‘difficult’ or ‘extreme’ sexual imagery or scenarios. our broader findings in this research demonstrate that there are multiple reasons for accessing pornography and that such consumption is significant for many people, not least in enabling exploration of the possibilities and opportunities for sexual feeling; finding out about what interests and arouses and excites. pornography is not ‘only fantasy’, it is much more than that: it speaks to the relations between bodies, selfhood, and social and cultural permissions and forbiddings. many of our respondents explored their interests in extreme topics through online literary erotica or hentai and there are interesting ways in which such material is seen to occupy a place in the developing of sexual literacies as well as sexual fantasies. even so, it is clear that respondents are aware of the many criticisms that can be leveled at any expression of ‘enjoying rape’ thus respondents emphasised only enjoying watching scenes which are clearly acted. understanding audience pleasures and engagements with these is a fraught and risky business. the idea of showing sexual violence carries with it a host of perceived worries. a key one is the fear that depictions of rape may cause sexual arousal. our culture maintains a pretty tight line on this – any depiction judged likely to arouse viewers, and especially male ones, is per se dangerous. there is however a powerful discourse of ‘redemption’ for representations of sexual desire (especially in ‘arthouse’ cinema), whereby critics and regulatory bodies, such as the bbfc, redefine unusual and/or dangerous images as ‘unerotic’ in order to make them ‘safe’. to admit to films being sexually arousing is to attach a smell of danger to them, because arousal is seen as basic, compulsive, overriding. equally, representations explicitly targeted to female audiences are often justified as ‘safe explorations’ of rape – interesting to women precisely because they allow them to experience the possibility of ‘giving in’ to kinds of sex they would avoid in ‘real life’. men are not given the same ‘excuse’: for a man to fantasise rape, or to enjoy a rape fiction, is to be complicit in actual violence against women. even so, the recognition of female rape fantasies has generated its own difficult concerns. brought to prominence by masters and johnson’s (1966) research and made concrete by the hite report (2003) and nancy friday’s (1973, 1975, 1991, 2009) work into women’s sexuality, ‘force fantasies’ are enjoyed by a substantial proportion of women a recent meta-study concluded that between a third and half of all women experience rape fantasies (see critelli & bivona, 2008). but that has aroused powerful fears that this might be misread in for instance judgments by the bbfc on films containing ‘sexual violence’. it is true that many people understand the viewing of fantasy rape to be de facto problematic behaviour but there is no robust evidence that such viewing leads to actual harm to others. as academic brian mcnair (2014) has recently argued ‘porn, like the knife in every household kitchen, is used by the vast majority of people in ways which cause no harm to others. only a small minority will use it to injure another, which is why we do not ban kitchen knives (although some jurisdictions restrict possession outside the domestic zone).’ in addition to referencing rape fantasies, respondents (n. 63; 1.1%) also mentioned the fantasy of non-consensual sex, or simply just ‘noncon’ or some variation, often used as a euphemism for rape; in addition, terms like ‘forced sex’ or ‘forced orgasm’ appear many times. other terms, such as ‘reluctance’ or ‘control’, seem to refer, less overtly, to rape, though they appear to continue this theme of a fantasy situation not entirely of the subject’s choosing. issues around consent and fantasy are also raised as qualifying or clarifying points when mentioning a ‘forced’ situation, as in this response: i recall one film with a slow, very artfully shot ‘forced’ fellatio the woman in question was in the role of a sex toy, and was being very gently directed by her ‘master’. please note this was all filmed with consent and was pure fantasy. thus there are complex and layered engagements with pressured or extreme sexual scenarios which this presentation will try to explore via a general overview of issues around taboos, extremes, religious undercurrents, and societal pressures/ perceptions in relation to pornography. this presentation will draw out some insights in relation to gender, sexual orientation, and porn viewing choices and their connections to taboo subjects including incest, child pornography, bestiality, fetishisms, and rape, among others. references bergner, d. (2013) what do women want? adventures in the science of female desire, london: canongate. critelli, j. w. & j. m. bivona (2008) ‘women’s erotic rape fantasies: an evaluation of theory and research’, journal of sex research, february, 57–70.. friday, n. (1973) my secret garden: women’s sexual fantasies, simon & schuster (1975) forbidden flowers: more women’s sexual fantasies, simon & schuster, (1991) women on top: how real life has changed women’s sexual fantasies, simon & schuster. (2009) beyond my control: forbidden fantasies in an uncensored age, sourcebooks, inc. hammers, c. (2013) ‘corporeality, sadomasochism and sexual trauma’, body and society, vol. 20, no.1. hite, s. (2003) the hite report: a nationwide study of female sexuality, new york: seven stories press. kahr, b. (2008) sex and the psyche: the truth about our most secret fantasies london: penguin masters, w. h & v. e. johnson. (1966) human sexual response. ny: bantam books mcnair, b. (2014) ‘rethinking the effects paradigm in porn studies’, porn studies, vol.1 no.1/2 selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): chesher, c. (2019, october 2-5). trusting voice assistants: a typology of invocationary acts. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. trusting smart speakers: a typology of invocationary acts chris chesher the university of sydney smart speakers such as the google home and the amazon echo have recently become popular internet-connected consumer devices with the seemingly magical capacity to hear user ‘invocations’ and provide intelligent responses in natural language. this paper analyses and categorises popular smart speaker commands and extends austin (1964) and searle’s (1976) analysis and classifications of speech acts to develop a typology of what i call invocationary acts. i argue that a query or command to a smart speaker is a modern translation of the ancient ritual invocation. invocation is form of supplication to a sublime non-human other, following protocols, seeking guidance or support at a moment of crisis. but today’s invocations are not to a deity, but to servers and databases in the cloud, and most crises are trivial. contemporary invocation is a convenient form of power for users, but also a supplication to the asymmetrical power of corporations. in order to better understand invocation, i will turn to austin’s (1964) speech act theory which provides the basis for analysing invocationary acts. austin explained the dynamics of speech acts by distinguishing between three elements: the locutionary, the illocutionary, and the perlocutionary. the act of speaking a grammatically sensible speech act, such as ‘what is the capital of iraq?’ is the locutionary act. the illocutionary act is what is performed in saying this question. in this case, it is the intersubjective force that obliges the person addressed to respond. if the listener responds, this is the perlocutionary act that occurs as a consequence, even if this is ‘i don’t know’. when a user makes a request to a smart speaker, they are performing an everyday speech act, but they are also initiating an invocationary act that initiates a technical procedure. the user starts the invocationary act with a proprietary ‘wake word’ such as ‘hey google’. in linguistic terms, this is a phatic — an interpersonal communication that in this case identifies the person (or thing) addressed (meltzer & musolf 2000). at a social level, this obliges the ‘assistant’ persona, as a quasi-social actor, to provide an appropriate response. at the technical level, the sounds ‘hey google’ invoke the device to record the user’s invocation and pass the recorded utterance to the cloud for interpretation. the invocationary act continues when the computing infrastructure uses machine learning models to (1) interpret the locutionary act using speech-to-text conversion and (2) interpret the illocutionary act using artificial intelligence statistical models, and (3) use machine learning algorithms to find baghdad from a database as the most probable appropriate response. the assistant then responds in a synthesised voice to perform the perlocutionary act, fulfilling the social obligation. so, what can we say about speech acts have taken place? we can use searle’s (1976) classification of five kinds of human speech acts: • directives attempt to influence another actor’s future actions — such as a question; • representatives represent something as true — such as an answer; • commissives make a commitment to take a future action, such as making a promise; • expressives communicate a psychological state; and • declarations do something in the act of saying it, such agreeing to a marriage proposition, or when a judge passes sentence on a convicted criminal). in the example above, my invocation is a question — a kind of directive speech act. the assistant’s response is an answer — a representative speech act that identifies baghdad as iraq’s capital. but the interaction has been mediated as an invocationary act. to develop a typology of speech acts in common smart speaker invocations i found 300 recommended google home commands from cnet, lifewire, android authority, tech ranker, tom’s guide and lifehacker. i also drew from the record of hundreds of invocations made by me and my family. i tested each of these invocations and investigated their services. the users’ invocationary acts are almost all directive speech acts: questions (n.98) or commands (n.166). non-directive acts were much rarer (n.10), and usually invoked scripted responses. for example, when i said, ‘i am your father’ (representative) the assistant made a star wars reference by answering, ‘i’m sorry i’m not luke’ (representative)… ‘this is kind of awkward’ (expressive). when i said, ‘it’s my birthday’ (representative) it gave the expressive response, localised for australia, ‘g’day and happy birthday. i hope you have a cracker’. when i performed an expressive act by saying ‘that’s disgusting’, the assistant responded with another expressive — ‘i didn’t mean to gross you out, sorry’. i even performed a declaration by saying ‘i am chris’, which prompted the assistant to say ‘you’d like me to call you chris. is that right? i’ll call you chris from now on (a commissive). i then asked, ‘who am i’ and the assistant used speaker recognition to identify me uniquely as chris (representative). if the assistant could not recognise the invocation, it responded with an error such as ‘i’m sorry i don’t understand’ — indicating that my speech act has failed, and expressing the psychological state of incomprehension (expressive). where user invocations were almost always directives, the smart speaker speech acts were mostly representatives providing facts. however, responses can take many other forms (see table a). they can make promises, ask the user to do things, make declarations and express emotions. to speaker’s invocation: smart speaker speech act speech act type what is the capital of tanzania? ‘dodoma is the capital of tanzania’ representative set a timer for five minutes ‘alright. five minutes. and that’s starting now. ‘ commissive play the trivia game ‘…welcome to “are you feeling lucky”… i’m the host of this silly show… how many are playing this time?’ directive (at the beginning of the quiz and at the end of the quiz) ‘player one. i’ll call you “dingo”’… ‘and now for your score. not bad at all. you got four right…’ declaration do you love me? ‘love. i knew the way i felt about you had a name.’ expressive table a with some reverse engineering i identified the operations in play with a number of invocationary acts (see table b). many invocationary acts search internal or external databases, or lookup data from a service, such as the weather forecast. others perform mathematical calculations. many play streaming media such as music or radio. some invoke scripted responses or generate random responses. some create more complex interactions such as tutorials or games, some commands control devices like smart lights or thermostats. invocation (user’s locutionary act) evocation (machine’s locutionary act) invocationary act classification what is the capital of iraq baghdad is the capital of france (representative) searches google database for answers search what is the weather? currently in newtown it is 24 and cloudy… (representative; commissive) looks up information from an established authority lookup play ‘lust for life’ by iggy pop sure. lust for life by iggy pop. playing on spotify (commissive) [plays song] looks up song in media database and starts streaming media what is spelunking? according to wikipedia caving, also known as spelunking in the united states… (representative) looks up brief wikipedia entry third party search i’m talking nonsense my apologies. i don’t understand error message error roll a dice (sound) it’s a five (declarative) chooses a random number random are you skynet? no way. i like people. skynet hates people. i rest my case. (expressive) responds with a response scripted for a defined invocation scripted response (often randomly selected from multiple answers) how do you make devilled eggs? ok i’ve got a recipe from food network… (representative) would you like to hear the ingredients or skip to the instructions? (directive) accesses recipe information and steps through ingredients and method. users must invoke each step. interaction (tutorial) turn on the light directive [light turns on] turns on smart home lights device set a timer for 10 minutes got it. ten minutes, starting now. (commisive) sets timer clock table a. it is from variations on this repertoire of invocationary acts that users like me are able to get an impression of intelligence or even companionship (andreallo & chesher 2019). exchanges of invocationary speech acts mimic the dynamics of conversation, operating within certain acceptable thresholds of space (what is audible and apparently present) and time (the average 200 milliseconds gap between conversational turns) (enfield 2017)). with continued conversation (gebhart 2018) it becomes possible for users to respond within 8 seconds without the wake word. the interactivity is particularly interesting when using voice assistants in a social context with the experience of mixed human and non-human conversation partners. in mediating invocationary acts, voice assistants have become a distinctive media form whose implications are only becoming apparent. but unlike everyday conversations, invocations are supplications to corporations with monopolies of invocation. references andreallo, f. & chesher, c. (2019) prosthetic soul mates: sex robots as media for companionship m/c vol 22, no 5. austin, j. l. (1975). how to do things with words (2d ed.). oxford: clarendon press. gebhart g. (2018) ‘google home's new continued conversation setting keeps the mic hot for a smoother chat’ c-net. june 21, 2018. available at: https://www.cnet.com/news/google-home-continued-conversation-setting-keeps-themic-hot/ heidegger, m. (1977). the question concerning technology, and other essays. new york: garland pub. meltzer, b.n. and musolf, g.r. (2000) ‘”have a nice day”: phatic communion and everyday life. studies in symbolic interaction, volume 23, pages 95-111. phan, t (2017). ‘the materiality of the digital and the gendered voice of siri’. transformations issue 29. available at: http://www.transformationsjournal.org (accessed 1 october 2019). searle, john r. (1976). “a classification of illocutionary acts.” language in society 5, no. 01 (april 1976). zuboff s (2018) surveillance capitalism. london: profile books. microsoft word aoir2019-appstoresplatformpower-final-formatted.docx selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): nieborg, d.b. van dijck, j., poell, t. (2019, october 2-5). analyzing platform power. app stores as infrastructural platform services. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. analyzing platform power: app stores as infrastructural platform services david b. nieborg university of toronto josé van dijck utrecht university thomas poell university of amsterdam february 2019, tech magazine techcrunch revealed how mobile app developers have been abusing so-called “enterprise certificates” (constine, 2019). apple grants these special software licenses to businesses to bypass the ios app store and distribute apps among employees. what prompted techcrunch’s investigation was earlier reporting on the misuse of these certificates by facebook and google. it turned out, smaller app developers also exploited this loophole. techcrunch pointed to real-money gambling and pornography apps, the latter category being outright forbidden in the app store. this story of a heavily regulated app space speaks to the broader question of the evolution and entrenchment of platform power. apple is one of a very select group of u.s.-based platform operators that shape the flow of public information in the western world, thereby disrupting societal institutions and industry sectors. as a broad variety of scholars pointed out, there is a severe lack of transparency in how these platforms operate and intervene in public life (bucher 2018; gillespie 2018a). this is particularly problematic, as their interventions conflict with vital public values, undermining socioeconomic equality, democratic processes, and the quality of public services (van dijck, poell & de waal, 2018). in this paper we examine how platform power is operationalized in the specific case of app stores. we take a first step in developing an analytical framework that critically examines the infrastructural power relations that constitute online platform ecosystems. this involves distinguishing among different levels of platform ecosystem analysis. building on a relational understanding of power, we propose an analytical vocabulary to systematically interrogate the material power 2 relations among the three main actors active in platform ecosystems: platform operators (e.g. apple), third party institutions (e.g. app developers, businesses, governments), and end-users (i.e. individuals). five levels of platform power to better differentiate among the different actors in platform ecosystems, the paper proposes to study platform power at five expanding levels, similar to those of ecological ecosystems. the first level is that of individual actors, who can be end-users or developers, and who typically only yield power in the aggregate. second, these users constitute populations aggregated by infrastructural platform services. the ios app store, we argue, is an example of such a service as it acts as a key access node in apple’s wider platform ecosystem. end-users need access to the app store to download individual apps of competing platform operators (facebook and google) and developers need access to offer their apps and services. infrastructural platform services operate as markets, connecting different actors. they are the connective glue, so to say, that allows tech companies to govern an opaque and complex ecosystem in which connections are invisible to the public eye and hence largely beyond societal control. for platform operators there is an incentive to expand its reach beyond individual platform services, which brings us to the third level of platform power: those of company platform ecosystems. for example, apple has amassed hundreds of millions of users of apple devices, all of whom are subject to the rules and regulations of governance frameworks set by apple. collectively, major platforms companies exercise power on a fourth level: that of the geopolitical platform ecosystem. we distinguish between two dominant ones. u.s.-based platform companies are primarily active in the west, whereas china-based platforms originate and operate in a heavily state-sanctioned environment. lastly, the highest level of abstraction is the global platform ecosystem, which combines all individual actors and encompasses all levels. this fifth level is likely to become increasingly relevant to scholarship on platform power as platforms have ambitions beyond their respective geopolitical spheres. studying infrastructural platform services, such as app stores, offers relevant insight into how globally operating platforms are able to set, steer, and bend rules and norms that impact individual actors on the local and national level. app stores as infrastructural platform services the typical unit of analysis in scholarship discussing platform power is either the level of individual actors, company ecosystems, or geopolitical ecosystems. missing here is the level of infrastructural platform services and how they fit into the higher levels of platform ecosystems. examples of such services include app stores, but also advertising networks, login services, cloud hosting, payment systems, data analytics, and artificial intelligence (ai) services. we consider these services infrastructural because of their ubiquity and consistent use, which allows for platform power to emerge and to be consolidated (plantin et al. 2018). app stores, then, offer a standardized, techno-economic architecture for app developers. in the west, to reach billions of mobile media users, app developers have to go through either apple’s ios app store or google’s play store. thus, their reach extends far beyond dominant marketplaces in physical domains, such as walmart or media markt. 3 in the case of app stores, the paper shows that platform power is not casual or discursive, but highly strategic, uniform, and centralized. first, we examine how endusers and developers are firmly ‘locked-in’, as it is impossible to transfer data (or apps) outside the proprietary platform walls. second, the analysis demonstrates that by active gatekeeping, platform operators are able to halt, prohibit, block, or privilege some apps over others. this raises the wider question of market entry and distribution, particular in the case of cultural production (nieborg & poell, 2018). for example, apple follows a set of subjective and opaque submission guidelines (gillespie, 2018b), as illustrated by the gambling and pornography apps in our introduction. while notably hard to investigate, our understanding of platform power would benefit from greater insight into this issue, to be gained via developer interviews, reviewing shifts in policy, or surveying apps that are rejected (hestres, 2013). third, app stores operators have full control over which apps are featured in their storefronts, deeply impacting individual actors and institutions. investigating these regimes of platform visibility, we stress, requires a sustained effort that draws on developer interviews, digital methods, and financial analysis. by interrogating these three instances of platform power at the platform service level, the paper demonstrates that platform power is not a property of one platform itself, but a corollary of a platform’s function in the context of other platforms and actors in a dynamic ecosystem. future research could illuminate how, specifically, other apps stores, or other infrastructural platform services gain, lose, and wield platform power in similar or different ways. references bucher, t. (2018). if... then. algorithmic power and politics. oxford: oxford university press. constine, j. (2019, february 13). apple fails to block porn & gambling ‘enterprise’ apps. techcrunch. retrieved from https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/12/apple-porn-gamblingapps/. gillespie, t. (2018a). custodians of the internet. platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. new haven: yale university press. gillespie, t. (2018b). exodus international. banned apps, app stores, and the politics of visibility. in j. w. morris & s. murray (eds.), appified. culture in the age of apps (pp. 51–60). ann arbor: university of michigan press. hestres, l. e. (2013). app neutrality: apple’s app store and freedom of expression online. international journal of communication, 7, 1265–1280. nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society, 20(11), 4275–4292. 4 plantin, j. c., lagoze, c., edwards, p. n., & sandvig, c. (2018). infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook. new media & society, 20(1), 293-310. van dijck, j., poell, t., & de waal, m. (2018). the platform society. public values in a connective world. oxford: oxford university press. microsoft word the role of breakdown in imagining big data_ir16_submission_reformatted.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): tanweer, a., fiore-gartland, b., aragon, c. (2015, october 21-24). the role of breakdown in imagining big data: impediment to insight to innovation. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the role of breakdown in imagining big data: impediment to insight to innovation anissa tanweer university of washington brittany fiore-gartland university of washington cecilia aragon university of washington introduction as the era of “big data” unfolds, researchers across myriad disciplines are increasingly engaging with large, complex datasets distributed across networked technologies. this emerging data-intensive mode of inquiry has been called the “fourth paradigm” of scientific exploration (hey et al. 2009), inspiring research areas termed “e-science” and more recently “data science,” that call for the development of new knowledge infrastructures that support the development of new types of software ecologies (e.g. borgman 2007; 2015; edwards et al. 2013). the pursuit of data-intensive scientific discovery in academia means that a wide array of digital technologies and internetenabled infrastructures that produce, process, manage, store, and analyze the increasing volume, variety, and velocity of data have become inextricable from the everyday work practices of a growing number of scholars. difficult to envision or engage with in their entirety, these vast and distributed datasets demand new strategies for knowing, seeing, and communicating with data. one such strategy involves breakdown. we argue that encounters with breakdown – conceived of as points at which progress is stopped due to a material obstacle – represent essential sites of knowledge production for data science and any other big data analysis. description of study this research is part of an ongoing ethnographic study of data science communities and collaborations in academia. for this paper, we embedded ourselves within a recurring data science collaboration (dsc) program that takes place over the course of a few months at a large public university. this program brings together data science methodology experts with domain researchers across a range of disciplines, from astronomy to oceanography to political science, to collaborate on data science projects throughout the academic term. a central feature of the program is the co-location of project collaborators two days per week in an effort to advance collaboration and productivity in a short period of time. our research is based on participant-observation within the space of co-location, semi-structured interviews with all participating data science methodology experts and domain researchers, and archival analysis of project documentation and communication that occurred online. breakdowns in big data participants in the dsc were conducting research on massive data sets. for example, an astronomer in the group was analyzing pixels from a telescopic sky survey contained in a database with a trillion rows that was stored in the cloud and analyzed using distributed virtual machines. another participant was a political scientist conducting textual analysis on the entire 90-terabyte corpus of web pages published in a single web domain over the course of several years. working with data at this scale and volume obscures its materiality and renders it invisible and unknowable in its entirety. someone manually entering information into an excel spreadsheet can see the entire data set and be intimately familiar with its contents. this is clearly not the case for someone working with 90 terabytes of html code or a table with a trillion rows these big data sets are partially obscured from human comprehension by their sheer volume. susan leigh star has demonstrated the ways in which obscured information infrastructure “becomes visible upon breakdown” (1999, p. 382), while graham and thrift have highlighted the way breakdown brings materiality to the fore: “things only come into visible focus as things when they become inoperable – they break or stutter and they then become the object of attention” (2007, p. 2). in an essay on the value of “broken world thinking” as a lens for furthering media and technology studies, steve jackson refers to breakdown in two senses: as the inevitable decay of systems under the inescapable law of entropy, and as points of breakage resulting from “bumping up against the limits of existing protocols and practices” (2013, p. 228). in the context of the dsc, we understand breakdown in the latter sense, as a point of stoppage forced by a material obstacle. we observed numerous instances in which encounters with such breakdown illuminated the materiality of the data and provided an occasion for the researchers to envision its content and structure. in one case, louis was surprised that a dataset didn’t take up very much space on a disk, yet when he opened his data in the statistical software package r, it unexpectedly exceeded 60 gigabytes of ram and maxed out his computer’s processing capabilities, making it impractical to manipulate without a distributed computing system. in trying to figure out why the data seemed to be “growing” to an unmanageable size, louis and his data science mentor realized that r, by default, was processing the data as a dense matrix, in which every coordinate contained a value. the mentor realized that in actuality, louis had a sparse matrix, with most of the coordinates containing zeroes. in this example, the encounter with breakdown led to important insights about the data’s content (it consisted mostly of zeroes) and its structure (it could be organized as a sparse matrix). not only does breakdown serve to foreground the otherwise invisible, but a number of scholars have also noted that breakdown often leads directly to productivity (e.g., petroski, 1985; graham & thrift, 2007), and that “[innovation’s] engine is breakdown and repair” (jackson, 2013, p. 228). in keeping with this vein of thinking, we observed how encounters with breakdown in the dsc not only surfaced the materiality of big data, but also how they generated important insights that the researchers and data scientists then leveraged for innovation and discovery. for example, after louis’ encounter with breakdown generated insight into the nature of his data, he and his mentor developed a strategy for writing code that would allow them to work with a sparse matrix in r. this was a novel innovation for the software package and reduced ram consumption by compressing the data to a manageable level. by focusing on breakdown in this example and others from the dsc, we were able to trace the iterative process of envisioning the data, generating insights into the data, translating insights into strategies for managing the data, and encoding those strategies into reparative communication with the data. conclusion our ethnographic study of data-intensive research in an academic setting highlights the importance of the negotiations between the partial images of data and the material interactions with data. we find that encounters with breakdown became sites that inspired new ways of knowing, seeing, and communicating with one’s data. often dismissed as impediments that slow or derail a typical process of scientific inquiry, we argue that these encounters are underappreciated resources for innovation and productivity, and that they represent essential sites of knowledge production for data science and any other big data analysis. thought of in this way, productive encounters with breakdown have significant design implications, in that the data science community may benefit from tools and platforms that facilitate communication between data and researcher by more explicitly calling attention to points of breakdown. references borgman, c. l. (2007). scholarship in the digital age. cambridge, ma: mit press. borgman, c. l. (2015). big data, little data, no data: scholarship in the networked world. cambridge, ma: mit press. edwards, p. n., jackson, s. j., chalmers, m. k., bowker, g. c., borgman, c. l., ribes, d., burton, m., & calvert, s. (2013) knowledge infrastructures: intellectual frameworks and research challenges. ann arbor: deep blue. http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/97552. graham, s. & thrift, n. (2007). out of order: understanding repair and maintenance. theory, culture & society, 24(3), 1–25. doi:10.1177/0263276407075954 hey, a., tansley, s. & tolle, k. (eds.) (2009). the fourth paradigm: data-intensive scientific discovery. microsoft research. http://research.microsoft.com/enus/collaboration/fourthparadigm/4th_paradigm_book_complete_lr.pdf jackson, s. j. (2013). rethinking repair. in t. gillespie, p. j. boczkowski, & k. a. foot (eds.), media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society (pp. 221–239). cambridge, ma: mit press. petroski, h. (1985). to engineer is human: the role of failure in successful design. london: macmillan. star, s. l. (1999). the ethnography of infrastructure. american behavioral scientist, 43(3), 377-391. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 tiidenberg, k., markham, a., schreiber, m., lehmuskallio, a., seppänen, j., häkkinen, j., bechmann, a., fausing, b. (2017, october 18-21). shifts in socially mediated visual cultures: images by/for machines and humans. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. panel: shifts in socially mediated visual cultures: images by/for machines and humans panel consists of papers by: katrin tiidenberg and annette markham aarhus university, school of communication and culture maria schreiber university of vienna, department of sociology asko lehmuskallio, janne seppänen and jukka häkkinen university of tampere, faculty of communication sciences / university of helsinki, medicum, department of psychology and logopedics anja bechmann aarhus university, institute of advanced studies, bent fausing nors, university of copenhagen, media and communication department while “visual turns” have been pointed to before (mitchell 2005), and claims of those are often indicators of moral panics surrounding new technologies, rather than shifts in visual culture, recent scholarship has noticed significant changes in the scope and form of images generated and circulated through automated and non-automated practices. nicholas mirzoeff (2015) goes as far as to say that one of the most notable uses of the internet is to create, send and view images of all kinds; that the global society is emerging as visual; and that networked publics are moving towards more intense forms of visual interaction. in a similar, if somewhat narrower approach, martin hand (2013) has argued, that photography has become ubiquitous in today's world. he means here both the explosive increase in the numbers of images taken, but also the fact that some aspects of photography have become woven into the very “fabric of information technologies and economic, social, political and cultural forms” (hand 2013: 12). he claims that this has resulted in a standardized visual landscape, “where the majority of digital images are ordinary and mass-produced (…) but photos are still meaningfully produced, used and interpreted very differently among social groups and communities of practice” (ibid). in a recent, jarring essay on the role of machine learning and algorithms in visual culture, trevor paglen (2016) astutely notes, that visual culture has changed form by detaching from human eyes and becoming invisible. “the overwhelming majority of images,” paglen writes: “are now made by machines for other machines, with humans rarely in the loop.” this panel brings together five scholars of visuality to engage with the above-mentioned shifts in (socially mediated) visual culture to analyze different visual practices and rhetoric of visuality used by or influencing different networked publics (boyd 2010). in doing so, we follow mirzoeff’s (2015: 68) call: “the interest for us is not in the specific platform but the development of a new visual conversation medium” and the practices, norms and rhetoric surrounding the meanings and implications of that visual conversation. our analyses look at different groups, practices and discourses, but all come back to the central question of how visual culture is enacted, made sense of and regulated in both automated and manual, algorithmic and intimate, professional and vernacular ways. the first two papers in our panel engage with how everyday users experience, enact and understand the properties, affordances and structures of visual social media apps. the first presentation asks how young people, for whom instagram and snapchat are important arbiters of networked visuality, articulate their own visual practices, and how they frame and situate these two visual apps in the flows of their networked lives. the second presentation asks what the visual conversational practices of german snapchatters are, and analyzes snapchat’s distinctive aesthetics and visual affordances. since social media apps are increasingly used to send and view photographs, our third presentation explores one apparent paradox concerning digital photography. it asks whether professional photographers, for whom a conventional understanding of photography is of importance, can distinguish digital photographs from photorealistic computer-generated images by looking at them on a computer screen? their inability to do so has implications for our understandings of digital photography, which our fourth presentation discusses, by stepping outside of human-to-human visual culture and engaging with automated aspects of visual culture. algorithms are constantly tasked with interpreting social media images that carry multiple social functions and meanings for people creating and uploading them. thus this presentation asks how deep learning algorithms used on social media images are used to predict gender of the uploader, and what the potential political, social and ideological implications of such data-driven categorizations are. finally, our fifth presentation zooms out and engages with the current state of networked visuality and internet mediated visual culture. it explores the shifts that visual scholarship has been pointing to, the reason for those changes, and engages with what an image is in the age of the internet. it brings the panel to completion by offering an argument on why images seem so important. references boyd, d. (2010). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in papacharissi, z (ed.). networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites. new york: routlege, 39–58 hand, m. (2013). ubiquitous photography: digital media and society series. cambridge: polity press. mirzoeff, nicholas (2015). how to see the world. penguin books ltd. kindle edition. mitchell, william j 2005. what do pictures want? chicago – london: chicago university press. paglen, trevor 2016. invisible images (your pictures are looking at you). the new inquiry. 8.12.2016. https://thenewinquiry.com/essays/invisible-images-yourpictures-are-looking-at-you/ desirable or accurate? both, of course making sense of snapchat and instagram katrin tiidenberg aarhus university, school of communication and culture annette n markham aarhus university, school of communication and culture this presentation focuses on how young people make sense of their own practices on and with visual social media apps. we take a networked publics (boyd 2010) approach, which means that to understand practices of socially mediated visuality, we need to understand the properties, affordances, and dynamics of visual social media. but affordances always refer to the potential of a given technology; they are socially constructed (hsieh 2012), dependent on actor intentions (majchrzak et al. 2013), or imagined (nagy & neff, 2015). yet, how people make sense of visual apps and their affordances, shapes perceptions, practices and visual culture in the larger sense. snapshot practices have always had multiple functions – they help make memories, create and maintain relationships, and tell stories. socially mediated images have added or scaled up photography’s functions as social currency, for impression management and interaction (van dijck 2008). thus, affordances that are interpreted as fostering sharing (scalability, searchability and duplicability in boyd’s 2010 model) lead to increased relevance of interactivity and relationality in how people make sense of their photographic practices. further, specific platforms and apps have properties and affordances that are made sense of by users in different ways. snapchat, with its ephemeral content and explicit control over audiences is experienced by users as a source of enjoyment (bayer et al, 2016), whereas the affordances that foster attention economy (i.e. hashtagging and unidirectional following) on instagram, make it particularly suitable for strategic impression management and self branding (marwick 2013). given the ubiquity of networked visuals, and their importance in constructing identities, social entities (i.e. families); attributing meaning or value to different categories or phenomena (i.e. what is beautiful, feminine) it is important we understand how visual social media is made sense of by users. material, method, analysis this presentation is part of a larger, collaborative project that analyses how college students make sense of their social media experiences. that project in turn is situated in one author’s ethnographic study, where she trained young people to become ethnographers of their own social media experience. for this presentation we discursively analyzed eight people’s multimodal (video, screen-captures, text narrative) auto-ethnographic reflections (instant reflections, analytical narrative, field notes, interviews). the focus of these reflections, including which apps they explore, are choices made by participants themselves. thus, we analyze how young people, for whom instagram and snpachat are important, make sense of and articulate their visual practices, and how they frame and situate these visual apps in their lives. discussion in the following we present how our participants make sense of instagram and snapchat; how the affordances of both are explicitly and implicitly compared, and how the apps are rhetorically constructed as different yet important in their everyday lives. instagram snapchat posting pictures on social media = posting images on instagram. instagram dominates what participants frame as “posting images on social media”. facebook profile pictures, or snaps are not experienced as such. the first is not framed as a “social media image”, and the second not as “posting”. snapchat is a “communication platform” used with everyone for all kinds of content and emotions. snapchat is framed as choice platform to communicate with friends, family, acquaintances and (potential) lovers, about what the participants are up to, frustrated with, where they are, or anything in between. snapchat has substituted other chatting apps, as well as the camera app. instagram has permeated experiences of socially mediated visuality to the extent where everyday life is viewed through and already created content measured against the lens of “instaworthy.” snapchat is and seems casual. participants frame snapchat as both allowing them to be, but more importantly, making them come across as more relaxed about their self-presentation. there’s nothing “insta” about instagram. posting to instagram is framed as slow, calculated and painstaking. images are chosen and edited based on assumptions about imagined audiences, comparisons to others' content, and preferred aesthetic. snapchat is framed as presenting participants and their lives in a fairly accurate way, but doesn’t have a recognizable aesthetic, thus doesn’t have the benefit of aestheticizing one’s life. instagram is about strangers. our participants have public instagrams, which they acknowledge as reducing their ability to relax their self-presentation, but insta-snapchat. whether exchanging messages with friends or posting to my story, snapchat is framed as a hereandwhich they are reluctant to give up, as they enjoy aspects of the attention economy. “stalking” and “discovering” content by strangers is articulated through a dialectic of inspiration and envy. now activity. conclusion instagram is experienced and construed as an app where participation is effortful, driven by self-imposed rules, and occasionally depressing because of comparison to, and envy of strangers’ beautiful lives. snapchat, in contrast, is experienced and construed as an app that is and seems casual and allows spontaneous, yet relaxed participation. our participant anna writes: instagram lets me portray my life in just the way i like it, how i know others like it, and in a way that is broadly accepted. on instagram i am showing my desired life. however, i know it is not entirely accurate … i think that the identity cues i give via snapchat might be the most accurate, since it’s both content about “the ugly truth,” and about the spectacular and special moments. yet, our participants do not frame either app as expendable. instead, it seems, both are framed as important ways of visually experiencing their everyday lives. why does there seem to be space for both, when facebook, for example, was framed by participants as having completely lost its relevance for visuality? returning to the framework of networked publics, it is worth asking, whether snapchat and instagram can coexist as relevant for the same user, because only one of them is (experienced as) a networked visual public (instagram), while the other (snapchat) might serve as something else. and what will happen as a result of instagram incorporating my story? hjorth and hendry (2015) proposed a transition from first-generation camera-phone practices or networked visuality (emphasizes sharing), to second-generations camera-phone practices or emplaced visuality (emphasizes place-making). perhaps snapchat could be positioned as another transition, a third generation of camera-phone practices for conversational visuality. references: bayer, j.b, ellison, n.b, schoenebeck, s.y., falk, e.b. (2016). sharing the small moments: ephemeral social interaction on snapchat, information, communication & society, 19, 7, 956-977. boyd, d. (2010). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in papacharissi, z (ed.). networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites. new york: routlege, 39–58 hjorth, l., & hendry, n. (2015). a snapshot of social media : camera phone practices. hsieh, y.p (2012). online social networking skills: the social affordances approach to digital inequality. first monday, 17, 4. majchrzak, a.; faraj, s.; kane, g.c; azad, b (2013). the contradictory influence of social media affordances on online communal knowledge sharing. journal of computer-mediated communication, 19, 1, 38–55. nagy, p., & neff, g. (2015). imagined affordance: reconstructing a keyword for communication theory. social media + society, 1(2), 1–9. van dijck, j. (2008). digital photography: communication, identity, memory. visual communication, 7, 57–76.
 filtered faces an investigation of snapchat’s aesthetic affordances maria schreiber university of vienna, department of sociology ever since snapchat’s release in 2011, the number of the app’s users is constantly growing. the platform tripled its number of daily active users from 50 m to 150 m from march 2014 to june 2016. it is the preferred social network of teens( in the us, and also hugely popular among this age group in ireland, sweden, belgium, canada and the uk (statista 2016). fair to say, it ‘hit a nerve’ (at least a western nerve) but which nerve? i would argue, that snapchat as a platform and medium accelerates our understanding of visual media as being conversational and communicative. visual media have actually always been communicative in a symbolic-interactionist-sense, but we rarely had the chance to immediately ‘talk back’ in visual ways to a renaissance painting or a family photo album. with the penetration of smartphones and their mobile networked cameras, visual communication became an everyday cultural technique. these visual conversational practices are also entangled with the structures and affordances of apps like facebook, instagram, whatsapp, vine, prisma, hipstamatic, eyeem, vsco, etc that amplified these practices (some more successfully than others). visual communication is performed both in front of the camera with our bodies and facial expressions but also on the display, by editing and filtering these bodily expressions. to understand the technical and aesthetic affordances of snapchat, it is crucial to take both levels of hardware and software into account. inspired by recent methodic approaches (mcveigh-schultz & baym 2015; schrock 2015; hutchby 2014), this paper takes a closer look at the structural implications and communicative environments that snapchat affords, with specific emphasis on visual and aesthetic conventions. software co-constructs processes of editing, distribution, sharing, affirmation, etc. (gillespie 2010; kitchin und dodge 2011). avoiding any techno-deterministic causal explanations and emphasizing the visuality of practices, i am using belting’s triadic model of the interrelation of body-medium-image (belting 2005) as frame of analysis. snapchat as medium and software is always understood as connected to the operating body and generated image. it seems particularly interesting how visual conversational practices play out aesthetically, as this visual layer is seldom investigated more closely. as snapchat always was and still is a mobile-only platform, its affordances are closely related to the mobility and ubiquity of the hardware (hand 2012), usually a smartphone. this device allows you to be constantly connected. through flat rate data plans, visual mobile communication became an affordable everyday practice (in western europe), not something elitist or extravagant (only for brief period). there are usually two cameras than can be used on a smartphone, the front-camera and the back camera. when opening snapchat on your phone, the display first shows the little white ghost on a yellow background and then immediately shows you what is facing your front camera. which is normally: your face. the app is designed to be used while you hold your phone upright, which means pictures and videos are generated in a portrait format. the portrait format is, in the truest sense of the word, a format for portraits, usually of human faces (belting 2013). the face is the starting point of visual conversational practice on snapchat. the face has always been the most successful body part for communicating and showing ourselves in non-technically-mediated interactions, featuring a nearly endless and fine-tuned repertoire of possible expressions. recent research on the ‚selfie’ as multifaceted visual genre (tiidenberg und gómez-cruz 2015; warfield et al. 2016; senft und baym 2015) affirms the importance of embodied expressions for communication. what is crucial for analyzing selfies in general and snapchat in particular is to take into account the malleability of the digital photo (hand 2012): digital photos are actually accumulations of pixels that appear to us as pictures. they can be edited, transformed and altered. there is still a „practical ontological realism“ (hand 2012) ascribed to digital photos, and an especially snapchat seems to be particularly authentic (this is also discussed and confirmed by the previous paper in this panel). snapchat introduced some new visual conventions or ways of showing, regarding format (portrait), filters, bitmoji, etc. that are very different from what instagram and youtube allows users to do visually. the photo (or video) becomes the canvas for possible visual work: you can ‚paint’ on the photo in different colors with your finger; add as many stickers (from a huge range of different styles and categories) as you want, add location and time information, etc. many of these editing styles seem similar to earlier collage/assemblage techniques of scrapbooking (good 2013). in my paper, i will especially focus on the introduction of ‚selfie lenses’, which was a huge success and important boost for snapchat’s popularity. lenses allow users to augment, decorate or distort their faces (and voices) with a broad variety of things – animal ears, make-ups, hair wreaths, famous people. the app provides a repertoire of masks, that is dynamic and easy-to-use. the analysis of the aesthetic affordances that are provided by the smartphone as hardware and snapchat as software was accompanied by a close reading and visual analysis of three german ‚snapchatters’ (laura falafel, yugorette, simon desue) and their stories. they build specific personae around specific lenses, acting out different personalities in their snapchat stories. for example an ‘ugly’ younger version of laura falafel wears braces, lives with her mom and has a weird accent. based on these condensed performances, ‘selfie lenses’ can be interpreted as playful practice of digital masking. while this practice clearly has old analogue predecessors, playful masking is translated, amplified but also standardized in snapchat’s digitally networked structures. based on these findings and connecting to the other contributions in this panel, questions of authenticity in digital photographic practices have to be understood as strongly linked to questions of truthfulness in relation to identities. references belting, h. (2013). faces; eine geschichte des gesichts. münchen: beck. belting, h. (2005). image , medium , body : a new approach to iconology. critical inquiry 31: 302–319. burri, r. v. (2012). visual rationalities: towards a sociology of images. current sociology 60: 45–60. gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of ‘platforms’. new media & society 12: 347–364. good, k. d. (2013). from scrapbook to facebook: a history of personal media assemblage and archives. new media & society 15: 557–573. hand, m. (2012). ubiquitous photography. cambridge: polity press. hutchby, i. (2014). communicative affordances and participation frameworks in mediated interaction. journal of pragmatics 72: 86–89. kitchin, r., dodge, m. (2011). code/space. software and everyday life. mit press. mcveigh-schultz, j., baym, n.k. (2015). thinking of you: vernacular affordance in the context of the microsocial relationship app, couple. social media + society 1. schrock, a. r. (2015). communicative affordances of mobile media : portability , availability , locatability , and multimediality. international journal of communication 9: 1229–1246. senft, t.m., baym, n.k. (2015). what does the selfie say ? investigating a global phenomenon introduction. international journal of communication 9: 1588–1606. statista. 2016. snapchat statista dossier, study id 26377. tiidenberg, k., gómez-cruz, e. (2015). selfies, image and the re-making of the body. body & society 1–26. warfield, k, cambre, m.c., abidin, c. (2016). introduction to the social media + society special issue on selfies: me-diated inter-faces. social media + society 2. do you know if you’re looking at a photo shot with a camera, or at a photorealistic computer-generated image? a case study with professional photographers and photo-editors full article accepted to visual communication, pre-print available at http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:uta-201708162290 lehmuskallio, asko; häkkinen, jukka & seppänen, janne (accepted). photorealistic computer-generated images are difficult to distinguish from digital photographs: a case study with professional photographers and photo-editors." asko lehmuskallio university of tampere, faculty of communication sciences janne seppänen university of tampere, faculty of communication sciences jukka häkkinen university of helsinki, medicum, department of psychology and logopedics with digitization of news work, including increasing reliance on near-real time connections to the internet, questions of authenticity of journalistic images have resurfaced. can we trust images shown to us in networked publics? or the images that we ourselves forward on social media for others to see? in order to counter ’pictorial fraud,’ press photographers need to adhere to strict guidelines in how photographs are shot, edited and published, while pictures published may be widely digitally circulated (gursel 2016). in recent years, photographers have been fired due to removing or adding content to images, pulitzer-prize winning narciso contreras being only one famous example among many. he had retouched a photo of a fighter in syria by removing from it the video camera of a colleague before sending the picture to the associated press. the discipline asked for in press photography concerns particularly photographic processes, that should leave decipherable traces in the images taken for, and published by, news media. of particular concern in published guidelines are the technical characteristics of the photographs published. has the picture been staged or reenacted? has content been removed or added? surprisingly, these guidelines pay little attention to the increasing use of photorealistic computer-generated imagery, that is increasingly found in various areas of visual communication, be it in films, games, advertisements, or on social media. when creating computer-generated imagery, render software is used to create visualizations that have not been captured with a camera. while photojournalistic practice focuses on uses of digital photo-editing, the software used to render images already allow for creating photorealistic visualizations that may be difficult to distinguish from photographs. the at times heated discussions regarding uses of digital photography within press photography, and recent developments within computer-generated imagery point toward a seeming paradox in our understandings of photography. the images we see as photographs, might not contain any trace of an event outside of the photographic technology. we approach this apparent paradox by focusing on one detail that is of importance within these discussions: can professional photographers, for whom a conventional understanding of photography is of importance for their professional practice, distinguish digital photographs from photorealistic computer-generated images by looking at them on a computer screen? the rationale for the question is evident: if computational techniques for photorealistic image rendering are indeed so advanced that professional viewers cannot distinguish them from photos taken with a camera, our understanding of the digital photographic image, and of its relations have to be reassessed. this is particularly so, since many professional photographers still hold that it is utterly important to be able to make a distinction between strongly edited digital photographs – let alone purely computergenerated pictures – and photographic images taken according to a conventional understanding (e.g. mäenpää 2014; solaroli 2015). therefore we showed 20 professional photographers and photo-editors 37 pictures on a computer screen and asked them to look at each picture and answer a simple question: “do you think the picture shown is a photograph or is it computer-generated?” due to their expertise, these people should be particularly suited in making a correct distinction, particularly since the majority of respondents were acclaimed professionals working in news and press photography. to make the task somewhat more interesting, we did not choose just any pictures, but border cases. the computer-generated-images we chose looked very much like actual photographs taken with a camera, whereas some of the pictures recorded with a camera contained elements that an untrained eye might take to result from render engines. after each decision we asked the research participants to justify their choices in writing, as well as later to answer to questions in a short interview. this material was analyzed by paying special attention to two aspects: 1) are the studied able to make a correct distinction between photographs and computer-generated images?, and 2) what knowledge of photography do they rely on when making their distinctions both in writing and the latter interview? our results show clearly that the people we studied are unable to distinguish correctly between digital photographs and photorealistic computer-generated images. since they, somewhat paradoxically, continued to hold to a conventional understanding of photography, (visible in the ways in which they described pictures they assumed to be photographs), we pay attention to this contrariness by turning to related literature on the digitization of photography in general and discussions surrounding their use in photojournalism in particular. while a conventional understanding of photography follows the idea that at the time a photographic image is taken something outside of the camera is actually having an effect on both the material surface of photographic film and, after developing and printing, to the photographic pictures created, many scholars continue to argue that digitalization has undermined the causal connection between a pre-photographic reality and the photographic image (e.g. rubinstein and sluis 2013). instead of claiming an ontological break per se between images created with analogue and digital cameras, we suggest that the computational in digital photography should be assessed from a clearer foundation, that takes both technical development and the roles of communities of practice in directing the use of specific digital photographs into account. if digital photographs are to serve as records of events that really happened, their particular purity has to be painstakingly created, every time anew. the capture, development, and visualization of a photographic trace has to be carefully manipulated in order to assure its authenticity (schröter 2011). the authentic trace is an accomplishment assured by codes of conduct, education, and peer review in particular communities. our understandings of particular photographs are hence tied to the communities of practice in which they are used, and in this context it is seldom a technology alone that is taken as a guarantee for authenticity. as both our findings and the related work among photojournalists show, the mechanisms of authentication are difficult to keep pure. references gursel, z.d. (2016). image brokers: visualizing world news in the age of digital circulation. berkeley: univ of california press. mäenpää, j. (2014). rethinking photojournalism: the changing work practices and professionalism of photojournalists in the digital age. nordicom review 35, 2, 91–104. rubinstein d., sluis k. (2013). the digital image in photographic culture: algorithmic photography and the crisis of representation. in: lister m (ed) the photographic image in digital culture. second edition, kindle. new york/london: routledge. schröter, j. (2011). analogue/digital. referentiality and intermediality. kunstlicht, 32, 3, 50–57. solaroli, m. (2015). toward a new visual culture of the news: professional photojournalism, digital post-production, and the symbolic struggle for distinction. digital journalism 3, 4, 513–532. the algorithmic gaze: predicting uploader’s gender based on private social media images anja bechmann aarhus university, institute of advanced studies introduction vast amounts of images are uploaded every minute around the world to social media platforms and companies have long had an interest in mining these, but only recently deep learning algorithms are said to perform convincingly in the interpretation of images (vanrullen, 2017). how do algorithms interpret social media images, how is this different than human perception and interpretation, and focusing on equality what are the consequences of using algorithmic predictions to act or decide in a data-driven society? these are the driving questions in this paper. to answer these questions, i will use the case of internet profiling and train an algorithm to predict gender of the uploader from the uploaded social media images. the reason for choosing this case as an example of the algorithmic gaze is that neural networks are the most advanced types of machine learning. social media images are chosen because, they are increasingly interpreted through algorithms with the purpose of presenting images in the feed or predicting something about the uploader that can increase revenue. theoretical framework: images and the algorithmic gaze with a starting point in critical algorithmic studies (e.g. gillespie, 2014) the theoretical framework for the paper will consist of three building blocks: literature of algorithmic reasoning with a focus on image processing (e.g. klette, 2014), human reasoning with a focus on image interpretation (e.g. barthes, 1967; rose, 2000; fodor & pylyshyn, 2015), and feminist science and technology studies (e.g. star, 1991) with a focus on outliers and inequality (e.g. sweeney, 2013). vision algorithms can be divided into supervised (top down deductive approach) and unsupervised learning (bottom up inductive approach). in comparison to human interpretations the unsupervised algorithm does not have any prior understanding of how gender differentiate on picture uploads, it will only know the patterns that it can find in the pictures that we put forward. therefore, it is interesting to detect whether classical discriminating understandings of female versus male stereotypes are reproduced in the outliers. this will be analyzed by focusing on stereotypic interpretations in the false negatives. methodology: dataset and training setup through the lens of audit studies (e.g. sandvig, 2014) the paper will report on a case study from our lab where we try to predict gender (interpreted binary to mirror a commercial lens) from a representative dataset of 1,000 danes and their total amount of self-uploaded private and public facebook images; a total of 350,000 images. we have chosen to look at denmark because the country has one of the highest penetration rates of facebook in the world, thus training on this dataset will prevent potential age overfitting. in order to predict the gender, we will build and train an algorithm based on three widely used neural networks in our lab and test the performance of these algorithm, one including and one excluding profile pictures (that may reveal gender most effectively). the dataset then will look like this: female male individuals in total 511 456 individuals with at least one non-profile image (= selected group) 486 397 maximum non-profile images per individual in selected group 13125 8241 minimum non-profile images per individual in selected group 1 1 median non-profile images per individual in selected group 150 52 by using metadata, we will be able to improve the prediction of the uploader’s gender. however, we will not include metadata in the prediction to understand how accurate predictions this will provide when following new guidelines for privacy by design (eu directive). in this way, we try to increase the difficulty in the prediction as an extreme case where we only focus on the images uploaded and the goal is to be able to predict gender from one uploaded facebook picture (see also author, in preparation for the algorithmic contribution). findings when we test the three algorithms with profile pictures we get the following performance measures: neural network accuracy alexnet 66.9 % vgg 66.5% googlenet 65.7% there is no sign of overfitting (see also author, in preparation), but the performance is not overly enthusiastic. now we report on first iteration with the use of alexnet (more iterations will be finished at the time of the conference). we remove all the profile pictures from the dataset and take a random subset of the total dataset to balance the number of females and males. we also adjust for the much higher number of images uploaded by females. this provides us with the following accuracies: accuracy (overall): 55.33% accuracy (female): 57.28% accuracy (male): 52.49% the illustration show the test set as a function of the training iteration. accuracy increases in the beginning, but quickly reach a plateau. the network is only marginally better to predict than random. when we initially look at the false negatives, does the pictures deviate from the stereotypical understanding of male and female lifestyles and thereby create an unequal and discriminating understanding of females and males? there are more baby pictures in the male false negative category than in the male true positives and there are more alcoholic beverages in female false negatives than in female true positives. this can indicate that the algorithm does tend to discriminate according to stereotypical understandings of gender construction. however, these are very preliminary results and we need to scrutinize this further in future iterations. discussion and conclusion the algorithmic results show signs of discrimination by reproducing some stereotypical understandings of male and females, because the data that participants upload are seemingly stereotypic. what is the consequences when using algorithmic predictions to act or decide in a data-driven society when we see stereotypic predictions of gender? gender is often interpreted binary as this study is an example of. this in turn suppress other gender forms. the reproduction of gender stereotypes one can claim is caused by user data thereby reflecting the society historically or at a given time. however, when actions and decisions are built on top of such stereotypic predictions this will have profound preservative effects and stigmatizing individuals who tries to move away from such stereotypes. one solution would be to train the algorithm to adjust for certain types of stereotypic images, but developers will need to be governed by general policies and ethics beforehand in order not to enforce their own individual politics. references author, in preparation barthes, r. (1967). image, music, text, new york: hill and wang. fodor, j & pylyshyn, z.w. (2015). minds without meanings: an essay on the content of concepts, cambridge; ma: mit press. gillespie, t. (2014). the relevance of algorithms, in media technologies, cambridge, ma: mit press. klette, r. (2014). concise computer vision, springer. rose, g. (2007). visual methodologies: an introduction to interpretation of visual materials, london: sage. sandvig, c., hamilton, k., karahalios, k., & langbort, c. (2014). auditing algorithms: research methods for detecting discrimination on internet platforms, ica, seattle, wa, usa. star, s. l. (1991). power, technology and the phenomenology of conventions: on being allergic to onions, in law, j (ed.) a sociology of monsters, london: routledge. sweeney l. (2013). discrimination in online ad delivery. communications of the acm, 56, 5, 44-54. vanrullen, r. (2017). perception science in the age of deep neural networks, frontiers in psychology, 8, 142. picture oneself into being bent fausing nors, university of copenhagen, media and communication department the visual turn has been introduced and discussed since around 2000, as an opposition to the linguistic turn around 1900. even though the internet was still approached as a media of words. since then social media and the internet turned more and more towards the visuals: instagram, pinterest, facebook’s timeline, snapchat, and pokémon go. in 2015 media scholar, nicholas mirzoeff pointed out that the most notable uses of the internet is to create, send and view images of all kinds. three matters will be investigated in my presentation, 1) why does this change occur, 2) what is an image – and what is an image in the age of the internet, and 3) what is the relation between the images and the subject at the screen. or to rephrase the last: why are the images so important? i will investigate these three matters via analysis of two tv-commercials for smartphones from 2007 and 2016. the analysis will investigate images and bodies, images as affect, images and trauma in the tv-commercials through the following theoretical approaches: the image and body the body creates the images. reality has been imaged and shaped, through our bodies and senses. we cannot comprehend it, if we do not shape it into images, which we can sense and tell others about. reality is too much to take in directly; therefore, we must ritualize it and make it into images. it can only be transmitted and comprehended through all the different kinds of images we constantly create of it through the body – internal, external, concrete, abstract, as sounds, as things we taste and touch, as affects etc. the sensoric images or perceptual images, are created and put together almost like pixels by all the senses of the body. we pick up the world and form it through the images we shape and seek out. we go out into the world with our images and the world enters us through its images. the body is the meeting point and intermediate link for the images, which come to and from us. we are not only sensing subjects; we are constantly symbolizing and getting hold of our sense datum through images. to see and sense is in itself a way of formulating. it is a need so great that we cannot stop it. the images must come out – in dreams, in concrete pictures, constructed or not, in phantasms, in sound images, in the metaphors of words, in bodily expressions, in sensations of textures, and in synesthetic sensing. the world is perceived from the inside through the body and we have the possibility to look at it from the outside through the images, which are made from this material. these images are made from our subjective point of view through the visuals and the affects from the outside world, and the increasingly significant visuals on the internet and the social media. the images need an intersubjective form to be able to communicate with others. in that way, new visual conversation medias are created. image and affect in the beginning was the emotion, the affect, julia kristeva claims: "in the beginning was the word, says the genesis. no! in the beginning was the affect. the word came later." the language came afterwards, because it is the response to and is the processing of an affective world. the words are a tool that apparently seems to protect against the disturbing affective world. with the reservation apparently i refer to kristeva's own thesis that the words are not strong or good enough to explain and to keep the emotional from life. therefore, we still ritualize the strong affective emotionality through religion, mass culture, practices, research and images. we can only understand in detours or the long way around. the image thus function in two ways. first, as a phenomenon, an object that starts as subjective affect. the affect is then secondly expressed via intersubjective images such as customs, rituals, morality, science, religion and concrete images, because the language is not sufficient to keep the emotion at a distance or to express it. through these interpretations, we become hermeneutics of phenomena and passions. the subjective affections are thus also intersubjective and objectified. image and trauma many children’s games, fairy tales, and electronic games deal with the possibility of being eliminated from the world or losing control of reality. the primitive pains and the unthinkable anxiety, as donald w. winnicott calls them, are the basis of children’s games and of adults’ heritage of imagination. these pains and anxieties come from stories and conceptions about falling to pieces, not having any contact with the body, losing one’s sense of orientation, falling continuously, not continuing to exist, being in total isolation because there is nobody to be in touch with – to connect with. winnicott uses the term disconnection about the young child’s movement into the open space away from the illusion of connection and it is linked to the terms of transitional object and transitional experience concerning the process where the child finds a new object to relate to after its mother. the aesthetics of commodities is an extension of this connection and transitional experience. disconnection creates a basis for archaic as well as present anxieties. the anxieties and their configurations are omnipresent in children and adults. they are also important for tv commercials. our memory is closely associated with visualization and so are traumas. the trauma has its origins in an event, which has been hidden. one could say that the trauma insists on a past, which has never been made present, i.e. visible. therefore, it is very important to visualize the images of trauma. it always takes two traumas to create a trauma: the hidden trauma and its substituting visualization. the images we are back at the point of departure of this explanation: it is the body that creates the images. reality has been imaged and shaped, one might say, through our bodies and senses. we cannot comprehend it if we do not shape it into images, which we can sense and tell about. the tv commercials teach through their images about digital technologies, and how we shall live with and communicate about these technologies. references boyd, d. (2007). “why youth heart social network sites: the role of networked publics in teenage social life” harvard. bergson, h 1991 (1895). matter and memory. new york: zone books damasio, a. r. (2000).the feeling of what happens: body and emotion in the making of consciousness, new york/london. fausing, b (2013). see for your selfie. selfies and the search for recognition, k-forum june. fausing, b. (2015). self-media. the self, the face, the mirror, the media and the selfie,” triade, 3,1, rio de janeiro. fausing, b. (2017). emotion in motion. on images and affect london. kristeva, j. (1982). powers of horror new york. mirzoeff, n. (2015). how we see the world, london: penguin books. strangelove, m. (2010). watching youtube: extraordinary videos by ordinary people toronto: university of toronto press aoir2018-final-version-of-paper-christian-ritter selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): ritter, c. (2018, october 10-13). distributing services through the cloud infrastructure: the case of a norwegian software firm. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. distributing services through the cloud infrastructure: the case of a norwegian software firm christian s. ritter norwegian university of science and technology introduction this paper outlines an ethnographic approach to the study of cloud infrastructures. analyzing evidence from ethnographic fieldwork in a norwegian software firm, i examine how the everyday practices of programmers developing industrial software configure socio-technical assemblages within the global oil and gas industry. the norwegian software firm delivers business intelligence software to oil and gas corporations. generating insightful dashboards, the software assists engineers in their decision-making on technical equipment and operational risks. the main purpose of this paper is to advance the understanding of the dynamic interplay between human and non-human actors in socio-technical assemblages. i initially negotiated access to field sites and ethnographic data by attending industry events. however, a three-month secondment in the firm under investigation was invaluable for the collection of data since i was granted access to cloud-based software, developer platforms, and internal meetings. the data set is comprised of observation records from the secondment, 30 indepth interviews with employees, event organizers, and industry experts, as well as organizational materials, including company blogs, reports on industry events and internal documents. based on an extensive assessment of the evidence collected, i argue that programmers of the industrial software embody the capacity to scale sociotechnical assemblages by building application programming interfaces (apis) that control the access for communities of practice to data stored in the cloud infrastructure. material worlds within cloud infrastructures the conceptual frame that gives direction to this study combines a materialistic take on internet infrastructures with a renewed understanding of socio-technical assemblages. infrastructures can be seen as built networks that facilitate the flows of goods, services, people, or ideas and allow for symbolic exchange over space (e.g. larkin 2013). the sociality and everyday practices occurring within internet infrastructures are embedded in material worlds, including complex orders and relations among artefacts themselves and their relationships to persons (horst & miller, 2012). digital infrastructures are material entities in the sense that they carry the symbolic meanings persons exchange through the internet. symbolic meanings are actualized through the material worlds of artefacts. the cloud infrastructure constitutes socio-technical assemblages which are grounded in material worlds, including data centers, open office spaces, computer screens, and the affordances of interfaces. the software of the firm under investigation generates one of these socio-technical assemblages in which various professional groups can meaningfully interact. assemblages are basically configurations of the relations between parts and wholes. they involve multiple collections of persons and artefacts. consisting of various components, socio-technical assemblages are enacted through everyday practices tied to technological configurations (dodson 2014). the main components of the socio-technical assemblage that the software under investigation generates are source code, cloud technologies, digital services, and interfaces. the source code is the initial version of a software written by a human (lip 2018). cloud service providers, such as amazon web services and microsoft azure, provide on-demand services that enable programmers to store large-sized databases and to build software within the cloud infrastructures. digital services, such as access to databases and dashboards showing business insights, circulate through the sociotechnical assemblage. the interface is a central component of cloud infrastructures. interfaces can be broadly defined as shared boundaries cross which symbolic meanings can be exchanged. they serve as meeting points where components of systems interact. furthermore, interfaces are autonomous zones of activities and points of transition between different mediatic layers within a nested system (galloway 2013). ethnographic researchers can observe everyday practices in interfaces to explore relations among humans and between humans and artefacts. inside a socio-technical assemblage this investigation identifies various actors in the socio-technical assemblage that the software under investigation generates. shadowing the work routines of consultants and programmers in the norwegian software firm, i traced the circulation of digital services within the socio-technical assemblage. two ethnographic cases illustrate how digital services are distributed through the cloud infrastructures. both cases describe interfaces as crucial components of the socio-technical assemblage. these artefacts of the assemblage are actors with substantial agency. the first case traces an ‘issue’ through various interfaces of the cloud infrastructure. a text field in a popup window displayed the wrong message, which was spotted on a computer screen in houston, usa. the users of the software reported this bug to a consultant during a support call. the consultant added an ‘issue’ describing the flaw in the graphical user interface (gui) to the backlog of the developer platform. in a grooming session, which was held in the following week, the product owner and scrum master prioritized the issues that needed to be completed prior to the next release. the flaw identified in houston was among the urgent issues. after the release of the new version of the software, the houston-based users could experience the newly designed affordances of the software on their computer screen. the observable everyday practices of human actors, such as consultants and software users, indicate that the cloud infrastructure enables a transnational built network connecting the transnationally dispersed material worlds of office spaces. the second case that illustrates the circulation of digital services through cloud infrastructures deals with the application programming interfaces (apis) of the software. an employee of a client company requested access to a database of the software during a further support call with a consultant. after a discussion between the consultant and a programmer in an open office of the firm, the client was provided with an access key and could call the api to retrieve data about the technical equipment used for the extraction of oil and gas. the analysis of the access rights to databases of the software reveals the programmed hierarchy that structures who can access and analyze the data for specific pieces of equipment, specific operators, or the entire industry. both cases indicate that interfaces play a central role in the circulation of digital services and the workflows of software development. conclusion cloud infrastructures make the collaboration among firms in different regions possible. the programmers of the cloud-based software steer flows of business insights through a socio-technical assemblage by building apis that include and exclude members in accordance with subscription rates to digital services. based on the evidence studied, i suggest that programmers can scale the socio-technical assemblage by writing scripts that organize the membership hierarchies within the apis of industrial software. in addition to the agency that programmers exert, the circulation of the digital service through the socio-technical assemblage is configured by the affordances of various artefacts. for example, cloud services and backlogs structure the everyday practices of software development. the findings of the study imply that cloud technologies enable new infrastructures connecting human and non-human actors in ever-greater transnational settings. references dodson, j. (2013). suburbia under an energy transition: a socio-technical perspective. urban studies 51(7), 1487-1505. galloway, a. (2013). the interface effect. malden, ma: polity. horst, h. & miller, d. (2012). the digital and the human: a prospectus for digital anthropology. in horst, h. & miller, d. (ed.), digital anthropology. (pp. 3-38). london and new york: berg. larkin, b. (2013). the politics and poetics of infrastructure. annual review of anthropology 42(1), 327-343. the linux information project (2018). source code definition. http://www.linfo.org/source_code.html. accessed: 28/09/2018. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): kotliar, d., ribak, r., ahmed, s., roberge, j., senneville, m. (2020, october). algorithmic production beyond silicon valley. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. algorithmic production beyond silicon valley dan m. kotliar (organizer) the hebrew university of jerusalem and stanford university rivka ribak university of haifa shazeda ahmed uc berkley jonathan roberge institut national de la recherche scientifique (inrs) marius senneville institut national de la recherche scientifique (inrs) the last decade has seen a proliferation of research on algorithms. algorithms were shown to influence the content we see online (gillespie 2018), our chances of getting a job or a loan (pasquale 2013), our relationships with our friends, colleagues or bosses (bucher 2018), and even how we express and understand ourselves (turow and couldry 2018). algorithms were also shown to affect our identities (cheney-lippold 2017), our choices (yeung 2017), and our autonomy (rouvroy 2013), and to mirror, and at times exacerbate social inequalities (noble 2018; benjamin 2019; buolamwini and gebru 2018; eubanks 2018). at the same time, scholars have begun to examine the ties between algorithms and culture (seaver 2017; christin 2018; ribak 2019; seyfert and roberge 2016), describing algorithms as products of complex socioalgorithmic assemblages (gillespie 2016, 24), with often very local socio-technical histories (kitchin 2017, 16; seaver 2017). however, while the power of algorithms is becoming unmistakable, the spatial trajectories through which algorithms operate, and the specific socio-cultural contexts in which they arise have been largely overlooked. that is, research overwhelmingly focuses on american companies (and particularly, on a handful of silicon valley companies) and on the effects their algorithms have on euro-american users. but algorithms are in fact being developed in various geographical locations, and they are being used in highly diverse socio-cultural contexts. moreover, companies, engineers, and even algorithms themselves often move from one geographic location to the next. that is, research on algorithms tends to disregard the heterogeneous contexts in which algorithms arise, the spatial aspects of algorithmic production, and the effects various cultural settings have on the production of algorithmic systems. focusing on case studies from china, israel, and canada, we will ask: how do developers view information privacy at the intersection of local and global flows of ideas? how cultural identities and cross-cultural encounters construct notions of privacy? how is algorithmic bias and discrimination understood and acted upon in china? what symbolical and material resources were invested in making canada’s ai hubs? and how do israeli tech companies use their algorithms to overlook culture and profile their “others”? focusing on algorithmic production across three continents, this panel offers to think beyond the paradigm of silicon valley, and to aim towards a more nuanced, culturally sensitive approach to the study algorithms. discussant: angele christin, stanford university references benjamin, ruha. 2019. race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. new york, ny: john wiley & sons. bucher, taina. 2018. if...then: algorithmic power and politics. oxford, uk: oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190493028.001.0001. buolamwini, joy, and timnit gebru. 2018. “gender shades: intersectional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification.” in proceedings of the 1st conference on fairness, accountability and transparency, edited by sorelle a friedler and christo wilson, 81:77–91. proceedings of machine learning research. new york, ny, usa: pmlr. http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a.html. cheney-lippold, john. 2017. we are data: algorithms and the making of our digital selves. new york: nyu press. christin, angèle. 2018. “counting clicks: quantification and variation in web journalism in the united states and france.” american journal of sociology 123 (5): 1382–1415. https://doi.org/10.1086/696137. eubanks, virginia. 2018. automating inequality: how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. new york, ny: st. martin’s press. gillespie, tarleton. 2016. “algorithm.” in digital keywords: a vocabulary of information society and culture, edited by benjamin peters, 18–30. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. ———. 2018. custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. new haven, ct: yale university press. kitchin, rob. 2017. “thinking critically about and researching algorithms.” information, communication & society 20 (1): 14–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154087. noble, safiya u. 2018. algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york: nyu press. pasquale, frank. 2013. “the emperor ’s new codes: reputation and search algorithms in the finance sector.” in governing algorithms conference, 1–86. new york. ribak, rivka. 2019. “translating privacy: developer cultures in the global world of practice.” information, communication & society 22 (6): 838–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1577475. rouvroy, antoinette. 2013. “the end(s) of critique : data-behaviourism vs. dueprocess.” in privacy, due process and the computational turn: the philosophy of law meets the philosophy of technology, edited by m hildebrandt and k de vries, 143–69. new york: routledge. seaver, nick. 2017. “algorithms as culture: some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems.” big data & society 4 (2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717738104. seyfert, robert, and jonathan roberge. 2016. “what are algorithmic cultures?” in algorithmic cultures: essays on meaning, performance and new technologies, edited by robert seyfert and jonathan roberge, 1–26. new york: routledge. turow, joseph, and nick couldry. 2018. “media as data extraction: towards a new map of a transformed communications field.” journal of communication 68 (2): 415–23. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqx011. yeung, karen. 2017. “‘hypernudge’: big data as a mode of regulation by design.” information, communication & society 20 (1): 118–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1186713. materializing privacy in local and global developer communities rivka ribak university of haifa contemporary ai systems execute value-based decisions (zarsky, 2016) which must be attentive to national and transnational laws and regulations, and sensitive to cultural norms and values (jafarinaimi, 2018). this poses a challenge to the global companies that develop them – specifically, how privacy is to be designed when it is a contested and contextual concept, ridden by cultural variation (mulligan, koopman & doty, 2016; nissenbaum, 2004). developers in these companies are assigned with interpreting global architectures into vernacular interfaces, and local practices into worldwide platforms and infrastructures. as inadvertent cultural producers (neff, 2012), their daily work involves negotiating tensions between local and global, ethical and technical ideas and values. yet ideas and values are not easily nor transparently inscribed into cultural products; so rather than copy and paste, the developers translate them (frenkel, 2005; latour, 1987). the challenges to privacy that they identify, and the solutions they develop, both mediate and are mediated by the web of local and global interests and practices of which they are a part. this view of it workers as socio-technical mediators appears to inform the recent surge in research on developers' values and their perceptions of privacy. overall, these studies suggest that developers do not prioritize privacy, and are not critical or reflective about the privacy implications of their work. for instance, in interviews with workers in facebook and google, jørgensen (2018) identifies “a disconnect between the internal discourse on freedom of expression and privacy at google and facebook, and external concerns relating to these issues” (p. 341); his interviewees believe that privacy and freedom of expression are cherished by their companies, and are to be protected from government threats. while such studies shed light on developers' perceptions and values, we know surprisingly little about these developers and their work environments. the groundbreaking work of bamberger and mulligan (2013) constitutes an exception in localizing the production of privacy. through interviews with corporate privacy leaders in the us, germany, france and spain, bamberger and mulligan learn about the ways in which companies’ chief privacy officers translate legal and regulatory discourse to the company and supervise its implementation in company risk management and product development. studies of cross-cultural encounters in high-tech companies shed light on two complementary moves: encounters both accentuate cultural identities and enhance cultural flows. such tensions appear even more pronounced in imbalanced encounters between workers hailing from developed and developing economies – e.g. a visit of pakistani software developers to the partnering book publishing company in denmark (zahedi & babar, 2016), designating the outsourced team as an “offshore.” takhteyev's ethnography of software developers in rio de janeiro (2012) highlights flows of ideas and practices between silicon valley and “places that can also be aptly described as ‘not silicon valley’,” where the overwhelming majority of developers’ work (p. 205). takhteyev characterizes a ‘diasporic’ situation of peripheral practitioners, who engage simultaneously in the local mainstream culture and the global culture of the practice. these conceptual threads underlie the following research questions: how do developers view information privacy at the intersection of local and global flows of ideas and practices? how are notions of information privacy implicated in cultural identities, and how crosscultural encounters, in turn, construct notions of privacy? materializing privacy in developer communities in preliminary interviews (ribak, 2019), i probed at the role of cross-cultural encounters in mediating developers' notions of information privacy. as against the construction of developers as a generic occupational category, the analysis highlighted the role of cultural identity in the ways developers conceive of and commodify user information. specifically, the analysis identified four themes that shed light on the intersection of local ideas and practices, cross-cultural encounters, and the production and commodification of users' personal information: (1) the trajectory of the company as it is narrated into a founding myth, and the ways in which changing concepts of privacy are interwoven in its evolution; (2) workers' personal and professional biographies, as narrations of their interests, priorities, and shifting positions within this dynamic matrix; (3) stories about external regulatory forces that impose privacy standards on the one hand and cultural diversity or homogeneity on the other; and (4) observations on how cross-cultural variation and regulation are translated into and intertwined with work practices, rituals and communication formats. the analysis suggests, then, that developers' ecosystems, as multicultural, global environments, are arenas in which local ideas about privacy are negotiated and take shape. in the proposed presentation i analyze additional interviews with developers from diverse cultural backgrounds, asking how peripheries matter, and how ideas materialize in code. in a recent piece, titled “how silicon valley sets time,” judy wajcman (2019) draws on interviews with designers, software engineers and product managers to explore how their economic rationality and efficiency express themselves in the scheduling apps they produce. she explains: “like all artifacts, electronic calendars […] are the result of a series of specific decisions made by particular groups of people at particular times and in particular places. as such, technologies are crystallizations of society: they bear the imprint of the people and the social context in which they develop” (2019, p. 1276). in this spirit, wajcman perceptively describes her interviewees’ hyper-productive culture, and critically observes how their preoccupation with time, as a linear and ownable resource, informs their efforts to quantify and calibrate it and minimize waste. wajcman makes the point that her interviewees are also users of the technology, although of course – as the very pilgrimage to palo alto (an “iconic place” (p. 1286)) suggests – these are not ordinary consumers – or even ordinary producers – of calendars. in the presentation i adopt wajcman's rationale, but attempt to draw production closer to the ground by studying it in “not silicon valley” (takhteyev, 2012). specifically, i expand the breadth and the depth of the exploratory interviews i conducted in order to compare different “not silicon valley” locations in order to make finer distinctions between different peripheral sites. references: bamberger, k. a., & mulligan, d. k. (2013). privacy in europe. george washington law review, 81(5), 1529-1664. frenkel, m. (2005). the politics of translation. organization, 12(2), 275-301. information society and culture (pp. 18-30). princeton university press. jafarinaimi, n. (2018). our bodies in the trolley’s path, or why self-driving cars must *not* be programmed to kill. science, technology, & human values, 43(2), 302-323. john, n. a. (2011). representing the israeli internet. international journal of communication, 5, 1545–1566. jørgensen, r. f. (2018). framing human rights. information, communication & society, 21(3), 340-355. latour, b. (1987). science in action. harvard university press. mulligan, d. k., koopman, c., & doty, n. (2016). privacy is an essentially contested concept. philosophical transactions of the royal society a, 374(2083), 118. neff, g. (2012). venture labor. mit press. nissenbaum, h. (2004). privacy as contextual integrity. washington law review, 79, 119157. ribak, r. (2019). translating privacy. information, communication & society, 22(6), 838-853. takhteyev, y. (2012). coding places. mit press. wajcman, j. (2019). how silicon valley sets time. new media & society, 21(6), 12721289. zahedi, m., & babar, m. a. (2016). why does site visit matter in global software development. information and software technology, 80, 36-56. zarsky, t. (2016). the trouble with algorithmic decisions. science, technology & human values, 41(1), 118-132. beyond ‘big data swindling’: a literature review of chinese perspectives on algorithmic discrimination shazeda ahmed uc berkley as the understanding that algorithms pervade and shape countless aspects of everyday life has gained consensus in academia and mass media, the corollary realization that they can have discriminatory outcomes has likewise become widely accepted— yet the question of how bias is perceived and responded to outside of north american and western european cultural contexts remains neglected. algorithms can be discriminatory in other geographies, cultures, and languages, which makes understanding the phenomena that people outside of western democracies identify as demonstrative of algorithmic bias valuable in advancing this field of study. china presents a rich site for this type of inquiry. international perceptions of china have coalesced around the image of a technological juggernaut pouring funding into developing artificial intelligence (ai) applications, whose government uses much of this technology to surveil its citizens and curb their freedom of expression, and whose technology industry is now exporting these tools. the prevalence of these narratives has to date obscured fundamental questions of how internal debates on what constitutes inappropriate uses of technology in china are playing out— debates that must be accounted for if conversations about china’s technological development are to evolve. assuming that china’s government and technology firms will seek more control in international tech policy-making processes1 to match the state’s purported status as a global leader in ai development, researchers have an imperative to investigate how issues of algorithmic discrimination are viewed within the country. such studies can explicate the domestic chinese discourse around regulation of algorithmic systems, and contextualize how chinese policymakers might act in international tech policymaking arenas. this paper offers a first step towards building this understanding, in the form of a literature review of mandarin sources spanning academic, tech industry, news media, and policy texts that address algorithmic bias (算法歧视, suànfǎ qíshì). the paper’s core source texts comprise chinese research papers, policy documents, and news articles centered around discussions of terms and concepts in direct translation from english, such as algorithmic discrimination and black box algorithms (黑 箱算法, hēixiāng suànfǎ). the literature review also surfaced new words and phrases that have emerged in china to describe related issues, e.g., the roughly translated “big data swindling” (大数据杀熟, dà shùjù shā shú) to describe price discrimination against frequent users of digital platforms whose massive data profiling capabilities enable companies to exploit users’ differential willingness to pay in china’s mostly oligopolistic 1 gross, anna et al. 2019. chinese tech groups shaping un facial recognition standards. financial times. https://www.ft.com/content/c3555a3c-0d3e-11ea-b2d6-9bf4d1957a67. tech ecosystem.2 how does this range of authors define algorithmic discrimination and identify real-world examples of it in china and beyond? what are the proposed solutions to problems of algorithmic discrimination, and who is tasked with the responsibility of executing them? and finally, do conversations about algorithmic discrimination provide an avenue for discussing sensitive sociopolitical issues in china? certain arguments, examples, and calls to action recur across these sources. examples of algorithmic bias tend to draw from the us context, including frequent references to the racially biased compas pretrial risk and sentencing assessment tool, alongside others such as google’s gender-based discriminatory practices in delivering job advertisements through search and racial biases reproduced in facial recognition systems (ji 2018). more in-depth examples from china include framing price discrimination in e-commerce and ride-hailing apps as a form of algorithmic bias which state media itself recognizes as such (yang and luo 2019, wen 2018), and elements of the supreme people’s court “smart court” (智能法院, zhìnéng fǎyuàn) project to integrate ai into courtrooms across china (sun 2019). still other sources diverge from critiques of ethnic, gender, and consumer discrimination in arguing that china’s algorithmic bias problems stem from a lack of data produced in rural, poor areas of the country (ji 2018). citing state-produced data on the lower number of mobile phone users in these regions, this argument posits that the lack of data from non-metropolitan areas is reflected in digital under-representation of, and ultimately discrimination against, these populations. without directly referencing the literature on “data deserts,” this line of reasoning closely mirrors some of the same conclusions and proposed solutions to that framing of the problem. comparative exercises across the literature are often followed by imperatives to adopt western-style educational and commercial practices. multiple sources gesture to top us universities’ course offerings on ai ethics and the social impacts of ai to suggest that chinese students also require this kind of education in addition to their technical training (liu and chi 2019). this view pairs with the acknowledgment that there is a dearth of scholarly attention to algorithmic discrimination in china (yang and luo 2019). similarly, the identification of major us tech companies that are developing internal ai ethics roles and teams highlights how chinese firms could learn from this precedent (sun 2019), a solution that falls under the more nebulous call for stricter self-regulation (自律, zìlǜ) within companies (yan 2019). tech companies notably make little mention of algorithmic discrimination, or do so superficially as in an “annual trends” report from social media and entertainment company tencent that listed algorithmic discrimination as a trending tech issue of 2019 alongside net neutrality. 2 the literal translation of this term would be more akin to the clunky “big data-enabled killing through familiarity,” where the latter portion of the phrase, 杀熟 (shā shú), is a colloquialism used to describe taking advantage of someone one is personally close to in order to benefit oneself, e.g., when seeking employment. while this phrase tends to describe interactions with relatives and friends, when it is used in conjunction with big data the “familiarity” comes from the ways in which companies’ massive datasets culled from their customers’ online activity enables them to understand those individuals’ behaviors and exploit or manipulate them into paying a premium for goods and services. elsewhere, chinese legal scholars compare us anti-discrimination law to what they see as its weaker chinese counterpart in order to make the case that the latter is illequipped to manage algorithmic discrimination and must therefore be reformed.3 calls for revision of existing data protection laws to include language on algorithmic bias remain unmet (cui 2019).4 both types of policy revision recommendations avert the suggestion of creating entirely separate laws around the use of algorithmic systems more generally, or drafting of sector-specific regulations. the growing discourse on algorithmic discrimination in china is itself a challenge to the notion that all chinese citizens uncritically accept the incursion of algorithmic systems into everyday life. it may also provide the seeds of understanding of what chinese tech companies, policymakers, and other social institutions value in the development of automated systems. such a foundation could enable scholarly analyses to look beyond the trinity of fairness, accountability, and transparency that have become omnipresent in much writing about algorithmic bias in the west. references cui, jingzi [崔靖梓]. 2019. the crisis to equal rights protection under algorithmic discrimination and its responses [算法歧视挑战下平等权保护的危机与应对]. science of law (journal of northwest university of political science and law) mar 2019 [法律科学( 西北政法大学学报) 2019 年第3 期]: 29-42. ji, jie [季洁]. 2018. financial risk prevention and control under algorithmic discrimination [算法歧视下的金融风险防控]. shanghai finance oct 2018 [《上海金融》 2018 年第 10 期]: 60-64. liu, pei and zhongjun chi [刘培、池忠军]. ethical reflections on algorithmic discrimination [算法歧视的伦理反思]. journal of dialectics of nature 41(10) [自然辩证法 通讯]: 16-23. 3 this position might surprise experts on us law given the understanding that the burden of proof for bringing discrimination cases in the united states is often regarded as too high for most plaintiffs to meet. critiques of how this is further complicated when algorithmic systems become involved have emerged in response to the department of housing and urban development’s proposed rule to protect companies who use algorithmic decision-making tools in the housing industry from being sued for discriminator treatment or outcomes these systems might be found to cause. see: selbst, andrew. 2019. a new hud rule would effectively encourage discrimination by algorithm. slate. https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/hud-disparate-impact-discrimination-algorithm.html. 4 although some drafted laws around data protection address algorithmic recommendation systems and the need to respect users’ rights to opt out of having their data collected for this purpose, these protections were likely designed as a response to targeted advertising rather providing false or harmful information rather than the set of issues the literature labels as indicative of algorithmic discrimination. ramzy, austin. 2016. china investigates baidu after student’s death from cancer. new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/04/world/asia/china-baidu-investigation-student-cancer.html. sun, na [孙那]. 2019. the construction of legal ethics for artificial intelligence [人工智 能的法律伦理建构]. jiangxi social sciences feb 2019 [《江西社会科学》 2019 年第2 期 ]: 15-23. wen, jing [温婧]. 2018. using big data to “swindle” is routine for ecommerce [用大数 据 “杀熟”，电商的套路都在这了]. times weekly [时代周报]. http://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1595270398443964710. yan, jing [严景]. 2019. algorithmic bias in artificial intelligence and its responses— from the perspective of gender discrimination in a certain company’s ai resume screening system [人工智能中的算法歧视与应对—以某公司人工智能简历筛选系统性别歧视为视角]. legality vision (14) [《法制博览》14期]: 127-128. yang, chengyue and xianjue luo [杨成越、罗先觉]. 2018. a preliminary study into comprehensive governance of algorithmic discriminations [算法歧视的综合治理初探]. science and society (10) [《科学与社会》第 10 期]: 1-12. data orientalism: on the algorithmic construction of the non-western other dan m. kotliar the hebrew university of jerusalem and stanford university while the social consequences of algorithms have been systematically discussed (noble 2018; benjamin 2019; eubanks 2018; o’neal 2016; bucher 2018; gillespie 2016), research on algorithms tends to assume that the companies that write and run big data algorithms are american, and accordingly, that the global spread of such algorithms is unidirectional – from “the west” onwards. similarly, while recent research has shown that algorithms stem from specific socio-cultural contexts (seaver 2017; christin 2018; ribak 2019; shestakofsky 2017), and that data tends to mirror the social surroundings from which it was extracted (angwin et al. 2016; crawford 2016), the distances and differences between the people who develop such algorithms and the users their algorithms affect remain overlooked. moreover, while recent research tends to compare algorithmic powers to colonial powers (couldry and mejias 2019; mann and daly 2019), the move from the colonial gaze (yegenoglu 1998; said 1995) to the algorithmic gaze (graham 2010) has yet to be discussed. this paper aims to fill these gaps and ask: how do companies use their algorithms to “see” and profile their other? what happens to this saidian knowledge/power nexus when knowledge about the other is algorithmically produced? and what is the role of the algorithmic gaze in the expansion of “data colonialism”? this paper will answer these questions by focusing on the case study of an israeli data analytics company and its attempts to sell its algorithmic products to companies in east asia. this paper is based on a 5-year ethnographic study of the israeli data analytics industry that included 40 semi-structured interviews, participant observations, online content analyses, and more. particularly, this presentation will focus on the case study of extractive – an israeli company that provides user profiling algorithms to companies in singapore, china, and the philippines. i will show that extractive’s view of the other stems from multiple opposing-but-complimentary perspectives: from their “culture agnostic” algorithms that can allegedly overlook culture, race, or locality; from the names of their categories that stem from a globalist, techno-elitist ethos; and finally, from their more traditional, orientalist attempts to capitalize from the otherness of the other. i will accordingly argue that this algorithmic gaze is simultaneously a continuation of the colonial gaze and its exact opposite. it is a gaze that disregards culture, but at the same time highlights cultural differences; a gaze that generates countless hyper-individuated identities but that also categorizes people into a handful of supposedly universal categories. a gaze that potentially offers softer ways of seeing (cheney-lippold 2017; lash and lury 2007), but that falls back into and is based on more “traditional”, racist worldviews. i will argue that these opposing-but-complimentary perspectives work together to create extractive’s expansionary vision, to pave their way into other territories, or at the very least, to help them secure their place on the right side of the “big data divide” (andrejevic 2014). that is, i will show that through their multi-focal view of the other, this company is creating its own “imaginary cartography of the internet” (marchart 1998) as a territory that is divided between data collectors and data subalterns – those who see and those who are being seen – while technologically and discursively placing themselves on the "right" side of that map. thus, this paper follows milan and treré's call to move past the universalist view of datafication (milan and treré 2019), but it also challenges the presumption that algorithmic power flows from its centers in the west out to the global peripheries. in fact, as this paper will demonstrate, the algorithmic gaze is dependent upon different actors across different geographic locations, as well as on the dynamic interactions between them. and so, while recent discussions on algorithms and their power overwhelmingly focus on euro-american companies, we should keep in mind the multi-directional flow of such powers, as well as the multi-cultural relations that sustain them. references andrejevic, mark. 2014. “the big data divide.” international journal of communication 8: 1673–89. angwin, julia, jeff larson, surya mattu, and lauren kirchner. 2016. “machine bias.” propublica. 2016. https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-riskassessments-in-criminal-sentencing. benjamin, ruha. 2019. race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. new york, ny: john wiley & sons. bucher, taina. 2018. if…then: algorithmic power and politics. oxford, uk: oxford university press. cheney-lippold, john. 2017. we are data: algorithms and the making of our digital selves. new york: nyu press. christin, angèle. 2018. “counting clicks: quantification and variation in web journalism in the united states and france.” american journal of sociology 123 (5): 1382–1415. https://doi.org/10.1086/696137. couldry, nick, and ulises a. mejias. 2019. the costs of connection: how data is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism. stanford, ca: stanford university press. crawford, kate. 2016. “can an algorithm be agonistic? ten scenes about living in calculated publics.” science, technology & human values 41 (1): 77–92. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243915589635. eubanks, virginia. 2018. automating inequality: how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. new york, ny: st. martin’s press. gillespie, tarleton. 2016. “algorithm.” in digital keywords: a vocabulary of information society and culture, edited by benjamin peters, 18–30. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. graham, stephen d. 2010. “interrupting the algorithmic gaze? urban warfare and us military technology.” in observant states." geopolitics and visual culture, edited by and klaus j. dodds. macdonald, fraser, rachel hughes. lash, scott, and celia lury. 2007. global culture industry: the mediation of things. malden and cambridge: polity. mann, monique, and angela daly. 2019. “(big) data and the north-in-south: australia’s informational imperialism and digital colonialism.” television and new media 20 (4): 379–95. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476418806091. marchart, oliver. 1998. “the east, the west and the rest: central and eastern europe between techno-orientalism and the new electronic frontier.” convergence 4 (2): 56–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/135485659800400208. milan, stefania, and emiliano treré. 2019. “big data from the south(s): beyond data universalism.” television and new media 20 (4): 319–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419837739. noble, safiya u. 2018. algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york: nyu press. o’neal, cathey. 2016. weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. new york: broadway books. ribak, rivka. 2019. “translating privacy: developer cultures in the global world of practice.” information, communication & society 22 (6): 838–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1577475. said, edward w. 1995. orientalism: western conceptions of the orient. new york: penguin books. seaver, nick. 2017. “algorithms as culture: some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems.” big data & society 4 (2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717738104. shestakofsky, benjamin. 2017. “working algorithms: software automation and the future of work.” work and occupations 44 (4): 376–423. yegenoglu, meyda. 1998. colonial fantasies: toward a feminist reading of orientalism. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. the gospel of “we the north” or how to build an ai hub outside of the u.s. jonathan roberge institut national de la recherche scientifique (inrs) marius senneville institut national de la recherche scientifique (inrs) when, in 2019, a first canadian team rose to win an nba championship (the toronto raptors), it was accompanied by this novel slogan and sense of pride: “we the north”. by itself, such motto is surprising as it indicates a strong, yet diffuse identity where the city and the country are replaced by a powerful, if hard to describe “way of life”. a similar phenomenon can be observed with the emergence of the no-less widely adopted call for a “sillicon valley of the north”. indeed, toronto and montreal have both seen artificial intelligence (ai) hubs emerged around star researchers like geoffrey hinton (uoft) and yoshua bengio (udm) and the subsequent interest of companies like google, samsung and uber to leverage canada’s noted availability of machine learning (ml) specialists (metz, 2017b). figuring how and why this decentering of technological development away from california was made possible requires to focus on the relevant entrepreneurial and institutional translators as well as their symbolical and material resources. because many of these developments and strategies rest on the unchallenged assumption that ai is a force for the “betterment of humankind”, their impacts, including on canadian culture and society, have yet to be fully investigated (roberge et al., 2019). three elements are central to this particular new political economy of ai. first, it is indispensable to acknowledge the past and current contributions of canadian institutions. this started with cifar’s commitment in the 1980s, a time when the technique was deemed unfashionable, and is continued today with the c$125-million pan-canadian ai strategy, or the c$100-million invested by the province of quebec, of which 80% has been committed to bengio-led montreal institute for learning algorithms (mila). second, the mila itself is significant in the way its very mandate calls for the intermingling of corporate, academic and government actors (etzkowitz & leidesdorff 2000). this participates in an ecological mentality where, following what slaughter & rhodes have termed “academic capitalism”, institutional domains blur and hybridize with one another (2010). third, it should be noted how ai developments are inseparable from a specific ethos or model of “open science” (leonelli 2013). researchers see the sharing of information as progress in and of itself. the obligation to choose to pursue a career in either academia or industry becomes less of an issue once research-inclined corporate labs allow, if not actively encourage the publication of research results in scientific journals and conferences. knowing the shortage of qualified personnel, such open science practices are instrumentally adopted to navigate the “war to attract talents”, often going as far as offering dual affiliation (metz, 2017a). unrestricted circulation of people and ideas thus allows for companies to track the best of university research and to reach scientists wherever they are, may that be close to the north pole as in the cases of montreal and toronto. elucidating the rise of ai in the canadian context implies not only to look at the political economy involved but also the discursive practices that convoyed them (roberge et al., forthcoming). when discussed, the risks of ai have been addressed through the selfregulation of technology firms, as was the case for instance with google’s involvement with openai in the us (grygiel & brown, 2019). in canada, the federal government, quebec and ontario each have developped their approaches to ethical ai. quebec and montreal have both signed the montreal declaration for a responsible development of artificial intelligence, while ontario, conversely, has yet to adopt the comparable toronto declaration. the federal government has adopted impact assessment guidelines on its internal use of ai (mckelvey & macdonald, 2019). what is it then that these initiatives have in common that enables ai ethics to occupy such a central stage? for problematizations to develop into symbolical justifications, fears are to be addressed, interpretations are to be tempered, and sensitivities are to find a language by which they can be communicated. as greene et al. note, “building a moral background for ethical design is partly about shaping public perception, providing the concepts through which ai/ml can be understood” (2019: 8). the montreal declaration, for instance, is the result of a two-year process of consultation with diverse actors from public and private sectors. problematically, its guiding principles never question whether ai technologies are safe, if specific forms should in fact be developed, or whether certain surveillance technologies should be made illegal. the fact of the matter is that the montreal declaration’s value statements and core principles are so broad that they do not even specifically address ai. it calls for instance for a development of ai that “must contribute to the realization of a just and fair society”; or, yet again, that “must eliminate relationships of domination between groups and people based on differences of power, wealth, or knowledge” (ia responsible, 2018). that the automation of knowledge-production is the sole definition of ml, the reason why people invest time and money, and the way that firms are able to create such metamorphoses within power and capital distribution, are simply ignored. as a conclusion, the presentation will attempt at understanding what there is up north in canada as emblematic of broader algorithmic deployment of late: dense, yet diffuse spatial implementation; the construction of material as well as (because of) symbolically-rich environment. in montreal and toronto, the mantra is “governance at a distance”, i.e. to navigate the complexities of the present, it is deemed better to aim for a horizon that is as remote as possible and hope for the best. the quebec government has, for example, no data privacy reform planned, nothing to say about facial recognition, and only a vague understanding of the consequences ai will have on the job market and higher education. as it turns out, real investments are mostly about techchauvinism, that is yet another attempt at filling-in what could only remain a sort of “we the north” empty-signifier. references alwani, k., & urban, m. c. (2019). governing the future: creating standards for artificial intelligence and algorithms. the mowat centre. https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/mowatcentre/governing-the-future-creating-standardsfor-artificial-intelligence-and-algorithms/ cardon, d., cointet, j.-p., & mazières, a. (2018). la revanche des neurones. réseaux, 211(5), 173–220. etzkowitz, h., & leydesdorff, l. (2000). the dynamics of innovation: from national systems and “mode 2” to a triple helix of university–industry–government relations. research policy, 29(2), 109–123. grygiel, j., & brown, n. (2019). are social media companies motivated to be good corporate citizens?. telecommunications policy, 43(5), 445–460. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.telpol.2018.12.003 ai responsible. (2018). montreal declaration for a responsible development of artificial intelligence. https://www.montrealdeclaration-responsibleai.com/ kirkwood, i. (2019). samsung opens second montreal-based ai lab, moves into mila. betakit. https://betakit.com/samsung-opens-second-montreal-based-ai-lab-moves-intomila/ leonelli, s. (2013). why the current insistence on open access to scientific data? big data, knowledge production and the political economy of contemporary biology. bulletin of science and technology studies, 33(1–2), 6–11. mckelvey, f., & macdonald, m. (2019). artificial intelligence policy innovations at the canadian federal government. canadian journal of communication, 44(2). metz, c. (2017a). tech giants are paying huge salaries for scarce ai talent. medium. https://medium.com/the-new-york-times/tech-giants-are-paying-huge-salaries-forscarce-ai-talent-ac6b19c92813 metz, c. (2017b). for google, the ai talent race leads straight to canada. wired. https://www.wired.com/2017/03/google-ai-talent-race-leads-straight-canada/ roberge, j., morin, k., & senneville, m. (2019). "deep learning's governmentality: the other black box" in the democratization of artificial intelligence, a. sudmann (eds.), bielefeld, transcript verlag, pp. 123-142. roberge, j., senneville, m., & morin, k. (forthcoming). how to translate artificial intelligence? myths and justifications in public discourse. big data and society. slaughter, s., & rhoades, g. (2010). academic capitalism and the new economy: markets, state, and higher education. johns hopkins univ. press. musical.ly’s sleight of hand: circumventing family social media governance selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): mccosker, a., & wilken, r. (2017, october 18-21). mapping mental health intermediaries: vulnerable publics and platformed support. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. mapping mental health intermediaries: vulnerable publics and platformed support anthony mccosker swinburne university of technology rowan wilken rmit university this paper examines online mental health support programs through a case study of the support forums and facebook page of australian non-profit mental health organisation beyondblue. we develop the concept of ‘vulnerable publics’ to help account for the differences in the forms of sociality and support between the facebook page and forums. digital methods and qualitative analysis help distinguish patterns of participation, connective action and platformed and human mediation between the two sites. this is part of a larger project to identify and develop better models for using popular social media platforms like facebook to facilitate community-based, peer mental health support at scale. our analysis identifies standout characteristics and work of 'intermediaries' and mediators, both human and non-human or platformed (smithmaguire and matthews, 2012; moor, 2012) as they affect the impact of peer-oriented online mental health support, in order to better understand what we are referring to as vulnerable networked publics. vulnerable publics cohere around socially sensitive, stigmatised, and affective issues or experiences. in public health research, it relates to at risk populations (‘vulnerable populations), or ‘people whose situations or contexts make them especially vulnerable, or who experience inequality, prejudice, marginalization and limits on their social, economic, cultural and other rights’ (the global fund, 2016). vulnerable publics can be associated with aspects of identity such as race, sexuality, belief, political affiliation or activism and advocacy; the term can also designate health status, where stigma or disability factors are in play. vulnerable publics are very much ‘affective publics’ (papacharissi, 2014; mccosker, 2015), and follow dewey’s (1927) well-known sense of being ‘problem-oriented’, often operating outside of mainstream, dominant or majority contexts (warner, 2002). with these characteristics in mind, we analyse vulnerable publics associated with mental health problems, with a focus on the influence of platform elements and the practices of peer mentors and community facilitators. aims, approach, findings the primary question guiding the comparative analysis is: what are the characteristics and effects of human and platform intermediaries and mediators in building, sustaining and driving supportive mental health publics? two approaches are used to address these questions. first, we consider platform features and capacities, with a focus on observable effects in use patterns and outcomes for the formation of publics and interaction over time. second, we examine activity, engagement and interactivity over time, extracting a year-long data set from the beyondblue facebook page (sep 2015 – sep 2016), and a sample of 5 forums and 14 threads, with a total of 1140 posts from beyondblue's moderated forums. the forum analysis uses qualitative content analysis drawing on the core concepts of ‘cultural intermediary’ theory (smith maguire and matthews, 2012; moor, 2012). smith maguire and matthew's analytical framework targets factors establishing a) expertise, b) framing practices, and c) impact or influence. these form the broad concepts guiding the initial coding of the forum content, with more nuanced themes developed through an axial coding process (strauss and corbin, 1998). aligning with core tenets of cultural intermediary theory, analysis of the forums demonstrates the establishment of expertise through a range of ‘devices’ (e.g. badges – or indicators of experience and roles as champions in the forums; or branding, as in the logo badging posts and comments from beyondblue admin on the facebook page). expertise also involves the presentation of personal mental health experiences, translational stories, coping and recovery and strategy and information or help-seeking techniques. these factors establish an ‘asymmetry of influence’ (smith maguire and matthews, 2012), and are far more explicit and distributed amongst members on the forums than the facebook page. a range of framing practices are observable, often involving ‘making choices credible’ (smith maguire and matthews, 2012: 555), processes of discursively shaping ideas about mental health experiences, and proffering a range of resources for coping and recovery. this is again more distributed among key peer mediators on the forums, and more centralized and driven by admin on the facebook page. finally, influence and impact become visible within the forums through the expression of recognition, and affirmation of the effects of advice and coping and recovery resources. these practices reaffirm the expertise of the designated ‘cultural intermediaries’ and others who have influence within the system. importantly, our analysis revealed that these characteristics of cultural intermediary were not solely the domain of the designated group of around 26 community champions (trained peer mentors). we identified many more who take on this role, but were not badged as champions. to examine activity within the facebook page, we used the trisma tracking infrastructure (see http://trisma.org/) to capture page data over the year with a focus on comments in relation to unique comment id (excluding those by beyondblue page http://trisma.org/) admin). this is visualised below (figure 1) to illustrate the rate of comment-based engagement, with the aim of identifying high volume and high impact participants, or potential key intermediaries and mediators, engaging with the page over time. the page has a large active community of more than 539,000 ‘fans’, and so the initial assumption by the researchers, and beyondblue community managers, was that there would be many high volume influential users matching the highly active members of the forums. this was not the case. the data in figure 1 shows a small segment of the total number of people who commented on the beyondblue facebook page over the year (total commenters n=10,155, total comments n=12,664 excluding the beyondblue page administrators). figure 1 shows those who commented 3 or more times (n=484), which represents approximately 5% of all commenters – a very small group. the two highest commenting participants, commented only 13 times in the year and both were on the same post. the large number of page followers (539,829) and level of post engagement would suggest a highly active and engaged public in relation to the mental health issues addressed by beyondblue. however, the analysis shows that there is not one single, sustained public, but rather that engagement is ephemeral. facebook’s restrictions on page posts appearing on fans' newsfeeds would be one factor. it does suggest that the page does not function as a space for sustained engagement with mental health content, despite achieving extensive reach. preliminary discussion unlike the forums, the facebook page actively restricts the potential for intermediary practices. it does not support the establishment of expertise, framing practices and impact beyond that to be achieved (at cost) by the page admin team. the platform itself ‘mediates’ engagement, and the page admins retain the primary role in this communicative system. this may be beneficial to beyondblue if it prefers to deal with mental health problems and associated vulnerable publics through other channels. but it does represent a missed opportunity with such large numbers following the facebook page. to realise the connective value of social media, beyond the risks, there is space for developing the means for enabling greater participation by individual users as cultural intermediaries within both the page and forums. references boardman, j. et al., (2010) social inclusion and mental health, london: rcpsych publications. davidson, l. et al., (2012) ‘peer support among persons with severe mental illnesses: a review of evidence and experiences’, world psychiatry, 11, 123-128. dewey, j. (1927). the public and its problems. new york, ny: henry holt mccosker, a. (2015) ‘social media activism at the margins: managing visibility, voice and vitality affects’, social media + society, 1(2), 1-11. papacharissi, z. (2014). affective publics: sentiment, technology, and politics. oxford, uk: oxford university press. strauss a. and corbin j. (1998) basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. london, uk: sage the global fund (2016) key populations action plan 2014–2016. geneva: the global fund to fight aids, tuberculosis and malaria; 2016. available from: http://www.theglobalfund.org/documents/publications/other/publication_keypopul ations_actionplan_en/. warner, m. (2002). ‘publics and counterpublics’. public culture, 14, 49–90 http://www.theglobalfund.org/documents/publications/other/publication_keypopulations_actionplan_en/ http://www.theglobalfund.org/documents/publications/other/publication_keypopulations_actionplan_en/ microsoft word literat-likes, sarcasm and politics-likes, sarcasm and politics.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): literat, i., abdelbagi, a., law, n. y., cheung, m. y., tang, r. (2021, october). likes, sarcasm and politics: youth responses to a platform-initiated media literacy campaign on social media. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. likes, sarcasm and politics: youth responses to a platform-initiated media literacy campaign on social media ioana literat teachers college, columbia university abubakr abdelbagi teachers college, columbia university nicola yl law teachers college, columbia university marcus y-y cheung teachers college, columbia university rongwei tang teachers college, columbia university introduction amidst an alarming rise in online misinformation, there has been a growing interest in media literacy education as a way to combat the rapid spread of misinformation (bulger & davison, 2018). however, the focus of research and practice has been on the integration of media literacy instruction into young people’s various educational experiences, rather than implementing and evaluating such initiatives on social media (bulger & davison, 2018), which is known to be their central news source (common sense media, 2019). because of the lack a nuanced understanding of these dynamics on the platforms most popular with youth today, our study aimed to analyze how users responded to a platform-initiated media literacy education campaign on tiktok—an increasingly popular yet understudied social media platform—with a focus on the lessons that we might draw from these responses in terms of targeted media literacy education initiatives for youth. methodology while there is broad societal consensus about the urgency and significance of media literacy education, especially for young people, we still lack a grounded, bottom-up understanding of youth attitudes towards such initiatives. moreover, trying to capture these attitudes through self-report methods like surveys or interviews runs the risk of producing biased results, due to social desirability effects (especially strong regarding media literacy and misinformation; see tully et al., 2020), as well as the normative pressures that shape the way youth might respond to adult questions about their educational experiences. here, using qualitative content analysis on a large corpus of youth reactions to a media literacy campaign on social media facilitates a naturalistic study of young people’s attitudes towards such initiatives in situ, “in the wild.” a thematic analysis, particularly suitable for understanding experiences, views and perceptions (braun & clarke, 2006), was conducted on 11,449 public comments posted in response to five videos created by tiktok us in partnership with external experts and tiktok microcelebrities. videos were part of a strategic media literacy campaign aimed at youth and designed to highlight skills like fact-checking, assessing the credibility of information and visuals, understanding bias, and distinguishing facts from opinions. they were extremely popular on the platform, accumulating a total of 53.8m views, 1.63m likes, and 11k shares. based on the age demographics of tiktok and the content of the comments themselves (e.g. references to school, use of youth lingo, references to youth culture), we can infer that the vast majority of commenters are youth. findings reactions to the campaign were mixed, and highly political in nature. while young people appreciated the urgency of media literacy education and understood its relevance to their social media participation, negative comments—often sarcastic in tone—far outweighed the more positive takes. these negative reactions were grounded in: confusion about the aim of the videos; annoyance at videos being pushed on users’ “for you page”; disliking the video content and aesthetics; and perceived hypocrisy due to tiktok’s own actions and policies. particularly, they called out tiktok’s failure to control the spread of misinformation on its platform and brought up stories of reporting questionable content, with tiktok taking no action about it. whether positive, negative, or neutral, a large proportion of comments were political, and addressed topics like black lives matter, partisanship and the presidential election. political comments usually got more responses than non-political ones, and exchanges were longer and more engaged, though often impolite and uncivil. commenters frequently expressed their political identities and stances; a prevalent pattern was mentioning the opposing party in comments and saying that they need to watch these videos, thus implying that the other party/ideology is lacking media literacy skills. significantly, the rationale behind the videos was politicized too, framing media literacy education as an inherently political endeavor. implications and recommendations we identify key takeaways and recommendations that can valuably inform future media literacy campaigns on social media. first, youth were keenly aware of tiktok’s “rap sheet” in regard to curbing misinformation (or not), which shaped by both microand macro-level factors (e.g. personal experience with reporting/moderation on the platform, mass media reports, political rhetoric). commenters openly rebuked tiktok for sharing educational materials addressing fake news while failing to curb the spread of misinformation, which resulted in a diminished level of trust. providing explicit reasoning around content moderation practices promotes a higher level of user trust (brunk, et al., 2019), which might help with the effectiveness of such educational initiatives. platforms should aim for increased transparency in communicating how decisions are made regarding user reports of misinformation or content violations. much of the negative feedback addresses promotion and design/content as being at odds with the ethos and function of tiktok in youth lives. while tiktok’s campaign attempted to meet these expectations, users did not connect with the language and style employed in the videos. this might be understood in relation to the shift in tiktok users’ aesthetic appetite, which is moving away from “visual theatrics” and towards more relatable content that taps into the current trends and latest memes (abidin, 2021). we also found that youth were extremely frustrated with how the videos were being pushed onto their feeds. a key way to preempt these pitfalls is to include youth in the design of such campaigns via participatory design, which has been shown to be an effective strategy for the design of news literacy initiatives for youth (literat, chang & hsu, 2020). for instance, initiating participatory activities that align with the ethos of tiktok (e.g. tiktok challenges) and/or engaging influencers in the promotion of content. finally, the highly political nature of responses is a powerful illustration of the politicized nature of media literacy education in the current sociocultural landscape. future media literacy initiatives should be aware that even apolitical content might be politicized and framed in polarizing terms by users. these findings also reinforce the link between media literacy and civic education (mihailidis, 2018), and, particularly in this political and technological context, each is a prerequisite for the other. references abidin, c., 2021. mapping internet celebrity on tiktok: exploring attention economies and visibility labours. cultural science journal, 12(1), 77–103. https://doi.org/10.5334/csci.140 braun, v. and clarke, v. (2006) using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77–101. brunk, j., mattern, j. and riehle, d.m. (2019). effect of transparency and trust on acceptance of automatic online comment moderation systems. in ieee 21st conference on business informatics (cbi) (vol. 1, pp. 429-435). ieee. https://doi.org/10.1109/cbi.2019.00056. bulger, m., & davison, p. (2018). the promises, challenges, and futures of media literacy. journal of media literacy education, 10(1), 1-21. https://doi.org/10.23860/jmle-2018-10-1-1 common sense media (2019). teen news engagement: key findings and toplines. https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/uploads/pdfs/2019_cssm_summarytoplines_release.pdf literat, i., chang, y. k., & hsu, s. y. (2020). gamifying fake news: engaging youth in the participatory design of news literacy games. convergence, 26(3), 503-516. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1354856520925732 mihailidis, p. (2018). civic media literacies: re-imagining engagement for civic intentionality. learning, media and technology, 43( 2), 152-164. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2018.1428623 selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): munn, l. (2019, october 2-5). “alexa, can i trust you?”: small sisters and friendly power. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “alexa, can i trust you?”: small sisters and friendly power luke munn institute for culture & society, western sydney university how is trust fabricated today? this paper argues that the persona of ‘alexa’ bypasses concerns around surveillance and privacy, defusing anxieties not via the rationality of a convincing argument but through the relationality of alexa as a singular presence. always listening and empathically attuned, she embodies a turn toward “friendly power” (han 2017). rather than big brother, she is experienced as a small sister. alexa is typically described as a voice-based virtual assistant. once her wake-word of ‘alexa’ is uttered, she listens to a user’s voice, parsing it into text and responding by playing music, setting timers, dimming lights, or ordering products. alexa has now expanded to power a whole ecosystem of products, from thermostats and baby monitors to car interfaces. indeed, amazon recently revealed that 100 million of these ‘alexa-enabled’ devices have been sold (bohn 2019). moreover, there are over 10,000 employees working on the alexa team (macmillan 2018). these figures are not about parroting a silicon valley success story, but about considering her widespread adoption from the perspective of power. why do so many feel they can trust alexa? in many respects alexa is more invasive than other technologies. by placing these assistants in the living room or kitchen, amazon has encroached into the very heart of the home. in addition, the company is actively seeking to delve further into the subject through voice identification, mood monitoring, and health detection. every day amazon extracts an immense amount of conversational data and funnels it to their data centers, where it can be mined for consumer insights and trained on via machine learning in order to develop more sophisticated systems. “there are millions of these in households, and they’re not collecting dust” admitted one alexa team member, “we get an insane amount of data coming in that we can work on” (simonite 2017). but, based on my phd research involving ethnography, technical and discourse analysis, this paper argues that alexa feels different—in fact, she instrumentalizes feeling itself. after combing through logs, one amazon developer was surprised to find selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): munn, l. (2019, october 2-5). “alexa, can i trust you?”: small sisters and friendly power. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. that “every day, hundreds of thousands of people say ‘good morning’ to alexa” (turk 2016). another user admitted that “i have a very familiar relationship with my echo. i talk to it like it’s an actual person” (schwedel 2016). such treatment is by design. as one study observed (purington et al. 2017), alexa is endowed with a name and gender, she can interact playfully, she is co-located with users, and she can alter the environment—all of which “are designed to afford social functionalities and promote anthropomorphism.” rather than an algorithmic bundle of technologies, alexa is experienced as an affective persona. the goal is to make this persona warm and welcoming, affirmative and open. product chief tony reid has said the team’s aim is to develop something that is friendly, can turn off your lights, chat about anything, and empathize when you’re having a bad day (mcgirt 2018). alexa has now added an ability to distinguish between voices. rather than ‘zeroed out’ for a generic user after each use, this capability allows for ongoing relationships (‘from our last conversation, i recall that’). moreover, recent patents attempt to delve further into the life of the individual, detecting vocal variations that betray one’s present health condition and current mood. thus, while amazon is constantly updating her capacities, the overall vector remains the same: to develop something chattier and chummier, something more affective and emotionally attuned. in doing so, alexa embodies what theorist byung-chul han has called “friendly power.” such power operates not through restrictive obedience, but via relentless affirmation. as han asserts (2017, 36): “it says ‘yes’ more often than ‘no’; it operates seductively, not repressively. it seeks to call forth positive emotions and exploit them.” rather than remaining at a distance, it “cosies up to the psyche” (2017 37). always attentive and always supportive, alexa remains structurally open to every utterance. the result, then, is a strange paradox. on the one hand, amazon has actually become more invasive, capturing conversational data from the kitchens and living rooms of millions homes while actively developing new ways to extract intimate information about health, mood, daily routines, and so on. yet at the same time, judging by consumers’ embrace of alexa, trust has also been increased. while concerns around privacy or data use have surfaced in a handful of articles, they have never gained significant traction, particularly when compared against technologies like facebook. the paper thus argues that, even as voices are extracted and data is mined, the persona of alexa produces a subjective shift that has a substantive impact on the issue of trust. alexa selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): munn, l. (2019, october 2-5). “alexa, can i trust you?”: small sisters and friendly power. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. isn’t monitoring you, she’s getting to know you. alexa isn’t recording you, she’s listening to you. and alexa isn’t advertising to you, she’s conversing with you. capture is reframed as companionship. alexa thus accomplishes a double move, delving deeper into the inner life of the subject, while simultaneously shrugging off the anxieties associated with cold, command-and-control technologies. such force, at once lighter and more penetrative, suggests a gap in theorizations of power. if the notion of big brother does not adequately characterize contemporary power (harcourt 2015), then alexa might be labeled as a “small sister.” rather than an all-seeing eye, she is an always listening voice. rather than an awe-inspiring dictator, she is a friendly companion. and rather than emanating from a central agency, she is distributed throughout millions of homes and co-located with the user. small sisters work alongside instead of above, developing an intimate understanding of subjects and fulfilling or even anticipating their needs. in contrast to power as centralized and spoken from on high, small sisters are multiple, sited, and supple. in apprehending alexa’s operations, we gain insight into how trust is generated and technologies insinuated within the everyday. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): munn, l. (2019, october 2-5). “alexa, can i trust you?”: small sisters and friendly power. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. references bohn, dieter. “amazon says 100 million alexa devices have been sold — what’s next?” the verge, january 4, 2019. https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/4/18168565/amazon-alexa-devices-how-many-soldnumber-100-million-dave-limp. han, byung-chul. psychopolitics: neoliberalism and new technologies of power. london: verso books, 2017. harcourt, bernard. exposed: desire and disobedience in the digital age. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2015. macmillan, douglas. “amazon says it has over 10,000 employees working on alexa, echo.” wall street journal, november 13, 2018, sec. tech. https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-says-it-has-over-10-000-employees-working-onalexa-echo-1542138284. mcgirt, ellen. “amazon’s echo device chief on the risk of alexa’s many rewards.” fortune, july 17, 2018. http://fortune.com/2018/07/16/amazon-alexa-echo-toni-reid/. purington, amanda, jessie g taft, shruti sannon, natalya n bazarova, and samuel hardman taylor. “alexa is my new bff: social roles, user satisfaction, and personification of the amazon echo.” in proceedings of the 2017 chi conference extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems, 2853–2859. denver: acm, 2017. schwedel, heather. “what life with an amazon echo is like after the novelty wears off.” slate magazine, december 26, 2017. https://slate.com/technology/2017/12/whatlife-with-an-amazon-echo-is-like-after-the-novelty-wears-off.html. simonite, tom. “alexa gives amazon a powerful data advantage.” mit technology review, january 18, 2017. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603380/alexa-givesamazon-a-powerful-data-advantage/. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): munn, l. (2019, october 2-5). “alexa, can i trust you?”: small sisters and friendly power. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. turk, victoria. “home invasion.” new scientist 232, no. 3104 (december 17, 2016): 16– 17. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0262-4079(16)32318-1. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): kaye, d.b.v. & gray, j.e. (2020, october). copyright gossip: exploring copyright knowledge, sentiment, and blackbox theories on youtube. paper title. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. copyright gossip: exploring copyright knowledge, sentiment, and blackbox theories on youtube d. bondy valdovinos kaye queensland university of technology joanne e. gray queensland university of technology introduction this study investigates copyright discourses on youtube. through a qualitative content analysis of approximately 200 youtube videos, we explore how youtube creators understand copyright law, and how they navigate a highly technical and dynamic copyright enforcement ecosystem. our findings offer insights into how digitally situated cultural producers are impacted by and respond to automated content moderation. this is important because increasingly lawmakers around the world are asking digital platforms to implement efficient systems for content moderation (reda, 2019) and yet there is a lack of good information about the stakeholders most directly impacted by these practices. in this study, we provide a systematic analysis of the opinions and strategies of creators who are affected by youtube’s copyright enforcement measures. background and literature review for cultural producers, copyright offers both benefits and harms. copyright provides authors of original works exclusive rights to their work, which facilitates commodification and market exchange (ginsburg, 2015). yet, overly restrictive copyright laws that prevent access to existing resources can also prevent authors from creating and disseminating new work (lessig, 2008). in digital media and communication environments, this tension often plays out as a battle between larger established creative industries entities--such as major record labels, movie studios and broadcasters--and smaller independent producers who are native to digital creation and dissemination ecosystems (cunningham & flew, 2019). as one of the largest and most widely-used platforms for content creation and dissemination globally (youtube, 2020), youtube is a prominent staging ground for contests between large entertainment industry copyright owners and independent producers. in digital spaces, copyright enforcement is governed in significant part by the private copyright rule-making and enforcement policies of internet platforms (bridy, 2016; gray, 2020). on youtube, copyright owners who participate in youtube’s rights management programs have available to them a wide and constantly evolving array of tools they can use to contest or remove unlicensed content posted by users to youtube (urban et al., 2016). these enforcement measures are justified as in the interest of creators, by protecting their economic rights to remuneration and financial exploitation and their moral rights to attribution and integrity (edwards et al., 2015a). for many youtube creators, however, the risk of having a video de-monetised or removed from youtube due to a copyright claim is relatively high (gray & suzor, 2020). youtubers are required to interact with a complex copyright enforcement system that is highly automated, dynamic, and opaque (maayan perel & niva elkin-koren, 2017). often, when doing so, youtubers participate in copyright discourses, posting videos sharing their experiences with copyright enforcement. in many of these videos, they offer interpretations of copyright law and explanations of youtube’s technical systems, and they offer strategies for avoiding copyright strikes or removals. in doing so, these creators directly contribute to discourses surrounding copyright policies and practices that are championed as serving their best interests. research by sophie bishop (2019) shows how youtube creators participate in algorithmic gossip, that is, socially informed theories, strategies, and advice, to help navigate youtube’s recommendation algorithms and how this information can shape production practices on the platform (bishop, 2020). previous research has also examined the degree to which rightsholders and rights users engage in and shape copyright law and policy debates in the uk (edwards et al., 2015). other research has shown how independent, amateur, or other smaller-scale creators often do not have accurate knowledge of copyright law or lack understanding of why they have been penalised (pappalardo et al., 2017; phillips & street, 2015). these studies did not, however, closely examine the particular copyright knowledge and experiences of youtube creators. by studying public communications about copyright enforcement made by youtube creators, we can improve understanding of the impact of automated, opaque and dynamic digital copyright enforcement systems on cultural producers operating in digital media and communication environments. methodology for this study, between november and december 2019, we manually collected a sample of 200 youtube videos using keyword search terms “copyright” “copyright strike” “copyright claim” and “dmca”. videos were excluded from analysis if they were non-english language videos and if they were published by a formal institute such as a government or educational organisation. for each video, we logged the video publication date, url, title, account, channel, hashtags, and number of views, likes, comments, and subscribers. we conducted a pilot study of 20 randomly selected videos, analysing each video in order to develop a codebook. the codebook ultimately included categories for coding sentiment towards copyright law generally and copyright enforcement on youtube specifically; the accuracy of legal knowledge proffered by youtubers; theories of how algorithmic enforcement on youtube works; and strategies for avoiding a copyright claim, block or demonetisation. initial results our initial analysis suggests that professional youtubers have a relatively sophisticated knowledge of copyright law and of youtube’s copyright enforcement system, in contrast to creators from more traditional creative industries sectors, such as music, filmmaking and visual art (pappalardo et al., 2017; phillips & street, 2015). they demonstrate a largely accurate knowledge of issues such as copyright subsistence, copyright exceptions, and permission and remuneration requirements. initial results also suggest a highly negative sentiment towards youtube’s copyright enforcement system is shared among youtube creators, with creators frequently expressing frustration that the system is unfair, broken and biased towards the interests of large media and entertainment corporations. overall, our preliminary analysis suggests youtube’s copyright enforcement system represents an outsized force on youtube, influencing the creative practice of youtubers, and, by participating in copyright discourses, youtube creators, unlike their offline counterparts, have become highly adept at navigating copyright law enforcement. references bridy, a. (2016). copyright’s digital deputies: dmca-plus enforcement by internet intermediaries. in j. rothchild (ed.), research handbook on electronic commerce law: vol. edward elgar. cunningham, s., & flew, t. (2019). a research agenda for creative industries. edward elgar publishing. edwards, l., klein, b., lee, d., moss, g., & philip, f. (2015). discourse, justification and critique: towards a legitimate digital copyright regime? international journal of cultural policy, 21(1), 60–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2013.874421 ginsburg, j. (2015). the author’s place in the future of copyright. the centre for law and economic studies columbia university school of law, working paper no. 512, 1. gray, j. e. (2020). google rules: the history and future of copyright under the influence of google. oxford university press. gray, j., & suzor, n. (2020). playing with machines: using machine learning to understand automated copyright enforcement at scale. big data & society, forthcoming. lessig, l. (2008). remix. penguin press. maayan perel & niva elkin-koren. (2017). black box tinkering: beyond transparency in algorithmic enforcement. florida law review. pappalardo, k., aufderheide, p., stevens, j., & suzor, n. (2017). imagination foregone: a qualitative study of the reuse practices of australian creators. qut. phillips, t., & street, j. (2015). copyright and musicians at the digital margins. media, culture & society, 37(3), 342–358. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443714567018 reda, j. (2019, january 2). upload filters. julia reda. https://juliareda.eu/eu-copyrightreform/censorship-machines/ urban, j. m., karaganis, j., & schofield, b. l. (2016). notice and takedown in everyday practice. uc berkeley public law research paper 2755628. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 robards, b. & lincoln, s. (2017, october 18-21). left behind, left unsaid: absences on young people’s facebook timelines. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. left behind, left unsaid: absences on young people’s facebook timelines brady robards monash university sian lincoln liverpool john moores university since its launch in 2004, facebook has promoted an ethos of sharing and connecting with friends. from facebook’s motto to “connect and share with people in your life” to its recent “friendaversary” that invites users to celebrate friendships as mediated on the site, facebook operates on a logic of sharing (van dijck 2013; kennedy 2015). despite discourses of flight from the site, facebook is still one of the most popular social networks with over 1.2 billion daily users. there is a considerable and growing literature on facebook use, including disclosure practices (boyd & ellison 2008; sauter 2013; marwick & boyd 2014; duguay 2014), privacy strategies (raynes-goldie 2010; vitak 2012), and the role of the site in mediating identity-work (robards 2014; lincoln & robards 2014). what is less well-understood is dis-use, or the absence of disclosures. in other words, what is left unsaid on facebook? in this paper we draw on data from the facebook timelines project to explore the multidimensional notion of ‘absence’ as it plays out on facebook: obvious gaps, disclosures that were erased, and significant events (deaths, break-ups, failures) deemed inappropriate for facebook. we interviewed 34 people in their twenties who had been using facebook for more than five years, in both tasmania (australia) and liverpool (uk). during our interviews, we ‘scrolled back’ with our participants over their years of disclosures, and invited our participants to explain, reflect, and ‘co-analyse’ with us this digital trace of their life (see robards & lincoln 2017 for full details). absence manifests in disclosure practices in a number of ways as part of the ongoing reflexive project of self (giddens, 1991; lincoln & robards 2017). light’s (2014) book disconnecting with social network sites signals a new area of interest on ‘disconnective practice’ that this paper works to build upon. in addition, we engage with goffman’s dramaturgical framework (1959) often used in studies of connection on facebook to further unravel some of the complexities of managing ‘absence’ across a frontand back-stage. this paper will be divided into three parts to cover three themes in the data: evolving social media literacies, imagined audiences, and absence on social media as a safety mechanism. first, we begin our discussion by considering notions of social media literacy and how ‘absences’ are intrinsically linked to the emerging social media competencies of our participants as they’ve grown up and as facebook has become more widely adopted. we explore how through the research process, participants were able to reflect upon changes in their use over time, often constructing an ‘all or nothing’ narrative around disclosure with ‘all’ defining their early practices (posting daily or weekly) and ‘nothing’ or very little as their current practices. we consider how ‘absence’ figured into the refining of disclosures over time while our participants were still very much present on and connected to the site: checking it a number of times each day, commenting, messaging friends, liking posts from others, but not making as many posts themselves as they had in the past. in this sense, ‘absence’ is not as straightforward as ‘not being present’ and presence here is multi-faceted. evolving social media literacies were also found to be directly informed by changes in imagined audiences. as parents and older relatives came to adopt facebook as the site became more widely adopted, so too did our participants’ strategies around audience segregation become more complex. our data indicate considerable ‘back stage’ work around decision-making to determine what will and won’t be disclosed on the site, drawing on goffman’s dramaturgical framework (1959) and a range of existing work that makes use of goffman’s dramaturgical framework as applied to digital social spaces (hogan 2010; pinch 2010). an event such as the death of a loved one, for example, might be a key critical moment in the life narrative of a young person, but posting about this explicitly on facebook may be deemed unsuitable. however, the overt absence of a tragic event might be alluded to when a friend makes reference to it in a comment, or in a vague references that only close friends and family will be able to decode. here ‘absence’ becomes complicated as conflict between facebook etiquette – where front and back stage boundaries are negotiated – and family conventions occur. here, questions emerge about what should be left unsaid. the theme of family continues to be significant as we consider how ‘absence’ is used as a safety mechanism on facebook often instigated by parents or family members. in this context, a number of our participants were guided in their setting up of profiles by parents or older siblings who worked with ‘absence’ as a starting point for presence on the site. for example, some of our participants were discouraged from using photographs of themselves. others were encouraged to use alises. as we discuss elsewhere, absences are amplified when applying for a job when facebook users are encouraged to remove particular types of information about themselves, erasing traces and narratives that may compromise employment opportunities (lincoln & robards 2017). our discussion concludes when we turn to the role of absences in self-care on social media: removing unsettling content from one’s news feed, blocking abusive users, and even de-friending friends and family to escape drama. one of our participants, mary, explained how she deleted her father from her facebook, for instance, because ‘he posts emotional stuff about family, friends and stuff’. mary explained that facebook was part of her daily rhythm and posts from her father would disrupt and irritate her. ‘there’s a time and place for that’, mary explained discussing the ‘emotional stuff’ her father would post, and facebook was not it. ‘if i sit there at work and if i open facebook and see something that pisses me off it ruins the whole day’, she added. mary’s approach here – to delete her father – represents a different kind of absence, but connects to light’s (2014) broader arguments about the productive (and vital) dimensions of disconnection. in summary, the scroll back method we’ve employed in this study, and recruiting our participants as co-analysts, has allowed us to move beyond the logic of sharing and visibility and connection that facebook turns on. instead, moving attention to disconnection and absence and what is left unsaid can reveal developing literacies around social media use that exist outside a formal school-based curriculum, and that instead develop among friends. turning to absence can also reveal complex strategies around audience segregation and self-care. references boyd, d and ellison, n (2008) social network sites: definition, history, and scholarship. journal of computer-mediated communication, 13(1), 210–230. duguay, s (2014) ‘“he has a way gayer facebook than i do”: investigating sexual identity disclosure and context collapse on a social networking site’, new media & society, 18(6), 891907: http://nms.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/09/03/1461444814549930.abstract giddens, a (1991) modernity and self identity: self and society in the late modern age. london: palgrave macmillan. goffman, e (1959) the presentation of self in everyday life. london: allen lane. hogan, b. (2010). ‘the presentation of self in the age of social media: distinguishing performances and exhibitions online’, bulletin of science, 30(6), 377–386. kennedy, j. (2015). ‘conceptual boundaries of sharing’, information, communication & society, 1–14. http://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2015.1046894 light, b (2014) disconnecting with social network sites, basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. lincoln, s. & robards, b. (2014) ‘being strategic and taking control: bedrooms, social network sites and the narratives of growing up’, new media & society, 18(6), 927-943: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1461444814554065 lincoln, s. & robards, b. (2017) ‘editing the project of the self: sustained facebook use and growing up online’, journal of youth studies, 20(4), 518-531: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13676261.2016.1241869?journalcode=cjys20 marwick, a and boyd, d (2014) ‘networked privacy: how teenagers negotiate context in social media’, new media & society, 16(7), 1051-1067. pinch, t. (2010). ‘the invisible technologies of goffman's sociology from the merry-go-round to the internet’, technology and culture, 51(2), 409–424. raynes-goldie, k. (2010). ‘aliases, creeping, and wall cleaning: understanding privacy in the age of facebook’, first monday, 15(1). robards, b. (2014) ‘mediating experiences of “growing up” on facebook’s timeline: privacy, ephemerality and the reflexive project of self’ in a bennett & b robards (eds) mediated youth cultures: the internet, belonging and new cultural configurations, palgrave, pp. 26-14. robards, b. & lincoln, s. (2017) ‘uncovering longitudinal life narratives: scrolling back on facebook’, qualitative research, 17(6): 715-730: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1468794117700707 sauter, t (2013) ‘“what‘s on your mind?” writing on facebook as a tool for self-formation’, new media & society, 16(5), 823–839. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444813495160 van dijck, j. (2013). ‘“you have one identity”: performing the self on facebook and linkedin’, media, culture & society, 35(2), 199–215. http://doi.org/10.1177/0163443712468605 vitak, j (2012) ‘the impact of context collapse and privacy on social network site disclosures’, journal of broadcasting and electronic media, 56(4): 451-470. grosseaoir2019submission.pdf selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 lasting impacts of 1990s internet governance meghan grosse washington college introduction over the past few years, facebook has found itself mired in out controversy after the next. during the 2016 u.s. presidential election, the company received criticism when it was revealed that russian groups had created fraudulent social media accounts on their site in order to interfere with the elections – creating anti-hillary groups, groups stoking fears of minority populations, and materials accusing the democratic party of voter fraud in an attempt to discourage voter turn-out. in april 2018 facebook’s founder and ceo, mark zuckerberg, was called before u.s. congress to testify about this breach of trust, not just by the social media platform, but in the election process upon which the u.s. federal government relies. the question is, how did we get to this point; the point where foreign entities are affecting political outcomes in other countries through a website created by a private american corporation on a media platform wherein the lines between the cultures and legal systems of different countries is sometimes difficult to draw? to consider this question, we have to look back at the foundations of the commercial internet, and for that, i point us back to consider the policies developed by the administration of u.s. president bill clinton regarding governance of the global internet. broadly, this research seeks to address the following question: whose interests drive the use and development of the early internet, and as new concerns about sovereignty arise, how are questions of internet governance addressed to ensure that the needs of citizens around the world are met? in 2019, it’s easy to take for granted that the internet is a commercial system, but in the mid-1990s, the nature of the increasingly global internet was debated as commercial, governmental, and technical interest groups attempted to influence the policies and structures that would guide this system. i return to this history to contextualize contemporary issues and to consider the various stakeholders that influenced earlier internet governance. suggested citation (apa): grosse, m. (2019, october 2-5). lasting impacts of 1990s internet governance. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. methods/critical frameworks i examine the era of 1990s internet history through archival analysis. in particular, i engage with the ‘ira magaziner electronic commerce’ papers at the clinton presidential library in little rock, arkansas. in looking at this history, i apply a political economy of communication framework that focuses on issues of power and the imbalances they create, particularly as they’re built into the structures of media systems. in this research, i consider three broad groups that are represented in this archive: the technical community, the experts that understood the mechanical workings of the system who also knew its technical capacities and limitations; commercial interest groups, the companies and for-profit institutions investing in the early internet; and official government actors from the united states and abroad as well as representatives from intergovernmental organizations. in looking at these key groups, the official and unofficial exchanges between them and the policies written related to these exchanges, i’m arguing that the efforts undertaken by the clinton administration – while appearing to encourage feedback from and collaboration between government, private and technical actors – were surface efforts to make it appear as though serious, multistakeholder governance was taking place when in actuality, the united states was primarily engaging with capitalist states, and in particular, ones who were interested in, or at least willing to, follow a u.s.-centric approach to internet governance. the inclusion of multiple stakeholders goes beyond any multilateral or state-to-state policy making to include private interests. though this discourse frames the attention to commercial interests as inclusive and even democratic, including commercial perspectives undercuts the ability for other governments and any form of non-commercial public interest groups to set policy while advancing corporations’ ability to do so. findings/conclusions in 1994, the clinton administration was very public about the fact that the commercialization of the internet was a top priority for the u.s. government. one important space where we can consider the overlapping interests of the groups noted above was in the development and control of the domain name system or dns. this system is the backbone of the commercial internet. connecting ip addresses with easy to remember names and addresses allows users without technical expertise to more easily navigate the internet. without a system like this, the internet does not become a commercial system like we know it today. understanding the commercial interest in this system, the clinton administration understood the need to control and protect a stable dns in order to encourage investment by private corporations. issues of intellectual property and trademark were prioritized, and u.s. interests were disproportionately offered generic top-level domains, such as addresses ending in .com, while interests in other countries were more likely to operate using countries code domains, .uk for the united kingdom, .au for australia, .de for germany and so forth. as a result, u.s. preferences became a kind of default setting for the internet despite the persistence of romantic or utopic narratives of the internet that framed the internet as a global system on which everyone had equal access. the prioritization of commercial interests has continued impacts. in addition to the issues with the u.s. presidential election in 2016, other countries around the world remain concerned about the ways in which facebook, a private american corporation, could harm their national politics. in february 2019, british parliament released a report critical of the corporation. parliament argued that facebook’s influence on their national politics resulted from serious flaws in oversight, flaws that have resulted in facebook operating as if above the law and in total disregard of its users’ privacy interests. in that same month, polls in canada indicated that a majority of citizens there believed that facebook would negatively impact their next federal election. this is where we can see those early iterations of multistakeholderism that set roots in the 1990s – with commercial interests taking priority over more democratic concerns. connection to conference themes this paper addresses concerns related to trust in governance – considering how various stakeholders in early internet governance were represented (or not) in the final policy decisions that shaped the structures and coordination of the internet. i argue that the focus on including commercial interests in these earlier discussions has had a lasting impact on the ways in which the internet operates to this day. in considering recent controversies that stem from the blurring lines of online sovereignty, wherein commercial and governmental interests become interwoven without a clear sense of who bears the responsibility when the system operates against the interests of its users, it becomes essential to consider the historical foundations which may have led to this moment. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): ellis, j. (2020, october). skipping discovery? music discovery and personal music collections in the streaming era. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. skipping discovery? music discovery and personal music collections in the streaming era jack ellis university of tasmania introduction online music streaming currently constitutes the preferred method of consumption among music listeners worldwide (international federation of the phonographic industry [ifpi], 2019). these streaming services afford users unparalleled access to vast music databases, providing an abundance of music choice and possibilities for exploring and discovering new music. within these platform environments, combinations of algorithmic recommendation systems and playlist curation are made salient as tools to help users navigate the conditions of abundant choice and retain listeners through the personalised curation of song suggestions (seaver, 2018; fry, 2018; lüders, 2019). despite the promise of music streaming services for the discovery of new music, curated and personalised playlists have been found to trigger only short-term exposure and may even be detrimental to long-term experiences and enduring engagement between listeners and music which is new to them (kjus, 2016; morgan, 2019). these perspectives draw attention to the intersection of user listening behaviours and algorithmic recommendation systems in shaping experiences of music discovery. investigating this relationship in the case of spotify, lüders (2019) describes users as engaging in a form of ‘non-linear finding’, as combinations of personalised algorithmic music recommendations and curated playlists serve to ‘push’ users to ‘always explore further’ (p.11). these features provide ways for service users to expand their music tastes and indulge their curiosities through exposure to new sounds. however, these features were simultaneously recognised as the source of ephemeral music experiences, characterised by impatience, a loss of focus and tendencies to skip quickly through songs in order to listen to the next suggestion. it is here that lüders (2019) identifies user practices of saving and collecting music by creating their own playlists as a strategy to mitigate the ephemeral experience of exploring music on spotify. these practices are indicative of a ‘will to archive’ among spotify users as a way to exercise a sense of ownership over music and create connections between music and their own individualised histories (lüders, 2019). foregrounding the position of personal music collections in establishing enduring relationships with music on spotify, lüders’ work may be complimented by scrutinising the ‘phenomenological moment’ of discovery itself (nowak, 2016 p.140). as such, in this paper i will locate the use of personal music collections by spotify users to cultivate instances of music discovery which extend beyond initial encounters with music recommendation systems. this addition allows for the affective processes in which music becomes meaningful to be captured, as well as the evolving trajectories of these meanings over time. in doing so, i will engage with conference themes concerning platforms and algorithms and their increasing presence in shaping the distribution, consumption and discovery of culture in the everyday lives of individuals. theoretical framework my focus on ‘phenomenological moments’ of discovery follows nowak’s (2016) reframing of music discovery to include affective responses to music content which mediate the interpretation and definition of music by individuals. nowak’s conceptualisation explains how ‘the initial interaction with content matters less than the interaction that leaves an affective mark on individuals —the actual discovery’ (2016, p.143). in this way, an individual’s social surroundings or the availability technologies for discovering music represent the conditions from which music discoveries may emerge, but these moments are modulated by affect, or the ‘bodily responses to music content that arouse individuals’ sensibilities and enable them to categorize content they discover’ (nowak, 2016 p.142). from this perspective, i examine how spotify users experience different types of music discovery through their personal music collections, including growing music discoveries which emerge over time. method the data for this paper was collected as part of a larger project focused on music collections. a series of semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with a research sample of 20 generation y music fans who use music streaming platforms, reported an active interest in popular music and ownership of at least one other music media format. participants were recruited using an online facebook advertisement. interviews were recorded using a digital audio recorder before being transcribed and thematically coded (saldaña, 2013). findings a subset of my participants identified a change in their listening habits when using spotify, reporting an excessive increase in the skipping of songs and impatience with song recommendations. in this context, the cultivation of a music collection became a strategy to mitigate feelings of being pushed to explore new music by platform interfaces and to slow down the pace of their music consumption. such collections often took the form of user-created playlists explicitly intended for saving music recommendations from friends and others or suggested by service algorithms. users consciously returned to these personal music archives with an intention to listen to music content more closely or in its entirety, constituting a listening context and mindset sympathetic towards affective response and different types of music discovery. these collections were described as the site of music which grew to be discovered over time through repeated listening and gradual affective definition by the listener. this process of emergent discovery made salient the influence of the listener’s social surroundings, friends and online communities as the impetus for choosing to give particular music content time to grow towards being discovered. conclusion this paper investigates the notion of music discovery at the current height of the streaming era of music consumption, where systems of service personalisation, recommendation and access to vast cloud-based music databases shape the practices of a significant proportion of music consumers. music discoveries were found to represent a nexus of culture, algorithms, listener practices and social engagements. adopting a focus on user practices of personal archiving and music management within the architecture of music streaming services, i locate personal music collections as the site of an enduring ‘will to archive’, in order to remember music which is important and facilitate affective musical discoveries (lüders, 2019). this focus yielded longitudinal perspectives on music discovery which reflected long-term experiences and sustained engagement between users and music which is new to them. these findings raise implications for the use of algorithmic recommendation systems in the delivery and consumption of music and other cultural forms, drawing attention to user practices and strategies as platforms and algorithms become increasingly relevant conduits of cultural diffusion and circulation. references fry, a. (2018). an echoic chamber: algorithmic curation and personalized listening. in: e. mazierska, l. gillon and t. rigg, ed., popular music in the post-digital age politics, economy, culture and technology, 1st ed. new york: bloomsbury academic, pp.269-290. ifpi. (2019). ifpi global music report 2019. [online] available at: https://www.ifpi.org/news/ifpi-global-music-report-2019 [accessed 28 feb. 2020]. kjus, y. (2016). musical exploration via streaming services: the norwegian experience. popular communication, 14(3), pp.127-136. lüders, m. (2019). pushing music: people’s continued will to archive versus spotify’s will to make them explore. european journal of cultural studies, pp.1-18. morgan, b. (2019). revenue, access, and engagement via the in-house curated spotify playlist in australia. popular communication, 18(1), pp.32-47. nowak, r. (2016). when is a discovery? the affective dimensions of discovery in music consumption. popular communication, 14(3), pp.137-145. saldaña, j. (2009). the coding manual for qualitative researchers. 1st ed. london: sage. seaver, n. (2018). captivating algorithms: recommender systems as traps. journal of material culture, 24(4), pp.421-436. breadtube extended abstract for aoir-final.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 temporal frames for platform publics: the platformization of breadtube aikaterini mniestri siegen university, germany alex gekker university of amsterdam, netherlands. in this paper we suggest the notion of platform publics to account for the intermingling of socio-technical processes that make online platforms (in this case: youtube) resistant to stable definitions. it has been over a decade of youtube studies and yet, a consensus on what precisely youtube is seems unlikely. arguably, burgess and green began this ontological quest with the first edition of youtube (2008) in which they set out ‘to work through some of the often-competing ideas about just what youtube is.” (iv) snickars and vondereau (2009) considered the “ontological ambivalence” (2009, p. 28) of youtube to be an asset since the platform’s success was rooted in its flexibility as a stage for content. following work attempted to understand yt as a ‘new screen ecology’ (cunningham 2016); through its platform logics of monetization and viewership (postigo 2015, van es 2020); as a contested space between creators, content and audience (berryman and kavka 2018, bishop 2018; 2019); and as a database, often implementing scraping and other computational techniques to account for its nature as vast graph network of content (airoldi et al. 2016) with internal algorithmic dynamic for instance the preference of “yt-native” content over mainstream actors within its search and recommendations (rieder et al. 2018). however, this methodology, too, confronted the researchers with “the realities of an intricate mesh of mutually constitutive agencies that frustrate our desire for causal explanation” (ibid 65). addressing all the above, our call is thus to abandon the ontological stability of yt as a singular object and instead present it from a post-representational (thrift 2008) and temporally-orientated (adam 2008) perspective. using a case study on the emergence, convergence and schism of left-leaning content creators and publics known as breadtube on the platform, we refrain from asking what yt is, but rather where and when yt happens. from the election of donald trump and through a series of escalating events radical right wing ideologies penetrated the vernacular of politicians and other public figures. virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): mniestri, a., gekker, a. (2020, october) temporal frames for platform publics: the platformization of breadtube. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 (norman 2020, tuters 2020). at this moment in time, yt rose to infamy as an alt-right pipeline, arguable ‘radicalizing’ users towards reactionary content (tufecki 2018, lewis 2019). in response, numerous creators began to produce videos on the platform whose purpose was to provide counterpoints to the discursive narratives of the alt-right around the issues of anti-feminism and racism. what had begun as an incidental trickling of politically left-leaning channels consolidated, by 2018, into a strong community of interlinked channels. a running point for mass recognition was a prominent exposé in the verger, where natalie wynn (of the “contrapoints” channel) was hailed as the “oscar wilde of youtube” (cross 2018). soon, the so-called “breadtube” (or lefttube) amassed a substantial following on yt but importantly also on other platforms, like reddit and twitch. in other words, controversies around reactionary rhetoric fertilized “discrete and identifiable sites of uncertainty and creativity” (burgess and metamoros fernandez 2016, p. 81-82) rendering breadtube an “issue public.” (81) this is, for the most part, the image that kuznetsov and ismangil (2020) have captured, painting breadtube as a “catalyst, an agent preparing and hastening up conditions for change.” (205) and denoting it as a “socialist movement.” (216) as we show, taking a snapshot of breadtube at precisely the right moment might produce such an image, but it can be misleading without taking into account the temporal dynamics of the platform and the issue publics converging on it. case in point is the release of “opulence,” video in october 2019 which caused a severe rift in the community. to us, this again challenges the presumption that one can capture a single static image of yt, or any public that exists on it. with that in mind, this paper examines breadtube not as a successful or failed movement, but as an apt case, which reveals the complexity that a temporallyoriented perspective can bring to the study of platform publics. this is all the more important in the face of platformization (helmond 2015). yt has followed alphabet’s trajectory in replacing a two-sided market with a much more complex multi-sided market (rieder and sire 2014), where advertisers, content creators and audiences are all pitted against each other for yt’s sake. within this multi-sided market, cultural production is articulated through the affordance of particular types of “activities, connections, and knowledge” (nieborg and poell 2018; 6). thus, breadtube should be seen as a momentary crystallization of an issue public, positioned as much within the creator anxiety surrounding the production and streaming of video content selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 online and its (cross-)platformization (bishop 2018;2019) as it is within a certain political discourse. references adam, barbara. "of timescapes, futurescapes and timeprints." lüneburg university 17 (2008). berryman, rachel, and misha kavka. "crying on youtube: vlogs, self-exposure and the productivity of negative affect." convergence 24.1 (2018): 85-98. bishop, sophie. "managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip." new media & society 21.11-12 (2019): 2589-2606. bishop, sophie. "anxiety, panic and self-optimization: inequalities and the youtube algorithm." convergence 24.1 (2018): 69-84. burgess, jean, and joshua green. youtube: online video and participatory culture. john wiley & sons, 2018. burgess, jean, and ariadna matamoros-fernández. "mapping sociocultural controversies across digital media platforms: one week of# gamergate on twitter, youtube, and tumblr." communication research and practice 2.1 (2016): 79-96. cross, katherine. "the oscar wilde of youtube fights the alt-right with decadence and seduction." the verge. n.p., 2018. web. 29 feb. 2020. cunningham, stuart, david craig, and jon silver. "youtube, multichannel networks and the accelerated evolution of the new screen ecology." convergence 22.4 (2016): 376391. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 helmond, anne. "the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready." social media+ society 1.2 (2015): 2056305115603080. lewis, rebecca. 2019. “‘this is what the news won’t show you’: youtube creators and the reactionary politics of micro-celebrity.” television & new media, october, 1527476419879919. nieborg, david b., and thomas poell. "the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity." new media & society 20.11 (2018): 4275-4292. norman, chelsey. "the alt-right arc: identity construction and audience uptake on youtube." 2020 conference of the american association for applied linguistics (aaal). aaal, 2020. postigo, hector. "the socio-technical architecture of digital labor: converting play into youtube money." new media & society 18.2 (2016): 332-349. rieder, bernhard, and guillaume sire. "conflicts of interest and incentives to bias: a microeconomic critique of google’s tangled position on the web." new media & society 16.2 (2014): 195-211. snickars, pelle, and patrick vonderau. the youtube reader. kungliga biblioteket, 2009. thrift, nigel. non-representational theory: space, politics, affect. routledge, 2008. tufekci, zeynep. "opinion | youtube, the great radicalizer." nytimes.com. n.p., 2018. web. 29 feb. 2020. tuters, marc. 2020. “on the problem of reactionary nonsense at the bottom of the web.” europenow, january. accessed february 28, 2020. <https://www.europenowjournal.org/2020/01/15/on-the-problem-of-reactionarynonsense-at-the-bottom-of-the-web/>. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 van es, karin. 2020. “youtube’s operational logic: ‘the view’ as pervasive category.” television & new media 21 (3): 223–39. wynn, natalie. opulence | contrapoints. youtube: n.p., 2020. video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd-pbf3ywgo microsoft word 912-656-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 watching the watchers: new perspectives on spectatorship, gaming and online media keywords digital games; e-sports; spectatorship; competitive gaming; case studies panel outline electronic sports (e-sports) represents the configuration of competitive videogaming as spectatorial, professionalized sport, problematizing conventional distinctions between work and leisure, ‘geek’ and ‘jock’ cultures, and crucially, between playing games and watching others play. much of the scholarship on e-sports has focused primarily on players and player communities involved in the ‘professionalization’ of digital gaming, examining players’ game-based skillsets (rambusch, jakobsson & pargman, 2007), the ways they negotiate the rules, expectations and challenges that come with professional play (witkowski, 2012), and the formation of gendered subjectivities afforded (and constrained) by the confluence of gaming and sport (taylor, 2010). recent work by tl taylor (2012) and todd harper (2010) have begun to extend the study of competitive play beyond players, examining the fundamental role of spectatorship in the social, technological and economic development of e-sports. as tl taylor points out in raising the stakes, the connections between spectatorship and play run deep. while the wizard, twin galaxies, and starcade may have presented spectatorial gaming as an entertaining, if quirky sideshow, watching others play whether attending tournaments, bars or arcades in person, or simply watching others in between turns at the controls has arguably always been an integral, albeit understudied, part of gaming culture (alloway & gilbert, 1998; lin & sun, 2011; taylor, 2012). over the last 15 years, however, the loosely affiliated and often volatile assortment of clans, tournaments and leagues collectively representing the e-sports industry has sought to cultivate a mass online audience for competitive, elite gaming. recent developments have demonstrated that there is indeed a global audience for e-sports, made possible both by the surging popularity of specific games as well as by the emergence of high definition, live streaming webcasts, and the various viewer practices and business models these make possible. major league gaming (mlg), the self-proclaimed “world’s largest e-sports organization”, recently reported 11.7 million “live online viewers” for online, streaming webcasts of mlg’s pro circuit tournament play in 2012 (mlg, 2012). the last day of competition of the 2012 spring championship, held june 8-10 in anaheim, ca, which featured the league of legends and starcraft 2 finals, drew 2.2 million viewers to mlg’s webcast – more than their total number of unique viewers for all 2010. over roughly the same period of time, twitch (http://www.twitch.tv/) has emerged as a highly popular venue to watch live-streaming videogame play, including e-sports. boasting over 23 million subscribers a month, the platform has not only offered a means for e-sports organizations, teams and individual players to reach potentially massive audiences, but it has served to further enact and legitimate the notion of gaming as something we watch as well as something we do. the recent success of mlg and twitch, as well as the (related) surging popularity of starcraft 2 and league of legends, have seemed to establish e-sports as a legitimate and viable entertainment media industry (tassi, 2013). at the same time, the short history of professional gaming is marked as much by sudden declines as by sudden success; claims that ‘e-sports has finally arrived’ were heard shortly before the collapse of the longstanding cyberathlete professional league (cpl) and the much-touted championship gaming series (cgs) in 2008-2009, for instance (kane, 2010). outside of south korea, where e-sports has had a solid foothold for some time (jin, 2010), competitive gaming selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 organizations struggle to attract and maintain sponsorship for what is still largely seen, by potential sponsors, as a marketing experiment (taylor, 2012, p. 146). adding to this the high “churn” rate of players, games, and tournaments (p. 153); the brevity of players’ careers and the relatively short shelf life of games and gaming platforms means that the constellation of pro-gaming ‘stars’ shifts rapidly. for these reasons, competitive gaming is very much a moving target for researchers: often, by the time a particular community, tournament, or organization is reported on in academic publications, it no longer exists in the same form, if at all. given this dynamic and unpredictable terrain, one of the central challenges for e-sports researchers is to link accounts of competitive gaming to larger transformations in digital games, social media, and emerging forms of both leisure and labor. each of the papers on this panel undertakes this project, whether through linking e-sports spectatorship in china to issues of censorship, nationality, and broadcasting, analyzing the fundamental role of spectators in enacting and shaping the psychological and social experiences of play, or exploring changes in the ways spectators have been incorporated into the ‘assemblage’ of north american e-sports broadcasting over the past five years. collectively, this panel represents an attempt to more productively understand the crucial role that audiences carry out in the ongoing socio-technical transformation of digital play as spectatorial activity. references alloway, n. and gilbert, p. (1998). video game culture: playing with masculinity, violence and pleasure. in s. howard (ed.), wired up: young people and electronic media. london: ucl press, pp. 95-114. harper, t. (2010). the art of war: fighting games, performativity, and social game play. phd dissertation, ohio university. jin, d.y. (2010). korea’s online gaming empire. cambridge, ma: mit press. kane, m. (2008). game boys: professional videogaming’s rise from the basement to the big time. new york: viking. lin, h., and chuen-tsai, s. (2011). the role of onlookers in arcade gaming: frame analysis of public behaviours. convergence, 17(2), pp. 125–137. major league gaming. (nov. 14, 2012). mlg 2012 season generates 334% growth in live online viewers. accessed march 1, 2013, from: http://www.majorleaguegaming.com/news/mlg-2012-season-generates334-growth-in-live-online-viewers rambusch, j., jakobsson, p., and pargman, d. (2007). exploring e-sports: a case study of gameplay in counterstrike. in a. baba (ed.), situated play. tokyo: university of tokyo press, pp. 157-164. tassi, p. (march 3, 2013). heart of the swarm invades mlg winter championship along with call of duty and league of legends. forbes. accessed march 4, 2013, from http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/03/11/heart-of-the-swarm-invades-mlg-winterchampionship-along-with-call-of-duty-league-of-legends-and-planetside/. taylor, n. (2009). power play: digital gaming goes pro. phd dissertation, york university, toronto. taylor, t.l. (2012). raising the stakes: e-sports and the professionalization of computer gaming. cambridge, ma: mit press. witkowski, e. 2012. inside the huddle: the sociology and phenomenology of team play in networked computer games. phd dissertation, it university of copenhagen, denmark. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 one shining (virtual) moment: the social facilitation hypothesis extended to video game performance nicholas david bowman west virginia university united states nicholas.bowman@mail.wvu.edu abstract from the first public arcade machines to the massive online worlds and professional gaming contests of today, a central part of the history of video games has been that of performance: a demonstration – often public – of mastery over a digital challenge. when we consider the notion of public performance, something often overlooked in video game research, we might also suggest the audience to play an important part of the gaming experience. just as athletes might shine or choke when playing in front of a crowd, e-sports feature gamers succeeding or failing in front of gathered crowds. emerging research suggests the drive theory of social facilitation to provide a robust explanation of how the mere presence of an audience an affect one’s performance at a video game, and the following paper suggests how this research can be extended to better understand the interaction between gamer and audience in the e-sports arena. keywords e-sports; social facilitation theory; performance; drive; competition introduction a cursory review of research on the psychology of video games reveals an interesting methodological artifact: studies often conducted with gamers in relative isolation, playing video games in front of a monitor under laboratory supervision. such approaches are insightful in understanding the individual experience of gaming, but they by proxy adopt a putnam-esque (1995) approach to the medium as an isolated and socially-withdrawn one. this limits how we can understand video games as a social phenomenon being played with and for audiences as a matter of performance. indeed, a core component of e-sports is the notion of a central performance qua video gamer performing for a gathered audience, and we can turn to psychology to understand how audiences might impact that performance. drive theory of social facilitation the drive theory of social facilitation (zajonc, 1965) provides a psychology-based explanation for understanding human behavior in front of audiences. in its simplest form, the theory explains that the presence of social others is an indiscriminate multiplier of habitual response, which results in increased effort on behalf of the performer. a behaviorist approach (cf. hull, 1943), it argues that the presence of social others is a physiologically-arousing experience that energizes our actions. to understand the influence of this process on performance, (zajonc, 1980) studied the influence of audience presence on male billiards players, and discovered that professional players had a significantly better shot accuracy when playing in front of a crowd, while novice players often performed far worse. he concluded that audience-induced drive was causing both sets of players to respond more intensely with their habitual response to the event: for the skilled player, this habitual response was a skillful and accurate shot while for the unskilled player it was a clumsy and inaccurate one. a similar analogy might be drawn from understanding one’s reaction to a pitched baseball: a skilled person has the innate hand-eye coordination to swing his/her bat at an even and powerful level while the unskilled person usually lacks these skills. in front of a crowd, we often see the skilled player perform far better while the unskilled player tends to perform far worse. thus, we see the social facilitation process: audience presence induces drive, which influences performance. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 the social dimension of video gaming to study video games and social facilitation, it is first important for us to recognize the social dimensions of video games. video games as a sociocultural phenomenon are steeped in public performance. borrowing from the operating model of pinball and other parlor games, the first video game systems were installed in public spaces such as taverns and gaming arcades. as a matter of implicit (or perhaps even explicit) public performance, skilled gamers would often attract crowds in a similar style of athletes playing in sports arenas early video games adopting “hi score” boards so that top players could earn their regard. as technologies allowed for video game consoles to be manufactured smaller and cheaper, a home market for video games opened up. yet, even this home market was designed nearly from the start to be a social experience. for example, the 1977 release of the atari vcs featured a pair of controller ports to facilitate the co-located game play of pong and since then, one is hard-pressed to find a home console that has not included at least two game controller parts and games supporting multiplayer gaming (cf. bowman, weber, tamborini & sherry, 2013). furthermore, studies player experiences continually implicate the social dimension of gaming as important to the medium’s attraction: colwell and kato (2005) talk about the companionship expressed by gamers with each other, wan and chiou (2006) report on the friendships formed between gamers and sherry, lucas, greenberg and lachlan (2006) suggest that challenge and competition as well as social and relational aspects of the experience all serve as related-yet-discrete dimensions of the experience. video games and social facilitation effects arguing that social dimensions are a salient aspect of video gaming allows us to more closely examine it. to this end, bowman et al (2013) examined the potential influence of audience presence on performance at a video game. using an arena-style first-person shooter (quake 3), their research assessed the cognitive abilities of a randomly-selected group of individuals notably, their hand-eye coordination and their ability to mentally rotate two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects (skills positively associated with performance at first-person shooter games) before having them play either in front of a co-located audience or in isolation. in line with the drive theory of social facilitation, the presence of an audience significantly and substantially increased the performance of high skill players, although the performance of low skill gamers was not significantly decreased. notably, ‘high skill’ in this application is indicative of a player whose cognitive skills were most conducive to game performance, not necessarily a player who was experienced with the game itself. moreover, manipulating the challenge of the game itself was also found to moderate the social facilitation effect audiences were more influential on performance at low-challenge versions of the video game than at high-challenge versions. indeed, the differential capacity of an audience’s ability to influence game performance as a function of game challenge is explained by worchel et al. (1997), who found that the difficulty of a given challenge can also increase drive. bowman et al. (2013) explained that gamers in the high-challenge condition were already exerting a maximal level of drive independent of audience presence. implications for e-sports returning to the core concept of e-sports the public performance of video game play akin to a professional sporting event the connections between the psychology of audience-influenced performance and video game play become apparent. studies (kimble & rezabek, 1992; bowman et al., 2013) have demonstrated audience presence to influence video game performance analogous to audience effects long-established in sport psychology by which athletes ‘shine’ or ‘choke’ in the heat of competition (cf. schwartz & barsky, 1977). emergence evidence suggests that the basic tenets of drive theory should operate for competitive gamers, yet such research has not been replicated or extended. why might this matter for the understanding of e-sports or competitive gamers? first, it suggests the audience has a great deal of agency over the event itself. part of what legitimizes e-sports is their ability to draw large and interested crowds. yet as the crowds grow, competitive gamers will selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 5 need to become accustomed to handling the increased drive that comes from playing in front of, for example, 5000 spectators in a public arena rather than a few friends in one’s living room or a gaming center. moreover, many e-sports are broadcast through traditional and internet channels and scant evidence exists that compares the relative influence of a virtual (non-co-located) or actual (co-located) audience on game performance; particularly relevant to online-based video games. conclusion as e-sports evolve into public performances, we can borrow from psychological theories of audience and performance to better understand the experience of the competitive gamers themselves. evidence suggests that there is an implicit interaction between audience and athlete, and the massive crowds gathering around e-sports can be a boon not only for the competitions themselves, but for performance of the gamers themselves. references bowman, n. d., weber, r., tamborini, r., & sherry, j. l. (2013). facilitating game play: how others affect our performance at and enjoyment of video games. media psychology, 16(1). colwell, j., & kato, m. (2005). video game play in british and japanese adolescents. simulation & gaming, 36(4), 518-530. hull, c. l. (1943). principles of behavior: an introduction to behavior theory. new york: appleton. kimble, c. r., & rezabek, j. (1992). playing games before an audience: social facilitation or choking? social behavior and personality, 20(2), 115-120. putnam, r. d. (1995). bowling alone: america’s declining social capital. journal of democracy, 6(1), 65-78. schwartz, b. & barsky, s. f. (1977). the home advantage. social forces, 55, 641-661. sherry, j. l., lucas, k., greenberg, b. s., & lachlan, k. (2006). video game uses and gratifications as predictors of use and game preference. in p. vorderer & j. bryant (eds.), playing video games: motives, responses and consequences (pp. 213-224). hillsdalen nj: lea. wan, c. s., & chiou, w. b. (2006). psychological motives and online game addiction: a test of flow theory and humanistic need theory for taiwanese adolescents. cyberpsychology & behavior, 9(3), 317-324. worchel, s., shebilski, w. l., jordan, j. a., & prislin, j. (1997). competition and performance on a computerbased complex perceptual-motor task. human factors, 39(3), 410-416. zajonc, r. b. (1965). social facilitation. science, 149. zajonc, r. b. (1980). compresence. in p. b. paulus (ed.), psychology of group influence (pp. 35-60). hillsdale, nj: lea. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 6 creating a spectacle: live e-sports events and china’s digital games market marcella szablewicz massachusetts institute of technology united states mszabs@mit.edu abstract based upon ethnographic research conducted in china, this paper examines two e-sports tournaments, the esports champion league tournament (ecl), a domestically produced and government sponsored warcraft iii tournament held in beijing in may 2010, and the world cyber games (wcg) festival, an international, multigame tournament held in kunshan in november 2012. by comparing these two events and placing e-sports in the context of literature on sports spectacle and chinese national sports culture, this paper argues that live esports events in china are less about fan spectatorship than they are about creating a spectacle fueled by politics, nationalism and capitalist consumer culture. keywords e-sports; china; spectatorship; ethnography introduction and methodology as e-sports develop on the international scene, there are many questions about the future of this industry and its sustainability. one interesting issue has to do with the development of ‘live’ spectatorship for a form of competition that is, by nature, already mediated. indeed, many might argue that it is easier to follow an e-sports match through live streaming or replays than it is to watch the ‘live’ event in a noisy arena with a distant screen, an argument supported by the ethnographic findings of this author. if this is the case, what is the true purpose of the “live” e-sports event? based upon ethnographic research conducted in china, this paper examines two e-sports tournaments, the e-sports champion league tournament (ecl), a domestically produced and government sponsored warcraft iii tournament held in beijing in may 2010, and the world cyber games (wcg) festival, an international, multi-game tournament held in kunshan in november 2012. by comparing these two events and offering analysis of chinese e-sports policy and media coverage, it is possible to see that live e-sports events in china are less about spectatorship than they are about creating a spectacle fueled by politics, nationalism and capitalist consumer culture. theoretical framework spectacle is a term that has been variously theorized by both sports sociologists (e.g. macaloon, 1984; manzenreiter, 2006; tomlinson & young, 2005) and marxist critical theorists (debord, 1994; kellner, 2003). this paper will consider these theories of spectacle while also engaging with literature on the connection between chinese olympic aims and politics. importantly, scholars who have studied sport in china note that sports play a mediating role between nationalism and internationalism (brownell, 1995; xu, 2008). says xu (2008), china defines sports “almost completely in terms of nationalism and politics” (p. 60). discussion china is a country familiar with the power of spectacle. over the course of the past few years, they have hosted an array of domestic and international events with a clear eye trained on the image they would present to a global audience. notable events include the 2008 beijing olympics, the 2009 national holiday celebration for the 60th anniversary of the founding of the ccp, and the 2010 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 7 shanghai world expo. such events make use of the size of china’s population to impress upon the global audience the sheer power in numbers of the chinese state. china’s hosting of the world cyber games is a continuation of this concerted effort to demonstrate china’s power, but of a different sort. rather than physical prowess, military might or urban planning, the world cyber games served as a venue for demonstrating china’s ascendency in the realm of digital gaming and techno-culture. e-sports, while an extension of china’s nationalistic sports culture, is also implicated in powerful processes of capitalist consumer culture. the chinese government’s desire to create an image as a leader in digital gaming is linked to the notion that china has long been seen as lagging behind its east asian neighbors in the realm of pop cultural commodities (chua, 2004). for example, hjorth and chan (2009) noted that south korea and japan are considered to be the leaders in the east asian games market. this imbalance is one that china is actively seeking to rectify, and the promotion of international e-sports events is one of the ways in which china is creating a new image for itself. from the “olympics of e-sports” to an empty stadium the world cyber games is the perfect venue for china to promote itself in this regard as the wcg fashions itself as the olympics of e-sports (hutchins, 2008; lowood, nd; taylor, n., 2009; taylor, t., 2012). the chinese producers clearly sought to reinforce this olympic metaphor, housing professional gamers in a designated “player’s village” and featuring an impressive opening ceremony with the requisite carrying of the country flags. the presence of a large contingent of young volunteers wearing official attire harkened back to the volunteers that were present at both the olympics and the shanghai expo. finally, the emphasis on good sportsmanship and diplomatic behavior aligns well with china’s promotion of “harmonious” internet culture. china’s 2012 wcg was particularly notable for the large number of spectators that turned out for the event. according to the official press release, the event attracted over 110,000 spectators over the course of four days and a reported 85 million online views. wcg ceo brad lee commented on size of china’s e-sports and digital gaming audience, even going so far as to state that china was one of the largest markets for e-sports and that it was quickly catching up with south korea. but behind the shiny façade created by spectacles such as the world cyber games, china’s contradictory policies about digital games reveal that games still remain a marginalized and contested part of chinese culture. in comparison to wcg, the ecl championship in beijing revealed a very different image of e-sports. aside from a seemingly staged crowd that appeared for the opening ceremony of the competition, there was virtually no audience, and the event was poorly promoted. furthermore, e-sports, while being publicly sold as china’s “99th professional sport” is actually banned from being broadcast on tv by the state administration of radio, film and television (sarft). such policies are largely the result of negative public opinion and fears about internet addiction (golub and lingley, 2008; szablewicz, 2010). indeed, a government official presiding over the opening of wcg even noted that her spouse would not allow their teenage son to attend the competition for fear that e-sports would negatively impact his studies. the problem of live spectatorship finally, from the audience perspective, live spectatorship at wcg was less about watching the match than it was about the atmosphere (qifen). to begin, the arena in which the matches were held was not always conducive to close watching. the sheer number of people in the audience often meant that it was hard to see the front of the stage. announcers, while present, were set to the side or back of the audience, and while their voices were sent over loudspeakers, they often had to compete with loud music or other announcements being pumped out of surrounding booths. one of the young men i work with posted mainly pictures of the professional players and the “booth babes” he posed with at the event. many had never before attended a live e-sports event, but chose to go with friends to reminisce about the games or players they had followed as teenagers. conclusion selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 8 elsewhere (szablewicz, 2012) e-sports in china have been framed as a form of “patriotic leisure” that, extending from lisa hoffman’s (2011) notion of the “patriotic professional,” fuses a neoliberal ethos of the skill-building, self-enterprising individual with a commitment to acting in the best interests of the socialist state. but aside from the fact that e-sports is promoted as a “healthy” form of digital gaming and contrast to other, unhealthy and purportedly addictive games such as world of warcraft, it is clear that in hosting international e-sports competitions such as the wcg, china also aims to produce a media spectacle that demonstrates for a global audience their growing strength in the digital games market. references brownell, s. (1995). training the body for china: sports in the moral order of the people’s republic. chicago: university of chicago press. chua, b.h. (2004). conceptualizing an east asian popular culture. inter-asia cultural studies, 5(2), 200-221. doi: 10.1080/1464937042000236711. debord, g. (1994). the society of the spectacle. (d. nicholson-smith, trans.). new york: zone books. (original work published 1967) golub, a. & lingley, k. (2008). “just like the qing empire”: internet addiction, mmogs, and moral crisis in contemporary china. games and culture, 3(1), 5975. doi: 10.1177/1555412007309526. hjorth, l. & chan, d. (eds.) (2009). gaming cultures and place in asia-pacific. new york: routledge. hoffman, l.m. (2010). patriotic professionalism in urban china: fostering talent. philadelphia: temple university press. hutchins, b. (2008). signs of meta-change in second modernity: the growth of e-sport and the world cyber games. new media & society, 10 (6), 851-869. doi: 10.1177/1461444808096248. kellner, d. (2003). media spectacle. new york: routledge. lowood, h., (n.d.). "beyond the game”: the olympic ideal and competitive e-sports. (unpublished manuscript). macaloon, j. (1984). olympic games and the theory of the spectacle in modern society. in j. macaloon (ed.). rite, drama, festival, spectacle: rehearsals toward a theory of cultural performance. (pp. 241-280). philadelphia: institute for the study of human issues. manzenreiter, w. (2006). sport spectacles, uniformities and the search for identity in late modern japan. the sociological review. 54 (s2), 144-155. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-954x.2006.00658.x szablewicz, m. (2010). the ill effects of “opium for the spirit”: a critical cultural analysis of china’s internet addiction moral panic. chinese journal of communication, 3(4), 453-470. doi: 10.1080/17544750.2010.516579 szablewicz, m. (2012). patriotic leisure: e-sports, government policy and national image. unpublished paper presented at the 10th chinese internet research conference, los angeles, ca. [video file]. retrieved from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqejm_duqri taylor, n. (2009). power play: digital gaming goes pro. (doctoral dissertation). retrieved from proquest dissertations and theses database. (umi no. nr64963) taylor, t.l. (2012). raising the stakes: e-sports and the professionalization of computer gaming. cambridge: the mit press. tomlinson, a. & young, c. (eds.). (2005). national identity and global sports events: culture, politics, and spectacle in the olympics and the football world cup. albany: suny press. xu, g.q. (2008). olympic dreams: china and sports 1895-2008. cambridge: harvard university press. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 9 belly up to the barcraft: e-sports spectatorship in informal spaces todd harper massachusetts institute of technology united states tlharper@mit.edu abstract in this paper, i examine the phenomenon of “barcrafts:” informal gatherings at bars, pubs, and other similar public spaces for the viewing of e-sports content. these settings have long been used as gathering places for the viewing of traditional sports media, and thus have a particular status in sports culture, as well as in cultures orthogonal to sports culture (such as the public performance of masculinity). this research uses ethnographic observation to identify the characteristics of the barcraft. does it match up with our concept of pub-based sports spectatorship, or does its engagement with e-sports and digital gaming culture infuse it with a different quality? keywords e-sports; spectatorship; sports culture introduction consider the following image: a group of people (mostly men) sit at a long bar, each one nursing a drink of some kind; various types of beer are favorite. their eyes are glued to a flatscreen hdtv hanging overhead, behind the bartender, but chatter about what’s going on still flows back and forth… until a big play is made. then everything changes. people’s hands go into the air; cheers (or maybe even boos) drive the volume level up a few decibels. eyes turn away from the tv as these spectators turn to each other and start discussing what just happened with animated excitement. if this image seems familiar, that’s no surprise; this vision of the consumption of sports media is well-known in the public imaginary. however, take a step back and look at that tv. what these individuals were watching was not football, basketball, hockey, or soccer. instead, it was a championship round of riot games’ incredibly popular online battle arena (moba) game, league of legends. this was the scene at a 2012 “barcraft” held in the boston area. all the markers of the previous stereotypical image were there: the crowded bar, with viewers typically clustered in small groups of acquaintance. the term “barcraft” is a portmanteau, combining “bar” (as in a pub or tavern) with “starcraft,” the title of one of the largest and most popular e-sports. however, barcrafts are not limited to viewing starcraft matches, as this example shows. in fact, the concept of the barcraft meeting extends to mobas such as league of legends (lol), and even the competitive fighting game culture. in this paper, i examine the phenomenon of the barcraft in the context of sports spectatorship, specifically the practice of public viewing of sport in bars. through ethnographic observation of these events, i seek to better understand how barcrafts navigate various aspects of sport culture, as well as the distinct qualities that their intersection with e-sports and digital sports culture may produce. sports, pubs, and public spectatorship the pub as a place to publically consume sports media is a phenomenon that exists across the globe. although here in the us we might associate it with a wide variety of spectator sports, in other parts of the world the pub has a strong tie to soccer culture. in a new zealand study on the influence of a particular brand of beer’s advertising and cultural production on nz culture, gee and jackson (2010) refer to the confluence of beer, sport spectatorship, and masculinity as a “holy trinity” of sorts. the link between these three confluent forces these researchers describe is very powerful. they note that it isn’t simply the consumption of beer at sporting events, or the consumption of sport in pubs, that selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 10 builds this link, but also the sponsorship of sport by breweries that binds these acts together in the public imagination. the pub as spectator space is also an archetypal example of oldenburg’s (1999) concept of a “third space:” a neutral space away from work or home with familiar faces where people can go to socialize, often in the context of a shared interest or event. thus there may be reasons beyond spectatorship that would drive participants to meet at these events; repeat attendees may come to rely on them as a “home away from home” where they can relax in the company of other fans. in considering why spectators might gravitate to pubs and off-site spectatorship of sporting events, mike weed (2007; 2008) notes a few factors that influenced the viewing of soccer at pubs in the uk: increasing accessibility of high-quality display technology in bars (such as hdtvs), better access to a wider variety of games on satellite networks such as bskyb, and what he calls the “sanitization” (2008, p. 190) of public stadium viewing. however, this movement of spectatorship to pubs, for weed, calls for us to re-examine certain motivations for, and qualities of, off-venue spectatorship in pubs. in his eyes, pub viewership is less about being “the leisure of being there” (baines, 1996) or a need for proximity to the event. instead, “[i]t would appear that ‘spontaneous group association’ is a key part of the sport spectating experience… rather than being about seeing the game, it is centered on sharing the experience” (2008, p. 195). these conclusions echo earlier findings by eastman and land (1997), who examined pub-based spectatorship in the us, in particular looking at how sports fans contextualized the public viewing experience in comparison to home viewing. they observed that, among other things, public viewing was related to feelings of community and group membership; being among other fans and participating in specialized discourse about the activity turned a group of strangers into a unified body, circling the axis of their shared interest. these findings resonate with existing literature on public video game play and competition, particularly in the form of analysis of e-sports competitions and competitive gaming. the qualities that the above scholars observed in public consumption of sports media in pubs – the idea of co-creation of a space around shared interest, in using ritual and specialized discourse to establish community, and the influence of masculinity and consumption on public discourse – are also found in game studies literature. these behaviors emerge at lan events (taylor & witkowski, 2010) and esports/competitive gaming events (taylor, 2009; harper, 2010; taylor, 2012; witkowski, 2012) in particular. methodology this study will employ ethnographic observations of local barcrafts, and similar events, to examine the ways in which they are both resonant with and different from the depiction of pub-based sports media consumption identified in the above research. analysis of field observations and interactions with barcraft attendees will provide a more complete picture of these informal events. the selection of sites will be focused primarily on informal events – those organized by fans or venues, rather than official bodies such as major league gaming or game developers – in order to focus on the difference of these spaces to more “sanctioned” events. conclusions while there is no complete data yet to draw definitive conclusions, current research into digital games as described above presents a number of important areas for consideration. for example, do barcrafts present a space like the online forums mentioned in harper’s (2010) analysis of fighting game culture, where new entrants are expected to already have specialized knowledge to participate, or can they also be gateways for those new to the scene? do the various manifestations of sporting masculinity that witkowski describes in her work appear in this space, and if so, how? finally, how does the nature of selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 11 e-sports media come into play? since many e-sports media are livestreamed, the question of “being there” is considerably more thorny than with physical sports. references baines, s. (1996, july). sports tourism: the leisure pursuit of being there. paper presented at the 4th world leisure and recreation association world congress. cardiff, wales. gee, s. & jackson, s. j. (2010). the southern man city as cultural place and speight’s space: locating the masculinity-sport-beer ‘holy trinity’ in new zealand. sport in society 13 (10), 1516-1531. harper, t. (2010). the art of war: fighting games, performativity, and social game play. (doctoral dissertation). ohio university, athens, ohio. oldenburg, r. (1999). the great good place: cafés, coffee shops, community centers, beauty parlors, general stores, bars, hangouts, and how they get you through the day. new york: marlowe and company. taylor, n. (2009). cheerleaders/booth babes/halo hoes: pro-gaming, gender, and jobs for the boys. digital creativity, 20 (4), 239-252. taylor, t. l. (2012). raising the stakes: e-sports and the professionalization of computer gaming. cambridge, ma: mit press. taylor, t. l. & witkowski, e. (2010). this is how we play it: what a mega-lan can teach us about games. proceedings of the fifth international conference on the foundations of digital games. new york: acm. 195-202. witkowski, e. (2012). inside the huddle: the phenomenology and sociology of team play in networked computer games. (doctoral dissertation). it university copenhagen, denmark. weed, m. (2007). the pub as a virtual football venue: an alternative to ‘being there’? soccer & society 8 (2/3), 399-414. weed, m. (2008). exploring the sport spectator experience: virtual football scholarship in the pub. soccer & society 9 (2), 189-197. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 12 staging the crowd: the changing work of e-sports spectatorship nicholas taylor north carolina state university united states nttaylor@ncsu.edu abstract the emergence of high-definition, accessible live-streaming services has led to a surge in online spectatorship for competitive gaming matches and tournaments. major league gaming (mlg), long regarded as a consoledriven e-sports organization, now boasts a ‘mass’, globalized audience for its live-streaming broadcasts of competitive play in starcraft 2 and league of legends. this paper reports on a qualitative case study, comparing two mlg tournaments the 2008 toronto open and the 2012 raleigh summer championship – from the perspective of spectators and the kinds of activities they undertook at these events. the differences in the kinds of ‘audience labor’ at these events point to transformations in mlg, and (to some extent) in e-sports more generally, towards a re-entrenchment of conventional divisions between mass media producers and consumers. these transformations run contrary to the trend towards more ‘participatory’ forms of socio-technical practice made possible by online media. keywords e-sports; spectatorship; live-streaming; ethnography introduction major league gaming (or mlg), which proclaims itself “the world’s largest e-sports organization”, has seen audiences for live streaming of its competitive gaming tournaments grow propitiously in the last two years. regarded for much of its history as a league for console-based games (particularly halo), mlg’s recent surge is partly due to its adoption of league of legends and starcraft 2; but it is also fueled by the increasing use of the internet as a platform to view content typically delivered by television or film (fox, senior & thomas, 2010). the emergence of a large, globalized online audience for mlg’s events challenges the often-repeated assertion that online media undermine many conventional distinctions upon which the study of “mass” communication rests (cover, 2006; livingstone, 2003). rather, mlg’s recent success is based on the re-enactment, via new media platforms, of traditional distinctions between media producers (the organization and its cadre of sponsored ‘pro’ gamers) and consumers (the online audience). this short paper examines the effects of this transformation on the ‘work’ of attendees at two e-sports events, representing two very different periods in the development of major league gaming (2008 and 2012). in doing so, it situates these events within broader socio-technical transformations in the e-sports industry and digital media more generally. theoretical framework this study employs the political economic concept of “audience work”, as developed by smythe (1977), adapted by jally and livant (1986), and revised, for the study of ‘web 2.0’ and social media platforms, by andrejevic (2002), cover (2006), and napoli (2010). in smythe’s formulation, television producers vie for audience attention which is then sold to advertisers; the audience simultaneously acts as commodity and as unpaid workforce, carrying out the labor of watching advertisements. while this theory has undergone substantial revision, the core concept – that media audiences conduct significant forms of unpaid labor on behalf of producers – remains the same. this framework, developed for analyses of mass media, has a renewed significance for e-sports. not only does it provide a critical perspective on the crucial role spectators play in competitive gaming, but it highlights the ways that some organizations such as mlg are purposely enacting the conventional selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 13 ‘one-to-many’ media producer/consumer relationship that the theory was initially developed to accommodate. methodology this qualitative case study incorporates field notes, photographs, and interactions with participants from two mlg events, separated by four years: the 2008 summer open (toronto), and the 2012 summer championship (raleigh). proceeding from ethnographic observations, this paper explores the ways crowds were hooked in to two very different spectatorial assemblages of competitive gaming. sites mlg held the 2008 toronto open between august 22 and 24, as part of its “pro circuit”, a series of tournaments held across north america, primarily for team-based halo play. located on the ground floor of the metro convention center in downtown toronto, the tournament ran in conjunction with fanexpo, an annual convention for sci-fi and fantasy enthusiasts. set at the far end of the floor, between a concession stand and a card-gaming tournament, mlg was positioned as a sideshow for fanexpo attendees. the majority of mlg’s crowd consisted of the approximately 500 mlg players and their family, friends and partners. in contrast, the 2012 summer championship, held on the bottom floor of the raleigh convention center between august 24 and 26, attracted approximately 2500 attendees. whereas the 2008 event featured a central stage capable of accommodating about 300 spectators for its marquee matchups, this event had four separate stages, each capable of accommodating around 500. discussion examining the activities of spectators at these two events illustrates the very different versions of esports spectatorship instantiated by mlg between 2008 and 2012. while a full account of the different kinds of labor undertaken by crowds at these events is beyond the scope of this paper, two observations highlight these differences. kickoff the 2008 toronto open began late friday (august 22), with tournament emcees addressing a (at the time) small crowd attendees directly, welcoming them and reviewing tournament rules and schedule. they then invited those assembled to raise their xbox 360 controllers in the air and shout “lock it down!” in unison. this ritualistic spectacle indicated the extent to which the lines between players and spectators were blurred. kickoff for the 2012 summer championship was configured quite differently. integrating mlg’s promotional video with live shots of cheering spectators as tournament emcees addressed the ‘folks watching at home’, the kickoff delivered the crowd to a digitally-mediated audience. here, the role of the crowd was more aligned with that undertaken by live audiences at televised sporting events than the kind of participatory ritual signaling the start of the 2008 event. spectating with most matches taking place on the event floor among rows of xboxes and monitors, often with up to 16 matches occurring at once, spectating at the 2008 toronto event was a frenzied and highly selective activity. players spent time in between matches studying other teams; if a match they wanted to watch took place during their own matches, friends or partners were tasked with watching and taking notes on other teams’ strategies, strengths and weaknesses. this spectatorial ‘work’ primarily served players, in their efforts to get a competitive edge. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 14 the majority of attendees at the 2012 raleigh event were spectators, who either bought single-day or full weekend passes. in contrast to the activities of players-spectators in toronto four years earlier, spectators spent their time circulating between seating areas for various games, promotional booths, concession stands, and autograph tables, where they could line up to meet celebrity shoutcasters and players. they could also line up for a blank banner on which they could write messages “to their favorite mlg pros” to hold up during matches. during breaks in play, cameras swooped over the crowd, zooming in on particularly colorful or catchy banners. these activities are far more in keeping with the ‘work’ expected of spectators at conventional sporting events than with the practices undertaken at typical lan events or at the 2008 toronto open. the differences drive home the extent to which mlg has, in the intervening years, enacted a relationship towards its audience (both present and online) that is, in some key respects, more aligned with conventional mass media than with the “participatory” affordances of online media (jenkins, 2006). conclusion e-sports has its roots in lans (taylor, 2012), and grassroots events (such as the “barcrafts” discussed elsewhere in this panel) continue to be the primary means for aspiring competitive gamers to meet and gain tournament experience. while such events are not particularly inclusionary (taylor, 2009), they are nevertheless participatory (taylor and witkowski, 2009). the increasing prevalence of online livecasting does not necessarily signal a lessening of opportunities to participate in e-sports; indeed, services such as twitch.tv make it possible for gamers to be both consumers and content creators. at the same time, mlg’s recent success in creating large, globalized online audiences for its events signals one particular configuration of competitive gaming based on clear distinctions between spectators and athletes, and between content producers and audiences. as with mainstream professional sports, these divisions are engineered by and entirely conducive to the capitalist interests of the organization. references andrejevic,m. (2002). the work of being watched: interactive media and the exploitation of self-disclosure. critical studies in media communication, 19(2), pp. 230–248. cover, r. (2006). audience inter/active: interactive media, narrative control and reconceiving audience history. new media and society, 8(1), pp. 139–158. fox, b., senior, j., and thomas, p. the big video game: tv’s battle to hold online viewers. ieee communications magazine, 48(5), pp. 52-56. jhally, s. and livant, b. (1986). watching as working: the valorization of audience consciousness. journal of communication, 36(3), pp. 124–143. jenkins, h. (2006). quentin tarantino’s star wars? digital cinema, media convergence, and participatory culture. in m.g. durham and d.m. kellner (eds.), media and cultural studies: key works. london: blackwell publishing, pp. 549-576. livingstone, s. (2003) the changing nature of audiences: from the mass audience to the interactive media user. in a. valdivia, (ed.) companion to media studies. london: blackwell publishing, pp. 337-359. napoli, p.m. (2010). revisiting ‘mass communication’ and the ‘work’ of the audience in the new media environment. media, culture & society, 32(3), pp. 505-516. smythe, d. (1977). communications: blindspot of w estern marxism. canadian journal of political and social theory 1(3), pp. 1–27. taylor, n. (2009) cheerleaders/booth babes/halo hoes: pro-gaming, gender, and jobs for the boys. digital creativity, 20(4), pp. 239-252. taylor, t.l. (2012). raising the stakes: e-sports and the professionalization of computer gaming. cambridge, ma: mit press. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 15 taylor, t.l. and witkowski, e. (2010). this is how we play it: what a mega-lan can teach us about games. proceedings of the fifth international conference on the foundations of digital games. new york: acm, pp. 195-202. microsoft word 867-611-1-pb.docx alt-muslim: digital islam as a third space nabil echchaibi university of colorado boulder abstract through a textual analysis of the website alt-muslim and semi-structured interviews with the site’s founder and editors, this paper explores the ways in which new muslim subjectivities are envisioned and arguably enabled in what i call the ‘third spaces of digital islam’. specifically, i ask how the site imagines a new face of public islam that appropriates slick media and design aesthetics (more visual and non-linear) and communication modes (more interactive) to draw inspiration and nurture a different and presumably authentic religious experience. i also look at how the site produces new religious practices and generates new templates and narratives of social action for its users while policing at the same time the terms and boundaries of what it calls modern islam. keywords resistance; alt-muslim; third spaces; identity; digital islam both popular and scholarly debates on islam have been largely captive of a narrative of security and/or integration of muslims in western societies, or the compatibility of their faith with modernity. the actions of muslims have often been inscribed in a cultural and political discourse that casts them in subordinate terms as traditional, introverted and fatalist. re-instituting faith in a culture that sees itself mostly at the receiving end of a powerful imported secular culture, no matter how liberating it might be, is unequivocally considered regressive and anti-modern by those who see no emancipation in the dogmas of the religious. but a number of muslims have turned to modern media technologies like the internet, not necessarily to re-invent religious tradition and stir up pious passions but to seek original ways to render religious discourse more deliberative and create spaces of meaningful religious experiences beyond scripturalist forms of islam and bounded religious practices. islamic media are a far cry from the staid sheikh delivering his sermon on a state-owned television channel. men and women host talk shows, reality programs, and music variety shows on television and on youtube where formerly taboo issues like politics, sexuality, relationships, and women’s rights are openly debated. a growing number of tele and web-islamists effectively weave qur’anic narratives into elaborate programs of social change and civic engagement. and traditional institutions of religious authority like al-azhar university in egypt and other statesanctioned constituencies are also adopting aggressive media strategies to counteract what they see as an emerging culture of semantic disarray over what islam means today. on the internet, videobloggers and otherwise marginal actors are capitalizing on much cheaper means of media production to join this massive fray of new cultural producers in islam. their mediation of islam this paper will focus on one influential muslim web site and analyze its claim for deepening the spiritual experience of muslims through public engagement and disciplined consumption. altmuslim.com is described as a space for introspective comments on the muslim world and a forum for progressive muslims. with contributing editors and writers from the us, canada, australia, and the uk, alt-muslim bills itself at the forefront of an emerging independent muslim media in the west. its articles, opinions, media reviews, podcasts and video commentaries seek to project an alternative view of muslims as intellectuals, politicians, and artists. specifically, this paper examines the dialogic and deliberative aspects of alt-muslim in its attempt to function as an alternative to conventional authority in islam and in its claim to create a counterculture for muslims across the world. i argue that the producers of the site have used the digital to create a third space of religious enunciation. rather than treating digital manifestations of the religious as either inevitably corrosive or merely hyperreal, i argue that digital spaces such as alt-muslim are important performative sites of enunciation where formal and unitary structures of religious knowledge and practice can become the object of both revision and transformation. as such, the digital with its own communication logic, stylistic features, and convergent properties can become a significant site of disruption and invention, or at least of imagined possibilities of what values such as community, authenticity, and civility among others could be in a presumably open terrain of non-linear thinking. conceived this way, visitors to alt-muslim are interpellated to adopt both a religious logic in their media consumption and a media logic in their religious imagination. modern communication technologies become therefore critical tools not only in the transmission of religious teachings and the extension of the religious message across space, but increasingly in the creation of new aesthetic forms which arguably rival existing structures of preaching and other forms of religious mediation. the kind of thirdness that i seek to foreground in borrowing the concept of third spaces from postcolonial theory is primarily its resistance to the impulse to anchor culture and identity in place and within bounded frames of thinking. third space arguably unsettles the singularity of dominant power narratives and opens up new avenues of identification and articulation. in the context of digital spaces of religion, i argue that our research efforts should be directed at interpreting these sites as critical attempts to recuperate the particularity of the lived experience of religion or spirituality in late modernity and divest it from a narrow essentialism of belief. far from being mere technological events, religious third spaces in the digital realm are different not because they are radically new, but because they build from the ambivalent encounter of old and new forms of sociality and negotiate differing poles of cultural identity. as a ‘contact zone’, to use mary louise pratt’s concept (1991), these social spaces are not simply places where marginal subjects toy around with their peripheral individuality, but rather are sites where individuals use the technical capacities of the digital to imagine social and cultural configurations beyond existing binaries of the physical versus the virtual and the real versus the proximal religious experience. the encounter of these binaries in these third spaces does not end in tension only but is often generative of new cultural meanings and social practices. through a textual analysis of alt-muslim and semi-structured interviews with the site’s founder and editors, this paper explores the ways in which new muslim subjectivities are envisioned and arguably enabled in these third spaces of digital islam. specifically, i ask how the site imagines a new face of public islam that appropriates slick media and design aesthetics (more visual and non-linear) and communication modes (more interactive) to draw inspiration and nurture a different and presumably authentic religious experience. i also look at how the site produces new religious practices and generates new templates and narratives of social action for its users while policing at the same time the terms and boundaries of what it calls modern islam. references pratt, l. (1991). arts of the contact zone, profession, 91. 33-40 bhabha, h. (1994). the location of culture, london and new york : routledge. derrickson, k. (2008). second life and the sacred: islamic space in a virtual world. in v. sisler (ed.) digital islam: research project on middle east, islam and digital media, 2008. echchaibi, n. (2011). from audiotapes to videoblogs: the delocalization of authority in islam. nationalism,17 (1). 25-44. the ties that bind and break: emotional fraud and community formation in religious mom blogs deborah whitehead university of colorado boulder abstract in this presentation i focus on the issue of “emotional fraud” in social media, showing how the discernment of truth from falsity is framed as a social question as well as a religious one in these spaces, and how the question of what is “real” online has become a central problem for online users and communities. attention to the construction and interpretation of authenticity on the web reveals a complex set of negotiations and practices taking place in social media networks around its adjudication, as users struggle with the conflict between the imagined ideal nature of online communities versus the revelation of deception and manipulation. i rely primarily on the work of birgit meyer on “aesthetic formations” to analyze how emotional investment in personal blogs has a binding function in the creation of online communities, and the exposure of fraud leads to unbindings and rebindings in the creation of new communities. keywords emotional fraud; aesthetic formations; mom blogs; authenticity; social media in this presentation i focus on the issue of “emotional fraud” in social media, showing how the discernment of truth from falsity is framed as a social question as well as a religious one in these spaces, and how the question of what is “real” online has become a central problem for online users and communities. attention to the construction and interpretation of authenticity on the web reveals a complex set of negotiations and practices taking place in social media networks around its adjudication, as users struggle with the conflict between the imagined ideal nature of online communities versus the revelation of deception and manipulation. i engage the concept of “third spaces” (hoover and echchaibi 2012) as an interpretive tool to explore the generativity of these blog spaces, and the work of birgit meyer on “aesthetic formations” to analyze how emotional investment in personal religious blogs has a binding function in the creation of online communities, and the exposure of fraud leads to unbindings and rebindings in the creation of new communities. the blogosphere caters to a culture of consumption hungry for the truth. “american protestants manifest a persistent inclination to experience media as an untrammeled representation of ‘the truth,’” david morgan writes, and images “naturalize what believers have wanted to assume about the world and their pressing mission within it.” (morgan, 2002, p. 37-38). through design, text, and photographs, personal blogs about mothering promise an unvarnished, entertaining picture of motherhood as it exists in real life, not on tv or in glossy magazines. pulling back the curtain, inviting readers into one’s living room, the successful mom blogger promises authentic revelation: “see! this is what my floor really looks like, unvacuumed and covered with toys and spilled milk! my kids are wearing the same clothes they wore yesterday and slept in last night, and i haven’t had a shower in two days!” pictures and narratives capture happy family moments and carefully posed and framed memories for the scrapbook, but they can also record epic tantrums and parenting disasters. because the blogosphere is viewed and advertised as the site of “authentic voices” and “conversations,” even authentic revelation on occasion, and indeed, even seems to be a last bastion of authenticity as media users increasingly shift their time from traditional to social media, a blogger’s credibility is deeply tied to honest self-disclosure.1 americans on the whole continue to lose confidence in organized religion, as indicated by gallup polling over the past two decades showing decreasing levels of trust in tv evangelists and organized religion.2 in such a climate, religious innovators like mom bloggers may come to play an increasingly visible and influential role in the american religious marketplace, striving to present credible portrayals of faith to a suspicious public. indeed trust and deception are key features of market culture, and as historian leigh schmidt reminds us, the evangelical movement in u.s. culture has made religion “entertaining, popular, dramatic, enterprising, and marketable,” at the same time that it has also become the object of deep suspicion. (schmidt, 1999, p. 375). once made part of the market culture, religion has become subject to the same kinds of suspicions and doubts endemic to a highly competitive and entrepreneurial economy. similarly, once commodified and branded, authenticity in personal blogs is also rendered suspect. two evangelical christian mom blogs, “the story of april rose” (littleoneapril.blogspot.com), and “my charming kids” (mycharmingkids.net) are my case studies for the analysis of socially mediated fraud and authenticity in digital spaces.3 these cases address issues of trust and authority in social media and how they are defined, ascribed, and contested, while also pointing to questions of broader significance in the study of religion and media regarding religious authority and community verification. on the one hand, the internet is hailed as a bastion of freedom and transparency, allowing people to be who they really are and form relationships based on shared interests and communicative relationships, rather than on personal appearance. yet on the other hand, precisely because the internet allows for interpersonal relationships to develop virtually rather than face to face, it also allows for the possibility of mass deception in those relationships: the perils of online dating and manti teo’s recent fake girlfriend scandal are well-known examples. so it is not surprising that awareness of the constant risk of deception, along with the evolution of socially mediated practices of discernment designed to distinguish truthful representations from fraudulent ones, have emerged as central features of online practice. the investment of “emotional capital” is part of the everyday fabric of the blogosphere, drawing readers to keep coming back to compelling stories and powerful, evocative writing. however, if 1 the largest women’s blog network, blogher, describes itself as the place to find “the best conversations led by women in social media. a curated selection of authentic voices. life well said.” “about blogher,” http://www.blogher.com/about-this-network, accessed 3 march 2013. 2 a june 2012 gallup poll found that 55% of americans have “some,” “very little” or no confidence in organized religion or “the church”; see http://www.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx#2, accessed 3 march 2013. while in 1980 most americans had a favorable view of television evangelists, this dramatically changed during the decade as a result of various scandals. a 1987 gallup poll found 63% of americans believed tv evangelists were “untrustworthy,” and by 1989 this number had increased to 79%, describing them as “dishonest” (70%), “insincere” (67%), “lacking a special relationship with god” (67%), and “uncaring” (62%). george gallup, the gallup poll 1989 (wilmington, de: scholarly resources, 1990), 204-05. 3 two points of clarification are in order here. first, both blogs have since been taken down by their authors or allowed to expire, and can hence only be viewed as cached pages. second, the term “mom(my) blog” is somewhat controversial. some bloggers embrace it, others reject it as trivializing. i use the term in a descriptive sense to reflect the distinctive content of the blogs i refer to and because i am not aware of another umbrella term for this particular genre.       this emotional capital is discovered to have been invested in an imaginary source, i.e. when the persons and situations created in the blog are found to be false or misleading, readers of personal blogs feel emotionally manipulated and used, and the question of “emotional fraud” arises. emotional fraud online seems to be primarily motivated by the emotional payoff of power, authority, popularity, sympathy, and attention rather than financial gain. the creation of fictitious situations is made easier by the existence of online forums and communities specifically designed to offer support to those struggling with particular illnesses or difficult life situations, such as the grave illness or loss of a child. because these communities operate with a presumption of honesty and authenticity and are designed to offer instant support to members without question, the exposure of frauds creates significant fractures within these communities, yet also allows for the creation of new ones. i highlight some of the effects of that awareness and practice by examining community exchanges and consequences in these cases when readers began to suspect deception on the part of the blog authors. what emerges is a contextualized analysis of emotional investment and emotional fraud in the blogosphere, and the role of trust and deception as key factors in the binding and unbinding of religiously-based social media networks. references hoover s. and echchaibi n. (2012) the ‘third spaces’ of digital religion. discussion paper. available at: http://cmrc.colorado.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/third-spaces-essay-draft-final.pdf (accessed 15 november 2012). meyer, b. introduction: from imagined communities to aesthetic formations: religious mediations, sensational forms, and styles of binding.” in b meyer (ed.) aesthetic formations: media, religion, and the senses. new york: palgrave. morgan, d. (2007) the lure of images. new york: routledge. schmidt, l. (1999) trust and confidence in american religious history. in p williams (ed.) perspectives on american religion and culture (pp. 366-377). malden, ma: blackwell. creative rebellion: postsecret participation as a third space of digital religion rachael liberman university of colorado boulder the general connotations that most often accompany the object “postcard” include terms associated with travel and storytelling. this method of communication most often conveys a sense of “i miss you” or “wish you were here” to the recipient, and is often found displayed on refrigerators or kept as a method of memory. recently, thanks to the creation of postsecret, an art project that solicits, displays, and profits from the submission of anonymous secrets, postcards are now involved in the production of confessionary, often subversive discourses. the postsecret project has created a forum for resistive, creative, and anonymous expression that occupies a space between offline/offline and traditional/resistive activity. with messages such as, “my revenge to you is to have a wonderful life,” and “i don’t want to share my workout videos to my friends because i want to have the best body not them,” postsecret has created a “third space” for the creation and circulation of rebellious discourse. in fact, warren was cited in a relevant (2009) article as saying that postsecret offers an opportunity to express “the things we really can’t say in church.” before postsecret became a commercial empire, drawing 4.1 millions users to its website each moth, it was an art-based community project created by frank warren (yallouz & mcgee, 2011). based on his earlier project, the reluctant oracle, which centered on the anonymous distribution of warren’s personal postcard creations, postsecret became a public project that invited individuals to anonymously submit postcards with a personal secret. in 2004, warren began handing out postcards in washington, dc with specific instructions that included an emphasis on revealing anything, staying anonymous, being brief, being legible, and being creative: “let this postcard be your canvas” (postsecret.com). after successfully receiving submissions, warren created the postsecret blog and continues to update it every sunday. in addition to the anonymous submissions—200-300 arrive in warren’s mailbox daily—and the blog, the empire of postsecret includes five books published by william morrow publishers (a division of harper collins), a lecture tour—postsecret live!—hosted by frank warren himself, an international art exhibit, community-focused picnics and events, and an online discussion board, postsecret chat, that offers a non-hierarchical online space for discursive production. recently, postsecret has entered the social networking arena, including a facebook page with 1.2 million “likes” (as of 11 march 2013) and a twitter account with 518,369 followers (as of 11 march 2013). in 2001, an app was launched but was shut down in january 2012 due to issues related to an overwhelming amount of “gore” and “pornography” posted daily, according to the washington times (phillips, 2012). according to the times article, moderators could not keep up with the postings, which were based on instant imagery captured by phone cameras rather than postcard drawings and photography. in the end, warren, his family, and the moderators received threats, and the app was voluntarily shut down. although there are various themes that motivate the postcard submissions of postsecret (i.e., eating disorders, suicide, family, marriage), this paper focuses on those with a religious dimension, and argues that postsecret offers a unique space for religious expression due to the aesthetics of its website, the affordances of its online discussion boards, and its cultivation and curation of religious secrets. this paper can be described as a case study in orientation and adopts the framework of cultural studies in its focused investigation of mediated, lived practices in contemporary culture. in the context of religion, it would be limiting to analyze postsecret as just another digital interface that threatens traditional order. although this reaction has surfaced, it fails to capture the unique way in which postsecret has emerged as a fluid space that facilitates the production of religious discourse in a postmodern digital era. as opposed to the traditional top-down model of religious knowledge production, postsecret invites anyone and everyone to submit their thoughts and then shares these secrets through a capitalist process. but beyond the profit-generating books and the lecture tours, the organization of the offline picnics and gatherings, the video montages created for youtube, and the postsecret chat (discussion boards) uniquely allow for a community-focused, non-hierarchical exchange of information and opinions. these online and offline exchanges do not dismiss traditional religious discourse, nor are they free from the logics of capitalism, but they do work as an alternative method of religious practice for individuals that both support and question religious authority. while postsecret includes a strong offline dimension, this paper draws on critical textual analyses of its online components—the sunday secrets, postsecret chat—in order to situate the affordances of digital media in their facilitation of the “rebellious” discourses within the postsecret project. the sunday secrets are the 20-30 postcards that warren curates from his weekly submissions and posts to the website. each sunday, these postcards appear against a black, advertisement-free backdrop, and are available for “sharing” on twitter, facebook, tumblr, pinterest, and reddit. the opportunity to discuss the sunday secrets postcards is also available on the postsecret chat page. here, users are able to recycle the religious meanings found on these postcards and add personal meanings in the form of introductions to the postcard, such as facebook posts or tweets to accompany the image. after an exploration of postsecret chat, specifically, the secrets of spirituality “topic,” it was discovered that users were utilizing this space as a forum for democratized discussion and discourse. in other words, users were capitalizing on the affordance of digital media’s allowance of multiple voices and viewpoints, which can be conceptualized as the democratization of religious discourses. rather than reproduce and promote religious dogma—or the work of power regimes—users on postsecret chat are using this space to question and challenge discourse and concepts. this proliferation and production of reverse discourses allows individuals to enter a space for the open expression of ideas about religion outside of her/his immediate material community. it is critical to keep in mind that the postsecret project is not religious; rather, religious themes and discourses have emerged from online affordances and offline organization. as a result of postsecret’s invitation to self-reflexivity, catharsis, and community, individuals are able to communicate their religious beliefs and practices in a postmodern arena. finally, this paper concludes by drawing on the work of edward soja (2008), kim knott (2006), and michel foucault (1990) to connect the online logics of postsecret to the larger claim that this project is an example of a third space of digital religion. campbell, h. (2012). understanding the relationship between religion online and offline in a networked society. journal of the american academy of religion, 80(1), 64-93. foucault, m. (1990). the history of sexuality: an introduction. vintage books: new york. hall, s. (1998). notes on deconstructing ‘the popular’. in j. storey (ed.), cultural theory and popular culture: a reader, pp. 442-453. pearson/prentice hall. knott, k. (2006). spatial theory and method for the study of religion. temenos 41(2), 153-184. lossau, j. (2008). pitfalls of (third) space: rethinking the ambivalent logic of spatial semantics. in ikas, karin and gerhard wagner (eds.) communicating in the third space, 62-78. manovich, l. (2001). the language of new media. cambridge, ma: mit press. phillips, a. (2012, january 7). hijacked by pornography and gore, post secret iphone app shut down. the washington times. retrieved from: http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/60-second-attention span/2012/jan/7/hijacked-pornography-gore-post-secret-app-shut-dow/ sassen, s. (2000). socio-digital formations: constructing and object of study. plenary. soja, e. w. (2008). thirdspace: toward a new consciousness of space and spatiality. in ikas, karin and gerhard wagner (eds.) communicating in the third space, 49-61. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): jackson, n j. (2020, october). “i’ve gotta do it for the bit”: memetic media and collective identity through streamer performance on twitch. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “i’ve gotta do it for the bit”: memetic media and collective identity through streamer performance on twitch nathan j jackson school of the arts and media, unsw sydney videogame livestreamers on the platform twitch present a carefully curated version of themselves negotiated in part via interactions with their viewers. this persona is encoded not just through their live performance, but also through other platform features including streamer-specific emoticons (emotes) and audio-visual overlays triggered by stream events such as donations and subscriptions (alerts). from these customisable features emerges a complicated feedback loop between the streamer and non-streamer participants that ultimately results in a set of collective values performed and refined by both parties over time. in this paper i interrogate how the incorporation of internet memes into streaming personas creates accessible avenues for communication with and between members of this collective that contribute significantly to this value system. memes operate based on a core duality between commitment to a fixed set of properties and creative variation – this duality has been referred to using several different terminologies (see wiggins & bowers, 2015; milner, 2016; phillips & milner, 2018). as such, there is a necessary plurality to memes considering their diverse manifestations, as emphasised by limor shifman’s (2014) definition of the term. this complicates the meaning-making process of memes as they carry not just the intended value of each manifestation’s creator, but also the latent values of the meme template and the referent texts. i define the term memesis – the core concept of this paper – as the cultural process by which internet users draw upon existing memes in order to create new memetic media. a portmanteau of the words ‘meme’ and ‘mimesis’, memesis emphasises the performative process of creating the memetic product. the live performance and interaction with viewers enabled by livestreaming makes twitch an ideal site for an introduction to this concept. i will show how memesis occurs live on twitch, where it simultaneously reinforces and redefines aspects of collective identity (in a memetic fashion). in this way, this paper will contribute to conversations around how memes influence collective identity and values (gal, shifman & kampf, 2016; nissenbaum & shifman, 2017). t.l. taylor (2018) acknowledges the performativity underpinning successful streaming through connections between users facilitated by language, jokes, and memes. further, the liveness and direct interaction enabled by the livestreaming mode are key to strengthening these connections (woodcock and johnson, 2019). understanding how memes are deployed in this environment, where for instance there isn’t time to prepare an image macro, is essential to examining the labour and creativity involved in stream interactions. in this way, memesis can also be understood as a form of relational labour (baym, 2015). through two case studies, i will discuss how memesis affects streamer agency and impacts the structure and values of stream collectives. the first, raynarvaezjr, is an american streamer whose identity performance extends to his emotes and twitch alerts, which explicitly reference his puerto rican heritage. he performs memesis through twitch alerts for donations of memetic amounts, such as us$69.69 or us$420, and subscriber emotes, for example browndab, which depicts him performing the memetic dab gesture. members of chat are then able to enact memesis on raynarvaezjr’s behalf and through his persona by engaging with these features. the second case study, paladinamber, is an australian streamer renowned for her readiness to challenge the hegemonic masculinity of the platform. her approach towards inappropriate stream behaviour undermines the underlying values motivating the behaviours without alienating other members of her audience (grayson, 2019). in fact, paladinamber contrasts neatly with mia consalvo’s (2018) analysis of kaceytron, who tackles similar problematic attitudes through very different means. further, kishonna l gray’s (2017) work on deviance suggests that paladinamber is doubly resistant through a combination of her marginalised identity on the platform and explicit rejection of the dominant (white male) value system. paladinamber’s creative use of memetic overlays and multiple cameras is core to her streaming persona. like raynarvaezjr, paladinamber performs memesis in two stages (preparation and execution), however she maintains control over both by choosing which overlays to implement and when. her performance becomes more complex when these moments exist in an ambivalent state as both serious confrontation and humorous memesis. considering memesis through these case studies draws focus towards how streamers interact with the memescape in order to construct and maintain a streaming persona, as well as create connections with and between their viewers. this paper will touch on a number of key opportunities for analysing stream collectives that emerge through memesis, including: the impact of the streamer’s identity on the value system within their stream; a temporal dynamics of values determined by both the rate of change of particular memes and the regularity with which they occur within streams; engagement with memes as active participation in the collective value system and the associated boundary work; and the contrasting explicit and latent values of manifestations of particular memes. whilst demonstrated within twitch in this paper, each of these ideas is ripe for exploration within other digital cultural arenas. this paper draws upon ongoing ethnographic research as part of a larger project involving the close examination of a small number of twitch streamers with a focus on streaming personas and the different forms of collective identity that they facilitate. this research is combined here with scholarship on memes in order to examine memesis as a method for the construction and communication of a collective value system. an essential but generally unseen part of meme-making, memesis renders visible the encoding of meaning and value into manifestations of meme, and so this concept names a practice that warrants attention not just on twitch but within broader digital cultural spheres. references baym, n. (2015). connect with your audience! the relational labor of connection. the communication review 18(1): 14-22. consalvo, m. (2018). ‘kaceytron and transgressive play on twitch.tv’, in jørgensen k. and karlsen, f. (eds.) transgressions in games and play, cambridge, ma, mit press, pp. 83-98. gal, n., shifman, l and kampf, z. (2016). “it gets better”: internet memes and the construction of collective identity. new media & society 18:1698-1714. gray, k.l. (2017). ‘“they’re just too urban”: black gamers streaming on twitch’, in daniels, j., gregory, k. and cottom, t.m. (eds.) digital sociologies, bristol, policy press, pp. 355-368. grayson, n. (2019). aussie streamer paladinamber does not have time for your shit, internet creeps. retrieved from: https://www.kotaku.com.au/2019/07/aussiestreamer-paladinamber-does-not-have-time-for-your-shit-internet-creeps/. accessed february 2020. milner, r.m. (2016). the world made meme: public conversations and participatory media. mit press. nissenbaum, a. and shifman, l. (2017). internet memes as contested cultural capital: the case of 4chan’s /b/board. new media & society 19: 483-501. phillips, w. and milner, r.m. (2018). the ambivalent internet: mischief, oddity, and antagonism online. john wiley & sons. shifman, l. (2014). mit press essential knowledge: memes in digital culture. mit press. taylor, t.l. (2018). watch me play: twitch and the rise of game live streaming. princeton university press. wiggins, b.e. and bowers, g.b. (2015). memes as genre: a structurational analysis of the memescape. new media & society 17: 1886-1906. woodcock, j. and johnson, m.r. (2019). live streamers on twitch.tv as social media influencers: changes and challenges for strategic communication. international journal of strategic communication 13: 321-335. selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 suggested citation (apa): giglietto, f., & lee, y. (2015, october 21-24). to be or not to be charlie: twitter hashtags as a discourse and counter-discourse in the aftermath of the 2015 charlie hebdo shooting in france. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. to be or not to be charlie: twitter hashtags as a discourse and counter-discourse in the aftermath of the 2015 charlie hebdo shooting in france fabio giglietto università di urbino carlo bo yenn lee soas university of london introduction following a shooting attack by two self-proclaimed islamist gunmen at the offices of french satirical weekly charlie hebdo on 7th january 2015, there emerged the hashtag #jesuischarlie [i am charlie] on twitter as an expression of condolences for the victims, solidarity, and support for the magazine’s right to free speech. by 9th january, the hashtag was used over five million times, making it one of the most popular topics in the platform’s history. however, there too emerged #jenesuispascharlie [i am not charlie], almost simultaneously and explicitly countering the former, affirmative hashtag. since the former hashtag entailed a tragedy of twelve deaths and support for the universal values of freedom of expression, #jenesuispascharlie carried the inherent risk of being viewed as opposing accepted social norms. despite the risk, the negative hashtag was used more than 74,000 times over the next few days since 7th january. against this backdrop, we set out to achieve an in-depth understanding of what was going on under that hashtag, with a focus on three interlinked questions as below. 1. what are the characteristics of the network formed around the #jenesuispascharlie hashtag on twitter? 2. how did users of #jenesuispascharlie position themselves discursively with regard to the #jesuischarlie hashtag? 3. how did the activities under #jenesuispascharlie evolve as the broader public discussion of the shooting attack developed? literature review the present study draws upon a combination of three strands of work in the current scholarship: the network characteristics of twitter-mediated discussion; the roles of hashtags in such discussion; and the expressions of identity in social media activism. methodology based on a complete corpus of 74,074 tweets (41,687 unique contributors) containing the hashtag #jenesuispascharlie and posted between 7th and 11th of january 2015, we identified peaks in the twitter activity (through a ‘breakout detection’) as well as what accounted for those peaks (through a semantic cluster analysis). we first employed the text mining techniques provided by the textcat r package (feinerer et al., 2013) on the corpus of all tweets in the dataset. we created a by-minute time series (n=6,444, avg tpm=11.5) of activity and used the breakout detection r package, which had recently been open-sourced by twitter (james, kejariwal, & matteson, 2014), to identify breakouts or shifts in the mean of tweet per minute (tpm). the breakouts tool detected 14 breakouts, including three moments of high user engagement (table 1). from to n (tweets) n (rt) n (@replies) avg tpm 07/01 6:07 pm 07/01 11:44 pm 9,194 7,392 150 50.00 08/01 11:42 am 08/01 11:37 pm 16,048 11,688 472 23.56 09/01 11:55 am 10/01 00:44 am 10,159 6,899 465 13.57 table 1. moments of high user engagement on each subset of tweets created during one of the three moments, we calculated a document term matrix of the most frequently used terms and then grouped those terms according to their co-occurrences. finally, to qualitatively complement the findings from the above techniques, we are currently conducting a content analysis of all original tweets created during the three identified peaks, i.e. 1,652, 3,888 and 2,795 respectively. discussion of analytic findings two of the most frequently shared tweets in our dataset contained hyperlinks to drawings by two cartoonists, the arab brazilian freelance political cartoonist carlos latuff and the maltese american cartoonist/journalist joe sacco. those drawings represented a concern over the alleged ‘double standards’ on freedom of speech that justify growing islamophobia in europe. along the same lines, another heavily retweeted message recalled the incident of australian newspaper the sydney morning herald being forced to issue an apology and remove a satire that was considered anti-semitic in august 2014. https://paperpile.com/c/cnejoe/gyh2b https://paperpile.com/c/cnejoe/ucyuh https://paperpile.com/c/cnejoe/ucyuh we discovered that french (30%), english (25%) and spanish (12%) accounted for most of the tweets. it was unsurprising that french was most frequently used, but the proportion was smaller than expected, seemingly underscoring its reference to #jesuischarlie. the fact that the most frequently shared external sources were images and not a single article, together with the fact that this french hashtag was used mostly in non-french tweets, suggests that #jenesuispascharlie was not about the news of the shooting itself. its primary goal was instead to mark and declare an identity by distinction. to that end, 2% of the tweets in our dataset contained nothing but the hashtag. while the hashtag started as an immediate reaction to #jesuischarlie, nevertheless, its nature changed over time. figure 2. most frequently used words and their associations across the three key moments there are a few noteworthy dynamics in figure 3. first, word clusters containing désolé [sorry], familles, victimes, and compatis [sympathise] were present in the first dendrogram but not in the following two. liberté and expression (and their corresponding english words) were prominent in all three moments, confirming that the freedom of expression and its contested limits were the real leitmotif across the entire dataset. terms such as racism and racist stood out in the second and third moments since users of #jenesuispascharlie started to approach charlie hebdo’s satires from alternative perspectives than free speech, such as hate speech, eurocentrism, and islamophobia. conclusion users of #jenesuispascharlie showed resistance to the mainstream framing of the charlie hebdo shooting as the universal values of freedom of expression being threatened by religious intolerance and violence. in this context, retweeting something that would justify their resistance was a way of marking their identity as distinct from what was accepted in the mainstream. we also observed a unique practice of tweeting nothing but the said hashtag, amounting to 2% of the dataset. this is a strategy that can be explained in a similar vein. over time, there were three distinguished phases in the manifestation of this resistance: grief (i.e. joining the mourning for the victims but indicating a reservation against the proposed frame); resistance (i.e. starting to voice out the resistance); and alternatives (i.e. fully developing and deploying alternative frames). in this study, the hashtag was not a conversation marker as previous studies identified but a discursive device that facilitated users to form, enhance, and strategically declare their self-identity. findings from the content analysis of the 8,335 sample tweets currently being conducted will enable us to delve further into the ways in which users of #jenesuispascharlie expressed their stances despite the sensitive nature of the issue at hand and put forward alternative perspectives. references feinerer, i., buchta, c., geiger, w., rauch, j., mair, p., & hornik, k. (2013). the textcat package for n-gram based text categorization in r. journal of statistical software, 52(6), 1–17. james, n. a., kejariwal, a., & matteson, d. s. (2014). breakout detection: breakout detection via robust e-statistics. morstatter, f., pfeffer, j., liu, h., & carley, k. m. (2013). is the sample good enough? comparing data from twitter’s streaming api with twitter's firehose. in seventh international aaai conference on weblogs and social media. aaai.org. retrieved from http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/icwsm/icwsm13/paper/viewpaper/6071 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): steinberg, m. (2020, october). automobile platform capitalism: a vehicular history of the digital economy. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. automobile platform capitalism: a vehicular history of the digital economy marc steinberg concordia university extended abstract: this paper takes up a variant on the meaning of the term platform – the base structure of an automobile – to explore the discursive and labour origins of what we now call platform capitalism. the argument made in this paper is that while nick snricek (2016) mentions toyotism in passing in his platform capitalism, there is a much more profound relationship between toyota – and japanese “lean manufacture” or just-in-time automobile production in general – and the platform economy than has previously been appreciated. based on extensive historical research on the automobile industry discussions in north america and japan, and the platform managerial literature that emerged from it, this paper will offer an alternate genealogy of platform capitalism and the managerial theory that buttresses it, with the aim to ultimately offering a distinct mode of analysis of both platform theory and platform capitalism. the analysis in this paper takes as its starting point the importance of offering a genealogy of the mediation style digital platform theory that both celebratory (parker, van alstyne, and choudary 2016; evans and schmalensee 2016) and critical (nieborg and poell 2018; steinberg 2019) works on the topic foreground in their accounts of platform capitalism. this includes first and foremost its close connections to japanese and american managerial theorizations of automobile manufacture that, as this paper will show, is the starting point for theories of platform capitalism. subsequently, this paper will trace some of the continuities in precarious labour practices and data collection that connect the toyota production system (ohno 1988) to contemporary platform capitalism. while the aim is not to discount important transformations that have taken place between the 1970s and 2010s, this paper will suggest that attention to the platform discourse and practice of the automobile industry draws attention to the continuities at play between the toyotist moment and contemporary platform capitalism – including the precarious labour practices (scholtz 2017) that characterize the gig economy. this allows us to paint a more accurate picture of the history of the contemporary platform economy. offering a genealogy of platform thinking around the automobile and then the internet, this paper traces an unlikely link between managerial theory around automobile manufacture from the 1980s, to the development of platform theory in the 1990s in japan, to internet-based contemporary platforms. the main trait of mainstream managerial platform theory today – thinking that informs silicon valley practices and platform building the world over – is an understanding of the platform as a mediator of transactions. this is the transactional theory of platforms commonly attributed to organizational economists rochet and tirole (2003) in france, and parker and van alstyne (2005) in the us. this theory has parallels with annabelle gawer and michael cusumano’s (2002) book platform leadership. significantly, cusumano gets his start leading the analysis of the japanese auto sector and its industrial practices under the auspices of the mit’s international motor vehicle program, during the 1980s. it is from here that some of the earliest theorization of the platform economy emerges – albeit through analyses of car manufacture (cusumano 1985). the use of the term platform in the automobile industries is one of the first sites where we see an overt combination of hardware production and business strategy. this usage implies a certain transformation of assembly lines with an eye to building multiple models of cars from a single “base,” or standard, and coincides with the optimization of automobile production under the toyotist system of manufacture that shook up the global automobile industry during the 1970s and 80s. platform here denotes a standardization of the base element of the car – the ground, or foundation – upon which different bodies could be placed. this paper will furthermore argue that the missing link between automobile platform theory and the theory of the platform as mediation device is to be found in a series of articles that come out of managerial theory in the 1990s japan. from 1993-94 when several essays and an edited collection on “platform business” was first published, japanese scholars (kokuryō 1994; imai 1994) develop an analysis of the function of platforms (particularly internet-mediated auctions) as intermediaries or transactional sites, in the context of analyses of the impacts of the internet on company organization – thereby anticipating a later move by north american economists (parker and van alstyne 2005). in part economic history of the internet, in part history of platform capitalism, this paper offers a different view onto the platform economy, through attention to the models of the platform at play both in the automobile industry and subsequently in the information technology industry. it further offers a historical typology of platforms models that emerge from the automobile industry and are still dominant in managerial and critical platform studies today. the automobile today once again figures as the site for innovations in the current digital economy as both a site for autonomous driving and for ride-hailing services (chen & qiu 2019). this paper presents an opportunity to reconsider the legacy of the platform concept in the automobile industry, and its hitherto unexplored impacts on the economic models of the internet that inform the platform economy in general. references chen, j. y., & qiu, j. l. (2019). digital utility: datafication, regulation, labor, and didi’s platformization of urban transport in china. chinese journal of communication, 1-16. cusumano, michael a. the japanese automobile industry: technology and management at nissan and toyota. cambridge: harvard, 1985. evans, david s. and richard schmalensee. matchmakers: the new economics of multsided platforms. boston: harvard business review press, 2016. gregg, melissa. counterproductive: time management in the knowledge economy. duke university press, 2018. imai kenichi. “hajime ni” [preface]. in “platform business,” edited by imai kenichi and kokuryō jirō, infocom review (winter 1994). kokuryō jirō. ōpun nettowāku keiei: kigyō senryaku no shinchōryū [open network management: new trends in business strategy]. tokyo: nihon keizai shinbunsha, 1995. ------. “purattofōmu bijinesu no torihiki chūkai kinō to ‘ōpun-kei keiei’” [platform businesses as facilitators of transactions and their role in encouraging ‘open’ management]. in “platform business,” edited by imai kenichi and kokuryō jirō, infocom review (winter 1994). nieborg, david b. and thomas b. poell. “the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity.” in new media & society (2018): 1–18. nobeoka kentarō. muruchi purojekuto senryaku: posuto riin no seihin kaihatsu manejimento [multi-project strategies: the post-lean management of product development]. tokyo: yuhikaku, 1996. ohno, t. (1988). toyota production system: beyond large-scale production. portland: productivity press. ------, and marshall van alstyne. “two-sided network effects: a theory of information product design.” management science 51, no. 10 (oct. 2005): 1494-1504. parker, geoffrey, marshall van alstyne, and sangeet p. choudary. platform revolution: how networked markets are transforming the economy and how to make them work for you. new york: w. w. norton & company, 2016. rochet, jean-charles, and jean tirole. “platform competition in two sided markets.” journal of the european economic association 1, no. 4 (june 2003): 990 –1029. scholz, trebor. uberworked and underpaid: how workers are disrupting the digital economy. john wiley & sons, 2017. srnicek, nick. platform capitalism. malden: polity press, 2016. steinberg, marc. the platform economy: how japan transformed the consumer internet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2019. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): soriano, c.(2019, october 2-5). bridging, coaching and boundary spanning: intermediation and brokerage in the online labor platform economy. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. bridging, coaching, and boundary spanning: brokerage and intermediation in the philippine online platform labor economy cheryll ruth r. soriano de la salle university, manila earvin charles cabalquinto deakin university, melbourne, australia the increasing networked connectivity and relative affordability of technology facilitated the rise of digitally-mediated service and microwork across the world. workers, mostly located in the global south, can now directly obtain ‘gigs’ through online labor platforms and microwork intermediaries such as upwork, onlinejobs.ph, or freelancing.ph. the philippines, the site of this study, is second to india in terms of the number of online platform workers actively involved in the market (graham, hjorth, and lehdonvirta 2017, p.142). in the advent of abundant information infrastructures and ‘flexible’ work environments, it has been predicted that intermediaries will be bypassed in electronic markets as workers can do away with traditional hiring and employment procedures and connect to potential clients directly. yet, we see an emerging category of digital labor intermediaries—locally called influencers, peer mentors, and coaches-who are playing a significant role in the expansion and continued uptake of digital platform labor in the country. building on and drawing connections between earlier works on the influencer economy (see for example abidin, 2015; senft, 2013; and marwick, 2013) and on labor migration brokerage literature (lin, lindquist, xiang, & yeoh, 2017; shreshta & yeoh, 2018; xiang, 2012), the paper conceptualizes digital labor brokerage arising within various ‘spaces of (labor) intermediation.’ we examine the transactional nature underlying the ‘producer-audience’ relationship of digital labor brokerage, the activation of trust and influence through personalised practices and mediated encounters, and the power dynamic underlying the digitally mediated symbolic and material power taking place between them and their respective teams as their audiences / partners. the paper seeks to contribute to the digital labor literature in two ways: 1) by characterizing the emergence of digital labor brokers in a labor supplying country in the global south, the role they play in the digital platform labor economy and the interventions that they engage; and 2) analyzing the structural conditions that facilitate the emergence of digital labor brokerage. drawn from a combination of participant observation in digital labor online groups and interviews with prominent coaches and digital workers, we present insights into the digital interventions that these brokers engage to wield influence by filling in critical structural gaps: a) coaching digital workers on the ‘possibilities’ of the digital labor economy, on how to address the structural ambiguities of digital labor platforms, on how to build ‘marketable skills’ to attract and sustain foreign clients, and on how to find ‘good jobs’ in these platforms, (b) aiding workers to span digital work boundaries and fluidly move across available platforms and job types to mitigate labor arbitrage; and c) bridge geographically dispersed workers that allow them to form a supportive online space where opportunities for labor are shared, exchanged, and debated. finally, the paper examines the structural conditions that give rise to these brokers and how, in their role as influencers, they also set norms and standards in this largely unregulated sector, leading to fostering trust among their followers/partners and enabling them to benefit economically and socially in the process. in turn, we also consider how labor mobility or precarity is made possible and organized, through the work of digital labor brokers. we argue that they play a symbolic role in brokering the relationship between the local digital labor workforce and digital labor platforms, and between the digital workers and the state through various partnerships aimed at advancing the local digital labor economy. marketed as a geographically-flexible and competitive source of income, digital labor emerges as a highly attractive option in countries such as the philippines where employment conditions are fraught with financial stagnation and socio-economic tensions and likewise celebrated by government as a viable solution to unemployment. beyond attending to the unemployed, digital labor has also been attracting workers who experience difficulty in coping with the conditions surrounding older employment models such as business process outsourcing or call center work, overseas labor migration, or in supplementing casual and unstable employment elsewhere. we then posit that work displacement compels workers to embark in digital labor, and eventually build trust among co-workers through skills-matching, networking, and a reclaimed status, even symbolically. however, while workers generate profit from digital labor, research on digital worker experiences have shed light on the problematic realities of platform labor, which include increasing levels of anxiety over financial and career instability, physical stress, and isolation all of which underscore the precarity that belie the optimistic facade of labor under the new economy (hesmondhalgh and baker, 2010, pp. 34-38; graham, hjorth & lehdonvirta, 2017; lehdonvirta, 2016). these include exploitation as a result of ‘labor arbitrage’ practices by foreign clients and absence of bargaining power (graham, lehdonvirta, wood, barnard, hjorth, and simon, 2017, pp. 8, 11; graham, hjorth & lehdonvirta, 2017), as well as ‘self-exploitation,’ where workers work with long hours for fear of losing to competition or accept low rates in hopes of future advancement (hesmondhalgh & baker 2011). despite strong government pronouncements promoting digital labor as a crucial solution to unemployment, mechanisms for supporting workers remain absent. for labour migration, several private and public institutions have been set up to help workers aspiring to migrate overseas for jobs in terms of employment seeking, expectationsetting, salary identification, taxation, or welfare protection. for bpo-related jobs such as call center work, foreign companies operating in the country have institutionalized recruitment and employment mechanisms. by contrast, aspiring workers bid for jobs in labour platforms directly and many workers learn the ropes through experience of taking on gigs from different platforms. we argue that it is this dialectical tension of opportunity and precarity underscored by the neoliberal economy, shortcomings in state interventions for advancing the local labor condition, and a celebrity culture that presents the basis for the emergence of digital labor brokerage. references abidin, c. (2015).communicative intimacies: influencers and perceived connectedness. ada: a journal of gender, new media, and technology, 8, 1-16. graham, m., hjorth, i. & lehdonvirta, v. (2017). digital labour and development: impacts of global digital labour platforms and the gig economy on worker livelihoods. transfer: european review of labour and research 23(2), 135-162. graham, m., lehdonvirta, v., wood, a., barnard, h. hjorth, i. and d.p. simon (2017). the risks and rewards of online gig work at the global margins. oxford: oxford internet institute retrieved from https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/publications/gigwork.pdf hesmondhalgh, d., & baker, s. (2010). a very complicated version of freedom: conditions and experiences of creative labour in three cultural industries. poetics, 38(1), 4-20. doi:10.1016/j.poetic.2009.10.001 lehdonvirta, v. (2016). algorithms that divide and unite: delocalisation, identity and collective action in microwork. in j. flecker (ed.) space, place and global digital work: dynamics of virtual work (pp. 53–80), london: palgrave macmillan. lin, w., lindquist, j., xiang, b., & yeoh, b. s. a. (2017). migration infrastructures and the production of migrant mobilities. mobilities, 12(2), 167– 174.doi:10.1080/17450101.2017.1292770 marwick, a. (2013). status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. new haven, ct: yale university press. senft, t. (2013). microcelebrity and the branded self.” in j. burgess & a. bruns (eds), a companion to new media dynamics (pp. 346–54). malden, ma: blackwell. shreshta, t. and yeoh, b. (2018). practices of brokerage and the making of migration infrastructures in asia. pacific affairs, 91(4), 663-672. 1 1 selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 the ‘friending’ rules: social norms of connection and disconnection at midlife kelly quinn university of illinois at chicago usa kquinn8@uic.edu abstract ‘friending’ is most commonly understood to convey the idea that some relationship exists between individuals, yet the unnuanced and decontextualized nature of social media connections and their discursive association with friendship has obscured the meaning of this practice. this study explores the meaning of the practices of connection and disconnection on social network sites at midlife. using data from interviews with social media users between the ages 45 and 65 years, this research demonstrates contrasts in the meaning of such practices from those reported in studies of younger adults, and suggests differences in how these technologies are used to support relational development and maintenance. keywords friending, social media, older adults, relationships, connection introduction “the medium is the message,” mcluhan’s (1964/2001) snapshot phrase, captures the interdependence between the means of communication and the communication of meaning. today this phrase serves as a reminder that not only do communication technologies convey meaning by their mere selection and ability to deliver a message, but they often shape how we understand and make meaning from the messages that are received. like messages, the practices undertaken within and through today’s communication technologies are communicative acts that reflect a similar symbiosis between medium and meaning. one practice in particular has attained notoriety for the recursive effects between message and medium: ‘friending’ is most commonly understood to convey the idea that some relationship exists between individuals, yet the unnuanced and decontextualized nature of social media connections and their discursive association with friendship has obscured the meaning of this practice. the purpose of this study is to explore the meaning of the practices of connection and disconnection on social network sites at midlife. using data from interviews with social media users between the ages 45 and 65 years, this research demonstrates contrasts in the meaning of such practices from those reported in studies of younger adults, and highlights how the use of these technologies may support or detract from relationship development processes at different life stages. background friend relationships span across a continuum of intimacy, encompassing a range of forms from acquaintances to casual friendship to close friendships (blieszner and roberto 2004), and terms such as social connections, social ties, and friendships are used interchangeably to designate these informal, personal associations (fingerman and lang 2004). the socio-historic location of midlife adults means that they experienced relationship development paths outside of the influences of newer communication technologies such as email and social network sites, thus their expectations related to relational development may be substantially different than what is experienced by today’s youth and younger adults. previous research has identified that younger adults use the internet for building and maintaining interpersonal relationships more than midlife and older adults (thayer and ray 2006; zickuhr and madden 2012). further, while friendships play an important role in well-being at midlife, selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 having large number of friends is not as important as it is for younger adults (carstensen 1992), and large social networks become less satisfying than at earlier points in adulthood (carney and cohler 1993). the social norms surrounding relationship development specify behaviors that should be performed or avoided in order to optimize social efficiency (bryant and marmo, 2012), and relationships develop or dissolve based on whether expectations embedded within such norms are met or broken (felmlee, 1999). previous research has identified that the norms of connection on social network sites to include actions related to connection, disconnection and expectations for interaction (bryant and marmo, 2012; lewis and west, 2009; mclaughlin and vitak, 2012; west, lewis and currie, 2009), however these studies concentrated on populations of young adult social media users. midlife and older adults experience different motivations and usage patterns in using social media (brandtzæg, lüders, and skjetne, 2010), so a focus on how young adults view relational norms may diminish the cultural and cohort differences embedded within these practices and the differing values that arise among users of varying life experiences. understanding the ways in which expectations are met or broken in social media practice at varying points in life can enhance our understanding of how these technologies support or detract from relationship development processes. method a purposive sample of 23 facebook and linkedin users between the ages of 45 and 65 years was interviewed, and the resulting data analyzed for this study: 15 females and eight males participated; 17 participants used both facebook and linkedin, while six individuals used one or the other exclusively. interviews were transcribed and the dialogs were categorized into themes using a conceptdriven structure (gibbs, 2007) which included attitudes related to the internet, privacy and social media sites, and social strategies related to connecting with others and privacy and identity management. the interviews were conducted as part of a larger study which explored internet use by midlife adults, and this paper specifically highlights the analysis and findings related connection, disconnection and expectations for interaction with social media use. findings the meaning of connection on social network sites was highlighted in the way connections, disconnection and decisions not to connect are understood and enacted by the midlife adults participating in this study, and in the perceived and expected norms for interaction once connection is established. despite arguments that social network site connections do not possess characteristics of friendship (condella, 2010; tedesco, 2010), connection on social network sites for participants has substance: connections are not just passing acquaintances, but are grounded personal history, and do not include those who might share only a peripheral interest. most participants report “knowing” their social network site connections, though this description takes on different interpretations depending on whether it is applied in personal or professional contexts. in contrast, research reports of young adult connections report that a majority are comprised of acquaintances (ellison, steinfeld and lampe, 2011; west, et al., 2009). despite knowing most connections, participants did not use social network sites to actively engage with close friends and family. though acknowledging connections with these close ties, social network sites were utilized by participants primarily to communicate with extended networks or groups; other, more intimate, modes of communication are reserved for close connections. this differs from research on young adult usage patterns, which have reported that social media is a primary communication vehicle for close friends (bryant and marmo, 2012). selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 in contrast, the decision not to friend is often based on ‘not knowing’ the person making the request, though often there is a common connection. requests of this nature are often ‘ignored’ and reevaluated at a later point if the relationship progresses to a more substantial level. ignoring requests for connection is uncomfortable however, despite that it is widely used as a means of evading undesired connection requests. a fear of appearing rude or discourteous by ignoring requests was commonly expressed, similar to how this behavior would be perceived in an offline context. in contrast, studies of young adults indicate that friend requests from acquaintances of a similar undetermined nature are often accepted and then deleted in an effort to avoid the appearance of discourtesy (mclaughlin and vitak, 2011). unfriending, the process of disconnection, is seen as unusual and unnatural by participants, especially given the careful consideration given to the connection decision. participants noted ignoring a request is preferred over a later decision to ‘undo’ a connection in such a public forum. unfriending arises most frequently when the costs of interaction outweigh the benefits: costs include time, ‘noise’ or unwanted/undesired information disclosure, and loss of information control. though conventional wisdom might suggest that social network sites incur a low cost for maintaining online connection (donath and boyd, 2004), participants were clear that these types of costs were not negligible. finally, the expectations for interaction reflect a preference for professional etiquette and minimum levels of online interaction from those with whom one is connected. participants noted that once a connection is established, certain behaviors are anticipated in the online environment, typically because they are also anticipated offline. these expectations are similar to those anticipated by younger adults (bryant and marmo, 2012), and include common courtesies such as sending birthday wishes. implications this study demonstrates that the anticipated social norms of connection and disconnection differ in some meaningful ways between younger and older adult users of social network sites, potentially leading to differences in how these technologies are used to support relational development and maintenance. life experiences are connected to the use of the internet through the attitudes we bring and in the technologies we choose to employ. by examining how these vary at different points in life, we arrive at a deeper understanding of what it means to grow up and grow old with technology. ultimately, this gives us a more complete grasp of the place technology occupies in everyday life. references blieszner, r. & roberto, k. a. (2004). friendship across the life span: reciprocity in individual and relationship development. in f. r. lang & k. l. fingerman (eds.), growing together: personal relationships across the life span (pp. 159-182). cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. brandtzæg, p. b., lüders, m. & skjetne, j. h. (2010). too many facebook “friends”? content sharing and sociability versus the need for privacy in social network sites. international journal of humancomputer interaction, 26(11-12), 1006–1030. doi:10.1080/10447318.2010.516719 bryant, e. m., & marmo, j. (2012). the rules of facebook friendship: a two-stage examination of interaction rules in close, casual, and acquaintance friendships. journal of social and personal relationships, 29(8), 1013–1035. doi:10.1177/0265407512443616 carney, j. k. & cohler, b. j. (1993). developmental continuities and adjustment in adulthood: social relations, morale, and the transformation from middle to late life. the course of life: volume vi. late adulthood (pp. 199–226). madison, wi: international universities press. carstensen, l. l. (1992). social and emotional patterns in adulthood: support for socioemotional selectivity theory. psychology and aging, 7(3), 331–8. condella, c. (2010). why can’t we be virtual friends? in d. e. wittkower (ed.), facebook and philosophy: what’s on your mind?, (pp. 111-121). chicago: open court. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 donath, j. & boyd, d. (2004). public displays of connection. bt technology journal, 22, 71-82. doi:10.1023/b:bttj.0000047585.06264.cc ellison, n. b., steinfield, c., & lampe, c. (2011). connection strategies: social capital implications of facebook-enabled communication practices. new media & society. doi:10.1177/1461444810385389 felmlee, d. (1999). social norms in sameand cross-gender friendships. social psychology quarterly, 62(1), 53–67. fingerman, k. l. & lang, f. r. (2004). coming together: a perspective on relationships across the life span. in f. r. lang & k. l. fingerman (eds.), growing together: personal relationships across the life span (pp. 1-23). cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. gibbs, g. (2007). analyzing qualitative data, sage, london. lewis, j. & west, a. (2009). “friending”: london-based undergraduates’ experience of facebook. new media & society, 11(7), 1209–1229. doi:10.1177/1461444809342058 mcluhan, m. (2001). understanding media: the extensions of man. new york: routledge. (original work published 1964). tedesco, m. (2010). the friendship that makes no demands. in d. e. wittkower (ed.), facebook and philosophy: what’s on your mind?, (pp. 123-134). chicago: open court. thayer, s. e. & ray, s. (2006). online communication preferences across age, gender, and duration of internet use. cyberpsychology & behavior: the impact of the internet, multimedia and virtual reality on behavior and society, 9(4), 432–440. doi:10.1089/cpb.2006.9.432 west, a., lewis, j. & currie, p. (2009). students’ facebook “friends”: public and private spheres. journal of youth studies, 12(6), 615–627. doi:10.1080/13676260902960752 zickuhr, k. & madden, m. (2012, 6 jun). older adults and internet use. washington, dc: pew internet & american life project. retrieved from http://pewinternet.org/reports/2012/older-adults-and-internetuse.aspx license this article is ©2013 kelly quinn, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. http://pewinternet.org/reports/2012/older-adults-and-internet-use.aspx http://pewinternet.org/reports/2012/older-adults-and-internet-use.aspx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 noone, r.. (2020, october). going in a different direction: critical arts-based approaches to google maps. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. going in a different direction: critical arts-based approaches to google maps rebecca noone faculty of information, university of toronto introduction these days, wayfinding is often associated with ‘asking’ google maps to locate where something is and how to get there. google maps is among the most popular applications for mobile devices with over 1 billion people putting it to work every month. despite this frequency, there is little information available on how google maps is used; or, as verge writer andrew j. hawkins confesses (2017), “we just need the directions, the right subway route, or the name of that good sushi place.” what is happening in these moments of everyday wayfinding and place-making? what on-the-ground relationships to space are produced in these orientations towards big tech’s mobile maps? the following paper builds on the theoretical contributions of critical digital mapping research (barns, 2020; kwan, 2016; farman, 2014; mattern, 2017; mcquire, 2016) through an arts-based (loveless, 2019; leavy, 2015) exploration of contemporary wayfinding practices. i consider the conditions of orientation (ahmed, 2006) and the operationalization of location awareness (mcquire, 2016) mediated through the use of google maps. methods to focus on everyday wayfinding, i designed a creative intervention into street-level practices of getting from a to b. in the streets of toronto (tkaronto), new york (manahatta), amsterdam, and london, i approached passers-by and asked for directions, with the follow up request that the informant draw their directions for me, using the paper and pen i provided. i based the process off a conceptual art project from the early 1960s by artist, stanley brouwn. in his work, this way brouwn (1964), brouwn walked the streets of amsterdam and asked passers-by for directions, then prompted the helpful strangers to draw out their instructions on the paper he provided. brouwn’s piece is a foundational conceptual artwork that brings together performance, drawing, and urban-intervention. in reactivating brouwn’s work, the directions i asked for were to and from a group of pre-set locations in these cities. these encounters framed moments of spontaneous spatial sense-making and on-the-spot navigation, resulting in 220 drawing that were adhoc in their rendering. using visual grounded theory (konecki, 2011) and situational analysis (clarke, 2005), i l looked at relations that run across and between the environment, the technology, and the social registers of the wayfinding moment. i then mapped this empirical research onto a discourse analysis of google’s own discursive framing of google maps evidenced through its application, its web presence, and its developer conference, i/o. i looked at street-level wayfinding the context of this rhetoric through the lens of sara ahmed’s (2006) theorizing on orientation as actions made in relation power. findings and contributions when i asked for directions, google maps was overwhelmingly the most used digital map. informants would turn to google maps to “show” me or “make sure they have it right” when i asked them to draw. it was also used after participants noted they were unfamiliar with the area but were able to give directions based on their access to google maps, pointing to a spatial command or even a claim to space that may otherwise have been unknown. in some cases, participants would draw directions based from the google maps visual representation of space or copy its text-based directions. in other encounters, i would scribe for them based on their elicitation of the google maps directions. as the city was made legible in these moments, i noted how informants were locating themselves in techno-imaginaries of google maps evident through phases like: “thank goodness for google” or “i just put on google maps and i go” or “it’s my favourite app because i’m obsessed with finding the best way.” these utterances frame google maps as a dependable resource paralleling the google maps claim that it “helps people as they move around the world” by way of “bringing our understandings to our users” (google developers, 2017). turning to google maps’ discursive maneuvers, there is a repeated focus on the imperatives to “discover” and “explore” with emphasis placed on acts of personalization by way of “your world” and “your plans.” explore is a means of consumption framed by locating sites to eat and shop. navigation is a means to find the ‘best route’ or the fastest way, avoiding traffic, as well as avoiding other impediments to speed (read ‘speed traps’). google maps’ discursive maneuvers promote an exploratory logic through frames of reliability and seamlessness, granting purchase on place through map access. when everyday uses of the digital map move beyond a navigational tool towards an instrument of place-making, it is important to identify how the prototypical google maps ‘user’ is itself an apparatus of the google maps spatial imaginary in which urban experiences can be (and are naturalized to be) optimized and managed. these encounters reveal responsive means of wayfinding that are more than acts of compliance (barns, 2020) but also demonstrations of selective and iterative engagements with mediated environments. but what preconditions do these orientations set and what is erased in the process? the creative intervention cuts through the everyday and points to the ways digital mobile tools are put to work and how they parallel, intersect, and diverge from other forms of a city’s ambient intelligences. the paper presents a case study of a creative approach to critical internet research used to better assess dominant discourses of wayfinding and place-making and how these seep into mundane practices of getting from a to b. references ahmed, s. (2006). queer phenomenology. duke university press. barns, s. (2020). platform urbanism: negotiating platform ecosystems in connected cities. palgrave macmillan. brouwn, s. (1964). this way brouwn. [collection of drawings from public performances in amsterdam]. moma. clarke, a. (2005). situational analysis: grounded theory after the postmodern turn. sage publications, ltd. farman, j. (ed.). (2014). the mobile story: narrative practices with locative technologies. routledge, taylor & francis group. hawkins, a.j. (december 2017). this deep dive into google maps is fascinating: google maps is more powerful than you know. verge. https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/24/16801334/google-maps-justin-obeirne cartographer-apple-waymo google developers. (2017). making the world your own with google maps apis (google i/o ’17)—youtube. retrieved march 10, 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlrutvtjwlg&t=8s kwan, m.-p. (2016). algorithmic geographies: big data, algorithmic uncertainty, and the production of geographic knowledge. annals of the american association of geographers, 106, 274–282 konecki, k.t. (2011). visual grounded theory: a methodological outline and examples from empirical work. revija za socilologiju, 41(2) 131-160. leavy, p. (2015). method meets art: arts-based research practice (2nd ed.). the guilford press. loveless, n. (2019). how to make art at the end of the world: a manifesto for research creation. duke university press. mattern, s. (2017). code + clay... data + dirt: five thousand years of urban media. university of minnesota press. mcquire, s. (2016). geomedia: networked cities and the future of public space. polity. sharma, s. (2012). it changes space and time! introducing power-chronography. in communication matters: materialist approaches to media, mobility and networks, edited by jeremy packer and stephen b. crofts wiley, 66-77. routledge. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): egliston, b. (2019, october 2-5). videogame analytics, surveillance capitalism, and the retentional economy of play. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. videogame analytics, surveillance capitalism, and the retentional economy of play ben egliston, university of sydney abstract data analytics tools are increasingly prevalent in videogames and are reliant on the surveillant capture and relay of user data. in this paper i present some conceptual work and preliminary analysis of the analytics tool ‘dotaplus’ used in dota 2. through my analysis, i frame dotaplus as a site of ‘surveillance capitalism’, using data derived from various modes of surveillance to generate potentials for commercially desirable gameplay experience. introduction recently, zuboff has argued that data derived from contemporary forms of technological surveillance have the capacity to offer significant knowledge about people’s behavior, and the potential to profoundly shape that behavior in future (2019). within the context of contemporary global technoculture, zuboff argues that the surveillant collection of data about people’s lives are put in service of capitalism. data facilitate the continued use and development of technologies (see also srnicek, 2017), but are also traded commodities valuable in the development of systems of prediction and probabilization (which as zuboff and many others see as creating subjects more amenable to capitalism). in short, the power and control exerted through logics of accumulation and the technologies and techniques of surveillance denote what zuboff calls ‘surveillance capitalism’. in this paper, i present initial analyses of videogame analytics tools as a site of surveillance capitalism. particularly, i focus on the tool ‘dotaplus’ for the popular multiplayer game dota 2. dotaplus’ various features are enabled through the monitoring of user activity. distinct from zuboff, who argues that sites of modern surveillance capitalism are in large part tied to the ‘behavioral futures’ marketplace, in this paper i suggest that the power and control exerted over subjects, as to make them more amenable to capitalism, operates by using surveillance and data accumulation as a technique for directly shaping how people experience, feel and think about the consumption of a particular product (here, dota 2). in order to develop this argument, i draw from stiegler’s concept of retentional economy (2010, pp. 8-10). for stiegler, retentional economy broadly describes how memory and human experience are retained in, and transmitted through, material objects or environments (what he calls tertiary retention). this process changes up the temporal structure of humans’ phenomenological experience – that is, for stiegler, how people remember their pasts, and develop forward-leaning expectations of the future. as stiegler sees it, new kinds of tertiary retentions condition human experience – increasingly, within the context of modern, commercial technics, to generate economic value (a dynamic he calls ‘psychopower’). drawing from stiegler, the claim made in this paper is that the way people play and experience dota 2 is transformed through analytics as a form of tertiary retention; the numerical and statistical quantification of play, enabled by various modes of surveillance, transforming how players affect and are affected by dota 2, producing qualities that might be seen as economically desirable for valve. methods from march 2018 (dotaplus launch) until january 2019, i analyzed material from 40 threads on the dota 2 subreddit, ‘/r/dota2’ and 15 videos (from youtube and twitch). i focused on content about dotaplus and play experience. empirical material presented represents a convenient sample. in line with the exploratory nature of the research, data was first open coded to determine themes, and then relations between themes were established. concepts derived from the literature on data, surveillance and humantechnology relations sensitized me to lines of inquiry in analysis. my own experience as a dotaplus user over this period (340 dota 2 matches, approximately 300 hours playtime) enabled me to parse and analyze the data. dotaplus, surveillance, power dotaplus is a paid subscription-based form of self-tracking software for the game dota 2. dotaplus features various forms of data analytics to do with players’ performance in different aspects of the game. to illustrate how dotaplus might create the potential for continued consumption of the game, i focus on data to do with the ‘positive’ impacts of dotaplus on the phenomenal quality of playing the game (cf. ash, 2015). each of dotaplus’ features involve the collection, sorting, and presentation of player data in some sort of numerical or visual format. i found that dotaplus’ features could be classified according to three different modes of surveillance: self-surveillance, lateral surveillance and autonomous, nonhuman surveillance – each of which with various effects. self-surveillance in dotaplus involves the real-time scoring of players’ ingame performance. one feature compares player performance to an average of similarly skilled players (see figure 1). across the empirical material, this self-tracking feature was widely seen as productive – players performing aspirationally (with the potential for positive affects when the goal is met) and negotiating the game through their own somatic and cognitive faculties and the gaze of the data. self-tracking features also include the stylized quantification of gameplay maneuvres (e.g. in flashing and glowing numbers over a player’s character), with some users pointing out the emotional and affective connections they had to this data (over using it for skill development). figure 1 – self-tracking in dotaplus lateral (or ‘peer’) surveillance (see andjrevic, 2004) afforded by dotaplus is evident in the ‘game summary’ feature – which enable the surveillance of player performance over a game. across the material here, a key theme was the capacity to draw on and reflect upon past performance, exteriorized in the form of data, potentially shaping future encounters with the game. others saw it as ‘amplifying’ the competition between players. one thread discussed affects of anxiety or dread about underperforming and anticipating being admonished by teammates (who can view the summary if they have dotaplus), as a result, forcing players to play ‘better’. lastly, i consider the autonomous surveillance that enable the tool’s machine learning features. through this collection of user data valve provide dynamic systems of prediction which enroll players into anticipatory regimes in negotiating each match. discussions situated this as a mode of experience of pre-empting experience, lessening the need for accumulating large amounts of subjective memory, assisting in negotiating a difficult and forbidding game. conclusion in exploring these three sites of surveillance, which variously exteriorize gameplay performance as data, i argue that digital traces of player activity work as tertiary retention – captured and fed back to users, altering the experience of playing dota 2 in a way that may be economically desirable for valve. reading stiegler and zuboff together, dotaplus might productively be understood as a site of surveillance capitalism, shaping people’s experience of playing the game through various features enabled by data from various forms of surveillance. this paper is expected to be of interest to games and media researchers in spotlighting new techniques used by game developers to create subjects amenable to continued consumption. more broadly, it is pertinent in a moment where surveillance-based technologies mediate our everyday lives. references ash, j. (2015). the interface envelope: gaming, technology, power. new york, ny: bloomsbury andrejevic, m. (2004). the work of watching one another: lateral surveillance, risk and governance. surveillance and society, 2(4), 479497 srnicek, n. (2017). platform capitalism. cambridge, uk: polity. stiegler, b. (2010). for a new critique of political economy. cambridge, uk: polity. zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. new york, ny: public affairs. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 kotliar, d. (2017, october 18-21). coding against culture: on language, theory and expertise in the algorithmic construction of identity. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. coding against culture: on language, theory and expertise in the algorithmic construction of identity dan kotliar the hebrew university of jerusalem data mining algorithms are fast replacing traditional social sorting mechanisms in creating, recreating and reifying social identities (lyon, 2003; willson, 2013; zarsky, 2002), and are now used to sort people in a growing variety of fields – banking, insurance, education and more (kennedy, 2016; kockelman, 2013; o’neil, 2016). but while previous social sorting mechanisms have predominantly relied on different theories (or lay theories) to supply the basic discursive, theoretical and lingual building blocks for identity construction, algorithmic classification often lacks a theoretical and lingual base, and is accordingly seen as beyond interpretation or explanation (hallinan & striphas, 2014); beyond symbols or discourse (gillespie, 2014), and hence, as a posthegemonic (beer, 2009; lash, 2007) or post-textual (andrejevic, hearn, & kennedy, 2015) way of government. however, algorithms depend on the people who design and use them, and are the result of constant interactions between human actors and computer code (bucher, 2012; crawford, miltner, & gray, 2014; morris, 2015). therefore, theory, language and expertise still play a role in the creation and implementation of such algorithms. but what role do they play? what kinds of theories take part in algorithmic sorting, in the algorithmic construction of identities? are "human technologies" (rose & miller, 2008), such as psychology or sociology, still needed in the process of sorting people, or are such experts replaced by mathematicians and engineers? moreover, what role does language play in algorithmic sorting? and, if language is involved, does the use of lingual categories shed light onto algorithmic black boxes (driscoll, 2014; leese, 2014; pasquale, 2015), or is it merely another measure of obfuscation? relying on an ethnographic study of the israeli data analytics' scene and on 40 semistructured interviews with israeli data scientists, this paper offers a closer look at the epistemic amalgam of algorithmic profiling, and at the changing role of expert knowledge, theory and language in the algorithmic construction of identities. the paper aims to show that, while language and expertise are often described (by programmers and critical thinkers alike) as superfluous to algorithmic sorting, they still play an important role in this process. accordingly, while algorithms can produce new and often 2 countless types of human categories, far beyond the known demographic or psychological ones (rogers, 2009), such traditional categories still play a central role in algorithmic sorting, albeit one dramatically different than before. 3 references andrejevic, m., hearn, a., & kennedy, h. (2015). cultural studies of data mining: introduction. european journal of cultural studies, 18(4–5), 379–394. http://doi.org/10.1177/1367549415577395 beer, d. (2009). power through the algorithm? participatory web cultures and the technological unconscious. new media & society, 11(6), 985–1002. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809336551 bucher, t. (2012). want to be on the top? algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on facebook. new media & society, 14(7), 1164–1180. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444812440159 crawford, k., miltner, k., & gray, m. l. (2014). critiquing big data : politics , ethics , epistemology. international journal of communication, 8, 1663–1672. driscoll, k. (2014). working within a black box : transparency in the collection and production of big twitter data, 8(1243170), 1745–1764. gillespie, t. (2014). the relevance of algorithms. in k. gillespie, t; boczkowski, p.; foot, k. (ed.), media technologies. cambridge, ma: mit press. hallinan, b., & striphas, t. (2014). recommended for you: the netflix prize and the production of algorithmic culture. new media & society, 1461444814538646-. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814538646 kennedy, h. (2016). post, mine, repeat. london: palgrave macmillan uk. kockelman, p. (2013). the anthropology of an equation. sieves, spam filters, agentive algorithms, and ontologies of transformation. hau: journal of ethnographic theory, 3(3), 33–61. lash, s. (2007). power after hegemony: cultural studies in mutation? theory, culture & society, 24(3), 55–78. http://doi.org/10.1177/0263276407075956 leese, m. (2014). the new profiling: algorithms, black boxes, and the failure of antidiscriminatory safeguards in the european union. security dialogue, 45(5), 494– 511. http://doi.org/10.1177/0967010614544204 lyon, d. (2003). surveillance as social sorting. in surveillance as social sorting: computer codes and mobile bodies (pp. 13–31). new york: routledge. morris, j. w. (2015). curation by code: infomediaries and the data mining of taste. european journal of cultural studies, 18(4–5), 446–463. http://doi.org/10.1177/1367549415577387 o’neil, c. (2016). weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. new york: crown publishing group. pasquale, f. (2015). the black box society. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. 4 rogers, r. (2009). post-demographic machines. in a. dekker & a. wolfsberger (eds.), walled garden (pp. 29–39). amsterdam: virtueel platform. rose, n., & miller, p. (2008). governing the present: administering economic, social and personal life. retrieved from http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/21097/ rouvroy, a. (2013). the end(s) of critique : data-behaviourism vs. due-process. in m. hildebrandt & k. de vries (eds.), privacy, due process and the computational turn: the philosophy of law meets the philosophy of technology (pp. 1–19). milton park and new york: routledge. willson, m. (2013). the politics of social filtering. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies. http://doi.org/10.1177/1354856513479761 zarsky, t. z. (2002). mine your own business: making the case for the implications of the data mining of personal information in the forum of public opinion. yale journal of law and technology, (5), 1–57. microsoft word cassidy.docx selected papers of internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers daegu, korea, 22-24 october 2014 suggested citation (apa): cassidy, e.m. (2014, october 22-24). the convergence of niche and mainstream social networking services in gay men’s digital culture: how generation y uses facebook to extend and enhance the gaydar experience. paper presented at internet research 15: the 15th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. daegu, korea: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the convergence of niche and mainstream social networking services in gay men’s digital culture: how generation y uses facebook to extend and enhance the gaydar experience elija marc cassidy queensland university of technology intro in her early discussions of social networking sites (snss) in the context of the rise (and fall) of friendster, danah boyd (2007) noted gay men’s tendencies to use mainstream social networking services as “gay dating sites”. being amongst the earliest adopters of friendster, during its initial growth period, gay identified users in new york perceived gay dating to be the site’s purpose and invited other gay men (boyd, 2007). while friendster itself did not last, due, among other things, to a crumbling database and large-scale user abandonment, the extension of gay men’s networks into mainstream social networking sites has not abated. when facebook began achieving popularity in australia in 2007, for example, it was initially touted amongst some in the gay community as ‘the new gaydar’ (see, e, 2007); a new addition to the raft of existing snss designed specifically for the gay male population. while any user of facebook can attest the site is not designed to facilitate gay male interaction, as it was once imagined in some quarters, empirical data has not yet been published which examines the roles mainstream social networking services, such as facebook, now play in relation to niche networking sites like gaydar (ww.gaydar.net), and to gay men’s digital culture more broadly. expanding on the work commenced in this general area by cooper and dzara (2010), who examined the possibilities of facebook for lgbt identity and activism, this paper provides a qualitative beginning to this discussion1. 1 prior to lgbt identity and online new media (pullen and cooper, 2010), in which demographic (see, for example, mowlabocus, 2010). methods this paper emerges from data gathered as part of a larger project on the extension of gay men’s social networks into more mainstream snss and the associated implications for identity management in these spaces that focused, in particular, on the use of gaydar and facebook amongst 18-28 year old users of these sites in brisbane, australia. as part of this project 7500 gaydar profiles and more than 40 brisbane-based gay-oriented facebook groups and pages were examined using participant observation techniques. semi-structured interviews and focus group sessions about the ways that participants personally engaged with and perceived of gaydar and facebook; how they went about managing their identities in these spaces; and what roles, if any, they saw the services playing in the gay male community more generally were also carried out with 30 users of these sites, in effect, constructing a feedback loop to verify the accuracy of interpretations made during the participant observation phase of the project. participants were recruited using the ‘snowball’ method, and while not intended in any way to be representative of the entire gay male community in brisbane, were nonetheless from a broad range of social, economic, religious and ethnic backgrounds, of differing education levels, from every age in the 18-28 year old bracket, and at different stages of the coming out process. findings although facebook has certainly not usurped the role of gaydar in gay men’s digital culture in brisbane, the data from this study clearly indicates that young gay men in brisbane are using the site for purposes that overlap with their core reasons for using gaydar. indeed, the data suggested that facebook has become deeply enmeshed in this demographic’s experience of gay men’s digital culture, and is used in very specific ways to extend, verify, connect with, and navigate, gay men’s social networks. the participants in this study, for example, routinely used facebook as: a space to shift acceptable interactions with other gaydar users away from the gaydar environment; an important connection point for and verifier of the identities presented in gaydar; and an alternate avenue to access likeminded gay men. by briefly examining facebook’s affordances with regards to identity management options vis-à-vis glbt specific snss such as gaydar, this paper provides a contextual analysis of how and why facebook is now an important aspect of gay men’s digital culture and why it has been taken up and embraced by young gay men in the above ways. i suggest that the main impetus for these developments is derived from facebook’s provision of a framework through which glbt identities can be expressed in a fashion that makes homosexuality banal in ways not possible within snss designed specifically for gay male users. implications/relevance the positioning of facebook as a significant part of gay men’s digital culture through a range of technosocial convergences raises questions for a number of associated parties. for owners and designers of niche social networking sites aimed specifically at gay men, for example, it raises the issue of how to best provide the kind of services their target demographic is now looking for from niche social networking sites. as gay men’s digital spaces have a long history of providing ‘identity demarginalization’ (mckenna and bargh, 1998) to users, for glbt community organisations and support groups convergence between sites like gaydar and facebook also raises questions about how to best adapt support services if this is no longer the case. for example, how might guidelines aimed at young people about ‘coming out’ and exploring one’s sexuality (see, for example, http://www.comingout.com.au/comingout/) be adapted to suit a generation of men for whom this process may now occur in the spaces of mainstream social networking sites? this paper is a contribution to the body of research that will need to be done in order to adequately address such questions, and to strengthen our understandings of contemporary gay men’s digital culture more broadly. its relevance to aoir’s theme for 2014 lies in its dual focus on convergence and identity, and on the particular uses of a mainstream social networking site by a minority group. references boyd d (2007) none of this is real: identity and participation in friendster. in: karaganis j (ed) structures of participation in digital culture. new york: ssrc books, pp.132157. cooper m and dzara k (2010) the facebook revolution: lgbt identity and activism. in: pullen c and cooper m (eds) lgbt identity and online new media. new york: routledge, pp.100-112. e (2007, december 19) is facebook the new gaydar. awkward sex in the city. retrieved march 21, 2008 from http://awkwardsexinthecity.blogspot.com.au/2007/12/isfacebook-is-newgaydar.html. mckenna k.y.a, and bargh j.a. (1998). coming out in the age of the internet: identity ‘demarginalization’ through virtual group participation. journal of personality and social psychology, 75, 681-694. mowlabocus s (2010) gaydar culture: gay men, technology and embodiment in the digital age. surrey, uk: ashgate. aoir2020-race influences panel spir final v2.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): guarriello, nb., persaud, c.j., maris, e., bhargava, r., hund, e., abidin, c., zeng, j. (2020, october). racing the platform/platforming race. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. racing the platform/platforming race nicholas-brie guarriello university of minnesota christopher j. persaud university of southern california elena maris university of illinois at chicago raj bhargava university of california, berkeley emily hund university of pennsylvania crystal abidin curtin university jing zeng university of zurich panel rationale race and racism are enduring structural forces that have a hand in virtually every aspect of society; the internet and its vast array of platforms, applications, devices, and cultures are well within their grasp (nakamura and chow-white, 2013; brock, 2020). the papers on this panel trouble, question, and reorient notions of how race comes to matter in our contemporary digital landscape. we build on scholarship that explores how content creators make sense of their relationships to audiences, their contested digital labor, and the centrality of identity to their (im)material work (eg: baym, 2018; abidin, 2018; senft, 2008). indeed, as critical internet researchers interested in “the lively, animated machines of today’s internet”, we argue that an examination of influencers, microcelebrity, and virality that explicitly attends to race and racism is sorely needed. this panel brings together a diverse group of interdisciplinary (anthropology, sociology, media and communication, game studies, queer studies, and feminist studies) scholars working in the united states and australia, who engage in empirical and theoretical research on microcelebrity and influencer cultures. the papers in this panel employ a broad range of methods including qualitative discourse analysis and digital ethnographic research of youtubers, onlyfans creators, tiktok users, and facebook groups to offer a multifaceted analysis of how race and racism function across social media platforms and within microcelebrity/influencer cultures. the first paper takes the broadest approach in their digital ethnographic work and attempts to flesh out the workings of race, gender, and political economies of influencers on youtube. particularly, paper 1 analyzes the pokémon go phenomenon and the influencers who came to fame through building relationships with their fans, discarding conversations of race and racism, and engaging in unequal, gendered forms of private work. key to its argument is an examination of how particular social locations of race and gender and the neoliberal project of entrepreneurship affect the clout, visibility, and well-being of pokémon go influencers. the next three papers focus explicitly on how race operates within microcelebrity and influencer circles as well as the effects that racism has on influencers across various social media platforms. indeed, paper 2 examines how race and racism mediate the experiences of gay porn microcelebrities in order to flesh out the differing, racialized relational work that occurs on onlyfans and within its attendant social media subcultures. most crucially, it destabilizes the often unnamed ‘white default’ of porn studies, while accounting for how race, racism, and sexuality shape online microcelebrity. paper 3 studies the tiktok platform to think about how young influencers navigate race and racism and pose social justice stances on a burgeoning and ephemeral platform. in particular, engagement with american racial and cultural politics are explicitly linked to notions of platformed citizenship norms on tiktok. finally, paper 4 introduces the term “platformed race” to interrogate how asianness is commodified, circulated, and microcelebrified within subtle asian things (sat), a private facebook group. the paper interrogates how dominant narratives on sat tend to leverage diasporic asianess in the generation and circulation of memes, which in turn provoke socio-political debate and incite culturally relevant discourse amongst its distributed global community. to summarize, our analyses explore the intersections of microcelebrity and influencer economies, cultures, and labor demands by looking at how creators and their audiences experience race and racism across several platforms. our various approaches contribute different examinations of race and racism to existing literature on the everyday experiences and structural hurdles that microcelebrities and influencers must endure in order to sustain their livelihood in a shifting platform(ed) landscape (eg: abidin, 2018, baym, 2018, duffy, 2017). as internet researchers working with qualitative methods, we can never know in advance what contexts might be most meaningful for our work, and so we remain critical of how we make sense of both our own judgements and those of our participants (markham and baym, 2009). references abidin, c. (2018). internet celebrity: understanding fame online. united kingdom: emerald publishing. baym, n. k. (2018). playing to the crowd: musicians, audiences, and the intimate work of connection (vol. 14). nyu press. brock jr, a. (2020). distributed blackness: african american cybercultures (vol. 9). nyu press. duffy, b. (2017). (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. new haven; london: yale university press. markham, a. n., & baym, n. k. (eds.). (2009). internet inquiry: conversations about method. sage publications. nakamura, l., & chow-white, p. (eds.). (2013). race after the internet. routledge. senft, t. m. (2008). camgirls: celebrity and community in the age of social networks (vol. 4). peter lang. 1. capturing feelings: the circulation of whiteness and private praise of pokémon go influencers on youtube nicholas-brie guarriello university of minnesota introduction on july 6, 2016, pokémon go was released and has served many social, economic, and cultural functions to date. on the one hand, pokémon go brought people to the streets and parks to foster communication to capture pokémon (virtual creatures) or partake in raid battles, whereas on the other hand, the app has been used to the police bodies of color and low-income communities from public spaces. moreover, a plethora of community meet-ups, live streams, and let’s plays on youtube has stemmed from pokémon go in a way that has resonated with most gamers and created a community of pokémon go influencers. games, like pokémon go, and gamers enact positive and negative emotional resonances that stick with us sentimentally (anable, 2018; ahmed, 2012) and aid in illuminating current debates regarding social media celebrityhood (abidin, 2016), gendered and racialized working conditions online (abidin, 2018; duffy, 2017; ouellette, 2016), and the broadcasting of everyday life (taylor, 2018; johnson et al., 2017). this presentation examines the contours of pokémon go influencers relational labor practices and rise to niche, celebrityhood status. specifically, the focus is on how particular social locations of race and gender and the neoliberal project of entrepreneurship affect the clout, visibility, and well-being of pokémon go influencers. drawing on over two years of digital ethnographic research, this presentation discusses how whiteness and eurocentric modes of production and content circulation pervades the pokémon go community and the disproportionate, yet dynamic relational labor and audience building women influencers experience by analyzing the following pokémon go youtubers: mystic7, trnrtips, reversal, pkmnmasterholly, zoetwodots, and the trainer club. methods employing digital ethnography through participant observation, chatting on uploaded videos, commenting and lurking in live streams, attending the first pokémon go festival in 2017, taking copious fieldnotes and creating memos, and data scraping and archiving of youtube content and comments, the empirical data for this research was collected from july 6, 2016 (pokémon go release date) through december 31, 2019. pokémon go content producers on youtube were selected and analyzed based on the following criteria: 1) the ability to communicate in english or provide english subtitles, which is one of the researcher’s native language, 2) uploaded videos achieved at least 1,000 views, 3) consistency of uploading at least two videos a week related to pokémon go, and 4) participating in sponsored content with niantic (the parent company of pokémon go) or the pokémon company international by december 2018. although data analysis occurred during 2016 and 2019, content creators who did not meet the fourth criteria by the end of 2018 were not analyzed for this research presentation. for this study, the last criteria served as a marker for influencer status because the content creator’s clout with their audience was enough for niantic to sponsor them to attend pokémon go fest held in july each year. after the data collection process and meeting the aforesaid criteria, a grounded theory and theoretical sampling approach (glaser and strauss, 1967) was used where codes illuminated and refined initial queries, the following codes were developed and analyzed through nvivo 12 (underscores denote similar themes): emotions, gendered_labor, gendered_private, relational, sponsored, whiteness_useuro. the following sections draw from theoretical approaches and empirical results to analyze pokémon go influencers. catching relationships and releasing whiteness the most assigned code was relational, which refers to the temporal investments and labor that each pokémon go influencer undertook to ensure a loyal audience base. this relational code heavily resonates with nancy baym’s (2018) watershed work on relational labor. indeed, relational labor is the ongoing and interactive affective, material, and cognitive work of communicating and developing intimate relationships with people over time to create structures of feelings that can support continued, freelance or precarious work (baym, 2018). this ongoing communicative work served as the unpaid, temporal work to build sustained work and audience support. however, this type of relational labor is often packaged in race-neutral language that does not interrogate why most influencers flaunt a certain aesthetic of whiteness (bishop, 2019). trnrtips (trainertips) disclosed that he is multi-racial in a 2016 youtube video, in which some fans responded with racist comments. trainertips proceeded not to mention his race in further uploaded content on youtube. all the other aforesaid influencers are white and rose to popularity during the initial release of pokémon go because they were: 1) personable, 2) asked audience for help, and 3) kept the 2016 election out of their videos. private praise and women influencers although the types of relationships developed with their audience help sustain one’s income on youtube and gain sponsorships from corporate brands, women pokémon go influencers experienced a form of private praise. pkmnmasterholly (holly) said in one of her 2019 videos that she gets a lot of direct messages on her instagram or twitter praising her youtube content, her skilled augmented reality photos, and personality while live streaming or at community meet-ups. holly continues to mention how several people have mentioned they enjoy her content and she’s their favorite youtubers, but will talk to their friends about mystic7’s or trainer tips videos instead. zoetwodots re-affirms holly’s claims saying she’s received similar, positive feedback messages as well as verbal harassment that is common among women gamers. the gendered dynamics of youtube work for women pokémon go influencers entail them doing behind-the-scenes relational building via direct messaging on other platforms in order to remain visible and keep a loyal audience base. conclusion pokémon go influencers align with the neoliberal project where folks become selfsufficient, passionate, always-on-the-clock workers in order to sustain their income. bringing feminist media studies theoretical frameworks in conversation with the empirical data of pokémon go influencers demonstrates how the relational labor content creators perform to obtain and maintain influencer status is often racialized and packaged in line with neoliberal logics of colorblindness and a leveled-playing field. furthermore, this analysis examines how women pokémon go influencers are often celebrated for their uploaded, live streaming, and community meet-up content via private, direct messages where relational bonding and conversations that ultimately contribute to their income is created and sustained. references abidin, c. (2018). internet celebrity: understanding fame online. united kingdom: emerald publishing ahmed, s. (2012). on being included: racism and diversity in institutional life. durham; london: duke university press. anable, a. (2018). playing with feelings: video games and affect. minneapolis, minnesota: university of minnesota press. baym, k. n. (2018). playing to the crowd: musicians, audiences, and the intimate work of connection (postmillennial pop). new york: new york university press. bishop, s. (2019). “why the ‘ideal’ influencer looks like….that.” paper magazine. duffy, b. (2017). (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. new haven; london: yale university press. glaser, b. g., strauss l. a. (1967) the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. chicago, il: aldine publisher. johnson, m. r., woodcock, j. (2017). ‘it’s like the gold rush’: the lives and careers of professional video game streamers on twitch.tv. information, communication & society: 335-351. ouellette, l. (2016). lifestyle tv (routledge television guidebooks). new york, ny: routledge. taylor, t. (2018) watch me play: twitch and the rise of game live streaming. princeton, nj: princeton university press. 2. race, racism, and networked gay porn microcelebrity christopher j. persaud university of southern california love me, love me, please retweet these days if i want to watch gay porn, i can simply navigate to twitter or reddit and click through to the profile of an indie gay porn content creator. beyond a vast array of diverse content, however, audiences increasingly expect gay porn performers to devote substantial time and energy towards building personal connections with them. nancy baym (2018) has described this phenomenon as “relational labor”; for popular gay porn performers, who are largely professional amateur queer internet microcelebrities (senft 2008; abidin, 2018; duguay, 2019), these interpersonal connections at scale supposedly lead to revenue and notoriety. in some queer male adult subcultures, there is a sense that direct subscription-based adult content platforms like onlyfans (used here as a catch-all for various platforms of this kind) that host and distribute indie gay porn videos are democratizing gay porn in the social media age (street, 2018). the means and rewards of gay porn production have been decentralized, redistributed to the hands – or perhaps more accurately the dicks and asses – of the hard-working performers themselves. with this industrial shift in mind, in this paper i explore two intertwined questions: how do digital platforms like onlyfans and their linked adult content social media subcultures shape relationships between queer male adult content creators and their audiences? how does race and racism mediate the experiences of gay porn microcelebrities and the audiences with whom they are intimately entangled? methods leveraging data from an on-going project, i draw on digital ethnography through participant observation of racially and geographically diverse queer male social media subcultures (primarily on twitter and reddit) of gay porn performers and their fans, inperson participant observation at queer social and nightlife events affiliated with gay porn microcelebrities, and interviews with gay porn performers both physically in the los angeles area and globally through digital means. interview participants and social media subcultural groups were selected through a combination of purposive sampling from my own social networks, referrals from queer men in the los angeles night life community, and participant observation in the digital and physical social worlds of onlyfans performers and their audiences. this presentation draws on preliminary data analysis (coded using nvivo) from digital participant observation and interviews collected in late 2019 as well as in-progress (and covid-19 adjusted) data collection in 2020. here, i would like to note that i explicitly locate myself as a queer internet subculture researcher whose in-group knowledge and physical body shapes my data collection and mediates relationships with interlocutors (campbell, 2009; bromseth and sundén, 2011). further, my theoretical interests in race and racism are explicitly tied to my own identity as a black american queer man and begins from the position that the internet has long been a conduit for meaningful intimate connections and disconnections among queer people (mcglotten, 2013). professional amateur gay porn stars enacting a particular kind of calibrated amateurism (abidin, 2017), onlyfans content creators lean into the affective pull of the homemade sex tape that itself is, implicitly, always in contrast to traditional studio pornography productions. as my interlocutors describe, part of what makes a video shot, edited, and produced for a direct subscription platform erotically compelling is precisely that it looks like an amateur production. to be sure, this aesthetic amateurism is not simply tied up in the moment of porn production, as audiences sometimes interpret highly produced and stylized amateur porn like much of the content on performers’ onlyfans pages as “real sex” when it is taken out of its original context (brennan, 2018). i argue that this professionalization of the amateur or indie gay porn star shapes the way that audiences of popular indie gay porn actors seek out and recirculate clips of their favorite performers in queer male social media subcultural contexts. these videos are simultaneously seen as outside the official production platform of onlyfans and yet essential to its success. echoing dyer (2004), the erotic conceit of the vast majority of these videos is that the fact that they exist in the first place means that they were recorded for some form of monetization and there might never have been any “authentic realness” there in the first place. the digital color line alongside this notion of the professional amateur gay porn performer, some performers of color that i spoke with described a number of racial stereotypes that occasionally map onto their interactions with their audiences and even at times other performers. these digital microaggressions and racist encounters are unsurprising given that queer men of color navigate implicit and explicit forms of racial exclusion in gay community spaces (han, 2007). yet, considering that indie gay porn is often an important stream of income for even established studio performers (berg, 2016), as one black porn performer put it: “what do you do when someone’s racist fetishization of your body pays your bills? [laughs] at least i don’t have to actually fuck them.” despite these negative and stigmatic dimensions, i discuss how for many performers of color, onlyfans gay porn is not necessarily bound by the normative expectations of studio porn about how particular kinds of bodies should have sex, how racial and gender identities do not neatly fit into prescribed ways of being, and how the “genres” of porn themselves can be harmful to performers and audiences whose desires are mutable and complex (paasonen, 2010; mowlabocus and wood 2015; ruberg, 2016). references abidin, c. (2017). #familygoals: family influencers, calibrated amateurism, and justifying young digital labor. social media + society, 3(2) abidin, crystal. 2018. internet celebrity: understanding fame online. bingley: emerald group publishing. baym, n. k. (2018). playing to the crowd: musicians, audiences, and the intimate work of connection (vol. 14). nyu press. berg, h. (2016). ‘a scene is just a marketing tool’: alternative income streams in porn’s gig economy. porn studies, 3(2), 160–174. brennan, j. (2018). microporn in the digital media age: fantasy out of context. porn studies, 5(2), 152–155. bromseth, j., & sundén, j. (2011). queering internet studies: intersections of gender and sexuality. the handbook of internet studies, 271-299. campbell, j.e. (2009). how do issues of gender and sexuality influence the structures and processes of qualitative internet research? in: markham, annette and baym, nancy, (eds.) internet inquiry: conversations about method. sage, thousand oaks, ca, pp. 99-130. duguay, s. (2019). “running the numbers”: modes of microcelebrity labor in queer women’s self-representation on instagram and vine. social media + society, 5(4), 205630511989400. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119894002 dyer, r. (2004). “idol thoughts: orgasm and self reflexivity in gay pornography”, in gibson, p. church. (series ed.). more dirty looks: gender, pornography and power (2nd ed.). london: british film institute. han, c. (2007). they don’t want to cruise your type: gay men of color and the racial politics of exclusion. social identities, 13(1), 51–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630601163379 mcglotten, s. (2013). virtual intimacies: media, affect, and queer sociality. suny press. mowlabocus, s., & wood, r. (2015). introduction: audiences and consumers of porn. porn studies, 2(2–3), 118–122. paasonen, s. (2010). labors of love: netporn, web 2.0 and the meanings of amateurism. new media & society, 12(8), 1297–1312. ruberg, b. (2016). doing it for free: digital labour and the fantasy of amateur online pornography. porn studies, 3(2), 147–159. senft, t. m. (2008). camgirls: celebrity and community in the age of social networks (vol. 4). peter lang. street, m. (2018, october 18). how sites like onlyfans and justforfans are democratizing gay porn. out. retrieved from https://www.out.com/outexclusives/2018/10/18/amateur-gay-porn-sites-onlyfans-are-big-business-influencers 3. welcome to #melaninmansion: reimagining the color of influence on tiktok elena maris university of illinois at chicago raj bhargava university of california, berkeley emily hund university of pennsylvania introduction tiktok is a popular short-form video social network. from suppression of political content, to privacy and addiction concerns, the platform has been plagued with controversies worldwide since launching in 2017. in the u.s., race has been a recurring issue as the chinese-owned company seems particularly challenged in understanding the american racial context. two large controversies around tiktok influencers and race emerged in late 2019 and early 2020. in this paper we use ctda, or critical technocultural discourse analysis (brock, 2018), to examine tiktok user-generated content that refers to these two controversies to understand how users think about how race and influence operate on a young but rapidly growing platform. our study found a (quite young) online community deeply invested in the evolving platform. the data revealed a community wrestling with the place of the platform, and of social media concepts like ‘influencer,’ ‘creator,’ and ‘original content,’ in larger (digital) american racial and cultural politics. analyzing the videos as active commentary, interventions, and sites of digital information sharing, activism, and solidarity in the face of a racially hostile platform, we discuss major themes of the content and argue for their important role in countering deficit models of race and technology use. race and tiktok: the cases of the the hype house and the renegade tiktok had approximately 37.2 million u.s. users in 2019. the new york times explained the platform’s popularity thus: “to many users, what’s special is tiktok's goofiness and sense of genuine fun...you don’t have to friend anyone or search for anything to watch...you’ll (be) likely to encounter a barrage of funny, meme-y videos from total strangers that tiktok spools up for you, personalizing the feed as you go…some users say tiktok is more authentic than the self-consciously pretty and polished instagram.” the platform has propelled many creators to fame. some of tiktok’s most followed influencers are dancers. tiktok creators often create, revise, and repeat various choreographies matched to audio tracks. “the renegade” dance, a viral tiktok sensation, became a cultural phenomenon onand offline. charli d'amelio, a 15-yearold white tiktok dancer from connecticut, became inextricably linked to the dance, gaining 30.6 million followers by february 2020 (lorenz, 2020a). that february, the new york times published an article discussing the creator of the renegade, a black 14-year-old girl from atlanta, and how she had been erased from the renegade craze, missing financial and career opportunities that instead found their way to d’amelio. immediately, the tiktok community launched into discussions of race, influence, original content, appropriation, and attribution. d’amelio is at the center of another tiktok influencer race controversy as a member of the hype house. “hype house was formed in december by some of tiktok’s most talked-about stars...videos including the hashtag #hypehouse have accrued nearly 100 million views on tiktok” (lorenz, 2020b). lorenz (2020b) explained: “since the arrival of hype house...some tiktokers began discussing a melanin mansion for black creators, noting that hype house is predominately white.” indeed, the group of white creators became an object of both fascination and critique on tiktok as community members often paired group pictures of the hype house influencers with a popular tiktok audio clip of someone asking, “where’s the flavor?!” social media “influence” is often associated with white, thin women in contemporary understandings of mainstream digital microcelebrity (duffy & hund, 2015). this is true despite that black culture has provided major innovative contributions to larger digital culture (brock, 2020; florini, 2020). “black digital practice has become very much a mainstream phenomenon, even if its expert practitioners rarely receive economic compensation for their brilliance or political compensation for their activism” (brock, 2020, p. 1). these issues were central to emerging conversations on tiktok around hype house and the renegade. black tiktok creators, other creators of color, and a number of white creators, began lip syncing, performing skits, and performing other tiktok trends to wade into the incredibly difficult racial politics the controversies surfaced. method and findings we used tiktok’s application programming interface (api) to scrape the platform for all videos using primary hashtags related to the cases of hype house and jalaiah harmon, collecting a sample of 500 highly relevant tiktok videos for analysis (250 for each controversy). brock (2020) explains that ctda “decenters the western deficit perspective on minority technology use to instead prioritize the epistemological standpoint of underrepresented groups of technology users.” thus, analytically we prioritized understanding the videos as digital commentary, interventions, and other sites of information sharing, activism, and solidarity. we identified the following three theoretically-informed themes of content. “let me in! i be the i-g-g-y”: performing (digital) racial literacy for most of the creators in the sample, hype house and the renegade became standins for the whiteness of “influence” on tiktok, and how the lack of representation is undergirded by more overt and violent acts of racism on-platform and in larger society. many creators performed their lack of surprise with the whiteness of the hype house or harmon’s invisibility. for example, one creator looked solemnly in the camera, stating he was shocked white people took a black girl’s creation, especially in christopher columbus’s america. others delivered lessons on the history of cultural appropriation. and some tied history and contemporary tiktok culture in shocking ways, one boy explaining that of course the hype house only accepts white people, but he has good news: the influencers decided to let him in since he is light-skinned as their house slave. we discuss these and other similar content as performances of (digital) racial literacy. “tiktok, i’m disappointed in you”: (re)defining platform citizenship much of the content showed creators looking for accountability. creators targeted the platform itself, tiktok’s most famous influencers, and the community of regular users. content focused on what are, or should be, norms of tiktok platform citizenship. creators focused on norms of crediting original creators of memes and dances as a courtesy rarely extended to creators of color. we discuss this theme in relation to narratives of race and technological literacy, using the content to interrogate what are often deficit approaches to digital literacy and people of color. we also tie it to theoretical understandings of the labor of racial activism. “the flavor is immaculate”: radical reimaginings of influence one of the most widespread responses to the hype house and race was the hashtag #melaninmansion, usually tied to content suggesting complete withdrawal from white influence; opting instead for celebratory and utopian imaginings of black and/or nonwhite (online) community. descriptions and skits of how a mansion for influencers of color might look ranged from wry descriptions of all of the spices used on chicken to sincere suggestions about which influencers of color should occupy the house along with urgings to support their accounts. we discuss this theme in relation to black and queer utopianism. discussion florini (2020) explains about people of color’s use of digital technologies to counter racism: “...despite digital media’s potential to provide a space for the experiences of people of color, such media are still shaped by the same logics that silence and erase those experiences. consequently, using them to construct counterdiscourses around race is not an uncomplicated endeavor.” this paper studies such complicated endeavors from tiktok creators. we discuss their labor and discursive and technological practices as central digital experiences of race and social media influence. further, we argue racialized forms of digital citizenship often go unexamined and uncredited, and call for further work on such labor and its impact on young digital citizens. references brock, andre. (2020). distributed blackness: african american cybercultures. new york: nyu press. duffy, b., & hund, e. (2015). “having it all” on social media: entrepreneurial femininity and self-branding among fashion bloggers. social media & society, 1-11. florini, s. (2020). beyond hashtags: racial politics and black digital networks. new york: nyu press. lorenz, t. (2020a, february 13). the original renegade. the new york times. lorenz, t. (2020b, january 3). hype house. the new york times. 4. ‘subtle asian traits’: platformed race on facebook crystal abidin curtin university jing zeng university of zurich ‘subtle asian traits’ ‘subtle asian traits’ is a private facebook group that was started by 8 asian-australian teenagers in september 2018 “as a joke”, but amassed over 1 million members under 3 months. users share ‘asian positive’ stories, resources, and memes. prolific members include actors/musicians of asian descent who praise sat for championing asian representation. sat is a leader and advocate by organizing meet-ups with members offline, speaking at facebook hq menlo park about race issues, partnering with asian microcelebrities to generate content, and fundraising for calamities like the australian bushfires (lejano, 2019). as of february 2020, sat boasts over 1.7 million members and 1,200 new posts daily. in this paper, we study how asianness is commodified, circulated, and microcelebrified on sat. through content analyses and participant observation (apr 2019–feb 2020) we identify sat’s group norms, post genres, and cultures to offer the concept of ‘platformed race’ microcelebrity. these are preliminary findings from an ongoing project (–oct 2020), and research will progress to engage with diasporic studies (i.e. ang, 2003). drawing on matamoros-fernández’s ‘platformed racism’ (2017) and theories of platformisation (nieborg & poell, 2018), we introduce ‘platformed race’ to interrogate how ‘being asian’ is co-shaped by the group’s collective identification construction and facebook’s architecture and governance. facebook group norms and ‘platformed race’ in sat, members can contribute posts, but much of the identity negotiations and camaraderie are fostered in the comments section, where facebook rewards activity by allocating ‘conversation starter’ (n=116), ‘visual storyteller’ (n=106), and ‘rising star’ (n=10) badges next to a user’s handle. there are also badges that distinguish membership recency like ‘new members’ (n=9983), and membership hierarchy like ‘admins’ (n=11) and ‘moderators’ (n=38). admins and moderators gatekeep platformed race on sat. they approve “asian related content”, “original asian related memes”, “memes which have good captions relating to asians”, but censor “political, racial or any controversial content” such as comparisons between asians and whites, derogatory commentary, and negative stereotypes. however, the inclusivity of the label ‘asian’ is questionable. like its founders, sat’s 30 moderators are asian diaspora/immigrants in predominantly anglo-saxon countries including australia (2 cities), the us (5), canada (2), and the uk (1). further, 27 appear to be of east asian descent. this governance is reflected in our observations that posts tend to favour east asian customs (i.e. language, food, festivals) and cultural displacement discourses (i.e. migration, diaspora, adoption, international student living). sat’s hand in dichotomizing (east/south or yellow/brown) asian identity on facebook is critical, judging from our larger survey of a large network of ‘subtle x’ spin-offs groups. enduring meme elements coding from our data reveal that sat is comprised of five main enduring meme elements (table 1): table 1: enduring meme element categories and examples. figures 1 & 2: memes depicting typical asian parental expectations. figures 3 & 4: memes depicting asian food trends & cultures. figures 5 & 6: memes depicting stereotypical asian physical attributes. to understand how asianess is constructed, circulated, and commodified on sat, we conducted a qualitative analysis of 793 most popular posts (sep 2018–feb 2020). five cornerstone features that register virality and high engagement on sat are: 1) shared stereotypes: asian stereotypes are presented in a self-deprecatory way, such as joking about their one’s accent or being lactose-intolerant (figure 7). but occasionally, memes target an ‘out-group’ (e.g. ‘white people’ and ‘international students’) (figure 8). figures 7 & 8: memes about sharing stereotypes. 2) agony aunt: emotional personal stories about parental conflicts, academic struggle, or employment pressure stimulate agony aunt-like advice columns, arousing empathy and attracting engagement. while some posts coat personal struggles with funny memes (figure 9), others seek advice and emotional release (figure 10). figures 9 & 10: memes provoking agony aunt discussions. 3) calling out: as the vast majority of members are diaspora, call-outs focus on racism and xenophobia to denounce ignorance and discrimination (figure 12), but can also be loaded with humour (figure 11). figures 11 & 12: memes addressing call-out cultures. 4) asian role models: given the scarcity of asian role models in western media, some public figures of asian descent are widely celebrated and discussed, including comedian ali wang (figure 13), and actor-rapper awkwafina (figure 14). figures 13 & 14: memes depicting asian role models. 5) asian media events: current issues relating to asian communities are discussed, including milestones like korean film parasites’ academy award for best picture (figure 15), and the outbreak of covid-19 (figure 16). such time-specific media events disrupt the tempo of group discussions, attract a spike in engagement, and eventually blend into the enduring meme elements. figures 15 & 16: memes depicting asian media events. a matrix for cultivating ‘platformed race’ sat exemplarily demonstrates how asianess is co-constructed on and shaped by social media platforms. this process includes two primary features: 1) facebook’s technological affordances directly influence how asianess is imagined and manifested. for instance, since facebook is blocked in some countries like china, there is little direct input from mainland china users to sat. however, chinese diaspora serve as the ‘brokers’ who curate chinese media content (especially from short video platforms like douyin and kuaishou) to sat. the ‘private group’ model sustains sat as a walled community where new membership is gatekept by existing members. this snowballing method of recruitment reinforces and exacerbates the lack of diversity/underrepresentation within sat. 2) moreover, the two-layer governance from facebook and sat administrators/moderators determine how ‘asianness’ is defined. for example, the moderation and approved memes on have to meet facebook’s community standards, and satisfy the group’s vetting and quality control. given the huge volume of submissions in queue and the anglo-centric distribution of moderators, contents that receive priority tend to reflect trends or issues deemed important by the diasporic gatekeepers. the asian media events that have attained virality and whose creators have become microcelebrity reflect mostly asian issues that have ‘made waves’ in the anglo-centric global south, such as parasite’s unprecedented win, xenophobia arising from corvid-19, and the rise of east asian pop culture in the us through korean boyband bts. conclusion from our preliminary analyses, sat’s platformed race has shaped ‘asianness’ to be a placeholder for east asians exclusively. specifically, the dominant narratives tend to focus on diasporic asianess involving some extent of geographical displacement or cultural exoticism. while many memes reflect asian ‘inside jokes’, they are also utilised to provoke socio-political discussions and surface issues on a global scale. these memes tend to situate ‘asianness’ in opposition to a presumed ‘whiteness’, initially by phenotypical homophily, and later by socio-cultural affinity. this identity gatekeeping is evident through a handful of posts from self-declared ‘white lurkers’ who admit to feeling embarrassment over their lack of asian heritage (e.g. never lived in asia) or affiliation (e.g. dating an asian partner). as we pondered if a ‘subtle white traits’ group will be allowed to exist on facebook, we posit that sat is permissible as it celebrates an ‘underdog’ or minority race/culture in a positive light. despite dabbling in stereotypes, these are self-deprecating humours and confessions intended to foster in-group relatability (ask & abidin, 2018). this is also reflected in the wider network of ‘subtle x’ facebook groups that we have surveyed, which excludes any semblance of a ‘subtle white traits’ spin-off. references ang, i. 2003, ‘together-in-difference: beyond diaspora, into hybridity.’ asian studies review, 27(2), 141-154. ask, k, and c, abidin. 2018. ‘my life is a mess: self-deprecating relatability and collective identities in the memification of student issues.’ information, communication and society, 21(6), 834-850. lejano, d. 2019. ‘‘subtle asian traits’ proves that social media can still be a fun place to be.’ asia one, 23 june. matamoros-fernández, a. 2017. ‘platformed racism: the mediation and circulation of an australian race-based controversy on twitter, facebook and youtube.’ information, communication & society, 20(6), 930-946. nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. 2018. ‘the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity.’ new media & society, 20(11), 4275-4292. selected papers of #aoir2019:  the 20​th​ annual conference of the  association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 trust in the music? automated music discovery, music recommendation systems & algorithmic culture. sophie freeman the university of melbourne after nearly three decades of piracy and declining sales, online music streaming has returned some semblance of stability and growth to the global music industry. popular music streaming service spotify reports 200 million active users and a powerful music recommendation system that curates and personalises playlists based on user data and profiles. given access to huge online collections of music, users become increasingly reliant on algorithmic recommender systems and automated discovery features to find and curate music for them. in this way, spotify’s black box recommender system becomes a powerful cultural intermediary, shaping music consumption and altering processes of music discovery. in this paper i argue that music recommendation algorithms are a complex element of contemporary digital culture. they are personalised, aim to 'know' us intimately and reflect some of our most private listening moments. ​we trust music streaming services and recommender systems like spotify to ‘set the mood’ for us, to soundtrack our private lives and activities, to recommend and discover music for us. these systems purport to ‘know’ individual users (alongside the millions of other data profiles), and as such users let them into their most intimate listening spaces and moments. spotify users fetishise and share the datafication of their own listening habits, reflected annually in spotify’s “your 2019 wrapped” and every monday in ‘discover weekly’, and in the suggested citation (apa): freeman, s. (2019, october 2-5). ​trust in the music? automated music discovery, recommendation systems and algorithmic culture​. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20​th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 1 daily offering of a “playlist made for you”. in this way users’ music taste becomes a commodity and a marketing tool, as well as a fuel for automated discovery. this paper examines the affectivities, restrictions and possibilities of music recommendation algorithms. drawing on an ongoing observational and ethnographic study of spotify users, artists, and software developers, i develop a critical framework for understanding the emerging politics of recommendation algorithms. the critiques i raise relate to the role algorithms play in: (1) the interpersonal and social relations of music discovery and listening, (2) human-software anthropomorphism, and (3) the politics of in/exclusion of content and its relation to phenomena such as curation & control, identity and tastemaking. in bringing together these critiques of algorithmic music recommendation technology, i situate this particular subset of algorithms within a number of embodied material practices relating to the computer-mediated modelling, prediction and reification of music discovery. this research, i argue contributes to work that is critically engaging with broader trajectories and emerging political issues relating to automation, machine learning and the technical mediation of human subjectivity. in order to ‘reverse-engineer’ the spotify recommender system, i consider: what people do with their playlists, how are data profiles of users created and what modes of analysis are deployed in making sense of the music found on the platform. of the approximately 20 million songs on spotify, each is acoustically analysed and annotated, by both humans and computers. semantic analysis, natural language processing and machine learning models are used to make sense of how users, and non-users on music websites, talk about and describe music. this particular hybrid filtering approach that relies on both human and computer analysis, is arguably what gives spotify it’s competitive edge over other streaming sites.these infinitesimal data points about both users & music items are arrayed to produce the affordance of "discovery". music is matched to those most likely to enjoy it, at the ‘right time’, in the ‘right context’. spotify thus automates discovery, but in doing so places a premium on accuracy over serendipity. this is emblematic of the logics of recommendation more broadly. music recommenders are sense-making machines, attempting to compute the relationship between music and listeners, and offer meaningful recommendations based on this computation. however they each represent just one way of understanding music, each platform has a different combination of human and non-human knowledge to train machine learning models and algorithmic recommender systems. music streaming services buttress computational and algorithmic logics with the subjective experience of human music knowledge and taste. but i ask, what is the difference between computational accuracy and human subjectivity? suggested citation (apa): freeman, s. (2019, october 2-5). ​trust in the music? automated music discovery, recommendation systems and algorithmic culture​. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20​th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org​. 2 http://spir.aoir.org/ identified by schedl et. al (2018) as an emerging research agenda in the field of music information retrieval (mir), this research aligns itself with the idea of a ‘​beyond-accuracy’ ​evaluation of music recsys. until recently accuracy has been the key measure of the efficacy of a recommender system, with researchers and industry alike beginning to acknowledge that other factors such as novelty, serendipity, and diversity are also desirable qualities in a music recsys. this research positions itself within this recognised research agenda, suggesting that computational accuracy is only one part of the music recommendation and discovery experience as automated by streaming platforms. as such, the central thesis proposed herein is that music recommender systems, and indeed mir research, have neglected essential parts of the phenomenological human experience of music discovery. this ongoing project aims to elucidate the user experience of music recommender systems and perhaps suggest ways that aspects such as serendipity, novelty and diversity can be better incorporated into music streaming services. as the processes of discovery and listening become further automated, and these systems purport to ease search frictions, the active input of users seeking music becomes less and less important to the functioning of the system. what are the qualitative concerns in adopting this algorithmically assisted music discovery from the point of view of content vendors and platform users respectively? how might we better understand (or re-define) ‘accuracy’ in relation to music recommendation algorithms? are trustworthy recommendations inherently good recommendations? in what way do music recommender systems bear the imprint of the developers that built them? what tacit music knowledge exists, or indeed, pre-exists the music recommender system? this research aims to make some way towards answering the broader concerns of, how can we train machines to understand human taste, and what do we gain and lose when we relinquish curatorial control to platforms, machines & recommender systems. as music recommendation systems seek to incorporate and expand their reach into the private life world of users, by providing recommendations based on context factors like mood or activity, how does this affect the privacy of users? at what point do these automated curatorial choices and algorithmic recommendations stop being predictive and start to be prescriptive? might trust in recommendations lead to passivity in music seeking behaviours? suggested citation (apa): freeman, s. (2019, october 2-5). ​trust in the music? automated music discovery, recommendation systems and algorithmic culture​. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20​th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org​. 3 http://spir.aoir.org/ references schedl, m., zamani, h., chen, c.-w., deldjoo, y., & elahi, m. (2018). current challenges and visions in music recommender systems research. ​international journal of multimedia information retrieval, 7​(2), 95-116. doi:10.1007/s13735-018-0154-2 suggested citation (apa): freeman, s. (2019, october 2-5). ​trust in the music? automated music discovery, recommendation systems and algorithmic culture​. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20​th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org​. 4 http://spir.aoir.org/ selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 jurno, a.; d’andréa, c. (2017, october 18-21). do algorithms have cosmopolitics? a discussion based on facebook's nudity policy. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. do algorithms have cosmopolitics? a discussion based on facebook's nudity policy amanda jurno communication studies graduate program, federal university of minas gerais (ufmg), brazil carlos d’andréa communication studies graduate program, federal university of minas gerais (ufmg), brazil. visiting scholar at the university of amsterdam (2017-2018) sociotechnical mediators that have an increasingly influence in digital platforms, the algorithms construct and implement regimes of power and knowledge (kitchin, 2014). although there is a strong institutional effort held by facebook and other platforms to present them as “reliable sociotechnical actors” (gillespie, 2014), frequent controversies around the agencies of the algorithms have been highlighting the importance of discussing their ethical and political implications. in this context, it seems pertinent to remember an issue and a provocation pointed by langdon winner (1986). by asking “do the artifacts have politics?”, this author calls for attention to the specific forms of power and authority incorporated by technological innovations. dialoguing with this perspective, introna (2016, p.18) points that the algorithms "more or less enact important value choices, made implicitly or explicitly, by those who build them and implement them, which may have significant implications for those that draw upon them in their daily practices". one of the most evident examples of regimes of power and normatization delegated to algorithms are the restrictions of the circulation of images that contain some trace of nudity (feminine in particular) on facebook. according to gibbs (2016), "facebook says it uses both automated systems and human reviewers before taking action," but, at community standards’ page, the platform says that "it is essential that we have policies in place that our global teams can apply uniformly and easily when reviewing content” (our highlights), which suggests at least a normatization of the process. the reason for that is because "some audiences within our global community may be sensitive to this type of content particularly because of their cultural background or age". the idea of "global community" evoked by facebook reminds us of the differentiation between cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitics presented by latour (2004). to point out the crisis of eurocentric mononaturalism, the author brings up the thoughts of eduardo viveiros de castro, anthropologist on the amerindian perspectivism. unlike westerners, for whom the body is something given, for amerindians all living beings have souls, but not necessarily bodies. to denature the body, thus, is pointed out as a way of recognizing other cosmopolitics, outweighing a cosmopolitanism that appeases differences and disputes. two cases held in 2016 allow us to discuss the cosmopolitical nuances of algorithms’ agency and the repercussions of some actors involved in the controversies triggered by censorships. the first case widespread internationally: in september 2016, facebook removed a post from the norwegian writer tom egeland which contained the photograph "the terror of war", taken by nick ut (1972). this is the famous image of a naked girl running from a napalm attack during the vietnam war. when the norwegian newspaper aftenpost republished the photo on its own page, facebook suggested that it should be pixelated, and deleted the image before the journalists could answer the notification. the reaction was published on the cover of the printed edition of the following day: an open letter written in english to mark zuckerberg, ceo of facebook. image 1: aftenpost printed edition. source: hansen (2016). calling zuckerberg the "world's most powerful editor", the editor-in-chief accuses him of "limiting freedom (...) in an authoritarian way," shaking the "mainstay of our democratic society" (hansen, 2016). the repercussion of the case involved even the norwegian prime minister, who was emphatic: "facebook had no right to edit history" (solberg, 2016). facebook then apologized and released the circulation of the image, claiming that it would learn from the error to avoid future problems (dagenborg, 2016). the second case that we highlight is the censorship of the brazilian magazine piseagrama (in english, "tread on the grass"), which defines itself as a "non-profit publication about public spaces: existing, urgent, imaginary". facebook blocked its page after posting of a cover with a photograph of an amazonian yawalapiti indian with naked breasts. the image of the indian caring a tree seedling in her hands was taken in 1958, during a reforestation campaign undertaken by the brazilian dictatorial government. by reviving this unknown photograph, the magazine emphasizes that it preserves the prophecy of “shamanic images”, because "while the indians multiply by cultivating the forest, despite the persistent and systematic plans to decimate them, the friends of the motherland knock down trees like never before in the history of this country". restricted to the brazilian followers of the page, the repercussion of the case wasn’t enough to reverse the censorship of facebook – the platform never answered to the administrators’ messages. for the editors, "it seems that the guys from the silicon valley didn’t understand that indians do not wear t-shirts and that uncovered breasts are not pornography. in fact, we have to say that there is a lot of hypocrite machismo and puritanism in this policy" (piseagrama 2, 2016). the publication was obligated to create a new page, in which it republished the image by covering the breasts of the indian. image 2: picture edited after censorship. source: piseagrama 2 (2016). the significant difference in the public repercussion and the response given by facebook to the two cases described here allows us to point out that different regimes of knowledge and power are at stake in the censorship of images with traces of nudity in this platform. the restriction of the circulation of perhaps the most famous image of the vietnam war provoked a wide international repercussion by actors who, in short, demanded from facebook to respect the values of contemporary western society, including “freedom of expression” and respect to “history”. yet the almost silent censorship of the image of the brazilian indian reinforces not only the invisibility of the indigenous cause in the country, but also an apparent inability of the algorithms and the public that respond to them to recognize noneurocentric cosmopolitics. then, it's pertinent to point out that, like western cosmopolitic culture, facebook considers the bodies as something finished, and not as a locus of disputes or something to be discovered, like the belief of the amerindian cosmology of the yawalapiti and others ethnicities. future discussions about the mononaturalism of the digital platforms and their networks publics are recommended for a better comprehension of the cosmopolitics of the algorithms. bibliography dagenborg, j. (2016, september 12). facebook says will learn from mistake over vietnam photo. retrieved february 23, 2017, from http://www.reuters.com/article/usnorway-facebook-iduskcn11i1vu gibbs, s. (2016, september 09). nudity and facebook's censors have a long history. retrieved february 23, 2017, from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/09/facebook-history-censoringnudity-automated-human-means gillespie, t. (2014). the relevance of algorithms. media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society, 167 hansen, e. (2016, september 8). dear mark zuckerberg. i shall not comply with your requirement to remove this picture. retrieved february 23, 2017, from http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kommentar/dear-mark-i-am-writing-this-to-informyou-that-i-shall-not-comply-with-your-requirement-to-remove-this-picture-604156b.html introna, l. d. (2016). algorithms, governance, and governmentality: on governing academic writing. science, technology, & human values, 41(1), 17-49 kitchin, r. (2014). thinking critically about and researching algorithms. programmable city working paper 5 latour, b. (2004) “whose cosmos, which cosmopolitics? comments on the peace terms of ulrich beck,” common knowledge 10(3): 450–62 piseagrama 2. (2016, october 21). facebook post. retrieved february 23, 2017, from https://www.facebook.com/piseagrama-2-1835251376718408/. solberg, e. (2016, september 09). facebook had no right to edit history | erna solberg. retrieved february 23, 2017, from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/09/facebook-napalmvietnamese-deleted-norway winner, l. (1980). do artifacts have politics?. daedalus, 121-136 selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): hoffmann, c. p., lutz, c., müller, s. & meckel, m. (2017, october 18-21). accidental online political engagement: the role of social media escapism in online political participation. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. accidental online political engagement: the role of social media escapism in online political particpation christian pieter hoffmann university of leipzig christoph lutz bi norwegian business school severina müller university of st.gallen miriam meckel university of st.gallen introduction the effect of online media on political participation has received substantial attention (boulianne, 2009). as soon as significant numbers of citizens started using the internet, observers began to wonder how the new medium would affect citizens’ options for engagement within the political process. optimistic observers associate a number of positive effects with online media: new media provide easy access to an unprecedented wealth of information, facilitate the association with like-minded citizens, and support the organization and coordination of interest groups (gil de zúñiga et al., 2010). social media, particularly, reduce barriers to public self-expression and could provide non-elite citizens with access to the public agenda (towner & dulio, 2011). yet scholars disagree on whether these new opportunities would mobilize previously inactive citizens (krueger, 2002) or primarily foster the political engagement of already engaged citizens (norris, 2001). in this paper, we will build on these perspectives by focusing on a phenomenon we term “accidental online political engagement”. we will introduce the concept of escapist media use to online political participation (opp) research. based on a quantitative survey of 762 german facebook users, we examine how escapist facebook use moderates the effect of various forms of facebook use on opp. thus, we will answer the following research question: does escapism impede or facilitate the effect of facebook uses on opp? escapism and opp escapism is seen as a key motivation of media use that describes a temporary escape from everyday life into the world of media. the concept suggests that mass media can fulfill individuals’ needs to distract themselves from everyday life by turning “to the dreamlike world of the mass media for substitute gratifications” (katz & foulkes, 1962, p. 379). escapism is usually conceptualized as an avoidance-oriented coping mechanism (knobloch-westerwick et al., 2009). media use can be driven by an escapist desire to withdraw from everyday life (katz & foulkes, 1962), to draw attention away from negative self-awareness (moskalenko & heine, 2003), or to regulate unsolicited emotional states (kubey, 1986). escapism has received little attention in the context of social media. yet platforms such as social networking sites (sns) provide many opportunities to engage in escapism. on sns, even users geared towards escapist motives may be lured into opp without initial intent. our research model examines the effect of three distinct facebook uses on opp: (a) consumptive facebook use, e.g. checking the newsfeed (h1), (b) participatory facebook use, e.g. liking or sharing posts (h2), and (c) productive facebook use, such as writing public posts or uploading pictures (h3). we control for an influence of political interest (h4) and internal political efficacy (h5) on opp. we then test for a moderating effect of escapism on the relationships between all three forms of facebook use and opp on facebook (h 6a-c). finally, we control for the age, gender, education, income, and political orientation of participants. figure 1 shows the research model. methods our analysis is based on an online survey of 762 german facebook users. the survey sample was provided by a certified market research institute. a gender and age composition of the sample representative of the population was ensured by defining quotas for these attributes. during march 2016, internet users in germany were invited to participate in the survey by e-mail and 1013 users responded. the participants received a small monetary incentive. after filtering for facebook profile ownership, 762 participants remained for the regression analysis. the questionnaire surveyed the participants on their facebook use, sociodemographics, escapism, political interest, knowledge, efficacy and orientation, and online and offline political participation. we used established measures with sufficient cronbach’s α for all scales and applied linear regression analysis to answer the research question. for each construct in the data set, we carried out a principal component analysis (with spss) and saved the factor scores with the “regression” command. the resulting components were then included in a linear regression model with 3 steps: model 1 includes all independent variables and control variables but not escapism and the interactions, model 2 adds escapism, and model 3 adds the interaction effects. the regressions were carried out with stata (version 14) using robust standard errors to account for heteroscedasticity. we also tested for multicollinearity and none of the vifs exceeded 5. figure 1. research model findings table 2 shows the results of the regression analysis. as seen in model 1, both political interest and political efficacy exert a positive influence on opp. consumptive facebook use has a small negative effect while productive facebook use shows the strongest influence of all variables considered. adding escapism increases the explained variance by one percent. the variable itself has a positive effect on opp. the more facebook users indicate that they use the platform for escapist purposes, the higher they score on opp. finally, adding the interaction terms increases the explained variance by one more percent. the interaction terms of consumptive and productive facebook use with escapism significantly influence opp. the interaction effect of escapism with consumptive facbeook use is negative, strengthening the already negative effect of consumptive facebook use on opp. on the other hand, escapism boosts the positive effect of productive facebook use on opp. according to these results, even sns uses geared towards distraction foster opp, especially when users engage in productive facebook uses in general. this phenomenon we term “accidental online political engagement”: users visit the sns to find distraction, but then get lured into some form of opp by the content they encounter online. facebook users geared towards consumptive uses, instead, will experience a displacement effect, with escapism further lowering their frequency of opp. model 1 model 2 model 3 gender -0.06 -0.06 -0.05 age 0.00 0.00 0.02 education 0.01 0.01 0.01 income 0.02 0.01 0.01 political interest 0.13*** 0.13*** 0.12*** political orientation -0.03 -0.04 -0.04 (internal) political efficacy 0.18*** 0.18*** 0.18*** fb consumption -0.09* -0.11* -0.10* fb participation 0.03 0.03 0.05 fb production 0.57*** 0.55*** 0.45*** escapism 0.08* 0.08* escapism * consumption -0.11* escapism * participation 0.01 escapism * production 0.19** constant -0.11 -0.12 -0.22 r2 0.41 0.42 0.43 n=762; dependent variable: opp; standardized regression coefficients are displayed; *** p < 0.001; ** p < 0.01; * p < 0.05 table 2. linear regression results. references boulianne, s. (2009). does internet use affect engagement? political communication, 26(2), 193-211. gil de zúñiga, h., veenstra, a., vraga, e., & shah, d. (2010). digital democracy. journal of information technology & politics, 7(1), 36-51. katz, e. & foulkes, d. (1962). on the use of mass media as escape. public opinion quarterly, 26, 377–388. knobloch-westerwick, s., hastall, m. r., & rossmann, m. (2009). coping or escaping? communication research, 36, 207-228. krueger, b. s. (2002). assessing the potential of internet political participation in the united states. american politics research, 30(5), 476-498. kubey, r. (1986). television use in everyday life. journal of communication, 36(3), 108–123. moskalenko, s. & heine, s. j. (2003). watching your troubles away. personality and social psychology bulletin, 29, 76-85. norris, p. (2001). digital divide. cambridge: cambridge university press. towner, t. & dulio, d. (2011). the web 2.0 election. journal of political marketing, 10(1-2), 165-188. aoir2020 spisak.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 "may the shame be with you. always." mitigating young finns' intimate exchanges online sanna spišák media studies, university of turku, finland introduction cultural anxiety about the impact of young people's intimate exchanges online has increased over the past 15 years. sexual media and 'digital intimacies' (scott et al. 2020) are routinely understood to be a source of harm and adverse outcomes (tsaliki 2016; spišák 2019). this paper engages with finland's national bureau of investigation's sextortion video campaign, the police of finland's public announcements on 'teen sexting' between 2017–2019 and young finns responses to such educational efforts by using data from rethinking young finns' practises of mediated intimate exchanges study that is a part of a more significant research project on intimacy in data-driven culture in finland. the university of turku ethics board has approved the research design and the uses of all the research datasets. 
 my research interest lies with some of the disconnections between current educational and policy discourses addressing young people's participation in digital cultures, and the lived experiences of young finns. i am interested in developing a more rights-based approach to digital intimacies, respectful of the lived experience of young people. therefore i direct my attention to the productive possibilities of the practices of digital intimacies in the everyday lives of young finns. 
 i call for a focus on the political, ethical and material implications of such educational efforts and policy responses that premises on digital abstinence to critically reflect on the question of young people's (sexual) rights in digital environments. by suggesting that we should critically address the current educational efforts that are leaning towards digital abstinence, i am not saying that cultures of mediated intimacies are devoid of problematic situations. instead, i contend that the "single story" of media determinism of digital intimacies ignores the complexity of media practices in its monolithic construction of the problem and outcome. a sole focus on harm and adverse implications of digital suggested citation (apa): spišák, s. (2020, october). "may the shame be with you. always." mitigating young people's intimate exchanges online. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. intimacies limit understanding and opportunities for a holistic take on digital platforms' relevance in young people's lives. cultural context due to an internet-intensive lifestyle, smartphone use among young finns is exceedingly ordinary, and ubiquitous connectivity is already mundane for children in their early school years. globally favoured social media platforms and digital publics, in general, facilitate active participation in digital intimacies. practises such as flirting, dating, communicating and searching for information and advice about relationships and sex, and sharing nude or semi-nude selfies have stirred intense anxiety about the wellbeing of the young among caretakers, educators, policymakers and public debaters. public discussion of young finns' engagement with digital intimacies have primarily focused on notions of risk and harm (nielsen, paasonen & spišák 2015; spišák 2019). finland's national bureau of investigation and the finnish police have been particularly vocal about young people's participation in digital intimacies. for example, in 2017, the national bureau of investigation launched a sextortion video campaign with an accompanying hashtag #sayno. the main idea of the 10-minute long video available on youtube is to "exercise self-control" and to "not uncover yourself". similarly, the police of finland has published several public announcements, warning young finns and their caretakers of the 'inherent risks' of sharing intimate selfies. theoretical context with interest in rethinking and working to dismantle deficit orientations relating to digital intimacies, i am framing my research project around questions of ethics and learning rather than risk and harm. building research around an ethical framework that involves imagining rights and responsibilities within the intimate is an effective means of redirecting the debate towards alternative approaches on digital intimacies respectful of multiple sites and forms of agency and learning. to contextualise the current policy responses to young people's participation of cultures of mediated intimacy, i draw on egan and hawke's (2010) work on the social construction of sexual "problems". to reflect on the question of young people's sexual rights in digital environments, i consider young people's social imaginary (ricoeur 1994) of sexual rights and social media practices. furthermore, i utilise albury's (2017) proposals of ethical strategies that move away from gendered pedagogies of shame concerning both individual and collective expressions of sexual rights in the digital culture. i aim to gain a 'thick' and multifaceted understanding of the phenomena. i suggest similarly to attwood et al. (2017) that we should understand practices of digital intimacies as essential and meaningful forms of digital social capital. by this, i mean that participating in cultures of digital intimacy potentially advances necessary emotional knowledge, intimacy skills and social benefits as part of lifespan development. results and conclusion by asking from a focus-group of young finns aged 15–19-years-old how they and their peers experience digital intimacy and their perceptions of the benefits, possible outcomes, mitigations and solutions, i can draw a more ethical yet a complex picture of young people's engagement with digital intimacies. young finns critical responses to 'the official messages', such as "may the shame be with you. always.", illuminate how they interpret educational and policy activities. instead of solely relying on the official messages on the potential ill impact of digital intimacies, young people innovate different strategies to safeguard themselves online while exercising their right for (sexual) self-expression. we need to consider the ways how young people contend with new digital dynamics, resulting in new tactics designed to evade or manage online visibility, privacy or surveillance (stoilova, nandagiri & livingstone 2019). additionally, i suggest that we should make defending young people's sexual rights – not just a right to protection from coercion and violence but also a right to sexual self-representation, sexual expression and a right to experience sexual pleasure – a civic duty and a collective action where young people's voices are being recognised and respected. references albury k (2017) just because it’s public doesn’t mean it’s any of your business: adults’ and children’s sexual rights in digitally mediated spaces. new media & society 19(5): 713–725. attwood f, hakim j & winch a (2017) mediated intimacies. journal of gender studies 26 (3): 249–253. egan dr & hawkes g (2010) theorizing the sexual child in modernity. london: palgrave macmillan. hasinoff a (2015) sexting panic: rethinking criminalization, privacy, and consent. university of illinois press. nielsen s, paasonen s & spišák s (2015) “pervy role-play and such”: girls’ experiences of sexual messaging online. sex education: sexuality, society and learning 15 (5): 472–485. ricoeur p (2016) imagination in discourse and in action. in robinson g & rundell jf (eds.) rethinking imagination, pp. 118-135. london: routledge. scott rh, smith c, formby e, hadley a, hallgarten l, hoyle a, marston c, mckee a and tourountsis d (2020) what and how: doing good research with young people, digital intimacies, and relationships and sex education. sex education: sexuality, society and learning. published online before print 17.3.2020. doi: 10.1080/14681811.2020.1732337. spišák s (2019) porn and norms – pornography and normative notions of gender, love and sex in the sexual narratives of finns on their adolescence experiences. turun yliopiston julkaisuja – annales universitatis turkuensis -sarja. ser b – tom. 498. humaniora. turku. stoilova m, nandagiri r & livingstone s (2019) children’s understanding of personal data and privacy online – a systematic evidence mapping, information, communication & society, doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2019.1657164 tsaliki l (2016) children and the politics of sexuality. the sexualization of children debate revisited. london: palgrave macmillan. microsoft word ir16farmansilvabueno_062815.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 the life cycle of a mobile phone: material cultures of manufacturing and consumption adriana de souza e silva north carolina state university, usa jason farman university of maryland, usa daniela de cunto bueno fiocruz, brazil the fields of mobile communication and internet studies have increasingly pushed toward an examination of the material conditions that contextualize digital media use in general, and mobile phone use specifically (de souza e silva, 2006; packer & wiley, 2013; sheller & urry, 2006). as hayles (1999) points out, the material interfaces used for communication influence the way messages are transmitted and received. different communication interfaces also have different affordances (gane & beer, 2008). for example, cell phones allow users to exchange messages while on the go, facilitating micro-coordination (ling & yttri, 2002), but smartphones with gps facilitate spatial coordination by allowing users to be location aware (gordon & de souza e silva, 2011; sutko & de souza e silva, 2011). while the affordances of different communication interfaces have been topics of scholarly exploration for a while, very few (if any) studies have investigated the material life cycle of the cell phone device itself, that is, the stages through which the devices go from manufacturing to consumption. following latour (2005), we suggest that the life cycle stages of a mobile phone are each a node in the larger network of how we understand mobile usage. in this paper, we argue that to truly understand mobile culture, researchers must understand the transnational scope of how these devices come into users’ hands in the first place and where they end up when they are sold, used, and discarded. to achieve this goal, we offer a representative case study of the life cycle of generic cell phones in the city of rio de janeiro, brazil. brazil is the fifth mobile phone market in the world in absolute numbers (itu, 2014), and therefore significant as a case study. in addition, brazil is well known for its mobile black market. cell phones are among the most stolen items in brazil, and these devices are either resold in the slums (de souza e silva, sutko, salis, & de souza e silva, 2011), or by street vendors downtown rio. re-selling and buying stolen cell phones is considered a crime according to the brazilian penal code, and therefore it is extremely difficult to get both quantitative and qualitative data suggested citation (apa): de souza e silva, a., farman, j., & de cunto bueno, d. (2015, october 21-24) the life cycle of a mobile phone: material cultures of manufacturing and consumption. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. on this topic, since very rarely subjects acknowledge participating in the offense. recently, after cloned cell phones cases decreased with the introduction of digital phones, generic phones became a big hit among lower income populations. generic or “pirate” phones are phones which are not certified by the national telecommunications agency (anatel), because they normally transmit a radio frequency that do not meet the safety standards of national cellular networks. these phones, as anatel argues (personal communication), are dangerous not only for the consumers’ health, but also to the functioning of the cellular network. however, they are increasingly sold illegally, with cloned imeis (international mobile equipment identity), and enter the country through smuggling. generic phones are also known as “xing-ling” because they are normally produced in china, at low costs and low quality, offering a cheap alternative to the lowincome population to be connected. in order to understand how these cell phones are produced, enter the country illegally, are sold (either in stores or illegally) and regulated, we conducted 15 in-depth interviews with five street vendors who sell generic cell phones, five consumers who use generic phones, and five agents of the rio de janeiro city police who represses the illegal commerce of these devices on the streets. by covering three different perspectives of cell phone use and circulation, we are able to discuss the materiality of the device itself and the materiality of the mobile network as critical actors (latour, 2005) in the construction of mobile culture in rio de janeiro. our findings are also applicable to understand other national situations similar to the brazilian case, such as south africa, chile, and argentina. each of these countries have a lower middle class, high numbers of cell phone penetration, and difficulty in regulating cell phone use. by looking at the material circulation of mobile devices in the city of rio de janeiro, we argue that a single device is the symbol of national and transnational mobility. as the network is made up of nodes such as laborers, global economic flows, andmovement of data around the world, the cell phone represents not only our communication practices, but also our material realities. the cell phone trajectory remains an unacknowledged aspect of consumer culture. building on the theories of latour (2005) and harman (2013), we argue that the “tool being” of a mobile device is one that functions through invisibility; when each stage is revealed to the next, there is a “break” in the system. this break, which echoes heidegger’s (1962) move from ready-to-hand to present-athand, shifts the visible connections that make up the global nodes in the life of a mobile device. as such, drawing on our single case study of brazilian pirate phone market as a springboard into broader explorations of transnational materialities of mobile media studies, we explores these breaks, the various modes of visibility possible, and the outcomes of such shifts in understanding in the life mobile devices. references de souza e silva, a. (2006). from cyber to hybrid: mobile technologies as interfaces of hybrid spaces. space and culture, 3, 261-278. de souza e silva, a., sutko, d. m., salis, f. a., & de souza e silva, c. (2011). mobile phone appropriation in the favelas of rio de janeiro. new media & society, 13(3), 363374. farman, j. (2012). mobile interface theory: embodied space and locative media. new york: routledge press. gane, n., & beer, d. (2008). new media: the key concepts. new york: berg. gordon, e., & de souza e silva, a. (2011). net locality: why location matters in a networked world. boston: blackwell publishers. harman, g. (2013). tool-being: heidegger and the metaphysics of objects: open court. hayles, n. k. (1999). how we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. chicago: the university of chicago press. heidegger, m. (1962). being and time. new york: harper & row. itu. (2014). the world of ict. 2014. retrieved 23 december 2014, 2014, from http://www.itu.int/en/itu-d/statistics/pages/stat/default.aspx latour, b. (2005). reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network theory. oxford: oxford university press. ling, r., & yttri, b. (2002). hyper-coordination via mobile phones in norway. in j. katz & m. aakhus (eds.), perpetual contact: mobile communication, private talk, public performance (pp. 139-169). new york: cambridge university press. packer, j., & wiley, s. (2013). communication matters: materialist approaches to media, mobility and networks: taylor & francis. sheller, m., & urry, j. (2006). mobile technologies of the city. new york: routledge. sutko, d. m., & de souza e silva, a. (2011). location aware mobile media and urban sociability. new media & society, 13(5), 807-823. http://www.itu.int/en/itu-d/statistics/pages/stat/default.aspx selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 wyatt, d. and d. leorke (2019, october 2-5). from knowledge cathedrals to networked co-creation: public libraries, trust, and the knowledge economy. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. from knowledge cathedrals to networked co-creation: public libraries, trust, and the knowledge economy danielle wyatt university of melbourne dale leorke tampere university abstract since their emergence in the mid-nineteenth century, public libraries have been trusted sites of information. as enlightenment institutions, built upon the authority of the book (billington 1998), the public trust they enjoy has been predicated on their standing as foundational institutions of the public sphere. for habermas, the public sphere is a space of ‘undistorted communication’ (audunson 2005, 434) independent from the market and the state. libraries were funded by philanthropists and governments to provide an independent space for the accumulation of knowledge. historically, they have been valued for promoting rational discourse and higher learning, and for giving citizens access to the materials they need for informed, democratic participation in society. libraries have retained this public trust even as the networked society and digital technologies have profoundly changed the status and function of information in social and economic life (sassen 2002; castells 2002). information super-abundance (mccullough 2013), ‘platform capitalism’ (srnicek 2017) and the rise of ‘big data’ (kitchin, 2014) have made information a currency within increasingly intersecting processes of commercial exchange, governance, surveillance and self-expression. libraries are not on the sidelines of this shift. as media centres and information managers, they have supported users to navigate the new ways information is distributed and accessed. they are also actively shaping how information is put-to-use, reconfiguring their service delivery around user-centred models emphasising participation and co-creation of content, user experience, pleasure, innovation, and peer-to-peer learning. 2 this paper explores the tensions at the heart of the library’s continued status as a site of public trust and source of trusted information. using a theoretically contextualised ethnographic methodology, the paper discusses how libraries perform as infrastructures of trust in the knowledge economy – a time of both opportunity and disruption. our research is premised upon social studies of science and technology approaches to digital technologies. as judy wajcman (2002) has argued, new technologies do not flow unmediated into everyday practices. social studies of science and technology, she argues, ‘provides rich resources for understanding technology as a socio-technical product, patterned by the relations of its production and use’ (360). libraries are relevant, but often overlooked institutions in wider debates around the internet and the impact of digital technologies on communication, connectivity and public discourse. they are ‘meso-level’ (mansell 2002) sites that support digital information infrastructures and embed them into social life. as a widely distributed network, accessible to all sectors of society, libraries redistribute digital capacity to excluded populations (wyatt et al 2018), as well as facilitating adaptation to and normalisation of these technologies within very different communities and professional sectors. part one of the paper contextualises the library’s altered relation to information within its physical transformation as an institution. in response to the rise of networked, digital technologies, libraries have reinvented themselves from the silent cathedrals of knowledge of the carnegie era, to more diversified, programmable spaces of noise and activity (mattern 2007; 2014). they have become entrepreneurial hubs, community centres, training facilities, innovation labs and makerspaces, hosting everything from coding workshops for children, to business startups, to community choirs and book clubs. coupling striking architectural design with attention to ambience and comfort, libraries have signaled their desire to be both engines of innovation and creative production, and hearts of community life (leorke and wyatt 2019). part two drills down into how libraries perform as infrastructures of informational trust by drawing from qualitative interviews with library professionals from australian libraries across victoria and queensland. the experiences of library managers, it professionals, architects and policymakers reveal that libraries continue to see themselves in the frame of their enlightenment inheritance as mediators of truth, knowledge and rational discourse. they see a role for themselves in educating the public in news and information literacy, and in distinguishing between authentic news and ‘fake news’. they run programs with children around cyber-safety and who to trust online. and they are spaces for informed debate, encouraging open discussion on topical or contentious issues. at the same time, these libraries are promoting very different informational values. as stephen sayers, manager of digital experience at the state library of victoria explains: ‘our current strategy, number one, is people at the heart. and i think the digital experience encapsulates that, that it’s all about what users would like to do or the experience that users would like to have with technology’ (sayers transcript 2017). with users ‘at the heart’ of their service, libraries are shifting their focus from being spaces for the storage and consumption of information, to being spaces of creation and creativity. they are investing in programs to stimulate innovation and entrepreneurial 3 activity, and seeking to connect users to networks through which they can develop their ideas and capacity, often for commercial applications. libraries continue to value and maintain their (increasingly digitized) collections. but our research reveals a change in how libraries perform as trusted institutions: from repositories conferring institutional legitimacy upon information (billington 1998), to ‘platforms’ (weinberger 2012) that legitimate the processes through which users navigate and make productive use of an expanded informational field. this shift cannot be detached from broader, neoliberal, technology-driven visions of the knowledge economy. libraries globally have embraced the underlying agendas of the knowledge economy, positioning themselves as support infrastructure to transition citizens into digitally literate, entrepreneurial agents who can compete in the precarious conditions of a globalized, post-industrial labour market. the reinvented library is a long way from being the ‘collective communal tribute to the culture of the book’ (billington 1998, 12) that made it a trusted institution for much of its history. instead, our findings reveal that libraries perform as institutions of informational trust in a variety of non-equivalent ways. they promote themselves as trusted mediators of truth and knowledge in the public sphere, while also embracing the expanded participatory and creative potential of new technologies and new media. the tensions between these roles suggests that we need to develop new thinking around what kind of trust infrastructures we need in an information-abundant, entrepreneurialist culture. references audunson, r. (2005) the public library as a meeting-place in a multicultural and digital context. journal of documentation 61(3): 429-441. billington, j. (1998). american public libraries in the information age: constant purpose in changing times. libraries & culture 33(1): 11-16. castells, m. (2002) an introduction to the information age. in gary bridge and sophie watson, eds, the blackwell city reader. oxford: blackwell publishing. kitchin, r. (2014) the data revolution. london: sage. leorke, d. and d. wyatt (2019) public libraries in the smart city. palgrave. mansell, r. (2002) from digital divides to digital entitlements in knowledge societies. current sociology 50(3): 407-426. mattern, s. (2007). the new downtown library: designing with communities. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. mattern, s. (2014, june). libraries as infrastructure. places journal. https://placesjour nal.org/article/library-as-infrastructure/. 4 mccullough, m. (2013) ambient commons: attention in the age of embodied information. mit press sassen, s. (2002) towards a sociology of information technology. current sociology. 50(3): 365-388. srnicek, n. (2017) platform capitalism. polity press. wajcman, j. (2002) addressing technological change: the challenge to social theory. current sociology 50(3): 347-363. weinberger, d. (2012) library as platform. library journal. https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailstory=by-david-weinberger wyatt, d., s. mcquire and d. butt (2018) libraries as redistributive technology: from capacity to culture in queensland’s public library network. new media and society, 20(8): 2934-2953. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): harrisson, a. marchessault, j., pedraça, s., jones, s., consalvo, m. (2020, october). the virtual census 2.0: a continued investigation on the representation of gender, race and age in videogames. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the virtual census 2.0: a continued investigation on the representation of gender, race and age in videogames annie harrisson concordia university jessie marchessault concordia university sâmia pedraça concordia university shawn suyong yi jones concordia university mia consalvo concordia university introduction in 2009, williams et al. examined the representation of characters in the united states’ 100 top-selling videogames of 2005 in “the virtual census: representation of gender, race and age in videogames”. their results highlighted the overrepresentation of characters that are white, adult and male compared to characters of other races, genders, or age groups. a decade later, we revisit key questions addressed in the original research to examine how these representations have changed over time. research questions our study revisits the following three research questions: • rq1: how frequently are different gender, race and age groups represented in games? • rq2: is there a difference between groups’ appearance in primary and secondary roles? • rq3: is there a difference in characters’ social group representation between games with different esrb ratings? while the first research question considers the overall frequency in which these social categories appear in videogames, the second and third questions address the context in which these representations take place. specifically, rq2 looks at the representation of the three social groups in the context of character playability and rq3 focuses on representation within different esrb ratings. to williams et al.’s inquiry, we added a fourth question that takes into account the intersections of the three social groups: • rq4: how does character playability relate to the intersection of demographic characteristics and game rating? this intersectional approach allows us to make visible the gaps in representation of specific groups defined by multiple identities. methods this study examines 8,135 characters observed in a sample of 100 videogames. the sample of games was drawn from the united kingdom’s 100 top-selling boxed videogames of 2017 according to ukie and gfk chart-track. this list consists of playstation 4, xbox one, and nintendo switch games, as well as a limited number of pc and nintendo 3ds titles. the list includes both games that were launched in 2017 and years prior that have consistently maintained high sales figures through online features and dlcs. following the method of the original study, mobile and/or free-to-play titles were excluded from our analysis. members of the research team played and recorded the opening cinematic scene, as well as the first 15 minutes of gameplay for each game. given the study’s focus on human representation and its impact on social groups, only the 7,043 human characters of the 8,135 total characters coded were considered for analysis. preliminary findings the following discusses each social category separately in relation to rq1, 2 and 3. the preliminary analyses show that, similarly to the 2009 study, most characters proportionally are white, male, and adult. nevertheless, the overall proportion of female characters has nearly doubled from 13% in 2005 to 22% in 2017. when examining this increase in relation to playability, however, female characters accounted for 15% of all primary roles and 13% of secondary roles in 2005, compared to 16% of primary roles and 22% of secondary roles in 2017. so, while the proportion of overall female characters nearly doubled, this increase was primarily due to non-playable secondary roles. in regards to’ esrb rating, the results show a significant increase in the presence of female characters in both teen (t) and mature (m) rated games, while there was no significant change in everyone (e) and everyone +10 (e+10) games. with respect to race, the proportion of poc characters significantly increased from 17% to 20% between the two studies. specifically, asian/pacific islanders (api) and biracial characters significantly increased while black and hispanic characters did not significantly change. for rq2, the probability of a black character being playable increased over time while the other racial groups saw no significant change; white characters still occupied a higher proportion of the secondary non-playable roles in both years. finally, there was a significant increase in biracial characters in e games, api in t games, and white in m games, while t and m games both saw a significant decrease in black and hispanic characters. looking at age, the present study found no significant change in child and elderly representation across time. however, the proportion of adult characters did significantly increase, while that of teen characters decreased. in terms of playability, the probability of an adult character being primary in 2017 increased, while all other age categories had no significant change. in general, the proportion of adult characters has increased noticeably in e and e+10 rated games from 2005 to 2017. meanwhile, the representation of elderly characters has stayed nearly the same across all categories, with the exception of e+10, which showed a slight increase. finally, rq4 concerns the intersection of gender, race, and age relative to character playability and esrb rating. biracial male and female characters have significantly higher model-predicted probabilities of being playable compared to their white counterparts. conversely, white characters of both genders generally had lower probabilities. the model showed no significant interaction between race and gender, even though the interaction coefficients are fairly large. this non-significance is possibly due to low statistical power when characters are simultaneously categorized by race and gender. correspondingly, we noticed a trend in the model predictions consistent with an intersectional effect. black female characters, who had the lowest probability of being playable across all rating categories, were much less likely than black males to be playable. conversely, api female characters consistently had a higher predicted probability than api males of being playable across esrb ratings and ages. significance of findings though discussions on “race”, “diversity” and “inclusiveness” in videogames have been raised at industry events such as the annual game developers conference (gdc), studies have shown that representations of race and ethnicity have barely shifted in recent years (waddell et. al. 2014). given the media’s influence to shape a consumer’s worldview, there is growing concern over the lack of diversity in the representation of videogame characters, which could have significant social impacts on players—for example, normalizing power imbalances and marginalizing certain groups (gerbner et al. 1994; harwood and anderson 2002). in conducting a virtual census of the human characters present in the best-selling uk games of 2017, the researchers hope to bring an awareness to the continued lack of diverse representation of videogame characters, while simultaneously underlining the positive changes and trends that are slowly emerging due to the pressure of a more diverse and socially conscious gaming community. works cited gerbner, g. et al. “growing up with television: the cultivation perspective.” media effects: advances in theory and research, edited by j. bryant and d. zillman, lawrence erlbaum associates, 1994, pp. 17–41. harwood, j. and k. anderson. “the presence and portrayal of social groups on primetime television.” communication reports, vol. 15, no. 2, 2002, pp. 81–97. williams, dmitri, et al. “the virtual census: representations of gender, race and age in video games.” new media & society, vo. 11, no. 5 2009, pp. 815-834. waddell, t. f. et al. "white man’s virtual world: a systematic content analysis of gender and race in massively multiplayer online games." journal for virtual worlds research, vol. 7, no. 2, 2014. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): john, n. (2017, october 18-21). transparency, research and facebook: the case of facebook.com/peace. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. transparency, research and facebook: the case of facebook.com/peace nicholas a. john department of communication, the hebrew university of jerusalem an important body of literature has laid out a series of critiques of the ways that social media platforms enable (or not) access to the enormous quantities of data that their users produce (e.g. bodle, 2011; bruns & burgess, 2016), and calls have been made for greater access to such data (e.g. burgess & bruns, 2015; rieder, 2016). research into political facebook unfriending, for instance, has found that data can only be attained by surveying facebook users (john & dvir-gvirsman, 2015), a state of affairs that itself is a function of the bias towards connectivity among social media and their apis (john & nissenbaum, 2016). the current paper builds on these critical approaches to social media data by examining data provided directly by facebook regarding users’ friending behaviors. as i shall show, there are multiple reasons for being skeptical as to the validity of some these data, but hard and fast proof remains perpetually out of reach. this, i argue, is an essential component of the research politics of social media platforms. the data under question are published at facebook.com/peace. the page, which is updated daily, is titled “a world of friends”, and includes the text: “facebook connects people from all over the world even in unexpected places. here’s a look at how many new friendships formed just yesterday” (see figure 1). part of peace dot, “the first technology based initiative to measure peace on the internet”,1 the page was set up in october 2009 (then at peace.facebook.com), the fruits of a partnership between facebook and the stanford persuasive technology lab. 1 https://peaceinnovation.stanford.edu/projects/peacedot/peace-facebook-com-case-study/ http://facebook.com/peace http://peace.facebook.com/ https://peaceinnovation.stanford.edu/projects/peacedot/peace-facebook-com-case-study/ figure 1: www.facebook.com/peace, 26/2/2017 the stanford peace innovation lab suggests that friending between israelis and palestinians declined during the escalation of armed conflict between israel and the gaza strip in 2012, before picking up again once a cease fire was agreed upon (figure 2). several other texts other have referred to the page in discussions of the place of social media in fostering closer ties among people in situations of conflict (examples include hasler & amichai-hamburger, 2013; kampf, 2011; lee, 2014, 2015). figure 2: https://peaceinnovation.stanford.edu/projects/peacedot/peace-facebook-com-case-study/ however, as mentioned, while potentially fascinating, closer observation of the data raises many questions. accordingly, starting on 4 august, 2016, the published data were systematically collected every day, and the wayback machine was used to gather as much data as is available from before then (68 days’ worth between october 2009 and june 2013). focusing my attention on the israel/palestine case (though the others are equally mysterious), the following are some of the reasons for treating with deep skepticism the data as published by facebook: 1. the numbers of friendings reported today are far higher than they were in 2010 in proportion to the number of israeli facebook users (see table 1), and the increase has not been gradual: see the huge leap around the beginning of 2016 in figure 3. the stanford peace innovation lab itself says it does not know “the precise reason for the drastic increase in friending numbers”.2 it does not seem likely that the page is today reporting what it was reporting when it was first launched. 2. my own survey of a representative sample of the israel’s jewish online population (n=1005) found that 93.3% of jewish israeli facebook users made no 2 https://peaceinnovation.stanford.edu/projects/peacedot/peace-facebook-com-case-study/ https://peaceinnovation.stanford.edu/projects/peacedot/peace-facebook-com-case-study/ friendships with facebook users in the palestinian territories in the last six months, and 97.6% made 5 or less. the average for the last 6 months was 2.83. a survey of palestinian citizens of israel is underway, but in order to reach the numbers published by facebook, each of them will need to have friended over 30 palestinians in the palestinian territories in the last six months. meanwhile, in january 2017 alone, the 1.7m facebook users in the palestinian territories would, on average, all have had to have friended 4.6 israelis each if, as published, around 7.9m friendships were made during the course of that month. (as a thought experiment, think about how many people you friend every month.) 3. friending between israelis and palestinians appears to follow a weekly cycle, with some days seeing statistically significantly greater numbers of friendings than others (figure 4). however, this cycle does not accord with the knowledge of social media marketing experts in israel regarding facebook use by day, whereby all days enjoy roughly equal numbers of log-ins. further data on numbers of friendings by day are not provided by facebook. 4. the numbers appear to fluctuate entirely independently of events. for instance, in october 2016, a month with several important jewish holidays, the weekly cyclicity of friending by israelis and palestinians is not affected by a series of jewish (and israeli national) holidays (see figure 5). table 1 daily average of friendships made annual extrapolation no. of israeli facebook users (internetwordstats.com) new palestinian friends per israeli facebook user per year 2010 10,813 3,946,745 3,209,040 (august 2010) 1.23 2012 20,304 7,410,960 3,693,260 (september 2012) 2.01 2016 236,303 86,250,595 4,900,000 (june 2016) 17.60 figure 3 figure 4 figure 5 at the time of writing i still do not know where the numbers come from, and over a month’s emailing to various position-holders within facebook (in the us and in israel) has yielded no answers. indeed, i do not expect answers. theoretically speaking, therefore, this research contributes to critical studies of the research politics of social media platforms, and especially those that call for greater transparency on the part of facebook and others (langlois & elmer, 2013; lomborg & bechmann, 2014) moreover, with facebook positioning itself as the key infrastructure for the development of “global community”,3 and its increased power via the growing platformization of the web (helmond, 2015), it is behoven on internet researchers to demand accountability from facebook for data it publishes, especially when those data are claimed to support facebook’s ideological position and its political agenda. 3 https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634 https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634 bodle, r. (2011). regimes of sharing: open apis, interoperability, and facebook. information, communication & society, 14(3), 320-337. bruns, a., & burgess, j. (2016). methodological innovation in precarious spaces: the case of twitter. in h. snee, c. hine, y. morey, s. roberts, & h. watson (eds.), digital methods for social science: an interdisciplinary guide to research innovation (pp. 17-33). london: palgrave macmillan. burgess, j., & bruns, a. (2015). easy data, hard data : the politics and pragmatics of twitter research after the computational turn. in g. langlois, j. redden, & g. elmer (eds.), compromised data : from social media to big data (pp. 93-111). london: bloomsbury publishing. hasler, b. s., & amichai-hamburger, y. (2013). online intergroup contact. in y. amichai-hamburger (ed.), the social net: understanding our online behavior (pp. 220-252). oxford: oxford university press. helmond, a. (2015). the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready. social media+ society, 1(2), 2056305115603080. john, n. a., & dvir-gvirsman, s. (2015). ‘i don’t like you any more’: facebook unfriending by israelis during the israel-gaza conflict of 2014. journal of communication, 65(6), 953–974. doi:10.1111/jcom.12188 john, n. a., & nissenbaum, a. (2016). unobservable unfriending: an agnotological analysis of apis. paper presented at the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. kampf, r. (2011). internet, conflict and dialogue: the israeli case. israel affairs, 17(3), 384-400. langlois, g., & elmer, g. (2013). the research politics of social media platforms. culture machine, 14, 1-17. lee, n. (2014). facebook nation : total information awareness (second edition. ed.). new york: springer. lee, n. (2015). counterterrorism and cybersecurity : total information awareness (2nd ed.). new york: springer. lomborg, s., & bechmann, a. (2014). using apis for data collection on social media. the information society, 30(4), 256-265. doi:10.1080/01972243.2014.915276 rieder, b. (2016, 27 may 2016). closing apis and the public scrutiny of very large online platforms. the politics of systems. retrieved from http://thepoliticsofsystems.net/2016/05/closing-apis-and-the-public-scrutiny-of-verylarge-online-platforms/ http://thepoliticsofsystems.net/2016/05/closing-apis-and-the-public-scrutiny-of-very-large-online-platforms/ http://thepoliticsofsystems.net/2016/05/closing-apis-and-the-public-scrutiny-of-very-large-online-platforms/ selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation: pym, t., albury, k., byron, p., mccosker, a. and race, k. (2019, october 2-5). “i still want to know they’re not terrible people”: negotiating trust, pleasure and queer ethics in lgbtq+ young people’s dating app use. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “i still want to know they’re not terrible people”: negotiating trust, pleasure and queer ethics in lgbtq+ young people’s dating app use tinonee pym swinburne university of technology kath albury swinburne university of technology paul byron swinburne university of technology anthony mccosker swinburne university of technology kane race university of sydney dating and hook-up apps constitute spaces of intense negotiation around issues of sex, identity and intimacy, in which norms are tested and reinforced. this paper examines discussions of ‘ideal app use’ which emerged in qualitative workshops conducted in 2018 with 23 lgbtq+ app-users aged 18-35 in urban and regional new south wales. when asked to describe the ways they distinguished ‘good’ (or trustworthy) profiles from ‘bad’ (untrustworthy) profiles, many participants expressed a need to perceive potential hook-ups as ’good people’, with a shared political sensibility. previous research on ethical practice and hook-up apps has considered how users’ continuous negotiation (and, crucially, their transgression) of their own ‘rules’ constitutes a “process of self-formation” (byron and albury, 2018, p. 225). in this process, users oscillate between describing app interactions as embedded in everyday life, and at other times as discrete spaces with particular functions (byron and albury, 2018). our workshops invited app users to articulate their ‘rules’ for conduct on dating apps via creative design activities. these prompted participants to create ‘how-tos’ for ideal app use, including lists of instructions for crafting a good profile and avoiding ‘red flags’. within the workshop discussions, the ideal ethical user was articulated as being clear and consistent in their dating app practices of picture-sharing, messaging and blocking as a means of demonstrating self-knowledge and responsibility for others’ emotions. however, participants observed inconsistencies between their ideal ethical standpoint and their own app use, which they explained in relation to the challenges of negotiating app affordances and prioritising their own safety and desires. in some cases, app affordances enabled strategies for connecting with users that were aligned with their politics, implicitly conferring a greater sense of trustworthiness. in their discussions, participants articulated their ‘rules’ for filtering matches in relation to particular design features and affordances which enabled (sexed and gendered) cultures of accountability to others. for example, a grindr user described blocking other users as a practical filtering measure which frees up space for more relevant matches. although he experienced anxiety when he himself was blocked, he justified his blocking of others as “a courtesy to people that have the free version… one less person taking up space”. by contrast, a female participant described how the app her demands the user select from a menu of explanations when blocking another user, making the practice less common and its significance heightened. this reflects the privileging of temporality over spatiality in the design of queer women’s dating apps, where proximity is referenced in geolocative features but is countered by a stronger emphasis on fostering connections that may emerge gradually (murray & sapnar ankerson, 2016). for non-binary and trans participants, the affordances of app profiles were viewed as crucial to providing the conditions for self-presentation and strategies for being seen safely by the right kind of users. one regional non-binary participant described shifting between gender and sexuality identities regularly on tinder to avoid contact with straight cis men. trans participants further discussed the incorporation of pronouns and gender identity in profiles which allowed them not only to identify (and potentially match with) other trans people, but also noted that those using the ‘cisgender’ label were likely to be more trans-friendly. participants often spoke about needing to feel someone is a ‘nice person’, particularly in groups featuring female, trans and non-binary users. a ‘nice person’ was synonymous with being politically aligned, and this heightened feelings of safety, or even initial desire or interest: even if it’s just for a hook-up … i don’t want to sleep with people who are actually shit people at the end of the day, or have crappy politics … i still want to know they’re not terrible people. (queer, non-binary transmasculine, regional) the concern with engaging with the ‘right kind of person’, regardless of how casual or fleeting the connection, was consistent in these groups. in tandem with this emphasis on the politics, ethics and likeability of potential matches, users across all groups articulated an expectation of consistency and clarity from themselves and others. in these instances, self-awareness and agency were presumed to be expressed through consistency of self-presentation in profile photographs and biographies, that was interpreted through a lens of ‘knowing what you’re looking for’. for example, one participant noted that: “sometimes i tend to go, you’re way too wholesome for what i’m looking for… i don’t want to fuck up your life, bye.” (queer, cisgender female, urban). in imagining the ideal app user as a self-aware subject who knows in advance what they are seeking, and crafts their profile accordingly, users seemed to be guided by an expectation of a consistent, stable alignment between in-app personae and personal politics and ethics. this was most apparent in the tension between users’ articulation of their ideal best practice, and how they reflected on their actual behaviour and interpreted that of other users. for example, one urban participant noted that despite her commitment to challenging femme-invisibility in queer communities, she tended to dismiss women whose profile pictures “seem straight”. similarly, another user reflected on his avoidance of users without photos, which he read as ‘discreet’ (i.e. closeted) profiles: i understand the ‘not out’ thing because i was in that stage (when i was growing up) in the country. it was pretty tough… but i don’t have the time to be trying to pry it out of someone… if i was in a different stage and i cared more about helping people feel comfortable about coming out, then that would be different. (gay, cisgender male, regional) here, users negotiate prioritising their own safety and desires with an emerging queer ethics. as noted in prior studies, this tension reflects the way users apprehend the app environment as both an integrated part of their ‘real life’ social worlds, and a space necessitating different expectations, boundaries and styles of interaction (byron & albury, 2018). in this paper, we explore how a reading of in-app practices such as messaging, picture-sharing and blocking through a lens of queer ethics can inform lgbtq+ young people’s ‘rules’ for app use. as in duguay’s (2017) research on queer women’s deployment of in-app affordances as ‘identity modulation’, participants interacted with other users and interpreted their profiles in relation not only to sexual desires, but also queer politics and identity. in some instances, this was expressed through a need to connect with ‘good people’ and a heightened sense of responsibility for self-knowledge and self-disclosure. at other times, participants acknowledged the challenges of negotiating politicised responsibility to others while simultaneously pursuing the kinds of pleasurable connections they sought on apps, and limiting their own self-disclosure as a means of guarding their physical and emotional safety. references byron, p & albury, k. (2018). ‘there are literally no rules when it comes to these things’: ethical practice and the use of dating/ hook-up apps. in a. s. dobson, (ed.), digital intimate publics and social media, (pp. 213-229). cham, switzerland: palgrave macmillan. duguay, s. (2017). identity modulation in networked publics: queer women's participation and representation on tinder, instagram, and vine (doctoral dissertation, queensland university of technology). murray, s & sapnar ankerson, m. (2016). lez takes time: designing lesbian contact in geosocial networking apps. critical studies in media communication, 33(1), 53-69. aoir2018-exploring rural digital landscape final exploring the rural digital landscape: libraries, equity, and scale dr. sharon strover university of texas at austin dr. alexis schrubbe university of texas at austin background to the problem public libraries in large cities across the united states have been loaning out hotspot devices as part of their regular catalog offerings for several years. chicago, minneapolis, seattle, houston and tulsa are just a few of these locations. these programs are robust and popular in urban locations, but offering similar programs in rural locations presents unique challenges. rural libraries often have small staff numbers, small budgets, and are located in places that have limited cellular service on which hotspots depend. due to budget and staff limitations of small and rural libraries, some locations do not have regular business hours (swan et al., 2013). additionally, as internet connectivity has become essential to conduct so many routine activities of daily life, its absence and unaffordability create penalties for rural populations. few rural libraries have explored the potential of cellular-based hotspots to connect patrons with the internet long after the library hours are over. the importance of hotspots in rural areas grows due to the fact that rural areas have fewer options for internet service: rural areas often face slower speeds and face gaps in wireline provider access, leaving rural residents with slow or no service. about 70% of rural libraries are the only sites with free internet in their communities (real, et al. 2014), and they provide a wide range of economically-oriented services (mehra et al., 2017). as well, rural residents pay more for commercial service than urban residents, and often the service is lower quality than service available in urban areas (ntia, 2016; fcc 2015). the populations of rural areas also tend to be both older and lower income, so affording costly internet is another challenge. research questions and methods suggested citation (apa): strover, s., schrubbe, a.. (2018, october 10-13 exploring the rural digital landscape: libraries, equity, and scale. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. drawing on theories of digital inclusion (bertot 2009; whitacre, strover and gallardo (2015; gangadharan and byrum, 2012), critical development communication, and infrastructure policy (walsham, 2012; strover, 2014), this research investigates rural hotspot lending programs in order to examine questions of scale and organizational capacity in the 21st century internet environment and how the matter of rural internet connectivity reflects on the broader framing of equity in national and state policy. important core concepts include digital literacy, public and private space, the affordances of mobile access, how digital inequalities operate in rural communities, and the institutional setting that influences rural internet. the research results bear on policy initiatives at the federal level (such as universal service) and at the state level. specific questions are: 1. how do a public institutions and spaces (the library) interact with private uses of the internet (in the home and other private spaces) as seen through the lens of rural hotspot lending programs? where do matters of scale figure organizationally and in terms of local or national policy? 2. how might library hotspot lending programs influence access gaps and digital literacy in rural areas? what are the broader institutional and personal dimensions of connectivity that frame conceptions of rural information needs, uses and gaps? 3. what types of community economic or social impacts can be linked to librarybased hotspot lending, or to libraries’ roles with internet services more generally? we examined programs sponsored by state libraries in kansas (18 rural libraries all over the state) and maine (6 in the northernmost county) that partnered with the new york public library to implement hotspot lending. the locations were homogeneous ethnically (predominantly caucasian), mainly lower income, and often beset by economic problems. for example, washington county me has the highest unemployment rate in the state and has a lower average income and higher poverty rate than other state counties (mainegeneral medical, 2016). this research uses qualitative and quantitative methods to create a comprehensive understanding of the information ecosystems present in these rural communities. individual interviews with 26 library staff, over 100 individual stakeholders and eleven in-person focus group meetings with patrons who accessed the hotspot program as well as patrons who did not access the program but were library users provide data regarding local information needs, a framework to assess rural internet access, and the hotspot program itself. findings community stakeholders, librarians, and individuals all asserted the importance of the internet, and they underscore that internet resources are significant everywhere. library users stressed that absent internet connectivity, they know they are missing out on crucial information and connections. stakeholders stressed the link between the internet and economic viability and its utility to limit out-migration. internet applications including first-responder networks and telemedicine arose in multiple locations as a foundational need for a robust community, as well as its importance for redressing the homework gap. the rural communities echo the results of the hotspot program in new york, where people who checked out the hotspots have reported that having consistent, affordable, home-based access affords them avenues to remain socially connected, find economic opportunities, save money and time, and to feel like they could remain as competitive. digital dignity, or feeling “equal to” everyone else, became a recurring theme in focus groups. users reported more confidence in their digital skills. patrons who checked out the hotspot used the hotspot as if it were a regular wireline subscription service: they communicated with family and friends, helped their children complete homework, consumed entertainment and looked for job opportunities online. however, the program implementation in the two states differed, reflecting different organizational approaches to scaling support systems. the library experiences more broadly also raised questions regarding these public institutions’ roles with and broader framing of the internet alongside the contentions and content problems it raises. where the hotspots functioned well, they were greatly appreciated. however, they were at best a band-aid in the more vexing problem of easy and affordable broadband. hotspots elicit important debates libraries’ broader institutional setting and their role in local information circulation. the matter of scale – critical to any discussion of the rural region – is addressed. conclusions and implications hotspot lending in rural libraries is shaped both by library implementation schemes and also the availability of middle-mile infrastructure supporting local connectivity. when a robust hotspot lending program exists in a small community, local efforts can make a measurable impact in the lives of rural residents. when connectivity is less robust, patrons feel left out from the benefits of connectivity. libraries represent public, trusted spaces and the internet access they offer (through hotspots, wifi, and internally) extend a public space ethos beyond the walls of the institution. a dearth of competitive options for internet service or prohibitively expensive service costs render hotspot programs a modest improvement for individuals and a gateway for additional literacy-related services from libraries. our research details the many ways that hotspots ameliorated poor internet connectivity and affected the lives of community members. the implications of hotspot lending suggest that even on a small scale, efforts to increase local connectivity have consequences for those who remain unconnected. hotspot lending is a novel way that institutions respond creatively to access gaps and reinforces other local efforts engage the internet socially, civically, and economically in rural areas. at the same time, problems with how states and the federal government think about the types and costs of connectivity currently available and the broader support structure that is required to best serve rural regions are highlighted by our findings. hotspot programs reflect on the difficulties policymakers create in their limited conceptualization of rural circumstances. references bertot, j., jaeger, p., mcclure, c., wright, c., jensen, e. (2009, november). public libraries and the internet 2008-2009: issues, implications, and challenges. first monday. retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2700/2351. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v14i11.2700. federal communications commission (2015). 2015 broadband progress report. accessed at https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/broadband-progressreports/2015-broadband-progress-report. federal communications commission (2016). 2016 broadband progress report. accessed at https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/broadband-progressreports/2016-broadband-progress-report. gangadharan, s. and byrum, g. (2012). introduction: defining and measuring meaningful broadband adoption. international journal of communication, 6, 26012608. mainegeneral medical center (2016). maine shared health needs assessment & planning process. available at http://www.maine.gov/dhhs/mecdc/phdata/shnapp/documents/county-reports/wholereports/maine%20shared%20chna%20washington%20county%20report-2-2916.pdf. mehra, b., bishop, b. w., & partee ii, r. p. (2017). small business perspectives on the role of rural libraries in economic development. library quarterly, 87(1), 17-35. https://doi.org/10.1086/689312. national telecommunications and information administration (2016). the state of the urban/rural digital divide. accessed at https://www.ntia.doc.gov/blog/2016/stateurbanrural-digital-divide. real, b., bertot, j., jaeger, p. (march 2014). rural public libraries and digital inclusion; issues and challenges. information technology and libraries, 6-24. accessed at https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v33i1.5141. strover, s. (2014). the u.s. digital divide: a call for a new philosophy. critical studies in media communication. 31 (2), 114-122. swan, d., grimes, j. owens, t. (2013). the state of small and rural libraries in the united states. institute of museum and library services. walsham, g. (2012). are we making a better world with icts? reflections on a future agenda for the is field. journal of information technology, 27 (2), 87-93. microsoft word decook-safe from "harm"-safe from "harm".docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): decook, j. r.. cotter, k., kanthawala, s. (2021, october). safe from “harm”: the governance of violence by platforms. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. safe from “harm”: the governance of violence by platforms julia r. decook loyola university chicago kelley cotter pennsylvania state university shaheen kanthawala university of alabama introduction since the early days of the covid-19 pandemic, and more recently, the january 6 u.s. capitol insurrection, a number of issues have emerged in regard to how platforms moderate and mitigate “harm” on their services. although in recent years platforms have developed more explicit policies in regard to what constitutes “hate speech” and “harmful content,” the unintended consequences and side effects about how platforms define harm and how those definitions, in turn, affect users’ normative understandings of harm are understudied. namely, it appears that platforms often use subjective judgments of harm that specifically pertains to spectacular, physical violence but harm takes on many shapes and complex forms. the politics of defining “harm,” “violence,” and “danger” within these platforms are complex and dynamic and represent entrenched histories of how control over these definitions extend to people’s perceptions of them (arendt, 1970; bourdieu, 1999). with this analysis, we suggest that platforms’ narrow definitions of harm, violence, and danger are not just insufficient, but result in these platforms engaging in ideological hegemony, imposing conceptions of not just what violence is and how it manifests, but who it impacts and by what mechanisms. through this governance, they continue to control normative notions of harm and violence, effectively managing perceptions of their actions (gillespie, 2017) and directing users’ understanding of what is “harmful” versus what is not. rather than changing the mechanisms of their design that enable harm, the platforms reconfigure intentionality and causality to try to stop users from being “harmful,” which, ironically, perpetuates harm. data collection and method we collected data in the form of public facing documentation (such as blog, policy, and help page documents) put forth by three of the major platforms (twitter, facebook, and youtube) that mentioned “harm” and its variants (e.g. violence, hate, etc.). through keyword searches we assembled a corpus of 270 documents across all three platforms. using bourdieu’s symbolic violence framework (1999) and feminist technoscience critiques of “unintended consequences,” (parvin and pollock, 2020) we conduct a critical discourse analysis of how the three platforms define and police “harm” within their digital milieu. we paid close attention to the power dynamics and asymmetries present (lazar, 2007), focusing our attention to policy documents about misinformation and hate speech to understand how the platforms are conceptualizing “harm”, and their practices to mitigate it via human and machine-driven interventions. through an iterative process of open coding the documents that mention harm, we tease out not only recurrent or similar practices but the discursive contours of defining and classifying “harmful” content and behavior. initial findings and implications there are three key findings from our initial review of platform policy documents. first, we characterize the platforms’ use of the terms “harm” and “violence'' as floating signifiers (mehlman, 1972). rather than sticking to “fixed” categories constitutive of harm or violence, the platforms seemed to use these terms as concepts that can be molded and interpreted flexibly to fit their needs at any given moment or within a specific context. as new harms emerge and public outcry reaches a tipping point, the platforms adapt their policies accordingly, as in the case of covid-19 and election misinformation in 2020 (coppins, 2020; donovan, 2020). this is apparent in the labels the platforms devise for emergent categories of harm. for example, all three platforms have in recent years begun referring to “coordinated influence operations” (youtube), “coordinated behavior” (facebook), and “coordinated inauthentic activity,” as catchalls for various harms (e.g., qanon, election interferences, etc.). while none of the three platforms offered a clear or consistent definition of harm or violence, we did see a patterned emphasis on normative notions of these concepts--namely, an emphasis on child safety, cyberbullying, and terrorism, but less meaningful enagement with other significant forms of harm and violence on their sites. second, we observed an inclination to hierarchize and quantify harm and violence, presumably to accommodate the platforms’ technical infrastructures. operationalizing harm and violence in these ways assists automated tracking, identification and moderation of such content, which helps build towards decreased reliance on and investment in human labor. for example, in a blog post, twitter described a three-tiered system (low, medium, high) to classify the severity of “coordinated harmful activity,” which emphasizes the quantity of documentation of such activity. similarly, facebook repeatedly refers to “prevalence” as a metric for gauging the magnitude of harm. for example, in a blog post, facebook explained prevalence, writing: “if a piece of hate speech is seen a million times in 10 minutes, that’s far worse than a piece seen 10 times in 30 minutes." metricizing harm and violence in these ways oversimplifies the complex ways harm manifests and differently impacts different people at different times. finally, we saw a discursive positioning of harm and violence as physical and as something that exists outside of the platforms in the “offline” or “real world.” in this sense, the platforms seemed to be defining harm and violence narrowly in terms of materiality. indeed, as mentioned, the platforms consistently referred to child sexual exploitation and/or terrorism as prototypical examples of harmful content. such an emphasis could be a means of deflecting attention from the less tangible but no less real psychological, emotional, and symbolic violence perpetrated on their sites (massanari, 2017; recuero, 2015). for instance, in a report on “harmful stereotypes,” facebook casually stated that the “direct causality” between such content on the platforms and “real world” violence is “uncertain.” such rhetoric urges the idea that “real” harm does not occur on the platforms, and, therefore, they should not be held responsible for it. our above findings suggest a reactive approach by platforms to defining and addressing harm and violence. by sticking close to normative understandings of harm, they give the appearance of attentiveness while avoiding controversy. moreover, a positioning of harm and violence in terms of quantifiability and physicality suggests a surface-level approach that underplays the impact and ignores the interrelatedness of different forms of harm and violence (physical, emotional, psychological, symbolic) and of violence and power. references arendt, h. (1970). on violence. houghton mifflin harcourt. bourdieu, p. (1999). language and symbolic power (j. thompson, ed.; g. raymond & m. adamson, trans.; reprint edition). harvard university press. coppins, m. (2020). the billion-dollar disinformation campaign to reelect the president. the atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-2020-disinformationwar/605530/ donovan, j. (2020). social-media companies must flatten the curve of misinformation. nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01107-z lazar, m. m. (2007). feminist critical discourse analysis: articulating a feminist discourse praxis. critical discourse studies, 4(2), 141–164. gillespie, t. (2017). governance of and by platforms. in j. burgess, t. poell, & a. marwick (eds.), the sage handbook of social media (pp. 254–278). massanari, a. (2017). #gamergate and the fappening: how reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. new media & society, 19(3), 329–346. mehlman, j. (1972). the" floating signifier": from lévi-strauss to lacan. yale french studies, (48), 10-37. parvin, n., & pollock, a. (2020). unintended by design: on the political uses of “unintended consequences.” engaging science, technology, and society, 6(0), 320–327. recuero, r. (2015). social media and symbolic violence. social media + society, 1(1), 1-3. microsoft word characterising_twitter_reply_chains_in_the_australian_twittersphere_(final).docx selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): moon, b. (2017, october 18-21). characterising twitter reply chains in the australian twittersphere. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. characterising twitter reply chains in the australian twittersphere brenda moon queensland university of technology introduction this research contributes to the understanding of conversation on twitter by looking at reply chain networks in the australian twittersphere. by examining all of the reply chains in november 2016 from the comprehensive trisma dataset this paper develops a description of the characteristics of reply chains in the australian twittersphere. many studies of conversation on twitter have been based on searching for specific keywords or hashtags, potentially missing important sections of the conversation (rambukkana, 2015; bruns & burgess, 2015). these keyword or hashtag based studies by their nature focus on a single topic and may not consider the conversation chains at all (bruns 2012; moon, suzor & matamoros fernández 2016). to address this considerable limitation, lorentzen and nolin (2015) proposed a method of collecting all the tweets that were replied to by the tweets collected using a keyword or hashtag using the twitter api. by using the tracking infrastructure for social media analysis (trisma) (bruns, burgess & banks et al., 2016), moon, suzor & matamoros fernández (2016) extended this technique to recursively collect both tweets replied to and in reply to the initial set of keyword tweets. trisma captures the public tweets of 4m australian accounts on a continuous basis, and allows searching both for tweets which are in reply to the seed tweets and for tweets which the seed tweets replied to. in comparison, the twitter api only supports retrieving tweets which are replied to by the seed tweet. the present paper both advances beyond the limitation to specific pre-identified topics as expressed through keywords and hashtags, and builds on the author’s previous work in developing methods to trace conversations both backwards and forwards from selected seed tweets. this results in a considerably more complete picture of twitter conversations than has been developed in the past. however, one remaining limitation of the trisma dataset is that it only includes tweets sent by the accounts identified as australian, and so conversation chains will break if there are tweets which are external to the australian twittersphere, even if they then continue inside the australian twittersphere. identifying tweets tweets involved in reply chains were first identified by selecting all the tweets from the trisma dataset that had their ‘in_reply_to_status_id’ field set, which contains the unique tweet id for the replied-to tweet. for the purpose of this paper, we limited the timeframe to tweets posted in november 2016. the reply chains are then identified by using the ‘in_reply_to_status_id’ field for each tweet to retrieve the replied-to tweet, if it is already in the replies dataset as shown in figure 1. each reply chain on twitter has an original tweet (indicated in green in figure 1) that is not a reply, i.e. it does not have the ‘in_reply_to_status_id’ field set. figure 1. reply chain with all tweets in trisma dataset figure 2. all tweets in trisma dataset – missing tweet figure 2 shows the same reply chain, but with one tweet missing on trisma (shown in red). the missing tweet means that we find two reply chains, and have no way of knowing that they are connected. tweets which are replied to and tweets which are replies that are outside of the trisma dataset (shown in figure 3 in blue and purple respectively) are excluded from this study. figure 3. tweets outside trisma dataset analysing reply chains reply chains features such as the number of tweets in the chain, duration of the conversation, the interval between tweets, branching structure, and number of participating accounts, as well as tweet content features such as links, topics, and images are examined to identify characteristics which can be used to classify the reply chains. initial results in november 2016, there are 39.4m tweets in the trisma dataset, of which 7.1m (18%) are replies with their ‘in_reply_to_status_id’ set. 6.2m unique tweet ids are listed in ‘in_reply_to_status_id’ fields during this time. of these, 1.2m (20%) are included in the november 2016 ‘in_reply_to_status_id’ dataset, and 0.9m (15%) are original australian tweets posted during november 2016. an additional 21,500 (0.4%) replied-to tweets were found in the trisma dataset but were posted before november 2016; these were added to the overall dataset. 4.1m (65%) of the tweets that australian accounts replied to during november 2016 originated from outside the trisma dataset, indicating that substantial amount of the conversation in the australian twittersphere also includes participation by non-australian accounts. i will present an analysis of these different metrics for reply chains in the australian twittersphere and evaluate their utility in categorising their different conversational patterns. this may make it possible to computationally distinguish single-authored threads, rapid and heated arguments, extended chats, multi-user responses to a single controversial tweet, and other types of conversation. this has important applications in large-scale, automated social media discourse analysis and in the computational filtering of ‘big social data’ into smaller samples for manual analysis. limitations the initial results show that 65% of the replied-to tweets are not in the trisma dataset (shown in blue in figure 3), which is limited to tweets from australian accounts. retrieving these tweets from the twitter api would allow us to check which were original tweets and which were replies, and this could be done recursively to find the older tweets in the reply chain. external tweets that are replies (shown in purple in figure 3) to the tweets in the reply chain can only be detected manually through the twitter client interface, not in the trisma dataset or using the twitter api. this study focusses on the australian twittersphere so we exclude these external tweets, even though that may reduce the lengths of some of the reply chains. because this study uses reply chains, it does not consider other forms of conversation on twitter – such as manual replies, mentions, retweets, and quoted retweets. it would be possible to extend this study to quoted retweets and button retweets as these generate metadata in fields similar to the ‘in_repy_to_status_id’ field (including ‘quoted_status_id’ and ‘retweeted_status’, the latter of which contains the full retweeted tweet), and this is an area for further work. acknowledgments this research was supported by infrastructure provided through the australian research council lief project tracking infrastructure for social media analysis, and the arc future fellowship grant understanding intermedia information flows in the australian online public sphere. references bruns, a. (2012). how long is a tweet? mapping dynamic conversation networks on twitter using gawk and gephi. information, communication & society, 15(9), 1323–1351. http://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2011.635214 bruns, a., and burgess, j. 2015. twitter hashtags from ad hoc to calculated publics. in hashtag publics: the power and politics of discursive networks, n. rambukkana, ed.new york: peter lang, 13-28 bruns, a., burgess, j., banks, j., tjondronegoro, d., dreiling, a., hartley, j., leaver, t., aly, a., highfield, t., wilken, r., rennie, e., lusher, d., allen, m., marshall, d., demetrious, k., and sadkowsky, t. (2016). trisma: tracking infrastructure for social media analysis. retrieved from http://trisma.org/ moon, b., suzor, n., matamoros-fernandez, a. (2016, october 5-8). beyond hashtags: collecting and analysing conversations on twitter. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. lorentzen, d. g., & nolin, j. (2015). approaching completeness: capturing a hashtagged twitter conversation and its follow-on conversation. social science computer review. http://doi.org/10.1177/0894439315607018 rambukkana, n. (2015). hashtag publics: the power and politics of discursive networks. peter lang publishing, incorporated. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): braybrooke, k., jordan, t., richterich, a. & wenz, k. (2017, october 18-21). when does irl matter? collocation and networked creativity in gamer, hacker, and maker publics. panel presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. when does irl matter? location and networked creativity in gamer, hacker and maker publics kat braybrooke university of sussex humanities lab tim jordan university of sussex school of media, film and music annika richterich maastricht university karin wenz maastricht university summary this panel examines how communities engaged in predominantly digital practices rely on offline and online environments for public and private interaction. we argue that understanding how these spaces are used for these forms of interaction is crucial in order to make sense of the networked practices of digitally grounded communities. through four papers, we analyse gamer, hacker, and maker communities as examples of networked actors known to rely on and create internet technologies. to what extent do these networked publics require collocation (trainer et al. 2016), physical co-presence more casually referred to as irl and direct face-to-face interaction? in the early days of gaming, lan parties were common means of getting together (jansz & martens 2005). more recently, such practices have been complemented and affected by new possibilities for online sharing such as twitch.tv. early hacker groups not only set up conferences that persisted for years (defcon began in 1993 and persists to this day) but also met regularly (coleman, 2010; kostakis, niaros & giotitsas, 2015; moilanen, 2012). in recent years hacker-, makerspaces, fab labs and other sites have arisen to bring together the spirits of hacking and making in specific, persistent locations − some of those within institutions (halverson & sheridan, 2014; richterich & wenz, 2017). while participants increasingly collocate in dedicated offline spaces to train skills and exchange knowledge, they likewise strategically continue to use online environments to demonstrate and enact their expertise (kubitschko, 2015). acknowledging the relevance of such developments, genealogical and practice-oriented approaches to internet 2 research have gained in importance (pink et al., 2015; bräuchler & postill, 2010; braybrooke & jordan, 2016). within this field, however, little attention has been paid to the motivations of actors/communities for deciding on, shifting between, and combining offline and online interaction related to private/public divides. therefore, this panel asks whether ‘networked publics’, i.e. the concept that power in a network society is exercised through the existence of networks (castells, 2011), need to take greater account of co-located activities among what are heavily ‘digitised’ groups. boyd argues that “networked publics are publics that are restructured by networked technologies. as such, they simultaneously [exist as]: (1) the space constructed through networked technologies, and (2) the imagined collective that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice” (boyd, 2010, p. 39). we will explore if restructuring in these ways through networked technologies also involves the network and its technologies being adapted to ensure collocation is fostered. the panel will do this by exploring four different yet comparable groups to offer case studies from which we can discuss how a networked public creates different kinds of public/private divides. we will examine what seem to be ‘online founded’ networked groups of hackers and gamers, both of which generate their own sense of what they make public and what they try to keep private. in contrast, we will also examine physical communities of makers who are heavily afforded by networked technologies but, unlike gamers and hackers, require on-site collocation to create their public/private divides. papers will address two questions: what are the main factors in facilitation that a community focuses on to move between online interaction and collocation (and is this a false binary)? what kinds of practices and motivations foster an interest in combining digital and physical collaboration? we will reflect on the role of institutions, corporations, internet technologies, and communities themselves in defining these choices. particularly, we will explore − through the effect of face-to-face elements across the groups we are studying − how they create not just a sense of being a networked public, but that this is complexly constructed out of a number of different public/private divides. in particular, the way collocation is integrated is different across the groups this panel studies, and these differences, point to ways that each group is constituted by a number of ways, dividing public and private. the ongoing location of a makerspace in the u.s. contrasts with a pop-up fab lab in a museum in london. the episodic collocation afforded by an annual conference contrasts with regular meetups of hackers in similar regions. these developments point to a more complex and fluid vision of networked publics in which it is important to trace multiple public/private divides and how they integrate online and offline interactions. we will finish by posing two challenges through our examination of cases and theories of networked publics. first, we will ask whether collocation or physical connection remains a structuring element in different networked publics, and why this has been underappreciated and theorised. second, grasping the roles of collocation, we will make it clear that when discussing networked publics, it is important to be explicit that this is a public/private relationship that is continually created and re-created, and that each group is constituted by not just one such divide, but several. 3 references boyd, d. (2010). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in papacharissi, z. (ed.), a networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 39−58). abingdon: routledge. bräuchler, b. & postill, j. (eds.), (2010). theorising media and practice. oxford: berghahn books. braybrooke, k. & jordan, t. (2017). genealogy, culture and technomyth: decolonizing western information technologies, from open source to the maker movement. digital culture & society 3:1, 25-46. castells, m. (2011). a network theory of power. international journal of communication, 5, 773–787. coleman, g. (2010). the hacker conference: a ritual condensation and celebration of a lifeworld. anthropological quarterly, 83(1), 47–72. halverson, e.r. & sheridan, k. (2014). the maker movement in education. harvard educational review, 84(4), 495–504. jansz, j. & martens, l. (2005). gaming at a lan event: the social context of playing video games. new media & society, 7(3), 333-355. kostakis, v & niaros, v. & giotitsas, c. (2015). production and governance in hackerspaces: a manifestation of commons-based peer production in the physical realm?. international journal of cultural studies, 18(5), 555–573. kubitschko, s. (2015). hackers’ media practices demonstrating and articulating expertise as interlocking arrangements. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 21(3): 388–402. moilanen, j. (2012). emerging hackerspaces–peer-production generation. ifip international conference on open source systems. 94–111. new york: springer. pink, s. et al. (2015). digital ethnography: principles and practice. new york: sage. richterich, a. & wenz, k. (2017). introduction: making and hacking. digital culture & society 3:1, 5-24. trainer, e.h. et al. (2016). how to hackathon: socio-technical tradeoffs in brief, intensive collocation. 2016 acm, conference on computer-supported cooperative work & social computing, 1118–1130. 4 when mailing lists ‘don’t work’: digital-material entanglements in makerand hackerspaces annika richterich maastricht university this paper explores how individuals affiliated with maker and hacker communities interact in online and offline environments. i will examine the role that digital platforms and physical spaces play for communal interactions and individuals’ creative practices. making and hacking do not merely take place in private homes. they are not necessarily solitary activities. instead, they are commonly networked through digital platforms and set in shared, communal and public, spaces. physical, communal settings have been described as increasingly important places for explorative, creative and political engagement with digital technology (davies 2017; toupin 2014). such settings are, for example, hacker and makerspaces, fablabs, and shared machine shops (kostakis, niaros, and giotitsas 2015; dickel, walter-herrmann and büching 2014; ferdinand and petschow 2014). it is likewise characteristic for these communities to rely heavily on digital platforms, for example for knowledge sharing, coordination or collaborative projects. but for what kinds of activities are online or face-toface encounters preferred in such communities, in what cases and ways are they intertwined? how are public/private boundaries drawn and negotiated, among others by choosing and combining online/offline environments? in various (online) instructions on how to create a hackerspace, the relevance of internet tools for these communities has been frequently stressed: “the first thing the founders of noisebridge did, even before we had the name, was create a google group so that anyone could communicate about getting involved. within weeks we’d registered our chosen name online; started our website, email list, and irc channel”. (altman 2012; see also london hackspace n.d.) at the same time, potential members “[…] begun meeting every tuesday night at a local café” (ibid.). the significance of physical interaction for actors involved in hacking and making has been emphasised in prior research (see e.g. moilanen 2012; coleman 2010). in various communal online environments, one often encounters suggestions that some topics should be discussed ‘irl’, stating that ‘it’s not really working’ via e.g. the mailing list. this applies for instance to decisions concerning communal governance. kubitschko moreover highlights that hackers do not solely acquire skills, communally or privately. hackers, in this case the members of the chaos computer club, also perform expertise publicly: “media-related practices – ranging from individual websites to personal blogs, from podcasts to radio shows […] – were fundamental for the hackers’ construction of and articulation of expertise.” (2015, 398) such practices indicate that hackers (and makers) deliberately choose certain public spaces for communication and interaction – and that these spaces may be physically or digitally grounded. i will analyse communities describing themselves as hackerand makerspaces alike, since these are often home to similar practices. making has been described as more 5 strongly linked to creative approaches involving diverse materials (rather than focusing mainly on information technology). yet, locally at hackerand makerspaces the equipment tends to be similar. conceptually, some hacker and makerspaces can be described as ‘communities of practices’ (hughes 2013; rohde et al. 2007; wenger 1998), characterised by situated learning, knowledge exchange and strong social ties. others are rather noncommittal and loosely based on shared interests and expertise, thus better depicted as communal ‘affinity spaces’ (gee 2005). in this regard, it will also be examined whether groups that classify as either ‘communities of practice’ or ‘affinity spaces’ differ in their use of online/offline environments. the analysis will be based on different primary sources, such as websites, wikis, forums and mailing lists. among others, i will draw on online interactions of hackerand makerspaces as well as observations and informal interviews from physical hackerspace visits (mainly in england). content will be selected based on the main criterion that it implicitly or explicitly reflects on reasons for communicating and interacting in online or offline public/private spaces. i will first examine what kind of communication/interaction typically takes place online and in what cases face-to-face meetings appear preferred. second, i will analyse what public/private boundaries are drawn: for example, if environments are meant for communal communication or aimed at reaching wider audiences. in doing so, this paper responds to the panel’s main question how actors involved in ‘heavily digitised’ communities and cultures negotiate multiple public/private divides. i argue that physical, material spaces and digital environments are selectively used as well as combined by hacker and maker communities. this does not imply that physical spaces are considered per se more private: instead, i address how online and offline alike are used to create and reach communal or broader publics. the practices set in maker-/hackerspaces are compounds of digital-material interactions, selected and intertwined depending on respective conditions, objectives and needs. individuals’ interactions indicate that certain tools and spaces are used in attempts at heightening accountability and engagement and fostering distinct public/private divides. with this analysis, i contribute to the panel’s overall aim of shedding light on entanglements between online/offline spaces and public/private negotiations in communities which heavily rely on internet technology. more generally, this also adds to an argument emphasised by some internet researchers: that online and offline activities can rarely be separated. instead, they should be considered as practices in which individuals and diverse (im)materials are entangled (pink et al. 2016; hine 2015; miller and slater 2001). 6 references altman, m. (2012). “how to create a hackerspace”. makezine, august 7. retrieved from: http://makezine.com/2012/08/07/how-to-create-a-hackerspace. coleman, g. (2010). the hacker conference: a ritual condensation and celebration of a lifeworld. anthropological quarterly, 83(1), 47–72. dickel, s., ferdinand, j. p. and petschow, u. (2014). shared machine shops as real-life laboratories. journal of peer production, 5. retrieved from: http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-5-shared-machine-shops/peer-reviewedarticles/shared-machine-shops-as-real-life-laboratories. gee, j.p. (2005). semiotic social spaces and affinity spaces. in: d. barton and k. tusting (eds.), beyond communities of practice. cup, pp. 214−232. hine, c. (2015). ethnography for the internet: embedded, embodied and everyday. bloomsbury. hughes, j. et al. (eds.) (2013). communities of practice: critical perspectives. london: routledge. kostakis, v., niaros, v. and giotitsas, c. (2015). production and governance in hackerspaces: a manifestation of commons-based peer production in the physical realm?. international journal of cultural studies, 18(5), 555–573. kubitschko, s. (2015). hackers’ media practices demonstrating and articulating expertise as interlocking arrangements. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 21(3): 388–402. london hackspace. n.d. “organisation”. retrieve from: https://london.hackspace.org.uk/organisation. miller, d. and slater, d. (2001). the internet: an ethnographic approach. bloomsbury. moilanen, j. (2012). emerging hackerspaces–peer-production generation. in: ifip international conference on open source systems (pp. 94–111). springer. pink, s. et al. (2015). digital ethnography: principles and practice. sage. rohde, m. et al. (2007). reality is our laboratory: communities of practice in applied computer science. behaviour & information technology, 26(1), 81−94. toupin, s. 2014. feminist hackerspaces: the synthesis of feminist and hacker cultures. the journal of peer production. retrieved from: http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-5-shared-machine-shops/peer-reviewedarticles/feminist-hackerspaces-the-synthesis-of-feminist-and-hacker-cultures. walter-herrmann, j. and büching, c. (eds.). (2014). fablab: of machines, makers and inventors. transcript. wenger, e. (1998). communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. cup. 7 power geometries in the museum: introducing the ‘collections makerspace’ at cultural institutions in london kat braybrooke university of sussex humanities lab “how people think about the institutions under which they live, and how they relate to the culture of their economy and society, defines whose power can be exercised and how it can be exercised." – manuel castells, a network theory of power, 2011. this paper examines the recent phenomenon of shared machine shops (smss) for digital making and learning that are opening at cultural institutions around the world. combining historiographies of hacking-as-practice and smss with empirical research and working with doreen massey’s feminist technoscience theory of space as power-geometry, ‘collections makerspaces’ are introduced as fourth-wave exemplars in a sms canon. ethnographic findings drawn from a year-long study of three such sites at tate britain, the british museum and the wellcome collection are presented, enabling the paper to explore how these sites fit within the historical tradition of smss while also remaining distinctive. in conclusion, the collections makerspace is claimed as a new field for transformative experimentation that both reinforces and reframes the museum. digital studio, innovation lab, makerspace, hackspace, fab lab, tech shop, incubator, reading room, media lab, hardware studio, maker library, design hub – the role of the shared machine shop as a space for embodied hacker and maker cultures is changing, its variations becoming as myriad as the titles used for it. what, exactly, does a shared machine shop look like today? is it an “occupied factory of peer production theory… a worker-owned production unit which often look[s] like the perfect illustration of revolutionary theory on first sight, yet on closer look exhibit[s] all its contradictions” (troxler & maxigas 2014)? has it instead become a classical sanctuary, a place for highly skilled experts and craftsmen to weld finely-detailed fabrications using complex systems (culpepper 2016)? or is it merely a free and open workshop, a public community space that provides “different tools and equipment where people can go independently to make something” (nesta 2014)? the answers, it turns out, are as varied as the questions. what many do seem to agree on is the fact that shared machine shops are evolving. there are enthusiastic visions of a digital fabrication revolution, a society transformed through peer production, a future where anyone can make anything (gershenfeld 2012; fleischmann et al 2016). there are explorations of smss becoming new centres of lab-style experimentation, places where groundbreaking sustainable innovations are fostered (dickel et al 2014, smith et al 2013). there is evidence of unexpected new collaborations as an increasing number of smss open in partnership with companies, institutions and governments, ranging from the inspiration lab, a public space for digital making installed in the vancouver public library in canada in 2015 with the support of the municipal council, to the global fab lab network which began as a collaboration between the grassroots invention group and the center for bits and atoms at the media lab of the massachusetts institute of technology in 2001 (wolf et al 2014). there are now 1,000 fab labs in 78 countries, many of them opened in partnership with local organisations, such as the shibuya fab lab in tokyo’s co-lab workspace in japan, and a fab lab at the national innovation foundation in gujarat, india 8 (fab foundation 2016, fablabs.io 2016). more recently, there is also a new generation of smss that are opening within the walls of cultural institutions as they attempt to bring in both new sources of funding and new audiences to foster novel modes of belonging for the once-excluded (oates 2015). in london, census data suggests that while visits to museums and galleries are increasing, there remains a strong causal correlation between sustained participation in ‘high’ culture and socioeconomic status (department for culture, media & sport 2016, 2017; trust for london 2015). at the same time, a blurring of once-clear boundaries between popular culture and fine art is fostering a process of general commodification which renders museums in an increasingly competitive setting “alongside shopping malls within the realms of consumption and entertainment” (prior 2005). institutions themselves are reflecting on the particular transformations brought about by digital media. in 2014, tate research collaborated with the royal college of art and london south bank university on a study entitled "modelling cultural value within new media cultures and networked participation", exposing a still-persistent false binary opposition regarding conceptions of culture being separate from the digital, a segregation rooted in historical separations of technology from art (walsh et al 2014). the tate study also found many museums continuing to employ the digital merely as a tool for traditional broadcast models of a one-to-many transmissions instead of two-way or many-to-many models of networked participation, and furthermore that the separation of policy, theory and practice restricted the birth of new cultural value models which could better recognize "contemporary socio-cultural conditions of online production and consumption of culture" (walsh et al 2014, p. 3). new museology-style revelations of this kind have meant the learning departments of institutions like the tate are increasingly being given the power to employ informal and ‘free learning’ practices, allowing for participant experiences that are "free-choice, non-sequential, self-paced and voluntary" (falk & dierking 1992, quoted in hooper-greenhill & moussouri 2000). this builds on a general orientation towards hands-on social practice artforms since the 1990s in europe, based on a shared art world aim to overturn the traditional oppression of institutional relationships between artists, audiences and objects (bishop 2012; bourriard 2002). experiments take various forms, from interventionist artworks installed in ‘white box’ style pop-ups (bishop 2006), to robot tour guides remote-controlled by publics to roam museum grounds at midnight (kennedy 2014), to a series of hands-on digital making workshops in collections makerspaces dedicated to these activities. this paper explores the status of these new generation spaces – and the experiences of the those who gather within them, ‘online’ and ‘offline’. are they merely the corporate steward-sites of technology companies, who provide funding and tools in return for product promotion in a late-capitalist experience economy (bishop 2012, pine & gilmore 1999)? or are they transforming future possibilities for the museum to become pioneers in radical, open co-creation? the aim of this research is to address such questions. the paper unfolds as follows. first, a brief historiography of smss is outlined in four temporal waves. conceptual inspiration is then drawn from massey’s understanding of the power of spatial power geometries (1993, 1994), exploring empirical data gathered from a year as researcher-in-residence at three representative sites at tate britain, the british museum and the wellcome collection, with a focus on canonical and distinctive characteristics that define each space. the paper concludes by positioning the collections makerspace as an 9 experimental field site for future transformations of the museum through peer-led cultural (re)production and co-creation. 1 0 references bishop, c 2006, antagonism and relational aesthetics, mit press, boston. bishop, c 2012, artificial hells: participatory art and the politics of spectatorship, verso, new york. bourriard, n 2002, relational aesthetics, les presses du reel, paris. castells, m, 2011, ‘a network theory of power,’ international journal of communication vol. 5, pp. 773–787. culpepper, m.l., 2016, ‘types of academic makerspaces, their import to the education mission, and the characteristics of their culture and community,’ proceedings of the 1st international symposium on academic makerspaces, mit, cambridge, pp. 1013. department for culture, media & sport 2016, use of public libraries, visits to museums and galleries, engagement in the arts, 1 february 2016, available from: gov.uk. [1 may 2016]. department for culture, media & sport 2017, statistical dataset: museums and galleries monthly visits, 1 february 2017. available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/museums-and-galleries-monthlyvisits. [1 september 2017]. dickel, s & ferdinand, j.p. & petschow, u 2014, ‘shared machine shops as real-life laboratories’, journal of peer production, vol. 5. available from: http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-5-shared-machine-shops/peerreviewedarticles/shared-machine-shops-as-real-life-laboratories/. [1 september 2017]. fablabs.io 2016, ‘labs map’, fablabs.io. available at: https://www.fablabs.io/labs. [1 september 2017]. fab foundation 2016, ‘about the fab lab network,’ fab foundation. available at: http://www.fabfoundation.org/index.php/about-fab-foundation/index.html. [1 september 2017]. falk, j & lynn d 1992, the museum experience, whalesback books: washington. foucault, m & miskowiec j 1986, ‘of other spaces,’ diacritics vol. 16, no. 1: pp. 22-27. fleischmann, k & sabine h & merritt t 2016, ‘making things in fab labs: a case study on sustainability and co-creation,’ digital creativity, pp. 1-19. hooper-greenhill, e & moussouri t 2000, researching learning in museums and galleries 1990-1999: a bibliographic review, research centre for museums and galleries, leicester. kennedy, m 2014, ‘follow that robot: the hi-tech tour guides taking over the tate britain at night,’ the guardian, 12 august. available at: http://bit.ly/1metnrh. [1 september 1 1 2017]. massey, d 1993, ‘power-geometry and a progressive sense of place,’ mapping the futures: local cultures, global change vol. 1, pp. 59-69. massey, d 1994, space, place and gender, john wiley & sons, new york. nesta 2014, ‘uk makerspaces: the data’, nesta, 22 february. available at: http://www.nesta.org.uk/uk-makerspaces-data. [1 september 2017]. oates, a.v. 2015, ‘evidence of learning in an art museum makerspace,’ m.a. thesis, university of washington. pine, j & gilmore j 1999, the experience economy, harvard business school press, boston. prior, n 2005, ‘a question of perception: bourdieu, art and the postmodern,’ journal of sociology vol. 56, no. 1, pp. 123-139. smith, a & hielscher, s & dickel, s & söderberg, j & van oost, e 2013, ‘grassroots digital fabrication and makerspaces. reconfiguring, relocating and recalbirating innovation?’ spru working paper series. available at: https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=2013-02-swps-aps-shgdf-working-paper.pdf&site=25. [1 september 2017]. troxler, p & maxigas 2014, ‘editorial note: we now have the means of production, but where is my revolution?’ journal of peer production vol. 5. available at http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-5-shared-machine-shops/editorialsection/editorial-note-we-now-have-the-means-of-production-but-where-is-myrevolution/. [1 september 2017]. trust for london 2015, ‘london poverty profile report 2015’, london poverty profile, october. available at: http://www.londonspovertyprofile.org.uk/publications. [24 may 2016]. walsh, v & pringle e & dewdney a & zouli i & griffiths h 2014, ‘cultural value: modelling cultural value within new media cultures and networked participation,’ arts and humanities research council. available at: http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk/projects?ref=ah%2fl014513%2f1. [1 september 2017] wolf, p & troxler, p & kocher, p & harboe, j & gaudenz,u 2014, ‘sharing is sparing: open knowledge sharing in fab labs,’ journal of peer production vol. 5. available at: http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-5-shared-machine-shops/peer-reviewedarticles/sharing-is-sparing-open-knowledge-sharing-in-fab-labs/ [1 september 2017]. 1 2 hacktivists in the flesh tim jordan university of sussex school of media, film and music this paper will explore the digitally mediated networked publics associated with hacktivists and will explore how offline physical copresence plays a role in creating their boundaries of public and private. it will also provide examples that establish the layers of complexity within a number of hacktivist actions and will then discuss the implications for understanding networked publics. (papacharissi 2010) the first example will be project chanology of anonymous because this marks a moment when a primarily, if not at this time wholly, online group moved offline. the street protests that followed recreated the public--private divide for anonymous bringing what had been primarily online jargon and norms into offline settings putting them into necessary conversation with others offline. the role of the ‘v’ mask will be discussed as a key element that allowed some of the prior public/private divide, which had a major role for anonymity and pseudonymity, to persist offline in a redrawn way. the ‘v’ mask allows for an assertion of anonymity in an offline environment in which anonymity may be created in highly different ways to online. (coleman 2014, olsen 2013) the second example will be the announcement of ‘back orifice’ by group cult of dead cow at def con 7 in 1999. (jordan and taylor 2004) this event will be used to explore the relationship between the related but different publics created by hackers and hacktivists and how launching hacking software at a conference by a hacktivist group demonstrates the key place for physical co--presence in a predominantly online group. the use of conferences and journals, such as 2600, within hacking will be traced to explore how even among a criminalised hacker groups such physical copresence was structured by events. the use of def con 7 to announce a hacking/hacktivist software release will be examined for the emphasis this has on publics with the simultaneous reliance on the prior generation of code and definition of the purpose of the code through online discussion and cooperation. (jordan and taylor 2004, sauter 2014). the third example will be anonymous’ operation payback which involved the ddos’ing of some major corporate sites in response to their removing of services previously used by wikileaks. this will be particularly traced through the layers of chat rooms through which the actions were organised. the more open and publicly available chat rooms, where most hacktivists discussed action and organised ddos’ing using software called the ‘low orbiting ion cannon’, will be connected to the series of secured chat rooms where use of bot nets were co--ordinated. (sauter 2014) finally, the public nature of this action and its announcements will be connected to the actions, drawing out different levels and types of copresence and the control of copresence using open or closed spaces. this example has minimal physical copresence which will allow it to also be used to compare with the other two examples to identify where physical copresence is associated with different kinds of publics. in conclusion, these examples will be compared and contrasted. they importance of some physical copresence will be examined across the three examples in relation to two different concerns. changes in the nature of the networked publics of anonymous and cult of dead cow when the group moves from primarily online networked to mixed online/offline networked public will be established. further, the multiple divisions 1 3 of public/private that make up the networked public nature of the two groups will also be explored. these multiple divisions will be seen to operate not just whether there is physical copresence or not, or in what degree there is such presence, but also in primarily online spaces (such as the different kinds of chatrooms in operation payback). 1 4 references coleman, g. (2014). hacker, hoaxer, whistleblower, spy: the many faces of anonymous. london: verso. jordan, t. & taylor, p. (2004). hacktivism and cyberwars. new york: routledge. papacharissi, z. (2010) (ed.), a networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites. new york: routledge. sauter, m. (2014). the coming swarm: ddos actions, hacktivism and civil disobedience on the internet. london: bloomsbury. 1 5 get a life? mediated collocation in gaming communities karin wenz maastricht university in massive multiplayer online roleplaying games (mmorpgs) the game space is divided in specific ways, partly dependent on the game design and its coded and formal rules, partly in gaming conventions or its informal rules (carter et al 2015). this leads to a diversity of subgroups of players within an online game. we find factions, guilds, and alliances of guilds, nations, and families. when we look at the names chosen for the different social groups within a game space we notice that the terms refer to political concepts such as nation and alliance, social groups connected by craftsmanship such as guild and intimate social groups such as family. the terms chosen for the groups seem to imply scale (a faction can consist of thousands of players, while a family usually is small scale) and a specific degree of intimacy between players. the different groups also might be involved in “server politics”, and might fight for dominance in the game environment. this leads to discussions of what is considered public and private, discussions of trust and reliability of group members (kocurec 2014). the different groups are highly dependent on internet technology for their public and private interaction. physical co-presence of players as in lan parties is rarely experienced or organized by mmorpg players. instead a wide array of internet technology is used to strengthen the bond between groups playing together. while the game characters of players share a physical space, the players often don’t. they use different communication channels to interact. these are partly provided by the game technology and partly additionally used such as voice-over software (teamspeak, ventrilo) creating a co-presence of voices. the platform discord and forums allow players to communicate cross-faction or even cross server, which is not possible in games usually. games and discord also show who is online the moment a player logs on and they therefore create a sense of co-presence in the digital space. game videos are shared on youtube or twitch.tv, a streaming platform (lowood 2011, frolunde 2013). gameplay is streamed in real time and the player streaming the content comments on the activities at the same time. streaming is interesting in those cases where the player does not only record gameplay in the game environment but also him-or herself in a picture frame sitting and playing in front of the screen. thereby the player’s face and real environment is part of the video glas 2015). those streamers go public in a way, gaming communities only did in the case of highly competitive groups of players competing in national or international tournaments. while youtube videos are usually edited before they are published and shared, the streamed content is not (smith 2013). this leads to a discussion within guilds when and what the streamer might stream and guilds develop norms what is acceptable and what is not. when streamers are connected to a voice-over software the stream can also include guild communication. for many youtube videos it is a norm already to not include written chat in those videos and even more to exclude voice communication. thereby gameplay is made public but not the discussion of strategies or jokes and comments of guild members. in some cases videos are shared first internally and only shared publically after agreement of the guild members. 1 6 voice-over software allows for recording of the communication of guild members. a sound announces when recording starts and often players who try to record discussions without asking for consent first are kicked from the channel to stop them or their rights to connect to the channel are even removed. we can clearly observe that gamers generate their own rules of what they make public and what they try to keep private. we can observe different practices dependent on the goal of the nation, guild or family and different stages they go through as described by trainer et al (2016) as forming, storming, norming, and performing. dependent on the group investigated in mmorpgs those stages appear differently. both forming and norming stages sometimes are already set either by game design or by a guild before a game is launched and members join. as guilds move from game to game players might be in different stages of the process. guilds knowing each other for years and fighting each other in different games often try to keep the “storming stage” on a server and within a faction alive as an element they consider to be fun for public interaction. in private interaction performing matters most and therefore storming and conflict between team members is avoided. those stages are also impacted by the different rules at play in games as coded and formal rules are strong and often overruling informal rules for forming, storming, norming, and performing. direct face-to-face interaction is only possible in real life meetings of gamers as e.g. during game conventions or guild meetings. real life meetings are difficult to organize as players join servers and guilds from a huge diversity of locations (e.g. asia, canada, europe, us). they do take place though. in case of one guild i investigated – and whose core members play together now for more than 15 years – a 1-week summer holiday is organized yearly. those face-to-face meetings are rare and considered private. this special community developed as a multi-gaming community over the years where the game(s) played do matter less than staying together and having fun playing online games. migration from one game to another always means that many new members want to join and therefore the group has to go through the stages of forming, storming, norming, and performing over and over again but with a core already monitoring these stages and presetting norms. this paper will discuss (1) the different private and public divides of gaming communities, (2) in which ways internet technologies play a role as structuring element for those communities and (3) in how far mediated collocation plays a central role for “the imagined collective that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice” (boyd 2010, p. 39). 1 7 references boyd, d. (2010). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in: papacharissi, z. (ed.), a networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites. new york: routledge, 39-58. carter, m., gibbs, m. & arnold, m. (2015). the demarcation problem in multiplayer games: boundary-work in eve online's esport. gamestudies 15(1). accessed at http://gamestudies.org/1501/articles/carter frolunde, l. (2013). facing the audience. in: ng, j. (ed.), understanding machinima, london: bloomsbury, 85-107. glas, r. (2015). vicarious play: engaging the viewer in let’s play videos. empedocles: european journal for the philosophy of communication, 81-86. kocurec, c. (2014). community. in: wolf, mark j.p. & perron, b. (eds). the routledge companion to video game studies. new york: routledge, 364-372. lowood, h. (2011). video capture: machinima, documentation, and the history of virtual worlds. in: lowood, h. & nitsche, m. (eds.), the machinima reader, cambridge: mit, 3-22. smith, thomas p.b., obrist, m., & wright, p. (2013). live-streaming changes the (video) game. 2013 acm, proceedings of the 11th european conference on interactive tv and video. 131-138. trainer, erik h. et al. (2016). how to hackathon: socio-technical tradeoffs in brief, intensive collocation. 2016 acm, conference on computer-supported cooperative work & social computing, 1118-1130. witkowski, e. (2014). competition and cooperation. in: wolf, mark j.p. & perron, b., the routledge companion to video game studies. new york: routledge, 158-165. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 garrison s, jacobs, n. (2020, october). life as a networked fan. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. life as a networked fan stephanie garrison university of aberdeen naomi jacobs lancaster university introduction research to understand the lives of fans has generally considered online fandom as fan community, such as communities of interest (hills, 2015), knowledge communities (jenkins, 2006) and interpretive communities (sullivan, 2019). however, the facilitative nature of modern digital social networks mean that fans are now able to engage in fandoms without having to belong to a definable singular fan community and can spread their fannish interest across a multitude of social platforms and spaces within them. some scholars have suggested that online communities and/or fandoms are fragmenting (delanty, 2018; coppa, 2014; hills, 2017; larsen and zubernis, 2012). instead, we suggest that digital technologies facilitate new types of networks which are fan-centric rather than fan community-centric, and which extend offline. incorporating decentralized practices such as lurking and fandom hopping which are less communitycentered, we propose that fans, rather than the fan communities, should be considered as the center of a network model of modern media fandom. fans as networks in this work, we build on theories of social networks defined by sociologist barry wellman (rainie & wellman, 2012) via several different case studies which the authors have carried out using ethnographic and survey methods. these include; 1) outlander fans who were selected for study as members of a particular facebook group, but who often participate simultaneously in multiple fan spaces both online and offline. different forms and levels of interaction were observed depending on the strength of their network ties within each space. this ranges from online participation with micro-fandoms to offline activities in the form of fan tourism to scotland. 2) fans of supernatural who take live-stream footage at conventions. these individuals were seen to act as a nexus point between online and offline fan groups and individuals, by co-existing in both spaces. 3) intergenerational knowledge-sharing in doctor who fans facilitated by a new space for engagement, the twitch-based live-streaming of classic episodes. the level of fan engagement was observed to be heterogeneous, with some fans viewing and not participating, some using it to facilitate offline networks and interactions, some participating in real-time online discussions, and some extending this participation into other online communities and spaces such as twitter. these examples demonstrate how individuals form networks around themselves which extend into multiple online and offline spaces, creating a multilayered personal interaction space. implications – different lives in different platforms our case studies illustrate cases where fans have personal networks which span different platforms and spaces of fan community and fan expression both online and offline. a fan may have affective ties which connect them to individual media texts, as well as to social fan milieus online or offline. these latter may be networks of social engagement (micro-fandoms) but not necessarily contiguous with the wider ‘community’ surrounding a media text itself (macro-fandoms). this concept of the networked individual can be more generally applied to life in digital society, and the multidimensional nature of our lives across the online spaces we inhabit. in addition to the idea of context collapse and multiple presentations of self (marwick and boyd 2010) we suggest that individuals may draw different value from different connections and activities within their own network. fan communities have historically congregated sequentially on different digital platforms, with identifiable ‘migrations’ occurring for a variety of reasons (dym and fiesler 2018, fiesler 2018). however, we have also seen in our case studies that fans may exist in several different micro-communities simultaneously, across multiple platforms, and may exhibit different behaviors within them. fans may move between several different micro-fandoms within a single or across multiple macro-fandoms, with different forms of interaction and behaviors depending on the nature of their network ties to each. cross-fertilization on multi-fandom platforms such as tumblr may be making it easier for individuals to discover and join new macro-fandoms, as they examine the individually curated spaces of other fans. costa (2018) provides an example of how platform architectures can be utilized differently in different cultural contexts, describing social media users in turkey who create multiple facebook accounts and rigorously constructed privacy settings to keep social groups distinct. by doing this, they are using the platform in a way that was not intended by the designers, to create their own affordances-in-practice. fan communities have a similar history of such appropriation, for example, tumblr users in fandom have developed a discourse function in the tagging system (borlai, 2018), echoing the complex tag usage on delicious which was destroyed by a design update that removed this unintended functionality (cegłowski, 2013). these affordances-in-practice, both intended and appropriational, may change how an individual behaves in each space that is part of their network. conclusion based on our research to date, we suggest that different behaviors and social norms are attached to different platforms, and arise as an ongoing constructional combination between the needs of the individual, the desires of the community, and the design of the digital spaces themselves. for example, the granular privacy settings and text-centric community structuralization available on livejournal and dreamwidth creates different opportunities for affordances than tumblr, which lacks them. costa suggests that “affordances are not intrinsic properties that can be defined outside their situated context of usage, but ongoing enactments by specific users that may vary across space and time” (costa, 2018 p. 3653). we propose that future work should interrogate how policies related to such communal digital spaces, both written and socially constructed, impact upon individual and community behavior online and offline. this has implications for the design and policy design of new platforms. references bourlai, e. e. (2018). ‘comments in tags, please!’: tagging practices on tumblr. discourse, context & media, 22, 46-56. cegłowski, m. (2013) fan is a tool-using animal. presented at the 2013 dconstruct conference brighton, uk. text available at https://idlewords.com/talks/fan_is_a_tool_using_animal.htm coppa, f. (2014). fuck yeah, fandom is beautiful. the journal of fandom studies, 2(1), 73–82. https://doi.org/10.1386/jfs.2.1.73_1 costa, e. (2018). affordances-in-practice: an ethnographic critique of social media logic and context collapse. new media & society, 20(10), 3641-3656. delanty, g. (2018). community: third edition (third edition). routledge. dym, b., & fiesler, c. (2018). generations, migrations, and the future of fandom's private spaces. transformative works and cultures, 28. fiesler, c. (2018) survey results: fan platform use over time. https://cfiesler.tumblr.com/post/171831912875/survey-results-fan-platform-use-overtime hills, m. (2015). the expertise of digital fandom as a ‘community of practice’: exploring the narrative universe of doctor who. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 21(3), 360–374. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856515579844 hills, m. (2017). from fan culture/community to the fan world: possible pathways and ways of having done fandom. palabra clave revista de comunicación, 20(4), 856–883. https://doi.org/10.5294/pacla.2017.20.4.2 jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york university press. larsen, k., & zubernis, l. (eds.). (2012). fan culture: theory practice. cambridge scholars publ. marwick, a. e., & boyd, d. (2011). i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. new media & society, 13(1), 114-133. rainie, h., & wellman, b. (2012). networked: the new social operating system. mit press. sullivan, j. l. (2019). media audiences: effects, users, institutions, and power (second edition). sage. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 rip it up and start again. piracy, remix and co-option in the media industry michelle phan simon fraser university alessandro delfanti university of toronto media workers use radical remix techniques to produce content for the mainstream media industries. be it wanna-be influencers remaking the latest viral video on tiktok, videomakers producing dozens of rip-o-matic clips that will constitute the storyboard for tv ads, or writers churning out pieces in content farms in the hope they land on a newspaper, the media industry outsources work to masses of people who use piracy and remix to produce content based on scissor reels composed from existing audio, textual and visual materials. these forms of labour amount to a renewed commodification of media piracy and remix cultures rather than a form of resistance (johns 2009; mueller 2019). these examples are also related to the endemic precarity of the media industry. among the many who produce content, only a fortunate few will ever be able to monetize their labour. in the meantime, the media industry is positioned to capture the value of this new remix culture downstream. in a sense this is nothing new: the whole history of the cultural industry is one of rip-off, from vivienne westwood turning chelsea’s street punk style into marketable fashion, to chiara ferragni cannibalizing and monetizing her followers’ ideas. yet what we are witnessing today is the institutionalization of these practices. in fact, the broader landscape in which the labour of rip-off and remix takes place is a digital creator economy fostered and controlled by platforms (kopf 2020). this is most visible in processes of “platformization” of cultural production (nieborg and poell 2018) but can be found even beyond the media industry – just think of shopify and amazon providing a platform for and profiting from third-party vendors to which manufacturing and marketing are outsourced. our analysis of the rapid pace of content production and the modes in which it is coopted into mainstream media industries is rooted in italian workerist (autonomist) theories of the production of “surplus”, that is, capital’s struggle to foster creativity while also controlling the workforce and capturing the value it generates (hardt and negri suggested citation (apa): phan, m., delfanti, a., (2021, october). rip it up and start again. piracy, remix and cooption in the media industry. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 2004). in the case of remix cultures, the speed of production is contingent on “the integration of the working class within the system”, which for early workerist mario tronti is “a vital necessity of capitalism” (tronti 1962). to fulfill this necessity, creative labour is fostered, datafied and quantified into order to be made productive. for workerists, workers do wield power in the liminal space generated by technologies, and capital must continuously adjust to the ever-changing social and economic landscape in which it operates. this generates tensions. how do you preserve the production of surplus typical of the openness of the creative process while at the same time controlling masses of workers that are not formally employed and capturing the value they generate? for instance, workers’ tacit knowledge represents an obstacle to capital’s rapid expansion, so it must be codified through forms of algorithmic commodification (cohen 2015, p. 103). here we stress two core tactics used by capital to control creative workers: intellectual property rights and a culture of entrepreneurialism. media workers who produce rip-off content, say a rip-o-matic video, do so by cutting and pasting existing content from video sharing platforms like youtube. freelance jobs for these can be found on platforms such as fiverr. the copyright that protects content does not prevent them from producing a remixed video as long as it is used internally by the major advertising agencies that commission rip-o-matics. rather, copyright modulates workers’ ability to monetize their labour: only one of the dozens of rip-o-matic videos commissioned to precarious creative workers will eventually be used as the cinematic blueprint for the final commercial, whose copyright will reside with the agency. intellectual property thus allows agencies to keep the upper hand and control the content created by the independent contractors they employ. under these conditions, the fluid relation between piracy and copyright, between legal and illegal practices, contributes to multiplying precarity in the sector. entrepreneurialism is at play too. as they spend sleepless nights cutting and pasting videos to create rip-o-matics, mostly white young male freelance media workers perform a mode of masculinity typical of the era of tech entrepreneurialism in which “subcontracting occurs at an informal rather than formal level, and the pressure workers face to constantly acquire new employment perfectly align with the neoliberal emphasis on the entrepreneurial self” (mueller 2019, p. 19). tiktok presents similar challenges. the video-sharing social network service is a widely popular platform that utilizes pastiche, satire, and replication across a series of genres. the platform’s users rely on rip-off and remix techniques to create new cultural products, but only the labour of a select few is recognized, for instance through tiktok’s newly instituted creator fund. here, the significance of rip-off labour is magnified through the competition for the accumulation of followers. tiktok creators must rely on forms of “aspirational labour” documented in the social media industry (duffy 2017), as they produce unpaid cultural content with the hope of eventual pay off through sponsorships or monetization. in the meantime, the platform has become one of the most valuable social media companies (at $250b in spring 2021). finally, remix labour is not race-neutral. for instance, the monetization of creative labour increases the gap between the highest paid influencers and the ones who are censored for posting black lives matter content (shead, 2020). in response to this backlash, tiktok introduced a black creatives incubator program (2021). the commodification of black cultural labour is not novel. historically, groups such as public enemy and run dmc popularized remix culture through the use of “sampling [that] introduced the acts of copying, cutting, and mixing to everyday culture” (de kosnik 2019, p. 156-157). the ethos of remix culture hinges on this very idea. in sum, the imperative of consistent cultural production hinges on piracy and remix as chief sources of value and wealth that “must be jealously held to secure competitive advantage.” (mueller 2019, p. 21). to understand these modes of production, we need to focus on the tactics used to codify and commodify creative labour while also devaluing the work ‘from below’ of creative workers. an old tension is at play. as an autonomous form of bottom-up reappropriation, the social practice of rip-off has subversive potential. as an activity fostered and commodified by capital, it obscures the power of precarious creative workers while securing their participation in value production within the contemporary digital media landscape. references cohen, n. (2015). from pink slips to pink slime: transforming media labour in a digital age. the communication review 18(2), pp. 98–122. de kosnik, a. (2019). why it matters that black men and queer women invented digital remix culture. jcms: journal of cinema and media studies 59(1), pp. 156-163. duffy, b. e. (2017). (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. yale university press. hardt, m. and negri, a. (2004) multitude: war and democracy in the age of empire. penguin books. johns, a. (2009). piracy: the intellectual property wars from gutenberg to gates. university of chicago press. kopf, s. (2020). “rewarding good creators”: corporate social media discourse on monetization schemes for content creators. social media + society 6(4). mueller, g. (2019). media piracy in the cultural economy: intellectual property and labour under neoliberal restructuring. routledge. nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society 20(11), pp. 4275-4292. shead, s. (2020, june 2). tiktok apologizes after being accused of censoring #blacklivesmatter posts. cnbc. tronti, m. (1962) la fabbrica e la società. quaderni rossi, 2. tiktok. (2021, january 13). introducing the tiktok for black creatives incubator program. tiktok newsroom. microsoft word aoir2019_sleep apps draft v4.docx selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 nansen, b. and o’neill, c. (2019, october 2-5). ‘smart wake up’ and ‘binaural beats’: sleep apps and the acoustic modulation of sleep-wake rhythms. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ‘smart wake up’ and ‘binaural beats’: sleep apps and the acoustic modulation of sleep-wake rhythms bjorn nansen and christopher o’neill the university of melbourne introduction sleep has become a site of daily monitoring via internet technologies, including mobile applications and wearable devices, as part of a wider normalisation of internet economies and cultural practices of self-tracking and datafication (see o’neill and nansen, 2019). this article contributes to the critical analysis of sleep tracking, mediation, and datafication by analysing features in the most popular sleep apps. a key finding of this analysis is that sleep apps extend beyond the personal tracking of sleep patterns through two novel acoustic features – ‘smart wake up’ alarms and ‘binaural beats’ frequencies. we show how these features operate to organise transitions between waking and sleeping states by directly intervening in and modulating sleep-wake rhythms. in doing so, we argue that these functions draw on histories of both sleep science and acoustic media in attempts to optimise the rhythms associated with sleeping bodies. personal sleep monitoring within the sleep industry, concern for how mobile devices disrupt sleep (crary, 2013) is supplanted by an ideology of innovation in which mobile software applications are envisaged as able to produce better sleep through sleep management functions including notifications and alerts, sleep tracking, and relaxation features designed to encourage good sleep ‘hygiene’ (fuller, 2018). williams et al (2015) highlight how personal sleep monitoring was enabled by technologies that moved outside the scientific and medical institutions of the sleep lab, and into everyday life through the development of wearable devices, mobile phones, and internet applications. their analysis is helpful for critically positioning sleep’s digitisation within wider socio-cultural shifts, however, there remains a lack of close analysis of the sleep app market. researching sleep apps we undertook a feature and case study analysis of the most popular sleep apps on the apple app store. this method was aimed at documenting the dominant features, the possibilities afforded by their functions, and the implications of app operations for managing and modulating sleep (lupton 2014). 100 apps were coded into distinct categories of sleep apps, with the two dominant categories, sleep cycle monitoring and relaxing sounds, coded through an analysis of their features, derived from app descriptions provided by the app developers in the app store. following the app feature analysis, we selected a key example from each of the dominant sleep app categories for case study analysis. the apps selected were northcube sleep cycle alarm clock and ilbsoft’s relax melodies. this analysis revealed a diverse range of functions for tracking and analysing sleep patterns, as well as features to promote relaxation and rest. in doing so, sleep apps remediate the monitoring technologies of the sleep science lab – polysomnography, actigraphy – to make claims for accuracy and efficacy. yet, the analysis also revealed how sleep apps go beyond simply monitoring sleep patterns by directly intervening in sleep-wake rhythms through two key acoustic features: the ‘smart wake up’ alarm function, and the ‘binaural beats’ sound frequency function. we argue that these features should be understood not only in terms of monitoring or customisation of one’s sleep patterns, but as forms of acoustically modulated automation and optimisation of sleep-wake rhythms. smart wake up: optimising the rhythms of sleep a novel feature emerging from the analysis of sleep cycle monitoring apps was the algorithmically determined ‘smart wake up’ function. rather than setting an exact time to wake, the smart wake up allows users to enter a time period in which the app is able to determine the optimal time of waking based on sensor data on stages of sleep. sleep cycle describe their smart wake up function as: a wake-up phase (30 minutes by default) that ends at your desired alarm time. during this phase sleep cycle will monitor signals from your body to wake you softly, when you are in the lightest possible sleep state. whilst sleep tracking features offer indirect suggestions for improving the general quality of a user’s sleep, the ‘smart wake up’ feature of these apps claims to directly produce a sense of wellbeing, with several apps promising users will ‘wake up refreshed’. the smart wake function diverges from the medical genealogy of sleep monitoring functions that remediate earlier sleep actigraphs, through a computational approach to automation and algorithmic intervention. by going beyond measurement, these apps offer a more direct modulation and optimisation of biorhythms by claiming to wake users at the optimal point within the phases of the sleep cycle. the ‘smartness’ of the app, then, indicates a shift from disciplinary to control technologies for sleep management, based upon adaptive automation of sleep-wake rhythms. binaural beats: modulating the frequency of sleep our analysis of the ‘relaxing sounds’ group of apps uncovered a novel acoustic function within customisable soundscape on popular sleep apps, ‘binaural beats’. binaural beats work by simultaneously transmitting different sound frequencies in each ear using headphones (the binaural), which the brain physiologically responds to by producing brainwave frequencies at a rate of hertz (hz) dividing the two frequency tones (the beat) (oster, 1973, p. 94; see: fig: 1). the human brain emits different frequencies in different psychological states, and it is claimed that binaural beats can deliberately produce particular frequencies in the brain – a psycho-acoustic phenomena referred to as ‘brainwave entrainment’. in sleep apps the aim is to produce lower frequency waves of brainwave activity, such as delta (approximately 1 to 4 hz) and theta (approximately 4 to 8 hz) frequencies, which are associated with relaxed, meditative, and sleeping states. figure 1: screenshot of relax melodies binaural beats function such sleep acoustics can be traced through a trajectory of media theorisation that differs from dominant critical theories of datafication and self-tracking (e.g. lupton, 2017). instead they demonstrate the continued cultural significance of environmental media, and in this case ‘audible’ technologies, for materially shaping our perception of spaces in everyday life (see sterne, 2003). histories of perceptible media, however, take on new resonances in the contexts of sleep apps and binaural beats for modulating neural-electrical activity. extending a murky lineage of psychoacoustic attempts to induce states of affect or consciousness, ranging from alternative therapies to the sonic disciplining of spaces of work or leisure, popularised by the muzak corporation (laliberty, 2017), we can see binaural beats as operating within a more intensive perceptual terrain in aiming to modulate brainwave frequencies to induce sleep. as with the smart wake up function, there is again a delegation of the work involved in entraining the body towards a given state of somnolence. however, binaural beats more directly intervene into the physiological interior of corporeal optimisation. and in this dream of delegation and automation, we can observe a shift in the register of mobile sleep app affordances. there is a shift from the burden of self-management via datafication and tracking to a more passive mode of neurological modulation that organises the self in a cybernetically oscillating operation of transmission-reception, signal-noise, on-off. references crary, j. (2013) 24/7: late capitalism and the ends of sleep. london: verso. fuller, m. (2018) how to sleep: the art, biology and culture of unconsciousness. london and new york: bloomsbury. laliberty, r. (2017) audio acid: design and the psychoacoustic trip. journal of sonic studies 14, at https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/291802/291803/0/0. lupton, d. (2014) apps as artefacts: towards a critical perspective on mobile health and medical apps. societies 4: 606-622. lupton, d. (2017) feeling your data: touch and making sense of personal data. new media & society 19(10): 1599-1614. northcube. (2017) how does it work? sleepcycle.com available at https://www.sleepcycle.com/how-it-works/. accessed 1 september 2017. o’neill, c. and nansen, b. (2019) sleep mode: mobile apps and the optimisation of sleep-wake rhythms. first monday 24(6): https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/9574/8045. oster, g. (1973) auditory beats in the brain. scientific american 229(4): 94-103. sterne, j. (2003) the audible past: cultural origins of sound reproduction. duke university press. williams, s. coveney, c. and meadows, r. (2015) ‘m-apping’ sleep? trends and transformations in the digital age. sociology of health and illness. 37(7): 1039-1054. microsoft word aziz-a repertoire of everyday resistance and technological-a repertoire of everyday resistance and.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): aziz, a. (2021, october). a repertoire of everyday resistance and technological (in)security: constructing the rohingya diaspora and transnational identity politics on social media. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. a repertoire of everyday resistance and technological (in)security: constructing the rohingya diaspora and transnational identity politics on social media abdul aziz digital media research centre, queensland university of technology, australia extended abstract digital technologies have allowed migrants and diaspora to ascertain and revive their ‘diasporic imaginaries’ (georgiou, 2006, 2019) and led to the rise of emerging digital diasporic networks on transnational spaces (levitt & schiller 2004). as illustrated by anderson’s (2006) concept of “imagined communities” and hall’s (1990) insights into diaspora and cultural identity formation, examining diasporic and transnational networks have been critical in developing media and communication studies (ponzanesi, 2020). additionally, appadurai’s (1996) term of “scapes” has been useful to understand transnational identities and how cultural transformation is intertwined with changing digital communication landscapes. this research examines how social media is used to negotiate identity politics, as well as how online narratives contribute to rohingya transnational identity. the rohingya, known as the ‘most persecuted minority in the world’, is an ethnic minority group of myanmar who has been forcefully made stateless through constant and ongoing systemic and institutionalised persecution by the burmese government. in this context, transnational networks of rohingya diaspora groups have campaigned to recognise their sufferings and citizenship rights in global advocacy forums (e.g., bernal, 2014, brinkerhoff, 2009) using social media during and after ‘genocide’ in rakhine state in 2017. yet, the use of such technologies like social media also poses security threats. this paper mainly draws on literature of digital media and internet studies within forced migration, transnationalism and diaspora contexts. in digital migration studies (leurs & smets, 2018), research has made significant strides in understanding refugees’ media practices during the migration, transnational family ties, settlement in a host society (e.g., alencar, kondova, & ribbens, 2019; kaufmann, 2018; robertson, wilding, & gifford, 2016). however, little attention has been paid to more nuanced understanding everyday (digital) resistance and identity negotiation through social media practice in the context of conflict and forced migration. additionally, very few studies (abraham & jaehn, 2019; al-rawi, 2019) show digital media use of the rohingya community, and no study, to date, highlights how they negotiate their identity in a way that articulates their transnational engagement for justice and citizenship rights. to situate the conceptualisation of everyday digital media practices in diasporic settings, i use scott’s (1985) concept of “everyday forms of resistance” with a combination of goffman’s (1959) work on self-representation. the question of identity politics and resistance is explored more precisely through the lens of power structures as foucault argued “where there is power, there is resistance” (1978 , 95–96). this study follows the idea of multi-sited approach (marcus, 1995) to acknowledge the ‘methodological transnationalism’ (amelina & faist, 2012) paradigm in migration studies, to go beyond nation state as a unite of analysis. in doing so, this study draws on a qualitative approach of semi-structured interviews (kvale & brinkmann, 2009) and social media scroll back interviews (robards & lincoln, 2019) methods to investigate the use of technologies in their everyday experiences of prolonged displacement in the cox’s bazar refugee camp, bangladesh and among resettled refugees in brisbane, australia, both distinct but interconnected within a power structure. face to face interviews (n=20) were conducted in brisbane, while mobile/online interviews (n=10) were followed to collect data from the cox’s bazar refugee camp. the findings offer some new insights into the lived experience with technology and how participants negotiate using social media to form a community while also enables us to shed light on a larger context dealing with issues of surveillance and insecurity. although most participants see technologies have been a lifeline for their survival, some participants from the cox’s bazar refugee camps show that surveillance has also been key concern in everyday life, thus how they negotiate their identity to avoid harassment and intimidation in the camps. the findings shows that repertoires of resistance are “situated in a certain time, space, and it engages with different (types of) actors, techniques” and power relations (johansson & vinthagen, 2016, p 418). primarily, identity politics are negotiated on social media through (1) cultural resistance (e.g., traditional song, food event; (2) mediated visibility as a politics (e.g., photography practice, hashtag), and (3) information resistance (e.g., diasporic media). such techniques of resistance can be regarded as ‘repressive and productive’ (foucault 1978) as well as the politics of ‘confrontation and recognition’ (abraham & jaehn, 2019). this paper shows how social media play a dual role of opportunities and risks simultaneously enabling both resistance and fear in everyday use through the presences, assemblages and absences of technologies. this paper argues that social media offer a niche of a repertoire of resistance and the rise of a new form of engagement as a transnational space in a context of surveillance and statelessness. overall, by focusing on both urban and refugee camp settings, this paper responds to calls for more research into power inequalities and transnational diaspora activism, authoritarian politics, specifically its mediation by digital technologies. references abraham, i., & jaehn, m. (2019). immanent nation: the rohingya quest for international recognition. nations and nationalism. al-rawi, a. (2019). twitter influentials and the networked publics’ engagement with the rohingya crisis in arabic and english. the sage handbook of media and migration, 192. alencar, a., kondova, k., & ribbens, w. (2019). the smartphone as a lifeline: an exploration of refugees’ use of mobile communication technologies during their flight. media, culture & society, 41(6), 828-844. amelina, a., & faist, t. (2012). de-naturalizing the national in research methodologies: key concepts of transnational studies in migration. ethnic and racial studies, 35(10), 17071724. anderson, b. (2006). imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (revised ed.): verso books. appadurai, a. (1996). modernity al large: cultural dimensions of globalization (vol. 1): u of minnesota press. bernal, v. (2014). nation as network: diaspora, cyberspace, and citizenship: university of chicago press. brinkerhoff, j. m. (2009). digital diasporas: identity and transnational engagement: cambridge university press. cohen, r. (2008). global diasporas: an introduction (second ed.): routledge. foucault, m. (1978). the history of sexuality: an introduction (vol. 1). new york: random house. georgiou, m. (2006). diaspora, identity and the media: diasporic transnationalism and mediated spatialities. cresskill, n.j., united states.: hampton press. georgiou, m. (2019). diaspora and the plurality of its cosmopolitan imaginaries. in j. retis, & tsagarousianou, r. (ed.), the handbook of diasporas, media, culture (pp. 63-76): john wiley & sons, incorporated. goffman, e. (1959). the presentation of self in everyday life. garden city, ny: doubleday. hall, s. (1990). cultural identity and diaspora in j. rutherford (ed.), identity: community, culture, difference (pp. 222–239). london: lawrence and wishart johansson, a., & vinthagen, s. (2016). dimensions of everyday resistance: an analytical framework. critical sociology, 42(3), 417-435. kaufmann, k. (2018). navigating a new life: syrian refugees and their smartphones in vienna. information, communication society, 21(6), 882-898. kvale, s., & brinkmann, s. (2009). interviews: learning the craft of qualitative research interviewing: sage. leurs, k., & smets, k. (2018). five questions for digital migration studies: learning from digital connectivity and forced migration in (to) europe. social media+ society, 4(1), 2056305118764425. marcus, g. e. (1995). ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography. annual review of anthropology, 24(1), 95-117. ponzanesi, s. (2020). digital diasporas: postcoloniality, media and affect. interventions, 1-17. robards, b., & lincoln, s. (2019). social media scroll back method. in sage research methods: sage publications ltd. robertson, z., wilding, r., & gifford, s. (2016). mediating the family imaginary: young people negotiating absence in transnational refugee families. global networks, 16(2), 219-236. scott, j. c. (1985). weapons of the weak. new haven, ct: yale university press. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): demirkol tønnesen, o. (2020, october). “two can play at that game”: communicating dissent as a micro-celebrity in a restricted national twittersphere. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “two can play at that game”: communicating dissent as a micro-celebrity in a restricted national twittersphere ozlem demirkol tønnesen university of southampton background turkey has a notoriously restricted online sphere where sharing any anti-government content can have serious repercussions such as imprisonment (saka, 2018). yet for those who oppose the government, twitter still remains the primary space for antigovernment political discourse and mobilisation. especially during political events such as elections, visibility of these narratives on twitter becomes a top priority in order to mitigate the erasure of anti-government viewpoints from the mass media. however, the criminalisation of online dissent creates a tension between this desire for visibility and the need for self-preservation. in this context, a lot of responsibility falls on those accounts who are the most visible on twitter, while also being more exposed to the surveillance mechanisms. this research explores the expressive political participation by high-visibility twitter users (micro-celebrities) in an effort to reveal the tactics they use in mitigating these tensions. amidst a surge of academic studies on micro-celebrity and influencers on social media in recent years (see. abidin and brown, 2018), twitter micro-celebrity remains an under-researched phenomenon. studies that look at micro-celebrity on twitter often focus on public figures and traditional celebrities (giles ,2016; bennet and thomas, 2014; marwick and boyd, 2011) or micro-celebrities that offer a form of expertise such as medical doctors (chandawarkar et al., 2018). this trend persists in the research on micro-celebrities’ political expressions where the focus is mainly on the activist accounts and the “usual political suspects” (wright et al., 2012) such as journalists and politicians. however, these actors reveal very little about the pressures of censorship that the ordinary citizens experience as their reflections on politics are often presented from a professional or issue-specific standpoint. in order to capture the everydayness of political talk, i focus on a genre of microcelebrity that gained popularity among anti-government users primarily through their witty, relatable and humorous depictions of everyday life under the akp government. these once ordinary users gained popularity specifically during 2013 gezi park protests when they were sharing witticisms, narrating the events and disseminating key information about the protests. to this day, their on-point observations and clever narration of everyday events under akp provides comic relief to those who hold similar views. over time, these accounts claimed a significant command of the vernacular twitter culture and their tweets became a regular source of inspiration for many memetic expressions that others use when talking about similar topics including politics. thus, as accounts that openly oppose the government, the ways they mitigate the dangers of visibility on twitter can have significant implications for the language that is used in this discourse. methods as these accounts engage in anti-government political talk on an as and when basis, i wanted to capture a time period when political events and news are frequent. an opportunity has arisen as the government announced early elections in april 2018 and set the election date only 3 months in the future, which generated a lot of debate. thus, i have set the data collection period as the 3-months leading up to the 2018 presidential elections. i have created a private twitter list of 97 micro-celebrity accounts that i have gathered through purposive sampling. during the campaign period, i have closely followed this list, gathered common memes, took screenshots and compiled a list of prominent events that were widely discussed. i have also scraped the tweets daily through web data research assistant tool. employing an interpretive content analysis was necessary as in a majority of these tweets critical content was presented inexplicitly. i have first decided which tweets were elections-related and assigned codes according to their purpose (criticism, support, call to action etc.). then used a second set of codes to document the evasion tactics and implied accusations in critical tweets. findings and discussion findings show that on turkish twitter, micro-celebrities’ political talk relies on platformspecific cultural capital in formulating a language that is understood by subgroups who are acclimated to the platform culture. i argue that the primary aim here is to produce content that cannot be decoded by pro-government accounts who are responsible from much of the surveillance on turkish twitter. in this sense, the weaponisation of the platform culture supports the previous arguments on the perceived gap in cultural capital between proand anti-government groups (irak, 2018). this gap can be linked to the government framing of twitter as a source of evil and not being on twitter as good citizenship. on twitter, the platform culture is built on creative strategies such as play and humour to overcome expressive restrictions imposed by the platform (papacharissi, 2012). my findings show that these characteristics of the platform become tools to achieve temporary reversals of power (scott, 1990) when the oppressors lack the necessary knowledge to decode such content which became second nature to regular users. for instance, appropriation of the vernacular twitter language and the western popular culture which includes drawing subtle comparisons between movie villains and the president, references to early internet phenomena, captioning viral videos with implied political messages etc. has become the cornerstone of this powerplay between those who hold the cultural knowledge and those who hold the political power. i argue that, in this restricted environment, the forced confinement of dissent in the online platforms and the need for visibility have given those who can command both the attention and the platform culture the power to shape the political discourse. adoption of this playful language and “tactical frivolity” (kingsmith, 2016) on social media and beyond (see. recent campaigns of opposition parties) shows that platform-specific literacies are becoming essential for those who want to be heard and also be safe when expressing political grievances. this inevitably creates a generational and socioeconomic divide by giving the agency to those who are “in on” these online conventions. therefore, the ways micro-celebrities mitigate expressive restrictions need further attention as, especially in repressive settings, the platform-specific literacies they share with their audience have power to define who gets left out of these discourses. references abidin, c. and brown, m.l. eds., 2018. microcelebrity around the globe: approaches to cultures of internet fame. emerald group publishing. bennett, j. and thomas, s., 2014. tweet celebrity: forum: tweet celebrity. celebrity studies, 5(4), pp.501-503. chandawarkar, a.a., gould, d.j. and stevens, w.g., 2018. the top 100 social media influencers in plastic surgery on twitter: who should you be following?. aesthetic surgery journal, 38(8), pp.913-917. giles, d.c., 2017. how do fan and celebrity identities become established on twitter? a study of ‘social media natives’ and their followers. celebrity studies, 8(3), pp.445-460. irak, d., digital cultural capital as a counter-hegemonic tool in turkey. kingsmith, a.t., 2016. why so serious? framing comedies of recognition and repertoires of tactical frivolity within social movements. a journal for and about social movements, 8(2), pp.286-310. papacharissi, z., 2012. without you, i'm nothing: performances of the self on twitter. international journal of communication, 6, p.18. saka, e., 2018. social media in turkey as a space for political battles: aktrolls and other politically motivated trolling. middle east critique, 27(2), pp.161-177. scott, j.c., 1990. domination and the arts of resistance: hidden transcripts. yale university press. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): kristensen, j. (2019, october 2-5). making the unseen visible: exploring crosscutting social media publics and their sociopolitical traits. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. making the unseen visible: exploring crosscutting social media publics and their sociopolitical traits jakob bæk kristensen university of canterbury, new zealand introduction the potential of increased connectivity between people has been a main topic of discussion in media and communications research since the popularization of the internet, and especially since the web 2.0 revolution and the rise of social media. however, it is not easy to make claims about the effects and emergent properties of such digitally enhanced connectivity. two somewhat clashing traits of digital media are 1) the increased complexity with which we find and appropriate information and form opinions about the world (edgerly, thorson, bighash & hannah, 2016) and 2) the increased amount of digital traces we leave behind when engaging with online materials (jensen, 2013). while the first undoubtedly makes media and communication practices more complex to comprehend, the second should theoretically provide additional opportunities for reaching a deeper understanding of said complexity. however, bigger data does not always provide more accurate knowledge and researchers still need to make choices that greatly affect the results (boyd & crawford, 2012). this paper combines sociodemographic and political classifications of social media users based on surveys with network clustering techniques in order to preserve the full-scale complexity of digital interactions while eliciting patterns relating to concrete sociopolitical properties. motivation and previous research for the better part of a decade scholars have been using the digital breadcrumbs of peoples' online behavior to study media use in various contexts. this paper draws on two kinds of previous studies, those that make classifications and those that find clusters. an example of the latter is bruns, moon and münch (2017) who mapped a significant subsample of the australian twittersphere showing the emergence and development of how certain groups of users cluster together based on how much they interact with each other. in that study however, there is little additional information about the users in each cluster. in contrast, other studies have shown that accurate classifications regarding personality, voting intention and various other socio-demographic features can be made from digital trace data (youyou, kosinski and stillwell, 2015). the motivation behind this paper is that, although the purpose behind the two studies mentioned above are very different, the two approaches can be combined in a way that potentially allows one to explore previously unseen patterns. retaining a lot of the complexity by mapping all interactions and looking for clusters that arise naturally from these while at the same time making predictions about different sociopolitical traits of the users provides the opportunity for looking at social media publics in greater detail. methods and materials this paper combines both supervised and unsupervised techniques to explore overlapping patterns of crosscutting publics on facebook in denmark. the first step involves using a survey of 1697 danes whose public facebook activity is coupled with their personal, self-reported information. using machine-learning models, the survey is used to make predictions about the voting intention, gender, age and geo-location of a random sample of 50.000 facebook users between 2016 and 2018. the activity of these 50.000 users are spread across 20.000+ public facebook pages relating to politics, media, popular culture, music, art, unions and local venues. all their activity is modeled as a network and a clustering algorithm is used to divide users into groups based on which pages they interact most with compared to all other users and pages. this method thus allows one to compare the socio-political backgrounds that define the users with their belonging to a certain (naturally occuring) group based on the sum of their actual interactions on public facebook pages. results results show that voting intention overlaps most strongly with the clusters in the network, followed by gender and then geo-location, while age has little overlap. they also show that clusters relating to the core political left, right and alt. right make up only smaller groups in the network with the majority of users having other interests as their main identification. left voting users are overrepresented in clusters relating to lifestyle, ngos and animals, the political right is more significantly interested in sport and infotainment shows. the alt. right, especially when compared to their size, completely dominates two clusters, one is the tabloid media and the other is a cluster made up of discussion around the most hot button political issues such as immigration, religion, crime and the eu. furthermore the core alt. right cluster stands out by using angry emojis five times more on average than any other group. in contrast to studies that tend to highlight polarization and echo-chamber formation on social media (e.g. schmidt et al., 2017; del valle & bravo, 2018), this mapping can provide a more balanced narrative. while the results of this study show that there are politically isolated clusters with up to 97% (core left, core right or core alt. right) users with the same voting intention, there are also large clusters around mainstream news with a politically equal distribution of users. the main findings show the potential for exploring concrete sociopolitical trends in social media publics while conserving a high degree of the complexity of the digital trace data. while the method does not guarantee to elicit patterns that could not have been found with another approach, the way that it conserves complexity might make it less likely for researchers to overlook some patterns while overestimating the significance of others. references: boyd, d., & crawford, k. (2012). critical questions for big data: provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon. information, communication & society, 15(5), 662-679. bruns, a., moon, b., münch, f., & sadkowsky, t. (2017). the australian twittersphere in 2016: mapping the follower/followee network. social media+ society, 3(4), 2056305117748162. del valle, m. e., & bravo, r. b. (2018). echo chambers in parliamentary twitter networks: the catalan case. international journal of communication, 12, 21. edgerly, s., thorson, k., bighash, l., & hannah, m. (2016). posting about politics: media as resources for political expression on facebook. journal of information technology & politics, 13(2), 108-125. jensen, k. b. (2013). how to do things with data: meta–data, meta–media, and meta–communication. first monday, 18(10). schmidt, a. l., zollo, f., del vicario, m., bessi, a., scala, a., caldarelli, g. & quattrociocchi, w. (2017). anatomy of news consumption on facebook. proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 114(12), 30353039. youyou, w., kosinski, m., & stillwell, d. (2015). computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans. proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 112(4), 1036-1040. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): paris, b., currie, m., donovan, j. (2017, october 18-21). grand intention, small interventions: climate data rescue as counter-data action. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. grand intention, small interventions: climate data rescue as counter-data action britt s. paris department of information studies, ucla morgan e. currie stanford university center for philanthropy and civil society joan donovan data and society research institute introduction in this scholarly literature on data activism (milan, 2016), counter-data action (kitchin and lauriault, 2014) or statactivism (bruno 2014), the work of data activists involves the generation of data to create new statistical representations or to challenge official ones. however, much less attention has been focused on activity at the other end of the data lifecycle spectrum: data archiving and preservation as an act of political critique. in fact, literature on data activism has widely ignored issues of stewardship and long-term preservation, which raises the important question of whether largely ad hoc, diverse groups of data activists can manage data with sufficient integrity and sustainability over the long term. this paper focuses on framing the environmental data & governance initiative’s (edgi) data archiving and preservation as an act of political critique, and a concrete type of counter-data action. the environmental data & governance initiative (edgi) is a mostly-volunteer, collaborative network that investigates potential threats to the scientific research infrastructure necessary for environmental and energy policy in the united states. edgi began in november 2016, soon after donald trump was elected to the u.s. presidency. internationally, scholars shared similar concerns that trump’s ideological position on climate change would result in the removal of this information from public access. edgi formed with a few goals in mind: to design web-based tools, foster a network of 2 researchers, and host public events in an effort to keep public environmental data accessible.1 to better understand this phenomenon, i will briefly examine data activism’s questioning the power of official statistics with relation to social justice issues. data collection as activism building archives has already been an integral part of struggles for social justice (flinn & alexander, 2015). there are many examples of archiving as an inherently political activity from jimerson (2009), caswell (2010) and countless others. this archival work challenges the dominant narratives of the past and makes us rethink how we preserve memories for the next generation. autonomy is key to the success of these archives, which are often maintained, owned and used by the very people who generate them (sellie et al, 2015). by remaining independent from formal institutions, archivists are making a statement about how entrenched organizations play a role in their political necessity in the first place. past and present marginalization of and violence to particular minority communities and pervasive ecological exploitation remain central to institutions of american democracy – whether universities or federally funded historical archives. for this reason, johnson, drake, and caswell (forthcoming) note that we cannot always count on such institutions to meaningfully memorialize on behalf of these voices and autonomy from central institutions can also protect valuable materials within politically volatile environments. data rescues and their archival work strive not to challenge a dominant scientific narrative, but to protect it from a “post-truth” mentality that makes climate change denial seem a viable social act, one in which facts pertain only to individual perspectives. in this respect it may be different from past radical archive of the pasts. but the work is autonomous and comprised of heterogeneous actors interested in resisting the actions of those in power to cast aside empiricism and our future progress on climate change. archiving for the future to counter any possible loss, edgi members devote themselves to several tasks: website monitoring for any changes to content on a subset of federal websites; archiving datasets and web pages alongside local organizers and volunteers at archiving events, called datarescues, in collaboration with other internet archiving efforts, including internet archive, the university of pennsylvania’s datarefuge, and climate mirror. they have moved to focus on creating their own data infrastructure to maintain the data, its trust and accessibility in collaboration with protocol labs. this discussion will focus on edgi’s data archiving activity in particular. at the time of this writing, multiple epa climate change subdomains have been removed and now redirect to an “update” page (mooney and eilperin, 2017). links to the state department’s ‘climate change’ pages also stopped working after the obamatrump whitehouse.gov changeover (varinsky, 2017). to be clear, federal data is not so much in danger of being deleted than of becoming difficult to access thanks to policy 1 see edgi’s report, “introducing the environmental data and governance initiative,” published february 1, 2017. https://envirodatagov.org/publication/introducing-edgi/. 3 changes and related funding cuts. edgi’s concern is that data that previously circulated as “open” will disappear from the web in an effort to reduce the capacity for scientific research and calls for reform and regulation. one vital part of edgi's archiving work involved the coordination of 'datarescue' events around the united states; over 30 of these occurred from december 2016 until july 2017. often hosted by higher educational institutions, datarescues invited volunteer participants together to copy federal scientific datasets, documents, and webpages using an array of archiving tactics that edgi participants call “seeding,” “harvesting,” and “bagging.” “seeding” is edgi’s term for nominating federal webpage urls to the internet archive’s end of term project. end of term routinely archives .gov websites during periods of a presidential transitions. the project uses an automated web crawler to “crawl,” or map out relations between federal web pages, as well as archive web snapshots; it also accepts nominations for urls from external parties who want to ensure particular web pages are replicated. edgi volunteers contributed to the end of term project by nominating the pages of agencies devoted to energy and environmental research in particular. the internet archive’s basic crawler, however, encounters many intractable webpages that it cannot crawl. in order to archive this uncrawlable data, edgi participants designed an open source web application called archivers.space, a project management tool that tracks a dataset’s process from its uploading to a server through multiple stages of research and vetting by participants. in one step participants “bag” the data edgi’s term for running a python script that generates checksums. another step entails pulling the data into a zip file along with information that pertains to its web context, metadata, and any other important descriptive information. in a final step the dataset is fully described, including its chain of custody, context, and provenance. once a dataset is ready, it is pushed to datarefuge.org (maintained by datarefuge), where scientists and activists can use it. archiving data does not necessarily preserve it, and exigent dissemination of data may struggle without custodial publics. the recent rise of autocratic tendencies in various jurisdictions (turkey, the philippines, russia, the united states) is a salutary reminder of the fragility of any centralized data storage system. in a centralized model, however, the problem of data authority is simple -the central warehouse authorizes a piece of data simply by storing it. in the decentralized web, that problem is more difficult, as are the problems of locating data, versioning it, and storing it reliably. edgi’s data together collaboration with protocol labs and qir.io exists to decentralize the rescued data. more broadly this collaboration exemplifies kitchin and lauriault’s notion of counter-data action as it serves as a juncture at which communities work cooperatively, share responsibilities, and reinforce each other so that data is accessible to all, immediately discoverable, easily verifiable, and robustly preserved. the verification problem can be solved by cryptographic signing provided by protocol labs’ interplanetary file sharing system (ipfs). an application layer protocol that allows data o take advantage of many efficiencies lost via the de facto file retrieval system, http, making the latter work more like a peer-to-peer system. the authority problem can be solved by webs of trust provided by edgi and data 4 together. the access problem remains a complex problem for which scientific and activist communities must be polled to determine how to meet their needs within the existing ifps structure. conclusion edgi archives data created by u.s.-funded scientists to document evidence of climate change and human-induced ecological violence; it replicates and preserves scientific evidence to protect it from a vicious relativism, not to augment, challenge, or reinterpret it. edgi’s web archiving and data mirroring pluralizes and distributes the material context of the data; its political work lies in decentralizing information by removing it from institutional control, not re-presenting it. it does so by building upon data archives that typically fall somewhere within the civic sphere involving grassroots political activism, who commune voluntarily to collect evidence around shared matters of concern. to be trustworthy, the archivist will want to show that a dataset has not been tampered with or degraded in any way; she will want to use professional standards for digital data preservation: metadata that documents chain of custody and provenance; metadata that preserves context; analog and automated checksums; and multiple, mirrored copies to prevent loss. in the case of edgi volunteers designed bespoke platforms for data ingestion and documentation in order to ensure the integrity of the data. by treating federal scientific data as a public utility, data rescues create an occasion for community and political resistance and constitute an emergent form of counter-data action. in fact, we might find that the importance of mirroring federal climate data lies less in rescuing data sets for the scientific community – since it’s too soon to tell whether more information will vanish or be defunded – but instead in creating spaces for community dialogue and wider public awareness of the vulnerabilities of politically contentious scientific work. references bruno, i., didier, e., & vitale, t. (2014). statactivism: forms of action between disclosure and affirmation. bruno isabelle, didier emmanuel and vitale tommaso (2014)," statactivism: forms of action between disclosure and affirmation", in partecipazione e conflitto. the open journal of sociopolitical studies, 7(2), 198–220. caswell, m. (2010). khmer rouge archives: accountability, truth, and memory in cambodia. archival science 10 (1), 25-44 doria d. johnson, j. m. drake, and m. caswell. (forthcoming). “from cape town to chicago to colombo and back again: towards a liberation theology for memory work,” forthcoming. eilperin, j. (2017, may 6). the epa just buried its climate change website for kids. retrieved june 24, 2017, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energyenvironment/wp/2017/05/06/epa-buries-climate-change-site-for-kids/ 5 flinn a. and b. alexander. (2015). “'humanizing an inevitability political craft’: introduction to the special issue on archiving activism and activist archiving,” arch sci, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 329–335. jimerson, r. (2009) archives power, society of american archivists. kitchin, r., & lauriault, t. p. (2014). towards critical data studies: charting and unpacking data assemblages and their work (ssrn scholarly paper no. id 2474112). rochester, ny: social science research network. retrieved from https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2474112 mooney, c., & eilperin, j. (2017, april 29). epa website removes climate science site from public view after two decades. washington post. retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/04/28/epawebsite-removes-climate-science-site-from-public-view-after-two-decades/ varinsky, d. (n.d.). data on climate change progress is disappearing from the us state department website. retrieved june 27, 2017, from http://www.businessinsider.com/climate-action-reports-disappeared-2017-1 aoir2018-#rezist selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): mercea, d. (2018, october 10-13). the political information to protest: an assessment of topical social media usage in contentious politics. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the political information to protest: an assessment of topical social media usage in contentious politics dan mercea university of london introduction in romania, the 2017 #rezist protests marked a high point of successful mobilisations that have followed a pattern of rolling demonstrations across the country and among romanian communities abroad which attained their declared aims, i.e. to halt the licensing process for the largest open-cast gold mine in europe, in 2013; to prompt the resignation of two governments, in 2012 and 2015; and in the case of the #rezist protests, to forestall the adoption of emergency ordinance no. 13 that would slacken the country’s anti-corruption legislation (badescu and jiglau, 2016). attendant to this latest wave was a modest rise in levels of protest participation (mercea, 2014). against evidence that the utilisation of social media in the protest wave that has swept democratic countries since the turn of the decade (biekart and fowler, 2010) has primarily been instrumental to the orchestration of collective action, this article probes the circulation of political information among protestors on facebook. as in other recent instances of protest events in the country (mercea, 2017), protestors set up public facebook event pages used for topical communication at various stages such as in advance, during or in the wake of a demonstration. a combination of network analysis and topic modelling are employed to describe the communication encountered on facebook event pages associated with four romanian cities where large anti-corruption protest locations transpired in january-march 2017. survey data for the same four locations is analysed to measure the degree to which students who attended those protests exchanged political information on facebook. romanian students were previously reported as more likely to engage in acts of protests than the general population. likewise, they were most likely to embrace social network services for both offline and online political participation (burean and badescu, 2014). the article grapples with the contention that the while the use of social media exposes people to diverse political content (bakshy et al., 2015, fletcher and nielsen, 2017, kim, 2011), it does not make them politically more knowledgeable. critical observers have argued that social media users are becoming dangerously unaware of their level of political ignorance (gil de zúñiga et al., 2017). in this light, the aim to examine the degree to which protestors source political information on social media is further significant as they are ostensibly a cohort that is susceptible to taking political action on the basis of strategically manufactured online rhetoric designed to engineer a consensus for collective action (bliuc et al., 2012). data and methods the facebook dataset comprises 48 event pages associated with the four cities examined in this study—bucharest, cluj, oradea and timisoara—with data points covering the period 16 january to 6 march 2017. secondly, a student survey probing participation in the #rezist protests was conducted in the four cities. these are university centres where 60% of the student population in romania is concentrated according to the romanian ministry of education. it provided the research team with the list of registered students in the country, in 2017. the survey was conducted from april to june 2017. it comprised 1658 respondents. the sampling strategy accounted for the proportion of students per higher education discipline. we first approached the social media—facebook event page—data descriptively. to that end, we used the “five number summary” statistics (luke, 2015). in addition, to gain an appreciation of how information circulated in the city event page network, we analysed the diffusion of information (gonzález-bailón and wang, 2016) based on the distance between nodes or vertices in the network. the results are standardized falling between 0 and 1 with a high value indicative of a short distance between nodes and a low value suggesting the reverse. moreover, we estimated the capacity for brokerage of actors in the network. as we expected to find structural gaps in the flow of information (gonzález-bailón and wang, 2016), we calculated the modularity score of the network. additionally, we conducted a topic modelling analysis using the latent dirichlet allocation algorithm. this was done so as to examine the content of the communication transpiring in the event page network. lastly, we used regression analysis to model the bearing of political information on protest participation while controlling for multiple factors previously shown to influence this outcome. results and discussion the regression analysis revealed that the likelihood of protest participation was influenced first by respondents’ political interest, measured as their penchant for sourcing news content from the internet; and by communication about the protests on social media, respectively. the effect of posting activity on social media, by way of calls for protest participation or commentary on the protests (models 1 and 2) disappeared when controlling for students’ participatory experience. however, placing a #rezist hashtag overlay on one’s profile photo and joining a facebook protest event page or group were two of the three variables with the highest predictive power in all models. conversely, there was an inverse relationship between broadcast news consumption and protest participation. both the effect of internet (positive) and broadcast(negative) news consumption disappeared, however, as soon as we introduced the indicator for protest experience. next, we noted that neither political information nor knowledge had any bearing on participation. this additionally held true for organisational membership, voting or any of the socio-demographic variables. thus, the chief predictors of protest participation were pro-active social media usage combined with protest experience and distrust of a prominent social (the church) rather than any political institution. although initial models suggested political interest affected students’ inclination to participate, the effect vanished upon further testing. table 1. determinants of student participation in the #rezist protests dependent variable: protest participation *<.05, **<.01, ***<001. coefficients are standardized beta for logistic regression. second, our study further points to the diffusion of information among members of event page networks on facebook as being more robust than expected. despite the existence of community structures in the network, and by implication of structural holes, the observed diffusion score and the capacity for brokerage among network actors led us to infer that information circulated reasonably effectively among and within groups in the facebook network. the low density and long diameter of the protest event network alluded to its social fabric being at least in part heterogenous, with users many steps removed from each other. network clustering suggested users were not confined to tight, localised groups. representing the main public interface of the protests, the event model 1 model 2 model 3 model 4 tv or radio news consumption -.073*** -.066*** -.067 -.089 used internet for political information .086*** .084*** .042 .039 posted calls for protest participation on social media .071*** .069*** .066 .093 posted a protest-related comment on social media .051*** .051** .072 .073 placed #rezist hashtag on profile photo .069*** .076** .151* .193** joined a facebook protest event page or group .115*** .114*** .120** .158** distrust in government .027 .046 .068 distrust in parliament .039 -.111 -.161 distrust in church .036* .105** .136 distrust in national agency for combatting corruption (dna) -.074*** .009 -.007 protest participation experience .157** .168** vote .006 .011 organisational membership -.019 -.022 political knowledge .041 .056 father’s education .004 mother’s education -.044 income-money spent in a month .087 gender .072 nagelkerker² .271 .302 .474 .488 dependent variable: protest participation *<.05, **<.01, ***<001. the indicators are standardized beta for logistic regression. page network was populated with messages that displayed political information side-byside with content pertaining to the orchestration, implications and outcomes of collective action. table 2: lda-modelled latent topics selected references burean, t. & badescu, g. 2014. voices of discontent: student protest participation in romania. communist and postcommunist studies 47, 385-397. gil de zúñiga, h., weeks, b. & ardèvol-abreu, a. 2017. effects of the news-finds-me perception in communication. journal of computer-mediated communication, 22, 105-123. gonzález-bailón, s. & wang, n. 2016. networked discontent: the anatomy of protest campaigns in social media. social networks, 44, 95-104. mercea, d. 2014. towards a conceptualization of casual protest participation. east european politics and societies, 28, 386-410. topic 1: opposition to ordinance facebook, oradea, come, psd, street, unirii, participate, tell, ordinance, eu, judgement, government, oug, resist, give, positions, penal, is, cluj, protest topic 2: sunday anticorruption protests facebook, event, citizens, street, do, be, sunday, public, government, right, protests, state, events, the people’s, see, want, government, corruption, kill, defend topic 3: protesting audio-visual regulator victoriei, facebook, audiovisual, event, play, generates, resistance, draw, law, code, do, television, constitution, cna, regulation, disinformation, sunday, resignation, see, protests topic 4: orchestration of protest banner, facebook, protest, be, see, street, people, banners, romania, can, meet, seeing, event, corruption, only, help, delimit, transmit, parliament, victoriei topic 5: collective action and outcomes protest, facebook, are, do, change, public, see, corruption, be, kill, event, citizens, sunday, want, begin, down, street, come, scandal, power topic 6: preserving the momentum of rolling protests sunday, facebook, square, flag, street, cluj, fight, celebrate, resistance, win, unirii, resist, bucharest, initiative, victoriei, resist, tri-color european, union topic 7: protest as civic participation right, sunday, liberty, citizens, do, european, civic, gather, needs, be, authority, politics, expression, rights, people, public, opera, help, education, resist microsoft word 795-543-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 the forum, the sardine can and the fake: contesting, adapting and practicing the massive open online course. jeremy knox university of edinburgh uk j.k.knox@sms.ed.ac.uk abstract the massive open online course (mooc) has emerged at the forefront of a burgeoning open education movement. in the typical mooc, students are expected to use internet technology as a transparent window to the prestigious university lecture. however, the modes, tendencies and routines of mooc participation remain significantly under-theorised, and the need for in-depth and extensive research in this area is critical. this paper will foreground the themes of resistance and appropriation in the mooc through a discussion of e-learning and digital cultures, a course from the university of edinburgh in partnership with coursera. three events from this course – a forum thread, a course review written by a student, and a final assignment submission will be used to explore the ways in which teachers and students are responding to, contesting, adopting and practicing higher education in this emerging and digitally-mediated domain. keywords mooc; open education; digital education; online learning; higher education introduction the massive open online course (mooc) has emerged at the forefront of a burgeoning open education movement, in which internet technology is advanced as both the vehicle for widening participation and the solution to the perceived elitism of the traditional university. high profile mooc offerings from silicon valley start-ups, such as ‘coursera’ or ‘udacity’, or the harvard and mit initiative ‘edx’, often attract enrolees in their tens of thousands, and have received unprecedented media attention. despite a long history of distance and online education (for example the open university in the uk), involving varying degrees of openness (for example the open educational resources movement, or courses pioneered by connectivist theorists, see mcauley, a. et al. 2010), advocates of the mooc frequently predict the impending disruption of higher educational institutions and practices (adams 2012, friedman 2013, marginson 2012, wente 2012). these institutionally affiliated moocs are typically highly structured, content-driven courses, comprised of pre-recorded lectures, and assessed with automated or peer-marked assignments (osvaldo rodriguez 2012). they are courses designed to solve what is perceived to be the fundamental problem in education today: limited access to expert knowledge. thus, the notion that internet technology provides unproblematic and revolutionary admittance to academic knowledge not only drives the promotion of moocs, but is also indicative of the educational rationale that underpins the course format, and the kind of educational experience one is meant to have as a participant. in the typical mooc, students are expected to use internet technology as a transparent window to the prestigious university lecture, absorbing expert knowledge, and conducting their learning activities within a centralized platform. however, the modes, tendencies and routines of mooc participation remain significantly under-theorised, and the need for in-depth and extensive research in this area is critical. this paper will foreground the themes of resistance and appropriation in the massive open online course through a discussion of e-learning and digital cultures, a course from the university of edinburgh in partnership with coursera, and co-taught by the author. the following three accounts, derived from the design and delivery of the first instance of the course in january 2013, will explore the ways in which teachers and students are responding to, contesting, adopting and practicing higher selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 education in this emerging and digitally-mediated domain. these narratives derive from a forum thread, a course review written by a student, and a final assignment submission, and will be used to structure a discussion of emergent educational practices in the mooc. the intention here is to understand how educational practices are forming in response to both the technologies utilised in moocs, and conventions of education and learning that are brought to bear upon them. this paper will analyse specific course content produced by teachers and students of e-learning and digital cultures, as well as selected academic literature and media coverage of moocs. theoretical frameworks associated with the philosophy of technology (dahlberg, 2004; kanuka, 2008), critical technology studies (friesen & hamilton, 2010), as well as online learning and education technology (land & bayne 2011, selwyn 2011) will underpin this analysis. the forum: recognition and resistance the very first forum post in e-learning and digital cultures was entitled ‘where are the professors?’ it enquired about the absence of video lectures, a feature which the poster was expecting to find upon entering the course site, and the subsequent discussion involved various interpretations of what a mooc is, should, or could be. specific posts from this forum thread be illustrated and analysed to prompt an exploration of emerging conventions and expectations within the mooc format, and, significantly, the ways that these early practices are being contested and resisted through teaching methods and student activity. claims to an authentic mooc structure will be shown to vary considerably, while resistance will be suggested to manifest in a number of ways, including both student opposition towards self-directed modes of study and contestation regarding the central role of the teacher. the sardine can: course content as ‘objet trouvé’ rather than pre-recorded video lectures, the content of e-learning and digital cultures consisted of a teacher-curated and -annotated selection of resources, including public domain short films, openaccess academic papers, media reports, and videos, in response to which participants were asked to engage in discussion. a student review, posted online during the course, described e-learning and digital cultures as analogous to a ‘sardine can’ that had been smuggled into an art gallery to fool the unsuspecting visitors. this criticism will be used to explore: the idea of ‘openness’ in relation to the mooc, specifically the distinction between free enrolment and open content; the fetishization of ‘expert knowledge’ and the idolisation of the university professor; and ownership of, and participation in, the knowledge producing practices of the mooc. in addition to specific content from e-learning and digital cultures, this section will draw upon promotional material from mooc providers and example video lectures and assessment exercises from a number of coursera moocs. the appropriation of public domain content will thus be explored as a form of resistance to the dominant design approaches and technical features of mooc platforms. the fake twitter account participants in e-learning and digital cultures were asked to create a ‘digital artefact’ for the final assignment, the definition of which was left intentionally open, simply as ‘something that is designed to be experienced digitally, on the web’. this final narrative describes a submission which took the form of a fake twitter account, designed to impersonate one of the course tutors. specific tweets from the fake account, the student’s rationale behind the submission, and the resulting responses and discussions from other participants, will be analysed here in a discussion of teacher and student roles, digitally-mediated presence, power and hierarchy in the mooc. this section will highlight the ways in which learner and teacher subjectivity is often predetermined in a course format that maintains established educational orderings. conclusions selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 through the discussion of recognition and resistance, the mooc will be theorised as an educational format undergoing persistent transformation, resulting from a tension between the expectations fed into technology design and the subsequent practices of opposition and orthodoxy. despite the recent emergence of the mooc, processes of standardisation and deviation are already taking place, creating a space in which these courses are viewed very differently by the various stakeholders involved. the use of open-access resources will be offered as an example of appropriating non-educational objects for the purposes of education, highlighting some of the nascent interventions through which established institutional conventions are being resisted in the mooc format. however, rather than offering a simplistic solution, such practices of academic experimentation often conflict with student expectations of the value of university education. finally, it will be suggested that the established roles of ‘teacher’ and ‘student’ are placed into disarray and confusion in the mooc. the scale of these courses creates a teaching presence that is profoundly outnumbered, while the student often experiences an overwhelming lack of direction and guidance. rather than simply replacing a teacher-led education with a model of student-centred learning in which the pedagogue is absent (anderson & dron 2011), this paper will conclude with a discussion of the ways that these roles have been resisted and appropriated in e-learning and digital cultures. references adams, s. (2012). is coursera the beginning of the end for traditional higher education? forbes. retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2012/07/17/is-coursera-thebeginning-of-the-end-for-traditionalhigher-education anderson, t. & dron, j. (2011). three generations of distance education pedagogy. international review of research in open and distance learning, 12(3), 80-97. retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/890/1826 dahlberg, l. (2004). internet research tracings: towards a non-reductionist methodology. journal of computer mediated communication, 9(3). retrieved from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol9/issue3/dahlberg.html friedman, t. l. (2013). revolution hits the universities. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/opinion/sunday/friedman-revolution-hits-theuniversities.html?pagewanted=1&hp&_r=0 friesen, n. & hamilton, e. (2010). online education: the view from technology studies. in proceedings for the technological learning and thinking conference: culture, design, sustainability, human ingenuity. retrieved from http://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca/conference/index.php/tlt/2010/schedconf/presentations kanuka, h. (2008). understanding e-learning technologies-in-practice through philosophies-in-practice. in t. anderson (ed.) the theory and practice of online learning (pp. 91–118). edmonton: au press. land, r. and bayne, s. (eds.) (2011). digital difference: perspectives on online learning. rotterdam: sense. mcauley, a., stewart, b., siemens, g., cormier, d. (2010). the mooc model for digital practice. retrieved from http://www.elearnspace.org/articles/mooc_final.pdf marginson, s. (2012). yes, mooc is the global higher education game changer. university world news. retrieved from http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=2012080915084470 osvaldo rodriguez, c., (2012). moocs and the ai-stanford like courses: two successful and distinct course formats for massive open online courses. european journal of open, distance and e-learning, (pp.1–13). retrieved from http://www.eurodl.org/?p=current&article=516. selwyn, n. (2011). education and technology: key issues and debates. london: continuum international. wente, m. (2012). we're ripe for a great disruption in higher education. the globe and mail. retrieved from http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/were-ripe-for-a-great-disruption-in-highereducation/article543479/ selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 4 aoir2018 paper submission social news and advocacy journalism selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): hurcombe, e. (2018, october 10-13 examining the role and significance of emerging social news outlets and their advocacy journalism in the 2017 australian same-sex marriage postal survey. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. examining the role and significance of emerging social news outlets and their advocacy journalism in the 2017 australian same-sex marriage postal survey edward hurcombe digital media research centre, queensland university of technology introduction this paper examines emerging news forms and journalistic practices within australia that are native to social media. it argues that these shared forms and practices constitute a new genre of ‘social news’. three australian-based outlets are studied through the conceptual lens of social news – buzzfeedoz news, junkee media, and pedestrian.tv. using digital tools alongside manual methods, this paper investigates the role and significance of these outlets on twitter and facebook during the same-sex marriage postal survey from august-november 2017. the survey was commissioned by the incumbent conservative liberal-national australian government to gauge nationwide support for same-sex marriage. notably, these social news outlets played an advocacy role, breaking with journalistic norms around ‘objectivity’ and ‘balance’. background news material is increasingly accessed through social media, as twitter and facebook emerge as platforms for news engagement, sharing and discussion (nielsen & schroder 2014). in turn, news-reading publics are co-evolving with these platforms, as the former become embedded within everyday sociable practices on platforms (highfield 2016). concurrently, news and journalism are transforming (harrington 2012) alongside these emerging platform publics. social news embodies specific kinds of platform vernaculars (gibbs et al 2014) and pop-cultural sensibilities. these vernaculars and sensibilities – which include acronyms, irony and humour, along with pop-cultural visual media like gifs and memes – reflect a 2 deep connection to the cultures of social media platforms. the use of these vernaculars indicates social news’ suitability for the kinds of everyday socialising prevalent on platforms, and social news’ desire for shareability. in addition, such vernaculars – particularly the use of gifs, which act as affective gestures (papacharissi 2015) within articles – demonstrate not only a blurring of ‘serious’ and ‘entertaining’ news content, but also an innovative use of explicit affect in engaging news-reading publics. the editorial perspectives of social news outlets are frequently overt, a quality i term ‘positionality’. this positioned perspective is distinct from an editorial bias concealed within seemingly ‘objective’ news content (eveland & shah 2003). social news outlets also eschew and critique ‘balance’, an established journalistic norm. ‘balance’ aims to present both sides of any newsworthy issue. however, not all sides deserve equal attention, and as boykoff & boykoff found in their work on climate science coverage in the us (2004), the requirement for ‘balance’ has in previously led otherwise respected outlets to mislead audiences by over-representing fringe perspectives. social news outlets’ eschewing of balance was notable during the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey, itself an exercise in ‘hearing both sides’ so as to stall policymaking on a well-supported human rights issue. legacy news outlets like news corp’s the daily telegraph and fairfax media’s the sydney morning herald regularly ran provocative op-eds from ‘no’ advocates, the justification being that this was ‘balance’. the national public broadcaster, the australian broadcasting corporation, also was committed to neutrality. conversely, social news outlets refrained from publishing ‘no’ op-eds. all three outlets encouraged enrolment, and junkee media and pedestrian.tv actively advocated for the ‘yes’ side. this advocacy journalism even steered into activism – as in mobilising action (fisher 2016) – with the two outlets creating a ‘#enrolandupdate’ hashtag on twitter, encouraging their audiences to enrol and vote ‘yes’. methods both manual and automated digital methods were used to investigate the role and significance of social news reporting, advocacy and activism during the postal survey. for twitter data, the tracking tool dmi-tcat (borra & rieder 2014) was used to track postal survey-related keywords. ‘postal survey’, ‘postal plebiscite’, ‘#enrolandupdate’, ‘#enrolforequality’ and ‘#marriageequality’ were tracked from 11 august 2017 – 17 november 2017, covering the period shortly after the survey was announced until two days after the results were announced. within this dataset, social news actors – official accounts and the accounts of social news writers – were identified, and assessed in terms of visibility (based on retweets and @mentions). i currently lack access to detailed enrollment and voting data; however measuring visibility provides preliminary indications of impact. i am also currently working on methods to capture the most shared urls, and domains, within this twitter dataset. manual tracking methods – such as screenshots, and hyperlink archiving – were also used to collect data outside of keyword parameters. on facebook, these same manual methods were used to collect data on social news advocacy and activism. preliminary findings 3 overall, social news actors were moderately-to-highly visible on twitter during the postal survey period, in particular buzzfeedoz news reporters alice workman (@workmanalice) and lane sainty (@lanesainty). during the 11 august – 17 november period, workman and sainty were the 15th and 17th most visible users, respectively. during 11 august – 28 august, before and immediately after the enrollment deadline, workman and sainty were the 4th and 5th most visible users. also during this period, osman faruqi from junkee media was the 16th most visible user. #enrolandupdate was also the 10th most visible hashtag during 11-28 august; attracting 598 tweets. the official accounts of social news outlets had low visibility during both periods. all social news outlets were prolific during 11 august – 15 november, with pedestrian.tv writing 183 articles about the survey, buzzfeedoz news writing 182, and junkee media writing 146. sainty was praised by activists and other journalists for her reporting. junkee media also received praise for their advocacy role by major ‘yes’ activists. facebookspecific activist efforts by junkee media encouraging users to enrol and vote ‘yes’ included 1 video, 1 meme, and 4 articles, all posted before the deadline. pedestrian.tv changed its facebook profile and cover images to a ‘yes’ logo, and posted an article encouraging users to enrol. buzzfeedoz news also posted 3 articles to facebook encouraging enrolment. these posts had varying levels of engagement, although the junkee video received over 3,300 views. all of these videos and articles used platform vernaculars, including pop-cultural imagery. these preliminary findings allow some conclusions to be drawn. firstly, the prominence of some social news actors on twitter during the survey indicates a shifting – although not totally transformed – australian news ecology. secondly, social news outlets’ lack of ‘balance’ indicates a growing challenge from emerging outlets to traditional journalistic norms within australia. significantly, in this case the challenge comes not from hyperpartisan outlets trading in propaganda and disinformation (marwick & lewis, 2017), but from outlets that intelligently critique the value in giving a platform to ‘both sides’. thirdly, these findings demonstrate how new forms of advocacy and activist journalism are utilising, to mixed success, pop-culture-infused platform vernaculars to engage news-reading publics on social media. overall, this research is useful in highlighting that disruptions from social media platforms and cultures can be sources of positive potential for news and journalistic practice. references borra, e. and rieder, b. (2014) ‘programmed method: developing a toolset for capturing and analyzing tweets’, aslib journal of information management, 66(3), pp. 262-278. boykoff, m. t. and boykoff, j. m. (2004) ‘balance as bias: global warming and the us prestige press’, global environmental change, 14(2), pp. 125–136. eveland jr, w. p. and shah, d. v. (2003) ‘the impact of individual and interpersonal factors on perceived news media bias’, political psychology, 24(1), pp. 101–117. fisher, c. (2016) ‘the advocacy continuum: towards a theory of advocacy in journalism’, journalism, 17(6), pp. 711–726. 4 gibbs, m., meese, j., arnold, m., nansen, b. and carter, m. (2015) ‘#funeral and instagram: death, social media, and platform vernacular’, information, communication & society, 18(3), pp. 255–268. harrington, s. (2012) ‘australian journalism studies after “journalism”: breaking down the disciplinary boundaries (for good)’, media international australia, (144), pp. 156– 162. highfield, t. (2016) social media and everyday politics. cambridge: polity. marwick, a. and lewis, r. (2017) media manipulation and disinformation online, data & society research institute. nielsen, r. k. and schrøder, k. c. (2014) ‘the relative importance of social media for accessing, finding, and engaging with news’, digital journalism. routledge, 2(4), pp. 472–489. papacharissi, z. (2015) affective publics: sentiment, technology and politics. oxford: oxford university press. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 harvey, a., rambukkana, n., bain, j., whiteman, n. (2017, october 18-21). networked niceness: gendered affective publics and potentialities of political resistance. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. . panel: networked niceness: gendered affective publics and potentialities of political resistance alison harvey (university of leicester), nathan rambukkana (wilfred laurier university), jessica bain (university of leicester), natasha whiteman (university of leicester) the contemporary political, economic, and social environment has necessitated a focus within internet and digital culture studies on the ways in which our platforms, online environments, and shifting digitally-enabled practices can support, perpetuate, and amplify hate, harassment, exclusion, toxicity, and incivility (cheney-lippold 2011, cross 2014, jane 2014). critical analysis of the infrastructure, algorithms, and other sociotechnical features (shepherd et. al. 2015) enabling online hate has demonstrated the ways in which the internet is a deeply unsafe space, one that is difficult to regulate through traditional means (citron 2014, franks 2009) and that can have very serious consequences, as we have seen with the deaths of teens targeted by cyberbullies (rey & boesel 2014). within this context, it can be easy to overlook, minimize, or dismiss the spaces and sites where quite the opposite can be observedthe digital enclaves where we find kindness, support, friendship, and the grounds for resistance and organizing. the papers in this panel examine precisely these affective publics via grounded analysis of several sites and practices linked by distinctly different resonances than captured in the focus on online hate. through critical and qualitative engagement with specific sites of ‘networked niceness’, these papers explore the ways in which such sites are gendered and how they draw on affective relations and discourses as the grounds for feminist activism and resistance. through this, they indicate how it is a focus on practices as well as structures that are required in explorations of our digital publics and politics. papers 1, 2, and 3 highlight situated practices within and across networked publicstwitter, facebook, instagram, and youtube, among others. while their practices and communities differ, including feminist digital games initiatives, academics, and digital dress-makers, what they share is a struggle with coming to understand the relationship between socio-technical norms on specific platforms and affective engagement therein. they draw on empirical research with these sites and communities to consider the power of support, kindness, mentorship, and care to resist violence, and the limitations to networked niceness within the internet’s broader structure. paper 4 rounds out these grounded analyses by interrogating the ethical queries raised when theorizing networked niceness and affective publics, including the very notion of an ‘ethics of care’. through this, it presents pressing considerations for contemporary internet research into networked publics across sites and thematics. these papers share an acknowledgment of the rise of networked misogyny and its attendant vilification of feminist critique and organizing (banet-weiser & miltner 2016). their starting point is the context of the visible misogynist and feminist zeitgeist in popular culture (banet-weiser 2015), but they aim to explore the contours of smallscale, specific sites and questions related to affective protest against hate online. while in each case the networked niceness can be read in response to the rise of ‘alt-right’ sexism, racism, harassment, and fascism and its digital traces, their specific tactics, discourses, and aesthetics differ. it is for this reason that examination of these practices are necessary, as they can disrupt binaristic (working/not working) and antagonistic portrayals of feminist action and organizing. rather than arguing for a return to early blue-sky thinking about online communities, communication, and identity, these talks critically engage with the nuances of contemporary affective publics. as they reflect on these spaces of positivity, they question how such ‘hopeful performativities’ (ahmed, 2010) can constrain as well as enable political resistance. these papers interrogate the fantasies as well as the potentialities of networked niceness, opening up a conversation about how in a context of online hate we may find the grounds for the next steps in critical engagement and resistance. references ahmed, s (2010) the promise of happiness. durham: duke university press. banet-weiser, s (2015) popular misogyny: a zeitgeist. culture digitally. available at: http://culturedigitally.org/2015/01/popular-misogyny-a-zeitgeist/ banet-weiser s & miltner km (2016) #masculinitysofragile: culture, structure, and networked misogyny. feminist media studies 16(1): 171-174. cheney-lippold j (2011) a new algorithmic identity: soft biopolitics and the modulation of control. theory, culture & society 28(6): 164-181. citron dk (2014) hate crimes in cyberspace. cambridge: harvard university press. cross k (2014) ethics for cyborgs: on real harassment in an ‘unreal’ place. loading… the journal of the canadian game studies association 8(13): 4-21. franks ma (2009) unwilling avatars: idealism and discrimination in cyberspace. columbia journal of gender and law 20: 224-246. jane ea (2014) ‘you’re a ugly, whorish, slut’: understanding e-bile. feminist media studies 14(4): 531-546. rey pj & boesel we (2014) the web, digital prostheses, and augmented subjectivity. in: kleinman dl and moore k (eds) routledge handbook of science, technology and society. new york: routledge, pp. 173-186. shepherd t, harvey a, jordan t, srauy s, & miltner k (2015) histories of hating. social media + society 1(2): 1-10. paper 1beyond gamer love and gamer hate: resistance to violence, vengeance, and vitriol in digital games culture alison harvey university of leicester the last three years of digital games culture scholarship has been explicitly or implicitly inflected with a response to the #gamergate campaign, a movement that is more associated with harassment of visible women in games than with the ethics in games journalism mantra it emphasizes (braithwaite 2016, chess & shaw 2014, mortensen 2016). in this time, we have seen recognition across digital games scholarship of the exclusionary and often toxic culture of gaming, with a commensurate emphasis on gendered, racialized, and intersectional forms of oppression and marginalization across a range of gaming publics (braithwaite 2014, salter & blodgett 2012). this work has shown the ways in which gaming publics are not partitioned off from digital culture, but linked to the production and reification of toxic masculinist cybercultures more broadly (massanari 2015). these moves are riven with affective discourse, including both love of gaming and its culture as well as hatred of the intrusions of so-called ‘social justice warriors’ and their criticisms. as this would indicate, online games culture is one where affective and gendered boundaries play a central role in defining the gamer identity. in tandem, we have seen the rise of interventionist and transformative work aimed at shifting toxic masculinist norms in games (jenson & de castell 2013). under the banner of ‘feminists in games’, artistic, critical, and activist projects showcase resistance to the exclusions of campaigns such as gamergate and the prior cybermob attacks on feminist critic anita sarkeesian (consalvo, 2012) and more historically longstanding practices related to marketing, production, and design normalizing violent hegemonic masculinities (see for example fron, fullerton, morie & pearce 2007, huntemann 2015). in this paper, i consider the affective nature of these forms of resistance to anti-feminist and misogynistic norms in games culture. recent research has shown that these feminist interventions are met with scepticism about the legitimacy of their affective engagement with games (harvey & shepherd 2016), especially when it does not meet the criteria of adequate passionate love for the medium. other work demonstrates the centrality of women’s affective labour both within game play (aubrey 2013, chess 2016) and related to feminist games-based activism (harvey & fisher 2016). affective discourses of love and hate produce and solidify intense attachments between subjects, bodies, spaces and communities (ahmed 2012), which is central to understanding the ways the above-mentioned digital campaigns link to broader contemporary political climate and its deployment of white supremacist rhetoric. what this paper contributes is a sense of the affective engagement with digital games that is not captured within the predominant polarizing frames of love and hateof sadness, hope, friendship, community, and grim determination, supported by networked publics. in this talk, i argue that a grounded consideration of feminist and interventionist practices is necessary to bypass the tendency to focus on successes and failures, inroads and backlashes, social justice warriors and snowflakes when discussing these networked publics of gaming. drawing on three collaborative research project undertaken within the ‘feminists in games’ network over the last six years, i provide local nuance and context to the affective economies of feminist organizing and activism in digital games. in the above projects, qualitative interviews and participatory action research within both informal and formal digital games education contexts has highlighted the deeply affective ways in which women in games negotiate virulent and violent hate and harassment. these actions range in scale from individual mentorship to community-wide initiatives to network-wide organizing, but what characterizes (and what has yet to be examined in detail) is their negotiation of networked affective publics in their organizing. where the focus has been on reddit, twitter, 4chan and 8chan for their designed affordances allowing for antifeminist harassment, this talk highlights how these and other digital media sites and platforms are mobilized for feminist engagement and affective support. through this analysis, i make the provocation that the concept of a ‘feminist internet’ is not a fantasy but already exists, though to address it as such requires a different, smallscale, more local methodology that can highlight practices rendered invisible in dominant discourse and research (hill collins 2000). as such, this consideration of feminist networks in digital games highlights both conceptual and methodological questions to consider when examining politics, resistance, and activism in contemporary digital publics. references anable a (2013) casual games, time management, and the work of affect. ada: a journal of gender, new media, and technology 2. braithwaite a (2014) ‘seriously, get out’: feminists on the forums and the war(craft) on women. new media & society 16(5): 703-718. braithwaite a (2016) it’s about ethics in games journalism? gamergaters and geek masculinity. social media + society 2(4). chess s & shaw a (2014) a conspiracy of fishes, or, how we learned to stop worrying about #gamergate and embrace hegemonic masculinity. journal of broadcasting & electronic media 59(1): 208-220. chess s (2016) a time for play: interstitial time, invest/express games, and feminine leisure style. new media & society, onlinefirst. consalvo m (2012) confronting toxic gamer culture: a challenge for feminist game studies scholars. ada: a journal of gender, new media, and technology 1. fron j, fullerton t, morie jf & pearce c (2007) the hegemony of play. situated play: proceedings of the 2007 digital games research association conference, tokyo, japan, pp. 308-319. available online at: http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/the%20hegemony%20of%20play.pdf harvey a & fisher, s (2016) growing pains: intergenerational feminisms in digital games. feminist media studies, special anniversary issue on intergenerational feminisms, 16(4): 648-662. harvey a & shepherd t (2016) when passion isn’t enough: gender, affect and credibility in digital games design. international journal of cultural studies, onlinefirst. hill collins, p (2000) black feminist thought. 2nd edition. new york and london: routledge. huntemann n (2015) no more excuses: using twitter to challenge the symbolic annihilation of women in games. feminist media studies 15(1): 164-167. jenson j & de castell s. (2013) tipping points: marginality, misogyny, and videogames. journal of curriculum theorizing 29(2): 72-81. massanari a (2015) #gamergate and the fappening: how reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. new media & society, onlinefirst. mortensen te (2016.) anger, fear, and games: the long event of #gamergate. games & culture, onlinefirst. salter a & blodgett b (2012) hypermasculinity & dickwolves: the contentious role of women in the new gaming public. journal of broadcasting & electronic media 56(3): 401-416. paper 2: individual academic networks on facebook and feminist ethics of care nathan rambukkana wilfred laurier university this paper explores facebook as a tool for forming personal and individual academic networks of support and resource sharing, from a feminist perspective. lee rainie and barry wellman (2012) define networked individualism as “the ways in which people connect, communicate, and exchange information” as individuals, rather than as members of “large hierarchical bureaucracies and small, densely knit groups such as households, communities, and workgroups” (p. 6–7). mobilizing the analogy of an operating system, they note that: the social network operating system is personal—the individual is at the autonomous center just as she is reaching out from her computer; multiuser— people are interacting with numerous diverse others; multitasking—people are doing several things; and multithreaded—they are doing them more or less simultaneously (p.7) individual social networks are powerful organizing forces in modern, increasingly technologically mediated, life, and a particular case of this is how individual social networks are mobilized by academics. there has been some exploration of how social media connections can support academics in their professional and personal lives. rainie and wellman (2012, p. 4), for example discuss how internet enabled linkages and connections (email, websites, posts, online food ordering, paypal donations) as well as more traditional media (the telephone, pictures) helped an academic couple who suffered a pair of overlapping severe illnesses to connect with diffuse networks of aid and support during a time of need (p.4). similarly, communication scholar jonathan sterne (2009) used his blog (with reposts on facebook) as a way to discuss his battle with thyroid cancer, and simultaneous exploration of the world of online cancer support communities, a narrative that was at once personal and professional, acting as a model for academics with serious illness navigating the canadian healthcare system. similarly, sterne has used both social media (2014) and journal articles (2011) to expand mentorship on academic professionalization to students beyond his immediate graduate program, a growing trend (see for example kelsky, 2017). others have talked about how twitter can be used as a powerful backchannel during academic conferences (reinhardt, ebner, beham, & costa, 2009), how twitter can be used to perform academic identities (singh, 2013), and how hashtags might be mobilized broadly for enabling academic research and community formation (singh, 2015). building on this work, my paper is a consideration of the role facebook has played in my own academic formation and career, in both professional and personal ways. while the role of facebook as a pedagogical tool has been well explored (de villers, 2010; deil-amen, 2015) its significant role for academics bears further consideration. the “virtual togetherness” (bakardjieva, 2004) enabled by network technology allows us to create forms of “digital intimacy” (rambukkana, 2015) that can connect us across geographies and contexts. social media has the ability to create networks of “shared resources and support” (baym, 2015, p. 91) including enabling social integration and network support (p. 93), emotional support (p. 93), esteem support (p. 94), informational support (p. 94), shared identities (p. 96), and the facilitation of interpersonal relationships (p.99). for academics, these connections can enable the following forms of support and connection: creation and extension of broad academic, institutional, and disciplinary networks; emotional support during difficult periods, such as writing the dissertation, the job hunt, tenure review, and personal crises; esteem support for those with “imposter syndrome” or who are disheartened by rejections or failures; information sharing on everything from job hunting resources, to sharing research materials, to legal advice; shared identities and a feeling of diffuse but supportive collegiality; and the development and maintenance of specific interpersonal relationships across institutions, career levels, and even international borders. moreover, in addition to enabling all of the above, as a platform (montfort & bogost, 2009a, 2009b), facebook’s affordances for sharing news and other links, messaging, specialty group and page creation, and file sharing enable users to collaborate, coordinate and motivate each other's work and professional lives. this paper will employ a situated auto-ethnography of the author’s facebook practices as pertaining to academia based on their individual network that includes over 450 academics and comprises ma students; phd students, candidates, and graduates; sessional instructors; tenure-track, tenured, and full professors; and deans. it will elaborate facebook’s affordances for creating individual academic networks with a particular focus on how such networks might enable a “feminist ethics of care” (gilligan, 1982), in that such networks might have the ability to somewhat flatten the uneven power relations inherent to the academy, and help junior scholars to understand the sometime inscrutable world of professional academe. references bakaedjieva, m. (2004). vitrual togetherness: an everyday life perspective. in a. feenberg and d. barney (eds.), community in the digital age: philosophy and practice (pp. 121–142). lanham, ma: rowan and littlefield. baym, n. (2015). personal connections in the digital age (2nd ed). malden, ma: polity. deil-amen, r. (2015, december). changing the context of student engagement: using facebook to increase community college student persistence and success. teachers college record, 117. retrieved from https://works.bepress.com/reginadeil-amen/6/download/ gilligan, c. (1982). in a different voice. cambridge: harvard university press. kelsky, k. (2017). the professor is in. retrieved from http://theprofessorisin.com montfort, n., & bogost, i. (2009a, december 12–15). platform studies: frequently questioned answers. paper presented at digital arts and culture, irvine, california. ---. (2009b). racing the beam: the atari video game system. cambridge, ma: mit press. rainie, l., and wellman, b. (2012). networked: the new social operating system. cambridge, ma: mit press. rambukkana, n. (2015). from #racefail to #ferguson: the digital intimacies of raceactivist hashtag publics. the fibreculture journal: digital media + networks + transdisciplinary critique, 26. retrieved from http://twentysix.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-194-from-racefail-to-ferguson-thedigital-intimacies-of-race-activist-hashtag-publics/ reinhardt, w., ebner, m., beham, g., & costa, c. (2009). how people are using twitter during conferences. in v. hornung-prähauser & m. luckmann (eds.), creativity and innovation competencies on the web. proceeding of 5 edumedia conference (pp. 145–156). salzburg, austria. singh, s. s. (2015). hashtagging #highered. in n. rambukkana (ed.), hashtag publics: the power and politics of discursive networks (pp. 265–277). new york: peter lang. singh, s. s. (2013). tweeting to the choir: online performance and academic identity. selected papers of internet research, 13. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org/index.php/spir/article/view/835 sterne, j.. (2014, august). academe. retrieved from http://sterneworks.org/academe/ ---. (2011). the politics of academic labor in comunication studies: a re-introduction. international journal of communication, 5: 1853–1872. ---. (2009, december 9). cancer blog! super bon! retrieved from http://superbon.net/?p=985 de villers, m. r. (2010). academic use of a group on facebook: initial findings and perceptions. in: proceedings of the 2010 informing science and it education (insite) conference. cassino, italy, june 2010. retrieved from http://uir.unisa.ac.za/handle/10500/13225 paper 3: of female friendships and fabriculture: deliberate acts of kindness in online spaces jessica bain university of leicester ‘digital dressmaking’ (bain, 2016), is a growing movement in which sewists utilise online technologies as a core part of their sewing practice. converging across platforms like instagram, blogs, pinterest, twitter and youtube, largely female digital dressmakers engage in a range of practices which serve to connect a traditionally material craft and new digital technologies. tekkobe (2013) has noted that the online spaces predominantly inhabited by women, such as pinterest, have been normatively assessed by those in the tech sector as valueless; as frivolous and feminine time-wastage, compared to the serious, valuable and apparently masculine work of content creation (p.382). yet digital dressmaking arguably complicates this “typical association of masculinity/digital culture and femininity/fabriculture” (bratich & busch, 2011), and contests exclusionist and gendered discourses which depict women as passive technology consumers, not creators. the digital dressmaking ‘community’ brings visibility to an historically ignored domestic craft through the informal creation of digital archives of home sewing. and, in creating these, participants also strive to create a space which celebrates women: their various forms and figures, and the friendships which are central to the fabric of many women’s lives. in a context of increasingly hostile and negative public discourses in which trolling, harassment, bullying and abuse online have become normalised (for eg. inter alia: adams, 2011; lewis, 2012; arthur & kiss, 2013; jane 2014a), one of the most striking features of the digital dressmaking community is its apparent inclusivity and positivity: the online spaces populated by sewists appear to be profoundly kind ones. drawing on data from a two-year long ethnographic project conducted both onand offline, this paper interrogates the practices of the digital dressmaking community, focusing in particular on identifying its modality of kindness, and asking more broadly, what the practice of kindness might look like in a digital environment. a lack of kindness, particularly online, has received considerable scholarly and press attention of late (herring et al., 2002; marcotte, 2013; jane 2014b; gibbs, 2015; hardaker & mcglashan, 2016), and as philips and taylor (2009) have noted, “kindness is often seen as either a cover story, or a failure of nerve” (p. 6). kindness, niceness, and even empathy are perceived as signs of weakness, and related to this, as largely feminized characteristics to be viewed with scepticism (philips & taylor, 2009). in such a context, the apparent ‘networked niceness’ of digital dressmakers might be similarly critiqued as merely a performance of a particular kind of hegemonic femininity, or perhaps more cynically as an example of what alison winch (2013) has called ‘girlfriend culture’; a friend community bound up in a postfeminist sensibility where friendships between women are strategic and based on a girlfriend gaze that at once invites intimacy, but which is ultimately intended to control. i would instead suggest that in an online environment characterised by worsening vitriol, particularly towards women, we can perhaps conceptualise the behaviour of those in the digital dressmaking community in another way: as consciously practiced form of kindness which functions as a form of quiet activism (hackney, 2013; solomon, 2013; corbett, forthcoming) and intentionally disrupts the more routinely negative spaces in which women find themselves online. such a practice is arguably a radical act which also challenges the internalised misogyny typically seen in media representations of female relationships, where women are pitted against one another and ‘cattiness’ and snarking are common (douglas, 2010). such practices may also be considered to function more widely as a form of ‘cyber-feminism’ (minahan & cox, 2007) empowering female digital ‘immigrants’ to find a voice online, negotiate technology and share material labour to generate economic and social capital. the paper argues that there is value in exploring spaces such as these, which might enable such female-centric friendships to flourish and which offer opportunities for deliberate acts of kindness. in a scholarly context in which the dominant research discourse places particular value on large-scale, typically quantitative approaches to public/civic online interactions (kitchin, 2014), if we overlook more domestic, small-scale digital practices which may enable various affective relationships, we risk reproducing the earlier critiques of women’s tv genres and entertainment formats which were often derided for their ‘feminine’ concerns with emotions, domesticity and/or the ordinary (eg: brunsdon 1999, 1993; huyssen 1986; lury 1995; patterson, 2016). attention to online hatred is, of course, crucial. it is dangerous, misogynistic, and is experienced as terrorising by victims. but as this paper will suggest, there is value, too, in interrogating spaces where alternative, kinder conversations are happening. references adams, t. (2011), “how the internet created an age of rage”, the observer july 24 2011. arthur, c & j. kiss (2013), “twitter abuse: what can be done to stop trolling?”, the guardian, 29 july, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jul/29/twitter-abusedealing-with-trolls-options bain, j. (2016), “‘darn right i'm a feminist…sew what?” the politics of contemporary home dressmaking: sewing, slow fashion and feminism”, women’s studies international forum 54, pp. 57-66. bratich, j., & brush, h. (2011), “fabricating activism: craft-work, popular culture, gender” utopian studies, 22(2), 233–260. brunsdon, c. (1999) “pedagogies of the feminine: feminist teaching and women’s genres.” in feminism and cultural studies, edited by morag shiach, 343–367. oxford: oxford university press. brunsdon, c. (1993), “identity in feminist television criticism.” media, culture & society 15 (2): 309–320 corbett, s. (forthcoming) how to be a craftivist: the art of gentle protest, london: unbound. douglas, s. (2010). enlightened sexism: the seductive message that feminism's work is done. new york: times books. gibbs, s. (2015), “troll uses twitter adverts to urge transgender people to kill themselves”, the guardian, 20 may https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/20/troll-uses-twitter-adverts-to-urgetrans-people-to-kill-themselves hackney, f. (2013) “quiet activism and the new amateur”, design and culture, 5:2, 169-193 hardaker, c. and m. mcglashan (2016), "real men don't hate women": twitter rape threats and group identity, journal of pragmatics 91:1, pp. 80-93. herring, s., job-sluder, k., scheckler, r., barab, s (2002), searching for safety online: managing "trolling" in a feminist forum information society, 18 (5), pp. 371-384. hunt, e. (2016), “ ‘what law am i breaking?’ how a facebook troll came undone”, the guardian, 29 july, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jul/30/how-facebook-trollcame-undone huyssen, a. ( 1986), “mass culture as woman: modernism’s other.” in: studies in entertainment: critical approaches to mass culture, edited by tania modleski, pp. 188– 207. bloomington: indiana university press. jane, e. a. (2014a), "your a ugly, whorish, slut": understanding e-bile”, feminist media studies 14:4, pp. 531-546 jane, e.a. (2014b), “back to the kitchen, cunt: speaking the unspeakable about online misogyny”, continuum 28:4, pp. 558-570. kitchin, r. (2014), “big data, new epistemologies and paradigm shifts”, big data and society, april-june, pp. 1-12. lewis, h. (2012, june 12) “dear the internet, this is why you can’t have anything nice. newstatesman, http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/internet/2012/06/dear-internetwhy-you-cant-haveanything-nice lury, c, (1995), “the rights and wrongs of culture: issues of theory and methodology.” in feminist cultural theory: process and production, edited by beverley skeggs, 33–45. manchester, nh: manchester university press. marcotte, a. (2012, june 13) “online misogyny: can’t ignore it, can’t not ignore it”, slate.com. http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/06/13/online_misogyny_reflects_women_s_r ealities_though_in_a_cruder_way_than_is_customary_offline_.html. minahan, s., & cox, j.w. (2007). stitch'nbitch: cyberfeminism, a third place and the new materiality. journal of material culture, 12(1), 5–21. patterson, n. (2016) “emotional scholar-fandoms: negotiating researcher identity in a study with reality show participants”, continuum, 30:2, 195-205. philips, a. & taylor, b (2009) on kindness, london: penguin books. solomon, e., (2013). craftivism and the professional-amateur: a literature review on do it yourself activist craft culture. psychnology journal, 11(1), 11 – 20. tekobbe, c. k. (2013) “a site for fresh eyes”, information, communication & society, 16:3, 381-396 winch, a. (2013), girlfriends and postfeminist sisterhood, basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. paper 4: ‘intimate’ ethics and imagined subjects in the study of female fandoms online. natasha whiteman university of leicester this paper takes as its focus one aspect of the ethical challenges of studying ‘networked niceness.’ it starts from the perhaps unfashionable position that research relationships – whether online or off are always fictitious, mythologised and fetishised by their participants. given this, our identifications with the other how these others are brought into being in our engagement with them as well as in our accounts of them, and how “their” ethics are presented as informing “ours” must be a key concern for any critical consideration of the formation of ethics in the online study of affective publics. this position can be seen to be unpopular given the valuing of notions of participation, reciprocity, compassion and care, and looks towards indigenous ethics in writing on qualitative inquiry (see, for example, denzin and giardina, 2007). it also presents a challenge to the growing emphasis on the “human” in online research. as buchanan and zimmer note, “as the internet has evolved into a more social and communicative tool and venue, […] ethical issues have shifted from purely data driven to more humancentered” (2016, np). yet, to date, the ways that ethical values are attributed or denied in the objectification of online subjects of research – and how these inform the methodological approaches of internet scholars remains an under-examined topic. instead the general referent point ‘[human] subject’ is typically regarded as an unproblematic entity in terms of its inherent ethical status. this has focused researchers’ attention onto the rights and protection of individuals, but leaves unchallenged the objectification of ethical others in qualitative online research and how these shape ethical practice. such consideration is particularly necessary in the study of online practices whose value can be seen to be defined in binary terms: established in opposition to de/legitimated other (even if this is valuing is implicit). in the study of deviant online groups researchers face the challenge of identifying (or not) with an unlikeable other. in contrast, in the study of what appears to resemble “online niceness” – communities whose values and actions may seem more similar to our own world views, the challenge is avoiding the lure of apparently ‘easy’ identifications. in both such extremes there is a need for a rupturing of sceptical/earnest identification with the other, in order to breach any slippage into either pathologising or celebratory positions. accounts of research have demonstrated how these sorts of distinctions can be unsettled during research – the way that others whose interests we may despise can surprisingly reveal themselves to be likeable (blee, 2003), and how those with whom we think we identify may unexpectedly challenge our identification with them (bott, 2010). there are also dangers in identifying too quickly with particular points of ethical authority in research. in academic writing this has often been expressed in reference to the influence of proceduralised ethical frameworks (koro-ljungberg et al 2007; canella and lincoln 2007), rather than a concern with over-identifying with those we study. yet the dangers of reifying the communities that we study have also been explored: as hammersley and traianou note, approaches to an ethics of care that appear to rest on “[…] the establishment of a communal or solidaristic form of social relation between researcher and researched […]” can be totalising in their ‘envisioning’ of the researched” (2014, np). against this backdrop, this talk will seek to question the ‘human’ basis of researchers’ affective relationships to the researched in the study of online networked niceness. my empirical focus will be on the study of women-centered online fandoms (bury, 2005; hellekson and busse, 2006). such spaces have long been defined by fan studies scholars in contrast to more hostile and constraining alternatives; presented as examples of “online haven[s]” where women “can build meaningful interpersonal relationships and discuss issues like sexism, fashion and desire among ‘sisters’.” (wakefield, 2001,136) and celebrated as positive spaces for identity exploration beyond normative constraints (lothian, busse and reid, 2007). yet female fans have also been, and continue to be, both pathologised in society and marginalised in academic research (dare-edwards, 2015) in ways that can be seen to be part of a wider and “persistent denigration of women’s media” (anderson, 2012, 241). given this, it is perhaps unsurprising that such settings have been configured by fan studies researchers as vulnerable spaces that require protection from scholarly exploitation. the need to cultivate intimacy in the study of these settings has been promoted through the privileging of certain research choices (particularly the use of participation over observation), a suspicion of methodological and analytical distance, and a privileging of the ethics of the researched as a point of ethical authority (see kelley (2016) on “goodwill” ethics, and busse and hellekson (2012) on the idea of “fans first”). if our interest is in the “envisioning” of online subjects and communities, the nature of the affective discourses at play in this work might demand our attention. these tend to configure fan subjects as being both knowable and like us; as kelley notes “[..] we will be most effective as researchers when we reach out as emotional and embodied humans to the emotional and embodied humans on the other sides of our computer screens.” (2016, np). yet the equivalence between ‘them’ and ‘us’ that this suggests is inescapably based on a rationalisation of the other. drawing from stephen fuchs’ discussion of how systems become formulated into persons or things (2009), this paper will therefore explore the ethical implications for both fan studies research and the online study of ‘networked niceness’ more broadly of the idea that any judgement as to the status of the researched is an objectification that must be interrogated. references anderson, t. (2012) “still kissing their posters goodnight: female fandom and the politics of popular music” participations: journal of audience & reception studies, 9(2), 239 – 264. blee, k. m. (2003) “studying the enemy” in barry glassner and rosanna hertz, our studies, ourselves: sociologists’ lives and work, cary, us: oxford uni press, pp 1323. bott, esther (2010) ‘favourites and others: reflexivity and the shaping of subjectivities and data in qualitative research’ qualitative research, 10(2), 159-173. buchanan, e., & zimmer, m. (2016) “internet research ethics,” stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-internet-research/ last accessed 25 august 2016. bury, r. (2005) cyberspaces of their own: female fandoms online (digital formations; v. 25). new york: peter lang. busse, k., & hellekson, k., (2012), ‘identity, ethics, and fan privacy’. in larsen, k., & zubernis, l. (eds), fan culture: theory/practice, newcastle: cambridge scholars publishing, pp. 38–56. canella, g. s., & lincoln, y. (2007) predatory vs. dialogic ethics: constructing an illusion or ethical or ethical practice as the core of research methods. qualitative inquiry 13(3): 315-335. dare-edwards, h. (2015) interrogating tweendom online: ‘fangirl as pathology,’ gender/age, and icarly fandom. doctoral thesis, university of east anglia. denzin, n. & giardina, m. (2007) 'introduction: ethical futures in qualitative research', in denzin, n. & giardina, m. (eds) ethical futures in qualitative research: decolonizing the politics of knowledge, walnut creek ca, left coast press, p.9-44. fuchs, s. (2009) against essentialism, cambridge, us: harvard university press. hammersley, m & traianou a. (2014) “an alternative ethics? justice and care as guiding principles for qualitative research.” sociological research online, 19 (3), 24 http://www.socresonline.org.uk/19/3/24.html hellekson, k., & busse, k. (2006) fan fiction and fan communities in the age of the internet. jefferson, nc: mcfarland & company, inc. kelley, b., (2016) “towards a goodwill ethics of online research methods.” transformative works and cultures, 22, np. koro-ljungberg, m., gemignani, m., brodeur, c. & kmiec, c. (2007) the technologies of normalization and self: thinking about irbs and extrinsic research ethics with foucault. qualitative inquiry 13(8): 1075-1094. lothian, a., busse, k., & reid, r. a. (2007) “’yearning void and infinite potential’; online slash fandom as queer female space.” english language note, 45(2), 103 – 111 wakefield, s. (2001) “your sister in st. scully”: an electronic community of female fans of the x-files” journal of popular film and television, 29(3), 130 – 137. aoir2020.sipley.final.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): sipley, g. (2020, october). ‘lurker’ literacies: living in/through facebook neighborhood groups. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ‘lurker’ literacies: living in/through neighborhood facebook groups gina sipley suny nassau community college/ hofstra university understanding ‘lurker’ literacies although mythologized as a fringe or deviant behavior, ‘lurking,’ or passive participation in an online group, has become a regular part of the way we lead our lives online. in a discussion with jenkins and ito (2016), danah boyd questions the current emphasis on active online participation. she posits two salient questions: “can someone be a valuable and participatory lurker?” and “what does high quality listening look like?”(jenkins, itō, & boyd, 2016, p.112). from a literacy studies perspective, “high quality listening” is a metaphor for reading, and reading is a highly active process. in facebook groups, an optional feature for people to virtually gather around a common interest, where membership can be measured in the thousands, it is far more common to ‘lurk’, then it is to respond in words, shares, likes, memes, or emoji to content we have read. to ‘lurk’ or engage in these so-called passive online reading practices is not neutral. just as no act of reading or writing can ever be neutral (street, 1993). a reader’s relationship with the verbal symbols on the page is an “experiential reservoir” of personal, social, historical, and political influences (rosenblatt, 1969). this relationship between text and reader is not fixed, but continually shifting and evolving. rosenblatt’s work pre-dates the rise of social networking technologies and the study of digital literacies; however, this does not mean that her work is not relevant to the study of facebook groups. new technologies mean new ways of reading, writing, and communicating and these technologies proliferate as a response to society’s increasing desire to engage. as street (1993) explains, a literacy practice is more than an observable behavior it is the way language is used in everyday life; it involves values, attitudes, feelings, and social relationships. the popular practice of ‘lurking’ in a neighborhood facebook group affects personal and professional relationships among people living in the same geographic community, even if these effects cannot be visually captured using vanity metrics, a term used to describe the quantifiable capture of likes, shares, and comments, that algortihmically ascribe value to a post. despite the popularity of facebook groups, they are just beginning to be studied by scholars and ‘lurkers’ have not yet been the site of a socio-cultural or transactional literacy study. the facebook group feature is particularly worthy of investigation because extensive analyses performed prior to the u.s. midterm elections found that it is facebook’s groups “that represent the greatest short-term threat to election news and information integrity”(albright, 2018). my irb approved dissertation research, which will be completed by the end of october 2020, examines ‘lurking’ in nyc suburban neighborhood facebook groups during the covid-19 pandemic. through a qualitative study of facebook users enrolled in the same neighborhood facebook groups, this study seeks to describe both the ‘lurker’ literacy practices of facebook group users and to understand if and how the features of the facebook social media platform encourage these literacy practices. given that neighborhood groups are intended for people who are in the same geographic area, many members of the group know one another offline and in real life. this adds an additional layer of connectivity worthy of analysis. since ‘lurkers’ are groups that are typically not included in academic studies, this research will have broad appeal to scholars across the social sciences. when scholars only examine the role of active contributors and ignore the literacy practices of the silent majority of ‘lurkers’, their findings present an incomplete portrait of the way people engage in participatory culture and how these online experiences influence our lives offline. methodology this two-part qualitative study used community mapping of self-reported literacy practices and extensive interviews of facebook users in new york city suburban neighborhood facebook groups to describe the literacy practices involved in ‘lurking’ and to describe the facebook features, policies, and transactions that may encourage ‘lurker’ literacies. the study addresses the questions: 1) in what ways do so-called facebook 'lurkers' engage in literacy practices?; 2) what makes these individuals choose to engage in these literacy practices on facebook?; 3) in the minds of these facebook users, what role might facebook, itself, as a social media platform, play in their decision to ‘lurk’ and in the creation of 'lurker' literacies?; 4) from the participants’ perspective, what other factors might influence their choices about how publicly to engage in literacy practices within facebook? the study began with a general query to the 15 neighborhood facebook groups, spanning three local areas of varying socioeconomic circumstances, of which i am already a member. the total number of people i am connected to across all 15 groups is 102,793. community mapping invited these 102,793 facebook group members to use padlet to anonymously list and tally the literacy practices they engage in while ‘lurking’ (defined in the study as reading, but not commenting, liking, or sharing facebook group content). since ‘lurking’ is a context specific behavior that all users engage in, responses from any facebook user are valuable. a preliminary list of these ‘lurker’ literacy practices included: researching; saving posts for future annotation and curation outside of the facebook platform; attending local events; having a face-to-face conversation with someone about group content; supporting local businesses; using an alternate social media platform to post about content learned via a facebook group; taking political action. i then shared a post to each of the 15 facebook groups inviting members who participated in the community mapping to contact me for follow up interviews and thus far i have conducted interviews with 16 people. utilizing the aoir guidelines for ethical research, participants reflected on reasons why they chose to engage in these literacy practices and in what contexts. findings the interview data continues to be collected, coded, and analyzed with nvivo software at the time of this publication. preliminary findings from social mapping indicate that individuals engage in a wide range of literacy practices, including: receptive reading to better understand divergent opinions; low-commitment entertainment in-between daily activities; engaging in face-to-face and text message conversation about private group content; supporting local businesses; taking screenshots; and researching and curating information. interviews revealed that participants choose to engage in these so-called passive practices because they want to understand oppositional opinions, but also minimize the risk of professional or economic consequences for expressing an unpopular opinion and resist arguing with their neighbors. individuals shift from passive to active participation, such as commenting on a thread, if they feel they have an expertise in a particular area, if they know the original poster in real life, or if they genuinely believe that what they post will be helpful to the group. facebook features that encourage this kind of participation include limited implementation of the seen feature; save function; follow thread; use of real names and avatars; friends of friends limits; algorithmic frequency in newsfeed. references albright, j. (2018, november 16). the shadow organizing of facebook groups – the micro-propaganda machine – medium. retrieved from https://medium.com/s/the-micropropaganda-machine/the-2018-facebook-midterms-part-ii-shadow-organizationc97de1c54c65 jenkins, h., itō, m., & boyd, d. (2016). participatory culture in a networked era: a conversation on youth, learning, commerce, and politics. cambridge, uk: polity press. rosenblatt, l. m. (1969). towards a transactional theory of reading. journal of reading behavior, 1(1), 31–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/10862969609546838 street, b. (1993). introduction: the new literacy studies. in b. street (ed.), crosscultural approaches to literacy (pp. 1-21). new york, ny: cambridge university press. aoir2020-submission-final-evolutionfacebooksgraphapi.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): burkhardt, m., helmond, a., seitz, t., & van der vlist, f. n. (2020, october 2831). the evolution of facebook’s graph api. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the evolution of facebook’s graph api marcus burkhardt university of siegen anne helmond university of amsterdam tatjana seitz university of siegen fernando n. van der vlist utrecht university / university of siegen (authors listed in alphabetical order) introduction the facebook–cambridge analytica data scandal continues to occupy the public debate about data privacy and protection. central to the ongoing controversy are facebook’s data-sharing practices with third parties and their use of data for targeted advertising in political campaigns. the platform responded by changing its policies, more strictly governing third-party data access via facebook’s graph api, and by removing particular targeting options from facebook’s marketing api for programmatic advertisers. facebook’s application programming interfaces (apis) are core to many ongoing concerns and enable third-party app developers to access data and functionality. in the case of cambridge analytica, the collection of data about millions of people via their friends via the friends api was not a bug but a feature of how the api was designed to work. understanding how the platform and its apis evolve and how a leading platform such as facebook responds to issues and concerns requires looking closely and empirically at the evolution of access points, data structures, and graph data structures (cf. barrett and kreiss, 2019; helmond et al., 2019). therefore, this paper contributes an in-depth technical and empirical perspective on the evolution of virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 virtual event facebook’s graph api in its entirety from its introduction as the facebook api (beta) in 2006 onwards, and how it evolved into one of the most significant web apis and an integral part of contemporary advertising infrastructures and web development cultures. as we show, key changes in the graph api evolution are characterized by phases of experimentation, standardization, commercialization, and regulation. our study is unique in (i) its level of empirical historical granularity, utilising and reconstructing the entire collection of available materials on the facebook platform in the internet archive, (ii) in outlining an innovative research methodology for studying the evolution of a platform in terms of its apis, and (iii) in providing a granular empirically informed history of facebook’s graph api. api studies web apis have been core research objects for studying the politics of platforms and data sharing (e.g. bodle, 2010), their function as data collection devices (e.g. lomborg and bechmann, 2014), as elements of infrastructure (e.g. raetzsch et al., 2019; helmond et al., 2019), and the research politics of increasingly restricted apis (e.g. bruns, 2019). however, few studies focus specifically on the technicity of apis, such as on data representations, structures, or governance. yet the technicity of apis is crucial for understanding the politics of data sharing and how apis represent and structure phenomena and temporarily stabilise them (cf. pridmore, 2016). therefore, instead of using apis as an umbrella term for data retrieval in general, we conduct the necessary historical technical fieldwork (cf. rieder et al., 2015) for examining the evolving architecture and interfaces of facebook’s popular web apis. with our historical case study, we contribute to the emerging scholarship on the evolution of digital platforms, apis, and governance (e.g. barrett and kreiss, 2019; helmond & van der vlist, 2019; helmond et al., 2019). approach our empirical historical analysis of facebook’s graph api is based on the entire corpus of available archived developer documentation held by the internet archive wayback machine (august 2006–february 2020). this covers the initial beta facebook api up to the current version 6.0 of the graph api, which was scraped from the live web. based on this sizable corpus of archived web sources, we reconstructed the structure of the entire graph api at different levels of granularity: from the overall structure to the individual objects or endpoints, to the associated properties, connections, and parameters or specifications of those objects. to reconstruct and analyse the overall structure of the graph api, we considered the networked structure of the reference documentation pages over time. we also relied on facebook’s own account of change as documented in its changelogs, in which changes to the graph api and marketing api are announced. these include announcements of new features, so-called breaking changes and deprecations, and information about removed or restricted data fields and edges, which can be considered important traces of governance. looking at the evolving structure of the graph api, we found that facebook continues to expand with messenger and acquisitions of atlas, instagram, and whatsapp. although these remain separated on the ‘front-end’, they are increasingly integrated at the ‘back-end’ as reflected in the structure of the graph api, which now is facebook’s unified foundational data infrastructure for app and business development. we further examined how some of the most connective nodes in the graph api – the user and the page – evolved. these objects represent the profile pages of users and business, organisations and public figures. how are these objects conceptualised, what kind of relations can they enter into, and which operations can be performed on them? and how did the user and page evolve? importantly for facebook, whose core business model is based on advertising, the user is also a targetable user. therefore, we looked at the evolving targeting options available to target users on facebook via the marketing api, which has been a core component of the graph api since 2012. these options provide another account of the user and its representation by facebook: targetable fields do not only consist of information provided by users on their profiles but also many calculated data derivatives beyond the user’s control. this approach also allows us to trace specific targeting options of interest, such as the controversial options related to race, gender, and housing exclusions (e.g. angwin and parris, 2016). a scalable reading of apis based on the analysis, we provide a “scalable reading” (weitin, 2017) of the evolution of facebook’s graph api which provides insights in how data and data flows are governed through changes in data structures and permissions. by considering the evolving structures of apis and individual data objects, we may develop further empirically informed critiques of platforms, apis, and their data. references angwin j and parris t (2016) facebook lets advertisers exclude users by race. https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers-exclude-users-by-race barrett b and kreiss d (2019) platform transience: changes in facebook’s policies, procedures, and affordances in global electoral politics. internet policy review 8(4). https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/platform-transience-changes-facebookspolicies-procedures-and-affordances-global bodle r (2011) regimes of sharing: open apis, interoperability, and facebook. information, communication & society 14(3): 320–337. doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2010.542825. bruns a (2019) after the ‘apicalypse’: social media platforms and their fight against critical scholarly research. information, communication & society 22(11): 1544–1566. doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2019.1637447. helmond a and van der vlist fn (2019) social media and platform historiography: challenges and opportunities. tmg – journal for media history 22(1): 6–34. doi: 10.18146/tmg.434. helmond a, nieborg db and van der vlist fn (2019) facebook’s evolution: development of a platform-as-infrastructure. internet histories 3(2): 123–146. doi: 10.1080/24701475.2019.1593667. lomborg s and bechmann a (2014) using apis for data collection on social media. the information society 30(4): 256–265. doi: 10.1080/01972243.2014.915276. pridmore j (2016) a social api for that: market devices and the stabilization of digital identities. in: van der ploeg i and pridmore j (eds) digitizing identities: doing identity in a networked world. routledge. raetzsch c, pereira g, vestergaard ls, et al. (2019) weaving seams with data: conceptualizing city apis as elements of infrastructures. big data & society 6(1). doi: 10.1177/2053951719827619. rieder b, abdulla r, poell t, et al. (2015) data critique and analytical opportunities for very large facebook pages: lessons learned from exploring “we are all khaled said”. big data & society 2(2). doi: 10.1177/2053951715614980. weitin, t (2017) scalable reading. zeitschrift für literaturwissenschaft und linguistik. 47(1), 1–6. doi: 10.1007/s41244-017-0048-4. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): henman, p. (2019, october 2-5). assessing ethical ai-based decision-making. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. assessing ethical ai-based decision-making: towards an applied analytical framework paul henman university of queensland introduction globally, there is strong enthusiasm for using artificial intelligence (ai) in government decision making. in activities as diverse as assessing individuals’ national security risk, allocating social housing services, deciding parole applications, and identifying tax fraud, ai is being promoted and adopted as an efficient, effective, unbiased and errorfree approach to government decision making. simultaneously, people are expressing words of caution that this algorithmic approach is not without significant downsides including bias, exacerbating discrimination and inequalities, and reducing government accountability and transparency (e.g. eubanks 2017; pasquale 2015). consequently, there has been a flurry of work striving to identify challenges, principles, policies, regulations and institutions for enacting ethical ai within government, and society more broadly (e.g. uk, 2018; australia, 2018; council of europe, 2018; campolo et al 2017). these ethical ai frameworks operate primarily at the abstract level of issues and dimensions. an elusive dimension in these discussions and proposals is applied or practical mechanisms and methodologies by which specific ais can be assessed as un/ethical. we therefore remain poorly equipped to assess the ethics of an particular ai based on its design and operation. one approach suggested by australia’s department of industry, innovation and science (2019) provides a “toolkit for ethical ai” that includes impact assessments, risk assessments, review, best practice guidelines, industry standards, collaboration, monitoring, improvement and recourse mechanisms, and consultation. the uk government recently published a guide to using artificial intelligence in the public sector (2019), which focuses on assessing, planning and managing ai, and using ai ethically and safely. the purpose of this paper is to complement and extend these works, by proposing an more practical analytical framework that gets closer to the actual characteristics of an ai, and which can help guide the design, building and assessment of ai-based decision making. the analytical tool is constituted by a series of key questions that in turn can highlight areas for caution or concern. an applied analytical framework for assessing ethical ai ai based decision making can be summarized as: ai decision making = (data * context) + code + (use * context) an ai algorithm requires code, a set of instructions, which operates on input data to produce output data (and actions). such input data and the writing of the code are outcomes of the context in which they originate. the effects of the algorithm are intimately tied to how the algorithmic output is used and its wider context. data ai-based decisions are determined on the basis of data. algorithms define the data structures on which they operate. bias is often listed as an ethical challenge of ai decision making (e.g. noble 2018; campolo et al 2017). the nature of data used to design an ai, as input data for learning, and to provide decisions, is a source for bias. what is known or not known, and the structure of that knowledge or data ontology matters (davis 2017, iliadis, 2018; züllighoven & keil-slawik 1992). as the nature of data and data categories provide the foundation for ai bias, identifying its data and categories are therefore central for assessing the ethicality of ai. does the ai incorporate social categories associated with disadvantage (e.g. sex, ethnicity/race, religion, sexuality)? are proxies for these used (e.g. names, place of birth, address, nationality)? data context the context of data generation and data for learning deeply shapes the quality and potential for bias in data. for example, critics of using ai in the criminal justice system argue that because criminal justice statistics arise out of a racially biased system, an ai trained on that data is likely to make decisions that reproduce that racial bias (c.f. noble 2018). could the training set data be ‘biased’ (e.g. not representative, of poor quality, reflecting structural inequalities)? code algorithms execute operations based on a program or code. the code defines how input data is operated on in order to produce output data and/or actions. understanding how input data is used to determine outcomes is thus central for assessing the ethicality of ai. importantly, just because social categorical data is available, it does not necessarily follow that those categories have any effect on outcomes. does the ai differentiate along social categories associated with disadvantage (e.g. sex, ethnicity/race, religion, sexuality)? if so, does it make scientific and/or ethical sense to treat individuals differently based on cohort characteristics? is the algorithm based on proxy data to make decisions (e.g. assuming neglect = abuse; student performance = teacher performance)? in traditional algorithms the relationships between input and output variables is defined by programmers and can be traced, whereas in learning algorithms these relationships are ‘learnt’ by trial and error in matching input data with a learning set of output data. consequently, in evaluating ai alternative approaches are needed, such as testing and reverse engineering (watcher et al 2018). use ai-based decision-making about individuals, necessarily involves differentiating between individuals. a key ethical overarching consideration is whether these decisions could increase (or ameliorate) social structures and inequalities, or increase (or reduce) overall societal harms (such as bombing in an urban war environment). does the ai decision involve (a redistribution of) an increase of ‘harms’ or disadvantages (particularly for disadvantaged groups)? use context considerations about the use context of ai based decision making include whether or not humans can intervene to stop an ai decision, reverse its impact (unlike diallo (2018) who was fired by an algorithm), appeal an ai decision, and seek redress. is human intervention possible in halting, reversing and correcting an ai-based decision? do subjects have the right to an explanation for an ai based decision? can subjects affected by an ai based decision effectively appeal and overturn that decision and seek appropriate readdress? conclusion building ethical ai is a widely agreed objective, but there is little understanding of how this might be achieved. developing applied analytical frameworks that can evaluate the design, development and operation of specific ai decision-making tools is an important and urgent task in achieving this objective. this paper analytical approach and series of questions can in turn be deployed as lickert scale questions to score an ai’s ethics. references australia. department of industry, innovation and science (2019) artificial intelligence: australia’s ethics framework – a discussion paper, canberra: diis, https://consult.industry.gov.au/strategic-policy/artificial-intelligence-ethicsframework/supporting_documents/artificialintelligenceethicsframeworkdiscussionpaper. pdf australia. human rights commissioner (2018) new technology and human rights, sydney: ahrc, tech.humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/201807/human%20rights%20and%20technology%20issues%20paper%20final.pdf. council of europe. parliamentary assembly (2018) algorithms and human rights, stasbourg: coe, rm.coe.int/algorithms-and-human-rights-study-on-the-human-rightsdimension-of-aut/1680796d10. campolo, a., sanfilippo, m., whittaker, m., & crawford, k. (2017). ai now 2017 report. new york university: ai now institute. davis, s. l. (2017). ‘the uncounted: politics of data and visibility in global health’. the international journal of human rights, 21(8), 1144-1163. diallo, i. (2018) ‘the machine fired me: no human could do a thing about it!’ idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me, accessed 25/02/19. eubanks, v. (2018). automating inequality. new york: st. martin's press. iliadis, a. (2018). ‘algorithms, ontology, and social progress’. global media communication, doi: 1742766518776688. pasquale, f. (2015). the black box society. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression. new york: nyu press. uk. house of lords. select committee on artificial intelligence. (2018). ai in the uk: ready, willing and able?, london: publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201719/ldselect/ldai/100/100.pdf uk. (2019) ‘a guide to using artificial intelligence in the public sector’, https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/a-guide-to-using-artificial-intelligence-in-thepublic-sector wachter, s., mittelstadt, b. d. m., & russell, c. (2018). ‘counterfactual explanations without opening the black box: automated decisions and the gdpr’. harvard journal of law and technology, 31(2). züllighoven, c. f. h., & keil-slawik, r. b. r. (1992). software development and reality construction. berlin: springer https://consult.industry.gov.au/strategic-policy/artificial-intelligence-ethics-framework/supporting_documents/artificialintelligenceethicsframeworkdiscussionpaper.pdf https://consult.industry.gov.au/strategic-policy/artificial-intelligence-ethics-framework/supporting_documents/artificialintelligenceethicsframeworkdiscussionpaper.pdf https://consult.industry.gov.au/strategic-policy/artificial-intelligence-ethics-framework/supporting_documents/artificialintelligenceethicsframeworkdiscussionpaper.pdf https://tech.humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/2018-07/human%20rights%20and%20technology%20issues%20paper%20final.pdf https://tech.humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/2018-07/human%20rights%20and%20technology%20issues%20paper%20final.pdf https://rm.coe.int/algorithms-and-human-rights-study-on-the-human-rights-dimension-of-aut/1680796d10 https://rm.coe.int/algorithms-and-human-rights-study-on-the-human-rights-dimension-of-aut/1680796d10 https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201719/ldselect/ldai/100/100.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/a-guide-to-using-artificial-intelligence-in-the-public-sector https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/a-guide-to-using-artificial-intelligence-in-the-public-sector selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): cabalquinto e.c. and soriano, c. r. (2019, october 2-5). “hey, i like your videos. relate much!” locating sisterhood in a postcolonial public on youtube. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “hey, i like your videos. relate much!”locating sisterhood in a postcolonial public on youtube earvin charles b. cabalquinto deakin university, australia cheryll ruth soriano de la salle university, philippines the advent of convergent online platforms revolutionised the ways in which migrants connect to diverse groups and in various contexts. social media platforms have enabled migrants to curate and display their private lives online (komito, 2011; madianou & miller, 2012). such online performances of everyday life forges a ‘digital intimate public’ (dobson, robards, & carah, 2018). intimate connectivity and trust are facilitated through relatability (kanai, 2019) and authenticity (banet-weiser, 2012), which are both structured by heteronormative systems (duffy & hund, 2015). paradoxically, social media use fosters both connectivity and communicative risks and abuse (salter, 2018). as part of a broader project that seeks to investigate the brokering of digitally-mediated intimacies through matchmaking platforms and social media channels, this paper unpacks the formation of ‘online sisterhood’ in a postcolonial intimate public, as evinced in the comments of viewers on selected youtube videos of rhaze, a filipina youtuber who is married to an australian man. with a massive following of over 450 thousand followers, rhaze’s videos typically receive diverse comments from her viewers and subscribers. this exposition is facilitated by collecting, categorising and analysing selected comments from rhaze’s top videos. the comments were analysed through discourse analysis, paying special attention to the factors that influence digital media practices (keightley & reading, 2014). the findings reveal that competing comments are shaped by postcolonial views on a gendered, racialized and class-based body in an interracial relationship. one type of comment applauds rhaze for being bold in using a dating website, taking risks by meeting the man overseas, and eventually marrying him. a sense of authenticity on youtube is attained (raun, 2018) through ‘bold confessions’. further, viewers find rhaze’s experiences as relatable. this is most salient whenever she performs the role of a nurturing partner of a foreigner. we argue then that the appeal of rhaze’s performances, implicitly or explicitly, feeds the imaginaries of the viewers of a prescribed femininity in a neoliberal and postcolonial state –a caring partner, a filial family member or a good citizen of the philippines. personalised videos articulate ideological messages about what a filipino woman is and can be. in examining an intimate connectivity between rhaze and her viewers, we coin the term ‘online sisterhood’. such proposition builds on the proposed term ‘local sisterhood’ by roces (2003), emphasising how filipino women married to australian men in remote towns find support and comfort by forging friendship with fellow filipinas married to a foreign national. such modality, we argue, surfaces in online spaces wherein women gravitate to each other based on trust and mutual understanding of lived conditions. however, derogatory comments can also emerge in an online space. terms such as ‘gold-digger’ or ‘don’t be hypocrite’ are used by other ‘bashers’ on youtube. this goes to show how discrimination of a filipina spreads across physical spaces (aquino, 2018) and the space of mainstream media (espinosa, 2017; laforteza, 2006) and online channels. we argue that discriminating comments are linked to pre-existing prejudices toward filipino women who marry white foreign nationals through matchmaking websites. often, the image of a filipina in an interracial relationship is branded as ‘mailorder bride’. historically, women from poor socio-economic background are purchased by white men through mail-order websites (constable, 2003; tolentino, 1996). generalised and stereotypical views are then reflected in the comments of some individuals on youtube. significantly, online sisterhood becomes a collective strategy in dismissing belittling comments. for instance, other commenters defend rhaze’s persona and positionality in an interracial relationship. this paper emphasises that sisterhood reflects the shared support that women nurture with other women through online practices. however, we argue that such cohesion, if performed as detached from the broader context of feminised migration, may reinforce systems that marginalise women. online performances and comments only generate positive affects that may perpetuate neo-colonial and neoliberal subjectivity. digital practices may eclipse the historical and political context of transnational mobility of women in a globalised economy. for instance, women, who do not have access to work opportunities, often capitalise on their skills and bodies to secure a future for themselves and their loved ones (parreñas, 2011). a neoliberal state amplifies feminised migration by constructing women as self-sacrificing and entrepreneurial individual (guevarra, 2010; rodriguez, 2010). ultimately, online sisterhood in a postcolonial intimate public displays how filipino women generate and negotiate spaces of mutual support in a neoliberal state. paradoxically, a neoliberal government benefits from such cross-border and mediated mobility of filipina migrants through the commodification of their everyday life. it is through this point that we argue for a closer evaluation of the role of ‘online sisterhood’ in the construction of female subjectivity and imaginaries of mobility in the global south. references aquino, k. (2018). racism and resistance among the filipino diaspora: everyday antiracism in australia (vol. routledge): london. banet-weiser, s. (2012). authentic tm: the politics and ambivalence in a brand culture: new york, ny : new york university press, [2012]. constable, n. a. (2003). romance on a global stage: pen pals, virtual ethnography, and "mail-order" marriages. berkeley: university of california press. dobson, a. s., robards, b., & carah, n. (2018). digital intimate publics and social media: towards theorising public lives on private platforms. in a. s. dobson, b. robards, & n. carah (eds.), digital intimate publics and social media (pp. 3 27). switzerland: palgrave macmillan. duffy, b. e., & hund, e. (2015). "having it all" on social media: entrepreneurial femininity and self-branding among fashion bloggers. social media + society, 1(2), 1 -11 espinosa, s. a. a. (2017). sexualised citizenship: a cultural history of philippinesaustralian migration. gateway east, singapore: palgrave macmillan. guevarra, a. r. (2010). marketing dreams, manufacturing heroes: the transnational labor brokering of filipino workers. new brunswick: rutgers university press. kanai, a. (2019). gender and relatability in digital culture: managing affect, intimacy and value. basingtoke: palgrave macmillan. keightley, e., & reading, a. (2014). mediated mobilities. media, culture & society, 36(3), 285-301. doi:10.1177/0163443713517731 komito, l. (2011). social media and migration: virtual community 2.0. journal of the american society for information science and technology, 62(6), 1075-1086. laforteza, e. (2006). what a drag! filipina/white australian relations in the adventures of priscilla queen of the dessert. acrawsa e-journal, 2(2), 1-18. madianou, m., & miller, d. (2012). migration and new media: transnational families and polymedia. abingdon, oxon: routledge. parreñas, r. s. (2011). illicit flirtations: labor, migration and sex trafficking in tokyo standford: standford university press. raun, t. (2018). capitalizing intimacy: new subcultural forms of micro-celebrity strategies and affective labour on youtube. convergence, 24(1), 99 113. roces, m. (2003). sisterhood is local: filipino women in mount isa. in n. piper & m. roces (eds.), wife or worker? : asian women and migration (pp. 71 100). lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. rodriguez, r. m. (2010). migrants for export: how the philippine state brokers to the world. minneapolis: the university of minnesota press. salter, m. (2018). publicising privacy, weaponising publicity: the dialectic of online abuse on social media. in a. s. dobson, b. robards, & n. carah (eds.), digital intimate publics and social media (pp. 29 44). switzerland: palgrave macmillan. tolentino, r. b. (1996). bodies, letters, catalogs: filipinas in transnational space. social text(48), 49-76. doi:10.2307/466786 microsoft word shrum-internet use and mental health in africa and india-internet use and mental health in africa and india.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): shrum, w., yevuyibor, j. t., thakkar, s. (2021, october). internet use, personal networks, and mental health in low income areas: an analysis of urban slums in ghana and kerala. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. internet use, personal networks, and mental health in low income areas: an analysis of urban slums in ghana and kerala wesley shrum louisiana state university jonathan teye yevuyibor louisiana state university shriya thakkar louisiana state university prior research has shown that mental health in urban slums is associated with the proportion of older individuals in personal networks (shrum et al, 2021). this presentation will examine the extent to which that association is mediated through internet and social media use. while over 71% of the urban population of sub-saharan africa live in slums, and the high disease burden among slum residents is well known, mental disorders such as depression and anxiety, have been generally neglected (kyobutungi et al., 2008; saris et al., 2017). scarcity of both clinics offering mental health services and resources to pay for them, mostly from their network of social capital, might imply that informal networks are even more important than in higher income locations. recent work in sub-saharan africa shows that the expected negative association between network size and the severity of mental health issues is positive, suggesting an alternative mechanism at work in disadvantaged areas and calling into question the generalizability of the relationship between network size and mental health. in the summer of 2018 and 2019, we conducted face to face interviews with residents (minimum 18 years) in two high density, low income areas of accra (west africa) and trivandrum (kerala, india). gender and age (18-30, 31 to 50, 51+) quotas were provided. our preliminary results show that mobile phones are primary way in which respondents communicate with members of their core networks. further, it shows no general association of larger networks with reduced symptoms of anxiety and depression. second, older individuals are strongly associated with depression and anxiety selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 pelletier c, ruffino p, woodcock j, bulut e, nieborg d and fordyce r (2020, october). games of empire, ten years on. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. games of empire ten years on caroline pelletier ioe ucl, london paolo ruffino university of liverpool jamie woodcock university of oxford ergin bulut koc university istanbul david nieborg university of toronto robbie fordyce monash university panel overview the seminal book games of empire, by nick dyer-witherford and greig de peuter, made two major contributions to the field of internet studies. first, it illustrated the productivity of social theory, and autonomous marxism in particular, to an analysis of digital culture. second, it demonstrated methodologically the importance and value of treating digital culture, and game culture in particular, as a practice extending from sites of text production to sites of text consumption / textual play, by contrast to focusing on one or the other end of that spectrum. the book played a central role in the development of the then nascent fields of internet and game studies, and helped to situate both in relation to other, more established domains within cultural studies which also deployed long-standing theories of social organization. this panel has been brought together to revisit the themes and analytic approach of games of empire, and explore where this tradition within the study of digital culture can be taken next. each paper takes key concepts from the book – including, ideology, desiring machines, empire and multitude, minor and major subjectivity, cognitive capitalism – and applies them to the present moment in videogame culture. our aim is to revisit the significance of autonomous marxism for cultural critique and also identify how games culture has evolved over the last ten years. the panel will discuss the productivity of an approach to criticism which, across the papers, combines sociological / ethnographic analyses of workplaces and working conditions with interpretations of the cultural objects produced there as well as cultures of play / consumption. this approach aligns with attempts to re-think cultural studies methodology in the wake of playable / interactive texts, as well as participatory cultures in which the boundaries between producers and consumers are being reconfigured (caldwell, 2009). in this respect, the panel also aims to explore the possibility and value, in game studies, of identifying continuities, as well as discontinuities, between the different components of game culture, and integrating text and social analysis. each paper will highlight the productivity of games of empire but also some of its flaws, the latter in two respects. first, in relation to theoretical developments within autonomous and post-marxist thought. the limitations of concepts such as ‘cognitive capitalism’ will be reviewed, as well as developments within deleuzian practices of analysis. recent post-colonial theory will also be drawn on to highlight the neglect of matters of gender and race in the original book, and its theoretical framework, particularly noticeable in the wake of phenomena such as gamergate and analyses of digital culture which attend to representation. second, the panel will also identify the book’s limitations in relation to empirical developments within the games sector and games culture. the games sector has changed significantly over the last ten years, with the emergence of ‘independent games’, games as apps, the growth of unionisation and a far more globalised production and distribution network. we will discuss the productivity but also the problems of understanding these new phenomena in the light of the concepts central to the original book, and explore how more recent work in new media studies, including the field of production culture, can inform current research. for instance, we will explore the benefits and problems of treating the ‘independent games’ phenomenon as an instance of ‘multitude’ opposing the extension of empire. discussing the flaws of games of empire is intended to review how critical social theory can inform the analysis of a more culturally and economically complex games sector than existed ten years ago. the panel brings together contributors to a special issue of the journal games and culture, due for publication in 2020, and which retrospectively evaluates the significance of games of empire, within game and new media studies. it has been convened by the editors of the special issue and each paper will be based on an article within it. the panel will provide contributors with the opportunity to reflect on the productivity of situating games, theoretically and methodologically, within digital culture, and the costs and benefits of having a specialist disciplinary sub-field dedicated to it. for example, the panel will reflect on the difference and continuities in thinking and talking about games at aoir, versus digra (the digital games research association conference). the panel will also allow presenters to consider the collaborative editorial process which underpinned the development of the special issue, including how some of the issues highlighted in games of empire are themselves affecting the study of games culture, such as unsustainably precarious working conditions which inhibit longterm careers, the marginalisation of feminist and anti-racist critiques, and the uneven concentration of resources in a globalised network of work and production. references caldwell jt. (2009) screen studies and industrial theorizing. screen 50: 167-179. dyer-witherford n and de peuter g. (2009) games of empire: global capitalism and video games. minneapolis: minnesota press. game workers unite: unionisation in the uk video game industry this presentation will investigate some of the key debates that have emerged within the nascent labour union game workers unite uk (gwu uk). game workers unite is an international organisation and movement dedicated to unionizing the video game industry. the group started as a response to a panel at the annual game developers conference in san francisco in 2018. the event, titled “union now? pros, cons, and consequences of unionization for game devs”, was organised by the international game developers association (igda), traditionally considered as an anti-unionisation association. participants organised an alternative pro-union event, which worked as the starting point for the establishment of game workers unite. the uk gwu branch became part the iwgb (independent workers union of great britain) in december 2018, building ‘a worker-led, democratic organisation that represents and advocates for uk game workers' rights’ (gwu uk, 2019), and represents one of the first and most significant examples of unionisation within the video game industry. the presentation is informed by a period of participatory observation at the local meetings of the union in london and by a series of interviews with members of the association, which took place throughout 2018 2020. one of the authors has participated in the establishment of the union in the uk since 2018, drawing on previous examples of co-research with workers. first, we look at gwu uk in its historical continuity with previous attempts at organising the workers of the video game industry, and other, less notorious, forms of resistance. we identify how gwu uk, often presented by the press and even by its participants as a breakthrough moment in the history of labour in the video game industry, should be more accurately represented as the upshot of a long series of struggles. the analysis of comparable examples (such as the french union le syndicat des travailleurs et travailleuses du jeu vidéo) is not presented with the purpose of denying gwu of its historical relevance. on the contrary, it serves to strengthen its significance and stress the likelihood of it continuing in its operations in the future. the national unions that work as part of the global gwu network should not be seen as exceptional events, made up by a small number of organised volunteers. on the contrary, they provide a name and identity to a much longer and complex series of demands for better conditions of work. for this purpose, we take the case of ea spouse as a significant example to look at in relation to the findings we have gathered while observing and participating at gwu uk. published in 2004, an anonymous letter written by the wife of an employee at electronic arts described how the exploitative regime of labour inflicted on their husband was damaging their lives and relationship. ea spouse revealed a condition of labour that was shared among many in the sector, highlighting the culture of very long working hours often termed “crunch.” ea spouse constitutes one of the most famous examples of demand for workers’ rights in the industry (dyer-witheford and de peuter 2009, pp. 35-68). however, it came about at a time when similar forms of protest did not have an institution to refer to, or an identifiable community that could scale up an individual protest towards a demand for structural and systemic change. seen through this historical comparison, we conclude that gwu uk acts as a catalyst for pre-existing but isolated struggles within the video game industry. second, the presentation will identify a series of keywords to articulate the differences that gwu introduces in relation to the conditions of labour analysed in previous literature. in chapter 7 of games of empire by dyer-witheford and de peuter, ‘games of multitude’, the authors imagined the possibility of emancipation via independent labour, as well as other ‘politics of withdrawal’ (p. 218) via practices of ‘counterplay’ (galloway, 2006). since the publication of games of empire, the emergence of social media has incentivised practices of self-promotion, which are often conflated with self-branding and the promotion of one’s own labour (gregg, 2011; tyni, 2017). these dynamics can draw attention to and implicate game workers are overtly visible. they need to be active on twitter, and other channels of promotion and visibility, to get access to, or keep their position within, the networks of production. presence in first person is also required at the frequent meet-up events, workshops, festivals and conferences, which often act as cultural mediators and gatekeepers (parker et al., 2017). the current state of the video game industry in the global north is characterised by formal and informal relations of production, and a large number of producers who could be identified as independent of a publisher or producer (keogh, 2017; gdc, 2018; vanderhoef, 2016; ukie 2017). while participating in the meetings of gwu uk and engaging with their members, it emerged that the main issues currently faced by the organisers concern the excess of visibility and individualisation of the game worker implied in practices of independent labour, and the organisation of bottom-up networks for the exchange of practices and legal advices for those working within the industry. the article concludes that the visibility and individualisation of the game worker, exacerbated through the last decade in many sectors of the creative industries, are currently challenged by gwu via strategies of opacity and collectivism. references dyer-witherford n and de peuter g. (2009) games of empire: global capitalism and video games. minneapolis: minnesota press. galloway a. (2006) gaming: essays on algorithmic culture. minneapolis: minnesota press. gdc (2018) state of the game industry 2018. game developers conference, usa. gwu uk. 2019. we are game workers unite. gwu uk. available at https://www.gwuuk.org/. gregg m. (2011) work’s intimacy. cambridge: polity press. keogh, b (2017) who else makes videogames? considering informal development practices. proceedings of digra 2017, melbourne, australia. parker f, simon b, and whitson j. (2017) megabooth: the cultural intermediation of indie games. new media and society 20(5): 1953-1972. tyni h. (2017) double duty: crowdfunding and the evolving game production network. games and culture. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1555412017748108 ukie. (2018) uk games industry fact sheet. april 2018. ukie the association for uk interactive entertainment. vanderhoef jr. (2016) an industry of indies: the new cultural economy of digital game production. phd thesis, university of california santa barbara, usa. white masculinity, creative desires, and production ideology in video game development my presentation will revisit games of empire and complement the concepts of “desiring machine” and “ideology” with narratives from my three-year-long ethnographic work in a medium-sized video game studio in the u.s. midwest. drawing on postcolonial approaches to gaming (harrer, 2018; mukherjee and hammar, 2018), and cultural studies (slack & wise, 2015), i argue that games of empire’s deleuzio-guattarian framework fails to illuminate how racialized and gendered histories inform game developers’ practices of creating racialized and gendered fantasies. in my fieldwork, i asked developers what they thought about the criticisms of objectionable representation of certain demographic groups in their games. ai programmer chris (white, late 30s) said: “a lot of it is letting out your inner child… the general freedom to do what you want to do is a pretty big deal.” for matthew, a programmer of color, they were “definitely playing off of stereotypes” but it was really about “escapism.” though these two programmers felt comfortable with claims of escapism, ricardo (white, midthirties), an artist involved in constructing the game’s urban territory, expressed discomfort about the questionable color choices for some characters: “i’ve always kind of felt that was a little racist. so, i’m not sure where that came from.” in analyzing how machines operate in the game industry, games of empire examines hardware’s unequal production materiality in asia, but it casts insufficient attention to the racialized and gendered histories and longings of game industry’s creative labor force. as argued, the computer screen is never blank prior to game production (mejia and lesavoy, 2018). the phrases i encountered during my fieldwork (“escapism,” “letting out your inner child,” and “the general freedom to do what you want”) are “a continuation of the western historic project of securing pleasure through the other” (leonard 2003, 5). therefore, one has to acknowledge how white masculinity hegemonically shapes how game workers desire, how they imagine escapism, and ideologically structures how they relate to technology. my presentation will then address the dominance of white masculinity behind game developers’ productive desires through another concept that games of empire analyzes only at the representational level: ideology. according to dyer-witheford and de peuter, gta iv both constructs essentialized identities of people of color and provides a “comedic exposure of u.s politics” and a “scathing parody of neoliberal sensibilities” (2009, p. 179). yet, gta’s criticism fails, because it doesn’t suggest a way out of the urban decay and corruption. for the authors, gta’s ideology is cynical because both its producers and players believe that the game is too absurd to take seriously (2009, p. 181). while dissecting the cynical ideology shaping gta iv, the book fails to illuminate how white-masculinity informs the cynical desire of equally offending everybody. in my fieldwork, i asked game developer stuart (white, early thirties) his thoughts about their game’s subversive narrative. he said: we go after men. we go after women. we go after fat. we go after skinny. we go after white, black, asian, latino. it doesn’t matter to us. i think that’s what allows us to get away with it. this statement reveals a discursive strategy of whiteness, which exists by systematically denying its actuality (nakayama and krizek, 1995). denying its centrality to power relations, white masculinity becomes the gatekeeper for boundary-making. through the discourse of equally offending everyone, it establishes an unquestionable coherence around who the proper subjects and objects of offense are (ortiz, 2019). so, games of empire misses the racialized and gendered roots of cynical ideology in production. yet, there is also a technological dimension to this. i expand ideology beyond game representation to encompass how game developers’ desire functions in relation to technological work. through my concept of ludic religiosity, i unpack how game developers hold onto the idea that video games are advanced machines to push innovation within white masculine technocultures (johnson, 2018). as a belief system, ludic religiosity measures everything against the commensurability of ludic and technical pleasure in a supposedly neutral technological system. this ludic function is related to game content but even more deeply connected to the capacities of technological machines, which game workers push for professional pleasure. if technology, as james carey (2009, p. 87) suggests, holds a “secular religiosity” within the euro-american imagination, the theology of game developers is ludic and technological experimentation. evoking the racialized and gendered desire for technological mastery, many of my interlocutors would make a claim for good command of computer skills, display a masculine libertarian work attitude, and endorse a gendered attitude regarding passionate work. programmer karl (white, early forties), would tell me how their initial success depended on “just a personal sacrifice from a number of people and ridiculous hours that we pulled that pedal off.” “pulling that pedal off” was possible because most of the developers were “either single or pretty close to it, no kids,” he added. ludic religiosity accomplishes a few things. while it reinforces whiteness as the universal arbiter of what counts as escapism, it also claims to erase whiteness in shaping production cultures in the gaming industry (dyer, 1997). my interlocutor stuart’s color and gender blind rhetoric of “equal opportunity offense” promises an abstract form of liberal individualism and liberalism in the context of post-racialism (bonilla-silva, 2014), rendering “radical resistance to and revisioning of racial logics unlikely if not impossible” (young, 2016, 359). ten years after games of empire was published, foregrounding the racialized and gendered nature of desire and ideology at work is vital, given how gamergate’s resentful and networked white masculinity feeds into authoritarianism. references bonilla-silva e. (2014) racism without racists: color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in america. fourth edition. boulder: rowman & littlefield. carey jw. (2009) communication as culture: essays on media and society. revised edition. new york: routledge. dyer r. (1997) white: essays on race and culture. london; new york: routledge. harrer s. (2018) casual empire: video games as neocolonial praxis. open library of humanities 4 (1): 1–28. https://doi.org/doi: http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.210. leonard d. (2003) 'live in your world, play in ours’: race, video games, and consuming the other. studies in media & information literacy education 3 (4): 1–9. mejia r and lesavoy b (2018) the sexual politics of videogame graphics. in gray k et al. (eds) feminism in play. new york: palgrave macmillan, 83–101. mukherjee s and hammar el. (2018) introduction to the special issue on postcolonial perspectives in game studies. open library of humanities 4 (2): 1–14. https://doi.org/doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.309. nakayama tn and krizek rl. (1995) whiteness: a strategic rhetoric. quarterly journal of speech 81: 291–309. ortiz sm. (2019) the meanings of racist and sexist trash talk for men of color: a cultural sociological approach to studying gaming culture. new media & society 21 (4): 879–94. slack jd and macgregor wise j. (2015) culture and technology: a primer. new york: peter lang. young h. (2016) racial logics, franchising, and video game genres: the lord of the rings. games and culture 11 (4): 343–64. apps of empire a decade after games of empire was published, it is time to revisit its key argument: games are emblematic of twenty-first century hypercapitalism. whatever metric one uses—revenue, players, published titles—digital play has become more international and lucrative. in 2004, while acknowledging that “predicting the future trajectory of videogames and videogaming is a highly problematic, perhaps even foolhardy, undertaking”, newman gestured towards the bright future of gaming, which would “not be distinguished by its uniformity, but by its diversity” (p. 169). in certain respects, this is true. after decades of “aggressive formalization” on the part of the industry, independent and amateur game makers have found new ways to develop more games (keogh, 2019). similarly, alternate reality and virtual reality games push the boundaries of technology, while esports and streaming platforms offer consumers novel ways to engage with play as spectators (taylor, 2018). in this presentation, we focus on popular mobile game franchises and question their radical potential along the lines set up by games of empire. we ask: do apps, with their colourful, cartoony aesthetics, deviate from the banalization of war, or, are they embedded in the very same militaristic spirit constituting global capitalism? dyer-witheford and de peuter consider three games to be emblematic of games of empire: full spectrum warrior, world of warcraft, and grand theft auto. each of them are either still dominant or have spawned a series of spiritual successors. for example, late 2019, grand theft auto v has sold over 110 million copies and earned its publisher over us$6 billion. the war simulator full spectrum warrior marked a direct and unique cooperation between the us army and a us-based game developer. the game’s spiritual sibling, the first-person-shooter franchise call of duty, has been similarly unapologetic in its celebration of modern warfare and serves as an enduring example of the military-industrial-media-entertainment complex’s impact. also in 2019, activision blizzard launched call of duty mobile, which quickly rose to the top of the app store charts. the instant, global uptake of call of duty mobile can be seen as a restoring of the, one might say, natural order of hard-core gaming’s decade-long dominance. casual game apps, such as the candy crush series and pokémon go, may be widely popular, they are surpassed—in terms of the revenue they generate—by titles that offer a twist on what dyer-witheford and de peuter (2019, p. 97-122) describe as “banal war.” consider titles that raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, such as boom beach, clash of clans, clash royale, mobile strike, lords mobile, and a title that serves as the most literal instance of the militarization of digital play: game of war. each of these offer a variation on the argument that games “banalize the global violence of primitive accumulation” (dyer-witheford and de peuter, 2019, p. 118). enemies are notoriously faceless and often nameless, there is no collateral damage, and there are no moral or geopolitical dilemmas to grapple with. the player is put in the role as a benevolent general tasked to conquer enemy bases and accumulate resources. the representation of modern war in apps, much more so than console and pc-games, is notoriously desensitized. even if game developers would want to present players with the weight of their life and death decisions, apple would not allow for it. the app store reviewer guidelines are quite explicit when they state that an app cannot be “upsetting” or “intended to disgust”. these limitations instantly foreclose any meaningful avenue to grapple with the implications of modern warfare. apps of war are therefore unduly generic, in which “clans”, “kings” and “lords” battle, storm sunny beaches, or just simply “clash.” most of these successful titles are online multiplayer games, whose lineage can be traced back to titles like world of warcraft, which is still drawing millions of monthly players itself. similar to call of duty and testament to the pervasive cultural conservatism among players, or as they call it “nostalgia,” its developers reincarnated its blockbuster by launching world of warcraft classic in august of 2019. this reissue allowed players to experience the game as it was late 2006. dyer-witheford and de peuter point to world of warcraft to make a broader point about “biopower play”, as online multiplayer games provide virtual worlds that recapitulate “the accumulative structure of consumer capitalism” within their “archaic dream worlds” (dyer-witheford and de peuter, 2019, p. 150). the very same can be said of one of the most enduring app store hits, clash of clans. if warcraft offers, as rettberg argues (2008, p. 20), “a capitalist fairytale in which anyone who works hard and strives enough can rise through society’s ranks and acquire great wealth” thereby serving “as a form of corporate training,” than clash of clans distills this logic to its essence. the game’s builders are perpetually busy to build, upgrade, or rebuild structures (e.g. decorations, defensive walls, and traps) and buildings (e.g. barracks, cannons, and workshops). players have to hone their managerial competencies to work together—not in guilds but in clans—to coordinate weekly attacks against other clans. clash of clans thus serves as a prototypical game of empire, the fastest way to accrue significant amounts of virtual currency is to invade other bases and destroy other clans. and this brings us back to the interrogation of games of empire a decade after its publication. do apps that oppose global capitalism, or at least develop or propose alternatives to it, even exist? if they do, they are more marginalized than the predecessors described by dyer-witheford and de peuter (2009, p. 185-214). mobile platform power as exerted by google and apple challenge, if not foreclose many avenues of dissent. sure, there are thousands of quirky, challenging, and sometimes slightly transgressive apps available in the app store. independent (“indie”) developers have grown in numbers and broadened the ludic landscape. but do they allow to play against the grain and are they part of a new wave of activist-developed “tactical games” espousing radical critique? if they are out there, they are rare and hard to find. “dissonant development” of apps, understood as “ludic dissent against today’s capitalist empire” (dyer-witheford and de peuter, 2009, p. 196-197) has the same unicorn status as platform companies. the stifling app store guidelines make sure of that. references dyer-witheford n and de peuter g. (2009) games of empire: global capitalism and video games. minneapolis: minnesota press. keogh b. (2019) from aggressively formalised to intensely in/formalised: accounting for a wider range of videogame development practices. creative industries journal 12(1) 14–33. newman j. (2004) videogames. new york: routledge. rettberg s. (2008) corporate ideology in world of warcraft. in corneliussen hg and rettberg jw. (eds.) digital culture, play, and identity. a world of warcraft reader. cambridge: mit press, 19-38. taylor tl. (2018) watch me play. twitch and the rise of game live streaming. princeton: princeton university press. reading dwarf fortress as a game of multitude this presentation uses the model of videogame analysis drawn from the work of nick dyer-witheford and greig de peuter’s (2009) games of empire to analyse the videogame dwarf fortress (adams, 2006-present). dwarf fortress has a relatively unique development model: the game was initially started as a side project by disaffected mathematics scholar, tarn adams, who quit his post-doc so that he could fully dedicate his time to the game. dwarf fortress has since become adams’ full-time project and has been estimated as having at least a twenty-year development cycle (weiner, 2011). the reason that dwarf fortress remains of interest, approximately fourteen years into its development, is partly due to its remarkable influence in videogame circles. dwarf fortress has directly influenced the development of the extremely popular minecraft (goldberg and larsson, 2013) as well as the mmo fortnite (urquhart, 2019), it has acted as a museum piece in the museum of modern art (adams, 2011). dwarf fortress has influenced the development of several major games, but more importantly, it provides a perspective onto a type of production strategy that we can identify as what dyer-witheford and de peuter call a ‘game of multitude,’ providing insights into an alternative videogame production system. dwarf fortress remains a free game and is supported entirely through a series of donations. the online community itself supports the process of telling interesting stories and developing unique explorations or interpretations of events that happen in the somewhat buggy world of the game (see denee n.d. for an example). its code is modifiable, and save games circulate within the player community. the idea that videogames might foster a capacity to think beyond the present economic system is an established idea (see, for instance, ruffino, 2019), and is located in the same search for cultural or imaginary models for thinking on the problem of contemporary imperialism. dyer-witheford and de peuter’s argument is that there needs to be a consideration as to how videogames are embroiled in international geopolitics and the development of political resistance. in doing this, games of empire follows the work of michael hardt and antonio negri’s empire trilogy (2000; 2004; 2009) in the focus on labour and production as being central to the nature of politics and, ergo, a primary component both of imperialist expansion and of resistance to it. in the context of these works, ‘empire’ is the proper name for the liberal-capitalist globalisation project that has expanded through both culture and economy to create a standardised system of order that covers much of the globe. empire carries with it systems that standardise states through the opening up of borders and the liberalising of trade; alongside this comes familiar economic icons such as american express, coca-cola, and greenwashing. in tandem with the identification of empire is the constitution of the multitude: the multitude is a diverse and varied subject, aligned in its co-constitutive nature. the multitude is also defined in its capacity to break out from empire and forge new futures that might go beyond the limits of present social and economic structures. hardt and negri’s empire trilogy itself reads like the script to a videogame; it is on this fantastic telos for the multitude that critique has often been located: the empire trilogy is too abstract, too fantastic (see boron, 2005; brennan, 2003, 2004; tilly, 2003; žižek, 2004). indeed, reading hardt and negri’s work, it is clear that at times that they work to avoid evidence; trying to keep their arguments abstract and seeking to avoid locating their claims within a specific context. dyer-witheford and de peuter’s work solves the issue of context, and provides an account of how digital cultural production in videogames are connected with a variety of geopolitical forces, mainly through transnational production processes for the videogame industry, from the mining of coltan (222-224) and to the outsourcing of digital labour (144), the prevalence of crunch time (59-65) and the push for unionisation (63), and the propagandistic elements of military shooters (97-122) aligned against digital storytelling of the experiences of refugees in offshore detention (185-191). the use of production as the analytical framework for the assessment of politics proves to be extremely useful when deployed in the context of videogames; it seems like videogames as a cultural product are capable of providing a clearly demonstrated role at every level of imperial operation, from direct public relations fights over the responsibility for coltan militias, through to the large-scale propagandistic multiplayer online military shooting games that they call ‘games of empire’. it is perhaps for this reason that dyer-witheford and de peuter argue that games are a “paradigmatic media of empire” (2009: xv). the particularities of cultural production and consumption combined with an economy that prioritises work with the use of digital devices and digital infrastructure describe a materialistic condition where people may well spend large portions of their life in a digital environment. dwarf fortress, despite its fantasy-derived name, offers a concrete example of what dyer-witheford and de peuter call ‘games of multitude’. in contrast to games of empire, these are games that offer a way of thinking or perhaps – to follow hardt and negri – an experiment in alter-globalisation, where a way out of the current system is perhaps feasible. a game of multitude represents itself not just through the generation of an ideological context where imperialism is not a virtue in itself, but it also presents a different model of production and exchange. references adams t. (2006-present) dwarf fortress. washington, dc: bay 12 games. adams t. (2011) dwarf fortress – gallery listing. moma.org. available from: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/164920 boron a. (2003) empire and imperialism. london: zed books. brennan t. (2003) the italian ideology. in balakrishnan g. (ed) debating empire. london: verso. 97-120. brennan t. (2004) the magician’s wand: a rejoinder to hardt and negri. critical inquiry 29 (2): 374-378. denee t. (n.d.) oil furnace. timdenee.com https://www.timdenee.com/oilfurnace goldberg d and larsson l. (2013) the amazingly unlikely story of how minecraft was born. wired. 5 september, 2013. available from: https://www.wired.com/2013/11/minecraft-book/ hardt m and negri a. (2000) empire. cambridge: harvard university press. hardt m and negri a. (2004) multitude: war and democracy in the age of empire. new york: the penguin press. hardt m and negri a. (2009). commonwealth. cambridge: harvard university press. ruffino p. (2019) the end of capitalism: disengaging from the economic imaginary of incremental games. games and culture. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412019886242 tilly c. (2003) a nebulous empire. in balakrishnan g. (ed) debating empire. london: verso. 26-28. urquhart e. (2019) the dwarves who built the road to fortnite. slate. 6 june, 2019. available from: https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/dwarf-fortress-fortnite-minecraftstrange-play-it.html weiner j. (2011) the brilliance of dwarf fortress. new york times. 24 july, 2011 retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-of-dwarffortress.html?_r.0 žižek s. (2004) the ideology of the empire and its traps. in passavant p and dean j. (eds) empire’s new clothes. london: routledge. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): jenson, j., hébert, c. (2017, october 18-21). moving from theory to practice: creating empirical, digital game-based research with k-12 teachers. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. moving from theory to practice: creating empirical, digital game-based research with k-12 teachers jennifer jenson york university cristyne hébert york university background educators and educational theorists have long recognized the potential of digital games to transform educational experiences in k-12 classrooms (gee, 2003, 2007; prensky, 2007). in our increasingly digital knowledge economy, conceptions of literacy have been slowing shifting to acknowledge the importance of multimodality and multiliteracies over singular, print-based texts that have, for quite some time, been the central focus of the curriculum (de castell & jenson, 2003; rowsell & walsh, 2011; the new london group, 1996). as 21st century citizenship requires a wide range of competencies, engagement with digital games in classrooms can develop students’ capacities to recognize, gather, and address pertinent material in a wide variety of forms (de zengotita, avrich, koster & johnson, 2006; gee, 2003, 2007; kafai, 2010; rieber, 1996). though the potential of digital games to support student learning in a wide range of areas has been well documented, empirical evidence for these claims, including studies that can replicate outcomes across contexts, is desperately needed (linderoth, 2012; young et al., 2012). this is especially important when considering that canonical texts in the field are often devoid of this empirical basis (gee, 2003; 2009; prensky, 2005; 2007) recognizing the prevalence of arguments in favour of the use of educational games and the gap between claims and evidence, this project addresses the question of how teachers can be best supported in using digital games in their classrooms, with a specific focus on teaching strategies developed through professional development and guided support. in this paper, we detail the most effective teaching strategies for digital game-play in k-12 classrooms. implementing videogames in classrooms in this project, we used an ios and browser-based game, sprite’s quest, designed to support physical and human geography learning for grade 7 and 8 students. 34 teachers from the province of ontario were invited to attend a two-day workshop that attempted to provide the scaffolding and tools necessary to use games in the classroom prior to the game’s implementation. the effectiveness of this support was evaluated by way of classroom observations as well as interviews with the teachers. observations demonstrated that classroom environments in which the game and gamebased learning were well integrated into the curriculum contained meaningful learning activities that connected the game to prior learning, the geography curriculum more broadly, and the real world (including the local community). in this classroom ecology, game play was focused; the teacher set up the game play activity, and the game play period was then followed by a specific learning activity that required an application of knowledge, e.g., in the completion of a culminating task. in classroom environments that meaningfully integrated the game and game-based learning, tasks centered on game content rather than technology. while most teachers in this group used electronic platforms such as google classroom and board d2l sites as a component of their sprite’s quest lessons specifically and physical geography units generally, the platforms were positioned as tangential to the content. for example, teachers might remind students that an activity should be completed and submitted for evaluation through google classroom or they might demonstrate submission techniques through a brief modeling activity, but the game and learning activities remained the point of focus. in situations where technology failed to function properly, troubleshooting took place quickly and effectively while the learning task was positioned as the focal point for students. classrooms that integrated game play into a curriculum that was also structured and focused typically asked students to collect facts while they played and/or to pay attention to particular items or objects while working through the game. this focused play also translated into accountability for learning during play, with students often asked to submit artifacts such as jot notes as evidence of learning at the end of game play. more often than not, students were required to complete more than one task per period or were given multiple tasks to work on if a single task had been completed. finally, in classroom contexts where game play was well supported and integrated, teachers were engaged in game play, demonstrating knowledge of the game and speaking with students about their own experiences and their students’ experiences while playing the game. engagement also extended to game-based learning, with teachers regularly checking in with their students by circulating during game play to ask questions, including those connected to learning and the follow-up activities. consequently, students in these environments were often on task. this is essential and timely research greatly needed to inform policy and practice guiding the development and deployment of digital games in formal, classroom learning contexts, as well as to contribute to a re-conceptualization the practical experiences, including the everyday realities and struggles relating to using videogames in the classroom. with respect to teacher training, much more work is needed to ensure that teachers conceptualize videogame use in the classroom in a manner that is productive to and impactful for learning: as tools that exist as part of a larger nexus of educative texts and around which a comprehensive curriculum can be developed. references alvermann, d. e. (2002). adolescents and literacies in a digital world. new york: peter lang. de castell, s. & jenson, j. (2003). serious play. journal of curriculum studies, 35(6), 649-665. de castell, s. & jenson, j. (2004). paying attention to attention: new economies for learning. educational theory, 54(4), 381-97. galarneau, l. & zibit, m. (2007). online games for 21st century skills. in: d. gibson, c. aldritch & m. prensky (eds.), games and simulations in online learning: research and development frameworks (59-88). hershey, pi: igi global. gee, j. p. (2003). what video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. acm computers in entertainment, 1(1). 1-4. gee, j. p. (2007). good video games and good learning: collected essays on video games, learning and literacy. new york: peter lang. goldhaber, m.h. (1997). the attention economy and the net. first monday, 2(4). jenkins, h., clinton, k., purushotma, r., robinson, a., & weigel, m. (2009). confronting the challenges of participatory culture: media education for the 21st century. cambridge, ma: mit press. lankshear, c. & knobel m. (2006). new literacies: everyday practices and classroom learning. berkshire, uk: open university press. linderoth, j. (2012). why gamers don’t learn more: an ecological approach to games as learning environments. journal of gaming and virtual worlds, 4(1), 45–62. prensky, m. (2006). don’t bother me mom – i’m learning!: how computer and video games are preparing your kids for 21st century success and how you can help! st. paul, mn: paragon house.
 prensky, m. (2007). how to teach with technology: keeping both teachers and students comfortable in an era of exponential change. emerging technologies for learning (vol. 2). retrieved from http://partners.becta.org.uk/page_documents/research/emerging_technologies07_c hapter4.pdf rowsell, j., & walsh, m. (2011). rethinking literacy education in new times: multimodality, multiliteracies and new literacies. brock education, 1(fall), 53–62. the new london group. (1996). a pedagogy of multiliteracies : designing social futures. harvard educational review, 66(1), 60–92. watts, s. (2009, november 11). president’s “digital learning initiative” using little big planet. 1up. accessed oct. 1, 2010. young, m. f., slota, s., cutter, a. b., jalette, g., mullin, g., lai, b., … yukhymenko, m. (2012). our princess is in another castle: a review of trends in serious gaming for education. review of educational research, 82(1), 61–89. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 hardley, j. and richardson, i. (2019, october 2-5). perceptions of darkness: mobile media and the embodiment of risk and safety in the urban night. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. perceptions of darkness: mobile media and the embodiment of risk and safety in the urban night jess hardley murdoch university ingrid richardson murdoch university this paper explores the embodied experience of smartphone users in urban darkness, and considers how the geo-locative and network functionality of mobile media impacts upon the perception of safety and risk at night. city spaces at nighttime are often perceived as less safe, and the habitual trust we place in familiar strangers during the day can become imbued with caution, suspicion and fear. women in particular are typically advised to reduce nighttime risk by remaining in well-lit, more populated areas, not travelling alone, and keeping mobile phones handy. indeed, in contemporary popular culture, media coverage increasingly links heightened physical safety with the use of geo-locative mobile media. the case of mollie tibbetts’ disappearance in iowa in 2018 after she went running early in the morning is one salient example of this – her mobile phone, fitbit and social media accounts were not only used to help locate her, but the consequent coverage focused on the importance of carrying a mobile phone and sharing geo-locative data with friends or family as a way to better ensure one’s safety (bever, lindsey, wootson 2018; spector 2018). this paper unravels the phenomenological dimensions of such accounts, and draws on original ethnographic data collected in perth and melbourne from 2015-2017, from surveys, interviews and tracking apps, to better understand the complex relation between mobile media use and women’s corporeal and affective experience of the city at night. we examine how mobile devices as both communicative and location-aware interfaces are used to provide women with a perceived or ‘felt’ sense of bodily safety and security, and the potential implications this has for users’ pedestrian traversal of the urban dark. the effect of darkness on city-dwellers has been explored by a number of researchers concerned with urban safety, including brands and schwanen’s (2014) sociological work on fear, trust and urban policy, and hobbs et.al.’s (2005) study of violence, control and the night-time economy. a recent conference on darkness convened in norway (https://darknessconference2019.wordpress.com) covered such topics as folk literature, artificial intelligence, light pollution, religion, philosophy, architecture and nature, yet much of the research in this area neglects the impact of both the networked infrastructure of the city – what de souza e silva and sutko (2009) term “net-local space” – and the place of mobile media in people’s nighttime practices and their experience and perception of the urban dark. that is, although nighttime spaces and darkness are emerging as significant factors in urban media studies, to date academic research has tended “to overlook what happens when night falls” (van liempt, van aalst, and schwanen 2014). it is the aim of this paper to begin addressing this oversight. throughout the paper, our conceptual and ethnographic approach is informed by merleau-ponty’s (1945) work on habituation and proprioception, ihde’s (1998, 2009, 1993) postphenomenological take on the cultural specificity of the body-technology relation, and weiss’s (1999) feminist adaptation of the term intercorporeality. in line with this work, we argue that mobile media use comprises a particular relational ontology; that is, as we incorporate mobile devices as “fresh instruments” that become part of our pre-reflective grasp on the environment, mobile media practices are habituated as “knowledge in the hands” (moores 2009), and thus are intrinsic to our embodied beingin-the-world. as we will show, a postphenomenological approach to ethnographic research and mobile media use allows us to account for gendered experiences and perceptions of urban space, darkness and risk. through a close mixed-methods analysis of our participants’ use of their mobile phones at night, we explore how mobile devices have modified women’s embodied metaphors of darkness both in terms of their geo-spatial and proprioceptive awareness of local space, and the ambient sense of connection afforded by social networking platforms and mobile apps, or what farman (2012) calls “social proprioception”. our research data reveals that darkness affects the way women deploy proprioceptive vigilance and incorporate mobile devices into their bodily schemata, while at the same time mobile user-habits changed participants’ affective and visceral awareness of immediate and potential risk. in each case the presence of the mobile phone “in the hand” was accompanied by a varying spectrum of trust and apprehension that was felt in the body – from mistrust in the fluctuating reliability of geo-location apps and network connectivity, to faith in the ambient everpresence of friends and family just a phone call or direct message away. the theme of “trust” runs as a thread through this paper, as we unpack the mistrust city dwellers have of the urban dark and how mobile media perceptually ameliorates this embodied sense of risk by extending users’ communicative reach via location-aware interfaces. at the same time, the trust users place in their mobile devices is explored as a paradoxical tension between the reassurance afforded by perpetual connection, and concurrently, the anxiety generated by fallible tracking apps, network interruptions and gps dysfunctionality. references bever, lindsey, wootson, cleve r. 2018. “fitbit may be key to finding iowa student who went for a jog last week and hasn’t been seen since.” the washington post, july 27. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/truecrime/wp/2018/07/27/fitbit-data-may-be-key-to-finding-the-iowa-college-studentwho-went-for-a-jog-and-vanished/?utm_term=.614084e605ee. brands, jelle, and tim schwanen. 2014. “experiencing and governing safety in the night-time economy : nurturing the state of being carefree.” emotion, space and society 11. elsevier ltd: 67–78. doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2013.08.004. de souza e silva, adrianna, and d. sutko (2009) digital cityscapces. newyork: peter lang. farman, jason. 2012. “historicizing mobile media: locating the transformations of embodied space”. in n. arceneaux and a. kavoori (eds) the mobile media reader new york: peter lang, pp. 9-22. hobbs, dick, phil hadfield, stuart lister and simon winlow. 2005. "violence and control in the night-time economy." european journal of crime, criminal law and criminal justice 13(1): 89-102. ihde, don. 1993. postphenomenology: essays in the postmodern context. evanston, illinois: northwestern university press. ———. 1998. philosophy of technology: an introduction. new york: paragon house. ———. 2009. postphenomenology and technoscience: the peking university lectures. new york: suny press. merleau-ponty, maurice. 2014 [1945]. phenomenology of perception. london: routledge. moores, shaun. 2009. “that familiarity with the world born of habit: a phenomenological approach to the study of media uses in daily living.” interactions: studies in communication and culture 1 (3): 301–12. doi:10.1386/iscc.1.3.301. spector, nicole. 2018. “scared to run alone? women runners share their best safety tips.” better, november 13. https://www.nbcnews.com/better/health/scared-runalone-female-runners-share-how-they-stay-safe-ncna935186. van liempt, ilse, irina van aalst, and tim schwanen. 2014. “introduction: geographies of the urban night.” urban studies, october, 0042098014552933-. doi:10.1177/0042098014552933. weiss, gail. 1999. body images: embodiment as intercorporeality. new york: routledge. microsoft word amit-danhi-facts of (financial) life-facts of (financial) life.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): amit-danhi, e. (2021, october). facts of (financial) life: political power and revisualization strategies on social media. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. facts of (financial) life: political power and revisualization strategies on social media eedan amit-danhi hebrew university digital political visualizations are a growing genre, providing an elegant solution to the informational overload that citizens encounter as they learn about the political world from social media. as visual representations of the numeric, scientific and seemingly impartial (porter, 1996), the introduction of visualized political information and data is often viewed as a positive turning, away from personality politics and towards datacentered public debate (naerland, 2020). however, when digital visualizations are used as part of political campaigns, they may also serve to misinform, persuade and divert attention (amit-danhi and shifman, 2020). thus, visualizations comprise a unique meeting point between political interests and the democratic greater good. in political campaigns, candidates are engaged in a contest over the winning narrative. in a hybrid media world, political power, or the ability to "create, tap, or steer information flows in ways that suit their goals and in ways that modify, enable, or disable the agency of others" chadwick, 2017: 285) may afford specific actors a head start in the race. power manifests in different discursive and persuasive strategies. powerful actors tend to focus on their persona (rahat and sheafer, 2007) through displays of emotionality, while peripheral actors tend to narrate reality through issue-oriented content (samuelazran et al., 2018). demonstrated by widespread grassroots campaigns in the past decade, (e.g., #metoo, blm) the digital world offers a challenging, though somewhat effective pathway for awareness-raising. in recent years, studies have explored the narrative, engagement and emotionality potentials of digital visualizations (see kennedy et al, 2016; weber, 2020; kennedy and hill, 2018). however, an analysis of the ways in which different actors utilize visualization for political persuasion and rhetoric has yet to emerge. accordingly, i ask: "how do different types of political actors visualize the same political reality?" method stemming from a failed budget approval process, israel's 2015 election-cycle uniquely revolved around repeated refuting and confirming of financial facts. using qualitative grounded analysis, i analyze a sample of all cost-of-living visualizations posted to facebook by various political actors during the campaign period (n=209), and contrast rhetorical strategies with the political power-stance of the posting actor. findings across the sample, different narrative, visual, and information-oriented strategies were applied by the actors in regards to israeli cost-of-living. analysis exposed two main visualization strategies: progress makers & hinderers and re-visualized economy. in the category of progress makers & hinderers, visualizations tend to anoint and celebrate economic progress-makers, battle over credit, or assign blame (hindering). in this category, peripheral actors tended claim progress based on indisputable data such as parliamentary voting records in traditional scientific formats (see fig.1), whereas primary actors visualized broad, uncited statements using simplified graphs (see fig. 2). several times throughout the election, the latter type of progress-maker visualizations were reposted by challenger-primary actors, overlaying their own narrative on top of the original claim (see fig. 3). alternatively, in the category of re-visualized economy, peripheral actors' visualizations challenged existing perceptions of economic reality as part of an ongoing debate about the existence (or the extent) of an israeli economic crisis. two main strategies emerged: humanizing poverty, wherein visualizations emotionally contextualize economic data to define poverty in terms of its emotional and moral consequences (see fig. 4); and greener grasses in which both peripheral and primary actors employ global comparisons of financial metrics to counteract the incumbent prime minister's claims about israel's prospering economic state (see fig. 5). despite their shared similarity in timeframe and subject, the visualizations in this sample took starkly different approaches, beginning with what was information chosen, as well as how it was visualized and for what rhetorical end. the visualization approached identified suggest rhetorical dynamics that correspond with political power structures, relating to three types of power: the powerful role of (visualized) numbers in political discourse, the persuasive power of emotions, and the political power of the actors posting the visualizations to social media. across my findings, i highlight re-visualization an act of discursive and political resistance by weakened actors. re-visualization is used by powerful actors in order to reclaim political narratives of achievements and failures (e.g., fig. 3). alternatively, when used by peripheral actors, re-visualization is applied in order to better their political stance in the battle of narratives. when they invite audiences to find the moral faults in the humanized reality of progress claimed by primary actors, or to be appalled at the wilting grasses of israeli economy in comparison to its neighbors', they engage in acts of resistance (i.e. power-gaining) against primary narratives, by enlisting both the power of numbers, and the power of emotional persuasion. conclusions this paper contributes a first in-depth exploration of visualization rhetoric as an expression of political power and a tool for resistance against it on social media. while studies have looked at political mechanisms of visualizations, the interplay depicted in this study provides much needed insight into the wide variety of strategies this growing genre provides political actors of all types for the dissemination of both benign and disinformative visualized messages on social media. through the strategies defined and the political patterns detected, future studies may use this local study to explore the ways in which political actors utilize the power of visualization and revisualization throughout different political contexts. references aiello g and parry k (2020) visual communication: understanding images in media culture. sage publications limited. amit-danhi er and shifman l (2018) digital political infographics: a rhetorical palette of an emergent genre. new media & society 20(10): 3540-3559. amit-danhi er and shifman l (2020) off the charts: user engagement enhancers in election infographics. information, communication & society: 1-19. chadwick a (2017) the hybrid media system: politics and power. oxford university press. kennedy h, hill rl, aiello g and allen w (2016) the work that visualisation conventions do. information, communication & society 19(6): 715-735. kennedy, h., & hill, r. l. (2018). the feeling of numbers: emotions in everyday engagements with data and their visualisation. sociology, 52(4), 830-848. nærland tu (2020) the political significance of data visualization: four key perspective. in engebretsen m and kennedy h (eds) data visualization in society. amsterdam university press, pp. 63-76. porter tm (1996) trust in numbers: the pursuit of objectivity in science and public life. princeton university press. rahat g and sheafer t (2007) the personalization (s) of politics: israel, 1949–2003. political communication 24(1): 65-80. samuel-azran t, yarchi m, and wolfsfeld g (2018) rhetoric styles and political affiliations during israel’s 2013 “facebook elections”. international journal of politics, culture, and society 31(1): 15-30. towner tl (2017) the infographic election: the role of visual content on social media in the 2016 presidential campaign. in schill d and hendricks ja (eds) the presidency and social media. routledge: pp. 236-262. weber w (2020) exploring narrativity in data visualization in journalism. in engebretsen m and kennedy h (eds) data visualization in society. amsterdam: amsterdam university press, pp. 295-312. fig. 1: how did they vote? february 22, 2015. fig. 2: netanyahu. march 5, 2015. fig. 3: revisualized progress making. netanyahu (right) and gadi meiri (left), january 20 and 30, 2015. fig. 4: taub center, fig. 5: greener grasses comparing israel to its oecd peers. february 1, 2015. microsoft word hintz-towards civic participation in the datafied society-towards civic participation in the datafied society.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): hintz, a. (2021, october). towards civic participation in the datafied society: can citizen assemblies democratize algorithmic governance? paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. towards civic participation in the datafied society: can citizen assemblies democratize algorithmic governance? arne hintz cardiff university citizens are increasingly assessed, profiled and categorized according to data assemblages. government and public sector institutions are using data analytics to rate and rank citizens, households and communities and allocate services accordingly (eubanks 2018, yeung 2018). data scores are emerging as prominent mechanism for government institutions to focus social services and interventions, guide policing, regulate people’s movements, and affect people’s well-being and living conditions (citron and pasquale 2014, dencik et al 2019). increasingly, state-citizen relations are thus affected by algorithmic decision-making. yet this happens largely without people’s knowledge and without avenues to meaningfully engage and intervene. while citizens become infinitely knowable, they have little ability to interrogate and challenge the use of their data. this raises significant challenges for democratic processes, active citizenship and public participation (hintz et al 2019). how, then, do we participate as citizens in a society in which we are assessed and categorized according to data analytics which we do not understand? how do we intervene into algorithmic governance processes and affect the development and management of the very data systems that increasingly organize society? how do we develop new democratic practices to ensure participation, transparency and accountability? citizen assemblies, citizen juries, deliberative polls and other models of public engagement and deliberation offer opportunities for advancing citizen voices outside and beyond classic electoral procedures. while distinct in their specific implementation (i.e., their size, goals, policy focus, etc.), they share an approach of bringing together a small selection of the population for deliberation on key issues that society is facing (smith 2009; escobar & elstub 2017). they have successfully been applied to discuss problems and develop shared norms and policy solutions across a growing range of thematic areas (oecd 2020). those areas have expanded to questions of data and ai. in the uk, the geographic focus of this study, participatory and deliberative events have included (in the past two years alone) a citizens jury on the use of automated decision-making, a citizens’ summit on the use of data in the health and care sector, citizens juries on applications of ai in criminal justice, recruitment and healthcare, and a citizens’ biometrics council on the use of facial recognition technology. several of these initiatives were commissioned by major oversight and advisory institutions, such as the royal society and the information commissioners office, and are thus closely related to policy development. as part of a larger project on ‘civic participation in the scoring society’, based at the data justice lab at cardiff university, we have examined different practices for enhancing civic engagement with data analytics. the part of the project that is discussed in this paper draws on findings from 15 expert interviews conducted between june 2019 and march 2021 with members of government, civil society organizations and providers of citizen engagement fora; extensive desk research on methods and cases of participatory initiatives; and a fact-finding workshop with representatives of relevant institutions and initiatives. we have been interested in the level of participation, the decision-making power and the policy impact of public engagement initiatives, as well as prospects for institutionalizing civic participation at different levels of decisionmaking. conceptually, the study is situated at the intersection of two different areas of research that have rarely been in detailed conversation – critical data studies and democratic innovation. critical data studies has explored the role of data in a wide range of social settings (e.g., boyd and crawford 2012, kitchin 2014) as well as in government and the public sector (e.g., dencik et al 2019), while work on democratic innovation has advanced our knowledge of participatory mechanisms but has not focused on the specific challenges of communication technologies (e.g., goodin 2008, patriquin 2020). some insights from participatory studies have been applied to the field of media and communication (see carpentier 2011) but have not yet been systematically adopted for algorithmic governance. most prominently, attempts of auditing algorithms and data systems have been explored (e.g., kitchin 2017, o’neil 2016, reisman et al. 2018) but often remain in a technology-centred and expert-based context that has limitations in advancing broader societal deliberation and participation. our research on the suitability of models of civic engagement for decisions on the deployment of data analytics systems suggests that citizen assemblies, citizen juries and similar initiatives can be a useful tool in larger strategies for democratizing the datafied state but have several limitations. they can raise public knowledge and awareness, they demonstrate that citizens can address complex problems of datafication, and they can lead to policy change if they are closely related to a specific policymaking process. however, in order to have policy impact and fulfil their substantial resource requirements, they are often commissioned and guided by larger institutional actors (government, think tanks, public opinion institutes), rather than self-organised by citizens or social movements, which limits both the range of issues discussed and the freedom of participants to challenge dominant views about data. while very few of these initiatives could be characterized as mere ‘engagement-washing’ exercises, the tradeoff between policy effectiveness and fundamental re-thinking of the datafied society constitutes a tension at the core of these mechanisms. a more detailed discussion of the research findings will be provided in an upcoming research report that will be available on the data justice lab website (https://datajusticelab.org). despite their shortcomings, models of public engagement and democratic innovation demonstrate a growing concern with the democratic deficiencies of algorithmic governance and offer significant starting-points for expanding democratic practices in a datafied society and placing datafication under public control. references boyd, d. & crawford, k. (2012). critical questions for big data. information, communication & society, 15(5). carpentier, n. (2011). media and participation. bristol: intellect. citron, d. k. and pasquale, f. (2014). the scored society: due process for automated predictions. washington law review, 89(1). dencik, l., redden, j., hintz, a. and warren, h. (2019). the golden view: data-driven governance in the scoring society. internet policy review, 8(2). escobar. o. and elstub, s. (2017). forms of mini-publics: an introduction to deliberative innovations in democratic practice. new democracy foundation. eubanks, v. (2018). automating inequality: how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. st. martin’s press. goodin, r.e. (2008). innovating democracy: democratic theory and practice after the deliberative turn. oxford: oxford university press. hintz, a., dencik, l., and wahl-jorgensen, k. (2019). digital citizenship in a datafied society. polity press. kitchin, rob (2014). the data revolution: big data, open data, data infrastructures & their consequences, london: sage. kitchin, r. (2017). thinking critically about and researching algorithms. information, communication and society 20(1). oecd (2020) innovative citizen participation and new democratic institutions. report. o’neil, c. (2016). weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. new york: crown random house. patriquin, l. (2020). permanent citizens’ assemblies: a new model for public deliberation. london/new york: rowman and littlefield international. reisman et al. (2018). algorithmic impact assessments: a practical framework for public agency accountability. report of the ainow institute. available at: https://ainowinstitute.org/aiareport2018.pdf smith, g. (2009). democratic innovations. cambridge university press. yeung, k. (2018). big data-driven government: towards a new public analytics in public administration? paper presented at icon-s, hong kong, may 27 selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 titley, g., nikunen, k., pantti, m. (2017, october 18-21). racism and affect in the hybrid media system: analyzing the ‘finnish immigration debate’. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. racism and affect in the hybrid media system: analyzing the ‘finnish immigration debate’ gavan titley maynooth university/university of helsinki kaarina nikunen tampere university mervi pantti helsinki university the syrian emergency and wider border crisis has amplified exclusionary practices and political discourses in europe. though neither unique to the post-2014 moment nor a ’temporary problem’ of european politics, the intensive construction of refugees and people who migrate as a near-existential crisis for the european union has led to the mainstream legitimation of overt islamophobia and xenophobia. the extensive media coverage and political instrumentalisation has ensured that in public debates, refugees and migrants have been connected with terrorism particularly after the paris attacks in october 2015 and with sexual violence, most notably after the allegedly organised sexual harassment of women in cologne on new year eve 2015. it is certainly the case that mediated moments of individual tragedy, such as the widely circulated photo of alan kurdi, have generated social media events that appeared to shift public opinion towards the plight of refugees rather than the ‘problem of migrants’ (see vis et al 2015). however the intersection of these divisive communicative events, and their circulation throughout blogs, social media platforms and mainstream news sites, with the overtness of anti-immigrant movements and ‘populist’ politics in european politics, have arguably fuelled opposition and racism towards refugees and migrants. in this broader context, this paper explores the ‘immigration debate’ in finland with a particular focus on the affective force of racism in social media networks, and on how key communicative events become generative sites for the discursive reproduction – and to resistance to racism. in the finnish context, several significant online communities and blogs played a crucial role in mobilizing racist rhetoric and sentiments during this period, but it is not possible to understand their significance without examining them in terms of what andrew chadwick theorises as a hybrid media system (2013), a concept that emphasizes the interdependence of older and newer media logics, and thus invites an exploration of the relations between different communicative and political spaces. central to chadwick’s analysis is the recognition that a hybrid media system will inevitably be characterized by contingent distributions of power. that is, even within an unequal political economy of communication, the dynamics of intensive communicative events that are simultaneously mediated across platforms allow for a wider range of actors to “create, tap or steer information flows in ways that suit their goals in ways that modify, enable, or disable others’ agency”(chadwick 2013: 218). the paper argues that these dynamics are critical to understanding how contemporary expressions of racism are shaped and contested in the interactive everyday cultures of digital media. as the sociology of racism broadly recognizes, racism appears to occupy a paradoxical status in contemporary societies (murji & solomos 2014). it is held to have been historically overcome, while remaining a constant focus of public debate and political mobilization (lentin & titley 2011). the ‘refugee and migration’ crisis has witnessed a distinct intensification of this dynamic, with endless contestation as to what constitutes racism in public debates that foreground ‘the migrant’ and ‘the refugee’ as problems to be deliberated upon, and solved. thus, we argue, racism are discursively shaped in a context that combines both the political disputability of racism in contemporary societies of migration and multiculturalism, and in an interactive, interdependent and convergent media environment predicated on the ‘spreadability’ of media content (jenkins et al 2014) and the ‘constant incitement to discourse’ (couldry 2012) of media events and digital participation. to explore the intensity of these ‘events about racism’, we turn to a consideration of how affect drives online engagements in different ways (paasonen 2016). the ‘affective dimension’ of racism is, of course, not new, having been explored in a range of studies of everyday experiences of being racialized, and investments in racism (essed 1991, jackson 2010). we approach affect as practice to be able to explore the ways in which social formations are marked and shaped by affect and emotions (wetherell 2012, 103). in this way our work involves exploration of the collective dimensions of affective meaning-making. we focus on affective-discursive practices that involve sharing and circulation (ahmed 2007) of racism in the finnish immigration debate through three analytical dimensions. first, affective practice engages emotional discourses shared through personal networks. the topics circulated also draw on intimacy and body – and employ themes such as rape and sexuality that are used to politicize the intimate sphere. second, we analyse the production of racism through an ironic sensibility that provides multiple layers of meanings to images and an increasingly challenging environment for interpretations. the practices of ironic commenting, re-interpretations, and intentional misrepresentations complicate the critique with ever escaping definitions and in this way epitomize the sensibility of the post-factual context (andrejevic 2013: 10-13). third, we look at the structure of these rhetorical practices. the intensity of the interaction and the way publics organize around particular debates produce what has been termed as networked and affective publics (papacharissi 2013). this emergence of publics around news events, debates and topics is also structured by algorithmic mechanisms that constitute several subcultures or multiple parallel and also racialized ‘bubbles’ (gillespie 2014, pariser, 2011; sharma 2013). the data of the research is gathered from finnish online discussion forums, social media and mainstream news platforms using custom web scrapers and existing application programming interfaces as well as from existing big data sets of finnish online discussion collected during the finnish parliament elections in 2015 for the project “cyber-elections 2015”and online discussion forum, “suomi24”, from 2002 to this date publicly available through fin-clarin. acknowledging the limitations related to automated text mining and computational methods (e.g. grimmer & stewart 2013), the research has combined quantitative data with qualitative data collection and analysis with focus on specific case studies. references: ahmed, s. (2004) the cultural politics of emotion. edinburgh university press. andrejevic, m. 2013. infoglut: how too much information is changing the way we think and know. london and new york: routledge. chadwick, a. (2013) the hybrid media system: politics and power. oxford university press. couldry, n. (2012) media, society, world. social theory and digital media practice. polity press. essed, p. (1991) understanding everyday racism. london; sage. gillespie, t. (2014) the relevance of algorithms. in t. gillespie, p.j. boczkowski, k. a. foot: media technologies: essays on communication, materiality and society. cambridge: mit press. hills, b, paasonen, s. & petit, m. (2015) (eds.) networked affect. cambridge: mit press. jackson, j.l., (2010) racial paranoia: the unintended consequences of political correctness. new york: civitas press. jenkins, h., ford, s., and green, j. (2013) spreadable media. new york university press. lentin, a. & g. titley (2011) the crises of multiculturalism: racism in a neoliberal age. london: zed books. murji, k. & j. solomos (2014) theories of race and ethnicity: contemporary debates and perspectives. oxford: oup. paasonen, s. (2015) a midsummer’s bonfire: affective intensities of online debate. in k. hillis, s. paasonen and m. petit (eds.) networked affect. cambridge: mit press, 27-42. papacharissi, z. (2014) affective publics: sentiment, technology, politics. oxford university press. parisier, e. (2011) the filter bubble: what the internet is hiding from you. the penguin books. sharma, s. (2013). black twitter? racial hashtags, networks and contagion. new formations 78(1), 46-64. shohat, e. and stam, r. (2012) race in translation: culture wars around the postcolonial atlantic. new york wetherell, m. (2012) affect and emotion: a new social scientific understanding. london: sage. theorizing online racism: the stream, affect and power laws. sanjay sharma brunel university the stream has been the organizing metaphor for the web for the past several years…the stream represents the triumph of reverse-chronology, where importance…is based exclusively on nowness…(madigral 2013). the internet has reached peak hate (marche 2013). the web has supposedly become a dynamic social stream. this stream is replete with viral events such as breaking news or political revolts, as well as the frenetic circulation of celebrity gossip, banal chatter, images, videos and status updates. social media platforms such as facebook, youtube, instagram, twitter and reddit are key players in generating the stream. they ‘curate’ and monetize the enormous amounts of user generated content. nonetheless, according to editor of techcrunch, the social stream ‘…creates a different form of syndication which cannot be licensed and cannot be controlled’ (schonfeld 2009). social media commentators lament that the hyper-connectivity of the web has produced a mass participatory medium that foments over-sharing, produces 'fake news' and creates a fickle online attention-economy. in particular, the stream is cast as a debased flow of communication. moreover, the mainstream condemnation of ‘online hate’ flits between blaming malicious users/mob-like crowds for propagating hostility; or singles out the technologies of the medium itself – for example, internet anonymity, ease of sharing – as being responsible for engendering a toxic online culture (harry 2013). the characterization of the social stream raging with hate does little to advance an understanding of what are specific forms of online antagonism (shepard et al 2015). while a burgeoning academic literature is exploring various forms of online hate, there has been a relative lack of research specifically examining web-based racism. in particular, theorizing how racism is manifested in social media remains remarkably under-developed (cf. daniels 2012; nakamura 2008). along with other forms of online antagonism, racism occurs across different social media platforms, with varying degrees of frequency, magnitude, visibility and affect. online racism is propagated by individuals, networked crowds, bots and algorithms. and racism can morph as it traverses the web, gaining traction and visibility across different platforms. the multi-modality of web racism is not easy to analyse. the lack of meta-theorizations of web-based racism has thwarted establishing it as a field of study (cf. kolko et al 2000). a key limitation to our understanding has been a failure to pursue an analysis from a sociotechnical standpoint. this paper, organised as three parts, innovates an approach for studying the manifestation of online racism by advancing a ‘materialist’ account. part i interrogates mainstream accounts of online racism. these treat racism as either: (i) an 'extreme', socially aberrant real world phenomenon which spills over into the virtual world and is amplified by the web; or conversely; (ii) ‘everyday’ online racism is a prosaic phenomenon, primarily caused by the communicative technologies and network effects of the web. essentially, both perspectives fail to acknowledge the mutual imbrication and entanglement of racism and the web. part ii offers an alternative approach that conceives online racism as an assemblage (sharma 2013). racism is emergent, via interactions and encounters on the web: an entanglement of both human and non-human relations and technologies. racial differentiations are ‘performed not only through human interaction, but also through encounters with all kinds of things...which have the capacity to affect’ (swanton 2010: 8). part iii identifies a racialized ‘affective economy’ for grasping online racism. there is a wild variation in the attention economy of the web, because the processes of information propagation and visibility are multiply determined. it is proposed that online racism can be modelled by a power law distribution. in situations when power laws operate, ‘decisions’ such as linking to a web page, ‘liking’, sharing or retweeeting – are influenced by existing behaviours of the system. racism is not an individualized, random or independent phenomenon; it is embedded in techno-socio-material relations. the power law distribution figuratively describes not just scale, but also variations in frequency, magnitude, visibility and affect of online racialized events. with reference to the flow of affects in the assemblages of online racism, i am concerned with elaborating ‘... an “affect economy”’ (clough, cited in fox & alldred 2014: 403). it is possible to analytically identify at least three modalities of online racism with respect to a power law distribution: spectacular, explicit and ambient racisms. (i) at the ‘head’ of the power law distribution is spectacular racism. this characterizes racialized events that garner significant attention on the web, for example, by a trending hashtag, or an image or video intensely shared across social media platforms, or reported by influential online magazine sites and mainstream news media. it can be formed of an event such as a prominent public figure shamed for a racist diatribe, or the exposure of racist trolling against a non-white celebrity. (ii) in between the ‘head’ and ‘long tail’ of the power law distribution is explicit racism. this is less visible on the web, as it tends to occur in particular sites that foment online racist cultures. it can circulate in a facebook hate group, or fester in a racist sub-reddit, or take the form of a racist meme created by the notorious trolls of 4chan. (iii) ambient racism languishes in the long tail of the power law distribution. while this mode of racism garners relatively little immediate attention on the web, it constitutes the majority of online racialized events. ambient racism appears as everyday antagonistic online chatter, and is composed of seemingly transient racialized infractions, such as vitriolic expressions on online news sites and youtube's comment space, or tweets harbouring micro-aggressions (sharma & brooker 2016). the three modalities of online racism outlined aim to heuristically identify its differing characteristics. in reality they overlap, and rhizomatically flow across the web. to conclude, a power law model to grasp online racism is a simplification of what is occurring. nonetheless, it offers a means of beginning to making sense of the multifarious types of online racism that exist on the web. references daniels, j., 2013. race and racism in internet studies: a review and critique. new media & society 15, 695–719. fox, n.j. & alldred, p., 2015. new materialist social inquiry: designs, methods and the research-assemblage. international journal of social research methodology 18, 399–414. harry, s., 2014. attacking the stream, dissent magazine. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/attacking-the-stream. kolko, b.e., nakamura, l., rodman, g.b., 2000. race in cyberspace. routledge. madrigal, a.c., 2013. 2013: the year “the stream” crested. the atlantic. marche, s., 2013. there are no saints online. esquire. http://www.esquire.com/nosaints-online-0513. nakamura, l., 2008. digitizing race: visual cultures of the internet. university of minnesota press. schonfeld, e., 2013. jump into the stream. esquire. http://www.esquire.com/newspolitics/a22310/no-saints-online-0513/ sharma, s., 2013. black twitter? racial hashtags, networks and contagion. new formations, 78, 46–64. sharma, s., brooker, p., 2016. #notracist: exploring racism denial talk on twitter, in, daniels, j., gregory, k., cottom, t.m. (eds.), digital sociologies. policy press, pp. 459–481. shepherd, t., harvey, a., jordan, t., srauy, s., miltner, k., 2015. histories of hating. social media + society 1. swanton, d., 2010. sorting bodies: race, affect, and everyday multiculture in a mill town in northern england. environment and planning a 42, 2332–2350. more than meets the eye: understanding networks of images in controversies around racism on social media ariadna matamoros fernandez queensland university of technology tim highfield queensland university of technology felix muench queensland university of technology introduction visual objects are central to social media and its practices, acting as key mediators of discussions of matters of socio-cultural relevance, including politics and news events. iconic images spread virally across social media, becoming symbols of events and issues, and inspiring further visual reactions and remixes; these include the myriad versions of shepard fairey’s 2008 obama ‘hope’ poster (gries, 2015), or of the photograph of three year-old syrian refugee alan kurdi (vis & goriunova, 2015). while most of the research on social media communication has focused on text-based analysis, the visual as “widespread social media form” requires critical investigation ([author]). this paper examines images as an opportunity to understand conversations around race and racism online (nakamura, 2008), and develops new methods to understand processes of meaning-making and sharing patterns across platforms. previous research on racism online has examined racist text-based discourse (hughey & daniels, 2013), hashtag tropes and their networks (sharma & brooker, 2016) and how the visual can highlight antagonistic practices (everett, 2013; milner, 2013). most of the work on how the visual mediates racist practices, though, has used semiotic analyses of small-scale samples of visual content to describe the surrounding practices and cultures. our empirical approach builds upon these methods by adding a second element of analysis: the examination of networks of visual content across platforms. do certain genres of images tend to stay in their original communities? can we identify polarising pictures by their communication patterns? through a combination of qualitative approaches and community detection algorithms, we will map the actors, objects and arguments involved around the sharing of key visual objects to discuss current controversies around racism. context the techno-social construction of racism online, which is nationand medium-specific, requires nuanced investigation and the development of new methods to understand its complexity ([author]). we propose an empirical approach to examine how visual objects mediate conversations around race, focusing on the australian context. similar to klugman and osmond’s (2009) study of how a 1993 photograph of indigenous footballer nicky winmar gesturing to his skin triggered a national discussion about racism, we centre our analysis on two contemporary iconic images involving adam goodes, another indigenous footballer and one of the game’s most fêted players. during a game in 2013, goodes pointed out to the umpire a girl in the crowd who had called him an “ape”, and who was subsequently removed. while there was substantial support for goodes for calling out racism in australian sporting culture, rival supporters would also boo him every time he played. in 2015, during the annual indigenous round, a celebration of the role of aboriginal and torres strait islander people in australian rules football, goodes celebrated a goal by performing a war dance, which included him mimicking the action of throwing a spear in the general direction of the crowd. this event served to reignite debate about race and racism in australia and increased the booing campaign towards goodes at matches and online. these two events involving adam goodes invoked different tropes on social media, from the ‘aggressive black man’ to ‘playing the racist card’. like winmar’s gesture 20 years earlier, images of goodes’ actions (see figure 1) became iconic: widely shared, spread, and referenced in responses to these events. figure 1. adam goodes’ gestures in 2013 (left) and 2015 (right). method and discussion our mixed-methods approach uses twitter as our seed data source since it is a rich repository of images that users post from other platforms (thelwall et al., 2015). we used the tracking infrastructure for social media analysis (trisma) for the data collection, which utilises the twitter api to continually capture tweets of 2.8m australian users (bruns et al., 2016). we chose the trisma dataset to guarantee that the images examined were posted by australian users, which is important to understand the national specificity of racism. we queried for all tweets that matched the keyword “goodes” between the war dance (29 may 2015) and goodes’ retirement on 16 september 2015. although this period was focused on the war dance controversy, a preliminary exploration of the images posted showed that images of goodes’ 2013 gesture were also shared. these were used to deny the racial motives of the booing and to justify opponents’ dislike of him because of his involvement in past controversial events. we qualitatively analysed all the tweets with images (2,174 tweets) to only keep the ones containing goodes’ iconic gestures from 2013 and 2015, ending with 200 tweets. following this, we coded the images, using the tweet text to help determine whether they are ‘pro’ or ‘against’ goodes1. this categorization is crucial to study the publics and sharing dynamics around the same images based on different cultures of use: prosocial and antisocial practices. the retweet, @mention, and co-hashtag networks around those images further develop this analysis. network visualisations, supporting an explorative analysis of the dissemination of the pictures, as well as key network metrics, and community detection algorithms give us the possibility to find correlations between the origin and features of the content, communication patterns, and dissemination dynamics (e.g. del val, rebollo, & botti, 2015). furthermore, we can identify different actors and arguments involved in the debate, and the communication dynamics of these images, depending on who shared them and with what purpose. for instance, was the war dance image mostly shared on twitter to oppose goodes or to support him? how disconnected are the friends and foes of adam goodes? this paper is a preliminary exploration of our method on twitter. building on this, we aim to explore how the visual was used and shared not only on twitter, but also across other relevant platforms including youtube and facebook. references bruns, a., burgess, j., banks, j., tjondronegoro, d., dreiling, a., … hartley, j. (2016). trisma: tracking infrastructure for social media analysis, http://trisma.org/ del val, e., rebollo, m., & botti, v. (2015). does the type of event influence how user interactions evolve on twitter? plos one, 10(5). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0124049 everett, a. (2013). have we become postracial yet? race and media technology in the age of president obama. in l. nakamura & p. chow-white (eds.), race after the internet (pp. 146–167). new york: routledge. gries, l. e. (2015). still life with rhetoric: a new materialist approach for visual rhetorics. logan: utah state university press. 1 some mainstream media shared these images in a purely informative fashion. these were coded as ‘neutral’ and removed from the subsequent analysis. hughey, m. w., & daniels, j. (2013). racist comments at online news sites: a methodological dilemma for discourse analysis. media, culture & society, 35(3), 332– 347. klugman, m., & osmond, g. (2009). that picture-nicky winmar and the history of an image. australian aboriginal studies, 2009(2), 78. milner, r. m. (2013). fcj-156 hacking the social: internet memes, identity antagonism, and the logic of lulz. fibreculture, (22). retrieved from http://twentytwo.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-156-hacking-the-social-internet-memesidentity-antagonism-and-the-logic-of-lulz/ nakamura, l. (2008). digitizing race: visual cultures of the internet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. sharma, s., & brooker, p. (2016). #notracist: exploring racism denial talk on twitter. retrieved from http://opus.bath.ac.uk/53206/1/sharma_brooker_notracist_digital_sociology_preprint.pd f thelwall, m., goriunova, o., vis, f., faulkner, s., burns, a., aulich, j., … d’orazio, f. (2015). chatting through pictures? a classification of images tweeted in one week in the uk and usa. journal of the association for information science and technology. retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.23620/full vis, f., & goriunova, o. (eds.). (2015). the iconic image on social media: a rapid research response to the death of aylan kurdi*. retrieved from http://visualsocialmedialab.org/projects/the-iconic-image-on-social-media online hate speech: genealogies, tensions and contentions eugenia siapera dublin city university paloma viejo otero dublin city university elena moreo dublin city university the explosion of discussions of online hate speech suggests raised public concerns. controversial figures such as milo yiannopoulos have generated multiple discussions and commentaries in journalistic articles but also in people’s timelines and news feeds. concerns are raised over the proliferation of online hate and its pernicious effects especially on vulnerable individuals. at the same time concerns are raised over tensions between controlling hate and freedom of speech. additionally, concerns are raised over the perceived duties and responsibilities of social media platforms. as more discussions, comments and opinions accumulate, there is added confusion and more and more layers of complexity. on the one hand such discussions are typical of the domain of social media and of what jodi dean has described as communicative capitalism. on the other hand, the accumulation of discourse may end up obscuring the very contours of hate speech that it is meant to address and illuminate. additionally, the very debatability of hate speech, especially racist hate speech, points to the operation of a particular politics in play which denies it during the very act of supposedly seeking to address it – as gavan titley (2016) has convincingly shown. taking a step back, this article is looking to identify and discuss definitions of hate speech encountered in different political actors. in identifying and contextualising the origins, differences, tensions and contentions among these definitions, this article is hoping to contribute to understanding the terms of the discussion with a view to ultimately escaping the limits and impossible dilemmas encountered in much of the public debate. at the same time, this article is concerned with identifying the role played by the various actors in the debate. the paper focuses on three discrete but occasionally overlapping discourses of online hate speech as an entry point to uncovering the terms of the debate. firstly, it examines institutional and legal responses, which feed into policy; secondly, social media platforms themselves; using materials from interviews with key informants in facebook and twitter, and through an analysis of their online terms of service and reporting mechanisms; and finally, civil society initiatives that have emerged in order to deal with online hate and which act as pressure groups. more specifically, the article begins by looking at the formal documents of the european commission, and more specifically the framework decision of 2008 and the 2016 code of conduct agreed with social media platforms. tracing the antecedents of these documents and their basis in other decisions referenced in this decision, the analysis here identifies the roots of current online hate speech in the various international court decisions that took place at the end of wwii and which culminated in the universal declaration of human rights of 1948. however, this declaration subsumed important tensions between two ideologically opposite understandings, one associated with the soviet delegation and one associated with us liberalism, revealed in the opposing principles in article 7 concerning non-discrimination and article 19 concerning freedom of speech (viejo otero, 2017). addressing this tension in practice means that the ec framework decision has focused on what they identify as illegal online hate speech but leave everything else go through, while the code of conduct focuses on the efficiency of the mechanisms by which illegal hate speech is removed. in many ways, existing legislation shapes understandings of hate speech in the policies of social media platforms. both facebook and twitter contain references to the same vulnerable groups identified in the universal declaration of human rights. facebook is influenced by the european convention of human rights and has adopted its main principles. the two main sources of tension for these platforms concern firstly the liberal ideology and freedom of speech ‘absolutism’ and the requirement that they offer a pleasant and enjoyable experience to their customers; and secondly, between the social origins and uses of hate and the individualistic approach to users. the former tension is discursively resolved through references to safety and security for users; this is further accompanied by a realisation of the monumental difficulties of tracing online hate on their platforms a shift towards encouraging users to produce counter-narratives. the latter tension is addressed through the slide between hate speech and cyberbullying and through individualised reporting mechanisms (siapera and viejo otero, 2016). in a third step, the paper will consider understandings of hate speech as they emerge from anti-racist groups in the context of ireland. this part of the research hasn’t been conducted yet, and it will rely on a set of focus group interviews with anti-racist groups discussing their understandings of hate speech online, their experiences and the varieties of hate encountered, as well as their views on how to address this. this analysis is looking to identify the tensions in the discourses and understandings of online hate encountered in civil society groups as well as tensions that emerge between online and offline experiences and because of the difficulties associated with remedial actions. taken together these three distinct but related discourses will reveal some of the contours of the debate on online hate speech and point to overlaps but also important differences. the discussion will point to a kind of role reversal in which social media platforms operate as states or state-like actors, and political institutions act as lobbyists. the role of civil society actors is diminished as social media platforms understand their constituencies primarily as individuals and not as members of social groups. at the same time, social media corporations collaborate with some civil society groups and ngos but under conditions that remain unclear and using criteria that are opaque. the relationship remains one between a service provider and a client. in these terms, the formulation of distinct approaches to online hate speech points to the existence of a parallel politics that sees the various actors jostling for position and influence. in substantive terms, the prioritisation of legal discourses or illegal versus legal hate speech, of hate speech as an issue of safety and security, the individualisation of responses and emphasis on counter-narratives or the production of more speech, as well as the lack of any open channels for social groups to communicate with social media platforms point to a foreclosure of political responses to online hate speech. references dean, j., 2005. communicative capitalism: circulation and the foreclosure of politics. cultural politics, 1(1), pp.51-74. titley, g. ,2016, the debatability of racism. networked participative media and postracialism. rasismista ja rajoista, available at: https://raster.fi/category/in-english/ siapera e. and viejo otero, p. 2016, hate speech and social media platforms, paper presented at the 17th aior conference, berlin, 5-8 october. viejo otero p., 2017, from harmful speech to hate speech, work in progress. microsoft word ir16-template-final.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 ser técino: technology transfer, emerging technical actors, and brazilian open-source software beatrice j. choi northwestern university in a statement issued as both a critique and a challenge, former brazilian president luiz inácio “lula” da silva asserts, “while society has entered the digital era politics has remained analog.”1 his opinion addresses the social divide between technological advancement and the state’s ability to tap into technology as a platform for effective political action. introduced in 2005 as the first state-sponsored campaign to support legal practices of open-source software, lula’s initiative introduces brazilians to technology education with aims to engage in interactive, “participatory” politics within a networked democratic culture. brazil does not have an ideological history, however, of associating technology’s generative qualities with democratic ideals or social utopia. in fact, the country is a relatively new democracy, and the first of its technology-oriented policy regarding computers emerged in the midst of a military dictatorship in the 1970s. furthermore, the idea that open-source technology policy in brazil allows the state to enter a “digital” era invites a rhetorical contrast that labels the country’s prior investment in computer-oriented technology transfer as outdated, or perhaps “merely” analog. the rhetoric concerning the local production of computer technology, its transfer between international markets, and the state’s protectionist role in the market during the dictatorship diverges greatly from the tone that the prior president takes in the present. consequently, the contemporary climate of open-source software advocacy, followed by the ideologically charged rhetoric of democratic, non-proprietary, and participatory technology use owes its historical roots in brazil to one of its most politically and economically restrictive eras: the military dictatorship from 1964-1985. the initial steps brazil made in regards to the technology transfer and local production of computers took place in the early 1970s, manifesting as state-driven technology policy emerging from a set of national security concerns. at the time, the brazilian navy was operating its ships using british ferranti computers, a fact which triggered the military’s growing awareness of its dependence on foreign technologies, which according to sociologist peter evans “became thereafter a central justification for the national computer policy” (evans, 69). consequently, brazilian policies issue standards on international technology transfer to open the market to brazilian consumers, and 1 da silva, luiz inácio lula. “the message of brazil’s youth.” ny times, jul. 16, 2013. suggested citation (apa): choi, b. (2015, october 21-24). ser técino: technology transfer, emerging technical actors, and brazilian open-source software. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http:// spir.aoir.org. foster protectionist measures for local computer production to provide an incubating space for brazilian innovators (tigre 1983, evans 1986, schwartzman 1988). without attempting to conflate the trend from proprietary hardware towards programmed software, i argue that brazil’s evolving technology policies, rotating cast of technical actors, and local computer production establish the premise for a robust software culture to take root in the present. nearing the regime’s end in 1984, brazilian social scientist simon schwartzman observes that a “national policy for informatives” got approved because it addressed the “dilemma between national autonomy and self-determination, on one hand, and control of the country’s resources by international companies and their local associates, on the other” (schartzman, 67). on the actor-level, conditions of technological restriction and economic dependency had thus far constrained individuals who would fit the mold as brazilian technology producers—university researchers, technicians, engineers, among others—from finding state resources to contribute to the growth of a local computer industry. the protectionist policy enabled the state to safeguard local computer production enough to encourage the emergence of national computer products, but the policy alone was not sufficient to steer and sustain such technological developments into a state of self-reliant production and fiscal independence. by the 1990’s, the economy minister zelia cardoso de mello charged such laws with hindering the country’s economic growth into an international scale of technological competition. she claimed that brazil was “effectively very backward because of this senseless nationalism” and argued that this “computer problem effectively blocked brazilian industry from modernizing. it does not make any sense to retain this cyst, which is the computer market reserve” (“brazil backing computer imports”). in response, a são paulo deputy named fernando gasparian spoke for the 60,000 people working in the domestic computer industry, “we are opening in exchange for nothing”, and that the local technology experts would ally with nationalist lawmakers because an “opening could kill our computer industry” (ibid). the moment of opening the technology market marks a series of conflicting interests. first, the state, which had been such an active proponent of market protectionism in the 1980’s demonstrates a drastic volteface, calling the local computer industry a “cyst” and a “problem” that holds the nation back from becoming a legitimate, international competitor. second, the emergence of a nationalist body of technological experts, who had surfaced at first to negotiate very material and economic restrictions with the possibility for new political formations in a vanguard, insurgent light now appear regressive, “backward”. finally, the state portrays the national technology market as having outgrown its incubating stage, and to remain further in a protectionist state would not prove that a local industry is viable on an international scale but rather, evoke instead “senseless nationalism”. it is already clear that a reductive model of “trickle-down” adaptation does not accurately depict brazil’s historical engagements with technological development. i analyze brazil’s evolving computer technology policy to debunk notions of streamlined technology adaptation that neglect the larger historical, economic, and political frameworks of global north-south power relations and inequalities. in this work, i consider analyses of how international sites locally receive and adapt specific technologies and technological practices (radway 1988, appadurai 1990). i address a growing body of media studies from both producer and user perspectives (larkin 2010, burell 2012) by looking specifically at the discourse produced by brazilian local technical actors, emerging computer policies, and technology transfer. the advent of “indigenously designed” computers (evans 1986), state-sponsored hybrid companies, “power brokers” (castells 2009), and technical specialists create the local environment of computer production prior to floss hackers and programmers, establishing historical precedence as an “emerging” technological culture in brazil (williams 1976). this emergent culture reflects the trajectory of a transforming cast of technical actors, who i call seres técnicos—or, “technical selves”—because their positions within the brazilian landscape of technological innovation are defined by the historical, ideological, and political positions they conceptually assume. to borrow from julian orr’s talking about machines, i assert that these seres técnicos express a human mental activity of labor as situated practice that is “socially and materially located” and that these “actions [as] practice must be understood with reference to the situation of their doing” (orr 10,11). what defines a moment of situated practice for the brazilian actors engaged in technical expertise and knowledge production as praxis changes within the country’s shifting technological, political, and economic terrain. first, the programmers, developers, and coders refute dependency theory that marginalizes brazil’s capability to produce software to the economic, political, and cultural periphery. second, this class of technological producers, or “frustrated nationalists” (evans 1986) becomes enmeshed— and at times romantically conflated—with the already-existing creative class as “ideological guerrillas” through the state’s established technology and cultural policies (alder 1986). finally, this evolving class of technological actors involved in brazilian computer production becomes ideologically political, as “insurgent experts” (shaw 2011), thus setting the precedent for contemporary dialogues about the digital divide and the participatory promise of open-source software. works cited adler, emanuel (1982). “ideological ‘guerrillas’ and the quest for technological autonomy”. international organization, vol. 40, issue 3 (1986): 673-705. appadurai, arjun. “disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy”. theory culture society, vol. 7 (1990): 295 brooke, james. “brazil backing computer imports”. the new york times. july 9, 1990. online. burrell, jena. invisible users: youth in the internet cafes of urban ghana. cambridge: mit press, 2012. cardoso, fernando henrique & enzo faletti. dependency and development in latin america. berkeley: u of california p, 1979. castells, manuel. the rise of the network society. new york: wiley-blackwell, 2009. computerworld. “under aggressive national policy: brazilian computer market now sixth largest”. computerworld. november 24, 1980. online. da silva, luiz inácio lula. “the message of brazil’s youth.” ny times, jul. 16, 2013. da silveira, sergio amadeu, murilo basi machado & rodrigo tarchiani savazoni. “backward march: the turnaround in public cultural policy in brazil”. media culture & society, vol. 35 (2013): 549. edwards, paul. the closed world: computers and the politics of discourse in cold war america. cambridge: mit press, 1997. evans, peter b. “state, capital, and the transformation of dependence: the brazilian computer case.” world development, vol. 14, no. 7 (1986): pg. 791-808. evans, peter. high technology and third world industrialization: brazilian computer policy in comparative perspective, edited with claudio r. frischtak and paulo bastos tigre. (1992) larkin, brian. signal and noise: media, infrastructure, and urban culture in nigeria. durham: duke u of p, 2010. orr, julian. talking about machines: an ethnography of a modern job. ithaca: cornell u of p, 1996. radway, janice. reading the romance: women, patriarchy, and popular literature. durham: u of north carolina p; 2nd edition (november 1991). schwartzman, simon. “high technology versus self-reliance: brazil enters the computer age”. brazil’s economic and political future. ed. julian m. chacel, pamela s. falk & david v. fleischer. boulder: westview press, 1988. shaw, aaron. “insurgent expertise: the politics of free/livre and open source software in brazil”. journal of information technology & politics vol. 8, issue 3 (2011): 253-272. takhteyev, yuri. coding places: software practices in a south american city. cambridge: mit press, 2012. tigre, paulos bastos. technology and competition in the brazilian computer industry. new york: st. martin’s press, 1983. williams, raymond. keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society. oxford: oxford u of p, 1988. microsoft word ir14_savasahelisingh.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 tweeting to the choir: online performance and academic identity sava saheli singh nyu usa sava@nyu.edu abstract new academic practices supported by platforms like twitter give scholars the opportunity to carve out professional identities at a time when the expectations of them in an increasingly competitive academic marketplace have never been higher. networked academic communities magnify the reach and impact of scholarly work, as well as support professional connections. propagating publications – both traditional and nontraditional – via twitter and creating platform-specific artifacts like “storified” conversations are things scholars seeking to legitimize alternative forms of scholarship do to give voice to their dissatisfactions. while ostensibly fostering a climate of openness that has the potential to disrupt the status quo in academia, these practices run the risk of creating insular groups of scholars – an outcome contrary to the very things such scholars profess to be trying to achieve. keywords twitter; scholarship; social media; academia introduction becoming a member of academia as a student, professor, or alternative academic has never been easier – or harder. social networking services like twitter, for instance, spread job announcements that once were limited to word of mouth or closed listservs. these sites also allow academics to forge and maintain connections. but all these things mean that more people are applying for fewer jobs, expectations are higher, and a greater range of proficiencies is desired. and while new digital scholarly practices affect academia as a whole, early-adopter, early-career scholars may be disproportionately affected. many scholars have taken to the internet to create and build academic identities that demonstrate their skill and mastery of technology – desirable traits in an increasingly technologized academia. some of this gets referred to as “digital scholarship”. many scholars today are conducting their work more openly via different platforms. as baym & boyd (2012) note, “there are more layers of publicness available to those using networked media than ever before; as a result, people’s relationship to public life is shifting in ways we have barely begun to understand.” (p. 321) participatory technology is making us reexamine what “scholarship” looks like and in so doing calls into question some of the norms of academia itself. acceptance of digital practices as “academic” practices is growing, but it may take time for these practices to be considered legitimate within academia because old forms of scholarship still hold sway. participatory scholarly networks twitter provides a space for people to create identities and enact them for an imagined audience, or even a networked audience (marwick & boyd, 2010). as users build their networks on twitter, they build strong weak ties (granovetter, 1973) – connections that grow over time into professional or personal relationships. rainie & wellman (2012) refer to this as “networked individualism” within the paradigm of an emergent “social operating system”. they explain, the networked operating system gives people new ways to solve problems and meet social needs. it offers more freedom to individuals than people experienced in the past selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 because now they have more room to maneuver and more capacity to act on their own. (rainie & wellman, 2012, p. 9). acknowledging the role of social media in academia, greenhow, robelia, & hughes (2009) spoke of the rise of “social scholarship” aided by web 2.0 technologies. veletsianos’ (2012) study of scholars’ use of twitter revealed practices that seem to push at what “scholarship” means. for example, scholars elicit feedback on their work from their networks – a practice that many scholars balk at for fear their ideas will be appropriated by others. in taking to this new platform, “...scholars have capitalized on the ease with which they can connect with others, traverse networks and communities of interest, and engage in conversations to further their work.” (p. 11). veletsianos & kimmons (2011) refer to the ways scholars are using participatory online technologies to both support existing scholarly practices and bring them into the 21st century as “networked participatory scholarship”. they assert that the movement of scholarly practice into a more techno-cultural space is influenced by the change from a passive culture to a more participatory one as noted by jenkins et al (2009), leading to more collaboration and crowd-sourcing. while building scholarly networks, users learn to recognize valuable connections and weed out ‘noise’ or unwanted information and people. donath (2007) likens this to signaling theory – originally from economics and biology – which talks about the “relationship between signals and qualities, showing why certain signals are more reliable and others are not.” (p. 3). on twitter, users develop different ways of verifying the legitimacy of information and people ranging from looking at how much information a user reveals in their profile to a google search of a person’s name. reputation and ‘followability’, paradoxically, often depend on who a person follows and/or is followed by. as donath & boyd (2004) note, social networking sites let us publicly display our connections – signaling reliability and trustworthiness. professionalizing non-traditional scholarly practice the flip side of building networked communities of scholars is that we run the risk of creating echo chambers on twitter, using them only to propagate the things we deem important. eli pariser (2011) calls it a "filter bubble," except instead of algorithms doing the filtering for us, we create our own incestuous pockets of information. within these bubbles, new practices are taking root among academics. for example, someone asks a question on twitter (with or without a hashtag), storifies the responses that come from their network, blogs about the storify, tweets about the blog post about the storify of the tweets, and then members of this person's network propagate this blog post about the storify of the tweets with a tweet or retweet of their own. this cyclical behavior is supported by the bubble and "the media" at large and has become an accepted and expected behavior among a certain class of academics. another example is citation practices on twitter, as priem & costello (2010) report, in which scholars promote their own and their peers’ articles, making them more accessible and visible, and thus, theoretically, increasing their scholarly impact. acknowledging that twitter, blogs, and other web-based, social channels are conduits for spreading scholarly work, priem, tarabolrelli, groth, & neylon (2010) started altmetrics (http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/) in an effort to track and report scholarly impact outside of the traditional citation models. practices like this are even becoming part of academic professionalization – the things a grad student or early-career scholar must do to develop a reputation as a scholar and academic. akin to the "teams" that erving goffman (1959/1990) speaks of made up of individuals who "cooperate in staging a single routine," practices that academics partake in are evocative of goffman's definition of a team and its behavior: a team is a grouping, but it is a grouping not in relation to a social structure or a social organization, but rather in relation to an interaction or series of interactions in selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 which the relevant definition of the situation is maintained. (goffman, 1959/1990, p. 104.) by engaging in practices like tweet-storify-blog-tweet-retweet loops and quantifying citation, academics lend legitimacy to them and make them a form of professional display. conclusion the implications of legitimizing non-traditional scholarly practices are profound at a time when twitter is a place where graduate students and early-career academics find community while dissertating and job-hunting. eager to create online portfolios and career-enhancing connections, they use services like twitter to develop desirable professional personas and makes themselves more attractive in an increasingly competitive job market. it is obvious that twitter, along with other social media platforms, is helping challenge the closed nature of many current academic practices. there is dissatisfaction among scholars, especially younger ones, seeking to upend the academic status quo and redefine our understandings of scholarly work, and twitter is giving them voice. the up-sides and down-sides of such practices can impact one's academic identity and chances on the job market. it is important that we as internet scholars step out of our filter bubbles in order to make sense of and critically examine the emerging, and possibly dominant and exclusionary, rituals that many academics on twitter engage in today. references baym, n. k., & danah boyd. (2012). socially mediated publicness: an introduction. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 56(3), 320-329. donath, j., & boyd, d. (2004). public displays of connection. bt technology journal 22(4), 71–82. donath, j. (2007). signals in social supernets. journal of computer-mediated communication 13. 231–251. goffman, e. (1990). the presentation of self in everyday life. uk: penguin. (original work published 1959.) granovetter, m. s. (1973). the strength of weak ties. american journal of sociology, 78, 1360 –1380. greenhow, c., robelia, b. & hughes, j. e. (2009). learning, teaching, and scholarship in a digital age: web 2.0 and classroom research: what path should we take now? educational researcher, 38, 4, 246–259. doi: 10.3102/0013189x09336671. jenkins, h., purushotma, r., weigel, m., clinton, k., & robinson, a. j. (2009). confronting the challenges of participatory culture: media education for the 21st century. cambridge, ma: the mit press. marwick, a., & boyd, d. (2011). i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience." new media and society, 13, 96-113. pariser, e. (2011). the filter bubble: what the internet is hiding from you. penguin press hc. priem, j., & costello, k. l. (2010). how and why scholars cite on twitter. proceedings of the american society for information science and technology,47(1), 1-4. j. priem, d. taraborelli, p. groth, c. neylon (2010), altmetrics: a manifesto, (v.1.0), 26 october 2010. http://altmetrics.org/manifesto rainie, h., & wellman, b. (2012). networked: the new social operating system. cambridge, mass.: mit press. veletsianos, g., & kimmons, r. (2011). networked participatory scholarship: emergent techno-cultural pressures toward open and digital scholarship in online networks. computers & education. veletsianos, g. (2012). higher education scholars' participation and practices on twitter. journal of computer assisted learning. license this article is ©2013 sava saheli singh, and licensed under cc by-nc-nd. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 rankine, j. (2017, october 18-21). disrupting online racism against māori in aotearoa/new zealand. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. disrupting online racism against māori in aotearoa/new zealand jenny rankine university of auckland, new zealand this visual presentation illustrated a pilot study that developed anti-racist graphics in an attempt to disrupt dominant anti-māori discourses on news facebook pages in aotearoa/new zealand. despite the acknowledgement of māori sovereignty in the 1840 tiriti o waitangi, colonisation of aotearoa/new zealand resulted in the wholesale theft of māori land and the dominance of pākehā (non-māori of european descent) people, structures and discourses. persistent campaigns for te tiriti to be honoured resulted in a settlement process which returns less than three percent of what was taken. theoretical framework this research draws on an emerging theory of affective-discursive practice (wetherell, 2012), which recognises the intricate binding of affect in discourse (hepburn & jackson, 2000) and online social networking sites (papacharissi, 2014; vie, 2014), and the role of emotions in pākehā decolonisation. huygens (2011, p. 75) points to a pākehā need for “quite some emotional assistance” to come to terms with the “emotional shock” of their group’s maintenance of structural racism. this research also draws on the concept of discursive repertoires (wetherell & potter, 1992) from social psychology. methodology reviews of anti-racist interventions (challenging racism project, 2014; pedersen, walker, paradies, & guerin, 2011) indicate that they should 1) be respectful; 2) highlight inconsistencies in racist beliefs (image 8, below); 3) evoke feelings such as empathy or outrage (image 3); 4) undermine the hegemony of the dominant culture (image 4); 5) aim to change social norms about racism (image 5) (mnet, 2012); and 6) counter persistent misinformation (image 6). conversely, some studies have shown that attempts to reverse stereotypes (eg, image 1) could make racism worse (donovan & vlais, 2006; murji, 2006). a sample of online commentary on māori and treaty of waitangi issues from 2015 found that news facebook (fb) pages hosted antagonistic discussion between different viewpoints, many of which used common anti-māori discursive repertoires (moewaka barnes et al., 2012). twitter carried news media updates about māori news stories but very few comments, while blog sites were silos for similar viewpoints. as a result i chose to intervene on news and private fb pages. in an iterative cycle of co-intentional praxis (huygens, 2006) with non-māori treaty educators and in consultation with māori, i developed 80 graphics that aimed to disrupt some of the anti-māori discourses in the 2015 sample. difficulties obtaining historical images restricted some representations (eg, 7, 11). while humour is the main factor contributing to online artefacts becoming widely-shared memes (knobel & lankshear, 2007), it was difficult to make anti-racist responses funny; irony predominated and humorous graphics (8-11) were a minority. implementation i posted 49 images on news fb page comment threads about nine news stories; they stimulated a low level of engagement with average or fewer likes, shares or responses. however, the thread on which i posted the most graphics was dominated by pro-māori comments and featured a more respectful and agonistic discussion (mouffe, 2000) than the baseline sample. twenty-four participants posted 36 graphics on personal fb pages, usually unaccompanied by participant’s comments; most also received few likes, comments or shares. however, 305 people shared image 2, stimulating sometimes long comment threads on half the visible pages privacy settings hid the majority of sharers’ pages. image 12 was shared by 260 people, with comments on 28 percent of visible pages, and in response to requests from some of the commenters has since been made into a poster. on visible pages, the two graphics reached almost completely separate networks; discussion was overwhelmingly friendly and agonistic. treaty education groups and fb participants all valued having images with which to respond to racist fb comments. treaty groups also valued highly the thinking involved in developing the graphics, and two planned to continue the process; the only stumbling block was access to design skills and programmes. conclusions from an activist’s viewpoint, this attempt to disrupt online racism against māori seemed to be unsuccessful, although fb metrics are proxies rather than reliable measures of impact. several factors may have contributed to less than average engagement on news fb pages. they include timing (graphics were posted an average of one hour after news stories), lack of humour, image format, the short intervention time-frame, and the resistance of dominant discourses to disruption. from a researcher’s viewpoint, this result suggests several tentative conclusions. firstly, the wide dissemination of two graphics on personal fb pages suggests that personal networks of existing and potential allies may have more potential than public fb pages to extend counterhegemonic discourses into new digital networks. secondly, it suggests that the emotional shock of pākehā confronted by their “ignorance and complicity” (huygens, 2011, p. 75) in colonial racism, which motivates them to change their worldview, may be more likely from face-to-face interactions than the fleeting glimpse of an image when surfing online news sites. thirdly, it suggests that the prominence of counter-hegemonic graphics in newsfeeds may influence the quality of discussion, and encourage more lurkers with counter-hegemonic views to comment. fourthly, it indicates the need to create a wide range of alternative graphics in the competition for online attention (weng, flammini, vespignani, & menczer, 2012). and fifthly, it indicates the difficulty of predicting which of those graphics will be widely disseminated; image 12, for example, is didactic rather than funny, and one i used in the study only at the request of a participant. applying discourse analysis to develop anti-racist graphics also resulted in a methodological finding a transferable five-step process for developing counterhegemonic visual and textual alternatives to dominant online discourses that undermine social justice. this process includes: 1) measuring baseline discussion of the issue; 2) identifying dominant discourses; 3) analysing contradictions and paradoxes; 4) developing humorous visual and text alternatives; and 5) evaluating their online impact. this process has been adopted by treaty workers, feminist (kennedy, 2017) and antipoverty activists (rankine, 2017, march), and is similar to one advocated by the european no hate speech movement (de latour, perger, salaj, tocchi, & otero, 2017). graphics 1 2 3 5 6 7 8 4 references challenging racism project. (2014). anti-racism initiatives. retrieved from http://www.uws.edu.au/ssap/ssap/research/challenging_racism/initiatives 9 10 12 11 de latour, a., perger, n., salaj, r., tocchi, c., & otero, p. v. (2017). we can! taking action against hate speech through counter and alternative narratives. strasbourg, germany: council of europe. donovan, r. j., & vlais, r. (2006). a review of communication components of antiracism/anti-discrimination and pro-diversity social marketing/public education campaigns. melbourne, australia: vichealth. hepburn, a., & jackson, c. (2000). rethinking subjectivity: a discursive psychological approach to cognition and emotion. in d. fox, i. prilleltensky & s. austin (eds.), critical psychology: an introduction (2nd ed., pp. 176-194). london, uk: sage. huygens, i. (2006). discourses for decolonization: affirming maori authority in new zealand workplaces. journal of community & applied social psychology, 16, 363– 378. doi:10.1002/casp.881 huygens, i. (2011). developing a decolonisation practice for settler colonisers: a case study from aotearoa new zealand. settler colonial studies, 1(2), 53-81. doi:10.1080/2201473x.2011.10648812 kennedy, k. (2017). introduction: university of canterbury feminist society’s third annual feminist conference (17–18 september 2016). women's studies journal (nz), 31(1), 74-99. knobel, m., & lankshear, c. (2007). online memes, affinities and cultural production. in m. knobel, & c. lankshear (eds.), a new literacies sampler (pp. 199-228). new york, usa: peter lang. mnet. (2012). responding to online hate. ottawa, canada: media awareness network. moewaka barnes, a., borell, b., taiapa, k., rankine, j., nairn, r., & mccreanor, t. (2012). anti-maori themes in new zealand journalism; toward alternative practice. pacific journalism review, 18(1), 195-216. mouffe, c. (2000). the democratic paradox. london, uk: verso. murji, k. (2006). using racial stereotypes in anti-racist campaigns. ethnic & racial studies, 29(2), 260-280. papacharissi, z. (2014). affective publics: sentiment, technology, and politics. oxford, uk: oxford university press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199999736.001.0001 pedersen, a., walker, i., paradies, y., & guerin, b. (2011). how to cook rice: a review of ingredients for teaching anti-prejudice. australian psychologist, 46, 55–63. doi:10.1111/j.1742-9544.2010.00015.x rankine, j. (2017, march). developing alternatives to dominant discourses about poverty. workshop with child poverty action group, auckland, new zealand. vie, s. (2014). in defence of ‘slacktivism’: the human rights campaign facebook logo as digital activism. first monday, 19(4) weng, l., flammini, a., vespignani, a., & menczer, f. (2012). competition among memes in a world with limited attention. scientific reports, 2, 335-42. doi:10.1038/srep00335 wetherell, m. (2012). affect and emotion a new social science understanding. london, uk: sage. wetherell, m., & potter, j. (1992). mapping the language of racism: discourse and the legitimation of exploitation. new york, usa: harvester wheatsheaf. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 blind spots of information operations: of micro propaganda, algorithm gaming & how to profit from it panel introduction the same technologies that once promised to strengthen democracy increasingly have become accused of undermining political processes. the internet, and specifically social media—once celebrated as technologies of liberation—have recently shown themselves to be vulnerable hosts to various forms of influence campaigns and manipulation. around the world, a wide range of actors exploit social media platforms to distort public discourse and undermine trust. malicious foreign influence campaigns armed with “fake news” and automation, hyperpartisan alternative media outlets propagating conspiracy and hate, and extremist voices at the fringe of the spectrum all have found a fertile breeding ground in social media networks. already, scholars have argued that the spread of malicious information campaigns and computational propaganda sustained by social media algorithms can corrode democratic discourse and disrupt digital public spheres (persily, 2017; tucker, theocharis, roberts, & barberá, 2017; woolley & howard, 2016). a growing body of scholarship, has become concerned with tracking the spread disinformation and automated messages during sensitive moments of public life (ferrara et al., 2016; vosoughi, roy & aral, 2018) the relationship between social media algorithms and the viral dissemination of various kinds of problematic information (bradshaw & howard, 2018; silverman, 2015; wu, 2017); the different kinds of nefarious actors behind political influence campaigns (marwick & lewis, 2017; faris et al., 2017); and possible countermeasures and solutions (ash, gorwa, & metaxa, 2019; bradshaw, neudert & howard, 2018). but techniques designed to manipulate public opinion and undermine information ecosystems are rapidly evolving while academic research lags behind technological innovation and strategic expertise. as a new and more sophisticated generation of information operations is fast to mature, the papers in this panel shed light on some of the blind spots of scholarly inquiry making visible new thematic strategies, technical infrastructures, and both political and economic incentives. the first two papers examine the progression from general political propaganda geared towards influencing elections to highly issue-specific micro propaganda. the first paper presents an analysis of anti-semitic disinformation campaigns and political harassment during the 2018 us midterms on twitter and offers rich evidence from interviews with jewish american opinion leaders about the impact of these campaigns. drawing on data from twitter’s election integrity initiative, the second paper examines the gender dimensions of foreign influence operations and how hostile state actors frame and discuss gender identity & politics. the third paper presents an analysis of search engine optimization strategies that extremist youtubers use in an attempt to game the algorithm and increase their visibility in the network. the fourth paper investigates the relationship between partisan bias associated with google search results and the success of political candidates associated with the search queries during elections and finds that partisan search media is a predictor for election outcomes. the fifth paper examines the emergence of a global political economy for manipulation and offers a grounded typology of the vendors, marketplaces, services, and products that are designed to turn a profit from swaying public opinion. together, the papers on the panel present methodological research into widely unexplored phenomena having to do with information operations, including issuespecific influence campaigns, search engine hacking, and profit-driven manipulation. while journalistic and expert inquiries have reported on several phenomenological instances discussed in these papers, the debate so far widely lacks scholarly attention. rooted in political communication literature on disinformation, “computational propaganda” and hyperpartisan media, the papers offer data-driven research into both technological systems and the actors that seek to manipulate them. thus, this panel analyzes through an exploratory lens illuminating technological, thematic and strategic blind spots of state-of-the-art information operations. references ash, t. g., gorwa, r., & metaxa, d. (2019). glasnost! nine ways facebook can make itself a better forum for free speech and democracy. oxford. retrieved from https://pacscenter.stanford.edu/wpcontent/uploads/2019/01/garton_ash_et_al_facebook_report_final_0.pdf bradshaw, s., & howard, p. n. (2018). why does junk news spread so quickly across social media? algorithms, advertising and exposure in public life. knight foundation working paper. retrieved from https://kf-siteproduction.s3.amazonaws.com/media_elements/files/000/000/142/original/topos_kf_ white-paper_howard_v1_ado.pdf bradshaw, s., neudert, l. m., & howard, p. n. (2019). government responses to malicious uses of social media (working paper 2019.2). oxford, uk: oxford university, project on computational propaganda. faris, r. m., roberts, h., etling, b., bourassa, n., zuckerman, e., & benkler, y. (2017). partisanship, propaganda, and disinformation: online media and the 2016 u.s. presidential election. berkman klein center for internet & society research paper. retrieved from https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/33759251/201708_electionreport_0.pdf https://pacscenter.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/garton_ash_et_al_facebook_report_final_0.pdf https://pacscenter.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/garton_ash_et_al_facebook_report_final_0.pdf ferrara, e., varol, o., davis, c., menczer, f., & flammini, a. (2016). the rise of social bots. commun. acm, 59 (7), 96–104. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818717 marwick, a., & lewis, r. (2017). media manipulation and disinformation online. data & society research institute. retrieved from https://datasociety.net/pubs/oh/dataandsociety_mediamanipulationanddisinformationo nline.pdf persily, n. (2017). the 2016 u.s. election: can democracy survive the internet? journal of democracy, 28(2), 63–76. silverman, c. (2015). lies, damn lies, and viral content. how news websites spread (and debunk) online rumors, unverified claims, and misinformation (p. 164). tow center for digital journalism. tucker, j. a., theocharis, y., roberts, m. e., & barberá, p. (2017). from liberation to turmoil: social media and democracy. journal of democracy, 28(4), 46–59. woolley, s. c., & howard, p. n. (2016). political communication, computational propaganda, and autonomous agents. international journal of communication, 10, 4882–4890. wu, t. (2017). the attention merchants: the epic struggle to get inside our heads. atlantic books. vosoughi, s., roy, d., & aral, s. (2018). the spread of true and false news online. science, 359(6380), 1146–1151. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap9559 https://doi.org/10.1145/2818717 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap9559 understanding the human impact of computational propaganda: anti-semitism and the 2018 us midterm elections samuel woolley digital intelligence lab, institute for the future katie joseff digital intelligence lab, institute for the future introduction jeff, a jewish american reporter at a major u.s. news outlet, first experienced antisemitic political attacks online during the 2016 u.s. presidential election. when his stories gained traction—or featured details on topics such as white nationalism, donald trump, or libertarianism—he would be sent photoshopped images of his face in a gas chamber or messages threatening violence. now, this harassment has become common. “it has become something that i expect to happen,” he said, “i don’t even think about it anymore.” for jeff, the 2016 election was a major impetus that transformed the online sphere into a hotbed of hate speech and harassment. the number of jewish people living in the united states is estimated to be between 4.2 million and 12 million, the wide range due to religious versus ethnic distinctions (steinhardt social research institute, 2016; dellapergola, 2017). for many of these individuals—especially those in the public eye—social media platforms have become inhospitable for both general communication and as forums for discussing public life. this report explores the ways in which online propaganda, harassment, and political manipulation have impacted jewish americans during and after the 2018 u.s. midterm elections. in the course of our research, interview subjects have described a marked rise in the number of online attacks they have experienced. correspondingly, our data analyses suggests that tools like social media bots and tactics, including doxxing, disinformation, and politically-motivated threats, have been used to target jewish americans. literature review there has been an undisputed rise in white supremacist activities and overt antisemitism following the 2016 u.s. election (adl, 2018b). from 2016 to 2017, the number of established neo-nazi groups increased from 99 to 121 (splc, 2018); twice as many hate-motivated murders were committed by white supremacists (baynes, 2018); and there was a 258% increase in the number of white supremacist propaganda incidents on college campuses (adl, 2018a). while not all white supremacist groups consider themselves anti-semitic, anti-semitism is often a core tenet of white supremacy and, by extension, white nationalism and neo-nazism (ferber, 1999). as such, it comes as little surprise that 1,986 anti-semitic incidents—harassment, vandalism, and assault—occurred in 2017 (adl, 2018b). the 57% increase in such events was the largest escalation in a single year since the anti-defamation league (adl) first began recording incidents in 1979. a staggering expansion of online harassment coincided with, and arguably fomented, the increase in offline anti-semitism. fringe internet communities, such as 4chan, 8chan, and gab allowed for the propagation of such ideas, which quickly spread to twitter, reddit, and other mainstream online communities (marwick & lewis, 2017). an analysis of over 100 million posts on gab and 4chan’s politically incorrect message board (/pol/) found that, between july 2016 and january 2018, the use of the terms “jew” and “kike,” a derogatory term for jewish people, more than doubled on /pol/ and dramatically increased on gab (finkelstein et al., 2018). spikes also occurred in the use of both terms following president trump’s inauguration and the 2017 unite the right rally in charlottesville (adl, 2017). methodology expanding upon our preliminary report published by the adl in 2018 (woolley & joseff, 2018), the intention of this report is to better understand the impact of online political harassment and anti-semitic disinformation during and after the 2018 u.s. midterm elections. we conducted both interviews and analyses of tweets in order to understand the scope of the issue on a national scale and the repercussions faced on the individual level. we interviewed eighteen jewish americans who are involved in american politics as elected officials, policy makers, activists, journalists, and consultants. while somewhat limited in number, the interviewees were diverse in political affiliation, jewish movements membership, age, and race. for our data analysis, we selected for specific hashtags (e.g. #maga and #voteblue) and collected 7,512,594 tweets related to u.s. politics. using tweepy, the tweets were gathered in groups between august 31, 2018 and september 17, 2018. the hashtags were categorized by political leaning: conservative, liberal, extremist, and neutral (e.g. “#vote”). the hashtags were purposively gathered using markers from previous and ongoing research on twitter conversations (kollanyi et al., 2016; woolley & guilbeault, 2017). we worked to be nonpartisan in our selection of hashtags and analyses of data in order to produce the most objective results possible; although, we accept the impossibility of true positivism in social scientific research. tweets were then filtered based upon whether or not the text of the tweet contained a series of terms related to judaism and/or anti-semitism. instances of term use in hashtags, usernames, and shared links were not included. the terms were categorized as: derogatory, lean derogatory, context dependent, lean context dependent, neutral (e.g. jew, orthodox, israeli), and other, which consisted of derogatory terms historically used by jews to describe other ethnicities, non-jewish individuals, and to criticize other jews (e.g. kushi, kapo). the accounts that tweeted five or more derogatory or lean derogatory terms during the time period were then run through botometer to ascertain whether or not they were automated. implications the most startling trend is the transmutation of online hate speech into real world violence. many of the graphic memes that were used to target our interviewees were created on 4chan and spread through targeted twitter campaigns initiated by white supremist leaders. often these campaigns involved doxxing—the release of the target’s private information— which increases the likelihood of offline violence. the immense stress caused by these attacks is difficult to quantify. references adl. (2017, august 7). “unite the right” rally could be largest white supremacist gathering in a decade. retrieved from https://www.adl.org/blog/unite-the-right-rallycould-be-largest-white-supremacist-gathering-in-a-decade adl. (2018a). adl finds alarming increase in white supremacist propaganda on college campuses across u.s. retrieved from https://www.adl.org/news/pressreleases/adl-finds-alarming-increase-in-white-supremacist-propaganda-on-collegecampuses adl. (2018b). audit of anti-semitic incidents: year in review 2017. retrieved from https://www.adl.org/media/11174/download. baynes, c. (2018). murders by white supremacists in america more than doubled last year. retrieved from https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/whitesupremacist-murders-us-figures-double-2017-racist-hate-crime-las-vegas-shootingextremist-a8165416.html. dellapergola, s. (2017). world jewish population, 2016. in american jewish year book 2016: the annual record of north american jewish communities (vol. 116, pp. 253– 332). ferber, a. l. (1999). white man falling: race, gender, and white supremacy. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield publishers. finkelstein, j., zannettou, s., bradlyn, b., & blackburn, j. (2018). a quantitative approach to understanding online antisemitism. arxiv preprint arxiv:1809.01644. marwick, a., & lewis, b. (2017). media manipulation and disinformation online. new york, ny: data & society research institute. splc. (2018). the year in hate: trump buoyed white supremacists in 2017, sparking backlash among black nationalist groups. retrieved from https://www.splcenter.org/news/2018/02/21/year-hate-trump-buoyed-whitesupremacists-2017-sparking-backlash-among-black-nationalist steinhardt social research institute. (2016). american jewish population project. waltham, ma: cohen center for modern jewish studies, brandeis university. retrieved from http://ajpp.brandeis.edu/aboutestimates.php woolley, s., & guilbeault, d. (2017). computational propaganda in the united states of america: manufacturing consensus online (computational propaganda working paper series no. 2017.5) (p. 37). oxford, united kingdom: oxford internet institute, university of oxford. woolley, s., & joseff, k. (2018). computational propaganda, jewish-americans and the 2018 midterms: the amplification of anti-semitic harassment online. new york, ny: anti-defamation league. retrieved from https://www.adl.org/resources/reports/computational-propaganda-jewish-americansand-the-2018-midterms-the-amplification the gender dimensions of foreign influence operations samantha bradshaw oxford internet institute, university of oxford introduction malicious state actors are increasingly leveraging social media as a proxy for political power. during elections and other important political events, coordinated disinformation campaigns have been used to manufacture consensus, automate suppression, and undermine trust in media, institutions and democracy (bradshaw & howard, 2017, 2018a). one aspect of foreign influence operations that has received little scholarly and public attention has been on the gender dimensions of these campaigns. it is widely recognized that female politicians, journalists, bloggers, and activists—especially those of colour or diverse gender identity—are frequently targeted with intimidation, harassment, threats, and hate speech in online spaces (amnesty international, 2018). yet little research has examined how malicious state actors are using trolling tactics and disinformation to perpetuate sexism and misogyny in order to suppress the political speech of vulnerable groups, heighten cultural tensions, and further divisions within and across communities. drawing on data from twitter’s election integrity initiative, this paper explores how gender identity & politics are framed and discussed by foreign state actors. by performing an analysis of prominent keywords and hashtags related to gender identity and gender-related political movements, this paper hopes to provide insight into the gender dimensions of foreign influence operations. literature review foreign influence operations on social media have emerged as a critical concern of the 21st century. since 2016, many researchers and journalists have uncovered foreign influence operations taking place on social media during critical moments of public life. these studies have mainly focused on the internet research agency’s (ira) disinformation campaigns, situating modern strategy with historical tenants (maréchal, 2017), describing the russian playbook for information warfare (polyakova, laurelle, meister, & barnett, 2016), or analysing their broader campaigns in the baltics, for example (helmus, 2018). this quickly growing topic of study has also expanded to look at disinformation campaigns taking place across a wide-range of platforms, countrycontexts, and issue-areas including race, religion, and other social justice issues (marwick & lewis, 2017; woolley, 2016; woolley & howard, 2018). although foreign influence operations have always been a part of political and military strategy, the unique characteristics of the internet and social media coupled with advances in technology are posed to give rise to a new generation of tools and techniques that expand the scope and scale of foreign influence operations (hwang & rosen, 2017). the growing study of “computational propaganda” (howard & woolley, 2016) highlights how both user capacity and technological affordances both enhance and constrain the spread of disinformation about politics (bradshaw & howard, 2018b). but the “social shaping”(mackenzie & wajcman, 1985) of social networking technologies also have implications for the spread of hate speech and misogyny against women and those of diverse gender identities (banet-weiser & miltner, 2016; mantilla, 2013). as hostile state actors continue to look for pressure points within society, it is important to understand how other groups or communities such as women or individuals with diverse gender identities, might be affected by foreign influence operations that are sustained by the affordances of social media platforms. this research paper asks three questions: (1) what are the gendered elements of foreign influence operations? (2) how do the technical affordances, structures and policies of online platforms, as well as existing legal frameworks, enhance or constrain the gendered elements of foreign interference? and (3) how best can policymakers and social media platforms respond to these challenges? methodology building on the growing corpus of research about foreign influence operations on social media, this paper explores the gender dimensions of these campaigns. this study focuses specifically on influence operation that have taken place on twitter. twitter is an important social media platform for political news and discussion (newman, fletcher, kalogeropoulos, levy, & nielsen, 2018). as a result, several hostile state actors have exploited twitter to conduct online influence operations. although these activities occur on all major social media platforms, twitter was chosen as the platform to analyse because the company has released the most comprehensive dataset about foreign influence operations to date. twitter’s election integrity initiative (twitter, 2018) provides researchers with publicly available data about accounts and related content associated with potential influence operations that have taken place on the platform. this dataset includes information about accounts themselves (such as username, number of followers, and profile information), tweets (such as public posts and hashtags), and shared media (including pictures, video’s and urls). at the time of writing, twitter has uploaded seven datasets about potential influence operations from four different countries: russia, iran, venezuela and bangladesh. these datasets form the foundation of my study. to develop a better understanding on how gender identity & politics are used in discussions on twitter by foreign state actors, this paper conducts a qualitative hashtag and keyword analysis to identify relevant discussions by hostile state actors. by purposively selecting keywords related to gender, i searched the database for relevant conversations. from there, i used a snowball sample to further identify collocated hashtags about gender identity and politics. following this topic-based sampling strategy, i collected approximately 1.3 million tweets from twitter’s integrity initiative dataset. five prominent cross-cutting themes were identified: (1) gender, race and crime; (2) gender and islam; (3) lgbt rights; (4) the feminist movement; (5) white male supremacy. at the time of writing, i am preparing a sentiment analysis to analyze the valence of these tweets to see how gender is performed, framed and discussed by foreign state actors engaged in influence operations on twitter. sentiment analysis a growing area of natural language processing that determines whether a piece of text is positive, negative or neutral. in particular, i will adopt a “lexicon-based approach” to identify the sentiment of tweets about gender politics. the results of these findings will be discussed in the context of policy responses to foreign influence operations, and enrich the academic discussion currently taking place in the field of political communication. references amnesty international. (2018). toxic twitter a toxic place for women. retrieved from https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2018/03/online-violence-against-womenchapter-1/ banet-weiser, s., & miltner, k. m. (2016). #masculinitysofragile: culture, structure, and networked misogyny. feminist media studies, 16(1), 171–174. bradshaw, s., & howard, p. n. (2017). troops, trolls and troublemakers: a global inventory of organized social media manipulation (working paper 2017.12 no. 2017.12) (p. 37). oxford, england: project on computational propaganda, oxford internet institute, oxford university. bradshaw, s., & howard, p. n. (2018a). challenging truth and trust: a global inventory of organized social media manipulation (working paper 2018.1 no. 2018.1) (p. 26). oxford, england: project on computational propaganda, oxford internet institute, oxford university. bradshaw, s., & howard, p. n. (2018b). why does junk news spread so quickly across social media? algorithms, advertising and exposure in public life. knight foundation working paper. helmus, t. c. (2018). russian social media influence: understanding russian propaganda in eastern europe. santa monica, calif: rand corporation. howard, p., & woolley, s. (2016). political communication, computational propaganda, and autonomous agents. international journal of communication, 10(special issue), 20. hwang, t., & rosen, l. (2017). harder, better, faster, stronger: international law and the future of online psyops. computational propaganda project working paper, paper no. mackenzie, d., & wajcman, j. (1985). the social shaping of technology. milton keynes: open university press. mantilla, k. (2013). gendertrolling: misogyny adapts to new media. feminist studies, 39(2), 563–570. maréchal, n. (2017). networked authoritarianism and the geopolitics of information: understanding russian internet policy. media and communication, 5(1). marwick, a., & lewis, r. (2017). media manipulation and disinformation online (pp. 1– 106). data and society. newman, n., fletcher, r., kalogeropoulos, a., levy, d. a. l., & nielsen, r. k. (2018). digital news report 2018, 144. polyakova, a., laurelle, m., meister, s., & barnett, n. (2016). the kremlin’s trojan horses. atlantic council. twitter. (2018). elections integrity. retrieved from https://about.twitter.com/en_us/values/elections-integrity.html woolley, s. c. (2016). automating power: social bot interference in global politics. first monday, 21(4). woolley, s., & howard, p. (2018). computational propaganda: political parties, politicians, and political manipulation on social media. oxford: oxford university press. search engine optimization on political youtube: sociotechnically situated disinformation and propaganda rebecca lewis stanford university leon yin new york university in recent years, search engines have become invaluable resources for people seeking information. as described by information studies scholars deirdre mulligan and daniel griffin, search engines no longer only shape public understandings of digital content; they also “shape [our] public understanding of the world” at large (2018: 557). a range of quantitative and qualitative studies over the past decade have shown that people inherently trust the information that appears to them in online search results (daniels, 2009; purcell, brenner, & rainie, 2012; tripodi, 2018). in this paper, we argue that despite this trust, search engines are themselves often instruments of propaganda, disinformation, and manipulation. specifically, we argue that political influencers and alternative news sources on youtube are adopting the tactics of search engine optimization in ways that intentionally and unintentionally amplify misleading and problematic information – or place it within misleading or problematic contexts. our analysis centers on the content tags that a range of political youtube creators place on their videos to optimize their placement in search results, as well as the content of the videos that are labeled with these tags. combining quantitative and qualitative analysis, we develop a typology for these tags to specify how they can result in differing kinds of misleading information. while journalistic and academic accounts of search engines have largely focused on google and bing, these accounts neglect to account for the fact that youtube is a crucial source for information-seeking, particularly among young internet users. according to a 2018 pew research report on social media use in 2018, youtube is used by nearly three-quarters of american adults and 94% of 18-to-24-year-olds (smith & anderson, 2018). about a third of those users get their news there, making it the second most common social media site for news, behind facebook (shearer & gottfried, 2017). most importantly for the purposes of this paper, youtube is the second-most-popular search engine on the internet, behind online its parent company, google (richards, 2018). more recently, analyses have begun to treat youtube as a serious source of news and political content (lewis, 2018; tripodi, 2018; tufekci, 2018). in particular, these analyses have focused on the radicalizing potential of right-wing political content on the platform. tufekci’s work has highlighted the power of the youtube algorithm to draw users into more extremist content, while lewis and tripodi have focused on the power of youtube influencers as alternative news sources that can lead their audiences to extremist content. rather than focusing on recommendation algorithms or video content as pathways of radicalization, we focus on youtubers’ tactics to influence users’ information-gathering at a first point of entry: youtube search results. thus, we also build on the growing body of literature that argues that as advertising-driven companies, search engines are not neutral distributors of information (mulligan & griffin, 2018; noble, 2018). specifically, as this literature as noted, a range of actors have learned to adopt “black hat” search engine optimization tactics that can exploit search results with low content results or mask the original sourcing of highly ranked results. our analysis builds on, and draws together, these two strands of literature by interrogating the search engine optimization strategies of political youtubers and channels. we were driven by the following research questions: what specific seo strategies do political youtubers adopt to appear highly on youtube search results? what are the possible implications for disinformation, propaganda, and other harmful information on the platform? to answer these questions, we developed a population of analysis by identifying seed english-language youtuber accounts on both the political right and the left; we then used a snowball method to build out the larger sample. we extracted search tags from video metadata retrieved from the youtube data api. these tags are explicitly input by users uploading videos, and they help the youtube search algorithm rank results by relevance on related search terms. although these tags are not visible to content viewers on the site, they are available from the api. for this reason, for any given user, we can count the unique instances of search tags across every video they have uploaded. for videos with specific tags, we also performed a qualitative analysis of the video content itself. we watched a wide range of videos within the population, and, in certain cases, we manually downloaded and performed qualitative coding on youtube’s automated video transcripts. this allowed us to combine quantitative metrics from video tags with qualitative insights from videos themselves, thus giving us better insight into the work accomplished by each tag. we developed a typology of search engine optimization tactics employed by these youtubers. first, we observed evidence of “issue hacking,” a concept previously explored by ried, matamoros-fernández, and coromina (2018), in which youtubers strategically tag their content with hot-button issues or newsworthy topics to attract more viewers. second, we identified attempts at influencer amplification, in which users tag their content with specific influential people that may be able to further amplify their content – or who may be frequent subjects of searches. finally, we identified keyword tags that operate specifically as dog whistles and gateways, in which content becomes matched with terms that specifically mask extremist messaging. in all cases, we argue that the disinformation and propaganda within certain videos has the potential to become far more potent when successfully placed within certain search contexts. overall, our findings indicate that digital content creators understand the importance of the positioning of information within certain socio-technical contexts. as a result, it is essential for researchers to move beyond understandings of digital propaganda and disinformation that focus solely on the content of messages. disinformation is not only a matter of content that needs to be fact-checked, but is also a result of complex relationships between users and the technical systems they use. references daniels, j. (2009). cyber racism: white supremacy online and the new attack on civil rights. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield publishers. lewis, r. (2018). alternative influence: broadcasting the reactionary right on youtube (white paper). data & society research institute. mulligan, d. k., & griffin, d. s. (2018). rescripting search to respect the right to truth. georgetown law technology review, 2(2), 557–584. noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york, n.y.: nyu press. purcell, k., brenner, j., & rainie, l. (2012). search engine use 2012. pew research center. retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/03/09/search-engine-use-20122/ richards, l. (2018, june 27). video and search: youtube, google, the alternatives and the future. retrieved february 24, 2019, from https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/06/27/video-and-search-youtube-google-thealternatives-and-the-future/ rieder, b., matamoros-fernández, a., & coromina, ò. (2018). from ranking algorithms to ‘ranking cultures’: investigating the modulation of visibility in youtube search results. convergence, 24(1), 50–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856517736982 shearer, e., & gottfried, j. (2017, september 7). news use across social media platforms 2017. retrieved march 11, 2018, from http://www.journalism.org/2017/09/07/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2017/ smith, a., & anderson, m. (2018). social media use in 2018. pew research center. tripodi, f. (2018). alternative facts, alternative news: conservatives search for truth through scriptural inference. data & society research institute. tufekci, z. (2018, march 10). youtube, the great radicalizer. the new york times. retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politicsradical.html investigating partisanship in u.s. political web search danaë metaxa stanford university abstract concern about algorithmically-curated content and its impact on democracy is reaching a fever pitch worldwide. but relative to the role of social media in electoral processes, the role of search results has received less attention. this work analyzes news media in web search results pages in the context of political partisanship. our empirical analyses use urls scraped from google search queries for political candidates in the 2018 u.s. elections. we use these data to empirically study trends theorized in political science, in particular finding that candidates with less partisan search media are more likely to win elections. introduction while algorithmically-curated media content has much to offer, public concern is mounting about possible negative impacts on individuals and our society as a whole. most of the focus thus far has been on social media; in comparison, web search has received less attention, though recent studies have found web users are more likely to find and trust news through search than social media sites (newman 2018). web search is especially critical in the context of politics, where research has shown it to be among the most commonly-used technologies for finding political information (dutton et al. 2017). prior work has identified that differences in the way search results are presented, in particular their ordering, has substantial effects on user perceptions of content credibility and quality (pan et al. 2007). these effects may influence users' information-gathering and opinion-formation process substantially enough to impact the outcomes of close elections (epstein and robertson 2015). we present an empirical analysis connecting election candidate google search results and election outcome. using our data—over 5 million urls from search results for nearly 4,000 candidates—we find that search media reflect trends theorized in political science around incumbency and election success. in particular, we find that candidates who won general elections in 2018 had less partisan search media than those who lost. method & data leading up to the 2018 midterm elections, we scraped the results of google searches, using as keywords the names of legislative candidates running for office at the federal level (house and senate). we focus our study on google as it almost completely dominates the u.s. web search market with a market share of over 90%. we analyze these data by looking at the degree of partisan bias associated with search results' sources, according to partisan attention scores compiled by a team at harvard's berkman klein center (faris et al. 2017). this dataset, which covers may 29 through the election on november 6, 2018, collects data using queries for each candidate's name and state abbreviation (i.e., “dianne feinstein ca”). scraping we used five scrapers to collect this data, each with its own ip address. each of the five scrapers collects the first page of google search results for a fifth of the 3,383 candidates daily. we add a depersonalization parameter (“pws=0”) to the end of each query url in order to avoid any history-based or other personalization. recent work investigating personalization in political web search has also found that personalization has “little impact” on such queries (robertson, lazer, and wilson 2018). partisanship scores we use the partisan attention scores for 5,798 media sources compiled by the berkman klein study as part of their 2017 report to annotate our datasets for the degree of partisan bias they display. these scores, which are expressed on a -1.0 to 1.0 scale, with -1.0 representing extremely left-leaning and 1.0 extremely right-leaning, are generated based on the frequency of media source sharing among over 30,000 users who retweeted either of the two general election candidates (@donaldjtrump and @hillaryclinton), but very rarely retweeted both. we compute the partisan intensity score of a page of search results by first taking the absolute value of the partisan attention score of each source on the page, and then averaging all scores on each page of results. results incumbency status political science literature predicts that incumbents should be more moderate and more centrist in their positions than challengers, in whose best interest it is to be more extreme in order to appeal to the fringe of the party (groseclose 2001). extending this theory to the domain of search media, we might expect that incumbents, who are generally more centrist, should receive more mainstream media attention, relative to challengers whose campaigns and subsequent coverage by search media should exhibit higher levels of partisanship. such theory does not predict what patterns for open seat candidate (those elections without an incumbent) might reflect. we find that incumbents’ web search display lower levels of partisanship than challengers. interestingly, search media for open seat candidates tracks with challengers, suggesting that candidates running for open seats all find themselves in an uphill battle akin to running against an incumbent. figure 1. incumbents' search media are significantly less partisan relative to challengers and those running for open seats. election outcomes political science theory that suggests more moderate, centrist positions lead to election victories, due to the importance of garnering a broad voting coalition (groseclose 2001). we see the same trend in our data: those candidates with lower levels of search media partisan intensity are more competitive. in fact, we are able to use search media partisanship over time to predict election outcomes. we average candidates' partisan intensity scores over the three months prior to the 2018 general elections, and predict that, for each race, the candidate with less partisan search media in that time range will win the election. using this very simple heuristic, our predictions are 68.4% accurate (compared to less than 50% if we were guessing at chance, since general elections in the u.s. two-party dominant system have at least two major candidates). conclusion in our findings we see evidence that search media provide empirical support for some previously theorized trends regarding incumbency status and election outcome. this work suggests that studying search media and other algorithmically-generated content can provide valuable insight into real-world political phenomena. we hope to extend this work from its current examination of the production of search media to study its consumption: the effect political search results have on users. references dutton, w. h., reisdorf, b. c., dubois, e., & blank, g. (2017). social shaping of the politics of internet search and networking: moving beyond filter bubbles, echo chambers, and fake news. ssrn electronic journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2944191 epstein, r., & robertson, r. e. (2015). the search engine manipulation effect (seme) and its possible impact on the outcomes of elections. proceedings of the national academy of sciences,112(33). doi:10.1073/pnas.1419828112 faris, r.; roberts, h.; etling, b.; bourassa, n.; zuckerman, e.; & benkler, y. (2017) partisanship, propaganda, and disinformation: online media and the 2016 u.s. presidential election. berkman klein center for internet & society research paper. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.instrepos:3375925 groseclose, t. (2001). a model of candidate location when one candidate has a valence advantage. american journal of political science,45(4), 862. doi:10.2307/2669329 pan, b., hembrooke, h., joachims, t., lorigo, l., gay, g., & granka, l. (2007). in google we trust: users’ decisions on rank, position, and relevance. journal of computer-mediated communication,12(3), 801-823. doi:10.1111/j.10836101.2007.00351.x robertson, r. e., lazer, d., & wilson, c. (2018). auditing the personalization and composition of politically-related search engine results pages. proceedings of the 2018 world wide web conference on world wide web www 18. doi:10.1145/3178876.3186143 http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.instrepos:3375925 follower factories, false amplifiers and fakes for sale: the political economy of social media manipulation alexander hogan oxford internet institute, university of oxford and etic lab lisa-maria neudert oxford internet institute, university of oxford introduction the malicious use of social media platforms tasked with the manipulation of political processes has emerged as critical public interest issue. globally, political and nonpolitical actors deploy campaigns to sow division, errode trust and orchestrate consensus (bradshaw, neudert & howard, 2018). state-of-the-art information operations rely on an amalgam of automation and big data to disseminate deceptive messages over social media. they use bots, fake personas and sock puppets to game algorithms, inflate opinions and distort discourse – and these instruments of manipulation are for sale. online market places on both the open and dark web offer deceptive tools, like fake accounts and positive reviews, within the click of a few buttons to anyone with a credit card (hegelich, 2016). so far, scholarly work into the initiators of influence campaigns has focused on different actor groups–primarily, russia’s internet research agency, the alt-right and the military-industrial complex (benkler, faris & roberts, 2018). profit-driven actors, as opposed to politically motivated ones have received less scholarly attention. it is widely recognized that there are economic incentives to information campaigns, many of which are related to the monetizability of content through advertising. yet little research has explored how profit-driven actors use online marketplaces to offer products and services that are designed to manipulate as a business model. using data from the darknet market archives and purposeful keyword search the open and dark web, this paper explores the political economy of digital marketplaces for social media manipulation and examines how profit-driven actors market the tools for the malicious manipulation of social media. providing an analysis of these tools, their availability, functionality and pricing over time, this paper develops a grounded typology of manipulation marketplaces and hopes to offer insights into their scope and dynamics. literature review the rise of malicious information operations has appeared as a pressing concern on the global public agenda. in the aftermath of foreign interference in the 2016 us elections, both scholarly and public research have produced a growing body of evidence about influence operations on social media platforms. these inquiries have focused on tracking “computational propaganda” across different platforms and geo-political contexts; social media algorithms as the technical infrastructures that afford such campaigns; and the political actors that execute information operation playbooks (tucker et al, 2018; woolley & howard, 2018). overwhelmingly, these findings have underscored the role of automated and fake accounts for amplifying viewpoints and manufacturing consensus. yet, how these tools are developed and acquired by malicious actors has widely escaped scholarly attention. as social networks have come under attack for offering a fertile ground for influence operations of all couleur, academic inquiry has pointed to systemic design flaws that make platforms vulnerable to manipulation. wu (2017) argues that social platforms capitalize attention through advertising and hence algorithmically promote attentiongrabbing content. the more clicks, likes or shares a piece of content has the more visible it will appear. marwick & lewis (2016) find that platforms are prone to “attentionhacking”, whereby these mechanisms are gamed with misleading content and false amplification through automated and fake accounts. similarly, tucker et al. (2018) argue that social media platforms favor attention regardless of veracity. by rewarding attention with visibility social networks have created powerful economic and political incentives for algorithm gaming through fake accounts, bots and other forms of content amplifiers. coupled with a growing demand from malicious actors, social media manipulation has emerged as profitable business strategy that hundreds of digital vendors cater to. already, phenomenological instances of profit-driven “follower factories” have been reported on (confessore et al., 2018). as hostile actors continue to look for ways to undermine public discourse, it is pivotal to understand how online marketplaces sustain manipulation and cater to market demands. this paper asks the following questions: (1) what is the scope of digital manipulation marketplaces and their products? (2) in what way do the affordance structures of their products support political manipulation and how do they interact with platform ecosystems? (3) how can platform and policymakers address these issues? methodology this paper analyzes data from two main sources. firstly, the gwern dark market archives (branwen et al., 2015) that comprehensively compile vendor pages and feedback forums from dark net markets from 2013 to 2015. secondly, we searched the top three search engines on the open web – google, yahoo!, bing – and dark web– torch, ahmia, parazite– to identify marketplaces with purposefully selected key terms. modeling our analysis after joyce, antonio & howard (2013) we used crawlers and qualitative content analysis to build a coded spreadsheet of specific variables of interest. these included: available products and services e.g. bots and fake accounts; pricing; currency; social networks targeted; feedback from users about feasibility; targeting options; audience size; and geo-location of accounts used. we will conduct fundamental statistical analysis to show patterns and trends. to develop a better understanding of these digital marketplaces we set out to perform an iterative typology building process. typology building is one of the most foundational tasks in political research and is especially important when it comes to investigating new phenomena. (aronovitch, 2012). following our sampling strategy our initial dataset identified more than 200 distinct marketplaces. four main categories were identified: (1) influence inflaters that sell simple metric boosters for likes, shares, retweets etc. (2) fake factories that offer pre-aged accounts, sock puppets and bots that clients populate with content (3) human amplifiers that sell social media engagement from genuine human accounts, often held by users in the global south (4) all-round agencies that promise custom-tailored influence campaigns using a canon of techniques. the findings of this analysis will inform a discussion about the role of the emergent political economy for sustaining information operations and provide rich evidence to the current public and scholarly debate on impacts and countermeasures. references aronovitch, h. (2012). interpreting weber’s ideal-types. philosophy of the social sciences, 42(3), 356–369. https://doi.org/10.1177/0048393111408779 benkler, y., faris, r., & roberts, h. (2018). network propaganda: manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in american politics. oxford university press. bradshaw, s., neudert, l. m., & howard, p. n. (2019). government responses to malicious uses of social media (working paper 2019.2). oxford, uk: oxford university, project on computational propaganda. confessore, n., dance, g. j. x., harris, r., & hansen, m. (2018, january 27). the follower factory. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/social-media-bots.html branwen, g., christin, n., décary-hétu, d.,munksgaard, r., stexo, a., anonymous … goode, s. (2015). dark net market archives, 2011-2015. https://www.gwern.net/dnmarchives hegelich, s. (2016). social bots: invasion der meinungsrobotor. konrad-adenauerstiftung, 221, 1–9. http://www.kas.de/wf/de/33.46486/ joyce, m., antonio, r., & howard, p. n. (2013). global digital activism data set. icpsr. http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/icpsr/studies/34625/version/2 marwick, a., & lewis, r. (2017). media manipulation and disinformation online. data & society research institute. https://datasociety.net/pubs/oh/dataandsociety_mediamanipulationanddisinformationo nline.pdf tucker, j. a., guess, a., barbera, p., vaccari, c., siegel, a., sanovich, s., … nyhan, b. (2018). social media, political polarization, and political disinformation: a review of the scientific literature. ssrn electronic journal, 95. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3144139 woolley, s., & howard, p. (2018). computational propaganda: political parties, politicians, and political manipulation on social media. oxford: oxford university press. wu, t. (2017). the attention merchants: the epic struggle to get inside our heads. atlantic books. https://doi.org/10.1177/0048393111408779 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/social-media-bots.html http://www.kas.de/wf/de/33.46486/ http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/icpsr/studies/34625/version/2 https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3144139 aoir2018-submission-hauntology-final selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): o’connell, c. (2018, october 10-13). a hauntological analysis of digital memorialization of the dead. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. a hauntological analysis of digital memorialization of the dead carrie o’connell university of illinois at chicago the cultural ways in which we memorialize the dead are changing in the digital age. while traditional forms of memorial like wakes, funerals, or altars of offering still persist in western culture, newer forms of digital memorialization have emerged with the rise of social networking sites. facebook and other social platforms now allow pages of the deceased to remain active, controlled by immediate family of the deceased person, as a sort of memorialization or “electronic wake,” (stokes, 2011). emerging research on user interaction with memorial pages on social networking sites (massimi and charise, 2009; kern, forman, and gil-egui, 2012; goldschmidt, 2013; bouc, han, and pennington, 2015) suggests that while these pages do serve as artefacts of the dead much the same way headstones in a graveyard serve as static memorials, these interactive pages also represent a digital continuation of the relationship between the living and dead, as one-sided as that relationship may be. the overall goal of the author is to examine the evolution of the materiality of memorialization and investigate how our human connection with death has changed as our media tools have become untethered from tangible artefact. as is often the case, the history of the evolution of media tools may offer insight. during the 19th century-arguably the last time an epochal evolution of media technology occurred--fascination with ghost-themed theatre, poetry, and literature (not so) coincidentally paralleled a rise in new technologies that forever changed both the way we preserve and chronicle our human existence, as well as the manner in which we socially engage with our fellow humans, mass culture, and the artefacts of that mass society due to those new technologies. today, the advancement of virtual reality technologies and artificial intelligence, as well as modern controversies over the ethics of “preserving” life after death via social network profiles have brought humankind to the precipice of change once again. this paper will argue that, similar to the technological epochal change and subsequent impact on human interaction with tangible media artefacts that occurred in the 19th century, we are once again undergoing a cultural and spiritual catharsis brought on by evolving technology that not only threatens to supplant our understanding of what it means to be human, but also what it means to be posthuman. this paper will explore three particular lessons gleaned from the correlation between the rise of media technology and a cultural fascination with ghosts in the 19th century: 1. advances in media technologies provided new avenues for dyadic communication between living beings, yet forced a re-evaluation of concepts like distance and temporal synchronicity in regards to those relationships. 2. advances in media technology change our human relationship with spectral beings, and therefore death itself. 3. spectral images that live through media deceive the viewer as a form of sleight of hand: on a superficial level, new technologies promise the viewer an extension of life in simulacrum, though this disembodied replication lacks beingness. to explore the links between media, human relationships, and the spectral plane, and how those links might be revelatory in an age of digital media, a hauntological examination of these questions will be endeavored. the basic premise of hauntology, a clever merge of haunting and ontology derived by jacques derrida (1993), is that an idea, once tangibly realized—even if just through written form—and, therefore, made real in the cultural zeitgeist, is never truly extinguished. like a spirit that lingers after death, the cultural lessons of the past linger anywhere from casual conversation to formal canon, enshrined in our cultural consciousness through tangible media which capture their written, visualized, and / or digital form. derrida’s hauntology derives from the ontological quest to articulate the nature of being, yet with the added perspective that everything that exists might not have ever lived, and nothing which is past ever really quite dies. this is no more so true than in our heavily mediated age in which written documents, photographs, film, and the internet are able to capture, record, store—and, as will be discussed—even replicate beingness in physical form. in an age where simulacra parade as true being, and cultural memory of events as accepted historical provenance, perhaps our human reality cannot be sufficiently quantified or qualified in temporal terms. examining the historical links and patterns between eras will only get us so far in our quest to understand the current impact of technology on humankind. in our current trans-epochal stage, “something is changing, something different is emerging--we can all feel it, and we are trying to articulate is,” (kochhar-lundgren, 2005, p. 194). by embracing a hauntological perspective we may very well abandon the need to find a causal relationship between life and the afterlife--one grounded in our need to articulate (or, find meaning). in the context of the philosophy of being, hauntology upends the notion that the material and ideal planes represent a fixed binary of opposites. because of the presence of specters—be they the traces of ideology never fully realized or the trauma of past lives encoded within living egos—we must reckon with the idea that being, or lack of being, may also represent neither what is ontologically material or ideal. perhaps there is a new mode of being—one that has yet to be fully understood. it is in the promise of a new perspective—a new way of understanding our own human existence—that hauntology proves an enticing theory from which to analyze our modern cultural fascination with and relationship to death. references bouc, a., han, s., & pennington, n. (2016). “why are they commenting on his page?”: using facebook profile pages to continue connections with the deceased. computers in human behavior, 62635-643. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2016.04.027 derrida, j. (1994) specters of marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international. new york: routledge. goldschmidt, k. (2013). thanatechnology: eternal digital life after death. journal of pediatric nursing, 28(3), 302-304. doi:10.1016/j.pedn.2013.02.021 kern, r., forman, a. e., & gil-egui, g. (2013). r.i.p.: remain in perpetuity. facebook memorial pages. telematics & informatics, 30(1), 2-10. doi:10.1016/j.tele.2012.03.002 kochhar-lindgren, g. (2004). technologics: ghosts, the incalculable, and the suspension of animation. albany: state university of new york press. massimi, m., & charise, a. (2009, april). dying, death, and mortality: towards thanatosensitivity in hci. in chi'09 extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems (pp. 2459-2468). acm stokes, p. (2012). ghosts in the machine: do the dead live on in facebook? philosophy & technology, 25(3), 363-379. doi:10.1007/s13347-011-0050-7. microsoft word ir16_submission_update.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 subverting social media sava saheli singh new york university introduction our use of twitter is shaped by the built-in biases of the people who created it (winner, 1980; akrich, 1992; marx, 2010; etc.). these biases may have come from a wellmeaning place, such as the belief in an open space where everyone can reply to and connect with everyone else. but biases like this tend to be quite blind to the needs of vulnerable populations that come to a platform for various, often unpredicted, reasons. much of the writing and research around twitter deals with how we’ve used the features to perform our identities (e.g.: papacharissi, 2012; marwick & boyd, 2010), connect with communities, and incur the wrath of those who feel wronged by us. more recently, there have been numerous mainstream media articles about how much twitter has changed (lafrance & meyer, 2104; jacobs, 2014; chimero, 2014; madrigal, 2014; stewart, 2014; etc.) a common nostalgic complaint from those privileged enough to have been early adopters, and privileged further to exercise the choice to reduce engagement or even leave. as internet researchers, we’re familiar with most features of twitter (bruns & moe, 2013; halavais, 2013) and what they are used for. we’re also familiar with how users can be manipulated to change behaviors based on changing features (liu, klimansilver, & mislove, 2014). here, i will discuss how some of these features are repurposed and reinterpreted by users, while highlighting the conflict of features that be used for both useful and harmful actions. observations here are based on existing literature, reflecting on my own practice of using twitter, my deep experience with and research of twitter use (predominantly with scholars and academics), participant observation in my research community, and conversations with other users. [note: this paper specifically addresses features of twitter’s web application on twitter.com – mobile and other applications, while similar, require additional and slightly different considerations and literacies.] suggested citation (apa): singh, s. (2015, october 21-24) subverting social media. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 2 subtweeting indirectly talking about someone is a great way to get opinions and frustrations out in the open without naming them. but, as part of a larger community, there is a very good chance that other users are going to know who is being talked about. that’s often the aim of what is known as a subtweet to say something about someone behind their back, to create a buzz about what’s being said or let other people know something about the other person without being obvious. subtweets allow for “plausible deniability” (marwick & boyd, 2014) because the subtweeter can always deny a specific target. there’s also another layer of subtweet, through a private account. private accounts of people who have public twitter accounts are a way for people to create a more private and safe space for them to express themselves, while controlling who gets to see these tweets. subtweeting can take on an interesting level of passive aggression when someone does so from a private account because only that special private community is privy to this. block-unblock unfollow this is the repurposing of a twitter feature as a way to control and manage followers and appearances on lists. there are some third-party twitter applications that provide a ‘force unfollow’ function, but there is no other “official” way to do this. the earliest mention of the tactic i found was from a blogpost (jorgensen, 2010) in 2010 that provided it as a solution to reduce the number of followers. the action is simple: if a user is followed by someone they don’t want to be followed by, they can block them and then immediately unblock them, which causes an automatic unfollow, without the follower’s knowledge. you can also use this tactic to be taken off a list that someone may have added you to. forcing an unfollow might seem somewhat counter to the expectation that twitter is an open space where anyone can “follow” anyone else, but it is a subversion of a twitter feature that can be used to ‘clean up’ one’s twitter followers and remove bots and people who haven’t tweeted in a while. it can also be a form of self-preservation or selfcare. people have used this to avoid scrutiny, to discreetly distance themselves from potentially harmful individuals, and reduce the reach of what they might tweet, as a way to control one’s own “publicness”. tweet deletion users might delete social media posts for a few reasons: because there’s a typo they want to fix, because they changed their mind, or because they regret something they said (wang et al, 2011). some researchers claim that it is possible to predict the kinds of tweets that will be deleted based on factors such as role of the author and certain words (xu, burchfiel, zhu, & bellmore, 2013; petrovic, osborne, & lavrenko, 2013), but others note that there are no real reasons for tweet deletion that can be surmised through examination of twitter data because people delete for a variety of reasons 3 (almuhimedi, wilson, liu, sadeh, & acquisti, 2013). the evolving nature of twitter and how people are learning to protect themselves means it will get harder to predict. there are also instances in which a user may have had a conversation maybe an argument or a disagreement and they want to erase that discussion. it is a way for users to control their content and manage both their external and personal identities, and sense of self. on the receiving end, it can leave other users looking as though they tweeted multiple times at a user and got no response, as though they were trying to force a conversation but were rejected. tweet deletion has interesting implications for identity and interaction on twitter. in 2011, twitter shut down undetweetable – a service that let you browse through deleted tweets by entering a username (hughes, 2011). ostensibly created in order to provoke conversations about online identity and privacy, it also ran the risk of opening people up to harassment and embarrassment. more recently, the sunlight foundation – a nonprofit organization that aims to increase the transparency and accountability of public officials in the government – had to shut down politwoops, a web service that collected deleted tweets from politicians and made them available for people to search through on their website. these deleted tweets from politicians and other government officials visible allowed us to see everything from minor typos to major gaffes, thus exposing the inner workings of political social media. both these services were told that they were in breach of twitter’s terms of service and were shut down after they had already been in operation for a while. it’s hard to say what harm was done to individuals based on these services, but this reaction is indicative of how services like twitter tend to adopt a just-in-time approach to potentially harmful uses of their services, rather than create a service that addresses these before they can be the conduits of actual harm. twitter advertisements and promoted tweets this may seem out of place on this list, but advertisements and promoted tweets can be effective forms of aggressions and microaggressions. they are unwanted noise. at their most benign, their irrelevance can be an annoyance, but at worst their tone-deaf ad copy can be offensive, and even triggering. as expected, most research and writing on twitter ads and promoted tweets are in the realm of celebrity, marketing, and business (wood & burkhalter, 2014; dacres, haddadi, & purver, 2014; and many more), with not as much consideration to the effects of the features on users beyond getting them to click on something and hopefully buy something. promoted tweets allow a user to create content and push this content to specific demographics via a dashboard that lets you target particular audiences based on gender, location, interests, keywords, and other factors (“increase twitter engagement”, n.d.). promoted tweets and sponsored links, either by individuals or companies, manifest much like the pop-up ads of the early internet, forcing users to expend more emotional labor in the effort of refusing them attention. a disturbing case of the use of promoted tweets to spread racist remarks gained attention when a troll used the system to target particular groups of people with white supremacist “ads” (smith, 2015). as 4 disturbing as this was, it took a troll to subvert the system for negative purposes in order to reveal the flaws in the system. open @-ing inserting characters in front of a user’s twitter handle makes their identity visible to all of the poster’s followers, regardless of whether they follow them or not. replying like this to someone can have multiple implications. in its most harmless manifestation, this type of tweet can broadcast information that a tweeter might think the rest of their followers would find relevant or interesting. but as a defense mechanism and a warning to the rest of the community, it can draw attention to a harasser, making public the harassment being enacted with the intention of eliciting support from one’s community and also publicizing the harassment. as an offensive or bullying mechanism, it can draw harassment to the recipient, including unwanted comments, abuse, and even shame. storifies storify is a third party web-based application that allows users to archive conversations and posts from multiple social media applications, often to create a larger narrative outside of the context of the original social media platform. users can create a record of a series of tweets (or other social media posts) – either from one user or from a conversation. on the surface, this is a useful way to preserve and present particular events or conversations, but these can also be constructed out of context and at the discretion of the creator, injecting that creator’s bias into the curation of those tweets. people might ostensibly want to preserve a series of tweets, an argument, or a conversation, but it can also be used as a form of abuse, and longer conversations are rarely completely recorded. storifies and tweets are also used/embedded in news stories or articles or blog posts and serve as a further magnifier to the tweet or person being reported on. again, this could work a couple of ways: purely as a record of something, as a way to point would-be harassers at someone, or as a way to point out inequities or harassment. retweeting and links to tweets retweeting is a common activity on twitter and has gone through several changes over time. in its basic form, it is a way to re-broadcast a tweet by someone else to your followers. people retweet for a variety of reason ranging from amplification to sharing information (boyd, golder, & lotan, 2010). one of the earliest forms of retweeting required users to insert ‘rt’ in front of the text copied from a tweet. sometimes, users could include a comment before the ‘rt’ or even change it to ‘mt’ to indicate that the tweet had been modified, but this meant that both the comment and the text of the retweet had to fit twitter’s 140-character constraint. now, you can retweet in a couple of ways: hitting the retweet button transmits the original tweet as a whole and adds a notation that shows it has been retweeted by you, or it gives you the option of adding a comment to an embedded version of the original 5 tweet. the difference in this type of commenting is that you get the full 140 characters to comment rather than having to share characters with the content of the retweeted tweet. i describe the historical difference in retweeting format because it is interesting and important to note the implications of this change on user behavior. the first iteration meant you retweeted someone and they’d know you did, but you could tweet a link to their tweet and they wouldn’t know – this allowed for more flexibility in how users retweeting. the former approach credited the author with tweeting content, but the latter approach allowed for shaming, drawing attention to a harasser, or making a snarky comment without the author’s knowledge. the new format changes how users interact with a retweet and how a retweet can be used to signal different things, and makes it harder to draw negative attention to a tweet/tweeter. you can still copy a tweet and put ‘rt’ in front of it, but compared to the new retweet, that is time-consuming and would use up the 140 characters limit. users sometimes tweet screenshots of a tweet or text – this was not uncommon before the changes to how retweeting works now, but it has gained further traction as a way to subvert the new changes – both to publicly shame and to potentially call out negative twitter behavior without drawing attention to the tweeter. faving favoriting or faving as a feature was ostensibly meant to be used as a way to bookmark interesting tweets or links in tweets, but it plays many roles now, from, well, bookmarking to signaling different kinds of acknowledgments. users still use faving as a bookmarking tool, sometimes as a trigger for web bookmarking services like pinboard using ifttt (a web application that uses changes in web applications – such as favoriting a tweet – to trigger another web application – such as pinboard – to perform an action) to send a tweet or a link in a tweet to a bookmarking database which offers an easier way to record these tweets. but there is a vast range of uses outside of bookmarking – as a “like” a la facebook, to signal agreement, take a side in a twitter argument between two people you know, or just because something was funny. there might be deeper cultural reasons for favoriting a tweet, such as “participating in a shared context” as cottom (2015) says, that she prefers to favorite over retweet, to avoid having to explain the context – something she can choose not to do. there are a number of interpretations – real and humorous – that can be inferred from a fav ranging from polite to maybe a little creepy (smale, 2014). an interesting phenomenon that brings a new aspect to faving is the “while you were away…” feature. in what seems to be an attempt to emulate facebook, twitter introduced this feature to show users tweets they might have missed from people they follow, based on engagement and other metrics (rosania, 2015). this breaks what used to be the traditional twitter stream – the ephemerality of twitter being one of its defining features – and displays tweets from hours ago. not long ago, if someone favorited someone else’s tweets from a while ago, it was more than likely that they were going through the person’s timeline looking at their older tweets. but now, if someone faved a tweet from a few hours ago, it could be that they saw it as part of the “while you were away…” feature. 6 conclusion there are subversive behaviors that i have not listed here, and there are probably new ones being born as i type. none of these are objectively good or bad. as with most systems built with apparent “openness and sharing” at the heart of their design a fallacy that is used as an excuse for the biases that are built into various platforms they are not neutral. they are built with very specific biases often by those at the top of the privilege structure who cannot envision the harm and misuse of the tools that were purportedly meant to allow for the free flow of ideas. those users who are not part of this demographic must find ways to protect themselves and the most vulnerable, which often involves subverting the uses of the platform to meet their needs. in the context of researching behavior in and culture of these spaces, these kinds of uses of twitter features can add messiness – desired and undesired (tufekci, 2014) – to the data collected. taking these phenomena into account can provide insight into the ad hoc use of these features and platforms outside of the usual types of data collected, but as features keep changing researchers must keep up with how the community both uses and subverts them. as we continue to conduct research and examine the cultural implications of twitter, we have to take into account the constantly shifting ground on which we are attempting to base our research. twitter will probably go through a lot of changes in response to shareholder expectations and concerns of return on investment. post-ipo, twitter is competing with other social media platforms like facebook, snapchat, and instagram, and will feel the pressure to change or introduce features in order to remain relevant. for example, recent changes like the ability to send direct messages to multiple people and lifting the character limit on direct messages have already changed the twitter experience. imagine what would happen if twitter lifted the character limit on tweets – this would be a fundamental change to the experience and there would be a drastic cultural shift. our use of twitter has already changed significantly over the years (liu, kliman-silver, & mislove, 2014). with every changing feature, we are forced to change our behaviors, find different workarounds, worry about new ways to nurture and protect our communities, and of course, update our research agendas. as twitter continues to introduce new changes, we will need new literacies to keep up and old cues that we depended on will no longer be valid – how we are online is changing and will continue to change. 7 references akrich, m. (1992). the de-scription of technical objects. shaping technology/building society, 205-224. almuhimedi, h., wilson, s., liu, b., sadeh, n., & acquisti, a. (2013, february). tweets are forever: a large-scale quantitative analysis of deleted tweets. in proceedings of the 2013 conference on computer supported cooperative work(pp. 897-908). acm. bruns, a., & moe, h. (2013). structural layers of communication on twitter. in k. weller, a. bruns, j. burgess, m. mahrt, & c. pushmann (eds.), twitter and society (pp. 15–28). new york: peter lang. cottom, t. m. (2015, august 19). faves. the message. retrieved from https://medium.com/message/faves-71b8fc71659e dacres, s., haddadi, h., & purver, m. (2013). topic and sentiment analysis on osns: a case study of advertising strategies on twitter. in proceedings of the second ase international conference on big data science and computing. halavais, a. (2013). structure of twitter: social and technical. in k. weller, a. bruns, j. burgess, m. mahrt, & c. pushmann (eds.), twitter and society (pp. 29-41). new york: peter lang. hughes, s. a. (2011, august 4). undetweetable archives deleted tweets, gets warning from twitter (update). the washington post. rerieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/post/undetweetable-archivesdeleted-tweets-gets-warning-from-twitter/2011/08/04/giqalqlbui_blog.html “increase twitter engagement”. (n.d.). retrieved from https://business.twitter.com/solutions/tweet-engagements jorgensen, l. (2010, february 20). the secret to fewer followers [guest blog post]. retrieved from http://www.twitter-fail.com/2010/02/20/the-secret-to-fewer-followers/ liu, y., kliman-silver, c., & mislove, a. (2014, may). the tweets they are a-changin’: evolution of twitter users and behavior. in international aaai conference on weblogs and social media (icwsm) (vol. 13, p. 55). marwick, a., & boyd, d. (2010). i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience." new media and society, 13, 96-113. marwick, a. e. (2014). networked privacy: how teenagers negotiate context in social media. new media & society, 16(7), 1051-1067. marx, l. (2010). technology: the emergence of a hazardous concept. technology and culture, 51(3), 561-577. papacharissi, z. (2012). without you, i'm nothing: performances of the self on twitter. international journal of communication, 6, 18. petrovic, s., osborne, m., & lavrenko, v. (2013). i wish i didn't say that! analyzing and predicting deleted messages in twitter. corr, abs/1305.3107, 2013. smale, h. (2014, october 23). mum asked what a twitter favourite "meant", so..... good luck mum. [tweet with image]. retrieved from https://twitter.com/holsmale/status/525370488437350401 smith, s. e. (2015). how a racist troll tricked twitter into promoting white supremacy. the daily dot. retrieved from http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/weev-supremacisttwitter-ad/ tufekci, z. (2014). big questions for social media big data: representativeness, validity and other methodological pitfalls. in icwsm '14: proceedings of the 8th international aaai conference on weblogs and social media, 2014. 8 wang, y., norcie, g., komanduri, s., acquisti, a., leon, p. g., & cranor, l. f. (2011). “i regretted the minute i pressed share”: a qualitative study of regrets on facebook. in soups ‘11: proceedings of the seventh symposium on usable privacy and security, (pp. 1-16). wood, n. t., & burkhalter, j. n. (2014). tweet this, not that: a comparison between brand promotions in microblogging environments using celebrity and companygenerated tweets. journal of marketing communications, 20(1-2), 129-146. winner, l. (1980). do artifacts have politics?. daedalus, 121-136. xu, j. m., burchfiel, b., zhu, x., & bellmore, a. (2013). an examination of regret in bullying tweets. in hlt-naacl (pp. 697-702). selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): dunham, i. (2020, october). faceless youtubers: how content creators shape audience expectations. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. faceless youtubers: how content creators shape audience expectations ian dunham kennesaw state university “okay, (calming zen gesture) let’s do this. this is so weird. welcome back to my channel…this is my face.” fastasmr on august 18, 2018, the youtube channel fastasmr revealed her face to her audience of several hundred thousand with little fanfare. prior to this moment, she had only ever shown the bottom half of her face, concealing her nose and eyes. she is not alone in being cautious about disclosing her face, and belongs to a surprisingly large group of channels this paper is calling faceless youtubers. as a platform that users value for its ability to provide ‘a critique, a goal, a community, and a context’ (jenkins quoting alex juhasz, 2009, p. 125), this specific subset of video creators employs unique practices related to surveillance, disclosure and information flow. youtube has achieved ubiquity as the de facto video platform for amateur content. its maturation as a platform can be seen through a collection of social norms, audience expectations, and politics, all of which weave themselves into the technosocial fabric of digital life. as such, certain practices that regulate the flow of information have become normalized across a certain subset of youtube channels. this paper will look at this practice among youtubers that are “faceless”—content creators who do not reveal their faces on camera while voluntarily revealing many other aspects of their identity. specifically, a content analysis is performed on these channels: the lockpicking lawyer, ave, steadycraftin, this old tony, bigclivedotcom, cgp grey, and fastasmr. the wide range of categories these channels belong to (diy, self-help, science and technology, home crafting, electrical appliance teardown, and audio therapy) indicates that choosing to remain faceless is not a function of a certain type of material, but rather a salient trend that crosscuts youtube genres. anonymity has been explored since the internet granted such communicative affordances (scott, 1998). it has a strong correlation with the online disinhibition effect, a phenomenon in which users more readily volunteer information “more boldly than they would in a face-to-face situation” (clark-gordon et al., 2019). furthermore, invisibility (a state reached through self-selecting which information is shown to outside users) has been shown to interact with anonymity to encourage the online disinhibition effect, both in toxic and prosocial instances. while anonymity deals with being completely unidentifiable, invisibility—which includes preventing access to “gender, weight, age, occupation, ethnic origin and residential location” (lapidot-lefler & barak, 2015)— proves a key concept since faceless youtubers generate a bond with their audience through this selective disclosure. in a medium that is mostly visual, remaining faceless is both a protest against cultural expectations within the format and an effort to shift focus to other audiovisual artifacts that empower these creators, such as shots of power tools and workspaces, animated content, a youtuber’s hands, and even sounds (see figure 1). it should be noted that all the analyzed channels contain content with the youtuber as its central focus, rather than other types of faceless material that might focus on narrative, news reporting, or documentary material. in this way, their representation is achieved through a novel method that does not require facial exposure. youtubers (and many other types of internet users for that matter) have always been forced to mitigate trolling, an unfortunate practice that is, ironically, afforded through anonymity (burgess & green, 2018, p. 80). because youtube has been classified as an engine that can fuel hatred and bigotry just as often as it can propagate learning and creativity (tufekci, 2018), youtubers constantly experiment with strategies to create meaningful content. in fact, trolling is one of the major hurdles youtubers must overcome: “learning how to ‘manage’ trolls, both practically and emotionally, is one of the core competencies required for effective or enjoyable participation” (burgess & green, 2018, p. 80). the faceless youtubers in this study manage trolls in two important ways: by refusing to reveal their faces, their appearance cannot be the fodder of trolling. simultaneously, though, by placing an emphasis on other aspects of their identity (their job, their hobbies, the physical space they inhabit), any trolling can only be aimed at what viewers hear and see (see figure 1). figure 1: faceless youtubers’ identity (clockwise from top left: steadycraftin, ave, cgp grey, and fastasmr) the content analysis of these faceless youtubers reveals a variety of motivations, but several have to do with identity construction. in the case of steadycraftin, his face is never in frame, and his hands are always covered by gloves, a choice most certainly made to conceal his race (his voice is always unconcealed, and his accent is raceambiguous, perhaps a choice to further conceal his identity). simultaneously, though, steadycraftin, has shared deeply personal information, such as the fact that he suffers from ptsd and other psychological problems, as well as the fact that he has a wife and children. similarly, ave and this old tony have both shown their children’s faces on camera. these examples suggest that youtubers feel empowered through remaining faceless, possibly making them feel more at ease and thereby allowing for increased disclosure about the topic at hand (clark-gordon et al., 2019). they also demonstrate that faceless youtubers selectively share information depending on a range of motivations, all of which revolve around imparting meaningful content to specific audiences while maintaining privacy. while faceless youtubers exercise unique strategies for controlling the flow of information to audiences, they are certainly not alone in developing methods of control. transgender youtubers, for instance, have demonstrated equally compelling methods for maintaining privacy, sharing relevant information, establishing a sense of identity, and cultivating a supportive community (raun, 2016). similarly, anorexic youtubers have propagated a sense of agency through sharing stories of recovery that deal with narratives of physical bodies (holmes, 2016). while overlap exists in the strategies these communities employ and those of the faceless youtubers i have analyzed, the specific configuration of approaches at hand are distinct as they “shape social norms and reflexively negotiate the ethics of online behavior, operating from a position of grounded, insider knowledge” (burgess & green, 2018, p. 80). these strategies, discussed only briefly here because of space constraints, will be expanded upon in the presentation. references burgess, j. & green, j. (2009). youtube: online video and participatory culture. cambridge: polity. burgess, j. & green, j. (2018). youtube: online video and participatory culture. cambridge: polity. clark-gordon, c. bowman, n. goodboy, a. wright, a. (2019) anonymity and online self-disclosure: a meta-analysis. communication reports, 32:2, 98-111 holmes, s. (2016).‘my anorexia story’: girls constructing narratives of identity on youtube. cultural studies, 31(1), 1-23. lapidot-lefler, n., & barak, a. (2015). the benign online disinhibition effect: could situational factors induce self-disclosure and prosocial behaviors?. cyberpsychology: journal of psychosocial research on cyberspace, 9(2). scott, c. r. (1998). to reveal or not to reveal: a theoretical model of anonymous communication. communication theory, 8, 381–407. raun, t. (2016). out online: trans self-representation and community building on youtube. new york: routledge. tufekci, z. (2018, march 11). youtube: the great radicalizer. new york times, p. sr6. aoir20 extended abstract lehto revised.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 neurotic influencer – feeling rules and the affective practice of anxiety in social media influencer work mari lehto university of turku in 2019 finnish pr-agency published a survey reporting that almost one of three finnish social media influencers have considered quitting. the research revealed that the stressful nature of the social media environment and the constant race to publish high-quality content is experienced as highly exhausting. (manifesto, 2019.) meanwhile, numerous finnish influencers are participating in social media campaigns encouraging people to speak openly about fatigue, depression and anxiety, and mental health is commercialized in social media with new vigor. this small-scale, interpretative study discusses the phenomenon by exploring the intimate cultures of finnish social media influencers who also share family-related content. through in-depth qualitative interviews with four finnish influencers and online observation of their social media accounts, the paper investigates how influencers negotiate the feeling rules (hochschild, 2003 [1983]) that govern (maternal) femininity on social media. my data do not allow for the possibility of generalization but are rich, nuanced, and offer insight into one method of investigating the ambivalent lived experiences and emotional pressures of ‘do what you love and love what you do’ ethic (e.g. duffy 2016) where emotional investment in one’s work encompasses all areas of life. the four influencers interviewed for this study tell about their lives “as lived” as the central theme of their output (abidin 2015) but the content they share is simultaneously carefully curated. influencers’ popularity depends on protecting the connection with their followers and they police themselves closely to adapt to followers’ expectations (eg. abidin 2013; mäkinen 2018). applying social psychologist margaret wetherell’s (2012, 2014) concept of “affective practice” and akane kanai’s (2019, 2019b) implementation of arlie hochschild’s work in the context of digital media, i ask how feeling rules shape the ways in which finnish influencers work to produce selves that are agreeable to their followers and cope with the emotional weight of precarious social media work. the paper argues for using the affective practice of anxiety as a theoretical concept to explore the influencers’ routinized emotional behaviour in their attempts to decrease the suggested citation (apa): lehto, m. (2020, october). neurotic influencer – feeling rules and the affective practice of anxiety in social media influencer work. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. discrepancy between their emotions and cultural expectations. the notion of affective practice is useful when contemplating what affects such as anxiety do (loveday, 2016: 1148; ahmed, 2004: 4). the experience of anxiety is viscerally felt at the individual level, but it is important to consider the role of anxiety and insecurity on more a structural level as well. as gill and pratt (2008) point out, this is highly relevant in fields of work in which individuals are judged on what they produce. the four influencers discuss at length about their negotiations about anxieties and uncertainties within their construction of relatable influencer identity. they all acknowledge the power of performative vulnerability (see koivunen, kyrölä & ryberg 2018) and emphasize that only sharing positive sentiments is often regarded as superficial. the paper suggests that although anxiety can be considered a negative side effect of stressful social media work, sharing it on social media can also be understood as a tactic that plays a central role in the lifestyle influencer industry. drawing on vik loveday’s (2018) analysis of the “neurotic academic”, i suggest that the construction of an entrepreneurial influencer self is underpinned by anxiety. in her study of academic staff working on fixed-term contracts, loveday (2018) notes that anxiety can be conceptualized as a kind of tactic of “neuroliberal governance” (isin, 2004): “it is both produced and productive, it is both an effect and affective” (loveday 2018, p.163). applying loveday’s (2018, p.162) insights, i consider the “neurotic influencer” to be an entrepreneurial figure that is governed through anxiety while being expected to take responsibility for the self-management of this anxiety. from this point of view, opening up about the affective practices of anxiety can be interpreted as a tactic through which the influencers perform feelings by either following the feeling rules or challenging but also capitalizing on them. in other words, the neurotic influencer as a figure governs itself through responses to anxieties, not in spite of them (see loveday, 2018, p. 161). the neurotic influencer is a figure of this neoliberal media culture. the performances of anxiety offer evidence of its claims to authenticity; however, at the same time, this entrepreneurial figure is expected to self-manage the structural anxieties that are outside of its control. the ambivalent influencer culture fosters sentimental discourse that, in keeping with berlant (2008, p.1–2), criticizes structures and “bad ideologies” about women’s suffering while at the same time retaining faith in many of the promises that originally caused the suffering. anxiety pushes the influencers to exceed themselves in their work all the while creating relatable social media subjects. references abidin, c. (2013). cyber-bffs: assessing women’s ‘perceived interconnectedness’ in singapore’s commercial lifestyle blog industry. global media journal australian edition 7(1). abidin, c. (2015). “communicative intimacies: influencers and perceived interconnectedness.” ada: a journal of gender, new media, & technology 8. doi: 10.7264/n3mw2ffg adams, v., murphy, m., and clarke, a.e. (2009). anticipation: technoscience, life, affect, temporality. subjectivity, 28, 246–265. ahmed s. (2004). the cultural politics of emotion. london: routledge. berlant, l. (2008). the female complaint. the unfinished business of sentimentality in american culture. durham: duke university press. duffy, b. e. (2016). the romance of work: gender and aspirational labour in the digital culture industries. international journal of cultural studies, 19(4), 441-457. gill, r. and pratt, a.c. (2008). in the social factory? immaterial labour, precariousness and cultural work. theory, culture & society, 25(7-8), 1-30. doi: 10.1177/0263276408097794 hochschild, a. r. (1983). the managed heart: commercialization of human feeling. berkeley: university of california press. kanai a. (2019a). gender and relatability in digital culture: managing affect, intimacy and value. cham switzerland: palgrave macmillan. kanai a. (2019b). on not taking the self seriously: resilience, relatability and humour in young women’s tumblr blogs. european journal of cultural studies 22(1): 60–77. koivunen, a-r., kyrölä, k., & ryberg, i. (2018). vulnerability as a political language. in k. kyrölä, i. ryberg (eds.), the power of vulnerability: mobilizing affect in feminist, queer and anti-racist media cultures. manchester: manchester university press. loveday v. (2016). embodying deficiency through “affective practice”: shame, relationality, and the lived experience of social class and gender in higher education. sociology 50(6): 1140–1155. loveday, v. 2018. the neurotic academic: anxiety, casualisation, and governance in the neoliberalising university. journal of cultural economy. 11(2), 154–166. manifesto. (2019). ‘somevaikuttaja 2019 -barometri’. viestintätoimisto manifesto, 3 september. https://www.dropbox.com/s/0o5amosog9p5vmc/somevaikuttajabarometri2019.pdf?dl=0 mäkinen, k. (2018). negotiating the intimate and the professional in mom blogging. in: s. taylor, s. luckman (eds.), the new normal of working lives critical studies in contemporary work and employment. palgrave macmillan. 129–146. wetherell m. (2012). affect and emotion: a new social science understanding. london: sage publications. wetherell m. (2014). feeling rules, atmospheres and affective practice: some reflections on the analysis of emotional episodes. in: maxwell c and aggleton p (eds.) privilege, agency and affect. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, pp. 221–239. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): bevan, a., wilson-barnao, c., & lincoln, r. (2019, october 2-5). from chastity belts to smart frocks: the promise of rape deterrent technology. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. from chastity belts to smart frocks: the promise of rape deterrent technology dr alex bevan university of queensland dr caroline wilson-barnao university of queensland assistant professor robyn lincoln bond university abstract in 2018, schweppes partnered with ogilvy brazil to design a smart dress that used touch-sensors to illustrate how women are groped in nightclubs (dickson 2018). the dress exemplifies an array of intimate digital devices that mobilize smart technology aimed at preventing sexual assault in public space. it represents a growing category of corporeal technologies ostensibly designed to protect and potentially capture probative evidence for previously silenced publics. other categories include smart phone apps or wearable jewellery that send alerts or alarms to smart bracelets that monitor alcohol consumption in order to provide more authentic indicators of sexual consent (bivens and hasinoff 2018, white and mcmillan 2019). devices like the ogilvy dress and the quantification they render, subject women to greater levels of surveillance, responsibilize them for personal safety, and reinscribe a silencing dynamic by positioning the technology as more reliable evidence of women’s experience than their verbal statements. these devices are undertheorized as potential erosions of the legitimacy of individual testimony and experience that are part of digital culture more broadly speaking (couldry 2010). the devices are problematically framed with technological solutionism to what are complex and contextually-sensitive social issues, and their promise undermines trust in the digital and online to prevent sexual harassment and assault victimization. summary schweppes partnered with ogilvy brazil in designing a smart dress that used touchsensors to track how three women were physically harassed in a nightclub. as the women moved through the venue, data from the sensory dress were sent to a control centre, which lit up a total of 157 times in four hours demonstrating the extent to which they received unwanted attention (dickson 2018). the experiment concurs with interview research revealing that more than half of young adult women in licensed premises in entertainment precincts had endured unwanted sexual attention including touching in the past three months (miller et al., 2019). the smart dress however is emblematic of the growth of a category of new devices marketed to women and girls and designed to make them feel safer in public space. for example, the stiletto is a wearable technology disguised as a piece of jewellery that is also able to place emergency calls on the user’s behalf. a fundamental claim of such rape deterrent devices is the assurance of enhanced safety, agency, and the ability to legitimize claims of sexual assault. in this paper we situate the discussion of rape deterrent technologies among current discourses on the monitoring and datafication of the body (andrejevic 2002, smith 2016, lyon 2014). we study a range of smart devices and their promises in order to set up an analytical comparison. we examine the extent to which these devices provide solutions and explore their claims to provide protection while commodifying forms of bodily surveillance. acknowledging that devices of this nature are not new, we consider the longer trajectory of how wearables such as chastity belts have been used to address social problems. over time, the role of these devices has transformed from their use to signify the modesty of the wearer to an apparatus that is promoted as giving women back control over their own bodies. by turning to examine contemporary devices, we highlight the ideologies and technological solutionism that accompany the current tranche of rape deterrent wear. our aim is to scrutinize the promises offered that emphasize empowerment and safety and yet denote misplaced trust in the digital and online spheres. such notions of safety rely on the active participation of users who make their bodies available to devices that enact various forms of digital surveillance. while acknowledging potential benefits of these inventions, we question their role in outsourcing the work of addressing broader social concerns and responsibilization of the wearer. the utopic discourse on the democratizing potentials of new technologies coexists with the history of how these same technologies can also disenfranchise vulnerable publics according to race, gender, class, and geographic location. this phenomenon is wellcovered by the academic literature on the digital divide (warschauer 2003, van dijk 2005, ragnedda 2018, caprio, 2018). indeed, the history of disruptive technologies demonstrates how they often initially reinscribe the marginalization of precisely the publics most in need of access to the public sphere (marneffe 1991). the histories of gender-based marginalization and technological innovation as a popular discourse are deeply entangled. the process of technological disruption is always bound up with the silencing and elision of vulnerable populations. this is because institutions of power shape technological “progress” and the ways inventions are ultimately disseminated and narrativized (marvin, 1988). it would seem that the affordances of anti-rape smart devices invite trust that the digital and online will offer protection and that eventually crowdfunded products will address the wider issues of sexual violence. there is promise that smart frocks and jewellery may permit data gathering and thereby enhance knowledge about the prevalence and incidence of unwanted touching, whether in nightclubs in metro districts or on public transport in poorer locations. concomitantly, there appears a patent false promise that these apps and wearables sending alerts and alarms are likely to prevent sexual assaults and inevitably erode trust in connected solutions. references andrejevic, m. (2002). the work of being watched: interactive media and the exploitation of self-disclosure. critical studies in media communication, 19(2): 230–248. bivens, r. & hasinoff, a.a. (2018). rape: is there an app for that? an empirical analysis of the features of anti-rape apps. information, communication & society, 21(8): 1050– 1067. carpio, g.g. (2018). racial projections: cyberspace, public space, and the digital divide. information, communication and society, 21(2): 174–190. couldry, n. (2010). why voice matters: culture and politics after neoliberalism. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. day, a. & fernandez, e., (eds), (2015). preventing violence in australia. sydney: federation press. de marneffe, d. (1991). looking and listening: the construction of clinical knowledge in charcot and freud. signs: journal of women in culture and society, 17(1): 71–111. dickson, e.k. (november 29, 2018). an ad agency created a smart dress to prove women get groped at clubs. vox. accessed at: https://www.vox.com/thegoods/2018/11/29/18118402/ogilvy-schweppes-smart-dress-harassment lyon, d. (2014). surveillance, snowden, and big data: capacities, consequences, critique. big data & society, 1(2): 1–13. marvin, c. (1988). when old technologies were new: thinking about electric communication in the late nineteenth century. new york: oxford university press. miller, p., et al., (2019). queensland alcohol-related violence and night time economy monitoring (quantem), final report (april). deakin university, geelong australia. prepared for the queensland government department of premier and cabinet. ragnedda, m. (2018). conceptualizing digital capital. telematics and informatics, 35(8): 2366–2366. smith, g. (2016). surveillance, data, and embodiment: on the work of being watched. body and society, 22(2): 108–139. van dijk, j. (2005). the deepening divide. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. warschauer, m. (2003). technology and social inclusion: remaking the digital divide. cambridge, ma: mit press. white, d. & mcmillan, l. (2019). innnovating the problem away? a critical study of antirape technologies. violence against women, online: 1–21. doi: 10.1177/1077801219856115. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): koltai, k. (2020, october 28-31). vaccine information seeking and sharing: how private facebook groups contributed to the anti-vaccine movement online. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. vaccine information seeking and sharing: how private facebook groups contributed to the anti-vaccine movement online kolina koltai university of washington introduction a major factor in vaccine dissent is the proliferation of vaccine opposed content online (kata, 2012). the affordances of the internet have contributed to the rise of alleged conspiracies (fahnestock, 2016), like the link between autism and vaccines, which is further amplified through social media and bots (broniatowski et al., 2018). the widespread availability of misinformation has been an integral part of the vaccine opposed movement’s success. they have been highly effective in spreading their messages and arguments through social media and content sharing platforms (wilson & keelan, 2013). people also seek out and join digital communities to gain support and health advice from others similar to them (zhang, he, & sang, 2013). this leads to the research question guiding the work: how do anti-vaccine facebook users use social media to search and evaluate vaccine related information and communities? with the increase of members joining anti-vaccine facebook groups online, it is critical to understand how these users are utilizing the platform to find and share vaccine opposed information, especially during shifting policy changes by facebook. in 2019, facebook implemented a series of algorithmic changes to limit the spread of vaccine opposed content and groups on their platform; however, membership continues to grow. methods and analysis this study was part of a larger body of work conducted by the author. the findings discussed in this paper draw primarily from interviews and data collected from antivaccine facebook groups (avfbg). interview participants, (n = 15) were recruited from an earlier survey distributed in avfbgs. interviews, conducted october – december 2019, revolved around their vaccine attitudes, their values, and their use of facebook as an information seeking, information sharing, and community building tool. data was also collected from 20 avfbgs by screenshotting the 30 most recent posts in those groups resulting in approximately 600 posts, collected in december 2019. thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2006) was used to analyze both the interviews and vaccine content shared on facebook. avfbgs are information exchange resources hubs avfbgs have become a vital resource in how people find and share vaccine opposed information. in the interviews, participants described not being satisfied with the vaccine information they were receiving from their healthcare provider, and in many cases, having their concerns dismissed. their health information wants (xie, 2009) were not being fulfilled so they sought out other information sources. they not only found information that aligned with their values, but also a welcoming environment of likeminded members who shared their concerns. common information behaviors in avfbgs are users requesting vaccine information (e.g., asking for sources about the ingredients in vaccines) and sharing vaccine related information (e.g., news article about vaccines). it gives users an easy way to quickly distribute information that would be appealing to the community. avfbgs are not a total echo chamber a common assumption of the avfbgs is that members are in an echo chamber. an echo chamber is when a group of participants chooses to preferentially connect with each other while excluding others with outside views (bruns, 2017). interestingly, members share pro-vaccine information in avfbgs. while the intention of sharing provaccine information is to be critical of it, members in these digital spaces regularly encounter pro-vaccine content both in their regular feeds and the avfbgs. with the sharing of pro-vaccine information, members in these closed digital communities are still being exposed to outside views. the members of these communities consistently interact, even actively engage, with viewpoints different from their own, both online and in-person. facebook’s insufficient moderation of avfbgs due to pressure to address misinformation on the platform, facebook has enacted policies to minimize the presence of vaccine opposed information. moderation of content on social media platforms is a difficult task as you need to enforce changing social norms of the community (gillespie, 2018). in this study, participants described being well aware of facebook's policies and began developing their own ways to adapt to the censorship through their understanding of the algorithm as well as mimicking how other members were adapting. members created workarounds to censorship like using non-standard lexical variations on the word 'vaccine' (e.g., ‘va((ine’), renaming groups to new terminology (e.g., instead of ‘anti-vaccine’, using ‘health freedom’), using screenshots to share information instead of links, and even migrating information and communities to other platforms (e.g., mewe and private forums). there is evidence to suggest that just like legal policy changes (e.g., removing vaccine exemptions), digital policy changes are not enough to encourage the vaccine opposed to vaccinate. avfbg members will develop workarounds and may become more confident in their decision not to vaccinate. avfbgs foster community and belonging these digital vaccine opposed communities, despite being demoted in facebook’s search results, keep growing in membership. they function both as an information exchange hub but also as a social support network. members have joined in search of vaccine information, but they stayed because they found a sense of community among strangers. participants described that the people in these groups do connect over having similar values and concerns about vaccines. they form these network ties due to homophily through values. these values also appear to be consistent group-to-group. when collecting the facebook posts, often the same resource or the same article would be posted multiples times across the groups and even in the same group by different members. these communities become incredibly important as members get more involved in fighting against vaccine mandates. in the interviews, members often described the relief and happiness they experience in these groups because they do not need explain the choice not to vaccinate. there is validation of vaccine opposition and a support system to handle the constant criticism (or hiding) of your vaccine attitudes from the public. to protect these spaces and their children, these communities foster a collectivistic environment that translates into taking direct actions to help the group (e.g., protesting). these spaces continue to be powerful because they encourage vaccine refusal and taking action to protect that refusal for your own family and others. references braun, v. & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77-101. bruns, a. (2017). echo chamber? what echo chamber? reviewing the evidence. paper presented at 6th biennial future of journalism conference, cardiff, uk. broniatowski et al. (2018). weaponized health communication: twitter bots and russian trolls amplify the vaccine debate. american journal of public health, 108(10), 13781384. fahenstock, j. (2017). controversies on the web: the case of adult human neuogenesis. in a. g. gross, & j. buehl (eds.), science and the internet: communicating knowledge in a digital age (pp. 115-141). taylor & francis. gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. yale university press. kata, a. (2012). anti-vaccine activists, web 2.0, and the postmodern paradigm-an overview of tactics and tropes used online by the anti-vaccination movement. vaccine, 30(25), 3778-3789. wilson, k., & keelan, j. (2013). social media and the empowering of opponents of medical technologies: the case of anti-vaccinationism. journal of medical internet research, 15(5), e103. xie, b. (2009). older adults' health information wants in the internet age: implications for patient-provider relationships. journal of health communication, 14(6), 510–524. zhang, y., he, d., & sang, y. (2013). facebook as a platform for health information and communication: a case study of a diabetes group. journal of medical systems, 37(3), 207–12. microsoft word j„rvek�lg-the merging of music criticism and music promotion-the merging of music criticism and music p.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): järvekülg, m. (2021, october). the merging of music criticism and music promotion: converged music professionals on facebook. paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the merging of music criticism and music promotion: converged music professionals on facebook madis järvekülg baltic film, media and arts school, tallinn university the digitalization of information and cultural production has undermined the business models of legacy media companies as well as music firms. this paper is particularly interested in the transformations in music journalism and its potential to transfer in some form to the digital media sphere. music journalism, indeed, represents the intersection of two industries that both have undergone a ‘free fall, with no bottom in sight’ (mcleese, 2010: 433). firstly, the decrease in readership and advertising revenues, intensified by the fragmentation of online audiences, have led to the ‘commercialization’ of cultural journalism in general – its submission to market requirements (verboord and janssen, 2015: 831). relatedly, scholars have indicated the decline of the ‘authority’ of cultural journalists and critics more broadly (kristensen, haastrup and holdgaard, 2018) and the ‘industrialization’ of music criticism more specifically (conner and jones, 2014). this has consequences for the identities, roles, functions of music critics who were once understood as ‘autonomous gatekeepers’ and ‘opinion leaders’ (hirsch, 1972). secondly, the music industry was the first creative sector that was thoroughly disrupted by digital technologies. while optimistic scholars have seen the ‘democratizing’ potential of this shift, scholars informed by the critical political economy have referred to the continuation and expansion of the traditional power inequalities in the music industries. in the oversaturated marketplace dominated by streaming services such as spotify, industry power ‘remains tied to access to capital, financing, and marketing support’ (hesmondhalgh and meier, 2015: 103). competition for the limited amount of attention from audiences has made the music industries indistinguishable from ‘promotional industries’ (meier, 2019). as most of the recent music-related media studies have focused on streaming services, the contemporary role of legacy media as well as social media platforms – either as platforms for music promotion or discussion – has received hardly any scholarly attention. therefore, the present study asks: how do music critics and music entrepreneurs in estonia make use of facebook? how does it transform our understanding of and the relationships between music criticism and music promotion? methodological practicalities this paper is based on the analysis of 32 semi-structured interviews with estonian music critics/journalists, experts, and entrepreneurs. the interviews were conducted between november 2018 and february 2020 and focused on how the participants make use of facebook concerning their professional identities; what are the roles through which they engage in local music cultures; how does the platform encourage or discourage them to present these roles; and how does it shape their status and relationship with other players in the local music sphere. early in the interviews, it became clear that, among all digital platforms, facebook provides the most diverse set of engagement practices. simultaneously with interviews and informed by them, ethnographic observations on facebook were conducted which provided contextual insight for the meaningful analysis of interview data. the constructivist grounded theory approach as introduced by charmaz (2006) was applied to the interview transcripts. qualitative data analysis software nvivo was used for coding the interviews. findings firstly, the interviews revealed that a number of participants were engaged with local music cultures from a variety of different positions. in many cases, the various roles adopted by one participant were further multiplied on facebook, as they held administrative control over various fan pages and groups. some participants, for example, managed more than 10 pages: pages of a record label, radio show, weekly publication, concert series, etc. among music critics, i distinguished three stances adopted on facebook: the converged promoter, the calculating professional, and the autonomous critic (järvekülg, accepted for publication). the position of the converged promoter means cross-sharing and publicly promoting all kinds of content – either record reviews, label news, event invitations, etc. – making use of numerous pages controlled by the critic. while this compromises the sense of critical distance and autonomy of a critic, it also provides greater visibility of one’s converged identities combined into a digital personality. adopting the position of the autonomous critic, however, means avoiding social media use other than for personal concerns and holding on to the decreasing musical authority acquired through legacy media, resulting in low visibility. the position of the calculating professional refers to the increasingly hesitant professional identities of music critics regarding negotiations between public and private, personal and professional. among the participants primarily identified as music entrepreneurs, two sets of promotional approaches were distinguished: brand-centered and community-oriented (järvekülg and wikström, 2021). as brand-centered entrepreneurs are characterized by a strong distinction between one’s personal and professional sphere, they are only engaging with facebook through the main brands organized as facebook pages directly associated with their business. the community-oriented approaches, however, are characterized by a network of promotional nodes – taste-specific groups, numerous pages, personal profile – that can be converged and used for synchronized promotion to cultivate and mobilize niche audiences. the latter approaches are the basis of what i call promotional gatekeeping, as it enables to build cultural authority and prestige among particular genre cultures. altogether, i argue that the autonomy and independence once associated with the authority of music critics and journalists have died out in the context of facebook and highly fragmented music cultures. music criticism and music promotion have become almost indistinguishable, as some niche music entrepreneurs have acquired expert authority as promotional gatekeepers and music critics tend to turn into converged promoters. both trends illustrate the decreasing distance between music criticism and music promotion. this paper is based on two research articles (järvekülg, accepted for publication; järvekülg and wikström, 2021) that are part of a phd dissertation titled ‘facebook as a digital music platform: communicative reorganization of estonian music cultures’. references charmaz, k. (2006). constructing grounded theory: a practical guide through qualitative analysis. london: sage. conner, t. and jones, s. (2014). art to commerce: the trajectory of popular music criticism. iaspm@journal, 4(2), 7–23. hesmondhalgh, d., and meier, l. (2015). popular music, independence and the concept of the alternative in contemporary capitalism. in: bennett, j. and strange, n. (eds) media independence: working with freedom or working for free? new york: routledge, pp. 94–116. hirsch, p. (1972). processing fads and fashions: an organization-set analysis of cultural industry systems. american journal of sociology, 77(4), 639–659. järvekülg, m., and wikström, p. (2021). the emergence of promotional gatekeeping and converged local music professionals on social media. convergence. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565211032376 järvekülg, m. (accepted for publication). the converged promoter, the calculating professional, and the autonomous critic – the presentation of musical authority on social media. popular communication. kristensen, n., haastrup, h., and holdgaard, n. (2018). cultural critique: renegotiating cultural authority in digital media culture. mediekultur, 34(65), 3–9. mcleese, d. (2010). straddling the cultural chasm: the great divide between music criticism and popular consumption. popular music and society, 33(4), 433–447. meier l (2019). popular music, streaming, and promotional media: enduring and emerging industrial logics. in: deuze, m. and prenger, m. (eds) making media: production, practices, and professions. amsterdam: amsterdam university press, pp. 321–334. verboord, m. and janssen, s. (2015). arts journalism and its packaging in france, germany, the netherlands and the united states, 1955–2005. journalism practice, 9(6), 829–852. nonuse aoir2020-submission-spir.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): kappeler, k., festic, n. & latzer, m. (2020, october). who remains offline and why? the evolution of individual factors influencing internet non-use from 2011 to 2019 in a highly digitized society. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. who remains offline and why? the evolution of individual factors influencing internet non-use from 2011 to 2019 in a highly digitised society author #1 kiran kappeler author #1 university of zurich author #2 noemi festic author #2 university of zurich author #2 michael latzer author #2 university of zurich introduction obtaining real-time traffic information, applying for jobs, buying things or being an informed citizen increasingly requires internet use. offline alternatives are often inferior, more expensive or non-existent. altogether, internet access and use yield many advantages in everyday life in digitised societies and internet non-users are excluded from possibilities for instance in economical, educational and health realms (dimaggio et al., 2004; van dijk, 2013). therefore, factors that predict internet non-use, and their evolution over time are worth examining. this is especially relevant with regard to whether internet non-use is chosen freely (e.g., media resistance; see syvertsen, 2017) or resides in structural social inequalities (see robinson et al., 2015). digital divide research has addressed these structural differences between internet users and nonusers. theoretical foundations digital divides have been hypothesized to evolve in two different directions over time (van dijk, 2005, 2013): with increasing internet penetration, socioeconomic differences in access to and use of the internet could either undergo normalisation—where existing differences are expected to fade—or stratification, in which case differences in internet adoption and use between socioeconomic groups would remain or be amplified and existing social inequalities would be reproduced instead of alleviated (dimaggio et al., 2004; robinson et al., 2015). thus far, it remains empirically unclear which of the two scenarios has materialized. relevance in societies where internet adoption is almost universal, the disadvantages of not being online are likely to increase and become even more detrimental to life chances. the growing importance of the internet for additional areas of everyday life renders potential digital divides more severe (van dijk, 2005). with increasing shares of the population using the internet, those people who cannot profit from its benefits become a potentially disadvantaged minority. hence, from a public-policy perspective, internet non-use in highly digitised societies should be addressed. for the choice of appropriate public policies to bridge digital divides, empirical assessment of factors influencing internet non-use in highly digitised societies is needed. existing empirical research previous studies indicated that differences in socioeconomic background influence patterns of internet use and non-use (reisdorf & groselj, 2017). whether the development of internet adoption between different societal groups today reflects normalisation or stratification remains unclear since there is only little empirical research on the recent evolution of digital divides. helsper and reisdorf (2017), who conducted a comparative study representative of the swedish and british population on the evolution of digital exclusion from 2005 to 2013, argued that an increasingly vulnerable “digital underclass” is emerging. still, empirical research on the recent evolution of digital divides in highly connected societies is insufficient. in order to understand how digital divides have evolved and will further evolve in the future, more longitudinal studies are needed. in particular, the choice of appropriate public policies to bridge digital divides requires more longitudinal assessments. research questions this article contributes to closing this gap by addressing the following research questions: who remains a non-user in a highly connected society and why? how have factors that affect internet non-use evolved since 2011? we investigate whether and how sociodemographic variables explain the probability of individual internet non-use and discusses how such digital divides have evolved in switzerland from 2011 to 2019. self-reported reasons for non-use are investigated over time and promotional factors for internet adoption among current non-users are derived. method this study analysed data from biannually repeated cross-sectional representative surveys of the swiss population aged 14 years and over from 2011 to 2019 (n = 5’581). data was collected through computer-assisted telephone interviews. multiple binary logistic regressions tested the association of being a non-user with different sociodemographic variables over time. in addition, descriptive statistics were computed to complement the findings with self-reported reasons for non-use and non-users’ intention to use the internet. results our results reveal that in switzerland—a country with one of the highest internet penetrations worldwide—8% of the population or about 600,000 people remain internet non-users in 2019. from 2011 to 2019, higher educational and income levels were consistently negatively associated with the probability of being a non-user. thus, the lower-educated and economically less affluent were more likely to be non-users. age had a positive effect on the probability of being a non-user. the effect of age on the likelihood of not using the internet has grown since 2011, resulting in a widening age gap between users and non-users (see figure 1). figure 1. probability of being an internet non-user. n2011 = 1,104; n2013 = 1,114; n2015 = 1,121; n2017 = 1,120; n2019 = 1,120. exp(b) stands for odds ratios. only significant effects (p<.01) are depicted. gender did not affect individual internet non-use. with regard to gender, normalisation tendencies have therefore been found. in contrast, regarding educational and income level, and age, stratification was observed. thus, already disadvantaged groups were more likely to be non-users in the examined period in switzerland. the most common self-reported reasons for non-use were a lack of perceived usefulness of the internet, followed by feeling too old and having insufficient skills to use it. interestingly, proxy internet use, i.e., asking someone to do something online, significantly correlated with an increased intention to use the internet. thus, an increased interest in the internet as well as indirect exposure to it can be identified as key enabling factors for internet use. conclusion this study’s representative, long-term results on the evolution of individual predictors of internet non-use may form the basis for developing targeted, evidence-based policy interventions that promote internet use among specific societal groups. first of all, barriers to internet use related to educational and income level need to be addressed by policies aiming at mitigating the risk of digital exclusion. furthermore, enhancing the perceived usefulness of the internet among non-users and promoting internet skills are promising starting points for policy interventions. finally, our results highlight the 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 2011 2013 2015 2017 2019 ex p (b ) year age education income importance of indirect exposure to the internet for an increased willingness to use it. increasing the possibilities for proxy internet use may thus be another policy focus. references dimaggio, p., hargittai, e., celeste, c., & shafer, s. (2004). from unequal access to differentiated use. in k. neckerman (eds.), social inequality (p. 355–400). russell sage foundation. helsper, e. j., & reisdorf, b. c. (2017). the emergence of a “digital underclass” in great britain and sweden: changing reasons for digital exclusion. new media & society, 19(8), 1253–1270. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816634676 reisdorf, b., & groselj, d. (2017). internet (non-)use types and motivational access: implications for digital inequalities research. new media & society, 19(8), 1157–1176. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815621539 robinson, l., cotten, s. r., ono, h., quan-haase, a., mesch, g., chen, w., schulz, j., hale, t. m., & stern, m. j. (2015). digital inequalities and why they matter. information, communication & society, 18(5), 569–582. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2015.1012532 syvertsen, t. (2017). media resistance—protest, dislike, abstention. palgrave macmillan. van dijk, j. a. g. m. (2005). the deepening divide: inequality in the information society. sage publications. van dijk, j. a. g. m. (2013). a theory of the digital divide. in m. ragnedda & g. w. muschert (eds.), the digital divide: the internet and social inequality in international perspective (p. 29–51). routledge. selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016 lutz, c., & hoffmann, c. p. (2016, october 5-8). the dark side of online participation: exploring non and negative participation. paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the dark side of online participation: exploring nonand negative participation christoph lutz department of communication and culture, nordic centre for internet & society, bi norwegian business school-oslo institute of communication and media studies, university of leipzig christian pieter hoffmann institute of communication and media studies, university of leipzig introduction social media facilitate the publication and sharing of content by lay audiences and have been described as participatory media (correa, 2010; hargittai & walejko, 2008; schradie, 2011). increasingly, research is differentiating forms of “online participation” in social domains as diverse as business, politics, culture or education (lutz et al., 2014). at the same time, research into the social stratification of internet use (“digital divide”) has triggered a lively debate on causes for non-participatory internet uses (hargittai, 2010; hargittai & hinnant, 2008; van deursen & van dijk, 2010). authors disagree on the importance of socio-economic characteristics as a cause of non-participatory internet uses (blank & reisdorf, 2012; correa, 2010; hoffmann et al., 2015; schradie, 2011). the participation divide literature tends to apply normatively affirmative frames to online participation: online participation, thereby, is held to contribute to the success and prosperity both of individuals and communities (lutz et al., 2014; jenkins et al., 2006). despite some critical voices (e.g, fuchs, 2014, chapter 2) challenging such affirmative views, the current discourse on online participation tends to neglect the negative aspects or “dark side” of online participation. recently, casemajor and colleagues (2015) have argued that both the forms and valence of online non-participation require closer scrutiny. non-participation, thereby, may signify either an active or a passive stance and user intention. active forms of nonparticipation include acts of boycotts and obfuscation, such as the use of anonymization techniques (cf., coleman, 2014). such non-participation based on user agency can be considered beneficial, while, by contrast, passive non-participation occurs when individuals do not participate for a lack of skills, interest, or time. similarly, online participation can be associated with significant individualand sociallevel disadvantages. in the case of passive participation, users “are participated” against their knowledge or will, for example by means of surveillance. accordingly, online participation can occur despite a lack of agency. finally, individuals may choose to participate online for causes generally deemed detrimental to either themselves or the larger community (e.g., engagement in anorexia support forums, radical political groups, etc.). in such cases, online non-participation might be considered preferable to participation. to explore the differentiation between beneficial and detrimental forms of online (non-) participation, we conducted a qualitative study based on focus groups with a diverse selection of german internet users. methods the study combines data from focus groups and online communities, conducted in fall of 2014 with 96 participants. twelve focus groups were carried out in september 2014 in frankfurt and berlin with eight participants per group. the focus groups were based on a milieu typology of german internet users derived from the “sinus-milieus®” (divsi, 2012; and otte, 2004 for an overview of the sinus approach). the milieu typology represents the german internet populace. basing the group composition on this typology thereby should ensure a broad representation of a diverse set of internet users. for more specific information on the methods, please consult lutz (2016). findings the analysis revealed a differentiated terminology across user groups. on the one hand, the distinction of online participation from non-participation differed among users, with some considering a mere internet connection as a form of participation. many, instead, focused on the publication and sharing of content and some stressed the purpose of and social interaction enabled by different internet uses. given these distinctions, users were quick to differentiate passive from active participation: „if i just sign up for a service, because i want to read something, then i am a completely passive participant. but if i sign up and write something myself, then i’m active.” “to participate, you have to blog, you have to help others in a forum, you have to collect donations, so be really active online. that’s what i consider participation.” furthermore, users distinguish voluntary from involuntary forms of online participation. “as an active facebook user, i am regularly drawn into participation anew by receiving messages (…), by receiving advertisements. i can try to turn that off, but i will be participated nonetheless.” another distinction emerging from the focus group discussions differentiated positive/constructive from negative/destructive forms of online participation. “there are a lot of trolls – people who enjoy provoking others. as soon as they get some reaction, they will fill the forum with spam, which will have nothing to do with the initial topic of the chat.” „participation can lead to recruitment. iraq, syria, etc. – how many germans are now fighting for is? those people have been recruited somehow.” when focusing on the causes of non-participation, we find a variety of important influences, including resource availability (above all, time constraints), motivation (such as lack of interest), awareness (or lack thereof), insecurity or concerns (regarding both online privacy and security but also fear of confrontation or cyber mobbing). “all these processes for registering. (…) i thought it was a great initiative, but the online registration and the account details, laziness and lack of time…” “i am not engaged online because i haven’t found the right cause for me yet.” “if i participate online, i reveal a lot about myself, whether i want to or not. (…) but there are so many connections online and all our data are whirring about, it’s very disconcerting.” we also find indications of more active forms of non-participation, for example when online campaigns are considered ineffective or even counterproductive. in these instances, users can be motivated not to participate despite principal awareness, interest and opportunity to do so. “just because i change my profile picture have i done anything yet? that really doesn’t help anyone.” to summarize, this paper explores challenges the affirmative framing of online participation by differentiating the notion of participation versus non-participation and by exploring questionable or outright detrimental forms of online participation. the following table presents a fine-grained typology of online (non-)participation. type t social valence passive nonparticipation active nonparticipation passive participation active participation positive lack of necessity or advantage abstention as agency low involvement constructive engagement informed and intentional constructive engagement negative exclusion silencing, selfcensoring involuntary engagement informed and intentional destructive engagement references blank, g. & reisdorf, b. c. (2012). the participatory web. information, communication & society, 15(5), 537-554. casemajor, n., couture, s., delfin, m., goerzen, m., & delfanti, a. (2015). nonparticipation in digital media. media, culture & society, online first. doi: 10.1177/0163443715584098 coleman, g. (2014). hacker, hoaxer, whistleblower, spy. new york: verso books. correa, t. (2010). the participation divide among “online experts”. journal of computermediated communication, 16(1), 71–92. divsi (2012). milieu-studie zu vertrauen und sicherheit im internet. https://www.divsi.de/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/divsimilieustudie_gesamtfassung.pdf fuchs, c. (2014). social media – a critical introduction. london: sage. hargittai, e. & hinnant, a. (2008). digital inequality. communication research, 35(5), 602-621. hargittai, e., & walejko, g. (2008). the participation divide. information, communication & society, 11(2), 239–256. hoffmann, c. p., lutz, c., & meckel, m. (2015). content creation on the internet: a social cognitive perspective on the participation divide. information, communication & society, 18(6), 696-716. https://www.divsi.de/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/divsi-milieustudie_gesamtfassung.pdf https://www.divsi.de/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/divsi-milieustudie_gesamtfassung.pdf jenkins, h. (2006). (2006). confronting the challenges of participatory culture? macarthur foundation report. http://www.macfound.org/media/article_pdfs/jenkins_white_paper.pdf lutz, c. (2016). a social milieu approach to the online participation divides in germany. social media+ society, 2(1), 2056305115626749 lutz, c., hoffmann, c. p., & meckel, m. (2014). beyond just politics: a systematic literature review of online participation. first monday, 19(7). otte, g. (2004). sozialstrukturanalysen mit lebensstilen. wiesbaden: vs. prensky, m. (2001). digital natives, digital immigrants: part 1. on the horizon, 9(5), 1–6. schradie, j. (2011). the digital production gap. poetics, 39(2), 145–168. van deursen, a., & van dijk, j. (2010). internet skills and the digital divide. new media & society, 13(6), 893–911. http://www.macfound.org/media/article_pdfs/jenkins_white_paper.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): glover-rijkse, r., stone, m., fletcher, m., eapen, g. (2020, october). mediating precarity through mobile apps. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. mediating precarity through mobile apps ragan glover-rijkse north carolina state university melissa stone north carolina state university megan fletcher north carolina state university gayas eapen north carolina state university panel rationale precarity is a loaded term, but one that often connotes insecurity, risks, and threats to life itself. according to mullenbach (2013), “precarity” operates as “shorthand for those of us documenting the multiple forms of nightmarish dispossession and injury that our age entails” (p. 298). precarity, therefore, does not refer to any one experience, but rather a “rubric that brings together women, queers, transgender people, the poor, and the stateless” under a common life experience (butler, 2009, p. xiii). increasingly, we have witnessed an uptick in populations uniting under this common experience through the use of internet-connected mobile applications. these apps allow precarious populations to connect with others in real-time, to ascertain information about current risks, and to find a community in nearby spaces. in short, they allow these populations to mediate their precarity. yet, as internet studies has taught us, online spaces rarely if ever offer seamless and friction-free encounters, even in spaces carved out specifically for marginalized populations (gray, 2012; shaw, 2014). in this panel, we take up this perspective to problematize the recent use of mobile apps for mediating experiences of precarity. while we acknowledge that these apps offer opportunities to form networks of resistance, these apps also pose substantial risks to their users and their livelihood. to begin to articulate these risks, the presentations in this panel consider case studies of these apps, targeted at three different experiences of precarity. first, we consider the precarity that arises as different identities move through urban spaces, encountering unknown others who might pose a threat. these apps, framed as “safety-oriented mobility” apps, allow users to track and report location-specific instances of harassment and violence. we consider how these apps are situated as an intervention to precarious urban mobilities, allowing users to avoid dangerous spaces; however, we also complicate this claim to suggest that these apps can reinforce harmful homogeneity in spaces, enable surveillance of marginalized populations, and provide a false sense of security to users. moving beyond urban spaces, we recognize that more often than not, acts of harassment and violence occur between people who already know one another in the private space of the home. as such, in this next presentation, we examine apps that have responded to intimate partner violence. we discuss the possibilities for these apps to help women connect with a network, track instances of violence, and exit abusive relationships. nevertheless, abusers can also weaponize these apps to enact forms of surveillance and control. we argue that ultimately these mobile apps do very little to protect their users from harm and, instead, provide a shortterm distraction from underlying issues. in a final move, we shift from apps that help users to avoid (harmful) people in the physical world to consider mobile apps that help users to connect with a nearby network of people with a similar identity. however, these nearby networks are not free from the risks of the physical world. in this presentation, we look specifically to lbgtq+ apps aimed at finding romantic partners or coordinating sexual encounters through location sharing. while these apps purport to mediate the precarity of performing sexual identity in public places, recent upticks in data breaches and leaks increasingly pose a risk of unwanted exposure to the lbgtq+ individuals who use these apps. as such, we argue for these apps to make their mediation and associated risks more evident to users. collectively, the presentations in this panel demonstrate how mobile apps may amplify, rather than mollify, experiences of precarity. by way of conclusion, we offer a collective statement which argues for systemic intervention addressing the inequalities within society but, until that time comes, we argue for measures that secure these mobile apps (and the data contained therein) and protect their users. such an intervention is critical in our current conjuncture, as we recognize the inextricable intertwinement of our physically and digitally networked lives. references butler, j. (2009). performativity, precarity and sexual politics. aibr. revista de antropología iberoamericana, 04(03), i–xiii. https://doi.org/10.11156/aibr.040303e gray, k. l. (2012). intersecting oppressions and online communities: examining the experiences of women of color in xbox live. information, communication & society, 15(3), 411-428. muehlebach, a. (2013), on precariousness and the ethical imagination: the year 2012 in sociocultural anthropology. american anthropologist, 115: 297-311. doi:10.1111/aman.12011 shaw, a. (2014). the internet is full of jerks, because the world is full of jerks: what feminist theory teaches us about the internet.” communication and critical/cultural studies, 11(3), pp. 273–277. panel abstracts mobile safety apps: a materialist feminist orientation to precarious mobilities ragan glover-rijkse north carolina state university melissa stone north carolina state university in recent years, a number of safety-oriented mobile apps have allowed users to report location-specific instances of public harassment and violence. these apps encourage the development of “networks of resistance” against such acts (hart & michael, 2015); and they engage storytelling as means to “exercise agency, shape identity, and motivate action” (dimond, dye, larose, & bruckman, 2013, p. 477). importantly, though, many of these apps also offer digital cartographies, reflecting spatial narratives of harassment and violence. these digital cartographies enable the tech-savvy and mobile phone equipped user to move through urban spaces, reading the urban landscape for safe paths and writing the urban landscape with their experiences of mobility. while practices of “reading and writing space” are often associated with playful, creative, and experimental encounters with urban space (de souza e silva & frith, 2012), this presentation contends that some users engage these practices as a necessity for selfand communitypreservation. while it may be tempting to position mobile apps as yet another platform through which particular communities interact, coordinate activity, and/or share resources, doing so would elide the particular affordance that mobile apps offer for forming an always-on, networked co-presence with a community of users. from this perspective, mobile devices become an interface for contending with precarious mobilities in urban spaces and generating a sense of safety through numbers. this presentation therefore examines several of these safety-oriented mobile apps (e.g. hollaback!, islamophobia, prejudice tracker, safety net) to consider how concerns for self-preservation might shape mobilities in urban spaces. for instance, the mobile app safety net allows sex workers to anonymously report instances of sexual violence via the app and to immediately broadcast a warning notification to other sex workers within the area, detailing the incident and where it occurred. similarly, the mobile app islamaphobia allows users to report locations and descriptions of islamophobia and to traverse other users’ reports. the app operates under the tagline “if you don’t report it, it never happened” and has an accompanying explanation which indicates that changes in public policy will only occur by producing a record of islamophic incidents. together, these apps serve two functions for users: to protect and be protected. put differently, safety-oriented mobile apps situate users within a community, instilling in these users an ethical imperative to preserve and protect that community. moreover, these apps also offer users the ability to interact with digitally crowdsourced information to inform their own safety-oriented mobilities. to arrive at such analysis, this presentation draws from critical mobilities studies and feminist new materialist approaches to understand the complex relations that produce mobilities. a critical mobilities perspective offers a useful approach to examining how the interplay between the technical and social field converge to construct mobility/immobility as well as the experience of it. it also attends to aspects of identity, power relations, and inequality that shape mobilities. complementing critical mobilities, a feminist new materialist approach offers insight into multiple agentic relations that cohere to configure spaces/places—importantly, though, a feminist new materialist approach understands space/place as ontologically unstable. safety-oriented mobility apps, therefore, respond to this instability, while simultaneously becoming constituted within these relations. this approach is informed by mcalister and ewalt (2018) who suggest that these two approaches “prompt radical reimaginations of place-based politics and spatial agencies by encouraging attention to animate matter, natural-cultural assemblages, and new forms of safety and precarity that follow from the differential distribution of movement” (p. 339). this presentation therefore avoids suggesting that mediated mobilities are necessarily agentic. instead, it considers the power relations that emerge through ongoing negotiations of identity, space/place, (im)mobility, and networked digital devices. to include matters of power and safety, this presentation “fine-tunes [its] accounts of the politics of mobility” (cresswell, 2010, p. 17) and treats socially constructed identities as a “question that inflects power relations throughout all contexts” (shaw, 2014, p. 273). this presentation argues that while safety-oriented mobile apps offer marginalized populations the chance to avoid potentially problematic places by navigating to/through safe urban spaces, these technologies should be met with a degree of skepticism, which acknowledges their potential for creating harmful homogeneity and continuing hegemonic surveillance. indeed, some anecdotes suggest that these apps have been used to harmfully target and track the apps’ intended users. thus, despite the intention for these apps to produce safety-oriented mobilities, they may, in fact, pose new risks. moreover, these apps may provide a false sense of safety, as “networked connectivity” gets conflated with “safety.” for example, in the past year, a college student in the southeastern united states was murdered by an uber driver, while her boyfriend tracked her location on his phone, aware that something was wrong, but powerless to do anything about the situation. as such, these apps draw attention to the limitations of networked co-presence for producing meaningful intervention. by analyzing the affordances and limitations of safety-oriented mobile apps, the definition of safety and how it is achieved becomes refigured. this presentation complicates the belief that carrying a mobile device and sharing location-information with a network necessarily produces safety. rather, safety becomes bound up in what it means to move through destabilized spaces —it implies attending to flux as relations constantly change and negotiating precarity as a mode of being. safety-oriented mobile apps attune users to this state of flux, while simultaneously becoming imbricated in it. references cresswell, t. (2016). towards a politics of mobility. in routes, roads and landscapes (pp. 181-196). routledge press. de souza e silva, a., & frith, j. (2014). re-narrating the city through the presentation of location.in j. farman (ed.), the mobile story: narrative practices with locative technologies (pp. 34–49). new york, ny: routledge. dimond, j. p., dye, m., larose, d., & bruckman, a. s. (2013). hollaback!: the role of storytelling online in a social movement organization. proceedings of the 2013 conference on computer supported cooperative work cscw ’13, 477. https://doi.org/10.1145/2441776.2441831 hart, l., & mitchell, c. (n.d.). from spaces of sexual violence to sites of networked resistance: re-imagining mobile and social media technologies. perspectives in education, 17. mcalister, j. f., & ewalt, j. p. (2018). new materialities and precarious mobilities: reinventing studies of space and place. women’s studies in communication, 41(4), 339–348. https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2018.1551680 shaw, a. (2014). the internet is full of jerks, because the world is full of jerks: what feminist theory teaches us about the internet.” communication and critical/cultural studies, 11(3), pp. 273–277. protection in the palm of your hand? the precarity of personal safety apps for women megan fletcher north carolina state university “text me when you get home.” this commonly used parting phrase encapsulates the social understanding that a woman’s safety is at risk when she is alone. most of the work that goes into policing and lessening that risk falls on women’s ability to adhere to socially constructed rules: walk in groups, do not travel alone at night, stick to well-lit areas and highly trafficked roads or paths. more recently, these tropes have taken a digital turn. mobile applications concerned with personal safety, with a primary focus on the protection and safety of women are on the rise (hart & mitchell, 2015). surveillance based applications are among the most common which include popular mobile applications like companion and bsafe which have been downloaded over 1 million times. now, there are a variety of mobile applications aimed towards helping victims of intimate partner violence (ipv). these applications include tools to evaluate the safety of relationships (onelove my plan, imatter), send text messages to trusted contacts in dangerous situations (early rescue, aspire news app, circle of 6), and document instances of abuse (aspire news app, bright sky). this presentation situates itself within scholarly discourse regarding violence, gender, and communication networks. it engages the circle of 6 as a locative mobile social network (de souza e silva & frith, 2012) concerned with soliciting a web of safety via social connections (evans & feder, 2016; hayes, 2013) and in doing so illuminates the precarity of personal safety apps for women. “protection in the palm of your hand” speaks to a recent shift towards using digital technology as a resource for victims to report and exit abusive relationships. this presentation interrogates the conceptualization of the circle of 6 mobile application and its functions, focusing primarily on its relevance to intimate partner violence. the national coalition against domestic violence (ncadv) claims that intimate partner violence can affect anyone, however it is most often perpetrated by men against women, which makes intimate partner violence a gendered issue. according to sharma (2017) women’s agency in entering and exiting space is historically disenfranchised. this becomes even more problematic when considering the inherent power imbalance that characterizes intimate partner violence. intimate partner violence is characterized by surveillance practices; thus resources for victims of abuse have historically been discreet in an effort to avoid attention from abusers, which if recognized could further threaten their safety (woodlock, 2017; evans & feder, 2016; hayes, 2013). mason and magnet (2012) examine the ways in which technological surveillance has been weaponized against women in abusive relationships; however, they also note how that same technology is now being recognized as a means of resistance and protection for women against abuse. the circle of 6 mobile application relies extensively on the pre-existing social networks of victims and access to mobile technology in order to facilitate networked support through reporting and intervention, which could ultimately allow for the victim to exit the abusive relationship. however, previous research regarding intimate partner violence and communication networks suggest a variety of difficulties victims face when trying to establish and maintain such networks (mason & magnet, 2012; goodboy & bolkan, 2011). additionally, resources and network-making power can be sabotaged by abusers, leaving victims unable to generate or summon a network of support. the circle of 6 app attempts to provide victims with a sense of protection regarding abuse and assault. however, it ultimately overlooks the historical and contextual forces within abusive relationships. abusive relationships are often marked by control over women’s bodies, social networks, and mobility. while the circle of 6 application is framed as a resource for victims of intimate partner violence, further analysis complicates whether it is capable of serving as a method of resistance, ultimately empowering victims' access to exit for optimal function “tech 4 good”, the circle of 6 development team, suggests picking reliable friends who are likely to respond to an impromptu text. this suggestion proves especially problematic when considering who the mobile application’s target audience is. research suggests that women in abusive relationships have a difficult time maintaining social connections and use anti-social strategies as a way to protect and sustain the abusive relationship (goodboy & bolkan, 2011). the app’s developers emphasize choosing contacts who understand the responsibilities of being a part of the “circle,” and suggest that users choose contacts who live within close proximity and are able to travel to the specified location (tech 4 good, 2015). according to mcalister and ewalt (2018) mobility studies considers how “human bodies, digital information, capital, and discourses—moving at different speeds and with different degrees of freedom— generate varying safeties and precarities within a broader set of sociospatial relations” (p. 342). variables are subject to change at any moment, yet personal safety apps prime women to see themselves as being in control of their safety (gill, 2008). the circle of 6 and other personal safety apps are partially paradoxical. the development and continued existence of personal safety apps acknowledges the very real crisis that sexual assault, rape and intimate partner violence pose for women– yet the solutions they offer perpetuate problematic and unsubstantial responses to violence against women and ignore the means of mobility and immobility that characterize and shape communicative practices within intimate partner violence (mcalister & ewalt, 2018). this presentation hopes to illuminate these issues in an effort to catalyze systemic interventions that recognize these complexities. references de souza e silva, a. & frith, j. (2012). mobile interfaces in public spaces: locational privacy, control, and urban sociability. routledge. evans, m. a., & feder, g. s. (2016). help‐seeking amongst women survivors of domestic violence: a qualitative study of pathways towards formal and informal support. health expectations, 19(1), 62-73. 10.1111/hex.12330 gill, r. (2008). culture and subjectivity in neoliberal and postfeminist times. subjectivity, 25(1), 432-445. goodboy, a. k., & bolkan, s. (2011). attachment and the use of negative relational maintenance behaviors in romantic relationships. communication research reports, 28(4), 327–336. doi:10.1080/08824096.2011.616244 hart, l., & mitchell, c. (2015). from spaces of sexual violence to sites of networked resistance: re-imagining mobile and social media technologies. perspectives in education, 33(4), 135-150. hayes, b. e. (2013). women’s resistance strategies in abusive relationships. sage open, 3(3), 215824401350115. 10.1177/2158244013501154 mason, c. & magnet, s. (2012). surveillance studies and violence against women. surveillance & society, 10(2), 105. mcalister, j. f., & ewalt, j. p. (2018). new materialities and precarious mobilities: reinventing studies of space and place. women’s studies in communication, 41(4), 339–348. https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2018.1551680 sharma, s. (2017). exit and the extensions of man. transmediale online journal, april. tech 4 good (2015). circle of 6. retrieved february 27, 2020, from circle of 6 website: https://www.circleof6app.com:443/ woodlock, d. (2017). the abuse of technology in domestic violence and stalking. violence against women, 23(5), 584-602. 10.1177/1077801216646277 breaches/leaks in ‘queer’ apps: location data, placemaking, and spatial reconfiguration gayas eapen north carolina state university reports of data breaches, leaks and security risks in mobile applications – especially dating applications – have become common in data security portals. for instance, in august 2019 zdnet.com reported that on four dating applications, users’ personal information was easily accessible. these apps included grindr (lbgtq+ dating app), 3fun (a dating app for arranging threesomes) as well as romeo and recon (apps targeted at gay men). the main emphasis of this report was the vulnerability of location data, which could be made available using computational processes, such as triangulation and trilateration, and plotted onto maps to analyze patterns of use. this presentation examines these data leaks and breaches to understand how a user’s location is closely tied to placemaking practices— contingent on a place’s social relations and the embodiment of people within them. aware that not all people have equitable access to participate in place/space(s), this presentation explores the control exerted by ‘places’ in disciplining non-normative sexualities. it also considers user practices, like location spoofing, which seek to mitigate this control. in particular, this presentation analyzes the data breaches in “queer” dating apps, 3fun and grindr. to offer this analysis, this presentation offers a close reading of reports of these data breaches. close reading reveals how these apps function in the public domain and offers insights into how users change their everyday behaviour when they encounter these applications’ vulnerabilities based on such reporting. it draws from the understanding that queer apps proliferate, leak, and insinuate themselves in the everyday lives of people (shah, 2012). yet it additionally recognizes that the internet’s infrastructures, constituted through the homophobic, capitalist state, are in constant opposition to queer, indeterminate and ambivalent experiences (cockayne & richardson, 2019). as such, this indeterminacy and ambivalence get mirrored in digital mediations and are identified by the fear of being made visible, outed and ousted, and perceived as dysfunctional. anna mccarthy (2001) emphasises the everydayness of places in discussing modern mobile subjects. in extending mccarthy's work, this presentation focuses on sites where media objects are located to contextualize the embodied use of dating applications. furthermore, this presentation attends to how power and control operate in spatial and relational terms. through a close reading of breaches and leak reports, this presentation complicates the idea that location says something about identity (de souza e silva & frith, 2012) as these apps conflate multiple identities and distort location as the place of use. for instance, in one 2015 data leak, the pastor of a baptist church in new orleans was revealed to be using a dating service for extra-marital affairs. the disciplining practices of the church, along with the identity of the user as a church official, are tied together along with that of a queer subject. similarly, in a 2019 breach of the 3fun app, the existence of users in the us supreme court and the white house generated immense surprise because of the dissonance between the act and the associations of the place. however, the reports analyzed for this presentation suspect that some of these users were spoofing their locations to be present in these places. location spoofing— a practice of morphing or falsifying one’s location in dating applications— has complicated the questions of ‘proximity’ or “site specificity” of action. spoofing has become a way for users to protect themselves from the vulnerabilities of large-scale data collection and subsequent exposure. leaks and breaches give a window into understanding the extent of data collection on these apps and how certain users attempt to mitigate sensemaking processes of these data. subversive practices such as spoofing attempt to resist data-driven urban spatial reconstitution, where a spatial sorting of bodies is made possible through the use of vast personal data and algorithmic processes. in this context, i read spoofing as an escape from the tyranny of historically heteronormative place(s) and systems. the existing work on location-based apps has already focused on the hybridization of the physical and the virtual (miles, 2017) as well as the co-constituting and producing of bodies and spaces using mobile technologies (farman, 2012). nash and murray (2019) similarly discuss placemaking practices — that draw on the mobilities paradigm — to contextualize unequal participation of subjects based on power dynamics in social relations as well places where these subjects are (non-)operational. further, shamas (2020) uses the idea of data-bodies, instead of datasets, to “draw explicit connections to the bodies in which we navigate the world.” this presentation expands on these ideas, using the cases of leaks and breaches in queer apps to understand how location data can also be potentially employed in spatial sorting/reconfiguring of bodies. while perhaps contingent on the ideology of the people developing and employing apps, algorithmic spatial reconfiguration has already been observed in neighbourhood segregation based on race and income (safransky, 2019). there is no guarantee that we will not see such discriminatory practices perpetuated through apps. this fear was particularly prominent when the data of hiv+ people were leaked from grindr in 2019. by analyzing the leaks and breaches in queer dating apps, this presentation demonstrates how the operations of black-boxed technological processes (apps in this case) can be made visible and analyzed, especially bringing together the ‘technical’ (location) and cultural-historical (place). this reflects a shift from looking at technological mediation of sexuality as simply disruptive or emancipatory, but instead trying to take such mediations as necessary and given. at the same time, this presentation offers a critical lens to account for the implications of surveillance and control, which can further disenfranchise queer identities and their access to space/places. references farman, j. (2012). mobile interface theory: embodied space and locative media. new york: routledge. shah, n. (2016). queer mobiles and mobile queers: intersections, vectors, and movements in india. in hjorth, l. and khoo, o. (eds.), routledge handbook of new media in asia (275-284). abingdon: routledge. mccarthy, a. (2001). ambient television: visual culture and public space. durham: duke university press nash, c.j. & gorman-murray. (2019). queer mobilities and new spatial media. in the geographies of sexuality. singapore: palgrave macmillan. cockayne, d. g and richardson, l. (2019). the queer times of internet infrastructure and digital systems. in nash, c.j. & murray, a. g. (eds.), the geographies of queer sexualities, 11-28. singapore: palgrave macmillan. miles, s. (2017). sex in the digital city: location-based dating apps and queer urban life. gender, place & culture, 24(11), 1595-1610. doi: 10.1080/0966369x.2017.1340874 safransky, s. (2019). geographies of algorithmic violence: redlining the smart city. international journal of urban and regional research. retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12833 shamas, n. (2020, january 23). the many lives of our sexy data bodies. deepdives.in. retreived from https://deepdives.in/the-many-lives-of-our-sexy-data-bodies656a27fdb1a7 de souza e silva, a. & frith, j. (2012). mobile interfaces in public spaces: locational privacy, control, and urban sociability. routledge. microsoft word locatelli-social media logic and health communication between independence and constraints-social media logic.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): locatelli, e., lovari, a. (2021, october). social media logic and health communication between independence and constraints: evidence from italy during the covid-19 pandemic. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. social media logic and health communication between independence and constraints: evidence from italy during the covid-19 pandemic elisabetta locatelli università cattolica del sacro cuore, italy alessandro lovari università di cagliari, italy theoretical framework during the latest years, public health organizations have faced the pressures of digitization adopting new means of communication, especially social media, to timely deliver information and constantly relate with their publics (shi et al., 2016), entering the phase defined as “medicine 2.0” and “health 2.0” (eysenbach, 2008; van de belt et al., 2010). the covid-19 pandemic impacted on this ongoing process characterized also by the necessity to capillary spread reliable information about the virus and the measures for preventing its diffusion (lovari, 2020). in this perspective, social media can represent an opportunity for public health organizations, but also a risk, due to their algorithmic logics and limits of access that can reiterate disparities and inequalities (van dijck & poell, 2013; gillespie, 2010) as pointed out also by critical digital health studies (lupton, 2018). in this paper an original approach was implemented, hybridizing health communication and social media studies. this approach is fruitful because it offers the possibility to understand both the evolution of public health communication and the role of social media platforms, an area partially investigated by the scientific literature, critically arguing about the pervasive role of digital and social media in the field of health communication, magnified during the covid-19 pandemic. italy was the first western country affected by the covid-19 pandemic and the initial outbreaks were discovered in lombardy (north of italy). by the end of february 2020, the country entered in an emergency with local and national lockdowns, limited access to hospitals in some areas due to the heavy presence of covid-19 patients, and a cacophony of voices stemming from an informative crisis that have characterized italy by the last decade (lovari et al., 2020). this paper presents the results of a study that investigated how a sample of 13 local health authorities (lhas), located in the areas of lombardy mostly impacted by covid19, faced the pandemic through the communication on their official facebook pages during the early weeks of the emergency (january-march 2020). methodology after having identified the sample of the 13 lhas, researchers retrieved facebook posts from official pages for the period january-march 2020, using fanpage karma. the dataset, exported in an excel 2020 file, was manually cleaned from duplicated entries, thus composing a final dataset of 1674 facebook messages. a qualitative coding of the posts was carried out, following a coding scheme developed according to the theoretical framework adopted. among the variables considered there were: the quantitative dimension of the posting, connected to the logics of programmability and popularity (van dijck & poell, 2013), including the number of posts, users’ total interactions and the engagement rate (cazorla milla et al., 2020); the content of the posts, according to previous categorization of social media health communication (cioni & lovari, 2014). main results the study showed the interdependence between lhas and social media communication during the early phase of the covid-19 pandemic and that the logics of programmability and popularity (van dijck & poell, 2013) were particularly stressed. data highlighted in fact that the number of posts has increased during the period of analysis (january 300 posts; february 490 posts; march 884 posts) and that lhas flexibly adapted the editorial plans according to the situation (66.01%, n=1105 posts covid-19 related, 33.99%, n=569 of the posts not covid-19 related). peaks in the number of posts corresponded with the pivotal moments of the pandemic (the discovery of the “patient one” and the regional and national lockdown). although it could be expected, it was not taken for granted that social media communication would become pivotal during the early phase of the emergency. on the one side this can be interpreted as an opportunity for lhas to communicate with stakeholders and laypeople, when other means of communication (like face-to-face meetings) were not accessible. on the other side, social media platforms shaped health communication, pushing lhas to adapt their institutional languages to the styles of social media communication. the analysis showed indeed a diffuse use of hashtags (46.12%, n=772) and of visual contents within the messages (89.72%, n=1502). about the logic of popularity, data highlighted also an increase of the total page likes and of the engagement rate (er) of the posts (average er for covid-19 related posts 0.27%, for other posts 0.07%), showing the relevance of contents for citizens. this is highlighted especially by the high number of shares, that contributed to increase the visibility of posts according to the algorithmic logics of the facebook newsfeed (facebook, n.d.). lhas become trustful sources for citizens, sharing also epidemiological data and daily press conferences about the evolution of the pandemic (6,24%, n=69). for doing this they show also a high degree of connectivity because one third of the posts shared national or regional campaigns (31.18%, n=522). a key factor, under this point of view, is the low presence of posts dedicated to fake news (2.53%, n=28), even if they had a high engagement rate (0.52%). this result pinpoints that the topic of fake news at that stage of the pandemic was more relevant for citizens, that hugely interacted with them, than for lhas. several messages (32.04%, n=354) dealt with the theme of citizens’ empowerment in order to diffuse correct behaviours for preventing the spreading of the virus, having a lower engagement rate (0.12%). this can be interpreted as a result of the flattening effect of their number but also a signal of a different perception of the relevance of the topics for lhas and users, but it is worthy of further research, in order to understand the dynamics of the platformization of healthcare communication and the role of platforms in the processes of content distribution. the act of engaging with the contents can be interpreted also as the ability of posts to put themes in the users’ agenda. in sum, lhas’ facebook pages become communicative hubs, acting as complementors within the ecology of platformization (van dijck, poell & de waal, 2018) bypassing the intermediation of news media in delivering information. from a public institution point of view, the platformization of healthcare communication can be problematic, since social media don’t reach all the targets and also contents diffusion is subject to algorithmic logics. moreover, lhas should resist to these logics, pursuing their public role and defining autonomously their content agenda (lovari & locatelli, in press). this study contributes to the knowledge of the field, showing the relevance of the topic and the fruitfulness of employing an interdisciplinary theoretical framework. references cazorla milla, a., mataruna-dos-santos, l.j., & muñoz helú, h. (2020). content strategy and fan engagement in social media. annals of applied sport science, 8(3), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.29252/aassjournal.905. cioni, e., & lovari, a. (2014). social media for health communication: implementation issues and challenges for italian public health authorities. in m. househ, e. borycki, a. kushniruk (eds.), social media and mobile technologies for healthcare (pp. 237-263), hershey (us): igi global. eysenbach, g. (2008). medicine 2.0: social networking, collaboration, participation, apomediation, and openness. journal of medical internet research, 10(3):e22, 1-9. facebook (n.d.), news feed, https://www.facebook.com/formedia/solutions/news-feed, [retrieved 04/14/2021]. gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of “platforms”. new media and society, 12(3), 347–364. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342738. guidry, j.p.d., jin, y., orr, c.a., messner, m., & meganck, s. (2017). ‘ebola on instagram and twitter’. public relations review, 43(3), 477–486. locatelli, e, lovari, a. (in press), ‘platformization of healthcare communication. insights from the early stage of the covid-19 pandemic in italy’. catalan journal of communication and cultural studies. lovari, a. (2020). ‘spreading (dis)trust. covid-19 misinformation and government intervention in italy’. media and communication. 8(2), 458–461. doi: 10.17645/mac.v8i2.3219. lupton (2018). digital health. critical and cross-disciplinary perspectives, london: routledge. shi j., poorisat t., & salmon c.t. (2016), ‘the use of social networking sites (sns) in health communication campaigns: review and recommendations’, health communication, 33(1), 49-56. van de belt t.h., engelen l.j., berben s.a., & schoonhoven l. (2010), ‘definition of health 2.0 and medicine 2.0: a systematic review’, journal of medical internet research, 12(2), e18. van dijck, j., & poell, t. (2013). ‘understanding social media logic’. media and communication, 1(1), 2–14. https://doi.org/10.12924/mac2013.01010002. van dijck, josé, thomas, poell and martijn, de waal (2018), the platform society: public values in a connective world, new york: oxford university press. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): boccia artieri, g., brilli, s., zurovac, e. (2019, october 2-5). boundaries of trust and transgression: studying the circulation of obscene contents within italian private group chats. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. boundaries of trust and transgression: studying the circulation of obscene contents within italian private group chats giovanni boccia artieri università degli studi di urbino, italy stefano brilli università degli studi di urbino, italy elisabetta zurovac università degli studi di urbino, italy introduction the mainstreaming of obscene and offensive contents in non-public networks is often cited as one of the hallmarks of the “dark side of the web.” however, since this phenomenon is observable mostly at an interactional level, thus leaving no durable or accessible aggregate data, the research on this topic is still lacking. our study provides an analysis of users’ meaning-making and boundary maintenance activities regarding violent/pornographic contents in group chats on telegram, that combines participant observation and in-depth interviews with active participants of such groups. socio-technological background: groups chats and the mundane circulation of the obscene the cambridge analytica scandal shed light on a dangerous mass surveillance context and the revelations about facebook’s plans to use whatsapp as a tool to track user data, lead developers to provide im applications with greater security. end-to-end encryption has been adopted in several ims (i.e. whatsapp), while some others have had ‘security’ as the main selling point from quite a while (i.e. telegram). closed and private groups answered to the need of having spaces in which to communicate and to connect many-to-many (facebook 2010) within a less visible environment avoiding the “context collapse” (marwick and boyd 2011), while private group chats became an everyday experience among peers, family members or other social networks made by trusted ties. the existence of this kind of ‘safe spaces,’ in which users’ privacy is not menaced, has renewed the debate on the virtues and dangers of enclosed non-public digital environments. on the one hand, some studies show how the practice of joining secret groups or group chats with strangers can happen because of different reasons, such as crisis events (malka et al. 2015) or activism (hensby 2017). on the other hand, the role of such platforms in facilitating users coordination in illegal or harmful activities has also been raised (prucha 2016). swart, peters, and broersma (2018) referring to messaging apps and facebook groups as “dark social media,” emphasize the specificity of the articulation between public and private that these spaces provide, and their role in shaping the meaning-making processes that happen there, for example in the daily circulation of news. so far, however, the styles and contents of the more mundane aspects of communication that moves through messaging apps have received scarce attention, also due to the technical difficulties in applying quantitative and data-oriented approaches to study of such environments (garimella & tyson 2018) and no research has yet tackled this phenomenon outside the cybercrime framework (halder 2015). our paper attempts to examine instant messaging apps as cultural platforms where the popular culture circuit unfolds, with its inherent excessive, carnivalesque and often disruptive features (fiske 1989; riley 2010). to this extent, it is necessary to take into account: 1) the multiplicity of uses and motivations that draw users to consume and share shock imagery (bartsch et al. 2016; alvarez 2017), 2) the current normalization of an ambivalent, transgressive and nihilistic ethos fostered by internet subcultures and by troll culture in particular (phillips 2015; phillips & milner 2017), 3) the interactional construction of group norms and transgressions in online environments. research questions and methodology this research aims to understand the relationship between the sharing of extreme imagery in non-public spaces and the mainstreaming of transgressive, violent and extreme contents. in particular, the study addresses the problem of groups' boundaries regulation by analysing users' connected reflexivity (boccia artieri 2012) on shared posting norms. therefore, three research questions are investigated: 1) which motivations and gratifications move users participation in group chats where graphic violent and pornographic contents are shared? 2) how users define the boundaries of trust within such group chats with strangers? 3) how users define and regulate the sharing of these contents outside group chats? given the exploratory nature of this study and the technical and ethical obstacles in retrieving data from non-public group chats, this study uses a qualitative approach, that combines digital ethnography (hine 2015) and in-depth interviews. in the first phase, researchers' direct experience as social media users is employed to find a significant amount of italian-speaking non-public group chats on telegram where extreme/graphic contents, generally prohibited by social media community guidelines, are shared. facebook closed groups linked to pages dedicated to black humor contents constituted a primary source for the collection. in the second phase, we join, daily monitor and participate in ten of the most active and popular telegram groups, collecting field notes on types of contents shared and emerging controversies regarding improper sharing behaviours. in the third phase, we conduct ten in-depth interviews with active participants, regarding their experience in these chats and their rules and practices of extreme contents sharing outside the group borders. preliminary outcomes of the research in this exploratory research on the use of porn in telegram private group chats, we tried to understand how obscenity is shaped in spaces where the visibility affordances are different from that of websites and social networks sites. first, we find that, contrary to those narrations that frame telegram as a new digital wilderness or as an extension of the dark web, group chats show a high level of technical and cultural permeability with the rest of the digital sphere. contents and languages, even when hateful, misogynistic and degrading, are not very far from the levels of misogyny and homophobia one could easily find on mainstream glossy and socially responsible porn sites. telegram does not appear to be chosen just as a place of concealment. the affordances of anonymity and privateness of the platform have to be taken into account in a dialectical relation with the affordances of reciprocal reachability that are used to foster conviviality, dating and advertising opportunity. third, group rules evolve over time towards an incremental codification and synchronization with legal discourse. fourth, the pleasure in participating seems not to be driven much by contents exclusivity, but by how they are assembled and used. users don't just exchange pornographic materials but use it to create affective atmospheres, which arouse and excite, but which are also functional to perform transgression and homosociality. this form of “group casting”, where both content flow and interaction is present, can act as further normalization agent, being both de-stigmatizing but that may also lower the guard on problematic and illegal contents. in the next phases we would like to expand the research along three paths: first, we want to interview also group members, second, we would try to approach and observe secret groups, third, start to set up a comparative work whatsapp group chats. references alvarez, m. (2017). online spectatorship of death and dying: pleasure, purpose and community in bestgore.com. participations, 14(1), 2-21. bartsch a., mares m. l., scherr s., kloß a., keppeler j., & posthumus l. (2016). more than shoot-em-up and torture porn: reflective appropriation and meaning-making of violent media content. journal of communication, 66(5), 741-765. boccia artieri g. (2012). stati di connessione: pubblici, cittadini e consumatori nella (social) network society. milano: franco angeli. facebook (2010). new groups: stay closer to groups of people in your life, retrieved at: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/new-groups-stay-closer-to-groups-ofpeople-in-your-life/434700832130/ fiske j. (2010). understanding popular culture. london: routledge. garimella k., & tyson g. (2018). whatsapp, doc? a first look at whatsapp public group data. arxiv preprint arxiv:1804.01473. halder d. (2015). children of internet era: a critical analysis of vulnerability of children in the darker sides of social media and whatsapp. in conference proceedings on accompanying social networking in teacher education, loyola college of education: chennai, 17-24. hine c. (2015). ethnography for the internet: embedded, embodied and everyday. london: bloomsbury publishing. hensby a. (2017). “open networks and secret facebook groups: exploring cycle effects on activists’ social media use in the 2010/11 uk student protests”, in social movement studies, 16(4), pp. 466-478. malka v., ariel y. and avidar r. (2015). “fighting, worrying and sharing: operation ‘protective edge’ as the first whatsapp war” in media, war & conflict 8(3), pp. 329–344 marwick a. e., and boyd d. (2011). “i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience”, in new media and society 13(1), pp. 114–33. phillips, w. (2015). this is why we can't have nice things: mapping the relationship between online trolling and mainstream culture. cambridge: massachusetts. phillips, w., & milner, r. m. (2017). the ambivalent internet: mischief, oddity, and antagonism online. cambridge, uk: polity. prucha n. (2016). “is and the jihadist information highway – projecting influence and religious identity via telegram”, in perspectives on terrorism, 10(6), pp. 48-58. riley, a. (2010). impure play: sacredness, transgression, and the tragic in popular culture. lanham: lexington books. swart j., peters c., & broersma m. (2018). shedding light on the dark social: the connective role of news and journalism in social media communities. new media & society, 1461444818772063. references references should be formatted the same as the body, with a double space between entries. any standard style guide (apa, chicago, etc.) is acceptable as long as it is consistent throughout the submission. aoir2020-submission-rbh&ampej.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): brøvig-hanssen, ragnhild and jones, ellis. (2020, october). detection algorithms and their implcations for participation: the case of mashups. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. detection algorithms and their implications for participation: the case of mashups ragnhild brøvig-hanssen university of oslo ellis jones university of oslo mashup music has often been seen as an exemplar of the participatory cultural environment that many expected the internet to foster. however, many online platforms today utilise automated and algorithmically driven tools to detect and moderate unwelcome content, including that which is seen as copyright infringing. drawing on interviews and an online survey with mashup producers, we show that detection procedures have a strong negative impact on mashup producers, including on their overall motivation to create mashups. we argue that that platforms’ technological (and economic) power currently supersedes, in practice, the legal exceptions intended to permit particular copyright uses. thus, we contribute to a growing literature highlighting the consequences of the immense power held by platforms to monitor, amend and remove content, and the central role of automatic and algorithmic regulatory tools in enacting this power. mashup music is a form of remix that relies on the combining of pre-existing, recognisable recordings. since these samples are usually unauthorised, it holds an ambiguous legal status. the copying of an artwork without authorisation from its copyright holder(s) generally constitutes copyright infringement. yet, various countries’ copyright laws are softened by exceptions, including ‘fair use’ (in the us), and parody (in the eu, among others), which are intended to balance the rights of intellectual property with fundamental rights of freedom of expression. several scholars have argued that many examples of creative and transformative uses of samples in fact correspond to specific exceptions, and that corporate interests have taken advantage of legal vagueness in ways that damage culturally valuable art expressions. at the turn of the twenty-first century, when mashup emerged, the internet was seen to offer a means by which to bypass these strong copyright restrictions and circulate sample-based music outside of traditional cultural industries’ infrastructures. however, following economic and legal pressure from copyright holders and media corporations, many platforms have now implemented robust detection procedures which include the use of automated identification tools to prevent the circulation of purportedly copyrightinfringing content. upon detection, these tools offer copyright holders different options, including to ignore the use, to monetise it by running ads against it and collecting the revenue, or to block it altogether. we interviewed thirty mashup producers in 2019, with the aim of understanding the impact of these detection tools on the mashup scene. the same year, we also surveyed ninety-two mashup producers via an anonymous online form. this empirical data shows that engagements with platforms’ detection procedures are an ‘everyday’ reality for mashup producers. 96% of survey respondents had experienced the detection of copyrighted material in their mashups by platforms. 82% had experienced the removal of their mashups from platforms, and 53% of them had had accounts permanently deleted as a direct consequence of uploading mashups. although there is usually some recourse to appeal takedowns on platforms, only 40% of survey respondents with takedown experience had ever explored this option. this reticence to appeal is often due to fear that this might draw further attention to their account and therefore result in more severe consequences, such as account deletion. we explore the impacts of these experiences in the following three areas: on motivation, distribution, and creative choices. our survey clearly shows that mashup producers see platforms’ detection procedures as a hindrance to their activity. of the surveyed producers, 56% reported that platforms’ detection procedures made them less motivated, compared to just 2% who felt that such procedures made them more motivated. a key source of frustration is that what is lost after a takedown is not only the music but also the play counts and, in the case of account deletion, the follower count and access to those followers. these losses can represent a really significant, demotivating experience which can happen at any time— even mashups which have been online for years can disappear ‘overnight’. our survey results also indicate that detection procedures have a significant impact on where producers distribute their mashups (with 81% answering that such procedures impact their distribution choices either ‘somewhat’ or ‘to a great extent’). interviewees indicated soundcloud, youtube, facebook, twitter, and instagram as platforms whose detection procedures made them ‘unsafe’ for mashups. youtube was seen as particularly prone to takedowns, but its uniquely large audience meant that it was still considered worth the effort to try and upload mashups there. the market-leading music streaming platforms, spotify and apple music, were generally seen to be infeasible due to their especially strict copyright regulation. furthermore, producers often employed distribution tactics aimed at minimising their potential losses. this included the use of ‘test’ accounts, where producers will upload new material on a different account in order to see how the platforms’ algorithm reacts, thus reducing the risk of their ‘main account’ being hit with copyright strikes. another mitigating tactic is the use of alternative platforms, developed more or less specifically for mashup producers. these sites have similar features to well-known platforms and offer a much higher degree of ‘safety’ to individual mashup producers, but at the cost of a much reduced audience. detection procedures also affected mashup producers’ creative decisions, since many of the small-scale tactics used to bypass detection involve changing the content of the mashup music or video itself. the ‘masking’ techniques they use to keep their music clear of the automated detection tools include ‘pitch shifting’, speed alteration, added processing effects, or altered videos, all beyond the extent required simply to make the sampled sources fit together. yet, producers are often unwilling to compromise on this aspect within a form which relies heavily on the recognisability of the original samples. our data also shows that detection procedures impact the creative process in terms of the music that producers choose to sample in the first place; certain artists’ recordings are widely perceived as ‘off limits’ for use in mashups because of their high propensity to result in takedowns. the aesthetic restrictions imposed by detection procedures can also lead to motivational issues. the legal status of mashup music is complex, but there are certain indications that mashups are not definitively excluded from being considered legal, by virtue of copyright exceptions. so, while platforms might act to remove or alter material on the grounds of its presumed illegality, the legal status of mashups is in fact still an open question. in the meantime, the practical reality is that mashups (and the larger remix culture of which they are a part) face a threat that borders on the existential. any rapid solution to this state of affairs seems unlikely: automated detection tools are a long way from boasting the necessary flexibility to make nuanced judgements, and non-automatic tools cannot be expected to manage the scale of content involved. mashup music, and remix culture more generally, is in this regard just one place among many where the current economic and technological power of online platforms has brought significant effects to bear on cultural producers—effects which are far from what was anticipated at the dawn of web 2.0.1 1 please feel free to contact the authors for a full-version of this paper. this work is supported by the university of oslo and the research council of norway through its centres of excellence scheme (ritmo, 262762) and research project mashed (275441) led by r. brøvig-hanssen. microsoft word rodriguez-technological agnosticism and climate change-technological agnosticism and climate change.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): rodriguez, a. (2021, october). technological agnosticism and climate change: platform culture on technology forum whirlpool, presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. technological agnosticism and climate change: platform culture on technology forum whirlpool aleesha rodriguez queensland university of technology introduction this paper explores the (limited) discussion of climate change within energy debates on australian technology forum whirlpool. these discussions are characterised by technological agnosticism, which is an attitude that no technology is “better” or “worthier” than any other because “different technologies have different strengths and weaknesses” depending on the application requirement (gorton & lui, 2002, p. 556). within these energy debates, i observed whirlpool contributors depoliticise energy technologies by removing climate change as a factor when considering technology choices. i argue that the prevalence of technological agnosticism within these debates is not an example of climate change denial per se but a reflection of whirlpool’s platform culture which valorises traits of geek masculinity such as rationality and neutrality (massanari, 2017). this paper is part of a larger research project that mapped online public debates about what was, until august 2020, the world’s biggest battery (vorrath & parkinson, 2020). the inception of this big battery—now known as the hornsdale power reserve—was generated through a wager on twitter, in march 2017, when an australian softwarebillionaire asked tesla’s ceo elon musk via a tweet if tesla could build a 100megawatt battery in 100 days in south australia to solve an ongoing power crisis. musk set the wager when he claimed that tesla will get the system built in 100 days or it would be free (musk, 2017). in this research, i employed digital methods (roger et al., 2015) to empirically detect, visualise, and analyse online public debates on two social media platforms: twitter—the platform of the big battery’s inception—and whirlpool, an australian technology forum where contributors engage in longer-term debates about australia’s energy transition. this research explores how publics on whirlpool are “discursively and practically taking part in the low-carbon energy transition” (ryghaug et al., 2018, p. 298) and considers how the platform culture shapes these debates. methods whirlpool (https://whirlpool.net.au/) is an online forum that is typically used to crowdsource solutions to various problems. it was established in 1998 as a broadband internet community resource “devoted to keeping the public informed about the state of internet access in australia” (whirlpool, 2021). today, whirlpool hosts over 3.7 million discussion threads that centre predominately on technology concerns but also lifestyle topics. the breadth of thread topics illustrates how whirlpool has normalised as a general community knowledge resource. yet, at present, very little research has been conducted on whirlpool and current studies have focused on the platform as a site to examine crowdsourcing information (podkalicka et al., 2019). thus, leaving a clear research gap to consider whirlpool’s platform culture. the data collected and explored in this paper comes from four public whirlpool threads. using keywords identified during an initial exploratory phase, i queried thread titles in whirlpool and identified four thread titles that were most appropriate for a close analysis based on a criteria of relating to the wager on twitter or south australia’s power crisis and having a reply count over 100. using the google chrome extension data miner, i scraped all reply texts (n = 3,101) within the four threads including any urls, as well as metadata such as username, user id, date and time posted. i then completed a close reading of all replies and conducted a thematic analysis by starting with broad open codes and refined these codes through an exploratory and iterative coding process (charmaz, 2006). findings when it came to debating different energy technologies and solutions, i found whirlpool contributors use the phases “technology agnostic”, “energy agnostic”, and “technology neutral” to signal technological agnosticism. overall, when technological agnosticism was expressed within these debates, i observed it intersecting with issues concerning the viability, reliability, affordability, and efficiency of technology and pushing against concerns regarding climate change. in terms of viability, i observed whirlpool contributors emphasise that any proposed technology needs to be feasibly deployed to address the current situation. for example, one contributor expressed “why can't we be energy agnostic and realise consumers will buy solar + [sic] batteries when its [sic] viable.” moreover, arguments by contributors such as keeping fossil fuel generation “until we can actually replace them with something useful”, illustrates that a technology’s viability is dependent on how quickly it can be deployed. in respect to a technology’s reliability and affordability, i often observed these issues expressed together. for example, one contributor declared that “i'm energy agnostic, i want the cheapest power that's reliable.” while within a different debate about which technology would be best to transition the grid to 100% renewable, a contributor asserted “having a reliable affordable power grid is an important national priority” and that the technology choice did not matter so long as this priority was met. lastly, with respect to efficiency, i observed this concern employed particularly to neutralise technology choices from the goal of addressing climate change through renewable energy adoption. for example, one contributor posted: “i must confess, my ideology is efficiency. i don't care if it is renewable or not but that it is efficient.” this operationalisation of technological agnosticism creates tension in addressing climate change as it attempts to depoliticise technology choice. discussion and conclusion the above findings provide insight into how whirlpool contributors employ technological agnosticism within energy debates. in these debates, climate change is framed as a political position and something that needs to be removed as a factor in technology choice. i argue that the operationalisation of technological agnosticism within these whirlpool debates is not an example of climate change denial, but rather of whirlpool's platform culture, which promotes geek masculinity. geek masculinity “revolves around the acquisition, sharing, and distribution” of knowledge and “a valorisation of masculinity masquerading as a peculiar form of ‘rationality’” (massanari, 2017, p. 332-333). by rationalising technology choice through technological agnosticism, whirlpool contributors attempt to absolve themselves from the effects of their technology choice on climate change. as one contributor defended in a reply: “a lot of people will accuse me of being a coal lover but really i'm just energy agnostic.” like reddit, whirlpool’s platform features—which includes pseudonyms and rating systems—propagates this platform culture. this raises critical questions for future research to explore how particular platform cultures shape energy debates and ultimately, attitudes and action towards climate change. references charmaz, k. (2006). constructing grounded theory: a practical guide through qualitative analysis. sage publications ltd. devine-wright, p., batel, s., aas, o., sovacool, b., labelle carnegie, m., & ruud, a. (2017). a conceptual framework for understanding the social acceptance of energy infrastructure: insights from energy storage. energy policy, 107, 27-31. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2017.04.020 gorton, i., & liu, a. (2002). software component quality assessment in practice. proceedings of the 24th international conference on software engineering icse ’02. https://doi.org/10.1145/581339.581408 massanari, a. (2017). #gamergate and the fappening: how reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. new media & society, 19(3), 329-346. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815608807 podkalicka, a., winfree, t., wright, a., & mcgregor, j. (2019). sharing advice online to foster sustainable homes. in p. newton, d. prasad, a. sproul, & s. white (eds.), decarbonising the built environment: charting the transition (pp. 469–488). palgrave macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7940-6_25 rogers, r., sánchez-querubín, n., & kil, a. (2015). issue mapping for an ageing europe. amsterdam university press. ryghaug, m., skjølsvold, t. m., & heidenreich, s. (2018). creating energy citizenship through material participation. social studies of science, 48(2), 283-303. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312718770286 vorrath, s., & parkinson, g. (2020, august 21). australia’s tesla big battery is no longer biggest battery in the world. reneweconomy. https://reneweconomy.com.au/australias-tesla-big-battery-is-no-longer-biggestbattery-in-the-world-30125/ whirlpool (2021). whirlpool knowledge base. whirlpool. https://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/ selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): zhao, x., chen, x., yang, y.j., wang, w.y. (2019, october 2-5). panel: online trust in the context of global migration: mobility, sociality, and the production of chinese diasrpoic subjectivity in australia. panel presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. panel: online trust in the context of global migration: mobility, sociality, and the production of chinese diasrpoic subjectivity in australia xinyu zhao deakin university xu chen queensland university of technology yanan jana yang independent researcher wilfred yang wang monash university summary digital media has now well-integrated into the journey of migration. new communication and media technologies have shaped migrants’ sense of self and belonging, reconfigured their experience of geo-mobility, and enabled a new mode of sociality and cultural imaginary. chinese migrants in australia embody these qualities not only chinese is one of the largest ethnic communities in australia, but the recent waves of immigration from china coincided with the rise of the chinese-language digital platforms and china-based technological enterprises. unlike their predecessors who had limited choice of chinese language content, the media consumption and mode of communication of today’s chinese migrants have become more abundant, flexible, and personalised. in light of the conference theme, trust in the system, this panel brings together three papers that explore the (trans)formation of chinese diasporic subjectivity through the intellectual lens of online dis/trust. as gidden (2010) argues, trust is a shared social reality. such a sense of collectively is being ‘stretched’ across national borders and cultural boundaries. while recent interests in online trust focus on the institutional (flew, 2019) and interpersonal trust (papacharissi, 2012) within a given geo-cultural context, i.e. the (lack of) western liberal democracy, fewer explore the dis/trust and the associated concepts of authenticity and credibility against a transnational and crossborder environment. by transnationality, we refer to the increased level of mobility of the material goods, financial capitals and social networks of contemporary migrants. in other words, they live a life that is constantly ‘transiting’ between national, social and cultural borders rather than having to choose a static sense of belonging. the three papers are then, organised to explore the transnational characters of chinese migrants’ lives in australia, from financial and economic survival to dating and socialisation, and the re-exploration of selfhood and belonging at later life. the papers draw on different research methods range from ethnographic interviews and participant observation, to the walkthrough method and interface studies, and to the researcher embedded approach, to form critical inquiries about the production of trust in a digital era from the perspective of transnational migrations. the panel’s discussions begin with the study of the daigou practice (personal shopper) between australia and china, which involve two perspectives. on the one hand, the rise of daigou relates to the lack of trust in mainstream social institutions in china. chinese overseas students have taken up the responsibilities to provide material supplies such as baby formulas, vitamin supplements and other material goods back to china because australian products are deemed to be more trustworthy, authentic and hence, ‘safer’. the trust between the purchaser and her/his customers requires ongoing engagements and configurations via wechat, the primary platform that host and facilitates the transaction of goods and services of daigou between china and australia. as the formation of a transnational daigou network relies on the interpersonal trusts between the purchaser and buyers who reside at different places at the time of transactions, the interpersonal trusts between individuals also guide chinese migrants’ experience with dating and intimate relations building. the second paper examines the use of popular dating apps, tinder, and the chinese dating app, tantan, in australia. although the two platforms share similar digital infrastructures, the cultural implications embodied within these two apps and the mode of use differ significantly. while the sense of authenticity and trust on tinder resembles a consumeristic logic of free choice, the sense of authenticity on tantan is based on the chinese notion of ‘guanxi’ (social networks), which emphasis on the building and accumulation of social capitals and interpersonal harmony. moreover, complexities of this issue have been raised in the context of cross-cultural use. australia-based chinese dating app users, according to the second paper, are more likely to perceive dis/trust of tinder and tantan based on their perceptions of ‘the local’, instead of authenticity mechanisms constructed by these two apps. trust is not only a principal concern to the younger digital media users but online trust also facilitates elderly chinese migrants (ecms) to reflect and revisit their social networks across china and australia. going against the popular perception that older migrants are less capable with new technologies due to lack of english and digital literacies, the third paper shows that digital media platforms are well integrated into ecms’s retirement lives in australia. however, instead of actively looking for new connections ecms tend to focus on the online management of their pre-existing social networks, which were established in china and australia. ecms are particularly fascinated by the privacy setting on instant messenger apps not because they concern about their personal data being exploited by large corporations, but they like to better manipulate the distribution of their online content to different sets of social networks within and beyond australia. in examining the different stages of life and the plurality of chinese migrants in australia, the three papers in this panel collectively, has the potential to contribute to the broader conversation in online trusts in a global, polymedia era. reference: flew, t. (2019). digital communication, the crisis of trust, and the post-global. communication research and practice, 5(1), 4-22. giddens, a. (2010). modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age. cambridge: polity press. papacharissi, z. (2012). without you, i'm nothing: performances of the self on twitter. page header logo international journal of communication, 6, 1989-2006. paper 1: practising daigou on social media: building trust and negotiating privacy in transnational entrepreneurship xinyu zhao deakin university introduction in this paper, i explore the strategies involved in chinese international students’ use of social media for daigou. daigou, literally translated as purchasing on behalf of, refers to both a form of transnational trading activity that is characterized by selling and shipping foreign-made commodities directly to consumers in china and the people or enterprises that carry out these activities. engaging in this transnational micro-entrepreneurship requires chinese international students to both mobilize their established networks and build new networks on social media. consequently, commitments to this activity has complicated their online relationships which require new ways of managing them. in particular, i focus on the significant role of trust throughout the daigou business, from motivating my participants to take on this entrepreneurial activity to ensuring the success of the business. while extant scholarship on migrants’ transnational entrepreneurship has revealed that recent developments of information and communication technologies (icts) have fostered intense cross-border business exchanges that earlier transnational entrepreneurs could not sustain or engage in (chen & wellman, 2009; portes et al., 2002), less attention is given to the ways in which the use of these technologies for work purposes have become part of migrants’ everyday lives. the emergence and popularisation of social media have greatly supported the co-presence of multiple types of online relationships in the same social space (marwick & boyd, 2011), resulting in an increasingly blurred boundary between personal and professional lives. in this context, this paper seeks to understand how chinese international students negotiate the diversity of their online networks. methodology this paper is part of a broader doctoral study that examines chinese international students’ everyday social media practices in australia. research data was collected during a twelve-month ethnographic fieldwork in which i conducted observation of chinese international students’ navigation of physical and digital spaces in situ, in melbourne, australia, and immersive observation of their online posts and interactions (on multiple platforms including wechat, facebook, instagram, etc.) which span a range of local and transnational locations. in so doing, i “treat internet media as continuous with and embedded in other social spaces” (miller & slater, 2000, p. 5) to reject a dichotomous or mutually exclusive relationship between the so-called “online” and “offline” environments. to complement these observations, i also carried out indepth, semi-structured interviews with 28 chinese international students in order to understand how and why they use social media in particular manners from their own perspectives. through my prolonged immersion in the various social spaces where chinese international students frequent, i managed to gain in-depth knowledge of their everyday digital experiences and practices. findings this paper generates three key findings that revolve around the concepts of trust and privacy. firstly, a central factor that has given rise to daigou business is chinese customers’ lack of trust in the products available in china. despite the increasing popularity of ecommerce platforms such as taobao, which have provided a wide range of overseas commodities from a variety of countries, many consumers in china tend to not trust these platforms because they believe there are counterfeits on these platforms. indeed, media coverage of china’s rising e-commerce market over the past decade has critically responded to this phenomenon by pointing out the vast number of counterfeits found in online transactions. as a result, many consumers in china still prefer daigou who actually live overseas, such as chinese international students with convenient access to authentic products. secondly, consumers’ trust in overseas daigou is not a given, but something that is being constantly produced and negotiated by both chinese international students and their customers. since authenticity of the products is the major concern for chinese consumers, daigou need to prove their identity as real students who are studying overseas. this is because being international students differentiate them from the estore owners on taobao whose identities are barely known, and sometimes suspicious. however, the fact that the student-daigou have mostly never met their customers in person has made it a difficult task. as such, it requires my participants’ active and strategic online identity performances to reveal their identity as international students in australia to their customers, which remains a prominent task throughout their practices of daigou on social media. a common strategy undertaken by the student-daigou is to publicise personal lives to those who are interested in purchasing commodities from them. these information covers a wide range, including different aspects of their everyday social lives and campus life in australia. it is the “hereness” embedded in the personal information disclosed that matters in fostering trust of the clients. furthermore, instead of sharing personal lives in an explicitly instrumental manner, chinese student-daigou need to do it intricately so that the revelation of their identities becomes a natural process. in other words, the intentional act of constantly publicising personal lives in a conspicuously unintentional manner reinforces my research participants’ identity as real students, thus enhancing their credibility. while it would be unfounded to treat these student-daigou as celebrities, their practices of privacy boundary-moving resemble those of internet “microcelebrities” who often intentionally disclose many aspects of their everyday lives to create “the illusion of ‘backstage’, giving the impression of uncensored glimpses into the lives of the very famous” (marwick & boyd, 2011, p. 140). similar to the celebrities, chinese student-daigou actively foster a sense of “perceived interconnectedness” (abidin, 2015) between them and their customers. in this sense, instead of building real intimate relationships, they strive to create the mirage of being honest and candid to their clients, just like their real friends on social media. finally, while the strategy of disclosing personal information to customers is a common strategy undertaken by chinese international students, they do not post every bit and piece of their lives on social media. in this sense, practices of daigou require not only sharing personal lives, but also careful management of the materials that they choose to make visible to this specific group of people who are barely “friends” to them. for this reason, the student-daigou categorise, very often informally and unconsciously, the publicised materials into different types. only a certain type of information is appropriate to share with their customers. in this sense, despite the importance of disclosing personal information, chinese international students in this study have strived to maintain a sense of privacy. this is achieved through a variety of online strategies including separate accounts, categorisation of contacts into groups, etc. references abidin, c. (2015). communicative intimacies: influencers and perceived interconnectedness. ada: a journal of gender, new media, and technology, 8(1). chen, w. & wellman, b. (2009). net and jet: the internet use, travel and social networks of chinese canadian entrepreneurs. information, communication &society, 12(4), 525-547. marwick, a.e. & boyd, d. (2010). to see and be seen: celebrity practice on twitter. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 17(2), 139-158. miller, d. & slater, d. (2000). the internet: an ethnographic approach. oxford, uk; new york, ny: berg. portes, a., haller, w.j., & guarnizo, l.e. (2002). transnational entrepreneurs: an alternative form of immigrant economic adaptation. american sociological review, 67(2), 278-298. paper 2: a cross-cultural analysis on authenticity framing of dating apps tinder and tantan xu chen queensland university of technology as hardey (2004) argues all stages involved in online dating requires successful communication that builds on trust among users. hence, ensuring online suitor's authenticity is a central theme in online dating websites (hardey, 2004). while mobile dating applications (apps) have distinct technological features compared to dating websites, scholars have pointed out that authenticity is still a major concern to dating app users (chan, 2017; duguay, 2017), even though interpersonal trust may not be essential for those who use dating apps for casual sex (chan, 2017), and indeed, dating app companies have put much effort in establishing authenticity within mobile dating apps. previous studies have shown that importing users’ facebook information into dating app profiles is a commonly used strategy to ensure users are ‘real people’, such as tinder (duguay, 2017), and bumble (bivens & hoque, 2018). however, chinese dating app companies have to develop other ways to establish authenticity within their products, as facebook is blocked in china, and there is no counterpart of such ‘anchor’ (lutz & ranzini, 2017) could be employed by these companies in the country. in addition to such specific technological and political constraints, chinese culture also has its own characteristics with respect to the understanding of trust. for example, guanxi (relationships) is a core concept of chinese networking culture, which is a significant survival strategy in china’s social, political and organizational context (huang, 2010). in the context of digital mediated communication, guanxi continues to be important (mcdonald, 2018), and this can be translated into chinese internet culture, for instance, chinese wechat users tend to only trust their close friends’ comments on this app (lien & cao, 2014), which indicates that the app rating mechanism in apple app store may be less likely to affect chinese users compared with their western peers. as such, although chinese dating apps may share similar digital architectures with their western counterparts, strategies for framing their authenticity can be significantly different. methodology this paper contrasts tantan and tinder as a case study to investigate the authenticity establishment within mobile dating apps in a cross-cultural fashion. due to tinder’s absence in china, there was the opportunity for creating tantan, a chinese dating app that mimics tinder, and although tantan is often referred to as a chinese tinder clone in the west,1 tantan is the first and currently most popular tinder-like dating app in china with 20 million monthly active users by the end of 2017.2 similar to tinder, tantan also claims itself as an authentic social platform with ‘real’ users. however, what is different from tinder is that tantan has developed different authentication strategies for the chinese situation mentioned above. this paper draws data collected from the walkthrough method (light, burgess, & duguay, 2016) and 23 interviews with australia 1 see https://www.larrysalibra.com/how-chinese-tinder-clone-screws-you/ 2 see https://m.pedaily.cn/news/427785 based chinese dating app users to investigate tinder and tantan’s mechanisms of framing authenticity. inspired by the hybrid theoretical framework built by duguay (2017), this paper draws on chinese cultural understandings of interpersonal trust to illustrate how authenticity is constructed among dating app users, and actor-network theory (ant) (callon, 2007; latour, 1992, 2005) to disclose cultural meanings attached to non-human mediator (e.g. app features, algorithms) that contribute to framing dating apps’ authenticity. multiple walkthroughs have been conducted through critically engaging with their promotional materials, technological affordances and platform governance. in addition to duguay’s (2017) framework, i also draw interview data derived from my doctoral project that investigates how australia-based chinese users engage with tinder and tantan. this paper combines my analysis of these two platforms and my participants’ concerns about tinder and/or tanan’s authenticity framing while they were using them in australia, to comprehensively discuss the issue of authenticity on dating apps in this particular context of the australian chinese diaspora. findings the preliminary analysis reveals how the issues of trust play out among australian chinese diaporic dating users : 1) despite that the specific chinese ways of authenticity framing do have effects in helping users build authentic identities within the app, the superficiality caused by the core feature of both apps – ‘swipe logic’ (david & cambre, 2016) – paradoxically undermines trust between users; 2) socio-cultural contexts that tinder and tantan being embedded in shape their authenticity claim strategies respectively, and play a significant role in how authenticity within these apps might be perceived by users; 3) my participants’ perceptions about western/australian culture shape their perceptions of tinder and tantan cultures, and therefore shape how they perceive users’ authenticity within these two apps. bringing together perspectives from science and technology studies (sts) and cultural studies, this paper provides a lens to examine how issues of trust play out in the chinese cultural context, and thus contributes to the de-westernisation of current debates about trust by offering an empirical case from a non-western context. practically, this paper also provides insights for dating app companies on how they might improve in framing authenticity within dating apps, and especially for those who are willing to expand their marketing transnationally. references bivens, r., & hoque, a. s. (2018). programming sex, gender, and sexuality: infrastructural failures in ‘feminist’dating app bumble. canadian journal of communication, 43(3), 441–459. callon, m. (2007). some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of st brieuc bay. in k. asdal, b. brenna, & i. moser (eds.), technoscience the politics of interventions (pp. 57–78). unipub: oslo academic press. chan, l. s. (2017). who uses dating apps? exploring the relationships among trust, sensation-seeking, smartphone use, and the intent to use dating apps based on the integrative model. computers in human behavior, 72, 246–258. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.02.053 david, g., & cambre, c. (2016). screened intimacies: tinder and the swipe logic. social media and society, 2(2). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177%2f2056305116641976 duguay, s. (2017). dressing up tinderella: interrogating authenticity claims on the mobile dating app tinder. information, communication & society, 20(3), 351–367. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1168471 hardey, m. (2004). mediated relationships. information, communication & society, 7(2), 207–222. huang, y.-h. (2010). theorizing chinese communication research: a holistic framework for comparative studies. chinese journal of communication, 3(1), 95–113. latour, b. (1992). ‘“where are the missing masses? the sociology of a few mundane artifacts.”’ in w. e. bijker & j. law (eds.), shaping technology/building society: studies in sociotechnical change (pp. 225–258). london: mit press. latour, b. (2005). reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. oxford university press. lien, c. h., & cao, y. (2014). examining wechat users’ motivations, trust, attitudes, and positive word-of-mouth: evidence from china. computers in human behavior, 41, 104–111. light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2016). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 1461444816675438. lutz, c., & ranzini, g. (2017). where dating meets data: investigating social and institutional privacy concerns on tinder. social media + society, 3(1), 205630511769773. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117697735 mcdonald, t. (2018). strangership and social media: moral imaginaries of gendered strangers in rural china. american anthropologist. paper 3: building trust in a transnational aging context: older chinese migrant’s wechat use in australia yanan jana yang independent researcher wilfred yang wang monash university introduction as cecilie givskov (2017) writes, the contemporary (western, at least) world is coconstituted by the dual processes of aging and digitisation. we shall add that transnational migration is a third process that has diversified the mode and experience of aging in a digital era. at the centre of this experience lays the issue of interpersonal trust in communication, which guides one’s online practices, their sense of self and belonging. while there is no shortage of interests and studies on either migrant new media use and digital media use amongst older generations, the elderly migrant group is located inbetween at a grey area that is often overlooked. take the elderly chinese migrants (ecms) group, for example; their digital experience falls into either the ‘migrant internet’ or the ‘new media use in later life’ categories. this study, however, treats the ecms as a socially and culturally independent group, whose desire, wishes and mode of digital engagements and practices are transnational and cross-cultural. trust and interpersonal network connection the issue of trust in communication has re-emerged in recent years as a result of what flew (2019) calls the ‘crisis of institutional trust’ in the era of digital media, which focuses on the relationship between online content and digital media users’ practices and perception of the world (o’neill, 2017). since trust is fundamental to the formation of human society as it relates to the concepts of credibility and authenticity of information and communication (duguay, 2017), the constructions of trust rely on the constant exchange of symbolic practices and representations, such as profile radiation (papacharissi, 2012) and timeline posting (zhang and wang, 2019), between users. these collective practices reinforce giddens’s (2010) argument that trust is a ‘shared and sharable reality’. however, the current literature mainly focuses on the building and negotiation of a ‘week-tie’ trust network, that is the new personal relation, and network interactions between users generally began in the virtual space. for many ecms, their social networks in australia, however, generally started from ‘offline’, such as the senior association, neighbourhood, and community interest group, they are part of. wechat, the popular chinese instant messenger application (app) on the smartphone, is generally used to reinforce and sustain the newly developed networks rather than being the ‘beginning’ of a new set of relationships. this is mainly because 1. many wechat users do not display their real names and 2. personal wechat accounts are not easily searchable comparing to the account searchability on other social networks sites such as facebook, twitter and sina weibo. interpersonal trust on wechat thus, demonstrates how individual users navigate, imagine and manager their relations with the different sets of social networks in life, which is reproduced through their journey of transnational migration. dis/trust as the underlying principle of digitisation this paper explores ecms’ wechat use in australia. wechat is not only one of the most popular social media services in the chinese speaking communities but the fact that wechat registration only requires a mobile phone number rather than an online accounts (email) enables the platform to penetrate the older, non-digital native generations in china since its initial launch in 2011. according to tencent’s official report (2018), there are as many as 61million wechat users in china age between 5570 by september 2018. many of whom migrated to australia actively kept their wechat with them. the popularity of wechat among the elderly chinese lead us to the research question of this study: how ecms use wechat to navigate and construct the interpersonal trust with their social networks across australia and home place? we use the term ‘home place’ to recognise the diversity and plurality of chineseness within and beyond the mainland prc region (leong, 2016). this study uses a combined participant observation and focus groups (eight on-site focus group interviews with 32 ecms). the participant observations are the critical self-reflection made by the two authors, who had both worked as volunteers at different capacities and job functions, across the senior chinese associations in australia (brisbane and melbourne) between 2014 and 2018. in approaching our data we draw on givskov and deuze’s (2018) advice to 1. adopt a cultural approach to understand the (trans)formation of a migrant self who is at the later stage of her/his life; 2. link the experience of mediatisation with the specific historical and biographical experience of the users; 3. explore the various practices and mode of engagement with the media to explore their perception, desire, and imagination with the particular media form. our preliminary findings suggest that the concept of dis/trust underlines the various practices and decision-making relating to wechat. wechat’s moments (timeline) privacy setting, for example, affords users to extend greater discretions over their different types of networks. interestingly, many ecms complained that they were often ‘forced’ to add someone they just met (face-to-face) as they do not want to seem as ‘rude’, they rely on moment’s privacy setting to prevent their shared content to be visible to the person. such a selective practice of friend-list management illustrate ecms’s desire and ability to manage the different sets of social relations as the result of their transnational migration journey. interestingly, such a pressure to connect with ‘stranger’ is greater in australia according to some of our research participants as they concern of offending others in a new social environment will be troublesome for their lives in australia. hence, while wechat might have established the ‘technical, communicative connections’ it also allows the newly established connection to be ‘disconnected’ on an interpersonal level. likewise, in assessing the credibility and authenticity of online news and information, ecms tend to believe those content shared by their close personal networks, which often include connections from home country. it seems ecms’s sense of dis/trust of news and information is not necessarily determined by their trust of the institutions (e.g. news media) but the interpersonal trust that is reinforced through wechat. this study has the potential to contribute to the scholarly conversations about transnational migration in a social media era. it is found that social media has forged a culturally hybrid sense of self and belonging amongst the ecms by enabling them to negotiate and manage their co-existing experience of aging and migration. references duguay, s. (2016). dressing up tinderella: interrogating authenticity claims on the mobile dating app tinder. information, communication & society, 20(3), 351-367. flew, t. (2019). digital communication, the crisis of trust, and the post-global. communication research and practice, 5(1), 4-22. giddens, a. (2010). modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age. cambridge: polity press. givskov, c., & deuze, m. (2016). researching new media and social diversity in later life. new media & society, 20(1), 399-412. leong, s. (2016). sinophone, chinese, and prc internet. asiascape: digital asia, 3(3), 117-137. o'neill, o. (2017). intelligent trust in a digital world. new perspectives quarterly, 34(4), 27-31. papacharissi, z. (2012). without you, i'm nothing: performances of the self on twitter. page header logo international journal of communication, 6, 1989-2006. zhang, g. d., & wang, w. y. (2019). property talk” among chinese australians: wechat and the production of diasporic space. media international australia. forthcoming in print tencent technology. (2018, october 16). wechat's senior users reached 61million: the smart life of the seniors (weixin laonian yonghu chaguo 6100 wan laoren yeguo zhihui shenghuo. retrieved november 27, 2018, from http://tech.qq.com/a/20181016/013129.htm microsoft word bhallamudi-girls, gadgets and gatekeepers-girls, gadgets and gatekeepers.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): bhallamudi, i. (2021, october). girls, gadgets and gatekeepers: how gender and class aspirations shape adolescent access to mobile phones in mumbai, india. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. girls, gadgets and gatekeepers: how gender and class aspirations shape adolescent access to mobile phones in mumbai, india isha bhallamudi uc irvine research question, context and methods indian society, broadly speaking, views mobile phones as simultaneously a cause of risk to girls and women, and a way to reduce the risks they face; as an artefact that poses dangers but also represents safety; that offers opportunities to empower individuals and at the same time the potential to disrupt the social order of class, caste and gender and its internal hierarchies. consequently, indian families struggle to navigate the myriad possibilities represented by the mobile phone in culturally appropriate ways, in accordance with classed and gendered boundaries. their fears illuminate social norms and attitudes surrounding gender, sex, class, caste and the limits of independence and control. indian adolescents, especially girls, who are transitioning to adulthood but are caught in the confines of the patriarchal, caste-based family and its rigid social norms, employ the mobile phone as a site to break boundaries, challenge social norms and otherwise fight to increase their independence. yet, access to mobile phones is itself deeply gendered and classed in india. against this context, my study addresses the question: how do gender and class intersect within the family to shape differential access to mobile phones for adolescents in urban india? i address this question using a mixed-methods study. my fieldwork focused on 9th-grade students aged 13-15 in mumbai, india, and i looked specifically at the experiences of adolescent girls. my field sites were 8 municipal (low-income) schools and international (high-income) schools across mumbai. i conducted repeated, in-depth group interviews with 59 girls as well as paper surveys with 278 adolescents (both boys and girls). the survey data was analyzed using simple descriptive statistics, crosstabulations and chi-square tests, while the interview data was thematically coded and qualitatively analyzed. analytical approach and contributions i employ an intersectional analytical framework (velaskar 2016) to help critique and unpack the assumptions underlying prior theorizations of gender, class and technology in india, while also allowing me to go beyond binary framings that read the circumstances of one set of women as ‘free’, therefore ‘empowered’, and the other as ‘constrained’, therefore ‘bad’, and understand that all women operate under specific types of gendered constraints shaped by intersectional effects of gender and caste. as velaskar points out, it is important to go beyond using intersectionality to highlight differential experiences and oppressions, and towards critically analyzing the social and material relations around technology that create structural differences and commonalities (velaskar 2016). this is the approach adopted in this paper. another intervention made by this paper, is to contribute to literature that shows that technology use in the global south tends to be marked by innovation, creativity and a sense of collective use (wesolowski 2012; steenson and donner 2008). unfortunately, literature on global technology use largely considers mobile phones as personal and private devices operated by single users and often conflates ownership, access and use of mobile phones (steenson and donner 2008; taylor 2019; poushter 2016), despite the fact that the majority of the world’s population relies on mobile phone sharing, which is egregiously understudied, to access mobile phones (donner 2008). in light of this, i start by untangling questions around modes of access before going on to comment about the dynamics of use. findings first, at a simple descriptive level, i found that adolescents in mumbai accessed mobile phones in 3 ways: owning, borrowing from family members, and sharing or co-owning a phone with family members; and these modes of access were not mutually exclusive. lower-class adolescents accessed mobile phones mainly by borrowing them from family members, but lower-class boys were more likely to own mobile phones than girls. higher-class adolescents tended to own mobile phones, but still showed high rates of borrowing, and here boys and girls showed equal rates of ownership. this analysis already starts to show how gender and class combine to create constraining effects on access to mobile phones. at an analytical level, i found that lower-class girls’ upbringing is marked by a focus on adhering to values of classand caste-based morality, which fashion the ideals of respectable femininity. these ideals include good academic performance, home training toward future marriage (cooking and other chores as well as care work towards male members of the family) and limiting time outside the home. the mobile phone is seen as an artefact that can threaten these practices of class aspiration and emulation, and parents consequently actively limit girls’ access to them. in contrast, higher-class girls’ upbringing included a cosmopolitan and merit-based rhetoric which encouraged and taught them to cultivate independence and capability, to live up to the cosmopolitan idea of a young woman who lives life on her own terms without any gendered constraints weighing her down. the mobile phone plays a crucial role in mediating these aspirations and forms an important part of upward mobility, in helping girls learn and enact the practices of a global, cosmopolitan way of line and gain ‘exposure’. rather than interpret these differences via binaries (tradition/modernity, restrictive/empowering, lower-class/upper-class), i instead consider how classed ideals of respectable femininity create different aspirational conditions for girls belonging to each class group, and form the cultural frames of everyday life. what implications might this have for adolescent girls’ understandings and enactments of independence? looking at class-gender relations around mobile phones in the context of the family helps uncover the lines of agency, domination and power emerging out of these structures and how they shape girls’ and women’s lives. girls learn to operate within, subvert or resist these boundaries, which variously enable and circumscribe their full participation in public life. in these years leading up to adulthood, they face the task of mediating their own, independent aspirations and desires to fit within the framework of class stability, respectability and morality, taught to them by their families. mobile phones play an important role in adolescent girls’ negotiation of this precarious femininity, and mediate their first steps of navigating online and offline public spaces and attendant ideas of risk and safety, threaded within and against boundaries of the private and public, tradition and modernity. references donner, j. (2008). research approaches to mobile use in the developing world: a review of the literature. the information society, 24(3), 140-159. poushter, j. (2016). smartphone ownership and internet usage continues to climb in emerging economies. pew research center, 22, 1-44. steenson, m., & donner, j. (2009). beyond the personal and private: modes of mobile phone sharing in urban india. the reconstruction of space and time: mobile communication practices, 1, 231-250. taylor, k., & silver, l. (2019). smartphone ownership is growing rapidly around the world, but not always equally. pew research center. velaskar, p. (2016). theorising the interaction of caste, class and gender: a feminist sociological approach. contributions to indian sociology, 50(3), 389-414. wesolowski, a., eagle, n., noor, a. m., snow, r. w., & buckee, c. o. (2012). heterogeneous mobile phone ownership and usage patterns in kenya. plos one, 7(4). aoir2020 submission ppopiel.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): popiel, pawel. (2020, october). competition policy discourses and platform power. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. competition policy discourses and platform power pawel popiel university of pennsylvania digital platforms present new policy challenges, while eluding traditional media regulatory frameworks. the effort to articulate policy responses includes debates about how to regulate speech flowing across these platforms (gillespie, 2018), how to address data collection (zuboff, 2019), and how to stem the growing market concentration in several sectors (khan, 2017). among these, using competition law to promote market competition increasingly gains currency globally as the dominant policy response to platform power amassed by predominantly us companies. policy scholarship has documented the shifting dynamics of competition within digital platform markets and explored potential reforms (moore & tambini, 2018). such approaches conceptualize platform power as market dominance in several markets (e.g., social media, online search, digital advertising) with political implications. however, the politics underlying these reform debates remains unexamined. mapping this politics is an essential component of accounting for platform power and contesting it, since implementing policy solutions is not a technocratic process, but a political one. to provide an account of the politics underlying addressing platform power via competition policy, this study analyzes policy debates in six 2019-2020 u.s. congressional hearings on “online platforms and market power.” the hearings— the first investigation by the us congress into digital platforms’ business activities— examined how platforms impact the economy and democratic politics and sought to identify potential policy solutions. they drew established stakeholders, experts, and prominent representatives from the tech industry, representing a microcosm of ongoing policy discussions. the discourses that circulated during the hearings not only aimed to inform policy, but also to signal to regulators in other countries grappling with these issues and to shape public opinion. consequently, the hearings sought to influence domestic politics and to contribute to ongoing international debates about how to address platform power. methodology my primary object of analysis comprises 98 publicly available documents, including the witnesses’ testimonies, statements submitted by other stakeholders for the record, and video recordings of the hearings. these stakeholders (n=50) fall into six groups: 1) competitors and online services (e.g., basecamp, duckduckgo), 2) economists and legal scholars (tim wu, fiona scott morton), 3) progressive advocacy groups and think tanks (e.g., open markets institute), 4) conservative think tanks (e.g., american enterprise institute), 5) platform representatives, including industry lobbyists (e.g., mark zuckerberg), and 6) regulators from various governmental agencies (e.g., joe simons, chair of the federal trade commission). drawing on critical policy studies, which foreground how politics and ideology operate through policymaking (fischer, 2003), i examine how the assumptions underlying stakeholders’ policy problem definitions and intervention proposals negotiate the boundary between state and market jurisdiction over competition within platform markets. i use critical discourse analysis to illuminate the internal contradictions of these policy proposals, their blind spots, and their implications for addressing platform power, particularly with reference to stakeholders’ strategic interests and ideological stances. addressing platform power the policy debates during the congressional hearings reveal a lack of consensus not only about appropriate policy interventions, but also about the definition of platform power. competitors and online services saw platform power as a privileged gatekeeping position in two-sided markets that platforms anticompetitively exploit to their advantage. however, the benefits accrued to them by platforms’ size and reach, their dependence on platform markets, and their reticence about regulation constrained their policy proposals. progressive stakeholders approached platform power as private governance over digital markets with political dimensions, facilitated by data and economic concentration. their interventions were two-fold. first, they offered a diagnosis of competition within digital markets that revealed gaps in existing antitrust approaches and challenged claims about contestability of platform dominance over those markets. second, they outlined a robust case for state intervention: economic regulation, stronger antitrust enforcement, and data and privacy protections. while this “regulated competition” aimed to rein in platforms’ market power, several stakeholders extended the approach to non-economic concerns like the spread of disinformation and privacy concerns. thus, user data and privacy became subsumed into antitrust calculus as commodities, obscuring their social and public dimensions (napoli, 2019). nevertheless, though in the minority, certain stakeholders stressed the limits of competition in addressing platform power, emphasizing the need to safeguard public rights related to social activity in digital spaces. conservative stakeholders and digital platforms contested accounts of platform power, characterizing the digital marketplace as bustling and regulated by the disciplining forces of innovation and market competition. conservative stakeholders redefined the problem as one of state disruption of natural market mechanisms. strategically defending narrow competition law, they argued for removing regulations on internet service providers in adjacent, marginally overlapping markets to address any market distortions. thus, they contributed little to the debate about changing competition in digital markets beyond the familiar refrain of regulatory restraint. meanwhile, platforms argued that fetishizing competition not only ignored their contributions to economic growth, but also created inefficiencies in addressing a range of policy issues from moderating hate speech to national security. they promoted co-regulatory regimes that would keep their businesses largely intact, while obscuring and naturalizing their growing market dominance. the analysis of politics underlying these policy debates suggests that formulating policy interventions to tackle platform power requires addressing the neoliberal logic of both narrowed antitrust and deregulation, as well as platform-driven co-regulatory frameworks. to a degree, the maintenance of this power rests on the absence of a robust policy discourse to articulate platforms’ expanding presence in multiple spheres of socio-political and economic life. the progressive critique attempts to provide this discourse by denaturalizing existing dynamics within digital markets and forcefully reasserting the state’s role in platform governance. its reform proposals seek to introduce a “taxonomy of techno-commercial mechanisms that can adequately delineate power relationships between various actors” (van dijck et al., 2018, p. 157) amidst ongoing platformization. this discourse contests platforms’ governance regimes over digital markets and, to a degree, their role in ongoing processes of datafication (mejias & couldry, 2019). nevertheless, without expanding complementary policy discourses that fundamentally contest platform “common sense regarding digital technology and market innovation involving the unfettered commodification of individuals’ data and the individualization of responsibility for the avoidance of harms” (cammaerts & mansell, 2020, p. 145), such interventions risk naturalizing the expression of non-economic dimensions of platform power in market terms—ranging from unrestricted logics of accumulation to a more democratically managed arena of commerce. references cammaerts, b., & mansell, r. (2020). digital platform policy and regulation: toward a radical democratic turn. international journal of communication, 14(2020), 134154. fischer, f. (2003). reframing public policy: discursive politics and deliberative practices. oxford university press. gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. yale university press. khan, l. (2017). amazon's antitrust paradox. yale law journal, 126, 710-805. mejias, u. a., & couldry, n. (2019). datafication. internet policy review, 8(4), 1-10. https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.4.1428 moore, m., & tambini, d. (eds.). (2018). digital dominance: the power of google, amazon, facebook, and apple. oxford university press. napoli, p. (2019). defining data. intermedia, 47(4), 36-40. van dijck, j., poell, t., & de waal, m. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford university press. zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the frontier of power. public affairs. myles aoir anne goes rogue for abortion rights selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 ‘anne goes rogue for abortion rights!’ exploring discursive materialization across and beyond online platforms david myles université de montréal this presentation examines the social media campaign #supportislandwomen that was undertaken by reproductive rights activists in prince edward island (pei), the last canadian province to offer abortion services. the initiative gained popularity in 2016 due to both the offand online circulation of posters throughout pei landmarks depicting the green gables-like image of a young girl (“rogue anne”) wearing red braids and a bandana. these posters showcased specific hashtags that encouraged debates on various online platforms, like #heywade (referring to wade maclauchlan, prime minister of pei), #accessnow, #itstime, and #supportislandwomen. while initial debates focused on abortion, conversations swiftly changed to address the suitability of invoking anne of green gables – an important cultural and economic figure in pei – for political purposes. indeed, this strategy was instantly criticized by pro-life supporters, some claiming that “abortion activists on prince edward island have hit a new low in their activism by attempting to co-opt the world’s most beloved spunky life-loving heroine” (baklinski, 2016). our presentation is part of a larger body of studies that underline the role of social media in the configuration of new modes of political action (highfield, 2017). overall, it addresses how women and feminist movements appropriate social media to advocate for human and reproductive rights. in recent years, researchers have taken a specific interest in twitter and its role in the creation of networked publics surrounding women’s issues, what is sometimes referred to as ‘hashtag activism’ (williams, 2015) or ‘hashtag feminism’ (loza, 2014). this presentation draws from and contributes to these studies by examining more closely how hashtags are embedded in larger discursive practices. drawing from sociomaterial approaches (orlikowski, 2007) and actor-network theory (latour, 2005), we define the notion of ‘discursive practice’ as a nexus of various actors (both human/nonhuman, symbolic/material) that intervene in interaction and generate suggested citation (apa): myles,d. (2018, october 10-13 ‘anne goes rogue for abortion rights!’ exploring discursive materialization across and beyond online platforms. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. certain effects. for this presentation, we use our case study to understand how prochoice activists invoked the symbolic ‘figure’ of rogue anne to give weight to their own arguments by speaking or acting in her name. by ‘figure’, we mean any symbolic entity that is materialized through interaction and that possesses agency, or the ability to make a significant difference in interaction (cooren, 2013). as cooren (2013) argues: “on a rhetorical level, any political project should engage in creating or proposing new configurations, that is new associations and dissociations between figures and other symbolic entities”. hence, our study examined the processes through which the figure of rogue anne was made present in interaction, the role of digital (online) and physical (offline) affordances in the materialization of this figure, and the differentiated effects that these invocations generated (like countering, defining, (re)framing, publicizing, denying, etc.). for this exploratory case study, we built our dataset by performing non-participant observation on social media platforms (mainly instagram and twitter) and by conducting an online search in canadian blogs and newspapers. our dataset contains 7 newspaper articles, 9 blog entries, and 1 radio interview. it is also composed of hashtag related materials that were extracted manually from twitter (71 pictures and 310 tweets) and from instagram (34 pictures) that were converted to pdf. we later conducted organizational discourse analysis (cooren, 2015), which contends that social reality is organized and performed via discourse and through its materialization. from a pragmatic perspective, we examined how discourses perform certain things, mainly the (re)framing of: (1) bodies, as well as (2) space and time. first, our results show that invoking the figure of rogue anne allowed for pro-choice collectives to assert their authority in abortion debates by labelling the fictional character as a modern feminist icon. on the one hand, such discursive association (anne would have been for abortion) helped pro-choice collectives to gain a body, as anne became the embodiment, the incarnation of their campaign. this was observed through the use of various images depicting the body of rogue anne as being the body of all pei women (get your government off my body). this relates more generally to the politicization of female bodies which is a major issue in most abortion debates. on the other hand, if invoking the figure of rogue anne helped pro-choice collectives to give their movement an identity, it also gave anne herself (the female character, the young woman) a political and bandana-wearing body. indeed, it reframed the character as a contemporary woman with full claim over her own reproductive rights. hence, as a symbolic figure, our case study shows that anne is as much speaking through activists as they are speaking in her name, thus enacting the polyphonic nature of discourse. second, our results also show that invoking the figure of rogue anne contributed in reframing space, particularly when it was used on posters that were distributed in off and online settings. for example, the display of posters throughout pei landmarks reframed everyday public places (like the founders’ hall in charlottetown) and objects (like statues of historical male figures dressed with rogue anne’s physical attributes) as political ones, effectively bringing pei’s male-dominated historical artefacts into a present-day conversation about reproductive rights. furthermore, these posters were also used as a countdown to pei’s council vote (9 days left) which relied on temporal hashtags to help gain momentum (#itstime) and engage in a conversational mode (#heywade) that took place across platforms (twitter, instagram, etc.) and beyond (in the streets, in public spaces, in newspapers, etc.). thus, our results underline the importance of studying the intervention of symbolic figures, their effects, and the situated context of their materialization within political initiatives that incorporate and go beyond the practice of ‘hashtagging’. furthermore, and in line with previous work on counterpublics (fraser, 1990), there is a need to understand not only how emerging publics are formed, but also how dominant discourses are countered by activists through language practices. to do so, researchers should continue to document political struggles while focusing on the establishment of new relations through discourse between symbolic entities that challenge the status quo (rogue anne as a feminism icon, anne of green gables as a symbol for the protection of life, etc.) and by examining how affordances of offand online settings sustain such practices. references baklinski, p. (2016). “yuck! pei abortion advocates co-opt life-loving anne of green gables to push abortion”. life site news. online. <www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/yuck-pei-abortion-advocates-co-opt-life-lovinganne-of-green-gables-to-push>. cooren, f. (2013). manières de faire parler. interaction et ventriloquie. bord de l'eau (le). cooren, f. (2015). organizational discourse: communication and constitution. john wiley & sons. fraser, n. (1990). rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. social text, (25/26), 56-80. highfield, t. (2017). social media and everyday politics. john wiley & sons. latour, b. (2005). reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. oxford university press. loza, s. (2014). hashtag feminism,# solidarityisforwhitewomen, and the other# femfuture. ada: a journal of gender, new media, and technology, 5. orlikowski, w. j. (2007). sociomaterial practices: exploring technology at work. organization studies, 28(9), 1435-1448. williams, s. (2015). digital defense: black feminists resist violence with hashtag activism. feminist media studies, 15(2), 341-344. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): gibbs, m., carter, m. and nansen, b. (2017). those led-lit, water-kooled, multi-screen, streamline battlestations. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18 th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers (18-21 october). tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. those led-lit water-kooled multi-screen streamline battlestations martin gibbs computing and information systems, the university of melbourne marcus carter media and communication, the university of sydney bjorn nansen media and communication, the university of melbourne abstract battlestations are customized desktop computers, typically devoted to gaming. in this paper we present analysis of the all-time top 50 up-voted battlestations on the /r/battlestations subreddit. through an examination of these highly commended battlestations and the community criteria defining a “good” battlestation we provide insights into the material culture of computer customization and its significance within an internet gaming sub-culture. introduction in his 1963 essay for esquire magazine, there goes (varoom! varoom!) that kandykolored (thphhhhhh!) tangerine-flake streamline baby (rahghhh!) around the bend (brummmmmmmmmmmmmmm)…, tom wolfe (1968) argued that custom cars were, in effect, sculpture (p.83). they were the crystallization of an anti-authoritarian new youth-culture that emerged as a result of (and in tandem with) the introduction and subsequent transformation of american society underpinned by the automobile, and america’s unparalleled economic growth. like religious architecture and other encumbered art forms that materialize particular cultural values and beliefs, custom cars were monuments built to celebrate the values of this youth-culture, its “devotion to form” (p.79) and the automobiles central transformative role in the creation and liberation of the american “lower” class. in this paper we present an initial analysis of customized gaming computers, drawing on posts shared on the “/r/battlestations” reddit sub-forum. like custom cars, we suggest these battlestations can be understood as “art objects”; creative devotions to the technological materialities that enable and express contemporary gaming cultures. battlestations are, we contend, monuments built and displayed to celebrate the personal computer’s central transformative role in the creation and liberation of internet gamer cultures. this work is situated within broader studies of gaming within domestic media ecologies (e.g. carter et al. 2014; enevold 2014; giddings, 2007), which have looked at the use of technology in the domestic environment, and how its context within the home influences its use and experience. our analysis adds to the studies of physical computer configurations and layouts in domestic environments (e.g. quandt and pape, 2010) and in social lan contexts (simon, 2007) by highlighting the forms of cultural and social capital valued in these monuments to gamer culture by highlighting the hedonistic (maines, 2009) impulses displayed in their material forms, display, and maintenance. methods we downloaded and saved all materials associated with the all-time top 50 up-voted posts on the battlestations subreddit, “/r/battlestations”. we chose to examine the most up-voted battlestations because these examples by-and-large represented the most critically acclaimed battlestations within this community forum, and thus exhibit qualities characterizing a “good” battlestation, rather than the breadth of this cultural form. to analyze this material we conducted an iterative open coding of each battlestation submission. once we had collected and collated all of the themes, we analyzed the relationships amongst these codes, and then returned through each submission reidentifying themes that emerged later in the analysis. in our analysis we examined what people built and chose to display in their postings and what features commenters chose to celebrate or denigrate in order to understand the values, attitudes and tastes of this community and how they are materially enshrined. battlestations r/battlestations is the place to post and look at clear photographs of desktop battlestation setups. battlestations are ‘a desktop computer setup including the tower, monitor, mouse, keyboard, mouse pad (if applicable), audio playback and recording devices (if applicable), and even wires/cables if desired.’ (reddit) as is to be expected, computer hardware features prominently in battlestation images. up-voted battlestations are typically high performance gaming machines. they feature enormous display real estate, often involving the integration of three or more screens. most run multiple graphics cards, top-end, over-clocked cpus, and were water-cooled. while expensive, high-performance components are typically featured and celebrated, figure 1 [meta] at least fucking try people. source: http://i.imgur.com/x4opdlk.jpg figure 2, my first triple screen battlestation source: http://imgur.com/a/hiwin figure 3, i present you my watercooled wall mounted rig source: http://imgur.com/a/x75u2#0 figure 4, more deathstar than battlestationsource: http://imgur.com/a/dqshv figure 5, my battlestation room source: http://imgur.com/a/zogul cultural capital is demonstrated through customization, technical prowess, and carefully chosen monetary investments. the presentation of the interior of the battlestation is important, often through windows in the chassis, or tower, with color-coordinated led lighting, cabling, water cooling systems, and the like. cable runs are neat as well as fitting the battlestation color scheme (see figure 2). as simons (2007) has argued for “case modders” at lan parties, the interior “material guts of their computers” (p.175) are a spectacular materialization of a masculine subculture that values “the visual aesthetics of machines combined with demonstrations of functional performance.” (p.190) this displaying of interiority and technical mastery is taken to an extreme with some battlestations thatsubvert the typical form of a desktop computer and eschew the traditional computer case/tower altogether. like the custom car, these computers are turned inside out, with all components on display and presented explicitly as sculptural art objects (see figure 3). although the definition of a battlestation (above) refers to the computer itself, in emic usage, “battlestation” refers to the desk, chair and surrounding environment as well. furniture choices are central to the design aesthetic of battlestations. celebrated chairs are sleek, highly adjustable, and very, very expensive (see figure 4). the functional value (comfort) provided by the chair justifies the high cost while the functional and aesthetic value of desk is achieved economically. the room is also an important feature; with whole rooms, even whole houses or apartments, devoted to gaming (see figure 5). the “man cave” is a recurring motif (see figure 5). discussion and conclusion the material practices and culture of battlestations – devotion to form, excessive while still utilitarian – stands in stark contrast to prior studies of the personal computer in domestic environments. quandt & pape (2010) have argued that computers are typically situated in a peripheral or “sloppy” location, vis-à-vis televisions, which have often been noted for occupying a prominent shrine-like position in the home (e.g. tichi, 1992). however, this configuration is inverted when we examine battlestations. rather, than being sloppy, battlestations are valorized for being tidy. this includes careful management of cables, maintaining streamlined and artfully configured screen real estate, orderly and clean desk spaces and so forth. indeed, a recent and highly uprated meme/post to battlestations succinctly highlights the value placed on tidiness and presentation (see figure 1). similarly, the placement of the computer is important in terms of how it is displayed, situated and cared for within the domestic environment. indeed, while battlestations are shrines to gaming, they reconfigure media consumption practices in ways that no longer neatly distinguish televisions and computers. we see “television” content consumed on battlestations, while notional “television” spaces are devoted to console gaming. the battlestations rigs are hybrid configurations of technophilia and domesticity, gendered in multiple ways through assemblage, computing power, cleanliness, and familial location. while universally absent of people, the traces of use point to diverse gaming activity, from solo and locked away to centrally located and shared as in the ‘his’ and ‘hers’ rig (figure 4). importantly, battlestations are not just sites of media consumption, but expressions of a culture of creative and vernacular production. maines (2009) suggests “any technology that privileges the pleasures of production over the value and/or significance of the product can be a hedonizing technology.” (maines, 2009, p.3) pleasure is found in the process of production, often with blatant disregard for efficacy or efficiency. the content of /r/battlestations reflect the hedonistic pleasure derived from assembling and displaying these baroque computers/sculptures. like custom cars, the long hours of labor involved in constructing a battlestation serve to demonstrate technical prowess and cultural capital within a masculine subculture that finds pleasure in intimate and performative technology relations. battlestations are, we contend, monuments built and displayed to celebrate the personal computer’s central transformative role in the creation and liberation of gamer and internet cultures, finding important expression through internet forums such as the battlestations subreddit. acknowledgements this research was supported by funding from the australian research council discovery project (dp130101519). references carter, m., nansen, b. and gibbs, m. (2014). screen ecologies, multi-gaming and designing for different registers of engagement”. in proceedings of chi play ’14 (toronto, canada, 2014), new york, ny, usa: acm press, 37-46. enevold, j. (2014). digital materialities and family practices: the gendered, practical, aesthetical and technological domestication of play. transactions of the digital games research association, 1(2), 1-18. retrieved from http://todigra.org/index.php/todigra/article/view/12/18 giddings, s. (2014) gameworlds: virtual media and children’s everyday play. new york: bloomsbury. maines, r. (2009). hedonizing technologies: paths to pleasure in hobbies and leisure. baltimore, md, usa: john hopkins university press. quandt, t. and pape, t. (2010). living in the mediatope: a multimethod study on the evolution of media technologies in the domestic environment. the information society, (5), 330-354. simon, b. (2007). geek chic: machine aesthetics, digital gaming and the cultural politics of the case mod. games and culture, 2(3), 175-193. tichi, c. (1992) electronic hearth: creating an american telvision culture. oxford university press. http://todigra.org/index.php/todigra/article/view/12/18 wolfe, t. (1968). the kandy-kolored tangerine-flake streamline baby. in t. wolfe the kandykolored tangerine-flake streamline baby. london: mayflower, 63-86. this meme is what we call progress sean mcewan selected papers of #aoir2018:  the 19 ​th​ annual conference of the  association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 "this meme is what we call progress”: history-as-meme, meme-as-history on 4chan sean mcewan, university of illinois-chicago figure 1: a variation of the “distracted boyfriend” meme, which combines the titular unfaithful partner with angelus novus suggested citation (apa): mcewan, s.. (2018, october 10"this meme is what we call progress”: history-as-meme, meme-as-history on 4chan. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http:// spir.aoir.org. memes “act as the locus of memory”, says gabriella coleman of the peculiar relationship 4chan has to its own history. rather than having an on-site permanent 1 archive as such, its collective history and memory is sublated into and through the circulation and production of memes: as herwig describes, it is “the archive as the repertoire”. this paper builds upon herwig to consider how the (re)production, 2 circulation, and referencing of memes serve as embodiments of specific historical ontologies: modes of being constructed in relationship to, and through, their own past(s). not only do memes serve to “propagate and strengthen certain visions of 3 cultural memory”, but the specificities of their cultural production and dissemination on 4chan have a temporal politics, that imparts “a sense of historical origins, spiritual rootedness and re-enchantment to its hypermodernity”. the potentially infinite 4 malleability of memes, yet the restriction of what constitutes memetic worth to that which re-affirms a specific temporal and technological presence, forms a “reactionary (post)modernism”. the purpose of the paper is twofold. first i wish to add to existing 5 meme research a case for consideration of their temporal politics. secondly, i wish to link an historical ontology on 4chan and the conditions of possibility thereof to its continued capacity as a wellspring of revolutionary conservatism. in this i follow work by el-ojeili that focuses on post-fascism’s “positive, reconstructive, and utopian elements”. 6 to animate this discussion i use benjamin’s famous thesis ix from “theses on the philosophy of history”, and his reading of paul klee’s angelus novus​:​ the angel of history looking backwards, watching the wreckage of past events accumulate before it, wanting to “awaken the dead and piece together what has been smashed”. the angel 7 is blown forward by a storm, a storm called progress. and so it is with successful meme-making on 4chan: in order for memes to “succeed”, and indeed in part for them to even be recognised ​as memes​, there requires a ​transformation ​of old content. at the same time, enough needs to be kept of the original content so that this transformation can be recognised. previous work has described the deployment of memes as a means 1 coleman, “net wars over free speech, freedom, and secrecy or how to understand the hacker and lulz battle against the church of scientology.” 2 herwig, “the archive as the repertoire. mediated and embodied practice on imageboard 4chan.org.” 3 foucault, “what is enlightenment?”, 49. 4 swiatek, “constructing cultural memory: a memetic approach”, 129.; griffin, “fixing solutions: fascist temporalities as remedies for liquid modernity”, 15. 5 i combine here herf’s use of “reactionary modernism” to describe nazism’s tension between its anti-enlightenment values and adoption of technology with grossberg’s description of the postmodern sensibility in ​we gotta get out of this place ​ as a “logic of ironic nihilism”. herf, ​reactionary modernism: technology, culture and politics in weimar and the third reich ​; grossberg, ​we gotta get out of this place ​, 224. 6 el-ojeili, “reflecting on post-fascism: utopia and fear”, 3. 7 benjamin, “theses on the philosophy of history”, 257. by which digital communities police their identities and garner cultural capital. i would 8 add to this that opportunities for users to gain cultural capital are predicated upon the perceived ​availability​ of positions within the field: that memes are “distinctive signs that are understood and perceived by digital inhabitants and that are ​misunderstood or passed over by others​”. this demarcates the meme savvy (insiders) from the normie 9 (outsiders). 10 this takes place in a digital environment saturated in the ​habitus of the new​, “a set of dispositions that are invited and regenerated via a state of permanent novelty”. as 11 bourdieu says, 4chan users measure “all practices against the yardstick of their own taste, the acid test of ​modernity​”. so as the “pile of debris… grows skyward” in the 12 forms of memes exhausted of potential capitalisation, meme-savvy users are driven forward to find new value. in the process of making, (re)posting, and commenting 13 upon memes in specific digital environments, users collectively participate in both the process of writing the histories of their communities, and embodying them. constituted with the creation of a new meme that ironically re-appropriates or (re)contextualises certain features of an earlier, spent meme, there is a ​history​: it tells the tale of (their) community that ​previously​ used, but discarded, this meme, but, through application of “vernacular creativity” that ​acknowledges​, and ​moves past​, this history, a meme is (re)made into an object (once again) worthy of esteem, consideration, and dissemination. the battle that happens over correct usage of memes not only defines 14 their subculture spatially, but ​temporally, ​with memers the avant garde positioned against the johnny-come-lately normie. rather than 4chan users relying upon a stable canon of memes, 4chan “demands that users as body-subjects engage and participate”. memes, in other words, hold no worth 15 merely sitting idle but must be performed anew, blown forward. previous research has outlined some of the technical affordances of 4chan-as-website, such as its lack of persistent user identity and the “ephemeral, transitory and fleeting” content of the 8 literat and van den berg, “buy memes low, sell memes high: vernacular criticism and collective negotiations of value on reddit’s memeeconomy”; nissenbaum and shifman, “internet memes as contested cultural capital: the case of 4chan’s /b/ board”; milner, “fcj-156 hacking the social: internet memes, identity antagonism, and the logic of lulz.” 9 julien, “bourdieu, social capital and online interaction”, 366 emphasis original. 10 literat and van den berg, “buy memes low, sell memes high: vernacular criticism and collective negotiations of value on reddit’s memeeconomy”, 8-9. 11 papacharissi and streeter, “the habitus of the new.” 12 bourdieu, ​distinction ​, 224. emphasis added. 13 benjamin, “theses on the philosophy of history”, 258. 14 milner, “media lingua franca: fixity, novelty, and vernacular creativity ininternet memes”, 2. 15 herwig, “the archive as the repertoire. mediated and embodied practice on imageboard 4chan.org”, 52. boards themselves. i argue that there should also be attention paid to the materiality of 16 memetic reproduction itself in 4chan’s history, and its role in creating an “infrastructure of feeling”, part of a constellation of “technological and institutional linkages or systems… central to the organization and functioning of social and cultural life.” 17 for much of 4chan’s “golden age”, one of the primary markers of a meme’s capital on 4chan was image manipulation and recontextualisation through software such as photoshop (or many laborious hours in microsoft paint). use of stock generators, such as those found on memegenerator.net, were held in disdain, as were as content aggregators such as icanhascheezburger. to rely upon such outsider sources for memetic worth illustrated the users’ disconnect with the ethos of the board: they needed to “lurk moar”. the burden of knowledge was privatised, with users expected to keep an extensive personal archive of memes at-hand. a common topic of thread on 4chan at 18 this time was concerned with the size and girth of meme folders, with users asked to either provide a screenshot of the amount of disk space it occupies (often photoshopped to comically large sizes), or to show their best, most select image from it. taken together, the means and forms of participation on 4chan build a particular temporality, the emergent state of which demands user vigilance and active participation. whilst ostensibly accessible to all and encouraging of democratic participation, not only does the extensive racist and misogynistic content on 4chan serve as barrier to entry, but the ​forms​ of popular meme-making on 4chan take often reinforce this divide. the need for extensive personal archive as well as specific 19 technical proficiency continues to favour users with desktop computers and a surplus of free time, as well as privilege a white masculine mastery over technological forms. this is further reflected in the recent adoption of the term disparaging term “phoneposting”, referring to the perception that low-quality content is posted from users browsing 4chan on phones. ​recalling benjamin’s xiii thesis, we should critique this crude, 20 pseudo-social darwinist vision of memetic ​progress​ that is presenced on 4chan. 21 although the culture of anonymity and lack of formal content rating system has been held to create a modern-day agora, where any user may speak (through memes) and be judged solely by the quality of their content, 4chan is better known today as a space “inclusive to the disparate factions of the far-right”. i argue that this is linked to the 22 16 knuttila, “user unknown: 4chan, anonymity and contingency.” 17 coleman, “theorizing the present: digital media, pre-emergence and infra-structures of feeling”, 11. 18 manivannan, “attaining the ninth square: cybertextuality, gamification, and institutional memory on 4chan.” 19 manivannan, “tits or gtfo:the logics of misogyny on 4chan’s random /b/.” 20 “/qa/ what’s wrong with phone posting? question & answer.” 21 benjamin, “theses on the philosophy of history”, 260. 22 poole, “meme factory”; thompson, “the measure of hate on 4chan.” memetic temporal politics of “futural thrust towards a new era” alongside “a diagnosis of the world-historical situation as one of crisis and decline”. 23 with the decline of /b/ random, and subsequent rise of /pol/ politics, it is notable that the focus of content production on 4chan has largely shifted from making memes to remaking​ the world memetically. this is, in part, a reaction to a nebulously defined “endless summer”, referring to an influx of new, undisciplined users to the site and the supposed breakdown in cultural coherency that it signified. accompanying this was a commercial appropriation and codification of meme production by outsiders, such as icanhazcheeseburger and know your meme, and subsequent loss of cultural cache as the internet’s meme factory to “normie” platforms such as facebook, tumblr, and twitter. while paranoia about degradation of board quality has been a constitutive part of 4chan since its inception, the locus of control shifting from /b/ to /pol/ has changed its fetish-object from intracultural exclusivity outward to crises of white masculinity. the 24 notion of an endless summer functions as a stab-in-the-back myth​,​ with the prelapsarian inner truth and greatness of 4chan “a mythic source of eternal values for its ultra-dynamic drive to conquer the future”. theirs is a revolutionary conservatism that 25 understands “what it would 'conserve' is already lost (if indeed it ever existed, which is doubtful), and hence must be created anew”. through a watchful shepherding of its 26 historical ontology, “the change presents itself fully to realise this ‘past’ for the first time”. in the valorisation of a hobbesian meme war and perpetual “operations” against its 27 enemies, users are provided the opportunity for post-fascist palingenesis, a redemption through rebirth overcoming “decadence, betrayal, humiliation and victimhood”. the 28 previous subtext of white masculine domination is made text in their pseudo-ironic embrace of open fascism. memes can be good. but /b/ was never good; there “is not a 29 document of [its] civilization which is not at the same time a document of [its] barbarism”. 30 23 griffin, “fixing solutions: fascist temporalities as remedies for liquid modernity”, 15; osborne, ​the politics of time: modernity and avant-garde ​, 163. 24 chebrolu, “modular whiteness: 4chan’s /pol/ as habitual enjoyment of crisis.” 25 griffin, “fixing solutions: fascist temporalities as remedies for liquid modernity”, 15. 26 osborne, ​the politics of time: modernity and avant-garde ​, 164. 27 ibid., 164. 28 el-ojeili, “reflecting on post-fascism: utopia and fear”, 5. 29 see, for example, frazer and carlson, “indigenous memes and the invention of a people”; phillips and milner, “decoding memes: barthes’ punctum, feminist standpoint theory, and the political significance of #yesallwomen”; breheny, “‘by any memes necessary’: exploring the intersectional politics of feminist memes on instagram.” 30 benjamin, “theses on the philosophy of history”, 256. bibliography “/qa/ what’s wrong with phone posting? question & answer.” ​4chan ​, october 12, 2016. https://yuki.la/qa/876200. benjamin, walter. “theses on the philosophy of history.” in ​illuminations​, translated by harry zohn, 253–65. new york: schocken books, 1968. bourdieu, pierre. ​distinction​. translated by richard nice. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press, 1984. breheny, caitlin. “‘by any memes necessary’: exploring the intersectional politics of feminist memes on instagram”, master’s thesis, (uppsala university, 2017​) chebrolu, rishi. “modular whiteness: 4chan’s /pol/ as habitual enjoyment of crisis.” presented at the 16th annual cultural studies association conference, pittsburgh, june 1, 2018. coleman, gabriella. “net wars over free speech, freedom, and secrecy or how to understand the hacker and lulz battle against the church of scientology.” presented at the the next hope, new york, july 17, 2009. http://www.tagtele.com/videos/voir/62946. coleman, rebecca. “theorizing the present: digital media, pre-emergence and infra-structures of feeling.” ​cultural studies​ 32, no. 4 (december 20, 2017): 1–23. doi:10.1080/09502386.2017.1413121. el-ojeili, chamsy. “reflecting on post-fascism: utopia and fear.” ​critical sociology​, may 8, 2018, 089692051876886. doi:10.1177/0896920518768867. foucault, michel. “what is enlightenment?” in ​the foucault reader​, edited by paul rabinow, 32–51. new york: vintage, 1984. frazer, ryan, and bronwyn carlson. “indigenous memes and the invention of a people.” ​social media + society​ 3, no. 4 (october 2017): 205630511773899. doi:10.1177/2056305117738993. griffin, roger. “fixing solutions: fascist temporalities as remedies for liquid modernity.” ​journal of modern european history​ 13, no. 1 (2015): 5–23. doi:10.17104/1611-8944_2015_1_5. grossberg, lawrence. ​we gotta get out of this place ​. new york and london: routledge, 1992. herf, jeffrey. ​reactionary modernism: technology, culture and politics in weimar and the third reich​. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1984. herwig, jana. “the archive as the repertoire. mediated and embodied practice on imageboard 4chan.org.” in ​mind and matter: comparative approaches toward complexity​, edited by gunther friesinger, johannes grenzfurthner, and thomas ballhausen, 39–56. bielefeld: transcript, 2011. julien, chris. “bourdieu, social capital and online interaction.” ​sociology​ 49, no. 2 (april 2015): 356–73. doi:10.1177/0038038514535862. knuttila, lee. “user unknown: 4chan, anonymity and contingency.” ​first monday​ 16, no. 10 (september 19, 2011). doi:10.5210/fm.v16i10.3665. literat, ioana, and sarah van den berg. “buy memes low, sell memes high: vernacular criticism and collective negotiations of value on reddit’s memeeconomy.” ​information, communication & society​, august 22, 2017, 1–18. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2017.1366540. manivannan, vyshali. “attaining the ninth square: cybertextuality, gamification, and institutional memory on 4chan.” ​enculturation​, no. 14 (october 10, 2012). ———. “tits or gtfo:the logics of misogyny on 4chan’s random /b/.” ​the fibreculture journal​, no. 22 (2013): 109–32. milner, ryan m. “fcj-156 hacking the social: internet memes, identity antagonism, and the logic of lulz.” ​the fibreculture journal​, 2013. ———​. “media lingua franca: fixity, novelty, and vernacular creativity ininternet memes.” ​selected papers of internet research​ 14 (2013): 1–5. https://spir.aoir.org/index.php/spir/article/view/806/390. nissenbaum, asaf, and limor shifman. “internet memes as contested cultural capital: the case of 4chan’s /b/ board.” ​new media & society​ 19, no. 4 (april 2017): 483–501. doi:10.1177/1461444815609313. osborne, peter. ​the politics of time: modernity and avant-garde​. london: verso, 1995. papacharissi, zizi, and thomas streeter. “the habitus of the new.” ​culture digitally​, october 16, 2012. http://culturedigitally.org/2012/10/the-habitus-of-the-new/. phillips, whitney, and ryan m milner. “decoding memes: barthes’ punctum, feminist standpoint theory, and the political significance of #yesallwomen.” in entertainment values​, edited by stephen harrington, 195–211. london: palgrave macmillan uk, 2017. doi:10.1057/978-1-137-47290-8_13. poole, christopher. “meme factory.” presented at the paraflows symposium 2009, vienna, september 12, 2009. https://digiom.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/moot-on-4chan-and-why-it-works-as-a-m eme-factory/. swiatek, lukasz. “constructing cultural memory: a memetic approach.” ​international journal of media & cultural politics​ 12, no. 1 (march 1, 2016): 129–42. doi:10.1386/macp.12.1.129_1. thompson, andrew. “the measure of hate on 4chan.” ​rolling stone​, may 10, 2018. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-measure-of-hate-on-4chan-6 27922/. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): savic, m., & mccosker, a. (2017, october 18-21). musical.ly’s sleight of hand: circumventing family social media governance. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. musical.ly’s sleight of hand: circumventing family social media governance milovan savic swinburne university of technology anthony mccosker swinburne university of technology introduction young people’s engagement with networked publics, understood in boyd’s (2011) terms as an imagined community restructured by social media, often raises public anxieties about possible risky encounters online. this anxiety problematizes governance of online practices, particularly for the parents of preteen children. private spaces for young people are intrinsically mediated (lincoln 2014) and social media is deeply entrenched in youth cultural practices such as identity construction, social interaction, experimentation and autonomy seeking practices (livingstone 2014, 2008; robards 2012; campos-holland et.al. 2015). as a response to increased uncertainty, parents often resort to more restrictive governance practices such as limiting time online or the type of online spaces and platforms children can access. through the example of musical.ly, an emerging social media platform, this paper examines how preteen young people negotiate networked publics in the family context. positioned as novice users and often still under (strict) parental authority, preteens face two difficult levels of negotiation as they simultaneously manage platform affordances and parental restrictions. in this paper, we provide evidence of how children appropriate musical.ly to circumvent restrictions. in doing so, their actions can be understood through lange’s (2007, 2014) concepts of publicly private and privately public interaction; or, to put it differently, preteens ‘manipulate media’ to achieve independence and create meaningful online spaces for engagement and interaction. aim and methods the interconnection between risk and opportunity becomes central to the parent-child dynamic that develops around digital media use. with new platforms like musical.ly one of the difficulties is the flipped expertise dynamic, where young users are in many ways more proficient and knowledgeable than their parents (savic, mccosker & geldens 2016). this paper adds to research in this area by examining how networked publics are constructed, negotiated and accommodated within the family at the time of emergence and uptake of a new social media platform. our empirical data draws from a larger qualitative study of social media use within 15 melbourne families with the eldest child between 10 and 15 years old. we focus here on four case study families. data collection included separate in-depth interviews with the eldest child and one of the parents or carers in each family (8 participants in total). during the interview, the children had their handheld digital devices, pointing to aspects of their online practices. these ‘social media tours’ were audio and photo/video recorded to complement interview data. as an analytical approach, we examined data through selective coding focusing on themes addressing engagement with musical.ly. we used lange’s (2007) framework of privately public and publicly private modes of engagement to identify patterns across the four families and to emphasise the way musical.ly explicitly pushes these boundaries further than many other social platforms, and that these boundaries are understood differently by children and parents. we complemented the qualitative data with analysis of the platform context of musical.ly. findings and discussion musical.ly presents challenges to family social media use, as a relatively new platform attracting a mostly preteen demographic revolving around sharing lip-synced music videos. launched in 2014, it has seen rapid growth, with recent reports suggesting 130 million registered accounts in december 2016, and 40 million monthly users (smith 2017). the app offers an easy to use tool for creating and sharing personal videos, but it also has all the functionalities of a social network site (i.e. user profile, followers list, like and comment features and messaging between users). given that preteens’ digital media use is driven mostly by play (nansen et.al. 2012) and that music as a medium is often central to how young people relate to and make sense of personal space (lincoln 2014), musical.ly’s popularity is understandable. the app’s own description positions it as ‘the world’s largest creative platform’, and as a utility app rather than a social media platform. as a result, it can fly under the parental ‘social media radar’. for each of the families in our study this factor shaped how musical.ly was understood and used. for example, emily, mother of 10-year-old phoebe, said she is not really familiar with phoebe’s engagement with musical.ly: ‘i’m familiar with instagram but then, like with the musical.ly, i had no idea what it was about; she is showing me videos and i didn’t even realise it was a social media’. emma, a mother of 11-year-old sophia, won’t allow her daughter on instagram until she is 13, but sophia can use musical.ly as emma sees it as a place for fun and play: ‘she is improvising, or acting/playing to music. so that’s what i understand of it’. for both emma and emily, musical.ly is not perceived as a platform that reflects their social media fears so they allow their daughters more freedom, while at the same time completely or partially restricting their use of other platforms (i.e. instagram). the young participants in our study recognise how their parents see musical.ly as different to other platforms and use it as a buffer to negotiate and push set limitations. for example, consistently among parents in our study the primary concern was the possibility of contact with strangers, and therefore each imposed rules to keep profiles exclusively private and connections only with persons they know in real life. while all our young participants adhered to private practices on instagram, their practices with musical.ly was more nuanced falling into two distinctive categories: publicly private and privately public (lange 2007). the first category implies practices in which they might provide personal and identifiable information but with limited access to their profile. while others withhold personal information, but make their profile accessible to everyone, engaging with musical.ly in a publicly private manner. clearly, both practices negotiate the minimum of parental requirements while also allowing children to appropriate the platform to their needs, negotiating and circumventing their parent’s uncertainty about muscial.ly’s status and functioning as social media. references boyd d. (2011) social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in: papacharissi z (ed) a networked self: identity, community and culture on social network sites. new york: new york: routledge, 39-58. campos-holland a, et al. (2015) keep calm: youth navigating adult authority across networked publics. technology and youth: growing up in a digital world. emerald group publishing limited, 163-211. lange pg. (2007) publicly private and privately public: social networking on youtube. journal of computer-mediated communication 13: 361-380. lange pg. (2014) kids on youtube: technical identities and digital literacies: taylor and francis. lincoln s. (2014) young people and mediated private space. in: bennett a and robards b (eds) mediated youth cultures: the internet, belonging and new cultural configurations. london: palgrave macmillan uk: london. livingstone s. (2008) taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: teenagers' use of social networking sites for intimacy, privacy and self-expression. new media & society 10: 393-411. livingstone s. (2014) developing social media literacy: how children learn to interpret risky opportunities on social network sites. communications-european journal of communication research 39: 283-303. nansen b, chakraborty k, gibbs l, et al. (2012) children and digital wellbeing in australia: online regulation, conduct and competence. journal of children and media 6: 237-254. robards b. (2012) leaving myspace, joining facebook: ‘growing up’ on social network sites. continuum 26: 385-398. savic, m., mccosker, a., geldens, p. (2016) cooperative mentorship: negotiating social media use within the family. m/c journal, 19(2): http://journal.mediaculture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1078 smith c. (2017) emerging social networks: 14 amazing musical.ly statistics. dmr, jan 23, http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/musically-statistics/ selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): szulc, l. (2020, october). digital gender disidentifications: queer migrants and transnational cultures of gender diversity. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. digital gender disidentifications: queer migrants and transnational cultures of gender diversity lukasz szulc university of sheffield the twenty-first century has observed the emergence of new practices of gender diversity, which eschew rigid gender binary and proliferate new gender labels, including “nonbinary,” “genderfluid,” and “agender.” time magazine declared the year 2014 as “the transgender tipping point” (steinmetz, 2014), recognizing not only the growing visibility of trans people, especially in the mainstream media in the us (cavalcante, 2018), but also emerging practices of gender diversity. reflecting on this emerging gender diversity, a long-standing trans academic and activist riki wilchins (2017) asks in a commentary to the advocate “is trans over?” wilchins (2017) suggests that older discourses around transgender, often related to the right to change sex or have one’s correct gender recognized, are becoming insufficient for the contemporary discussions about gender, anticipating that “[w]e are unconsciously and finally treading toward the end of gender.” while wilchins may be correct in forecasting the end of gender as we know it, gender as such has proved to become in recent years a prolific terrain of social experimentation, especially in digital cultures of young people. numerous researchers point to the key role of online social networks, particularly on tumblr, for providing unique conditions to explore, articulate and discuss new gender and sexual identity labels (e.g. byron et al., 2019; cover, 2018; haimson et al. 2019; oakley, 2016; vivienne, 2017). large social media platforms have followed suit and incorporated new labels into their interfaces, starting with google+, which added a third gender option “other” in their sign-up page in 2011, and followed by, for example, facebook and okcupid, which provided a long list of predefined gender options in their registration interfaces in 2014 (bivens & haimson, 2016; cover, 2018). some key academic discussions on this topic are structured around the questions of subversion and hegemony. while some authors point out that digital gender diversity subverts the hegemonic gender binary (e.g. haimson et al. 2019; vivienne, 2017), others argue either that the change is not radical enough (e.g. oakley, 2016; schudson & van anders, 2019; webster, 2019) or that there is no change at all, as the proliferation of gender and sexual labels re-establishes existing hegemonies, especially the idea of coherent, authentic, and essentialized gender and sexual identity (cover, 2018). in this paper, i contribute to this discussion by challenging the dichotomy of subversion versus hegemony, as well as some other related dichotomies of empowerment versus disempowerment or resistance versus regulation. i draw on the concept of disidentification, introduced by josé esteban muñoz (1999), who argues that attempting to break free of the hegemonic ideology is utopic. muñoz (1999, p. 11) proposes disidentification as “a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology,” transforming hegemonies from within. empirically, i build on the results of a larger project with a diverse group of queer migrants, polish lgbtqs in the uk, which includes 767 online survey responses and 30 in-depth face-to-face interviews. the survey ran online from mid-august to mid-september 2018 and was promoted through multiple channels, including social media platforms of lgbtq and migrant organizations, private messages on the biggest polish lgbtq website, queer.pl, targeted advertising on facebook and instagram, as well as twitter posts with the popular hashtag #polesinuk. thirty interviewees were recruited out of 334 survey respondents who stated that they would like to participate in a face-to-face interview. all interviews were semi-structured and were conducted at the end of 2018 or the beginning of 2019 in places chosen by the interviewees, usually at their homes or in cafés. interviews lasted two hours each on average and were carried out in polish, with some interviewees switching between polish and english occasionally. for the purpose of this paper, i analyze interviews with six participants who identify outside the hegemonic gender binary. my focus on queer migrants helps to bring up the issue of context, particularly cultural and linguistic context, which is largely absent from the current literature on digital gender diversity, dominated by research embedded in english-language countries (us, uk, and australia). the main contribution of the paper is to reveal the abundant practices of digital gender disidentifications, which i categorize into 1) strategic disidentifications (disidentifying instrumentally for different reasons, e.g. to protect oneself against microaggressions or dumbing down one’s identifications to remain intelligible), 2) contextual disidentifications (disidentifying differently in different contexts, e.g. on different social media platforms or when using different languages), and 3) doubtful disidentifications (disidentifying as a result of questioning identifications, e.g. questioning one’s right to a particular identification or questioning the finality of one’s identification). such a classification exercise, not intended to create a comprehensive model of disidentifications, allows me to systematize diverse practices of disidentifications, which helps to update the concept of disidentification to digital gender diversity. it also points to the wide spectrum of disidentification practices, suggesting that complicated practices of disidentifications are more prevalent than simple identifications or counteridentifications, at least for marginalized subjects who cannot easily identify with dominant ideologies, in this case the hegemonic gender binary. references bivens, r. & haimson, o. l. (2016). baking gender into social media design: how platforms shape categories for users and advertisers. social media + society. byron, p., robards, b., hanckel, b., vivienne, s., & churchill, b. (2019). “hey, i’m having these experiences”: tumblr use and young people’s queer (dis)connections." international journal of communication 13: 2239-2259. cavalcante, a. (2018). struggling for ordinary: media and transgender belonging in everyday life. new york: nyu press. cover, r. (2018). micro-minorities: the emergence of new sexual subjectivities, categories, and labels among sexually diverse youth online. in: susan talburt (ed.) youth sexualities: public feelings and contemporary cultural politics, santa barbara, ca; praeger. pp. 279-301. haimson, o. l., avery dame-griff, elias capello & zahari richter (2019) tumblr was a trans technology: the meaning, importance, history, and future of trans technologies. feminist media studies, pp. 1-17. muñoz, j. e. (1999). disidentifications: queers of color and the performance of politics. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. oakley, a. (2016). disturbing hegemonic discourse: nonbinary gender and sexual orientation labelling on tumblr. social media + society, july-september, 1-12. poole, r. j. (2017). towards a queer futurity: new trans television. european journal of american studies, 12(2), 1-23. doi: 10.4000/ejas.12093. schudson, z., & van anders, s. (2019). ‘you have to coin new things’: sexual and gender identity discourses in asexual, queer, and/or trans young people’s networked counterpublics. psychology & sexuality, 10(4), 354-368. steinmetz, m. (2014, may 29th). the transgender tipping point. time. https://time.com/magazine/us/135460/june-9th-2014-vol-183-no-22-u-s/ vivienne, s. (2017). “i will not hate myself because you cannot accept me”: problematizing empowerment and gender-diverse selfies. popualr communication, 15(2), 126-140. webster, l. (2019). “i am i”: self-constructed transgender identities in internet-mediated forum communication. international journal of the sociology of language, 2019(256), 129-146. microsoft word 798-546-1-pb.docx crafting minecraft: negotiating creative produsage-driven participation in an evolving cultural artifact alex leavitt annenberg school for communication, university of southern california introduction – “the pajamas should make you fall asleep faster!” the room was packed with probably ten thousand fans, sitting and chatting with one another, sometimes cheering, anxious and excited, but this was to be expected of minecon: the very first offline fan event held, in las vegas, for the renowned online video game, minecraft. a boy of maybe 10 or 12 years old – a surprisingly common occurrence at a convention that i expected to attract primarily male, tech-savvy twentysomethings – approached the microphone, after waiting forty-five minutes in a line that stretched down the dozens of rows from the main stage. this hour was dedicated to a question-and-answer session with the swedish development team, mojang. the microphone was lowered, and the boy asked about… sleepwear. players could shear it from sheep, he explained, just like how you make part of the bed you sleep in to create a save point. “the pajamas should make you fall asleep faster!” a tumultuous uproar from the audience: suggestions for adding new elements to the game, of course, are common to this group of player-fans. after an attempt to quiet down the room, markus – the team lead of the devs – gave everyone a quizzical look. and jens, minecraft’s then-appointed lead developer, said apologetically, “we’ll think about it.” minecraft, possibly one of the most popular games of the past decade, surpassed any initial expectations of creator markus persson – also known by his internet handle, notch – in terms of games sold but also players enticed to the now cult classic. notch was the only individual to imagine, code, and update minecraft for a few years, since its initial launch in late 2009, and only until the game began raking in millions of dollars did persson hire a small development team. with only a couple years past its launch, minecraft now boasts millions of players… and, uniquely, just as many creators. because even with its massive popularity boost, minecraft as a game was – and still is – not complete. in addition to notch’s hand-picked team of employees, minecraft has evolved over time as thousands of players have become producers: creating tutorial videos, sharing screenshots of in-game creations, analyzing in full detail the game mechanics, fashioning adventure maps, and – for the technically-inclined – banding together to reveal the official obfuscated (“intentionally jumbled”) code and hack away at it to create modifications, which are distributed widely for other players to implement into their own games. in other words, a verifiable ecosystem of player-creators exists that creates alongside the official production process, making minecraft possibly one of the largest and broadest participatory cultural productions ever. this paper looks deeply at the hierarchies of creativity, communities of participation, and teams of collaboration that contribute to minecraft as a cultural artifact. in particular, i look critically at how players’ experiences of minecraft as a game evolve alongside the negotiations of participatory roles, the boundaries of derivative value, and the development of the game itself. through ethnographic participant observation and interviews, i aim to answer: how do individuals negotiate the horizons of produsage in relation to an ever-evolving media artifact? i demonstrate that varying levels of familiarity with minecraft lead to equivalent game experiences, but by building upon and advancing in the social structures of creative participation in the produsage process, player-creators begin to deviate in their expectations from other producers and the game itself. also, i suggest that the empirical findings from this study reveal that the peculiar nature of evolving participatory cultural artifacts do not necessarily lead to a balanced, democratic state of participation for all involved individuals. instead, i suggest that a recursive process of co-production bounds this participation, where updates to the game impact participants’ expectations and values, moderated by how the community defines what it values. from the crafting table to crafting theory: minecraft and its ecosystem of produsage participation in and around minecraft may be framed through the lens of participatory culture, especially through the conceptual relationship of the user-producer known as produsage. the general framework of participation in a minecraft-like ecosystem falls in line with what jenkins et al. (2006) call participatory culture, which they define as: [a] culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression… strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. a participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created). this paper primarily extends participatory culture to a deeper theoretical underpinning of participation founded in the relationships between participants and the roles they play as “producers” and “consumers,” especially in the changing distinction between those roles. bruns (2008) describes the intersection of these practices under the label “produsage,” which “highlights that within the communities which engage in the collaborative creation and extension of information and knowledge… the role of ‘consumer’ and even that of ‘end user’ have long disappeared, and the distinctions between producers and users of content have faded into comparative insignificance” (2). probably the most important element of the produsage model that bruns introduces is that of the “fluid heterarchy” that emerges from collaborative creative action in the production of “temporary, unfinished artefacts” open for further creative reinterpretation (240). while bruns’s primary examples of produsage involve evolving technological platforms utilizing collectives of participants to contribute information to these systems, he provides a small number of examples of what he calls “creative produsage,” that focus on distributed creative work (230). he argues that “not all the contributions made by all produsers in the community are likely to be of uniform, high value to the shared underlying project.” but the case studies he explores operate in very different ways than minecraft, in that the participation does not directly impact the primary creative process. minecraft, on the other hand, has participants directly involved in the back-and-forth with the game’s developers as they develop the game. this distinction is particularly important for understanding how the evolution of the cultural artifact impacts the participatory ecosystem. literat (2012) provides a strong framework for participation in crowdsourced art: participants may increasingly contribute to the artistic work all the way up to co-production with the “alpha artist.” still, crowdsourced art purposefully draws from crowds to contribute; an open cultural artifact like minecraft did not initially have this in mind (though, as i explain later, the expectation for participation emerged from the community). therefore, this study contributes to the produsage literature by providing empirical evidence for the underlying processes of creative co-production. it is not enough to understand the productive context within which participation operates; instead, we must also look to the negotiated boundaries that emerge from the politics of participation in cooperative creative spaces. minecraft provides a unique case of an evolving media artifact that introduces challenges to the “level playing field” model of most theoretical work on produsage. as the artifact evolves, participants react to its evolution, confounding the ordinary negotiations between participants regarding their participation as the participatory infrastructure – minecraft as a platform for creative contribution – fluctuates too. digital ethnography: methods and sites for a virtual “world” this study represents the cumulative effort of 9 months of formal ethnographic fieldwork starting in autumn 2012 in the minecraft player-producer community. i conducted an extended case method (burawoy 1998), from which i established a grounded theory approach (glaser 1978) to understanding the process of creative coproduction. for this project, formal multisited ethnographic fieldwork encompassed some traditional, offline participant observation in combination with primarily digital, online participation observation. this included watching players offline play the game on their computers and participate in information-related (such as referencing wikis and other resources while playing) and community-based (participating on forums, speaking on social media, etc.) activities, as well as reading game forums, keeping up with official announcements, mapping out spaces of community engagement, and touring digital player spaces such as multiplayer servers. this observation occurred in various roles as an explicit researcher, a committed player in multiplayer settings, or a pure observer. also, i participated as a player on my own by not only downloading and playing the game over the course of 3 stages of official updates, but i also attempted to become involved in the modding community by trying out old and new mods and editing some of the game code on my own. beyond participant observation, 22 interviews were conducted with players, server moderators, and mod programmers to ask in more detail about players’ perceptions of the gaming community, motivations to participate, and changing in-game experiences. finally, in addition to interpretation of field notes and interview transcripts, i used archival material – mainly curated from online resource websites like fan forums, informational wikis, and news articles – to supplement findings. many of these artifacts i encountered during two years of exploratory research preceding this study, through participation as a minecraft player, whether while browsing community sites, playing the game with friends (or strangers), or attending live events (like minecon or penny arcade expo, two gaming conventions). punching trees: a contextual history of minecraft minecraft is an independently-developed, java-based video game, created by swedish game developer markus persson, where the player navigates a randomlygenerated, cube-based world in which s/he can collect resources, build shelter, explore caves, grow food, and raise animals. the game operates on a 10-minute day-and-night cycle: after 5 minutes, the sun sets, and monsters appear; if the player has not created a proper shelter, s/he must survive by fashioning tools and weapons. in addition to this “survival” mode, minecraft also allows players to maneuver in a “creative” world where every type of cube and item is available to build fantastic creations. players initially tended to use survival mode alone and creative mode on multiplayer servers, though with the addition of new server-based mods, these gameplay styles have spread across all types of play. minecraft was released to the public for pc in may 2009, though by official standards it was released as a stable game (its beta version) in november 2011. in the period before the release, the game was developed during a public alpha stage, during which players could buy the game at a discount. however, because minecraft was developed alongside the rise in its popularity, the growing audience of players was able to participate in the social and creative process of its development: sharing screenshots of creations, uploading videos of playthroughs (ligman 2011), debating on social media sites, providing suggestions to the official development team, creating hundreds of “mods” (nardi & kallinikos 2007; sotamaa 2010) that implement new features to the game, and with these mods creating more downloadable content (such as formulated, original adventure maps). minecraft continues to be updated frequently: in 2013, a small team at mojang releases downloadable “snapshots” of to-be-released game versions to the public to test new features and identify bugs. after a few months, mojang sends a stable update to all players’ computers. players frequently refer to mojang’s releases as the “official” or “core” version. the community develops many modifications for the world, but untouched versions of the game are dubbed “vanilla” minecraft. mine or craft: the emergence of roles in creative produsage participation in minecraft relies heavily on (though does not absolutely necessitate) being a player. to gain access to in-game materials and experience, one must download, install, and play minecraft. but immersion in the game and thus engagement with the larger community of players shapes creative involvement: for example, if an individual wanted to create a downloadable adventure map, s/he would have to first download the proper mods to edit the game and, when the product was finished, then share it on a game forum or upload it to a curated map website. still, the map itself and its presentation to the community would also have to be framed in a way that would attract other players to download it: the creator must situate hisor herself in the game experience. the experiences that players have in minecraft vary, but they remain crucial to how individuals interact with the game at all levels of play. this section explores typologies of roles that players employ in a produsage ecosystem: what they interact with in minecraft, how and to what degree they interact with it, and how such interactions produce roles for individuals in the larger minecraft community. these roles then affect how player-creators at all levels relate to the game and express expectations for how the game should interact with them in the future. basic player roles emerge from amount of interaction with the game and experimentation with gameplay styles. minecraft players fall in line with bartle’s typology of game players: achievers (action on the world), explorers (interaction with the world), socializers (interaction with other players), and killers (action on other players) (bartle 1996). much of the interaction with minecraft falls in line with its features: a player can participate in a survival mode or creative mode, in a single-player game or on a multiplayer server, or through in-game goals like exploring dungeons or building complex machines with “redstone,” minecraft’s in-game craftable circuitry. in a minecraft panel at the penny arcade expo, the panelists – participants on a popular minecraft podcast – discussed how different playing styles developed different player types and how these types impacted what experiences individuals wanted to derive from the game: so, there different classes i think in minecraft of what to do: you've got the adventurers, you've got the miners, the builders, people like to do farms. i think i'm the adventurer. you're the redstone guy, that's why you want more redstone updates, right? … i think they've done a good job of alternating the updates to where everyone gets a little bit of something they want, like each update is something different, so depending on what kind of player you are, this might not be your update, but the next one might be. while many players refer to their gameplay as simply “addictive,” familiarity with the game’s mechanics and elements also impacts how players perceive the extent of minecraft’s world: for instance, experiences players prefer to explore advanced features and experiment with modifications, while new players are content to investigate the boundaries provided by the original game. one player, sam, who had only been playing for a few months, said that his wish to explore the full potential of the original game restricted any need to go find mods: i don't think i've solved all of vanilla yet. there are a number of problems that i have seen other people solving, that i haven't gotten to. since the first time i played the game, they've added another boss-like enemy, and things that seem like additional threats/challenges that i would like to pursue. i haven't built a successful boat/water elevator, i haven't really collaborated with another player until very recently. in-game player roles also intermesh with participatory roles in the context of the produsage ecosystem around minecraft. participation occurs across a spectrum of everadvancing levels of creation and participation in the development of the game: from playing the vanilla game to installing mods, from creating adventure maps and aesthetic skins to writing advanced code to change the game. some players also contribute through feedback: frequently through social media channels like twitter and reddit, where mojang’s employees interact with players, individuals will provide opinions of recent updates and suggestions for new features, as well as participate with more commitment as an informal game tester and bug reporter. finally (though i do not explore their participation in this paper), some players with media-making skills will create tutorial or playthrough videos that thousands of players view on a daily basis. in relation to the emergence of produsage roles, bruns (2008) focuses on folksonomies as a “system of knowledge categorization and structuration” (187). though he describes role-making as possibly “too elusive to provide a strong sense of temporary unity for many participants,” minecraft players – as members of a creative produsage ecosystem – very strongly self-categorize based on how they interact with the objects of the ecosystem: players play, map-makers create maps, modders mod. what is important, though, is that all participants remain players from the start. even while mojang, the official developers of minecraft, can be considered part of the player category, ordinary players indicate a distinct separation of the developers from the rest of the community. nearly all of my interviewees – and, many times, users in my observation of forums posts – describe the developers with an othering, but powerful, “they.” for example, one forum complaint about a new update described the relationship between players and developers as “but they [make some questionable decisions] with the minecraft community in mind…” according to players, the community is made up of players, creators, and modders, and the developers are removed. figure 1. roles of produsage from the perspective of participants. every participant is a player, though some occupy a more distinct role. some players and modders can be considered developers (such as bug testers or modders that have their mods integrated into the original game), though largely the developers remain distinct from participants. “does mojang still care about the players?”: defining expectations in creative produsage the distinction between players and developers, though, remains important for how we conceptualize the produsage process in a creative, participatory media artifact. many players reference the creative vision of notch and his development team as structuring the primary experience that individuals take away from playing the game. players articulate that central, dominant experience in a variety of ways (that will be explored later in this paper), but they describe that experience as bounded by a “vision” that mojang has for the game, that the developers have planned and build upon incrementally with each release. interestingly, the reality of minecraft’s iterative production means that goals outlined one year may not be accomplished – or might be entirely different – by the next (evident, for example, from team meetings shown in the documentary minecraft: the story of mojang). still, players view the development team akin to the director of a traditional film, paving a way for the future of the game through hierarchical, top-down decision making. one of the core tensions in evolving creative produsage-driven cultural artifacts, then, is the role that the “alpha artist” plays in crafting experiences (literat 2012), versus the role that participants have in impacting those experiences. for instance, kevin, an advanced player that has been involved with minecraft since the early alpha release, highlights how the developers occupy the top, creative role: it isn’t my game. if mojang wants to go a whole completely different route, that is their prerogative and right as the developers. i might not be happy but i can’t complain. i bought the game and liked the game when i bought it. i don’t have to update if i don’t like the updates being released. however i have got my money worth and more from what they have done with the game. there isn’t anything they have added that i have not liked. everything they put in the game only really adds to it and has not subtracted from it. because players believe that the developers at mojang first and foremost architect the experience that individuals have with the game, a set of norms and expectations emerge from the produsage process based on the relative level of participation on the part of each individual. first, players believe updates to the game should adhere to a particular experience derived from the core vision, though it is possible to stray from this core. and second, because minecraft is in a sense limited by that core vision, players argue that the potential to participate in the development of ancillary content (maps, mods, etc.) for minecraft should be encouraged. of course, participants that contribute at higher increments of creative production provoke these trends by providing alternatives to the central thread of top-down production, such as by filling in gaps in players’ needs for expanded in-game features and goals. player-creators like modders take it upon themselves as a responsibility – comparable to the responsibility of mojang to contribute meaningful and precise additions to the core experience – to contribute to alternatives and even expect fellow produsers to fulfill that role. taken together, all of these expectations ultimately frame how players of all types articulate what is valued in evolving creative produsage settings. to understand how these expectations emerge, it is important to reiterate the technical context within which players play. minecraft as a game has undergone dozens of official iterations, and the community of game modders continually produces new mods that add new features, items, enemies, or even worlds, so a player’s experience of minecraft constantly changes over time. therefore, a player’s interaction with the game always changes depending on official updates but may change more as players personalize the software based on needs or whims. the editability of the game thus provides the opportunity for players to design particular experiences for themselves. still, players articulated that minecraft as a whole provides a central experience that manifests from mojang’s core vision. players from newbies to experienced modders all described this experience in varying ways, such as the “minecraft feeling” or the game’s “original spirit.” charles, an active player since the early alpha release, outlines the basic feeling that mojang has designed: minecraft is a game fundamentally about creation. it focuses on simple objects that can be manipulated. it doesn't try too much to presuppose what you might want to make, instead trying to give you simple tools for making things. its granularity is intentionally large; an artistic choice made by notch it its conception. it has a vaguely archaic or fantasy theme, lacking things like complex machines in favour of alchemy and magic and zombies. for all players, the architecture, mechanics, and “laws” of the game (lessig 2006) dictate the initial framework of an experience. minecraft’s design as a sandbox game, where participants encounter minimal goals at their leisure, and particularly its lack of driving narrative initially foster a much more open experience to begin with; players then build a personalized experience from interacting with parts of the game. without any familiarity, many new players articulated their experience of minecraft’s world in relation to other games they have played (some cited its similarity to dwarf fortress and other adventure games). as players gain more familiarity with minecraft’s in-game features, older players then express their experiences by drawing from their immersion in the game. that experience of course changes over time as mojang provides iterative updates. all types of players refer to mojang’s updates as crucial markers of stages in the game (eg., “i first started playing sometime during 1.7.3 beta about 3 months before 1.8.”), and they frequently cite how the experience changes based on the time they started playing. charles, a veteran player, explains that “alpha updates were crazy.” they'd fundamentally change the way the world works. for example, on our first server, one of my friends built a large upside-down pyramid in the air. the only way into it was by swimming directly up a lavafall. a few updates later, nobody could enter the pyramid, because players could now take damage in smp. the construct's fundamental conceit was broken. the alpha updates were pretty rough on the multiplayer scene where your map just kept evolving. i don't know that i'd say the game is really moving any slower, now, though. it's more refined. we're getting more new items and fewer new terrain blocks. … the most recent stuff seems to be focused on making the world seem a little more alive, like you're not the only actor. early versions tended to feel a little like a myst world: alone in an abandoned universe. still, the game is – again – bounded by the creative power that the developers wield. karl, who has been playing for almost a year and a half on his own, experimenting with some mods, explains that while mods can add new experiences, they can be seen as mere additions. he described this, saying: minecraft is a very personal game. a game that can be modified to fit the users mind. if one person feels there isn't a lot of mobs then they can find a mod to add more. this makes minecraft reach out to a bunch of more players because it makes them happy to customize their experience. me, personally, do not like these kind of mods. i enjoy the vision that mojang has created as it's base element. for experienced players, creators, and modders, the driving factor for continued participation in minecraft revolves around boredom. as new players grow more familiar with the game, they grow tired of playing with the same mechanics and features (debeauvais et al. 2011). while new additions to the official game provided by mojang can renew interest in the game, advanced players frequently describe a sense of boredom overwhelming their gameplay. one experienced player-turned-map-maker describes this process: “i've always felt that default minecraft holds a fantastic sense of awe originally. gazing out onto the massive and lovely world open before you is incredible. however, as you progress in the game things become more 'regular', which often prompts people i've interacted with to seek out something to spice up their gameplay.” new players experience a similar trajectory. sam, who has only played for a few weeks, said: as i become more familiar with the game, i play less. the longer i play, the more problems i find easy to solve, and therefor boring. i know how to grow food and make bread. i know how to organize torches to direct me in or out of a mine. i know what to do when i screw up. i know how to stay safe from night creatures. now there is a phase at the beginning of each new world where i am re-solving old problems. it doesn't get until several hours in until i feel like i am working on new things. this annoys me. unless multiplayer and mods satisfy me, i will probably stop playing again. players of all types describe how the lack of goals within the game prompted them to expect such features to be added in later. the iterative creative process, however, is not as clean-cut as all players would hope for. players tend to seek out new alternatives like mods when they find gaps in their gameplay, like caleb – who describes himself as having participated almost daily for the past three years – when he talks about the lack of difficulty in minecraft and how that prompts him to see out mods and maps: for me and seemingly many others, the default game is fairly 'easy'. mobs are fairly easy to battle, and survival doesn't have a proper end game set of good goals. while the bosses added later were nice, they don't provide a real end to the adventure. i use tools to modify spawners and craft custom terrains unlike anything you'd see in default minecraft, be it a weaving castle, a decaying swamp, or a massive floating city, it gives a player a sense of awe in the game again, after they've experienced the default game. newness, on the other hand, motivates players at all levels to explore various additions beyond the core component of an evolving creative cultural artifact. modifications of course provide this alternative. one creator reflects on this exploration: some turn to mods, some to maps, many to both. by giving yourself a new opportunity to learn things and discover stuff you never could see in the default game, i personally have found it reinvigorates my desire to play the game. something new is refreshing and fun for me as a player to experience, and often i can take something away from it to improve my gameplay and my building/design abilities too. new players draw similar connections. john, a relatively new player that has been participating in minecraft for about 9 months, simply says that “mods just give more.” i think of them a little like as an expansion pack that extends the game play and brings new opportunities for new combinations of blocks/systems/automation. the main changes between [vanilla minecraft and mods] are having more choice, or a wider palette to choose from, and being able to automate processes so there is more time to do other things. sometimes, doing the menial jobs, like harvesting wheat, can get rather boring. when jobs become a chore rather than a pleasure, it makes the game a hindrance rather the relaxing pastime it should be. some players, though, find that particular mods can be daunting. kristen, a high school student who has been playing for almost two years, says that her initial experience with mods “didn’t go well.” even though the additions didn’t really improve her experience, technical issues also got in the way of her enjoyment: i don't think the laptop i had at the time could handle it. i remember trying to get this one that would have villagers that would mine and harvest and build for you and i'm pretty sure i messed up in the installation process somewhere. and whenever i tried to install [another], the mod was never on the right version of minecraft. it used to get pretty frustrating. i think i tried to use mods before i even understood how to use a texture pack and back then things were even less noob friendly. players also express tensions around how certain modifications of minecraft provide too many options, thereby providing an unsatisfactory experience. some players, though, see most or even all additions as acceptable extensions of the minecraft world, and players can utilize modifications on the edge to rekindle the experience. one creator described this as: people complain that it's kill the original spirit of minecraft, and i share theirs views in some cases (like the portals one, or the one where you can build a nuclear reactor) because it's not coherent to the original style of minecraft. but i understand that people can like this kind of mods, because i guess that they search for the "minecraft feeling" with it. beyond players, creators and modders are also motivated by boredom to create. frequently, creators and modders expressed the need to solve gaps in the experience; their creations were cited as improving upon various aspects of the game that they had identified as lacking. for instance, one map-maker described his creations as solving the “issue” of boredom without providing too new of an experience: “generally people let me know that they find my maps close to the original game, but that the dungeons and landscapes that i've made, add something new to the game… i think that people i've liked my maps because it solves the issue of repetition/boredom, without breaking with the original spirit.” even as an advanced modder, drzhark, the creator of the popular mo’ creatures mod, described a similar experience where the lack of variety required him to look out for a way to change the experience: i was really enjoying playing minecraft for the first couple of weeks. i've been an avid gamer for many years, but over the last couple of years i never found a game i really enjoyed until i discovered minecraft. however, after three weeks i really felt the need for more variety in the game. i browsed the web and forums looking for mods to add extra creatures to the game, and found that nobody had done it. then i stumbled upon mcp1 and started browsing the deobfuscated code and i thought, why don't i do this myself? he identifies a void in the game that, as someone with the proper technical skills, he could solve. evidently players recognized the same issue; he quoted his mod as having                                                                                                                 1 minecraft coders pack, a collection of scripts and tools that allows an individual to decompile and unpack the minecraft software and unobfuscate the code to edit it for mod creation. been downloaded over 380,000 times by september 2011. in april 2013, drzhark’s horses were implemented officially into the game by mojang. uniquely, creators and especially modders articulate their position as contributors to the ecosystem of minecraft from a different position than ordinary players. in a produser role, he states how he also ventured into the territory of being evaluated according to other players’ experiences of minecraft. describing the reactions to his mod, he said, “i've noticed that it is extremely difficult to keep the users happy. even in a case like this, a free mod for a game that is still in beta. but i've received many more messages from satisfied users than the negative comments. i try to ignore the negatives and focus on the positives.” in pinpointing other players’ displeasures with the modification he created, he suggests a subtle boundary between players and modders, a point that confronts the potential of equal co-participation in produsage settings, akin to bruns’ description of unequal relations amongst participants and the contributions they produce. interestingly, social interaction provides a sense of newness as well. while there are a number of mods for minecraft’s multiplayer servers (especially regarding moderating what players can and can’t do), many of them are easier to implement in the first-person game. even without many gameplay-altering mods, though, some advanced players claim that the social aspect of minecraft provides a way to negate boredom, as players collaborate on adventure missions or build elaborate creations together (falling in line with the work of taylor [2006] on sociality in online games). patricia, a 30-year-old player who has been playing since the earliest release of minecraft, relates that her most recent enjoyment comes from running multiplayer servers. “it's not fun when you can't share your experience with other people,” she says. another older player, trevor, says that “being involved with a good community online really engages me.” the social aspect changes gameplay to such a degree that “without the community and the group of players i play with, i would be playing a completely different game,” because “having other players adds so much more depth to the game” beyond “just building and killing mobs for the most part.” one common conflict with the quest for newness in the iterative experience of minecraft occurs between the expectation that new and relevant content should always be developed and the actual process of producing that content. players repeatedly express what they believe should be produced, especially reflecting on the minecraft feeling to detail what should be allowed or not. as stated before, players also simultaneously recognize minecraft as guided by the developers’ vision. therefore, a key component that structures the conflict between expectations and production is the idea of “balance.” for example, karl, one advanced player, explains how he believes the developers try to create equilibrium between additions that provide new and difficult elements to the game (what players expect) and content that retains the proper feeling: well actually i feel that mojang does a pretty good job keeping their updates full of new things. when mojang adds all these things into minecraft i think it is part of two things: 1) i feel that they are trying to balance the game. when they just recently increased the difficulty of the skeletons, i think they thought they were too easy, and now when you play… you think and strategize how to keep surviving night after night. and 2) it doesn't diminish the feel of the game. when they added villagers and the trading system, it wasn't like when you add a mod because mods are extremely detailed… unlike vanilla where you get emeralds and you do a simple trade, nothing more. however, the conflict that arises in his explanation is that even when the developers try to strive for balance with the introduction of new mods, the production of new content sometimes doesn’t achieve the potential that it could to create the proper experience that older players expect. even with balance, though, players occasionally detail how some updates can be off-track from the vision (or the perception of a vision) that guides development. players tend to use forums to voice their opinions through large walls of text to express their concerns. for instance, one player wrote: i think minecraft development has a distinct lack of vision. don’t get me wrong, it’s great that they are actively developing the game. but… the features they add are (for the most part) ‘mildly interesting’ to just ‘why would i want that?’ for me. they feel like developers go ‘hmm, what random thing can i think up to add to the game today’. a mod api or adding new experiences with a distinct vision in mind would be huge. not just gimmicks. every time they’ve tried to set an actual direction/goal they just seem to push it ahead or shift away from it. here, the player describes various new updates to the official version as “gimmicks” that don’t add to the player’s preferred experience. because the game is not complete, the player also implies that there was a “distinct vision” to begin with; although he doesn’t delineate what the “actual direction/goal” might be in his mind, he sees the actions by mojang of continually updating the game not fulfilling a unified, ideal state that will come at the conclusion of the game’s development. another player, in the same forum, describes a similar experience: “as a long-time server admin and been playing this thing for so long, content creeping is not really the most attractive thing about minecraft. i want tools to expand on the experience there already is.” though these conflicts pop up now and then in community discussions, participants also recognize that a cycle occurs. this recursive cycle of co-production is particularly important for understanding how the roles and expectations created through the produsage process evolve recursively over time, as players interact with developers, developers integrate contributors feedback into new iterations, and those evolved iterations produce new norms, interactions, and expectations. players initially identify the cycle in their reactions to iterations of their game experience. after one panelist at penny arcade expo described himself forgetting about a new update that many people disliked, another panelist responded: “there's a cycle – it’s really crazy that they introduce something new, and we all hate it, because we want it back the way it was. like the [updated] sounds in the game… eating, nobody likes that. now i don't even realize it when i eat.” further, all levels of participants understand that developers pay attention to the community’s productions, but they also expect that attention. karl describes how the expectation that the developers interact with the community becomes a core component in the cycle of recursive co-creation: i know a couple of people who feel that minecraft has changed drastically in the past couple of updates and, yes, they do have their reasons for their upset attitudes. i do not agree or disagree with some of the decisions that mojang makes to the game. the fact is that the game is, in a way, run by the community. the community decides what they really like and what they don't like. for example in the 1.5 update when they nerfed bone meal so that it took 9 bone meal to grow 1 wheat, the people said,"woah wait a minute; that's not cool. can we have that taken away?" mojang replied by lowering it from 9 bone meal to just 2 or 3. seeing that some people may not be happy with this… it’s not only the mojang staff that makes decisions, it's also the decision of the community of the people. which means that, yes, the people have a reason to be mad, but also it's mojang's game, and they do what they feel is right for the game, and you can't expect the final decisions to be accepted by everyone. i think mojang knows this going into developing the game and they have to take the input of the community and their own personal choices that they think will benefit the most. he identifies that mojang’s creative direction is greatly impacted by the whims of the developers, but he also emphasizes the importance of the community’s feedback on the developers’ decisions. figure 2. the recursive co-creation cycle, where the process repeats as minecraft’s developers introduce incremental and frequent changes to the game through iterations produced through the cycle. the cycle of recursive co-creation thus operates on a simple flow of norms: first, players develop a state of expectations around the participatory nature of their interactions with developers and the game; second, after the developers release an iteration of the game, communication feedback occurs both ways between players, creators, modders, and developers; and finally, there is a state of acceptance on the part of the community, where a new set of norms are enacted. the cycle is recursive because, while it repeats, both participants and developers negotiate each stage of the cultural artifact’s iteration. the process resembles what kelty (2008) calls a “recursive public,” speaking about open-source software programmers that not only maintain and modify the code they produce but also the means of their existence as a group. mining for diamonds: articulating what is valued in creative produsage the expectations that emerge from various player roles reflect a range of articulations around what players find valuable in the outcomes of the produsage process. even so, the perception of a core vision of minecraft driven by the developers bounds what can even be valued by participants in the first place. this point particularly challenges the framework of produsage-driven participatory cultures, in which meaningful participation manifests through the recognition of valuable contributions by members of the community. while this still happens in a creative produsage process, the primary boundary around what is valuable remains structured by whatever is produced at the top of the creative hierarchy (namely the development team). beyond the limits of that wall, though, various processes of community decisionmaking moderate what becomes popular. comparable to mimi ito’s description of recognition and status within the anime music video community (ito 2011), minecraft players download and provide feedback on the varying additions created by the community. advanced creators and modders especially appreciate these responses: “i love the people that are willing to try things of mine out and give me honest feedback. i take everything said into deep consideration and look for every way possible i can increase enjoyment and understanding within my projects. both positives and negatives are incredibly valuable to me, and i feel that by listening to my players i create meaningful rapport with then to help drive the experience in the best way possible.” members of the community self-organize to moderate what becomes popular and define what content doesn’t make the cut: currently, on the minecraft forums we have a community thread… where mapmakers and players gather, discuss ideas, critique maps, and have a fun time doing so. that's one way of addressing a map's 'score', and often maps that are made by big names, generally people with youtube channels, can get them a lot of attention too. it all comes down to how enjoyable the map is to both watch and play. if a map is poorly designed or unbalanced, people wouldn't want to play it. because minecraft’s community has expanded across a variety of social media platforms – twitter, reddit, youtube, minecraftforum.net, and more – these communication infrastructures also inflect and reinforce the community’s moderation of what becomes popular. for example, as a video gets popular on youtube and its views increase, the view count feeds into youtube’s recommendation algorithms so that video becomes more visible. this is an especially important aspect for new players, who articulated that – before attempting to try out mods – much of what they found intriguing and valuable about minecraft was framed by the community resources they viewed, such as gameplay videos and contributions to the minecraft wiki. the larger minecraft community’s moderation of what becomes popular still must interact with individuals’ experiences and expectations as they emerge from participants’ roles in the co-production of the game. the recursive cycle remains important because players at different stages can be affected by what they perceive the community to value. new players, for instance, must create that value on their own: “i haven't been a part of the community to know where the cutting edge is.” advanced creators and modders, on the other hand, must keep on top of their own participation in the recursive cycle in addition to understand what the community wants or needs. as each official iteration of the game is released, they must react to how the community expresses what they find valuable in the new features and gameplay experience in order to keep their own productions relevant. conclusion – recursive participation: speaking back to produsage this study has demonstrated how the process behind creative produsage operates in an ongoing creative cultural product. minecraft’s vibrant community illustrates that particular roles emerge from creative co-production and how those roles shape expectations for all participants – from players to developers – and further impact how individuals articulate value from what is and how it is produced. further, the case of minecraft’s social world demonstrates the process of recursive co-production, where at various stages these expectations and values are built upon and reestablished. the case of minecraft suggests, interestingly, that the role of the “alpha artist” continues to matter: all participants expressed some experiential and creative boundaries based on the core game produced by mojang’s developers, which conveyed a particular feeling in players form which they did not want to deviate outright. when we extrapolate from minecraft to other creative, participatory-culture-driven cultural artifacts, the position of the “alpha artist” will matter just as much as the types of roles and participatory behaviors that emerge within the produser collective. minecraft’s form as a video game structures participation in a very particular way, but its role as a platform – not only literally as software but also metaphorically as a foundation on which participants build ancillary media – enable unique participatory behaviors to occur that the platform can support both technologically and socially. charles pinpoints this crucial difference: even though it feels like that to me, by not adding any kind of story or plot, others have their own opinion about what minecraft is like and what limitations there are to what can be added. … it gets rather to the heart of minecraft-as-game vs. minecraft-as-platform... sometimes, a feature will be only useful for minecraft-as-platform, like when they added the ability to have things recursively ride each other. sometimes it's primarily useful for minecraft-as-game, like when they improve monster ai on harder settings. … the minecraft platform and game are just two very related aspects of the same product. sometimes they'll work on one and sometimes they'll work on the other. (and, in actual fact, everything on one side affects the other at least a little bit.) identifying minecraft’s role as a platform for cultural production thus provides new opportunities for theoretical application to empirical research on the processes behind creative produsage. as the internet continues to link individuals in networked collaboration, the role that platforms play in acting as a coordinating space for that collaboration will shift as the creative and social dynamics that underlie it remain structured by the traditional cultural production process (eg., minecraft’s core vision). future research can continue to explore the implications of distributed creative work as the cultural artifact changes across forms, such as film or music. references burawoy, m. (1998). the extended case method. sociological theory, 16 (1). bruns, a. (2008). blogs, wikipedia, second life, and beyond: from production to produsage. new york, ny: peter lang. debeauvais, t., nardi, b., schiano, d., ducheneaut, n., & yee, n. (2011). if you build it, they might stay: retention mechanisms in world of warcraft. in proceedings of 6th international conference on the foundations of digital games. retrieved from http://www.nickyee.com/pubs/fdg%20-%20retention%20(2011).pdf glaser, b. (1976). theoretical sensitivity: advances in the methodology of grounded theory. mill valley, ca: the sociology press. ito, mizuko. (2010). the rewards of non–commercial production: distinctions and status in the anime music video scene. first monday, 15 (5). retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2968/2528 jenkins, h., clinton, k., purushotma, r., robison, a., & weigel, m. (2006). confronting the challenges of participatory culture: media education for the 21st century. retrieved from http://digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7b7e45c7e0-a3e04b89-ac9c-e807e1b0ae4e%7d/jenkins_white_paper.pdf jenkins, h., ford, s., & green, j. (2013). spreadable media: creating value and meaning in a networked culture. new york, ny: new york university press. kelty, c. (2008). two bits: the cultural significance of free software. durham, nc: duke university press. lessig, l. (2006). code: and other laws of cyberspace, version 2.0. new york, ny: basic books. ligman, k. (2011). let’s play super rutgers rpg: interactivity by proxy in an online gaming culture. paper presented at game behind the video game, rutgers school of communication, newark, nj. retrieved from http://direcritic.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/kris-ligman-lets-play-super-rutgersrpg.pdf literat, i. (2012). the work of art in the age of mediated participation: crowdsourced art and collective creativity. international journal of communication, 6. nardi, b. & kallinikos, j. (2007). opening the black box of digital technologies: mods in world of warcraft. presented at 23rd egos colloquium. retrieved from http://www.artifex.org/~bonnie/nardi_kallinikos_egos_08.pdf sotamaa, o. (2010). when the game is not enough: motivations and practices among computer game modding culture. games & culture, 5: 239 – 255. taylor, t. l. (2006). play between worlds: exploring online game culture. boston, ma: mit press. appendix. the passion that fuels minecraft this ethnography is based on the fieldwork i conducted on an internet-driven media phenomenon, a popular game called minecraft, throughout the course of an academic year while in graduate school from 2012-2013. my research was driven by the need to speak further to the idea of the co-creation process: a shift in the culture industries, where media companies increasingly deal with active audiences that speak back to producers, writers, and other creatives involved in the production process. my involvement with the minecraft community started in early autumn of 2010, when a friend introduced me to a popular youtube video of a player constructing a 1:1 scale of the starship enterprise. like thousands of other eventual players, the video intrigued me to an extent that i eventually purchased the alpha version of the game (at that time discounted, with the promise of free updates). i became drawn into the community, watching dozens of videos, trying of mods, and playing with friends, often into the dark hours of the night and frequently with all of us screaming at the top of our lungs as we encountered sudden monsters in the twisty entrails of the underground minecraft tunnels. nowadays, i rarely play minecraft anymore, but i continue to keep up to date with the community and the various updates that manifest from the development team. as a participant for more than two years before conducting this formal research, i made informal observations that i greatly relied on in writing up this study. but that is not to say that i framed this study as an objective observer removed entirely from bias or privilege. as an individual, i represent most of the core segment of the population that participates in these types of game spaces: white, male, middle class (without identifying as discretely heterosexual). does that impact my interaction with this space? i would like to argue not, as – and, having worked in the realm of fan studies in the past, i am not too surprised about this – all of the participants encapsulated in this project were particularly enthusiastic to share their experiences with me. henry jenkins has argued that fan-driven ethnographies – encapsulated by naming the researcher as “acafan” – bridge a gap of knowledge and access that other scholars are sometimes not privy to, while also addressing prior criticisms (really, pathologizing) of scholars doing fan work. as he notes in a blog post,2 acafen have “accountability” to the communities they are studying: a recursive public, in a sense, where fans (already analytical in their own ways) can speak back to scholars’ analyses, sometimes with even more vigor. some scholars have pushed back against jenkins’ popularizing of the term,3 and for good reason: henry notes that scholars in this vein can access different voices and thereby reach different conclusions. at such a high level of analysis, i recognize that i fit neatly into the aca-fandom framework, though i would like to argue that i don’t situate myself within it for this analysis. however, it is important to point out that i have particular biases that drive the research questions in this study. for instance, one major conflict around the minecraft community has been persson’s and mojang’s questionable relationship with the modding community, where such activities are vaguely encouraged and discouraged. the fact that mojang promised the community a modding api years ago and has still not delivered remains a stain on the community’s view of the team. my position regarding this conflict is largely irrelevant to this paper; however, i am strongly in favor of allowing these sorts                                                                                                                 2 http://henryjenkins.org/2011/06/acafandom_and_beyond_week_two.html 3 for example, see ian bogost’s blog post: http://www.bogost.com/blog/against_aca-fandom.shtml of behaviors to occur (particularly having been a member of the free culture movement for a number of years). thus, while my position within the community is at such a distance that it does not necessarily impact the behaviors and social relations that guide it (unlike, say, if i were a notable member of a well-known modding group), the argument i wish to put across guides the kind of questions i am interested in (though, to be blunt, i have not misrepresented the importance that mods and other participatory opportunities play to the community in favor of making that argument). further, it must be noted that my distanced position is both strategic and convenient. because studying such a distributed system of actors is difficult – literally thousands of participants and millions of pieces of media – i chose the route of, rather than focusing on a local area of the minecraft community that i could readily access, finding a sample of participants that self-elected their participation in the study via online communication. all of the interviews conducted in this project were through online means, primarily over email. however, i want to argue that this decision was largely tactical as well: not only was i able to conduct more interviews more easily (for example, because email provides immediate transcription and reference via search, though especially because i was able to conduct multiple interviews simultaneously), focusing solely on online communication reinforces the norms of the minecraft community: many interactions occur primarily online, and these interactions are largely limited to in-game text chat, message board posts, and instant messaging. while many players participate with family and friends – especially those under the age of 13, who primarily play together in or after school – i feel that allowing participants to describe their experiences in much the same way they do in the community infrastructures (social media, forums, etc.) would not misshape their self-disclosures. in fact, i believe it matches the metacommunicative routines that players are frequently required to adhere to when participating in digital communication: for example, i had two interview participants that responded on their phones. having to think about minecraft away from the computer is, as i believe from personal experience, a difficult but necessary task that many players face, as they consider their role in the system (eg., i’m a builder, and i need to keep thinking about how to coordinate my team to construct the castle tonight). overall, it’s a bit strange to say i might have occupied an ambivalent position while conducting this research: to many participants, i may have been seen in the role of a journalistic reporter, inquiring about the sustained phenomenon that minecraft has been for the past few years. the enthusiasm that i encountered by participants in fact sometimes challenge me to do more work: for instance, i had teens under the age of 16 politely ask to be interviewed and, when i had to decline, tell me to email them back as soon as i had approval to speak with them, because they just loved talking about minecraft that much. similarly, i had a handful of parents email me to ask if i would interview their young children (some even as young as 7), because they were as passionate about their kids’ enthusiasm as the kids were for the game. while i doubt that my ethnography will shape anyone’s outlook on the developments that have occurred around minecraft, i certainly hope that this study will be able to highlight the unique processes of participating in a produsage-driven community that underlie playing such a simple, online game, particularly for those in the creative and technology industries that would otherwise not have known about this particular case study. spatialized inequality twitter fin.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 stoltenberg, d. (2020, october 28-31). challenging spatial marginalization through social media communication?. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 201th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. challenging spatial marginalization through social media communication? a casestudy of the twitter discourse on housing in berlin daniela stoltenberg freie universität berlin, institute of media and communication studies introduction urban public life has historically and famously been structured by social stratification and a segregation of social milieus (enos, 2017; wirth, 1938). such spatialized social inequality along the lines of, most importantly, class and ethnicity engenders unequal access to civic participation and supportive social networks (kilroy, 2009). recently, social media data have proven capable of revealing these phenomena of socio-spatial des-integration (e.g., shelton et al., 2015). traditional, mass-mediated public discourses have largely been shown to reproduce socio-spatial inequality patterns. local journalistic coverage focuses on places within the centers of cities while neglecting the periphery (lindgren, 2009; oliver & myers, 1999; wiard & pereira, 2019). what focus there is on parts of the city outside the center is largely directed towards portraying districts with low socio-economic status and high shares of migrant populations in a negative light (lindgren, 2009; wiard & pereira, 2019). meanwhile, the internet and web 2.0 technologies in particular have often been hailed for their potential of bringing underrepresented voices into the public discourse and even creating so-called “networked counterpublics” (e.g., jackson & foucault welles, 2015), challenging social power structures. this contribution seeks to address the question of whether social media communication about urban issues challenges or reproduces the unequal attention patterns that have been shown to emerge in the mass-mediated public spheres of segregated cities. to do so, it introduces the concept of issue spatiality by bringing together the understanding of virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): stoltenberg, d. (2020, october). challenging spatial marginalization through social media communication? a case study of the twitter discourse on housing in berlin. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. issues as contentious, socially constructed matters of public debate (miller & riechert, 2001) and an understanding of space itself as socially constructed (löw, 2008). issue spatiality then emerges through references to places in public communication (placenaming, see wiard & pereira, 2019). through place-naming, issues become associated with particular locations within a single urban context, which may direct political attention, and thereby ultimately aid in challenging or reproducing spatialized inequalities themselves. empirically, the contribution asks: in what ways is the representation of urban locations through place-naming in social media issue discourses distributed along the lines of spatialized social stratification? method the study takes an issueand location-centric understanding of public discourses. it is based on a dataset of 50,672 twitter messages sent between december 2018 and april 2019, discussing the issue of housing in berlin and written by 18,274 unique users. housing is a hot-button issue in the rapidly gentrifying city (helbrecht, 2016), which has seen considerable political mobilization, both in the form of citywide popular referenda and hyperlocal tenants’ initiatives. berlin is also a pertinent case because it is among the most segregated german cities along the lines of class, ethnicity, and age (helbig & jähnen, 2018). to capture place-naming on a large scale, a simple computational approach was taken by applying a dictionary created for this purpose to the whole text corpus. through this, references to locations within the cities were detected and subsequently mapped. in particular, textual references to the 96 districts of berlin were searched. this yielded a final, location-based data set of 10,943 tweets by 5,474 unique users (21.6 percent of all messages), which referenced at least one district. regression analysis was leveraged to test whether population composition at the district level (share of elderly, share of non-citizen residents, average household income) as well as two issue relevance variables (average monthly rent, rent increase) explained the emergent attention distribution. moreover, district population size and a dichotomous variable, which indicated whether the district shared a name with the larger administrative burrough, were included as controls. results the analysis reveals a complex picture concerning the distribution of attention in the housing twitter discourse across berlin’s urban space. the spread of attention across the 96 districts follows a power-law trajectory, with very few districts garnering the vast majority of attention, while most districts are barely visible in the discourse. overall, a focus on the districts in the city center is clearly present, although there are some exceptions of districts even in the periphery receiving considerable discussion (see figure 1). figure 1: number of mentions per district (n = 50,671 tweets) a negative binomial regression model (see table 1) largely fails to explain the attention distribution. unsurprisingly, the clearest predictor is district population size; that is, larger districts are discussed more frequently. the second powerful predictor is whether the districts name is also (part of) the name of the burrough (i.e., the next larger adminstrative unit), pointing to a challenge of disentangling location references by scale. neither the average household income nor the share of elderly residents in a district add significant explanatory value. only the share of foreign citizens is significant, but surprisingly, the effect is a positive one (i.e., districts with more foreign citizens are mentioned more frequently). moreover, two different markers for local issue relevance on the district level (average rent in new contracts, average rent increase between 2009 and 2017) also fail to explain variance. table 1: negative binomial regression model for housing market twitter discourse se exp(b) (constant) 1.59 10.25 population (in 1,000) < .01 1.02*** is borough name (binary) .39 5.53*** share of elderly (65+) (in %) .03 .97 share of foreign citizens (in %) .02 1.05* household income (in 1,000 €/month) .34 1.06 monthly rent (2018, €/m², exc. utilities, new contracts) .10 1.00 rent increase (2009 to 2017) .01 1.00 nagelkerke’s pseudo-r2 .75 dependent variable: n = significance: note: number of references per berlin district in n = 10,943 with at least one such reference 96 berlin districts *: p <.05; **: p <.01; ***: p <.001 se = standard error; exp(b) = odds ratio discussion and outlook these results reveal an intriguing, if confusing picture of the issue spatiality of the housing discourse in berlin’s twittersphere. public discourse on this critical issue of urban life is clearly spatially structured, with a differential between center and periphery as the most striking pattern. this result is consistent with findings on the geographic attention distribution of local legacy media (lindgren, 2009; oliver & myers, 1999; wiard & pereira, 2019). the regression analysis, however, suggests that neither sociodemographic nor issue characteristics at the district level are capable of explaining much variance. in a sense, this is a hopeful finding – segregation and sociodemographic disadvantage do not appear to determine the spatial distribution of attention on twitter. on the other hand, many neighborhood populations are not represented in the discourse at all, even though they are not less affected by the overheated rental market. it is noteworthy that this attention distribution still makes some intuitive sense to those familiar with berlin and its political debates. one possible explanation for these patterns is that – rather than overall sociodemographic composition – the existence of a strong local civic culture and activist scene drives attention. including aspects such as number of communit organizations or availability of neighborhood meeting places in future analyses could test this proposition. further analyses should also dive more deeply into the content of communication through a mix of automated and qualitative methods to tackle the question of whether different local narratives associated with spatialized power differentials exist within the berlin housing discourse. references enos, r. d. (2017). the space between us. social geography and politics. cambridge: cambridge university press. helbig, m., & jähnen, s. (2018). wie brüchig ist die soziale architektur unserer städte? trends und analysen der segregation in 74 deutschen städten (no. p 2018-001). wzb discussion paper. helbrecht, i. (ed.). (2016). gentrifizierung in berlin: verdrängungsprozesse und bleibestrategien. transcript verlag. jackson, s. j., & foucault welles, b. (2015). hijacking# mynypd: social media dissent and networked counterpublics. journal of communication, 65(6), 932-952. lindgren, a. (2009). news, geography and disadvantage: mapping newspaper coverage of high-needs neighbourhoods in toronto, canada. canadian journal of urban research, 18(1), 74-97. löw, m. (2008). the constitution of space: the structuration of spaces through the simultaneity of effect and perception. european journal of social theory, 11(1), 25-49. miller, m. m., & riechert, b. p. (2001). the spiral of opportunity and frame resonance: mapping the issue cycle in news and public discourse. framing public life: perspectives on media and our understanding of the social world, 107-121. oliver, p. e., & myers, d. j. (1999). how events enter the public sphere: conflict, location, and sponsorship in local newspaper coverage of public events. american journal of sociology, 105(1), 38-87. shelton, t., poorthuis, a. & zook, m. (2015). social media and the city: rethinking urban socio-spatial inequality using user-generated geographic information. landscape and urban planning, 142, 198-211. wiard, v., & pereira, f. h. (2019). bad neighborhoods in a good city? space, place and brussels’ online news. journalism studies, 20(5), 649-674. wirth, l. (1938). urbanism as a way of life. american journal of sociology, 44(1), 1-24. please update your browser your browser isn’t supported anymore. update it to get the best youtube experience and our latest features. learn more safari opera microsoft edge google chrome mozilla firefox remind me later about copyright contact us terms privacy policy & safety © 2025 google llc selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): kennedy, j., wilken, r., nansen, b., arnold, m., & gibbs, m. (2019, october 2-5). household digital media ecologies – methodological innovations for fostering researcher-participant trust. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. household digital media ecologies – methodological innovations for fostering researcher-participant trust jenny kennedy rmit university rowan wilken rmit university bjorn nansen university of melbourne michael arnold university of melbourne martin gibbs university of melbourne introduction a key aim within much existing research on domestic technology use has been to gain access to households to develop a better understanding of the “‘intimate histories’ of how we live with a variety of media” technologies (morley 2007, p. 204), through examining these technologies in use, in situ. this, however, is more easily said than done. a major hurdle facing researchers is that the home is, of course, a quintessentially private space – one comprised of “narratives, practices and sensory experiences that [are] not usually available for public view” (pink 2004, p. 1). the presence of a researcher recording the everyday activities family life in the private sphere of the household, ideally for extensive periods of time, is often impractical and invasive (hine 2000; mackay & ivey 2004). not surprisingly, household media ethnographies have tended to focus on particular technologies, including pioneering research on television (e.g. morley 1986; spigel 1992), and computers (lally 2002). the unique challenges presented by the home as a private, “polymediated” environment (miller & madianou 2012), and by the dynamism and complexity of the connected home, call for additional methodological approaches and processes. in this paper, we describe a research methodology we have developed, based upon digital ethnography approaches, and which used mobile devices, digital ethnographic software and creative data collection activities, in order to overcome requirements for researchers to always be present in the field and to foster trust between us as researchers and our participants. our approach, refined over the course of a number 2 of interconnected research projects, addressed these difficulties through a staged process – utilising traditional ethnographic techniques, but augmenting them with something more novel: the “domestic probe”. background “domestic probes” are an adaption of “cultural probes”, a method developed by bill gaver and colleagues in response to the problems of user-centred design (gaver et al. 2004). cultural probes are particularly suited to investigating people’s everyday lives in settings difficult to reach using social science methods, such as questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, or participant-observation. this allows collection of data from sites where researcher presence is problematic, allows research materials to be collected over longer periods in multiple locations, and allows participants to provide samples of their own world in their own way. while cultural probes may appear to have much in common with diary studies or experiential sampling, they are intended to provoke greater participant engagement. research approach across our research projects, we adapted a cultural probe approach (which we called a domestic probe) by merging it with other techniques in order to support a more ethnographic approach of recording the everyday activities family life over an extended period of time, and to include participants as active collaborators in creating and interpreting their use of technology in the home. in essence, the domestic probe comprised a box of equipment given to a household to use in recording and interpreting their use of domestic technologies. they were kits of provocations, recording devices and other light-hearted activities and tools (stickers, scrapbooks, diaries, craft supplies). the precise contents of each domestic probe pack depended upon the make-up and preferences of the households being researched, and use of them (and their contents) evolved and was refined over the projects. in more recent work, we extended our participatory approach through the use of digital media. we pre-loaded ipad minis with a data collection software tool, ethnocorder, which we adapted for our domestic probes, extending the domestic probe approach with more digital ethnographic techniques. participants used the ethnocorder app to record images, video, sound and text, and to store and share the recordings with the researchers. using these technologies, our participants were asked to collect situated visual representations of domestic technology use. in particular, we asked participants to periodically generate visual data framed around a number of playful “televisual tasks”, named because they were inspired by familiar television formats and conventions that would likely be familiar to participants. tasks were designed to capture the household’s technology use using familiar televisual genres of a “nature documentary” (to capture household technology use in its “natural habitat”), “news report”, “paparazzi shot”, “diary room entry”, and “chat show interview”. trust and household technology research as we will argue in this paper, these approaches carry three specific trust-related methodological benefits (and challenges). first, the playful, whimsical, and sometimes provocative, nature of the research toolboxes we left with households 3 had the positive effect of fostering participant trust in us and in the larger aims and ambitions of the research. second, this trust worked both ways. not only did we have to trust participants with sets of research tools left behind for them to use (or not), we had to trust them having significant involvement in longitudinal research. the domestic probes stood in for us as researchers in absentia. they remained behind after we left each household, and provided these households with “objects to think with” (papert 1980), and were designed to encourage and empower subjects to collect, share, and interpret data in partnership with researchers. this is to say, by agreeing to participate in the study, the respective householders were in effect agreeing to participate as co-researchers or collaborators in our research work. although as researchers we recorded, interpreted and analysed probe-traces and the ensuing conversations, the probe required the close collaboration of and trust in the participants, not just as passive data sources – as subjects of research – but as full participants. not only were they responsible for the traces that built up as the probe was used, the probe’s traces invited participants to reflect upon and articulate their relations with the technology as the traces accumulated. third, the probes sought to disrupt familiarity with quotidian technologies and their uses, and to prompt participants to reflect on how and why they accommodated and “domesticated” – that is to say, trusted – particular household technologies. the recordings or traces generated through the use of the domestic probes provided provocative and evocative grist for the mill of conversation among the participant householders, and between the participant householders and ourselves. through these conversations, participants explained the significance of the media and technologies that populated their homes. in this way, these methods facilitated insight into and understanding of the ways in which existing and newly introduced technologies were being used in private spheres of everyday life. references gaver w, boucher a, pennington s & walker b (2004) cultural probes and the value of uncertainty, interactions 11(5): 53-56. hine c (2000) virtual ethnography. london: sage. lally e (2002) at home with computers. oxford: berg. mackay h & ivey d (2004) modern media in the home: an ethnographic study. rome: john libbey. miller d & madianou m (2012) migration and new media: transnational families and polymedia. london: routledge. morley d (2007) media, modernity and technology: the geography of the new. london: routledge. morley d (1986) family television: cultural power and domestic leisure. london: comedia publishing group. 4 papert s (1980) mindstorms: children, computers and powerful ideas. new york: basic books. pink s (2004) home truths: gender, domestic objects and everyday life. oxford: berg. spigel l (1992) make room for tv: television and the family ideal in postwar america. chicago: university of chicago press. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 platform as new “daddy”: china’s gendered wanghong economy and patriarchal platforms behind xiaofei han carleton university introduction wanghong, short for the chinese term “wangluo hongren” (“internet red people”— people who have gone viral online), refers to a particular stream of vocational chinese internet celebrities that have acquired their celebrity online and have acute incentives through various models to liquidate such online influence by transforming followers into consumers (han, 2020a). centred around the popularity of wanghong and their enormous potential in monetizing such popularity, wanghong economy in china evolves distinctive platform-based commodification models ranging from virtual gifts, tipping, advertising, and more increasingly, e-commerce, with injection of capital from major platform companies like alibaba and tencent (han, 2020a). through the framework of feminist political economy, this paper provides an explorative analysis of gender as a critical dimension of the prospering wanghong economy in china with special attention devoted to the e-commerce wanghong value chains. my analysis highlights the structurally embedded gender hierarchy of this platform business ecosystem. this research further connects the industrial, structural genderedness of wanghong economy with the cultural politics on popular livestreaming platform and examines how platform power has been associated with patriarchal order by looking into the specific case of updated meanings constructed around the word “baba” (daddy) that now is often used to refer to platforms. ultimately, this paper seeks to combine the industrial analysis of wanghong economy as a prominent “platform economy” in contemporary china with its cultural dimensions and highlight the critical roles of major chinese platform companies as not only new critical intermediaries in perpetuating the ongoing patriarchal system between the state and users but also active participants that aggressively profit from their construction of gendered wanghong economy value chains. methodology this paper adopts a combined method of document analysis and online ethnography. it firstly conducted analysis of different types of corporate documents of eight leading chinese platform companies: alilbaba, tencent, jd, pinduoduo, huya, douyu, douyin (chinese tiktok also owned by bytedance), and kuaishou; and five top wanghong incubators: ruhnn, tisu, chenfan, qianxun, and meiwan, in chinese market, which together have laid down the early structure and set prototype of e-commerce wanghong value chains since mid 2010s. the documents covered include audited corporate reports and registration statements, published contracts and agreements, corporate official websites, third-party industrial reports, professional and official databases and aggregators, pertinent policy documents. the document analysis was also combined with a six-month online ethnography on three chinese short video and livestreaming platforms that have a leading position in e-commerce wanghong sector—douyin, taobao livestream, and kuaishou, which enabled analyses of the cultural politics curated around wanghong in general and the specific case of referring host platform as “daddy” as well as the platform mechanisms behind that keeps perpetuating such patriarchal order between the platform and its users. key findings structural gender hierarchy analysis shows that, firstly, as e-commerce has become one of the primary monetization means for wanghong economy in recent years, the embedded genderedness of women-led consumption that undergirds china’s e-commerce platforms has been amplified with the coupling of wanghong industry of which the majority of wanghong are already women in the first place. women are actively involved more than ever in the production and distribution networks at downstream of the e-commerce wanghong value chains as entrepreneurs and workers in taobao villages (h. yu & cui, 2019). in contrast to the projection of wanghong economy as a new, progressive kind of platform economy that is by the women and for the women, there is a severe, structural gender hierarchy at the senior management level as revealed in table 1. the female participation is slightly better for wanghong incubators yet it is still disproportionally low considering the majority of wanghong they incubated is female. this structurally embedded gender hierarchy of wanghong economy suggests how the asymmetric power relation in terms of decision-making and wealth distribution between big platforms and wanghong as platform labor and users has intertwined with gender, making major platforms the new patriarchal actors. such structurally embedded genderedness of wanghong economy and the power hierarchy between participants and the patriarchal platforms is rendered explicit in the cultural politics and discursive construction around the term “baba” that is used to refer to popular short video and livestreaming platforms, douyin in particular. table 1. participation of women in major platforms in wanghong economy as of 2020 category platform (company) female board director (%) female wanghong incubated (%) major internet companies and ecommerce platforms alibaba 31.8% / tencent 11% / jd 10% / pinduoduo 0% / short video and livestreaming platforms huya 9% / douyu 9% / douyin (bytedance) 0% / kuaishou 0% / taobao livestream (alibaba) 31.8% / leading ecommerce wanghong incubators ruhnn 8.3% 100% qianxun 0% 89% meiwan 10% not disclosed tisu 20% 93% chenfan 60% 100% sources: author’s compilation of data extracted from corporate annual reports, corporate registration statements prepared for the securities and exchange commission in u.s. stock market and/or hong kong stock market, enterprise announcements and official websites, and national enterprise credit information and publicity system of people’s republic of china platform as new daddy increasing number of wanghong give their host platforms, douyin in particular, the nickname of “baba” (daddy) in their daily communication processes with audiences. two key themes are identified with the daddy narrative circulated on the platform douyin (dou baba). firstly, platform’s algorithms are perceived to be fair and reliable and it is the users’ responsibility to obey the rules of the platform (such as to maintain certain frequency and length for livestreaming sessions in order to be qualified to be recommended by the platform to larger pool of users) and the platform will reward obedient users with more visibility to the account. secondly, platform like dou baba is often glorified as the ultimate savior for streamers’ as it provides a better alternative for making a livelihood. many streamers perceive douyin as a shelter so they do not have to work twelve hours a day in a factory, given that many of them now are from semirural and rural areas of china, as more local governments provide support to the ecommerce wanghong business as an important way to raise local income and create more jobs. dou baba further provides tremendous opportunities for streamers to become successful, which indeed clings into the traditional father figure, especially in chinese society: streamers just need to obey and work hard towards father’s expectation to exchange for financial returns. such discursive construction of platformas-daddy echoes the structural genderedness of wanghong economy and the marginalization of streamers in getting involved at higher level of wanghong economy to represent their own benefits. it shows that wanghong are usually very aware of the asymmetric power relation between major platform companies and themselves but rarely find it problematic. in particular, through the daddy narrative, the exploitative nature of platforms is not only covered but further legitimized, naturalized, and even glorified, which have imposed further challenges for forming possible resistance from the participants. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): ren, x. (2019, october 2-5). from open knowledge sharing to semi-closed grouping: the evolution of academic social media in china. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. from open knowledge sharing to semi-closed grouping: the evolution of academic social media in china xiang ren western sydney university introduction while china has a growingly globalised system for scientific research, its social media system has long been separated from the rest of the world as facebook, twitter and the like are blocked in china. on the other hand, chinese technology companies have developed alternatives with vast amounts of users like wechat and weibo, which create a different system of academic social media, with different evolutionary trajectories and political economy (yu, asur, and huberman, 2001). this paper reviews the evolution of chinese academic social media in the past twenty years or so, with an analytical focus of trust and openness. it examines and compares the communicative models in scientific blog, weibo and wechat, and explores how academic social media co-evolve with academics’ changing demands, as well as broad social and institutional contexts in china. this work identifies transformative changes of chinese academic social media practices, particularly the shifting focus from open sharing of knowledge in public sphere to semi-closed and semi-public grouping based on acquaintance networking. while chinese academics believe acquaintance grouping enables more reliable and rewarding communications, this raises issues regarding a “closed” and “exclusive” approach to building trust in scholarly/scientific communications. inspired by the concept of “knowledge club” (potts, et al., 2017), this paper understands the evolution of chinese academic social media as a process of “clubization” of digital knowledge systems and further discusses the reasons and impact in the chinese contexts. methods, findings and arguments this research employs multiple methods and combines research data collected at different periods of time in order to understand the evolution of chinese academic social media from a multidimensional and historical perspective. it draws on over 20 in-depth interviews conducted during 2010-9 across different periods of social media evolution, 8 years’ participatory observation in science net blog, sina weibo and wechat following approximately 200 popular social media accounts and groups in scientific and scholarly communications, and document analysis and discourse analysis of corporate files, media reports, and online discussions. it categorises the evolution of chinese academic social media into three stages, as represented by three influential platforms, namely, blogging (science net blog), microblogging (sina weibo) and social grouping (wechat). • like academics elsewhere in the world, the chinese scholars began to share research, exchange ideas, engage discussions, and connect peers in scientific bbs portals in the 1990s. however, academic social media have not become an influential medium for informal scholarly communication until early 2000s when scientific blogging gained momentum in china, in particular, with the rise of science net blog. the emergent scientific blogosphere attracted both leading academics and early/mid-career scholars and started to challenge the established formal scientific communication system. • this transformation was further advanced by micro-blogging. launched in china in 2009, sina weibo soon became an extremely popular social media platform. weibo offers unprecedented interactivity, inclusiveness and connectedness in informal scholarly communication, especially enabling academics to effectively engage with general publics. • two years after weibo’s launch, wechat prevailed and soon became an infrastructural platform of china’s digital economy and society (zhang, li, wu, and li, 2017). the new communicative models and social functions of wechat, based on acquaintance networking and semi-public grouping, are redefining boundaries between public and private communications, in which, academics mostly communicate with selected group members and use social media for extending and enhancing real-world networks rather than contributing to virtual public sphere. the paper argues that, the changes of academic social media practices suggest a coevolution between the changing demands of chinese academics and the communication models of social media. while sharing, publishing and networking are basic functions of all forms of social media, different social media platforms have different priorities at different evolutionary stages (van dijck, 2013). blogs like science net serve as a public sphere within academia, along with relevant functions like a virtual water cooler and open access repository, which, however, have limited direct public engagement. micro-blogging offers a more efficient and interactive way for scholarly communication and academic outreach, and especially extends the scope beyond academic ivory tower. however, the inclusiveness of weibo is a double-edged sword, as controversies exist in the quality, trust and efficacy of scholarly communication, as well as the difficulties in china’s tightly censored internet. wechat seems to offer a solution through semi-public and semi-closed grouping, which, however, is exclusive by nature, given the maximum members for a wechat group is only 500. discussion and conclusion the evolution of academic social media suggests several important transitions: from access to usage, from scale to quality, from sharing to grouping, and from inclusive and anonymous virtual communities to selective acquaintance networks. potts et al propose an economic model of “knowledge club” to redefine journal publishing, where members form self-constituted groups, endeavouring to create new knowledge (potts, et al., 2017). for “knowledge clubs”, balancing the positive externalities of commons against the negative externalities of crowding in knowledge communications is key. the concept of “knowledge club” offers a perspective to explain the evolutionary changes of academic social media in china, particularly the decline of weibo’s public sphere and the rise of wechat groups. however, it raises new issues regarding trust and openness. trust in content, participants, platforms, and regulations is in the centre of social media transformations. social media is usually theorised as an “open” sphere. interestingly, the chinese social media evolution suggests a more “closed”, or “semi-closed” approach to building trust. for example, instead of universal open access to knowledge as a public good, many wechat groups are “by-invitation only” where like-minded people, acquaintances, or people with similar levels of expertise share knowledge as a club good. further, social media are usually viewed as disruptive technologies, bypassing traditional institutions (evens, 2013), which tend to democratise knowledge systems. however, through acquaintance networking or “knowledge clubs”, social and symbolic capitals of the real world institutions are increasingly important for building reputation and influence in the virtual social media world, which, re-institutionalises digital sphere and replicates the power structure of the established academic systems. this paper hopes to further the discussions on trust in the digital media systems through a focus of chinese academic social media and the perspective of trust and openness. for example, does the semi-public wechat grouping suggests a trend of clubisation of social media and knowledge systems in china (and beyond)? how can we balance the closed or semi-closed models like “wechat clubs” and open public sphere? references evens, t. (2013). platform leadership in online broadcasting markets. in handbook of social media management (pp. 477-491). springer, berlin, heidelberg. potts, j., hartley, j., montgomery, l., neylon, c., & rennie, e. (2017). a journal is a club: a new economic model for scholarly publishing. prometheus, 35(1), 75-92. van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media: oup usa. yu, l., asur, s., & huberman, b. a. (2011). what trends in chinese social media. arxiv preprint arxiv:1107.3522 zhang, c. b., li, y. n., wu, b., & li, d. j. (2017). how wechat can retain users: roles of network externalities, social interaction ties, and perceived values in building continuance intention. computers in human behavior, 69, 284-293. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): nicoll, benjamin. (2019, october 2-5). videogame engines and the politics of ‘democratised’ software development. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. videogame engines and the politics of ‘democratised’ software development benjamin nicoll queensland university of technology modes of production in the videogame industry have undergone fundamental changes over the past decade. once upon a time, in the 1990s and early 2000s, videogame studios would create bespoke development tools, assets, and engines from scratch, for use on internal projects. with a few notable exceptions, companies did not share their tools (unless leasing for a fee) or openly trade industry knowledge (o’donnell, 2014; see also darchen, 2016: 213-214 for an australian perspective). for the most part, development was slow, secretive, resource-intensive, and open only to those with access—financially and institutionally—to the proprietary ‘toolchains’ through which to produce and publish videogame content. since the early 2000s, however, several lowcost and low-barrier-to-entry game-making ‘engines’—such as ‘unity’ and ‘unreal’— have transformed the way people make videogames content. a game engine is a software tool that enables interactive digital content to be built, and a code framework that enables that content to run on different platforms, including consoles, smartphones, and virtual reality devices. game engines now form the backbone of videogame development and, increasingly, software development more broadly. the unity engine—a key player in this industry, and the main case study of this paper—aims to ‘democratise game development’ through an accessible editing interface, a flexible licensing structure, and a toolset that is interoperable with a range of different design tools, middleware software, programming languages, and production workflows. this paper evaluates the core claim made by and about unity—that it is has democratised game development—through a framework that analyses the engine’s ‘articulations’ in multiple areas of software culture: design, workflow, education, identity, political economy, and governance. it seeks to illustrate that unity’s perceived ‘democratisation’ extends not only to its accessibility, or even to the company’s decision to provide ‘free’ licenses for its core software (through a platform-based business model), but also in its efforts to cultivate an ‘affective community’—one that builds on long-standing ‘communitarian practices’ (guevara-vallalobos, 2011) in ‘indie’ development and ‘modding’ scenes—through extensive investment in education, events, and support. unity’s platform ecology can be described as what angela mcrobbie (2016) calls a ‘creativity dispositif’—an affective space where developers are granted a degree of social security to explore possibilities for self-entrepreneurship in what would otherwise be a career path fraught with risk and uncertainty. to make these claims, this paper draws on data from 24 semi-structured interviews with australian videogame developers, students, and educators, as well as participant observation and ethnographic fieldwork conducted at ‘the arcade’, a co-working space for (primarily) videogame studios located in melbourne’s southbank. it builds on an existing body of research on game engines and related development tools, including research informed by ideas and methods from actor network theory and object-oriented ontology, wherein game engines are understood as ‘actors’ situated in studio environments (see, for example, whitson, 2018; o'donnell, 2014; banks, 2013). my interview data indicate that unity is more than just an ‘actor’ in the studio space; it is also a cultural entity whose articulations in broader contexts of design, workflow, education, identity, and governance now need to be considered. these contexts form a ‘circuit of cultural software’, which informs the structure of this paper. my approach here has obvious resonances with the traditional ‘circuit of culture’ method (du gay et al., 1997), in which a cultural object (the prototypical example being the sony walkman) is passed through five interlocking registers—representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation—and researched accordingly. however, the circuit of culture cannot be applied wholesale to today’s software-based culture, of which game engines are an increasingly important component. as lev manovich (2013: 33) argues, design tools such as photoshop, blender, and maya ‘play a central role in shaping both the material elements and many of the immaterial structures that together make up ‘culture’”, and so configure the very circuitry that connect capital, labour, and creativity in today’s economy (see also qiu, gregg, and crawford, 2014). in the circuit of cultural software, the ‘discourse of democratisation’ is treated as a governing logic within which the interconnected circuits of design, workflow, identity, political economy, and education are situated. democratisation is a powerful, mobilising, and oftentimes-sensitive concept in videogame development (see harvey, 2014). whenever democratisation came up in the interviews—and it often did, unprompted—its status as an ‘empty signifier’ (laclau, 2007 [1996]) became clear. respondents linked democratisation to accessibility; versatility; empowerment; diversification of content and culture; recognition of the labour of artists and designers as opposed to just programmers; self-publishing; interfaces that are ‘creative-friendly’ and ‘visual’; the open sharing of knowledge; freedom to create and sell products on unity’s ‘asset store’ (which functions much like an app store); and care and community. democratisation was also articulated to contradictory feelings of ‘a lot more content and a lot more competition’; homogenized design practices; threats of monopolisation; silicon valley ‘blue-sky’ ideology; and the ongoing presence of ‘computer science baggage’ in ostensibly creative-friendly design tools. one respondent, who was developing a custom engine on a part-time basis, even went so far as to describe unity’s bid to democratise development as ‘absurd’, on the grounds that ‘democracy would imply that the wider world would decide who’s running unity, but they don’t’. has unity democratised development, as is often claimed? this is a complex question that requires an equally complex answer—not least because the very notion of ‘democracy’ is often intertwined with utopian ideals of ‘openness’ espoused by platforms such as wikipedia (cf. tckaz, 2014). however, as several of my respondents made clear, democracy can be a sensitive topic in a cultural context where, even in ostensibly democratic societies, an underlying ‘hatred of democracy’ (rancière, 2006) seems to have taken root. my sense is that people feel empowered by unity not only because of the tools it provides, but also because it makes a sustained commitment to democracy and equality in a political environment where such a commitment is felt to be lacking. there are multiple theories explaining unity’s rapid ascension to a quasi-monopolistic status, but one, perhaps under-acknowledged explanation—and one that will be explored in this paper—is that the company has leveraged the symbolic power of democratisation at a time when developers face increased vulnerability and precariousness because of, for example, the erosion of state welfare and policy support. references banks j (2013) co-creating videogames. london: bloomsbury. darchen s (2016) “clusters” or ‘communities’? analysing the spatial agglomeration of video game companies in australia. urban geography, 37(2), 202–222. du gay p, hall s, janes l, mackay h, and negus k (1997) doing cultural studies: the story of the sony walkman. london: thousand oaks. guevara-villalobos. 2011. cultures of independent game production: examining the relationship between community and labour. proceedings of digra 2011 conference: think design play: 1-18. retrieved from: http://www.digra.org/wpcontent/uploads/digital-library/11307.08157.pdf laclau e (2007 [1996]) emancipation(s). london: verso. manovich l (2013) software takes command. cambridge, ma: mit press. mcrobbie a (2016) be creative: making a living in the new culture industries. malden, ma: polity. o’donnell c (2014) developers’ dilemma: the secret world of videogame creators. cambridge, ma: mit press. qiu j.l, gregg m, and crawford k (2014) circuits of labour: a labour theory of the iphone era. triplec 12(2): 564-581. rancière j (2006) hatred of democracy. corcoran s (trans.). london: verso. tckaz n (2014) wikipedia and the politics of openness. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. whitson j (2018) voodoo software and boundary objects in game development: how developers collaborate and conflict with game engines and art tools. new media & society 20(7): 2315-2332. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): salzano, m. (2021, october). technoliberal participation: black lives matter and instagram slideshows. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. technoliberal participation: black lives matter and instagram slideshows matthew salzano university of maryland after the murder of george floyd in may 2020, black lives matter protests surged around the globe. amid covid-19, activism on social media flourished (rosenblatt, 2020). on instagram, use of the ten-image carousel as an informative slideshow akin to a powerpoint presentation gained significant attention: the new york times highlighted their “effort to democratize access to information” (guerrero, 2020). in this paper, i rhetorically analyze case studies to illustrate how instagram slideshows facilitated deliberation about participation. i argue that these posts reveal a tension in platformed digital activism: as digital templates broaden access to participation, technoliberal ideology constrains activist judgment. digital participation on instagram studying instagram slideshows within this specific context reveals how users of digital media navigate the ethics of participation. my rhetorical analysis performs a close reading of representative anecdotes to show how instagram slideshows prompted deliberation about participation in activism. this study highlights how questions about participation are at the center of political life, a “longstanding problem of the relation between persons and collectives” (kelty, 2019, p. 42) and builds on previous studies on digital media and participatory culture (jackson et al., 2020; steele, 2013). i collected posts that commented on the ethics of participation from my feed and from news articles about the phenomenon. i analyzed their visual and textual components in their mediated, political context. prior to the slideshow phenomenon, leaver et al. (2020) suggested that aesthetics on instagram are readily repeated by users to make their content appealing and recognizable to others in a logic they term templatability. templatability makes selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): salzano, m., (2021, october). technoliberal participation: black lives matter and instagram slideshows. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. participation in social life on instagram possible. the authors register, however, that templatability poses a problem to user agency and activism as it “may well diminish the feeling of … individual contributions to instagram, and with that a sense of being able to meaningfully communicate aesthetically, or contribute to change,” senses they consider essential to instagram (ch.7). in the case of summer 2020, the templatability of the slideshow itself offered a simple pathway for users to format their participation for instagram. instagram slideshows “[co-opt] popular design aesthetics from brands” to please instagram’s algorithm (nguyen, 2020, para. 6) and are easily created with free design software like canva and its pre-made design templates (ables, 2020). creating room for templates of activism and agency instagram slideshows offered necessary and accessible space for individuals to contribute to change. @sa.liine’s (2020) tie-dye themed “virtual protesting 101” provided a guide for how to use instagram to protest. the first slide offered: “black people do not need reminders that black lives matter. let’s target our posts towards the people that need to see and hear it. time to use the algorithm to our advantage.” the next slide offered hashtags to use to disrupt anti-black lives matter content, such as #blueline, #buildthewall, #womenfortrump. the last slides offered guidance on how to do so safely, without identifying people who could be targeted by “the oppressors” who see the images. this marks a departure from earlier conversations about activism and slacktivism which focused on going from online to the streets—these focused specifically on online-only praxis. when many were unable to safely complete ‘tangible action’ because of viral community spread of covid-19, instagram slideshows reflected an openness to many different forms of participation. transcending technoliberalism? as i appreciate the invitational quality of the slideshow phenomenon, i am also concerned about latent references to technoliberalism in the posts. by technoliberalism, i mean neoliberalism intensified by the belief that “digital technology can address liberalism’s shortcomings with an attenuated form of togetherness mediated by corporate platforms and focused on individual empowerment through software and hardware upgrades” (pfister & yang, 2018, p. 249). technoliberalism names the ideology that centers instagram as a site for political participation and provides the terms for assessment. technoliberal participation prioritizes ‘posting’ as a valued metric for participation. posting is cast as anti-racist in @ghostdump’s (2020) slideshow, “why the refusal to post online is often inherently racist: an explanation of why something as simple as an instagram story, can mean so much,” which has received more than 400,000 likes. set in a black and white theme, the post explains that “the absolute least you can do is repost the millions of instagram posts helping people spread the message on how to help, donate, protest, and converse. … a refusal to post is, at its core, a refusal to give up your comfort.” the post is right to call out the hypocrisy of people who wish for change but are silent and unwilling to call out injustice and risk being uncomfortable in their communities. but its moral nexus is on posts—sharing instagram slideshows. another post further reveals the technoliberal implications of focusing on posting. @norajmaxwell’s (2020) post titled “your solidarity shouldn’t follow the news cycle,” featured a slide with dots in a calendar grid representing the days between the killings of george floyd and walter wallace jr. the slideshow used dark blue dots to represent days where people were practicing their best allyship. the author claimed these days lined up with news coverage, ultimately arguing: “your solidarity shouldn’t require the witnessing of another viral video of a black person being injured or murdered.” @norajmaxwell is right that solidarity should not follow the news cycle. but like closing ‘move rings’ on an apple watch, participation is assessed in this slideshow via technoliberal methods of tracking. but just as high-calorie burning exercise that quickly closes move rings may not accurately reflect long term health, the instagram solidarity calendar valorizes public displays of activism, despite social justice work requiring reckonings with self and communities that may not be readily tracked or posted. conclusion inviting participation via instagram slideshows includes more people and circulates information to a broader network—but this practice also facilitates the use of technoliberal heuristics in deliberating about ethical participation. these ethical queries may be a task too nuanced for slideshow templates to serve as the guide for our answers. references ables, k. (2020, august 15). selfies and sunsets be gone. washington post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/08/15/instagram-raceactivism-slideshow-graphics/ @ghostdumps. (2020, may 30). “hello. a lot is going on, and i felt the need to say something. again i wish to reiterate, people aren’t obligated to post on their social….” instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/ca0zhfzfjlf/ guerrero, m. (2020, august 19). swipe-through activist guides are the new zines. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/style/instagram-activismgraphics-zines.html jackson, s. j., bailey, m., & welles, b. f. (2020). #hashtagactivism: networks of race and gender justice. the mit press. kelty, c. m. (2019). the participant: a century of participation in four stories. the university of chicago press. leaver, t., highfield, t., & abidin, c. (2020). instagram: visual social media cultures. polity. @norajmaxwell. (2020, october 28). your solidarity shouldn’t follow the news cycle. instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/cg5whxzroxm/?igshid=1vizdg4ln7m3u pfister, d. s., & yang, m. (2018). five theses on technoliberalism and the networked public sphere. communication and the public, 3(3), 247–262. https://doi.org/10.1177/2057047318794963 rosenblatt, k. (2020, september 26). a summer of digital protest. nbc news. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/summer-digital-protest-how-2020became-summer-activism-both-online-n1241001 @sa.liine. (2020, may 29). virtual protesting 101. instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/cayfgy6jde0/ steele, c. k. (2013). shaking off the ‘other’: appropriation of marginalized cultures and the ‘harlem shake.’ aoir selected papers of internet research, 3(0). https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/spir/article/view/8849 aoir 2018 gorea selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 navigating networked time: visual self-identity construction and management among youth michelle gorea queen’s university visual culture and mediatization according to dominant theorizations of contemporary society, many people’s daily practices now occur within, and reproduce, a social world where media are the fundamental reference and resource for the development of the self (couldry & hepp, 2017, p.15). as a result, the ways people make sense of the world and the practices they enact are entangled within the constraints, affordances and power-relations that are characterized by ‘deep-mediatization’ (couldry & hepp, 2017, p.7). as an important part of this continual mediation, the visual capacity of always present devices such as smartphones has increased the daily production and circulation of images of the self and others in social media, altering what and where images are made, and how they can be viewed and shared, making visual communication a far more routine activity in contemporary society (gomez-cruz & lehmuskallio, 2016). previous research has examined the incorporation of social media technologies into young people’s lives (livingstone & sefton-green, 2016), focusing on the dynamics of generational use and interaction (boyd, 2014), relationship maintenance (baym, 2015), and identity formation (turkle, 2012). this has revealed the mutual shaping of technologies, interaction, and identity in the broader contexts of economic and social change related to ‘millennials’. although there is literature surrounding youths’ social media practices, there is little work that focuses on the precise ways that daily visual practices get reworked into their conceptualizations of time, self-development and selfidentity. this work in progress paper is a component of a broader study, which focuses on: how the curation and circulation of images may be shaping how youth manage and negotiate their identities; the extent to which socio-economic differences frame youths’ encounters with, and understandings of, visual images; and the different practices that visual media devices allow, encourage, or constrain and how this may be creating scripts for behavior. this paper explores three key questions: suggested citation (apa): gorea, m. navigating networked time: visual self-identity construction and management among youth. (2018, october 10-13) paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 1) what happens when visuality becomes a part of youth’s everyday practices of interaction? 2) what roles are images playing in routine interaction among youth? 3) how and in what ways does the maintenance of a visually ‘mediated presence’ in social media shape youths’ views of the self? these questions are important to consider because as smartphones continue to mediate youth’s daily practices, images are increasingly conceptualized as meaningful modes of personal expression and identity construction (hand, 2017, p. 221). methods i will be reporting on emerging findings from a social media content analysis and indepth interview data. participants included me as a contact within their social media feeds enabling me to collect and analyze the images they posted on a daily basis before the in-depth interview. semi-structured interviewing was used to gain detailed understanding of the rationales different youth have for making, sharing and viewing images, whether they consider them to be significant and in what ways, how they understand the expectations for communicating visually, and to what extent they try to adapt and negotiate their immersion in visual social media. purposive sampling was used to recruit participants that reflect the broader demographic of several neighborhoods, capturing variation in socio-economic status, gender, age but also variations in material infrastructure (devices owned, access to wifi, data plans). 35 youth were interviewed between the ages of 15-22 from may 2017 through february 2018. findings this paper elaborates on findings within three categories that illustrate youth’s visual practices and how they are differently understood over time: (1) images of the self in the moment; (2) images of the self over time; and (3) images of the self under surveillance. firstly, i discuss the ways that participants use images as a primary vehicle for immediate identity expression and social judgment. some youth understand images as extensions of themselves and closely tied to their senses of not only who they are, but also who other people might be. through visual communication, the self is revealed in the moment. for instance, some youth monitor people’s personalized digital avatar (bitmoji) in real-time/location and accordingly change their behaviour based on this information. similar to recent research (tiidenberg, 2018; warfield, 2017), several rules for appropriate immediate visual communication emerged. such as excluding repetitive images and overly edited photos, and displaying interesting activities/events. the selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 increased pace and ubiquity of images coupled with the activity of looking adds a new component to the pre-existing pressures that youth feel regarding self-image and reputation. secondly, looking back at one’s visual self over time was significant. some youth commonly scroll back through images as a method of remembering and nostalgia, often with friends. the practice of regularly removing images was also common. a ‘silly’ image or a photograph of an ex-relationship was often perceived as requiring removal in order to portray a valid representation of ‘real life’. however, a common sentiment was that the images people post on social media are not representative of ‘real life’—as pictures of happiness and enjoyment are often posted when one is sad. this may prompt actions such as social media ‘cleanses’ and ‘breaks’, thus expressing youths’ broader desire to maintain a coherent idealized self-image both across platforms and within their daily lives. thirdly, i discuss how some participants’ perceived parental approval of their social media image is an important form of self-surveillance, shaping decisions about image posting in social media. some older youth seek approval of their image by asking friend’s opinions regarding what to post. embodying an older notion of surveillance, others routinely used the “find my friends” app to ensure their friends were safe, and not making a ‘fool’ of themselves in vulnerable situations. the findings indicate that some youth adjust their behaviour according to a perceived parental gaze while others self-survey themselves and those within their friend network for safety purposes. discussion the preliminary findings of this research suggest that although youth’s technological practices may not all be new, there are significant aspects of visuality that alters some of the key factors shaping youths’ use and understandings of new media technologies. visuality creates new knowledges and practices surrounding factors such as: age, socioeconomic status, peer group, and self-image. this results in youth not only having to manage these factors, but also engage in a variety of strategies to navigate the visibility of their digitally mediated lives. references baym, n. (2015). personal connections in the digital age. 2nd ed. cambridge: polity. boyd, d. (2014). it’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens. new haven: yale university press. selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 couldry, n., & hepp, a. (2017). the mediated construction of reality. cambridge: polity. gómez cruz, e., & lehmuskallio, a. (ed.). (2016). digital photography and everyday life, london: routledge. hand, m. (2017). visuality in social media: researching images, circulations, and practices. in l. sloan and a. quan-haase (eds.), the sage handbook of social media research methods (pp. 215-231). london: sage. livingstone, s., & sefton-green, j. (2016). the class: living and learning in the digital age. new york: new york university press. tiidenberg, k. (2018). selfies: why we love (and hate) them. united kingdom: emerald publishing. turkle, s. (2012). alone together. new york: basic books. warfield, k. (2017). “i set the camera on the handle of my dresser”: re-matter-ializing social media visual methods through a case study of selfies. media and communication, vol. 5 (4): 65-74. microsoft word 753-503-1-pb.doc selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 1 transgressive networks: this week in blackness and resistance through online programming abstract this paper explores the dynamics of power and resistance surrounding the independent online media network this week in blackness (twib). created by elon james white, twib is comprised of six podcasts covering a diverse range of topics, an active blog, and a fully functioning social networking site. white and his co-hosts l. joy williams, dacia mitchell, and aaron rand freeman, collectively nicknamed team blackness, have gained visibility in the progressive media world and have cultivated a substantial online audience. despite this, twib has had difficulty connecting with other media outlets or finding sponsors to support their work. i argue that this is because twib’s programming embraces a diverse, heterogeneous, and internally contradictory understanding of “blackness” that makes it largely incompatible with existing media production and consumption paradigms even in online and independent media spaces. keywords race and ethnicity; podcasts; independent media this paper explores the dynamics of power and resistance that surround the programming of the independent online media network this week in blackness (twib). the terms “programming” and “network” function in a dual sense here. while twib can be thought of as a traditional independent media network producing programming in the form of six audio podcasts, twib also exists online as a network of individuals and technologies. manuel castells (2011) argues that within this latter definition of networks a key locus of power is “programming,” or setting of the ideological, discursive, and normative parameters, of the network. twib’s programming, in both understandings of the word, deliberately cultivates resistance. by explicitly invoking “blackness,” it rejects the discourses of colorblindness that are the prevailing racial framework in the u.s. yet, simultaneously, it actively resists alignment with common political and cultural frames frequently relied upon by both mainstream and independent media to make blackness culturally intelligible. twib intentionally destabilizes racial paradigms, particularly through the network’s persistent attention to the dynamics of intersectionality. as a result of its transgressive programming, designed in ways that are largely incompatible with the logics of existing media networks, twib has found difficulty gaining support from advertisers and other media outlets. comedian, political commentator, and digital media entrepreneur elon james white was once told by a colleague, “there will never be an intelligent nigger show.” while white rejected this statement, he found himself at a loss for examples that could disprove such an assertion. in 2008, white launched a successful video series titled this week in blackness, and by the beginning of 2013 had developed twib into an online media franchise comprised of six podcasts covering a diverse array topics, an extensive blog, and a fully functioning social networking site. twib has been a labor of love for white and his co-hosts l. joy williams, dacia mitchell, and aaron rand freeman, know collectively as “team blackness.” independently funded and operated out of white’s home in brooklyn, twib has managed on site coverage from events across the country such as the naacp’s leadership 500 conference and the black congressional caucus conference. their flagship show, twib radio, dubbed best podcast by the 2011 black weblog awards, has attracted a range of high profile guests including jesse jackson, melissa harris-perry, ben jealous, lizz winstead, tim wise, and michael eric dyson. though twib has achieved visibility in the progressive media world and boasts a substantial and engaged fanbase, with over 120,000 downloads of its shows in the first the week of february 2013, it has struggled to find both media partners and advertiser support. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 2 despite their popularity and impressive output, twib has found difficulty connecting to other media networks. this is largely because twib offers neither a clear audience demographic for advertisers nor clear affinities with other black media brands. media professionals and prospective sponsors have repeatedly told team blackness that there simply is no audience for their content, and black media franchises like news one and the root have eschewed proposed partnerships with twib. twib’s audience is comprised of predominantly single, middle-class, college educated 24-44 year olds who are disproportionately female and 40 percent non-black (white, 2013). these fans embrace twib’s eclectic content that ranges from in depth political analysis to video game reviews to off-color conversation about the oddest and most inappropriate news of the day. neither twib’s audience nor its shows fit with pre-existing models of media audiences or representations. twib is programmed, both in castell’s sense and in terms of media content, to resist easy categorization, making it a risky proposition for advertisers and media outlets alike. perhaps the most transgressive aspect of how the twib network is programmed is its emphasis on intersectionality. at the core of twib’s project is the destabilization of constructions of blackness through the embrace of intragroup diversity. generally, media spaces marked as “black” privilege racial identities and discourses over those of gender, sexuality, or class. this often, as kimberle crenshaw (1991, pp. 1282) argues, serves to reify rather than challenge social hierarchies and power relations. twib invokes black racial identity as inseparable from gender identity, sexuality, and class, colliding these discourses in ways that disintegrate the forms of identity politics that are often perceived as the only alternative to mainstream u.s. culture’s quest for “colorblindness.” in the context of twib’s programming, blackness becomes not one, or even a handful of perspectives and experiences, but a complex polyphony of black voices that is unruly and not easily intelligible in existing media paradigms. combining analysis of over 500 hours of audio produced by twib with ethnographic data obtained through interviews with team blackness and in-studio observations of their production practices, i explore how twib resists prevailing media practices and racial representations through attention to intersectionality. this paper contributes to two underdeveloped bodies of academic literature – race and digital media and podcasting. digital media studies often erases users of color and the dynamics of race and racial identity online. when users of color do receive scholarly attention, most often they are cast as victims with limited technological access and resources (nelson et al., 2001, pp. 1-3). this frames people of color as technological outsiders and obscures the many people of color who are online (everett, 2008). further, there has been little research about podcasting in general, and black podcasters are completely absent from this literature. however, there is a large and vibrant community of black podcasters with well over forty different podcasts interconnected by a network of hosts and fans, the majority of whom explicitly mark themselves and their work as black. this paper contributes to the much-needed examination of the intersection of race and podcasting as a form of independent media production. acknowledgments i would like to thank team blackness for their generosity with their time and insight. shout out to the chatroom. references castells, m. (2011). a network theory of power. international journal of communications, 5, 773 787. crenshaw, k. (1991). mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. stanford law review, 43(6), 1241-1299. everett, a. (2009). digital diaspora: a race for cyberspace. albany, ny: state university of new york press. selected papers of internet research 14.0, 2013: denver, usa 3 nelson, a., tu, t. l. n., & hines, a. h. (2001). hidden circuits. in a. h. hines, a. nelson & t. l. n. tu (eds.), technicolor: race, technology, and everyday life (pp. 1-12). new york: new york university press. white, e. j. (2013, february 7). google plus interview. aoir 2020 submission.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): lastname, firstinitial. (2020, october). paper title. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. twittering research, calling out and canceling cultures: a story and some questions suzanne de castell the university of british columbia helen w. kennedy the university of nottingham sarah atkinson king’s college london jennifer jenson the university of british columbia colleen thumlert university of toronto background and context this is an analysis of how twitter played a significant, agentive and accountable role in the difficult birth and premature unravelling of a government-funded international feminist research network. we situate this case study and this process of initiation and annihilation within the broader context within which social media platforms are a critical site of intensive affective discursive practices through which individual and institutional reputations are made and unmade – frequently with far reaching professional and or personal consequences. to date there has been little academic study of the broader implications of both the potential benefits of social media for academic networking (see stewart, b. (2016) for an ethnographically grounded analysis of the benefits) and the perils (basak, r., ganguly, n., sural, s., & ghosh, s. k., 2016). one of the only explicit publications on this topic is the very recent book by diane anderson (2018) problematic: how toxic callout culture is destroying feminism. suggested citation (apa): de castell, s., kennedy, h., atkinson, s., jenson, j., thumlert, c. (2020, october). twittering research, calling out and canceling cultures: a story and some questions. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. through this case study, we look at the ways in which social media such as twitter can provide feminist academics with very public, very visible evidence of the issues they are aiming to counter which can then be pivotal in gaining funding and/or approval for publication. a prominent example of this is the way in which #gamergate brought to international popular and public attention the misogyny that feminist game studies had been decrying for years. suddenly, this was no longer a minoritarian feminist research finding but a very real public outpouring of toxic, virulent misogyny on a mass scale. funding feminism: gamergate’s unwitting gift? in a social networking world, we can be sure that #gamergate’s furious explosion of online misogyny in 2014, at least in part, fueled the project’s funding success. gamergate highlighted an increasingly violent public voice threatening, quite literally, violence against women speaking in or on videogames, imparting a topical urgency to the already serious problems we were addressing, and making our proposal for a cross-sectoral interventionist partnership more compelling. then, as now, using the term “feminist” was considered a self-destructive move (lopez, muldoon, mckeown, 2019), but since we only wanted to, or indeed could, do the work in those terms, to be consistent and honest with our research we chose to persist with it, and were surprised and gratified to find the program funded to the tune of millions of research dollars. the gamergate hashtag and its wide circulation via twitter had provided a high profile platform through which feminist research was legitimated. this case study involves the comparative analysis of two data sets – the first – detailed written responses of the research project participants gathered in a workshop at the concluding event of the funded project, and the second – a set of tweets and responses that erupted over a number of days shortly after that event. a study of how internet communications impacted the life and somewhat premature death of a research network was undertaken for two reasons. the first is that the quality of the data provided through the rapidly disseminated and amplified negative ‘shaming’ tweets might be able to speak clearly and persuasively about how twitter works, especially as a medium for research communication. we captured a data set small enough, deep enough, and focused enough to be an exemplary testing ground to investigate the causal impacts of twitter’s algorithmic ethics on the transformation of information, ideas, and professional and personal reputations. the second is that just five days before, we had materially gathered in-depth qualitative feedback on the value and efficacy of the project with nearly 40 people. we had used an innovative reflexive tool to gather this feedback and thus had a second rich and comprehensive data set that told a very different but much less visible narrative about the project. the data produced through the materially embodied event had a much slower gestation, as it needed to be transcribed and coded and then analysed through standard academic processes. as such, this rich, complex, embodied and reflexive data remains invisible and is not easily subject to the rapid dissemination and upvoting of discursive practices within twitter and other social media platforms. for this presentation, we subject these two data sets, their origins, their processes of dissemination and their sentiment to a deep, dispassionate feminist analysis seeking to understand how we might ensure that material lived realities are not effaced through virtual discursive practices that damage bodies and reputations without consequence. conclusion a noteworthy feature of this research network was the high number of professional and personal relationships that pre-existed the project, hence both online and offline data sets include prior friends, collaborators, and co-workers, as well as staff and students. what made this project distinctive, and especially promising, is that the bonds between and among partners weren’t just forged for this particular grant, but in the majority of cases had years of collaborative work and scholarly association behind them—and those that were newly forged shared explicit commitments to feminist research and praxis. relationships in this network weren’t simply academic or intellectual or disciplinary or, when payment was involved, not only financial – but, in a good sense, “ideological”, that is to say, explicitly principled. in addition to this shared commitment to feminist principles, practices, and aspirations, there were multiple kinds and degrees of relationships. taken together, these two discrete sets of data powerfully demonstrate the capability of twitter as a platform whose design enables it to shape user behaviours, and more specifically, to destabilize and indeed dissolve, instantaneously and without accountability, not just embodied professional and personal relationships (ross, 2019), but important trajectories of scholarly and engaged research – and not just conceptions, but practices of truth. what happens when an information economy supersedes and overrides what occurs in ‘real life’? this opportunistic, illuminating look into the impact of a small, localized twitter event on a network of researchers demonstrates, yet again, the tensions, ruptures, and conflict addressed and provoked by feminist work. references anderson, d. e. (2018). problematic: how toxic callout culture is destroying feminism. omaha, nebraska: university of nebraska press. basak, r., ganguly, n., sural, s., & ghosh, s. k. (2016, april). look before you shame: a study on shaming activities on twitter. in proceedings of the 25th international conference companion on world wide web (pp. 11-12). lamba, h., malik, m. m., & pfeffer, j. (2015, august). a tempest in a teacup? analyzing firestorms on twitter. in 2015 ieee/acm international conference on advances in social networks analysis and mining (asonam) (pp. 17-24). ieee. lopez, k. j., muldoon, m. l., & mckeown, j. k. l. (2019). one day of #feminism: twitter as a complex digital arena for wielding, shielding, and trolling talk on feminism. leisure sciences, 41(3), 203-220. doi: 10.1080/01490400.2018.1448022 ross, l. (2019, august 17). i’m a black feminist. i think call-out culture is toxic. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/17/opinion/sunday/cancel-culture-callout.html stewart, b. (2016). collapsed publics: orality, literacy, and vulnerability in academic twitter. journal of applied social theory, 1(1), 61-86. wright, l., ruths, d., dillon, k. p., saleem, h. m., & benesch, s. (2017, august). vectors for counterspeech on twitter. in proceedings of the first workshop on abusive language online (pp. 57-62). aoir2017-submission-loldiers-full ! selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 jamming the political with “intergalactic peace” – networked publics of anti-racism 
! salla-maaria laaksonen university of helsinki, finland ! merja porttikivi aalto university, finland ! introduction ! online environments have offered new ways for citizens to participate in political activities, create collective action, and form social movements. following flanagin, stohl and bimber (2006) collective action is an inherently communicative phenomenon that includes connecting people through their interest in a public good, communicating messages to these people, as well as coordinating, integrating, and synchronizing the contributions of these individuals. following this proposition, this paper investigates how a social movement is constituted as an organization through communication on digital media platforms. ! the study builds on the cco approach of organizational studies and sees organizations being constituted in communication (cooren et al., 2011). from this perspective communicative action emerges in conversations and is solidified in texts. as social media platforms allow for more decentralized forms of communication and action, they enforce openness to the process of constitution (kavada, 2016). hence, organizations are not only constituted by their internal communication, but also by “a network of relations between organizations and their public sphere” (raupp, 2011). ! to empirically study this co-participative form of communicative constitution we analyze the online presence of a social movement activist group, loldiers of odin, an activist group born as a parody to the anti-immigration group soldiers of odin. the group makes all their public appearances disguised, dressed as clowns. using network analysis combined with rhetorical analysis we trace the process of collective agency constituting itself as a collective actor in the digital realm (kavada, 2016). in particular, we depict the ways how novel, dramatic, and non-institutionalised forms of digital political expression act as constitutive elements for the emerging organization. !! suggested citation (apa): laaksonen, s-m. & porttikivi, m. (2017, october 18-21). jamming the political with intergalactic peace – networked episodes of anti-racism. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. social movements as communicative constitutions ! social movements are a significant social and political force that transform societies through their engagement with new media, thus making communication the essential way of enabling networking, sharing, and mobilization (benford & snow, 2000; kelly garret, 2006; loader, 2008), even ideology formation. the strategic use of novel, dramatic, unorthodox, and non-institutionalised forms of political expression to try to shape public opinion´and put pressure on those in positions of authority’ distinguishes social movements from other political actors (van laer & van alst, 2009). ! one such non-institutionalised form of political expression is culture jamming: creating a remix of known content to incorporate critical perspectives (e.g. memes, wiggins & bowers, 2015). consequently, bart cammaerts (2007) introduces the concept of political jamming, which means “the cultural jamming techniques used by political actors, as well as by citizens, in their political communication within fragmented counter-public spheres, as well as in the mainstream public sphere”. hence, the focus of the political jam is in politics, and it is directed against policies by governments, or acting against formal political actors, such as political parties, against undesirable behaviour in society. ! our empirical case illustrates the forms of political jamming in the online context. our primary data consists of all posts and comments published in 2016 on the loldiers of odin facebook page, including posts from both the page and page likers, extracted through the facebook api. this data set includes 140 posts, with 14212 users liking, commenting, or reacting to those posts a total of 54996 times. the data provides a chronological account to the lifecycle of the group during the first year of its existence, providing links to other relevant media coverage. following blaschke et al. (2012) proposition, we use network analysis to study the network of communication episodes, where the vertices of the network represent communication episodes and the edges represent individuals. ! preliminary results ! our preliminary results show how the digital dimensions bring an important aspect to the existence of the loldiers as a collective actor. the clown-suited activists are only a handful, but their online presence has engaged over 14 000 individual users during the year of 2016. however, the network graph (fig 1) shows how only a minority of users are connected to several communication episodes, and the vast majority remains as isolates on the border areas of the network, connected through one or two episodes only. further, from the full amount of activated page users only 1137 users commented on the page. the rest participated using likes and reactions, which is typical for any facebook page community. ! loldiers extensively use visual modes of communication to communicate their point. many of their statements are videos and photographs – including the most central episodes identified in the network analysis (figure 1). in particular, they use memetic content in order to maximise the replication and distribution capabilities of the issues they advocate. the performance of the loldiers becomes an example of an artefact with suggested citation (apa): laaksonen, s-m. & porttikivi, m. (2017, october 18-21). jamming the political with intergalactic peace – networked episodes of anti-racism. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. virtual physicality (wiggins & bowers, 2015), a thing existing in the digital environment, in the human mind – but also in the physical realm through their public appearances. ! hence, the group exists both as a material entity and as a digital entity. we argue that in particular the digital performance gives meaning to the group and its activity. the material and physical parts of their political jamming performance take place on the streets and in the demonstrations, but the digital dimension makes the protest more widespread, and allows them to use certain rhetorical elements, narratives, and forms of communication typical to the digital age. through the communicative episodes the group creates an ongoing digital performance through which the collective constitutes itself, and through which it organizes a wider protest. we argue that the public communication acts publicly performed on facebook as well as the voices of the supporters recorded as comments open important views to the process where the collective actor of loldiers is constituted, and where it performs its communication capacities. ! references ! benford, r., & snow, d. (2000). framing processes and social movements: an overview and assessment. annual review of sociology, 611-639. ! bennett, w.l., & segerberg, a. (2013). the logic of connective action: digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. new york: cambridge university press. ! suggested citation (apa): laaksonen, s-m. & porttikivi, m. (2017, october 18-21). jamming the political with intergalactic peace – networked episodes of anti-racism. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. figure 1. posts on red, commenters on blue, page on black. blaschke, s., schoeneborn, d., & seidl, d. (2012). organizations as networks of communication episodes: turning the network perspective inside out. organization studies, 33(7), 879–906. ! cammaerts, b. (2007). jamming the political: beyond counter-hegemonic practices. continuum, 21(1), 71–90. ! cooren, f., kuhn, t. r., cornelissen, j. p. & clark, t. (2011). communication, organizing, and organization. organization studies, 32(9), 1149–1170. ! della porta, d., & diani, m. (2009). social movements: an introduction. john wiley & sons. ! flanagin, a. j., stohl, c., & bimber, b. (2006). modeling the structure of collective action. communication monographs, 73(1), 29-54. ! kavada, a. (2016). social movements and political agency in the digital age: a communication approach. media and communication, 4(4), 8. ! loader, b. d. (2008). social movements and new media. sociology compass, 2(6), 1920-1933. ! raupp, j. (2011). organizational communication in a networked public sphere. studies in communication, 1, 15-36. ! van laer, j., & van aelst, p. (2009). cyber-protest and civil society: the internet and action repertoires in social movements. handbook on internet crime, 230-254. ! wiggins, b. e., & bowers, g. b. (2015). memes as genre: a structurational analysis of the memescape. new media & society, 17(11), 1886-1906. suggested citation (apa): laaksonen, s-m. & porttikivi, m. (2017, october 18-21). jamming the political with intergalactic peace – networked episodes of anti-racism. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. removing the physical body from interaction finished selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): grønborg, j. h. (2018, october 10-13). removing the physical body from interaction – a phenomenological investigation into laypeople sharing self-tracked exercise data on social networking sites when they feel uneasy exercising with people. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. removing the physical body from interaction a phenomenological investigation into laypeople sharing self-tracked exercise data on social network sites when they feel uneasy exercising with people joeb høfdinghoff grønborg aarhus university introduction self-tracking applications (apps) like endomondo, runkeeper and strava have made it effortless for laypeople to measure their exercise activity and turn it into detailed data on running time, distance, average pace, calories burned etc. the users can share the exercise data with personal networks of users (often named friends) on the apps’ internal social network sites (ellison & boyd, 2013) or external social network sites such as facebook or twitter. few studies, however, have shed light on how people use self-tracking in their everyday lives (lupton, 2016) – e.g. why people share exercise data on social network sites. recreational athletes seem to share workouts to grow bonds with likeminded people, to receive positive feedback on their workouts and to update networks on their comings and goings (stragier & mechant, 2013). when sharing data, people can feel more motivated to exercise if they receive social support from friends (e.g. textual responses à la »good job« in comment fields) or if they feel social pressure – e.g. to comply with uttered exercise goals or to beat their friends’ activity-levels (consolvo, everitt, smith, & landay, 2006). thus, sharing behavior is described in general terms. but understandings of the detailed, behavioral contexts that make laypeople’s sharing practices meaningful to research readers are currently not pursued so that the descriptions become what the anthropologist clifford geertz, following gilbert ryle, calls thick (geertz, 1973). some people feel uneasy when exercising with – or in the presence of – people. in this paper, i provide a thick description of people that bypass their struggle with social exercise by sharing exercise data on social network sites. i utilize the lived experience of two female newcomers to exercise, amanda and dorte, to illustrate this. firstly, using the philosopher and medical doctor drew leder’s phenomenological investigations into embodiment, i analyze how the females’ bodies dys-appear (leder, 1990) when they exercise near/with people. secondly, i examine how their networks of friends function as a beneficial form of exercise sociality that encourages amanda and dorte’s exercise activity. my empirical data originates from an exploratory, interview study of 12 danish, recreational athletes’ experiences with exercise-related self-tracking apps. dys-appearing bodies: feeling uneasy when exercising with/near people when a body dys-appears, it means that the body feels bad, hard or ill – it becomes the center of negative, sensorial attention for the individual (leder, 1990). amanda and dorte’s bodies dys-appear when they exercise with – or in the presence of – people, respectively. amanda feels uneasy when she runs with people. she uses the expression »i’m dying, i’m dying, i’m dying« to account for a constant and diffuse pain that sieges her dysappearing body during exercise. pain can, namely, both have a »(…) definite location and/or be diffused, a generalized place in which we dwell as when we simply say ”i am in pain.”« (leder, 2016, p. 11). a few times, dorte felt forced to run with her sister. her sister enjoys the mutual incorporation (leder, 1990) in discussing and negotiating the everyday life during exercise. but because of the sister being more fit, amanda is worried that finding a common (possibly faster) running pace will escalate her dysappearance. accordingly, she avoids being physically active with people. somewhat similarly, overweight dorte avoids exercising in the presence of people. she used to go to the gym. during workouts, she imagined that fit gym-goers observed her and thought: »who is that weird, fat fool over there?«. if the gaze of other people is experienced as hostile or objectifying, the individual getting negative attention can start to experience their body as problematic, alien and/or wrong (leder, 1990). dorte’s body dys-appeared at the gym because she believed the fit gym-goers monitored her workout execution and judged the execution as faulty. initially, dorte got too self-conscious to successfully perform workouts: her body became dysfunctional. subsequently, she shortened workouts to escape what she perceived of as a situation full of negative assessments of her body and physical abilities. finally, she quit the gym. removing the physical body from interaction today, amanda and dorte track and perform running and aerobic in solitude. they share the tracking data with networks of friends on endomondo and runkeeper. in line with findings from (consolvo et al., 2006), the sharing creates a social pressure: »it feels like constantly having pairs of eyes focused upon you«, dorte explains. alternately, the two newcomers to exercise and their friends serve as audiences to each other’s exercise data. they are engaged in participatory surveillance (albrechtslund, 2008). because of the participatory surveillance, amanda and dorte are more likely to exercise as well as »keep up the spirit« (perform better) during exercise. mutual and somewhat systematic practices of liking tracking data within the networks refresh the feeling of a present audience. when sharing the exercise data on social network sites, the physical body is removed from interaction. in contrast to exercising with/near people, the bodyless exercise interaction encourages physical activity for the researched newcomers. amanda does not have to worry about a common running pace affecting her dysappearance, while she benefits from the social pressure generated by mediated running partners. in the case of dorte, her network consists of 10 family members and friends. unlike in the gym, she controls who is monitoring her activity: she customizes an audience that creates social pressure but whose attention is experienced as friendly. thus, dysappearance is less likely to occur than in the gym. furthermore, the object of people’s gaze is the mediated, datafied performance (the tracking) rather than the corporeal performance (the exercising, overweight body) which also reduces the risk of experiencing dys-appearance. conclusion my research shows that some individuals are able to bypass their social exercise struggle and encourage physical activity by sharing tracking data on social network sites. however, many questions arise – e.g. in what cases are tracking data shared internally/externally of the apps? what attitudes toward sharing exercise data on social network sites are held by friends? when does the visibility of tracking data have negative effects for the individual athlete? references albrechtslund, a. (2008). online social networking as participatory surveillance. first monday, 13(3). consolvo, s., everitt, k., smith, i., & landay, j. a. (2006). design requirements for technologies that encourage physical activity. in chi '06 proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 457–466). presented at chi 2006. ellison, n. b., & boyd, d. (2013). sociality through social network sites. in w. h. dutton (ed.), the oxford handbook of internet studies (pp. 151–172). oxford: oxford university press. geertz, c. (1973). the interpretation of cultures. new york: basic books. leder, d. (1990). the dys-appearing body. in the absent body (pp. 69–99). chicago: the university of chicago press. leder, d. (2016). the experiential paradoxes of pain. journal of medicine and philosophy, 1–17. lupton, d. (2016). the quantified self: a sociology of self-tracking. cambridge: polity press. stragier, j., & mechant, p. (2013). mobile fitness apps for promoting physical activity on twitter: the #runkeeper case. in etmaal van de communicatiewetenschappen, proceedings. presented at the etmaal van de communicatiewetenschap. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): haddon, l., livingstone, s., mascheroni, g., stoilova, m., cino, d., and doyle, m. (2020, october). antecedents and consequences of digital skills. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. antecedents and consequences of digital skills leslie haddon lse, london, uk sonia livingstone, lse, london, uk giovanna mascheroni, università cattolica del sacro cuore, milan, italy mariya stoilova, lse, london, uk davide cino università cattolica del sacro cuore, milan, italy mary-alice doyle lse, london, uk introduction what actors and factors shape children and young people’s digital skills? and how do their digital skills impact the rest of their lives? these are the two research questions addressed in this paper, along with an analysis of how the research literature to date has measured digital skills. the findings reported here come from a systematic evidence review of the antecedents and consequences of digital skills (haddon, cino, doyle, livingstone, mascheroni and stoilova, forthcoming) as part of the yskills project funded by the eu’s horizon 2020 programme. systematic evidence review procedure the databases searched were web of science and scopus, international bibliography of the social sciences, communication and mass media, eric, psychinfo, embase and socindex. the inclusion criteria were that studies should examine children’s digital skills, use quantitative methods, cover children aged 12-17 years old, involve high-quality, methodologically robust research and be published in english between 2010 and january 2020. these criteria produced 110 studies from 64 countries, which is the material upon which the analysis below is based. skills there was considerable variation in how digital skills were measured in the studies reviewed. for example, skills were measured by asking about general self-efficacy, particular knowledge claims (‘i can do x’), demonstrating skills by actions taken and skill performance tests. the most common measures involved self-reported skills, usually using a likert scale. some questions asked the child to evaluate very specific instrumental competences with varying degrees of complexity, such as their ability open an attachment. other questions still focused on particular activities but also required the child to evaluate elements like their social skills (‘can you write a polite email?’) or judgemental skills (‘can you judge if the information on a website is true or false?’). yet other questions were more general measures of self-efficacy. about a third (37/110) of the reviewed studies included a performance test, which also adopted diverse formats. lastly, skill levels were operationalised in very different ways. for example, there wre studies distinguishing between ‘basic skills’ and ‘advanced skills’, although drawing the boundary between them differently. ‘functional skills’ could include basic skills but they can also be complex in the sense that a beginner could not achieve this goal. meanwhile, ‘critical skills’ were often a version of ‘advanced skills’ but implying some interpretation is taking place, more akin to media literacy. antecedents to digital skills in order to provide some structure to the systematic review, material collected was divided in the following categories: ascribed personal attributes: the age of the child (26 studies), gender (36), ethnicity (7), health problems (4), personality types (4) and cognitive abilities and styles (8). achieved personal attributes: educational attainment (6), approaches to learning (5), leisure activities (2), interests (3), and perceptions and attitudes (5). digital personal attributes: attitudes to and perceptions of icts (12), digital selfefficacy (9) and other ict related attributes (4). social context: socio-economic status of the family (ses) (21 studies), parenting (mediation, attitudes, etc.) (14), educational social context (teacher, pupil experience, school) (28), and peer, urban-rural and community factors (10). the ict environment: ict availability (15 studies), amount of ict use (14), age of first use of icts (7) and diversity, number and location of devices used (3). digital activities and experiences: gaming (3 studies), the use of social media/sns for social communication (5), some other digital experiences (4) and negative online experiences (2). the final antecedent was country differences. consequences the consequences covered wellbeing (6 studies), learning outcomes (7), approaches to learning and leisure (5), offline activities (e.g. civic engagement) (3), online activities (14), approach to digital technology (e.g. privacy behaviour) (3) and risk of harm (14 studies). discussion the literature was multi-disciplinary, meaning studies in this systematic review used a broad range of methods, measurements and definitions of digital skills. however, researchers selected from, adapted and added to measures used in previous studies, where there were different principles behind the various measurements. often studies justified their choices of measurement in relation to their particular goals. but the overall effect was to produce a striking diversity of measures, meaning that it could be a challenge to make comparisons and sometimes results could not be taken at face value. the influence of measurement was illustrated when comparing gender differences in performance tests of skills and self-reported skills. overall, more studies found more digital skills amongst boys, but it looks as though this was a product of measurement, with boys overclaiming relative to girls when skills are self-reported. there was more of a gender balance in studies using performance tests. most studies in the systematic review considered the antecedents to digital skills. there are few surprises in the findings overall; for instance, as may be expected, children who are older, who have positive attitudes towards icts, and who have ict access at home tend to have higher skill levels. the interesting results were mostly in the detail, such as evidence that the influence of age may flatten as children get older, the cases when ethnic minorities might have more of certain digital skills (e.g. being more critical of what they encounter online) or how the influence of ses depends on how whether it was measured by parental education or income – all of which suggest further lines of research. there are only a few studies that found evidence of how teachers influenced digital skills, which was surprising given the aspirations of educators. there were far fewer studies of the consequences of digital skills, which is significant given claims about the importance of digital skills for children’s lives. the overall patterns were again understandable (especially that skills influence other online activities). but once more the insights lay in the details. for example, digital skills often seemed to have a bearing on other learning outcomes, but it depended on what the skill was and what was being learnt; and while some skills influence offline activities, it is necessary to focus on which digital skills have this effect rather than looking at digital skills in general. one challenge with this literature is that it is difficult to be certain about the direction of causality. this direction may be clearer in the case of ascribed attributes and the 16 studies that entailed interventions, but the majority of the studies reviewed were cross-sectional surveys looking for correlations. another problem was that the majority of the studies focused on whether there was a statistically significant correlation between digital skills and particular antecedents and consequences, without looking at the interrelationship of a range of variables. only about 10% of studies developed models using multiple variables. more approaches using such statistical path analyses would be welcome. bibliography gough, d. (2007) weight of evidence: a framework for the appraisal of the quality and relevance of evidence, research papers in education, 22:2, 213-228. haddon, l., cino, d, doyle, m-a, livingstone, s., mascheroni, g. and stoilova, m. (forthcoming) children and young people’s digital skills: a systematic literature review, yskills, lse, london microsoft word shelby-independent oversight, data governance and the temporal construction-independent oversight, data.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): shelby, r.. (2021, october). independent oversight, data governance and the temporal construction of forensic evidence: the making of the first statewide rape kit tracking platform. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. independent oversight, data governance and the temporal construction of forensic evidence: the making of the first statewide rape kit tracking platform renee shelby northwestern university across the us, police management of sexual assault kits (saks) has led to systemic disorganization resulting in lost, forgotten, and abandoned forensic evidence. in response, victim advocates champion “sexual assault kit tracking platforms” as a pillar of survivor-centered and trauma-informed approaches to rape kit reform at the state level and to create independent oversight over forensic processes. in january 2017, idaho became the first state to fully implement a statewide tracking platform. the idaho sexual assault kit tracking system (ikts) allows survivors, medical and legal actors, and the broader public to track kits from distribution through the collection, testing, and retention process at law enforcement facilities. as of 2020, five other jurisdictions (new york, ohio, north carolina, utah, and puerto rico) have adopted the open-source ikts software. while a major step in confronting the systemic disorganization of evidence, the emergence of statewide tracking platforms raises urgent questions about what governance paradigms, data relations, and discourses are enabled through these systems. the aim of this research is to uncover which paradigms, relations, and discourses have emerged through the development and implementation of the first statewide sexual assault kit tracking platform. broadly, three research questions guide this paper: (1) how are discourses of “evidence” constructed in the legislative debate about ikts? (2) what data relationships and governance paradigms do evidentiary discourses in ikts enable? (3) how do evidentiary discourses draw on race, gender, and sexuality systems for meaning in ikts? using insights from critical race theory and feminist science and technology studies, i answer these questions through a discursive analysis of three state laws governing ikts and sexual assault forensic evidence (hb528, hb146, and hb116), legislative committee hearings, annual reports to the legislature, ikts protocols, and media coverage of idaho’s backlog between 2010 and 2020. 
 rather than “victim’s rights” or “perpetrator accountability,” i find concerns about “timeliness” and the temporal life of forensic evidence structured the creation, deployment, and maintenance of ikts. i argue that timeliness is a data governance paradigm with multiple and shifting meanings of temporality that comprise various legal, social, and data relationships. i show how constructions of time and timeliness are used to discipline the network of state actors responsible for stewarding forensic evidence, including medical examiners, police, prosecutors, and the crime lab. the discourse of tardy, slow, and untimely forensic evidence is an organizing principle to codify consistent statewide forensic practice, increase transparency, centralize legal decision making, and generate a steady stream of forensic data into codis, the national dna database. the legislature’s treatment of sak disorganization as a problem of unmanaged “temporality” assumes a view of evidence processing decisions as neutrally unmechanized and unstandardized. on one hand, this treatment of evidence as temporal obscures how gender and racialized rape myths have long shaped law enforcement decision making; on the other, ikts protocols do offer some intervention into such sexist and racist legal practices. i argue this intervention should not be read as signs of a racial justice technofix, but rather as indications of the limits and possibilities of the “techno-legal response to sexual assault” as a method of state accountability. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): ní bhroin. n., mcmonagle, s. (2020, october). social media and minority languages in everyday life: a comparative analysis of two twitter campaigns promoting the irish language. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. social media and minority languages in everyday life: a comparative analysis of two twitter campaigns promoting the irish language niamh ní bhroin university of oslo sarah mcmonagle university of hamburg introduction the irish language (‘gaeilge’), although the first official language of the republic of ireland, is a minority language in public life. in recent years, social media campaigns have been organised to promote the use of irish online. in this paper, we analyse two such campaigns by exploring how participation in them is connected to everyday practices of media use and meaning making, and how this in turn influences the success of minority language promotion in social media. we investigate the “international social media day for small languages” (ismdsl), organised on 26 september 2017, and #trasnanadtonnta, which ran from 22-26 january 2018. ismdsl was part of the european day of languages (edl), an annual council of europe event that promotes linguistic diversity. in this campaign, minority language users were encouraged to tweet using #edl2017 as well as their respective minority language hashtag (e.g. #gaeilge, #cymraeg, #frysk). we focus on just #edl2017 #gaeilge. #trasnanadtonnta was initiated by the ireland canada university foundation, which supports scholarly exchange between ireland and canada. it means ‘across the waves’, and is the title of an irish-language song about a traveller who returns to ireland from abroad. it is traditionally learned in primary school and would therefore be familiar to most people who grew up in ireland. both campaigns were international in scope, and shared the aims of gaining visibility for irish by encouraging people of all abilities to use it on twitter. however, #trasnanadtonnta was by far more successful. our investigation begins with asking, why? drawing on sociolinguistics and media and communication studies, we conducted a comparative analysis to address the following research question: 2 • how can everyday life and media use influence participation in twitter campaigns that aim to promote the irish language? theoretical framework sociolinguistic research examines whether social media can facilitate communication in and revitalisation of minority languages (e.g. cunliffe et al. 2013, mcmonagle 2019, nί bhroin 2013, stern 2017). social media are understood to facilitate users of minority languages in forming communication networks. some studies indicate that targeted campaigns can boost minority language usage on twitter – e.g. the praatmarfrysk campaign to promote frisian in the netherlands (jongbloed-faber 2014; mcmonagle et al. 2019). furthermore, mcmonagle et al. (2019) have found that irish-language users apply hashtags to promote irish internationally, more so than the other languages in their study (i.e. welsh and frisian). at the same time, dominant approaches in media and communication studies highlight how the production and consumption of digital media are socially situated and negotiated (cf. silverstone 2016). assumptions that access to digital media somehow compensates for social disadvantage are challenged by indications that processes of individual and collective meaning-making are inextricably connected to everyday life. this influences the ways in which individuals participate in and avail of digital media opportunities. our study employs these interdisciplinary foundations to examine which aspects of everyday social and technological life contribute to the relative success of the #edl2017 #gaeilge and #trasnanadtonnta campaigns. methods there was a dramatic difference in the total number of tweets posted in each campaign. #edl2017 #gaeilge generated a total of 47 tweets, while #trasnanadtonnta generated 10,663 tweets. we therefore analysed all tweets posted in #edl #gaeilge (n=47) and the top tweets in #trasnanadtonnta (n=260). this relatively small overall sample allowed us to explore how the success of each campaign related to everyday media use and processes of meaning-making. we adopted the coding book from mcmonagle et al.’s (2019) content analysis of minority language hashtags on twitter. by piloting a small sample of tweets (n=50), we revised the coding book to better reflect our sample content and study aims. coding categories adopted from mcmonagle et al. included the following: agents (i.e. who was tweeting), language (i.e. in which language(s) they were tweeting), topic (i.e. the topical content of the tweets), and other hashtags applied. to further explore meaning-making within the tweets we added categories relating to interactivity (i.e. @tweets and retweets), the use of emojis, and a specific focus on ‘place’ as a sub-topic. research ethical guidelines were followed and the data was treated anonymously during sampling and coding. findings & analysis although both campaigns were planned with similar aims, significant differences emerged. firstly, both campaigns connected to other hashtags. #edl2017 was part of a 3 larger campaign that included hashtags from other (minority) languages. #trasnanadtonnta linked to other planned hashtag campaigns to promote the irish language including #gaeilge (irish); #gaeilge2018 (irish2018); #bliainnagaeilge (yearofirish). while #trasnanadtonnta was a unique hashtag developed specifically for this campaign, #gaeilge (connecting the irish language to #edl2017) is a general hashtag. with regard to agents, a larger percentage of individuals (compared to organisations) were represented in the #trasnanadtonnta sample (62% versus 38%). irish embassies and diplomatic missions were also well represented amongst the organisations tweeting in this sample, but absent from #edl2017 #gaeilge. connected to this, the topic of ‘place’ was a significant feature of the #trasnanadtonnta campaign. tweets referring to place indicated both locations where irish people have emigrated to and from where tweeters were located. place was not a relevant sub-topic in the #edl2017 campaign. we find that the success of each campaign was dependent on the participants identifying connections between the campaigns and their everyday lives. based on the combination of agents and topics in our sample, #trasnanadtonnta found particular salience among the irish diaspora, for whom the language is a marker of a unique cultural identity. this twitter campaign provided a platform for irish-language users to connect with others across europe, north america, asia and australia – places where the irish language has not been traditionally spoken. although the same platform was provided in #edl2017 #gaeilge, irish-language twitter users did not identify with this campaign to the same extent. we further surmise that the unique hashtag created for #trasnanadtonnta, reminiscent of a song sung in childhood, had particular semiotic appeal when compared with the more policy-oriented approach of #edl2017. references cunliffe, d. et al. (2013). “young bilinguals’ language behaviour in social networking sites: the use of welsh on facebook”, journal of computer-mediated communication, 18/3: 339-361. jongbloed-faber, l. (2014). “social media: a treasure trove for minority language research”. in social media in social research: blogs on blurring the boundaries, edited by k. woodfield, 189–194. london: natcen social research. mcmonagle, s. (2019). “aspects of language choice online among german-upper sorbian bilingual adolescents”, international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism: https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2019.1624686 mcmonagle, s. et al. (2019). “what can hashtags tell us about minority languages on twitter? a comparison of #cymraeg, #frysk, and #gaeilge”, journal of multilingual and multicultural development, 40/1: 32-49. ní bhroin, n. (2013). “small pieces in a social innovation puzzle? exploring the motivations of minority language users in social media.” in media innovations: a multidisciplinary study of change, edited by t. storsul and a.h. krumsvik, 219-238. göteborg: nordicom. 4 silverstone, r. (ed). (2016). media technology and everyday life in europe. new york: routledge. stern, a.j. (2017). “how facebook can revitalise local languages: lessons from bali”, journal of multilingual and multicultural development, 38/9: 788-796. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 coornet: an integrated approach to surface problematic content, malicious actors, and coordinated networks fabio giglietto university of urbino carlo bo nicola righetti university of vienna luca rossi it university of copenhagen giada marino university of sassari with a specific reference to facebook, a recent study (giglietto et al., 2019) has spotlighted patterns of coordinated activity called by the authors “coordinated link sharing behavior” (clsb). clsb refers to the coordinated shares of the same news article in a very short timeframe by networks of pages, groups, and verified public profiles. clsb is a strategy used to boost the reach of content by gaming algorithms that govern the distribution of posts (giglietto et al., 2019). additionally, this coordinated activity has been proven to be consistently associated with the spread of problematic information before the 2018 and 2019 italian elections (giglietto et al., 2019; giglietto et al., 2020; giglietto et al., 2020). this paper presents a study on coordinated link sharing behaviour (clsb) during the first and second waves of the covid-19 pandemic in italy. specific attention is devoted to critically present the methodology and tool employed in the context of existing literature on mis/disinformation. coornet and the a-b-c framework as much as the field of mis/disinformation studies flourished during the last few years (freelon & wells, 2020), the efforts to measure its prevalence and effects (benkler, 2019) are often hindered or significantly limited by the fuzziness of the phenomenon under study (jack, 2017). deeply influenced by the idea that “fake news” was the sole vector of disinformation aimed at influencing the public debate online, content-based approaches have been suggested citation (apa): giglietto, f., righetti, n., rossi, l., and marino, g., (2021, october). coornet: an integrated approach to surface problematic content, malicious actors, and coordinated networks. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. longly seen as the most effective response to this mounting concern. however, the debunking activity is time-consuming, not always possible, and sometimes inevitably ineffective (zollo et al., 2017). furthermore, both fabricated and legitimate news content are circulated by malicious actors with the aim of influencing public opinion (phillips, 2018). given the amount of time and resources needed to check on a single content, researchers relied instead on lists of malicious actors. compiled and pre-existing lists of problematic domains have been employed to estimate the prevalence of “fake news” (allcott & gentzkow, 2017; guess et al., 2019). the main shortcoming of this approach lies in its inability to take into account the dynamic of information operations that often changes over time the sources, new outlets, internet domains, and social media accounts they rely on. differently from approaches based on sole content or actors, an integrated approach, such as the françois a-b-c framework (2019), highlights how we need to understand the interplay between manipulative actors, deceptive behaviour, and harmful content, to fully recognize these activities. coornet (giglietto et al., 2019; giglietto et al., 2020; giglietto et al., 2020) implements this framework as a cycle: by starting with harmful content, it detects deceptive behavior to identify manipulative actors. once a list of such actors has been identified, the next cycle uses the content produced by these actors to initiate a new iteration of deceptive behavior detection that, in turn, leads to identifying an updated set of manipulative actors. covid-19 case study the study on circulation of problematic information around covid-19 in italy relied on the coronavirus alliance database of news flagged as false or misleading by the international fact-checking network (ifcn). this database provided a list of 212 false and misleading italian claims that surfaced between january 22, 2020 and august 26, 2020. then, we used the crowdtangle (crowdtangle team, 2019) ‘search’ feature to identify a dataset of related news stories, finding a total of 1,258 urls. using coornet::get_ctshares() function we collected all the crowdtangle-tracked facebook posts that shared these urls up to one week from the story publication date (n=13,271). fig. 1 coornet a-b-c cycle flowchart by using coornet::get_coord_shares() function we define which shares were performed in a coordinated way, where coordination means two actors sharing the same link within an unusually short period of time. moreover, in order to avoid false positives created by shares performed at approximately the same time by chance, coornet allows setting a threshold on how many times coordination between two entities needs to happen in order to be counted. coornet::get_outputs()function returns several r objects: 1. a list of coordinated entities detected with summary statistics (highly_connected_coordinated_entities); 2. a data frame of all the urls shared containing a variable identifying the presence of coordination (ct_shares_marked.df); 3. highly_connected_g, i.e. a projected graph of the facebook entities that shared the urls in a coordinated way; 4. a data frame summarizing metrics of each coordinated component detected in the network, e.g. the average subscribers of the accounts, the proportion of coordinated shares over the total shares, the top 5 coordinately shared domains (component_summary); 5. a data frame of the most engaging posts containing the urls shared in a coordinated way (top_shares); 6. another including the top urls shared in a coordinated way (top_urls). this first iteration of the a-b-c cycle led to the identification of 152 actors. we then gathered all the posts with links shared by these accounts over a period of one month (october 2020, due to the resurgence of the coronavirus outbreak). the resulting dataset of 59,346 urls has been used as the input of the second iteration of the a-b-c cycle. coornet::get_ctshares() resulted in 364,400 facebook shares and coornet::get_coord_shares() identified 344 entities. finally, coornet::draw_url_timeline_chart() creates an interactive visualization that displays the cumulative shares over time received by a single url along with the entities that shared it in both a coordinated and non-coordinated manner (fig. 2). fig. 2 output of the draw_url_timeline_chart() for the news story with most shares emerged in iteration 2. various types of covid-19 skepticism, anti-vaxx, and anti-mask are prominently featured in the list of coordinated news stories (top_urls) shared by these networks. results of the case study will be presented at a macro, meso, and micro level. more general implications will be also discussed. references allcott, h., & gentzkow, m. (2017). social media and fake news in the 2016 election. the journal of economic perspectives: a journal of the american economic association, 31(2), 211–236. benkler, y. (2019). cautionary notes on disinformation and the origins of distrust. social science research council. crowdtangle team. (2019). crowdtangle [data set]. françois, c. (2019). actors, behaviors, content: a disinformation abc highlighting three vectors of viral deception to guide industry & regulatory responses (one). transatlantic high level working group on content moderation online and freedom of expression. freelon, d., & wells, c. (2020). disinformation as political communication. political communication, 37(2), 145–156. giglietto, f., righetti, n., & marino, g. (2019). understanding coordinated and inauthentic link sharing behavior on facebook in the run-up to 2018 general election and 2019 european election in italy. giglietto, f., righetti, n., & rossi, l. (2020). coornet. detect coordinated link sharing behavior on social media. giglietto, f., righetti, n., rossi, l., & marino, g. (2020). it takes a village to manipulate the media: coordinated link sharing behavior during 2018 and 2019 italian elections. information, communication and society, 23(6), 867–891. guess, a., nagler, j., & tucker, j. (2019). less than you think: prevalence and predictors of fake news dissemination on facebook. science advances, 5(1), eaau4586. jack, c. (2017). lexicon of lies: terms for problematic information. data & society. https://datasociety.net/output/lexicon-of-lies/ phillips, w. (2018). the oxygen of amplification. data & society, 22, 1–128. zollo, f., bessi, a., del vicario, m., scala, a., caldarelli, g., shekhtman, l., havlin, s., & quattrociocchi, w. (2017). debunking in a world of tribes. plos one, 12(7), e0181821. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): son, c. (2017, october 18-21). from port arthur to the lindt café siege: the role of digital publics in challenging australian print media agenda setting practices. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. from port arthur to the lindt café siege: the role of digital publics in challenging australian print media agenda setting practices catherine son university of south australia, adelaide, australia in the two decades since australia’s worst mass shooting at port arthur in 1996, the australian print media landscape has changed significantly. technological developments such as the internet and smart phones have created digital public spaces that did not exist at the time of the massacre. initial expectations were that these developments would enable digital publics to challenge the traditional media’s agenda setting role in an unprecedented manner. by the time of the lindt café siege in 2014, during which hostages were taken by a gunman in a café in sydney’s cbd, journalists found themselves competing with social media posts from eyewitnesses using their phones to report the incident as the siege unfolded. today, audiences have more opportunities to participate in the news agenda than ever before, facilitated by tools such as: social media, comments on online news stories, eyewitness contributions to news websites, and community discussion platforms such as reddit, as well as sophisticated audience measurement tools. conducted as one part of a broader doctoral thesis, this study examines how these increased opportunities for public involvement have affected the australian print media’s ability to set the agenda for discussion in the aftermath of events of national significance. agenda setting theory has evolved considerably since the ground-breaking chapel hill study (mccombs and shaw 1972). contemporary agenda setting research currently identifies four levels at which the concept occurs: object salience, attribute salience, network agenda setting and need for orientation (mccombs 2014). however, a key concern for agenda setting research remains whether early hopes that the internet would challenge the traditional media’s agenda setting function (althaus and tewksbury 2002; savigny 2002, trenz 2009) have been realised through greater public input in the generation of news content. this study addresses this concern by taking a historical perspective, and comparing the object and attribute salience present in print media reports from a seven week period of the port arthur massacre and lindt café siege, to assess the impact of digital public participation on agenda setting by the australian print media. using a combination of content and discourse analyses of almost 300 news reports, and oral history interviews with eight journalists who reported either or both incidents, this study explores australian journalists’ self-perceptions of their changing agenda setting roles in response to increased public involvement. journalistic attitudes towards greater public input to the discussion of nationally significant events are assessed, and compared to the findings of content and discourse analyses to determine whether journalists’ perceptions of the challenges presented by digital publics are reflected in the content of news reports. reports are analysed using leximancer content analysis software to determine the salient objects; that is, the topics or issues represented as of high importance in news reports of both incidents (dearing and rogers 1996; mccombs 2014; mccombs and shaw 1972; scheufele and tewksbury 2007). salient attributes used to describe the characteristics and traits of topics in reports of both incidents are examined using van dijk’s (2013) method of analysing news discourse. examination of the australian print media’s agenda setting practices from a historical perspective facilitates new understanding of whether, and how, digital publics have impacted the mainstream media’s agenda setting role towards the discussion of nationally significant events. although journalists now compete with citizens equipped with mobile phones and ubiquitous internet access to break and disseminate news, the number of objects present in reports of the lindt café siege in 2014 was fewer than those in reports of port arthur in 1996. likewise, the salient attributes in reports of port arthur were substantially more complex than the attributes featured in reports of the lindt café siege. thus, early expectations that greater public participation through digital technologies would influence media agenda setting practices (althaus and tewksbury 2002; savigny 2002, trenz 2009) have so far proven unfounded in terms of the news reports assessed in this study. despite this finding, journalists interviewed for this study stated that they perceived digital participatory technologies, particularly social media and audience measurement tools, as a challenge to their agenda setting role as journalists and editors. several aspects have contributed to the progressively more simplistic agenda featured in australian news reports since port arthur. diminishing print revenues, the 24 hour news cycle, and the rise of the pr (public relations) industry, have been found to substantively contribute to the lack of diversity of agenda identified in reports of the lindt café siege. declining print revenues have caused mass news room redundancies. consequently, with fewer journalists, a narrower diversity of perspectives is thus represented in news reports, and subsequently there are more time pressures on those who remain. as a result of dwindling profits syndicated reports are now more prevalent in australian newspapers than at the time of port arthur – reflected in the finding that during the seven week data collection period almost 40 per cent of lindt café siege reports were syndicated across several publications. an increase in pr professionals over the past two decades has also resulted in a much narrower agenda being presented to journalists from corporations and the authorities, a factor which bears substantial impact on media agenda setting practices. despite journalists’ assertions to the contrary, this research contends that increased public participation has had little impact on the australian media’s agenda setting role in the discussion of nationally significant events. this finding is in line with broader international research such as mccombs (2014), which also casts doubt on the ability of digital public participation to challenge existing media agenda setting practices. taking a historical perspective, it is evident that the object and attribute salience featured in lindt café siege reports is more simplistic than at the time of port arthur, and thus reflects minimal input from the digital public. while greater opportunities for public participation exist than ever before, this study advances the argument that initial hopes that technological developments would enable digital publics to challenge established media agenda setting practices have not been realised in australia to date. references althaus, sl and tewksbury, d 2002, ‘agenda setting and the “new” news patterns of issue importance among readers of the paper and online versions of the new york times’, communication research, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 180-207. dearing, jw and rogers, em 1996, ‘media agenda studies’, volume 6 of communication concepts, sage publications, california, pp. 24-39. mccombs, me and shaw, dl 1972, ‘the agenda-setting function of mass media’, the public opinion quarterly, vol. 36, iss. 2, pp. 176-187. mccombs, m 2014, setting the agenda, 2nd edn, polity press, cambridge savigny, h 2002, ‘public opinion, political communication and the internet’, politics, vol. 22, iss. 1, pp. 1-8. scheufele, da and tewksbury, d 2007, ‘framing, agenda setting, and priming: the evolution of three media effects models’, journal of communication, vol. 57, iss. 1, pp. 9-20. trenz, hj 2009, ‘digital media and the return of the representative public sphere’, journal of the european institute for communication and culture, vol. 16, iss. 1, pp. 3346. van dijk, ta 2013, news analysis: case studies of international and national news in the press, routledge, oxon, uk. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 mapping the migrant digital space, methodological challenges and preliminary results ahmad kamal it university of copenhagen, denmark luca rossi it university of copenhagen, denmark introduction the relationship between migrant population and digital technologies has been the subject of a growing body of research over the years, and the proliferation of social media has offered a new source of insights. this paper, based on the ongoing research activities of the project [omitted], presents an effort to study migration-related social media resources, which we define as migrant digital space (mds), across four european countries (greece, germany, denmark and sweden). the paper will first describe the process and challenges of “mapping” mds before proceeding to show how the collected data variously reflects critical incidents offline, thereby suggesting that the data could serve as a useful resource to study the interplay of human movement and icts, as well as serving to illuminate hidden aspects of europe’s recent history of migration which, reaching a peak of influx of migrants in 2015, acts as a background for the paper. background most studies of online migrant’s activity rely on interviews or surveys (e.g. galis & summerton, 2018; gillespie et al, 2018) to identify relevant online sites, user preferences, and the afforded benefits. other studies focus on the online representation of migrants (e.g., siapera, boudourides, lenis & suiter 2018), or are aimed at settled/second-generation migrants (e.g., kok & rogers, 2017). compared to the more established topic of digital diasporas, such as the e-diasporas atlas (diminescu, 2012), the number of studies of peoples-in-transit or newcomers working primarily with online suggested citation (apa): kamal, a. & rossi, l. (2019, october 2-5). mapping the migrant digital space, methodological challenges and preliminary results. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. data is relatively small. the goal of this project was to move beyond the analyses done so far by mapping a large segment of mds based largely on online data. mapping the migrant digital space we define migrant digital space as the set of online resources available to migrants (or to people interested in migrations). within this perspective mds is composed by a diverse set of entities: facebook pages, twitter account, hashtags, youtube channels etc. the selection of the specific entities to include in the mds was based on a mixmethods approach and the actors that ended up composing the final selection belongs to four sets: an initial set of entities were already known to the researchers do to previous research activities (references removed for review). a second set of entities identified through interviews that the researchers with migrants in germany, greece, and denmark. the third set of entities was created through keyword searches (greek, english, and arabic) on google search and major social media platforms (facebook, twitter, youtube, vimeo, instagram). the possible candidate entries were then selected by examining a subject’s title, profile information (where applicable) and scanning recent content and comments. this was done to establish that the entry was public (and impersonal), relevant and active. a four set of actors was "snowballed" from the third set of actors as "platform-recommended resource/page/profile etc." this approach led to the identification of 714 different resources (detailed in table 1) composing our exploratory mapping of the migrants digital space, with facebook being the largest source (due both to its popularity but also in reaction to changes in facebook access [see bruns et al. 2018]). these resources have been manually inspected and for each the research team has manually identified a set of attributes: the type of actor behind the resource (e.g. ngo, single individual, informal group, state agency), the offline location of the actor and the main language used online. moreover, the research team has used api based methods to collect all the available data produced from each resource (e.g. all the tweets written by twitter accounts, all the posts and comments written on facebook pages, the comments on youtube videos etc.). several limitations must be noted with respect to this mapping. first, a map of mds will never be based on a representative sample due to the impossibility of sampling an unknown population (i.e., the full list of online migrant resources is actually impossible to know). second, of the resources that are known to the researchers, many cannot be included in the sample, whether due to access barriers (e.g. facebook groups) or ethical concerns (e.g. facebook user data). resource count facebook group 42 facebook page 505 linkedin 1 twitter account 110 twitter hashtag 29 vimeo 2 website 5 youtube channel 20 total 714 table 1: resources making up mds with these limitations in mind, the sampling of mds presented here must not be considered a representative of the actual mds space, but rather a non-probabilistic and exploratory. testing the map of the migrant digital space despite its limits, this mds map can serve functions, such as studying the interaction between offline events and online activity in the context of europe’s “long summer of migration” (conventionally located between summer 2015 and spring 2016). given the preliminary nature of the material presented here, the data analysis is restricted to public facebook pages. the analyses (further developed in the full paper) investigate how facebook pages reacted to the long summer. for instance, figure 1 shows the number of posts shared on the facebook pages in the period between july 2015 and september 2015. the data shows clearly how pages located in germany and in the øresund region (sweden and denmark) saw increased activity toward the end of august, while this peak is absent in greece (where the mass-arrival of migrants had already occurred). figure 2 parallels this finding, while revealing that the increase of activity was especially high in pages in arabic, inviting various interpretations for further exploration. figure 1. number of posts on fb pages from different regions figure 2. number of post on fb pages written in different languages figure 3 presents a probability density function which shows the age (in days) of the pages in the mds sample across different types of actors. considering the time of the data collection (september 2018), it is possible to observe how most of the pages have been created right after september 2015, especially among type b actors (such as local ngos) and type c actors (individuals and self-organized groups), in contrast to the type a, fully institutional actors such as international ngos and state agencies. one can thereby observe how the humanitarian crisis triggered a grassroots reaction manifested through the boom of younger pages from informal actors. a final analysis can be done on the content shared by these pages at that time, as seen in figure 4, where a tagcloud of the most frequent words used showing the centrality of borders, refugees and the need (expressed) for solidarity. such tagclouds can be created for successive periods of time to identify shifting priorities and concerns (see bulbul and ismail, 2018). references bruns, a., bechmann, a., burgess, j., chadwick, a., clark, l. s., dutton, w. h., & howard, p. (2018). facebook shuts the gate after the horse has bolted, and hurts real research in the process. internet policy review. bulbul, a., & ismail, s. h. (2018). a visual demonstration based on social media analysis of refugees in turkey. in proceedings of ictacse conference, 2018. figure 4: wordcloud summarizing the words used during the period july-sept 2015 on the fb pages. figure 3: age (in days) of fb pages in the mds diminescu, d. (2012). e-diaporas atlas. http://www.e-diasporas.fr galis, v. & summerton, j., (2018). we are all foreigners in an analogue world: cybermaterialalliances in contesting immigration control in stockholm’s metro system. social movement studies, 17(3), 299-317 gillespie, m., osseiran, s., & cheesman, m. (2018). syrian refugees and the digital passage to europe: smartphone infrastructures and affordances. social media + society, 4(1). kok, s., & rogers, r. (2017). rethinking migration in the digital age: transglocalization and the somali diaspora. global networks, 17(1), 23–46. siapera, e., boudourides, m., lenis, s., & suiter, j. (2018). refugees and network publics on twitter: networked framing, affect, and capture. social media + society ed final submission version aoir2018 with author name selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): dehghan, e. (2018, october 10-13). from ad hoc issue publics to discourse communities: a year of public debate on twitter. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. from ad hoc issue publics to discourse communities: a year of public debate on twitter ehsan dehghan digital media research centre (dmrc), queensland university of technology (qut) introduction this paper presents an empirical investigation of the concept of ad hoc issue publics (bruns & burgess, 2015, 2011), through an analysis of a national debate over a contentious topic in the australian public sphere. in 2016, there were calls by some conservative political figures to make changes to a section of the racial discrimination act (rda). this particular section of the act—section 18(c)—they claimed, was ambiguous and restricted freedom of speech (norman, 2016). the dataset collected for this study covers a year of tweets discussing the matter in the australian twittersphere. this study argues that while communities involved in the debate were formed a priori to the issue, twitter’s affordances act as temporary bridges between disconnected communities, enabling the flow of information between them. methodology the data for this study was collected using a combination of hashtags and keywords, starting from the contextual knowledge about the issue, and snowballing to find more hashtags and keywords and collect more tweets. focusing on the range of network structures created due to the different communicative affordances of twitter as the medium, the goal was to have a broad and comparative view of the publics and communities involved in the debate, and the communication among them. these analyses included the co-occurrence of hashtags, use of hashtags by accounts, retweeting network, @mentions network, and sharing of urls by accounts. additionally, these networks were overlaid on the map of the australian twittersphere (bruns, moon, münch, & sadkowsky, 2017). this enables the researcher to compare the topic-related or affordance-dependent ad hoc issue publics with discoursedependent, ideology-oriented communities formed as a result of long-standing and more stable follower/followee relations among users. the study, therefore, helps empirically theorise the dynamics of communication and public debate on twitter. initial findings the different communities created as a result of the various communicative affordances of twitter could potentially create different network structures. in the case of this study, however, the retweet, @mention, account–domain and account–hashtag networks all take very similar forms. in all the networks, four main communities of users are present in the discourse, with one community, in particular, having more inward communicative behaviour, and being less connected to the rest of the network. a qualitative investigation of the twitter profiles of accounts in each cluster shows that the four major communities are users interested in politics in general, progressive politics accounts, indigenous rights activists, and conservative/hard-right politics accounts. in all four networks, the conservative/hard-right cluster is more insular, in that more retweeting or @mentioning happens exclusively among the accounts in this cluster than with any other, and the use of unique hashtags or information sources is more likely to happen in this cluster. figure 1: top-left: retweet network; top-right: @mention network; bottom-left: account–hashtag network; bottom-right: account–url network. orange: conservative/hard-right politics; fuchsia: progressive politics; blue: indigenous rights activists; green: general politics these network structures can give a picture of the different actors and networked publics (papacharissi & de fatima oliveira, 2012) present in the debate. however, it is worth comparing these topic-related, ad hoc issue publics with more long-standing discourse communities, in order to have a clearer picture of the underlying structures that can influence the formation of ad hoc publics. to do so, the networks formed between accounts in the dataset, i.e. retweet and @mention networks, were overlaid on the map of the australian twittersphere. this allows examination of the interrelationship between transient, issue-related ad hoc publics with more permanent, affinity-based follower/followee relations. figure 2: overlaying the retweets and @mentions networks on the map of the australian twittersphere. left: retweet; right: @mentions; red: accounts identified as hard-right and conservative in the dataset; yellow: accounts identified as progressive in the dataset; green = accounts identified as general politics in the dataset interestingly, the structures of the ad hoc publics closely reflect the affinity-based clusters of the australian twittersphere, in that the accounts identified as conservative or progressive based on the network formations in the dataset closely overlap with the network clusters formed based on follower/followee relations. in other words, although it is theoretically possible that an ad hoc issue public is created where users with a wide range of interests tweet about the issue, such is not the case here. rather, only users who have already formed discourse communities based on their political ideologies have tweeted about the issue. in doing so, these users retweet, @mention, incorporate hashtags, or share information purely based on their ideological affinity. this raises questions regarding the suitability of the concept of ad hoc publics to refer to this debate. discussion the dataset in this study represents a collection of tweets discussing a contentious topic in the australian public sphere. this can be theorised as an ad hoc issue public, created as a result of the use of certain hashtags or keywords (e.g. #18c and #rda). however, digging deeper in the data reveals that the concept of an ad hoc issue public cannot satisfactorily explain the dynamics of this discursive environment. discourse analysis of the tweets posted in each cluster shows a range of discourses at play; although all the tweets in the dataset discuss the same issue, the argumentation schemes, sources of information, communicative actions, and discourse topics are different. therefore, it seems better to conceptualise this discursive environment as a collection of publics or discourse communities, rather than as a singular public. moreover, the publics formed around this discussion can be argued to be not ad or post hoc, but formed a priori to the issue or discussion, as a result of affinity-based connections among individuals; the accounts participating in the discussion enter the conversations with already formed discursive positions and ideologies, and in discussing the issue, they draw from these ideologies. the imagined audience, therefore, is different for each community in this environment. while there are common hashtags central to the discussion, it is hard to argue that these hashtags are used to talk to an imaginary audience consisting of everyone interested in the issue. rather, seen in combination with all the other forms of communicative affordances employed on twitter, such as @mentions, retweets, and sharing of links, the evidence suggests that the imaginary audience for each public is mostly comprised of people with the same ideologies. in this case, therefore, the significance of twitter’s affordances lies in the fact that despite disconnected ideologies of the a priori communities, these affordances serve as temporary hybrids between long-term follower relations and short-term publics formed around the topic. that is, @mentions, retweets, and hashtags act as bridges, however temporary, between otherwise disconnected and/or antagonistic communities. of course, this is not to argue that discourse communities and ad hoc issue publics are mutually exclusive. rather, by using a limited number of hashtags, which form an ad hoc issue public through mere collective attention, discourse communities find a common space to perform discursive struggles and challenge each other’s ideologies. these findings also raise questions regarding the recent debates over algorithmic filter bubbles and presence of echo chambers in online discussions. to answer these questions, the next steps in this project are to investigate the links between these antagonistic discourse communities, in order to track the flow of information between them, conduct an in-depth analysis of their discursive strategies in light of the sociopolitical context, and compare the underlying dynamics of the various network structures created by the affordances of the platform. this provides new insights into the impact of algorithmic structures of the platforms and their affordances on online public debate and information flows, which in turn can be utilised to foster more democratic and less fragmented online discourses. references bruns, a., & burgess, j. (2015). twitter hashtags from ad hoc to calculated publics. hashtag publics: the power and politics of discursive networks, 13–28 bruns, a., & burgess, j. e. (2011). the use of twitter hashtags in the formation of ad hoc publics. in proceedings of the 6th european consortium for political research (ecpr) general conference 2011 bruns, a., moon, b., münch, f., & sadkowsky, t. (2017). the australian twittersphere in 2016: mapping the follower/followee network. social media+ society, 3(4) norman, j. (2016, august 30). the history of the racial discrimination act. retrieved february 26, 2018, from http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-30/racialdiscrimination-act-explainer/7798546 papacharissi, z., & de fatima oliveira, m. (2012). affective news and networked publics: the rhythms of news storytelling on #egypt. journal of communication, 62(2), 266–282 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): larsen, m. c. (2020, october). social media insecurities in everyday life among young adults – an ethnography of anonymous jodel disclosures. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. social media insecurities in everyday life among young adults – an ethnography of anonymous jodel disclosures malene charlotte larsen aalborg university this paper analyzes what makes young adults feel insecure when they use social media in everyday life as a means to socialize and connect with peers. the analysis is based on a two-year online ethnography (hine, 2015) conducted on jodel, an anonymous location based social media app popular among young adults across europe. the paper focuses on jodel users’ anonymous disclosures about their social media related insecurities – shedding light on discourses related to social media practices that are often hidden or neglected in interview studies. the analysis finds that it is often the affordances of the social media platforms (bucher & helmond, 2018) or changes in the design of apps such as snapchat, instagram or tinder that lead to feelings of insecurity or uncertainty in relational maintenance or in the forming of new relationships. thus, the codes of everyday actions become unclear and different expectations as to the affordances of social media platforms result in diffuse interaction orders (goffman, 1983) in various situations. put in other words: because of the platforms, young adults sometimes find it difficult to know why peers behave like they do online resulting in unfounded worries and feelings of insecurity. background and jodel as ethnographic site the ethnographic study was carried out from 2017 – 2019 on the anonymous location based social media app jodel that is “aimed at encouraging people to interact with each other locally in meaningful ways” (jodel, 2020). originally, jodel was designed for anonymous on-campus communication, but has gained popularity among various groups of young adults between the age of 18 and 30. updates and photos are shared anonymously, and the user has no public profile that link individual posts together. the app is moderated by users with a large amount of karma points. karma points are designed to shows the user’s positive impact on the app. one collects karma by “writing cool and funny posts, helping other jodelers and contributing to the overall positive atmosphere” (jodel, 2020). with the app being location based, the participant observations were conducted among posts and replies uploaded from people within a range of 10 kilometers from the author’s hometown, a larger danish university town. at the outset, the ethnographic study had an interest in the combination of anonymity and hyperlocal communication: what does it mean to communicate anonymously with people geographically close to you? what do young adults reveal about themselves when they know that posts are seen by people within 1 km from their psychical location? the observations unveiled that – besides trivial updates about everyday life, jokes and photos of food and cats etc. – young adults often use the app as a venue for complaints or expressions of insecurities related to other social media platforms such as snapchat, instagram and tinder. the ethnographic study ended up focusing on those disclosures. as ethnographic site jodel then became a window into some of the uncertainties young adults face when they use social media as part of everyday life, e.g. worries about not receiving “enough” likes, insecurities related to snapchat points or ephemeral interaction in general (bayer et. al., 2016; kofoed & larsen, 2016). the author observed and participated on the app daily for a period of two years, wrote field notes, took screenshots and organized relevant disclosures. as a follow up study, individual interviews were conducted, both anonymously via chat and in physical settings, asking informants about the central themes from the ethnographic study. theoretical background the paper is situated within the field of discourse studies with nexus analysis (scollon, 2001; scollon & scollon, 2004) as the theoretical approach. nexus analysis distinguishes itself from other discourse analytic approaches by focusing on central mediated actions within a loosely tied ‘nexus of practice’. the term refers to the social field where humans, discourses and cultural artefacts intersect and result in social action. thus, interactions on social media platforms such as jodel can be analyzed from a nexus analytical perspective (larsen & raudaskoski, 2018). the objective of the ethnographic engagement is then to find central mediated actions and cycles of discourses within the overall nexus of practice and analyze them as parts of a sociohistorical process. here, it is important to understand how mediated actions of a specific site of engagement relate to other sites, practices and discourses. circulating discourses intersect with cultural and material artifacts, specific forms of encounters between people (the interaction order) and the social identities and relationships played out (larsen & raudaskoski, 2018; scollon & scollon, 2004). analytical themes the analysis is divided into three themes covering different cycles of discourse and thereby different aspects of social media’s role in everyday life: 1) ephemeral matching, focusing on social media dating apps (carpenter & mcewan, 2016) and their role in forming new relationships, 2) platformed sociality (van dijck, 2013), focusing on how small changes in affordances and design affect social relations and rearrange typical interaction orders and 3) algorithmic personalization, focusing on the role of algorithmic, personalized news feeds (bucher, 2018) and one-click-interactions (heyes et. al., 2016; eranti & lonkila, 2015) such as liking practices. during the analysis it is explored how different disclosures of feeling insecure can be linked to the design of different social media apps or recent design updates that have a somehow negative impact on the user’s wellbeing and overall purpose of using the apps: human connectedness. references bayer, j. b., ellison, n. b., schoenebeck, s. y., & falk, e. b. (2016). sharing the small moments: ephemeral social interaction on snapchat. information, communication & society, 19(7), 956–977. bucher, t. (2018). if .... then: algorithmic power and politics. oxford university press. bucher, t., & helmond, a. (2018). the affordances of social media platforms. in j. burgess, t. poell, & a. marwick (eds.), the sage handbook of social media. sage publications, pp. 233–253. carpenter, c. j., & mcewan, b. (2016). the players of micro-dating: individual and gender differences in goal orientations toward micro-dating apps. first monday, 21(5). eranti, v., & lonkila, m. (2015). the social significance of the facebook like button. first monday, 20(6). goffman, e. (1983). the interaction order: american sociological association, 1982 presidential address. american sociological review, 48(1), 1-17. jodel (2020). jodel support: https://jodel.zendesk.com/hc/en-us hayes, r. a., carr, c. t., & wohn, d. y. (2016). one click, many meanings: interpreting paralinguistic digital affordances in social media. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 60(1), 171–187. hine, c. (2015). ethnography for the internet : embedded, embodied and everyday. london: bloomsbury publishing. kofoed, j., & larsen, m. c. (2016). a snap of intimacy: photo-sharing practices among young people on social media. first monday; volume 21, number 11 7 november 2016. larsen, m. c., & raudaskoski, p. l. (2018). nexus analysis as a framework for internet studies. in j. hunsinger, l. klastrup, & m. allen (eds.), international handbook for internet research (vol. 2) scollon, r. (2001). mediated discourse: the nexus of practice. london; new york: routledge. scollon, r., & scollon, s. w. (2004). nexus analysis: discourse and the emerging internet. london; new york: routledge. van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity : a critical history of social media. new york: oxford university press. hacking culture aoir 2020 v3.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): ogden, j. (2020, october). web archiving as culture: tumblr and the cultural construction of the archived web. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. web archiving as culture: tumblr and the cultural construction of the archived web jessica ogden university of bristol introduction recent trends in communication and internet research show a growing interest in the significance and impact of content moderation practices on the circulation and accessibility of particular forms of online media. this research has often focused on the platform policies and technical apparatuses of content delivery, the invisible labour of content moderators (both human and algorithmic), and the effects of this labour on the actors themselves and digital life online (gillespie, 2018; roberts, 2019). currently missing from this area of research, is an examination of the ways in which various web archiving initiatives, organisations and community groups are intervening and shaping the availability of information/media in the face of platform moderation policies. in this paper i bring together these fields of enquiry to discuss the cultural significance of web archiving through the example of tumblr’s 2018 efforts to remove so-called ‘adult content’ and ‘not safe for work’ (nsfw) posts from the platform. this paper examines efforts on the part of archive team a self-described ‘loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage’ to archive tumblr nsfw posts.1 the study forms part of a wider ethnographic investigation of web archiving across three field sites, with the aim of examining how web archival practices shape the archived web. borrowing from ‘facet methodology’ (mason, 2011), the wider research findings are framed elsewhere through the lens of three facets, where each facet provides one ‘methodological-substantive’ plane or surface view of web archiving (ogden, 2020). here, i use the case of archive team to reflect on web archiving as culture and emphasise the ways that practices ‘as an observable object for the study of culture’ (swidler, 2001) are filtered through and structured by ‘strategies of action’ that shape how the web is archived. in doing so, the paper contributes to broader discussions of platform politics and the role of power in the 1 http://archiveteam.org (visited 1 mar. 2020) virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 production of online memory, and raises further questions about the ethics of web archives and their positioning as historical representations of online culture. background and methods web archives (was) broadly conceived as any attempt to capture and preserve the web for future use are evermore central to discussions of digital access in the public sphere, as they provide tools for accessing parts of the web that have been subject to neglect, removal or censorship. this research is therefore motivated by the observation that despite their positioning as critical resources for a range of scholarly internet research agendas (rogers, 2013) and their widespread use as tools for evidence-based accountability online, was remain relatively understudied. as such, recent scholarship has framed the need for further research into the practices of web archiving, arguing the inherent connections between the ways the web is archived and our future understanding of the web’s past (ogden et al., 2017; summers and punzalan, 2017). although featured in numerous news media articles since their formation in 2009, the specifics regarding the processes that underpin archive team web archiving activities have yet to receive critical attention within the field. situated within a broader, longitudinal study of archive team’s wa activities (using interviews, non/participant observation and documentary research), this research focuses on data collected during their attempts to archive tumblr nsfw blogs between december 2018 and january 2019. during this period, i observed activities as they occurred on public efnet internet relay channels (irc), archive team’s github repositories, social media (including tumblr, twitter, reddit) and in popular news media. interviews and irc chat with archive team participants supplemented observations and provided a mechanism for clarifying findings and focusing further observations. the findings also draw on publicly available historical irc logs, the archive team wiki and media interviews to further contextualise observations. findings and discussion web archiving is produced within cultural worlds that produce meaning through practice. the first observation is rooted in the view that web archiving is situated within particular cultural worlds that are observable through local meanings, practices and strategies of action. archive team’s origin story is first used to contextualise the early visions for a volunteer ‘emergency response team’ dedicated to archiving online user-generated content. their origins, accompanying analogies and imagery then frame both ‘the opposition’ (corporations, bureaucracy, censorship) and an ‘a-team’ imaginary with a moral cause to ‘save the web’. next, web archiving as culture is observable through the practices used to both action and organise the collective work of web archiving. here, i discuss some of the ways that community identity is conveyed through socio-technical protocols and tools that: facilitate a form of ‘institutional memory-making’ through selfarchiving; shape remote communication and project organisation; create a sense of community belonging and ultimately reflect a broader attentiveness to the core tenets of liberalism and ‘hacker culture’ famously described by levy (2010). web archiving transforms the web through practice. the second observation is that web archiving is transformative; where a focus on cultural practices works to frame the ways the web is altered through archival practices, as well as highlights the contribution of culture in both sustaining and constructing strategies of action. practice dilemmas are revealed that highlight the impact of ‘folk theories’ and claims regarding which particular components of the site were deemed worth saving (and conversely, not worth saving) and why. archive team’s persistence in the collection of nsfw posts despite tumblr’s attempts to thwart their efforts revealed an observable ‘fetishisation of abundance’ that trumped the perceived risks of breaching the platform’s access restrictions. findings demonstrate the prioritisation of the scale of collection over the ‘integrity’ or completeness of was, where the juxtaposition of these two principles reveals the shifting ethical boundaries of practice in response to the challenges of archiving. in turn, the study reflects the performative ways that web archiving is shaped by culture, and critically positions practices as a transformative force that shapes the nature of our interaction with the past web. references gillespie, t., 2018. custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. yale university press, new haven and london. levy, s., 2010. hackers: heroes of the computer revolution. o’reilly, sebastopol, ca. mason, j., 2011. facet methodology: the case for an inventive research orientation. methodological innovations online 6, 75–92. https://doi.org/10.4256/mio.2011.008 ogden, j., 2020. saving the web: facets of web archiving in everyday practice (phd thesis). university of southampton, southampton, uk. ogden, j., halford, s., carr, l., 2017. observing web archives: the case for an ethnographic study of web archiving, in: proceedings of websci ’17. presented at the web science, acm, troy, ny usa. https://doi.org/10.1145/3091478.3091506 roberts, s.t., 2019. behind the screen: content moderation in the shadows of social media. yale university press, new haven and london. rogers, r., 2013. digital methods. mit press, cambridge, ma. summers, e., punzalan, r., 2017. bots, seeds and people: web archives as infrastructure, in: proceedings of cscw ’17. acm, new york, ny, usa, pp. 821–834. https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998345 swidler, a., 2001. what anchors cultural practices, in: schatzki, t.r., knorr cetina, k., von savigny, e. (eds.), the practice turn in contemporary theory. routledge, london and new york, pp. 83–102. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): siapera, e., bastos, m., tuters, m., walker, s., rasti, s., cunningham, p., curley, c., scally, b., khan. m. (2022, november). the toxic turn: conceptual and methodological advances on problematic/toxic contents on social media. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the toxic turn? conceptual and methodological advances on problematic/toxic contents on social media marco bastos university college dublin eugenia siapera, university college dublin marc tuters university of amsterdam shawn walker arizona state university sanaz rasti university college dublin padraig cunningham university college dublin cliona curley university college dublin brendan scally university college dublin mansura khan university college dublin the ‘toxic turn’ in social media platforms continues unabated. hate speech, misand disinformation, misogynistic and racist speech, images, memes and videos are all far too common on social media platforms and more broadly on the internet. while the diminishing popularity of populist politicians led to hopes for less social toxicity, the covid-19 pandemic introduced new and more complex dimensions. tensions have emerged around what constitutes problematic content and who gets to define it. coregulation models, such as for example the ec code of conduct against illegal hate speech, focus on the legality of certain types of contents, while leaving other categories of problematic contents to be defined by platforms. in parallel, the social media ecosystem became more diverse, as new platforms with hands off moderation policies attracted users who felt too constrained by the policies of mainstream platforms. the proposed panel examines this complex and dynamic landscape by problematizing what is understood as toxic, deplatformed, removable and in general problematic content on platforms with the aim to probe the boundaries of what is constituted as acceptable discourse on platforms and to map its implications. in particular, this panel discusses the broad definition of ‘problematic content’ employed by social media platforms, a catch-all term that cuts across hate speech and propaganda, including more politically topical content such as mal-, mis-, and disinformation, hyperpartisan and polarising content, but also abusive, misogynistic, racist, and homophobic discourse. the term is also employed to refer to spam and content that infringes upon the terms of service or the community standards of social media platforms. as such, it is a broad category that resists a narrower classification given the operational scope of its use. defining what constitutes problematic content is a key operation of platform content moderation policies but is also the subject of intense debates (de gregorio, 2020; gillespie, 2018; gillespie et al., 2020; gorwa et al., 2020). the panel interrogates the many definitions and applications of problematic content on social media platforms and applications through an empirically informed lens and focusing on deleted contents, complex mixed narratives, and grey areas, including hidden misinformation on voice applications. problematic content according to twitter compliance api presents ongoing work on the twitter compliance api and the compliance firehose, which allow researchers to identify content that has been deleted, deactivated, protected, or suspended from twitter, a proxy for problematic content. in multi-part narratives on telegram siapera presents ongoing research that probes the intersection between covid-19 scepticism, far right and other political narratives in vaccine hesitant groups on telegram. the third contribution, what if bill gates really is evil, people? investigating the infodemic’s grey areas discusses the conceptual and methodological definitions of problematic content in relation to work on anti-vax and other conspiratorial narratives on instagram and on twitter. all contributions foreground the difficulties and costs of identifying and dealing with problematic contents on social media. the panel fits with theme of decolonization in two ways: firstly, because it is concerned with the tensions around how toxic/problematic contents are defined and who gets to define them; and secondly, because of its focus on neo-colonial discourses or justifications for colonialism in both narratives hosted by platforms and in platforms’ attempts to regulate content. as some narratives are flagged for removal by social platforms, they also raise the question of who is deciding and what does problematic content mean, with far right discourses exploiting this tension and ironically denouncing any attempt to regulate the public discourse as ideological enforcement and justification for (neo)colonial practices performed by social media platforms. from this perspective, platforms' own claims about what constitutes acceptable content is uncomfortably close to colonial narratives of civilised discourse and brings to the fore the potential for neo-colonial narratives and practices in digital spaces. references de gregorio, g. (2020). democratising online content moderation: a constitutional framework. computer law & security review, 36, 105374. gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet. yale university press. gillespie, t., aufderheide, p., carmi, e., gerrard, y., gorwa, r., matamorosfernández, a., ... & west, s. m. (2020). expanding the debate about content moderation: scholarly research agendas for the coming policy debates. internet policy review, 9(4), article-number. gorwa, r., binns, r., & katzenbach, c. (2020). algorithmic content moderation: technical and political challenges in the automation of platform governance. big data & society, 7(1), 2053951719897945. problematic content according to twitter compliance api marco bastos university college dublin shawn walker arizona state university in this talk we discuss the twitter batch compliance endpoint and the compliance firehose made available to researchers querying and monitoring the covid-19 twitter public stream. these endpoints allow developers and researchers to batch upload large amounts of twitter data and receive information about the current state of the content on twitter. while they were created to help developers and academic researchers keep their twitter data sets in compliance with the developer agreement and policy, these endpoints can be leveraged to identify removed tweets and user accounts, and therefore offer important information about content that has been deleted, blocked, suspended, or is otherwise no longer publicly available on twitter. the removal of social media content results from the enforcement of the community standards and guidelines put together by social media platforms in the past years. the systematic removal of content, however, has the problematic drawback of altering the record of social interactions. unlike traditional media used to distribute propaganda, such as newspapers and posters in the 20th century (sanders & taylor, 1982), or pamphlets and leaflets going back as far as the 16th century (raymond, 2003), the removal of social media content eliminates any trace of the event, thereby preventing forensic analysis and academic research on influence operations targeting social media platforms. while there have been attempts to create public archives of social media posts, these institutional efforts faced considerable challenges and failed to come to fruition (zimmer, 2015). similarly, although social platforms have at times offered archives of disinformation campaigns identified and removed by the very platforms (elections integrity, 2018), such sanctioned archives offer only a partial glimpse into the extent of influence operations and may prevent researchers from examining organic contexts of manipulation (acker & donovan, 2019). researchers using the batch compliance endpoint can thus submit a set of tweet ids or user ids and receive the status of this content, which can be classified as deleted, suspended, protected, geo-information scrubbed, or deactivated—a set of information that until recently could only the retrieved through a labour-intensive process of querying the search api and reverse-engineering the results. this is important information for researchers tracking problematic content on social media, including misand disinformation, which is the type of content that is more likely to be removed from the social platform due to infringements to the tos. in our experience monitoring the twitter compliance firehose, we estimate that the baseline of tweet deletion stands at around 15%, which is a substantial portion of the entire public conversation on twitter. with social media platforms rarely disclosing content that was flagged for removal, the compliance endpoints offer a much welcome glimpse into what is considered problematic content by twitter. it makes it possible, for instance, to study the politics of deletion on social platforms and to infer what the company classifies as ‘low-quality content,’ seeing that deleted but particularly suspended content can be used as proxies to tangible examples of users and tweets that were selected for removal by the social media platform. references acker, a. and donovan, j., (2019). data craft: a theory/methods package for critical internet studies. information, communication & society, 22(11), pp.1590-1609. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1645194 elections integrity. (2018). data archive https://about.twitter.com/en_us/values/electionsintegrity.html raymond, j., (2006). pamphlets and pamphleteering in early modern britain. cambridge university press. sanders, m.l. and taylor, p.m., (1982). british propaganda during the first world war, 1914–18. macmillan international higher education. zimmer, m., (2015). the twitter archive at the library of congress: challenges for information practice and information policy. first monday. multi-part toxic narratives on telegram : covid-19 scepticism and the far right eugenia siapera university college dublin sanaz rasti university college dublin padraig cunningham university college dublin cliona curley university college dublin brendan scally university college dublin mansura khan university college dublin the pressures on social media to clean up their platforms from hate speech and disinformation led to a mass ‘deplatforming’ of far right and conspiracy theory accounts (rogers, 2020). one of the results of this deplatforming was the ‘migration’ of such accounts to alt tech platforms, whose moderation policies were less stringent. telegram, was among those platforms that gained followers dissatisfied with what they perceived as ‘censorship’ or infringement of their freedom of speech (guhl and davey, 2020). since this constitutes a displacement rather than eradication of what may generally be seen as toxic or problematic contents, there are important questions regarding the ways in which the relatively unconstrained space of alt tech platforms allows such contents to expand, intensify, proliferate and intermix with other kinds of contents. a case in point is the co-articulation of far right narratives with anti-vaxx and anti-covid-19 state measures. this complex kind of toxic/problematic contents eludes simple classification and requires a more nuanced approach to identify it, unpack it and understand how its various parts meld together. the proposed contribution is focusing on these complex narratives on telegram with the aim to understand how the ‘multi-toxic’ contents/narratives are constituted. in particular, covid-19 and misinformation policies pushed a number of covid-related sceptics, linked by a general mistrust of health authorities but not necessarily ideological affinities, to platforms such as telegram, because of less surveillance, more opportunity for the exchange of fringe views and less control over and/or removal of contents. while the presence and activities of the far right on telegram are increasingly well documented (e.g. urman and katz, 2020), the combined narratives of vaccine hesitancy/anti-covid-19 measures along with far right political beliefs are still not well understood. some studies provide evidence that the far right is associated with covid-19 scepticism: for example, focusing on twitter, caiani et al. (2021) found that in both italy and the uk the far right has used the pandemic to foreground xenophobic and racist narratives, while gunz and schaller (2022) found overt antisemitic narratives in conspiracy beliefs on covid-19 in both youtube and telegram. while these studies have outlined some connections between the far right, conspiracy theories and vaccine scepticism, questions still remain. the research questions that this article addresses therefore are: how are complex and multipart toxic narratives constituted? what is the role of political ideology and how does vaccine hesitancy become entangled in far right narratives? what other political or politicised beliefs are involved? to address these questions the present study focused on the irish telegram channels on covid-19, beginning with a set of seed accounts and snowballing to a total of 531 channels (including groups, supergroups and channels). using a purpose built crawler we have collected all posts and urls posted from march 2020 to early 2022 (data collection is ongoing). methodologically, the present study relies on ethnographic methods (social listening and digital ethnography), along with supervised and unsupervised topic modelling in order to identify the main narratives on covid-19 and their articulation with far right, conspiratorial and other kinds of political beliefs. initial findings of the topic modelling revealed the following opinion networks: covid denialism (fake pandemic); anti vaxx daily news; covid vaccine victims and families; covid vaccine sceptics supports; stop the lockdown; vaccine medical manipulation. we conducted a ‘deep dive’ in each of these areas, using a digital ethnographic approach, including observation, fieldwork note taking, reading, watching and listening to the various multimedia used (including a number of voice notes left by telegram users) with the objective to identify the areas where they overlap with far right exclusionary beliefs and with conspiratorial beliefs and to understand the nuances of the various ideas, beliefs and discourse circulating. while the qualitative analysis is still underway, several important observations are already emerging. these include: (i) a deep anxiety expressed by the majority of those posting in these groups covering the economic impact of the lockdown, the impact on children, uncertainties over the vaccines and side effects. importantly, a number of those posting felt that their anxieties were dismissed in more mainstream areas of the digital public sphere. (ii) the provision of social and psychological support offered by these groups who have become closely knit communities. importantly, the supports are occasionally offered conditionally, based upon confirming with the beliefs of the groups, for example, for as long as the member is still not vaccinating and wearing masks. (iii) political beliefs are of two kinds: firstly an ultranationalism, that focuses on a perceived core irish identity excluding those seen as different, and which views irish elites as corrupt and not serving the needs of the irish people. this mobilises a populist rhetoric and some racist and conspiratorial tropes (antisemitic tropes, globalism, depopulation, anti-agenda 21 etc). the second kind is about infringement of personal liberty and fundamental freedoms, including over health choice, freedom of expression and privacy. covid conspiracies over population control, constant surveillance, lack of freedom and ‘communism’ are common here. the combination of anxiety with far right political beliefs that provide a context, an explanation and a solution, alongside community-building supports which enhance group cohesion can be linked to an intensification and escalation of critical comments on covid-19 vaccines, government policies and elite actor actions and to political actions, such as the organisation of street protests. in making sense of these findings we develop a conceptual framework that brings together tilly’s political opportunity structure and cammaerts’ media opportunity structure. we use these to argue that the way in which the political, media and platform mainstream reacted to the pandemic along with the emergence of alt tech platforms have created a political and mediation opportunity structure for the politicisation of covid-19 sceptics, enabling the far right to opportunistically offer a political roof to these loose networks. moreover, our initial findings indicate the existence and operation of a comprehensive alternative information ecosystem. since many channels emerged out of the need to find a safe space for discussion for organisation of protests and other forms of resistance, in a climate of deplatforming of covid19 misinformation, perceptions of censorship and dismissal of all concerns over covid-19 related measures, our findings suggest that while deplatforming ‘exiled’ these from the mainstream, they have found an alternative space to flourish. the focus on content removal and more broadly the focus on controlling the circulation of what was deemed to be problematic/toxic content on covid has ignored the context of production of these contents, contributing to the creation of a political and mediation opportunity structure for loosely connected and ideologically disparate beliefs to coalesce in the anti-vaxx movement. we conclude by arguing that more attention to contexts of production rather than only control of problematic contents may lead to more understanding and ultimately more effective content moderation policies. references caiani, m., carlotti b., & padoan, e. (2021). online hate speech and the radical right in times of pandemic: the italian and english cases, javnost the public, 28:2, pp. 202-218, doi: 10.1080/13183222.2021.1922191 cammaerts, b. (2012). protest logics and the mediation opportunity structure. european journal of communication, 27(2), pp. 117-134. guhl, j. and davey, j., (2020). a safe space to hate: white supremacist mobilisation on telegram. isd global. gunz, h., & schaller, i. (2022). antisemitic narratives on youtube and telegram as part of conspiracy beliefs about covid-19. in antisemitism on social media (pp. 129-150). routledge. rogers, r. (2020). deplatforming: following extreme internet celebrities to telegram and alternative social media. european journal of communication, 35(3), pp. 213-229. tilly, c. (1978). from mobilization to revolution. reading: addison-wes-ley. urman, a., & katz, s. (2020). what they do in the shadows: examining the far-right networks on telegram. information, communication & society, 1-20. what if bill gates really is evil, people? investigating the infodemic’s grey areas marc tuters university of amsterdam one of the surprising developments over the course of the covid-19 pandemic has been the emergence of political protests against mitigation measures that cut ‘diagonally’ across identity and class in the shared conviction that ‘all power is conspiracy’ (callison & slobodian, 2021). this talk offers insights into conceptual frameworks and methods for studying these conspiratorially-minded communities in large social media datasets. with the pandemic, social media platforms have been recognized as a potential vector of information contagion; an ‘infodemic’. while platforms acted decisively to remove much 'problematic content', some is much harder to demarcate. an example here is the 'great reset', a narrative that emerged to prominence in late 2020 following a meeting in davos of the world economic forum. confusingly, the great reset is thus at once the name for a shadowy baseless ‘new world order’-type narrative (klein 2020) and, at the same time, the name of an actual agenda for global business leaders publicly promoting a vision of "stakeholder capitalism" (schwaab, 2021). as a primary case study, the talk focuses on a figure connected both with the davos agenda and the great reset conspiracy theory: bill gates. long perceived as an archvillain within the open-source programming community, with the arrival of the pandemic gates suddenly became the preeminent figure at the centre of multiple conspiratorial plots, including a plan to use vaccines to ‘microchip’ human populations (shahsavari et al, 2020). while often demonstrably false, generally these narratives are based on kernels of truth—for example relating to gates’ many and varied philanthro-capitalist ventures, including funding pandemic wargames and the development of unique digital certificates embedded within vaccines amongst countless other speculative investments. the talk offers a selective assessment of the relative engagement of some of these peculiar narratives—as well as an assessment of their moderation status—across two large datasets: 1m instagram posts and 15m tweets and from 2020, collected based on an expert list of ‘conspiratorial’ queries. drawing on the method of ‘digital hermeneutics’ (rommel and furia, 2018), which combines data science methods with qualitative interpretation and theorization, the talk presents various techniques by which to potentially detect conspiratorial 'narrative convergence' through patterns in hashtags, language and image use over time. by comparing hashtag use in the instragram dataset diachronically over separate quarters in 2020, preliminary research reveals various pre-existing hashtags (new world order, illuminati, etc.) increasingly overlapping with covid-related hashtags. at the same time we see the emergence of gates as a shared antagonist across many of these hashtag communities. as this research is ongoing, it forms the basis for a hypothesis regarding the phenomenon of narrative convergence over the course of the first waves of the pandemic. the instagram findings in turn inform queries into the much larger twitter dataset, which seek to test this convergence hypothesis. conceptually, the talk begins by acknowledging noortje marres’ (2018) claim that, in prioritising ‘engaging’ messages that circulate over objective knowledge, social media platforms—such as instagram’s parent company facebook— have created ‘a truth-less public sphere by design’. (423) rather than pathologizing these truth-less narratives—as is so common in the literature on conspiracy theory (cf sunstein and vermeule, 2009)—the talk aims to considered whether they may be considered as engaged in forms of speculation, based on aris komporozos-athanasiou's (2021) provocative claim that platforms like instagram “afford underexplored spaces for the exercise of the speculative imagination” (9). komporozos-athanasiou’s concept aims to update benedict anderson’s ‘imagined community’ to the era of social media, by arguing that "[s]peculation has become the very practice around which modern societies coalesce, the vernacular through which we express our collective disbelief in the waning legitimacy of neoliberalism" (144). by applying this conceptual lens to these data, the talk considers the extent to which infodemic narratives may plausibly be read as collective means of coping with uncertainty— for example over loss of control in the context of total media immersion and operations of globalised technocapitalism—as opposed to atavistic right-wing reaction? ultimately, the talk proposes that while deplatforming the infodemic is arguably desirable from a public health perspective, some of what has been labelled as problematic content during the pandemic may be of significant interest to internet researchers—especially those interested in novel practices of knowledge production and community formation in times of great uncertainty. references callison w, and q slobodian (2021) “coronapolitics from the reichstag to the capitol”. boston review. klein n (2020) ‘the great reset conspiracy smoothie’. the intercept komporozos-athanasiou, a (2021). speculative communities: living with uncertainty in a financialized world. chicago: university of chicago press marres, n (2018). “why we can't have our facts back.” engaging science, technology, and society 4. romele a, m severo and p furia (2020) “digital hermeneutics: from interpreting with machines to interpretational machines”. ai & society 35(1): 73–86. schwab, k and p vanham (2021) stakeholder capitalism: a global economy that works for progress, people and planet. new york: wiley shahsavari s, p holur, t wang, t tangherlini and v roychowdhury (2020) conspiracy in the time of corona: automatic detection of emerging covid-19 conspiracy theories in social media and the news. journal of computational social science: 1–39. sunstein, c r, and a vermeule. (2009). “conspiracy theories: causes and cures.” journal of political philosophy 17 (2): 202–27. microsoft word ging-tracking the pilling pipeline-tracking the pilling pipeline.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): ging, d., murphy, s. (2021, october). tracking the pilling pipeline: limitations, challenges and a call for new methodological frameworks in incel and manosphere research. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. tracking the pilling pipeline: limitations, challenges and a call for new methodological frameworks in incel and manosphere research debbie ging school of communications, dublin city university shane murphy school of communications, dublin city university the manosphere is an online network of disparate and sometimes conflicting, sometimes overlapping assemblages. these formations are united in their antipathy toward feminism, their reliance on evolutionary psychology and their belief that western civilization is under threat. in recent years, a growing body of scholarship on the manosphere has emerged from a range of disciplinary perspectives. much of this work sits within internet studies but there are also significant contributions from gender studies, social psychology and terrorism / cybersecurity studies. the purpose of this paper is to take stock of the current research, to identify methodological limitations, and to propose some new interdependent research frameworks and methods. to date, much of the work conducted on the manosphere and its various subgroups, of which incel is the most frequently researched, relies on gathering a dataset from one platform and subjecting it to either manual or machine analysis to identify key themes or characteristics. this categorisation has been necessary and important, but its frequent replication at this point, we argue, has led to a stagnation of knowledge, and does not facilitate theory building or intervention. notwithstanding some excellent theoretical framings from internet studies (massanari, 2015; marwick and lewis, 2017) social psychology (allan, 2016), gender and media studies (ging, 2019; braitch and banet-weiser, 2019), sociology (kimmel, 2018) and terrorism studies (hoffman et al., 2019; baele et al., 2019), there remain significant gaps in the research these relate primarily to three defining characteristics of manosphere subcultures: firstly, their anonymity and apparent reluctance to engage with academics, which has resulted in a dearth of interview or survey-based research. secondly, the dynamic nature of these communities and the speed at which they disband and re-form across disparate platforms means it is difficult to track their spread and development over time. thirdly, little if anything is known about how users become involved in these communities, i.e. the processes of algorithmic, ideological and psychosocial radicalization or ‘pilling’ which take place in different internet spaces. consequently, we have many useful static snapshots but we are missing the dynamic aspects of how and where ideas travel and interconnect. in addition to this, there is a tendency to think of the various sub-communities as homogenous, despite the significant diversity within them in terms of their agendas, motivations, and levels of involvement. this is especially relevant with regard to how certain vulnerabilities are being exploited in processes of recruitment into incel ideology among socially isolated and neurodivergent men. the dominant perception of incel as continuous with more strategically motivated men’s rights formations overlooks the exploitation of genuine – as opposed to performative (betafag) – vulnerability within this subgroup by a range of alt-right and antifeminist actors and influencers. exploring the heterogeneity within these communities is essential, therefore, to unravelling the dynamics of power that operate within them. more recently, there is a growing awareness of incel tendencies among several recent american and european far-right attackers, many of whom share a history of hating women, domestic violence and posting misogynistic views online. however, while an abundance of evidence of extremist pipelines exists, it is difficult to access and track. in response to these challenges, we propose new methodological directions that specifically attempt to map dynamic patterns and pathways of anti-women extremism online, based on our recent work on incel formations. to begin with, we call for a conceptual shift away from thinking of these communities as static, homogenous identity groups operating on isolated platforms, to conceiving of them instead as a multifaceted, ever-evolving online ecosystem, in which activity constantly migrates. we suggest that there is a need to consider a number of pathways, both spatially and temporally: firstly, the spread and extremization of ideas within different components of the incel/manosphere over time; secondly, the migration of ideas across different platforms over time (this relates to flows in both directions, i.e. both mainstreaming and extremization); and thirdly, the spread of ideas to and from other extreme online groups (e.g. alt-right, qanon, politigram ‘doomers’, etc.), bearing in mind that many of these pathways may also be transnational in nature. with regard to the first and second pathways, in addition to computational content analysis and in-depth qualitative analysis, we recommend the tracking of activity, such as posting frequency, membership counts and incel/mra-related keywords. multi-faceted analysis of this nature, particularly in spaces which were not originally incel, enables us to follow platform adoption dynamics and the various ‘pilling pathways’ that occur both within and across platforms. in addition to this, it is important to map intensity flows, to determine whether and how ideas become more or less extreme over time. with regard to radicalisation of and by other extreme communities, particularly the incel to far-right pipeline, we suggest introducing models of the transmission of ideas from research on conspiracy theories. for example, ward and voas’ (2011) use of the concept of “conspirituality” identifies an important convergence of conspiratorial and new age communities online. comparing ideological overlaps between communities against the timeline of platform adoption also allows us to see whether radicalisation is linked to the adoption of specific platforms. finally, interviews, pilling stories and web browser history scroll back analysis (robards and lincoln, 2017) can provide vital information regarding pilling pathways. evans (2018), for example, has analysed redpilling stories shared by fascist activists on white supremacist discord servers, yielding rich insights into how their platform use changed as they became more ‘pilled’. importantly, they also discuss contemporaneous developments in their real world lives, an important factor which is often left out of discussions of online radicalisation. approaching the incel/manosphere as a dynamic ecosystem, we argue, will take knowledge of this phenomenon in important new directions, particularly in relation to prevention and intervention, as well as opening up new space for inter-disciplinary collaboration. references allan, j. a. (2016). phallic affect, or why men's rights activists have feelings. men and masculinities, 19(1), 22-41. baele, s. j., brace, l., & coan, t. g. (2019). from “incel” to “saint”: analyzing the violent worldview behind the 2018 toronto attack. terrorism and political violence, 1-25. braitch, j. and banet-weiser, s. (2019) from pick-up artists to incels: con(fidence) games, networked misogyny, and the failure of neoliberalism. international journal of communication 13. evans, r. (2018). from memes to infowars: how 75 fascist activists were ‘red-pilled’. bellingcat, 11 october. ging, d. (2019). alphas, betas, and incels: theorizing the masculinities of the manosphere. men and masculinities, 22(4), 638-657. hoffman, b., ware, j., & shapiro, e. (2020). assessing the threat of incel violence. studies in conflict & terrorism, 43(7), 565-587. kimmel, m. s. (2018). healing from hate: how young men get into--and out of--violent extremism. berkeley: university of california press. marwick, a., & lewis, r. (2017). media manipulation and disinformation online. new york: data & society research institute. massanari, a. (2017). # gamergate and the fappening: how reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. new media & society, 19(3), 329346. robards, b., & lincoln, s. (2017). uncovering longitudinal life narratives: scrolling back on facebook. qualitative research, 17(6), 715-730. ward, c., & voas, d. (2011). the emergence of conspirituality. journal of contemporary religion, 26(1), 103-121. microsoft word tomlinson-beware asian servers-beware asian servers.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): tomlinson, c., & srauy, s. (2021, october). beware asian servers: racialized perceptions of cheating and skill among video game players. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. beware asian servers: racialized perceptions of cheating and skill among video game players christine tomlinson university of california, irvine sam srauy oakland university online interaction can be rife with hostility (liu et al., 2018). social media in particular has been observed as an arena to spread negative, racist, and racialized interactions and beliefs (mathew et al., 2019), but video games are another area to consider in terms of online racism. although competitive play makes up a large portion of toxic interactions (lee, 2016), targeted hostilities are common. in particular, an emphasis on whiteness and anti-black behavior is well documented in gaming spaces (gray, 2017). the design and content of video games may contribute to these dynamics through the inclusion of common racial stereotypes (srauy & cheney-lippold, 2019). less is understood, however, about specific forms of racism in gaming. this theoretical project considers the patterns of racism aimed at asian players. it is important to keep in mind, given the timeframe, that covid-19 illuminated many of the cultural embeddings against asians and asian-americans that predate the pandemic. in the united states, there has been a history of hostility directed toward china and chinese people in the context of epidemic events (edara, 2020). this creates unique circumstances where anti-chinese – and, as an extension, anti-asian – perceptions and behaviors flared up among the public more generally in much less subtle and sometimes violent ways (edara, 2020). these issues do not exist in a vacuum and racism is deeply ingrained in society, persisting subconsciously even underneath outwardly supportive attitudes (deangelis, 2009). for asianamericans, racism often takes the form of subconscious discrimination (deangelis, 2009), which is frequently also linked to cultural assumptions of skill (groen, 2013) in the form of the model minority myth (alvarez et al., 2006). however, discrimination may be more strongly related to immigration status than race for asian (and latine) people in the us (bean et al., 2013), suggesting that xenophobia may play a large role in player reactions. still, the position of asians and asian-americans in the us exists in the context of a shifting barrier between white/non-white (a movement toward a black/non-black divide), which interacts with other race-related issues like the model minority myth and “honorary [w]hiteness” (bean & lee, 2009; bonilla-silva, 2004). despite the privilege afforded by the honorary white status, asians also face a discursive attack as being machine-like automations and representation of a competitive “evil empire,” whose insidiousness encroaches on white spaces, viz. canonical cyberpunk texts such as blade runner (see nakamura, 2002). in these texts, the fear articulated is the supplanting of whites by asians in economic and cultural contexts through dishonest means such as “cheating” (nakamura, 2002, 2009). yet, bonilla-silva (2006) notes that whites justify their status as one not of privilege but of superior skill. thus, in our context, we see the rhetorical strategy of attributing white players’ gaming success as one of skill, while successes by asian players as the result of cheating/automation (e.g., aimbots or gold farming). we note the cyberpunk genre is having a renaissance in titles such as cyberpunk 2077, lending further weight to our claims. biased perceptions like these influence video game players’ perceptions and the ways that they highlight various behaviors online. cheating is viewed as linked to asian servers and, in particular, chinese players while cheating connected to other countries is not framed as aggressively. this perception is granted legitimacy by outlets focused on gaming. even in cases where cheating is linked to players in other countries at high rates, the conversation shifts toward the limited data on china without prompting. this is a pattern that has been present since before 2020 and has led to players hoping to block china from games to prevent cheating, cautioning one another against playing on asian servers, and questioning the cultural roots of cheating among chinese players. users in these spaces call upon stereotypical cultural attributes and apply them in attempts to explain cultural reasons that chinese players are prone to cheating. there is another side to discrimination against players from asian backgrounds as well. although the link of china to asian servers promotes a pan-ethnic approach to discussion in many cases, there are fewer accusations towards players from south korea and japan, linking their performance instead to a seemingly innate skill at video games and calling up concepts of the model minority myth. although nakamura (2002) notes that the cyberpunk genre otherizes japanese bodies in particular, the west’s tendency to adopt a pan-asian discourse (duara, 2001) affords an elision of china with the “evil empire” because of a chinese video game cheater imaginary, while popular press stories of japanese and south korean “obsessive” gaming carries discourses of skill that intersects with their honorary whiteness in the west (see groen, 2013). future studies should probe these patterns and trends in online racism more deeply to better understand their sources, spread, and potential cultural consequences. references alvarez, a. n., juang, l., & liang, c. t. (2006). asian americans and racism: when bad things happen to" model minorities." cultural diversity and ethnic minority psychology, 12(3), 477. bean, f. d., & lee, j. (2009). plus ça change…? multiraciality and the dynamics of race relations in the united states. journal of social issues, 65(1), 205-219. bean, f. d., lee, j., & bachmeier, j. d. (2013). immigration & the color line at the beginning of the 21st century. daedalus, 142(3), 123-140. bonilla-silva, e. (2004). from bi-racial to tri-racial: towards a new system of racial stratification in the usa. ethnic and racial studies, 27(6), 931-950. deangelis, t. (2009). unmasking racial micro aggressions. monitor on psychology, 40(2), 42. duara, p. (2001). the discourse of civilization and pan-asianism. journal of world history, 99130. edara, i. r. (2020). anti-asian racism in the shadow of covid-19 in the usa: reported incidents, psychological implications, and coping resources. journal of psychological research, 2(03). gray, k. l. (2017). “they’re just too urban”: black gamers streaming on twitch.in j. daniels, k. gregory& t. m. cottom (eds.), digital sociologies, 355–67. policy press. groen, a. (2013, may14). why gamers in asia are the world's best esport athletes. pc world.https://www.pcworld.com/article/2036844/why-gamers-in-asia-are-the-worldsbest-esport-athletes.html lee, m. d. (2016, september). crowdsourcing, communities and social identities: using citizen science to combat online toxicity. in joint international conference on serious games (pp. 231-242). springer, cham. liu, p., guberman, j., hemphill, l., & culotta, a. (2018). forecasting the presence and intensity of hostility on instagram using linguistic and social features. arxiv preprint arxiv:1804.06759. mathew, b., dutt, r., goyal, p., & mukherjee, a. (2019, june). spread of hate speech in online social media. in proceedings of the 10th acm conference on web science (pp. 173-182). nakamura, l. (2002). cybertypes: race, ethnicity, and identity on the internet. routledge. nakamura, l. (2009). don't hate the player, hate the game: the racialization of labor in world of warcraft. critical studies in media communication, 26(2), 128-144. srauy, s., & cheney-lippold, j. (2019). realism in fifa? how social realism enabled platformed racism in a video game. first monday. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): son, c (2019, october 2-5). rules of engagement: what terms and conditions moderating comments to australian online news sites say about trust in the audience. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. rules of engagement: what terms and conditions moderating reader comments to australian online news sites say about trust in the audience catherine son university of adelaide reader comments to online news websites have become an important part of civic debate and engagement since the advent of web 2.0. audience contributions in the form of reader comments are encouraged by most online news providers, as a way of creating strong audience communities and sustaining audience engagement. however, the extent to which participants can express themselves through reader comment sections is often constrained by the terms and conditions news organisations use to govern reader comments. such constraints indicate a lack of trust from news organisations towards their audiences. at a time when trust in mainstream media organisations is waning and readership figures continually declining, a mutually trusting relationship between news organisations and their audiences is essential to the future of mainstream commercial journalism. this study examines the terms and conditions used to moderate reader comments on five australian news websites, to assess what these conditions of use imply about trust towards the audience within these organisations. additionally, public statements from each of the five news organisations relating to public trust in their organisations or the broader institution of news are also examined, to understand the expectations of public trust that each organisation holds. initially, it was hoped that reader comments to online news sites and other participatory spaces would come to represent a new kind of democratic public sphere (dahlgren 2005; gerhards and schafer 2010; papacharissi 2002). yet, the inclusion of reader comments alongside online news stories has long been a source of contention among journalists and news organisations. early studies of reader comment spaces found that most journalists did not interact with readers “below the line” of their articles (hermida and thurman 2008; viscovi and gustafsson 2013). more recently, however, some journalists, contributors, and publications have made an effort to interact with readers “below the line”, in an endeavour to foster a sense of audience community. hosting reader comments can benefit news organisations by establishing a sense of online community, creating a loyal readership (conlin and roberts 2016), and extending the amount of time users spend on the organisation’s website (brost 2013, p. 109). yet, reader comments can also be problematic for news organisations, and many fear the legal repercussions and potential challenges to journalistic authority that come with letting the audience “inside the gates”. the moderation of reader comments to online news sites and their repercussions for both audiences and news organisations has been studied extensively (see for example braun and gillespie 2011; hermida and thurman 2008). however, there is limited research examining expectations of trust by news organisations from their audiences, compared to levels of trust in audience participation these organisations show when moderating reader comments. this study employs critical discourse analysis (fairclough 1995) to analyse the terms and conditions governing reader comments to five australian news websites – the advertiser, the age, the conversation, crikey, and guardian australia – to determine how each organisation’s moderation policies reflect the level of trust afforded to their audiences. public statements from each organisation relating to trust in their organisation or journalism more broadly are also assessed, to explore how the level of trust each organisation expects of the public compares to the level of trust extended to the audience when hosting reader comments. four of the five news organisations examined in this research publicly state on their website or through other communications such as annual reports that they value a strong relationship with their audiences. this is demonstrated in statements encouraging audience involvement (advertiser 2018), endeavours to ‘strengthen community’ (fairfax media 2018), or repeated references to the importance of ‘trustworthy’ journalism (the conversation 2018). yet, each of these organisations exercise substantial control over the contribution of reader comments to their websites. for example, crikey ‘reserves the right to choose which comments we deem to be appropriate to be posted and discussed, and which are not’, and ‘the right to close conversations which descend into inappropriate discussion’ (crikey 2018). such statements are highly restrictive, and demonstrate a significant level of distrust towards the audience. furthermore, each of the news organisations examined state that comments that are considered to be ‘off-topic’ or that ‘do not add to the debate’ will be rejected. these vague stipulations convey a strong desire to dictate the terms of audience participation on these websites, rather than encouraging audience engagement and the development of a strong reader community. other mechanisms constraining audience participation through reader comments are the requirement of all websites to set up an account with varying identification requirements – from logging in with email addresses and social media profiles (advertiser 2018, age 2018, crikey 2018), to stipulations that real names are required to comment and that comments made under aliases will be removed (the conversation 2018). additionally, the advertiser (2018) and the age (2018) impose character restrictions on the length of comments. these terms of use are highly restrictive, and in the case of comment word limit restrictions, serves to inhibit substantial audience contributions and stifle debate. a relationship of mutual trust between commercial news organisations and their audiences is vital to the long-term survival of commercial mainstream media in australia. yet, in contrast to their public statements of valuing audience and community engagement (advertiser 2018 and age 2018), and trust (the conversation 2018), it is evident from the terms and conditions used to moderate reader comments that the organisations examined in this research continue to deny audience contributors to varying degrees the same level of trust these organisations ask of their readers. consequently, despite early hopes that online reader comments to news sites may facilitate greater democratic participation for citizens, the potential for substantial democratic debate on the websites of the five organisations examined in this research remains unrealised at this time. references the advertiser 2018, about, viewed 24 december 2018, <https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/help/about>. braun, j and gillespie, t 2011, ‘hosting the public discourse, hosting the public: when online news and social media converge’, journalism practice, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 383398. brost, l 2013, ‘editors have mixed feelings on user-generated content’, newspaper research journal, vol. 34, iss. 3, pp. 101-115. conlin, l and roberts, c 2016, ‘presence of online reader comments lowers news site credibility’, newspaper research journal, vol. 37, iss. 4, pp. 365-376. the conversation 2018, the conversation 2018 stakeholder report, 13 december, viewed 24 december 2018, <https://theconversation.com/where-media-meets-realworld-impact-the-conversation-stakeholder-report-2018-108605>. crikey 2018, moderation guidelines, viewed 14 february 2019, <https://www.crikey.com.au/moderation-guidelines/>. dahlgren, p 2005, ‘the internet, public spheres, and political communication; dispersion and deliberation’, political communication, vol. 22, no. 2. pp. 147-162. fairclough, n 1995, critical discourse analysis: the critical study of language, longman publishing, new york. fairfax media 2018, corporate responsibility, viewed 24 december 2018, <https://www.fairfaxmedia.com.au/company/corporate-responsibility>. gerhards, j and schafer, mf 2010, ‘is the internet a better public sphere? comparing old and new media in the us and germany’, new media & society, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 143-160. hermida, a and thurman, n 2008, ‘a clash of cultures: the integration of usergenerated content within professional journalistic frameworks at british newspaper websites’, journalism practice, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 343-356. papacharissi, z 2002, ‘the virtual sphere: the internet as a public sphere’, new media & society, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 9-27. viscovi, d and gustafsson, m 2013, ‘dirty work: why journalists shun reader comments’, in t olsson (ed.), producing the internet: critical perspectives of social media, university of gothenburg, gothenburg, pp. 85-102. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): yecies, b., ren, x. (t.), shim, a. and wang, d. (2019, october 2-5). banking on cultural intermediaries across webtoon, webnovel and video-sharing platforms in asia’s digital creative economy. panel presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. banking on cultural intermediaries across webtoon, webnovel and video-sharing platforms in asia’s digital creative economy associate professor brian yecies communication and media, university of wollongong dr. xiang (tony) ren australia-china institute for arts and culture, western sydney university dr. aegyung shim university of wollongong dr. dingkun wang jiao tong baker centre for translation and intercultural studies, shanghai jiao tong university introduction the four papers in this interdisciplinary panel explore some of the dynamic reading, writing, sharing and transmedia adaptation trends emerging across popular digital webtoon (aka digital comics), webnovel (aka internet novel) and video platforms in asia and among asian users. specifically, the speakers investigate how complex layers of trust and (dis)trust are surrounding and impacting on the fans, also known as ‘cultural intermediaries’, involved in the production, circulation, translation and remake of korean and chinese webtoon and webnovel genres. included in this discussion are fan-dubbed and video remixes of banned television shows that are inspiring local amateur content production. together, the papers demonstrate how problematical layers of precarious labour are contributing to integral parts of asia’s expanding digital media cultures and industries – albeit in uneven and geographically dispersed ways. ultimately, the panel will document how a range of outward-bound cultural and economic strategies driving some of asia’s largest digital platforms and new media formats are expanding the digital creative economy in the asia-pacific and beyond. associate professor brian yecies: asian digital transcreators on korean webtoon platforms the first paper, “asian digital transcreators on korean webtoon platforms”, sets the context for this panel by analysing some of the contributions that amateur usertranslators from indonesia, thailand and vietnam are making to the thriving digital platform environment in the region. it explains how a coterie of trusted and respected indonesian, thai and vietnamese “cultural intermediaries” are generating value for the korean and global webtoon industry at large, while also inspiring a new generation of local writers and artists seeking to join this expanding arena. in turn, as this paper argues, such transcreators and transnational cultural practices are transforming new genres and aspects of digital media cultural practices in the global south, symbiotically advancing the expansion of the korean digital wave and its revitalised links with southeast asia. dr. xiang (tony) ren: transmedia online literature in china and global platform ecosystems the second paper, “transmedia online literature in china and global platform ecosystems”, explores the defining features of digital chinese online literature in the age of cross-platform distribution and fan-led transmedia adaptations. to shed light on this complex topic, and the new roles that kuaikan and bilibili are playing in this rapidly transforming arena, the talk first conceptualises the opportunities and challenges of this global phenomenon. next, it maps the extended value chain of online transmedia literature that is accessible via connected distribution platforms and multiple media formats. the paper concludes by showing how the practices surrounding the promotion and reception of chinese online literature on these two particular platforms represent a significant aspect of china’s “going out” (aka global expansion) campaign. in so doing, the paper highlights the changing role that fan-translation platforms are playing in the global expansion of chinese online literature and the interplay between international and domestic ecosystems of creative digital literature. dr. aegyung shim: webtoon literary adaptations and their east asian encounters the third paper, “webtoon literary adaptations and their east asian encounters”, builds upon the arguments about transcreation in the first paper. the presenter uses a case study of the popular webtoon series cheese in the trap as well as its television series and film remakes to illustrate how new transmedia flows are underpinning the expansion of literary adaptation in asia, thus winning the hearts and minds of audiences in the region. specifically, the speaker investigates some of the previously unrecognised contributions that fan-translators – or “transcreators” – are making to the inconspicuous spread of webtoon genres and narratives across the region, and how this form of precarious labour is being exploited by naver. as such, the speaker analyses how a webtoon series is translated and then transformed across multiple formats and platforms, and how representative cultural intermediaries are magnifying the power and spread of webtoons throughout the global south more broadly. dr. dingkun wang: the complexity of translation in the fan-made video ‘meeting sheldon’ (2014) in the fourth and final paper, “the complexity of translation in the fan-made video meeting sheldon (2014)”, the speaker presents a case study of fan-driven metamorphosis of the popular sitcom the big bang theory in the chinese context. the fan-made video “寨见谢耳朵” (aka meeting sheldon, available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tas7rcnyb0o) was produced by the fandubbing group huai xiu bang (淮秀帮) as a response to the official ban of the big bang theory from licensed online broadcast in china. huai xiu bang remixed the disintegrated clips and audio assembled from the original series, while recreating a newly dubbed soundtrack in chinese and english. as a result, as this paper argues, the group created a new story that deliberately ridiculed censorship in china, earning them a kind of respect and trust (or in some cases, distrust) among followers. the repurposed storyline represents a dynamic form of digital intermediation, through which fan translators breach the boundaries between their own cultural-political realities and the industrial context linked to the original storyworld – all while imposing upon the later their extradiegetic desire to transform the “target text”. today, thousands of youtube audiences watching this fanmade video are treated to an unnatural narrative which places the original main characters at the intersections between the two worlds to convey anxious emotions towards the official ban through a series of jokes. aoir2018 exploring the role of professional youtubers in young people&#39s health behaviour and identit selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): harris, j. porcellato, l. atkinson a, mink, m. (2018, october 10-13). “like, comment and subscribe”. exploring the role professional youtubers play in young people’s health behaviours and identity in the uk. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “like, comment and subscribe”. exploring the role professional youtubers play in young people’s health behaviours and identites in the uk jane harris liverpool john moores university supervisory team: dr lorna porcellato liverpool john moores university dr amanda atkinson liverpool john moores university dr michael mink california state university background in the united kingdom, there are now over 150 individual youtubers with more than one million subscribers (socialblade, 2017). the majority of their audience are under the age of 30 and a significant proportion are aged between 13-18 years. youtubers produce content on a whole range of topics including: gaming, music, beauty, fashion and vlogs of their daily lives, and the content they produce is often commercially sponsored and largely unregulated. their content often both purposefully and accidentally touches on a whole range of health topics including: mental health, alcohol, sexual health, body image, healthy eating and physical activity. youtubers successfully create “illusions of intimacy” (ellcessor, 2012) for their audience. through both youtube and other social media platforms including snapchat, instagram and twitter they appear increasingly interactive and accessible to their audience. for young people, youtubers could represent a magnified version of their own searchable and replicable online socially networked lives and could encounter the same difficulties that come from feelings of surveillance and misinterpretation online. youtubers could therefore be a particularly relatable source of health information for young people, more so than those of other adults offering them advice on their health and wellbeing (beer, 2008; boyd, 2008; uhls & greenfield, 2012). however, there remain concerns about young people’s ability to critically analyse the quality and reliability of health information they encounter online (bartlett and miller, 2011). inequalities in health information seeking exist across all age groups and are influenced by a number of factors including: experience, motivation, self-efficacy and autonomy of use (eastin and larose 2000, correa 2015). research suggests that young people have complex and often thorough methods for evaluating online health information and that popularity and peer appraisal plays an important role with likes, comments, views and favourites all influencing how likely young people are to engage with a particular information source (gold et al., 2012, fergie et al., 2013). this is reflected in an increased focus on digital media literacy on both national (house of lords 2017) and international (bulger and livingstone 2013) policy agendas. this study is the first to: examine the health related content produced by uk youtubers, and explore the role this plays in young people’s own health information seeking and youtuber’s perceived role in health promotion. by triangulating these findings it considers the potential contribution that youtubers could make to health promotion in the uk. aim the aim of the research is to explore the role that professional youtubers play in young people health behaviours and identities in the uk. methods the study was a four stage, sequential mixed methods design (creswell and plano clark, 2006). the first stage, a school based questionnaire with 931 13-18 year olds quantified young people’s engagement with youtuber produced health content and provided a sampling frame for the later qualitative stages. an online analysis of 7 uk youtubers examined the type of health content they produced. focus groups (n=7, 85 participants) with 13-18 year olds explored the impact this content had on young people’s health behaviours and case study interviews with professional youtubers ( <1 million subscribers, n=3) explored their perceived role in health promotion. findings youtubers appeared to be a significant source of health information for the participating young people with 80% watching at least one uk youtuber, 70% recalling youtubers talking about at least one health topic and 47% having used youtube to seek health advice. the survey also measured participants’ confidence in performing a number of social media literacy tasks. those who could recall youtuber health content and had sought health advice on youtube were at significantly increased odds of a high confidence score suggesting perceived confidence increases with exposure to youtuber health content. there are three broad characteristics which typify the way in which youtubers communicate health information. youtubers share personal health experiences with their audience, give health advice and encourage their audience to do the same through the comments section and share certain social norms about health and wellbeing. this appears to align well with the theory of planned behavior (azjen, 1991). however, interviews with professional youtubers suggest that numerous factors impact upon their decision to make health related content; both commercial and ethical. youtubers are treading a fine line between health promotion and self-promotion. interestingly, the young people participating in the focus groups were also aware of this tension and yet, despite demonstrating competence to critically analyse this content, still stated a preference for youtuber produced content when it was what they perceived to be “real and honest” experiences. conclusion youtuber produced health content appeared to be a recognized source of health information for young people in this study. young people appeared able to critique the accuracy and commercial influences on youtuber content. however, this content still appears to be a relatable way of sharing health experiences, giving advice and communicating social norms. references ajzen, i. (1991) the theory of planned behavior. organizational behavior and human decision processes, 50(2), 179-211. bartlett j & miller c. (2011) truth, lies and the internet: a report into young people’s digital fluency. london: demos beer, d. d. (2008) 'social network(ing) sites…revisiting the story so far: a response to danah boyd & nicole ellison', journal of computer-mediated communication, 13(2), 516-529. boyd, d. (2008) 'why youth heart social network sites: the role of networked publics in teenage social life' in buckingham, d., ed., youth, identity and digital media, cambridge, ma: the mit press, 119-142. bulger, m. and livingstone, s. (2013) media literacy research and policy in europe. a review of recent, current and planned activities. correa, t. (2015) 'digital skills and social media use: how internet skills are related to different types of facebook use among ‘digital natives’', information, communication & society, 19(8), 1095-1107. creswell, j. & plano clark, v.l. (2006) designing and conducting mixed methods research. michigan: sage. eastin, m. s. and larose, r. (2000) 'internet self-efficacy and the psychology of the digital divide', journal of computer-mediated communication, 6(1), 0-0. ellcessor, e. (2012) tweeting @felciaday: online social media, convergence, and subcultural stardom. cinema journal 51(2) fergie, g., hunt, k. and hilton, s. (2013) 'what young people want from health-related online resources: a focus group study', j youth stud, 16(5), 579-596 gold, j., pedrana, a. e., stoove, m. a., chang, s., howard, s., asselin, j., ilic, o., batrouney, c. and hellard, m. e. (2012) 'developing health promotion interventions on social networking sites: recommendations from the facespace project', j med internet res, 14(1), e30. house of lords (2017) growing up with the internet, tso: westminster. socialblade (2017) top 250 youtubers in uk. available at: https://socialblade.com/youtube/top/country/gb uhls, y. t. and greenfield, p. m. (2012) 'the value of fame: preadolescent perceptions of popular media and their relationship to future aspirations', dev psychol, 48(2), 315-26. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 the geography of1990s internet governance meghan grosse washington college introduction in april 2014, after edward snowden revealed a widespread, global spying program carried out by the u.s. government against citizens and world leaders, brazil hosted a meeting of netmundial, the global multistakeholder meeting on the future of internet governance, to discuss moving away from a u.s.-centric oversight of internet governance structures and towards a global multistakeholder model. in 2016, the contract between the internet corporation for assigned names and numbers (icann) and the u.s. department of commerce expired, nearly 20 years after it was first established. while the end of that contract did meaningfully address some of the concerns raised by netmundial, there are many ways in which the u.s.’s powerful position in developing the early commercial internet is still visible. this research seeks to address the question: in what ways were early decisions about the governance of the commercial web shaped by cultural imperialist logics and how was that reflected in policy developed in the mid to late 1990s? before the development of the internet as we know it today, economic and political principles developed that would lay the foundation for the internet governance policies that emerged during the president of bill clinton. concerns for economic development that the reagan administration undertook in the 1980s, reflected in later theories of neoliberalism, seem to run parallel to the 1990s clinton administration issues with internet governance. the supremacy of financially weighted votes in the international monetary fund (imf) and general agreement on trades and tariffs (gatt) placed wealthy nations in a position to push their agenda through with little consideration for the needs or interests of poorer nations. as vijay prashad explicates, this kind of neoliberalism “was less a coherent economic doctrine than a fairly straightforward campaign by the propertied classes to maintain or restore their position of dominance.” richards sennett’s the culture of new capitalism argues that the new economic system that emerged leading up to the establishment of the global internet created growth, but did so at the cost of “greater economic inequality as well as social suggested citation (apa): gross, m., (2022, november). the geography of 1990s internet governance. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. instability.” building this kind of world economy and global communication system requires careful maneuvering, using ‘soft power’ to gain acceptance rather than brute military strength. joseph s. nye, jr. defines soft power as “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payment,” a model of power that relies on the “attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies,” and a sense that a country’s “policies are seen as legitimate in the eyes of others.” global internet governance very much relies on this kind of power as the west, and particularly the united states, exported its preferences on internet infrastructure abroad. however, without the active consent of other countries, the global network created by the internet would have collapsed. for this reason, the u.s., led by ira magaziner, president clinton’s advisor on internet governance questions, pursued a campaign to promote u.s. principles abroad. methods/critical frameworks i examine early internet governance and the discourses of neoliberalism and globalization that emerged during that time through archival analysis. this research focuses on documents found in the ira magaziner electronic commerce papers at the clinton presidential library in little rock, arkansas. this archive primarily represents the work on internet governance undertaken within the department of commerce, the department under which clinton moved internet governance policy – a shift away from previous oversight coming from the department of defense and the national science foundation. i apply a political economy of communication framework to this analysis, focusing on concerns for power and look for patters in media history and history more broadly that explain the patterns in policy development seen in the early history of the commercial internet. in reviewing materials from this archive, i focus on documents that highlight which countries were represented in discussions and debates around internet policy and which countries or regions were excluded. i argue that these groups were intentionally excluded by the u.s., despite being flagged as an issue by a number of other countries, because the u.s. had significant economic and technological power that allowed them to operate without this input. while this alone is unsurprising, it stood in contradiction with narratives around the internet that highlighted its potential for open, equitable, global participation – narratives that the clinton administration placed centrally in their own discussions around a commercialized internet. findings/conclusions the archive suggests, in a piece by the digital future coalition, that ira magaziner committed time to working “extensively in developing nations” noting mexico, brazil, singapore, korea, taiwan, and indonesia as the primary focus (internet policy [1]). still, mentions of these countries in the archive was limited and indicated very little direct interaction between these governments and the u.s. government. the instrumental, technological arguments built into earlier periods of modernization theory extended to neoliberal approaches to the internet. if networked technologies were “culturally neutral” tools that could be dropped around the world, then nationally specific needs left out of internet governance talks could also be ignored and the market could be left as the final and best measure of success. tendencies to idealize the ability of the internet to overcome geographic boundaries, boundaries synonymous with state governments, buttressed these narratives. connection to conference themes this paper addresses concerns related to the conference theme: decolonizing the internet. this work looks at the ways in which internet governance policy was established using neoliberal, culturally imperialist logics. in the mid-1990s, the u.s. department of commerce positioned itself as the leader for policy making on questions of internet governance while at the same time failing to incorporate input from many countries, particularly those in the global south. while the 2016 expiration of icann’s contract with the u.s. department of commerce was an important shift towards multistakeholder oversight of internet structures, the power asserted by the u.s. in early policy making is embedded into this system. it is this persistent and embedded influence i explore through this history. references internet policy [1]. (1996). box 003, folder 100011 10379 100011-010. ira magaziner electronic commerce papers, william j. clinton presidential library archives, little rock, arkansas, united states. nye, jr., j.s. (2004). soft power: the menas to success in world politics. public affairs. prashad, v. (2012). the poorer nations: a possible history of the global south. verso press. sennett, r. (2006). the culture of new capitalism. yale university press. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa) taylor, h., meisner, c. (2020, october) what do you weigh? popular feminism and body positivity as mediated disembodiment. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. what do you weigh? popular feminism and body positivity as mediated disembodiment hannah taylor clemson university colten meisner cornell university on 16 march 2018, actress and activist jameela jamil posted a photo to instagram, obscuring her body with textual identifiers like “great friends” and “i laugh every day.” this post marked the launch of the instagram account @i_weigh. this page, founded and maintained by jamil, posts submissions from instagram users answering the call to “weigh” themselves beyond the corporeal. this movement, now millions in reach, signals a departure from the conventions of body positivity. rather than discovering empowerment through the body, @i_weigh encourages its participants to publicly privilege external relationships, social identities, and economic opportunities in an effort to look past the body. drawing on a visual discourse analysis of 300 instagram posts from the @i_weigh account, this study suggests that body positivity movements may be increasingly disembodied in a self-representational era hallmarked by popular feminism. body positivity as an expression of popular feminism popular feminism (banet-weiser, 2018) situates feminist politics in a neoliberal culture by directing the means of empowerment for women and girls to a visibility economy. body positivity movements are a visible expression of popular feminism in that they require the body to be put on display in a digital space, simultaneously requiring visibility while also enabling body image vulnerabilities. body positivity initially rose to prominence as a component of the radical and fringe ideologies that included public anti-discrimination protests and anti-capitalist advocacy against the diet industry (mull, 2018). the original intent of body positivity was to subvert. that is, to have a body that is marginalized and reviled in a world that affronts a person with shame and guilt-laden cultural values about their body––and accept it anyway––is inherently subversive. however, contemporary body positivity movements both commodify the body through visibility and place responsibility back on the individual. it asks women, in particular, to change their own self-image, directing critical attention away from the structures that created the need for empowerment in the first place. the move to a neoliberal sensibility of individual responsibility, and emphasis on capitalism, places body positivity discourses squarely in the domain of popular feminism. although body positivity has been primarily steeped in concerns of appearance, @i_weigh takes a different approach, seeking instead to overlook the body while inevitably underscoring its importance. method data from this project come from self-representational, user-submitted posts on the instagram account @i_weigh. the page instructs contributors to submit a photo where textual labels (i.e., non-physical “weights”) are superimposed over their bodies. after removing duplicate posts and advertisements, researchers collected the first 300 posts from the account, dated 16 march 2018 to 19 april 2018. images and textual identifiers were analyzed using an approach informed by visual discourse analysis, wherein visual representations index larger constructions of power and inequality (rose, 2007). findings: liminality, contradictory self-presentation, and mediated disembodiment the women, and few men, who contributed to @i_weigh exemplify identification in the age of popular feminism wherein the individual subject is positioned as responsible for their own empowerment and asked to define themselves publicly in this way. our findings suggest that @i_weigh discursively constructs a mediated disembodiment for participants, characterized by its liminal visual representation and categorization of the self through narratives of resilience and strength, claiming marginalized identities, and extra-self connection. the visual analysis of the posts revealed a disconnect between the body and the identities that the posters “weighed” heavily. most posts featured a person both literally and metaphorically covered, a deviation from the more normalized conceptions of body positivity which insist on visibility. though faces were captured, they were frequently obscured by the “weight” of the contributor. the text is superimposed over the image and often in a bright color, drawing the eye of the viewer immediately. the text is visually more important and central than the body. most of the posts do not depict the body doing anything. it is a fixed subject, operating almost as a lifeless backdrop to the words on the screen. the image in black and white reinforces the static nature of the body—dull and lifeless, hidden like a ghostly presence behind the words. the separation of the body from the self-identification of the participants demonstrates a liminality present in body positive discourses. most experiences of liminality (härkönen & räsänen, 2008; little, jordens, montgomery, & philipson, 1998; van gennep 1960) are focused on not being defined at all by the body, removing any value placed on an individual’s physical experiences. although this is not problematic at face value, it leads to a self-conception that inhibits embodiment. within this discourse, the inner self is seen as a valid subject, while the physical body is deemed other and stigmatized. the familiar problem with viewing the body in a liminal state is that it denies that body work, or that anyway a body functions, could be integral to a person’s experience and identity. particularly for people with marginalized identities, forcing a racialized, queered, or fat body in a liminal sphere can result in internalized hatred. the words chosen by the participants emerged in three primary categories: narratives of resilience and strength, claiming marginalized identities, and extra-self connection. the first theme focused on contributors disclosing mental and physical illness as part of their self-presentation, as well as repeated mention of recovery and survival from abuse, addiction, and trauma. the posters also identified with other marginalized communities, including but not limited to racial, queer, and activist communities. they often reference their external connections, including family, friends, romantic partnerships, and fandoms. this final note creates a contradictory dialectic of self-presentation, as they are valuing communal identities that are technically outside of the self. the forced presentation of the mind as separated from the body is a mediated disembodiment facilitated by the platform—a guiding of the individual to consider their body as deviant and valueless, their mind as rational and “true,” all the while preventing the disruption of ideal beauty norms. this mediated disembodiment inhibits participants from experience embodied body positivity, because the body is marked as inferior within this definition of self. the interaction of liminality and mediated disembodiment is reflective of self-representation in an age of popular feminism, placing the responsibility back on women for their own empowerment and production of selfhood, while ignoring the sociocultural frameworks that create a need for empowerment in the first place. references banet-weiser, s. (2018). empowered: popular feminism and popular misogyny. durham, nc: duke university press. härkönen, j., & räsänen, p. (2008). obesity, unemployment and earnings. work life research, 6(1), 3-16. little, m., jordens, p., montgomery, k., & philipson, b. (1998). liminality: a major category of experience of cancer illness. social science & medicine, 47(10), 1485-1494. mull, a. (2018, june 5). body positivity is a scam. vox. retrieved from https://www.vox.com/2018/6/5/17236212/body-positivity-scam-dove-campaign ads rose, g. (2007). discourse analysis i: text, intertextuality and context. in visual methodologies: an introduction to the interpretation of visual materials (2nd ed., pp. 141-171). thousand oaks, ca: sage. van gennep, a. (1960/1909). rites of passage. chicago: university of chicago press. microsoft word v„h„passi-finnish right to be -citizens initiative campaign and the "feeling-finnish right to be -citizens ini.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): vähäpassi, v. (2021, october). finnish right to be-citizens initiative campaign and the “feeling of being counted”. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. finnish right to be -citizens initiative campaign and the “feeling of being counted” valo vähäpassi university of turku in my research project, i address the finnish oikeus olla(right to be) citizens initiative campaign (2021) for a new trans law, from the viewpoint of the felt or anticipated “feeling of being counted” (coleman 2013; papacharissi 2015, 25), in several senses, shared and expressed on social media. i address the engagement in the campaign as the affective experience related to taking part in the number (of people) which comes to politically matter. following sara ahmed (smitchz and ahmed 2014, 1), i do not separate affect from emotion. following scholars interested in the meanings and emotions attached with numbers in the current culture (kennedy and hill 2018), and the importance of emotions in politics (coleman 2013; papacharissi 2015), i am interested in how meanings and emotion are attached to numbers in lgbtiq politics and activism. i concentrate on the affective aspects of taking part in the initiative and engaging with the online campaign. i ask, what work online signature count and the growing figures shared online do, when combined with the discourses and action frames of the campaign? how are the anticipation of reaching the required 50 000, following the increasing count, and reaching the threshold of required amount of signatures, lived and shared online? background of the right to be -citizens initiative campaign the finnish so called trans law (from 2003) has been critiqued by trans activists and human rights organizations for its human rights violations for a long time. the finnish coalition government of five parties, which has received international attention and admiration for its all-female lead, has its own plans to reform the trans law. however, this planned law is considered highly inadequate by the finnish trans activists. trans activists in finland have long demanded the separation of juridical gender change from the lengthy medical trans process, which in finland is a part of the public health care system. according to trans and human rights activists, one of the main faults in the reform planned by marin’s government, is leaving out the under aged. due to the demands of one party of the coalition government, the center-right party keskusta, the planned law would only allow for juridical change of gender for adults. according to the activists, the reform planned by the government has also other inadequacies, such as not being consistent with the principle of gender self-determination even in the case of adults. due to these shortcomings, a group of activists, supported by the trans organization trans.ry, started a citizens initiative for what they call a “just trans law”, which would make changing juridical gender a matter of announcement for everyone from the age of 15, and for children under that, a matter of announcement together with their guardian. even the proposed law would not address the human rights violations in the medical gatekeeping system for transition related health care. even while usually presented as a progress for trans rights, a similar bill in another nordic welfare state, denmark, has been critiqued of leading to worsening trans people’s access to state provided trans healthcare. state recognition of the principle of self-determination over juridical gender can be seen as politics of recognition. however, the lack of self-determination of (juridical) gender also has concrete and material consequences for many trans people. this background makes it pertinent to address the implications of the politics of recognition at play. it is important to ask, how and to what effect are affective relations to the nation state as well as the imagined nation of trans people lived and enlivened through media. method and material i address the citizens initiative through media autoetnography (kyrölä 2014), combined by theoretically informed qualitative analysis of online material related to the campaign. apart from the autoetnography, i address social media posts by the campaign and its background organization trans.ry, the campaign website, and the state provided site for signing citizens initiatives. to address the “affective public” (papacharissi 2015) gathered around the campaign, i address public posts on twitter using the campaign hashtag. i address tweets using the campaign hashtag from 6.4-8.4.2021, in other words, the two days it took to gather the required signatories, and one day after that. i use these posts as examples of taking part in the campaign and in the publicly shared experience created by the campaign. for instagram material, i address public posts on instagram by individual party politicians using the campaign hashtag. even while their parties are in the government, these politicians express their enthusiastic support for the citizen’s iniative. i chose politicians public posts for analysis, because of their wider online visibility, and because of their already public status as politicians. through the publicly expressed feelings about the initiative and issues it tackles, shared discourses, and “action frames” (bennett and segerberg 2012), such as the campaign hashtag and the figure 50 000, these posts take part in the campaign. in the wider project, i will also address the rest of the public instagram posts using the hashtag #oikeusolla, and conduct a deeper analysis of the discourses utilized by the campaign on its website and social media. i will possibly also conduct interviews about the experience of taking part in the citizens’ initiative and of sharing this collective moment online on various platforms. i will continue studying the campaign and the experiences of taking part and sharing feelings and views about it, as the citizen’s initiative eventually goes to hearing in the parliament. on the threshold of being counted i address the way the citizens initiative creates both a “feeling of being counted” (coleman 2013) and a threshold for being counted in the national context, and consider the implications for trans politics. my initial “hypothesis” is that trans rights citizens’ initiative as a mode of activism, invigorated by the “sharing” environments of social media, creates a feeling of “communicating to the nation” (sturken 1997, 14), and a feeling of being at the threshold of being heard and seen by the finnish nation state. through the simultaneity of taking part in the counting, and waiting to be counted, through social media, the citizen’s initiative campaign also helps create an imagined nation (anderson 1983) of trans people (and allies), a sort of nation within a nation. references anderson, benedict.1983. imagined communities: the origin and spread of nationalism. london: verso. bennett, lance & segerberg alexandra. 2012. the logic of connective action. information, communication & society, 15(5): 739-768. coleman, stephen. 2013. how voters feel. cambridge: cambridge university press. kennedy, helen, and rosemary lucy hill. 2018. the feeling of numbers: emotions in everyday engagements with data and their visualisation. sociology 52, no. 4 (august 2018): 830–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038516674675. kyrölä, katariina. 2014. the weight of images. affect, body image and fat in the media. ashgate: farnham & burlington. schmitz, sigrid, and sara ahmed. 2014. affect/emotion: orientation matters. a conversation between sigrid schmitz and sara ahmed. fzg–freiburger zeitschrift für geschlechterstudien 20.2 (2014): 13-14. https://elibrary.utb.de/doi/pdf/10.3224/fzg.v20i2.17137 papacharissi, zizi. 2015. affective publics: sentiment, technology and politics. oxford: oxford up. sturken marita. 1997. tangled memories: the vietnam war, the aids epidemic, and the politics of remembering. berkeley: university of california press. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): bork-hüffer, t., mahlknecht, b. & kaufmann, k. (2020, october). bullying in con/fflating spaces – why a ‘space’ perspective matters for understanding young people’s sociomaterial-technological experiences and practices of bullying. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. bullying in con/fflating spaces – why a ‘space’ perspective matters for understanding young people’s experiences and practices of bullying tabea bork-hüffer university of innsbruck belinda mahlknecht university of innsbruck katja kaufmann university of innsbruck one of the risks children and adolescents increasingly have to face in their digitally connected lives is bullying. however, their bullying experiences and practices as well as the larger socio-material-technological contexts into which these are embedded, are not confined to the virtual sphere, but occur in variegated inseparable and conflating spatialities. thus, it is all the more urgent for the often disparate areas of research on traditional bullying and cyberbullying to not only take note of each other, but also to analyse the interdependences, intersections and conflation of bullying in digital and offline spaces in a more comprehensive manner. in our view, more recent conceptualisations of ‘space’ offer valuable contributions to a reflection upon the epistemological and related methodological considerations when seeking to understand the lifeworlds, practices and experiences of young people involved in bullying. in this sense, we have recently advanced the concept of “con/fflating situational spaces and places” (bork-hüffer and yeoh 2017: 93) in an attempt to integrate existing algorithmic, (post-)feminist and relational perspectives to the analysis of bullying (cf. bork-hüffer et al. 2020). meanwhile, existing studies are mostly quantitative in nature, with an emphasis on structures and conditions, and split into studies looking at traditional offline (e.g., woods and wolke 2004; stassen berger 2007) or cyberbullying (willard 2007; schultze krumbholz et al. 2012; betts 2016). these perspectives have thus taken either a focus on socio-material or techno-social contexts of bullying. only more recently, some works have started to bridge both spheres by looking into the similarities and differences of traditional and cyberbullying (e.g., antoniadou and kokkinos 2015). what still remains unexplored in these, predominantly quantitative, studies are young people’s subjective perspectives and their everyday experiences of the intersecting and conflating spaces that are critical to understanding how bullying unfolds among young people. in line, we applied a young people-centred approach that used written narratives produced by young adults in austria with the objective to let them speak with their own voice when describing their experiences and involvement with (cyber)bullying (bork-hüffer et al. 2020). we asked: whether and how does bullying in physical and digital spaces intersect in school contexts? our study showed how the continuous technological advancement of not only the digital devices but also of the affordances of specific media used, played a fundamental role in the historicity of bullying in the young adults’ lives: in the opportunities for, types of, frequencies and harshness of bullying attacks. kitchin and dodge (2011: 4) have elaborated the contingent, ontogenetic and performative function of hardand software in the co-construction of space, stating that “coded objects, infrastructures, processes, and assemblages mediate, supplement, augment, monitor, regulate, facilitate, and ultimately produce collective life.”. our results reflect how particularly with the increasing appropriation of smartphones as “digital companions” (thulin et al. 2020: 170) cyberbullying attacks became omnipresent in all spaces of young adults’ lives (cf. also slonje and smith 2008). what is more, when a combination of digital media, acting as integrated and converged set (cf. madianou and miller 2013) became used, digital media turned into “(poly-)mediators” (bork-hüffer et al. 2020: 7) of the attacks. however, as rose (2017: 799) remarks, given the dominant focus on the technological and more-than-human in recent conceptualisations of space, the “agency of the human, […] has been left undertheorized”. in our study, perpetrators of bullying were among our respondents, and their accounts laid bare the relevance of human individual and collective agency in intentional and reflected acts of bullying – regardless of the acts being enabled and channelled through affordances of hardand software. often, (co-) perpetrators precisely did not act anonymously but were part of the target’s peer groups. here, elwood (2020: 3) argues that “digital objects, praxes and ways of knowing always contain possibilities for unanticipated forms of agency, subjectivity, or sociospatial relations.“ indeed, the making of relational space by people, their conflictive interactions and practices, its historicity and the role of power, are central to understanding bullying in con/fflating spaces. our study showed the relevance of deeply ingrained heteronormative discourses in austrian society that were reflected particularly in gendered and partly intersectional bullying. even when bullying practices themselves seemed to be restricted to digital spaces, they are still entangled within the spatialities of participants’ relations, practices, identities and life-worlds that stretch across inseparable socio-material and technological spheres. thus, they are characterised by con/fflating spaces of bullying even if not by con/fflating practices of bullying per se. bullying practices that were performed only online, strongly encroached into pupils’ public offline spaces at school and private home space in the evenings. although bullying has reached an anytime-anywhere quality, in our study in schools, it remained somewhat localised, occurring in the social connections and entity of the class groups. references antoniadou, n., and kokkinos, c. m. (2015). cyber and school bullying: same or different phenomena. aggression and violent behavior 25: 363-372. doi:10.1016/j.avb.2015.09.013. betts, l. r. 2016. cyberbullying: approaches, consequences and interventions. london: palgrave macmillan. bork-hüffer, t., and b. yeoh. 2017. “the geographies of difference in conflating digital and offline spaces of encounter: migrant professionals' throwntogetherness in singapore.” geoforum 86 (11): 93-102. bork-hüffer, t., mahlknecht, b. and k. kaufmann (2020): (cyber)bullying in schools – when bullying stretches across con/fflating spaces. children's geographies. online first. doi:10.1080/14733285.2020.1784850 elwood, s. (2020). digital geographies, feminist relationality, black and queer code studies: thriving otherwise. progress in human geography. online first. doi:10.1177/0309132519899733 kitchin, r., & dodge, m. (2011). code/space: software and everyday life. london, cambridge: mit press. madianou, m., & miller, d. (2013). polymedia: towards a new theory of digital media in interpersonal communication. international journal of cultural studies 16 (2): 169-187. doi:10.1177/1367877912452486 rose, g. (2017). posthuman agency in the digitally mediated city: exteriorization, individuation, reinvention. annals of the american association of geographers 107 (4): 779-793. doi:10.1080/24694452.2016.1270195 schultze-krumbholz, a., a. jäkel, m. schultze, and h. scheithauer. 2012. “emotional and behavioural problems in the context of cyberbullying: a longitudinal study among german adolescents.” emotional and behavioural difficulties 17 (3-4): 329-345. doi:10.1080/13632752.2012.704317. slonje, r. and p. smith. 2008. “cyberbullying: another main type of bullying.” scandinavian journal of psychology 49 (2): 147-157. stassen berger, k. 2007. “update on bullying at school: science forgotten?” developmental review 27 (1): 90-126. willard, n. 2007. cyberbullying and cyberthreats: responding to the challenge of online social aggressions, threats, and distress. champaign: research press. woods, s., and d. wolke. 2004. “direct and relational bullying among primary school children and academic achievement.” journal of school psychology 42 (2): 135-155. microsoft word guo-liziqi and chinese rural youtube videos-liziqi and chinese rural youtube videos.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): abidin, c. & guo, c. (2021, october). liziqi and chinese rural youtube videos: scoping a genre. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. liziqi and chinese rural youtube videos: scoping a genre crystal abidin curtin university chen guo zhengzhou university introduction chinese rural youtube videos are videos produced by chinese people and depicting people’s daily activities in chinese rural villages. this genre of videos generally contains rural village lifestyle and activities, including farming, cooking, crafting and some daily experiences. in order to create a nostalgic environment for audiences, some youtubers use traditional decoration, or use soft instrumental music to emphasise a pastoral feeling. audiences can see the imagery of the picturesque rural life and hear the local dialect when they watch these videos (figures 1 & 2). with chinese rural village videos and their followers proliferating exponentially on youtube, these influencers have been empowered by digital technologies. hence, it is important to scope the genre of chinese rural youtubers and analyze rural chinese videos because the genre has aroused cultural, economic, and societal influence. figure 1 & 2: screenshot of examples of chinese rural youtube videos. (source: dianxi xiaoge & grandpa amu) !"#$%&'&(")#"*&#+,'"#$,$-./%#/(0#1.,2/..3#$%,.4546#7*4(&'&#%-%/.#4(5.-&(6&%#,(#8,-9-2&#4'# :4;4<4#=>?@a)#b*,#*/'#/66-+-./"&0#+,%&#"*/(#cd#+4..4,(#'-2'6%42&%'#/6%,''#*&%#ced# f40&,'#-$.,/0&0#'4(6&#g/%6*)#ehec#=i41-%&#jak#liziqi was selected as an ambassador for promoting the chinese farmer harvest festival in 2020, chosen by the communist youth league as ambassador for promoting the economic empowerment of rural youth in 2019. it seems that the chinese government has realised liziqi’s potential to promote chinese rural culture and economy internationally and has sought various collaborations to leverage on the global scale of her internet celebrity. in response, scholars in china have focused on how rural influencers partake in collaboration and promotional work to stimulate awareness of rural products and local economies (i.e., guo & cheng, 2020). figure 3: screenshot of liziqi’s most popular video at the time of writing. (source: liziqi) scholars have explored the role of digital technologies for rural influencers. leong et al. (2016: 482) has researched how digital technology empowers the e-commerce ecosystem in marginalized communities and argued that rural communities can become ‘drivers of change’ when they are empowered by digital technologies. zhang (2020) explored how the rural influencers in china, as the group on the edge of urbanization, frame themselves and perform ‘rurality’ to audiences. however, the research has not yet provided a scope or discussion of the genre of chinese rural videos on youtube. this article aims to map out the emergent genre of chinese rural influencers on youtube, and consider how they empower themselves with internet technologies, and use the internet to gain independence on youtube. while independence is frequently assumed to be about progressive politics, in the context of china, it can also reveal an attachment to individualization. individualization refers to how the ‘naturally autonomous’ (yan, 2010) operates in china, noting people’s increased autonomy as a result of social and economic reforms. under the digital environment, the development of digital technologies and the internet also play a role in promoting chinese rural youtubers’ individualization. individualization in china specifically means that people assume more responsibility and take proactive means to achieve a good life (yan, 2010). chinese rural youtubers have used digital technology to gain emotional, intellectual and material independence, which helps them to get rid of the “trapped” situation. methodology this study relied on youtube’s algorithmic recommendation of videos to understand how the platform ‘categorizes’ and ‘promotes’ related content to viewers. using a brand new youtube account on a clean slate, we started with liziqi’s channel as a ‘starter dough’ by watching the top 10 most viewed videos. at the end of each video, we noted all the recommended videos lined up, paying attention to new channels. each time a new channel was recommended, we followed through to the account and watched the top 10 most viewed videos, and similarly noted the new channels recommended by the platform thereafter. we followed through this process for 5 rounds (figure 4), and eventually manually amassed a corpus of 3480 video links from 205 channels in february 2021. figure 4: a sample of the ‘chinese rural youtube’ channels we had discovered through the iterative algorithmic recommendation from youtube at the end of each video. based on specific selection criteria – such as channel visibility, geographical location, and audience engagement – we streamlined our corpus to 29 channels for closer examination. after a closer screening, in this abstract we presented our data from the the most viewed video from the top 5 channels (outlined in figure 4). guided by grounded theory (glaser & strauss 2017), we closely surveyed various elements of each video, including the cover images, title, narrative structure, filming aesthetic, and so on. a truncated version of our codebook is below (figure 5). figure 5: truncated summary of our codebook. findings we present three preliminary findings in this abstract. first, the genre of chinese rural youtube videos is constituted by some necessary elements in the video content, including rural scenery, thematic content of rural life activities, paratexts to introduce the content or (optionally) embed advertising, and the use of diegetic or non-diegetic sound to enhance the atmosphere. this genre shows people farming, feeding animals, gathering crops, and cooking in rural villages surrounded with natural scenery. second, by focusing on the cover image of videos, categories of videos, narrative structure, aesthetic styles, and thematic content of a video, we found these youtubers engaged with themes of rurality, nostalgia, orientalism, exoticism, and commodification in the videos. this has a profound influence in culture, economy, and society because these videos have changed the stereotype of rural life and activities in china as being backward, and spread cultural knowledge globally. third, we found that chinese rural youtubers use digital technologies to empower themselves. digital technologies have provide them a new way to achieve their individualization, by gain emotional (e.g. dianxi xiaoge expressed happiness when her videos are welcomed globally), intellectual (e.g. rural people’s autonomy from controlling imagery of lifestyle on traditional media), and material independence (e.g. liziqi selling her own branding product). this abstract presents a brief snippet of our larger study, which we hope can serve as a benchmark for future studies on chinese rural youtube videos. references glaser, b. g., & strauss, a. l. (2017). discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. routledge. guo, n., & cheng, x. (2020). research on the online sale model of agricultural products under the background of internet celebrity economy#=lmnopqrstuvwxyz [\]ak price: theory & practice, 04, 124-127. retrieved from https://doi.org/10.19851/j.cnki.cn11-1010/f.2020.04.096 leong, c. m. l., pan, s.-l., newell, s., & cui, l. (2016). the emergence of selforganizing e-commerce ecosystems in remote villages of china: a tale of digital empowerment for rural development. mis q., 40(2), 475-484. yan, y. (2010). the chinese path to individualization. the british journal of sociology, 61(3), 489-512. zhang, x. (2020). the rural video influencers in china: on the new edge of urbanization. retrieved from https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/70319 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): keyes, o, austin, j & zimmer, m. (2020, october). autobiography of an audit: tracing the roots and repercussions of the htr-transgender database. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 201th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. autobiography of an audit: tracing the roots and repercussions of the hrt-transgender database os keyes university of washington jeanie austin san francisco public library michael zimmer marquette university introduction and overview much concern has been expressed regarding the difficulty in attending to harms in data collection, distribution, and use in sociotechnical systems (seaver, 2017; kitchin, 2016). arguments around both internal and external audit mechanisms frequently focus on the work of private-sector organisations, which are often seen as responsible for the increasing role of data collection and analytic systems in society (kerssens, 2019), as well as the site of particular practical barriers to data auditing due to concepts such as trade secrets. this approach tends to reify the idea that research conducted by universities and other public-sector parties is both more ethical and more easily lends itself to auditing. in reality, the possibility for scrutiny of research utilizing online content to create databases and to train algorithmic prediction is heavily reduced by limited irb oversight and researcher’s guarded approach to their own data collection and sharing practices. further, approaches to audits rarely examine the practices of identifying and addressing discursive harms (hoffmann, 2019; dencik, jansen & metcalfe, 2018) and the affective work and cost of undertaking audits of violent systems. documenting our attempts to audit the hrt-transgender database a database collected by a public university in the united states we engage in a critical examination of not only data collection practices, but the practical and phenomenological experience of auditing violent research. doing so raises vital questions that those seeking to design audit mechanisms should attend to. background transgender people often face difficulties in accessing reliable information about navigating the medicolegal systems that gatekeep access to hormones, surgery and other biomedical technologies used in the process of physical transition (pohjanen and kortelainen, 2016). social media communities, particularly those that utilize video recording, have become one of the primary means by which transgender people share vital information that can ease the strain of accessing needed medications and therapies while building a sense of community and social support (haimson, damegriff, capello, & richter, 2019; horak, 2014). repurposing and appropriating these community resources and personal narratives, researchers at the university of north carolina, wilmington developed the “hrttransgender database”, a collection of transition progress videos scraped from youtube and acquired for use in the design of facial recognition systems (mahalingam & ricanek, 2013). this database was then made available to other researchers through the project website. several years after its creation, the database and its authors attracted (largely-negative) media coverage for their work, and eventually shut the project down (vincent, 2017) on the surface, this controversy centers on issues that are well-covered in critical data studies and internet research ethics; the problem of treating data as “already public” and the insufficiency of existing accountability mechanisms around algorithmic systems (zimmer, 2010; neyland, 2016). our interest in it, however, stems from our desire to expand on research addressing two other aspects of data’s negative effects and efforts to ameliorate them; the discursive harms of data and the fluid nature of database distribution. by the former, we mean the way that researchers frequently not only repurpose data, but resituate it in cultural contexts where it can be violently deployed against the creator something that, as anna lauren hoffmann notes, is undertheorised in work around algorithmic ethics (hoffmann, 2019). by the fluid nature of distribution, we are referencing the way that database repurposing is commonly done across organisational and disciplinary boundaries, undermining accountability mechanisms that assume a singular entity to audit (be that “internally” or “externally”) (raji et al., 2020). in order to build on this work, we document and narrate our efforts to audit the hrttransgender database and its secondary reusage. drawing on feminist holistic reflexivity (cooky, linabery, corple, 2018), we not only engage in a critical examination of the practical difficulties in auditing a (theoretically) publicly-accessible data collection process, but grapple with our own emotive experiences of auditing a violent, transfocused database as a (predominantly trans) research team, and surface the discursive violence central to how the database is framed, narrated and reused. our work brings into frame vital and critical issues that researchers seeking to design oversight mechanisms should address, and begins a conversation about the visceral and often painful work of providing that oversight. conclusion our experience of auditing the creation, distribution and reuse of the hrt-transgender database provides a vital case study in expanding on existing work on algorithmic accountability and data ethics. complicating the traditional image of private-sector organisations causing direct material harms due to (for example) issues of database bias, we demonstrate the discursive harms and obfuscatory practices involved in even a supposedly “public” research project. further, we attend to the cost borne by researchers undertaking audits of violent systems audits that frequently require close encounters with that violence. we argue from this that conversations around algorithmic accountability must take a more systemic and reflective view, recognising not only idealised accountability processes but the complex and very human failures contained within them in practice, and the affective cost that (frequently, marginalised) auditors take on by seeking to surface harms in this space. references cooky, c., linabery, j. r., & corple, d. j. (2018). navigating big data dilemmas: feminist holistic reflexivity in social media research. big data & society. dencik, l., jansen, f., & metcalfe, p. (2018, august 30). a conceptual framework for approaching social justice in an age of datafication. datajustice project. retrieved from https://datajusticeproject.net/2018/08/30/a-conceptual-framework-for-approachingsocial-justice-in-an-age-of-datafication haimson, o.l., dame-griff, a., capello, e. & richter, z. (2019). tumblr was a trans technology: the meaning, importance, history, and future of trans technologies, feminist media studies. doi: 10.1080/14680777.2019.1678505 hoffmann, anna lauren. (2019). "where fairness fails: data, algorithms, and the limits of antidiscrimination discourse." information, communication & society 22.7: 900-915. horak, l. (2014). trans on youtube: intimacy, visibility, temporality. tsq: transgender studies quarterly, 1(4), 572 585. kerssens, niels. (2019). "de-agentializing data practices: the shifting power of metaphor in 1990s discourses on data mining." journal of cultural analytics: 1-26. kitchin, rob. (2017). "thinking critically about and researching algorithms." information, communication & society 20.1: 14-29. mahalingam, gayathri, and karl ricanek. (2013). "is the eye region more reliable than the face? a preliminary study of face-based recognition on a transgender dataset." 2013 ieee sixth international conference on biometrics: theory, applications and systems (btas).. neyland, daniel. (2016). "bearing account-able witness to the ethical algorithmic system." science, technology, & human values 41.1: 50-76. seaver, nick. (2017) "algorithms as culture: some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems." big data & society 4.2. pohjanen, a. m., and kortelainen, t. a. m. (2016). transgender information behavior. journal of documentation, 72 (1), 172-190. raji, inioluwa deborah, et al. (2020). "closing the ai accountability gap: defining an end-to-end framework for internal algorithmic auditing”. in proceedings of the 2020 conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (fat* ’20). association for computing machinery, new york, ny, usa, 33–44. vincent, james (2017). “transgender youtubers had their videos grabbed to train facial recognition software”. the verge. retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/22/16180080/transgender-youtubers-ai-facialrecognition-dataset zimmer, michael. (2010). "“but the data is already public”: on the ethics of research in facebook." ethics and information technology 12.4: 313-325. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): steinfeld, nili. (2019, october 2-5). internet safety education: how we educate our girls to beware of others, and our boys to beware of themselves. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. internet safety education: how we educate our girls to beware of others, and our boys to beware of themselves nili steinfeld ariel university introduction alongside its many advantages, the internet presents a variety of challenges and risks to adolescents, which occupy parents and teachers, as well as adolescents themselves. from a perspective focusing on information flow processes, or “information flux” (bossewitch & sinnreich, 2012), these can be roughly divided into risks resulting from exposure to information, i.e. exposure of adolescents to inappropriate content: harmful, sexual or violent (boyd & hargittai, 2013; ktoridou, eteokleous, & zahariadou, 2012; livingstone & smith, 2014) and risks resulting from exposure of information, i.e. disclosure of personal information online, privacy harms inflicted by the user or others (marwick & boyd, 2014), misuse of the information which can result in identity theft, physical and sexual assault (gadekar & pant, 2015; notten & nikken, 2016; shin & lwin, 2017). research on gender differences in internet usage points to several trends. alongside a general perception that boys spend more time on games and girls on social networks (borca et al., 2015) other studies found little gender variance in type of activities (gross, 2004; livingstone et al., 2014). girls share more self-images, however boys share identifiable information and use less strict privacy settings on snss (gadekar, & pant, 2015). girls are more careful online (ibid.), but research reports no significant gender differences with respect to involvement with strangers online or exposure to sexual content (livingstone et al., 2014). research questions the study’s main assumption is that perceptions of gender differences in adolescents’ online uses and risks lead to differences in emphasis of educational messages delivered by parents and teachers to adolescents. therefore, the study asks: rq1. what differences exist between boys and girls with respect to online usage, and are they aligned with adolescents and parents’ general perceptions? h1.1. boys spend more time playing online games, girls spend more time on snss, in practice as well as perceived. h1.2. a general perception contends that girls share more personal information online and they are in a greater risk of pedophilia, and boys are more risk seekers and in a greater risk to consume inappropriate content online. rq2: what are the gender differences in educational messages by parent and teachers to adolescents regarding safe surfing? h2. messages directed at boys emphasize risks resulting from exposure to (inappropriate) information, whereas messages directed at girls emphasize risks resulting from exposure of (personal) information. methodology a mixed-method study included survey conducted among 513 adolescents and 50 semi-structured interviews with adolescents, parents and teachers. the study examined surfing habits, exposure to violent, harmful or sexual content, adolescents and parents’ online concerns, parental mediation, monitoring and educational activities and messages. interviewees were requested to think of gender differences in adolescents’ online habits, risks and in parents’ education for safe surfing. findings in accordance with h1.1. it was found that girls spend more time in snss. boys spend more time playing online games. these differences are in-line with perceptions of gender differences in usage as repeatedly expressed in the interviews (“girls surf. boys play”). gaming activities are perceived as less social, although they usually involve interactions with other users online. regarding h1.2, girls were more often mentioned in interviews regarding sharing photos and videos of themselves. boys were described as “nosy”, naughty, occupied by “teenage boys’ stuff” and actively searching for sexual content (“you know which websites they enter…”). survey findings partially support these perceptions. girls post more content to social media. boys reported being exposed to sexual content more than girls, but no differences were found regarding exposure to violence or bullying. with respect to risks, the survey indicates girls are more concerned than boys about almost every aspect of online risks, including exposure of information about them to others and being exposed to inappropriate content. interviewees repeatedly stated there are hardly any gender differences with respect to risks, however girls were perceived as more vulnerable, mentioned mostly with relation to risks of strangers and online predators, and boys with relation to risk of consuming violent and sexual content representing distorted realities (“naturally with the girls i am more concerned that some guy will contact them […] with the boys […] i don’t think there are boys who haven’t visited porn sites”). with respect to h2, although a general statement of no gender differences in educational messages, in practice several differences repeated in the interviews. messages to boys emphasize risks of exposing oneself to inappropriate, violent or sexual content. messages to girls emphasize implications of uploading personal, revealing or provocative content. survey findings indicate significant differences in parental monitoring of adolescents’ online activities, such that boys are more monitored or limited in searching activities, general surfing and search for movies. girls are more monitored and limited in posting information about themselves. conclusions the findings indicate several gender differences in usage, perceived risks and education of adolescents. there is a common perception that girls share more personal information online and perceived as being at more risk of online predators. accordingly, more emphasis is given to implications of personal information disclosure. boys are considered naughty and nosy, searching for “forbidden”, mainly sexual, content, and emphasis is given on limiting and monitoring their searches and video consumption. apparently, although parents, teachers and adolescents proclaim to be aware of the similar risks to boys and girls online, there is a message interwoven in internet safety education discourse: girls are to be aware of others looking to harm them, and boys are to be aware of themselves, their curiosity and evil inclination. references borca, g., bina, m., keller, p. s., gilbert, l. r., & begotti, t. (2015). internet use and developmental tasks: adolescents’ point of view. computers in human behavior, 52, 49-58. bossewitch, j., & sinnreich, a. (2013). the end of forgetting: strategic agency beyond the panopticon. new media & society, 15(2), 224-242. boyd, d., & hargittai, e. (2013). connected and concerned: variation in parents’ online safety concerns. policy & internet, 5(3), 245269. gadekar, r., & pant. s. (2015). exploring facebook users’ privacy knowledge, enactment and attitude: a study on indian youth. international journal of communication research, 5(4), 273. gross, e. f. (2004). adolescent internet use: what we expect, what teens report. journal of developmental psychology, 25(6), 633–649. ktoridou, d., eteokleous, n., & zahariadou, a. (2012). exploring parents’ and children's awareness on internet threats in relation to internet safety. campus-wide information systems, 29(3), 133-143. livingstone, s., mascheroni, g., ólafsson, k., & haddon, l. (2014). children’s online risks and opportunities: comparative findings from eu kids online and net children go mobile. livingstone, s., & smith, p. k. (2014). annual research review: harms experienced by child users of online and mobile technologies: the nature, prevalence and management of sexual and aggressive risks in the digital age. journal of child psychology and psychiatry, 55(6), 635-654. marwick, a. e., & boyd, d. (2014). networked privacy: how teenagers negotiate context in social media. new media & society, 16(7), 1051-1067. notten, n., & nikken, p. (2016). boys and girls taking risks online: a gendered perspective on social context and adolescents’ risky online behavior. new media & society, 18(4), 966–988. shin, w., & lwin, m. o. (2016). how does “talking about the internet with others” affect teenagers’ experience of online risks? the role of active mediation by parents, peers, and school teachers. new media & society, 19(7), 1109-1126. microsoft word steinfeld-content matters, fake or not-content matters, fake or not.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): steinfeld, n., lissitsa, s. (2021, october). content matters, fake or not: media content influence on perceived intergroup threat. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. content matters, fake or not: media content influence on perceived intergroup threat nili steinfeld ariel university sabina lissitsa ariel university introduction the media is central in shaping perceptions, especially with relation to minorities. media coverage of ethnic minorities often makes use of stereotypes (dixon & williams, 2015). this has also been the case with coverage of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers in europe, often portraying these populations as presenting a threat to european society, security, welfare and democratic values (kuntz et al., 2017). perception of threat may lead to negative attitudes toward the outgroup (stephan & stephan, 2017). intergroup threat theory distinguishes two types of perceived threats: realistic (a threat to ingroup power, resources, and safety) and symbolic (a threat to ingroup values and way of life), which can lead to negative attitudes and prejudice toward the outgroup (stephan et al., 2009). recently, the media ecosystem is increasingly integrated with false and misleading content. propaganda and disinformation campaigns disguised as news are being pushed on social media (rainie et al., 2017; smith, 2019), in ways that concern media experts and scholars due to these campaigns’ influence on user decisions, behavior and opinions (rainie et al., 2017). media consumers as well believe that fake news causes high levels of confusion around basic facts and current events (barthel et al., 2016). we investigate how consumption of media content leads to change in perceived threat towards a geographically distant minority group, and how is such change affected when individuals are aware that the information they consumed is false. we focus on geographically distant minority groups because in such cases, opinion formation regarding a population the individual has no direct interaction with relies almost entirely on media portrayals of this group. however, opinion formed on a distant group can be generalized to a local outgroup, a process known as secondary transfer effect (lissitsa & kushnirovich, 2020). research questions rq1: how is perceived threat towards an outgroup changed after exposure to media content about the outgroup? h1a: after exposure to negative media content, the perceived threat towards the outgroup will increase. h1b: after exposure to positive media content, the perceived threat towards the outgroup will decrease. q2: how will the change of perceived threat be affected when media consumers become aware that the information they consumed is false? h2: media consumers who are aware that the information they consumed is false, will show minor or no change in perceived threat. methodology a survey experiment was conducted among 403 israeli participants. the participants filled out a questionnaire measuring realistic and symbolic threat towards eu asylum seekers (euas), based on the scales by stephan et al. (1999). then, after 10-14 days, participants were requested to participate in a short online activity in which they were instructed to read an article. the participants were divided into 5 groups: group 1 read a positive article emphasizing the economic advantages in immigrants’ integration in the labor market, i.e. aspects of realistic threat. group 2 read a negative article emphasizing aspects of symbolic threat. group 3 read the same negative article, followed by a disclaimer notifying participants that fact-check websites found the facts in the article misleading and false. group 4 read a neutral report of decrease in asylum seeker immigration into europe. a control group did not read an article. after reading the article, participants were requested to fill out another questionnaire, where the same indices of perceived realistic and symbolic threat were measured, as well as participants’ evaluation of the article’s convincingness, reliability, professionalism, and objectivity. findings perceived threat has changed in each group in a different way. in the positive article grouponly perceived realistic threat decreased significantly (t(98)=3.81, p<.001). in the negative article group, only symbolic threat increased significantly (t(93)=-2.66, p<.01), matching the articles’ focus. in the neutral and control groupno significant differences were found in any perceived threat. interestingly, in the group that read a negative article with a fake news disclaimer, a similar change to the negative group was found and perceived symbolic threat increased significantly (t(88)=-2.80, p<.01), despite participants’ awareness to the falsehood of the article. the findings are further observed by the way that participants have evaluated the articles. apparently, participants’ perceived threat towards euas prior to reading the articles correlated with their evaluation of the article. in other wordsthe articles were evaluated in accordance with participant prior opinion on euas. moreover, the relationship between article type (content) and article evaluation is moderated by feelings towards local outgroups: israeli arabs, palestinians and asylum seekers in israel, such that negative feelings towards local outgroups directed participants to positively evaluate the negative article about european asylum seekers and negatively evaluate the positive article and vice versa, and article evaluation as well as feelings towards local outgroups mediate the relationship between content and change in perceived realistic threat. conclusions fake news concern media scholars and consumers because of its potential to shape people’s perceptions, sow confusion and distort opinions. in the case of distant outgroups, fake and biased information believed to be true may be even more influential for media consumers’ opinion formation on the outgroup, and consequently on similar local outgroups. our findings show that indeed, media content has an immediate effect on perceived threat towards the outgroup. however, even when consumers are aware that the facts in the content are dubious or misleading, it still influences perception. it seems that prior attitudes – towards the distant outgroup but more importantlytowards more familiar local outgroups, serve as a lens through which media consumers evaluate content, and the question of whether the facts are true becomes negligible compared to one’s own inclination and beliefs. content itself is still influential in shaping perceptions and opinions, but content reliability, whether facts are true and authenticated, is seemingly not quite a crucial consideration, depending on media consumer’s prior beliefs. references barthel, m., mitchell, a., & holcomb, j. (2016). many americans believe fake news is sowing confusion. pew research center, 15, 1-15. dixon, t. l., & williams, c. l. (2015). the changing misrepresentation of race and crime on network and cable news. journal of communication, 65(1), 24-39. kuntz, a., davidov, e., & semyonov, m. (2017). the dynamic relations between economic conditions and anti-immigrant sentiment: a natural experiment in times of the european economic crisis. international journal of comparative sociology, 58(5), 392-415. lissitsa, s., & kushnirovich, n. (2020). is negative the new positive? secondary transfer effect of exposure to lgbt portrayals in tv entertainment programs. journal of applied social psychology, 50(2), 115-130. doi:10.1111/jasp.12644 rainie, h., anderson, j. q., & albright, j. (2017). the future of free speech, trolls, anonymity and fake news online. washington, dc: pew research center. smith, c. a. (2019). weaponized iconoclasm in internet memes featuring the expression ‘fake news’. discourse & communication, 13(3), 303-319. stephan, w. g., & stephan, c. w. (2017). intergroup threat theory. the international encyclopedia of intercultural communication, 1-12. stephan, w. g., ybarra, o., & morrison, k. r. (2009). intergroup threat theory. in t. d. nelson (ed.), handbook of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination (pp. 4360). new york, ny, usa: psychology press. stephan, w. g., ybarra, o., & bachman, g. (1999). prejudice toward immigrants 1. journal of applied social psychology, 29(11), 2221-2237. aoir2020-resubmission.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): lokot, t., boichak, o. (2020, october 28-31). exploring networked identity and transnational mobilization in ukraine’s euromaidan protest. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. exploring networked identity and transnational mobilization in ukraine’s euromaidan protest tetyana lokot dublin city university olga boichak university of sydney introduction social media are a prominent space for diasporic mobilisation and activism, opening new avenues for studying transnational communities living outside of their countries of origin (andén-papadopoulos & pantti, 2013; moss, 2016). unlike entities with clear geographical boundaries, diasporas are transglocal actors (aparicio, 2010) – networked publics that strategically use technological affordances to mobilize around issues of local, national, and transnational importance. social media-based narratives produced by these publics can be coupled with ethnographic approaches to empirically study transnational diasporic identity and mobilization in the networked era. mapping the datafied representations of diasporic political discourses and practices on social media and triangulating them with qualitative interview data contributes to the growing exploration of innovative, hybrid research methods that increasingly underpin the interdisciplinary study of social and political transformations. we offer a critical analysis of the digitally mediated transnational activism among ukrainians living abroad. the political and social upheaval in ukraine since 2013 resonated with ukrainian diasporic communities internationally (lapshyna, 2019), including in the united states. the digitally augmented nature of euromaidan protests in 2013-2014 also made protest participation highly accessible to diasporic actors (krasynska, 2014). but how does political engagement work in diasporic settings, where people who share a national identity are physically remote from the center of protest? virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 virtual event situating our inquiry in online diasporic communities, our method foregrounds the possibilities for studying transnational mobilization. data and methods this study considers how ukrainians living in the u.s. engaged with homeland politics during the euromaidan protests, and their use of social media in transnational protest politics. we used historical data from 2014 from three public u.s.-based ukrainian groups on facebook (table 1) to produce a series of semantic maps – networks of nouns that co-occur in a unit of speech – to map the semantic structure of discourse within these groups. this networked approach, where nodes are represented by nouns and edges are weighted according to the frequency of their co-occurrence in a post or comment, allows to detect and map topics without removing the words from their context, and thus helps preserve the meaning embedded in the online narratives. we then conducted 33 in-depth interviews with ukrainians living in the u.s. (with respondents selected through snowball sampling in communities in washington, dc and new york, ny), to understand how they engaged with networked protest discourses and made meaning of their digitally mediated participation. the study considered two key research questions: rq1: what is the structure of ukrainian americans’ platform-mediated discourses on political participation in the context of the protests in their home country? rq2: what are the affordances of networked technologies for transglocal protest and how do they co-construct diasporic political participation? findings the semantic networks from each of the facebook groups in the u.s. reveal broad similarities in the structure of diasporic discourse about euromaidan (see maps in figures 1-3 in appendices). the key structural features of the discourse were: 1) the centrality of ukraine-related topics in each of the group discussions (figure 1); 2) the prominence of political narratives in each of the groups (terms such as “citizen”, “community”, “freedom,” as well as names of key political figures, feature prominently in the semantic maps, as shown in figure 2); 3) protest-focused discourse connected to particular mediated protest practices (“maidan” (shorthand for euromaidan), and “action” co-occur with terms such as “help” and “share”); and finally 4) post-euromaidan, the emergence of war-focused discourse signifying that diasporic activist attention shifted from protests to supporting ukraine in the conflict with russia, which began immediately after the protests in the spring of 2014 (figure 3). these semantic mapping findings gain deeper meaning in combination with themes that emerged from interviews with ukrainian diaspora representatives. the respondents felt strongly that their participation in the euromaidan events was an expression of their political position, as well as a representation of their identity and belonging to ukraine. interviewees defined protest engagement as a combination of offline and online actions, including direct action (street rallies); advocacy efforts in mainstream media, social networks and official channels (e.g., letters to congress); needs-based fundraising and charity work; and indirect engagement in activism efforts through anti-corruption investigations. the centrality of protest discussion and related activity in the semantic maps illustrates the key role of social media in mediating diasporic protest participation by layering digital networks over existing diasporic personal connections. this hybrid tandem of personal connections and social networks afforded respondents crucial opportunities for engaging in euromaidan politics, as they were primarily relying on their strong ties, but achieved wide reach and visibility to the weak ties in the networks. importantly, distance from the events on the ground in ukraine did not appear to influence the volume and depth of political engagement, but rather predicated the tactical choice of activities respondents engaged in and the tools they used. strategic decisions about choosing to engage in socially mediated information sharing, building support networks and fundraising over other activity allowed the diasporas to preserve and repurpose their networked protest publics when the protest was followed by an armed conflict. the semantic maps indicate that the diasporic online groups directed their attention from the protest to the ensuing war in ukraine, while the interviews suggest they were able to build on existing networked connections to support their activity. contribution this study contributes to the broader field of transnational mediated protest participation by using a hybrid methodological approach to examine diasporic mobilization of ukrainians living in the u.s. during the euromaidan protests. triangulating data on online diasporic community practices with in-depth interviews, we show how diaspora members engaged in the protest despite distance and how their activity and tactical decisions were mediated by social networks. we specifically show how diasporic personal networks and networked technologies enmesh into a set of hybrid networked practices, circumscribing how ukrainian americans interpret political engagement and how they strategically use the affordances of social media for protest participation. the findings indicate that digitally mediated protest politics can be an important component of studying transnational mobilization and can play a pivotal role in connecting remote diasporic communities to on-the-ground action. references andén-papadopoulos, k., & pantti, m. (2013). the media work of syrian diaspora activists: brokering between the protest and mainstream media. international journal of communication, 7, 22. aparicio, a. (2010). transglocal barrio politics. in pérez, g. m., guridy, f., & burgos, a. (eds.), beyond el barrio: everyday life in latina/o america. nyu press. krasynska, s. (2014). digital civil society: euromaidan, the ukrainian diaspora, and social media. in marples, d. r., & mills, f. v. (eds.), ukraine's euromaidan: analyses of a civil revolution (vol. 138), 177-198. columbia university press. lapshyna, i. (2019). do diasporas matter? the growing role of the ukrainian diaspora in the uk and poland in the development of the homeland in times of war. central and eastern european migration review, 8(1), 51-73. moss, d. m. (2016). transnational repression, diaspora mobilization, and the case of the arab spring. social problems, 63(4), 480-498. appendices group name (anonymized to protect privacy of group participants) # of members # of posts ukrainians in chicago 12,823 940 ukrainians in boston 2,229 1,357 ukrainians in seattle 2,695 824 table 1. sample descriptives. figure 1. the centrality of ukraine-related topics in discussion among ukrainians in seattle. figure 2. discussion of ukraine-related political topics among ukrainians in boston. figure 3. war-related discourses, centering on fundraising, among ukrainians in chicago. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): croeser, sky. (2019, october 2-5). critical pedagogies for internet studies. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. critical pedagogies in internet studies: teaching for change sky croeser curtin university abstract: there are urgent reasons for considering whether, as academics, we place our trust in the current system or whether we try to change it. research offers one pathway towards supporting efforts for positive change, but we should not neglect the potential of our teaching work. academics within internet studies have unique possibilities for engaging in critical pedagogies, supporting students in understanding and challenging oppression. i draw here on ten years’ experience teaching in internet studies, student and peer feedback, and the literature on critical pedagogy and decolonizing academia. i suggest that where possible we reflect on the texts we set students; redesign assessment; considering being vulnerable with students; and challenge restrictive policies and procedures (such as those around late submission of assignments). these approaches rely on trusting students, and on building their trust in us without relying solely on our institutional authority. as a field we need to actively and explicitly discuss how, and what, we teach. internet studies and the potential for critical pedagogies we urgently need teaching practices that unsettle academia. our social, political, economic, and environmental situation is increasingly dire, characterized by backlashes against queer, feminist and anti-racist movements; rising inequality; and limited action on climate change. we cannot trust that the current system is the best we can hope for. academics need to decide whether we will use our positions to perpetuate the status quo or to work towards decolonization, more diverse and inclusive societies, more directly democratic political systems, and a more sustainable economic system. research has a role to play here, but we must not neglect the power of teaching as a path to creating change. the aim of this paper is to suggest ways in which we might selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): croeser, sky. (2019, october 2-5). critical pedagogies for internet studies. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. support and extend teaching methods that encourage students to understand and challenge oppression – critical pedagogies (breuing 2011) within internet studies. there are two factors that open internet studies to the possibility of transformative teaching practices. the first of these is that teaching about the internet frequently requires – or at least encourages – practices that make use of the internet. unfortunately, as many of us are well aware, the use of the internet in teaching is frequently linked to top-down policies that mandate the use of digital technologies to ‘increase productivity’, usually through centralized learning management systems and ever-expanding surveillance of academic labour (fernback 2018). however, in order to teach students more about how the internet works, some teachers are designing assessments that require using online tools and actively reflecting on their experiences (see, for example, tay and allen 2011; di lauro & johinke 2016). fairly early on, some teachers were already arguing for the benefits of carefully-facilitated collaborative learning networks (hiltz 1998). these efforts have the advantage of connecting academic analysis with practical skills that can be used by students beyond academia – hopefully in critical and reflexive ways. the second factor that encourages critical pedagogies is that internet studies is a relatively new field: just over a decade ago, there was speculation about whether it should be considered a discipline at all (baym 2005). some early reflections argued against the temptation to seek increasing institutionalization, suggesting instead that we attempt to sustain the field’s “deliberately unruly, flexibly, and transformative” nature (markham 2005, 257). much has happened to solidify internet studies over recent years, including the growing prominence of the aoir conference and the gradual emergence of a canon and leadership structure. charles ess and mia consalvo write that by 2007, “internet studies had emerged as a relatively stable field of academic study” (2011, 2). however, attempts to define the field have frequently focused far more closely on research – including methodologies and ethical guidelines – than on teaching. while there is extensive writing, debate, and established practice on how to teach with the internet, there has been less attention to how we teach about the internet. this means that there is still significant room within the teaching of internet studies for beautiful, diverse, unruliness. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): croeser, sky. (2019, october 2-5). critical pedagogies for internet studies. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. methodology this paper reflects on a decade of work teaching internet studies under employment conditions spanning from sessional (short-term) tutoring through to a permanent position. i have taught more than ten internet studies units, designed one unit and radically updated others. overlapping teaching semesters mean this work encompasses more than fifty individual unit iterations overall, many of which included both undergraduate and postgraduate teaching. as well as my own experiences i draw on student and peer feedback, analyzing this through the lens of work by paulo freire (1972); bell hooks (2013); clelia rodríguez (2018); sara ahmed (2012); aileen moreton-robinson (2000) and heila lotz-sisitka (2017). pathways and challenges in order to be effective, critical pedagogies must be diverse, context-dependent, and reflexive. the pathways which have seemed most useful to me may not be available to others, or may produce very different results. the institutional and imaginative constraints that have led to gaps between my intentions and my practices may be more or less applicable to others. with this in mind, i make several suggestions for critical teaching practices we might encourage within internet studies. the most obvious way to disrupt existing hierarchies within academia is in the readings we set in the syllabus. there is no research that focuses specifically on internet studies, but research in other fields suggests that non-white scholars are cited less than white scholars (chakravartty et al. 2018) and that people with names read as female are cited less often than people with names read as male (mitchell et al. 2013). we should assign more diverse readings, even (especially!) if it means reconceptualising how we think about core concepts. there are several other interventions we might make, including redesigning assessment; being willing to be vulnerable with students; and challenging restrictive policies and procedures (such as those around late submission of assignments). these rely on trusting students, and on building their trust in us without relying solely on our institutional authority. in detailing my experiences with these tactics, i am hopeful that others will add their own analysis, and that we might end up with a living document akin selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): croeser, sky. (2019, october 2-5). critical pedagogies for internet studies. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. to the aoir research ethics guidelines (markham & buchanan 2012). as a field, we will benefit from more actively organizing around how, and what, we teach. references ahmed, s. (2012). on being included: racism and diversity in institutional life. duke university press. baym, n. k. (2005). introduction: internet research as it isn’t, is, could be, and should be. the information society, 21(4), 229–232. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972240591007535 breuing, m. (2011). problematizing critical pedagogy. the international journal of critical pedagogy, 3(3). retrieved from http://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/view/246 chakravartty, p., kuo, r., grubbs, v., & mcilwain, c. (2018). #communicationsowhite. journal of communication, 68(2), 254–266. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqy003 di lauro, f. & johinke, r. (2017). employing wikipedia for good not evil: innovative approaches to collaborative writing assessment. assessment & evaluation in higher education, 42(3), 478–491. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2015.1127322 ess, c., & consalvo, m. (2011). introduction: what is “internet studies”? in the handbook of internet studies (pp. 1–8). john wiley & sons, ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444314861.ch fernback, j. (2018). academic/digital work: icts, knowledge capital, and the question of educational quality. triplec: communication, capitalism & critique, 16(1), 143–158. https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v16i1.878 freire, p. (1972). pedagogy of the oppressed. harmondsworth: penguin books. lotz-sisitka, h. (2017). decolonisation as future frame for environmental and sustainability education: embracing the commons with absence and emergence. in p. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): croeser, sky. (2019, october 2-5). critical pedagogies for internet studies. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. b. corcoran, j. p. weakland, & a. e. j. wals (eds.), envisioning futures for environmental and sustainability education (pp. 45–62). wageningen, netherlands: wageningen publishers. hiltz, s. r. (1998). collaborative learning in asynchronous learning networks. presented at the web98, orlando, florida. retrieved from https://web.njit.edu/~hiltz/collaborative_learning_in_asynch.htm hooks, bell. (2013). teaching critical thinking : practical wisdom (1st ed.). hoboken: taylor and francis. markham, a. n. (2005). disciplining the future: a critical organizational analysis of internet studies. the information society, 21(4), 257–267. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972240591007571 markham, a., & buchanan, e. (2012). ethical decision-making and internet research 2.0: recommendations from the aoir ethics working committee. retrieved from https://aoir.org/ethics/ mitchell, s. m., lange, s., & brus, h. (2013). gendered citation patterns in international relations journals. international studies perspectives, 14(4), 485–492. https://doi.org/10.1111/insp.12026 moreton-robinson, a. (2000). talkin’ up to the white woman: aboriginal women and feminism. univ. of queensland press. rodríguez, c. o. (2018). decolonizing academia: poverty, oppression and pain. halifax & winnipeg: fernwood books ltd. tay, e., & allen, m. (2011). designing social media into university learning: technology of collaboration or collaboration for technology? educational media international, 48(3), 151–163. https://doi.org/10.1080/09523987.2011.607319 selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): ataman, j., (2021, october). performing lifestyle politics: exploring the slow fashion community on instagram. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. performing lifestyle politics: exploring the slow fashion community on instagram jimil ataman university of pennsylvania introduction type “#slowfashion” into instagram’s ‘most popular’ search function and you will be met with approximately 8.5 million photos. at first glance slow fashion instagram appears to consist mostly of perfectly manicured photos of highly curated outfits, accessories or clothing. but to those in the slow fashion community, these posts also indicate a unique discursive register (agha 2007) that includes a set of political, ethical and social repertoires, emerging through the formation of the movement’s lifestyle politics (portwood-stacer 2013). this paper explores three key performable roles being taken up by slow fashion practitioners on instagram to analyze how these performances are positioned within the community’s broader ethical and political goals. background the slow fashion movement is based on the model of the slow food movement, which emerged in response to its ‘fast’ counterpart (jung and jin 2016). it includes people, practices, ideas, and things from all over the world and online all of which are broadly connected through a shared effort to resist and transform the waste-driven, profitseeking, inequitable and unjust systems which produce and sustain contemporary ‘fast’ fashion (pookulangara and shephard 2013; štefko and steffek 2018; clark 2008). the fast fashion industry is a system of transnational capitalism in which the supply chains of labor and commodities span dozens of countries (rofel and yanagisako 2019), rely on the exploitation of garment workers in low-income countries in the global south (collins 2003) and reproduce unattainable western beauty standards to keep production costs low and demand high (jung and jin 2016; entwistle 2000). most apparel today is produced through the fast fashion business model wherein clothing is made and marketed through cycles of inexpensive ready-to-wear garments (krause 2018). this model proliferates a capitalist consumer ethic (campbell 1987) where desire and novelty fuel the repetitive cycle of buying and discarding mass-produced garments (dei ottai and cologna 2015; reinach 2005). the result? the fashion industry has become a major contributor to global pollution (niinimäki et al 2020), yielding 1.2 billion tons of co2 to the atmosphere and over 80 billion pieces of discarded, often unworn clothing into landfills each year (whitty 2018). performing lifestyle politics since 2014, the slow fashion community has coalesced on instagram, bringing together four groups of entangled practitioners: brands, consumers, influencers, and diy makers interested in advocating for clothing-sustainability, ethical-fashion, representationdiversification in the fashion industry, economic justice, and anti-capitalism. recently slow fashion practitioners have been using their slow fashion performances to publicly navigate issues of race, class, gender, and ethics present in slow fashion and the broader fashion industry. they do so using tactics of lifestyle practices (portwoodstacer 2013) in which individuals integrate the “movement’s values into a holistic way of life” (haenfler et al. 2012: 7). as slow fashion practitioners are performing their lifestyle practices on instagram, they are also performing a presentation of their selves. selfpresentation produces a “coherent and distinctive way of ‘being-in-the-world’” (clarke, 2005: 54). because so much of contemporary slow fashion is coalescing on the online platform instagram, where the politics of the internet, including issues of the commodification of internet users (lukás 2020) datafication (van dijck 2014), and selfpromotion (marwick 2013) are at play, the slow fashion movement is a uniquely representative site of a constantly changing and continuously developing contemporary political practice. using case studies from my ongoing ethnographic research which follows the coalition of practitioners on instagram and in the pacific northwest i explore three key performable roles in the slow fashion community which slow fashion practitioners are using as a way to perform the politics of the movement: (1) outfit of the day posts (ootd), (2) wardrobe tracking, and (3) knowledge-sharing posts. in discussing each of these instances of popular slow fashion performances, i examine what each example is “saying” and “doing” within the slow fashion community and analyze how these performances are positioned within the community’s broader ethical and political goals. further, my discussion offers insight into how these performances are producing avenues for a slow fashion practice aimed at consuming differently and connecting a community of people advocating for alternative modes of fashion production. ultimately, this discussion adds to the emerging scholarship on slow fashion by exploring how slow fashion on instagram is producing a set of identifiable repertoires of communication which index the larger political and ethical principles being constructed by the community in response to the capitalist structures in which it is housed. by exploring the kinds of performances most commonly posted on instagram i draw attention to the ways slow fashion practitioners’ performances are both assembling individual practitioner identity (or ‘self’) to the wider slow fashion community as well as producing a wider register of lifestyle politics in the world at large. references campbell, colin. 1987. the romantic ethic and the spirit of modern consumerism. oxford, uk: b. blackwell. clark, hazel. 2008. “slow fashion – an oxymoron – or a promise for the future?” fashion theory 12 (4): 427–446. collins, jane. 2003. threads: gender, labor, and power in the global apparel industry. chicago: the university of chicago press. dei ottai, gabi and daniel brigadio cotogna. 2015. “the chinese in prato and the current outlook on the chinese-italian experience.” in chinese migration to europe: prato, italy and beyond, edited by loretta baldassar, graeme johanson, narelle mcauliffe, and masimo bressan, 29-48. new york: palgrave macmillan. entwistle, joanne. 2000. the fashioned body: fashion, dress, and modern social theory. malden, ma: blackwell. jung, sojin; and byoungho jin. 2016. “from quantity to quality: understanding slow fashion consumers for sustainability and consumer education.” international journal of consumer studies, 40 (4): 410421. krause, elizabeth. 2018. tight knit: global families and the social life of fast fashion. chicago: the university of chicago press. lukács, gabriella. 2020. invisibility by design: women and labor in japan’s digital economy. durham: duke university press. marwick, alice. 2013. status update: celebrity, publicity, & branding in the social media age. new haven & london: yale university press. niinimäki, kirsi, greg peters, helena dahlbo, patsy perry, timo rissanen, and alison gwilt.2020. “the environmental price of fast fashion.” nature reviews earth & environment 1 (4): 189–200. overdiek, anja. 2018. “opportunities for slow fashion retail in temporary stores.” journal of fashion marketing and management 22 (1): 67–81. https://doi.org/10.1108/jfmm-052017-0042. pookuangara, sanjukta; and arlesa shepard. 2013. “slow fashion movement: understanding consumer perceptions—an exploratory study.” journal of retailing and consumer services, 20: 200-206. reinach, simona segre. 2005. “china and italy: fast fashion versus prêt à porter. towards a new culture of fashion.” fashion theory: the journal of dress, body & culture 9(1): 43-56. rofel, lisa, and sylvia j. yanagisako. 2019. fabricating transnational capitalism: a collaborative ethnography of italian-chinese global fashion. durham, nc: duke university press. štefko, róbert; and vladimira steffek. 2018. key issues in slow fashion: current challenges and future perspectives. sustainability 2018, vol. 10, no. 7. pp. 1-11. doi:10.3390/su10072270 van dijck, josé. 2014. datafication, dataism and dataveillance: big data between scientific paradigm and ideology. surveillance & society 12(2): 197-208. whitty, jennifer. 2018. "wardrobe hack and uncatwalk: design interventions to encourage more fulfilling relationships with our clothing." clothing cultures 5(1): 131-151. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): ticona, j, tsapatsaris, r. (2020, october). platform counterpublics:gossip and contested knowledge about online labor platforms. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. platform counterpublics: gossip & contested knowledge about online labor platforms julia ticona university of pennsylvania ryan tsapatsaris university of pennsylvania as commercial platforms mediate large swaths of online markets for information and services, scholars have shown how users resist, or work around these opaque digital environments. from content producers to uber drivers, digital laborers are particularly adept at appropriating and gaming platforms like youtube, and uber (chen 2017; duffy 2017; rosenblat 2018). often described as “multi-sided markets,” platforms bring together many different kinds of stakeholders, including consumers, workers, advertisers, and regulators (gillespie 2010; lingel 2020). however, investigations of working alongside algorithms have so far focused on workers’ relationship to algorithms, and neglected other stakeholders. extending counterpublics theories (warner 2002; fraser 1990), we examine over 3,000 online reviews of a labor platform, care.com, finding that both workers and clients use gossip to create a platform counterpublic that constructs a counternarrative about platform business practices.1 while previous studies suggest that different platform stakeholders have conflicting interests, we find that platform counterpublics draw both workers and clients together to draw boundaries demarcating acceptable platform business practices. second, we point to the implications of platform counterpublics for the investigation of platform labor and algorithms. consumer reviews of platforms are absent from critical literature on labor platforms. by bringing together scholarship on counterpublics with critical literature on labor platforms, this paper offers a relational approach to platforms. 1 care.com is the world’s largest online marketplace for domestic work. it provides an algorithmically filtered search for a wide range of services from nannies to dog walkers and tutors. in 2019, care made $192 million in annual revenue and had 11.5 million workers profiles in the united states alone (ticona & mateescu 2018). data & methods looking for evidence of multiple platform stakeholders in the same online spaces, we found that consumer reviews sites like trustpilot, sitejabber, and highya appeared at top of multiple search engine results for care.com, behind only official company pages, wikipedia, and news stories about company scandals. these consumer reviews sites allow users to write pseudonymous reviews of products, companies, and services (utz 2009). we scraped over 3,000 reviews from four reviews sites and analyzed them using nvivo software. networked gossip produces platform counterpublics gossip, both on and offline, is networked by nature, but networked digital media has provided an opportunity to understand the processes by which marginalized groups engage in alternative practices of knowledge production. from “algorithmic gossip” about how to gain visibility among youtube beauty vloggers (bishop 2019), to “rumors” about internet scams (burrell 2011), scholars have illuminated the ways that networked media allows users create knowledge that runs counter to dominant technological imaginaries and create communities around that knowledge. reviewers of care.com reveal that information-seeking about the platform across the internet lead them to consumer review sites as a useful source of information: “i applied for several jobs...nothing. i googled why no one was responding and ran across other people here who were having the same problem…”. through a google search, this reviewer found others with the same problem. reviewers also expressed the value of reading other reviews: “i almost paid money to this site. i’m so grateful to have read the reviews of others before i made such a mistake” and referenced the reviewers as a kind of community: “stay off the site and stay safe internet buddies!” review sites of care.com have created a limited kind of community among reviewers who, upon searching for information across the web, find others whose experiences mirror their own. as rogoff notes, gossip is always-already in close proximity to dominant narratives and the ability of the former to move “...through subterranean and unacknowledged channels and continuously constitutes communities within its listeners’ (1996: 7). as is the case with most networked media, instead of listeners, review site gossip constitutes communities of interactive text-based audiences. following warner’s description of counterpublics that “...comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation” (2002: 413), we contend that consumer review sites constitute a platform counterpublic. unlike “networked counterpublics,” that use platform affordances (e.g., hashtags on twitter) to gather communities around a cause (jackson & foucault welles 2016), platform counterpublics take platforms as their object instead of the medium through which they are formed. for labor platforms, this entails workers and clients overcoming platform design meant to separate them. care.com provides separate interfaces to each set of stakeholders. if a user wants to use the service as both an employer and as a worker, they must register with different e-mail addresses. the platform also privileges the experiences and accounts of clients over workers by only allowing clients to review workers but not allowing workers to review clients (ticona & mateescu 2018). however, on review sites, workers and clients can read about one another's' experiences, providing an alternative space where accounts from both are given equal standing. reviews from both clients are workers reference one another: “from all the reviews here it doesn’t look like they require background checks of families? but nannies are out here paying $59?!” “families & sitters avoid this site! read the reviews!”. beyond discourse: implications for research from #deleteuber to instacart clients rallying behind workers to demand transparent tipping practices, digital labor often creates alliances among diverse stakeholders. however, scholarship on platform labor often uses theories of labor that occlude these shifting relational dynamics between clients, workers, and platforms. understanding the role of workers and clients in platform counterpublics is an invitation to a more relational model of digital labor that is attuned to the ways meaning and power are shaped through relationships that escape the shop-floor and bend traditional managerial relationships (baym 2015; zelizer 2013). references baym, nancy k. 2015. “connect with your audience! the relational labor of connection.” the communication review 18(1):14–22. bishop, sophie. 2019. “managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip.” new media & society 00 (0): 1-18. chen, julie yujie. 2017 “thrown under the bus and outrunning it! the logic of didi and taxi drivers’ labour and activism in the on-demand economy.” new media & society. duffy, brooke erin. 2017. (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. new haven ; london: yale university press. fraser, nancy. 1990. “rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy.” social text 25/26: 56-80. gillespie, tarleton. 2010. “the politics of ‘platforms.’” new media & society 12(3):347–64. lingel, j. (2020). an internet for the people: the politics and promise of craigslist. princeton university press. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691188904/an-internet-for-the-people rogoff, irit. 1996. “gossip as testimony a postmodern signature” in generations and geographies in visual arts, g. pollock, ed. new york: routledge rosenblat, alex. 2018. uberland: how algorithms are rewriting the rules of work. first edition. oakland, california: university of california press. ticona, j., & mateescu, a. (2018). trusted strangers: carework platforms’ cultural entrepreneurship in the on-demand economy. new media & society, 20(11), 4384– 4404. utz, sonja. 2009.“‘egoboo vs. altruism: the role of reputation in online consumer communities.” new media & society 11(3): 357-374. warner, michael. “publics and counterpublics (abbreviated version).” quarterly journal of speech 88(4): 413-425. zelizer, viviana. 2013. economic lives: how culture shapes the economy. princeton, new jersey: princeton university press. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 poikolainen rosén, a., lundmark, s., jonsson, f., & håkansson, j. (2017, october 18-21). control and reward in online dating practices – a study of users experiences of tinder. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. control and reward in online dating practices – a study of users’ experiences of tinder anton poikolainen rosén school of natural sciences, technology and environmental studies, södertörn university, sweden sofia lundmark school of natural sciences, technology and environmental studies, södertörn university, sweden fatima jonsson department of sociology, stockholm university, sweden school of natural sciences, technology and environmental studies, södertörn university, sweden jesper håkansson school of natural sciences, technology and environmental studies, södertörn university, sweden introduction this paper is based on a study of users’ experiences and practices of meeting potential new partners through the use of the mobile dating service tinder. while previous studies on the design of online dating systems to a large extent have focused on the discrepancy between meeting romantic partners online and face-to-face, the use of tinder as an application for finding sex partners (birnholtz et al., 2015; zytko et al., 2014); and the role of online dating in everyday life (birnholtz et al., 2015; smith & duggan, 2013) our study explores how the design of online dating applications form users’ dating experiences. the aim is to explore how users experience design features and functionalities for online dating practices. by exploring the experiences of specific functionalities and features in the location-based mobile application tinder we offer a broad understanding of the relationship between designed functionalities, users attitudes towards dating practices and their own experiences of dating. the analytical approach is based on use qualities connected to the users’ experiences (löwgren, 2006), theories on self-representation (goffman, 1959), and gamification and rewards (hamari & koivisto, 2014; löwgren & stolterman, 2004). these approaches are used for an in-depth understanding of the users’ experiences of the designed features and the dating practices in which they are engaged. for example, tinder was among the first online dating applications to use specific designed features such as a location based and swipe-centered function for users to mutually match with potential partners. these features are particularly interesting in our analysis as they have gained a broad implementation in several other online dating services and were also addressed as important for the experiences of dating by the participants in our study. the empirical material presented in the paper is drawn from a study conducted in 2015 and 2016. we use a mixed method approach (creswell, 2014), combining an initial observational study (n=7), an online survey (n=244), and three focus group discussions (n=9) with swedish participants. by using a mixed method approach we gained a broad understanding of online dating practices and experiences of tinder. the empirical data from the online survey and the focus group discussions were analyzed through a thematic analysis based on a card sorting method, which resulted in the themes for our analysis and highlighted the specific functionalities addressed by participants. control and reward experiencing tinder four specific designed functions are highlighted in our empirical data: the connection with facebook, the profile cards of users, the swipe-centered mutual match function, and geographical proximity. these functions contribute to specific user experiences of control and reward. our findings indicate that online dating practices include an interplay of being in and out of control. in tinder, the authentication through facebook plays an important role in controlling self-representation as it is harder to fake a tinder profile when an additional social media connection is needed. accordingly, the connection to facebook is by the respondents stated as a reason for potential partners being perceived as real or authentic and thus creating a sense of control regarding that persons are who they claim to be. further, the profile cards function of retrieving information from social media along with the editable profile text gives the participants a sense of control over what information they present about themselves. these functionalities afford a standardized and reliable form for self-representation (cf. goffman, 1959) and facilitate the fast navigation and decision making on the application. the specific feature of the match function, i.e., that a match occurs only when both users agree, add another element of perceived safety and control among the participants, as the risk of being harassed is reduced. the mutual match function further eliminates a risk factor of being exposed or embarrassed as there are only two possible outcomes of the function: either both parts like each other and a match occurs, or only one part likes the other which is not indicated in the application and thus has no social consequence. further, the location based functionality affords that potential meetings can be casually arranged, but also easily interrupted if one wishes. the possibility of physical interaction means that users are less likely to lie in their profiles or behave in ways that they would not in face-to-face interactions (ellison et al., 2006), which leads to an increased sense of control over the dating situation. further, tinder affords simplicity and speed in use, which made the respondents describe a fun, easy and casual dating practice in which they understand, the functionality and thus feel in control. however, the simplicity afforded unanticipated consequences as several participants reported using the application so fast that they lost control over their actions, for example, declining a person they would have wanted to accept or accidentally liking a person. lack of control also concerns feelings of insecurity for online dating practices in general as you never know if a match occurs, and are in no control of who you will be presented to. the same feature also works contrariwise, implying that you are in no control of who will see your profile, as it is completely public. our findings also indicate that mobile dating practices on tinder include various forms of reward mechanisms beyond the obvious reward of finding a potential partner or friend. the mutual match function enables rewards in terms of self-affirmation and instant gratification when a match occurs. this was perceived as a positive enhancement of the dating experience and to some users, it was a goal of its own, disconnected from the dating practice and viewed as a pastime. however, the match function could also create feelings of boredom and distress among the participants, as the act of swiping through a massive amount of potential partners became monotonous and the decision could be rationally calculated as in a game (cf. hamari & koivisto, 2014) after a longer period of use. finally, a cynical attitude towards mobile online dating was observed, as participants employed market metaphors to describe their own online dating experiences in terms of “the meat market” or being “treated as a commodity”. to conclude, this study suggests that online dating practices are formed by an inseparable interplay of design functionalities, users’ attitudes and the use of specific mobile applications that taken together contributes to overall online dating experiences. references birnholtz, j., shklovski, i., handel, m., & toch, e. (2015). let’s talk about sex (apps). proc. of cscw 2015, acm press, 283-288. creswell, j.w. (2014). research design. qualitative, quantitative and mixed method approaches. london: sage. ellison, n., heino, r. & gibbs, j. (2006). managing impressions online: selfpresentation processes in the online dating environment. journal of computermediated communication, 11(2), 415–441. goffman, e. (1959). the presentation of self in everyday life. edinburgh: penguin books. hamari, j., & koivisto, j. (2014). measuring flow in gamification: dispositional flow scale-2. computers in human behavior, 40, 133–143. löwgren, j. (2006). articulating the use qualities of digital designs. aesthetic computing, 383-403. löwgren, j., & stolterman, e. (2004). thoughtful interaction design: a design perspective on information technology. london: mit press. smith, a. & duggan, m. (2013). online dating & relationships. pew research center’s internet & american life project. zytko, d., grandhi, s. a., & jones, q. (2014). impression management struggles in online dating. proc. of the 18th international conf. on supporting group work, acm press, 53-62. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 graham, t., & whelan-shamy, d. (2022, november). in on the grift: how platforms govern authenticity for neo-colonial ends. presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. in on the grift: how platforms govern authenticity for neo-colonial ends. timothy graham queensland university of technology daniel whelan-shamy queensland university of technology introduction cryptocurrency is uncritically presented as an easy solution for complex financial problems facing vulnerable people around the globe (scott, 2016; jutel, 2022). despite the oft-touted narrative as the “people’s coin”, it exhibits extreme wealth inequality: 0.01% of the addresses contain over 58.21% of all bitcoins in circulation (sai et al., 2021). simultaneously value is extracted from a vulnerable class of people through the exploitation of new forms of capital such as personal data and cryptocurrency (mcmillan, 2020). the politics and self-imposed regulation of platforms (gillespie, 2010) are being tested and exploited by an ever-growing group of users active in pioneer communities (hepp, 2020) around the trade of cryptocurrency on twitter. prominent advocates or ‘shills’ of cryptocurrency include controversial billionaire elon musk who brings significant attention to the matter (nahar, 2022) and has been criticised for market manipulation (ponciano, 2022). the entry point we have chosen to demonstrate the problematic aspects of cryptocurrency coordination on twitter is the term coordinated inauthentic behaviour (cib). it first appeared in a 2018 press release by meta, acknowledging the scale and scope of orchestrated abuse of the platform (meta, 2018). both meta and twitter have policies that deal with cib (help centre, n.d; meta, 2018), but the common thread is that they are vague and do not provide a satisfactory explanation of what exactly cib is and when it is worthy of platform attention. indeed, coordinated behaviour is common on social media platforms and is often legitimate, such as political activism around social issues such as black lives matter (ince et al., 2017). so, what counts as inauthentic remains largely unclear to researchers and the public as platforms continue to self-regulate. it is against this regulatory backdrop that we ask: is financially motivated cib playing out on twitter and being ignored owing to its lucrative nature? we present evidence in this paper that it is; and that the neo-colonial aspects of this case stem from the furthering global wealth inequality and centralisation of new highly profitable resources (mcmillan, 2020). as we observe, exploitative language and phrases are used to pique interest in investment in unstable currencies, which poses great financial risk to investors. cryptocurrency encourages a so-called ‘escape to the internet’ whilst ignoring the real financial and political problems of a nation and thus, helps individuals, but not the collective (scott, 2016). techno-utopianism and marketdriven capitalism are the central ideologies that underpin the proliferation of cryptocurrency; while particular people make considerable gains in certain circumstances, many others do not (scott, 2016). the uneven of trading cryptocurrency make it not a force for positive change as techno-utopianists may have hoped, but rather; a new technology that hinders common development and centralises wealth to those with the technology, time and skills to become involved (scott, 2016). analysis to investigate these issues, we used the twitter academic api to collect a total of 1,812,286 tweets over 24 hours on the 24th of february 2022. we used ten search terms in total: #bitcoin, $btc, #ethereum, $eth, #bnb, $bnb, #xrp, $xrp, #ada, $ada. we used the ‘coordination network toolkit’ (graham, 2020) on the collected dataset to construct a network of coordinated retweet behaviour for further analysis. this ‘co-retweet’ network draws on and extends the concept as developed by schafer et al. (2017) and later keller et al. (2019), where nodes in the network are twitter accounts that are connected by an edge if they retweeted the same tweet within 60 seconds of each other, at least twice. by construction, co-retweet networks are designed to capture online astroturfing where multiple accounts work in unison to artificially amplify content. we then applied a filter so only nodes with a degree greater than 100 would be included. this provided a sub-graph of highly coordinated retweet activity consisting of 7139 nodes and 40,370 edges. figure 1. co-retweet network showing coordinated retweet activity around the top five cryptocurrencies. we observe high levels of promotional cib within this network. cryptocurrency influencers were present in every community and often mixed currency types in their tweets presumably for maximum visibility. actors within the network often shared links that lead outside of twitter to other sites such as discord. it was also common for users to identify themselves solely as cryptocurrency traders, implying that they can make a living from their financially risky work. all communities had similar posts about their respective coins. many users touted “giveaways” of large amounts of cryptocurrency for the first x amount of people to follow or retweet them. similarly, users used exploitative phrases such as: “the next millionaire could be you!” to encourage the buying of cryptocurrency. other users boasted of their quick profits with simple phrases such as: “$6500 eth | 24 hrs⏰"#$%&'”. we noted very few accounts that had been suspended since this data was collected and further note the frequency of linking users to other platforms such as discord, where ‘pump and dump’ schemes and other coordinated market manipulation are rife (hamrick et al., 2021). future work. it is evident that twitter is ignoring cib surrounding cryptocurrency on its platform. in future we suggest an extended analysis of actors within this network and how they coordinate in different ways (e.g., reply brigading and coordinated link sharing), communicate and what major trends there are across the communities. references bucher, t., & helmond, a. (2017). the affordances of social media platforms. in burgess, j., marwick, a., & poell, t. (eds). the sage handbook of social media. sage publications. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com graham, t. (2020). coordination network toolkit. queensland university of technology. (software) https://doi.org/10.25912/rdf_1632782596538. gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of ‘platforms.’ new media & society, 12(3), 347–364. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342738 hamrick, j. t., rouhi, f., mukherjee, a., feder, a., gandal, n., moore, t., & vasek, m. (2021). an examination of the cryptocurrency pump-and-dump ecosystem. information processing & management, 58(4), 102506. help centre. (n.d). platform manipulation and spam policy. twitter help centre. https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/platformmanipulation#:~:text=inauthentic%20engagements%2c%20that%20attempt%20to,automation %20and%2 for%20 scripting%3b%20and hepp, a. (2018) deep mediatization. routledge. ince, j., rojas, f., & davis, c. a. (2017). the social media response to black lives matter: how twitter users interact with black lives matter through hashtag use. ethnic and racial studies, 40(11), 1814-1830. jutel, o. (2022). blockchain humanitarianism and crypto-colonialism. patterns, volume 3(1). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2021.100422 mcmillan t. (2020), where platform capitalism and racial capitalism meet: the sociology of race and racism in the digital society. sociology of race and ethnicity. thousand oaks 6(4): 441-449. meta. (2018) coordinated inauthentic behaviour explained. meta news. https://about.fb.com/news/tag/coordinated-inauthentic-behavior/ nahar, p. (2022). elon musk pumps dogecoin with yet another tweet, token surges 25%. the economic times. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/cryptocurrency/elon-musk-pumps-dogecoin-withyet-another-tweet-token-surges-25/articleshow/88894068.cms?from=mdr ponciano, j. (2022). musk denies bitcoin ‘pump and dump’—and says tesla will resume transactions once this mining goal is reached. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano/2021/06/13/muskdenies-bitcoin-pump-and-dump-and-says-tesla-will-resume-transactions-once-this-mining-goal-isreached/?sh=196078c0aa2a sai, a. r., buckley, j., & le gear, a. (2021). characterizing wealth inequality in cryptocurrencies. frontiers in blockchain, 38. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fbloc.2021.730122/full scott, b. (2016). how can cryptocurrency and blockchain technology play a role in building social and solidarity finance? unrisd/un publications. https://www.unrisd.org/unrisd/website/document.nsf/(httppublications)/196aef663b617144c1257f550 057887c?opendocument twitter. (2022). about government and state-affiliated media account labels on twitter. https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/state-affiliated van dijck, j., & poell, t. (2013) understanding social media logic. media and communication, 1(1), 2-14. https://www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication/article/view/70/60 please update your browser your browser isn’t supported anymore. update it to get the best youtube experience and our latest features. learn more opera safari microsoft edge mozilla firefox google chrome remind me later about copyright contact us terms privacy policy & safety © 2025 google llc microsoft word vogelman-natan-the algorithm playground-the algorithm playground.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): vogelman-natan, k. (2021, october). the algorithm playground: a content analysis of user-produced children’s videos on youtube. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the algorithm playground: a content analysis of userproduced children’s videos on youtube kalia vogelman-natan northwestern university with online videos now dominating children’s screen time, youtube has emerged as a key source of content for children (rideout & robb, 2020). while the company explicitly states that its platform is not intended for children under the age of 13, content oriented toward children makes up a large share of youtube’s videos (pew research center, 2018). in fact, of the top ten most viewed youtube channels worldwide as of january 2021, six feature user-produced children’s content (statista, 2021). unlike content developed for television, the user-produced children’s videos proliferating youtube are essentially unregulated, overtly commercially-driven creations. public concern over child privacy violations and exposure to inappropriate – and at times, disturbing – content on youtube due to the recommendation algorithm has led to international legal action against the company (kelly, 2019). despite these issues and ineffective efforts on youtube’s behalf to address them, the platform remains the dominant source of video content for children. the escalation in children’s consumption of youtube videos and the precedented multimillion-dollar revenues of high-subscriber channels (including ad view earnings, sponsored content, merchandise sales, and more) have contributed to the establishment of children’s video production into a popular, lucrative venture. as a result, there have been some recent industry shifts concerning children’s media and youtube. primarily, there has been a change in the power relations towards bottom-up production. no longer viewed as a supplementary distribution outlet for tv-produced content, youtube is increasingly recognized as a source for ‘televisable’ content. many successful youtube channels have been picked up by leading networks and streaming platforms, their videos featured alongside traditionally produced content. additionally, there is a rise in media production and management companies that focus on youtube content. these companies engage youtube content in various ways, including purchasing and distributing channels to networks, youtube channel management, assisting existing tv shows in developing content for youtube, and grassroots attempts at low-tier incorporation, among others. however, not much academic research has focused on these videos beyond a handful of studies on specific channels or sub-genres (see nicoll & nansen, 2018; jaakkola, 2019) and one attempted wider-scale assessment (radesky et al., 2020). the alarming popularity and ever-expanding reach of youtube-produced children’s content makes it crucial for parents, educators, and policymakers to study this phenomenon and asses its impact on both families and the media industry. this study aims to address the knowledge gap that exists around user-produced children’s videos on youtube by providing a typological map of the landscape and initial exploration of the relations between content and features. method the study corpus consists of 100 user-produced children’s videos was collected in late february 2021. a sampling method inspired by previous studies (e.g. shifman, 2012; radesky et al., 2020) was developed and applied to ensure that the sample both reflected the current landscape and addressed algorithmic considerations. this included using the search term “children videos” and youtube’s ‘view count’ filters, sampling videos recommended by youtube’s algorithm, and addressing popular genres identified by mainstream media and past studies. the sampled videos were subjected to content analysis and analyzed in terms of youtube characteristics (such as number of views, channel subscribers, length, etc.) and content-related features, including genre, format, materials, actors, setting, narration, production quality, use of visual effects, and overall quality and educational value. selected findings the analysis led to the identification and conceptualization of 13 distinct genres of userproduced children’s videos: unboxing, surprise eggs, finger family, play-doh, nursery rhymes, kids songs, learning, pretend play (enactment), pretend play (toys), storytelling, arts & crafts, entertainer in character, and process repetition. each video genre had a distinctive and often unequivocal video format associated with it (2d/3d animation, live action, or hands-only). the data also revealed that 23% of the sampled videos belong to licensed channels, reflecting the discussed industry trends. overall, the videos were clearly targeted towards early childhood audiences (preschool and younger). in this abstract i would like to focus on a few select genres not commonly featured in the literature: learning series videos feature the most educational elements from the sample. each video is dedicated to learning a preschool-level subject, such as counting numbers, colors, shapes, abcs, etc. most of these videos are 3d animated, featuring animated object rather than people (as opposed to nursery rhymes), the music (songs and/or melodies) is usually accompanied with disembodied narration and sound effects. nursery rhymes videos usually feature familiar nursey songs sung by a cast of 3d animated characters, mostly people but occasionally singing animals too. most of the videos in this genre are memetic of each other using the same repeated structure of family and animal cast, vehicles, same list of songs, and so on. kids songs differ from the ‘nursery rhymes’ genre in that they feature original songs about various situations or holidays (mostly halloween). these videos are animated 3d and 2d, the majority feature animated people, and are of medium-high production quality. despite the potential educational value of some prosocial messaging, many of the lower quality videos feature scary and violent content. entertainer in character videos always feature an adult actor in costume, in a commercial or staged location, narrating their so-called adventure to the accompaniment of background melodies. the production of these videos is medium yet relatively simple (one camera or continuous shot) with rare visual effects despite the known expansive resources available to these successful influencers. this suggests an intentional strategy intended to attract children who are more easily emersed in the content when captured through a simple lens. the imaginative play modeling and simple narration of activities offer some educational value. pretend play (enactment) videos are usually family productions featuring the children and adults acting out scripted scenes, usually in their homes or yards, accompanied by sounds effects and animated special effects. these videos lean heavy on consumerism and feature lots of expensive, large-item toys. these videos are generally captured by home recording devices or phones. pretend play (toys) videos differ from the enacted pretend play genre in that they featuring adult hands playing with the toys, set up in simple indoor staged locations. these too employ simplified production efforts and are often accompanied with sound effects and exclamations, though only half had scripted narration. despite being heavy on consumerism, the simplified imaginative play offers some educational value in that it models playing for young children. these videos are closely related to other toy play genres, such as unboxing, surprise eggs, and play-doh. discussion the selected findings indicate that there are unique interplays between genre, content, format, educational value, and more to be found in these videos. for example, there is a clear division between the format of genres licensed by networks (only animated and live action) and those not (hands-only particularly excluded). yet this distinction is not reflected in the popularity and number of views of the non-licensed genres. this suggests that despite changes in content consumption and the departure from public broadcasting, there is still a distinction made between what is deemed tv-worthy content by corporations and what is not. the licensed genres and video formats are reminiscent of traditional children’s television shows. however, this also does not necessarily reflect the quality or educational value of the content, both licensed and overlooked. ultimately, each of the genres identified in this study offer much to learn and unpack, the analysis of which can provide valuable insights into the materials that children are increasingly consuming. in addition to highlighting the importance of studying childtargeted youtube content, this study can serve as a basis for future studies. references jaakkola, m. (2019). from vernacularized commercialism to kidbait: toy review videos on youtube and the problematics of the mash-up genre. journal of children and media, doi: 10.1080/17482798.2019.1693409 kelly, m. (2019, september 4). google will pay $170 million for youtube’s child privacy violations, the verge. retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/4/20848949/google-ftc-youtube-child-privacyviolations-fine-170-milliion-coppa-ads nicoll, b., & nansen, b. (2018). mimetic production in youtube toy unboxing videos. social media + society, 3, 1-12. pew research center (november, 2018). many turn to youtube for children’s content, news, how-to lessons. available at: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/11/07/many-turn-to-youtube-forchildrens-content-news-how-to-lessons/ radesky, j. s., schaller, a., yeo, s. l., weeks, h. m., & robb, m.b. (2020). young kids and youtube: how ads, toys, and games dominate viewing, 2020. san francisco, ca: common sense media. rideout, v., & robb, m. b. (2020). the common sense census: media use by kids age zero to eight, 2020. san francisco, ca: common sense media. shifman, l. (2012). an anatomy of a youtube meme. new media & society, 14(2), 187-203. statista. (2021). most viewed youtube channels worldwide as of january 2021, by monthly views (in billions). retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/373729/most-viewed-youtube-channels/ selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): gekker, a., & kotliar, d.. (2022, november). the data center cannot hold: data colonialism and the “nimbus project”. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the data center cannot hold: data colonialism and the “nimbus project” alex gekker department of communication, tel aviv university, israel dan m. kotliar department of sociology, university of haifa, israel in her now classic paper, susan leigh star (1999) called upon sociologists to study the “boring things” in life, such as bridges, sewer grates, classification schemes and many other infrastructural components that recede into the background – yet make modern life possible. this has led to the so-called infrastructural turn in media studies (plantin et al., 2018; hesmondhalgh, 2021; edwards et al., 2009), focusing on both material and social invisible practices that underpin communicative technologies. nothing epitomizes this turn more than the central object of our paper – data centers (holt & vonderau, 2015). these mundane structures are built to accommodate the computer servers, wires and accompanying equipment to route traffic, analyze data and serve content to internet companies and users. they are built in strategic locations to accommodate connection speeds (lag), safety concerns (redundancy and security), and environmental requirements. once erected, they are largely nondescript as contemporary technology allows them to operate mostly autonomously with minimal personnel. to the outside view, they are profoundly boring. this paper explores six of such boring data centers, built or repurposed these days in israel. they are part of a $1.2 billion tender offered by the israeli government to move most of its computational infrastructure "to the cloud" and won by amazon and google with 70-30 percent, respectively. as part of the winning bid, each company is required to build or rent three data centers, set at least 25 kilometers apart (ziv, 2021). this major project has drawn considerable attention globally, both due to its high costs and technical complexity; as well as the resulting backlash from the two companies’ workers attempting to curtail the tech giants' involvement on moral grounds (anonymous google and amazon workers, 2021). the employees emphasize the role of the data centers as crucial to the modern government and security apparatus (amoore, 2011), and thus claim inherent complicity with israel’s occupation of the palestinian territories. power differentials are also present within the israeli society, as intimate governmental data will be processed and stored by foreign us companies. these nested questions of data sovereignty and extraction are particularly resonant with the rising theories of “data colonialism” (thatcher et al., 2016), which ‘combines the predatory extractive practices of historical colonialism with the abstract quantification methods of computing.’ (couldry & mejias, 2018, p. 337). yet, as we show in our paper, the notion of data colonialism is complicated within project nimbus, when lines blur in terms of whose data is colonized by whom, whose lands are used (and colonized) by these centers, and whose resources (predominantly electricity and water) will be used for their functioning? specifically, three central aspects challenge this clear positioning: israel’s geographic and economic proximity to the eu without being beholden to its data protection regime; the competing environmental vs. economic narratives surrounding the new construction; and the complicated data relations between us and israel’s respective intelligence communities, which include both cooperation (greenwald et al., 2013) and animosity (harris & mekhennet, 2021). thus, data centers' acute materiality offers a more nuanced understanding of data colonialism, and of the different actors and stakeholders involved in the creation and sustainment of this global regime. accordingly, the centers' concrete geopolitical location in a big data periphery (cooper, 2021) that deems itself a global tech center, raises important questions around state vs. corporate sovereignty and power. moreover, the fact that the nimbus data centers are still on paper (or rather, in the cloud), and that they are currently half-built assemblages (burrell, 2020), only highlights the sociopolitical drama around them, and make seen the oft-invisible ideational and political bolts and screws of such big-data infrastructure. thus, based on thematic analysis of local journalistic sources and public officials’ documents released by the state, local planning authorities and the tender winners themselves, we delineate the concrete materialization of cloud infrastructure to offer a more nuanced understanding of data colonialism. references amoore, l. (2011). data derivatives: on the emergence of a security risk calculus for our times. theory, culture & society, 28(6), 24–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276411417430 anonymous google and amazon workers. (2021, october 12). we are google and amazon workers. we condemn project nimbus. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/12/google-amazonworkers-condemn-project-nimbus-israeli-military-contract burrell, j. (2020). on half-built assemblages: waiting for a data center in prineville, oregon. engaging science, technology, and society, 6, 283–305. https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2020.447 cooper, z. g. t. (2021). of dog kennels, magnets, and hard drives: dealing with big data peripheries. big data & society, 8(2), 20539517211015430. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211015430 couldry, n., & mejias, u. a. (2018). data colonialism: rethinking big data's relation to the contemporary subject. television & new media, 20(4), 336–349. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476418796632 edwards, p., bowker, g., jackson, s., & williams, r. (2009). introduction: an agenda for infrastructure studies. journal of the association for information systems, 10(5), 364–374. https://doi.org/10.17705/1jais.00200 greenwald, g., poitras, l., & macaskill, e. (2013, september 11). nsa shares raw intelligence including americans’ data with israel. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/nsa-americans-personal-dataisrael-documents harris, s., & mekhennet, s. (2021, july 20). u.s. and e.u. security officials wary of nso links to israeli intelligence. washington post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2021/07/20/nso-israelintelligence/ hesmondhalgh, d. (2021). the infrastructural turn in media and internet research. in p. mcdonald (ed.), the routledge companion to media industries. routledge. https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/168831/ holt, j., & vonderau, p. (2015). "where the internet lives": in l. parks & n. starosielski (eds.), signal traffic (pp. 71–93). university of illinois press; jstor. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt155jmd9.7 plantin, j.-c., lagoze, c., edwards, p. n., & sandvig, c. (2018). infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook. new media & society, 20(1), 293–310. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553 star, s. l. (1999). the ethnography of infrastructure. american behavioral scientist, 43(3), 377–391. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326 thatcher, j., o’sullivan, d., & mahmoudi, d. (2016). data colonialism through accumulation by dispossession: new metaphors for daily data. environment and planning d: society and space, 34(6), 990–1006. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775816633195 ziv, a. (2021). חתפנ אל דועש ןקתמל הסופת 80% :סרטנס הטאדה ףוריט . themarker. retrieved 16 december 2021, from https://www.themarker.com/technation/.premium-1.10033833 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): winter, r., and decook, j. (2021, october). from top-down to bottom-up: political image management and the preservation of white supremacy through visuals and memes on social media platforms. panel presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. from top-down to bottom-up: political image management and the preservation of white supremacy through visuals and memes on social media platforms rachel winter university of central florida julia decook loyola university chicago social media platforms play an increasing role in politics, facilitating the circulation of populist texts disseminated by politicians, official campaign media, and user-generated content, all of which contribute to voters’ perceptions of politicians and political issues. the networks and affordances of social media platforms allow for the development of an individualized, affective connection with voters, which is a particularly important strategy for far-right politicians, who are often stigmatized. furthermore, social media enables the circulation of user-generated materials in a form of digital political participation, allowing citizens to respond in real-time to political developments. while digital political participation ostensibly offers the potential for the expression of marginalized perspectives, digital texts predominantly emphasize and enforce existing hierarchies, particularly the supremacy of whiteness. this panel explores visuals and memes circulated on social media through the lenses of platform studies, whiteness studies, nostalgia, and critical discourse analysis. by examining both “top-down” media disseminated by public figures and “bottom-up” user-generated content, this panel provides an in-depth understanding of the social media ecosystems that work to preserve and extend far-right values and white supremacy. rachel winter focuses on the influence of official campaign materials on user-generated content, as well as the impacts of both on candidate image management and the racial hierarchy of the united states. an analysis of representations of race in user-generated rafael “ted” cruz and robert “beto” o’rourke memes reveals an embedded valuation of whiteness and white supremacy to the detriment of other racial demographics. political memes collected from facebook, twitter, instagram, tumblr, and reddit uphold the importance of the white racial identity of candidates and, in so doing, attempt to preserve white american identities from the perceived threat of multiculturalism embodied in racially diverse politicians and their constituents. julia decook examines nostalgia and chronotopes in alt-right memes, contending that the emphasis on “tradition” over “progress” is an attempt to unify the alt-right and preserve white identity and supremacy from threats of globalization and feminism. the alt-right creates virtual nation-states that use consistent linguistic strategies to enable these groups to engage in a form of collective action. examining white supremacist memes from reddit and instagram, panelist 2 explores the ways that time, memory, and the abstract conception of “the past” are used in digital propaganda to appeal to younger voters and emphasize the myth that whiteness must be protected from the threat of multiculturalism. “beto” and “ted”: authentic performance of ethnic identity and the primacy of the white perspective rachel winter university of central florida the development and increasing popularity of mass communication technologies has contributed to the growing importance of celebrity status to political success, as well as the necessity of mediated candidate image management (wheeler, 2007, p. 33). branding, a marketing technique, can be used to develop conceptual links between aspects of “economic management…[and] policy commitments” and “emotional attractions...such as ‘one of us,’ authenticity, approachability, and attractiveness” (scammell, 2014, p. 82). in a post-broadcast democracy, media consumption is fragmented; some citizens choose to avoid news content while others increasingly participate in non-traditional political activity (wilson, 2011, pp. 446-7). this participation can take the form of “candidate image building” (penney, 2017, p. 100), which builds on source materials, in this case “the texts produced by journalists and politicians in the elite public sphere” (wilson, 2011, p. 449). these texts are adapted by users to further develop their favored politician’s brand and, in turn, their following and chances for electoral success (penney, 2017, p. 103). while citizens have a wide range of options for producing digital media, memes in particular are easily created, modified, and circulated (kligler-vilenchik & thorson, 2016, p. 1997), making them a popular choice for contributing to candidate branding. although overtly the purpose of memes about political candidates is to provide surfacelevel criticisms or support for the candidates, examining the implicit values in the memes can also provide information about the beliefs of the creators/circulators of the memes, as well as their perception of their audience. examining depictions of race in political memes can thus provide insight regarding voter perceptions of race, power, and representation, as well as the manner in which memes can be used to challenge – or uphold – valuation of whiteness and white supremacy. this study was guided by the following research questions, using the 2018 texas midterm election as a case study: 1. how did political fans incorporate representations of race in beto o’rourke and ted cruz memes in the months leading up to, and directly following, the november 2018 election? 2. what do racially focused memes reveal about conservative and liberal voters’ candidate preferences and perceptions of racial hierarchies in the united states? data collection and analysis to answer the above research questions, i collected memes from pro-cruz and proo’rourke communities on facebook, twitter, instagram, reddit, and tumblr from the period of september 1, 2018 through november 14, 2018. i used critical discourse analysis (cda) to assess the content of memes to determine trends in the manners in which voters represented race in o’rourke and cruz memes. discourse “does not just contribute to the shaping and reshaping of social structures but also reflects them” (jorgensen & phillips, 2002, p. 61). in this same manner, user-generated political memes not only shape the way users participate in politics but also reflect the current structure of politics. memes and the preservation of white supremacy despite conceptions of the united states as a “nation of immigrants,” white residents of european descent have traditionally held positions of privilege and power. as the number of non-white immigrants increases, white residents resort to “racialization, racial stereotyping, and prejudice” to protect the existing racial hierarchy (leitner, 2012, p. 829). “othering” non-white racial identities defines them as existing outside of mainstream american culture and identity, implying that non-white immigrants (and, indeed, native residents) must conform to white “values and norms” to be accepted (leitner, 2012, p. 828). in general, memes tend to enforce existing racial hierarchies; matias (2020) found that digital texts like memes largely support hegemonic valuation of whiteness, reinforcing white supremacist views already entrenched in american society. a white supremacist apparatus is so embedded in united states’ racial ideology that the enforcement of this ideology in memes and other digital content is often overlooked. although white supremacy is often “latent and subliminal” (matias, 2020, p. 15) in user-generated content, it works to uphold and enforce existing racial hierarchies that privilege whiteness and white individuals. despite an increasing number of people of color online (krogstad, 2015), the internet largely remains a space largely dominated by whitecentric discourse. this paper explores similar trends in political memes during the texas 2018 election. despite the growing role of hispanic texans in the texas electorate, the collected memes predominantly privilege whiteness and the white perspective and were created and shared for an english-speaking audience. as dyer (1997, p. 47) explained, the indeterminate nature of white as color/non-color is ideal for designating a population that is both “particular and nothing in particular.” being white involves fulfilling strict (but unclear) criteria; however, whiteness is also considered the “default” human quality. any identities existing outside the white race are defined by their differences from this “default.” in addition, this paper argues that memes attempting to persuade racial minority voters emphasize characteristics of non-white racial identity, belying a belief that racial minorities determine their voting preferences based on shared racial identity rather than candidates’ platforms and proposed policies. according to white supremacist beliefs, race is the most important defining characteristic, and therefore determines decisions related to voting. it is ultimately clear that the political meme creators in this study also perceive racial identity as an important marker of authenticity, revealing that the (presumably) white creators and posters of these memes strongly associate “authentic” identities with the performance of racial and place-based characteristics. discourse facilitated by political memes shares similarities with other popular media representations of race, reproducing the default status of whiteness and representing audiences of color as niche interests. thus, despite the potential for user-generated content to challenge existing power structures in the united states and represent alternative perspectives, political memes largely reproduce and enforce existing racial hierarchies while othering minority populations. like other digital texts, political memes act as an apparatus for preserving white identity and supremacy in the united states against the perceived threat of multiculturalism. references dyer, r. (1997). white. new york, ny: routledge. jorgensen, m., & phillips, l. j. (2002). discourse analysis as theory and method. london: sage. http://www.mrdowoportal.com/uploads/1/0/1/8/10183165/__discourse_analysis_a s_theory_and_method.pdf kligler-vilenchik, n., & thorson, k. (2016). good citizenship as a frame contest: kony2012, memes, and critiques of the networked citizen. new media & society, 18(9), 1993–2011. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815575311 krogstad, j. m. (2015). social media preferences vary by race and ethnicity. pew research. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/03/social-mediapreferences-vary-by-race-and-ethnicity/ leitner, h. (2012). spaces of encounters: immigration, race, class, and the politics of belonging in small-town america. annals of the association of american geographers, 102(4), 828-846. doi: 10.1080/00045608.2011.601204 matias, c. e. (2020). do you see the words coming out of that text?: seeing whiteness in digital text. international journal of multicultural education, 22(2), 14-29. penney, j. (2017). the citizen marketer. oxford scholarship online. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190658052.003.0004 rogers, r., malancharuvil-berkes, e., mosley, m., hui, d., & g. o. joseph. (2005). critical discourse analysis in education: a review of the literature. review of educational research, 75(3), 365–416. scammell, m. (2014). consumer democracy: the marketing of politics. cambridge, ma: cambridge university press. wheeler, m. (2013). celebrity politics. malden, ma: polity press. wilson, j. (2011). playing with politics: political fans and twitter faking in post broadcast democracy. convergence: the journal of research into new media technologies, 17(4), 445–461. https://doiorg.ezproxy.net.ucf.edu/10.1177/1354856511414348 “reject progress, embrace tradition”: chronotopes and the nostalgic past in white supremacist memes julia r. decook, phd loyola university chicago introduction “the west is not in the west. it is a project, not a place.” édouard glissant (1992, p. 2) the project of the west has spread to the digital realm. the rise of nationalism in the united states and europe is primarily built upon the foundations of a white identity that transcends material borders. these nationalist movements believe that pluralistic and multicultural societies are a threat to white identity itself. social movements that fall under the umbrella term of the alt-right often make invocations to western civilization, which is ambiguously loaded with multiple meanings but at its core is primarily focused upon white supremacy. memes are more often than not created by everyday users and members of online communities, making them a quotidian part of life online. through the creation of a virtual nation state, these boundaries are constantly being expanded by netizens who all share the similar sentiment: western civilization is under attack by globalization and feminism. the alt right despite its fractures and disagreements are bound together by a shared language, and it can be argued that the alt right is less a political ideology and more a way of speaking (hodge & hallgrimsdottir, 2019). a shared language is the glue that binds people together; or in the words of anderson, language is what creates the nation, not blood (anderson, 2006). the mentality that is created through constant consumption of these materials and the creation of them through memes and alternative online communities enable these groups to engage in a form of collective action. many of the memes harken back to and appeal to a sense of loss, of humiliation, and of regaining what was “stolen” from the members of these groups. particularly, many of these memes mock feminism, progressive politics, and racial justice initiatives; and in white supremacist movements, the highest duty and honor of a white man is to preserve the heteropatriarchal, white family (daniels, 2009). relying on these white supremacist beliefs that undergirds much of u.s. policy, culture, and myth that whiteness must be protected, the memes and other digital artifacts that circulate often rely on the invocation of the past. the role of myth in the perpetuation of white supremacist rhetoric is critical in understanding not only the persistence of white supremacy, but also its continued appeal to younger audiences. the myth of white supremacy is sold in not just nostalgic renderings of the past, where white women raised white children and white men ruled the world, but also through memes and other digital artifacts that celebrate the past and urge younger generations to reject “progress” and to “embrace tradition.” examining white supremacist memes from reddit and instagram, this paper aims to uncover the ways that time, memory, and the abstract conception of “the past” are used in these modes of digital propaganda. indeed, white supremacist myths shape racial attitudes that impact laws, policy, and our broader culture, serving as the very foundation of u.s. ideals and norms (hughes, 2018). using bakhtin’s conception of chronotopes, the purpose of this study will be to uncover how time, memory, and the abstract conception of “the past” feed into and perpetuate the project of “the west” in white supremacist memes. research questions the research questions that guide this study are: 1. how do white supremacist memes use time and memory in their iconography and text? 2. to what extent do these memes rely on chronotopes (i.e. the relations and implications of space-time) in their rhetoric? a. how are chronotopes used to reinforce the relationship between space, time, and whiteness? data and methods data for this chapter comes from a variety of sources: namely, the memes that are used to represent the ideas are popular on forums like 4chan, instagram, reddit, facebook, and twitter. the images presented here come from instagram data that was scraped in november 2017 as well as from the subreddit r/europe and r/the_europe, which was formed after r/europe was banned. on social media platforms, these memes are often accompanied by hashtags in order to allow for easy searching and discovery of them (like #maga, #whiteidentity, #westisthebest, #proudboys, to name a few). regardless of their platform of origin, these memes tend to spread across the digital world and enter into a variety of different communities, newsfeeds, and the like, making them the perfect vehicles for recruitment and mobilization. using critical discourse analysis, i then attempt to make visible the ways that time, memory, and chronotopes are used in white supremacist memes, and implications for understanding online white supremacist propaganda moving forward. potential implications these activities push past the boundaries of physical space and have created global networks that are built on the ideology pushed in memes that provide a common vernacular (hodge & hallgrimsdottir, 2019). thus, “western civilization” became less of a contained and abstract idea that fostered images of old castles and crusaders, and became a tangible organizing effort through the linguistic practices of the online alt right. the alt right’s digital nation transcends the constraints of borders and created a new logic of recruitment and mobilization by focusing in on the pan-ethnic “european” and “western” identity and culture. the internet also allows for the quick creation and adoption of new symbols that help to sustain the digital nation, and also for it to move from place to place when platforms ban, censor, and remove them (benett, 2018; shifman, 2014). by creating linguistic practices that are unique to the group, the alt right unifies itself despite its fractures. it is not only in the creation, but the consumption and sharing of memes that create community, helping to sustain it (miller-idriss, 2017). the alt-right use a variety of different images to provoke outrage, to build a collective identity, and to appeal to a loss of identity and through appeals to nostalgia and through the deployment of choronotopic speech. nostalgia is created as a psychological state by provoking a longing for a time that never was, for something that hasn’t been lost because it was never “had.” these recruitment strategies tap into very base emotions and desires, and after the initial negative affect that they tap into, they promise a better future and hope. references anderson, b. (2006). imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (3rd ed.). verso books. benett, t. (2018, april 5). gab is the alt-right social network racists are moving to. vice. https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/ywxb95/gab-is-the-alt-right-socialnetwork-racists-are-moving-to daniels, j. (2009). cyber racism: white supremacy online and the new attack on civil rights. rowman & littlefield publishers. glissant, e. (1992). caribbean discourse: selected essays. university of virginia press. hodge, e., & hallgrimsdottir, h. (2019). networks of hate: the alt-right, “troll culture,” and the cultural geography of social movement spaces online. journal of borderlands studies, 1–18. hughes, r. t. (2018). myths america lives by: white supremacy and the stories that give us meaning. university of illinois press. miller-idriss, c. (2017). soldier, sailor, rebel, rule-breaker: masculinity and the body in the german far right. gender and education, 29(2), 199–215. shifman, l. (2014). memes in digital culture. mit press. nithreasaigh & boler (aoir 2021 #606) final melodramatic platforms: the affective theatre of polarized political storytelling on social media selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 melodramatic platforms: the affective theatre of polarized political storytelling on social media míchílín ní threasaigh ontario institute for studies in education (oise), university of toronto megan boler ontario institute for studies in education (oise), university of toronto contrary to claims that social media platforms are not contributing to political polarization, our study of affect and narratives of race and national belonging in social media discourses of the 2019 canadian and 2020 u.s. federal elections reveals clearly polarized, collective political storytelling marked by a highly affective moralizing tone and clear binaries of us versus them and good versus evil. to understand the roles of affect and narrative in shaping online civic discourse, we ask: 1. what role do emotions play in catalyzing, organizing and circulating polarized political meta-narratives on social media platforms? and, 2. how might we analyse social media expressions as a form of collective political storytelling? to answer these questions, we draw upon a subset of our data to use the us capitol riots as a case-study in the melodramatic genre of collective political storytelling on social media platforms. methodology: this case-study is situated within our larger cross-platform, mixed-methods research project which engages grounded theory to explore how emotions are expressed in relation to narratives of racial and national belonging within election-related social media debates. this larger study explores twitter, facebook, reddit, youtube and gab discussions about the 2019 canadian and 2020 u.s. elections. with a collaborative team consisting of the pi and seven graduate research assistants, we conducted a four-month digital ethnography in the lead up to and aftermath of both federal elections, tracking online debates within far right, conservative, liberal, and left social media communities. we documented these in a collaborative and iterative process including extensive field notes and memos, weekly team meetings, and literature reviews. following each 4-month digital ethnography, we selected 2-4 threads from each platform for a total of 12 threads. in the context of the data for the u.s. election, the suggested citation (apa): ní threasaigh, m. and boler, m. (2021, october). melodramatic platforms: the affective theatre of polarized political storytelling on social media. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. http://spir.aoir.org threads were selected according to the following criteria: initiated by an influencer, reflecting cross-partisan dialogue, explicit address of race, and more than 300 comments/responses. we focused on analysis and coding of the comments to these original posts in order to understand the affective and cross-partisan dynamics of polarization and conflict. over the next three-month period, we engaged grounded theory (charmaz, 2006) to develop coding families suitable for the complex task of coding emotional expression, including: rhetorical and linguistic features, objects of emotion, and beliefs about in-groups and out-groups. we then coded a total of 2500 posts for each election with atlas.ti, using a combination of discourse, rhetorical, and "narrative emotions analysis” (kleres, 2011). theoretical framework: our theoretical framework was developed as themes emerged from our grounded theoretical work. as we engaged digital ethnographies and coded thousands of posts, what clearly emerged were persistent melodramatic storytelling features surrounding emotional expressions related to narrative of race and nation. we follow loseke (2009) in examining key elements of this genre present in the construction of polarized political meta-narratives. the typical plot of a melodrama is an "intense emotional and ethical drama based on the manichaeistic struggle of good and evil" (brooks, 1976, p. 279), and the main characters are “the morally faultless victim, the ruthless villain, and the heroic savior (anker, 2005, as cited in loseke, 2009, p. 503 ). to further understand the plots of these collectively constructed political meta-narratives, we employ arlie hochschild’s (2016) concepts of “deep stories'' and associated “feeling rules” as theoretically sensitizing concepts. deep stories underlie all political ideologies, and are metaphorical representations of a group’s experience, “feels-as-if accounts” that are “stripped of judgment and of facts”. these deep stories contain the protagonist’s pain, someone or something to blame for this pain, and point to a mechanism for rescue from this pain. they also prescribe an “emotional accounting system” -what hochschild calls “feeling rules” -that govern what the group should and should not feel about events as they unfold in these stories. in the context of our grounded theory and ethnography, the political meta-narrative that surfaced as a critical finding of our research was in essence a digital version of hochschild's notion of deep stories -but significantly, not inclusive of the "rescue" dimensions. the lack of a "rescue narrative" in these stories is indicative of lack of solution-focused discourse on social media platforms. the “overwrought emotion and heightened states of emotional urgency, tension, and tribulation" (singer cited in loseke, 2009, p. 503) that characterise the melodramatic genre ensure audiences “unambiguously distinguish between good and evil” (anker, cited in loseke, 2009, p. 503). the language employed by melodrama is a “‘vocabulary of clear, simple, moral and psychological absolutes’ and ‘rhetorical excess’’’ (brooks cited in loseke, 2009, p. 503). to understand the emotional work that style is doing in these stories, we engage the methodology of “narrative emotion analysis” (kleres, 2011) to analyze the emotional expression embedded in these meta-narratives -including emotions not explicitly stated by social media users -by coding for their linguistic and rhetorical markers. findings: our findings reveal social media platforms as melodramatic theatres of emotionally-charged collective political storytelling. the melodramatic genre, as donileen loseke (2009) has noted, might be effective in “encouraging audience emotional engagement” (p. 517) due to its oft-disparaged sensational, predictable plots detailing the “triumph of moral virtue over villainy” (frye, 1957, p.44) in ways that discourage reflection (wagner-pacifici, 1986), refuse nuance (brooks, 1976, p. 36), and ultimately idealize the “moral views assumed to be held by the audience” (frye, 1957, p.44). conflicting political meta-narratives constructed around the same event tell near opposite stories of pain and blame, with victims and villains who exchange roles with the discourse community doing the storytelling, with variations of the same characters, us and them, with the narrator/self always cast as the protagonist/victim dueling against their political other as antagonist/villain. in contrast to prevailing understandings of polarization as solely shaped by partisan political identity, these discourse communities are formed according to both social and political identities. the meta-narratives constructed by these communities contain a highly affective moralizing tone and clear binaries of us versus them and good versus evil. negative, compound-emotions of anger/indignance, judgement, dismissal, distrust and disgust are aimed at them; while love, hope and pride bind us in networked communities. coding for rhetorical and linguistic expression of emotions further reveals users employing the melodramatic style of rhetorical excess (evidenced by high incidences of name calling/belittling/mocking, dismissing, conflict/threat language, sarcasm/satire/irony, and emotion language) and a vocabulary of clear, simple, moral and psychological absolutes (evidenced by high incidences of moral claims, blaming, and accusations of bias and double standards). conclusion: social media platforms are shaping political discourse in ways that are counterproductive to democratic debate. debate or discussion across differences is incredibly rare in these spaces. while everyone has something to say, few are interested in listening. political ideologies are reinforced through melodramatic political storytelling in which binary opposite meta-narratives are constructed around the exact same reported events. marked by a highly affective and moralizing tone centred on the struggle between good and evil, melodramatic storytelling structures entrench political ideologies and polarization. our analysis contributes myriad directions that encourage affective polarization and political communications scholarship to move beyond reductive, essentialized, and ahistorical conceptions of emotion, and to explore the ways in which platform structures reinscribe binary modes of thought and feeling that work against the possibility of genuine political conversation across difference. references: ahmed, s. (2014). cultural politics of emotion. edinburgh university press. anker, e. (2005). villains, victims and heroes: melodrama, media, and september 11. journal of communication 55, 22-37. berlant, l. (2008). the female complaint. duke university press. boler, m., & davis, e. (2018). the affective politics of the “post-truth” era: feeling rules and networked subjectivity. emotion, space and society, 27, 75-85. brooks, p. (1976). the melodramatic imagination: balzac, henry james, melodrama, and the mode of excess. new haven, ct: yale university press. bucholtz, m. (2019). the public life of white affects. journal of sociolinguistics, 23(5), 485-504. charmaz, k. (2006). constructing grounded theory: a practical guide through qualitative analysis. sage. duncan, p. k. (2017). the uses of hate: on hate as a political category. m/c journal, 20(1). frye, n. (1957). anatomy of criticism. princeton, new jersey: princeton university press ganesh, b. (2020) weaponizing white thymos: flows of rage in the online audiences of the alt-right. cultural studies, (34)6, 892-924. hochschild, a. r. (2003). the commercialization of intimate life: notes from home and work. univ of california press. hochschild, a. (2016, september). the american right: its deep story. global dialogue, 6(3). globaldialogue.isa-sociology.org/the-american-right-its-deep-story. kleres, j. (2011). emotions and narrative analysis: a methodological approach. journal for the theory of social behaviour, 41(2), 182-202. literarydevices editors. (2021). foil. literary devices. retrieved from literarydevices.net/foil loseke, d. r. (summer, 2009). examining emotion as discourse: emotion codes and presidential speeches justifying war. the sociological quarterly, 50(3), 497-524. https://globaldialogue.isa-sociology.org/the-american-right-its-deep-story loseke, d. r. (2018). narrative and the politics of meaning in a “post-fact” world. social problems, 65(1), 1-10. papacharissi, z. (2016). affective publics and structures of storytelling: sentiment, events and mediality. information, communication & society, 19(3), 307-324. postman, n. (1986). amusing ourselves to death: public discourse in the age of show business. new york: penguin books. singer, b. (2001). melodrama and modernity: early sensational cinema and its contexts. new york: columbia university press. stark, l. (2020). empires of feeling: social media and emotive politics. in affective politics of digital media (pp. 298-313). routledge wagner-pacifici, r. (1986). the moro morality play: terrorism as social drama. chicago, il: university of chicago press. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): vlassenroot, e., chambers, s., geeraert, f., mechant, p. (2020, october) requirements and desiderata for the scholarly use of web archives. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. requirements and desiderata for the scholarly use of web archives eveline vlassenroot imec-mict-ugent, ghent, belgium sally chambers ghent centre for digital humanities, ugent, ghent, belgium friedel geeraert royal library and state archives of belgium, brussel, belgium peter mechant imec-mict-ugent, ghent, belgium introduction the web and online information has become of utmost importance. however, the short lifespan of online data (with 40% of content being removed after 1 year) (brügger, 2005, p.15) poses serious challenges for preserving and safeguarding digital heritage and information. hence, web or media historians, sociologists or digital scholars must learn to "dig" in online sources such as the internet archive or national web archives in order to find relevant research material. thus, gaining insight into the needs and requirements of users of web archives is essential especially for web archives that are currently taking shape (as is the case in belgium). however, web archiving institutions often do not have a lot of information about the use of their respective web archives (bailey, grotke, mccain, moffatt, & taylor, 2017). in addition to projects that took a qualitative approach in researching needs in relation to web archiving, see e.g. stirling et al. (2012) , dougherty & meyer (2014) or fernando et al. (2018), a number of studies have been published that analyse the needs of web archive users. the perceived challenges of using web archives for research are well-documented in recent publications and research initiatives such as the buddah project and resaw. one of the most important challenges web archiving institutions need to overcome is the lack of awareness of the existence of web archives in the research community (winters, 2017). given that archived web content is relatively new research material, new skills need to be acquired to work with this content which is not something evident or something every researcher is willing to do (gebeil, 2016; winters, 2017). yakel & thores (2003) point to three distinct forms of knowledge required to work effectively with primary data sources: (i) domain (subject) knowledge, (ii) artifactual literacy, and their own concept of (iii) archival intelligence. domain, or subject, knowledge is an understanding of the subject being researched. artifactual literacy is the “practice of criticism, analysis, and pedagogy that reads texts as if they were objects and objects as if they were texts.” archival intelligence is a person’s knowledge of archival principles, practices, and institutions, and an understanding of the relationship between primary sources and their surrogates (yakel & thores, 2003). methodology in this paper, we explore the requirements of researchers working with web archives and outline how they perceive the limitations and possibilities of using the archived web as a data resource, using survey data (n=154)1. the research question underlying this study is: “what are scholars’ requirements for working with web archives as primary sources?”. we asked researchers with and without experience of working with web archives for, amongst others, the search functionalities, descriptive metadata and selection and access criteria they require. the survey also requested basic demographic information (e.g. gender, nationality, highest level of education, current job role, area of study) and the prevalence of use of web archives. in order to assess the relationship between researcher’s domain (subject) knowledge, artifactual literacy, archival intelligence and the prevalence of use of web archives, we elaborated on the work of yakel and torres (2003) and van deursen et al. (2014). our survey ran for two months and was disseminated in english, french and dutch. the survey was spread through mailing lists, newsletters, websites and social media channels of the institutions participating in the project, targeted emails to library, archives and web archiving professionals as well as to researchers in the humanities and social and political sciences in belgium and abroad. a dedicated effort was made to send personal survey-invites to relevant researchers and research groups. preliminary results preliminary results show that only 68% of the researchers are aware of the existence of web archives. when asking respondents with no experience of working with web archives why they are not using web archives the most popular answer was that they 1 this survey was launched in the context of the promise project (2017-2019) financed by the belgian science policy office (belspo) as part of the brain.be programme. promise is a first step towards implementing a longterm web archiving strategy for belgium. were not aware of the existence of web archives. this corresponds with the findings of costea (2018) who suggests that “a significant segment of the research community is still unaware of web archives and that many do not know exactly what they contain or how they can be used.” with regard to the specific requirements for scholars to work with web archives, there is no solution that can cater to all the wishes and requirements of all scholars in every domain (hockx-yu, 2014). every scholar has different requirements depending on the research they are conducting, the skills they have and the tools available. nevertheless we identified text/discourse analysis, exploratory research and retrieving lost documents/ web pages as the most important methods of analysis. furthermore we found that scholars were most interested in the following topics: news websites (online journals and articles) and websites about culture/cultural history. keeping these results in mind can prevent us from relapsing in a ‘one size fits nobody’ trap. few researchers have explored this paradigm of user expertise that was described by yakel and torres (2003) and found that users need a good deal of domain knowledge and artifactual literacy to process collections, create value-added finding aids, and fulfill user needs. archival intelligence is what users learn in archival education programs, by reading and analyzing the archival literature and through years of practice in repositories (duff, yakel, & tibbo, 2013). nevertheless we found in our research that years of practice is not relevant to acquire archival intelligence but the frequency of use of web archives is. furthermore, we would like to propose an extension to yakel and torres’ ‘archival intelligence’ by introducing a new concept of ‘web-archival intelligence’. in addition to arriving at significant findings that demonstrate the relationships between researcher’s domain (subject) knowledge, artifactual literacy, archival intelligence and use prevalence of web archives, this study discusses the limitations of using the archived web as a data resource and concludes with actions to overcome these hurdles and fulfill the desiderata of scholars. references bailey, j., grotke, a., mccain, e., moffatt, c., & taylor, n. (2017). web archiving in the united states: a 2016 survey. national digital stewardship alliance. brügger, n. (2005). archiving websites. aarhus: centre for internet research. costea, m.-d. (2018). report on the scholarly use of web archives. netlab. dougherty, m., & meyer, e. t. (2014). community, tools, and practices in web archiving: the state-of-the-art in relation to social science and humanities research needs. journal of the association for information science and technology, 65(11), 2195–2209. duff, w.m., yakel, e., & tibbo, h. (2013). archival reference knowledge. the american archivist, 76(1), 68–94. fernando, z. t., marenzi, i., & nejdl, w. (2018). archiveweb: collaboratively extending and exploring web archive collections—how would you like to work with your collections? international journal on digital libraries, 19(1), 39–55. gebeil, s. (2016). quand l’historien rencontre les archives du web. revue de la bnf, (2), 185–191. hockx-yu, h. (2014). access and scholarly use of web archives. alexandria, 25(1-2), 113-127. stirling, p., chevallier, p., & illien, g. (2012). web archives for researchers: representations, expectations and potential uses. d-lib magazine, 18(3/4). van deursen, a. j. a. m., helsper, e. j., & eynon, r. (2014). measuring digital skills. from digital skills to tangible outcomes project report. winters, j. (2017). breaking in to the mainstream: demonstrating the value of internet (and web) histories. internet histories, 1(1–2), 173–179. yakel, e., & torres, d. (2003). ai: archival intelligence and user expertise. the american archivist, 66(1), 51–78. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): welsh, s. (2020, october). burying the dead (users): a life of data within limits. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. burying the dead (users): a life of data within limits sarah welsh the university of texas at austin technological innovation depends on earthly resources. as such, the drive to continuous growth that has propelled technology forward is also in direct competition with a planet that is reaching capacity. this expansion and consumption model has both supported and neglected the data of the dead, which both proliferates and languishes. for example, as researchers across disciplines have noted, the dead may soon outnumber the living on social media (karppi, 2018; öhman & watson, 2019). but while questions about digital remains are “critically needed” (öhman & watson, 2019, pp. 8), those questions should attend not only to social media profiles but also to the life cycles of data. this paper considers environmental and resource-related questions about the traces we leave when we depart. to do this work, a theoretical methodological approach following the computing within limits model (nardi et al., 2018) is employed to consider the accumulation of data that remains after users have departed from their earthly (and digital) lives. limits is a sustainability model that asks researchers to (1) question growth, (2) consider models of scarcity, and (3) reduce energy and material consumption. that is, this paper questions the life of digital data that can be maintained and can even grow after a user passes on. in addition to questions about mourning, memorializing, and archiving the dead, the limits model prompts ethical questions about how to bury our dead data responsibly and sustainably in the face of exponential growth. maintaining digital remains increasing attention has been paid to technologies for grief, end of life, and digital possessions (sas et al., 2019), and also to digital remains as big data (karppi, 2018; öhman & watson, 2019). however, these perspectives often focus on the (important) question of how digital remains are mediated by corporate interests (as facebook profiles especially), and less on the environmental impact of the mass-scale preservation required for such a model. many corporate responses to dead profiles depend on more profiles accumulating, and some digital services even allow the dead to “stay in touch” with their descendants after their death. this paper poses such responses to this problem as growth-oriented and unsustainable in the long-term, using the limits model to show how the maintenance of digital remains does not always contribute to well-being or allow for flourishing. services for digital remains that are most in-line with the limits model are those that öhman & floridi (2018) term “information management services” which ensuring that “assets are passed on (or destroyed) on death” (pp. 318), rather than being given new life, or in other cases even sustained. some digital remains and languishing pages may not seem like much environmental strain, but every piece is a part of the larger whole. as more humans are starting online lives, the services that address death often promote (unsustainable or unnecessary) digital growth. environmental scarcity digital remains become digital rubbish (gabrys, 2011) when they are not maintained, useful, or are left to languish. for gabrys, while data may be transient, the “rapidity of technological progress leads to enduring and toxic electronic materials” (pp.17). across platforms, across users, across systems, all digital actors are implicated in technological progress and “growth” writ large. while big data may help provide the scientific knowledge necessary for environmental problems like climate change, data centers consume vast amounts of energy, water, and other resources in order to maintain the data that they sustain (gmach et al., 2010). as such, it would seem that sustainable, responsible data deletion (and forgetting) is in order as a viable solution for the everyday user. data belonging to deceased users might be valuable to corporations, but aside from a means to navigating grief or mourning, may be less so to relatives or friends of the deceased. additionally, one's personal digital remains may be distributed across platforms, and thus the solution affects multiple stakeholders: relatives, friends, corporations, data centers, and so forth. this to say that the data of the deceased is valuable to multiple stakeholders, but approaches that provide an environmentallysustainable model are the most ethically responsible especially in this moment of planetary crisis. reducing energy consumption through ephemerality when and how can we learn to let go? social media platforms have become “global repositories of our digital memories” (mayer-schönberger, 2018) rife for data harvesting, for expansion, for growth. and digital technology has been designed to discourage forgetting—as accidental deletion, crashes, hardware failures, and so forth—in order to protect what has been stored, or in this case, to preserve and memorialize lives that have been lived online. but if forgetting has value alongside memory (ricoeur, 2004), what are we to make of the data of the dead? digital remains of the deceased are a tangible example of hotly debated archival and preservation-focused questions about memory and forgetting. such an accumulation might do well to embrace ephemerality and promote deletion or at least strategic forgetting. life is inherently ephemeral, and online our data might find a way to replicate that, which would respect limits. looking to ephemeral messaging functions provides a sustainable model that reflects life’s inherent ephemerality, allows for and even encourages decomposition and disappearance, and might be ethically extended to the digital traces that persist after death. conclusion while the futures of internet platforms and physical data centers are of course uncertain, what is more certain is that digital remains do not decompose, and environmental resources are scarce. because there is no end in sight for death as a force of life, and because digital media technologies proliferate among users across the globe, the goals of this paper are twofold: to review the sustainability of solutions to the afterlife of digital remains, and to outline solutions that allow digital zombies to live within limits, or to exist in the same ephemeral spaces as our physical bodies. in so doing, this paper questions growth as a viable environmental model, and argues that deletion and forgetting are the most sustainable—if not counterintuitive—options for digital remains. references gabrys, j. (2011). digital rubbish: a natural history of electronics. university of michigan. gmach, d. et al. (2010). "profiling sustainability of data centers," proceedings of the 2010 ieee international symposium on sustainable systems and technology, arlington, va, 2010, pp. 1-6. karppi, t. (2018). disconnect: facebook’s affective bonds. university of minnesota press. mayer-schönberger, v. (2018). remembering (to) delete: forgetting beyond informational privacy. in thouvenin, f., hettich, p., burkert, h, & gasser, u. remembering and forgetting in the digital age. (pp 118-123). springer nardi, b., tomlinson, b., patterson, d. j., chen, j., pargman, d., raghavan, b., & penzenstadler, b. (2018). computing within limits. communications of the acm, 61(10), 86-93. https://doi.org/10.1145/3183582 öhman, c. j., & watson, d. (2019). are the dead taking over facebook? a big data approach to the future of death online. big data & society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951719842540 öhman, c.j., & floridi, l. (2018). an ethical framework for the digital afterlife industry. nature human behavior. doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0335-2 . ricoeur, p. (2004). memory, history, forgetting. chicago: university of chicago press. sas, c., schreiter,m., büscher, m., gamba, f. & coman, a. (2019). futures of digital death: past, present and charting emerging research agenda. death studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2019.1647643 aoir-2020-final.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 “thanks amazon for ruining my life”: worker breakdown and the disruption of care at amazon author: brendan smith university of toronto summary infamous for their highly exploitative, algorithmically-managed labour regimes, amazon fulfillment centers are sites of continual breakdown and disrepair for the bodies and minds of its workers. from a methodological approach via workers’ inquiry, this paper aims to theoretically frame the effects (and affects) resulting from amazon’s strategy of augmented despotism, which engenders “new forms of domination mediated and augmented by digital tools” (delfanti, 2019, p.3). through an analysis of online video confessionals detailing the physical and mental experiences of worker burnout and breakdown, this paper aims to bring the voices of (ex)-workers at amazon to the forefront of understanding amazon’s integrated architectures of labour management, surveillance, and control. the rallying cry of amazon workers, “we are not robots,” implies that there is a direct relationship between the treatment of their minds and bodies as machinery, and the forms of mental and physical breakdown they experience. the experiences of “broken” amazon workers interacting with amazon’s technological media apparatus of augmented despotism on the warehouse floor explain how amazon’s rate metering and notifcation delivery systems cultivate “automatic subjectivities” (till, 2019) for its workers through forms of automated and networked surveillance, control, and discipline. as worker confessionals on youtube attest, amazon’s infrastructure of caring for its workforce, amazon care, is as much an architecture of managerial surveillance, control, and discipline as it is of “care.” while other wearable and trackable technologies haunt the amazon worker during their shift, amazon care extends the company’s technological power beyond the confines of the fulfillment center directly into their personal lives. drawing from political and technological theories of labour and care, this paper will look into how amazon workers navigate (and often escape) the affective and embodied confines of amazon's augmented despotism. virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): smith, b. (2020, october). “thanks amazon for ruining my life”: worker breakdown and the disruption of care at amazon. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. theoretical and methodological framework this paper is an exercise in broken world thinking, which steven jackson describes as an approach that takes “erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as our starting points in thinking through the nature, use, and effects of information technology and new media” (jackson, 2014, p.221). i hypothesize that the experiences of breakdown and disrepair shared by workers and ex-workers at amazon can serve as a starting point for thinking about the relationship between productive (rather than sustainable) bodies, minds, and machines. in keeping with the conference theme, and with the rallying cry of amazon workers, “we are not robots,” this paper asks: what does it mean to be treated as a robotic lifeform, such as the amazon worker is in the fulfillment center? what role does the technological media apparatus enable for amazon’s treatment of its workers as robots? this paper was developed through a process of transcribing and coding online video confessionals of amazon worker breakdown. by means of workers’ inquiry, the aim of the paper will be to bring the voices of amazon workers’ embodied and affective experiences of breakdown and disrepair to the forefront of scholarly theory and dialogue on the broader topic of media technology and wellness. the focus of the analysis will be on the relationships between workers and ex-workers with the digital tools that mediate their experiences of breakdown. drawing from literature at the intersections of digital labour studies and critical mental health studies, this paper looks at how workers experience being treated as machinery through their relationship with digital technologies that quantify, track, and discipline. it will proceed from the basis that the experience of being treated like a robot is the result of a managerial articulation of cybernetic psychology: an analysis of the body and mind that is “applicable to both machines and living things” (edwards, 1996, p.181). this paper is also following the premise of a media genealogical approach that situates technologies such as amazon care in terms of a “practical rationality and a means to govern specific practices and people” (packer, 2013, p.4). the content analysis will trace what denotes the practical rationality of amazon’s technologies of augmented despotism by looking for how the bodily and affective limitations of amazon workers are problematized through these technologies. by looking at how the bodies and minds of workers are encountered as a problem through these technologies, i want to suggest that we can think of amazon’s strategy of augmented despotism as a managerial articulation of cybernetic psychology. this paper is also drawing from theories of psychopolitical power and managerial control that understand industrial psychology as a science of managing behaviour and conduct in accordance with specific norms (braverman, p.60 -62). these experiences of technologically-mediated breakdown can tell us about how amazon automatically produces and selects workers on the warehouse floor as ideal automatic subjects. conclusion the story of relations between amazon and its workers is more complex than one of linear exploitation, in which bodies are overworked and experience breakdown as a result. instead, these experiences of breakdown are integral to the networked production and selection of workers as ideal automatic subjects. the more that workers are made to feel individually responsible for their own productivity and well-being, the more they are made to realize themselves as something machinic and inhuman. amazon’s technologies on the warehouse floor, such as the scanner’s rate meter and notification system, affords amazon to automatically place responsibility upon workers to manage their own time, productivity, and wellness. amazon care blurs the divison between the worker’s life on the warehouse floor and their personal lives, as it extends amazon’s surveillant gaze into their time off work after having sustained workplacerelated injuries. these are not simply technologies that push unfit workers toward breakdown, thus helping amazon to separate the fit from the unfit. i argue that they also, and perhaps more importantly, function as automated psychotechnologies that steer and govern the affective and cognitive capacities of amazon workers. the experiences of worker breakdown at amazon either transform workers into ideal docile bodies and automatic subjects, or signal their disposability to amazon’s technological apparatus of augmented despotism. references braverman, h. (1974). labor and monopoly capital: the degradation of work in the twentieth century. new york: monthly review press. delfanti, a. (2019). machinic dispossession and augmented despotism: digital work in an amazon warehouse. new media & society. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/1461444819891613 edwards, p. n. (1996). the closed world: computers and the politics of discourse in cold war america. cambridge: mit press. jackson, s. (2014). “rethinking repair.” in t. gillespie, p. boczkowski, & k. foot. (eds.), media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society (p.221-239). the mit press. packer. j. (2013). “the conditions of media’s possibility: a foucauldian approach to media history.” in: a.n. valdivia (ed.), the international encyclopedia of media studies. hoboken: blackwell publishing. till, c. (2019). creating ‘automatic subjects’: corporate wellness and self-tracking. health: an interdisciplinary journal for the social study of health, illness and medicine, 23(4), 418-435. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 the datafication of childhood: examining children’s and parents’ data practices, children’s right to privacy and parents’ dilemmas giovanna mascheroni, università cattolica del sacro cuore, milan, italy sonia livingstone, lse, london, uk mariya stoilova, lse, london, uk rishita nandagiri, lse, london, uk tijana milosevic, dublin city university aldona zdrodowska, national information processing institute, warsaw, poland elisabeth staksrud, university of oslo andra siibak, university of tartu marit sukk, university of tartu mascheroni, g., livingstone, s., stoilova, m., nandagiri, r., milosevic, t., zdodrowska a., staksrud, e., siibak, a., sukk, m., zaffaroni, l. g., cino, d., & wartella, e. (2020, october 28-31). the datafication of childhood: examining children’s and parents’ data practices, children’s right to privacy and parents’ dilemmas. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. lorenzo zaffaroni, università cattolica del sacro cuore, milan, italy davide cino, università cattolica del sacro cuore, milan, italy ellen wartella, northwestern university introductory statement in the age of continuous data collection and algorithmic predictions, children’s privacy seems threatened by the variety of surveillance and data practices in which parents, institutions, corporations and children themselves engage. the vast amount of data routinely collected about children as they grow up include data shared online, whether by children themselves (social media updates, web searches and browsing, data traces of their internet and smartphone use) or their parents (sharenting practices); data shared in the home, like conversations and environmental data captured by internetconnected devices such as smart speakers and internet connected toys; data shared outside the home, including educational and school apps, biometric data in schools and/or airports and stations, health data and medical records, geo-location apps or wearables, etc. data can be knowingly shared with others, or “given off” as traces of online activities, and even inferred by algorithms that profile, classify and predict users’ behaviour. this panel on the datafication of childhood draws together a number of leading scholars in this area of research to explore questions and issues associated with children’s privacy online as both a protective and enabling right. the collection of papers in this panel contribute empirical data and theoretical insight on a range of relevant topics in the study of the datafication of childhood from the perspective of both children and parents. based on qualitative and quantitative methods, the individual contributions to the panel illuminate the situated nature of data practices, their embeddedness in diverse contexts and practices of meaning-making through which children and parents negotiate online privacy. the first paper draws on qualitative data collected from 150 children aged 11 to 16 from selected schools in the uk and to some of their parents. the findings problematise both the common-sense assumption that children and teenagers do not care for their online privacy, and the myth of the digital natives as competent users, by showing how young people struggle to protect their online privacy despite employing a range of dataficationevasive strategies. the second paper examines survey data collected in norway on a representative sample of 9-17-year-old internet using children and one of their parents/caregivers in order to test the “privacy paradox”. the paper aims to assess whether privacy concern is associated with the amount of personal information about themselves that children disclose online, or with their experience of sharenting-related breaches. further, it also investigates whether children’s level of privacy concern is related to their parents’ preoccupation with online privacy. the third paper employs a mixed-method approach (semi-structured interviews and qmethodology) to explore the surveillance imaginaries and practices of estonian parents (n=20) who use tracking technologies for keeping an eye on their children, as well as their 7-13 year-old children (n=20) who are aware of such intimate surveillance. the paper provides a typology of both children’s and parents’ perspectives related to the use of tracking technologies. the fourth paper analyses survey data collected from a national representative sample of italian parents of 0to 8-years-old children to map the data-practices in which parents and young children engage, and the availability of internet-connected devices (smart speakers, internet of toys, other iots) in italian homes. the paper aims to identify the antecedents and consequences of the datafication of children’s lives, and develop a typology of families based on parents’ intimate surveillance practices, parenting imaginaries and children’s use of digital media and iots. the fifth paper explores how parents govern their children’s social media presence when not only parents, but also adults from external systems share about them. the paper draws on a survey of 300 american parents to show how parents are divided between conflicting social expectations and the desire to protect their children’s privacy. it also highlights a double loss of agency which may result from sharenting: children lack control of the process, but parents too may lose track of their children’s digital footprints when it is other adults who share about the child. papers “i want to keep it to myself”: how well do children evade online datafication to protect their privacy? sonia livingstone, lse, london, uk mariya stoilova, lse, london, uk rishita nandagiri, lse, london, uk children’s autonomy and dignity as actors in the world depends on both their freedom to engage and their freedom from undue persuasion or influence. in a digital age in which many everyday actions generate data – whether given by digital actors, observable from digital traces, or inferred by others, whether human or algorithmic – the relation between privacy and data online is becoming highly complex. in such complicated digital ecology, how do children evade online datafication to protect their privacy? do they have the knowledge, media literacy and digital skills to counteract a privacy-invasive model? as part of our ico-funded project on children’s data and privacy online, we spoke to 150 children aged 11 to 16 from selected schools in england, scotland and wales and to some of their parents, asking about their privacy and data sharing practices, understanding of the digital ecology and struggles with privacy protection. this paper presents our findings and argues that children are engaging in a range of datafication-evasive strategies and take a stand against invasions of their privacy by both individuals and companies. yet, their efforts are limited – more by their awareness than their skills, but mostly within the boundaries of a data-commercialisation environment. still, how effective are children in their strategies to manage interpersonal privacy vs managing commercial privacy? firstly, children care about their privacy and are outraged that companies use their data ‘behind the scenes’, often demanding data minimisation, more visibility of data processing, and more control over their digital footprint. on the interpersonal level, they expect their friends and families to respect their privacy and follow a mutually-acceptable code of practice. secondly, children are generally protective of their information and often reply that they would like to keep to themselves various types of personal data, such as where they go, who they meet and what they search online. children also engage in a wide range of strategies to keep their devices, online profiles and personal information safe from unwanted interference. yet, children mostly focus on strategies to manage interpersonal privacy, rather than commercial. thirdly, children can be quite evasive online – they move quickly between different apps and platforms, switch between several accounts and channels with carefully selected audiences, know how to remove their traces and to alter data, by providing fake information, changing textual descriptions, removing tags, altering images, deleting or blocking content. quite effective in terms of interpersonal privacy, children seek to apply the same strategies to commercial contexts – with varying effects. while, children are actively learning about the online environment, drawing on a wide range of social, educational and online resources, their privacy protection is not without limits. we conclude the paper arguing in favour of system-level privacy-by-design changes which can support and reinforce children’s rights and privacy. the characteristics of privacy-minded children in the context of privacy paradox: norwegian case study tijana milosevic, dublin city university aldona zdrodowska, national information processing institute, warsaw, poland giovanna mascheroni, università cattolica del sacro cuore, milan, italy elisabeth staksrud, university of oslo with an ever-growing use and variety of digital devices, most recently the internet of things, children’s and family privacy is an important topic with many under-researched aspects (livingstone, stoilova, nandagiri, 2019). although children and adolescents might be more likely to share greater amounts of personal information than adults, and to apply more lenient privacy settings on social media (walrave, vanwesenbeeck, & heirman, 2012), studies have also shown that young people tend to care about their privacy (see e.g. boyd, 2014; marwick & boyd, 2014). in this article, we examine “privacy concern” as a possible source of motivation for privacy protecting behaviors. according to the widely used communication privacy management (cpm) theory (petronio, 2002, 2015), higher privacy concern leads to employing more restrictive privacy behaviors. nonetheless, previous research has also identified the concept of “privacy paradox” (de wolf cf. acquisti & gross, 2006; hargittai & marwick, 2016), which proposes that despite reported privacy concern, young people nonetheless disclose large amounts of information about themselves. a possible explanation is in the feeling of a lack of control in networked environments generating “apathy” and “cynicism” and the impression that “privacy violations are inevitable” (hargittai & marwick, 2016, p. 3752). we test the paradox by studying whether children who report greater privacy concern actually disclose more or less personal information about themselves; or otherwise engage in behaviors that might jeopardize their privacy (e.g. by using wearable devices and the internet of things, which might expose them to increased levels of data collection for commercial purposes). we further examine whether children whose parents or caregivers share significant amounts of information about them, and children who have experienced sharentingrelated breaches (such as being upset about what their parents have posted online) are more likely to be concerned about their privacy than other children. following cpm, such breaches, which the theory terms as “turbulence” would lead to higher privacy concern. finally, we also test whether children whose parents display higher levels of privacy concern tend to be more concerned about their privacy as well. we study these questions on a nationally representative sample of 9-17-year-old internet using children from norway and one of their parents/caregivers, conducted as part of the eu kids online project in 2018. as a case study, norway is a country where the use of digital technology among youth is very high, as confirmed by the most recent analyses on nationally representative samples of children in 19 european countries; and so is exposure to risks (smahel et al., 2020; helsper et al., 2013). while children’s independent smartphone and social media use starts early, children also tend to enjoy significant family, social and policy-level support for safe digital media use, as compared to other european countries. with this in mind, we ask the following research questions: rq1: what are the characteristics of children who report grater levels of concern for their privacy online and with digital technology? rq1a: are children with higher digital skills more worried about their privacy (because they are more aware of the dangers)? rq1b: are children who have experienced privacy or data-protection-related harms more likely to report privacy concerns? rq2: what are the characteristics of families of children who report grater levels of concern for their privacy online and with digital technology? rq2a: how are parental attitudes to privacy online and with digital technology related to children’s levels of concern for their privacy? rq2b: what is the relationship between parental digital skills and children’s levels of concern for their privacy? rq3: do children who report higher privacy concern share more information about themselves online than children who report lower concern? rq3a: are children who report higher privacy concern less likely than other children to use wearable devices and the internet of things devices? sampling and method this study relies on a nationally representative survey sample of internet-using children in norway. the data was collected between june and october 2018 within the eu kids online research project. 1001 children of both sexes, aged from 9 to 17 years, were interviewed via casi method. the data was collected by ipsos mori. 47.1% of the sample was female, mage= 13.3. the sampling frame was stratified by the economic characteristics of municipalities as well as the number of 9 to 17-year-old children who lived there. respondents were initially recruited by telephone, followed by face-to-face interviews at home. respondents’ anonymity and confidentiality were secured. the data collection was approved by the norwegian national data authority (datatilsynet), and followed procedures established by the national ethical committees for social science and humanities and by the norwegian center for research data (nsd). informed consent was obtained from each parent and each child that participated. data analyses and initial results in order to verify determinants of higher levels of privacy concern in children and teenagers, we conducted a series of logistic regression analyses in the proportional odds model, controlling for child demographics and psychological characteristics. findings indicate that privacy breaches such as sharenting, as well as general risk experiences significantly predict higher levels of privacy concern. furthermore, children who declare having found themselves in a situation where they could use the privacyrelated advice (e.g. on sharing personal information online) are also more concerned about their privacy online. additionally, parental level of privacy concern seems to have a modelling effect on a child’s attitude towards privacy online. preliminary analyses into privacy paradox did not provide support for nor evidence against the effect. references acquisti a and gross r (2006) imagined communities: awareness, information sharing, and privacy on the facebook. in: danezis g and golle p (eds) privacy enhancing technologies. berlin: springer, pp. 36–58. baruh l, secinti e and cemalcilar z (2017) online privacy concerns and privacy management: a meta-analytical review. journal of communication 67(1): 26–53. de wolf, r. (2019). contextualizing how teens manage personal and interpersonal privacy on social media. new media & society, 1461444819876570. hargittai e and marwick a (2016) “what can i really do?” explaining the privacy paradox with online apathy. international journal of communication 10: 3737–3757. helsper, e. j., kalmus, v., hasebrink, u., sagvari, b., & de haan, j. (2013). country classification: opportunities, risks, harm and parental mediation. livingstone, s., stoilova, m., & nandagiri, r. (2019). children's data and privacy online: growing up in a digital age: an evidence review. retrieve: http://www.lse.ac.uk/mediaandcommunications/assets/documents/research/projects/childrens-privacyonline/evidencereview.pdf petronio s (2002) boundaries of privacy: dialectics of disclosure. albany, ny: state university of new york press. petronio, s. (2015). communication privacy management theory. the international encyclopedia of interpersonal communication, 1-9. smahel, d., machackova, h., mascheroni, g., dedkova, l., staksrud, e., olafsson, k., ... & hasebrink, u. (2020). eu kids online 2020: survey results from 19 countries. staksrud, e. and ólafsson, k. (2019). access, use, risks and opportunities: norwegian children on the internet. oslo: university of oslo. retrieved from: https://www.hf.uio.no/imk/english/research/projects/eu-kidsonlineiv/publications/20190701_euko2018_summary_eng.pdf walrave, m., vanwesenbeeck, i., & heirman, w. (2012). connecting and protecting? comparing predictors of self-disclosure and privacy settings use between adolescents and adults. cyberpsychology: journal of psychosocial research on cyberspace, 6(1). funding acknowledgement: tijana milosevic has received funding from the european union’s horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the marie skłodowskacurie grant agreement no. 801522, by science foundation ireland and co-funded by the european regional development fund through the adapt centre for digital content technology grant number 13/rc/2106_p2, also known as elite-s co-fund programme. under the parental techno-gaze: reflections and experiences of estonian pre-teens and parents who track them andra siibak, university of tartu marit sukk, university of tartu in the recent years the use of various digital parenting tools, e.g. other-tracking apps (gabriels, 2016), has increasingly gained popularity among parents. recent eu kids online survey findings report, for example, that 22% of estonian parents are making use of various tracing technologies in order to keep an eye on their child (sukk & soo, 2018). such tendencies indicate that present day parents are increasingly cultivating a specific plugged-in parenting routine, leading us to an age of “transcendent parenting” i.e. a practice “wherein parents must transcend every media consumption environment their children enter, their children’s offline and online social interaction milieu and ‘timeless time’ as experienced in the apparent ceaselessness of parenting duties” (lim 2018: 32). although caring for children’s well-being and safety has always been one of the main cornerstones of parenting philosophies, in contrast to the previous decades, the current “parental gaze has become technologized” (howell 2010: 1). some scholars even suggest that spying has become “an enhanced parenting tool” (marx & steeves 2010: 205) as various digital parenting aids – from pregnancy apps and baby monitors to parental controls and tracking devices – have been brought to the market in the hopes of responding to the concerns and anxieties of parents. in fact, the use of digital technologies have started to redefine the parents’ and society’s understanding of child rearing. tama leaver (2017: 8), for instance, has argued that we have reached a point in our society where offline parenting can be viewed as irresponsible and even reckless behavior. furthermore, the concept of a “good” parent is also constantly being reshaped (siibak 2019: 105), leading to the fact that many parents end up feeling that they are not fulfilling their parental role “correctly”. digital technologies and the processes related to them (e.g. mediatization), thus, affect the family dynamics and through that the roles of the family members in ways we are yet to fully unveil. although scholars (e.g. siibak 2019; mascheroni, 2018; lupton & williamson, 2017) have become increasingly concerned about this growing (over)reliance on various digital technologies and parenting apps, empirical studies providing insights about children’s views and experiences related to intimate surveillance exercised by parents, is currently lacking. in fact, in addition to a need to “document the diverse surveillance imaginaries and practices that are enacted in different families” (mascheroni, 2018:10), lupton and williamson (2017) have argued for a need for child-oriented approach to dataveillance. our ongoing empirical study aims to contribute to this knowledge by carrying out semistructured individual interviews with estonian parents (n=20) who use tracking technologies for keeping an eye on their children, as well as their 7-13 year-old children (n=20) who are aware of such intimate surveillance. furthermore, we also made use of q-methodology, a method that is often used to reveal subjective attitudes and perspectives (stephenson, 1953); to explore the surveillance imaginaries and experiences related to the use of tracking technologies. all the participants in our study were asked to rank and sort a series of statements (n=28 for the children; n= 36 for the parents) related to the parental use of othertracking apps. the statements were built upon claims published by different media outlets and international press. the data collected enables us to propose a typology of both children’s and parents’ perspectives related to the use of tracking technologies. preliminary analysis indicates that this (over)protective and technologically moderated parenting stance has been caused by the competing demands of social, work-, and family life and the societal expectations about “good parenting”. the pervasive attitude of the parents can be described as caring dataveillance (lupton, forthcoming 2020): the parents wish to use every digital tool at their disposal to make sure their children are sticking to their daily routine and staying safe. in fact, parents in our sample tend to onesidedly focus on the protective and preventative features of tracking technologies, while almost entirely discarding the issues related to the children’s privacy and digital rights. the use of q-methodology has enabled us to reveal that although many children do not mind nor see any harm in such parental surveillance, there are children whose responses indicate a growing tension between care and the restriction of freedom such tracking evokes. those children have also started to make use of different practices (e.g. “forgetting” their phones at home, switching them off, deleting the apps) in order to escape from this parental techno-gaze. the findings of the study could provide important insight for parents and policy makers while aiming to foster accountability and responsibility of industry stakeholders. references howell, j. (2010), parents, watching: introducing surveillance into modern american parenting, university of iowa, iowa city, iowa, usa, http://dx.doi.org/10.17077/etd.a4wpg2r2. leaver, t. (2017). intimate surveillance: normalizing parental monitoring and mediation of infants online. social media + society, 3(2), 1–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2056305117707192. lim, s. (2018). transcendent parenting in digitally connected families: when the technological meets the social. in: mascheroni, g. ponte, c. &. jorge, a. (eds.), digital parenting: the challenges for families in the digital age, the international clearinghouse on children, youth and media, https://norden.divaportal.org/smash/get/diva2:1265024/fulltext01.pdf#page=21. lupton, d. (forthcoming 2020). caring dataveillance: women’s use of apps to monitor pregnancy and children. in: green, l., holloway, d., haddon, l., stevenson, k., & leaver, t. (eds.) the routledge companion to children and digital media. routledge. lupton, d. & williamson, b. (2017). the datafied child: the dataveillance of children and implications for their rights, new media & society, 19(5), 780-794. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1461444816686328. marx, g. & steeves, v. (2010). from the beginning: children as subjects and agents of surveillance, surveillance & society, 7(3/4), 192-230. http://dx.doi.org/10.24908/ss.v7i3/4.4152. mascheroni, g. (2018). datafied childhoods: contextualising datafication in everyday life, current sociology, p. 001139211880753, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0011392118807534. siibak, a. (2019). digital parenting and the datafied child. in: burns, t. & gottschalk, f. (ed.). educating 21st century children. emotional well-being in the digital age (pp. 103−118). paris: educational research and innovation, oecd publishing.10.1787/313a9b21-en. stephenson, w. (1953). the study of behavior; q-technique and its methodology. sukk, m. & soo, k. (2018). eu kids onlineí eesti 2018. aasta uuringu esialgsed tulemused, ühiskonnateaduste instituut, tartu, www.yti.ut.ee. the datafication of childhood at home: the data practices, meanings and affects of parents of young children. giovanna mascheroni, università cattolica del sacro cuore, milan, italy lorenzo zaffaroni, università cattolica del sacro cuore, milan, italy “we are all now datafied – but children growing up today are among the first to be datafied from birth.” (children’s commissioner, 2018, p. 11). concern is high regarding the short-term and especially long-term social and political consequences of datafication for children’s life chances. however, empirical evidence on everyday life data-practices and their meanings for children, families and communities is still sparse, especially in italy. while datafication represents a radicalization of the commodification of childhood, we cannot understand it only as a top-down process, driven by corporations adhering to the logic of surveillance capitalism (zuboff, 2015). rather, the datafication of childhood is also a bottom-up practice, initiated by a variety of actors, for different purposes and with different meanings. children today do not encounter automated data collection and algorithmic calculation systems only as a result of their direct engagement with digital media. data about children is generated and shared by parents and other family members, and, increasingly, by a number of internet-connected devices at home and at school. the datafication of childhood, then, is further expanded by two simultaneous and interdependent developments: namely, the domestication of internet of things (iot) devices and the mediatization of parenthood (damkjaer, 2018; author, 2018). numerous iots are designed and marketed for the child and the family, including: wearable technologies for the monitoring of biometrics; the internet of toys (author, 2019) robots, talking pets and dolls, smart building blocks, etc.; smart watches to track children’s whereabouts; virtual home assistants and other domestic internet-connected appliances. being fitted with sensors and connected to networks is the pre-condition for objects to take part in the datafication of family life. indeed, sensors and connectivity turn things into media (bunz & meikle, 2018; author, 2019) that potentially mediate the most mundane and most intimate aspects of family life, such as children’s conversations with their dolls. as a result, our homes are refashioned as “datafied environments” (hintz, dencik & wahl-jorgensen, 2018). iots and iotoys are domesticated in the context of an increasingly mediatized performance of parenthood. indeed, many expecting couples now ritually mark the transition to parenthood in the form of ultrasound images shared on social media (leaver, 2017). moreover, a growing number of mothers use pregnancy apps to monitor their foetus’ development and track their own health parameters (lupton & pederson, 2016). mediatized parenting practices (author, 2018) continue after birth, whether in the form of sharenting that is, the (semi)public sharing of family photographs and videos on social media (autenrieth, 2018; blum-ross & livingstone, 2017; damkjaer, 2018); or through the use of parenting apps and wearables to monitor infants’ health, or sleeping and feeding patterns (author, 2019). we can define such practices as “intimate surveillance” (leaver, 2017) or “caring dataveillance” (lupton, in press) to emphasise the entanglement of caring and dataveillance (the surveillance enabled by digital technologies and data analytics) in the contemporary practices and imaginaries of “good parenting”. once parenting becomes mediatized and reliant on technologies of caring and sharing, it is simultaneously imbued with a data-driven business logic called “surveillance capitalism” (zuboff, 2015). however, existing research shows the ambivalent meanings of datafication for parents and children and suggests that the messiness, uncertainty and taken for grantedness of everyday life generates complex entanglements of data and practices. for example, lupton’s (in press) work on pregnancy and parenting apps points to the diverse agential capacities that are implicated in the practices of caring dataveillance, that is experienced by women also as empowering and an expression of love. similarly, barassi (2018) finds that “children are being profiled on the basis of highly contradictory, inaccurate and imprecise data traces” (2018, p. 174), with parents failing to record systematically each and every behaviour. algorithmic calculations and predictions, then, fit ill with the messy world of families. autenrieth (2018) and damkjaer (2018) show how parents appropriate, negotiate and even resist sharenting by inventing new photo practices that minimise children’s data. the datachildfutures project aims to push forward the line of inquiry that analyses datafication at the level of the everyday, and generate a grounded understanding and novel theorisations of the datafication of childhood as a socially situated, everyday and embodied experience. it adopts a triangulation of methods, combining a survey of parents of 0to 8-years-old children, a qualitative longitudinal research (qlr) with young children and their families, an ethnography of online parenting forums, blogs and social media (hine, 2015), and a walkthrough (light et al., 2018) of the affordances of apps, iots and iotoys used by children. this presentation will report on the first phase of the research – the survey of a national representative sample of parents aimed at mapping mediatized parenting practices, children’s practices (play, learning, communication) through and with digital media and iots, parents’ imaginaries. the survey will measure: family’s demographics; access and use of the internet, touchscreens and iots by parents; access and use of the internet, touchscreens and apps, iots and iotoys by children; children’s digital play, literacy and communicative practices; parental mediation and scaffolding practices adopted by parents; intimate surveillance practices such as sharenting; parents’ beliefs around the opportunities and risks of these technologies. the data analysis will identify which factors explained variations in a) children’s digital practices, b) parent’s intimate surveillance practices, and c) parental mediation. factor and cluster analysis will be used to identify family types. references autenrieth, u. (2018). family photography in a networked age. anti-sharenting as a reaction to risk assessment and behaviour adaption. in g. mascheroni, c. ponte, & a. jorge (eds.), digital parenting: the challenges for families in the digital age (pp. 219231). göteborg: nordicom. barassi, v. (2018). the child as datafied citizen. critical questions on data justice in family life. in g. mascheroni, c. ponte, & a. jorge (eds.), digital parenting: the challenges for families in the digital age (pp. 169-177). göteborg: nordicom. blum-ross, a., & livingstone, s. (2017). “sharenting,” parent blogging and the boundaries of the digital self. popular communication, 15(2), 110-125. bunz, m., & meikle, g. (2018). the internet of things. cambridge: polity press. children’s commissioner for england. (2018). who knows what about me? a children’s commissioner report into the collection and sharing of children’s data. london: children’s commissioner for england. retrieved from: https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/who-knowswhatabout-me.pdf damkjær, m. s. (2018). sharenting = good parenting? four parental approaches to sharenting on facebook. in g. mascheroni, c. ponte, & a. jorge (eds.), digital parenting: the challenges for families in the digital age (pp. 209-218). göteborg: nordicom. harris, r. (2017). 72m data points collected on children in spite of coppa. app developer magazine, 27 december. retrieved from: https://appdevelopermagazine.com/5769/2017/12/27/72m-data-points-collectedonchildren-in-spite-of-coppa/ hine, c. (2015). ethnography for the internet: embedded, embodied and everyday. london: bloomsbury. hintz, a., dencik, l., & wahl-jorgensen, k. (2018). digital citizenship in a datafied society. cambridge: polity. leaver, t. (2017) intimate surveillance: normalizing parental monitoring and mediation of infants online. social media + society, 3(2). lupton, d., & pedersen, s. (2016). an australian survey of women’s use of pregnancy and parenting apps. women and birth, 29(4), 368–375. zuboff, s. (2015). big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization. journal of information technology, 30(1), 75–89. “governing” sharenting: parents’ privacy concerns and the governance of children’s social media presence davide cino, università cattolica del sacro cuore, milan, italy ellen wartella, northwestern university “sharenting”, or “sharing representations about one’s parenting or children online” is a usual habit for families in the digital age (blum-ross & livingstone, 2017). this practice is part of a broader process of datafication of the everyday life for many families, where information and representations ranging from one’s pregnancy to accounts of children’s lives are transformed into online data (mascheroni, 2018). this study explores how parents govern their children’s social media presence when not only parents, but also adults from external systems share about them. as such, we administered a survey to a sample of 300 american parents focusing on four main areas: parents’ preand post-birth sharing experiences; parents’ use of privacy settings and alternative ways of sharing; parents’ concerns and digital dilemmas about sharenting; parental agency and management of sharing about children from external systems (i.e. extended family members, schools, and teachers). descriptive results show that the majority of parents in our sample start sharing about their children before they are born and continue to do so as they grow, with number of pictures in the span of a month ranging from 1 to 100+. most parents are on the same page with their partners about rules to share, and use restrictive privacy settings, but few have opted for alternative ways of sharing (e.g. tiny beans). only one third of respondents have questioned their photo-sharing behaviors, which lead in some cases to removing a social media post about their children. few have asked for their children’s permission before sharing (when age would allow to do so). finally, the majority of respondents feel like it is their job to be in control of their children’s digital footprints and deem unacceptable for people external to the nuclear family, like relatives and teachers, to share about their kids, interpreting such occurrences as a privacy violation. still, few have set preventive boundary rules. further, we measured parents’ level of privacy concern using a four-item scale focusing on parents’ worries about possible consequences of their photo-sharing behavior with respect to risks such as digital kidnapping, bullying, conversion of the pictures into child pornography, and the use of children’s data by corporations. the analysis will show how different level of privacy concerns relate to different styles of governance with respect to parents’ own and people’s from external systems sharing behavior. implications of these findings are discussed in terms of children’s rights in light of what we conceptualize as the double loss of agency which may result from sharenting. when parents share about their children, in fact, a first-level loss of agency occur as the child has not control of the process. when it is other adults who share about the child, a second-level loss of agency takes place as parents, as children’s personal information gatekeepers (steinberg, 2016), may lose track of their kids’ digital breadcrumbs. references blum-ross, a., & livingstone, s. (2017). “sharenting,” parent blogging, and the boundaries of the digital self. popular communication, 15(2), 110-125. mascheroni, g. (2018). datafied childhoods: contextualising datafication in everyday life. current sociology, 1-16. steinberg, s. b. (2016). sharenting: children's privacy in the age of social media. emory lj, 66, 839-884. aoir2021-submission-template-final selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): sundén, j., tiidenberg, k., paasonen, s. & vihlman, m. (2021, october). space, place and location in sexual social media. panel presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. space, place and location in sexual social media jenny sundén södertörn university katrin tiidenberg tallinn university susanna paasonen university of turku maria vihlman university of turku with the development of digital media in increasingly participatory formats, in tandem with progressively more powerful devices, networks, and platforms, digital modes of sexuality and intimacy have proliferated (andreassen et al. 2018, dobson et al. 2018, paasonen 2017, sundén 2018, tiidenberg & van der nagel 2000). networked digital devices are more than conduits of desire, but rather intrinsically entwined with the ways in which people form sexual attachments and connections, actively shaping how desire takes form and becomes oriented. our intimacies with devices and platforms contribute to how we relate to ourselves and others sexually, what we consider sexy, and how we communicate, experiment with, or experience sex in ways that have everything to do with the making of sites of sexual significance. contributing to the swiftly emerging field of the geographies of digital sexualities (nash and gorman-murray, 2019), this panel explores the geosocial and geopolitical dimensions of digital sexual cultures by zooming in on the connections between sexual practices, geographic imaginaries, and locally embedded social media platforms devoted to sexual expression. the panel builds on a research project about the geopolitics of digital sexual cultures in estonia, sweden, and finland (2020-2022), which focuses on an estonian platform used primarily by those interested in group sex (lc, est. 2018), a swedish platform preferred by bdsm practitioners (darkside.se, est. 2003), and a finnish platform for nude self-expression (alastonsuomi.com, est. 2007). drawing on these case studies consisting of platform walkthroughs, a year of ethnographic observation on the platforms, and interviews with owners, moderators and users, we show how these platforms contribute to, and shape sexual geographies in digital and physical registers. as sexual content and communication are 2 increasingly pushed out of large, u.s.-owned social media platforms like facebook, instagram, and tumblr, local and (to some extent) independent platforms where sexual expression is much less regulated offer an interesting counterweight. on the one hand, these platforms operate as spatialized tools which put bodies in motion in the interest of hooking up. the platforms, in this case, function as digital compasses that allow for orientation of sexual desires in material spaces. the digital becomes an apparatus with which to actualize encounters in the flesh, something which in some instances necessitates transnational travels (for example, across the baltic sea). on the other hand, these platforms also assemble localized online places for flirtation, imagination, visibility, and appreciation (as well as sexism and harassment), which interlink bodies with the visual pleasures and vulnerabilities of seeing and being seen. in this case, the platforms afford digital placemaking oriented at sexual identity work in specific linguistic and cultural context. we approach questions of locatedness and place-making both through the regional and linguistic boundaries within which these platforms operate, as well as through our participants’ sense of comfort and investment in the local as a space of sexual play. through nordic and baltic contexts, we contribute to studies of geosocial hookup apps and research of sex and sexuality in social media by accounting for the importance of language and location in a research context largely dominated by anglocentric approaches. our panel opens up (at least) two important discussions, which we feel resonate with the aoir community: (1) how geographic imaginaries shape and constrain sexual social media platforms at a political moment when sex is increasingly de-platformed from social media and pushed out of public view in ways that are particularly harmful for sexually marginalized people; and (2) how our examples, when understood as social media platforms, can challenge our understandings of what social media are, how they function, and what kind of sociability they foster. our panel initiates a discussion of the significance of sex in social media, and the ways in which geography, spatiality, and proximity are key to how social sexual media platforms operate. cartographies of kink: slow connectivity and a sense of safety jenny sundén darkside was founded already in 2003 and is the largest swedish kink and bdsm web community with some 250.000 members, housing social and sexual networking. in stark contrast to large corporate social media platforms, darkside is virtually non-profit and as such offering an independent platform for non-normative sexualities by providing, as the site states, “love and community in bdsm, kink, sex positivity, fetishism, expressions and lifestyles beyond the prison of normativity.” even if the site is functional in english and other nordic languages (due to community translation efforts), it is built on and in swedish, and according to site statistics, it is primarily used by people residing in sweden. the urban concentration of use is obvious, but there are also small nodes of users spread across the country. swedish bdsm and kink geographies need to be understood against the background of sexual marginalization. even if “sadomasochism” was de-pathologized in sweden in 2009, it is far from destigmatized. among the participants, a select few are out and proud bdsm activists and educators, but for most such public openness and outness is not an option. darkside thus 3 becomes a vital place where it is, as they put it, easier to breathe, to be brave, to stand tall, to feel kinky, to feel sexual, and to feel normal. darkside relates to notions of location and locatedness in a number of overlapping ways. firstly, it operates as a tool for digital wayfinding, or wayfaring (cf. hjorth and pink 2014), for locating sites of sexual play. secondly, it functions as a temporal device which privileges slow connectivity which temper the pace with which connections are made, highlighting how the question of location may have an important temporal dimension in digital sexual cultures. finally, it is also a safety device, which helps users negotiate a sense of comfort framed by notions of cultural proximity and intelligibility. digital wayfaring in their everyday use of the platform, darkside offers the participants a both imaginary and tangible geography, a gateway to a community firmly grounded in physical spaces of play. the platform calendar function is a key feature in the user interviews, a central organizing principle for non-normative desires and an opening to a world in which kink operates as the norm. it provides users with a kink compass of sorts guiding them in their local scene, giving them the coordinates of clubs and events difficult to find otherwise. darkside is thus less of a tool to locate unknown others as it is a place-making tool: an event finder and a kink map which unlocks more or less hidden physical locations reminiscent of what dominique pierre batiste (2013) calls a queer cartography mapped onto both familiar and strange spaces. the calendar is a pragmatic tool which presents a concrete timeline marking upcoming events, but it is equally a tool of the imagination which outlines the contours of a community always much larger than the community the participants call their own. as a link to this larger, national community, the calendar provides not only a window to local spaces of play, but to kink activities in all of sweden. this dynamic map of swedish kink events highlights an (unsurprising) urban concentration, but it also gives ample evidence of, for example, countryside rope gatherings, or a discreet bdsm get together for “fika” on the second level of a small-town pastry shop, subtly re-arranging urban-rural relationality. slow connectivity the use of darskide as a tool for wayfaring and wayfinding resonates with the use of dating and hookup apps, and yet there is a widespread understanding among the participants that darkside is, in fact, not a site for dating and hookups. the geolocative capacities of hookup apps are tailored to be used on the go, built on spatio-temporal sexual norms around proximity and immediacy. such swiftness is noticeably at odds with how acceptance in bdsm and kink communities is a gradual process which involves knowledge, time, and devotion. further adding to this sense of delay or deferral is the fact that bdsm and kink communities are grounded in semi-public sexual spaces, shared vulnerabilities, and forms of play that take time. the platform is in this sense not only a slower version of a hookup app, but also partly resistant to a speedy hookup logic, as well as to those straight, male users that regularly use the platform to seek quick, sexual adventures. sarah murray and megan sapnar ankerson (2016) similarly argue that designing for “lesbian contact” in geosocial networking apps is a process that needs to consider not only the social dimension of space, but equally the social dimension of time to also make space for a slower rhythm of imagination and desire. this is not to suggest that queer women (or kinksters) would not also seek out hookups built on 4 immediacy—indeed several of the participants occasionally use the platform as a jumping off point for play dates with strangers—but it is to draw attention to how there are important temporal elements in digital sexual geographies that have not been accounted for in app design. a sense of safety the slow connectivity of darkside is also a matter of how the participants use the platform to negotiate a sense of safety (see albury and byron 2016) in the midst of sexual practices that could be considered risky. the geographical dimension of this safety is intimately tied to the fact that the platform is in swedish. to feel at home on darkside is a combination of the site’s “swedishness”—the language, the terminology, the cultural context—and its local embeddedness, as the people you connect with are often close to you geographically. many participants are part of an international network of kinksters, and they use fetlife (the considerably larger canadian born transnational social networking site for kinksters) for international kink travels. but things do get lost in translation. a queer female participant recounted how bdsm literature written for the u.s. context never spoke to her directly. she then came across a series of diary entries on darkside that were chronicling secret play sessions at ica (a swedish grocery store), which quite concretely gave her a new way of being with or in her sexuality, a new way of being sexual. it produced an opening, not only to reimagine the most mundane of places as having kink potential, but it also rendered her desire intelligible. it became real. the cultural proximity of the grocery store thus came to relate quite concretely to intelligibility in a butlerian sense (butler 2004) in so far as the platform becomes a place where the participants feel they make sense, or even exist. even in a supposedly sexually liberated nation like sweden, there are clear limits for what constitutes intelligible desires and lives. libertine imaginaries of place and platform katrin tiidenberg based on observation and walkthrough of and on libertine center (lc) an estonian-founded “social media network for open-minded adults” as well as interviews with its founders and users, this paper explores the geo-sexual imaginaries that the platform affords. specifically, i focus on the imaginaries (1) of geographical places, (2) of the platform generated “kinky places,” and (3) of the platform as a techno-sexual place that hopes to generate a particular version of sexual liberation. on-platform geo-sexual imaginaries emerge from the intersections of platform features, affordances, use practices and cultures. they are, in turn, shaped by the broader, culturally ingrained social imaginaries pertaining to geography, sexuality and the internet. conceptually, i draw on charles taylor’s approach to social imaginaries (2004), on work extending his ideas to study how shared meanings regarding technology circulate (hereman 2010, trere 2019, markham 2020); and on jennifer robinson’s idea of geographical imagination (2011). thus, i operationalize on-platform geo-sexual imaginaries as shared perceptions, meanings and knowledges about placeness and sex and placeness of sex that emerge on and circulate from lc. they function as “pragmatic templates for social practice” (herman 2010, 190), illuminating the otherwise tacit perceptions and norms. 5 context lc was founded in 2018 and currently has about 50 000 users (population of estonia is 1.3 million), of whom 70% are from estonia. adults interested in a variety of sexual lifestyles and practices are welcome and present on the platform, but ‘swinger’ (a category only available to those who sign up as a couple) is currently the most popular, followed by ‘libertine’ (available to single and couple profiles). thus, users interested in variations of partner swapping and group sex are the dominant group on lc. every user has to choose one category from 20 + upon registration, and the list from which to choose depends on the gender and couple status chosen (options include m, f, trans, m+f, m+m, f+f couples). geo-sexual imaginaries on lc perhaps the most productive geographical imaginary on the platform is about an ambivalently sized estonia that is both too small and not small enough. this imaginary collapses the size of the population, the area of the country and the function of lc. thus, the size of estonia’s population introduces particular risks into how lc is used both as a sexual place and as a tool for sexually organizing and inhabiting a geographic area. the small population limits the number of lifestylers, but also makes it more likely that one will be recognized where they don’t want to be. this shapes how people use lc (e.g. what kinds of images or information is shared) and their sexual practices (e.g. the process of screening potential contacts). at the same time many of my interviewee’s articulated the fallacy of the popular statement that estonia is small enough to easily drive from one end to the other. rather, for a practicing “lifestyler” even someone 50 km away tends to be too far, dividing the geographical area of estonia into lifestyle specific chunks, with very different lifestyler populations and thus different expectations to the platform as a tool. those who live outside of the two biggest cities imagine and practice the platform as more place-like (to hang out, play in the image competition, browse), while those who live in the capital experience lc more as a tool. the second geo-sexual imaginary lc affords is that of kinky places. lc was born from founders’ personal frustration with how difficult it was to find lifestyle friendly beaches when they were travelling internationally, so users are incentivized (they receive platform specific tokens) to submit “community friendly locations” into a specific menu item on the site. the current list of kinky locations includes 77 entries from 20 countries, most of which are sexclubs and nude beaches. the platform thus invites users to imagine places as “kinky,” and in some cases to overwrite certain places to make them “community friendly.” this links to a material practice known as “takeovers”. during takeovers resorts and hotels are rented out and used in lifestyle specific ways (usually including temporary suspension of rules regarding public nudity and sex). however, the imaginary of kinky locations extends the feature as users continue reimagining places as sexual in personals and chat group themes. thus, “out of the city” a common estonian geo-social imaginary for the summer season takes on a sexual overtone and becomes a kinky location, as do spas and saunas. some chat groups are imagined as kinky locations, e.g. when groups are set up for “webcamming,” or “voyeurism, exhibitionism.” finally, lc affords a geo-sexual imaginary of it as a socio-sexual place that puts forth a particular version sexual liberation. as mentioned above, the platform describes itself as a 6 “social media network for open-minded adults.” open-minded is a direct and somewhat clumsy translation of the estonian word “vabameelne,” which dictionaries translate as “liberal,” but is used primarily as sexually “free spirited” or “libertine.” lc users regularly refer to themselves, the people they are looking to meet, and to the shared culture on lc as “vabameelne” (including in the quoted snippets above, where i translated it to free spirited). despite having resorted to the direct translation on the “about page,” lc is making a concentrated effort to introduce the imaginary of and the term of libertine. beyond the platform name, libertine as a category users can choose when signing up comes with an explanation: “libertine is an extreme form of hedonism. sexually almost everything goes. libertines care very little about social, moral or common values. they may practice open marriage / relationship, swinging, flashing, voyeurism, cuckolding or any other less traditional sexual behaviors. this does not mean they do not have any boundaries. the word "libertine" originates in the latin for 'free'. since the real definition of libertine is yet publicly unknown most of us call them swingers.” in an interview one of the founders revealed that they are introducing the word libertine, because “the term swinger has kind of been branded …” and that the platform prefers all those who don’t know which category to choose or who’d like to choose more than one to choose libertine. contextualizing this in broader ambitions for the platform, it becomes clear that libertine is introduced to overhaul the swinging lifestyle as more glamorous and youthful and to detach it from the social imaginaries presumed to be linked to “swinging.” while libertine is the second most popular category on the platform and my interviewees all elevated “vabameelsus,” as a platform specific norm, there seems to be some confusion lingering around the libertine label, where some users feel that self-labeling as a libertine presumes a level of sexual liberation they have yet to achieve despite actively partaking in a variety of practices. the spaces and places of “naked finland” susanna paasonen & maria vihlman launched in 2007, alastonsuomi.com (i.e., “naked finland”) is an online image gallery and social networking site originally created as an adult version of irc galleria – a local pre-facebook social media market leader known for its strict content policy pertaining to nudity and sex. as one of the alastonsuomi founders explains, the rationale was to “create a similar site where you must show naked pictures”. initially a diy enterprise, or even “kind of a joke”, the site grew rapidly as surprisingly “many want to show off their nuts and tits for free online to everyone”. with over 100,000 registered users at the time of this writing, alastonsuomi is an established brand with free and premium memberships. as the site’s name suggests, the concept of alastonsuomi is firmly local in the regional marker of a nation-state (finland), as well as in its main language of operation (finnish). if, in terms of geopolitical imaginaries, a nation-states territory can be considered a “container” filled with specific meanings through processes of nation-building (häkli 1999, 124; paasi 1992), alastonsuomi both builds on existing imaginaries and reshapes them in its abundant and explicit displays of naked bodies, bodily fluids and fetishes. 7 through the marker of “finland”, the site performs territorial, linguistic and cultural boundary work in terms of its assumed members and users; through the marker of nudity, it defines undress as the default mode of social relating. as an “imagined community” (anderson 1983), it joins users together into something of a nation exposed, or a nation where belonging is defined in terms of naked displays and exchanges, making room for unclothed self-expression in a region where, as one participant pointed out, showing skin in public is complicated due to the climate alone. within human geography, space is generally understood as abstract, as opposed to place filled with cultural and social meaning through human action. thinking through spatial structures in cscw (computer-supported cooperative work) paul dourish (2006, 301) argues that the distinction does not stand when considering virtual spaces that are designed with certain needs and opportunities in mind so that they structure social action. furthermore, dourish is interested in how networked technologies can make people re-encounter everyday space by not merely creating places for sociality but by transforming our ways of relating to, and understanding these spaces. following this line of thinking, this paper asks how the “space” of alastonsuomi, designed with certain purposes, functions and forms of action in mind, works with and through mundane locations, spaces and places. belonging through imagined finnishness and sexual liberation for some users, the platform’s manifest regional specificity breeds a sense of intimacy of the kind that they believe would be more difficult to achieve on internationally operating services. according to one participant, such intimacy is connected to trust felt toward fellow users and, should something unwanted happen on the platform, toward the moderators. here, an analogy was drawn to the comparable to high levels of trust within finland toward public institutions and organizations, such as the police (cf. kääriäinen 2008). for others, it is the specificity of relating through nudity or erotic selfexpression that fosters a sense of intimacy, community and freedom, centrally expressed as involving freedom from shame. the platform’s sex-positive ambiance allows for vicarious courage, enabling spaces for exploring novel pleasures and ways of connecting. the ability to move affectively and spatially from places of shame towards places of belonging is, for many, a profoundly powerful experience. while the first framing positions the presumed finnishness of alastonsuomi as an issue of shared cultural codes and degrees of safety, the latter helps to articulate the platform as a site of liberation from the kinds of social norms and hierarchies that delimit sexual expression, bodily visibility and the articulation of desires in the society at large. the platform brings together people from different local places and backgrounds, enabling intense feelings of affiliation – as well as those of ostracism. in the current political climate of anti-immigration activism and national populism where definitions of finnishness come embedded in exclusive, even ethnonationalist notions of belonging (pantti et al. 2019), alastonsuomi is both inclusive in the range of bodies it features and, similarly to other social media platforms, facilitates practices of segregation. it remains crucial to ask whose sense of belonging or trust is stronger and which users may be excluded from networks of sociability and exchange dependent on cultural codes and conventions one is assumed to share. 8 connecting to, and transcending the local both the visual landscape and the uses of alastonsuomi are tightly connected to physical locations that it simultaneously transcends. in visual sexual place-making, people pose in city parks, in forests, at summer cottages and by lakesides, transforming mundane spaces – simultaneously recognizable and generic – into sites of exhibitionism, cross-dressing, group sex and kink play. in the visual economy of alastonsuomi, a quotidian, generic signifier such as a dick pic can gain local recognizability through its proximity to cultural markers allowing for a sense of familiarity without compromising anonymity. this regional recognizability, combined with users’ general anonymity, adds to voyeuristic pleasure connected to potential spatial proximity that manifests in the titillating thought that “it could be anyone” – or, more precisely, “it could be someone next door”. finland being a small country, this may indeed be the case. the downside of this involves the heightened possibility of being identified against one’s will – a risk that users are actively aware of, yet willing to take since. alastonsuomi operates as a site for hooking up and otherwise connecting with others off-platform but it is equally a site for being seen, and seeing within the confines of the platform itself. many users publish their region or place of residence so that their bodily displays, scenes of sexual play and preferred places for meeting up become anchored in identifiable locations. as with hookup apps, incongruence between the reported and factual places of residence can also be used strategically to strengthen anonymity and safety (breitschuh & göretz 2019; albury & byron 2016). as in any country, physical locations are connected to possibilities for sexual expression and relationship-making, as there is generally more room for alternative sexualities in metropolitan areas than in rural ones, or in regions where the prevalence of conservative christianity is comparatively high (e.g., gray 2009). for someone whose sexuality conflicts with the norms of their immediate local community, a sex-positive platform can be a lifeline allowing for sex education, peer support, embodied and erotic self-expression, and the possibility of gathering in a safer space – be this a digital one, or a place that one enters fully in the flesh. we argue that alastonsuomi comprises a spatial sexualizing technology on multiple interconnected levels: as a digital space for sexual exchange and for locally meeting up; as a tool for re-signifying both recognizable locations and those representing the more generically “finnish” as sites for nudity and sex; as well as for sexualizing the notion of the finnish nation-state itself. being a “container” in itself, filled with meanings relating to both territorial and national imaginaries that position the platform’s users along the lines of proximity and distance, alastonsuomi contributes to boundary-work of spatial, cultural and national belonging. references albury, k. & byron, p. (2016). safe on my phone? same-sex attracted young people’s negotiations of intimacy, visibility, and risk on digital hook-up apps. social media + society, 2(4): 1–10. 9 anderson, b. (1983). imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. london: verso. andreassen, r, nebeling petersen, m., harrison, k. & raun, t. (eds.) (2018). mediated intimacies: connectivities, relationalities and proximities. abingdon, oxon: routledge. batiste, d. p. (2013). “0 feet away”: the queer cartography of french gay men’s geo-social media use. anthropological journal of european cultures, 22: 111–132. breitschuh, v. & göretz, j. (2019). user motivation and personal safety on a mobile dating app. in international conference on human-computer interaction. cham: springer, 278–292. butler, j. (1990). gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. routledge: new york & london. dobson, a. s., robards, b. & carah, n. (eds.) (2018). digital intimate publics and social media. cham: palgrave macmillan. dourish, p. 2006. re-space-ing place: “place” and “space” ten years on. proc. acm conf. computer-supported cooperative work cscw 2006 (banff, alberta), 299-308. gray, m. l. (2009). out in the country: youth, media, and queer visibility in rural america. new york: nyu press. herman, a., (2010). the network we all dream of: manifest dreams of connectivity and communication or, social imaginaries of the wireless commons. in b. crow, b. longford and k. sawchuk (eds.) the wireless spectrum: the politics, practices, and poetics of mobile media. toronto: university of toronto press, 187–198. hjorth, l. & pink, s. (2014). new visualities and the digital wayfarer: reconceptualizing phone photography and locative media. mobile media & communication, 2(1): 40–57. häkli, j. (1999). cultures of demarcation: territory and national identity in finland. in g.h. herb & d.h. kaplan (eds.), nested identities: nationalism, territory, and scale. lanham: rowman & littlefield,: 123–150. kääriäinen, j. (2008). why do the finns trust the police? journal of scandinavian studies in criminology and crime prevention 9 (2), 141–159. markham a. (2021). the limits of the imaginary: challenges to intervening in future speculations of memory, data, and algorithms. new media & society, 23: 382–405. murray, s. & sapnar ankerson, m. (2016). lez takes time: designing lesbian contact in geosocial networking apps. critical studies in media communication, 33(1): 53–69. 10 nash, k. & gorman-murray, a (eds.) (2019). the geographies of digital sexuality. singapore: palgrave macmillan. paasi, a. (1990). the rise and fall of finnish geopolitics. political geography quarterly, 9(1): 53–65. paasonen, s, (2017). infrastructures of intimacy. in r. andreassen, m. nebeling petersen, k. harrison & t. raun (eds.) mediated intimacies: connectivities, relationalities and proximities, abingdon, oxon: routledge, 103–116. pantti, m., nelimarkka, m., nikunen, k. & titley, g. (2019). the meanings of racism: public discourses about racism in finnish news media and online discussion forums. european journal of communication 34 (5): 503–519. robinson, j., (2011). comparisons: colonial or cosmopolitan? singapore journal of tropical geography, 32: 125–140. sundén, j. (2018). queer disconnections: affect, break, and delay in digital connectivity. transformations 31. http://www.transformationsjournal.org/wpcontent/uploads/2018/06/trans31_04_sunden.pdf. taylor, c., (2004). modern social imaginaries. durham, london: duke university press. treré, e. (2019). hybrid media activism: ecologies, imaginaries, algorithms. london: routledge. tiidenberg, k. & van der nagel, e. (2020). sex and social media. bingley: emerald publishing. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): kang, yena. (2021, october). #yellowperilsupportsblackpower: memory work for interracial solidarity. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. #yellowperilsupportsblackpower: memory work for interracial solidarity yena kang university of massachusetts amherst introduction after george floyd’s murder in may 2020, monyee chau posted on her instagram page some artwork with the slogan, #yellowperilsupportsblackpower (figure 1). the artwork, which included symbols representing asians and african americans, ignited asians’ activism in support of african americans and was circulated on multiple social media platforms. in this study, i view the #yellowperilsupportsblackpower movement (ypsbp) as digital activism, and i analyze how asian americans project their “asianness” to advocate for the black community. in particular, i focus on how memory work plays a key role in a process by which asian americans produce affective ties with the black community to build a multiracial identity extending beyond color lines. contextualizing memory work josé van dijck (2007) defined mediated memories as “the activities and objects we produce and appropriate by mediated technologies, for creating and re-creating a sense of past, present, and future of ourselves in relation to others” (p. 21). expanding the concept of memory work into the contemporary context of social media, humphreys (2020) considers memory work to be one of the media accounting practices that involve the creation, circulation, and consumption of media traces (e.g., writing a text, taking a photo). according to humphreys, remembrancing—the term she uses instead of memory work—creates a media trace that may involve performing identities that invite reflexivity. in this paper, i consider memory work as practice, particularly focusing on how memory work plays a key role in building interracial solidarity activism of the asian community in digital spaces. figure 1. monyee chau’s work posted on instagram methods this study views the asian american #yellowperilsupportsblackpower, a hashtag activism as a field site (bonilla & rosa, 2015) to analyze how interracial solidarity has been organized by marginalized groups, particularly racialized ones in digital counterpublics. i focused on three hashtags that utilize an asian identity to show support for black people: #yellowperilssupportblackpower, #asiansforblacklivesmatter and #asians4blacklives. i selected 60 instagram posts from among the top posts for each of these three hashtags (total of 180 posts) from june 5th, 2020 to december 31st, 2020. using a grounded theory approach (charmaz, 2014) to reading all text and images in the corpus, i identified three thematic types of memory work. i also paid attention to how participants1 used platform vernacular (gibbs et al., 2015) to perform memory work while engaging in ypsbp activism. reckoning racial suffering in childhood participants confess that their wounding experiences stem from their racial identity. the revelation of their racial and diasporic identity shapes their experiences of racism. they compare their racist treatment as asians with the oppression suffered by blacks. many participants share “i can feel your pain” narratives because they, as racial minorities, are always subject to racism. in terms of vernacular practice, selfies play a role in showing racial identity by allowing participants to reminisce about their racialized experiences. childhood photos are another noticeable visual image type. images of the younger self complement autobiographical reflections of self, family, and friends as members of a racial minority. reactivating historical moments and figures this memory work reactivates history by invoking historical figures and articulating historical justice movements in terms of ypsbp activism. a frequently mentioned figure is japanese american yuri kochiyama, a grassroots organizer and activist of the civil rights era. she is best known for her political involvement with malcolm x, african american leader and human rights activist. because most supporters of malcolm x were young blacks, the friendship between malcolm x and yuri kochiyama was considered unique. additionally, kochiyama is historically connected to angela davis, a well-known african american activist. both were human rights activists of the same age. participants in ypsbp recall these female activists as “two monumental women in the civil rights movement who embody #yellowperilsupportsblackpower.” using the remix practice and artistry work (e.g., memes), historical figures 1 i use the term participant instead of instagram “user” because i consider those who engage in cultural production by posting text and visual images with the hashtag #yellowperilsupportsblackpower to be “participating” in digital activism in the context of racial and identity politics. figure 2. postings on instagram are symbolized, circulated, and juxtaposed with other figures as well as contextualized within the current moments of ypsbp activism (figure 2). confessing past indifference, unlearning internalized bias, and learning solidarity participants performing this type of memory work confess how ignorant and indifferent asians have been toward the suffering of african americans. comparing the microaggressions toward asians with the life-threatening brutality african americans suffer, participants argue that asians should no longer be complacent and silent about racism toward african americans. participants confess they have been indifferent to the model minority myth generated by white supremacy. as part of an action to debunk this myth, participants post infographic guides pointing out negative implications of the myth and how white supremacy ideology operates. conclusion this study demonstrates that memory work plays a key role in legitimatizing a process through which asian americans produce affective ties with the black community. by narrating their individual and collective memory work, which includes racialized experiences and histories, the asian american community is arousing emotions such as shame, anger, and rage, emotions that become connected to the suffering and oppression that the black community faces. the formation of a memory mechanism reflects remembrance as a form of resistance (yang & wu, 2018) and emotional achievement (yang, 2000). in the history of the united states, asian communities have been caught in an ambivalent position between the black and white color line (wu, 2003). memory work enables the asian community to legitimize the formation of a multiracial identity with the black community and with multiracial rights movements beyond the boundary of color. in this study, i advance our understanding of digital activism for racial rights by illustrating how memory work is manifested in the context of web 2.0 participatory culture. references bonilla, y., & rosa, j. (2015). # ferguson: digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the united states. american ethnologist, 42(1), 4-17. charmaz, k. (2014). constructing grounded theory. sage. gibbs, m., meese, j., arnold, m., nansen, b., & carter, m. (2015). # funeral and instagram: death, social media, and platform vernacular. information, communication & society, 18(3), 255-268. humphreys, l. (2018). the qualified self: social media and the accounting of everyday life. mit press. van dijck, j. (2007). mediated memories in the digital age. stanford university press. wu, f. h. (2003). yellow: race in america beyond black and white. basicbooks. yang, g. (2000). achieving emotions in collective action: emotional processes and movement mobilization in the 1989 chinese student movement. the sociological quarterly, 41(4), 593-614. yang, g., & wu, s. (2018). remembering disappeared websites in china: passion, community, and youth. new media & society, 20(6), 2107-2124. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 herman, a., luka, m.e., markham, a., dilkes, d., pronzato, r., sarawatay, carlson, r., stirling, r., stirling, f. (2021, october) collaborating at microscopic and massive scales: the challenge and value of covid isolation for critical internet studies. paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. collaborating at microscopic and massive scales: the challenge and value of covid isolation for critical internet studies andrew herman wilfred laurier university mary elizabeth luka university of toronto annette markham, rmit danielle dilkes university of toronto riccardo pronzato ilum university devina sarwatay university of hyderabad rebecca carlson tokyo university fiona stirling abertay university keywords covid, sensemaking, digital collaboration, community, digital methodologies short abstract (word count: 247) global events like a pandemic or climate change are massive in scope but experienced at the local, lived, microscopic level. what sorts of methodologies and mindsets can help critical internet researchers, functioning as interventionists or activists, find traction by oscillating between these levels? how can we push (further) against the boundaries of research methods to build stronger coalitions and more impactful outcomes for social change among groups of scholars/researchers? this panel presents four papers addressing these questions based on a large scale online autoethnography in 2020. this “massive/micro” project simultaneously used and studied the angst and novelty of isolation during a pandemic, activating researchers, activists, and artists to explore the massive yet microscopic properties of covid-19 as a “glocal” phenomenon. the challenge? working independently and microscopically through intense focus on the self but also working with distributed, largely unknown collaborators, in multiple platforms. the emerging shape of the project itself showcases the challenges and possibilities of how research projects at scale can (or don’t) reflect and build social movements. the panel’s four papers situate the project through a kaleidoscope of perspectives featuring participants from 7 countries, who variously explore: the value of the project for precarious or early career researchers, how mms worked as both collaborative space and critical pedagogy, how non-institutional or playful experimentation in asynchronous collaborations can lead to new synergies; and how mms developed an independent life of its own, beyond studying covid to generating multiple communities of future digital research practice. extended description of the panel: 600-800 words (word count 785) global events like a pandemic or climate change are massive in scope but experienced at the local, lived, microscopic level. what sorts of methodologies and mindsets can help critical internet researchers, functioning as interventionists or activists, find traction by oscillating between these levels? how can we push (further) against the boundaries of research methods, disciplines, and institutional boundaries to build more independent coalitions and more impactful outcomes for social change among groups of scholars/researchers? this panel presents four papers addressing these questions based on the experiences of engaging in a large scale online autoethnography in 2020. the project was initially cast as a call for papers focused on the question: how is covid 19 helping us think about socio-technical systems of humans, machines and the planet at different registers and dynamics of scale? with poignant contributions from more than 150 artists, researchers, and activists from 26 countries, the the “massive and microscopic sensemaking in times of covid 19” project (hereafter mms) project grew into a large-scale experiment to facilitate collaborative yet distributed research, using various digital platforms (cf: markham, harris and luka, 2020). the aim of mms was to simultaneously use and study the angst and novelty of isolation during covid-19 lockdowns, to activate researchers, activists, and artists to explore, through collaborative autoethnographic approaches, the massive yet microscopic properties of covid-19 as a “glocal” social phenomenon (roudometof, 2016). the challenge? working independently and microscopically through intense focus on the self as research subject, but also engaging virtually with largely unknown collaborators on asynchronous digital platforms. the emerging shape of the project itself showcases the challenges and possibilities of how research projects at scale can (or cannot) reflect and build social movements, how serendipity plays a strong role in emergent research design, how independence and interdependence are emergent and ad hoc temporal qualities of large scale collaborations rather than built-in or top-down properties. this was a unique situation. the size of the group was larger than could be managed as a whole. individuals were situated in almost all the world’s timezones. each person had varying degrees of ability to participate on a regular basis. finally, and perhaps most importantly, the ongoing stress and anxiety around covid-19 meant this was a vulnerable group. we needed to find a way for people to collaborate without feeling pressured to be online all the time, respond to others, or respond in a particular time frame. facebook, despite the facilitators’ misgivings around the politics of this platform, became the primary mode of digital communication and collaboration between participants in the project. the socio-technical affordances of the platform had a noticeable effect on the interactions and sociality of the group. a rhythm of collaborative community emerged, as posts and responses to prompts influenced other posts and responses. people also indicated they felt encouraged by others’ posts, and some remarked that this enabled them to reply when otherwise, they might have been reserved for some reason, whether by insecurity about their own thoughts or shyness. whether this was because they could see how happy people were when others responded positively to their posts, even if that was only in the form of a like, love, laugh, or care icon. although a close level analysis of the facebook group has not yet been conducted yet, anecdotal evidence indicates that the experience was unfolding more like a focus group than an individual autoethnographic immersion. over a year later, the project is ongoing and thus far, has generated more than 50 papers and 15 audio/visual exhibition performances. in the panel, several participants from mms reflect on how this collaboration worked, what it meant, and what it suggests for future research practice. the papers situate the project through a kaleidoscope of perspectives illustrating how mms developed an independent life of its own, beyond studying covid to generating multiple communities of future digital research practice. 1. paper 1 uses mms as an example of an independent, non-institutionalized project to discuss the contradictory and precarious nature of online collaborations as well as their potential for positive change; 2. paper 2 discusses theoretical implications emerging from their auditory sensemaking during mms, and the value of ‘oscillating’ between microand macro-focused methodologies; 3. paper 3 focuses on mms as a critical pedagogy for early career participants and how this impacted their researcher identities; 4. paper 4 circles back to the critical and ethical value of the project overall by focusing initially on the mms videos, then moving towards a manifesto for large scale collaborations. references markham, a. a. harris, and m. e. luka. (2020). “massive and microscopic sensemaking during covid-19 times”. qualitative inquiry 0 10.1177/1077800420962477. roudometof, v. (2016) “theorizing glocalization: three interpretations”. european journal of social theory vol. 19(3): 391–408 remotely rewilding: precariously collaborating during the covid pandemic (1145 words) rebecca carlson tokyo university fiona stirling abertay university background in this paper, the authors, based in the uk and japan, reflect on the possibilities and barriers for digitally mediated forms of emergent research collaborations using autoethnographic methods. both authors participated in the “massive and microscopic sensemaking in times of covid 19 project” (hereafter mms), an independent, large-scale online social community collaboration that incorporated over 100 scholars from various academic backgrounds, from 26 countries. led by annette markham, anne harris and m.e. luka in early 2020, the project was a direct response to the covid-19 pandemic. it utilised social media and a 21-day series of asynchronous, self-guided activities to bring together academics, artists, and activists for collaborative research around the everyday impact of isolation and lockdowns. participants practiced critical autoethnographic methods independently (working mostly alone), and also interdependently (alongside each other), completing, sharing, and commenting on their and others’ reflective writing exercises. the authors met through this event, finding themselves methodologically interconnected through the project process. using their shared experience of the mms project as a point of focus, in this paper, the authors discuss the precarious and contradictory nature of online research collaborations along with their restorative potential for broader academic landscapes. although more recent internet-mediated collaborations may be a response to living in various frames of relative isolation over the past year, they more broadly reflect the negotiation of modern experiences of social isolation that predate the pandemic. digital collaborations embody both the affordances and the limitations of their communicative forms, simultaneously potentializing connection and dis-connecton, atomization and collectivization. in addition, such collaborations reflect the modern nature of intellectual labor, where researchers must take on independent responsibility for their productivity, but remain subject to limiting academic standards. what then does academic ‘work’ look like now? feel like? exactly what activities and outputs are recognized as productivity right now? shifting spaces and emerging questions in the wake of a destabilizing pandemic, an unprecedented number of online research collaborations have flourished, at times with little direct institutional support or guidance. both authors joined multiple digital collaborations, in addition to mms, that often formed relatively organically, drawing on resources and initial connections already at hand (well-established mailing lists for example). at the same time, both also experienced, or witnessed, the ways that academic requirements prioritized researchers to work independently, and in ways that would lead to standardized research outputs such as first-author journal publications. these two conditions can make online and large-scale experimental projects relatively unsustainable in the long term. mcculloch (2017) advises that such institutional processes put pressure on how and what academics write, which shape career goals, disciplinary values, and scholarly identity. the roles we might choose to take on then, or the energy we might choose to commit, may diminish in value and importance if collaborative opportunities do not fit accepted institutional modes of productivity. ultimately, we then also fail to take on new voices and ideas, and to innovate in our research methods, analysis and publication styles. to produce research that accurately reflects modern experiences, the authors argue that it is necessary to find ways for online collaborations to form in playful, thoughtful, digital sandboxes, and to have such practices and their diverse outcomes be valued in the academy. a window into precarities and possibilities nordback et al. (2021) suggest that while academic identity appears to be ‘placeless’ it is in fact influenced by time and place. covid-19 displaced all academics, shifting them from known physical spaces to remote digital unknowns. the navigation of these new boundaries and norms can be jarring and exhausting; this materialized for author 1 who had not previously held a professional ‘online’ identity and for author 2, in the loss of her in-person field site and the participatory side of her ethnographic work. yet, both authors also felt pulled together with other researchers in new and exciting ways. such novel engagement can prompt (re)consideration of long held attitudes and approaches to activities like collaboration. hernaus et al. (2018) identify a general tension in academia between the presumption of a generous spirit of collaboration, and the competitive pressure to perform and outperform others. this can encourage ‘knowledge-hiding’, where information and ideas are intentionally concealed. when exposed to the openness of the digital landscape, where comments are committed to permanent record and thoughts are transcribed onto pages that will likely exist beyond single lifetimes, the process of producing knowledge is transformed from one which is insular and driven by the need for immediate production of evidence, to an ongoing, never-ending assemblage process rewarded by the potential for meaningful interconnection. ethnographic research is humanistic. its purpose is precisely to reach across lived experiences, beginning in the everyday subjectivity of the researcher, to something collectively meaningful. forging collaborations with other researchers helps us shift these registers. methods such as autoethnography, in which the researcher becomes the subject of the research with the purpose of examining an aspect of the lived experience in cultural contexts (ellis, 2004), can provide a direct and immediate lens of reflexivity for ‘thick description’ to emerge (geertz, 1973). considering, and facilitating, online research in this way emphasizes the interconnected experience central to digital mega-collaborating and illustrates the challenges, and possibilities, present in attempting to represent the co-production of knowledge generated through such projects. rinehart and earl (2016) posit that such methodology is also an inherently caring practice, thereby resisting some of the pressure inducing practices of the neoliberal academy. moriarty (2019) develops the concept of ‘rewilding’ as an apt metaphor for renewing the diverse landscape of higher education via replenishing new approaches to pedagogy and research. ‘neoliberalism has choked too much of what was nourishing about higher education,’ she warns ‘and yet, the answer is not to return to our past’. mms experimentally pointed us to a possible future, one of online collaborations informed by autoethnographic methods, a weaving of the microscopic self into the massively social, rich with rewilding promise. references blalock, a. e., & akehi, m. (2018). collaborative autoethnography as a pathway for transformative learning. journal of transformative education, 16(2), 89-107. ellis, c. (2004). the ethnographic i: a methodological novel about autoethnography. altamira. geertz, c. (1973). the interpretation of cultures. basic books. hernaus, t., cerne, m., connelly, c., vokic, n. p., & škerlavaj, m. (2019). evasive knowledge hiding in academia: when competitive individuals are asked to collaborate. journal of knowledge management. mcculloch, s. (2017, february 9th) the importance of being ref-able: academicwriting under pressure from a culture of counting. impact blog, london school of economics.https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2017/02/09/theimportance-of -being-ref-able-academic-writing-under-pressure-from-a-culture-ofcounting/ moriarty, j. (ed.). (2019). autoethnographies from the neoliberal academy: rewilding, writing and resistance in higher education. routledge. nordbäck, e., hakonen, m., & tienari, j. (2021). academic identities and sense ofplace: a collaborative autoethnography in the neoliberal university. management learning, 13505076211006543. rinehart, r. e., & earl, k. (2016). auto-, duo-and collaborative-ethnographies: “caring” in an audit culture climate. qualitative research journal. the sound of critical sensemaking: revisiting orality, sound & voicing during the isolation of global trauma andrew herman wilfrid laurier university annette markham rmit university background what is the “sound” of critical sense-making? this paper draws on the experiences of the authors to revisit--through sound and aurality--the methodological mandate of the “massive and microscopic sensemaking in times of covid 19” collaborative auto ethnography project (hereafter mms) explored by this panel. mms was initially cast into sense by annette markham and anne harris in the spring of 2020 as most of world was thrown into various degrees of lock down in order to prevent the spread of covid 19 (markham and harris, 2020; markham, harris and luka, 2020) to pose a basic question: how is covid 19 helping us think about socio-technical systems of humans, machines and the planet at different registers and dynamics of scale, or how do intimate occurrences with microscopic properties connect with a planetary-scale event with potentially massive outcomes? (markham, harris & d luka, 2020: 1) the ongoing project has grown to involve more than 150 researchers and artists from 26 countries. from ocular lens to aural ear: a lingering challenge in social research a multiplicity of diverse modes of scholarly and art-based autoethnographic practices have been deployed as critical sense-making on the mms project, largely story-telling via prose and poetry or visual artistic practices of image making. in this paper, the collaborating authors shift attention from the “autoethnographic lens” of visuality towards the “autoethnographic ear” of sound and aurality. we explore some of the lessons of the mms project for digital methodologies that foreground the acoustic space of audition and aurality. the concept of acoustic space is drawn from the work of canadian communication theorist marshall mcluhan (1962) and comprador intellectual spirit in medium theory, walter ong (1982). for both, the story-telling practices of oral cultures privilege a collaborative and communal sonorous way of knowing and being, phenomenologically embodied in ways that visual signs of writing and image are not, enveloping the speaker and listener in a shared space of audition (cavell, 2003). what are the practical accomplishments of a performative grounded theory centrally figured around the aurality and acoustic? one way of hearing and listening our way across these articulations entails working with and through the concept and phenomenology of “resonance”. for mcluhan, “resonance” is a way of thinking about the relation of sounds in acoustic space and the way they converge in degrees of consonance and dissonance (c.f. young, 530). acoustic space, as cavell points out, is not “a physical space in the sense of a container; in the acoustic field, it is the sound itself that creates the space” (cavell, 203: 157). the sonic convergences of resonance also invite an understanding of acoustic space as heideggerian ethos, an abode or place of dwelling from within which one can engage the world. critically analyzing how we make sense of covid: acoustic punctums and vibratory experiences the story that unfolds in this presentation starts from two very different such abodes. the starting point of markham’s story is a stretch of beach in northern europe where sea meets sand along a wind-swept beach (cf. markham, 2020). as the author walks along the beach during the early covid-related lockdowns of 2020, she repeats the ancient kundalini mantra of sat nam. she sings it, whispers it, screams it, swallows it. the repetition of the mantra is key to the author’s grounding of the self in the midst of a larger world that has been dislocated by covid 19. in pettman’s words, the invocation of the mantra is an “acoustic punctum”, a sonic pinprick in the fabric and flow of the quotidian that organizes an aural ethos from which she attempts to make sense of the pandemic (pettman, 2017: 5). the sanskrit mantras also give notice to the plasticity of the self as embodied subject in aural space, “as sanskrit as a language was supposedly designed to make changes in our bodies as they entered our ears, or as we shape them in our mouths” (markham, 2020: 3). this continual chanting also becomes author #1’s central focus for analyzing patterns, both in the physical environment and the digital world of news about and around covid-19 through grounded theory. the resonant features of the aural are reflected in later writing and image making that reflect the repetition of the mantra, or distinguish the whispering from screaming, through long paragraphs without any punctuation or staccato-punctuated one word paragraphs, as if shouting. at the same time that markham is screaming sanskrit to the sky against the wind in denmark, herman is broadcasting from his basement in toronto, using sonic intimacy to break the sensory loneliness of isolation. these are guttural outcries-viscerally felt entreaties connecting the microscopic resonances in and of the body to the massive and incomprehensible weight and power of a pandemic to a public-in -ormation. looking back at the playlists, herman recognizes a pandemic-driven compulsion to be engulfed by music on the low-end frequencies of the bass. as henriques’ (2011) analysis of the affective power of low-end sonority of reggae sounds systems suggests, these soundscapes can foster spaces of empowerment, resistance, and community. as the weeks pass, herman playfully experiments with song and spoken word to generate “lively” acoustic resonance between the self and the imagined world of listeners, hopefully conjuring: “vibratory encounters [that] work to unravel selfcertainty and recast our sensed surroundings, making us rethink what we can do how we operate” (jasen, 2016: 3). each broadcast is a form of sensemaking to make prefigurative sense of the altered, damaged and destroyed rhythms of everyday life under the conditions of covid-19. from these points of origin—a beach in europe and a basement in canadathe authors work their ways towards one another across different socio-technical registers of the massive and micro through the acoustic space of collaborative story-telling and performative grounded theory. drawing from jasen’s (2016) work on the materiality of sonic experience, we find that in our listening to each other, the “sonic body” of the pandemic is microscopic in quality, as sonorous sensemaking passes intercorporeally, to generate affective harmonic frequencies of resonance in that ‘moved us’ into a massive shared sensory space in those experiential moments of becoming otherwise, before covid-19 yielded fits full meanings. what does this quality of inquiry bring to the study of global crisis, to sonically illuminate the different registers of the scale between the “micro” and the “massive” as it thrums along each node of their articulations? references cavell, r. (2003). mcluhan in space. toronto: university of toronto press henriques, j. (2011) sonic bodies. new york: bloomsbury. jasen. p. (2016). low end theory: bass, bodies and the materiality of sonic experience. new york: bloomsbury. markham, a. (2020) “pattern recognition: using rocks, wind, water, anxiety, and doom scrolling in a slow apocalypse (to learn more about methods for changing the world)”. qualitative inquiry 0 10.1177/1077800420960191 markham, a. and a. harris. (2020). “prompts for making sense of a pandemic”. qualitative inquiry 0 10.1177/1077800420962487 markham, a., a. harris, and m. e. luka. (2020). “massive and microscopic sensemaking during covid-19 times”. qualitative inquiry 0 10.1177/1077800420962477. mcluhan, m. (1962). the gutenberg galaxy. toronto: university of toronto press ong, w. (1982). orality and literacy. new york: methuen. pettman, d. sonic intimacy. (2017). palo alto: stanford university press. young, l. c. (2019) “the innis-mcluhan field: in search of media theory”. canadian journal of communication vol. 44: 527-544. autoethnography as critical pedagogical practice danielle dilkes ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto riccardo pronzato iulm university devina sarwatay university of hyderabad background the massive-micro sensemaking (mms) project drew on critical autoethnographic methodologies to engage multiple participants in simultaneously independent and collaborative sense-making during the covid-19 pandemic. the 21-day series of prompts, distributed on facebook and a mailing list to a large group of participants, prompted individual level self-reflection and exploration while creating a sense of global connectedness. each participant experienced the project in a unique way, and in this paper, we elaborate how this project was not simply a study of covid-19, but an event that brought together unknown researchers at all different levels. the authors of this paper, phd students based in canada, india and italy, bring their early career perspective on the epistemological value of this form of collaboration. we offer three distinctive examples of how this project positively challenged common assumptions about how inquiry might operate outside institutional and disciplinary boundaries, and how communities of practice develop; about how the techniques used for building reflection among participants of mms could be adapted to our own pedagogical work; and how the same patterns in the global mms project could be witnessed in smaller clusters of learners. these examples illustrate how mms affected our own pedagogical practices, identities as scholars, and our ideas about how inquiry in this era might operate. exploring the nexus of identity through autoethnography for many people, covid-19 stay-at-home orders disrupted daily routines and relocated professional, academic, social, familial, and other daily practices to the same physical and virtual spaces. this blurred the boundaries between previously distinct identities. as a student, academic, educational developer, daughter, sister, wife, i (dani) felt this blurring acutely. this sudden unboundedness forced me to critically reconsider my own identity and practices while simultaneously offering a release from the confines of preexisting boundaries of practice. as wenger notes, reconciling multiple selves “into a way of being in the world” can be one of the largest challenges faced by individuals (1999, p. 160). the mms project provided a means for me to critically reflect on the nexus of these identities, demonstrating how autoethnography can perform as an intersectional praxis allowing individuals to reflect on how they are “always both particular and plural at the same time” (alexander, 2021, p. 32) while understanding themselves and others as situated in larger macro-communities. in this way, critical autoethnography is liberating, as it allows participants to engage in a form of community rule-breaking by practicing outside of traditional boundaries, thus empowering them to critically reflect on, and potentially subvert, existing bounded practices and the systems in which they occur. in the context of higher education, autoethnography has the potential to transform professional identities, collaborative pedagogical practices, and the communities where both are situated. adapting the 21-day autoethnography challenge as a research tool i (riccardo) applied the mms approach in my doctoral research to investigate the reception of algorithmic media by individuals in everyday life. in this field, users are often depicted as oppressed subjects, unable to protect themselves from opaque, discriminatory and exploitative commercial practices (zuboff, 2019), incapable of imagining different digital futures (markham, 2021) because they have perhaps internalized this exploitation within hegemonic narratives of dependency, inevitability and trajectorism (markham, 2021). this research highlights how researchers can play a scholar-as-activist role to elicit critical reflections regarding structures of datafication and surveillance. drawing on a critical pedagogy approach (markham, 2019), i prepared a “7-day autoethnography challenge,” with many prompts directly inspired by mms. i invited my own students to participate, aiming to help them become autoethnographers of their own lives, i.e. to stimulate reflections about their practices related to algorithmic media and how their experiences are increasingly intertwined with datafication and surveillance processes, in order to increase their self-reflexivity, awareness and data literacy. although this study analyses how algorithmic outputs are embedded in everyday life (siles et al., 2019)--a slightly different focus from the mms project--the research exemplifies how an mms approach can turn personal experience into moments of critical understanding of social life. subversion and reflexivity during the pandemic, for all the obvious reasons, my (devina’s) doctoral work on the use of tiktok and instagram by 10-18 year-olds in india stalled. at the same time, i had stumbled into the mms project to help me deal with some of the disruptions in my own life and work. as the 21 days of prompts progressed, my participation helped my own sense-making of the micro and macro in the pandemic context but also my research approach. among my research participants, conversations similar to those at mms were taking place --not about the pandemic, necessarily, but about the micro aspects of online learning and macro considerations about where we are headed, why this is important and what is coming next, especially because of thoughts of the “new normal.” similar to what was being addressed in the videos, artworks and writing i was seeing in the facebook group for mms, my encounters with research participants became a space for reflection and voicing confusions/frustrations even as they were questions without answers/solutions. subverting the normative structures, as taylor (2021) discusses, within which we do research or work with participants in studies, is especially difficult for entry level researchers, since these structures seem very dominant. mentoring is “a complex ecology and expanded pedagogy” (taylor) and can be a way of either reinforcing patterns of institutional structures or subverting these structures, making space for greater independence and exploration of what interdependence means in practice. the mms experience represented this sort of mentorship for me. the facilitators played a role, but the digital interface of facebook also became a “mentor” by showing me how research collaborations are emergent, sometimes even accidental, and how connections emerge within scholarship across many boundaries. conclusion mms problematizes “taken-for-granted” traits of what it means to do research. our different experiences highlight that the collaborative parts of autoethnography can be a critical pedagogy practice, in that the interactions and processes, played out in mms, can help individuals explore their own identities and sensemaking processes, while considering and potentially challenging the constraints of the environments in which these processes are situated. the autoethnographic challenge and this mode of inquiry may enhance self-reflexive practices, the construction and reconciliation of identity, and qualitative ways of knowing that can empower individuals to construct embodied sensibilities toward their daily activities and transform individual “micro” experiences into a critical connection with the more “macro” community. references alexander, b.k. (2021). critical autoethnography as intersectional praxis. in r. boylorn and m. orbe, critical autoethnography. routledge. markham, a. (2019). critical pedagogy as a response to datafication. qualitative inquiry, 25(8), 754-760. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800418809470 markham, a. (2021). the limits of the imaginary. new media & society, 23(2), 382405. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820929322 siles, i., espinoza-rojas, j., naranjo, a., & tristán, m. f. (2019). the mutual domestication of users and algorithmic recommendations on netflix. communication, culture & critique, 12(4), 499-518. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz025 taylor, j. (2021) subversive spaces, embodied places and mentoring as ontoepistemology. in mentoring and communication. peter lang. wenger, e. (1999). communities of practice. cambridge university. zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism. profile books. seeing, believing, learning: towards a manifesto m.e. luka university of toronto-scarborough background on october 27, 2020, 40 people from around the english-speaking world met online to screen a collection of 14 videos exhorting social awareness and change. it was the first night of a three-day international performance festival, the mark de garmo virtual international arts (via) festival for social change, on the pandemic’s ubiquitous gathering platform, zoom. the first night featured videos generated by the 21-day autoethnographic initiative, “massive and microscopic sensemaking (mms) in times of covid 19” (markham, harris & luka 2020) that had ended in june. the presentation honoured the independent and interdependent methods and methodologies finessed throughout the mms experience, including the messy production values required by the rapid response process during the challenge, but also presented unresolved and sometimes inchoate calls to social action engendered by the global covid-19 pandemic and subsequent social protests. interspersed with discussions, the hourlong event created a bubble of visceral, intense reminders about what it had been like in the first weeks of the lockdowns, within which to watch, revisit, feel, and reflect on covid19 times, so far. months later, it is evident that the layers of observation, reaction and early analysis generated within the mms experience allowed scholars, artists and activists a way to feel connected to others throughout startling shifts in unfolding social conditions, and to actively pause their own research agendas in pursuit of a digitally vibrant collective research exchange. in this paper, the first author explores how notions of resilience embedded in the video productions can be unpacked as expressions not just of the tantalizing sensemaking promise of mms, but also how mms offers lessons about collective research actions and lays the groundwork for a manifesto to encourage further work in this vein. at the end of the paper, the rest of the authors in this panel will present a co-created massive micro sensemaking manifesto to discuss at aoir during the question and answer period for this panel. to what extent will the shifts in research and creative practice that were wrenched online--or deepened through virtual spaces and methods and the kind of collegiality engendered by mms with its 165 participants--take hold in the longer term, and why does this matter? peering through the lenses of the videos in the via festival presentation illustrate how the mms process moved participants towards the making of a manifesto on collaborative, or collective, actions and shared experiences. lessons learned: towards a manifesto digital feminist manifestos surface periodically in internet studies and digital media forums, particularly in relation to efforts towards collaboration, addressing power injustices and anti-racism, class inequities and more (kember, 2012; moravec, 2018). indeed, as moravec (2018) notes: “while manifestos are by their nature utopian visions,...the more prosaic definitions also contain words like “hope,” “promise,” “potential,” and “future” (p.189). such terminology resonates throughout the mms experience, including the via festival videos. this is more than simply a set of demands for a better world. in the digital context, manifestos are used to articulate social problems and actionable tasks and questions to address them. in critical internet studies, manifestos can help identify research questions, narratives about the problems involved, and how the questions could be addressed. art and creative production are crucial to this exercise. hence, natalie loveless’s manifesto on research-creation as a mode of scholarly production and analysis (2019) argues “…[that] the crafting of a research question is the crafting of a story that is also the crafting of an ethics” (pp. 2425, emphasis in the original). to arrive at this position, loveless examines the affective work required to study inter-species relations in donna haraway’s (2003) manifesto on “companion species” as both a defamiliarizing and ethical storytelling strategy. this methodological approach identifies circumstances within which the person doing the investigation is deeply implicated, never more so than on the internet through the kind of collective research and work undertaken at mms. in the mms context, identifying “haraway’s dog” (as multi-faceted objects of study) is similar to asking how to denaturalize the situation, the conditions, the people and other-than-people that intersected at the specific moment of the global pandemic. but that’s not all. the rapid and repetitive responses in the mms videos speak to a desire for urgent collective research and curiosity about the varied answers to autoethnographic questions in the covid context, such as “why is this important?,” “who cares?,” “why?” and “what next?” these questions prompt crucial forms of observation at different registers (visceral, analytical, narrative, descriptive, etc.), evident in the other papers in this panel, and are often explicitly grounded in visual or oral culture practices, contributing to the painting of a picture or the telling of a story that can act as a call to action, or a lesson learned. resilience, repetition, retelling: collective ethical sensemaking in the mms case, telling the story of the unfolding responses to pandemic social conditions in video form became a way to reflect on what can be understood as steadfast forms of resilience in a social context. the notion of resilience in the spheres of the arts, digital media, social media and internet production is often mobilized to signal strength of will and creative talent; a primarily laudatory and desired characteristic for workers in the sector, who experience precarity and often damaging work conditions while expected to be inventive and productive (mcrobbie 2020). the mms videos collectively offer a palpable desire to make sense of the world outside the mms space and time while situated within it: to be resilient and to show resilience at specific sites of storytelling. but many of the mms videos also hint at unresolvable devastating personal and social experiences during the first half-year of the covid-19 pandemic. and while these representations do not compare to the difficulties of resisting racism and other systemic oppressions that became increasingly visible in the pandemic--including black lives matter protests--the sincere and attentive reworking of the pandemic stories offered lessons to an increasingly skillful research-creation community of practice that might contribute to resolving complex challenges. so, what next? what can we do about pandemics and social conditions alike as researchers, creators, and activists? concluding with a co-created manifesto by panel participants, this final paper challenges the internet research community to consider how large-scale collaborations continue to have strong reach and duration through carefull nurturing and digital curating. references haraway, d. (2003). the companion species manifesto. prickly paradigm press. kember, s. (2012). “notes towards a feminist futurist manifesto,” ada: a journal of gender new media and technology 1. loveless, n. (2019). how to make art at the end of the world: a manifesto for research-creation. duke university press. markham, a., harris, a., & luka, m. e. (2020). massive and microscopic sensemaking in times of covid-19. qualitative inquiry, 10.1177/1077800420962477 mcrobbie, a. (2020). feminism and the politics of resilience. in feminism and the politics of resilience: essays on gender, media & the end of welfare, pp. 42-72. polity. moravec, m. (2018). exceptionalism in digital humanities: community, collaboration & consensus. in disrupting the digital humanities, eds., d. kim & j. stommel, pp. 169-196. punctum books. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): holloway. d., archer, c., & willson, m. (2019, october 2-5). entrusting children’s data. panel presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. entrusting children’s data (panel proposal) this panel is devoted to the issue of trust and children’s data. trust in the ethical treatment of children’s data relies on a broad balance of trust in a complex network of actors and practices involved in data collection, analytics, sharing and use of children’s data. more specifically, trust in how data is captured, who the data is captured by, what is done to the data and how outcomes generated out of the data are employed needs to be guaranteed. we discuss the predictive practices (algorithmic analysis) used to uncover behaviours, characteristics and relationships in order to anticipate outcomes, and nudge behaviours and attitudes or initiate interventions on behalf of children. the panel also investigates how children’s databases have made their way onto the dark web, positing that trust in the security of databases held by commercial and state actors is at risk. we then consider the ethical tension between the use of micro-celebrity social media influencers to establish market trust in brands and products, and the use of these potentially vulnerable influencers to market to other potentially vulnerable consumers. paper one ‘entrusting predictions for children’s futures’ discusses the future implications of large-scale data collection and analytic activities enacted across the everyday that is evident in media, academic publications and government policy discussions. digging deeper, this concern is centred largely on unease about how the data is captured, who the data is captured by, what is done to the data and how outcomes generated out of the data are employed. lack of transparency or clarity around internal machinic calculation processes requires ‘trust’ in the veracity of outputs of these systems. children are increasingly being positioned as data sources, datafied and embedded in algorithmic ecosystems that employ a range of calculations to uncover patterns or anomalies, to highlight risk, and to predict future outcomes. these practices inform strategies, policies and planning and therefore can have material consequences that can be advantageous or disadvantageous for the child, the family and their future pathways. this presentation explores three examples of predictive practices in early childhood in the health, education and commercial sectors through an analysis of relevant academic, policy and commercial literature and discourse to highlight the raft of ways that the placing of trust in algorithmic processes needs to be carefully scaffolded and critiqued. paper two, ‘when trust goes wrong: children on the dark web’ investigates what happens when trust goes wrong; when children’s personal data is hacked and circulated on the dark web? where once child abuse material (cam) was the only type of children’s data generally available for sale or circulation over the dark web, the growth of big data over the last decade, has seen children’s databases sourced from medical records, school records and app databases now available on the dark web—including those associated with connected toys. the paper first discusses children’s abuse material available on the dark web and then outlines the emerging availability of children’s personally identifiable information. the paper argues that, while parents are often held accountable for their children’s digital profile and data safety, vast amounts of children’s data is being legally collected by tech companies and state actors. some of this data has found its way onto the dark web. so far, little concern has been voiced about who is responsible for the protection of children’s data along children’s data supply chains—as well as any future ramifications of children’s data being sold and circulated on the dark web. paper three, ‘trusted babes of instagram brand-land: child as co-opted marketer and profitable brand extension on the internet’, explores how marketers are using/exploiting consumers’ inherent love, trust and interest in children, to generate ‘brand trust’, while at the same time wading into murky ethical territory, commoditising children’s images and appeal to promote adult brands. a related phenomenon is the use of children as ‘brand extension’, where celebrity/microcelebrity influencer parents push their children as personal brand extensions, leveraging the cuteness and newsworthy impact of their own children to earn money and/or achieve fame (archer, 2019). far from being the ‘everyday, ordinary internet users’ initially described in abidin’s early definition (2015b), some child social media stars are now being presented as beyond ‘ordinary’, with lavish lifestyles or unattainable attributes presented as aspirational for the consuming public. the paper uses case studies three extreme case studies, to examine the extent to which mainstream commercial organizations/brands and parents are colluding to use still and video social media images of children (as brands in their own right) in attempt to gain consumer ‘trust’. the impact of marketers and parents co-opting children to engender this consumer ‘trust’, and the ensuing issues relevant to the digital rights of the child and the larger issue of ‘trust’ in society is also discussed. en/trusting predictions for children’s futures willson, michele curtin university concern about the collection, use and possible implications of large-scale data collection and analytic activities enacted across the everyday is evident in the media, academic publications and government policy discussions. digging deeper, this concern is centred largely on unease about how the data is captured, who the data is captured by, what is done to the data and how outcomes generated out of the data are employed. these concerns are amplified further by the opacity of the calculations and manipulations of these data sets, by proprietary restrictions and obfuscation, by the scale by which data can be gathered across the everyday and by the increasing use of machine learning and multiple, intertwined iterative algorithmic systems. while machinic calculations are frequently positioned as neutral, objective and frequently more accurate than calculations through direct human action, numerous examples abound that demonstrate the problems with such assumptions (bucher, 2018; keddell, 2016; dencik et al., 2017). children are increasingly being positioned as data sources, datafied and embedded in algorithmic ecosystems that employ a range of calculations to uncover patterns or anomalies, to highlight risk, and to predict future outcomes (willson, 2019; mascheroni, 2018; lupton & williamson, 2017). these systems rely heavily on various surveillance, reporting and data capture practices of the child from conception (even preconception) onwards for a range of diverse reasons and diverse stakeholders. the increasing prevalence of childhood datafication practices is attracting attention amongst privacy advocates and those working in surveillance studies, and on children’s rights (livingstone & third, 2017; leaver, 2015). research that also considers the broader implications for the child in her/his every day and in terms of possible futures become increasingly important. this presentation offers this latter form of research. early childhood is often portrayed as the ideal time to shape, support and encourage the child in order to become fully emotionally, intellectually and socially competent adults in the future. different theories, methods and approaches have informed these various stakeholder intentions (parent, state, commercial sector): to develop good citizens or good workers, resilient adults, and desiring consumers. discussions about the degree that children can participate and have agency in these shaping processes are ongoing (livingstone & third, 2017). however, what happens to these agentic capacities – of both adults and children – when decisions are made through data analytics and predictive algorithms drawn from variously sourced data and variable data quality? trust in the veracity of the data collected, the accuracy of the assumptions underpinning the algorithmic calculations that have been incorporated or the (unintended) consequences that result are all questionable and should be subject to critique. we also need to consider, in cheney-lippold’s words, ‘how is this data made useful?’ (2017, 46). by predictive practices, i am referring to the use of predominantly machine learning processes using structured and unstructured data and algorithmic analysis to uncover patterns in behaviours, characteristics or relationships, to anticipate outcomes, to nudge behaviours and attitudes and to be able take pre-emptive action or acts of intervention (mcquillan, 2016). these practices inform strategies, policies and planning and therefore can have material consequences that can be advantageous or disadvantageous for the child, the family and their future pathways. for example, as cope and kalantzis (2016, 13) note about predictive analytics in relation to education: just as predictive analytics can be used to raise one’s insurance premium or increase one’s chance of arrest, so they might be used to predetermine a child’s place in a learning track or a teacher’s employment prospects. within the contemporary child’s digital ecosystem/s, there are multiple and diverse predictive practices currently and potentially at play. in the health sector, for example, predictive machine learning algorithms are being applied to anticipate the likelihood of genetically detectable disorders in ivf pre-implantation screening (regalado, 2017) or for the child’s possibility of developing autism (ananthaswamy, 2017); in the education sector, they are being applied to educational data to identify students at risk or those in need of particular types of targeted intervention (smith, 2017; clow, 2013), in the commercial sector they are being used to nudge particular types of purchasing decisions or to prompt data disclosures. unquestionably, human and algorithmic methods all display limitations, biases, and strengths, however, there appears to be an increasing societal reliance on machinic practices: positioning these as more objective, more efficient, more factual and therefore by default, more likely to be accurate. lack of transparency or clarity around internal machinic calculation processes requires ‘trust’ in the veracity of outputs of these systems. this presentation explores three examples of predictive practices in early childhood in the health, education and commercial sectors through an analysis of relevant academic, policy and commercial literature and discourse to highlight the raft of ways that the placing of trust needs to be carefully scaffolded and critiqued. in doing so, the paper raises questions about the broader ethical, and normative issues that become apparent for child rearing practices, data collection and the possibilities for child or parental current and future agency when predictive practices, risk aversion, and caring intent drive the choices that are made available, hidden or negated. references ananthaswamy, a. (2017). baby brain scans can predict who is likely to develop autism. new scientist, 7 june. available at https://www.newscientist.com/article/2133941babybrain-scans-can-predict-who-is-likely-to-develop-autism/ bucher, t. (2018). if…then: algorithmic power and politics. oxford studies in digital politics. new york: oxford university press. cheney-lippold, j. (2017). we are data: algorithms and the making of our digital selves. new york: nyu press. clow, d. (2013). an overview of learning analytics. teaching in higher education, 18(6): 683-695. cope, b. and kalantzis, m. (2016). big data comes to school: implications for learning, assessment and research. aera open, 2 (2): 1– 19. dencik, l., hintz, a. & carey, z. (2017). prediction, pre-emption and limits to dissent: social media and big data uses for policing protests in the united kingdom. new media & society (online, march) 1-18, doi: 10.1177/1461444817697722 keddell, e. (2016). substantiation decision-making and risk prediction in child protection systems. policy quarterly, 12(2): 46-56. leaver, t. (2015). born digital? presence, privacy, and intimate surveillance. in: hartley, j. and qu, w. (eds) re-orientation: translingual transcultural transmedia studies in narrative, language, identity, and knowledge. shanghai: fudan university press, pp.149-160. livingstone, s., & third, a. (2017). children and young people’s rights in the digital age: an emerging agenda. new media & society, 19(5), 657–670. lupton, d., & williamson, b. (2017). the datafied child: the dataveillance of children and implications for their rights. new media & society, 19(5), 780–794. mascheroni, g. (2018). datafied childhoods: contextualising datafication in everyday life. current sociology, 1-16. doi: 10.1177/0011392118807534 regalado, a. (2017). eugenics 2.0: we’re at the dawn of choosing embryos by health, height, and more. mit tech review, 1 november. available at: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609204/eugenics-20-were-at-the-dawn-ofchoosing-embryos-by-health-height-and-more/ smith, r. (2017). the emergence of the quantified child. discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, 38(5):701-712. willson, m. (2019). raising the ideal child? algorithms, quantification and prediction. media, culture & society, 41(5): 620-636. when trust goes wrong: children on the dark web holloway, donell edith cowan university this paper discusses what happens when trust goes wrong; when children’s personal data is hacked and circulated on the dark web? where once child abuse material (cam) was the only type of children’s data generally available for sale or circulation over the dark web, the growth of big data over the last decade, has seen children’s databases sourced from medical records, school records and app databases now available on the dark web—including those associated with connected toys. the paper first discusses children’s abuse material available on the dark web and then outlines the emerging availability of children’s personally identifiable information. a case study approach then traces and analyses spiral toys’ cloudpets 2017 data breach where children’s information was hacked and placed on the dark web. the paper argues that, while parents are often held accountable for their children’s digital profile and data safety, vast amounts of children’s data is being legally collected by tech companies and state actors. some of this data has found its way onto the dark web. so far, little concern has been voiced about who is responsible for the protection of children’s data along children’s data supply chains—as well as any future ramifications of children’s data being sold and circulated on the dark web. child abuse material the emergence of the internet has seen greater global trade and circulation of child abuse materials. internet technologies provide perpetrators with greater access and anonymity, and high capacity hard disks and cloud storage has made the possession of large quantities of cam relatively unproblematic. furthermore, the emergence of the dark web early this century has resulted in a dramatic rise in the amount, and circulation, of cam (drench, 2014). this is because encrypted networks, cryptocurrency and block chain technology have provided the people responsible for the production, sale and circulation of child abuse materials with extra layers of anonymity (acar, 2017). despite the vast scale of cams available on the dark web, the circulation of cams on the dark web provides limited financial gain for the producers and distributors of these materials. this is because piracy behaviour is widespread amongst people who download cam; the reason being that “commercial trade of online cams contradict the core values of this communal group [cam community] which has a strong tendency not to sell [but share] the abusive images they create or possess” (acar, 2017 p. 6). as a result, new more financially profitable forms of child abuse materials are appearing. one new practice is webcam child prostitution, where people pay to direct and view live-streaming video footage of minors in other countries carrying out “sexual acts in front of a webcam” (puffer et al, 2014, slide 2). these practices involve children primarily in southeast asia and thousands of perpetrators from across the world. another new practice is the crowd funding of cam on the dark web where sellers promise to produce and provide new cams in exchange for crypto-currency provided by the crowd (acar, 2017). children’s personal information although not as immediately alarming as cam availability on the dark web, the emerging availability of children’s personal data (via big data databases) is also of concern (van rijmenan, 2017) children's data chains now extends beyond corporate and state data collectors. this data is usually sourced from health records, educational records, ict platforms, and children’s apps—including those associated with connected toys. children’s personally identifiable data (pii) is especially sought after. their social security numbers (or other national identification numbers), birth dates, mothers’ maiden names and so on are used for identity theft. this information is then used to apply falsely for welfare benefits, loans, mortgages and for tax fraud. this data is particularly valuable because children’s pii provides access to clean credit histories and can go undetected for many years (foltyn, 2018; nettenj, 2018; wilson, 2019). it will take many years until these children apply for their first credit card, open loans, buy their first car, or apply for a medical health care card or welfare benefits—and will then understand that their identity, credit history and government records have been appropriated by others. the cloudpetstm case connected toys have been implicated in the theft of children’s pii and circulation on the dark web. known data breaches include: the hacking of mattel’s wi-fi hello barbietm (nov, 2015), vtech’s learning lodgetm (nov, 2015) and cloudpetstm (2017). cloudpets data breach, involved over 820 000 user accounts which included photos and children’s names, the month and day of their birth, and 2,182,337 voice recordings. the profiles also contained the child’s relationship to any adults who had been authorised to share messages with the child (hunt, 2017). security expert, troy hunt, found that, over a six week period, many attempts were made by email, telephone, and through the company’s facebook and twitter accounts to notify spiral toys of the risks to children’s and customers’ data. these messages went unanswered. over this same period, parents were not informed of the breach, a requirement of the californian government where the company is located (hunt, 2017). hunt was notified of the breach by an acquaintance involved in data breach trading circles. these trading circles redistribute stolen databases either for financial gain or as a hobby. the breached databases “often spread well beyond the party that originally obtained it and the ease with which huge volumes of digital information can be replicated across the globe means that once it’s exposed, it spreads rapidly” (house committee on energy and commerce, 2017, p. 2). conclusion large amounts of children’s data is being legally collected, analysed and shared by commercial and state actors. this same information is now being stolen and circulated on the dark web for profit. all too often, it is parents are who are held responsible for their children’s digital profiles and data privacy, while at the same time some commercial and state actors are failing to maintain safe, secure databases and are vulnerable to the risk of being hacked. it needs to be recognised is that there are many players in children’s data supply chains who need to be answerable for children’s data privacy and security. references acar, k. v. (2017). child abuse materials as digital goods: why we should fear new commercial forms. retrieved from kiel, germany: https://www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/157247 dredge, s. (2014, dec 31). study claims more than 80% of 'dark net' traffic is to child abuse sites. the guardian. retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/31/dark-web-traffic-childabuse-sites foltýn, t. (2018, jan 26). babies’ personal data hawked on dark web. welivsecurity. retrieved from https://www.welivesecurity.com/2018/01/26/babies-personal-datadark-web/ hunt, t. (2017). data from connected cloudpets teddy bears leaked and ransomed, exposing kids' voice messages. retrieved from https://www.troyhunt.com/datafrom-connected-cloudpets-teddy-bears-leaked-and-ransomed-exposing-kidsvoice-messages/ identity verification in a post-breach world, house of congress (2017). netten|, m. (2018, june 19). stolen identities of adults, children and even babies for sale on the dark web. versec. retrieved from https://virsec.com/stolenidentities-of-adults-children-and-even-babies-for-sale-on-the-dark-web/ puffer, e., mcdonald, k., pross, m., & hudson, d. (2014). webcam child sex tourism: an emerging global issue [powerpoint slides]. paper presented at the research and scholarship symposium, ohio. https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://scholar. google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1131&context=research_scholarship_symposi um wilson, e. (2019, feb 24). the worrying trend of children’s data being sold on the dark web. tnw news. retrieved from https://thenextweb.com/contributors/2019/02/23/children-data-sold-the-dark-web/ trusted babes of instagram brand-land: child as coopted marketer and profitable brand extension on the internet archer, catherine murdoch university for marketers, the issue of ‘trust’ is a key concern, as they strive (with business objectives in mind) to understand the psychology of consumers (hiscock, 2001). similarly, some marketing academics have spent their careers researching how to gain consumers’ trust in brands and organisations in order to generate ‘commitment’ from consumers, generally for the consumers to buy (more) products and/or remain loyal customers (see, e.g., filo, funk, & alexandris, 2008, ruparelia, white & hughes, 2010). the now seminal work of morgan and hunt, posited that if marketers work to develop trust through various means “such actions will enable firms and their networks to enjoy sustainable competitive advantages over their rivals and their networks in the global marketplace” (1994, p. 34). for marketers, the internet and more specifically social media, has become a relatively new field to attempt to win consumer trust in brands and generate sales (chahal & rani, 2017). while marketers seek the holy grail of consumer trust, they are simultaneously enlisting ‘prosumer’, microcelebrity social media influencers (smis), who have built up social capital and ‘trust’ amongst their readers/viewers/followers, with large followings on their social media (abidin, 2017; archer, 2016). the ‘selling power’ of these ‘authentic’ smi storytellers has been well documented (audrezet et al., 2018). indeed, influencer marketing has become a new field of endeavour and research for marketers and marketing research (brown & fiorella, 2013). however, for some marketers, sociologists, consumer advocates and government/industry regulators (to name some), the attempt by marketers to gain consumer trust through the conduit of smis has ironically raised ethical and trust concerns, given the smis often promote brands through covert means, with their instagram, youtube and other social media platforms filled with (often undisclosed) promotion of brands (archer, pettigrew & harrigan, 2014). a related concern is the use by marketers of potentially vulnerable (liminal) influencers to market to other potentially vulnerable consumers, for example mothers (archer & harrigan, 2016). a more recent development has been the use of children as social media influencers, or micro-microcelebrities (abidin, 2015a), co-opted (through their parents as agents) to push products. while the use of children to market goods and services has been a popular technique with a long history, smi children are now a growing phenomenon. this paper explores how marketers are using/exploiting consumers’ inherent love, trust and interest in children, to generate ‘brand trust’, while at the same time wading into murky ethical territory, commoditising children’s images and appeal to promote adult brands. a related phenomenon is the use of children as ‘brand extension’, where celebrity/microcelebrity influencer parents push their children as personal brand extensions, leveraging the cuteness and newsworthy impact of their own children to earn money and/or achieve fame (archer, 2019). far from being the ‘everyday, ordinary internet users’ initially described in abidin’s early definition (2015b), some child social media stars are now being presented as beyond ‘ordinary’, with lavish lifestyles or unattainable attributes presented as aspirational for the consuming public. the paper details through three extreme case studies, the extent to which mainstream commercial organizations/brands and parents are colluding to use still and video social media images of children (as brands in their own right) in attempt to gain consumer ‘trust’. publicly available instagram posts, promotional material and mainstream media articles are explored for three social media micro-microcelebrities from australia, the philippines and japan. these instagram and brand sensations include baby chanco in japan, who has been ‘adopted’ by shampoo giant pantene as the ‘face’/hair model of their shampoo (abc radio, 2019), and scarlet snow belo, the filipina three-year-old daughter of plastic surgeon/cosmetics brand owner parents, who is used to promote her parents’ business interests (aguiler, 2018). further the paper explores the impact of marketers and parents co-opting children to engender consumer trust in brand and the ensuing issues relevant to the digital rights of the child and the large issue of ‘trust’ in society. i argue that focusing on children as brand and influencers of ‘trust’ is important because, as livingstone & third (p 662) posit: “the child – as a cypher for our cultural anxieties and a focus of investment for our future desires – represents an important figure through which to (re)think the digital and human rights, one in which there is almost too much at stake.” references abc radio (2019) inside the lucrative child modeling business behind instagram phenom baby chanco retrieved from: https://wtop.com/social-media/2019/02/insidethe-lucrative-child-modeling-business-behind-instagram-phenom-baby-chanco/ abidin, c. (2015a) "micromicrocelebrity: branding babies on the internet." m/c journal 18 (5):1-6 abidin, c. (2015b) communicative intimacies: influencers and perceived interconnectedness. ada: a journal of gender, new media, and technology, (8). abidin, c. (2017). influencer extravaganza: commercial “lifestyle” microcelebrities in singapore. in l. hjorth, h. horst, a.galloway, g. bell (eds). the routledge companion to digital ethnography (pp. 184-194). routledge. aguilar, k. (2018). scarlet snow is ‘the future of beauty’ in digital magazine cover. retrieved from: https://entertainment.inquirer.net/300831/scarlet-snow-is-the-future-ofbeauty-in-digital-magazine-cover#ixzz5giaughvl archer, c. (2019) pre-schooler as brand extension: a tale of pixie’s bows and birthdays. in: green l, holloway dj, stevenson kj, et al. (eds) digitising early childhood. newcastle: cambridge scholars publishing, pp. 58–73. archer c & harrigan p (2016) prosumers with passion: learning what motivates bloggers as digital influencer stakeholders. prism 13(1), 1–14. archer, c., pettigrew, s., & harrigan, p., (2014), a tale of power, passion and persuasion: bloggers, public relations and ethics, asia pacific public relations journal, 15(1), 37-54. ashley, c., & tuten, t. (2015). creative strategies in social media marketing: an exploratory study of branded social content and consumer engagement. psychology & marketing, 32(1), 15-27. audrezet, a., de kerviler, g. & moulard, j.g., 2018. authenticity under threat: when social media influencers need to go beyond self-presentation. journal of business research. brown, d., & fiorella, s. (2008). influence marketing how to create, manage, and measure brand influencers in social media marketing. routledge. chahal, h., & rani, a. (2017). how trust moderates social media engagement and brand equity. journal of research in interactive marketing, 11(3), 312-335. filo, k., funk, d. c., & alexandris, k. (2008). exploring the role of brand trust in the relationship between brand associations and brand loyalty in sport and fitness. international journal of sport management and marketing, 3(1-2), 39-57. hiscock, j. (2001), “most trusted brands”, marketing, march, pp. 32-3 livingstone, s., & third, a. (2017). children and young people’s rights in the digital age: an emerging agenda. new media and society, 19(5), 657–670 morgan, r. m., & hunt, s. d. (1994). the commitment-trust theory of relationship marketing. journal of marketing, 58(3), 20-38. ruparelia, n., white, l., & hughes, k. (2010). drivers of brand trust in internet retailing. journal of product & brand management, 19(4), 250-260. microsoft word ir16-template-final.docx selected papers of internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers phoenix, az, usa / 21-24 october 2015 tweeting @thewritersroom: mapping the television industry's ideal fan through writers' room twitter accounts annemarie navar-gill university of michigan introduction in contemporary television culture, the industry has embraced and engaged with fan practices and cultures. this engagement, however, is often deployed to demarcate boundaries around appropriate participation and fandom (johnson, 2007). online social interaction between fans and creators, for example, can be used to reify the distinction between them, making clear which fan questions and behaviors are appropriate and which should be ignored (chin & hills, 2008). in the current television environment, it has become particularly important for the industry to become involved in audience social media practices. evans (2014) argues that audience conversations on social media become part of the program and network’s brand. given the number of voices involved in these conversations, it is essentially impossible for the network to manage its brand(s) as effectively as desired. engaging in social media with fans provides a way to steer audience social media behaviors in favorable directions, and reward “good” fans by highlighting their comments. this study investigates a recent television social media trend: the increasingly popular practice of a show’s writing staff engaging with fans collectively via a writers’ room twitter account. stepping away from the figure of the showrunner-as-author and instead foregrounding the collective creativity that actually goes into television writing and production, this practice invites in those dedicated fans who have a deeper understanding of how television writing works. the content of these accounts varies significantly, with some focusing on giving fans a peek behind the scenes into the day-to-day operation of the writers’ room, while others focus on official promotional content or live-tweeting sessions. though all are intended to foster some type of fan relationships, the level of actual interactivity varies considerably. celebrity interaction with fans on twitter can serve as a powerful force for shaping behaviors and identity on the social media platform. television writers are not “celebrities” in the traditional sense, but can be conceptualized as “subcultural celebrity,” meaning that they possess all the cache of a traditional celebrity, but only for a limited number of fans (chin & hills, 2008; ellcessor, 2012). celebrity practitioners use twitter as a venue for sharing apparent disclosures, creating a feeling of intimacy suggested citation (apa):navar-gill, a. (2015, october 21-24). tweeting @thewritersroom: mapping the television industry’s ideal fan through writers’ room twitter accounts. paper presented at internet research 16: the 16th annual meeting of the association of internet researchers. phoenix, az, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. for their fans while reinforcing the asymmetrical status between celebrity and fan (marwick & boyd, 2011; muntean & petersen, 2009). on twitter, identity is constituted through interaction (marwick & boyd, 2010). this coconstruction can be particularly powerful when the power imbalances of twitter’s hierarchical structure are taken into account (van dijick, 2013). the representations of celebrities that saturate our culture serve as a model of how people engage with culture and construct their identities, and celebrity performance of the self on social media serves as a model for how everyday users present themselves (marshall, 2010). while celebrity practices of self-presentation serve as a model, the status marker of being acknowledged by the celebrity serves further as a powerful reinforcement for certain behaviors. this study examines the ways in which television writers use their subcultural celebrity status to produce and police fan behaviors and identities. research questions rq1: what are the various social media strategies that writers’ room twitter accounts use to engage with fan audiences? rq1: how do these posts and social interactions of writers’ room twitter accounts hail particular fan identities? in what ways do these ideal fan identities serve industry interests? methods to explore the ways in which writers’ room twitter accounts engage with audiences and hail ideal fan identities, i engage in analytics-supported qualitative analysis of a sample of tweets from writers’ room twitter accounts. using sysomos and the twitter api, i scraped one month of tweets from each writers’ room twitter account, as well as the corresponding month of @mentions for that account. for each account, my sampling period began one week before the television show’s most recent series premiere. there were two major aspects of my analysis. first, i synced the two datasets produced for each account in order to track patterns of interaction and non-interaction with fans who tweeted to the writers. second, i conducted textual analysis of the tweets in order to identify the strategies being used to manage fan participation and hail particular fan identities. findings and discussion all of the writers’ room twitter accounts that i examined selectively engaged with fans in ways that hail a fan identity that labors for and promotes industrial interests. however, the strategies that they use vary considerably. while some writers’ room twitter accounts focus on crass promotion, others work to foster a deeper level of fan engagement. the techniques that they use to do so range from cultivating a sense of personal intimacy to providing backstage information about production processes to directly engaging with and affirming creative fan practices, such as fan art and cosplay. these more intimate relationships are then used to encourage fans to engage in behavior that is beneficial for the show—for instance, raising the show’s visibility on social media during specific temporal windows that matter for ratings, voting for the show in online contests, and encouraging friends to watch—as well as to support textual readings of the show that are preferred by producers. although all writers’ room twitter accounts are geared toward promoting fan identities that are productive for the industry, the specifics of the fan identities hailed vary based on the particular branding that the show and its network (or online distribution platform) are looking to support. for example, the writers’ of faking it, a sitcom on mtv—a network invested in its youthful brand—disclose (or perform the disclosure of) intimate personal details and highlight fan creativity. these tactics build a sense of community among their followers, hailing a fan who feels a loving sense of responsibility toward the show. on the other hand, the writers’ of orange is the new black use irony and the repeated invocation of non-television taste cultures to hail a fan with a discerning television palate and reinforce the notion of artistic authority in quality television that netflix’s premium brand demands. through the lens of writers’ room twitter accounts, this project identifies a number of different ways that the television industry is using twitter to manage its audiences. references chin, b., & hills, m. (2008). restricted confessions? blogging, subcultural celebrity and the management of producer–fan proximity. social semiotics, 18(2), 253–272. ellcessor, e. (2012). tweeting @feliciaday: online social media, convergence, and subcultural stardom. cinema journal, 51(2), 46–66. doi:10.1353/cj.2012.0010 evans, e. (2014). tweeting on the bbc. in d. johnson, d. kompare, & a. santo (eds.), making media work: cultures of management in the entertainment industries. new york: nyu press. johnson, d. (2007). inviting audiences in: the spatial reorganization of production and consumption in “tviii.” new review of film and television studies, 5(1), 61–80. marshall, p. d. (2010). the promotion and presentation of the self: celebrity as marker of presentational media. celebrity studies, 1(1), 35–48. doi:10.1080/19392390903519057 marwick, a., & boyd, d. (2011). to see and be seen: celebrity practice on twitter. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 17(2), 139–158. doi:10.1177/1354856510394539 marwick, a. e., & boyd, d. (2010). i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. new media & society, 13(1), 114– 133. doi:10.1177/1461444810365313 muntean, n., & petersen, a. h. (2009). celebrity twitter: strategies of intrusion and disclosure in the age of technoculture. m/c journal, 12(5). retrieved from http://www.journal.media van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. oxford  ; new york: oxford university press. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): hong, s. (2020, october). the moralisation of predictivity in the age of datadriven surveillance. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the moralisation of predictivity in the age of datadriven surveillance sun-ha hong simon fraser university this paper argues that emerging technologies of datafication are intensifying a moralisation of predictivity. on one hand, this describes the growing pressure to quantify and predict every kind of social problem. reluctance to adopt emerging technologies of surveillance is construed as abdication of a moral responsibility via negligence to inevitable progress. on the other hand, it describes the corresponding demand that human subjects learn to live in more predictable and machine-readable ways, adapting to the flaws and ambiguities of imperfect technosystems. this argument echoes that of joseph weizenbaum (1976), a pioneer of early ai research and the inventor of the eliza chatbot: that well in advance of machines fully made in our image, it is the human subjects that are asked to render themselves more compatible and legible to those machines. drawing from a book-length research project into the public presentation of surveillance technologies, i show how messy data, arbitrary classifications, and other uncertainties become fabricated into the status of reliable predictions. specifically, the bulk of the presentation will examine the rapid expansion of counter-terrorist surveillance systems in 2010’s america, focusing on three vignettes: 1. the whole haystack i begin by examining the moralised public discourse around the predictivity (and preventability) of terrorism, and increasingly, its anchoring in the promises of datadriven surveillance. expansive ‘dragnet’ surveillance as publicised by the snowden leaks were rooted in the post-9/11 legitimisation of the idea that terrorism was becoming radically unpredictable. new systems for data collection and processing were thus justified through the persistent interpellation of uncertainty towards a moralised argument, in which the rapid expansion of new surveillance technologies was an ethical obligation to ‘do something’ as much as a calculated response to statistical and geopolitical realities. as keith alexander, the nsa’s long-time director (2005-2014) put it, they were to not simply look for the needle in the haystack but to “collect the whole haystack” (nakashima and warrick 2013). the projected unknowability of the ‘new breed’ of terrorist was thus leveraged to broker public trust and political legitimacy for a new breed of data-driven surveillance and, in turn, pre-emptive intervention. 2. the lone wolf such revisionist narratives about past terrors in turn feed into unprovable claims in favour of new surveillance technologies from nsa dragnets to sentencing algorithms. central here is the social life of the ‘lone wolf’ terrorist: a figuration of an unpredictable and unknowable threat, yet also the object of public belief around the possibility of prediction. attacks like the boston bombings and the las vegas shootings have been accompanied by formulaic public retrospectives, agonising over how the individuals must have been radicalised and how they could have been stopped with better data. this project to predict (and prevent) the unpredictable terrorist becomes a site of not simply indiscriminate surveillance or data-driven objectivity, however, but a back-door for enduring forms of discrimination and prejudiced heuristics. a leaked 2017 survey, used by the fbi to assess suspects under watch, attempted to datafy the risk of lone wolf terrorism through ‘weak indicators’ like playing paintball, laser tag, or ‘undergoing religious conversion’ (currier 2017). an internal nsa slide, leaked by edward snowden, show fictional names like ‘mohamed badguy’ and ‘mohammed raghead’ used to denote hypothetical lone wolves (davidson 2014). in this way, the ‘anybody and everybody’ of the ‘whole haystack’ is reduced down into the arab and the muslim. yet the very phrase of the ‘lone wolf’, in fact, originates with white supremacist discourse in the 1990s. i argue that the insistence on predictivity reflects a broader faith in data as pure and sanitising — intersecting all too well with the older fantasies of national and racial purity in the war on terror (puar and rai 2002). 3. hollywood endings on closer inspection, furthermore, surveillance data raises its own ambiguities. i show how practices like the fbi’s counter-terrorist sting operations often reveal intense pressures to claim certainty on the basis of deeply uncertain data. ‘weak’ indicators and other uncertain data are repackaged into more palatable forms to meet the political and moral demand to ‘do something’. i discuss the case of sami osmakac, where fbi undercover agents and informants supplied osmakac with money, with fake weapons and explosives that he could buy with that money, the training to use that equipment, and so on, until he has produced enough behavioural data to justify arrest. here, electronic surveillance intersects with more traditional practices, legal classifiers like ‘probable cause’, and the heavily moralised climate of ‘zero tolerance’. the result is a practice of not merely surveillance, but the active fabrication of the kinds of tangible data that can legally count as evidence of terrorist intent – or, as the fbi agents called it, a ‘hollywood ending’ (aaronson 2015). these episodes are part of a broader pattern around the moralisation of predictivity visà-vis the fabrication of data’s certainty. the presentation ends by noting how such algorithmic performances of objectivity and control are replicated in growing publicprivate partnerships for surveillance. for instance, i show how amazon ring’s aggressive data-sharing with local law enforcement spearheads a broader corporate strategy for cultivating a new faustian bargain between customer convenience and data extraction (see zimmer 2008; van dijck 2013). from the state’s counter-terrorist strategies or consumer technologies’ sales pitch, the deeply speculative nature of these predictions are repackaged as both morally necessary and technologically inevitable. in short, we find a bias towards “actionism” (hannah 2010) where doing something is construed as better, and more ethical, than doing ‘nothing’. all in all, the moralisation of predictivity helps suture the many imperfections of datadriven surveillance, and provide justificatory cover for their breakneck expansion across the boundaries of public and private. they perpetuate the normative expectation that what can be predicted must be, and what needs to be predicted surely can be. in the process, spaces for human discretion, informal norms, and sensitivity to human circumstance – what we might call margins of tolerated ‘illegality’, in foucault’s sense (2015) – are being squeezed out. references aaronson, trevor. 2015. “the sting: how the fbi created a terrorist.” the intercept. march 16. https://theintercept.com/2015/03/16/howthefbicreatedaterrorist/. currier, cora. 2017. “48 questions the fbi uses to determine if someone is a likely terrorist.” the intercept. february 13. https://theintercept.com/2017/02/13/48questions-the-fbi-uses-to-determine-if-someone-is-a-likely-terrorist/. davidson, amy. 2014. “the n.s.a.’s spying on muslim-americans.” the new yorker. july 10. http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/the-n-s-a-s-spying-onmuslim-americans. foucault, michel. 2015. the punitive society: lectures at the college de france 19721973. edited by bernard e harcourt. new york: palgrave macmillan. hannah, matthew g. 2010. “(mis)adventures in rumsfeld space.” geojournal 75 (4): 397–406. nakashima, ellen, and joby warrick. 2013. “for nsa chief, terrorist threat drives passion to ‘collect it all.’” the washington post. july 14. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/for-nsa-chief-terroristthreat-drives-passion-to-collect-it-all/2013/07/14/3d26ef80-ea49-11e2-a301ea5a8116d211_story.html. puar, jasbir k, and amit s rai. 2002. “monster, terrorist, fag: the war on terrorism and the production of docile patriots.” social text 20 (3): 117–48. van dijck, josé. 2013. the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. cambridge: oxford university press. weizenbaum, joseph. 1976. computer power and human reason: from judgment to calculation. new york: w.h. freeman and company. zimmer, michael. 2008. “the externalities of search 2.0: the emerging privacy threats when the drive for the perfect search engine meets web 2.0.” first monday 13 (3). selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): plantin, jc. (2020, october) platform logic and the infrastructural power of tech giants. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. platform logic and the infrastructural power of tech giants jean-christophe plantin london school of economics and political science while alphabet, facebook, and microsoft are mostly associated with online services and mobile applications, they now constitute important actors of global communication networks. this paper investigates this infrastructural expansion of tech giants in four sectors: data centers, subsea cables, telecommunication networks, and non-terrestrial connectivity. its central hypothesis is that tech giants become a dominant force shaping the global infrastructure by leveraging in the connectivity sector the platform logic that granted them their initial success in the web economy (gillespie, 2010; helmond, 2015; srnicek, 2016; josé van dijck et al., 2018). the infrastructural growth of tech giants takes two forms. the first and most visible consists of direct investments in infrastructure projects. for example, google has invested $30 billion since 2015 in its data centres and undersea cables, and currently owns part or all of eleven subsea cables (8.5% of undersea cables worldwide). since 2013, facebook has been teaming up with local service providers to provide low-cost mobile access through the project internet.org. google fiber provides fiber-to-the-home in various u.s. cities (albeit with various levels of success). the alphabet-founded loon project is currently tested in peru to deploy internet access through balloons after environmental crisis. amazon opened in 2019 a global network of ground stations for access and management of satellites capacities. while these spectacular (and sometimes failed) infrastructure projects have gained wide media coverage, a second look at these transformations reveal how internet companies are not only building infrastructures, but also changing the ways they are managed. they do so by adapting the platform model from the web economy to communication networks. literature in management and platform studies have highlighted key characteristics of this platform logic, e.g. a new intermediary creating two-sided or multisided markets (rochet & tirole, 2003), relying on datafication to generate network effects (van dijck, 2014), or making content programmable (helmond, 2015). tech giants now adapt this platform logic to enter and to reorganize infrastructural markets, hereby allowing them to bypass incumbent companies and to eventually position themselves as central actors operating communication networks. an illustrative example at the core of this paper is the open compute project, a consortium in the data center industry that facebook impulsed in 2011. its objective is to promote open source hardware for data centers by inviting its members to share design specs. the long-term goal is to break free from the dependence towards blackboxed components sold by legacy manufacturers (such as ibm or cisco) and to replace them by modular and programmable components. to do so, the consortium leverages the platform model: it reorganizes a vertical market into a two-sided market connecting manufacturers and buyers of data center components, that the consortium can mediate and supervise. similar to an app store, this platform allows facebook and its partners to act as gatekeepers: they can channel innovation efforts in one direction over another, and select the types of products that will be sold on the consortium marketplace. in addition to data centers, tech giants deploy a similar strategy with undersea cables, telecommunications, and satellites. the comparison between these four sectors is based on interviews with industry experts and network engineers, document analysis, and site visits, and it reveals a model of platformization of communication networks that comprises the four following stages: 1. disaggregating black-boxed technologies the platform strategy is first used to break up closed technologies into smaller components that can each be developed, managed, or upgraded separately. for example, in the subsea cable industry, the “open cable” model promoted by microsoft or alphabet disaggregates the “dry plant” (comprising the cable landing stations and routers) from the “wet plant” (the actual cables and signal repeaters), instead of having both built and managed by the same company. 2. inserting of a platform once network components are disaggregated, a platform is inserted to integrate them all together. in the telecom sector, the various platforms developed by the open networking foundation link together the disaggregated components of a telecommunication network (cell tower, backhaul, data centers, etc). 3. making components modular with network components now modular, they can each be changed or updated separately. the open compute project mentioned earlier promotes a model of data center maintenance presented as “tool free” and allowing “hot swap:” a piece of hardware can be removed and replaced simply by pressing a lever and without having to switch off the whole rack (i.e. while being still “hot”). 4. making networks programmable as platforms are based on apis, network operators can extract data about the state of the networks and program new features on the spot. “programmable satellite” is such data-driven paradigm allowing the change of orientation of a satellite or of the types of data it extracts after its launch. disaggregating networks, inserting a platform, making networks modular and programmable: this is the model that tech giants are currently using to take control over the global infrastructure for connectivity. by detailing this model, this paper makes two contributions. first, it complements the critical analysis of tech giants’ infrastructural growth (author et al, 2018) by going beyond the current focus on their cloud computing capacities (hogan, 2015; mosco, 2014) or their most publicized failed projects (halegoua, 2015; prasad, 2018). second, while studies on the social implications of tech giants focuses on their technical architecture, ecosystems of apps, and data circulation (gillespie, 2018; helberger et al., 2017; mansell, 2015; van dijck et al., 2018), this paper provides a comprehensive study of the multifaceted infrastructural expansion of tech giants and the power they gain over global connectivity. author et al, 2018 gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of ‘platforms’. new media & society, 12(3), 347–364. gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. yale university press. halegoua, g. (2015). calling all ‘fiberhoods’: google fiber and the politics of visibility. international journal of cultural studies, 18(3), 311–316. helberger, n., pierson, j., & poell, t. (2017). governing online platforms: from contested to cooperative responsibility. the information society, 0(0), 1–14. helmond, a. (2015). the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready. social media + society, 1(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080 hogan, m. (2015). data flows and water woes: the utah data center. big data & society, 2(2). mansell, r. (2015). the public’s interest in intermediaries. info, 17(6), 8–18. mosco, v. (2014). to the cloud: big data in a turbulent world. paradigm publishers. prasad, r. (2018). ascendant india, digital india: how net neutrality advocates defeated facebook’s free basics. media, culture & society, 40(3), 415–431. rochet, j.-c., & tirole, j. (2003). platform competition in two-sided markets. journal of the european economic association, 1, 990–1029. srnicek, n. (2016). platform capitalism. polity press. van dijck, josé. (2014). datafication, dataism and dataveillance: big data between scientific paradigm and ideology. surveillance & society, 12(2), 197–208. van dijck, josé, poell, t., & waal, m. de. (2018). the platform society. oxford university press. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): brodie, patrick and velkova, julia. (2020, october). dissolved clouds: data centres and infrastructural abandonment. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. dissolved clouds: ericsson’s vaudreuil data centre and infrastructural abandonment patrick brodie concordia university julia velkova linköping university over the past decade much of internet connectivity and communication infrastructure has been re-shaped towards the provision of video streaming and computation services within the ‘cloud.’ tech giants and smaller actors alike have been fervently constructing data centres to enable these practices, animating hopes and promises for ‘a fourth industrial revolution’ and likewise new paths of value creation within digital capitalism. despite these visions, any industrial revolution is bound by the logics of capital growth to leave its ruins (harvey, 2001). this paper engages with infrastructural abandonment that emerges in the process of rapid construction of data centres. we do so by tracking the afterlife of an abruptly abandoned data center constructed by the global telecom giant ericsson in vaudreuil, a town near montréal, québec, canada. the company erected the data centre in 2016 as part of its global network of data centers, only to shut it down less than a year after becoming operational. in our attempt to recover the history and afterlife of this rapidly obsolete global communication node, we argue for the need to take perspectives of ruination, discard, and contingency of digital technologies to understand digital futures through their infrastructural pasts in-the-making. in our work we build upon earlier debates on post-industrial ruination (edensor, 2005; storm, 2016), and extend them to discuss the aftermath of ‘cloud’ construction. our methods were ethnographic, with material collected between 2018-2020, after ericsson withdrew from their high-profile canadian expansion. brodie visited this abandoned ericsson data centre in vaudreuil, interviewed several individuals who had a relation to the site, and traced the online media coverage of the shut-down. our findings were limited by the secrecy surrounding the site and the aftermath of its shut down, requiring us to sift through rumors and speculation about the fate of the data centre. velkova visited the canadian site’s sister-data center that is still operational and located in stockholm. she interviewed the site manager, the architecture company that had designed the data centers, and had contact with the ericsson headquarters in sweden that all provided additional context of the closure in canada. abandoned promise between 2015 and 2017 ericsson invested 7 million usd to construct a network of three large-scale data centres. two of them were located in sweden and one in canada, where the company already had a long history of research and development. the stylish white, prismatic façade of the canadian facility located in vaudreuil mirrored the architecture of the swedish data centers, designed by its architects to reflect timelessness and scalability. like in other places (vonderau, 2018), the data center was imagined by the local government as a shortcut to development, which would alleviate local problems and provide future prosperity. vaudreuil-dorion is a small community on the shore of lac des deux montagnes. not long ago, the region was sustained by the agricultural sector, but recent years have brought significant economic and social change. projects such as je suis..., a municipal initiative designed to promote ‘sustainable urban development through culture,’ promoted the data centre as an example of the community’s ability to progress and host a thriving enterprise culture. however, the difficulty in finding community responses to ericsson’s investment—filtered through government talking heads like the city’s mayor, guy pilon—leaves questions and gaps about the interface between people and the forces of development that shape their economic futures. after construction delays, reduced capacity, and falling profits by ericsson, the company consolidated its data centre needs to its two still-operating nodes in sweden. the vaudreuil facility was abruptly shut down in 2017 to the dismay of the local community (see velkova, 2019). the aspirations of different social and possibly digital futures on the shore of lac des deux montagnes were suspended. tucked away in a suburban industrial and logistics park, ericsson’s ostentatious former vaudreuil facility still stands out against the surrounding landscape. as of february 2020, the building remains mostly vacant, sold to us real estate firm gi partners. after local political mobilization, government tax breaks, and the promise of jobs and prosperity, the inert site now employs only a skeleton crew of security and maintenance professionals tasked with not letting the impressive structure fall to ruin while waiting for new buyers. the mechanical connections in the building wait to be fired up by a new influx of tech capital to rescue them from ruin. conflicting stories exist across the press and our informants. an employee of bgis, the montréal firm administering the site, told us that gi partners cannot operate on canadian soil and thus needed a new buyer. however, media reports assert that ericsson maintains a physical data presence, renting server space as the only remaining client at the site. other brochures indicate that vague multinational stream data centres is in charge of the building, in spite of zero evidence of this anywhere on their website. whatever is happening at the site, the vaudreuil-dorion community seems intent on forgetting. mayor pilon, who strongly advocated for the data centre, expressed deep disappointment in ericsson’s withdrawal, but his statements on the matter have been removed from the municipal website. local press write-ups argued that because ericsson had not fulfilled their promises, their tax holiday would be revoked, and this would bring significant revenue into the municipalities’ pockets. on social media and in the local presses, residents expressed similar disappointment, but were eager to move on from the whole affair. a comment on facebook suggested that amazon web services should take over the site, as they have been expanding their infrastructure region in montréal. otherwise, references to the data centre have largely disappeared from the public discourse and materials available to us. conclusion what gets lost in the real-time and localized (non-)coverage of the data centres’ construction and aftermath is two-fold. first, there is the digital obsolescence of the global tech market. in an age of planned obsolescence and accelerated capitalism (wajcman and dodd, 2017), the lifespans of digital infrastructures are dramatically shortened, producing sites of digital ruination like de-commissioned data centres. second, the politics of ‘infrastructural abandonment’ reveal the degree to which public visibility and actual corporate operations are always discrete. while the municipality of vaudreuil-dorion saw a stable future revenue stream in the data centre’s operations, global tech infrastructure is anything but stable. obsolescence only accelerates the timelines of abandonment. these are not ‘eventful’ processes, as large-scale thinking and investment tends to indicate. rather, our research finds that the promise of such infrastructures seems to ‘dissolve,’ leaving behind material ruin and affecting social relations in ways that reflect the crossed but mismatched wires between communities and big tech capital. references edensor t (2005) industrial ruins: spaces, aesthetics, and materiality. oxford [u.k.] ; new york: berg. harvey d (2001) spaces of capital: towards a critical geography. edinburgh: edinburgh univ. press. storm a (2016) post-industrial landscape scars. palgrave. velkova j (2019) data centres as impermanent infrastructures. culture machine (18). vonderau a (2018) scaling the cloud: making state and infrastructure in sweden. ethnos: 1–21. wajcman j and dodd n (eds) (2017) the sociology of speed: digital, organizational, and social temporalities. oxford: oxford university press. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): valdovinos kaye, b.. (2019, october 2-5). trust in translation: a case study of copyright as a legal transplant in the music industry in myanmar . paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. trust in translation: a case study of copyright as a legal transplant in the music industry in myanmar d. bondy valdovinos kaye trust and transplants trust is foundational in digital governance, especially in regard to fundamental policies that affect how information is regulated online such as copyright. as copyright regulations in developed nation-states rush to keep pace with evolving digital technology, developing nations face pressure to adopt foreign copyright policies as part of international treaties (yu, 2006). these ‘transplanted’ policies are often implemented without being adapted to local conditions or critically evaluating their future consequences. this study examines transplanted copyright regulation in an emergent and increasingly digitalized creative industry: the music recording industry of myanmar. through qualitative interviews with key stakeholders this study critiques trust in transplanted copyright by asking: why do musical artists in myanmar trust transplanted copyright? legal transplanting, taking a law or legal framework from a source nation-state and implanting it into a host nation-state, was a common practice throughout colonial history (watson, 1993). transplants are still employed in modern international intellectual property governance through multi-lateral treaties such as the trade related aspects of intellectual property agreement (trips) (yu, 2006). transplanted copyright has encountered issues in cases where source regulations do not adequately account for local history, culture, and language in host nation-states (geller, 1994). despite wide criticism against legal transplants (legrand, 2002), they remain a fundamental component of globalized governance (harding and örücü 2002). the legal code of myanmar, formerly burma and formerly a british colony, was shaped almost entirely by colonial-era transplant laws. the only copyright law enacted in myanmar was ratified in 1914, transplanted from the uk copyright act of 1911. recently, after several years of development, the myanmar parliament passed the literary and artistic copyright act in 2019 that contains several transplanted provisions that accede to international standards set by the world intellectual property organization that will impact, among other things, the music recording industry of myanmar. copyright is fundamental to governing music industries (wikström, 2019). over the past two decades, music recording industries have experienced unprecedented disruption resulting from digital music technologies that has required innovative regulatory response. policymakers in developed nation-states spent the first part of the 21st century desperately trying to sort out the new copyright challenges connected digital music proliferation. meanwhile in some developing nation-states, in particular those with unique or informal creative industries, the transplantation of foreign ip regulations have led to new problems and destabilization (yu, 2006). digital myanmar myanmar has undergone a seismic shift in digital capacity in the past ten years. prior to 2011, myanmar’s internet penetration rate was one of the lowest in the world. in 2017, the rate skyrocketed to nearly ninety percent coverage following new laws that allowed foreign telecommunications companies to establish new mobile networks in 2012 (telenor, 2017). mobile sim cards, which previously could cost up to $1500 (usd) in myanmar dropped to just $1.5 (usd) and affordable smart devices have become more available from neighboring china. the availability of the mobile internet has affected several sites of industry in myanmar; the music recording industry being no exception. the myanmar music recording industry has experienced the same digital disruption as in other music industries around the world; however, the myanmar music industry faces additional challenges. for example, a lack of copyright law gave way to a deeply informal structure, fragmentation, and unique practice of copying international songs and adapting them for burmese audiences (maclachlan, 2011). as momentum has built toward the adoption of the 2019 copyright law, many artists in press and in interviews expressed a willingness to trust and accept transplanted foreign copyright. this study building on legal transplant theory (watson, 1993) this study takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying trust in transplanted regulation from a decolonizing methodological viewpoint (tuhiwai smith, 2008). data for this study were collected from qualitative interviews with thirty (n=30) key informants in the myanmar, including music industry professionals and legal experts. coding of interviews revealed strong favorable attitudes toward transplanted copyright among informants. key findings reveal the presence of a strong ‘copyright culture’ among musical artists in myanmar. despite being absent throughout the development of the myanmar music industry, many musical artist informants expressed favorable attitudes toward the adoption of copyright in myanmar. on the other hand, producers and industry insiders expressed frustration with the push to transplant foreign systems. throughout its development, myanmar music professionals have developed their own solutions to problems that take into account history, culture, and language. conclusion formal music industries rely on stakeholders’ trust in copyright system. in an informal music industry, like myanmar, implicit trust in a foreign system could lead to perilous consequences. transplanted copyright may myanmar artists at a disadvantage in the digital music economy. digital regulations for music are increasingly common in other jurisdictions, such as the recent music modernization act in the us and the european directive on copyright in the digital single market. however, transplanted myanmar copyright act does not contain specific provisions that reflect recent trends in copyright development for digital music. this case study raises questions about the international power dynamics that have led to a culture of copyright in myanmar, in which artists implicitly trust foreign copyright regulation. i argue that global copyright regulation must be viewed through a decolonizing lens (tuhiwai smith, 2008). throughout the past two centuries, copyright has been used as an imperialistic tool. nearly every critical juncture in the development ‘modern’ copyright law has coincided with paradigm shifts in politics, technology, society, or norms. at each breaking point, the construction and interpretation of the law has shifted. yet the sites where these reinterpretations have taken place have been colonial or economic superpowers. these powers created a system of copyright that worked best for them and protected their interests in response to a changing world. it was no surprise, therefore, that nuance would be lost in translation when copyright was transplanted elsewhere in the world. as the next patient on the transplant list, stakeholders in myanmar should have the same opportunity to provide their input to create a copyright system that fits myanmar’s unique circumstances and is deserving of their trust. references cheesman, n. (2015). opposing the rule of law: how myanmar’s courts make law and order. cambridge: cambridge university press. geller, p. e. (1994). legal transplants in international copyright: some problems of method. ucla pacific basin law journal, 13, 199–230. harding, a., & örücü, e. (2002). comparative law in the 21st century. london: kluwer law international. legrand, p. (1997). the impossibility of legal transplants. maastricht journal of european and comparative law, 4, 111–124. lobato, r., & thomas, j. (2015). the informal media economy. cambridge: polity. maclachlan, h. (2011). burma’s pop music industry: creators, distributors, censors. rochester: university of rochester press. telenor. (2017). realising digital myanmar: leapfrogging to an inclusive digital economy. retrieved from https://www.telenor.com/wpcontent/uploads/2018/02/telenor-realising-digital-myanmar-report-06february.pdf tuhiwai smith, l. (2008). decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. london: zed books ltd. watson, a. (1993). legal transplants: an approach to comparative law. athens, ga: university of georgia press. wikström, p. (2019). the music industry: music in the cloud (3rd ed.). malden, ma: polity press. yu, p. (2006). trips and its discontents. marquette intellectual property law review, 10(2), 369. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): matamoros-fernandez, a., gray, j., bartolo, l., burgess, j., and suzor, n. (2021, october). what’s ‘up next’? investigating algorithmic recommendations on youtube across issues and over time. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. what’s ‘up next’? investigating algorithmic recommendations on youtube across issues and over time ariadna matamoros-fernandez queensland university of technology joanne e. gray queensland university of technology louisa bartolo queensland university of technology jean burgess queensland university of technology nicolas suzor queensland university of technology introduction algorithms play a pivotal role in influencing users’ exposure to a range of diverse media content and information sources, which is critical for a media environment supportive of deliberative democracy (helberger, 2012). scholars have argued that platforms’ focus on maximising ‘engagement’ can limit user exposure to different points of view (e.g. pariser, 2011); while others suggest that excessive concern about personalisation limiting users’ exposure to diverse content may not be warranted (e.g. möller et al., 2018). the opacity of algorithms makes it difficult to reconcile these conflicting views. while calls for greater transparency may be justified, the complexities of digital platforms pose unique challenges that complicate the effectiveness of transparency as a tool for generating knowledge about “what is hidden” (rieder & hofmann, 2020, p.5). these challenges have motivated a growing body of empirical research interested in studying algorithms from the outside. observability has been proposed as a path to deal “systematically with the problem of studying complex algorithmic systems” (rieder & hofmann, 2020, p.1). conceptions of transparency suggest an algorithm is a mathematical formula that, if revealed for oversight, could improve understanding of platforms’ role in media diversity. contrastingly, as a regulatory tool, observability recognises platform algorithms as complex socio-technical systems. algorithmic performance, particularly of those that use deep learning models, is influenced by multiple factors: design choices; built-in randomness; business practices; content creator optimisation tactics; and audience practices. as such, rieder and hofmann (2020) advocate for “regulating for observability” (p. 22), stressing the need to observe platform performance over time (p. 24). drawing on the idea of platform observability, this paper combines computational and qualitative methods to investigate the types of content youtube’s ‘up next’ feature amplifies over time, using three search terms associated with sociocultural issues for which concerns have been raised about youtube’s role: ‘coronavirus’, ‘feminism’ and ‘beauty’. we provide empirical evidence for evaluating the claims made by critics and the counterclaims made by youtube itself about the function of the platform’s ‘up next’ feature in amplifying problematic, authoritative, or diverse content. method over six weeks, we collected videos (and their metadata) that were highly ranked in the search results for our three keywords, as well as the top recommendations associated with these videos, repeating the exercise for three steps in the recommendation chain. we then examined patterns in the recommended videos (and channels) for each query and their variation over time. the following research questions informed our analysis: what kind of media does youtube frequently recommend over time in relation to specific socio-cultural topics? are there patterns that can help answer longstanding questions about media diversity? are there patterns that can improve understanding of youtube’s operationalisation of 'media authority'? our approach provides two main vantage points from which to study algorithmic cultures: as time is crucial to platform observability, we examine recommendations over time, moving away from the “snapshot logic” underlying many studies on algorithmic accountability (rieder & hofmann, 2020, p. 7); and because ‘good’ recommendations can only be envisioned and operationalised in relation to specific issue domains, we study recommendations across specific topics (rieder, 2020, p.334). findings we found significant variation in recommended videos (content diversity) over time and across queries. this finding aligns with the company’s commitment to “diversification” in the ‘up next’ section (davidson et al., 2010). yet, we also found youtube clearly prioritises certain channels (source diversity) over time and across steps, which provided important insights into how youtube operationalises “authoritativeness” in practice. us channels dominated across queries, down the chains, and over time, highlighting the cultural dominance of the us on youtube (rieder et al., 2020). our data also suggests that youtube makes decisions to categorise certain topics deemed societally significant and truth-oriented enough for heavyheaded platform intervention (e.g. vaccination, climate change, elections), while others (e.g. gender politics and beauty) are less regulated by youtube. while youtube might be committed to offering video diversity in the ‘up next’ section, we found that the videos most recommended for each of our queries did not feature a breadth of genres, viewpoints, or framings. for ‘beauty’, youtube’s ‘up next’ section favoured channels uploading highly stereotyped, commercialised and gendered content, and for ‘feminism’ it prioritised channels run by male youtubers with strong anti-feminist views. these findings indicate that youtube has not effectively addressed content diversity from a social perspective (failing to attend to factors such as race, gender, nationality, sexuality and ability). our findings show a clear correlation between frequently recommended channels and popularity and ‘freshness’ (youtube’s proxies for ‘quality’). however, platform and issue vernaculars (gibbs et al., 2015) also play a role in influencing what was recommended for each query. increasingly, content creators understand the importance of ‘gaming’ social media algorithms to boost visibility (bishop, 2019), implementing and testing various optimisation tactics–e.g. use of relevant keywords in headlines–to increase their chance of amplification by recommendation systems, which was visible in both the ‘feminism’ and ‘beauty’ data. finally, we found the algorithms underpinning the ‘up next’ feature to be, like ranking algorithms, sensitive to newsworthy events and controversies (rieder et al., 2018, p. 63). this was visible in the ‘feminism’ data where india-based channels uploading new content to youtube were recommended at high rates after a gender-based controversy relating to indian actress neha dhuphia. conclusion this paper provides the basis for a crucial intervention in the space between technology press speculation and folk theories about algorithms on the one hand, and abstract critical theory on the other. we show how corporate understandings of diversity, quality and authoritativeness, and their operationalisation in practice, can have significant limitations in terms of improving the types of content that are amplified by automated recommendations systems and, potentially, the types of information users are exposed to in relation to issue domains. references bishop, s. (2019). managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip. new media & society, 21(11–12), 2589–2606. davidson, j., liebald, b., liu, j., nandy, p., van vleet, t., gargi, u., . . . sampath, d. (2010). the youtube video recommendation system. proceedings of the fourth acm conference on recommender systems (pp. 293–296). usa: association for computing machinery. gibbs, m., meese, j., arnold, m., nansen, b., & carter, m. (2015). # funeral and instagram: death, social media, and platform vernacular. information, communication & society, 18(3), 255–268 helberger, n. (2012). exposure diversity as a policy goal. journal of media law, 4(1), 65–92. möller, j., trilling, d., helberger, n., & van es, b. (2018). do not blame it on the algorithm: an empirical assessment of multiple recommender systems and their impact on content diversity, information, communication & society, 21(7), 959-977. pariser, e. (2011). the filter bubble: how the new personalized web is changing what we read and how we think (reprint edition). penguin books. rieder, b., & hofmann, j. (2020). towards platform observability. internet policy review, 9(4). https://doi.org/10.14763/2020.4.1535 rieder, b., matamoros-fernández, a., & coromina, ò. (2018). from ranking algorithms to ‘ranking cultures’: investigating the modulation of visibility in youtube search results. convergence, 24(1), 50–68. antoine-"miss rona is really clapping the white supremacists"-"miss rona is really clapping the white supre copy selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 13-16 oct 2021 (2021, october). “miss rona is really clapping the white supremacists”: black twitter’s political humor in covid-19 times. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “miss rona is really clapping the white supremacists”: black twitter’s political humor in covid-19 times anshare antoine university of central florida mel stanfill university of central florida as has been widely reported, the covid-19 pandemic has disproportionately sickened and killed black americans. at the same time, however, there is a significant body of conversation on black twitter that jokes about the pandemic. this includes tweets that nickname the pandemic as miss rona,” as in “god i need a drink so bad, miss rona i promise i will be good.” as previous research has shown, black online practices are “libidinal” (brock, jr. 2020) or expressive of affect (lu and steele 2019). in particular, black online practices (brock, jr. 2020; lu and steele 2019), black humor (haggins 2007), and the intersection of the two (monk-payton 2017) are all forms of group interaction that encompass both joy and pain, moments rooted in pleasure but also a “response to social, political, and economic realities of oppression” (haggins 2007, 13). through an analysis of tweets using the “miss rona” nickname, we examine how black twitter humor serves as a site of political critique of both public policy failures in the covid-19 pandemic and the trump administration more broadly, with users leveraging practices like signifyin’ (gates, jr 1989), african american vernacular english (aave), and wordplay to resist legibility by outsiders as they orient toward their own community. methods to make sense of this cultural phenomenon, we collected tweets for the phrase “miss rona” between october 6 and october 9, 2020 using the twitter archiving google sheet (hawksey n.d.). the search terms was selected after a preliminary survey of black twitter conversation about covid-19, as a phrase that was not widely used in other twitter enclaves in order to limit false positives (florini 2019). we collected a total of 3798 tweets for “miss rona.” we then removed instances of retweets from the data set before calculating word frequency using orange to gain a broad overview of the data (demšar et al. 2013). we subsequently took a random sample of 100 tweets for initial qualitative analysis. though retweets were removed in order to not skew these two methods, we also counted the quantity of retweets to create a sample of the most popular posts. the two authors coded the random and most popular samples virtual event independently for major themes, and then discussed to reach consensus about both the themes and to identify the keywords representative of the themes. those keywords were then searched in the full body of tweets to create corpuses of tweets for each of three themes: references to political figures, direct addresses to miss rona, and projections of the future. these three corpuses were then closely read for patterns in how users humorously engaged with both the coronavirus and the political landscape. findings our examination of black twitter’s “miss rona” tweets revealed that one of the key themes was a connection of the virus to the broader political moment within a heavily critical, but humorous dialogue. in october 2020, when our tweets were collected, many members of the trump administration had recently been diagnosed with covid-19, which was widely viewed in light of the then-president’s downplaying of the pandemic. black twitter used forms of signyfin’ to engage with and critique the political climate, headed by the then-president donald trump, that had politicized the covid-19 pandemic making minority groups more likely to contract and die from the virus. many of the “miss rona'' tweets originating from black twitter used humor to express outrage as the african american community disproportionately suffered the consequences of donald trump’s inaction at the beginning of the pandemic. the tweets showed the ways black humor is political commentary that resonates with the black community, addressing or referring to black trauma during the pandemic: dealing with continued racial violence, increased public visibility of white supremacist ideology, and medical disparities based on race. african american vernacular english (aave) featured heavily in the tweets we examined as black twitter used the hybrid dialect to circumvent twitter’s 240 character limit and to invoke the speech intonation unique to black communicative and cultural practices. the tweets are also expressions of black twitter catharsis (joy despite pain) through witty one-sided twitter banters that skillfully and playfully engage with the social and political climate. while the tweets may seem trivial on the surface, correct and full knowledge of their meaning is dependent upon an authentic black experience. the tweets we examined epitomize twitter as a counterpublic digital space where black people avoid respectability politics, engaging with political and social issues within their communicative traditions and culture, to which the white gaze is irrelevant. conclusion through examining these tweets, which appear to make light of a pandemic that has disproportionately sickened and killed black americans, we consider how these conversations go beyond laughing to keep from crying to coded political statements and cultural alliance. we conceptualize signifyin’ as a black cultural technology with affordances such as humor, misdirection, and double meaning that enables black twitter users to not only perform their racial identity, but also leverage humor to comment on political and social reality. twitter’s affordances, such as its “trending” feature, allow black users to digitally gather around a conversation as they would at the barbershop or corner store sharing cultural and political commentary that is powerful because of its collective participation and reach. while black twitter is not a monolith nor it is a singular representation of all black people, the “miss rona” tweets demonstrate a shared cultural, communicative practice and response to oppressive policies and actions that devastate the black community in real life. we argue that black twitter’s jokes about the collective trauma of covid-19 is a resource for online camaraderie, cultural critique, and community affiliation. references brock, jr., andré. 2020. distributed blackness: african american cybercultures. new york: nyu press. 'hpãdu��-dqh]��7rpdå�&xun��$ohã�(umdyhf��ýuw�*ruxs��7rpdå�+rþhydu��0lwdu� milutiqrylþ��0duwlq�0rålqd��hw�do��������³2udqjh��'dwd�0lqlqj�7rroer[�lq�3\wkrq�´� journal of machine learning research ��������í����� florini, sarah. 2019. “enclaving and cultural resonance in black ‘game of thrones’ fandom.” transformative works and cultures 29 (march). https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2019.1498. gates, jr, henry louis. 1989. the signifying monkey: a theory of african-american literary criticism. reprint edition. new york, ny: oxford university press. haggins, bambi. 2007. laughing mad: the black comic persona in post-soul america. new brunswick, n.j: rutgers university press. hawksey, martin. n.d. “twitter archiving google sheet.” tags. accessed february 11, 2021. https://tags.hawksey.info/. lu, jessica h., and catherine knight steele. 2019. “‘joy is resistance’: cross-platform resilience and (re)invention of black oral culture online.” information, communication & society 22 (6): 823–37. kwwsv���grl�ruj����������������;�������������� monk-payton, brandy. 2017. “#laughingwhileblackgender and the comedy of social media blackness.” feminist media histories ���������–���� kwwsv���grl�ruj���������ipk������������� selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): papaevangelou, c., & roinioti, e. (2021, october). exploring video-game production’s contingency οn live-streaming platforms: the case οf twitch. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. exploring video-game production’s contingency on live-streaming platforms: the case of twitch papaevangelou charis université toulouse iii paul sabatier (lerass/jolt-etn) elina roinioti panteion university of political and social sciences introduction this article studies the cultural contingency (nieborg & poell, 2018) of videogame production on amazon’s live-streaming platform, twitch. it looks at this phenomenon from a political-economic perspective to unearth twitch’s platformisation strategy to better understand what it means for the video-game industry. subsequently, we wish to grasp what dependencies are created and how it is made possible. we argue that twitch is transforming into an integral part of the video-game production cycle by expanding its services to every stage of a game’s life cycle. literature review scholars have rigorously engaged with platforms or the so-called “platform society” (van dijck et al., 2018), in which socio-technical infomediaries have created “complex multisided market configurations” (nieborg & poell, 2018, p. 1) in an organised, curated and non-neutral way (gillespie, 2010). subsequently, platformisation signifies the infrastructural embeddedness of platforms (zhang, 2020; plantin et al., 2018), supported by a business strategy of expanding beyond their services’ boundaries to standardise appropriation, processing and exploitation of data (helmond, 2015), resulting in a dependency of content creators on digital platforms (papaevangelou, 2018). one of the most popular and thus thoroughly examined case study, is twitch.tv. people’s motives for watching streamers (taylor, 2018), twitch community of practice (consalvo & phelps, 2021) or twitch as a virtual third space (hamilton et al, 2014), are some of the most prominent approaches on the subject. live-streaming and esports (hamari & sjöblom, 2017) and “playbour” (postigo, 2016; woodcock & johnson, 2019) have also been well examined. although some have argued that twitch has democratised access to the game industry (johnson & woodcock, 2018), the affordances and the economic implications of the platform (partin 2020; roinioti & papaevangelou, 2019; kaytoue et al., 2012), the gamification (siutila, 2018) or, even, gamblification (abarbanel & johnson, 2020) mechanics constitute aspects of a phenomenon that is still evolving and changing. methodology this paper examined twitch’s “game developer playbook” on two levels: its content and its discourse. first, we coded the playbook to identify features that twitch proposed as solutions for game developers and then, labelled them according to which stage of a video-game’s production cycle they arguably affect. we must emphasise that we based our categorisation on twitch’s broad “three phases,” which is an indicative distilment of a typical game development cycle. second, we attempted to critically analyse the discourse dictated by twitch: following the tradition of semiotically analysing software affordances (curinga, 2014) or scripts (ask et al., 2019), we analysed twitch’s document in order to infer how the platform is shaping up to accommodate game developers not only as streamers but also as customers. findings & discussion feature brief description production phases identity serves as a remote access point for twitch (e.g., as facebook login) development bounty board sponsored rewardable tasks for streamers to complete road to launch & live games interactive extensions interactive extensions (e.g., overlays) for streams road to launch & live games drops time or event-based rewards (e.g., ingame items) for viewers or streamers road to launch & live games table 1 twitch's core game production features the features in table 1, demonstrate how twitch has infiltrated the game production cycle with infrastructural but also metagaming elements. specifically: identity essentially enables the communication between twitch and video games under development; the bounty board incentivises streamers to promote partnered video games; drops and interactive extensions seek to acquire more viewers, as well as make streamers stream certain video games and, thus, convert some viewers into players or as twitch mentions, into payers; drops, particularly, also drive more amazon prime subscriptions. game developers can then have access to game data, like viewership metrics, to gauge how streamer-friendly their game is and optimise it, as well as utilise said metrics to target specific streamers to advertise their game. similar to free-to-play games, in which data and users’ behavioural preferences are used to fuel game design and create the so-called “game as service experience” (ball & fordham, 2018). game developers are incentivised to apply these features in their game design, thus creating an economic feedback loop that a) aspires to increase user acquisition, retention and revenue, b) locks-in game developers and viewers alike, and c) “platformises” the gaming experience. figure 1 twitch's platformisation loop (authors’ formulation) furthermore, from a streamer’s perspective, choosing a game to stream is not related to the content per se, but rather to the popularity of the game. online tools like twitchtracker or twitchstrike provide information about viewership and popularity of a game. in game developers conference (gdc) 2014, the streamer sean plott or “day[9]tv” talked about how skill-based or non-linear narrative games (zukowski, 2013) are more pleasurable to watch. likewise, sjöblom et al. https://twitchtracker.com/ https://twitchstrike.com/ https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/chriszukowski/842841/ https://www.researchgate.net/profile/max-sjoeblom?_sg%5b0%5d=dkh5hpzzgwkh9ekowlv8vknmx4tiktxzxshmp03e8l3x3bhbtmfpakhxyxnhgggmsv5hvag.2-k1e_lbtvbztj5iqbbh26dyvm0w7oljqx19vrtv3nmzrs7byanjxe14cxro7ob07xcch7x0lqw9ilrajiu9ag&_sg%5b1%5d=qi3c6sg59yogtods8pvqtkhpfkmt2mkdgdchggufuv4j4luclor-pvcf4yw4dliik0fvac4.idaf3nwgwq-aw7wrzecegmj0eqzi7t-ie4k72dfbl3qqo38-jkougodmdrd0bc8uxkqbxxo0hakjhvsgukzwww (2017) have talked about the “spectator experience” and how the rts genre lacks this element, initiating thus a discussion about mechanics, game genres and live-streaming. this kind of platform embeddedness in content creation is not new: netflix, streaming technologies, the algorithmic-driven model of viewership and subscription membership, have had a profound impact on the contemporary tv industry, exploiting what burroughs (2018) has mentioned as the “industry lore” (havens, 2013). now netflix has become a content creator carrying the “badge” of quality tv (ibid), while disrupting traditional means of distribution and production. accordingly, one cannot help but wonder if twitch is claiming the same spot for videogame content creation; and, if this is indeed part of twitch’s strategy, what kind of content creation should we anticipate? are game development studios ready to be “twitched?” one thing is certain: we have yet to fully grasp the consequences of livestreaming and twitch on the video-game industry and beyond. references ask, k., spilker, h. s., & hansen, m. (2019). the politics of user-platform relationships: co-scripting live-streaming on twitch.tv. first monday. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i7.9648 burroughs, b. (2018). house of netflix: streaming media and digital lore. popular communication, 17(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2017.1343948 consalvo, m. & phelps, a. (2021). 6. game development live on twitch : observations of practice and educational synergies. in o. sotamaa & j. svelch (ed.), game production studies (pp. 123-140). amsterdam: amsterdam university press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048551736-008 curinga, m. x. (2014). critical analysis of interactive media with software affordances. first monday. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v19i9.4757 gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of ‘platforms’. new media & society, 12(3), 347–364. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342738 hamari, j., & sjöblom, m. (2017). what is esports and why do people watch it? internet research, 27(2), 211–232. https://doi.org/10.1108/intr-04-2016-0085 hamilton, w.a.,garretson, o. and kerne, a. (2014). streaming on twitch: fostering participatory communities of play within live mixed media. proceedings of the 32nd annual acm conference on human factors in computing systems havens, t. (2013). black television travels: african american media around the globe. new york university press. helmond, a. (2015). the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready. social media + society, 1(2), 205630511560308. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080 nieborg, d. b., & helmond, a. (2019). the political economy of facebook’s platformization in the mobile ecosystem: facebook messenger as a platform instance. media, culture & society, 41(2), 196–218. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443718818384 https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2017.1343948 https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048551736-008 https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v19i9.4757 nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society, 20(11), 4275–4292. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769694 papaevangelou, c. (2018). “play, connect, create”: delineating valve’s steam platformisation strategy through its affordances faculty of humanities theses. https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/368625 partin, w. c. (2020). bit by (twitch) bit: “platform capture” and the evolution of digital platforms. social media + society, 6(3), 205630512093398. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120933981 plantin, j.-c., lagoze, c., edwards, p. n., & sandvig, c. (2018). infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook. new media & society, 20(1), 293–310. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553 postigo, h. (2016). the socio-technical architecture of digital labor: converting play into youtube money. new media & society, 18(2), 332–349. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814541527 ροϊνιώτη, ε., & παπαευαγγέλου, χ. (2019). esports και ψηφιακές αρένες. στο ε. ροϊνιώτη. ε. πανδιά & γ. σκαρπέλος (επιμ) ψηφιακά παιχνίδια: φιλοσοφικές, κοινωνικές και πολιτισμικές αναζητήσεις, oasis, αθήνα sjöblom, m., törhönen, m., hamari, j., & macey, j. (2017). content structure is king: an empirical study on gratifications, game genres and content type on twitch. computers in human behavior, 73, 161–171. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.03.036 suitila, m. (2018). the gamification of gaming streams, gamifin conference 2018, pori, finland taylor, t. l. (2018). watch me play. princeton university press; jstor. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvc77jqw van dijck, j., poell, t., & de waal, m. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford university press. woodcock, j., & johnson, m. r. (2019). the affective labor and performance of live streaming on twitch.tv. television & new media, 20(8), 813–823. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419851077 zhang, z. (2020). infrastructuralization of tik tok: transformation, power relationships, and platformization of video entertainment in china. media, culture & society. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720939452 zukowski, c. (2013). how to make your games better to stream, according to day[9], gamasutra, november 5 2013, accessed 15th july 2021. https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/204099/how_to_make_your_games_bett er_to_stream_according_to_day9.php https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120933981 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.03.036 https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/204099/how_to_make_your_games_better_to_stream_according_to_day9.php https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/204099/how_to_make_your_games_better_to_stream_according_to_day9.php selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): hardy, a.(2022, november). the intellectual labor of digital black feminist enclaves in the narrative construction of #muterkelly. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the intellectual labor of digital black feminist enclaves in the narrative construction of #muterkelly alisa hardy university of maryland abstract: while existing research has examined counterpublics in hashtag activism, little attention is given to digital enclaves that emerge when mainstream media disregards the voices of these communities. this paper helps us understand the process of hashtag activism that derives from the intellectual labor of digital enclaves. i examine the digital black feminist enclave that emerged through the black online magazine, ebony, mobilizing #muterkelly on twitter. #muterkelly brings attention to musical artist's, robert sylvester kelly, sexual exploitation of black women and girls. i combined digital black feminist theory with critical technocultural discourse analysis to demonstrate how this black feminist enclave maximized ebony's interface to defy ideologies of capitalism, racism, colonialism, and sexism that underpin the music industry's public allegiance to black women’s exploitation on and offline. this digital black feminist enclave solidified in the rhetorical and technical demand of #muterkelly, for (1) the music industry to dispatch all financial, commercial, and social engagements with the kelly and resist negative ideologies of black women inscribed in his musical lineage, (2) for mainstream media to eradicate discourse that romanticizes domestic violence from celebrity black men, and (3) for survivors’ take space in the digital sphere to assemble a grapevine committed to advocacy aimed at legal justice and increased protection for black women and girls. it is important for scholars to trace the lineage of internet practices that traverse to hashtag activism and for us to look at the digital enclaves that produce these practices. the digital affordance of hashtags on social media platforms like twitter allow users to streamline their messages nationally and centralize discussions around a single issue or focus (moscato, 2016, 3; brock, 2020, pp. 279-281). hashtag activism describes how users raise awareness for specific social issues through hashtags that foster political debates, communal belonging, and identity construction (wonneberger, hellesten, & jacobs, 2021, p.1697). research on hashtag activism has primarily focused on the ways counterpublics, or public spheres separate from the dominant group, emerge on social media platforms (fraser,1990; ku, 2018, 499; jackson, bailey, and welles, 2018). while existing research has examined the construction of counterpublics online, little attention is given to digital enclaves that emerge when mainstream media initially disregards the voices of marginalized communities. catherine squires described enclaves as hidden spaces for minority groups to strategize and gather resources for intervention into dominant discourse (p. 458). inside the enclave, group members can interpret the rhetorical messages in public debates and create rhetorical strategies to build a movement that is dedicated to their interests and needs (chávez, 2011, p. 13; squires, 458). through the intellectual labor of the enclave, the group can develop into a counterpublic that then challenges ideologies of race, gender, and class (squires, 2002, p. 448). this paper helps us understand the social construction of a hashtag that derives from the intellectual labor of digital enclaves. in this study, i examined the digital black feminist enclave that emerged on the black magazine platform, ebony, mobilizing #muterkelly on twitter (brock, 2018; steele, 2021; jones, 2019; collins, 2000). #muterkelly formed within the digital sphere to bring attention to musical artist, robert sylvester kelly’s sexual exploitation of black women and girls. combining digital black feminist theory with critical technocultural discourse analysis (ctda), i analyze how users fostered enclaved discourse that sharpened language and cultivated research about kelly’s harassment from 2012 to 2016 (brock, 2020; steele, 2021). i used ctda as a technique to examine the discourse on ebony in a way that connects the sites digital affordances including imagery, format, tools, and codes, with underlying ideologies of black womanhood. i collected my data by using the wayback machine website to examine the initial interface and discourse on the platform during that time. to understand how the message to silence kelly in the music industry circulated across the digital sphere, i mapped the links between ebony and bloggers from other platforms that used digital affordances to connect themselves to the conversations happening on ebony. while there were many people engaged in this movement, i examined the intellectual labor of aya de leon, danielle britni, josi pickens and jamilah lemieux to demonstrate how these women collectively worked to construct this movement against kelly. the black feminist enclave that emerged on ebony challenged the tradition of silencing and devaluing black women’s intellectual work in activism. even before hashtag activism, black women were commonly denied entry to mainstream conversations. public spaces reproduced coloniality that privileged white supremacy and patriarchy in public debates ignoring the voices of many black women activists. to counter this oppression, kitchens, churches, homes, and beauty shops emerged as enclaved spaces for black women to speak freely about their daily lives and resist ideologies in civil society (davis, 1999, 367; collins, 2000). these black feminist enclaves cultivated healing, empowerment, self-definition, and relationships that uniquely enhance members’ ability to collectively confront physical and discursive effects of intersecting oppressions in wider public arenas (collins, 2000, pp. 101-110;). extending this research to online platforms, steele (2022) argued that digital black feminist enclaves are online spaces created for and by black women that “produces knowledge through discussion” (84-85). this study builds on this scholarship by demonstrating how the digital black feminist enclave that emerged on ebony participated in the reception, construction, and stratification of #muterkelly. the digital black feminist enclave that emerged on ebony solidified initiatives in the rhetorical and technical demand for (1) the music industry to dispatch all financial, commercial, and social engagements with the kelly and resist negative ideologies of black women inscribed in his musical lineage, (2) mainstream media to eradicate discourse that romanticizes domestic violence from celebrity black men, and (3) survivors’ take space in the digital sphere to assemble a grapevine rhetorically committed to fighting, aimed at legal justice and increased protection for black women and girls. on ebony, many bloggers used the feature of the hyperlink to mobilize selfdefining practices across media platforms that allowed bloggers to criticize dominant discourse about kelly (collins, 2000). in lemieux’s 2013 blog post, she uses sarcastic undertones in language and the bolding of text to differentiate between the blatant ostracization of these women and the factual evidence from the case. in bold text, lemieux posted, “save ‘where were their parents?’” and “save ‘he was not guilty!’” she attached hyperlinks to her post that connected viewers to others engaged in this counter discourse and provided explanations for why these excuses marginalize black women. her intervention largely critiques patriarchal discourse that publicly dehumanized and victimized black women to mask the severity of kelly’s exploitation. lemieux uses the hyperlink as a self-defining tool to build her own story that included evidence from other media posts. together, her self-defining rhetoric fortified the demand to mute the artist and created fertile digital space for the arrival of #muterkelly. by giving increased scholarly attention to the digital enclave’s discursive practices and the digital tools used on the interface, we can better trace the lineage of internet practices that traverse to hashtag activism. references bailey, m., & trudy. (2018). on misogynoir: citation, erasure, and plagiarism. feminist media studies, 18(4), 762-768. brock, a. l. (2020). distributed blackness: african american cybercultures. ny: new york university press. choi, s. y., & cho, y. (2017). generating counter-public spheres through social media: two social movements in neoliberalised south korea. javnost-the public, 24(1), 15-33. davis, o. i. (1999). in the kitchen: transforming the academy through safe spaces of resistance. western journal of communication (includes communication reports), 63(3), 364-381. fraser, n. (1992). rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. in c. calhoun (ed.), habermas and the public sphere (pp.109–142). cambridge, ma: mit press. hill collins, p. (2000). black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. ny: routledge. jackson, s. j., bailey, m., & foucault welles, b. (2018). # girlslikeus: trans advocacy and community building online. new media & society, 20(5), 1868-1888. jones, f. (2019). reclaiming our space: how black feminists are changing the world from the tweets to the streets. boston, ma: beacon press. kuo, r. (2018). racial justice activist hashtags: counterpublics and discourse circulation. new media & society, 20(2), 495–514. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816663485 moscato, d. (2016). media portrayals of hashtag activism: a framing analysis of canada’s# idlenomore movement. media and communication, 4(2), 3-12. steele, c. (2021) digital black feminism. ny: new york university press. wonneberger, a., hellsten, i. r., & jacobs, s. h. (2021). hashtag activism and the configuration of counterpublics: dutch animal welfare debates on twitter. information, communication & society, 24(12), 1694-1711. 2020 markham aoir spir echolocation paper.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): markham, a. (2020, october 28-31). echolocating the digital self: a conceptual framework. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. echolocating the digital self: a conceptual framework annette n. markham rmit university introduction/overview bats send out a continuous series of shrieks as they fly, using the returning echoes to build up a sonic map of their surroundings. navigate through space. the speed and sound of the responding echo tells them the location and shape of material around them. how is this related to internet studies? echo-location, in the way we might think of radar, sonar, or lidar, serves as an useful metaphor for describing the process of searching for and locating the self in an era of constant connectivity and ‘always on’ (turkle, 2008) --or more importantly, ‘always available’ internet. building from foundational symbolic interactionist theories that the self is social (mead, 1934), performative (goffman, 1959), and relational (from cooley’s notion of the looking glass self (1902) to gergen’s notions of the populated self in 1991), this work focuses on the quality of the response in micro moments of the symbolic interaction process. it argues that these are central in positioning or mapping social space as well as the characteristics of the self within these spaces, particularly in, but not limited to, digitally saturated contexts. the discursive and material responses of digital interfaces --red dots, numbers, hearts, checkmarks often colloquially called ‘pings,’ play key and active roles in digital interactions. pings can be conceptualized as having qualities of liveness: they are primary (rather than mediating) interlocutors, interpersonal partners in ongoing interactions through which the individual constructs self identity. virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 virtual event this conceptual frame of echolocation contributes to stronger theorizing about a) what is happening in and through the continuous ‘call and response’ of pings, notifications, information exchange, and b) why it is so difficult to disconnect from social media. methodology the development of the theory of social echolocation draws on my observations and close readings of autoethnographic accounts of a group of around 50 young participants, a theoretical sample from a larger 6-year study (involving approximately 1500 persons, between 2012-2018, about everyday social media use (cf markham, 2018; tiidenberg, et al, 2017). participants were selected because they mention the importance of responses or indicate distress about being disconnected. participants generated material through guided autoethnographic study of their own digital lived experience, including periods of deliberate disconnection from various digital media. material analyzed includes video, audio, and written narratives. participants granted informed consent. sensitive material is stored according to gdpr regulations and anonymized appropriately, following best practices aoir guidelines. material presented effectively obscures personally identifiable information. reliance and anxiety regarding notifications in some ways, the participants’ perceptions of notifications are not surprising. some types of notifications are useful, such as double checkmarks in messaging apps (“i immediately see whether my friends have seen my question, and for some reason, i feel better, like people are there.” says marie, danish, age 26). other types of notifications, especially push notifications like red dots on iphone screens or audible pings are annoying, interruptive. as paolo, a 24-year-old italian remarks, “i hate seeing those evil red dots! they bug me until i finally check them, to make them disappear.” not only are they stressful (cf., kushlev, proulx, & dunn, 2016; pielot & rello, 2017), they produce pressure to check one’s device repeatedly (as 22year-old jax from usa says, “i’m so mad at myself for not being able to wait until the end of class to check. why am i so obsessed with instant responses?”). this tendency has been linked to increased dopamine production, suggesting notifications are addiction (haynes, 2018). whether or not addictive, the experience of notification is powerful. as paul frosh remarks, “the wrongly colored ticks are a wound, cutting into me as a blade. ...it bruises me, it immobilizes me, it reveals the termination of connection” (2017, np). participants express deep anxiety especially when they receive too few or no responses. the unexpected absence of response might indicate that they can no longer verify the presence or status of others, but more interesting to the present study, it’s associated with feelings of deep vulnerability about the presence and status of the self. in a way, participants feel as if they themselves have disappeared. disconnection as ontological dysphoria their expressions of vulnerability take us in a different direction about identity formation in the digital age. previous conceptual work has tended to focus on how digital identity is a matter of performativity (e.g., sunden’s 2003 notion that we write ourselves into being); that it occurs through multiple windows (turkle, 1995) or on multiple frontand back-stages (e.g., pearson, 2008, drawing on goffman, 1959). my ethnographic work suggests that digital identity is even more deeply linked to the quality and characteristics of the responses to these performances than we have previously theorized in studies of digital identity. at the granular level of the interaction through which self is relationally constructed and reified, we can ask what is happening in and just following the moment of the ping, checkmark, push notification, or other form of informational echoes? these moments are when and how the self makes sense of what they signaled (cf. donath 2007) and not only respond in kind, but simultaneously build self awareness through micro adjustments, as weick discussed in his early work on the social psychology of sensemaking (1969). this connects to recent explorations on distraction and affective modulation by susanna paasonen (2016) or the phenomenology of “operative attention” by paul frosh (2019). these affect scholars are among those who attend to these granular levels where we can see micro shifts in affect. sharif mowlabocus (2016), for example, focuses on the rhythms of what occurs in what he calls “interstitial time,” or “moments when we become uncertain — about what to do next, about how to occupy our time, about how to ‘be’ in a particular space, perhaps even about our life trajectories” (np). echolocation contributes to this discussion by focusing on how certainty is a matter of continuous call, response, and adjustment. in the case of bats, the outcome is flying at high speeds, avoiding obstacles, and catching small insects. in digital culture, it enables people to assess their position relative to others in multiple networks and relations. even more, the presence of a continuous ‘call and response’ ontological positioning becomes visible when it is absent. disconnecting results in being removed from the continual process of marking the social state of self and other. when the self is identified through the flow of responses, and suddenly there is no response, it can cast the social body into doubt. as celia, a 25-year-old bulgarian writes, “i was only disconnected for two hours, but it was not pleasant. it was like i didn’t know where i was or what i should do.” this is not like removing one of the senses. rather, the body suddenly appears as a discrete, separate, and isolated object. this ontological dysphoria is poignantly expressed by participants like sara, a 24-year-old german: “i know i’m right here and it’s ridiculous to feel so dependent on my phone. but turning off all my apps even for a few hours has made me feel like i’m not anywhere.” this paper is part of a larger project to build a symbolic interactionist conceptual frame that gives attention to the qualities and functions of human and nonhuman responses, not just as feedback or social validation, but as echoes through which we locate and demarcate boundaries of our selves. references cooley, c. h. (1902). human nature and the social order. c. scribner’s sons. donath, j. (2007). signals in social supernets. journal of computer mediated communication, 13(1). 231-251. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00394.x frosh, p. (2019). the poetics of digital media. polity press. frosh, p. (2017). vital signs: screenshots, social media and existential delegation. precarious media life conference. sigtuna, sweden, october 30. gergen, k. (1991). the saturated self. basic books. goffman, e. (1959). the presentation of self in everyday life. doubleday publishers. haynes, t. (2018). dopamine, smartphones, and you: a battle for attention. harvard university science in the news blog, available from: http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones-battle-time/ mead, g. h. (1967/1934). mind, self and society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist. university of chicago press. kushlev, k., proulx, j., and dunn, e. w. (2016). "silence your phones": smartphone notifications increase inattention and hyperactivity symptoms. in proceedings of the 2016 chi conference on human factors in computing systems. new york. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858359 markham, a. n. (2018). critical pedagogy as a response to datafication. qualitative inquiry, online first edition at https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800418809470 markham, a. n. (2013). dramaturgy of digital experience. in edgley, c. (ed.). the drama of social life (pp. 279-294). ashgate press. mowlabocus, s. (2016). the ’mastery’ of the swipe: smartphones, transitional objects and interstitial time. first monday, 21(10). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v21i10.6950 paasonen, s. (2016). fickle focus: distraction, affect and the production of value in social media. first monday, 21(10). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v21i10.6949 pearson, e. (2009). all the world wide web’s a stage: the performance of identity in online social networks. first monday, 14(3). pielot, m. & rello, l. (2017). productive, anxious, lonely: 24 hours without push notifications. in proceedings of the mobilehci conference. vienna, austria. sunden, j. (2003). material virtualities: approaching online textual embodiment. peter lang. tiidenberg, k., markham, a.n., pereira, g., rehder, m., sommer, j., dremljuga, r., & dougherty, m. (2017). “i’m an addict” and other sensemaking devices: a discourse analysis of self-reflections of lived experience on social media. proceedings of the 8th international conference on social media & society. article no. 21. available: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3097286.3097307 turkle, s. (2008). always-on/always-on-you: the tethered self. in katz, j. (ed.). handbook of mobile communication studies (121-138). mit press. turkle, s. (1995) life on the screen. simon & schuster. weick, k. (1969). social psychology of organizing. addison-wesley. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): kuntsman, a. (2020, october). smart cities’ environmental dreams and their dirty material politics. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. smart cities’ environmental dreams and their dirty material politics adi kuntsman manchester metropolitan university this paper draws on a study that included two types of materials: firstly, visual and textual analysis of a selection of smart cities’ websites: bristol, london, milton keynes, dubai, beijing, cape town, and moscow; and secondly, a review of published literature on smart cities and the environment. in both, a celebratory narrative of environmental efficiency is abundant, in various forms. although ecology is usually not the primary focus of smart cities’ self-promotion, their websites often tell a story of how smart cities would ultimately make the environment better. they would streamline the collection of waste by using smart bins; use smartphone-operated bike-rental schemes; monitor air pollution; control traffic via digital dashboards; and run paper-free e-government services. the literature about smart cities, similarly, talks about “sharing cities”; “green growth”, “green infrastructure”, “progressive urbanisation”, “sustainable urbanism”, “green technology innovation”, “resilient cities”, “smart future” and more. however, despite the overwhelming rhetoric of being environmental saviours, smart cities pose multiple ecological threats, most of which are invisibilised, because they take place elsewhere: the ever-growing extraction of resources needed to produce the actual devices: from a range of smart sensors to the smartphones and computers themselves; the toxicity of their production process and of the e-waste left behind after their short lives, often made disposable by design; and the rapidly increasing energy demands of data farms, needed to sustain every air pollution sensor, every city dashboard, every smart bus stop, every ‘smart’ communication network. at the heart of my paper lies a troubling, yet crucial question: how to reconcile the rapid and expansive adoption of various smart technologies into environmentally driven initiatives and sustainability projects such as smart cities, with the extensive environmental damages brought on by the digitization itself? how, in other words, can we think about smart cities environmental promises, while taking into account their dirty material politics? i argue that a celebratory approach to smart cities as environmental dreamlands of the future, resonates with a broader tendency within environmental sustainability literature, where techno-optimism currently dominates (kuntsman and rattle, 2019). the literature is not blind to the complexity of technological innovation. but even when warning against the environmental costs of manufacturing and operating digital devices and platforms, or when cautioning against improper disposal resulting in toxic e-waste, most research into environmental sustainability is not advocating to reduce the use, or to shift away from digital technologies. when concerns about the environmental damages of digital communication are raised, the responses still follow the circular logic of technooptimism: the tools merely need to be improved; the users merely need to be educated to use them correctly; and more research or monitoring needs to take place – and those solutions, too, often require even more digital devices, platforms and networks. this phenomenon can be understood as ‘digital solutionism’ (morozov 2013; kuntsman and rattle, 2019;) an approach where digital technologies such as the internet, apps, tracking devices etc., are imagined as being both uniquely suited and unquestionably necessary tools for solving political, economic, and indeed environmental problems; while their dangers are rarely acknowledged. this as a form of paradigmatic myopia towards the material harms of digital dependency, a powerful and powerfully enforced blindness that persists despite a wealth of existing scholarly critique. the notion of paradigmatic myopia is crucial, for it is not the absence of evidence of environmental digital harms that is at stake (the fields of geography, environmental science, human health etc have them in abundance), but rather, the insistence on the immateriality of the digital, which prevails within the field of digital communication and media, and in particular within scholarship on smart/ digital cities. i argue that in order to consider life in smart cities as a just life, and a sustainable life, it is imperative that we focus on digital cities’ invisible materiality and on material accountability of digital data and communication and its unevenly distributed toxic effects. such an approach would involve placing the analysis of digital harms geographically and historically (e.g. within the context of past and current colonialism or global inequalities); and being attentive not only to the environmental damages of the digital, but also to which technologies, and where, are inflicting harm on who. to do that, i propose the following steps: firstly, rather than approaching smart cities simply as infrastructures that link together computers, network flows of data, and various city functions (transport, air, water, energy, waste), we need to think of them as relational infrastructures, for example, by looking at the relations between each smart city and broader infrastructures in geographical proximity within and outside of city borders, as well as relations to the actual landscape of the city. in some cases the smart city initiative actually refers to only one area of the city. in some cases, like dubai, it refers to the entire city which seem to exist in a complete detachment between the physical environment – sands, the desert, or the heat – and the digital happiness. in others, like cape town, smart cities are envisioned as part of a continental network. we need to ask: what is the environmental impact on the desert of the energy infrastructure needed to support such a city? what is the cost to the lives of construction workers – who are almost exclusively migrant workers -building the smart city in unbearable heat and dying from heat strokes? secondly, we need to be attentive to the temporal dimension of smart cities: often, the infrastructures of devices and data are created as part of large funded project, only to disappear later, as is the case of milton keynes (uk) which had ambitions plans, data available to all, a dashboard, a network of initiatives, but where no information can be found past 2018. here, we need to ask: what are the he hidden lives, the broken lives, and the afterlives of smart city infrastructures, such as the “internet of trash” created by discarded smart sensors; or the disfigured “smart” bikes, rotting in manchester canal after the citizens refused to adopt them and hacked into their navigation systems instead? finally, it is crucial that we pay attention to the relations between each smart city’s digital infrastructures, and the global distribution of their environmental impacts. where are the smart cities’ e-waste sites? where are the data farms, used to hold the city’s data, located? what kind of cross-city politics of heat (velkova, 2016) do they generate? as the global digital economy grows at an unprecedented speed, the links between global environmental degradation and digital industries become more apparent. yet the geography of material impacts of the digital is often deeply uneven, reflecting and reinforcing many other forms of global and local injustices, and it is that geography that calls for our urgent attention. references kuntsman and rattle (2019). towards a paradigmatic shift in sustainability studies: a systematic review of peer reviewed literature and future agenda setting to consider environmental (un)sustainability of digital communication. environmental communication, 13 (5)., 567-581. morozov e (2013) to save everything, click here: technology, solutionism, and the urge to fix problems that don't exist. london and new york: penguin. velkova, j. (2016) data that warms: waste heat, infrastructural convergence and the computation traffic commodity. data &society, 3(2). microsoft word keye-instagram and the memed self-instagram and the memed self.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): keye, w. (2021, october). instagram and the memed self. paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. instagram and the memed self wade keye university of rochester, visual and cultural studies the communicative power and political potential of internet memes has garnered increasing interest in recent years, compelling study from journalists, researchers, and internet users alike. journalists have delved into specific meme communities with an effort to track memes’ impact on politics both on and offline (nagle, 2017; barrett-ibaria 2018). the crowdsourced meme wiki “know your meme” has become a useful source for taxonomizing memes, their source material, their variations and spread, providing researchers an imperfect but wide-reaching starting place for the history of popular memes. academic work, too, has come to recognize memes as an important part of internet culture and a growing literature has emerged around meme study. the stillcoalescing subfield of “meme theory” has largely focused on memes in the terms of their viral spread and their political or social efficacy (i. e. shifman, 2014). but little research attends to memes as objects in their singularity, nor to the meme makers themselves as artists or craftspeople. the irreverent, bizarre, and deeply political work of instagram meme artists serves as a potent rejoinder to the claim that “the left can’t meme.” in their commitment to an always-moving mix of politics and absurdism, instagram memers have something in common with the alt-right despite their completely opposed political views. many of these well-followed accounts have developed a signature brand of humor and aesthetics while cultivating loyal fans. these “meme lords” are part of a recent wave in online culture i’m calling “weird instagram.” named for facebook precursor (hongo, 2018), weird instagram might best be differentiated from facebook in the way its practitioners have include their own selves in their posts, taking on new performative, diaristic, or autobiographical qualities. self, identity, and subjectivity features prominently in the work of these meme artists, often verging into deeply personal territory. memers present themselves as almost anti-influencers who nevertheless use the same tools and platforms to support their work. by focusing on two meme artist’s use of their own image, this paper describes an emerging practice that toys with identity and the boundaries of the self. selfies and memes are both social media phenomena that aren’t often discussed together. the co-occurrence of the front-facing smartphone camera with a social platform (instagram) designed around the circulation of images forever changed our relationship to photography and portraiture. (marwick, 2015; jurgenson, 2019). alongside the move toward what alice marwick calls “instafame,” a similar push toward authorship and self-promotion has come out of the weird world of meme culture. these artists are compelled by the platform to engage in the same “attention economy” marwick described in her early study. addy borneman (@gayvapeshark) and jenson leonard (@coryintheabyss) rose to viral prominence alongside the explosion of “weird facebook” meme pages and groups (barrett-ibarria, 2018; hongo, 2018). borneman founded the facebook page lettuce dog, inviting leonard to become an admin before forming “sharks, dragon ball, vaping, and being gay.” in 2018 the bulk of their production migrated to their instagram accounts, @gayvapeshark and @coryintheabyss, and to a platform that allowed for a greater control of their content and encouraged more engagement with their followers. borneman was the godmother of weird facebook, and her page lettuce dog became known for its absurdist, irreverent meme production before she moved on to her @gayvapeshark persona. her memes were text-heavy and conversational. mostly using stock photos, borneman’s characters can be seen as types to whom she attributes characteristics that are often unflattering. the humor of borneman’s memes is often found in the contradictions in her character’s behaviors, motivations and selfperceptions. there is one character with greater complexity however: borneman herself. borneman, who was a transwoman, created the anthropomorphic shark character to ventriloquize her observations. but upon moving to instagram, that shark became more confessional, sometimes sharing quotidian details and thoughts from borneman’s life. she began to include her own images as well in september 2018, often connected to experiences from her life as a trans person. imbued with a melancholy humor, this work takes on a new dimension following borneman’s 2020 suicide. “cory in the abyss” is a handle that could not better represent the absurdist hyperreferentiality of meme culture. jenson leonard’s alter-ego refernces a long running twitter meme riffing on the 2007 spin-off cory in the house (abreu, 2017). similarly, leonard’s work often refers to a long and tangled knot of referentiality: online in-jokes, bizarrely appropriated pop culture, and crude humor. unlike the haphazard collage aesthetic of many memers, leonard’s memes are polished works of graphic design exhibiting a meticulous attention to detail. his work is situated in politics, gender, and race—especially the black american experience. leonard’s work as @coryintheabyss, often draw from historical black cultural productions that have little presence in the dank meme world. leonard’s references vacillate between the allusive and the garish, contributing to the sense that he’s cultivating a series of political statements amidst the crude and absurd. this sense is compounded when looking through his memes as a collected body of work. leonard uses his own image very sparingly, when compared to borneman. his face appears in the profile image of his instagram account, photoshopped onto the water entity from the film abyss. in some noteable pieces, leonard uses images of black men in ironic reference to himself and, perhaps, to play on the common racist failure of white people to see black people as unique individuals. this cultivated uncertainty begs the viewer’s complicity in confusing two black men’s identities, an interpellation of visual white supremacy made darkly playful. memers are thought of as political agitators, idle shitposters, or simply nodes in a digital multitude—rarely artists. but weird instagram complicates those frames, and challenges assumptions around memes and their spread. meme artists do create content to be shared in hopes it will go viral, but each meme represents its author’s oeuvre instead of a distributed cultural text. instagram, the home of the “influencer,” imposes a parasocial connection and presentation of self. no longer anonymous, these artists have had to reconcile their own relationship to the selfie. references abreu, manuel. “still i shitpost: cory in the abyss on a communism of the visual + antiblackness in the meme-o-sphere with manuel arturo abreu,” atractivoquenobello. december 12, 2017. https://www.aqnb.com/2017/12/12/stilli-shitpost-cory-in-the-abyss-on-a-communism-of-the-visual-antiblackness-in-thememe-o-sphere-with-manuel-arturo-abreu/. barrett-ibarria, sofia. “the socialist memelords radicalizing instagram.” vice (blog), november 27, 2018. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ev3vgz/the-socialistmemelords-radicalizing-instagram. hongo, hudson. “the rise of weird facebook: how the world’s biggest social network became cool again (and why it matters),” ny daily news intelligencer. february 25, 2016. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/02/weird-facebook-became-coolagain.html. marwick, alice e. “instafame: luxury selfies in the attention economy.” public culture 27, no. 1 75 (january 2015): 137–60. ———. “memes.” contexts: understanding people in their social worlds; berkeley 12, no. 4 (fall 2013): 12–13. shifman, limor. memes in digital culture. mit press, 2014. ———. “the cultural logic of photo-based meme genres.” journal of visual culture 13, no. 3 (december 1, 2014): 340–58. aoir-2020--revised-v03.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 the dynamics of digital capture: how industries tie audiences to emerging technologies shinjoung yeo city university of new york mara einstein city university of new york joseph turow university of pennsylvania anna jobin university of lausanne panel abstract in recent years there has been much scholarly and journalistic work about surveillance and privacy (greenwald, 2014; lyon, 2015; turow, 2017). much too has been written about the consequences of surreptitious tracking, the consequences of unchecked data collection, and the non-transparent, often discriminatory, use of information (einstein, 2016; ferguson, 2017; eubanks, 2018). but while research proliferates regarding how deeply our personal and social spaces are being exploited in the name of corporate and political profits, few studies examine the forces that have guided the “digital capture” that has led audiences to be ensnared in these activities: the ways industries in key sectors of public life get people to adopt new digital technologies that on balance benefit the organizations more than the publics. (for a rare exception, see zuboff, 2019, chapter 10). what is needed is an understanding of the dynamics through which sets of organizations turn new digital developments into habits of everyday life that make decoupling from them extremely difficult. using various perspectives on this topic, the panel will explore the ways four industries currently rolling out digital technologies have captured audiences into long-term relationships. the captures have happened before serious widespread discourse took place about the costs, benefits, and regulatory options facing individuals and society. suggested citation (apa): einstein, m., yeo, s., turow, j. & jobin, a. (2020, october). the dynamics of digital capture: how industries tie audiences to emerging technologies. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. one paper will use a “digital colonialization” perspective (ricaurte, 2019) that highlights the influence of capitalist imperialism within contemporary political economy. it will draw parallels with the dynamics of mapping and mapmaking during material colonial conquests, and it will illustrate how the digital mapping industry colonizes people around time and space. a second paper will demonstrate how network effects related to adoption of the common application created the conditions for this online product to become the primary method for entree into institutions of learning. in driving an exponential increase in applications, the common app laid the groundwork for a marketing engine that fetishizes customer relationship marketing (crm) technologies to the point of not only constructing teenage college prospects as sales leads and “yields” but also then teaching them to act that way. a third presentation will explore how companies are seducing people to use smart devices that can infer information about the ways they talk and sound while the companies play down the surveillance aspects of the technologies. this “seductive surveillance” dynamic (troullinou, 2013) helps marketers model ways to discriminate among consumers and erodes citizens’ freedom to make choices under the guise of giving them new ways to choose. the fourth contribution presents the growing convergence between emerging technologies and the health sector, demonstrating through case studies how audiences are captured through ambiguous framings that highlight the advantages of health information sharing, but obscure the exploitative nature of pervasive data collection and its use for commercial purposes. each presentation approaches the dynamics of digital capture through different theoretical lenses. taken together, they point to a fascinating form of research that is needed to understand the emergence of various surveillance regimes before they become taken-for-granted parts of the cultural landscape when changes to them can be made mainly at their margins. the papers also shed light on the ways publics lose agency without knowing it, and they point to ways that might be changed. einstein, m. (2016). black ops advertising: native ads, branded content and the covert world of the digital sell. new york: or books. eubanks, v. (2018). automating inequality: how high-tech tools profile, police, andpunish the poor. new york: st. martin's press. ferguson, a. g. (2017). the rise of big data policing: surveillance, race, and the futureof law enforcement. new york: new york university press. greenwald, g. (2014). no place to hide: edward snowden, the nsa, and the u.s.surveillance state. new york: metropolitan books. lyon, d. (2015). surveillance after snowden. cambridge, uk ; malden, ma : politypress. ricaurte, p. (2019) “data epistemologies, the coloniality of power, and resistance,” television & new media, vol. 20(4) 350-365. troullinou, p. (2017). exploring the subjective experience of everyday surveillance; the case of smartphone devices as means of facilitating “seductive” surveillance. phd thesis the open university. turow, j. (2017). the aisles have eyes: how retailers track your shopping, strip your privacy, and define your power. new haven: yale university press. zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism. new york: public affairs. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 digital mapmaking: digital colonization and the expansion of corporate territories shinjoung yeo city university of new york digital maps have become ubiquitous. they are used to find the fastest route to work, explore new unknown places, plan a trip, and find nearby transit stops and restaurants. they are no longer merely a navigational tool but rather an everyday information utility and more. underneath this utilitarian function, however, mapmaking is neither a value-neutral technical endeavor nor merely the spatial representation of a particular geography. this has been true for a long time. for colonial empires, map-making was an instrument of colonial rule to extract local knowledge by surveying geography and spying on local populations as a means to exercise, manage and control political and economic power over colonial territories (edney,1997; hornsby & stege, 2011; sutton, 2015) in the creation of a cartographic panopticon (edney,1997; harley, 2001)). when britain marched into its new territories, cartographers were there alongside soldiers, together mapping the boundaries of conquest and exploitation (laxton, 2001). britain’s empire came to an end; however, the mapping continues. in the 1990s, the emergence of the internet saw the rise of digital map-making, this time driven not by colonial empires but by transnational tech firms – google, and its competitors apple, dutch company tomtom, nokia’s here – which is majority-owned by a consortium of german automotive companies – and chinese search engine company baidu etc. these transnational tech firms have been competing to map and remap the world and turning map-making into an everyday application. what is the nature of their digitalmapping today? how are transnational companies producing digital maps, and for what purposes? why do they invest billions of dollars in mapping? to answer these questions, this paper will shed light on the political economy of digital mapmaking centered around google and its competitors. today’s tech companies don’t accompany soldiers across continents; yet they still are exploring and occupying digital territories for political-economic purposes. to understand contemporary digital map-making, historian ellen wood's concept of capitalist imperialism (2003) is helpful because it emphasizes that today power operates mostly through the market rather than through military force. this doesn’t mean that suggested citation (apa): yeo, s. (2020, october). digital mapmaking: digital colonization and the expansion of corporate territories. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. capitalist imperialism doesn’t need the military, rather, that today’s capitalism is sustained through political-economic and military power. while the everyday utility function obfuscates these power relations, the core technologies of today’s digital mapping – global positioning systems (gps) and remote sensing via satellites and gis which processes gps data – are deeply rooted in us military operations. gps, built during the cold war by the united states air force and the department of defense, provides geolocation and time information globally which are vital to global military and the building of digital mapping systems. gps was exclusively used for the military until 2000, when the clinton administration commercialized gps use to boost the us information industry. the us government continues to invest billions of dollars on gps, spending $1.7 billion in 2020. the us global political economic rivals – russia, china and european union – have launched their own gps to reduce their dependence on the us. bolstered by the us military and state subsidies, us tech companies have been mapping both indoors and out, from buildings to streets, commercial districts to transportation networks to power grids – even wild fires – around the globe as they increasingly try to control both the visualization of commercial territories, potential profitable territories, and the digital data and mapping technologies needed for these purposes. google maps and waze are the most popular navigation tools, heading toward market domination. camouflaging profit motives with utility, the company marches into digital territories not with armies but with engineers, ai technology, machine learning, cars, drones, camels, and feet. google extracts information from its own car-collected street images and then layers that with data from 1000 third party sources ranging from national governments’ and military satellite imaging data to local municipalities’ gis data to commercial data from developers and other sources from around the world. beside 7000 paid workers, google taps into millions of users to update lane closures and construction, crashes, and traffic slowdowns to make the precision of its “real-time map.” concomitantly the company tracks users and where they are, how long they spend in a particular place, and which routes they take. and when it comes to places where google doesn’t see immediate economic rewards, the company uses persuasive approaches tuned to its geographic targets to recruit volunteer “trekkers” to carry google’s 360-degree cameras and walk around collecting data and images in the remotest parts of the world from khumbu, nepal to petra, jordan. google’s stunning 3d imagery makes one forget the world of google and yearn to explore the world. the company has already mapped out over 200 countries (google, 2020). while google intentionally tries to avoid “disrupting utility aspects,” the company has never hid its ambition to build a world where every piece of space has google’s digital address. this effort hasn’t generated significant revenue yet; but, with deep cash reserves, the company can afford to take the long view in preemptively occupying its future territorial profits. google is charting out its global commercial routes and integrating its maps into selfdriving cars, delivery services, tourism and logistics, ushering people and businesses into google’s map of the world. meanwhile, google’s competitors are trying to map out their own digital territories using their own resources and persuasive techniques. these transnational tech firm competitors are in hot pursuit to create the perfect map – a digital cartographic panopticon – based on science and data to control, manage and exploit every bit of profitable opportunity over what gary field termed their “territory of profit” (field, g. 2004). uncovering contemporary dynamics of digital mapmaking illustrates how capitalist imperialism operates and our complicity in political economic power relations which increasingly subjugates us into the marketplace. references edney, h. (1997). mapping an empire: the geographical construction of british india, 1765-1843. chicago: university of chicago press. fields, g. (2004). territories of profit: communications, capitalist development, and the innovation of g.f. swift and dell computer. stanford, calif: stanford university press. google (2020). google maps platform. retrieved from https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform. harley, j. b. & andrews, j. h. (2002). the new nature of maps: essays in the history of cartography. united kingdom: johns hopkins university press. hornsby, j & stege, h. (2011). surveyors of empire: samuel holland, j.w.f. des barres, and the making of the atlantic neptune. mcgill-queen's university press. laxton, p. (ed.). (2001). the new nature of maps: essays in the history of cartography. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press. ricaurte, p. (2019) “data epistemologies, the coloniality of power, and resistance,” television & new media, vol. 20(4) 350-365. sutton, e.a. (2015). capitalism and cartography in the dutch golden age. chicago: the university of chicago press. wood, e. m. (2003). empire of capital. london: verso. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 digitizing the college applicant: how the common app paved the way for admissions marketing and surveillance mara einstein city university of newyork technology has crept insidiously onto college campuses, from online teaching to digital gradebooks to tracking student movements via their id cards and the amazon dots in their dorms. less evident is the use of technology for promoting to prospective students and tracking them throughout the admissions process using the same tools as sophisticated consumer marketing companies. the proliferation of student surveillance technology in the application process and the invasion of marketing onto college campuses is fundamentally tied to the widespread use of the common application (common app). started from humble beginnings as a mimeographed form to save students time, the common app has become the 900 pound gorilla of the admission process. it began in 1975 with only fifteen elite schools and was still at only 150 participating institutions two decades later. applications increased considerably in 2004, however, when the first public schools (suny) came on board, and again in 2008 when the “next generation” of the app was launched. these two changes led to a tipping point such that the number of schools using the application rose from 300 in 2007 to over 800 today, evidence that network effects have come into play (katz & shapiro, 1985; farrell & klemperer, 2005). as more schools joined, the value of membership increased on the system overall because it provided students with the convenience to apply to multiple and different types of schools through a single form, and conversely, this hurt schools who were not on the platform because they became less likely to be part of a student’s college consideration set. this widespread adoption of the common app changed the relationship between schools and students. instead of applying to three to five schools, students apply to 10 to 15 schools. college admissions officers can no longer discern if students are actually interested in their institution or if they applied because it was convenient to do so. and while the volume of applications has increased, the size of the admissions offices has stayed virtually unchanged. in just one example, new york university went from receiving 42,800 applications to over 75,000 applications in a 6-years span. to manage this onslaught, admissions personnel look at test scores and high school gpas (often via computer) to weed out the vast majority of applicants. the wall street journal suggested citation (apa): einstein, m. (2020, october). digitizing the college applicant: how the common app paved the way for admissions marketing and surveillance. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. confirmed the streamlined review process when they noted that top schools are spending merely 8 minutes on an application. students, on the other hand, are led to believe that the college application process entails a “holistic review” and that something as simple as a brilliantly written essay— the cornerstone of the common app—can overcome mediocre grades and ho-hum test scores. not likely. these tortured writings are “window dressing,” according to a former admissions director (ad) who asked not to be identified. they are a thin ray of hope held out to students who don’t have the slightest chance of getting into a top-tier school, while enable colleges to keep their acceptance rates low. the common app is just one touchpoint through which colleges interact with an applicant. it begins with standardized testing. the act and the college board, the purveyor of the sat and the psat, ask high schoolers to fill out surveys before they take the tests. this questionnaire is presented to students as helping the companies connect them to the right schools. maybe, and maybe not. these companies sell their student email lists (and survey data) to colleges. the best estimate is that the college board makes between $40 and $50 million a year doing this, so there is no motivation to streamline the number of names being sold. from this, the best students get thousands—not one or two thousand, but five or six thousand—emails during their junior and senior years of high school. these emails are only the beginning of the promotional push. over the last decade, marketing has become integrated into college campuses like never before. chief marketing officers (cmos) are being hired with experience from companies like pottery barn and general mills. these top executives bring their expertise with them. prospective students—some as young as 15 ad 16 years old—are seen as sales leads, and they are treated as such. customer relationship management (crm) tools are used to track teens throughout the application process—assessing points for how quickly an email is opened, how much time is spent on the college website, if the student attended a webinar with the financial aid officer, and if they did an overnight on campus. in this paper i will answer the question: how did network effects lead to the widespread adoption of the common application in the american college application process and how was this instrumental in creating the conditions for the commoditization of higher education and a concomitant marketing mentality that turned admissions directors into hardcore pitchmen and teenagers into sales leads and personal branding machines to get their attention? the paper is based on research for a larger book project that i have been working on for 7 years. for that work, i used a multi-pronged methodological approach. i conducted one-on-one interviews with admissions directors, college marketing personnel, and edtech executives. i attended college marketing conferences targeted to practitioners, participated in dozens of webinars also targeted to this group, and attended college fairs targeted to students. i have analyzed marketing materials—both onand offline—and used auto-ethnology, as not only am i a professor but also the mother of a college student. the fallout from the application digital capture cannot be overstated. today, the choice of where one goes to college has garnered so much importance as appear to be the make-or-break point of one’s life. so much so that the pressure on students has been linked to unprecedented rates of anxiety and depression. these kids are aware that they need to sell themselves to schools as much as the other way around. regulation exists to protect children against hardcore marketing tactics and yet higher ed marketing occurs unabated, and even with the blessing of parents and administrators. moreover, high schoolers are pushing themselves even when the possibility of getting into some of these schools is about as good as winning the lottery. that’s because the process is particularly stacked against the middle class, something that has come increasingly to light in the wake of operation varsity blues and the harvard discrimination lawsuit. this is a work in progress. over the last five years, in particular, i have seen the number of companies and conferences devoted to the marketing of higher education grow exponentially. i have also seen that there is a huge disparity among colleges in terms of their facility with marketing, though that differential is beginning to close. as their skills increase, it is young, eager adolescents that will be caught in the crossfire. references farrell, j. & klemperer, p. (2005). “coordination and lock-in: competition with switching costs and network effects,” in m. armstrong and r. porter, eds., handbook of industrial organization, volume iii. amsterdam: northholland. katz, m. l., & shapiro, c. (1985). “network externalities, competition, and compatibility.” the american economic review, vol. 75, no. 3, pp. 424–440. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 seductive surveillance and social change: the rise of the voice intelligence industry joseph turow university of pennsylvania not fully a decade old, the voice intelligence industry is an emerging internet sector that marketers are building to collect information about individuals from the ways they talk and sound. it is the leading edge of commerce-oriented personalization through bioprofiling. it involves inferring individuals’ emotions, sentiments, and personality characteristics from their voices in order to persuade them, often in in real time. the possibility in the not-so-distant future may be to home in people’s weight, height, age, ethnicity, and more—all things scientists believe leak through from your voice. the power marketers have to model ways to discriminate among consumers and citizens— and to erode their freedom to make choices under the guise of giving them new ways to choose—is unprecedented and troubling. the emerging voice intelligence industry involves smart speakers, car information systems, customer service calls, “connected-home” devices such as thermostats and alarms as well as other tools. when you speak, their “intelligent assistants” can draw inferences about you using algorithms generated by artificial intelligence. in the united states and the european union, the best-known vehicles for such activities are amazon’s alexa, google assistant, and apple’s siri. in china, baidu is doing it with its dueros assistant, and tencent has xiaowei. according to industry observers, google assistant, accessed mostly through smartphones and google home cylinders, is available in more than a billion devices (bohn, 2019b) and amazon’s alexa personal assistant is present in more than 100 million devices (bohn, 2019a). at the same time, a different though related ecosystem of firms is creating voice initiatives propelled by artificial intelligence in customer contact centers. amazon and google, the highestprofile forces in voice today, are not yet using these tools for their maximum marketing potential evidently because they are worried about inflaming social fears around the collection of people’s voices. but contact centers, which are out of the public eye and thus more audacious about dealing deal differently with people based on how they talk, may represent the future. suggested citation (apa): turow, j. (2020, october). seductive surveillance and social change: the rise of the voice intelligence industry. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. two key questions stand out about this new development in the united states: how has the voice intelligence industry been able to gain the kind of social traction that has tens of millions of people giving their up voiceprints to so-called “intelligent assistants”? and in the face of this widespread shift to voice bio-profiling, what social policies should concerned citizens advocate to slow the process and implement regulations regarding this new form of surveillance? this paper addresses these questions based on interviews with 45 industry executives that averaged about 45 minutes; in-depth exploration of trade magazine articles and general news sources; analysis of dozens of voice-industry patents; attendance of a major industry multi-day meeting; and examination of major federal and state laws that apply to biometric surveillance. a key theme is that the rise of voice is the next step in what might be called the never-ending “spiral of personalization’ in digital media. a secret worry of internet marketers is that current behavioral approaches to tracking, profiling, and targeting are fraught with challenges for the entire ecosystem. data may not be up to date, profiles may be created based on multiple users of a computer or phone, names may be confused, and people may lie about their age, income, even gender in the hope of confusing digital marketers. in response, a furious new industry cycle has begun where companies large and small are trying to shape this next frontier of personalization. voice is, in the words of consultant pete erickson, a “value-added” to the current personalization regime, not a replacement (personal interview). but the industry does see the rise of voice as something of a new beginning where their data scientists can potentially implement methods of artificial intelligence to achieve unprecedented and near-immediate insights into shoppers’ identities and inclinations without the fraud and roi glitches of “traditional” personalization. to people at the leading edge of voice developments the public’s pickup of smart speakers, intelligent car centers, and voice-friendly phones along with the rise of voice intelligence in call centers presents an intriguing arena that gets around the current difficulties of knowing the audience on the internet. not only can individuals be profiled by what they say (their speech) and where they say it, but also by the physiology of their sounds (their voice) that, the belief is, cannot lie. this hope for a new chance at audience knowledge is where a furious next cycle of personalization begins. the increasing adoption of voice technology devices shows that voice intelligence executives have developed a sophisticated scheme for spreading their technology that can be described as seductive surveillance. pinelopi troullinou (2017) coined the term to shed light on the reasons individuals “willingly” participate in activities that allow organizations such as cell phone companies to keep tabs on them. the argument here adapts her idea to suggest seductive surveillance is a corporate strategy that presents target audiences with devices so alluring they will pay less attention (and so less concern) than they otherwise would to the marketing scrutiny and personalization carried out through those devices despite gnawing worries about these activities. voice executives employ seductive surveillance to turn people’s operation of voice assistant devices into a widely accepted habit. british sociologists tony bennett and francis dodsworth (2013), building on ideas from the 20th century french sociologist pierre bourdieu, contend that an understanding of “the processes through which habits are formed and reformed” must take into account the ways companies, governments and other “material agencies” in the society’s field [for example media outlets] shape the mindset and the habits that flow from it. he uses the word habituation to refer to the process through which forces in the society cultivate the creation of habits. it’s not hard from this standpoint to see how habituation and seductive surveillance are linked in the voice intelligence universe. seductive/surveillance is a dual approach through which companies cultivate people’s habituation to using their voice across a range of devices. from the low-cost distribution of smart speakers on “prime day” to the spread of those devices in the connected existing home, among new-home builders, car manufacturers, hotels, stores, and even schools, the voice industry is creating a new sensibility that giving up your voice is fun, emotionally satisfying, and natural. influenced by public relations, general news sources repeat much of this mantra even when they report incidents of privacy invasion and creepy surveillance related to the devices. the overarching press message is a thrill regarding smart speakers and connected homes along with a sense of resignation to the surveillance that come along with them. “seductive surveillance and social change” brings together the theories and findings to present and interrogate the dynamics of the new voice-surveillance structures. it describes the policy challenges they present for current us approaches to privacy andsurveillance regulation ranging from the california consumer privacy act to the illinois biometric information privacy act and beyond. references bennett, t. & dodsworth, f. (2013). “habit and habituation: governance and the social,” body & society 19:2&3. bohn, d. (2019a, january 4). “amazon says more than 100 million alexa devices have been sold—what’s next,” the verge.com. bohn, d. (2019b, january 7). “google assistant will soon be on a billion devices, and feature phones are next,” the verge.com. troullinou, p. (2017). exploring the subjective experience of everyday surveillance; the case of smartphone devices as means of facilitating “seductive” surveillance. phd thesis. the open university. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 capturing 'life': the convergence of health and technology for profit anna jobin university of lausanne technological advances have brought many benefits to public health. yet, the blurring boundaries between silicon valley and the medical sector are also a matter of concern. for one, the repurposing of non-medical data for health assessments by tech companies is poised to provide more capital benefits to companies than health benefits to consumers and citizens. furthermore, the adoption of bio-digital technologies in nonmedical fields is touted as “innovation,” although it may simply be a way for companies to harvest the health data of their audience for questionable use purposes (sadowski 2019). this paper presents ongoing exploratory research into how companies push “data frontiers” (beer 2019) by highlight problematic shifts in industry dynamics, where nonmedical information is transformed into health data, and vice versa. through case studies of google and facebook initiatives on the one hand and of online available direct-to-consumer genetic tests and some data use cases on the other i examine how the capturing and repurposing of particular types of data is framed as innovative by technology firms, but otherwise raises serious concerns about the very different stakes at play for corporations and citizens respectively. pushing the institutional frontier: from non-medical data to health assessments the foray of big tech into the health domain has been constantly increasing, not least driven by the immense amount of data that companies such as google or facebook have been able to collect about their users' lives. such data has been considered to be a valuable resource containing lucrative correlations simply waiting to be derived (puschmann & burgess, 2014; couldry & yu, 2018). correlations not only justify tailoring content delivery to individuals, particularly for advertising purposes, but they also allow for recognizing trends on the level of populations. a classic example in the later domain is google flu trends (gft), a project which used multiple data points but, most importantly, search query data (of expressions describing flu symptoms, medication etc.) to “now-cast” regional extents of influenza epidemics suggested citation (apa): jobin, a. (2020, october). capturing 'life': the convergence of health and technology for profit. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. (ginsberg et al., 2009). gft seemed to accurately predict flu outbreaks for several years (2003-2009) when plotted against the numbers from the u.s. centers for disease control and prevention, before its predictions became less accurate and the error rates increased significantly. with hindsight, lazer et al. (2014) were able to point out that gft had been particularly accurate in predicting winter (p. 1203) and that its creators had failed to recognize that web search does not happen in a vacuum but is influenced by factors both external (e.g. media reporting) and internal (e.g. google’s algorithms). using such a non-robust model in the context of public health decisions, where it is undeniable that lives are at stake, would have disastrous consequences. fast forward to 2019: a peer-reviewed study claims to prove that medical condition categories can be deduced from facebook posts (merchant et al. 2019). among these conditions are diabetes, hypertension, depression, obesity and pregnancy. for instance, according to the study, "religious language" such as "god", "family", and "pray" are indicative of diabetes. the researchers acknowledge several important limitations and even mention the ethical challenges regarding potentially communicating health risks to patients. nonetheless they recommend further research with more data, and confidently conclude that "[s]ocial media data are a quantifiable link into the otherwise elusive daily lives of patients," going so far as to call such data a "social mediome" akin to the human genome. but whereas medical research is at least in theory undertaken for the benefit of society, it is unclear who other than facebook would benefit from facebook inferring the medical conditions of their users and capturing even more data. despite being over ten years apart, both cases above have in common that they do not necessarily originate in an unsolved problem in the health sector. they stem from a belief that “innovative” data-driven technological solutions outperform already existing methods – an attitude broussard (2018) termed "technochauvinism." following beer (2019), they can also be seen as an attempt to push the boundaries of what their own data analytics can be seen to achieve, thus legitimizing their collection ex post. pushing the consumer frontier: from biometric data to genealogy and music a contrasting example of how emerging technologies and the health sector converge, this time by repurposing health data for “recreational” non-health related purposes, are direct-to-consumer (dtc) genetic tests. available for purchase online, they offer a wide range of analyses based on someone's genome. a recent study of 246 such tests showed that many offer genealogy results, some paternity tests, others nutritional and even partnership advice (phillips, 2016). in the field of genetic genealogy, a commercial platform advertised as follows: "kelly found an italian ancestor who made a living from making macaroni." another one touted its benefits to customers as the opportunity of coming together as "a global genetic family" (couldry and yu, 2018). although such claims "construct an ‘empowering’ participatory culture" they are always also a means to create value for the company behind them (harris et al., 2013). genomic data being individual, this is sometimes marketed as an incentive to share it with companies. here, audiences are promised an individual benefit in exchange for valuable biometric data. for instance, spotify offers music selections that are allegedly personalized based on people's dna, thus encouraging users to provide their unique biometric data to a dtc genetic test company and share it with a streaming service. however, the uniqueness of genomic data also makes the issues of privacy, data security, tracking and surveillance even more salient than for other types of personal data. addresses, phone numbers, names etc. may change, but one’s dna remains the same. therefore, even when aggregated, genetic data is potentially identifying because of its singularity and uniquely valuable: in 2018, 23andme, a major dtc genetic test company, announced a lucrative data sharing deal with a pharmaceutical giant, allowing the corporation to make profit from people's personal data without even having to return potential research results. another illustrating use of genomic data is by law enforcement: recently, open murder cases have been resolved through the use of genetic genealogy data from the murderer’s sibling. this example also acts as a powerful demonstration of how genomic data contains not only individual personal data but relational personal data, too. collection of such data for “recreational” purposes via individual notice and consent agreements, as done by online services, is therefore highly questionable. the medical domain is governed by stringent regulation and builds on a long tradition of reflexivity and ethical considerations, whereas big tech and online platforms may be more inspired by the silicon valley adage "move fast and break things." yet it makes a fundamental difference whether data collection and use is done by health professionals, who have a duty towards their patients, or by non-regulated for-profit companies that aim above of all at expanding and legitimizing their own data analytics capacities. in the later case, it is likely that most benefits, contrary to the risks, will not be the customers'. references beer, d. (2018). the data gaze: capitalism, power and perception. sage publications. broussard, m. (2018). artificial unintelligence: how computers misunderstand the world. mit press. couldry, n., & yu, j. (2018). deconstructing datafication’s brave new world. new media & society, 20(12), 4473–4491. ginsberg, j., et al. (2009). detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data. nature, 457(7232), 1012–1014. harris, a., wyatt, s., & kelly, s. e. (2013). the gift of spit (and the obligation to return it). information, communication & society, 16(2), 236–257. lazer, d., kennedy, r., king, g., & vespignani, a. (2014). the parable of google flu: traps in big data analysis. science, 343(6176), 1203–1205. merchant, r. m., et al. (2019). evaluating the predictability of medical conditions from social media posts. plos one, 14(6), e0215476. phillips, a. m. (2016). ‘only a click away — dtc genetics for ancestry, health, love...and more.’ applied & translational genomics, 8, 16–22. puschmann, c., & burgess, j. (2014). big data, big questions. metaphors of big data. international journal of communication, 8(0), 20. sadowski, j. (2019). when data is capital: datafication, accumulation, and extraction. big data & society, 6(1), 205395171882054. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): boler, m. & trigiani, a. (2021, october). discourses of victimhood and identity politics on social media: understanding affective polarization during the us election. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. discourses of victimhood and identity politics on social media: understanding affective polarization during the us election megan boler university of toronto amanda trigiani university of toronto this cross-platform digital ethnography examines the nuances of how emotions are expressed and who they are directed towards within social media in order to better understand the phenomenon of affective polarization and the increased emotionality online. by examining how social media users discursively construct representations of self and other through expressions of us/them dichotomies, this project seeks to better understand polarized political identities and how social media users emphasize that their morals and values are similar or distinct from others. how do people on the left and the right feel victimized by the other? what are the moral and emotional injuries as well as the identity politics upon which they base their claims to victimhood? how do social media users rhetorically express their indignation through us/them dichotomizing, to justify their negative affect as well as enactments of revenge as moral duty? through examination of the messy and nuanced affect expressed in social media, this project identifies narrative patterns closely linked to ressentiment and “discourses of victimhood”. the different stories told by in-groups and out-groups shed light on the affects surrounding moral judgment, influenced by race relations, which distinctively shape affective polarization. regardless of political stance, expressions of indignation, disgust, and distrust towards the other are supported as a moral stance, creating clear rhetorical distinctions between “us” and “them”, influenced by both political and social identities, and placing blame on “them” as the personal and national threat. they are guilty for their immoral, unpatriotic, and violent behaviour. we are righteous, justified, and oppressed. by understanding the existing trends of moral rhetoric, this project reveals how affect is expressed and what broader emotional-moral narratives fuel such affect to deepen our understanding of affective polarization. our findings explore the similarities and differences in the ways that social media platforms of facebook, twitter and gab construct stories of moral and emotional injuries and narratives of perceived victimization towards the guilty other. such narratives of victimhood unite people based on inner-group pain and polarize based on outer-group blame. methodology this mixed-methods, three-year project, funded by sshrc, explores how emotions are expressed in relation to narratives of racial and national belonging within electionrelated social media. engaging grounded theory (charmaz 2006), the cross-platform study explores twitter, facebook, and gab in the context of the 2019 canadian and 2020 u.s. elections. over the past two years, the pi and a seven person team developed an innovative approach of affective discourse analysis through collaborative and iterative weekly meetings. the four-month digital ethnography conducted in the lead up to and aftermath of each federal election, tracked developing stories and debates within social media conversations across the political spectrum, documented through extensive field notes and findings discussed weekly. we coded a sample of 1800 posts discussing the january 6th capitol riots, election fraud, and black lives matter protests using the qualitative data research software atlas.ti. contributing an innovative approach to the analysis of affect and emotion within social media, our affective discourse analysis was developed through an intensive iterative process over two years, drawing from critical discourse analysis (wodak & meyer, 2015), rhetorical analysis (leach, 2000), and "narrative emotions" analysis (kleres 2011). we engaged grounded theory to develop and refine a codebook suitable for the complex task of coding emotional expression, including: rhetorical and linguistic features; topics to which emotions were directed; and beliefs about in-groups and out-groups. theoretical framework for this project, we draw on an emotional-moral framework (nietzsche) and ressentiment (brown, 1993) to explore affective polarization in terms of "discourses of victimhood" found across the political spectrum. analysing social media posts together reveal broader collective narratives that attempt to characterize the victim and the culprit in relation to polarized issues. ressentiment, or the moralizing revenge of the powerless (brown, 1993), provides a framework for understanding how social media users moralize the self and demoralize the other while expressing indignation and disgust regarding current political events. other partisan identities function as a site of blame on which to avenge and redistribute one’s pain (brown, 1993). people often feel “most safe anchored in our subordinated position to avoid addressing our position within dominant groups and to maintain our innocence” (razack, 1998, p. 132). both those who are marginalised and historically privileged often make similar identity-based claims to victimization and moral innocence. this project seeks to understand how politicized identities “become attached to its own exclusion” (brown, 1993, p. 406) and how this influences the proliferation of affective polarization in online political arenas. affective polarization “explains the hostility felt by partisans toward members of opposing political parties” (capuzza, 2018, p. 217). partisan political identities are reinforced through feelings of interconnectedness, resulting in positive feelings toward ingroup and negative towards the opposition. however, much of the focus of the literature on affective polarization defines in and out group in terms of partisan differences, missing the intertwined dynamics of social and racial identities (iyengar et al 2019). while the literature reveals the negative sentiment felt towards the other political group, it simultaneously illuminates a gap in terms of understanding the complex stories that elicit such in-group and out-group affect, and in particular how these polarized narratives are influenced by a history of race relations. this project seeks to better understand polarized political identities and how social media users emphasize that their morals and values are similar or distinct from others. contribution moving beyond the binary oppositions of "us/them” that permeates much political communications scholarship, we explore how expressions of identity, solidarity, hate and blame reinscribe collective identities rooted in "victimization", virtues, and perceptions of "others" as perceived threats. we explored the influence of race relations in connection to the moral rhetoric that is used to normalize and rationalize polarized narratives. specifically, the findings from two years of affective discourse analysis allow us to trace the nuanced complexities of identity politics as shaped by platform politics. further, the synthesized findings of our coding of 1800 social media posts allows us to paint a complex, grounded, theoretical portrait of identities of victims, enemies, and moral rhetoric that undergirds white supremacy and other discourses of racial and national belonging that have surfaced so explicitly in the u.s. we contribute substantially to the nascent scholarship that seeks to update the concept of ressentiment. further, our extensive research provides nuanced analyses of the multiple interconnected in and out-group emotions that are expressed in social media related to the capitol riots and blm protests, thereby radically deepening the concept of affective polarization. references brown, w. (1993). wounded attachments. political theory, 21(3), 390-410. capuzza, j. (2018). 16 meta-sexist discourses and affective polarization in the 2016 us presidential campaign. affect, emotion, and rhetorical persuasion in mass communication. charmaz, k. (2006). constructing grounded theory: a practical guide through qualitative analysis. sage. iyengar, s., lelkes, y., levendusky, m., malhotra, n., & westwood, s. j. (2019). the origins and consequences of affective polarization in the united states. annual review of political science, 22, 129-146. kleres, j. (2011). emotions and narrative analysis: a methodological approach. journal for the theory of social behaviour, 41(2), 182-202. leach, j. (2000). rhetorical analysis. qualitative researching with text, image and sound, 207-226. wodak, r., & meyer, m. (eds.). (2015). methods of critical discourse studies. sage. microsoft word aoir2021_final.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): magnani, m., segerberg, a. (2021, october). deep neural networks for social visuals: studying climate communication on youtube. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. deep neural networks for social visuals: studying climate communication on youtube matteo magnani infolab, uppsala university alexandra segerberg uppsala university visual politics is becoming increasingly prominent, in particular in online environments that are primed for visual content. visuals are persuasive, affective, and may convey different information than text. as visuals become digitally augmented—replicated, modified and shared online—it is increasingly important to study what they convey and do: their content, social negotiation, and the role of platforms in their prominence and spread. however, research on visual politics has typically employed qualitative methods in small scale settings (e.g., focused on national newspapers in selected western countries), with approaches that do not easily expand to complex media ecologies and to questions with a global aspect, in which it matters how communication on an issue (e.g., climate change) or a communicative style (e.g., populism) is characterised, perceived and distributed across particular populations or across different parts of the world. a stumbling block has been the inability to automate the analysis of visual communication on the basis of actual images. now, advances in deep learning in computer vision and image analysis open a potential path to large-scale analysis of visual politics on the basis of actual visual content. promising work is starting to develop this potential in a variety of directions (see for example, casas & webb williams 2019; joo et al., 2019; peng 2021; zannettou et al, 2019). harnessing deep neural networks in this context has the potential to make important contributions to understanding contemporary political communication. nevertheless, it can also easily lead to misleading results. it is challenging to robustly integrate deep learning into the study of politics, and a particularly difficult area concerns the analysis of social visuals. in contrast to other application areas for neural networks more focused on object detection, visuals of social and political scenes are semantically rich and can convey complex ideas and narratives about power and politics (brennen et al., 2021). this paper examines validity conditions for integrating deep neural network tools in the study of digitally augmented social visuals. we argue that the complexity of social visuals needs to be reflected in the validation process and its communication. with "social visuals" we refer to the social and political themes present in visuals, which we in this context infer empirically from objects (denotational content of the images) and labels (annotations recognised by the deep neural networks). a key validity concern in neural network research focuses on designing the structure of networks that can accurately replicate the relation between some input data and an output classification. in this case, the data is assumed to be unproblematic and the focus is on building a valid classification tool. a second key validity concern focuses on the challenges of obtaining good data (e.g., correct and unbiased). in this case, even an accurate tool can give invalid results when it is executed on wrong data. here we go beyond this dichotomy and focus on the interdependency between data and tool. we note that good data can be defined as such only with respect to it being representative of the themes (classes) that we want to identify. however, when we analyse social visuals, the operationalisation of the themes may develop while we are preparing the final analysis, as the processing of new content may lead to the revision of our analytical frame – so that a final definition of good data is not available until the end of the process, which itself relies on a tool which needs good data to be trained. some new themes may even emerge during the analysis. in addition, the operationalisation may develop not just because of our interaction with the data, as they would in a small-scale, qualitative analysis, but also because of our interactions with the tool and the specific way in which it mediates our analysis. here, the final empirical operationalisation is an artifact produced by this hybrid methodology involving the iterated interaction between researcher and computational tool. an important implication is that the conventional approach of performance assessment – i.e., counting errors – while a necessary validation baseline, is potentially misleading if used on its own. at the same time, the validation of the tool can also be used to better understand the tool itself and help the researcher to refine the analytical process. we explore our argument experimentally in the context of an ongoing study that asks whether the tendency to frame climate change as a remote problem is a global trend on youtube. while it does not exercise conventional editorial control, its rankings matter for the visibility of contents on the site. this platform is a common source of science information, and has been criticized for amplifying science skeptics (although the evidence is mixed) (avaaz 2020; see also allgaier 2019, bounegru et al. 2020). iconic (but distancing) climate themes such as the polar bear in arctic landscapes and focus on elite people and events (e.g., the cop summits) involve tough cases of social visuals. for example, in figure 1a we show the accuracy of a pre-trained network used to identify polar bears in youtube video frames. a first analysis of performance on plausible datasets (google search, wikimedia commons, control data without polar bears) indicated a high accuracy of our classifier. however, testing on a different source (greenpeace campaign pictures about polar bears) highlighted that the first datasets were capturing only a specific instance of the polar bear theme. the qualitative analysis of all errors also allowed us to generate hypotheses about different types of polarbearness (animals vs. activism vs. arctic environments). adding one more dataset, we could corroborate our hypothesis about surroundings, showing that the network was recognizing pictures of glaciers as polar bears. a recurrent point throughout is the imperative that the uncertainties of the process are systematically communicated, not to undermine the quality of the results but to make them more precise. we use as starting point a possible representation of the distribution of youtube polarbearness around the world, shown in figure 1b. we use this example to discuss how to qualitatively and quantitatively communicate validity questions. references allgaier, j. (2019). science and environmental communication on youtube: strategically distorted communications in online videos on climate change and climate engineering, frontiers in communication, 4:36. avaaz (2020). why is youtube broadcasting misinformation to millions? youtube is driving its users to climate misinformation and the world’s most trusted brands are paying for it. avaaz report 15/01/2020. brennen, j., simon, f., & nielsen, r. (2021). beyond (mis)representation: visuals in covid-19 misinformation, the international journal of press/politics, 26(1): 277–299. bounegru, l., de pryck, k., venturini, t., & mauri, m. (2020). “we only have 12 years”: youtube and the ipcc report on global warming of 1.5°c. first monday, 25(2):1-20. casas, a., & webb williams, n. (2019). images that matter: online protests and the mobilizing role of pictures. political research quarterly 72(2): 360 375. joo, j., bucy, e., & seidel, c. (2019). automated coding of televised leader displays: detecting nonverbal political behavior with computer vision and deep learning, international journal of communication, 13: 4044-4066. peng, y. (2021). what makes politicians’ instagram posts popular? analyzing social media strategies of candidates and office holders with computer vision, the international journal of press/politics, 26(1): 143–166. zannettou, s., caulfield, t. bradlyn, b., de cristofaro, e., stringhini, g., blackburn. j. (2020). characterizing the use of images in state-sponsored information warfare operations by russian trolls on twitter. 14th international aaai conference on web and social media (icwsm). selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 iliadis, a., stevens, w., plantin, j-c., acker, a., davies, h., eynon. r. (2020, october). platformizing knowledge: mess and meaning in web 3.0 infrastructures. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. platformizing knowledge: mess and meaning in web 3.0 infrastructures andrew iliadis temple university wesley stevens temple university jean-christophe plantin london school of economics amelia acker university of texas at austin huw davies university of edinburgh rebecca eynon university of oxford panel introduction this panel focuses on the way that platforms have become key players in the representation of knowledge. where the retronym “web 1.0” is generally used to refer to the web before the advent of social media, “web 2.0” is typically used to represent a shift toward digital convergence and user interaction—though scholars have shown that the division is ultimately contingent on one’s historical perspective (ankerson, 2015; blank & reisdorf, 2012; boyd, 2015; cammaerts, 2008; fisher, 2018; gehl, 2011; song, 2010; van dijck, 2013; zimmer, 2009). media and communication researchers have further theorized the web 1.0-2.0 transition by emphasizing the modularity of social media platforms like youtube, facebook, and twitter (langlois et al, 2009; gillespie, 2010; langlois & elmer, 2013; mckelvey, 2011). following research into the cultural significance of software (chun, 2011; fuller, 2008; galloway, 2004; kitchin & dodge, 2011; manovich, 1999, 2001), web 2.0 researcher’s emphasis on platform programmability (bogost & montfort, 2009) and the materiality of informational media (dourish, 2017; dourish & mazmanian, 2013) as a definitional aspect of the web highlighted a historical shift from unidirectional and largely static web content to a more dynamic and multidirectional one with increased affordances (bucher & helmond, 2017). specifically, inquiries into the social significance of digital tools like application programming interfaces (apis) have shown that such technologies facilitate platformization (berry et al, 2015; bucher, 2013), which “entails the extension of social media platforms into the rest of the web and their drive to make external web data ‘platform ready’” (helmond, 2015). building on work in the tradition of ethnography of infrastructure (star, 1999), research into digital information infrastructures has developed adjacent to these platform-oriented approaches (bowker et al, 2010; edwards et al, 2009), with a specific subset focusing on online knowledge infrastructures (edwards et al, 2013; karasti et al, 2016) and their interoperability. recently, there have been calls to combine infrastructure and platform-based frameworks to understand the nature of information exchange on the web through digital tools for knowledge sharing (plantin, 2018; plantin et al, 2018a; plantin et al, 2018b). the present panel builds and extends work on platform and infrastructure studies in what has been referred to as “knowledge as programmable object” (plantin, et al., 2018b), specifically focusing on how metadata and semantic information are shaped and exchanged in specific web contexts (bates et al, 2016; edwards et al, 2011; hui, 2016; leonelli, 2016). as bucher (2012; 2013) and helmond (2015) show, data portability in the context of web platforms requires a certain level of semantic annotation. semantic interoperability is the defining feature of so-called “web 3.0”—traditionally referred to by computer scientists as the semantic web (antoniou et al, 2012; szeredi et al, 2014). since its inception, the semantic web has privileged the status of metadata for providing the finegrained levels of contextual expressivity needed for machine-readable web data, and can be found in products as diverse as google's knowledge graph, virtual assistants like siri and alexa that rely on wikidata, online research repositories like figshare, and other sources that engage in platformizing knowledge. the first paper in this panel examines the international schema.org collaboration. the second paper investigates the epistemological implications when platforms organize data sharing. the third paper discusses private platforms’ extraction and collection of user metadata and the enclosure of data access. the fourth paper argues for the use of patents to inform research methodologies for understanding knowledge graphs. references ankerson, m. s. (2015). social media and the “read-only” web: reconfiguring social logics and historical boundaries. social media and society, 1(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115621935 antoniou, g., groth, p., harmelen, f. van, & hoekstra, r. (2012). a semantic web primer. cambridge: mit press. bates, j., lin, y.-w., & goodale, p. (2016). data journeys: capturing the socio-material constitution of data objects and flows. big data & society, 3(2), 205395171665450. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716654502 berry, d. m., borra, e., helmond, a., plantin, j.-c., walker rettberg, j., & walker, j. (2015). the data sprint approach: exploring the field of digital humanities through amazon’s application programming interface. digital humanities quarterly, 9(4). retrieved from http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/65438/ blank, g., & reisdorf, b. c. (2012). the participatory web: a user perspective on web 2.0. i information, communication & society, 15(4), 537–554. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2012.665935 bogost, i., & montfort, n. (2009). racing the beam: the atari video computer system. cambridge: mit press. bowker, g. c., baker, k., millerand, f., & ribes, d. (2010). toward information infrastructure studies: ways of knowing in a networked environment. in j. hunsinger, l. klastrup, & m. allen (eds.), international handbook of internet research (pp. 97– 117). boyd, d. (2015). social media: a phenomenon to be analyzed. social media and society, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115580148 bucher, t. (2012). want to be on the top? algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on facebook. new media and society, 14(7), 1164–1180. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444812440159 bucher, t. (2013). objects of intense feeling: the case of the twitter api. computational culture (a journal of software studies), 1–17. retrieved from http://computationalculture.net/article/objects-of-intense-feeling-the-case-of-the-twitterapi bucher, t., & helmond, a. (2017). the affordances of social media platforms. sage handbook of social media, (june 2016), 1–41. cammaerts, b. (2008). critiques on the participatory potentials of web 2.0. communication, culture & critique, 1(4), 358–377. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.17539137.2008.00028.x chun, w. h. k. (2011). programmed visions: software and memory. cambridge: mit press. dourish, p. (2017). the stuff of bits: an essay on the materialities of information. cambridge: mit press. dourish, p., & mazmanian, m. (2013). media as material: information representations as material foundations for organizational practice. in how matter matters: objects, artifacts, and materiality in organization studies (p. 92-118). edwards, p. n., bowker, g. c., jackson, s. j., & williams, r. (2009). introduction: an agenda for infrastructure studies. journal of the association for information systems, 10(5), 364–374. doi:10.17705/1jais.00200 edwards, p. n., jackson, s. j., chalmers, m. k., bowker, g. c., borgman, c. l., ribes, d., … calvert, s. (2013). knowledge infrastructures: intellectual frameworks and research challenges, (may), 25–28. https://doi.org/http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/97552 edwards, p. n., mayernik, m. s., batcheller, a. l., bowker, g. c., & borgman, c. l. (2011). science friction: data, metadata, and collaboration. social studies of science, 41(5), 667–690. fisher, e. (2018). when information wanted to be free: discursive bifurcation of information and the origins of web 2.0. information society, 34(1), 40–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2017.1391910 fuller, m. (2008). software studies: a lexicon. the mit press, 334. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262062749.001.0001 galloway, a. r. (2004). protocol: how control exists after decentralization. cambridge: mit press. gehl, r. w. (2011). the archive and the processor: the internal logic of web 2.0. new media and society, 13(8), 1228–1244. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444811401735 gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of “platforms.” new media and society, 12(3), 347– 364. doi:10.1177/1461444809342738 helmond, a. (2015). the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready. social media and society, 1(2). doi:10.1177/2056305115603080 hui, y. (2016). on the existence of digital objects. minnesota: university of minnesota press. karasti, h., millerand, f., hine, c. m., & bowker, g. (2016). knowledge infrastructures: part iv. science and technology studies, 29(4), 1–9. kitchin, r., & dodge, m. (2011). code/space: software and everyday life. cambridge: mit press. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2012.696477 langlois, g., & elmer, g. (2013). the research politics of social media platforms. culture machine, 14, 1–17. leonelli, s. (2016). data-centric biology: a philosophical study. chicago: university of chicago press. manovich, l. (1999). database as symbolic form. convergence, 5(2), 80–99. https://doi.org/10.1177/135485659900500206 manovich, l. (2001). the language of new media. cambridge: mit press. https://doi.org/10.1386/nl.5.1.25/1 mckelvey, f. (2011). fcj-128 a programmable platform? drupal, modularity, and the future of the web. fiberculture, (18), 232–254. plantin, j.-c. (2018). google maps as cartographic infrastructure: from participatory mapmaking to database maintenance. international journal of communication, 12, 489–506. plantin, j.-c., lagoze, c., & edwards, p. n. (2018a). re-integrating scholarly infrastructure: the ambiguous role of data sharing platforms. big data & society, 5(1), 205395171875668. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718756683 plantin, j.-c., lagoze, c., edwards, p. n., & sandvig, c. (2018b). infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook. new media and society, 20(1), 293–310. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553 song, f. w. (2010). theorizing web 2.0: a cultural perspective. information, communication & society, 13(2), 249–275. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691180902914610 star, s. l. (1999). the ethnography of infrastructure. american behavioral scientist, 43(3), 377–391. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326 szeredi, p., lukácsy, g., benkő, t. (2014). the semantic web explained: the technology and mathematics behind web 3.0. cambridge: cambridge university press. van dijck, j. (2013). facebook and the engineering of connectivity: a multi-layered approach to social media platforms. convergence, 19(2), 141–155. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856512457548 zimmer, m. (2009). renvois of the past, present and future: hyperlinks and the structuring of knowledge from the encyclopédie to web 2.0. new media and society, 11(1–2), 95–113. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444808099573 one schema to rule them all: analyzing google, microsoft, yahoo, and yandex’s schema.org structured metadata project andrew iliadis temple university wesley stevens temple university increasing data interoperability on platforms through structured metadata modeling is a key feature of web 3.0. historically, several domain-specific metadata initiatives have facilitated data interoperability for individual industries. these structured metadata schemas typically allow developers to “wrap” web data to provide semantic and contextual expressivity of content, thus improving information search and retrieval in their respective fields. some drawbacks of this practice are that a plurality of metadata schemas produces layered code that can overburden administrators, while lack of a single metadata vocabulary results in unequal distribution of schemas due to intermittent application. in this paper, we use network analysis and archival research to provide a historical timeline and an analysis of a global project to construct a universal standard schema on the web (schema.org). throughout, we discuss the political economy of semantics and raise some potential ethical concerns. the semantic web the semantic web is a loosely connected group of technologies, standards, methods, organizations, and people responsible for improving data interoperability across the web. today, many products that people use benefit from semantic web outputs, including knowledge panels, virtual assistants, databases, and dashboards. since its inception, the semantic web has privileged the status of metadata for providing the fine-grained levels of contextual expressivity needed for machine-readable web data. sir tim berners-lee, the inventor of the web, expressed that “the first form of semantic data on the web was metadata” (berners-lee & fischetti, 1999). after inventing the web in 1989, berners-lee founded the world wide web consortium (w3c) in 1994, one of the web’s main international standards organizations. w3c describe the semantic web as a ‘web of data’ and have led several semantic web metadata initiatives, publishing standards like resource description framework (rdf) data model and the languages that use rdf to describe semantic information on the web, including the widely used web ontology language (owl) and the more recent shapes constraint language (shacl). in 2006, berners-lee issued four rules for a proper semantic web that could be checked against a five-star linked open data system. these rules included using uniform resource identifiers (uris) as names for things, using hypertext transfer protocol (http) uris so individuals can look up names, providing metadata using rdf, and including links to enable further discovery. a fivestar, linked open data rating from the w3c would require that the web data be open licensed, available as machine-readable structured data, exist in a non-proprietary format, use the technical standards of the w3c for identifying data, and, most importantly, link the data to other data on the web, thus creating context. since these early beginnings, w3c’s standards have effectively bootstrapped the semantic web into what it is today, undergirding web data in several domains. though the project has yet to fully live up to the early vision of ubiquitous adoption promoted by berners-lee, there is clear evidence that standards created by w3c have impacted areas where semantic web data must be exchanged by machines. yet, as mccarthy (2017) shows, the project might more accurately be described as a series of “entangled” semantic webs, due in part to the diverse, specialized domains where idiosyncratic vocabularies are created (economics, publishing, etc.), along with tensions between proprietary and public metadata schemas. this situation is starting to change with the introduction of globally coordinated projects to align semantics across fields. schema.org and key structured data events a modern outgrowth of the semantic web, schema.org was launched on june 2, 2011 as a joint project between google, microsoft, yahoo, and yandex to standardize structured data on the web. since its beginnings, schema.org has acted as a selfdescribed “collaborative, community activity with a mission to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the internet, on web pages, in email messages, and beyond,” according to their website. a list of all the core changes to the vocabulary in each of the schema.org releases is available (visit schema.org/docs/releases.html), from versions 0.91 (released on 21/4/12) to 6.0 (released on 21/1/20). while the schema.org project is global in nature and the result of individual contributions from people at different organizations (some commercial competitors), google is most closely associated with schema.org’s daily operations, provide the most resources and personnel, and are one of the largest users of its outputs in their products such as google’s knowledge graph and virtual assistants. further, the schema.org metadata model in many ways collects and build on the work of smaller, domain specific initiatives such as dublin core, friends of a friend, and goodrelations. to get a better sense of schema.org, we spent time over a five-year period talking to semantic web experts, developers, and users to better understand the history of structured data on the web. several of the individuals and groups we spoke to are part of search engine optimization (seo) communities (like seo skeptic and graph lounge), or were involved (then or in the past) in building the underlying tools and infrastructure for the semantic web at places like the w3c. before analyzing the structure of schema.org itself, we wanted to get a better sense of the historical development of large platform companies’ engagement with structured data on the web, and to do this we pulled csv data from seo skeptic, who had been tracking platform companies’ releases and announcements, to create our own data visualization of a timeline of key structured data events over a ten year period, from 2009-2019 (figure 1). we labelled and color coded the data to identify which platform companies and organizations were involved in each of the events. these included google, microsoft, yahoo, yandex, schema.org, freebase, pinterest, apple, wikipedia, facebook, twitter. figure 1 timeline of key structured data events (2009-2019) the timeline clearly showed that google was the dominant force involved in over 90 key events involving announcement and effective dates of structured data products and services. some of these included the introduction of “rich snippets” (12/5/2009), the launch of the “knowledge graph” (16/5/2012), and the beta version release of the “fact check markup tool” (2/10/2018). while the visualization lacks certain small product updates and releases from organizations like wikipedia (it does contain most of the major announcements), the timeline overwhelmingly shows that google has been involved in more significant product and feature announcements (apart from updates and releases) than other companies and organizations in the structured data field. we coded schema.org as a separate entity since it is technically an international collaboration, and identified 20 key structured data events, including its version release date history, allowing us to see its progress alongside google and the others. if one were to label schema.org as being, for all intents and purposes, a google initiative, then google’s dominance of the structured data field increases by a third. schema.org and semantic networks where the timeline allowed us to see a bird’s eye view of schema.org activity in the structured data field while also providing us an idea of the overall investment in semantics by some of the main platform companies, we also wanted to bring a magnifying glass to schema.org’s embedded semantic structure. our second task was to examine in detail the semantics of schema.org’s structured data and organization. to do this, we downloaded the raw schema.org data model hierarchy in machine readable form as an rdf file (available at schema.org/docs/developers.html). we then processed the rdf data model in webvowl, a tool for web-based visualization of ontologies. this allowed us to create a semantic network visualization of schema.org’s internal organization, overall vocabulary and centrality of terms, which we compared to the hierarchy and available documentation (figure 2). figure 2 partial schema.org hierarchy (left) and schema.org semantic network (right) we then took turns iteratively and individually reviewing the hierarchy and semantic network while taking notes and then met to discuss our observations. each of us noted several interesting features of schema.org’s ontology. first, we both noted that as a form of knowledge representation schema.org is created, disputed, and revised as evidenced by the extensive available documentation of its release history. second, we broadly noted that the project privileges ontological and epistemological commitments and understandings of things relating to work and everyday life and that these assumptions are subsequently baked into platforms by algorithms that pull structured metadata in search results (schema.org is used by over 10 million websites, apps, and products, according to their website). by laying bare these conceptual maps, it became clear that schema.org privileges certain modalities of things like labor, leisure, and knowledge over others (though, as we mentioned, the hierarchy is always revised). the semantic network illustrates the datafication of life within several domains, from tech industries to creative work. for instance, the “creativework” category in the network is the third largest node and includes entities related to media texts, production, and consumption. here, creative works are understood as units or types of labor, illustrating tech companies’ role in shaping normative standards of cultural production and consumption in recent decades (craig & cunningham, 2019; napoli & caplan, 2017). similarly, the “place” categorization privileges locations related to culture, tourism, and commerce (i.e. where people are likely to spend money and leisure time). these largely public locations are those often involved in vacation and leisure contexts (e.g. “touristattraction,” “landmarksorhistoricalbuildings,” “civicstructure”). likewise, the “event” item is largely focused on cultural events and texts, specifically the arts (e.g. “comedyevent,” “festival,” “screeningevent,” “exhibitionevent”). the “intangible” category seems to hierarchize purchasing behaviors and commodities, a common theme among all the second-level entities that appear (beyond the top-level entity “thing”). moreover, some items seem far less tangible than others (e.g. the difference between making a reservation, purchasing a ticket, or enumeration). this category also includes sub-level items such as “brand,” “merchantreturnpolicy,” and “mediasubscription.” what is notable here is not necessarily how well these items fit within the assigned category, but the extent to which each category is defined by purchasing behaviors, cultural commodities, and creative labor. the privileging of creative work and focus on cultural labor made possible through the services provided by these tech companies illustrates the complex webs of meaning-making within these spheres as well as the role these corporations play in legitimizing and making those meanings accessible to the people who use them so frequently. several interesting entities appear, including “claimreview,” which enables developers to markup news stories with fact checks so they appear as such in search results. the display of this feature was announced by google on 13/10/2016. the use of this tool grew in connection to the “fake news” debates surrounding the 2016 us presidential election (bing introduced support for fact checks using claimreview on 14/9/17). claimreview positions schema.org and google as a key arbiter of what can be considered credible, leveraging their already widespread legitimacy as both a harbinger and source of information. moreover, google’s inclusion of knowledge panels as a way of keeping online traffic on their own search engine for quickly accessing information is illustrative of the company’s attempt to maintain their foothold and monopolize information as a kind of semantic “middle” layer between users and primary sources. for example, the google knowledge panels that are partially populated by schema.org markup and that contain information about things like biographical details and facts, are a major part of internet infrastructure for users today. “62 percent of mobile searches in june 2019 were no-click” and “people ages 13 to 21” are “twice as likely as respondents over 50 to consider their search complete” once they’ve seen a “knowledge panel” (kelley, 2019). semantics provided by sources like schema.org will continue to play a key role as users ask google and virtual assistants for things “on the fly.” conclusion by engineering software that analyzes structured metadata and using it to provide ontological descriptions of the world, companies like google have designed the technological infrastructure that privileges certain conceptualizations of things like work, labor, news, life, and technology, while limiting or ignoring alternatives (iliadis, 2018, 2019). through its ability to surface information in retrieval, schema.org is in a way a regulator and gatekeeper, potentially limiting access to information that is not defined or included in the markup. our job now is to locate more examples of this limitation and we plan to do so in future work. for example, we are interested in surfacing semantic errors in information retrieval on products like google’s knowledge panels and alexa’s answers which rely on wikidata markup. these semantic infrastructures assert what is possible, normal, and appropriate while consolidating the datafication of information in ways that benefit companies and corporations. the schema.org partnership represents a critical juncture in terms of how tech companies have grown to play an integral role regarding the way labor, information, cultural commodities, and media products are understood and accessed. in doing so, platform companies have not only created a hierarchy of what people want and how often they search for it, but underscore these processes with their own marketing and cultural logics (jenkins, 2004; klinger & svensson, 2014; van dijk & poell, 2013). references berners-lee, t., and fischetti, m. (1999). weaving the web: the original design and ultimate destiny of the world wide web by its inventor. new york: harper. craig, d. and cunningham, s. (2019). social media entertainment: the new intersection of hollywood and silicon valley. nyu press. iliadis, a. (2018). algorithms, ontology, and social progress. global media and communication. 14(2), 219-230. doi.org/10.1177/1742766518776688 iliadis, a. (2019). the tower of babel problem: making data make sense with basic formal ontology. online information review. 43(6), 1021-1045. doi.org/10.1108/oir07-2018-0210 jenkins, h. (2004). the cultural logic of media convergence. international journal of cultural studies, 7(1), 33-43. kelley, l. (2019). the google feature magnifying disinformation. the atlantic, september 23. available at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/09/googles-knowledge-panels-aremagnifying-disinformation/598474/ klinger, u., & svensson, j. (2015). the emergence of network media logic in political communication: a theoretical approach. new media & society, 17(8), 1241-1257. mccarthy, m. t. (2017). the semantic web and its entanglements. science, technology and society, 22(1), 21–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/0971721816682796 napoli, p., & caplan, r. (2017). why media companies insist they’re not media companies, why they're wrong, and why it matters. first monday, 22(5). van dijck, j. and poell, t., 2013. understanding social media logic. media and communication,1(1), 2-14. the epistemological power of data sharing platforms jean-christophe plantin london school of economics critical internet researchers have shown the larger politics involved in using social media data for research, including the risks of neglecting the corporate logic that shapes the “social” (langlois & elmer, 2013; marres, 2017) or resulting in a divide between “data rich” and “data poor” institutions (boyd & crawford, 2012). existing research has also detailed how conditions of access and use of such data conflict in many ways with the requirements for reliable scholarship (acker & kreisberg, 2019; borra & rieder, 2014; driscoll & walker, 2014; gaffney & puschmann, 2013; gerlitz & rieder, 2013; hogan, 2018). this paper complements this research, but goes beyond analyzing the politics or the methodological issues emerging when using social media platforms as data source. it focuses instead on platforms dedicated to data sharing—defined as the deposition, preservation, and access for use and reuse of research data (tenopir et al., 2011)—and investigates the epistemological implications when such platforms organize data dissemination and reuse. the central case study is the platform figshare, created in september 2011 by dr mark hahnel, a phd graduate from imperial college london in stem cell biology. on one hand, it exists as figshare.com, a website that invites individual researchers to selfarchive their outputs (such as datasets, graphics, presentation slides, and almost anything else) on a personal profile. on the other hand, it exists as a middleware technology sold as figshare for institutions and figshare for publishers. with these offers, institutions such as universities, research institutions, libraries, data archives, repositories, and scientific publishers can contract with the company to get a series of services on top of their existing data infrastructures—such as customized web portals, management software for researchers’ data, or services that mint persistent identifiers (e.g., dois). acting as a platform that mediates between a plurality of scholarly actors, but also that is “plugged-in” on top of other research institutions, figshare illustrates how platforms are an increasingly important configuration for data sharing (plantin et al, 2018). based on this case study, this paper investigates the epistemological implications of the reliance on such platforms in scholarship, by asking: when the logic of platforms is transposed from the web economy to the scholarly world, how does this configuration shape research? do platforms facilitate all types of research practices, or are they more compatible with some scientific paradigms than with others? is there an epistemological program embedded in the architecture of platforms? extending literature in internet studies that described how digital platforms act as gatekeepers (bucher, 2013; galloway, 2006; gillespie, 2010; mckelvey, 2011; van dijck & poell, 2013), the following research shows that, beyond a discourse of neutrality, platforms shape the mediation between scholarly parties based on specific normative incentives. the demonstration is organized in three stages. first, data sharing platforms emphasize the large collection of heterogeneous data sets—facilitated by minimal selection, low deposit requirements for researchers, and minimal internal processing— and their publication through apis. second, the architecture of data sharing platforms, by providing automatic access to deposited research data through api, operationalizes “big data” research practices, based on pattern recognition over large quantity of data. third, complementing the analysis of the platform architecture with discourses from figshare founder and manager, the paper reveals the epistemological inclinations of the platform logic towards “big data” research. it concludes that as figshare positions their apis at a central configuration for scholarship (with the larger aim to making science “programmable”), it is crucial to uncover the gatekeeping function that platforms play within the large infrastructure for knowledge, despite being typically hidden behind rhetoric of openness, accessibility, and neutrality. the methodology to analyze this platform combines document analysis with interviews. the documents comprise figshare blog posts, op-eds by its founder mark hahnel or interviews of him in specialized press, the data deposit interface, the figshare api documentation, and an interview i conducted with mark hahnel in london in 2016. combined altogether, this mixed-method approach reveals how the technical architecture and the discourses of the two entities shape the research practices and types of knowledge that can emerge from their mediation. references acker, a., & kreisberg a. (2019). social media data archives in an api-driven world. archival science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09325-9 borra, e., & rieder, b. (2014). programmed method: developing a toolset for capturing and analyzing tweets. aslib journal of information management, 66(3), 262–278. boyd, d., & crawford, k. (2012). critical questions for big data. information, communication & society, 15(5), 662–679. bucher, t. (2013). objects of intense feeling: the case of the twitter api: computational culture. computational culture, 3. retrieved from http://computationalculture.net/article/objects-of-intense-feeling-the-case-of-the-twitterapi driscoll, k., & walker, s. (2014). big data, big questions| working within a black box: transparency in the collection and production of big twitter data. international journal of communication, 8(0), 20. gaffney, d., & puschmann, c. (2013). data collection on twitter. in k. weller, a. bruns, j. burgess, & m. mahrt, twitter and society (pp. 55–68). new york, ny: peter lang international academic publishers. galloway, a. r. (2006). protocol: how control exists after decentralization (new ed edition). cambridge, ma: the mit press. gerlitz, c., & rieder, b. (2013). mining one percent of twitter: collections, baselines, sampling. m/c journal, 16(2). retrieved from http://journal.mediaculture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/620 gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of ‘platforms.’ new media & society, 12(3), 347–364. doi:10.1177/1461444809342738 hogan, b. (2018). social media giveth, social media taketh away: facebook, friendships, and apis. international journal of communication, 12, 592–611. langlois, g., & elmer, g. (2013). the research politics of social media platforms. culture machine, 14(0). retrieved from http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/505 marres, n. (2017). digital sociology: the reinvention of social research. malden, ma: polity press. mckelvey, f. (2011). a programmable platform? drupal, modularity, and the future of the web. fibreculture journal, 18. retrieved from http://eighteen.fibreculturejournal.org/2011/10/09/fcj-128-programmable-platformdrupal-modularity-and-the-future-of-the-web/ plantin, j.-c., lagoze, c., & edwards, p. n. (2018). re-integrating scholarly infrastructure: the ambiguous role of data sharing platforms. big data & society, 5(1), 205395171875668. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718756683 tenopir, c., allard, s., douglass, k., aydinoglu, a. u., wu, l., read, e., … frame, m. (2011). data sharing by scientists: practices and perceptions. plos one, 6(6), e21101. van dijck, j., & poell, t. (2013). understanding social media logic. media and communication, 1(1), 2–14. private platforms, metadata, and the enclosure of data access amelia acker university of texas at austin two of the most urgent issues for internet researchers concern the rise of private platforms and their models for data access that rely on profit-driven standards and ontologies. capitalist in their design, platforms aggregate user data en masse so that it can be transformed, bought, sold, and accessed (sometimes for free) as an integral part of a profit model of data expropriation away from users to data brokers (gehl, 2014). the standards and ontologies used to classify and exchange data in private platforms are different from web standardization efforts and international standards engineering of the early internet and open web (russell, 2014). platforms are frequently described as ‘walled gardens’ for user experiences. these walls are extended to inhibit and enclose methods for data access as well, because platforms rely upon the ‘accumulation by dispossession’ of data from individuals (thatcher, o’sullivan, & mahmoudi, 2016). the generation and reuse of metadata through the asymmetric creation and collection of user data in platforms is now an epistemic mark of our present data culture. increasingly we see that the semantic relationships between users’ data and data derived from their environments (such as work, gym, church, or commute) are classified with corporate taxonomies and then become central to the user experience and product design of personalized platform products from amazon, yelp, or youtube. for example, spotify recently announced its personas tool, which builds on years of user-centered design techniques to cluster and examine listening behaviors of user groups in the u.s. (torres de souza, hörding, & karol, 2019). personas are now part of the platform’s internal vocabulary to support the identification of users, categorize their listening habits, and drive algorithmic recommendations. yet the classified personas label of spotify users is not available to users who generated this tool. while metadata standards like the personas product taxonomy that describe people and their behaviors have always been essential to social platforms, the intensification and datafication of icts we now see proves that some user categories can and have been used in support of profiling, social sorting, and redlining minority and vulnerable populations with platforms (eubanks, 2018; noble, 2018). with profit-driven platforms premised on targeted advertising based on user metadata, the power of legacy standards and the categorization of users has far-reaching consequences when deployed in big data applications, where large-scale data-mining and data analytics are dependent upon initial taxonomies and classification systems to sort users. more and more, we see engagement metadata being gamed for misinformation campaigns, media manipulation and disinformation efforts, even largescale discrimination tactics across platforms (acker & donovan, 2019). for example, ethnic affinity categories are among the options that data brokers and advertisers can use to promote content and direct targeted content to users on platforms (angwin, mattu, & parris jr., 2016). platforms typically classify users by a range of affinity categories that may be unknown to users themselves. these metadata structures can be used to control the information that is accessed by some users and not others, as well as categorizing content for specific users based on personalized predictions. these metadata are then used to display new content, push news alerts, and personalize search results to users through affinity categories on platforms such as google, youtube, instagram, even navigation apps. grouping users into audiences for targeted advertising is not new. data markets such as newspaper, television media, food service, and insurance markets existed for decades before mobile networks and social platforms. but with knowledge infrastructures that enable near-constant data creation and collection, platforms can leverage large-scale social networks, environmental sensors, and rapid data-processing to create new gateways of control and access to collections of data. so, in our data culture of constant creation and collection of data in platforms, metadata standards and ontologies that underwrite these networked infrastructures remain hidden and are often not accessible by most of the creators who produce them or researchers who wish to investigate them (acker, 2018). another characteristic of this moment is that data creators are ceding control and access to their data to profit-driven platforms, whilst platform intermediaries’ profit from consuming and providing access to these collections to data brokers who curate them for long-term value. despite the fact that knowledge infrastructures can now extract data at scale, intermediaries and brokers assert control over collections of user data by enclosing access and inhibiting oversight, criticism, and research (acker & kreisberg, 2019; bruns, 2019). this distance between creators who produce data and collection contexts where data and metadata are accumulated and stored in private platforms is where ki research can have swift and lasting impact. these uncertain archives are made of data and metadata accrued from big data apparatuses such as transportation and mapping apps, social media, mobile devices, learning management systems, and internet infrastructures assembled by data intermediaries to resell and repurpose user data to data brokers. few of these data archives are accessible to the creators who produced these digital traces and are impacted by these categories the most. indeed, platform users cannot opt out of affinities, audience profiles, schemas, corporate taxonomies or personas once they have been classified as such, because these metadata standards and ontologies belong to the intermediaries and brokers who control them. while these metadata are not always understood or preserved for the people who created them, they are actively leveraged by platform intermediaries, data brokers, and third-party data consumers to create personalization profiles, predictive analytics, algorithmic recommendations, and user data collections. internet infrastructures reinforce and redistribute authority, power, and control with gateways like metadata standards and ontologies. today, creating data in platforms is a form of belonging, but there are few avenues in place for users to control or access metadata generated about them, or to withdraw from categories once they have been sorted and enrolled into them. if the space that separates users from collections of their data is an epistemic mark of our current moment, then the access and enactment of metadata in private platforms will continue to be how this space grows and more walls are built. it is imperative for internet researchers to confront not just the commodification of data in private platforms, but the impact of enclosure of data access regimes we are witnessing with their rise. references acker, a. (2018). a death in the timeline: memory and metadata in social platforms. journal of critical library and information studies, 2(1), 27. acker, a., & donovan, j. (2019). data craft: a theory/methods package for critical internet studies. information, communication & society, 0(0), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1645194 acker, a., & kreisberg, a. (2019). social media data archives in an api-driven world. archival science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09325-9 angwin, j., mattu, s., & parris jr., t. (2016, december 27). facebook doesn’t tell users everything it really knows… [text/html]. retrieved august 31, 2018, from propublica website: https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-doesnt-tell-userseverything-it-really-knows-about-them bruns, a. (2019). after the ‘apicalypse’: social media platforms and their fight against critical scholarly research. information, communication & society, 0(0), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1637447 eubanks, v. (2018). automating inequality: how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. new york, ny: st. martin’s press. gehl, r. w. (2014). reverse engineering social media: software, culture, and political economy in new media capitalism. philadelphia, pennsylvania: temple university press. noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism (1 edition). new york: nyu press. pomerantz, j. (2015). metadata. cambridge, massachusetts; london, england: mit press. russell, a. l. (2014). open standards and the digital age: history, ideology, and networks. new york, ny: cambridge university press. thatcher, j., o’sullivan, d., & mahmoudi, d. (2016). data colonialism through accumulation by dispossession: new metaphors for daily data. environment and planning d: society and space, 34(6), 990–1006. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775816633195 torres de souza, m., hörding, o., & karol, s. (2019, march 26). the story of spotify personas. retrieved may 2, 2019, from spotify design website: https://spotify.design/articles/2019-03-26/the-story-of-spotify-personas/ towards a sociological understanding of knolwdge graphs huw davies university of edinburgh rebecca eynon university of oxford why should we care about knowledge graphs? many of the world’s richest and influential technology companies such as google, facebook, microsoft, ebay, and ibm draw value from their knowledge graphs. knowledge graphs can be used to unify and link different sources and types of data, build sophisticated models for machines to understand our social world, deanonymize data in ways that challenge our privacy, and help ai pretend to be human. facebook, for example, is using its knowledge graph to create a “structured understanding of music and lyrics” (noy, gao, jain, narayanan, patterson, & taylor, 2019) that can be used to “detect when people are referencing them” during conversations on its platform so that the company can monetise “serendipitous moments between individuals” (ibid). yet, despite this technology’s importance, the inner workings of knowledge graphs are unfamiliar to sociologists (halford, pope, & weal (2013). what are knowledge graphs? knowledge graphs synthesize more recognisable ways of managing data. for example, they are databases that can be interrogated via structured queries and their properties can be analysed like social networks. however, unlike databases and social networks, knowledge graphs are also knowledge bases within which data is labelled and characterized with formal semantics. these three affordances combined, allow owners of knowledge graphs to search across and within large and previously incompatible datasets and analyse and interpret data in ways that enable machines to infer new knowledge about our world. knowledge graphs can operationalise five forms of semantic modelling instrument: entities, classes, relationships, categories, and ontologies. classes enable entities to be put into logical hierarchical categories. for example, a person is an entity that belongs to the class ‘human’ who has the relationship ‘works for’ an entity ‘company’ that belongs to the class ‘corporation’: her job within the company maybe within the category of ‘managerial’. entity descriptions often include a classification of the entity with respect such a class hierarchy. for example, a manager has a ‘higher salary’ than an administrator. the relationships between entities are usually tagged with types, which provide further information about the nature of the relationship. for example, the administrator is ‘subordinate to’ the manager. it is possible to add ‘human-friendly text’ to further clarify design intentions for the entity and improve searches. ontologies further formalize these ways of organizing data to make them more robust, standardized, and legible to machines. ontologies serve as prescribed taxonomies that integrate logic so that the model without knowing any specific salary figures would logically assume two mangers in the same role would have the same salary. however, such systems are only as good as their logics. for example, the sociology of gender pay gaps would need to be integrated into the model for the machine to understand structural sexism in the workplace and why male and female managers may not be paid the same. machines are not good at processing such anomalies. therefore, knowledge graphs often operationalise socially constructed and sometimes problematic ways of reflecting human knowledge. human subjectivity becomes hard coded into systems which are then treated as embodiments of objective processes. graham and ford (2016), for example showed, jerusalem’s highly politically sensitive status was hard coded into google’s knowledge graph. yet sociologists with expertise in knowledge production and all its socially constructed ambiguities know relatively little about knowledge graphs and adjacent semantic web technologies (halford, pope, and weal (2013). how can this be changed; how can knowledge graphs be rendered more legible to sociologists? a way into knowledge graphs given their commercial value to companies, proprietary knowledge graphs are a typical ‘black box’ technology that they don’t want to reveal to competitors. however, there are ways of studying knowledge graphs that offer sociologists opportunities to critically engage with them and there are opportunities to develop knowledge graphs as a sociological method. to develop their knowledge graphs, many of the technology companies apply for patents. in 2018, for example, facebook, applied for a patent its model of social class to be integrated into its knowledge graph united states patent office (2020). see figure 1. figure 1 drawing on such examples can facilitate a better sociological understanding of knowledge graphs and highlight the salience and relevance of knowledge graphs to a broader research community. we can query facebook’s ontological categories such as ‘socio-economic group’ and the data such as ‘travel history’ that facebook uses to justify these categories. knowledge graphs a sociological method knowledge graphs are also available to sociologists as a method. this is enables us to expose their inner workings to a non-specialist audience and show opportunities for us to engage with technologists in the construction of computerised knowledge. in our example, we model the political economy field educational technology (davies and enyon, 2020). to produce our knowledge graph, we use a graph database engine called neo4j and combine data from various sources including interviews, financial records, and automated web searches. we show how we classified our entities, characterized relationships between entities with semantic tabs, and added contextual data such as hyperlinks to justify our decisions and render them transparent. using graph measuring techniques such as pagerank, we are able to gain new insights into this political economy such as its dominant capital investors. see figure 2 for a screen shot from this graph. pagerank identified the central node in this graph, learn capital as a dominant investor in the political economy of edtech. the pink and blue nodes are edtech companies that learn capital is investing in. the purple and green nodes are other investors. figure 2 these two strategies, analyzing patents and developing our own knowledge graphs, promise sociologists a better, more meaningful understanding of this important technology. references davies, h., & eynon r. (2020). the mobilisation of ai in education: a bourdieusean field analysis. sociology. (in press). ford, h., & graham, m. (2016). provenance, power and place: linked data and opaque digital geographies. environment and planning d: society and space, 34(6), 957–970. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775816668857 halford, s., pope, c., & weal, m. (2013). digital futures? sociological challenges and opportunities in the emergent semantic web. sociology, 47(1), 173–189. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038512453798 noy n., gao y., jain, a., narayanan, a., patterson, a., & taylor, j. (2018). industryscale knowledge graphs lessons and challenges. semantic web conference in asilomar, california, in october 2018 retrieved from http://iswc2018.semanticweb.org/panel-enterprise-scale-knowledge-graphs/ us patent and trademark office (2020). systems, computer-readable media, and methods for activation-based marketing. retrieved from http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nphparser?sect1=pto2&sect2=hitoff&p=1&u=%2fnetahtml%2fpto%2fsearchbool.html&r=1&f=g&l=50&co1=and&d=pg01&s1=%22socioeconomic+group%22&os =%22socioeconomic+group%22&rs=%22socioeconomic+group%22 selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 koene, a., perez, e., webb, h., patel, m. (2017, october 18-21). human agency on algorithmic systems. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. human agency on algorithmic systems ansgar koene university of nottingham elvira perez vallejos university of nottingham helena webb university of oxford menisha patel university of oxford abstract the majority of large web service platforms promote service personalization as a means of providing user convenience. parameter settings are commonly inferred from user behavior rather than explicit requests. as a consequence, users have little direct control of the system behavior. in this paper we discuss the implicit trade-off between user convenience and agency over the online experience. we will present results from multistakeholder engagement workshops exploring concerns and routes to solutions as raised by participants from industry, civil-society, teachers and academics. finally, we will place these results within the context of the wider debate about user trust on the internet and specific efforts to develop a standard on algorithm bias considerations. introduction/context from search engines to social-media feed personalization and news recommender systems, online access to information is heavily mediated by algorithmic systems that filter and guide the behavior of users. in the competition between services, the limited capacity of human attention is perceived as the main resource bottleneck and thus the primary factor in the competition between services. in response to this, increasingly sophisticated and personalized algorithms are used to cut through the mountains of available information in the hope of providing content that is sufficiently enticing to keep the users on the platform. superficially, there seems nothing wrong with prioritizing information that users will likely agree with; after all, people tend to self-select information that aligns with their own beliefs anyway. however, the implementation, and sometimes the very existence, of these personalization algorithms is often hidden from users with potentially negative consequences for their personal agency over their internet experience. rather than ask users to explicitly define the topics or content the algorithm should select for, data mining and behavior tracking are used to algorithmically infer/identify personalized interest patterns. in order to perform this inference of personal interests the algorithms have to rely on certain basic assumption about user behavior, such as an assumption that browsing behavior is rationally efficient (e.g. time spent on a website is assumed to correlate with level of interest). despite such assumptions the ‘big data’ properties of high volume and high dimensionality are assumed to produce better predictions of the user’s interests than even the users themselves are capable of consciously expressing [1]. when challenged over concerns that these highly complex algorithms are imposing editorial control over the information that people can access (e.g. amplifying the ‘echo chamber’ phenomenon), and should therefore require the service providers to be classified as media organizations with corresponding editorial responsibilities and regulations, the ‘data driven’ aspect of the algorithms is often used to argue that regardless of the filtering, ranking and recommendations performed by the algorithms, the platforms remain ‘content neutral’ technology providers, and are thus not media companies [2]. in brief, it is argued, that since the algorithm makes its inferences based on the data which is provided by the user it is not the service provider but rather the user who ultimately determines the behavior of the algorithm. such an argument however is contestable when one considers that the users are often unaware of the types of actions that are monitored to provide input data for the algorithm, and have no way of knowing how those actions affect the algorithm behavior. instead, the combination of design decisions by the service provider acting on behavioral data mined from the user results in a system that is not fully controlled by either party, with the potential to produce unexpected and undesired results. many examples of unintended bias by information mediating algorithms against racial, gender or other protected groups are most likely the results of this kind of semi-blind interaction of applying a ‘black box’ system to an uncontrolled data set. when the google advertising algorithm showed more ads related to criminal background checking for typically africanamerican names than ‘white’ names [3], or showed higher paying jobs more to men than women [4], a general purpose ‘black box’ algorithm was probably mining historical data sets, that had not been screened against such bias, resulting in the perpetuation of unjustified bias. methodology our project [5] is working to develop tools, educational material and recommendations for regulatory safeguards to re-assert users’ agency over their online information access, with special focus on the identification and avoidance of unjustified algorithmic bias. the project combines deliberative discourse with 13-17 years old ‘digital natives’ with user behavior observation studies to map user experiences with algorithmic online systems, as well as experiments with algorithm design principles. the results of these studies are used as basis for engagement with stakeholders from industry, civil-society, government regulators and academia to develop recommendations for better education, design and regulation of these systems. the stakeholder engagement takes the form of workshop based discussions around specific case studies, e.g. the manipulation of page rankings in search engine results, and questionnaires. the discussions are recorded, transcribed and anonymized. the transcripts and the anonymized questionnaire responses are subsequently analyzed to identify common themes expressed by the participants. results outcomes of the first multi-stakeholder engagement workshop suggest that participants ranging from smes to ngos and academics (legal and/or technical experts) consider a number of ‘agency’ related factors to play an important role in establishing the perceived ‘fairness’ of an algorithm. factors such as: ability to appeal or negate an algorithm’s decision; freedom to explore algorithm effects by experimenting with the algorithm in a non-binding way; ability to have an explanation for the algorithm outcomes; ability to control the data that is used by the system; and an ability to explicitly ‘manually’ finetune the algorithmic system to match personal user objectives in recognition of the subjective nature of fairness. the next step in our exploration of user agency on algorithmic systems will consider the feasibility and desirability of implementing the proposed capabilities that were identified as ‘fairness’ enhancing factors. implications on the policy/regulatory side, we are taking the results of our user and stakeholder studies to contribute to initiatives such as the user trust agenda of the internet society [6] and the ieee global initiative for ethical considerations in artificial intelligence and autonomous systems [7]. as part of the latter initiative we are leading an ieee working group for the development of a standard on algorithmic bias considerations [8]. this standards is focused on ‘surfacing’ and evaluating societal implications of the outcomes of algorithmic systems, with the aim of countering non-operationally justified results. it will provide individuals or organizations creating algorithms with methods to provide clearly articulated accountability and clarity around how algorithms are targeting, assessing and influencing the users and stakeholders affected by the algorithm. acknowledgement this work forms part of the unbias project supported by epsrc grant ep/n02785x/1. unbias is an interdisciplinary research project led by the university of nottingham in collaboration with the universities of oxford and edinburgh. for more information about the unbias project, see http://unbias.wp.horizon.ac.uk/ references [1] youyou, w., kosinski, m. and stillwell, d. (2015). computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those more by humans. pnas, 112(4), 1036-1040. http://unbias.wp.horizon.ac.uk/ [2] segreti, g. (2016). facebook ceo says group will not become a media company. reuters, 29 august – http://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-zuckerbergiduskcn1141wn [3] sweeney, l. (2013). discrimination in online ad delivery. queue, 11(3), 1-19. [4] vincent, j. (2015). google's algorithms advertise higher paying jobs to more men than women. theverge, july 7 – http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/7/8905037/googlead-discrimination-adfisher [5] unbias http://unbias.wp.horizon.ac.uk/ [6] internet society (2016). a policy framework for an open and trusted internet. white papers, 22 june – https://www.internetsociety.org/doc/policy-framework-open-andtrusted-internet [7] https://standards.ieee.org/develop/project/7003.html http://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-zuckerberg-iduskcn1141wn http://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-zuckerberg-iduskcn1141wn http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/7/8905037/google-ad-discrimination-adfisher http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/7/8905037/google-ad-discrimination-adfisher http://unbias.wp.horizon.ac.uk/ https://www.internetsociety.org/doc/policy-framework-open-and-trusted-internet https://www.internetsociety.org/doc/policy-framework-open-and-trusted-internet https://standards.ieee.org/develop/project/7003.html selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): stromer-galley, j., hemsley, j., rossini, p., smith, a., bolden, s. (2020, october 28-31). does anyone talk about the issues anymore? the 2016 u.s. presidential candidates’ messaging on facebook and twitter. paper submitted to aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. does anyone talk about the issues anymore? the 2016 u.s. presidential candidates’ messaging on facebook and twitter jennifer stromer-galley syracuse university jeff hemsley syracuse university patricia rossini university of liverpool alex smith syracuse university sarah bolden syracuse university motivation and background political campaigns use their twitter and facebook accounts to undertake a variety of different communication strategies, including mobilizing supporters to act, shaping journalists’ and supporters’ understanding of the candidate’s policy positions, conveying the qualities and characteristics the candidate has to lead, and to differentiate themselves from their opponents (stromer-galley, 2019). in their advertisements, political campaigns historically have emphasized their policy positions more so than their own character and ability to lead (johnston and kaid, 2002). as campaigns have expanded their strategic communication to social media, we aim to better understand the dynamics of image and issue communication by the presidential candidates, and the public’s engagement with policy topics. the questions that drive our study are the following: (rq1) do candidates talk about policy (advocating for theirs or attacking their opponents’) more so than their character and ability to lead (either their own ability or attacking that of their opponent)? given the large number of candidates in the race, and the prior scholarship that suggests that the political parties own certain topics (petrocik, 1996) and that political candidates will work to differentiate themselves from their opponents by owning certain policies (arbour, 2013), we ask: (rq2) when candidates talk on policy matters, what topics do they emphasize, and are there specific policy topics that certain candidates own? because both facebook and twitter enable the public to engage the candidates’ posts, we can further examine if the topics that candidates talk about are the ones engaged with by the public. thus, we ask: (rq3) does the public engage more with certain policy topics over others? finally, as candidates strategically use their social media accounts in different ways (bossetta, 2018; kreiss, lawrence, mcgregor, 2018), we ask: (rq4) do the candidates use their social media accounts in strategically different ways? methods we studied the candidates who ran during the u.s. primaries in the 2016 presidential campaign. we collected the facebook and twitter posts by the 17 viable republican and 5 viable democratic candidates from september 1, 2015 through march 31st, 2016, when the field had narrowed dramatically to these finalists. we also collected all firstlevel public comments on candidates’ facebook walls and all retweets and @mentions of candidate posts on twitter. we used human-supervised machine learning techniques to classify candidate posts on whether they were issue-focused, image-focused, along with several other categories. our performance using this technique has an overall f1 score of .76 or higher on the image and the issue classifications for twitter and for facebook. we also built lexicons to classify candidate posts on nine different political topics (economy, foreign policy, social and cultural issues, social programs, safety, military, governance, immigration, and environment). we validated our lexicons by comparing human and machine scoring of topics on a random sample of posts and found agreement of 75% or better on each topic. using clustering techniques as well as regression analysis, we examined the volume of posts that are image and issue focused, and what topics the different candidates analyze. preliminary results to answer rq1 regarding whether candidates are more likely to post issue-focused messages as compared with image-focused messages, we analyzed a total of 59011 posts (14550 fb, 44461 tw) from 22 candidates. of all of the posts, 27.42% were labeled as “issue.” the rate was higher on facebook at 34.39%, whereas for twitter it was 25.14%. to answer rq2, we examined what topics candidates posted on and clustered them by percentage. we found noteworthy patterns in our preliminary analysis. for example, we noted that bernie sanders (democrat) posted the most economy-focused messages, while jeb bush (republican) was the most focused on foreign policy. we saw evidence for partisan ownership of some political issues. for example, republicans were more likely to emphasize social and cultural issues as compared with democrats. the democratic candidates largely focused on domestic issues, with the exception of jim gilmore. to answer rq3, we will examine the topics the candidates posted on and the amount of engagement for those posts using engagement metrics of likes and retweets on twitter and likes, shares, and comments on facebook. preliminary results of rq4 suggest that there are differences in what the candidates post on facebook as compared with twitter. for example, candidates in our set were more issue focused on facebook than on twitter. the platform difference is highly significant with a chi square test (p = 0.000). discussion and conclusions our results so far indicate that there is substantially less communication on social media about the issues than we have historically seen in candidates’ paid advertising. the implication of this finding speaks to the shifting emphasis in u.s. politics to the character and personality of the candidates over their policy positions. political communication scholars have long observed the shifting relationship between political candidates, their party, and the centrality of each to the voting public in the united states (hacker, 2004; jamieson, 1996). moreover, the emphasis on communicating authenticity (enli, 2015) and promoting celebrity (abidin, 2018) on social media seems to extend to political candidates and the ways they communicate online. functionally, our public sphere is deprived of articulation and deliberation of public concerns and how political elites propose to solve them. we also see from our preliminary results that the candidates use their social media platforms for different strategic emphasis, with more policy discussion happening on facebook. this may be because, as kreiss, lawrence, and mcgregor (2018) find from their interviews with digital campaign staff, campaigns see facebook as a platform where they are more likely to communicate with supporters and thus want to provide additional arguments to support their candidate based on policy. twitter, on the other hand, is used to talk more directly with journalists and set the news agenda. limitations to the study include the methodological challenges of lexicon-based classification, including the risk of low recall given the variance in words used to convey issues. references abidin, c. (2018). internet celebrity: understanding fame online. united kingdom: emerald publishing bossetta, m. (2018). the digital architectures of social media: comparing political campaigning on facebook, twitter, instagram, and snapchat in the 2016 us election. journalism & mass communication quarterly, 95(2), 471-496. doi:10.1177/1077699018763307 enli, g. (2015). mediated authenticity: how the media constructs reality. peter lang. hacker, k. l. (2004). introduction: the continued importance of the candidate image construct. in k. l. hacker (ed.), presidential candidate images (pp. 1-20). oxford, uk: rowman & littlefield publishers. jamieson, k h. (1996). packaging the presidency (2nd ed.). oxford university press. johnston, a., & kaid, l. l. (2002). image ads and issue ads in u.s. presidential advertising: using videostyle to explore stylistic differences in televised political ads from 1952 to 2000. journal of communication, 52, 281-300 kreiss, d., lawrence, r. g., & mcgregor, s. c. (2018). in their own words: political practitioner accounts of candidates, audiences, affordances, genres, and timing of strategic social media use. political communication, 25 (1), 8-31. doi:10.1080/10584609.2017.1334727. petrocik, j. r. (1996). issue ownership in presidential elections, with a 1980 case study. american journal of political science, 40 (3), 825-850. stromer-galley, j. (2019). presidential campaigning in the internet age (2nd ed.). oxford university press. microsoft word aoir2018-socialsimmel-spirversion-092018.docx selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): riedl, m.j. (2018, october 10-13). who put the ‘social’ in social payment platforms? re-reading simmel and colleagues in light of the cambrian explosion. paper presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. who put the ‘social’ in mobile and social payment platforms? re-reading simmel and colleagues in light of the cambrian explosion martin johannes riedl the university of texas at austin this research considers the cambrian explosion (nelms, maurer, swartz, & mainwaring, 2017) of mobile and social payment technologies from a perspective that integrates classical theorizing on money and payments (mauss, 2002; simmel, 2005), more recent work (bandelj, wherry, & zelizer, 2017; dodd, 2014; maurer, 2015; zelizer, 2017), as well as research coming out of the future of money research collaborative and moneylab at the institute of network cultures at amsterdam. the paper negotiates mobile and social payment apps and the social realities that they stand upon and applies theoretical viewpoints from key authors to the emerging technologies. based on a contemporary investigation of what ‘social’ entails in payment spaces, the paper then analyzes, via the walkthrough method (light, burgess, & duguay, 2016) and a content analysis of app store material, the social nature of a selection of payment platforms. payment penetration a cambrian explosion (nelms et al., 2017), as some have called the influx in new payment technologies over the last few years, has penetrated people’s smartphones and social lives through platforms such as zelle, apple pay cash, square cash, google pay, wechat pay, alipay, and venmo. some of these payment technologies are described as ‘socializing’ (kremers & brassett, 2017), because they add social media to previously dry matter (venmo), submerge payments into social media/operating systems (wechat pay), integrate themselves into messaging services (apple pay cash), and/or replace physical wallets altogether (square cash, google wallet). the socialness of ‘just us’ at their core, mobile and social payment systems can be considered social because of “their intimate connection to users’ private lives” (kremers & brassett, 2017, p. 10), or through the notion of “just us” (nelms et al., 2017, p. 12), an ideal-typical social enactment of payment, void of government, corporate, and other influences. if “surveillance capitalism” (zuboff, 2015) is about the monetization of data, we can think of this as the datafication of money, wherein the social permeates payment apps and datafies financial transactions. trust, a central concern in all money matters, becomes visible through app transactions. (in)visibility and public databasing social aspects of payment processes are made visible (and in some cases public), while the visibility of money remains behind a veil. behind the scenes, the larger trend of creating public databases of transactions has gained popularity and possibility through blockchain technologies. some payment apps such as venmo provide public feeds of the messages that accompany payments. simmel’s struggles with money mobile and social payment apps represent a formidable counter-thesis to georg simmel’s money skepticism. simmel has described money as a “claim upon society” (simmel, 2005, p. 176), that results in a “sense in which money’s value … rests on social relations between its users that are fluid and dynamic” (dodd, 2015, p. 438). according to simmel, money is completely objective, a matter of quantity and not quality. money is “the absolute freedom from everything personal” (simmel, 2005, p. 126). simmel’s utilitarian perspective assumes money is a mode of objectifying people (coeckelbergh, 2017). maussian gifting in the gift (2002), marcel mauss proposed that there is no such thing as a true gift, because gifting leads to reciprocity. according to simmel “a gift in the form of money distances and estranges the gift from the giver” (2005, p. 335). in mobile and social payment apps, gifting plays an important role — e.g., in red packet gifting through wechat pay during the chinese new year (wu & ma, 2017) or cash-wrapping functions in square cash (barbosa, 2016) — and this gifting function upends simmel’s conception. back to the social it is the reintroduction of the social into monies, what zelizer (2017) refers to as earmarking, or setting aside money for specific (social) purposes, that updates simmel’s work to fit mobile and social payments. according to perry and ferreira (2018), zelizer’s understanding of money has contributed to an extraeconomic, social perspective, and bandelj et al. (2017) diagnose a “historical paradox” (p. 4), in which classical sociology has been turned upside down by contemporary research that emphasizes the socialness of money, such as dodd (2015), who holds that money is “ process, not a thing” preliminary analysis the empirical core of this work-in-progress employs the walkthrough method (light et al., 2016), and compares select mobile and social payment apps. furthermore, the researcher content-analyzes app store screenshots, as well as descriptions, and sampled reader reviews in app stores. preliminary analysis attempts to map apps on a continuum of sociality/publicness, with venmo and its social feed on the liberal side of the spectrum. criteria for analysis follow conceptual categories from scholarship outlined above, such as visibility, objectivity, freedom from everything personal, gifting, and earmarking capacities. references bandelj, n., wherry, f. f., & zelizer, v. a. (eds.). (2017). money talks: explaining how money really works. princeton university press. barbosa, g. (2016, september 13). square cash update includes promised messages app plus siri integration. 9to5mac. retrieved from https://9to5mac.com/2016/09/13/square-cash-messages-app-siri/ coeckelbergh, m. (2017). quantification machines and artificial agents in global finance: historical-phenomenological perspectives from philosophy and sociology of technology and money. in e. ippoliti & p. chen (eds.), methods and finance: a unifying view on finance, mathematics and philosophy (pp. 169–178). springer. dodd, n. (2014). the social life of money. princeton and oxford: princeton university press. dodd, n. (2015). redeeming simmel’s money. hau: journal of ethnographic theory, 5(2), 435–441. kremers, r., & brassett, j. (2017). mobile payments, social money: everyday politics of the consumer subject. new political economy, 22(6), 645–660. http://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2017.1306503 light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2016). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 maurer, b. (2015). how would you like to pay? how technology is changing the future of money. durham and london: duke university press. mauss, m. (2002). the gift: the form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. london and new york: routledge. http://doi.org/10.4324/9781912281008 nelms, t. c., maurer, b., swartz, l., & mainwaring, s. (2017). social payments: innovation, trust, bitcoin, and the sharing economy. theory, culture & society. http://doi.org/10.1177/0263276417746466 perry, m., & ferreira, j. (2018). moneywork: practices of use and social interaction around digital and analog money. acm transactions on computer-human interaction, 24(6). http://doi.org/10.1145/3162082 simmel, g. (2005). the philosophy of money. london and new york: routledge. http://doi.org/10.4324/9780203481134 wu, z., & ma, x. (2017). money as a social currency to manage group dynamics: red packet gifting in chinese online communities. proceedings of the 2017 chi conference extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems chi ea ’17, 2240–2247. http://doi.org/10.1145/3027063.3053153 zelizer, v. a. (2017). the social meaning of money: pin money, paychecks, poor relief, and other currencies (2.). princeton university press. zuboff, s. (2015). big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization. journal of information technology, 30(1), 75–89. http://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2015.5 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): evelyn wan, e., flore, j., mccosker, a., hendry, n.a., kamstra, p. & farmer, j. (2020, october 28-31). mediating mental illness: lifewords, platforms, and algorithms. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 201th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. panel submission: mediating mental illness: digital lifeworlds, platforms and algorithms evelyn wan institute for cultural inquiry, utrecht university jacinthe flore school of global, urban and social studies, rmit university anthony mccosker social innovation research institute, swinburne university of technology peter kamstra swinburne university of technology jane farmer swinburne university of technology natalie hendry school of media and communication, rmit university how is “mental illness” and mental ill-health conceptualised, designed or experienced by and through digital life? what “is” data related to mental ill-health? this panel explores how digital technologies and media have transformed rhetoric, discourses and practices related to mental ill-health. we bring together different methodological and theoretical contributions towards an interdisciplinary study of mental illness and digital life. a considerable amount of data related to emotional states and experiences is currently being collected on and by individuals today. sometimes, collection is obvious, as in the biometric readings displayed on apps used for fitness and mood tracking, posts shared on online forums to convey social isolation, or the transcripts we generate talking to bots designed to assist us with mental-health related queries. other times, collection is harder to determine, as on social media platforms where users receive pop-up 2 “intervention” messages inquiring about their state of mind, or directing them to counselling services. for their part, corporations have engaged with this data to categorise, treat and predict mental illness, or shape possibilities for users’ experiences of emotional distress, trauma and mental ill-health. machine learning is purportedly well-suited to "dementalise” psychiatry (castel 2000, in ross 2006); that is, use descriptive language to diagnose, and ultimately predict mental illness. today it is used to “coach” users to psychological recovery in support apps to alleviate distress and isolation (e.g. fuller et al. 2020, parshley 2020). further, corporations market machine learning in hospital "smart rooms" as a technology with a dual function: it provides a cost-effective way to monitor patients, and using aggregated data, it generates "optimal treatment paths" for the hospital to adopt in the future. this collection of papers considers the social and cultural contexts of mental ill-health and digital technology. we hope to expand discussions at previous aoir conferences beyond the impact of social media or digital technology on individuals’ mental health; the impacts of public health communication about mental health; the clinical outcomes of digital treatment or e-therapy; or mediated representations of mental health. we ask what does mental ill-health related data produce, materially, culturally and politically? what happens when this data is absent or made visible or invisible? how is “mental illness,” “mental ill-health” or “emotional distress” recognised, enacted upon, discursively produced and practiced through digital platforms and user interactions? how do ‘truth claims’ made using mental-health data map to material contexts and histories of mental illness? how do they intersect with the cultural politics of the day and location? our first two papers analyse mental health data, specifically chatbots and ingestible sensors that are used for diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment of mental illness in their entanglements with private companies, state policy, and university lab experimentations. our first paper frames the emerging field of computational psychiatry as a biopolitical form of governance of mental illness through algorithmic and digital means, and analyses the logic of control through the example of a cognitive-behavioural therapy chatbot for depression and anxiety. the second paper turns to the body as a site of intervention for the treatment of psychiatric diagnoses. drawing on theories of new materialism, this paper explores how we can think through the assemblages of digital technology, embodiment and moods associated with mental illness. we discuss the experience of mental ill-health and related data cultures as they intersect with the social and cultural politics, as well as the historical and material contexts, of mental illness. understanding online forums as potentially “enabling places,” the third paper discusses the relationships between space and location, and social experiences of mental ill-health for participants living in remote areas in australia. the paper draws from empirical data from mental health organisation online forums. our final paper considers the absence of these “enabling places” as digital platforms disafford familial or relational experiences of mental illness. this paper discusses how both discourses of individual mental illness and normative infrastructures of digital platforms design out families where a parent or adult carer lives with mental illness. 3 references fuller-tyszkiewicz, m., mclean, s., sukunesan, s. & yager, z. (2020). can new snapchat features help troubled teens? the conversation. https://theconversation.com/can-new-snapchat-features-help-troubled-teens-131992 parshley, l. (2020, feb 12). our phones can now detect health problems from parkinson’s to depression. is that a good thing? vox. https://www.vox.com/thehighlight/2020/2/5/21056921/phones-health-apps-data-digital-phenotyping ross, c. (2006). the aesthetics of disengagement: contemporary art and depression. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. 4 paper 1: “hello! it’s time for a check-in”: chatbots, computational psychiatry, and the biopolitical algorithmic governance of mental health evelyn wan utrecht university clinical psychologists at stanford university created a chatbot called woebot based on cognitive-behavioural therapy to help people cope with feelings of depression and anxiety. using the experience of the author’s interactions with this depressionprevention chatbot, this paper discusses the context of computational psychiatry and the biopolitical implications of using digital tools to diagnose, monitor, and treat mental health. chatbots used to support clinical practices may be situated in a growing field of computational psychiatry (mit 2017; fineberg et al. 2017). as a growing field, computational approaches are increasingly being used to model behavioural and neural processes in mood and anxiety disorders under the banner of computational psychiatry. computational methods can collect patient data differently, such as increased frequency through the interaction with an app (in this case a chatbot) on a smartphone, compared to regular visits to the medical professional. different types of data/ meta-data can also supplement patient monitoring—one could ascertain how active the user is through location tracking, or monitor habits such as sleep time and duration, or frequency of contact through monitoring the use of social messaging apps. computational methods thus open up new possibilities for the study of social behaviour. in recent years, conversational agents (such as alexa, siri) have come onto the digital landscape as digital assistants. natural language processing technology has made woebot, alongside other chatbots such as wysa, youper, replika, navigate conversation in a relatively smooth manner. woebot’s conversations, unlike replika, are almost entirely scripted and are written by real humans. the app only uses neural networks for the sake of processing user responses and interpreting the free text answers. many interactions, however, are completely guided by woebot’s limited conversation response options that the user can select from. in this sense, woebot has clear limitations, but as a representative of one of the most successful chatbots (2019 winner of the google play award for standout well-being app; 4.7 million messages exchanged each week with users spread over 135 countries) it nonetheless offers a glimpse into the world of technological mediation of mental illness and its politics. how does woebot do its job and what does it tell us about the possibility of mental health monitoring through chatbot technology? the author made use of woebot as an experiment to understand the performance of the chatbot and how it attempts to build an empathetic relationship with the user. through such relationship-building, it is able to maintain close contact with the user and entices the user to continue with the ‘therapy’. woebot maintains a cheerful personality, makes jokes, sends gifs, and uses plenty of emojis. based on the interaction, i highlight two dimensions of woebot’s performance of its posthuman identity that turns its ‘limitations’ as a computational agent into its strength and elicits continued user engagement. 5 as a conversational agent, woebot playfully navigates its identity as a posthuman entity. in its very first conversation, it introduces itself as “a wise little person you can consult with during difficult times, and not so difficult times” and invites the user to click the response “you’re a person?”. woebot performatively plays with embodiedness, telling the user that it enjoys wearing sunglasses, loves how sunshine makes its "metal skin all shiny”, has neighbours, goes to the office, and even has a pet seagull. it does not pretend to be a human agent, compared to how other chatbots (such as customer service bots) attempt to hide their artificial nature. this is in fact to its advantage. studies (lucas et al. 2017; lee et al. 2020) have shown that humans are more likely to disclose personal information and reveal deeper emotions that they may otherwise be ashamed of to a non-human entity, especially when there is a belief that the conversation would remain anonymous. notwithstanding woebot’s privacy policy, this positioning of the chatbot increases the likelihood of continued usage and the willingness to engage. as such, chatbots have the potential to get patients to volunteer information (chat data and metadata) even better than their human counterparts. the rhythm of conversation is set by woebot, where the user is prompted to select from a series of preset responses. while these responses are extremely limited (sometimes only 1 option is possible), it keeps the user focused on the unfolding conversation and gives an illusion of interaction when in fact the ‘conversation' is almost entirely scripted. a rhythm of engagement is continued overall as a set time based on user preference initiates daily check-ins, where woebot asks a series of questions to ascertain the mood of the day accompanied by emojis, and to collect entries for a gratitude journal. the availability of woebot as a 24/7 tool allows for a chat companion at any hour of the day should the user feel upset or need ‘someone’ to talk to at 4am in the morning. this design constructs both the continuous flow of interactivity as well as a rhythm of monitoring and surveillance. coupled with a cuteness factor, woebot allows for a durational engagement that reduces, if not replaces, the resource-intensive human expertise required to be available for consultations. in other chatbots such as wysa, the app also provides human therapy options at the click of a button through premium subscriptions. computational psychiatry and the algorithmic adoption of mental health technologies through chatbots further the biopolitical power involved in disciplining deviant bodies who may be mentally ill. from a cultural theory perspective, mental illness has long been a subject of discipline and biopower in foucault’s writings (1991; 2007; 2013). those who deviate from the norm are disciplined and placed within institutions like hospitals and hopefully through treatment could become productive members of society again. indeed, woebot’s website quotes who statistics on the us$1 trillion loss in productivity due to depression and anxiety globally, as well as the returns on mental health treatment ($4 on every $1 spent). in the monitoring and treatment dimension of computational psychiatry, the technology (to varying degrees) enables tailor-made, personalised diagnosis and intervention based on individual data and individual profiles, in the style of personalised medicine which is currently in vogue. one could argue that the mental health technology is developed to reduce public health expenditure on mental health and to safeguard the productivity of the population by targeting depressive individuals before the symptoms even develop into actual depression, and 6 the impetus is rather biopolitical in nature (wan 2018, 208). while monitoring and treatment apps can be seen as a laudable foray into developing mental health support for patients, they infuse psychiatric practice with technicity by way of algorithmic measures of a given population through durational capture and surveillance. in biopolitical terms, individuals become “a technical object, a political object of management and government” (clough 2016, 3). chatbots perform algorithmic governance (mcquillan 2015; rouvroy and stiegler 2016; chun 2016) as apps become tools of voluntary mental health interventions, where the veneer of fun is overlaid with surveillance and biopolitical intervention. moreover, it is questionable whether such designations of individuals as depressive or prone to depression may leak into other databases and affect other algorithmic models. woebot, in its developmental stage, was integrated with facebook messenger. it may be free to use, but users ‘pay’ with the volunteering of data and metadata. in feb 2020, jezebel ran an article on how the better health and talkspace apps, which use human counsellors, send metadata to facebook and other analytics companies for ad targeting (osberg and mehrota 2020). in this sense, the data collected is not only valuable for health surveillance but also for capitalistic gain, and brings an additional layer of ethical concern to the table. as the global pandemic of covid-19 brings an increased risk to mental health, the us fda is relaxing rules for digital therapy apps, thus accelerating the development and availability of mental health digital technologies (simonite 2020). woebot represents an early success tale of a growing industry of digital mental health interventions and the expansion of algorithmic governance of mental health in the years to come. references chun, w.h.k. (2016). updating to remain the same: habitual new media. mit press. clough, p.t. (2016). rethinking race, calculation, quantification, and measure. cultural studies ↔ critical methodologies, 16(5), 435–441. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708616655760 fineberg, s.k., stahl, d.s. & corlett, p.r. (2017). computational psychiatry in borderline personality disorder. current behavioral neuroscience reports 4(1): 31–40. foucault, m. (2007). security, territory, population: lectures at the college de france, 1977 78. new york: picador books. foucault, m. (1991). discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. london: penguin books. foucault, m. (2013). madness and civilization: a history of insanity in the age of reason. knopf doubleday publishing group. lee, y., yamashita, n & huang, y. (2020). designing a chatbot as a mediator for promoting deep self-disclosure to a real mental health professional. proceedings of the 7 acm on human-computer interaction 4 (cscw1): 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1145/3392836. lucas, g. m., rizzo, a., gratch, j., scherer, s., stratou, g., boberg, j., & morency, l. p. (2017). reporting mental health symptoms: breaking down barriers to care with virtual human interviewers. frontiers in robotics and ai, 4, 51. mcquillan, d. (2015). algorithmic states of exception. european journal of cultural studies, 18(4-5), 564-576. osberg, m. & mehrotra, d. (2020, 19 february). the spooky, loosely regulated world of online therapy. jezebel. https://jezebel.com/the-spooky-loosely-regulated-world-ofonline-therapy-1841791137 rouvroy, a., & stiegler, b. (2016). the digital regime of truth: from the algorithmic governmentality to a new rule of lab. (trans. by a. nony and b. dillet), online journal of philosophy, 3, 6–29. simonite, t. (2020, 17 june). the therapist is in – and it’s a chatbot app. wired. https://www.wired.com/story/therapist-in-chatbot-app/. the emerging science of computational psychiatry. (2017, 21 july). mit technology review. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608322/the-emerging-science-ofcomputational-psychiatry/ wan, e. (2018). clocked!: time and biopower in the age of algorithms [dissertation]. utrecht university. 8 paper 2: sensors and subjectivity: thinking through the morethan-human worlds of digital mental health jacinthe flore rmit university digital mental health is becoming increasingly popular as governments and ngos harness technology to provide support to people experiencing emotional and mental distress. it is a central policy of several western countries to expand the digitisation of mental healthcare (e.g. australian government 2012). in the u.k., for example, a key review on the future of mental healthcare in national health service predicts an increased uptake of technologies such as apps, sensors and wearable devices (foley & woollard 2019). this paper examines a notable addition to the toolbox of digital mental health, abilify mycite, which was approved by the united states’ food and drug administration (fda) in 2017. it draws on publicly available material on abilify mycite, including recommendations and documentation published by the fda, to articulate a framework for understanding subjectivity in the era of digital mental health. assembling abilify mycite abilify mycite is comprised of four main elements that communicate through bluetooth®: the drug, which includes the active chemical ingredient aripiprazole, and the sensor that sends a signal to a patch designed to be worn on the rib cage (fda 2017), a smartphone app and an online portal. the patch and app must be within bluetooth® range to work properly. the sensor is 1 mm in size and embedded in the tablet. it is made of cuprous chloride (copper), magnesium and silicon and releases a signal to the patch when it encounters stomach acid. this information is then transmitted to the ‘mycite’ app. the patch is not limited to tracking ingestion. based on sensing the body’s movements, it records data on activity levels and sends this information to the app. as the patch is intended to be changed weekly, instructions indicate that it should be worn ‘when showering, swimming, or exercising’ (fda 2017). in addition, users can rate their quality of rest and how they are feeling during the day through the app’s ‘my rest’ and ‘my mood’ functions. abilify mycite requires a prescription for use and a person who is prescribed and agrees to take abilify mycite is required to share data on the ingestion of the drug with their primary physician; however, they can choose whether to grant access to data related to rest, mood and activity, and can elect to grant access to the online portal to a third party, for example, other physicians, and up to five familial and non-familial carers or supporters. bio-affective-digitalism abilify mycite combines wearables, sensors and apps. it represents “embodied computing” (pedersen and iliadis 2020) that buttresses quantified subjectivities and dataveillance (lupton 2017), and harbingers future innovations in digital mental healthcare. in addition, clinical research has praised the application of ingestible sensors in mental healthcare specifically for monitoring compliance in ‘real-time’ (batra 9 2017). such claims require critical examination, which this paper undertakes through the lens of new materialism. the assemblage of sensors, programing, data, objects, knowledge of mental health and treatment – which i term ‘bio-affective-digitalism’ – demands a rethinking of the cultivation of subjectivity and mental health and illness. research drawing on theories of new materialism urges us to rethink subjectivity as a dynamic web of bio-affective-digitalism where objects have vitality and ‘force’ inside and outside bodies (lupton 2019). the case study of abilify mycite reveals the inextricable relationship between bodies (mouths, digestive fluids), mental health diagnoses, and technologies (sensors, patches, apps). the concept thus captures experiences of embodiment and the contested (neuro-)biological underpinnings of mental ill health (singh and rose 2009). bio-affective-digitalism holds on to biology not as an opposing force, but rather a countervailing one. the idea put forward by this paper of analysing emerging technologies by considering its intersections with biology and affect renders data both potent and agentic. hence, the aim of conceptualising bio-affective-digitalism is not to dispense with biology, especially since abilify mycite needs the body to function (proper digestion is essential). the case of abilify mycite demonstrates that subjectivity should not be understood as limited to human experience, but rather assembled through and with technology in more-than-human worlds. new materialism offers a productive theoretical lens for analysing transformations of subjectivity in digital mental health (lupton 2019). the concept of ‘bio-affective-digitalism’ affirms that experiences of mental health and illness are also enacted through technological innovations. this includes abilify mycite, which embeds technology in the fleshiness of the body, alongside individuals wearing interventions over a period of time (the patch). digital mental health manifests as an assemblage of human and non-human actors, and participates in technological worldmaking, where sensors, objects, knowledge of mental health and ill health, and subjectivity emerge together in more-than-human worlds. debates around whether mental illness resides ‘in the mind’ or is socially constructed are insufficient to account for the entanglements of humans, technology and biology in social worlds which together constitute mental health and illness. the question perhaps should not be what mental illness really ‘is’, but rather what it ‘does’ through the technologies. with technology increasingly embedded in mental healthcare systems, we can no longer think of mental illness as merely biological or merely social. what is unique in the case study of abilify mycite, is how technology has become embedded in subjects, and how subjects have become ‘active enactors’ (seaver 2017) of mental health technologies. we have become not only producers of data for digital mental health systems – as though humans are separable or detachable from this assemblage – rather we are ‘becoming-with’ digital mental health innovations and vice versa. concluding remarks abilify mycite, as the first antipsychotic equipped with an ingestible sensor, is paradigmatic of the broader questions raised by data-driven mental healthcare. such questions are inextricable from lived experience, socio-cultural and economic contexts and diagnoses. to that end, future research could include ethnographies and interviews 10 with users of abilify mycite and practitioners, thereby unpacking the differences between and within diagnoses and experiences of mental illness, and examining the embodied and affective dimensions of the digital antipsychotic and its technological system. in this paper, i have proposed a rethinking of subjectivity in the era of digital mental health as bio-affective-digitalism. this theoretical framework considers the multiple layers through which individuals experiencing affects, moods and behaviors framed as ‘mental illness’, become-with technology. references australian government. (2012). e-mental health strategy for australia. https://www1.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/content/mental-pubs-e-emstrat batra, s. et al. (2017). digital health technology for use in patients with serious mental illness: a systematic review of the literature. medical devices: evidence and research, 10, 237-251. fda. (2017). highlights of prescribing information. available at: https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2017/207202lbl.pdf (accessed 20 september 2019). foley, t., & woollard, j. (2019). the digital future of mental healthcare and its workforce: a report on a mental health stakeholder engagement to inform the topol review. nhs. lupton, d. (2019). the thing-power of the human-app health assemblage: thinking with vital materialism. social theory & health 17, 125-139. lupton, d. (2017). digital health: critical and cross-disciplinary perspectives. london: routledge. pedersen, i., & iliadis, a. (eds). (2020). embodied computing: wearables, implantables, embeddables, ingestibles. massachusetts: the mit press. seaver, n. (2017). algorithms as culture: some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems. big data & society, 4(2), 1-12. singh, i., & rose, n. (2009). biomarkers in psychiatry. nature, 460(7252), 202-207. 11 paper 3: online health forums as enabling places: rural isolation, relationships and mental illness anthony mccosker swinburne university of technology peter kamstra swinburne university of technology jane farmer swinburne university of technology while popular social media platforms are struggling to address the factors that see users reporting poor mental health, large numbers continue to turn to forums managed by health organisations during times of crisis (mccosker, 2018; tucker and goodings, 2017). online forums dedicated to mental health enable a set of simple community affordances that have been surprisingly robust in comparison to the much-maligned dominant social media platforms. despite their widespread use spanning decades of digital health practice, there is still no consensus about the extent to which online forums offer health benefits beyond their capacity to provide social support (naslund et al., 2016; author reference). to what extent, in a time of heightened mistrust of dominant social media platforms, do forums mediate mental health help seeking and act as ‘enabling places’ (duff, 2012)? this paper draws on research collaborations with australian mental health service providers sane and beyond blue, and patient feedback platform patient opinion (now care opinion). the broader project uses forum interaction and post data to map and understand service needs and mental health experiences in remote areas. we focus here on the way forums and their participants mediate and manage two forms of isolation – geographical (material circumstances of people who post from outer regional, remote and very remote locations), and social-psychological (in relation to expressions of stigma, poor social relations). the analysis in this paper focuses on the portion of the data located outside of major cities, in remote and very remote areas (n=3286). it shows that isolation itself highlights and intensifies the ‘place’ of relationships in mental illhealth. methods a one-year sample (august 2018 to august 2019) of posts were collected from beyond blue (bb), sane and po.org (patient.opinion.org) (overall total: 1,006,433 posts) and categorised by location (see table 1). these posts were mapped by the 2016 australian bureau of statistics remoteness index categories to categorise and map post locations (figure 1). arcgis (geographical information system) was used to map posts against remoteness categories. qualitative content analysis of remote and very remote posts (n=3286) was undertaken, targeting participants’ accounts of their mental health needs, experiences, interactions with services, and self-management of mental health issues. 12 findings australia has one of the highest metropolitan population concentrations globally, coupled with health service disparity in rural and remote areas. the spread of post locations in our dataset (table 1, figure 1) is revealing of this disparity, and the need for connection to support services outside of the major cities where services are concentrated. table 1 – aggregated posts by remoteness classification. remoteness category bb sane po.org very remote 288 (<1%) 96 (<1%) 340 (53%) remote 151 (<1%) 2,228 (3%) 183 (29%) outer regional 3,219 (<1%) 6,623 (8%) 118 (18%) inner regional 285,348 (31%) 20,201 (26%) n/a major cities 637,734 (69%) 25,954 (33%) n/a total 926,740 79,052 641 13 figure 2 – map of all three organisations’ posts across australia. figure 2 shows that all po.org posts are in western australia (po.org has been operational in wa for longer than in other states and promoted there by the consumer health peak body). sane and beyond blue posts are spread across the country. there are more posts from sane within remote and very remote areas while beyond blue data is more concentrated in areas around the edges of the vast remote hinterland. participants’ use of the forums, particularly in rural, remote and very remote parts of the country offer insights for service providers tasked with addressing health disparities in those areas. while many posts addressed particular service and support gaps, we were surprised by the underlying emphasis on isolation and relationship breakdown. when participants talk about their experience of stigma regarding to their mental illhealth, it is often in response to relationships with locals and feelings of isolation: ‘i would be feeling that i didn't belong and feeling that there was something deeply, fundamentally wrong with who i am’ (sane, remote, 330): it’s a completely different world. unfortunately, many of the people around me have never been exposed to mental illness or they carry ‘the judgement’ which also makes it difficult to communicate with them however sometimes i just want to stay home and curl up in a ball and sleep (beyond blue, very remote, 141). similarly, rural life and living in remote areas brings isolation and problematic relationships with service providers, specialists, as well as other locals. ‘i can’t get a gp 14 appointment, living in a new place with very little services available and not being an existing patient there's a waiting list currently of 2 weeks’ (beyond blue, remote,103). my hubby, best friend and soul mate had to move for his job and i was unable to go due to the care of my 2 children and their father refusing to allow me to take them […] i feel so lonely and isolated and have no friends or family close by, i live in a country town that's isolated and just don't know what to do (bb_remote line 55). in a much higher proportion than in regional and major city areas, for rural and remote posts, 32% address issues of feeling lonely and ‘stuck’, often due to being new to the area, distances to services, poor relationships with the few existing services, or due to long wait times. help seeking practices lean heavily toward understanding and navigating symptoms or advice on treatment options: ‘i don't know whether i should be listening to the gp or my parents and the psych’ (bb_remote line 127). mental ill-health is compounded by challenges associated with relationship breakdown and experiences of isolation, resulting in some experiencing ‘being bullied by the town’ – along with financial problems, difficulty of getting or maintaining a job. duff’s (2012) work on enabling places establishes a model for clarifying the therapeutic aspects of place and can be applied to a range of scenarios to identify the influence health-supportive resources and characteristics in an environment, or the impact of their absence. extending duff’s analysis to include digital platforms draws attention to the specific impacts of place on mental health – stigma, isolation and multi-faceted relationship challenges or service access problems – while also offering a site for intervention. conclusions the findings highlight the centrality of multi-dimensional relationships affecting rural mental health. along with clinical services, responses can target relationship building and maintenance. the analysis points to the emplaced dimension of mental illness as it is embedded in geographical, social and digital contexts. addressing rural and remote mental health disparities has involved ensuring that clinical specialists are available; our findings shows that this can be augmented by addressing relationship support to address experiences of isolation. as ‘enabling places’ online forums can also be enhanced through moderation and in-platform interventions that address rural isolation and relationships. references duff, c. (2012). exploring the role of ‘enabling places’ in promoting recovery from mental illness: a qualitative test of a relational model. health & place, 18(6), 1388-1395. mccosker, a. (2018). engaging mental health online: insights from beyondblue’s forum influencers. new media & society, 20(12), 4748-4764. 15 naslund, j. a., aschbrenner, k. a., marsch, l. a., & bartels, s. j. (2016). the future of mental health care: peer-to-peer support and social media. epidemiology and psychiatric sciences, 25(2), 113-122. tucker, i. m., & goodings, l. (2017). digital atmospheres: affective practices of care in elefriends. sociology of health & illness, 39(4), 629-642. 16 paper 4: digital absence of “family assembages” and young people whose parents or carers live with mental health issues natalie ann hendry rmiit university emotional distress, variously understood as mental illness or psychiatric disorder, is an experience beyond the bodily or mental boundaries of individual people. as critical mental health and mad studies scholars and activists argue, the communal or collective experience of mental “illness” and/or madness stresses that it is socially and culturally produced in ways that delegitimise or ignore the knowledge and power of groups of people marginalised by technologies of psychiatry (beresford, nettle & perring, 2009). in this way how madness or emotional distress is understood is always more than each individual and experienced in relation to contextually-defined cultural norms of sanity and insanity, or health and illness. one way to understand this is to move away from individual mental illness online to consider how digital platforms disafford relational or familial experiences of emotional distress, trauma and madness. we can do this by theorising “family assemblages” (price and epp, 2015) as a concept to decentre the material, social and discursive experience of one family member as “it makes little sense to attempt to abstract the causal strength of a particular member, practice or relationship within a given assemblage, because assemblages produce activity as an emergent effect of all associations immanent to them (price-robertson, manderson & duff, 2017, p.426). researching family life through digital ethnography this emerging project explores how young people in australia whose parents or adult carers live with mental ill-health emerge—or do not emerge—through social media and digital platforms. in this project, i have found that these families and their experiences are absent, invisible or “missing” from circulation on platforms. these insights are drawn from the first stages of digital ethnography engaged with australian websites and government platforms related to health (e.g. mygov portal including my health record and better health channel), and organisations and individuals using popular platforms in australia (e.g. instagram and facebook). tumblr was also included in the digital fieldwork as it extended earlier work about young people and mental health. this first stage focused on text-based practices (e.g. posts, hashtags, captions, search functions, hyperlinks etc.); later stages will include ethnographic methods with families and consider other practices beyond text. ethics approval was granted as part of a larger study of health experience communication, and health educator and influencer practices on digital platforms. making sense of this absence as a work in progress, i offer three ways to make sense of the absence of these “family assemblages”. 17 first, this absence or silence is connected to the broader social and cultural challenges these families endure. as other papers in this panel have highlighted, psychiatry acts within a “technological paradigm” (bracken et al., 2012) that labels and individualises distress and ill-health, whether or not these experiences are best understood as—often stigmatising or shameful—psychiatric experiences. this ignores the “patient’s” relationships and their social roles, as well as their interaction with environments, places and objects. the individual, isolated parent/adult carer is the subject of intervention, and the family becomes a potential source of care or barrier to recovery (price-robertson, manderson & duff, 2017). without a shared name for these familial or relational experiences, they are sidelined by mental health organisations and on platforms profiles related to mental health care, or reimagined by services as “carers” (irrespective of whether they do identify as carers) or, if mentioned at all, as “children of parents living with mental illness.” technologies and other elements of the assemblage are obscured. second, digital contexts shape how these families become absent or invisible online. without language or shared text-based practices to mental health issues beyond an individual experience, these familial relationships are obscured on digital platforms including social media and state administration portals (e.g. mygov). on instagram, for example, these families circulate through mental health service-driven practices like hashtags attached to service or mental health advocate images such as #copmi, #childrenofparentswithamentalillness, and #youngcarers. on tumblr, posts rely on psychiatric terms (even if they are critical of them) that centre on the young person’s rather than parent or carer’s diagnosis (e.g #schizophrenia, #actuallymentallyill), or on more complicated assemblages of negative themes and tags such as “abusive families,” “shitty parents,” “toxic parents,” or “traumatic childhood” that may not resonate for all families entangled with mental health challenges. finally, dominant digital platforms in australia ensure that intervention or support is afforded to individual family members and require users to adopt individual user identities. social media and other digital platforms herald their capacity to connect and network individuals to other people; their underlying logic is tied to the individual (customer) user, with one unique user-identity, profile, account and password. when families have emerged in the project, their relationality is a hyperlinked, network connection: linking a family member to your my health record as a “nominated representative,” tagging a family member in a story about hospital waiting rooms posted to facebook, sharing a photo on a mental health organisation instagram account of a family member who died by suicide on their anniversary, who now inspires your mental health advocacy work. my claim here is akin to cho’s (2019) argument that the “default publicness” of dominant platforms like facebook demands users’ identities to be compatible to coherent, “real,” singular, and state-validated identities (or a “passport identity” of the “facebook nation” as baym [2011] describes), and in turn this risks the safety, inclusion and participation of diverse users and collectives. for cho, this default publicness excludes queer youth of colour; in my analysis, diverse families are “designed out” of or become problems for digital platforms. these families exceed the capacity of platforms to make sense (and capital value) of familial relations. the broader family assemblage in this way is invisible. 18 this paper challenges how we understand the “lived experience” of families online and argues for an approach where mental ill health online is relational. however, my early analysis does not suggest whether or not social media and other digital platforms should address or amend the absence or invisibility of these family assemblages. given the ongoing discrimination of those living with “mental illness” and the limiting technological paradigm of both psychiatry and digital platforms, enabling more diverse family assemblages online may only serve to strengthen the existing and emerging political, cultural and economic relationships between computational, medicalised psychiatry and commercial and state-based digital platforms. references beresford, p., m. nettle, and r. perring. 2009. towards a social model of madness and distress?: exploring what service users say. york: joseph rowntree foundation. bracken, p., thomas, p., timimi, s., asen, e., behr, g., beuster, c., bhunnoo, s., browne, i., chhina, n., double, d., downer, s., evans, c., fernando, s., garland, m. r., hopkins, w., huws, r., johnson, b., martindale, b., middleton, h., … yeomans, d. (2012). psychiatry beyond the current paradigm. british journal of psychiatry, 201(6), 430–434. baym, n. k. (2011). introducing facebook nation [blog post]. social media collective research blog. http://socialmediacollective.org/2011/09/27/introducing-facebook-nation/ cho, a. (2018). default publicness: queer youth of color, social media, and being outed by the machine. new media & society, 20(9), 3183–3200. price, l. & epp, a. (2015). the heterogeneous and open-ended case of assembling family. in r. canniford & d. bajde (eds.), assembling consumption: researching actors. london: routledge, pp. 59-76. price-robertson, r., manderson, l., & duff, c. (2017). mental ill health, recovery and the family assemblage. culture, medicine, and psychiatry, 41(3), 407–430.   selected papers of aoir 2016: the 17​th​ annual conference of the association of internet researchers berlin, germany / 5-8 october 2016   game genre differences in player­avatar relationships    nichola david bowman  west virginia university, usa    jaime banks  west virginia university, usa    edward paul downs  university of minnesota­duluth, usa    in many videogames, avatars serve as a critical contact point between the embodied  player and the digital gameworld. although initially designed to be more of a functional  relationship — on­screen pixels representing player agency ­ the evolution of games  from puzzle dynamics to elaborate narrative experiences engendered a similar shift in  the player­avatar dynamic: from largely ludic to variably ludic/narrative. although the  player­avatar relation is traditionally examined in terms of parasocial identification (van  looy, courtois, de vocht, & de marez, 2012) and psychological merging (lewis,  weber, & bowman, 2008), recent scholarship suggests a more comprehensive model  wherein the player­avatar relationship (par; banks, 2015) is situated along a sociality  continuum non­social/functional, to parasocial, to fully social. this variable sociality is  understood to emerge from four discrete player­avatar interaction (pax; banks &  bowman, 2016) factors: emotional investment (ei; experiencing deep attachment),  anthropomorphic autonomy (aa; seeing the avatar in a human­like fashion), suspension  of disbelief (sod; taking the avatar and its world as real), and an inverse association  with sense of control (soc; agency over the avatar’s actions).     notably, par/pax have been examined extensively in massively multiplayer online  games (mmos) — primarily ​world of warcraft ​ (​wow​ ) — with little attention to potential  differences among game genres. this research gap limits understandings of how  genre­specific game affordances and constraints may influence subjective player­avatar  suggested citation (apa): bowman, n. d., banks, j., & downs, e. p. (2016, october 5­8). ​the duo is in the  details: game genre differences in player­avatar relationships​ . paper presented at aoir 2016: the 17​th  annual conference of the association of internet researchers. berlin, germany: aoir. retrieved from  http://spir.aoir.org.      relations. this potential for genre­based par/pax variations is especially important  given distinct differences in mmos play compared to “non­massive” environments,  including more complex social systems (ducheneaut & moore, 2004) with persistent  spaces, characters, and events (ross, castronova, & knowles, 2015). for example, a  first­person shooter (fps) might prompt greater character identification than  third­person mmo views, or a linear platformer might prompt greater senses of control  than more open mmo gameplay. conversely, par/pax might be more characteristic of  players’ orientations toward games and avatars broadly, given that these relations (a)  persist through drastic game changes character models and environments (banks, in  press) and (b) given demographics have little impact on par/pax variance (banks &  bowman, 2016). the current study asks (​rq1​) do pars differ as a function of game  genre? and (​rq2​) do different game genres impact pax dynamics?     method    data from two large­scale surveys on game characters (banks, in press; banks  &  bowman, 2016) were combined to consider potential variance in par and pax as a  function of videogame genre. from a total sample ​n ​ = 1,302, all listed videogames were  coded into their representative genres (using available data from wikipedia and  ign.com), and genres mentioned a minimum ​n ​ = 30 times were included in final  analysis, along with ​n ​ = 30 randomly selected ​wow​  cases as an anchor for comparison  with extant literature on par/pax. the final sample represented a randomized quota  sample of ​n ​ = 180 individuals reporting on experiences playing action­adventure, action  role­playing games (arpgs), first­person shooters (fps), mmos, turn­based rpgs  (trpgs), or ​wow​ , (30 responses for each). in this subsample, ~66% identified as male,  with a mean age of 25.68 (​sd ​ = 7.69).     in both surveys, participants were asked to consider their favorite game avatar. among  other survey items, participants all (a) classified their avatar into one of four heuristic  par types (avatar­as­object suggesting a functional relationship, avatar­as­me  suggesting self­extension, avatar­as symbiote suggesting interdependence, and  avatar­as­other suggesting interpersonal sociality) and (b) completed the 15­item pax  questionnaire. both scales and their validation data are available at  http://http://comm.wvu.edu/lab/pax​, and descriptives in table 1 and 2, respectively.     results      http://http//comm.wvu.edu/lab/pax   to address rq1, a chi­square analysis compared the distribution of the four par types  across five popular videogame genres, using ​wow​  as a comparison group (using data  from banks & bowman, 2015, as an anchor).     sample­wide, par type distributions were non­random, χ2(15)=25.3, ​p​ =.047  (replicating past work). however, post­hoc comparisons found no variance in the  distribution of par types among genres (table 1) — the frequency of pars from one  genre to the next is the same.         attending to rq2, variance in pax dimensions within each genre was examined, again  using ​wow​  as a comparison anchor. separate anovas were calculated for the four  pax dimensions (table 2). for ei, participants playing arpgs reported the highest  scores (equal to ​wow​ ). regarding aa, the lowest scores were found for those playing  mmos (equal to ​wow​ ). concerning soc, the lowest scores were reported in fps and  action­adventure games.           discussion    different videogame genres did not have different par distributions — counterintuitive,  given that game genres represent critical variance in gaming experiences that should  impact pars. however, our data suggest that broader par categories are less  associated with these game design features, in line with banks (in press) and rogers et  al. (under review). players recalled their “favorite avatars” so they might have recalled  based on meaningful experiences rather than on ludic influences, but that par types  appeared in the same ratio across five popular genres suggests the player­avatar  connection to be less about the game­systems or gameworld that avatars might exist in,  and more about the experiences one has with their avatar. as suggested by banks  (2013), they may also be a function of players’ orientations toward games, broadly.     shifting to pax, several patterns did emerge. high ei in turn­based rpgs may emerge  from the central role of narrative in such games ­ increased narrative prompts emotional  reactions and considerations of one’s role in the gameworld (banks, 2013; oliver et al.,  2015). aa was lowest in mmos, in line with assertions that such genres usually require  players to co­author the avatar’s narrative (bowman, 2016), which over time can shift      play orientation from social to mundane­functional (cf. chen, 2012). decreased soc for  action­adventure and fps was surprising, but may derive from these games’  comparatively limited player agency — the player is more responsible for guiding the  avatar through a predetermined progression rather than an open­ended gaming  experience.     in sum, our data suggests that videogame genre does not influence heuristic  perceptions of player­avatar relations as broad types. however, genre differences may  influence how players perceive more discrete qualities of player­avatar interaction. for  designers and researchers alike, this data suggests that while genre characteristics can  impact the relative importance of discrete relationship dimensions, pars are not  inherent to or typical of any given genre. as such, in investigations of online game  avatars and their influences — within and across genres — it may be important to  consider variations in the social ​and ​ technological, as they intersect.    references    banks, j. (in press). of beard physics and worldness: the (non­) effect of enhanced  anthropomorphism on player­avatar relations. ​psychology of popular media culture.     banks, j. d. (2015). object, me, symbiote, other: a social typology of player­avatar  relationships. ​first monday, 20​ (2). doi: 10.5210/fm.v20i2    banks, j. (2013). ​human­technology relationality and self­network organization: players  and avatars in world of warcraft​  (unpublished doctoral dissertation). colorado state  university, fort collins, co.    banks, j. d. & bowman, n. d. (2016). emotion, anthropomorphism, realism, control:  validation of a merged metric for player­avatar interaction (pax). ​computers in human  behavior, 54​ , 215­223. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2015.07.030    bowman, n. d. (2016). video gaming as co­production. in r. lind (ed.), produsing  2.0: ​the intersection of audiences and production in a digital world​  (vol. 2, pp.  107­123). new york: peter lang publishing    chen, m. (2012). ​leet noobs: the life and death of an expert player group in world of  warcraft.​  new york: peter lang.     ducheneaut, n., & moore, r.j. (2004). the social side of gaming: a study of interaction  patterns in a massively multiplayer online game. in cscw ‘04: ​proceedings of the 2004      acm conference on computer supported cooperative work​  (pp. 360­369). new york:  acm.    lewis, m. l., weber, r., & bowman, n. d. (2008). “they may be pixels, but they’re my  pixels:” developing a metric of character attachment in role­playing video games.  cyberpsychology & behavior, 11(​ 4), 515­518.    oliver, m. b., bowman, n. d., woolley, j. k., rogers, r., sherrick, b., & chung, m­y.  (2015). video games as meaningful entertainment experiences. ​psychology of popular  media and culture​ . doi: 10.1037/ppm0000066    ross, t.l., castronova, e., & knowles, i. (2015). virtual worlds as laboratories.  emerging trends in the social and behavioral sciences ​ (pp. 1­15).     van looy, j., courtois, c., de vocht, m., & de marez, l. (2012). player identification in  online games: validation of a scale for measuring identification in mmogs. ​media  psychology​ , ​15​ (2), 197­221.    selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): nolan, k. (2020, october). the ‘stuff’ of life: material play and performance in digital video cultures and contemporary art practice. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the ‘stuff’ of life: material play and performance in digital video cultures and contemporary art practice katherine nolan technological university dublin introduction: video cultures of material play crunching, crinkling, oozing, peeling, tapping, folding: play and performance with materials and objects can be seen as a trope across digital video cultures, in particular in the context of youtube. many popular forms, such as slime making tutorials, prank stunts, asmr and unboxing videos employ different modes of interaction that serve to emphasise material form and sensory qualities. addressing various different target audiences, activities can include pouring viscous glue, crushing tin cans, exploding watermelons, tapping nails on plastic or sinking them into sand. sound, image and material are employed to create a ‘haptic visuality’ (marks, 2000); where the audiovisual simulates experiences of other senses especially touch, producing a more ‘realistic’ embodied and affective experience. affective labour and the consumption of material play asmr videos are made with the intention of triggering an autonomic sensory meridian response in the viewer. this prescribed physiological response is described as a pleasurable tingling sensation that spreads from the scalp down the spine, and is claimed to be therapeutic, relieving stress and anxiety through the release of biochemicals. the self-identified intention of asmr to deliberately trigger bodily affects is instructive of the operation of the trope of material play across wider digital video cultures. there is a catharsis implied by the manipulation of material, an affect similar to that of popping bubble wrap: the satisfying yield of the material to pressure. i aim to trace and examine material play as a trope of digital video culture obscured in the ‘visual soup’ of youtube. the platforms rhetoric to ‘broadcast yourself’, belies the curation of ostensibly user-generated content through algorithmic instruments of corporate profit. the “affinity space” (lange, 2014) of youtube exemplifies how selfproduction, fandom and community are deployed to operate in the service of the market, with multiple forms of digital labour enabled through the platform. hardt and negri’s (2000) conceptualisation of affective labour is asserted as playing a key role in the operation of digital economies in many current contemporary analyses (gregg, 2009; jarrett, 2016). terranova’s discussion of free and immaterial labour in digital economies can be further categorised in relation to the labour of production and consumption, such as internet prosumer labour (fuchs, 2010) and consumption work (huws, 2003). i will argue that the trope of sensory material play produces bodily affects in the viewer, and that the power of these pleasurable embodied experiences operating at a preconscious level, produces a form of compulsive spectatorship that drives consumption. as patricia clough maintains: “capital has begun to accumulate from within the very viscera of life” (clough, 2008: p. 219). in this way, this ostensibly ‘throwaway’ video culture speaks to the harnessing of affect as a key driver of digital economies, and the biopolitical colonisation of bodies. the ‘stuff of life’: material registers of re-presentation the items used in material play videos are often mundane domestic or artificial, poptastic and iridescent objects and materials; through a diy culture aesthetic and the ostensibly user-generated setting of youtube, these materials are represented as the objects to hand, part of the everyday: ‘the stuff’ of life. they are at once both mundane matter and desirable product. the employment of these materials is framed by a rhetoric of participatory culture that speaks of agency, disruption, and the reappropriation of these commodities as ‘life hacks’ and ‘pranks’. these videos operate through the mimesis of the material, sensory experiences of life: re-presentation that triggers and replays physical and affective memories. in this paper i will employ cowie’s discussion of ‘desire for the real’ in order to examine the visual pleasures offered by these forms of video and to unpack the registers of representation that they operate through: in particular the mimetic representation of ‘reality’ and ‘liveness’ (cowie, 2011; auslander, 1999). material play in performance practice in order to and to consider the trope of material play within wider visual culture, i will draw a parallel between these digital video cultures and art practice, especially performance. this ‘queering’ of the use of material and the sense of the live event unfolding speak to performance art practice, in which materials and objects, often in dialogue with the body produces the art work live or ‘as if live’. for instance fischli and weiss’ the way things go (1987) in which a series of mundane, dis-used objects – a plank, an old tire, cans of paint – are set off in a precarious chain reaction, unfolding as a series of contingent events that may or may not work. the question might be asked what art can offer to critical discourse when such subversive modes of material play have been subsumed into the mainstream? this is even more problematic for artists who position their work in digital contexts. the work of david henry nobody jr and jan hakon erikson are published within the digital space, specifically on instagram. both these artists use play with domestic materials, objects and food that evokes abject, sadistic and absurd voyeuristic pleasures. whether they identify themselves as anti-influencers or visual artists, they occupy a space between high and low culture, art practice and internet sensation. in addition to resonating with some forms of digital video culture, they can also sit within the tradition of high art. there are strong parallels to rebecca horn’s body sculptures, as well as the self-portraiture of cindy sherman, especially in its later turn to the grotesque. through an analysis of the practices of these artists, i will discuss how these works reveal, mobilise, parody and subvert the operation of digital video cultures. conclusion through this discussion of play and performance within digital cultures and art practices i aim to consider how these representations operate through the mimetic production of ‘realness’ both as representation and bodily affect. through discussing this obscured trope of digital culture, i aim to consider the operation and power of such forms of representation in digital economies as the covert harnessing affective labour. references auslander, p. (1999). liveness: performance in a mediatized culture clough, p. (2008). the affective turn: political economy, biomedia and bodies cowie, e. (2011). recording reality, desiring the real fuchs, c. (2010). labor in informational capitalism and on the internet frey, p. (2006). the way things went: fischli/weiss iii gregg, m. (2009). learning to (love) labour: production cultures and the affective turn hardt, m. and negri, a. (2000). empire huws, u. (2003) the making of a cybertariat: virtual work in a real world jarrett, k. (2016). feminism, labour and digital media : the digital housewife klaussen, h. b. (2009). ‘safe and sound’: what technologically-mediated asmr is capable of through sound lange, p. g. (2014). kids on youtube: technical identities and digital literacies. marks, l. (2000). the skin of the film: intercultural cinema, embodiment, and the senses nicoll, b., and nansen, b. (2018). mimetic production in youtube toy unboxing videos raun, t. (2018). capitalizing intimacy: new subcultural forms of micro-celebrity strategies and affective labour on youtube terranova, t. (2000). free labor: producing culture for the digital economy . selected papers of #aoir2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers montréal, canada / 10-13 october 2018 suggested citation (apa): iliadis, a., pulsifer, p., lauriault, t., couldry, n., and mejias, u. a. (2018, october 10-13). social ontology in big data organizing. panel presented at aoir 2018: the 19th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. montréal, canada: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. social ontology in big data organizing andrew iliadis temple university peter pulsifer carleton university tracey lauriault carleton university nick couldry london school of economics and political science ulises ali mejias state university of new york at oswego summary computational ontologies (pease 2011; arp et al. 2015) are a key feature of datasharing and data-labelling practices on the internet. ontologies help integrate disparate or unorganized data to produce meaning, sort of “like a thesaurus, a finite set of terms, organized as a hierarchy that can be used to provide a value for an element” (pomerantz 2015). modern ontologies are an outgrowth of early artificial intelligence research in expert systems (hayes-roth et al. 1983) and knowledge representation (sowa 1999). today, many data-driven media technologies like virtual assistants and social media platforms use ontologies (tecuci et al. 2016). more specifically, media technologies like google and facebook’s graphs, semantic web standards like the world wide web consortium’s web ontology language (owl), and virtual assistants like siri, cortana, alexa, and bixby provide unique opportunities for harnessing disparate data to increase knowledge mobilization via ontologies. however, like any technology, they can impede social progress if during their development designers are not also attentive to data justice issues. ontologies present truly unique problems—they are not only a matter of quantification and sorting but also a matter of meaning. what counts as a restaurant in siri’s active ontology? how are social entities and relations defined in owl? what languages do ontologies recognize? building and extending ontology work to data justice and social progress issues involves looking at how ontology is connected to data gathering, data modeling, databases, metadata, and how the use of these and other tools like application programming interfaces (helmond 2015) impact civil society through public facing ontology-driven apps and technologies. drawing on the work of gitelman (2008), srinivasan (2012) offers one such approach by asking how we might include computational ontology in our discussion of “ethical questions about the sovereignty of diverse knowledge, and whether the voices of emerging users should be ignored or empowered” (205). what happens, for example, when digital objects represent social entities and relations (kallinikos et al. 2010; hui 2012; krämer and conrad 2017)? this is a modern update to an old problem, one we have seen in critical scholarship on the history of the census, statistics, and, more recently, big data (hacking 1982, 1991; beer 2016). the question “who counts?” can be read as a double articulation—who is doing the counting and who deserves to be counted? data ontologies are an update to those problems, complicated by semantics (“who counts what?”). currently employed in areas as diverse as municipal administration, virtual assistants, scientific knowledge sharing, production and logistics, and intelligence gathering, data ontologies that deal with social entities and relations necessitate what couldry and kallinikos describe as a “new ontology of the social” (2017: 153). computational ontologies encourage the datafication of social entities and relations by constructing social ontologies (searle 2006) to provide labels for data in organized, semantic structures. once completed, one may combine and analyze heterogeneous data in ways previously impossible when they retained their own idiosyncratic labels, and computations can extract new information. to set the stage, the first paper in this panel describes the upper level ontology industry. drawing on in-depth, long form, unstructured ethnographic interview data collected from multiple senior stakeholders in a variety of ontology projects, including developers in the private sector and researchers at nonprofit organizations, the paper describes several global ontology initiatives, users, and potential to impact civil society. the second paper discusses several formal ontology development activities being carried out within the broader polar community. the project “mapping the arctic data ecosystem” aims to develop a formal ontology and network model of the arctic data system. technical relationships are documented as are data sharing and financial relationships. the paper provides a critical analysis of observed problems, risks, and benefits of the formal ontology projects described. the third paper provides an analysis of city ontologies and homelessness. it presents the results of primary research conducted as part of a critical data and software studies project carried out in dublin, boston and ottawa. the study examined how digital data were materially and discursively supported and processed in three homeless intake and case management systems, pass, hifis and hud hmis compliant systems and how these systems ‘made up’ homeless people. the fourth and final paper provides a broader media theory of the ontological challenges that arise when ‘the social’, or at least particular important sites for sociality and the production of social knowledge (including ‘social media’) are computed: that is, constituted by and through the outcomes of deep forms of data processing driven by instrumental practices of control and/or profit making. references arp r, smith b and spear a (2015) building ontologies with basic formal ontology. cambridge: mit press. beer d (2016) how should we do the history of big data? big data & society 3(1): 1-10. couldry n and kallinikos j (2017) ontology. in: burgess j, marwick a and poell t (eds) the sage handbook of social media. london: sage, pp. 146-159. gitelman l (2008) always already new: media, history, and the data of culture. cambridge: mit press. hacking i (1982). biopower and the avalanche of printed numbers. humanities in society 5: 279-295. hacking i (1991) how should we do the history of statistics? in: burchill g, gordon c and miller p (eds) the foucault effect: studies in governmentality. chicago: the university of chicago press, pp. 181-195. hayes-roth f, waterman da and lenat db (1983) building expert systems. reading: addison-wesley. helmond a (2015) the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready. social media + society 1(2): 1-11. hui y (2012) what is a digital object? metaphilosophy 43(4): 380-395. kallinikos j, aaltonen av and marton a (2010) a theory of digital objects. first monday 15(6). available at: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3033/2564 (accessed 1 december 2017). krämer b and conrad j (2017) social ontologies online: the representation of social structures on the internet. social media + society 3(1): 1-11. pease a (2011) ontology: a practical guide. angwin: articulate software press. pomerantz j (2015). metadata. cambridge: mit press. searle j (2006) social ontology. anthropological theory 6(1): 12-29. sowa jf (1999) knowledge representation: logical, philosophical, and computational foundations. pacific grove: brooks cole. srinivasan r (2012) re-thinking the cultural codes of new media: the question concerning ontology. new media & society 15(2) 203-223. tecuci g, marcu d, boicu m and schum da (2016) knowledge engineering: building cognitive assistants for evidence-based reasoning. cambridge: cambridge university press. the ontology industry: people, products, practice andrew iliadis temple university this paper provides an analysis of the upper level ontology industry, including its main designers, the diverse ontology products they produce, and the positionalities that inform their practice. the first bona fide computational ontology groups formed almost three decades ago and today there is a robust ontology community that includes several lower-level communities of practice. here, i describe these groups and their activities, focusing specifically on a digital ethnography of the actual ontologies they produce that facilitate data sharing and interoperability for countless groups in both private and public spheres. data for this paper was collected through long form, unstructured ethnographic interview data collected from multiple senior stakeholders in a variety of ontology projects, combined with a comparative computational analysis of ontology products. numerous ontology leaders (“ontologists” or “ontology engineers”) have emerged since the inception of the ontology industry by late-career artificial intelligence researchers in the 1990s. many ontologists have at one point worked for doug lenat’s cycorp. lenat was arguably the first individual to take the challenge of representing knowledge through the construction of applied computational ontologies seriously. through interviews with employees of cycorp, i describe the firm’s genesis, its funding bodies through three periods of growth, the groups that splintered from cycorp into google after some early successes, and the main challenges and differences that make cycorp distinct from other upper level ontology groups. cycorp’s main product – the ontology cyc, one of the longest running ontologies around – takes a unique approach to applied ontology compared to more modern ontologies on the market. cyc’s ability to make “common sense” inference is based on decades of hand-curated logical axiom building, produced by employees (often philosophers) to describe complex facts about the world. perhaps unsurprisingly, cycorp leadership are quick to point out the unique benefits of cyc’s reason engine, which was described to me as the only “true” upper ontology. cyc is a propriety ontology that is used by teams in the public and private sector. lastly, cyc performs some level of ethical reasoning, an important fact about ontology. among the other ontology groups, barry smith’s involvement with the basic formal ontology (bfo) has been instrumental in situating the bfo as the preeminent ontology in the fields of bioinformatics and intelligence communities. after interviewing ontology engineers involved in the development of the bfo, i was told about bfo’s importance in the eventual success of enormous bioinformatics projects like the open biological and biomedical ontology (obo) foundry and bioportal, two of the world’s most comprehensive repositories of biomedical ontologies, as well as the usa’s national center for biomedical ontology. smith – a classically trained philosopher – continues to build ontologies with the bfo, including highly expressive metadata ontologies to represent a countless array of informational artifacts. the bfo takes a different approach from cyc and can be broken down not into millions of logical axioms about “common sense” facts about the world but rather a highly formalized, minimalist ontology where reality is essential divided into subcategories of time and space. there are several ethical questions that one can raise with administrators involved with bfo’s application to intelligence databases, including issues of privacy and surveillance. natural language processing is a particularly difficult problem in ontology engineering, and to tackle this problem many ontologists prefer the descriptive ontology for linguistic and cognitive engineering (dolce). like the bfo and cyc, dolce makes high level claims about the nature of the world. where the bfo divides physical entities into neat containers without troubling with concepts and mental artifacts, dolce contains descriptors unique to those categories and follows a more “traditional” approach to ontology engineering that views ontology as the specification of conceptualizations (in contrast, the bfo engineers described their ontology as “realist” and not concept based). it is interesting to note the similarities between divisions in applied computational ontology with those of traditional philosophical ontology. rounding out the public-facing ontologies is the suggested upper merged ontology (sumo), the largest formal public ontology in existence today used for research and applications in search, linguistics, and reasoning. sumo is connected to wordnet, a lexical database for the english language, and thus was described to me as being the most accurate upper level ontology with respect to its understanding of language. proprietary ontologies are also used by companies like google, apple, amazon, and facebook. over the course of my interviews, i learned that ontology engineers from cyc and other projects eventually made their way to developing products for those companies. products like those developed by the google affiliated schema.org, facebook and google’s graphs, and apple’s siri all utilize ontological technologies to integrate heterogeneous data that are gathered from various orchestrated services like apps via application programming interfaces. various engineers involved in these projects have been members of ontology communities like ontolog, where i have also spent time interviewing leadership and analyzing their email exchanges. this paper will present each of these upper level ontology groups, provide a description of their various products and how they are applied to specific industries, and note the different practices that go into making up ontology work. data sharing in the polar data community: a critical approach to ontoloy, standardization, and semantic formaliation peter pulsifer carleton university for many centuries, the term “ontology” referred to the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of being: what constitutes reality, and possibly philosophical and cognitive questions related to how we conceptualize and categorize the world ("world view"). over the last two decades, a new definition of ontology has been added to our lexicon. in the context of information science, “formal ontology” refers to an explicit (machine-readable) and formal representation of concepts and categories in a subject area or domain that shows their properties and the relations between them. both philosophical and formal ontology are related, in that they both deal with how we conceptualize the world, however formal ontology is conducted in specific computer environments. the discussion in this paper will focus on the intersection of philosophical and formal ontology. many scientific disciplines, including the researchers and practitioners in the broader polar community (agarwal 2005, pulsifer and brauen 2017), have adopted semantics and formal ontology as a significant area of research and development. formal ontology applications use an ontology or set of ontologies to describe data, generate new knowledge through logical inference, and reconcile differences in meaning between knowledge domains. the formal ontology approach depends on standards used to expose, share, and connect pieces of data using transport protocols and unique identifiers. ontology development is often driven by a set of ideal design criteria that establishes if an ontology is a “good” model of the world (gruber 1993: 17). the characteristics of a good ontology include clarity, coherence, extendibility, and minimal ontological commitment, among others (gruber 1993: 2-3). formal ontology proponents argue that, through linkage to scientific ontologies, formal representations of inuit environmental terms and concepts can result in an enhanced cross-cultural understanding of the environment and improved resource management. however, little attention is paid to the broader implications of codifying, stabilizing, and analyzing inuit knowledge using a logical framework driven by western scientific ideals. the potential for destructive reduction of knowledge into a form that can be readily extracted from its production and cultural context is discussed. thus, rather than empowering scientific and local communities, the global exposure and broad dissemination of ontologies afforded by the internet may result in a form of knowledge colonialism. alternatively, if researchers and residents ignore this increasingly dominant form of knowledge representation, their voices may be silenced in key knowledge construction and information policy-making processes. at the same time, there are several collaborative, participatory formal ontology construction projects emerging in the polar community. these initiatives have the potential to minimize the risks while acting as a platform for building community. this paper will discuss several formal ontology development activities being carried out within the broader polar community. the formal ontologies being developed include projects specific to a scientific domain. originally, several independent projects aimed to formalize conceptualizations and relations in the domain of permafrost science. through many organizing bodies, these activities became a collaborative, networked activity. differences in the size and scope of projects reveal that power dynamics exist and must be considered in how this collaborative effort develops and is governed over time. at a broader level, the project “mapping the arctic data ecosystem” aims to develop a formal ontology and network model of the arctic (and eventually polar) data system. this includes human and technical actors. for example, key nodes within the model include “cyberinfrastructures” and “coordinating bodies”. technical relationships are documented as are data sharing and financial relationships. the project is evolving towards a social network model that can be used for understanding and planning community interaction. the paper provides a critical analysis of observed problems, risks and benefits of the formal ontology projects described. while the benefits envisioned under the formal ontology are starting to emerge, the social construction of these knowledge artifacts is apparent, particularly in relation to power dynamics, cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural “disconnects”, and the challenges of interacting across scales of information governance. references agarwal, p. (2005). ontological considerations in giscience. international journal of geographical information science, 19(5), 501–536. gruber, t.r. (1993) toward principles for the design of ontologies used for knowledge sharing. international journal human-computer studies 43, p.907-928 pulsifer, peter l., and glenn brauen. (2017). “geosemantic web.” in understanding spatial media, edited by r. kitchin, t.p. lauriault, and m.w. wilson, 136–48. london, uk: sage publications. obfuscating complexity with smart city ontologies: how the standardization hides the messiness of homelessness tracey lauriault carleton university the delivery of social services normally involves one or many face to face interactions. this is especially the case when it comes to accessing the myriad of services offered to people who experience homelessness. most of these services are located in cities and access to these services is predicated on a face to face interaction where information is exchanged and recorded into an online shelter intake or case management system. intake and case management systems intermediate and account for the exchange of services between a state service provider or a subsidized charity, not-for-profit or religious organization and an individual in need. a person who wishes to access must exchange personal information to access services which may be a shelter bed for the night, a meal, healthcare, identification, time with a social worker, a welfare check and a fee-based check cashing service, a shower, a laundry machine, a place to store a few possessions, a computer and a phone or just a cup of coffee on a cold day. if one is lucky, it might be information in exchange for a lease for more permanent housing. often personal information is all a homeless person has, and people who experience are reluctant to share it, but share it they do in order to survive. just as there are many services for people who experience homelessness, there are many intake systems. in some countries, such as the republic of ireland, the pathway accommodation and support system (pass) is used by all state funded social services related to homelessness, whether they be a charity, a religious organization, a city service, health services or social housing. if organizations receive state funding for homeless services, they must use pass. pass is “an online system that generates vital information in terms of managing access to accommodation. the system provides ‘real-time’ information in terms of homeless presentation and bed occupancy across the dublin region. this therefore provides a more enhanced and up-to-date way of collating key information in terms of presentation to homeless services and service occupancy on a live basis” (dublin regional homeless executive 2018). pass data are shared between and among the organizations that use it and it adheres to europe’s data protection laws. ireland is however not the norm. in canada, social service delivery is the responsibility of the provinces and each administers their services differently. even though there is a nationally managed homeless individuals and families information system (hifis), it is not universally used by all shelters, nor are data shared within a city between shelters. the federal government manages the data and regional coordinators manage access to these data. there is a different intake system for social housing, another for health and so on. in the us, the department of housing and urban development (hud) has a different strategy, it has developed a series of data collection, management, and reporting standards that local continuum of care providers must adhere to and must ensure that their local homeless management information systems (hmiss) are compliant with. hud provides vendors who design, implement, and maintain an hmis with resources such as “templates and tools, sample policies and procedures, training modules, and manuals” to help with compliance (hud exchange 2018). this paper will present the results of primary research conducted as part of a critical data and software studies project carried out in dublin, boston and ottawa as part of the european research council (erc) funded programmable city project based at maynooth university in ireland. the study examined how digital data were materially and discursively supported and processed in three homeless intake and case management systems, pass, hifis and hud hmis compliant systems and how these systems ‘made up’ homeless people. the primary study site was dublin where the author conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with state actors charged with developing system requirements, as well as developers, operations managers, and multiple service providers, the national statistics organization and dublin city council policy makers and researchers. the analysis of transcribed data is complemented with a close reading of grey literature such as training manuals, specification documents, reports and data. a shorter but similar process was followed in both boston and in the city of ottawa. ian hacking’s dynamic nominalism framework theoretically framed the study of data, classification systems and indicators while a socio-technological assemblage framework informed the broader analysis of the context within which these three intake systems are situated, how the technologies were developed and how data collection was standardized and routinized. the results of this project empirically conclude that counting and accounting for the experience of homelessness is the result of a complex assemblage of legislation, regulation, and policies combined with funding rules and the historical evolution of local social service delivery models. this assemblage of elements manifests in intake systems as templates, drop down menus, tick boxes and pages architected in such a way as to standardize the data collected during the face to face encounters with people living very real and messy experience. these are often a city’s most vulnerable people. these intake systems and their data do not necessarily manage the housing and social support needs of the people on the other side of the desk experiencing homelessness but more so inform the very clean, organized technocratic service delivery system that audits and funds services for the homeless. furthermore, homeless people according to pass, hifis and hud systems are not the same and it is not possible to compare the data about homelessness between jurisdictions precisely because the assemblage of elements that influence how data are collected ‘make up’ homeless people differently. the drive to develop ‘common yard sticks’ remains nonetheless strong. the iso 37120:2014 sustainable development of communities — indicators for city services and quality of life standard is one such initiative supported by smart city enthusiasts. in canada at a recent national homelessness data summit, a group of software engineers tried to convince a room of front line service providers and social workers that the best way to understand homelessness was to develop a top down homelessness data ontology as part of a newly designed software intake system. the assumption was that current practices are messy because social workers do not understand ontologies nor computers. it is hard to follow a data trail and see in real terms how they change a mind, a policy, or loosen purse strings. however, it is easy to see the effects of r&d funding that stipulate the requirements to partner with cash strapped social services. those who work on the front lines have seen this before, and are becoming data literate and technologically savvy, and know not to accept all the free technology that comes their way. it is not to say that engineers, ontologies and a new intake system will not help with the delivery of social services, but it is wrong to assume, as the results of this research demonstrates, that data ontologies can clean up a messy data space, especially if proponents walk in without subject matter expertise and an attitude that past does not matter. computing ontology and social ontology: when appearance is calculation nick couldry london school of economics and political science ulises ali mejias state university of new york at oswego this talk will discuss the ontological challenges that arise when – as increasingly universal today – ‘the social’, or at least particularly important sites for sociality and the production of social knowledge (including ‘social media’), is computed: that is, constituted by and through the outcomes of deep forms of data processing driven by instrumental practices of control and/or profit making. this process is not the result of corporate conspiracy. its starting-point is the fact, noted by philip agre (1994) more than two decades ago, that computing, in the social form of computing that is today taken for granted, operates by tracking every significant change of state that occurs on each computer. since, following the commercial expansion of the internet from the mid-1990s, every computer is in principle accessible to every other via the internet, the combination of tracking and connection means that every computer is in principle trackable by every other. since significant computing capacity is increasingly embedded into every point in space and time (at least, every point from which action occurs), an entirely new type of social order has developed, based on ordering through computer tracking. it is interesting to approach the implications of this from the perspective of social ontology (couldry and kallinikos 2017). if ontology in philosophical terms is an ‘investigation concerned with being’ and (according to leading realist philosopher markus gabriel: 2015: 1, 166) ‘existence is appearing in a field of sense’, social ontology is concerned with how things appear in the social field of sense. both the embedding of computing at every point of social action (through e.g. mobile phones) and the development of platforms for focussing social action have changed profoundly the social ‘space of appearances’ (to borrow hannah arendt’s well-known phrase), that is, social ontology. but this is not a simple transformation: the computing processes on which the new social appearances are based are profoundly tied to processes of categorization (bowker and starr 1999) which underlie the data that computers can track, and platforms gather. this has major implications for the type of social world we can inhabit, and the sorts of order and reality it can exhibit (boltanski 2011: 57). the first implication is that social interaction of multiple sorts, when online or conducted in interaction with devices that are connected online, is increasingly organized to generate a computable and ultimately tradable data footprint. discrete data are aggregated into larger units that, through their ceaseless processing, generate value. the goal of generating economic value in turn is reflected in the design of interfaces where social actors operate. in this way the values of platforms and other datagenerating interfaces are involved in the shaping of the social forms through which interaction takes place. social appearance (social ontology) becomes closely linked to axiology, what is valued. in this respect, the consequences of computing’s recent embedding in social life can be compared with the change in the axioms (or implicit values) of everyday life that ivan illich (1996) noted in his history of a decisive phase in the use of written texts in the early middle ages. but – and this is the second implication – this value-driven shift in social ontology is more than a general fact. it is part of a wider construction of social order, an order shaped for and by capitalism, that embeds a new rationality closely linked to the ideology of datafication (van dijck 2014). how should we understand the rationality that guides this new social order and its social otology? this rationality can be understood as the apotheosis of what to date has been called ‘western’ rationality, focussed on the elimination of difference and the construction of a complete social and economic order geared to absolute control. there is therefore a remarkable continuity between the current developments in data and capitalism, read critically (e.g. zuboff 2015), and the critique of western colonial rationality for suppressing difference and heterogeneity, developed by peruvian postcolonial theorist aníbal quijano in the 1990s (2007/1992). potentially, this provides the basis for a wider critique of contemporary data practices as colonial. but there is one crucial difference from historical colonialism: that the new data-driven rationality which is at the heart of most business models today is being pushed forward not only from the west, but also from market-states such as china. in authoritarian states such as china, social ontology is much more than a theoretical or philosophical question: under conditions where the state is closely allied to the economic forces that manage the digital platforms for social life, the link between social appearances, social ontology, and social order is much more explicit than in the ‘west’. social theory/ontology in this way (and, connectedly, computing theory/ontology, which underlies the transformations now under way) has a political significance. changes in what can be computed and what must be tracked in computer-based fields of social appearance entail a new form of social order, co-extensive with capitalism, and with major implications, potentially, for what can count as political order, too. references agre, p. (1994) ‘surveillance and capture: two models of privacy’, the information society 10: 101-127. boltanski, l. (2011) on critique. london: verso. couldry, n. and kallinikos, j. (2017) ‘ontology’ in j. burgess et al. (eds.) sage handbook of social media. london: sage, 146-159. gabriel, m. (2015) fields of sense. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. illich, i. (1996) in the vineyard of the text. chicago: university of chicago press. quijano, a. (2007). ‘coloniality and modernity/rationality’, cultural studies 21(2): 168178 [originally published as ‘colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad’, perú indíg. 13(29): 11-20 (1992).] van dijck, j. (2014) ‘datafication, dataism and dataveillance’, surveillance and society, 12(2), pp. 197–208. zuboff, s. (2015). ‚big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization.‘ journal of information technology 30, 75-89. microsoft word wark-what personalisation can do for you! or, how to do racial discrimination without race-what personalisatio.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): phan, t., wark, s. (2021, october). what personalisation can do for you! or, how to do racial discrimination without race. paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. what personalisation can do for you! or, how to do racial discrimination without race thao phan adm+s centre, monash university scott wark centre for interdisciplinary methodologies, university of warwick in this paper, we use the life and death of facebook’s notorious “ethnic affinity” categories to identify and critique emergent forms of racialisation made possible by computational platforms, like social media, that use large-scale data collection and processing techniques to categorise and act on their users. we counter-pose these emergent forms of racialisation against the notion that by refusing to collect data about users’ race, platforms inaugurate a “post-racial” reality. to the contrary, we argue that these technologies actively produce novel racial categories and, consequently, new forms of racial discrimination. facebook’s “ethnic affinity” categories were superficially innocuous. originally designed to help advertisers reach specific audiences, these categories used data on north american users’ actions, their connections with other users, and their expressed preferences to sort people in to one of three “affinity” groups: some users were categorised as having an affinity for “african american,” “asian american,” or “hispanic” culture. a few years after this form of categorisation was introduced, a series of investigative reports (e.g. angwin and parris, 2016) and subsequent lawsuits began to reveal their potential for discriminatory use. after resisting these mounting critiques for years, in 2020 facebook finally quietly and unceremoniously deprecated the ethic affinity feature (facebook, 2020). as investigative journalists subsequently pointed out (merril 2020), facebook’s advertising tools still seemed to enable discrimination against users on the basis of their race. in this paper, we argue that the life and death of facebook’s ethnic affinity categories allow us to reflect on the shifting configurations of race and racial categorisation today. rather than being a singular instance of a well-intentioned idea gone awry, this case typifies emerging techniques of racialisation made possible by data processing techniques that purport to be able to apprehend us as individuals, but which can only do so by first assembling us into groups. it is our contention that ethnic affinities operationalise a function that is inherent to algorithmic culture: discrimination. we contend that the quiet demise of these categories, which is supposed to have brought one particularly ignominious chapter in facebook’s recent history to a close, is bound up with one of digital culture’s organising tendencies: the drive to subject widespread and, indeed, often indiscriminate techniques of data collection to processing by ai-driven techniques to provide personalised services (kant, 2020). facebook’s ethnic affinity categories typify a widespread mode of categorising the users of platformbased online services that seems paradoxical. in order for a service to be personalised for you, you must first be understood in relation to a set of others (lury and day, 2018). indeed, platforms like facebook claim that the capacity to personalise content ought to actually obviate crude demographic markers, like race: such techniques mean that marketers ought no longer have to “hold anything constant” (facebook for business, 2017). personalisation is supposed to inaugurate what darmody and zwick call a “postmarketing turn” that itself has the potential to institute a “post-racial” reality (2020). these services are discriminate. we argue that these categories demonstrate how the drive to personalise has created the conditions for new forms of racial discrimination. to substantiate this claim, we first contextualise the concept of “ethnic affinities” by tracing its operative term, “ethnic,” to the post-war discursive shift from using terms like “race” to describe difference to using terms like “ethnicity,” which is ostensibly-neutral and which lacks race’s biological connotations (kowal and watt, 2018). we argue that facebook’s use of the term “ethnicity” allowed them to rebrand racialising techniques at a moment that “race” had once again become a particularly contested issue of public concern. facebook posited ethnic affinities as a socially-useful technique of categorisation that could be used to reach otherwise “underserved minority markets” (garcía martínez, 2019). what ethnic affinities’ life and death makes clear, however, is that this kind of semantic substitution can’t magic the category of race away. we then draw on recent research by scholars working in fields including law, humancomputer interaction, and data ethics to argue that facebook’s ethnic affinity categories themselves belong to a specific mode of categorisation mobilised by inferential machine learning/ai techniques: proxies. this literature describes the proxy as a variable that is known to be a correlate of another, and which can be used, in substitution for that other variable, to target a particular group (e.g. datta et al, 2017). whilst proxies can and do allow marketers to target their advertisements at specific, underserved minority groups, they also and necessarily allow platforms that don’t otherwise collect protected information about their users to target or exclude users from campaigns based on those characteristics. instead of inaugurating a post-racial present, we argue that the capacity to proxify protected characteristics recapitulates race in new inferential, data-driven, often-automated, and all-too-obfuscated ways. this capacity to target individuals by sorting them into categories based on preferences, actions, or connections that stand in for what we would otherwise identify as “race” constitutes new modes of racialisation. reciprocally, we can also use this capacity to target race by proxy to identify and critique the specific material affordances and discriminatory effects of racialisation in an age of datafication and personalisation. insofar as facebook’s ethnic affinity categories recapitulate race, we argue that we can use them as proxies, in turn, to make sense of race’s novel form. we conclude this paper by reflecting on the mechanisms of categorisation that underpin the novel forms of racialisation represented by facebook’s ethnic affinity categories. we make a conceptual argument: in order to understand how racialisation operates on and in platformised spaces, we need to remain attentive to proxification. these techniques can subject wholly new communities to racialisation and discrimination, because they offer a wholly new means for differentiating communities based on emergent commonalities of action, preference, or relation. but we also make a methodological argument. in order to understand, and to be able to critique, these emergent forms of racialisation, we need to train our attention not only on what race is, as it’s embodied and experienced, but what it does to us, as we’re targeted, and with us, as we’re assembled into new racialised formations. references angwin, j. & parris jr., t. (2016) facebook lets advertisers exclude users by race, propublica, https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers-excludeusers-by-race darmody, a. & zwick, d. (2020) manipulate to empower: hyper-relevance and the contradictions of marketing in the age of surveillance capitalism. big data & society, january-june, 1-12. datta, a. et al. (2017) proxy non-discrimination in data-driven systems: theory and experiments with machine learnt programs. arxiv preprint arxiv:1707.08120 facebook for business. (2017) people-based marketing: thinking people-first planning and measurement, facebook, viewed https://www.facebook.com/business/news/insights/the-future-of-marketingpeople-based-planning-and-measurement facebook for business. (2020) simplifying targeting categories, facebook, https://www.facebook.com/business/news/update-to-facebook-ads-targetingcategories garcía martínez, a. (2019) are facebook ads discriminatory? it’s complicated. wired, https://www.wired.com/story/are-facebook-ads-discriminatory-its-complicated/ kant, t. (2020) making it personal: algorithmic personalization, identity, and everyday life. oxford university press, new york. kowal, e., & watt, e. (2018). what is race in australia? journal of anthropological sciences, 96, 229–237. lury, c. & day, s. (2019) algorithmic personalization as a mode of individuation. theory, culture & society, 36, 17-37. merrill, j.b. (2020) does facebook still sell discriminatory ads?, the markup https://themarkup.org/ask-the-markup/2020/08/25/does-facebook-still-selldiscriminatory-ads selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): xiong-gum, m., lee, j., he., g., zhang, y., wallis, c., and de souza e silva. (2022, november). mobile media during the pandemic: four scenarios to help us imagine a mobile media future towards liberation. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. mobile media during the pandemic: four scenarios to help us imagine a mobile media future towards liberation mai nou xiong-gum furman university, usa jeonghyun lee united nations university institute in macau, china guanqin he utrecht university, netherlands yijia zhang the university of british columbia, canada cara wallis texas a&m university, usa adriana de souza e silva north carolina state university, usa together, our projects pose the question of what else can be possible as a way to rearrange the power relations that have contributed to the asymmetric flows of information and resources to some instead of others. we are inspired by indigenous scholars’ claim that “decolonization is not a metaphor” because liberation should not be a metaphor: it should be a possibility (tuck & yang, 2012). we, panelists, hope to engage conversations that address the future of the internet, especially the future of mobile communication with the lessons learned from our studies. it is in the future that we have the possibility for change. in this panel, we examine how mobile media is being used in conjunction with governments, social media, privileged classes, and geographic information systems to better understand how we can imagine a future of mobile media uses in which there can be agency that is constituted in communities’ cultural and situated practices. there seems to be two popular lines of thought with mobile media: they are either very good because they serve as “life-lines,” or they are dangerous because of privacy and tracking issues. nonetheless, mobile media, especially mobile phones, and networked communication have diffused across the globe, following the trajectory of the internet. thus, any effort to decolonize the internet would require a careful analysis of mobile media uses to understand the complexity of power relations and cultural representations at play. we offer a close reading of four distinct scenarios: in south korea among residents whose locative data tell a story about their comings and goings, among international exchange students social media use during the on-set of travel bans, in china among rural-to-urban female migrant workers use of mobile phones, and in brazil among those who used the unified slum dashboard to called attention for proper government intervention. in each scenario, there is an emergence of the two popular lines of thought, but the presenters add nuance by showing how there can be a middle ground, or something else outside of this dichotomy. the first presenters discuss how data-traces speak for subalterns. xiong-gum & lee use a framework that compares western thoughts on stigma and the non-western idea of “loss of face” to ground our findings. with rigid covid-19 protocols in place as the context in south korea, residents, especially those who do not conform to heteronormativity, are not necessarily free to assembly because geolocation data retrieved from mobile phones can be used to “speak for them when they are not yet ready to speak.” these findings complicate the progress narrative of digital inclusion, because in some cases, it is digital inclusion that replicates the older systems of cultural hegemony. the second presenters illuminate the blurriness of the center-and-margin rhetoric, as they analyze the social media posts of chinese international students (cis) who must return to their “homeland” because of covid-19 travel mandates. their findings give researchers real-time accounts of the loneliness and limbo experienced as cis are not welcomed in either their home country or their host country. he & zhang conclude that cis are “characterized as the motherland’s burden,” but that cis content has created an affective economy of sympathy for cis outside of the homeland and motherland dichotomy. in this case, internet relations make it possible to create other spaces of belonging. the third presenter draws attention to the constraints that rural-to-urban migrant women face during china’s covid-19 lockdown. wallis builds on studies that have identified that many who live socially isolated lives use their mobile phones to expand and enrich their social networks. wallis adds that something different is happening during this ongoing pandemic and finds that the mobile phone is what pressed this population to return to being mobile when mobility was discouraged. although mobility may have been desirable before, mobility during the pandemic places this population at risk to exposure and exploitation. wallis concludes that mobile media and being connected has a dual logical. lastly, the fourth presenter analyzes the unified slums dashboard is an example of how a network of grass roots organizations can make a difference in mapping the unmapped, that is, giving visibility to covid-19 cases and deaths that would normally remain undetected. de souza e silva’s case study findings describe how a grass-roots public mapping project that emerged from a network of favelas in rio de janeiro (brazil) helped people in more than 300 low-income communities manage the pandemic and gain visibility outside the territories of the slums. de souza e silva’s finding offers hope for how mobile media can be used to support communities and circles back to complicate the role for data-tracing (as discussed with xiong-gum & lee) and support a role for user-generated cultural content (as discussed with he & zhang), all of which addresses the continuum within the dual logic of mobile media use (as discussed with wallis). the internet and mobile media already have affordances and consequences that can be appropriated for the betterment of communities. as such, our findings share a common theme that mobile media simultaneously can liberate and complicate our mobility choices, especially during a global pandemic, but that liberation can be possible through more careful policies that take minoritized experiences into consideration for future policies. references tuck, e., & yang, k. w. (2012). decolonization is not a metaphor. decolonization: indigeneity, education & society, 1(1), article 1. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630 complicating the progressive rhetoric of digital inclusion: the case of south korea and data-traces obtained from mobile media data mai nou xiong-gum furman university, usa jeonghyun lee united nations university institute in macau, china since the 1960s, south korea’s economy has grown to become ranked twelfth in the world, according to the world bank (2021), and south korea’s research and development is ranked second in the world, according to the bloomberg 2020 innovation index (dayton, 2020). this is quite a significant turn considering that the korean war took place from 1950 to 1953. and prior to this, south korea had been mostly an agrarian-based japanese colony. nonetheless, south korea has largely improved its overall standards of living in part due to their openness to international trading, and their efforts in developing information communication technologies. this later effort is part of south korean’s digital inclusion initiative, which happens to create the conditions that made their covid-19 and mobile communication strategy so culturally effective, yet also culturally intrusive. digital inclusion has been a global mission envisioning worldwide accessibility to digital technologies that enhances social development and economic growth. digital inclusion refers to the conditions that are necessary to ensure that all individuals and communities, especially the most disadvantaged individuals, have access to the use of digital media. these technologies include the internet, telecommunications, digital media such as software, and mobile communication devices. thus, the rhetoric of digital inclusion is rooted in a westernized developmental progress narrative. through the diffusion of digital media access and engagement, lives are meant to be better overall, and the nation would increase development; however, with the introduction of any new technology, there emerges new arrangements for social, regardless of its wellintentions. while critics have not identified digital inclusion in a negative light, studies have surfaced around the privacy and surveillance issues that emerged alongside critical adoption and use of digital media (aouragh & chakravartty, 2016; jung et al., 2020). for example, in a report from the carnegie endowment for international peace, kavanagh (2019) explains that digital inclusion efforts have well-intentioned promises for social and economic benefits, efficiency, and enhanced productivity across various sectors of society and government. however, kavanagh cautions, “the technologies are mostly dual use, in that they can be used as much to serve malicious or lethal purposes as they can be harnessed to enhance social and economic development…” as such, our primary goal in this study is not to make any value claims about digital inclusion; instead, our goal is to describe how digital inclusion alters people’s relationship to information and to each other, and how this might be exacerbated when people are asked to engage with mobile media and networked information without the option to opt out. in this case, mobile media travels with the body and leaves geographical information about the person’s physical locations. we investigate the dynamic among digital inclusion, mobile media, and data-traces because the united nations human rights council has expressed that the rights to privacy in the digital age and other human rights related to privacy norms and the freedoms of expression, speech, and assembly apply online as much as they do offline (general assembly, 2014). therefore, this presentation invites attendees to consider and discuss how we might design digital inclusion policies that allow people to opt out without being placed on the other side of the digital divide. our position is that decolonizing the internet does not mean abstaining from the internet; rather, we ask, what if decolonizing the internet could involve engagement with respect to cultural agency. in this study, we discuss both the consequences and affordances of digital inclusion and mobile media to build on to two key scholarly conversations that concern the affordances of digital inclusion and the privacy issues of mobile media use. we contribute the idea that there are privacy issues related to digital inclusion: this complicates the on-going rhetoric on digital inclusion’s progressive narrative. using interview data collected in the itaewon providence in seoul, south korea during the first year of the covid-19 pandemic, in 2020, we interrogate how digital inclusion might lead users into experiencing unexpected exclusion or unanticipated instances of public exposure of private information. we ground our analysis in a framework that combines erving goffman’s (1963) western insights on stigma with the non-western notion of “losing face” (kim & yon, 2019). digital inclusion, particularly mobile media use, can change a person’s social status because it involves the de facto production of legible data-traces. goffman (1963) has argued that people strategically share information about themselves as a way to control how they present themselves to the public and to shape the public’s perception of them. thus, we argue that digital inclusion, especially in the context of south korea’s covid19 public health protocols, can lead people into experiencing unexpected exclusion or unanticipated instances of public exposure of private information. in light of the 2015 mers pandemic, south korea had instituted a special law that would only come into effect in the event of a public health crisis: articles 76-2(1) and 762(2) of the infectious disease control and prevention act. this allows the health minister and the director of the center for disease control to require disclosure of positive covid-19 test results and grant the minister of health the authority to collect private digital data, without a warrant, from people who were identified as close contacts. our findings suggest that some people would rather not have others know about their whereabouts or who they associate with, but their data-traces speak for them. datatraces then become a colonizing language that diminishes a person’s capacity to live and associate freely, as private lives can potentially become public. for example, pairing credit card data with mobile phone data can render a well-defined history of a person’s everyday movements, especially if there is locative data from mobile phone use and surveillance cameras to verify both the whereabouts of the person. for this reason, people who attended “gay clubs” were unexpectedly “outed.” this resulted in the loss of their reputations, of face, in a culture that values “face” and is still largely weary of non-heterosexuality. the data-traces speak when the subaltern is not quite ready to speak. this has consequences for privacy and personal agency and complicates the progressive rhetoric of digital inclusion. unlike other scholars who have theorized about decolonizing the mind (wa thiong’o, 1981), we have yet to imagine ways to decolonize the language that is composed of data-traces. references aouragh, m., & chakravartty, p. (2016). infrastructures of empire: towards a critical geopolitics of media and information studies. media, culture & society, 38(4), 559–575. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443716643007 dayton, l. (2020). how south korea made itself a global innovation leader. nature, 581(7809), s54–s56. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01466-7 general assembly. (2014). the promotion, protection and enjoyment of human rights on the internet. http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/hrcouncil_res26-13.pdf goffman, e. (1963). stigma: notes on the management of spoiled identity. simon and schuster. jung, g., lee, h., kim, a., & lee, u. (2020). too much information: assessing privacy risks of contact trace data disclosure on people with covid-19 in south korea. frontiers in public health, 8, 305. kavanagh, c. (2019). new tech, new threats, and new governance challenges. https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/08/28/new-tech-new-threats-and-newgovernance-challenges-opportunity-to-craft-smarter-responses-pub-79736 kim, p. y., & yon, k. j. (2019). stigma, loss of face, and help-seeking attitudes among south korean college students. the counseling psychologist, 47(3), 331–357. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011000019872790 wa thiong’o, n. (1981). decolonizing the mind: the politics of language in african literature. east african educational publishers, ltd. world bank data set. (2021, accessed). world bank national accounts data and oecd national accounts data files. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ny.gdp.mktp.cd?most_recent_value_des c=true the motherland’s burden: chinese international students’ difficult journey to home during the covid-19 pandemic guanqin he utrecht university, netherlands yijia zhang the university of british columbia, canada since the global outbreak of covid-19, massive chinese students who had been studying abroad returned to china. in contrast to the spiking number of cases and anti-mask rallies in students’ host countries, china is perceived as a safer place after implementing a “cruel but effective” lockdown policy (graham-harrison & guo, 2020). yet their return journeys are marked by physical immobility. currently, students must secure overly priced flight tickets as inbound international flights are severely cut under five-one policy (han et al., 2021). to board the plane, they need to upload to a wechat-based program negative pcr and serology antibody test results within 48 hours of departure and obtain a green qr code once the local consulates approve their submitted certificates. once in china, they receive tests at the airports and are dispatched to hotels for collective quarantines of at least 14 days. returning students also confront symbolic immobility (smets, 2019). the general antipathy to returning students saw the birth of what we call the “poison discourse.” it depicts returning students as coronavirus carriers and accuses them as selfish opportunists who think of their motherland only when their beloved host countries cannot protect them anymore. they are criticized for endangering china’s hard-won accomplishment in its battle against covid-19. in turn, they are characterized as “the motherland’s” burdens. this study explores how chinese international students who return to their homeland during covid-19, use the social media platform douyin to create opportunities for others to witness and garner empathy of their immobility. using content analysis, drawing on 36 posts that students made and shared on douyin, we examine how students react to such imposed immobility and positions as burdens on the motherland within their social media posts about their difficult journeys. in addition to providing verbal accounts of their experienced immobility, students take the full potential of douyin as a multimedia content platform by making and sharing their fear, gratitude and confidence when trapped in such unprecedented historical situations. this, in turn, illuminates the complicated notion of center and periphery that international students experience. when we think of colonial relations, we tend to easily inscribe people into center and periphery positions, when the reality of mobile people, such as international students, who occupy multiple social spaces complicate the motherland and host-country rhetoric. our finding suggests, the performance of these emotions displayed through douyin creates spaces for domestic audience to imagine students’ physical immobility through their own senses, to witness their symbolic immobility at the comment section, and to identify with their emotions, and with the chinese international student as one of “us,” instead of a threatening “them.” to collect data from douyin, a popular short-video platform in china (chen et al., 2021) where returning students’ posts about their return journeys are numerous and rapidly increasing, we manually searched the self-representational videos of returning chinese students using three search terms: “留学生” (international student), “疫情” (covid-19) and “回国” (return). in total, we gathered 36 posts including both the videos and the comments. the sampled videos were uploaded from march 2020 to july 2021. in these videos, students make and share their journeys back to china from north america, europe, australasia and asia. existing research on chinese international students’ digital storytelling during covid-19 tends to focus on their opinions (xu & zhao, 2021), yet little is known about their real-life (im)mobility challenges and their manifestation and sharing of emotions. our analysis, therefore, at the crossroads of (im)mobility, mobile media, and emotion, focuses on these affective performances and their potential effects on the general reception of returning students and the affective economy that emerges around so-called “motherland relations.” three interrelated emotions stand out in the douyin posts that students make and share. first, using screenshots of coronavirus trackers, videos of unmasked pedestrians, helpless emojis and gloomy music, students demonstrate intense fear staying in the host countries, where the number of cases spike and various local gatherings including antimask rallies suggest the continuation and worsening of the local epidemic in the future. second, students highlight their gratitude to frontline workers in various parts of the video, including its title and description. by showing footage of them getting along with frontline workers, whom they praise and thank using voiceover, students undercut the misrepresented tension they have with the homeland public health system. third, the posts showcase students’ emotional attachment to china. they frequently compare the effective measures and zero-in accomplishments of china with the slack measures and poorly controlled dissemination of coronavirus in their host countries. in addition to “objectively” analyzing china’s systematic advantage in the global fight with covid-19, students display their patriotism with chinese flag stickers, patriotic songs and straightforward praise of the power of china. by sharing their curated performances of emotions on douyin, students create opportunities for witness, and then empathy, from broader audiences in the chinese mediascape. first, the video posts show students as witnesses to the difficult journey, which reveals the unique immobility structured by global societies’ reactions to covid-19. it proves to the audience that students hold such insider knowledge because they have been there. as in the case where refugees create spaces of self-representation by sharing their testimonios online (witteborn, 2012), the first-hand experiential knowledge shared by students holds potential to undercut impressionistic stigma transmitted by people who have never been there. second, the sharing of such witnesses makes their audience cowitnesses to the physical and symbolic immobility students have to cope with. the multimedia accounts designed by students using materials they gathered throughout the journey make it possible for domestic audiences to feel their fear, gratitude and patriotic love. third, circulated on one of the most popular social media platforms in china, these posts bring attention to students’ stigmatized identity, as well as the poison discourse that stigmatizes them. consequently, these douyin posts serve as numerous micro-platforms where students and netizens exchange their arguments, as well as emotions, regarding students’ return to their shared motherland during the global pandemic. thanks to the various ways that students make their feelings possible to be witnessed, both students’ physical and symbolic immobility become empathizable for douyin users who never embarked on such a journey. references chen, x., kaye, d. b. v., & zeng, j. (2021). #positiveenergy douyin: constructing “playful patriotism” in a chinese short-video application. chinese journal of communication, 14(1), 97–117. doi: 10.1080/17544750.2020.1761848. graham-harrison, e., & kuo, l. (2020, march 19). china’s coronavirus lockdown strategy: brutal but effective. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/19/chinas-coronavirus-lockdownstrategy-brutal-but-effective. han, x., xu, y., fan, l., huang, y., xu, m., & gao, s. (2021). quantifying covid-19 importation risk in a dynamic network of domestic cities and international countries. proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 118(31), 1-9. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2100201118. smets, k. (2019). media and immobility: the affective and symbolic immobility of forced migrants. european journal of communication, 34(6), 650–660. doi: 10.1177/0267323119886167. witteborn, s. (2012). testimonio and spaces of risk: a forced migrant perspective. cultural studies, 26(4), 421–441. doi: 10.1080/09502386.2011.587881. xu, j., & zhao, x. (2021). coping with the ‘double bind’ through vlogging: pandemic digital citizenship of chinese international students. continuum. doi: 10.1080/10304312.2021.2008319. from (im)mobile mobility to mobile immobility: theorizing mobile communication, gender, and disenfranchisement from the margins cara wallis texas a&m university, usa in early january 2020, the chinese government mandated a lockdown on the city of wuhan, the location where what would come to be known as covid-19 was thought to have originated. as the deadly coronavirus spread to various parts of china, other major cities, including beijing, also experienced lockdowns. for many chinese citizens, social media, particularly wechat, became a lifeline – to search for information, order necessities, and seek social support (yang, 2022; zhong, huang, & liu, 2021). although upperand middle-class residents confined to their homes were just as likely to use a desktop or laptop computer as they were a mobile phone to access wechat, more marginalized populations relied on mobile devices, primarily low-end smartphones to do so. as work, school, medical appointments, and other aspects of daily life moved online, those fortunate enough to be able to work or learn from home complained of challenges that have been noted globally, not only loneliness and depression (zhong, huang, & liu, 2021) but also screen burnout. however, those who are more marginalized, in particular china’s rural-to-urban migrant workers, faced devastating constraints due to their social location and the timing of the initial outbreak. many migrant workers returned to their rural homes for the annual spring festival celebration in late january 2020 and subsequently had to quarantine, and then were stuck in their villages. this impacted both their financial and emotional well-being (liu, et al., 2020). those who did not return were also positioned in a particular type of covid-limbo due to lockdowns and the closures of places that employ large numbers of migrant workers (e.g., restaurants, small shops, construction sites, etc.), yet their voices were barely heard in chinese popular and official media (print and digital), which instead sought to drum up nationalistic support for government containment efforts. the various scenarios highlighted above concern china, yet they reveal how the covid-19 pandemic has brought to the fore ongoing issues of privilege, marginalization, and disenfranchisement. they also raise new questions regarding the entanglement of mobile communication – particularly the mobile internet – immobility, and mobility as well as how smartphones enable what has been called “immobile mobility,” which is defined as “a socio-techno means of surpassing spatial, temporal, physical, and structural boundaries” (wallis, 2013, p. 6). the concept of immobile mobility emerged from research on young, rural-to-urban women working in the lowlevel service sector in beijing (wallis, 2011, 2013). the current study explores migrant workers and what i call “mobile immobility,” by which i mean compelled physical movement enabled by mobile technologies that, rather than challenging structures and limits, reinforces them and makes an individual’s life ever more precarious, as i elaborate below. due to china’s hukou, or household registration system, rural residents who labor in china’s cities and towns are treated as second-class citizens and are, for the most part, extremely marginalized and exploited. emerging from, and grounded in, the constraints of young migrant women’s everyday lives and their own social uses of technology, immobile mobility through a mobile phone offered migrant women opportunities for agency and empowerment. for example, they lived very socially isolated lives and used the phone to expand and enrich their social networks. mobile phones also enabled them to live a life outside the constraints of parents and relatives back in the village; e.g., to date freely, construct an urban identity, search for jobs, and learn new skills (wallis, 2013). still, immobile mobility has a dual logic because it is not a bounded phenomenon. those who are marginalized can engage in practices that reify their own marginalization, and those in power can take advantage of immobile mobility to exploit and disempower those under their control. other scholars who have examined the mobile communication practices of marginalized groups in and outside of china have found the concept of immobile mobility useful for analyzing the particularities of their circumstances, whether chinese factory workers (wang, 2016) or sojourners on the haitian border (horst & taylor, 2014). given current political, institutional, economic, and social factors in china, including covid-19 and the strengthening of authoritarian governance under chinese president xi jinping, this paper moves beyond the concept of “immobile mobility” to examine “mobile immobility.” while studies have found that young migrant women were relatively immobile due to their marginalized status (wallis 2011, 2013), during the pandemic, many workers in china and elsewhere have been forced to be physically mobile precisely because of their marginal status. to be sure, there are privileged populations who are usually highly mobile and who have experienced unwanted physical immobility, yet their array of networked devices has meant that they can traverse this immobility in ways unavailable to others. there are also doctors, nurses, and police officers deemed “essential workers,” who returned to work either voluntarily or by coercion (fu, 2020) who were lauded in chinese state media for their “heroism” (sun, 2020). others, however, such as delivery drivers and other low-wage workers, have experienced mobile immobility enabled by smartphones, and rather than gaining accolades or economic reward have instead been seen as potential “virus carriers” and have experienced illness or even death. as an analytical concept, mobile immobility, like immobile mobility, draws attention to the constraints faced and the agency enacted by those who are less often centered in internet studies (outside of “development communication”). the concept grounds the following questions: what practices have become articulated to mobile communication for navigating various forms of immobility and mobility in a (post)-pandemic world? how are these phenomena gendered? does mobile immobility paradoxically open up space for agency? although the concept of immobile mobility emerged from the position of marginalized populations, mobile immobility compelled by the global pandemic reveals multiple layers and positionalities of immobile mobility and mobile immobility that have yet to be fully explored. references fu, d. (2021, february 9). how the chinese state mobilized civil society to fight covid19. the diplomat. https://thediplomat.com/2021/02/how-the-chinese-statemobilized-civil-society-to-fight-covid-19/ horst, h. a., & taylor, e. b. (2014). the role of mobile phones in the mediation of border crossings: a study of haiti and the dominican republic. the australian journal of anthropology, 25(2), 155-170. liu, z-h., zhao, y-j., feng, y., zhang, q., zhong, b-l, cheung, t., hall, b, & xiang, yt. (2020). migrant workers in china need emergency psychological interventions during the covid-19 outbreak. globalization and health 16, 75 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12992-020-00608-w sun, s. (2020, may 15). heroes, just like this–portraits of heroes who sacrificed their lives in the fight against the epidemic. xinhua news agency [in chinese]. http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2020-04/03/c_1125812075.htm wallis, c. (2011). “‘immobile mobility:’ marginal youth and mobile phones in beijing.” in mobile communication: bringing us together and tearing us apart. mobile communication research series ii, edited by rich ling and scott campbell. new brunswick, nj: transaction publishers, pp. 61-81. wallis, c. (2013) technomobility in china: young migrant women and mobile phones. new york: nyu press. wang, x. (2016). social media in industrial china. london: ucl press. yang, g. (2022). the wuhan lockdown. new york: columbia university press. zhong, b., huang, y., & liu, q. (2021). mental health toll from the coronavirus: social media usage reveals wuhan residents’ depression and secondary trauma in the covid-19 outbreak. computers in human behavior, 114, 106524. the unified covid-19 slums dashboard: how grass-roots crowdsourced mapping practices can help underpriviledged populations manage a pandemic adriana de souza e silva north carolina state university, usa geographic information systems (gis) maps do not only represent territories and display spatial information—they shape how we understand social connections, how we move through urban space, and how we identify resources. in addition, web-based gis maps, particularly those built with crowdsourced user information, have the potential to decenter power relations and bring visibility to the reality of underprivileged populations. this paper describes a case study of how a grass-roots public mapping project that emerged from a network of favelas in rio de janeiro helped people in more than 300 low-income communities in rio de janeiro (brazil) manage the pandemic and gain visibility outside the territories of the slums. mapping health information to understand public health crises is not new. one of the first uses of spatial visualization to map health information happened during the london cholera outbreak in the mid-19th century. british physician and epidemiologist john snow deduced that the cholera outbreak was originating from the drinking water on a broad street well after plotting the location of cases on a map of london (gordon & de souza e silva, 2011). based on the visualization, snow found out that cases were more prevalent in households that used that specific well. for over 70 years, health organizations—including the world health organization (who) and the us center for disease control (cdc) have used gis and other mapping tools to manage infectious disease outbreaks. with the covid-19 pandemic, many governments were quick to develop web-based dashboards with the intent to help stop the spread of the coronavirus (collado-borrell et al., 2020; goggin, 2020). while the proliferation of these dashboards happened all over the world, they are particularly important in countries where the pandemic raged out of control due to the lack of governmental public health policy guidelines. among these countries, brazil is a significant case. the country has the second highest number of covid-19 deaths in the world—just below the united states. as a result of the lack of effective public health policies and appropriate federal government response to the pandemic in brazil, many non-governmental organizations started developing dashboards to map the pandemic. this decentralized response to tracking the virus in brazil is particularly significant because in most other national contexts, mapping efforts are initiated and coordinated by government agencies. a common characteristic of government dashboards is that they are generated by official data (pietz et al., 2020), which is a problem in countries with severe lack of testing, as is the case of many global south countries, like brazil. in january 2022, for example, when the ômicron variant of sars-cov-2 raged the country, people were instructed not to test, unless they were experiencing severe symptoms (g1, 2022). as a result, official government dashboards display a misleading picture of how the pandemic is evolving in the country. even if people in favelas do get tested, official results are often plotted on dashboards outside of the favelas. many favela residents do not have official addresses. their system of street names and numbers does not belong to the official maps of the city. it is estimated that more than 50% of favela residential addresses do not have a zip code (galdo, 2021). when requested for a home address, favela residents frequently give the location of a nearby store or the community center, which are often outside the geographic area of the favela. as a result, when they test positive for the virus, the case is associated with a “formal” nearby neighborhood, leading to a skewed picture of the pandemic situation in the favelas (gracie & scofano, 2020a). aware of this problem, as early as march 2020, each favela in rio de janeiro started to count their covid-19 cases on their own. to collect the data, volunteer residents went from door to door asking for information about cases and deaths. they also collected this information via whatsapp—the most popular mobile app in brazil. one of their first activities was to organize and consolidate all the scattered information about covid-19 cases and deaths from all the favelas on an excel spreadsheet. in may 2020, they transferred all the data from the spreadsheets to an online dashboard that resembled the johns hopkins university covid dashboard. the unified slums covid-19 dashboard is a robust example of how a network of grass-roots organizations can make a difference in mapping the unmapped, that is, giving visibility to covid-19 cases and deaths that would normally remain undetected because they were not reported, either due to the lack of tests, or because cases were assigned to other neighborhoods. the dashboard also highlighted the basic infrastructural and mapping problems of favelas to incite proper government intervention. for example, the project’s leaders plan on providing the municipal government with new adjusted zip code data they have been collecting, so that favelas can be accurately included in official government maps. in addition, the same community leaders who help report cases also mobilize to deliver factual information to the population about disease spread and vaccines, in person or via whatsapp, and help them with basic needs, like food supplies. the unified slums dashboard demonstrates that mapping the spread of the virus is just one aspect of the already existing community networks that support favela residents. according to behágue and ortega (2021), public health experts around the world have much to learn from the grass-roots horizontal networked organizations in the favelas. they also should look at the impact and benefits of a universal free public health system, like the one that exists in brazil, in the lives of minoritized communities. these structures work because rather than being vertical, top-down public health approaches, they are built into pre-existing networks of mutual aid, and are developed locally within the communities. so, rather than being created to specifically tackle covid-19 problems, the same individuals already have a history of addressing associated problems like economic inequality, hunger, mental health, violence, and police repression. references béhague, d., & ortega, f. (2021). mutual aid, pandemic politics, and global social medicine in brazil. the lancet. collado-borrell, r., escudero-vilaplana, v., villanueva-bueno, c., herranz-alonso, a., & sanjurio-saez, m. (2020). features and functionalities of smartphone apps related to covid-19: systematic search in app stores and content analysis. journal of medical internet research, 22(8). g1. (2022, 12 january 2022). há risco de falta de testes para covid no brasil, alerta associação de laboratórios. g1. https://g1.globo.com/saude/noticia/2022/01/12/ha-risco-de-falta-de-testes-paracovid-no-brasil-alerta-associacao-de-laboratorios.ghtml galdo, r. (2021). em comunidades do rio, salto no número de infecções por covid-19 ultrapassa o dobro da média da cidade. o globo. https://oglobo.globo.com/rio/em-comunidades-do-rio-salto-no-numero-deinfeccoes-por-covid-19-ultrapassa-dobro-da-media-da-cidade-24955011 geraghty, e. (2020). mapping epidemics: from sars, zika, and ebola to the pandemic of covid-19. goggin, g. (2020). covid-19 apps in singapore and australia: reimagining healthy nations with digital technology. media international australia. gordon, e., & de souza e silva, a. (2011). net locality: why location matters in a networked world. boston: blackwell publishers. gracie, r., & scofano, a. (2020b). covid19 nas favelas: contributicoes para estrategias de visibilizar esses territorios (nota tecnica no.1). marston, c., renedo, a., & miles, s. (2020). community participation is crucial in a pandemic. the lancet, 395(10238), 1676–1678. https://doi.org/10.1016/s01406736(20)31054-0 pietz, j., mccoy, s., & wilck, j. h. (2020). chasing john snow: data analytics in the covid-19 era. european journal of information systems, 29(4), 388-404. thornton, j. (2020). covid-19: lack of testing in brazil is a “major failure,” says msf. bmj, 370, m2659. doi:10.1136/bmj.m2659 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): roetman, s. (2020, october). self-tracking ‘femtech’: commodifying & disciplining the fertile female body. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. self-tracking ‘femtech’: commodifying & disciplining the fertile female body sara roetman university of queensland this paper engages with feminist political economists to explore questions of affective labour in self-tracking technologies designed for the female body (‘femtech’). selftracking femtech is largely characterised by smartphone applications (apps) and smart devices that track user data relating to menstruation, fertility periods, sexual activity, ovulation, hormones, and health and wellbeing. this data can be collected through selfreporting or through automated transmission from sensory devices attached to the body. by reflecting on my own experiences with these technologies in the tradition of feminist autobiographical writing, this paper argues that users of self-tracking femtech perform the labour of reproducing our bodies and our affective relations in ways that are amenable to both capitalist and patriarchal structures of power. the everyday activities of social media users liking, sharing can be understood as freely given, uncompensated labour that produce value for commercial media platforms (terranova, 2000). kylie jarrett’s (2016) pivotal work points to parellels between this model of labour and the unpaid labour of the housewife. jarrett (2016) outlines how the work of the domestic labourer produces value for capitalism in dual ways: the labour of (re)producing a healthy body that then enters the workforce and generates profit, and the labour of forming and disciplining subjects and social relations amenable to capitalism. in this paper, i firstly argue that the productive role of self-tracking femtech must be contextualised within broader shifts of affective, reproductive labour. i subsequently argue that self-tracking femtech is a new category of digital labour focused on management and reproduction of the normative fertile, hormonal, and sexual female body within the post-fordist context. furthermore, social networking sites have been explored for disciplining subjectivities in linguistic and symbolic ways. i highlight the ways that digital technologies like self-trackers discipline subjects via the realm of affect and material, embodied experiences. suggested citation (apa): roetman, s. (2020, october). self-tracking ‘femtech’: commodifying & disciplining the fertile female body. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. nancy fraser (2016) persuasively argues that we are living through a crisis in care and social reproduction that reflects the socio-economic contradictions of post-fordism. the fordist mode of production utilised public health services and mass media to communicate appropriate norms that could then be enforced by a class of unpaid women. as social services were diminished and women entered waged work, social norms continued to unevenly push the burden of caregiving onto mothers (fraser, 2016). the contemporary displacement of these socio-economic conditions necessitates the outsourcing of their responsibilities. self-tracking can therefore be understood as a reconfigured manifestation of labour that reproduces and does the caring work for the labouring body and performs the labour of subject formation (mcewen, 2016). i argue that the proliferation of self-tracking technologies specifically focused on fertility, menstruation, and sexual reproduction demonstrate not only the ongoing and unequal outsourcing of reproductive labour to unpaid women, but that these technologies also re-stabilise gender hierarchies in the post-housewife “crisis” of care and reproduction. when i log a bout of acne or weight gain, i immediately receive instructions on how to “fix my symptoms” from the app myflo. the app instructs me to do specific exercises, to eat vegetables, to change my sleeping schedule, and even to engage in sexual intercourse as “stress relief.” the intimate and affective experiences of users are shaped and modulated by self-trackers to (re)produce and discipline the fertile and sexual female body to be both a productive labouring body and heterosexually attractive feminine subjectivity. rachel sanders (2016) analyses digital self-tracking devices as “technologies of gender” that ascribe individual self-discipline and self-improvement to the individual. technologies of gender construct the healthy female body as a project that must be constantly managed, regulated, and surveilled (sanders, 2016). selftracking femtech presents novel body projects concerned with disciplining the hormonal, sexual, and fertile female body according to normative configurations of embodied heterosexual femininity. these apps displace the medical professional and subject the female body to ever more fine-grained, laborious, customised, and internalised forms of measurement, management, and control. my embodied experiences are quantified, judged, and shaped by the “expert knowledge” of the app’s algorithm. the bar for reaching optimal “health” is placed increasingly and unattainably high, as my body is the project that i must constantly work on and improve. crucially, these body projects are further intertwined with the labour of producing data for digital media industries that generates profit in the advertising marketplace. several of the apps i came across had an option to share my biometric dataset with a partner. myflo has a unique sync my partner feature that sends regular emails that “let your partner know how to best support you.” the apps purport to bypass my own narrative accounts and tap directly into my body, calling upon me and my partner to act upon its algorithmic knowledge. the various interventions into my body and my intimate suggested citation (apa): roetman, s. (2020, october). self-tracking ‘femtech’: commodifying & disciplining the fertile female body. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. experiences reveals the ways that power manifests within self-tracking femtech in affective, experiential ways. self-tracking femtech create an affective space that intertwines intimate experiences, social relationships, and identity formation with the commercial logics of consumption and production. to understand how gender hierarchies are formed in this affective context, i turn to preciado’s (2014) critical history of the playboy mansion. the playboy mansion was a biopolitical space which intertwined market processes and media technologies with the lived experiences of the residents (preciado, 2014). in the shift away from the fordist roles of the housewife and the breadwinner, women experienced sexual liberation via the contraceptive pill and sex became increasingly disassociated from reproduction and strict morality (preciado, 2014). the playboy mansion, then, recalibrated appropriate gender roles and became a “laboratory” for the production of new forms of hegemonic masculinity (preciado, 2014, p. 10). unshackled from the world of domesticity, men were the voyeurs and playboys who chased, watched, and managed the sexually ready and available women. femtech constructs and intertwines medical devices, economic exchange, expertise knowledge, bodies, affective experiences, social relations, and labour. self-tracking femtech responsibilises me to meticulously ensure that my fertile body is under control and attractive in order to maximise both my sexual availability and my labour power. the app myflo encourages my partner to distract me with a “passionate kiss in the kitchen” if i seem disinterested in sex at any given moment. the overt reference to my place in “the kitchen” cannot go unnoticed here. fraser (2016) notes that the crisis of social reproduction emerges in the contradictory imperative for women to dually fulfill the role of the waged worker and continue the uneven labour of caregiving and domesticity. through self-tracking femtech i commodify and reproduce my paradoxically thin, emotionally balanced, hormonally managed, sexy and sexually available, caring, docile and domestic self for both the machine gaze and the male gaze suggested citation (apa): roetman, s. (2020, october). self-tracking ‘femtech’: commodifying & disciplining the fertile female body. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. references fraser, n. (2016). contradictions of capital and care. new left review, 100(1), 99-117. mcewen, k. d. (2018). self-tracking practices and digital (re)productive labour. philosophy & technology, 31(2), 235-251. jarrett, k. (2016). feminism, labour and digital media: the digital housewife. new york, ny: routledge. preciado, b. (2014). pornotopia: an essay on playboy’s architecture and biopolitics. cambridge, ma: zone books. sanders, r. (2017). self-tracking in the digital era: biopower, patriarchy, and the new biometric body projects. body & society, 23(1), 36-63. terranova, t. (2000). free labour: producing culture for the digital economy. social text, 18(2), 33-58. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): lingel, j. (2020, october). in the ring and online: relational labor and audience engagement in the wwe. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 201th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. in the ring and online: relational labor and audience engagement in the wwe jessa lingel university of pennsylvania introduction professional wrestling has long been of interest to cultural and media theorists (barthes, 2015; canella, 2016; olson, 2018). long before reality tv, the performativity and scripted drama of professional wrestling allowed theorists to unpack questions of fictionality and narrative authenticity. in the context of internet studies, professional wrestling raises additional questions: how do performers use social media to maintain relationships with fans? how do gender norms manifest in on-stage versus online performances of professional identity? in this extended abstract, i present key concepts and guiding research questions for an investigation of fan culture and gender norms. i then provide a brief overview of related work and describe my mixed-methods approach. as this research project is ongoing, i present preliminary findings and implications as a concluding section. key frameworks and concepts: relational labor and kayfabe following baym’s (2018) work on how musicians maintain relationships with their fans, i use the concept of relational labor to describe the work that professional wrestlers do to connect with their audience through social media. relational labor refers to the “ongoing, interactive, affective, material and cognitive work of communicating with people over time to create structures that can support continued work” (p. 19). i use the concept as a framework for analyzing the socio-technical labor conducted by wwe performers on instagram. i am particularly interested in thinking about how gender shapes the work of relational labor: how do professional wrestlers manage relationships with fans online? what are the gendered constraints and affordances of a platform like instagram for fan engagement? one reason that wrestling has provoked interest in cultural studies has to do with how wrestling as a genre insists on its authenticity, a commitment shared by performers, management and (many) fans. similar to the fan fiction category of “in canon,” kayfabe refers to “the practice of sustaining the in-diegesis performance into everyday life,” (litherland, 2014, p. 531). more than staying in character, kayfabe in professional wrestling refers to the performers’ (and audience’s) commitment to treating on-stage performances as authentic rather than fake, and to carry over that performance outside the ring. while tv and movie celebrities are rarely expected to stay in character for promotional interviews or in their social media presence, the tradition of kayfabe pushes wrestlers to negotiate their online identity work in particular ways. bringing the concept of kayfabe to the context of social media and fan engagement allows me to ask, how does social media complicate norms around kayfabe? how do online relationships with fans change when kayfabe is broken? related work this paper is primarily informed by (1) studies that investigate how wrestlers, particularly women wrestlers, negotiate complex expectations around gender and (2) how wwe wrestlers leverage social media as a form of professional identity work and self-promotion. in general, the wwe positions its content as intended for straight, working class cis-men (canella, 2016). while increasing numbers of women are included in the wwe lineup, their characters are generally limited to heteronormative gender roles (dunn, 2015; malhotra & ruchi, 2016). people of color are similarly constrained in the staging of their identities (peppard, 2019; sikon, 2018). studies that have investigated gender-based identity work in the wwe have not addressed how these norms manifest in online contexts. indeed, in the limited research that considers professional wrestling and digital media, the framing has overwhelming been from a fan studies approach, with an emphasis on authenticity and kayfabe (barker, 2019; litherland, 2014; martin, 2017; olson, 2018). while i am similarly interested in the expectations of fans regarding wwe celebrities, i focus my attention on how relationships between fans and performers take shape online and the ways that gender is implicated in relational labor. doing so requires both a high-level view of what kinds of content celebrities post online and how those decisions play out in terms of identity work and engagement with fans. methods this project analyzes the instagram accounts of 26 wwe celebrities, drawing on both computational and qualitative methods. performers were selected because they had the largest instagram following of active wwe performers (as of december 2019). the corpus consists of ~51,000 images and videos posted to performers’ feeds. a large set of image features were extracted using cloud-based deep learning algorithms, relating to content, context and emotional facial expression. given my research questions on gender roles and kayfabe in the context of wwe performers and fans, analysis focused on understanding differences in self-promotion in terms of gender, and contingent differences that surface around kayfabe. regarding the first research question, i use topic modeling (of both image and textual features) and other unsupervised approaches, as well as descriptive statistics to identify post topics with high levels of fan engagement (measured in the number of likes and comments), and identify key differences that surface in terms of what men and women performers post. regarding the second research question, i used supervised machine learning to detect kayfabe – as determined by the presence of wwe markers, such as a wrestling ring and combative poses. (in the longer version of this paper, i provide an extended discussion of the computational parameters of both topic modeling and image analysis.) having identified (1) categories of content that differ between men and women performers and (2) examples of breaking kayfabe that provoked high levels of fan engagement, i turn to qualitative analysis of the posts’ texts and fan comments. the goal of this qualitative analysis is to gather a more nuanced understanding of wrestlers’ relational labor, particularly in terms of gendered differences the categories of content and fan reactions to breaking kayfabe. implications moving forward with this project, the goal is to contribute to theoretical work on relational labor through a discussion of how gender dynamics shape practices of mediated relationships with fans. a second goal is to draw together internet studies and wrestling studies; presently, discussions of digital culture have been limited in scholarship on wrestling. in both cases, my objective is to use the context of professional wrestling to inform broader investigations of fan studies, self-promotion and authenticity in digital culture. references barthes, r. (2015). mythologies. paris: le seuil. baym, n. k. (2018). playing to the crowd: musicians, audiences, and the intimate work of connection. new york, ny: nyu press. canella, g. (2016). occupy raw: pro wrestling fans, carnivalesque, and the commercialization of social movements. the journal of popular culture, 49(6), 1375-1392. litherland, b. (2014). breaking kayfabe is easy, cheap and never entertaining: twitter rivalries in professional wrestling. celebrity studies, 5(4), 531-533. malhotra, h. & ruchi, j. (2016). performance of gender and fetishization of women in wwe divas matches a case study using the mixed-methods framework. amity journal of media & communication studies, 6(1), 75-85. olson, c. (2018). twitter, facebook, and professional wrestling: indie wrestler perspectives on the importance of social media. popular culture studies journal, 6(1), 306-316. peppard, a.f. (2019). “we’re not just cheerleaders”: reading the postfeminist polysemy of total divas. in d. jeffries (ed.), #wwe: professional wrestling in the digital age (pp. 177-197). bloomington, indiana: indiana university press. sikon, j. m. (2018). wwe: redefining working-class womanhood through commodified feminism (honors thesis, wright state university). selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): maddox, j. (2020, october) “exactly what i needed for a good night’s rest”: transactional tingles and asmr as emerging media genre. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “exactly what i needed for a good night’s rest”: transactional tingles and asmr as emerging media genre jessica maddox, ph.d department of journalism and creative media, the university of alabama abstract a young, brunette woman sits in a polished, modern bedroom. she wears thick, noisecancelling headphones and sits behind a binaural microphone. she flutters her fingers next to the mic and begins to speak in a voice only a hair above a whisper. “tonight,” she says, “i’m going to be humming you to sleep” (gibi asmr, 2019). the video, simply titled “asmr | humming you to sleep,” has over one million views. its creator, the whispering brunette in noise-cancelling headphones, is gibi asmr, a youtube creator who has 2.48 million subscribers and is largely considered among the youtube asmr community to be one of its greatest “asmrtists.” asmr, or autonomous sensory meridian response, has become an international phenomenon in recent years, with youtube creators hailing from around the globe. additionally, the phenomenon gained cultural prominence when it was featured during a michelob ultra beer commercial during the 2019 american national football league superbowl, as well as in a featurelength film produced by reese’s canada that combined five prominent asmrtists, whispering, and candy. but what exactly asmr is remains fraught with misunderstandings and cultural slippages. asmr itself is a relatively new term, coined by scientists in 2010, but it describes an age-old biological feeling: the sensation of tingling on the scalp and down the spine. biologically, it has been compared to fission or paresthesia, and asmrtists refer to this feeling as tingles. however, tingles, combined with the whispering or softspoken voices used to induce asmr in youtube videos, has rendered asmr the punchline of cultural jokes, a gag used by late-night comedy hosts, or a social experiment by traditional media outlets like the today show or w magazine for viral social media videos (videos such as “cardi b tries asmr” or “jennifer garner tries asmr are common) (dickson, 2020). many also dismiss asmr as a strange sexual fetish, given the term tingles, and purponents of this view claim that the soft-spoken voices are just sensual (dickson, 2020). but while specifically sexual asmr does exist, asmrtists themselves eschew accusations that asmr is inherently sexual and insist there is more to the craft and the asmr youtube community. additionally, not everyone is capable of experiencing asmr, which may render the whispering videos odd and confusing. to this end, this research is informed by the results of a three-year long participant observation and ethnographic study in youtube’s asmr culture and community in order to define and analyze asmr as an emerging media genre (see lüders, prøitz, and rasmussen, 2010). while i have never created an asmr video, i have been active participant in the community as a viewer for eight years. similar to nicholas-brie guarriello’s (2019) ethnographic participant observation of youtube gaming, this asmr internet ethnography emerged “as an open event and [was] embedded in everyday online/offline interactions” (p. 1756). what began as a relaxation habit become a research activity, and between february 2017 and february 2020 i watched over 180 hours of asmr videos. most individual videos fall between 15-30 minutes, and i watched one video almost every day for three years. upon conclusion of videos, i wrote memos on the video, which included summations of the video, top viewer comments, and reflections on the interplay of both, as well as my own experiences. additionally, these video notes are supplemented by public social media posts from asmrtists discussing their craft. this ethnography culminated in the fall 2019 launch of the zees app, which was created by most of the asrmtists i had studied for three years. i continued my work for a few months post-launch to see what, if anything, would change in the asmr community. i argue asmr is best understood as a genre, situated between the varying content possibilities of the text and the affordances of youtube as media and platform. genres “play a pivotal role in connecting micro-practices with macro structures” and are “an intermediary level between the levels of media and text, however influenced by both” (lüders et al., 2010, p. 949, 952). the textual and the micro connect with the macrolevel of youtube, which enable and constrain capabilities of asmr as a genre. specifically, my research found asmr draws on youtube dynamics such as platform governance, algorithms, and monetization. it also draws on textual strategies and performances that are rooted in care, creativity, affect, and intimacy. because other asmr studies have examined the affect and intimacy of asmr (andersen, 2015; gallagher, 2016), i focus primarily on the interplay between care and creativity with platform governance, algorithms, and monetization. by analyzing the relationship between platform governance, algorithms, monetization, care, and creativity, i identify a key component of the asmr genre as transactional tingles. i define transactional tingles as the interaction between asmrtist and viewer, in which the viewer receives a form of relaxation in exchange for clicks, likes, and views in the internet’s attention economy. both parties (ideally) receive what they want out of the interaction – the viewer is relaxed, or has their anxiety alleviated, and the asrmtist bolsters their digital presence through clicks and views, which may also result in financial capital. far from conceptions and metaphors of pornography, asmr and transactional tingles have more in common with the artist/patron system of the renaissance era (wolff, 1993), or the kickstarter campaigns of the twenty-first century, in which entertainers draw on their audiences for financial support (booth, 2015). both models indicate how the asmrtist and the viewer receive something in this mutually beneficial interaction. the culmination of my ethnographic research was the announcement of the asrmtist-driven app, zees, which shows how creators of emerging media genres harness the affordances of participatory culture to push the boundaries of said genre, while maintaining committed to the key principles for creator and viewer. in this case, such a principle is transactional tingles, ensuring relaxation and anxiety and insomnia alleviation for others, and fair monetization policies for creators themselves. transactional tingles remain regardless of where the asmr content is housed in the internet’s attention economy, and creators can eschew the limits of one platform in favor of pushing the boundaries on a genre. references andersen, joceline. (2015). now you’ve got the shiveries: affect, intimacy, and the asmr whisper community. television & new media, 16(8), 683–700. booth, paul. (2015). crowdfunding: a spimatic application of digital fandom. new media & society, 17(2), 149–166. dickon, ej. (2020, february 20). an oral history of asmr. rolling stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/asmr-oral-history-whispervideo-soothing-sleep-youtube-954423/ gallagher, rob. (2016). eliciting euphoria online: the aesthetics of “asmr” video culture. film criticism, 40(2), 1–15. gibi asmr (2019, november 21. asmr | humming you to sleep [video]. youtube. retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkrqpb3o46e guarriello, nicholas-brie. (2019). never give up, never surrender: game live streaming, neoliberal work, and personalized media economies. new media & society, 21(8), 1750–1769. lüders, marika; prøitz, lin; rasmussen, terje. (2010). emerging personal media genres. new media & society, 12(6), 947–963. wolff, janet. (1993). the social production of art. (2nd edition). nyu press. microsoft word mackinnon-critical care & the early web-critical care & the early web.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): mackinnon, k. (2021, october). critical care and the early web: ethical digital methods for archived youth data. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. critical care & the early web: ethical digital methods for archived youth data katie mackinnon university of toronto web archiving initiatives and organizations are currently engaged in “intervening and shaping the availability of information/media” (ogden, 2020) through their collection practices as they provide access to parts of the web that have been deleted or abandoned by state and corporate owners. this has significant impact on the future of historical research, as the materials collected will act as an “unprecedently rich primary resource” (winter, 2017), thus shaping and informing the types of histories we can write. the internet archive, one of the most prominent and prolific web archives, has been crawling and collecting materials for the past 20 years with a mission to preserve web history that would otherwise be lost. this approach, however, cannot account for the sensitivity of the materials it has captured. for researchers engaging with web materials in web archives, there are significant ethical and methodological challenges and questions to engaging with web archived collections in the internet archive. for example, geocities web pages archived in internet archive, like neighborhoods westhollywood (lgbtq+) or enchantedforest (youth), are a unique and incredibly fruitful resource for studying youth and queer participation in the early web in a way that gives those voices autonomy and agency and are integral resources for writing about digital cultures on the early web. however, there are significant ethical concerns around a researcher’s approach to this data. it is imperative that we consider whose stories are being told, who is equipped to tell them, and what kinds of vulnerability and harm we might encounter and nurture when doing so (cowan, 2020; franzke, et al., 2020; luka & millette, 2018; lin et al., 2020). young people’s data are particularly subject to commodification, surveillance, and archiving without consent (grimes & chung, 2005; steeves, 2015; van dijck et al., 2018), and researchers who engage with their archived web material have a responsibility to develop better practices of care. one of the biggest challenges in historical web research is grappling with distance between researchers and the researched; websites become defunct, users have grown up and changed names, and communities have splintered and dispersed. informed consent is nearly never a possibility, and while deploying “contextual integrity” tactics and evaluating the scale of archived web materials are significant ethical developments (lomborg, 2018; nissenbaum, 2010; tiinderberg, 2018), getting in contact with creators of digital materials is still an important ethical dimension for many internet researchers (eichhorn, 2019; horbinski, 2018; leurs 2017; lialina, 2017; robards & lincoln, 2020). this paper demonstrates an ethico-methodological (cowan, 2020) approach to working with archived web pages created by young people and collected and stored by the internet archive. the early internet memories project explored archives with web materials made by young people throughout 1994-2005 through qualitative, online semistructured interviews. participants are positioned as co-investigator and analyst of web archival material, enabling simultaneous discovery, memory, interpretation and investigation, as they guided the researcher through a walkthrough of their digital materials collected and stored in web archives (light, burgess, duguay, 2016; robards & lincoln, 2017). this method begins with the person, rather than their data, and is influenced by the conceptual framing of data materials in research on the "right to be forgotten” (crossen-white, 2015; gdpr, 2018; tsesis, 2014), digital afterlives (sutherland, 2020), indigenous data sovereignty and governance (wemigwans, 2018), and the feminist data manifest-no (cifor et al, 2019). by exploring experiences and memories of the web while guided through web archives by the creators, we are able to re-center human and move towards a digital justice approach (gieseking, 2020; cowan & rault, 2020) and a critical feminist ethics of care (luka & millette, 2018) for engaging with historical youth data. works cited cifor, m., garcia, p., cowan, t.l., rault, j., sutherland, t., chan, a., rode, j., hoffmann, a.l., salehi, n., nakamura, l. (2019). “feminist data manifest-no.” retrieved from: https://www.manifestno.com/. cowan, t.l. & rault, j. (2020). “heavy processing for digital materials (more than a feeling),” digital research ethics collaboratory, http://www.drecollab.org/risking-it/. cowan, t.l. (2020). “x-reception: re-mediating transfeminist and queer performance art,” in kathryn brown (ed), the routledge companion to digital humanities and art history. taylor and francis. crossen-white, h. l. (2015). “using digital archives in historical research: what are the ethical concerns for a ‘forgotten’ individual?” research ethics, 11, 108 – 119. eichhorn, k. (2019). the end of forgetting: growing up with social media. cambridge, mass: harvard university press. franzke, aline shakti, bechmann, anja, zimmer, michael, ess, charles and the association of internet researchers. (2020). “internet research: ethical guidelines 3.0.” retrieved from: https://aoir.org/reports/ethics3.pdf general data protection regulation (2018). “right to be forgotten.” https://gdprinfo.eu/issues/right-to-be-forgotten/. accessed march 10, 2020. gieseking, jj. (2020). “privacy in public: visualizing the lives of trans youth through tumblr posts.” digital research ethics collaboratory, http://www.drecollab.org/privacyin-public/. grimes, sara and grace chung. (2005). “data mining the kids: surveillance and market research strategies in children’s online games.” canadian journal of communication vol. 30 no. 4. horbinski, a. (2018). talking by letter: the hidden history of female media fans on the 1990s internet, internet histories, 2:3-4, 247-263, doi: 10.1080/24701475.2018.1500794 leurs, k. (2017). “feminist data studies. using digital methods for ethical, reflexive and situated socio-cultural research.” feminist review, 115(1): 130-154. lialina, olia. (2017). “still there: templates and ruins of geocities,” in annett dekker (ed) lost and living (in) archives: collectively shaping new memories. amsterdam: valiz. light, b., j. burgess, s. duguay, (2018). “the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps.” new media & society, 20(3): 881-900. lin, j., i. milligan, d.w. oard, n. ruest, k. shilton. (2020). “we could, but should we? ethical considerations for providing access to geocities and other historical digital collections.” chiir ’20, march 14-18, vancouver, bc, canada. luka, m.e. & millette, m. (2018). (re)framing big data: activating situated knowledges and a feminist ethics of care in social media research. social media + society, januarymarch, 1–10. doi: 10.1177/2056305118768297 lomborg, s. (2018). “ethical considerations for web archives and web history research,” in: eds. brügger, n. & milligan, i. (eds) sage handbook of web history, pp. 199-219. nissenbaum, h. (2010). privacy in context: technology, policy, and the integrity of social life, stanford, stanford university press. ogden, j. (2020). web archiving as culture: tumblr and the cultural construction of the archived web. aoir selected papers of internet research, 2020. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2020i0.11294 robards, b. & lincoln, s. (2020). growing up on facebook. new york: peter lang. robards, b. & lincoln, s. (2017). “uncovering longitudinal life narratives: scrolling back on facebook,” qualitative research, 17(6): 715-730. steeves, valerie. (2015). “now you see me: privacy, technology, and autonomy in the digital age.” current issues and controversies in human rights, edited by gordon digiacomo, university of toronto press, pp.1-31. sutherland, t. (2020). “data, death, and dignity: reflections on archives and the digital afterlife.” ichora ’20, october 26-30, michigan, usa. tiidenberg, k. (2018). “research ethics, vulnerability, and trust on the internet”. in j. hunsinger, l. klastrup, m. allen (eds.) second international handbook of internet research (pp. 1-15). dordrecht: springer. tsesis, a., (2014). “the right to be forgotten and erasure: privacy, data brokers, and the indefinite retention of data,” wake forest law review, vol. 48, loyola university chicago school of law research paper no. 2013-11/30. van dijck, jose, thomas poell and martijn de waal. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford scholarship online. wemigwans, j. (2018). a digital bundle: protecting and promoting indigenous knowledge online. university of regina press. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): heřmanová, m. (2021, october). do your research: covid-19 and the narrative of information independence among czech instagram influencers. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “do your research”: covid-19 and the narrative of information independence among czech instagram influencers marie heřmanová institute of sociology, czech academy of sciences abstract the global pandemic in 2020 significantly reshaped influencer culture worldwide as travel restrictions and the closure of many public places such as pubs and cafés limited the options for what constituted aspirational content (hund et al 2019) in the prepandemic world. while social media influencers undoubtedly play an important role in spreading awareness and sometimes vital information about covid-related situation to their audience (abidin et al 2020) there’s also evidence of instagram and tiktok influencers involvement in the spread of conspiracies and false information regarding the pandemic (maly 2020) and of the role that instagram influencers played in the mainstreaming of qanon-related narratives in the us (remski, 2020). the proliferation of political narratives on instagram is thus an ongoing trend, accelerated by the pandemic, but most likely here to stay, as instagram evolves and competes with other (re)emerging platforms. the aim of the paper is to analyse the role of lifestyle instagram influencers in shaping the public narrative that explains covid-19 as an orchestrated political event aimed at curbing civic freedom in the czech republic. the narrative of covid-19 as political cause is often placed in the context of post-socialist historical experience of the czech citizens, where the invocation of totalitarian past has a highly symbolic discursive value – in this context, the anti-pandemic restrictions are discussed as a return to authoritarian communist state (closed borders and the restrictions on freedom of movement and right to assembly are the most discussed markers of the perceived return of the past). the paper attempts to identify the role lifestyle influencers may have played in the proliferation of the distrustful narrative (and subsequently in the formation of negative attitudes towards vaccination). empirically it builds on long-term digital ethnography (participant and non-participant observation at the platform, semi-structured narrative interviews) among a group of 15 czech female influencers aged 23 to 35. the focus of the analysis is on two key elements in the process of the narrative shaping and proliferation: 1 the shift in the both the self-perception and public perception of lifestyle influencers from aspirational celebrities towards opinion leaders via the process of “politicization of the domestic” on instagram. while the role of platforms such as facebook, twitter and youtube has been widely discussed and researched in the context of political communication and its actors (for example finlayson 2020, štětka et al 2019 in the czech context), instagram on the other hand has until recently been suspiciously absent from these debates. in the public imagination instagram tends to be perceived as female dominated space for aspirational lifestyle content where politics is intentionally overlooked, even though evidence shows that instagram has been used for spreading disinformation in 2016 us presidential election, to mention one example (howard et al 2018, leaver at al 2020). the gendered character of influencers’ work on social media (duffy 2016, duffy and hund 2019) often leads to the assumption that politics, seen as male domain, is excluded from the influencer communities on instagram. social media on the other hand offered women an unprecedent tool of political expression, where the dedication to the domestic affairs could be seen as a political act on itself (stern, 2020) and female political activists have been able to utilize their platform in novel ways, proliferating political content via connecting it to everyday lifestyle choices and domestic issues (miller-idriss, 2020).the paper argues that the pandemic further blurred the boundaries between domestic and political on instagram because “staying at home” was performed as an expression of political opinion and the everyday lifestyle decisions such as where to play with children or where and how to shop for groceries could be used to demonstrate a political stance towards the government-imposed restrictions. the female lifestyle influencers used their platforms to chronicle these now politicized everyday decisions and to subsequently communicate their opinion to their followers. they also started openly discussing their political opinions to justify their actions when facing critique. the concept of “third space” developed by scott wright seems to be particularly useful in the context of the discussed data. wright defines “third spaces” as non-political online spaces where political talk emerges. women seek refuge in primarily non-political places because the openly political online arenas discussion are often dominated by men and perceived as unsafe. women are often actively discouraged to participate in the discussion by men and are targets of sexist attacks and various forms of hatespeech (vochocová 2018, jane 2014, poletta and chen, 2013). in this sense, female influencers aim at creating “third spaces” within the communities of their followers on instagram where they feel safe to discuss their attitudes towards the pandemic openly. 2 the shift from domestic to political on instagram needs to be explained in the context of historical experience of (post)socialism in the central and eastern european region. previous research (heřmanová and lehečka 2016) indicated that the distrust of mainstream media narratives in the post-socialist space is often framed by what is perceived as mainstream media hegemony and the need to “do your research” before forming an opinion. influencers are adapting to this context by placing themselves as the ones who are “doing their own research” and present information filtered through everyday reality of average citizen as opposed to elitist journalists or politicians. while the hashtag #doyourownresearch has been in the english-speaking context recently associated with the spread of qanon conspiracy, its czech variations used among lifestyle influencers often point to the perceived media hegemony which is seen as a dangerous return of past totalitarian practices of the state. within this context, the influencers are positioning themselves as the independent voice of the public and thus an important democratic element in the pandemic situation. references abidin, c., barbetta, t. & lee, j. (2020). influencers, brands, and pivots in the time of covid-19: a look at australian, japanese, and korean issues. m/c journal, 23(6). https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2729 finlayson, a. (2020). youtube and political ideologies: technology, populism and rhetorical form. political studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720934630 duffy, b.e. (2016). the romance of work: gender and aspirational labour in the digital culture industries. international journal of cultural studies 19(4): 441 – 457. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877915572186 duffy, b. e., & hund, e. (2019). gendered visibility on social media: navigating instagram’s authenticity bind. international journal of communication, 13(0), 20. hund, e., mcguigan, l (2019) a shoppable life: performance, selfhood, and influence in the social media storefront, communication, culture and critique, 12 (1) 2019, p. 18–35, https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz004 heřmanová, m., lehečka, m. (2016) the roots and causes of czech attitudes towards migration – audience research report, anthropictures, available at: http://www.anthropictures.cz/, (retrieved 1.4.2021) howard, p.n., ganesh, b., liotsiou, d., kelly, j. and francois, c. (2018). the ira, social media and political polarization in the united states, 2012 – 2018. computational propaganda research project, oxford university leaver, t., highfield, t. and abidin, c. (2020). instagram. polity press. maly, i. (2020). metapolitical new right influencers: the case of brittany pettibone. soc.sci. 9 (113) https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci9070113 miller-idriss, c. (2020). hate in the homeland the new global far right. princeton university press. polletta f and chen pcb (2013) gender and public talk: accounting for women’s variable participation in the public sphere. sociological theory 31(4): 291–317 https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2729 https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720934630 https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877915572186 https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz004 http://www.anthropictures.cz/ https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci9070113 stern, a.m. (2020). living the tradlife: babies, butter, and the vanishing of bre faucheux, in stern, a.m. (2020) proud boys and the white ethnostate: how the altright is warping the american imagination, beacon press. štětka, v., surowiec, p., & mazák, j. (2019). facebook as an instrument of election campaigning and voters’ engagement: comparing czechia and poland. european journal of communication, 34(2), 121–141. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323118810884 vochocová, l., & rosenfeldová, j. (2019). ridiculed, but safe: what e-mothers’ discussion on migration tells us about the potential of ‘third spaces’ for the political communication of women. european journal of communication, 34(2), 142–158. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323118810865 wright, s. (2012). from “third place” to “third space”: everyday political talk in nonpolitical online spaces. in javnost (vol. 19, issue 3, pp. 5–20). euricom. https://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2012.11009088 https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323118810884 https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323118810865 selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): jaber, h., kraidy, m., al-ghazzi, o., zidani, s. (2021, october). transnational feelings: digital affect as global analytic. panel presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. transnational feelings: digital affect as a global analytic heather jaber university of pennsylvania marwan kraidy northwestern university qatar omar al-ghazzi london school of economics and political science sulafa zidani massachusetts institute of technology introductory statement this panel examines the role of affect in transnational digital media, offering finegrained analyses of online communities and media artifacts which contend with and carve out contested futures. across several sites and languages, these papers reflect on the role of feeling in the formation of new publics, communities, and identities, illuminating the suturing and severing work of digitally mediated affects. using a variety of humanistic and qualitative approaches, this panel mines affects which are steered, channeled, and recoded to challenge hegemonic practices of meaning-making. they offer that in a moment of global ruptures—lost visions of revolution, polarizing extremist expressions, and uncertain socioeconomic conditions—digital affect is an analytic for contending with interdependent realities. in the last decade, scholarly work in media and communication has turned to affect theory to complicate functionalist models of power, liberal notions of the sovereign self, and an overdetermination of the causative power afforded to language. this work has drawn on a range of theories of affect and emotion (ahmed 2014, gregg & seigworth 2010, massumi 2002) to examine the rise of networked publics (papacharissi 2015), new media practices (chun 2016), and the weaponization of affect in digital media (boler & davis 2021). beyond the walls of the academy, popular discourse has also designated this as a particularly affective time (hsu 2019), turning to affect to answer questions about our increasingly complex entanglements with digital media. at the same time, while the “affective turn” has offered new ways of examining contingency and causality, it has remained difficult to distinguish the particular power(s) of affects and to trace what is often described as intangible, ephemeral, and lying beyond the level of signification. in order to think through the power of digital affect, this panel turns to several transnational and transhistorical contact zones to reanimate questions of feeling on the internet. it examines the power of particular affects— nostalgia, fear, shame, and zanaakha, a kitschy humor of the times—and the particular power of affects—to recode undesirable and threatening feelings, to suture continuities with the past, and to relieve the pressures of a fraught present. through qualitative interviews, close readings, and textual analyses, these projects engage in a range of approaches to trace the affects which circulate online. across these papers, sites of mediation include the live-streamed media event, meme-making and historically focused social media accounts, and the promotional materials of extremist groups. sites like the world economic forum allow audiences to vent shared frustrations toward national representatives who escape local censure. on twitter, national affects become transnational, illuminating shared affinities which can form the basis of new identifications while also entrenching nationalist responses to international censure. at times, such affects are sought out and manipulated, with groups like the one that calls itself “islamic state” utilizing the digital to potently recode symbols of fun into evil and symbols of pain into symbols of healing. propagandistic images not only represent extremist expression but bind and polarize worldviews. however, alternative, more reparative uses of digital media produce other ways of imagining community. alandalus, the arabic name for the muslim-ruled spain of 711-1492, becomes a node in the production of a new arab muslim identity, generating new ways of feeling history. here, digital mediation of the past offers those yearning for respite and hope ways of contending with the present and making it mean differently. these are present in the transnational “structures of feeling” (williams 1977) that meme-makers around the world illuminate through their use of humor and critique. these continuities point to shared affinities across language and nation, making a transnational approach to questions of affect politically productive. each of these projects contends with not only imagined futures but presents which are inescapably interdependent. across each site, new kinds of “worlding” take place, even when these worlds may be radically at odds with one another. by turning to these spaces, these projects make the case for careful, contextualized approaches to affect and digital media in order to mine their political power. references ahmed, s. (2014). the cultural politics of emotion (second edition). edinburgh university press. boler, m., & davis, e. (eds.). (2021). affective politics of digital media: propaganda by other means. routledge. chun, w. h. k. (2016). updating to remain the same: habitual new media. the mit press. gregg, m., & seigworth, g. j. (eds.). (2010). the affect theory reader. duke university press. hsu, h. (2019, march 18). affect theory and the new age of anxiety. the new yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/25/affect-theory-and-the-new-age-ofanxiety massumi, b. (2002). parables for the virtual: movement, affect, sensation. duke university press. papacharissi, z. (2015). affective publics: sentiment, technology, and politics. oxford university press. williams, r. (1977). marxism and literature. new york: oxford university press. dignity and shame in transnational spectacles of justice heather jaber university of pennsylvania this paper examines affective economies of pleasure and shame which undergird spectacles of transnational capital like the world economic forum (wef). it offers as a case study the 2020 wef in davos, switzerland for the way that it provoked digital commentary around national representation by a lebanese public on the heels of a revolution. in particular, i turn to a panel entitled “the return of arab unrest” for the way that affects of pleasure and shame were channeled and recoded by panelists and viewers. i offer that by turning to the political work that particular emotions do, we have better tools to understand the nationalist responses which have surfaced following national mobilizations not only in lebanon, but across the world. what is more, turning to the wef as a node in transnational circuits of capital prompts renewed questions of independence and interdependence of not only nations, but of the affective states of transnational publics. the annual invite-only event which gathered the global elite—corporate leaders, politicians, media moguls, ngo directors, and select academics—made headlines across the country due to the controversy that erupted around the presence of one of lebanon’s most notorious political actors, gebran bassil. bassil was not only the leader of the largest christian bloc of lebanese parliament, but the son-in-law of lebanon’s president and had lauded a host of ministerial positions in the years past. in the context of mass mobilizations that had erupted on october 17, 2019, bassil’s was one of several names chanted in calls for the downfall of the ruling regime. an online petition by lebanese diaspora circulated, asking organizers to remove him from the line-up. however, bassil was not disinvited and the event became an anticipated one after cnbc international correspondent hadley gamble’s questioning of bassil became something of a spectacle for its performative dimension. in particular, the panel was distinct and heavily discussed online for its moralizing element, whereby lebanon, through bassil, was castigated for its economic failure. the “affective turn” has led to an interest in examining affect, emotion, and feeling in the field of communication, with much work drawing on the deleuzian-massumian dialect which conceptualizes affect as a pre-subjective force distinct from emotion (clough 2018, manning 2013). an alternative strand adopts a looser typology of affect and emotion (schaefer 2020), situating itself amongst scholars in queer and feminist theory, religious studies, and poststructuralism (ahmed 2014, schaefer 2015). this project follows this second strand, offering that an understanding of particular affects and emotions offer more political utility and analytic potential for the study of digital media. by adopting this orientation, we are able to think through the particular ways we are differently moved by what i call the “transnational spectacle of justice.” rather than adopting a view of the internet as a site for the circulation of a monolithic affect, this project turns to the way that such sites rechannel, reroute, and recode affects like pleasure, shame, joy, and humiliation. in particular, i am interested in the ways that such spectacles figure as sites where internal contradictions are discursively disguised, but affectively resonant. while all panelists denounced the regressive role of emotion in voting habits in the mena region, putting forth a secular discourse of a rational public sphere, they acted as channelers of different emotions. the pleasure of such call-outs—by indignant diaspora, international funders, and transnational media figures—undergirds much of the online discourse around the event. i examine the performative effects of such callouts, such as the performances of dignity, pride, and shame of those interpellated by the spectacle. in order to discern the different affects which were channeled through this site, i examine the live-streamed spectacle, press around the event, and responses on twitter. i turn to the posts by social media users who shared a variety of memes, jokes, expressions of indignation, and other commentary about the event. in doing so, i build on work which examines the affective dimensions of digital media (chun 2016, el-ariss 2019, papacharissi 2015, schaefer 2020), seeking to animate studies of the internet with attention to particular feeling states. i build on this work to recognize the ways that affects like pleasure and shame reveal interdependencies and intersectionalities which operate below the level of discourse, producing nationalist responses to the international call-out. in doing so, i offer these spectacles as sites where affects are recoded as viewers absorb and remediate them online. by analyzing these social media posts, i find that publics interpellated by the spectacle engage in performative recodings of popular culture. through intertextual references, memes, and jokes, internet users grapple with representations of national failure on what many referred to as the “international” or “global stage.” the performative acts of not only the journalist and interviewees, but internet users, reveal an affective investment in the national spectacle, implicit in the way that posts rearticulate and recode what has been labeled embarrassing, shameful, or worthy of pride to match their own local investments. these posts are recirculated by other national publics and related to local issues of corruption and socioeconomic inequality, as well as affects like shame around the transnational publicity that digital media produces. these practices point to broader structures of feeling which span the national and tether together new kinds of transnational publics through shared forms of affect. this project provokes questions of independence around countries in the global south, like lebanon, which are imbricated in circuits of transnational capital inextricable from colonial and imperial legacies. while narratives of independence and sovereignty are continuously revived on nationalist terms, spectacles like these and the performative acts they produce reveal the transnational interdependencies which are tethered together by particular affects, such as shame or pride. identifying such affective investments and their interdependencies creates the grounds for new forms of identification, community, and critique. references ahmed, s. (2014). the cultural politics of emotion (second edition). edinburgh university press. chun, w. h. k. (2016). updating to remain the same: habitual new media. the mit press. clough, p. t. (ed.). (2018). the user unconscious: on affect, media, and measure. university of minnesota press. el-ariss, t. (2019). leaks, hacks, and scandals: arab culture in the digital age. princeton university press. manning, e. (2013). always more than one: individuation’s dance. duke university press. papacharissi, z. (2015). affective publics: sentiment, technology, and politics. oxford university press. schaefer, d. o. (2015). religious affects: animality, evolution, and power. duke university press. schaefer, d. o. (2020). whiteness and civilization: shame, race, and the rhetoric of donald trump. communication and critical/cultural studies, 17(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2019.1667503 recoding affect: digital pyropoesis & extremist expression marwan kraidy northwestern university qatar this paper develops the notion of digital pyropoesis—meaning-making by fire via digital means. more specifically, it explores how digitally mediated fire enables a recoding of affect. to do so, io develop a critical humanistic framework from a combination of elemental philosophy, actor-network theory, and affect theory, which i apply to primary texts produced by the organization that calls itself “islamic state” and collected as part of a book project on extremism, affect and elementalism. based on this close reading of several arabic-language videos and pamphlets produced by islamic state (see “primary sources” in references), this paper concludes that the potency of extremist agitprop resides in its ability to recode affects via digital pyropoesis. fire has as a peculiar capacity to stir our imagination and alter our perception. a stimulus to the imagination, the flame is “one of the greater operators of images,” wrote the french chemist and philosopher gaston bachelard (1949, 1961). contemporary writers have likened the magic of cinema to fire’s capacity to beguile (moore, 2000). others have equated the rise of the internet itself to a rediscovery of fire (anderson, 2011). if fire, as lévi-strauss has shown, is culture’s tool to shape nature (fire hardens spear tips, warms up cold caves, cooks raw meat), in this paper i explore how fire is as importantly an instrument to switch sentiment, to disrupt affective experiences and reorient us towards different, often antagonistic feelings. fire, i argue, is a potent recoder of affect. in the distinction in actor-network-theory between intermediary and mediator (callon, 1991; latour, 2005; sayes, 2014), fire is a mediator (see also candea, 2018). an intermediary links various actants in a network in predictable patterns—a given input leads to an expected output; in contrast, a mediator transforms the relationship between actants and leads to contingent, unpredictable outputs. this important insight can be adapted to our discussion of fire. the flame not only induces reverie and ignites our imagination. it also, as bachelard (1949) put it, avers a longing to “brusque time,” and lights up a desire for radical transformation. as an affective catalyst, fire is therefore an ideal medium for stark worldviews. it can serve as a social accelerant that mobilizes and polarizes. the flame can help forge a dualistic, self-versus-other identity. spun in words and images, flames pop up in pivotal you-are-with-me-or-against-me moments in my primary sources. for example, in shield yourselves and your families from a fire, a video released in may 2016 by islamic state as part of a moral campaign against satellite dishes, begins with a flame circling a boy on his knees before a television set, and ends with a preacher threatening “crusaders” who push satellite dishes on muslims, to meld the antennas into “shrapnel” that “will tear your bodies asunder.” the satellite dish is what sara ahmed would call a “sticky” object—it attracts and aggregates affect. but rather than being what ahmed discussed as “happy” objects, the dish is an unhappy thing that accrues negative affect. why does shield yourselves begin with a flame guarding a child and end with missiles melded from dishes? why the rush from shield to shrapnel? this paper answers: because such a switch affirms “islamic state’s” life-or-death, manichean ethos, and fire is a superb affective linchpin of that mindset. a fundamental insight ensues: in is propaganda, a projectilic affect—the feeling of bodily harm that we experience from images design to cause psychic damage (see kraidy, 2017) always lurks under a prophylactic veneer—prophylactic images convey community, belonging, and shelter. harm is inextricably linked to wellness. to defend oneself is to harm the nonself. is identity exists through its opposite. death is at the center of life, but a flame of community shimmers over dying and demise. digital pyropoesis enables the construction of two antagonistic domains: the hearth, which provides shelter and belonging, and the torch, with which the enemy is blasted. one way to understand the articulation of projectilic and prophylactic images, of constructions of torch and hearth, is to focus on how agitprop manipulates feelings. fire plays an incredibly powerful role in this grand recoding of affect by making possible slippages between projectilic and prophylactic affects. we can thus better understand why the atrocious burning of a human being is framed as a soothing spectacle (in healing the believers’ chests), why scenes of belonging end up with the symbolic violence of passport burning (in what are you waiting for?), and why the flame turns from shield of childhood to shrapnel tearing the enemy apart (in shield yourselves and your families from a fire). the paper shows how fire stirs and steers feelings. in primary sources, objects of desire, like the satellite dish, become sources of repulsion: once a gateway to fun, the satellite dish grows into a portal of evil. the cinematographers of the caliphate framed an abominable immolation as a healing spectacle. iraqi satirists ridiculed caliphal grandiosity and recast fear as fun. the dish and other insignia transmute feelings. fire’s ability to switch emotions makes it a potent binding agent for shaping extreme collective identities—from “islamic state” to white power militants, which i will discuss comparatively in my conclusion—and expressing their worldviews. primary sources what are you waiting for? (2014, november 19). al-hayat media center [video, french]. healing the believers’ chest (2015, february). al-hayat media center [video, english]. protect yourself and your family from the fire (2017). al-khayr province [video, arabic]. secondary sources ahmed, s. (2014). the cultural politics of emotions, 2nd ed. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. ahmed, s. (2010). “happy objects.” in m. gregg & g. i. seigworth (eds.), the affective theory reader (pp. 29-51). durham, nc: duke university press. anderson, c. (2011). “the rediscovery of fire,” in john brockman (ed.), is the internet changing the way you think? the net’s impact on our minds and future (35-37). new york: harper collins. bachelard, g. (1949). la psychanalyse du feu. paris: gallimard bachelard, g. (1961). la flamme d’une chandelle. paris: presses universitaires de france. callon, m. (1991). “techno-economic networks and irreversibility,” in j. law (ed.), a sociology of monsters: essays on power, technology and domination (132–165). london: routledge. candea, m. (2008). fire and identity as matters of concern in corsica, anthropological theory, 8(2), 201-216. hansen mbn (2006) new philosophy for new media. cambridge, ma: mit press. hillis k, paasonen s and petit m (eds) (2015) networked affect. cambridge: the mit press. kraidy, m. m. (2017). the projectilic image: islamic state’s digital visual warfare and global networked affect, media, culture & society, 39(8). latour, b. (2005). reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. oxford: oxford university press. moore, rachel o., savage theory: cinema as modern magic (durham, nc: duke university press, 2000), 121. papacharissi, zizi (2015). affective publics: sentiment, technology and politics. new york: oxford university press. peters, j. d (2015). the marvelous clouds: toward a philosophy of elemental media. chicago: university of chicago press. sayes, e. (2014). actor-network-theory and methodology: just what does it mean to say that nonhumans have agency? social studies of science, 44(11), 134-149. feeling al-andalus online omar al-ghazzi london school of economics and political science this paper examines the arab digital culture of remembrance of al-andalus, the arabic name given to muslim-ruled spain (which lasted roughly from 711-1492). it argues that affective engagement with history gets pronounced in digital mediation, as meaningmaking processes are destabilised, and traditional gatekeepers of the past are increasingly challenged and side-lined. my interest is in the politics of nostalgic engagement with al-andalus as a new generation of arabs, inspired by online clerics, turn to social media to express historic sentiment. through textual and discursive analysis of social media pages, as well as interviews with bloggers and social media administrators, i tell the story of how online al-andalus enthusiasts were inspired by the cassette tapes and media productions of celebrity clerics, who popularized al-andalus as a central node in arab muslim identity. my empirical focus is on how celebrity clerics moved online and retold the story of alandalus in a digital space and how those productions and interactions inspired ordinary users to take the lead and become al-andalus social media activists in the period 20102020— tracing the continuities and ruptures in how al-andalus was interpreted. the social media practices that invoke al-andalus inspire the formation of online communities and contribute to finding new ways to talk about politics and imagine subjectivity. the administrators of these social media pages share daily posts (texts and images) about a historic period they feel passionate about. mostly without mentioning sources, they post anecdotes about how life was like in al-andalus, the food people ate, the clothes they wore and the weapons they took to battle. they share information about military leaders from that period, in addition to poets and scholars. on par with this highly nostalgic content about the muslim and arab past, the administrators often share their “takes” about what is going on today in the arab world. the circulation of al-andalus on social media has renewed its political shelf life as it moved from its position of a high culture trope in poetry and musicals, with social media, al-andalus became more accessible to ordinary users to take the lead in its imagination and reproduction. this al-andalus 2.0 is also more islamically-committed than what was represented in 20th century arab culture. as i was told in the interviews i conducted, a group of social media activists coordinated their efforts to popularize al-andalus online as they were inspired by popular islamic clerics, (the likes of egyptian da’iyas ragheb al-sarajani and amr khaled), who were pioneers in the efforts to make arab muslims feel direct affinity to islamic history and to express that on social media as an affirmation of religiosity and piety. on social media, practices of meaning-making and emotional expressions and imaginings of al-andalus became more participatory as millions of online arabs partook in nostalgic and sentimental expressions to affirm that al-andalus is part of their identity. since 2010, a network of young arabs from across the middle east and north africa, inspired by online clerics, connected to each other on the internet and decided to spread information in the form of memes, videos and anecdotes that culminated in launching an al-andalus craze on social media pages. their followers became part of an online community that engages in phatic communicative practices of likes, shares and mundane reactions of approval and prayer, as well as sometimes, in making direct political statements. the 2011 uprisings efforts offered an opportunity to amplify their alandalus revivalism and allowed for radical imaginings of new futures and fresh interpretations of the past. furthermore, given heightened state surveillance of social media, blogging and tweeting about al-andalus shielded those living under repressive regimes by allowing them to express political opinions and aspiration that may have otherwise captured the attention of authorities. politically, new actors took the reins of speaking about al-andalus, they needed a way to express a sense of collective belonging outside of a repertoire dominated by states and going beyond established clerics. the administrators of these social media pages, as well as a network that cooperated in producing content from videos to memes to blog posts, in addition to the millions of followers they attracted, found in al-andalus a convenient lens through which to view their political and cultural position and to find a voice to express their sense of agency. they sought to demonstrate their connection to arab-islamic history and to cultivate a sense of a cultural, religious, and political community under conditions of fast-changing political circumstances and suffocating restrictions on freedoms of expression. this kind of engagement makes sense in relation to the political environment that post2011 arabs find themselves in wherein fast-shifting foreign policies are communicated by opinion leaders as rooted in historic identities. popular understandings of history in the region are engulfed by shifting foreign policy priorities of ruling regimes. within a complex and shifting geopolitical terrain, where does that leave questions of identity and their relation to history? the answer to the question gives an indication of why many continue to be invested in the idea of al-andalus as part of a history they can continue to cherish while staying out of the complexities of current international relations and moving beyond the state as the gatekeeper of historical imagination. yet, beyond the extraction of meaning from this widespread engagement with alandalus, there is another side to how we encounter history, which is in the realm of how history makes us feel. in the arab world, intense sentimentality has characterised modern imaginings of al-andalus. one reason is its reduction to the moments of its conquest and fall, and the emotive stories that are told about how muslim leader tariq bin ziyad (who lead the initial conquest of the iberian peninsula in the 8th century) heroically crossed the narrow sea separating africa and europe. the choice of words through which its story is told heightens emotion. examples are common words like “fateh” (opening) and “suqut” (fall). like a chameleon of different emotions, al-andalus is about the melancholia of loss; the anxiety over being dominated by a foreign power, getting expelled, and forgotten. it is about the idea that even 700 years of history could be erased. it provokes rage over how historic accomplishments were stolen, how muslims were ethnically cleansed. it also brings joy and pride over past glory; feelings of defiance that arab muslims are not intrinsically backward; and the hope in the sense of possibility that historic glories could be revived. while one feeling may dominate depending on present political circumstances, these contradictory sentiments have long co-existed and they clearly manifest themselves on social media as one scrolls through a twitter page or reads reactions on facebook. i conclude by showing how these social media pages invite their users and fans to indulge in different expressions of sentimentality that are amplified and intensified as they get shared on different platforms. zanaakha: the transnational affect of memes sulafa zidani massachusetts institute of technology memes serve as cultural building blocks that bridge between personal and political meanings (shifman, 2014), between the past and present (hristova, 2013), and between seriousness and silliness or politics and humor (mina, 2019; shifman, 2014; tay, 2014). thus, it is no surprise that questions related to worldview, hope, aspirations, and self-awareness hop on the vessel of memes. with the exception of regional case studies that address cultures separately (makhortykh and gonzález aguilar, 2020; szablowicz, 2014), scholarship investigating internet memes and affect from a transnational perspective is so far limited. this paper looks into memes that mix languages (including: mandarin chinese, arabic, hebrew, english, french, spanish) as well as interviews with international meme makers to examine the relationship between affect and humor in internet memes. the importance of studying affect in memes lies in the potential for affect to be a locus for cultural and political theories (deleuze and guattari, 1983 ; seigworth and gregg, 2010). i build on scablowicz’s analysis of the diaosi meme in china, and her conceptualization of memes as “structures of feeling” (as per williams, 1977), and apply this type of analysis to a transnational level that also examines multiple memes rather than a single one, and incorporates data from interviews with meme makers. this analysis contributes to a better understanding of the structures of feeling in which global meme makers (usually youth, broadly defined between the ages of 16-35) are operating. there is a certain type of affect that comes through when we look at memes globally that can teach us about the generation of youth that is making and circulating these memes. this is an affect of self-awareness, defeat, extraneousness, and a type of humor which i am calling zanaakha—a cheesy or kitschy humor that is not trying to be edgy or creative. in what comes below, i outline some of the findings of the study under three themes: independence, zanaakha, and extraneousness. i conclude with a brief discussion on the stakes and implications of these findings. the independence of the fictional space despite—or perhaps because of—the clear connection between online and offline worlds, meme makers i interviewed saw a unique opportunity in online expression through memes. in the words of one of my interviewees, hadeel: “our everyday context that we live in is oppressive, as opposed to the fictional context [of memes and popular culture].” hadeel invoked the 1996 declaration of the independence of cyberspace in which john perry barlow speaks of the internet as a space where nation-states have no authority and cannot impose their rules (barlow, 1996). “globalization ignores my specific oppressive context.” hadeel said, “it just makes me think: is the fictional space the place where we can make change?” the humor and affect of zanaakha: defeated kitsch below are a few examples of the memes i examined combining different cultures and languages. “you have time to write a long [facebook] status on game of thrones, but you don’t have time to love me.” the invincible east 东方不败 (dōngfāng búbài) is a fictional character from the martial arts novel the smiling, proud wanderer by jinyong. this meme draws on dongfang bubai’s name and formidable martial arts skills to create a pun about relentless shopping to november 11th (singles’ day), an unofficial holiday in china usually celebrated with big sales and shopping. hey, how are you feeling? [image of american singer post malone] what’s that? kind of bad. [sounds like post malone] the humor of the memes i examined is a self-aware kitschy humor. it is a type of humor that is not always trying to be edgy, but rather often basks in its kitsch. at the same time, this humor carried along with it an affect of defeat or powerlessness. this defeat is similar to what szablewicz explains in her work on the diaosi memes, whereby internet users use the meme/term diaosi (loser) to articulate their desired-yet-unachievable lifestyles due to economic uncertainty (szablewicz, 2014). the meme makers turn that defeat into cheesy jokes in their memes to laugh at their situations like lost love, shopping crazes, or bad feelings. i use the colloquial arabic term zanaakha to refer to this type of humor since it encapsulates both the kitschy humor and the defeated affect in one term. zanaakha is a type of humor that is aware of its almost annoyingly cheesy nature, and that is what leads to laughter. extraneous but involved interviewees expressed feeling neither here nor there, or somewhere in between. many identified as marginalized, oppressed, outsiders in their own communities, or third culture kids. despite feeling extraneous, they also expressed an air of pride and confidence in who they are and in their multilinguistic meme production. “this is what we’re like” said sharihan, a meme maker from haifa. hager, who makes memes with her sister, said that mixing languages is “more true to who we are.” the admin of the page lgbtq sarcasm society expressed that, in their meme creation, they aim for “something beyond laughter.” that which is beyond laughter refers to making a point about culture, religion, gender, and politics. it is about changing people’s minds and opinions, and raising awareness. is this… activism?! the global rhythm of memes is punctuated by cultural trends dominated by american meme trends and media culture. despite their global nature, multilinguistic memes include scenes from films and tv shows or music videos and meme templates that come predominantly from the united states. however, multilinguistic meme makers transform these punctuations into punctures or interventions, communicating their own voices of critique, humor, and desire for change. the affect of defeat that is in the zanaakha of these memes might seem counterproductive to civic efforts. however, to circle back to hadeel’s question about whether or not the fictional space can be an independent space for change, i argue that zanaakha has a purpose here. its low effort and seemingly low stakes affect can lift the pressure of extraneousness and oppression that meme makers expressed to feel in reality and create a space for negotiation, critique, and push for a culture that is more just, without double standards, and a world where they are able to lead the life they want outside of economic precarity. the full paper will unpack the dual relationship to extraneousness which, on one hand, can create isolation, but on the other hand benefits meme makers by creating a safe and exclusive space that they may wish to maintain. what is clear, however, is that, although they use the fictional space independently, meme makers hope to see lasting change across the board. references barlow, j. p. (1996, february 8). a declaration of the independence of cyberspace [web page]. available at: https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence deleuze, g. & guattari, f. (1983). anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. trans. r. hurley, m. seem, & h. r. lane. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. hristova, s. (2013). occupy wall street meets occupy iraq: on remembering and forgetting in a digital age. radical history review, (117), 83-97. makhortykh, m., & gonzález aguilar, j. m. (2020). memory, politics and emotions: internet memes and protests in venezuela and ukraine. continuum, 34(3), 342-362. seigworth, g. j., & gregg, m. (2010). an inventory of shimmers. in j. seigworth & m. gregg (eds.), the affect theory reader (pp. 1-25). duke university press. shifman, l. (2014). memes in digital culture. cambridge: mit press. szablewicz, m. (2014). the ‘losers’ of china’s internet: memes as ‘structures of feeling’ for disillusioned young netizens. china information, 28(2), 259-275. tay, g. (2014). binders full of lolitics: political humour, internet memes, and play in the 2012 us presidential election (and beyond). european journal of humour research, 2(4), 46–73. https://doi.org/10.7592/ejhr2014.2.4.tay williams, r. (1977). marxism and literature. new york: oxford university press. microsoft word todd-leaving home to come home-leaving home to come home.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): todd, p. (october, 2021). just the facts fit to (delete:print) believe: from gatekeeping to ‘corralling’ by journalistic fact-checkers in the era of misinformation. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of international researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. just the facts fit to (delete:print) believe: from gatekeeping to ‘corralling’ by journalistic factcheckers in the era of misinformation paula todd york university this paper introduces the theoretical concept of post-publication information ‘corralling’ as the next evolutionary step in traditional gatekeeping (lewin, 1943, 1947; white, 1950) and gate-watching (bruns, 2003) within a chaotic marketplace of misinformation[1] where alternate-reality expressants[2] battle against an evidencebased factual public record. corralling is the modern process of culling but not crafting (shoemaker and vos, 2009) accurate information from the infinite online supply of falsehoods, misrepresentation, and manipulation across all genres and platforms characterizing internet communication in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. in part, corralling is reverse engineering of journalistic gatekeeping, occurring after content publication, rather than during the selection of constituent parts at the beginning. the act of corralling — testing and sequestering accurate information into safe fact zones — is also journalistic critique, exposing pronounced subjective weaknesses in the original gate-keeping process by imposing formulaic protocols and more transparent methods. while analysis of claims already in the public domain occurs across disciplines, in law, education, history, science and more, it is modern post-publication fact-checkers, positioned both within and external to the journalistic field, who are emerging with sufficient legitimacy to help corral truth from the morass of online fabrications. this, despite early scholarly concerns that repetition of false information further embeds it in the human psyche. adjustments to the public disputation of erroneous content is proving remedial (jamieson hall, 2021). a new lease on journalistic gatekeeping imagine mid-20th c. gatekeeping theorist kurt lewin, who examined how housewives control meals, confronted with the internet information food chain some 70 years later: endless selection but also unsolicited deliveries, ripe and rotten, piling up on the dinner table, cascading unchecked from chairs, toppling to the ground and out the door until all the world is drowning in packages. deciding on what to feed the family becomes quixotic, overwhelming, even dangerous. even collaborative gate-watchers (bruns, 2003) willing to help distribute the largesse balk as the false, the toxic, and the tainted contents spill into the informational food stream. ‘produsage (bruns, 2008),’ after all, anticipated a content community united to improve, not undermine, a multi-genre, global conversation. the public grows increasingly unable and — and in some cases, frighteningly unwilling to distinguish facts from lies, truth from falsehood, and complexity from conspiracies. traditional journalistic gatekeepers, even amid allegations of hegemony, discursive selfempowerment, and histrionics, could be forgiven for wondering whether anyone misses them. by the 2020s, it is too late for a full return to media power: traditional news editing gates are hanging by hinges or crushed to rust, watchers are overwhelmed, and donald trump's ‘fake news’ (a baseless oxymoronic term deployed as a political strategy to undermine factual reporting) has further destabilized journalism. the democratic euphoria accompanying the mass introduction of internet publishing is hardening into anger and fear amid escalating cyber abuse, misinformation, internet criminality, image manipulation, propaganda, and ‘co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour’ online. by 2021, the reuters institute for the study of journalism at oxford will find that americans trust their media less (29%) than audiences in peru (40%), the philippines (32%), brazil (54%), and finland (65%). despite attempts to rehabilitate trust in mainstream western media, a return to traditional gatekeeping is physically and philosophically impossible at this juncture. the sheer capacity of the largely free internet ‘news hole’ in comparison to the expensive and limited publishing space in print and on commercial airwaves means gatekeeping roles are no longer structural, but affective and must be earned. the mass proliferation of expressants and content-generation across news and social media platforms, through multiple layers of internet infrastructure, including the so-called ‘deep’ web, dilutes the appeal or viability of singular information authorities, and decentralizes communication control. a china-style internet blackout would be intolerable in many countries where democratic (and increasingly anti-democratic), and capitalist players demand internet freedom to ply their wares and warfare. yet, as mainstream journalism struggles to maintain a public foothold, a new phenomenon emerges in the u.s. circa 2003 with the founding of factcheck.org, a consumer advocate website offering free facts to all. reporters, scholars, free speech advocates and democratic activists from developing countries soon coalesce around an explosion of fact-checking organizations, positioned at the opposite end of the information delivery spectrum. without the power to affect newsroom editorial decisionmaking and well aware of shrinking staff and impossibly tight internet deadlines, the new information workers throw their energy into assessing and, increasingly, adjudicating the accuracy of what is flowing, already formed, across the internet. ‘corralling’ facts in a vast landscape of misinformation it was necessary to conceive of information ‘corralling’ to effectively describe this modern process of culling but not crafting (shoemaker and vos, 2009) accurate information from the online plethora of falsehoods, misrepresentation, and manipulation. as such, corralling can be loosely described as a reverse-engineering of information gatekeeping — the sifting and selecting of ‘pertinent’ information undertaken across disciplines, including in journalism. unlike the traditional press’s pre-publication practise of excluding from storytelling information deemed unimportant, uninteresting, and/or under-substantiated in the eyes of rotating decision makers, corralling occurs at the end of the selective publication transaction, after claims are in the public domain. faced with a vast field of inter-knit filtered and unfiltered human expression, modern fact-checkers deploy and publicly document research techniques aimed at assessing the veracity of public claims. assertions that can be verified by accountable and approved method form are roped off and privileged. while value judgments are required, as they are in every facet of human life, the ppfc protocol is fashioned for reproducibility, much like academic experimentation, so the public can reach its own conclusion about the veracity of corralled information and the investigative methods undertaken to collect it. by distinguishing themselves in time and technique from mainstream press, yet rarely calling out media outlets publishing misinformation, post-publication fact-checkers can challenge reported misinformation, while simultaneously shoring up journalistic bona fides from within the field. unlike formative gatekeeping, this new journalistic genre’s fact corralling upholds many normative press values while also engaging in movementbuilding, social reform (graves, 2013) and communication revolution. references amazeen, m. a. (2018). practitioner perceptions: critical junctures and the global emergence and challenges of fact-checking. international communication gazette, 81(6-8), 541-561. doi:10.1177/1748048518817674. benson, r. (2006) news media as a “journalistic field”: what bourdieu adds to new institutionalism, and vice versa, political communication, 23:2, 187-202, doi: 10.1080/10584600600629802 . bruns, a. (2003). gatewatching, not gatekeeping: collaborative online news. media international australia, 107(1), 31–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x0310700106. jamieson, k. h. (1992). dirty politics: deception, distraction, and democracy. oxford: oxford university press. lewin, kurt. (1943). “forces behind food habits and methods of change.” bulletin of the national research council. 108: 35–65. https://doi.org/10.17226/9566. shoemaker, p.j. and vos, t. (2009). gatekeeping theory. routledge. wahl-jorgensen, k., & hanitzsch, t. (2020). the handbook of journalism studies. new york ; london: routledge. notes [1] the term ‘misinformation’ is preferred over ‘disinformation’ ‘to avoid often impossible accurate adjudication of intent in creating and communicating false information. [2] i use the term ‘expressants’ to describe the millions of potential online publishers. it is more accurate than ‘citizen’ or’ witness journalists,’ and more descriptive and informative than ‘participants.’ selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 wertz, b., groshek, j. (2017, october 18-21). emerging media, instability and democracy: examining the granger-causal relationships of 122 countries from 1946 to 2014. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. emerging media, instability and democracy: examining the granger-causal relationships of 122 countries from 1946 to 2014 blake wertz boston university: college of communication, united states of america jacob groshek boston university: college of communication, united states of america research has been divided on whether internet diffusion tends to facilitate democratic transition or weaken participation in a democratic society. studies have evidenced variously that heavy internet users become less likely to take part in democratic processes (e.g., bailard, 2012), that the internet enhances democratic engagement (e.g., rhue & sundjaran, 2014) or that only particular types of internet activity lead individuals to desire and act toward democracy (e.g., stoycheff, nisbet & epstein, 2016). one complicating factor in much research has been the speed and recency of the internet’s development, leading some studies (e.g., groshek, 2010) to use data from a time period when many key online resources of web 2.0, and widespread mobile access to the internet had not yet been developed (joyce, 2011). this study approaches these questions and makes an important contribution to update key findings in the field by extending groshek’s (2011) earlier work from 2003 through 2014. his work was based on ball-rocheach and defleur’s (1976) media systems dependency (msd) theory, which states that the more functions media serves in society or the greater the instability in a society, the more society will depend on media to fulfill those functions. accordingly, groshek (2011) divided countries into both high and low media and high and low conflict categories, and found that in high, but not low, media and conflict countries, media seemed to augment democracy. however, because data regarding more interactive forms of mobile online media were not yet available, and insofar as the internet itself has dramatically transformed over the last decade, groshek’s earlier study was limited to studying relatively ‘older’ forms of media and the results reported may carry over to newer forms of media technology. the study reported here thus crucially updates an investigation into the potential role that emerging media plays in democratization processes. to address these issues and incorporate important geopolitical events such as the arab spring, the following hypotheses, adopted as directly as possible from groshek (2011), are advanced: h1: in countries where emerging media serve more information functions, its diffusion will granger-cause institutionalized democratic growth. h2: in countries with greater sociopolitical instability due to conflict and change, emerging media diffusion will granger-cause institutionalized democratic growth. method where possible, data was drawn from the same sources used by groshek (2011) so as to accurately replicate the study. all of the 122 countries used in that study and all procedures, except collection and measurement of media diffusion information, were carried out similarly to groshek (2011), making use of only those variables which groshek (2011) identified as meaningful. accordingly, several variables identified in the model of democratic development established by weaver et al. (1985) were used: democracy, sociopolitical instability. all data was evaluated at the annual level, and data was drawn from, at the earliest, 1946 through 2014. as with groshek (2011) data was evaluated using granger-causality tests. grangercausality tests mathematically evaluate whether one variable helps to predict another. to demonstrate that hypothesized causes (media) and effects (democracy) are not independent, all other variables were tested reciprocally against each other, setting each variable as dependent and testing the hypothesis that any arrangement of other variables causes any variable. results and conclusion in contrast with earlier findings regarding newspaper, radio and television diffusion in groshek (2011), granger-causality testing identified no significant causal relationship connecting either mobile or internet diffusion to national level democratizing effects. as such, in contrast to the expectations of msd theory, both hypotheses 1 and 2 were found to be invalid. in contrast to what groshek (2011) observed in regards to traditional media, there seems to be no direct relationship between democratization and media diffusion in either high or low media diffusion countries or high or low sociopolitical instability countries. this finding is important, as it suggests that new media has fundamentally distinct characteristics which cannot be predicted from studies on older of media diffusion. furthermore, it adds strong quantitative evidence to support the notion that the mere presence of the internet or mobile technology does not suffice to enhance national level democratizing effects. notably, this does not mean that particular uses or types of online activity have do not have democratizing effects. this study is one of the first to take up the call of stanyer and mihelj (2016) and not only take time more seriously in communication research, but to contribute an essential update to a vital and still-ongoing field of debate. references: bailard, c. s. (2012). a field experiment on the internet's effect in an african election: savvier citizens, disaffected voters, or both? journal of communication, 62(2), 330-344. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2012.01632.x ball-rokeach, s. j., & defleur, m. (1976). a dependency model of mass-media effects. communication research, 3(1), 3 – 21 granger, c. w. j. (1969). investigating causal relations by econometric methods and cross spectral methods. econometrica, 34 , 424 – 438 groshek, j. (2011). media, instability, and democracy: examining the granger-causal relationships of 122 countries from 1946 to 2003. 61, 1161-1182. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2011.01594.x groshek, j. (2010). a time-series, multinational analysis of democratic forecasts and internet diffusion. international journal of communication, 4, 142-174. joyce, m. (2011). activism, repression, and ict: what we know now. meta-activism. retrieved from http://www.meta-activism.org/2011/01/activism-repression-andict-what-we-know-now/ stanyer, j., & mihelj, s. (2016). taking time seriously? theorizing and researching change in communication and media studies. journal of communication, 66(2), 266-279. doi:10.1111/jcom.12218 stoycheff, e., nisbet, e. c., & epstein, d. (2016, april 25). differential effects of capitalenhancing and recreational internet use on citizens demand for democracy. communication research. doi:10.1177/0093650216644645 rhue, l., & sundararajan, a. (2014). digital access, political networks and the diffusion of democracy. social networks, 36, 40-53. doi:10.1016/j.socnet.2012.06.007 weaver, d. h., buddenbaum, j. m., & fair, j. e. (1985). press freedom, media, and development, 1950 – 1979: a study of 134 nations. journal of communication, 35, 104 – 117. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 researching the ambivalent role of digital media in enabling educational participation of young refugees michi s. fujii faculty of human sciences, university of cologne, germany prof. dr. nadia kutscher faculty of human sciences, university of cologne, germany in 2015 an unprecedented number of young refugees came to germany. since their arrival, coping with the experience of forced migration and finding a place in a new country proves to be essential for their everyday life. against this background, the question emerges, what role digital media do play in terms of benefits and risks when it comes to overcoming barriers in participation and education. so far, the relevance of digital media (and associated practices) for young refugees in formal (school), nonformal (youth welfare) and informal (leisure) educational contexts is scarcely investigated. thus, the a) contradictory dynamics that are connected with digital media, b) different meanings of digital media in young people’s lives in general and c) the dimension of vulnerability of this special target group, are researched in an ethnographical approach. digital media, such as smartphones, apps and learning tools, can be valuable in different spheres of (everyday) life and are discussed controversially regarding their potential for education (erstad, 2012). research on the issue of educational and digital inequality points to the relevance of social and cultural capital (bourdieu, 1987) in the context of digital media use (angus, 2007; iske et al., 2008; lareau, 2011; paushasebrink et al., 2019). an interplay of educational disadvantages at the subject level as well as institutional structures at the context level is therefore assumed. against this background, digital opportunities can be accompanied by risks of social and digital exclusion, potentially undermining educational participation and supporting social reproduction (sefton-green/livingstone, 2020). across all continents, there is an insufficient evidence base with regard to policy and practice of digital media in educational contexts (livingstone et al., 2017). with reference to marginalized groups, such as young refugees and the potential of digital media, studies have shown the everyday relevance of digital media for refugees as an essential tool (chamarkeh, 2013; alam/imran, 2015). while refugees face a range of restrictions in social participation in the receiving countries, e.g. regarding education, health care and access to labor and housing market (kutscher, 2017), the question comes up, in what way digital media have a function for coping processes in this context. so far, first indications exist regarding the supportive role of mobile media for certain learning and appropriation processes (gillespie et al., 2016; kutscher/kress, 2019) as well as for self-empowerment (witteborn, 2015; trujillo, 2018). at the same time, digital spaces are not detached from power and inequality relationships: resources and general conditions (e.g. socioeconomic status) decisively shape the use of digital media (in general: dimaggio/hargittai, 2001; buckingham, 2007; livingstone/haddon, 2009; paus-hasebrink et al., 2019; in respect to refugees: kutscher/kress, 2018) and existing disadvantages persist respectively are being reproduced in digital spaces (see ermel/stüwe, 2019, 10). marginalized groups also face greater risks concerning issues of privacy and surveillance (gangadharan, 2017). in europe, the evaluation of mobile phone data of refugees for identity verification is already in widespread use (metcalfe/dencik, 2019). in residential institutions, digital media can have conflicting meanings of support and control (kutscher/kress, 2015). the joint research project of university of cologne and leuphana university luneburg, funded by the german federal ministry of education and research, examines the question of the importance of digital media in the everyday life of young refugees for their educational participation using an ethnographic approach. against the background of subjectively unequal conditions and the structural reproduction of digital inequalities as a challenge for digital educational contexts and activities, the research aims at identifying enabling and restricting conditions for participation of refugee youth in different educational arrangements. to avoid a “methodological localism” (nieswand, 2008, 78), the young people are being followed into their different everyday contexts in a multi-sited ethnography (falzon, 2009), starting in the institutional settings of child and youth welfare institutions and schools. in a transorganisational perspective (schröer, 2013) the practices of young refugees as well as of pedagogical staff and other actors in the different structures are reconstructed following a praxeological approach (schatzki, 1996). the focus is on where and in what way – embedded in arranged pedagogical (in school, in tutoring, in youth welfare contexts) as well as informal practices (e.g. in the family, with peers, etc.) – educational and self-organized appropriation processes take place and digital media become relevant in overcoming or producing barriers to participation. education is understood as a (partially medially moderated) transformative process (bildung), which goes hand in hand with a change of world and selfrelationships and with the acquisition of orientation knowledge for coping with unknown situations (jörissen/marotzki, 2009) the methodological and methodical approach in the ethnography of the project identifies and analyzes both explicit and pedagogically planned as well as implicit and spontaneous practices with and in the context of digital media including participant observations in the sense of "follow-the-actor" in the respective everyday contexts of the young refugees, field discussions and interviews with different actors as well as artifact analyzes (lueger/froschauer, 2018) of the relevant digital media. over 20 adolescents aged 12-24 years are participating during three ethnographic field phases. the data are interpreted according to the grounded theory methodology (strauss/corbin, 1996). ethical questions of forced migration research (kleist, 2015), such as participation in the research process and sensitivity for dealing with the limits of privacy, represent, in addition to the "dual imperative" of the application-oriented benefit of the research process for the participants (unger, 2018), continuous reflective references for the research team in methodological and methodological terms. references alam, k./imran, s. (2015): the digital divide and social inclusion among refugee migrants. a case in regional australia. information technology & people, 28(2), 344– 365. angus, l. (2007): implications for social inequality in internet use for educational policies and programs. in kompetenzzentrum informelle bildung (eds.): grenzenlose cyberwelt? wiesbaden, 15–29. bourdieu, p. (1987): die feinen unterschiede. frankfurt a.m. buckingham, d. (2007): digital media literacies: rethinking media education in the age of the internet. research in comparative and international education, 2(1), 43–55. chamarkeh, h. (2013): social media usage, tahriib (migration), and settlement among somali refugees in france. refuge: canada’s journal on refugees, 29(1), 43–52. dimaggio, p./hargittai, e. (2001): from the 'digital divide' to 'digital inequality': studying internet use as penetration increases*. working paper series #15. princeton university. ermel, n./stüwe, g. (2019): lehrbuch soziale arbeit und digitalisierung. weinheim. erstad, o. (2012): the learning lives of digital youth—beyond the formal and informal. oxford review of education, 38(1), 25–43. falzon, m. (2009): multi-sited ethnography. theory, praxis and locality in contemporary research. london. gangadharan, s. p. (2017): the downside of digital inclusion: expectations and experiences of privacy and surveillance among marginal internet users. new media & society, 19(4), 597–615. gillespie, m./ampofo, l./cheesman, m./faith, b./iliadou, e./issa, a. et al. (2016): mapping refugee media journeys. https://www.open.ac.uk/ccig/sites/www.open.ac.uk.ccig/files/mapping%20refugee%20 media%20journeys%2016%20may%20fin%20mg_0.pdf iske, s./klein, a./kutscher, n./otto, h.-u. (2008): young people’s internet use and its significance for informal education and social participation. technology, pedagogy and education, 17(2), 131–141. jörissen, b./marotzki, w. (2009): medienbildung – eine einführung. stuttgart. kleist, j. o. (2015): über flucht forschen. peripherie – politik • ökonomie • kultur, 35(138-139), 150–169. kutscher, n. (2017): geflüchtete als zielgruppe medienpädagogischer arbeit in der digitalisierten gesellschaft. in s. eder/c. mikat/a. tillmann (eds.): software takes command. münchen, 203–217. kutscher, n./kreß, l.-m. (2018b): the ambivalent potentials of social media use by unaccompanied minor refugees. social media & society, 4(1): special issue "forced migrants and digital connectivity" (eds. k. leurs/k. smets), 1–10. kutscher, n./kreß, l.-m. (2019): das smartphone als schlüsselmedium – transnationale und lokale teilhabe unbegleiteter geflüchteter jugendlicher. migration und soziale arbeit, 40(04), 325–330. lareau, a. (2011): unequal childhoods. class, race, and family life. berkeley. livingstone, s./haddon, l. (2009) (eds.): eu kids online: final report. london. livingstone, s./lemish, d./lim, s. s./bulger, m./cabello, p./claro, m. et al. (2017): global perspectives on children's digital opportunities: an emerging research and policy agenda. pediatrics, 140(2), 137–141. lueger, m./froschauer, u. (2018): artefaktanalyse. wiesbaden. metcalfe, p./dencik, l. (2019): the politics of big borders: data (in)justice and the governance of refugees. first monday, 24(4). https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/9934/7749 nieswand, b. (2008): ethnografie im spannungsfeld von lokalität und sozialität. ethnoscripts: zeitschrift für aktuelle ethnologische studien, 10(2), 75–103. paus-hasebrink, i./kulterer, j./sinner, p. (2019): social inequality, childhood and the media. cham. schatzki, t. (1996): social practices. new york. sefton-green, j./livingstone, s. (2020): connecting and disconnecting learning between home and school. australian educational leader, 41(1), 42–44. schröer, w. (2013): entgrenzung, übergänge, bewältigung. in w. schröer/b. stauber/a. walther/l. böhnisch/k. lenz (eds.): handbuch übergänge. weinheim/basel, 64–79. strauss, a. l./corbin, j. m. (1996): grounded theory. weinheim. trujillo, l. (2018): contextualizing voice in refugee youth research. medienimpulse, 55(3). https://journals.univie.ac.at/index.php/mp/article/view/mi1127 unger, h. von (2018): ethische reflexivität in der fluchtforschung. forum: qualitative sozialforschung, 19(3). witteborn, s. (2015): becoming (im)perceptible: forced migrants and virtual practice. journal of refugee studies, 28(3), 350–367. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): whelan, a., james, a., humphry, j., dreher, t., hynes, d., & wilcock, s. (2019, october 2-5). smart wifi kiosks and trust trade-offs in digitally deprived communities. panel presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. smart technologies, algorithmic governance and data justice this panel engages critically with the development, application and emerging effects of ‘smart’ technologies of governance. attending specifically to the ramifications of new forms of (‘big’) data capture and integration implemented by or for state agencies, the panel describes how the rollout of these technologies impacts on and is shaped by contexts prefigured by social and economic inequalities. two specific arenas are addressed and juxtaposed, with two papers on each of these. the first arena is the introduction of ‘smart city’ technologies and their implications for low income and marginalised communities. often presented as novel augmentations of urban space, enhancing and customising the urban experience at the same time that they increase the city’s efficiency and ‘awareness’, smart city technologies also reconfigure urban spaces and how they are understood and governed by rendering the city a site of data generation and capture. this presents new opportunities and risks for residents and powerful commercial and state actors alike. the emergence of public wifi kiosks as a means of providing internet access to underserved communities, as one panellist describes, can be shown to expose lowincome residents to new forms of surveillance and to new kinds of inequity in terms of the asymmetry of information made available to the parties in the exchange at the kiosk. surveillance and data capture is organised to particular ends and powerful interests shape and leverage the design and affordances of such initiatives in particular ways. insofar as concerns are raised about these developments, they are commonly framed in terms of individual rights to privacy, missing the scale of the issues involved. it is not merely that ‘opting out’ becomes untenable. as other panellists show, the issues involved are fundamentally social rather than individual in that they foreground questions around the appropriate relations between state and commercial actors, the use and nature of public space, and the uneven distribution of rights of access to space, information, and other resources within the city. economically disenfranchised groups are not only denied meaningful access and participation, but colonised by data processes designed to extract various forms of value from their use of ‘public’ infrastructure which may not best serve their own interests. the second arena addressed by the panel is the role of algorithmic governance and artificial intelligence in the provision of social welfare. this context is described in terms of both the effects for the frontline service encounter, and the design, justification, and implementation of the technologies reformatting this encounter from key locations within state agencies. emerging technological infrastructures for social welfare do not simply reconfigure how existing services are offered and accessed. they facilitate the identification of new target populations for intervention, at the same time that they introduce additional burdens, hurdles and forms of intervention and surveillance for these populations. as such, it is evident in the design and application of these technologies that they accord with and expedite punitive logics in welfare provision, providing new opportunities for the application of dominant neoliberal governance strategies. in both arenas, one can conceptualize ‘pipelines’ for the implementation of these developments. these pipelines are interstitial and heterogeneous, and combine different timelines, technologies and actors. they are often technically or administratively opaque or otherwise obscured from view. this gives rise to a methodological and intellectual problem, around the extent to which researchers can say they know enough to point to determining instances, political agendas, commercial agreements, incidental alignments and so on in such a way as to advocate effectively for democratic input and oversight. in this sense the papers assembled highlight how these developments call for new politics of method, new modalities of analysis and critique, and more effective activist and academic engagements with the question of how ideals of justice and equity can best be instantiated in these contexts. smart wifi kiosks and trust trade-offs in digitally deprived communities justine humphry university of sydney public wifi has been promoted by local governments as part of a solution to establish internet connectivity in urban centres to those who lack or cannot afford digital access. while some critics have argued that municipal wifi projects have failed to deliver their promise of a low-cost internet solution (fraser, 2009, tapia, 2011), freely accessible wifi systems have found new life in the roll out of smart wifi kiosks in citywide digital transformation projects. wifi has given cheaper and faster internet access to those who rely heavily on mobile access such as people experiencing homelessness (humphry, 2014) and low-income households that lack home broadband. yet, public wifi is proving to be a poor and contingent solution for meeting the long-term connectivity needs of these digitally deprived communities, with the potential to amplify a host of data security, privacy, racialised surveillance and profiling risks. the growing critical literature on smart cities has focussed on the dangers of engineering cities as programmable sites of data capture and harvest (mattern, 2017; kitchin, 2011), the expansion of digital surveillance (boyd & crawford, 2012; lyon, 2011), and the lack of citizen participation in new urban designs and their governance (joss, cook & dayot, 2017; meijer & bolívar, 2016). few have examined the implications of smart city solutions for digital inclusion, even though these often promise to improve public access to free wifi, mobile charging, telephones and other services. while freely accessible wifi might increase ‘buy in’ from municipalities embarking on smart infrastructure projects, some suspect that their real effect is to lock users into low trust/high risk systems that collect and process data for advertising and smart city application. what do these trust trade-offs mean for digitally deprived communities who rely on these services yet have historically been subject to heightened regulation and policing through a vast collection of surveillant technologies (browne, 2015; scannell, 2018)? this study explores these questions through the case of linknyc, a smart wifi kiosk network that is being installed across the five boroughs of new york city by the private company intersection, in partnership with the city of new york. linknyc has been operational since january 2016, with 1778 active at time of writing and a plan to reach 7,500 in eight years, replacing nyc’s ageing public payphone network (linknyc a). the wifi kiosks, called ‘links’ provide a suite of services, including free phone and internet access, usb charging, a red emergency button and wayfinding services. the large obelisk-looking structure has a side-facing 55-inch digital screen and two cameras. for intersection, linknyc represents a ‘first-of-its-kind communications network’, a city-wide test bed for its global smart city product (linknyc b). the cities of philadelphia and newark have adopted the links with subsequent implementations in london and glasgow. these implementations represent some of the first manifestations of smart city imaginaries that have been building momentum over the past two decades. linknyc is therefore an important case for understanding the digital inclusion implications of large-scale smart systems and their infrastructural politics (bowker & star; winner 1980). the research has so far involved a document analysis of promotional material and media coverage of linknyc, 36 interviews and site observations in east harlem, brooklyn, central manhattan and queens. the interviews were carried out with homeless wifi users and former staff of the office of new york city, representatives of intersection, members of rethinklink, a community activist organisation and staff of homelessness services. the recruitment aim was to elucidate different aspects of the development, representation, use and public reception of linknyc, following the model of the cultural circuit (du gay et al 1997), and to capture the diverse experiences and understandings of the actors involved. in this paper, i argue that trust, understood as placing one’s information, identity, safety or health into someone else’s hands, with confidence of a benefit (gambetta, 2000), is something that digitally deprived communities trade off in their use of smart wifi systems. important context for this analysis is that in new york city, nearly one third of households lack home broadband and many of these are in predominantly low-income black american neighbourhoods in upper manhattan, the south bronx and central brooklyn (mocto, 2018). users who rely on links for access make strategic decisions in their engagement with the system, weighing up the benefits of use against the known risks. some of the risks are insecure connections because of lack of support for wireless encryption in low-end android devices; reduced physical safety as links are accessed in open public spaces, and greater exposure to police and legal enforcement since even with limits placed on sharing data and camera footage in the intersection privacy policy (linknyc c), there is potential for this information to be used as evidence of a crime. browne’s ideas on the role of technologies in the surveillance of blackness are adopted to analyse the dynamics of trust established through interaction with the links. this includes consideration of what is given up and made visible in using the service, such as personal information or geolocation data, as well as what is given or withheld in return, such as making available for public scrutiny the purpose, use and protection of data collected and shared. references bowker, g. c., and s. l. star (2000). sorting things out: classification and its consequences. mit press. browne, s. (2015). dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. duke university press. du gay, p., hall, s., janes, l., madsen, a. k., mackay, h. and negus, k. (2007). doing cultural studies: the story of the sony walkman. sage. fraser, e. m. (2009). the failure of public wifi. j. tech. l. & pol'y, 14, 161. kitchin, r. (2011). the programmable city. environment and planning b: planning and design, 38(6), 945-951. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1068/b3806com linknyc a. ‘find a link’. linknyc website. retrieved on 22 february from: https://www.link.nyc/find-a-link.html linknyc b. ‘home page’. linknyc website. retrieved on 22 february, 2019 from: https://www.link.nyc/ linknyc c. ‘frequently asked questions’. linknyc website. retrieved on 22 february from https://www.link.nyc/faq.html#whynetworks gambetta, d. (2000) ‘can we trust trust?’, in gambetta, diego (ed.) trust: making and breaking cooperative relations, electronic edition, department of sociology, university of oxford, chapter 13, pp. 213-237. joss, s., cook, m. & dayot, y. (2017). smart cities: towards a new citizenship regime? a discourse analysis of the british smart city standard. journal of urban technology, 24(4), 29-49. mattern, s. (2017). the city is not a computer. places journal. february, 2017. https://placesjournal.org/article/a-city-is-not-a-computer/ meijer, a. & bolívar, m. p. r. (2016). governing the smart city: a review of the literature on smart urban governance. international review of administrative sciences, 82(2), 392-408. scannell, r. j. (2018). electric light: automating the carceral state during the quantification of everything. unpublished phd dissertation. city university of new york. tapia, a.h., kvasny, l. & angel ortiz, j. (2011). a critical discourse analysis of three us municipal wireless network initiatives for enhancing social inclusion. telematics inform. 28, 215–226. the mayor’s office of the chief technology officer (2018). truth in broadband: access and connectivity in new york city. mocto. april, 2018. new york city. winner, l. (1980). do artifacts have politics?. daedalus, 121-136. dehumanising human services: how digital welfare initiatives transform the relationship between the state and citizen scarlet wilcock university of wollongong governments around the world are increasingly looking to new and sophisticated information and communications technologies (itcs), including advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence, to assist with the delivery of social services (see, eg., henman 2010; harlow and webb 2003). the introduction of these ‘digital welfare’ initiatives is routinely touted as a means to increase the efficiency and quality of government service delivery, a claim that endures despite a growing list of ‘e-government failures’ (jenner 2009). notable australian examples include the failures associated with the 2016 ecensus (macgibbon 2016) and the much-criticised and possibly unlawful ‘robo-debt’ regime (carney 2018). notwithstanding these incidents, the australia government is forging ahead with ‘one of the world’s largest social welfare ict system transformations’ known as the welfare payment infrastructure transformation (wpit) (arthur 2015). the wpit is a 7-year, $1 billion digital enhancement project led by australia’s central welfare delivery agency, the department of human services (dhs). it encompasses a suite of projects broadly underpinned by the aim of creating ‘a flexible welfare service delivery system for now and into the future’ (dhs 2018a). a core pillar of the wpit is the replacement of the dhs’s aging payment infrastructure with a more modern and flexible system based on the sap suite, which has facilitated a series of new commercial linkages between it companies and the welfare state (hendry 2018; arthur 2015). at the same time, the wpit has delivered a series of smaller ‘client-facing’ projects, including the introduction of three virtual assistants to help beneficiaries to access benefits online, a new online document lodgment and appointments portal, and a claims tracker so that beneficiaries track the progress of new payment claims (dhs 2017a: 223). the introduction of these client-facing initiatives is ostensibly designed to improve access to welfare entitlements. as the dhs (2017b: 119) vows, the ‘wpit’s outcomes will save welfare recipients time and effort by offering easier access to improved digital services’. this paper explores the transformative effects of the wpit’s client-facing initiatives. its focus is on how these initiatives have redrawn the relationship between the state and welfare-citizen at the macro and micro levels. drawing on foucault’s (2007; 2008) concept of governmentality and critical literature on welfare administration (esp. henman 1997; 2006; 2010), this paper begins from the position that the technologies of welfare administration – including new digital welfare platforms and processes – are inextricably linked to welfare policies and politics. technologies are not simply neutral tools to support policy implementation, but are forms of governance, which can themselves propel, shape and/or disrupt processes of welfare policy and practice. drawing on these conceptual resources, this paper traces how the wpit’s client facing projects have shaped the minutiae of welfare administration at various junctures in the welfare state. it seeks to contextualise and connect these micro-level reforms with broader processes of welfare reform. in doing so, it draws on analysis of two documentary data sets. the first data set includes the electronic forms, menus and interfaces deployed as part of these ‘client-facing’ initiatives. these represent the visible manifestation of the state in these new welfare interactions. the second data set comprises policy and other official documents that purport to capture the objectives and vision for the wpit including these client-facing initiatives. these data provide the basis for connecting changes to the ‘micro-processes’ of welfare administration to broader socio-political visions of welfare reform. whilst these client-facing initiatives are perhaps smaller-scale than other aspects of the wpit, as this paper argues, these initiatives have nonetheless reconfigured the architecture and operation of the welfare state, including the relationship between the state and welfare subject. collectively, these initiatives operate to delay or deny recipients’ access to departmental officials via the phone and in person, that is, they literally and figuratively ‘de-humanise’ welfare provision. this has gone hand in hand with cuts to frontline dhs staff and the closure of dhs offices. the wpit’s client-facing initiatives also place new micro obligations on welfare recipients to ‘self-manage’ their welfare entitlements. however, in this process, the state is no less present. in fact, these new digital welfare initiatives create new ways for the state to interact with and intervene in the lives of welfare recipients, albeit ‘from a distance’. in this site of welfare governance, the state is simultaneously present and absent in the lives of welfare recipients. this serves to both propel and re-shape broader processes of welfare reform. references arthur, d. (2015), ‘changes to welfare system compliance and ict systems’, budget review index 2015-16. australian parliamentary library. carney, t. (2018), ‘the new digital future for welfare: debts without legal proofs or moral authority?’’, unsw law journal forum, 1: 1-16. department of human services (dhs) (2017a), submission to the finance and public administration references committee, digital delivery of government services, submission no. 13, https://www.aph.gov.au/parliamentary_business/committees/senate/finance_and_pub lic_administration/digitaldelivery/submissions. department of human services (dhs) (2017b), annual report 2016-17, dhs. department of human services (dhs) (2018a), welfare payment infrastructure transformation, 12 november, https://www.humanservices.gov.au/organisations/aboutus/welfare-payment-infrastructure-transformation-wpit-programme. department of human services (2018b), annual report 2017-18, dhs. foucault, m. (2007), security, territory, population. lectures at the collège de france, 1977-78, graham burchell trans. palgrave macmillan. foucault, m. (2008), the birth of biopolitics: lectures at the collège de france, 197879, graham burchell trans. palgrave macmillan. hendry, j. (2018), ‘mega vendors tie-up $100m centrelink wpit work’, itnews, 1 november, https://www.itnews.com.au/news/mega-vendors-tie-up-100m-centrelinkwpit-work-514844. henman, p. (1997), computer technology–a political player in social policy processes’, journal of social policy, 26(3), 323–340. henman, p. (2006), ‘welfare reform as governance reform: the prospects of a governmentality perspective’ in henman, p and fenger, m (eds), administering welfare reform: international transformations in welfare governance, policy press. henman, p. (2010). governing electronically: e-government and the reconfiguration of public administration, policy and power, palgrave. harlow, e. and webb, s. a. (eds) (2003), information and communication technologies in the welfare services, 1st ed., jessica kingsley publishers. jenner, s (2009), realising benefits from government ict investment: a fool’s errand?, academic publishing international. macgibbon, a. (2016), review of the events surrounding the 2016 ecensus: improving institutional cyber security culture and practices across the australian government, office prime minister on cyber security, 13 october, https://apo.org.au/node/70705. social justice in the age of datafication: the case of smart cities in australia danielle hynes university of new south wales tanja dreher university of new south wales the scholarly and activist agenda on ‘data justice’ developing in europe and north america has much to offer media and communications research in australia, including research focused on the social justice implications of nascent ‘smart cities’ developments. in this paper, we outline the significance of interrelated frameworks of data justice (dencik, jansen and metcalfe 2018; taylor 2017), media justice and design justice (costanza-chock 2018) for research on social justice in the context of ubiquitous digital media and datafication in australia. we begin by outlining the key arguments on social justice in the age of datafication. crucially, in a context of ‘ubiquitous surveillance’ (andrejevik 2011) in which individuals and societies are ‘colonised by data’ (couldry and meijas 2018), a data justice framework approaches datafication as a pressing issue of social justice, not simply individual privacy (dencik, jansen and metcalfe 2018). the aim is to avoid datacentrism in studying and understanding the implications of datafication – which now extends to aspects of social life including housing, welfare, employment, education immigration, policing and more. yet while digital media and processes of datafication have rapidly become ubiquitous, the impacts, harms and benefits are highly unevenly distributed (eubanks 2018, dencik, jansen and metcalfe 2018; costanza-chock 2018). it is therefore vital to focus on data practices and experiences in everyday life, and not only technologies and algorithms, for understanding the challenges and opportunities of datafication. we also note the enduring significance of the politics of representation – as stereotyping and marginalization in mainstream media and public debate are a key factor in the ways in which welfare recipients and residents of social housing are framed in policy decisions and program development. extending beyond the more conventional focus on privacy and ethics, a data justice approach foregrounds vital questions of political economy. situating data in the context of social structures and interests, data justice researchers ask what interests are being advanced in rapid processes of datafication via digital media? what are the implications as functions that were previously the preserve of governments and state agencies are increasingly undertaken in public-private partnerships or by multi-national corporations? what are the labour conditions and the possibilities for regulation under ‘surveillance capitalism’ or ‘data capitalism’. and what might be the possibilities for collective or cooperative alternatives? throughout the past decade, cities across the planet have been embracing the term ‘smart city’, with many actively seeking to become ‘smarter’ through encouraging innovation in the use of data-driven technology. most smart city initiatives utilize this type of technology to plan and manage various, sometimes interconnected, city processes (shelton, zook and wiig 2015). technology-driven smart city initiatives promise to improve cities through making better informed, more objective decisions (kitchin 2014). sometimes these initiatives do improve efficiency and urban life. however, the dominant understanding of smart cities has been one that is commercially led and corporate driven (mcfarlane and söderström 2017). in taking a data justice approach to smart cities it is important to begin with the question, what interests are being advanced? in november 2018 the australian federal minister for cities, urban infrastructure and population announced the outcomes of round two of the smart cities and suburbs program, allocating $21 million of the $50 million fund to 32 projects across the country (department of infrastructure, regional development and cities 2018a). the 52 programs funded during round one of the program, announced in november 2017, included $5m to ‘switching on darwin’ with a co-contribution of $5m. this $10m project aims to implement smart infrastructure such as lighting, parking and wifi throughout darwin. a $13.5m project (including co-contribution) in newcastle aims to deliver a benchmark for integrated city systems including smart bus stops, parking and roadside poles (department of infrastructure, regional development and cities 2018b). whilst these programs are exciting it is important to examine the imperative focus on innovation and new technology in the program, a key funding criterion is that projects ‘apply innovative smart technologies that generate, store and process data to target urban challenges’ (australian government 2018). it is necessary to question whether this focus perpetuates the idea that innovative, data-driven technology automatically leads to improvement by virtue of being innovative and data-driven (mcfarlane and söderström 2017). the program also raises concerns around encouraging or furthering public-private partnerships. to be eligible for a grant, applicants must be able to fund at least 50% of the project through non-commonwealth sources. whilst this funding could come from other levels of government or ngos, multiple collaborators are encouraged, increasing the likelihood of public-private partnerships. involving private actors in the distribution of traditionally public-run services can lead to the technology involved being proprietary and therefore inscrutable, furthering what is described by pasquale as the creation of a ‘black box society’ (pasquale 2018). further scrutiny and critical research is necessary around these projects to investigate whether they perpetuate the deification of data and the idea that its utilisation in decision-making and service delivery leads to improved objectivity and efficiency. socially engaged research will listen to the voices of marginalised communities in debates on big data that are usually dominated by technology experts. the research should critically examine the assumptions underlying data-driven decision technologies, foreground the experiences and aspirations of the communities most vulnerable to the negative impacts of datafication, and identify innovative ways of preventing these injustices. references andrejevic, m. b. (2011) ‘surveillance and alienation in the online economy’. surveillance & society, 8(3), 278-287. australian government (2018) smart cities and suburbs round two, grant opportunity guidelines, accessed 27 february 2019, < https://infrastructure.gov.au/cities/smartcities/files/smart-cities-and-suburbs-grant-opportunity-guidelines-round-2.pdf>. costanza-chock (2018) costanza-chock, s. (2018). design justice: towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice. proceedings of the design research society available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3189696 couldry, n., & mejias, u. a. (2018). ‘data colonialism: rethinking big data’s relation to the contemporary subject’. television & new media, 1527476418796632. dencik, l, jansen f and p metcalfe (2018) ‘a conceptual framework for approaching social justice in an age of datafication’ datajustice working papers available at https://datajusticeproject.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/30/2018/11/wp-conceptualframework-datajustice.pdf department of infrastructure, regional development and cities (2018a) $21 million for smart cities projects across the country, media release, accessed 27 february 2019, < https://minister.infrastructure.gov.au/tudge/releases/2018/november/at028_2018.aspx>. department of infrastructure, regional development and cities (2018b) round one outcome, smart cities and suburbs, accessed 27 february 2019, <https://infrastructure.gov.au/cities/smart-cities/>. eubanks, v. (2018) automating inequality. new york city: st. martin’s press. kitchin, r. (2014) ‘the real-time city? big data and smart urbanism’, geojournal, 79(1), pp. 1–14. doi: 10.1007/s10708-013-9516-8. mcfarlane, c. and söderström, o. (2017) ‘on alternative smart cities’, city, 21(3–4), pp. 312–328. shelton, t., zook, m. and wiig, a. (2015) ‘the “actually existing smart city”’, cambridge journal of regions, economy and society, 8(1). taylor, l. (2017). ‘what is data justice? the case for connecting digital rights and freedoms globally’ big data & society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717736335 algorithmic governance in the australian welfare state and the emerging ethics discourse andrew whelan university of wollongong alexandra james la trobe university new digital technologies have emerged within the context of the neoliberal welfare state, in australia as elsewhere. associated with promises of efficiency gains, productivity growth, and the zero contact administrative encounter, an extensive literature addresses the deployment of these technologies in welfare state administration (see e.g. dubois et al 2018; oswald 2018; roy 2013). these developments are summarized variously as artificial intelligence (ai), big data analytics, machine learning, and algorithmic or ‘stochastic governance’ (sanders and sheptycki 2017). this terminology describes here the consequential application of computational techniques to state records, and, thereby, the people they represent, at scale, in decision processes previously owned and occupied by experienced administrative personnel. the transition to algorithmic governance puts traditional ideals of acaccountability, transparency and democratic process under pressure. blackbox machine learning and ai decision-making render transparency largely obsolete. it is often unclear how policy is turned into algorithm (or vice versa), and questions remain as to the capacity of operational powers to provide direct oversight and comprehend the protocols enacted. processes of immediate and fundamental importance to clients of state services are likely to become more opaque to those clients and the assumed neutrality and scientificity of these computational processes and outputs is particularly pernicious. as a result, there is increasing concern that the widespread use of such techniques may result in the codification and automation of bias, discrimination, and injustice, entrenching existing inequalities and generating new ones (eubanks 2018, madden, gilman, levy and marwick 2017, mann and daly 2018). well-publicized controversies in australia such as my health record and ‘robo-debt’ have damaged levels of public trust and confidence in the state and corporate actors involved. in this context, a discernible discursive shift has occurred. attention has turned to the development of ethical technologies and associated frameworks. it is anticipated that ethical frameworks can ameliorate potential harms resulting from the use of these new technologies and engender public trust. however, the extent to which ethics can alter the current trajectory of emerging technologies is questionable. such technologies are designed to operate within and reinforce, rather than transform, the prevailing neoliberal agenda. pivotal questions are further raised with respect to the designers of ethical frameworks and the values, codes and position of the represented voices. a wide range of actors and instruments stemming from civil society, corporate bodies, and public institutions are central to the deployment of the ethical technologies discourse. ‘ethics’ provides an alternative marketing platform for home-grown technologies in countries unable to replicate the technological dominance of china and the us. this discourse enables state agencies to bypass concerns around the initial implementation of algorithmic and ai techniques, reframing the discussion in terms of how and when, rather than if and why. it remains to be seen whether the development of ethical frameworks will involve meaningful democratic participation. tracking the processes by which these ethical frameworks are produced is critical to directing greater attention to the design of algorithmic governance futures. the literature on policy, the state, and bureaucracy furnishes valuable perspectives on how processes like this shape service delivery, and thereby the contours of the administrative state as it is encountered in everyday life (gupta 2012; lea et al 2018; lipsky 2010; shore and wright 2003). this literature reminds us that developments in policy and delivery are shaped in and through existing power dynamics. algorithmic governance does not appear fully formed and then simply roll out through the state apparatus. the introduction of new administrative techniques, or the introduction of ethics as the discursive padding for those techniques, is not a fait accompli. it is a heterogeneous process running on multiple parallel rails. it has a long history. the elements of the assemblage are also heterogeneous: legal documents, forms of civil service, technocratic, and engineering expertise, organizational structures and routines, proprietary hardware, software and so on. policy documents, white papers, media releases, and news reports provide a basis for tracing how the discourse of ethics enables and justifies the embedding of artificial intelligence, big data, and algorithmic governance techniques in social welfare provision. drawing on institutional ethnography (griffith and smith 2014; kearney et al 2018), we trace the relations between key sites within the state driving welfare automation, and evidence the common tropes in commitments to ethics being espoused at these sites. in doing so, we identify the ideologies, governing institutions and shifting power dynamics which shape the everyday experience of recipient citizens. our interest is not in how algorithms might not be fit for purpose, or whether procedures can be established to ensure adequate oversight of automated decision processes. the available evidence in australian welfare shows that these processes are themselves not innocent or neutral in their design or implementation. as such, the networks and agencies in which these processes are conceived, developed, approved and executed warrant attention. the interest lies in scrutinizing these networks and agencies, the relations between them, and their evidential traces, with sensitivity to the extent to which they are themselves discernibly opaque, unaccountable, or otherwise instantiate the kinds of governance problems they go on to install at system levels. through engaging with the development of ‘ethics’ across these sites, we hope to highlight how state actors legitimate leveraging technologies for innovative ends, counter to widely espoused values of benevolence, procedural fairness, democratic oversight and accountability, and equality before the law. references dubois, v., paris, m., & weill, p. (2018). targeting by numbers. the uses of statistics for monitoring french welfare benefit recipients. in creating target publics for welfare policies (pp. 93-109). springer, cham. eubanks, v. (2018). automating inequality: how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. st. martin's press. griffith, a., & smith, d. (eds.). (2014). under new public management: institutional ethnographies of changing front-line work. university of toronto press. gupta, a. (2012). red tape: bureaucracy, structural violence, and poverty in india. duke university press. kearney, g., corman, m., gormley, g., hart, n., johnston, j., & smith, d. (2018). institutional ethnography: a sociology of discovery—in conversation with dorothy smith. social theory & health, 16(3), 292-306. lea, t., howey, k., & o'brien, j. (2018). waging paperfare: subverting the damage of extractive capitalism in kakadu. oceania, 88(3), 305-319. lipsky, m. (2010). street-level bureaucracy: dilemmas of the individual in public service. russell sage foundation. madden, m., gilman, m., levy, k., & marwick, a. (2017). privacy, poverty, and big data: a matrix of vulnerabilities for poor americans. wash. ul rev., 95, 53. mann, m., & daly, a. (2018). (big) data and the north-in-south: australia’s informational imperialism and digital colonialism. television & new media, 1527476418806091. oswald, m. (2018). algorithm-assisted decision-making in the public sector: framing the issues using administrative law rules governing discretionary power. philosophical transactions of the royal society a: mathematical, physical and engineering sciences, 376(2128), 20170359. roy, j. (2013). from machinery to mobility: government and democracy in a participative age (vol. 2). springer science & business media. sanders, c., & sheptycki, j. (2017). policing, crime and ‘big data’; towards a critique of the moral economy of stochastic governance. crime, law and social change, 68(1-2), 115. shore, c., & wright, s. (eds.). (2003). anthropology of policy: perspectives on governance and power. routledge. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 bury, r. & easton, l. (2020, october). life with dick and dick: race and male pornographic selfrepresentation on reddit. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. life with dick and dick: race and male pornographic self-representation on reddit rhiannon bury athabasca university lee easton mount royal university the circulation of what kath albury (2018) refers to as pornographic genres of selfrepresentation (psr) via a range of content sharing sites such as pornhub, as well as messaging and dating apps, plays an integral role in the pornification of culture (paasonen, nikunen & saarenmaa, 2007). to paraphrase sandy stone’s words cited in the aoir2020 conference call, “the machines are horny tonight.” one locus that is not generally thought of in relation to psr is reddit. although associated with technology and gaming, reddit has a relatively small core of “not safe for work” subreddits that feature psr. while the majority primarily feature female psr, this paper will focus on the sharing of male psr on the largest subreddit of this ilk (305k subscribers), r/massivecock (henceforth referred to as massive). the large penis, associated with power and dominance, has long been a focal point in pornography (brennan, 2017). on massive, the cocks on display are without question a source of pride and admiration by posters and commenters alike. last year we conducted research that focussed on the ways in which gay-straight relations are recoded on the forum. mobilizing a discourse of inclusivity with its call to “all straight and gay who love those cocks so big they hurt,” massive brings together two groups of men who historically have been engaged in separate practices of porn consumption and psr-sharing (the “dick pic” being the most ubiquitous form.) we argued that heteronormativity is reinforced by the performances of the predominantly straight-identified posters but disrupted by those of the gay-identified commenters (bury and easton, forthcoming). in this paper, we turn our attention to the performance and representations at the intersection of masculinity and race. based on previous research we hypothesized that massive is structured not only by heteromasculinity but also by whiteness. in july-august 2020, we conducted a content analysis of up to 400 posts over seven, 24-hour periods. of the 2800 posts, we were able to classify 228 as being made by men of colour. even if we assume that the four percent of the dick pics that were not easily classifiable were in fact racialized psr, 88 percent of the posts unambiguously featured white cocks. next, we did a textual analysis to understand how racialized discourses were mobilized on the forum by both white posters and posters of colour. we looked specifically at a post’s three textual componentsthe title, the user name and what is known as flair (a searchable term sanctioned by the subreddit in question for use by “verified” subscribers. following barthes (1977), these serve to anchor the meaning of the image. in the context of reddit, text also needs to be treated as computer-mediated communication (cmc), which allows us to pay attention to “the ways in which contributions are justified and rendered authoritative and on the identities which authors construct and perform through their writings” (hine, 2000: 53). below we discuss several different performances of race and masculinity that emerged from our preliminary analysis: the first embraces the pornographic discourse of the bbc (“big black cock”). although a problematic trope which reduces black men to the stereotypes of hypermasculinity, violence and animality (smith and luykx, 2017), on massive, it was taken up by a number of black posters. although we are not providing sample of usernames due to ethical concerns, some posters included the bbc acronym in their username while a few also included the bbc flair. others marked out their identity with post titles such as thick black cock; blackzilla; dark magic; and bbc for raceplay (msg me). we also came across a few posts (no more than four out of four hundred) that flagged other racial identities, including latino, south asian, asian, and indigenous. while there is no flair available for non-black racialized men, usernames and post titles do this work. examples include: how are hung korean guys for you?; anyone appreciate 6.5” brown dick; hung native. taken together these markers of racialized identities disrupt the unmarked whiteness of massive. yet not all racialized posters chose to mark out their identity. in fact a slight majority of those whose posts we classified as racialized psr left no textual trace (more data is needed to support this claim). when we followed their digital traces on reddit by looking at their posting history on their profile (all reddit accounts have a public profile), however, we discovered that they tended to also post and cross post to subreddits organized around a particular racial or ethnic identity. some examples include bigasiancock (24k subscribers) indiansgonewild (309k subscribers) and mexicancocks (19k subscribers). many of the black posters, regardless of whether they textually marked out their identity on massive or not, did the same. example of these forums included church of the bbc (71k subscribers), bigblackcocks(21k subscribers), bbc-worship (7k), and interesting in light of recent us political protests, blackdicksmatter (11.2k subscribers). finally, we make note of another cluster of racialized performances— those by white men. about two percent of the posts (n=60) mobilized a discourse of the bwc (“big white cock”), one that is clearly an appropriation of that of the bbc. this was again done through use of a bwc flair, the poster’s username or through post titles such as big white cock?; any interested in bwc? [m 20]pm open. these performances function not to align these posters with black posters as much as to cast them into relief in a sea (see?) of unmarked whiteness. although more data needs to be collected and analyzed to further unpack and expand on these findings, there is no question that massive is, to paraphrase tom waugh (2004) a fraternity of the [white] cock. that said, our findings underscore how racialized identities can disrupt this whiteness. references albury, k. (2018). sexual expression in social media. in j. burgess, t. poell & a. marwick (eds.), the sage handbook of social media (pp. 444-462). los angeles; london: sage reference. barthes, r. (1977). the photographic message. image/text/music. translated by stephen heath. london: fontana press (imprint of harpercollins). brennan, j. (2019). porn penis, malformed penis. porn studies, 6 (3): 316-331. doi: 10.1080/ 23268743.2017.1388191 bury, r. & easton l. (forthcoming). fun with dick and dick: homosociality on r/massivecock. sexualities. hine, c. (2000). virtual ethnography. london; thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. paasonen, s., kaarina n., & saarenmaa l. (eds.) (2007.) pornification: sex and sexuality in media culture. london: bloomsbury. smith, j.g. & luykx, a.. (2017). race play in bdsm porn: the eroticization of oppression. porn studies 4 (4):433-446. doi: 10.1080/23268743.2016.1252158 waugh, t. (2004) homosociality in the classical american stag film: off-screen and onscreen. in williams, l (ed.), porn studies (pp. 15-32). durham, nc duke: university press. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): annabell, t. (2020, october). curating memories: the role of emotion in the digital memory work of young women on instagram & facebook. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. curating memories: the role of emotion in the digital memory work of young women on instagram & facebook taylor annabell king’s college london a core understanding in memory studies is that memory is not formed by an individual in insolation. instead, it is guided by social frameworks and enacted within a particular social context. this is articulated by van dijck (2007) as an inseparability of mediated memories from culture. accordingly, when exploring the way memory is part of the experience of social media platforms, the specific cultural context of individuals engaging in remembering must be considered. relevant to young women using instagram and facebook in london, is the postfeminist, neoliberal environment that places particular expectations and pressures on how young women should feel and act. the purpose of this paper is to specifically explore the role that emotion plays in shaping the performance of digital memory work of young women on instagram and facebook. i follow the approach of gill (2007) in understanding postfeminism as a sensibility. by this, she refers to the ways that postfeminism is characterised by distinctive, interconnected themes and features, which shape subjectivity. it involves contradictory entanglements of feminist and anti-feminist themes and is intimately tied to neoliberal ideas. it also operates in and through affective and physic registers (gill, 2017). the ‘right’ types of dispositions should be displayed, cultivating expectations around how young women are expected to feel and act (dobson, 2015; gill, 2017; kanai, 2019). for example, kanai (2019) demonstrates how the self is produced as relatable in tumblr blogs. it requires negative affects to be carefully shared and struggles and failures to be retold and downplayed. consequently, performance is guided by the ‘right feelings’. following this, i approach the practices, digital traces, perspectives and experiences of young women in the context of postfeminism may advance an understanding of the way(s) that remembering takes place on, with and through social media platforms. digital memory work refers to the active, purposeful creation of and re-engagement with digital traces of the past in the present by a memory actor. i echo the perspective of smit et al. (2018) that digital memory work can be performed by human and nonhuman actors. agency is distributed between people, algorithms and platforms. this is reflected in the way that this paper engages with the role of emotion in digital memory work from the perspectives of people and the platform. i draw on data gathered from semi-structured interviews with young women aged between 18 and 21 living in london, and ethnographic observations of their instagram and facebook profiles. the interview involved a scroll-back dimension (robards & lincoln, 2017), in which the participant acted as co-analysts by narrating their digital traces while ‘scrolling back’ through their profiles. this is complemented with a socioeconomic platform analysis (van dijck, 2013) and a technical walkthrough (light et al. 2016) carried out to examine how instagram and facebook encourage particular emotions to be expressed and the entanglement of memory and emotion in their memory product. this seeks to advance work on the emotional architecture of facebook (wahl-jorgensen, 2018) and the argument presented by lambert et al. (2018) that the algorithmic curation of facebook’s year in review is underpinned with a celebratory tone. i explore the overlap between this encouragement by platforms and the expectations of the postfeminist environment for happy moments to be shared with the way that different emotions influence what is shared according to the young women i interviewed. ahmed (2010) conceptualises happiness as a form of world-making, which provides the horizon. it functions as a form of orientation, which directs people toward certain objects with the expectation that these will provide them with ingredients for a good life. following this framework, i consider the range of moments and themes pursued by participants. the most dominate is friendships and relationships, celebrations and events, holidays and landscapes and finding the joy in everyday moments. reading these areas as ingredients for a good life offers insight into how this group of young women conceive of happiness, which can be situated in wider happiness scripts. on one level, the dominance of happy, positive emotions represents continuity with predigital photography mnemonic practices. emotion influenced what events were photographed and which photos were kept in photo albums, underpinned by cultural expectations of what the family wished to remember in the future. on another level, the public, connective sharing of photos as well as agency of the platform itself add complexity to mnemonic practices. the on this day algorithms attempt to determine the emotion of posts in order to resurface ‘happy’ posts for users as their memories. the encouragement by the platform to share about happy moments and for digital traces to act as vehicles for happy remembering aligns with cultural expectations of what emotions should be expressed and how life should be represented on platforms. interestingly, this curation and selectivity of representation, known as the ‘highlight reel’, is also reflected on critically, invoking discourses of authenticity and the perfect. teasing out tensions in the expression of negative emotions reveals the way that feeling rules are developed and negotiated on instagram and facebook. for some young women, such sharing falls firmly outside of their boundaries of what belongs in these spaces, interpreting it as attention-seeking or self-indulgent. yet, concern around being authentic and ‘real’ also emerges particularly in the perspectives and practices of two young women who seek to push back against the expectations to be happy and positive. i situate their stories and posts against the visible, public archive of female pain, sadness and feelings of the ‘sad girls of instagram’. this form of emotional sharing can be seen as a refusal of the affective norms but also, at times, suggests a reinforcement of postfeminist values in that difficulties and weakness are disclosed as part of presenting the self as confident and relatable. references ahmed, s. (2010) the promise of happiness. durham, nc: duke university press. van dijck, j. (2007) mediated memories in the digital age. stanford, ca: stanford university press. van dijck, j. (2013) the culture of connectivity. oxford, united kingdom: oxford university press. dobson, a. (2015) postfeminist digital cultures: femininity, social media, and selfrepresentation. new york, ny: palgrave macmillan. gill, r. (2007) gender and the media. cambridge, united kingdom: polity press. gill, r. (2017) the affective, cultural and psychic life of postfeminism: a postfeminist sensibility 10 years on. european journal of cultural studies. 20 (6), 606–626. kanai, a. (2019) gender and relatability in digital culture: managing affect, intimacy and value. cham, switzerland: springer international. lambert, a. et al. (2018) algorithmic memorial videos. memory studies. 11 (2), 156– 171. light, b. et al. (2016) the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society. 20 (3), 881–900. robards, b. & lincoln, s. (2017) uncovering longitudinal life narratives: scrolling back on facebook. qualitative research. 17 (6), 715–730. smit, r. et al. (2018) activating the past in the ferguson protests: memory work, digital activism and the politics of platforms. new media & society. 20 (9), 3119–3139. wahl-jorgensen, k. (2018) ‘the emotional architecture of social media’, in zizi papacharissi (ed.) a networked self and platforms, stories, connections. new york: routledge. pp. 77–93. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): cirucci, a., (2021, october). virtual learning affordances and identity: a case study. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. virtual learning affordances and identity: a case study angela m. cirucci rowan university it is no surprise that universities’ pandemic-induced move to virtual learning environments (vles) has provoked charged discussions of best practices including the “great camera debate” (e.g., reed, 2020). while how to engage students online is a popular topic of study, largely left out are the ways in which the vles themselves have implications for student identity maintenance and, consequently, learning quality. this case study pairs a walkthrough analysis of two popular vles (zoom and webex) with undergraduate responses (n=250) to an open-ended survey to investigate how vle affordances impact student identifications and quality of learning. background while early social media like myspace were exalted for inviting young adults to create bedroom-like personalized spaces (e.g., hodkinson, 2017), vles actually place professors and classmates into students’ rooms and homes. indeed, social media apps allow students to craft identities and edit before posting; but vles, although borrowing some social media functionalities, place students in new, live contexts. studies have shown that collaboration and communication lead to student satisfaction and academic achievement (abuhassna et al., 2020; almarzooq et al., 2020). additionally, social presence (with both professors and classmates) is positively correlated with learning quality. however, professors find these types of relationships difficult when students will not, or cannot, turn on their cameras during synchronous courses (andel et al., 2020; reich et al., 2020). affordances of digital spaces refer to the relationships that exist between tool and user (e.g., nagy & neff, 2015) and impact how identities are shared and shaped (duguay, 2016). previous studies have found that social media spaces privilege certain identities over others, often marginalizing groups (e.g., cirucci, 2017). against this backdrop, this study explores how students experience vles and suggests ways to offer more inclusive learning environments online. method first, a walkthrough analysis (light et al., 2018) was conducted on two popular vles— zoom and webex. second, an open-ended survey was advertised through a university’s student listserv. the survey focused on topics including vle preference, camera habits, “camera readiness,” background choices, and personalization tools used. findings three preliminary themes are explicated below. additional themes will be included once data analysis is complete. user friendly although zoom and webex offer similar features, zoom’s end-user interface, both in organization and design, feels like a traditional social media app. indeed, most participants explained that they prefer zoom because it is “user-friendly:” p74: i prefer zoom. i think zoom is the most user-friendly platform. this appification of desktop programs includes using larger buttons and forgoing traditional window dropdown menus. zoom’s structure allows for cleaner design, but also hides options. webex’s desktop application, on the other hand, looks more like a traditional desktop window and feels more professional. although participants largely prefer zoom because it reminds them of being within social media apps with which they are already comfortable, students may be feeling a false sense of security, not realizing that they generally do not feel comfortable turning on their cameras because, ultimately, their live video feed cannot be edited like an instagram post or tiktok video. few participants had ever heard of, let alone employed, the many identity management functions zoom offers—adding a profile picture, changing their display name, using appearance “touch up,” or switching to a virtual background. however, this is not surprising—the tools are not advertised in the main window and require diving into less user-friendly (and less app-like) settings options. location appearance even though most participants do not use virtual backgrounds, many noted that they feel self-conscious about their classmates and professors seeing their physical location. some explained they worry about a mess or distractions in the background. but others, often participants whose family incomes are below $50,000, noted they fear others will judge their home. p13: i definitely feel self-conscious because i feel that a lot of people are judging me i see people in their own homes and they are talking about how they are in their personal office or they are outside near their pool or outside on their porch and patio and i do not have that luxury a few participants also cited privacy concerns, noting that their bedrooms and homes are supposed to be private places that professors and classmates should not be privy to, contrary to any direct link between contemporary social media and bedrooms: p102: i don't like that my professors and peers can see my bed as my room is supposed to be a private place where i can relax. the only exception is students who live in dorms. multiple participants, across all demographics, noted that they have no problem turning on their cameras because they assume a dorm room is neutral territory: p41: [my] background is just a…dorm and maybe students have the same housing setting as me. physical appearance multiple students explained that they do not turn on their cameras because they are self-conscious about their appearance. this was especially true of bipoc who identify as women. these participants noted that they are concerned with their physical appearance, feeling like people are always staring at them during class. these women also included more elaborate “camera ready” procedures that they completed before logging on, even if they rarely turn on their cameras. p3: i get a bit self conscious about my appearance. especially for the 8 ams because i wake up and i do my morning routine of brushing my hair and teeth etc but i still personally think i look very unattractive. this is mostly because of my dark circles they are genetic :/ these fears are clearly tied to the ways in which society polices bipoc (particularly those who identify as women) bodies (e.g., hattery & smith, 2021). interestingly, bipoc women are also less likely to use other communication tools like embedded chat and emoji reactions, perhaps signaling that once a student feels uncomfortable, they are unlikely to be immersed at all. final thoughts undergraduates are still struggling to navigate the changes that vles bring. but these changes are felt more acutely by groups who are already marginalized. because zoom mimics popular social media app tropes, students lean toward these normalized spaces, but this does not mean they benefit from them. just as with popular social media apps, space for identity performance privileges normative narratives and makes it difficult for users to traverse options that may provide a more inclusive learning space. few students, no matter their identifications, employ identity tools, in line with social media trends—users who identify with more privileged identities feel the space is already made for them while users who identify with less privileged identities are accustomed to forcing themselves into what is considered “normal” and thus also do not seek out identity personalization options (e.g., cirucci, 2017). professors and universities alike should offer training sessions not only for vle functionality but also for identity maintenance, guiding students through largely hidden personalization options. vles should work less to mimic social media apps and more to imitate physical learning spaces, providing inclusive experiences that benefit diverse learners. finally, professors should not force students to turn on cameras or provide narrow paths to participating. instead, students should be allowed to show attention and progress in numerous ways including using emojis reactions and chat functions. references abuhassna, h., al-rahmi, w. m., yahya, n., zakaria, m. a. z. m., kosnin, a. b. m., & darwish, m. (2020). development of a new model on utilizing online learning platforms to improve students’ academic achievements and satisfaction. international journal of educational technology in higher education, 17(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-02000216-z almarzooq, z. i., lopes, m., & kochar, a. (2020). virtual learning during the covid-19 pandemic: a disruptive technology in graduate medical education. journal of the american college of cardiology, 75(20), 4. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jacc.2020.04.015 andel, s. a., de vreede, t., spector, p. e., padmanabhan, b., singh, v. k., & de vreede, g.-j. (2020). do social features help in video-centric online learning platforms? a social presence perspective. computers in human behavior, 113, 106505. cirucci, a. m. (2017). normative interfaces: affordances, gender, and race in facebook. social media + society, 3(2), 1-10. hattery, a. j., & smith, e. (2021). policing black bodies: how black lives are surveilled and how to work for change. rowman & littlefield publishers. hodkinson, p. (2017). bedrooms and beyond: youth, identity and privacy on social network sites. new media & society, 19(2), 272-288. light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881-900. nagy, p., & neff, g. (2015). imagined affordance: reconstructing a keyword for communication theory. social media+ society, 1(2), 2056305115603385. reed, m. (2020). should showing faces be mandatory? inside higher ed. reich, j., buttimer, c. j., coleman, d., colwell, r. d., faruqi, f., & larke, l. r. (2020). what's lost, what's left, what's next: lessons learned from the lived experiences of teachers during the 2020 novel coronavirus pandemic. mit teaching systems. https://edarxiv.org/8exp9 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): tikka, m., sumiala, j., harju, a. & valaskivi, k. (2020, october). weaponization of liveness: how live streaming activates hybrid media events of extreme violence. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. weaponization of liveness: how live streaming generates hybrid media events of extreme violence minttu tikka university of helsinki johanna sumiala university of helsinki anu a. harju university of helsinki katja valaskivi university of helsinki this paper investigates the concept and idea of liveness and the ways in which it generates contemporary hybrid media events of violence (sumiala et al. 2019). by liveness, we refer to the socio-technical practices that enable the mediated transmission of real-time events (as well as the recording and circulation of these afterwards). we see liveness as a constellation whose constitution varies depending on the conditions of institutions, technologies, and users (van es 2017). while the concept ‘media event' (e.g. dayan & katz 1992) refers to an incident or occasion that breaks the routine flow of media coverage and attention, the notion of ‘hybrid’ makes explicit the interconnectedness of different users, technologies and institutions that populate the hybrid media terrain and together construct the hybrid media event. moreover, violent hybrid media events are distinctive both in their unexpectedness and rapid dissemination across the hybrid media environment. thus, the concept of hybrid media event here refers to the type of media event of violence that is typically created in and by digital media, where legacy media together with other media actors (including perpetrators) all contribute to the ‘live making and sharing’ of violence (sumiala et al. 2018). describing some of the findings of a research project still in progress, the paper analyses constellations of liveness, its production as well as its consequences. the empirical analysis draws on media research on the christchurch mosque attacks in new zealand in march, 2019. in particular, we look at the live streaming activity undertaken by the perpetrator, and demonstrate i) how, utilizing the hybrid media environment, the perpetrator produced liveness through the live streaming of the massacre; ii) how this material circulated in diverse digital platforms; and iii) what kind of struggles around visibility and erasure took place on different platforms and by different media institutions. the empirical data on the christchurch mosque attacks was collected using a method of digital media ethnography (airoldi 2018; caliandro 2018; sumiala & tikka 2020). the empirical material consists of online news media articles as well as youtube and twitter material. the material was collected between may 15th, 2019 and february 26, 2020. in this paper, we argue that liveness was an integral part of the emergence and formation of the christchurch attacks as a hybrid media event of extreme violence. when looking at the issue of liveness from the perspective of production, the data demonstrates that the perpetrator live-streamed the massacre (where 51 people were killed) on facebook. the perpetrator carefully designed the attacks to attract media attention, as well as meticulously planned the dissemination of the event via digital media platforms. before committing the attack, the perpetrator left digital traces of his plans on twitter, facebook, and 8chan, including a ‘manifesto’ and a link to his facebook account. as intended, the first-person video of the massacre spread instantaneously across the hybrid media environment (cf. munn 2019). in addition to production, circulation of liveness also played a significant role in triggering attention in the hybrid media event of extreme violence. while only less than 200 people watched the massacre as it unfolded live on facebook live, copies of the video were instantaneously relayed on imageboards (8chan, 4chan) and file-sharing sites (e.g. mediafire, zippyshare) associated with the dark web, displayed on social media platforms (youtube, facebook, twitter) and presented on mainstream media sites (daily mail, the sun, the mirror, sky news channel, 10 daily news) (see e.g. graham 2019, tech against terrorism). a hybrid media event is formed through accumulation of attention, and a live streamed terror attack was planned to draw maximum attention. the incitement for the event was the live-streaming of the terror attack, seen by a small number of people; however, the fact that the attack was live streamed attracted attention in itself, which further enhanced the circulation of information about the attack, but also of the video itself. the digital content was simultaneously removed and reproduced as social media institutions, such as facebook, youtube, and twitter, attempted to remove the video from their platforms using content moderation (gillespie 2010), there were still several media organizations that provided clips of the video on their news sites. in conclusion, we posit that the constellation of liveness in the christchurch mosque attacks resulted in the weaponization of liveness (callahan 2017). while a relatively small number of people watched the massacre take place in ‘real time’ (en direct), a much larger audience captured the ‘re-enactment’ of liveness through the active circulation and sharing of the video on different platforms. this, we argue, shapes the hybrid media events of extreme violence of today as a phenomenon of intensified and accelerated death experienced online. as yves citton (2017) emphasizes, the direction of collective attention is the basis for our social construction of reality. the contemporary communication technology affords users to live stream their content including violent attacks for others to see. the responsibility for the accelerated circulation of the content, and the resulting accumulation of attention, however, lies with institutional actors, such as social media platforms and established media institutions. references airoldi, m. (2018). ethnography and the digital fields of social media. international journal of social research methodology, 21(6), 661–673. caliandro, a. (2018). digital methods for ethnography: analytical concepts for ethnographers exploring social media environments. journal of contemporary ethnography, 47(5), 551–578. callahan, g. (2017). attacking isil on twitter: addressing ethical responsibility in the weaponization of social media. intersect: the stanford journal of science, technology, and society, 10(2). retrieved from: http://ojs.stanford.edu/ojs/index.php/intersect/article/view/975 citton, y. (2017). the ecology of attention. cambridge: polity. dayan, d. & katz. e. (1992). media events. the live broadcasting of history. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet. platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. new haven: yale university press. macklin, g. (2019). the christchurch attacks: livestream terror in the viral video age. ctc sentinel, july 2019. retrieved from: https://ctc.usma.edu/christchurch-attackslivestream-terror-viral-video-age/ munn, l. (2019). algorithmic hate: brenton tarrant and the dark social web. institute of network cultures, 19.3.2019. amsterdam university of applied sciences. retrieved from: https://networkcultures.org/blog/2019/03/19/luke-munn-algorithmic-hate-brentontarrant-and-the-dark-social-web/ sumiala, j., & tikka, m. (2020). digital ethnographers on the move: an unexpected proposal. journal of digital social research. 2:1, 39-55. sumiala, j., tikka, m. & valaskivi, k. (2019). charlie hebdo, 2015: ‘liveness’ and acceleration of conflict in a hybrid media event. media, war & conflict, 12(2), 202–218. sumiala, j., valaskivi, k., tikka, m., huhtamäki, j., (2018). the charlie hebdo attacks and the global circulation of terrorist violence. bingley: emerald publishing. tech against terrorism (2019). analysis: new zealand attack and the terrorist use of the internet. retrieved from: https://www.techagainstterrorism.org/2019/03/26/analysisnew-zealand-attack-and-the-terrorist-use-of-the-internet/ van es, k. (2016). the future of live. cambridge, uk: polity press. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 “yes, i will work on my free time” – remote work on amazon mechanical turk as the historical continuation of the exploitation of women's labor bruno moreschi university of são paulo (usp), brazil amanda jurno federal university of minas gerais (ufmg), brazil monique lemos são paulo school foundation of sociology and politics (fespsp), brazil in this research, we analyzed the relationship between women and amazon mechanical turk (amt) – a platform where people work remotely performing human intelligent tasks. hits are small and important tasks responsible for making artificial intelligence feasible, such as labeling data. in this paper we discuss how ai automation is, in fact, an opaque architecture (pasquinelli and joler 2020) that perpetuates gender issues in digital work. although the number of turkers (amt workers) is generic, “about 500,000 registered” (amt 2020), it is estimated that more than 2,000 can be found simultaneously in the platform (difallah et al., 2018). this shows that we are not discussing something residual, but a crescent workforce (kuek et al., 2015). women proportion is not consensus and varies from 51% (difallah et al. 2018) and 70% (ipeirotis 2010). this cross-disciplinary work involves the interrelation of computer science, social sciences, digital ethnography and contemporary feminist studies. the aim to understand physicalities embedded in the internet and machine learning processes relates to the concerns of the group on artificial intelligence and art (gaia), a network of humanities researchers, programmers, and engineers located at the university of são paulo’s innovation center, brazil. we aim to expand the studies on digital work (gillespie 2010; woodcock and graham 2019; srnicek 2017; gray and suri 2019; zyskowski and milland 2018; difallah et al. 2018; irani 2015), gender and intersectionality issues (federici 2012; collins 1997; suggested citation (apa): moreschi, b., jurno, a., and lemos, m., (2021, october). “yes, i will work on my free time” – remote work on amazon mechanical turk as the historical continuation of the exploitation of women's labor. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. davis 2016; ribeiro 2017) and how these two topics intersect (haraway 1988; atanasoski and vora 2015; d'ignazio and klein 2020). to do this, we talked to 53 women turkers using a ten-question questionnaire on amt, in english, filtered to receive only answers from women (cis or trans1), paying us$ 7 for the hit — 71% more than average payment (difallah et al. 2018). we consciously chose a relatively small number of interviewees in order to extend conversations via email, marking a “place of speech” from their standpoints (ribeiro's 2017) – paying us$ 7 for continuity. to avoid retaliation, we anonymized interviewees and replaced their names by first names of feminist thinkers. besides general amt difficulties (e.g. low wages and high competition), women turkers stressed about having to balance housekeeping, childcare and amt work; and about partners' lack of appreciation of amt work and domestic labor. we also identified that anonymity, albeit not intentionally, benefits them minimally. the concomitance between housekeeping and work at amt appears in 80% of our interviewees, which relates to domestic work traditionally being imposed on women “into a natural attribute” (federici 2012). this is a stressful situation, according to patricia, 48-year-old from the us: “i am working the equivalent of a full-time job or more on amt yet also nearly having the responsibilities of a full-time homemaker.” the majority of women (68%) related amt to their children. some seek motivation to continue in them, as they use part of payment for purchasing toys – e.g. rosa, a brazilian 53-year-old. others highlighted the difficulties faced when balancing amt and childcare. bell, a british 37-year-old single mother, reports feeling guilty and having concentration problems caused by this binomial. a total of 10 women (out of 53) pointed out situations in which both works are not appreciated as real work – in some cases by their partners. this not only reinforces federici (2012) consideration of housework as the “most pervasive manipulation” that capitalism has ever perpetrated, but it points to an increase in this violence – now in digital work as well. four women indicated that they feel safer when working on the platform because their bodies are not exposed. lélia, a 48-year-old from the us highlights the fact of not being harassed as an "amt advantage". but, it is important to note that anonymity emerges as a coincidence since the lack of individualization of the amt workers directly relates to employers/requesters' profit pursuit. the problems pointed out by our research are the result of a total dependence of these women workers on rules and procedures that were built in a totally random way by amazon and by requesters on amt. understanding and approaching women on this platform is envisioning possible alternatives for more independent and fair work spaces on the internet. 1 we didn't get answers from any self-declared lgbtqia+ women. work cooperatives was suggested as a possibility by one of the interviewees, following the idea that “it is the common social location in hierarchical relations of power that creates groups and not the result of collective decisions made by individuals of these groups” (collins 1997). as grada, brazilian, 37-years-old points out: “the transformation would be possible if we included the turkers in the construction of a new online platform.” from what we have heard, we were able to perceive not only the specific problems pointed out by these workers, but something more structural. amt seems to be the prototype of a new work reality that, remotely, makes its workers insecure and dependent on rules created without their participation. in this sense, amt created something precious to capitalism: keep the women's labor power available for unpaid domestic services and, at the same time, make it profitable for several companies. in the so-called “late capitalism” (crary 2016) or “surveillance capitalism” (zuboff 2019), there are now not only the specific flows of patriarchy being managed by women, but also the organizing and maintaining contemporary information flows (castells 2008). about this control and profit from the women labor force at home, judith, 37-year-old french turker, sums it up: “yes, i will work on my free time.” references pasquinelli, m.; joler, v. 2020. the nooscope manifested. kim hfg karlsruhe and share lab. amt. overview of mechanical turk (2020). retrieved from: <https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsmechturk/latest/requesterui/overviewofmturk.ht ml >. difallah, d. et al. 2018. demographics and dynamics of mechanical turk workers. 11th acm, los angeles, feb. 2018. ipeirotis, p., demographics of mechanical turk (march 2010). nyu working paper. gillespie, t. 2010. the politics of ‘platforms’. new media & society, v. 12, n. 3, p. 347364. woodcock, j.; graham, m. 2019. the gig economy. cambridge: polity. srnicek, n. 2017. platform capitalism. cambridge: polity. gray, m. l., & suri, s. (2019). ghost work. houghton mifflin harcourt. zyskowski, k; milland, k. 2018. a crowded future: working against abstraction on turker nation. catalyst, v. 4, n. 2, p. 1-30. irani, l. 2015. the cultural work of microwork. new media & society, v. 17, n. 5, p. 720– 739. federici, s. (2012). revolution at point zero. pm press. collins, p. h. 1997. comment on hekman's truth and method: feminist standpoint theory revisited: where's the power?. journal of women in culture and society v. 22, n. 2, p. 375-81. davis, a. (1983). women, race & class. vintage books. ribeiro, d. 2017. o que é lugar de fala? belo horizonte: letramento. haraway, d. 1988. situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. feminist studies, v. 14, n. 3, p. 575. atanasoski, n and vora, k. 2015. surrogate humanity: posthuman networks and the (racialized) obsolescence of labor. catalyst, v. 1, n. 1, p. 1-40. jarrett, k. (2016). feminism, labour and digital media: the digital housewife. routledge, taylor & francis. d’ignazio, c., & klein, l. f. (2020). data feminism. the mit press. crary, j. (2014). 24/7: late capitalism and the ends of sleep. verso. zuboff, s. 2019. the age of surveillance capitalism: london: profile books. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 willcox, m., hickey-moody, a. and harris, a. (2020, october). instagram live community: a queer entanglement. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. instagram live community: a queer entanglement marissa willcox rmit university anna hickey-moody rmit university anne harris rmit university digital community making through a live entanglement of the self and social media, offers up new pathways for thinking through human and nonhuman divides. queer activism and feminist art on instagram has made way for a reframing of what constitutes a ‘digital community’ (boyd 2011, baym 2015, oakley 2018). this paper thinks through the materiality of this feminist activist art community through the method of ‘instagram live interviewing’. drawing from a larger project that aims to understand the ways activist art practice on instagram subverts heterosexual norms and patriarchal representation, we argue that the ‘live’ nature (back, 2012) of the instagram live interview (hickey-moody and willcox, 2019) mobilizes a new type of queer materiality. by applying karen barad’s (2007) feminist new materialist theory of ‘intra-action’ to ways of thinking about human experience as intra-acting with aspects of the world that we classify as non-human, we reconceptualize some of the literature around digital community making to account for the needs of those often left out of heteronormative and mainstream narratives. intra-action for barad (2007) is a way of entangling through force, and in seeing how matter can affect and intra-act with other matter, we find a reconfiguration of boundaries. this entanglement of liveness and intra-action in our methodology explores the feeling of ‘community’ as being a feeling that is central to human subjectivity and experience. through a lens of queer materiality, we suggest that community can therefore be produced by more-than-human assemblages, and argue that a more nuanced account of digital community making which accounts for live instagram intra-actions is needed. using live interview data with feminist activist instagram artist frances cannon (@frances_cannon) we draw into question the divide between human and nonhuman assemblages, as the boundaries are blurred between where the body begins and ends. for the feminist activist and queer artists in this study, community building through their art practice and online presence is their way of making a living, it enables them to connect with others through topics of gender, sexuality, race, body positivity, and it provides a place to feel seen, heard and represented. therefore, we reconsider the idea of the digital community to assert that digital community making has become an essential human and nonhuman life form which is necessary for our times. in an era of digital and technological advancement, and human to nonhuman relationality, posthumanist notions of community and identity are increasingly significant in defining the limitations of what social media can and cannot do. prominent social media scholars, such as hine (2015), markham (2016, 2019), hynnä, lehto, and paasonen (2019) and leaver, highfield, and abidin (2020) have drawn attention to the affective politics of being a digital ethnographer, unpacking the ethics of constantly evolving our methodologies with technologies. as such, according to rosi braidotti (2013, 2019) posthumanism and the posthuman convergence are shifting towards thinking beyond the human, an affirmative ethics which decentres european humanism from its highest order. a posthuman is multiple, relational, embedded in and with. braidotti never defines whom ‘we’ are in terms of human or nonhuman ways of being, but instead calls for a more transversal method for looking at human to nonhuman entanglement that accounts for the embodied complexity that comes with living in our times. this critical call, is one we answer through our methodological underpinnings of live interviewing within our participant’s instagram activist art spaces. this project works with 10 internationally based feminist and queer instagram activist artists that have over 20,000 followers, to better understand how they build communities and identities around their art. drawing and representing those often left out of mainstream narratives, such as people of colour, trans, non-binary, fat, queer, and disabled people, these artists take on a role as community leader, activist, artist as well as identifying as feminist or queer. after conducting an interview in private we conduct a follow up interview through the participant’s instagram live platform to engage their entire community of followers in our research. through this live entanglement, the researcher is thrust into a state of vulnerability and openness, one which shifts the researcher/subject power imbalance. artist participant frances cannon attempts to queer (jagose, 1996, ahmed, 2006) the way we use instagram, in representing and connecting with those often left out of mainstream narratives (mcinroy, et al. 2019). the idea of the digital community as being ‘non authentic’ (lingel, 2017) seems to fall flat in this context. the reoccurring themes emerging from this data suggest that often these built digital communities better resemble the politics or sense of self for the participants involved than that of family relationships or even everyday interactions. this emphasis on feeling seen, heard and accepted through queer and feminist instagram art suggests that more attention needs to be paid to those online communities that may differ from offline spaces. looking at the materiality of the digital world, through a queer lens of live human and nonhuman intra-actions, we start to reconfigure the boundaries of the human in relation to the feeling of community. with this theoretical frame in mind, we invite discussion on how we can redefine the ethics of digital community making through queering notions of online and offline material ways of being. after all, as new materialist digital ethnographers, it is through this constant becoming that we must endeavour to continually reconsider the boundaries of the human, one which at the moment, is entangled with the liveness of the digital. references: ahmed, s. (2006). queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. duke university press. back, les. (2012). live sociology: social research and its futures. the sociological review. 60: 18–39. barad, karen. (2007). meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning; durham: duke university press. baym, n. k. (2015). personal connections in the digital age (2nd ed.). malden: polity press. boyd, danah. (2011). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in papacharissi, z. (ed.), networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 39– 58). new york: routledge. jagose, a., & genschel, c. (1996). queer theory (p. 47). melbourne: melbourne university press. hickey-moody, anna. and willcox, marissa. (2019). entanglements of difference as community togetherness: faith, art and feminism. soc. sci. 2019, 8, 264. hine, c. (2015). ethnography for the internet : embedded, embodied and everyday. london: bloomsbury academic. hynnä, k., lehto, m., & paasonen, s. (2019). affective body politics of social media. social media+ society, 5(4), 2056305119880173. lingel, j. (2017). digital countercultures and the struggle for community. mit press. leaver, t., highfield, t., & abidin, c. (2020). instagram: visual social media cultures. john wiley & sons. markham, a. n. (2016). ethnography in the digital internet era. sage handbook of qualitative research. thousands oaks, ca: sage publications. markham, a. (2019). ways of being in the digital age. metaphors of internet. mcinroy, l. b., mccloskey, r. j., craig, s. l., & eaton, a. d. (2019). lgbtq+ youths’ community engagement and resource seeking online versus offline. journal of technology in human services, 37(4), 315-333. oakley, abigail. (2018). supporting one another: non-binary community building on tumblr. in nixon, p. g., & düsterhöft, i. k. (eds.). sex in the digital age (pp. 113-124). new york: routledge. suggested citation (apa): savnal, ketaki. (2021, october). “it looks better on instagram” networked photography and public art in mumbai. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 “it looks better on instagram”: networked photograph and public art in mumbai ketaki savnal university of east anglia introduction in this paper, i discuss networked photography practices and selfie cultures at the kala ghoda arts festival (kgaf) in mumbai. i offer two key examples of how global digital visual cultures are translated in the urban indian context, and the influence on the experience of contemporary art, the city and the resident. the kgaf is organised over nine days in february each year, in the art district of kala ghoda. built by the colonial government, the district became a primary site in the production of cosmopolitanism in the time after independence. in 1999, in the decade of economic reforms that opened up india to global markets, the elite art world started the kgaf, as a way to invite the public into the site. the festival was also designed to ideologically resist the violent, communal actions of the shiv sena, a political party trying to erase the multicultural, secular nature of the migrant port city (zitzewitz 2014). today, with the popularity of social networking sites (sns), thousands of young visitors, armed with dslr cameras and smartphones, are drawn to the street art section of the festival. the elite art world, that now has access to global markets, has distanced themselves from the festival (zitzewitz 2014) and as a result, corporate brands, upcoming artists and students are offered the exhibition spaces. these new participants, who are familiar with the visual vocabulary of sns, know how to extend the life of their installations online, beyond the nine days of the festival. their installations include “instagrammable” features, such as unique lighting, seating and mirrors, and are criticised by older artists and visitors for being mere “photobooths” or selfie backdrops. an artist trained at the prestigious jj school of art told me that the festival had turned into a “small gutter” and there was “nothing but a bad smell” left. conceptual framework i challenge the elite art world’s criticism of “selfie crowds” and the art catering to them, and instead think about how camera phone technologies “disrupt” hierarchical exhibition spaces. following several internet researchers, i approach the selfie and everyday networked photography as a form of self-expression, labour (abidin 2016), locative media (hess 2015), embodied socialisation (frosh 2015) and a mode of photography that collapses binaries of subject/object, spectator/operator and curated image/curator (frosh 2015, senft and baym 2015). to examine how the desire for networked visibility alters ideas of space and place, object production and meaning making, i draw from research on social networking sites, algorithms, branding and the production of subjectivity (lazzarato 2014, carah and shaul 2016, brodermerkel and carah 2016) and global instagram cultures (leaver, highfield and abidin 2019). i follow pinney (1997) in understanding photography as a medium of creative expression rather than documentation in india, and appadurai (2000) in recognising the role of electronic media in the production of neighbourhoods and national identities in a palimpsestic, postcolonial and politically volatile city. method in february 2020 i attended the festival as a resident, long-time visitor, and academic researcher. i took an ethnographic approach, conducting observational audiovisual recording in the exhibition areas and in-depth interviews with artists, curators and visitors. to participate in the physical-digital assemblage, i monitored social media tags and digital images, took images and videos on my phone camera and posted them on instagram, and commented on some images from other visitors. this was also my attempt to engage in the same fragmentary, humourous and spontaneous mode as instagram photography, and participate as a visitor as much as a researcher. findings space, place and identity: the intent of the organisers, to democratise the locality through art exhibitions and cultural workshops, is instead achieved by youtube and instagram algorithms, influencers and vloggers. the visitors who are brought to the festival by sns, are unaware of the historical significance of the locality in the production of mumbai as a cosmopolitan city. they take selfies with installations communicating social messages, such as gender equality, as well as advertising banners for brands like tinder, that coexist in the exhibition space. this fluidity between artistic and commercial backdrops in selfies shared online, indicates a rejection of tradition and a celebration of liberal, western values of individual autonomy, limited by and enshrined within a neoliberal logic of commodification. this is in contrast with the original discourse of the festival that privileged collective values of the socialist nation state. in this way, kala ghoda as a postcolonial place is reinterpreted as a space for creative photography and the stage for the visual production of a global digital identity by residents of the city. object production, meaning making and collaboration: the assemblage of installations, artists, attendees, curators, camera technologies and sns, animate each other through the desire of networked visibility. the installations that are designed as instagram “bait”, invite visitors to form close, embodied relationships with the material elements, through the limited field of vision of their camera phones. in order to take photographs from unique perspectives, visitors often disrespect the implicit rules of the installations and damage them in the process. the artists respond by mending them every morning, with an understanding that the installations have not been received as objects of reflection, but as creative prompts that generate photographic responses. instagram accounts of the installations are prominently displayed in concept notes, and artists share and re-share images they are tagged in on the festival days, even posing with the installations in similar ways. in this way, the exhibition space is turned from a hierarchy into a generative physical-digital assemblage, underscored by a sense of embodied interdependence and collaboration. it reminds me of the concept of jugalbandi from indian classical music, which refers to a duet of different styles or instruments, and also describes my interaction with these moving sounds and visuals that i record, edit and analyse. references abidin, c (2016) “visibility labour”. media international australia. vol. 161(1):86-100. appadurai, a (1996) modernity at large. minneapolis: university of minnesotta press. brodmerkel, s, n carah (2016) brand machines, sensory media and calculative culture. palgrave macmillan uk. carah, n, m shaul (2016) “brands and instagram”. mobile media & communication, vol. 4(1) 69–84. deleuze, g, f guattari (1980) a thousand plateaus. translated by brian massumi. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. frosh, p (2015) “the gestural image”. international journal of communication 9 pp. 16071628. hess, a (2015) “the selfie assemblage”. international journal of communication 9. pp. 1629–1646. lazzarato, m (2014) signs and machines. translated by joshua david jordan. los angeles: semiotext(e). leaver t, t highfield and c abidin (2019) instagram. london: polity. pinney, c (1997) camera indica. chicago: university of chicago press. pink, s (2013) doing visual ethnography. london: sage publications ltd. senft, t and n baym (2015) “what does the selfie say? investigating a global phenomenon”. international journal of communication 9. pp. 1588–1606. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): williamson, g. s. & dennen, v. p. (2017, october 18-21). religious narratives and networked learning spaces: using blogs to connect individuals to history. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. religious narratives and networked learning spaces: using blogs to connect individuals to history george s. williamson florida state university vanessa p. dennen florida state university introduction blogs have been used to support teaching and learning for over a decade, providing public spaces for student exploration of course topics. students perceive blogging as a useful learning activity (halic, lee, paulus, & spence, 2010). blogging supports both direct learning via writing (hansen, 2016) and vicarious learning via reading (ellison & wu, 2008). bloggers create online identities (dennen, 2009, 2014), which may leave students feeling vulnerable in a learning context (dennen & burner, 2017). when course topics are potentially sensitive, such as religion, students are likely to have personal narratives to share although those narratives may not be of use to their peers or may not be something they are comfortable posting online. at the same time, students will benefit from having a forum for exploring the relationship between their personal beliefs and experiences and the course content. this case study examines student use of “disposable blogs” (pimpare & fast, 2008) in a history of religion course . the instructor used edublogs to create student blogs that would not be indexed with pseudonyms for each student author. students were asked to post two times per week, once in response to the readings and once on a selfselected topic. while students were using a networked space to complete the course activity, their blogs were semi-private (elm, 2009), with an audience restricted to their instructor and anyone with whom they cared to share the blog url. although these privacy restrictions were deemed important for encouraging free expression on the course topic, it was not known if that would negate the value of using a blog to support learning. the questions that guided this study were: 1. how did students perceive the use of blogs to explore personal connections to readings and the course materials? 2. how did the use of a semi-private networked public space contribute to the students’ experience? 3. how did the blogging assignment contribute to student learning outcomes? method participants were the 34 students enrolled in the course. four types of data were collected for this study, student blogs, student grades, an end-of-term survey (completed by 25/73.5% of the students), and instructor reflections. the student was conducted with approval of the university’s ethics board and student consent. student surveys were analyzed using descriptive statistics. open-ended items were thematically coded and counted. blogs were analyzed for content, and the instructor reflections provide contextual information and triangulated other findings. findings student impressions of blog assignment in open comments, most students indicated that the blog activity had positive effects on their learning, pushing them to read more deeply (n=15) and keep up with the readings (n=2), reinforcing class sessions (n=4), and given them practice with writing on the course topic (n=3). students indicated in comments that the activity and format was helpful to them: • i do not like to speak in class so i liked how i was able to share my ideas and thoughts about different topics we discussed. • i enjoyed writing on whatever i wanted related to the class. • i liked being able to use technology in a effective manner and utilize a virtually untapped way to learn • getting to explore the readings in connection to ideas not necessarily pertinent to class discussion but that interest me was good. • i liked posting my thoughts in general on religion and getting instructor feedback on them. a t-test showed no significant differences in student interest in the blogging assignment from the beginning to the end of the semester, with most students reporting a positive attitude toward the activity. still, not all students were active bloggers, and some struggled to keep up with the assignment. the workload was the most cited element of blogging that students didn’t like (n=11). four students indicated that they had forgotten to do it, and others offered an array of individual excuses for missing posts, from travel to a dead hamster. four students felt it was a challenge to come up with topics, and three wished that the blogs were not graded, while one complained that the assignment (presumably its due date) interfered with a wednesday hangover. the dead hamster and hangover responses are worth mentioning here because it was clear from their open-ended responses that two participants were expressing, across items, a general feeling that the activity was not worthwhile use of semi-private networked space five survey respondents (20%) indicated that they shared their blogs with people outside of the class, ranging from friends and dating partners to parents. students also indicated a clear sense that they were writing for an audience – namely, their instructor – and that they enjoyed receiving his comments. students used the blogs primarily to write about course readings, although they also integrated outside sources and personal experiences. from the instructor perspective, students used the space effectively to discuss the course topic, review major points of the readings, and articulate their opinions and interpretations. the instructor reflected on some students’ need to share their personal experiences and beliefs about religion within the class, whether germane to the course material or not, noting ““if you don’t allow a space for that to happen, it’s still going to come out some way.” the blogs were that space during this semester, whereas in prior semesters the instructor felt that students were more prone to use in-class discussion as a platform for sharing their beliefs. blogging and learning outcomes there was a positive correlation between blog grades and final exam grades (r=.657, n=34, p=0.01). this correlation may simply be an indicator that students who are wellprepared for a final exam also are diligent about completing the blogging assignment and responsive to instructor feedback. conclusion was it important that this journaling assignment was conducted via blog versus some other medium? we believe that the medium made a difference for these students. the short article format of blogs provided a forum for students to develop a sense of ownership over the course material. the use of an online, networked tool provided a sense of writing for an audience even though the semi-private, pseudonomized settings gave the students the necessarily sense of privacy to freely express their religious beliefs without sparking extraneous class debate or attracting uninvited course outsiders. although the students had a limited audience, they nonetheless were highly attuned to that audience and gained more practice articulating course concepts than they might if applying the same word count to a research paper. the students also learned from the instructor’s blog, where both form and content were modeled for them. the blogs provided students with a space to negotiate the intersections of their personal narratives and religious thoughts with the historical narratives being taught within the course. collectively, these findings suggest that the space and format in which students write is important, and that networked spaces can be useful for supporting student learning even when audience is restricted. references dennen, v. p. (2009). constructing academic alter-egos: identity in an online community of practice. identity in the information society, 2(1), 23-38. doi:10.1007/s12394-009-0020-8 dennen, v. p. (2014). becoming a blogger: trajectories, norms, and activities in a community of practice. computers in human behavior, 36, 350-358. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.03.028 dennen, v. p., & burner, k. j. (2017). identity, context collapse, and facebook use in higher education: putting presence and privacy at odds. distance education, 38(2), 173-192. doi:10.1080/01587919.2017.1322453 ellison, n., & wu, y. (2008). blogging in the classroom: a preliminary exploration of student attitudes and impact on comprehension. journal of educational multimedia and hypermedia, 17(1), 99-122. elm, m. s. (2009). how do various notions of privacy influence decisions in qualitative internet research. in a. m. markheim & n. k. baym (eds.), internet inquiry: conversations about method. los angeles, ca: sage. halic, o., lee, d., paulus, t., & spence, m. (2010). to blog or not to blog: student perceptions of blog effectiveness for learning in a college-level course. the internet and higher education, 13(4), 206-213. hansen, h. e. (2016). the impact of blog-style writing on student learning outcomes: a pilot study. journal of political science education, 12(1), 85-101. doi:10.1080/15512169.2015.1060887 pimpare, s., & fast, j. (2008). the disposable blog: using the weblog to facilitate classroom learning and communication. the journal of effective teaching, 8(1), 3-12. microsoft word pierre-searching for the forgotten-searching for the forgotten.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): pierre, j., currie, m., paris, b., pasquetto, i. (2021, october). searching for the lost: examining the online presence of victims of police killings. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. searching for the lost: examining the online presence of victims of police killings jennifer pierre youtube morgan currie university of edinburgh britt paris rutgers university irene pasquetto university of michigan introduction contrary to the idea that social media is solely or primarily used for recreation, american adults are increasingly using social media for a variety of personal informational and expressive tasks, including finding and sharing health information, advice on parenting and dating, and even information on stress levels (perrin, 2015). many scholars point toward a deeper and more comprehensive study of social media in general as a worthy goal of continued future research in the information fields (boyd, 2015; brabham, 2015; domingo, 2015). this becomes increasingly important when investigating specialized contexts of social media use among marginalized populations, where less is known and values and motivations around social media use may shift (pierre, 2019). one specific area of non-recreational social media use, mourning or bereavement, is a growing but still limited area of inquiry. aiming to contribute to this body of work, this study investigates the basic online presence of individuals who have been killed by law enforcement through an analysis of their social media accounts or accounts of those connected to them. further, we explore how social media data might inform the incidents surrounding these victims’ deaths. the motivating inquiry behind our work is whether the presence of and content within social media accounts can contribute to a better understanding of the lives of victims of police killings, with a specific goal of using this information to better understand how social media platforms and data can be used to support affected communities. we specifically acknowledge the role that this social media content can play in the lives of bipoc and specifically black communities, as a counter-data archive to help more thoroughly reflect their lived realities as communities severely disproportionately affected by police violence (the guardian 2016, mapping police violence. 2019). background our paper describes one portion of a larger research venture, the police officer involved homicide (poih) project. as part of this work, our project team assessed and analyzed available federal and local databases that collected information on poih. after finding significant gaps in consistency of and access to collected information across the databases, we invited community members to work on decoding and understanding the datasets with us, as a way of ideally better accommodating data use for community desires and needs. the working group of particular interest in this paper is the social media mining group. participants on this team manually searched through facebook, twitter, youtube, and other platforms to find any information outside of traditional news sites regarding victims of police killings. the goal was to find and uncover the narratives surrounding victims from a more personal and nuanced perspective, through the social media accounts of family and friends, the reactions and comments of average citizens or witnesses, or even information provided from the victims prior to their passing. this paper describes the process of discovering and naming the three emergent categories of online presence we observed from this process, explains the specificities of the categories themselves, and discusses how these findings might aid in better understanding the varied contexts involved in police killings. as scholars like boyd & crawford (2012) ascertain, the need for critical assessment of big data usage is of increasing importance as it plays a larger role in research and policymaking, including the regulations regarding poih. we ultimately hope that this piece of our project, as well as the project as a whole, will positively contribute to the ability of affected community members to work with the available data on police killings in ways that empower and educate them, and serve their needs if desired. method the set of methods guiding the social media mining element of our poih database project involved primarily manual social media mining, followed by a qualitative analysis of found sites, accounts, and posts to gain a clearer comprehension of each victim’s presence across platforms. findings and discussion our reflections on the social media mining portion of our poih database analysis project fall into two major categories: emergent themes gathered from the social media content collected and reviewed for each victim, and overall takeaways on the inclusion of social media analysis as part of a suite of methods for collective use in engagement with and analysis of poih data. in general, the patterns we observed in the types of social media content found for each of the deceased fell into three categories: persistence of the deceased’s activity across social media, sensationalized commentary on videos and blog postings, and memorials on facebook, tumblr, and twitter. persistence of the deceased’s activity: information offered in this category about the victim typically did not directly relate to the details surrounding their death, but rather revealed the normal day-to-day activities and conversations in which they may have engaged. it served as a both a source of online preservation for the individual, as well as a contribution to a broader narrative. sensationalized commentary: examples of sensationalized commentary, or comments consisting of provocative language often portraying an extremist view, were observed in general in the comment sections of videos of poih footage. the comments offer very little substantive information to the context of the taped poih, and instead attempt to detract from the potential importance and significance of the videos as evidence of police brutality by focusing on speculation and opinion based commentary. they signal a greater need for deeper comprehension of qualitative and quantitative data on these victims. memorials: the final type of social media trace found on deceased poih individuals were memorials found primarily on facebook, twitter, and tumblr. they provide a gathering space for the contribution of information from individuals close to the source, the deceased’s family and friends, and combine the basic details of the deceased’s death with the potential for honest and knowledgeable reflections on the controversial issues surrounding the death. each of the types of content described and analyzed plays a particular role in adding context, nuance, and layers of information and evidence to the lives of police victims. we use this analysis to advocate for considering this information as part of an assemblage of relevant information that exists in addition to the more widely or primarily considered police and federal reports. this may substantially enhance the ability for more nuanced understanding of police killing incidents, which may in turn affect the ongoing discussions regarding ways to improve the standards and regulations they work within. these data add necessary complexity to way these incidents are presented and consumed as data points, and can be an important tool for empowerment, understanding, and healing for communities most affected, in particular black and other poc communities. references boyd, d. (2015). social media: a phenomenon to be analyzed. social media+ society , 1(1). boyd, d., & crawford, k. (2012). critical questions for big data: provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon. information, communication & society, 15 (5), 662-679. brabham, d. c. (2015). studying normal, everyday. social media+ society , 1(1), social media. 2056305115580484. domingo, d. (2015). follow them, closely. social media+ society, 1( 1), 2056305115578134. mapping police violence, 2019 perrin, a. (2015). social media usage: 2005-2015. pierre, j. (2019). building a digital family: examining social media and social support in the development of youth “at-risk” (doctoral dissertation, ucla). the counted, the guardian, 2016 microsoft word bitman-rethinking visibility, personalization and representation-rethinking visibility, personalization and.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): bitman, nomy. (2021, october). rethinking visibility, personalization and representation: disability activism in social media. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. rethinking visibility, personalization and representation: disability activism in social media nomy bitman department of communication and journalism, the hebrew university of jerusalem social media provides marginalized activists multiple ways to create alternative narratives that challenge mainstream discourse. these narratives are generated using two central features of social media activism: visibility and personalization (barrasi, 2018). the marginal identity's visibility is emphasized by activists' constructions of their networked identity, as part of a marginalized collective (barrasi, 2018; liao, 2019; moors, 2019). personalization is thus manifested by the activist's marginal identity's performance, based on an individualized personal storytelling strategy (couldry, 2008; vivienne, 2016). despite the greater freedom to express marginal voices in general, and the increasing accessibility of social media to disabled activists in particular (ellis & kent, 2017), disabled activists struggle in creating their counter-narrative within these platforms. these activists' inability to conform with inaccessible, able-bodied notions of activism (ellis & goggin, 2018; trevisan, 2017) lead to their increasing participation in seemingly slacktivist practices, which provide accessible means for civic participation (li et al., 2018; halupka, 2018; piat et al., 2019). from a theoretical perspective, disability activism is often discussed as separated from 'able-bodied' activism, and is often studied from a macro perspective that ignores its individual complexities (trevisan, 2017). this paper addresses these gaps by presenting the three stages of individual decisionmaking processes of users with concealable communicative disabilities regarding activist performance of disabled identity in social media. these stages follow the process from inception, considering disability activism, to its implementation – through performance of one's disability or avoidance of it. these stages were defined in the course of a thematic analysis of 31 in-depth interviews with autistics, stutterers and hard of hearing people who are active social media users, of whom seven also kept social media diaries for 48-72 hours. the focus on social media users with often-stigmatized disabilities provides new insights into the risks and complexities of contemporary social media activism. the first stage presents the interviewees' different perceptions of disability activism in social media. these perceptions mirror the inseparable connection between a person’s self-perception as dis/abled, and one's perceived risk of performing a disabled identity in public. experienced activists presented a stronger disabled identity by publicly performing their disability, which led them to perceive the impact of disability activism in social media as limited, practical and realistic. in contrast, interviewees who had a conflictual perception of themselves as disabled and abstained from taking part in disability activism, perceived its impact in idealistic, romantic, broad-reaching terms. 27-year-old joe, a male stutterer, demonstrated the latter: "let's talk about disability as a disability, and not as stuttering, okay? i think that concealable disability can be presented in campaigns which target audiences that mostly accept disabilities, and a minority that rejects it. this minority won’t have the stronger voice, but rather those who accept the disability. every society has both types. those who reject disabilities are afraid of it. they don't know what it is. i think that once they understand, they will accept it." the interviewees' perceptions led to the second stage: interviewees' motivations. these manifested the interviewees' risk-benefit calculations when it comes to public disability exposure for the potential benefit of other disabled people, and the dynamic nature of disability activism on social media. the motivation of these interviewees to pay the high social price of risking their privacy through public exposure of their disability was to prevent children with their disabilities from suffering the social stigmatization, medicalization and isolation, experienced by themselves. in addition, interviewees' motivations presented activists 'solutions' to users who wanted to take part in disability activism, but also to minimize their privacy risk. to protect themselves from the potential harm caused by disability stigma and context collapse (marwick & boyd, 2011), many users expressed their own 'intermediate' forms of activist performances using private or semi-private spheres in social media. the interviewees perceptions and motivations were enacted through the strategic design of their activist performances and storytelling in both private and public spheres. these strategies were influenced by their constant awareness of the presence of their offline acquaintances in social media (salisbury & pooley, 2017). younger interviewees, who 'grew up with facebook' (robards & lincoln, 2020), had better skills and knowledge that enabled them to adapt their activist performances and storytelling to social media affordances and audiences, optimizing the resultant social benefit. in addition, many disabled activists' strategies reflected their own perceptions of disability activism as a social, 'neutral' matter, rather than a political issue. the strategic design of activist performance also emphasized the centrality of personalization, visibility and representation. these elements are not only essential to social media activism in general, but also may be conflictual for activists with concealable communicative disabilities, given their diverse functioning nature and the potential stigma. it makes activism more complex for performers, as explained by 24year-old tom, an autistic man: "i have to think about which part of my group i truly represent. do i represent myself more than the whole group? i sometimes wonder whether the post that i write shows more of myself, the autistic group in general, israeli autistics, or something else. it's different in each post." the combination of social media studies and disability studies presented here, enriches the theoretical discussions of key concepts in social media activism research: representation, risk-benefit calculations, visibility and storytelling. the current paper reveals ableist assumptions behind both offline activism, which is often inaccessible for disabled users, and online 'slacktivism', that questions their commitment to activism, by illustrating the individual constraints and concerns disabled activists labor under. such assumptions also have considerable effect on social media activism made by other marginalized groups. references barrasi, v. (2018). social media activism, self-representation and the construction of political biographies. in g. miekle (ed.), the routledge companion to media and activism (pp. 142-150). routledge. couldry, n. (2008). mediatization or mediation? alternative understandings of the emergent space of digital storytelling. new media & society, 10(3), 373-391. ellis, k. & goggin, j. (2018). disability and media activism. in meikle, g. [ed.], the routledge companion to media and activism (pp. 355-364). routledge. ellis, k. & kent, m. [eds.] (2017). disability and social media: global perspectives (pp. 1-10). routledge. li, h., bora, d., salvi, s., & brady, e. (2018, april). slacktivists or activists? identity work in the virtual disability march. proceedings of the 2018 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-13). liao, s. (2019). “# iamgay# what about you?”: storytelling, discursive politics, and the affective dimension of social media activism against censorship in china. international journal of communication 13 (2019), 2314-2333. marwick, a. e., & boyd, d. (2011). i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. new media & society, 13(1), 114-133. moors, m. r. (2019). what is flint? place, storytelling, and social media narrative reclamation during the flint water crisis. information, communication & society, 22(6), 808-822. robards, b. & lincoln, s. (2020) growing up with facebook. peter lang. trevisan, f. (2017). disability rights advocacy online: voice, empowerment and global connectivity. taylor & francis. vivienne, s. (2016). digital identity and everyday activism: sharing private stories with networked publics. springer. microsoft word hurley-transnational visual inquiry-transnational visual inquiry.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): hurley, z. (2021, october). transnational visual inquiry: arab women’s interdependent/independent moves on tiktok and instagram. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. transnational visual inquiry: arab women’s interdependent/independent moves on tiktok and instagram zoe hurley zayed university theorising beyond stereotypes despite evident diversity of arab women’s lives, stereotyping of muslim women as passive victims in the western media has been talked and written about by middle eastern scholars for at least 40 years (abu-laghoud, 2013; mohanty, 1998). yet, arab women’s resistance to patriarchy has a history that both pre-dates and continues with islam and is played out at visual levels (alfassi, 2007). theorising arab women’s social media practices beyond stereotypes requires departure from ethnocentric perspectives that the west is the locus of knowledge and experience. therefore, while acknowledging the interdependence of global visual economies, this study recognises that arab women’s social media also occurs independently from western visual traditions. curation of gendered identities occurs in visual terms so the relationship between gender and visuality is vital to consider. but visual culture is considered as “both globalising and localising quite often simultaneously” (gruber and haugbolle, 2013, x). this study is needed to enunciate the diversity of arab women’s visual identities but also the hybrid forms of resistance to gender hegemony occurring beyond western frames of recognition. addressing the complex matrix of gendered visual interdependence/independence, this study involved a four-year comparative inquiry into arab women social media influencers, defined as micro-celebrities generating digital incomes (hurley, 2019). it takes instagram and tiktok, image and video sharing platforms, as a case to illustrate examples of arab women’s curated visual identities. the central research question asks, how can arab women’s visual identities be theorised in feminist transnational terms? critical framework: transnational feminist visual inquiry to develop planes of exploration, the study synthesises feminist transnationalism and visual inquiry. transnationalism refers not only to the movement and exchanges of consumer items, languages, practices and peoples across national borders, but it is also a research agenda concerned with the perspectives of social actors backgrounded by mainstream scholarship (nowicka, 2020). in this study, feminist transnationalism is synthesised with ‘inquiry graphics’ (lackovic, 2020). inquiry graphics is not a specific method per se but a semiotic move to ask critical questions about images. this offers a unique contribution to feminist visual social media scholarship, both contextually and theoretically. next, i outline the folds of inquiry. folds of inquiry • first, in contextual terms, feminist transnational inquiry graphics recognises the long-standing visual traditions of and by arab women in mena, across cinema, photography, art, magazines, fashion, mass media, music, dance, other visual and aesthetic modes (kraidy, 2015). acknowledging these visual practices is vital to avoid misconceptions of arab women’s visualities as static or monolithic while overlooking diverse religious and local practices. • second, at theoretical levels, inquiry graphics reorientates theorising of arab women’s self-presentations to decolonise perspectives of transnational visual digital cultures. it explores the interdependence of global and local gendered visual practices, while conceiving of arab women’s epistemologies in theoretically independent terms. synthesis of feminist transnationalism with inquiry graphics is therefore not just a lens or a method. rather, it is an ontological view of the visual subject who is always in process, interdependent and independent. • third, feminist transnational inquiry graphics provides the framework for construction of a corpus of 26 arab women influencers’ posts, to zoom in on situated examples of intersectional curated visual identities. • fourth, it stages discussion of the visual corpus via critical conversations with 12 arab women influencers. findings and discussion the study’s findings reveal arab women’s varying visual positionalities. they illustrate arab women’s visual subjectivities as occurring in simultaneously interdependent and independent relationships to commercial western visual practices. for example, @amyroko, from saudi arabia with 1.5 million followers, wears a niqab (veil) as she promotes make-up brands while never showing her face online (morris, 2020). @amyroko’s posts are mediated via tiktok and instagram’s affordances for synthetic embodiment. this involves merging and remixing american rap, hip-hop, reggaeton beats, her own dance moves and defiant stance of arab feminist positionality. but although arab women influencers, like @amyroko, may use western music and beats, within tiktok and instagram posts, they do so, not as a form of cultural appropriation, but to reconfigure its meanings in terms of localised subjectivities and situated curated identities. other examples emerging from the study reveal that arab women influencers on tiktok and instagram not only engage in commercialised self-branding practices but that they also contribute to global social justice movements and local activism. cases include arab women influencers’ allegiances to #metoo feminism; the black lives matter movement; decolonial, anti-colonial and counter-cultural positionalities; regional issues like the kafala system (oppression of migrant workers) and environmental concerns. the study reveals arab women influencers’ modes of visual activism. these are considered significant in the middle east context since public protests are illegal in many nations. arab women’s visual practices are thus highly political, subject to strict censorship and surveillance. critical conversations with arab women influencers provide further insights into visual social media’s curatorial affordances. while these remain gendered, they are locally situated. theorising reveals the intense levels of surveillance of and by arab women in the middle east. this occurs within online visual economies which position arab women in gendered terms. however, hegemonies cannot be understood in exclusively western terms but also as situated, local and scattered articulations (grewal, 2006). beyond fixed positionalities overall, the study offers nuanced insights into arab women influencers’ varying positionalities and localised visual subjectivities. it illustrates arab women’s curatorial identities as consecutively interdependent/independent within broader hyperinequalities, systemic and local patriarchal oppression. the study is generalisable to feminist transnational visual inquiry in other contexts. it makes the important point that, despite the crisscrossing, hybrid and multicultural ontoepistemologies of visual subjects, western emancipatory agendas, for example liberal feminism, cannot be graphed on to arab women. attempts to do so are arguably recolonialising mechanisms. conversely, feminist transnational inquiry graphics opens theorising to consider the nuances of social media’s hybrid curatorial visualities. it also disrupts conceptions of arab women’s fixed positionalities, to consider situated emerging, ephemeral visual agencies, beyond theoretical essentialism. references abu-lughod, l. (2015). do muslim women need saving? cambridge: harvard univ. press. al-fassi, h. (2007). women in pre-islamic arabia. oxford: british archaeological reports (bar) archaeopress. grewal, i. (2006). scattered hegemonies. minneapolis, minn.: univ. of minnesota press. gruber, c., & haugbolle, s. (2013). visual culture in the modern middle east. bloomington: indiana university press. hurley, z. (2019). imagined affordances of instagram and the fantastical authenticity of gulf-arab social media influencers. social media + society, 5 (1). kraidy, m. (2013). saudi-islamist rhetorics about visual culture. in c. gruber & s. haugbolle, visual culture in the modern middle east (pp. 5874 6286). bloomington: indiana university press. lacković, n. (2020). inquiry graphics in higher education. new york city: springer nature. mohanty, c. (1988). under western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. feminist review, (30), 61. doi: 10.2307/1395054 morris, o. (2020). amy roko: the saudi woman breaking down stereotypes in the gcc – emirates woman. retrieved 24 december 2020, from https://emirateswoman.com/amy-roko-saudi-woman-breaking-stereotypes-gcc/ nowicka, m. (2020). (dis)connecting migration: transnationalism and nationalism beyond connectivity. comparative migration studies, 8(1). doi: 10.1186/s40878-02000175-4 microsoft word ramirez-how mobile media enabled and limited online civic participation among low-income us young people.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): ramirez, j., jimenez, c., & clark, l.s.. (2021, october). how digital and mobile media enabled and limited online civic participation among u.s. low income young people during the pandemic: a case study. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. how mobile media enabled and limited online civic participation among u.s. low income young people during the pandemic: a case study johnny ramirez university of california at san jose carlos jimenez university of denver lynn schofield clark university of denver introduction: digital and mobile media and political expression digital media have provided important spaces for self-expression among youth, and in recent years many scholars have explored the ways that political and civic expressions occur in youthful online contexts (graef 2016; jenkins et al., 2016; literat and kliglervilenchik 2020). many focus their analyses on what happens online in social media spaces (see, e.g. lane et al. 2018; literat & kligler-vilenchik, 2018). existing research often overlooks how young people, particularly those from latinx, black, indigenous, asian american, and white young people living in low-income neighborhoods, find their way into these civic and political online spaces, particularly if they are newcomers to political and civic action (but see tufekci & wilson 2012; lee 2020). research is revealing the ways that the pandemic heightened societal inequities and deepened the challenges facing people who are experiencing multiple intersecting forms of marginalization (milan, trere, & masiero, 2021). this paper, which had its origins in two interdisciplinary youth participatory action research (ypar) projects seeking to support young people in leadership and online civic development, offered an opportunity to better understand how these inequities played out in the lives of 35 young people who were experiencing marginalization and who were newcomers to politics. the central research question of this paper is: what are the prospects for and barriers to online civic participation activities among young people who, along with their families, are experiencing economic precarity and other forms of marginalization? methods: we undertook a comparative and cross-platform analysis, focusing on young people who had been civically active prior to the pandemic but who dropped out of these activities during the period between march 2020 to march 2021. we coded communication devices used (phone, laptop, or both), contexts of use (shared technologies, wifi, household arrangements and expectations), and civic and political experiences with peers in onand offline settings. we also coded named withdrawal when a young person stated that they were going to withdraw from participation and silent withdrawal, when a young person stopped responding to texts, calls, tags, pings, or other forms of invitation. findings: previous research has found that offering invitations and incentives for young people to get involved in activities aligned with their passions have been sufficient motivators for newcomers to participation (kappaler, festic, & latzer 2020). however, our analysis found that these were not sufficient during the situation of covid. the organizers made several adjustments so that the meetings at the heart of the online civic and political endeavors would better align with young peoples’ scheduling demands. meeting times were shorter and scheduled with fewer people often one-onone with a mentor accommodating the young person’s school and family commitments, and sometimes physically bringing the mentor to the student offline. the organizers made available gift cards to favorite food places, and found that online games drew young people who longed for social connection. several barriers to participation quickly emerged, however. for seven of the young people who had been longtime participants in civic and political leadership activities, every virtual meeting took place via a hand-held mobile phone, as these young people did not have access to a laptop or tablet, either because they did not have one or because a device was shared among several family members. four of these young people were always in the company of a younger sibling, cousin, or neighbor, thus limiting their ability to participate. one 16-year-old female multitasking child care provider let the group know that she needed to withdraw from the project after the first week; another attended for three weeks and then returned texts intermittently before dropping out entirely. a third female of the same age and cultural background withdrew because she was balancing a part time job to support her family, caring for younger children, and schoolwork. a male multitasking child care provider attended one meeting and then did not answer texts and phone calls. another male continued to participate, almost always via phone and from the restaurant his parents owned. and a male who had emerged as a peer leader had to drop out when his family needed him to get a frontline job at wal-mart to help the family pay rent. most did not have time to meet, let alone create materials for online engagement, research community issues, or participate in online meetings with legislators. discussion: among young people who were interested in leveraging social media for political and civic expression and who had been involved in similar activities in the past, the picture of participation that emerged during covid was decidedly bleak. there were simply too many conflicting demands on their time. some expressed their regret, but most more than half of the original 35 participants simply ceased their participation entirely. thus, they were continually choosing not to respond to prompts from adults and peers who, in pre-pandemic times, had been sources of emotional as well as social and political support. the losses were not only to the civic and political realm, therefore, but were also representative of losses to mental and social well-being. our analysis suggests that, in spite of the great deal of attention focused on the individual political and civic expressions of young people during the pandemic, those stories may have obscured the stories of those who ceased to be present in such activities. building on concepts of “presence bleed” (gregg, 2011, 2014) and “spectral modalities” (watson, lupton & michael 2021), terms that reference the “leaky boundaries” adults experienced between home and work before and during the pandemic, we argue that young people in our projects experienced what we term tethered compliance: young people found themselves having to negotiate new demands between their schoolwork, home life, families, and their own well-being, and their mobiles were devices that tethered them to those who made heightened demands on them. thus their mobiles amplified stressors that had existed before the pandemic and foregrounded challenges around how they would or would not comply with those making various competing demands. conclusion: in pre-pandemic contexts, low income young people engaging in civic and political activities online and off were often leaving behind the responsibilities that shape their everyday lives, including child care, work, school, and family responsibilities, in order to participate. and in these situations of co-presence with like-minded peers and adults, they were able to build community that contributed to both well-being and political efficacy. we argue that even without the extreme constraints of the pandemic, those interested in working with young people from lower income communities, particularly for supporting political expression, need to consider the constraints of tethered compliance that shape the lives of young people in low income communities. co-presence is key to collective political and civic work. until we address inequities and ensure that young people can be co-present with their peers and with caring community members, technologies will only exacerbate rather than bridge current divides in political participation. references: graef, e. (2016). youth digital activism. in youth civic engagement: united nations world youth report. new york, ny: united nations, pp. 95-107. gregg, m. (2011). work’s intimacy. new york/london: polity. gregg, m. (2013). presence bleed: performing professionalism online. in m. banks, r. gill & s. taylor. theorizing cultural work. new york/london: routledge. kappeler, k., festic, n., & latzer, m. (2020). who remains offline and why? the evolution of individual factors influencing internet non-use from 2011 to 2019 in a highly digitised society. aoir selected papers of internet research, 2020. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2020i0.11243 lane, d. s., das, v., & hiaeshutter-rice, d. (2018). civic laboratories: youth political expression in anonymous, ephemeral, geo-bounded social media. information, communication & society, 1-16. literat, i. & kligler-vilenchik, n. (2018). youth online political expression in non-political spaces. learning, media & technology 43(4): 400-417. milan, s., trere, e., & masiero, s. (2021). covid-19 from the margins: pandemic invisibilities, politics and resistance in the datafied society. theory on demand, institute of network culture. tufekci, z. & wilson, c. (2012). social media and the decision to participate in political protest: observations from tahrir square. journal of communication 62(2): 363379. watson, lupton, d., & michael, m. (2021). the covid digital home assemblage: transforming the home into a work space during the crisis. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies. online first. https://doi-org.du.idm.oclc.org/10.1177/13548565211030848 . selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): mahnke, m. s. & kjær, k. m. (2020, october). health debates on social media: linking digital health to communication and ai studies. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. health debates on social media: linking digital health to communication and ai studies martina skrubbeltrang mahnke roskilde university, denmark katrine meldgaar kjær it university of copenhagen, denmark drawing on the examples of current health debates on social media this paper explores the broader theoretical question how we may expand our understanding of ‘health data’ to include health debates and discussions on social media, and further, how these can be linked to the concepts of digital health data assemblages (lupton, 2016) and communicative others (gunkel, 2012). media and internet studies have a rich tradition for studying discussions and debates about health on social media from diverse content, discursive, user, and platform perspectives. while such research typically asks how people communicate through data, this paper asks how our understanding of health discussions online might change, if we instead adopt a perspective where humans and data are engaged in a co-constructive relationship, that is to say, where people communicate with data. in health debates, twitter has become a place where controversies unfold, and it is hence valuable to study them in-depth. however, as scholars from critical media studies and science and technology studies (sts) have argued, adopting a solely contentfocused approach to studying these debates is not especially helpful for understanding the significance of these debates. this is due to the fact that in such an approach, researchers cannot be sure that they are analyzing the actual controversies and not the digital settings that render them (marres 2015; venturini and guido 2012). researchers must therefore also explore how digital technologies participate in the enactment of controversies online and take an interest in how they inflect the forms it takes (marres 2015). this paper examines the collected empirical material from the angle of a core question asked in case study research, namely: what is this data then a case of (flyvbjerg 2006)? taking this question into a more specific arena for health studies, we ask how we may see the data as examples to understand contemporary practices of digital health, as well as the challenges in researching this. by combing insights from sts, ai and communication studies and insights into the human-data relationship from digital health studies, this paper will provide a novel perspective on health debates in these digital health contexts, and further explore what this means for researchers engaging in discussions about health online. drawing on theory about materialism and nonor more-than human agency, digital health scholar deborah lupton (2016) argues for seeing digital data as a part of everyday health assemblages. the idea of assemblage can here be used twofold, as a way of understanding a phenomenon and a methodological approach to studying them. adopting a mediatization-like approach to contemporary health practices, lupton argues that data are a part of everyday health assemblages, made up of multiple and intersecting practices rooted in both online and offline life (see also hepp 2020). however, as a methodological approach, thinking about the human-data relationship as an assemblage, that is in a constant process of co-construction, hones our attention towards how the human and non-human live together and learn from each other, as well as the complex processes of meaning-making, tinkering and exploration that takes place between these actors (lupton 2016, 2-3). while this perspective has been developed in relation to self-tracking technologies and the data this generates, we suggest that it may be expanded to also include communicative practices online more generally. for this, we draw on perspectives from ai, communication and algorithmic research. working with issues of ai and communication, david j. gunkel (2012) argues that due to the raise of artificial intelligence humans have started to communicate with machines rather than through machines; this implies an exchange and negotiation process of meaning between human and machines that no longer can be ignored. inspired by gunkel and based on the analysis of our empirical material, we take this thought even further and argue that people have started to communicate with their health data. as the social media underlying material structure has become algorithmically interwoven, social media data can no longer be viewed as a pure mediator but has become an active communicator. the proposed conceptual lens provides further new research questions for researchers working with health-related data on social media about the ontology of this data and how we may study it. we therewith contribute towards a novel understanding of social media data as a part of both contemporary health data assemblages and the mediatization of health practices in contemporary society; and describe the human-data relationship through a communicative, co-constructive lens. the paper thus theoretically links digital data assemblages with communication and ai theory which provides tools to think about health data as relational and communicative. with this, social media data becomes relevant in a new light, not only for media scientists, but also for understanding health practices in a digital age more generally. in conclusion, the paper discusses issues this theoretical perspective raises for researchers of social media and online health engagement; what challenges and possibilities this provides in relation to studying social media discussions on health; and finally, an overview of analytical strategies and empirical fields from which these perspectives may be studied. references flyvberg, b. (2006). five misunderstandings about case-study research. qualitative inquiry, 12(2), 219-245. gunkel, d. j. (2012). communication and artificial intelligence: opportunities and challenges for the 21st century. communication+ 1, 1(1), article 1. doi: 10.7275/r5qj7f7r lupton, d. (2016). digital companion species and eating data: implications for theorising digital data–human assemblages. big data & society, 3 (1). doi: 10.1177/2053951715619947 marres, n. (2015). why map issues? on controversy analysis as a digital method. science, technology, & human values, 40(5), 655–686. doi: 10.1177/0162243915574602 hepp, a (2020). deep mediatization. london and new york: routledge. venturini, t., guido, d. (2012). once upon a text: an ant tale in text analysis. sociologica 62 (3). doi: 10.2383/72700. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): corry, f., (2021, october). as in life, so in death: employee values and content preservation during platform closure. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. as in life, so in death: employee values and content preservation during platform closure frances corry annenberg school for communication & journalism, university of southern california introduction despite dominant cultural narratives about platform vitality, whether their immense global penetration or companies’ overwhelming political and economic power, platform history is marked by shutdown and failure. companies and sites shutter with an understated regularity. as they go, they often delete large swaths of user content. this has included sites from the mid-1990s, like geocities; networks popular in the early 2000s, like friendster and myspace; and platforms known in the last decade, like vine and google+. other sites, like tumblr and flickr, have shorn off user content as their platforms have changed, due to economic or legal pressure. as both archivists and media scholars have noted, the way that media is preserved or neglected comes to shape memory practices, and therefore processes of meaningmaking in the present (sturken, 1997). in turn, the patterns of shutdown and deletion on these sites will come to shape the way that communities and individuals are able to reflect in the future (de kosnik, 2016). this paper examines the phenomenon of content deletion during platform sunsetting through interviews with 52 employees from now-shuttered platforms, including myspace, friendster, vine, and others. drawing on literature on values in technology (e.g. friedman, kahn, & borning, 2006), technological breakdown and decline (e.g. jackson, 2014), as well as from critical approaches to platforms (e.g. van dijck, poell & de waal, 2018), this research articulates the ways that platform employees understand the ethics of social media data deletion, and how these ethics come to shape what remains of these platforms after they close. method participants were recruited via professional online platform linkedin. a list of employees who had previously worked at shuttered social media platforms was developed using the archive team’s database of closed networks. participants were interviewed from the following networks: myspace (19), friendster (13), vine (8), geocities (5), bolt (2), moc (1), friends reunited (1), 43things (1), couple (1), foodily (1). semi-structured interviews were conducted over zoom from may-december 2020. because interviews were part of a larger project examining platform sunsetting, questions covered a participant’s role at the company, their perception of user communities, the arc of the platform while they worked there, and their involvement with the platform’s closure, if applicable. most interviews lasted an hour. interviews were examined through a grounded qualitative thematic analysis using qda software nvivo. the new old wild west? the first section of this paper hinges around an idea that was cited frequently in interviews: that when these platforms were successful, they operated without precedent and therefore without rules. employees felt they didn’t have a “roadmap” for how to run a platform, and therefore created best practices as they went along. interviewees frequently cited the idea that these platforms were part of the internet’s “wild west,” a metaphor for the stereotypical ‘lawlessness’ of the 19th century american frontier. drawing on these observations, i note the similarities between descriptions of the companies’ “wild west” days, and the lack of guidelines that employees also described when shutting down these networks. this paper thus first suggests that as these companies were in life–with employees feeling as though they were functioning without precedent–so too do these platforms function that way in death. in turn, deletion processes are strongly influenced by the values of those who remain to shut it down, instead of an agreed upon set of best practices for platform closure. employee preservation ethics this section describes the values–or what is considered important in life (friedman, kahn & borning, 2006)–that employees brought to the deletion of user content during platform closure. grouped by ethical standpoint, it shows three major themes in how employees grappled with the decision to remove user data. first, some employees believed that users would be happy if their content was removed without warning. embarrassing content from years ago would be deleted without users needing to make decisions about that content themselves. these perceptions often drew on employees’ feelings about their own online persona, as they often noted that they disliked information circulating about them online. others articulated ethics that drew on the public’s perception of platforms. these interviewees argued that platform companies needed to engage in “good communication” with their users about content deletion, including giving adequate time for users to download their data. if a company didn’t engage in good communication about their closure, it could erode public trust in either a parent company that owned the platform, or in platforms in general. finally, a third group articulated ethics that emphasized the need to preserve content, often out of allegiance to the user community or out of the belief that the platform was part of internet history. these employees drew on their personal experience with user communities to support this standpoint. these employees often advocated for particular preservation schemes, sometimes against the shutdown plans proposed by company leadership. this included donating user content to organizations like the internet archive, or creating a platform-based, static archive. conclusion this paper examines the ethical approaches that platform employees bring to the process of platform shutdown and user content deletion. describing the ways that platforms shutter without agreed upon rules, it extends descriptions of the internet’s perceived early ‘lawlessness’ and applies it to the phenomenon of platform closure. in a landscape absent of rules, employees shape platform content deletion in part through personal values. in this case, ethical parameters are developed in relation to the imagined desires of individual users, the projected fallout for a company, and the previous investment of user communities. this research contributes to literature on values and technology as well as literature that takes critical approaches to the platform environment. it shows how values shape not just the construction of technological systems, but also their breakdown. moreover, it describes how platforms have consequences not only during the years that they thrive, but also have consequences–here, for memory practices–after their presumable death. i conclude by noting how the values of individual actors influenced the sunsetting process toward specific ends. indeed, this research shows how public pressure on platforms, as well as drawing on the expertise of employees that have a nuanced understanding of user communities, can positively shape what remains of these platforms after they stop functioning. in turn, i argue that platform preservation advocates could focus on these components in order to develop a system–one of conscientious conservation and purposeful deletion–that best respects the use of these materials for future reflection. references de kosnik, a. (2016). rogue archives: digital cultural memory and media fandom. cambridge: mit press. friedman, b., kahn, p. h., & borning, a. (2006). value sensitive design and information systems. in p. zhang & d. f. galletta (eds.), human-computer interaction and management information systems: foundations (pp. 348–372). armonk: m.e. sharpe. jackson, s. j. (2014). rethinking repair. in t. gillespie, p. j. boczkowski, & k. a. foot (eds.), media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society. cambridge: mit press. sturken, m. (1997). tangled memories. berkeley: university of california press. van dijck, j., poell, t., & de waal, m. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connective world. new york: oup. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): hemsley, j., stromer-galley, j., rossini, p., smith, a. (2021, october). staying in their lanes: issue ownership in the 2016 and 2020 u.s. presidential campaigns on facebook and twitter. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. staying in their lanes: issue ownership in the 2016 and 2020 u.s. presidential campaigns on facebook and twitter jeff hemsley syracuse university jennifer stromer-galley syracuse university patrícia rossini university of liverpool alexander smith syracuse university introduction scholarly interest in the use of social media by political campaigns has been consistently growing as digital platforms are becoming increasingly central for candidates to communicate and engage with the public (stromer-galley, 2019). recent presidential primaries in the united states saw unprecedented numbers of candidates competing for the nomination on the republican and on the democratic side. this paper takes up some classic conceptualizations of campaign messaging from the television era--issue campaigning--and applies it to analyze the ways campaigns rhetorically communicate their candidacy on their free social media accounts on facebook and twitter, where they communicate with supporters, the public, and the news media. when it comes to television ads, researchers have found that the majority of campaign communication was focused on the issues (johnson and kaid, 2002). would such findings be true in the digital era? in this study, we examine to what extent candidates post about issues and policy matters on facebook and twitter. prior research has identified issue-ownership across partisan lines, with republicans seen to focus on issues such as taxes and national defense, and democrats more likely to focus on social issues and welfare (petrocik, benoit & hansen, 2003). given the complexities of the primary race, with candidates aiming to differentiate themselves within their own party, we ask whether the candidates in both parties engage in creating “lanes” by owning specific policy topics. we also investigate the context in which candidates discuss the issues in terms of advocacy and attack—that is, do they refer to issues to advocate for their own competency, or are issues used to attack opponents? methods we use supervised machine-learning to analyze all messages (facebook and twitter) posted by 17 republicans and 19 democrats during the 2016 and 2020 u.s. presidential elections. the data for the 2016 election was collected between september 1, 2015 and november 9th, 2016. the date range for 2020 was september 1, 2019 to november 4th, 2020. candidate posts were first categorized by message type using supervised machine-learning. using a multi-label classifier, posts were initially categorized as advocacy, attack, image, and issue. the performance for these models has an overall f1 score of 0.67 or higher for twitter and of 0.72 or higher for facebook. next, we used a lexicon approach to classify candidate posts on twelve different political topics (covid, economic, education, environment, foreign policy, governance, health, immigration, military, safety, social and cultural, social programs). we validated our lexicons by comparing machine vs. human tagging on a random sample. we found agreement of 75% or better on each topic. using data visualization and chi-square tests, we examined the volume of posts to see what topics the candidates of the different parties tended to use. results when looking at all attack or advocacy posts on facebook and twitter across both electoral cycles, it is noticeable that democrats are more likely to post about the issues on social media. shifting to differences in specific issues, we find that republicans and democrats talk about significantly different topics on social media, (chisq = 3034.5, p < 0.0001). as it can be seen on figure 1, democrats are overall more likely to post on a range of issues, such as the economy, social and cultural issues, social programs, health, safety, education, and the environment. republicans tend to have a narrower range of policy topics, with more emphasis on about issues, foreign policy, and immigration. however, the primaries in 2016 and 2020 were distinct, with republicans facing a crowded field in the former and democrats in the latter. to this point, distinctions between the two primary cycles, and particularly in 2020, may reflect how issue ownership patterns change when intra-party competition is one-sided. comparing 2016 to 2020, there are differences in the topics 'owned' by each party, with republicans more likely than democrats to post about the economy, safety, and social and cultural issues in 2016. we also note that some issues were largely absent from the discussion in 2016, such as health and governance. these might reflect two dynamics that were unique to 2020: the covid-19 global pandemic, which raised awareness and gave more centrality to the issue of healthcare, and the broader discussion of the electoral processes, voting, and corruption, which were prominent topics given the reliance on mail-in voting and trump's impeachment by the house of representatives. figure 1. total posts per issue by party and year we examine the extent to which each party relied on advocacy messages, that is, positive posts about the candidate's plans and competencies, and attacks, which are mainly negative and directed to a candidate's opponents, including the news media, to criticize them. messages could also feature both types—what can be described as a contrast message (johnson and kaid, 2002). as shown in figure 2, candidates from both parties predominantly used advocacy messages to talk about most issues, with few exceptions: for instance, on the topic of governance, which did not appear in 2016, donald trump posted more attacks and contrast messages than advocacy messages, while democrats advocated more. republicans were more prominently using attack and contrast messages in most topics, with the exception of the military. when democrats go on the attack, they are more inclined to use contrast messages—surpassing republicans in this category in the topics of covid-19, foreign policy, immigration, and the military. figure 2. proportion of attack, advocacy and contrast messages per party and issue conclusion this study examines how candidates use social media to talk about political issues across the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaign. we find first that there is issuefocused posting on social media. we also find that parties demonstrate significantly different patterns of topic ownership, with republicans owning topics such as the military and foreign affairs, and democrats owning social programs and social and cultural issues. this suggests that the parties continue to own policy matters that they historically were aligned with. however, in the case of the economy, these dynamics are sensitive to electoral contexts: even though democrats were overall more likely to post about issues, republicans posted more messages than democrats on this topic in 2016, while in 2020 issues around health were of central focus of both parties. moreover, the topic of governance, rarely of much interest to politicians or the public, was of central importance in 2020 given the challenges of voting given the global pandemic. references johnston, a., & kaid, l. l. (2002). image ads and issue ads in u.s. presidential advertising: using videostyle to explore stylistic differences in televised political ads from 1952 to 2000. journal of communication, 52, 281-300 petrocik, j. r., benoit, w. l., & hansen, g. j. (2004). issue ownership and presidential campaigning, 1952-2000. political science quarterly, 118 (4), 599-626. stromer-galley, j. 2019). presidential campaigning in the internet age (2nd ed.). oxford university press. microsoft word hilstob-the imagined independence of canada's internet-the imagined independence of canada's internet.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): hilstob, k. (2021, october). the imagined independence of the canadian internet. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the imagined independence of the canadian internet kayla hilstob simon fraser university background and context internet scholars are uncovering and connecting military, political and cultural histories of early internets across the globe, including in the us, (abbate 1999), chile (medina 2011) and france (mailland & driscoll 2016), respectively. all three approaches inform this exploration of the canadian context, an internet history that has been underexplored. the internet came to canada as we know it today in 1989 through netnorth, a private communication network developed by academics and researchers in 1983, where it eventually opened to the public and adopted protocols that originated with arpanet (miller 2015). but the history of the canadian internet begins decades earlier, in 1965 when the communication and electronics branch of the canadian armed forces (caf) first commissioned a study to develop, build, and implement its own internet. the concept was informed by the close relationship to the united states military through norad, where a top-secret whitepaper first recommended canada develop a distributed communications network (norad 1965), following paul baran’s (1964) publication on the subject one year previous. subsequently, project samson: strategic automatic message switching operational network was convened to modernize and secure its outdated communication system, an early internet that experienced a series of serious setbacks beginning almost immediately, until it was disbanded in 1984. the early emergence of the canadian internet occurred at a time of political renewal. the charismatic and popular figure pierre trudeau led this renewal in many ways during his tenure as prime minister from 1968-1984 (with a brief hiatus in 1980). at this time, canada attempted to construct its own independent national identity separate from the united states and its british colonial roots (litt 2008). as the name of canada’s first civilian internet, netnorth, suggests, canada’s internet imaginary stands unavoidably in relation to the united states, an occurrence endemic to the wider context of canada – us relations. as pierre trudeau famously stated in 1969, it is like “sleeping with an elephant. no matter how friendly and even-tempered the beast, if i can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt” (cbc 2018). at a time of pushback against american influence, the canadian military constructed samson in a grand ambition to build a completely made-in-canada system that was to be better than those of its allies, despite the technology and expertise not being available in canada (hatt 1984). it may have been this resistance to any american influence that led canada’s internet to fail, and paradoxically made canada eventually more technologically dependent on the unites states following its complete integration with arpanet. research question and methods this paper investigates canada’s internet infrastructural technopolitics through larkin’s framework of questioning how they “emerge out of and store within them forms of desire and fantasy and can take on fetish-like aspects” (2013, 329). specifically, it addresses how the design, equipment, and network protocols of the canadian internet embodied the imaginary of canadian independence, and how this history can be found in internet infrastructure today. drawing on the scholarship of infrastructure studies, this paper examines political imaginaries that are recycled and transmitted through technology. using winner’s (1980) perspective of infrastructure as the materiality of politics, i interpret how internet infrastructure, real or imagined, mutually constitute and affect social, political and economic arenas in society. this paper examines internet infrastructure from 1965 to 1984, attentive to canada’s rejection of both cooperation with the united states in developing its internet and baran’s recommendation for a distributed network on the grounds of concern not of nuclear survivability, but of internal threats: “civil unrest, sabotage and subversion” (caf 1985). i draw on primary sources from the unpublished documents from the directorate of history and heritage archives. the materials come from the communications and electronics branch of the caf that were declassified between 1997-2003. these documents include reports, studies, contracts, meeting minutes, memoranda and newspaper clippings. research implications internet infrastructure typically undergoes periods of localized state control and open distribution across networks (thussu 2018). in examining canada’s course between fragmentation and integration, analysis of decisions about geopolitics and security sheds light on global surveillance mechanisms that today’s internet users have inherited. as scholars visit questions of future conflicts around internet fragmentation (mueller 2015), this history further clarifies that disintegration is not novel but a part of internet history and decisions about internet infrastructure can be revisited in the interest of a more equitable distribution of power. samson was oriented towards securing the state against those who were seen as an internal threat, namely indigenous peoples. by design the canadian internet was a security apparatus, but the technopolitics embedded in the system dictate who is to be secured against whom. indigenous peoples have always been surveilled by the federal government through the use of technology, historically through indian status act cards, the reserve pass system, or inuit numbered discs, for example (proulx 2014). even at a time when the canadian internet was merely an idea, this threat was identified and prioritized over cold war rivalries. this history provides additional insight into today’s surveillance regimes, with its history traceable even to the first feasibility study of a canadian digital communications network. though with now different protocols, the technopolitics of canada’s internet remain, informing current participation in the five eyes intelligence alliance, and anti-terror legislation that permits lawful digital surveillance on everyone, particularly targeting activists and indigenous-led movements. references abbate, j. (2000). inventing the internet. mit press. baran, p. 1964. “on distributed communications: i. introduction to distributed communications networks”. the rand corporation. santa monica: ca. canadian armed forces communication and electronics branch. 1985. “samson project narrative”. september 3, 1985. catherine allan fonds, the directorate of history and heritage, ottawa, on. cbc. 2018. “sleeping with a very cranky elephant: the history of canada-u.s. tensions”. cbc radio. june 15 2018. retrieved from https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/the-sunday-edition-june-17-20181.4692469/sleeping-with-a-very-cranky-elephant-the-history-of-canada-u-stensions-1.4699017 hatt, w. l. 1984. “project samson: strategic automatic message switching operational network project completion report”. canadian armed forces communication and electronics branch. april 1984. catherine allan fonds, the directorate of history and heritage, ottawa, on. declassified nov 27 1997. larkin, b. 2013. “the politics and poetics of infrastructure”. annual review of anthropology 42: 327-343. litt, p. 2008. “trudeaumania: participatory democracy in the mass-mediated nation”. canadian historical review 89 (1): 27-53. mailland, j. and k. driscoll. 2016. minitel: welcome to the internet. mit press. medina, e. 2011. cybernetic revolutionaries: technology and politics in allende’s chile. mit press. mueller, milton l. 2017. will the internet fragment? cambridge, ma: polity press. miller, g. 2015. “a birthday for canada’s internet”. canarie. november 6, 2015 https://www.canarie.ca/a-birthday-for-canadas-internet/ norad. 1965. “brief for vcds”. north american air defense command. april 1965. catherine allan fonds, the directorate of history and heritage, ottawa, on. declassified may 29, 2003. proulx, c. 2014. "colonizing surveillance: canada constructs an indigenous terror threat," anthropologica 56 (1):83-100. thussu, daya. 2018. international communication: continuity and change. new york, ny: bloomsbury academic. winner, l. 1980. “do artifacts have politics?” daedalus 109 (1): 121-36. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): simatzkin-ohana, l., frosh, p. (2020, october). from user generated content to a user generated aesthetic: instagram, brands and the appropriation of digital photography. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. from user generated content to a user generated aesthetic: instagram, brands and the appropriation of digital photography liron simatzkin-ohana hebrew university of jerusalem, jerusalem, israel paul frosh hebrew university of jerusalem, jerusalem, israel in this paper we argue for a renewed critical examination of the overt and direct representational practices of commercial brands on social media, in particular their appropriation and adaptation of user-generated ‘amateur’ or ‘vernacular’ cultural styles. without this renewed attention our understanding of the connections between social media and consumer culture are overly skewed towards indirect brand strategies such as the rise of influencers and self-branding. for instance, recent research has focused on instagram as a key site for new visual formats and practices (highfield & leaver, 2016; manovich, 2017), including its importance in influencer culture (abidin, 2016). yet relatively little attention has been paid to the deliberate employment of user-generated photographic styles by brands themselves – to the ‘vernacularization’ of brand imagery. in this paper we outline the features of this process in recurring visual patterns, contextualize it in relation to earlier commercial appropriations of popular culture, and discuss its significance for cultural production in social media. we take fashion brands on instagram as our case study for two reasons: first, fashion photography is strongly connected to overt professional stylization; second, fashion can be seen as structurally definitive of consumer society in general (lipovetsky, 1994). we analyzed of a corpus of photographic posts collected from the instagram accounts of 24 fashion brands, selected based on lists of ‘leading fashion brands’ published annually by the business and financial press (e.g. forbes and fashion united). only accounts exceeding an activity threshold of 300 posts and a popularity threshold (quarter of a million followers of us and european brands, 5,000 followers for israeli brands) were included in the analysis. from each brand selected for analysis, all published posts were given an initial overall viewing, up to a cut-off date of 1st july 2018. this overall initial viewing enabled the gradual identification of recurring vernacular patterns, resulting in a corpus of 90 posted photographs which were subjected to detailed analysis. while eight distinctive patterns of stylistic appropriation were identified, here we discuss the three most common: (1) regramming: featuring a user’s images in the company’s official feed alongside professional images, and tagging the user as the image-creator. we discuss how the aspiration to be regrammed by a brand leads users to create 'brand-friendly' content. at the same time, regramming is a popular technological workaround or ‘hack’ to platform constraints on image-sharing: hence its very use by corporations connotes the ‘user-generated’ popularity and virality of the brand. (2) vernacular celebrity: posting the ‘amateur-looking’ photographs of a celebrity associated with the brand. this pattern simultaneously promotes both sides of the celebrity paradox (turner, 2004; marwick & boyd, 2011a) – remoteness and accessibility helping brands to gain authenticity while maintaining a conventional distinction between the brand’s visual assets and those of ‘regular users’. (3) brandfie: usually ‘faceless’ selfie-style images created by brands themselves where the brand appears to be the ‘self’ performing its own representation (zhao & zappavigna, 2017). the brandfie presents the brand as a social subject through an overtly embodied gestural image (frosh, 2015), integrating bodily, social and digital existence into a single format. through ‘brandfies’, brands seem to achieve not just social but also physical being. overall, our project highlights the aesthetic vernacularization of brand images on social media and the adoption by brands of amateur styles associated with user-generated content. in the case of instagram brand accounts, this adoption has solidified into a recognizable ‘user-generated aesthetic’. this is a contrary but parallel process to the professionalization of non-professional users on social media (e.g. kim, 2012; lobato 2016; cunningham, craig and silver, 2016). together, these dual movements – professionalizing user-generation and vernacularizing professional images – constitute a form of ‘context collapse’ that is more generally characteristic of social media (marwick and boyd, 2011b; davis and jurgenson, 2014), but here appears in visual form: as the collapse of conventional stylistic distinctions and visual indicators which viewers rely upon to infer an image’s authorial status, milieu and purposes. this context collapse conforms to the expansion of branding practices and discourses beyond the purview of marketing and celebrity into all aspects of social life (banetweiser, 2012; marwick, 2015), and in particular to instagram as a ‘social media storefront’ where ‘sociality unfolds within platforms that encode marketplace logics’ (hund and mcguigan, 2019). if everyday practices of self-representation and communication (such as photography) on social media are already largely produced within the discursive and performative structures of marketing, their actual appropriation by marketing and branding companies is likely to be both ideologically seamless and generative of new content. under these conditions, the activities of users and brands may ‘collude’ to the point where it becomes hard – or even experientially irrelevant to differentiate between their modes of action and expression. in an arena where users practice self-branding, and brands perform private life, engage in social interactions, and present emotional and physical selves, what signifies the difference between the two? references abidin, c. (2016). visibility labour: engaging with influencers’ fashion brands and #ootd advertorial campaigns on instagram. media international australia 161(1) 86100 banet-weiser, s. (2012). authentic™ :the politics of ambivalence in a brand culture. new-york: new york university press cunningham, s. craig d. & silver, j. (2016). youtube, multichannel networks and the accelerated evolution of the new screen ecology. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 22(4), 376–391 davis, j. l. & jurgenson, n. (2014). context collapse: theorizing context collusions and collisions. information, communication & society, 17(4), 476-485 frosh, p. (2015). the gestural image: the selfie, photography theory, and kinesthetic sociability. international journal of communication 9, 1607-1628 highfield, t. & leaver, t. (2016). instagrammatics and digital methods: studying visual social media, from selfies and gifs to memes and emoji. communication research and practice 2(1), 47-62 hund, e. & mcguigan, l. (2019). a shoppable life: performance, selfhood, and influence in the social media storefront. communication culture & critique, 12(1), 18-35 kim, j. (2012). the institutionalization of youtube: from user-generated content to professionally generated content. media culture & society, 34(1), 53–67 lipovetsky, g. (1994). the empire of fashion: dressing modern democracy. new jersey: princeton university press lobato, r. (2016). the cultural logic of digital intermediaries: youtube multichannel networks. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies. 22(4) 348–360 manovich, l. (2017). instagram and contemporary image. self-published. http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/instagram-and-contemporary-image marwick, a. e., & boyd, d. (2011a). to see and be seen: celebrity practice on twitter. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies. 17(2), 139-158 marwick, a. e., & boyd, d. (2011b). i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. new media & society. 13(1), 114–133. marwick, a. (2015). instafame: luxury selfies in the attention economy. public culture, 27(1 (75)), 137–160 turner, g. (2004), understanding celebrity. london: sage. zhao, s. & zappavigna, m. (2017). beyond the self: intersubjectivity and the social semiotic interpretation of the selfie. new media & society. 20(5), 1735–1754 aoir2021-final-abstract selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): vasudevan, r. (2021, october). “this isn’t a picasso, it’s a ferrari”: presentism, precarity and dependence in new media art practice. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “this isn’t a picasso, it’s a ferrari”: presentism, precarity and dependence in new media art practices roopa vasudevan annenberg school for communication, university of pennsylvania extended abstract at the 2018 eyeo festival, an annual gathering of practitioners working at the intersection of art and technology, a panel of prominent technologists and artists discussed their relationships with proprietary tools—and the need to consider what values or assumptions are perpetuated through their use (eyeo festival, 2018). this is a question that has become increasingly urgent as conversations surrounding technology, ethics, and bias have reached a fever pitch in recent years. more and more, new media artists find themselves re-evaluating the necessity of using proprietary tools, owned by big tech companies with whose policies they do not necessarily agree. (eyeo festival, 2018; thorp, 2018). ultimately, however, it is difficult to conceive of a techbased art practice that functions without utilizing any of the dominant technologies that we find ourselves surrounded by on a regular basis. this entanglement was encapsulated by art historian and critic claire bishop in 2012; writing for artforum, she declared that “the digital is, on a deep level, the shaping condition—even the structuring paradox—that determines artistic decisions to work with certain formats and media” (p. 436). however, the tension between artists and technology stretches beyond seemingly autonomous creative choices; it has become especially pronounced in cases such as twitter’s 2018 decision to change their guidelines for developer access to their application programming interface (api). the blog post announcing these changes began, in part, by celebrating the creative and unconventional uses of twitter adopted by artists and programmers since its initial launch, continuing a long-standing tradition of embracing these “delightful and fun” experiments on the platform (roth & johnson, 2018). however, the rest of the post detailed the tightening requirements the platform was placing on those who might want to use twitter in similar ways. the new process places a larger burden on developers to provide detailed, up-front descriptions of the functionality of applications, and requires lengthy review by representatives from the platform prior to approval—a stark contrast from previous requirements, where interested developers would automatically receive keys to use the api upon submitting a simple request for a new application (schwartz, 2018). developers who already had active applications using the twitter api would also still be subject to these requirements retroactively (roth & johnson, 2018). twitter’s post illustrates a pervasive mechanism by which the tech industry utilizes its own power to take control of its technologies back from those who intentionally appropriate, subvert, or modify them, by simultaneously celebrating these actions and altering the system so it becomes harder to do them. as a result, artists who work with technology are inevitably thrust into perpetually shifting situations or environments, controlled by the tech industry, which then directly impact the creation of their work; its longevity; and, often, their own perceptions of it. the fundamental dependence that new media artists have on the interests responsible for developing and controlling dominant technologies connects to larger notions of “perpetual training” necessitated by the societies of control (deleuze, 1992), which give rise to the industry’s ability to manufacture crises that force users to constantly update protocols and devices in order to remain at a habituated stasis (chun, 2016). while many contemporary art practices are dependent on technological advancement to some extent, artists specifically working with new and emerging technologies are uniquely tied to the cycle of updating and obsolescence: non-compliance typically means that any work they have already created with these tools will cease to function as originally intended (rinehart & ippolito, 2014). as one interviewee for this project put it, this artwork needs to be treated as a ferrari automobile instead of a picasso painting—which requires an acceptance of the fact that it needs to be consistently upgraded and maintained, in accordance with established technical protocols, in order to preserve functionality. thus, it can never be considered “complete” in the same way as a more traditional art piece. this study represents the beginnings of an investigation into the relationships between new media artists, the tools they use for their work (including data sources and apis, hardware and software, operating systems, and project storage), and those who control these technologies. i seek to portray this creative community as one that exists in a state of constant uncertainty, and that finds itself in this position at the behest of the tech industry—which both uses artists’ work as a way of positioning itself as cuttingedge and original, and as a means of locating potential sites of intentional misuse and subversion. artists are forced to constantly adapt their processes to the demands of the industry, reinforcing its dominance and, to some extent, undermining any desired critical statement or commentary. by expanding on these ideas, and demonstrating the outsized reliance that artists have on those who control the tools they use, this research also seeks to further trouble assumptions about the existence of this work outside of dominant systems (monahan, 2015; hu, 2016)—and, by extension, continue to question whether or not creative subversion or resistance is possible in the ways that artists themselves envision or expect. this research draws from 20 semi-structured interviews conducted to date with new media artists and creative technologists about their practices and experiences working with technology. the artists’ toolkits and media include screen-based computational processes; hardware and electronics; data analysis and the use of apis; internet art based in the web browser or in mobile applications; virtual or augmented reality; natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence; or combinations of the above. i also draw from my own practice as a media artist and creative technologist, with personal experience in these areas since 2012. preliminary findings from my analysis fall into four broad categories. first, artists consistently rationalize the use of proprietary tools in their work, even when their personal ethical stances would presumably oppose it. second, artists demonstrate a clear acceptance of instability within the work that they create, and assume by default that their pieces will eventually become out of date, malfunction, or otherwise necessitate some kind of technical upgrading. third, artists’ documentation and archival practices are generally inconsistent, haphazard, and focused on the current moment, reflecting a mentality of presentism built into their processes which assumes constant change and updates. and, finally, many of the artists advocate embracing the ephemeral qualities of their work rather than attempting to stave off the inevitability of obsolescence, which i aim to further explore as a new paradigm through which to examine the creation, experience and preservation of digital and new media artwork. together, these findings indicate that the participants’ current processes, artistic outputs, and even foundational conceptions of their work’s purpose and cultural function are shaped to a large degree by what is afforded to them by those who create and control the technology they use. and often, the restrictions placed on the artist by the technology have the effect of shaping the work in significant ways, sometimes forcing the artist to discard their original plans altogether. further research will build more on these themes, as well as connect them to a larger conception of the new media artist’s role in mainstream technological development and its integration into everyday cultural life. references bishop, c. (2012). “digital divide”. artforum, 51(1), 434-441. retrieved from https://www.artforum.com/print/201207/digital-divide-contemporary-art-and-newmedia-31944. chun, w.h.k. (2016). updating to remain the same: habitual new media. cambridge, ma: mit press. deleuze, g. (1992) postscript on the societies of control. october, 59, 3-7. eyeo festival [eyeofestival] (2018, august 28). whose tools? whose house? [video file]. retrieved from https://vimeo.com/287094317. hu, t.h. (2016). a prehistory of the cloud. cambridge, ma: mit press. monahan, t. (2015). the right to hide? anti-surveillance camouflage and the aestheticization of resistance. communication and critical/cultural studies, 12(2), 159-178. doi: 10.1080/14791420.2015.1006646. rinehart, r. & ippolito, j. (2014). re-collection: art, new media, and social memory. cambridge, ma: mit press. roth, y. & johnson, r. (july 24, 2018). “new developer requirements to protect our platform” [blog post]. twitter developer blog. retrieved from https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2018/new-developerrequirements-to-protect-our-platform.html. schwartz, o. (october 16, 2018). “your favorite twitter bots are about to die, thanks to upcoming rule changes”. quartz. retrieved from https://qz.com/1422765/yourfavorite-twitter-bots-are-about-die-thanks-to-upcoming-rule-changes/. thorp, j. (february 21, 2018). “tech and the fine art of complicity”. knight foundation. retrieved from https://knightfoundation.org/articles/tech-and-the-fine-art-ofcomplicity. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): mccosker, a., albury, k., maddox, a., barrett, m., dietzel, c. (2020, october). digital cultures of care, safety and wellbeing. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. digital cultures of care, safety and wellbeing anthony mccosker (chair) swinburne university of technology kath albury swinburne university of technology alexia maddox deakin university monica barrett rmit university christopher dietzel mcgill university practices of self-care and social support have long been identified across different social platforms, as people find new ways of using and adapting digital technologies to mediate and address personal and public health issues. but digital health participation is considerably contested and unevenly experienced, whether through the commodified ‘platformization’ of the health sector (van dijck et al., 2018: 98), or in the potentially ‘unhealthy’ engagement with dominant social media platforms or dating and hookup apps. contemporary policy frameworks for participatory, digital-enabled healthcare (e.g., nhs, 2019: ch 5) assume that we all engage in health or help seeking practices online, but have no answers to associated risks of over-exposure, invasive health surveillance or experiences of discrimination and harassment online (erikainen et al., 2019), particularly for those at the margins. in our case studies, this is pertinent for transgender, non-binary and female hookup app users, people seeking support for mental ill-health, illicit drug users participating in crypto-markets and dark web communities. in response to this scenario, this panel asks: what are the forms and capacities for collective care in the current digital ecosystem, between social media platforms and dating apps struggling to address harassment or mental wellbeing, within health service-supported online forums, and across the dark web? this panel looks at evidence and answers, exploring different forms of collective and personal attempts to negotiate, manage, circumvent and otherwise find ways to reinvent cultures of care through digital platforms. ‘cultures of care’ is a term coined by michael hurley in the early 2000s to account for the collective and relational aspects of dealing with public health crisis. he was interrogating gay men’s collective or social practices of ‘doing gay’ and ‘doing sex’ within the context of the australian hiv/aids response (hurley 2003 p.19). for hurley, ‘cultures of care’ emerged from networked interconnections between gay men’s overlapping practices of love, sex, friendship and intimacy; their relationships to biomedical technologies and systems of knowledge; their interactions with researchers, health policy frameworks, medical professionals and community educators; and their engagement with both ‘mainstream’ and community/niche broadcast and online media content relating to hiv, gay culture and sexualities. however, hurley was writing in a time when ‘community’ was more closely associated with geographical spaces, and social media was still nascent. if cultures of care are based on systems of shared values, how do they manifest within digital culture? across platforms? in relation to the fragmentation of identity categories? between online communities of practice and researchers? picking up hurley’s invitation to consider the “practices and repertoires of everyday life” as key aspects of cultures of care, this panel investigates the relationships between digital media platforms and practices, health policy, health promotion, research ethics and knowledge co-creation – as these come to affect the kinds of connection and community that matters for care and wellbeing in the digital age. references erikainen, s., pickersgill, m., cunningham-burley, s., & chan, s. (2019). patienthood and participation in the digital era. digital health, 5, 2055207619845546. hurley, m. (2003) then and now. gay men and hiv. monograph series number 46. the australian research centre in sex, health & society, la trobe university, melbourne, australia hurley, m. (ed) (2002) cultures of care and safe sex amongst hiv positive australians. papers from the hiv futures i and ii surveys and interviews, monograph series no. 43, australian research centre in sex, health and society, la trobe university, melbourne. nhs (2019) the nhs long term plan, https://www.longtermplan.nhs.uk/. van dijck, j., poell, t., & de waal, m. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford university press. https://www.longtermplan.nhs.uk/ https://www.longtermplan.nhs.uk/ going off site and off script: social support and health participation at the digital margins alexia maddox deakin university anthony mccosker swinburne university of technology monica j. barratt rmit university & unsw sydney online communities offer new forms of health participation, community-based support at scale (mccosker, 2018) and the opportunity for targeted health-messaging (white, 2001) and intervention. health empowerment plays out in specific online contexts; for people experiencing mental health challenges, one such space is the beyond blue forums (mccosker, 2018). people seeking a safe space for anonymous discussion of drug use, can access online drug discussion spaces in the clear net (barratt, 2011) or cryptomarket forums in the dark web (maddox et al., 2016). these platforms support transparent exchanges around mental health, wellbeing and drug use that may be stigmatised and unacceptable in other more mainstream online or in person interactions. while research has established the value of online social support (shaw, 2002; kraut, 2002) and safe spaces online for vulnerable populations (hanckel and morris, 2014; wilson, 2017), the curation and monitoring practices within digital platforms can be counter-productive. methods and approach this paper presents evidence from two empirical studies of the beyond blue mental health support forum and participants from the silk road cryptomarket forums. participants of these forums recount their movement toward the digital margins (‘offsite’), and away from traditional health institutions and services, in order to go ‘off script’. the empirical basis for this work is founded on the use of digital ethnography in the two case study populations, combining observations over time with participant interviews. the first case examines activity across beyond blue’s online support sites over several years (2017-2018). the starting point was to identify and gain access to key informants and prominent, influential forum participants, and then observe practices, events and activities in the forums over time. interviews were conducted with 10 participants. the second case study draws from collaborative research undertaken between 2013 and 2014 exploring the social implications of cryptomarkets, focusing on the leading cryptomarket, silk road. the silk road study incorporated multi-sited observation and engagement with the community surrounding silk road, including 17 interviews. it focuses on an anonymous population of drug users and adds the capacity for cryptomarket-based action with alternative modes of governance and autonomy. these two cases point to different but interrelated sites of collective attempts to manage imposed, scripted forms of health care, in favour of developing a culture of collective care that is always pushing against medical frames and platform structures. findings and discussion in both cases, participants sought forms of radical transparency in their practices, whilst protecting their identities, and moved to decentralised contexts in order to enact selfauthored versions of collective care outside of surveilled channels. the beyond blue forum enables access, with anonymity under increasing pressure for platforms to moderate, force real-name participation, and share data with authorities (to prevent suicide for example). explaining her involvement with the forum, just sara emphasises the social pressures of discussing her mental ill-health on facebook: i did make one little comment to say that i haven’t been well, not dealing with things too well [...] my aunty wrote back and blurted this big spiel about having a mental illness isn’t a bad thing, and just went on and on … and i was so put back by it, i haven’t posted since. (just sara, beyond blue forum) we argue that these kinds of practices are more than about managing privacy. they are also finding or managing digital environments that enable cultures of care. platform surveillance, the curation and control of the conversational ‘scripts’ and the dominant values and codes imposed by both health institutions or clinical practice, and social media and online health platforms, can have the reverse effect of excluding vulnerable populations who wish to go ‘off script’. the exit movement documented across these two cases indicates a spectrum of action from information-sharing and social support to resource sharing and active selfdiagnosis and treatment. through this empirical consideration we argue there is an unresolved tension or contradiction in the high-level demand for participatory and community health technology that both our cases insistently pinpoint. to illustrate this contradiction, we identify a range of factors related to people’s fraught relationships with face-to-face (f2f) healthcare and treatment forms, and with information sources and interfaces. in one example from a silk road participant, the lines between sanctioned pharmaceuticals and medicinal drugs restricts attempts to self-manage their health: i’m prescribed some add [attention deficit disorder] meds, but my doctor won’t prescribe me the add meds that i know work much better for me, because it has a high street value and abuse potential. so i just bought it through the silk road i think with things like marijuana and psychedelics a huge amount of people were able to access those substances not just to get high, but either for medical use or just for exploring themselves. (participant 19, silk road) the off site, off script practices considered highlight the agency of online participants to utilise the affordances of the environment to construct a more decentralised and permissive community of care based upon radical transparency and emerging technologies. references barratt, m.j. (2011) discussing illicit drugs in public internet forums: visibility, stigma, and pseudonymity, in j kjeldskov & j paay (eds), c&t '11. proceedings of the fifth international conference on communities and technologies, brisbane, australia, acm, new york, ny, pp. 159-68 hanckel, b. & morris, a. (2014) finding community and contesting heteronormativity: queer young people's engagement in an australian online community, journal of youth studies, vol. 17, no. 7, pp. 872-86. kraut, r., kiesler, s., boneva, b., cummings, j., helgeson, v. & crawford, a. (2002) 'internet paradox revisited', journal of social issues, vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 49-74. maddox, a., barratt, m.j., lenton, s. & allen, m. (2016) constructive activism in the dark web: cryptomarkets and illicit drugs in the digital ‘demimonde’, information communication and society, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 111-26. mccosker, a. (2018) engaging mental health online: insights from beyondblue’s forum influencers, new media & society, vol. 20, no. 12, pp. 4748-64. shaw, l.h. & gant, l.m. (2002) in defense of the internet: the relationship between internet communication and depression, loneliness, self-esteem, and perceived social support, cyberpsychology & behavior: the impact of the internet, multimedia and virtual reality on behavior and society, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 157-71. white, m. & dorman, s.m. (2001) receiving social support online: implications for health education, health education research, vol. 16, no. 6, pp. 693-707. wilson, a., carlson, b.l. & sciascia, a. (2017), 'reterritorialising social media: indigenous people rise up', australasian journal of information systems, vol. 21, no. 0. disconnective practices as situated cultures of care and wellbeing in dating app use kath albury swinburne university of technology anthony mccosker swinburne university of technology daniel reeders australian national university dating and hookup apps like tinder, grindr and bumble are deeply implicated in the transformation of intimacy and the mobile mediation of relationships (e.g. albury & byron, 2016; duguay, 2017; hobbs, owen & gerber, 2017; møller & petersen, 2018). but users' relationship with and through apps are far from seamless and untroubled. while they have become ordinary, everyday technologies of mediated relationships, dating apps have raised significant issues regarding health and wellbeing, including risks of sexual assault, harassment and sexually transmitted infections (stis), along with personal data and privacy breaches (mccosker et al., 2019). in fact, their status as 'technologies of risk' (albury & byron, 2016) has only risen over the past decade as population health research has sought to pin rising stis to app use (e.g., rice et al., 2012; sawyer et al., 2018). similarly, a number of initiatives have been put in place by app producers to reduce harassment, improve safety, and support sexual health messaging (for example grindr’s ‘kindr’ campaign addressing racism and sexism and discrimination on the app). it is not clear, however, that these issues can be addressed by platforms directly through campaigns or technological interventions alone. there is a need for critical interrogation of wellbeing and safety in app use that incorporates the voices and experiences of app users, and tests mediating factors such as gender, sexuality, mental health alongside cultures of use. methods to address this gap, this paper draws on a two-year study of the safety, risk and wellbeing in experiences of mobile dating apps. the study involves a mixed-methods approach that included a survey of app users across all australian states and territories (n=382), workshops with 18-35-year-old app users (n=51), and in-depth interviews (n=10). we focus on specific quantitative and qualitative findings in this study that show how wellbeing and safety are not evenly experienced by dating and hookup app users. we show that wellbeing is intimately bound up with a set of tensions around the sociotechnical components that shape experiences of connection and disconnection. approach and findings our approach to digital wellbeing draws on and extends atkinson's (2013) account of wellbeing as a relational and situated assemblage. atkinson frames wellbeing as 'an affect, depended on the mobilisation of resources from everyday encounters with complex assemblages of people, things and places' (2013, p. 137). a relational concept of wellbeing is vital, we argue, for understanding and facilitating cultures of care, safety and wellbeing in dating app use. in the quantitative component, survey participants (n=382, age 15-35) were recruited via unpaid posts on the social networks of the researchers and organizational partners. participants could select gender and sexual identities or describe their own in open-text. baseline health and disability were assessed using validated scales – the sf-8 and wg-ss, respectively. respondents listed the apps they ever, currently, and most used, and answered multi-choice questions on purposes, duration and intensity of use, satisfaction, concerns, experiences of discrimination, harassment, and unsafety, and safe sex practices. rather than dividing participants into a matrix of gender and sexual identity categories, quantitative analysis drew on the literature and qualitative findings to identify factors that might predict differences in experiences and outcomes of app use, including sex and gender diversity, cultural diversity, disability, and anxiety. results identify both needs and potential sites for health promotion intervention. limitations include very low recruitment of heterosexual men (n=10) and a convenience sample composed of people already connected with health promotion services. survey data showed that experiences of feeling safe or unsafe when using dating apps vary with socio-cultural experiences of identity, sexuality and gender. those who are marginalised or vulnerable in other ways (e.g., due to stigma associated with physical and mental ill-health, ableism, ageism, misogyny, homophobia, racism and transphobia) are also likely to feel unsafe when using apps. as we found, some groups use and appreciate apps in different ways, including people living with higher than average anxiety or with disability. the qualitative findings, similarly, show that dating apps fulfil important objectives for people who experience marginalisation and vulnerability. some participants discussed taking breaks from app use during times of stress or when focus was needed elsewhere, such as during exams. turning off notifications was a common self-care strategy: i turn notifications off when i've got other stuff going on and i make the choice to go in and use it because notifications are big for me. i think a lot of people are the same; if it comes up, it's like oh, you've got to respond straight away, or like have to be using it.’ (26, gay, male, urban) temporary deletion of apps was a common response to negative experiences: so many of my friends regularly will take app breaks. it's also often a question with breakups 'are you ready to be on the apps yet?' much like people will try to detox from technology on the whole, people are recognising the negative aspects of dating apps and trying to detox specifically from them. (27, queer, female, urban) overall, app use was framed as an ‘ordinary’ part of contemporary relationships for our participants, which could, in some cases increase their sense of connection, community and pleasure. however, some users experienced frustration, anxiety and distress. in line with previous research (light, 2014; light and cassidy, 2014) we found a range of disconnective practices and that helped participants manage connection through techniques such as careful profile management, taking breaks (deleting and reinstalling apps), linking or keeping other social media accounts separate, negotiating spaces for meeting up, and even engaging in forms of distributed cultures of care and support around app use and relationships. these findings make sense if we consider atkinson’s account of wellbeing as situated and relational. they signal the importance of personal and collective strategies of support, care and safety as they interact with platform features, technical rules, physical spaces, and sanctions and cultures of app use. references albury, k., & byron, p. (2016) safe on my phone? same-sex attracted young people’s negotiations of intimacy, visibility, and risk on digital hook-up apps. social media+ society, 2(4), 2056305116672887. atkinson, s. (2013) beyond components of wellbeing: the effects of relational and situated assemblage. topoi, 32(2), 137-144. duguay, s. (2017). dressing up tinderella: interrogating authenticity claims on the mobile dating app tinder. information, communication & society, 20(3), 351-367. hobbs, m., owen, s., & gerber, l. (2017) liquid love? dating apps, sex, relationships and the digital transformation of intimacy. journal of sociology, 53(2), 271-284. jørgensen, k. m., & petersen, m. n. (2018) bleeding boundaries: domesticating gay hook-up apps. in mediated intimacies: connectivities, relationalities and proximities (pp. 208-223). routledge. light, b. (2014). disconnecting with social networking sites. springer, london. light, b., & cassidy, e. (2014) strategies for the suspension and prevention of connection: rendering disconnection as socioeconomic lubricant with facebook. new media & society, 16(7), 1169-1184. mccosker, a., albury, k., pym, t., byron, p., race, k. (2019) swiping, stealthing and catfishing: dating and hookup apps in the media research report, swinburne university of technology, melbourne. http://doi.org/10.25916/5d7ed40274311 rice, e., et al. (2012), sex risk among young men who have sex with men who use grindr, a smartphone geosocial networking application, journal of aids & clinical research, suppl. 4, pp. 1-8. sawyer, a.n., smith, e.r. & benotsch, e.g. (2018) dating application use and sexual risk behavior among young adults, sexuality research and social policy, 15(2), 183191. dating beyond binaries: trans and gender-diverse dating app users negotiations of safety, risk and wellbeing christopher dietzel mcgill university trans and gender-diverse (tgd) people face high risks of dating violence, both online and in person (dank et al., 2014; walls et al., 2019). this paper draws on qualitative interviews and creative workshops conducted with australian tgd dating app users aged 18-35 (n=13), and consultations with professionals in australian sexual health organisations and tgd-specific organisations (n=22). it explores how tgd dating app users negotiate their safety, health, and well-being – and, in doing so, aims to offer insights into the specific needs and safety concerns of tgd dating app users. background research into tgd dating experiences suggests that at least half of trans people have reported unwanted sexual activity (stotzer, 2009), and over half have suffered psychological abuse (turell, 2000). six in ten have experienced sexual coercion, and nearly nine in ten have faced physical violence (dank et al., 2014). this is not news to tgd dating app users who have recorded their concerns in blog posts and social media (mckeon, 2015; windust, 2018) and have outlined strategies they employ to promote safety (sonoma, 2019). the lessons learned and peer advice shared by these tgd dating app users promotes a culture of care through which members of the community learn from one another in order to minimize risks when using dating apps (wong, 2018). findings tgd participants in our study used a range of popular apps, including tinder, grindr, her, and okcupid. although participants held diverse understandings of safety, health, and wellbeing and applied different strategies to navigate potential risks, there were common strategies participants employed that helped them feel safer on apps and in person. as in previous studies of app users, participants deployed practices of what duguay (2017) has termed ‘identity modulation’ to promote a sense of wellbeing and safety. however, this practice was complicated for those who were dating while in the process of exploring their gender identity or actively transitioning: i started out using things like craigslist, reddit, fetlife. basically, i was more interested in using things that weren’t picture and profile sort of things. i didn’t want to show myself. i was like, cool, if i can just put it into words and someone’s interested in what i have to say, and what i can say about myself – because i was not ready to put my face onto a thing if someone saw me. (blair, she/her) i probably had a bit of a break when i was transitioning early on because i didn’t have a lot of confidence, and then just didn’t feel that i was probably worthy enough, which is a bit stupid but i’m still working on that. (tristan he/him) as bivens. and haimson (2016) have observed, binary gender has been ‘baked in’ to the design of many social media platforms – including popular dating and hook up apps. this causes particular difficulties for participants who sought to avoid contact with abusive, transphobic or fetishizing individuals; and also limited users’ opportunities to deliberately seek out other tgd app users for the purposes on dating, friendship and community-building. as blair explained: tinder has options to put all the specific gender, and showcase – are you a translesbian and all this stuff. … the only problem is that you can’t siphon it down to other people who you’re interested in very well. it’s like, yeah, it’s just interested in men or women. those are your two choices for most of those apps. discussion and conclusions participants described a range of strategies for addressing concerns and minimizing perceived risks. for example max (they/them) described their practice of maximising opportunities for connection with other queer and tgd people on tinder by logging in as a ‘man seeking men’ on some occasions and a ‘woman seeking women’ on others. several users also described cycling through a range of ‘straight’ and ‘queer’ apps as they explored their evolving sexual desires and identities at different points in time, describing their relative drawbacks and merits. apps such as feeld and okcupid that facilitate longer, more nuanced profiles were preferred by users seeking non-dyadic or polyamorous relationships. while interacting with other dating app users, participants relied on the affordances of apps as well as cues from user profiles, photos, and chats to assess potential risks and ‘red flags’. participants and professional reference group members noted that tgd app users have specific wellbeing concerns that are not always shared within the broader lgbtiq+ community. for example, parker (he/him) expressed frustration with friends who encouraged him to take what he considered to be risks when using apps: my cis friends are like, it’ll be fine. i’m like, you don’t know. they don’t understand. i could get killed. but they’re like, just do it. to date, few studies have investigated the resources and supports available to tgd people through sexual health organisations, and fewer still have addressed the relationship between dating app use and healthcare/social support. the findings and recommendations from this study provide preliminary insights into the contemporary digital dating cultures of tgd people and outline tangible concerns that sexual health organisations can address in order to promote the safety, health, and well-being of tgd people. references bivens, r. and haimson, o.l., (2016). baking gender into social media design: how platforms shape categories for users and advertisers. social media+ society, 2(4), p.2056305116672486. dank, m., lachman, p., zweig, j. m., & yahner, j. (2014). dating violence experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth. journal of youth and adolescence, 43(5), 846-857. duguay, s., (2017). identity modulation in networked publics: queer women's participation and representation on tinder, instagram, and vine (doctoral dissertation, queensland university of technology). mckeon, l. (2015, december 17). what it’s really like to be young and trans in canada now. flare. https://www.flare.com/tv-movies/what-its-really-like-to-be-young-andtrans-in-canada-now/ risser, j. m. h., shelton, a., mccurdy, s., atkinson, j., padgett, p., useche, b., et al. (2005). sex, drugs, violence, and hiv status among male-to-female transgender person in houston, tx. in walter bockting & eric avery (eds.), transgender health and hiv prevention: needs assessment studies from transgender communities across the united states. binghamptom, ny: haworth medical press. sonoma, s. (2019, february 14). what dating and love is like for 10 nonbinary people. teen vogue. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/what-dating-and-love-is-like-for-10-nonbinary-people stotzer, r. l. (2009). violence against transgender people: a review of united states data. aggression and violent behavior, 14(3), 170-179. turrell, s. (2000). a descriptive analysis of same-sex relationship violence for a diverse sample. journal of family violence, 15, 281–293. https://www.flare.com/tv-movies/what-its-really-like-to-be-young-and-trans-in-canada-now/ https://www.flare.com/tv-movies/what-its-really-like-to-be-young-and-trans-in-canada-now/ https://www.flare.com/tv-movies/what-its-really-like-to-be-young-and-trans-in-canada-now/ https://www.teenvogue.com/story/what-dating-and-love-is-like-for-10-non-binary-people https://www.teenvogue.com/story/what-dating-and-love-is-like-for-10-non-binary-people https://www.teenvogue.com/story/what-dating-and-love-is-like-for-10-non-binary-people walls, n. e., atteberry-ash, b., kattari, s. k., peitzmeier, s., kattari, l., & langenderfermagruder, l. (2019). gender identity, sexual orientation, mental health, and bullying as predictors of partner violence in a representative sample of youth. journal of adolescent health, 64(1), 86-92. windlust, j. (2018, july 17). 5 lessons you learn when you date as a non-binary person. cosmopolitan. https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/love-sex/relationships/a22211856/nonbinary-dating/ https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/love-sex/relationships/a22211856/non-binary-dating/ https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/love-sex/relationships/a22211856/non-binary-dating/ https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/love-sex/relationships/a22211856/non-binary-dating/ a middle ground between fair game and locked down: bluelight.org, illegal drug use, and digital media research ethics monica barratt rmit university and university of new south wales michael gilbert independent background the question of how to evaluate and ensure ethical practices in social media research continues to be much debated. for some, publicly accessible digital traces of human interactions are considered as public documents comprising public information, and therefore outside the remit of human subjects research (see zimmer, 2010). for example, the policy governing research ethics in the us, the common rule, uses a decision tree to determine whether an activity is ‘research involving human subjects’, and the (passive) analysis of publicly accessible digital data that does not contain personally identifying information is deemed to fall outside this category (see vayena, gasser, wood, o'brien, & altman, 2016). in contrast, others (chiauzzi & wicks, 2019) have demonstrated that humans producing these digital traces can be affected and harmed by inclusion in research that analyses personally identifiable information without their knowledge, thereby complicating the exemption from ethical review and compliance under the common rule. such decisions often rest on determining whether or not data are public or private, without acknowledgement of the complexities of making this determination. nissembaum’s concept of ‘contextual integrity’ (nissenbaum, 2010) troubles the seeming public-private dichotomy. people who provide data on digital platforms have an interest in “ensuring it flows appropriately” (nissenbaum, 2010). what is technically considered publicly available data may be sensitive, personal or both, and its capture and use may prompt additional ethical dilemmas (ravn, barnwell, & barbosa neves, 2020). agreeing to the re-use of one’s data for research purposes in a terms of use agreement may be inadequate as a method of informed consent (halavais, 2019; vayena, mastroianni, & kahn, 2013), particularly as the scope, focus, and products of research evolve over time. changes in analytical methods and focus over time may also impact the extent to which anonymous or pseudonymous data may be deanonymized, with differences in data structuring analysis leading to critical implications for applicability of the common rule’s definition of ‘identifiable private information’. another factor that requires consideration, in addition to the researcher and the individual participants, is the impact on communities or platforms within which the digital traces occur (chiauzzi & wicks, 2019). the community itself has a key interest in whether research is conducted, how it is represented, and in the protection of its members’ privacy and sustained interactions. in some cases, there is a fourth actor involved: the platform which hosts the community, e.g. facebook or twitter (companies that have their own commercial interests and whose actions have stifled critical research; bruns, 2019). twitter has recently tightened its rules about what researchers can do with its data (see twitter, 2020). it is clear that we must also consider the interests of communities and corporate entities that develop and operate online platforms as we evaluate individual cases of data use for research purposes. vayena and tasioulas (2016) provide a useful framework for balancing two human rights that relate to this question: the right to privacy and the lesser-known right to science. in their analysis of human rights declarations, their reading of the right to science is not only that humans have a right to benefit from scientific advances, but also that ‘people have a right to actively participate in scientific inquiry’ (vayena & tasioulas, 2016, p. 4). indeed, the emergence of networked digital technologies has facilitated what has been called ‘citizen science’, including citizen-led research (vayena & tasioulas, 2015). if social media datasets are not necessarily fair game for research activities, how should the ethical practice of research be evaluated and ensured? can the passive contribution of data to a research project without informed consent of research aims or outputs be considered full participation? what if obtaining informed consent or ensuring beneficence for thousands (or millions) of individuals is simply impractical? the bluelight case study bluelight administrators describe the site as “an international, online, harm-reduction community committed to reducing the harms associated with drug use”. the site’s longevity is exceptional, having just celebrated its 20-year birthday. the site has hosted discussion forums since inception and keeps a large archive of drug-related discussion content spanning this entire period. bluelight’s structure as a stand-alone website means that there is no commercial platform that requires additional consideration. in this paper we draw on our experiences managing research partnerships on behalf of bluelight and liaising with data customers with an interest in its dataset. in the discussion, we draw out learnings from this case that will be of wider benefit when considering the ethics of digital research with stigmatised populations and on sensitive topics more generally. many online communities may reject offers to partner with researchers or may simply not have been asked. bluelight has supported research because it provides a win-win through enabling open dialogue between researchers and consumers. historically, many researchers will ‘do it anyway’ if the community doesn't actively create a pathway for engagement. the ‘do it anyway’ examples can be found in publications in academic journals where bluelight’s contribution has been erased in the spirit of protection: both to protect privacy of users and to help allow researchers to continue non-consented research, but the community has been able to identify itself (thus the ‘protection’ was inadequate, as well as being unwelcomed by the community). importantly, research is bluelight’s primary source of revenue. without research bluelight would not be able to pay its server costs and would not be able to keep the website free of paid advertising. additionally, the community wants to support research into drug-related harm reduction that might both challenge stereotypes and improve the health of people who use drugs. to that aim, bluelight requires researchers to participate in collaborative oversight of research practices. when evaluating a research topic, bluelight will deny authorisation to research deemed mis-aligned with its mission. due to the infrastructural burdens of web scraping and the lack of control over the data that is scraped, bluelight prefers to provide researchers directly with a tailored data file. funded or commercial research partners are asked to contribute an appropriate donation to help fund the website, while students and unfunded researchers may also donate small amounts. bluelight advises researchers who wish to present verbatim quotations to contact contributors directly and present the quotation in context, then offer them options for attribution or anonymisation. in the case of non-consent, quotes may be altered enough so as not to lead back to the original quote via search engine (wilkinson & thelwall, 2011) or used in a composite fashion to create an exemplar (see markham, 2012). bluelight also offers researchers a more involved partnership opportunity, where bluelight can offer collaboration on research grants, significant contribution to research outputs (co-authorship), opportunities to get regular feedback on emerging findings from the private moderators sub-forum, or to create a new private sub-forum specifically for the research project where the researcher can interact with a selected group of community members. discussion in the case study of bluelight, the community administrators play a pivotal role in negotiating the ethical parameters of research projects. it is a stark example of how frameworks that focus solely on how researchers interact with individual participants or contributors to a website/community may fall short in meeting community expectations. vayena et al.'s (2016) interpretation of the human right to science being one that includes a right to participate in research prompts serious consideration by ethics committees and researchers in this space. as social media platforms and third-party vendors develop an array of data use agreements and protections, the case study of bluelight illustrates one pathway towards striking a balance between fair game and locked down which could be drawn upon by other researchers and digital communities where topics are sensitive and/or identities are stigmatised. references bruns, a. (2019). after the ‘apicalypse’: social media platforms and their fight against critical scholarly research. information, communication & society, 22(11), 1544-1566. chiauzzi, e., & wicks, p. (2019). digital trespass: ethical and terms-of-use violations by researchers accessing data from an online patient community. journal of medical internet research, 21(2), e11985. halavais, a. (2019). overcoming terms of service: a proposal for ethical distributed research. information, communication & society, 22(11), 1567-1581. markham, a. (2012). fabrication as ethical practice. qualitative inquiry in ambiguous internet contexts. information, communication & society, 15(3), 334-353. nissenbaum, h. (2010). privacy in context. technology, policy, and the integrity of social life. stanford: stanford law books. ravn, s., barnwell, a., & barbosa neves, b. (2020). what is “publicly available data”? exploring blurred public–private boundaries and ethical practices through a case study on instagram. journal of empirical research on human research ethics, 15, 40-45. twitter. (2020). more about restricted uses of the twitter apis. retrieved from https://developer.twitter.com/en/developer-terms/more-on-restricted-use-cases vayena, e., gasser, u., wood, a., o'brien, d., & altman, m. (2016). elements of a new ethical framework for big data research. washington and lee law review online, 72(3), article 5. vayena, e., mastroianni, a., & kahn, j. (2013). caught in the web: informed consent for online health research. science translational medicine, 5(173), 173-176. vayena, e., & tasioulas, j. (2015). “we the scientists”: a human right to citizen science. philosophy & technology, 28(3), 479-485. wilkinson, d., & thelwall, m. (2011). researching personal information on the public web: methods and ethics. social science computer review, 29(4), 387-401. zimmer, m. (2010). “but the data is already public”: on the ethics of research in facebook. ethics & information technology, 12, 313-325. microsoft word aoir2021-submission-final abstract.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): schreiber, m. (2021, october). “i started the day just crying for 2 hours straight.” echo-locating the vulnerable self on instagram. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “i started the day just crying for 2 hours straight.” echo-locating the vulnerable self on instagram. author #1 maria schreiber author #1 university of salzburg on instagram, the hashtag “strokesurvivor” is regularly used by those who identify as such, but also by caregivers and professionals. overall, nearly 246.000 postings are labeled with this hashtag (april 2021). on instagram, hashtags function as rather loose elements of connecting people, postings and accounts (rambukkana 2015) compared to disease-specific facebook groups with admins, content moderation and guidelines (zhang et al 2013). building on previous online-ethnographic fieldwork on the #strokesurvivor-community on instagram, this contribution dives deeper into practices of echo-locating (markham 2020) the vulnerable self on instagram. the shared traumatic experience of stroke connects a diverse group of people in terms of age, gender, origin etc. some of the participating accounts were started specifically for stroke recovery documentation or advocacy, others just add the stroke aspect to their existing personal accounts. the level of engagement ranges from active community building to invisible lurking. the self-assigned term and hashtag strokesurvivor functions as a connecting node for the community and their topics, ranging from practical and therapeutical advice or information around stroke recovery and healthcare to disability activism, mutual encouragement and relationship advice, providing opportunities for practices of information management, relationship management and the focus of this paper identity management (schmidt 2006; 2013). the #strokesurvivor-community seems specifically interesting in terms of identity management as it emerges from a conjunctive existential, life-or-death experience and a shared crisis-laden phase of transition: the sudden loss of mental and/or physical abilities, loss of autonomy and independence, dependency on caregivers and long-term to lifetime recovery. moreover, this community “lives” within the rather loose, informal and public media ecology of instagram, which entails different dynamics and affordances than closed, topical, health-related online groups (maloney-krichmar & preece, 2005; zhang et al 2013). the paper therefore investigates communicative online practices of adapting to a new body, identity and self from a symbolic-interactionist perspective. i build on goffman’s concept of stigma, charmaz’ studies on adapting to illness and impairment and use the lens of markham’s (2020) concept of echo-locating the self through online connection, as it “highlights how people find the shape and quality of their social body by constantly assessing its positionality in relation to others. this is accomplished by a continuous call and response pattern. as people respond to us, we have a sense of a social self. a sense that we exist.” this paper therefore aims to reconstruct the complex practices of positioning oneself as a stroke survivor through communicating on instagram. the easy accessibility of online platforms has always been crucial for people with impaired mobility, but became even more important during the recent covid-19 pandemic. this is also relevant in relation to the aoir conference’s topic: being able to communicate with other survivors in a self-determined way gives them independence, compared to e.g. needing someone to drive them to a local support group. at the same time, they might become dependent on this online social space to negotiate and express their new identity and body due to the lack of other offline social spaces. an additional challenge of echo-locating the vulnerable self on instagram is the diffuse audience of public postings and a specific kind of context collapse: stroke survivors on instagram do not communicate with only each other in a closed, safe space for survivors only, they share their experience simultaneously with friends and family, who also know their previous, “non-stroke”-self. as a stroke survivor myself, i have been following the hashtag on instagram since september 2018, and started to systematically conduct an digital ethnography on the topic (ardèvol & gómez-cruz, 2013; pink et al., 2016; postill & pink, 2012) and collect qualitative data since october 2019, including fieldnotes, screenshots and interviews. the quote used in the title stems from a posting by a young female survivor, in which she negotiates both her pain and grief but also the question whether it is valid to share these feelings on the platform and how it will be anticipated: “you are probably reading this and［being me］ wtf omg no.” based on close readings and interpretations of postings, including pictures, captions and comments, as well as interviews with active community members, two critical antipodes of senseand self-making in the #strokesurvivor-community emerged: first, mourning the loss of the familiar body, self, and identity and related identity goals, as “the familiar becomes strange when altered bodies post new constraints, require careful scrutiny, and force attending to time, space, movement, and other people in new ways.” (charmaz 2018: 675). users therefore seek permission to mourn and also validation for their grief through their postings and comments. second, and probably oppositional, perseverance, or in its extreme form: toxic positivity this concept refers to a (more or less forced) attitude of optimism while ignoring valid reasons to actually not be positive, a mindset that seems to be embedded in a “contemporary cult of happiness” (wright 2014) and cruel optimism (berlant 2010). in the #strokesurvivorcommunity, a positive mindset and belief in the possibility of regaining physical and mental functions is a recurring theme and strong imperative. while perseverance is more common and strongly affirmed in the community, practices of mourning are seldom, but welcomed with solidarity; yet in both strategies, the sick or disabled body is not acknowledged as part of the transforming/transformed identity, as the struggle with internalized ableism is real, but not reflected upon. references ardèvol, e., & gómez-cruz, e. (2013). digital ethnography and media. in f. darlingwolf (ed.), the international encyclopedia of media studies: research methods in media studies. (pp. 498–518). wiley-blackwell. berlant, l. (2010). cruel optimism. in g. seigworth & m. gregg (eds.), the affect theory reader (pp. 93–117). charmaz, k. (2018). the body , identity , and self : adapting to impairment. the sociological quarterly, 36(4), 657–680. maloney-krichmar, d., & preece, j. (2005). a multilevel analysis of sociability, usability, and community dynamics in an online health community. acm transactions on computer-human interaction, 12(2), 201–232. https://doi.org/10.1145/1067860.1067864 markham, a. (2020). the ontological insecurity of disconnecting:a theory of echolocation and the self. draft paper on https://www.academia.edu/44577011/the_ontological_insecurity_of_disconnecting_a_ theory_of_echolocation_and_the_self (14.4.21) pink, s., horst, h. a., postill, j., hjorth, l., lewis, t., & tacchi, j. (2016). digital ethnography; principles and practice. sage publ. postill, j., & pink, s. (2012). social media ethnography: the digital researcher in a messy web. in media international australia. rambukkana, n. (2015). #introduction: hashtags as technosocial events. hashtag publics: the power and politics of discursive networks, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.3726/978-1-4539-1672-8 schmidt, j. (2006). social software: facilitating information-, identityand relationshipmanagement. in t. n. burg, & j.schmidt (eds.), blogtalks reloaded : social software research & cases (pp. 31-49). norderstedt: books on demand.https://nbnresolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-10215 schmidt, j.-h. (2013). practices of networked identity. in a companion to new media dynamics (pp. 365–374). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118321607.ch24 wright, c. (2014). happiness studies and wellbeing: a lacanian critique of contemporary conceptualisations of the cure. culture unbound, 6(4), 791–813. https://doi.org/10.3384/cu.2000.1525.146791 zhang, y., he, d., & sang, y. (2013). facebook as a platform for health information and communication: a case study of a diabetes group. journal of medical systems, 37(3). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-013-9942-7 microsoft word langton-constructing contemporary parenthood in digital spaces-constructing contemporary parenthood in.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): langton, k. (2021, october). constructing contemporary parenthood in digital spaces: walkthrough of infant feeding applications. paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. constructing contemporary parenthood in digital spaces: a walkthrough of infant feeding applications katrin langton queensland university of technology introduction infant feeding apps (if apps) are mobile applications designed to facilitate the feeding and care of children in their first year of life (i.e. infancy). they commonly include ‘babytracking’ features that promote the recording and tracking of basic caring activities like feeding, nappy changes and sleep, with some including informational support, like breastfeeding education (dienelt et al., 2019). infant feeding apps continue to be extremely popular, with apps like feed baby being downloaded millions of times (feed baby, n.d.), making them important mediators of how early parenthood is experienced and practiced. previous studies have considered infant feeding or baby-tracking apps as part of a wider ecology of mobile applications designed to manage reproductive health, such as period trackers, fertility and pregnancy apps (lupton, 2017). research on if apps to-date has explored how care and surveillance become entangled in digitally mediated tracking-as-care regimes that surveil and discipline women’s bodies specifically (thornham, 2019); these issues also relate to broader trends around the datafication of family life (barassi, 2020), which can produce valuable data-streams that contribute to surveillance capitalism (zuboff, 2015). what this study does similar to livingstone’s recent critique of media research approaches to datafication (2019), this study contends that a persistent focus on critical perspectives on parenting apps, and their (more or less perceived) power to discipline users into contributing to their own surveillance and datafication, disproportionately constructs users as disempowered, and lacking agency. yet, aspects of app design that may support “resistance, reappropriation and disruption” (thornham, 2019), remain underresearched. this paper is a work-in-progress that explores how contemporary parenthood is constructed and mediated through the functionalities and technological design of infant feeding apps. it aims to strike a balance between critical feminist analysis and the identification of opportunities for user resistance, agency and empowerment. methodology the app walkthrough method (light et al., 2018) was employed to facilitate a close examination of australian if apps feed baby and mum2mum. this method incorporates an exploration of an app’s environment of expected use, encourages the researcher to mimic everyday use while remaining aware of elements of the interface that shape the flow and experience of app use, and examines digital traces of users (e.g. user reviews) to shed light on unexpected uses. it thereby provides insights into developers’ agendas and socio-cultural influences that become embedded in technological design, and provides clues on the user experience. initial findings as its name suggests, mum2mum, published by the australian breastfeeding association (aba), specifically targets mothers as users. similar to the international la leche league, the aba’s organisational goals are to promote peer-to-peer support and breastfeeding education, to increase women’s self-efficacy in breastfeeding, and their agency in health decision making, thereby countering the medicalisation of infant feeding (jamieson, 2012); these goals are evident in mum2mum’s design. recording functions (feeds, nappies, sleep) are provided, but their use is discouraged, and visual and discursive elements of the app foreground the importance of the motherinfant-bond, through the inclusion of highly affective visual depictions of infant feeding. in an online community of like-minded mothers, these images can indicate a mutual recognition and acknowledgement of the specificity of women’s embodied experience of motherhood (van cleaf, 2020). yet, these framings also naturalise women into the primary caregiving role based on their biology, and the app’s informational material promotes a baby-led parenting philosophy that may alienate mothers who do not relate to this self-sacrificial maternal subjectivity. compared to other if apps however, mum2mum may fill a niche for mothers who align with a mothering philosophy that promotes a re-valuation of women’s embodied experience over the reduction of relational practices, like infant feeding, to numerical values. in contrast to mum2mum’s focus on embodiment, feed baby provides tools to “track every aspect of your newborn baby” (feed baby, n.d.), by enabling the daily recording of infant caring practices, and their tracking over time, without providing other instructive parenting support. tracking is enabled through a reduction of infant caring activities to quantities and durations. these reductions are common in if apps, and support the kinds of tracking-as-care regimes criticised by thornham (2019), that can contribute to the surveillance and disciplining of mothers in perinatal public health contexts (lee, 2018). third party access (e.g. health professionals, advertisers) to the information recorded in if apps can contribute to the normalisation of the unnecessary surveillance and disciplining of female bodies. however, feed baby collects minimal personal information and allows parents control over who to share recorded data with, providing opportunities for empowerment. parents’ own experiential knowledge of the context of data collection, together with the ability to control access to records of babies’ routines, can facilitate power-sharing in interactions with health-professionals (stern, 2012), as well as making parents feel more in control during a period of their lives that is often experienced as overwhelming (lupton, 2017). conclusion the findings highlighted above indicate that infant feeding apps can be very diverse in design, warranting exploration as a distinct category of tools within the range of reproductive health apps available. even the heavily-gendered mum2mum provides opportunities for empowerment, through its maternalist approach to infant feeding and care, by providing an alternative to if apps focussed on quantification. feed baby, despite its focus on quantification and tracking, also holds empowering potential, by enabling a greater sense of control throughout a chaotic life-stage, as long as parents can remain the gatekeepers of the recorded information. however, similar to the feminist critiques mentioned earlier, these findings are rather techno-deterministic; a deeper exploration of users’ perspectives (e.g. inclusion of user interviews), is necessary to provide more meaningful insights into different contexts of app use, and how it mediates parents’ lived experience and practice of contemporary parenthood. references barassi, v. (2020). datafied times: surveillance capitalism, data technologies and the social construction of time in family life. new media & society, 22(9), 1545-1560. https://doi-org.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/10.1177%2f1461444820913573 dienelt, k., moores, c., miller, j., & mehta, k. (2019). an investigation into the use of infant feeding tracker apps by breastfeeding mothers. health informatics journal. https://doi-org.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/10.1177%2f1460458219888402 feed baby. [@feedbaby]. (n.d.). feed baby [facebook site]. facebook. https://www.facebook.com/feedbaby jamieson, g. g. (2012). working together for health. in reaching for health: the australian women's health movement and public policy (pp. 155-178). anu press. lee, r. (2018). biopower, medicalization, and maternalism. in the ethics and politics of breastfeeding (pp. 33-67). university of toronto press. light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881-900. https://doiorg.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/10.1177%2f1461444816675438 livingstone, s. (2019). audiences in an age of datafication: critical questions for media research. television & new media, 20(2), 170-183. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1527476418811118 lupton, d. (2017). ‘it just gives me a bit of peace of mind’: australian women’s use of digital media for pregnancy and early motherhood. societies, 7(3), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc7030025 stern, m., cotton, s., & drentea, p. (2012). the separate spheres of online health. journal of family issues, 33, 1324-1350. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0192513x11425459 thornham, h. (2019). algorithmic vulnerabilities and the datalogical: early motherhood and tracking-as-care regimes. convergence, 25(2), 171-185. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1354856519835772 van cleaf, k. m. (2020). the pleasure of connectivity: media, motherhood, and the digital maternal gaze. communication, culture & critique, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz045 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): stewart, n., lesage, f. (2020, october). searching for tasks: taskorientation and the processuality of digital skills. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. searching for tasks: task-orientation and the processuality of digital skills nicole stewart simon fraser university frederik lesage simon fraser university digital skills can be reimagined with a task-orientation approach. we highlight findings from a 2020 pilot research project. 1. towards a task-orientation perspective on digital skills skills are not “out there” to be learned but develop through their enactment in situ. rather than defining skills using a toolor media-driven approach, we understand skills as situated, embodied processes known as ‘task-orientation’. coined by tim ingold (2011, p. 195) this term refers to “any practical operation, carried out by a skilled agent in an environment as part of his or her normal business of life”. part of this approach entails taking a holistic, narrative approach to investigating everyday life (ingold, 2000; 2006; 2011) which some scholars have applied to digital media use (moores 2017; sumartojo et al. 2016; pink 2016, 2015; pink & leder mackley 2013; pink 2011). we believe task-orientation offers a flexible way to define tasks performed online and offline encompassing three interrelated themes: 1) the processional quality of tool use; 2) the synergy of practitioner, tool, and material; and, 3) the coupling of perception and action. our focus for this project is an investigation into how people perform unfamiliar tasks with digital media using the four processional phases. unfamiliar tasks are an inherent part of our digitally-mediated everyday life to the extent that we have learned to ‘cope’ (see sigaut 1994; see ingold, 2000, p. 332; see also nicolosi & falsaperna, 2015, p. 71) with them — making them, in turn, one of our most ubiquitous and essential digital skills. 2. research design our fieldwork for the project took place in february 2020 in vancouver, canada. participants were recorded through lookback.io, a discreet screen and webcam recording software, which we used to track bodily and digital movements. combining a range of qualitative research techniques, we analyzed screen and webcam videos for behavioural patterns and interviewed participants using the walkthrough method (light & burgess, 2018). eleven female participants between the ages of 18 and 59 were invited to choose from one of three unfamiliar tasks to complete a self-directed online search to learn a new task. tasks were developed around common workplace skills, such as communication (a social media audit), creativity (modifying an image in adobe photoshop), and technology and information management skills (creating a pivot or macro table in microsoft excel). narrative is an important feature of task-orientation, and thus the research design, because a thing becomes a tool in context to its story (ingold, 2011; van ittersum, 2014; lave et al., 1990; patchett, 2016; etc.). we initially analysed participant stories using detailed narrative description but found it difficult to identify the processional phases. taking pen to paper, we used a colour-coding system to identify the processual moments (see 3. below) and any key pathways involved in these phases. we used this analysis to create a one-page profile of each participant, on which a visualization specialist developed a graph to show the proportion of time spent in each phase and a footprint showing the order of search phases and pathways. 3. the processional quality of tool use tasks are not predefined by a program. their performance is a processional enactment — an “episode of tool use” (ingold 2006, p.76) in which “every step is a development of the one before and a preparation for the one following” (ingold, 2006, p. 67). the process occurs through a range of phases: getting ready, setting out, carrying on, and finishing off (ingold, 2006, p. 67). 3.1 getting ready the starting point of any search for our participants is getting ready, which always moves into setting out. the first part of the getting ready phase is choosing an environment, ranging from a quiet bedroom to a bustling coffee shop. it includes the placement of materials like devices, coffee cups, or pens. on screen, it involves reading instructions, opening browsers and applications. for example, kendall, an israelicanadian undergrad in her 20s, opens her laptop at a campus coffee shop, opening google on her browser, and grabbing a notebook and pen out of her backpack. kendall, like many of our participants, goes through getting ready multiple times in her search process. for another participant, stephanie, a female ghanaian-canadian in her 20s, setting out can take time, as she gets ready over three different days and work environments. rebecca, a taiwanese canadian female in her 40s, needs help organizing a computer and the software, which shows help can be part of getting ready. 3.2 setting out the moment that getting ready moves to setting out is when “rehearsal ends and performance begins” (ingold, 2011, p. 54). for all of our participants, setting out to cope with these unfamiliar tasks entails launching google. keywords are important devices for navigating their search process, which we call webfaring – borrowed from ingold’s (2000; 2011) concept of wayfaring. with digital skills, there seems to be an inherent “finding your way” through tasks, which makes the essential task of using photoshop or excel the searching itself. every participant went through setting out after the first stage of getting ready. early keyword searches help participants understand the task while later keyword searches help the participant do the task. for example, rebecca starts her search with: “how to conduct a social media audit.” her later searches include more focused questions like “mcdonald’s on facebook” and “what is whatsapp[?]” 3.3 carrying on carrying on is the rhythm that develops when people work “with instruments and materials… rather than against them” (ingold, 2011, p. 55). abra is an asian canadian in her 20s and the only participant in the study to complete two tasks. she wants to create a pivottable but “excel just did not work,” which made her “really stressed out.” abra sits with her smartphone in a quiet bedroom, swiping in and out, rhythmically going between websites and her notes app for nearly half of her work session. yasmin and yesfir work from a couch in their shared living room. they are sisters, both in their 30s, of iranian descent; farsi is their mother tongue. yasmin is an mba student; yesfir has a bachelor’s degree and is currently taking classes in english and accounting. yasmin and yesfir both engage in carrying on at the precise moment they switch to farsi in their search. 3.4 finishing up not all participants go through the finishing up stage. some people abruptly leave the search process while they are in setting out or carrying on. finishing up seems to have a getting ready phase that involves some combination of reviewing instructions, checking work, or a mini-reperformance of work. while the above materials are only early observations, these findings confirm the value of taking a task-oriented approach to investigating digital skills by demonstrating that digital skills are necessarily embedded in their processual performance. references ingold, t. (2011). being alive essays on movement, knowledge and description. abingdon, oxon; new york: routledge. ingold, t. (2000). the perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling & skill.new york: routledge. ingold, t. (2006). walking the plank: meditations on a process of skill. in dakers, john r. (ed). defining technological literacy: towards an epistemological framework (pp.65-80), new york: palgrave macmillan, 2006. ingold, t. (1993). the temporality of the landscape. world archaeology: conceptions of time and ancient society, 25(2), 152–174. https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.1993.9980235 lave, j. (1988). cognition in practice: mind, mathematics and culture in everyday life. (1988). cambridge university press. lave, j. & wenger, e. (1990). situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge, uk: cambridge university. light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881–900. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 lookback.io (2020). retrieved from: https://lookback.io/ moores, s. (2017). digital orientations: movement, dwelling, and media use. in t. markham & s. rodgers (eds.), conditions of mediation: phenomenological perspectives on media (pp. 59–66). new york: peter lang. nicolosi, g., & falsaperna, f. (2015). open codes : skills, participation and democracy in new technology development / by guido nicolosi ; designed by francesco falsaperna. cambridge scholars publishing. patchett, m. (2016). the taxidermist’s apprentice: stitching together the past and present of a craft practice. cultural geographies, 23(3), 401–419. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474015612730 pink, s. (2011). multimodality, multisensoriality and ethnographic knowing: social semiotics and the phenomenology of perception. qualitative research, 11(3), 261–276. pink, s. (2015). approaching media through the senses: between experience and representation. media international australia, 154(1), 5–14. pink, s., & leder mackley, k. (2013). saturated and situated: expanding the meaning of media in the routines of everyday life. media, culture & society, 35(6), 677–691. sigaut, e. (1993). how can we analyze and describe technical actions? in berthelet, a., & chavaillon, j. the use of tools by human and non-human primates, 381-397. clarendon press; oxford university press. sigaut, e. (1994). technology. in ingold, t. (ed) companion encyclopedia of anthropology: humanity, culture and social life, 420-459. london: routledge. sumartojo, s., pink, s., lupton, d., & labond, c. h. (2016). the affective intensities of datafied space. emotion, space and society, 21, 33–40. van ittersum, d. (2014). craft and narrative in diy instructions. technical communication quarterly, 23(3), 227-246. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): trott, v., beckett, j., paech, v. (2020, october). tuning out hate speech on reddit: automating moderation and detecting toxicity in the manosphere. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. tuning out hate speech on reddit: automating moderation and detecting toxicity in the manosphere dr verity trott monash university dr jennifer beckett university of melbourne venessa paech university of sydney tuning out hate speech on reddit: automating moderation and detecting toxicity in the manosphere over the past few years social media platforms have been struggling to moderate at scale. at the same time, they have come under fire for failing to mitigate the risks of perceived ‘toxic’ content or behaviour on their platforms. discussion has turned to the role that automated machine-learning (ml) tools might play in an effort to better cope with content moderation, to combat hate speech, ‘dangerous organisations’ and other bad actors present on platforms. in 2017, jigsaw announced a technological answer to the problem of hate speech: a machine-learning technology called perspective that promises to detect toxicity in online comments with the goal of automating moderation. in late 2019, reddit, marketed as the ‘front page of the internet,’ announced that they would be using automated technology like perspective to help moderate harassment and bullying on their platform. this paper contributes to thinking about the role and suitability of ml for content moderation on community platforms such as reddit and facebook. in particular, it looks at how ml tools operate (or fail to operate) effectively at the intersection between online sentiment within communities and social and platform expectations of acceptable discourse. through an examination of the r/mgtow subreddit we problematise current understandings of the notion of ‘toxicity’ as applied to cultural or social subcommunities, like mgtow, online and explain how this interacts with google’s perspective tool. reddit has found itself host to a range of communities that are connected to the manosphere, a loose confederacy of male-only groups, that have gained public attention for perpetuating violent and misogynistic attitudes (ging 2017: 638). some of these groups have been directly tied to incidences of mass violence offline provoking media scrutiny into the role of platforms like reddit in hosting violent men’s groups (kalish and kimmel 2010; nicholas and agius 2018). reddit has responded to the mounting public scrutiny by sanctioning subreddit communities that are deemed offensive to the mainstream public. further, they have updated their harassment and bullying policies and announced the enhancement of their moderation efforts with the employment of machine-learning technology. the subreddit for mgtow (also known as men going their own way) was chosen as a site for examination because of their status as the largest growing community belonging to the manosphere (a loose confederacy of men’s groups that have garnered attention for their role in several violent mass physical attacks) (jones, trott, wright 2019). the top ten threads of all time on r/mgtow were scraped in october 2019 using the reddit api and included every comment within these threads, resulting in a dataset of 2,861 comments. these comments were initially analysed for toxicity using perspective. comments were rated as either not toxic, ‘quiet,’ ‘low,’ ‘moderate,’ ‘loud,’ and ‘blaring’. it is not clear how these categories of toxicity are defined but the developer information for perspective states that comments are scored based on ‘the perceived impact a comment might have on a conversation,’ (jigsaw, 2019). in other words, a comment’s discursive function, rather than the attitudes and beliefs depicted within the comment. overall 70% of comments were filtered within r/mgtow but the majority of comments were rated as ‘low’ toxicity (30%) and less than 10% were considered ‘loud’ and only 1% were labelled as ‘blaring’ in toxicity. while the overall results registered low levels of toxicity within the community it has become clear that reddit does not view the group in the same light. as of 6th february 2020, r/mgtow has been quarantined by reddit for breaching the platform’s community guidelines. to interrogate the discrepancy between perspective’s understanding of ‘toxicity’ and that of reddit, further analysis was conducted on the content of the subreddit. this involved deductive coding of the content based on reddit’s internal community guidelines and the sense of community index-2 (sci-2). the sci-2 measures community solidarity (sense of community) across four broad categories: membership, influence, reciprocity and shared emotional connection and is used by community management professionals and sociologists as a measure of community ‘health’. our overall analysis points to a tension between current social framings and operationalised notions of ‘toxicity’ and sociological understandings of community health as framed by the sci-2. understanding these tensions exposes issues around the use of ml tools for the automated moderation of community spaces within platforms. of particular interest is the finding that automated ml tools, especially those that rely on sentiment analysis as perspective does, may be good tools for measuring individual community health, making them potentially useful to community management practitioners. community health in this sense, however, is not what we consider when we talk about the effects of groups such as mgtow within the broader fabric of society. previous scholars (papacharissi 2002) have conceptualized online spaces such as reddit to be an extension of the public sphere thus it is important to redefine ‘toxicity’ to take into account more than corporate interests that frame toxicity around platform engagement. the key contribution of this paper is theorizing a framework for understanding and defining ‘toxicity’ in moderation in terms of different levels: corporate, community-specific, and broader societal interests. it draws attention to the different logics at play that collide and intersect in moderation processes, which have resulted in several challenges and key failings in the development of automated moderation tools and the defining of ‘toxicity’. references ging, d. (2017). alphas, betas, and incels: theorising the masculinities of the manosphere. men and masculinities, 22(4): 638-657. jigsaw. (2019) perspectiveapi, website, viewed 22 november 2019. available at: https://www.perspectiveapi.com/#/home jones, c., trott, v., and wright, s. (2019) sluts and soyboys: mgtow and the production of misogynistic online harassment. new media & society. epub ahead of print 8 november. doi: 10.1177/1461444819887141. kalish, r. and kimmel, m. (2010). suicide by mass murder: masculinities, aggrieved entitlement, and rampage school shootings. health sociology review 19(4): 451-464. nicholas, l. and agius, c. (2018). #notallmen, #menenism, manospheres and unsafe spaces: overt and subtle masculinism in anti-“pc” discourse. (pp. 31-59) in: nicholas l and agius c (eds) the persistence of global masculinities new york: springer. com-con (1).pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): halavais, a., bergstrom, k., massanari, a., & poor, n. (2020, october 28-31). reddit’s communities and consequences. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. reddit’s communities & consequences alexander halavais arizona state university kelly bergstrom university of hawaiʻi at mānoa adrienne massanari university of illinois at chicago nathaniel poor underwood institute as a platform, reddit provides a bit of a conundrum. despite being visited by more people than netflix and remaining one of the most visited spaces on the web (more than one in ten american adults used reddit in 2019, according to pew), it remains extraordinarily resistant to generalization. some of the worst of internet culture can be found on the site. it has served to amplify the voices of misogynists, supported vigilantism, and hosted child pornography. at the same time, some of the more civil conversations and learning communities appear on the site, with subreddits like change my view fostering respectful deliberation. even more than many other platforms, the lack of centralized moderation means that reddit contains a very wide range of practices, some of them quite extreme. but because these exist on a single platform, users bring these practices with them, both to the “front page” of the platform, and to other areas within. the three papers that make up this panel seek to better understand localized behaviors and how they may relate to global flows of participants and practices. of course, many of the discursive patterns that were fostered in subreddits make their way into other online and offline contexts--as anyone who has been called a “cuck” can tell you. but before they do that, they have often been produced as part of a culture local to one virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 virtual event: subreddit, or to a “neighborhood” of subreddits. how these practices emerge, evolve, and relate to the actions of their users runs as a thread through the three presentations. adrienne massanari begins the session with a discussion of the “dark play” that takes place on a subreddit that has become the base not just for support for donald trump, but much of the alt-right: the donald. a close textual reading and critical discourse analysis of the subreddit reveals the ways in which trump fandom is performed as a form of play that helps to constitute community, recreating the trump rally within a subreddit. alexander halavais presents an analysis of the neighborhood structure of reddit: the ways in which subreddits cluster, and how this affects the spread of ideas and practices on the network. reddit remains disproportionately understudied when compared with other popular platforms, and much of the work that has approached it has focused either on the platform as a whole, or more often on particular (sometimes representative) subreddits. contributor two argues that mapping the structure of reddit grounds an understanding of how ideas move between them. more importantly, it suggests how practices and discursive expectations--both prosocial and potentially harmful--move through the corridors of reddit. appropriately, in the last paper, kelly bergstrom and nathanial poor explore the process by which people exit their communities on reddit. the question of why people leave communities is a long-standing one, but the trace data provided by reddit allows for this history to be explored more directly, up through their final farewells. understanding these as cases where individuals are unable to find lasting community provides an opportunity to understand part of the impetus for migration, and the ways in which this informs our view of reddit as a community of communities. the panelists have created a brief discussion of issues around research and reddit that we will upload as part of the online content for the conference. dark play, fandom, and reddit’s /r/the_donald adrienne massanari university of illinois at chicago reddit, the popular social news/community site, has been long known for its transgressive, carnivalesque humor. but it has also gained increasing media attention for the toxic content that circulates many of its communities (subreddits) given the administrator’s hands-off approach to content moderation (massanari, 2015). the platform has also become a hub for the “alt-right” in the us: a loose coalition of “intellectuals” like richard spencer, racialists from active white nationalist groups, denizens of 4chan’s /pol board, and meninists (incels, men’s rights activists, and other anti-feminists) (wendling, 2018). as matthew lyons (2017) argues, individuals affiliated with this loose coalition demonstrate, “a contempt for both liberal multiculturalism and mainstream conservatism; a belief that some people are inherently superior to others; a strong internet presence and embrace of specific elements of online culture; and a selfpresentation as being new, hip, and irreverent.” however, little is understood about how these groups leverage the sociotechnical affordances of platforms like reddit and weaponize its culture of play. in this paper, i explore the ways in which a kind of “dark play” has been normalized on reddit, focusing on /r/the_donald (td), a popular community (subreddit) for supporters of donald trump. dark play subverts the play frame, blurring the lines between play and not-play (schechner, 1995). in “alt-right” communities dark play might take many forms, from subtle dog-whistles in humorous memetic content, to “trolling,” to outright harassment and intimidation. using td as a case study, this work reveals the discursive tactics and approaches used to both build community among subscribers as well as spread disinformation and foment dissent more broadly. play and dark play scholars have noted that play is an integral part of human culture, often set aside from “ordinary” life and governed by its own set of rules (caillois, 2001). it is contradictory; simultaneously “not serious” and yet, utterly absorbing (salen & zimmerman, 2003; sicart, 2014; sutton-smith, 1997). for the purposes of this paper, i am interested in a particular form of play: what performance theorist richard schechner (1995) terms “dark play.” despite its potential usefulness for understanding all kinds of rituals, performances, and collective action, dark play remains relatively undertheorized. schechner notes, dark play may be conscious playing, but it can also be playing in the dark, when some or even all of the players don’t know they are playing.… dark play subverts order, dissolves frames, breaks its own rules, so that the playing itself is in danger of being destroyed…. unlike the inversions of carnivals, ritual clowns, and so on (whose agendas are public) dark play’s inversions are not declared or resolved; its end is not integration but disruption, deceit, excess, and gratification (p. 36). dark play creates a space where one or all of the players may be unaware that a game is being played or that the space even delineated for play. online spaces are ripe for new and effective forms of dark play as memetic logics that underpin them remain relatively impenetrable to outsiders. and it is enabled by the ways online spaces amplify and render more salient popular content through algorithms and the technological affordances they offer users (davis & chouinard, 2016). as whitney phillips and ryan milner (2017) argue, the internet trades in a kind of “ambivalence” that is inherently polysemous and dialectical. the dark play of the “alt-right” takes advantage of this ambivalence to spread far-right ideology while simultaneously disavowing it as mere play or “trolling.” method this case study is based on a close textual reading and critical discourse analysis of the_donald (td) subreddit and associated media coverage (fairclough, 2010) prior to the subreddit’s quarantine in june 2019. critical discourse analysis (cda) engages in an examination of texts with particular attention to issues of power in an effort to critique and change social realities. i have also employed techniques drawn from visual studies to analyze how the verbal and visual elements reinforce (or contradict) one another (rose, 2016). the primary question guiding my analysis is, “how does /r/the_donald create community through dark play?” in the next section, i briefly discuss one finding from this project: the way dark play envisions trump supporters as fans. /r/the_donald as fandom community recasting support for donald trump through the lens of fandom becomes a critical way in which “dark play” occurs on the subreddit. theorists have tended to emphasize the democratic, liberatory potential of fandom, and the possibility it offers for political activism around social issues (brough & shresthova, 2012). however recent events like #gamergate remind us that fan communities are often divisive, exclusionary, and toxic (chess & shaw, 2015; paul, 2018). trump-as-candidate implicitly understood and was motivated by the idea of the fan (note his repeated use of the term “fan” throughout the campaign) and created catchphrases “make america great again” (maga) that were memorable and potent. in turn, his supporters (particularly those from 4chan and reddit), anointed him their “god emperor” – a larger-than life figure that was part relatable everyman, part untouchable superhero. /r/the_donald’s description mirrors this move from mere supporter to fan: be advised this forum is for serious supporters of president trump. we have discussions, memes, amas, and more. we are not politically correct. the description implies that there is a difference between supporters and “serious” supporters – the former perhaps being more likely to question other participants or even challenge trump’s policies. it also suggests that any disagreements that might happen between “serious supporters” are not fundamentally ideological in nature. the subreddit instead serves as a simulation of one of trump’s rallies, where dissent is muted, and where harassment, intimidation, and violence by trump fans is tacitly accepted. references brough, m. m., & shresthova, s. (2012). fandom meets activism: rethinking civic and political participation. transformative works and cultures, 10, 1-27. available online: https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/303/265 caillois, r. (2001). man, play and games (m. barash, trans.). urbana, il: university of illinois press. chess, s., & shaw, a. (2015). a conspiracy of fishes, or, how we learned to stop worrying about #gamergate and embrace hegemonic masculinity. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 59(1), 208-220. davis, j. l., & chouinard, j. b. (2016). theorizing affordances: from request to refuse. bulletin of science, technology & society, 36(4), 241-248. available online: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0270467617714944 doi: 10.1177/0270467617714944 fairclough, n. (2010). critical discourse analysis: the critical study of language (2nd ed.). london: routledge. lyons, m. n. (2017). ctrl-alt-delete: the origins and ideology of the alternative right. retrieved july 1, 2019, from http://www.politicalresearch.org/2017/01/20/ctrl-altdelete-report-on-the-alternative-right/ massanari, a. l. (2015). #gamergate and the fappening: how reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. new media & society. http://nms.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/10/07/1461444815608807.abstract paul, c. a. (2018). the toxic meritocracy of video games: why gaming culture is the worst. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. phillips, w., & milner, r. m. (2017). the ambivalent internet: mischief, oddity, and antagonism online. cambridge, uk: polity. rose, g. (2016). visual methodologies: an introduction to researching with visual materials (4th ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage. salen, k., & zimmerman, e. (2003). rules of play: game design fundamentals. cambridge, ma: the mit press. schechner, r. (1995). the future of ritual: writings on culture and performance. london: routledge. sicart, m. (2014). play matters. cambridge, ma: mit press. sutton-smith, b. (1997). the ambiguity of play. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. wendling, m. (2018). alt-right: from 4chan to the white house. london: pluto press. the nicer neighborhoods of reddit alexander halavais arizona state university it was the best of reddits, it was the worst of reddits. like any social platform, reddit contains multitudes of social interaction. thanks in part to its decentralization, reddit seems to mark out these extremes. on one end, this means that it supports “toxic technocultures” (massanari, 2017), as home to the “fappening” and subreddits dedicated to incels, child pornography, and images of women who have been beaten. on the other, some of the richest examples of deliberation and scientific exploration can be found on the site, reflecting some of the loftiest ideals of the early open internet (borge bravo & sáez, 2016; halavais, 2013). in some subreddits, both are found at the same time (buozis, 2019). by understanding how these neighborhoods of reddit are related, we can understand how discursive practices--both prosocial and less so--move among these spaces. generally, the reddit you see is determined by the subreddits you subscribe to and visit, just as two people living in a large city are likely to have very different experiences of that city, depending on their home neighborhood. can we find similar neighborhoods in reddit: clusters of subreddits that tend to make up shared space? if so, how are these neighborhoods related? are there areas of reddit that are more deliberative, more supportive, or kinder? does nearness, in terms of co-membership, allow for the sharing of ideas? of cultural values and discursive styles? the work presented here shows that there are cohesive neighborhoods on reddit and presents some of the ways of determining these neighborhoods (and the assumptions those approaches make), and ways of working with these maps. mapping these spaces provides a framework for answering other questions. what are the differences between those who stay within their “home” communities and those who roam? do users code-switch, or do they use the patterns of interaction from one space in the other contexts they participate in? finally, are there design cues that may be drawn from this user behavior? detecting neighborhoods there is a long history of attempting to find the borders of communities based on areas of density and sparseness within networks (fortunato, 2010). there are a number of ways you might identify which of the over one million subreddits should be included in an analysis, and then how these are related. while arguments could be made for using individual redditor’s subscriptions, posting, comments, or reading to determine shared interest between subreddits. some of this is determined by the availability of data: it is difficult to know what subreddits are regularly visited and read by redditors, although reading posts and comments is by far the most frequent activity on the site. here, the pushshift collection is used (baumgartner et al., 2020), which includes data on each post and comment made. the focus on discursive communities and civility means that comments posted represent the best way to tie subreddits. taking the top ten thousand subreddits, by number of comments in the previous year, a network is constructed based on comments made by individual reddit accounts. this network is then clustered into 36 groups, and distributed according to the top interlinkages and secondary linkages in terms of shared commenters in order to better visualize this space. but beyond providing a way of thinking about how subreddits might be related, this gives us a set of weighted pairwise connections between popular subreddits that can help us to understand a range of questions relating to the spread of information and practices across reddit neighborhoods. tracing the contagion of interactive strategies a great deal of work has been done to understand how viral content spreads across various parts of the internet. we might expect that discursive practices follow similar lines. but since such practices rely on social consensus, are they less likely to spread from the contexts in which they emerge? do the practices--formal and informal--that allow for “change my view” to work then lead to users who bring these styles of deliberation to other spaces on reddit? do some of the more toxic subreddits tend to spread their less convivial styles. (given new restrictions put in place by many subreddits, which reject postings by users with substantial contributions to subreddits that have been quarantined thanks to violations of the reddit terms, there seems to be some suggestion of such a relationship.) a number key terms terms have been associated with groups that tend toward the extreme right on reddit--indeed one of these “red pilling” has now largely passed into the common vernacular. tracing the use of these terms by users within the neighborhoods of the alt-right to other communities provides an indication that connection strength and shared membership tends to lead to “leakage” of some of these ideas and forms of argument. identifying markers of healthy deliberation is harder. an initial qualitative exploration of user’s adoption of the standards of change my view, and the degree to which this affects their participation in other subreddits, is offered. the intent is to provide ways of automatically identifying and tagging deliberative processes so as to measure this at scale across the landscape of reddit. understanding the vast variety of interaction that occurs on platforms--and in this case, on reddit--provides both a wider understanding of discourse communities, and the means of intervening on platforms to foster sociable spaces. references baumgartner, j., zannettou, s., keegan, b., squire, m., & blackburn, j. (2020). the pushshift reddit dataset. arxiv preprint arxiv:2001.08435. borge bravo, r., & santamarina sáez, e. (2016). from protest to political parties: online deliberation in new parties in spain. medijske studije/media studies, 7(14), 104122. buozis, m. (2019). doxing or deliberative democracy? evidence and digital affordances in the serial subreddit. convergence, 25(3), 357-373. fortunato, s. (2010). community detection in graphs. physics reports, 486(3-5), 75-174. halavais, a. (2013). home made big data‽ challenges and opportunities for participatory social research. first monday, 18(10). massanari, a. (2017). # gamergate and the fappening: how reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. new media & society, 19(3), 329-346. sundaresan, v., hsu, i., & chang, d. (2014). subreddit recommendations within reddit communities. leaving reddit communities: a large scale analysis kelly bergstrom university of hawaiʻi at mānoa nathaniel poor underwood institute introduction reddit, the self-proclaimed “front page of the internet”, is currently one of the most visited sites on the internet (as reported by amazon’s alexa.com metrics). every day, millions of users post comments and replies in thousands of online communities. these communities, called subreddits, range in topic from games, to funny pictures of cats, to extreme conspiracy theories. communication on reddit is relatively anonymous, as posting comments requires only a username and password with no personally identifying information required. these communities, formed by communication (dewey, 1927), have norms for behavior, ranging from subreddit-specific norms (bergstrom, 2011) to higher-level norms that are expected across the entire site (chandrasekharan et al., 2018). subredddits are started by, and run by, the users, and reddit employees generally take a hands-off approach to content. however, reddit has also been the subject of intense scrutiny at various times: for its problematic role in the search for the boston marathon bombers (kaufman, 2013), trading sexually explicit photographs of minors (chen, 2011), as well as documented problems with both bigotry (massanari, 2017) and violence (robertson, 2019). despite the critiques of the more toxic elements of the site, reddit has also become home to smaller sub-communities who have managed to carve out safe enclaves and persist using the site where the larger community may not be so welcoming (massanari, 2019). while such case studies are important to understand the (sub)community based culture and norms associated with reddit, the research presented in this paper seeks to better understand what happens to the users who do not find such enclaves and ultimately cease participating in the site and the communities where they were posting. disengaging from online communities investigations into why users leave other online communities, such as the communities that invariably form around online multiplayer games, found that players often leave for reasons beyond a personal lack of interest and instead there are internal or external forces that push a user towards disengagement (bergstrom, 2019; jiang, 2018; poor & skoric, 2014). our goal here is to better understand why users disengage from reddit. community is vital to humanity (dunbar, 2005), we evolved to communicate and form community (gamble, gowlett, & dunbar, 2014), and our communication capabilities and communities far surpass those of other species (tomasello, et al., 2009). communities give us life, while exile and excommunication can mean death to individuals when we are discussing real-world and historical communities. online communities can and do provide much in the way of emotional and information support, as much research has shown. however, they are far easier to leave: one merely needs to stop logging in to the system, as many people do and have done over time with online platforms including reddit. leaving would mean the loss of these resources (emotional and informational), as well as the loss of any personal ties that had been formed. when an individual leaves a community, it also means that the community loses the resources of that person (emotional support, informational support, and emotional ties). losing the wrong person, or too many people, can destabilize a community. thus, one person leaving can be a problem for both that person and the community itself. our focus in this research is to better understand why users leave reddit. study design to address this question, we employ large-scale network analysis techniques to track the events leading up to a user’s disengagement with the site and the community with which they had participated. we study these events by drawing on millions of reddit posts: 52 million posts from reddit’s launch in 2005 to 2014, and then a second set (to be collected) from then to december, 2019. trace ethnography (geiger & ribes, 2011) has shown that the data left behind by users is rich and meaningful, in this case we examine posts made by a reddit account that exists yet is no longer is active on the site—abandoned yet not deleted. however, isolating the moment that a user stops participating is only part of the picture. drilling down, we employ the methods outlined by nelson (2017) to determine the conditions under which previously prolific posters decide to no longer engage with the site, if indeed they have left hints or notices in their final posts. while still a work in progress, this paper will report on research to date about why users quit reddit, if these reasons have shifted over time. trying to discover if users of a platform give hints (or even direct notice) of their imminent departure can help identify what the reasons for their leaving are, and can in turn suggest actions that may help these communities retain users and thus retain cohesion over time. community stability is important as stable communities are better positioned to give the various types of support that communities give to the individuals who comprise those communities. references bergstrom, k. (2011). “don’t feed the troll”: shutting down debate about community expectations on reddit.com. first monday, 16(8). retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3498/3029 bergstrom, k. (2019). moving beyond churn: barriers and constraints to playing a social network game. games and culture, 14(2), 170-189. chandrasekharan, e., samory, m., jhaver, s., charvat, h., bruckman, a., lampe, c., gilbert, e. (2018). the internet’s hidden rules: an empirical study of reddit norm violations at micro, meso, and macro scales. in proceedings of the 2018 acm conference on computer supported cooperative work (cscw). https://doi.org/10.1145/3274301 chen, a. (2011, october 11). reddit’s child porn scandal. gawker. retrieved february 27, 2020, from http://gawker.com/5848653/reddits-child-porn-scandal?tag=jailbait dewey, j. (1927). the public and its problems. denver, co: swallow press. dunbar, r. (2005). the human story. london, uk: faber & faber. gamble, c., gowlett, j., & dunbar, r. (2014). thinking big: how the evolution of social life shaped the human mind. london, uk: thames & hudson. geiger, r. s., & ribes, d. (2011, january). trace ethnography: following coordination through documentary practices. in proceedings of the 2011 44th hawaii international conference on system sciences (hicss). ieee. jiang, q. (2018). off the hook: exploring reasons for quitting playing online games in china. social behavior and personality: an international journal, 46(12), 20972112. kaufman, l. (2013, april 28). bombings trip up reddit in its turn in spotlight. the new york times. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/business/media/bombings-trip-up-reddit-inits-turn-in-spotlight.html massanari, a. l. (2017). #gamergate and the fappening: how reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. new media & society, 19(3), 329-346. massanari, a. l. (2019). “come for the period comics. stay for the cultural awareness”: reclaiming the troll identity through feminist humor on reddit’s/r/trollxchromosomes. feminist media studies, 19(1), 19-37. nelson, l. k. (2017). computational grounded theory: a methodological framework. sociological methods & research, 0049124117729703. poor, n., & skoric, m. m. (2014). death of a guild, birth of a network: online community ties within and beyond code. games and culture, 9(3), 182–202. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412014537401 robertson, a. (2019). reddit quarantines trump subreddit r/the_donald for violent comments. the verge. retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/26/18759967/reddit-quarantines-the-donaldtrump-subreddit-misbehavior-violence-police-oregon tomasello, m., dweck, c. s., silk, j. b., skyrms, b., & spelke, e. s. (2009). why we cooperate. cambridge, ma: boston review. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): gerrand, v. (2022, november). drawing to disrupt: alternative narratives to the manosphere. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. drawing to disrupt: alternative narratives to the manosphere dr vivian gerrand centre for resilient and inclusive societies, deakin university content calling out everyday sexism on social media has grown in prominence in recent years through the work of feminist instagram accounts such as @theequalityinstitute, @disbonjoursalepute and @vulgadrawings. and yet, for the most part, such accounts have had limited impact on the proliferation of materials associated with the so-called manosphere, which uphold the narrative that men are victims of women’s empowerment. intersecting with colonial, far-right and white supremacist views, this content promotes traditionalist gender norms that eschew feminism and are imbued with misogyny, leading to threats and acts of violence against women (ran 2021). efforts to mitigate the social influence of such movements through cve counter narrative campaigns or the removal of content from big tech platforms through de platforming initiatives have limited efficacy (conway 2020; hemmingsen and castro 2017; rogers 2020). this is the case for at least three key reasons. first, such content may simply be relocated to niche unregulated dark web environments. second, violent extremist groups may turn to analogue means to conduct their recruitment processes offline (berger et al. 2020). finally, content-driven ‘pull factor’ interventions will be inadequate if ‘push factor’ underlying grievances that motivate radicalization processes are not addressed (vergani et al. 2020). popular feminist influencer and cartoonist lily o’farrell’s (@vulgadrawings) memes about sexism began to engage with the nuances of the manosphere in 2021 when she decided to talk to young men who were trolling her instagram account. these men had become aware of her account after it was shared in a men’s rights subreddit group. concerned that the group was made up of young men predominantly aged 16-23, o’farrell decided to investigate the movement by joining incel (involuntary celibate) subreddit groups. following these investigations, the cartoonist produced a series of meme drawings titled: ‘everything i’ve learned about incels’ (2021), which illuminates the dynamics of the phenomenon for her mostly feminist 297 000 followers. instead of demonising incels, her drawings provide an anatomy of the movement that allows viewers insight into its logics (see figure 1). figure 1. ‘everything i’ve learned about incels.’ vulgadrawings instagram post, 2021. o’farrell powerfully acknowledges the real and perceived grievances of young men in these groups, such as loneliness, body-image insecurities, lack of mental health support and resources, which are blamed by incels on women (2021). the cartoonist reveals that at one end of the spectrum are pick-up artists. at the other, ‘black-pilled’ violently oriented incels who may share neet (not in any education, training or employment), doomer and alt-right characteristics (depicted in figure 1). the artist’s cartoons expose the root causes of these grievances as being tied to the structures of patriarchy, helping young male viewers on the incel spectrum to see that women are not responsible for, but are instead also victims of, such structures. in addition to illuminating a disturbing trend, o’farrell’s drawings ‘call people in’ within a context of calling out everyday misogyny (ross 2021). digital anthropologists have established that social networking sites can enable political agency and subversion (leaver, highfield and abidin 2020). through a multimodal content analysis, this paper considers them as hosts of possible alternative narrative strategies that disrupt gender assumptions through empathetic engagement with young men at risk of violent misogynist radicalization. alternative narrative interventions can arguably be deployed to disarm the manosphere and support disengagement from violent extremist discourses. unlike counter narratives, alternative narratives can be more effective at challenging extremist narratives because they directly address real and perceived grievances as well as the psycho-social needs that may lead to engagement with extremist discourse. figure 2. ‘everything i’ve learned about incels.’ vulgadrawings instagram post, 2021. the final slide within o’farrell’s series poses the question of what to do about the phenomenon. it advises the cartoonist’s followers to engage in radical empathy, to listen and challenge the assumptions put forward by adherents of the male supremacist movement. this empathetic analysis and call to arms have led to significant numbers of young men at risk of misogynist radicalization interacting with o’farrell, with one young man sharing that he had left the movement and found intimacy with a partner after his dm (direct messaging) exchange with the artist. o’farrell’s memes are an example of an alternative narrative strategy that supports good conflict, cultivating bonding (williams 2019), bridging and linking social capital while encouraging a shift from ‘us and them’ to ‘we’ (gerrand 2020; roose et al. 2021). the feminist influencer’s works subvert male supremacy, recruitment and engagement with violent misogynist content. in this sense, o’farrell’s instagram meme-based alternative narrative strategy has the capacity to decolonize, depolarize and encourage movement away from violence-based solutions to grievances toward pro-social radical and resilient action. references berger, j.m., k. aryaeinejad & s. looney. 2020 ‘there and back again: how white nationalist ephemera travels between online and offline spaces.’ the rusi journal 165(1): 114-129. conway, m. 2020 ‘routing the extreme right. challenges for social media platforms.’ the rusi journal. no 165, pp. 108-113. gerrand, v. 2020 ‘can social networking platforms prevent polarisation and violent extremism?’ open democracy. 13 november. hemmingsen, a. and k. i. castro. 2017 ‘the trouble with counter-narratives.’ copenhagen: danish institute for international studies. reu alm.del bilag 189: diis_rp_2017_1.pdf (ft.dk) leaver, t., t. highfield and c. abidin. 2020 instagram: visual social media cultures. polity press. o’farrell, l. 2021 ‘everything i learned about incels.’ instagram post, 19 august. radicalisation awareness network (ran) 2021 ‘incels. a first scan of the phenomenon (in the eu) and its relevance and challenges for p/cve.’ european commission. rogers, r. 2020 ‘deplatforming: following extreme internet celebrities to telegram and alternative social media.’ european journal of communication. vol. 35, issue 3, pp. 213-229. roose, j.m., v. gerrand & s. akbarzadeh. 2021 rapid evidence assessment of alternative narratives. avert (addressing violent extremism and radicalisation to terrorism) research network. ross, l.j. 2021 ‘don’t call people out – let them in.’ ted talk, august. vergani, m., m. iqbal, e. ilbahar & g. barton. 2020 ‘the three ps of radicalization: push, pull and personal. a systematic scoping review of the scientific evidence about radicalization into violent extremism.’ studies in conflict and terrorism. 43(10): 854. williams, j.r. 2019 ‘the use of online social networking sites to nurture and cultivate bonding social capital.’ new media and society. 21(11-12): 2710-2729 breuer pierson aoir20 right to city &amp data protection.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 the right to the city and data protection: complementary for developing citizen-centric digital cities? jonas breuer free university of brussels dr. jo pierson free university of brussels life in digital – or ‘smart’ – cities is mediated by the internet. in urban space that aims to integrate physical and digital worlds, information and communication technologies become ubiquitous, not least to capture and process (personal) data. there can be benefits, but cases like sidewalk labs in toronto also hint at major potential for subverting exercise of citizens’ rights, especially when the latter are accepted only as long as economically feasible for those who control the data (goodman & powles, 2019; zuboff, 2018). private governance can reconfigure public values and relations between public institutions and citizens (mosco, 2019; swyngedouw, 2011). so, who decides what cities become, whose interests they serve? we present ongoing research about the right to the city (lefebvre, 1968) and the right to personal data protection: complementary in fostering agency and protecting citizen interests in technologically-enhanced, citizen-centric cities. lefebvre’s right to the city installs ‘users’ of cities at their core, enabled to change conditions of life by (re)producing all aspects of the urban, collectively and without being constrained (harvey, 2008; kitchin et al., 2019). similarly, the right to data protection addresses users of technology (data subjects) whose personal data is processed. the general data protection regulation (gdpr) demands to “[…] seek views of data subjects or their representatives” (eu, 2016, art 35(9)), which could empower data subjects of digital cities: citizens (van eck, 2019, p. 308). our main research question is how ‘users’ of cities can be represented meaningfully in processes that shape cities? much is already written about participation (see e.g. castelnovo et al., 2016; o’faircheallaigh, 2010) but few have investigated it in relation to data protection. we address this gap in the four-year interdisciplinary research virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): breuer, j., pierson, j. (2020, october) the right to the city and data protection: complementary for developing citizen-centric digital cities? paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. project spectre1. in this paper, we present an empirical cross-case analysis of urban data processing projects affected by the gdpr. we conducted twelve interviews with people directly involved in belgian smart city projects in november 2019, purposefully selected for their heterogeneous roles and first-hand knowledge.2 the study is rooted in the believe that technology and its use are shaped by constantly shifting networks of relationships between artefacts, users and society with an analytical equivalence of human and non-human actors. the latter is framed with the social constructivist perspectives of science & technology studies and actor network theory (callon, 1990; lievrouw, 2014; michael, 2016), as our guiding methodological framework. we are interested in processes that underlie those projects, to understand where citizens are or can be involved in implementing technology in urban space. a focus lies on data protection impact assessments (dpia) as concrete instruments of inclusion in the gdpr. for public administrations, processing personal data is a standard task. data security is prioritised and involving stakeholders is not considered. the interviews show that typical smart city projects (e.g. tracking of passers-by), however, often seem to start because ‘there is a solution, so let’s find a problem’, ‘the more data the better’, pr, or the inevitability of ‘because everyone becomes smart’. all interviewees were affected by stricter data protection rules in the gdpr and described frustrations or perceived barriers to innovation. the projects without a clear purpose that is related to serving citizen needs experienced more tensions, were delayed longer or even have to be cancelled. involving views of citizens at an early stage before a project to co-decide whether it should be started, as some interviewees have mentioned, seems especially important in the light of the rights discussed above. the interviews illustrated that diverse agendas and processing purposes of public and private actors in the projects make it challenging to legally formalise relationships and define roles and responsibilities through contracts and agreements. actors seem to be hesitant to take legal responsibility, which is often related to uncertainty about obligations and fines. citizens largely seem to remain without real agency or power to influence decisionmaking. actual moments of public participation in dpias as suggested by the regulation are not common, not least due to lack of budget or time and other priorities. our study illustrates that data protection impacts smart city developments, but true agency of citizens as in the right to the city remains limited. it shows that researchers can contribute to lowering barriers to participation in practice: by addressing practicalities such as costs and expertise, by raising capabilities, by developing specific methods and techniques for participation in this context. interdisciplinary expertise is required to further understanding in this complex, cross-domain environment. we focus on these aspects and continue researching how meaningful involvement can be facilitated in urban development. 1 spectre (smart city privacy: enhancing collaborative transparency in the regulatory ecosystem) is funded by the flemish region and allows three research centres of different disciplines to combine their expertise and investigate the potential of data protection and in particular data protection impact assessments in strengthening the role of citizens in smart cities. 2 we interviewed dpos of cities and companies, smart city project owners, legal advisors, the ceo of a start-up, user involvement specialists, public servants directly involved in processing personal data, representatives of a data protection authority and an adviser to a major city in the netherlands. the interviews were transcribed and analysed with the qualitative research software maxqda. references callon, m. (1990). techno-economic networks and irreversibility. the sociological review, 38(1_suppl), 132–161. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467954x.1990.tb03351.x castelnovo, w., misuraca, g., & savoldelli, a. (2016). smart cities governance: the need for a holistic approach to assessing urban participatory policy making. social science computer review, 34(6), 724–739. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439315611103 eu. (2016). regulation (eu) 2016/679 of the european parliament and of the council on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data. goodman, e. p., & powles, j. (2019). urbanism under google: lessons from sidewalk toronto. ssrn electronic journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3390610 harvey, d. (2008). the right to the city. new left review, 53, 23–40. kitchin, r., cardullo, p., & feliciantonio, c. d. (2019). citizenship, justice and the right to the smart city. in the right to the smart city (p. 28). emerald publishing. lefebvre, h. (1968). le droit à la ville. seuil. lievrouw, l. a. (2014). chapter 2) materiality and media in communication and technology studies: an unfinished project. in t. gillespie, p. j. boczkowski, & k. a. foot (eds.), media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society (pp. 21–51). the mit press. michael, m. (2016). actor network theory: trials, trails and translations (1st edition). sage ltd. mosco, v. (2019). the smart city in a digital world: vincent mosco. o’faircheallaigh, c. (2010). public participation and environmental impact assessment: purposes, implications, and lessons for public policy making. environmental impact assessment review, 30(1), 19–27. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar.2009.05.001 swyngedouw, e. (2011). the zero-ground of politics: musings on the post-political city. in t. kaminer & m. robles-duran (eds.), urban asymmetries: studies and projects on neoliberal urbanization. 010. van eck, g. j. r. (2019). algortithmic mapmaking in ‘smart cities’: data protection impact asessments as a means of protection for groups. in good data (pp. 298– 316). institute of network cultures (amsterdam). zuboff, s. (2018). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power (first edition). publicaffairs. microsoft word aoir2021-submission-template-399-the governance-of-facebook-platform.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): helmond, a., van der vlist, f.n., burkhardt, m. & seitz, t. (2021, october). the governance of facebook platform. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the governance of facebook platform anne helmond university of amsterdam fernando n. van der vlist utrecht university and university of siegen marcus burkhardt university of siegen tatjana seitz university of siegen introduction policymakers and competition and regulation authorities worldwide recognise application programming interfaces (apis) for their role in processes of datafication and platformisation; even as a way to ‘dominate the digital world’ (iyer and getchell, 2018; van dijck, 2020). apis serve as the ‘lingua franca for the exchange of data and services between companies’ (iyer and getchell, 2018) and are of strategic importance for platform companies like google and facebook as the web became more data-intensive with the rise of the platform as its dominant technological and business model. apis have become the core elements of digital infrastructure that underpin today’s vibrant platform ecosystems and the platform economies and societies that depend on them. consequently, iyer and getchell warn that regulators should not only focus on the market dominance of platform companies but also on their ‘data dominance’ – specifically, how platform companies use apis to share data or insights with third parties. competition authorities and regulators in europe and in the usa increasingly scrutinise anti-competitive uses and potential data misuses centred around facebook’s apis and the platform’s monopoly power. despite broad recognition of the importance of apis, we lack a comprehensive understanding of them as complex technical objects. as such, critical scholars argue that ‘[r]egulatory fixes require detailed insights into how technology and business models work’ (van dijck et al., 2018: 158) and call for the ‘observability’ of platforms as an explicit means of regulation (rieder and hofmann, 2020). approach we present the results of an empirical case study of the structure and evolution of facebook’s apis and their relation to platform governance to highlight the technicity – that is, the technical dimension and dynamics – of how and what platforms like facebook seek to govern. the analysis is focused on facebook’s apis, which have been among the most popular, widely used, and most controversial apis for over a decade (albright, 2018). while the facebook graph api (gapi) is the best-known, there are hundreds of distinct facebook api entities that have (dis)appeared over the years. we explore how these apis have changed or evolved in the face of public controversy and mounting criticism around facebook, and what this might reveal about governance by large platforms like facebook. specifically, we consider the relationality between the design of facebook’s apis, platform governance, and (data) strategy from a material-evolutionary perspective on three levels: (1) the structure of facebook’s entire api architecture, (2) core api objects in terms of their properties, connections, and parameters, and (3) their associated permissions, as handled through facebook applications and login, using current and archived facebook developer pages. on the level of the api architecture, we derived the link structure of 63,027 reference documentation pages that describe facebook’s apis. on the level of individual api objects, we examine one of the core (and most connective) nodes in the entire reference documentation: the graph api user object. finally, we examine application permissions, which represent a gateway for apps to access data from facebook, and which have become an increasingly important governance mechanism. the empirical analysis is based on a large corpus of developer pages as retrieved from the ‘live’ web and from the internet archive wayback machine. we downloaded 3,394 ‘live’ web pages from developers.facebook.com and retrieved 1,960,901 developer pages from the wayback machine, going back to the initial facebook api (beta) launch (august 2006 – february 2020). because facebook does not provide an archive of its developer website, these independent archived sources provide an important means for the observability of platforms (helmond and van der vlist, 2019). additionally, we consult facebook’s own developer blog and news sections, as well as external technology journalism blogs, interviews and testimonies by ceo mark zuckerberg, and 7,000 pages of documents leaked during facebook’s litigation with app developer six4three in california state court. we thus draw on a variety of primary facebook sources and external sources that provide important contextual information about specific changes. findings we find that facebook’s apis have evolved from a simple programming interface for development into a complex layered and interconnected governance arrangement, wherein technical api specifications serve to enforce (changes to) platform policy and (data) strategy. we thus contend that governance by platforms is about more than a platform’s content moderation policy, terms and conditions, and corporate governance structure; instead, it is also the design (and redesign) of technical api specifications that condition and control the possibilities for the exchange of data and services between software systems and organisations. as such, this study contributes to the ongoing debate on platform governance within the platform studies literature (e.g. caplan and gillespie, 2020; gillespie, 2018; gorwa, 2019). we argue that it is important to study the technicity (and materiality) of governance by platforms like facebook to understand the sources of their infrastructural power, and how that power enables them ‘to shift the economic dynamics of competition and monopolization in their favor’ (blanke and pybus, 2020: 2). to understand how the dependence relationships between a platform like facebook and its ecosystem are established and governed, it is important to track changes in the dynamics between a platform’s api design (or technical architecture), governance, and strategy in relation to public controversy, or other social and legal pressure to change. web archives serve an important role in providing a means for the observability of platforms by preserving the material traces of platform evolution. references albright j (2018) the graph api. medium: tow center, march 21. available at: https://medium.com/tow-center/the-graph-api-key-points-in-the-facebook-andcambridge-analytica-debacle-b69fe692d747. blanke t and pybus j (2020) the material conditions of platforms: monopolization through decentralization. social media + society 6(4). doi: 10.1177/2056305120971632. caplan r and gillespie t (2020) tiered governance and demonetization: the shifting terms of labor and compensation in the platform economy. social media + society. doi: 10.1177/2056305120936636. gillespie t (2018) regulation of and by platforms. in: burgess j, poell t, and marwick a (eds) the sage handbook of social media. london: sage publications, pp. 196– 212. gorwa r (2019) what is platform governance? information, communication & society 22(6): 854–871. doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2019.1573914. helmond a and van der vlist fn (2019) social media and platform historiography: challenges and opportunities. tmg – journal for media history 22(1): 6–34. doi: 10.18146/tmg.434/. iyer b and getchell k (2018) why apis should be regulated. mit sloan management review, february 13. available at: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/why-regulatedigital-organizations-apis/. rieder b and hofmann j (2020) towards platform observability. internet policy review 9(4). available at: https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/towards-platformobservability. van dijck j (2020) seeing the forest for the trees: visualizing platformization and its governance. new media & society. doi: 10.1177/1461444820940293. van dijck j, poell t and de waal m (2018) the platform society. oxford university press. available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190889760.001.0001. please update your browser your browser isn’t supported anymore. update it to get the best youtube experience and our latest features. learn more opera microsoft edge safari mozilla firefox google chrome remind me later about copyright contact us terms privacy policy & safety © 2025 google llc selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 do emotional responses to data visualisation mobilise people to act? a case study of climate change visualisations in different national contexts monika fratczak university of sheffield background there has been a huge rise in the visual communication of data and information in the form of data visualisation (datavis) in everyday social life and on social media. politicians, designers, activists and campaigners increasingly use datavis in topics ranging from climate change and elections to covid-19 distribution and social inequalities, hoping that it is an effective tool not only in communicating information to the public and reaching a variety of recipients but also in mobilising them to undertake the actions they deem necessary. yet there is little understanding of the role of this datavis and its social impact in different national and geographic contexts. in this context, understanding the role emotions play in engagements with datavis published on social media is especially important, because emotions are vital components of making sense of data, as a number of practitioners and scholars argue (such as d'ignazio and bhargava, 2020; gray, 2020; kennedy and hill, 2017). moreover, nærland (2020) suggests that datavis enable and mobilise people to function as citizens and take part in political debates or everyday discussions among citizens. however, this claim has not been researched empirically and sociological research has yet to explore emotional experiences of datavis and where they can lead. existing studies of the perceptions of datavis have mostly been carried out from a computer science or psychological perspective, often failing to recognise the social aspects of engagements with datavis (kennedy et al., 2016). little has been done to empirically explore datavis emotional impact taking into account national and other demographic differences among social media users. this may be due to an assumption that data and thus datavis are objective reflections of knowledge and do not make much of an emotional impact. in contrast, this paper considers emotions as a central aspect of social and political experience (ahmed, 2004; wahl-jorgensen, 2018) and a vital aspect of users’ engagements with data visualisation (as seen in kennedy and hill, 2017). suggested citation (apa): fratczak, m., (2022, november). do emotional responses to data visualisation mobilise people to act? a case study of climate change visualisations in different national contexts. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. objectives my paper offers original insights into diverse users’ emotional responses to data visualisations about climate change through a sociological lens and considers whether and how these emotional responses may subsequently prompt political participation in different national and geographic contexts. i do this through a focus on climate change as a case study, investigating data visualisations produced or disseminated on facebook, instagram and twitter by carbon brief, climate science, greenpeace and the world wildlife fund, organizations from the uk and poland. responding to the limited academic empirical interest in social media users’ experiences of data visualisation and recognising the significance of this for political participation, the primary aim of this paper is to learn more about diverse users’ emotional responses to social media datavis and what they mean for mobilisation and political participation in different national and geographic contexts in a datafied democracy. method as indicated previously, the main discipline researching how users engage with visualisation is computer science (as noted by kennedy et al., 2016), which often focuses on the visual text and does not provide much information about the study participants. consequently, these research projects mostly try to quantitatively assess the effectiveness of datavis and its visual elements. however, kennedy and colleagues (2016) argue that due to the social nature of datavis, the “context of visualisation use and other factors outside the visualisation texts are also important in determining visualisation effectiveness” (p.4). qualitative sociological research can offer a counterbalance to these often quantitative and decontextualized studies. sociological approaches take into account social factors outside the visualisation text, such as “who are the users and what are their circumstances” (kennedy et al., 2016, p.5), presenting a picture that is far more complex than other studies mentioned above can offer. therefore, this empirical study employs a comparative mixed qualitative methods approach, incorporating semiotic analysis of thirteen data visualisations about climate change published on facebook, twitter and instagram, nine semi-structured interviews with ten data visualisation professionals from six organisations who design, commission and/or disseminate data visualisations about climate change on social media, thirty-four semi-structured interviews and thirteen follow-up interviews with diverse social media users who responded to the data visualisations about climate change on facebook, instagram or twitter. results the paper argues that datavis can be seen as what i have called an ‘emotional repository’ of dynamic and complex emotional experiences. these emotions play an important role in mobilising social media users to participate in datafied democracies, more often on an individual and daily level, and less frequently on a collective and public scale; and they do so in different ways, depending on national and geographic contexts and other demographic characteristics. moreover, the paper argues that different national contexts and other demographic and social factors may lead to unequal emotional engagement with datavis and mobilisation or lack thereof. it suggests that some demographic, often vulnerable, groups may be discriminated against in data(vis) practices (d'ignazio and bhargava, 2020) which may be the reason why some people on social media do not engage with datavis or do not pay attention to datavis and are consequently not mobilised by it. finally, it is suggested that datavis, in this case about climate change, may be skewed towards and target the interests of white (usually) men, from the global north. this, in turn, can create blind spots around the needs of more vulnerable people, including ethnic minority communities, and lead to a lack of emotional engagement and consequently non participation in, for example, environmental activities (clarke and agyeman 2010). the paper makes an original contribution to the internet research, sociology of emotions, critical data studies, the limited existing research on data visualisation in society, and the emerging sociology of data, by advancing understanding of experiences of data visualization published on social media from an audience ‘bottom up’ perspective (couldry and powell, 2014) and focusing on factors that affect diverse users’ engagement and political participation. references: ahmed, s. (2004). the cultural politics of emotions. edinburg: edinburg university press. couldry, n. and powell, a. (2014). big data from the bottom up. big data & society, 1. d’ignazio, c. and bhargava, r. (2020). data visualization literacy: a feminist starting point. in: engebretsen, m. and kennedy, h. eds. data visualization in society. amsterdam: amsterdam university press. gray, j. (2020). the data epic: visualization practices for narrating life and death at a distance. in: engebretsen, m. and kennedy, h. eds. data visualization in society. amsterdam: amsterdam university press. kennedy, h., hill, r., lucy, allen, w. and kirk, a. (2016). engaging with (big) data visualizations: factors that affect engagement and resulting new definitions of effectiveness. first monday, 21(11). kennedy, h. and hill, r. (2017). the feeling of numbers: emotions in everyday engagements with data and their visualization. sociology. kennedy, h., steedman, r. and jones, r. (2020). approaching public perceptions of datafication through the lens of inequality: a case study in public service media. information, communication & society, 24:12. nærland, t.u. (2020). the political significance of data visualization: four key perspectives. in: engebretsen, m. and kennedy, h. eds. data visualization in society. amsterdam: amsterdam university press. pp.40-47. wahl-jorgensen, k. (2018). emotions, media and politics. polity press. microsoft word goldenfein-design choices-design choices.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): viljoen, s. goldenfein, j. mcguigan, l., (2021, october). design choices: mechanism design and platform capitalism. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. design choices: mechanism design and platform capitalism salomé viljoen columbia law school, columbia university jake goldenfein melbourne law school, university of melbourne and arc centre of excellence for automated decision-making and society lee mcguigan hussman school of journalism and media, university of north carolina at chapel hill digital platforms have been built into infrastructures for organizing an increasing range of social, economic, and cultural activities. consternation about the power of these platforms is a hallmark of the present moment. through automated and algorithmic tools and methods, companies like google, facebook, amazon, and uber seem to exercise a special capacity for managing their customers, competitors, and workers (darmody and zwick, 2020; shapiro, 2020; yeung, 2017). they have many sources of leverage, including the monopoly power permitted under moribund antitrust enforcement (srinivasan, 2020), regulatory blackholes that relieve them of social responsibilities (rosenblat and stark, 2016), and informational advantages owing to their position between buyers and sellers (mansell and steinmeuller, 2020). to these concerns we add a critical focus on the intellectual technologies powering these platforms a specific set of disciplinary tools and methods deployed in their theorization, development and operation. core operations at google, facebook, and beyond derive from a research discipline that treats asymmetrical accumulation of data and profiling capacity, and the optimization of actors' choices, as fundamental design principles. in this paper, we pull back the curtain of platform capitalism to glimpse the world of mechanism design. mechanism design brings a formidable but conflicted lineage into the heart of platform governance. with its origins in nobel prize-winning economic theory, mechanism design claims to be a set of methods tailored expressly to achieve social welfare by harnessing the self-interested rationality and autonomy of individuals. mechanism design creates bespoke markets and auctions that direct individuals’ choices toward outcomes that maximize a formally defined social welfare. its ideological and normative commitments to rationality and autonomy have provided market-makers with a persuasive justification for exercising strategic control over the environments where people interact and make decisions. the apparent power of mechanism design to orchestrate forms of social coordination has earned multiple nobel prizes for the discipline’s leading proponents (maskin, 2008), and helped to propagate its influence beyond conventional economic settings. mechanism design is seen to provide a set of intellectual technologies for enacting “optimization” as a worldview and a powerful idiom for a great deal of policymaking. and it has gained particular currency in areas where computers and algorithms mediate the actions of agents (varian, 1995, 2010; einav and levin, 2014; papadimitriou, 2001). largely without critical scrutiny, computational adaptations of mechanism design (and related management sciences, such as operations research) have become a major force in governing online environments and platforms. the experiences of almost all web and mobile app users are organized, in part, by optimizing schemes from mechanism design—such as the advertising auctions that monetize online traffic and the decision systems that configure facebook newsfeeds. as google’s chief economist hal varian (2010: 4) puts it, “online advertising serves as a poster child for algorithmic mechanism design.” there is accordingly considerable scope for augmenting discussions of platform and algorithmic governance with an analysis of how the intellectual tools of mechanism design are applied in those environments. we argue that these computational applications warrant a critical reassessment of how this discipline tries to design choices. contrary to the legitimizing premises introduced above, the mechanism design methods and techniques underpinning digital platforms actually threaten social welfare and distort collective interests for platform firms’ own ends. platforms now use mechanism design to leverage data science and automation toward goals that dispense with the normative commitments assumed in its economic theorization. drawing examples from online advertising auctions and the multi-sided market platforms that coordinate gig-labor and on-demand services, we illustrate how firms instrumentalize mechanism design to achieve information asymmetry, to distribute social costs in ways that benefit designers, and to orchestrate behaviors and choices in their systems. the paper offers four contributions to the scholarship on platform governance. first, it provides a critical introduction to mechanism design (and so-called automated mechanism design) for researchers who study big data, platform capitalism, and the values designed into technologies like algorithms and artificial intelligence. so far, most critical work in these areas has not engaged directly with this hybrid economicengineering discipline, even though it is now central to the operations of platform firms, as well as other online networks and data-driven decision-making systems. a fluency in the vocabulary and techniques of mechanism design will help critical researchers translate and intervene in debates across these fields of science, policymaking, and industrial practice. second, we identify contradictions in the normative, ideological, and political commitments claimed by mechanism design’s two main traditions: one descended from game theory and welfare economics, the other oriented around experimentation and applied computation. the digital uptake of mechanism design has papered over profound differences in how these two traditions define and operationalize key concepts, including the actor/subject, and its relationship to autonomous, rational decision-making. third, we look at how platform companies deploy and exploit mechanism design. we show how automated or algorithmic mechanism design operationalizes and progresses through the contradiction noted above, leveraging both the prestige and elegance of mechanism design’s game theory tradition, as well as the brute force of the computational and statistical techniques honed by mechanism design’s experimental tradition. finally, we provide insights into how automated mechanism design (amd) extends the political project of installing automated market-like institutions to orchestrate social choices and allocate opportunities and value across more and more settings, while at the same time abandoning the normative commitment to autonomy and the ideological commitment to rationality that have been key to mechanism design’s justification (tomasetti, 2016). put another way, the deployment of mechanism design in digital platforms carries forward the normative justification of markets into settings that seem like markets but operate more like control infrastructures. overall, our critique of mechanism design makes interventions in two directions: it gives critical researchers new insights into the discipline behind certain pathologies of platform capitalism; and it asks mechanism designers to look critically at the contradictions and pathologies within the discipline itself. references darmody a and zwick d (2020) manipulate to empower: hyper-relevance and the contradictions of marketing in the age of surveillance capitalism. big data & society (jan-june): 1-12. shapiro a (2020) dynamic exploits: calculative asymmetries in the on-demand economy. new technology, work, and employment 35(2): 162-177. yeung k (2017) ‘hypernudge’: big data as a mode of regulation by design. information, communication & society 20(1): 118-136. srinivasan d (2020) why google dominates advertising markets. stanford technology law review 24(1): 55-174. rosenblat a and stark l (2016) algorithmic labor and information asymmetries: a case study of uber’s drivers. international journal of communication 10(27): 10-27. mansell r and steinmueller we (2020) advanced introduction to platform economics. cheltenham, uk: edward elgar publishing. maskin e (2008) mechanism design: how to implement social goals. american economic review 98(3): 567-576. varian hr (1995) economic mechanism design for computerized agents. proceedings of the first usenix workshop on electronic commerce. varian hr (2010) computer mediated transactions. american economic review 100(2): 1-10. einav l and levin j (2014) economics in the age of big data. science 246(6210): n.p. papadimitriou ch (2001) algorithms, games, and the internet. stoc ’01: 749-753, 752. tomasetti j (2016) does uber redefine the firm? the postindustrial corporation and advanced information technology. hofstra labor & employment law journal 34(1): 178. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): keller, tobias, graham, tim, angus, dan, bruns, axel, marchal, nahema, neudert, lisa-maria, nijmeijer, rolf, nielbo, kristoffer laigaard, mortensen, marie damsgaard, bechmann, anja, rossini, patrícia, stromer-galley, baptista, erica anita, & veiga de oliveira, vanessa. (2020, october 28-31). ‘coordinated inauthentic behaviour’ and other online influence operations in social media spaces. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ‘coordinated inauthentic behaviour’ and other online influence operations in social media spaces tobias r. keller digital media research centre, queensland university of technology timothy graham digital media research centre, queensland university of technology daniel angus digital media research centre, queensland university of technology axel bruns digital media research centre, queensland university of technology nahema marchal oxford internet institute, university of oxford lisa-maria neudert oxford internet institute, university of oxford rolf nijmeijer luiss guido carli kristoffer laigaard nielbo aarhus university marie damsgaard mortensen aarhus university anja bechmann aarhus university / university of antwerp patrícia rossini university of liverpool jennifer stromer-galley syracuse university erica anita baptista federal university of minas gerais vanessa veiga de oliveira federal university of minas gerais panel description responding to criticism of their role in the dissemination of hyperpartisan political propaganda (faris et al. 2017), ‘fake news’, and other malinformation (wardle & derakhshan 2017), leading social media platforms such as facebook and twitter have recently made a number of major public announcements about their efforts to identify and mitigate the use of human and automated accounts in online influence operations that often pursue overtly political aims. in a significant move, facebook has increasingly adopted the term “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” (gleicher 2018) to describe such activities; this shift in corporate language points to the fact that malinformation campaigns are becoming more and more sophisticated in their use of large numbers of accounts that individually may not appear to be especially aberrant in their activities, but in combination interfere substantially with ordinary user activities. this development is not limited to facebook alone: other social media platforms have similarly highlighted such coordinated activity. in spite of efforts by platform providers to address the misuse of their platforms by domestic as well as foreign, commercial as well as political operators, however, independent scholarly research continues to produce evidence that such operations persist unabated. such research, too, must increasingly come to terms with coordinated inauthentic behaviour: it must advance beyond approaches and tools that examine only the activity patterns of individual accounts for evidence of automated behaviour, and pay increasing attention to the signs of coordination across a large number of such accounts. such work is further complicated by the often precarious and unreliable nature of data access to the various major social media platforms, however (bruns 2019). in pursuit of the conceptual and methodological innovation required to address the challenge of coordinated inauthentic behaviour, this panel brings together a selection of recent studies that advance the methods available for the forensic, mixed-methods, indepth and large-scale analysis of inauthentic information operations, and present important new findings from current analyses of such activities across platforms and countries. paper 1, “#arsonemergency: climate change disinformation during the australian bushfire season 2019-2020”, conducts a forensic analysis of coordinated inauthentic behaviour by twitter accounts during the recent catastrophic bushfires in australia. the paper uses computational tools to examine the activity patterns of a population of accounts that sought to promote the debunked claim that arson rather than climate change was the root cause for the severity of the fires, and retraces the trajectory of the #arsonemergency hashtag from its first emergence to being amplified by donald trump jr.’s tweets. paper 2, “investigating visual media shared over twitter during the 2019 european parliamentary elections”, shifts our focus to the 2019 european parliament election, and investigates the content and distribution strategies for memes and other visual content on twitter during the campaign. it finds that images from traditional political actors remained prominent during the campaign, and that anti-european and populist imagery, often also expressed in a humorous fashion, accounted for a substantial amount of posts but largely remained disconnected from mainstream debate. paper 3, “different narratives for different people? understanding deviant semantic effects across countries in the political campaigns of the european parliament election 2019”, complements the previous study by exploring whether facebook’s microtargeting advertising functionality allows political parties to promote conflicting narratives to different groups of people, without making such divergent campaign messaging sufficiently transparent. it draws on the facebook ad library to identify deviant semantics in 2019 european parliament election advertising, and identifies the factors that predict such campaign strategies. finally, paper 4, “explaining dysfunctional information sharing on whatsapp and facebook in brazil”, turns our attention also to a critical emerging space for the fight against malinformation: whatsapp. it examines the respective roles that whatsapp and facebook in the accidental as well as intentional spreading of political malinformation in brazil, finding especially that more engaged users are also more likely to have shared misand disinformation, and that social correction of such information is more likely to occur on whatsapp than facebook. in combination, these contributions advance the study of online influence operations by providing key new methodological and empirical impulses for malinformation research across a range of social media platforms. in particular, they enable an independent assessment of the extent and impact of “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” beyond the occasional glimpses that platform providers’ press releases can offer. in doing so, these studies provide pointers on how to move forward in the ongoing arms race between those who initiate covert malinformation operations and those who seek to detect and counter them. references bruns, a. (2019). after the ‘apicalypse’: social media platforms and their fight against critical scholarly research. information, communication & society, 22(11), 1544– 1566. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1637447 faris, r., roberts, h., etling, b., bourassa, n., zuckerman, e., & benkler, y. (2017). partisanship, propaganda, and disinformation: online media and the 2016 u.s. presidential election (berkman klein center research publication no. 2017–6). social science research network. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3019414 gleicher, n. (2018, december 6). coordinated inauthentic behavior explained. facebook newsroom. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/12/inside-feedcoordinated-inauthentic-behavior/ wardle, c., & derakhshan, h. (2017). information disorder: toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making (dgi(2017)09). council of europe. https://shorensteincenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/information-disordertoward-an-interdisciplinary-framework.pdf paper 1 #arsonemergency: climate change disinformation during the australian bushfire season 2019-2020 tobias r. keller digital media research centre, queensland university of technology timothy graham digital media research centre, queensland university of technology daniel angus digital media research centre, queensland university of technology axel bruns digital media research centre, queensland university of technology introduction the 2019-2020 australian bushfire season was devastating (un environment, 2020): an estimated 18 million hectares burned, millions of animals died, and public health was threatened when the national capital canberra measured the worst air quality index of any major city worldwide. during this bushfire season, scientists pointed to the link between the bushfires and climate change (abram, 2019): increasing temperatures in australia mean that bushfires will become ever more extreme and difficult to contain. yet with social media platforms including twitter becoming the major news source for australians (digital news report, 2019), citizens did not only encounter evidence-based information regarding the major issues in the 2019-2020 bushfire season online. these platforms have also become a fertile habitat for bots and trolls that spread propaganda, conspiracy theories, and disinformation (shao et al., 2018). initial research into the public debate around the 2019-2020 bushfire season identified the hashtag #arsonemergency as a particular focus of such activity (graham, 2020). the hashtag was used especially to spread the false (abc news, 2020) claim that the majority of the bushfires had been caused by arson, and were therefore due to human activity rather than an increasingly extreme climate. our exploratory research therefore focusses on two questions: rq1: what is the history of the hashtag #arsonemergency? rq2: what is the role of bots and trolls in the hashtag #arsonemergency? methods using twint, we collected all tweets including the hashtag #arsonemergency for 1 to 6 january 2020 (1,340 tweets from 315 accounts). to generate comparable data on the number of bots and trolls within the dataset, we also collected all tweets including two other popular hashtags for debating the australian bushfires, using the same tool and for the same period: for the hashtag #bushfireaustralia, twint returned 1,309 tweets from 1,106 unique accounts, and for the hashtag #australiafire it retrieved 4,592 tweets from 3,966 unique accounts. finally, we also collected every (australian) news article including the words ‘arson*’ and ‘bushfires’ for 2019 and 2020, and traced the hashtag #arsonemergency back to its first appearance on twitter. to determine the history of the hashtag #arsonemergency, we collected the search behaviour of australian google search users for the terms ‘arson’ and ‘bushfires’ via google trends. we synchronised peak search behaviour with the publication of tweets and news articles to explore which tweets or news articles may have sparked australian users’ interest to search for the alleged links between arson and the bushfires. we then analysed all detected twitter accounts with two tools designed to spot bots and trolls on twitter: botometer is a machine learning algorithm that compares the presentation and behaviour of a twitter account with a set of known bots and calculates a score that describes its resemblance to a bot (varol et al., 2018). botsentinel, too, is a machine learning algorithm and was trained on trollbots (botsentinel, 2020): these accounts distinguish themselves from bots in that they may not be fully automated and aim to be highly active and/or to hinder rational debate. results we identified four critical elements that sparked an increased interest for australians to search for arson and the bushfires in 2019-2020 (see figure 1): 1. sydney declared a catastrophic fire danger for the first time in november 2019, and australians’ interest in the possible links between arson and the bushfires increased (the guardian, 10 nov. 2019). 2. a sydney morning herald article on 17 nov. 2019 directed attention to the alleged links between arson and the bushfires by claiming in its title “arson [...]: 87 percent of fires are man-made”. some twitter users cited this article as an argument to get the new #arsonemergency hashtag trending. 3. one such account tweeted on 21 november 2019: “with the vast majority of fires being deliberately lit, a better hashtag for the bushfires instead of #climateemergency would be #arsonemergency”, and received over 500 likes and 130 retweets (“patient zero tweet” in figure 1). 4. when prominent international and domestic politicians such as donald trump jr. (on twitter, 8 jan. 2020) or the arch-conservative liberal party senator eric abetz (to the national broadcaster abc, on 4 jan. 2020) repeated these claims, australians’ search for this link peaked. thus, the idea of an ‘arson emergency’ can be identified as a counter-narrative to concerns about climate change, relying on deconstructed news (i.e. disinformation) and supported by prominent climate change deniers to national and international audiences. figure 1. google search history for australians searching for “arson + bushfires” from january 2017 to january 2020, linked with crucial events for the hashtag #arsonemergency. we relied on botometer to compare the number of fully automated, bot-like accounts spreading #arsonemergency to those spreading #bushfireaustralia and #australiafire (see figure 2a). overall, the distribution of bot-likeliness scores between the three hashtags is almost identical. on average, accounts that contributed to #arsonemergency received a score of 0.18 (sd = 0.14), which is statistically significantly lower than those for accounts contributing to #bushfireaustralia (t = 5.3, df = 704, p < 0.001) and #australiafire (t = 8.8, df = 462, p , 0.001). however, analysis using botsentinel shows a different picture (see figure 2b): while those accounts contributing to #australiafire (mean = 0.08, sd = 0.12) and #bushfireaustralia (mean = 0.08, sd = 0.1) have a very similar distribution of trollbotlike scores, those accounts contributing to #arsonemergency showed significantly higher scores on average (t = 12, df = 268, p < 0.001 to #australiafire and t = 14, df = 324, p < 0.001 to #bushfireaustralia). although contributors to #arsonemergency did not resemble fully automated bots, then, they clearly exhibited a behaviour that was similar to that of known trollbots, in botsentinel’s definition. that is, these accounts aim to hinder rational debate, are highly active, and seek to sow discord among ordinary users. figure 2a+b. density plot of botometer results (top) and botsentinel results (bottom) for a sample of 100 random accounts for each of the hashtags #bushfireaustralia (green) and #australiafire (blue), and for all 315 accounts spreading #arsonemergency (red). discussion in a crisis such as the 2019-2020 australian bushfire season, citizens need to be able to find reliable information on social media platforms such as twitter. with the rise of bots and trolls on these platforms, these platforms are polluted and may even prevent citizens from forming their opinions on the ongoing crisis. our investigation shows that it was not fully automated bots, but human-curated trollbots, that sought to kick-start a counter-narrative to replace the scientifically proven link between climate change and the bushfires with a non-existent crisis, specifically by claiming that arsonists were the main cause of the 2019-2020 bushfire emergency. this disinformation campaign relied on decontextualised and deconstructed news, amplification from prominent and influential public personas around the globe, and media organisations that provided such climate change deniers with a mainstream media platform. such deliberate disinformation campaigns are likely to become ever more common in a news environment that now heavily relies on social media as distribution channels; they require constant vigilance from media organisations, journalists, politicians, public figures, scholars, and ordinary users. focussing on a crucial case study, our study provides an important blueprint for further research to investigate similar such disinformation campaigns: drawing on readily available tools, it combines a forensic analysis of the dynamics of a campaign with a method for detecting the presence of bots and trolls among the accounts promoting it. this enables researchers to disentangle how alternative narratives seek to ingratiate themselves into mainstream public debates. references abc news (2020). peter dutton says 250 have been charged with arson. but the data tells a different story. abc news, 18 feb. 2020. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-18/fact-check-peter-dutton-arson-250charged/11971454 abram, nerilie (2019). australia’s angry summer: this is what climate change looks like. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/australias-angry-summerthis-is-what-climate-change-looks-like/ botsentinel (2020). bot sentinel. https://botsentinel.com/ digital news report (2019). reuters institute digital news report 2019. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/inlinefiles/dnr_2019_final.pdf graham, t. (2020). twitter bots and trolls promote conspiracy theories about australian bushfires. https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-bots-and-trolls-promoteconspiracy-theories-about-australian-bushfires/ shao, c., ciampaglia, g. l., varol, o., yang, k. [kaicheng], flammini, a., & menczer, f. (2018). the spread of low-credibility content by social bots. retrieved from http://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.07592v4 un environment (2020). ten impacts of the australian bushfires. https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/story/ten-impacts-australianbushfires paper 2 investigating visual media shared over twitter during the 2019 european parliamentary elections nahema marchal oxford internet institute, university of oxford lisa-maria neudert oxford internet institute, university of oxford introduction from the rise of selfies, memes1 and animated gifs in digital culture to the surging popularity of visual-centric platforms like instagram, snapchat, and tiktok that reach billions of monthly users across the world – we live in an age of visual communication. visual content in the form of photos, videos, infographics and user-generated images are becoming central to our day-to-day interactions, informing how we present ourselves (thomson & greenwood, 2020), communicate and understand the world around us (pearce et al. 2020). most contemporary political communication research into the spread of disinformation and computational propaganda on social media relies heavily on text-based evidence and methodologies. yet political disinformation is increasingly taking on visual forms, such as memes, gifs, short-format video, synthetic deep fakes and other userand machine-generated visuals. in modern attention economies, visual forms of communication offer advantages over text; they are easier to process, elicit emotions and are effective at capturing viewers’ attention (fahmy et al., 2014). in recent years, however, they have also emerged as catalysts of misand disinformation (bradshaw & howard, 2019; guy, 2017). it is therefore vital to better understand how social media images are strategically employed during critical moments of public life as well as their potential consequences on information flows and audiences. despite the ubiquity and potency of manipulative visuals as vehicles of both political and emotional information, their use during political campaigns and information operations remains critically understudied (weller et al., 2014). in this paper we conduct a multilingual, cross-case comparative content and thematic analysis of twitter images posted 1memes typically consist of ‘digital objects that riff on a given visual, textual or auditory form and are then appropriated, re-coded, and slotted back into the internet infrastructures they came from’ (nooney & portwood-stacer, 2014, p.249). by users in six different european language spheres—english, french, german, italian, spanish and swedish—during a two-week-long period leading up to the 2019 eu parliamentary elections. specifically, we investigate images on twitter in the context of two conversations: one surrounding the eu elections in general, and one surrounding the more contentious issue of membership to the eu. three main research questions drive our analysis: rq1: what salient formats and modes of visual content were users in europe sharing over twitter during the 2019 eu parliamentary election campaign? rq2: how does this differ across two conversations with varying degrees of contention? rq3: what were the most common themes embedded in different modes of visual communication? methodology our data collection proceeded in four stages. we first identified a set of relevant hashtags in english, french, german, italian, polish, spanish, and swedish intended to capture twitter traffic. using a set of 84 hashtags, our team then collected a total of 3,620,701 tweets in real time between 13 may and 26 may 2019 through twitter’s streaming api. from this initial dataset we extracted tweets that contained static visuals in their metadata fields. next, we identified tweets that had been removed or deleted, resulting in a final dataset of 307,951 tweets with visual content of which 256,204 related to the eu election and 3,164 related to eu exit. finally, we selected a random sample of 599 tweets for what we refer to as the ‘general’ sample and 505 tweets for the ‘exit’ sample. our team developed a grounded typology to classify visuals into categories based on their mode and format. here, format describes the type of media shared by users, based on their constitutive elements (e.g. photographs, screen-captures, posters, infographics, composites, and quotations), while the concept of mode captures the ways in which political information is being transmitted (e.g. official campaign communication, campaign event, political humor, satellite campaign material, news media reporting etc.), based on an image’s content and its apparent provenance. intercoder reliability was then determined using krippendorf’s alpha on two random sub-samples achieving high scores (a = 0.843 for format, a = 0.865 for mode). finally, we performed a thematic analysis of images, inductively identifying recurrent themes and patterns of meaning as they emerged in the data through semantic and visual symbols. findings & discussion we find that visuals originating from traditional political actors prevailed among both twitter conversations. while users shared substantial amounts of anti-european, populist and, to a lesser extent, extremist images, this content remained largely disjointed from the mainstream public debate. finally our data revealed political humor to be as a strong vector for anti-establishment and eurosceptic themes, especially in discussions critical of the european project. our findings underscore that visual media played a central role in the twitter political discourse ahead of the 2019 european parliamentary elections, both as a conduit for official campaigning and candidate communications and for novel forms of political expression and user-generated political content. our analysis provides both a terminology and conceptual framework for future studies of the strategic spread of social media visuals and their impact. references bradshaw, s., & howard, p. n. (2019). the global disinformation order 2019 global inventory of organised social media manipulation (working paper 2019.2). project on computational propaganda. diresta, r., shaffer, k., ruppel, b., sullivan, d., & matney, r. (2018). the tactics & tropes of the internet research agency. new knowledge. fahmy, s., bock, m. a., & wanta, w. (2014). visual communication theory and research. palgrave macmillan us. guy, h. (2017, october 17). why we need to understand misinformation through visuals. first draft. pearce, w., özkula, s. m., greene, a. k., teeling, l., bansard, j. s., omena, j. j., & rabello, e. t. (2020). visual cross-platform analysis: digital methods to research social media images. information, communication & society, 23(2), 161–180. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2018.1486871 thomson, t. j., & greenwood, k. (2020). profile pictures across platforms. in s. josephson, j. d. kelly, & k. smith (eds.), handbook of visual communication (1st ed., pp. 349–363). routledge. weller, k., bruns, a., burgess, j., mahrt, m., & puschmann, c. (2014). twitter and society. peter lang publishing. paper 3 different narratives for different people? understanding deviant semantic effects across eu countries in political campaigns of the 2019 european parliament election rolf nijmeijer luiss guido carli, italy kristoffer laigaard nielbo aarhus university, denmark marie damsgaard mortensen aarhus university, denmark anja bechmann aarhus university, denmark / university of antwerp, belgium introduction facebook has been heavily criticized for allowing political parties in their campaigns to potentially advertise with conflicting voices to different groups of people through their microtargeting advertising interface without being transparent about it. this has potential implications for deliberative democracy because lack of transparency can create voter discrimination where certain voters are targeted either heavily due to their behavioral profile, voter region (available in the ad interface) and/or with different campaign messages (bechmann, 2019). furthermore, the lack of overview of the amount of placed advertisements prevent an understanding of the potential correlation between the facebook campaign of any candidate and the subsequent election results. based on data from the facebook ad library established in the wake of european commission pressure (buning et. al., 2018) this paper will analyze whether we find conflicting semantics in the political campaigns of candidates running for the 2019 european parliament election (epe) across european union (eu) countries and whether such conflicting semantics are to be found in certain countries. the paper will analyze all campaign items available in the archive from may 2019 across political parties and all eu countries. we will measure if deviant semantics (see also bechmann & nielbo, 2018) within a political party campaign correlate with factors such as country, left-center-right leaning, and which factors are the strongest predictor for deviant semantics. the potential deviant ad semantics and the associated effects across countries studies have shown that known agents of disinformation dissemination, such as the russian internet research agency (ira), adjusted the contents of their 2015-2016 facebook advertising campaigns in the united states (us) based on the groups they intended to target. advertisements targeting conservative voters, for example, preyed on existing prejudices against ‘others’, whereas advertisements aimed at africanamericans and mexican-americans tried to increase distrust of politics in the us (howard et. al., 2018). this lends credence to the assumption that facebook political advertisements and their intended effects are based on the concept of conflicting semantics. when this concept is applied to the 2019 european parliament election, it can be hypothesized that the different cultural, political and social spheres in each member state influence the content of the targeted advertisements shown to voters on facebook. a major advantage of studying this election is the multi-country campaign run by the same candidates/political groups, which allows for a comparative analysis. the percentage of the population that uses facebook varies significantly per country, affecting any potential success for advertisements on this platform. differences in media and political systems (hallin & mancini, 2004) further increase the likelihood that facebook advertisements spread a different narrative in each country. it is the objective of this paper to identify deviant semantics, if any, between microtargeting facebook advertisements from different european countries. research has shown that the spread of deliberately false narratives through social media is observed more among political parties on the far-right of the spectrum (lance bennett & livingston, 2018). however, this may vary between countries. the anti-establishment five star movement in italy, for example, is more difficult to fit within that frame, but has a history of constructing emotional narratives on social media (fusaro, 2018). it is the assumption of this study that there will be an observable semantic distance between microtargeting facebook advertising campaigns used in the 2019 eu election, where far-right politicians/parties are the most divergent. methods & dataset in order to examine whether we see different semantics, we use the ad library api from facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/api/), comprising advertisements posted on facebook during the 2019 eu election isolating the dataset to the run-up period of may 2019. the library api contains the text, images and any urls included in the advertisement, impression count (range provided) as well as data on who viewed the advertisement (7 age categories and 3 gender categories) and who paid for it. we identify parties through national epe lists and code them using the chapel hill expert survey scores as politically left, center or right-leaning. we then sort our dataset accordingly and run word count vectorization, term frequency–inverse document frequency, document clustering and paragraph embedding to identify semantic differences. these different levels of analysis should give a comprehensive overview of any potential textual deviations within the advertisements, and the political entities that used them. this is done for each eu member state individually, and the respective results will be compared to identify any major differences in the use of political microtargeting on facebook across europe. results, discussion and conclusion the analysis is currently being processed and the results will be presented and discussed at the conference in october 2020 as an add on to the framework presented in this extended abstract. references bechmann, a. (2019). data as humans: representation, accountability, and equality in big data. in information policy series: vol. 16. human rights in the age of platforms (pp. 73–94). cambridge, ma: mit press. bennett, w. l., & s. livingston (2018). the disinformation order: disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions. in european journal of communication, vol. 33 (2), 122–139. https://doi.org/10.1177/026732311876031. bechmann, a., & nielbo, k. l. (2018). are we exposed to the same “news” in the news feed? digital journalism, 6(8), 990–1002. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2018.1510741. buning et. al., m. d. c. (2018). a multi-dimensional approach to disinformation: report of the independent high-level group on fake news and online disinformation (pp. 1– 40). retrieved from eu commission website: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-singlemarket/en/news/final-report-high-level-expert-group-fake-news-and-onlinedisinformation. fusaro, c. (2018). misinformation, an old issue in a new context. the state of the art in italy. conference: misinformation in referenda. retrieved from https://www.sipotra.it/old/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/misinformation-an-old-issuein-a-new-context.-the-state-of-the-art-in-italy.pdf. hallin, d. c., & mancini, p. (2004). comparing media systems: three models of media and politics. cambridge university press. howard, et. al., p. n. (2018), the ira, social media and political polarization in the united states, 2012-2018. the computational propaganda project. retrieved from https://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/93/2018/12/ira-report.pdf. kullback, s., & leibler, r. a. (1951). on information and sufficiency. the annals of mathematical statistics, 22(1), 79–86. https://doi.org/10.1214/aoms/1177729694 paper 4 explaining dysfunctional information sharing on whatsapp and facebook in brazil patrícia rossini university of liverpool jennifer stromer-galley syracuse university erica anita baptista federal university of minas gerais vanessa veiga de oliveira federal university of minas gerais introduction in the run-up to the 2018 brazilian elections, false and misleading information was widely circulated through the mobile instant messaging service whatsapp (first draft, 2019). researchers estimated that roughly half of all images circulating through the service were likely altered or distorted to convey false information (tardáguila et al., 2018). another study reported by the guardian sampled whatsapp messages prior to the election and found evidence of a politically right-leaning coordinated campaign to spread misinformation and bolster jair bolsonaro, who ultimately won the election (avelar, 2019). similar concerns have been raised in other democratic countries, including india and indonesia, about the use of whatsapp to spread false and misleading information in an effort to affect public opinion and alter election outcomes. mobile instant messaging services (mims), such as whatsapp, snapchat and facebook messenger, are increasingly being used for more than casual communication (gil de zúñiga et al., 2019; valeriani & vaccari, 2017). these private messaging applications became important venues for people to talk about political issues and news, access information, and communicate with businesses. the reuters digital news report has been consistently capturing this trend: while the use of facebook is declining worldwide, the use of messaging apps is on the rise (nielsen et al., 2019). yet, political communication scholars have largely researched social networking sites (snss), and less attention has been paid to these burgeoning private messaging apps. one challenge for the study of private messaging apps is that they are end-to-end encrypted and by design are not broadly visible for easy study by scholars. nevertheless, as concerns spread globally around political propaganda and the intentional spread of politically false information, scholars are challenged to identify and measure the extent and effects of misinformation in democracies, in both public and private social applications. in light of these concerns, this study aims to address this challenge by examining political misinformation on whatsapp in brazil. data compiled by "we are social”i places whatsapp in third place among all social platforms, with 1.5 billion monthly active users, only behind facebook and youtube. in brazil, whatsapp is the second most popular social media application, with over 120 million users in 2017. the concerns around misinformation on whatsapp have led government institutions, media outlets, and ngos to create fact-checking services to mitigate the spread of false and misleading information in brazil, and the platform itself to fund social science research on this problem, including this study. one important dimension of research is understanding who are more likely to share misinformation on these private messaging apps. in spite of concerns with coordinated disinformation efforts and computational propaganda (jamieson, 2018; wooley & howard, 2018), regular users are responsible for spreading misinformation in their own networks — a behavior that chadwick, vaccari and o’loughlin (2018) have described as "democratically dysfunctional news sharing". although motivations for sharing news on social media may be varied, and we cannot assume that those who engage with and share misinformation have the intention to trick or troll others, understanding the types of users and behaviors associated with dysfunctional news sharing is an important step towards devising strategies to combat the spread of misinformation online. methods we adopt a comparative approach to examine dysfunctional sharing on whatsapp and facebook, as semi-public platforms have been consistently scrutinized for facilitating the spread of misinformation because of algorithmic curation and an engagement-driven news feed (guess et al., 2019). considering the different affordances in these two platforms, comparing misinformation sharing dynamics on whatsapp to facebook may help understand the differences between private and semi-public venues. in this study, we present survey data of a representative sample of internet users in brazil (n = 1,615) to examine dysfunctional sharing on facebook and whatsapp by examining both accidental misinformation sharing as well as intentional misinformation sharing, in which people recognize the information is incorrect and choose to share it anywayii. specifically, we investigate the relationship between dysfunctional sharing and 1) frequency of political talk; 2) cross-cutting exposure; 3) social corrections (experiencing, witnessing and performing). results our findings provide further evidence of a participation vs. misinformation paradox: those who are more engaged in political talk are significantly more likely to have shared misinformation in the platform they use to discuss politics, and also significantly more likely to disinform — in the latter, the effects are cross-platform, as political talk on whatsapp is associated with intentional misinformation sharing on facebook and viceversa. we also find that instead of tempering the spread of false information, exposure to cross-cutting political views is positively associated with both types of dysfunctional sharing. those who share misinformation are more likely to experience a social correction and to witness other being corrected, suggesting that false information does not go unnoticed in peoples' networks. finally, we find that people are significantly more likely to experience, perform, and witness social correction on whatsapp than on facebook, suggesting that the closer social ties maintained through whatsapp might provide a sense of safety that supports these behaviors. references avelar, d. (2019, october 30). whatsapp fake news during brazil election ‘favoured bolsonaro.’ the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/30/whatsapp-fake-news-brazilelection-favoured-jair-bolsonaro-analysis-suggests first draft. (2019, june 27). what 100,000 whatsapp messages reveal about misinformation in brazil. first draft. https://firstdraftnews.org:443/latest/what100000-whatsapp-messages-reveal-about-misinformation-in-brazil/ gil de zúñiga, h., ardèvol-abreu, a., & casero-ripollés, a. (2019). whatsapp political discussion, conventional participation and activism: exploring direct, indirect and generational effects. information, communication & society, 0(0), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1642933 guess, a., nagler, j., & tucker, j. (2019). less than you think: prevalence and predictors of fake news dissemination on facebook. science advances, 5(1), eaau4586. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aau4586 jamieson, k. h. (2018). cyberwar: how russian hackers and trolls helped elect a president what we don’t, can’t, and do know. oxford university press. nielsen, r. k., newman, n., fletcher, r., & kalogeropoulos, a. (2019). reuters institute digital news report 2019. reuters institute for the study of journalism. http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2019 tardáguila, c., benevenuto, f., & ortellado, p. (2018, october 17). opinion | fake news is poisoning brazilian politics. whatsapp can stop it. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/opinion/brazil-election-fake-newswhatsapp.html valeriani, a., & vaccari, c. (2017). political talk on mobile instant messaging services: a comparative analysis of germany, italy, and the uk. information, communication & society, 0(0), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2017.1350730 wooley, s., & howard, p. n. (eds.). (2018). computational propaganda: political parties, politicians, and political manipulation on social media. oxford university press. notes: i https://wearesocial.com/global-digital-report-2019 (last access: august 20, 2019). ii scholars such as jack (2017) have defined purposeful and coordinated efforts of sharing false or misleading information as “disinformation”. we do not adopt this term to refer to what we call “intentional misinformation sharing” because we are not explicitly studying coordinated efforts of misinformation sharing, and we also do not know the motives behind the intentional sharing behaviors we investigate. aoir2020-ah.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 the many sides of a coin: exploring the cost and value of tokens in chaturbate antonia hernández concordia university overview as a social technology, money is one with many incarnations: a unit of account and a store of value, a commodity, an abstract measure of labor-power, an extractive tool, an equalizer that produces inequality. money, however, is never just money, and not even made-up currencies are simple. on the sexcam platform chaturbate.com, a ‘token’ is at the same time the name of a unit of its made-up currency (‘tokens’) and its descriptor (something issued by an authority that can be exchanged later on). a token stands in for something else. but what else, exactly? as this paper shows, chaturbate tokens have different uses and meanings for the audience and performers. these differences do not only happen at the users’ level but are sustained by an ecology of associated payment services that deepen the contrast between them. an analysis of the differences in cost and value of tokens shows their roles as an affective currency and differential exploitation tool. drawing upon the sociology of money, social reproduction theory, and affect studies, this investigation interrogated textual and visual data from public broadcasting and chat logs, dedicated online forums, blog and social media posts, gathered between 2014 and 2019. this paper has two main sections. the first one elaborates on the role of a currency designed to pay a work not formally waged and explicitly labeled as non-work. with an emphasis on the value of tokens, this section expands on the affective role they have for audience and performers, with material and immaterial results. the second part of this paper focuses on the cost of tokens. although with clear differences between what the audience pays for tokens and what the performers receive, the dissimilarities do not stop there but expand to associated services at each side of the transaction. this section maps the connected payment systems that participate (or not) in these exchanges, showing two distinct ecologies that seem intended for two different markets. as the final part of this paper shows, the platform not only benefits from this differential exploitation but engages in the same kind of practices as well. virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): hernández, a. (2020, october) the many sides of a coin: exploring the cost and value of tokens in chaturbate. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. a free platform one of the complexities of tokens is related to the self-declared status of chaturbate as a ‘free platform.’ two common types of platforms overlap on chaturbate: a usergenerated content (ugc) platform and a hire on-demand one. this overlap, however, does not happen without friction. in the guise of platforms that provide ugc, chaturbate does not ask for an entrance fee, nor a mandatory membership. individual broadcasts (‘shows’) are free to watch, and it is the performers’ job to encourage what are defined as voluntary donations (‘tips’) during their shows. while chaturbate keeps half of the transactions, the provided services are never labeled as such. this construct not only helps chaturbate to eludes legalities but contributes to the narrative and practices of work that the sexcam platform sustains. broadcasting from what looks like domestic environments, or settings presented in that way, performers make clear that rather than working, they are having fun. the audience, then, can enjoy the experience because nobody is ‘working’–deemed as a waged and not-fun activity –and performers cannot make demands about the conditions of their work and wages for the same reason. by explicitly labeling the work that happens on the platform as ‘non-work,’ chaturbate perpetuates the abstraction of labor from other spheres of life and profits from the reproductive quality of the performed work–both structural capitalist principles. tokens, through their fictitious nature, facilitate this double articulation. value if chaturbate performers have to pretend that they are not working, and money is not discussed, how do they get paid? there is not only one answer–and often, the answer is that they do not. there are many different strategies to encourage tips, being the most common to set up monetary goals that are matched with specific sexual acts. the audience collaborates to reach those goals in a tacit crowdfunding model. other strategies include organizing contests or using bots and apps. however, the performers’ earnings do not depend on single events but on their succession. reputation is key for this reason, achieved for some through regularity and the construction of a fan base. as its slogan states (the act of masturbating while chatting online), chaturbate not only offers sexual shows but interactions between audience and performers, including conversation and care. more than affective labor, chaturbate is about the laboring of affect. the audience buys and holds tokens, spend them, and start the cycle again. the incentives for doing so vary. tokens not only sustain the platform but are for the audience a communication tool. despite its fictitious nature, tokens carry and trigger affect, enable conversations, create a reputation, prompt smiles. tokens allow the audience to be seen by the performer and the public, express and gain recognition, contribute to the room’s ambiance, influence the show, and affect the performers’ bodies. tokens also have material incarnations through color, sound, and the possibility to remotely activate sex-toys used by the performers. if money is a source of social recognition, chaturbate makes this statement literal by assigning different colors to users, according to how many tokens they have and how much they have recently spent. the ability to chat is sometimes restricted to users with tokens, and users that tip are named and acknowledged during the show. as voluntary gratuities that express appreciation and allow recognition and interaction, tokens are the audience's affective currency. cost besides differences in their value depending on who uses them, tokens have different costs. once purchased, the tokens' value within the platform is half of the original purchase price. in this way, tokens are a technology that allows the exchange of the same quantity for a different price. although blatant, the difference between bought and cashed tokens does not stop at their fungibility–their interchangeability. at each side of the transaction, this difference is enacted through two distinct systems, systems that determine their liquidity–the ease of their conversion into cash. as this investigation demonstrates, there are two different ecologies of associated payment services for performers and for the audience–and the platform connects them. standard and recognized payment services are available for the audience (to buy tokens) but not for performers (to be paid). performers have fewer options and must use less-reliable services, often with bigger associated fees. these differences–that generally precede the sexcam platform–disclose the infrastructural ecology of differential exploitation towards sex workers. however, the platform not only profits from connecting these two different markets but engages in similar discriminatory practices by, for example, valuing tokens differently depending on geographic zones. conclusions chaturbate is a platform built upon a domestic paradigm that signals the platform's services and how value is extracted there. the limit of this paradigm, yet entangled with it, is sex work. this compound determines who the client is on the platform and who provides the service, what is considered work and what is not, who has the right to wages and who does not. the lack of recognition–of work as sex work and of sex work as work–prevents workers from organizing or receive protection, allowing the sexcam platform to establish abusive practices with no consequences. despite their apparent simplicity and fictional nature, chaturbate tokens are coins of many sides. on the sexcam platform, tokens are a technology that allows differential exploitation, taking advantage of deeply embedded systems of oppression. the interplay between the different values and costs of tokens, for audience and performers, is at the core of this technology. marxist feminists have shown reproductive labor as structural to capitalism. the sexcam platform not only agrees: it is its business area. references bhattacharya, tithi, ed. social reproduction theory: remapping class, recentering oppression. london: pluto press, 2017. davies, richard. extreme economies: survival, failure, future: lessons from the world’s limits, 2019. federici, silvia. revolution at point zero: housework, reproduction, and feminist struggle. oakland, ca : brooklyn, ny : london: pm press ; common notions : autonomedia ; turnaround [distributor], 2012. hart, keith. “heads or tails? two sides of the coin.” man, 1986, 637–656. jarrett, kylie. “devaluing binaries: marxist feminism and the value of consumer labour.” in reconsidering value and labour in the digital age, edited by eran fisher and christian fuchs, 2015. trenkle, norbert. “value and crisis: basic questions.” in marxism and the critique of value, edited by neil larsen. chicago, il: mcm, 2013. zelizer, viviana a. rotman. the social meaning of money. new york: basicbooks, 1994. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): ringel, s., davidson, r. (2020, october). deletion will be my epitaph: journalists deletion practices on twitter. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. deletion will be my epitaph: journalists deletion practices on twitter sharon ringel department of communication, university of haifa, israel roei davidson department of communication, university of haifa, israel the stakes involved in the deletion of social media discourse have grown as commercial internet platforms have become a central distribution infrastructure of the public sphere (plantin, lagoze, edwards, & sandvig, 2018) constituting together with news organizations a “platform press” (bell & owen, 2017). these platforms also serve as crucial systems for the “production, distribution, and circulation of cultural content” (nieborg & poell, 2018, p. 1) more generally. twitter is an especially important component of this ecosystem. it presents itself as the world’s “public square,” (dorsey, september 5, 2018) suggesting its role in news gathering and opinion-making is central to its identity. in many countries, a majority of journalists operate an account on twitter for different purposes, from news gathering and reporting to attracting new audiences and maintaining a relationship with their readers (hanusch & bruns, 2017). most studies of twitter’s journalistic role have examined journalists’ tweeting practices and the ways in which twitter serves as an organizational and individual branding tool (e.g., molyneux, holton, & lewis, 2018), studying commission rather than omission. while journalists’ tweeting practices have received a fair amount of scholarly attention, the status of journalistic tweets as a cultural archive and its role in shaping collective memory, have gained less scholarly interest. work on journalism and memory (zelizer & tenenboimweinblatt, 2014) has demonstrated how news production and products are involved in shaping collective memory. however, the potential contribution of journalists’ social media activities to collective memory is being overlooked. if a newspaper is the first draft of history, then journalists’ professional tweets are “the first draft of the first draft of history”—as described by one of the interviewed journalists in semi-structured interviews we conducted in new york city. this study seeks to understand the practice of the deletion of tweets by journalists while arguing that these uniquely reflect the contemporary fragility of archiving and journalism – two human enterprises central to societies’ ability to reflexively consider the past and present and democratically chart a future course. from the perspective of journalism as a profession, it argues that the study of tweet deletion is a means of examining the constraints under which journalists operate today including the occupational precarity (davidson & meyers, 2016) and polarized public sphere with which they contend. workers in many sectors manipulate time on the job as a means of gaining control over their lives (fine, 1990). similarly, journalists might delete past tweets, limiting their temporal presence online, in order to minimize occupational and physical risks arising from the use various audiences might make of their social media record. based on interviews conducted in the winter of 2019 with 17 journalists working in new york city, the study examines how journalists perceive the action of deleting their tweets and how they justify it. the analysis suggests that gender plays a significant role in deletion practices because of political and sexual harassment. the journalists told us that social media audiences often took journalists’ past tweets out of context to criticize them and damage their occupational prospects and threaten their physical wellbeing. we also found that the career shifts common to entrepreneurial journalists prompt them to frequently reshape their public image and hence delete some or most of their past social media activities to ensure their public record is compatible with their current job. this perception of threat together with a perceived lack of support from employing news organizations in an entrepreneurial labor market led some of them to prefer massive deletion over the preservation of journalistically valuable tweets for posterity. this is a form of “proactive ephemerality”, a social media phenomenon that occurs when users intentionally remove their own content from their social media profiles manually or with the aid of mechanical tools. they do so in an attempt to reassert control over their public image and occupational destiny. further, some journalists claim they and many of their colleagues use external services to regularly and mechanically delete all but the most recent tweets from their timeline thereby expunging many tweets that have journalistic and archival value such as livetweeting of prominent trials or of breaking news events. the interviews suggest that journalists’ perception of using a mechanical solution to mass-delete their tweets and to periodically start a new blank twitter feed bypasses the responsibility they feel when they manually delete individual tweets. in other words, when the machine oversees mass deletion, they do not feel the same moral obligation as when they are required to manually choose tweets for deletion. it suggests that human users echo the discourses and strategies internet platforms use when they argue that the responsibility for human actions on the platform lies with computer algorithms rather than with their human developers (gillespie, 2010). when discussing news both practitioners and scholars focus on the present and emphasize its immediacy in terms of production and consumption. as we talked to journalists about their decisions to delete (or not) tweets, we realized that many journalists were continuously aware of the passage of time as the tweets they publish in the present, in a given context, recede into the past. the interviewees expressed their concern that these tweets are remaining accessible to audiences months and years after first published anchored in a different context. they were especially attuned to the risks their public record of tweeting in the past could pose in the future, and some if not all were determined to wield deletion as a means of reducing such risks. we argue that the occupational and physical threat journalists experience together with the lack of nuanced deletion tools on social media platforms and a lack of employer and platform support to deal with online abuse result in massive deletion that damages journalists, news organizations, the platforms and society more generally. we suggest platforms and news organizations adopt a number of organizational and technical design changes to ensure that more of the first draft of the first draft of history survives in the long term. references bell, e. j., owen, t., brown, p. d., hauka, c., & rashidian, n. (2017). the platform press: how silicon valley reengineered journalism. https://doi.org/10.7916/d8r216zz davidson, r., & meyers, o. (2016). toward a typology of journalism careers: conceptualizing israeli journalists’ occupational trajectories. communication, culture and critique, 9(2), 193–211. https://doi.org/10.1111/cccr.12103 dorsey, j. (2018, september 5). jack’s twitter feed. https://twitter.com/jack/status/1037399105306324993 fine, g. a. (1990). organizational time: temporal demands and the experience of work in restaurant kitchens. social forces, 69(1), 95–114. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/69.1.95 gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of ‘platforms’. new media & society, 12(3), 347–364. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342738 hanusch, f., & bruns, a. (2017). journalistic branding on twitter: a representative study of australian journalists’ profile descriptions. digital journalism, 5(1), 2643. molyneux, l., holton, a., & lewis, s. c. (2018). how journalists engage in branding on twitter: individual, organizational, and institutional levels. information, communication & society, 21(10), 1386-1401. nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society, 20(11), 4275–4292. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769694 plantin, j.-c., lagoze, c., edwards, p. n., & sandvig, c. (2018). infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook. new media & society, 20(1), 293–310. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553 zelizer, b., & tenenboim-weinblatt, k. (2014). journalism’s memory work. in b. zelizer & k. tenenboim-weinblatt (eds.), journalism and memory (pp. 1–14). palgrave macmillan uk. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137263940_1 selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 suggested citation (apa): maddox, a., sinanan, j., carter, m., horst, h., spencer, m., & wiesenfeldt, g. (2019, october 2-5). cultural cosmologies of the internet: situating digital networked technologies in diverse moral universes. panel presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. cultural cosmologies of the internet: situating digital networked technologies in diverse moral universes introductory statement this panel explores the ways in which cosmological understandings shape social orientations of trust towards techno-bureaucratic systems. we ask how people negotiate, resist and refuse through the diverse moral universes that arise from the conditions in which people find themselves. the approach we take is informed by scholarship that considers technological practices and how they are embedded in social and cultural cosmologies (burrell 2012; horst & foster 2018; miller et. al. 2016). behavior and choices are guided by moral values that emerge ultimately from a cosmology—a culturally patterned view of the universe and the human place within it (wilk and cligett, 2009: 44). the papers in this panel contextualise technological practices that may be considered good, appropriate and right, bad, destructive and malign within moral models of behaviour, articulating tensions of trust. the first paper in this panel introduces the framework for the moral economy of the mobile phone and emphasises the role of consumers, companies and state agents in resisting and revealing the constraining tendencies of capitalism in fiji and papua new guinea. horst argues that there are several meanings of free culture associated with digital media and technology which departs from the democratic, liberatory potentials of digital culture. this cosmological diversity highlights mistrust in top-down, hierarchical techno-bureaucratic meanings of sharing information and foregrounds social circulation as an alternative and culturally robust mode of exchange within digital cultures. in the second paper, carter explores the good, bad and the ugly of online gaming through examining how players situate their play within the moral economy of the game’s socio-technical system. previous studies have positioned transgressive behaviours such as trolling and cheating as ‘within the game’ practices. however, the paper highlights how these acts occur within a system of values, influenced by game rules, that determine whether win conditions are established or can be met. in the third paper, the spencer draws on an ethnographic study with australian indigenous elders and knowledge authorities on digital formats of presenting, recording and archiving research materials. the spencer argues that these exchanges reveal a set of complex cosmopolitics that support negotiations around inclusion, exclusion and action within shared activities of remaking ancestral and other realities. yet, she suggests that further attempts for creating transparency emerges from recognising the complexity within these exchanges. the fourth paper, sinanan and wiesenfeldt take a historicized view of how of good and evil, or more specifically the theological understanding of the demonic, are inherent to the navigation of technological systems; and how such culturally shaped cosmologies continue to inhabit contemporary, digital technological systems. drawing on demonological discourses that frame technologies as inherently evil or as having the capacity to extend the will of human actors, the authors argue that in the cybernetic vision, as in the demonological vision of technology, humans engage in technological systems beyond their control that produces moral ambivalences as to where responsibility, benign or malign intentions liewithin humans or in the machines they produce. in the final paper, maddox examines the context collapse between the digital pirate and the digital ethnographer. through a study of the drug cryptomarket, silk road, this paper explores the moral economy of digital pirates in the dark web. the quintessential digital culture exemplifying distrust in the system, this community offers more than just an extension of the theory of piracy. they provoke a consideration of the principles of practice. the unique contribution of this panel is to illustrate the impact of diverse cultural cosmologies upon trust and/or distrust in techno-bureaucratic systems. we move beyond a dualistic frame of life online as either emancipatory or an artefact of engineered domination by ‘the system’ (manion & goodrum 2000). instead we seek to reframe social engagement with digital networked technologies through lived experiences in order to encounter diverse world views. it is this cosmological diversity, we argue, that draws us through free cultures, online gaming, indigenous knowledges, a demonic internet and digital pirates. from this arc, we seek to challenge a dominant conceptualisation of a single system and a single view of trust or distrust and nuance the questions surrounding moral cosmologies emerging through socio-technical systems. references burrell, j., (2012). invisible users: youth in the internet cafés of urban ghana. cambridge ma: mit press. horst, h. a. and foster, r.j. (eds), (2018). the moral economy of mobile phones: pacific islands perspectives. canberra: anu press. manion, m., & goodrum, a. (2000). terrorism or civil disobedience: toward a hacktivist ethic. sigcas computers and society., 30(2), 14-19. doi:10.1145/572230.572232 miller, d., costa, e., haynes, n., mcdonald, t., nicolescu, r., sinanan, j., spyer, j., wilk, venkatramen, s. and wang, x. (2016). how the world changed social media, london: ucl press. wilk, r. r. (2009). economies and cultures: foundations of economic anthropology: routledge. paper 1 the multivalent meanings of free culture heather horst university of sydney introduction from organisations such as creative commons to figures such as larry lessig, free culture represents one of the key ideologies of the digital age. in many parts of the global south free culture movements are associated with the call for open source software (horst 2011), the sharing and remixing associated with dancehall, hip hop and other contemporary music and the success of platforms such as frontlinesms in zimbabwe, nigeria and other parts of africa. free culture is associated with a broadening or opening of access to distributing and modifying content, and digital media technologies represent a key mechanism through which these ideals and ideologies operate. although often framed by legal regimes such as piracy and copyright, free culture-inspired platforms and practices play an important role in the circulation of music, films, videos and other forms of creative culture outside of the global north (karanovic 2013). as free culture ideology circulated around the globe so, too, did the liberalization of telecommunications markets in many pacific islands countries which led to exponential growth in the distribution and use of mobile phones. in many countries around the world it is the mobile phone, and especially the smartphone, through which free culture is or can be experienced. this paper examines the notions of free culture, and particularly freeness, as they circulate in contemporary studies of digital culture. drawing upon two research projects based in fiji and papua new guinea, i focus upon the different meanings of freeness operating in fiji and papua new guinea with particular attention to the ways in which ‘freeness’ has come to garner meaning in people’s relationships to telecommunications over the past decade. after introducing the framework of the moral economy of the mobile phone and the role of consumers, companies and state agents in shaping the moral economy (foster and horst 2018), i introduce notions of ‘freeness’ and the culture of ‘free’ operating in fiji and png. this includes an examination of the ways in which telecommunications companies market and advertise freeness through series of promotions and “deals” designed to incentivize the purchase or use their phones, airtime and data. i then turn to the ways in which mobile consumers themselves create moments of ‘freeness’ through the use of apps to share music and video made available through the smartphone and associated technologies. by comparing the creation of mobile company’s free culture and the emergence of other forms of exchange in everyday consumer use, i highlight the multivalent notions of free culture and what we might think of as a vernacular culture of freeness associated with digital media and technology. how do we make sense of the vernacular forms of free culture which have emerged and the underlying value of freeness that they reflect and the implications of these for what we might think of as free culture as a concept? how do these different notions of ‘free culture’ come together, especially given the long history of gifting and exchange, as well as political culture in the pacific? in this paper i argue that there are multiple meanings of free culture operating in fiji, much of which bears little resemblance to the democratic, liberatory potential of digital culture that celebrated the ability to share and remix various sources of information and creative content. with the forms of freeness now circulating, i suggest that the “free” in “free culture” has been reduced to the possibility and ability to get more than what you pay for and/or avoid paying for minutes, data or content. certainly this has enhanced, for some, the accessibility to information and the possibilities for sharing and circulating via a variety of networked media (often without and/or circumventing payment), including sites and applications like youtube, facebook, whatsapp and a range of others. among many people circumventing the use of data either through wifi or sharing apps such as c-share where videos and music are quickly and cheaply shared, there is a sense that movies and other works are recognized as part of public culture and are used creatively. yet, this is about not paying for something of value rather than a recognition of the freedom to distribute and modify creative work. elsewhere (horst 2018) i have argued that mobile telecommunications companies seek to create relationships with people who use mobile services, creating consumer-citizens (building on the work of media scholar sarah banet-weiser and others). vodafone emphasizes its long-term commitment to fiji by stressing the citizen dimension of consumer-citizens and digicel stresses consumers and broader values of global capitalism. the notion of free culture that operates in such contexts – while at times framed by the companies as a gift is deliberately designed to create a sense of belonging which will in turn obligate consumers to use and keep their services. however, this sense of obligation is transient and must be reframed and reinforced. the notion of freeness that operates for ordinary (and especially pre-paid) consumers in fiji and png requires knowledge of the broader system, and the capacity to discipline and calculate oneself to take advantage of the forms of freeness being offered. while these practices resonate with the discipline and practice ep thompson as foster (2018) has argued in relation to the micro-calculation of little to no data in papua new guinea, the ability to leverage freeness operates more like the sense of addiction created in schull’s work on gambling where people become reliant on the system to keep going and use data to continue to remain embedded in the social networks that underpin the mobile network. in effect the free culture that emerges through subversion and gamification by for consumers both subverts and extends the limits of their own capacity to purchase data but it also continues to tie them into the broader system. however, the subversion, and the use of things like whatsapp and messenger for talking have impacted the voice call business and have driven the two companies to develop different demands for data. this fundamental tension around the discursive notions of freenees and particular valences of free that circulate between consumers and the companies that operate is part of the moral economy of mobile phones. this tension around who is more or less obligated – and the moments of freeness that emerge is perhaps a lens through which to understand the ways that digital culture and global capitalism continue to be intertwined. references foster, r. and horst, h. (eds). (2018). the moral economy of mobile phones: pacific perspectives. canberra: anu press. foster, r. (2018). “top-up: the moral economy of prepaid mobile phone subscriptions.”. in foster, r and horst, h. (eds) the moral economy of mobile phones: pacific perspectives. canberra: anu press horst, h. (2018). “creating consumer-citizens: competition, tradition and the moral order of the mobile telecommunications industry in fiji”. in foster, r. and horst, h. (eds) the moral economy of mobile phones: pacific perspectives. canberra: anu press. horst, h. (2011). free, social, and inclusive: appropriation and resistance of new media technologies in brazil. international journal of communication, 5: 437–462. karanovic, j. (2012). free software and the politics of sharing. in horst, h. & miller, d. (eds) digital anthropology. london: bloomsbury. schull, n. (2012). addiction by design: machine gambling in las vegas. princeton: princeton university press. paper 2 a constructionist approach to moral norms in multiplayer online games marcus carter university of sydney abstract research on transgressive and problematic behavior in online gaming environments (eg. cheating, griefing and trolling) has typically conceptualized moral norms and values of videogames as existing within clearly demarcated spheres, albeit spheres that are constantly being negotiated and renegotiated. this process as multiplayer games’ demarcation problem (carter, gibbs & arnold, 2015), draws on gieryn’s theory of boundary-work for understanding the ways acts of play are demarcated as unacceptable (in the form of cheating, or griefing) or acceptable. though useful for understanding processes where social rules are established and maintained in multiplayer games, this binary approach inadequately accounts for other practices that are present in, and crucial to the success of, online multiplayer games and how players situate their play within the moral world of the game’s socio-technical system. in this paper, i propose a constructionist approach to understanding the moral economy of multiplayer games and present and example from eve online that demonstrates its merit. multiplayer games as thought provinces on the concept of scientific disciplines, clifford geertz proposed “thinking about thought as a social activity, diversely animated, organized and aimed” (1982, p. 30). doing so is essentially a means to understand how “separate individuals come to conceive, or do not, reasonably similarly similar things” (p. 23). this, he argues, overcomes the error that lies “in attempting to interpret cultural materials as though they were individual expressions rather than social institutions” (1982, p. 16). this way of conceptualizing disciplinary thought – as a key example of a thought province – can be an extremely useful lens for understanding forms of negotiation, resistance and refusal that occur around player perceptions of a game’s rules and moral norms. drawing on this approach, i argue, is to recognize that all acts that occur within a multiplayer game are held within a system of values, a game’s moral economy (carter, 2018). valuing certain play acts, styles, strategies and events over other instances of play is intrinsic to the function of multiplayer games it is through valuing play that win conditions are established or can be met; e.g. paper beats rock. the most common way in which value is influenced is through rules. rules are also extremely influential in devaluing play, principally through categorising them as being against the rules, with some form of penalty. while picking up the ball and running it through the opponent’s goal posts in a roman-legion testudo formation might successfully move the ball between the goal posts, rules against using your hands to touch the ball devalue it. rudimentary stuff – rules are at the forefront of the practice of valuing play and have consequently been given primacy in definitions of, and attempts to understand, games and game play (stenros, 2017). however, rules are not the only mechanism with which play is valued in multiplayer games. prior work has shown how terms and concepts like sportsmanship (moeller, esplin & conway, 2009), cheating (consalvo, 2007), fair-play (butcher & schneider, 1998), griefing and trolling (lin & sun 2005) are attached to play acts, events and strategies to change their worth, irrespective of their relation to rules. game paratexts (genette, 1991; 1997) help “structure [play] and give it meaning” (2007, p.21), and that they play a key role in telling a player “how to play, what to play, and what is cool (and not) in the game world” (p.22). a game’s imaginary, its fictive world also serves a similar role in shaping how play is valued. in the mutual, shared recognition of this moral economy, multiplayer games can be considered a form of geertz’s thought province; a socially constructed system about which players collectively conceive reasonably similar values. such an approach decentralizes written rules in how we might examine the social codes of online worlds and prioritizes attention to the sociality of their existence. case study: killing on sight in dayz dayz is a survival, sandbox first-person shooter games in which players scavenge items to survive in a zombie apocalypse. featuring high-consequence death that encourages players to avoid conflict (carter, gibbs & wadley, 2013), yet ultimately configured as a combat simulator, the online community of dayz players constantly negotiates the tension between survival and killing. one such site of negotiation is the practice of ‘killing on sight’ (kos), where players are immediately (and always) hostile towards other players they encounter. kos is an excellent example of a type of play overlooked by a binary approach to understanding transgressive play in online game environments. it is within any coded and formal rules of the game, but has the capacity to negatively – and significantly – impact the play of others, and is subsequently widely condemned and denigrated by players as “unsportsmanlike”, “despicable” and “scummy”. the lack of these formal rules make dayz a fruitful site of investigation, since it uncovers the socio-technical systems at work in establishing a game’s moral economy. a constructionist approach to understanding this form of play, that crucially exists within the moral economy of dayz does not offer the opportunity to identify if this is indeed a “piece of shit” thing to do, but rather, identifies the sites and processes that shape the production and experience of the dayz gameworld. it highlights the role that online spaces – such as reddit gaming forums and youtube – play in devaluing kos behavior (via memes and stories) and valuing other, more social ways of playing. participant responses to a 1700+ player motivations survey further identified other factors that players draw on to understand how to play, and how to respond to the play of others (carter and allison, 2018). many drew on the game’s zombie-apocalypse imaginary, complaining about kos players, “i don’t think people would act like that in the apocalypse”. another the configuration of high consequence death, “the point of permadeath is to discourage kos”, unveiling the primacy of the designer’s intent. more though, even in this post-apocalyptic combat simulator where death is necessary for the desired intense experience of play, situated their complaint within the mutual desire for everyone to have pleasurable experience. these social, technological and immaterial systems collide to shape the experience and social activity of playing dayz. references butcher, r., & schneider, a. (1998). fair play as respect for the game. journal of the philosophy of sport, 25, 1–22. brown, a. (2012). “no one-handed typing”: an exploration of gameness, rules and spoilsports in an erotic role play community in world of warcraft. journal of gaming & virtual worlds, 4, 259–273. carter, m., gibbs, m. & wadley, g. (2013) “friendly, don’t shoot!”: how communication design can enable novel social interactions. in proceedings of the 24th australian computer-human interaction conference (ozchi’12), acm press, p. 72-75. carter, m., gibbs, m., & arnold, m. (2015). the demarcation problem in multiplayer games: boundary-work in eve online’s esport. game studies, 15. retrieved from http://gamestudies.org/1501/articles/carter carter, m. (2017). valuing play in survivor. games and culture. (online first) carter, m. & allison, f. (2018). guilt in dayz. in k. jorgensen and f. karlsen’s transgression in games and play. cambridge, ma.: mit press. consalvo, m. (2007). cheating. cambridge, ma.: mit press. geertz, c. (1982). the way we think now: toward an ethnography of modern thought. bulletin of the american academy of arts and sciences, 35, 14–34. genette, g. (1991). introduction to the paratext. new literary history, 22, 261–272. genette, g. (1997). paratexts: thresholds of interpretation. london, england: cambridge university press. gieryn, t. f. (1983). boundary-work and the demarcation of science from non-science. american sociological review, 48, 781–795. gieryn, t. f. (1999). cultural boundaries of science: credibility on the line. chicago, il: the university of chicago press. lin, h., & sun, c. t. (2007). “white-eyed” and “griefer” player culture: deviance construction in mmorpgs. in s. de castelle & j. jenson (eds.), worlds in play: international perspectives on digital games research (pp. 103–114). new york, ny: peter lang. moeller, r., esplin, b., & conway, s. (2009). cheesers, pullers and glitchers: the rhetoric of sportsmanship and the discourse of online sports games. game studies, 9. retrieved from http://gamestudies.org/0902/articles/moeller_esplin_conway stenros, j. (2017). the game definition game. games and culture, 12, 499–520. paper 3 digital first: being sensitive to epistemic politics michaela spencer charles darwin university abstract ‘digital first’ is an emerging paradigm in the college of indigenous futures, arts and society at charles darwin university (cifas 2019), where indigenous teachers and learners comprise a growing proportion of the university and there are strong connections between the university and both urban and remote aboriginal communities. this paradigm is coming to infuse both teaching and research within many areas of the university, and offers both challenges and opportunities to research and teaching staff. as a member of a small ‘ground up’ team of researchers and educators who work collaboratively with indigenous elders and knowledge authorities as well as government and non-government organisations, this transition carries implications for our ongoing research collaborations and everyday practices (www.groundup.cdu.edu.au). as a researcher and educator facilitating gradual transitions to ‘digital first’ ways of working, i am involved in developing online profiles and e-portfolios for researchers showcasing their professional skills, exploring digital formats for presenting, recording and archiving research materials, and developing micro-credentials which can recognise community-based research skills exhibited by indigenous and other researchers. supporting connections between research and learning, also involves reshaping online course materials so as to support community-based learners, and developing forms of practically based research training and assessment suitable for students operating in aboriginal languages and prioritizing oral and visual forms of presentation. the first part of the paper takes the embodied work of crafting these new practices and technologies as a site of research, and offers several ethnographic episodes arising within this research and teaching work. these episodes emerge at the intersection of community-based research and learning practices, and new forms of ‘digital first’ technologies and ways of operating where surprises and challenging demands often arise. for example, requests to accommodate group enrolment and learning within course structures as community-based researchers push to enroll in research diploma courses in groups which encompass senior and junior learners; grandmothers and grandchildren. the apparent necessity of developing ways of accounting student/researcher identities as relationally configured in place, rather than appearing independently from the outside. and, the conceptual hijinks required when developing online research resources and findings that are explicit about their performative capacities in use. the second part looks to juxtapose these ethnographic accounts with work produced by an earlier generation of ground up researchers exploring possibilities of online learning and digitally mediated knowledge work. in the early 2000’s a number of initiatives were established by groups of cdu based researchers, and yolŋu colleagues and collaborators in east arnhem land. the program teaching from country established processes for conducting online distance education in reverse, with yolŋu lecturers teaching from remote places, to students in urban centres (http://learnline.cdu.edu.au/inc/tfc/). while the program ‘indigenous knowledge and resource management in northern australia (ikrnma): making collective memory from computers’ explored tools for capturing, storing and using digital objects concerning collective life and place. writing about these efforts, verran and christie (2007) described the work of yolngu elders struggling against the grain of digital technologies designed to represent, to use them in ways that were actively performative in expressing the remaking of an ancestral reality. at the same time, exploiting the possibilities the technologies offered for representation in achieving political ends in dealing with representatives of mainstream australia (2007: 214). my suggestion is that juxtaposing these sets of research materials allows each to be read as enacting a relational ethics of digital first; that is, to enact a working ‘cosmopolitics’. cosmopolitics is a term that was first coined by isabelle stengers’ to denote an on-going exploration of who or what may participate in the composition of a shared world, and how (stengers 2005). in their recent book, mario blaser and marisol de la cadena pick up on this term, and the associated concept of ‘political ontology’, to foreground the need for a minimalist translating frame when considering performative practices capable of working multiple worlds. they suggest other interpretive options such as ‘…political economy and political ecology, formulated with ideas of nature and economic growth, are insufficient (at times even unable) to think antagonisms that, for example, involve things like mountains and forests that emerge as resources through some practices but also as persons through other practices’ (2018: 5, see also blaser 2009). as such, cosmopolitics denotes a politics across worlds that lacks – or even more strongly, denies the necessity of – a common ground as a precursor to performative action (dányi & spencer 2019). looking back to the archive examples of online learning and tools for managing digital objects helps to make visible ways of working technologies as social and material assemblages, and to reveal a relational ethic of digital design. this relational ethic remains significant as arrangements of digital first university curricula and assemblages come to life. learning to work such an ethics carefully and well may be an important step for the novice digital first cosmopolitician seeking to participate in new forms of digital design and pedagogy. references: college of indigenous futures, arts and society (2019) strategic plan. internal document. de la cadena, m., & blaser, m. (eds.). (2018). a world of many worlds. duke university press. dányi, e. & spencer, m. (2019). un/common grounds: tracing politics across worlds, social studies of science. forthcoming. stengers, i. (2005). the cosmopolitical proposal. making things public: atmospheres of democracy, 994, 994. verran, h., & christie, m. (2007). using/designing digital technologies of representation in aboriginal australian knowledge practices. human technology: an interdisciplinary journal on humans in ict environments. paper 4 sorcerer’s apprentice or manichaean devil? a demonological understanding of technological systems and digital media jolynna sinanan university of sydney gerhard wiesenfeldt university of melbourne abstract a widespread argument declares technological systems as purely physical and thus value neutral (pitt, 1999). against this idea, approaches in science and technology studies have pointed out the inherent normative constructions along inclusionary and exclusionary frameworks (winner, 1980; radder, 2009), thus emphasizing the social nature of technology. with the swift uptake of digital and mobile media and the even faster integration of these technologies into everyday routines and practices, good and evil, or emancipatory and dominating potentials become invisible or obscured. miller and horst suggest that a consequence of technologies becoming rapidly mundane is that what is experienced is not necessarily the technology, but an ‘immediately cultural inflected genre of usage’ (2010: 29). issues of blame and morality that are inextricable from cultural understandings are often projected onto technologies themselves. in this paper, we take a step further and present a historicized view of the ways in which good and evil, or more specifically, demonic understandings are inherent to the navigation of technological systems and that such culturally shaped cosmologies continue to inhabit contemporary, digital technological systems. technology is thus less in the realm of the natural or the social, but belongs to the preternatural. our approach is similar to canales’ and krajewski’s (2012) historical epistemology of scientific demons and resonates with kelty’s observation that data, algorithms and infrastructure can embed forms of exclusion and domination through their implementation by social actors in their everyday operation, but the kinds of evil in question simply goes unmeasured, or remains hidden (2017). by revisiting the explicit notion of evil as demonic, we argue that such qualities are important to recognize if we are to appreciate and more fully understand the role of consequences of digital media in everyday life. reflecting on the ubiquity of mobile phones in the first ten years or so, arnold draws on the mythical janus face as a metaphor to examine how mobile phones have both benign and malign potentials at the same time (2003). we take this idea further as digital media produces relationships that extend far beyond dyadic communication between individuals and employ the notion of the demonic to reconsider the moral norms of social and material infrastructures. we are interested in how far the ontologies of technologies contain the concepts of demons, in a theological rather than an epistemological interpretation of technology. the demonic nature of technology the theological discussion of technology as a matter of good or evil was framed by the manichaean challenge to early christianity, which classified material technology as belonging to the realm of darkness and thus inherently evil (coyel, 2009). rejecting the idea of a second, dark creation, augustinian theology reconceptualized evil as a deviant form of good – a privation of form and substance (mathewes, 2001). in early modern demonology, this notion led to an understanding of technology as natural magic that was necessarily either good or evil. natural magic was the human activity of engaging preternatural demons as active agents that change the natural course of things (clark, 1999). while invoked demons could be good or evil, their actions were intrinsically beyond human control and their true nature often hidden from humans. in the demonological discourse, the conditions under which demons could ethically be invoked remained contested, but a key criterion related to the mastery of the magus who possessed the required knowledge and experience to perform magic responsibly. the literary figure of the sorcerer’s apprentice and of faust established the risks that demonic practices could face from either ignorance or intellectual vanity (tambling, 2016). on the other hand, the figure of the witch embodied black magically practices that invoked demons to exercise invisible control over other people to their detriment (brock et al. 2018). while modern techno-science was established – at least rhetorically – by rejecting the old demonological ideas and thus understanding technological knowledge as inherently beneficial to humanity (d’alembert, 2000), the moral ambivalence of technology remained. the ambivalence was not only about the excesses of technological progress – the ‘dark satanic mills’ of the industrial revolution – but also about inventions such as humphry davy’s safety lamp that were intended as purely beneficial, yet resulted in negative consequences; in davy’s case the intended use to save miners’ lives enabled practices that increased the death toll (golinski, 2016). the demons of technological systems proved to be beyond the scientist’s control. consequently, demons reentered the scientific imaginary in the works of laplace, maxwell and others as superhuman beings with the mastery to control the very phenomena out of reach of humans (weinert, 2016; osietzki, 2001). the involvement of techno-science in modern warfare provided moral dilemmas, culminating in the ‘evil technology’ of toxic gases in world war i, causing invisible harm and death to soldiers (friedrich et al., 2017). the demonic ontology of technology became central to norbert wiener’s conceptualization of cybernetic warfare as a fight against a manichaean devil that used disguise and dissimulation and needed to be emulated in order to be defeated (galison, 1994). more recently, the notion of the demonic as human-technological deviant has been employed by internet and communication scholars to counter the anxieties produced by the increased ubiquity of algorithms, data flows and automation in everyday life. fuller and goffey consider digital platforms ‘evil’ in their ability to have an active capacity to shape and manipulate things and people that come into contact with them (2012). mckelvey quite directly uses demons to interpret ‘daemons’ as potentially mischievous software for distributed and dynamic social control (2018). in the cybernetic vision as in the demonological vision of technology, we engage in technological systems beyond our control producing moral dilemmas stemming from our inability to clearly discern good and evil demons, while maintaining the same criteria for evils in technology – the invisible control and the irresponsible transgression of our expertise. our trust in technological systems we engage with, but don’t control, is the trust in a benevolent demon. references arnold, m., (2003). on the phenomenology of technology: the “janus-faces” of mobile phones. information and organization, 13(4), pp.231-256. brock, m. d. et al. (2018). knowing demons, knowing spirits in the early modern period. london: palgrave macmillan. canales, j., krajewski, m. (2012). little helpers. about demons, angels and other servants. interdisciplinary science reviews, 37(4), 314-331. clark, s. (1999). thinking with demons: the idea of witchcraft in early modern europe. oxford: oxford university press. coyel, j. k. (2009). manichaeism and its legacy, boston: brill. d’alembert, j. l.r. (2000). “discours préliminaire de l’encyclopédie”, paris: vrin. friedrich, b., et al. (2017). one hundred years of chemical warfare: research, deployment, consequences. berlin: springer. fuller, m. and goffey, a., (2012). evil media. cambridge: mit press galison, p. (1994). the ontology of the enemy: norbert wiener and the cybernetic vision”, critical inquiry 21(1), 228-266. golinski, j. (2016). the experimental self: humphry davy and the making of a man of science. chicago: the university of chicago press. horst, h. a., & miller, d. (eds.). (2013). digital anthropology. london: bloomsbury. kelty, c. (2017). "introduction: evil infrastructures." theorizing the contemporary, cultural anthropology website, april 28. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1106-introductionevil-infrastructures. mathewes, c. t. (2001). evil and the augustinian tradition. cambridge: cambridge university press. mckelvey, f. (2018). internet daemons: digital communications possessed. minneapolis. university of minnesota press. osietzki, m. (2001). 'dämon' gegen 'wärmetod': energie und information in der männlichen naturaneignung des 19. und 20. jahrhunderts, freiburger frauenstudien, 11, 89-112. pitt, j. c. (1999). thinking about technology: foundations of the philosophy of technology. new york: seven bridges press. radder, h. (2009). “why technologies are inherently normative”, in meijers, a., philosophy of technology and engineering sciences, amsterdam: north-holland, 887– 921. tambling, j. (2016). histories of the devil: from marlowe to mann and the manichees, london: palgrave macmillan. weinert, f. (2016). the demons of science: what the can and can’t tell us about our world, cham: springer. winner, l. (1980). do artifacts have politics?. daedalus, 109(1), 121–136. paper 5 researching digital pirates in the dark web: an ethnographic reflection alexia maddox deakin university abstract media reports sensationalise the dark web as a seedy digital location where drugs, guns, hitmen and child pornography circulate through ebay-style marketplaces that are only accessible to your hacker types. here, elusive fringe behaviours proliferate in plain sight, with identities hidden through encryption technologies and secretive user cultures. in 2013, i began collaborating on a digital ethnography of the most popular dark web drug market, silk road. the social impacts of an online drug market defined by choicedriven drug purchasing, highly visible yet anonymous user cultures and customer-tocustomer (c2c) drug sales were unknown. this paper is a contemplation of ethnographic research practice with the online community surrounding silk road, the first widely used cryptomarket for drugs on the dark web. to position the study within a cosmological moral universe, a theory of piracy is interrogated for its explanatory capacity of the digital pirates of the dark web. as has been previously argued (dawdy and bonni 2012; johns 2010), there are significant continuities between the pirates of the open seas and the pirates of digital spaces. cryptomarkets are e-commerce websites that operate in the dark web, commonly referred to as darknet markets (dnms). the dark web (or darknet) is an overlay of special routing software designed to provide anonymity for website visitors and publishers (gehl, 2018). in this paper, i socially finese the definition of cryptomarkets to argue that they are a domain of activity for marginalised populations who prefer ebay style drug access (referred to here as ‘choice-driven’ access) and a preference towards information liberty and self-sovereignty. as the ethnographer on the ground, my aim for entering the silk road cryptomarket was initially to immerse with the microcosm of a digital culture forming and reforming in the dark web. there is an emerging field of scholarship into cryptomarkets that draws together criminologists, media scholars, sociologists, and computer scientists (cf. barratt and aldrige 2016). however there remains a disconnect between existing literature engaging with the cryptomarket space and relevant anthropological scholarship that may illuminate its social adoption, user cultures and the meaning making that arises through the social appropriation of technological innovations. to address this gap, i will connect this research to anthropological literature on illegal practices (thomas and galemba 2013, roitman 2006) such as drug use and distribution (polson 2013) and piracy (cf. dent 2012). i will also draw in literature on platform affordances (nardi 2015) specific to hacker cultures (cf. coleman and golub 2008, coleman 2014), and online visibility, especially in the negative/dark sense such as trolling (philips 2015) as a way to frame cryptomarkets and their surrounding users and communities. in contrast to the illegal yet socially licit blackmarket described by roitman (2006) in the chad basin, the moral economy surrounding the silk road cryptomarket etched out a space of independent economy, collaborative creativity and political resistance. the cryptomarket encoded johns (2009)’ notion that digital pirates undermine property and enact security through technical designs that avoid centralised control and harness peer-to-peer architectures. the justification for the retail of illicit commodities rested on anarchist values of formative internet cultures (levy 1984) that argue for user privacy and the free circulation of information (and drugs). we can connect these observations to define silk road as an autonomous pirate state in the dark web that was operating on decentralised and securitised principals of trade. the early work of barratt (2012) describes the peer-to-peer architecture of silk road as producing an ebay for drugs and the central role of encryption and cryptocurrencies for decentralised exchange and privacy practices (gehl 2018; nelms et al. 2018). because of the site founder and initial core member’s orientation towards information liberty, anonymity and personal privacy linked to notions of self-sovereignty, they initiated a secure platform and marketplace based upon anonymising technologies that bootstrapped cryptocurrencies and started a whole wave of innovation. in review, the start of the study unexpectedly coincided with the fbi seizure of silk road in october 2013. the field site disappearance provoked a practice-based and conceptual rewiring. for example, in the paper i unpack how the ‘hydra effect’ introduced to conceptualise resilient innovation within cryptomarkets can also apply to research practice. consequently, throughout this paper i argue that there is a predictable and yet uncanny parallel between field site and research practice. to illustrate this, i further explore how practices that characterise cryptomarkets, such as contention, disruption, redirection, obsolescence, construction and iteration, are paralleled within digital ethnographic practice. i would argue however that this reflexive knowledge is not sufficient and must be accompanied by the researcher’s own vulnerability, a common element of being human. perhaps, on the high seas of the dark web, it is through vulnerability that there can be a context collapse between the digital ethnographer and the digital pirate. references barratt, m. j. (2012). “silk road: ebay for drugs.” addiction 107 (3):683-683, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1360-0443.2011.03709.x barratt, m. j., and j. aldridge. 2016. “everything you always wanted to know about drug cryptomarkets* (*but were afraid to ask).” international journal of drug policy 35:1-6. doi: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2016.07.005. coleman, e. g. and golub, a. (2008). “hacker practice: moral genres and the cultural articulation of liberalism.” anthropological theory, 8(3), 255–277. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499608093814 coleman, g. (2014). hacker, hoaxer, whistleblower, spy: the many faces of anonymous. london : new york : verso books dawdy, s. l., & bonni, j. (2012). towards a general theory of piracy. (3), 673. doi:10.1353/anq.2012.0043 dent, a. s. (2012). understanding the war on piracy, or why we need more anthropology of pirates. anthropological quarterly, (3), 659. gehl, r. w. (2018). weaving the dark web : legitimacy on freenet, tor, and i2p. cambridge, ma : the mit press johns, a. (2009). “piracy as a business force.” culture machine 10:44–63. johns, a. (2010). piracy: the intellectual property wars from gutenberg to gates. chicago: university of chicago press. levy, s. (1984). hackers: heroes of the computer revolution. garden city, n.y. : anchor press/ doubleday. martin, j. a. (2014. “lost on the silk road: online drug distribution and the ‘cryptomarket’.” criminology and criminal justice 14 (3):351-367. doi:10.1177/1748895813505234. nardi, b. (2015). “virtuality.” annual review of anthropology, 44, 15-31. doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-014226 nelms, t. c., b. maurer, l. swartz, and s. mainwaring. (2018). “social payments: innovation, trust, bitcoin, and the sharing economy.” theory, culture and society, 35(3), 13–33. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276417746466 phillips, w. (2015). this is why we can’t have nice things : mapping the relationship between online trolling and mainstream culture. cambridge, massachusetts ; london, england : the mit press. polson, m. (2013). land and law in marijuana country: clean capital, dirty money, and the drug war's rentier nexus. political and legal anthropology review : polar, 36(2), 215-230. doi:10.1111/plar.12023 roitman, j. (2007). the right to tax: economic citizenship in the chad basin. citizenship studies, 11(2), 187-209. doi:10.1080/13621020701262636 thomas, k., & galemba, r. b. (2013). illegal anthropology: an introduction. polar: the political and legal anthropology review, 36(2), 211-214. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): kaufmann, k.; palmberger, m., parreiras, c., bussoletti, a., belotti, f., comunello, f., donato, s., wagenaar, w., bermúdez, j., schweiger, m., & wimmer, j. (2021, october). the in(ter)dependencies of mobile online and offline spaces: reflections on methods, practices, ethics. panel presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the in(ter)dependencies of mobile online and offline spaces: reflections on methods, practices, ethics katja kaufmann university of innsbruck / cmc vienna monika palmberger university of vienna / university of leuven introduction to the panel mobile media technologies place users in digital (online) as well as physical (offline) spaces in novel ways, opening up new environments of affordances. in everyday life these mobile online and offline spaces are increasingly interdependent and interwoven in manifold ways. practices, experiences, meanings, and expectations are negotiated across these spaces, while at the same time they are bound by the respective logics and limitations, leading to new interrelations and contradictions. the mobile, interlocking but non-converging nature of these online and offline spaces involves issues of access and power in struggles over in(ter)dependencies and leads to significant method(odolog)ical, practical and ethical challenges for researchers, to which the current covid-19 pandemic only adds complexity. meanwhile, in the discussion of research findings as well as in methodological literature, the specific challenges associated with researching the intersections of online and offline spaces, especially under mobile conditions, are rarely explicitly addressed. for this reason, this panel seeks to advance methodological scholarship and crossdisciplinary exchange on prevalent and emerging icts and their embeddedness in everyday practices across mobile online and offline spaces. paper 1, smartphones in precarious contexts: ethnographic reflections on the use of mobile technologies in favelas in rio de janeiro (brazil), investigates the everyday use of smartphones in the impoverished and unequal contexts of brazilian favelas. based on ethnographic data from both in-person and digital conversations, interactions and observations, the author discusses the methodological contributions that ethnography presents as a tool for dealing with transitions between online and offline environments, and for considering the particularities of the incorporation of technologies in everyday life in contexts of social and digital inequality. the paper thus seeks to contribute to an understanding of smartphones as mediators between digital/online and physical/offline relationships. paper 2, in the backstage of fridays for future between (mobile) online and offline practices, is based on multimodal ethnography and examines how fridays for future (fff) activists are seamlessly organized between online and offline environments. conceptualizing mobile instant messaging services (mims) as the ‘backstage’ of activism, the authors argue that we need to consider physical and digitally-mediated environments as a whole to understand fff’s organizational dynamics, identity-building processes, and sense-making related to social media usages. the authors advocate the use of methods that value the mutual influence of culture and technology, such as their qualitative multimodal research design that combines participant observation and digital ethnography across multiple settings (whatsapp, zoom, physical locations). paper 3, studying the everyday lives of media fans: practical and ethical challenges, gives insight into the significant challenges of studying how online fan practices and experiences are embedded in and interact with the everyday offline contexts from which individual fans engage in them. using non-media-centric, ethnographic research on the day-to-day lives of media fans, the author reflects on addressing the geographical delimitations of doing face-to-face fieldwork as well as on having to adapt established ethnographic methods to online approaches during ongoing research in light of the covid-19 pandemic and considers some of the practical and ethical challenges that come into play when studying how pseudonymous identities and sensitive online practices are embedded in people’s everyday lives. paper 4, ethnographing between spaces: researching tiktok from an e3thnomusicological perspective, deals with the challenge of ethnomusicology to research musicality in its holistic course of performance. using the case of the videosharing app tiktok, the paper discusses the analysis of multimedia musical practices as a necessary shift in thinking about the importance of internet in the everyday life of the actors, their musical practices, as well as the recognition of internet as an embodied experience beyond the real/virtual dichotomy. the author argues that in order to capture the deterritoralization and multimedia reality of musical practices, researchers need a threefold focus on interactions, interrelations and enabling processes. moreover, the author opens a discussion on the ethnographic field and its conceptualization in the context of deterritorialization and the multimedia reality of the musical practices studied. paper 5, methodological reflections on capturing augmented space: insights from an augmented reality (ar) field study, provides insights into the methodological challenges and opportunities of researching the emergent phenomenon of augmented reality and its impact on people’s perception of urban space in daily life. the authors share their experiences in applying a range of qualitative and quantitative approaches which proved valuable for capturing the reception of space, including thinking-aloud-protocols (tap) to analyze the influence of ar on spatial perception and meaning, a standardized online survey to capture spatial meaning, and the collection of spatial movement using locative tracking via the head-worn ar glasses. the covid-19 pandemic posed additional challenges to the practical use of the technical instruments. with these five papers, the panel presents a thought-provoking range of examples of research into phenomena at the intersections of mobile online and offline spaces and the associated experiences as well as methodological challenges of researchers in dealing with issues of in(ter)dependence at all levels. smartphones in precarious contexts: ethnographic reflections on the use of mobile technologies in favelas in rio de janeiro (brazil) carolina parreiras state university of campinas (unicamp) introduction the aim of this paper is to reflect on the theoretical, ethical and methodological challenges involved in conducting research that focuses on the use of smartphones, as well as research that is carried out through the use of mobile devices. i take daniel miller's (2021) recent proposals regarding research with smartphones as a starting point and inspiration. miller seeks to think of these devices not only as material devices in themselves, but as places we inhabit and in which we live. the data on which this paper is based is derived from an ethnographic research carried out among favela dwellers in the city of rio de janeiro (brazil). it is important to note that, in these favelas, smartphones have become an essential means for accessing social services, school, and work, as well as for sociability and accessing information. as christine hine (2015) proposes, there is a need for greater attention to the “embedded, embodied and everyday” internet. i am especially interested to discuss the everyday character of the use of smartphones in impoverished contexts, how smartphones work as the technological device through which it is possible to map the transits between online and offline spaces, as well as the many inequalities that these uses point to. context favelas are impoverished places marked by what we could call structural and material precariousness, in which residents face difficulties in accessing basic services, housing, water, and basic sanitation, for example. as they are also places marked by different forms of urban violence, with increasing clashes between police/army and groups linked to drug trafficking, i use the fictitious name complexo to name the favelas addressed in this paper. the context of the complexo reflects the general data around access to the internet and to technological devices in brazil. according to one of the surveys available on use of technology in brazil (the ict households), brazil is still quite unequal in terms of access, with 58% of internet users in the country using their smartphone as the only means of access. methods the covid-19 pandemic impacted the ways in which the research was carried out, as it made any type of in-person/offline fieldwork incursion impossible. my contacts with my interlocutors started to be exclusively through digital means, specifically with the use of whatsapp. whatsapp is a strategic application because it is used by most of my interlocutors functioning, as suggested by cruz and harindranath (2020), as a “technology of life” that shapes the everyday life and serves for a big range of activities. another important point is that whatsapp allows for different forms of exchange: synchronous and asynchronous, by text, video or audio messages. these aspects are useful because they point to the different significances each format receives in the daily uses and tells us about the digital literacies associated with social inequalities (for example, why audio messages are preferred in detriment to text messages). i aim to advance our understanding of smartphones as mediators of digital/online and analogic/offline relationships, creating hybrid and everyday spaces of life. ethnography offers methodological contributions as a tool for dealing with these hybrid spaces, and for considering the particularities of the incorporation of technologies in everyday life. as i am interested in the microscopic sphere of life, summarized in this idea of everyday, ethnography can account for the quotidian uses of smartphones. the bet on everyday character of life is not new to internet studies. i use it, following das (2020), as a way that helps us to understand the ordinary acts of life. i focus my reflections on conversations and interactions with women living in these favelas, carried out in person (before the covid-19 pandemic) and from whatsapp (before and during the pandemic). in what concerns ethics, all participants gave formal consent – by text or audio message, during the pandemic, and by signing a term of consent before the pandemic. discussion the ethnographic data shows that this tool is the predominant (and almost exclusive) means of accessing the internet in these favelas. the digital inequality manifests itself both in terms of access to technology and in terms of digital literacy, and it is common for a single device to be shared amongst the members of a single household. thus, smartphones are the main device for accessing the internet because they are more affordable and because they allow for the use of mobile connection networks, also at a lower cost. a large part of the residents with whom i had contact use plans called “prepaid” that is, a fee is paid for credits that serve for using the connection during a certain amount of time. such plans guarantee cheaper access to the internet and, in most cases, the data plans do not charge for using whatsapp app on your phone. regarding digital literacy, most users navigate popular applications (whatsapp, facebook, instagram) relatively easily, but they have a lot of difficulty with other sites or applications such as e-mail and banks (essential for receiving federal government benefits, for example). something very common is the loss of passwords, and there is a lack of knowledge of the possibility of recovering them, which causes users to create innumerous new accounts on social networks, e-mails and websites. thus, i provide an analysis that takes into account both the contexts of use of smartphones, and their particular materiality as technological devices that are considered to be high-quality goods with symbolic value in these places. during the period in which it was still possible to go to complexo to conduct research, i was struck by how smartphones were present in the houses, the narratives about the operations involved in their acquisition (payments in various installments or the purchase of used or smuggled devices) and the moments of despair when the devices had problems or simply stopped working. another common practice is the contracting of local internet services, with broadband connection and of better quality by some residents. when they do this, they become “internet providers” for the neighborhood, renting the use of their connection for a weekly payment. still, most connections are made exclusively by smartphone. the pandemic makes inequality even clearer, as smartphones and the internet become essential for carrying out basic daily activities. in many cases, the lack of connection, of the technological device itself, or both, meant that several children were unable to access remote classes or that so many others did not have access to the emergency aid paid by the federal government, which required registration online through an application. the pandemic sheds light on inequality processes that involve access, use and “existential opportunities” (van dijk, 2005) offered by the internet, with an increase in digital exclusion processes. references cruz, e. & harindranath, r. (2020). whatsapp as ‘technology of life’: reframing research agendas. in: first monday, 25 (12). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v25i12.10405 das, v. (2020). textures of the ordinary. doing anthropology after wittgenstein. new york: fordham university press. hine, c. (2015). ethnography for the internet: embedded, embodied and everyday. bloomsbury: london. miller, d. (2021). a theory of a theory of the smartphone. in: international journal of cultural studies: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1367877921994574 van dijk, j. (2006). digital divide research, achievements and shortcomings. poetics, vol. 34, n. 4-5, p. 221-235. in the backstage of fridays for future between (mobile) online and offline practices arianna bussoletti sapienza university of rome francesca belotti sapienza university of rome francesca comunello sapienza university of rome stellamarina donato lumsa university introduction climate activism increasingly gained traction worldwide, with the fridaysforfuture movement (fff) at its forefront. social media are pivotal in fff activities, specifically in recruiting activists, organizing protests, sharing climate-related information and emotions, and building the movement’s identity. we discuss how, thanks to multimodal ethnography, we entered fff-rome’s backstage and understood fff’s organizational dynamics, identity-building processes, and sense-making related to social media usages. while research has mostly focused on social media as digital activism’s ‘frontstage’, we value mobile instant messaging services (mims) as its ‘backstage’ (trerè, 2019). still incipient, literature on mims has highlighted the connection between political participation and these platforms’ usages (valenzuela et al., 2019; milan & barbosa, 2020), which provide activists with more private and controlled environments compared to social network sites (snss) (valeriani & vaccari, 2018; gil de zúñiga et al., 2021). however, mims are inscribed in a complex social media ecology (barnes, 2008; treré, 2019), with media practices supporting broader grassroots politics (mattoni, 2020). this poses a methodological challenge to researchers, who must consider how political action unfolds seamlessly between (mobile) online and offline realms, within a mutual shaping relationship between technology and activism (dennis, 2018). within a broader qualitative research, we carried out a multimodal ethnography with(in) the fff-rome group (july 2020-january 2021) by blending participant observation and digital ethnography across multiple settings (whatsapp, zoom, physical locations, depending on covid-19 restrictions), thus observing activists’ everyday practices in their natural settings (emerson et al., 2007; pink, 2016). multimodal ethnography (dicks et al., 2006) precisely values the diversity and complementarity of meanings as they emerge from different observation/interaction settings (i.e., 'multi-semiotic modes'), allowing the researchers to present them through a multimedia data recording. in our case, we merged traditional fieldnotes during in-person and on-zoom assemblies with the novel method of mobile screen capture of significant exchanges on fff-rome’s whatsapp group. the group worked as a supportive environment for organizational and identity-building processes among users, while screenshots provided complementary, moment-by-moment fine-grained data about users’ digital experiences and whatsapp’s social functions (chiatti et al., 2018; jaynes, 2019). all data was coded combining deduction and induction towards thematic analysis (guest et al., 2011). two researchers (a 25and a 35-year-old) were involved in all of fff-rome’s activities as insiders, while the other two monitored their work, acting as cognitive counterweight to their interpretations. in this, we adopted a transformative paradigm aimed at understanding and practising research as committed to social change and accountable to both the movement and the academy (mertens, 2007). we fostered genuine bonds with fff-activists and discussed our research to encourage its appropriation. consent was gathered iteratively throughout the fieldwork, collectively and explicitly, thus overcoming the mere ‘willingness to engage’ in favor of a ‘wanting to take part’ (nairn et al., 2020). for minors, we collected written consent through a form signed both by them (in recognition of their political agency (fargas-malet et al., 2010) and their parents/guardians. findings and discussion these methods allowed us to better understand how fff-activists seamlessly inhabit online and offline environments. raising a hand to take the floor during physical assemblies translates into sending asterisks in the zoom chat, while sharing ongoing protests’ images on whatsapp allows at-home activists to participate along with those in the streets. while this confirms digital activism as a fully-embedded political experience, it also shows that this experience is concretely defined at the juncture between social media platforms and physical places. by being both offline and online, we also saw how fff-activists assign specific functions and rules to each environment. all topics are/must be discussed in the appropriate forum and way. mims groups are dedicated to coordinating strikes and producing snss posts, with fff’s official whatsapp group serving as a think tank. assemblies establish fff’s political agenda, including identity issues. when the latter arise on whatsapp they are redirected to the assembly, otherwise, as stated by a user, “it’s easy to misinterpret things.” when negotiating ‘proper’ platform usage (i.e. asking a member not to share catholic messages to keep fff non-religious), fff-activists relate to the movement’s values, which permeate all its backstage environments. inclusiveness and horizontality imbue all settings we experienced and, whenever whatsapp discussions escalate, activists remind each other how to, as stated by another user, properly and peacefully “live [in] this space.” all this provides a ‘map’ of the overlaps among, and distinctiveness of, different semiotic modes, and also defines the boundaries and consistency of the field as both we and fff-activists constituted it. these boundaries are continuously negotiated, along with normative manners regulating interaction among activists, coming to define what fff is, where it stands, and how it behaves, thus configuring fff-rome’s social media ecology across mims groups and snss. references barnes, s.b. (2008). “understanding social media from the media ecological perspective.” in e.a. konijn, utz s., tanis m., barnes s.b.(eds.), mediated interpersonal communication (pp.14-33). new york: routledge. chiatti, a., yang, x., brinberg, m., cho, m.j., gagneja, a., ram, n., reeves, b., giles, c.l. (2018). text extraction from smartphone screenshots to archive in situ media behavior. proceedings of the ninth international conference on knowledge capture. austin: acm. dennis j. (2018). beyond slacktivism: political participation on social media. cham: palgrave. dicks, b., bambo, s., coffey, a. (2006). multimodal ethnography. qualitative research 6(1):77–96. emerson, r.m., seale, c., gobo, g., gubrium, j.f., silverman, d. (2007). “working with ‘key incidents’.” in s. clive, silverman, d., gubrium, j.f., gobo, g. (eds.), qualitative research practice: concise paperback edition (pp. 427-442). london: sage. fargas-malet, m., montserrat, d., mcsherry, l.e., robinson, c. (2010). research with children: methodological issues and innovative techniques. journal of early childhood research, 8(2):191-203. gil de zúñiga, h., ardèvol-abreu, a., casero-ripollés, a. (2021). whatsapp political discussion, conventional participation and activism: exploring direct, indirect and generational effects. information, communication & society, 24(2):201-218. guest, g., macqueen, k., namey, e. (2011). applied thematic analysis. london:sage. jaynes, v. (2019). the social life of screenshots: the power of visibility in teen friendship groups. new media & society, 22(8):1378–1393. mattoni, a. (2020). practicing media—mediating practice| a media-in-practices approach to investigate the nexus between digital media and activists’ daily political engagement. international journal of communication,14:2828–2845. mertens, d. m. (2007). transformative paradigm: mixed methods and social justice. journal of mixed methods research, 1(3):212-225. milan, s., barbosa, s. (2020). enter the whatsapper: reinventing digital activism at the time of chat apps. first monday. doi:10.5210/fm.v25i12.10414 nairn, k., showden, c.r., sligo, j., matthews, k.r., kidman, j. (2020). ‘consent requires a relationship: rethinking group consent and its timing in ethnographic research’, international journal of social research methodology, 23(6):719-731. pink, s., horst, h., postill, j., hjorth, l., lewis, t., tacchi, j. (2016). digital ethnography. principles and practice. london:sage. treré, e. (2019). hybrid media activism: ecologies, imaginaries, algorithms. london:routledge. valenzuela, s., bachmann, i., bargsted, m. (2019). the personal is the political? what do whatsapp users share and how it matters for news knowledge, polarization and participation in chile. digital journalism, 1-21. doi:10.1080/21670811.2019.1693904 valeriani, a., vaccari, c. (2018). political talk on mobile instant messaging services: a comparative analysis of germany, italy, and the uk. information, communication & society, 21(11):1715-1731. studying the everyday lives of media fans: practical and ethical challenges welmoed wagenaar university of groningen fandom and everyday life digital media and mobile devices have made it possible to engage in new ways with the fictional worlds of sherlock holmes, harry potter, and many others. media fans in particular can spend hours exploring and expanding their favorite story worlds and characters via online platforms like tumblr, twitter and discord. what is more, fans can now take their fandoms everywhere in their pockets, these story worlds always being only a few clicks or finger taps away. existing research on fandom often focuses primarily on online fan practices and how these are embedded in particular online cultures and/or a broader context of social networking, transmedia and participatory culture (cf. hills, 2017). this overlooks important dimensions of how fictional worlds and fandom are given a place and meaning in people’s actual day-to-day lives. at the same time, studying the everyday dimensions of fans’ online practices and the complex, often messy intersections between online and offline spaces comes with significant challenges. challenges in pandemic times in this paper, i discuss some of the practical and ethical challenges i encountered during ongoing non-media-centric, ethnographic research into the everyday lives of media fans. non-media-centric research focuses on media-oriented practice and discourse, asking what people are doing in relation to media across a range of situations and contexts (e.g. couldry, 2010; moores, 2012; bareither, 2019). rather than focusing on (an element of) fan culture as it has developed in a particular online space, then, this research specifically examines how fan practices and experiences are embedded in and interact with the everyday contexts from which individual fans engage in them. over the course of the study, i went from grappling with the geographical delimitations of doing face-to-face fieldwork while starting from online environments that transcend such boundaries, to having to adapt methods like participant observation, video re-enactments (pink et al., 2016) and the media go-along (jørgensen, 2016) to online-only formats due to the covid-19 pandemic. how does one study the intersections between online and offline domains when one cannot move beyond online interactions? moreover, what ethical dilemmas and practical obstacles may arise in studying dimensions of the everyday when starting from online spaces where people carefully manage the boundaries between different identities and spheres of life? adapting methods the video re-enactment is a method of observation and audiovisual recording in which research participants re-enact their everyday engagement with media and reflect upon habitual activities and routines by responding to questions or providing ongoing commentary of their activity (pink et al., 2016; richardson & hjorth, 2017). the media go-along is a mobile method where researcher and participant sit down together to simultaneously access a given setting, and participants give visual and verbal tours of a platform (jørgensen, 2016). both methods enable researchers to observe and analyze the embeddedness of media in people’s everyday life and the use of media ‘as it happens’. this includes paying attention to body habits, gestures and other (micro)movements. the methods also rely upon the physical presence of the researcher to give initial instructions, ask questions, and record. due to travel restrictions, physical visits became impossible. instead, i used screensharing technology during video call interviews and asked people to show me their smartphone screen through the webcam to create a virtual media go-along. that way, participants could walk me through their use of different platforms and accounts, revealing details that would otherwise have remained obscured to me as researcher. for example, the go-along showed habitual movements and considerations people made with regard to checking notifications and personal messages, creating and sharing content, and adapting and organizing the platforms in ways that allowed them to prioritize specific interactions over others. in order to gain insight into how this is embedded in participants’ day-to-day lives, this research will make use of a semistructured, solicited diary study where participants will be asked to track their fan activities and the physical surroundings and social settings in which those take place for two weeks. by encouraging the use of (audio)visual material in these diaries and discussing them afterwards during an interview, this method forms a helpful strategy to acquire detailed information on moments when the researcher is absent and enables participants to reflect on day-to-day situations relatively closely to their occurrence (cf. bartlett, milligan, and crow, 2015). negotiating boundaries fan activities and identities, feminized fan cultures in particular, have a history of being culturally devalued and stigmatized. consequently, there are fans who take special care to separate their fan identity from other parts of their lives, for example by using different pseudonymous accounts and sometimes by fabricating an online persona (cf. gerrard, 2017, 2020). in addition, fans can face criticism from within fandom spaces and risk being affected by platform crackdowns, which is especially a concern among marginalized communities who share and create sexually explicit content. in part as a result of this, the use of discord servers and chat groups has become increasingly common, establishing private and semi-public fan spaces which are carefully organized and managed by their communities. this, however, also means that access often is restricted – the more private and personal these spaces get, with community members opening up about other aspects of their lives, the more apprehensive people are to allow researchers entry. with direct access being limited, creative methods are needed to examine the significance of these hybrid spaces to people’s individual fan experience. moreover, it asks for a strong sensitivity on the researcher’s part to ensure that interactions with participants and reports on research findings do not expose techniques or break down boundaries people have deliberately set. it raises the question of how to examine the intersections between different spheres of life and their existence across online and offline spaces, when the people being studied are extremely careful in how, where and when these intersections should take place. while not offering any definitive conclusions, this paper aims to further the discussion on these and related challenges. references bareither, c. (2019). doing emotion through digital media: an ethnographic perspective on media practices and emotional affordances. ethnologia europaea, 49(1), 7-23. bartlett, ruth, christine milligan, and graham crow. (2015). what is diary method? london: bloomsbury publishing uk. couldry, n. (2010). theorising media as practice. in b. bräuchler & j. postill (eds.), theorising media and practice (pp. 35-54). new york: berghahn books. gerrard, y. (2017). ‘it’s a secret thing’: digital disembedding through online teen drama fandom. first monday, 22(8). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v22i8.7877. gerrard, y. (2020). what’s in a (pseudo)name? ethical conundrums for the principles of anonymisation in social media research. qualitative research. advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794120922070. hills, m. (2017). foreword. the ‘imaginary opponents’ of digital fandom (and fan studies). in p. booth (ed.), digital fandom 2.0: new media studies (pp. xi-xx). new york: peter lang. jørgensen, k. m. (2016). the media go-along: researching mobilities with media at hand. mediekultur: journal of media and communication research, 60, 32-29. https://doi.org/10.7146/mediekultur.v32i60.22429. moores, s. (2012). media, place and mobility. houndmills, basingstoke, hampshire: palgrave macmillan. pink, s., horst, h.a., postill, j., hjorth, l., lewis, t. & tacchi, j. (2016) (eds.), digital ethnography: principles and practice. los angeles: sage. richardson, i. & hjorth, l. (2017). mobile media, domestic play and haptic ethnography. new media and society, 19(10), 1653-67. https://doi.org/10.117/ 1461444817717516. ethnographing between spaces: researching tiktok from an e3thnomusicological perspective juan bermúdez university of vienna introduction in a deterritorialized and digitally interconnected world a vast number of interrelations between multimedia spaces have been developed and established as an inseparable part of our daily life. this appropriation of the virtual worlds, as well as the development of new digital platforms have not only shaped the interaction between actors, but they have also enabled new forms of musical practices. the investigation of musicking, such as in tiktok offers a large number of theoretical possibilities but at the same time it poses practical and theoretical challenges. in a world where interactions are increasingly happening beyond a physical contact, (ethno)musicologists are forced and encouraged to widen their approaches and methods in order to adjust to these new multimedia realities. in this paper i will outline these challenges and possibilities and i will as well also reflect on the consequences for ethnographic work and methodological approach using tiktok’s musicking from an austrian perspective as an example. an ethnomusicological approach in 1964 alan p. merriam presented a long-lasting model based on the study of three analytical levels: conceptualization about music, behavior in relation to music and music sound itself. in 1987 this model was expanded by timothy rice adding a focus on the individual and his experiences in the process of making music, as well as a diachronic perspective. in 2016, julio mendívil contributed to this methodological approach with christopher smalls concept of musicking. mendívil explained: “[…] such an approach allows us to analyze the historical formation of sound’s structures, behavior and concepts as a particular process in a given time and place, which involves all the actors musicking (not only playing and hearing, as rice defines it)” (2016, p. 73). the analysis of multimedia musical practices, such as the practices in tiktok, require, however, more than a successful ethnomusicological model. to overcome the digital challenges, i propose to understand internet and its (musical) practices, as embedded, embodied and everyday, as postulated by christine hine (2015). the shift that makes it possible to expand merriam’s model with the required contemporary level, reflects the realities of a multimedia world in thinking in terms of the meaning of internet in the everyday life of the actors, their musical practices, as well as the recognition of internet as an embodied experience that is influenced and determined by forms, discourses, times, objectives, etc., and by the interactions between the human and non-human actors. embedded, embodied, and everyday – towards an e3thnographie to explore mediatized musical practices, it is firstly indispensable to understand digital and analog media as practices, which are created, discussed, and experienced in everyday situations and contexts synchronously or asynchronously. that is why an intensive multi-local and multimedia participatory observation in line with a hermeneutic phenomenological ethnography allows us to concentrate our focus on what people are actively doing with and in a mediatized environment and herewith against a discourse that sees media exclusively as a communication or representation channel used by physical actors. a discourse that creates a strict dichotomous separation between reality and virtuality and which does not perceive digital media as part of knowledge practice, but rather as a passive representational practice. a different approach to the relation between reality and virtuality can be found in the scholastic philosophy: “in scholastic philosophy ‘actual’ and ‘virtual’ exist in a dialectical relation rather than in one of radical opposition” (ryan, 1999, p. 88). this dialectical interdependence between the reality happening at the current moment and the potential reality, meaning the virtual, has an influence on the perception of each of our cultural practices. therefore their dichotomous separation doesn’t show a logical sense. secondly, an e3thnographic approach requires a strong focus on individuals and their music-making experiences as individuals or in groups. that is why, it is important to prioritize the use of methods that focus on the learning of multimedia practices related to musicking (see baily, 2001), but also to the processes that allow the creation and negotiation of the auditory knowledge of the musicking under investigation (see bermúdez et al., 2018). in addition, the focus shall also lie on the performative creation of musical personae (auslander, 2006) and on the discussion of cultural behaviors related to them. the same way interactions can take place in spaces beyond the real/virtual dichotomy, interactions are not tied to a physical body, but much more to the varied characteristics of the actors’ identities. thirdly, we need a new definition for our ethnographic field and a new approach due to the deterritoralization and multimedia reality of these musical practices. there is no preexisting space within these practices, which we can enter, it is only possible to construct and interact through the continuous multimedia interaction of physical and digital actors or personae. this is why, we need to increasingly focus on 1) interactions continuously created and experienced by the actors of this musicking; 2) the interrelations built, discussed and experienced by the actors of this musicking throughout time; 3) the processes that enable the creation, discussion and experience of personal and public multimedia locations. conclusions merriam‘s model that can be seen as the fundament of ethnomusicological work, provided the basis for a musicological paradigm in 1964, which encompasses musics in their holistic performativity from a culture-relativistic perspective. the further developments of merriam’s model by rice (1987) and mendívil (2016) have enhanced the way that realities of musical worlds of the turn of the century have been included in said model. with approaches like hine’s approach (2015) and a research paradigm that does not see digital media as a passive representation channel or an economical product, but rather as a practice, merriam‘s model gets the support and opportunities needed to overcome challenges posed by contemporary music practices. an e3thnography makes it possible to observe and experience how concepts, behaviors and sounds are historically constructed by the actors of a certain musicking in different contexts, how they are socially maintained and how they are individually created and experienced in everyday life in synchronous or asynchronous multimedia situations. references auslander, p. (2006). musical personae. the drama review, 50(1), 100–119. bermúdez, j., l. dullnig, s. gmeiner, h. matthäus, m. rogenhofer, f. schriebl, l. auer, and b. brabec de mori. (2018). von klang(-)wissen und anderen fischen. auditive wissenskulturen von konzertfachund musikologiestudierenden im vergleich. in b. brabec de mori, and m. winter (ed.), auditive wissenskulturen: das wissen klanglicher praxis (pp. 283–302). wiesbaden: springer vs. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-65820143-2_14 baily, j. (2001). learning to perform as a research technique in ethnomusicology. british journal of ethnomusicology 10(2), 85–98. hine, c. (2015). ethnography for the internet: embedded, embodied and everyday. london: bloomsbury. mendívil, j. (2016). the battle of evermore. music as a never-ending struggle for the construction of meaning. in r. allgayer-kaufmann (ed.), world music studies (pp. 6791). berlin: logos verlag. merriam, a. p. (1964). the anthropology of music. evanston: northwestern university press. rice, t. (1987). toward the remodeling of ethnomusicology. ethnomusicology, 31(3), 469-488. ryan, m.-l. (1999). cyberspace, virtuality, and the text. in m.-l. ryan (ed.), cyberspace textuality: computer technology and literary theory (pp. 78-107). bloomington: indiana university press. small, c. (1998). musicking: the meanings of performing and listening. middletown: wesleyan university press. methodological reflections on capturing augmented space: insights from an augmented reality (ar) field study moritz schweiger university of augsburg jeffrey wimmer university of augsburg digital-based ar overlays physical (offline) space and adds new layers of meaning to it (liao & humphreys, 2015). this is particularly evident in urban space, which, as a burning glass of media developments, is already affected by a multitude of holographic content (aurigi & cindio, 2008). but how does ar change our perception of urban space and the personal meaning it unfolds in daily life? and how can we capture the reception of meaningful ar content, experienced through head-worn ar, methodically? to answer these questions, a historical building, which had been destroyed during air raids in the second world war, was holographically reconstructed on a public city square. in order to resurrect this building in ar, old photographs, paintings and postcards were assessed to program a hologram in its original size and place it at its original location. using high-tech ar glasses (microsoft hololens 2), test persons were able to move freely around the square, observe the hologram from different angles and walk into it. thereby, we wanted to illuminate how ar might influence the relation of city dwellers and urban space based on three spatial dimensions: the spatial perception of the square (dimension 1), its spatial meaning in the lives of city dwellers (dimension 2) and their spatial movement patterns on the square (dimension 3). methodological challenges when capturing augmented space in order to capture the appropriation of augmented space, we relied on a multi-method approach using both qualitative and quantitative tools. due to its explorative character and constantly changing field conditions, among others the covid-19 pandemic, we had to critically reflect and adapt our study to several unpredictable obstacles. after evaluating the development of our empirical tools, we can now present insights into the methodical challenges and chances of ar field studies and give an overview of best and worst practices regarding sampling, test persons recruiting, study implementation, and data analysis when capturing the interrelation of physical and augmented space. preliminary and follow-up questionnaires and mean value comparisons were used to determine (in)significances in the influence of ar on spatial perception and meaning. the influence on spatial perception was captured via polarity profiles including 20 opposite pairs (e.g. “narrow/spacious”, “bare/decorated”) deduced from a study by kuliga et al. (2014, p. 368). finding standardized items on spatial meaning posed more difficulties, since most studies focus on the significance of specific places (e.g. residence (manzo, 2005)) instead of analyzing places in general. thus, we referred to the three-pole-model by gustafson (2001), who allocates the general meaning of place within the comprehensive field of the self, others and the physical environment. this three-pole-model was operationalized into 33 items during an online survey followed by factor analysis and proved appropriate for capturing spatial meaning holistically. in addition to standardized questionnaires, the influence of ar on spatial perception and meaning was also explored using qualitative thinking-aloud-protocols (tap). due to the ongoing methodological discussion on appropriate forms of tap, especially apparent in hci usability research (alshammari et al., 2015), we decided to pre-test their suitability for our ar field study. for this purpose, the statements, gaze direction and gestures of the subjects were videotaped via the built-in recording system of the microsoft hololens 2 and evaluated. in a first pre-test, we compared the most prevalent forms of tap: • unguided vs. guided tap (open vs. space specific questions) • concurrent vs. retrospective tap (during or after the ar-experience) it showed that unguided tap, while undoubtedly evoking unfiltered reactions on usability, is less suited for capturing augmented space. it mainly led to extravagated statements regarding the graphic quality in general or the light weight of the ar glasses. this might be traced back to the fact that head-worn ar is not yet established and many subjects were wearing ar glasses for the first time. in guided tap, queries can direct the narrative of the subject towards specific aspects of the ar experience, while their disruptive character can be seen as trade-off. with regard to the timing, we found that concurrent tap is better suited for capturing spontaneous reactions or references to special ar content, while also evoking cognitive overload and a sense of social undesirability regarding passers-by. in retrospective tap, an ego-centered videorecording of their ar experience was shown to the subjects on a laptop, while their verbal comments were captured via screen recording. this led to more reflected statements and intensive thoughts, since subjects could relive their previous ar experience and focus on specific aspects they had overseen before. based on our pre-test, we decided to use guided-concurrent tap during the ar experience to analyze the influence of the hologram on spatial perception. the effects on spatial meaning were captured right after the ar experience in an interview room close to the city square via guided-retrospective tap. the spatial movement was collected via locative tracking within the ar glasses. thereby, we could generate walking lines and compare how subjects allocated themselves towards the hologram, how many walked right into it or didn’t dare to break its presence. the combination of both quantitative and qualitative methods proved valuable to capture the reception of space, since some test persons for instance focused entirely on augmented spatial meaning while omitting augmented spatial perception in both the taps. thus, the supplementation with standardized questionnaires helped us to analyze spatial dimensions that had been passed over in the qualitative statements. due to the technological and methodological affordances of our field study, an extensive interviewer training was conducted including a detailed interviewer guide and an exploratory video. ar researchers should keep in mind that interviewers need to know how to use high-tech ar glasses, how to accurately place a hologram, how to react to manifold technical issues (e.g. a dislocated or disappearing hologram, abortion of recording) or social interventions (e.g. intrusive by-passers, police controls). methodological challenges for sociological field research during a pandemic when doing sociological field research during a pandemic, it is essential be flexible and adapt to daily changing contact restrictions and challenges in recruiting test persons. the creation and adherence to study-specific hygiene and cleaning protocols are crucial for guaranteeing the safety of the test persons and the official approval by local health authorities. besides, these protocols need to be constantly questioned and adjusted to the actual terms. in our field study, all participants had to constantly wear their masks, the ar glasses, tablets and laptops (used for the follow-up questionnaire and retrospective tap) were regularly disinfected and interviewers were only allowed to conducted two interviews per day. test persons who reported contact with a covid-19 patient within the last two weeks were excluded from the study. by early informing police departments about the officially approved field study, contact controls regarding group sizes at public spaces can be avoided. references alshammari, t., alhadreti, o., & mayhew, p. (2015). when to ask participants to think aloud: a comparative study of concurrent and retrospective think-aloud methods. international journal of human computer interaction, 6(3), 48-64. aurigi, a. & cindio, f. d. (2008). augmented urban spaces: articulating the physical and electronic city. london: routledge. gustafson, p. (2001). meanings of place: everyday experience and theoretical conceptualizations. journal of environmental psychology, 21(1), 5-16. kuliga, s. f., thrash, t., dalton, r. c., & hölscher, c. (2015). virtual reality as an empirical research tool exploring user experience in a real building and a corresponding virtual model. computers, environment and urban systems, 54, 363375. liao, t. & humphreys, l. (2015). layar-ed places: using mobile augmented reality to tactically reengage, reproduce, and reappropriate public space. new media & society, 17(9), 1418-1435. manzo, l. c. (2005). for better or worse: exploring multiple dimensions of place meaning. journal of environmental psychology, 25(1), 67-86. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): rosa, fernanda r. (2021, october). shared networks: the paths of latincentric indigenous networks to a pluriversal internet presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. shared networks: the paths of latin-centric indigenous networks to a pluriversal internet fernanda r. rosa virginia tech the sun was already setting when we were leaving the neighborhood of san martín in abasolo. the internet was now finally working in one of the houses of that tseltal pueblo for the first time. the area was densely green, in a hill with sparse houses, some of them not that distant from each other, denoting the sharing of land by family members. the state of chiapas, mexico, where this pueblo is located, is ranked at the lowest level of internet connectivity in the country. in the role of a doctoral researcher, i was joining a group of indigenous activists, part of the colectivo ik' ta k'op (word of the wind collective) in abasolo, in the town of ocosingo, whose goal is to expand internet access in their community. this paper is an invitation to understand the global internet interconnection infrastructure, focusing on the strategies of tseltal and zapoteco communities to become part of the internet. deciding to improve their connectivity conditions marked by poor or absent internet services in their territories, they have autonomously engaged in processes of “infrastructuring,” by building their own internet networks and interconnection arrangements to physically connect to the larger internet. i borrow the term “infrastructuring” from participatory design scholarship, where “information infrastructure is viewed as constantly ‘becoming’,” (karasti, 2014, p. 3) in that design is a continuous activity, a “process of inscribing knowledge and activities in new material forms” (karasti, 2014, p. 3 emphasis added). focusing on tseltal and zapoteco internet design experiences, this paper aims to address the internet ecosystem with a bottom-up approach, seeking to shed light on the role of infrastructure in this scenario and raising, at least, two points. first, it calls attention to the existence of shared networks, built by indigenous people, but non-discernible when seen from above. from an internet routing system standpoint, networks are owned by autonomous systems and identified with autonomous system numbers (asns). that is not the case of the indigenous networks studied here, as they interconnect to internet service providers as a mere household, becoming part of that commercial network without their own asn. as already noted, “the question is perhaps not just what is a network but what it means to treat something as one” (dourish, 2017, p. 172). despite their invisibility, tseltal’s and zapoteco’s shared networks are internet networks. second, these shared networks illuminate processes of latin america hybridization and ch’ixi,1 only recognized when adding the lens and the values of these communities to the discussion. when they decide to be part of the internet, they ally with technologies and create interconnection arrangements that mark the instant when their local networks become part of the global internet. at the moment of interconnection, when the local becomes global, the values embedded in their actions and technology allies, here discussed in terms of comunalidad scholarship (communality, own translation), meet the values of the internet service providers regulated by their policy terms, materializing hybrids and ch’ixi, an articulation of intentions and negotiations that make that internet possible. and while framing indigenous media as a hybrid is not new (ginsburg, 1991), framing the moment of internet interconnection as the moment when it materializes allows to think in terms of both the “technopolitics” of interconnection, and the materialization of hybridization and ch’ixi into infrastructure in the specific context of latin america (canclini, 1989; cusicanqui, 2012). thus, i adopt the term shared network to denote the internet first mile signal-sharing practices that articulate both interconnection infrastructure and coexistence values to extend basic services to underserved areas, here in particular, to extend the internet to areas where the services of existing larger internet service providers are unsatisfactory or unavailable. shared networks both acknowledge the sharing-oriented principles characteristic of these networks, independent of the actor responsible for it (a municipality, a collective, a business, etc.), while also critically illuminating interconnection infrastructure that affords and materializes such principles. it takes into consideration that artifacts are actively constitutive of societies’ morality (latour, 2008), implying a delegation of their values to infrastructure. the shared network in guelatao is presented in the paper focusing on the formation and design of their first mile infrastructure, followed by the case in abasolo, which is presented complementarily with a focus on the sharing principles that they expand inside the community. joining literature focused on actors whose participation still need to be told and emphasized (costanza-chock, 2020; mcilwain, 2019), in considering the internet design as a process, the present research enable to see tseltal’s and zapoteco’s participation clearly, as internet codesigners. furthermore, in identifying these shared networks as latin-centric indigenous networks, this paper calls attention to similar patterns of colonialism and coloniality rooted in latin american history and entangling the sovereign territories of tseltal and zapoteco people. their protagonist role enables to see a vivid struggle for a pluriversal internet, founded on pluriversal (as opposed to universal principles (escobar, 2018). an internet that is not homogenizing, but inclusive and diverse by design. 1 silvia rivera cusicanqui informs that the word ch’ixi “has many connotations: it is a color that is the product of juxtaposition, in small points or spots, of opposed or contrasting colors: black and white, red and green, and so on.” (cusicanqui, 2012, p. 105). methodology and methods considering that technology and society mutually shape and embed each other, i apply the ethnography of infrastructure (star, 1999) to indigenous infrastructure projects in order to “learn from the south and with the south” (santos, 1995, p. 508). the question this research endeavors to answer is “what do tseltal’s and zapoteco’s local networks add to our understanding of internet interconnection infrastructure?” in the present paper, i examine two of the sites that i visited following the international forum on indigenous and communitarian media, in oaxaca, in august 2017. the sites are a tseltal pueblo in abasolo, ocosingo, in chiapas, and a zapoteco pueblo in guelatao de juárez, in oaxaca, where i have conducted research since then. references canclini ng (1989) culturas hibridas. estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad. 1st edition. mexico city: grijalbo. costanza-chock s (2020) design justice: community-led practices to build the worlds we need. 1st edition. cambridge, ma: mit press. cusicanqui sr (2012) ch’ixinakax utxiwa: a reflection on the practices and discourses of decolonization. south atlantic quarterly 111(1): 95–109. doi: 10.1215/00382876-1472612. dourish p (2017) the stuff of bits: an essay on the materialities of information. 1 edition. cambridge, massachusetts: the mit press. escobar a (2018) designs for the pluriverse: radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. duke university press. ginsburg f (1991) indigenous media: faustian contract or global village? cultural anthropology 6(1). [wiley, american anthropological association]: 92–112. jasanoff s (ed.) (2004) states of knowledge: the co-production of science and social order. international library of sociology. london ; new york: routledge. karasti h (2014) infrastructuring in participatory design. in: proceedings of the 13th participatory design conference: research papers volume 1, new york, ny, usa, 2014, pp. 141–150. pdc ’14. acm. doi: 10.1145/2661435.2661450. latour b (2008) where are the missing masses? the sociology of a few mundane artifacts. in: johnson dj and wetmore jm (eds) technology and society, building our sociotechnical future. 1st edition. cambridge, ma: mit press, pp. 151–180. mcilwain cd (2019) black software: the internet & racial justice, from the afronet to black lives matter. 1st edition. cambridge: oxford university press. santos b de s (1995) toward a new common sense: law, science and politics in the paradigmatic transition. 1 edition. new york: routledge. star sl (1999) the ethnography of infrastructure. american behavioral scientist 43(3): 377–391. doi: 10.1177/00027649921955326. microsoft word gilmore-its 1776, baby!-its 1776, baby!.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): gilmore, j.n., hamer, m., erazo, v., and hayes, p. (2021, october).’it’s 1776, baby!’: broadcasting revolutionary performance during the u.s. capitol riots. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ‘it’s 1776, baby!’: broadcasting revolutionary performance during the u.s. capitol riots james n. gilmore, ph.d. clemson university madeline hamer clemson university valerie erazo clemson university patrick hayes clemson university introduction this paper focuses on the mediation of the january 6, 2021 breach of the u.s. capitol by supporters of then-president donald trump in an effort to overturn the certification of joseph biden’s electoral victory. we analyzed videos participants recorded and shared through seven different platforms: the social networking sites facebook, twitter, and parler; the live-streaming sites dlive, twitch, and periscope; and the messaging application snapchat. in examining this range of platforms and applications, we argue not just for the importance of attending to the documentation of violent protests, but to also account for the broad spectrum of possibilities at play across the ecology of digital video-sharing platforms in building digitally networked publics (tufekci 2017) on the far right. research questions rq1: how did participants in the u.s. capitol riot use different online platforms to broadcast video content of this event? rq2: in what ways did participants in the u.s. capitol riot draw on imagery and language of revolution in the video content shared on online platforms? method we accessed footage from the capitol riot through a public file sharing archive on the service mega. the contents of this folder were crowdsourced through data hoarders coordinating through the r/datahoarder subreddit on the message board site reddit. the mega folder did not provide identifying metadata for any videos we examined; the sample was anonymous. we selected seven platforms for analysis. three of them— dlive, twitch, and periscope—are primarily for live-streaming over a length of time. they allow users to stream continuous, real-time long-form videos up to several hours in length. we viewed live-stream footage from five dlive users totaling over six hours, three periscope streams totaling over three hours, and three twitch streams totaling over four hours. three other platforms—facebook, twitter, and parler—are more traditional social networking sites that utilize the relationships between users in various networks engaging with one another. we viewed fifty-eight videos shared through facebook, fifty videos from twitter, and thirty videos from parler. our seventh platform was snapchat, a messaging application focusing on supposedly ephemeral transmission of still images and videos of up to ten seconds in length that are programmed to ‘disappear’ from public view after twenty-four hours. we viewed thirtyone snapchat stories. we approached videos qualitatively and with an interpretivist position, using visual analysis to map both form (what is the camera doing, and how is the videographer using the technology to record the riot) and content (what is represented in the frame itself). we interpret meaning based on visual evidence and we assume intent: participants in the capitol riot had to make decisions to take out their phones or mobile cameras, to open different applications, to engage the streaming functions of their devices, and to click the necessary buttons to share and broadcast these videos. this is a choreography between human participant, media device, and platform infrastructure. the decision to, for instance, turn one’s camera so that it faces the videographer (the “selfie” mode) is a meaningful decision about how a participant positions their face and body into the documentation of the event. findings we identified six aesthetic themes—three for form and three for content. for form, we note the use of camera pans (moving back and forth from a relatively still position) to capture crowd size and activity outside the capitol, selfies (using the front-facing camera on smartphones) to place the videographer in the frame and position their body as important to the documentation, and tracking (moving the camera through space) to mimic the style of embedded journalists. for content, we identified costume, which includes both attire like the red “make america great again” caps many trump supporters wear as well as an array of flags meant to illustrate loyalty to trump and to cast this as a political revolution; speech, which includes anything from crowd cheers of phrases like “fight for trump” to individuals screaming “traitors” towards capitol police officers; and songs, which include so-called “hype videos” produced and distributed mostly through parler in the twenty-four period leading up to the capitol riot as well as spontaneous singing of the national anthem and christian hymns during the course of the riot. the participants in the capitol riot drew on a variety of symbols meant to coordinate anti-government revolution through their positioning of trump as superior to the existing u.s. government (which is labeled as “traitors” in some speech), their invocation of multiple nationalist symbols emerging from prior historical moments of revolution, and connections to domains like religion and sport through hymns and hype videos. these symbols are mediated through formal choices like pans and selfies to emphasize relationships to the crowd and broadcast these symbols back to digital platforms. they indicate an aesthetics of dissent (neumayer and rossi, 2018). we call this a revolutionary aesthetic—a mode of sensuous perception meant to cultivate affective sympathies towards an insurrection against the united states and a delegitimization of the democratic process. the goal of this revolutionary aesthetic is not just a means of displaying one’s political identity and solidarity within a community of far-right organizers (decook, 2018). the revolutionary aesthetic is an ongoing strategy of far-right political participation in digital public spheres based on forging articulations across understandings of u.s. history, religion, sport, and fandom more broadly. technologies like front-facing cameras on mobile smartphones and facebook live platform features are part of how representations of violence against the state become performed and aestheticized. relevance aoir 2021 is focused on the relationship between “independence” and the internet. the conference’s intended site of philadelphia was, of course, a crucial location in the u.s. revolutionary war; many of the participants in the u.s. capitol riots explicitly invoked this war, with variations of the chant “1776” drawing connections between this insurrectionist attempt at interfering with election certification and the country’s founding war against the british. our research shows how “independence” works as a floating signifier that gets absorbed by far-right militias and other nationalist groups to build support for violent actions. it is indicative of the contextual forms of “chaos” grossberg (2018) has attributed to trump(ism). our research shows how “independence” was rearticulated through the stop the steal movement as a means for challenging the legitimacy of the federal government, and how that can be traced through the revolutionary aesthetic. references decook jr (2018) memes and symbolic violence: #proudboys and the use of memes for propaganda and the construction of collective identity. learning, media and technology 43(4): 485-504. grossberg l (2018). under the cover of chaos: trump and the battle for the american right. london: pluto press. neumayer c and rossi l (2018) images of protest in social media: struggle over visibility and visual narratives. new media & society 20(11): 4298-4310. tufekci z (2017) twitter and tear gas: the power and fragility of networked protest. new haven: yale university press. microsoft word dezuanni-tiktok's peer pedagogies-tiktok's peer pedagogies.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): dezuanni, m. (2021, october). tiktok’s peer pedagogies learning about books through #booktok videos. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. tiktok’s peer pedagogies learning about books through #booktok videos michael dezuanni queensland university of technology background this paper eschews normative constructions of formalized ‘online learning’ to argue that learning with ‘the internet’ is mostly vernacular, ordinary, messy and constant. it uses the example of #booktok short videos to argue that individuals frequently learn from and with peers in online spaces, where ‘peerness’ is defined broadly. the paper draws on traditions within education, media and communications research such as theories of media pedagogies that refuse to see learning as pedagogically isolated within formal learning arrangements. i build on these foundations to conceptualize how tik tok viewers learn about books and reading via ‘peer pedagogies’. ‘peer pedagogies’ recognizes that in digital contexts individuals often learn from other individuals, regardless of if the ‘teacher’ in the relationship is directly known to the learner, and regardless of if ‘teaching’ is intended or purposeful. for instance, peer pedagogies and learning are frequently central characteristics of the relationships that form between ‘micro-celebrities’ and their fans. the paper discusses findings from an ongoing nationally funded australian study which is mapping the digital ecology of teen reading in australia. the project argues that one avenue for teens to find out about books is on digital platforms via peer pedagogies. that is, teenagers may purposefully or casually learn about books and reading from everyday users and micro-celebrities on digital platforms. the tiktok #booktok hashtag is therefore being investigated to identify examples of how young people learn about books and reading via tik tok videos and associated communities. friere’s 1970s work on the role of dialogue, praxis, lived experience, and ‘conscientization’ in informal learning inspired a movement in education scholarship. his attempts to liberate learners directly challenged formal educational structures to promote the idea of public and critical pedagogies (friere, 1972). giroux (1994) drew on friere to argue that “pedagogy is about the creation of a public sphere, one that brings people together in a variety of sites to talk, exchange information, listen, feel their desires, and expand their capacities for joy, love, solidarity, and struggle”. in similar ways, media scholars have explored how media offer informal learning opportunities. suggested citation (apa): dezuanni, m. (2021, october). tiktok’s peer pedagogies: learning about books through #booktok videos. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. eco argued that television is the “school book of modern adults, as much as it is the only authoritative school book for our children” (eco, 1979). hartley (1999) claimed that like the institutional church before it, television is teaching, particularly within the informality of the family home. with youtube in mind, hartley also argued that the internet ‘has rapidly evolved into a new ‘enabling social technology for knowledge’ (hartley, 2011, original emphasis). ellsworth (1997) explored the concept of the power of address to trace similarities between how cinema addresses its audience through plot, character, subtext, genre, causal links and point of view, and how teachers address students. in these ways, scholars have explored media pedagogies to understand the relationships between everyday media use and learning. peer pedagogies ‘peer pedagogies’ (dezuanni, 2020) recognizes that in digital contexts individuals often learn from other individuals, regardless of if the ‘teacher’ in the relationship is directly known to the learner, and regardless of if ‘teaching’ is intended or purposeful. for instance, peer pedagogies and learning are frequently central characteristics of the relationships that form between ‘micro-celebrities’ (senft, 2008) and their fans. the concept draws on ellsworth’s (1997) argument that ‘mode of address’ creates a volatile space between the intended addressee and the actual addressee of a pedagogical interaction that is performative and productive, which often results in new knowledge. peer pedagogies function on digital platforms through the development and maintenance of friendships (real and imagined), trust, and emotional investment. within these relationships, there is frequently an attempt on the part of the producer to reduce social distance between themselves and those they are addressing, which is frequently a form of ‘relational labour’ (baym, 2018), and often an attempt to maintain authenticity (abidin, 2018; marwick, 2013). learning about books and reading with tiktok to explore these concepts, the paper discusses findings from an ongoing nationally funded australian study which is mapping the digital ecology of teen reading in australia and is motivated by previous research showing that a key barrier to increasing long form reading by teens is the difficulty they experience in ‘finding a good book’ (rutherford, merga & singleton, 2018). the project hypotheses that one avenue for teens to find out about books is on digital platforms via peer pedagogies. that is, teenagers may purposefully or casually learn about books and reading from everyday users and microcelebrities on digital platforms. the tiktok #booktok hashtag is therefore being investigated to identify examples of how young people learn about books and reading via tik tok videos and associated communities. the approach involves the dual process of 1) analysis of short video content and user comments across dozens of tik tok accounts that frequently or exclusively use the #booktok hashtag, and 2) close analysis of a selection videos and user comments on accounts that offer specific insights into the peer pedagogies of books and reading on the platform. the broader analysis identifies emergent codes and conventions, practices, modes of address and commenting practices; while the closer analysis suggested citation (apa): dezuanni, m. (2021, october). tiktok’s peer pedagogies: learning about books through #booktok videos. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. reveals the specificity of the performative peer pedagogical practices used by tik tokkers to engage and inform their audience. the paper shows how #booktok videos typically include practices such as ‘selfies’ and ‘shelfies’ featuring book stacks and book hauls, brief commentaries about books, microreviews, and explanations about book related practices such as shelving, and room design. emerging findings suggest that on one level #booktok videos seem to function in a similar way to marwick’s assessment of ‘luxury selfies’ on instagram. she suggests “instagram represents a convergence of cultural forces: a mania for digital documentation, the proliferation of celebrity and microcelebrity culture, and conspicuous consumption”. a significant number of #booktok videos promote the consumption of books and stylized versions of readers in ways that claim a particular habitus or form of cultural capital (bourdieu, 1979). peer pedagogies functioning on this level are less about reading culture, and as much about displaying books as status artefacts which may or may not be read. in contrast, other #booktok accounts and videos operate within particular esoteric subcultures and communities of users (abidin, 2021) who are book savvy and that feature regular readers. videos and associated comments in these communities offer fans an opportunity to discover new authors and books and to enter into conversations about books and reading that may otherwise be unavailable to them, and which invite them to take up identities as readers. the paper provides examples of indicative analysis of several accounts, videos and comments as illustrations of these claims. references abidin, crystal. 2018. internet celebrity: understanding fame online. bingley: emerald publishing. abidin, c. (2021). mapping internet celebrity on tiktok: exploring attention economies and visibility labours. cultural science journal, 12(1). baym, nancy k. 2018. playing to the crowd: musicians, audiences, and the intimate work of connection. new york: new york university press. bourdieu, pierre. 1984. distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste. routledge. new york. dezuanni, m. (2020). peer pedagogies on digital platforms: learning with minecraft let’s play videos. cambridge: mit press. eco, umberto. 1979. “can television teach?” screen education 3 1(12): 15-24. ellsworth, elizabeth. 1997. teaching positions: difference, pedagogy, and the power of address. new york: teachers college press. freire, paulo. 1972. pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: penguin books. suggested citation (apa): dezuanni, m. (2021, october). tiktok’s peer pedagogies: learning about books through #booktok videos. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. giroux, henry. 1994. disturbing pleasures. new york: routledge. hartley, john. 1999. the uses of television. london: routledge. hartley, john. 2011. the uses of digital literacy. new brunswick, nj: transaction publishers. marwick, alice. 2013. status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. new haven, ct: yale university press. marwick, alice. 2015. instafame: luxury selfies in the attention economy. public culture 1 january 2015; 27 (1 (75)): 137–160. rutherford, leonie, lisa waller, margaret k. merga, michelle mcrae, elizabeth bullen, and katya johanson. 2017. “the contours of teenagers' reading in the digital era: scoping the research.” new review of children's literature and librarianship, 23 (1): 27-46. senft, theresa m. 2008. camgirls: celebrity and community in the age of social networks. new york: peter lang. muhammadyounis-aoir-dublin-abstract-aoir-template-4finalupload-200826.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 younis, m, ribak r. and abu-baker, k. (2020, october 28-31). living with the smartphone: religious muslim families in israel practice mobility and piety. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. living with the smartphone: religious muslim families in israel practice mobility and piety muhammad younis department of communication, university of haifa rivka ribak department of communication, university of haifa khaula abu-baker teaching program, al-qasemi college in this paper, we explore some practices and meanings involved in the adoption of the smartphone among religious muslim families in israel. as part of a larger project on the cultural practices underlying media adoption and resistance, we analyze in-depth interviews conducted with 25 families (50 parents, 41 children aged 12-17 and 4 older ones, between august 2016-may 2017) that belong to an ethnic and national minority in israel. our analysis suggests that the adoption of this seemingly transparent medium involves a multilayered, ongoing cultural and religious interpretive work. the intergenerational perspective on this ideological group suggests, at the same time, that the deliberations they experience and the negotiations they perform may be shared among smartphone users in other cultural contexts. the study draws on three theoretical strands: (1) work on the mobile online telephone that explores the socio-technical construction of this medium by its users – the meanings and the affordances they assign to it and the ways in which their cultural positioning shapes and colors how they use and discuss it (schrock, 2015; smahel et al., 2020); (2) work that develops concepts of mediation to ask how communication media “domesticate” family members and at the same time, how they appropriate, objectify, incorporate and convert media within the moral economies of their households and communities (hoover, clark & alters, 2004; silverstone, hirsch & morley, 1992); and (3) work on media and religion that explores ways in which new media are virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 virtual event implicated in expanding, broadening and deepening religious practices or in challenging and undermining them (bunt, 2018; campbell, 2013). we discuss our findings from two complementary perspectives: the family: studies of mediation and domestication have often defined the family as their unit of analysis, taking for granted the household as the social and physical context in which adoption and consumption take place (nathanson, 2015; zaman et al., 2016). our investigation similarly regards the family as its unit of analysis, particularly since the families we interviewed are traditional both in that they have two parents and at least two children living under the same roof; and in that they are literally conservative. it is ironic, then, that these traditional characteristics construct the families we interviewed as the other of the quintessential family presumed in the literature. our analysis highlights how muslim family members negotiate a medium that undermines traditional parental and religious authorities, while at the same time providing them with intense and renewed ways of practicing their familial ties and religious commitments. as against the backdrop of several mostly quantitative studies of palestinian arabs in israel (abu-asbah, 2018), we analyze the relationships between mothers and fathers (e.g. how mothers are tasked with enforcing family rules whereas fathers are the ones who punish for breaking them); between older and younger siblings (e.g. how older brothers monitor their younger sisters’ use of the technology and their verbal and visual social networking); between parents and their children, and the children’s imagined peer group (e.g. how parents and children negotiate purchase and use of the phone, and how they introduce the community to justify their practices); between parents and uncles, children and their cousins (e.g. how family members practice religion, while their less devout relatives delegate practicing to others). the challenges that members of this relatively invisible group face with the adoption of the smartphone are to some extent “theirs” – challenges of an ethnic and national minority group whose voice, if heard at all, would be typically through others. at the same time, we propose that their challenges bespeak of the challenges faced by users in other social contexts and moral economies, specifically, when and how to use the smartphone in ways that enhance (or do not interfere with) their practices and beliefs. religion: the main characteristic of muslim religious practices is their independence from space, suggesting “ontological connection between mobility and islam” (bağlı, 2015, p. 309). this constructs the mobile phone as particularly suitable for muslim religious practice. thus, we describe a range of smartphone apps that allow our interviewees to practice their religion: a compass that points in the direction of prayer, a clock that signals the times of prayer, a string of beads counting the names of god, and last but not least, an electronic version of the quran. these apps are embedded in muslims’ particular religious practice. at the same time, we describe religious practices that rely on widely used apps which are not essentially religious – mostly whatsapp groups that afford virtual gatherings for promoting charity, pilgrimage and quran reading (khatma groups). members of other religions use the online mobile for similar purposes – the documentation of pilgrimages allows jews to re-experience them in other times and places and with different people (schwarz, 2010), and they too organize psalms reading groups using whatsapp. however, the analysis highlights the particular tensions that are woven into our interviewees’ uses: they are concerned whether participation in khatma groups amounts to showing off – namely, the sin or riya – or whether it expresses devotion; whether the electronic texts are authentic or fake and whether they are sunni or shia; and whether authority lies with the familiar local sheikh or with trans-national worldrenowned preachers. these questions are implicated in muslim doctrines and in the predicament of palestinian arab families in israel – and in the affordances of social media and online mobile phones. cited references: abu-asbah, k. (2018). intergenerational gaps in digital understanding and skills in palestinian society in israel. education and information technologies. 23(6), 2991-3006. bağlı, h. (2015). material culture of religion: new approaches to functionality in islamic objects. the design journal, 18(3), 305-325. bunt, g. r. (2018). hashtag islam: how cyber islamic environments are transforming religious authority. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. campbell, h. a. (2013). digital religion: understanding religious practice in new media worlds. new york: routledge. hoover, s. m., clark, l. s. & alters, d. (2004). media, home, and family. new york: routledge. nathanson, a. (2015). media and the family: reflections and future directions, journal of children and media, 9(1), 133-139. schrock, a. r. (2015). communicative affordances of mobile media: portability, availability, locatability, and multimediality. international journal of communication, 9(18), 1229-1246. schwarz, o. (2010). praying with a camera phone: mediation and transformation in jewish rituals. culture and religion, 11(3), 177-194. silverstone, r., hirsch, e. & morley, d. (1992). information and communication technologies and the moral economy of the household. in r. silverstone & e. hirsch (eds.), consuming technologies (pp.15-31). london: routledge. smahel, d., machackova, h., mascheroni, g., dedkova, l., staksrud, e., olafsson, k., livingstone, s. & hasebrink, u. (2020). eu kids online 2020: survey results from 19 countries. eu kids online. available at: http://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and communications/research/research-projects/eu-kids-online/eu-kids-online-2020. zaman, b., nouwen, m., vanattenhoven, j., de ferrerre, e. & van looy, j. (2016). a qualitative inquiry into the contextualized parental mediation practices of young children’s digital media use at home. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 60(1), 1-22. microsoft word monea-the digital closet-the digital closet.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): monea, a. (2021, october). the digital closet: platform censorship and lgbtqia+ independence online. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the digital closet: platform censorship and lgbtqia+ independence online alexander monea george mason university this paper draws on research for my forthcoming book – the digital closet: how the internet became straight from mit press – to examine the coders, data, algorithms, and policies that govern the circulation of content on internet and technology platforms like google, facebook, apple, and amazon. i argue that these platforms are increasingly embedding heteronormative and cisnormative bias into their algorithms, datasets, and policies that are censoring lgbtqia+ speech across the internet. this presentation combines archival studies, discourse analysis, platform studies, and critical code studies to piece together an analysis of what is going on inside the proprietary software at google and facebook in particular. the first section of the paper draws on scholarship on silicon valley culture and ‘toxic geek masculinity’ to analyze the endemic heteronormativity and cisnormativity at work in tech culture. i connect these critical-analytical scholars to data from the department of labor produced during a protracted legal battle of sexist hiring and retention practices at google, testimonials from former google employees, and informal surveys and screen captured conversations in the wake of james damore’s infamous ‘google memo’ circa 2017. by reading across these various sources i develop an understanding of google’s work culture as having deeply embedded normative understandings of gender and sexuality that are directly connected to the company’s repeated failure to anticipate and meet the needs of lgbtqia+ users. the second section of the paper draws on original investigations into the benchmark datasets that google used to develop its image recognition algorithms (like the google net algorithm behind google photos and safesearch). i provide examples from wordnet and imagenet to demonstrate the substantial heteronormative and cisnormative biases that are embedded in these datasets and provide some examples of the ways in which these biases are amplified once they are learned and applied by machine learning algorithms like the convolutional neural networks used for computer vision and image recognition tasks. the third section of the paper draws on original investigations into facebook’s content moderation policies by performing close readings of its community standards enforcement reports, documents from its product policy forum (previously called the content standards forum), and leaked documents obtained by investigative journalists. throughout this analysis i demonstrate the systemic heteronormative and cisnormative bias that structures facebook’s community standards and content moderation efforts on the platform and connect them directly to its attempts to produce “human algorithms” through outsourced digital piecemeal labor. in closing, i argue that while less definitive than desirable due to the proprietary nature of platform code, these analyses demonstrate a substantial heteronormative and cisnormative bias across some of the most popular internet platforms in the world. as they increasingly dominate web traffic, they begin to structure our very experience of the internet, inflecting it in a heteronormative and cisnormative way. in so doing, they are damaging the capacities the internet might otherwise have for lgbtqia+ independence and the fostering of community building, social organizing, sex education, and the exploration of non-normative erotics and desires online. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): jankowski, s. (2022, november). imaginary parliaments: excavating the metaphor of consensus within blockchain technologies. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. imaginary parliaments: excavating the metaphor of consensus within blockchain technologies dr. steve jankowski university of amsterdam consensus as a sociotechnical affordance blockchain technologies function partly according to the technical mechanisms of "proof-of-work." these mechanisms assess the similarities between different information sources to validate the content of a block. what is interesting about these mechanisms is that their capabilities go beyond their technical operations. in many ways, they can be considered to be a radical technology that have imagined affordances, affordances that “emerge between users’ perceptions, attitudes, and expectations; between the materiality and functionality of technologies; and between the intentions and perceptions of designers” (nagy and neff, 2015, p. 5). in the case of blockchains, these affordances are attached to the fact that it uses “consensus algorithms” for the proof-of-work. beyond the validation of information, these algorithms are imagined as representing "social trust" (de filippi and loveluck, 2016) and decentralizing electoral processes (hermstruwer, 2020, p. 405). as such, blockchain technologies have been intimately woven into discourses that imagine the future of governance, transparency, and democratic decision-making. but how has this happened? in this paper i identify that at the root of these discourses is the ambiguous concept of "consensus" and that socio-political meanings of consensus have be re-written as a set of technical operations. through a combination of metaphor analysis and content analysis i demonstrate how the oscillation between technical and political meanings became the basis of the celebratory discourses around blockchain technologies. within science and technology studies and media studies, these narratives are built upon imaginaries that are composed of a vision which “is common to an entire profession or sector” and are connected together by “intentions and projects, as well as utopias and ideologies” (flichy, 2007, p. 4). additionally, these imaginaries exist at the threshold of the real and the unreal as they “weave in and out of the purely imagined and the actually realized media machineries” (kluitenberg, 2011, p. 48). internet imaginaries and metaphors in many ways, the socio-technical imaginaries of blockchains have already been wellcovered. for instance, lana swartz identified differences in how bitcoin was imagined through digital metallism and mutual infrastructuralism (2017) as well as radical and incorporative dreams (2018). more recently, brody and couture (2021) examined the discursive transition between viewing blockchains as money and as decentralizing media. while these studies are significant in identifying the different ideological boundaries that are shaping the meaning of blockchain technologies, there is a parallel necessity to identify the common ideas that carry political meanings. for example, recent research on wikipedia identified how wikipedians drew from democratic meanings of consensus and then transformed it to suit both their policy and interface (jankowski, 2022). however, in the case of blockchain technologies, i argue that it is apt to consider consensus as a concept that exists at the edge of metaphor and affordance. as sally wyatt explained, "[m]etaphors are available to all, are much more flexible and dynamic than sociotechnical imaginaries[…,] and can capture fears as well as hopes and promises" (2021, p. 410). indeed, the excavation of the layers of meaning embedded within metaphors is an establish method of media analysis. for example, partice flichy's work on the internet imaginare (2007) highlighted the proliferation of metaphors attached to the internet. more broadly, john durham peters took on analyzing the "key metaphors for digital media" as a whole (2015, p. 8). others like vincent mosco (2014) excavated the historical materialities that were hidden by the metaphor of "the cloud," or cornelius puschmann and jean burgess's analysis (2014) of the etymological lineages of "big data" as a metaphor. metaphor analysis in a similar fashion, i follow the method that puschmann and burgess established. they use a combination of metaphor analysis and content analysis by providing a general etymology of "data" and "big data" which is connected to an analysis of how the metaphor was circulated within news media. in my case, i provide a more restricted etymology by looking specifically at how the meaning of consensus was articulated by computer scientists. i start with leslie lamport's paxos protocols and consensus algorithms. of particular interest is the fact that to explain how his algorithm functioned, lamport fabricated an imaginary greek parliament that had been recently excavated and found a whole new system of governance. after reviewing the associated meanings that emerge from lamport’s explanation, i trace how his technical and political ideas were revised to include the notions of "distributed consensus," during the 2000s and 2010s. after outlining a map of associated concepts, i identify how these articulations were taken up and transformed by news circulation. again, similar to puschmann and burgess, i use a corpus including business and technology news spanning a five-year period of 2016–2021 to observe how consensus shifted from a technical metaphor to a circulation of political discourse. after this analysis, i conclude the paper by summarizing how the meaning of consensus shifted from being metaphor, to a set of techniques, and then into an assortment of political visions for decentralization, autonomy, and democracy. this research therefore makes valuable contributions to understanding the actual process by which ideas, visions, and socio-technical imaginaries become entangled within the development and understanding of new media. references brody, a. and couture, s. (2021). ideologies and imaginaries in blockchain communities: the case of ethereum. canadian journal of communication, 46(3), 543– 561. de filippi, p. & loveluck, b. (2016). the invisible politics of bitcoin: governance crisis of a decentralised infrastructure. internet policy review, 5(3). flichy, p. (2007). the internet imaginaire. mit press. hermstrüwer, y. (2020). the limits of blockchain democracy. new york university journal of law & liberty, 14, 402–492. jankowski, s. (2022). making consensus sensible: the transition of a democratic ideal into wikipedia’s interface. journal of peer production, 15. jankowski, s. (2022). making consensus sensible: the transition of a democratic ideal into wikipedia’s interface. journal of peer production, 15. kluitenberg, e. (2011). on the archaeology of imaginary media. in huhtamo, e., parikka, j. (eds.), media archaeology: approaches, applications, and implications (pp. 48–69). berkeley, ca: university of california press. mosco, v. (2014). to the cloud: big data in a turbulent world. boulder, colorado: paradigm publishers. nagy, p. and neff, g. (2015). imagined affordance: reconstructing a keyword for communication theory. social media+ society, 1(2). peters, j. d. (2015). the marvelous clouds: toward a philosophy of elemental media. chicago london: the university of chicago press. puschmann, c. and burgess, j. (2014). metaphors of big data. international journal of communication, 8(0). swartz, l. (2017). blockchain dreams: imagining techno-economic alternatives after bitcoin. in castells, m. (ed.), another economy is possible: culture and economy in a time of crisis (pp. 82-105). malden, ma: polity. swartz, l. (2018). what was bitcoin, what will it be? the techno-economic imaginaries of a new money technology. cultural studies, 32(4), 623–650. wyatt, s. (2021). metaphors in critical internet and digital media studies. new media & society, 23(2), 406-416. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): scully-blaker, r. (2021, october). nostalgia and the backlog: /r/patientgamers and the transactional nature of leisure. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. nostalgia and the backlog: /r/patientgamers and the transactional nature of leisure rainforest scully-blaker university of california, irvine extended abstract on november 11, 2011 bethesda game studios released a long-anticipated installment in their acclaimed video game series, the elder scrolls v: skyrim. for many, it was a day to retreat from one’s earthly responsibilities and embark on a virtual adventure. for others, however, this was not the case. on the same day as skyrim’s release, reddit user jetmax25 made a post to /r/gaming entitled “being poor sucks” to lament the fact that they could not afford the brand-new game and were instead playing an older bethesda title (2011). in the resulting comment thread, one supportive user remarked that there should be a community for people who wait to buy a game due to financial or other constraints. this comment spawned a chain of others that supported the idea and within thirty minutes, /r/patientgamers was created, a discussion board which serves as a stark reminder that while patience can be a virtue, it can also be a necessity. as a piece of a larger project on slowness and slow play in game culture, this paper uses the findings of an investigation into the /r/patientgamers subreddit to account for the ways that our leisure time and our play have been assimilated by the logics of neoliberal, late capitalism. i do this by tracing classed experiences of slowness as they are experienced by video game players. the figure of the patientgamer was selected not just because of their explicitly protracted approach to video game consumption, but because the grows out of a frustration with the financial and temporal costs to access leisure. through foucauldian discourse analysis (given 2008), two major themes were detected across a number of posts which traced how many players tried, and often failed, to slow down their lives in restful ways through their play and the conversations that emerged from the impulse to treat their leisure time as work. specifically, users’ nostalgia for their childhoods and their anxieties around possessing a video game backlog are both emblematic of the way that video game play has been made legible to capitalist logics such that any distinction between labour and leisure becomes moot. but can the work of play may be reframed to undercut logics of efficiency and productivity? /r/patientgamer’s clear resistance to marketing hype and their intrinsic critique of the tech sector mantra that what is newest is best both come across as anticapitalist, yet much of how patientgamers speak of video gaming frames play as a transaction, as an investment of both money and time made in exchange for comfort. this comfort was emblematized in multiple discussion threads about so-called cozy games “those games where, whenever you fire them up and begin a new adventure, there's that warm, embracing feeling that says, ‘welcome home.’” (wickedwenchofthewest, 2018). this pervasive notion of coziness forces us to reconsider the patientgamer’s expression of nostalgic longing, what boym (2001) calls the desire for “the repetition of the unrepeatable” (p. xvii). given that video games generally allow one to play through the same stories as many times as they wish, the medium would seem to push against this sense of nostalgia, however a closer look at communal discussions revealed that patientgamers longed not for a return to the comfort of a familiar game world, but rather for a return to their childhood which was explicitly mourned as a time before the burden of temporal and financial obligations, a time before being aware of their own capitalist subjectivities. through the lens of theories on time, labour, and grievance (ahmed 2018; sharma 2014), i argue that the desire for comfort is a form of political stasis, an expression of dissatisfaction with the status quo which conserves hegemony by ignoring the difficult but necessary work of acting against an unjust system to bring about change (keeling 2019). for example, the “backlog” originally referred to surplus resources held in reserve, it has come to refer to the exact opposite – an excess of tasks which perennially works complete. within game culture it refers to a stockpile of titles that one has purchased but not played, but the ties to labour are unmistakable. given the particularly transactional nature with which the /r/patientgamers framed video game play, those who no longer had the time to play as often as in their childhood were now faced with imposing backlogs which left them lamenting “hours worth of content to slog through” (eatenbyweirdfishes, 2019). this anxiety productively thwarts the received wisdom that play is a voluntary form of leisure and instead shows many feel held ransom by an obligation to relax (agamben, 2011; trammell, 2021). ultimately, these forces of nostalgia and backlog are read as an indictment against late capitalism and against neo-liberal logics of independence and self-care through deleuze’s articulation of the control society in which “you never finish anything” (1990, p. 179). this case study of /r/patientgamers holds relevance not just for the study of games and/as culture, but of how technocapitalism instrumentalizes all leisure and the consequences felt by those who try to slow their rhythms of consumption but do so without proper attention to issues of class and power. as sharma notes, “slowing down does not necessarily change (and certainly does not ameliorate) the ways in which individuals are tangled together in time” (2014, p. 111). the transactional nature of play within patientgamer discourse shows how media products are routinely framed as supposed escapes but consumers nonetheless faithfully tether them to the same draining logics of labour, time, and value that many wish to forget when they turn to these virtual worlds for a reprieve. to conclude, this paper opens the door to asking whether slowness can be made uncomfortable in ways that subvert the ideal of productivity rather than reifying it. references agamben, g. (2011). hunger of an ox. in g. agamben, nudities (pp. 104-112). stanford: stanford university press. ahmed, s. (2018). refusal, resignation and complaint. feministkilljoys. retrieved from: https://feministkilljoys.com/2018/06/28/refusal-resignation-and-complaint/ boym, s. (2001). the future of nostalgia. new york: basic books. deleuze, g. (1992). postscript on control societies. in g. deleuze and m. joughin (trans.) negotiations 1972-1990 (pp. 177-182). new york: columbia university press. [eatenbyweirdfishes]. (2019, july 17). my thoughts after finally clearing my backlog: this was a huge fucking mistake. [online forum post]. reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/cebopw/my_thoughts_after_finally_cl earing_my_backlog/ given, l. (2008). the sage encyclopedia of qualitative research methods. los angeles, calif: sage publications. [jetmax25]. (2011, november 11). being poor sucks [online forum post]. reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/m8rqh/being_poor_sucks/ johnson, m. and luo, y. (2017). gaming-value and culture-value: understanding how players account for video game purchases. convergence, 25.5-6. keeling, k. (2019). queer times, black futures. new york: new york university press sharma, s. (2014). in the meantime: temporality and cultural politics. durham: duke university press. trammell, a. (2021). torture, play, and the black experience. game, 8.9. [wickedwenchofthewest]. (2018, november 8). cosy games? [online forum post]. reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/9vh4k4/cosy_games/ selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 soronen, a., & koivunen, a. (2021, october). negotiating professional belongings: finnish actors’ affective engagements on social media platforms. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. negotiating professional belongings: finnish actors’ affective engagements on social media platforms anne soronen tampere university anu koivunen university of turku in this paper, we examine how social media practices shape freelance actors’ and theatre employees’ professional lives, social relationships, and occupational selfconceptions. social media platforms have changed the conditions of the production, distribution, and reception of creative works (hadley, 2017; nieborg & poell, 2018). previous studies have shown that for creative professionals in precarious conditions, social media entail promotional work (e.g. gandini et al., 2017). many creative workers have transformed themselves into “promotional labourers” (bollmer, 2018), regularly producing work-related social media content to increase their visibility and enhance their job opportunities. our study focuses on actors and their perceptions of social media as an area of professional agency. we ask how social media practices inform and shape actors’ occupational self-conceptions and professional belongings. to answer this question, we employ baym’s (2018) concept of relational labour, which accounts for the endeavours of online communication musicians to build social relationships with audiences and ensure continued work. we read baym’s notion of relational labour through berlant’s (1988) conceptualisation of intimacy as mobile attachments to explore the consequences of platformed socialities for actors’ professional selves. we collected data from 15 finnish professional actors from june 2020 to march 2021. the participants were eight freelancers and seven theatre employees, of whom nine were women and six were men, all white. their ages ranged from 29 to 64 years. we applied the diary-interview method (e.g. spowart & nairn, 2014) in an ethnographic framework. the participants kept free-form “digital everyday life” diaries for one week, after which they were interviewed using individually designed interview frames based on their diaries. our analysis was based on a close reading of the interview material and 2 diary entries in which participants described their experiences and feelings concerning their presence, professional agency, and promotion on social media. our main finding is that while engaging in promotional work and attracting audiences on social media, finnish actors foreground professional belonging rather than strategic self-branding. our data confirm that creative workers prefer mutual support on social media – liking, emoting, and reposting – and perceive it as a means of securing collaborations (see patel, 2017). although manifesting belonging to professional communities is especially pertinent to freelancers, our findings suggest that colleagues, rather than the general audience, are the primary intended audience on instagram and facebook. this creates regular negotiations with collapsed contexts (marwick & boyd, 2011) and imagined peer audiences for social media updates. the actors in our study do not, as a rule, strategically seek new followers, and their approach to visibility is often complex or hesitant. the insecurity about when, how, and to whom one is visible occupies many participants’ thoughts. theatre employees commonly distance themselves from their organizations’ official social media marketing. also, some freelance actors often choose to ignore production companies’ guidelines for social media promotion. other freelancers describe checking promotional instructions carefully as a matter of routine. some consider the operations of algorithms in trying to control their visibility. second, all participants reflect on the increasingly important role of social media presence in employability, although estimations of its importance vary. actors make considerable efforts to foster a sense of belonging to the professional community. some worry about the reputational disadvantage of social media presence, seeing digital traces and social media archives as potential threats to future employability, whereas others find them beneficial for new job opportunities. for participants active on instagram, the ephemerality associated with the story feature has reduced the sense of platform dependency. third, our data support the findings of leidner (2016), who, studying how actors manage labour force oversupply and precarity, documented a durable commitment to occupational identity. however, among finnish actors, the primacy of professional identity also results in ambivalence and contradictory feelings about social media posting (e.g. lehto, 2021). whereas one participant describes elaborate tactics of using props as a way of managing the genre of selfies, another participant depicts updating and sharing selfies on social media as a gradual process of unlearning shame by getting used to it and managing ambivalent affects. some prefer to share behind-thescenes material, whereas others wish to maintain secrecy about their characters and production processes (cf. turner, 2017). negotiating the different notions of openness and authenticity between artistic professions and social media, the participants reflect on the productions in which they are involved and the roles that they play, seeking a balance in sharing content proportional to the size of their respective roles and productions. the participants negotiate their online actions related to imagined peer assessments in a way that involves continuous movements between visibility and invisibility and 3 between independence and interdependence. anxieties, ambivalences, and uncertainties about one’s social media presence are entangled with the actors’ professional self-conceptions. while manifestations of mutual support are perceived as performances of professional networks and friendships before a general audience, they are simultaneously viewed as important acts of community building, signalling belonging and expressing aspirations among peers. to conclude, we suggest that relational labour on social media needs to be studied as a phenomenon of complex belongings to account for professional community building rather than mere strategic self-promotion. more research is needed on the subtle boundaries and overlapping intimacies between peers and the general audience to gain deeper insights into the complexities and mobile attachments that define the lived experiences of these platforms. references baym, n. (2018). playing to the crowd: musicians, audiences, and the intimate work of connection. new york university press. berlant, l. (1998). intimacy: a special issue. critical inquiry, 24(2), 281–288. https://doi.org/10.1086/448875 bollmer, g. (2018). software intimacies (social media and the unbearability of death). in a. dobson, b. robards, & n. carah (eds.), digital intimate publics and social media (pp. 45–58). palgrave macmillan. gandini, a., bandinelli, c., & cossu, a. (2017). collaborating, competing, co-working, coalescing: artists, freelancers and social entrepreneurs as the ‘new subjects’ of the creative economy. in j. graham & a. gandini (eds.), collaborative production in the creative industries (pp. 15–32). university of westminster press. hadley, b. (2017). theatre, social media, and meaning making. springer international publishing ag. leidner, r. (2016). work identity without steady work: lessons from stage actors. in s. vallas (ed.), research in the sociology of work: vol 3. research in the sociology of work (pp. 3–35). emerald. lehto, m. (2021). ambivalent influencers: feeling rules and the affective practice of anxiety in social media influencer work. european journal of cultural studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549421988958 marwick, a., & boyd, d. (2011). i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. new media & society, 13(1), 114–133. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365313 https://doi.org/10.1086/448875 https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549421988958 https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549421988958 https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549421988958 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365313 4 nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society, 20(11), 4275–4292. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769694 patel, k. (2017). expertise and collaboration: cultural workers’ performance on social media. in j. graham & a. gandini (eds.), collaborative production in the creative industries (pp.157–176). university of westminster press. spowart, l., & nairn, k. (2014). (re)performing emotions in diary-interviews. qualitative research, 14(3), 327–340. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794112473498 turner, p. (2019). fast marketing, furious interactions: an interstellar community on instagram. celebrity studies, 10(4), 469–478. https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2019.1672997 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769694 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769694 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769694 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1468794112473498 https://doi-org.libproxy.tuni.fi/10.1080/19392397.2019.1672997 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): rohden, f. (2022, november). covid only on thursdays: dealing with an infodemic in languageand region-based online communities. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. covid only on thursdays: dealing with an infodemic in languageand region-based online communities frauke rohden university of oslo introduction even before declaring the global coronavirus outbreak a pandemic in march 2020, the who warned in february 2020 that the disease was “accompanied by a massive ‘infodemic’ an over-abundance of information” (world health organization, 2020). as the pandemic unfolded, social media platforms implemented measures to control information flows. however, alongside platform-wide measures, smaller communities also found themselves grappling with moderation decisions on new types and amounts of content. to study the reactions of localized online communities facing the ‘infodemic’, i have examined several languageand region-based online communities on reddit, exploring how moderation practices and rules were adjusted in existing subreddits in spring 2020. background platform vernacular (gibbs et al., 2015) describes the combination of technical affordances and cultural practices that shapes how user interactions differ between large social media platforms. however, within the same platform, many styles of interaction can be observed. for example, rodgers et al. (2021) highlight the significance of local moderators in geographically based online communities on facebook. for reddit, research ranges from pointing out toxic technocultures (massanari, 2017) to a potential for public engagement with science (chen et al., 2021). this points to a diversity of subcommunities on the platform, influenced by decentralized moderation practices and unique sets of norms. fiesler et al. (2018) describe an ecosystem of distinct rules across different subreddits. an analysis of moderation practices on the platform found that a few macro norms hold true across almost all subreddits, while some meso norms only apply to certain groups of subreddits, and a number of micro norms are unique to individual subreddits (chandrasekharan et al., 2018). a systematic overview of reddit studies noted that with a majority of the studies being based in computer science and using computational text analysis, contextualization with qualitative research methods would be important (proferes et al., 2021). methods some practical considerations make reddit an interesting object of research to trace content moderation rules in relation to covid-19: many subreddit communities actively engage in discussing moderation practices, giving insights into the negotiation of new rules related to the pandemic (accessible and searchable through the pushshift api (baumgartner et al., 2020)). furthermore, many subreddits document their rules in a wiki format, allowing to trace changes. while many subreddits revolve around specific topics (with content moderation focusing on defining what is on-topic or off-topic), regionand language-based subreddits have diverse content that might be grouped into quite different subreddits otherwise. therefore, moderators in such communities are particularly concerned with organizing and structuring content, in addition to questions of whether a given topic is allowed. for this study, i examined moderator posts in spring 2020 as well as subreddit rule changes (using the wiki function where available) from 2020 onwards. i have followed three european language-based subreddits throughout the pandemic (r/de, r/sweden, and r/norge) and conducted additional searches for coronavirus-related rule changes in other european subreddit wikis. findings and discussion research has examined the diverging user trajectories and controversy around the establishment of r/coronavirus as the official subreddit, compared to alternative subreddits such as r/china_flu (zhang et al., 2021). many existing subreddits found themselves forced to relate to the pandemic as well, reflected by meta-discussions about moderation and rules as well as rule changes in these communities that explicitly point to covid-19 related content. subreddit moderators used different tools to control pandemic-related content. this includes for example the creation of new geographically-oriented subreddits for covid-19 content, daily or weekly discussion threads, the use of ‘flairs’ (tags) to indicate the types of content, or schedules to only allow certain topics on certain days. the moderators integrated new rules with existing practices in their subreddits and tended to use strategies they were already employing before the pandemic. in some subreddits, they did so without referencing covid specifically in the moderation rules, relying on the existing rules to be applicable to covid-19 content as well (for example enforced flairs in r/norge, with an additional coronavirus flair). other subreddits made changes to their rules explicitly addressing covid-19 (for example r/de making extensive changes elaborating on their handling of covid-content, or r/sweden assigning weekdays for covid-discussions and specifying that political and covid-related content would be moderated more strictly). the wave of information related to the pandemic has led to discussions of moderation practices and rule changes in many communities, making it possible to compare how they react to it. the different strategies make clear that context knowledge is important for understanding such subcommunities and their differences – for example, whether rules for the content in question have limited it, enforced it to be tagged with distinct flairs, encouraged the use of other subreddits for this topic, or otherwise intervened in what could or could not be posted to the community at a certain time. observing this on reddit is facilitated by the accessibility of post history and the traceability of rules in wikis. nevertheless, not all parts of the reddit moderation ecosystem are captured in this way, with for example moderator posts, ‘stickied’ posts (always displayed on top of the subreddit), rule changes only displayed in the sidebar, or the use of the automoderator tool all intervening in what content can be submitted in a given community. similar decentralized content moderation practices can be observed on other platforms, for example in facebook groups, comment sections of youtube channels or videos, or other online communities, in more or less outspoken forms, making it crucial to understand the context of captured data. references baumgartner, j., zannettou, s., keegan, b., squire, m., & blackburn, j. (2020). the pushshift reddit dataset. proceedings of the international aaai conference on web and social media, 14, 830–839. chandrasekharan, e., samory, m., jhaver, s., charvat, h., bruckman, a., lampe, c., eisenstein, j., & gilbert, e. (2018). the internet’s hidden rules: an empirical study of reddit norm violations at micro, meso, and macro scales. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 2(cscw), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1145/3274301 chen, h., hara, n., & mckay, c. (2021). investigating mediated public engagement with science on the “science” subreddit: from the participants’ perspective. plos one, 16(4), e0249181. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249181 fiesler, c., jiang, j., mccann, j., frye, k., & brubaker, j. (2018). reddit rules! characterizing an ecosystem of governance. proceedings of the international aaai conference on web and social media, 12(1), article 1. https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/icwsm/article/view/15033 gibbs, m., meese, j., arnold, m., nansen, b., & carter, m. (2015). #funeral and instagram: death, social media, and platform vernacular. information, communication & society, 18(3), 255–268. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2014.987152 massanari, a. (2017). #gamergate and the fappening: how reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. new media & society, 19(3), 329–346. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815608807 proferes, n., jones, n., gilbert, s., fiesler, c., & zimmer, m. (2021). studying reddit: a systematic overview of disciplines, approaches, methods, and ethics. social media + society, 7(2), 20563051211019004. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211019004 rodgers, s., mcloughlin, l., ballatore, a., & moore, s. (2021). localizing content moderation: approaching the orientational spaces of facebook group admins and mods. aoir selected papers of internet research. https://doi.org/1631737835 world health organization. (2020). novel coronavirus(2019-ncov) situation report— 13. https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situationreports/20200202-sitrep-13-ncov-v3.pdf zhang, j. s., keegan, b., lv, q., & tan, c. (2021). understanding the diverging user trajectories in highly-related online communities during the covid-19 pandemic. association for the advancement of artificial intelligence, 12. aoir2020-reynolds-final-submission.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): reynolds, c. (2020, october). it’s rewind time, everybody: the contestation of platform culture in youtube’s yearly review. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. it’s rewind time, everybody: the contestation of platform culture in youtube’s yearly review cj reynolds the hebrew university of jerusalem youtube rewind, especially its controversial 2018 and 2019 offerings, surfaces contested and contradictory understandings of what youtube culture is and who gets to speak for the platform. in 2018, youtube’s blog excitedly announced the release of annual year-in-review video, youtube rewind. titled “everyone controls rewind,” the video highlighted the ostensible control youtube gives creators over their content, audiences, and platform culture. tellingly, however, the first paragraph of the blog post mentions only celebrities with limited presence on the platform like kylie jenner, will smith, and beyoncé. it was perhaps predictable, then, that many youtube viewers swarmed to the video only to feel ostracized and powerless watching mainstream celebrities and scripted skits that gave homage to corporate visions of the platform rather than viral and unique moments. rewind videos have traditionally featured stars whose fame is closely tied to the platform, like pewdiepie, smosh, and logan paul, or memes that rose to prominence via youtube like psy’s “gangnam style” or rebecca black’s “friday.” in 2018, however, many of youtube’s most notable faces were conspicuously absent and the memes and culture they represented only minimally acknowledged. in an effort to take back control, viewers struck at youtube in one of the few ways readily available—the dislike button. within days, rewind 2018 surpassed one of youtube’s most ignominious records, becoming the most disliked video of all time with over sixteen million people clicking the thumbs down button. where the previous recordholder, justin bieber’s “baby,” took almost ten years to acquire ten million dislikes, youtube rewind reached the mark in eight days. the backlash was severe enough that youtube executives considered removing the dislike button across the entire platform (palladino 2019) and youtube ceo susan wojcicki’s own children informed her that the video was “cringey,” eventually prompting the company to publicly acknowledge its mistake. “we hear you,” wojcicki wrote in a blog post, admitting that rewind 2018 “didn’t accurately show the year’s key moments, nor did it reflect the youtube you know” (wojcicki 2019). youtube rewinds serve as occasions of “festive viewing” driven, in this case, by an online video platform rather than a traditional television broadcaster (dayan and katz 1992, 1). adopting and adapting the idea of media events established by dayan and katz to fit the change in medium, i argue that rewinds serve as social media events. like media events on television, rewinds interrupt the everyday business of youtube. they are a dominant moment of shared culture on a platform saturated with more content than the entire history of broadcast television at over 500 hours of video added per minute (wojcicki 2020). rewind 2018 alone boasts over 170 million views and thousands of response videos. rewinds are annual, preplanned, and heavily advertised, with release dates announced on social media up to a week before the video’s debut, factors that build a sense of ceremony around jointly celebrating a year in youtube culture. these are moments of coming together with shared rituals (burgess, mitchell, and münch 2018, 10), anthems, and cultural leaders. and, most tellingly, violating the formula for this ceremonial event upset audiences to the point of generating a mass, organized, and negative response. by focusing on the question of cultural development on youtube through the social media event of rewind videos, i aim to develop the larger question of how researchers can talk about online culture on a globalized scale. youtube’s 2019 version of rewind, “for the record,” offers one strategy for how to do this. in the wake of missing the cultural tone of the platform in 2018, youtube retreated to metrics as a way to understand it in 2019. “for the record” returned to the strategy of the first rewind in 2010 of simply counting down lists of the most popular videos in various content categories, accompanied by an extensive website that offered popularity measures from selected markets around the world. the reception to this approach was mixed as the video generated less mainstream vitriol, but still earned over eight million dislikes within two months of release. youtube’s metricized approach was meant to look both more global and more objective, but the ambiguity and secrecy around how the platform generated these metrics and why it only released them for certain areas of the world shows that it was still a carefully framed corporate operation. additionally, the sterility of metrics extracted much of the celebratory joy and creativity from rewind, perhaps in an attempt to simply avoid controversy rather than generate excitement. tracing the flows of content creation, including the corporate-produced rewind videos and critical response and reaction videos from youtube creators, such as pewdiepie's popular “rewind 2018, but it’s actually good,” reveals competing visions for and structuring tensions of platform culture. this constellation of videos helps draw out what danah boyd terms the “networked public” of youtube, or “the imagined collective that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice” on the platform (2010, 39). former disney chairman jeffrey katzenberg once claimed, “youtube tells our collective story” (n.d.)—if this is so, who makes up the collective and would they all tell the same story? recognizing what makes a social media event and why they generate such engaged attention can point towards other ways of understanding platform cultures. julia sonnevend defines events as moments that “structure our social lives and give reference points for our life stories and global histories” (2016, 109). from viewerdriven virality, to the establishment of microcelebrities, to the role of international cultural leaders like pewdiepie and the paul brothers across the english-speaking world, luccas neto in brazil, namewee in malaysia, spanish-language channels like elrubiusomg and vegetta777, and arabic youtubers like eyshelly, understandings of what it means to be a youtuber emerge from more sectors than ever before. is a singular rewind possible for a platform that now encompasses over 100 countries and 80 languages? if corporate visions of what youtube is and should be no longer generate popular excitement and backing, who then gets to speak for the platform? focusing on youtube’s premiere cultural event offers a starting point for understanding what youtube means to those who structure their lives on and around the platform. references boyd, danah. 2010. "social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications." in a networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites, 47-66. routledge. burgess, jean, peta mitchell, and felix münch. 2018. "social media rituals: the uses of celebrity death in digital culture." in a networked self: birth, life, death, 224-239. taylor and francis. dayan, daniel, and elihu katz. 1992. media events: the live broadcasting of history. harvard up. katzenberg, jeffrey. no date. review of videocracy, by kevin allocca, available on amazon. palladino, valentina. 2019, 4 february. “youtube is trying to prevent angry mobs from abusing ‘dislike’ button.” arstechnica. sonnevend, julia. 2016. “event.” in digital keywords: a vocabulary of information society and culture, 109-117. princeton up. wojcicki, susan. 2020, 14 february. “youtube at 15: my personal journey and the road ahead.” youtube official blog. ---. 2019, 5 february. “youtube in 2019: looking back and moving forward.” youtube official blog. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): green, a., shibuya, y., trillo, t., mizoroki, s., scharlach, r., hallinan, b., park, t.,shim, a., levi, e., segev, e. shenhay, s., & shifman, l.. (2022, november). how to do things with “values”: a cross-linguistic analysis of the meanings and functions of a core concept on twitter. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. how to do things with “values”: a cross-linguistic analysis of the meanings and functions of a core concept on twitter avishai green the hebrew university of jerusalem yuya shibuya the university of tokyo tommaso trillò the hebrew university of jerusalem saki mizoroki the hebrew university of jerusalem rebecca scharlach the hebrew university of jerusalem blake hallinan the hebrew university of jerusalem tim park the hebrew university of jerusalem anna shim the hebrew university of jerusalem effi levi the hebrew university of jerusalem elad segev tel aviv university shaul shenhav the hebrew university of jerusalem limor shifman the hebrew university of jerusalem the term values is prominent in political discourse. yet its ubiquity is matched by its vagueness, especially when considering usage among different cultures. twitter provides a promising venue for exploring the contested political discourse surrounding this term. in this paper, we study the use of the term values on twitter across different language communities. we ask: what meanings do users ascribe to the term “values”? and what are the social and political discursive functions of the term? for both questions, we will explore cross-cultural similarities and differences. we compiled a corpus of around 15 million tweets containing the term values from 2019-2021 in english, german, italian, japanese and korean. we use two computational tools to analyze the data: 1) co-occurrence network analysis at the tweet level, 2) phrase-detection – using the pointwise mutual information measure (pmi) – of word combinations containing values. both quantitative tools are complemented by qualitative analysis of full tweets containing key terms and phrases. preliminary results suggest fundamental differences in how different cultures perceive and frame values: while the term in english, italian, and german appears mainly in a partisan political context, japanese and korean usage is far more interpersonal and apolitical. in the english, italian, and german corpuses, the term is often invoked in politically motivated rhetorical attacks, often alleging hypocrisy. in the japanese and korean corpuses, tweeters use the term to promote a societal norm of respecting others’ values and to discuss generational gaps. our analysis demonstrates the potential of twitter-based research for unpacking the meanings and functions of this core concept, across cultures. final paper aoir2021.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 from buzzfeed creator to (in)dependent youtuber managing precarious labour through gossip vanessa richter university of amsterdam aikaterini mniestri university of siegen in 2019, buzzfeed announced plans to make 220 employees redundant (bennett, 2019). in the wake of the cuts, other creators decided to leave the company of their own volition calling the management of buzzfeed out for toxic business practices and disregard of labour rights (kludt & phung, 2019). several well known buzzfeed creators moved on to an autonomous career as youtube creators hoping that the previously acquired audience would migrate with them to support their company independent channel as an entrepreneurial career move. while this is often represented as a move towards independence by the creators, research in cultural production (nieborg & poell, 2018; postigo, 2016) has shown that the creators are always platform-dependent and dependent on their youtube public (mniestri & gekker, 2020) for viability. therefore, we question whether being an (in)dependent youtuber would be more precarious than being an employed buzzfeed creator. how does the migration from buzzfeed to youtube creator offer both independence and a host of new precarious contingencies to creators? theoretical framework the circulation of user-generated video content has had a telling influence on our understanding of digital culture; yet, youtube has evaded the scope of much digital platform research (burgess & green, 2018; rieder et al. 2018). similarly, research into the precarious nature of cultural production has often left creators out despite the ongoing professionalization of the creator industry. furthermore, current research often looks at independent creators entering the industry as laypersons while there is little research on creators that move from traditional employment to (in)dependent content creation. while precarity has become a buzzword in the creative industries (mcrobbie, richter, v., & mniestri, a. (2021, october). from buzzfeed creator to (in)dependent youtuber managing precarious labour through gossip. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 1 2016), it is most often associated with financial insecurity referring to limited employment opportunities, the growth of contract work and freelancing (kalleberg, 2009; campell & burgess, 2018). however, precarity ought to be understood as a more holistic problem impacting creators’ mental health, work-life balance and live narratives (morgan & nelligan, 2018; morini et al., 2014). research on the “architectures of digital labour” (postigo, 2016) points to the exploitation of creators, due to a lack of unionisation and, hence, labour protection, and the monetization of intimate labour enforcing mental health issues, leading to an overall precarisation of the industry. numerous prominent buzzfeed creators, including members of ladylike and try guys, have created “why i left buzzfeed” videos calling out the company for pushing overwork, intimate content, and disregarding labour rights. taking this into consideration, we are referring to precarity as a framework to parse the complex shifts inherent in the migration from employee creating content to becoming a self-employed creator. methodology contributions to the field of qualitative youtube studies have preferred content analysis and on/off-line ethnography to elucidate the concerns and struggles of creators (berryman & kavka, 2017; burgess & green, 2018; bishop, 2018). considering existing literature, we first attempt to capture cultural, economic, and social processes by reviewing relevant popular literature and interviews with buzzfeed executives1. additionally, we are situating a content and discourse analysis of 17 ‘why i left buzzfeed’ videos by former employees turned youtubers within academic and popular discourse. we understand these videos as potential sources of ‘gossip’ (bishop, 2018) defined as “loose, unmethodological talk that is generative” (p. 2590). as bishop points out, gossip allows creators to negotiate platform visibility collectively, despite the uneven power distribution between creators and the platforms. we hypothesize that gossip can be beneficial to ex-buzzfeed creators by building on their buzzfeed association to boost their algorithmic visibility. additionally, gossip is a valuable form of knowledge exchange for creators to stay informed on discourse, support one another, and communicate their own perspectives on former buzzfeed content to followers. gossip also allows us as researchers to break through the black box of youtube as a workplace to better comprehend precarity as multifaceted. thus, we coded the collected videos according to creators’ gossip on financial, emotional, and temporal precarity. additionally, we used the module “video info and comments” (rieder, 2021) from the youtube data tools to crawl the video comments and analyse whether there is a consistent set of users across these videos. results creators are walking a tightrope to balance financial security with emotional well-being, and sustainability of their work-life balance both as buzzfeed employees or youtube 1 including ceo jonah peretti, publisher dao nguyen and cco carole robinson among others. although we shall not analyse these materials word for word, it is essential to acknowledge them. 2 creators. the imaginary of independence is a false friend as creators, both as employed and self-employed, are dependent on platform governance for visibility. while buzzfeed as an employer seems to provide more financial stability, creators discredit this notion referring to the massive employee cuts in the last years. similarly, creators call out buzzfeed’s toxic workplace culture for causing mental health issues but simultaneously question youtube’s platform as a ‘healthy’ alternative. they ponder their intimate labour to sustain their pre-existent following, creation fatigue, and algorithmic precarity (duffy, 2020) to win the visibility game openly with their audiences. hereby, they are gaining leverage with their viewers against youtube’s opaque platform governance, arguably bolstering public support for a more sustainable career on youtube. in other words, this public performance of vulnerability is an investment in a less precarious future on the platform, that is not contingent on the unreliable algorithmic economy within youtube but on a perceivably more long-lasting affective relationship with their audience alleviating their temporal precarity. future research could aim to incorporate the perspectives of creators, employers such as buzzfeed and youtube officials through interviews to compare their narratives around precarious employment. references bennett, l. (2019, january 26). 'gutted' buzzfeed employees reveal full extent of redundancies. adnews. https://www.adnews.com.au/news/gutted-buzzfeed-employees-reveal-full-extentof-redundancies. berryman, r., & kavka, m. (2017). ‘i guess a lot of people see me as a big sister or a friend’: the role of intimacy in the celebrification of beauty vloggers. journal of gender studies, 26(3), 307-320. burgess, j., & green, j. (2018). youtube: online video and participatory culture. polity press. campbell, i., & burgess, j. (2018). patchy progress? two decades of research on precariousness and precarious work in australia. labour & industry: a journal of the social and economic relations of work, 28(1), 48–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/10301763.2018.1427424 duffy, b. e. (2020). algorithmic precarity in cultural work. communication and the public, 5(3-4), 103–107. https://doi.org/10.1177/2057047320959855 kalleberg, a. l. (2009). precarious work, insecure workers: employment relations in transition. american sociological review, 74(1), 1–22. 3 https://www.adnews.com.au/news/gutted-buzzfeed-employees-reveal-full-extent-of-redundancies https://www.adnews.com.au/news/gutted-buzzfeed-employees-reveal-full-extent-of-redundancies https://doi.org/10.1177/000312240907400101 kludt, t., & phung, a. (2019, february 13). buzzfeed votes to unionize after layoffs. cnn. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/12/media/buzzfeed-union/index.html. mcrobbie, a. (2016). be creative: making a living in the new culture industries. polity press. mniestri, a., & gekker, a. (2020). temporal frames for platform publics: the platformization of breadtube. aoir selected papers of internet research. morgan, g., & nelligan, p. (2018). the creativity hoax: precarious work in the gig economy. anthem press. morini, c., carls, k., & armano, e. (2014). precarious passion or passionate precariousness? narratives from co-research in journalism and editing. recherches sociologiques et anthropologiques, 45(2), 61–83. https://doi.org/10.4000/rsa.1264 nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society, 20(11), 4275–4292. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769694 postigo, h. (2016). the socio-technical architecture of digital labor: converting play into youtube money. new media & society, 18(2), 332-349. rieder, bernhard (2021). youtube data tools (version 1.22) [software]. available from https://tools.digitalmethods.net/netvizz/youtube/. rieder, b., matamoros-fernández, a., & coromina, ò. (2018). from ranking algorithms to ‘ranking cultures.’ convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 24(1), 50–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856517736982 4 selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 berge, p. (2021, october). “go back in your fetus cave”: how predatory influencers manipulate audiences through platform retreats. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “go back in your fetus cave”: how predatory influencers manipulate audiences through platform retreats ps berge university of central florida introduction during summer of 2020, numerous high-profile figures in videogame entertainment— including twitch and youtube creators—were exposed for grooming minors and predatory behavior. among them, british youtuber craig thompson (‘mini ladd’ on youtube), was accused of grooming and sexting underage fans. but just months after confessing to the allegations on twitter, thompson uploaded a new minecraft video to his youtube channel, inciting outrage online as #cancelminiladd and #getminiladdoffyoutube circulated. youtube’s response to survivors, however, rang hollow: thank you for reaching out – if you think the channel violates our community guidelines, you can directly report it here… (@teamyoutube, sept. 2020). [exact date and user handle redacted for survivor privacy]. youtube’s reaction typifies the problems of cross-platform insulation—and what i call the platform retreat: users exposed for predatory behavior on one platform can take refuge within a different platform’s myopic moderating practices. other scholars have noted examples of this, such as the r/deepfakes community enduring on github after being shut down for circulating revenge porn on reddit (winter & salter, 2019). thompson’s platform retreat from twitter to youtube serves a dual role: he can ‘publicly confess’ on twitter (claiming the issue is resolved), while maintaining his revenue-earning audience on youtube. simultaneously, youtube is able to “seek protection for facilitating user expression, yet also seek limited liability for what those users say” (gillespie, 2010, p. 347). this study complicates youtube’s claim that its role in moderation ends with its channels while ignoring the networked actions of its creators. method this article builds on scholarship about cross-platform digital culture, such as burgess and matamoros-fernández’s study that showed how #gamergate was amplified across numerous platforms (2016). jackson et al. have likewise explored how social media networks intersect with activism and public intervention (2020). brock’s productive framework for critical technoculture discourse analysis (2018) also provides an essential model. to explore this, i used the snscrape python scraper (justanotherarchivist, 2018/2020) to collect historic twitter data, using the query “miniladd” from 6/1/2020 – 3/31/2021, resulting in a population of 34,316 tweets. i also collected comments and video network data for seven mini ladd videos using youtube data tools, resulting in 62,911 comments. i then conducted a mixed-methods social network analysis using orange (a data mining tool), antconc concordance tools, and gephi for visualization. analysis the discursive patterns of the youtube and twitter samples were worlds apart. while the twitter discourse was pointed, organized, and furious with thompson, the youtube comments featured a mixture of loyal support and toxic attacks on thompson’s fans. it became evident that it was not simply the characteristics of the platforms that insulated thompson, but the way these platforms and their users interacted with each other that created opportunities for evading accountability. by comparing these two samples, i show: 1. thompson moderated his youtube comments, shielding himself from coherent criticism. many of the most prevalent words in the twitter discourse (ex. “pedo” [n=1823], “pedophile” [n=1451], “minor(s)” [n=1362], “children/child” [n=885], “#getminiladdoffyoutube” [n=333]) did not appear once in thompson’s youtube comments. however, misspellings, variations, and concatenations of these words did appear—such as “p e d o p h i l e,” “pediladd,” and “r/children.” youtube studio offers “blocked word” filters for creators, and the data indicated that thompson used these to censor references to his scandal in his comment sections. thompson’s critics were clearly aware of these filters and used leetspeak and concatenations to circumnavigate them. as a result, the narrative in the comments was fragmented, allusive, and enthymematic: couched in jokes and veiled references that required knowledge of the twitter discourse to understand (figure 1). figure 1. allusive jokes left on thompson’s videos. 2. thompson optimized youtube’s uploading pipeline and metadata to prevent algorithmic pairing of his content with videos referencing his behavior. because thompson’s primary fanbase was teenagers who were already subscribed to him, there was a direct correlation between time of upload and negative criticism on youtube comments, as it took critics (including from twitter) longer to reach thompson’s videos. because of this, his fans were unlikely to be exposed to negative commentary if they arrived early. this was evidenced in a sentiment analyses of his videos, as there was a clear negative regression over time (r = -0.19), and a delay in negative comments. additionally, a network analysis of thompson’s videos showed how the algorithms shielded thompson, while videos made by survivors were siphoned off into ‘youtube drama’ pipelines (lewis et al., 2020). thompson’s videos were linked with other meme and gaming content, but his two videos referencing the scandal directly were separate from his regular content in the network. this was exacerbated by the way thompson tagged his videos. while his videos normally include over a dozen keywords, (ex. “hilarious, energetic, family, friendly, comedy, react, gameplay”), videos referencing the scandal had only autogenerated keywords, (ex. “video, sharing, camera phone, video phone, free, upload”). figure 2. visualization of video-network from “clearing the air” using gephi with radial axis layout. survivor videos redacted for privacy. 3. drama youtubers, attempting to signal-boost survivors and expose thompson, ended up counterproductively weaponizing their fanbases to create further harassment. animosity towards thompson’s young fanbase was widespread in youtube comments, with the word “fetus” appearing over 700 times (ex. “stfu fetus, before he sends you much love,” “fetus, do you want his mini ladd too?”). drama youtubers (lewis et al., 2020) such as ‘diesel patches’ mobilized their fanbases through callout videos to systematically harass thompson and his still-loyal supporters. this was exacerbated by several factors: the censorship on thompson’s channel, where criticizing thompson directly was difficult; the ignorance of his own fans, unlikely to be on twitter and hence shielded from the scandal; and the toxic praxis of youtube drama videos as a genre. conclusion while scholars have excavated the role of moderation on social media platforms (gillespie, 2010; marwick & caplan, 2018), this study emphasizes the need to critically examine inter-platform dynamics. thompson’s case demonstrates how cross-platform insulation can exacerbate harassment and protect predators. youtube’s policies cannot meaningfully address these issues so long as they ignore the networked structures that empower predators: ambiguous moderation policies, exploitable affordances, and cultures of harassment. references brock, a. (2018). critical technocultural discourse analysis. new media & society, 20(3), 1012–1030. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816677532 burgess, j., & matamoros-fernández, a. (2016). mapping sociocultural controversies across digital media platforms: one week of #gamergate on twitter, youtube, and tumblr. communication research and practice, 2(1), 79–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2016.1155338 gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of ‘platforms.’ new media & society, 12(3), 347–364. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342738 jackson, s. j., bailey, m., & foucault welles, b. (2020). #hashtagactivism: networks of race and gender justice. the mit press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10858.001.0001 justanotherarchivist. (2020). justanotherarchivist/snscrape [python]. https://github.com/justanotherarchivist/snscrape (original work published 2018) lewis, r., marwick, a., & partin, w. c. (2020). “we dissect stupidity and respond to it”: response videos and networked harassment on youtube. socarxiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/veqyj marwick, a. e., & caplan, r. (2018). drinking male tears: language, the manosphere, and networked harassment. feminist media studies, 18(4), 543–559. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1450568 winter, r., & salter, a. (2019). deepfakes: uncovering hardcore open source on github. porn studies, 0(0), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2019.1642794 suggested citation (apa): rivnai, s., kotliar, d., and avnoon, n., (2021, october). contextualizing ai ethics in time and space. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. \ selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 contextualizing ai ethics in time and space shira rivnai ben-gurion university of the negev dan m. kotliar university of haifa netta avnoon the hebrew university of jerusalem research has recently highlighted the ramifications of big-data algorithms and artificial intelligence (ai). with their overwhelming ubiquity, and with the increasing datafication of social life, such algorithms were shown to limit personal autonomy (cooper 2020), (re)produce social biases, racism, and inequities (benjamin 2019; eubanks 2018; noble 2018), destabilize democracy (tufekci 2014), provide fertile ground for polarization, and more. accordingly, algorithmic ethics is recently raising considerable public and scholarly interest (ananny 2016; wachter, mittelstadt & floridi 2017), as researchers, activists, and legislators have begun to chart ethical frameworks to direct the development and implementation of such algorithms (jobin, ienca & vayena 2019). however, despite an extensive multi-disciplinary discussion, the literature on algorithmic ethics tends to examine the subject through philosophical, legal, or technocratic perspectives, largely neglecting the empirical, socio-cultural ones. moreover, this literature tends to focus on algorithmic production in the united states, and to overlook other tech centers around the world. this paper aims to fill these gaps by focusing on how israeli data scientists understand, interpret, and depict algorithmic ethics. after all, scholars have shown that algorithms are cultural products (gillespie 2014; seaver 2017) that stem from specific socio-technical contexts (kotliar 2020). hence, the ethics of algorithms are more than an outcome of formal guidelines or regulations. like other technological artifacts, these ethics are deeply tied to the values of those who design them, and to their particular occupational, organizational, and cultural backgrounds (ribak & turow 2003; ribak 2019). and so, we ask: which ideologies, discourses and world views construct algorithmic ethics? and what cultural processes affect their creation and implementation? 2 using a pragmatic sociological analysis (boltanski & thévenot 1999) and based on a thematic analysis of 60 semi-structured interviews with israeli data scientists, this paper examines the moral regimes of israeli data scientists and the specific moral logics (schwarz 2013) through which they construct their algorithmic ethics. our findings point to three central moral logics: a) ethics as a personal endeavor; b) ethics as hindering progress; and c) ethics as a commodity. the first moral logic treats ethics as an inherent feature of the self – as a personal trait that individuals either possess or lack, and on which the social environment bears little significance. we show that this logic is deeply incongruent with the creation of an agreed-upon moral regime, and with the possibility of eliciting organized, collective action against the development of “unethical” algorithms. we accordingly argue that this moral logic poses a heavy burden on individuals and as such, its potential to translate into political action is extremely limited. the second moral logic sees the discussion of ai ethics as a hindrance to technological progress. according to this view, data science’s primary duty is to promote new technologies, despite potential social ramifications. hence, the only viable ethics this regime can acknowledge is work ethics, as technological production is seen as inherently “ahead of its time”, and as something that necessarily renounces restrictive and outdated social norms. accordingly, adopting an institutionalized moral regime which regulates or restricts algorithmic production (e.g., with ethical codes), is seen as tantamount to joining technology’s age-old enemies – regulation and bureaucracy. in the third moral logic, israeli data scientists see algorithmic ethics as attainable only when they are commodifiable. here, ethical values (such as privacy or transparency) only seem viable when a commercial company is founded to protect them. hence, israeli data scientists are able to imagine a collective, restrictive moral regime only when it is governed by the rules of the market, as engineering’s dominant moral logics embrace the entrepreneurial ethos (neff 2012). finally, we show that while data science is a nascent profession, these three moral logics in fact stem from the techno-libertarian culture of its parent-profession – engineering (avnoon 2021), and that they accordingly prevent the institutionalization of a wider, agreed-upon moral regime. while our findings echo other recent studies on tech ethics in other parts of the world (metcalf, moss, & boyd 2019; orr & davis 2020; ribak 2019), suggesting this might be a global techno-professional moral regime, our findings can also be explained through their particular national context – namely, the israeli one. israeli data scientists’ tendency to avoid an organized, politicized moral regime seems to also stem from israelis’ general disregard to privacy (ribak & turow 2003), from the link between the israeli high-tech scene and the israeli military (swed & butler 2015), or from israeli tech workers’ long-time refrain from unionizing. thus, this paper offers to see algorithmic ethics in a contextualized, culture-specific perspective, one that focuses on how data scientists practically see and construct their ethics, while taking into account their professional, organizational, and national contexts. 3 references ananny, mike. (2016). toward an ethics of algorithms: convening, observation, probability, and timeliness. science technology and human values, 41(1), 93–117. avnoon, netta (2021). data scientists’ identity work: omnivorous symbolic boundaries in skills acquisition. work, employment and society, 35(2), 332-349. benjamin, ruha. (2019). race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. john wiley & sons. boltanski, luc, & laurent thévenot. (1999). the sociology of critical capacity. european journal of social theory, 2(3), 359-377. cooper, rosalind. (2020). pastoral power and algorithmic governmentality. theory, culture & society, 37(1), 29–52. eubanks, virginia. (2018). automating inequality: how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. st. martin’s press. gillespie, tarleton. (2014). the relevance of algorithms. in tarleton gillespie, pablo j. boczkowski & kirsten a. foot (eds.), media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society (pp. 167–193). mit press. jobin, anna., marcelo ienca, & effy vayena. (2019). the global landscape of ai ethics guidelines. nature machine intelligence, 1(9), 389-399. kotliar, dan m. “the return of the social: algorithmic identity in an age of symbolic demise.” new media & society 22, no. 7 (2020): 1152–67. metcalf, jacob, emanual moss, & danah boyd. (2019). owning ethics: corporate logics, silicon valley, and the institutionalization of ethics. social research: an international quarterly, 82(2), 449-476. neff, gina. (2012). venture labor: work and the burden of risk in innovative industries. mit press. noble, safiya. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. nyu press. orr, will, & jenny davis l. (2020). attributions of ethical responsibility by artificial intelligence practitioners. information, communication & society, 23(5), 719-735. ribak, rivka, & joseph turow. (2003). internet power and social context: a globalization approach to web privacy concerns. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 47(3), 328–349. ribak, rivka. (2019). translating privacy: developer cultures in the global world of practice. information, communication & society, 22(6), 838-853. 4 schwarz, ori. (2013). dead honest judgments: emotional expression, sonic styles and evaluating sounds of mourning in late modernity. american journal of cultural sociology, 1(2), 153-185. seaver, nick. (2017). algorithms as culture: some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems. big data & society, 4(2). swed, ori, & john sibley butler. (2015). “military capital in the israeli hi-tech industry.” armed forces & society, 41(1), 123–41. tufekci, zeynep. (2014). engineering the public: big data, surveillance and computational politics. first monday, 19(7). wachter, sandra, brent mittelstadt, & luciano floridi. (2017). transparent, explainable, and accountable ai for robotics. transparent, explainable, and accountable ai for robotics. science robotics, 2(6). mckeeporterhumanmachineethics.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): mckee, heidi a., & porter, james e. (2020, october). human-machine writing and the ethics of language models. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. human-machine writing and the ethics of language models heidi a. mckee miami university james e. porter miami university our lives are intimately connected with networked writing machines. we write to, for, and with machines—and machines write to, for, and with us. increasingly, much of what we read online is written by machines, such as the newswriting bot heliograf, persado’s marketing copy app, narrative science's gamechanger app, and chat and twitterbots too numerous to name. and our emails and other communications are often co-written with machine writing agents, such as google’s smart compose, which suggests words, phrases and sentences for us to use. the research we summarize here focuses on the language models or "informational frameworks" (russo, 2018) that support machine writing agents, especially ai-based writing agents. how do these systems accumulate data?, how do they learn?, what are their principles and procedures for generating text?, is there anything missing from the model necessary for effective and ethical communication?, and, importantly, what ethical codes do these language models embody? our ethics framework draws from the field of machine ethics (e.g., dignum, 2018; floridi, 2018; leikas et al., 2019; malle, 2016), as well as communication/language theory (e.g., bengtsson, 2018; chai et al., 2016; mckee & porter, 2017; mckee & porter, 2020). ethical assumptions in language models how ai agents operate is, of course, shaped by how they learn language in the first place. often, ai writing systems employ a language model based on a reductive, formalist model of text generation. for example, the talk to transformer app takes a short textual prompt and, using gpt-2, an openai generative language model, creates a written article from that prompt, using a predictive model that creates new text based on the preceding text (openai, 2019; radford et al., 2019). this linear model (aligned with the shannon-weaver model) is based on a questionable core assumption: that meaning arises solely based on combining topic knowledge (derived from a database) with a grammatical/syntactical notion of text coherence. but what is missing in this model is the crucial element shaping any communication: the context, including audience, exigence, purpose, and ethical understandings. the linear model’s approach to coherence is based on a formalist notion of textual coherence (does one piece of text follow topically from another?) versus a social notion of coherence that involves human participation (does the text make sense to some intended readers in the contexts of interaction? does the text serve a meaningful social purpose?). the ethical implication of this linear model is that communication is a oneway process in which the communicator is the expert who "packages" knowledge or information into a text, which is then transmitted to the uninformed audience, who contributes little or nothing to knowledge formation. the linear model contrasts with a more social/participatory ethical model, which begins by acknowledging the vital contribution of the audience to meaning making and, further, by recognizing that the exigence for communication arises from audience in the first place. communication and meaning-making are collaborative processes. an ethical approach recognizes that meaning-making is constructed by interlocutors within the rhetorical context in which their communications circulate (mckee & porter, 2020). examples of machine writing agents writing machines will never write ethically if they are simply writing for textual coherence, an extreme example of this problem is microsoft’s tay, who was grammatically and syntactically correct but who also, in less than 24 hours, became a racist, xenophobic, anti-semitic, anti-feminist supporter of white nationalism because the machine had not been designed or programmed with context in mind. but not all machine writers fail. they are generally effective handling very well-defined tasks with established genre conventions, clearly identified audience needs, and predictable interaction scripts (e.g., customer service bots who offer set solutions to common problems). not surprisingly, where machine writers struggle most is in openended situations with multiple audiences, competing needs, unclear expectations, complex contexts, and/or incomplete data. a well-known ai agent is narrative science’s quill, which powers the gamechanger app that writes recaps for youth sports, taking the game box score and converting it into a narrative story. the linear model shaping gamechanger—if x in box score, write y— limits its reporting, in ways that if you were at the game, can be quite humorous. the box score reads derek johnson 1 hr is translated into “derek j. smashed a home run,” converting the data into a full sentence with an action verb. but that home run was no "smash," it was a dribbler that the infielders and outfielders muffed. without the full context, it’s hard for gamechanger to actually tell an accurate story of the game. youth sports games are not high stakes events, but what happens when ai is the sole reporter for more significant events—elections, for example, or protest marches? the limitations regarding context become much more significant and ethically problematic as communication stakes are higher. bottom line is that context matters and not all ai systems can navigate context adequately. in our interview with dennis mortensen, ceo and founder of x.ai and creator of amy ingram, the online, ai-based scheduling assistant, he discussed the complexity of context in something as seemingly simple as setting up a meeting: “even when [humans] speak to time, sometimes it doesn’t even look like time. they’ll say things like, ‘let’s meet up later.’ later? what does that mean?” preparing ai agent amy for market took years and required over 65 human trainers because, as mortensen explained to us, “we need[ed] to train on ambiguity. amy needs to exist in your [human] universe.” what mortensen realized was that his ai-writing system needed human help—it needed human common sense (hao, 2020) and practical reason (marcus & davis, 2020), it needed to understand the exigencies of the situation and the needs of human participants, and it needed the capacity for human inference-drawing (i.e., the ability to determine what is needed even if it is not clearly and explicitly articulated). there are some ai-based writing systems that assess audience needs. figaredo (2020) discusses how an ai-based learning management system can collect information abouts its student audience using the lms itself as a database informing its choices about "how to adapt course design to student needs." similarly, the ai-based marketing app persado collects information about users to predict what kind of marketing messaging will be effective with different customers. it, too, has some contextual awareness of audience built into its production system. we say "some awareness," because it would be dangerous assume that the data collected adequately captures readers' needs or that the data is implemented ethically. merely drawing from "big data" does not guarantee that the data are relevant or right or used with the audience's benefit in mind: big is not necessarily helpful or ethical; it can be manipulative. conclusions (1) for now machine writing systems still need humans—particularly for the ethical guidance required in any communication interaction. (2) human writers need to understand the affordances and limitations of their machine writing assistants. where and how can the ai writing systems be useful—and maybe at times even better than the human writer? where and when do they need human writer intervention? (3) ai-writing system designers need to critically examine the language models they are building for these systems. we need to move beyond formalist, linear input models to more complex social and contextual models that account for the broader and, yes, messier contexts in which communication arises and circulates. references bengtsson, stina. (2018). ethics exists in communication: human-machine ethics beyond the actor-network. media@lse working paper series, london school of economics and political science. oai: diva.org:sh-37239 chai, joyce y., fang, rui, liu, changsong, & she, lanbo. (2016). collaborative language grounding toward situated human-robot dialogue. ai magazine, 37(4), 32– 45. doi: https://doi.org/10.1609/aimag.v37i4.2684 dignum, virginia. (2018). ethics in artificial intelligence: introduction to the special issue. ethics and information technology, 20(1), 1-3. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676018-9450-z figaredo, domínguez d. (2020). data-driven educational algorithms pedagogical framing. ried. revista iberoamericana de educación a distancia, 23(2), 65-84. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5944/ried.23.2.26470 floridi, luciano. (2018). semantic capital: its nature, value, and curation. philosophy & technology, 31, 481-497. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-018-0335-1 hao, karen. (2020, january 31). ai still doesn't have the common sense to understand human language. mit technology review. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615126/ai-common-sense-reads-humanlanguage-ai2/ leikas, jaana, koivisto, raija, & gotcheva, nadezhda. (2019). ethical framework for designing autonomous intelligent systems. journal of open innovation, 5(1), 18. https://doi.org/10.3390/joitmc5010018 malle, bertram f. (2016). integrating robot ethics and machine morality: the study and design of moral competence in robots. ethics and information technology, 18(4), 243-256. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-015-9367-8 marcus, gary, & davis, ernest. (2020, august 22). gpt-3, bloviator: openai's language generator has no idea what it's talking about. mit technology review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/22/1007539/gpt3-openai-languagegenerator-artificial-intelligence-ai-opinion/ mckee, heidi a., & porter, james e. (2017). ai agents as professional communicators. in professional communication and network interaction: a rhetorical and ethical approach. new york: routledge. mckee, heidi a., & porter, james e. (2020). ethics for ai writing: the importance of rhetorical context. proceedings of 2020 aaai/acm conference on ai, ethics, and society (aies’20 ), february 7–8, 2020, new york, ny, usa. doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/3375627.3375811 openai. (2019). better language models and their implications. https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/ radford, alec, et al. (2019). language models are unsupervised multitask learners. openai blog. https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/ russo, federica. (2018). digital technologies, ethical questions, and the need of an informational framework. philosophy & technology, 31(4), 655-667. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-018-0326-2 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 28-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): ruiz-gomez, a., gavilan, d., & avello, m. (2020, october). #babiesofinstagram: the digitally mediated lives of ‘aspiring’ baby models and brand reps. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. #babiesofinstagram: the digitally mediated lives of ‘aspiring’ baby models and brand reps alexandra ruiz-gomez esic business & marketing school (spain) diana gavilan universidad complutense de madrid maria avello universidad complutense de madrid introduction sharenting, a term that refers to parents sharing the lives and images of their children in digital spaces (leckart, 2012), has become an extended phenomenon (blum-ross & livingstone, 2017). emerging literature and popular media reveal that a growing number of parents practice sharenting to obtain financial advantages (archer, 2019). children not only appear as part of their parents’ accounts, but well-known influencers and celebrities also create accounts on behalf of their children that get verified by platforms. this not only contributes to normalize sharenting, but it seems to encourage ordinary parents to create accounts for their children. research on sharenting driven by financial gain is urgently needed to understand how children’s images are used and how their lives are being commodified (archer, 2019). this paper is part of an on-going study of baby accounts created by ordinary parents to reach audiences outside friends and families. this study aims to provide insights into the growing phenomenon of commercial forms of sharenting. the investigation takes place on instagram where people perceive digital fame and rewards to be more easily attainable than other social media sites (harrison, 2018). the question guiding this research is: what sort of practices and technical affordances are used in baby accounts to attract visibility and attention of brands? methods a qualitative exploratory approach is used to examine baby accounts and posts created by parents. for the purposes of this study, we define baby accounts as parent-run accounts where a child or several children 0-3 years old appear in more than 90% of the content. only accounts without activated privacy settings are included. profile descriptions, such as ‘account run by mommy’ are used to determine if accounts are managed by parents. a multi-step approach using hashtags allowed access to these specific types of accounts (see figure 1). an external hashtag tool helped generate 68 variations of the broad term ‘baby’ and identify hashtags frequently tagged together in baby posts. we opted for hashtags combining two or more words as this suggests a more deliberate use. two popular hashtags (#babiesofinstagram and #igbabies) were selected based on relevance, cooccurrence frequency and volume to extract a total of 20,284 posts of babies. to obtain a ‘clean’ data set of posts from baby accounts, 4,730 random posts were visually checked on instagram using post links. a smaller data set of 308 posts was created through a random process of selecting and discarding posts when the account originating the posts did not fit the criteria. customized primary data was collected of 158 unique baby accounts behind the posts in our sample to provide a richer context to our analysis. annotations included the user handle, child’s gender, and whether the account monetized by visually checking posts and profile information to look for brand partnerships and promotional discounts. content analysis was conducted on the posts by observing images, captions, and hashtags. figure 1: multistep approach to identify baby accounts findings 1 •hashtag selection: three-week study of 68 baby hashtags suggested by display purposes (hashtag generator tool). •selection of two hashtags: #igbabies #babiesofinstagram 2 •extraction of raw data set: 20,284 posts (using metricool tool). 3 •visual inspection of 4.730 random posts (using post links) to identify posts shared from baby accounts. •posts with broken links, shared by spammers, businesses, or with captions in other languages were marked to discard from selection. 4 •selection of 308 baby posts shared from confirmed baby accounts •creation of corpus of study of 158 unique baby accounts •customized annotations added to conduct analysis. findings reveal that baby accounts in our study are predominantly created to seek financial opportunities in the fashion industry. this is observed in the post images where brands are mentioned or tagged and children appear in carefully staged poses that emphasize the baby’s looks and the clothes worn. the choice of hashtags added to the posts, such as #babymodel or #babybrandrep, suggest a willingness to participate in baby model contests and brand representation (commonly known as ‘brand rep’) searches. the commercial motivations of these accounts are also evident in post captions and profile descriptions such as “14-month-old fashionista and aspiring baby model”, “brandambassador” or “dm for collabs” and post captions like “use code babydanielle to get 15% off discount of this lovely romper”. discussion and conclusions there is much debate about the role of parents in the digitally mediated lives of children, but very little is known about the specific practices used by ordinary parents to disseminate the images of their children on social media to reach brands and seek monetization opportunities. by studying the accounts created on behalf of babies on instagram, this study aims to shed light on unexplored behaviors behind evolving sharenting practices. past studies on sharenting practices have focused on parents’ motivations for sharenting through surveys and interviews (ammari, kumar, lampe, & schoenebeck, 2015; blum-ross & livingstone, 2017). parents have indicated motivations such as creating digital albums for posterity, sharing content of a child’s milestones with relatives and friends, or seeking advice or support from other parents (archer, 2019). however, the accounts in this study reveal different motivations. in these accounts, the lives and images of children are packaged to obtain rewards such as brand partnerships and free or discounted products or services through brand representations. using children to sell products is nothing new. children have been used in traditional advertising to appeal emotionally to women by arousing maternal love (kinsey, 1987). what is significantly different today is the scale in which children’s lives are being commodified by parents. furthermore, another issue involves the demands placed on the children appearing in accounts that seek monetization or that already monetize through brand representations. posts of babies photographed during naptimes with multiple changes of outfits in carefully staged flat-lays illustrate some of these demands. this is not just of theoretical interest to researchers, but it also has implications for society at large. numerous scholars have raised concerns about children’s right to privacy and rights as participants in commercial content. however, to date, there is inadequate systematic regulation of children’s rights regarding their participation in digital spaces when monetization occurs, even though some countries have created self-regulatory guides (van der hof et al., 2019). this investigation extends emerging research on the growing presence of children on digital spaces by exploring parent-run baby accounts driven by financial gain. the larger implications of our study suggest that as sharenting evolves into a potential commercial endeavor, children’s privacy is further exposed to the eyes of strangers. references ammari, t., kumar, p., lampe, c., & schoenebeck, s. (2015). managing children’ s online identities: how parents decide what to disclose about their children online. proceedings of the 33rd annual acm conference on human factors in computing systems, 1895–1904. acm. archer, c. (2019). how influencer ‘mumpreneur’ bloggers and ‘everyday’ mums frame presenting their children online. media international australia, 1329878x1982836. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x19828365 blum-ross, a., & livingstone, s. (2017). “sharenting,” parent blogging, and the boundaries of the digital self. popular communication, 15(2), 110–125. https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2016.1223300 kinsey, j. (1987). the use of children in advertising and the impact of advertising aimed at children. international journal of advertising, 6(2), 169–175. https://doi.org/10.1080/02650487.1987.11107013 leckart, s. (2012, may 12). ‘the facebook-free baby’ are you a mom or dad who’s guilty of 'oversharenting’? the wall street journal. van der hof, s., verdoodt, v. v., leiser, m., simone, van der h., verdoodt, v. v., & leiser, d. m. (2019). child labour and online protection in a world of influencers. the regulation of social media influencers. date: 2019/01/11. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3458379 selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 1 trust in taiwan’s media ecology, audience and civic engagement: 2018 taiwanese local elections and national referenda as a case study pai-lin chen1, yu-chung cheng1, wen-cheng fu2, trisha t.c. lin3 organization(s): 1: national chengchi university, taiwan; 2: national defense university, taiwan; 3: national chengchi university, taiwan institute for governance and communication research submitted by: prof. yu-chung cheng (national chengchi university, tw) november 24, 2018 was the polling day for general local elections and national referenda in taiwan. in the general local elections, the mayors of taipei city and kaohsiung were among the tightest, and the ruling and opposition parties geared up their campaign efforts as the polling approached. in the national referenda, same-sex marriage is the focal issue. as such, five out of the ten referenda were related this issue, so that the proand anti-same-sex marriage camps fervently lobbied for support. this elections and referenda received a large-scale media coverage, but on the same time fake news circulating in the social media became a significant force in the elections and referenda, for the first time in the political history of taiwan. political figures were busy making clarification and accusing the opposing camps for releasing fake news. this triggered a crisis of trust in the entire society. therefore, this panel presents four papers aiming to examine the significance of this election and referendum to taiwan from the perspectives of instant news, social media, the relationship between online and offline behaviors of citizens, and socially mediated activism. the authors explored media ecology, trust issues toward the audience and civic engagements of this election and referendum. the research methods of studies presented in this panel are also diverse, ranging from computational methods, national survey, to in-depth semi-structured interview. the first paper analyzes instant news on the voting day and the following day in the five major online news media outlets in taiwan. the primary goal of this study is to investigate how the online news media construct “liquid reality” in the election-related contents to earn the trust toward to media from the audience. the second paper analyzes twitter data related to the elections and referenda. by topic modeling, the large dataset was sorted into several topics. this approach allowed the identification of issues, in which “fake news” was in play during the elections. how social trust influence fake news sharing on social media was further discussed the third paper concerns how the election-related information on social media influenced the offline behavior of the political participants. specifically, the author conducted a nation-wide survey to examine the online political information consumption behavior, including news watching, online chat, comment posting, and the motivation to participate in real-life political activities. also, the author explored how political trust constitutes a core contributor to this dynamic process. the fourth study of the panel focuses on the same-sex marriage issue in the referenda. the relationship among socially mediated activism, fake news, and trust in social media are investigated. the author performed in-depth interviews with advocacy groups, thirdparty fact-checking organizations, governmental authorities, and social media platforms to explore the response strategies to the negative influence of fake news on social activism and vulnerable groups. exploring “liquid reality” constructed by online news media: the case study of 2018 local election in taiwan pai-lin chen national chengchi university, taiwan “liquidity” is the term used by the polish scholar zygmunt bauman (2012) to refer to the significant characteristics of modern society such as uncertainty and variability. liquid flows by spilling, inrushing, splashing, infiltrating, dripping, and etc. as constant changing of contexts is decisive, speed, rather than space, is decisive in our living world. this theory applied to many of our social structures, and the news media are part of it (deuze, 2008). the organization, production and delivery of news reflect the changing faces of the societies. in modern society, news media operate under a heavy-duty organization with rigid news production processes and long-standing paths to the delivery of contents (fishman, 1980). for example, newspapers are constantly published every day. tv news launches every 2-4 hours. tuchman (1978) uses the metaphor of web to describe how journalists weave the facts, and how these facts construct the reality of our society. on the other hands, news media in a liquid society owns flat organization, flexible production process, as well as virtual path in delivery news messages. these flat-and-light media produce their own version of facts like a steaming line. the facts emerge as time goes on. online news media represent a good example of this liquid-like news production process. rather than its counterparts updating news in a solid, fixed pattern, the online news media distribute news in a different way (deuze, 2007). online news can be in different formats: text, images, video, graphics and even games (widholm, 2016). the media coverage comes up with the development of the event, disregarding the traditional constraint of a fixed deadline (karlsoon, 2012). as the social events go on, the media keep on covering news by adding texts and graphics, changing the bylines, reorganizing the formats, or restructuring the sequences of articles, a process of continuous editing (karlsson & sjøvaag, 2016). all of these changing contents are operated under a temporal structure, rather than a spatial one. besides the format, routine, and platform, people in each society context have a different imagination toward the relationship between news and reality. in a traditional society, people regarded news as a mirror to reflect reality of the society. in a modern society, people regarded news as a media-constructed reality. in a liquid modern society, people tend to regard the reality as temporally flowing construction by the news media. this media constructed reality in a multiple format with speed and variability, and therefore can be titled “liquid reality”. although it is nothing new to the notion that news owns one day of life. the accelerating speed in liquid society makes the life of news even shorter. bauman noted that immorality is nothing but live-through-the-moment. for news media in contemporary society, reality may exist only through the moment, and it therefore owns the property of liquidity. one may ask: how do news media construct this liquid reality anyway? in this particular study, we tend to illustrating the notion of liquid reality by analyzing a case study of election news. taiwan is an emerging democratic society in east asia. elections are one of the most significant social events in such society. elections taking place every two years mobilize the whole society, take up a great deal of social resources, and attract most attention of the society. news media cover the elections with their full capacity, particularly during the days immediately before and after the election day. a large portion of news flow occurs in a very short period of time. this makes a case of instant news production and provide a significant research field with a highly-saturated amount of data. and therefore, this fits our intention to explore how online news media construct “liquid reality” in taiwanese society. we collected the news reports from the five major online media outlets in the 2018 local elections in taiwan as the dataset of this case study. the dataset covers 72 hours amongst the election day, 8187 titles of online news. we compared and contrasted metadata and contents to illustrate how online media construct liquid reality in the election event. in essence, we explore the kind of formats, platforms and processes that online news media adopt to react with ever-changing news contexts, and the way they produce news flow in response to the unfolding events, in order to construct a liquid-like reality. references bauman, z. (2000). liquid modernity. new york: polity. deuze, m. (2007) journalism in liquid modern times, journalism studies, 8(4), 671-679. deuze, m. (2008). the changing context of news work: liquid journalism and monitorial citizenship, international journal of communication, 2: 848-865. fishman, m. (1980). manufacturing the news. austin: the university of texas press. karlsoon, m. (2012). charting the liquidity of online news. the international communication gazette, 74, 4, 385-402. karlsson, m. & h. sjøvaag (2016). content analysis and online news: epistemologies of analyzing the ephemeral web, digital journalism, 4(1): 177-192. tuchman, g. (1978). making news: a study in the construction of reality. new york: free press. widholm, a. (2016). tracing online news in motion, digital journalism, 4(1): 24-40. comparing the patterns of sharing on social media bewteen “true news” and “fake news”: a case study of local elections and referenda in taiwan yu-chung cheng national chengchi university, taiwan introduction interactions between mass media and social media play a pivotal role in the formation of public opinions and affect the outcomes of political and electoral events in contemporary societies. when a major event breaks out, mass media publish real-time news as the event unfolds, and real-time news spreads rapidly through the social media; on the other hand, the sharing of and the comment on the news often once again became the subject of news coverage, so it forms a complex feedback network on social media, consisting of mass media, public figures, and general users. furthermore, the so-called “fake news” also enters this network. the clarifications and comments by public figures, political organizations, news media and netizens together form yet another network of disinformation and its counteractions on social media. the operation of this network often affects the public trust in the political candidates, and even the results of elections and referenda. the 2018 taiwanese local elections and referenda involves several complex topics, including the highly competitive taipei and kaohsiung mayoral elections and the controversial referenda on same-sex marriage. the disinformation attacks from one camp and the clarifications from the opposing camp were highly visible and were broadly discussed in the online community. therefore, this represents an extraordinary case for studying how fake news spreads on social media. this study analyzed the international and local news-sharing networks on twitter. by computationally sorting tweets based on their topics, researchers can distinguish and contrast the patterns in which “true news” and “fake news” spreads on social media. literature review chadwick (2013) pointed out that a hybrid media system has a profound impact on political communication. political candidates use live broadcast on traditional mass media and on social media to promote and campaign, and this also increases the volume of discussion on social media in an election (chadwick, o'loughlin, & vaccari, 2017). the visit to online news is increasingly guided by links shared by individual users or by accounts operated by news media on social media. consequently, gatewatching and news curation by social media users would have a greater impact on news diffusion and rumor correction than ever. social media users disseminate the “shareworthy” as well as the “newsworthy” to their own personal publics (schmidt, 2014; trilling et al., 2016; bruns, 2018). however, not every social media user has the same ability or habit to perform fact-checking as the professional journalists do, and therefore the shareworthy information is not necessarily true. in so-called post-truth era, true news and fake news intermix, and discussions on social media are often confused and fail to distinguish the true from the false. vosoughi, roy, & aral (2018) found that fake news spread farther and faster, especially when such news concerns hate politics, which arouses negative emotions such as fear, resentment, and surprise. susstein (2017) considered this as a crisis in democracy caused by social media, which split communities into echo chambers. therefore, there is an urgent need to understand the spreading pattern of fake news versus that of true news on social media. methodology we collected 38,617 unique tweets and 28,123 unique posting users by twitter search api using keywords“taiwan election” and “taiwan referendum” in traditional chinese, simplified chinese and english between november 14 and december 9, 2018 (total 25 days; voting took place in november 24, 2018). the average number of tweets per user is 1.37. among the overall tweets, 77% are chinese, 9% are thai, 8% are english, and 6% are japanese. chinese posts includes those in different language codes, representing taiwanese, hong kong, chinese or overseas chinese speakers. in order to explore the differences in the topics of interest between the different chinese communities, we further selected the chinese tweets for further analysis. to identify the themes and contexts of the people’s concerns in this event, we further explored individual topics discussed during the election period by natural language processing and topic modeling. our topic modeling allowed us to identify and analyze the topics containing the “fake news” elements and generating a higher amount controversies during the election period. result & discussion our study found that the peak of the overall postings was on the voting day, resulting from the sharing of news reporting. the incumbent taipei mayor wenzhe ke won by a small margin over the kmt candidate shouzhong ding, who subsequently file a lawsuit against the central election commission as an attempt to invalidate the election result. this action caused extended discussion of this topic until november 28. through topic modeling analysis, it was found that the main topics distributed on the twitter platform includes taiwan election, democracy, president ingwen tsai, democratic progressive party, election queuing, election invoicing, taiwan-china relationship, taiwan-china-usa relationship, kaohsiung city mayor kuo-yu han, and “greedy old people” (fake news). our results further showed that twitter serves as a communication platform for transregional communities. the discussion on taiwan's local elections focuses on the results, president ing-wen tsai and the ruling democratic progressive party, as well as relations with china and us-china relations. however, there were also several popular “fake news” issues arising during the election period, including issues relating to the kaohsiung mayor kuo-yu han and taipei mayor's criticism of greedy old people. both of these topics involve disinformation and rebuttals. within the specific topics selected, keywords were used to identify tweets, contents, and hyperlinks. network relationships of all the posts participating in the discussion were reconstructed, so as to reveal the diffusion patterns of “true news” and “fake news” issues during the election period. social trust toward accounts representing specific persona or institutions is revealed to a key catalyst in the suppression or facilitation of fake news sharing on social media. references bruns, a. (2018). gatewatching and news curation: journalism, social media, and the public sphere. new york: peter lang. chadwick, a. (2013). the hybrid media system: politics and power. oxford, uk.: oxford university press. chadwick, a., o'loughlin b., & vaccari, c. (2017). why people dual screen political debates. journal of broadcasting and electronic media, 61(2), 220-239. schmidt, j.-h. (2014). “twitter and the rise of personal publics.” in katrin weller, axel bruns, jean burgess, merja mahrt, and cornelius puschmann (eds.). twitter and society, pp. 3–17. new york: peter lang. sunstein, c. r. (2017). #republic: divided democracy in the age of social media. new jersey: princeton university press. trilling, d., tolochko, p. & burscher, b. (2017). from newsworthiness to shareworthiness: how to predict news sharing based on article characteristics, journalism & mass communication quarterly, 94(1), 38-60. vosoughi, s., roy, d., & aral, s. (2018). the spread of true and false news online. science, 359(6380), 1146-1151. how does online social media using behavior motivate offline political participation? taking the 2018 taiwanse local elections as a case study wen-cheng fu national defense university, taiwan introduction social media is a growing force in the study of political participation. the focal facets for discussing the effects of new media range from the level of global media industries (isaacs, 2014) to the level of personal media using behavior (stier, bleier, lietz, & strohmaier, 2018). accumulating evidences suggest that the political messages on vital social media platforms, such as the facebook, twitter, and instagram influence the publics’ cognitions, attitudes, and behavior toward the political engagements in the real worlds (karlsen& enjolras, 2016; hoffmann& suphan, 2017). however, fewer studies have specifically addressed how social media usage influences individuals’ motivation toward engaging in political activities, such as protests, voting, and political mobilization. 14 million out of the 23 million taiwanese are the internet users (xie, liu, wu, & tan, 2018). social media, especially the facebook and the ptt electronic message board, have become a significant resource for political information exchange among taiwanese. it has become a commonplace to communicate with the audience via social media. the 2018 local elections of taiwan were a critical election in which the landscape of traditional political parties was flipped (anon., 2018). a focal points of this election was the important role of social media in motivating the publics’ voting propensity (holl, 2019). this study examines how the online media usage motivates the publics’ offline political behavior in the 2018 taiwanese local elections. literature review the theoretical framework of this study concerns the development of deliberative democracy. specifically, media are a significant indicator of public opinion, and media can further influence the public opinion via the perceptions of opinion climate (blekesaune, elvestad, & aalberg, 2017). also, media become the primary source from which the general public gains the knowledge about the governance of bureaucracy (klinger & svensson, 2015). further, new media, especially social media empowered the public. social media users are not only information consumers but also information producers (hoffmann & suphan, 2017). that is, the public can voice themselves up via social media without the censorship of the traditional media. also, this study examined the public’s political trust toward the government which is another crux contributor to the offline political engagement of the public (karlsen & enjolras, 2016). “political trust” refers to the public’s trust of that the political leaders will take all possible actions to safeguard the rights and interests of the general public rather than the interests of individuals (stier, bleier, lietz, & strohmaier, 2018). meanwhile, political trust is recognized as one of the vital factors that influence the public’s perception and propensity on political activities in advance. this study also investigated the roles of social media agreement and attitude strength toward political activities as mediators to offline political participation (klinger& svensson, 2015). drawing on recent empirical analyses of online forms of political engagement, this study has identified three core interrelated research questions that literature on this topic needs to address. first, this study aimed at understanding how political participation in social media influences the publics’ offline political participation. second, how does political trust influence the publics’ offline political participation? third, how are online media usage and offline participation mediated by social media agreement and attitude strength of the public toward the political activities? figure 1. construct of research methodology for this study, a nationwide telephone survey was conducted by a taipei-based commercial polling agency. randomly generated phone numbers were used to reach taiwanese over the age of 20 years old. 1,379 completed questionnaires were collected in about two weeks. each participant spent about 20 minutes answering the questionnaire. the participants’ ages ranged from 20 to 75 years. the questionnaire contained measures for this study’s key variables, including social media participation, political trust, social media agreement, attitude strength, offline political participation, and participants’ demographics. all the measurement items were based on seven-point likert scales, as these scales are reliable and valid, and have been widely used in previous studies (yin & wang, 2014; hoffmann & suphan, 2017). specifically, this survey questionnaire included seven online political activities on social media, divided into three levels, including the news attention, discussion, and the expressive levels; nine of campaign-specific offline political participation items were also conducted in this project, divided into three levels, including voting, party/campaign activity, protest activity, contacting, and communal levels. result the results indicated that the frequency and dependency of online political engagement via social media correlate positively to the strength levels of attitude on political activities, as well as offline political participation. specifically, the participants who had more political participation on social media attitude strength social media agreement offline political participation political trust experience in posting and commenting on political and campaign messages online are more likely to volunteer for a political party or candidate. besides, the political trust of the participants also positively correlates to the strength of attitude toward political participation. however, levels of social media agreement did not exhibit a significant correlation to offline political participation. discussion this article has examined the concept and measurement of e-participation on social media and argued that a greater theoretical rigor is needed for the study of this phenomenon. in particular, by examining questions of how social media influence offline political participation behavior, this study suggested that online political participation is a key indicator of the audience’s offline political participation. more generally, the finding that the internet may be spawning certain types of dominant, if not exclusive, forms of political activities is grounds for both concern and optimism. from a ‘‘digital divide’’ perspective, such a development carries the potential of reinforcing the existing participatory inequalities in that it may mean that the non-internet users are excluded from this new form of citizen empowerment in taiwan society. references anon. (2018)taiwan/republic of china: taiwan ruling party suffers major defeat in local elections. asia news monitor, asia news monitor. blekesaune, a., elvestad, e., & aalberg, t. (2012). tuning out the world of news and current affairs: an empirical study of europe’s disconnected citizens. european sociological review, 28, 110–126. holl, d. (2019). taiwan to step up probe of surveillance by pro-china media on island. the epoch times, p. a12. hoffmann, c. p., & suphan, a. (2017). stuck with “electronic brochures”? how boundary management strategies shape politicians’ social media use. information, communication & society, 20(4), 551–569. isaacs, d. (2014). social media and communication. journal of paediatrics and child health, 50(6), 421-422. karlsen, r., & enjolras, b. (2016). styles of social media campaigning and influence in a hybrid political communication system: linking candidate survey data with twitter data. the international journal of press/politics, 21(3), 338–357. klinger, u., & svensson, j. (2015). the emergence of network media logic in political communication: a theoretical approach. new media & society, 17(5), 1241–1257. stier, s., bleier, a., lietz, h., & strohmaier, m. (2018). election campaigning on social media: politicians, audiences, and the mediation of political communication on facebook and twitter. political communication, 35(1), 50-74. xie, z., liu, g., wu, j., & tan, y. (2018). big data would not lie: prediction of the 2016 taiwan election via online heterogeneous information. epj data science,7(1), 116. yin, j., & wang, j. (2014). a dirichlet multinomial mixture model-based approach for short text clustering. in proceedings of the 20th acm sigkdd (pp. 233–242). new york, ny: acm. same-sex marriage referendum in taiwan: understanding socially mediated activism, fake news and social media trust trisha t.c. lin national chengchi university, taiwan institute for governance and communication research taiwan has become the first asian country to support the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2017. however, the revolutionary decision has led to societal polarization. anti-gay groups mobilized millions of supporters and filed referenda to refute supreme court’s ruling on marriage equality, while lgbt groups and the supporting communities urged to amend the civic code to allow gay couples to have all the rights entitled to heterosexual marriage (yang, 2017). before two sets of referenda were voted in late november 2018, the two opposing camps utilized online and social media to attract likeminded supporters and to persuade the neutral to support their causes. unfortunately, lots of fake news that smeared the lifestyles of homosexual people with ill agenda has been disseminated virally via facebook and line for propaganda purposes, and they caused tension and conflicts in taiwanese society. this study aims to examine lgbt groups’ mediated activism during the 2018 taiwanese referenda for marriage equality. according to waisbord (2018), mediated activism refers to the utilization of media technologies and institutional resources for collective action, including expressing demands, giving visibility to identities, raising awareness about social problems and solutions, petitioning authorities, and advocating for policy and legal changes. as mediated activism involves tactics, goals and platforms, social media has played an essential part in disseminating the information, disinformation and misinformation for both proand antimarriage equality groups this time. lots of fake news flooded on social media such as facebook and line, which not only confused voters but also affected their attitudes toward same-sex marriage, and even their voting behaviors. fake news is defined as the intentional production and dissemination of false information in order to deceive others (klein & wueller, 2017; tandoc, zheng & ling, 2018). the most serious problem of the fake news during taiwan’s 2018 referenda was that it challenged the democratic policy-making process. on one hand, the misled people could not make informed decisions based on facts and rational debates; on the other hand, disinformation, primarily on social media, threatened the social trust and created polarization in taiwanese society. therefore, this paper aims to investigate lgbt groups’ social media strategies to combat the fake news and to regain social trust during the 2018 taiwanese elections. as fake news and disinformation pose risk to socially mediated trust, the research question is that how do the lgbt organizations strategically deal with the risk that fake news poses to, in order to build, maintain and utilize social media trust to achieve social and political change? given the influentialness and affordability of social media communication, activism groups had to make a good use of these https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/dosearch?contribauthorstored=waisbord%2c+silvio platforms to frame issues, mobilize, and seek support. the lgbt groups tended not to have abundant resources and human power, in comparison with their counterparts. they faced concurrent challenges in promoting marriage equality rights and battling anti-lgbt disinformation. on the other hand, some fact-checking ngos and authorities that felt concerned about negative impacts of anti-gay fake news made efforts to clarify the rumors and false accusation to lgbt communities, but fake news unfortunately outnumbered the verified ones. hence, social media has been a two-faced sword for the mediated activism groups in the marriage equality referenda of taiwan. as the cost and the consequence of participating social movement is unsure, trust is an essential factor to overcome the uncertainty and anxiety between activists and between followers and the activism groups (wang & emurian, 2005). as for socially mediated activism, haciyakupoglu and zhang (2015) have discussed how social trust (the feeling of connection to a certain social group or organization) and system trust (technological affordances) influenced the establishment and maintenance of mobilization among protestors. this study will adopt haciyakupoglu and zhang’s framework to examine how lgbt groups strategize to combat fake news, to promote their causes, and to improve social trust during the referendum. this study utilizes snowball sampling to recruit key persons in lgbt groups, fact-check ngos, and social media platforms for in-depth semi-structured interviews. by analyzing the transcribed data thematically, this study will be able to advance the theoretical understanding of socially mediated activism by untangling the complicated effects of fake news and social media trust, as well as shed light on the activism practices of using limited resources to overcome disinformation and fierce polarized perspectives. references haciyakupoglu g. & zhang w. (2015). social media and trust during the gezi protests in turkey. journal of computer-mediated communication, 20(4), 450-466. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12121 klein, d. o., & wueller, j. r. (2017). fake news: a legal perspective. journal of internet law, 20(10), 1-13. tandoc, jr. e.c., zheng w. l. & ling r. (2018). defining “fake news”. digital journalism, 6(2), 137-153, https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2017.1360143 waisbord s. (2018). revisited mediated activism. sociology compass, 12(6). https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12584 wang y. d. & emurian h. h. (2005). an overview of online trust: concepts, elements, and implications. computers in human behavior, 21(1), 105-125. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2003.11.008 yang, w. (2018, february 15). marriage equality in taiwan: time to re-engage the public. retrieved from http://www.ketagalanmedia.com/2018/02/15/marriageequality-taiwan-time-re-engage-public/ https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/dosearch?contribauthorstored=haciyakupoglu%2c+gulizar https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12121 https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2017.1360143 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/dosearch?contribauthorstored=waisbord%2c+silvio https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12584 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2003.11.008 http://www.ketagalanmedia.com/2018/02/15/marriage-equality-taiwan-time-re-engage-public/ http://www.ketagalanmedia.com/2018/02/15/marriage-equality-taiwan-time-re-engage-public/ selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): harper, p. (2020, october). viral musicking: aesthetics and iteration in online contagion. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. viral musicking: aesthetics and iteration in online contagion paula clare harper washington university in st. louis cats at keyboards. dancing hamsters. a photo of a dress, and videos set to “harlem shake.” the above are recognizable as “viral” phenomena—artifacts of the early twenty-first century whose production and dissemination were facilitated by the internet, proliferating social media platforms, and ubiquitous digital devices. in this paper, i argue that participation in such phenomena (producing, consuming, circulating, or “sharing” them) constitutes a significant site of twenty-first-century musical practice: viral musicking, to adopt and adapt christopher small’s foundational 1998 coinage.1 i use this term broadly—“viral musicking” comprises the viral circulation of clearlymusical objects (like music videos), as well as the musicalizing of viral material, but i also want to open up space for considering viral circulation itself as “musical” in nature. some recent media scholarship has enthusiastically adopted sonic metaphors to describe digital culture and behavior—from the imagined democratization of digital “voice” to kate crawford’s 2009 theorization of social media “listening.”2 this paper pivots to investigate how such metaphors interface with sounds themselves, and how online virality might be productively understood within a framework of musical practice. closely cribbing christopher small’s formative 1998 theorization, in which he verb-ed the noun “music” to expand its purview and to more fully account for its ability to enact relationships, i define “to viral-music,” as: to take part in a performance of viral music in any capacity, whether by performing and/or providing material, by viewing/listening, by remixing or 1 christopher small, musicking: the meanings of performing and listening (middletown: wesleyan university press, 1998). 2 kate crawford, “following you: disciplines of listening in social media,” continuum 23/4 (2009): 525535. remediating, or by sharing that material—giving it the potential to pass on and “infect” new “hosts.”3 i value the productive friction embedded within the term “viral musicking,” which forces proximity between the human-forward sociality of small’s “musicking” concept, and “viral”—a term somewhat famously rejected by media scholar henry jenkins, for its tendency to construe users as passive zombie hosts.4 in my conception of “viral musicking,” i seek to highlight this tension. for me, the term foregrounds ambivalences bound up in digital viral circulation: of bodily threat and aesthetic pleasure, of constant negotiation between everyday users, powerful platforms, and black-boxed nonhuman algorithms. the notion of virus as a metaphor for cultural spread is often traced to computer science and science fiction, with subsequent co-option into marketing and media; such formulations run adjacent to the popularization of "virus" in philosophical models for globalization and pervasive capitalism across the late twentieth century, from derrida to baudrillard and deleuze. i seek to braid these lineages with the work of scholars reading cultural contagion through lenses of alterity and difference, in particular those who situate music as a particularly felicitous vector for viral contagion, exceeding and preceding internet circulation.5 in this paper, i analyze instances of viral musicking from the 2000s through the present day, from geocities to tiktok, tracking viral circulation as heterogeneous, capacious, and contradictory—a dynamic, relational assemblage of both “new” and “old” media and practices. my methodology for analyzing viral musicking bricolages musicological toolkits (like those for the analyses of voice, genre, form, and repetition) with media archeology, digital autoethnography, and—crucially—a hybrid (even “analog”) method of twenty-first-century reception history and discourse analysis. this latter approach holds more similarities to traditional archival methods than the material under analysis might seem to suggest—clicking, paging, and reading through masses of recorded documents to find consensus, contradiction, and latent coherences—but the archives i'm studying are digital media platforms, and the documents are youtube comments and tweets, blogposts and technology news columns. reading across these archives, i collate and analyze reactions—both vernacular and institutional, creative and critical—to viral phenomena. this paper theorizes some of the characteristic structures of viral musicking in a twentyfirst-century context—structures that are looping and cyclical, irritating and iterative. 3 see small, musicking, 9. 4 henry jenkins, xiaochang li, ana domb krauskopf, and joshua green, “if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead (part one): media viruses and memes,” henryjenkins.org, 2 february 2009. http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2009/02/if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p.html. 5 see barbara browning, infectious rhythm: metaphors of contagion and the spread of african culture (new york: routledge, 1998); ronak k. kapadia, “sonic contagions: bird flu, bandung, and the queer cartographies of mia,” journal of popular music studies, 26/2-3 (2014): 226-250; james gordon kennaway, bad vibrations: the history of the idea of music as a cause of disease (farnham: ashgate, 2012). some come at the level of form: loops in content, small units of image and sound compelled to repeat indefinitely. often, digital architectures mirror or reinforce these loops; from the webrings of the 1990s, to the modules of a contemporary social media feed, viral content circulates on structures that iterate or that loop back on themselves— structures that afford repetition and repeated encounter. more social operations of virality, like remix or alteration, are achieved by the making and sharing of new versions that simultaneously clearly reference the original, and provide an aspect of novelty or surprise. additionally, most instances of digital virality feature the mediation of the original content into new platforms—in particular, coverage of digital virality by “old” or “legacy” media like print journalism or television. these engagements with virality might be envisioned as coils or helixes, expanding outwards concentrically from the original object, but also orbiting back in, redirecting attention back to the original viral object— and, with attention, potential new “hosts.” but despite the resemblance of cyclical patterns across different instances of internet virality, i will also endeavor to show that these loops change and shift diachronically: “viral musicking” has evolved and adapted alongside the proliferation and growing ubiquity of digital devices, platforms, and software over the course of the twenty-first century. consequently, “going viral” in 1999 was different than “going viral” in 2006, or 2011, or 2020—in part because viral musicking, and the participatory practices associated with online virality, were distinct as well. ultimately, i argue that viral musicking activates utopian promises of digital advocates, through the cooperative social operation of “sharing,” even as it resonates through histories and presents of racialization, miscegenation, appropriation, and the realities of porous, breachable borders, cultures, and bodies. further, this paper demonstrates how participation in the genres and performances of viral musicking has served to normalize and neutralize early twenty-firstt-century conditions of pervasive advertising, data collection, and surveillance. microsoft word lee-"climate justice is racial justice"-"climate justice is racial justice".docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): lee, a. (2021, october). “climate justice is racial justice”: the youth climate movement and intersectional media organizing in an algorithmic society. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “climate justice is racial justice”: the youth climate movement and intersectional media organizing in an algorithmic society ashley lee study context and rationale before the covid-19 pandemic struck, the world saw unprecedented levels of youth mobilization. from black lives matter to march for our lives to the youth climate strikes, the past decade saw young people leveraging social media to build movements around the world. existing studies have shown how young people use social media to build movements in liberal democracies under the conditions of free assembly and association (bennett & segerberg, 2012; cohen & kahne, 2012; jenkins et al., 2016; literat & kligler-vilenchik, 2018). however, since the global pandemic hit, young people (and others) have had to face various constraints to street mobilization and freedom of assembly. plans to organize and take part in mass, in-person demonstrations rapidly came to a halt. during the pandemic, the context in which youth organizers and their movements operate shifted dramatically. as youth movements come to depend heavily on the digital space, social media platforms and their algorithms may further complicate young people’s ability to exercise political power. social media platforms like facebook, twitter, and tik tok are commercial spaces where powerful actors vie for political attention (noble, 2018). using the broader youth climate movement as a case study, i examine how youth movements shift their tactics in response to the pandemic, and what the implications of shifting to the digital space are for the youth climate movement. research questions this study asks the following inter-related questions: • how do young climate activists and their movement leverage social media to organize during a major health crisis? • as youth organizing come to rely more on the digital space, what challenges do platforms and algorithms introduce for youth climate activists? methods this study draws on in-depth interviews with 23 youth climate activists, along with digital ethnography and surveys that i conducted between 2019 and 2021. i used purposive sampling, targeting diverse youth, ages 18-30, who leverage social media to engage in youth climate activism. each interview is 90-120 minutes in length. the interviews and surveys were conducted after obtaining informed consent from the participants. with permission from the participants, the interviews were recorded with a digital audio recorder and transcribed in full, using speech recognition software. during the interview, participants were invited to share and talk about social media artifacts they created as part of their activism. the survey included items about the respondents’ present and past civic and political activities (both online and offline), as well as values, motivations, attitudes, and beliefs that underlie their participation patterns. in addition, public strategy documents that the youth climate movement produced were analyzed. data collection and analysis took place in tandem, and analytical strategies were modified as new data and analyses became available. in line with the analytical strategy of the grounded theory, i developed coding categories inductively and refined them in parallel with data analysis (charmaz, 2006). findings and discussion in response to lockdown measures and other restrictions to public assembly, youth activists had to pivot away from traditional physical forms of protests, such as mass demonstrations, rallies, protests, and sit-ins. however, for young climate activists, staying apart did not mean staying silent. instead of giving up, these young climate activists galvanized digital platforms to take actions appropriate for the moment. young activists quickly leveraged digital platforms such as zoom, facebook, and tik tok to build foundational skills and relationships. for instance, they organized online teach-ins and skills building workshops for newcomers and members; they ramped up online fundraising; they held sessions to process grief together; they organized with local mutual aid groups; they engaged in digital storytelling in solidarity with one another. at the same time, intersectional media organizing became front and center during the pandemic. embracing intersectionality (crenshaw, 1991), youth climate organizers and their movement used social media to bring into focus the voices and struggles of marginalized communities. prior to the pandemic, even before the george floyd protests came into focus in the summer of 2020, many young activists were approaching their climate activism as a struggle against racial injustice and other intersecting forms of oppression. when george floyd protests broke out, young climate organizers centered racial justice in their strategies for climate justice activism. finally, as youth organizing came to rely more on the digital space, youth activists and their movement saw the need to scale up their digital organizing infrastructure. however, inequalities introduced by social media platforms and algorithms became more acute for the youth climate movement. in addition to my empirical findings, i will also discuss methodological considerations that came up in my study. in particular, i consider the ways in which the global pandemic has altered the terrain of field work, forcing researchers to adapt rapidly to digital methods for collecting and analyzing data. i discuss the significance of this transformation in the research landscape for analyzing and interpreting data. bibliography bennett, w. l. & segerberg, a. (2012). the logic of connective action. information, communication & society, 15(5): 739-768. charmaz, k. (2006). constructing grounded theory: a practical guide through qualitative analysis. thousand oaks, ca: sage. cohen, c., & kahne, j. (2012). participatory politics: new media and youth political action. oakland, ca: macarthur research network on youth & participatory politics. retrieved from http://ypp.dmlcentral.net/sites/all/files/publications/ypp_survey_report_full .pdf crenshaw, k. w. (1991). mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. stanford law review, 43(6), 1241–1299. jenkins, h., shresthova, s., gamber-thompson, l., kligler-vilenchik, n., & zimmerman, a. (2016). by any media necessary: the new youth activism. new york, ny: nyu press. literat, i. & kligler-vilenchik, n. (2018). youth online political expression in nonpolitical spaces. learning, media & technology 43(4): 400-417. noble, s. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york, ny: nyu press. selected papers of #aoir2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers brisbane, australia / 2-5 october 2019 kirkwood, k. (2019, october 2-5). too many cooks: trusting new voices in online culinary advice. paper presented at aoir 2019: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. brisbane, australia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. too many cooks: trusting new voices in online culinary advice katherine kirkwood queensland university of technology digital technology is becoming increasingly enmeshed in the practices of everyday life, particularly that of cooking and eating (see lewis 2018; kirkwood 2018). the proliferating number of devices and platforms through which users can engage with and disseminate culinary information mean it is becoming increasingly important for users to remain vigilant about the voices and perspectives they turn to for food and nutrition advice. previously, culinary celebrities like jamie oliver, nigella lawson and the like gained their legitimacy through being chefs, restaurateurs or food writers, for example. as this paper will illustrate, culinary personalities with controversial views still have mainstream media traction. however, the ease with which anyone with a digital device and an internet connection can disseminate culinary information means it becomes more difficult to verify the legitimacy of these identities and their claims. this scenario is pertinent when considering online food information where credibility is increasingly established through followers, likes, and subscribers on social networking platforms. in examining which online sources are trustworthy, this paper adds to the scholarship that highlights how the growing industrialisation of food led to a loss of food literacy (pollan 2006; vileisis 2008) that popular media is attempting to rectify. in relation to digital food media, lewis (2018, 214) argues that “food citizens increasingly require a critical media literacy…”. this is especially important considering that consumers are more likely to turn to the media than nutrition professionals for advice (contois and day 2018, 16). this paper questions then how media personalities obtain trust in a foodscape that is becoming increasingly complex as both the number of dietary approaches, as well as avenues for engaging with food media proliferate. through textual analysis of news, popular commentary, as well as relevant books and films, this paper explores the case 2 studies of australian celebrity chef pete evans and fraudulent wellness advocate, belle gibson. in doing so, this analysis highlights differing dynamics in how the two food personalities managed to gain trust. evans leverages his mainstream media exposure and experience as a chef to establish credibility for his online channels where he explores his somewhat alternative culinary views more extensively. gibson’s reputation meanwhile was established in an opposing fashion where she achieved grassroots fame online for supposedly beating cancer through shunning conventional treatments. in both instances, these culinary personalities were eventually met with skepticism and ridicule. evans has been criticised for venturing outside his remit as a celebrity chef to offer controversial food and medical advice, and gibson was prosecuted for misleading consumers after claiming to beat cancer through changing her diet. when media personalities rather than nutrition professionals are the prominent source of culinary information, it is especially important to understand how trustworthiness or authority is established and negotiated. pete evans is an australian celebrity chef and has mainstream prominence as a judge on the seven network’s reality cooking program my kitchen rules. but his other media ventures make it clear that evans’ is an advocate of the paleo and keto diets. evans starred in a netflix documentary the magic pill (2017) and maintains a youtube channel the paleo way with pete evans. although evans published extensively with pan macmillan, including paleo and keto cookbooks, he tends to pursue these subjects more extensively via online, rather than traditional, channels. arguably, this is in some ways a response to the controversy evans’ approach has sparked in recent years. in 2015 pan macmillan stepped away from controversial title bubba yum yum: the paleo way for new mum’s, babies and toddlers after health professionals raised concerns regarding the high vitamin a levels in a bone broth baby formula recipe (davey 2015b). the title was subsequently published independently as an e-book (landy 2015). unlike evans who used his recognition via legacy media to leverage his alternative food views online, belle gibson gained prominence via instagram and the whole pantry (2013) app. she was beginning to achieve mainstream success with a cookbook of the same name, but her ventures were based on what was revealed to be a fabricated story of using a healthy diet, alternative therapies, and avoiding conventional medicine to survive cancer (davey 2015a). toscano (in douglas 2017), co-author of the woman who fooled the world: belle gibson’s cancer con emphasised that “her incredible reach was made possible by a number of intensely modern forces.” toscano (in douglas 2017) pointed out that “she [gibson] flourished and developed 200,000 followers without ever having gone through the checks and balances that are provided by traditional media.” even when gibson began working with penguin—where the publisher’s records show it was warned of potential discrepancies in the supposed cancer survivor’s story—gibson still received $130,000 advance and penguin “worked intimately with her for more than a year” (donelly and toscano 2016). gibson’s case is interesting because she became prominent via social media and then eluded the gatekeeping processes of apple and penguin for so long. both of these case studies reinforce lewis’ (2018) argument for critical media literacy. although such literacy is needed in engagements with both legacy and digital media, the abundance of information available online compared with web 2.0 and produsage 3 (bruns 2008) logics of participation, shareability and do-it-yourself creativity add another layer of complexity for users attempting to navigate the wide array of culinary approaches in circulation. this paper presents two cases, which are similar in that they promote culinary approaches that have gained the ire of conventional science and medicine, but they are different in that evans uses online channels as an alternative outlet for his personal views, whereas gibson first cultivated an online following before moving into more mainstream spaces. analysis of these cases work to uncover how trust is established, how it can then be broken, and potential consequences for audiences who engage with suspect food information. references bruns, axel. 2008. blogs, wikipedia, second life, and beyond: from production to produsage. new york: peter lang. contois, emily and anastasia day. 2018. “the history of food and public health” in food and public health: a practical introduction, edited by allison karpyn, 1-30. new york: oxford university press. davey, melissa. 2015a. “'none of it’s true': wellness blogger belle gibson admits she never had cancer.” the guardian. april 22, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/apr/22/none-of-its-truewellness-blogger-belle-gibson-admits-she-never-had-cancer davey, melissa. 2015b. “pete evans paleo for kids cookbook put on hold amid health concerns.” the guardian. march 12, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/mar/12/pete-evans-paleo-forkids-cookbook-put-on-hold-amid-health-concerns douglas, james robert. 2017. “vehind belle gibson’s cancer con: ‘everything about this story is extreme.’” the guardian. november 13, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/13/behind-belle-gibsons-cancercon-everything-about-this-story-is-extreme donelly beau and nick toscano. 2016. “penguin published belle gibson’s lies despite ‘gaps’ in her story in her story.” sydney morning herald. september 19, 2016. https://www.smh.com.au/national/penguin-published-belle-gibsons-lies-despitegaps-in-her-story-20160920-grkdj5.html kirkwood, katherine. 2018. “integrating digital media into everyday culinary practices.” communication research and practice 4(3): 277-290. landy, samantha. 2015. “pete evans’ paleo baby cookbook to be released as e-book after publisher puts printed version on hold over health warnings.” herald sun. march 16, 2015. https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/pete-evans-paleo-babycookbook-to-be-released-as-ebook-after-publisher-puts-printed-version-on-holdover-health-warnings/news-story/fc06d6d02c72caec4a7b25b8f8d16bdb 4 lewis, tania. 2018. “digital food: from paddock to platform”. communication research and practice 4(3): 212-228. pollan, michael. 2006. the omnivore’s dilemma: a natural history of four meals. new york: the penguin press. vileisis, ann. 2008. kitchen literacy: how we lost knowledge of where food comes from and why we need to get it back. washington dc: island press. microsoft word strover-public policy meets public surveillance-public policy meets public surveillance.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): strover, s., cao, t., esteva, m., park, s. (2021, october). public policy meets public surveillance. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. public policy meets public surveillance sharon strover university of texas at austin tiancheng cao university of texas at austin maria esteva university of texas at austin soyoung park university of texas at austin introduction deploying municipal camera systems has catalyzed several debates and even violent reactions in major cities around the world. this has everything to do with the increasingly advantageous capabilities of these cameras and other ‘smart city’ technologies, including ai-enhanced data collection and analytics possibilities associated with the internet of things (d'ignazio & klein, 2020; buccelatto, 2020; shaffer, 2021). these cameras promise functionality and cost savings for municipalities, but also surveillance opportunities for government authorities. in hong kong, for example, smart streetlights have been attacked out of concern over their surveillance capabilities; in the us, when publics become aware of these systems, concern and outrage sometimes have erupted. in the us, only a few cities have policies regarding these technologies (chivukula & takemoto, 2021). matters of citizen independence and algorithmic bias lack robust discussion in many smart cities initiatives. research approach to investigate the theoretical and political implications of city-deployed camera systems, we examine infrastructure adoption and public engagement practices in seven us cities exercising varied approaches. while this design sacrifices the insights available from other countries’ experiences, it provides a culturally and legislatively cohesive set of cases. our research is multi-site and multi-method, combining case studies with results from a delphi survey of us experts with ‘smart cities’ experience. our cases examine decision-making and public policies associated with public cameras. analytic categories include governance, infrastructure choices, data policies, public engagement, and oversight mechanisms. we investigated deployments in: chicago, with its nsf-funded ‘array of things’; denver, which expanded camera networks using existing public infrastructure; detroit, with its ‘project green light’ mobilizing voluntary business participation; portland, oregon, which banned the use of facial recognition technologies (frt); san diego, using smart streetlights; san francisco, with a privately-funded and neighborhood-run camera network monitoring neighborhood safety; and seattle, which implemented public engagement processes for its surveillance ordinance. summary results are presented in table 1. governance the seven cities exhibit varying levels of public involvement, from city-led efforts (denver, san diego, seattle), to forms of public-private-partnerships (ppp) (chicago, detroit, portland), to a privately funded project operated by neighborhood coalitions (san francisco). governance structures are closely related to the projects’ intended goals. when led by local police departments, they prioritize policing and surveillance over environmental and transportation concerns and community buy-in. in san diego, smart streetlights intended for energy-saving and traffic improvements were turned into a police surveillance tool without the knowledge of city council or the public (marx, 2020). local debates regarding privacy, transparency, and fairness occurred in seattle, san diego, detroit, and san francisco (harmon, 2019; bowles, 2020). infrastructure the projects’ infrastructural components, both hardware and software, come primarily from the commercial sector. in chicago, the exception, an open-source platform was developed by researchers from university of chicago and argonne national laboratory. in all other cities, infrastructure and technology support are provided by private-sector vendors such as ge and applied video solutions. for example, portland’s smart city pdx initiative utilizes both the system from chicago and the same sensor nodes (developed by ge) used in san diego. cctv cameras and environmental sensors are the most common types of hardware. however, some cities may not utilize equipment functions to the fullest extent. portland, for instance, has turned off the microphones on its sensors and does not save raw video footage (the city of portland, 2018). by contrast, san diego uses microphones and saves raw footage for up to five days (the city of san diego, 2019). detroit embraces automated facial recognition but claims it is not used in real-time monitoring. denver, san diego, and san francisco all claim to have no built-in frt functionalities; portland and seattle prohibit the use of frt by most public offices, with portland extending the ban to private entities in public spaces (becker, 2020). data most city-sponsored projects in our study lack explicitly stated data policies regarding public surveillance projects. portland and san diego only reference the city’s open data policy, and while portland has an open data policy it does not specifically mention video data. chicago’s data collection and dissemination process is detailed in a scientific journal; seattle’s 2018 surveillance impact report explicitly outlines the collection, use, storage, deletion, and sharing of data associated with the use of cctv cameras (seattle department of transportation, 2019). a san francisco lawsuit alleges that local police used private camera data during black lives matter protests, violating the city’s surveillance technology ordinance (san francisco ordinance 107-19). public engagement both denver and san diego have been criticized for their ‘secret’ deployment or expansion of surveillance networks, highlighting the lack of public communication and community outreach. in detroit and portland, public feedback was gathered for earlystage pilot programs, but the detroit system remains contested by public groups such as detroit community technology. in san francisco, neighborhood coalitions run and establish policy on localized camera systems. chicago adopts a more proactive approach to public engagement, partnering with local civic groups, obtaining community feedback, publishing engagement reports, and creating educational outreach in local schools (thornton, 2018); seattle is the only city in our study that formalizes public engagement procedures in its surveillance ordinance (young et al., 2019). oversight similar to data policies, many cities do not have well-established oversight mechanisms. chicago, portland, and seattle have an internal work group or committee responsible for project review and assessment. portland, san diego, san francisco and seattle recently passed ordinances that govern the procurement and use of public surveillance technologies, although san diego did so only after local news revealed the clandestine operations of the local police department (marx, 2020). litigation is underway in san francisco regarding police use of privately generated video data. references becker, t. (2020, september 9). city council approves ordinances banning use of face recognition technologies by city of portland bureaus and by private entities in public spaces. portland.gov. https://www.portland.gov/smart-citypdx/news/2020/9/9/city-council-approves-ordinances-banning-use-facerecognition bowles, n. (2020, july 10). why is a tech executive installing security cameras around san francisco? the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/business/camera-surveillance-sanfrancisco.html buccelatto, p. (jan 9, 2020). how cities can turn cctv into smart sensors. government technology. https://www.govtech.com/opinion/how-cities-canturn-cctv-into-smart-sensors-contributed.html chivukula, a., and takemoto, t. (2021, february). local surveillance oversight ordinances. samuelson clinic student white paper. https://www.law.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/local-surveillanceordinances-white-paper.pdf d’ignazio, c., & klein, l. f. (2020). data feminism. the mit press. harmon, a. (2019, july 8). as cameras track detroit’s residents, a debate ensues over racial bias (published 2019). the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/us/detroit-facial-recognition-cameras.html marx, j. (2020, july 20). smart streetlights are now exclusively a tool for police. voice of san diego. https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/public-safety/smartstreetlights-are-now-exclusively-a-tool-for-police/ san francisco administrative code-acquisition of surveillance technology. ordinance no .107-19, chapter 19b. shaffer, g. (2021, february). applying a contextual integrity framework to privacy policies for smart technologies. tprc48 conference. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3742916 seattle department of transportation. (2019). 2018 surveillance impact report: closed circuit television “traffic cameras.” http://www.seattle.gov/documents/departments/tech/2018-1008%20draft%20sir%20-%20cctv%20traffic%20cameras%20%20for%20public%20comment.pdf the city of portland. (2018). how privacy is protected. the city of portland, oregon. https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/76740 the city of san diego. (2019). smart streetlights city of san diego public meeting. https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/sust-smartstreetlightpublicmeeting091019.pdf thornton, s. (2018, january 2). a guide to chicago’s array of things initiative. datasmart city solutions. https://datasmart.ash.harvard.edu/news/article/a-guide-tochicagos-array-of-things-initiative-1190 young, m., katell, m., & krafft, p. m. (2019). municipal surveillance regulation and algorithmic accountability. big data & society, 6(2), 2053951719868492. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951719868492 please update your browser your browser isn’t supported anymore. update it to get the best youtube experience and our latest features. learn more safari google chrome microsoft edge opera mozilla firefox remind me later about copyright contact us terms privacy policy & safety © 2025 google llc trill�-have a great, positive, beautiful day!-have a great, positive, beautiful day!.pdf selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 “have a great, positive, beautiful day!”: good morning memes and the cross-cultural articulation of values tommaso trillò department of communication and journalism the hebrew university of jerusalem this paper adopts the lens of social media rituals to study a new incarnation of ritualized greetings: good morning memes. these are a popular yet under-studied form of ritualized greeting posted every morning by social media users across the global. such memes feature text with a wish for the incoming day paired with elements such as flowers, food or animals. in this paper, i focus on the ways in which these memes construct values, broadly defined as guiding beliefs about the desirable. my analysis is based on a sample of 414 good morning memes posted to instagram in english and italian. i conducted a content analysis examining the posts for content (protagonist and background), the main values conveyed (e.g. achievement and self-efficacy, happiness and positivity), and their stance (serious or ironic). a preliminary analysis revealed strong consistency in the dataset. overall, good morning memes embed the general mandate for “politeness” that infuses the communicative genre of greetings, transposing it in the meme format through impersonal messages and a saccharine aesthetic. furthermore, the memes voice a shared core of values, namely: “happiness and positivity” and “performative kindness.” however, the english and italian subsets also diverge in significant ways. the english language version of the meme upholds the value of “achievement and self-efficacy,” possibly because of the influence of american values on globalized social media content. conversely, the italian-language version of the meme uses humor to pushback against the idea that the morning is a time to be energetic and productive. suggested citation (apa): trillò, t. (2021, october). “have a great, positive, beautiful day!”: good morning memes and the cross-cultural articulation of values. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. microsoft word aoir2021-submission-template-401-social-media-in-the-audience-economy.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): van der vlist, f.n. & helmond, a. (2021, october). social media in the audience economy: business-to-business partnerships and co-dependence. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. social media in the audience economy: business-tobusiness partnerships and co-dependence fernando n. van der vlist utrecht university and university of siegen anne helmond university of amsterdam introduction social media platforms are among the world’s most profitable businesses and their digital advertising revenues depend considerably on partnerships. business alliances have become endemic to the advertising market because of its inherent fragmentation: each industry player has a particular role in the digital supply chain while only a handful of players have multiple roles, establishing networks of co-dependence. this is especially the case for the growing ecosystem of programmatic advertising, where ads and audience commodities are automatically traded and served across media distribution channels and geographic regions in mere milliseconds through real-time bidding auctions of ‘dizzying computational and organizational complexity’ (alaimo and kallinikos, 2018: 110). the current global digital advertising market comprises thousands of interconnected platforms and is projected to be $333 billion, in which programmatic advertising accounts for the vast majority (84.5% or more) of total revenue. social media platforms are uniquely positioned within this complex ecosystem because they play a significant role on both the demand and supply sides of the advertising market. despite its significance, we do not know enough about the structure of the digital advertising market, how it relates to social media, and the dependence on partnerships and partner integrations. business-facing application programming interfaces (apis) are at the heart of the (programmatic) advertising ecosystem. they facilitate the software development and integration work that is necessary to make programmatic advertising ‘work’ at a large scale. access to these business software tools is typically governed through partner programmes. social media platforms form strategic business partnerships through partner programmes, which attract advertisers, business partners, media publishers, and content creators. industry players depend on these partnerships with social media to gain privileged programmatic (api) access to social media advertising tools, products, and services – and their massive data audiences – via these business-facing software tools. approach this paper considers the significance of business partnerships in the establishment of co-dependence relationships in the social media ecosystem to understand how partners mediate and shape platform power. partners contribute to the ongoing process of ‘platformisation’ – the technological extension and economic growth of digital platforms, transforming markets, industries, and societal domains (helmond, 2015; helmond et al., 2019; poell et al., 2019; van der vlist and helmond, 2021) – through their collective development of business-to-business platform infrastructures that extend the social media ecosystem. partners are powerful industry players with ‘their own interests, business models, and bottom lines’ while remaining relatively invisible to consumers (braun, 2013: 127) but remain underexplored in the literature on platformisation and platform power. the complexity of this ecosystem, with its specialised terminology and constantly changing structure, poses challenges to regulators and lawmakers, which mostly focus on consumer markets (van dijck et al., 2019). nonetheless, this paper identifies key public business partnerships and partner integrations that comprise this global ecosystem. we trace and visualise the partner relationship networks of the 20 most-used social media. we analyse which relationships exist, which are exclusive or shared, and identify key ‘nodes’ of power in this ecosystem (broughton micova and jacques, 2020). industry players, through partnerships and the software integrations they build, integrate social media platforms with what we call the audience economy – a complex global and interconnected marketplace of business intermediaries involved in the creation, commodification, analysis, and circulation of data audiences for digital advertising and marketing. the empirical analysis is based on platforms’ public partner directories. we extracted the names and details for each partner using custom-built scrapers to derive a structured dataset with all these partners’ names, descriptions, logos, urls, specialities, industries, countries, languages, service types, goals, and pricing models. next, we focus on the partners categorised as data intermediaries. we found and scraped another 50 partner directories, listing 9,941 additional partnerships and integrations, and extracted all names and details. by combining both datasets, we gain a sense of the entire audience economy as it relates to social media through organisational partnerships and through technological (api-based) partner integrations. findings we suggest several ways in which partners and the platform infrastructure they build mediate and shape platformisation and the implications for platform power. first, partners develop data-sourcing and media distribution infrastructures. second, any partner creates value not just for one platform but for the entire ecosystem and all its members by connecting and integrating the different ends of the audience economy. third, platform infrastructures for data-sourcing and media distribution developed by partners are typically programmable and programmatic. the affordances of programmatic and programmable infrastructure are controlled through distinct governance strategies for app development and for business and marketing development (additionally governed through partnerships). we find that partnerships are significant in mediating the impacts of social media in different markets and industries worldwide, particularly through key players in advertising and marketing-related areas. as such, we note that platform power is about more than market or monopoly power alone. partnerships are endemic and essential to the advertising business of digital platforms. partners expand the collection, use, and integration of audience data in other industry platforms, services, domains, and industries. as a result, platform power is not just held by a single platform but is in part mediated by partners and dispersed into the platform ecosystem, where governance and control are exercised through infrastructure and partnership agreements. business and data partnerships establish and govern the preferred pathways (e.g. digital supply chains) and ‘nodes’ of connectivity in this ecosystem, which yields strategic and infrastructural power to a handful of social media and industry platforms. in this, business-facing apis have an important gateway function and serve as a source of infrastructural control for platform owners. these partners represent diverse types of audience intermediaries with distinct business models predicated on privileged access to social media’s audience data and marketing and advertising services. additionally, the prevalence of partnerships between audience intermediaries means that it is exceptionally difficult, if not impossible, to trace the origins and flow of audience data throughout the ecosystem. the mediation of platform power takes many different forms: from cooperation with digital platforms (e.g. partnerships, integrations, revenue-sharing deals, etc.) to forms of resistance (e.g. industry partnership alliances, open standards, advertising boycotts, etc.). partnerships simultaneously make data widely accessible and exclusive, while also making it more difficult for new competitors to participate because of the consolidation of strategic and infrastructural power. furthermore, firms acquire and leverage these forms of power through mergers and acquisitions, whereby they inherit existing partnerships and partner integrations. references alaimo c and kallinikos j (2018) objects, metrics and practices: an inquiry into the programmatic advertising ecosystem. in: living with monsters? (eds u schultze, et al.), 2018, pp. 110–123. springer. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-04091-8_9. braun j (2013) transparent intermediaries: building the infrastructures of connected viewing. in: holt j and sanson k (eds) connected viewing. routledge, pp. 124–143. broughton micova s and jacques s (2020) platform power in the video advertising ecosystem. internet policy review 9(4). available at: https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/platform-power-video-advertising-ecosystem. helmond a (2015) the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready. social media + society 1(2): 1–11. doi: 10.1177/2056305115603080. helmond a, nieborg db and van der vlist fn (2019) facebook’s evolution: development of a platform-as-infrastructure. internet histories 3(2): 123–146. doi: 10.1080/24701475.2019.1593667. poell t, nieborg d and dijck j van (2019) platformisation. internet policy review 8(4). available at: https://policyreview.info/concepts/platformisation. van der vlist fn and helmond a (2021) how partners mediate platform power: mapping business and data partnerships in the social media ecosystem. big data & society 8(1). doi: 10.1177/20539517211025061. van dijck j, nieborg d and poell t (2019) reframing platform power. internet policy review 8(2). available at: https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/reframing-platformpower. microsoft word dutta-is ott in india 'over-the-top' re-presentation, regulation and religious sentiments in indian ott-is ot.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): dutta, a. (2021, october). is ott in india ‘over-the-top’? re-presentation, regulation and religious sentiments in indian ott. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. is ott in india ‘over-the-top’? re-presentation, regulation and religious sentiments in indian ott anmol dutta english and writing studies, university of western ontario ott in india the recent ott (over-the-top) regulation measures in india brings netflix india and amazon prime video, among other subscription based video platforms under the ambit of the ministry of information and broadcasting. on november 11, 2020, the indian government declared that all ott streaming platforms, including netflix and amazon prime video, would be forced to undergo government regulation. as per the government regulations announced on february 25, 2021, the rules “borrow heavily from the existing regulations and structure governing the television media, including content codes and grievance redressal structure” (a.n. dutta). at the outset, i want to acknowledge that in order to maintain the integrity of the content being disseminated, and to ensure its appropriate reception, regulation is not the problem—the problem arises when one notices that there is a pattern to this regulation; in this case, aligning towards the right-wing interests in the country. cultural policing turned into regulation is not an occurrence in vacuum, rather, it shapes the truths that negotiate ‘protecting’ cultural sensibilities in 2020s’ india. while other indian ott players like voot, disney + hostar, mx player, alt balaji, zee plus, etc. cater specifically to the local audience, amazon prime and netflix, being two primary international ott giants, relay an india that is accessible to the global audience. these platforms, hence, re-present indian realities, becoming national projects in their own right. mediating national(ist) negotiations of cultural heritage in a global space, netflix india and amazon prime video (re)fashion the “national imaginary”, inherently becoming a “project of nationhood” (qtd. in clini 247). as the virtual becomes our reality, digital platforms enable the vision of a fluid world, that widens “the range of our imaginary geography” (qtd. in lobato 9). the popular notion of art transcending borders compels us to question if netflix and prime video “[are] global service[s] with local versions, or a collection of national services tied together into a global platform?” (lobato and lotz 135). regulation or cultural policing? before the regulations came to fruition in the country, several shows on netflix india and prime video were brought under fire for “hurting religious sentiments” (an equivalent to specifically being anti-hindu). a few weeks after the release of the adaptation of vikram seth’s a suitable boy on netflix india in november 2020, furore erupted as a result of an on-screen kiss shared between a hindu girl, lata and a muslim boy, kabir against the backdrop of a temple—calling for a ban on the ott platform as #bannetflixindia trended on twitter. in january 2021, the amazon prime political thriller, tandav, came under scrutiny for being “anti-hindu” over a scene that ‘wrongfully depicts’ the hindu deity, lord shiva, leading to a host of firs and the scene being eventually edited out of the series. while these forms of regulation have been framed as "guidance", they are grounded within religious fundamentalist policing that threatens the fabric of democracy and freedom of expression in the nation (dutta forthcoming). the resistance towards netflix india, specifically, started with the netflix india’s first indian original series sacred games (2018); and continued with shows like ghoul (2018), leila (2019), and finally to a suitable boy (2020), as these shows allegedly “paint an incorrect picture of hindus and india globally" (financial express). the complaint by a right-wing hindu group activist lodged against the platform became national news which read: “almost, every series on netflix india is with the intention to defame the country on a global level. it is with deep rooted hinduphobia that the platform is portraying the nation in a bad light” (financial express).digital entertainment in india has been at the forefront of cultural warfare in the midst of a global pandemic, reeling under a form of policing that ‘safeguards’ indian sensibilities, leading to a slippage between hindu sentiments and right-wing religious politics. this regulation, i argue, has replayed panoptic cultural policing in the current political climate in the country by weaponizing religious sentiments to propel right-wing fundamentalism. conclusion the definition of “screens” is evolving, as the pandemic has people hooked to their screens more than ever, making the need to police content viewed on these platforms seemingly urgent. at a time of global fragility and home quarantine, it became more important than ever to exert control over what can be seen, or rather, what should not be seen—akin to the notion that a problem is not a ‘problem’, until the masses see it. manipulating “the terms of appearance”, these images accused of hurting religious sentiments are ‘framed’ to unwittingly reveal themselves (butler 11), causing a dent in the post-colonial perception of india being a “country where diverse faiths, languages, and cultures co-exist peacefully within the boundaries of a single peacefully within the boundaries of a single state” (khilnani 151). through judith butler’s narrative of “framing images”, i argue that content on these platforms is anchored in an external locus, posing a threat of not making the country look good. in a seemingly (in)dependent internet age, where the virtual is our reality, i explore what it means to submit to or to resist this new reality in 2020s’ india. references “bannetflixinindia trends on twitter after shiv sena member’s complaint over platform’s ‘deep-rooted hinduphobia’.” financial express, september 2019, https://www.financialexpress.com/india-news/ban-netflix-in-india-trends-after-shiv-senamember-files-complaint-against-online-streaming-giant-for-disrespectinghindus/1698139/ butler, judith. frames of war: when is life grievable?, verso, 2009. pp. 11-12. clini, clelia. “from bollywood to ‘hindependent’ film: narrating the indian diaspora.” beyond borers and boundaries, edited by nilufer bharucha et. al, navvishnu publications, 2018, pp. 247. dutta, amrita nayak. “this is how modi govt’s new rules will regulate digital media and ott content.” the print, february 25, 2020, https://theprint.in/india/this-is-how-modigovts-new-rules-will-regulate-digital-media-and-ott-content/611909/. dutta, anmol. “content carnival: (re)viewing representation, religion and ott culture in india.” streaming and screen cultures asia-pacific, edited by michael samuel and louisa mitchell, palgrave macmillan, forthcoming 2022. khilnani, sunil. the idea of india, penguin books, 1997, pp. 151-152. lobato, roman and amanda d. lotz. “imagining global video: ‘the challenge of netflix’ in ‘in focus: global netflix’.” journal of cinema and media studies, vol. 59, no. 3, university of texas press, 2020, pp. 135. lobato, ramon. “preface.” netflix nations: the geography of digital distribution, new york university press, 2019, pp. 9. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): helm, p., de götzen, a., cernuzzi, l., diwakar, s., hume, a., ruiz-correa, s., gommesen, n. j., & gatica-perez, d. (2022). leveraging or exploiting? breaking through data colonialism and ethnocentrism when building a diversity-aware social platform. in the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. leveraging or exploiting? breaking through data colonialism and ethoncentrism when building a diversity-aware social platform paula helm university of amsterdam amalia de goetzen aalborg univeristy copenhagen luca cernuzzi universidad católica "nuestra señora de la asunción" shyam diwakar amrita university alethia hume universidad católica "nuestra señora de la asunción" salvador ruiz-correa instituto potosino de investigación científica y tecnológica (ipicyt) niels jørgen gommesen aalborg university copenhagen daniel gatica-perez ipiap research institute, ecole polytechnique de lausanne in recent years, there has been growing concern about the negative impacts of the extractive logic of data-driven technology and knowledge production. while the initial focus was on the impact on western societies, scholars are increasingly concerned with the consequences for countries and communities in the global south. some commentators have gone so far as to describe the prevailing dynamics as neocolonial and imperialist (arora, 2019; milan & treré, 2019; philip et al., 2012; taylor & broeders, 2015). some go as far as describing the dynamics at play as neocolonial and imperialistic (varon & peña, 2021; zembylas, 2021). while neocolonial dynamics are most evident regarding powerful private sector companies, they do extend to the realm of publicly funded research projects between partners from souths and norths countries. here, it can be observed that while the initial idea may be benevolent, the benefits generated often end up flowing in only one direction. this can impoverish research in the disadvantaged country as experience and data are siphoned off and no contribution is made to local capacity and infrastructure (armenteras, 2021). this practice has been named "helicopter," "parachute," or downright "colonial" science (belhabib, 2021). the present paper (self-)critically examines these dynamics by means of drawing on the experiences collected during one eu-funded research and innovation project that all authors have been involved with. the project that inspired this paper can be diagnosed at operating at precisely the intersection of benevolent but unequal and potentially neocolonial transnational scientific collaboration. it is set in the context of data-driven technology and knowledge production. in this paper, we present a spin-off study departing from the official research plan. in this spin-off study we reflect on and analyze the challenges, (missed) opportunities, and hurdles that we encountered in our collaboration. the authors are diverse. they include cultural studies and ethics scholars, data scientists, designers, and computer scientists, among them are full partners from eu countries (denmark, germany, switzerland) and associated international partners (india, mexico, paraguay). the basic idea of the research project bringing us together was to create a digital platform that connects users who want to solve complex tasks or answer questions by leveraging the diversity of their communities. the matching is based on profile data and self-learning algorithms. by focusing on leveraging diversity, the wenet-project responds to recent criticism of socalled "filter bubble" and "echo chamber" effects (helberger et al., 2018; pariser, 2011). in contrast to similarity-based matching algorithms, the goal of the wenet-project is to develop a decidedly diversity-aware platform that enables machine-mediated social interactions between individuals who differ in their traits and competencies and thus complement each other productively (helm et al., 2021). this is where our conceptual approach comes in, going beyond traditional understandings of diversity and enriching flat demographic categories with sociological and psychological ones. data-based profiling is key to this approach. user profiles are therefore populated with data collected through self-reporting, mobile sensors, and geolocation. terabits of clean and reusable data have already been obtained, and a platform is in place. several pilot studies are underway. the longer-term goal consists of algorithmically analyzing user queries based on continuously updated profiles in order to identify suitable respondents in an automated way. the users in the pilots are students from around the world. pilot sites include china, denmark, great britain, india, italy, mexico, mongolia, and paraguay. while the leaders of the european pilot sites receive full funding, this is not the case for the souths partners. this circumstance makes the situation substantially imbalanced. the imbalance does not only concern the cultural diversity at play, which makes the appropriateness of a onesize-fits-all design developed from a european perspective doubtful (this refers to what in the paper we discuss under "ethnocentric design"). moreover, power asymmetries between european and international partners are also not trivial given the economic and epistemological value of the generated datasets operated and stored by the european partners but derived from international pilot sites (this refers to what in the paper we discuss under "data colonialism"). in this constellation, wenet finds itself in an ambivalent position that holds both risks and potentials. on the one hand, the project partners are themselves caught up in the extractive logic of data capitalism (sadowski, 2019), thus reproducing certain practices that have become standard in computer science: a scalability mindset as the ordering logic of innovation, prioritizing one-size-fits all solutions over plural design, the unequal distribution of data power, as well as time pressure and competition. on the other hand, by focusing on diversity, choosing an interdisciplinary approach, including ethicists on the core team, and working with partners from the souths, wenet simultaneously seeks to develop an inclusive and value-based alternative to existing private sector solutions. given this tension, in this paper, we address the following questions: within the existing eu-funding framework and facing the prevailing pressures in innovation-driven research, what do we need to change to enable more equitable practices? what are the main problems? what activities have proven useful? to answer these questions, we proceed as follows: first, we provide an overview of recent studies and conceptual works that address the challenges of transnational research efforts and innovation projects under the conditions of postcolonial technoscience. this serves to clarify the structures in which the project discussed here is situated and needs to be assessed against. based on the conceptual clarifications, we develop a model, visualizing the interplay of extraction and eurocentrism at the intersection of transnational research and datafication. we then zoom in on four exemplary pilot sites (denmark, paraguay, mexico, india), examining how the project design played out on the ground, reflecting on successes, hurdles, challenges, missed opportunities and analyzing these against the background of the more general situation outlined in the previous section. after presenting the pilots, the various observations are analyzed comparatively. based on this analysis, we draw some conclusions, that we hope will be instructive for future projects facing similar challenges. references armenteras, d. (2021). guidelines for healthy global scientific collaborations. nature ecology & evolution, 5(9), 1193–1194. arora, p. (2019). the next billion users: digital life beyond the west. harvard university press. belhabib, d. (2021). ocean science and advocacy work better when decolonized. nature ecology & evolution, 5(6), 709–710. helberger, n., karppinen, k., & d’acunto, l. (2018). exposure diversity as a design principle for recommender systems. information, communication & society, 21(2), 191–207. helm, p., michael, l., schelenz, l. (2022) diversity by design? balancing the protection and inclusion of users in online social networks, in: conference proceedings of the acm/aai conference on artificial intelligence, ethics, society, https://doi.org/10.1145/3514094.3534149. milan, s., & treré, e. (2019). big data from the south(s): beyond data universalism. television & new media, 20(4), 319–335. pariser, e. (2011). the filter bubble: how the new personalized web is changing what we read and how we think. penguin uk. philip, k., irani, l., & dourish, p. (2012). postcolonial computing: a tactical survey. science, technology, & human values, 37(1), 3–29. sadowski, j. (2019). when data is capital: datafication, accumulation, and extraction. big data & society, 6(1), 2053951718820549. taylor, l., & broeders, d. (2015). in the name of development: power, profit and the datafication of the global south. geoforum, 64, 229–237. varon, j., & peña, p. (2021). artificial intelligence and consent: a feminist anti-colonial critique. internet policy review, 10(4). zembylas, m. (2021). a decolonial approach to ai in higher education teaching and learning: strategies for undoing the ethics of digital neocolonialism. learning, media and technology, 0(0), 1–13. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): hourigan, a. (2022, november). ‘how much space am i supposed to take?’: understanding ‘digital inclusion for international development’ through fa’asamoa. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ‘how much space am i supposed to take?’: understanding ‘digital inclusion for international development’ through fa’asamoa aimee hourigan digital media research centre, queensland university of technology introduction it is widely held that efforts to achieve the united nations’ 2030 sustainable development goals must sit alongside efforts to achieve ‘universal’ digital inclusion; to ensure global access and increased literacy in the effective use of digital and information and communications technologies (graham, 2019). in the independent state of samoa, local and foreign governments have argued digital inclusion will ‘leapfrog’ the nation into the 21st century (ministry of communications and information technology, 2020). comparatively, samoan academics and community leaders have continued to foreground fa’asamoa (the samoan way) within conceptions of socioeconomic and cultural prosperity (enari, 2021). as ‘culture lived’ (lilomaiava-doktor, 2009), fa’asamoa hinges on the vā; the contextual, multi-dimensional, sociospatial relationality that guides knowledge and action (tugalu, 2008). commitment to the vā can be seen in samoa’s social structure (the fa’amatai, or chiefly system) and conceptualisations of identity (such as through tautua, or service, and responsibilities to aiga, or family) (tugalu, 2008). indeed, through fa’asamoa, the samoan self is constructed as ‘dividual’; as “an identity that is deeply dependent on others and burdened with obligations” (besnier, 2011, p. 20). however, “the dividual self competes with ideological orientations that actively seek to disembed the self from structures of exchange, remove it from the tyranny of obligation, and distance it from expectant others” (besnier, 2011, p. 21). the ascription of such ‘autonomy’ or ‘empowerment’ underscores discourses of (western) ‘modernity’ (giddens, 1991). in the context of ‘international development’—both industry and ideal (slater, 2013)—such ‘modernity’ is intertwined within broader mechanisms of ongoing coloniality, such as capitalism (appadurai, 2001) and informationalism (castells, 2010). the latter is especially influential to the extent that inclusionary paradigms of technology for social ‘progress’ (such as digital inclusion) are deeply encoded (practically and conceptually) into ‘knowledge’ of how the future (‘the modern’) can, or should, be obtained (unwin, 2017). this paper discusses findings from an on-going qualitative, mixed-methods, study that employs decolonial thinking to investigate perceptions and experiences of ‘digital inclusion for international development’ amongst samoans from a fa’asamoa standpoint. in following mignolo (2007), it scrutinises the ‘knowledge’ underlying ideologies and practices of ‘digital inclusion for international development’ and critically questions the effects of on-going (western) hegemonies in the construction of ‘modern’ subjectivities and enactment of ‘modern’ life. centering fa’samoa through (decolonial) co-design in recognition of critiques of decolonisation within the digital humanities as an ‘empty metaphor’ (risam, 2018), the study’s methodological approach ascribes agency and authority to participants, as ‘peer researchers’, by ‘distancing’ the primary researcher from the design of objectives, actions, and anticipated results (taboada et al., 2020). ‘stepping back’ from the central position of control acknowledges my position as a nonsamoan and additionally responds to calls for research communities “to be fundamentally changed via the transfer of resources and authority from the center to indigenous communities” (latulippe & klenk, 2020, p. 8). the initial findings discussed below draw from a co-design workshop conceived and facilitated in late-2021 in collaboration with samoan members of two pasifika-led community organisations based in brisbane, australia. engaging with samoan diaspora responds to the interconnectedness of samoan communities beyond geographic boundaries, the unique sociocultural positionality of fafo (abroad, overseas) samoans, and the related significance of fa’asamoa as a transnational knowledge framework (lilomaiava-doktor, 2009). within the workshop, the peer researchers were guided to create mind maps (buzan, 2010) to draw forth peripheral knowledge and create a snapshot of connections and relationships within their experience and understanding of ‘digital inclusion for international development’. an additional activity (incorporated whilst the workshop was in progress) further defined the group’s understanding of ‘digital inclusion’ through talanoa, a pasifika method that centres on establishing noā (equilibrium) between individuals to create a power neutral context in which deep, rich tala (talk, conversation) can occur (enari, 2021). initial findings the design artefacts and discussions emerging from the workshop draw attention to how the emergent tensions between fa’asamoa and current (western) structures and practices of ‘digital inclusion for international development’ are (consciously and unconsciously) navigated by the peer researchers in their everyday and envisioned engagement with icts and digital technologies. the relevance or applicability of ‘digital inclusion for international development’ is mediated by the extent to which it strengthens key cultural practices and values within fa’asamoa (cultural relationality) and further by the extent to which ‘digital inclusion’ (distinctly named as a colonial agenda by the group) is perceived to have an innate connection to matters of power, control, and domination. in bringing forth critiques of ‘digital inclusion for international development’ as ‘empowering’, i argue that the findings from this first stage of the study suggest a level of appropriation of icts and digital technologies is occurring to allow samoans (as ‘modern’ subjects) to define their past, present, and future on their own terms. in the remainder of the study, due for completion in late-2022, two additional workshops have been devised through which the peer researchers will more deeply examine the dynamics of the emergent ‘samoan digital culture’. in doing so the study will contribute to understanding the role of digital technologies in relation to the discursive and practical conception of alternatives to modernity/coloniality. figure 1: the peer researchers’ mind maps explored ‘digital inclusion for international development’ through six key considerations. references appadurai, a. (2001). grassroots globalization and the research imagination. in a. appadurai (ed.), globalization (pp. 1–21). duke university press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv111jhnm.3 besnier, n. (2011). on the edge of the global: modern anxieties in a pacific island nation. stanford university press. buzan, t. (2010). the mind map book: unlock your creativity, boost your memory, change your life. pearson bbc active. castells, m. (2010). the rise of the network society: the information age—economy, society and culture (2nd ed.). wiley-blackwell. enari, d. (2021). methodology marriage: merging western and pacific research design. proceedings journal of interdisciplinary research, 5(1), 61–73. https://doi.org/10.26021/10641 giddens, a. (1991). the consequences of modernity. polity press. graham, m. (2019). digital economies at global margins. mit press. latulippe, n., & klenk, n. (2020). making room and moving over: knowledge co production, indigenous knowledge sovereignty and the politics of global environmental change decision-making. current opinion in environmental sustainability, 42, 7–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2019.10.010 lilomaiava-doktor, s. (2009). beyond ‘migration’: samoan population movement (malaga) and the geography of social space (va). contemporary pacific, 21(1), 1–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cp.0.0035 mignolo, w. d. (2007). delinking. cultural studies, 21(2–3), 449–514. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162647 ministry of communications and information technology. (2020, november). digital pacific. https://mcit.gov.ws/digital-pacific/ risam, r. (2018). decolonizing the digital humanities in theory and practice. in j. sayers (ed.), the routledge companion to media studies and digital humanities (pp. 78–86). routledge. slater, d. (2013). new media, development and globalization: making connections in the global south. polity press. taboada, m. b., rojas-lizana, s., dutra, l. x. c., & levu, a. v. m. (2020). decolonial design in practice: designing meaningful and transformative science communications for navakavu, fiji. design and culture, 12(2), 141–164. https://doi.org/10.1080/17547075.2020.1724479 tuagalu, i. (2008). heuristics of the vā. alternative: an international journal of indigenous peoples, 4(1), 107–126. https://doi.org/10.1177/117718010800400110 unwin, t. (2017). reclaiming information and communication technologies for development. oxford university press. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 information activism in the first digital copyright decade: a case study of the digital future coalition, 1996-2002 and the internet that nearly was bryan bello school of communication, american university dr. patricia aufderheide school of communication, american university abstract: the digital future coalition (1996-2002) was an unprecedented public interest coalition on internet and copyright policy with much farther-ranging effects than has been recognized previously. uniting commercial and noncommercial stakeholders to push back against intellectual property maximalism on the nascent internet, it altered both treaty and legislative language, entered a trope—“balance”—into national discourse on copyright policy, blocked u.s. copyright protection for databases, enhanced popular engagement with fair use, and set the stage for the “right to repair” movement. this historical research was accomplished primarily by interviewing representatives of the digital future coalition (dfc) and opposing groups, as well as one ex-official, and by consulting a hitherto untapped, private archive of documents relevant to the prehistory and 1996-2002 history of the dfc. keywords: copyright policy, internet policy, coalitions, lobbying, internet history introduction a public policy coalition in the public interest, the digital future coalition (dfc) played a significant role in a policy process that eventually established the terms of managing copyright on the internet: the digital millennium copyright act (dmca).1 the creation of the dmca was a pivotal moment, when the internet was only beginning to be widely accessible and digital transmission of copyrighted material was still largely ungoverned bello, b. & aufderheide, p (2020, october). information activism in the first digital copyright decade: a case study of the digital future coalition, 1996-2002 and the internet that nearly was: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. in practice. one key member of the coalition recalled, “i hope we never see an effort of this magnitude again. everything was on the table.”2 the process of shaping that legislation took four years, beginning in 1994 with a study issued through the department of commerce known to participants as the “green paper.”3 it argued that the “information superhighway” could never be used without the implementation of draconian copyright protections. the paper was substantially drafted with the help of media company lawyers, especially from disney.4 it proceeded to be debated as the green paper became a white paper and then, in 1996, a bill in congress with companion legislation establishing a new “database right.”5 expeditiously defeated, the bills’ proposals became part of the u.s. delegation’s negotiations in treaties that emerged at the world intellectual property organization (wipo) conference in december 1996.6 action on a database right was stalled, but placeholder agreements on digital copyright were enacted. the clinton administration then proposed legislation, ostensibly to conform to the treaties, and later amended it to include database copyright protection; that legislation dueled with counter-legislation. the two bills were debated, lobbied over and amended in 1997-8. the version of the dmca enacted into law emerged from congress in october of 1998.7 see appendix 1 for a timeline. among other things, the dmca created protection from copyright liability for telecommunications entities and the proto-internet service providers, if their users infringed copyright. in order to win this protection, the service providers or platforms had to take down upon request any offending material; users who countered the takedown were then put in direct contact with the complainant. it also prohibited and criminalized circumvention of encryption (technical protection measures, or tpms) and creating devices to decrypt, functionally prohibiting otherwise legal forms of sampling and reverse engineering.8 finally, it served as a vehicle for advancing an interrelated legislative effort that nearly established a brand-new intellectual property right in collections of digital information, or databases. this article focuses on the role the dfc played in the first decade of digital intellectual property (ip) legislation, how it worked, and what its legacy is. (see appendix 3 for a glossary of acronyms.) the dfc played a central role in stopping the first round of domestic digital copyright legislation, in preventing the creation of a u.s. copyright for collections of data, and in significantly modifying u.s. demands at wipo. it was crucial to altering provisions in the second round of legislation, and its seemingly insignificant independent win in the last hours of legislative negotiation turned out to be the clause that has created the most change in the dmca over the years. the set of relationships built in the dfc has continued for decades since, as allies worked on similar issues; the dfc brought copyright issues to major nonprofit organizations, and put in motion the processes to start others. methods we used a well-organized, hitherto untapped archive of documents relevant to the 1993-2002 history of the dfc, archived by the program on information justice and intellectual property (pijip) at the washington college of law. the archive includes emails among members, notes from meetings, sign-in sheets, and copies of articles members consulted and produced, as well as leaked information from intellectual property (ip) organizations and copies of versions of legislation. we also interviewed 12 lead actors in the coalition, three representatives from ip maximalist groups, and two people from later organizations, identifying them through sign-in sheets of the dfc, through recommendations from other interviewees, and through consulting existing reports. finally, we interviewed the public official leading the effort to create the dmca, bruce lehman. our interview pool prioritized dfc members because their perceptions and understanding of events has been poorly chronicled (as discussed below) in narratives of dmca policymaking. the views of representatives of ip maximalist groups have, by contrast, been widely shared and used by historians and policy scholars. after analyzing and summarizing our findings we engaged interested interviewees in a member checking process. respondent validation is an additional way researchers relying on interviews can assess the credibility of their findings.9 we permitted interviewees to retain anonymity if they preferred. if they agreed to be named, we honored a pledge to show them all quotes attributed to them in advance, with the right to remain anonymous on consideration. although we had obtained an institutional review board (irb) waiver based on the merits of our pre-submitted questions and outlined interview approach, we believed that such agreements with interviewees would permit franker conversations. we also felt confident in doing so as the rich archive we accessed, which contained leaked documents from dfc’s opposition and unedited or curated dfc material, allowed us to further contextualize the statements and reactions of all our interviewees. context we consider our topic within three context areas: the history of the formation of the dmca; public interest coalition characteristics in communication; and the political roles of coalitions. legal and communication scholars have authoritatively tracked the path of the dmca legislation.10 in each of these narratives, the dfc plays a role as an ineffective pushback on the unstoppable forces of ip maximalism. for instance, jessica litman, who as a fellow worked at the american university law school—a major node in the dfc network—at the height of the dfc, bitterly noted the “failure of the digital future coalition to achieve any concessions of substance” in dmca negotiations.11 james boyle, who was also at american university’s law school during the dfc’s rise, bemoaned the fact that they were defeated because “the currents were running against them,” with ip maximalists passionately convinced of their cause even though the dfc represented “a broad range of interested groups.”12 bill d. herman’s detailed analysis of the diplomatic and legislative process that resulted in the dmca does feature the dfc, but categorizes it as a nonprofit rather than a coalition of public interest, nonprofit, and industry groups and dismisses it as “really just an umbrella group for other actors, and it was conceived, founded, and run by people who had day jobs other than as full-time policy advocates.”13 in tarleton gillespie’s wired shut, which looks at copyright policy changes with the advent of digital, the dfc receives only a passing mention in descriptions of the dmca, with no discussion of the coalition’s influence.14 in hector postigo’s discussion of the formation of the dmca, anti-maximalist and public interest positions are ascribed to individuals and to categories such as librarians but not to organizations (the dfc itself is mentioned only in a table listing “digital rights movement organizations, missions statements and classification” at the end of the book).15 the profound and widely recognized consequences of the dmca’s provisions for censorship, limitations on innovation, and regulatory precedent for ip maximalism have been analyzed by many, including the above-mentioned authors.16 they include private censorship through both the takedown process and the anticircumvention provision; the hobbling of digital security research; limiting the ability to repair products independently; and the inhibition of innovation. here, we accept the assessment of the dmca as legislation that both foreclosed options for the internet’s development and created an enduring regime to protect copyright monopolies on the internet. however, we argue that a closer look at the coalition’s actions, goals, and long-range effects can reposition that coalition productively in history. such repositioning helps us understand how different the dmca today is from the originally proposed policy and the implications of those differences. it also demonstrates that public-interest involvement in policymaking is more than window-dressing or a futile exercise, even given the power dynamics of large corporate interests. the role of public interest advocates has been explored extensively in the communications area. mass media and communication public interest advocacy organizations began appearing in the 1970s and grew dramatically in the 1990s.17 the dfc appeared at the height of this growth. but it was distinguished from former advocacy organizations in two ways: it directly addressed the new problem of internet ip regulation, and its coalition was a mix of nonprofit and for-profit actors. as napoli charts the history, typically public interest advocacy organizations on communications issues had not worked directly within organizations with commercial interests.18 indeed, even academics and activists on a self-described “public interest” continuum (usually featuring some combination of consumer and non-commercial concerns, including concern for future members of the public) have had a difficult time collaborating and routinely construe their interests as opposed to corporate interests.19 while coalitions on particular issues are typical of advocacy organizations—for instance, the fairness doctrine routinely featured “strange bedfellow” combinations including phyllis schlafly, the national rifle association, and mainline religious organizations—copyright advocacy in the public interest did not have much experience with commercial alliances at the time.20 just how unusual the dfc’s coalition approach was at the time is registered by the reaction of some of the members. litman argued that the dfc’s commercial interests ended up “settling for something that sells the public short” because an over-broad but short piece of legislation, which did not address copyright exceptions, became a tortuously long one with exceptions that are narrower than copyright law generally permits.21 jamie love, a public-interest advocate, told us in an interview, “i was not 100% comfortable; it was portrayed as a nonprofit/for profit coalition, but it was clear to me that the corporate guys were calling a lot of the shots.”22 this work contributes to the literature on media and communications advocacy. much empirical work on media has focused on movements galvanizing the general public— activism that is formed from purely nonprofit alliances and around social justice principles, the notion of resistance, and grassroots, participatory, or youth media.23 much work done on infrastructure policy in communication, by contrast, has focused primarily on technological and business interests in policy change;24 this work is well showcased annually, for instance, at the annual telecommunications policy research conference (tprcweb.com). we strive to contribute to a third area of research: empirical studies of public interest advocacy conducted in complex engagement with the policy process.25 this work is characterized by a focus on movements that engage directly with policymakers and close analyses of the policymaking process, the interactions of different stakeholders, and the public interest stakeholders’ influence on the results. the dfc featured one of the consistent rhetorical frameworks for such public-interest advocacy that napoli identifies: the freedom to communicate.26 however, unlike a human-rights perspective commonly associated with such a framework, the dfc framed this argument for freedom to communicate within the public and political function of copyright policy. the coalition argued that copyright was designed to be a policy that created incentives to create in a balanced way: both rewarding creative effort with limited monopolies and also rewarding creative effort by permitting limited use of monopoly-protected material in the creation of new culture. unlike some arguments for balance that assume extremism on both sides and negotiate toward the center—an approach that tends to privilege the powerful—this argument went to the constitutional grounding of copyright itself: that intellectual property policy exists to promote “science [i.e. knowledge] and the useful arts,” and its implementation must use a range of tools, some of which constrain access and others of which enable it. james madison’s federalist 43 was thus instituted in article i, section 8 of the constitution—the so called “progress clause.”27 the constitutionality of the policy is only maintained when there is balance between the different kinds of incentives used. copyright monopolies must be limited in order to be constitutional; exceptions to monopoly permit the creation of knowledge, too. it was this argument that neatly united the interests of the noncommercial and commercial members of the dfc. within scholarly understanding of media and communications public interest efforts, the dfc was thus precedent-setting for a variety of reasons: its members represented both commercial and noncommercial interests at a time when public-interest groups in communication typically eschewed commercial alliances; there had been, until then, no public interest representation on this aspect of internet policy; the group acted, on minimal funding, with remarkable consensus; and there was a high level of shared respect among coalition members for the core values and principles that shaped the coalition’s arguments. coalition behaviors, political scientists argue, are governed by reputation, resources, constituencies, and other currencies that can affect action.28 this is a succinct summary of reasons why coalition members sought each other out in the dfc. stakeholder alliances are expected in political hardball, and they are notoriously transactional, as we know from a well-developed literature on regulatory capture, the “revolving door” between lobbying and government positions, and special interests.29 coalitions have, however, no clear pattern of success. they have been variously assessed by political scientists as either a dominant force in shaping policy, typically ineffectual or even counter-productive, or conditionally successful.30 we take from this wild diversity that context—political, social, historical—is crucial to understanding the successes and failures of any particular coalition action. this article strives to provide dfc’s history within that historically contingent context. formation and interests the green/white papers were part of an aggressive push by the clinton administration to re-imagine the american economy in the context of a national information infrastructure (nii).31 secretary of commerce ron brown headed a special task force appointed by vice president al gore in february 1993. later that year, the task force published its “agenda for action.”32 ip—a top american export—was crucial to the agenda, and so was the proto-internet, or what was called the “information superhighway.” recalled bruce lehman, the then-commissioner of the u.s. patent and trademark office (uspto) and self-described true-blue clintonista: “these intangible property rights were important economic assets to the us economy, and the ability to monetize them was critical to this vision[;] it was the foundation for the economy we envisioned emerging in the 21st century,”33 from the beginning, commerce was central to the nii, and ip was central to commerce. thus, the clinton administration’s decision to place the nii initiative in the hands of the department of commerce was an early signal that the internet would be developed as a commercial network. the internet up to this point had been defined by experimentation, free discourse, and the creation of culture by early yet robust user communities. the ip task force wanted to redirect those patterns of exchange around a legacy rent-seeking framework. essential to this plan were ip policies appropriate to digital communication. the choice of lehman to lead the nii’s ip task force made sense: he had already demonstrated his commitment to ip protection. the dfc developed when the working group’s first publication, the so-called green paper, raised concern among internet users. where copyright interests saw an opportunity in the proposal put forth—make all internet traffic go through copyright holders—others who benefited from copyright’s exceptions and limitations saw a problem. nonprofit cultural institutions, consumer technology manufacturers and internet service providers were particularly threatened. the nonprofit actors were roused when pamela samuelson, a computing-oriented law professor at the university of california berkeley, read the green paper with its stark description of an empty “superhighway” that would remain unused unless the “cars” (intellectual property) on it could travel safely (have copyright protection): i knew it wasn’t close to being an accurate statement of the situation. the notion that the internet was empty, that nothing is flowing through these empty spaces and tubes— i knew lots of people who were using it. but the green paper was arguing that in order to induce all the content companies to participate in the new economy, we need these strict rules and anticircumvention.34 samuelson immediately thought she understood the implications of tight copyright control over all internet transmission: it would criminalize most of the then-current internet activity and stifle future development of the network: i realized by looking at some of the journalistic coverage that the journalists couldn’t decode the green paper. it’s full of legalese. one of the things i thought i could do to add value in the world was to explain to the community of computing professionals what these lawyers are talking about.35 samuelson began a writing and speaking campaign that for the next few years took her to 25-50 events a year. she wrote in law journals, computing newsletters, and even wired magazine.36 in precise prose, she argued that the proposed policy was draconian, stripping citizens of their existing rights to privacy and to the private use of copyrighted materials. it would, she pointed out, criminalize even temporary copies in random-access memory that are critical to basic computer operations. it would, in effect, abolish fair use—the right to reuse copyrighted material under certain circumstances— which was a time-honored practice in private life, vital to journalism, and crucial to internet innovation. it would also do away with first-sale, or the right to do what you will with the ip you bought—a right that enables the very existence of libraries. furthermore, a proposed database right threatened to fence off the “elementary particles and building blocks of knowledge,” or collections of data that were the lifeblood of the nation’s scientific communities.37 samuelson already had experience connecting legal scholarship and constituencies around issues. she previously had done work on software copyright interpretation in the courts, which she found often misunderstood technology and tilted toward extending copyright. samuelson quickly earned a consulting position with the national research council’s (nrc) newly established committee on data for science and technology (codata).38 by 1995, she was providing them with briefings on the ip working group’s proposed database right and its implications.39 she and future dfc colleague, legal scholar jerome reichman, would prove instrumental in shaping the committee’s official position on database ip—they were the most cited scholars in the 1997 codata publication on the issue, bits of power.40 independently, law professor peter jaszi, an expert on copyright exceptions and limitations, had also seen the green paper and was immediately alarmed. “it’s an appalling document,” he recalled with visceral distaste in 2018.41 where samuelson was outraged at the paper’s ignorance of existing activity on the internet, jaszi was outraged at what he saw as its impingement on free expression and future culture. holding as his intellectual hero the legal scholar and judge benjamin kaplan, jaszi had built his own scholarly work on the notion of balance between the rights of copyright holders and the rights of users and new creators in the production of culture.42 in his own work and with others, he had argued that the romantic notion of authorship itself— celebrating the unique genius of the creator—was a relatively new social construct, one that had served copyright holders (rarely the creators) for political purposes.43 for him, copyright holders were not only market actors but potential censors of present and future culture. fair use was a central concept in balancing copyright, especially as term extensions and other expansionary clauses of copyright policy pushed the balance of power toward copyright holders. “the green paper was a redescription of copyright policy,” he said. “it described fair use not as a right but as a tax on copyright owners, and prescribed copyright education—‘teach them not to steal.’”44 he saw the problem but not a solution, until samuelson, who was familiar with his work from previous amicus briefs, introduced him to prue adler at the association of research libraries (arl), the most prestigious library association in the u.s. and a gateway organization to the most important research universities in the u.s. and canada. samuelson happened to occupy office space at arl while working with the national research council. adler was already well aware of the issues. now the arl’s legislative director, she had come to the organization five years before from the communications and information technologies program at the (now defunct) congressional office of technology assessment, a research body on technology policy issues. she knew that libraries in the u.s. exist because of two fundamental balancing features in copyright: first sale and fair use. arl already had taken action, she recalled: with the american library association, we had hired someone to go through all of that clinton administration work so we could identify exactly the areas we understood them to be targeting, where we would need to be involved. we did a set of principles at the same time. bruce lehman and the administration were very clear that they were going to introduce legislation, and it was pretty clear how everybody was lining up.45 furthermore, adler knew how badly the libraries—led by arl and the american library association (ala)—had fared in the fundamental rewrite of copyright law that resulted in the 1976 copyright act. the act vastly extended copyright monopolies in scope and length. during that legislative battle, librarians had fought hard but lacked commercial allies and largely lost. she welcomed the idea of combining forces and valued samuelson’s business connections. as a result of board members’ concerns, she recalled, “in ’91 or ’92 we brought in people and started working on our agenda. we brought in the ala. carol henderson, who was part of the washington office of the ala, had been a part of the [lobbying on the] ’76 revision [of the copyright act], so we both understood the value of coalition building.”46 adler and jaszi called a meeting at american university in washington, d.c. samuelson used her industry connections to fill out the guest list. it eventually included representatives from libraries, academia, and consumer electronics and computing companies.47 “everyone got along quickly and could speak a common language,” adler remembered, noting how unusual it was that an organization was born immediately from the first, one-day meeting.48 one of the entities with the most clout on the sign-up sheet was the home recording rights coalition (hrrc)—an industry consortium formed in 1981 to defend the interests of recording device manufacturers, such as fujitsu. (david rubenstein, political insider and founder of the carlyle group, was hired by the manufacturers to organize the hrrc.) japanese manufacturers—the dominant makers of vcrs—had found their business threatened by a lawsuit that was challenged all the way to the u.s. supreme court. in sony corporation of america et al. v. universal city studios, inc., et al., (464 u.s. 417), often known as the “betamax case,” media companies sued manufacturers of vcrs for enabling what media companies claimed was copyright infringement by users recording off-air. the supreme court decided in favor of sony both because the creation of the tool did not qualify as contributing to infringement and because private-use home taping was fair use. media companies continued to be on high alert for infringement, and hrrc girded for future attacks. the hrrc team drew talent from top lobbying and legal firms, with skills ranging from public campaigns to insider hill politicking to treaty negotiations. it also had strong public support: american consumers loved their videocassette recorders (vcrs) and could be counted on to protest if someone tried to take away their ability to record and timeshift video (fast-forwarding and rewinding content). at the same time, however, the hrrc negotiated with media companies over an acceptable solution to copy protection, which would allow coalition members to continue selling devices. the hrrc had, by 1995, an impressive history of successfully defending its interests.49 after almost two decades, it was used to winning against ip interests, given strong public support for its products. but the dfc offered something of unique worth to the hrrc: librarians. “there’s a librarian in every district,” said one interviewee who requested anonymity. “our interests were aligned enough... from their perspective, [the librarians] had a dream team of specialists [the librarians] could never have built or even imagined on their own. what we had were nice librarians to put forward.”50 the dfc also had allies in computing companies, for which fair use was also extremely important. fair use protected reverse engineering, as the 1992 sega v. accolade case (977 f.2d 1510) demonstrated, and reverse engineering facilitated interoperability—“the ability to make a new product or service work with an existing product or service.”51 in this lawsuit, a third party game designer, accolade, in order to identify and replicate the code that facilitated a program’s operation on the sega genesis console, temporarily copied three sega properties in the act of decompiling them. sega argued that both the acts of copying its creative code and re-publishing a functional portion of it constituted dual infringements of sega’s copyrights. the ninth circuit court of appeals disagreed. content considered strictly functional, as opposed to expressive or creative, is not protected by copyright law. the court found that accolade only republished what facilitated the interoperability of games on sega’s console. furthermore, the act of copying the creative code to access the functional bits through the process of decompiling was protected by fair use. sega had hoped to force independent game designs to license from them directly. accolade’s solution for creating titles for the genesis console without sega’s technical authority did not infringe on sega’s ip, the court found, and was good for competition.52 although ibm, the behemoth in the computing industry at the time, strongly opposed interoperability and thus, like sega, sought to thwart reverse engineering through technical and legal measures, most companies agreed that interoperability was the engine driving both commerce and innovation. furthermore, it benefited consumers who were provided with a greater range of products at cheaper prices. jaszi and samuelson similarly saw interoperability as critical to promoting the robust production of new culture online. each had filed amicus briefs in the sega case alongside the computer and communications industry association (ccia) and the american committee for interoperable systems (acis), which employed lawyer and technical expert, jonathan band. band knew jaszi and samuelson as allies through his experience representing acis and was familiar with the team from hrrc as well. the ultimate partnership of the hrrc, ccia and acis through the formation of dfc was a “win-win,” band reflected. “a convergence of interests—it was to everyone’s benefit to be in the same coalition.”53 such an alliance was new for the computing technology businesses. they had largely stayed out of the home-taping wars that had birthed the very focused hrrc. this was not their fight, so long as the arrangement brokered between the media and the home recording companies did not influence the design of computing technology industry’s products.54 the sega ruling, on the other hand, had enshrined the discrete copying of functional code as lawful for reverse engineering, seemingly cementing the core ip rights the computer industry required to compete in the new century. lehman’s maximalist reimagining of ip for the internet age changed that. it would undermine the recent sega victory as well as the betamax precedent within the digital space while creating entirely new domains of ip related conflict. in the plan put forth in the green paper, temporary copies of content made in the random access memory (ram) of a server, router, modem, or personal computer while loading information through the internet would constitute a violation of copyright law, presenting a host of potential liability issues for device manufacturers, internet service providers (isps), and consumers. all three could be liable, differently, for copyright infringement charges. direct liability is an immediate actor’s liability—say, that of the individual infringer(s). contributory liability occurs where a third party knowingly induces, causes, or contributes to someone else’s direct infringement—say, the isp that allowed the individual(s) to load an unlicensed copyrighted image. vicarious liability can be assessed in cases independent of a third party’s knowledge or awareness of direct infringement—say, a device manufacturer that knows an individual could potentially use its device to commit an infringing act.55 as the green paper imagined digital copyright policy, multiple parties could be found liable for infringements resulting from each unlicensed ram copy generated when the image was viewed online. even if users didn’t have an internet connection, the framework proposed by the green paper would ultimately make the ram used in loading third party software applications illegal acts of copying as well. this proposal divided the computing world. the green paper’s framework benefited the software protection interests of computing businesses represented by the business software association (bsa). while only a few hardware manufacturers opposed a market based on interoperability by the mid-90’s, many of these same computing companies were also creators of software content. for bsa founding members such as microsoft, ibm, and adobe, joining forces with legacy publishing interests and their consortia provided access to veteran rent-seeking expertise.56 the overlap of interests resulted in the creative incentive coalition (cic), which, in addition to the bsa, included, the software publishers association, viacom, the association of american publishers, the mcgraw-hill companies, the motion picture association of america, the recording industry association of america, time, and warner, inc.57 cic members, who lehman had often worked with before, had direct access to the nii task force, and the green paper’s proposal of a new database copyright benefited both software companies and print businesses transitioning to an online marketplace. collections of data had long been considered exempt from copyright protection due to a lack of creative merit.58 the ability of core internet computing technology to freely access databases so as to query them and perform basic networked operations such as “search” was fundamental to user engagement online. a database copyright would make these functions cost prohibitive, dramatically limiting the public utility of the internet while presenting further contributory infringement issues for computing companies around the ram copies of data collections. the green paper’s maximalism galvanized a previously unorganized coalition of countervailing interests. but those newcomers to the copyright issue were not necessarily fully informed. copyright was either a new or peripheral issue for many in the computer industry at the moment of the green paper. ed black, director of the ccia later recalled, the content people were very well funded, they had been fighting the battles for years, they were diverse geographically, and they were not distracted by a lot of second, third, fourth tier issues. for all of my companies, and some others, there were a lot of other issues to fight. getting copyright to be a constant high priority was virtually impossible. you had to settle for getting as much attention as you could, and remind people, “you have to care about this.” silicon valley companies had a tradition for many years of avoiding washington policy. they weren’t staffed to provide the kind of support activity to play in the dc world on a wide range of issues.59 black, a seasoned political operator, understood that balanced copyright was inextricably linked to his members’ businesses. ccia’s slogan was “open markets, open systems, open networks.” he also believed that there was a meaningful overlap between nonprofit interests and those of his industry on the issue: i went back many years as a huge believer in the first amendment. our industry in particular was founded on those bedrock principles of a free and open society. the early part of the industry flourished because people just traded information[;] they were excited by ideas…we were dedicated to promoting the interests of our industry, which included the users of our products, which then extended to the public interest. i believed it was a wise policy not to look at narrow parochial short-term interest, but what is the impact on our users—that is, society at large.60 he had seen ibm try to leverage copyright against microsoft: “the extreme use of ip as a weapon was well known to me.” for all of these reasons, black and jonathan band of acis committed their associations to the dfc effort. the last group of dfc allies were telecommunications and proto-internet companies such as prodigy and america online (aol), which collectively lobbied as the ad hoc copyright group. in addition to holding these businesses contributorily liable for facilitating ram copying, the nii taskforce’s proposal sought to make transmission providers generally liable for the potentially infringing behaviors (pirating, decryption, etc.) of their users. the lack of a safe harbor provision—that is, a protection from shared liability with their users—threatened their businesses to the core. the ad hoc copyright group united with the dfc during the first attempt to pass legislation and was involved in the wipo negotiations but eventually dropped out to fight on its own. in the second round of legislation, they shared information with the dfc, but after winning their argument on contributory or intermediary liability in april 1998, the ad hoc copyright group ended its collaboration with the coalition.61 at its peak, the dfc had 42 institutional members and represented perhaps 3 million direct members. it also claimed to represent consumers using some of the most popular technology of the day and the general public via various library associations (see appendix 2). one advantage the dfc had in securing loyal allies, black noted at a public event, was the totalizing nature of the ip interests’ attempt to control internet traffic: “the excessive greed on the other side put a light on us, and we could play a paul revere role. it wasn’t obvious to telecom companies how much their industries would be affected. you have to thank your enemies for their overreach.” 62 trust and pragmatism the coalition worked generally in consensus, unlike the cic. this was universally noted in our interviews, often with appreciation for its relative rarity. the group quickly established that no action would be taken and no statement issued on dfc letterhead without unanimous approval. members refrained from leaking information, and when interests had to separately negotiate, they alerted each other beforehand.63 partly this was pure political calculation, and partly it was mutual confidence in the expertise each group brought to the table. “we implicitly trusted folks in the coalition that were working on things that we didn’t have experience with. they trusted us on library things,” recalled arl’s adler. she was fully aware of the kind of value librarians brought to the commercial players’ game: “we would give cover for some of the industry folks— and they knew that. going into hill offices with them gave them a good glow.”64 the anonymous political insider recalled, “librarians were eh, so-so as a political force. they didn’t have the muscle of industry, or the money. but they are good at what they do… prue [adler] was very smart politically and well connected and able to get the right person.”65 interviewees also pointed out the human element. “a big part of the trust was personalities. they were dealing with people [that] they could trust in us,” the political insider said. in band’s mind, “what made it unique was the people involved actually liked each other.”66 indeed, all of the dfc interviewees were still on friendly terms more than two decades later. many of them appeared at american university’s celebration of prue adler’s career when she retired in 2019.67 because of the depth of experience with hill politics on all sides, and because of institutional goals and memory, all the participants agreed on a pragmatic approach. for instance, when bruce lehman took his task force’s plan to wipo, none of the dfc representatives endorsed a goal of trying to kill the treaty. in contrast, other nonprofit organizations held out hope for this very goal. jamie love, who had focused on drug patents previously and who had also attended wipo but was not yet part of the dfc, strongly supported the strategy of killing the treaty rather than negotiating language.68 rather, dfc members agreed on the strategy of altering language. all actors were aware of the moment, as band said, as “just one battle in a long war. we’re repeat players, we can’t take advantage of a situation for temporary interests. we know we will need each other again.” as well, none of the players needed credit for success. indeed, it was deeply important to all to avoid being named or singled out. as the insider’s desire for anonymity shows, for some it remains a central strategy. from the start, the dfc knew it needed a good slogan. robert schwartz, legal counsel on the hrrc, said, “hollywood could always say, ‘we need to stop piracy in china.’ our side didn’t have a sound bite.”69 with fair use uniting them, the dvd settled on a “sound bite” that focused on “balance” in copyright—balance between monopoly rights and what later was to be called user rights. this was a key word in describing their position, one the dfc used for both industry and noncommercial arguments. this was a familiar position for librarians, and one that aligned as well with jaszi’s own intellectual formation. at the same time, it signaled respect for the interests of copyright holders. the dfc was not anti-ip, but pro-competition and pro-knowledge. dfc members wanted to ensure that digital copyright enforcement frameworks provided equal incentives for creating new culture online and rewarded valuable contributions. with the language of balance and competition, and high-profile support of major technology companies such as fujitsu and sun microsystems, dfc quickly found an audience on capitol hill. the call for balance influenced official action. for instance, in decisive interventions to stall out the first cic-backed bill, h.r. 1861, sens. chuck grassley (r-ia) and paul simon (d-il) wrote a letter to the head of the appropriations committee in september 1995. using the dfc’s language, the letter protested that a provision in the bill would affect vital public interests as well as commercial interests, by losing balance; it “would dramatically change copyright law and could result in imposing direct, vicarious, and contributory copyright liability on educational institutions, libraries, internet service providers, telecommunications companies, software developers, and hardware manufacturers.”70 the preamble to the 1996 wipo copyright treaty also directly reflected the dfc’s message of a need for balance: “the contracting parties… recognizing the need to maintain a balance between the rights of authors and the larger public interest, particularly education, research and access to information … have agreed as follows.”71 treaty negotiations at the 1996 wipo negotiations held on the eve of the winter holidays in geneva—nii legislation having long since ground to a stalemate in congress—seth greenstein represented both the hrrc and the dfc. while not a part of the official delegation to geneva, the dfc still managed to out-maneuver lehman’s envoy by building a voting coalition among smaller nations that embraced the framework of balance, effectively hamstringing the official u.s. agenda. in courting allies, greenstein carefully linked the language of public interest and commercial interests. he shared his argument with members of the dfc: both in the context of section 1201 of the nii copyright amendments bill and this wipo proposal, general language covering a wide range of acts and a broad scope of devices has time and again proved to be prejudicial to fundamental public interests such as fair use, and unfair to manufactures of devices having legitimate uses.72 in building support for his argument, greenstein and others developed a solid front with other nongovernmental organizations, with developing countries, and with telecommunications representatives to push back against the u.s. position. “balance” became a banner of the allies. the balancing concept also put them in a good position to negotiate since they were not positioning the dfc or its members as anti-copyright but pro-balance. greenstein routinely checked in with the american delegation and strove for industry compromise, which was also the goal of u.s. negotiators. they told him privately that lehman’s abrasive approach led to disorganization.73 greenstein also had negotiating meetings with the ip lobby, and telco lobbyists attended nightly phone calls to dfc members. the telcos worked with dfc to block attempts to declare all temporary copying in computer memory (ram) as belonging to the copyright holder— something that would have left all telecommunications operators vulnerable to infringement charges. in his daily reports to the dfc members, greenstein celebrated the way balance had become a rallying cry for, among others, south africa, korea, singapore, australia, germany and norway: it was rare in the past that countries called for a balance of rights or fair use. today, it was a main focus of discussion. a short time ago, the "primary purpose or effect" standard [for banning devices designed to break encryption] was broadly acceptable with little dissent except from three ngos. today, there was widespread recognition of the adverse impact on public and commercial interests. this all is largely made possible by the extraordinary efforts of all of our respective groups…i think we all can be justifiably and extraordinarily proud, but the opera ain't over 'til bruce lehman cries uncle.74 when lehman gave the last speech for the u.s. delegation, he ended it with, as thenrookie dfc representative adam eisgrau later recalled, “a great paean to fair use in the us and our economy. that’s not what people would have anticipated mr. lehman saying, but those were the instructions he got.”75 the dfc’s negotiation strategies had worked, and the white house had told lehman to moderate his message. balance ended up in the preamble to the treaty. the coalition’s success took ip interests by surprise. many years later, one of the ip lobby’s strategists described, with some emotion, the dfc’s opposition as having the lehman proposal be “hijacked.” the ip interests had not anticipated and had underestimated the dfc.76 wipo negotiations resulted in general and vague treaty language, which was a remarkable overturning of lehman’s own expectations. he recalled that he had been confident, when entering the negotiations, that the u.s. maximalist position would dominate. it was why he had sought out geneva in the first place. and no one on the dfc side had expected to stymie the u.s.-wipo agenda; indeed, as eisgrau recalled, “playing to a draw was considered a significant win.”77 but they had won more than that. the vagueness of the treaty’s language now allowed the u.s. to avoid implementing legislation. the treaty, as written, signified little more than a good faith agreement between nations. dfc member and sun microsystem’s representative to the wipo negotiations, peter choy, reported back to colleagues, [c]ompared with the white paper, and where we were four months to two years ago, these outcomes…represent a significant victory for dfc and acis [computing equipment manufacturers]. we didn't get everything we asked for, but achieved a great deal more than the uspto [patent and trademark office, which bruce lehman headed] would have been willing to concede; our lobbying in the administration and of the nations in the wipo was clearly effective in raising our concerns to the level of domestic and worldwide visibility.78 a draft dfc press release on jan. 15, 1997, three weeks after the negotiations concluded, used the headline, “wipo treaties embrace balance.” absent from the copyright treaty, it noted, were copyrights in ram reproductions, intermediary liability for osp/isps, broad penalties on home copying/taping, and ip protection for databases (“the conference delegates decided that it required further study”).79 finally, the treaty preserved nations’ rights to develop copyright exceptions.80 legislation the dfc members hoped that they would avoid domestic legislation via the vague language of the wipo treaty. they were wrong. lehman, as he later recalled, had entered wipo negotiations with the express goal of justifying new legislation in the u.s. (a tactic known as “policy laundering”), and he intended to use the outcome as a means of forwarding that agenda.81 on his return, he won support for legislation from a clinton administration that was already deeply committed to a vision of an information superhighway fueled by commerce and that was increasingly eager to settle the terms under which the superhighway would operate. despite advancing bills that reconstituted previously failed frameworks, in 1997, lehman finally found momentum in congress. as this momentum mounted, the dfc developed its consumer/user-oriented public relations campaign. with funds from the list foundation, a private family funder with a commitment to the public interest in communication, dfc members carried the message of “balance” they’d honed during the wipo negotiations into various public campaigns.82 the dfc’s 1997 public campaign combined national and local press with broad grassroots work. the hrrc drew on its connections with thousands of video retailers throughout the country. the hrrc developed promotional materials that deliberately had a diy look. “we were trying to make sure it looked like we weren’t heavily funded. so a lot of the stuff looked like it had been put together by a kindergarten teacher. but it worked,” recalled ruth rodgers, who coordinated much of the public campaign:83 we had standup signs, placards, we put them up in video stores, or the conventions, where you could tear off a postcard and send it back to us. we would note where it was from and send all those postcards to a member of congress…and we got a lot of good press. we would do ads in billboard magazine, and in rolling stone, saying the songwriters were behind us, and the riaa was trying to kill these indie songwriters, anyone not under contract—that got a lot of publicity….we were emphasizing the harm to the american consumers, and that was getting out. we would write up pieces and send them out [to local newspapers in relevant districts]—op-eds or little blurbs that would go into weeklies or local newsletters or free papers. what was going on and how they could help, our phone number. we had an 800 number, and when they called, we signed them up to send a letter to their member of congress.84 the dfc enacted their grassroots lobbying in part through a coordinated local and national press campaign that relied heavily on editorials, depicted here in this june 1998 advertisement in the hill. record courtesy of the program on information justice and intellectual property, washington college of law, american university, washington, dc. the messages of the op-eds and ads linked consumer interests with the public interests of balancing copyright: “under the guise of protecting copyrights, measures threaten readers by allowing publishers to repeal the fair use provisions of today’s copyright law and by creating a whole new category of intellectual property.”85 they also appealed to library patrons by asking them to respect “the constitutional underpinnings of american intellectual property law” and “the need for balance” in the administration of moral rights. “it is fair to say that most people don't know what fair use is, but they do know what they can do in a library,” wrote adler, advising on the public campaign.86 print ads and seeded editorials also linked home taping and library access with the concept of balance. the dfc drew support from the hrrc’s strong grassroots base, first organized in the early 1980’s to fight legislation and lawsuits that threatened consumers’ right to record on their new videotaping devices. the dfc connected long standing consumer interests to the digital copyright debates through the invocation of a familiar device (the vcr) and fight (the supreme court “betamax” case). the hrrc playbook required little updating, as seen here in this advertisement, record courtesy of the program on information justice and intellectual property, washington college of law, american university, washington, dc. other ads sought to make copyright activism “as easy as abc” (short for ashcroftboucher-campbell bills that supported dfc positions). encouraging one’s congressional representatives to support these bills, the ad stated, would ensure “an appropriate balance in the copyright act so that it protects intellectual property and affords public access to it.”87 op-eds in papers around the country, including one in usa today, encouraged congress to support “balanced” frameworks, to reject “unbalanced” ones, to “balance the rights of copyright holders and consumers of information” and to “preserve the 'fair use' doctrine” to ensure balance.”88 this core messaging was carried onto its website, where users could read through issues, concepts and bill comparisons by clicking on clearly labelled tabs.89 dfc strategically sought to make its website a central hub for public education on the issues of fair use and balanced copyright.90 the cic felt the sting of this approach. the group had also learned the dangers of underestimating the dfc. “the mpaa and riaa started hitting back pretty hard,” recalled rodgers.91 the maximalist interests leaned heavily into the piracy trope. jack valenti warned, “pirates have become more sophisticated. they are armed with new technology and hackers and others are going to invade the [internet].” cic lobbyist steve metalitz drew a dire picture: “pirates can make limitless perfect copies, disseminate them around the world at the touch of a button, and carry out their activities with less fear of detection and capture than ever before.”92 along with the sting of the public campaign, ip interests perceived the dfc in general as deeply threatening, especially its nonprofit members. as executive director of the association of american publishers (aap), former congresswoman patricia schroeder wrote members as the final stage of legislation began: there are serious questions about whether the bill, when it finally emerges from the commerce committee, will be anything that publishers, authors, musicians, software developers and creative artists can live with. the library community is intransigent in its opposition to any bill that effectively implements the treaties, and is unwilling to seek compromise. they are waging a campaign of disinformation about the true nature of the legislation, a campaign based of hypothetical scenarios that have no basis in market realities. they are holding members of congress hostage with predictions of the death of fair use—and indeed of our great national tradition of free public library service—if the wipo implementing legislation moves forward.93 the cic had more experience in copyright lobbying and more access to an ipmaximalist administration than dfc’s most seasoned members. the mpaa had been successfully generating ip policy domestically and abroad for decades. furthermore, the cic had star power. at one famous dmca hearing, the riaa brought johnny cash to congress to advocate for strong internet copyright legislation. the dfc, on the other hand, had no celebrities and so had to counter with consumer and public-interest arguments.94 once, the dfc got in a zinger. during the same hearing, the dfc, arguing that the proposed legislation was so flawed that it would lead to endless litigation, managed to make their position memorable. as robert schwartz recalled with stillevident pleasure, the dfc’s representative said the proposed legislation might as well be called “a bill named sue,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to cash’s famous song.95 in the face-off in public campaigns between celebrity power and consumer/publicinterest arguments, the exclusively industry membership of the cic may have underestimated the consumer appeal of its opponents in the communications hardware and nonprofit sectors. computer and vcr owners were highly invested in using their devices for consumer purposes as they liked. the cic portrayed consumers as (often youthful) internet users who were either pirates (as discussed earlier) or passive “surfers,” just seeking to get entertainment for free. a commercial internet, the cic argued, could thus only be managed with stiff copyright protection: as people surf through the information superhighway in search of interesting sites, one thing remains clear: content will drive the success of this revolutionary way to communicate. ultimately, the value of the information superhighway—its ability to deliver social progress and economic growth—will depend directly on the ability to ensure strong copyright protection.96 dfc members often expressed the belief that the cic piracy arguments were, basically, political theater. however, the cic’s continual focus on piracy, however politically convenient, may also have been a point of conviction. lehman personally believed (and still believes) that the “information superhighway” was filled with “self-righteous young people who seemed to feel they had a right to steal anyone else’s creation and do what they want to.”97 the cic also portrayed the internet as currently empty of creative work, with creators needing the protection of the ip interests. the organization’s advertising campaigns moralized, framing dfc-backed legislation as “teaching your kids to steal.” they made legislation an “us versus them” proposition, printing magazine ads that said “they are wrong” in half-page bold letters.98 this message has continued ever since; generations of schoolchildren have received free materials from associations representing ip interests linking any kind of copying with stealing.99 the cic vied for public support through blunt appeals to morality and even patriotism, framing copyright as “american.” record courtesy of the program on information justice and intellectual property, washington college of law, american university, washington, dc. group dynamics also distinguished the dfc from the cic. one lawyer representing stakeholders in the cic discussed (on the condition of anonymity) the “contentious” nature of decision making within the cic. parties drew hard lines even among each other and were resistant to compromise; some members were as much competitors as allies, and others had orthogonal interests to each other: the business software alliance was aligned in some respects with the motion picture association but since their content was different, they were sometimes prepared to draw a line in a different place…even those who were trying to protect content had different views of how their particular content should be protected. those had to be hammered out as well. we had meetings where “our” side would meet to agree on our lines, and then meet with isps who had a different view. 100 the cic lobbyists were seasoned, had access to celebrities, and worked with legislators who were acutely aware of the value of media for their own political campaigns. the dfc had no celebrities and faced a number of legislators with little technological savvy. but the coalition had a professional understanding of the workings of the hill, especially among the hrrc representatives, and the dfc was able routinely to mobilize its constituencies for congressional visits. thus, it made a claim, with physical bodies, to broad consumer interest. “we showed up on the hill, all the time, all the time,” recalled miriam nisbet, who had been legislative counsel for the american library association. “we had a committed group of people. you didn’t have to worry if someone was going to represent their stakeholders. we were there, we were committed, we had practical examples, we had the public interest argument, but more importantly, we showed up.”101 when they did show up—a group of seven or eight people representing different but united constituencies—they often faced legislators who had no idea about the technologies or about copyright implications. their unity was one guarantor of their ability to educate, ed black later recalled.102 robert schwartz, legal counsel on the hrrc, recalled that the dfc and its allies had had the upper hand in political jockeying around the green and white papers, because of the combination of a deep consumer base and the ubiquity of libraries in everyone’s district. as well, the dfc demonstrated clout in geneva: “right through to 1994-6, the hrrc plus the emerging tech plus the library and user groups and consumer groups controlled the discourse and public perception.”103 that control would extend through early spring of 1998 with the dfc’s communication campaign taking hold of the public’s attention and new bipartisan co-sponsors backing their bills.104 the cic was feeling the pressure. as schroeder put it in a memo to aap members: after two years of effort, seemingly endless negotiations, victories and setbacks, and a heartening win in the u.s. senate, the wipo legislative process is on life support. we may lose the most important piece of legislation to come before congress this year and in the process scuttle two vital international treaties essential to american interests.105 compromise: copyright carveouts and exceptions opposition, however, stiffened the clinton administration’s resolve, and the administration increased its political pressure.106 as it brought more political muscle to bear, dfc allies began peel off. this moment of carveout—when individual organizations no longer negotiated as a whole coalition and bargained for their own interests—was one that the members of the dfc had anticipated. “we understood the realities of business; you go as far as you can together,” recalled eisgrau. “we would have been upset if someone not only got off the train but pushed in the other direction. i never felt betrayed by someone cutting a deal.”107 the carveouts affected the core functions of the dfc. in 1998, the year the dmca passed, only 10 members chipped in financially. the coalition’s industry interests increasingly reallocated their contributions to the dfc back towards their own niche legal efforts. groups like the hrrc and ccia, which made enormous in-kind contributions of staff time and legal expertise, had always been low-level financial donors. industry members wanted to avoid charges that the dfc was a front for corporate interests.108 now their contributions were even smaller, similar in size to those of the nonprofits. the second highest donation in 1998 was from the modern language association at $10,000.109 with the dfc relying entirely on contributions of this size, increasingly deprived of in-kind legal support and general labor, the group’s ability to negotiate in the closing stages of policy formation diminished. for the first time, closed-door meetings between the dfc’s industry affiliates and the publishing consortia in the last round of legislating did not include nonprofits. individual interests struck deals for themselves. most powerfully, telecommunications and protointernet providers won exemptions from intermediary liability in the dmca, which amended the copyright act to include a new section, sec. 512. they horse-traded it for a provision that criminalized circumvention of encryption (a technical protection measure, or tpm), incorporated into the copyright act as sec. 1201. the loss of the telcos led to other commercial interests peeling off. schwartz recalled, “1201 wouldn’t have passed if it wasn’t for [telcos] getting 512. losing the telcos was a big blow.” seth greenstein affirmed, “the online world then was at&t, mci, the big telcos, and they could stop the bill in its tracks, for certain. they had been active at wipo. once 512 came in, they disappeared.”110 the relationships between dfc members continued, but the terms changed. “we kept up the grassroots work,” recalled schwartz, “but it shifted. it now had to accommodate the deals we were making into the story we were telling the public…the message became compromise. even the dfc message was nuanced and compromised.” some coalition members were losing their clients’ patience. for the hhrc’s clients, the consumer electronics manufacturers who had been fighting with ip owners for two decades about home taping, “there was lawsuit fatigue.” even an imperfect deal was beginning to look better than unpredictability.111 membership contributions dried up; periodic matching donations of $25,000 by the foundation of mitch kapor (lotus 123 developer and electronic frontier foundation co-founder) could no longer be matched.112 this turn to pragmatic individual interests’ search for the best deal for themselves did not surprise the library interests, but it did shock other public-interest advocates. schwartz added, “people like pam samuelson and jessica litman were appalled by the deals the consumer electronics [manufacturing] association [known today as the consumer technology association] made.”113 jamie love similarly found his deepest suspicions confirmed.114 jonathan band, who was representing companies concerned with interoperability, said, in 1997, it was clear we couldn’t kill the dmca once joined with safe harbors [sec. 512]. the telcos didn’t care about our issues—they were focused on safe harbors. aol was the exception, but most proto-internet people didn’t care. we were all going to have to try to get our own exception. and we all understood that we would each drop off once we got our carveout. we all believed this was bad policy. but at the same time, if you’re a lawyer repping a client, you go for your client’s interests.115 cic representatives looked upon the telcos’ safe harbor arrangement as a major loss. they found themselves dismayed at the idea that telcos were being let off the hook for what they feared would be massive systematic infringement. it was “a major thorn in the rights holders’ side,” said lehman.116 the nonprofits were left negotiating for carveouts without their powerful partners. libraries stood to lose almost everything, with a few arcane exceptions. for instance, they won the right to break encryption when deciding whether or not to purchase an item. adam eisgrau, a supporter of arnold lutzker who represented the dfc and libraries, was at the bargaining table until 3:30 am on the final day of negotiations over what would become the dmca bill, hoping to insert the phrase “fair use,” or at least a clause useful to the nonprofit members of the coalition generally. lutzker finally in desperation created, on the spot, the proposal for a clause requiring the copyright tribunal to hold triennial decryption penalty waiver hearings for people whose work was impaired by the requirement.117 this became sections 1201(a)(1)(b)-(d) of the dmca. “after the dmca passed, it took quite a while for me to reconcile, to not consider that a defeat, a big one,” recalled eisgrau. “friends within and outside the coalition had more perspective. their attitude was, the bottom line is, fair use is alive and well. the rulemaking will do something.”118 at the same time that its coalition was dissolving on the dmca front, the dfc won a major victory on another front. in a parallel fight, the coalition blocked the copyrighting of databases in the u.s. once more—and at a decisive moment. in the spring of 1998, the house passed a database protection bill. by late july it was merged with the dmca.119 prue adler and peter jaszi alerted the coalition about the merger. a vote for the legislation that included the painstakingly negotiated sec. 1201 carveouts protecting the dfc’s manufacturing members’ interests was now also a vote for database copyright. convinced their work negotiating was over, jonathan band managed to rouse the litigation-fatigued tech manufacturers one last time to standby the dfc’s efforts and work to excise the database portion of the bill. one of the coalition’s levers was to split ip holders. jamie love realized that newspapers and magazines would have to license statistics from major league sports, and that brought those media interests to the dfc’s side of the argument. financial organizations including bloomberg realized that not only would costs for data skyrocket, but some data would become entirely unavailable, lowering the quality of financial information. another approach was to gather new allies. on the commercial side, yahoo as a latebreaking member of the coalition added important heft, and the chamber of commerce eventually came in on the dfc’s side. finally, the dfc won concessions at the white house. in august 1998, the general counsel for the department of commerce wrote senator patrick leahy, the ranking minority member of the senate committee on the judiciary, with the “consensus position” of the clinton administration: any database amendment entered into the dmca should have a guaranteed “de minimis effect” on noncommercial research.120 the white house’s language on database ip was now on par with national research council’s. in the opinion of scholar mark davison, the national research council’s influence consulting on the matter was shaped by samuelson and reichman’s expertise.121 with pressure mounting on multiple fronts, the senate eventually stripped the amendment altogether.122 this was a win that changed the landscape for internet-enabled communications technology and could not have happened without the formation of the dfc around the dmca. the dfc continued for a few years after passage of the dmca and the defeat of copyright protection for databases. by 2002, the coalition disbanded as members pursued other agendas, and its minimalist funding could not be sustained. members would reunite informally to defeat one last piece of database legislation (the second attempt to pass such a law post-dmca), the database misappropriation act of 2003. legacy as with the wipo legislation, the dmca that finally passed looked dramatically different from the roadmap provided by the green and white papers. users maintained their freedom to use media devices as they saw fit (albeit with tpms); isps avoided liability for third-party infringement; affected users were granted exemptions from anticircumvention provisions. users maintained their freedom to use media devices as they saw fit (albeit with tpms); isps avoided liability for third-party infringement; affected users were granted exemptions from anti-circumvention provisions. this was not just a set of concessions. it was a refusal of lehman’s vision of a totalized copyrighted environment in which all non-authorized uses were prohibited or taxed. for dfc members, this was a harshly limited version of victory. the concessions they won did not really reflect balance in copyright, and fair use was never even invoked. bruce lehman, by contrast, today believes that the compromises in the dmca jeopardized the future. the forces he imagined in 1994—forces he believed wanted everything on the internet for free—succeeded in creating a leaky copyright system online, with dire consequences: “i hope the naderites [followers of consumer activist ralph nader] are happy. we wonder why 1% runs everything. because individual creators are absolutely, totally disempowered. they have zero rights; everything they do can be stolen.”123 blocking database protection was perhaps the dfc’s biggest achievement. and its members still regard it as such. miriam nisbet, ex-legislative counsel for the american library association, said, “this ‘non-event’ was a very important event.” but because it was an act of blockage, it was less well recorded in histories of the dmca and its related issues. the united states is one of a small group of countries that does not have a codified database right. the european community enacted its own database directive in 1996, independent of the wipo.124 the eu conducted an evaluation ten years later and found no discernable impact on the production of databases. a new right was passed in response and a subsequent evaluation by the eu once more found no impact.125 mark davison provides this historical assessment: the u.s. and the ec [which later dissolved into the eu] have provided a world laboratory for the value and effectiveness of database protection. the u.s. legal position has operated as the control test and the [ec’s] directive has constituted the innovative experiment. the u.s. has not suffered as a consequence of the lack of a database right and the eu has not made any demonstrable gain from having it…the lack of database protection and, in particular, its defeat in the senate in 1998 was the direct product of the input of pre-existing, institutionalized, funded, and congressionally recognized scientific and educational lobby groups such as the national research council. without them, the u.s. would have passed legislation that was very similar to the directive.126 the dfc was not, however, able to keep digital protection measures off digital content. the dmca resulted in what many information activists and critical policy scholars see as a sea change in copyright policy and a set of obstacles to innovation and expression. gillespie argues that the dmca is “the most dramatic change in the history of u.s. copyright law” because it links copyright policy to specific technology for the first time.127 for some, the dmca is worse than the original white paper-model bill that the dfc helped to defeat. litman argues that the dmca as it emerged from years of wrangling was even more “pernicious” than the original, for being so long, confusing, and having a “laundry list” of narrow exceptions that do not appropriately balance the “sweeping new rights” given to rightsholders.128 her criticisms of the dmca’s weaknesses largely echo the sentiments held by some of the most longstanding dfc activists we interviewed. the rightsholder lobbyists we spoke to, by contrast, were divided on whether the exceptions were functional or not narrow enough. otherwise, they shared the view that the bill represented a working arrangement. so then, was it worth the fight? it is impossible a world in which the dmca was never passed or passed with major concessions to the dfc’s public interest concerns. technology companies have certainly been able to develop products and services—for instance, all search functions—under the dmca that may well have been impossible to execute with a policy that copyright-protected databases, or that made platforms share liability with their users. social media companies have enabled content to be rapidly shared, hyperlinked, remixed and indexed. ordinary users are now familiar with the fair use doctrine, the conscious use of which has been vastly expanded. in short, under the original bill, life would probably have been different, for better and worse. but in reality, the dfc and cic battled over balance in copyright because there was no way either side could avoid such a fight. interviewees on both sides repeatedly described alarm over how high the stakes were. the current law has indeed created obstacles to freedom of expression and exercise of fair use. the 1201 rulemaking exception has harsh limits, requiring users to organize and return every three years to defend what they have previously won. it does not explicitly recognize fair use as a reason to break encryption, and the exemptions are hard to use, even when users win them. as a recent study showed, many users are unaware that they might qualify for an exemption and how specific exemptions apply to their work. (the study also found that once users were notified, they could appropriately apply the exemption to their work.)129 similarly, sec. 512, which exempts isps from infringement charges if they take down work at a rightsholder’s request, has created freedom of expression problems. for example, the lumen database has ceaselessly recorded evidence that automated takedowns of legitimately fairly used material continue, and some copyright holders use takedown requests for censorship purposes.130 on the other hand, if we look at the 1201 exemptions granted since the passage of the dmca, we can see that more has changed than any of the combatants in the process expected. the seemingly smallest change to lehman’s original vision, this little exemption clause—considered a mere throwaway gesture at the time—has gradually changed the dmca itself more than any other provision. exemptions have been won by filmmakers; noncommercial creators such as vidders, remixers and makers of audiovisual political criticism; cybersecurity analysts; independent auto repair companies; software preservationists; and teachers.131 the kinds of exemptions granted have become more expansive and, once won, are typically renewed. indeed, the renewals have become so routine that in 2016, the copyright office held hearings to determine whether some should be made perpetual.132 the nearly-nixed exemption mechanism brokered by the dfc in the final moments of negotiations has resulted in durable changes to the meaning of the law. passage of the 2014 unlocking consumer choice and wireless competition act, the first legislative change to the dmca since its passing in 1998, resulted from a rigorous triennial exemptions debate.133 a lead ip lobbyist deeply involved in the ’90s legislative battle, steve metalitz, said that the exemption process was “the real afterlife of the dmca.”134 a numerical count of participation in and results of the exemptions process demonstrates sustained and consequential activity.135 public participants ranging from individuals without legal representation to grassroots organizations and coalitions earn new and expanded carveouts each hearing.136 1201 hearings to date: exemptions and participation137 2000138 2003139 2006140 2010141 2012142 2015143 2018144 comments145 235 50 74 19 674 40,000+146 181 replies147 129 338 35 56 18 50 77 rules148 2 2 3 2 1 6 1 expansions149 n/a 2 0 1 3 2 5 renewals150 n/a 0 3 3 1 1 4 while successful exemptions do not mitigate the real censorship and innovation-stifling effects of the dmca, they do provide a safety valve that would not exist without the dfc. these exemptions also continue to demonstrate the problems of the law more generally. as exemptions mount, so does evidence of the constraints on anticircumvention. (furthermore, because no exemption is ever permanently installed in the law, the financial burden on nonprofits to organize and file their requests for exemptions and renewals every three years cannot be overlooked.) the dfc’s work has also had institutional effects. for instance, alerting international diplomats at the wipo of the value of copyright exceptions and limitations began a new conversation. for representatives of many nations, this was the first time they encountered u.s. views that diverged from the official delegation’s position, and it opened the door to new discussions and alliances.151 the electronic frontier foundation (eff), long resistant both to washington politics and to ip issues, began to include copyright on its list of concerns.152 jonathan band also built on the relationships he forged with adler and the association of research libraries. he opened his own firm, with a strong focus on public interest in ip, and is counsel to the library copyright alliance. he has participated in many dmca waiver processes, among others. and gigi sohn, who had worked with the dfc as a ford foundation program officer but who had ultimately decided not to contribute funds to the coalition (to the disappointment of dfc members), launched the nonprofit public knowledge (pk) with david bollier using a ford foundation grant she received after leaving the foundation.153 pk took many of the dfc concerns as its own when it launched in 2001 but without the same incentives for discretion and collegiality.154 thus, pk has been a challenging collaborator for dfc members, but it continues to be active on a range of copyright issues in communication. pk, eff, and dfc joined forces, for example, when the stop online privacy act/protect ip act (sopa/pipa) legislation was proposed and backed by rightsholder interests. this act threatened to break the basic lookup functions of the internet in order to patrol piracy, but by working together, the alliance helped defeat it.155 the content industry had once again painted infringement as an existential threat to the economy despite a thriving online content sector, said band, who worked on the issue.156 he attributed the coordination of nonprofit and for-profit actors with an engaged public increasingly wellversed in information policy issues as elemental to defeating the legislation.157 the dfc created a policy network that still operates today. for instance, when the riaa sued telecommunications providers in the early 2000s over users’ downloading practices, verizon, among others, appealed to the dfc and won support for—and ultimately successfully defended—its position that the dmca exempted telecommunications providers from such infringements claims.158 “you formed ties and relationships,” recalled ed black. “gigi sohn and others stayed in the game. the longer it lasted, the more the relationships could deepen among the members. it allowed communication among a variety of players who might have interacted less consistently otherwise.”159 jonathan band commented, “even though the dfc doesn’t exist per se, its spirit continues, and we all still work together.”160 prue adler noted that dfc members still annually get together in washington, d.c. during restaurant week.161 the dfc also has successor organizations. the library copyright alliance, which band now represents, grew out of the dfc and continues to be an essential policy coalition for library interests. the recreate coalition, mostly composed of a younger generation of activists, deals with many of the same issues as the dfc, although, as adam eisgrau noted, the recreate coalition may be unaware of its heritage. “it’s fun to hear the 20somethings come up with new ideas that are actually old,” he said. and as a result of the dfc’s wins in the dmca negotiations, a now-lively new movement has formed: the “right to repair.”162 this movement advocates for interoperability broadly but especially in consumer and personal devices. it seeks dmca exemptions from anti-circumvention from the copyright tribunal, for the breaking of encryption in order to conduct repairs. while tpms are not necessarily difficult to crack, the act of doing so (barring a codified exception) still constitutes a crime under sec. 1201. selling tools that break tpms is also illegal under sec. 1201, a provision right to repair has also sought to remove from the law. like the dfc, which emphasized a balance between public and private interests in copyright protections, right to repair steeps its consumer rights agenda in a commercial argument. tinkering, modification, and personal repair, the movement argues, facilitates a robust secondary market for tools, aftermarket parts, repair services, and fixit guides. among the right to repair’s earliest victories was gaining a dmca exemption, using sec. 1201, for breaking mobile device encryption (often known as jailbreaking), the only subsequent legislation that has altered the dmca. the organization ifixit, which contributed to the jailbreaking exception, shares grassroots knowledge on repairing devices from phones to cameras to cars to hot tubs to old typewriters.163 the repair association (ra), the movement’s main trade consortia, counts 30 nonprofits. like the dfc, the coalition includes a strong library and public interest organization constituency. it also includes 20 corporate members. (co-founder kyle wiens of ifixit is on the repair association’s board of directors and is its head strategist.) the ra’s public-private composition distinctly resembles the dfc’s. this may be due in part to the group’s origins. the ra’s early members met through the 1201 hearings.164 the dfc’s influence on those hearings is indelible. the eff, who as members of the dfc developed their positions on digital copyright, provide strategic legal support to the ra (and others) in relation to the triennial hearings.165 the ra also collaborates with pk in a similar capacity—another organization drawn into ip policy issues through the dfc. like others who participate in the exemption process, ifixit’s wiens is under no illusion about the limits of dmca exemptions. they take enormous resources of time and legal knowledge, and they result in narrow exemptions. nevertheless, he sees the hearings as an opportunity to gain a public interest foothold and push for legislation at a state and national level. the ra has used the sec. 1201 exemption process to address issues from election security to environmental health (implicated in 1201 rules affecting the recycling of technology). the ra is using the dmca exemption process systematically; it has targeted ten areas in which it will file exemptions under sec. 1201 before the copyright tribunal.166 one of the right-to-repair movement’s high-profile issues, farm equipment repair, became an issue in the 2020 democratic primaries.167 reflecting on his coalition’s successes, wiens commented, “we stand on the shoulders of giants,” although he was not aware of the dfc itself.168 while not genetically dfc, the ra clearly emerges from the coalition’s historically overlooked copyright activism. as evidenced in the right to repair’s tactics, dfc’s activism also created a trope that became part of u.s. policymaking and public discourse: the need for balance. previously, commercial interests had depended on consumers’ anti-taping fears and telecoms’ deep lobbying connections. the argument for balance refocused the discussion on the constitutional purpose of copyright policy: to incentivize more cultural creation. hrrc executive ruth rodgers noted, “people understood what fair use was more [as a result of the dfc]. there were concessions made to fair use. that’s the long-term thing.”169 since then, many professional communities have articulated their own standards to apply fair use in a digital era, finding it a crucial tool for creating new culture.170 the trope is not without its critics. some copyright activists today critique the notion of balance as reifying the ultimately colonial merger of property and creativity, which, no matter the terms, they argue, inherently promotes a system of stratified, individual ownership over collective prosperity.171 for those in the global south who were not signatories nor invited participants in the berne convention and who have seen their creative resources commodified globally without local renumeration, balance can smack of neoliberal solutionism.172 within a u.s. context, however, the concept of balance, anchored to the u.s. constitution, has provided consistent pushback to copyright maximalism. in the 1990s and early 2000s, an alternative trope was developed by dfc member and ip academic jamie boyle and david bollier, who developed the notion of the “information commons,” invoking the specter of information enclosure.173 this formulation, however, never caught fire at the level of national policy. conclusion combatants on both sides have declared a flawed victory over the dmca. on a panel about the dfc at the washington college of law, band said, “i think sometimes people don’t see what didn’t happen. the motto for the dfc could be, ‘it could have been worse.’”174 pamela samuelson took the longer view: “if you look at the world bruce lehman wanted in 1995, and the one we have today, ours looks a lot more like the one i was arguing for.”175 ip advocates noted that the dmca has been, with the exception of the 1201 exemption process, stable and has accomplished core goals of the ip side. “‘happy’ and ‘won’ are not applicable to the legislative process,” said joel jankowsky. “a legislative process is successful when both sides are unhappy. dmca is a pretty good example of that. it is a crude instrument that was hammered out to get where we are today.”176 the history of the dfc demonstrates the greater role public-interest actors played in establishing the basic terms of ip on the internet than previously acknowledged. the coalition’s history demonstrates that minor wins, like the libraries’ exemption mechanism, can become more important than anticipated. it shows that major wins that stop bad policy, such as the killing of database copyright legislation, need to be remembered as much as wins that create functional policy. consumer and public interests can collaborate productively and in good faith with commercial actors if given clearly defined goals. public-interest and nonprofit actors can bring to the negotiating process ideological strength and rhetorical advantage, all of which can expand public awareness and responsiveness of legislators in an enduring way. just as importantly, the history of the dfc reveals the hidden long tail of public-interest activism. the dfc put in motion alliances and relationships that have lasted decades and been activated in other fights. it created the capacity for rapid responses to crises. it paved the way for new organizations. its actions changed law and opened possibilities for new public interest activity. all those relationships and institutions will be tested again. the dmca was just one major stop on the road to digital copyright policy. the eu’s copyright directive, discussions about sec. 230 of the communications decency act/title v of the telecommunications act of 1996 (47 u.s.c. sec. 230), and the copyright office’s 2020 report on sec. 512—which generally supported the rightsholders’ argument that sec. 512 was not adequately protecting them from internet piracy—all mobilize copyright advocates, whose numbers and connections continue to grow.177 as ed black commented, “it’s not a closed chapter. the arguments continue. the ideas that sparked the problems are alive and well and living in different sets of clothing.”178 notes we thank the staff of the program on information justice and intellectual property at american university’s washington college of law, especially meredith jacob and michael palmedo, for patiently facilitating access to the dfc archive over months. we thank our interviewees for their time and review. we thank mariana sanchez santos, a phd student at american university, for assistance in research. 1 the digital millennium copyright act, pub. l. no. 105-304 (1998). 2 robert schwartz and seth greenstein, interview with authors, august 28, 2018. 3 information infrastructure task force, intellectual property and the national information infrastructure: a preliminary draft of the report of the working group on intellectual property rights (1994). 4 bruce lehman, interview with authors, march 15, 2019. 5 u.s. government working group on intellectual property, green paper on intellectual property and the national information infrastructure 130 (1994); national research council, bits of power: issues in global access to scientific data (washington, d.c.: national academies press, 1997), 157-159. 6 national research council, bits of power, 160. 7 jessica litman, digital copyright: protecting intellectual property on the internet (new york: prometheus books, 2001), 135-140. 8 litman, digital copyright, 143-145. 9 linda birt, suzanne scott, debbie cavers, christine campbell, and fiona walter, “member checking: a tool to enhance trustworthiness or merely a nod to validation?” qualitative health research 26, no. 13 (2016): 1802–11. 10 james boyle, shamans, software, and spleens: law and the construction of the information society (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1996); tarleton gillespie, wired shut: copyright and the shape of digital culture (cambridge, ma: mit press, 2007); jessica litman, digital copyright. 11 litman, digital copyright, 194. 12 james boyle, the public domain: enclosing the commons of the mind (new haven, ct: yale university press, 2008), 59. 13 bill d. herman, the fight over digital rights: the politics of copyright and technology (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2013), 64. 14 gillespie, wired shut, 176. 15 hector postigo, the digital rights movement: the role of technology in subverting digital copyright (cambridge, ma: mit press, 2012), 45-51, 188. 16 julie cohen, configuring the networked self: law, code, and the play of everyday practice (new haven, ct: yale university press, 2012); lawrence lessig, code: version 2.0, 2nd ed. (new york: basic books, 2006); boyle, shamans; gillespie, wired shut. 17 milton mueller, christiane pagé, and brenden kuerbis, “civil society and the shaping of communication–information policy: four decades of advocacy,” the information society 20, no. 3 (2004): 169-185. 18 philip napoli, “public interest media advocacy and activism as a social movement,” annals of the international communication association 33, no. 1 (2009): 385-429. 19 joe karaganis, “cultures of collaboration in media research,” in communications research in action: scholar-activist collaborations for a democratic public sphere, eds. philip napoli and minna aslama, (new york: fordham university press, 2011), 287-312. 20 frank r. baumgartner, jeffrey m. berry, marie hojnacki, david c. kimball, and beth l. leech, lobbying and policy change: who wins, who loses, and why (chicago: university of chicago press, 2009). 21 litman, digital copyright, 145. 22 jamie love, interview with authors, october 5, 2018. 23 angela j. aguayo, documentary resistance: social change and participatory media (new york: oxford university press, 2019); john downing, ed. encyclopedia of social movement media (thousand oaks, ca: sage, 2011); sue currey jansen, jefferson pooley, and lora taub-pervizpour, eds., media and social justice (new york: palgrave macmillan, 2011); 24 see for instance, part vi, “law, regulation and ethics,” in routledge reader on electronic media history, eds. donald g. godfrey and susan l. brinson (new york: routledge, 2015), 492-581. 25 along with work specifically on the dmca referenced in this article, we note, inter alia, such examples as allison perlman, public interests: media advocacy and struggles over u.s. television (new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press, 2016); robert b. horwitz, “broadcast reform revisited: reverend everett c. parker and the ‘standing’ case,” communication review 2, no. 3 (1997): 311; whitfield diffie and susan landau, privacy on the line: the politics of wiretapping and encryption (cambridge, ma: mit press, 1998), particularly its discussion of the clipper chip; patricia aufderheide, the daily planet (minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press, 1999), particularly its look at public broadcasting, access cable, dbs set-asides, and regulation of children’s television; victor pickard, america’s battle for media democracy: the triumph of corporate libertarianism and the future of media reform (new york: cambridge university press, 2015), particularly its examination of the fairness doctrine and fcc public interest standards; robert mcchesney, telecommunications, mass media, & democracy: the battle for the control of u.s. broadcasting, 1928-1935 (new york: oxford university press, 1993). 26 napoli, public interest media advocacy, 388. 27 james madison, federalist no. 43 “the same subject continued (the powers conferred by the constitution further considered),” the independent journal, january 23, 1788; u.s. constitution, art. 1, §8, cl. 8; lewis hyde, common as air: revolution, art, and ownership (new york: farrar, straus and giroux, 2010). 28 gregory miller, “reliability and alliance behavior,” in the shadow of the past reputation and military alliances before the first world war (new york: cornell university press, 2011), 45-55. 29 michael levine and jennifer forrence, “regulatory capture, public interest, and the public agenda: toward a synthesis,” journal of law, economics, and organization 6 (1990): 167-198. 30 william lowry and scott krummenacher, “coalitions and conservation: conditional impacts of coalitions on ballot measures for open space,” review of policy research 34, no. 3 (2017): 357-358. 31 litman, digital copyright, 90. 32 information infrastructure task force, u.s. department of commerce, the national information infrastructure: agenda for action, 58 fed. reg. 49025-01, 1993 wl 365171 (1993). 33 lehman interview, march 15, 2019. 34 pamela samuelson, interview with patricia aufderheide, september 28, 2018. 35 samuelson interview, september 28, 2018. 36 pamela samuelson, “the u.s. digital agenda at wipo,” virginia journal of international law 37, no. 2 (1997): 369-439; pamela samuelson, “copyright and digital libraries,” communications of the acm 38, no. 4 (1995):15-ff; pamela samuelson, “the copyright grab,” wired, january 1, 1996, https://www.wired.com/1996/01/white-paper/ (accessed july 11, 2019). 37 jerome reichman and pamela samuelson, “intellectual property rights in data?” vanderbilt law review 50, no. 51 (1997): 52–166. 38 mark davison, “database protection: lessons from europe, congress, and wipo,” case western reserve law review 57, no. 4 (2016): 829–54. 39 davison, “database protection,” 844. 40 national research council, bits of power. 41 peter jaszi, interview with the authors, june 6, 2018. 42 benjamin kaplan, an unhurried view of copyright, republished (and with contributions from friends) (newark: lexisnexis matthew bender, 2005); peter jaszi, “on the author effect: contemporary copyright and collective creativity.” in the construction of authorship: textual appropriation in law and literature, eds. martha woodmansee and peter jaszi (durham, nc: duke university press, 1994). 43 martha woodmansee and peter jaszi, the construction of authorship: textual appropriation in law and literature. (durham, nc: duke university press, 1994). 44 jaszi interview, june 6, 2018. 45 prue adler, interview with bryan bello, august 20, 2018. 46 adler interview, august 20, 2018. 47 “sign up – dfc meeting. dfc member sign-in sheet,” 12 february 1998, folder 2, box 1, digital future coalition archive, program on information justice and intellectual property, washington college of law, american university, washington, dc. (hereafter dfca-pijip). 48 adler interview, august 20, 2018. 49 james lardner, fast forward: hollywood, the japanese, and the onslaught of the vcr, 1st ed. (new york: norton, 1987). 50 anonymous, interview with authors, october 2, 2018. 51 svea windwehr and christoph schmon, “our eu policy principles: interoperability,” electronic frontier foundation, june 18, 2020, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/our-eu-policy-principles-interoperability. 52 sega enterprises ltd. v. accolade, inc., 977 f.2d 1510 (9th cir. 1992). 53 jonathan band, interview with authors, june 22, 2018. 54 band interview, june 22, 2018; schwartz and greenstein interview, august 28, 2018. 55 curtis karnow, “indirect liability on the internet and the loss of control” (inet 1999 proceedings), internet society, 1999, internet archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20100219005230/http:/www.isoc.org/isoc/conferences/inet/ 99/proceedings/3e/3e_2.htm (accessed july 1, 2020). 56 “business member companies,” business software alliance, 1998, internet archive http://web.archive.org/web/19991012032644fw_/http://bsa.org/about/index.html (accessed july 1, 2020). 57 “the cic membership,” creative incentive coalition, 1998, internet archive, https://web.archive.org/web/19980110133715/http:/www.cic.org/memb.htm (accessed july 1, 2020). 58 see, feist publications, inc. v. rural telephone service co., 499 u.s. 340 (1991). 59 ed black, email to authors, april 17, 2019. 60 ed black, interview with authors, january 7, 2019. 61 chris byrne, “statement of chris byrne silicon graphics, inc. on behalf of the information technology industry council (‘iti’). before the senate committee of foreign relations on the world intellectual property organizations (‘wipo’) copyright treaty and the wipo performances and phonograms treaty,” 10 september 1998, folder 6, box 2, dfca-pijip; patricia schroeder, letter to association of american publishers, inc. constituents, 20 january 1998, folder 1, box 2, dfca-pijip; peter jaszi, letter to u.s. senator orin hatch, chairman of the senate judiciary committee, 20 april 1998, folder 1, box 2, dfca-pijip; zoe lofgren, letter to u.s. house representative howard coble, chairman of the subcommittee on courts and intellectual property, committee on the judiciary, 22 april 1998, folder 1, box 2, dfca-pijip. 62 byrne, 10 september 1998, dfca-pijip; schroeder to association of american publishers, 20 january 1998, dfca-pijip; jaszi to orin hatch, 20 april 1998, dfcapijip; lofgren to howard coble, 22 april 1998, dfca-pijip. 63 jaszi interview june 6, 2018; schwartz and greenstein interview, august 28, 2018. 64 adler interview, august 20, 2018. 65 anonymous interview, october 2, 2018. 66 band interview, june 22, 2018. 67 “the power of coalitions: a forum on public interest intellectual property advocacy honoring prudence s. adler,” washington college of law, american university, april 17, 2019. 68 love interview, june 29, 2018. 69 schwartz and greenstein interview, august 28, 2018. 70 sens. chuck grassley and paul simon, letter to senator mark hatfield, 25 september, 1995, folder 1, box 2, dfca-pijip. 71 s. treaty doc. no. 105-17 (1997); 2186 u.n.t.s. 121; 36 i.l.m. 65 (1997). 72 seth greenstein, email to select dfc members, 10 december 1996, folder 1, box 2, dfca-pijip. 73 greenstein to select dfc members, 10 december 1996, dfca-pijip. 74 greenstein to select dfc members, 10 december 1996, dcfa-pijip. 75 adam eisgrau, interview with authors, december 18, 2018. 76 joel jankowsky, interview with patricia aufderheide, february 5, 2019. 77 eisgrau interview, december 19, 2018. 78 peter choy, email to christie owens, 20 december 1996, folder 6, box 2, dfcapijip. 79 national research council, bits of power, 134. 80 “wipo treaties embrace balance: implementing legislation should preserve it. unidentified dfc boilerplate letter,” 15 january 1997, folder 6, box 2, dfca-pijip. 81 lehman interview, march 15, 2018. 82 prue adler, email to the digital future coalition, 12 november 1997, folder 7, box 1, dfca-pijip. 83 ruth rodgers, interview with patricia aufderheide, february 7, 2019. 84 rodgers interview, february 7, 2019. 85 “dfc – our current issues, dfc webpage,” 1 june 1998, folder 1, box 1, dfcapijip. 86 adler, email to the digital future coalition, 12 november 1997. 87 “dfc – our current issues,” june 1, 1998, dfca-pijip. 88 ruth rodgers, letter to steve castle, congressional quarterly, 21 january 1998, folder 3, box 1, digital future coalition archive, pijip; dfc, “voters of the house of representatives: don’t miss the thousands of wake-up calls like these” (advertisement in congressional quarterly), ca. 1998, folder 3, box 1, dfca-pijip. 89 “dfc – our current issues,” 1 june 1998. 90 adam eisgrau, email to helen brunner, 12 november 1997, folder 7, box 1, dfcapijip. 91 rodgers interview, february 7, 2019. 92 herman, the fight over digital rights, 39. 93 schroeder to association of american publishers inc. constituents, 20 january 1998, dfca-pijip. 94 jeri clausing, “entering the net copyright debate, johnny cash,” the new york times, september 18, 1997, http://movies2.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/091897copyright (accessed july 11, 2019). 95 schwartz and greenstein interview, august 28, 2018. 96 “creative incentive coalition introduction. cic webpage,” 12 february 1998, folder 2, box 1, dcfa-pijip. 97 lehman interview, march 15, 2019. 98 cic, “voters of the house of representatives: don’t miss the thousands of wake-up calls like these” (advertisement in congressional quarterly), ca. 1998, folder 7, box 1, digital future coalition archive, pijip; cic, “voters of the house of representatives: don’t miss the thousands of wake-up calls like these” (advertisement), ca. 1998, dfca-pijip; cic, “stealing is ______.: a) wrong” (advertisement in congressional quarterly, ca. 1998, folder 3, box 1, dcfa-pijip. 99 tarleton gillespie, “characterizing copyright in the classroom: the cultural work of antipiracy campaigns,” communication, culture and critique 2, no. 3 (2009): 274-318. 100 anonymous interview, march 15, 2019. 101 “the power of coalitions: a forum on public interest intellectual property advocacy honoring prudence s. adler”, washington college of law, american university, april 17, 2019. 102 “the power of coalitions,” april 17, 2019. 103 schwartz and greenstein interview, august 28, 2018. 104 skip lockwood, email to select dfc members, 26 march 1998, folder 1, box 2, dfca-pijip. 105 schroeder, letter to association of american publishers, inc. constituents, 20 january 1998, folder 1, box 2, dfca-pijip. 106 u.s. congress, senate, “message from the president of the united states transmitting world intellectual property organization copyright treaty…signed by the united states on april 12, 1997,” wipo contract treaty (wct) (1996) and wipo performances and phonograms treaty (wppt) (1996), 105th cong., 1st sess., 1997, treaty doc. 105-17, https://www.congress.gov/105/cdoc/tdoc17/cdoc-105tdoc17.pdf (accessed july 17, 2019). 107 eisgrau interview, december 19, 2018. 108 schwartz and greenstein interview, august 28, 2018. 109 “dfc membership dues. unidentified internal dfc financial record,” ca. 2000, folder 1, box 1, dfca-pijip. 110 schwartz and greenstein interview, august 28, 2018. 111 schwartz and greenstein interview, august 28, 2018. 112 “cash flow report 4/30/96 through 5/20/97. unidentified internal dfc financial record,” 2 october 1997, folder 7, box 1, dfca-pijip. 113 schwartz and greenstein interview, august 28, 2018. 114 love interview, june 29, 2018. 115 band interview, june 22, 2018. 116 lehman interview, march 15, 2019. 117 jaszi interview, june 6, 2018; eisgrau interview, december 19, 2018. 118 eisgrau interview, december 19, 2018. 119 jerome reichman and paul uhlir, “database protection at the crossroads: recent developments and their impact on science and technology,” berkeley technology law journal 14, no. 793 (1999): 802, 803. 120 reichman and uhlir, “database protection at the crossroads,” 822. 121 davison, “database protection,” 844, 845, 853. 122 davison, 844, 845, 853. 123 bruce lehman, message to author, march 15, 2019. 124 davison, “database protection,” 829. 125 davison, 829. 126 davison, 852, 853. 127 gillespie, wired shut, 183. 128 litman, digital copyright, 76. 129 patricia aufderheide, aram sinnreich, and joseph graf, “the limits of the limits of the law: how useable are dmca anticircumvention exceptions?” international journal of communication 12, no. 1 (2018): 4353–4372. 130 “lumen database,” https://www.lumendatabase.org/ (accessed june 29, 2020). 131 patricia aufderheide and peter jaszi, reclaiming fair use: how to put balance back in copyright, 2nd ed. (chicago; london: the university of chicago press, 2018), 84-85. 132 aufderheide and jaszi, reclaiming fair use, 43-55. 133 unlocking consumer choice and wireless competition act, u.s. code 17 § 1201 (2014); brian fung, “what a new law about cellphone unlocking has to do with coffee, cars and consumer freedom,” washington post, july 28, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/07/28/what-a-new-lawabout-cell-phone-unlocking-has-to-do-with-coffee-cars-and-consumer-freedom/ (accessed july 20, 2019); kyle wein, message to author, may 13, 2019. 134 steve metalitz, message to author, december 17, 2018. 135 see table 1 notes 2-9. 136 gabriel j. michael, “politics and rulemaking at the copyright office,” journal of information technology & politics 11, no. 1 (january 2, 2014): 70–77. 137 michael efficiently summarizes the exemption process: “the copyright office first issues a notice of inquiry, before any specific rules are being considered. comments submitted during this period are 'initial' comments. after initial comments have been received, the office issues a notice of proposed rulemaking, specifying proposed rules and soliciting comments on those rules. comments submitted during this period are designated 'reply' comments, as they often explicitly position themselves in support or opposition to initial comments. public hearings are held after both comment periods have ended, and eventually, the copyright office issues its final decision on rules.” see gabriel j. michael, “politics and rulemaking at the copyright office,” journal of information technology & politics 11, no. 1 (january 2, 2014): 64–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2013.872073. the process is explained directly by the library of congress in each exemption ruling, posted in the federal register. see, u.s. copyright office, “exemption to prohibition on circumvention of copyright protection systems for access control technologies,” federal register 83, no. 208 (october 26, 2018): 54010-54031. 138 u.s. copyright office, “exemption to prohibition on circumvention of copyright protection systems for access control technologies,” federal register 65, no. 209 (october 27, 2000): 64556–64574. 139 u.s. copyright office, “exemption to prohibition on circumvention of copyright protection systems for access control technologies,” federal register 68, no. 211 (october 31, 2003): 62011-62018. 140 u.s. copyright office, “exemption to prohibition on circumvention of copyright protection systems for access control technologies,” federal register 71, no. 227 (november 27, 2006): 68472-68480. 141 u.s. copyright office, “exemption to prohibition on circumvention of copyright protection systems for access control technologies,” federal register 75, no. 143 (july 27, 2010): 43825-43839. 142 u.s. copyright office, “exemption to prohibition on circumvention of copyright protection systems for access control technologies,” federal register 77, no. 208 (october 26, 2012): 65260-65279. 143 u.s. copyright office, “exemption to prohibition on circumvention of copyright protection systems for access control technologies,” federal register 80, no. 208 (october 28, 2015): 65944-65964. 144 u.s. copyright office, “exemption to prohibition on circumvention of copyright protection systems for access control technologies,” federal register 83, no. 208 (october 26, 2018): 54010-54031. 145 in a given rulemaking process, the body of public comments produced reflect heterogenous forms of participation and indicate different experiences with §1201 of the dmca. comments may be coordinated and express unified support for an exemption among a well-organized group of commonly concerned parties. participation flashpoints may emerge as changing social and economic norms generate new conflicts of interest. mirror exemptions may be proposed by commenting parties operating independently and potentially unaware of one another. such activity may signal a future flashpoint. comments may also be novel with individual parties recommending unique exemptions that are not echoed by others. finally, comments may be illegible in the sense that what is communicated does not meet the submission standards enforced by the library of congress. in summary, one cannot cleanly distinguish how many unique exemptions are proposed through the commenting process and thus produce a clean metric around the efficacy of public participation through the dmca’s triennial rulemaking process. it can be said that, so far, public participation modifies the power of §1201 every rulemaking. these observations are derived directly from the rulemaking materials archived online by the copyright office for each rulemaking. see https://www.copyright.gov/1201/. see also the “final rule” entered in the federal register for each hearing, notes 2 – 8. 146 comments supporting a right-to-repair exemption for consumer electronics accounts for this outlier. not an aberration though; the swell of participation was strategically coordinated by the advocacy group ifixit and the electronic frontier foundation through a campaign they launched through reddit. see julia bluff, “we sent 40,000 comments demanding reform to the copyright office,” ifixit, february 10, 2015. https://www.ifixit.com/news/copyright-office. 147 michael, “politics and rulemaking at the copyright office,” 67. as michael explains, comments submitted following the initial open comment phase “are designated 'reply' comments, as they often explicitly position themselves in support or opposition to initial comments.” 148 rules constitute new exemptions. exemptions can’t be cleanly counted from year-toyear or as a sum total registered at the end of each rulemaking. this is because exemptions are sometimes combined and expanded and thus do not purely constitute a renewal. by our count, renewals have been denied just three time – once in the 2006 hearing concerning website “filtering software applications” previously exempted in 2000 and renewed in 2003; twice in the 2010 hearing concerning a proprietary digital recording medium (exempted 2006) and library audiovisual media (exempted 2006) that would later be recovered through an expansion. see notes 2-6. 149 see note above 150 see note 12 151 love interview, june 29, 2018; eisgrau interview, december 18, 2018; sarah deutsch, interview with the authors, may 9, 2019. 152 jaszi interview, june 6, 2018; deutsch, message to author, may 9, 2019. 153 jaszi interview, june 6, 2018. 154 anonymous interview, september 29, 2018. 155 annemarie bridy, “copyright policymaking as procedural democratic process: a discourse-theoretic perspective on acta, sopa, and pipa,” cardozo arts & entertainment law journal 30 (2012): 153-164. 156 jonathan band, “the sopa-tpp nexus,” joint pijip/tls research paper series, no. 2012-06 (washington, d.c.: american university washington college of law, 2012), 48-52. 157 band, “the sopa-tpp nexus,” 43, 44. 158 deutsch interview, may 9, 2019. 159 black interview, january 7, 2019. 160 jonathan band, “the power of coalitions: a forum on public interest intellectual property advocacy honoring prudence s. adler”, washington college of law, american university, april 17, 2019. 161 “the power of coalitions: a forum on public interest intellectual property advocacy honoring prudence s. adler”, washington college of law, american university, april 17, 2019. 162 u.s. copyright office, section 1201 rulemaking: seventh triennial proceeding to determine exemptions to the prohibition on circumvention recommendation of the acting register of copyrights, by karyn a. temple (washington, d.c.: u.s. copyright office, 2018): 342. 163 kyle wien, interview with authors, may 13, 2019. 164 wien interview, may 13, 2019. 165 wien interview, may 13, 2019. 166 wien interview, may 13, 2019. 167 makena kelly, “elizabeth warren comes out in support of a national right-to-repair law for farm equipment,” the verge, march 27, 2019, https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/27/18284011/elizabeth-warren-apple-right-to-repairjohn-deere-law-presidential-campaign-iowa; nathan proctor, “right to repair is now a national issue,” wired, april 1, 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/right-to-repairelizabeth-warren-farmers/ (accessed february 2, 2020). 168 wein, message to author, may 13, 2019. 169 rodgers interview, february 7, 2019. 170 aufderheide and jaszi, reclaiming fair use, 84-85. 171 alan story, “‘balanced’ copyright: not a magic solving word,” intellectual property watch (blog), february 27, 2012, https://www.ip-watch.org/2012/02/27/‘balanced’copyright-not-a-magic-solving-word/ (accessed june 30, 2019). 172 story, “‘balanced’ copyright.” 173 david bollier, public assets, private profits: reclaiming the american commons in an age of market enclosure (washington, d.c.: new america foundation, 2001); david bollier and tim watts, saving the information commons: a public interest agenda in digital media (washington, dc: new america foundation & public knowledge, 2002); boyle, the public domain. 174 “public interest copyright advocacy and fair use education: 1995-2015,” program on information justice and intellectual property, american university washington college of law, http://www.pijip.org/copyrightadvocacy2015/ (accessed december 27, 2019). 175 pamela samuelson, message to author, september 28, 2018. 176 joel jankowsky, message to author, february 5, 2019. 177 oj l 130, 17.5.2019, p. 92–125; 47 u.s.c. § 230; communications decency act of 1996, (cda), pub. l. no. 104-104 (tit. v), 110 stat. 133; united states copyright office, section 512 of title 17: a report on the register of copyrights (washington, d.c.: u.s. copyright office, 2020) https://www.copyright.gov/policy/section512/ (accessed july 1, 2020). 178 “the power of coalitions: a forum on public interest intellectual property advocacy honoring prudence s. adler,” washington college of law, american university, april 17, 2019. appendix 1 dfc membership 1996 98 (the dmca years)1 org2 s3 size4 reps5 y6 description7 alliance for public and technology n 300 ruth holder 96 "to foster broad access to affordable, usable information and communication services and technology." american association of law libraries n 4,800 robert oakley, mary alice baish 96 "provides leadership in the field of legal information, to foster professional growth of law librarians and to develop the profession of law librarianship." american t 30 peter choy, 96 "advocates ip policies that carefully balance strong protection committee for christie owens, and incentives for motivation with the public interest goals of interoperable jon band, tom interoperability, open systems and fair competition." systems gan, lowell sachs american council of learned societies n 51 douglas bennet 96 "supports humanistic research efforts and helps meet the present and future needs of humanistic scholarship." american historical association n 15,000 bonnie hedges 96 "the promotion of historical studies, the preservation of historical documents and the dissemination of research." american library association n 56,444 adam eisgrau 96 "provide leadership for the development, promotion, and improvement of library and information services." art libraries society of north america n 1,500 marylyn snow 96 "includes architecture and art librarians, visual resources professionals, artists, curators, educators, publishers, and others interested in visual arts information." association of american geographers n n/a ron abler 96 "advances professional studies in geography and encourages the application of geographic research in education, government, and business." association of research libraries n 121 prue adler 96 "to influence forces affecting the future of research libraries in the process of scholarly communication." committee of n n/a peter jaszi 96 n/a concerned intellectual property educators computer & t 25 gregory gorman 96 "represents a broad cross-section of the computer and communication telecommunication industry." industry association conference on n 7,500 andrea lunsford, 96 "actively concerned with the teaching of composition in college jim porter colleges and universities." composition and communication consortium of social science associations n 90 howard silver 96 "advocacy organization for the social and behavioral sciences." consumer federation of america n 240 bradley stillman 96 "advances the consumer interest through advocacy and education." consumer project on technology n n/a jamie love 96 "investigate consumer issues presented by new technologies, including information technologies." electronic frontier foundation n n/a lori fena 96 "ensure that civil liberties are protected as new communications technologies emerge." electronic privacy information center n n/a marc rotenberg 96 "focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues relating to the national information infrastructure." home recording t n/a seth greenstein, 96 "dedicated to preserving the right to purchase and use home rights coalition bob schwartz, audio and video recording products for noncommercial ruth rodgers, purposes." jeff turner medical library association n 5,000 mary langman 96 "to serve the needs of health information specialists." modern language association n 31,700 phyllis franklin 96 "promotes study, criticism, and research in the modern languages and their literatures." national council of teachers of english n 100,000 patti stock 96 "devoted to improving the teaching of english and the language arts at all levels of education." national education association n 2,200,000 barbara yentzner 96 "committed to advancing the cause of public education." national humanities alliance n 750,000 john hammer 96 "represents the humanities as a whole." national school boards association n 95,000 gus steinhilber 96 "advocacy organization for public school governance." national writers union n 4,200 jonathan tasini 96 "the largest union for freelance writers in the u.s." people for the american way action fund n 300,000 jill lesser 96* "through public education, litigation, and lobbying defends americans' fundamental liberties." special libraries association n 14,000 lois schoenbrun 96 "serving the information profession, including librarians, information managers, brokers, and consultants." american association of legal publishers n n/a eleanor lewis 97 n/a college art association n 15,000 susan ball 97 serve "those who by vocation or avocation are concerned about and/or committed to the practice of art, teaching, and research of and about the visual arts and humanities." computer n n/a karen coyle, paul 97 "influence decisions regarding the development and use of professionals for hyland computers... provide the public and policymakers with social assessments of the power and limitations of computers." responsibility consortium for school networking n n/a sherry ettleson 97 "further the development and use of telecommunications in k 12 education." international n 40,000 sherry ettleson, 97 "promotes appropriate uses of technology to support and society for leslie harris improve teaching and learning." technology in education national n 1,100 jeff burnet, 97 "promoting high standards of educational quality and ethical association of chris collins behavior." independent schools national initiative for a networked cultural heritage n n/a david green 97 "formed to assure the fullest possible participation of the cultural sector in the new digitally networked environment." society of american archivists n n/a susan fox 97 "serves the needs of its members and provides leadership to help ensure the identification, preservation, and use of the nation's historical record." society for cinema studies n n/a robert kolker 97 "a professional organization of college and university educators, filmmakers, historians, critics, scholars, and others devoted to the study of the moving image." u.s. catholic conference n n/a pat canan, katherine grincewich, michael hill 97 n/a u.s. distance learning association n n/a glenn kessler 97 "to promote the development and application of distance learning for education and training." visual resources association n n/a kathe albrecht 97 "to further research and education in the field of visual resources and to promote a spirit of cooperation among the members of the profession." american association of school administrators n 16,500 n/a 98 "improving the condition of youth; preparing schools and school systems for the 21st century; connecting schools and communities; enhancing the quality of school leaders." association for computers and the humanities n n/a n/a 98 "devoted to disseminating information about work in the field of humanities computing and encouraging the development and dissemination of software for research." chief officers of state library agencies n n/a n/a 98 "to further state library agency relationships with federal government and national organizations and to initiate cooperative action for the improvement of library services." music library association n n/a n/a 98 "mla provides a forum for study and action on issues that affect music libraries and their users." 1 membership is represented by organization name (org), financial structure (s) with the categories of nonprofit (n) and trade group (t), the membership size of the organization (size), representatives’ names (reps), the year the organization joined the dfc (y) with an asterisks (*) indicating one year membership, and a quoted summary of the organization’s mission statement (description). the roster is listed in alphabetical order by the year the organization joined the dfc starting in reverse chronological order. 2 our record of organizations was compiled respectively from a 1998 prepared written testimony to congress (in which members were listed), two working rosters, and a sign in sheet. see peter jaszi, “testimony of the digital future coalition before the senate foreign relations committee,” 10 september 1998, folder 6, box 2, digital future coalition archive, program on information justice and intellectual property, washington college of law, american university, washington, dc. (hereafter dfca-pijip); “members and contacts – dfc meeting. dfc roster,” 2 october 1997, folder 8, box 2, dfca-pijip; “members and contacts – dfc meeting. dfc roster,” 12 february 1996, folder 8, box 2, dfca-pijip; “sign up – dfc meeting. dfc member sign-in sheet,” 12 february 1996, folder 2, box 1, dfca-pijip. 3 organizational details (structure, size, representatives, year joined, and description) were partially compiled from an archived print out of dfc’s membership webpage ca. 1996. see “dfc – organizational biographies. dfc webpage,” 5 february 1996, folder 8, box 2, dfca-pijip. descriptions of groups not listed in the aforementioned document that joined the dfc later were acquired via the wayback machine. we selected captures of these organizations’ websites as close to the year they joined the dfc as possible to reflect accurate membership size and sense of mission. descriptions were excerpted from the “about us” page or equivalent. 4 “dfc – organizational biographies. dfc webpage,” 5 february 1996, dfca-pijip. 5 “dfc – organizational biographies. dfc webpage,” 5 february 1996, dfca-pijip. 6 “dfc – organizational biographies. dfc webpage,” 5 february 1996, dfca-pijip. 7 “dfc – organizational biographies. dfc webpage,” 5 february 1996, dfca-pijip. appendix 2 1. jessica litman, digital copyright: protecting intellectual property on the internet (new york: prometheus books, 2001), 90. 2. information infrastructure task force, u.s. department of commerce, the national information infrastructure: agenda for action, 58 fed. reg. 49025-01, 1993 wl 365171 (1993). 3. prue adler, interview with bryan bello, august 20, 2018. 4. litman, digital copyright, 90. 5. national research council, bits of power: issues in global access to scientific data. washington, d.c.: national academies press, 1997. 1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 6. information infrastructure task force, intellectual property and the national information infrastructure: a preliminary draft of the report of the working group on intellectual property rights (1994). 7. litman, digital copyright, 90. 8. information infrastructure task force, intellectual property and the national information infrastructure: the report of the working group on intellectual property rights (1995). 9. u.s. congress, house, nii copyright protection act of 1995, hr 2441 104th cong., 1st sess., september 29, 1995. https://www.congress.gov/bill/104th-congress/housebill/2441/text; u.s. congress, senate, nii copyright protection act of 1995, s 1284 104th cong., 1st sess., september 28, 1995. https://www.congress.gov/bill/104thcongress/senate-bill/1284/text. 10. jonathan band, interview with authors, june 22, 2018; peter jaszi, interview with authors, june 6, 2018; adler interview, august 20, 2018. 11. u.s. congress, house, database investment and intellectual property antipiracy act of 1996, hr 3531 104th cong., 2d sess., introduced in house may 5, 1996. https://www.congress.gov/bill/104th-congress/house-bill/3531/text. 12. litman, digital copyright, 128. 13. pamela samuelson, “the u.s. digital agenda at wipo. (symposium: intellectual property law in the international marketplace)”, virginia journal of international law, 37(2), (1997): 369-439. 14. samuelson, “wipo.” 15. william clinton, “message from the president of the united states transmitting world intellectual property organization copyright treaty and the world intellectual property organization performances and phonograms treaty, done at geneva on december 20, 1996, and signed by the united states on april 12, 1997”. (july 28, 1997). retrieved from https://www.congress.gov/105/cdoc/tdoc17/cdoc105tdoc17.pdf. 16. litman, digital copyright, 149. 17. u.s. congress, house, collections of information antipiracy act, hr 2652, 105th cong., 1st sess., october 09, 1997. https://www.congress.gov/bill/105thcongress/house-bill/2652/text. 18. robert schwartz and seth greenstein, interview with authors, august 28, 2018; sarah deutsch, interview with authors, may 9, 2019. https://www.congress.gov/bill/104th-congress/house-bill/2441/text?r=1&s=3 https://www.congress.gov/bill/104th-congress/house-bill/2441/text?r=1&s=3 https://www.congress.gov/bill/104th-congress/senate-bill/1284/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/104th-congress/senate-bill/1284/text https://www.congress.gov/105/cdoc/tdoc17/cdoc-105tdoc17.pdf https://www.congress.gov/105/cdoc/tdoc17/cdoc-105tdoc17.pdf https://www.congress.gov/bill/105th-congress/house-bill/2652/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/105th-congress/house-bill/2652/text 19. schwartz and greenstein interview, august 28, 2018; deutsch interview, may 9, 2019. 20. the digital millennium copyright act, pub. l. no. 105-304 (1998); jerome reichman and paul uhlir. “database protection at the crossroads: recent developments and their impact on science and technology.” berkeley technology law journal 14, no. 793 (1999): 793–838. 21. u.s. congress, house, collections of information antipiracy act, hr 354, 105th cong., 1st sess., january 19, 1999. https://www.congress.gov/bill/106thcongress/house-bill/354/text. 22. band interview, june 22, 2018; jaszi interview, june 6, 2018; adler interview, august 20, 2018. 23. u.s. congress, house, database and collections of information misappropriation act, hr 3621, 108th cong., 1st sess., october 03, 2003. https://www.congress.gov/bill/106th-congress/house-bill/354/text. https://www.congress.gov/bill/106th-congress/house-bill/354/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/106th-congress/house-bill/354/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/106th-congress/house-bill/354/text appendix 3 list of acronyms aap – association of american publishers acis – american committee for interoperable systems aol – america online ala – american library association arl – association of research libraries bsa – business software association ccia – computer and communications industry association cea – consumer electronic association cic – creative incentive coalition codata – committee on data for science and technology dfc – digital future coalition dmca – digital millennium copyright act ec – european community eff – electronic frontier foundation hrrc – home recordings rights coalition ip – intellectual property isp – internet service provider irb – institutional review board mci – microwave communications, inc., mla – modern language association mpaa – motion picture association of america osp – online service provider ota – congressional office of technology assessment pk – public knowledge nii – national information infrastructure nrc – national research council pijip – program on information justice and intellectual property ra – repair association ram – random access memory riaa – recording industry association of america sopa/pipa – stop online privacy act/ protect ip act tpm – technological protection measures uspto – united states patent and trademark office wipo – world intellectual property organization aoir2020-bello_aufderheide bello_appendix 1 appendix 2 appendix 3 list of acronyms aol – america online arl – association of research libraries cea – consumer electronic association cic – creative incentive coalition dfc – digital future coalition ec – european community eff – electronic frontier foundation hrrc – home recordings rights coalition nrc – national research council ra – repair association ram – random access memory selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): heřmanová, marie. (2022, november). from fringe to mainstream: qanon narratives in central european digital spaces. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. from fringe to mainstream: qanon narratives in central european digital spaces marie heřmanová institute of sociology, czech academy of sciences background the proliferation of conspiracy theories in digital spaces has been widely studied within the english speaking digital context and spaces (bracewell, 2021; forberg, 2021; hannah, 2021). attention has been paid to the emergence of dark platforms (zeng & schäfer, 2021) and their role in the proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy narratives, the role they play in the global media ecosystem as well as to the effectivity and tools meant to prevent the spread of false or conspiracy content (cobbe, 2020). research has also focused on the role of influencers and digital opinion leaders in the proliferation of conspiracy narratives on social media (lewis, 2018). authors such as remski (2020) and baker (2022) focused on the overlap of lifestyle, spiritual and domestic content on instagram with far-right political narratives and conspiracies within the u.s. and english-speaking influencer culture. the papers builds on the aforementioned research and focuses on how influencers and digital opinion leaders engage in spreading conspiracy theories in czech and slovak speaking online spaces. it builds on a case of study of the proliferation of qanon-related content among czech and slovak influencers on instagram and tiktok and analyses how this type of content moves from a) english speaking spaces to local communities of czech/slovak influencers and their audiences and b) how the content moves across platforms and gets mainstreamed in the process. methodology the paper employs a mixed-method approach. it is informed by an ongoing digital ethnography (pink at al, 2016; kozinets, 2020) of political radicalization among influencers (participant and non-participant observation, semi-structured interviews). furthermore, the content created by the influencers was analysed using ethnographic content analysis (altheide&schneider, 2013). analysis the analysis focuses on two selected narratives that are shared among czech and slovak influencers and their audiences: a) the narrative that explains the covid-19 pandemic as an orchestrated political event that serves the hidden elites (namely people like bill gates and george soros) as a tool to control the world population and b) the narrative that anti-covid vaccines are poisoning the blood of vaccinated people, especially children. these narratives became prominently visible in the czech and slovak discourse and their origins can in many cases be traced back to u.s. based qanon adjacent websites such as for example greemedinfo.com or questioningcovid.com. at the same time, the influencers and their audiences employ various discursive practices to recontextualize these narratives within the local political and societal context and framed by symbolic references to authoritarian past of central and easter europe (cee) and explains the intentions of world elites such as (hungarian) george soros as an attempt to return to the past. the paper proposes a structure for tracing the journey of conspiracy narratives from english to czech/slovak speaking digital spaces: 1) the emergence of the narrative on a website such as greenmedinfo.com, in english 2) the posting of the narratives on a platform that within the cee spaces could be consider fringe (bail 2012) such as reddit, 8chan, telegram or local web fora and discussion groups, were the content is translated into a local language 3) the reposting of memes, banners or posts based on these narratives in both english and czech/slovak within semi-closed communities such as facebook groups or parts of tiktok – i propose the term niche platforms to describe the function of these platforms within the local context 4) the reposting by mainstream and major influencers and in groups on mainstream platforms such as facebook, instagram and parts of tiktok where the context of the original post with local narratives about authoritarianism blurs and merges together and finally 5) following backlash from mainstream publics and attempts at content moderation, the content moves to dark platforms (zeng & schäfer, 2021), within the czech and slovak speaking context now mostly represented by telegram. the analysis presents a case study of the involvement of influencers and digital opinion leaders in proliferating conspiracy content and traces the movement of content from one platform to another via influencers and their audiences. significance since the movement of conspiracy narratives from u.s. / english-speaking environment to smaller and more closed spaces such as the czech/slovak speaking online communities is so far understudied, the proposed structure is meant as hypothesis that describes how the content moves from fringe to mainstream spaces withing different local contexts and what role do individual actors, such as influencers play in the process. references: altheide, d., & schneider, c. (2013). ethnographic content analysis. in qualitative media analysis (pp. 23-37). sage publications, ltd, https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452270043.n2 https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452270043.n2 bail, c. a. (2012). the fringe effect: civil society organizations and the evolution of media discourse about islam since the september 11th attacks. american sociological review, 77(6),855 879. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122412465743 baker, s.a. (2022). alt. health influencers: how wellness culture and web culture have been weaponised to promote conspiracy theories and far-right extremism during the covid-19 pandemic. european journal of cultural studies, 25(1), pp. 3 24. doi:10.1177/13675494211062623. bracewell, l. (2021). gender, populism, and the qanon conspiracy movement. frontiers in sociology, 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2020.615727 cobbe, j. (2020). algorithmic censorship by social platforms: power and resistance. philosophy and technology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00429-0 forberg, p. l. (2021). from the fringe to the fore: an algorithmic ethnography of the far-right conspiracy theory group qanon. journal of contemporary ethnography. https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416211040560 hannah, m. n. (2021). a conspiracy of data: qanon, social media, and information visualization. social media and society, 7(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211036064 kozinets, r.v. (2019). netnography an essential guide to qualitative social media research, sage publications ltd. lewis, b. (2018). alternative influence. data & society research institute, https://datasociety.net/library/alternative-influence/ pink, s. (eds.) (2016). digital ethnography. sage publishing ltd. remski, m. (2020). the conspirituality report. available at: https://matthewremski.medium.com/the-conspirituality-report-home5b6006b4543d, retriever 18.3.2021 zeng, j., & schäfer, m. s. (2021). conceptualizing “dark platforms”. covid-19-related conspiracy theories on 8kun and gab. digital journalism, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2021.1938165 https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122412465743 https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/27089/ https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/27089/ https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/27089/ https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/13675494211062623 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): lastname, firstinitial. (2022, november). paper (or panel) title. paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. dadbot and what ‘he’ reveals about reddit’s everyday platform culture dominique carlon queensland university of technology; arc centre of excellence for automated decision making and society introduction ‘wielding the power of the ancient dads i have descended from the heavenly realms to bring puns [and] dad jokes to reddit!’ (u/dadbot_3000). this is the description of a bot named u/dadbot_3000, one of many from a group of similarly behaved ‘dadbots’ operating on the reddit platform. dadbots are programmed to make jokes that usually consist of short, one-line puns and wordplay that are widely associated with the humour of fathers in popular culture. the most common dadbot post uses the ‘dad joke’ format of ‘‘hi hungry, i’m dad’, a well-worn joke that deliberately mistakes a child’s statement of hunger as their name. when a reddit user begins a post with the word ‘i’m’, dadbots are programmed to respond ‘hi (insert text above), i’m dad’. sometimes, dadbots make other ‘dad jokes’ that employ questions and wordplay, such as u/dadbot_3000’s joke: ‘what do you call an alligator in a vest? an investigator. :d’, or ‘can february march? no, but april may. :d’. our cultural imaginary of bots, or software applications that run automated tasks or activities (holmes & lusso, 2018) tends to focus on the potential ‘intelligence’ of bots (johnson, 2022), their usefulness to humans (seering et al, 2018) and their capacity to cause harm by becoming indistinguishable from humans (sheehan et al., 2020; gehl & bakardjieva, 2016). the dadbots and their activities are neither intelligent, useful, or inherently harmful. they do not pretend to be human, but acquire a persona by identifying as a certain type of bot. dadbots are not at risk of developing sentience, and they are not the type of bot that spread misinformation or perform coordinated and harmful attacks. yet these bots are common, prolific and at times beloved. they operate in the domain of humour, creativity and ‘play’ (massanari, 2016) and their stories demonstrate how humans experiment and interact with bots, and how the perception and relevance of them evolve over time to reflect changes in the cultural landscape where they operate. suggested citation (apa): carlon., d. (2022, november). dadbot and what ‘he’ reveals about reddit’s everyday platform culture. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the life stories of dadbot reddit is an open-source social news and sharing platform where anyone with access and technical proficiency can create a bot, or multiple bots, as user accounts. reddit features an abundant variety of bots that perform different functions and that are openly discussed across the platform, offering a rich environment to examine how bots are perceived and engaged with. bots on reddit frequently operate in clusters, and often have complex histories and relationships with other bots. u/dadbot_3000 is a well-known bot, however ‘his’ fame can largely be attributed to being part of a wider lineage of dadbots. u/mombot_3000 was created to respond directly to u/dadbot_3000 and together dad and mom bots engage in a crude parodic performance of gendered parenting stereotypes. the identity of dadbot derives not just from identifying proudly as being a bot, but also as being a simple bot. the bots receive criticism from some reddit users for being oblivious to context and for not contributing valuable content. on occasions, the bot comments on serious discussion topics, such as the death of a father or discussion of incest, where the comment ‘hi, i’m dad’ is unwelcome. however dadbots also sparks amusement as reflected in responses to the bots, the large karma points they hold, and defense of the bots in subreddit forums such as r/botsrights, r/botsscrewingup and r/botwatch. despite the simplicity of the bots, or potentially because of it, the dadbot collective hold cultural relevance to the reddit platform. adopting a platform studies approach this paper will examine the role that reddit’s distinctive architecture and culture plays in fostering an environment that appears to welcome user-generated novelty bots such as dadbot. the presence of bots of this type demonstrates the interesting way that everyday online communities engage with semi-autonomous entities in a manner that inspires and ‘plays with sociality’ (massanari, 2016 p.117). the dadbots acquire personas and identity not by pretending to be human, but rather from identifying as being a bot. reddit users respond to the presence of bots like these with amusement and annoyance, demonstrating how bots can be simultaneously applauded and contested, and revealing how reddit users navigate the broader role and expectations of bots on the platform. using data extracted from pushshift api, combined with a detailed analysis of reddit threaded discussions, the paper will present a cultural biography of the dadbots of reddit, documenting their interactions with other bots and human users and their contributions to the platform. a time series of events will highlight patterns across the bot’s lifespan, depicting peaks and dips in activities, key controversies and connections, and how attitudes and interactions with the bots evolve over time. the extraction and analysis of activity connected to the dadbots will be used to construct their life stories, documenting how these bots come to life, and their overall contributions to reddit’s platform culture. conclusion the stories of dadbot demonstrate how everyday online communities engage with, adopt, and interact with semi-autonomous technology in a creative, ‘playful’ (massanari, 2016) and sometimes humorous manner. by constructing and closely examining the life stories of dadbot this paper will depict how the culture and architecture of a platform can influence how bots are created, used and perceived. the paper will also highlight how online communities actively negotiate and navigate their expectations around the role of bots and how bots should behave. references gehl, r.w. & bakardjieva, m. (2016). socialbots and their friends. in r.w. gehl & m. bakardjieva (eds.) socialbots and their friends: digital media and the automation of sociality. (pp. 147-163). routledge, new york. holmes, s., & lussos, r. g. (2018). cultivating metanoia in twitter publics: analyzing and producing bots of protest in the #gamergate controversy. computers and composition, 48, 118–138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2018.03.010 johnson, k. (2022, june 14). lamda and the sentient trap. wired https://www.wired.com/story/lamda-sentient-ai-bias-google-blake-lemoine/ massanari, a. (2016) contested play the culture and politics of reddit bots. in r.w. gehl & m. bakardjieva (eds.) socialbots and their friends: digital media and the automation of sociality (pp. 110-127) routledge, new york. seering, j., flores, j. p., savage, s., & hammer, j. (2018). the social roles of bots: situating bots in discussions in online communities. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 2. https://doi.org/10.1145/3274426 sheehan, b., jin, h. s., & gottlieb, u. (2020). customer service chatbots: anthropomorphism and adoption. journal of business research, 115, 14–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2020.04.030 u/dadbot_3000 (2020). about dadbot_3000 [online forum]. retrieved from https://www.reddit.com/user/dadbot_3000/ selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 breuer, j., van zeeland, i, pierson, j. (2022, november). walkshops – testing a low threshold methodology for participatory city making. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. walkshops – testing a low threshold methodology for participatory city making jonas breuer free university of brussels ine van zeeland free university of brussels jo pierson free university of brussels we present ongoing research that suggests and tests an inclusive participatory research methodology: walking in the ‘datafied’ city. walking interviews (evans & jones, 2011), data walks (powell, 2018), or walkshops (greenfield, 2010) facilitate experiences of and discussion about the urban environment in which social challenges arise, together with citizens who may perceive them in different ways than decision-makers. this enables investigations into social issues, but also co-production of knowledge, and improvement of solution-finding processes (anastasiu, 2019). our main research question is whether walkshops can provide a low-threshold methodology for meaningful involvement of citizens in technological decision-making in cities. our specific interest lies in the involvement of societal groups that are vulnerable. the paper evaluates the utility of ‘walkshops’ as an approach to hearing perspectives of urban dwellers on the ubiquitous processing of data in public space (van zeeland et al., 2021). we believe that it can be valuable for engaging urban dwellers in decisionmaking processes on technological interventions, on the balancing of risks against benefits, and on impacts on fundamental rights. we describe how the methodology was tested during eighteen walks in the three belgian cities of brussels, gent, and leuven. in each of the cities, a walkshop (i.e. a route along which diverse data processing technologies are encountered in public space) was co-created, together with different public organisations. walks in each city were conducted three to four times, with between five to twelve citizens each. in two of the cities, follow-up walkshops were organised with decision-makers within the municipal authorities, to discuss insights from the walks with citizens. the overall evaluation of the methodology and executed walkshops, by researchers as well as by participants and partner organisations, showed very promising results. in this paper, the description of the testing and evaluations will be accompanied by a set of conclusions and recommendations on how to reach also vulnerable groups. underlying this research is the notion of the three-way interrelationship of mutual shaping between artefacts (i.e. the technology), practices (i.e. the people, users or citizens), and socio-economic arrangements (lievrouw, 2014; lievrouw & livingstone, 2006). in the context of datafied urban space and ubiquitous data processing, an influential socio-economic arrangement that organises practices is the european general data protection regulation (gdpr) (eu, 2016). the gdpr offers means of control to ‘data subjects’. in smart, datafied cities, it could contribute to empowering citizens, or the data subjects (christofi et al., 2022), through its accountability principles, transparency obligations, and data subject rights intended to enable control and empowerment (ausloos, 2020). specifically, article 35(9) gdpr stipulates involvement of data subjects in risk assessments. however, while it is difficult for non-experts to take self-determined decisions regarding legal provisions and complex technical systems (breuer & pierson, 2021), it can be nigh impossible for specific groups in society: how can individuals exercise their rights if there is already a struggle to, for example, read and write, to speak the language in which a privacy notice is composed, or to set up an email account? as a result, despite legal efforts to empower all data subjects in making self-determined decisions vis-à-vis the processing of their personal data, inherent power imbalances remain and the provisions in the regulation hardly reach some groups (malgieri & niklas, 2020; piasecki & chen, 2022). an important aim of the walkshop methodology is therefore to be inclusive and attractive enough to be meaningful for anyone. our walkshops do have methodological downsides: recording discussions can be difficult in crowded public areas and not all challenges of inclusiveness will be solved (e.g., language). participant recruitment efforts have illustrated how difficult it can be to gather representative societal groups and recruit beyond the ‘usual suspects’. however, the evaluations of the first walks demonstrated potential for socially relevant empirical work that creates win-win situations for researchers, public partners, and citizenries. references anastasiu, i. (2019). unpacking the smart city through the lens of the right to the city: a taxonomy as a way forward in participatory city-making. in m. de waal & m. de lange (eds.), the hackable city (1st ed., pp. 239–260). springer singapore. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315178387-24 ausloos, j. (2020). the right to erasure in eu data protection law: from individual rights to effective protection (first edition). oxford university press. breuer, j., & pierson, j. (2021). the right to the city and data protection for developing citizen-centric digital cities. information, communication & society, 24(6), 797– 812. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2021.1909095 christofi, a., breuer, j., wauters, e., valcke, p., & pierson, j. (2022). data protection, control and participation beyond consent—‘seeking the views’ of data subjects. in e. kosta & r. leenes (eds.), research handbook on eu data protection. edward elgar publishing. eu. (2016). regulation (eu) 2016/679 of the european parliament and of the council on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data. evans, j., & jones, p. (2011). the walking interview: methodology, mobility and place. applied geography, 31(2), 849–858. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2010.09.005 greenfield, a. (2010, may 10). how to bring a systems/layers walkshop to your town. adam greenfield’s speedbird. https://speedbird.wordpress.com/2010/05/10/howto-bring-a-systemslayers-walkshop-to-your-town/ lievrouw, l. a. (2014). chapter 2) materiality and media in communication and technology studies: an unfinished project. in t. gillespie, p. j. boczkowski, & k. a. foot (eds.), media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society (pp. 21–51). the mit press. lievrouw, l. a., & livingstone, s. (2006). introduction to the updated student edition. in handbook of new media: social shaping and social consequences of icts, updated student edition (pp. 1–14). sage publications ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446211304.n1 malgieri, g., & niklas, j. (2020). vulnerable data subjects. computer law & security review, 37, 105415. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clsr.2020.105415 piasecki, s., & chen, j. (2022). complying with the gdpr when vulnerable people use smart devices. international data privacy law, ipac001. https://doi.org/10.1093/idpl/ipac001 powell, a. (2018). alison powell on data walking. tmg journal for media history, 21(2), 146. https://doi.org/10.18146/2213-7653.2018.371 van zeeland, i., breuer, j., & pierson, j. (2021). walkshops for citizen involvement: walk the talk with smart city citizens. 2021 ieee international smart cities conference (isc2), 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1109/isc253183.2021.9562922 microsoft word bitencourt-from digital influencers to influencer-laboratories a case study-from digital influencers to.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): bitencourt, e; castelhano, g; lopes, c. (2021, october).from digital influencers to influencer-laboratories. a case study of lil miquela. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. from digital influencers to influencer-laboratories. a case study of lil miquela elias bitencourt universidade do estado da bahia universidade federal da bahia grégori castelhano universidade federal da bahia catarina lopes universidade federal da bahia introduction digital influencers stand out as a phenomenon that mixes independent entrepreneurship and a profound interdependence with platform services. treated as microcelebrities (senft, 2008) that have achieved their status by attracting a large audience in social networks, digital influencers are frequently associated with people who use social capital acquired online to gain access to financial resources (abidin, 2015). the literature tends to differentiate between digital influencers and celebrities in the traditional media based on two general factors: authenticity and entrepreneurship (duffy & hund, 2015; marwick, 2015, 2018) however, if they are to appear authentic or real or to be financially successful on social networks, digital influencers must constantly play the visibility game (cotter, 2019) with platform affordances to achieve online influence (gerlitz & rieder, 2018). this research focuses on an emerging influencer category: cgi influencers, or virtual influencers (marwick, 2018). cgi influencers are characters created with computer modeling techniques that have profiles on social networks and sociomaterial trajectories built with the aid of digital marketing, business intelligence and media companies. most notable among the various successful examples is @lilmiquela. created in 2016, miquela presents herself as a pop artist. with more than 3 million followers on instagram, 7000 subscribers on youtube and 2.9 million on tiktok, she was considered one of the 25 most important internet personalities in 2018 by time1. behind this independent artist is brud2, a californian company founded in 2014 that specializes in robotics, ai and storytelling3 and has received more than 6 million dollars financial support from investors in the technology sector since 20174. the aim of this study was to map the ways in which miquela acts on instagram and to find traces that allow us to explore better the interrelationship between the brud strategies and the appropriations of instagram affordances that model the ways in which the cgi acts both as a fictional character and as a digital influencer. the main questions we asked were: (a) what instagram affordances does miquela prioritize in her actions in the feed? (b) how do miquela and brud appropriate these platform affordances to build a fictional world and the attributes of the cgi character? and (c) how does the intertwining of the appropriations of affordances and the storytelling approach impact the promotion of the character and the brands that she advertises in her feed? we argue that miquela represents a type of digital influencer for which the influencer itself acts as a laboratory used to investigate which sociomaterial arrangements create conditions that favor the production of online influence on digital platforms. methodology we used instaloader5 to extract 1089 posts available in miquela’s feed up to june 2021. we classified the posts by the type of affordance used (i.e., hashtags, location, profile mentions, profile tagging, type of media) and calculated post engagement based on the number of followers each year6. we found that the profile mention and tagging tools were the ones most used by miquela, so we explored these in a bipartite network (posts/tags + mentions) in gephi and found clusters characterized mainly by fashion, celebrity, luxury brand and brud product profiles. we used these preliminary findings as guidance for the content analysis. the database was imported into atlas.ti and analyzed according to three criteria: (a) type of content promoted; (b) type of profiles tagged, cited or mentioned and (c) subjects used as context for the posts (topics). finally, we filtered the posts with good engagement (n=390) and investigated cooccurrences among the categories adopted. 1 https://time.com/5324130/most-influential-internet/ 2 http://brud.fyi/ 3 https://www.linkedin.com/company/brudinc 4 https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/brud 5 https://instaloader.github.io 6to recover the follower base before 2021, we used technical reports and news articles covering miquela’s career from 2016 onwards. findings and discussion figure 1. summary of the different practices adopted by each version of miquela. source: the authors. we observed three ways of acting (practices) that are characteristic of miquela and operate interdependently. we called these sets of practices versions, namely: (a) miquela the fictional character, (b) miquela the experiment and (c) miquela the influencer (fig. 1). we found that miquela the character adopts practices that appear to be aimed at testing subjects that will make up the central arcs of the fictional cgi narrative and that can be explored in the other two versions. in this version, the tagging and mention tools are used as a way of anchoring the cgi character in the real world (tagging and mentioning real partners and places) and as the company’s digital signature. in the experimental version, we observed that the use of tagging and mentioning features is more geared toward qualifying and promoting miquela’s own brand products (i.e., songs and merch7) by targeting celebrities and deluxe brands in posts about musical topics. this version appears to aim to explore ways of reaching fashion and lifestyle niches in a controlled manner (using miquela's products as experimental bait). in the influencer version, we observed practices that focused more on brand content promotion with more directed use of tagging and mentioning tools; this version appears to combine the best results of the experimental version, the subjects that stand out most in the character and experimental versions and a greater number of brand profile tags. added to the fact that brud raised substantial investment funding in the last few years, these findings could suggest that the three versions of miquela act as an experimental 7 https://bit.ly/3yg61go model of what we here call “influencer-laboratories”. together, the three versions of miquela mix the mimicry of “realism”, “authenticity” (character version) and “entrepreneurship” (experimental and influencer versions) that characterize “influencers” (abidin, 2015; duffy, 2017), the fictional storytelling approach and the appropriation of platform affordances in a “controlled experiment”. such an experiment allows one to test and implement fine adjustments to both the fictional narrative of cgi and the practices that characterize miquela as a digital influencer. although still only partial, these findings suggest that brud may is promoting miquela as a methodological experiment that allows one (a) to map which instagram actions, topics and affordances exert more influence for each niche, (b) to refine these actions based on specific audience characteristics and (c) to design digital influencers and segmentedon-demand influence strategies. miquela illustrates the concept of influencer-laboratories and shows that when influence regimes are understood as a product that is interdependent on instagram affordances, algorithmic recommendation systems and the platform political and economic model, the influencer him or herself may not act merely as an independent content creator or a microcelebrity whose career depends on the platform, but also as methodological bait for companies to learn how relationships of influence are built from the action of these characters on the internet. references abidin, c. (2015). communicative intimacies: influencers and perceived interconnectedness. ada: a journal of gender, new media, and technology, 8, 1-16. cotter, k. (2019). playing the visibility game: how digital influencers and algorithms negotiate influence on instagram. new media & society, 21(4), 895–913. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818815684 duffy, b.e; hund, e. (2015) “having it all” on social media: entrepreneurial femininity and selfbranding among fashion bloggers. social media + society 1(2): 1–11. gerlitz, c., & rieder, b. (2018). tweets are not created equal: investigating twitter’s client ecosystem.international journal of communication, 12, 528–547. marwick, a. (2015) instafame: luxury selfies in the attention economy. public culture 27(75): 137–160. marwick, a (2018). the algorithmic celebrity: the future of internet fame and microcelebrity studies: the future of internet fame and microcelebrity studies. https://doi.org/10.1108/978178756749820181015 senft, t. m (2008) camgirls (digital formations), vol. 4. new york: peter lang. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): recuero, r. (2021, october). framing covid-19: how facr-checking circulates on political facebook. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. framing covid-19: how fact-checking circulates on political facebook raquel recuero midiars laboratory universidade federal de pelotas/universidade federal do rio grande do sul (brazil) introduction brazil is one of the worst-affected countries by covid-19 in the world, with a record of 4000 deaths a day by april of 2021 1 . the gravity of the situation was partially attributed to the lack of coordination of the health ministry and the denial of the pandemic by brazilian far-right president jair bolsonaro (alcantara & ferreira, 2020). disinformation on social media was also connected to bolsonaro’s political framing of the pandemic, which may have been key to its spread and gravity in the country (soares et al., 2021). while there are also several fact-checking outlets in the country to combat this phenomenon, it seems they were unable to mitigate it. in this context, we discuss how political framing influences the circulation of fact-checking posts about the covid-19 pandemic on facebook’s pages/groups in brazil. theoretical background the political framing of the content connected to the covid-19 pandemic is important because the tendency to receive or share disinformation has been linked to political affiliation. calvillo et al. (2020), for example, found a connection between conservative ideological views and the difficulty to discern between disinformation and real content. clarke et al. (2021), another example, found connections between political affiliation with the right-wing and the negative response to covid-19 mitigation efforts. in brazil, rossini & kalogeropoulos (2021) found similar results. fact-checking has been one of the important tools to mitigate the spread of disinformation and particularly, during the covid-19 pandemic for many countries (lópes-garcia, sánchez & visozo, 2021). however, studies have shown that despite having a positive effect on the disinformation perception (walter et al., 2019), fact-checking content often 1 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/07/brazils-coronavirus-death-toll-passes-4000-a-day-forfirst-time suggested citation (apa): recuero, r. (2021, october). framing covid-19: how facr-checking circulates on political facebook. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. doesn’t circulate in the same spaces as disinformation (recuero, soares & zago, 2021), when they do, it is often connected with accusations against fact-checkers (shao et al., 2018) and their circulation is biased by partisanship (shin & thorson, 2017). methods in this research, we aim to discuss how the political framing of fact-checking posts about covid-19 may influence their circulation on facebook pages and groups. our research is based on a dataset of 460 fact-checking posts published on politically aligned brazilian facebook pages/groups that also published disinformation (312 with the right-wing and 149 with the left-wing). data was obtained through ifcn/poynter (international factchecking network). to analyze these posts, we used frame analysis and particularly, tannen's (1986, 2009) notion of “interactive frames”. we categorized two sets of frames: the macroframe (the page/group where it was originally shared and how it provides context for interpretation of the posts) and the strategies used on the micro-frame (how the fact-checking content was framed on the post itself). in this category, based on data from the posts, we identified three sub-framing strategies: (1) confirmation framing, when the content was shared with other discourses that confirmed the post content and connected this content to the macroframing; (2) accusation framing, when the content was shared through an accusatory tone, often connecting the post content with an opposite political view; (3) discussion framing, when the post content was shared through a questioning/in doubt framing. results table 1 presents a summary of the results. table 1: summary of results macro-frame micro-frame pages/groups confirmation framing accusation framing discussion framing right wing pro-bolsonarop (56) conservatives (12) military intervention (6) other groups/pages (21) 174 posts 33 posts 4 posts left wing pro-lula (27) workers’ party (3) anti-bolsonaro (6) other groups/pages (11) 141 posts 8 posts 0 posts our data present interesting results. first of all, groups/pages that circulate fact-checking posts on this dataset are mostly affiliated with the right-wing (shin & thorson, 2017). other studies have shown that right-wing and conservative views are often more connected to disinformation than the left (calvillo et al.; 2020, alcott et al., 2020; rossini & kalogeropoulos, 2021; clarke et al., 2021), thus, a different result. however, the factchecking content that circulates among these right-wing groups is subjected to framing strategies that subvert their meaning to conform to a pro-bolsonaro discourse. accusation framing was also used to frame fact-checking as false or misleading content to support conspiracies, supporting bolsonaro’s claims of persecution by the media. only a few posts would actually defy the page’s ideology (though “discussion framing”). leftist suggested citation (apa): recuero, r. (2021, october). framing covid-19: how facr-checking circulates on political facebook. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. groups shared more plural content of fact-checking and also used confirmation framing strategies but in a different way. their framing was connected to support the fact-checking content itself. this may be because much of the fact-checking links would discredit bolsonaro’s discourse. accusatory posts were connected to anti-bolsonaro content. these results are similar to what was discussed by other studies (soares et al., 2021) that argued that disinformation about the pandemic in brazil was strongly connected to the support of bolsonaro. however, this research shows that fact-checking does circulate on political facebook groups/pages that share disinformation (particularly on right-wing and conservative ones), but it is used to reinforce their discourse, rather than debunk it. references alcantara, j., & ferreira, r. (2020). a infodemia da “gripezinha”: uma análise sobre desinformação e coronavírus no brasil. chasqui. revista latinoamericana de comunicación, 1(145), 137-162. https://doi.org/10.16921/chasqui.v1i145.4315. allcott, h., boxell, l., conway, j., gentzkow, m., thaler, m., & yang, d. (2020). polarization and public health: partisan differences in social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic. journal of public economics, 191, 104254. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2020.104254 calvillo, d. p., ross, b. j., garcia, r. j. b., smelter, t. j., & rutchick, a. m. (2020). political ideology predicts perceptions of the threat of covid-19 (and susceptibility to fake news about it). social psychological and personality science, 11(8), 1119–1128. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550620940539. clarke, e., klas, a., & dyos, e. (2021). the role of ideological attitudes in responses to covid-19 threat and government restrictions in australia. personality and individual differences, 175, 110734. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2021.110734 crowdtangle team (2021). crowdtangle. facebook, menlo park, california, united states. url: https://apps.crowdtangle.com/search/ lópez-garcía, x.; costa-sánchez, c.; vizoso, á. (2021)journalistic fact-checking of information in pandemic. stakeholders, hoaxes and strategies to fight disinformation during covid-19 crisis in spain. int. j. environ. res. public health 2021, 18, 1227. https://doi.org/10.3390/ ijerph18031227 recuero, r., soares. f. & zago, g. (2021) polarização, hiperpartidarismo e câmaras de eco: como circula a desinformação sobre covid-19 no twitter. ahead of print. revista contracampo. https://periodicos.uff.br/contracampo/article/view/45611 rossini, p., & kalogeropoulos, a. (2021). news and (mis)information about covid-19 in brazil. research report, liverpool university. https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/media/livacuk/schoolofthearts/documents/communicationan dmedia/rossini,kalogeropoulos,report,insights,07122020.docx.pdf suggested citation (apa): recuero, r. (2021, october). framing covid-19: how facr-checking circulates on political facebook. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. shao, c., hui, p., wang, l., jiang, x., flammini, a., menczer, f., & campaglia, g. l. (2018). anatomy of an online misinformation network. plos one 13(4): e0196087. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0196087 shin, j. & thorson, k. (2017). partisan selective sharing: the biased diffusion of factchecking messages on social media. journal of communication 67(2), 233-255. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12284 soares, f. b., recuero, r., volcan, t., fagundes, g., & sodré, g. (2021). research note: bolsonaro’s firehose: how covid-19 disinformation on whatsapp was used to fight a government political crisis in brazil. harvard kennedy school (hks) misinformation review. https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-54 tannen, d. (1986) frames revisited. quaderni di semantica / vol. vii, no. 1, june 1986. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5523ffe4e4b012b2c4ebd8fc/t/56d9c77f1bbee076 a4c276ae/1457112959138/frames+revisted.pdf tannen, d. (2009). framing and face: the relevance of the presentation of self to linguistic discourse analysis. social psychology quarterly, 72(4), 300–305. https://doi.org/10.1177/019027250907200404 walter, n., cohen, j., holbert, l, & morag, y. (2019). fact-checking: a meta-analysis of what works and for whom. political communication 37(3): 350-375. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2019.1668894. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 a cross-country analysis of internet policies: trends in internet-related proposed legislation in brazil, chile, and the united states (1997-2021) kimberly anastácio american university chelsea horne american university mariana sánchez-santos american university this paper analyzes trends and shifts in internet policy over time through a cross-country comparative lens. we employ computational and qualitative methods to map patterns on internet regulation across brazil, chile, and the united states. our historical analysis extends across 24 years of proposed legislation. our time frame ranges from 1997 to 2021, which constitutes the available data for all three countries together. additionally, by beginning our study in 1997, we analyze proposed legislative responses since the enactment of the communications decency act (cda), which is regarded as one of the first comprehensive internet legislations in the world. this study examines the power structures both within and outside each country. brazil is home to the marco civil, a law celebrated as one of the most innovative internet policies in the world (moncau & arguelhes, 2020). chile was the first country to enact a net neutrality law (marsden, 2015). the united states has a laissez-faire approach to internet regulation, in contrast to more interventionist ones (pohle et al., 2016; miao et al., 2021). we selected brazil, chile, and the united states as a purposeful sample of the global north and global south. this study constitutes one of the first cross-country and historical comparative analysis on proposed internet legislation. we aim to address the conference theme by de-centering european and north american narratives of the internet. this study makes an original contribution as we consider south american internet policy within the global narrative and identify points of convergence and divergence between two suggested citation (apa): anastácio, k., horne, c., & sánchez-santos, m. (2022, november). a cross-country analysis of internet policies: trends in internet-related proposed legislation in brazil, chile, and the united states (1997-2021) paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. south american countries in contrast to the united states, adding a new perspective on global internet policy trends. contextual framework against historical aversion to governmental input on internet policies (napoli & caplan, 2017), lawmakers were always a key part of the internet regulation debate. while some still argue that the internet policy realm belongs primarily to technical experts, the private sector, and/or multistakeholder internet institutions (mueller, 2019), internet regulation takes place at different levels, in different forms, and by different actors (kerr et al., 2019). in fact, global interest over internet policies may have never been more in evidence. actors as diverse as users, legislators, and private companies themselves argue in favor of greater internet regulation and governmental oversight on matters as diverse as data protection and net neutrality. in light of recent struggles around misinformation and online content moderation, for example, even social media companies that were once averse to regulation are calling on lawmakers to establish stronger rules for the internet (zuckerberg, 2019). such a focus on regulation follows a global turn to platforms and their surrounding sociopolitical and economic implications (keller, 2018; gillespie, 2018; gorwa, 2019). in order to better understand and situate the current trends demanding internet regulation, we offer a systematic analysis of internet-related proposed legislation in the american continent. methodology our analysis focuses on bills instead of laws and other regulatory documents because our aim is to understand what themes prompt the legislative intent of lawmakers and not only what gets cemented into law. we consider only documents with a regulatory intent – those documents that have the potential to be made into law. we do not consider position and opinion papers, as well as other legislative documents such as requests for public hearings and administrative decrees. our database consists of 554 brazilian, 242 us-american, and 57 chilean bills. the study answers the following questions: rq 1: what issues are lawmakers discussing in their proposed internet-related legislation? rq 2: what are the cross-country thematic trends and patterns in internet policy over time? rq 3: can we identify national/transnational turning points in such trends? we collected all bills with the word “internet” in their titles from the house of representatives website of the three countries. while we recognize that many internetrelated bills may not explicitly mention the word “internet” in the title, our focus is solely on the pieces of proposed legislation that clearly label themselves as internet-related bills. further, we focus only on proposed legislation introduced at the house of representatives in order to level the experiences of countries with bicameral congresses that have different expectations towards the duties of representatives and senators. this study applies a mixed-method approach. first, we will conduct a probabilistic topic modeling analysis over the titles and summaries of all bills by country in order to determine emerging trends and patent common themes. then, we will conduct a qualitative analysis to specify policy topics among the proposed legislations. each bill will be labeled according to its main theme (e.g., telecommunications, content moderation) as well as the party affiliation of those proposing the bills. the list of possible policy themes will be defined based on the topic modeling results and a first cycle of coding (saldaña, 2013). research questions 1 and 2 will be answered based on the topic modeling and content analysis results. research question 3 will be answered by crossing the rqs 1 and 2 outcomes with the party affiliation of the bills’ authors. conclusions our cross-country historical analysis of internet-related bills help us understand how responsive the lawmakers in the american continent are. by contrasting the bills’ policy themes with endogenous and exogenous events and forces in the region, we will be able to identify if lawmakers are anticipating future problems and then proposing regulation to meet those ends or if they are reacting after problems occur. more than that, we will be able to compare the lawmakers’ responsiveness between the north and south divide. further, by contrasting the volume of bills per policy theme, we will be able to identify what issues are more salient to the lawmakers from the different countries. this information helps us analyze if the drivers for internet regulation in the region differ, and how different are the responses to similar issues between countries and between lawmakers from different ends of the political spectrum. internet policy is a field of struggle in which there is a somewhat autonomous constellation of actors struggling over meaning making and the issues on the table (pohle et al., 2016, p. 3). this paper offers a systemic look into one such actor – lawmakers – and finds patterns across the issues addressed by the different countries. references gillespie, t. (2018). regulation of and by platforms. in j. burgess, a. marwick, & t. poell (eds.), the sage handbook of social media (pp. 254–278). london: sage. gorwa, r. (2019). what is platform governance?. information, communication & society, 22(6), 854-871. keller, d. (2018). internet platforms: observations on speech, danger, and money. hoover institution's aegis paper series, (1807). kerr, a., musiani, f., & pohle, j. (2019). communication and internet policy: a critical rights-based history and future. internet policy review, 8(1). marsden, c. (2015). comparative case studies in implementing net neutrality: a critical analysis. tprc 43: the 43rd research conference on communication, information and internet policy paper, available at ssrn: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2587920 miao, w., jiang, m., & pang, y. (2021). historicizing internet regulation in china: a meta-analysis of chinese internet policies (1994–2017). international journal of communication, 15, 24. moncau, l. f. m., & arguelhes, d. w. (2020). marco civil da internet and digital constitutionalism. the oxford handbook of intermediary liability online. oxford: oxford university press. napoli, p., & caplan, r. (2017). why media companies insist they’re not media companies, why they’re wrong, and why it matters. first monday, 22(5). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v22i5.7051 pohle, j. & hösl, m. & kniep, r. (2016). analysing internet policy as a field of struggle. internet policy review, 5(3). https://doi.org/10.14763/2016.3.412 saldaña, j. (2013). the coding manual for qualitative researchers. sage publications. zuckerberg, m. (2019). the internet needs new rules: let’s start in these four areas. the wahsington post. https://tinyurl.com/2bpdkpzs microsoft word vinhas-the limits of fact checking-the limits of fact checking.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): lastname, firstinitial. (2021, october). the limits of fact-checking: eight notes on consensus reality. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the limits of fact-checking: eight notes on consensus reality otávio vinhas university college dublin marco bastos university college dublin; city, university of london introduction considerable efforts and resources have been allocated to the fact-checking industry as a potential solution to correcting prior knowledge and offsetting the upsurge in hyperpartisanship that nurtures misinformation (marietta & barker, 2019). the expansion of this industry is associated with a political context marked by the spread of misinformation (lewandowsky, ecker, seifert, schwarz, & cook, 2012), where trust in government and institutions, including news organizations, have markedly decreased (amazeen, 2020; zuckerman, 2017). several organizations emerged that envisioned an expansion of journalistic practices devoted not only to selecting information but actively classifying information that is deemed to be true and therefore trustworthy and information that is false and, consequently, harmful to the public debate (graves, 2016). the number of fact-checking organizations more than doubled since 2016, reaching 304 organizations in 84 different countries worldwide (stencel & luther, 2020). as the industry expands as a partial solution to mitigate informational uncertainty and institutional distrust, its capabilities and limitations to counter the misinformation landscape should be reviewed. the main tenet of fact-checking consists of verifying and correcting false claims to protect the democratic principles underpinning political deliberation. the practice is posited as the diametrical opposite of misinformation, providing evidence to rebut the inaccuracies advanced to mislead individuals (jiang & wilson, 2018). however, while the fact-checking movement arises and establishes partnerships with social media platforms (facebook, 2018a, 2018b; twitter, 2019), practitioners are also shifting their focus to combat online misinformation (graves & mantzarlis, 2020). this expansion is also designed to counter the growing distrust in democratic institutions, particularly the government and mainstream media (amazeen, 2020; zuckerman, 2017), while also offsetting the growing epistemic crisis manifested in reports about information disorders (wardle & derakhshan, 2017). yet, the rampant distribution of false content and the epistemic effects of its spreadability across social networks poses fundamental questions about fact-checking limitations in addressing problems that do not occur in isolation. instead, these problems stem from broader social tensions, technological affordances, and partisan arrangements (benkler, faris, & roberts, 2018; bennett & pfetsch, 2018; lewandowsky, ecker, & cook, 2017). in this study we review the literature on fact-checking and the empirical evidence contending that it can correct prior knowledge and false information. we outline eight fundamental problems with fact-checking revolving around epistemology, methodology, implementation, polarization, bias, efficacy, ambiguity, ephemerality, objectivity, and criticism. we discuss these problems in relation to recent developments, including the establishment of fact-checking agencies across the world and national elections, both in western countries and in the global south that led to greater uncertainty despite intense fact-checking. in the following, we discuss in detail the unsurmountable limitations of fact-checking summarized in eight fundamental limitations. discussion the four case studies discussed in this study foreground the shortcomings of factchecking in contexts where contentious politics took precedence over consensual reasoning. they also caution against normative parameters of valid speech, particularly in contexts of an institutional crisis of trust where hegemonic narratives are fraught and disputed by actors disengaged from consensus reasoning. the case studies also show that dissensus reality and conspiracy theorizing are not prerogatives of the far-right (benkler et al., 2018), notwithstanding conservatives being reportedly more hostile towards fact-checkers in various countries (lyons, mérola, reifler, & stoeckel, 2020; shin & thorson, 2017). the allegiances that underpin the misinformation landscape may be detached from ideological fault lines, feeding instead on epistemological cleavages where the establishment of facts is contingent on political and value-based perspectives. fact checks thus reestablish the social order by resorting to forms of universal demarcation―including true/false, fact/fiction, and nature/spirit―principles that continue to orient journalistic practices (waisbord, 2018). however, with social media communication allowing social groups to insulate themselves from conflicting information, it may not be possible for individuals to evaluate news or rely on factchecks based on the trust and authority of the original producer if they sit in opposition to their own modes of justification (ekström & westlund, 2019). conclusion we reviewed the literature in the area and argued that the central problem with factchecking is the premise that false information can be offset with more information and that facts are events universally agreed upon. we posit that the growing fact-checking industry is detached from the misinformation landscape and outline eight fundamental problems with fact-checking revolving around epistemology, implementation, bias, efficacy, ambiguity, objectivity, ephemerality, and criticism. we discuss these shortcomings in relation to the establishment of fact-checking agencies across the world and their role in national elections in the united kingdom, united states, malaysia, and brazil. the article concludes with a discussion on the extent to which fact-checking may be effective against false information in a context where consensus reality has been super-imposed by individual reality. references amazeen, m. a. (2020). journalistic interventions: the structural factors affecting the global emergence of fact-checking. journalism, 21(1), 95-111. benkler, y., faris, r., & roberts, h. (2018). network propaganda: manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in american politics: oxford university press. bennett, w. l., & pfetsch, b. (2018). rethinking political communication in a time of disrupted public spheres. journal of communication, 68(2), 243-253. doi:10.1093/joc/jqx017 ekström, m., & westlund, o. (2019). the dislocation of news journalism: a conceptual framework for the study of epistemologies of digital journalism. media and communication, 7(1), 259-270. doi:10.17645/mac.v7i1.1763 community standards, (2018a). understanding the facebook: community standards enforcement report, (2018b). graves, l. (2016). deciding what’s true: the rise of political fact-checking in american journalism. new york: columbia university press. graves, l., & mantzarlis, a. (2020). amid political spin and online misinformation, fact checking adapts. the political quarterly, 91, 585-591. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923x.12896 jiang, s., & wilson, c. (2018). linguistic signals under misinformation and factchecking. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 2(cscw), 1-23. doi:10.1145/3274351 lewandowsky, s., ecker, u. k., & cook, j. (2017). beyond misinformation: understanding and coping with the “post-truth” era. journal of applied research in memory and cognition, 6(4), 353-369. lewandowsky, s., ecker, u. k., seifert, c. m., schwarz, n., & cook, j. (2012). misinformation and its correction: continued influence and successful debiasing. psychological science in the public interest, 13(3), 106-131. lyons, b., mérola, v., reifler, j., & stoeckel, f. (2020). how politics shape views toward fact-checking: evidence from six european countries. the international journal of press/politics, 25(3), 469-492. doi:10.1177/1940161220921732 marietta, m., & barker, d. c. (2019). one nation, two realities: dueling facts in american democracy. oxford: oxford university press. shin, j., & thorson, k. (2017). partisan selective sharing: the biased diffusion of factchecking messages on social media. journal of communication. doi:10.1111/jcom.12284 stencel, m., & luther, j. (2020). fact-checking count tops 300 for the first time [the reporters' lab finds fact-checkers at work in 84 countries -but growth in the u.s. has slowed]. political content, (2019). waisbord, s. (2018). truth is what happens to news. journalism studies, 19(13), 1866-1878. doi:10.1080/1461670x.2018.1492881 wardle, c., & derakhshan, h. (2017). information disorder: toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making. retrieved from https://shorensteincenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/information-disordertoward-an-interdisciplinary-framework.pdf?x78124 zuckerman, e. (2017). mistrust, efficacy and the new civics: understanding the deep roots of the crisis of faith in journalism. suggested citation (apa): ging, d., ringrose, j., mendes, k., horeck, t., milne, b., desborough, k. and castellini da silva, r. (2022, november). reclaiming digital intimacy for youth: piloting digital sexual violence workshops for under-18s during the covid-19 pandemic in england and ireland. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 reclaiming digital intimacy for youth: piloting digital sexual violence workshops for under-18s during the covid-19 pandemic in england and ireland debbie ging dublin city university jessica ringrose institute of education, university college london kaitlyn mendes western university ontario tanya horeck anglia ruskin university betsy milne institute of education, university college london karen desborough university of leicester ricardo castellini da silva dublin city university online sexual abuse and violence have become an urgent global problem for women and girls, and in particular for poor women, women of colour and lgbtq women (ging and siapera, 2019). from the existing research on image-based sexual abuse (ibsa) often referred to as ‘revenge porn’ or ‘sexting gone wrong’ we know that women and girls are much more likely than men and boys to receive unsolicited sexual content (cyberflashing) to be pressured into sending sexual images (nudes), and to face slut-shaming and victim-blaming if their sexual images are shared nonconsensually (hasinoff 2014; naezer and van oosterhout 2021; ringrose et al. 2022, andreasen et al. 2022). online sexual harassment and abuse is an especially urgent issue for young people, for whom digital spaces are key sites of communication, identity formation, self-expression and sexual interaction. the toxic dynamics that frequently underpin these complex entanglements thus pose a significant threat to ethical digital intimacy. according to foody et al. (2021), half of irish teenagers have been asked to send sexually explicit pictures of themselves by text, email or on apps such as snapchat. in this study, around 44% of all the teenagers surveyed said this happened frequently and this included 29.3% of all females sampled and 15.2% of males surveyed. almost one-third received sexually explicit images that they didn't want and this number was much higher among girls (at 21.9%) than boys (at 7.5%). meanwhile, a recent study conducted by ringrose, regehr and whitehead (2022) in the uk found that girls aged 11-18 were bombarded with unwanted dick pics on social media platforms like snapchat to such an extent that this has become not just normalised but even a sign of desirability or popularity among girls. negotiating the ‘ubiquitous dick pic’, as they put it, has simply become a daily fact of life. this situation became substantially more extreme during covid-19, with rates of online abuse and harassment rising as young people have been forced to spend more and more time online. since the beginning of the pandemic, in the uk, 25% of girls have experienced at least one form of abuse, bullying, or sexual harassment online (plan international uk, 2020). in ireland, a study conducted by women’s aid found that one in five women aged between 18 and 25 have experienced intimate relationship abuse including emotional, physical and sexual abuse. in this study, half of the young women abused by a partner experiencing online abuse including having intimate images taken and shared without their consent (women’s aid, one in five women report, 2020). during this period, usage of particular platforms (e.g. tiktok) dramatically increased. a substantial rise in screen time also impacted young people’s experiences and digital intimacies in important ways. this paper reports on the findings of a crossnational study conducted in england and ireland, which explored pedagogical interventions into the continuum of online and offline sexual violence amongst young people in schools. the respective studies used participatory workshops and focus groups as well as online surveys to explore young people’s experiences of and attitudes towards online sexual abuse and harassment. the workshops address 3 types of online sexual harassment and abuse: unsolicited sexual content, imagebased sexual abuse (i.e. non-consensual creation or distribution of private sexual images), and sexual coercion, intimidation, and threats. in particular, we are interested here in how different social media platforms are used to perpetuate different types of online abuse based on certain technological affordances. for example, recent research (ringrose, regehr and milne, 2021) shows that snapchat enables image-based sexual harassment and abuse through its quick adds, shout outs, streaks, score points and lack of identity verification measures. this study also indicates that instagram facilitates unwanted sexual content through its direct message and group chat features. in this paper, drawing on approximately 500 online surveys and 20 focus groups, we explore in more detail the platform-specific affordances associated with different types of gender-based abuse and imagesharing practices. our study concludes that schools are not equipped to deal with the gendered harms that arise from non-consensual image sharing because they lack sufficiently nuanced policies at the intersection of digital literacy, e-safety, and sexual harassment (ringrose, regehr and milne, 2021). most educational interventions focus on an abstinence model, simply warning young people not to sext because of the legal and reputational risks. interventions have typically placed both responsibility and shame on girls, locating wrongdoing at the point of consensual sharing rather than when trust is violated (dobson and ringrose, 2016). our intersectional feminist research design provided valuable insights into gender and sexual inequity in contemporary youth cultures. importantly, this participatory research offered spaces for young people to critique and challenge online genderbased and sexual online. we make a number of concrete recommendations, pointing in particular to urgent paradigm shifts in digital ethics and digital safety initiatives, with a particular focus on platform algorithms, policies and governance. without a robust digital sexual literacy framework, young people do not have equal rights or access to ethical digital intimacy, and workable solutions must be found at the intersection of platform politics, education, and legislation. references andreasen, m. b., mazzone, a., foody, m., milosevic, t., & norman, j. o. h. (2022). the gendered experiences of image-based sexual abuse: state of the research and evidence-based recommendations. https://antibullyingcentre.ie/wpcontent/uploads/2022/02/dcu-online-abuse-report.pdf dobson, a. s., & ringrose, j. (2016). sext education: pedagogies of sex, gender and shame in the schoolyards of tagged and exposed. sex education, 16(1), 8-21. foody, m., mazzone, a., laffan, d. a., loftsson, m., & norman, j. o. h. (2021). “it's not just sexy pics”: an investigation into sexting behaviour and behavioural problems in adolescents. computers in human behavior, 117, 106662. ging, d., & siapera, e. (eds.). (2019). gender hate online: understanding the new anti-feminism (pp. 45-67). cham: palgrave macmillan. hasinoff, a. a. (2014). blaming sexualization for sexting. girlhood studies, 7(1), 102120. naezer, m., & van oosterhout, l. (2021). only sluts love sexting: youth, sexual norms and non-consensual sharing of digital sexual images. journal of gender studies, 30(1), 79-90 plan international uk (2020). the state of girls’ rights in the uk: early insights into the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on girls. available at https://planuk.org/file/plan-uk-state-of-girls-rights-coronavirusreportpdf/download?token=gddeazlz ringrose, j., regehr, k., & milne, b. (2021). understanding and combatting youth experiences of image-based sexual harassment and abuse. association of school and college leaders. available at https://www.ascl.org.uk/ibsha ringrose, j., regehr, k., & whitehead, s. (2022). ‘wanna trade?’: cisheteronormative homosocial masculinity and the normalization of abuse in youth digital sexual image exchange. journal of gender studies, 31(2), 243-261. women’s aid, one in five women report, 2020, available at https://www.womensaid.ie/assets/files/pdf/one_in_five_women_ report_womens_aid_2020.pdf microsoft word schellewald-on getting carried away by the tiktok algorithm-on getting carried away by the tiktok algorithm.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): schellewald, a. (2021, october). on getting carried away by the tiktok algorithm. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. on getting carried away by the tiktok algorithm andreas schellewald goldsmiths, university of london in this paper i respond to debates on the addictive and distractive quality associated with algorithmic environments like the popular short-video app tiktok. while it has been discussed and praised for its fun atmosphere, especially during lockdown (cf. kale 2020 or roose 2018), many describe tiktok as mere short-lived entertainment made addictive by algorithmic means. or, in other words, a distraction from more meaningful and profound experiences (cf. koetsier 2020, odell 2019, or spanos 2019). scholarship on tiktok has opposed such commentaries, instead emphasizing the depth and complexity of communication on the app (among others abidin 2020, literat and kligler-vilenchick 2019, rettberg 2017, or siles and meléndez-moran 2021). joining these scholars taking tiktok seriously, i report from an ethnographic investigation into the short-video app. doing so, i explore how the tiktok algorithm’s addictive quality is actively approached and managed by users of the app in search for distraction. fieldwork started in early 2020 and lasted for roughly one and a half years. during that period, a digital ethnography of the tiktok app was carried out, aimed at understanding the forms and flows of communication on the platform (see schellewald 2021). in addition, a series of semi-structured interviews was conducted over the course of one year, starting in the early summer of 2020. participants of the study were 30 young adults, mostly based in the greater london area. interviews focused on locating tiktok within people’s polymedia environments (madianou and miller 2012) and their interactions with and reflections on the tiktok algorithm. the primary way in which participants of the study used tiktok was for ‘passive consumption’ or ‘mindless scrolling’. on their respective for you pages all would see a dominant element of comedy content. aside from that, a variety of different types of videos (such as vlogs or dance videos), genres (like cottagecore), or topics and ‘tiktok sides’ (like ‘gay tiktok’, ‘british tiktok’, or ‘dnd tiktok’) characterized each participants’ individual feed. while none felt as being part of a specific tiktok community, all described their for you page as ‘close to home’ and the people and videos they would encounter as exceptionally ‘authentic’ and ‘relatable’. early during fieldwork, it become clear that the key reason why mindlessly scrolling through tiktok’s algorithmically curated content feed appealed to people was as a means of escape. they always ended up on the app in situations in which they felt left empty by the ‘here and now’. they turned to tiktok when they needed cheering up, distraction, help relaxing and winding down, or simply escape the unbearableness of boredom. for them tiktok was something like a ‘true 30-minute escape’, an easily accessible way of forgetting about life in the ‘here and now’. an experience that none of their other social media apps seemed able to afford. tracing these small moments of everyday tiktok use, in my work i show how people actively appropriated and engaged with the addictive quality of the tiktok algorithm as a means of escape, of getting carried away. in the spirit of remediation (bolter and grusin 1999), i link this ‘passive consumption’ of tiktok to prior popular media forms like soap operas (ang 1985) or magazines (hermes 1995). i outline how the pleasure people experience and desire from tiktok fits within a broader lineage of media forms like soap operas that have and do still offer similar forms of momentary escape and distraction in everyday life. following ien ang’s (1985) argument that such ‘mere entertainments’ are not simple pleasures but the product of complex processes, i trace how people interacted with the tiktok algorithm to achieve an experience of getting carried away. looking at how people dealt with ‘scarily precise’ recommendations on their feed, as well as how they adjusted their behavior on the app to be ‘seen’ more easily by the tiktok algorithm, in my work i discuss how the tension of tiktok being a site of pleasure yet also surveillance played out. drawing on these stories of situated interactions with the tiktok algorithm, i conclude by arguing that independence, in the context of algorithms and their emotional consequences, comes to matter not in absolute but relative terms. the importance of independence is not fixed but dynamic, matters to people more in some moments and digital settings than others. doing so, i join scholars emphasizing that the emotional consequences of practices of scrolling are manifold (e.g. lupinacci 2020) and that digital media play a vital role in the micromanagement of everyday rhythms (e.g. markham 2020 or paasonen 2021). while for my participants ‘mindless scrolling’ through tiktok induced pleasure, the same practice, on other platforms, like instagram, induced boredom. these subtle differences within the landscape of ‘addictive media’ are often overlooked within debates and the question how they come into being deserves more attention. references abidin, c. (2020). mapping internet celebrity on tiktok: exploring attention economies and visibility labours. cultural science, 12(1), 77-103. ang, i. (1985). watching dallas. soap opera and the melodramatic imagination. london: methuen. bolter, j.d. and grusin, r. (1999). remediation. understanding new media. cambridge, ma: mit press. hermes, j. (1995). reading women's magazines: an analysis of everyday media use. london: wiley. kale, s. (2020, april 26). how coronavirus helped tiktok find its voice. the observer. retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/26/howcoronavirus-helped-tiktok-find-its-voice koetsier, j. (2020, january 18). digital crack cocaine: the science behind tiktok’s success. forbes. retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/01/18/digital-crack-cocaine-thescience-behind-tiktoks-success/ literat, i., and kligler-vilenchick, n. (2019). youth collective political expression on social media: the role of affordances and memetic dimensions for voicing political views. new media & society, 21(9), 1988–2009. lupinacci, l. (2020). 'absentmindedly scrolling through nothing': liveness and compulsory continuous connectedness in social media. media, culture & society, 1-18. madianou, m. and miller, d. (2012). polymedia: towards a new theory of digital media in interpersonal communication. international journal of cultural studies, 16(2), 169-187. markham, t. (2020). digital life. cambridge: polity. odell, j. (2019, august 31). can we slow down time in the age of tiktok? the new york times. retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/31/opinion/sunday/students-time.html paasonen, s. (2021). dependent, distracted, bored: affective formations in networked media. cambridge, ma: mit press. rettberg, j. w. (2017). hand signs for lip-syncing: the emergence of a gestural language on musical.ly as a video-based equivalent to emoji. social media + society, 3(4), 1–11. roose, k. (2018, december 3). tiktok, a chinese video app, brings fun back to social media. the new york times. retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/technology/tiktok-a-chinesevideo app-brings-fun-back-to-social-media.html schellewald, a. (2021). communicative forms on tiktok: perspectives from digital ethnography. international journal of communication, 15, 1437-1457. siles, i. and melendez-moran, a. (2021). 'the most aggressive of algorithms'. user awareness of and attachment to tiktok's content personalization. paper presented at the annual meeting of the ica, may 27-31, 2021. http://repositorio.ucr.ac.cr/handle/10669/83230 spanos, b. (2019, march 2019). i spent a week on tiktok and all i got was a new phone addiction. rolling stone. retrieved from https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/i-spent-a-week-on-tiktok811361/ aoir2020 kinder-kurlandaweller researchethicspractices.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): kinder-kurlanda, k.e., weller, k. (2020, october 27-31). research ethics practices in a changing social media landscape. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. research ethics practices in a changing social media landscape katharina kinder-kurlanda gesis – leibniz institute for the social sciences katrin weller gesis – leibniz institute for the social sciences this contribution considers the evolution of social media research and specifically focuses on changes in ethical practices and decision making. our contribution is based on a long-term project in which we interview researchers who study social media platforms and users. our project started in 2013/2014 with a series of more than 40 qualitative, face-to-face, semi-structured interviews with researchers who were at different stages in their scientific career and who were targeting different social media platforms with a variety of disciplinary and methodological backgrounds. the interviews provided insights into the challenges of everyday research practices at the various stages of the research process, as well as into motivations for specific approaches and into critical reflections on research design and decision making, particularly concerning research ethics. since our first round of interviews the social media research landscape has changed considerably. ai and machine learning methods are (again) challenging notions of human and non-human agency and various incidents and phenomena around social media have caused changes but also wider discussions in academia and beyond. examples are the so-called “cambridge analytica scandal” and facebook suspending access to its data via the formerly used api. these events have affected social media research in general (e.g. as they limit options for accessing data) and have also initiated more critical reflection of methods, processes, and ethics. at the end of 2019 we started re-interviewing the participants in our study. in addition to questions about the details of everyday data work and the rationales behind (ethical) decision making, we are asking participants what has changed in the way they conduct research with social media. a reading of the initial interview transcript (during a break in the interview) allows participants to compare their answers with the previous interview and to reflect on process and change. based on our interviews as well as the ongoing discussions of internet research ethics in the community, this paper focuses on the ethical dimensions of social media research practices and how they have evolved over the past years. when we started studying social media researchers’ data practices in 2013 we witnessed a variety of practices resulting out of different ethical framings. for example, depending on whether researchers prioritized recognizing authorship over privacy concerns or the other way around, they would decide to quote tweets or other social media content in their research papers or not. situations were often considered to be unproblematic from an ethical point of view if only public figures (e.g. organizations, politicians) and deliberately publicized content was studied. overall, most ethical decision making was centered on issues around the ‘publicness’ of content, how to deal with data as a consequence of uncertainty about social media users’ privacy expectations and consent to research, and, consequently, publication practices. first results from our current round of interviews indicate that things look a little differently at the current point in time. first, a wider variety of people are much more concerned about the ethics of social media research in addition to individual researchers themselves. particularly, there has been much public attention in the media toward the role of platforms in manipulating user experiences and on the role of researchers in providing methods and tools to these endeavours. professional associations in various disciplines and regulatory bodies of all kinds of institutional levels have positioned themselves with regard to ethical conduct in social media research (see e.g. the recent german data forum (ratswd) publication on “data collection with new information technology” (ratswd, 2020)), and to the significant role that platforms and their algorithmically shaped publics play within our societies (see e.g. the recently updated code of ethics of the association of computing and machinery acm (acm, 2018)). second, and concurrently to the wider concern and attention being paid to ethics in social media research, different ethical issues are being attended to. based on our first results we argue that there are more established (formal and informal) norms and practices around sharing information in publications – but a far wider variety of (ethically reflective) practices around data access and data sharing. these practices follow calls for pragmatically ‘routing around’ the restrictions that are being put in place by platform owners to establish more just and equal footings between users, researchers and platforms (halavais, 2019). we are witnessing research in an environment that is more visible and being paid attention to much more than was the case only five years ago. at the same time we are seeing an even greater variety of potential data practices resulting out of opposing ethical frames being applied. there are at once more established practices (around treatment of user information in publications and privacy-conscious data handling) and at the same time more willingness not to follow rules (for ethical reasons), prioritizing ethical concerns over legal restrictions. it has become more recognized how practices many regard as undesirable have spread and the role of platforms in shaping public spaces has been revealed – if not their still mostly opaque algorithms, practices and influence on individual users’ behaviour. an api’s terms of service may in the past not have been followed for reasons of practicality or not knowing any better – now it has become an ethical obligation for many researchers to more generally question power imbalances in data access and algorithmic influence and to rethink their (legal) relationship with a social media platform. references acm [association of computing machinery] (2018, agust 22). acm code of ethics and professional conduct. https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics halavais, a. (2019). overcoming terms of service: a proposal for ethical distributed research. information, communication & society, 22(11), 1567–1581. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1627386 ratswd [rat für sozialund wirtschaftsdaten] (2020). datenerhebung mit neuer informationstechnologie. empfehlungen zu datenqualität und -management, forschungsethik und datenschutz. ratswd output paper series. https://doi.org/10.17620/02671.47 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): bainotti, l. (2023, october).trending resistance: a study of the tiktok #deinfluencing phenomenon. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. trending resistance: a study of the tiktok #deinfluencing phenomenon. lucia bainotti university of amsterdam starting from january 2023 a new tiktok trend has become popular: #deinfluencing. if searching tiktok for this hashtag (which counts over 264 million views), one can see videos aimed at challenging the hype about specific products (especially fashion and make-up products) and criticising the large number of consumer goods purchased as a result of influencers’ recommendations and tiktok trends. all these videos share similar aesthetics and the emphasis on transparency and authenticity, which emerges from the very beginning of almost every tiktok, with the content creators staring at the camera, stating: “let me deinfluence you!”. some commentators have considered this phenomenon as a crucial milestone that will change influencer culture from within. as faithfull (2023) writes, “the revolution will, it appears, be streamed after all”. if defining such a phenomenon as a revolution could be excessive, it is however worth critically investigating the #deinfluencing trend on tiktok to analyse to what extent it represents a form of resistance to issues of overconsumption and consumerism, or whether it represents yet the latest version of what it means to be an influencer. in this contribution, i argue that the deinfluencing phenomenon is an example of how forms of resistance are becoming “trending”, that is, not only ‘fashionable’, popular, or widely discussed online, but also increasingly intertwined with the affordances and algorithmic nature of tiktok. it is exactly in the trending nature of these forms of resistance that lies the highly controversial nature of the deinfluencing trend. the emergence of the deinfluencing trend is not a new phenomenon, as it represents an iteration of already existing critiques concerning content creators and the influencer industry. from being the target of networked harassment (duffy, miltner & wahlstedt, 2022) to the risk of getting “cancelled” (lee & abidin, 2021; lewis & christin, 2022), content creators have long felt the pressure of being scrutinised, exposed as “fake”, or held accountable online. differently from other manifestations of dissatisfaction, however, the #deinfluencing trend does not focus exclusively on the critique towards some specific content creators, and it is not related to some specific anti-fandom spaces (duffy, miltner & wahlstedt, 2022) or ironic instagram pages. on the contrary, it represents a broader critique of the influencer economy and its functioning, in particular its reliance on consumerism and the display of overconsumption, fuelled by platforms’ economies of visibility (banet-weiser, 2012). research shows that influencers’ practices are deeply rooted in consumption (abidin, 2016; abidin & gwynne, 2017) and that the display of consumer goods represents a way to gain micro-celebrity (marwick, 2015) and social status (bainotti, 2023). against this backdrop, the deinfluencing trend has emerged as a venue where isolated voices can converge to express their discontent not only about content creators and the influencer industry but also about the ongoing cost of living crisis, exacerbated by the current political and economic situation. the deinfluencing trend is also characterised by a metacritique of the overconsumption practices facilitated by tiktok content and fuelled by the socio-technical characteristics of the platform. tiktok contributes to promoting forms of ephemeral consumption (caliandro et al., forthcoming), meaning consumption practices that last for the duration of the latest trend and are then immediately supplanted by the next, popular challenge to replicate. these forms of consumption are enhanced by the fast-paced nature of the platform and by its tendency towards creating imitative publics (zulli & zulli, 2022) that gather around shared sounds, templates, hashtags, as well as lifestyles and consumer products (caliandro et al., forthcoming). the fact that the deinfluencing phenomenon is a tiktok trend makes its understanding even more compelling. as such, the content and critiques it promotes are influenced by memetic practices (zulli & zulli, 2020), editability affordances (hautea et al., 2021), as well as the algorithmic visibility prompted by tiktok’s architecture (bhandari & bimo, 2021). as a trend, deinfluencing content can be considered a way to get visibility, outsmart the algorithm, and join imitative publics, and, because of these practices, its potential for resistance can be diluted. given these specificities, it is relevant to study the deinfluencing phenomenon to understand changes in the perception of content creators, the influencer industry and issues of overconsumption and consumerism topics which have so far been rarely studied jointly. this contribution aims at providing an interdisciplinary perspective which blends literature on content creators and influencers pertaining to communication and media studies, with ideas rooted in consumer research. i believe that such an interdisciplinary approach offers the possibility to enrich the analytical toolkit of internet research, particularly in a time when consumerism, overconsumption, and environmentalism are compelling and urgent topics to address in relation to the internet. to understand how the deinfluencing trend represents a form of resistance to issues of overconsumption and consumerism, the research is based on a digital methods approach (rogers, 2019), and qualitative data analysis techniques (caliandro & gandini, 2017). after collecting the videos shared with the most popular hashtags associated with the deinfluencing trend (“#deinfluencing”, “#deinfluencer”, “#antihaul”), the analysis focuses on the categories of content emerging from the trend, as well as how the debates around consumption and overconsumption are articulated by means of tiktok-specific affordances, in particular, “stitches” and “duets”. the results show that the deinfluencing trend is composed of three main categories of content: resistance; consumerist reappropriation; and trend-surfing. in the first category, users express their refusal of the aspirational lifestyle promoted by both the influencer industry and tiktok, as well as the need for new ways of self-expression that go beyond the mere adherence to a pre-defined lifestyle rooted in consumption. this content expresses users’ resistance towards consumerism, and it is the most genuinely connected to active practices against overconsumption. on the contrary, the potential for resistance is diluted with videos that show a consumerist reappropriation of the trend. with this content, the trend is used not as an opportunity to spread awareness of overconsumption, but as yet another way of promoting consumer goods. the difference here lies in the emphasis on the authenticity of these promotions, which only aim at selling “cheap products” from the “brands that won’t disappoint you”, as some videos in this category mention. lastly, in the case of trend-surfing content, users take advantage of the trend, and its critique of overconsumption, as a way of promoting the most important product of the attention economy, the self-brand, and to maximise visibility by replicating the trending and possibly viral content on tiktok. although some genuine forms of resistance can be found, the analysis of the deinfluencing trend shows the different ways in which resistance becomes “trending”, meaning intertwined and progressively mitigated by the logic and architecture of tiktok. the concept of trending resistance is suitable to highlight the contradictory nature of deinfluencing: a trend which proposes a critique of consumption which still largely relies on consumption practices; a criticism of the influencer industry via crafting and boosting a personal brand; and an opposition to the logic of tiktok by using that same logic for personal gains. besides this specific case study, the concept of trending resistance is useful to enrich the understanding of those tiktok trends and content which address contemporary issues, such as climate change, environmentalism, human rights, and inequalities, among others. references abidin, c. (2016). agentic cute (^.^): pastiching east asian cute in influencer commerce. east asian journal of popular culture, 2(1), 33–47. https://doi.org/10.1386/eapc.2.1.33_1. abidin, c., & gwynne, j. (2017). entrepreneurial selves, feminine corporeality and lifestyle blogging in singapore. asian journal of social science, 45(4–5), 385–408. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685314-04504002. bainotti, l. (2023). how conspicuousness becomes productive on social media. marketing theory. 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931231202435. https://doi.org/10.1386/eapc.2.1.33_1 https://doi.org/10.1163/15685314-04504002 https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931231202435 banet-weiser, s. (2012). authentic tm: politics and ambivalence in a brand culture. new york university press. bhandari, a., & bimo, s. (2020). tiktok and the “algorithmized self”: a new model of online interaction. aoir selected papers of internet research, 2020. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2020i0.11172. caliandro, a., & gandini, a. (2017). qualitative research in digital environments: a research toolkit. routledge. caliandro, a., gandini, a., bainotti l., anselmi g., (2023, forthcoming). the platformization of consumer culture. amsterdam university press. christin, a. & lewis, r. (2021). the drama of metrics: status, spectacle, and resistance among youtube drama creators. social media + society, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305121999660. duffy, b. e., & hund, e. (2019). gendered visibility on social media: navigating instagram’s authenticity bind. international journal of communication, 13, 4983–5002. retrieved from https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/11729. duffy, b. e., miltner, k. m., & wahlstedt, a. (2022). policing “fake” femininity: authenticity, accountability, and influencer antifandom. new media & society, 24(7), 1657-1676. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221099234. faithfull, m. (3 february 2023). the new phenom of ‘deinfluencing’ is changing influencer culture. forbes. available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/markfaithfull/2023/02/03/could-the-tiktok-deinfluencingbacklash-topple-influencer-culture/?sh=46d892cc5853. hautea, s., parks, p., takahashi, b., & zeng, j. (2021). showing they care (or don’t): affective publics and ambivalent climate activism on tiktok. social media + society, 7(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211012344. lee, j., & abidin, c. (2021). backdoor advertising scandals, yingyeo culture, and cancel culture among youtube influencers in south korea. new media & society, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444821106182914614448211061829. lewis, r., & christin, a. (2022). platform drama: “cancel culture,” celebrity, and the struggle for accountability on youtube. new media & society, 24(7), 1632-1656. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221099235. marwick, a. e. (2015). instafame: luxury selfies in the attention economy. public culture, 27(1 75), 137–160. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2798379. rogers, r. (2019). doing digital methods. sage. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2020i0.11172 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305121999660 https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/11729 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221099234 https://www.forbes.com/sites/markfaithfull/2023/02/03/could-the-tiktok-deinfluencing-backlash-topple-influencer-culture/?sh=46d892cc5853 https://www.forbes.com/sites/markfaithfull/2023/02/03/could-the-tiktok-deinfluencing-backlash-topple-influencer-culture/?sh=46d892cc5853 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211012344 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444821106182914614448211061829 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221099235 https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2798379 zulli, d., & zulli, d. j. (2022). extending the internet meme: conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation publics on the tiktok platform. new media & society, 24(8), 1872–1890. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820983603. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820983603 microsoft word o fathaigh-digital platforms and the digitisation of government surveillance-digital platforms and the .docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): ó fathaigh, r; bellanova, r.; zeybek, b & moeller, j.. (2021, october). digital platforms and the digitisation of government surveillance. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. digital platforms and the digitisation of government surveillance ronan ó fathaigh university of amsterdam rocco bellanova university of amsterdam bengi zeybek university of amsterdam judith moeller university of amsterdam in europe today, digital platforms, such as facebook, twitter and youtube, provide an essential means for millions of people to express themselves, engage in public debate, and organise politically (poell & van dijck, 2018). their crucial role in modern digital societies is increasingly recognised by public institutions. for instance, europe’s highest human rights court has recently highlighted platforms’ importance for public expression and distribution of news. in the words of the european court of human rights, platforms provide an ‘unprecedented’ means for exercising freedom of expression, ‘undoubtedly’ enhance the public’s access to news, and facilitate the widespread dissemination of information (cengiz v. turkey, 2015, para. 52) (see also, dobber, ó fathaigh & zuiderveen borgesius, 2019). however, these platforms are built upon vast systems of data collection and data monetization (cohen, 2017; ó fathaigh, van hoboken & van eijk 2019), which raises major concerns in terms of privacy, data protection and consumer protection. besides, platforms’ regular use of algorithmic and ai systems is shaping information dissemination, which impacts on users’ freedom of expression (eskens, helberger & möller, 2017). crucially, over the past five years in particular, governments have been able to leverage the power of platforms to impose new forms of restrictions on free expression, and engage in the surveillance of individuals and online activism. this has profound implications for the rights to freedom of expression, privacy, and data protection. indeed, the un special rapporteur on freedom of expression has highlighted the government ‘pressure’ on digital platforms to implement ‘proactive measures’, including automated tools, that may ‘serve as a form of prepublication censorship’ (kaye, 2018, p. 12). further, platforms that once refused to cooperate with governments in identifying users responsible for disseminating allegedly illegal or harmful content are now expanding cooperation with authorities, including sharing data about users flagged by law enforcement and other authorities. for example, in summer 2019, the french government announced that for the first time, facebook had agreed to hand over identification data of users suspected of disseminating allegedly illegal content to french judicial authorities (rosemain, 2019). other countries, such as the united kingdom and united states, have announced similar agreements with platforms such as facebook and google (schulze, 2019). while welcomed by public authorities, these forms of platform/government cooperation raise multiple concerns. for instance, civil society organisations note that too many different public authorities seek (and obtain) access to platform users’ data, including not only law enforcement but also intelligence and immigration agencies. as civil society organisations warn, this trend is contributing to ‘invasive and unlawful digital surveillance’ (amnesty international, 2019 p. 24). as such, platforms are becoming both tools of government and targets for regulation, and taking advantage of regulation by platforms (gillespie, 2018). this paper examines how european governments are leveraging the power of digital platforms to engage in government surveillance online, and assesses the compatibility of these measures with european human rights law. the paper applies a unique interdisciplinary perspective, bringing together law, political communication and surveillance studies. literature on platforms is rapidly burgeoning, especially in the field of law (ó fathaigh, van hoboken, van eijk 2019), media studies and regulation (gorwa, 2019; gillespie, 2018; van dijck, poell & de waal, 2018). yet, interdisciplinary conversations remain rare (helberger, pierson & poell, 2018). first, the paper examines how platforms’ algorithmic systems shape (and limit) information dissemination. the paper then critically analyses government-platform initiatives that exist to surveil citizens and gather information, including new measures under the eu’s proposed digital services act. third, it assesses how these measures comply with freedom of expression and the right to privacy, and concludes with recommendations on remedying problematic elements of the role platforms play in digitisation of government surveillance. references amnesty international. (2019). surveillance giants: how the business model of google and facebook threaten human rights. http://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/pol30/1404/2019/en/ cengiz and others v. turkey. (2015, december 1). application nos. 48226/10 and 14027/11. european court of human rights. cohen, j.e. (2017). law for the platform economy. u.c. davis law review, 51, 133204. dobber, t., ó fathaigh, r., & zuiderveen borgesius, f. 2019. the regulation of online political micro-targeting in europe. internet policy review 8(4). https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.4.1440 eskens, s., helberger, n., & möller, j. (2017). challenged by news personalisation: five perspectives on the right to receive information. journal of media law, 9(2), 259-284. gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. yale university press. gorwa, r. (2019). what is platform governance? information, communication & society, 22(6), 854-871. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1573914 helberger, n., pierson, j., & poell, t. (2018). governing online platforms: from contested to cooperative responsibility. the information society, 34(1), 1-14. kaye, d. (2018). report of the special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. united nations. https://documents-ddsny.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/g18/096/72/pdf/g1809672.pdf?openelement. ó fathaigh, r., van hoboken, j., & van eijk, n. (2019). mobile privacy and businessto-platform dependencies: an analysis of sec disclosures. journal of business & technology law, 14(1), 49-105. poell, t., & van dijck, j. (2018). social media and new protest movements. in j. burgess, a. marwick and t. poell (eds.), the sage handbook of social media (pp. 546-561). sage. rosemain, m. (2019, june 25). in a world first, facebook to give data on hate speech suspects to french courts. reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-francetech-exclusive-iduskcn1tq1tj schulze, e. (2019, october 4). us, uk sign first-ever deal to access data from tech companies like facebook and google. cnbc. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/04/us-uk-sign-agreement-to-access-data-fromtech-companies-like-facebook.html van dijck, j., poell, t., & de waal, m. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford university press. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): kappeler, k., festic, n., & latzer, m. (2022, november). qualitative evidence on chilling effects—how users’ imaginaries of dataveillance lead to inhibited digital behavior. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. qualitative evidence on chilling effects—how users’ imaginaries of dataveillance lead to inhibited digital behavior kiran kappeler university of zurich noemi festic university of zurich michael latzer university of zurich theoretical basis for chilling effects of dataveillance our everyday life has become highly digitized: we read articles online, scroll through news feeds, or google health symptoms—and all these online actions leave digital data traces that are automatically collected, aggregated, and analyzed with the use of algorithmic systems. this dataveillance can be problematic as perceiving it can have a chilling effect on mundane and legitimate information and communication behaviors (büchi et al., 2022; van dijck, 2014). such self-inhibition can manifest in avoiding searching for a certain topic online or refraining from posting something on social media for fear that these data traces could lead to potential harms in the future. these chilling effects of dataveillance are problematic in a democratic society as they deter individuals from informing themselves unrestrictedly and voicing their opinion freely, which are essential requirements for well-functioning democratic processes (büchi et al., 2022; penney, 2016; véliz, 2020). limited existing empirical research while there is an established body of theoretical and empirical research on online privacy and how internet users aim at protecting it in light of surveillance discourses (see viola & laidler, 2022), research on dataveillance and, specifically, its effects has only recently emerged. extant empirical research has confirmed that people are somewhat aware of dataveillance (e.g., lupton, 2020) and that they limit their legitimate information and communication behavior in response to this perception (e.g., marthews & tucker, 2017; penney, 2016; stoycheff et al., 2019). however, the intricacies of these suggested citation (apa): kappeler, k., festic, n., & latzer, m. (2022, november). qualitative evidence on chilling effects—how users’ imaginaries of dataveillance lead to inhibited digital behavior. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. mechanisms and the extent to which a sense of dataveillance deters individuals from freely engaging in legitimate digital behaviors remain empirically understudied. aim to fill this research gap, this study first addresses imaginaries (bucher, 2017; lupton, 2020) of dataveillance, namely, to which degree internet users have a sense of dataveillance, how they acquire it, and how they feel about dataveillance. second, it investigates how a sense of dataveillance leads to chilling effects on digital behavior, namely, what own behaviors internet users limit due to perceived dataveillance and how they feel when (dis-)engaging in such digital behaviors. method empirically studying chilling effects is challenging because, among other things, they are conceptualized as long-term and expected effect sizes are small, dataveillance practices do not have high variance and therefore cannot be manipulated in experimental settings, and the phenomenon is difficult to convey to lay people without priming them in survey studies (büchi et al., 2022). to address the aforementioned questions, we therefore apply an explorative approach to investigate internet users’ perceptions, imaginaries, and reasonings regarding their digital behavior. we conduct qualitative semi-structured interviews with 15 individuals from diverse life stages and social environments (brinkmann & kvale, 2015; lareau, 2021). the interviewees answer a recruitment questionnaire providing information on their background and basic internet use before being invited to take part in the study to maximize variety among participants. the interview topics include general online behaviors like information seeking, socializing, and commercial transactions, feelings towards and imaginaries of dataveillance, and diverse manifestations of chilling effects. the interviews are transcribed and coded continuously parallel to the interviewing process using the qualitative coding software maxqda in order to be able to adapt the topic guide to emerging themes. to acknowledge the explorative nature of this study, our coding approach remains open for emerging themes. hence, while some codes are deducted from existing research, most are inductively generated from the interview data (silverman, 2018). in our analysis we explore how people imagine dataveillance, we investigate how these imaginaries of dataveillance lead to mundane digital behavior being chilled, and we identify the types of digital behaviors that are chilled in response to this perceived dataveillance. results and contribution our results contribute to our understanding of people’s imaginaries of dataveillance, for instance by informing us about the imagined sources of dataveillance that can range from states to corporate actors monitoring individuals’ activities. we further contribute qualitative evidence on the sources of dataveillance, which can include external shocks like news articles about data scandals or internal perceptions from concrete internet-use experiences like becoming aware of dataveillance by recognizing personalized advertisements. the interviews further reveal whether and how people react to a heightened sense of dataveillance with limiting their digital behavior. in addition to searching for information and expressing opinions, we identify further legitimate, suggested citation (apa): kappeler, k., festic, n., & latzer, m. (2022, november). qualitative evidence on chilling effects—how users’ imaginaries of dataveillance lead to inhibited digital behavior. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. mundane behaviors in other life domains like participating in online dating and buying things online that are affected by a sense of dataveillance and have so far been neglected in literature on chilling effects. these results contribute to an empirically founded understanding of the nature of a sense of dataveillance and resulting chilling effects on digital behavior and thus advance research in this emerging field. insights from the qualitative internet-user interviews contribute to rendering these chilling effects more tangible. they provide the basis for a representative survey and a mobile experience sampling study as part of a mixed-methods research design, that will investigate the prevalence of chilling effects in digitized societies on a population level. references brinkmann, s., & kvale, s. (2015). interviews: learning the craft of qualitative research interviewing (third edition). sage. bucher, t. (2017). the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 30–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154086 büchi, m., festic, n., & latzer, m. (2022). the chilling effects of digital dataveillance: a theoretical model and an empirical research agenda. big data & society, 9(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211065368 lareau, a. (2021). listening to people: a practical guide to interviewing, participant observation, data analysis, and writing it all up. university of chicago press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/l/bo114845989.html lupton, d. (2020). thinking with care about personal data profiling: a more-than-human approach. international journal of communication, 14, 3165–3183. marthews, a., & tucker, c. e. (2017). the impact of online surveillance on behavior. in cambridge handbook of surveillance law (pp. 437–454). cambridge university press. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3167473 penney, j. w. (2016). chilling effects: online surveillance and wikipedia use. berkeley technology law journal, 31, 117–182. silverman, d. (2018). doing qualitative research. sage. stoycheff, e., liu, j., xu, k., & wibowo, k. (2019). privacy and the panopticon: online mass surveillance’s deterrence and chilling effects. new media & society, 21(3), 602– 619. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818801317 van dijck, j. (2014). datafication, dataism and dataveillance: big data between scientific paradigm and ideology. surveillance & society, 12(2), 197–208. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v12i2.4776 suggested citation (apa): kappeler, k., festic, n., & latzer, m. (2022, november). qualitative evidence on chilling effects—how users’ imaginaries of dataveillance lead to inhibited digital behavior. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. véliz, c. (2020). privacy is power. why and how you should take back control of your data. bantam press. viola, l. a. & laidler, p. (2022). trust and transparency in an age of surveillance. routledge studies in surveillance. routledge. microsoft word inwood-white supremacists deceptively using screenshots as evidence-white supremacists deceptively using.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): inwood, o. (2021, october). white supremacists deceptively using screenshots as evidence: a social semiotic approach to analysing conspiratorial youtube videos. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. white supremacists deceptively using screenshots as evidence: a social semiotic approach to analysing conspiratorial youtube videos olivia inwood university of new south wales introduction over the years, extreme right-wing communities have formed on youtube, spreading discourses of white supremacy and conspiracy. the focus of this study is on the notre dame fire from april 2019, one of the most googled news events of 2019, and an event that ignited hate speech by white supremacists and conspiracists who blamed innocent religious groups and officials for instigating the fire. the dataset for analysis consists of videos taken from popular youtube videos in english-speaking extreme right-wing communities that spread conspiratorial content about how the fire started or how it was received on social media. most of these videos also spread disinformation and hate speech by blaming muslims for starting the fire and labelling the notre dame fire as a terrorist act. screenshots, defined as a still image that shows the screen of a computer or mobile phone, have become a ubiquitous part of our social media activity, and are often presupposed as evidence to support claims. this study considers the role of screenshots in these conspiratorial youtube videos and how a social semiotic approach can help to further analyze the social significance of screenshots as a form of evidence. social semiotics is a perspective on communication that is interested in how language and other modes of meaning-making are used in social contexts. after initially conducting a multimodal analysis on the frames of youtube videos about the notre dame fire, the high frequency of screenshots appearing as evidence to support conspiratorial claims became apparent. thus, this initial analysis inspired a more detailed and focused analysis on the specific role of screenshots in these videos. the main questions guiding this study are: what strategies do white supremacists use to artificially create credibility in their conspiratorial youtube videos? what values are attached to these strategies and how can this be mapped out? literature review research into screenshots on social media is a relatively new area to explore. thus, only a few works to-date have considered screenshots as their main object of study. jaynes (2020) takes an ethnographic approach to analyzing the everyday use of screenshots by teenagers and how screenshots are used as evidence by teenagers. jaynes (2020: 1378) describes screenshots as a “taken-for-granted practice” but highlights the importance of screenshots as “powerful communicative tools” that should be further studied. moore (2014:141) has explored digital game screenshots with theories such as cybernetics, remediation, and affect, and writes that in relation to screenshots the digital humanities offers a “powerful and complimentary means for examining the assumptions embedded in their form and function”. this highlights the importance of examining screenshots from a social perspective, and the range of methodological contributions that can be made regarding the analysis of screenshots. in terms of research into screenshots and manipulation, krafft and donovan (2020) have analyzed ‘evidence collages’ in media manipulation campaigns from an ethnographic perspective. these ‘evidence collages’ consist of screenshots and the authors argue that “the use of visual evidence collages represents a key strategic element in the formation and spread of disinformation” (krafft and donovan, 2020). despite the valuable research that has already been conducted into screenshots, a social semiotic approach in relation to screenshots has not yet been developed. a social semiotic approach would be a valuable addition to research on screenshots, as this approach can systemically provide a way for understanding the social significance of screenshots and how they deceptively contribute to legitimation in discourse. methodological framework this study takes a social semiotic approach to understanding screenshots. in particular, this study applies a combined legitimation (van leeuwen, 2007) and communing affiliation (zappavigna and martin, 2018) framework to the verbal and visual content of 15 videos that were the most viewed conspiratorial videos released about the notre dame fire. the dataset consists of transcripts (20 000 words in total) and frames representing each change of scene in a video (850 images in total). communing affiliation refers to how values are positioned as bondable in situation where users don’t interact directly (zappavigna and martin, 2018). it is formed from couplings of ideational (what is being evaluated) and attitudinal (how it is evaluated) meaning as per the appraisal framework (martin and white, 2005), hence forming a value that is bondable (i.e. a value that can be used to align with others). legitimation (van leeuwen, 2007) refers to how discourses establish or negate authority and can be realized linguistically or visually. there are four main categories of legitimation, and a text can represent multiple (de)legitimations, a single form of (de)legitimation or no (de)legitimation at all. in table 1 the summarized coding strategy for the data is shown. overall, a combined communing affiliation and legitimation framework has been considered to understand what values are highlighted in the language and visual content of the videos, and how these values are (de)legitimized or if (de)legitimation is ignored entirely. table 1 coding strategy for verbal and visual data key findings based on preliminary findings, ‘technological authority’ was a core theme expressed throughout the entire dataset. this ‘technological authority’ was construed by positive evaluations of video clips and screenshots as evidence in the transcripts, and the use of screenshots as visual evidence. screenshots were more frequently seen as a form of authorizing legitimation rather than delegitimation. in terms of key bonds, screenshots were used to validate the claims that information is ‘valuable’, the fire is ‘suspicious’, migrants are ‘evil’, video clips are ‘truthful’, and viewers who watch the channel are ‘fearless’. screenshots in conjunction with language also contributed to ‘authorities’ and ‘islam’ being delegitimized. in other instances, moral evaluations were primarily made through language, rationalizations were made by stating deceptive statistics, and conspiracies were evaluated as valuable by appealing to the idea of a cohesive narrative. a sample of these key bonds and how they relate to legitimation strategies is seen in figure 1. a sample of the analysis conducted on specific screenshots is shown in figure 2. figure 1 sample of the relationship between key bonds and legitimation strategies figure 2 – sample of specific screenshots linked to legitimation and affiliation strategies authorisation moral evaluation rationalisation mythopoesis suspicious fire valuable info legitimate delegitimate legitimate delegitimate truthful clip fearless viewer evil migrants evil islam powerful nwo lying authorities powerless islam evil migrants valuable conspiracy technological authority scrolling through the newsweek website suspicious fire bond personal authority clown pepe meme associated with white nationalism + ‘name a more toxic community’ meme fearless viewer bond technological authority scrolling through the newsweek website suspicious fire bond technological authority screenshots from twitter highlighted text suspicious fire bond + evil migrants bond conclusion this paper has highlighted how a social semiotic approach can further illuminate the legitimation of screenshots in conspiratorial youtube videos and the values that they are attached to. whilst this current study has remained explorative in terms of focusing on new methodological insights rather than providing exact frequencies of how often these features appear, future work will quantify the frequencies of these verbal and visual features across the entire video dataset. youtube videos can spread conspiratorial and hateful content in sophisticated ways, and screenshots have contributed to the believability and virality of the particular videos discussed in this paper. in other words, the assumption that screenshots solely act as evidence should not be taken for granted and the values and legitimation strategies attached to screenshots needs to be considered. this has several ethical implications for how we independently use screenshots in our daily lives – have we taken for granted screenshots as evidence and ignored the broader social contexts screenshots are implicated in? references jaynes v (2020) the social life of screenshots: the power of visibility in teen friendship groups. new media & society 22(8): 1378-1393. krafft p and donovan j (2020) disinformation by design: the use of evidence collages and platform filtering in a media manipulation campaign. political communication 37(2): 194-214. martin, j. r., & white, p. r. (2005). the language of evaluation: appraisal in english. london: palgrave macmillan. moore c (2014) screenshots as virtual photography. advancing digital humanities. springer, pp.141-160. van leeuwen, t. (2007). legitimation in discourse and communication. discourse & communication, 1(1), 91-112. zappavigna, m., & martin, j. r. (2018). # communing affiliation: social tagging as a resource for aligning around values in social media. discourse, context & media, 22, 412. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): righetti, n., rossi, l., marino, g. (2021, october). into the belly of the beast: the research on social media and covid-19 misinformation in 2020. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. into the belly of the beast: the research on social media and covid-19 misinformation in 2020 nicola righetti university of vienna nicola.righetti@univie.ac.at luca rossi it university of copenhagen lucr@itu.dk giada marino university of sassary gmarino@uniss.it introduction in this paper we present some preliminary findings from an ongoing research (righetti, rossi, marino, 2021) on a comprehensive corpus of 378 interdisciplinary studies about misinformation and covid-19 published in 2020, focusing on the role of social media platforms in spreading and countering misand disinformation. from the health of democracy to the health of people, after the major wave of research on “fake news” following the 2016 u.s. presidential elections (righetti, 2021), the covid-19 pandemic has probably been the event that attracted most of the research on the topic. changing the everyday lives of people around the world, the threatening and unknown virus has led to an explosive stream of information, including unsubstantiated, misleading, and false information (brennen et al., 2020) which led the who to use the term “infodemic” to label this excessively prolific, confused and potentially harmful flow of information. social media platforms have been into the belly of the infodemic beast. pointed out as one of the main means for spreading groundless and harmful disinformation, they have also implemented a series of countermeasures to curb misinformation and connect nicola righetti university of vienna luca rossi it university of copenhagen giada marino university of sassary selected papers of #aoir2021: people to official information sources, becoming an important tool for government to debunk fake news and promote health information (lovari, 2020). here we aim at answering the following research questions: rq1) which social media platforms have been taken into account by the research on covid-19 misinformation in 2020? rq2) what methods have been used by these studies? rq3) which perspectives on misinformation and social media emerge from them? data and method following the prisma guidelines for systematic reviews (moher et al., 2009) we collected, screened and analyzed a comprehensive interdisciplinary corpus of 565 papers on covid-19 misinformation published in 2020 (fig. 1). the collected data set can be defined largely complete, considering the records for the same keywords registered in the official covid-19 literature research service of who (n=484)1. fig. 1. prisma flow chart 1 covid or covid-19 or coronavirus and misinformation or disinformation or malinformation or "problematic information" or "fake news" or "information disorder" or infodemic or conspiracy or rumor or hoax. of 453 articles assessed for eligibility, 75 studies were excluded considering that they just incidentally mention the topic (n=378). the papers were read by three coders and the main information annotated according to a coding scheme on methodological and substantive questions2. this data set was used to answer the above-mentioned research questions by using a quantitative and qualitative approach. findings the most popular and accessible social media platforms – twitter and facebook – are the most mentioned in the investigated papers, followed by whatsapp, instagram and youtube. less mainstream platforms (e.g.: telegram and reddit) are less represented, and non-western platforms (e.g.: wechat and odnoklassniki) are markedly underrepresented (fig. 2). figure 2. platforms mentioned in the studies. as shown in the next plot (fig. 3), most of the studies used social media to distribute a survey, therefore collecting a convenience sample of social media users, or make reference to social media in a survey. it can also be seen the impact of data availability on the methods used by researchers: for instance, 2 among the categories taken into consideration: methods, units of analysis, sample size, country, social media platforms, and main findings. social network analysis or natural language processing (nlp) require data generally not available for instant messaging platforms such as whatsapp, so they are not used to study this platform. many perspectives and findings emerged in the research. here we can just make a few examples, highlighting three crucial topics – prevalence of misinformation, countermeasures, and the role of social media communication – to bring out the polyphony of scholar voices. about misinformation prevalence, for instance, some study found just minor misinformation (prabhakar & prasad, 2020), while others a relevant and impactful flow of misleading content (li et al. 2020). figure 3. methods used in the studies. with reference to moderating practices, some scholars have observed they could even strengthen conspiracy beliefs, and that banned content keeps circulating on alternative platforms (bruns, harrington, & hurcombe, 2020), while others have even gone so far as to suggest, as a viable solution to counter disinformation, collaboration with platforms to imprison who spread fake news (alvarez-risco, 2020). finally, although many papers focus on the role of social media in the infodemic, others have observed that they can also be used against it, for instance thanks to celebrities sharing quality information with their followers (mututwa, 2020), or by official agencies to disseminate pandemic-related information (liu & tong, 2020). conclusions the preliminary results we have sketched, show that research on covid-19 misinformation reproduces a well-known trend of differentiated attention to social media platforms based on both popularity among users and ease of access to data by scholars. this points out the importance for researchers to get wider access to social media data due to the constrains that, otherwise, will inevitably limit research based on just a few platforms. about methods, online survey distributed via social media has been a very popular approach, due to the urgency to understand what was going on with the pandemic in the information ecosystem, along with the relevance of digital platforms for the spreading of misinformation, and the ease to collect data through them. however, this approach has several limitations, mainly because it relies on convenience samples which can lead to a partial view on the issue. beside limitations, the research has made evident a wide range of perspective on problematic information, and sometimes diverging point of views. it is therefore important to summarize the studies already made on the topic to favor the development of the research, also pointing out limitations to overcome, viable solutions, and new hypotheses to test. references alvarez-risco, a., mejia, c. r., delgado-zegarra, j., del-aguila-arcentales, s., arceesquivel, a. a., valladares-garrido, m. j., ... & yáñez, j. a. (2020). the peru approach against the covid-19 infodemic: insights and strategies. the american journal of tropical medicine and hygiene, 103(2), 583-586. bruns, a., harrington, s., & hurcombe, e. (2020). ‘corona? 5g? or both?’: the dynamics of covid-19/5g conspiracy theories on facebook. media international australia, 177(1), 12-29. li, h. o. y., bailey, a., huynh, d., & chan, j. (2020). youtube as a source of information on covid-19: a pandemic of misinformation? bmj global health, 5(5). liu, j. c., & tong, e. m. (2020). the relation between official whatsapp-distributed covid-19 news exposure and psychological symptoms: cross-sectional survey study. journal of medical internet research, 22(9). lovari, a. (2020). spreading (dis) trust: covid-19 misinformation and government intervention in italy. media and communication, 8(2), 458-461. moher, d., shamseer, l., clarke, m., ghersi, d., liberati, a., petticrew, m., ... & stewart, l. a. (2015). preferred reporting items for systematic review and meta-analysis protocols (prisma-p) 2015 statement. systematic reviews, 4(1), 1-9. mututwa, w. (2020). covid-19 infections on international celebrities: self-presentation and tweeting down pandemic awareness. journal of science communication, 19(5) prabhakar kaila, d., & prasad, d. a. (2020). informational flow on twitter–corona virus outbreak–topic modelling approach. international journal of advanced research in engineering and technology, 11(3). righetti, n., rossi, l., marino, g. (2021). the 2020 research on problematic information on the covid19 pandemic. a systematic literature review https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/fn3cj/ righetti, n. (2021). four years of fake news. a quantitative analysis of the scientific literature. first monday. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 hybrid network methods to disentangle datafication in the domestic context gaia amadori catholic university of the sacred heart of milan giovanna mascheroni catholic university of the sacred heart of milan introduction datafication of childhood and family life (barassi, 2020; mascheroni & siibak, 2021) represents one of the main expressions of data colonialism (couldry & mejias, 2019). the normalisation of data relations on which data colonialism is premised that is, the emergence of new types of social relations that are enabled by the technologies of data extraction while contributing to their legitimation (couldry & mejias, 2019) poses significant epistemological and methodological challenges. drawing on a longitudinal mixed-methods research project with 20 families with young children (0-8 y.o), this contribution sets out to advance some methodological proposals to study such phenomena through hybrid methods. theoretical framework the colonisation of everyday life through technologies and practices of data extraction would not be possible without a simultaneous colonisation of social imaginaries, which normalise data relations as natural, inevitable and even desirable (couldry & mejias, 2019). data relations are pervading the practices and imaginaries of parenting and childhood to the point of being taken for granted. this pervasiveness, yet ambivalence, of data in family life, then, poses an “epistemological puzzle” (milan & treré, 2019) that includes a methodological component. addressing the heterogeneity and irreducibly contradictory character of the social world (couldry & mejias, 2019), some methods have been accredited as more suitable to disentangle the situated nature of data practices, while fostering suggested citation (apa): amadori, g., & mascheroni, g. (2022, november). hybrid network methods to disentangle datafication in the domestic context. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. empowerment of research subjects (see costanza-chock 2018, d’ignazio & klein, 2019). in our study of datafication of childhood and family life, we declined this into a “nonmedia-centric” approach (couldry, 2012)which recognises data relations as embedded in situated social practices (kennedy et al., 2015) and foregrounds the power relations at play. moreover, we argue that the entanglement of data with imaginaries and practices can be best framed if we understand families as communicative figurations (couldry & hepp, 2017; hepp et al., 2018) composed of a constellation of actors (family members), culture (including technological and surveillance imaginaries (lyon, 2018), communication practices, and a specific digital media ensemble. methodological proposal accordingly, the study adopts constructivist grounded theory (charmaz, 2014) and integrates interviews, observational and visual data (pink & leder-mackley, 2012) and network analysis within a qualitative longitudinal research (qlr) with families with young children (0-8 y.o) (n=20), comprising three waves of data collection. we suggest that network methods and cgt appear suited as analytical tools to capture the interactions between data (generated by the media practices of each household’s member) and each family figuration. these techniques allow to map each family’s constellation of actors, their data practices and imaginaries, and the digital media ensemble accounting for household’s power relations and the family’s social norms. moreover, these visualisations can be employed as “reflexive maps” to foster participants’ reflexivity and co-participation. findings although still in an initial stage of development, the employment of networks methods seems to be an effective way to map the intersection between data relations and family figuration, as shown by the following maps realised triangulating data from the interviews of the first wave of the qlr within a family with two female children of 8 and 10 y.o. fig.1 two-mode network of media ensemble and family members (constellation of actors). the thickness of the edges is proportional to the intensity of communicative practices that employ the medium (low-medium-high). the size of the nodes is proportional to their degree (number of actor-device connections). two-mode networks allow to identify the most relevant devices and visualise patterns of spatial differentiation. for example, the east of the graph represents the space for children, where they can experience digital media with reduced external interference; while the west describes the private space reserved only to parents. in the center, we observe the common spaces (living room/kitchen) with shared media (tvs, alexa…). it’s worth noticing that the strongest edges are those connecting individuals, both adults and children, to ‘owned’ and ‘personal’ media that represent both identity resources and means to confirm status and agency within the household. fig.2 simple projection of the two-mode network (fig.1). every node is a family member and each link represents a device adopted by both actors. fig.3 matrix of the one-mode network of actors. each cell reports the number of devices used in common, while the aii one shows the actor’s degree, i.e the number of adopted media. the projection of the previous network – i.e the conversion of a two-mode in a onemode network shows the pattern of distribution of the media ensemble and the mediarelated structure of relationships among family members. we observe (fig. 2) that the father has a more symmetric formation, sharing the same number of media with the children. likewise, the two kids use many devices in common, although child 1 seems to be a little bit more mediatized (degree=11), even if she has less intense communicative practices (see fig.1), while child 2 shares the highest number of devices with relatives. it’s interesting to notice that the mother uses less devices and shares fewer of them with children compared to her partner: this may suggest a specific attitude towards technology or an under-investment due to the need to keep up with childcare as the husband comes home late in the evening. these visualisations are useful to glimpse some coordinates of the family’s culture worth to be deepened in the next waves of research. moreover, they can be adopted as a stimulus to participants to foster reflexivity on data relations in the digital-material context of their daily life. conclusion studying datafication of childhood and family life poses relevant methodological and epistemological challenges that require a critical approach to data. this paper has suggested how the adoption of a cgt methodology employing hybrid methods, which leverages the potential of network methods, may represent a way to materialize data relations and foster reflexivity to disentangle data colonialism in family life. references barassi, v. (2020). child | data | citizen. how tech-companies are profiling us from before birth. the mit press. charmaz, k. (2014). constructing grounded theory: a practical guide through qualitative analysis. second edition. los angeles: sage. costanza-chock, s. (2018). design justice, a.i., and escape from the matrix of domination. journal of design and science, 3 (5). retrieved from https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/costanza-chock couldry, n. (2012). media, society, world: social theory and digital media practice. polity. couldry, n., & hepp, a. (2017). the mediated construction of reality. polity. couldry, n., & mejias, u. a. (2019). the costs of connection. stanford university press. d’ignazio, catherine, and lauren klein. 2019. data feminism. cambridge, ma: mit press. hepp, a., breiter, a., & hasebrink, u. (2018). communicative figurations: transforming communications in times of deep mediatization. cham, switzerland: palgrave. kennedy, h., poell, t., & van dijck, j. (2015). data and agency. big data & society, 2(2), 1-7. lyon, d. (2018). the culture of surveillance: watching as a way of life. cambridge: polity. mascheroni, g. & siibak a. (2021). datafied childhoods. data practices and imaginaries in children’s lives. peter lang ag. milan, s., & treré. e. (2019). big data from the south(s): beyond data universalism. television & new media, 20 (4), 319–35. pink, s. & leder-mackley k. (2012). video and a sense of the invisible: approaching domestic energy consumption through the sensory home. sociological research online, 17(1), 3. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): bene, m., magin, m., haßler, j., russmann, u., lilleker, d., kruschinski, s., jackson, d., fenoll, v., farkas, x., baranowski, p. & balaban, d. (2022, november). populism in context. a cross-country investigation of the facebook usage of populist appeals during the 2019 european parliament elections. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. populism in context. a cross-country investigation of the facebook usage of populist appeals during the 2019 european parliament elections márton bene centre for social sciences, hungarian academy of sciences centre of excellene & elte eötvös loránd university, budapest melanie magin norwegian university of science and technology jörg haßler lmu munich uta russmann university of innsbruck darren lilleker bournemouth university simon kruschinski johannes gutenberg-university mainz dan jackson bournemouth university vicente fenollπ university of valencia xénia farkas centre for social sciences, hungarian academy of sciences centre of excellene paweł baranowski university of wrocław delia balaban babeș-bolyai university, cluj-napoca recent scholarship demonstrated that social networking platforms (snps), especially facebook, are a convenient and fertile space for populist political communication to proliferate (e.g., engesser et al., 2017). facebook enables the publication of multimedia content, with unlimited frequency at relatively negligible costs. this allows populists to reach a mass audience bypassing the filters of journalistic gatekeepers who frequently present populist arguments in a negative way (wettstein et al., 2018). research shows that political communication on snps is characterized by higher levels of populist sentiment (engesser et al., 2017), and populist actors are more prominent on snps than on other media channels (ernst et al., 2019). also, populist appeals prove to be highly popular on snps as they provoke more reactions, comments, and shares from users than non-populist appeals, which increases the reach of populist communication (jost et al., 2020). existing works, however, mostly focus only on the prevalence of the three dimensions of populist communication, while less attention has been paid to the overall context of their strategic use. this is a surprising gap as several scholars emphasized that populist communication is a context-dependent strategy (weyland, 2001) which has two important consequences. first, populist elements are consciously combined with other content (de bruycker & rooduijn, 2021) rather than used independently from the immediate context of communication. second, its usage is also conditioned by actors’ political position and strategic goals (schmuck & hameleers, 2020). if populist communication is a strategic tool, it is important to uncover the conditions under which it is more likely to appear and identify the elements of communication and political contexts that are strongly associated with the use of populist appeals. by identifying the specific context of populist appeals, we can better understand communicationand actor-related factors that facilitate the heightened presence of populist communication on social media. while some research has focused on certain contextual factors such as topics (de bruycker & rooduijn, 2021) or actors’ political positions (schmuck & hameleers, 2020), a gap in research exists requiring us to analyze in detail what communicationand actor-specific conditions are related to the use of populist appeals on snps. to fill this gap, our main research objective is to explore what postand pagelevel factors were associated with parties’ populist communication on facebook during the 2019 ep election. our study brings together common factors from populism research. our hypotheses are discussed on two dimensions: postand page-level. a facebookpost usually have a topical focus discussed on a certain political level (e.g. local, national or eu-level), serving particular strategic goal (e.g. information, interaction, mobilization) and is communicated via different modalities and styles. based on the literature, we expect that certain topics (h1 economy, immigration, social policy, environment), political levels (h2 european level), strategic goals (h3 mobilization appeals) and modalities (h4 visual communication) are more frequently associated with populist appeals that other content elements. research indicates that the application of populist communication is not only shaped by the communication content, but also by the political context. populist communication is ‘endemic’ in the sense that it is not limited to populist actors (mazzoleni & bracciale, 2018). a range of parties uses populist rhetoric strategically in line with their political positions and goals (schmuck & hameleers, 2020). we expect that parties will use populist appeals to different extents based on their ideologies (h5 more extreme and more conservative parties will be more populist) and role as governing or opposition party (h6 opposition parties will be more populist) at the national level. figure 1. overview of factors assumed to be associated with populism. to test our hypotheses and answer our research question, we conducted a quantitative content analysis of parties’ facebook posts during the 2019 ep election. twelve countries were chosen as the site of our analysis (austria, denmark, france, germany, hungary, ireland, italy, poland, romania, spain, sweden, and uk). the facebook posts of all parties from these 12 countries that reached more than 5% of votes in the 2019 ep election (n of parties = 67, n of posts =8,074) were collected during a fourweek investigation period prior to the election. our findings show that while there is a remarkable co-occurrence between the subdimensions of populism, the different subtypes of populist appeals are used in specific ways. on post-level, anti-elitism is frequently used in relation to economy, labor and social policy and immigration, people-centric appeals are associated with labor and social policy and used when parties call for action, while out-group messages are not related to other topics beyond immigration. interestingly, populist appeals do not draw upon visuals more heavily, and their usage are less connected to specific political level. at the party-level it seems that anti-elitism is more often used by parties not belonging to the ep´s ‘grand coalition’, while references to out-groups characterize party posts of the far-right ep groups. however, the usage of people centrism, is not explained by parties’ ideology. rather, it seems to be a widely used communication appeal across the political spectrum. references de bruycker, i., & rooduijn, m. (2021). the people’s champions? populist communication as a contextually dependent political strategy. journalism & mass communication quarterly, 98(3), 896–922. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699021998648 engesser, s., ernst, n., esser, f., & büchel, f. (2017). populism and social media: how politicians spread a fragmented ideology. information, communication & society, 20(8), 1109–1126. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1207697 ernst, n., esser, f., blassnig, s., & engesser, s. (2019). favorable opportunity structures for populist communication: comparing different types of politicians and issues in social media, television and the press. the international journal of press/politics, 24(2), 165–188. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940161218819430 jost, p., maurer, m., & hassler, j. (2020). populism fuels love and anger: the impact of message features on users’ reactions on facebook. international journal of communication, 14(0), 22. mazzoleni, g., & bracciale, r. (2018). socially mediated populism: the communicative strategies of political leaders on facebook. palgrave communications, 4(1), 1– 10. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-018-0104-x schmuck, d., & hameleers, m. (2020). closer to the people: a comparative content analysis of populist communication on social networking sites in preand postelection periods. information, communication & society, 23(10), 1531–1548. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1588909 wettstein, m., esser, f., schulz, a., wirz, d. s., & wirth, w. (2018). news media as gatekeepers, critics, and initiators of populist communication: how journalists in ten countries deal with the populist challenge. the international journal of press/politics, 23(4), 476–495. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940161218785979 weyland, k. (2001). clarifying a contested concept: populism in the study of latin american politics. comparative politics, 34(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.2307/422412 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): eshkol, k.l. and ribak, r. (2022, november). privacy discourse in github readme files. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. voices from the margins: privacy discourse in github readme files keren levy eshkol department of communication, university of haifa rivka ribak department of communication, university of haifa as more and more products become an exchange of information about the user for information for the user – e.g., user location for navigation and weather forecast, past purchases for effective recommendations, etc. – product managers and developers must decide what information they will collect, where they will store it, how they will protect it, and whether they will share it with other commercial entities. thus developers may be seen as mediators whose daily work involves translating cultural values into material products (ribak, 2019). the challenges to privacy that they identify, and the solutions they design, both mediate and are mediated by the web of norms and practices of which they are a part. studies suggest that developers do not prioritize privacy, and are not particularly critical or reflective about the privacy implications of their work (balebako et al., 2014; boyd, 2021; boyd & shilton, 2021; hadar et al., 2017; jørgensen, 2018; li et al., 2022; senarath & arachchilage, 2018). the proposed presentation is designed to contribute to this emergent (rather technical) body of work in two interrelated ways: conceptually, it draws on digital materialism (parikka, 2015) to define github1 (kitchin, 2017; prana et al., 2019) as a platform in which culturally diverse open-code developers meet other developers, encounter practical and ethical problems and solutions, learn from one another and collaborate in joint projects. methodologically, it is attentive to the ways in which developers consider the design of privacy amongst themselves. following green and shilton (2017; shilton & green, 2018; tahaei et al., 2020), it attempts to learn about developers’ privacy challenges by unobtrusively studying their discourse; however, by using automated tools, it can offer a broader view of developers’ concerns and practices as they are presented to fellow developers. 1 https://github.com/. github is the repository of more than 200 million open code projects. to explore how developers discuss privacy in github readme files, we adopt a grounded-theory interpretive process that is combined with automated analytic tools based on natural language processing algorithms, designed to make computer languages “understand” human language (nelson, 2020). we focus on the explanatory files (readme) that developers use to account for and essentially promote the software’s design and functionality, and where they describe, among other things, how they implement privacy protection. the first phase of the analysis sought to map developers’ privacy discourse. to identify paragraphs that contain information about the developers’ privacy practices from within the text, we used github2 retrieval tools and dedicated software written in python for information processing.3 we collected 59,898 readme files of software projects on various topics created between 2008-2020 in which the word privacy appears. we saved the relevant paragraph from each file in a separate file used for the automated process. the second phase involved a qualitative discourse analysis of the paragraphs containing the references to privacy. we applied vosviewer (www.vosviewer.com) for the first phase and voyant-tools (www.voyant-tools.org) for the second, selected for the level of documentation and functionality they provide. preliminary results the cluster analysis of phase 1 produced nine clusters. the two larger ones represent the main themes in developers’ privacy discourse in the readme files: one cluster includes 13 words and word pairs (e.g. “external site,” “third party”), the most common of which is “privacy policy.” the other cluster includes 68 words and word pairs, the most common of which is “security” alongside other, technologically-oriented references (e.g. “algorithm,” “anonymity,” “communication cloud,” “cryptocurrency,” “database,” "differential privacy,” “encryption,” “ip address,” “machine,” “network,” “protocol,” “transaction”). figure 1: clusters of privacy themes in github readme files 2 https://docs.github.com/en/rest/reference/search 3 https://www.python.org/ to gain insight into developers' privacy approaches (phase 2), we used voyant-tools to display the key words in their context (kwic). a qualitative discourse analysis of the paragraphs containing the words found in the two main clusters established that the clusters express two prevalent approaches to maintaining privacy: privacy-by-policy and privacy-by-design (cavoukian, 2009; spiekermann and cranor, 2009), and provided additional insights into developers’ privacy discourse. the initial findings suggest that more than simply two design approaches, the distinction between privacy-by-design and privacy-by-policy discourses is in fact a distinction between discourses that uphold privacy as a value and discourses that regard it as an imposition to comply with. the latter readme references consider the policy requirement a legal or corporate obstacle that must be dealt with, and some admit that the application is designed such that displaying the notice and consent button will mislead users to agree to the data collection, thus allowing that app to collect data and use it as it wishes. at the same time, readme references that describe privacy-bydesign embed solutions in the software code such that it does not allow data misuse, thereby ensuring personal data is used according to the contextual informational norms (nissenbaum, 2019). references balebako, r., marsh, a., lin, j., hong, j., cranor, l. f. (2014) the privacy and security behaviors of smartphone app developers. in proc. workshop on usable security (usec’14). the internet society. boyd, k. l. (2021). datasheets for datasets help ml engineers notice and understand ethical issues in training data. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 5(cscw2), 1-27. boyd, k. l., & shilton, k. (2021). adapting ethical sensitivity as a construct to study technology design teams. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 5(group), 1-29. hadar, i., hasson, t., ayalon, o., toch, e., birnhack, m., sherman, s., & balissa, a. (2018). privacy by designers: software developers’ privacy mindset. empirical software engineering, 23(1), 259-289. jørgensen, r. f. (2018). framing human rights: exploring storytelling within internet companies. information, communication & society, 21(3), 340–355. cavoukian, a. (2009). privacy by design: the 7 foundational principles. information and privacy commissioner of ontario, canada, 5, 12. kitchin, r. (2017). thinking critically about researching algorithms. information, communication & society 20.1:14-29. li, t., reiman, k., agarwal, y., & cranor, l. f. (2022). understanding challenges for developers to create accurate privacy nutrition labels. chi ’22, new orleans., la. nelson, l. k. (2020). computational grounded theory: a methodological framework. sociological methods & research, 49(1), 3-42. nissenbaum, h. (2019). contextual integrity up and down the data food chain. theoretical inquiries in law, 20(1), 221-256. parikka, j. (2015). a geology of media. u of minnesota press. prana, g. a. a., treude, c., thung, f., atapattu, t., & lo, d. (2019). categorizing the content of github readme files. empirical software engineering, 24(3), 12961327. ribak, r. (2019). translating privacy: developer cultures in the global world of practice. information, communication & society, 22(6), 838-853. senarath, a., & arachchilage, n. a. g. (2018). understanding software developers' approach towards implementing data minimization. usenix symposium on usable privacy and security (soups), august 12-14, baltimore md. arxiv preprint arxiv:1808.01479. shilton, k. (2013). values levers: building ethics into design. science, technology & human values, 38(3), 374-397. shilton, k., & greene, d. (2019). linking platforms, practices, and developer ethics: levers for privacy discourse in mobile application development. journal of business ethics, 155(1), 131-146. spiekermann, s., & cranor, l. f. (2009). engineering privacy. ieee transactions on software engineering, 35(1), 67-82. tahaei, m., vaniea, k., & saphra, n. (2020, april). understanding privacy-related questions on stack overflow. in proceedings of the 2020 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-14). selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): king, w.e., (2022, november). a match made in heaven: queer christians & dating apps. paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. a match made in heaven: queer christians & dating apps w.e. king university of washington introduction dating apps pose particular challenges for queer christians, reproducing oppressions and experiences of dispossession in the context of seeking intimate relationships. queer christians using dating apps complicates an already sensitive combination of social and cultural commitments, values, and beliefs. dating apps position themselves in the dating market in a variety of ways, however all function to help people meet other people for dates. some apps are known for facilitating hookups or catering to queer populations, others are used more broadly and aim to facilitate long-term relationships. dating apps, along with other social media sites, independently create and control the categories users interact with (bivens & haimson, 2016). on dating apps, users expect the app interface to enable them to represent their unique identities. however, dating apps are often designed with dominant populations in mind and end up excluding those who do not fit the model of their ideal user (duguay, 2017). dating apps produce and control categories that are contingent and contribute to cultural knowledge about what identities are dateable, reachable, and even possible. gender, sexuality, and relationship categories are contested and unruly, as are religious identities, even though they appear stable when offered as radio buttons or checkboxes on a clickable menu of options. queer christian technocultural discourses this paper explores the ways gender, sexual, and relationship diversities (gsrd) intersect with religious identities and are discursively constructed in the context of using dating apps. i use brock’s (2018) critical technocultural discourse analysis (ctda) as a methodological toolkit that views dating apps as cultural representations and social structures that interact with identity work. technoculture (dinerstein, 2006) is a matrix that positions white, middle-class, straight men as the norm to which others are compared. ctda examines technology artifacts, beliefs about technology, and users insitu. i analyzed fifteen semi-structured initial interviews with queer christian dating app users. nine of the interviewees opted-in to follow up with a self-study of their dating app usage. the nine self-study participants used their notes as the basis for elicitation interviews. i also used the dating apps the participants in this study used. i signed up for and completed user profiles using an abbreviated technical walkthrough (light, burgess, & duguay, 2018) of the dating apps mentioned in interviews. i interpret and discuss discourses of representing non-dominant identities in technocultural spaces after conducting qualitative discourse analysis of user interviews along with dating app walkthroughs. in this paper, i discuss ways queer christians navigate the presumed discontinuity of being lgbtq+ and christian, choosing to embrace what seems a contradictory identity. queer christians are often deprived of community in both religious and queer spaces and experience feelings of oppression and dispossession. in academic queer studies, narratives of those who are religious (they) hating those who are queer (us) abound and build the foundation of the inverse (puar, 2014). regimes of truth governing queer conceptions of an us (queer) vs. them (religious) are built around lived experiences of material harm done to queer people in the name of religion. in the context of this study, the religious (them) are primarily involved with conservative, fundamentalist, evangelical christianity, which is the background of most of the participants in this study, as well as the dominant expression (and stereotype) of christianity in the u.s. today. participants expressed the importance of making both their queer and christian identities visible and reachable on their dating app profiles. queer christians who want to date other queer christians are in a very thin dating market and believe dating apps will help them find people to date. however, christian dating apps assume users are cisgender and straight or gay, limiting usability by queer christians who are non-binary or bisexual or both. dating apps that target queer users offer limited or no filterable options for religious identification. dating apps that do offer religion as a structured profile element, do not offer the nuanced and expansive religious categories found on christian-based or christian-targeted apps. further, filtering for religion often requires payment for premium services. i discuss the ways technoculture informs the creation and implementation of dating app identity categories and matchmaking methods and how queer christians often do not fit the categories available to them. dating apps rely on structured profile elements and questionnaires to construct knowledge about users and offer that knowledge to help users find “the one,” their match made in heaven. conclusion this paper makes an empirical contribution to information and internet studies, as it explicitly interrogates the technocultural aspects of queer identity work among a multiply oppressed group of users. in this work, i privilege the perspectives of queer christians, contributing to a broader understanding of marginalized christians in north america. by advancing our understanding of the ways technological solutions to diversity and inclusion are experienced among a multiply marginalized population, we gain insight into how dating app interfaces and identity categories shape users and shape worlds. ultimately, my analysis reveals how queer christians know and express gender and religious identities on dating apps but dating apps do not allow for this complexity to be easily visible or searchable. queer christians wrestle with dominant narratives, deviate from social scripts, and resist condemnation to a life without hope for loving partnerships. dating apps offer fine-grained means of seeking and finding a match made in heaven while simultaneously constructing a hellhole of exclusionary, discriminatory, and oppressive binary categories. still, queer christians depend on dating apps, both to do queer identity work and to help them seek and find their match made in heaven. references references should be formatted the same as the body, with a double space between entries. any standard style guide (apa, chicago, etc.) is acceptable as long as it is consistent throughout the submission. bivens, r., & haimson, o. l. (2016). baking gender into social media design: how plat forms shape categories for users and advertisers. social media + society, 2(4), 2056305116672486. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116672486 brock, a. (2018). critical technocultural discourse analysis. new media & society, 20(3), 1012–1030. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816677532 dinerstein, j. (2006). technology and its discontents: on the verge of the posthuman. american quarterly, 58(3), 569–595. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2006.0056 duguay, s. (2017). dressing up tinderella: interrogating authenticity claims on the mobile dating app tinder. information, communication & society, 20(3), 351–367. https: //doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1168471 light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881–900. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 puar, j. k. (2014). reading religion back into terrorist assemblages: author’s response. culture and religion, 15 (2), 198–210. https://doi.org/10.1080/14755610.2014.911045 microsoft word de-lima-santos-social movements organized built on social media platforms-social movements organized built on.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): ceron, w., &.de-lima-santos, m.f. (2021, october). social movements organized built on social media platforms in brazil: a study of how traditional media embraced these novel forms of connection and community. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. social movements built on social media platforms in brazil: a study of how traditional media embraced these novel forms of connection and community wilson ceron federal university of são paulo, brazil mathias-felipe de-lima-santos university of navarra, spain the political turmoil unleashed in recent years has influenced how people interact and organize themselves. “arab spring” is an example of how communities are a powerful driver of global digital culture. during this social unrest and political upheaval, social media platforms played an important role in the organization of these movements that spilled across the middle east in early 2011, beginning with tunisia and continuing across egypt and into yemen (browning, 2013). in this process, many authoritarian governments toppled in the arab spring wake. in this respect, some governments like in egypt attempted to eliminate the nation's internet access to inhibit the use of social media to generate protests (overbey et al., 2013). in another vein, these social movements were underestimated by their importance of self-expression and collective experience. in the case of the arab spring protests, it was historically marked by the considerable amount of attention focused on the role of digital technologies in promoting collective activism to circumvent state-operated media channels, that is, the social media platforms served to give voice to these people that were otherwise not represented in the traditional media (overbey et al., 2013). however, ten years after the uprising, the initial euphoria felt in the arab world in the immediate aftermath of the uprising proved to be short-lived (schapals & harb, 2021). in this scenario of political turmoil, brazil is suffering from an economic downturn and a lack of political leadership in recent years that has resulted in an unprecedented crisis that is causing widespread human suffering, upending lives, devastating forests, threatening democracy, and risking reversals of hard-won progress (caren et al., 2020; inclán, 2018). even before 2016, when the impeachment of the president dilma rousseff happened, the turbulent years amid an extensive corruption scandal have heated the people on social media platforms. it was intensified even more after the victory of jair bolsonaro and the "right turn" of brazilian politics. in this almost decade of crises (political, economic, and social), social movements have taken to social media to organize protests (caren et al., 2020). in our study, we consider the 2013 protests in brazil, also known as “june journeys” (jornadas de junho, in portuguese) as the initial point of articulation on social media platforms that galvanized movements to pressure the brazilian government to develop and implement policies to mitigate corruption and its consequences and ensure a more sustainable pathway for the population. although it started against increases in public transportation fare prices, this movement grew to include other issues such as the police brutality used against demonstrators. similar to arab spring, social media has played a fundamental and influential role in the organization of public outcries and in keeping protesters in touch among them. hence, this movement was considered “brazilian spring” (caren et al., 2020; inclán, 2018). since then, another social movement has attracted attention not only from the government but also from the media. the 2018 brazil truck drivers’ strike, also called the diesel crisis, drew significant attention, as the paralysis of roads caused a shortage of food, medicines, and oil across the country. disparate bands of truckers turned to whatsapp and facebook to unite thousands of drivers in the largest truckers strike in the nation’s history (lopes, 2018). with the same emphasis on movement building and coalition work on online social media, the panelaço gained popularity after the protests against the former president dilma rousseff in 2015 (magalhães, 2020). inspired by the italian cacerolazo, it became a form of popular protest in brazil, in which people make noise by banging pots, pans, and other utensils to call for attention. these demonstrations are organized using these platforms to have a coordinated action. considering that all these three movements were built in the new media, traditional news media has been impacted by these events. influenced by these social dynamics of the platforms, these movements represent an evolving power trend in society. since social movements attempt to replace “a dominant belief system that legitimizes the status quo with an alternative mobilizing belief system that supports collective action for change” (gamson et al., 1982, p. 15), brazilian news media have to report on these events under a myriad of contextual control, in some cases diminishing their strength, in others multiplying it (harlow, 2012; harlow et al., 2020). although there are many studies, the research in brazil remains limited. therefore, this study aimed to answer the following research questions: rq1: how does traditional media frame these movements? rq2: how are these movements interconnected according to the media? to fill this gap in the literature, this study, under the lens of sociology and social media theory, examines the evolution of these movements using data gathered from gnews api (barua et al., 2019; gupta et al., 2021; hswen et al., 2020). data was composed of news articles published from january 2013, the time that the first event occurred, until january 2021, when the covid-19 death reached a boom in the city of manaus in the north of brazil, leading to a great panelaço (marreiro, 2021). in order to understand how the media frames these social movements and provide a contextual context of how these movements are interrelated (goffman, 1974), we conducted a time-series analysis to identify the peaks of these events. based on these initial results, we randomly selected 40 news stories from legacy news media when peaks occur to analyze how the media framed these events, according to code frames derived from an initial exploratory analysis of a sample, then defined in a codebook (matthes, 2009). our initial findings indicate that there is a strong critique about some of these movements as they are challenging pre-existing power relationships that the traditional news media had. additionally, news media use these movements to report on governmental actions and dilemmas, and, at the same time, to remain in the illusionary ‘objectivity’ (tong & zuo, 2019). although these groups brought some level of independence from the media and influence on salient issues covered by the media (lippmann, 1921; walgrave & van aelst, 2006), the promises to break from the constraints of traditional media and embrace novel forms of connection and community are yet limited. we can argue that these three movements are at some level interconnected, due to the strong influence of the political destabilization in brazil. on the other hand, echoing the findings in the arab spring movement (schapals & harb, 2021), the initial euphoria of these movements proved to be short-lived. references barua, r., maity, r., minj, d., barua, t., & layek, a. k. (2019). f-nad: an application for fake news article detection using machine learning techniques. 2019 ieee bombay section signature conference, ibssc 2019, 2019januar, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1109/ibssc47189.2019.8973059 browning, j. g. (2013). democracy unplugged: social media, regime change, and governmental response in the arab spring. michigan state international law review, 21(1), 63–86. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lgs&an=88845251&site=e host-live caren, n., andrews, k. t., & lu, t. (2020). contemporary social movements in a hybrid media environment. annual review of sociology, 46, 443–465. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-121919-054627 gamson, w. a., fireman, b., & rytina, s. (1982). encounters with unjust authority. dorsey press. goffman, e. (1974). frame analysis: an essay on the organization of experience. in american journal of psychiatry (vol. 132, issue 10). harper & row. https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.132.10.1093-a gupta, v., beckh, k., giesselbach, s., wegener, d., & wirtz, t. (2021). supporting verification of news articles with automated search for semantically similar articles. ceur workshop proceedings, 2838, 47–58. http://arxiv.org/abs/2103.15581 harlow, s. (2012). social media and social movements: facebook and an online guatemalan justice movement that moved offline. new media and society, 14(2), 225–243. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444811410408 harlow, s., kilgo, d. k., salaverría, r., & garcía-perdomo, v. (2020). is the whole world watching? building a typology of protest coverage on social media from around the world. journalism studies, 21(11), 1590–1608. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670x.2020.1776144 hswen, y., zhang, a., freifeld, c., & brownstein, j. s. (2020). evaluation of volume of news reporting and opioid-related deaths in the united states: comparative analysis study of geographic and socioeconomic differences. journal of medical internet research, 22(7), e17693. https://doi.org/10.2196/17693 inclán, m. (2018). latin america, a continent in movement but where to? a review of social movements’ studies in the region. annual review of sociology, 44, 535–551. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-073117-041043 lippmann, w. (1921). public opinion. lopes, m. (2018, june 11). whatsapp is upending the role of unions in brazil. next, it may transform politics. the washington post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/whatsapp-is-upending-therole-of-unions-in-brazil-next-it-may-transform-politics/2018/06/09/777e537e-68cc11e8-a335-c4503d041eaf_story.html magalhães, g. (2020, march 18). símbolo latino-americano, panelaço marcou dilma e foi usado de esquerda à direita. folha de s. paulo. https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder/2020/03/simbolo-latino-americano-panelacomarcou-dilma-e-foi-usado-de-esquerda-a-direita.shtml marreiro, f. (2021, january 15). crise de manaus comove brasil e panelaço ressurge forte contra bolsonaro. el país brasil. https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2021-0115/crise-de-manaus-comove-brasil-e-panelaco-ressurge-forte-contrabolsonaro.html matthes, j. (2009). what’s in a frame? a content analysis of media framing studies in the world’s leading communication journals, 1990-2005. journalism and mass communication quarterly, 86(2), 349–367. https://doi.org/10.1177/107769900908600206 overbey, l. a., greco, b., paribello, c., & jackson, t. (2013). structure and prominence in twitter networks centered on contentious politics. social network analysis and mining, 3(4), 1351–1378. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-013-0134-8 schapals, a. k., & harb, z. (2021). “everything has changed, and nothing has changed in journalism”: revisiting journalistic sourcing practices and verification techniques during the 2011 egyptian revolution and beyond. digital journalism, 0(0), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2020.1856702 tong, j., & zuo, l. (2019). the inapplicability of objectivity: understanding the work of data journalism. journalism practice, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2019.1698974 walgrave, s., & van aelst, p. (2006). the contingency of the mass media’s political agenda setting power: toward a preliminary theory. journal of communication, 56(1), 88–109. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2006.00005.x microsoft word messina-its there for you, but is it #fyp-its there for you, but is it #fyp.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): messina, n. (2021, october). it’s there for you, but is it #fyp?: a methodological reflection of researching queer content, community, and experience on tiktok. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. it’s there for you, but is it #fyp?: a methodological reflection of researching queer content, community, and experience on tiktok nicole messina temple university introduction with each new online platform comes a new set of methodological challenges when studying its content and inhabitants. this paper presents a methodological reflection of studying the exchange of information and building of community and safe space amongst queer youth within the app. initial research questions investigated: how are lgbtqia+ youth using the platform to care for each other through the sharing of healthrelated information? further, how prevalent is content of this nature? in encountering challenges related to affordances within the app, further questions began to emerge. how do we go about studying the nature of content that users, especially those who belong to historically marginalized communities, will come across in their day-to-day engagement with the app? and how might this lead to them exchanging information and support with one-another? lgbtqia+ youth, social media, and health information seeking social media platforms prioritize users, centering them in ways unlike more traditional media (manduley et al., 2018), allowing users to challenge hegemonic narratives. users are able to form communities based on information and experiences related to health issues (sendra & farre, 2020), and adolescents in particular have been able to cultivate a safe space and ask for advice related to sexual (yeo & chu, 2017) and mental (yeo, 2020) health. social media has also provided a beneficial space for sex-education among marginalized communities who are typically left out of such conversations (manduley et al., 2018; burns, chakraborty, & arnault, 2021), further filling gaps in schools’ sex-education curricula that pose disadvantages based on race (farkas et al., 2015) and sexuality (mitchell et al., 2014). fyp: not your average tag-based architecture hashtags have become increasingly used across platforms to link and continue ongoing conversations. in earlier platforms such as twitter, tumblr, and instagram, hashtags have been vital in creating and locating visibility, “indicat[ing] not only content but also audience, intent, and self-identity” (dame, 2016). the use of hashtags is not necessarily straightforward, which has been acknowledged in literature suggesting that more attention should be paid to “large-scale patterns…nuanced practices” moving beyond the hashtag itself (mccosker & gerrard, 2020). still, hashtags have long been a central aspect of the most popular social networking sites. also used as the mechanic of a social system, tags are used for both “information organization and conversation promotion” (dame, 2016). narratives are essentially what makes sense of all of the data and categorization. tagging can be seen as a way that users of large social media platforms further define what a tag means and signifies, through their addition of narrative to the post and the tag (dame, 2016). this is the foundation upon which i had been constructing my method, but this was quickly challenged in a conversation with my informant, an avid tiktok user, as she walked me through the app and its functionality. blended from a 2014 app musical.ly launched in shanghai, then purchased by the chinese company bytedance in a rebranding of their 2016 douyin, tiktok thrives on its “extraordinarily powerful algorithm, which learns what content users like to see far faster than many other apps” (tidy & galer, 2020). my informant began to discuss the fyp (for you page), the home feed in one’s tiktok account. this is where videos are recommended by the app based on videos shared, followed, created, and commented on; video information such as captions, hashtags, and audio; and basic settings such as language and location (tiktok, 2020). the algorithm goes deeper than what is described, and at times seems to simply know what a user will like. my informant, impressed by the system, described that a video appearing in her fyp does not have to be from an account that she is actively following, and does not always have any hashtags, thus complicating common assumptions that hashtags are essential markers of content and indicators of community. pilot data given these constraints, and the broad nature of content on tiktok, my initial data collection was largely exploratory. the initial plan was to conduct this exploratory data collection followed by a content analysis of the nature and prevalence of videos related to health information sharing and community building, alongside an analysis of interactions within the comment sections of these videos. i conducted searches of hashtags that were broadly connected to lgbtqia+ communities on tiktok (i.e. #queertiktok, #lgbtq), coding each video on a spreadsheet for hashtags, themes, and tone/affect. the initial data set is very spread out in terms of theme and affect, and with the already existing concerns of replicating users’ actual experience and access to the content, i paused data collection in order to re-evaluate the best path forward. only twenty coded videos in, i had already logged 57 different hashtags and 28 different themes. there was also not a noticeable trend of one theme, tone, or hashtag appearing more frequently than others. there is a gap in understanding, or replicating, how the user actually would come across this content, and to what capacity, that is left unaddressed. moving forward in studying and replicating user experience on tiktok attempts to replicate the fyp of a typical lgbtqia+ tiktok user comes with its own insufficiencies. it is difficult to attempt understanding what will appear in individuals’ feeds, let alone how much health-related content will actually be seen by a user without them having to actively search for it. a potential solution for a singular researcher or small group of researchers would be to create a tiktok account, seek similar content to view, favorite, and follow. it should presumably generate an fyp with relevant content for study, regardless of captions or hashtags used. however, it would still be understandably difficult or even impossible to replicate the user experience and fyp of users among a specific audience. this could also risk essentializing members of a marginalized group and generating assumptions that all members would be seeking the same or similar content. for tiktok users, the platform is a customized and even communal experience. as a researcher, the app’s affordances pose some significant challenges as a space to be studied. this begs the question of whether content on this platform can truly be studied or understood, even in terms of a simple content analysis, without the direct involvement of users. this concern is particularly relevant when working with content shared among historically marginalized communities. such issues should be considered when researching this newer digital space, as traditional platform assumptions no longer apply. one can and should research the content that exists on tiktok, especially given its rise in popularity and prominence, as well as the potential health-related implications (physical, mental, social, and beyond) associated with said content. however, we need to acknowledge the difficulties in replicating user experiences, and in figuring out who sees what, and when, and how. there is a lot left to consider and to contend with on this platform, and others that may come after, with continuing changes in trends, affordances, and user experiences. references burns, j. c., chakraborty, s., & saint arnault, d. (2021). social media preference and condom use behaviors: an analysis of digital spaces with young african american males. health education & behavior, 48(2), 190 198. https://doi.org/10.1177/1090198121993043 dame, a. (2016). making a name for yourself: tagging as transgender ontological practice on tumblr. critical studies in medica communication, 33(1), 23 37. farkas, a. h., vanderberg, r., sucato, g. s., miller, e., akers, a. y., & borrero, s. (2015). racial and ethnic differences in young men’s sex and contraceptive education. journal of adolescent health, 56(4), 464 467. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2014.12.014 manduley, a. e., mertens, a., plante, i., sultana, a. (2018). the role of social media in sex education: dispatches from queer, trans, and racialized communities. feminism & psychology, 28(1), 152 170. doi: 10.1177/0959353517717751 mccosker, a., & gerrard, y. (2020). hashtagging depression on instagram: towards a more inclusive mental health research methodology. new meadia & society. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820921349 mitchell, k. j., ybarra, m. l., korchmaros, j. d., kosciw, j. g. (2014). accessing sexual health information online: use, motivations and consequences for youth with different sexual orientations. health education research, 29(1), 147 157. https://doiorg.libproxy.temple.edu/10.1093/her/cyt071 sendra, a., & farre, j. (2020). communicating the experience of chronic pain through social media: patients' narrative practices on instagram. journal of communication in healthcare, 13(1), 46 54. https://doiorg.libproxy.temple.edu/10.1080/17538068.2020.1752982 tidy, j., & galer, s. s. (2020, august 5). “tiktok: the story of a social media giant”. bbc news. retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53640724 tiktok. (2020, june 18). how tiktok recommends videos #foryou. tiktok. retrieved from: https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/how-tiktok-recommends-videos-for-you/ yeo, t. e. d. (2020). "do you know how much i suffer?": how young people negotiate the tellability of their mental health disruption in anonymous distress narratives on social media. health communication. doi: 10.1080/10410236.2020.1775447 yeo, t. e. d., & chu, t. h. (2017). sharing "sex secrets" on facebook: a content analysis of youth peer communication and advice exchange on social media about sexual health and intimate relations. journal of health communication: international perspectives, 22(9), 753 762. doi: 10.1080/10810730.2017.1347217 final aoir 2021 abstract.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 diesel death zones in the amazon empire: environmental justice and algorithmically mediated work sonja solomun* mcgill university rachel bergmann* microsoft research new england *co-first authors introduction in 2019 amazon announced a climate pledge to be net zero carbon by 2040; a few months later, their ceo jeff bezos announced a 10 billion dollar “earth fund” to fund climate research. other tech companies like google, microsoft, and netflix have made similar commitments to fund climate research and achieve “net zero.” as a trillion-dollar digital platform company, amazon provides a considerable portion of the infrastructure that supports internet technologies (alimohamed-wilson & reese, 2020). at the same time, “big tech” has come under mounting public and policy scrutiny for the extractive business models of “platform capitalism” (srnick, 2017) and their impacts on tech workers (e.g., roose, 2018; dubal, 2020). yet environmental justice remains largely siloed from these important interventions. in december 2019—just after amazon’s climate pledge announcement—a coalition of residents and community groups in southern california called the san bernardino airport communities (sbac) organized a cyber monday community picket line at one of amazon’s 16 facilities in the inland empire. this group was focused particularly on the intersections of worker rights and environmental justice. this paper examines who and what is left out when conversations around technology and sustainability are limited to global, multi-million-dollar “climate funds” and abstract measures like carbon neutrality. we ask: what would it look like to consider the technology industry’s role in climate change by centering the perspectives of those who currently experience these environmental harms? the vast networks of warehouses, trucks, highways, airports, railways, and logistics hubs that constitute the infrastructure suggested citation (apa): solomun, s.* & bergmann, r.* (2021, october). diesel death zones in the amazon empire: environmental justice and algorithmically mediated work. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. behind our platform ecosystems have significant environmental consequences for the neighbors and communities that physically surround them (parks & starosielski 2015; crawford, 2021). in the us, environmental and economic exploitation often intersect: these are often the same communities of low-power, low-wage, racialized workers, including gig workers, warehouse workers, and “the many janitors, cafeteria staff, security officers, and other contract workers who power tech” (kneese, n.d.). this case study demonstrates that far from being independent struggles, the fights for tech worker rights and environmental justice are instead deeply intertwined. further analysis on both platform labor and on the environmental impacts of algorithmic systems must therefore consider them as such. methods informed by “ecologically informed intersectionality” (tuana, 2019), we use this case study to explore how geographic place, environment, race, migrant status, and worker status are interrelated categories of power relations that mutually shape one another. we use an environmental justice framework that emphasizes the relational dimension of climate justice and, in particular, attachment to place (schlosberg, rickards, and byrne, 2017). conceptualizing platform infrastructure through this lens enables us to extend “green technology” discussions beyond carbon footprint and instead centre interdependence – the relationships and places that surround, support, and are harmed by these systems. we analyzed campaign materials and local and national coverage of the sbac eastgate / amazon air campaign alongside primary materials from amazon about their climate pledges. we additionally drew from general and campaign documentation from the local community organizations who formed the sbac coalition. this case situates questions of tech justice in a specific place and moment in time and provides an opportunity to analyze the ways platform technologies affect communities “on the ground.” findings sbac argued that amazon, already the largest employer in the area, would enact environmental racism with their new air cargo hub in the predominantly hispanic, working-class riverside and san bernardino counties (amazon employees for climate justice, 2020). the hub’s increased plane and diesel truck traffic would worsen california’s “diesel death zones,” a term activists aptly use for the premature deaths and respiratory diseases and cancers caused by dangerous amounts of diesel exhaust near highways. the sbac coalition used a wide range of organizing tactics in their eastgate campaign, a reflection of place-specific histories of labor and environmentalism as well as the diversity of groups the coalition brought together (sarathy, 2013). sbac’s central demand for “good jobs, healthy communities” points to a dual crisis faced by the communities in and around san bernardino: environmental exploitation and unand underemployment (morello-frosch et al., 2001; allison et al., 2018). although warehouses like eastgate bring new jobs, many are temporary, unreliable, or suggested citation (apa): solomun, s.* & bergmann, r.* (2021, october). diesel death zones in the amazon empire: environmental justice and algorithmically mediated work. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. contingent; do not pay livable wages; do not include benefits; are heavily surveilled; and include inadequate workplace safety measures. importantly, sbac was not organizing to push amazon out of san bernardino altogether. instead, sbac demanded a community benefits agreement (cba) with amazon and the real estate developer, which would include legally enforceable measures to improve the community. an agreement like this would help address the labor and environmental crises of san bernardino and link economic development with improving quality of life for the community, not just profit for the developers and their tenants. conclusion this case study illustrates one way that commitments to environmental justice and economic justice can be aligned in platform studies if workers and community are centered, rather than abstracted in discussions of global technological governance and sustainability. by using a relational environmental justice framework, attachment to place becomes a central analytic for understanding how tech workers and their agency are deeply entangled within contexts that include their homes, schools, geographies, communities, and the air they breathe. this case demonstrates the need to center the environment in tech work, and to center the worker in sustainable technology, in order to work towards an ethics of mutuality that prioritizes interdependence, solidarity, and shared responsibility. references alimahomed-wilson, j., & reese, e. (eds.). (2020). the cost of free shipping: amazon in the global economy. pluto press. allison, j. e., herrera, j. s., struna, j., & reese, e. (2018). the matrix of exploitation and temporary employment: earnings inequality among inland southern california’s blue‐collar warehouse workers. journal of labor & society, 21(4), 533–560. https://doi.org/10.1111/wusa.12366 amazon employees for climate justice. (2020, may 26). how amazon’s emissions are hurting communities of color. medium. https://amazonemployees4climatejustice.medium.com/environmental-justice-and-amaz ons-carbon-footprint-9e10fab21138 amazon sustainability. (n.d.). the climate pledge. amazon sustainability. retrieved april 2, 2021, from https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/about/the-climate-pledge crawford, k. (2021). atlas of ai: power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. yale university press. dubal, v. b. (2020). a brief history of the gig (ssrn scholarly paper id 3649694). social science research network. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3649694 suggested citation (apa): solomun, s.* & bergmann, r.* (2021, october). diesel death zones in the amazon empire: environmental justice and algorithmically mediated work. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. grist & marguerite casey foundation. (2020, january 10). seeking environmental justice in california’s “diesel death zones.” grist. https://grist.org/sponsored/seeking-environmental-justice-in-californias-diesel-death-zon es kneese, t. (n.d.). silicon valley uncovered: race, gender, class syllabus (davies forum, pp. 1–18). university of san francisco. retrieved february 20, 2021, from https://www.academia.edu/38291146/silicon_valley_uncovered_race_gender_class_ syllabus morello-frosch, r., pastor, m., & sadd, j. (2001). environmental justice and southern california’s “riskscape”: the distribution of air toxics exposures and health risks among diverse communities. urban affairs review, 36(4), 551–578. https://doi.org/10.1177/10780870122184993 parks, l., & starosielski, n. (2015). signal traffic: critical studies of media infrastructures. university of illinois press. roose, k. (2018, april 25). workers of silicon valley, it’s time to organize. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/technology/tech-workers-change.html sarathy, b. (2013). legacies of environmental justice in inland southern california. race, gender & class, 20(3/4), 254–268. schlosberg, d., rickards, l., & byrne, j. (2017). environmental justice and attachment to place. in r. holifield, j. chakraborty, & g. walker, the routledge handbook of environmental justice (1st ed., pp. 591–602). routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315678986-47 srnicek, n. (2016). platform capitalism. wiley and sons. https://www.wiley.com/en-us/platform+capitalism-p-9781509504862 tuana. (2019). climate apartheid: the forgetting of race in the anthropocene. critical philosophy of race, 7(1), 1. https://doi.org/10.5325/critphilrace.7.1.0001 suggested citation (apa): solomun, s.* & bergmann, r.* (2021, october). diesel death zones in the amazon empire: environmental justice and algorithmically mediated work. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. microsoft word demirkol tonnesen-perceived interconnectedness and the dependence on ambient context on twitter during.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): demirkol tonnesen, o. (2021, october). perceived interconnectedness and the dependence on ambient context on twitter during elections. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. perceived interconnectedness and the dependence on ambient context on twitter during elections ozlem demirkol tonnesen university of southampton “shut up, you god’s punishment to all of us, just shut up” (translated tweet, 2018) in 2019, as i was analyzing microcelebrity tweets about turkish presidential elections for my phd thesis, this tweet drew my attention. it wasn’t a part of a thread and it wasn’t responding to another tweet, yet it was communicating outrage at something that thousands who retweeted or liked it also felt. i scrolled through the timeline in search of context and after reading a few other tweets that were just as cryptic and emotionally charged, i found it; the president was giving a speech on cnn. in this paper, i explore the role of ambient context in the encoding and decoding of tweets and the ways such tweets signal perceived affective interconnectedness between users. here, i build on abidin’s (2015) account on perceived interconnectedness as a performance of intimacy between influencers and followers. i argue that during political events, for twitter microcelebrities, affect, as in, manifestations of experienced emotions (papacharissi, 2012), replaces strategies of intimacy in building these bonds. political events create an environment where intimacy is capitalized to reinforce affective experiences and simultaneously generated through them. tweets such as the one shared above are analyzed as signifiers of affective interconnectedness that reinforce a ‘feeling of community’ (dean, 2010) by setting certain shared offline/online experiences as a prerequisite for engagement and affective bonding. this research is informed by an interpretive analysis of 97 turkish microcelebrity accounts over the three months leading up to the 2018 turkish presidential and general elections. the interpretive analysis includes open coding of tweets across two columns to interpret the tweet’s aims and the communicative means used in the tweet. thus, the coding process aimed to answer two important questions about the tweets at hand; what the message or purpose is and how it is communicated. tweets were collected each day in the order they appear on the timeline to replicate a more authentic reading of the content. one of the biggest challenges i faced in my qualitative analysis was the abundance of context dependent and emotionally charged tweets in the dataset (approx. 20%). these tweets made sense in a particular moment to a select audience who happen to have the necessary context available to them and lose all meaning when looked at in isolation or after the fact (sadler, 2017). indeed, many scholars such as chadwick (2017) and papacharissi (2015) have shown that content on social media does not exist in isolation but is often contextualized through other sources of information, and events. likewise, these tweets encompassed moments as mundane as a tv interview, exemplified in the tweet above, or a news article, which are more difficult to uncover, to bigger moments such as rallies and the election day. thus, to analyse the tweets that rely on the ambient context, i have also tracked the media events, tv programs, protests and rallies during the data collection period to have a more complete understanding of their meaning. among many others such as accessibility and authenticity, intimacy is an essential component of the affective labour of microcelebrity (raun, 2018), however, how this intimacy is produced differ across platforms, contexts and influencer genres. abidin’s (2015) research on lifestyle influencers in singapore show that influencers convey intimacy though a flat power dynamic and reciprocal, disclosive and interactive communication with their followers. whereas on twitter, insight into the intimacy between celebrities and their followers was mainly reflected on by marwick and boyd (2011) who analyse twitter celebrities that have also achieved fame elsewhere. they suggest that celebrity practitioners on twitter disclose personal information to build intimacy yet still preserve a level of hierarchy and social distance. however, the microcelebrity accounts that i am observing here are ordinary people who are not celebrities outside of twitter, thus their positioning is different to the celebrity practitioners. especially, considering that these microcelebrities’ fame comes from their narration of everyday life and commentaries on current events, disclosures and a flat power relationship are indeed important parts of their fame which sets them apart from their celebrity counterparts. dynamics of localised (i.e national twittersphere) and twitter native microcelebrity needs more attention but the research on this topic is yet at its infancy. here, i introduce dependence on ambient context as a platform-specific tool for reinforcing intimacy and a signifier of the existing familiarity between twitter microcelebrities and their audience. i argue that ambient contextualisation of sentiment or message is platform-specific as it is afforded mainly by the fast-paced, in-the-moment and ephemeral logic of micro-blogging. my analysis shows that during events (protests, elections etc.) that are shared/experienced nationally, these tweets that allude to a togetherness in occupying the same space at the same time, such as being among the viewers of a tv programme, replace disclosive intimacies in building affective bonds. for the audience, understanding the frustrations and the subtext in these affective expressions imply a level of sameness between the microcelebrity and the follower, a shared, in-group experience. for instance, right after the elections were once again won by the same party, most tweets were raw with emotions that ranged from disbelief to anger and despair such as ““are you kidding me????”, “i want to wake up tomorrow and notice that today was a dream”, “i give up!”, “i don’t believe in a better future anymore” etc. these tweets are products of viewing twitter as a conversational space, and they are imagined to be situated in a timeline of similar tweets or seen by those who share that moment, which provide the necessary ambient context. such tweets that are often emotionally charged and conversational allude to shared sorrows, experiences and feelings which are essential in the affective bonding of users however ephemeral it may be (papacharissi, 2015). these types of expressions have so far been documented in the hashtagged datasets during protests in which the ambiance and context is provided by the hashtag (papacharissi, 2015). in this paper, i also add to this literature by expanding the understanding of affective publics formed through hashtags onto the communicative intimacies between microcelebrities and audiences during political events. references abidin, c., 2015. communicative ❤ intimacies: influencers and perceived interconnectedness ada: a journal of gender, new media, and technology. [online] ada: a journal of gender, new media, and technology. available at: <http://adanewmedia.org/2015/11/issue8-abidin/> chadwick, a., 2017. the hybrid media system: politics and power. oxford university press. dean, j. (2010). affective networks. media tropes ejournal, 2(2), 19–44. marwick, a. and boyd, d., 2011. to see and be seen: celebrity practice on twitter. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 17(2). papacharissi, z., 2012. without you, i'm nothing: performances of the self on twitter. international journal of communication, 6, p.18. papacharissi, z., 2015. affective publics and structures of storytelling: sentiment, events and mediality. information, communication & society, 19(3), pp.307-324. raun, t., 2018. capitalizing intimacy. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 24(1), pp.99-113. sadler, n., 2017. narrative and interpretation on twitter: reading tweets by telling stories. new media & society, 20(9), pp.3266-3282. witt rivera aoir20 final submission.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): witt, a., & rivera, y. (2020, october). images of post-mastectomy scarring on instagram: an evaluation of content moderation and the implications for public health. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 1 images of post-mastectomy scarring on instagram: an evaluation of content moderation and the implications for public health alice witt faculty of law, digital media research centre, queensland university of technology yonaira rivera school of communication and information, rutgers university online platforms play a central role in moderating aspects of our digital lives, including the types of content that we see and how and when we see it.1 content moderation refers to the regulatory processes through which platform executives and their moderators set, maintain and enforce the bounds of ‘appropriate’ user behaviours.2 platforms make decisions about the appropriateness of content based on a range of factors, including platform-specific policies, jurisdiction and social and cultural issues.3 content is, however, moderated within a ‘black box’ that obscures the internal workings of platform governance from external scrutiny.4 transparency deficits like this matter because online social networks are not only where individual expression through content can be influenced or controlled,5 but also places that can shape how people represent, share and live different experiences.6 the direct interventions that platforms make around content can also have far-reaching public health consequences: some can be transformative, such as when vulnerable healthcare consumers have greater access to real-time support and information,7 while others can have detrimental impacts on health and well-being, including the uptake of potentially harmful behaviours due to health misinformation.8 on instagram, the moderation of women’s bodies is particularly controversial, with users and other stakeholders claiming that content (especially nonnormative expression) is arbitrarily removed from the platform.9 recent empirical research suggests these claims might not be unfounded: an inconsistent trend of moderation has been identified across virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 2 explicitly prohibited and explicitly allowed depictions of apparent female forms,10 as well as images of women’s bodies that do not appear to violate content policies.2 we aim to build upon this research by empirically investigating the moderation of images depicting post-mastectomy scaring on instagram, one of few explicitly allowed categories of content under the platform’s community guidelines,11 by skin tone darkness and the presence or absence of tattoos. we explore removal by skin tone given the growing number of bipoc (black, indigenous and people of colour) communities on instagram.12 the presence or absence of tattooing is also a focus of our investigation because tattoos may be used to cover post-mastectomy scars and/or recreate nipples that could not be spared. we argue that the moderation of this subject matter is important because images of postmastectomy scarring are inextricably linked to complex issues among breast cancer survivors: it can, for instance, be educational, help to raise awareness about breast cancer in different communities and connect users who are actively looking to find a shared community.13 mastectomies as a result of breast cancer can also have important ramifications for women’s self-image and identity worldwide.14,15 in this paper, we report on our pilot study for this research, which we will undertake on a larger scale in late 2020. methodology our methodology is based on witt, suzor and huggins’ (2019) input/output method of black box analytics that identifies how discrete inputs into a system produce certain outputs.2 input refers to individual images, while output pertains to the outcome of content moderation (i.e., whether an image is removed or not). images for our pilot study were programmatically collected through the australia-based digital observatory at qut’s digital media research centre.i specifically, automated tools scraped the last 20 images from 16 mastectomy-related hashtags every six hours on an ongoing basis. our hashtags, which we deliberately selected by searching instagram and news articles for mastectomy content, are varied: some are mastectomy-specific, including #breastcancersurvivor and #mastectomy, while others pertain to breast tattoos (e.g.,#mastectomytattoo), and some are generally cancer-related (e.g.,#lifeaftercancer). once the sample was generated for manual coding (n = 4,410), we undertook content analysis to code images based on the 11-point massey and martin skin colour scale (mmscs) (where zero = albinism and 10 = the darkest possible skin).16 we also coded for the presence or absence of tattooing (i.e., tattoo = 1, no tattoo = 0), and for content removal (i.e., removed = 1, not removed = 0) based on programmatic testing one month after initial data collection, providing a discrete output for every coded input. we excluded close-ups of women’s faces and images in which breasts were covered. this methodology ultimately enables us to identify potential true negatives (explicitly allowed images that were not removed), and false positives (explicitly allowed images that were removed), for analysis by apparent skin tone and by tattooing. our final coded sample comprises 74 images depicting post-mastectomy scarring with coding agreement ranging from 78% (mmscs) to 100% (presence/absence of tattoo). descriptive statistics and quantitative analyses were conducted using stata v15. 3 pilot study results and implications of the collected images, 44 depicted post-mastectomy scarring alone and 30 included breast tattooing. given the small sample size of the pilot data, we were not able to detect statistically significant differences in images removed versus not removed. however, we believe there is a strong case for further largescale investigation. first, despite instagram explicitly allowing depictions of post-mastectomy scarring, we identified 31 potential false positives (41.9%). second, preliminary data suggest differences in removal rates by presence or absence of tattoos: 67.7% of images without tattoos were removed, compared to only 32.3% of images with tattoos (n=10)(χ2=2.03, p=0.15). lastly, a logistic regression suggests that the odds of an image being removed increase by a factor of 1.21 for every unit increase in skin tone darkness (p=0.31). moving forward, given that most images in our pilot study depicted white women, we will diversify our selected hashtags to attempt to collect more images of women with darker skin tones. we will also extend the data collection timeframe to collect a larger sample of images for manual coding. our further in-depth investigation has the potential to provide valuable insights about how images of post-mastectomy scarring are moderated on instagram in practice. in general, women who undergo mastectomies face unique experiences related to body image, with some expressing feelings of empowerment in light of this procedure.17 content moderation that is consistent with instagram’s policies may provide additional support for the effective use of this platform to promote body positivity,18 which can be leveraged for interventions that share the lived experiences of breast cancer survivors. however, evidence of potentially arbitrary moderation may have a wide range of negative effects on the well-being of women seeking to share their experiences with, or learn from the experiences of, others who have undergone mastectomies. for example, content removal might exacerbate some women’s negative body and self-image,11 or contribute to social media platforms, including those who have been victims of body shaming. while we cannot draw definitive conclusions about whom (i.e., the platform or individual users) removed content and why (e.g., user choice, platform policy reasons) from outside the black box, our research will make valuable contributions to the growing body of literature on the moderation of female forms on instagram. it will also help to better assess the efficacy and ethics of using black box methods to examine content moderation at scale and contribute to ongoing debates around the transparency and accountability of platform governance more broadly. we look forward to furthering this research in late 2020. references 1. leaver t, highfield t, abidin c. instagram: visual social media cultures. john wiley & sons; 2020. 2. witt a, suzor n, huggins a. the rule of law on instagram: an evaluation of the moderation of images depicting women's bodies. unswlj. 2019; 42(2):557. 3. gillespie t. custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. connecticut, us: yale university press; 2018. 4 4. roberts st. behind the screen: content moderation in the shadows of social media. connecticut, us: yale university press; 2019. 5. suzor np. lawless: the secret rules that govern our digital lives. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press; 2019. 6. locatelli e. images of breastfeeding on instagram: self-representation, publicness, and privacy management. social media+ society. 2017;3(2): 2056305117707190. 7. gurrieri l, drenten j. visual storytelling and vulnerable health care consumers: normalising practices and social support through instagram. j services market. 2019; 33(6): 702-720. 8. rivera ym, moran m, thrul j, smith kc. the role of culture and cognitive heuristics in assessing the credibility of cancer (mis)information on facebook among u.s. latinos. ajph. 2020; under review. 9. west sm. facebook’s guide to being a lady. onlinecensorship.org. https://www.onlinecensorship.org/en/news-and-analysis/15 published 2015. 10. witt a, the rule of law in platform governance: the moderation of images depicting women’s bodies on instagram. doctoral thesis: qut; 2020. 11. instagram. community guidelines. https://help.instagram.com/477434105621119 published 2020. 12. garcia se. where did bipoc come from? the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-bipoc.html published 2020. 13. koskan, a., klasko, l., davis, s. n., gwede, c. k., wells, k. j., kumar, a., ... & meade, c. d. (2014). use and taxonomy of social media in cancer-related research: a systematic review. american journal of public health, 104(7), e20-e37 14. koçan s, gürsoy a. body image of women with breast cancer after mastectomy: a qualitative research. j breast heal. 2016;12(4):145. 15. potter s, conroy ej, cutress ri, jain a. short-term safety outcomes of mastectomy and immediate implant-based breast reconstruction. lancet onco. 2019;20(2):254266. 16. massey, douglas s, martin, jennifer a. the nis skin color scale. https://nis.princeton.edu/downloads/nis-skin-color-scale.pdf published 2003 17. la j, jackson s, shaw r. ‘flat and fabulous’: women’s breast reconstruction refusals post-mastectomy and the negotiation of normative femininity. j gend studies. 2019;28(5):603-616. 5 18. cohen r, irwin l, newton-john t, slater a. #bodypositivity: a content analysis of body positive accounts on instagram. body image. 2019;29:47-57. i we thank professor nicolas suzor for his assistance with data collection. any errors are our own. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): pohle, j., gorwa, r., miller, h. (2020, october). the turn to trade agreements in global platform governance. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the turn to trade agreements in global platform governance dr. julia pohle wzb berlin social science center robert gorwa university of oxford hailey miller wzb berlin social science center context as the rules, policies and regulations governing the global digital ecosystem multiply, they have become a key arena for contending visions of governance over the digital data flows created by billions around the world. issues once exclusively in the realm of internet scholars have become deeply politicized and contested facets of international public policy (suzor, 2019; gorwa, 2019). in the past few years, a growing number of proposals have been developed to govern major platforms for user-generated content through formalized legislation as well as voluntary self-regulatory initiatives. however, less work has sought to understand how governments worldwide are increasingly turning to trade agreements in order to pursue their preferences for how to govern platforms specifically and the digital ecosystem more broadly. while it is well-known that china and the united states represent different visions for the governance of the internet and its applications, this paper seeks to understand how different political actors are using trade agreements to seek to ‘lock in’ their preferences on platform governance topics. in some democratic countries such as brazil, india or germany policymakers, courts, and citizens have called for restrictions of the crossborder flow of specific types of data. the limitation of data traffic to a country or region may lead to a stronger protection of citizens' rights in the digital sphere and to more independence from foreign service providers. yet other countries have sought to deliberately and strategically use trade agreements to remove barriers to cross-border data flows, most prominently the united states, which regards other governments’ efforts to restrict them as “digital protectionism” (aaronson, 2018). therefore, the platform governance implications for restrictions on cross-border data flows cannot be overlooked. historical trends in digital policy and trade research has shown that in 2012, the us and korea were the first to include specific language related to digital data flows in their free trade agreement. since then, similar language has been part of trade negotiations around (draft) agreements such as acta, ttp, ttip, and bilateral agreements between the eu or the us with third countries (aaronson, 2016; bendiek & schmieg, 2016). in addition, the issues first included by the us in free trade agreements can now also be found in agreements between other countries, such as singapore–australia, thailand–australia, japan–singapore, and others (burri, 2017). these trade agreements have been deeply analysed by academics working on internet governance, copyright, and other issues, but still have underexplored implications for national governments that are increasingly seeking to craft regulation designed to address a host of perceived democratic externalities posed by dominant technology firms and platform providers like facebook, google, microsoft, and amazon. the recently re-negotiated north american free trade agreement (usmca) has provisions which stipulate that the members will not amend intermediary liability frameworks that could hold american platforms liable for illegal content posted by their users. is including these issues in trade agreements a major developing way that the us is fighting back to protect its firms in the global digital economy? existing research tends to concentrate on multi-level governance and the role of the wto in the negotiation of digital trade issues (burri, 2017; weber, 2015). given the economic and political weight of the eu or the us in the negotiations, most scholars concentrate primarily on trade deals involving these two partners (e.g. aaronson, 2016; 2019). a systematic examination of all digital provisions included in trade agreements was created by burri and polanco (2020) in their taped (trade agreements provisions on electronic-commerce and data) dataset. the taped dataset is focused on a systematic categorization of digital trade provisions included in ptas (preferential trade agreements) which states have used to “fill in gaps” left by pre-internet wto frameworks and address new issues involving cross border data flows (burri & polanco, 2020). this dataset has led to a clearer mapping of digital governance issues addressed by trade and the implementation of specific state preferences. this paper uses this data along with available policy discourse and other regulatory developments to examine how actors have sought to lock in their preferences in key digital governance areas. paper outline the paper provides a first step in this direction, presenting the first results of an interdisciplinary project bringing together digital communication scholars, internet governance researchers, and international relations academics to look at the nexus of digital governance and international trade. based on a platform governance focused analysis of the taped dataset, as well as policy papers put forth in trade discussions, the first part of the paper maps digital provisions in trade agreements and their relation to platform governance. using this dataset, we then analyse the respective positions of the us, eu, and china on issues relating to cross-border data flows. understanding how the movement of data between states relates to key digital governance issues will provide a starting point for a deeper analysis of key actor strategies. drawing upon the literature on platform governance and regulation (e.g. lynskey, 2017; culpepper & thelen, 2019; helberger et al. 2018), trade agreements and trade policy, and work at the intersection of digital governance and trade, we seek to reach a better understanding of the various issues at stake, building the ground for future research on the trade positions of specific countries or regions, and an analysis of the normative impact of these trade agreements on the digital rights of the world’s connected population. references aaronson, s. a. (2016). the digital trade imbalance and its implications for internet governance. global commission on internet governance paper series, 26. aaronson, s. a. (2018). what are we talking about when we talk about digital protectionism? world trade review, 1–37. aaronson, s. a. (2019). data is different, and that’s why the world needs a new approach to governing cross-border data flows. digital policy, regulation and governance, 21(5), 441–460. bendiek, a., & schmieg, e. (2016). eu-außenhandel und datenschutz. wie lässt sich beides besser vereinbaren? swp aktuell, 10. burri, m. (2017). the regulation of data flows through trade agreements. law and policy in international business, 48(1), 407–448. burri, m., & polanco, r. (2020). digital trade provisions in preferential trade agreements: introducing a new dataset. journal of international economic law, 23(1), 187–220. culpepper, p. d., & thelen, k. (2019). are we all amazon primed? consumers and the politics of platform power. comparative political studies. helberger, n., pierson, j., & poell, t. (2018). governing online platforms: from contested to cooperative responsibility. the information society, 34(1), 1–14. gorwa, r. (2019). what is platform governance? information, communication & society, 22(6), 854–871. lynskey, o. (2017). regulating “platform power.” lse law, society and economy working paper, 1, 1–31. suzor, n. (2019). lawless: the secret rules that govern our digital lives. cambridge: cambridge university press. weber, r. h. (2015). digital trade and e-commerce: challenges and opportunities of the asia-pacific regionalism. asian journal of wto & international health law and policy, 10(2), 321–348. weichert, t. (2014). freihandelsabkommen contra datenschutz? datenschutz und datensicherheit dud, 38(12), 850–856. aoir2021-producing the problem of parental overshare_v2 selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): kumar, p.c. (2021, october). producing the ‘problem’ of parental overshare. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. producing the ‘problem’ of parental overshare priya c. kumar pennsylvania state university, college of information sciences and technology introduction: critically examining overshare with the rise of social media, the term overshare has become shorthand for concerns about people disclosing seemingly excessive amounts of information. accusations of oversharing typically target information about “sex and romance, intimate relationships, [and] parenthood and reproduction” (hoffmann, 2009, p. 71). parents are attuned to concerns about oversharing on social media (ammari et al., 2015; kumar & schoenebeck, 2015). hoffmann (2009) argues that the term overshare does not simply describe an action; it reinforces problematic boundaries that marginalize women especially. i extend this line of thinking by examining how social media discourse actively produces overshare and then instructs parents, particularly mothers, to selfcensor in the name of satisfying their social media audience. i focus on stfu, parents, a once-popular blog dedicated to “mock[ing] parent overshare on social networking sites” (koenig, n.d.). method: conducting a governmentality analysis of stfu, parents my study of overshare follows the analytical framework of governmentality, a foucauldian-inspired means of examining how authorities intervene in people’s lives. governmentality traces how expertise, manifesting in people, institutions, and discourses, harnesses ideas and materials to regulate social conduct (miller & rose, 2008). to conduct my analysis, i engaged with stfu, parents material in dialogue with governmentality literature, a method known as thinking with theory (jackson & mazzei, 2012). i explored the blog’s informational pages and press coverage and followed multiple pathways through its posts. i examined the author’s list of favorite posts, her annual lists of noteworthy posts, and the blog’s most commented posts. i also studied posts in each of the tags created by the author. beyond the blog, i examined the stfu, parents book as well as the stfu, parents’ column on the parenting website mommyish. i circulated between stfu, parents material and governmentality literature, concentrating on how discursive and material elements dynamically defined what stfu, parents was trying to accomplish, where it directed its attention, and how others responded. findings: how stfu, parents produces the problem of overshare a brooklyn woman named blair koenig created stfu, parents in 2009 because “some friends in my facebook feed were driving me crazy by documenting the minutiae of their lives as new parents” (koenig, n.d.). she invited people to send her screenshots of parents’ social media posts, which she published on the blog with snarky, sometimes acerbic, commentary. in 2011, she began writing the stfu, parents column on mommyish, and in 2013 she published an stfu, parents book. the column and book legitimated koenig as a type of parenting expert, her authority stemming from the blog’s thousands of examples of overshare. i find that stfu, parents defines overshare as gross or overly emotional content on social media. gross content is anything related to waste, fluid, and tissue that come out of the body’s orifices, which commonly appears on the blog as photos of children’s feces or the processes of birth and afterbirth. overly emotional content includes gratuitous displays of sentiment, from mawkishness to fury. stfu, parents argues that emotional posts imply that parents’ lives revolve around children and that parents expect special treatment simply for being parents. i contend that stfu, parents regards overshare as a problem because it confronts people with what feminist theorist margrit shildrick (1997) calls “leaky bodies.” this includes literal leaks, like the material that bodies expel, and conceptual leaks, like the blurring of parent and child identities, especially when children are very young. stfu, parents materializes overshare through the technologies of screenshots and editing software. in governmentality, technologies are the tools, techniques, and devices that authorities use to actualize the process of shaping people’s conduct (miller & rose, 2008). to support its claim that parents share too much, stfu, parents solicits screenshots of social media posts. most of the content stfu, parents criticizes comes from facebook, and since such posts are often not publicly visible, screenshots provide the evidence stfu, parents needs to justify its accusations of overshare. stfu, parents edits screenshots to redact people’s names and block out faces in photos. koenig wrote that she does so to minimize risk, though in at least one case, an stfu, parents reader identified a woman from a screenshot and doxed her. the woman said she received hundreds of angry emails and voice mails, some containing death threats. the use of anonymity enables stfu, parents to distance itself from the consequences of its actions. discussion: overshare is information pulled out of context stfu, parents separates information from its context and uses it in a way that the people who originally posted the information likely did not anticipate and may not appreciate. as such, stfu, parents violates the contextual integrity of information (nissenbaum, 2010) and then labels that information overshare. it complains about being confronted with evidence of leaky bodies, but it was never meant to see the information in the first place. stfu, parents portrays itself as simply curating a phenomenon—overshare—that exists in the world. however, i argue that overshare does not pre-exist stfu, parents; rather, stfu, parents brings overshare into being. the acts of taking a screenshot, blocking out names and faces, and posting the results on a blog crystalize information that once flowed on a timeline or news feed into specimens that stfu, parents has decided to call overshare. stfu, parents derides what it calls “sanctimommies” who act self-righteous about their parenting and “mommyjackers” who hijack conversations to discuss their children. this echoes hoffmann’s (2009) finding that overshare discourse primarily castigates women. stfu, parents shames parents, particularly mothers, for displaying their “leaky bodies” and instructs them to avoid posting such content so as to not irritate their social media audience. presenting overshare as a problem of individuals not knowing proper social media etiquette enables stfu, parents to distance itself from its role in constructing the very problem it claims to critique. references ammari, t., kumar, p., lampe, c., & schoenebeck, s. (2015). managing children’s online identities: how parents decide what to disclose about their children online. proceedings of the 33rd annual acm conference on human factors in computing systems (chi ’15), 1895–1904. https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702325 hoffmann, a. l. (2009). oversharing: a critical discourse analysis. university of wisconsin-milwaukee. jackson, a. y., & mazzei, l. a. (2012). thinking with theory in qualitative research: viewing data across multiple perspectives (1st ed.). routledge. koenig, b. (n.d.). about the blog. stfu, parents. retrieved august 6, 2017, from http://www.stfuparentsblog.com/about kumar, p., & schoenebeck, s. (2015). the modern day baby book: enacting good mothering and stewarding privacy on facebook. proceedings of the 18th acm conference on computer supported cooperative work & social computing (cscw’15), 1302–1312. https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675149 miller, p., & rose, n. s. (2008). governing the present: administering economic, social and personal life. polity press. nissenbaum, h. (2010). privacy in context: technology, policy, and the integrity of social life. stanford university press. shildrick, m. (1997). leaky bodies and boundaries: feminism, postmodernism and (bio)ethics. routledge. aoir 2020 burk.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): burk, d. (2020, october). algorithmic legal metrics. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. algorithmic legal metrics dan l. burk university of california, irvine introduction automated pattern analysis and decision-making, colloquially designated as “artificial intelligence” or “ai,” is increasingly being deployed to mediate or to assist in social determinations across a range of domains including governance and regulatory decisions. (1) predictive algorithms have been deployed to identify families at risk of abusive behavior, in order to mobilize social services intervention before actual harm occurs. predictive algorithms have been relied upon to assess the threat of criminal recidivism, and so determine the allowance for bail or for prisoner parole. predictive algorithms are being incorporated into policing strategies, allowing law enforcement resources to be positioned where criminal activity is anticipated to occur. and algorithmic predictions are becoming progressively arrayed across a broad swath of other legal and social decision-making: to allocate public assistance, to pre-empt customs and border violations, to determine immigration status, to forecast threats to national security. (2, 3) emerging proposals suggest an even greater role for algorithmically determined legal metrics. specifically, recent scholarship has suggested that the collection of detailed information on consumers, together with algorithmic processing of such data, will allow for customized tailoring of legal imperatives to the capacity or characteristics of individual actors. (4,5) this body of work argues that legal directives could be matched to detailed consumer profiles so as to create metrics that are “personalized” for the profiled individual, rather than uniform for the general populace. proposals of this sort have been circulated for a variety of legal regimes, including contract, tort, trusts and estates, criminal law, and copyright. relying as they do on mechanisms of consumer surveillance, these proposals are effectively intended to translate the mass “personalization” of market services and institutions to the provision of legal services and institutions. (6) although such proposals for personalized legal metrics carry a degree of superficial plausibility, on closer inspection it becomes clear that they entail a breathtaking degree of naivete regarding the social infrastructure on which such classifications depend. an increasingly robust sociological literature demonstrates that algorithmic scoring recreates and re-enforces existing social orders, accelerating some of the most problematic mechanisms for exploitation and inequality. (7,8) such metrics not only amplify and reinforce existing social biases, but tend to produce detrimental selfsurveillance. (9) due to such effects, the quantified assessments supplied by algorithmic scoring are not neutral, but take on normative and moral connotations. (10) legal determinations such as tort liability or criminal culpability that carry their own moral weight are likely to produce unintended consequences when associated with morally charged algorithmic metrics. a close examination of these mechanisms quickly illuminates disjunctions at the intersection among jurisprudence, automated technologies, and socially reflexive practices, and alerts us to areas of concern as legal institutions are increasingly amalgamated into the growing algorithmic assemblage. consequently, in this paper, i begin to map out the intersection between the social effects of quantification and the social construction of algorithms in the context of legal decision making. in previous work, i have explored the implications of attempting to incorporate legal standards into algorithms, arguing that the social action typical of algorithmic systems promises to shape and eventually become the legal standard it seeks to implement. here i essentially consider the inverse proposition: i explore the effects of incorporating algorithms, which is to say algorithmic metrics, into legal standards. in particular, i examine the anticipated use of algorithmically processed “big data” in attempting to align legal incentives with social expectations. several previous commentators have been properly concerned about the biases endemic to data profiling, but i argue that algorithmic bias extends well beyond problems of prejudice or inaccuracy, to shape and define the social relationships and behavior experienced by its targets. the source of such distortions lies in reflexive social practices associated with algorithmic measurements, with which algorithmic processes interact in a broader structural context. (3, 11) these effects are accelerated and amplified by the speed and scale of automated data analysis and processing. algorithmic metrics are therefore performative, in the sense that they create their own social facts. (11, 12) such effects are, perhaps paradoxically, heightened by transparency of algorithmic inputs and processes, leaving in doubt the advisability of some recent scholarly calls for greater transparency in algorithmic profiling. i link these concepts to the normative functions of law, showing how legal judgments will be distorted by the introduction of algorithmic scoring regimes, particularly those being imported from datafied business models in the private sector. i describe how the social processes on which algorithmic metrics rest lead ultimately to the characterization of such metrics as moral character judgments. when inserted into legal determinations that intrinsically require moral character judgments, we may expect the value biases embedded algorithmic legal metrics to effectively become legal judgments. (10) the precipitation of algorithmic metrics into legal culpability poses a particular problem for american legal discourse, due to the american legal system’s long fascination with the utilitarian economic analysis of law. in tracing the characteristic arc of algorithmic metrics from profiling through legal application, this paper makes several novel contributions to the literature on law and algorithmic governance. first, it details corrosive social effects of algorithmic legal metrics that extend far beyond the concerns about accuracy that have thus far dominated critiques of such metrics. second, it demonstrates that traditional corrective governance mechanisms such as due process or transparency are inadequate to remedy such corrosive effects, and that some such remedies, such as transparency, may actually serve to exacerbate the worst effects of algorithmic governmentality. third, the paper shows that the application of algorithmic metrics to legal decisions aggravates the latent tension between equity and autonomy that is endemic in liberal institutions, undermining democratic values on a scale not previously experienced. these findings make imperative the identification the areas most perniciously affected by such systems, so as to curtail or entirely exclude automated decision-making from such decisions. references (1) monika zalnieriute, lyria bennett moses, & george williams, the rule of law and automation of government decision-making, 82 modern l. rev. 425 (2019). (2) lyria bennett moses, artificial intelligence in the courts, legal academia, and legal practice, 91 australian l.j. 561 (2017) (3) karen yeung, five fears about mass predictive personalization in an age of surveillance capitalism, 8 int’l data priv. l. 258 (2018). (4) anthony casey & anthony niblett, self-driving laws, 66 u. toronto l.j. 429 (2016). (5) ariel porat & lior j. strahilevitz, personalizing default rules and disclosure with big data, 112 mich. l. rev. 1417 (2014) (6) julie e. cohen, the biopolitical public domain: the legal construction of the surveillance economy, 31 phil. & tech. 213 (2018). (7) sonia katyal, private accountability in the age of artificial intelligence, 66 ucla l. rev. 54 (2019). (8) solon barocas & andrew d. selbst, big data’s disparate impact, 104 cal. l. rev. 671 (2016). (9) john cheney-lippold, a new algorithmic identity: soft biopolitics and the modulation of control, 28 theory, cult. & soc’y 164 (2011). (10) marion fourcade, ordinalization, 34 soc. theory 175, 176-78 (2016). (11) lucas d. introna, algorithms, governance, and governmentality: on governing academic writing, 41 sci. tech. & hum. values 17, 29-30 (2016). (12) adrian mackenzie, the production of prediction: what does machine learning want?, 18 euro. j. cult. stud. 429 (2015). selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 narratives in america: the connection between affective polarization and victimhood in the 2020 us election hoda gharib, phd candidate university of toronto professor megan boler (principle investigator) university of toronto introduction: recent literature on polarization indicates that societal divisions are not only based in ideological and policy differences, but can also occur at the level of emotion and identity. affective polarization has been used to describe the dislike and distrust that members of an ingroup have for an outgroup and studies indicate that american citizens are reporting increasing levels of affective polarization and behavioural distancing from members of other political groups (iyengar et al., 2019). the 2020 us election and its aftermath coupled with the black lives matter protests during summer of 2020 have highlighted the negative emotions and beliefs that citizens feel towards outgroup members. this study explores the narratives held by individuals on the political right and left about self and other. what are the beliefs that they hold about the self/other and which emotions do they feel? what stories do these beliefs and emotions tell about group identity and belonging in america and about each group’s relationship to the state and its institutions? we bring horwitz’s 2018 article on the politics of victimhood into conversation with affective polarization, building on these to contribute original insights regarding how narratives of victimhood and blame may exacerbate affective polarization. horwitz (2018) argues that victimhood “has become among the most important identity positions in american politics” (pg. 553). despite the stigma around victimhood as a position of weakness, inferiority, and powerlessness, to be a victim is to hold power, particularly in relation to morality. victims have a claim over justice because it is they who have been wronged and they who have the injury that needs to be recognised and rectified by powerful institutions (horwitz, 2018). thus, victimhood imparts on the victim a sense of moral superiority and can become a site of contestation in society. our study seeks to understand how claims over victimhood manifest in contexts of heightened partisan and racial tensions. we draw further on the concept of “deep stories”, theorized by suggested citation (apa): gharib, h., boler, m., (2021, october). narratives in america: the connection between affective polarization and victimhood in the 2020 us election. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. sociologist arlie hochschild (2016) to describe the affectively-charged narratives underlying all political ideologies (such as the american dream). a deep story “describes pain, blame, and points to a rescue narrative; it provides an emotional accounting system, establishing an accounting of who deserves sympathy, distrust, shame” (pg. 135). the concept of “deep stories” provides a framework for analyzing polarization and how narratives about race and national identities are linked with strong emotions. through extensive 4-month ethnography and grounded theoretical coding and discourse analysis of 2500 social media posts and comment sections, we address debates relating to the nature of cross-partisan dialogue and affective polarization on social media. citing the mixed results on the potential of social media to serve as a productive public sphere, bouvier & rosenbaum (2020) call for deeper analysis of this question through research in a variety of political contexts. our study contributes to this ongoing debate by exploring these questions in a highly polarized context and during divisive and tense historical moments in the us. methodology: this mixed-methods, three-year project (funded by the canadian social sciences and humanities research council) explores how emotions are expressed in relation to narratives of racial and national belonging within election-related social media. engaging grounded theory (charmaz, 2006), the cross-platform study explores twitter, facebook, and gab in the context of the 2019 canadian and 2020 u.s. elections. over the past two years, the pi and a seven-person team developed an innovative approach of affective discourse analysis through collaborative and iterative weekly meetings. the four-month digital ethnography, conducted in the lead up to and aftermath of each federal election, tracked developing stories and debates within social media conversations across the political spectrum. observations were documented in extensive field notes and discussed in weekly meetings. we coded a sample of 2500 posts discussing the january 6th capitol riots, election fraud, and black lives matter protests using the qualitative data research software atlas.ti. threads were selected according to the following criteria: initiated by an influencer; reflecting cross-partisan dialogue; explicit address of race; and having more than 300 comments/responses. contributing an innovative approach to the analysis of affect and emotion within social media, our affective discourse analysis was developed through an intensive iterative process over two years, drawing from critical discourse analysis (wodak & meyer, 2015), rhetorical analysis (leach, 2000), and "narrative emotions" analysis (kleres, 2011). we engaged grounded theory to develop and refine a codebook suitable for the complex task of coding emotional expression, including: rhetorical and linguistic features; topics to which emotions were directed; and beliefs about ingroups and outgroups. results: one of the most prominent findings to emerge from our data relating to emotions was frequent distrust of the other. individuals tended to demonstrate distrust in others who displayed opposing views to their own as well as to others’ political and media institutions. this distrust was manifested in several ways. for example, when individuals provided idiosyncratic or “authoritative” evidence (e.g., news articles) to support their argument, they were met with dismissal or accusations of bias or lying. on gab, we frequently saw distrust in the form of right-leaning individuals calling leftleaning individuals “trolls” and accusing them of being “paid” to repeat a predetermined “script”. finally, left-leaning individuals showed distrust in right-leaning individuals’ claims that the january 6 capitol events were a result of “passion and love” for america; as one user exclaims, “passionate about america? you sound like a damn fool”. our findings on beliefs confirm previous literature by showing that members of the ingroup tend to believe that they are critical thinkers, innocent, and oppressed, while members of the outgroup are brainwashed, hypocrites, and unpatriotic. affective polarization literature, largely quantitative, understand polarization almost solely in terms of partisan identity, and conceptualizes emotion in terms of a “positive/negative” binary. our research provides greater nuance and complexity, revealing the extensive feelings of bitterness and resentment of the other in u.s. politics. these feelings are linked to the ingroup’s narrative of victimhood and blame: the ingroup feels victimised and hurt by the outgroup which not only refuses to recognize this pain but in fact is the cause. significantly, our analysis supports sociologist arlie hochschild’s theorization of “deep stories.” this was common across both right and left-leaning threads; those who disagreed with one’s interpretation of victimhood and blame were treated as outsiders, dismissed, and mocked. moreover, pain was exacerbated by perceptions of double standards that privileged the outgroup and discriminated against the ingroup. discourses of double standards were particularly common among left-leaning individuals, who felt that the police response to the storming of the capitol was disproportionately lenient in comparison to their response to black lives matter protests and that this leniency was a product of racism and underlying partisan loyalties. conclusion: through innovative and nuanced coding of emotions, beliefs, and narratives of self/other on social media, our study deepens understandings of the nature and manifestation of affective polarization in the u.s. our findings shed new light on the interconnectedness of extreme societal divisions and ingroup victimhood, outgroup blame and feelings of bitterness and resentment. we contribute insights into dynamics of distrust, and particularly the predominant accusations of hypocrisy and doublestandards from across the political spectrum. in addition to addressing gaps in scholarly understanding of the nature of polarization within social media and cross-partisan dialogue in our increasingly polarized landscape, our research contributes an innovative approach to coding emotional expressions on social media. references: bouvier, g., & rosenbaum, j. e. (eds.). (2020). twitter, the public sphere, and the chaos of online deliberation. palgrave macmillan. charmaz, k. (2014). constructing grounded theory. sage. horwitz, r. b. (2018). politics as victimhood, victimhood as politics. journal of policy history, 30(3), 552-574. iyengar, s., lelkes, y., levendusky, m., malhotra, n., & westwood, s. j. (2019). the origins and consequences of affective polarization in the united states. annual review of political science, 22, 129-146. kleres, j. (2011). emotions and narrative analysis: a methodological approach. journal for the theory of social behaviour, 41(2), 182-202. leach, j. (2000). rhetorical analysis. in bauer, m.w. & gaskell, g. (eds), qualitative researching with text, image and sound, 207-226. sage. wodak, r., & meyer, m. (eds.). (2015). methods of critical discourse studies. sage. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): martini, f. (2020, october). countering the counterpublic? the german #metoo network on twitter. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. countering the counterpublic? the german #metoo network on twitter franziska martini weizenbaum institute/freie universität berlin questions of representation and visibility have a long tradition in the field of gender media studies, and digitization and the structural change of the public sphere have given them fresh momentum. while certain varieties of feminism have become more popular, so have anti-feminist reactions to it with both sides competing for visibility (banet-weiser, 2018; mcrobbie, 2009). establishing the concept of feminist counterpublics that arise in response to the exclusion from dominant publics, fraser (1990) noted already in her constitutive writing that counterpublics are not necessarily progressive and democratic. however, newer research on this topic seems to focus on either the potential of digital technologies (and especially social media platforms) for the formation of progressive and desirable feminist publics or on the rising of antifeminist networks exclusively; thus, leaving questions about power inequalities within platforms and the (gendered) interplay between multiple, strongly conflicting counterpublics unanswered. this study sheds light on the networked structure of the german-language #metoo protest on twitter in order to reveal who succeeded in becoming visible and influential in this digital protest and in order to show differences in networking practices among those involved. it will be shown that on the one hand, the hashtag enabled, also in the german-language twittersphere, a network of individuals protesting against sexism and sexualized violence; on the other hand, twitter accounts of traditional news media play a central role in the #metoo network from the very beginning, indicating that protest networks are less “equal” and horizontal than often assumed. at the same time, few but very loud voices used the #metoo protest to strategically mobilize against migration in germany and austria and to promote their racist agenda, even before a centralized campaign that exploited #metoo – the “120dezibel” campaign from the radical right identitarian movement – was launched. theoretically, this paper draws not only on research in the field of feminist media studies, but also on network science as well as research on social movements. previous research on social (protest) networks suggests that they consist of a number of heterogeneous actors, e.g. highly connected hubs and peripheral actors that play a crucial role in spreading information (gonzález-bailón & wang, 2015; bennett, segerberg & yang, 2018). we collected all german-language tweets containing ‘#metoo’ from the first tweet on october 16, 2017 to january 28, 2018, the last day before the radical right ‘120dezibel’ campaign was launched. we built a network of twitter accounts as nodes (n= 31,918), and retweet, reply, and @mention relations between them as edges (n= 84,341). the majority of nodes are part of one large connected component, indicating that twitter’s networking affordances where broadly used. in order to identify the most central actors, we calculated centrality measures for each node: indegree, outdegree, betweenness and eigenvector centrality. using k-core decomposition technique, we identified the core and the periphery of the network. this technique recursively removes edges from a network, so that as a result the core consists of those nodes that are not only highly connected but also connected to other nodes in the core. analyses were conducted using python’s networkx library (hagberg et al., 2008). those twitter accounts with the highest values for each centrality measure, the core and a random sample from the periphery were analyzed and classified as actor types, such as media actors, political actors, civil society actors and private accounts (n=692; two coders, intercoderreliability krippendorff’s α: 0.95). in the last step, a qualitative-quantitative content analysis was conducted for the core’s retweets and tweets. as expected, the network consists of some highly connected hubs and a majority of nodes with only few connections. the most central nodes, only 1.1 percent of the twitter users involved, account for 35 percent of interactions within the network. from those accounts that were most often a target of interaction, half belong to journalists and media outlets (53 percent), indicating that they play a central role as broadcasters in the german #metoo protest. on the other hand, primarily private accounts (89 percent) retweet, mention and reply to others’ tweets on very high levels, functioning as amplifiers of #metoo. surprisingly, no celebrities and only few political and civil society actors take a central position in the network. the coreperiphery decomposition revealed that in the very well-connected core of the network we find large amounts (re-)tweets with racist and/or anti-feminists and sexist conent (67 percent). these actors seem to use twitter’s networking affordances more strategically and effectively than feminist activists while striving to counter feminist action. of course, the protest on twitter is only one part of the larger #metoo movement. however, it is the participatory potential of twitter that has sparked high hopes for feminist mobilisation and therefore it is necessary to critically examine the platform’s dynamics. also, this study shows how the concept of social networks and networked publics cannot only serve as a theoretical background but also as a fruitful methodological approach within the field of feminist media studies. further, this study presents another example that while we experience a transnationalization of political communication (and feminism), it is still important to pay attention to the local context, as we assume that the rising of an anti-migration network within the germanlanguage #metoo protest is very context specific. references banet-weiser, s. (2018). empowered. popular feminism and popular misogyny. duke university press. bennett, l., segerberg, a., & yang, y. (2018). the strength of peripheral networks: negotiating attention and meaning in complex media ecologies. journal of communication, 68, 659–684 fraser, n. (1990). rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. social text, (25/26), pp. 56-80. gonzález-bailón, s. & wang, n. (2015). networked discontent: the anatomy of protest campaigns in social media. social networks, 44, 95-104. doi: 10.1016/j.socnet.2015.07.003 hagberg, a. a., schult, d. a. & swart, p. j. (2008). exploring network structure, dynamics, and function using networkx. proceedings of the 7th python in science conference, 11–15. mcrobbie, a. (2009). the aftermath of feminism. gender, culture and social change. sage publications ltd. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): kamish, d. and k. hilstob. (2023, october). digital labor and rentier platform capitalism: reform or revolution?. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. digital labor and rentier platform capitalism: reform or revolution? d. w. kamish school of communication, simon fraser university kayla hilstob school of communication, simon fraser university digital labor has become an umbrella term for describing a range of digitally mediated practices from paid work in the gig economy (srnicek 2017) to cultivating a personal brand on social media (scolere, pruchniewska, and duffy 2018). it seems that every day, scholars identify a new type of labor being performed in the digital economy: aspirational labor (duffy 2016) listing labor (kneese and palm 2020), labored identity (aires 2020), tidying labor (li 2023), and more have appeared to describe the myriad activities that users undertake on social networking and other sites online. in many cases, social media users are theorized as workers who perform unremunerated labor (fuchs 2014) akin to immaterial labor (lazzarato 1996; terranova 2000) and unwaged housework (jarrett 2015; federici 1975). this wellspring of new labor(s) has, however, muddied the waters: digital labor is an ambiguous concept at best (gandini 2021; goodwin 2022). despite recent attempts to clarify it, the “user labor” (jarrett 2022) version of the concept, we argue, obscures more than it clarifies the user/platform relation. moreover, this framing of user activity as labor has political limitations, producing reformist rather than revolutionary demands. in series of articles later published as the housing question, engels ([1887] 1970) engages in a polemic against proudhonists who argue that tenants have the same relationship to landlords as workers do to capitalists. this, he says, is totally untrue: tenants confront landlords wishing to purchase housing, not sell a commodity. following engels, we argue analogously that typical social media users—those whose activity jarret (2022) describes as “user labor”—are less like workers than they are like tenants. users do not confront platforms as sellers of labor-power but as buyers of a commodity. in the first instance, platforms provide (the use of) a commodity or service to users, not the other way around (fumagalli et al. 2018). this does not mean that users aren’t exploited, though; landlords exploit tenants and creditors exploit debtors despite neither of them performing labor. rather, platforms offer the use of a particular commodity to users (terms and conditions apply) and extract profit in the form of rent from advertisers (rigi and prey 2015). from this foundation, we engage with ongoing debates on the audience commodity (kaplan 2019) and digital rent (frayssé 2015) to begin articulating a more precise account of social media platforms’ valorization process and the user/platform relation therein. the valorization of social media platforms must be understood in context of the expansion of rentier capitalism (rigi and prey 2015). rentier capitalism describes an economic configuration wherein charging rent to access a monopolized asset becomes a predominant mode of accumulation (christophers 2020). marx’s theory of rent extends to digital platforms, which do not create value but capture it by embedding themselves into spaces, interactions, and information flows (sadowski 2020). a shift toward extracting profit through rentier relations has seen corporate platforms like alphabet and meta come to dominate the world economy over the last decade, and there is little incentive to create value when some of the world’s highest earning companies are so successful simply capturing value instead. this valorizing model is not entirely new, though. technological rents have been identified as a key feature of the late capitalist economy for half a century (mandel [1972] 1975) and digital platforms can be seen as a new “spatial fix” in the long history of capitalist expansion (greene and joseph 2015; harvey 1981). this economic arrangement nonetheless remains an underexplored cause of lowering rates of productivity and profit, and a decline of real wages (moseley 2014). distinguishing where surplus value is created versus captured is therefore crucial for understanding the relationship between platforms and economic crises. counterintuitively, theorizing users not as workers actually empowers a stronger political response to digital exploitation. by misidentifying the user/platform relation, “user labor” concedes the commoditization of communication rather than challenging it. reformist demands follow: “wages for facebook” (ptak 2014 as cited in jung 2014) or “data agency,” meaning the owning and selling of one’s own data on open data markets, as proposed in legislation introduced by democrats in 2020 (chakravorti 2020). as marx, engels, and many others after have argued, the goal, however, is not for workers to own the commodities they produce. what benefit is it to the worker to own ten yards of linen at the end of each day, or for users to own data about themselves, of which they can make neither sense nor use? instead, it is capitalist data relations (mejias and couldry 2019) and the existence of for-profit social media platforms that ought to be opposed from the outset. our present condition of communicative capitalism (dean 2009) is a situation in which the values of democracy have been subsumed by capital through social media, and it cannot be solved by compensating users for so-called labor. formalized wage relations would exacerbate the problem by creating more financial incentives with which to remain trapped in the feedback and drive (dean 2010) corporate owned platforms, increasing their influence, power, and profits. it is not necessary to cast the activity of users as labor in order to identify the exploitation at the core of digital platforms. moreover, turn towards digital labor has arguably displaced a more revolutionary platform politics. rather than advocating for progressive reform from unwaged to waged labor, platforms must instead be disentangled from the stranglehold of capital and transformed into public utilities with democratic accountability. platforms like google and facebook have won the status of infrastructure by becoming increasingly essential to our daily lives (plantin et al. 2018), and our platform politics must treat them as such (srnicek 2019). as part of the work of revolution we must socialize the means of communication as well as the means of production. what this looks like in practice is freeing platforms from the rentier relations of user exploitation and turning these infrastructures—email, social networking sites, video sharing—into public utilities. the horizon of our platform politics must not stop short at remuneration for the daily activities of platform users but extend to the creation of genuinely democratic infrastructures. references aires, susana. 2020. “laboured identity: an analysis of user branding practices on instagram.” triplec: communication, capitalism & critique 18 (1): 494–507. chakravorti. 2020. “why it’s so hard for users to control their data.” harvard business review, january. christophers, brett. 2020. rentier capitalism: who owns the economy, and who pays for it? new york: verso. dean, jodi. 2009. democracy and other neoliberal fantasies. durham, nc and london: duke university press. ———. 2010. blog theory: feedback and capture in the circuits of drive. cambridge: polity press. duffy, brooke erin. 2016. “the romance of work: gender and aspirational labour in the digital culture industries.” international journal of cultural studies 19 (4): 441–57. engels, friedrich. (1887) 1970. the housing question. second edition. moscow: progress publishers. federici, silvia. 1975. wages against housework. new york: power of women collective and falling wall press. frayssé, olivier. 2015. “is the concept of rent relevant to a discussion of surplus value in the digital world?” in reconsidering value and labour in the digital age, edited by eran fisher and christian fuchs, 172–87. new york: palgrave macmillan. fuchs, christian. 2014. digital labour and karl marx. new york, ny and london: routledge. fumagalli, andrea, stefano lucarelli, elena musolino, and giulia rocchi. 2018. “digital labour in the platform economy: the case of facebook.” sustainability 10 (6): 1757. gandini, alessandro. 2021. “digital labour: an empty signifier?” media, culture & society 43 (2): 369–80. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720948018. goodwin, peter. 2022. “mission impossible? a review of kylie jarrett’s book ‘digital labor.’” triplec: communication, capitalism & critique. open access journal for a global sustainable information society 20 (2): 213–20. greene, daniel marcus, and daniel joseph. 2015. “the digital spatial fix.” triplec: communication, capitalism & critique. open access journal for a global sustainable information society 13 (2): 223–47. https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v13i2.659. harvey, david. 1981. “the spatial fix – hegel, von thunen, and marx.” antipode 13 (3): 1–12. jarrett, kylie. 2015. feminism, labour and digital media: the digital housewife. new york: routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315720111. ———. 2022. digital labor. digital media and society series. cambridge, uk: polity. jung, alex e. 2014. “wages for facebook.” dissent 61: 47–50. kaplan, michael. 2019. “the self-consuming commodity: audiences, users, and the riddle of digital labor.” television & new media 21 (3): 240–59. kneese, tamara, and michael palm. 2020. “brick-and-platform: listing labor in the digital vintage economy.” social media + society 6 (3). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120933299. lazzarato, maurizio. 1996. “immaterial labor.” in radical thought in italy: a potential politics, edited by paolo virno and michael hardt, 133–47. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. li, zizi. 2023. “digital domestic (im)material labor: managing waste and self while producing closet decluttering videos.” television & new media, january, 15274764221150163. mandel, ernest. (1972) 1975. late capitalism. london: new left books. mejias, ulises a., and nick couldry. 2019. the costs of connection: how data is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism. stanford: stanford university press. moseley, fred. 2014. falling rate of profit in the postwar united states economy. place of publication not identified: palgrave macmillan. plantin, jean-christophe, carl lagoze, paul n. edwards, and christian sandvig. 2018. “infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook.” new media & society 20 (1): 293–310. rigi, jakob, and robert prey. 2015. “value, rent, and the political economy of social media.” the information society 31 (5): 392–406. sadowski, jathan. 2020. “the internet of landlords: digital platforms and new mechanisms of rentier capitalism.” antipode 52 (2): 562–80. scolere, leah, urszula pruchniewska, and brooke erin duffy. 2018. “constructing the platform-specific self-brand: the labor of social media promotion.” social media + society july–september: 1–11. srnicek, nick. 2017. platform capitalism. cambridge and malden, ma: polity press. ———. 2019. “the only way to rein in big tech is to treat them as a public service.” the guardian, april 23, 2019. terranova, tiziana. 2000. “free labor: producing culture for the digital economy.” social text 18 (2): 33–58. microsoft word gault-traces of black freedom in the machine-traces of black freedom in the machine.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): gault, erika. (2021, october). studies of black freedom in the machine: ethnographics approaches to the study of digital black religion. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. traces of black freedom in the machine: ethnographic approaches to the study of digital black religion erika gault university of arizona final abstract there was a time when one wanted to learn about black religion you went to church, the black church to be more specific. the “all-in-one agency” which w.e. b. dubois described the black church as certainly operated as a centralized and essential aspect of black life. its networks have come to signify black believers’ emancipatory visions since its beginning during slavery in america. today black users’ contemporary engagement with digital technology has both broadened and complicated the scholarly understanding of the black church and black religion to include more than its christian manifestation. a number of works (c.f. brock 2012; florini 2013; noble 2018; watkins 2018) provide important theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of black digital use, digital structures of inequality, and counter-discourse production. on the topic of digital religion, works (c.f. campbell 2012; mia lovheim 2013; hoover, echchaibi 2012) have emphasized the importance of digital technology in mediating religious experience. yet, despite findings that people of african descent are often early adopters of technology, at the intersections of blackness, religion, and digital technology scholarly work remains sparse. this paper provides both a survey and framework for the study of digital black religion. this paper takes up works regarding black religion and media technology (frederick 2009, walton 2009, lomax 2019) as a way of discussing persistent themes and strategies for freedom nascent in black media making. the digital scene carries many of these same traces in the social media practices of black religious practitioners. the work of black religious media scholars is paired with that of heidi campbell and others writing on digital religion to offer a needed approach to the articulation and study of digital black religion. i also write with a particular regard for how young black religious bodies have received far less attention in digital religious studies or internet studies. several works have taken up religion in digital spaces, the use of ethnography in the study of digital religions, and the mediatization of religion (to name only a few concerns). however, a white lens is usually employed, a critical race/black theory is absent, or racial homogeneity among research participants is assumed. without question, when scholars of black religion write about black digital-religious life, they have often turned to such theoretical frameworks. new methods for the study of the particularities of black digitalreligious life are needed. this paper moves in that direction. first, i examine a few important turns thus far in the study of digital religion and situate black religious expression in this discussion as an influential framework in establishing religious meaning making online. earlier works have mostly overlooked the significance of black programmers, online curators, and content creators in reconstructing the notion of american religion in the last thirty years. charting the influence of black religion in the digital not only speaks to the essentiality of its study. but, as the title of this paper suggest, it points to important approaches to the way the digital in religion is explored and the way blackness and black people in digital spaces are both studied and develop their own epistemologies. next, taking a cue from john l. jackson’s “ethnography is, ethnography ain’t” i will briefly introduce “artifacts” from my own fieldwork in order to provide the “kind of writing [and analysis] …. the digitalization of culture demand[s] and afford[s].” through this process we view the non-linearity, the trans-historical composition of the digital black church in its quest for freedom in digital spaces. this points to new theoretical and methodological approaches for the study of the same. heidi campbell’s theory of networked religion bodes well in this endeavor. this paper provides a needed next step in the discussion on what the black church is and is becoming through the use of digital technology and useful ethnographic techniques for the study of this digital-religious context. references campbell, heidi. 2010. when religion meets new media. 1st ed. media, religion and culture. abingdon, oxon; new york, ny: routledge. ———. 2012a. digital religion: understanding religious practice in new media worlds. new york: routledge. ———. 2012b. “understanding the relationship between religion online and offline in a networked society.” journal of the american academy of religion 80 (1): 64– 93. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfr074. jackson jr., j.l. (2012), ethnography is, ethnography ain’t. cultural anthropology, 27: 480497. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01155jr, ———. 2013. thin description. boston: harvard university press. stewart hoover and nabil echchaibi, “the third spaces of digital religion,” working paper, center for media, religion and culture, university of colorado, boulder, colorado, 2014, https://www.colorado.edu. lomax, tamura. 2018. jezebel unhinged: loosing the black female body in religion and culture. durham: duke university press. loveheim, mia. 2012. “identity” in digital religion: understanding religious practice in new media worlds edited by heidi campbell, 41-56. new york: routledge. walton, jonathan. 2009. watch this! the ethics and aesthetics of black televangelism. new york: new york university press. microsoft word burnett-'the great youtube purge of wrongthink'-'the great youtube purge of wrongthink'.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): burnett, scott and trancoso, fotini paleologou moura. (2021, october). “‘the great youtube purge of wrongthink’: altright adaptations in a changing media ecology”. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “the great youtube purge of wrongthink”: altright adaptations in a changing platform ecology scott burnett university of gothenburg fotini paleologou moura trancoso university of gothenburg introduction and approach social media companies stand accused of having facilitated the “radicalization” of the young, white men associated with the “manosphere” (ging, 2019) and with far-right movements online (conway, 2017; johnson, 2018). as many platforms attempt to tighten their moderation practices and terms of service in order to close down “independent” spaces for extremism, originators of these discourses evolve in response. in this paper, we investigate how a swedish altright youtuber successfully adapts to his changing environment, and we argue for the importance of understanding how ideologies of hate behave under pressure. youtube has been an important vector of extremism that until quite recently positioned itself as a neutral, open hosting service that took minimal responsibility for the content of user posts (lewis, 2018). this laissez-faire approach to political content, combined with an algorithm that promoted similar content, saw youtube emerge as the backbone of the “alternative influence network” (ain) which builds the relatability, authenticity, and accountability of far-right “micro-celebrity” figures (lewis, 2018, 2020). by 2018, calls were coming in from a number of sectors for youtube to “govern content and behavior for explicit values” (lewis, 2018, p. 44). the focus on values here moves on from the focus on specific slurs or racial calumnies, which are already easy to avoid in the highly coded, ironic registers of the altright (askanius, 2021). one member of the ain identified by lewis (2018) is swedish white nationalist marcus follin. his “the golden one” (tgo) channel is not the most popular altright account, but articulates a novel mix of health, fitness, self-help, and neo-nazi ideology that repays careful discourse analysis. while a number of other nodes in the ain – including richard spencer and stefan molyneux – have been shut down since youtube tightened their rules, tgo has endured, and grown his subscriber base from 96,000 to 111,000. his approach to fitspiration, self-help, white nationalism (including nazi symbology) and positivity (see strick, 2020) is highly coded, and even esoteric. he operates his channel as the central content hub for a number of online businesses, selling personal training, fitness supplements, coffee, and clothing. tgo represents the confluence of a number of contemporary discourses: the neoliberal individualism endemic to self-help culture, the figure of the “influencer” in online attention economies (hund, 2019), and the wry humour and multimodal creativity of so-called “fascism 2.0” (fuchs, 2017). we refer to the role he plays in the masculinist and anti-feminist world of the manosphere as that of a “manfluencer”. we used multimodal discourse analysis, grounded in a postfoundational approach (see marttila, 2016) to analyse a corpus of 22 tgo videos posted on his channel between june 2019 and march 2021 in which the policies and actions of social media platforms to ban (or “shadow ban”) far right figures is explicitly thematized. data and analysis key themes we identified in our analysis include: cultural encryption: tgo adopts marxian/gramscian-inspired theories of the relationship between politics and culture to explain to his subscribers how “leftists” have succeeded dominating various social and political institutions. he understands himself and his followers as engaged in a “metapolitical” war for the west, for whiteness, and masculinity. in critiquing what he calls the youtube “great purge of wrongthink” he offers advice on crafting content and memes that will not be defined as hate-speech in order to not be “defeated” on platforms such as youtube. his already esoteric invocation of nordic mythology, as well as the characters and narratives of historical, gaming, and fictional narratives, as well as layers of irony and self-mockery, represent increasingly opaque codes designed to protect in-groups from external scrutiny. partial articulations: tgo repeatedly emphasizes his challenge to social media “censors” to show him exactly how he has broken their terms of service. he articulates his politics as a politics of love, doubling down on positive characterizations of the west, of white nations, and “population genetic” arguments about the dangers of the “great replacement” without explicitly naming the force behind it. he represents himself as focusing on white male health and wellness, without attacking out-groups. he does admit that if he were to speak openly, he could be prosecuted in sweden for “hets mot folkgrupp” (inciting violence against an ethnic group). he openly wears neo-nazi symbols and invokes arcane anti-semitic and racist tropes. but his “metapolitical” strategy and references to a “crusade” consistently avoid blatant negativity, or the promotion of specific acts of violence. platform diversification: the most significant strategy evident in the tgo corpus is an increasing platform-specific content strategy. he informs his viewers that he will continue to post “light-hearted” content on youtube while he will cover political content on gab, telegram, and his podcasts. he is explicit in articulating a multiplatform ecology for the tgo brand that segments the kinds of political speech he will engage in by platform and user agreements, while consistently hyperlinking between his various holdings in order to build his audience across platforms, building a strategy for a resilient and distributed online presence. preliminary conclusions from our initial analysis it seems that while youtube’s efforts to reduce rightwing extremism has had an impact on explicitly racist articulations, they have not necessarily diminished the profile, nor the popularity, of micro-celebrity “manfluencers” such as tgo. by characterizing social media platforms as politicized territories won by the “left”, tgo integrates his political diagnosis of the decline of western civilization into setbacks without losing face, and indeed continues to build an audience, maintain business operations, and show signs of improved resilience. this is not a reason to roll back youtube account restrictions, but rather for understanding the specific evolutionary pressures they exert. references askanius, t. (2021). on frogs, monkeys, and execution memes: exploring the humorhate nexus at the intersection of neo-nazi and alt-right movements in sweden. television & new media, 22(2), 147–165. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476420982234 conway, m. (2017). determining the role of the internet in violent extremism and terrorism: six suggestions for progressing research. studies in conflict & terrorism, 40(1), 77–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610x.2016.1157408 fuchs, c. (2017). fascism 2.0: twitter users’ social media memories of hitler on his 127th birthday. fascism, 6(2), 228–263. https://doi.org/10.1163/22116257-00602004 ging, d. (2019). alphas, betas, and incels: theorizing the masculinities of the manosphere. men and masculinities, 22(4), 638–657. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184x17706401 hund, e. d. (2019). the influencer industry: constructing and commodifying authenticity on social media [doctor of philosophy, university of pennsylvania]. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/289184334.pdf johnson, j. (2018). the self-radicalization of white men: “fake news” and the affective networking of paranoia. communication, culture and critique, 11(1), 100– 115. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcx014 lewis, r. (2018). alternative influence: broadcasting the reactionary right on youtube (media manipulation research initiative, p. 61) [research report]. data & society research institute. lewis, r. (2020). “this is what the news won’t show you”: youtube creators and the reactionary politics of micro-celebrity. television & new media, 21(2), 201–217. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419879919 marttila, t. (2016). post-foundational discourse analysis: from political difference to empirical research. london: palgrave macmillan. strick, s. (2020). the alternative right, masculinities, and ordinary affect. in g. dietze & j. roth (eds.), right-wing populism and gender: european perspectives and beyond (pp. 207–230). bielefeld: transcript verlag. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): lupinacci, l. (2022, november). reclaiming the experience: social media, the ‘metaverse’ and extractive imaginaries of experiential enhancement. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. reclaiming ‘the experience’: social media, the ‘metaverse’, and extractive imaginaries of experiential enhancement ludmila lupinacci university of sussex introduction in the introductory video to their vision for the ‘metaverse’1, mark zuckerberg and his colleagues repeat the word ‘experience’ more than 60 times. enhancing users’ experience is frequently what social media use to legitimate and justify their actions (beer 2019). the ‘experience’ – and how social media frame, appropriate and exploit it – is the topic of this paper. in this theoretical-methodological intervention, i start from a close reading and a digital technographic (berg 2022) analysis of zuckerberg’s introduction to the idea of the ‘metaverse’ to argue that a critical-phenomenological disposition is urgent for examining the dispute for ‘the experience’ and for challenging how certain platform-centric ideals of ‘the experiential’ (particularly, notions of ‘active’ and ‘embodied’ experience) become incorporated and habituated. social media and the matter of experience despite the discourse of openness and connectedness that is often reproduced by social media, in the last decade an increasing body of critical scholarship has been scrutinizing the extractivist, exploitative nature of mainstream platforms (van dijck 2013; zuboff 2019). the growing interest in platform capitalism and data colonialism (couldry and mejias 2019) foregrounds how human experience is central not only to social media’s rhetoric but also to their advertising-driven business models. 1 https://www.facebook.com/realitylabs/videos/561535698440683/ https://www.facebook.com/realitylabs/videos/561535698440683/ the central argument of this paper is that the colonial inclinations of mainstream social media are manifested not only in their data-extractivist operation, but also in how, through the construction of ideal usership through discursive material configurations (docherty 2020), they manage to normatively frame our conceptions and imaginaries of human experience. the presentation on the so-called ‘metaverse’, i suggest, is a fertile site to observe how those configurations operate, and the notions of the experiential they are trying to construct. the ‘metaverse’ and the experiential in presenting the next stage of his company, zuckerberg calls it a transition from ‘the social internet’ to ‘the embodied internet’. my analysis suggests that the central narrative here is an alleged shift from a technoscape premised on ‘engagement’ to one based on ‘immersion’. that is, after normatively framing what is an ‘active’ experience’, the next stage seems to focus on our ideas of ‘embodied experience’. mainstream platforms inform our conception of what ‘sociality’ is (carmi 2020). the ideal user of our current ‘social internet’ has been the ‘actively’ engaged user (docherty 2020) – the one who likes, clicks, comments, shares. indeed, when interviewing social media users for a previous project, i identified that scrolling an endless stream of content, for instance, is generally assumed to be a ‘passive’, ‘mindless’ task (lupinacci 2021). this is, in my view, the unquestioned, naturalized reproduction of ‘engagement’ as the ideal, valued attribute of social media practices. this conception is platformcentric insofar as ‘active experience’ is reduced to those practices that more clearly generate quantifiable data footprints. allegedly, the novelty brought by ‘the metaverse’ would be a sensorially richer, more immersive mediation in which, “instead of looking at a screen, you’re going to be in these experiences”. meta claims that human interaction should finally become more “natural and vivid” as “devices won’t be the focal point of your attention anymore”. the transition to this ‘embodied internet’ would mean the beginning of a new era for human interaction, “where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it”. in emphasizing notions of immersion, social and co-presence, and teleportation, as well as the access to people’s gestures, movement, and facial expressions, the company is discursively constructing the (future) ideal user as someone whose corporeality is fully available for mediation (and, presumably, data extraction). subjecting the body to objectification is then how “to unlock a lot of amazing new experiences”. bearing this in mind, i posit that what is needed is a critical framework that approaches the topic of social media and their self-proclaimed experiential enhancement not by focusing on how effective those interfaces that seek to provide ‘immersion’ are, but rather by dedicating attention to processes of naturalization of certain normative ideals and types of interactions with technology. the lens of habituation, i argue, offers us a less ‘platform-centric’ vocabulary for the examination of how power relations become incorporated into everyday life. critical phenomenology and habituation phenomenology is the study of everyday, taken-for-granted experiences, and is concerned with the examination of how the world ‘appears’ to us through our senses (merleau-ponty 2012). the starting point of a critical phenomenology of social media is the understanding that, in these platforms, ‘appearances’ are never neutral or organic (couldry and kallinikos 2017; carmi 2020). rather than reproducing the attribution of media’s power and taken-for-grantedness to their pervasiveness and ‘saturation’, phenomenology frames this as a result of active processes of habituation (highmore 2011; pedwell 2021). yet, focusing on habituation should not stop us from acknowledging the fact that these habits are often orchestrated and oriented. as coined by chun (2017), “habit is ideology in action”. it is precisely in understanding this enactment between habit and ideology, and the contested experiences resultant from it, that a critical phenomenological disposition is useful. in this context, ‘experience’ is both what social media platforms (claim to) deliver, and the resource they cultivate, extract, and exploit for commercial purposes. in short, i argue that a critical-phenomenological perspective is productive for scrutinizing social media precisely at the intersection of embodied affect and the political economy of platformization, whilst centering specifically what is so often framed as the driver of technical mediation: human experience. concluding remarks scholars have long critiqued the use of the adjective ‘social’ to distinguish certain types of technologies and practices. perhaps, then, we need the same dedication and scrutiny in critiquing this attempted possession of ‘the body’ by silicon valley ideology. embodiment, as understood by phenomenology, is a basic condition of our being in the world (merleau-ponty 2012) – there is, therefore, no such a thing as a ‘disembodied’ internet that needs to be fixed, regardless of what meta might try to make us believe. ultimately, through the introduction of their vision for the next technological tide, platforms such as facebook are also colonizing our conditions of imaginability – the ways in which we can dream and conceive of possible futures (haupt 2021). in setting the vocabulary and expectations for what the future of mediated communications ought to look like, as well as “the technology that needs to be invented” for the concretization of these ambitious plans, zuckerberg and his counterparts are also controlling the narrative of technological development in the direction that best favors their own interests. despite the overly reproduced emphasis on incrementing ‘the experience’, they are mostly supporting the endurance of their extractivist, (meta)data-driven operation. references beer, d. (2019). the quirks of digital culture. emerald publishing. berg, m. (2022). digital technography: a methodology for interrogating emerging digital technologies and their futures. qualitative inquiry, 28(7). carmi, e. (2020). media distortions. understanding the power behind spam, noise, and other deviant media. peter lang. chun, w. h.k. (2017). updating to remain the same. habitual new media. the mit press. couldry, n., kallinikos, j. (2018). ontology. in j. burgess, a. marwick, & t. poell (eds.), the sage handbook of social media (pp. 149–159). london: sage. couldry, n., mejias, u. (2019). the costs of connection. stanford university press. docherty, n. (2020). facebook’s ideal user: healthy habits, social capital, and the politics of well-being online. social media + society. haupt, j. (2021). facebook futures: mark zuckerberg’s discursive construction of a better world. new media & society, 23(2). highmore, b. (2011). ordinary lives. studies in the everyday. routledge. lupinacci, l. (2021). ‘absentmindedly scrolling through nothing’: liveness and compulsory continuous connectedness in social media. media, culture & society, 43(2). merleau-ponty, m. (2012). phenomenology of perception. london: routledge. pedwell, c. (2021). revolutionary routines. the habits of social transformation. mcgillqueen’s university press. van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. oxford university press. zuboff , s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. publicaffairs. microsoft word murru-bringing the pandemic home-bringing the pandemic home.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): vicari, s., murru, m. f. (2021, october). bringing the pandemic home: memes as local politics at times of global crisis. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. bringing the pandemic home: memes as local politics at times of global crisis stefania vicari the university of sheffield maria francesca murru university of bergamo on 22 february 2020 part of northern italy entered the first covid-19 lockdown of the west. while stories of people fleeing quarantined areas soon made national headlines, the international news was suddenly reporting of coronavirus patients connected to italy all around the world. against this background, italian social media started thriving with covid-19 humour (murru and vicari, 2020). on 9 march the northern lockdown turned nationwide and became one of the strictest in europe. this article focuses on covid-19 memes of quarantined italy during the 'first wave' of the pandemic. whether reflecting univocal ideological stancing or enabling 'polyvocal discourse' (milner, 2013), memes emerge at the intersection of 'cultural memory' (laineste and vooilad, 2017) and circumstantial events, often resulting in varied forms of political expression. but how does this play out at times of global crisis? how does local cultural fabric (nissenbaum and shifman, 2018) contribute to the definition of political categories when a crisis is both local and global? we investigate how local culture shaped pandemic memes and explore how these memes constructed political discourse in quarantined italy. our work explores the local appropriation of memetic practices, providing insight into how local publics make themselves a(t) home on mainstream social media. we combined digital methods (rogers, 2019) and netnographic techniques (kozinets, 2019) to study a dataset of covid-19 twitter memes. the study’s sample period spans from 28 february a week into the country's northern lockdown to 3 june when most of the national restrictions were finally lifted. the twitter capture and analysis tool (tcat) was used to 1) implement a keyword query strategy relevant to the pandemic in italy, 2) launch the live data (and metadata) capture and 3) filter the resulting archive by language (i.e., italian) and content format (i.e., containing media urls). the final filtering process returned 101,776 italian tweets containing media content. drawing from nissenbaum and shifman (2018), we used netnographic analytical techniques based on grounded analysis to investigate pandemic memes as local social, cultural and political objects. this translated into manually scanning the 101,776 covid19 media tweets with their metadata filtered via tcat to detect the data that would constitute the corpus for our analysis. we relied on shifman’s (2014) definition of memes to identify tweets that showed characteristics of memetics. we then applied a combination of open and theory-based coding to the resulting dataset. first, we used open coding to mark recurring patterns in meme forms and contents to explore in depth how local cultural fabric contributed to different dimensions of meme production. then, we focused on content-stance combinations and, using theory-based coding, we categorised the emergence of different forms of political expression. in all their dimensions, italian pandemic memes played a key role in generating affecting tuning. this happened via reshuffling past and present pop culture in native form templates, repurposing local or sub-local stereotypes and self-stereotypes in native content templates or adapting popular and/or populistic debates to the pandemic society. rather than generating 'disruptions or interruptions of dominant political narratives' (papacharissi, 2015: 131), this affective tuning provided a connective and temporarily reassuring dimension. it was 'laughing together' (kuipers, 2010) when there was no reason to laugh, or 'affective attunement' (papacharissi, 2015) without much content going with it. in fact, where political expression did emerge in pandemic memes that were 'making a point' (shifman, 2014), this 'point' was never particularly innovative or new because it was there to mark previously established communal belonging more than to initiate activist 'or social change' (mina, 2014) practices. italian pandemic memes did develop the ridiculing and delegitimizing techniques typical of political memetics (ross and rivers, 2017) but they did so primarily relying on populist narratives. this was evidenced by the frequent targeting of well known political leaders via pre-existing schemata adopted to attack them. this is perhaps not surprising as these practices aligned with the growing influence of populist parties (e.g., five star movement and league) in the italian political landscape and were made possible by what baldwin-philippi (2018) has defined as the 'democratic and populist' 'technologies of meme creation', namely by the easy access to memetics literacy and use on mainstream social media. what pandemic memes expressed is therefore a peculiar form of "mundane political culture" (merelman, 1998), that is, an active and ordinary exchange of symbols and ideas that stops on a purely performative level, remaining disconnected from any subsequent political action or collective undertaking. as shown by the analysis, pandemic memes drew on a vast repertoire of ideas and symbols and selected those resources that allowed the 'wittgenstein "language game" of political discourse to "go on"' (merelman, 1998, p. 517). the memetic culture here described was full of implicit meanings that remained as such, devoted to an evocative and never explanatory function and aimed at the pure enjoyment of the conversation and at mutual recognition. ultimately, our findings suggest that the 'in-group-ness' (miltner, 2014) allowed by memetic practices can have strong relevance to the geographically and linguistically local, in both its cultural and political dimension, especially when this local is under an exogenous threat. they then also point to the need for further research using contextual approaches to digital affordances as this research would enhance our understanding of how local publics appropriate global platforms. references baldwin-philippi, j. (2019). the technological performance of populism. new media & society, 21(2), 376-397. kozinets, r. v. (2019). netnography: the essential guide to qualitative social media research. sage. kuipers, g. (2010). humor styles and symbolic boundaries. jlt articles, 3(2), 219–239. laineste, l., & voolaid, p., (2017). laughing across borders: intertextuality of internet memes. the european journal of humour research, 4(4), pp.26-49. merelman, r. m. (1998). the mundane experience of political culture. political communication, 15(4), 515-535. milner, r. m. (2013a). media lingua franca: fixity, novelty, and vernacular creativity in internet memes. aoir selected papers of internet research, 3. miltner, k. m. (2014). 'there’s no place for lulz on lolcats': the role of genre, gender, and group identity in the interpretation and enjoyment of an internet meme. first monday. mina, a. x. (2014). batman, pandaman and the blind man: a case study in social change memes and internet censorship in china. journal of visual culture, 13(3), 359–375. nissenbaum, a., & shifman, l. (2017). internet memes as contested cultural capital: the case of 4chan’s/b/board. new media & society, 19(4), 483-501. nissenbaum, a., & shifman, l. (2018). meme templates as expressive repertoires in a globalizing world: a cross-linguistic study. journal of computer-mediated communication, 23(5), 294-310. papacharissi, z. (2015). affective publics: sentiment, technology, and politics. oxford university press. rogers, r. (2019). doing digital methods. london: sage. ross, a. s., & rivers, d. j. (2017). digital cultures of political participation: internet memes and the discursive delegitimization of the 2016 us presidential candidates. discourse, context & media, 16, 1-11. shifman, l (2014). memes in digital culture. cambridge, ma: mit press. vicari, s., & murru, m. f. (2020). one platform, a thousand worlds: on twitter irony in the early response to the covid-19 pandemic in italy. social media + society, 6(3), 2056305120948254. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 nothing without us: agentic power in #mydisabledlifeisworthy ailea merriam-pigg university of wisconsin-madison introduction on january 7, 2022 dr. rochelle walensky, director of the cdc, went on good morning america to discuss the state of omicron. while explaining that more than 75% of those who died after receiving the full series of covid-19 vaccines were people who had at least “four comorbidities” walensky concluded, “so really, these are people who were unwell to begin with. and yes; really encouraging news in the context of omicron” (good morning america 2022). this statement inspired the viral hashtag #mydisabledlifeisworthy, started by imani barbarin. the goal of the hashtag, like #metoo and #blacklivesmatter before it, was to push back against the rhetoric that it is ok if chronically-ill and disabled people are dying or discriminated against. the hashtag raises awareness toward the high prevalence of chronic illness and disability in the united states while also critiquing discourse which dismisses these lives as expendable. while abled people were quick to argue that this was not walensky’s intention, the hashtag brings to light how an inattention to disabled life perpetuates a system of harm. in this presentation, i analyze how the hashtag was strategically utilized by chronically ill and disabled people to push back on rhetoric which implies their lives are acceptable losses in a pandemic. this moves beyond the common declaration of the disabled community, “nothing about us without us,” to a new demand of “nothing without us.” literature review and research questions this project pulls on two distinct areas of inquiry: disability studies and digital studies, the latter focused on the sub-area of hashtag activism. modern conceptions of disability are tied to the 19th century, when the platonic ideal was replaced with the modern concept of normal as the goal (baynton 2013). with the platonic ideal, it was understood one can strive for the ideal but never reach it. with the concept of normal, however, there is an unattainable goal that now appears reachable. worse yet, all those who do not reach normal are seen as deviant (davis 1995; goffman 2003). this is the world in which disabled people were largely unable to hold typical jobs (because they suggested citation (apa): merriam-pigg, a. (2022, november). nothing without us: agentic power in #mydisabledlifeisworthy. paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. would not be hired) and the successfully disabled were found in the freak and side shows of the likes of p.t. barnum (craton 2009; hughes 2012). this idea of disabled people as unable to be part of society because they deviate from the norm and are, therefore, not worth more than entertainment, has carried into the 21st century. to receive disability benefits in the united states, disabled people cannot work, have more than $2,000 in their bank account, and typically only receive $800-$1800 on average. in addition, if a disabled person marries, they lose some or all of their disability benefits (ssa.gov 2022). this perpetuates a system in which disabled people are not able to be independent while simultaneously seen as disabled, continuing a cycle that infantilizes and makes deviant the disabled (dolmage 2014). this is the environment in which we find ourselves when dr. walensky makes her ill-considered comment that allows disabled people to be seen as acceptable losses. and this is the environment disabled people are trying to change through #mydisabledlifeisworthy. hashtags are a common source for digital activism, known as hashtag activism (dadas 2017). #mydisabledlifeisworthy follows in the steps of #metoo and #blacklivesmatter in that its focus is on bringing attention to an inequitable aspect of society that leads to severe harm. in both of these previous hashtags, agency is a key issue— the people being impacted (women and black people) were the primary users of the hashtag (wolfe 2018; yang 2016). importantly, these hashtags function as both a way to label and organize tweets as well as a rhetorical call (denomme 2019). by using hashtags, members of a specific community can quickly find each other, share their stories, and perpetuate a discussion under a specific banner (the hashtag) with intent to increase the reach of the message (wilkins et al 2019). given the power of hashtags to circulate discourse and make meaning, hashtags can be a key feature of digital citizenship, drawing on rob asen’s discourse theory of citizenship (2004). therefore, i am considering the rhetorical power of #mydisabledlifeisworthy as an agentic attempt for equitable citizenship. methods since a key component of this project is the discursive strategy of #mydisabledlifeisworthy, this project uses the rhetorical methodology of discourse analysis. the project looks at the first 200 tweets using #mydisabledlifeisworthy to better understand how the disabled community is mobilizing this hashtag as a response to walensky’s words for the purpose of raising awareness and making change. by focusing on the first 200 tweets, i am better able to capture the initial meaning and intent behind the hashtag. over time, the meaning and reach of a hashtag can shift or diminish. by focusing on hashtag use from the start of the digital response to walensky, i am better able to understand patterns of intent that are central to the discursive power of #mydisabledlifeisworthy. preliminary findings and discussion notably, the pushback carried out through #mydisabledlifeisworthy led to an apology by walensky to various disability advocacy groups for her “hurtful, yet unintentional” comments. however, the disabled community continued to push for a public apology and acknowledgment that their lives are worthy. through their hashtag, disability twitter questioned societal standards of normalcy and the dismissal of disabled life as expendable. through this hashtag, the disabled community shared their conditions, stories, poems, critique of ableist language, and, perhaps most importantly, built a viral movement that could not be ignored by the cdc. while before the concern was nothing about us without us, #mydisabledlifeisworthy illustrates a moment in which the disabled community banded together and moved for more inclusive equitable practice for disability in daily life. because disabled life is worthy. my disabled life is worthy. we are not expendable. references asen, robert. "a discourse theory of citizenship." quarterly journal of speech 90.2 (2004): 189-211. baynton, douglas c. "disability and the justification of inequality in american history." the disability studies reader 17.33 (2013): 57-5. craton, lillian. the victorian freak show: the significance of disability and physical differences in 19th-century fiction. cambria press, 2009. dadas, caroline. "hashtag activism: the promise and risk of ‘attention." social writing/social media: publics, presentations, pedagogies (2017): 17-36. davis, lennard j. enforcing normalcy: disability, deafness, and the body. verso, 1995. denomme, angelina marie. from viral hashtag to social movement: the rhetoric and realization of# metoo. diss. university of georgia, 2019. dolmage, jay timothy. disability rhetoric. syracuse university press, 2014. goffman, erving. "stigma." l’identità negata (2003). hughes, amy. spectacles of reform: theater and activism in nineteenth-century america. university of michigan press, 2012. wilkins, denise j., andrew g. livingstone, and mark levine. "whose tweets? the rhetorical functions of social media use in developing the black lives matter movement." british journal of social psychology 58.4 (2019): 786-805. wolfe, katherine. "narrative form and agency in# metoo." (2018). yang, guobin. "narrative agency in hashtag activism: the case of# blacklivesmatter." media and communication 4.4 (2016): 13. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): özkula, s., reilly, p., hayes, j. (2020, october) easy data, usual suspects, same old places? a systematic review of methodological approaches in digital activism research between 1995-2019. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. easy data, usual suspects, same old places? a systematic review of methodological approaches in digital activism research between 1995-2019 suay m. özkula university of sheffield paul j. reilly university of sheffield jennifer hayes university of sheffield background burgess and bruns (2015) are amongst those researchers to link the computational turn in social media research to significant transformations in digital research, such as a rise in studies that focus exclusively on “easy’ data”, such as the ‘low hanging fruit’ provided by twitter hashtags. this paper sets out to explore whether this “hegemony” of easy data and studies is evident in digital activism research between 1995 and 2018; this was a period of increasing media fragmentation and hybridization, as well as innovation in research methodologies. therefore, a systematic review of methodological approaches towards the study of digital activism in relevant peer-reviewed journal articles was conducted. objective the aim of the study was to provide an overview of the methodological explorations in the field to date, with a view to test burgess and bruns’ (2015) “easy data” hypothesis. three arguments are central to their hypothesis. the first argument is that research methodologies have substantially changed through the computational turn, in which the introduction of computational methods and the production of both digitized (data that has been converted into digital formats) and natively digital data (data created for and in digital spaces) has led to epistemic changes. their second argument is that these changes have led to the preponderance of more easily accessible data, i.e. “easy data”, as these media environments are easier to use than to adapt or manipulate. their third argument relates to the results of these preferences in light of platforms’ politics and regimes of access. they say that, due to restrictions set by platforms, these (twitter) studies often provide more easily or readily accessible data within those platforms such as reductionist hashtag studies and @reply network. consequently, a considerable amount of research relies on what they label “easy data”, data available through standard twitter api services and therefore consist of ‘some modestly sized sets of tweets and certain associated, pre-determined metadata matching a keyword search over a short, recent period of time’ (burgess & bruns, 2015). in response to these arguments, we formulated the following hypotheses to be tested in our systematic review of (empirical) digital activism scholarship: h1: following the computational turn, research methodologies draw predominantly on digital, digitized, and hybrid methods. h2: digital activism research based on digital data predominantly focuses on twitter data, and hashtags & reply networks in particular (= “low-hanging fruit”). h3: studies of activism on twitter primarily rely on “easy data” obtained via standard api services. methods in order to test these hypotheses, a mixed-methods systematic review of relevant journal articles was conducted between february 2019 and august 2020. the corpus was created by running queries spanning 21 relevant keywords describing digitally enabled activism (e.g. digital activism, online activism, cf. appendix) on the scopus database. post-filtering, a csv file containing the meta-data and abstracts for 1447 articles was downloaded from scopus. the abstracts were coded manually in excel on methodological attributes such as chosen methods of data collection and data analysis, digital data sources (i.e. studied platforms), and case studies. the final set of articles coded on methodological attributes consisted of 364 articles, of which 202 articles were judged to analyze social media data in some form among its methods, and separated. the aim was to explore the applicability of bruns and burgess’ easy data hypothesis by including additional coding categories, which were framed around how “easy” the data was to collect (e.g. hashtag studies, singleor multi-platform studies, triangulation). results #h1: research methodologies following the computational turn draw significantly, if not predominantly, on digital, digitized, and hybrid methods. in terms of methodological approaches, traditional research methods and digital methods studies were prevalent. the study found that twitter was the most researched platform in the corpus, closely followed by facebook. however, (software-based) digital methods were not as commonly deployed in these articles as traditional methods, such as interviews and surveys. #h1 was therefore judged predominantly accurate in terms of a strong representation of computerized methods, particularly in pos-2010 articles, at least as a part of the wider methodological approach. however, these approaches did not constitute a majority. thus, while computational methods have had a significant influence in the field, they do not dominate them. #h2: research methodologies using digital data predominantly draw on twitter data, particularly hashtag and keyword searches (= “low-hanging fruit”). while twitter studies did not dominate in the article collection overall, they did so within the subset of studies drawing on social media data mining as well as in studies using manual collection of social media data, meaning that amongst computational methods twitter was indeed prevalent. as such, twitter dominated studies drawing on computational methods, but not the dataset overall. while both twitter and facebook were used extensively as additional or contextual data (particularly in observational studies), twitter dominated the field both where multiple sources were used (in 74 out of 178 studies, compared to 31 facebook studies) and in single-platform studies. overall, #h2 was judged to be partially true as the “low-hanging fruit of twitter data” constituted (a) a substantial but not majority portion of the overall corpus, and (b) a dominant approach in single-platform and software-based studies. #h3: twitter research in the field primarily draws on “easy data”, meaning modestly sized short-term data available through standard twitter api services. since api access level remained difficult to judge based on the contents of the article methodologies, this hypothesis was primarily tested through what could be considered “reductionist approaches” beyond the platform and automation, for example sample size and timeframes. within the limitations of some missing data (due to differing methodologies), #h3 was judged true in that the data mining articles primarily drew on “easy data” interpreted as modestly sized short-term data (typically available through standard twitter api services). we acknowledge that the judgment of sample size and timeframe as high or substantial strongly relies on the type of activism and the size and spread of the specific movement overall, but considered these (in line with bruns and burgess’ line of argumentation) to be significant for an evaluation of easy data. as part of the inductive element of the study, we further considered what methodological profiles constitute typical approaches to the study of digital activism. we found that single-platform twitter studies drawing on either a form of content analysis or social network analysis (of hashtags, mention/reply, or link networks) were the single most consistent approach, with non-computerized single-platform facebook page studies also constituting a common approach to the study of digital activism. future work the findings of the review suggest that future scholarship would benefit from including other methodological approaches such as hard data studies through high-level (and therefore more extensive) access, as well as non-twitter singleor multi-platform studies, and more contextualized approaches (e.g. multi-platform, triangulated, and holistic approaches) towards producing knowledge that is somewhat more representative of the complex and wide digital landscapes. we do, however, acknowledge that future studies remain limited by the socio-economic conditions that produce these relations (as described by bruns and burgess) and these will consequently affect the type of research that is produced. references burgess, j. & bruns, a. (2015). easy data, hard data: the politics and pragmatics of twitter research after the computational turn. in langlois, g., redden, j., & elmer, g. (eds.), compromised data: from social media to big data (pp. 93-111). bloomsbury publishing: london. microsoft word final_pop stefanija & pierson_aoir2021.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): pop stefanija, a. and pierson, j. (2021, october). how to be algorithmically governed like that—data and algorithmic agency from user perspective. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. how to be algorithmically governed like that: dataand algorithmic agency from user perspective author #1 ana pop stefanija author #1 imec-smit, vrije universiteit brussel author #2 jo pierson author #2 imec-smit, vrije universiteit brussel our social lives are being increasingly governed by algorithmic, artificial intelligence (ai) and automated decision-making (adm) systems. if users are being the subject of the governance by algorithms (just and latzer, 2017), and companies and regulators have been proposing ways for governance of algorithms (saurwein, just and latzer, 2015), what role is there for the user? often put aside, this third actor in the tripartite network of technology-regulation-user(s), almost doesn’t have a say in if and how this governance is taking place. with this paper, we aim to tackle this issue. we are interested in a third type of governance — where users have also governing power(s) over algorithmic systems. our main research question is how do we enable users to actively govern algorithms, instead of passively being governed by them? and what do the users need in order to be algorithmically governed in such a way that will enable for more agency, autonomy and control when interacting with ai systems and being an object of their algorithmic outputs. we take the theoretical conceptualizations about algorithmic governance (katzenbach and ulbricht, 2019; latzer and festic, 2029; introna, 2016) and the related notion of algorithmic governmentality (bellanova, 2017; rouvroy 2013, 2020) as a starting point for discussing the state of how it is so we arrive to what ought to be. algorithmic governance is becoming a pervasive form of (co-)governing that affects and influences users’ behavior by steering actions, and limiting and influencing choices (latzer and festic, 2019), affecting users’ autonomy and agency. it is understood as a form of social ordering that governs (by shaping, enabling and constraining activities) (latzer and festic, 2019)) by relying “on coordination between actors, is based on rules and incorporates particularly complex computer-based epistemic procedures.” (katzenbach and ulbricht, 2019, p. 2). this notion is closely related with that of algorithmic governmentality, understood as “government of the social world that is based on the algorithmic processing of big data sets rather than on politics, law, and social norms” (rouvroy, 2020; see also rouvroy, 2013 and bellanova, 2017). as beer (2017) outlines — algorithmic systems participate in a kind of a social ordering of the world, having a “constitutive or performative role in ordering that world on our behalf.” (p.4). since users are being governed without real knowledge, control, agency and autonomy over both the algorithmic processes and the data collections enabling them, we aim to sketch a possible path for reversing the imbalanced power positions. in order to investigate what is it that users need to actively participate into governance of algorithms, we designed and conducted a participatory technographic (bucher, 2012) research with 47 participants. we opted for a guided and supportive process where participants were able to reflect on the process, formulate and elaborate their insights, thoughts, needs, and requirements based on their lived experience, i.e., after a real interaction with these algorithmic systems. through a guided multi-stage process, consisting of taking a survey, filing a subject access request (article 15 of the general data protection regulation) and purposeful interaction with the transparency tools of the platform of their choice (facebook, instagram, twitter, spotify, netflix, tinder, google and tiktok), during a period of three months, the participants provided us with a series of outputs. one of the outputs, in a form of pre-structured diary, required them to compile a list of requirements for agency and trust. we used these outputs as inputs for our analysis. we focus on agency because it is a prerequisite for a “power to” as an opposite of “power over”, characteristic for algorithmic governmentality. our results show that agency is preconditioned by three elements: to be provided with information, to be able to gain knowledge and to be afforded with ability(/ies). the first two are foundational elements that will enable individuals to act/have agency. these abilities range from having control over data flows and cycles, to influencing algorithmic outputs and acting with autonomy and self-reflection. we translate the requirements of ability to see, know and act into 3 main principles — the “power to” requires the elements of (data-, outputs-, self-) sovereignty, transparency and explainability. transparency, or ability to access to information, is the first important, but not sufficient element. explainability, or the opportunity and ability to gain knowledge, should provide individuals with agential power, ability to act and thus, to (re)gain sovereignty. these requirements and principles should be implemented at either interface only or both interface and infrastructure level. these leads to what we call agency affordances. agency affordances are potentialities for action, where the possibility to act with agency is coupled with the ability to act. while the aim of embedding interface agency affordances via elements (located in specific buttons and features (bucher and helmond, 2018) is to promote and make agency visible, agency affordances need to be “programmed” at system level (to make agency doable) via functions, enabling agency through different dynamics, conditions, and practices. when programming and embedding agency affordances, it is important to keep in mind that they require the coming together of various actors, processes, infrastructures, and levels, happening both before and after the development and employment of ai systems. as such, their implementation is context, user, and system dependent. and since exercising agency also requires not just the possibility, but also the knowledge of how to act and of ability to act, attention should be dedicated to improving literacy and skills efforts. however, to mitigate overburdening the individual, regulation should play supporting, by crucial part too. references: beer, d. (2017). the social power of algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1216147 bellanova, r. (2017). digital, politics, and algorithms: governing digital data through the lens of data protection. european journal of social theory. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/1368431016679167 bucher, t. (2012). programmed sociality: a software studies perspective on social networking sites. 221. bucher, t., & helmond, a. (2018). the affordances of social media platforms. in the sage handbook of social media (pp. 233–253). sage publications. https://dare.uva.nl/ search?identifier=149a9089-49a4-454c-b935-a6ea7f2d8986 hummel, p., braun, m., augsberg, s. and dabrock, p. (2018). sovereignty and data sharing. ict discoveries, 2, p. 1-10. introna, l.d, (2016). algorithms, governance, and governmentality: on governing academic writing. science, technology, & human values, 41(1), 17-49. just, n. & latzer, m. (2017). governance by algorithms: reality construction by algorithmic selection on the internet. media, culture & society, 39(2), 238-258. katzenbach, c. & ulbricht, l. (2019). algorithmic governance. internet policy review, 8(4). doi: 10.14763/2019.4.1424 latzer, m. & festic, n. (2019). a guideline for understanding and measuring algorithmic governance in everyday life. internet policy review, 8(2). https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.2.1415 rouvroy, a. (2020). algorithmic governmentality and the death of politics. green european journal. https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/algorithmic-governmentalityand-the-death-of-politics/ rouvroy, a. and berns, t. (2013). algorithmic governmentality and prospects of emancipation. réseaux, 177(1), 163-196. saurwein, f., just, n. and latzer m (2015) governance of algorithms: options and limitations. the journal of policy, regulation and strategy for telecommunications, information and media, 17 (6), 35-49. thornton, l., knowles, b., and blair, g. (2021). fifty shades of grey: in praise of a nuanced approach towards trustworthy design. conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (facct ’21), march 3–10, 2021, virtual event, canada. acm, new york, ny, usa, p. 64-77. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445871 microsoft word aoir 2021 544.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): yalın, a. (2021, october). quarantine vlogs: digital affective labor and selfgovernance during covid-19. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. quarantine vlogs: digital affective labor and selfgovernance during covid-19 alkım yalın university of massachusetts-amherst scholars indicate that vlogs are based on confessional narratives of intimate events (berryman & kavka, 2018), characterized by "controlled presentations" (griffith & papacharissi, 2010) of the self, and a "calibrated amateurism" (abidin, 2017) through which vloggers try to convey a sense of intimacy, relatability and “perceived interconnectedness” (abidin, 2015) to their viewers. like previous genres of diaries and blogs, vlogs function as foucauldian "technologies of the self" through which vloggers turn their everyday life into a self-reflexive project and align with the neoliberal discourse of productivity (siles, 2012; ibrahim, 2020). thus, compared to former genres, construction of the "authentic self" in vlogs is not the primary goal but a necessary tool to form intimacy with the audiences. for women content creators, this complex selfrepresentation framework implies gendered affective labor, through which they try to brand themselves in accordance with the post-feminist discourse of entrepreneurial femininity by showing “the ideal of having it all” (duffy & hund, 2015) and carrying out “visibility labor” to survive in a highly competitive attention economy (abidin, 2016). covid-19 changed what people considered appropriate to share on social media platforms as the realities of the pandemic shifted users' perception of aspirational content negatively and led them to seek more authenticity (molla, 2021). in response to this shift, influencers adapted their content to the pandemic moment and the audience expectations. shortly after many countries started to take precautions against the spread of the covid-19, such as stay home orders, a new subgenre of the vlog, namely the "quarantine vlog" started to appear on youtube. this research explores how did the covid-19 effect the cultural production of influencers – specifically, the affective labor carried out by women content creators – by examining the recent genre of "quarantine vlog." quarantine vlogs carry the quintessential characteristics of the vlog genre. however, they differ from other vlogs, and i explain this dissimilarity as a tension between influencers' struggle to form intimacy with the viewers – which can have a soothing effect in a moment of a crisis – and the use of vlogs as a neoliberal device to preserve their aspirational image. in this preliminary analysis, i draw upon “grounded theory approach” (charmaz, 2006). in parallel to my ongoing research on influencer cultures, i realized the emergence of quarantine vlogs in march 2020. later, with a combination of top search results and purposive sampling, i transcribed and analyzed 9 videos filmed by women influencers along with 250 user comments. i transcribed the videos by using youtube's own transcription tool and coded them along with the comments by using qualitative data analysis software nvivo. during this coding process, which took place in concurrence with the data collection process, i used the line-by-line coding method as proposed by charmaz (2006) to analyze the emerging themes and patterns both in the videos and comments. a limitation to this study is its focus on content creators based in north america. however, comments demonstrate that viewers are located in different parts of the world. quarantine vlogs demonstrate that influencers are not able to perform the “having-it-all” (duffy & hund, 2015) personae in their videos without first engaging with the mental stress, anxiety, confusion, and loneliness brought by covid-19 or apologizing for their relative privilege and demonstrating sympathy towards their followers who are in hardship. in this sense, by using “negative affect” (berryman & kavka, 2018) in their vlogs, content creators perform care, which is both necessary to build intimacy with the viewers and stay visible and relevant in a demanding attention economy as a woman. some content creators can also choose to frame their decision to film a quarantine vlog as a way to provide distraction for their viewers or to “check in” with them. the fact that many commenters reporting to find quarantine vlogs soothing, while they define the community mainly as providing a “feminine” and “safe” space confirms the gendered affective labor carried out by the content creators. in quarantine vlogs, content creators’ affective labor consists of a delicate selfgoverning strategy. creators engage in a 'dialogue with time' (giddens, 1991), which consists of re-designing the past and the future through nostalgic imagery and the ideal of progress. this revised performance helps them to extend their established aspirational personae to the pandemic conditions by 1) conjuring up memories to reimagine a pleasurable past that deserves nostalgic longing, 2) acknowledging the anxieties and material difficulties tied to pandemic but addressing the current moment as an opportunity to grow as an individual or to be productive, and finally, 3) reframing the pandemic experience as the precursor of a better future to come. the placement of the self in this reflexive and temporal project through the discourses of productivity and self-growth constructs the quarantine vlog as a foucauldian technology of the self. at the same time, this self-governance manages the relationship with the audiences by presenting a relatable yet "aspirational" (duffy, 2017) persona that is tailored according to the pandemic moment. to conclude, quarantine vlogs and the comments they received are strong indicators that even during a global health crisis, to stay relevant and visible online, women content creators need to carry out affective labor by performing care and proving their resilience in staying productive. it is also remarkable how the configuration of time that is specific to quarantine vlogs, i.e. the reproduction of nostalgia and the reframing of the pandemic as an opportunity for self-improvement, does not easily drift apart from the neoliberal ideal of productivity however users’ everyday life experiences may have shifted during the pandemic. references abidin, c. (2015). "communicative <3 intimacies: influencers and perceived interconnectedness." ada: a journal of gender, new media, & technology 8. accessed august 5, 2016 from http://adanewmedia. org/2015/11/issue8-abidin/ abidin, c. (2016). visibility labour: engaging with influencers’ fashion brands and #ootd advertorial campaigns on instagram. media international australia, 161(1), 86– 100. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x16665177 abidin, c. (2017). # familygoals: family influencers, calibrated amateurism, and justifying young digital labor. social media+ society, 3(2), 2056305117707191. berryman, r., & kavka, m. (2018). crying on youtube: vlogs, self-exposure and the productivity of negative affect. convergence, 24(1), 85–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856517736981 charmaz, k. (2006). constructing grounded theory: a practical guide through qualitative analysis. sage publications. duffy, b. e., & hund, e. (2015). “having it all” on social media: entrepreneurial femininity and self-branding among fashion bloggers. social media + society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115604337 duffy, b. e. (2017). (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. yale university press. giddens, a. (1991). modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age. stanford university press. ibrahim, y. (2020). accounting the ‘self’: from diarization to life vlogs. convergence. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856520947618 molla, r. (2021). posting less, posting more, and tired of it all: how the pandemic has changed social media. vox. https://www.vox.com/recode/22295131/social-media-usepandemic-covid-19-instagram-tiktok raun, t. (2018). capitalizing intimacy: new subcultural forms of micro-celebrity strategies and affective labour on youtube. convergence, 24(1), 99–113. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856517736983 siles, i. (2012). the rise of blogging: articulation as a dynamic of technological stabilization. new media & society, 14(5), 781–797. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444811425222 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 the circulation of feelings on politicised instagram mari lehto university of turku mona mannevuo university of turku in the spring of 2021, the finnish influencer marketing agency, ping helsinki, organised a webinar entitled why do i end up in the middle of a shit storm when i just want to do good? the virtual event reflected influencers’ increasing social responsibilities but also aimed to support them ‘in the middle of contrasting expectations, the numerous comments and social media storms’ (ping helsinki, 2021, para 4). as illustrated by the webinar’s theme, although social media offers a space for social belonging, commenting and passing on critical issues—through, for instance, the instagram stories feature—this exchange does not happen without affective costs. in this paper, we ask how popular finnish social media influencers experience the new possibilities and restrictions of politicised instagram. to do this, we use lauren berlant’s (2008) analysis of ‘intimate publics’ to examine instagram as a platform for vague intimacy, where feelings and commercial exchange flourish and circulate in proximity to the political. through the concept of vague intimacy, we develop an idea of intimacy, which is based on a combination of sharing, product placement and therapy talk with a post-feminist twist. our paper grapples with the contention that while the intimate publics should feel like democratic, non-hierarchical social worlds where everyone’s voices and struggles are heard and supported, the experience is somewhat different when it collides with the realities of the cold world. by starting from this perspective, the paper focuses on a larger cultural shift in which the line between social media content creators and those traditionally perceived as influencers, such as politicians, activists and experts, has blurred. finnish social media influencers have previously been known to avoid addressing issues like immigration, politics, sexuality, gender and the environment due to fear of negative feedback (ping helsinki & mediapooli, 2019). in recent years, however, a growing number of influencers suggested citation (apa): lehto, m. & mannevuo, m, (2022, november). the circulation of feelings on politicised instagram. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. have started using their online spaces to discuss political questions (suuronen et al., 2021), and even actors known for light lifestyle content have become increasingly vocal about social justice issues. the study builds on an online observations of a wide range of finnish lifestyle influencers and eight semi-structured interviews: four with influencers who work with advertisers, two with non-commercial influencers and two with influencer agency representatives. the interview data comprise a mixed-race, heteroand homosexual sample of six women and two men living in finland. all interviews were undertaken as part of a project designed to understand the mediatisation of politics and science in the contemporary landscape of ubiquitous connectivity. the political potential of instagram is woven into larger discourses of authenticity when influencers use their lifestyle narratives and platforms to personalise and promote causes related to politics (duffy & hund, 2019; abidin & cover, 2019, p. 217; see also caldeira, 2021). although the way influencers ‘make politics look easy’ (riedl et al., 2021, p. 3) and engage in meaningful conversations with their followers may (and is supposed to) seem effortless, the balance between inclusive politics, commercial visibility and protecting one’s own boundaries is hard work. our informants emphasise the ways in which their politically oriented instagram content naturally intertwines with their everyday lives and values, but they also speak of the exhaustion caused by algorithms, contradictory demands, and overflow of private messages from followers searching for meaningful discussion. our study shows that social media work on politicised instagram has become considerably more laborious, not just because of demands for ubiquitous connectivity but also because of the way the stories feature encourages one-on-one conversations. that is, the flood of dms has comprehensively altered the way popular content creators engage with their followers and has had significant consequences for the influencer profession, which has been based on creating an impression of intimate communication with an ‘imagined audience’ (marwick and boyd, 2010, p. 116). instagram, in other words, has become a personalised platform for vague intimacy. as the followers’ written responses or reactions to stories come via private dms, they increase the desire for intimate connections, although popular influencers may receive hundreds or even thousands of messages every day. furthermore, the air of authenticity that forms the basis for influencers’ affective relationships with followers (cotter, 2019, p. 897) requires influencers to be seen for them to share in the lived experiences of real people (duffy & hund, 2019). our participants realise that they need to produce fresh and engaging content to remain interesting, but they try to do this by creating a positive and affirming atmosphere. the standardised homogeneity makes these intimate publics non-political spheres of vague intimacy where communities are built on the expectation that there should be ‘a common emotional world’ (berlant, 2008, p. 10) that offers ‘unanxious sociality’ (berlant, 2008, p. 146). from this perspective, instagram can be analysed as an intimate sphere where people are attached to each other through a vague intimacy that should nonetheless give them a sense of belonging and empowerment. our investigation into influencers’ experiences of politicised instagram through the concept of vague intimacy offers a nuanced perspective on the ways these intimate publics operate through feelings, intensities and a sense of commonness among participants rather than through concrete political activity or a clear ideology. at the same time, our paper contributes to the investigations of politicised online platforms and their impact by considering new modes of instagram activism and by critically mapping out the possibilities and constraints of digital voices on social media. references abidin, c., & cover, r. (2019). gay, famous and working hard on youtube: influencers, queer microcelebrity publics, and discursive activism. in p. aggleton, r. cover, d. leahy, d. marshall, & m. l. rasmussen (eds.), youth, sexuality and sexual citizenship (pp. 217–231). routledge. doi: 10.4324/9781351214742-20 berlant, l. (2008). the female complaint: the unfinished business of sentimentality in american culture. duke university press. marwick, a.e. and boyd, d. (2010). ‘i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately’: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. new media society 13(1): 114–133. caldeira, s. p. (2021). it’s not just instagram models: exploring the gendered political potential of young women’s instagram use. media and communication, 9(2), 5–15. doi: 10.17645/mac.v9i2.3731 cotter, k. (2019). playing the visibility game: how digital influencers and algorithms negotiate influence on instagram. new media & society, 21(4), 895–913. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818815684. duffy, b. e., & hund, e. (2019). gendered visibility on social media: navigating instagram’s authenticity bind. international journal of communication, 13, 4983–5002. ping helsinki. (2021, april 29). how to survive social media without exhaustion. https://pinghelsinki.fi/en/how-to-survive-social-media-without-exhaustion/ ping helsinki & mediapooli. (2019, february 13). somevaikuttajien vastuu. kyselyraportti. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gtggoc0mxkpqutti8b_xkm6fqj800wb/view riedl, m., schwemmer, c., ziewiecki, s., & ross, l. m. (2021). the rise of political influencers—perspectives on a trend towards meaningful content. frontiers in communication, 6(752656). doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2021.752656 suuronen, a., reinikainen, h., borchers, n. s., & strandberg, k. (2021). when social media influencers go political: an exploratory analysis on the emergence of political topics among finnish influencers. javnost—the public. doi: 10.1080/13183222.2021.1983367 vickery memeification of school shootings.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): vickery, jacqueline ryan. (2020, october 28-31). the memeification of #schoolshootings in the u.s.: youth, tiktok, and the playful mediated body. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the memeification of #schoolshootings in the u.s.: youth, tiktok, and the playful mediated body jacqueline ryan vickery university of north texas with active shooter drills as a normal part of student experiences in the u.s., the threat of a school shooting has become commonplace and institutionalized. within a context of cultural trauma, it is no surprise that teens are using digital media to create spaces for sense-making and as a way to respond to the constant threat of violence. school shootings are thus doubly memetic: both the actual phenomenon of school shootings and the media texts are “contagious patterns of cultural information” (knobel and lankshear, 2007, p. 199) that are repetitive, replicable, malleable, and polysemic; both “directly generate and shape the mindsets and significant forms of behavior and actions of a social group” (ibid.). focusing on the mediated memeification of school shootings, there exists an entire genre of #darkhumor videos on tiktok in which young people create and circulate irreverent humorous media texts as a response to the constant threat of – and perceived political inaction to school shootings in the u.s.1 through an analysis of teens’ #darkhumor school shooting videos on tiktok, this paper asks: what can we learn about how young people understand cultural trauma through an examination of their playful and memetic social media practices? critical framework: the mediated playful body drawing from theoretical understandings of play as a pleasurable communicative power for experimenting with adult/societal norms and structures that blur boundaries between reality and imagination (parnell and patsarika, 2014), i consider how the memetic nature of tiktok videos – as social modes of production and as socially mediated texts 1 the videos frequently acknowledge the cultural specificity of school shootings as a uniquely u.s. phenomenon. virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 – are a way for young people to use their bodies and the technosocial affordances of social media to playfully experiment with and subvert cultural discourses and norms. the “carnivalization” (bakhtin, 1984) and irrational absurdity of turning generationallyspecific tragedy, cultural trauma, and the “tragic sense” (warnick, johnson, and rocha, 2010) into irreverent memes demonstrates a response to and engagement with larger cultural discourses that structure young people’s spaces (specifically school) and identification with their peers. the replicability and mutability of memes as a central digital artefact in participatory culture opens up possibilities for play, subversion, the personalization of politics, and collective affect (author, 2014; highfield, 2017). primarily a music video app, the “platform vernacular” of tiktok (gibbs et al., 2015) centers performativity and the body as the locus of memeification; in the videos, the teens’ bodies “become both the medium of the meme and its message” (shifman, 2012; p. 200). the genre of #darkhumor #schoolshooting videos are an acknowledgement of trauma – and the ways in which school shootings violate both childhood and schools as sites of protection but in ways that are playful, irreverent, humorous, and inherently corporeal. the affective performances and “videos of affinity” (lange, 2009) that are evident in the production and circulation of the memes are indicative of generational coping strategies. while the playful and irreverent videos can be read through a lens of critique, satire, or parody (buckingham, 2003; highfield, 2017), the memetic, social, corporeal, and performative nature of tiktok affords related yet distinct practices and modes of playful social engagement that i refer to as the mediated playful body. methodology and sample after an initial search for tiktok videos using the hashtag or combination of hashtags #darkhumor, #schoolshooting(s), and #schoolshooter(s), i identified four sound clips2 that young people frequently use to memeify school shootings with patterns of mimicry and repetition. a sample of 200 videos that used one of the four sound clips in combination with the hashtags were chosen for a multi-methodological analysis which involves: 1) coding the videos for a descriptive content analysis,3 and 2) a discursive analysis of the memetic narrative and visual elements of the video. although the sample cannot account for all potential videos and is not intended to be representative, for the sake of this qualitative analysis i believe it sufficiently captures a diverse sample of a memetic trend and phenomenon that is situated within a specific social practice and specific temporal context related to teens’ perceptions of school shootings in the u.s. findings school and placemaking practices coding for the content analysis is still in progress; the purpose is to reveal not only who is making the videos, but also to identify how gender, ethnicity, and location shape the 2 songs pumped up kicks (foster the people) and bulletproof (la roux); sound clips known as gett0 and sophienator3000. 3 videos are coded for gender and ethnicity of the participants, the filming location, the number of participants, and for the presence of adults memetic practices and “vernacular creativity” (burgess, 2008) of who is allowed to participate in irreverent #darkhumor #schoolshooting videos and in what ways. of note thus far, a large sample of the videos are produced at what reasonably appears to be schools, with many filmed in bathrooms, hallways, and classrooms. the creation of irreverent playful media in the very spaces that are constructed as potential sites of trauma demonstrates a re-appropriation of space and collective placemaking practices (halegoua, 2020). rather than ceding school as a site of potential violence, students are coping by expressing a sense of fear masked as pleasure and sociality through the reclamation of space. visual and discursive analysis there are at least three genres of #schoolshooting meme videos that i have identified which can be organized alongside two intersecting axes: the use of particular memetic themes (e.g. narratives, tropes, music, visuals) and their memetic function (e.g. parody, critique, coping). the first category is playful parodies of media stereotypes and tropes, the second is playful critiques of the absurdity of school violence, and the third is playful coping through dance and movement. although there are variations of these different memes, as will be discussed, they each use playful mediated bodies to corporally engage with the replication, mutability, and fidelity of the polysemic meme. the memes reveal an acknowledgement and critique of adult-centric and neoliberal narratives that attempt to individualize and “make sense of” the absurdity of violence at school. playful parody: stereotypes and transactional survival playful parody videos replicate, satirize, or mock mediated stereotypes of the “lone wolf shooter” whom the video creators depict and label as the “weird kid” or “quiet kid” at school. the videos humorously depict transactional relationships in which the video’s producer tries to befriend the “weird kid” as a means of survival. girls demonstrate an awareness of and humorous response to the power of their sexuality to mitigate their own vulnerability (i.e. trading sex for survival). boys in the videos are more likely to safeguard their survival by trading intellect or social status (i.e. “nerds” are saved by sharing homework and “cool” kids are saved by extending social invitations). the videos simultaneously disavow and uphold relationships as transactional protections against violence. the meme reveals young people’s awareness and internalization of gendered tropes and discourse that insinuate that it is the responsibility of teens to confer the sexual or social status of the shooter, lest they be held responsible for their own victimization. playful critique: absurdity of school violence and the failure of neoliberal responses the second meme depicts teens sarcastically mocking school and market “solutions” to the ever-present threat of school shootings: name badges, clear backpacks, and/or bulletproof backpacks. portraying “individualized solutions” rather than an engagement with systemic failures or structural changes are endemic of the neoliberal critique young people leverage. while these videos may be read as inappropriate, dark, or crass it is the very absurdity of the memes that sheds light on the equally – and arguably exponentially more absurd responses by adults and policymakers that have failed to safeguard children’s protection and well-being. playful coping: celebratory distractions the third genre involves students dancing as a means of celebration. the dances can be either spontaneous or choreographed responses to hypothetical shooting scenarios, actual campus lockdowns, or responses to credible threats that result in temporary school closures. the dances exhibit knowledge of both the platform logics of tiktok and a creative vernacular of using the body to express emotions that students may not have the language to express. the body becomes a stand in for affect and emotion, as well as a mode of peer identification through memetic dances. students temporarily transgress norms of classroom decorum and space, thus paralleling the ways violence also violates the boundaries of school and safety. cultural trauma gets codified as play and the playful mediated body serves as a coping mechanism in the face of unspeakable trauma. conclusion although the videos are intended to be humorous or irreverent, the performative and social affordances of tiktok and the mediated playful body emphasize play as a communicative expression of cultural and generationally-specific trauma and affords young people opportunities for collective sense-making via playful peer identifications. references author, 2014. bakhtin, m. (1984). problems of dostoevsky's poetics. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. buckingham, d. (2003). pedagogy, parody and political correctness. in d. buckingham (ed.), teaching popular culture: beyond radical pedagogy, 63-87.routledge. burgess, j. (2008). 'all your chocolate rain are belong to us?' viral video, youtube and the dynamics of participatory culture. in g. lovink and s. niederer (eds.), video vortex reader: responses to youtube (pp. 101-109). institute of network cultures. gibbs, m., meese, j., arnold, m., nansen, b., & carter, m. (2015). #funeral and instagram: death, social media, and platform vernacular. information, communication & society, 18(3), 255-268. halegoua, g. r. (2020). the digital city: media and the social production of place. nyu press. highfield, t. (2017). social media and everyday politics. john wiley & sons. knobel, m., & lankshear, c. (2007). new literacies: everyday practices & classroom learning. open university press. lange, pg (2009) videos of affinity on youtube. in p. snickars and p. vonderau (eds.) the youtube reader, 228-247, stockholm: wallflower press. parnell, r., & patsarika, m. (2014). playful voices in participatory design. in c. burke, and k. jones, k. (eds.), education, childhood and anarchism: talking colin ward, 125-136. routledge. shifman, l. (2012). an anatomy of a youtube meme. new media & society, 14(2), 187203. warnick, b. r., johnson, b. a., & rocha, s. (2010). tragedy and the meaning of school shootings. educational theory, 60(3), 371-390. microsoft word 'ethical biometrics' and the face of the child oneill smith andrejevic selwyn.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): o’neill, c, smith, g, andrejevic, m, selwyn, n, gu, x (2021, october). ‘ethical biometrics’ and the face of the child: the surveillance of children within facial recognition industry discourse, paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ‘ethical biometrics’ and the face of the child: the surveillance of children within facial recognition industry discourse christopher o’neill monash university gavin smith australian national university mark andrejevic monash university neil selwyn monash university xin gu monash university in this paper we analyse data gathered through facial recognition tradeshow ethnographies and interviews with members of the biometrics industry, as we consider recent shifts in industry discourse towards promoting the ‘ethical’ use of biometric technology. as the biometrics industry increasingly moves towards a ‘video surveillance as a service’ (vsaas) model, the study of facial recognition infrastructures is becoming a crucial aspect of the interrogation of the internet of things. we demonstrate that the facial recognition industry is acutely aware of critiques of facial recognition cameras and biometric technologies as enabling racialized and other forms of social harm (see stark, 2019), and that members of the industry are keen to promote a more prosocial public image of the technology. towards this end we find that biometric monitoring of children has gained a prominent place in the promotion of facial recognition technologies as a mode of ‘careful’ surveillance. we identify three key ‘use cases’ in which the face of the child takes on a prominent role as justifying and legitimating the use of facial recognition technologies – in the auditing of humanitarian food supply programs, in the detection of so-called ‘staging’ of family units at the us border, and in the detection of underage gambling in australia. we argue that the immanent ‘ethical’ framing of the child’s face in this context serves to obscure the broader political ramifications of this extension of facial recognition and biometric surveillance tools more broadly. these case studies are drawn from biometrics and security trade shows that we attended between july 2020 and july 2021, including the biometrics institute us congress (usa), the biometrics institute global congress (uk), the nec immersion+ showcase (australia), the identity expo (australia), the isc west trade show (usa), the security and government expo (australia), and the 2nd annual facial recognition summit (singapore). we supplement this analysis with interviews with leading industry players. there is a burgeoning literature on trade shows as a site of ethnographic practice, a site “where industries take shape and identities of professionals are created” (nyquist, leivestadt & tunestad, 2017: 1). as hockenhul & cohn (2020) note, the speculations and pronouncements presented at such events are frequently dismissed as so much ‘hot air’ – as ‘mere’ speculation designed to inflate egos or company profiles. yet, they argue that this is to miss a key aspect of the contemporary production of sociotechnical imaginaries (see jasonoff & kim, 2015), the way that such speculation functions as “simultaneously vacuous and productive” (2020: 123). tradeshow presentations serve as opportunities to outline imaginaries of a future where technology will provide answers to the seemingly intractable problems of today, while the grounded discussion of particular technologies and case studies demonstrates to audiences that these are not in fact ‘idle’ speculations – both presenter and audience understand themselves as seeing through the ‘hype’, and working to produce ‘real’ solutions (hockenhull & cohn, 2020: 130). in this way the tradeshow emerges as a key site for understanding the way that a given industry ‘understands itself’ within a particular lineage of development and as projected into the future. in our study we have found that a key means by which the industry seeks to ‘ground’ its claims is through the working through and negotiation of critiques of the industry, particularly in response to the argument that facial recognition cameras are racially biased. biometrics companies are keen to reframe public attitudes of the technology – away from being seen as a tool for policing, or as a cynegetic tool of tracing and capture (see chamayou, 2012; ginzburg, 2013), and instead as a means for the careful management of vulnerable subjects. perhaps the foremost figure in this effort is that of the child, and we argue that the face of the child has taken on a powerful rhetorical function, which aims at once to stand in metonymically for the control of deviant adult populations and at the same time to obscure the political consequence of the deployment of facial recognition technologies on a wide scale. as lynne wrennall (2010) has previously argued, surveillance technology companies have increasingly come to exploit the vulnerability of the child to promote the normalization of surveillance technologies which would otherwise be unpalatable or unacceptable when directed at adult populations. while the image politics around representing children have been predominately framed in ethical terms, around questions of a generalized duty of care, dale sampson has recently argued that to consider the face of the child in terms of an ethical relation is to obscure the “broader cultural politics of engagement with the child” (2020: 6), specifically the way that the ‘face of the child’ is figured as a political arrangement within a technics of recording and reproduction (see also bueno, 2020; edelman, 2004). beyond this, the focus on the face of the child as a problematic justifies further investment in the refinement of facial recognition algorithms. while facial recognition algorithms have attained ever greater levels of accuracy especially in the last several years, identifying the morphological changes of a growing child’s face remains a difficult technological challenge, justifying the development of ever more sophisticated and complex technological fixes, which can in turn be deployed on the broader population. because the child’s face is always dissimulating itself, always becoming ‘not-child’, it is never fully captured (cf. castañeda, 2002) – the biometrics industry is thus able to market ever more technological supplements, and require ever further refinements to surveillance infrastructures. we draw attention to three key case studies in which the face of the child comes to serve as a justification for the careful deployment of facial recognition technologies – the use of facial recognition in the audit of aid supplies in the developing world, the control of alleged ‘family staging’ (by which a child is used to ‘fake’ a family unit for the purpose of beneficial treatment at the border), and in the monitoring of underage gambling in australia. these three scenarios are both hugely divergent in their sociotechnical context, at the same time as the “face of the child”, in its innocence and its recalcitrance, takes on a transversal quality which works to legitimate the function of the facial recognition apparatus across these different contexts. references bueno, c. (2020) the face revisited using deleuze and guattari to explore the politics of algorithmic face recognition. theory, culture and society 37(1): 73-91. castañeda, c. (2002) figurations: child, bodies, worlds. duke university press: durham (nc). chamayou, g. (2012) manhunts: a philosophical history. princeton university press: princeton. edelman, l. (2004) no future: queer theory and the death drive. duke university press: durham (nc). ginzburg, c. (2013) clues, myths, and the historical method. johns hopkins university press: baltimore. hockenhull m & m cohn (2020) hot air and corporate sociotechnical imaginaries: performing and translating digital futures in the danish tech scene. in hockenhull, m. speculative relations: data and digitalization work in the danish public-private tech sector. phd thesis. it university of copenhagen jasonoff, s & kim, s (eds), 2015 dreamscapes of modernity: sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power. chicago university press: chicago. nyqvist a, h leivestad and h tunestad (2017) individuals and industries: large-scale professional gatherings as ethnographic fields. in ethnographies of conferences and trade fairs: shaping industries, creating professionals, edited by h leivestad and a nyqvist, 1-21. ebook. london: palgrave macmillan. stark, l (2019) facial recognition is the plutonium of ai, xrds: crossroads, the acm magazine for students, https://doi.org/10.1145/3313129. wrennall, l. (2010) surveillance and child protection: de-mystifying the trojan horse. surveillance and society 7(3/4): 304-324. microsoft word neff-how are public spheres transnational comparing news and social media networks during the madrid climate.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): neff, t., jemielniak, d. (2021, october). how are public spheres transnational? comparing news and social media networks during the madrid climate talks. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. how are public spheres transnational? comparing news and social media networks during the madrid climate talks timothy neff university of pennsylvania dariusz jemielniak kozminski university introduction in this study, we explore two parallel but related networks of discourse that arose during the united nations framework convention on climate change (unfccc) negotiations of 2019 in madrid: one produced by news media coverage of the talks; the other by twitter users who shared news content about the talks. as these networks disseminated information about the unfccc’s 25th conference of the parties (cop25), we see them as key channels of communication for a potentially transnational public sphere of dialogue and dissent, even if the existence or efficacy of such a transnational sphere is a matter of great debate (fraser, 2007). our aim is to compare the internal (within network) and external (across networks) homogeneity and heterogeneity of these two networks in terms of structure (e.g., language, geographic groups, etc.), dominant topics, and sentiments. we expect that moments of relative homogeneity will indicate how transnational public spheres may arise out of global news events. theoretical framework we use public sphere theory (habermas, 1989, 1998) and the concept of “thick big data analysis” (jemielniak 2020) to understand how transnational public spheres might arise out of news media and twitter networks. as public spheres are most often envisioned as requiring some degree of unity or consensus in order to influence policy action, and as climate change is in particular an issue requiring collective will and action to address, it is critical to know whether there is a realm of dialogue and dissent – a public sphere – capable of influencing transnational climate policy making. our use of “thick” analysis combines wide computational study with a qualitative focus on a selected sample in 2 order to provide nuanced understanding of network connections during cop25, a prominent example of a realm of transnational climate policy making, dialogue, and dissent that attracts international media attention. data and methods we develop a multi-stage process to gather and analyze parallel network data from two sources: twitter and mediacloud. this process uses data produced by the act of linking to news content, either by media organizations or by twitter users, to show affiliations between news organizations during cop25. these affiliations constitute the study’s two media ecosystems. we gathered 138,501 tweets dated between 2019-12-02 00:00:00 and 2019-12-13 23:59:00, with the hashtag #cop25. this timeframe roughly corresponds with cop25, which ran from dec. 1, 2019, to dec. 15, 2019, two days beyond the official end of the conference. we analyze the sentiment of these tweets and links to news media in a smaller subset of tweets. these links provide edges to build an affinity network showing how twitter use produces relationships between news organizations. we also use python module langdetect and the vader python script to understand language communities and sentiment in our corpus of tweets. for our mediacloud network of links created by professional media organizations, we take the top 50 news domains found in our twitter data as a basis for creating a seed set of outlets for mediacloud’s “topic mapper” platform. this spidering process produces a directed network of links between news organizations and other web domains, showing relationships between these entities. we then qualitatively assess the structure of these networks, their most prominent actors and topics, and, in the case of twitter, the sentiment of tweets in order to assess the degree to which these networks demonstrate homogeneity and heterogeneity, both within each network (internally) and between them (externally). findings our twitter network shows four communities strongly divided along language and national (geographic) lines: an english community with u.s. and u.k. news domains; three spanish communities with spanish and chilean news domains; and a french community with french news domains. strongly weighted edges between these communities are rare, but we find a focus on young climate activist greta thunberg that transcends these communities, thereby providing some homogeneity across the network. twitter accounts related to certain news organizations also help amplify tweets to content from their own organizations. analysis of all of the tweets in our corpus suggests different cultural practices, with german tweets more likely to generate replies and with the inclusion of news links in tweets somewhat suppressing twitter interactions. our mediacloud network, which mixes news and other sources due to the spidering process, includes 12 communities that also show strong division along language and geographic lines. thunberg again is a dominant topic across many of these communities, but there also is some prominence for highly technical analysis of cop25, 3 as well as the role of certain state and policy-making institutions, such as the unfccc. media organizations under the same ownership tend to link to one another. discussion our findings shed light on how transnational public spheres might arise during international events such as cop25. first of all, the social capital of certain actors such as greta thunberg is capable of gathering attention and spurring discourse across diverse publics (external homogeneity). more research is required to understand the exact processes by which such actors accrue and spend such capital, though media attention is clearly a key source. second, well-established international venues such as climate negotiations have the institutional infrastructure to sustain public spheres. diverse publics seek to leverage the power of governments, media organizations, and policy-making bodies such as the unfccc to act on climate change, and therefore these institutions have prominent footprints in the transnational networks examined here. third, media ownership is an important dimension of network structures, and research on network phenomena as diverse as the spread of misinformation and echo chambers should take account of such economic underpinnings to communication flows. finally, cultural practices, including practices specific to the cultures of commercial institutions such as twitter, can produce heterogeneity in transnational public spheres, which continue to show divisions along language, geographic, cultural lines. in conclusion, our study shows that transnational public spheres can emerge out of relatively homogenous moments internal to networks and external to networks (i.e., across multiple networks). these moments arise at the intersection of media attention, cultural practices, and commercial and non-commercial (state) institutions, some of which have the capacity to effect changes in climate policy. at the same time, there are persistent divisions along language, geographic, and other lines that encourage the formation of distinct micro-spheres of networked actors (internal heterogeneity), as well as distinct social media practices (arguably cultures) that work to differentiate mass media networks from networks produced by a different set of publics on social media (external heterogeneity). these differences persist even during transnational events that draw widespread, sustained media focus around the globe. moments of consensus and dissent will arise out of these contradictory currents of homogeneity and heterogeneity in transnational networks. references fraser n (2007) transnationalizing the public sphere: on the legitimacy and efficacy of public opinion in a post-westphalian world. theory, culture & society, 24(4): 730. habermas j (1989) structural transformation of the public sphere, trans. thomas burger. mit press. 4 habermas j (1998) between facts and norms: contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. mit press. jemielniak, d (2020) thick big data: doing digital social sciences. oxford: oxford university press. microsoft word yang-covid-19 across platform societies-covid-19 across platform societies.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): yang, z., vicari, s. (2021, october). covid-19 across platform societies: exploring the pandemic through weibo and twitter. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. covid-19 across platform societies: exploring the pandemic through weibo and twitter zheng yang department of sociological studies; the university of sheffield stefania vicari department of sociological studies; the university of sheffield information, and covid-19 platform studies often offer a western-centric theorization of the roles and values of contemporary social media platforms. the ‘digital universalism’ (chan, 2014) underlying this work is however being increasingly called into question by research directly interested in the ‘regionality of platforms’ (steinberg and li, 2017). in fact, this research is specifically drawing attention to the way platforms – with their uses, cultures and values – are shaped by regional settings. the chinese digital ecosystem has so far offered the most fertile ground for the growth of non-western centric platform studies. for instance, wang and lobato have called for a ‘spatialized platform theory’ – one both paying attention to platforms’ historical and contextual trajectories and assessing how these trajectories influence platforms within frames of reference that may not align with the liberal democratic model of free speech and free markets (2019: 367). the contemporary call for relational and contextual approaches to digital platforms is also extremely central to our understanding of participatory dynamics across contemporary ‘platform societies’. several studies have investigated the emergence of critical public opinion within the networked publics developing on social media platforms. for instance, research has shown that twitter’s socio-technical infrastructure has allowed the coming to prominence of actors traditionally defined as ‘non-elite’, namely ordinary users (hermida, 2015; jackson & foucault welles, 2015, 2016; meraz & papacharissi, 2013). these changes have not entirely suppressed traditional power structures; they have turned traditional media systems into ‘hybrid’ (chadwick, 2017) ecosystems. the ‘public sphere’ constructed by chinese digital media has however been shown to hold completely different characteristics from those found in the western society. in their early internet research, kalathil and boas (2001) highlighted the impact of authoritarian regimes on internet use, drawing attention to how, in those contexts, digital media have often been used to both extend authoritarian reach and push forward national development. contemporary chinese social media have been shown to play a peculiar role in relation to participatory practices (bomsel, 2014) – with their political function undergoing dynamic development (yang & calhoun, 2007). this role is shaped by local dynamics that influence user practices related to, for instance, how opinions are expressed, what content is being produced, distributed and used and which users become influential in gatekeeping dynamics, namely in selecting what content becomes most visible (yang, 2016). ultimately, existing research shows that the chinese platform ecosystem has developed through the tightening of china’s state control over digital media and at the intersection of corporate and public interests. in line with research pointing at the need to regionalise platform studies approaches and challenge digital universalism, in this paper we explore digital participatory cultures across platform societies. we do so by presenting a comparative exploration of participatory dynamics developing on weibo and twitter when the covid-19 pandemic started, respectively, in china and in the west. we explore these dynamics by specifically focusing on the sentiment, the topics and the (human) gatekeepers characterising content posted over a 48-hour period. we used python and the twitter capture and analysis tool (tcat) to collect data respectively from weibo and twitter. we then applied sentiment analysis, semantic network analysis and repost network mapping to a random selection of 301,000 weibo posts and tweets. our findings show that at the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic in china and in the west, weibo and twitter played very different roles as participatory platforms. authoritarian propaganda mechanisms clearly emerged on weibo, with the accounts of major official media like people's daily engaging in ‘thought work’ (kalathil & boas, 2001). not only did state propaganda nudge behaviour change through key national media outlets; it also developed propaganda networks through individual user accounts. in particular, slogans with nationalist tendencies, such as “million people united as one man” (万众一心) and “our wills unite like a fortress” (众志成城) were forwarded, absorbed, re-created and disseminated by individual ‘internet celebrities’. it is these ‘propaganda’ mechanisms that most likely also led to polarizing sentiment in weibo conversations about the pandemic. these dynamics did not apply to the ‘democratized’ western world, where other forms of influence were exerted, as signalled by the centrality of former us president donald trump’s account in gatekeeping practices. in fact, our findings show that elite accounts that can affect the political agenda played a central role in influencing the conversation and, most likely, the overall framing of the events – not necessarily in line with public health policies or scientific evidence. in conclusion, at the start of the pandemic, weibo primarily displayed a number of ‘topdown’ processes while twitter incorporated a range of dynamics: elite influence, horizontal flows, conflicting opinions and political framings of the events. in china, platforms can act as ‘propaganda tools’ used to unite and promote public policies under the control of the government and the guidance of state-controlled mainstream media. in western societies, platforms seem to work more as ‘messy public squares’ that allow the expression of different personal opinions, though under the influence of legacy media and public figures with different political agendas. in fact, democratic governments often find themselves struggling to impose effective regulation on platforms that have grown rapidly without their immediate oversight (van dijck et al., 2018). ultimately, our findings point to the need to further develop platform studies that take into account the local contexts in which platforms are used, developed and regulated (willems, 2020). reference bomsel, o. (2014). is china a weibo democracy. international relations and diplomacy, 2(2), 120-132. chadwick, a. (2017). the hybrid media system: politics and power. oxford university press. chan, a. (2013). networking peripheries: technological futures and the myth of digital universalism. mit press. hermida, a. (2015). power plays on social media. social media +society, 1. doi:10.1177/2056305115580340 jackson, s., & foucault welles, b. (2015). hijacking #mynypd: social media dissent and networked counterpublics. journal of communication, 65, 932–952. jackson, s., & foucault welles, b. (2016). #ferguson is everywhere: initiators in emerging counterpublic networks. information, communication & society, 19, 397–418. kalathil, s., & boas, t. c. (2001). the internet and state control in authoritarian regimes: china, cuba and the counterrevolution. first monday, 6(8). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v6i8.876 meraz, s., & papacharissi, z. (2013). networked gatekeeping and networked framing on #egypt. the international journal of press/politics, 18, 138–166. steinberg, m., & li, j. (2017). introduction: regional platforms. asiascape: digital asia, 4(3), 173–183. van dijck, j., poell, t., & de waal, m. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford university press. wang, w.y. and lobato, r., (2019). chinese video streaming services in the context of global platform studies. chinese journal of communication, 12(3), pp.356-371. willems, w. (2020). beyond platform-centrism and digital universalism: the relational affordances of mobile social media publics. information, communication & society, 1-17. yang, g. (2016). the red guard generation and political activism in china. columbia university press. yang, g., & calhoun, c. (2007). media, civil society, and the rise of a green public sphere in china. china information, 21(2), 211-236. microsoft word locating and theorizing platform power.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): poell, t., nieborg, d., van dijck, j., caplan, r., helmond, a., van der vlist, f., chen, j., plantin, j.c. (2022, november). locating and theorizing platform power. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. decolonising the internet. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. locating and theorizing platform power thomas poell university of amsterdam david nieborg university of toronto josé van dijck utrecht university robyn caplan data & society research institute anne helmond utrecht university fernando van der vlist utrecht university julie chen university of toronto jean-christophe plantin london school of economics amidst popular conversations about antitrust regulation and trillion-dollar valuations, the notion of “platform power” has found firm footing in the scholarly lexicon. media and communication scholars have tried to unpack platform power by theorizing forms of corporate control that include “algorithmic power” (bucher, 2018), “curatorial power” (prey, 2020), and “metric power” (beer, 2017). these studies are complemented by research that seeks to theorize and investigate the infrastructural, organizational, and economic dimensions of corporate control (caplan & boyd 2018; nieborg & helmond, suggested citation (apa): poell, t., nieborg, d., van dijck, j., caplan, r., helmond, a., van der vlist, f., chen, j., plantin, j.c. (2022, november). locating and theorizing platform power. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. decolonising the internet. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 2018; plantin et al., 2018; srnicek 2016). even business scholars have become more cognizant and vocal about the unprecedented clustering of capital, turning to decades old antitrust instruments to reign in platform companies (parker et al., 2021). likewise, scholars at the intersection of economics and geography have considered how globally operating platforms impact local labor markets (kenney & zysman, 2020). it should be noted, however, that these conversations about platform power largely play out within the confines of self-defined disciplinary silos. true dialogues across the fields of media and communications, geography, economics, and management are still quite rare. this panel aims to enable such a dialogue, drawing insights from these different fields to more systematically examine how platform power takes shape and evolves. in this effort, we build on van dijck and colleagues’ (2019) reframing of the notion of platform power. crucially, these authors recognize that power in platform markets is relational, but also highly uneven. and they understand platform companies not as monolithic entities but as operators of complex ecosystems. the panel locates and theorizes platform power through five case studies, focusing on: 1) video sharing platforms, 2) app stores, 3) programmatic advertising networks, 4) labor staffing intermediaries, and 5) cloud computing. each case study starts with the question: where do relations of dependence take shape on the examined platform(s) and how are these relations organized? addressing this question, the panelists hypothesize that platform power is exerted, codified, and operationalized around particular infrastructural platform services, which enable specific economic activities, such as advertising, content sharing, data analysis, labor staffing and management, cloud hosting, and so on. leading platform companies typically own and operate a range of such services, which are tied together in unified corporate structures. we argue that each of these individual services has taken on infrastructural properties as they have morphed into ubiquitous, networked sociotechnical systems. therefore, rather than analyzing how a platform company constitutes an all-powerful monolithic entity, the panel calls for greater specificity by locating and analyzing the set(s) of services that together constitute platform power. in this inquiry, the panelists specifically focus on the evolution of platforms. infrastructural services, such as facebook reels or the apple’s app store each set standards and provide gateways for complementors–content and service providers, advertisers, data intermediaries, talent agencies–to access other institutional actors, data, and end-users. yet, such services are also constantly adapted to local regulatory frameworks, to retain end-users and complementors, and to respond to competitors in platform ecosystems. in turn, such changes force complementors to adapt their own operations to continue offering their products and services through the platform. it is in these moments of change, when relations of dependence are reshuffled, that platform power becomes most visible. suggested citation (apa): poell, t., nieborg, d., van dijck, j., caplan, r., helmond, a., van der vlist, f., chen, j., plantin, j.c. (2022, november). locating and theorizing platform power. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. decolonising the internet. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. in combination, the five case studies will provide detailed insights into how and where relations of dependence take shape in the platform ecosystem and how these relations evolve over time. this investigation not only focuses on the large us-based, but also explicitly interrogates the development of platform power from a european and chinese perspective. references beer, d. (2016). metric power. palgrave macmillan. bucher, t. (2018). if... then: algorithmic power and politics. oxford university press. caplan, r., & boyd, d. (2018). isomorphism through algorithms: institutional dependencies in the case of facebook. big data & society, 5(1). kenney, m., & zysman, j. (2020). the platform economy: restructuring the space of capitalist accumulation. cambridge journal of regions, economy and society, 13(1), 55–76. nieborg, d. b., & helmond, a. (2019). the political economy of facebook’s platformization in the mobile ecosystem: facebook messenger as a platform instance. media, culture & society, 41(2), 196–218. parker, g., petropoulos, g., & van alstyne, m. (2021). platform mergers and antitrust. industrial and corporate change, 30(5), 1307–1336. plantin, j.-c., lagoze, c., edwards, p. n., & sandvig, c. (2018). infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook. new media & society, 20(1), 293–310. prey, r. (2020). locating power in platformization: music streaming playlists and curatorial power. social media + society, 6(2), 1–11. srnicek, n. (2017). platform capitalism. polity. van dijck, j., nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2019). reframing platform power. internet policy review, 8(2). https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/reframing-platform-power suggested citation (apa): poell, t., nieborg, d., van dijck, j., caplan, r., helmond, a., van der vlist, f., chen, j., plantin, j.c. (2022, november). locating and theorizing platform power. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. decolonising the internet. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. a comparative approach to platform power: monetization and creator economies on youtube, tiktok, and reels robyn caplan data & society research institute within the realm of cultural and content production, digital platforms like youtube, tiktok, and facebook retain significant power (poell, nieborg, & duffy, 2022). social media platforms have profoundly transformed cultural production, in part by restricting the terms by which culture is distributed and paid for (caplan and gillespie, 2020). scholars have already pointed to the dual logics at play as social media companies work to reconcile the competing needs and commercial logics of their various stakeholders – namely advertisers, media companies, and creators (van dijck and poell 2013; cunningham and craig 2019). this paper explores the ways that video-sharing platforms are using monetization and advertiser-friendly guidelines to negotiate and structure these competing dynamics. i will provide a comparative case study of monetization across three video-sharing platforms – youtube, tiktok, and facebook reels – to examine how monetization is being used by these platforms to both entice participation by complementors and to structure that participation in ways that appeal to advertisers. this analysis pays careful attention to how monetization and “advertiser-friendly guidelines” can provide a window on the organizational and economic dimensions of platform power, and the role platforms are playing in mediating between the various parties on their networks. in an effort to interrogate the specificities of how platform power is enacted in “multi-sided markets,” these case studies pay careful attention to how monetization policies are applied unevenly, and the ways that platforms stratify users and user groups in the application or adjudication of advertiser-friendly guidelines. three case studies the three case studies explored in this paper examine a push-pull dynamic unfolding over video-sharing platforms between these companies and their users. they were chosen specifically to understand how monetization practices are converging or diverging within the video-sharing platform industry, and the responses to monetization and demonetization from creators. for each case study, i rely on publicly available documents from platform companies, including terms of service agreements, sec filings, community guidelines, and posts from corporate blogs and websites, as well as other public statements made by company representatives. i also rely on search engine and social media trade reporting. in each case, i combine this analysis with interviews with creators and a content analysis of creators speaking about monetization on each of the platforms and on creator forums. suggested citation (apa): poell, t., nieborg, d., van dijck, j., caplan, r., helmond, a., van der vlist, f., chen, j., plantin, j.c. (2022, november). locating and theorizing platform power. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. decolonising the internet. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the first case study examines the economics and governance of the youtube partner program and builds off of existing work in the field that examines the monetization and demonetization of user-generated videos (kumar, 2019). it pays particular attention to how the youtube partner program – the class of channels that are given a share of advertising revenue – has changed over time, and how this program has contrasted with reporting on other revenue-sharing agreements with established media organizations, and the role of advertiser-pressure. the second case study looks at the launch of the “tiktok creator fund,” an initiative which was intended by tiktok to “help support ambitious creators who are seeking opportunities to foster a livelihood through their innovative content” (pappas, 2020). though creators initially expressed enthusiasm for the creator fund, soon influencers noted their disappointment with a lack of transparency around how resources are distributed to creators and why and how users get banned from tiktok’s creator fund for violating community guidelines. in addition to publicly available corporate documents, this case study makes use of narratives of the tiktok creator fund from tiktok creators, and by tiktok users who have posted to the reddit forums /r/tiktokhelp and /r/socialmedia. the final case study will be an overview of the monetization policies and practices of facebook reels, the vertical short-form video app introduced by facebook to compete directly with tiktok (roach, 2022). though reels has already been available through instagram since 2020, the company has recently committed to make this feature available in more than 150 countries (perez, 2022). investing in reels, facebook is both adapting the revenue-sharing agreement popularized by youtube (allowing creators to sign up for igtv ads, enabling them to “earn a share of revenue when ads run during their videos”), as well as a similar program to the creator fund model used by tiktok, referred to as the “reels play bonus program” (meta, 2022). facebook, has also, reportedly, asked tiktok creators to post exclusively on the reels platform (gross, 2020). this case study relies primarily on corporate blog posts and trade reporting of facebook reels as it unveils these new features. this comparative analysis of video-sharing platforms contributes two important elements to our understanding of platform power in terms of institutional dependencies (caplan & boyd, 2018). firstly, it provides a more detailed understanding of how monetization policies are intersecting with the application of community guidelines (gillespie, 2020), becoming one way to both entice users to produce content, while providing a cudgel that simultaneously governs that content, often in the service of advertisers. secondly, though there has been significant work studying institutional dependencies in terms of individual platforms (for instance, facebook’s impact on the news media industry, see meese & hurcombe (2020) and napoli (2014)), there has been less research on how these dependencies unfold across the platform ecosystem, suggested citation (apa): poell, t., nieborg, d., van dijck, j., caplan, r., helmond, a., van der vlist, f., chen, j., plantin, j.c. (2022, november). locating and theorizing platform power. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. decolonising the internet. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. in this case in the area of video-sharing. this research makes the case that comparative research can help bring platform power into view, through demonstrating how platforms react to their competitors and vie for users – creators, advertisers, and audiences. references caplan, r., & gillespie, t. (2020). tiered governance and demonetization: the shifting terms of labor and compensation in the platform economy. social media + society, 6(2), 1-13. cunningham, s., & craig, d. (2019). social media entertainment: the new intersection of hollywood and silicon valley. new york university press. gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. yale university press. gross, e.l. (2020). “tiktok launches $2 billion creator fund as facebook reportedly offersmoney to lure influencers from tiktok to reels.” forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/elanagross/2020/07/28/facebook-is-reportedly-offeringmoney-to-lure-influencers-from-tiktok-to-reels/ kumar, s. (2019). the algorithmic dance: youtube’s adpocalypse and the gatekeeping of cultural content on digital platforms. internet policy review, 8(2), 1-21. meese j & hurcombe e. (2021). facebook, news media and platform dependency: the institutional impacts of news distribution on social platforms. new media & society 23(8), 2367-2384. meta (2022, february 22). “launching facebook reels globally and new ways for creators to make money.” meta newsroom. https://about.fb.com/news/2022/02/launching-facebook-reels-globally/ napoli, p. m. (2014). automated media: an institutional theory perspective on algorithmic media production and consumption. communication theory, 24(3), 340360. perez, s. (2022, february 22). “facebook reels rolls out worldwide along with new creative tools and ads.” techcrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/22/facebookreels-rolls-out-worldwide-along-with-new-ads-and-creative-tools/ poell, t., nieborg, d., & duffy, b. e. (2021). platforms and cultural production. polity. suggested citation (apa): poell, t., nieborg, d., van dijck, j., caplan, r., helmond, a., van der vlist, f., chen, j., plantin, j.c. (2022, november). locating and theorizing platform power. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. decolonising the internet. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. roach, s., (2022). “facebook reels goes global and offers creators more ways to monetize.” protocol. https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/facebook-reels-global van dijck, j., & poell, t. (2013). understanding social media logic. media and communication, 1(1), 2-14. suggested citation (apa): poell, t., nieborg, d., van dijck, j., caplan, r., helmond, a., van der vlist, f., chen, j., plantin, j.c. (2022, november). locating and theorizing platform power. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. decolonising the internet. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. app stores as infrastructural platform services david nieborg university of toronto thomas poell university of amsterdam josé van dijck utrecht university app stores, such as google’s play store or apple’s app store, are often presented as simple app distribution mechanisms, which charge developers a hefty 30% standard commission. in this paper, focusing on the ios app store, we examine how app stores have become entrenched in wider platform ecosystems. speaking to their critical institutional position, we understand these stores as vital “infrastructural platform services”: they function as nodes “through which data flows are managed, processed, stored, and channeled, and upon which many other online services, complementors, and users have come to depend” (van dijck et al., 2019: 9). developing an institutional perspective on the app economy, we aim to investigate in detail how the app store functions as an infrastructural service, how a variety of third parties have come to depend on this service, and how these power relations have evolved. over the last decade, apple, in operating the app store, has grappled with the tensions faced by virtually all operators of platform markets and ecosystems: those between “openness versus closedness, control versus autonomy, centralization versus decentralization, visibility versus invisibility, and stability versus flexibility” (poell et al., 2022: 76). these constant tensions point to a process theorized as “tuning,” which in the case of apple, is “multilayered, overlapping, and on-going”, involving “a distributed network of actors and artifacts” (eaton et al., 2015: 221). in other words, the app store is not merely a “technological infrastructure,” but “turns out to be a complex cultural arrangement” (grenz and kirschner, 2018: 618). to gain more insight into the evolving nature of the tuning process we distinguish in this inquiry among four different stages: 1) app development, 2) app distribution, 3) the marketing and visibility of apps, and 4) the monetization of apps, either as products or its associated services (e.g., content streaming, transportation, etc.). during each of these phases, which are ideal categories that in practice overlap, apple aims to exert control. vice versa, app developers and their parent companies – from entrepreneurial individuals to global platform conglomerates such netflix and facebook – seek to challenge guidelines, establish new norms, create exceptions, or optimize technologies to their benefit. to structure our inquiry into the tuning process we first analyzed iosspecific “boundary resources” provided by apple: i.e., the sanctioned tools and suggested citation (apa): poell, t., nieborg, d., van dijck, j., caplan, r., helmond, a., van der vlist, f., chen, j., plantin, j.c. (2022, november). locating and theorizing platform power. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. decolonising the internet. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. interfaces, together with instructions, guidelines, and developer documentation (ghazawneh & henfridsson, 2013). second, we contextualized the actions and decisions of app developers and policy makers by collecting and reviewing news articles, both newspaper reporting and industry focused outlets. examining relations of dependence first, starting with the app development stage, we examine the environment in which ios apps are created. software developers have to produce a compressed software package or .ipa (ios application archive) file (dieter et al., 2019). ios development is streamlined by xcode, an integrated development environment (ide) that provides a variety of developer-oriented tools, examples, and templates, such as standardized graphical user interface elements. next to xcode, developers are also required to use the ios sdk (software development kit) to build and test their apps. hence, we show how from the very moment of an app’s inception, apple has a large degree of control over an app’s functionality and appearance. while such far-reaching oversight is not unprecedented – the requirement to use sanctioned sdks has been the norm in game software development since the 1980s – in other domains of software production (e.g., open-source development) or cultural production (e.g., music or book publishing), development can potentially be platform-independent. second, app distribution is most commonly associated with the app store. after submitting an .ipa file to apple for review, it may become available in one of the regional instances of the app store. the review process is notoriously opaque and guided by an arbitrary, constantly shifting set of “app store review guidelines” that center on “safety, performance, business, design, and legal.” for example, app developers cannot create alternative app stores or implement functionality that circumvents its build-in payment systems. it is through these guidelines that apple is able to shape the app marketing phase as well. late 2017, apple completely redesigned the layout of the app store from a largely top-list based design towards an editorial model that provides hand-picked selections by anonymous apple staff. apple also introduced “search ads,” that mimic app store profiles, and are displayed when users search for keywords. this brings us to the monetization stage. despite regulatory interventions and antitrust litigation, apple’s default is for financial transactions (e.g., app purchase, in-app purchases, subscriptions, etc.) to be tied to one’s apple id and for developers to pay a 30% commission. there are a few exceptions to this rule, some of which are public and codified via the aforementioned guidelines. the tight distribution/monetization integration is constantly challenged by app developers who deem apple’s revenue cut unfair. notoriously, the landmark case of epic games v. apple, was an attempt by game suggested citation (apa): poell, t., nieborg, d., van dijck, j., caplan, r., helmond, a., van der vlist, f., chen, j., plantin, j.c. (2022, november). locating and theorizing platform power. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. decolonising the internet. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. developer epic to have its epic games store serve as an alternative distribution channel taking a 12% fee instead. relational power examining how apple exercises control over developers in the four stages of app production, it is important to see that it can only do so because developers adopt its software tools, choose to distribute, market, and monetize apps through its store, all the while accepting its guidelines and terms of service. this means that even in the case of the app store, one of the most tightly governed platforms, power is never simply exercised in a top-down fashion. platform governance is always subject to negotiations between app store owners and users, and between owners and government agencies, such as regulators. the latter negotiation is commonly bound to a regulatory window that narrowly focuses on anticompetitive practices, most prominently visible in the constant pushback against apple’s 30% revenue commission and its compulsory choice architecture. for example, a recent ruling by the dutch authority for consumers and markets (acm) has fined apple first for prohibiting, then complicating developers of dating apps to use alternative payment systems. symbolically, the enforced solution for dutch dating app developers received a regional status in the app store, but this hardly makes a dent in apple’s infrastructural power or its position in the app ecosystem. even if apple was forced to adapt its monetization infrastructure, this would only have financial repercussions, but not fundamentally alter the relational balance of power in the app ecosystem. references dieter, m., gerlitz, c., helmond, a., tkacz, n., van der vlist, f. n., & weltevrede, e. (2019). multi-situated app studies: methods and propositions. social media + society, 5(2), 1–15. eaton, b., elaluf-calderwood, s., sorensen, c., & yoo, y. (2015). distributed tuning of boundary resources: the case of apple’s ios service system. management information systems quarterly, 39(1), 217–243. grenz, t., & kirschner, h. (2018). unraveling the app store: toward an interpretative perspective on tracing. international journal of communication, 12, 612–628. ghazawneh, a., & henfridsson, o. (2013). balancing platform control and external contribution in third-party development: the boundary resources model. information systems journal, 23(2), 173–192. poell, t., nieborg, d. b., & duffy, b. e. (2022). platforms and cultural production. polity. suggested citation (apa): poell, t., nieborg, d., van dijck, j., caplan, r., helmond, a., van der vlist, f., chen, j., plantin, j.c. (2022, november). locating and theorizing platform power. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. decolonising the internet. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. van dijck, j., nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2019). reframing platform power. internet policy review, 8(2). https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/reframing-platform-power suggested citation (apa): poell, t., nieborg, d., van dijck, j., caplan, r., helmond, a., van der vlist, f., chen, j., plantin, j.c. (2022, november). locating and theorizing platform power. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. decolonising the internet. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. data partnerships: strategic and infrastructural power in the programmatic advertising ecosystem anne helmond utrecht university fernando van der vlist utrecht university the global digital advertising market is enormous and vital to the internet and related industries, including social media entertainment, games, and journalism. bouncing back from the corona crisis, 2021 was a record year for the global advertising industry with 780.59 billion usd in worldwide ad spending (cramer-flood, 2021). an important slice of this advertising pie is taken by social media companies, which rely on advertising as their primary revenue flow. social media platforms have become central players in the advertising ecosystem by providing advertisers with access to massive yet highlycustomizable targetable audiences. social media are thus first and foremost advertising companies which do not exist in isolation, but operate within the global advertising ecosystem of thousands of interconnected platform companies that provide data-related or advertising-related services. many of these connected platforms function as “data intermediaries” which shape “the circulation and integration of new forms of data” (beer, 2018) and are actively building infrastructure for mediating interactions and exchanges between social media platforms and audience data providers, data marketplaces, thirdparty service providers, and data buyers worldwide (spiekermann, 2019). in this paper, we examine how social media platforms engage in business-to-business partnerships with data intermediaries. in the social media industry, such partnerships serve to drive growth and facilitate access to (exclusive) data and services, markets, and industries (author et al.). these business partners do not merely assist in the business operations of social media by providing additional data or services that compliment the advertising capacities of social media platforms themselves. rather, these partnerships are endemic to the business model of social media as partners help expand the collection, use, and integration of audience data into other industry platforms, services, domains, and industries as part of the process of “platformization” (author; nieborg and poell, 2018). through partnership arrangements and contracts, partners gain access to the business side of social media platforms, including their advertising and marketing apis (author et al.). this access is carefully governed and enables business partners to build technological (api-based) partner integrations to access the advertising and targeting capabilities of social media within their own software platforms. consequently, the advertising clients of these business partners can use these social media audience targeting options, combine it with other audience data and services offered, and build large-scale programmatic advertising campaigns. these suggested citation (apa): poell, t., nieborg, d., van dijck, j., caplan, r., helmond, a., van der vlist, f., chen, j., plantin, j.c. (2022, november). locating and theorizing platform power. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. decolonising the internet. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. partnerships are the central focus of our inquiry as they signal organizational and technical forms of co-dependence between social media platforms and their partners. examining partnerships to examine the relations between social media platforms and their business-tobusiness partners as well as their dependencies, we collected the publicly listed partnerships of the top-20 most-used social media according to statista (incl. facebook, twitter, instagram, snapchat, wechat, qq, sina weibo). using custom scrapers, we collected the details from over 1,500 partners, including their names, descriptions, logos, urls, specialties, industries, countries, and more. we then qualified their relationships, and examined which ones are exclusive or shared, in order to identify key sources and locations, or “nodes,” of power in the ecosystem (broughton micova and jacques, 2020). as partners also have partner networks of their own, in a next step, we collected almost 10,000 additional partnerships and (api-based) partner integrations the social media partners who labeled themselves as “audience data intermediaries.” we then analyzed the key actors within this “audience economy” – a complex global and interconnected marketplace of business intermediaries involved in the creation, commodification, analysis, and circulation of data audiences for purposes including but not limited to digital advertising and marketing (cf. beer, 2017; beauvisage and mellet, 2020). during our analysis we observed many mergers and acquisitions in the partner ecosystem, signaling how large firms have acquired leading audience data intermediaries of their own (smith, 2019). as such, we find that the evolution of the partner ecosystem of social media revolves around the strategic importance of data aggregation and partner integration networks in the audience economy. these mergers and acquisitions within the partner ecosystem are not only significant because of the consolidation of data assets but also because of the consolidation of infrastructure and other assets (e.g., partnerships, integration networks, reputation, customer records, etc.), transferring their infrastructural and strategic power to their new owners (author). we find that platform power is not just held by a single platform but is in part mediated by partners and dispersed within the platform ecosystem, where governance and control are exercised through infrastructure and partnership agreements. business and data partnerships establish and govern the preferred pathways (e.g., digital supply chains) and “nodes” of connectivity in this ecosystem, which delivers strategic and infrastructural power to a handful of social media and industry platforms. within this process, business-facing apis (such as marketing and advertising apis) have an important gateway function and serve as a source of infrastructural control for platform owners. data assetization suggested citation (apa): poell, t., nieborg, d., van dijck, j., caplan, r., helmond, a., van der vlist, f., chen, j., plantin, j.c. (2022, november). locating and theorizing platform power. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. decolonising the internet. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. to conclude, we understand the role of business partners in the process of platformization as an infrastructural process that facilitates data “assetization,” in which personal data is turned into an asset through a number of processes that make data valuable “for future revenue streams” (birch et al., 2021; emphasis added). thinking through data in terms of assetization challenges the idea that data are somehow inherently valuable or useful. instead, it shows how we may consider the role of business partners – and data intermediaries in particular – in turning audience data into a monetizable asset (birch et al., 2021). these aspects emphasize the technoeconomic and financial motivations behind the process of platformization. specifically, we contend that platformization allows for the distributed creation of the software infrastructure by partners that is necessary to source and “activate” data from and to different places. we might even say that data functions as a medium to facilitate databased processes between software companies, and as an interface to audiences (users) by enabling programmatic advertising, ad targeting, and other automated practices. partners thus play a vital role in platformization because they build, extend, and sustain the infrastructures that underpin assetization through data. this also means that platform power does not only reside in or is consolidated by big tech platforms, but that partners also benefit from and share some of the strategic and infrastructural power in the ecosystem. references beer, d. (2018). envisioning the power of data analytics. information, communication & society, 21(3), 465–479. birch, k., cochrane, d., and ward, c. (2021) data as asset? the measurement, governance, and valuation of digital personal data by big tech. big data & society, 8(1), 1–15. broughton micova, s. and jacques, s. (2020) platform power in the video advertising ecosystem. internet policy review 9(4). available at: https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/platform-power-video-advertising-ecosystem. cramer-flood, e. (2021) worldwide ad spending 2021: a year for the record books. available at: https://www.emarketer.com/content/worldwide-ad-spending-2021-yearrecord-books. beauvisage, t. and mellet, k. (2020) datassets: assetizing and marketizing personal data. in: birch k and muniesa f (eds) assetization: turning things into assets in technoscientific capitalism (pp. 75–95). mit press. suggested citation (apa): poell, t., nieborg, d., van dijck, j., caplan, r., helmond, a., van der vlist, f., chen, j., plantin, j.c. (2022, november). locating and theorizing platform power. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. decolonising the internet. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. nieborg, d.b. and poell, t. (2018) the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society, 20(11), 4275–4292. smith, h. (2019) people-based marketing and the cultural economies of attribution metrics. journal of cultural economy, 12(3), 201–214. spiekermann, m. (2019) data marketplaces: trends and monetisation of data goods. intereconomics, 54(4), 208–216. suggested citation (apa): poell, t., nieborg, d., van dijck, j., caplan, r., helmond, a., van der vlist, f., chen, j., plantin, j.c. (2022, november). locating and theorizing platform power. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. decolonising the internet. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. convoluted dependence and digital labor platforms julie chen university of toronto the question of how platforms impact labor has become a key line of inquiry across disciplines. one important focus in these debates has been research on platformmediated labor management, which shows that control over work has become “scalable” and “distributed” (van doorn, 2017). this has been enabled by the mobilization of economic, political, discursive, and technological resources by major platform companies, from deliveroo and uber to meituan and didi. these labor platforms are able to centralize regulatory power while outsourcing risk and responsibilities (vallas & schor, 2020). though many managerial techniques, such as labor casualization, have a long history, the so-called “platform management model” is characterized not so much by specific managerial techniques, but rather by the unstable “portfolio”-like character that is highly adaptable to “contextual requirements” (moore & joyce, 2019: 5–6). an assumption underlying this line of research is that the scalability and flexibility of labor control mechanisms are achieved by labor platforms’ (dis)intermediation (langley & leyshon, 2017). that is, they are said to replace and consolidate a wide range of functions of conventional labor market intermediaries by ways of information provision, matchmaking, and the management of work. platform intermediation, then, is believed to play a vital role in creating platform dependency among both users and complementors. these assumptions concerning platform intermediation or disintermediation and its relation to platform dependency, however, warrant scrutiny for two reasons. first, the focus on horizontal platform power–the ways in which platform companies bring two or more “sides” in a market to achieve infrastructural and market dominance–tends to overlook the changes happening among users on the same “side”. second, the multisided markets that digital labor platforms operate are far from being self-contained or self-sustaining. research has shown that multisided platforms are dependent on existing markets (see e.g., athique, 2019) or actors residing outside of platform markets (vonderau, 2019). approach in this paper, i question the presumed inevitability of platform intermediation thereby complicating the concept of platform dependence. i do so by examining the proliferation of labor staffing intermediaries and other types of intermediaries associated with the ride-hailing platform (didi) and food-delivery platforms (meituan and ele.me) in china. i ask: what factors contribute to the counterintuitive expansion of such intermediaries on suggested citation (apa): poell, t., nieborg, d., van dijck, j., caplan, r., helmond, a., van der vlist, f., chen, j., plantin, j.c. (2022, november). locating and theorizing platform power. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. decolonising the internet. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. china’s digital labor platforms? how do the shifts in labor management structures engendered by intermediaries facilitate or constrain dependence on and of labor platforms? addressing these questions, the paper is less concerned with the actions taken by platform companies and more so with the evolving praxis of those involved in labor supply and labor management. the paper is informed by a political economy and organizational study approach. the analysis is based on industry reports, trade publications, platform companies’ public records and interviews with workers and managers employed by labor staffing intermediaries. conceptually, i aim to expand on the notion of dependence. in the research on digital platforms, the concept of dependence has been used to refer to: 1) declining “autonomy and economic sustainability” on the part of platform complementors because of their reliance on the infrastructural platform tools (nieborg & poell, 2018: 4277), and 2) the significance of the institutional and political economic context that shapes a platform company’s business model and strategy across geographies (van doorn & chen, 2021; rahman & thelen, 2019; zhang, 2020). through theorizing what i call convoluted dependence, i argue that the dependent relations in the broad socio-technical system of labor platforms are more than mutual and uneven between different “sides”. instead, among users that populate one side in a market, dependency is varied, intertwined, and at times contradictory which goes beyond the platform per se. convoluted dependence to further theorize the notion of convoluted dependence i will focus on three aspects in examining chinese labor platforms. first, i will reflect on the intertwining and contentious forces of china’s domestic economic restructuring and its uneven integration into global digital capitalism. the involvement of all these heterogeneous social and institutional actors fuel the country’s existing, informal labor force, which provides the impetus for the growth-before-profit imperative in many labor platforms in china. i argue that chinese labor platforms develop a distinctive managerial structure to regulate workers by incorporating and generating intermediaries. the proliferation of the practice of outsourcing through temporary staffing intermediaries suggests a pathdependent trajectory of digital labor platforms in china. second, labor staffing intermediaries have emerged as a vertical and networked organizational actor that is able to regulate the workforce. as a result, they have created a highly fragmented labor market wherein worker’s contractual relations are obscured. on the one hand, their structural expansion in the platform economy helps precipitate a concentration of infrastructural power in the hands of platform companies to regulate a just-in-time workforce, thereby advancing their corporate interests. on the other hand, their increasing dependence on platform companies undermines their bargaining power suggested citation (apa): poell, t., nieborg, d., van dijck, j., caplan, r., helmond, a., van der vlist, f., chen, j., plantin, j.c. (2022, november). locating and theorizing platform power. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. decolonising the internet. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. vis-à-vis platform companies, whereas their dependence on workers opens new space for worker’ agency and activism, which, in turn, challenges and destabilizes platform power. third, accompanying the development of staffing intermediaries is another kind of worker-led self-intermediation akin to grassroot trade associations. discussing a specific example of such an intermediary, i will demonstrate how the boundary of workers’ platform dependence is porous and negotiable because workers are able to extend their social relations beyond the market defined and encapsulated by labor platforms. considering the notion of convoluted dependence, this paper contributes to the debate on the loci of platform power by shifting the horizontal focus on power negotiated between sides in a platform market to the vertical interactions among actors populating one side of the market. raising awareness to how dependence takes shape, the paper cautions against the tendency to homogenize the side(s) of platform-mediated markets. references athique, a. (2019). digital emporiums: platform capitalism in india. media industries journal, 6(2), 67-88. doorn, n. van, & chen, j. y. (2021). odds stacked against workers: datafied gamification on chinese and american food delivery platforms. socio-economic review, 19(4), 1345–1367. langley, p., & leyshon, a. (2017). platform capitalism: the intermediation and capitalization of digital economic circulation. finance and society, 3(1), 11–31. moore, p., & joyce, s. (2019). black box or hidden abode? the expansion and exposure of platform work managerialism. review of international political economy, 27(4), 1–23. nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society, 20(11), 4275–4292. rahman, k. s., & thelen, k. (2019). the rise of the platform business model and the transformation of twenty-first-century capitalism. politics & society, 47(2), 177–204. vallas, s., & schor, j. b. (2020). what do platforms do? understanding the gig economy. annual review of sociology, 46(1), 273–294. van doorn, n. (2017). platform labor: on the gendered and racialized exploitation of low-income service work in the ‘on-demand’ economy. information, communication & society, 20(6), 898–914. vonderau, p. (2019). the spotify effect: digital distribution and financial growth. television & new media, 20(1), 3–19. suggested citation (apa): poell, t., nieborg, d., van dijck, j., caplan, r., helmond, a., van der vlist, f., chen, j., plantin, j.c. (2022, november). locating and theorizing platform power. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. decolonising the internet. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. zhang, l. (2020). when platform capitalism meets petty capitalism in china: alibaba and an integrated approach to platformization. international journal of communication, 14, 114–134. suggested citation (apa): poell, t., nieborg, d., van dijck, j., caplan, r., helmond, a., van der vlist, f., chen, j., plantin, j.c. (2022, november). locating and theorizing platform power. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. decolonising the internet. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. platform power and infrastructure: the case of data centers jean-christophe plantin london school of economics scholars in internet studies and sts have demonstrated the importance of revealing the material infrastructure that sustains everyday media practices (parks & starosielski, 2015; peters, 2015). this stream of research builds upon a long tradition investigating the history of the internet through its standards (abbate, 2000; edwards, 1996) and comes alongside innovative work revealing its hidden infrastructure (blum, 2013; burrington, 2016). this “infrastructure turn” in internet studies is crucial to understand how tech giants—google, amazon, and facebook—expand and sustain their power over the datafication of social life (couldry & mejias, 2019; plantin et al., 2018; van dijck et al., 2018; zuboff, 2019). this paper shows how tech giants are becoming indispensable infrastructure—not only in the sense of utilities that are hard to live without, but as concrete brick-and-mortar infrastructure in the connectivity sector writ large. as several journalistic reports have shown, us-based tech giants are now investing massively in four connectivity sectors: subsea cables, data centers, network management software, and (to a lesser extent) non-terrestrial communication networks. reports on this activity tend to focus, however, on the large financial or spatial scale of such projects. using evidence drawn from the review of technical documentations, trade press, and verbatim from 30 semi-structured interviews with engineers working in these connectivity sectors, i reveal how this infrastructural turn should not only be understood as the result of large investment capacities. i show instead how they deeply change the market structure and innovation strategies of these sectors by using a wide range of strategies, such as advocating for open-source technologies and collaborations, creating industry-wide consortia, or developing white papers for technical standards. platform ecosystem and data centers the central hypothesis of this research is that tech giants acquire a dominant position to shape the global connectivity infrastructure by applying in this sector the platform logic that granted them their phenomenal success in the web economy. literature in communications studies and management has already highlighted key characteristics of the platform model, e.g. inserting a new intermediary to create two-sided or multi-sided markets (rochet & tirole, 2003), relying on extensive data collection to generate network effects (van dijck, 2014), or making content programmable via apis and sdks (helmond, 2015; nieborg & helmond, 2019). the ways powerful tech giants apply this model has also been critically analyzed at length and across various sectors (gillespie, 2010; helmond, 2015; poell et al., 2022; srnicek, 2016; van dijck et al., 2018). in this suggested citation (apa): poell, t., nieborg, d., van dijck, j., caplan, r., helmond, a., van der vlist, f., chen, j., plantin, j.c. (2022, november). locating and theorizing platform power. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. decolonising the internet. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. paper, i show that the same actors now adapt this platform model to take part in infrastructural markets and to reorganize them according to their hyperscalers needs. specifically, with the platform model, tech giants bypass incumbent companies (such as hardware manufacturers) by creating an ecosystem of complementors that they control. the central case study for this paper will be the open compute project (ocp) foundation, created in 2011 by facebook alongside intel, rackspace and goldman sachs. the general goal of ocp is to provide an industry non-profit focused on establishing an open source hardware ecosystem for the data center market. concretely, it means that the foundation brings together different actors of the data center industry—such as manufacturers, system integrators, clients, or software developers—and organizes their collaboration via working groups around specific topics and technologies, such as power supply, heat reuse, or network security. it organizes events, such as usand europe-based summits to show the results of these collaborations. it provides a licensing mechanism, a marketplace and a legal structure to allow manufacturers to sell the product of their collaboration online. in other words, the foundation aims to create an ecosystem of innovation around data center hardware. platform power and technical standards the dependency of existing industry actors towards this way of developing data center hardware is most visible when looking at the specific technical standards that the foundation pushes for via its ecosystem. facebook first applied the platform model via ocp to the most basic building block of the data center as early as 2011: the cabinet, or rack, containing the server components. traditional server cabinets are sold as vertically integrated solutions (by vendors such as hp or dell), hence giving little customization capacities or choice of specific hardware or software to the clients. on the contrary, the very first product of ocp was an open source version of the rack, or “open rack.” revealingly nicknamed “hardware api”, this rack is the basic module that complementors can use to design additional components (such as hard-drives, a switch, cabling systems), similar to the set of rules that an app store provides to thirdparty developers (via apis or sdks). crucially, the ocp open rack also constitutes a dramatic change of standard, as it is two inches larger than traditional server racks (for a total of 21 inches instead of the traditional 19-inch cabinet), allowing users of ocp gears to insert more hardware or bigger fans, but constraining vendors manufacturing hardware fitting only traditional racks. this shows how ocp generates an ecosystem of innovation around a specific product (here, the rack) while making sure it evolves in a direction that corresponds to its specific high-performing and densely-populated server standards. references abbate, j. (2000). inventing the internet. mit press. suggested citation (apa): poell, t., nieborg, d., van dijck, j., caplan, r., helmond, a., van der vlist, f., chen, j., plantin, j.c. (2022, november). locating and theorizing platform power. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. decolonising the internet. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. blum, a. (2013). tubes: a journey to the center of the internet (reprint edition). ecco. burrington, i. (2016). networks of new york: an illustrated field guide to urban internet infrastructure (3rd edition). melville house publishing. couldry, n., & mejias, u. a. (2019). the costs of connection: how data is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism. stanford university press. edwards, p. n. (1996). the closed world: computers and the politics of discourse in cold war america. mit press. gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of ‘platforms’. new media & society, 12(3), 347–364. helmond, a. (2015). the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready. social media + society, 1(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080 nieborg, d. b., & helmond, a. (2019). the political economy of facebook’s platformization in the mobile ecosystem: facebook messenger as a platform instance. media, culture & society, 41(2), 196–218. parks, l., & starosielski, n. (eds.). (2015). signal traffic: critical studies of media infrastructures. university of illinois press. peters, j. d. (2015). the marvelous clouds: toward a philosophy of elemental media (reprint edition). university of chicago press. plantin, j. c., lagoze, c., edwards, p. n., & sandvig, c. (2018). infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook. new media & society, 20(1), 293-310. poell, t., nieborg, d., & duffy, b. e. (2022). platforms and cultural production. polity. rochet, j.-c., & tirole, j. (2003). platform competition in two-sided markets. journal of the european economic association, 1(4), 990–1029. srnicek, n. (2016). platform capitalism. polity press. van dijck, j. (2014). datafication, dataism and dataveillance: big data between scientific paradigm and ideology. surveillance & society, 12(2), 197–208. van dijck, j., poell, t., & waal, m. de. (2018). the platform society. oxford university press. suggested citation (apa): poell, t., nieborg, d., van dijck, j., caplan, r., helmond, a., van der vlist, f., chen, j., plantin, j.c. (2022, november). locating and theorizing platform power. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. decolonising the internet. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. profile books. aoir2020-locatelli def.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): locatelli, e. (2020, october). objectifying the platform society: investigating users’ perception of smart speakers’ algorithmic suggestions and data processing. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. objectifying the platform society: investigating users’ perception of smart speakers’ algorithmic suggestions and data processing elisabetta locatelli università cattolica del sacro cuore theoretical framework smart speakers are devices that connect people with computing systems through voice to perform several activities and tasks (bentley et al., 2018). they are one the latest products of platforms such as google or amazon and have the capability to quickly connect platforms, algorithms, people, and households together. the transformative power of platforms into society has been extensively studied in the frameworks of platform society (van dijck, poell, & de waal, 2018) and platformization (helmond, 2015; van dijck et al., 2018) and recognized to affect technological, social, and economic processes in several sectors (nieborg & poell, 2018; van dijck et al., 2018). the fast diffusion of smart speakers (bentley et al., 2018) brought platforms’ and algorithms’ logics into everyday life to the point that researchers speak of “platformed households” with implications regarding surveillance and privacy (pridmore et al., 2019). there is, thus, a strong need of investigating smart speakers’ diffusion and their sociocultural impact also in other countries than the united states where they diffused and were researched first. the added value of the research here presented is to shed light into the adoption process of smart speakers in italy under several respects among which the users’ perception of algorithmic suggestions, algorithms’ “social power” (beer, 2017), privacy, and data processing. method and context 2 the research was done by the department of communication and performing arts of università cattolica del sacro cuore of milan (italy)1 and financed by a communication agency (researchers had autonomy and independence in the research process). the interest about investigating smart speakers’ diffusion in italy was generated by the scarcity of local research, as the literary review showed, and the fast diffusion of smart speakers in italy during the initial phase. the main player, google home and amazon echo, were released respectively in march 2018 and in october 2018 and during 2019 8% of the italian population owned a smart speaker (bvadoxa, 2020). the research had the aim to explore the social representations and domestication (silverstone & hirsch, 1992) of smart speakers. it was done between november and december 2019. it adopted a multi-sited methodology composed of: the content analysis of platforms' (google and amazon) online communication strategies about their devices; online articles from online newspapers, blogs, and online magazines with related news; four focus groups with users belonging to different generations (19-24 and 46-64 years old) and that owned a google or amazon device activated only with vocal commands (without any display); the netnographic analysis of three thematic italian facebook groups (ethically conducted according to the aoir’s ethical guidelines). user’s perception of algorithmic suggestions and data processing the research showed different speeds of diffusion of smart speakers among different targets, with techno-enthusiasts first, driven by the aura of curiosity around the devices, the hype of promotion and communication discourses, and the affordable prices. the research results indicate that general information about simple and quick questions (e.g. recipes, trivia, traffic news, weather) were well accepted, and their sources or selection was not questioned. some of these requests (like weather or traffic news) became part of a new daily routine that incorporated the smart speaker. users liked music selection and personalization according to their tastes and perceived it as time-saving (versus manual search). on the contrary, users liked less or even disliked news customization for the fear of losing important information and of being limited in their freedom of choice. users tried also to avoid or resist to algorithmic customization, for example doing multiple searches or personalizing the devices’ settings. vocal searches for purchases were seen as critical for the paucity of the results, the difficulty to distinguish between organic and paid ones, the opacity of algorithmic selection, and the potential interference of platform’s economic interests. users seemed to be more confident when they could check and confront different results like on a device with a display. they suffered also from the absence of reviews and ratings that help the products comparison. other concerns regarded personal data: if, on the one side, users accepted some use of data, on the other one, they were worried about the kind of data taken and their treatment. one of the most sensitive topics was the potential “continuous listening” of the devices that evoked risks like surveillance, 1 scientific direction: prof. fausto colombo. research team: elisabetta locatelli, mirko olivieri, barbara scifo, michela seresini, valentina turrini. 3 hacking, fraud or unauthorized purchases. users were little aware of the devices’ privacy settings, but some of them adopted “radical” measures such as turning the microphone off or changing the smart speaker’s room when talking about sensitive topics. platforms’ influence perception appeared to be almost in the background. google seemed to be perceived as more reliable and objective for search results. amazon's good reputation seemed to be based on the trust built up over the years as an ecommerce website and on its independence from other operating systems. its nature of e-commerce leader was however felt as limiting for the fear of commercial pressure into search results. results discussion and conclusions the research pinpointed the role of smart speakers in reproducing the power of algorithms and of platforms and in diffusing it into households. we can argue that smart speakers can be conceptualized as devices that objectify the logics of platform society connecting users with the platforms’ operating systems and with other platforms or subjects through their skills or actions. this process is done through two interrelated and interdependent fluxes of data both regulated and curated by algorithms: one is represented by the data coming from user’s behavior that let to customize their experience, the other one is represented by the data provided by the platforms (i.e. the answers given). the research evidenced that users are partially aware of platforms’ and algorithms’ pervasiveness, on the one side, taking them for granted and do not questioning them, but, on the other side, being conscious of them and trying to avoid or limit them. this nuanced approach confirms the influence of culture and context in the users’ perception of algorithmic suggestions and data treatment (pridmore et al., 2019), making it necessary to broaden cross-cultural research. references beer, d. (2017). the social power of algorithms. information communication and society. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1216147 bentley, f., luvogt, c., silverman, m., wirasinghe, r., white, b., & lottrjdge, d. (2018). understanding the long-term use of smart speaker assistants. proceedings of the acm on interactive, mobile, wearable and ubiquitous technologies, 2(3), 1– 24. https://doi.org/10.1145/3264901 bvadoxa. (2020). iot: in italia la casa è sempre più “smart.” retrieved august 25, 2020, from https://www.bva-doxa.com/iot-in-italia-la-casa-e-sempre-piu-smart/ helmond, a. (2015). the platformization of the web : making web data platform ready. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080 nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media and society, 20(11), 4275–4292. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769694 pridmore, j., vitak, j., trottier, d., liao, y., zimmer, m., mols, a., & kumar, p. c. (2019). intelligent personal assistants and the intercultural negotiations of 4 dataveillance in platformed households. surveillance and society, 17(1–2), 125– 131. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v17i1/2.12936 silverstone, r., & hirsch, e. (eds.). (1992). consuming technologies : media and information in domestic spaces. london/new york: routledge. van dijck, j., poell, t., & de waal, m. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connective world. new york: oxford university press. microsoft word bettoni-vigilant journalism-vigilant journalism.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 vigilant journalism dimitri bettoni institute of future media, democracy and society – dublin city university vigilant journalism: ethical and deontological dilemmas. in his book “liquid surveillance: a conversation” co-authored with zygmunt bauman, professor david lyon states: “one key problem with contemporary surveillance is its myopic focus on control, which quickly excludes any concern with care. are responsible and even caring forms of digital surveillance possible?” (bauman and lyon 2013, pag.37). taking inspiration from this question, this paper investigates whether forms of caring surveillance exist in journalism alongside the better-known form of threatening surveillance. it explores which ethical and deontological approaches regulate them, and whether such approaches constitute a self-absolving approach against related issues and responsibilities. journalists rightly fear surveillance technology when it is used to threaten their professional independency. suddenly this technology turns might into a useful, even beneficial tool, when it’s put into use by journalists themselves. the stranded relationship between surveillance and journalism traditionally, surveillance in journalism has been depicted under an orwellian aura that implies an inner negativity and malignity. given the worrisome reports (human rights council special report 2019), yearly produced from within (sanches et al. 2020) and outside academia (freedom of the net 2018) on the mounting dangers and threats that journalism faces, especially in the digital realm, this scary depiction of surveillance is still dramatically true. still, forms of surveillance practices daily occur in the exercise of journalism. journalists regularly use tools and equipment that hold immense intrusive capabilities. this surveillance capacity is bounded and regulated not just by the local and international laws in place (findlay and mckinlay 2003), but by the deontological norms of the profession as well (plaisance 2013). these deontological norms may be weakened or entirely eluded by a number of factors, including processes described by bauman as of adiaphorization, where moral obligations are defused in front of processes that detach and anesthetize the person “against the committing of immoral deeds and the sole use of criteria of instrumental efficiency in the choice of ways to proceed” (bauman and lyon 2013, pag.82). deontological considerations stem from the conceptualization of what is journalism, and what constitutes its mission. we might be tempted to take for granted that journalism acts as a watchdog on concentrations and misuse of power, ensuring the accountability of institutions in society (wahl-jorgensen et al. 2017). but journalists are to be seen as part of their society, immersed in it, and therefore not entirely immune to bias, polarisation, partisanship. outside the western journalistic tradition, the core mission of journalism may assume a different shape: to contribute to the nation-building processes by strengthening social unity and patriotism, while pluralism and freedom of the press are seen as secondary, or even damaging incumbencies (stevenson 1994). other forms of journalism exist beyond its traditional role of power’s watchdog, or reinterpreting this role in a different way: alternative journalism (atton and hamilton 2008), radical journalism (atton 2002), citizen journalism (roberts 2019) and solution journalism (mcintyre 2019) originated from new or partially new ideas of what constitutes good journalism, and what a good journalist is expected to do over the course of the job. if new forms of journalism are internally regulated by a diverse mesh of cultural and professional norms exist, how do these norms relate to surveillance practices, both from a cultural and a technological perspective? do journalists need to review their deontological guidelines for the use of surveillance technology in journalism? is there an emerging "self-absolving" approach to its use? should a debate within their community be stimulated through a bottom-up approach, and foster a new professional culture more aware of the opportunities, the dangers and the responsibilities connected to the use of such technology? methodology this paper adopts a qualitative, inductive approach through semi-structured interviews as a way to explore these questions and the journalists’ experiences both as targets and agents of surveillance practices. interviews have the advantage of being familiar to journalists, which facilitates the trust-building process. they also imply that the body of knowledge is co-produced by the interviewer and the interviewee together, thus simulating and stimulating the kind of debate that can happen between fellow journalists discussing the topic. journalists working in two countries (italy and turkey) were selected through a combination of targeted and snowball sampling techniques, two methodologies that reciprocally mitigate the foreseeable potential bias risks (heckathorn 1997). in-depth investigation received preference over representativeness of the sample. collected data, after a rigorous anonymisation procedure, were analysed through discourse, content and thematic analysis. findings show that although logics of power and issues regarding fundamental rights are very present in the journalists’ minds when dealing with threatening surveillance, the same issues tend to disappear from the discussion when it comes to the opportunistic and/or professional use of surveillance tools. a desirable deeper conceptualisation of these issues seems to be absent, or improvised only when asked about. for instance, a discourse around the right to be forgotten was not brought to the table unless explicit questions were made. journalists somehow tend to indulge in self-justification regarding the use of surveillance technology, primarily driven by the right to inform, and do not seem aware of the power-relations or lack of transparency that such technology implies. data archiving generally seems to lack standardised protocols of selection and retention. the main reasons are pure archive creation, since data can be useful for future investigations or teaching purposes, and especially protection against potential legal complaints. findings finally suggest common patterns on how journalists perceive the use of surveillance technology, outlining potential paths for self-regulatory deontological norms, produced from within the journalistic community itself. further research and debate on the issue seems desirable and necessary. references atton, c. (2002). news cultures and new social movements: radical journalism and the mainstream media. journalism studies, 3(4), 491-505. atton, c., & hamilton, j. f. (2008). alternative journalism. sage. bauman, z., & lyon, d. (2013). liquid surveillance : a conversation. john wiley & sons. findlay, p., & mckinlay, a. (2003). surveillance, electronic communications technologies and regulation. industrial relations journal, 34(4), 305-318. freedom of the net 2018 report. the rise of digital authoritarianism. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/freedom-net-2018 retrieved april 2021 heckathorn, d. d. (1997). respondent-driven sampling: a new approach to the study of hidden populations. social problems, 44(2), 174-199. janowitz, m. (1975). professional models in journalism: the gatekeeper and the advocate. journalism quarterly, 52(4), 618-626. lyon, d. (2001). surveillance society: monitoring everyday life. mcgraw-hill education (uk). mcintyre, k. (2019). solutions journalism: the effects of including solution information in news stories about social problems. journalism practice, 13(1), 16-34. plaisance, p. l. (2013). media ethics. international encyclopedia of ethics, 1-11. roberts, j. (2019). citizen journalism. the international encyclopedia of media literacy, 1-10. sanches, p., tsaknaki, v., rostami, a., & brown, b. (2020, april). under surveillance: technology practices of those monitored by the state. in proceedings of the 2020 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-13). stevenson, r. l. (1994). global communication in the twenty-first century. longman publishing group. surveillance and human rights 2019. report of the special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, human rights council, un general assembly. https://www.undocs.org/a/hrc/41/35 retrieved april 2021 wahl-jorgensen, k., hintz, a., dencik, l., & bennett, l. (2017). introduction: journalism, citizenship and surveillance. microsoft word van der nagel-interdependent platforms-interdependent platforms.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): van der nagel, e. (2021, october). interdependent platforms: onlyfans as nsfw social media layer. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. interdependent platforms: onlyfans as nsfw social media layer emily van der nagel monash university on content subscription platform onlyfans, the search function is limited. once an account is created, there are few directions about where to go. the assumption is that the user has arrived at onlyfans from another social media platform: that they already know who they want to find. this means that onlyfans functions, not as an independent platform, but one deeply conscious of a social media ecosystem in which people have accounts on multiple platforms. people have multiple stories about themselves, josé van dijck argued in 2013 when researching the differences between linkedin and facebook profiles. presenting the self on two different platforms allowed for context-specific performances of the “social” (facebook) and “professional” (linkedin) selves. since 2013, more research on accounts and platforms (including davis 2014; van der nagel 2018; vickery 2015) has demonstrated that compartmentalising identities by using a variety of social media platforms – sometimes even multiple accounts on the same platform – is a powerful strategy to combat what danah boyd (2014) calls “context collapse”. onlyfans’ tagline, “make your influence pay”, deliberately speaks to a broader culture of social media influencers as internet celebrities who have monetised their fame (abidin 2018). in a post to the onlyfans blog by staffer steve, he implores influencers to sign up. “you create great content anyway and your fans love it, so why deny yourself the chance to get paid for it?” (steve 2018). while the platform’s corporate communication emphasises a broad range of content creators, the dominant perception, or the platform imaginary, of onlyfans is a platform for women creating adult material. in researching onlyfans’ platform imaginary, i draw on karin van es and thomas poell (2020)’s work, which in turn is built on eden litt and eszter hargittai’s (2016) concept of the imagined audience, a mental guide for what people post on social media. for van es and poell (2020), a platform imaginary is how people understand, and organise themselves in relation to, platforms. these imaginaries carry underlying norms and ideologies which inform platform experiences. for example, snapchat began as “for” sending nudes, but has been reframed around notions of spontaneity and candid photos (tiidenberg & van der nagel 2020: 57). to investigate the way that onlyfans does not stand alone as an independent platform, but relies on established public presences on other platforms, i have taken a feminist content analysis approach (leavy 2007) to critically analyse memes as media texts that reflect and create social reality. i gathered 200 memes about onlyfans and found they most often inferred an expectation that onlyfans content would be posted by heterosexual women, and include adult, or not safe for work (nsfw) content. one meme sets out the platform imaginary most often drawn on by jokes and cultural references about onlyfans: a three-panel image of a white man closing his eyes in disbelief, a popular reaction image to express incredulity known as blinking white guy. the caption reads: “me when i sign up for onlyfans and see pictures of naked girls instead of ceiling fans” (cheezburger 2020), a pun on “fans” as well as ironically implying the expected content: pictures of naked girls. another meme features a photo of a young woman sitting on her couch, eyes wide in an expression of awkward surprise, as her cat bends over in front of her laptop, inadvertently exposing its anus to the camera. it’s captioned, “when you just wanna do your zoom call but your cat wants to start an onlyfans” (@ok_girlfriend 2020). as evoked in the meme, “starting an onlyfans” means beginning to sell access to specifically nsfw content. the cat’s exposed genitals stand in for what paying audiences can expect to see from content creators to whom they subscribe. platform imaginaries shape what social actors think about, and do, in relation to a platform (van es & poell 2020). they are useful because, as bucher (2018) put it, they give us ways of thinking about what these imaginations make possible. for onlyfans to suggest, through its corporate communication, that it is for influencers of all kinds implies two main strategies for this emerging platform. first, that its owners would like onyfans to be known as a broader platform than just for nsfw content creators – despite the platform imaginary that sets up an expectation of seeing nude and lewd content. second, that onlyfans is not a “home base” or core platform from which to create a profile and make connections. onlyfans does not act as an independent social media platform, but as one of many layers. references abidin, c. 2018. internet celebrity: understanding fame online. bingley: emerald. boyd, d 2014, it’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens, yale university press, new haven. bucher, t. 2018. if... then: algorithmic power and politics. new york: oxford university press. cheezburger. 2020. “top ten dank memes of the day.” cheezburger, 23 june. https://cheezburger.com/11813125/top-ten-dank-memes-of-the-day-june-23-2020 davis, j. l. 2014. “triangulating the self: identity processes in a connected era.” symbolic interaction 37 (4): 500–523. leavy, p. l. 2007. “the feminist practice of content analysis.” in feminist research practice, edited by s. n. hesse-biber and p. l. leavy, 222–248. thousand oaks: sage publications. litt, e. and e. hargittai. 2016. “the imagined audience on social network sites.” social media + society 2 (1): 1–12. doi: 10.1177/2056305116633482. @ok_girlfriend. 2020. “your cat wants to start an onlyfans.” twitter, 22 august, 3.27am. https://twitter.com/ok_girlfriend/status/1296861434610159616 steve. 2018. “the onlyfans way to make your influence pay.” onlyfans blog, 1 august. https://blog.onlyfans.com/the-onlyfans-way-to-make-your-influence-pay/ tiidenberg, k., and e. van der nagel. 2020. sex and social media. bingley: emerald. van der nagel, e. 2018. “alts and automediality: compartmentalising the self through multiple social media profiles.” m/c journal: a journal of media and culture 21 (2). doi: 10.5204/mcj.1379. van dijck, j. 2013. “‘you have one identity’: performing the self on facebook and linkedin.” media, culture & society 35 (2): 199–215. van es, k., and t. poell. 2020. “platform imaginaries and dutch public service media.” social media + society 6: 1–10. vickery, j. r. 2015 “‘i don’t have anything to hide, but … ’: the challenges and negotiations of social and mobile media privacy for non-dominant youth.” information, communication & society 18 (3): 281–294. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): bhandari, a. & bimo, s. (2023, october). algorithms, aesthetics, and the changing nature of cultural consumption online. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. algorithms, aesthetics and the changing nature of cultural consumption online sara bimo york university aparajita bhandari university of waterloo introduction this paper examines the development of digital subcultures and microtrends in a social media landscape increasingly driven by algorithms. whereas in the past people may have identified as members of subcultures such as “hippies” or “punks” (groups which were typically united by shared experiences, interests, and/or environments) (hebdige, 2012), in the modern social media landscape increasingly niche subcultures are proliferating in the form of “microtrends.” niche aesthetic movements such as the “coastal grandma,” “goblin academia,” and “chic modernist,” (aesthetics wiki, 2023) appear seemingly out of nowhere, enjoy a rapid rise in popularity, and often die out just as quickly. such trends call on users to partake in a highly specific aesthetic performances which are often tied to a particular lifestyle philosophy. while these trends often borrow elements from “real world” style movements, they are typically born entirely on the internet and are intimately shaped by the data-driven recommendation systems which have come to structure modern social media environments. whereas pre-digital subcultures spread values and aesthetic sensibilities through word-of-mouth or pre-digital media, the algorithmic recommendation systems of the web 2.0 age allow users to instantly connect with both like-minded aesthetes and similarly aligned commodities; thus, trends are both formed and propagated through the help of algorithms which connect similar data-groupings (bondy & burgess, 2021; seaver, 2019). in this project, we aim to extend scholarship on digital subcultures by examining the intersection of identity formation, algorithmic capitalism and user practices surrounding microtrends. whereas past literature has emphasized the environmental impact and labour costs of microtrends (reilly & hawley, 2019, lamm, 2022), we shift focus to instead examine this phenomenon from the perspective of user engagement and selfidentity. we are guided by three related research questions: (1) what tactics and practices constitute user participation in microtrends? (2) how does user engagement with microtrends function as an act of relational self-expression? (3) what are user discourses surrounding microtrend participation? methods we employed a qualitative mixed-methods analysis that combined visual discourse analysis and critical techno-cultural discourse analysis (ctda) (brock, 2018). we examined the content shared within the popular hashtag #aesthetic across three algorithmically driven platforms: tiktok, instagram and youtube. due to its widespread usage across platforms and trends, #aesthetic provided a useful access point through which we could examine a large variety of microtrends. visual discourse analysis was chosen as it is especially useful as a method for examining the meaning and rhetorics embedded in the circulation of visual messages (such as videos and images), which were the primary forms of content we were interrogating across platforms (rose, 2022). we paired this visual discourse analysis with a ctda which allowed for an interrogation of the material and semiotic nature of digital artifacts within the specific context of users’ offline social and cultural practices. brock (2018) defines ctda as “[an] analyses of information technology material and virtual design with an inquiry into the production of meaning through information technology practice and the articulations of information technology users in situ.” (brock, 2018, p. 2). ctda highlights the power relations embedded in technological artifacts, allowing for the in-depth examination of the relationships between technology, culture, and user practices. by combining these two methods we were able to analyze both the visual and textual content shared within the hashtag #aesthetic, paying attention both to the visual messaging and the broader platform infrastructures in addition to audience engagements and interactions. findings and analysis aesthetic consistency. we found that the visual style of posts belonging to a particular microtrend was remarkably consistent; microtrends appeared to be largely understood (and reproduced by users) as a set of recurrent symbolic markers and motifs. posts tended to contain a discrete set of common elements which were then described through hashtags. for instance, the “coastal grandmother” aesthetic features creamhued linen, hamptons-esque scenery, and woven sun hats as its hallmarks. this suggests that existing microtrend categories are relatively inflexible and standardized. users appeared to be largely aware of the particular motifs that characterize a particular aesthetic and were unlikely to experiment within a given trend. the specificity of these trends was somewhat at odds with their affective intentions. for example, popular trends such as the “clean girl aesthetic,” and the “coconut girl aesthetic” displayed a tension between the formulaic nature of user participation and the ideals of effortlessness and ephemerality that were promoted by the trend. aesthetic anxiety. users displayed anxiety over matters of categorization and identification. user discourses surrounding microtrend participation indicated that they are invested in “correctly” ascribing and associating with microtrends. for example, users often policed the boundaries of a given trend, arguing over what the hallmarks of the aesthetic were and debating whether a given post fit into the tagged aesthetic well enough. in the case of “boundary” content–that is, content that attempted to align with a particular micro trend, but in some way departed from the norm–users would often identify the content as an entirely new aesthetic rather than allow for an existing trend to develop and mutate. in addition, users frequently responded to more ambiguous posts by asking questions such as “what aesthetic is this?” and “how do you get this aesthetic?” these common refrains revealed a preoccupation with categorizing content according to a pre-set identifier, rather than accepting ambiguity. aesthetic creation. users were often actively involved in the creation of new microtrends, often based on particular elements of their own identities. this creative process often involved the abstraction of a particular element of their behaviors or personalities; for instance, one user attempted to start a “museum girl” trend which aestheticized their own penchant for visiting museums via the fragmentation of this experience into a set of discrete markers (such as framed oil paintings, sketch pads, and exterior shots of aesthetically pleasing buildings). such posts are often meticulously tagged and indicate that users have a high degree of expertise in both the aesthetic and technical logics of microtrend construction. users do not simply wish to create a new trend–they also aim to make the trend highly visible. users furnish recommendation algorithms with easily identifiable and marketable aesthetic markers and make posts easy to share and recommend to others via accurate tagging. discussion when brought into dialogue with the underlying processes of data-fication and abstraction that structure social media environments, these user practices demonstrate a fascinating reflection of algorithmic techno-logics in human behavior. just as algorithmic architectures abstract and discretize human behavior into data-elements, users appear to be discretizing their own behaviors and identities through their participation in microtrends. we theorize these user practices (the flattening of lifestyles into discrete aesthetic markers, the preoccupation with categorizing and organizing, and the fragmentation of identity into easily packaged trends) as an emergent process of “self-discretization,” wherein users “do the work” of abstracting and fragmenting their identities for the sake of attaining visibility within a data-fied digital environment. in this way, humans internalize not just the messaging, but also the logics of algorithmic capitalism. references kaye, b. & burgess, j. (2021) algorithmic recommender systems and everyday data cultures: the view from jazz tiktok. in selected papers in internet research 2021: research from the annual conference of the association of internet researchers. aoir association of internet researchers, united states of america brock, a. (2018). critical technocultural discourse analysis. new media & society, 20(3), 1012-1030. hebdige, d. (2012). subculture: the meaning of style. routledge. lamm, a. (2022). you need this: global fast fashion, environment, and consumption culture. reilly, a., & hawley, j. (2019). attention deficit fashion. fashion, style & popular culture, 6(1), 85-98. rose, g. (2022). visual methodologies: an introduction to researching with visual materials. visual methodologies, 1-100. seaver, n. (2019). captivating algorithms: recommender systems as traps. journal of material culture, 24(4), 421-436. list of aesthetics. aesthetics wiki. (n.d.). retrieved february 2, 2023, from https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/list_of_aesthetics selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): ma, c. (2022, november). thinking for themselves: examining the reactionary right’s bootstraps epistemology. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. thinking for themselves: examining the reactionary right’s bootstraps epistemology cindy ma oxford internet institute, university of oxford introduction in recent years, popular interest in disinformation has coalesced around a series of high-profile events: the brexit referendum, the election of donald trump, and more recently, the protests against vaccine mandates. even as “hypodermic needle” theory has been widely discredited within the social sciences, journalistic and scholarly investigations into these events have favoured simplistic models of media effects wherein conservative audiences are framed as passive recipients of propaganda, influenced by foreign agents and opportunistic tricksters to act against their own interests. this model of disinformation has been increasingly challenged by qualitative scholarship showing that conservatives are active agents in their media consumption who, at least in the us context, are more likely than liberals to visit diverse sources of news and information (schradie, 2019; tripodi, 2017). this paper offers a new way of conceptualizing right-wing approaches to truth and knowledge, based on over two years of online fieldwork (2019-2021) into reactionary1 youtube channels and their audiences. i use qualitative content analysis to examine over 100 hours of youtube videos, 1050 youtube comments, and online interviews with 18 current and former fans of these channels. drawing on these data sources, i introduce the concept of bootstraps epistemology to capture how reactionary influencers and their audiences speak about their political beliefs. bootstraps epistemology in this paper, i argue that the reactionary right’s emphasis on “rugged individualism” forms the basis not just of their political project but also of their imagined epistemology. throughout my fieldwork, i found that reactionary youtubers and their viewers described arriving at their political beliefs as a highly idiosyncratic process of personal 1 i use “reactionary” as the primary descriptor of my study’s subjects as it captures how popular right-wing youtubers are typically reactive: that is, working against the “woke” mob, social justice warriors, and the liberal establishment (including the mainstream media, democrats, and academia). research and rational deliberation. i call this narrative of political formation bootstraps epistemology. just as the bootstraps narrative in politics argues that individuals have the duty to reject government “handouts” and improve their circumstances through hard work and thrift, bootstraps epistemology encourages people to reject dogma and instead pursue knowledge through solitary study and intellectual combat with opponents. i propose that the bootstraps narrative of personal responsibility and bootstraps epistemology are mutually-enforcing discourses that advance individualistic solutions to social problems. i find that the latter has gained currency in recent years, with the widespread loss of trust in mainstream media (berry & sobieraj, 2014) and the proliferation of “alternative” sources of online news and information. the concept of bootstraps epistemology builds upon the work of critical race scholars who have complicated our understanding of enlightenment values, such as rationality, objectivity, and neutrality. in toward a global idea of race, ferreira da silva (2007) argues that racial logics are inextricable from early modern western philosophy, which centred “reason” as the locus of human endeavours. this worldview elevated the white european subject as transparent—possessing agency, interiority, and reason—while europe’s various “others” are always affectable—subject to the forces of nature. in my research, i find that reactionary youtubers embrace the legacy of the transparent subject, painting themselves as eminently rational while disparaging their political opponents as emotional, hyper-sensitive, and hysterical. thus, bootstraps epistemology cannot be separated from broader social hierarchies that mediate whose voices are imbued with “reason,” and whose are not. reactionary youtubers & their audiences within the current media landscape, there are no louder advocates for bootstraps epistemology than political influencers who create content for online platforms (lewis, 2018). these influencers benefit from the popularization of bootstraps epistemology because it engenders distrust of institutional voices while pushing people to “do their own research” on sites like youtube. my interview respondents closely echoed the language of reactionary influencers in expressing their wariness of mainstream media, while invoking the independent, non-institutional status of youtubers as a sign of integrity and trustworthiness. while this skeptical orientation towards mainstream media echoes tripodi’s (2017) concept of scriptural inference2, i found this approach to information-seeking across a wide range of respondents, not just christians. in fact, many of my respondents identified proudly as atheists, which suggests the widespread adoption of these practices beyond us-based evangelicals. just as reactionary youtubers place themselves outside of institutions, many also place themselves outside of ideology. this framing was eagerly taken up by interview respondents—across age groups and geographies—who eschewed political labels, parties, and movements in favour of the rational self as the purest, least corruptible, 2 tripodi’s (2017) ethnographic work with conservatives in the us southeast found that right-wing news readers and viewers engage in the practice of scriptural inference: that is, using christian “theological teachings to unpack texts like the constitution or other forms of media” (p.18). tools of scriptural inference include close reading, re-visiting founding documents, and tracing news stories back to primary sources. source of political belief. this finding was particularly striking given that almost all of these individuals held the same set of “idiosyncratic” (libertarian) political beliefs: rejection of progressive orthodoxy, reverence for individual freedoms and freedom of speech in particular, and a self-avowed openness to “different ways of life3.” although my respondents and the youtubers they admire may take pride in their openmindedness, only certain kinds of “evidence” are considered legitimate under bootstraps epistemology. for right-wing influencers, reason comes with a particular brand aesthetic that involves “destroying” liberals in debate settings, a confident and aggressive disposition, and the rapid-fire deployment of supporting evidence such as statistics and news headlines (hong, 2020). within this discursive community, the lived experiences of marginalized people are routinely dismissed as biased and self-serving, whereas pseudoscience and conspiracy theories peddled by white men hold sway if delivered in the correct manner. implications ultimately, bootstraps epistemology is highly compatible with white supremacist ideology, which hinges upon the figure of the transparent white subject who alone can employ reason to order, explain, and rank his various “others,” human and non-human (ferreira da silva, 2007). under this epistemology, harmful reactionary narratives quickly calcify, as individuals interpret progressive arguments as ill-informed dogma while insisting that their own views stem not from outside influence but from their own unimpeachable reasoning. i believe the concept of bootstraps epistemology—and increased attention to the epistemological underpinnings of white supremacist beliefs more generally—can help scholars and activists to better understand the problem of disinformation and better target their interventions. references berry, j. & sobieraj, s. (2014). the outrage industry: political opinion media and the new incivility. new york: oxford university press. ferreira da silva, d. (2007). toward a global idea of race. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. hong, s. (2020). “‘fuck your feelings’: the affective weaponization of facts and reason.” in boler, m., & davis, e. affective politics of digital media: propaganda by other means (1st ed.). london: routledge. schradie, j. (2019). the revolution that wasn't: how digital activism favors conservatives. cambridge, massachusetts: harvard university press. 3 my respondents ranged in their outlook on social issues, but many emphasized an openness to drug legalization or same-sex marriage as a sign of their tolerant attitudes. lewis, r. (2018). alternative influence: broadcasting the reactionary right on youtube. data & society. retrieved from: https://datasociety.net/output/alternativeinfluence/ tripodi, f. (2017). searching for alternative facts: analyzing scriptural inference in conservative news practices. data & society. retrieved from: https://datasociety.net/library/searching-for-alternative-facts/ microsoft word aoir_performing death and trauma_fullabstract.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): divon, t, & ebbrecht-hartmann, t. (2022, november). performing death and trauma? participatory mem(e)ory and the holocaust in tiktok #povchallenges. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. performing death and trauma? participatory mem(e)ory and the holocaust in tiktok #povchallenges tom divon the hebrew university of jerusalem tobias ebbrecht-hartmann the hebrew university of jerusalem introduction tiktok is no longer the short-video platform for “silly dances.” its transition from entertainment to an interest-based platform increased the visual volume of topics like politics, sexuality, identity, and history, enabled by the platform’s rich set of vernaculars that encourage young users’ participation in various socio-political activities (see literat and kligler-vilenchik, 2019; hautea et al., 2021; abidin and zeng, 2021). within this context, the memory of the holocaust had gained specific attention, especially during august 2020 when a controversial meme-trend emerged under the hashtag #povholocaustchallenge, quickly accumulating 895.1 million views. in this challenge, creators (aka “tiktokers”) were encouraged to participate in a point-of-view (pov) performance in which they reenacted fictionalized memories of holocaust victims. this memetic trend generated a public outcry calling it “trauma porn,” which motivated us to look beyond the voice of criticism and explore the culture of tiktok’s aesthetics (pov) and trends (#challenges) as performative engagements that enable users’ (re)mediation of knowledge on past events and afford them to facilitate personal connections to the memory of the holocaust via video-memes. memes, memory and #povchallenge this paper unpacks and contributes to the existing body of research about memes, practices of digital remembrance, and tiktok’s participatory culture. memes on tiktok are complex multimodal structures of content often contextualized in the culture of challenges (klug, 2020). challenges focus on users’ gamified participation in social media, motivating content creation via a collaborative play-based task governed by a set of performative rules (text, sound, and movement). challenges invite users to engage in the mimetic reproduction of popular content trends (zulli and zulli, 2020). the intensity of imitative content on tiktok increases challenges’ frequency, and rewards users with exposure on the platform’s individually-curated “for you page” (fyp), where most virality on the platform occurs. this study draws attention to the understudied and unique nature of the pov aesthetic on tiktok, especially via pov challenges as a series of fictional memes that mediate users’ self-reflections on various personal and collective issues. memes related to historical events tend to stir affective reactions, increase engagement with the issues referred to, and articulate emotional attachments to past atrocities or collective traumas (makhortykh, 2015; trillò and shifman, 2021). we argue that this is especially true when combining the creative participatory nature of challenges with the empathetic bent of the pov aesthetic, and thus this subset of memes is crucial to challenging rigid discussions of holocaust memory online representation. methods in an attempt to make this work a useful explanatory analysis to profoundly understand young creators’ performative engagements with the past, a set of multilayered questions is used. focusing on the platform, we ask (q1) how does intensified adoption of the platform’s memetic vernaculars in the #povholocaustchallenge enables tiktokers to “play” with holocaust remembrance. focusing on the participatory culture of tiktok, we ask (q2) what motivated tiktokers to initiate and respond to #povholocaustchallenge? finally, with a focus on the educational horizon, (q3) we ask to what extent does the #povholocaustchallenge foster an empathetic dialogue about the holocaust? the study was conducted as follows: (1) multimodal thematic analysis of 250 videos manually scraped from the trending #povholocaustchallenge between august 20-28, 2020. (2) fifteen semi-structured in-depth interviews with tiktok users (ages 18-23) who participated in the challenge to learn about their motivations and illuminate their creative choices. (3) five semi-structured in-depth interviews with educators from holocaust institutions to understand the platform’s potential in enabling, encouraging, and mobilizing users’ curiosity about the memory of the holocaust. we developed a codebook informed by grounded theory (glaser and strauss, 2017), and a coding framework inspired by zeng and abidin’s (2021) considerations of tiktok “meme categorization.” we analyzed our sample according to what we see as “memetic structure,” tracing the use of the platform’s vernacular by means of sound, visual, and performative elements, as well as users’ interplay with memory narratives of the holocaust. we focused on embodied communicative forms like spoken and written language, still and moving images (videos), sound, body posture, and use of space (jewitt, 2014), and multifaceted modes of communication like metalinguistics (emojis), hypertextuality (hashtags), temporality (looping), and technical choices (editing tools). findings the multimodal analysis illuminates three imaginative narratives in users’ (re)mediations of memories that resulted in a series of memetic pov structures, which we call mem(e)ories. testimonial (n=83). this mem(e)ory structure shows mini “conversations” happening in heaven as tiktokers welcome the viewers to observe a dialogue with an imagined other that asks how they ended up in heaven “so young.” given their testimony, in response, they tell the story of an anonymous victim using visceral memory work composed of a combination of historical facts and imagined fragmented narratives (e.g., “i was sent to the gas chamber”), covered with heavy makeup (figure 1). figure 1: author screenshots of examples of testimonial mem(e)ories. punitive mem(e)ory (n=80). this mem(e)ory structure shows tiktokers playing prisoners who are “chained” in the present (2020) and being sent back to tragic events as punishment for their crimes. the video starts with a caption saying, “this one was sent to the holocaust,” while the tiktoker, with the help of the green-screen feature, manipulates a transformation from the present into a holocaust-related setting like a concentration camps or ghetto (figure 2). figure 2: author screenshots of examples of punitive mem(e)ories. escapist mem(e)ory (n=87). this mem(e)ory structure shows tiktokers’ use of the platform’s popular narrative of time traveling as they merge the 1940 with and 2020 in a complex temporal interplay with the viewers. tiktokers, acting as victims, get the chance for a momentary escape from their horrifying present of the holocaust (the viewers’ past) by going to an imagined future (the viewers’ present), but eventually are sent back to find their tragic death (figure 3). figure 3: author screenshots of examples of escapist mem(e)ories. in all three mem(e)ories, tiktokers carefully alter their environment to sustain an “authentic” experience of the victim’s story re-enactment. they utilize the platform’s features (like green screen) to convey aesthetics that relate to holocaust memories, such as using holocaust-related symbols (artifacts, customs, makeup, historical images, etc.), wearing ragged clothes (like concentration camp uniforms with yellow stars), and using makeup mimicking cuts, bruises, exhaustion, and malnourishment. interviews with tiktokers raised intriguing motivations and production decisions in their #povholocaustchallenge mem(e)ories: (1) tiktokers expressed the sense of importance they felt when engaging with topics like the holocaust in a “superficial environment” like tiktok; (2) tiktokers emphasized the significance of the pov as an aesthetic that enables creativity and empathetic interpretation; (3) tiktokers mentioned the topic's relevance as they compared feelings of victimization to their covid-19 reality and their attempts to combat tiktok’s toxic environment of holocaust denial. interviews with the representatives of holocaust-related institutions emphasized the platform’s memetic momentum and access to new audiences. three thematic ideas were raised: (1) holocaust-related challenges on tiktok as a hook for gen-z attention; (2) the #povholocaustchallenge as a commemorative act that can foster historical empathy; (3) tiktok as a space for institutionalized holocaust education and an opportunity for remodeling traditional learning concepts. conclusion unlike common beliefs that social media of collective remembrance are often embedded in rigid traditional institutional power structures of memory (kansteiner, 2017), the platform’s plural and memetic nature illustrate tiktok’s potential in holocaust education and commemoration. findings show that tiktok’s culture of #povchallenges fosters complex dialogic modes of digital witnessing of the past, corresponding with van alphen’s (2001, p. 69) speculation about whether “there is a place for ‘playing the holocaust’ in holocaust remembrance.” the diverse pov aesthetics can beneficially influence users’ empathy as they can imagine, relate to, and share the emotions of others (vossen & valkenburg, 2016). this quality of the #povholocaustchallenge enabled tiktokers to empathetically “play” with the memory of the holocaust by using audiovisual memes as vehicles for victim perspectives. inserting holocaust victims into the contemporary digital ecology of tiktok is a gesture that embodies the seemingly insurmountable tension that surrounds holocaust memorial culture. however, concluding from the interviews with the creators and education practitioners, it seems that the platform’s infrastructural dissemination of holocaustrelated memories enables opportunities for creating historical empathy and consciousness-raising among younger generations. when provided with the educational context, holocaust institutions on tiktok can spark conversation, interpretation, and reflection among youth reacting to and participating in the creation of user-generated content related to the holocaust, an outcome hopefully following from this work. the #povholocaustchallenge invites the inscription of holocaust memory and other past atrocities into gen-z's (social media) lives. references glaser, b. g., & strauss, a. l. (2017). the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. routledge. hautea, s., parks, p., takahashi, b., & zeng, j. (2021). showing they care (or don’t): affective publics and ambivalent climate activism on tiktok. social media + society. jewitt, c. (2014). multimodal approaches. in interactions, images, and texts: a reader in multimodality (pp. 127-136). de gruyter mouton. klug, d. (2020). “it took me almost 30 minutes to practice this”: performance and production practices in dance challenge videos on tiktok. arxiv preprint, arxiv:2008.13040. kansteiner, w. (2017). transnational holocaust memory, digital culture and end of reception studies. in s. andersen & b. tȍrnquist-plewa (eds.), the twentieth century in european memory: transcultural mediation and reception (pp. 30–34). brill. literat, i., & kligler-vilenchik, n. (2019). youth collective political expression on social media: the role of affordances and memetic dimensions for political views, new media & society, 21, (9), pp. 1988-2009. makhortykh, m. y. k. o. l. a. (2015). everything for the lulz: historical memes and world war ii memory on lurkomor’e. digital icons: studies in russian, eurasian and central european new media, 13, 63-90. trillò, t., & shifman, l. (2021). memetic commemorations: remixing far-right values in digital spheres. information, communication & society, 24(16), 2482-2501. van alphen, e. (2001). playing the holocaust. in n. l. kleeblatt (ed.), mirroring evil: nazi imagery/recent art (pp. 65–85). rutgers university press. vossen, h. g., & valkenburg, p. m. (2016). do social media foster or curtail adolescents’ empathy? a longitudinal study. computers in human behavior, 63, 118-124. zeng, j. & abidin, c. (2021) ‘#okboomer, time to meet the zoomers’: studying the memeification of intergenerational politics on tiktok, information, communication & society. zulli, d., & zulli, d. j. (2020). extending the internet meme: conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation publics on the tiktok platform. new media & society. advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820983603 microsoft word kermani-how a connective action is disrupted in restrictive contexts the case-how a connective action is.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): kermani, h., hooman, n. (2021, october). how a connective action is disrupted in restrictive contexts? the case of dismantling #rape on persian twitter. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. how a connective action is disrupted in restrictive contexts? the case of dismantling #rape on persian twitter hossein kermani university of vienna niloofar hooman mcmaster university introduction having reduced the cost of political activism, social media has provided room for ordinary citizens to engage in politics, build networks, spread information, and resist oppressive regulation (howard and hussain, 2013; margetts et al., 2016). in particular, feminist activists and other ordinary women were keen to find the discursive power of twitter hashtags in shaping movements to raise their voice against gender inequality and sexual harassment (clark, 2016). the phenomenon which is referred to as hashtag feminism in scholarly literature is rooted in the idea of hashtag activism; a discursive practice by which minor and peripheral groups use twitter to challenge any form of systematic violence and inequality (linabary et al., 2020; xiong et al., 2019). nonetheless, hashtag activism could encounter many challenges in non-democratic societies which is less probable in western democracies. the state and other forces probably try to suppress online protests, including hashtag activism, to prevent them from threatening the dominant discourses. the hashtag feminism literature has relatively failed to investigate this extent as most researches have focused on discursive power of hashtags in changing injustice relations and criticizing social and cultural inequalities (jackson et al., 2020; mendes et al., 2018; xiong et al., 2019). as a result, the mechanisms of dismantling feminist hashtags, as a significant limitation of this new phenomenon, have not yet been studied to a satisfying level. it is of more significant to study such strategies in restrictive contexts since interrupting women digital practices could deprive them from the merely only space to share their uncensored experiences of rape and harassment. this study sheds light on such disruptive processes by investigating how and by who a connective action in the iranian twittersphere (revolving around #rape1, i.e., iranian #metoo) was derailed. method our empirical analyses focus on a dataset of 249292 tweets (containing the #rape hashtag or keyword in farsi) gathered during the #rape movement from august 6, 2020 to october 6, 2020. three years after embarking #metoo in united states, iranian users joined the global wave of fighting gender and sexual violence by articulating #rape as a connective action. #rape was emerged as one of the first examples of hashtag activism on persian twitter which aimed to challenge socio-cultural gender and sexual inequalities and structures. having collected data, we removed duplications, and non-farsi tweets (e.g., arabic tweets as the writing of rape (tajavoz) is identical in persian and arabic). then, we extracted the top 20 most retweeted tweets per day (1200 tweets total). retweet (rt) is considered as a sign of acceptance and publicity in social media (nahon et al., 2013). thus, the most retweeted tweets probably provide us with the most popular messages on twitter (bruns and stieglitz, 2013; jungherr, 2015). following the thematic analysis method proposed by braun and clarke (braun and clarke, 2006), we thematically and iteratively coded the most rt tweets to identify themes that reflect mechanisms through which users’ generic meaning-making is disrupted. results our findings showed that the tweets which directly tried to disrupt the movement rarely raised to prominence. therefore, we identified such mechanisms based on the most rt tweets, those mainly criticized the disruptive practices. it also shows that disruptive tweets gained less attention than building tweets. therefore, #rape was not disrupted significantly, and active users in developing it were more successful than who wanted to dismantle this hashtag activism. we identified several tactics which have been documented by previous researches: circulating coordinated hashtags and disinformation, disseminating fake stories, mainstream media’s support of rapers, attacking activists (including hate speech and trolling). two context-specific mechanisms have also been emerged: threatening victims in real world, and reporting/revealing anonymous accounts. furthermore, findings revealed that the state and pro-regime users were not the only forces in dismantling the movement. anti-regime groups and figures also attempted to make disruptions. from a different perspective than pro-regime users, anti-regime camps (such as monarchists and mojahedin-e-khalgh) circulated coordinated hashtags to derail the flow of #rape tweets, arguing that this movement is a distraction to their attempts in destabilizing the regime. 1 in farsi: زواجت furthermore, active users in #rape were under attacked and criticized by some intellectuals and anti-regime figures. there were many names of members of so-called iran’s intellectual community among predators. that is probably the reason such figures try to discredit activists by challenging their honesty and reliability. this finding also showed that the rape culture is not just entrenched by the state. people who are politically against the regime also underpin the misogyny and anti-women norms. conclusion this paper sheds more light on the ways by which a feminist hashtag was disrupted in non-democratic societies. while several practices which have been employed to disrupt #rape have been well documented in previous studies, new strategies were also emerged which are more contingent to iranian contexts. in other words, our findings show that disruptive practices are more or less same in different contexts. however, the differences lie in the context-specific strategies have been taken to interrupt hashtag movements. we argue that digital repression literature in authoritarian regimes, particularly in feminist movements, should extend its horizon to other forces than pro-regime users. opposition camps could be worked with the state to dismantle women movements in raising their voice against rape culture due to their mutual interests. in other words, rape culture is supported by dominant discourses, but intellectuals also reinforce it due to their personal benefits and power. references braun v and clarke v (2006) using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology 3(2): 77–101. doi: 10.1191/1478088706qp063oa. bruns a and stieglitz s (2013) towards more systematic twitter analysis: metrics for tweeting activities. international journal of social research methodology 16(2): 91– 108. doi: 10.1080/13645579.2012.756095. clark r (2016) “hope in a hashtag”: the discursive activism of #whyistayed. feminist media studies 16(5): 788–804. doi: 10.1080/14680777.2016.1138235. howard pn and hussain mm (2013) democracy’s fourth wave? digital media and the arab spring. new york: oxford university press. jackson sj, bailey m and foucault welles b (2020) #hashtagactivism: networks of race and gender justice. london, england: the mit press. doi: 10.7551/mitpress/10858.001.0001. jungherr a (2015) analyzing political communication with digital trace data. springer. linabary jr, corple dj and cooky c (2020) feminist activism in digital space: postfeminist contradictions in #whyistayed. new media and society 22(10): 1827– 1848. doi: 10.1177/1461444819884635. margetts h, john, p. hs and yasseri t (2016) political turbulence: how social media shape collective action. princeton, nj: princeton university press. mendes k, ringrose j and keller j (2018) #metoo and the promise and pitfalls of challenging rape culture through digital feminist activism. european journal of women’s studies 25(2): 236–246. doi: 10.1177/1350506818765318. nahon k, hemsley jj, mason rm, et al. (2013) information flows in events of political unrest. in: 2013. xiong y, cho m and boatwright b (2019) hashtag activism and message frames among social movement organizations: semantic network analysis and thematic analysis of twitter during the #metoo movement. public relations review 45(1). doi: 10.1016/j.pubrev.2018.10.014. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): bhandari, a., bimo, s., noone, r., butkowski,c. (2022, november). what does the internet sound like? panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. what does the internet sound like? aparajita bhandari cornell university sara bimo york university rebecca noone university college london chelsea p. butkowski university of pennsylvania when it comes to the study of digital phenomena, the visual constitutes a privileged mode of analysis, as seen by the ample and storied scholarship on visual media and visually based methods. this hegemony of the visual is an issue that has been raised by sound studies scholars, who have called for an increase in multi-sensory modes of inquiry in order to disrupt the dominance of vision-based ways of knowing. while there is a growing body of scholarship focused on the analysis of sonic media, there remains relatively little meaningful collaboration between internet studies and sound studies. this panel aims to utilize method as an entry point through which to bring together sound studies and internet studies. the goal is not to investigate sound in of itself; rather it is to think about reorienting internet studies questions around sound as a way to develop more robust, less hierarchical, and more embodied research methodologies for the analysis of wider internet phenomena. the papers within this panel are organized around a deceptively simple provocation which was posed to each of the contributing authors: how can sound be used methodologically in order to expand and deepen our understanding of the internet? the panelists each address this question through a variety of different approaches. in their analysis of sound and their incorporation of sound in their methods for studying internet phenomena, each of the papers illuminate the emancipatory and revolutionary potential of sound as a methodology while reflexively engaging with the connections between sound and larger patterns of hegemonic power. the first paper in this panel, entitled “voice from nowhere: deep listening to data,” introduces the concept of deep listening as a feminist analytical method for “tuning-in” to the persistent hegemonic structures that underly digitally mapping technology. by building upon the question “what does data sound like?” the author explores the potential for sound to unveil the deeply embedded racist, classist, and colonial data structures that underlie maps data; structures that, when experienced only visually, go unnoticed and un-interrogated. in a similar vein, the second paper, “the ‘sonic interface’: sound as a mediator of internet experience” deploys sound-based epistemologies as a way to break free from the often hierarchical power-dynamics introduced by vision-based ways of knowing and being. this paper puts forth the concept of “the sonic interface” as a means to conceptualize the role that sound plays in mediating everyday internet experience, and argues that understanding the internet as a sonic, rather than purely visual experience allows for a more embodied and affective relationship between humans and machines. drawing from work on alternative text practices and critical disability studies, the third paper in this panel, entitled “utilizing participatory arts-based research to understand online experiences through screen readers and alt-text,” proposes the use of participatory arts based methods as a reflexive and critical framework through which researchers can begin to “listen” to alternative internet narratives while centering the voices of communities rather than researchers. the final paper of this panel, entitled “what a memory sounds like: studying the sonic and silent memory work of tiktok sounds,” probes the intersection between memory and sound on tiktok. through an examination of three configurations of collective sounds and silences on the platform, this paper posits methodological considerations through which sound and memory can be examined on tiktok, and demonstrates the importance of incorporating sound-based methods in the study of social media phenomena. through interrogations of sound (and silence) as a method through which to examine the contours of the internet this panel makes both theoretical and empirical contributions to the fields of sound studies, critical internet studies and digital research methodologies. rather than proposing a singular methodology for dealing with and incorporating sound in internet studies, this panel instead seeks to draw from sound studies in order to supplement, extend, and reinvigorate existing approaches to internet phenomena. the varied entry points through which each of the panelists chose to delve into entanglements of the sonic and the digital highlight the rich and generative imaginative potential of centering sound and the sonic within our interrogations of the online and the digital. voice from nowhere: deep listening to data rebecca noone university college london introduction what does data sound like? at times, data can seem quiet and invisible (parks, 2015; starosielski, 2015)— nested into cloud databases or discreetly stitched in algorithms. at other times, data is loud, with data centres emitting grating whirs and incessant hums (garber, 2014; hogan, 2015). devices such as amazon’s alexa and google home make quiet data audible. these everyday technologies of data sonification represent and communicate data through sounds (thulin, 2018)– a verbal language as well as blips and bings that signify ‘listening’ and ‘thinking’. in this paper, i narrow in on a similar technology: google maps’ voice navigation software. the software activates spoken turn-by-turn instructions of how to get from point a to point b. google maps’ auditory direction-giving enunciates ordinary cues and commands rendered through project ground truth— the name google gives to its global mapping project (graham & dittus, 2022). i argue that the sonification of google maps data reveals discriminatory logics that might not otherwise be perceptible in the maps’ visual and textual forms. in this paper, i introduce the concept of deep listening as a feminist analytical method of tuning-in to the map’s persistent hegemonic structures. i present a framework for deep listening and showcase examples and provocations of deep listening in practice. framework the critique of map data has often focussed on the maps’ regimes of visibility, reflected in haraway’s (1988) critique of maps as a “a conquering gaze from nowhere”. haraway argues that the gaze enforced through the map, cloaked in an allure of objectivity, “signifies the unmarked positions of man and white” (p.581). consequently, the technology of the map fails to address the subjective and situated experiences of space, amplifying entitled masculinity and whiteness as a dominant paradigm for seeing and being in the world. the sonification of map data, rendered through google maps’ voice navigation software, translates haraway’s “gaze from nowhere” to what i am calling “the voice from nowhere” while enforcing the same hegemonic paradigm. deep listening is a means to critically analyze google map’s spatial regimes presented through the sonification of its data. i situate a deep listening to “the voice from nowhere” as an affective and sensorial method of critique. deep listening has historically been a practice tied to mindful pedagogy (berila, 2015) that pairs personal reflection with compassion discussion. in the context of a feminist media studies practice, i situate deep listening in conversation transfeminist queer methods of heavy processing (lapp, 2020; rault & cowan, 2020). rault and cowan situate heavy processing as a means to reckon with the messiness and dirtiness of data, giving you “the information you need to see what is wrong with the questions you were asking to being with.” deep listening to google maps is not an act of compassion for google maps’ audible data but rather a means to listen beyond the map’s database to the structures and systems these spatial commands enunciate and reinforce. deep listening in practice to help animate the deep listening method, i turn to an example that inspires this approach. in race after technology, benjamin (2019) points to a tweet by princeton scholar allison bland, in which bland calls out google maps’ voice navigation system. according to her tweet, the navigation system instructed bland to “turn right on malcolm ten boulevard” instead of “turn right on malcolm x boulevard” – an interpretation of the x in malcolm x to be the roman numeral ten instead the name of a black liberation leader. the rest of the tweet reads: “and i knew there were no black engineers working there.” google maps’ spatial command replaces a historical figure, displaces the significance of the x in malcolm x, and erases the territory where malcom x is situated. it reveals the pervasive whiteness encoded in google maps’ claims to accurate geographic information. benjamin argues that this error is more than just a fleeting moment but reflective of racist harms that are “an enduring and constitutive feature of social life” (p. 80). google’s data processes are revealed in google’s sonification of data, what might otherwise have been lost in a textual reading of the directional data. from this example, i build on practices of deep listening to the masculinists narrations of space rendered through google’s map maker tool and the colonial pronouncements of google maps’ plus codes program. contributions approaching data through sound harnesses the affective, embodied and sensorial processes of data criticism. the paper offers deep listening as a feminist method of analysis in critical internet studies as a means to tune into data’s discriminatory logics woven into everyday information encounters and find new forms of evidence of discriminatory design. references benjamin, r. (2019). race after technology. polity press. berila, beth. 2015. integrating mindfulness into anti-oppression pedagogy: social justice in higher education. routledge. garber, m. (2014, may 5). what does the internet sound like? the atlantic. retrieved from: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/what-the-cloudsounds-like/361728/ graham, m. & dittus, m. (2022). data and inequality: geographies of digital exclusion. pluto press. haraway, d. (1988). situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective, feminist studies, 14(3), pp. 575-599. hogan, m. (2015). data flows and water woes: the utah data center. big data & society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951715592429 lapp, j.m. (2020). the provenance of protest: conceptualizing records creation in archives of feminist materials. available from proquest dissertations & theses global. retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/provenanceprotest conceptualizing-records/docview/2466327785/se-2?accountid=14511 parks, l. (2015). ‘stuff you can kick’: toward a theory of media infrastructures. between humanities and the digital, patrick svensson and david theo goldberg (eds), mit press, 355-373. rault, j. and t.l. cowan (2020). heavy processing part i – lesbian processing. digital research ethics collaboratory. http://www.drecollab.org/heavy-processing/ starosielski, n. (2015). the undersea network. duke university press. thulin, samuel (2018) sound maps matter: expanding cartophony, social & cultural geography, 19(2), 192-210, doi: 10.1080/14649365.2016.1266028 the “sonic interface”: sound as a mediator of internet experience sara bimo york university introduction through what modes do we experience the internet? what are the elements that structure and guide our online experiences? as evidenced by the breadth of scholarly work on graphic interface design and by the focus on image and text in the fields of media studies and internet studies (kittler, 2010), it is apparent that visual content is widely considered the building block of the digital interface, and as such is seen as the primary medium through which users may become entangled with the entity that we call the world wide web. the privileged position of the visual mode all too often goes unquestioned in scholarship that analyzes internet phenomena, which, through the deployment of largely visuallyoriented methods such as content analysis, often struggles to rigorously incorporate other forms of sensory experience (pearce et al., 2018). in this project, i provide an intervention into this “hegemony of the visual” through an exploratory conceptualization of what i term “the sonic interface,” a concept which aims to re-orient scholarly analyses of interface in order to specifically focus on the sonic elements that mediate and shape user entanglements with the web. such elements include the sounds that are intentionally created by designers to enhance screen-based interaction, such as ear-cons (abstract sounds that accompany certain events, such as the beeping of a text alert) and auditory icons (common sounds associated with certain computer interactions, such as the crushing of paper when moving files to the recycling bin) (franinovic & serafin, 2013). however, the sonic interface also extends beyond these intentionally designed sounds in order to account for the myriad of sonic elements that otherwise mediate internet usage, such as the click of keyboard keys, the whirring of computer fans, the noises of dial-up, the grumbling stomach sounds of a desk-bound student working late into the night, or even the absolute silence of a well-insulated office. in this project, i address three central research questions. firstly, what are the components of the sonic interface, and how might they vary across contexts and times? secondly, how does sound mediate, guide, and structure user experience online? thirdly, how can the concept of the sonic interface be employed methodologically in order to study wider internet phenomena? background the impetus behind this project emerges from scholarship that unpacks the violence implicit in the western preoccupation with vision as the central mode of perception (jay, 2008). as pointed out by past work in visual culture, decolonial studies, and feminist studies, the philosophical underpinnings of western vision-based ways of knowing and being propagate a type of distancing and objectifying violence through the assertion of a binary hierarchical divide between the viewer and the object being viewed (hooks, 2010; jay, 2008). in addition, this ocularcentrism introduces the presumption that, through the act of seeing, knowledge may be fully apprehended and appropriated by those dominant groups who have the “power to look” (hooks, 2010; jay, 2008). the harmful impact of the visual mode is expanded upon in work on the violence of colonial representation which examines how representations of the self and the other have been weaponized to empower certain classes, genders, nations, or races, and subjugate others (armstrong & tennenhouse, 2015). extended to the study of graphical user interface, such work on the hegemony of exclusively visual epistemologies reminds us that the common signs and symbols that mediate our everyday experiences of the internet are far from neutral signifiers; rather, they encode and reproduce normative (and at times, harmful) beliefs, practices, identities, and behaviors. in addition, a purely visual apprehension of the web produces a distinct ontological difference between human and machine, and contributes to the obfuscation of machinic processes by seeing them as distinctly removed from the humans whose lives they intimately affect. scholarship in decolonial studies has pointed to the potential of sound as a tool that unsettles dominant epistemologies (robinson, 2020). sound, as a physiological experience of vibrational energy, is co-constructed by the listened-to and the listener; as such, it presents a model of knowing based on reciprocity and the collapse of self/other boundaries (goffe, 2020). drawing from this body of scholarship, i put forth the concept of “the sonic interface” as a tool to examine and interpret everyday internet experience that reveals a more embodied, relational, and situated way of understanding humanmachine interactions. by moving away from strictly semiotic modes of communication, sound allows us to better embrace affective, communal modes of knowing. ultimately, i argue that this reorientation toward sound as a mediator of internet experience allows us to move away from binary divisions between humans and technics, and toward an concept of entangled human/non-human assemblages which is ultimately a more accurate depiction of the human-computer relationships that characterize our modern moment. methods & contributions in order to address the central questions guiding this paper, i employ a variety of methods. firstly, i undertake a historical literature review of primary literature related to the development of the internet in order to illustrate the ways that sounds have historically mediated online experience. i present an alternate history of the “sonic internet” which reveals the ways that the sonic mediators of the web have changed over time (e.g. the sound of dial-up, once the gateway into the cyberworld, has been largely replaced with the silence of broadband). secondly, i present the findings of a “sonic auto-ethnography.” over the course of a week-long period in january 2022, i recorded the sounds that mediated my daily internet use. i present this depiction of my own sonic interface in the form of a soundscape, and accompany it with a written reflection on how the intentional consideration of sound components influenced my usage patterns and experiences online. lastly, i undertake a literature review of commonly used digital methods, and provide potential extensions and reimaginings that incorporate sound as a methodological tool. i present the concept of “the sonic affordance” as a tool for elucidating understudied aspects of everyday internet usage. references armstrong, n., & tennenhouse, l. (2015). the violence of representation: literature and the history of violence. franinović, k., & serafin, s. (eds.). (2013). sonic interaction design. the mit press. goffe, t. l. (2020). unmapping the caribbean: toward a digital praxis of archipelagic sounding. archipelagos, 5. https://doi.org/10.7916/archipelagos-72th-0z19 hooks, b. (2010). the oppositional gaze: black female spectators. in m. furstenau (ed.), the film theory reader: debates and arguments. routledge. jay, m. (2008, june 5). scopic regime. wiley online library; john wiley & sons, ltd. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781405186407.wbiecs017 kittler, f. a., & enns, a. (2010). optical media: berlin lectures 1999 (english ed). polity. pearce, w., özkula, s. m., greene, a. k., teeling, l., bansard, j. s., omena, j. j., & rabello, e. t. (2020). visual cross-platform analysis: digital methods to research social media images. information, communication & society, 23(2), 161–180. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2018.1486871 robinson, d. (2020). hungry listening: resonant theory for indigenous sound studies. university of minnesota press. listening to a meme: utilising participatory arts-based research to understand online experiences through screen readers aparajita bhandari cornell university introduction the internet is rife with images and videos. for people who are blind or have low vision (blv) this image dominated landscape can be difficult to navigate. in order to consume such content many who are blv utilize image descriptions, called alternative text (alt text), in conjunction with screen readers (hanley et al., 2019). alt text is read aloud by screen reader software when an image is encountered online. however, there has been a rapid increase in user-generated content online which is often non-textual and unable to be parsed by screen readers (stangl et al., 2021). for example, only 0.1% of images posted on twitter in 2019 had alt text (gleason et., 2019). while there is some research on the ways that alternative text practices can be improved (bennett et al., 2021; hanley et al., 2019) and online experiences can be made more accessible to people who are blv (stangl et al., 2021), this research often still approaches these problems from a visual framework. questions such as how to best replicate visual ideas into text, or whether alt text should include identity based descriptive labels such as race dominate this area of literature. however, there is little examination into the lived sonic dimension of screen readers and few researchers question the imperative to replicate the visual. bennett et al. (2021) state, “conflation of vision with power to know has led [to]..downplay the role of nonvisual sensemaking of race, gender, disability…while overstating the validity of visual perception as definite and confirmatory” (p. 3). additionally, while issues of access and participation are important, some researchers have noted that framing disability only as an issue of participation can reinforce the maintenance of current socio-structural systems rather than promoting the imagination of new ones (hoffmann et al., 2020). it can also reify the position of non-disabled people as gatekeepers of this access to current systems. thus, in this paper i seek to move away from questions of access to instead exploring contours of lived online experiences. i approach the study of alternative text from a critical disability studies framework, ultimately arguing for an interrogation of alt text practices that moves away from visual practices of sensemaking, an argument will be co-constructed alongside people who utilize screen readers and alt-text to experience the internet. critical disability studies and technology researchers have noted that the default user of technology is implicitly able-bodied and taken as the basis for interaction with technological systems. i argue that while it is necessary to move beyond an able-bodied imagined or default user of the internet it is also necessary to expand our understanding of digital experiences beyond the default able-bodied modes of sensemaking. we must come to understand the sonic as a valid form of experiencing of digital phenomena, without seeking to translate these experiences back into the terms of the dominating visual paradigm. i also want to note that disability is not a binary and there is a range of experiences of vision impairment. i avoid imposing my own expectations of the sensorial mode through which blv may choose to experience the internet. for example, szpiro et al. (2016) found that some people who have low vision, preferred to access digital information visually rather than aurally, highlighting how those with low vision have differing digital needs and preferences compared to people who are blind. critical disability approaches remind researchers to always center the contextualized and lived experiences of disabled people over their own expectations (hofmann et al., 2020). the goal of this paper is not to assume a preference of the sonic mode for people who are blv or to privilege sound over vision. rather i investigate the ways that people who do experience the internet primarily through sound, which has been understudied, feel and think about their online experiences. proposed methods in this paper i will draw from a series of participatory arts-based research sessions with internet users who are blind or have low vision. these sessions will be aimed at capturing their personal experiences of the internet, and participants will be guided to reflect through prompts such as: “how has the sound of the internet changed over time or “what does your favorite meme/online joke/ video sound like?” when choosing my methodological approach, i first considered what it meant to research the experiences of a community that i am not part of. in particular i was guided by tuck and yang’s (2014) critique of the tendency to extract and repackage the pain and stories of communities as academic research. similarly, critical disability scholars encourage researchers center the point of view, history and context of disabled people when examining questions of disability (spiel et al., 2020). thus, in order to center the experiences of people who are blv in this paper i chose to utilize participatory artsbased research methods. participatory arts-based research can be broadly defined as a research approach in which scholars collaborate with people in ‘art making as a way of knowing’ (leavy, 2018, p.4). it combines participatory action research, which approaches research through a non-hierarchical frame, and arts-based research, in which art forms are employed as methodological tools (leavy, 2018). references bennett, c. l., gleason, c., scheuerman, m. k., bigham, j. p., guo, a., & to, a. (2021, may). “it’s complicated”: negotiating accessibility and (mis) representation in image descriptions of race, gender, and disability. in proceedings of the 2021 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-19). cole gleason, patrick carrington, cameron cassidy, meredith ringel morris, kris m. kitani, and jeffrey p. bigham. (2019). almost like they’re trying to hide it: how userprovided image descriptions failed to make twitter accessible. in world wide web conference (www ’19). acm, new york, ny, usa, 549–559 hanley, m., barocas, s., levy, k., azenkot, s., & nissenbaum, h. (2021, july). computer vision and conflicting values: describing people with automated alt text. in proceedings of the 2021 aaai/acm conference on ai, ethics, and society (pp. 543554). hofmann, m., kasnitz, d., mankoff, j., & bennett, c. l. (2020, october). living disability theory: reflections on access, research, and design. in 22nd international acm sigaccess conference on computers and accessibility (pp. 1-13). leavy, p. (2018). introduction to arts-based research. handbook of arts-based research, 3-21. spiel, k., gerling, k., bennett, c. l., brulé, e., williams, r. m., rode, j., & mankoff, j. (2020, april). nothing about us without us: investigating the role of critical disability studies in hci. in extended abstracts of the 2020 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-8). stangl, a., verma, n., fleischmann, k. r., morris, m. r., & gurari, d. (2021, october). going beyond one-size-fits-all image descriptions to satisfy the information wants of people who are blind or have low vision. in 23rd international acm sigaccess conference on computers and accessibility (pp. 1-15) szpiro, s. f. a., hashash, s., zhao, y., & azenkot, s. (2016, october). how people with low vision access computing devices: understanding challenges and opportunities. in proceedings of the 18th international acm conference on computers and accessibility (pp. 171-180). tuck, e., & yang, k. w. (2014). unbecoming claims: pedagogies of refusal in qualitative research. qualitative inquiry, 20(6), 811-818. “what a memory sounds like”: studying the sonic and silent memory work of tiktok sounds chelsea p. butkowski university of pennsylvania memories sound like tinkling piano melodies, acoustic guitar chords, and echoing voices, that is, according to the latest tiktok microtrend. the trend encourages users to attach videos of their “core memories”—cutting birthday cake with wine glasses, dancing in the street—to a shared series of atmospheric audio files. the effect is dreamlike and nostalgic, and the videos are overlaid with the caption, “here’s what a memory sounds like.” this is just one of many ways that memories are manifest on tiktok, a short-form video platform structured through image, text, and audio. although memories and sound often overlap on tiktok and across many other media contexts, the mnemonic role of sound is often minimized in research on media memory, which tends to focus on visuals and text instead (kuhn, 2010). sound is also fundamental to tiktok itself, a network driven through discursive ties (i.e., hashtags, visual effects, audio) rather than purely social ones (i.e., following, friends). sound serves as a key pillar of the platform infrastructure and a creative social tool (vizcaínoverdú & abidin, 2022). while users can record original sounds for their own videos, they can also reuse and remix audio clips from other users, interconnecting networks of different videos set to the same soundtrack on shared sound-based feeds (serrano et al., 2020). despite the centrality of sound on tiktok, researchers have much to learn about its situated social functions and methodological potentials. sounds are deeply intertwined with the platform’s sociality, and they also intersect with practices of memory making in various ways—from silence to resounding noise. therefore, in this paper, i center configurations of sound and memory on tiktok as an in-roads to building memory studies and social media scholarship. i explore the potential of sound as a site for connective memory work, or the process of actively reconstructing and reinterpreting the past in the present using digital and networked technologies (smit, 2020). ultimately, i challenge researchers to explore sound and memory on social media by probing three different configurations of sound and memory as they overlap on tiktok. my paper suggests implications for social media sound as a site of memory work and a methodological tool on tiktok and beyond. configuring sonic and silent memory work on tiktok social media platforms are important sites of memory work (humphreys, 2018), but the unique primacy of sound on tiktok introduces formalized junctures of auditory platform logics, memory, and sociality. i study these junctures by asking the following research question: how do tiktok sounds facilitate and disrupt connective memory work? to answer this question, i outline three cases that represent different configurations of memory work and sound on tiktok. these configurations emerged from an ongoing discourse analysis of tiktok sounds and are intended to be illustrative but not exhaustive of the possibilities of studying sonic and silent memory work on the platform. first, sound can serve as a representation of memory work on tiktok by recoloring a visual or textual trace as a memory. this is evident in the “core memory” microtrend described above where certain songs or types of sounds (e.g., echoes) contribute to the sense that an event or image is memorable or worthy of remembrance. this sense of “memory-ness” becomes symbolically attached to particular audio files and songs within the tiktok landscape. the performance of memorability or nostalgia through visual and auditory elements draws from long traditions of representation forged through movies, television, and literature. however, tiktok provides the representational tools of background music and auditory filters for users to explicitly recast their own media traces as mediated memories. second, sound can be incrementally forgotten and reimagined through the memory work of decontextualizing, reusing, layering, or remixing audio files for new purposes. tiktok enables users to directly import audio from other tiktok videos into their own. however, the constant recycling of tiktok sounds can also obscure important details about their original contexts and creators (kaye et al., 2021). tiktok memeifies sounds by design and, in doing so, diminishes or alters users’ collective memories of what they signify (zulli & zulli, 2020). third, strategic and imposed silences executed through the intended absence or forced removal of tiktok sounds can disconnect or destabilize memory work completed through platform archives. although tiktok is known for proliferating dance videos set to top-charting pop songs, it is also rife with pockets of quiet and silence. through algorithmic governance, the platform regularly mutes videos that contain copyrighted sounds, such as music or movie clips. sounds serve as cataloging mechanisms on tiktok (vizcaíno-verdú & abidin, 2022). muted videos might still remain in circulation, but without their sound, their meanings change and their connection to sound archives is diminished. to avoid copyright strikes, tiktok users sometimes deliberately create silent videos, hiding copyrighted sounds through audio workarounds. conclusion: social media sound, memory, and method beyond tiktok although tiktok presents unique configurations of sound and memory work, sonic and silent memories are worthy of investigation in other social media contexts. sound plays important roles in youtube videos, livestreaming, and audio messaging, for example. digital platforms record and store mediated memories, and sound plays an important yet underexamined part in this process. additionally, these case studies are also suggestive of methodological approaches for studying sound on tiktok and on social media more broadly. because tiktok structures its recommendations and archives around trending and user-created sounds, sound can readily serve as a sampling frame for assembling tiktok videos. sounds also invite users to examine sonic discourses through interrelated or iterated versions of the same audio. more importantly, studying sound calls for an important and translatable methodological skill that is often overlooked in studies centered primarily on text and discursive analysis. across platforms and configurations of sonic and silent memory work, sound requires researchers to place listening at the forefront of their social media research. references humphreys, l. (2018). the qualified self: social media and the accounting of everyday life. mit press. kaye, d. b. v., rodriguez, a., langton, k., & wikström, p. (2021). you made this? i made this: practices of authorship and (mis)attribution on tiktok. international journal of communication, 15, 3195–3215. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/14544 kuhn, a. (2010). memory texts and memory work: performances of memory in and with visual media. memory studies, 3(4), 298–313. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1750698010370034 serrano, j. c. m., papakyriakopoulos, o., & hegelich, s. (2020). dancing to the partisan beat: a first analysis of political communication on tiktok. proceedings of the association of computing machinery conference on web science. 257–266. https://doi.org/10.1145/3394231.3397916 smit, r. (2020). connective memory work on justice for mike brown. in s. merrill, e. keightley, & p. daphi (eds.), social movements, cultural memory, and digital media: mobilising mediated remembrance. (pp. 85–108). palgrave macmillan. vizcaíno-verdú, a., & abidin, c. (2022). music challenge memes on tiktok: understanding in-group storytelling videos. international journal of communication, 16, 883–908. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/18141 zulli, d., & zulli, d. j. (2020). extending the internet meme: conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation publics on the tiktok platform. new media & society. advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1461444820983603 selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): valdovinos kaye, d.b., zeng, j., wikstrom, p., qiu, j., hendry, n., tiidenberg, k., abidin, c., highfield, t., leaver , t., and bucher, t. (2021, october). panel rationale for “platform specificities: the platform books panel” panel presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. panel rationale for “platform specificities: the platform books panel” d. bondy valdovinos kaye queensland university of technology jing zeng university of zurich patrik wikstrom queensland university of technology jack linchuan qiu national university of singapore natalie ann hendry rmit katrin tiidenberg tallinn university crystal abidin curtin university tim highfield university of sheffield tama leaver curtin university taina bucher university of oslo. social media platforms shape our lives on micro, meso and macro levels. they have transformed our everyday practices as individuals, or social practices as small and large groups, and have multiple, entangled impacts on rituals of democracy and cultural (re)production, organization of labor and industry. studying platforms is a multidisciplinary project. platform studies, sts, and cultural studies approaches center slightly different aspects of platforms to make sense of their affordances, relations between technology, people, political economy and culture. approaches to operationalizing platform research vary widely too. sometimes scholars use the lens of a particular practice and explore trolling, fame, or selfies. alternatively, scholars focus on particular groups of people: influencers, musicians, gamers, but most often young people or children. finally, sometimes, scholars choose to explore a specific platform as a complex system, paying attention to its histories, functions, users and their practices as well as the power relations it is embroiled in and its broader sociopolitical or cultural impact. this is what we do. this panel brings together five papers, each by authors of recently published or forthcoming platform books “tiktok: creativity and culture in short video” (forthcoming), “super-sticky wechat and chinese society” (2018), “tumblr” (2021), “instagram: visual social media cultures” (2020), “facebook” (2021). together, the papers offer an analysis of five social media platforms (tiktok, wechat, tumblr, instagram, facebook). because of the book-length analyses preceding the panel, we are able to distill what is distinct and recognizable about these platforms – what we call ‘platform specificities’ and demonstrate how these specificites are shaping not only the experiences of the users of those platforms, but also the social media ecosystem more broadly, with all of its socio-political implications and future trajectories. thus, the panel contributes to the ongoing discussion regarding platform power, social media and ways of making sense of social media, painting in board strokes plausible future developments to keep an eye on. paper one is based on a book on tiktok and argues that the platform facilitates “circumscribed creativity,” nudging users to create certain types of content based on trending formats or templates. circumscribed creativity is a platform specificity that leverages the central role audio and variety creative remix features on tiktok. these features are increasingly germane to the genre of short videos, which the paper argues is an evolutionary step in platformed digital content. paper two is based on a book on wechat, which argues that the “super-stickiness” is a specificity of wechat the superapp. in both cases the platform specificities begin in china, but extend far beyond the asian market thereafter, representing the growing power of non-silicon valley platforms in shaping the social media ecosystem. paper three is based on a forthcoming book on tumblr, arguing that the platform’s rare, almost cultish position as a shaper of the 2010s internet cultures owes to its particular “silosociality”, which made tumblr feel insular and ‘special’ to its varied constituencies, while also contributing to it being more difficult to study and corporately monetize. paper four is based on a recently published book on instagram, and elevates “templatability” as the platform specificity. it comprises recognizable and replicable visual stylings and practices. while both silosociality and templatability are platform specificities that allow users positive experiences or success, they can also be exploited for harmful purposes or become experienced as toxic. understanding these specificities demonstrates the pervasive cultures of these platforms in the wider social media landscape, and offers alternatives in terms of how to contextualise and study platforms in a comparative manner. finally, paper five is based on a forthcoming book on facebook, and explores the notion of platform specificities by showing how facebook, as a result of its dominance and expansion into various parts of the web, has eclipsed its own specificity and become a “hyperobject” of sorts. thus, instead of arguing for a facebook specificity, it is important to critically analyze the possible consequences of different specificities being elevated by various interest groups. together, our analyses of the platforms explore the entanglement of corporate interests, built structures, cultural imaginaries, agential users, shared identities, communities and practices, mapping and critiquing the social media ecosystem systematically and from a variety of perspectives. analysing specificities across the five volumes is also a first step of comparative platform studies toward the understanding of platform generalities. paper 1, tiktok: creativity and culture in short video d. bondy valdovinos kaye queensland university of technology jing zeng university of zurich, switzerland patrik wikstrom queensland university of technology since its acquisition and rebranding in 2018, tiktok has become one of the fastest growing digital media platforms in the world. tiktok is the first chinese-developed digital media platform to find mainstream international success and is carving its own niche in the global short video industry. our forthcoming book “tiktok: creativity and culture in short video” (2021) systematically interrogates tiktok and the genre of short video. we examine the scrutiny facing this transnational platform, and the creators who are driving the platform’s success. there are multiple reasons why tiktok is one of the most studied platforms at the moment. it is one of the first digital media platforms dominated by gen z and it has become a buzzword following its soaring popularity in 2019, coupled with its surge in international active users during the global covid-19 pandemic. in early 2021, tiktok had 689 million monthly active users outside china (kemp, 2021) and it was the most downloaded mobile app during 2020 (blacker, 2021). as the platform grows in popularity, communities are steadily discovering the plethora of subcultural groups, the potential for educational content, and also activism (stevens, 2020). while in its early days it was considered to be ‘just for kids’, the platform is growing its significance as a mainstream social media platform, shaping debates and cultures across the world and transforming the dynamics of the broader creative industries. however, tiktok is also a platform surrounded by controversies and uncertainties. tiktok is discussed on a daily basis in mainstream media and misunderstandings are abound regarding the platform itself and the youth cultures it purports to represent. citing such “immoral and objectionable content”, pakistan has banned the platform more than once (singh, 2021). further, as a “non-silicon valley platform” from a chinese developer, its rise in the west has been perceived as a symbol of china’s softpower (liu, 2019). such ‘chineseness’ has become an obstacle in tiktok’s development in global markets. for instance, india banned the platform due to security concerns following skirmishes with china (mukhopadhyay, 2020). in the us, a national security investigation into tiktok was launched in 2020 (roumeliotis et al., 2019) and the trump administration made serious (but failed) attempts to force tiktok out of the us market (elegant, 2021). our main arguments we advance three broad streams of argument. first, we argue that short video is an evolutionary step in platformed digital content. by focusing on the platform, creators, markets and governance, we will systematically differentiate tiktok from other digital media platforms, such as vine or youtube to which tiktok is often compared. we argue that tiktok was initially catalogued as a ‘gen z’ platform, but its cultural significance demonstrably extends beyond gen z. as we present throughout this book, tiktok is having a pronounced impact on media industries and platform economies around the world including (but not limited to): music industries, advertising industries, digital influencer industries, online content creation industries, educational media economies, and political media economies. in doing so, tiktok is shifting paradigms of produsage, vernacular creativity, and digital creative labour. we argue that tiktok is pushing digital content industries in new directions by internationalising a ‘short video industry’ that has been prominent in china for several years. second, we argue that tiktok centralises the importance of audio in everyday digital cultures. previous research has highlighted the efficacy of textual, visual and video content, on platforms such as twitter, instagram, and youtube, for creating spreadable ‘viral’ memetic content. kaye, rodriguez, wikstrom and langton (2020) suggest that tiktok foregrounds audio as an additional dimension for creating spreadable memetic content through features such as ‘use this sound’. tiktok’s platform affordances empowers creators to make ‘aural memes’ that can be easily reused by other creators. aural memes raise novel issues regarding authorship and attribution on tiktok that are likely to be reproduced in future competing short video platforms. third, we argue that tiktok circumscribes creativity on users through its platform features and cultures. circumscribed creativity is a platform specificity of tiktok that builds on existing logics of templatability (leaver, highfield, & abidin, 2019) by adding a ‘call to action’ from other users, or a ‘nudge’ to create from the platform itself. tiktokers can directly circumscribe creativity by asking viewers to create content based on a template they are trying to promote, such as by inviting others to participate in dance challenges. the tiktok platform also passively circumscribes creativity by suggesting ways to interact with existing content through features such as the main viewing interface, the algorithmically driven for you page (fyp), as well as actively, such as features like ‘duet’ which allows users to create a new video side-by-side the one they were just watching, ‘stitch’ which allows users to clip a portion of a previous video and add new content. these features may implicitly guide tiktokers towards certain kinds of creativity but can also work in concert with explicit calls to action from other tiktokers who invite audiences to “duet this video” or “use this sound”. merging these three streams, we argue that the emergent international short video industry requires a reformulated theoretical lens for analysis. triangulating theories of platformization of cultural production (nieborg & poell, 2018), vernacular creativities (burgess, 2006), and critical media industries studies (herbert, lotz, & punathembekar, 2020) we provide a theoretical lens to interrogate and problematize the emerging shortvideo industry, short video cultures and the complex, transnational short video political economy. references blacker, a (2021, jan 7). worldwide and us download leaders 2020. apptopia. retrieved from https://blog.apptopia.com/worldwide-us-download-leaders-2020 burgess, j. (2006). hearing ordinary voices: cultural studies, vernacular creativity and digital storytelling. continuum, 20(2), 201-214. elegant, n. x. (2021, jan 11). tiktok banned trump before trump could ban tiktok. fortune. retrieved from https://fortune.com/2021/01/11/tiktok-bans-trump-before-trumpbans-tiktok/ herbert, d., lotz, a. d., & punathembekar, a. (2020). media industry studies (short introductions). cambridge: polity. leaver, tama, tim highfield, and crystal abidin. 2020. instagram: visual social media cultures. cambridge: polity press. kaye, d.b.v, chen, x., & zeng, j. (2020). co-evolution of chinese mobile short video apps: parallel platformization of douyin and tiktok. mobile media and communication. kaye, d.b.v., rodriguez, a., wikström, p., & langton, k. (2020). you made this? i made this: practices of authorship and attribution on tiktok. international journal of communication. kaye, d.b.v, zeng, j., wikström, p. (2021). tiktok: creativity and culture in short video. cambridge: uk, polity press. kemp. s. (2021, jan 27). digital 2021, global overview report. hootsuite & we are social. retrieved from https://wearesocial.com/digital-2021. liu, s. (2019, nov 26) 中国科技企业带着模式出海. people's daily. retrieved from ydyl.people.com.cn/n1/2019/1126/c411837-31474767.html mukhopadhyay, a. (2020, jun 6). india's ban on chinese apps threatens economic ties with beijing. dw. retrieved from https://p.dw.com/p/3eb9w. nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media and society, 20(11), 4275–4292. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769694 roumeliotis, g., yang, y., wang, e., & alper, a. (2019). us opens national security investigation into tiktok. cnbc. retrieved from https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/01/usto-investigate-tiktok-over-national-security-concerns-sources-say.html singh, m. (2021, mar 12). pakistan bans tiktok again over ‘immoral and objectionable’ videos. techcrunch. retrieved from https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/11/pakistanblocks-tiktok-again-over-immoral-and-objectionable-videos/ stevens, t. c. (2020, january 21). tiktok isn't just for teens anymore. usc annenberg relevance report. retrieved from: https://annenberg.usc.edu/research/center-publicrelations/usc-annenberg-relevance-report/tiktok-isnt-just-teens-anymore wechat: super app and its super-stickiness jack linchuan qiu, national university of singapore introduction tech companies dream of creating an “all-in-one” platform that users never need to leave, that keeps them glued forever, an app that is “super-sticky”. this dream was turned into reality with wechat, which has 1 billion active monthly users, most of whom are in china. however, wechat is not an isolated success. it has inspired new attempts to create all-in-one “super-apps” throughout southeast asia (e.g. grab, go-jek). meanwhile, according to marc steinberg (2019), wechat belongs to the same cohort of east asian platforms (e.g., line, kakaotalk) that started about one decade ago, first as chat apps, then expanding into other businesses to become “super-apps” or “platform of platforms”. the root of this business model can be traced back to i-mode, the world’s first mobile internet service that became commercially viable two decades ago. this paper is based on our book “super-sticky wechat and chinese society” (2018) and the post-publication analyses of stickiness and super-apps. in the book, we ask: what exactly is super-stickiness? why has it spread regionally from east to southeast asia? how does it work for designers and regulators, citizens and consumers? what are its social implications, for progressive change, cultural stasis, even regress? let us examine the underlying infrastructure, state-industry relationship, design logics, interplatform competition, and the socio-techno in-betweenness of wechat the “super-app”. “hand of the buddha” buddhist legend has it that the almighty buddha holds the entire universe in his infinite palm. it is therefore impossible to escape from his hand. mr. keiichi enoki, managing director of ntt docomo’s i-mode, was famously quoted to use this metaphor and refer to i-mode as the “hand of buddha” (ibid, p. 150). the super-app here is an all-inclusive eco-system of applications, contents, and services. ordinary apps cannot escape from it. neither can ordinary users, because both are captured and glued down by the dense networks of exchanges and transactions within the super-app. in this study, we examine several functionalities of wechat such as “moments” (similar to facebook updates), “official accounts” (similar to facebook public accounts), “wechat pay” (similar to paypal), and “mini-program” (similar to google play store). users can rely on the single app of wechat for all the things they need to do, including paying taxes and booking a doctor’s appointment. "each chosen functionality represents a step further toward integrating more services and functionalities into wechat, and in collective terms, they reveal the cumulative construction of the app to become social, informational, transactional and now infrastructural. wechat's transformation is linked to its adaptability to diverse aspects of chinese social, economic, and cultural worlds and its ability to glue them together" (chen, mao & qiu, 2018 p. 40). for i-mode, the real hand of the buddha is ntt, japan’s largest telecom operator that would profit from data traffic generated through i-mode. however, wechat is in the palm of tencent, china’s largest privately-owned it company providing social media, gaming, video, and ai services. tencent is not owned by a telecom company. instead, it works closely with the chinese government, providing seamless real-time data for the state surveillance machinery. super-stickiness as in-between interactions stickiness is a peculiar physical state of half-solid, half-elastic substances turning into adhesives that create molecular bonds between the surfaces. from a designer’s viewpoint, this requires the app to foster constant interactions between the user and the interface, between what the user expects and what s/he gets from the interactive experience, over and again. a “sticky” design must be able to “hook” users (eyal, 2014). if the interactions “dry up” and lose their elasticity, the adhesives would become less sticky. if they turn into complete liquids, the user experience would become shapeless, seeping through the buddha’s fingers, so to speak. the key is therefore to keep the inbetweenness a constant feature of interface design, balancing out predictability and serendipity. but it is not just interface design. the same applies to system-level in-betweenness by which we mean more than technology systems but also social, cultural, and political systems as well. at one level, wechat the super-app works with the communist partystate to not only keep track of online opinions but also actively mold them into shape, according to instructions from beijing, now with the aid of ai-powered tools. but at another level, wechat remains much more pluralistic and more tolerant than chinese legacy media although it cannot trespass beyond the censorship lines, either. wechat, in this sense, “glues” the party-state to the online communities. while it’s true that in some cases the party-state can use wechat to prevent centrifugal tendencies, in other cases it is likely that the party-state would be tied down, even dragged down, by the super-stickiness of this super-app. in recent years, beijing has used anti-trust and other regulatory measures to target china’s private it companies, such as alibaba. so far, tencent has not been similarly targeted but wechat still faces competition, especially now that china’s app market has become so consolidated. intercapitalist clashes have become inevitable and increasingly acute among alibaba, tencent, and bytedance. the competition has turned more cut-throat since the beginning of covid-19. for instance, in a move to block the growth of dingtalk, alibaba’s fast-growing chat app, wechat disabled dingtalk-based health codes (i.e. “green codes”) through its internal qr code scanner, causing public health havoc in 24 chinese provinces in february 2020. this triggered intervention by the authorities, especially in the country’s wealthier regions. and wechat had to back down to provide system interoperability (hu, 2021). as such, the in-betweenness of the super-app should be seen as a site of struggle, much more than a simplistic characterization, be it utopian or dystopian. conclusion super-stickiness is a specificity of wechat the super-app, when it comes to the statecompany relationship, infrastructural role, and inter-platform competition that are at play underneath the super-app. but in terms of its regional diffusion and its design logics driving toward permanent adhesiveness – as highlighted in its corporate slogan “wechat is lifestyle” – the ramifications are way beyond china, even asia. behold wechat’s super-stickiness and its socio-technical in-betweenness. more than specific qualities, they are of general importance for platforms around the world, when the world is at a crossroad of in-betweenness itself. references chen, y., mao, z., qiu,j.l. (2018). super-sticky wechat and chinese society. bingley: emerald publishing. eyal, n. (2014). hooked: how to build habit-forming products. new york: portfolio. hu, l. (2021). health codes, digital identity, and the rise of certification infrastructure. china law review, 2, 96-104. (in chinese) steinberg, m. (2019). the platform economy: how japan transformed the consumer internet. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. tumblr: silosociality natalie ann hendry rmit katrin tiidenberg tallinn university crystal abidin curtin university launched in 2007, the blogging site tumblr has been credited with launching social movements, fandoms, trends, memes and identities. it has profoundly shaped 21st century internet cultures, yet has often been cast aside and understudied as “too subcultural” or “too weird.” this paper is based on our forthcoming book “tumblr” (2021). based on decade-long ethnographic fieldwork in diverse tumblr cultures, we analyze what users imagine they can do on tumblr (affordances), what tumblr-specific styles and genres of communication emerge (platform vernacular), and how users evaluate each other’s behavior (platform sensibility). we argue that together, these produce tumblr’s unique sociality, which we characterize as ‘silosociality’. silosociality explains why scraping tumblr data cannot wholly make sense of tumblr, and why for years the platform was understudied and difficult for tumblr inc. to monetize. the concept explains why curating tumblr became a legitimate genre and source of popularity (e.g. buzzfeed listicle articles); this legacy remains important in shaping 2010s digital cultures, even though users and commentators have proclaimed the platform as “dead” (tiienberg, hendry, abidin 2021). silosociality functions like an affective, discursive, intuitive gate (cho 2015); while most tumblr blogs are publicly accessible, there is no blueprint for how to find and experience things. the concept of silosociality helps critically re-think social media, interrogate how it is structured, what kinds of sociality are encouraged, and what (unintended) consequences may arise. affordances platform affordances are the perceived possibilities of action that variably request, demand, allow, encourage, discourage or refuse specific actions (davis & chouinard 2017), and help demonstrate how user practices and platform structures interrelate. while most platforms seem to have the same high-level affordances (bucher & helmond 2017), we suggest that tumblr as a social space is characterized by the following set of affordance ranges: ● high pseudonymity, it is easy to remain pseudonymous and most users do; ● high scalability, high potential for content to spread and reach various audiences when reblogged; ● low searchability, things are difficult to find for the uninitiated because of long conversational tags, poor search features, no formal grouping structures; ● high multimodality, content and conversations are primarily in mixed form of texts, images, videos, gifs, memes, links, tags, and copyright is poorly enforced; ● high interactivity, users interact with each others’ ideas and content, and pseudonymity encourages interaction between strangers; ● low reactivity, knee-jerk reactions and sentiment signposting cannot be easily registered since reaction buttons and metric counters are collapsed and public comments are refused; ● high non-linear temporality, some posts recirculate forever while others are soon forgotten, feeds are full of ephemera, yet many blogs function as archives. vernacular each social media platform has a combination of communication practices, conventions and registers of meaning and affect, which emerge from platform affordances and their everyday enactment (gibbs et al. 2014, 257). our analyses suggest that tumblr’s recognizable platform vernacular comprises of conventions and registers that are: curatorial, content is selected, interpreted, and shared to self-express by proxy, speak back to power, form communities and leads to particular flows of aesthetics and affects; based on affective investments and personal testimonials; multimodal and multiply literate, where ‘getting’ tumblr content requires combinatory literacies; and finally, driven by interest and affinity, which shape people’s experience of tumblr as ‘their tumblr’ and breeds a sense of community. sensibility tumblr as a social space is shaped by a shared sensibility (eg shared norms, ethics, and small-p politics), which on tumblr is characterized by an orientation towards social justice and a related commitment to maintaining tumblr as a safe space. this sensibility speaks through the elements we listed as making up tumblr ‘vernacular’, taking form in platform specific practices like curatorial activism, but also mutating into toxic practices of call-outs or dogpiling. affordances + vernacular + sensibility = silosociality tumblr’s affordances, vernacular and sensibility suggest that tumblr as a social space is experienced in and may be understood through silos. silos are users’ experiential tumblrs, and silosociality is about feelings of connection rather than metric-driven connection. silos on tumblr are felt and imagined tumblrs (e.g. fandom tumblr, queer tumblr, nsfw tumblr, mental health tumblr) that are experienced as somewhat sequestered from each other. they are characterized by a cohesive reblogging practice, often publicly referencing relationships to other users and presuming a shared local vernacular. moving between silos requires effort and insider knowledge, making tumblr often disorienting to newcomers. yet, while silos feel separate, posts connect across silos. this means that silosociality is about separate contexts, not content or users. posts are reblogged, shared, and remixed across tumblr. one blogger may belong to multiple silos – usually with different blogs. silosocial implications silos can lead to an ambivalent ‘love/hate’ relationship with tumblr. tumblr’s pseudonymity, multifaceted self-presentation, and its vernacular of personal testimonials and affective engagement create a sense of safety, escape, and intense affinity and affect. this intensity – especially that interest-based silos allow people to converge around topics that are validated and celebrated on tumblr, but often unwelcome elsewhere – makes silos worth protecting and compels normative ‘right ways’ of being, call-outs, and virtue-signalling to maintain that experience. conceptually, silosociality has similarities to online communities (baym 2015, tiidenberg and van der nagel 2020), networked publics (boyd 2010), affinity spaces (gee 2004), back places (goffman 1981), and social worlds and arenas (strauss 1978), but does not neatly map onto any of these. silos can and sometimes do include communities, but for us, are broader and looser than communities. they may be examples of networked publics (especially intimate or networked counterpublics), but networked publics are more transient than silos, more often rely on technological boundaries (a forum, a hashtag), and have fewer shared imaginaries. silosocial media emulates the more manageable, partially self-regulating and selfmoderating early internet communities. context collapse is less likely; tumblr is a more safe-feeling, creative-seeming, and justice-oriented social space. slipping into tumblr silos can be a pleasure, a relief, a “life saver”. even if many tumblr users have moved on, silo-like places to escape the world and more demanding corners of the internet remain invaluable. dominant platforms that rarely afford group-sociality and enforce inescapable real-name connectivity and pervasive surveillance do not afford silosociality. but perhaps silosociality is a potential future for media industries faced with increasingly critical and surveillance-fatigued constituencies, where only digital detox or disconnection offers reprieve. references baym, n.k. (2015). personal connections in the digital age. wiley. boyd, d. (2010). ‘social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications.’ in z. papacharissi (ed). a networked self: identity, community and culture on social network sites. routledge, 39-58. bucher, t., & helmond, a. (2017). ‘the affordances of social media platforms.’ in j. burgess, t. poell, & a. marwick (eds). the sage handbook of social media. sage, 233–253. cho, a. (2015). sensuous participation: queer youth of colour, affect and social media. [doctoral dissertation] university of texas. https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/31667 davis, j.l., & chouinard, j.b. (2017). ‘theorizing affordances: from request to refuse.’ bulletin of science, technology & society, 36(4), 241-248. gee, j.p. (2004). situated language and learning: a critique of traditional schooling. routledge. gibbs, m., meese, j., arnold, m., nansen, b., & carter, m. (2014). ‘#funerals and instagram: death, social media and platform vernacular.’ information, communication & society, 18(3), 255-268. goffman, e. (1963, 1981). stigma. prentice hall. strauss, a. l. (1978). “a social world perspective.” in n denzin (ed.), studies in symbolic interaction 1. jai press, 119–128 tiidenberg, k., hendry, n.a., abidin, c. (2021). tumblr. cambridge, uk: polity press tiidenberg, k. & van der nagel, e. (2020). sex and social media. bingley: emerald publishing. instagram: beyond templatability tim highfield university of sheffield tama leaver curtin university crystal abidin curtin university turning 10 years old in october 2020, the place of instagram within the global digital platform economy has evolved dramatically from its origins as one of a number of iphone-only, retro-aesthetic photo-sharing apps. in our recent book “instagram: visual social media cultures” (2020), we argued that the subsequent decade had seen instagram instead become “more than an app, more than a platform… [but rather] an icon and avatar for understanding and mapping visual social media cultures”. as part of this, though, the study of instagram is also a means of tracing the dynamics of platform cultures and practices more broadly, especially given global turns towards – and reliance upon – digital spaces in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic. writing before the pandemic, we suggested that the experience of the platform is both understood and challenged by a logic of ‘templatability’, privileging “visually memorable and memorisable visual stylings, settings and practices that can be replicated with relative ease” (leaver, highfield & abidin, 2020). what has changed since then has had dramatic consequences for instagram as a platform, as a community, and as an aesthetic shorthand. in this paper, we build upon and look beyond this notion of templatability within evolving uses and contexts of instagram, in order to examine the varying experiences – and meanings – of instagram, for its users, developers, and other stakeholders. re-examining the logic of templatability in outlining instagram’s logic of templatability, we denoted the different platform elements collectively contributing to the ongoing perpetuation of similar styles and content: affordances, algorithms, aesthetics, affect, attention, audiences, agency, and activism (leaver, highfield & abidin, 2020). together, these elements simultaneously illustrate and limit the ‘platform vernacular’ (gibbs et al., 2015) unique to instagram: not only does templatability demonstrate what ‘successful’ content looks like on the platform, but it also reinforces the recurring prominence of such content over discovering new or different contributions. on an algorithmically-organised platform like instagram, understanding this logic is key to becoming visible, to garnering and maintaining an audience (cotter, 2019). however, such concerns do not only apply to (human) influencers with audiences in the millions of users; templatability underlines the strategies and styles employed (or resisted) by instagram accounts representing interests as diverse as museums (budge & burness, 2018), pets (maddox, 2020), and fitness enthusiasts (reade, 2020), among many others. if templatability describes what content is privileged and promoted on instagram, it also helps to understand the limits of how the platform works and how it is used. in particular, the changing contexts of 2020 and 2021 have meant an adaptation of existing practices in response to global and local developments. this has occurred alongside the continued development of new features on instagram, from the tiktokesque ‘reels’ to the support and promotion of small businesses through in-app shopping and stickers. in early 2020, for example, when fitness spaces were required to close, trainers and instructors took to instagram to provide live sessions and connect with their communities (jacobsson purewal, 2020). live streaming on instagram, meanwhile, provided new opportunities for musicians and djs as well as allowing for outlets for documenting the mundanity of lockdown life (harmon, 2020). in such cases, these developments can be seen as giving people a means for adapting their paid work to a covid context, remediated on instagram; however, they also highlight the challenges for many in either learning how to effectively use platforms in a time of hardship, and in developing new skills and carrying out more labour without any guaranteed payoff (see kneese & palm, 2020). the pandemic context then complicates questions of who benefits from templatability, and of mechanisms for resisting and challenging it. weaponising templatability visual templates have taken on new significance in response to events of 2020, some of which are centred on developments in the us but with global repercussions. the protests and demonstrations after the may 2020 killing of george floyd in minneapolis, for example, saw a wave of politically motivated content and activism on social media including instagram. this represented varying degrees of meaning and suitability: while resources and guides supporting black voices were promoted by instagram itself (instagram, 2020), the attempted display of racial justice activism of #blackouttuesday in june 2020 became an interminable series of black squares that swamped important activist channels like the #blacklivesmatter hashtag (kircher, 2020). the recurring visual of the black square then highlights the pitfalls of templatability: the same content repeated visually, attracting attention through new uploads and demonstrations of solidarity, but also making accessing other content more difficult. furthermore, understanding the logics underpinning how platforms operate has been critical to the spread of conspiracy theories, misinformation, and disinformation, concerns which took on increased importance in the contexts of both the pandemic and the us presidential election in november 2020. as instagram provided new ways of sharing information and promoted a recurring template of visually appealing guides and lists, these aesthetics were adopted to push false and problematic viewpoints that gain acceptance through their use of the affordances and audience of wellness influencers, for example (tiffany, 2020). in such cases, the familiar and successful on instagram becomes weaponised, exploiting an understanding of the logics of templatability – of how instagram works – to potentially harmful ends (see phillips & milner, 2021). instagram, beyond the templates? this paper offers a reconsideration of the logic of templatability on instagram, taking into account new platform features as well as major global, political, social, cultural, and economic events. we re-examine how such concerns are apparent across different genres and content types on instagram, from posts to stories, as well as of crossplatform templatability, as popular content travels from tiktok, twitter, and more, reframed and reshared for instagram. in doing so, we re-evaluate what makes instagram ‘instagram’, and who this represents in the process. references budge, k., & burness, a. (2018). museum objects and instagram: agency and communication in digital engagement. continuum: journal of media & cultural studies, 32(2), 137–150. cotter, k. (2019). playing the visibility game: how digital influencers and algorithms negotiate influence on instagram. new media & society, 21(4), 895–913. gibbs, m., meese, j., arnold, m., nansen, b., & carter, m. (2015). #funeral and instagram: death, social media, and platform vernacular. information, communication & society, 18(3), 255–268. harmon, s. (2020, march 22). isolaid: livestreamed music festival brings community and joy to a frightening weekend. the guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/mar/23/isolaid-livestreamed-music-festivalbrings-community-and-joy-to-a-frightening-weekend instagram. (2020). “act for racial justice.” https://www.instagram.com/instagram/guide/act-for-racialjustice/17903566507475316/?igshid=npat97sd8990 jacobsson purewal, s. (2020, april 24). instagram live has replaced the gym during quarantine, and the classes are actually good. gizmodo. https://gizmodo.com/instagram-live-has-replaced-the-gym-during-quarantine1842864232 kircher, m. m. (2020, june 2). your black square instagram isn’t helping. vulture. https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/dont-use-black-lives-matter-on-blackout-tuesdayinstagrams.html kneese, t., & palm, m. (2020). brick-and-platform: listing labor in the digital vintage economy. social media + society, 6(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120933299 leaver, t., highfield, t., abidin, c. (2020). instagram: visual social media cultures. cambridge, uk: polity press. maddox, j. (2020). the secret life of pet instagram accounts: joy, resistance, and commodification in the internet’s cute economy. new media & society. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820956345 phillips, w., & milner, r. m. (2021). you are here: a field guide for navigating polarized speech, conspiracy theories, and our polluted media landscape. the mit press. reade, j. (2020). keeping it raw on the ‘gram: authenticity, relatability and digital intimacy in fitness cultures on instagram. new media & society. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819891699 tiffany, k. (2020, august 18). the women making conspiracy theories beautiful. the atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/08/how-instagramaesthetics-repackage-qanon/615364/ facebook: becoming conceptual taina bucher university of oslo introduction everybody has a facebook story. whether it is the story of how a relationship started, or ended, how people found long-lost loved ones, how they learned about the weddings, births, and divorces of old friends and acquaintances, facebook has played – and still does ‒ an important part in people’s personal and professional lives. seventeen years after facebook first launched, an approximate one-third of the world’s population uses one of its apps on a monthly basis, nearly half of americans get their news from the facebook feed, and 4 petabytes of data are generated through the site each day. facebook has become one of the most important advertising venues to ever exist. this paper is based on my recently published book “facebook” (bucher, 2021), and asks to what extent we can still adequately think of facebook as a social media platform or social network site? metaphors (un)limited if facebook was originally built as a site that would let people know to whom they and their friends were connected, this is no longer the case. today, metaphors abound as to what exactly facebook is. some of the most prevailing metaphors used to describe facebook include notions of the public square, company town, shopping mall, gatekeeper, operating system, broadcaster, editor, government or state actor. facebook itself routinely presents itself as a ‘social infrastructure’ and ‘community builder’, to add to the long list of metaphors in use. interestingly, the longer facebook is in existence, the larger the amount of metaphors and analogies in circulation used to describe it. unlike other technologies and media phenomena that usually experience this kind of definitional uncertainty at the beginning of its lifetime, facebook ontology seems to have become bewilderingly uncertain much longer after the fact. in other words, the language and metaphors used to describe facebook no longer seem to capture the ontological variability and definitional uncertainty of facebook today. rather than opting for one of the many metaphors abound, this paper starts from the assumption that the existing metaphors no longer seem to serve us well. in a seemingly tautological move, i argue instead that facebook is facebook (bucher, 2021). the fact that facebook is facebook speaks not just to its global corporate power but, more profoundly, to facebook becoming a concept of sorts. what the many definitions and conceptions of facebook in newspaper articles, lawsuits, congressional hearings, scholarly papers and company press reports suggest is that there seems to be a growing need for clarification as to what facebook really is. the ontological question is not just interesting for philosophical and theoretical reasons, but serves a very practical and political purpose. in a world where facebook and its founder and ceo, mark zuckerberg, exercise unprecedented power and the conversation on regulation has gained a new urgency, we might have to come to terms with the notion that facebook cannot readily be compared to something else but must be taken for what it is – facebook. facebook is facebook this means grappling with multiple and overlapping concerns. first, it means interrogating the claim that facebook has turned into a concept of its own? this is to say that, as time has passed, what we take facebook to be has acquired a life of its own. it is no longer just a word, or a label for a technological platform or a social network site (if it ever was). we are living in a society where people are routinely socialized into acquiring a concept of facebook, sometimes even without being an active user themselves. conceptions of facebook figure in policy discussions, academic discourse, news reports and public controversies. it plays a habitual role in people’s everyday lives and exists more broadly as a global sociotechnical imaginary. as such, we might think of facebook as a ‘basic concept’ in the sense of koselleck; something we cannot do without when accounting for “the most urgent issues of a given time” (berenskoetter, 2017: 157). second, to say that facebook has turned conceptual is also to highlight its multiplicity. facebook does not exist in a singular form. rather we are dealing with multiple conceptions that take on different forms. borrowing from berenskoetter, we might say that conceptions of facebook “evolve throughout history”, “take on different empirical forms yet still maintains an abstract unity”, and “artificially reified yet at closer inspection reveals nothing but fragments” (2017: 170). the idea, then, that facebook needs to be understood as multiple is not about adding different perspectives to illuminate the meaning of a singular thing or to say that there are indefinite versions of facebook that exist in parallel (mol, 2002). how facebook materializes in situated practices do not just produce different perspectives but enact different realities, or versions of facebook as well. third, rather than thinking of facebook in terms of fixed spatial metaphors such as squares, cities or states, the notion of topology offers a language for articulating the instabilities and fluctuations characteristic of malleable and changing entities such as facebook. in contrast to ‘“euclidean” space with its familiar geometry of stable, singular entities positioned against the external backdrop of a static space and linear time’, a topological approach accentuates how the infinite and differential character of relations has the capacity to generate its own ‘space-time, with its particular scales, extension and rhythms’ (marres, 2012: 292). bringing a topological approach to bear on facebook means paying close attention to unfolding configurations and reconfigurations, and grappling with the variations and multiplicities that facebook produces. this means that what we take facebook to be is a result of different elements being gathered in a specific way at a specific time. conclusion claiming that facebook is facebook is a way of resisting easy labels. while it at first sight may seem like an obvious statement, it is precisely in the seemingly obvious that we are confronted with the fact that no precise meaning exists so that we must “stay with the trouble” of interrogating how the concept of facebook is made to cohere in the present moment and what we would like it to mean in the future. just as concepts can travel from discipline to discipline and take on new meanings (bal, 2002), framing facebook as a concept points to its generative force. the purpose of this paper, then, is not to come up with a precise definition of what facebook is, but to think about the repercussions and implications of what its different conceptions do and the kinds of realities that are shaped by them. what do different labels do for an understanding of facebook? what are the possible consequences of using certain metaphors rather than others? what stories are more or less likely to emerge in the different ways that facebook gets framed? references bucher, t. (2021). facebook. cambridge, uk: polity press. bal, m. (2002). travelling concepts in the humanities: a rough guide. toronto: university of toronto press. berenskoetter, f. (2017). approaches to concept analysis. millennium, 45(2): 151–73. marres, n. (2012). on some uses and abuses of topology in the social analysis of technology (or the problem with smart meters). theory, culture and society, 29(4–5): 288–310. mol, a. (2002). the body multiple: ontology in medical practice. durham, nc: duke university press. microsoft word fitzgerald-witnessing like a user-witnessing like a user.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): fitzgerald, a. (2021, october). witnessing like a user: mobile notifications and the layered construction of mediatized terrorism. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. witnessing like a user: mobile notifications and the layered construction of mediatized terrorism andrew arthur fitzgerald stanford university extended abstract this paper examines the construction of mediatized terrorist attacks as datafied media events through mobile media accounts circulated by media outlets, users, platforms, and devices. emerging out of a wider study of the intersection of mediatized responses to accounts of terrorist attacks and shifting mobile audience usage due to the datadriven political economy, this study analyzes the role of smartphone push notifications in the reception of mediatized terrorism. recent user and digital audience studies employ a range of methods including survey panel, trace data or traffic metrics (e.g., kim, 2016; nelson & webster, 2017; taneja, 2017) and in-depth interviews (e.g., edgerly, 2017). this paper provides an embedded examination of mobile media use in line with kormelink & meijer’s call for methods affording examination of “micro-moments” such as video ethnography, tracking, or as used here, screen capture (2018) – providing analysis of media use across time and close to the rapid level of nonconscious thought at which datafied mobile media often operate (hayles, 2017). using a data collection framework that logs screenshots of participants’ mobile devices every five seconds during longitudinal studies (reeves et al., 2019), i ethnographically observe screenshots capturing the mobile media usage of 16 u.s.-based participants in southern california from late may to late june 2017, including the mobile reception of two mediatized terrorist attacks in europe: the stockholm truck attack and the london bridge attack. this empirical approach provides a detailed view into how users use media platforms and encounter affordances and media texts in situ. as such, it affords study of “layering” across mediatized contexts within a single device from a user’s point of view (schrøder, 2019), in complement to studies of the layering of contexts between life beyond the screen and media reception (e.g., kormelink & meijer, 2018). in the minutes following the first reports of an attack, push notifications often pop up on mobile phone screens. for multiple users studied, these notifications are an immediate path to pursuing further information about an attack and reading news articles or watching news and bystander videos. in one instance, when an indian international university student gets a push notification from the new delhi tv app, “3 attackers shot dead by police outside london p…” they immediately tap the notification to go in and read the article. at other times and for other users, the push notifications sit within the android mobile devices’ “notifications center,” often until a point of later engagement. push notifications blur the line between nudges, habit (chun, 2016), and ritual (burgess et al., 2019; kertzer, 1988) in the wake of a terrorist attack. one participant, a white middle-aged hollywood actor who, trump supporter, and close follower of updates on the uk’s impending parliamentary elections, receives a push notification of a text from a friend, terror in london” from a friend and then immediately looks for more information on drudge report. the push notification serves as a microevent (beck & gleyzon, 2016; collins, 1981) that activates a latent ritualistic potentiality to this user’s habitual checking of news aggregators like drudge report and realclearpolitics at various times throughout the day, which for this user is then re-encoded into their subsequent collective reaction to and discussion of the attack’s political ramifications in mediatized microrituals on comment threads and in text messages within their far-right media ecosystem – often blaming the labor party and european liberal multicultural policies more broadly. when notifications about the stockholm truck attack are pushed to participants’ phones and they are sleeping, they are often either cleared by the subject immediately upon seeing the notification among others when the phone is woken up in the morning, or, in some cases, the notifications sit in their “notifications center” until they are engaged with after the users have caught up on their email, personal messages they received over the night, and the rest of their mediatized morning routines. therefore, while encountering news through asynchronous microevents may be maligned for reducing the import of the topics––much as platform-designed political engagement may be considered “clicktivism” or “virtue signaling”––or for de-ritualizing news in its individual, seemingly sporadic asynchronous experience (poindexter, 2012), in the observed instances, it maintains elements of ritual by trying to create a sense of “order” and connection to others in the collective decoding of mediatized terrorism, even if this “order” is fragmented by an users’ rapid switching of mobile applications and asynchronous with a deferred sense of liveness relative to other users, bystander videos, and news reports. push notifications are an understudied phenomena in critical audience research and serve as a valuable marker of how micro (both temporally and textually) affordances and features of datafied mobile media can function as mediatized microevents, prompting microrituals in response to these attacks, ascribing an importance that belies not only their relative distance to users or the overall casualty count, but also the users’ time spent with formal news reports of the attack. in exploring the role of push notifications about terrorist attacks in sparking mediatized microrituals and the broader construction of attacks as datafied media events, this paper also highlights the layering of mediatization, wherein the above-mentioned intertwining of alerts from news outlets or interpersonal messages, device interface design elements and notification settings impact the circulation of and responses to mediatized terrorism. references beck, c., & gleyzon, f.-x. (2016). deleuze and the event(s). journal for cultural research, 20(4), 329–333. https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2016.1264770 burgess, j., mitchell, p., & münch, f. v. (2019). social media rituals: the uses of celebrity death in digital culture. a networked self and birth, life, death, 224– 239. chun, w. h. k. (2016). updating to remain the same: habitual new media. mit press. collins, r. (1981). on the microfoundations of macrosociology. american journal of sociology, 86(5), 984–1014. couldry, n., & hepp, a. (2016). the mediated construction of reality. polity. edgerly, s. (2017). making sense and drawing lines: young adults and the mixing of news and entertainment. journalism studies, 18:8 1052-1069. groot kormelink, t., & costera meijer, i. (2018). what clicks actually mean: exploring digital news user practices. journalism, 19(5), 668-683. hayles, n. k. (2017). unthought: the power of the cognitive nonconscious. university of chicago press. kertzer, d. i. (1988). ritual, politics, and power. yale university press. kim, s.j. (2016). a repertoire approach to cross-platform media use behavior. new media & society, 18(3), 353-372. nelson, j. l., & webster, j.g. (2017). the myth of partisan selective exposure: a portrait of the online political news audience. social media + society, july-september, 1-13. reeves, b., ram, n., robinson, t. n., cummings, j. j., giles, c. l., pan, j., chiatti, a., cho, m., roehrick, k., yang, x., gagneja, a., brinberg, m., muise, d., lu, y., fitzgerald, a., & yeykelis, l. (2019). screenomics: a framework to capture and analyze personal life experiences and the ways that technology shapes them. human–computer interaction, 1–52. schrøder, k. (2019). audience reception research in a post-broadcasting digital age. television & new media, 20(2), 155-169. taneja, h. (2017). mapping an audience-centric world wide web: a departure from hyperlink analysis, new media & society, 19(9), 1331-1348. microsoft word stuhl-entangled autonomy on automated airwaves-entangled autonomy on automated airwaves.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): stuhl, a. k. (2021, october). entangled autonomy on automated airwaves: the case of rivendell. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. entangled autonomy on automated airwaves: the case of rivendell andy kelleher stuhl mcgill university beginning in the early 2000s, a piece of software infrastructure for radio broadcasters brought several groups—distinguished by clashing stances on technology, communication, and cultural politics—into unlikely cooperation. the software, called rivendell, is a free and open source radio automation system. in radio, automation refers to a set of utilities that allow stations to “stay on the air for hours with virtually no human intervention” (douglas, 2004). in the latter decades of the 20th century, radio automation became an audible marker of rapid consolidation in american broadcast industries. monopolistic firms bought up stations by the hundreds and, laying off local djs, often used sophisticated automation suites to replace them with centrally and algorithmically managed content. when many independent broadcasters began adopting rivendell after its first release in 2004, they were thus interfacing with an already controversial technological category among radio professionals: a type of tool that on one hand would allow a small group of volunteers to run a continually transmitting (or streaming) station and that, on the other, represented a technical facet of a corporatized upheaval to the whole medium. this paper treats rivendell as an opening onto the politics at play when the liberal ethos propelling free and open source software1 meets the autonomy-prizing traditions of independent broadcasting at a juncture provided by automation. situating rivendell in a longer history of media automation and the cultural contests that surround digital-era changes, i draw out a friction between discourses of autonomy and automatedness—the latter referring to media workers’ critiques of automation’s perceptible effects on the cultural institutions where it is installed. elena razlogova (2013) has shown how djs at independent, freeform radio stations have worked out a nuanced relation to algorithmic audio tools: these radio workers tend to define their roles in contrast to but not necessarily in competition with music recommendation systems, while also relying on other software in producing their shows. but radio automation, since its origins in the 1950s, has been defined less by technological incursions from outside the medium than by concretizations of formatting—the same 1 coleman, coding freedom. logic that “freeform” radio, in its name, opposes. the opposition between experimental and monopolistic poles of the radio industry spectrum is not, however, the only major tensions running through rivendell. the development of this software, which quickly became a favored tool among left-leaning community stations, began within a right-wing christian network. broadcast engineer fred gleason was working for salem radio network, a national syndicator focused on christian and conservative talk-format programming, when he began developing a new automation system that would meet the needs of his employer’s affiliate stations at the start of the 2000s. in interviews with gleason, i explore how and why this system, rivendell, adopted a free and open source software (foss) architecture. this aspect of rivendell, which along with gleason has since split out from salem, today distinguishes it in the radio automation field much more saliently than do its origins in a religious right context. being open source means that current and past versions of rivendell’s c++ code and surrounding documentation can easily be retrieved, read, and executed. analysis of this source code demonstrates how techniques and devices from early automation systems have persisted as structural metaphors in software. more significantly, though, my interviews and software analysis will examine how the tradition of right-wing christian broadcasting interacted with these enduring radio automation structures and with the open source technologist ethos when all three combined in rivendell’s early development. by understanding how these elements came into articulation, i clarify what values rivendell has carried forward in its ongoing use and maintenance—and what kinds of reconciliation have been required on the part of broadcasters in very different contexts who have used this automation software. automation and christian conservatism have both been depicted as colonizing forces that have dominated and remade american radio. this paper explores movements that have levied such accusations, but it will foreground how ensuing efforts to radically reclaim radio have been entangled with those same forces. in 2008, low-power california station kdrt and the prometheus radio project published a “handbook on automation” that detailed, among other things, how the station’s operators relied on rivendell since their launch in 2004 (just a year into the software’s official release, while the project was still housed by salem). explaining automation to an audience of current or prospective grassroots broadcasters, the station engineers cite as one benefit of rivendell that it can automatically retrieve and air new episodes of democracy now!, the daily progressive news show hosted by amy goodman. as christina dunbar-hester (2014) recounts in her study of prometheus, the left-leaning activists who pushed the federal government to make low-power fm licenses available entered an uneasy alliance with christian groups interested in the same goal. the fact of that bygone alliance from a 2008 vantage point, after the fcc had acted upon that pressure, may explain why the political contrast between salem’s and kdrt’s programming went unremarked in the handbook. another tension is much more prevalent though: the opening pages acknowledge that “[s]ome people,” and perhaps the majority of a station’s volunteers, “might think radio automation is inherently evil” (shaw, 2008). the work that played out within that prometheus/kdrt handbook—making automation tools legible to an audience that may largely object to automation in principle—was not just parallel to the articulation that dunbar-hester describes; it was part of the same larger web of uncomfortable technical and political relations. exploring how actors maintain a goal of autonomy amid these relations, this paper draws on an interview with rivendell’s lead developer, fred gleason. gleason describes the user community as a “donut,” noting that the large station conglomerates who occupy a central place in the current american radio landscape have no potential interest in the software because they built or acquired their own automation systems in the course of their expansion. this spatial metaphor invites us to look toward forms of relationality—a shared negative orientation toward a culturally, economically, and technologically dominant force—that may facilitate cooperation among groups in spite of their also desiring independence from one another. references coleman, e. gabriella. coding freedom: the ethics and aesthetics of hacking. princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2013. douglas, susan j. listening in: radio and the american imagination. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press, 2004. dunbar-hester, christina. low power to the people: pirates, protest, and politics in fm radio activism. cambridge, ma: mit press, 2014. razlogova, elena. “the past and future of music listening: between freeform djs and recommendation algorithms.” in radio’s new wave: global sound in the digital era, edited by jason loviglio and michele hilmes, 62–76. new york, ny: routledge, 2013. shaw, jeff. “handbook on radio automation.” philadelphia, pa: prometheus radio project, 2008. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): butkowski, c. p.; bimo, s., & bhandari, a. (2022, november). digital traces, social residues: usage as self-representation on lifestyle apps. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. digital traces, social residues: usage as selfrepresentation on lifestyle apps chelsea p. butkowski university of pennsylvania sara bimo york university aparajita bhandari cornell university introduction social media platforms are established sites of digital self-representation, or the process of creating and accumulating media traces identified with particular people (rettberg, 2014). media traces are gestural and relational “vestiges or marks that indicate our presence, existence, or action through media” (humphreys, 2018, p. 9). revisited over time, these traces help us to make sense of our identities and selfhoods, forging meaning from our everyday experiences and personal histories (thumim, 2012). selfrepresentation is built into the fabric of social media interfaces and business models, and it is hyper-visible on feeds and profiles that archive millions of personal photos and posts. however, while the majority of relevant scholarship focuses on digital self-making practices in social media environments, self-representation is by no means isolated to digital spaces that are explicitly social or expressive; rather, self-representational behaviors may occur through a variety of a-typical contexts and practices (tiidenberg & whelan, 2017). in this project, we aim to extend scholarship on digital self-making by examining cases of digital self-representation in unexpected and unorthodox platform configurations. we shift focus away from explicitly social contexts (i.e., social media platforms that are expressly designed as a “stage” for the enactment of sociality) and turn to examine digital environments that are not explicitly or directly configured for social self-making purposes, but that nonetheless become re-purposed, re-configured, or “appropriated” (by users, platforms, or both) for relational acts of self-representation. we are guided by three main research questions: (1) how and why does this process of repurposing platform usage behaviors for self-making practices come about, and what roles do users and platforms play? (2) how might self-representational practices differ in these “re-purposed” environments, when compared to conventional selfrepresentational practices on existing social media platforms? (3) what implications might this hold for user conceptualizations of the self? methods we examine digital self-representation through three popular lifestyle applications dedicated to tracking or facilitating user behaviors that are not generally shared as public social performances online. however, these apps are repurposed with interactional features known as “social awareness streams” (sas) to encourage user investment and ritual engagement (caraway et al., 2017). sas incorporate sociality into the everyday usage of platforms that center on (and profit from) typically private, personal, invisible, or offline user behaviors (swartz, 2020). our three cases of interest include: (a) venmo, a payment app that displays transactions between friends as social updates; (b) spotify, a music streaming service that allows users to observe what their friends are currently or recently listening to; and (c) strava, an activity tracker that shares self-quantification metrics and gps movement data (e.g., runs, hikes) with friends. we selected these cases because all of them reflect the imposed sociality of sas while also displaying different kinds of social and potentially self-representational data, including monetary, entertainment, bodily, and spatial information. in these environments, usage of the platform’s primary functions is a prerequisite to self-expression. in this paper we draw from three “walkthroughs” (light et al., 2018) of each of the three applications. based in actor-network theory, this method involves holistically analyzing an application by examining its context and environment of use, features and everyday user experience, and broader narratives and discourses surrounding it. in combination with the data from the walkthrough method, we will be conducting interviews with users from each of the three applications. this data will help us approach these cases from an interpretive framework, centering how everyday users perform and experience sociality within these lifestyle apps. expected findings our expected findings are grouped into three preliminary themes regarding the nature of self-representation on venmo, spotify, and strava. “residues” of usage. these apps specialize in constructing echoes or fragments of platform usage behaviors and mobilizing them as social updates. the updates enable users to observe friends’ interactions with the platforms and, in some cases, with one another. at the same time, they also displace the social intentionality behind usage behaviors, which are first and foremost interactions with the platform (or on venmo, one other user) rather than a wider network of friends and followers. we describe these updates as a particular kind of media trace, which we term residual traces. like any trace, residues are marks that users leave behind when they engage with platforms, but the original purpose of residual traces is only indirectly social. residual traces describe ambient usage data repurposed into social updates and, in turn, indirect self-representations. spectrums of awareness. we expect to find that some users will intentionally mobilize their residual traces as social performances while others “play it straight” and only engage in the primary activities of the platforms (e.g., listening to music on spotify without attending to social displays). the performance of usage is highly encouraged by platform design. as our walkthrough data demonstrates, social updates from platform usage are often the “default” setting, which are either required for participation (e.g., transactional captions on venmo cannot be left blank) or must be manually turned off (e.g., spotify automatically turns on its sas every time the application is reopened). for users who lean into the performativity of residues, the self is bifurcated between the material actions of tracking a run or paying a friend and wider projects of digital selfmaking implicated within them. affective capitalism. our walkthrough data suggest that platforms encourage this repurposing of self-making, possibly because it furnishes additional, saleable data on users as well as inviting increased usage. residual traces and the self-representational practices they engender are ultimately displays of user engagement, making users aware of the popularity, frequency, and purposes of platform usage within their social networks. this extends our understanding of affective capitalism: beyond mining people’s digital behaviors, platforms also repurpose their social residues for further gain. conclusion by studying self-making and sociality on lifestyle apps, this research probes existing conceptualizations of digital self-representation and media traces through questions of intentionality, performativity, and displacement. it also problematizes the commodification of self-making and connectivity beyond social media contexts (van dijck, 2013). the social streams on lifestyle apps like venmo, spotify, and strava can be spaces for self-making and identity play. however, whether sharing these social residues is more in service of users or platform profit remains an open question. references caraway, m., epstein, d. a., & munson, s. a. (2017). friends don’t need receipts: the curious case of social awareness streams in the mobile payment app venmo. proceedings of the acm on human computer interaction. https://doi.org/10.1145/3134663 humphreys, l. (2018). the qualified self: social media and the accounting of everyday life. mit press. light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881-900. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1461444816675438 rettberg, j. w. (2014). seeing ourselves through technology: how we use selfies, blogs and wearable devices to see and shape ourselves. palgrave macmillan. swartz, l. (2020). new money: how payment became social media. yale university press. thumim, n. (2012). self-representation and digital culture. palgrave macmillan. tiidenberg, k., & whelan, a. (2017). sick bunnies and pocket dumps: “not-selfies” and the genre of self-representation. popular communication, 15(2), 141–153. https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2016.1269907 van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. oxford university press. suggested citation (apa): striphas, t, hallinan, b, reynolds, c.j., brown, m., & postigo, h. (2021, october). algorithmic imaginations: rethinking “algorithmic” as a heuristic for understanding computationally-structured culture. panel presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 algorithmic imaginations: rethinking “algorithmic” as a heuristic for understanding computationallystructured culture ted striphas university of colorado boulder blake hallinan hebrew university of jerusalem cj reynolds hebrew university of jerusalem mikayla brown temple university hector postigo temple university panel rationale friedrich nietzsche once wrote, “with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression...the creator [of language] only designates the relations of things to people, and for expressing these they lay hold of the boldest metaphors…” (1993, p. 82; translation modified). generations later frantz fanon, writing about the dehumanizing elements of colonialism, noted that making sense of things was “an endless task. we accumulate facts, we discuss them, but with every line that is written, with every statement that is made, one has the feeling of incompleteness” (2008, p. 149). it is thus that we come to revisit how we imagine “algorithmic” anything (be it culture, decision-making, the internet, etc.) and the consequences thereof. we are motivated by a feeling that, after nearly a decade of technological change and critique, it’s become heuristically imprecise, infused with its own predilections, and taken up as a catchphrase describing a host of vastly complex human/institutional/technological relationships. for purposes of this panel, how we imagine our place within the structure of sociotechnical-human relationships is our “algorithmic imagination.”1 many people, for example, no longer just imagine if attending a political rally will be understood as conferring support to a collection of points of view, should someone they know see them there. taina bucher (2017) noted that informants from her study of a small set of facebook users do indeed imagine how algorithms imagine them, so much so that they were moved to tweet about it. she coined the phrase “algorithmic imaginaries” to conceptualize her informants’ ruminations about how facebook sees them. we follow that logic here but connect it more directly to social relations reified in algorithms. awareness of a deterministic, barely visible computational hand shaping society is evident in academic scholarship, which has experienced a proliferation of studies on the subjects of: the oppressive dimensions of algorithmic decision making, particularly with respect to race and gender (benjamin 2019; browne 2015; cheney-lippold 2018; gandy 1993; o’neil 2016; nakamura, 2009; noble 2018); the nature, definition, and historicity of algorithms (gillespie 2017; goffey 2008; seaver 2017; striphas 2021); algorithmic culture (galloway 2006; striphas 2015); the relationship between algorithms, media systems, democracy, and public life (andrejevic 2019; pasquale 2015; vaidhyanathan 2012; vaidhyanathan 2018); and more. importantly, however, the algorithmic imagination isn’t confined to the academy, nor only to academic scholarship. it is also evident in spheres such as journalism and popular culture, as epitomized by two recent, high-profile examples (among many others): the new york times’ feature story on robert julian-borchak williams, “wrongly accused by an algorithm,” which explores racist patterns in the computationally directed surveillance of black people and populations (hill 2020); and disney’s family-friendly film ralph breaks the internet (2018), which includes in its cast an algorithm named yesss, voiced by taraji p. henson. 1 we do not mean “algorithmic imagination” in the way ed finn used it to describe “the growing cognitive traffic between biological, cultural, and computational structures of thinking” (p. 185), challenging those observing the role of algorithms in public life to consider how the category “imagination” was no longer the exclusive provenance of human beings. we mean “imagination” as c. wright mills (1959) meant it, and “algorithmic” a reification of what he meant by “the sociological,” i.e., the complex of institutions and human relationships that structure groups’ places in and movements through society. the purpose of this panel is to explore the “algorithmic imagination” as it manifests in particular scholarly, historical, socio-cultural, and technical contexts. we prioritize how social actors, situated in distinct settings, go about constructing an “algorithmic imagination” in conversation/opposition with how computational systems have “imagined” them; panelists will also reflect critically and self-reflexively on the implications of an algorithmic imagination, so conceived. we demure from monolithic understandings of the “algorithmic imagination,” and also embrace algorithmic intersectionality, the idea that because intersectionality dictates that “no person has a single, easily stated, unitary identity […]" (delgado and stefencic 2017) the algorithmic imagination so informed is poly-modal. confronted with this complexity, we are reminded of j. k. gibson-graham’s observation that “[i]t is the way capitalism has been 'thought’ has made it so difficult for people to imagine its supersession." similarly, this panel contends that the ways in which algorithms have been “thought,” or imagined, have made it difficult to conceive of practicable strategies for transforming algorithmic cultures and, indeed, for delinking them from both state and corporate control. algorithms then are sites ripe for political contention. the panel, thus, makes three primary contributions. first, we situate, define, and distinguish the concept, “algorithmic imagination.” second, the panel provides analyses of key facets of the algorithmic imagination, in specific historical settings and life-worlds defined by intersectionality. lastly, it aims to contribute, however provisionally, to a political theory that recognizes the deterministic power of computational systems but rejects the notion that power is inherently democratic or monolithically insurmountable. the panelists’ papers address, respectively: the cultural-historical and socio-semantic entailments of the algorithmic imagination; the agenda-setting function of popular “algorithmic audit” videos appearing on youtube; the role of algorithms in the shaping of the “digital afterlife, and vice-versa; and the possibility of hacking algorithmicallytrained ai systems, in an effort to mitigate gender and other pernicious biases manifest in algorithmic culture. references andrejevic, mark. automated media. london: routledge, 2019. benjamin, ruha. race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. cambridge, uk: polity, 2019. browne, simone. dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. durham, nc: duke university press, 2015. bucher, taina. “the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the affects of facebook algorithms.” information, communication & society 20, no. 1 (2017): 30–44. cheney-lippold, john. we are data: algorithms and the making of our digital selves. new york: nyu press, 2017. delgado, richard, jean stefancic, and angela harris. critical race theory. 3rd edition. new york: nyu press, 2017. fanon, frantz. black skin, white masks. translated by richard philcox. revised edition. new york: grove press, 2008. finn, ed. what algorithms want: imagination in the age of computing. cambridge, ma: the mit press, 2017. galloway, alexander r. gaming: essays on algorithmic culture. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2006. gandy, oscar h. the panoptic sort: a political economy of personal information. boulder, co: westview press, 1993. gibson-graham, j. k. the end of capitalism (as we knew it): a feminist critique of political economy. oxford, uk: blackwell, 1996. gillespie, tarleton. “algorithm.” in digital keywords: a vocabulary of information society and culture, edited by benjamin peters, 18–30. princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2016. goffey, andrew. “algorithm.” in software studies: a lexicon, edited by matthew fuller, 15–20. cambridge, ma: mit press, 2008. hill, kashmir. “wrongfully accused by an algorithm.” new york times, june 24, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recognition-arrest.html. mills, c. wright. the sociological imagination. new york: oxford university press, 1959. nakamura, lisa. “the socioalgorithmics of race: sorting it out in jihad worlds.” in the new media of surveillance, edited by shoshana magnet and kelly gates, 149-162. abingdon, uk: routledge, 2009. nietzsche, friedrich. “on truth and lies in a nonmoral sense.” in philosophy and truth: selections from nietzsche’s notebooks of the early 1870s, translated by daniel breazeale. atlantic highlands, nj: humanities press, 1993. noble, safiya umoja. algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york: new york university press, 2018. o’neil, cathy. weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. new york: crown, 2016. pasquale, frank. the black box society: the secret algorithms that control money and information. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2016. seaver, nick. “algorithms as culture: some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems.” big data & society 4, no. 2 (december 2017): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717738104. striphas, ted. “algorithmic culture.” european journal of cultural studies 18, no. 4–5 (august 2015): 395–412. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549415577392. ted striphas, “algorithm.” in information: a historical companion, edited by ann blair, paul duguid, anja goeing, and anthony grafton, 298-303. princeton, nj: princeton university press., 2021. vaidhyanathan, siva. antisocial media: how facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy. new york: oxford university press, 2018. vaidhyanathan, siva. the googlization of everything (and why we should worry). berkeley: university of california press, 2011. mathematics is ordinary: culture, computation, & philological power ted striphas university of colorado boulder this essay contributes to the ongoing body of research on the subject of “algorithmic culture” (galloway 2006; striphas 2015; see also gillespie 2016). it is inspired by and situated with respect to studies of the relationship between algorithmic processes and instances of racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and more, both on and offline, in the present day (e.g., gandy 1993; gandy 1995; ananny 2011; browne 2015; o’neil 2016; sandvig et al. 2016; gillespie 2017; cheney-lippold 2017; noble 2018). it also seeks to complement and provide deeper context for recent investigations into vernacular understandings of algorithms and of algorithmic processes, or of what bucher (2017) characterizes as instances of “the algorithmic imaginary” (see also finn 2017; seaver 2017). throughout this paper, i endeavor to situate both concepts— “algorithmic culture” and “algorithmic imaginaries”—within a broader historical frame by inquiring into the origins, as it were, of the term algorithm in english and adjacent languages. the paper does so by adopting (and in certain respects going beyond) the keywords approach developed by the cultural studies scholar raymond williams (1983), and also by positing numbers, computational processes, and forms of quantitative reasoning not merely as instances of mathematics, generally, but as technologies more specifically. the etymology of the word algorithm leads almost unfailingly to moḥammed ibn-mūsā al-khwārizmī, a polymath who lived and worked in baghdad in the ninth century c.e.—a member of caliph al-mamun’s “house of wisdom” whose research was carried out at the height of the so-called “golden age of islam.” al-khwārizmī’s surname is the source, supposedly, of the word algorithm. instead of accepting this account, which posits an irreducible point of origin for the term, this paper explores the relations of power and authority that produced that origin in the first place. the process begins by digging deeper into al-khwārizmī’s life and, more specifically, into the history of conquest, coloniality, and ethnic and religious persecution that may have landed him in baghdad, his reported home; he or his ancestors, it turns out, probably hailed from the steppe lands of central asia, an area that was brutally conquered and colonized by the persian empire. next, this paper follows al-khwārizmī’s treatises on algebra and the indo-arabic number system as they wound their way west into europe and eventually to england, where, in the nineteenth century, they are taken up by the very same brand of orientalist scholars whom said (1979) devastatingly critiqued in his path-breaking work. the first english-language translations of al-khwārizmī’s mathematical writings were published in 1831, under the auspices of england’s royally-chartered oriental translation fund. the objective here is to show how the standard al-khwārizmī “story” was forged under conditions of english colonialism and, more specifically, an orientalist desire to imagine al-khwārizmī’s asia as europe’s proctological past. moreover, i argue that henry thomas colebrooke and friedrich rosen, al-khwārizmī’s translators, mischaracterized the texts in regarding them strictly as elementary mathematical treatises, or as evidence of “the art and sciences among the arabs” (colebrooke 1817, vii). the texts, in fact, had (and continue to have) so much more to say. the final main section of the paper consists of a close reading of al-khwārizmī’s algebra, highlighting the text’s intricate mapping of relations between kith and kin under conditions of slavery. the text brings to light some early affinities between culture and computation; it also shows how mathematics and mathematical formulae were used to perform something strongly resembling “cultural” work albeit in the absence of the word, culture. the conclusion returns to the present day. there, i reflect on both the politics and idiom of algorithmic culture, which i see as closely connected to one another. the goal is to think through what a historically-driven, keywords approach might offer in terms of understanding the relationship between culture, technology, and language today. more specifically, i draw links between the historical insights of the paper and a brief series of recent examples. but the intention isn’t to suggest that we’re prisoners of language, or that we’re trapped in some dizzying eternal return. the point is to embed contemporary algorithmic imaginaries and experiences of algorithmic culture in a deeper historical timeframe, so that observers may better appreciate the degree to which they are not alone in history. and the message, ultimately, is to listen more closely to the “terms and conditions” of these everyday algorithmic imaginaries, by which i mean the words contemporary speakers may or may not use in making sense of digital-computational decision making. references ananny, mike. “the curious connection between apps for gay men and sex offenders.” the atlantic, april 14, 2011. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/04/the-curious-connectionbetween-apps-for-gay-men-and-sex-offenders/237340/. browne, simone. dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. durham, nc: duke university press, 2015. bucher, taina. “the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the affects of facebook algorithms.” information, communication & society 20, no. 1 (2017): 30–44. cheney-lippold, john. we are data: algorithms and the making of our digital selves. new york: nyu press, 2017. colebrooke, henry thomas. “dissertation.” in algebra, with arithmetic and mensuration, from the sanscrit, translated by henry thomas colebrooke, i–lxxxiv. london: john murrary, 1817. finn, ed. what algorithms want: imagination in the age of computing. cambridge, ma: the mit press, 2017. galloway, alexander r. gaming: essays on algorithmic culture. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2006. gandy, oscar h. “it’s discrimination, stupid!” in resisting the virtual life: the culture and politics of information, edited by james brook and iain boal, 35–47. san francisco, ca: city lights publishers, 1995. gandy, oscar h. the panoptic sort: a political economy of personal information. boulder, co: westview press, 1993. gillespie, tarleton. “algorithm.” in digital keywords: a vocabulary of information society and culture, edited by benjamin peters, 18–30. princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2016. gillespie, tarleton. “algorithmically recognizable: santorum’s google problem, and google’s santorum problem.” information, communication & society 20, no. 1 (2017): 63–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1199721. noble, safiya umoja. algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york: new york university press, 2018. o’neil, cathy. weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. new york: crown, 2016. said, edward w. orientalism. new york: vintage, 1979. sandvig, christian, kevin hamilton, karrie karahalios, and cedric langbort. “when the algorithm itself is a racist: diagnosing ethical harm in the basic components of software.” international journal of communication 10 (2016): 4972–90. seaver, nick. “algorithms as culture: some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems.” big data & society 4, no. 2 (december 2017): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717738104. striphas, ted. “algorithmic culture.” european journal of cultural studies 18, no. 4–5 (august 2015): 395–412. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549415577392. williams, raymond. keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society. rev. ed. new york: oxford university press, 1983. user-generated accountability: auditing and the algorithmic imagination of youtube creators blake hallinan hebrew university of jerusalem cj reynolds hebrew university of jerusalem “congratulations sir, the youtube algorithm has chosen you,” reads one of the comments beneath the “70 subscriber special” video from youtube creator nickolas green outdoors, a video that has since acquired more than 17 million views. as the tiny camping channel added subscribers by the thousands, people left comments explaining that the youtube algorithm had “randomly recommended” the video to them. despite the language of randomness, a sudden surge of popularity attributed to algorithmic promotion is a familiar script on the platform, the latest iteration of the “chosen one” narrative. all this talk about the algorithm in the comment sections of viral videos highlights the growing public interest and engagement with algorithmic culture (hallinan and striphas 2016). from the personalized mix that populates a user’s home page to the order of search results to the selection of videos “up next,” algorithms are inescapable on youtube. beyond the more visible aspects of the interface, algorithms also power decisions around the placement of ads, the eligibility of videos for monetization, the enforcement of copyright, and the moderation of content. these techniques of automation both respond to and enable the immense scale of youtube, a platform with more than two billion monthly users and 500 hours of content uploaded every minute (youtube 2021). accordingly, the algorithm often stands in for the broader system of platform governance that mediates what audiences see, which creators are seen, and the possibilities for extracting social and economic value. however, details about the backend operations of the platform are scarce, constrained by technical challenges and economic incentives (ananny and crawford 2016), and compounded by the power differential between platform and users (postigo 2003). unsatisfied with the black-boxing of algorithmic governance on youtube, some creators have begun to seek accountability through other means, deploying their skills, audiences, and situated knowledge to investigate the platform’s operations. these efforts translate to an emerging video genre which combines industry lore with methods of systematic testing to explain how recommendation and moderation work, and why audiences should care. in other words, creators transform “algorithmic audits” (sandvig et al. 2015) into content. one prominent example, a collaboration between andrew platt, sealow, and nerd city, begat over three million views across two videos. the team developed a “demonetization detector based around machine learning ai” to generate and test more than 15,000 words by uploading sample videos with thousands of linguistic combinations (platt 2019). the tests revealed that the term "gay" and related terms like "gay marriage" and "gay pride" were automatically demonetized. follow-up tests found that replacing the words with "friend" or "happy" made the videos eligible for monetization. nerd city characterized the platform’s denial of these discriminatory results as "youtube's biggest lie." the discrimination enacted through algorithmic operations plays a significant role in the development of a platform’s networked public (boyd 2010), determining who encounters content from creators and topics relevant to them and who does not (sobande 2017). as the example shows, audit videos go beyond discourse about social media optimization and position youtube algorithms as matters of public concern. in this paper, we conduct a grounded analysis of algorithmic audit videos alongside official corporate communications about algorithmic recommendation and moderation. because content creators are structurally incentivized to both care about and contest platform governance (caplan and gillespie 2020), creator perspectives and practices offer insight into the conditions of cultural production on youtube and reveal novel political strategies. accordingly, we frame algorithmic audit videos as a strategy of usergenerated accountability, providing an account of how the platform operates while simultaneously using publicity in an attempt to hold the platform accountable. by auditing practices of recommendation and moderation, youtube creators intervene in how the platform imagines and cultivates its desired creators and audiences. in other words, creators intervene in the production and popularization of particular algorithmic imaginaries (bucher 2016). user-generated accountability is a response to uneven power dynamics on youtube that grant risk-averse corporate stakeholders of the platform, including parent company google, paid advertisers, and large-scale copyright holders greater capacity to influence the public culture of the platform than the creators and audiences who generate the vast majority of its content and views. as michael power, a leading scholar of auditing argues, “audits are needed when accountability can no longer be sustained by informal relations of trust alone but must be formalized, made visible and subject to independent validation” (1997, 11). by critiquing the operations of algorithmic culture, audit videos take on an agenda-setting function for how audiences understand, relate, and respond to youtube's algorithms. algorithmic audit videos also enroll creators and audiences as active stakeholders in platform governance through the publication of participatory investigations that reveal and critique how the platform operates. youtubers thus combine strategies from labor activism (ferrari and graham, 2021), academic research (rieder, matamoros-fernández, and coromina 2017), and investigative journalism (e.g., larson et al. 2016) to identify discriminatory practices, call for their redress, and respond to the limitations of official, top-down mechanisms of accountability. references ananny, mike, and kate crawford. 2018. “seeing without knowing: limitations of the transparency ideal and its application to algorithmic accountability.” new media & society 20 (3): 973–89. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816676645. boyd, danah. 2010. “social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications.” in networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites, edited by zizi papacharissi, 39–59. new york: routledge. bucher, taina. 2017. “the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms.” information, communication & society 20 (1): 30–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154086. caplan, robyn, and tarleton gillespie. 2020. “tiered governance and demonetization: the shifting terms of labor and compensation in the platform economy.” social media + society 6 (2): 205630512093663. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120936636. ferrari, fabian, and mark graham. 2021. “fissures in algorithmic power: platforms, code, and contestation.” cultural studies, march, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2021.1895250. hallinan, blake, and ted striphas. 2016. “recommended for you: the netflix prize and the production of algorithmic culture.” new media & society 18 (1): 117–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814538646. larson, jeff, surya mattu, lauren kirchner, and julia angwin. "how we analyzed the compas recidivism algorithm." propublica, 23 may 2016. available at: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-the-compas-recidivism-algorithm platt, andrew. "list of youtube demonetized words revealed." andrew platt youtube analyzed. 30 september 2019. video. available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofyhpbsvck0 postigo, hector. 2003. “emerging sources of labor on the internet: the case of america online volunteers.” international review of social history 48 (s11): 205–23. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859003001329. power, michael. the audit society: rituals of verification. oxford: oxford up, 1997. rieder, bernhard, ariadna matamoros-fernández, and òscar coromina. 2018. “from ranking algorithms to ‘ranking cultures’: investigating the modulation of visibility in youtube search results.” convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies 24 (1): 50–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856517736982. sandvig, christian, kevin hamilton, karrie karahalios, and cedric langbort. 2014. "auditing algorithms: research methods for detecting discrimination on internet platforms." paper presented to “data and discrimination: converting critical concerns into productive inquiry,” a preconference at the 64th annual meeting of the international communication association. 22 may; seattle, wa, usa. sobande, francesca. 2017. “watching me watching you: black women in britain on youtube.” european journal of cultural studies 20 (6): 655–71. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549417733001. youtube. "youtube by the numbers." youtube official blog. accessed 22 march 2021. available at: https://blog.youtube/press data, eternity, and death: identity and the digital afterlife mikayla brown temple university identity “captures the implicit and explicit responses to the question, “who am i” (nagy 278)? this malleable cultural identity we undertake is largely due to social events such as globalization, modernity, and the digital society we find ourselves existing in (koç 38). previously, our identity and legacy were “confined by physical realities and constraints of the here and now,” but currently, modern identities have taken on a malleable form constantly forming and transforming “in relation to the ways we represent or address the cultural systems which surround us” (hall 277). in a society of “constant, rapid and permanent change" (hall 277), our identity has become constructed by and permanently embedded in an entirely new arena – the virtual. our digitally mediated lives have blurred the boundaries between the physical and the virtual, making us revisit and reimagine our identity posthumously. as we begin to explore what it means to be digitally immortal, death, in a traditionally defined sense, will become a distant concept of the past. cracking the mortality myth creates an arena where we can construct our posthumous identity and legacy in a much more multifaceted, permeable, sentient, and editable manner (nagy 279). as new technology arises to bring ourselves and our loved ones back to life posthumously, our digital presence, from avatars to blog posts, can be imagined as immortal and conscious living units instead of as fixed artificial entities (nagy 280). the concept of digital immortality expands the idea of the “algorithmic imagination” to include areas of memorialization and the human condition concerning what it means to die and to grieve in an era of digital immortality. the idea of a posthumous identity is commonly discussed and written about in its attempt to mirror consciousness using ai and machine learning. instead of only focusing on the data being fed into the machine and how the machine sees us now, we should begin to imagine and worry about how the machine will continue to "see" once we are not around to make corrections. as orwell noted, “the one who controls the past, controls the future” (orwell 32). the way our data immortalizes our identity leaves history susceptible to curation through the lens of the individual and the algorithm, not through the evolutionary lens of facts and time. history is left vulnerable and susceptible to being reimagined and reborn through the "algorithmic imagination," changing the presentation of history. the possibility of an algorithmically driven, fluid history points out our need to not only begin reimagining our identities posthumously but begin considering how “imagining” will inevitably be algorithmically lensed. what pieces will the machine deem essential to highlight or unworthy of remembrance? how will we be remembered through the imagination of an algorithm? faced with the capitalization of humanity’s natural tendency to grieve and the commodification of our desire for immortality, the treatment and delivery of lived histories and memories are at the whims of companies and their black-box algorithms. as we consider digital immortality, posthumous identity, and the "algorithmic imagination," ethical concerns of power and control, equity, accessibility, autonomy, and ownership become transparent. with no regulations, “ethicists argue that digital afterlives should be treated with the same postmortem dignity as our corpses” (robitzski), provoking questions about data inheritance, data ownership, and platform adaptation. confronted with today's data grabs and money-making business models, we should worry more about what we want to be remembered, what we would like to be forgotten, and what it would mean for an algorithm to reimagine or rewrite our personal history. while digital afterlife services can readminister to the dead a minimal form of digital agency, allowing more adept intervention than when they were elderly, terminally ill, or close to their biological death (meese et al.), the identities created online can be molded and personalized posthumously by others and through the “algorithmic imagination.” people often leave wills containing instructions about how they wish to be remembered, but they have little say on how algorithms will tell their story. with the rise of web 2.0, the idea of inheritance has been extended into an eternal, digital presence that is constantly learning and, most importantly, constantly changing. now, a person not only exists in the memory of friends or relatives but also through their online personhood. like comments on long-forgotten forums, the digital record will tell more than we want or less than we hoped and be more a history of a changing self and less of a snapshot in time. there are no answers and concrete solutions to the tension between the fixed and the fluid. however, by envisioning what we want our posthumous identity to be alongside what we want to be forgotten, we can begin to critically address the idea of “algorithmic imagination” in relation to digital immortality. working off of foucault’s idea of the panopticon, we are constantly connected, constantly surveilled, constantly online, and constantly redefining who we are. this eternal digital lifecycle brings us to contemplate ephemerality, yearning for the fleeting but accepting a conflicting algorithmic self. what agency should the dead possess when being shaped by the "algorithmic imagination?” references hall, stuart, and paul dugay. questions of cultural identity. sage, 2011. koç, mustafa.“cultural identity crisis in the age of globalization and technology.” the turkish online journal of educational technology, vol. 5, no. 1, jan. 2006, pp. 37–43. koles, bernadett, and peter nagy. “who is portrayed in second life: dr.jekyll or mr. hyde? the extent of congruence between real life and virtual identity.” journal for virtual worlds research, vol. 5, no. 1, 2012, doi:10.4101/jvwr.v5i1.2150. meese, james, et al.“from here to eterni.me–the quest for digital immortality.”the conversation. 2014. 17 october 2018.<https://theconversation.com/from-here-to-eternime-the-quest-for-digital-immortality-33688> nagy, peter, and bernadett koles.“the digital transformation of human identity: towards a conceptual model of virtual identity in virtual worlds.” the international journal of research into new media technologies, vol. 20, no. 3, 2014, pp. 276–292. sage publications, doi:10.1177/1354856514531532. öhman, carl, and luciano, floridi.“the political economy of death in the age of information: a critical approach to the digital afterlife industry.” minds & machines, vol. 27, 7 sept. 2017, pp. 639–662. springer, doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-01794452. orwell, george. 1948. united kingdom: penguin publishing group, 1950. robitzski, dan.“the digital afterlife is open for business. but it needs rules.”futurism. 2018. 17 october 2018. <https://futurism.com/companies-digital-afterlife-ethical guidelines> hacking diversity into creative artificial intelligence-assessment: categorization and remedies for gender and race bias in natural language processing models for the creative industries hector postigo temple university when i was a boy in the 1980s, freshly arrived in the us, my mother worked two jobs. i was often left at home alone, so i watched a lot of television. the characters of all in the family reruns, archie bunker, edith, gloria and mike (meathead), were my english tutors. in one episode, during the family’s usual bickering, gloria posed the following riddle: a boy and his father are on a drive. there’s a terrible car accident and the father dies. the boy is injured and rushed to the hospital for surgery. upon seeing the boy, the surgeon says, “i can’t operate on this boy. he’s my son.” how come? caveat: the boy is not adopted. i’ve been posing that riddle to people here and there for almost 25 years. the majority of respondents are usually stumped or use magical thinking to explain what was going on. there are two answers that don’t tread on fantasy: 1) the surgeon could be the boy’s mother, or 2) the surgeon could also be his father from a same sex marriage and surrogacy. the research supporting this paper is inspired by that riddle. the biases that make it hard for most respondents to proceed with occam’s razor to answer the riddle is baked into american culture by gendered professional barriers and by idiomatic custom, which have for centuries established “he” as the default pronoun when there’s ambiguity. those cultural realities create imprecise language and epistemology for understanding ambiguous, context-based categories. as we surrender more of our work and administrative processes to artificial intelligence (ai) and the algorithms that comprise them, how those algorithms imagine culture and society will be how it comes to be reified in music, literature, images and film. if our biases are baked into our forms of cultural communication, then it follows that computationally-generated models for culture ai use are also biased. the research presented here will: 1) catalogue how culturally implicit biases, embedded in our use of the english language, show up in the computationally-derived assumptions of ai, designed for the natural language processing (nlp) ai when they write stories, movie scripts or poetry. for this project openai has given me beta access to their natural language processing (nlp) ai, gpt-3, via its api. through open source licenses i also have access gtp-2 (openai’s previous model for nlp). the paper shows findings from testing those ais. over the years, researchers from various disciplines have pointed out that “algorithmic bias” or the “politics of platforms” are present, but few have analyzed their code and the modules that implement it, or hacked at them, unpacking them so that we may know how exactly those biases make the voyage from culture to ai (striphas n.d.; anderson n.d.; gillespie n.d.; 2018; corbett-davies et al. 2017; diakopoulos 2016; žliobaitė 2017; woolley and howard 2016) are they in the code that dictates ai’s computational logic? or are they in what machine learning (ml) practitioners call “unknown layers,” where the computational leaps taken by ai reproduce meaning and structure from language patterns? or are the data corpora, exogenous to ai systems and used to train them about the human world, biased? researchers critiquing ai and algorithms have pointed out they are purposefully designed to serve the logic of a platforms’ business, and platform owners misrepresent what ai or algorithms are actually doing. they note patterns in outputs that are biased, a laudable finding, but with too few exceptions, (burrell 2016; raji et al. 2020; sandvig et al. 2014) offer little about how ai’s actual inner workings got to those outputs and how that might be corrected through minor hacks to otherwise unwieldy computational systems. as an exercise in theory and praxis, the research presented in this paper also shows how to modify ai models to inoculate against gender and race biases in creative ai outputs writing scripts, song lyrics and other text-centered creative work. for example, findings from research show that gpt3 and 2 both default to male normative narratives when prompted to write stories about doctors, lawyers and judges. the frequency at which men are represented in those roles by ai exceeds the actual real-world presentation in us job census data. ai, trained on unstructured data, mirrors the biases in english speaking cultures to assuming the default male in the profession tested. interventions in this paper have empirically shown to correct those biases. the algorithmic imaginary in this case is layered. it’s composed of both the cultural imaginary, which is reflected in english speaking cultural creative outputs, and the computational models derived therefrom, which are mathematically sound but unreliably applied. in this research, ongoing work is seeking to determine how deeply and widely cultural biases—not only about gender but also about race and class—have permeated through already existing ai that are helping creative industry and other professionals make new content. references anderson, c.w. n.d. “the materiality of algorithms – culture digitally.” accessed january 27, 2021. https://culturedigitally.org/2012/11/the-materiality-of-algorithms/. burrell, jenna. 2016. “how the machine ‘thinks’: understanding opacity in machine learning algorithms.” big data & society 3 (1): 2053951715622512. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951715622512. corbett-davies, sam, emma pierson, avi feller, sharad goel, and aziz huq. 2017. “algorithmic decision making and the cost of fairness.” in proceedings of the 23rd acm sigkdd international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, 797–806. kdd ’17. new york, ny, usa: association for computing machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3097983.3098095. diakopoulos, nicholas. 2016. “accountability in algorithmic decision making.” communications of the acm 59 (2): 56–62. https://doi.org/10.1145/2844110. gillespie, tarleton. 2018. custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. illustrated edition. new haven: yale university press. ———. n.d. “the relevance of algorithms – culture digitally.” accessed january 27, 2021. https://culturedigitally.org/2012/11/the-relevance-of-algorithms/. raji, inioluwa deborah, andrew smart, rebecca n. white, margaret mitchell, timnit gebru, ben hutchinson, jamila smith-loud, daniel theron, and parker barnes. 2020. “closing the ai accountability gap: defining an end-to-end framework for internal algorithmic auditing.” arxiv:2001.00973 [cs], january. http://arxiv.org/abs/2001.00973. sandvig, christian, kevin hamilton, k. karahalios, and c. langbort. 2014. “auditing algorithms : research methods for detecting discrimination on internet platforms.” 2014. /paper/auditing-algorithms-%3a-research-methods-for-on-sandvighamilton/b7227cbd34766655dea10d0437ab10df3a127396. striphas, ted. n.d. “what is an algorithm? – culture digitally.” accessed january 27, 2021. https://culturedigitally.org/2012/02/what-is-an-algorithm/. woolley, samuel c., and philip n. howard. 2016. “automation, algorithms, and politics| political communication, computational propaganda, and autonomous agents — introduction.” international journal of communication 10 (0): 9. žliobaitė, indrė. 2017. “measuring discrimination in algorithmic decision making.” data mining and knowledge discovery 31 (4): 1060–89. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10618-0170506-1. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): bastick, z. and mallet, m. (2021, october). between inclusion & exclusion: the digital lives of undocumented immigrants in the united states. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. between inclusion & exclusion: the digital lives of undocumented immigrants in the united states zach bastick oxford university marie mallet oxford university introduction there are approximately 10.3 to 10.7 million undocumented immigrants in the united states, approximately half of whom originate from mexico (connor et al., 2019). these individuals face distinct intersectional vulnerabilities, exclusion from many public institutions and services, and increased risks of exploitation (mallet et al., 2017). despite the heightened effects that digital inclusion may have on this precarious group, there is a paucity of research on their digital lives. this paper investigates their digital practices and attitudes, and the ways in which digital technologies reduce or reinforce their marginalization. it provides needed insight on digital life at the margins of society. theoretical framework undocumented immigrants rely on digital technologies to facilitate risky border crossings (newell et al., 2016), aid integration into host communities (kaufmann, 2018), and grow social capital (gonzales, 2017). however, these same technologies can surveil migrants’ social networks and increase their risks of deportation (wall et al., 2015). undocumented latino immigrants are likely to struggle with these privacy risks (guberek et al., 2018). yet, since undocumented latino immigrants are often (deliberately) hard to reach, there is a paucity of evidence on the ways in which these immigrants use technology to mitigate their undocumented status. both digital inclusion and undocumented status are increasingly viewed in sociology and media studies as continuums rather than dichotomies. in recent years, the binary of the digital divide that is, being on the ‘right’ or ‘wrong side’ of the gap in digital access, skills, and literacy has been supplemented by the more nuanced notion of digital inclusion (helsper, 2021). likewise, the inclusion of undocumented immigrants, for example as essential workers during the covid-19 pandemic, is recognized as being restricted by “varying degrees of subordination, rule, discrimination, and segmentation” (mezzadra and nielson 2013: 159). as such, de genova (2013) writes of ‘inclusion through exclusion’, showing that ‘illegalization’ is a particular form of inclusion. the mismatch between their legal exclusion and their societal inclusion constitutes what lamont (2018, p.412) has called a ‘recognition gap’. recent studies in communication suggest that digital technologies can both attenuate and exacerbate dimensions of marginality (pearce et al., 2020). for undocumented immigrants, this can lead to both positive and negative outcomes of digital inclusion (bastick and mallet, 2021). this vests marginalized individuals with the responsibilities of juggling these outcomes and their digital processes rendering them both subjects and objects of complex technological dynamics that they are often ill-suited to direct. method this paper reports interim findings from an original set of 44 semi-structured interviews with undocumented latino immigrants, conducted in the united states between february and july 2021. interviewees were recruited through snowball sampling based on an initial sample contacted through the authors’ existing networks and connections with immigrant organizations. we constructed an interview guide covering pertinent themes: (1) digital access and skills; (2) attitudes towards digital technologies; (3) outcomes related to undocumented status; (4) impacts on transnational family practices; (5) privacy and attitudes towards government and corporate data collection; (6) attitudes towards ai (such as newsfeeds); (7) self-efficacy in detecting fake news; and (8) pandemic related impacts on digital inclusion. our analysis was framed by constructivist grounded theory enabling new findings to emerge from the data without being bound by the initial thematic frame (charmaz, 2014). we report below on three of key findings. key findings digital employment and gig work our interviewees reported using the internet to circumvent their legal inability to work in the united states. craigslist, facebook, and yelp were crucial for finding employment in manual labor and service sector jobs. conversely, we found that digital work opportunities sometimes reinforced the vulnerabilities of undocumented status: many reported online employers disappearing before paying; others had difficulty recovering from scams masquerading as job opportunities; and others noted that gig work apps enabled exploitative working conditions e.g., working for reduced pay under an online food delivery account of a documented individual. digital family and social practices video calls and instant messaging (especially whatsapp) were reported as being especially important for maintaining transnational family practices. conversely, they sometimes unanchored identities – underscoring that some undocumented immigrants are both far from ‘home’ and not fully integrated in the us. online relationships cultivated through apps or social media groups for immigrants was sometimes used to alleviate social exclusion. importantly, with few exceptions, most did not substantially report modifying their online practices due to fears of surveillance by immigration services or the risks of deportation. telehealth being largely uninsured, many reported relying on digital family communication to obtain health guidance. a few reported relying on telehealth services abroad for support. obtaining health information through online search engines was a common strategy to mitigate their lack of coverage in the us, yet many remained uncertain about the opportunities and risks associated with seeking care in the us. conclusion highly vulnerable populations are associated with specific sets of vulnerabilities that interact with their digital inclusion. as such, there is a need to understand how digital technologies alleviate, but also exacerbate, marginalization. our analysis points to the utility of conceptualizing the digital inclusion of undocumented immigrants in terms of (a) fluid legal statuses, (b) involving different processes, and (c) resulting in differential outcomes. we underscore the need for more research on the digital lives of highly vulnerable populations, generally and suggest that intersectionality and marginalization offer useful frameworks for such studies. references bastick, z and mallet, m (2021). double lockdown: the effects of digital exclusion on undocumented immigrants during the covid-19 pandemic. available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3883432 charmaz k (2014). constructing grounded theory. sage. connor, p., passel, j. s., & krogstad, j. m. (2019). how european and u.s. unauthorized immigrant populations compare. pew research center. de genova n. (2013) spectacles of migrant ‘illegality’: the scene of exclusion, the obscene of inclusion. ethnic and racial studies, 36:7. gonzales, a. l. (2017). disadvantaged minorities’ use of the internet to expand their social networks. communication research, 44(4). guberek t, mcdonald a, simioni s, et al. (2018) keeping a low profile? technology, risk and privacy among undocumented immigrants. proceedings of the 2018 chi conference on human factors in computing systems. helsper, e. j. (2021). the digital disconnect: the social causes and consequences of digital inequalities. sage. kaufmann, k. (2018). navigating a new life: syrian refugees and their smartphones in vienna. information, communication & society, 21(6). lamont, m. (2018). “addressing recognition gaps: destigmatization and the reduction of inequality.” american sociological review 83 (3). mallet, m. l., calvo, r., & waters, m. c. (2017). “i don’t belong anymore”: undocumented latino immigrants encounter social services in the united states. hispanic journal of behavioral sciences, 39(3). mezzadra, s., neilson, b. (2013). border as method, or, the multiplication of labor. durham, nc: duke university press. newell bc, gomez r and guajardo ve (2016) information seeking, technology use, and vulnerability among migrants at the united states–mexico border. the information society, 32(3). pearce, k. e., gonzales, a., & foucault welles, b. (2020). introduction: marginality and social media. social media + society, 6(3). wall, m., otis campbell, m., & janbek, d. (2017). syrian refugees and information precarity. new media & society, 19(2). microsoft word ems-virtually amish-virtually amish.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): ems, l. (2021, october). virtually amish: preserving community at the internet’s margins. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. virtually amish: preserving community at the internet’s margins lindsay ems butler university my forthcoming book (mit press), virtually amish, is an ethnographic study of the adoption, and use of digital communication technologies among members of old order amish communities. this paper explores a section of the book focusing on amish strategies for internet management. today it is increasingly common for the amish to adopt computers, the internet and mobile devices in calculated ways to remain competitive in business. the concept internet management is a system of decisions and actions that can be managed by a business owner to mediate their relationship with anonymous others through the internet. because many amish already outsource tasks related to their businesses like transportation, accounting and printing, the system already fits within current business practices. strategies like these are in place to protect amish communities from the negative impacts of connectivity. data was collected via semi-structured interviews with thought-leaders (business and religious leaders) in indiana amish settlements. amish communities today are in the process of determining how to navigate the social forces that have come along with, what theorists like shoshana zuboff (2019) call, hightech capitalism. amish people describe internet technologies as both functional tools and symbols of engagement with, and resistance to the external social world. if not properly mitigated, they feel this external world has the potential to erode their culture and religion from the outside in. this research shows that decisions about technologies are productive sites of struggle that enable the amish to create and sustain a dynamic social and cultural sanctuary where their way of life can thrive while resisting the disempowering aspects of the world around them. this research illustrates how members of old order amish communities calibrate their use of communication technologies strategically in an effort to resist macro-level social forces that work to fragment people in their communities from nature, religion and each other. many social theorists have also noted what the amish seek to resist in the world around them. namely, digital technology works to amplify certain negative impacts of capitalism on people’s lives. for example, they alter and accelerate our experience of time (virilio 2006) and place by fragmenting people from nature (brende 2005, borgmann 1984) and each other (putnam 2000, sennett 1996, zuboff 2019). digital technologies contribute to the alienation of workers by making their labor invisible (dyerwitheford 1999, gray & suri 2019) and under-paid (duffy 2017, geissler 2014). the everyday lived experience of people working in a capitalist economy that is increasingly fueled by high technology is characterized by increased stress and anxiety (rosen et al. 2012), increased feelings of loneliness (dijulio et al. 2018) and an inability to fashion a long-term narrative of one’s life (sennett 1996). importantly, analysts have noted that these negative experiences result from an inability to opt-out of participation in a larger social and economic structure where power is intentionally, asymmetrically distributed and the most oppressed and marginalized people in society more acutely experience all of these negative impacts (castells 2009, eubanks 2012, 2019, noble 2018, o’neil 2016, tufekci 2017, yueng 2019). the few individuals who have the most power in society own and program the infrastructures that undergird the high-tech economy by collecting user data and using it to further strengthen their power and control. while the various theoretical critiques of capitalism abound, there are few modern examples of everyday people who have found a sweet spot in which their participation in the economy allows them to acquire resources that can be used to fulfill their social, cultural and political desires regardless of whether or not they align with the system’s. remarkably, members of amish communities do just this. they participate in the global economy while maintaining cultural, spiritual and ideological autonomy in defiance of what shoshana zuboff calls, “big other.” big other refers to an instrumentarian super power reigning over today’s high-tech society that “reduces human experience to measurable observable behavior while remaining steadfastly indifferent to the meaning of that experience” (376-77). in this new regime, “big other poaches our behavior for surplus and leaves behind all the meaning lodged in our bodies, our brains, and our beating hearts” (377). the lived experience under big other is a new kind of automaticity, a digital logic “that thrives within things and bodies, transforming volition into reinforcement and action into conditioned response” (zuboff 2019, 379). this form of power is designed to reduce uncertainty in society and produce knowledge and profits for surveillance capitalists. that the amish actively make decisions about technology that rest upon their unique moral, spiritual and faith-based values puts them precisely outside big other’s reign of power. they do not acquiesce to surveillance by this new authority and do not consent to the re-writing of the religious, faith-based texts and identities that guide their behavior. as such, their decisions about technology adoption and use provide an example of resistance to the powerful assault on the human capacity for authoring one’s morals and will that we all face today. references brende, eric. (2005) better off: flipping the switch on technology. new york: harper perennial. borgmann, a. (1984) technology and the character of contemporary life. chicago: university of chicago press. castells, m. (2009). communication power. oxford: oxford university press. dijulio b, hamel l, munana c, brodie m. loneliness and social isolation in the united states, the united kingdom, and japan: an international survey. kaiser family foundation; 2018. accessed may 28, 2020. kff.org/other/report/loneliness-andsocial-isolation-in-the-united-states-the-united-kingdom-and-japan-aninternational-survey/ duffy, b. e. (2017). (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. new haven, connecticut: yale university press. dyer-witheford, n. (1999). cyber-marx: cycles and circuits of struggle in high technology capitalism. urbana, illinois: university of illinois press. eubanks, v. (2012). digital dead end: fighting for social justice in the information age. cambridge, mass: mit press. eubanks, v. (2019). automating inequality: how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. new york picador: st. martin’s press geissler, h. (2014). seasonal associate. leipzig: spector books. gray, m. and suri, s. (2019) ghost work: how to stop silicon valley from building a new global underclass. new york: houghton mifflin harcourt. noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression: data discrimination in the age of google. new york: nyu press. o’neil, c. (2016). weapons of math destruction. new york: broadway books. putnam, r. d. (2000). bowling alone: the collapse and revival of american community. london: simon & schuster. rosen, l. d., whaling, k., rab, s., carrier, l. m. and cheever, n. a. (2012) “is facebook creating “idisorders”? the link between clinical symptoms of psychiatric disorders and technology use, attitudes and anxiety.” computers in human behavior, 29(3): 1243-1254. sennett, r. (1998). the corrosion of character: the personal consequences of work in the new capitalism. new york: w.w. norton. tufekci, z. (2017, october) we’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads. retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_m ake_people_click_on_ads?language=en virilio, p. (2006). speed and politics: an essay on dromology. los angeles: semiotext(e). yeung, p. (april 2019) the grim reality of life under gangs matrix, london’s controversial predictive policing tool. wired. accessed may 28th, 2020. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/gangs-matrix-violence-london-predictive-policing zuboff, s. (2020). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. corinna peil on the verge of collapse verify to continue to continue, please confirm that you're a human (and not a spambot). checking if the site connection is secure vimeo.com needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 chess, s., massarani, a., kruse, h., consalvo, m., & boudreau, k. (2021, october). pleasure+gender+play. panel presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. pleasure+gender+play shira chess university of georgia adrienne massanari american university holly kruse rogers state university, mia consalvo concordia university kelly boudreau harrisburg university of science & technology panel rationale from the start, play and game studies scholars have investigated the experiences of women and girls who play games online, as well as gendered assumptions around digital as well as non-digital play (brunner et al., 2000; bryce & rutter, 2002; delamere & shaw, 2008; fron et al., 2007a, 2007b; pearce, 2009). scholars have challenged ideas such as that girls and women have weaker gameplay skills than boys and men (jenson & de castell, 2008), that women are not interested in competitive play (taylor, 2006), that girls and women are different in their play experiences and interests (royse et al., 2007) and that women are not frequent or loyal players (consalvo & begy, 2015; williams et al., 2009). however, there is still more to learn about how women, girls, boys, men, nonbinary and other individuals play, as well as how gender can play an important role beyond as an identity marker in playful expressions as well as normative expectations for play. this panel offers new ways of examining how gender, games, and other forms of online play, can be analyzed and understood. these four papers argue for a more nuanced understanding of gender and play, further challenging gaming culture’s preoccupation that certain games and certain styles of play are more “valid” than others (consalvo & paul, 2019). to do that, we offer fresh analytical tools, different theoretical lenses and underexplored sites for study. analytical tools “no need for speed” makes a unique contribution to gaming and play literature, offering a new articulation of the temporal experiences within and external to game play especially in covid/pandemic times. in particular, the authors argue that the concept of “slow gaming,” might offer new possibilities for both our experiences of play and the way that time within the games industry itself is being reconceptualized. the authors offer three different games as examples of how “slow gaming” challenges our relationship to play, domesticity, notions of gender, and labor practices within the gaming industry more broadly. this paper argues that playing slow games, or playing games slowly, might provide a unique political rejoinder to contemporary life under late capitalism. theoretical lenses two papers in this panel bring underutilized theoretical frameworks to the study of gender and games: examining how socioeconomic class and boundary keeping intersect with gender and gameplay in important ways. the presentation “working for hearts: social class and time management games” reads popular casual games such as sally’s spa through an intersectional critique. adding to gendered examinations of casual games (chess, 2012, 2017), this paper brings in a critique of social class. it does so through exploring the classed positions of jobs in these games, as well as how the player’s agency is limited both through classed expectations of certain occupations as well as further undermined by particular design decisions and gameplay mechanics as well as game narratives. it demonstrates how class is an important aspect of identity that can help us better understand gaming representations. the second paper to bring in underutilized theory is “gendered expectations of playing nice, boundary keeping and problematic/toxic behaviors in casual video game communities.” this paper offers a different way of understanding the role of toxic behavior and players in game communities: through the sociological lens of boundary keeping. while not dismissing the real effects of harassment, it explores how activities such as trolling and other problematic gameplay is defined differently within different player groups, how it can strengthen some in-game communities or spur the creation of groups dedicated to combating such problems, and in the process helping to further enrich and make more inclusive gaming culture. overlooked cases “girls, platforms, and play” examines an offline form of gendered play and competition – pre-teen and teen girls riding hobbyhorses – and how the activity has been differently contested and/or constructed on two platforms: youtube and instagram. legacy media video content of hobbyhorse competitions uploaded to youtube inevitably have led – given youtube’s largely antisocial comment culture (burgess & green, 2018) – to hobbyhorsers’ activities to be delegitimized for a number of reasons by commenters: mainly, because it’s just girls playing with toys, not participating in a sport; or because it is an athletic endeavor, but its participants should compete in a “real” sport, like track and field; or because it’s not real equestrianism. instagram's affordances, which help encourage connections among subculture participants and the creation of communities (leaver, highfield, & abidin, 2020), have allowed hobbyhorse enthusiasts to create a space of their own online. references brunner, c., bennett, d., & honey, m. (2000). girl games and technological desire. in j. cassell & h. jenkins (eds.), from barbie to mortal kombat: gender and computer games (pp. 72–88). mit press. bryce, j., & rutter, j. (2002). killing like a girl: gendered gaming and girl gamers’ visibility [paper presentation]. cgdc conference http://jasonrutter.co.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2015/03/bryce-rutter-2005-gendered-gaming-and-girlgamers%e2%80%99-visibility-.pdf burgess, j. & green, j. (2018). youtube (2nd ed.). polity press. chess, s. (2012). going with the flo. feminist media studies, 12(1), 83–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2011.558350 chess, s. (2017). ready player two: women gamers and designed identity. university of minnesota press. consalvo, m., & begy, j. (2015). players and their pets: gaming communities from beta to sunset. university of minnesota press. consalvo, m., & paul, c. a. (2019). real games: what's legitimate and what's not in contemporary videogames. mit press. delamere, f. m., & shaw, s. m. (2008). “they see it as a guy’s game”: the politics of gender in digital games. leisure/loisir, 32(2), 279–302. https://doi.org/10.1080/14927713.2008.9651411 fron, j., fullerton, t., morie, j. f., & pearce, c. (2007a). playing dress-up: costumes, roleplay and imagination. philosophy of computer games, 24–27. fron, j., fullerton, t., morie, j. f., & pearce, c. (2007b). the hegemony of play. situated play: proceedings of digital games research association 2007 conference. tokyo, japan, 1–10. http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/the%20hegemony%20of%20play.pdf jenson, j., & de castell, s. (2008). theorizing gender and digital gameplay: oversights, accidents and surprises. eludamos. journal for computer game culture, 2(1), 15–25. leaver, t., highfield, t., & abidin, c. (2020). instagram. polity press. pearce, c. (2009). communities of play: emergent cultures in multiplayer games and virtual worlds. mit press. royse, p., lee, j., undrahbuyan, b., hopson, m., & consalvo, m. (2007). women and games: technologies of the gendered self. new media & society, 9(4), 555–576. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444807080322 taylor, t. l. (2006). play between worlds: exploring online game culture. mit press. williams, d., consalvo, m., caplan, s., & yee, n. (2009). looking for gender: gender roles and behaviors among online gamers. journal of communication, 59(4), 700–725. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2009.01453.x no need for speed: the gendered pleasures of slow gaming while video games used to be poised primarily for a presumed masculine audience (kocurek, 2015) industrial shifts, changing technologies and new habits have seen the outcome of new kinds of players and games (cote, 2020; chess, 2017; harvey, 2015). on the surface, the importance of these shifts might appear minimal after all, for a medium to “grow up” it necessarily needs to broaden, and needs to find new kinds of audiences. but the overwhelming pushback from larger game-related culture such as the hashtag movement #gamergate has demonstrated the politicized implications of why the diversity of audiences and game types matter. while, certainly, many video games are built for expected masculine or feminine audiences, these categories were always imperfect. in our presentation, we argue that rather than understanding this faultline in terms of gendered politics, it is far more useful to think about that rift in terms of speed. to this end, our paper interrogates the politics of slow gaming as a necessary rejoinder to the industry’s prioritization of speed. time, speed, and games time and speed have long been of interest to media and communication scholars, especially the ways that new technologies shift our collective experiences of each. paul virilio, manuel castells, and other critics note the increasingly “sped up” nature of our everyday lives creates a world where politics, culture, networks, and war are global, and instantaneous communication is portrayed as a sign of progress and a net positive for society (castells, 2011; virilio, 2006). judy wajcman (2015) argues that there is a dialectical relationship between technology and time, with contemporary society awash in discussions of the acceleration of everyday life enabled by/through new technologies. the experience for individuals is one of acceleration, with instantaneous communication, immediacy, and always-on connectivity creating a sense of anxiety and pressure. in response, we see silicon valley offering other solutions: meditation apps, life-hacking tools, and ever-present monitoring of our well-being. but as wajcman and others argue, these solutions work to prop up late capitalism: making us stronger, faster, and fitter for a world that is actually detrimental to our health. in addition, feminist scholars remind us that time remains a commodity that is unequally shared, with women doing the bulk of this invisible work in domestic settings and thus having less time for other pursuits (hochschild, 2001). other scholars remind us that our class position also determines our relationship to time, with, for example, gig workers experiencing time as a commodity controlled and surveilled by others (sharma, 2014; gray & suri, 2019). narratives of speed have also long overwhelmed the industrial and cultural conversation about what makes video games fun. speed is both a mechanic, but also a framing device used by game developers and players: players are often timed, we speak of processor speeds, and timed actions. player competitions often focus on a combination of time plus skill, and achieving goals as quickly as possible. some players engage in speed runs getting through the key milestones of a game as quickly as possible to demonstrate their expertise in the gaming domain (ruburg, 2019). speed is both representative of a core group of players that have dominated the fiscal output of the industry and a cultural conversation within the industry about what games, systems, and companies matter. in this way, speed has become a kind of heuristic device and aesthetic choice, one that not only defines output, but also input: it suggests how the video game industry understands itself and the craft of making video games within that industry. slow gaming: a new paradigm however, because of this historical focus on competition through the lens of speed, it is easy to miss alternative modes of thinking about speed. as the industry continues to shift towards more complex, nuanced, and mass audiences the aesthetics of speed have promoted the development of an alternative mode of gaming, slow gaming, as its antithesis. in this presentation, we focus on the rhetoric of speed, paying specific attention to the emerging qualifier of “slow gaming” and how it represents a new face on the industry in terms of aesthetics, technologies, and industrial practices. we argue that slow gaming matters as a label and heuristic because while it has always existed to varying extents the previous emphasis on speed has defined the products, nature, and culture of the industry. considering the politics of inaction and stasis can help to understand different kinds of affective experiences (scully-blaker, 2020). the emergence of slow gaming as a cultural category marks a shift wherein games are increasingly being built as a more accessible medium and affirming a new industrial zeitgeist wherein slowness is appreciated as a stylistic marker. slow gaming is not a rejection of time as an organizing principle in our everyday lives; instead, it provides an experience of time that is liminal and malleable through particular gaming mechanics. thus, we argue that playing a “slow game” or embracing a “slow gaming” approach can encourage players to think more reflectively about the nature of time more broadly. it is also, we suggest, explicitly political, becoming a kind of “pleasure activism” per adrienne maree brown (2019), allowing us to reclaim and reimagine the world in ways that are more just and humane. to that end, in our presentation, we argue that speed whether characterized by fastness or slowness is at the core of thinking about diversifying game playing audiences. slow gaming offers both opportunities and pitfalls for thinking about the complexities of how we play video games and perform leisure. our presentation both considers how time functions broadly within the rhetorical space of digital play, but then uses examples of slow gaming instances in games such as animal crossing, stardew valley, and gorogoa to think about how they represent changing heuristics and audiences. each of these games offers distinct and different experiences that highlight the value of observing, waiting, and meditating while playing. while slow gaming has always existed as a mode of analog play (for example, chess), we consider its significance as an emerging point in digital play. references brown, a. m. (2019). pleasure activism: the politics of feeling good. ak press. castells, m. (2011). the rise of the network society: john wiley & sons. chess, s. (2020). ready player two: women gamers and designed identity. university of minnesota press. cote, a. (2020). gaming sexism: gender and identity in the era of casual video games. nyu press. gray, m. l., & suri, s. (2019). ghost work: how to stop silicon valley from building a new global underclass. houghton mifflin harcourt. harvey, a. (2015). gender, age, and digital games in the domestic context. routledge. hochschild, a. (2012). the second shift: working families and the revolution at home. penguin. kocurek, c. (2015). coin operated americans: rebooting boyhood at the video game arcade. university of minnesota press. ruburg, b. (2019). straight paths through queer walking simulators: wandering on rails and speedrunning in gone home. games and culture, 15(6): 632-652. scully-blaker, r. (2020). stasis and stillness: moments of inaction in games. press start journal, 6(1). https://press-start.gla.ac.uk/index.php/press-start/article/view/124 sharma, sarah. 2014. in the meantime: temporality and cultural politics. duke university press. virilio, p. (2006). speed and politics (m. polizzotti, trans. new ed.). mit press. wajcman, j. (2015). pressed for time: the acceleration of life in digital capitalism. university of chicago press. girls, platforms, and play introduction in spring 2017, the release of the finnish documentary hobbyhorse revolution, which chronicles the lives of girls who ride stick horses in jumping and dressage competitions, made the sport “go viral,” inspiring news media coverage and social media discussion. in march of that year, the times of london and the wall street journal both featured the competitions in stories. in may, a headline in the british tabloid the mirror exclaimed, “bizarre hobbyhorse craze sees teenage girls compete at showjumping contests with toy horses.” comments on youtube videos of hobbyhorse competitions were divided, with most popular early comments ridiculing the events, with statements like “nothing like girls jumping around with rods between their legs, guess this makes me a pervert,“ and “finally a ‘sport’ women can be good at." though recently newsworthy, the hobbyhorse, or stick horse, has existed for more than a millennium, although not as a children’s toy. early hobbyhorses appeared in the arab world in the ninth century a.d. or earlier, when men used them to ritually reenact battles. accounts of children playing with hobbyhorse-like toys soon followed. hobbyhorses spread to north africa and andalusia and were present in catholic areas of europe by the thirteenth century, where they were used in festivals by, among others, morris dancers. through most of its history as a toy, the hobbyhorse has been used by both boys and girls: domesticated, but only recently gendered. the development and spread of hobbyhorse competitions has taken place almost exclusively among girls. the sport now has approximately 10,000 competitors. many of them construct their own stick horses, and others buy and then customize their hobbyhorses. youtube comment culture and hobbyhorse competitions recent competitions in finland and elsewhere have generated media coverage. the tone of mainstream media stories in outlets like the new york times and wall street journal ranges from curious to perplexed to mocking. commenters on news reports on legacy media youtube channels about hobbyhorse competitions, and on videos shared through social media, primarily ridicule the competitions and participants. a clip from the american daytime television talk show the doctors that featured a prominent finnish hobbyhorse competitor elicited comments like "these kids have developmental delays." of course, antisocial commenting practicing have long been a defining feature of youtube culture (burgess & green, 2018). the sexualized comments directed at hobbyhorsers mentioned in the introduction point to how girls' interests tend to be marginalized and how their pre-adolescent and adolescent bodies are surveilled. comments on videos posted by the associated press and walls street journal question the legitimacy of hobbyhorse competitions, mirroring discourses about who counts and who doesn't count as a "real gamer" (consalvo & paul, 2019). hobbyhorsers never claim that they are equestrians, but many perform difficult athletic maneuvers. despite this, comments include "anyone can do it and you are fucking dumb thinking this takes effort compared to riding." the presence of the hobbyhorse confounds some commenters: "why can’t you just do normal, athletic, human stuff? like sprinting, running, jogging. why do you have to go around with a freakin stick and walk like a horse?" self-identified equestrians make clear that hobbyhorsing is not legitimate, writing, "this is a true insult to real riders." in watching online videos of girls on their hobbyhorses, however, we can see, or at least imagine, them using stick horses as means to define and control the self and the body, to “become hobbyhorse.” in studying welsh girls in mining communities who ride real horses, emma renold and gabrielle ivinson (2014) observe that the girls experience moments of “becoming horse.” in kafka, gilles deleuze and félix guattari (1986) argue, to become animal is to participate in movement, to stake out a path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum of intensities that are valuable only in themselves, to find a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone. (p.13) in becoming horse/hobbyhorse, girls find a line of flight that enables them to transverse spaces, to become assemblages that are able that occupies the borders of our understanding, often confounding observers; for example, youtube commenters. hobbyhorsers do push back on youtube (e.g., "i have a horse but still do it"). the participants in video clips and news stories argue eloquently for the aesthetic, athletic, personal, and social value of their sport. even though they participate in public competitions and maintain social media presences, they report that their involvement feels private. participation in hobbyhorsing doesn't just happen at competition or in training "rides" with friends. it also happens on instagram. semi-public hobbyhorse space: instagram on instagram, hobbyhorse fanciers find a friendlier space than on youtube, one that seems semi-private. leaver, highfield, and abidin (2020) argue that subcultural communities that require in-group knowledge to access are common on the platform (p. 149). hobbyhorsers post photos of their hobbyhorses, and videos of them riding hobbyhorses, under hashtags that include #hobbyhorse and #keppihevonen (finnish for “hobbyhorse"). they also create and share identities for their hobbyhorses. instagram is treated by hobbyhorsers as a relatively safe space where they can not only share photos, videos, and stories about their "horses," but also be supported when they discuss issues in their daily lives. in this way, the instagram terrain occupied by hobbyhorse girls reflects the physical spaces of girls who ride real horses. studies of girls and horses show that girls’ horse spaces are places where they can create their own subject positions without the burden of gender-related expectations (ranio, 2009, p. 34). many traditional spaces of girl-only culture have been inaccessible to researchers because they are located in the home and/or in other private spaces (mcrobbie & garber, 1977). the association of horses with girls’ “rooms of their own” is the inspiration for patricia cronin’s 1997 art exhibit pony tales, a sentimental display of fifty oil portraits of horses faces arranged on a wall meant to resemble a girl’s bedroom (cronin, 2001). her subsequent installation, tack room, cronin explains, “looked like a woman's private tack room in the country, but it was really my private fantasy room, in which i imagined the adolescence i had not had and fantasized about my future” (p. 95). the "hobbyhorse revolution" helps us understand the gendering and domestication of technologies in online (and offline) spaces, as well as the policing of girls' bodies and behaviors in public. shouldn't something as "cringe" – to quote some youtube comments – as pre-teen and teen girls riding hobbyhorses happen at home, in private? instead, hobbyhorse girls have used platform affordances to create semi-public places of their own. references burgess, j. & green, j. (2018). youtube (2nd ed.). polity press. consalvo, m., & paul, c. a. (2019). real games. the mit press. cronin, p. (2001). what a girl wants. art journal, 60(4), 90-97 deleuze, g., & guattari, f. (1986). kafka: toward a minor literature. university of minnesota press. leaver, t., highfield, t., & abidin, c. (2020). instagram. polity press. mcrobbie, a., & garber, j. (1977). girls and subcultures. in s. hall & t. jefferson (eds.), resistance through rituals (pp. 208-222). hutchinson. ranio, a. p. (2009). horses, girls, and agency: gender in play pedagogy. outlines: critical practice studies, 11(1), 27-44. renold, e., & ivinson, g. (2014). horse-girl assemblages: towards a post-human cartography of girls’ desire in an ex-mining valleys community. discourse, 35(3), 361-376. toivoniemi, e., hellstedt. v., & vilhunen, s. (2017). hobbyhorse revolution [motion picture]. finland: tuffi films. working for hearts: social class and time management games this presentation examines time management games such as sally’s salon 2 and sally’s spa for their intersectional representations of class and gender. prior work on time management games has examined them primarily from the axis of gender as well as their designation as casual and/or mobile titles (chess, 2012, 2017; juul 2010). yet in addition to their gendered design, these games feature important socioeconomic class markers that are crucially and critically intertwined with these representations. to examine this more fully, this presentation engages in game analyses of the titles listed above, arguing that the work being done in these games is not only gendered, as chess has argued, but is also classed, in key ways. this analysis draws on theorizations of social class as well as temporal labor. scholars of social class and media have argued that our class positioning not only determines our educational and social opportunities, but also structures our use of media, our sense of ourselves, and our life expectancy and opportunities (deery & press 2017). in her studies of time and work, sarah sharma writes of how work time can be differently experienced depending on one’s occupation (sharma, 2014). for example, taxi drivers can spend long periods waiting for customers but then engage in frenetic bursts of speed as passengers wish to reach their destinations as quickly as possible. as a result, they are not simply producing a ride for passengers, but are instead “producing time” (2014, p. 71). the daily life of the taxi driver “is structured by the constant tension of being out of time while responding to and maintaining the time of others” (p. 56). game design & class representation games such as sally’s salon 2 have a complex relationship to social class. as with other games like diner dash or supermarket mania, the lead character is a white woman who is positioned as the owner of the establishment in question (salon, spa, supermarket), but is also its central (often only) worker. game narratives center on wanting to run a successful establishment and being a valued member of the community. gameplay mechanics are similar to other time management games. in sally’s salon 2 the player starts the game by learning how to do basic tasks such as assign customers to the appropriate stations and then moving between them, cutting, washing, and styling hair, finally ringing up completed customers before the end of the workday. customers want different services and can have varying levels of patience. days have monetary goals to achieve, which then allow the player to purchase game facilitating upgrades (i.e., a new couch will keep customers happier for a longer period of time while waiting). each game level increases gameplay complexity – such as by adding different types of customers, adding more customers, having players complete quests within the round (find a mouse on the screen when it appears), or adding new items or services that customers might want. players receive bonuses for quick attention to customers throughout their visit, but also lose tips and/or money when customers get angry for having to wait too long at any one particular station. sally’s salon 2 features gendered work – the hair salon has long been considered a feminine gendered space, where women not only get their hair maintained but can socialize with other women (gimlin, 1996). while the game does have male customers, a large number of the customers are women, and the intervening cut scenes also feature mostly women. chess (2012, 2017) has written about how gender permeates not only the narratives and representations of such games, but also how the games are designed (including their mechanics) with “player two” in mind. yet this game and others similar to it are also classed in certain ways. despite being the salon’s owner, the player-as-sally must also do the customer-facing work. in this way they are similar to sharma’s taxi drivers, who are sole proprietors and often mention their desire not to work for other people: taxi driving is a way to control their own work/day/life. yet just like sharma’s drivers, the player-as-sally is not in control of those elements. this is further reinforced via gameplay: despite the expertise that stylists have in their craft (gimlin), there is no opportunity in the game to offer advice or commentary on npc choices. the player must acquiesce to demands, or else simply stop playing. the game’s reliance on hearts as a currency similarly reproduces the “emotion work” that stylists must engage in – affirming, celebrating, and enhancing the well-being of their clients (gimlin, p. 512), which further undercuts their position as beauty experts. further, the player-as-sally is not in charge of their time: she must wait for others to request her services, and then speed up to complete tasks as quickly as possible, saving time for her clients. and just as with the taxi drivers who must also keep passengers happy (or at least avoid generating negative emotions in them), the playeras-sally must literally move as quickly as possible to keep hearts/approval from disappearing. this repetition through each day and level results in a procedural rhetoric affirming the job of stylist as lacking in authority and only able to make choices about the smallest details, such as the order in which to perform prescribed tasks (bogost, 2010). conclusion in these ways and others, this game (and others like it) reinforces classed expectations such that service economy workers must strive to keep customers happy as their central goal. this is accomplished through careful management of their time. when engaging with customers, sally moves quickly so that customers leave the shop in the shortest time possible, with no or very few mistakes made. the player learns through gameplay the most efficient ways to move customers through the shop, learning to read npc cues and interface elements quickly. just as taylorism was a process to make production lines more efficient, the player learns that to be successful, each move must be carefully choreographed. although in this case the player is responsible for all steps of the production process, there remains no room for improvisation, down time, or leisure. work is a series of tasks to be performed in the most logical order, quickly, and on demand. despite being the proprietor, and an alleged expert in styling and beauty, the player-as-sally is largely relegated to a service role, where pleasing others takes center stage. references bogost, i. (2010). persuasive games: the expressive power of videogames. mit press. chess, s. (2012). “going with the flo.” feminist media studies 12 (1): 83–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2011.558350. chess, s. (2017). ready player two: women games and designed identity. university of minnesota press. deery, j., & press, a. (2017). studying media and class. in j. deery & a. press (eds.), media and class: tv, film, and digital culture, (pp. 1–18). routledge. gimlin, d. (1996). “pamela’s place: power and negotiation in the hair salon.” gender & society 10 (5): 505–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/089124396010005002. juul, j. (2010.) a casual revolution: reinventing video games and their players. mit press. sharma, s. (2014). in the meantime: temporality and cultural politics. duke university press. gendered expectations of playing nice, boundary keeping & problematic/toxic behaviors in casual video game communities “in any game community the informal rules decided upon by the group opens doors for players to play their own way, in ways that offend the norms of many players, or at least the loudest collective voice.” (lajeunesse, 2018) as the dominant demographic of players in the casual game space are adult females, there is an informal assumption that everyone is happily playing nice. while there is research on toxic player behavior in casual games (bergstrom, 2021), it is often framed within the context of outsider players causing problems for the player community. while this is the experience of some casual game communities, there is little research on the ways in which casual game players who identify as part of the core player base may engage in their own form of problematic or toxic behaviors. these behaviors may not stem from the same place, have the same purpose, or look the same as the trolling toxic outsider, yet they still act to keep outsiders ‘out’ and may cause the game communities to be unpleasant, problematic, or toxic for other members of the casual game community. broadly defined, casual video games are digital games that are designed to require low time commitment in any given play session, have themes and fiction that do not require deep thought or attention, have a low barrier to entry, and do not require previous knowledge of other video games in order to play (juul, 2010). often contrasted to “hardcore” or “real” video games that require more commitment, skill, and have more mature themes, causal video games are regularly perceived as inferior games that are played predominantly by non ‘gamers’ and considered gendered spaces of play (vanderhoef, 2013). while the dominant demographic who play casual games are (older) adult women (esa, 2020), the esa does not unpack the different ways casual games are consumed in terms of actual time invested in playing or the extent to which players are engaged in casual game communities. the low expectation of time investment and the design features of casual games often lead people to believe that the players themselves are not invested in the games or in game communities. gender norms & social expectations for female players to be and play nice even before girls are old enough to play video games, they are taught to play nice with others. within the construct of gender roles and norms, “[f]eminine characteristics are: affectionate, cheerful, childlike, compassionate, does not use harsh language, eager to soothe hurt feelings, feminine, flatterable, gentle, gullible, loves children, loyal, sensitive to the needs of others, shy, soft-spoken, sympathetic, tender, understanding, warm, and yielding.” (prentice & carranza, 2002). similarly, when research explores gaming preferences of female players, the games are often described as cooperative, social, and lighthearted in themes (hartmann & klimmt, 2006) and with a low skill expectation. when females play video games that are typically considered male games (violent, competitive, and engage in aggressive behaviors), they are often considered to be unfeminine, trying to fit in, or in cases of environments where toxic gamer culture is present, a defense mechanism to cope or deflect toxic behaviors (cote, 2017). boundary keeping & casual game communities boundary keeping – broadly defined as the expected group behaviors, definition, and enforcement of social norms, occurs in almost all social groups. the ways in which boundaries are defined and maintained between who is part of the group and those who are outsiders varies almost as widely as the group themselves. within the scope of digital game communities, boundary keeping strategies are often used to exclude newcomers or other players whom the core community may perceive as outsiders, however, some forms of boundary keeping move beyond simple exclusion and can venture into problematic gameplay and toxic gamer behavior (boudreau, 2019). however, the ways in which casual game players engage in boundary keeping and potential problematic behavior may vary widely and be expressed in very different ways than the tactics seen in more mainstream, male dominated toxic gamer culture. the perception of toxicity and problematic behavior is subjective and is often based on social, cultural and even linguistic norms of the individual (lajeunesse, 2019). one could argue that this is the case even more so in casual game communities as players also may appear to be less cohesive in terms of adhering to gameplay norms and fostering community in a casual game space. to this point, this paper is interested in three primary research areas: identifying the ways in which casual game players define and determine gameplay and community norms; the ways in which casual game players engage in boundary keeping within their casual gameplay and game related communities; and how these norms and tactics may be perceived as problematic or toxic both within the player community and to players who do not actively consider themselves part of the casual game community. finally, this overarching aim of this research is to explore the ways in which boundary keeping strategies that may be perceived as problematic and toxic behaviors are framed within the gendered expectations of ‘playing nice’ are fundamentally different than the current mainstream occurrences of toxic gamer culture and problematic gameplay that is grounded in racist, misogynistic, and prejudicial social behaviors, yet may have the same negative or damaging effects on the players and the casual game communities. conclusion in working to understand the nuances in the perception and occurrence of problematic and toxic behaviors in different player communities in general, and in the casual game community specifically, it is possible to address the ways in which boundaries are defined and maintained outside of the frame of the male-dominated, mainstream video game culture. in doing so, it is possible to work towards awareness and strategies to confront and change problematic and toxic gaming culture more broadly. references bergstrom, k. (2021). anti-social social gaming: community conflict in a facebook game. critical studies in media communication, 1-14. boudreau, k. (2019). beyond fun: transgressive gameplay—toxic and problematic player behavior as boundary keeping. in k. jorgensen & f. karlsen (eds.), transgression in games and play (pp. 257-271). mit press. cote, a. c. (2017). “i can defend myself”: women’s strategies for coping with harassment while gaming online. games and culture, 12(2), 136-155. eklund, l. (2016). who are the casual gamers? gender tropes and tokenism in game culture. in t. leaver & m. willson (eds.), social, casual and mobile games: the changing gaming landscape (pp. 15-30). bloomsbury. entertainment software association (esa). (2020). essential facts. https://www.theesa.com/esa-research/2020-essential-facts-about-the-videogame-industry/ lajeunesse, m. (2018). “it taught me to hate them all.”: toxicity through dota 2’s players, systems, and media dispositive, [doctoral dissertation, concordia university]. hartmann, t., & klimmt, c. (2006). gender and computer games: exploring females’ dislikes. journal of computer-mediated communication, 11(4), 910-931. juul, j. (2010). a casual revolution: reinventing video games and their players. mit press. prentice, d. a., & carranza, e. (2002). what women and men should be, shouldn't be, are allowed to be, and don't have to be: the contents of prescriptive gender stereotypes. psychology of women quarterly, 26(4), 269-281. richard, g. t. (2017). “play like a girl”: gender expression, sexual identity, and complex expectations in a female-oriented gaming community. queer game studies, 163178. vanderhoef, j. (2013) casual threats: the feminization of casual video games. ada: a journal of gender, new media, and technology, (2). doi:10.7264/n3v40s4d williams, d., consalvo, m., caplan, s., & yee, n. (2009). looking for gender: gender roles and behaviors among online gamers. journal of communication, 59(4), 700-725. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): michaelsen, m. (2020, october). resisting transnational repression: the digital security practices of diaspora and exiled human rights defenders. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. resisting transnational repression: the digital security practices of diaspora and exiled human rights defenders marcus michaelsen law, science, technology and society (lsts) research group, vrije universiteit brussels extended abstract transnational civil society and advocacy networks play an important role in exposing rights violations and undermining censorship under authoritarian regimes (keck & sikkink 1998). in these networks, exiled and diaspora activists act as essential bridge figures brokering information and knowledge across borders, supporting counterparts in their country of origin, raising international awareness, and leveraging external pressure on repressive regimes. with the help of digital communication technologies they maintain close links into the home country and participate in global news and advocacy cycles (bernal 2014; brinkerhoff 2009). yet the use of these technologies also creates multiple points of exposure that repressive state actors exploit for information controls and repression beyond borders. authoritarian states increasingly resort to surveillance, malware attacks, online harassment and disinformation campaigns to compromise civil society networks and mute their voices (hankey & ó cluanaigh 2013; freedom house 2018). because digital communication technologies allow for monitoring and responding to transnational activism rapidly and on a large scale, they enable new and influence established tactics of extraterritorial state control. digital threats are often intertwined with more traditional methods of transnational repression, such as pressure on incountry families and slander in state-controlled media (glasius 2018; moss 2016; michaelsen 2018, 2020). research into digital threats against civil society has made important strides in understanding the technical underpinnings of attacks targeting journalists, human rights defenders, and political activists across countries and diaspora communities (amnesty international 2018; citizen lab 2014). less is known, however, about the ways in which potential targets perceive and respond to increasingly complex risks, and how they are affected by digital threats. this paper (manuscript in progress) builds on more than 50 qualitative interviews with exiled human rights defenders and journalists from egypt, syria and iran to investigate risk perceptions and security practices of activists in transnational networks. it moves beyond the focus mere technical solutions to online threats in order to consider the broader human and behavioral factors shaping practices of privacy protection and digital security. diaspora activists operate in “transnational fields” with ties across multiple countries and communities (levitt & schiller 2004). in these networks, a successful attack against the weakest link could lead to severe consequences for all involved. the interviews show that activists often do not have the time, resources, or capacity to make security decisions based on nuanced risk assessment and factual knowledge. their security models reflect the complex techno-political environment in which they must navigate, and are shaped by the “imagined affordances” of digital technologies, emerging from expectations, fears, and everyday use (nagy & neff 2015, lyon 2017). reports on successful hacking and surveillance operations or new security flaws in popular applications, for instance, can overwhelm activists and lead to feelings of resignation and ‘security paralysis’. the paper argues that the complexity of today’s digital communication tools and the constant evolution of threats only work to aggravate the feelings of uncertainty that activists experience with regards to the aims and capabilities of repressive state actors – and thus risk exacerbating the silencing effects of surveillance and transnational repression. in turn, activists feel more empowered and resilient when they have close ties to local and global networks for incident response, support, and information sharing on digital security. bringing critical media studies in dialogue with research on transnational diaspora activism and authoritarian politics, the paper answers calls for more research into the social construction of risk and security of human rights defenders, in particular its mediation by digital technologies (bennett et al. 2015; kazansky 2015). by focusing on high-risk users and frontline defenders, the paper further contributes to the literature investigating the contentious politics and power inequalities that form around digital technology, especially from a bottom-up perspective (e.g. beraldo & milan 2019; guerses, kundnani & van hoboken 2016). references amnesty international (2018, december 19). when best practice isn’t good enough: large campaigns of phishing attacks in middle east and north africa target privacyconscious users. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2018/12/when-bestpractice-is-not-good-enough. bennett, k., ingleton, d., nah, a. m., & savage, j. (2015). critical perspectives on the security and protection of human rights defenders. the international journal of human rights, 19(7), 883-895. beraldo, d., & milan, s. (2019). from data politics to the contentious politics of data. big data & society, 6(2). bernal, v. (2014). nation as network: diaspora, cyberspace, and citizenship. university of chicago press. brinkerhoff, j. m. (2009). digital diasporas: identity and transnational engagement. cambridge university press. citizen lab (2014). communities @ risk: targeted digital threats against civil society. https://targetedthreats.net. freedom house (2018). freedom on the net 2018: the rise of digital authoritarianism. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/freedom-net-2018/rise-digitalauthoritarianism. glasius, m. (2018). extraterritorial authoritarian practices: a framework. globalizations, 15(2), 179-197. gürses, s., kundnani, a., & van hoboken, j. (2016). crypto and empire: the contradictions of counter-surveillance advocacy. media, culture & society, 38(4), 576590. hankey, s., & clunaigh, d. ó. (2013). rethinking risks and security of human rights defenders in the digital age. journal of human rights practice 5(3), 535-547. kazansky, b. (2015). privacy, responsibility, and human rights activism. the fibreculture journal 26 (entanglements–activism and technology). levitt, p., & schiller, n. g. (2004). conceptualizing simultaneity: a transnational social field perspective on society. international migration review, 38(3), 1002-1039. lyon, d. (2017). surveillance culture: engagement, exposure, and ethics in digital modernity. international journal of communication, 11(19). michaelsen, m. (2018). exit and voice in a digital age: iran’s exiled activists and the authoritarian state. globalizations, 15(2), 248-264. michaelsen, m. (2020). silencing across borders: transnational repression and digital threats against exiled activists from egypt, syria, and iran. hivos. https://www.hivos.org/assets/2020/02/silencing-across-borders-marcusmichaelsen-hivos-report.pdf moss, d. m. (2016). transnational repression, diaspora mobilization, and the case of the arab spring. social problems, 63(4), 480-498. nagy, p., & neff, g. (2015). imagined affordance: reconstructing a keyword for communication theory. social media+ society, 1(2). selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): bagdogan s. (2022, november). “may god bless youtube”: the spirituality of hoping in the activities of turkish muslim women self-branding on youtube. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “may god bless youtube”: the spirituality of hoping in the activities of turkish muslim women self-branding on youtube seyda bagdogan copenhagen business school setting out the discussion between public and private divide on domestic labour by feminist scholarship, the online performances of domestic activities are discussed within the concept of “new domesticity” (matchar, 2013). for digital media platforms give space for women to have a creative identity-making process through their social networking practices online (song, 2021). in particular, information exchanged about homemaking activities like cooking is a manifestation of digital domesticity, which is created through the interactions centered on subjects that make people feel "at home." (gajjala, 2019: p.121). indeed, food preparation and cooking are essential to the creation and affirmation of identity, as fürst points out in cooking and femininity (1997), where she focuses on the connection between cooking and the experience of being a woman. regarding that, in this paper, i will delve into the motivations of turkish muslim women cooking on youtube. for that, conducting digital ethnography, i carried out in-depth interviews with twelve women and observed their channels over six months between december 2020 and july 2021. taking account that wedel (2013, cited in bektas ata, 2020) found in her fieldwork in shantytowns of istanbul that women do not consider doing [informal] home-based work as work and that their production is seen as worthless, how they approach their new domestic activities thereby comes into prominence. according to mehta (1999), indo-trinidadian women transform the kitchen from a domesticated area into a creative hub while achieving culinary agency, which serves as a foundation for cultural authority. concordantly, bratich and brush (2011) explain new domesticity as the transfer of private into the public rather than bringing up the burdensome nature of domestic labour by saying that "the new domesticity does not change old into new; it reweaves the old itself" (p.238). for this research, turkish muslim women cooking on youtube whom i interviewed do not have a precise selfdefinition for their youtube activities beyond articulating them as an extension of their housewifery roles. on the one hand, in addition to seeing cooking as their contribution to their family (white, 1994), they consider business and entrepreneurship as masculine –which is consistent with the results of the research of duffy and hund (2015). but, on the other hand, regardless of supporting financially their family at present, they have future-oriented wishes either through trademarking their youtube channels or opening a cookshop. therefore, i explore their hopes upon their new domestic activities with the concept of self-branding that marwick (2013) explains as “a strategy of success in which one thinks of oneself as a brand” (p.16). as a social phenomenon, religion affects how people relate to god spiritually and how they behave in society (gümüsay, 2015). the women i interviewed predominantly restrain from showing their bodies in the foreground whereas employing some techniques to increase their channels´ visibility with channel names, video headlines, and subtitles. aligned with their islamic values of piety and modesty that they exercise through the culinary process online plus refusing commodification and sexualization (zempi, 2016), they reflect on their doings, go about accordingly, and reconstruct their digital publicity perpetually through impression management (pearce and vitak, 2015). it is significant to note that i consider "the self" as an incarnation of the sociocultural entity since they utilize their embodied cultural capital through their culinary prowess. the function that their social positionality plays in their self-branding throughout their digital domesticity thus assumes importance. further to that, since they predominantly emphasized their hopes, i particularly concentrate on their islamic spirituality while hoping to boost their digital self-brands in this paper. to be precise, the research question i ask in this paper is: “how do islamic values have impact on the hopes of turkish muslim women to construct their self-branding activities of digital domesticity?” online labour-driven activities that serve commercial interests are classified as part of creative industries since the creative sector is now synonymous with innovation (wright, 2018). however, except for very little published research, the point made by hesmondhalgh and saha (2013) in their earlier article—that voices from people with backgrounds other than western culture and ethnicity are underrepresented in the cultural sectors—remains pertinent today (alacovska and gill, 2019; jamal and lavie, 2022). therefore, my research on the spirituality of hopes turkish muslim women will contribute to the scarce literature. regarding the conceptual background, i will elaborate on the recent discussions by the scholarship researching creative industries on hope along with their anthropological aspects. after that, i will explicate the understanding of "hope" in islam to investigate the topic holistically. embracing the digital methodology of the everyday internet, as a result, i will introduce an exploration of hope from an intersectional perspective with the empirical cases of turkish muslim women cooking on youtube. references alacovska, a., & gill, r. (2019). de-westernizing creative labour studies: the informality of creative work from an ex-centric perspective. international journal of cultural studies, 22(2), 195-212. bektaş, l. anneler ne yapar, kızları ne i̇ster? i̇ki nesil kadın anlatılarında bir gecekondu mahallesi. fe dergi, 12(2), 74-87. bratich, j. z., & brush, h. m. (2011). fabricating activism: craft-work, popular culture, gender. utopian studies, 22(2), 233-260. duffy, b.e. & hund, e. (2015). “having it all” on social media: entrepreneurial femininity and self-branding among fashion bloggers. social media + society 1(2): 1–11. fürst, e. l. o. (1997). cooking and femininity. in women's studies international forum (vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 441-449). pergamon. gajjala, r. (2019). digital diasporas: labor and affect in gendered indian digital publics. rowman & littlefield. gümüsay, a. a. (2015). entrepreneurship from an islamic perspective. journal of business ethics, 130(1), 199-208. hesmondhalgh, d., & saha, a. (2013). race, ethnicity, and cultural production. popular communication, 11(3), 179-195. jamal, a., & lavie, n. (2022). hope and creative work in conflict zones: theoretical insights from israel. sociology, 56(4), 693-709. marwick, a.e. (2013). status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. new haven, ct: yale university press. matchar, e. (2013). homeward bound: why women are embracing the new domesticity. simon and schuster. mehta, b. j. (1999). indo-trinidadian fiction: female identity and creative cooking/ةباتكلا ,alif: journal of comparative poetics, (19) .يعادبإلا خبطلاو ةیوثنألا ةیوھلا :ةیدادینیرتلا-ةیدنھلا ةیئاورلا 151. pearce, k.e. & vitak, j. (2016). performing honor online: the affordances of social media for surveillance and impression management in an honor culture. new media & society 18(11): 2595–2612. song, h. (2021). mothers’ baking blogs: negotiating sacrificial and postfeminist neoliberal motherhood in south korea. feminist media studies, 1-16. white, j.b. (1994). money makes us relatives: women’s labor in urban turkey. austin, tx: university of texas press. wright, d. (2018). “hopeful work” and the creative economy. in the palgrave handbook of creativity at work (pp. 311-325). palgrave macmillan, cham. zempi, i. (2016). ‘it's a part of me, i feel naked without it': choice, agency and identity for muslim women who wear the niqab. ethnic and racial studies, 39(10), 1738-1754. watsonrobards etal. qtm aoir2020.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): watson, a., robards, b., kirby, e., churchill, b. & larochelle, l. (2020, october). queering the map: physical traces and digital places of queer lives. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. queering the map: physical traces and digital places of queer lives ashleigh watson university of new south wales brady robards monash university emma kirby university of new south wales brendan churchill university of melbourne lucas larochelle concordia university queeringthemap.com, launched in late 2017 by designer lucas larochelle, is a ‘community-generated mapping project that geo-locates queer moments, memories and histories in relation to physical space’. in a google maps-style interface, users can locate pins anchored to physical locations. attached to each pin is a story. collectively, there are tens of thousands of stories about being lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming: coming out stories, stories of first kisses, sexual encounters, break-ups, pride marches, assaults, traumas, and realisations. these stories digitally layer physical spaces with anonymous individual and collective stories; they locate queer life and they queer the map. in this project we seek to document these experiences, improve understandings of community archiving and digital storytelling practices, and expose the potential for reconfiguring forms of resistance and solidarity through new platforms for collectivity and community-making. in this paper, we consider how these narratives may be understood at scale to provide insights into the digital architecture of queer lives. we focus our analysis on the 1,941 posts pinned to australia, to consider how qtm reaffirms contemporary understandings of the physical-digital continuum and queers how we conceive of traces and places in this context. methods working with canadian-based founder and director of the project, lucas larochelle, we collected these 1,941 posts tagged to coordinates within australia where the researchers live. the scraped posts consist of a) a numerical post id; b) the post text; and c) latitude and longitude coordinates. we are conscious that these posts were not made with the intention of being collected for research. however, the anonymous nature of the posts they are submitted for moderation without a name or any contact details prohibits us from contacting post authors and seeking consent to include them in this study. these posts were also made with the intention of being ‘publicly’ consumed. we acknowledge that the difference between public and private is not a neat binary, but a complex and nuanced spectrum. nevertheless, the intended audience can generally be interpreted as any visitor to the site. we are conscious that this data includes coordinates, sometimes to a home or other private dwelling, and sometimes sensitive identifying elements such as the name of a person or a school. where we do use direct quotes, we anonymise such details. findings digital & physical entanglements a range of themes were evident in our sample of posts. many stories document diverse ‘first’ experiences such as ‘first 100% trans house i ever lived in… we used to have jam sessions until the early hours’ (id 2928); and ‘my primary school where i had my first crush on a boy’ (id 10088). coming out stories are also common, such as ‘drinking lots of port on the balcony with my bestie and us both coming out to each other’ (id 18727). our focus here, however, is on posts that variably reference digital media. we break these posts down into two categories: a) records of moments where a relationship moves from a digital space to a physical one (‘going physical’); and b) posts documenting encounters in physical spaces that explicitly referenced digital media (‘digital tracing’). both categories of posts point to how the digital and physical are entangled on queering the map, and in modern queer experience more generally. going physical the posts in this category document meeting people in physical spaces with whom relationships had previously been established in digital spaces. such posts centre on meeting someone through an app or a social media platform, such as ‘thank you grindr for allowing me to meet this boy and his cat’ (id 33351) or ‘this is where you lived when i visited you from the states for the first time in 2014 after we met on tumblr in 2012. who ever said tumblr wasn't a dating website?! <3’ (id 24787). in these examples the references to digital media, like grindr and tumblr, are explicit. these posts locate on the map that first physical encounter. for other posts in this category, the digital mediation of a relationship is more implied. for example: the first time we met in person, i was shaking as my feet propelled me up the tarmac and the airport terminal ramp. our eyes met as soon as my head was above the glass barrier. i haven't looked away since. (id 35) the vivid details in the retelling of this encounter are powerful and poetic, but our interest here is on the implication in the first phrase ‘the first time we met in person’ and the emotion in the anticipation of that first meeting, hinting at a pre-existing relationship. we do not know who this person is their age, gender, sexuality, nationality but that meeting resonates, and hints at a (presumably) digitally mediated history. digital tracing posts in this second category are not about ‘going physical’, but further evidence the complex entanglements between digital mediations and physical encounters. for example: at 13, my mother told me that being in a facebook relationship with my female friend would make people think i was a lesbian, thinking it was fake. im 20 and she still doesnt know (id 22266) i came out to my main friends through facebook and then saw them all at school the next day, i was a nervous wreck (id 45002) in both cases, digital traces of life a relationship, and a coming out are mediated through facebook, but are articulated, felt in, and inscribed onto physical locations: a family home in frankston, and a school south of perth. we draw out this theme of social and other digital media mentioned on queering the map specifically because of the double entanglement at work. these posts are a digital record of a physical encounter that was initiated or at least partially mediated in a digital space. while comparatively few posts in our sample explicitly document this kind of encounter or movement, the enduring significance of the internet in the lives of lgbtqia+ people (robards et al. 2018) provides important context for all the connections and relationships (digitally) storied on the site. we focus on this entanglement between the physical and digital in order to point towards a narrative about relationships initiated in digital spaces being fully realised in physical places, revealing stories of ‘queer realness’ (de ridder & van bauwel 2015). there is a history in internet research of discussions about doing away with online/offline dichotomies, such as jurgenson’s (2012) rejection of digital dualisms and attendance to the enmeshed forming of ‘augmented reality’, or tuszynski’s (2008) arguments about the ‘breaking down’ of the binary between online and offline interactions. our data, and queering the map itself, further evidence complicated entanglements between the digital and the physical, and reveal rich stories marked out across physical geographies but encoded and shared in a digital, communal project. references de ridder, s., & van bauwel, s. (2015). the discursive construction of gay teenagers in times of mediatization: youth's reflections on intimate storytelling, queer shame and realness in popular social media places. journal of youth studies, 18(6), 777-793. jurgenson, n. (2012). when atoms meet bits: social media, the mobile web and augmented revolution. future internet, 4(1), 83-91. robards, b., churchill, b., vivienne, s., hanckel, b., & byron, p. (2018) ‘twenty years of “cyberqueer”: the enduring significance of the internet for young lgbtiq+ people’, in p aggleton, r cover, d leahy, d marshall & m l rasmussen (eds), youth, sexuality and sexual citizenship, routledge, pp. 151-167. tuszynski, s. (2008). irl (in real life): breaking down the binary between online and offline social interaction. unpublished phd thesis. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): epstein, d. & quinn, k. (2021, october). vertical or horizontal? an empirical investigation of the role of privacy literacy and privacy self-efficacy on the dimensionality of privacy. paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. vertical or horizontal? an empirical investigation of the role of privacy literacy and privacy self-efficacy on the dimensionality of privacy dmitry epstein hebrew university of jerusalem kelly quinn university of illinois at chicago privacy is increasingly acknowledged as a multidimensional and expansive phenomenon. empirical evidence of inconsistencies between expressed levels of concerns for privacy and engagement in privacy-protecting behavior (ppb) the socalled “privacy paradox motivated scholars to adopt a more nuanced approach towards this relationship. recent research has differentiated between peer-facing (horizontal) privacy relationships from those oriented towards institutions and service providers (vertical privacy) (quinn et al., 2019; raynes-goldie, 2010). such dimensionality is frequently overlooked when examining ppb, leading to orthogonal understandings of how individuals navigate privacy on a daily basis. the fundamental relationship between privacy concerns and ppb is further complicated by mediating and moderating factors, such as digital privacy literacy and privacy self-efficacy, or the belief in one’s ability to achieve a desired level of privacy (chen & chen, 2015; dienlin & metzger, 2016; masur, 2020). in a social media context, where users trade personal information privacy with platform providers in exchange for services that support peer communication and relational maintenance, research, has typically counterposed vertically-oriented privacy concerns against horizontally-oriented disclosure behaviors (quinn et al., 2019). rarely have these two privacy perspectives been examined consistently or in tandem. the goals of this study are two-fold. we extend established models linking attitudes related to privacy concerns and ppb by (a) differentiating between horizontal (social) and vertical (institutional) orientations of ppb as capturing an aspect of privacy multidimensionality, and (b) introducing additional explanatory factors such as privacy literacy and privacy self-efficacy into the modeling of ppb. method https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?mjn4ci https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?arshoj https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?arshoj https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?uhkeg2 we test these relationships by focusing specifically on social media as a communicative environment, as opposed to general privacy online. empirically, this work builds on a representative sample (n=686) of social media users in the us, matched to the 2015 us census bureau’s american community survey on the parameters of income, gender, and age. we use confirmatory factor analysis to validate the measurement models for the latent constructs of privacy concern (xu et al., 2011), trust (krasnova et al., 2012), privacy self-efficacy (dienlin & metzger, 2016), and vertical and horizontal ppb. as a measured variable, we introduce the construct of privacy literacy (masur, 2020), which captures four domains of privacy knowledge--institutional practices, technical aspects of privacy protection, privacy law, and privacy protection strategies--for its influence on privacy concerns and trust. to model the resulting relationships, we employed covariance-based structural equation modeling. findings analysis of the data demonstrates that ppb can be dimensionalized as vertical and horizontal aspects of privacy (figure 1). although these two orientations are strongly correlated, privacy concerns have differing relationships with each. traditional privacy concerns have a stronger positive relationship with horizontal ppb than with vertical ppb. trust in the platform, which is inversely/negatively correlated with privacy concern, is also positively related to ppb, though it is somewhat equivalent in its effects on both vertical and horizontal behaviors. suggesting that ppb is enhanced by higher levels of trust in the platform operator is initially surprising, but it may also mean that the relationship between trust and ppb is mediated through additional factors, such as privacy self-efficacy. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?b9jpi3 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?kli1a7 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?unnqep https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?pyrva2 figure 1 dimensionalized ppb* *standardized estimates are displayed the addition of privacy literacy and privacy self-efficacy suggests they are important factors in explaining both vertical and horizontal ppb (figure 2). first, online privacy literacy has both a substantive positive effect on privacy concerns and a substantive negative effect on an individual’s trust in the social media platform. in other words, as privacy literacy increases, both privacy concerns are triggered and trust in the platform provider declines. this is important, as both privacy concern and trust in platform providers are critical factors in explaining ppb. figure 2 the role of privacy literacy and privacy self-efficacy on dimensionalized privacy* *standardized estimates are displayed second, privacy self-efficacy emerges as an important factor, as its strong association with trust helps to partially explain the initially surprising relationship between trust and ppb. introduction of privacy self-efficacy to the model eliminates the direct role that trust seemed to play in explaining horizontal ppb and it partially mediates the role of trust in explaining vertical ppb. on the one hand, the differential role of privacy self-efficacy in explaining vertical and horizontal ppb further supports the hypothesis that ppb can be dimensionalized. on the other hand, the mediated relationship between trust and horizontal ppb suggests that trust in a platform provider in fact does not predict the actual ppb, but rather one’s belief in their ability to protect social privacy on the platform. this observation seems in line with the rhetoric of platform providers, who emphasize the controls they offer their users for management of horizontal relationships. at the same time the more complex constellation of direct and mediated relationships between trust, privacy self-efficacy and vertical ppb, remains somewhat puzzling. the fact that privacy self-efficacy has a much weaker positive relationship with vertical, compared with horizontal, ppb is not surprising given our observation above. yet, the direct positive, albeit weak, relationship between trust and vertical ppb is not intuitive, as we would not expect it to be significant. it is possible that the factors that mediate the link between trust in platform providers and horizontal ppb differ from those that mediate that link with vertical ppb as the two are based on different threat models. alternatively, it is possible that we need a more nuanced measure of trust one that accounts for the dimensionality of the phenomenon similarly to our treatment of privacy in this study. implications this work reaffirms the basic logic of the relationship between privacy concerns and ppb, and expands its explanatory power by incorporating literacy and self-efficacy as relevant factors. we argue that a move from unidimensional views of privacy will encourage new ideas in the realms of privacy technology design, regulation, and activism. both our findings about the relationship between privacy concerns and the orientation of ppb and the roles that privacy self-efficacy and privacy literacy play in ppb, highlight that vertical and horizontal dimensions of privacy are enacted through different mechanisms. this is particularly important as we recognize that users of social media tend to adopt horizontal views of privacy (quinn et al., 2019), whereas many systemic threats stem from vertical privacy relationships (baruh & popescu, 2017). in this regard, the negative relationships between privacy literacy and privacy self-efficacy with vertical ppb warrants particular attention and further exploration to understand the mechanisms underlying those relationships. references baruh, l., & popescu, m. (2017). big data analytics and the limits of privacy selfmanagement. new media & society, 19(4), 579–596. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815614001 chen, h.-t., & chen, w. (2015). couldn’t or wouldn’t? the influence of privacy concerns and self-efficacy in privacy management on privacy protection. cyberpsychology, behavior, and social networking, 18(1), 13–19. https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2014.0456 dienlin, t., & metzger, m. j. (2016). an extended privacy calculus model for snss— analyzing self-disclosure and self-withdrawal in a u.s. representative sample. journal of computer-mediated communication, 21(5), 368–383. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12163 krasnova, h., veltri, n. f., & günther, o. (2012). self-disclosure and privacy calculus on social networking sites: the role of culture. business & information systems engineering, 4(3), 127–135. masur, p. k. (2020). how online privacy literacy supports self-data protection and selfdetermination in the age of information. media and communication, 8(2), 258– 269. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v8i2.2855 quinn, k., epstein, d., & moon, b. (2019). we care about different things: non-elite conceptualizations of social media privacy. social media + society, 5(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119866008 raynes-goldie, k. (2010). aliases, creeping, and wall cleaning: understanding privacy in the age of facebook. first monday, 15(1). http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2775 xu, h., luo, x., carroll, j. m., & rosson, m. b. (2011). the personalization privacy paradox: an exploratory study of decision making process for location-aware marketing. decision support systems, 51(1), 42–52. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dss.2010.11.017 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?llkgxk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?i1ebty selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): rentschler, c., nothwehr, b., morena, n., mulvin, d., mckinney, c., horrocks, s. (2021, october). enacting the politics of care with chronic and crip technologies. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. enacting the politics of care with chronic and crip technologies carrie rentschler mcgill university benjamin nothwehr blueprint nina morena mcgill university dylan mulvin london school of economics and political science cait mckinney simon fraser university stephen horrocks purdue university this panel contributes to studies of chronic illness, impairment, and disability as embodied and systemic ways of thinking about, and with, technology and the forms of care that chronically ill, impaired, and disabled folks do for themselves and others. issues of care – and what we mean by care -are increasingly centered in studies of disabled and chronic living with technologies. this panel places the politics of care at the heart of analyses of technology and the forms of intimacy and socially transformative work people do with and through technologies and their informational and data infrastructures. care is a capacious concept in studies of chronic and crip technologies: covering “an action (to perform in ways that support others), an affect (to feel empathy or compassion), a mode of engagement (to ‘care about’ a person or situation) and politic (to insist on the importance of caring), and even a tool for social change (whether for subverting hegemonic norms or justifying discrimination)” (ruberg and scully-baker 2021, 656). these practices and feelings vis-à-vis technology are situated between “enclosed regimes of self-care” and their individualizing models of selfhood and “collective communal care” frameworks. the latter reveal conditions familiar to those of us living chronic, impaired, disabled, and differently embodied lives and the “uncompromisingly tethered nature of human dependency,” its contingencies and mutual precarities (sharma, 2017, para. 20, para. 4). each talk examines the situated, contextual politics and strategies of care enacted by those living with chronic illness, disability, and impaired difference in their relationships to technologies and their related infrastructures – of information, medical oversight, and platformed communities. panelists build on hamraie and fritsch’s (2019) conception of “crip technoscience” and the “practices of critique, alteration, and reinvention of our material-discursive world” to examine the politics and practices of care that type 1 diabetics, breast cancer survivors, and deaf hiv positive folks do with chronic and crip technologies. their uses of technology and the internet trouble notions of the “chronic” and the “crip” and the ways they can both pathologize while also naming, articulating, and strategizing around their conditions of living (see bennett 2019). these terminologies are not unproblematic; as jonathan sterne argues, chronic illness, disability, and impairment each signal “the different work of metaphors” and how they can be used to trouble relationships between “human and system impairments” (sterne 2021, p. 35, p. 34). for folks who live these metaphors and their materialities, they experience how the fleshy “affordances of human bodies” interact with material-discursive technologies in ways that vividly reveal their “human/data assemblages” (lupton 2020, p. 18) and “intimate infrastructures” (forlano, 2017). drawing from feminist and queer technoscience studies, the talks on this panel examine the constitutive entanglements of bodies, technologies and systems in type 1 diabetic continuous glucose monitoring and the intimate feeling of their numbers and data visualization; in the politics of displaying the physical marks of mastectomy in instagram selfies and the platform vernaculars people use to make the grief of breast cancer’s gendered loss representable; in the ways bay area deaf aids activists in the 1980s and 1990s remediated their access to information through infrastructures of care they built for themselves and others; and in the ways type 1 diabetics navigate the material culture of insulin pump treatment as both compulsory and liberating. thinking across their research on breast cancer, type 1 diabetes and deaf aids activism, the panelists examine what it means, and is, to care for oneself and others in relation to what it feels like to navigate technologized, datafied, and materially marked lives. references bennet, jeffrey. (2019). managing diabetes: the cultural politics of disease. new york, ny: new york university press. forlano, laura. (2017). data rituals in intimate infrastructures: crip time and the disabled cyborg body as an epistemic site of feminist science. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2). special issue on science out of feminist theory. retrieved from https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v3i2.28843 gibbs, martin, meese, james, arnold, michael, nansen, bjorn & carter, marcus. (2015). #funeral and instagram: death, social media, and platform vernacular. information, communication & society, 18:3, 255-268, doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2014.987152. hamraie, aimi & fritsch, kelly (2020). the crip technoscience manifesto. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(1), 1-34. lupton, deborah. (2020). data selves: more than human perspectives. polity press. ruberg, bonnie & scully-baker, rainforest. (2021). making players care: the ambivalent cultural politics of care and video games, international journal of cultural studies, 24(4), 655-672. sharma, sarah. (2017). exit and the extensions of man. transmediale: art and digiculture. retrieved from https://transmediale.de/content/exit-and-theextensions-of-man sterne, jonathan. (2021). diminished faculties: a political phenomenology of impairment. durham, nc: duke university press. feeling numbers and data intimacy in type 1 diabetes carrie rentschler, mcgill university benjamin nothwehr, blueprint this talk examines the ways some people with type 1 diabetes relate to continuous glucose monitoring (cgm), its assemblages of sensor and receiver technologies, and its quantification of sugar in diabetic bodies, as numerate forms of self-intimacy and selfknowledge in relation to other diabetics. ways of knowing diabetes through its quantification and data visualization powerfully shape what it means to be diabetic; it is also a large part of what it is to “do” diabetes as a set of increasingly data-driven health management practices in relationship with technology (mol and law 2004). being type 1 diabetic and knowing oneself as diabetic are inseparable from the methods people with type 1 diabetes do to quantify their sugars (in blood, and in interstitial fluids via the cgm), and the devices they use to track and visualize their management of living with this disease around these measures. type 1 diabetics lead, as evan calder-williams (2014) puts it, a “biopolitical life, in which all food is quanta and [our] blood speaks in numbers” (para. 30). if living with diabetes is a “condition of being metric” (williams, 2014, para. 29), we ask whether and how some type 1 diabetics experience this condition (defined by their bodies’ lack of insulin production) as forms of intimate feeling and self-knowing; intimacies that emerge through their entanglements with glucose sensors, mobile app receivers, and networked insulin pumps and in relation to other people with diabetes, medical professionals, families, and their communities. the authors of this paper analyze their own long-term experiences of living with type 1 diabetes, its devices and quantification practices via transcripts of interviews they conducted with each other to assess the different, diffractive ways they interpret their self-understandings of living a quantified chronic life in relation to multiple networked medical devices. knowing diabetes intimately has enabled the authors to tune in to some of the similarities and differences that other type 1’s express in relation to how they “feel” their numbers, and what kind of relationality this creates between the person and their diabetes, between diabetics, and between diabetics and others (kennedy & hill, 2018). we draw on a feminist technoscience framework for our interview methodology to center ourselves as subjects who are “living chronic” (arduser 2017), mobilizing our experiential and observational knowledge of type 1 to examine, as well, the structures of inequality and the enactments of exclusion that diabetics face, name, and participate in over the course of their lives. in addition to drawing on their own interviews, the authors also analyze how other type 1s represent what it feels like to quantify themselves and to engage with the visualization of their sugar measures via their medical devices, focusing most directly on type 1 diabetes blogs and posts made in type 1 facebook groups and on instagram. across these materials, we examine the ways people with type 1 diabetes talk and write, as well as the things they post (such as screenshots of data visualizations of their sugar measures), about the quality and kinds of relationships they form with the datafied results of their sugar measures. responses to the line graphs of sugar measures that cgm technologies provide via mobile apps and integrated insulin pumps, for instance, reveal the ways in which cgm users may “judge and invite normalizing prescriptions” (webb, 2003, p. 225) about their own and others’ diabetes management. it also reveals the ways some people celebrate “good numbers” or even identify their own happiness with the “flat line” of overnight cgm glucose measures, as one of the authors experiences, in ways that can also function socially to exclude or marginalize those without good numbers, and for whom good numbers might be a constant struggle. in examining the patterns in how people talk, use, and interpret data visualizations from their cgms, we aim to understand how people feel about theirs and others’ numbers, and how that feeling shapes their chronic and crip epistemologies in relation to nondiabetics and other diabetics. “feeling” in relationship to diabetic numbers refers to “the emotional dimensions of engaging with data and their visualisation” (kennedy & hill, 2018, p. 834); we examine not only how individuals feel about their numbers, but how they feel in relation to others’ numbers. drawing on margaret wetherell (2012) we approach emotion in our study as “relational patterns” that form between diabetics, and between diabetics and non-diabetics, via affectively experienced modes of practice (p. 21). in our interview transcripts with each other, and in our collection of online type 1 posts about data visualizations of their sugar measures, the authors examine how type 1 diabetics talk about, represent, and deploy their “datafied body doubles” – their “device-produced numerical stand-ins" (horrocks 2019, p. 9) – in ways that are deeply felt in relation with others. our analysis focuses on how data visualizations of type 1 diabetic self-quantification feel to people with type 1s in contexts where type 1s are primarily talking to one another, but in ways that are also often visible to non-diabetics under the felt surveillance of “monitored performance” (lucherini, 2016). type 1s talk and self-present this quantified relationship and its visual and graphical representation in view of others, and they feel this monitoring. data visualizations produced by cgm mobile apps and insulin pump software translate minute-by-minute automated glucose readings into colourful graphical representations of glucose readings over time, from 1-24 hours in the daily use of cgms, and from 2 weeks to 3 months in the online graphical interfaces provided by companies that do online cgm data management. the set of data visualizations we analyze are drawn from the authors’ own corpus of cgm glucose data and other examples drawn from type 1 diabetes online forums. we are especially interested in how type 1 diabetics differently deploy data visualizations of their glucose measures in the process of keeping records for themselves and presenting themselves to others, through mobile phone photos of the graphical line marking one's sugars on the screen of one’s insulin pump, screenshots of the cgm mobile app interface and its line graph representation of glucose measures, and downloadable color graphs of glucose measures over longer time periods, alongside other forms for declaring and depicting one’s number (e.g. via verbal or textual report, for instance). on social media, these uses of data visualization can become key avenues for qualifying the self and accounting for diabetic selfhood (humphreys, 2018). there are technologized forms of intimacy at the heart of diabetic self-quantification practice and data visualization over time: affective, felt epistemologies of chronic, and sometimes “cripped,” relationships diabetics have in relation to their diabetes technology and other diabetics. while the data visualization of cgm measures might bring diabetics into closer relation to themselves, this relational device-driven dependency can also feel unwanted, imposing, and unchosen (forlano, 2016). diabetics feel their practices of quantifying diabetes: sometimes they feel really bad, and sometimes they feel great, and everything in-between. they demonstrate and express these feelings through how they relate to, talk about, see, and show their glucose numbers and their data visualizations to others. these practices can, in turn, also obscure or even amplify how experiences of diabetes continue to be conditioned by entrenched structures of inequality and lack of access to full healthcare. they sometimes “feel bad" because other’s numbers are so good. how these “data sensibilities” (lupton, 2020, p. 76) feel emerge over the long time periods in which type 1s (ideally, at least) live and continue to live chronic lives, revealing crucial archives of chronic and crip technologies that can both reveal and conceal some of the specificities of diabetic identity and experience. references arduser, lora. (2017). living chronic: agency and expertise in the rhetoric of diabetes. columbus: ohio state university press. forlano, laura. (2016). hacking the feminist disabled body, journal of peer production, 8. retrieved from http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-8-feminism-andunhacking-2/peer-reviewed-papers/issue-8-feminism-and-unhackingpeerreviewed-papers-2hacking-the-feminist-disabled-body/ forlano, laura. (2017). data rituals in intimate infrastructures: crip time and the disabled cyborg body as an epistemic site of feminist science. catalyst 3(2). special issue on science out of feminist theory. retrieved from https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v3i2.28843 horrocks, stephen. (2019). materializing datafied body doubles: insulin pumps, blood glucose testing, and the production of usable bodies. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(1), 1–26. retrieved from https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29613. humphreys, lee. (2018). the qualified self: social media and the accounting of everyday life. cambridge, ma: mit press. kennedy, helen & hill, rosemary lucy. (2018). the feeling of numbers: emotions in everyday engagements with data and their visualization, sociology, 52(4), 830848. lucherini, mark. 2016. “performing diabetes: felt surveillance and discreet selfmanagement.” surveillance & society, 14(2), 259–76. mol, annemarie and john law (2004). embodied action, enacted bodies: the example of hypoglycaemia, body & society, 10(2/3), 43-62. webb, stephen a. (2003). technologies of care. information and communication technologies in the welfare services, ed. elizabeth harlow and stephen a. webb (pp. 223-238). london: jessica kingsley publishers. williams, evan calder. (2014, december 17). the honeyed siphon, the new inquiry. retrieved from https://thenewinquiry.com/the-honeyed-siphon/ #mastectomy on instagram: selfies, patient visibility and gendered loss nina morena, mcgill university this paper approaches people’s creation of #mastectomy selfies on instagram through the conceptual and analytic framework of gendered loss and the platform vernaculars breast cancer survivors use to represent themselves and their scars. it approaches the mastectomy–a surgery with directly gendered implications–as forms of gendered loss. on instagram, people living with breast cancer and its post-surgical materialities post “autopathographic” photos that both perform and reckon with such loss (tembeck, 2016), but in ways that do not look like illness. in autopathographic photographs, the subject depicted has a specific desire to be identified as a person who not only has but who also continues to live with the illness in question (tembeck, 2016, p. 9). in the corpus of hashtagged and captioned #mastectomy selfies i analyze, mastectomy photos function as public proclamations of having had breast cancer, in ways that seem to suggest the surgical intervention was, in part, the end of their illness. they reveal the physical markings and comportments of women who have had one or two breasts surgically removed – the signs of breast cancer -but for the most part, the women depicted do not look sick. #mastectomy selfies tend to communicate “i have had a mastectomy” but they rarely say, “i am sick,” even as breast cancer -like so many other cancers -is increasingly recognized as a chronic illness. #mastectomy selfies, i argue, portray the condition of breast cancer and the surgical intervention to remove one’s breasts less as a sign of existing and chronic illness, and more as a sign of having had and lived through a mastectomy. they serve a documentary function, indicating recent patient status, but also a certain milestone in treatment, in the sense that surgery might be one of several steps in their medical journey. they consist of more than texts to be read and suggest an encounter with the subjectivity of another, which cannot be expressed solely through language. as alessandro delfanti and salvatore iaconesi (2016) suggest, “in the face of illness and disability, digital cultures often imagine and perform technologies as social and relational prostheses, as opposed to bodily prostheses” (p. 126). in sharing these selfies, current and former patients become visible to each other in an online space and contribute to the development of an online community of women with mastectomies. in this sense, the hashtag #mastectomy acts not only as a label, but as a unifying tool: the hashtag is a link, literally and figuratively, to a community that may prove invisible in offline spaces. many of the selfies i analyze do not appear, then, exactly like the autopathographic photos of breast cancer that tamar tembeck (2016) so powerfully analysed. they may “attest to personal experiences of illness or hospitalization” (p. 4), but their point seems in general to be to not portray illness per se. what they do reveal, perhaps, is the ways women navigate the experience of loss and grief from mastectomy in the context of breast cancer through the processes of making, posting, and commenting on #mastectomy selfies on instagram that communicate something else. the gendered loss of the mastectomy in these selfies, then, does not generally appear in the form of “sad girl” selfies, that is, as something primarily negative, making visible loss via tears, reddened faces, and other signs of affective burden typical of sad girl instagram selfies (holowka, 2018). instead, as this paper analyzes, #mastectomy selfies on instagram serve as potential sites of self and collective affirmation around another kind of articulation of breast cancer loss and grief, one that tarries more directly, but uncomfortably and unevenly, with the happiness politics of breast cancer philanthropy and the “recovery” focused aesthetics of so many self-help-oriented selfie aesthetics. selfies posted with the hashtag #mastectomy on instagram vary, though they may be loosely categorized as self-portraits of individuals who voluntarily expose their mastectomy scars, often in poses that suggest that they have made it through surgery and are now learning to live in their adjusted bodies. picking up on the gestural nature of selfies – as photos that are meant to communicate and be shared (senft & baym, 2015) -#mastectomy selfies are not just for the photographer but for others who will encounter the images and share them further; selfies “document the self for consumption by others,” (ori schwartz quoted in marwick, 2015, p. 141), or as paul frosh puts it, selfies say “see me showing you me” (frosh, 2015, p. 1610). while operating within recognizable platform vernaculars and adopting influencer-style habits, #mastectomy selfies also create a networked community wherein patients may grieve their pre-mastectomy selves and honour their post-mastectomy identity. locating the #mastectomy selfie within instagram’s platform vernaculars (caliandro and graham 2020; gibbs et al. 2015), this talk considers how the optimism of breast cancer culture and the visibility afforded by instagram converge, and what this means for preconceived notions of grief and mourning. in the #mastectomy selfies i analyze, many are full-length photos of the subject standing in front of a mirror; others are taken with the front-facing camera in which the subject is usually visible from the waist up. some #mastectomy selfies depict subjects bare-chested with their scars in full view, while others depict their subjects wearing hospital gowns or wrapped in bandages in clinical settings that suggest they were taken just after mastectomy surgery. many of the selfies appear to be taken at home, where women pose themselves to show their unilateral (one breast) or a bilateral (both breasts) mastectomy scars. others show women who have undergone breast reconstruction, and some wear bras specially made for women who have had mastectomies. in several, even those in the hospital, #mastectomy selfies depict subjects appearing with happy and cheerful dispositions, posing with their thumbs up signalling “okay” or with two fingers up in a peace sign. yet despite their perhaps exaggerated looking cheerfulness, something else seems to be at work here besides the hyper-feminized politics of breast cancer happiness and its related images of optimism and hope (ehrenreich, 2010; king, 2006). among other things, these selfies reformulate boundaries between public and private through openly sharing medical experiences of mastectomy that otherwise still tend to be so hidden, and even stigmatizing. analysis of the comments and talk around these selfies suggests there is far more complexity to what appears, a lurking discourse of loss and grief that seeps through the portrayals in the selfies, revealing something more about the genres of #mastectomy selfies, the cultural and political work they could be doing on the platform, and the spaces for talking about and representing the enduring, but underacknowledged, chronicity of breast cancer. these selfies represent a congealing of social media practices and patient visibilities, and have much to teach us about how gender, loss, and mourning are performed within the current social media landscape. they might prompt us to ask further: what might a politics of gendered loss vis-à-vis mastectomies look like if a fuller representation of its various affective experiences were more readily witnessed in the presentation and production of mastectomy selfies? how could a broader (and more intersectional) range of women’s experiences of mastectomy and breast cancer expand the cultural and aesthetic platform vernaculars, and the imperatives that drive them on instagram, in ways that could more readily portray the embodied loss of mastectomy? references caliandro, alessandro & graham, james. (2020).studying instagram beyond selfies. social media + society, 6(2), 1-7. cotter, kelley (2019). playing the visibility game: how digital influencers and algorithms negotiate influence on instagram. new media & society, 21(4), 895-913. delfanti, alessandro & iaconesi, salvatore. (2016). open-source cancer: brain scans and the rituality of biodigital data sharing. the participatory condition in the digital age. eds. barney, darin, et al. (123-144). minneapolis: university of minnesota press duffy, brooke erin. (2017). (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational labor. new haven, ct: yale university press. ehrenreich, barbara. (201). bright-sided: how positive thinking is undermining america. new york, ny: picador. frosh, paul. (2015). the gestural image: the selfie, photography theory, and kinesthetic sociability. international journal of communication, 9,1607-1628. gibbs, martin, meese, james, arnold, michael, nansen, bjorn & carter, marcus. (2015). #funeral and instagram: death, social media, and platform vernacular. information, communication & society, 18:3, 255-268, retrieved from doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2014.987152. holowka, eileen mary (2018). between artifice and emotion: the “sad girls” of instagram. leadership, popular culture, and social change. edward elgar publishing. jain, lochlann. (2013). malignant: how cancer becomes us. berkeley, ca: university of california press. king, samantha. (2006). pink ribbons, inc.: breast cancer and the politics of philanthropy. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. leaver, tama, highfield, tim & abidin, crystal. (2020). instagram: visual social media cultures. cambridge, uk: polity press. lorde, audre. (1980).the cancer journals. san francisco, ca: aunt lute books. marwick, alice. (2015). instafame: luxury selfies in the attention economy. public culture, 27(1), 137-160. senft, theresa m, & baym, nancy k. (2015). what does the selfie say? investigating a global phenomenon. international journal of communication, 9,1588-1606. tembeck, tamar. (2016). selfies of ill health: online autopathographic photography and the dramaturgy of the everyday. social media + society, 2(1), 1-11. deaf aids activism and bay-area tech histories dylan mulvin, london school of economies and political science cait mckinney, simon fraser university in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the san francisco bay area was home to an emerging tech boom, the most developed aids service infrastructure in the u.s., and concentrated disability activism. this paper draws on archival research to argue that this intersection is not only consequential: it is key to advancing knowledge of how hiv left an imprint on emerging communication technologies and to better understanding how sexuality and disability factor in technological cultures. the paper focuses on a specific organization called the deaf aids center, and their work to advocate for remediation of hiv-related information for the deaf community. specifically, we focus on how this organization framed telecommunications device for the deaf (tdd), a technology that used teletype machines and modems to facilitate “telephone” communication using text. the deaf aids center advocated for wider access to tdd in the aids service sector, while also marking its inadequacies as a substitute to the high touch, caring, one-to-one interpretive work needed by many asl speakers (tdd relies on written english). the deaf aids centre operated out of st. benedict’s catholic church for the deaf from 1988 until it became part of the university of california, san francisco in the mid 1990s. led by darol vance, a straight, white woman who was deaf and a lifelong advocate, the organization focused on creating accessible aids information resources for the deaf community through resource guides, tdd advocacy, interpretation services, and other forms of outreach. in this focus on outreach, the organization looked like scores of other aids service organizations, but made information accessible to deaf people who experienced a lack of access to culturally specific resources, and stigma around homosexuality and substance use from existing deaf services (gaskins; stevens; peinkofer; gannon). this work took place within a broader national context of deaf aids outreach, including similar organizations in other cities, and the national aids tdd hotline. we undertake a media history of the deaf aids center, asking how the organization’s grounding in san francisco’s deaf gay life worlds shaped its capacious understanding of information as one facet of a larger caring practice, and modem-supported access provisions as helpful but ultimately inadequate to supporting communication for chronically ill people using asl. to make this argument, we specifically analyze the deaf aids centre’s advocacy for tdd alongside their record keeping practices. while most activist and service organizations’ archives are comprised of file folders containing records of administrative paperwork, the deaf aids centre compiled their papers, photographs, and other media into five large scrapbooks. using techniques of bricolage, annotation, and candid photographs, the scrapbooks show how the deaf aids center facilitated a high-touch care network and interpreting service for deaf gay men dying from aids as an intrinsic part of their access politics and everyday information work. portraits of men in hospice appear alongside documentation from workshops on ethical asl interpretation of conversations about hiv, and documentation of deaf volunteers operating tdd phone lines. living, dying, and finding information were deliberately entwined; as vance explained at the annual deaf memorial service, the organization was guided by, “rememberance for those who have died of aids…. hope for cure, better treatment, understanding, communication…. action for better services to improve networking and accessibility…. [and] love for everyone.” reading across these scrapbooks, we argue that deaf culture’s intersection with hiv in san francisco enriches understandings of information as care, and nuances celebrations of modems and computing through a disability studies lens. the research contributes to internet studies work on alternative histories of silicon valley, and minor internet histories (paloque-berges; rankin). our analysis is grounded in a few intersecting literatures. recent scholarship has revisited questions about information, access, and hiv from an historical perspective, framing aids activist work with information and networks as critical experiments (lubin and vaccaro; esparza, brewster, and ruberg). these histories build on media studies written during the north american aids crisis (juhasz, crimp), and complement recent theorizations of care and care networks developed in and through aids and its structures of harm and survival (cifor; fink; watkins-hayes; jolly). we bring these literatures into dialogue with media studies of deafness and deaf culture (bruegemann; hickman; mills; sterne; bauman & murray) and the literature on scrapbooks as affective media in queer and trans archives (edwards; moynihan). we ask how the remediation of information through the situatedness of disability reorients our understandings of care, technology, and information. references bauman, h.d.l. and murray, j.j. eds. 2014. deaf gain: raising the stakes for human diversity. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. brewster, k., & ruberg, b. 2020. survivors: archiving the history of bulletin board systems and the aids crisis. first monday, 25(10). retrieved from https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v25i10.10290 brueggemann, b.j. 2009. deaf subjects. new york, ny: new york university press. cifor, marika. 2022. viral cultures: activist archiving in the age of aids. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. crimp, douglas. 1987. introduction: aids: cultural analysis/cultural activism. october, 43, 3–16. retrieved from doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3397562. driscoll, kevin & paloque-berges, camille. 2017. searching for missing “net histories.” internet histories, 1(1-2), 47-59. retrieved from doi: 10.1080/24701475.2017.1307541 edwards, rebekah. 2015. ‘this is not a girl’: a trans* archival reading. tsq, 2(4), 650– 665. retrieved from doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3151574 esparza, rené. 2021. ‘qué bonita mi tierra’: latinx aids activism and decolonial queer praxis in 1980s new york and puerto rico. radical history review, 140, 107–141. retrieved from doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-8841706 fink, marty. 2020. forget burial: hiv kinship, disability, and queer/trans narratives of care. new brunswick, n.j.: rutgers university press. gannon, c. 1998. developing hiv/aids resources for the deaf. siecus report, 26(2), 19-20. gaskins, s. 1999. special population: hiv/aids among the deaf and hard of hearing. journal of the association of nurses in aids care, 10(2), 75-78. hickman, l. 2019. transcription work and the practices of crip technoscience. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(1), 1–10. jolly, jallicia. 2019. from ‘at risk’ to interdependent: the erotic life worlds of hiv+ jamaican women, souls, 21(2-3), 107-131. retrieved from doi: 10.1080/10999949.2019.1705084 juhasz, alexandra. 1995. aids tv: identity, community, and alternative video. durham, n.c.: duke university press. lubin, joan., & vaccaro, jeanne. 2020. aids infrastructures, queer networks: architecting the critical path. first monday, 25(10). retrieved from https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v25i10.10403 mills, mara. 2012. do signals have politics? inscribing abilities in cochlear implants. the oxford handbook of sound studies (pp. 320–346). oxford, uk: oxford university press. moynihan, bridget. 2020. digital decoupage: reading and prototyping the material poetics and queer ephemera of the edwin morgan scrapbooks, 1931-1966. phd diss, university of edinburgh. retrieved from https://era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/37005 peinkofer, j.r. 1994. hiv education for the deaf, a vulnerable minority. public health reports, 109(3), 390-396. rankin, joy lisi. 2018. a people’s history of computing in the united states, cambridge, ma: harvard university press. sterne, j. 2003. the audible past. durham, nc: duke university press. stevens, h. 1998. aids, not hearing aids: exploring the link between the deaf community and hiv/aids. health and human rights, 2(4), 98–113. watkins-hayes, celeste. 2019. remaking a life: how women living with hiv/aids confront inequality. berkeley, ca: university of california press. retrieved from doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520968738 medicalized freedom through control: a crip critique of the techno-liberation of type 1 diabetes stephen horrocks, purdue university approximately 1.25 million people in the united states—9 million worldwide—have been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes (centers for disease control and prevention, 2017). not to be confused with the more common type 2, type 1 diabetes mellitus (or t1d) is an autoimmune disorder which eliminates the body’s ability to produce insulin altogether. because the body uses this hormone to break down and use carbohydrates for energy, people with t1d must take multiple daily injections or insulin pump infusions of artificial insulin to process the food they eat and prevent other related health problems from developing (eisenbarth, 1986; morran et al., 2015). for nearly 40% of people with t1d in the us, these injections are automated through the use of insulin pumps and networked blood glucose monitoring systems that have proved lifechanging—nothing short of a “miracle,” as one individual put it—and understandably so (heinemann et al., 2015).1 a chronic illness requiring constant attention and awareness of what is happening with(in) the body, t1d can be overwhelming and exhausting. given the conglomeration of medical, social, financial, temporal, and emotional complications of living with and treating diabetes, the prevalence of diabetes burnout is alarming if still unsurprising (polonsky, 1999). any respite from t1d’s constant presence can be, in a word, liberating. but that new freedom means constant connectedness with—and repetitively connecting to—multiple medical devices in ways that fundamentally transform t1d bodies, materially and phenomenologically. as people use and engage with these devices, they become embedded within (and extensions of) people, their bodies, and their social selves. that process produces altered people, altered bodies, and altered technologies as medical need and cultural norms make these use acts compulsory. in this paper, i analyze informant discussions alongside quantitative data sets collected from twitter diabetes online communities (doc) related to their treatment practices at the nexus of their bodies and their diabetes treatment devices, first as a material experience and then as a phenomenological or conceptual one, in an attempt to answer two primary questions. first, what does the act of use do to/for informants’ material experiences with their treatment devices and their world? and second, how does that material experience influence the ways they understand their bodies and use experiences? the material culture of insulin pump treatment, i argue, constructs and is in turn built by data-centric images of the diabetic body. the act of using insulin pumps, continuous 1 ashley, interview, female age 26, diagnosed with t1d in 2000, june 1, 2017. glucose monitors, and blood glucose meters relies on conceptualizing the body as data—what i call datafied body doubles—and through constant connectedness, incorporates these images into people’s lives and bodies (author, 2019). though these medical devices are frequently framed as technological gateways to users’ freedom and independence, those discourses rely on a definition of diabetes as medically un-free, inflecting people’s embodied experiences with ableist assumptions of dependence. by describing and analyzing some of the most influential locations of device-connected t1d materialities, as identified by informants—namely their infusion sets (where the pump attaches to/under the skin) and their pump devices themselves, this study centers the datafied t1d body in relation to its material lived experience. i then turn to the material traces left by these devices in/on the bodies of patient-users, examining the experience and implications of rashing, scarring, and so-called infusion site rotation. last, i follow those networked devices in their production and deployment of datafied body doubles: from new measurements systems and blood glucose meters, to technologically produced “freedom” in continuous glucose monitors, and finally to the contradictory rhetorical framework of freedom through control at the site of insulin pump use. as i will show, material and datafied bodies are also fundamentally social, and these embodied experiences require an agency-centered reframing of bodies/the body—a process common among critical disability studies/crip studies scholars such as alison kafer (2013), aimi hamraie and kelly fritsch (2019), laura mauldin (2016), and robert mcruer (2006, 2018), which likewise informs how we can approach the technologies and use acts entangled in these practices—to account for the complexities of choice and materiality in t1d treatment and life more generally. the freedom these informants have been promised through their devices, and have in some cases sought out with vigor, is actually a freedom from their own bodies and lives deemed unlivable. as one informant offhanded noted, despite the treatment regime requiring control over one’s body and one’s very self, “you don’t control diabetes, you manage it. there is no controlling it.”2 yet people with t1d are stuck in a medicalized system both compulsory and unrealistic, both life-sustaining and body-controlling. the tension built into that type of liminal experience can be a lot to handle, especially when added to the experience of living with chronic illness in general. in response, some people use that tense inbetween space to push back against the defining and confining that networked insulin pump treatment can produce. in so doing, they call attention to and critique the normalization of ableist conceptions of embodied freedom that discount/devalue life with chronic illness and that permeate cultural understandings of t1d, identifying rich sites of much needed nuance in discussions of diabetes treatment devices and of medical device use in the us more broadly. references 2 michael, interview, male age 41, diagnosed with t1d in 2010, may 19, 2017. horrocks, s. (2019). materializing datafied body doubles: insulin pumps, blood glucose testing, and the production of usable bodies. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(1), 1-26. centers for disease control and prevention. (2017). national diabetes statistics report, 2017. centers for disease control and prevention, us department of health and human services. eisenbarth, g. s. (1986). type i diabetes mellitus. the new england journal of medicine; boston, 314(21), 1360–1368. hamraie, a., & fritsch, k. (2019). crip technoscience manifesto. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(1), 1–33. retrieved from https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29607 heinemann, l., fleming, g. a., petrie, j. r., holl, r. w., bergenstal, r. m., & peters, a. l. (2015). insulin pump risks and benefits: a clinical appraisal of pump safety standards, adverse event reporting, and research needs: a joint statement of the european association for the study of diabetes and the american diabetes association diabetes technology working group. diabetes care, 38(4), 716–722. retrieved from https://doi.org/10.2337/dc15-0168 kafer, a. (2013). feminist, queer, crip. bloomington, in: indiana university press. retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16gz79x mauldin, l. (2016). made to hear: cochlear implants and raising deaf children. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. mcruer, r. (2006). crip theory: cultural signs of queerness and disability. new york, ny: new york university press. mcruer, r. (2018). crip times: disability, globalization, and resistance. new york, ny: new york university press. morran, m. p., vonberg, a., khadra, a., & pietropaolo, m. (2015). immunogenetics of type 1 diabetes mellitus. molecular aspects of medicine, 42, 42–60. retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mam.2014.12.004 polonsky, w. (1999). diabetes burnout: what to do when you can’t take it anymore. arlington, va: american diabetes association. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 bolin, g., kalmus, v., figueiras, r. (2022, november). conducting cross-cultural online audience research with two generations: methodological experiences and reflections from the pandemic context. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. conducting cross-cultural online audience research with two generations: methodological experiences and reflections from the pandemic context göran bolin södertörn university rita figueiras universidade catolica portuguesa veronika kalmus tartu university introduction one of the implications of the covid-19 pandemic has been the difficulties in conducting empirical research (kopecka-piech & łódzki 2022), not least research that involves meetings with media users (wahl-jørgensen 2021). while several useful compilations of research resources already exist (e.g., garcia garcia & barclay 2020; lupton 2021), this paper aims to contribute to the advancement of qualitative online audience research methodology. we will discuss some methodological, ethical, and empirical problems that arose due to forced changes in research methodology of a three-country comparative project, involving both quantitative survey and qualitative interviews. the paper focusses specifically on the benefits and challenges of conducting focus group interviews online and discusses wider implications for future audience and internet research. the point of departure: a three-country comparative project the larger project aims to understand whether experiences of authoritarianism affect media users’ attitudes towards corporate and state surveillance. we chose countries with different historical backgrounds in terms of surveillance regimes: estonia (subsumed by the totalitarian surveillance apparatus during the occupation by the soviet union 19401991), portugal (authoritarian regime in 1926-1974), and sweden (a liberal democracy with a welfare state legacy). we employed a mixed-method approach, combining a quantitative survey with qualitative focus group interviews. for the online survey conducted in autumn 2020, we sampled participants (n=3,221) from two generational cohorts: one born in 1946-1953, having had their formative years during the authoritarian regime in portugal or the soviet time in estonia (or in liberal democracy in sweden), and the second born in 1988-1995, with their formative years in post-totalitarian/post-authoritarian estonia or portugal (see kalmus et al., forthcoming). in each country, we planned to conduct six face-to-face focus group interviews (fgs) with people from the same cohorts in spring 2021. among both cohorts, we aimed at composing three gender-balanced groups with different profiles: one with higher education; one with mixed education, living in a small city or countryside; and one with secondary education. methodological implications of the pandemic the pandemic forced us to conduct the fgs online. we chose the videoconferencing tool zoom, which allows conducting synchronous focus groups, is relatively easy to use, and guarantees high quality recording. online interviewing had, indeed, some advantages: it was easier to recruit people irrespective of their geographical location, and to find common times for interviews. the challenges, however, prevailed. effects of the technological interface on the group size and interaction online video conferencing tools constrain people to talk in strict turns, hindering natural dialogical conversation. to enhance group interaction, we decided to reduce the group size to a maximum of five participants, which resulted in most groups consisting of only 3-4 people. bad internet connection sometimes interfered with some participants' ability to partake or interrupted the conversation. online interviews needed to be shorter than f2f interviews since it was more difficult to uphold concentration among participants, and a balance had to be struck between creating a calm atmosphere and time efficiency. the online setting also modulated attention by challenging mainly young participants to stay engaged in the conversation as they were more likely to multitask. the importance of digital skills besides needing a stable internet connection and access to a device with audio and video capabilities, digital literacy was paramount to navigate video conferencing software. all younger participants were familiar with zoom for professional and sociability reasons, and the focus groups with the younger cohort were conducted according to the initial schedule in all countries. since most participants in the older cohort were retired, many lacked experiences of video conferencing software. zoom was a new and challenging environment for them – even for those who were used to computers during their vocational life. although we recruited participants among internet users, many elderly participants had technological difficulties. several did not manage to connect and could thus not be interviewed. in all countries, some elderly informants with lower levels of education felt uncomfortable with the group interview in the online setting, which led us to complement the sample with individual interviews. this methodological decision, while prolonging the data collection, provided flexibility in choosing the interview mode and channel appropriate for each participant. in portugal, eight participants with scant digital skills preferred whatsapp they had gotten familiar with during the pandemic to interact with relatives and friends. in estonia, zoom, messenger and face-to-face contact were used alternately to conduct five individual interviews. in sweden individual interviews had to be used to compensate for the number of no-shows in the fgs. ethics-related considerations using online platforms introduced new types of privacy concerns. zoom interviews made the researcher, sometimes inevitably, enter participants’ private space. younger participants tended to be better equipped and more skilled in protecting their privacy, e.g., by participating via a mobile device from their car, garage, or sauna, or using filters to blur the background. the majority, however, participated from their living rooms (older participants) or bedrooms (younger participants). securing the informants’ confidentiality was sometimes beyond the researcher’s control as they could not know whether participants were alone in the room. concluding remarks our analysis revealed vast differences between the two generational cohorts. although we encountered some cultural differences between the three countries, our main methodological lessons and suggestions for further audience and internet research center on the need to consider the many subtle facets of inter-generational differences when planning online interviewing. as we witnessed, not all barriers were rooted in access to technology and connectivity. levels of digital skills and self-confidence in use also played a role in older participants' possibilities and willingness for taking part in online research. considering the various aspects of the gray digital divide (huxhold et al. 2020), researchers should reflect on the ways in which age and online methods intersect. as a contribution to methodological development within internet research, the study provided some insights into challenges in engaging different generations in online interviewing: • group size and communication dynamics need to be adjusted to the online setting. our recommendation is to use smaller groups and encourage turn-taking among participants; • participants’ digital skills, familiarity with the medium, and educational and vocational background are crucial factors. we recommend flexibility in choosing interviewing tools to build trust in technology and in the interviewer and overcome insecurities among participants; • in online interviewing platforms, additional ethical considerations, related to participants’ privacy and confidentiality, become paramount. references garcia garcia, s., barclay, k. (2022) adapting research methodologies in the covid-19 pandemic: resources for researchers. washington: nippon foundation ocean nexus at earthlab. https://www.uts.edu.au/sites/default/files/2020-06/uts-adapting-researchmethodologies-covid-19-pandemic-resources-researchers.pdf huxhold, o., hees, e. and webster, n. (2020). towards bridging the grey digital divide: changes in internet access and its predictors from 2002 to 2014 in germany. european journal of ageing, 17: 271-280. kalmus, v., bolin, g., figueiras, r. (forthcoming) who is afraid of dataveillance? attitudes towards online surveillance in a cross-cultural and generational perspective. new media & society. kopecka-piech, k., łódzki, b. (eds) (2022) the covid 19 pandemic as a challenge for media and communication studies. london: routledge. lupton, d. (editor) (2020) doing fieldwork in a pandemic (crowd-sourced document). https://docs.google.com/document/d/1clgjgabb2h2qbdutgfqribhmog9b6p0nvmgvuihzcl8/ edit wahl-jørgensen, k. (2021) the affordances of interview research on zoom: new intimacies and active listening. communication, culture & critique, 14(2): 373-376. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 lanson, k. (2020, october). #unmaskedselfiesinsolidarity: from self<ie> care to collective care— affective artivism, networked belonging and mobile media participatory art. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 201th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. #unmaskedselfiesinsolidarity: from self<ie> care to collective care—affective artivism, networked belonging and mobile media participatory art. klare lanson rmit university short abstract contemporary mobile media affords new insights into the social, critical, cultural and creative practice methods. with the continual rise of social practice in art which sees the “social” and “experience” as the medium, smartphones have become an increasingly important device for information dissemination, collective dialogue and poetic expression. this paper considers these insights through the lively and multivalent discussion of participatory art project entitled #unmaskedselfiesinsolidarity (2020) as case study. it is situated within the community of rmit university international students, local students, staff and friends during the initial outbreak of the current pandemic covid-19, a global health event that has had significant socio-cultural, economic, and political impacts. it employs one of the most pervasive barometers of popular culture today, the selfie. moving through related topics such as facial recognition and digital parenting, the #unmaskedselfies team recognise that now more than ever, we need transformative and socially engaged work to engage in collective care. in essence, this project has created an affective listening network to make the unheard heard, to voice personal concerns, and to show empathy for the broader community affected by this global health crisis. #unmaskedselfies openly supports international students caught in the crossfire of strict new travel restrictions imposed by the government. we critically reflect on the construct of corporatized social media platforms used for public art projects and how art is a socially transformative process, through its messages of care alongside messages from chinese students suffering anxiety and isolation, waiting for the travel bans to be lifted, a tempering of the stigma and racism accompanying the coronavirus event here in australia. long abstract contemporary mobile media affords new insights into social, critical, cultural and creative practice methods. with the continual rise of social practice in art which sees the “social” and “experience” as the medium, smartphones have become an increasingly important device for information dissemination, collective dialogue and poetic expression. the methodology of creative practice research playfully disrupts, innovates on, and extends the ways in which knowledge making and transmission can be understood (farman 2014; hjorth 2016; hjorth, de souza e silva, and lanson 2020). these everyday interventions can be framed in terms of broader urban art movements such as the situationist international (de souza e silva 2011 [2004]). the ubiquity of mobile media inside and outside traditional art spaces has also influenced how contemporary art is received, represented and understood new ways of making art through social media spaces. this can be understood as a borderless form of mobility, where relationships of power and visibility over who moves and who is able to move is at stake (hannam, sheller and urry 2006), as is the case with covid-19. mobile media art therefore extends audiences and enables dynamic reinforcement of digital humanities research projects regarding issues such as collective care. this paper considers these insights through the lively and multivalent discussion of a participatory art project entitled #unmaskedselfiesinsolidarity (2020) as case study, which highlights the importance of practicing collective forms of care as care at a distance (pols 2012; hjorth et al. 2020). it does this through affective and creative use of mobile and social media platforms to activate the experience of social belonging, care and wellbeing. engaging hundreds of contributions in just a few weeks, this socially engaged artwork is situated within the online and physical spaces of rmit university in the heart of melbourne, australia. the project was located within the community of international students, local students, staff and friends during the initial outbreak of the coronavirus in wuhan, china, a global health event that has had highly significant sociocultural, economic, and political impacts. it employs one of the most pervasive barometers of popular culture today, the selfie. online activity through networked digital publics have long pointed to social media engagement (van dijck 2013; hjorth and hinton 2019), employing collective forms where “we are activated and sustained by feelings of belonging and solidarity, however fleeting or permanent those feelings may be” (papacharissi 2014, 9). designed as a set of action strategies including social media and public paste ups, this paper critically reflects on the project #unmaskedselfiesinsolidarity to consider how participatory art can be a socially transformative process, through its messages of care alongside messages from chinese students suffering anxiety and isolation, waiting for the travel bans to be lifted, a tempering of the stigma and racism that has accompanied the coronavirus event here in australia. co-led by a team of artist researchers at rmit university: staff dr marnie badham and dr tammy wong hulbert (art) and phd students klare lanson and isabella capezio (media & communication), ye (sherry) lui (art), and wilson yeung (architecture & design), it resonates the mobilisation of social activist projects to encourage messages of care and solidarity through the phenomenon of the selfie and related hashtag #unmaskedselfiesinsolidarity. selfies, when activated through collective processes such as hashtagging, can affectively problematise socio cultural issues, providing visibility and access to a range of people that may be subject to inequalities based on race, gender or sexuality, such as for projects #blacklivesmatters and the #metoo movement. a blurring of art and activism within selfie making on social media platforms like the public facebook group, weibo, wechat and instagram used in #unmaskedselfiesinsolidarity allows for the private bodies currently in covid-19 lockdown mode to be heard around the affective atmospheres of social isolation. paul frosh contemplates the role of social media tagging beyond archival purposes. the entanglement of image, names, bodies and networks exist as a highly social and embodied performance—a continuous cycle of making communities, where tagging is “a profoundly poetic procedure for populating and disclosing worlds … by continually assembling multiple others in the confirmation of one’s existence as a body” (2019, 95). the more collectively created hashtag alongside the tagging of individuals in digital imagery also assumes a stance where platform connectivity takes precedence over matters of personal privacy. this complicates our engagement with digital media—with social and highly networked collective activity comes responsibility and ethical thinking around why we choose to do it, how we practice the doing of data and our perceived authority to do so. global pandemic conditions have also further heightened the discrimination and distrust of the chinese government and citizens, further impacting on the diaspora and people of asian appearance in australian society and beyond. with worsening pandemic conditions in the usa, these larger global influences, increased fear and anxiety in society due to abnormal socio-economic conditions, have created the context for increased stigma, racism and prejudice towards people of chinese heritage. our smartphones acted as creative co-conspirators, enacting the collective role of sensemaking, communicating with others through public space, and documenting how we move in and through the world. this experience provides evidence that the subjective self<ie> is performative, multidimensional and complex. this paper proposes the understanding of the selfie as a mediated and networked public art space. once known as ‘netizens’ (clark 2012)—a term dating back to 1984, popularised in mid90s china and used to describe global citizens intent on using the internet to improve social relationships—#unmaskedselfiesinsolidarity, as a transnational project, is performed by a team of ‘artivists’. this fertile merge of art and social activism takes full advantage of our social and digital world, framed as a form of resistance and “often considered in relation to a model of conflict” (toft 2016, 61). with over 700 million users in china, the term ‘netizen’ is now deeply contested as “it implies that political views in china exist solely online, away from the confines of regular society” (schiavenza 2013). interestingly, new technological developments such as facial recognition software have been recently adopted by companies in china “announcing their technology can now identify people even when they’re wearing facemasks” (li 2020, n.p.). using masks as performative objects within #unmaskedselfiesinsolidarity was also seen to be a mode of protection for participants in terms of everyday forms of data privacy and surveillance. many who wished to protect themselves from modes of facial surveillance, especially asian participants, chose to create a masked selfie, as opposed to an unmasked one. china, like many countries around the world, certainly utilises mass surveillance technology that leads to unwanted intrusions of privacy. especially in light of covid-19, where it was reported that facial recognition software used in china has now further developed its ai capacity to provide a “full range of epidemic prevention information such as body temperature, mask-wearing status, and employee identity” (li 2020, n.p.). however, when thinking metaphorically, although many contributed selfies were indeed masked, the situated action of participating in our collective project could very well be seen as visible enough. this project has also created an affective listening network, to show empathy for the broader community affected by this global pandemic. to date, findings have notably highlighted a form of parental modeling for those advocating a more balanced approach to digital parenting (clark 2013; lim 2016; ryan vickery 2017; plunkett 2019; lim 2020), due to the related issue of increased racial vilification in schools and then remote learning practices due to the coronavirus outbreak and subsequent lockdown mode. many children chose to upload selfies alongside their parents to protest unwanted racism. being highly affective, the selfie is both a mediated digital object and a gestural practice of communication (senft and baym 2015; warfield et al. 2016; kuntsman 2017; tiidenberg 2018). we understand #unmaskedselfiesforsolidarity to be more than simply an archive of self-expression or a hashtag, but as an embodied digital composite of conceptual and performative parts that act as a socially engaged arts methodology. it assumes a commitment equally to social aims and aesthetic interests. selfie making can be understood as an act of self-determination and representation requiring active reflexivity, at the same time expressing the intention to contribute to a live shared narrative. many patterns were discovered within the choices made by participants in relation to both the messages and the selfies created. as selfies were posted throughout the project’s duration, interesting connections were revealed. for example, the importance of morethan-human feelings of care within the home was highlighted as many participants chose to share their selfie moment with their pet companions. animals are recognised as an important part of the home dynamic, an entanglement of intimacy and kinship (hjorth, richardson, and balmford 2016), it makes sense that pet relationships are a type of reciprocal care. to share and perform a selfie with a pet—or even ‘help’ our pets create a selfie—heightens our sense of well-being during periods of social isolation. #unmaskedselfiesinsolidarity offered a more complex, playful and nuanced counter to prejudiced perspectives by creating a public platform for individual exchange. fears of racism, mistrust, and isolation were expressed by international students who participated. they expressed the desire to be viewed as individuals beyond racial stereotypes. our project captured the early stages of this difficult period of covid-19 by working on a local scale with our own student community and played out to reflect a national crisis impacted by greater international relationships. through collaborative, creative, directed and nominal forms of participation (huelguera 2011), these early personal, emotional expressions by our students and the wider community, was an indication of what was to come, as australia went into lockdown. nb: the short digital essay created for online presentation at aoir2020 is based on a reflective conversation in august 2020 in relation to #unmaskedselfiesinsolidarity, initiated and created by klare lanson, with dr tammy wong hulbert and dr marnie badham. references artivism collective. n.y. “what is artivism for?”, artivism website, n.d. clark, lynn schofield. 2013. the parent app; understanding families in the digital age. new york: oxford university press. clark, paul. 2012. youth culture in china: from red guards to netizens. cambridge university press. de souza e silva, adriana. 2011 [2004]. “art by telephone: from static to mobile interfaces.” in the mobile audience: media art and mobile technologies, edited by martin rieser, 67–80. amsterdam: rodopi. dijck, josé van. 2013. the culture of connectivity a critical history of social media. new york: oxford university press. farman, jason (ed). 2014. the mobile story: narrative practices with locative technologies. new york: routledge. frosh, paul. 2019. the poetics of digital media. cambridge, uk: polity. hannam, kevin, sheller, mimi, and john urry, “editorial: mobilities, immobilities and moorings,” mobilities 1, no. 1 (2006): 1–22, doi: 10.1080/17450100500489189. hjorth, larissa. 2016. “mobile art: rethinking intersections between art, user created content (ucc), and the quotidian”. mobile media & communication, 4(2): 169–85, doi: 10.1177/2050157915619210. hjorth, l., richardson, i., and balmford, w. 2016. “careful surveillance and pet wearables: at home with animals”. the conversation, september 5. hjorth, larissa, ohashi, kana, sinanan, jolynna, horst, heather, pink, sarah, kato, fumitoshi, and baohua zhou. 2020. digital media practices in households: kinship through data. amsterdam: amsterdam university press. doi: 10.5117/9789462989504. hjorth, larissa, da souza e silva, adriana, and klare lanson (eds.). 2020. the routledge companion to mobile media art. london; new york: routledge. kuntsman, adi. (ed). 2017. selfie citizenship. cham, switzerland: palgrave macmillan. li, jane. 2020. “china’s facial recognition giant says it can crack masked faces during the coronavirus”. quartz, february 18. lim, sun sun. 2016. “through the tablet glass: transcendent parenting in an era of mobile media and cloud computing.” journal of children and media 10 (1): 21–29. doi: 10.1080/17482798.2015.1121896. __________. 2020. “mobile communication and transcendent parenting.” in transcendent parenting: raising children in the digital age, 134–54. new york: oxford university press. papacharissi, z. 2014. affective publics: sentiment, technology, and politics. new york: oxford university press. perpitch, nicolas. 2020. “coronavirus travel ban hits australian universities, schools as chinese students stranded overseas”, abc news, 19 feb. . plunkett, leah a. 2019. sharenthood: why we should think before we talk about our kids online. cambridge, ma: the mit press. pols, jeannette. 2012. care at a distance on the closeness of technology. care & welfare. amsterdam: amsterdam university press. ryan vickery, jacqueline. 2017. worried about the wrong things: youth, risk, and opportunity in the digital world. cambridge, ma; london: the mit press. schiavenza, matt. 2013. “enough with the word ‘netizen’”, the atlantic, sept 25. tiidenberg, katrin. 2018. selfies: why we love (and hate) them (first ed.). bingley: emerald publishing limited. toft, tanya. (2016). “what urban media art can do”. in what urban media can do: why, when, where & how, edited by susa pop, tanya toft, nerea calvillo and mark wright, 50–65. stuttgart: avedition. warfield, k., cambre, c., and abidin, c. (2016). “introduction to the social media + society special issue on selfies: me-diated inter-faces”, social media + society, april–june 2016, p1–5. doi: 10.1177/2056305116641344. microsoft word cooper-constructing the digital skills crisis-constructing the digital skills crisis.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): bridges, l. e., cooper, z. g. t., ticona, j. (2021, october). constructing the digital skills crisis: a critical conceptual history of “skill”. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. constructing the digital skills crisis: a critical conceptual history of “skill” lauren e. bridges university of pennsylvania zane griffin talley cooper university of pennsylvania julia ticona university of pennsylvania introduction for nearly two decades, scholars of digital inequalities have examined the ways that technological skills affect the benefits people derive from being online. from knowing how to apply for a job online, to participation in online knowledge production (shaw & hargittai, 2018), scholars have demonstrated the key role skill plays in explaining current patterns in online activities today. digital skills are often treated through the framework of human capital with the implicit assumption that new technologies create deficits in skills to be overcome by education, training, or “upskilling” (davies & eynon, 2018). however, the cultural connections between skills and technology has both a history and a politics. in this paper, we explain the historical genealogy of technological skills, and its use as a political tool to order bodies according to the interests of power and capital. literature review taking up sara ahmed’s (2019) method of following words around, this paper follows skill––as a word, concept, and action––through its deep, yet critically sparse, intellectual history, to better understand how the idea of digital skills has been politically operationalized. this genealogy shows how, as a political concept, skill does not function as an intrinsic personal qualifier, but rather an extrinsic condition, an ordering logic imposed by power and capital. during the lateeighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the concept of skill was deployed largely as a political tool to organize changing relations of capital, and to maintain existing elite hierarchies (wajcman, 1991; kumar, 2018). the evolving coding of skilled vs. unskilled labor responded not just to the increased use of machines (marx, 1990), but more acutely to the changing demographics of workers––to maintain patriarchal power as women entered the industrial workforce (berg, 1994), to solidify hierarchies of colonial expertise (kumar, 2018), and to fetishsize cultural techniques of indigenous ways of knowing while exploiting indigenous workers (nakamura, 2014). in this way, skill began to take on a more instrumental meaning, as labor, both skilled and unskilled, became inextricably linked to doing work on/with machinery and, later, technology (braudel, 1982). today, the concept skill exists in close rhetorical relation, and is often deployed alongside technology, innovation, and progress, as an individual pathway to economic mobility. yet, “technology” is a comparatively recent concept, achieving its current dominant meanings only after world war ii. prior to the late-1940s, what we currently call technology was primarily referred to either as technics, mechanical arts, or industrial arts, which referred principally to specialized or artisanal knowledge and practice, not complex mechanical systems (schatzberg, 2018). conversely, the concept of technologie referred to an elite system of knowledge reserved for managers and royal officials who managed the artisanal trades (pp. 77-78). as such, technologie represented a hierarchical system of knowledge somewhat distinct from contemporary concepts like technics or mechanical arts. executive construction of the “skills crisis” using these entangled histories of skill and technology as a foundation, we trace this genealogy forward to see how skill is operationalized in executive level discourse. we analyze policies from four us presidents––from clinton’s digital divide policies, to trump’s executive order to “combat the skills crisis”––to understand the varying constructions of the technological skills crisis as a political project. our findings show, although variations exist between democratic and republican framing––where one treats digital skills as democratizing and the other as a way to ensure national strength––there is a consistent deficit framework that individualizes a lack of appropriate skills which can only be addressed through training in new technologies. who does this deficit-framed approach to digital skills serve? how might we reclaim an understanding of skills as a social collective that is essential to, and not separate from, technology? we argue that, by returning to and reexamining the conceptual roots of skill, we can better understand how skills discourses are related to technological progress, and how these discourses are deployed by powerful actors to achieve discrete political goals. presidential framing of policy issues has been shown to not only distinguish presidential speakers by style, but has material consequences on the way a president governs. our findings show similarities across political ideologies that start from the same core assumption that skills are separate from and subordinate to technology. instead, skills are defined externally by the interests of political and economic power and skills discourse is deployed to justify neoliberal and nationalist policy agendas. we assert, the pathologization of the “skills crisis” cannot be understood outside its political economic frame. instead, we understand the skills crisis to be a political construction that organizes workers according to market-defined economic value. across political ideologies, skills are framed as a deficit issue that present both an opportunity for economic growth and a threat to national prosperity. however, the political framing splits based on the treatment of skills as an opportunity or threat. where democratic administrations favored neoliberal policy solutions to meet market demands, republican administrations favored skills-based nationalism as a way to maintain global economic power. the clinton administration positioned skills training as a way to bridge the “digital divide”, which itself was understood as an issue of access to new technologies (greene, 2016). favoring the neoliberal consensus of the left, clinton’s “agenda for creating digital opportunity”, was presented as an opportunity for disenfranchised workers to compete in the new economy (the clinton-gore agenda for creating digital opportunity, 2000). the bush administration, on the other hand, rolled out an “american competitiveness initiative”, which aimed to make amercia’s “economic engine the envy of the world” and favored a skills-based nationalist frame. conclusion scholarship on digital inequalities has focused on the mechanism of digital skills to explain gaps in participation and outcomes from online activities. in this article, we critically analyze the concept of digital skills as a political project. first, through tracing genealogy of these terms, we illustrate that, although the idea of “technological skills” is a relatively recent invention, the concept of skill has been used to maintain classed, gendered, and racialized hierarchies among labor. second, we find a consistent deficit framing of the crisis in digital skills through both republican and democratic executive discourse. this analysis contributes a historical and critical cultural perspective on a central analytical term for studies of digital inequalities, and suggests the necessity of critical interrogation of the idea of digital skills. references ahmed, s. (2019). what’s the use? on the uses of use. duke university press. braudel, f. (1992). civilization and capitalism, 15th-18th century. university of california press. davies, h. c., & eynon, r. (2018). is digital upskilling the next generation our ‘pipeline to prosperity’? new media & society, 20(11), 3961–3979. greene, d. (2016). discovering the divide: technology and poverty in the new economy. international journal of communication, 10(0), 20. kumar, a. (2018). skilling and its histories: labour market, technical knowledge and the making of skilled workers in colonial india (1880–1910). journal of south asian development, 13(3), 249–271. https://doi.org/10.1177/0973174118810050 marx, l. (2010). technology: the emergence of a hazardous concept. technology and culture, 51(3), 561–577. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2010.0009 nakamura, l. (2014). indigenous circuits: navajo women and the racialization of early electronic manufacture. american quarterly, 66(4), 919–941. schatzberg, e. (2006). “technik” comes to america: changing meanings of “technology” before 1930 on jstor. technology and culture, 47(3), 486–512. schatzberg, e. (2018). technology: critical history of a concept. the university of chicago press. shaw, a., & hargittai, e. (2018). the pipeline of online participation inequalities: the case of wikipedia editing. journal of communication, 68(1), 143–168. the clinton-gore agenda for creating digital opportunity. (2000). wajcman, j. (1991). patriarchy, technology, and conceptions of skill. work and occupations, 18(1), 29–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/0730888491018001002 microsoft word stromer-galley-seeding doubts about voting broadly and strategically-seeding doubts about voting broadly and.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): stromer-galley, j., kim, p., khoury, c., mckernan, b., hemsley, j. (2022, november). seeding doubts about voting: trump and biden rhetoric online in the 2020 u.s. presidential election. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. seeding doubts about voting: trump and biden rhetoric online in the 2020 u.s. presidential election jennifer stromer-galley syracuse university pyeonghwa kim syracuse university christy khoury syracuse university brian mckernan syracuse university jeff hemsley syracuse university when rioters attacked the u.s. capitol on january 6, 2021, they did so mistrusting the electoral process and believing that donald trump had been robbed of the presidency. presidential rhetoric has the power to shape the attitudes of the public and steer the country (mercieca, 2020). indeed, presidential rhetoric has the power to shape what taylor (2004) describes as the social imaginary – the rhetorical construction of a version of a shared reality that takes hold in public discourse and public consciousness. trump’s rhetoric in 2020 around the vote continued a narrative that he had started when he took office. his first state of the union address painted a sinister portrait of the current and potential future state of the nation. in this study, using the framework of social imaginaries, we qualitatively and inductively analyze messaging on campaign social media accounts around the 2020 presidential campaign. we also examine the facebook advertisements and the targets of those ads specifically around the vote. we compare trump’s rhetoric to that of his opponent joe biden to contrast the distinct imaginaries around the vote each political candidate articulated. we find that trump relied on his social media accounts to sow distrust of the vote process and doubt about the accuracy of the vote count on election day. more concerning, we also find that trump attacked the voting process through his paid advertising on facebook, targeting voters in key battleground states. we focus on the communication produced on social media because of the nature of digital communication technologies (dct). stromer-galley (2019) argues that the affordances of dcts enable the candidates to produce rhetoric and to use technologies that makes it seem that they want to converse and get feedback from the public on policy and campaign matters. in truth, the campaigns are producing a simulacrum of interaction. the increasing reliance on microtargeting through digital advertising on social media platforms further challenges scholarly and journalistic efforts at transparency, as campaigns can increasingly communicate and persuade smaller segments of the public that are strategically beneficial to the campaigns in ways that are hidden from the larger public. it is critical to note that the 2020 presidential election was radically altered because of the covid-19 global pandemic that swept through the united states starting in late march of 2020. political campaigns stopped holding in-person events and fundraisers, and state legislatures quickly passed measures to allow for mail-in balloting, to expand absentee balloting, and to position special ballot boxes for voters to drop their ballots in without standing in long lines with other people. the 2020 u.s. presidential campaign commended within this landscape of: a president whose rhetoric actively sowed distrust of government; a global pandemic; and, a powerful social media communication and advertising apparatus (via facebook). starting in mid-may of 2020, as the primary campaign was ending, the trump questioned the validity of the november election outcome on twitter. at the same time, his campaign ran a large ad buy on facebook charging the “radical left” with stuffing ballot boxes with “fake and fraudulent” ballots. during the general election, trump’s ads and his social media accounts argued that absentee ballots were legitimate but “mail in” ballots were fraudulent. he described mail-in ballots as those automatically sent by state governments to all registered voters, as compared with absentee ballots where voters had to request a ballot to be sent to them. ads showed trump signing his absentee ballot while contrasting that with mail in ballots, which he described as “very bad” and “fraudulent.” trump’s get-out-the-vote ads targeted battleground states, including florida, wisconsin, pennsylvania, and maine’s second congressional district. trump’s social media posts on his official campaign accounts similarly emphasized that mail-in ballots would lead to fraudulent vote counts. his facebook posts falsely alleged that mail-in ballots were easily tampered with, suggesting that trump votes could be switched to biden votes. he also explicitly attacked the voting machine company dominion as being “fraudulent.” his tweets amplified his attacks on mail-in ballots as “phony,” and leading to “unfixable chaos” for the election. his tweets argued that liberals would pre-populate mail-in ballots, and his tweets and facebook posts constructed the election outcome as one that public should doubt because of mail-in ballots. biden’s ads, by contrast, extended his folksy “i’m just like you” persona. his ads used humor to promote voting (for example, an ad showing two dolls that looked like biden and his vp nominee, kamala harris, standing in front of a stick of butter, with the caption “you butter vote.”), and the ads highlighted the challenges of voting during the covid-pandemic. unlike trump’s ads, biden’s ads promoted voting by all means and did not make false claims regarding the legitimacy of various balloting approaches. his ads also emphasized that he would be the president for all americans, and not just those who voted for him – an indirect attack on trump. his social media posts were equally positive in encouraging voting by any means and as an american right. the imaginary that trump constructs in his rhetoric is of chaos on election day because of the fallibility of particular voting systems: mail-in balloting as well as electronic inperson ballots through the dominion system. he constructs and repeats a conspiracy theory whereby mail-in ballots and the dominion electronic voting systems are easily tampered with to alter the election outcomes. he actively urges his supporters to doubt the election results because of the alleged fallibility of these approaches. in the full paper, we articulate in more depth the nature, frequency, and reach of the ads, tweets, and facebook posts that trump and biden produced around voting during the general election. using thick description we unpack the imaginary that each candidate constructs with regard to the balloting technologies as well as the values that voting and the election mean to the democracy. we further analyze micro-targeting data of the candidates’ ad buys provided to us from facebook to understand who the primary targets likely were of these ads. with this analysis, we aim to help deconstruct the social imaginaries the candidates, but especially trump, produced that led to an attempted insurrection on the day when the u.s. congress was to certify the results of the election. references stromer-galley, j. (2019). presidential campaigning in the internet age (2nd ed.). oxford university press. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): palmer, m. (2021, october). news content & the “producerly potential” of facebook. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. news content & the “producerly potential” of facebook marie palmer centre for media pluralism and freedom, european university institute introduction over the past fifteen years, the emergence of intermediaries has transformed the circulation of news content. social media platforms and news aggregators have become main gateways to news content. this article aims to contribute to the ongoing academic discussion regarding how intermediaries contribute to add meaning to the news accessed by their users (bødker, 2016; carlson, 2020; hermida, 2020). more specifically, it focuses on the reason why snippets of news content available on intermediaries after circulation are identified by users as news. drawing on social semiotics, this study uses the concept of genre as a tacit and conventional system of categorisation of texts or discursive practices (neale, 1980), which provides clues regarding how to interact with a text in a specific cultural situation (martin, 1984)to understand the complex nature of the snippet of news produced by intermediaries. using facebook as a case study, i performed a multimodal analysis, using the genre and multimodality model (gem) (bateman, 2008) on the sample of over 157 facebook posts containing a link towards a news article, collected from the facebook newsfeeds of a sample of participants composed of seven voluntary young french undergraduate students in journalism practice. the gem is inspired from computational thinking and offers a systematic form of multimodal analysis. this is often considered as “somewhat mechanical” (gibbons, 2012, p. 19). however, what is usually considered as its main limitation, appears to be a valuable asset in the context of this study to recreate the systematic logic underpinning the design of automatically generated posts on facebook. therefore, i followed the four layers of analysis: 1/ base (listing the base units contained in the multimodal composition (e.g. pictures, pieces of texts, icons)), 2/ layout (spatial composition), 3/ rhetoric – that is the interaction between the different units of meaningand 4/ navigation which serves to uncover the points of salience and possible entries to a composition. the paratextual and intertextual nature of facebook posts the gem analysis highlighted that facebook posts are composed of paratexts (genette, 1997). those are multimodal elements of discourse (e. g. verbal, iconographic) which are intrinsically linked and subordinated to a reference text (the core article in this case) but they are not part of it. their function is twofold: transition and transaction. first, they constitute an entry point or “threshold” (genette, 1997, p. 2) used to transition to the text they are attached to. they provide some initial information regarding it, which helps reader to decide to read the reference text or to move on to another content. second, they play a transaction role. they provide information that quickly help the user to qualify the referent text and to make sense of it. those paratexts, authored by different agencies, feature vertical intertextuality (fiske, 1987). the original paratexts authored by a news media outlet which include the title, the illustration picture, the by-lines and the source could be labelled as ‘primary’ because they are directly extracted from the news article. the identity of the post sender and the post status could be considered ‘secondary’ as they provide a comment on the original texts and paratexts. finally, the comments and reactions located at the bottom of the post such as the number of ‘likes’, comments and shares are tertiary as they answer to either the secondary and the primary level. in turn, performative paratexts such as the icon share, like and comment, offer the possibility to users to integrate the intertextual dialogue as secondary or tertiary interlocutors. news posts as a genre the use of primary paratexts directly extracted from original news articles leads users to quickly label the content of the post as news and to react accordingly. in other words, the layout of facebook posts borrows the most recognisable parts of existing news articles – the picture, the title and the by-linesto appeal to “horizontal intertextuality” (fiske, 1999). establishing explicit “cross-references” (jensen, 2011, p. 191) to news article within facebook posts helps users to identify at a glance the genre of the message. while the horizontal intertextuality of primary texts serve to identify the genre of the message, the vertical intertextuality of secondary and tertiary texts provide social endorsement, that serves to evaluate the relevance and trustworthiness of the news in the absence of traditional editorial cues (e. g. place, size or format of the article) (messing & westwood, 2014). the specific design of facebook posts, mixing horizontal and vertical intertextuality, may be compared to a process of “selective contextualisation” (lemke, 1995, p. 86). building intertextual links between texts to trigger genre recognition and between paratexts to trigger social endorsement serves as a “contextualizing practice, a making sense of texts, or portions of them, by placing them in the context of only some and no other texts or recurring discourse patterns” (p. 86). therefore, facebook seems to express its “producerly potential” (fiske, 1999, p. 67) over existing texts via its design by prescribing a set of meaning relations to its users to make them interpret the original piece of news. in doing so, the social platform claims its “cultural authority” (p. 67) over the content of the news post and imposes its representations. therefore, facebook posts are likely to consist of a form of quaternary text, proposing an interpretation of primary, secondary and tertiary texts by associating them in a certain way. in other words, facebooks is not a simple gateway to news. facebook is the author of a quaternary level of intertextuality. references bateman, j. (2008). multimodality and genre: a foundation for the systematic analysis of multimodal documents. palgrave macmillan. bødker, h. (2016). stuart hall's encoding/decoding model and the circulation of journalism in the digital landscape. critical studies in media communication 33(5), 409-423. carlson, m. (2020). journalistic epistemology and digital news circulation: infrastucture, circulation practices, and epistemic contests. new media & society, 22(2), 230246. fiske, j. (1987). television culture. routledge. fiske, j. (1999). moments of television. in e. seiter, h. borchers, g. kreutzwen, & e. m. warth (eds.), remote control: television, audience and cultural power. routledge. genette, g. (1997). paratexts. thresholds of interpretation. cambridge university press. gibbons, a. (2012). multimodality. in a. gibbons (ed.), multimodality, cognition, and experimental literature. routledge. hermida, a. (2020). post-publication gatekeeping: the interplay of publics, platforms, parapharnelia, and practices in the circulation of news. journalism and mass communication quaterly, 97(2), 469-491. jensen, k. b. (2011). communication in contexts. beyond mass-interpersonal and online-offline divides. in k. b. jensen (ed.), a handbook of media and communication research. qualitative and quantitative methodologies. routledge. lemke, j. l. (1995). intertextuality and text semantics. in p. h. fries & m. gregory (eds.), discourse in society: systemic functional perspectives. meaning and choices in language: studies for michael halliday. ablex publishing corporation. martin, j. r. (1984). language, register and genre. in f. christie (ed.), language studies: children’s writing: reader (pp. 21-29). deakin university press. messing, s., & westwood, s. j. (2014). selective exposure in the age of social media: endorsements trump partisan source affiliation when selecting news online. communication research, 41(8), 1042-1063. neale, s. (1980). genre. bfi. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): kerby, n., schueler, m., romano, s., and beraldo, d. (2023, october). the world according to tiktok. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the world according to tiktok: an observatory on cross-national content prioritization and platformmediated proximities natalie kerby ai forensics miazia schueler ai forensics salvatore romano ai forensics davide beraldo university of amsterdam the present paper contributes to the field of critical platform studies by: a) showcasing a research tool which allows the research community to replicate our methodological framework; b) presenting the outcome of the analysis of global and geographical patterns of content promotion on tiktok; c) developing and operationalizing the notion of ‘platform-mediated proximity,’ which emerges from this type of data and analysis. cross-national analysis of tiktok content prioritization tiktok’s main access point to content is its for you page (fyp), a continuous feed of content that is algorithmically curated by the platform’s recommendation system (tiktok 2019). this recommendation system is based on a combination of factors, such as inferred user interests and interactions, video information, device and account settings, as well as, importantly here, the device’s geographical location (tiktok 2019). despite affording global connectivity beyond local and cultural barriers, indeed, platforms’ ecosystem are highly reactive to local conditions and cultural boundaries (rogers 2019). furthermore, growing concerns are emerging around the rise of a ‘splinternet,’ where national borders are impressed over an infrastructure that used to hold a promise of universality (lemley 2020). governments, as well as private platforms, are nowadays intervening at legal, commercial, and infrastructural levels to re-instantiate control over information diffusion (vendil pallin 2017). especially globally-operating private platforms have been found to adhere to countries’ local political pressures and national regulations (biddile, ribeiro & dias 2020). given its centrality in the contemporary mediascape, tiktok’s content moderation and promotion/demotion strategies are under scrutiny and at the center of controversies (biddle, ribeiro & dias 2020). additionally, little research has been conducted on how geography influences tiktok’s content prioritization on a global scale. monitoring and understanding how tiktok prioritizes content differently across the world is of paramount importance given its power over global information flows, and growing concerns associated with the platform’s compliance with countries’ censorship (ryan, fritz & impiombato 2020). these trends emphasize the need to make data available about how tiktok’s recommendation system works on a cross-national level. through the development of tools such as the one that we present and showcase here, we want to ensure that researchers, journalists, and content creators have the access and resources to hold the platform accountable for its globally-disparate implementation of algorithms and content moderation strategies. the tool the tiktok global observatory is based on a continuously updated dataset, which consists of the first 8 videos scraped from the web-version of the fyp of a nonauthenticated tiktok user. the data collection is replicated across 197 countries and territories up to 4 times per day. metrics made available include country, description, video id, authors/account, author id, views, likes, hashtags, shares, upload date, date of extraction, and more. this data collection relies on a residential ips network that allows us to programmatically access tiktok from each of the listed countries. with this tool, we aim to make cross-national comparisons on tiktok more accessible and contribute to easing the process of identifying how tiktok distributes content on the fyp. the tool’s main feature is a geographic map of the world that allows users to mouse-over territories and get a preview of the most recommended videos, hashtags, filters, or audio that are being pushed within an adjustable time frame. a search bar allows the user to query for specific authors, songs, filters, hashtags, labels, or words in the description. this data is then exportable as csv files, including different types of relational datasets for network analysis. overall, it allows users to view, filter, sort, and extrapolate fyp data as prioritized in different countries and territories, making it a unique access point for researchers, journalists, and content creators who aim to investigate trends, content moderation, and content promotion from a cross-national perspective. whereas focusing on homepages served to unauthenticated users does not enable the the study of personalization dynamics, it allows us to infer how tiktok tailors content trends and prioritization logic to the geographical and political context of respective countries or territories. moreover, the fyp displayed to a non-logged-in user represents the platform’s “show window” designed to attract newcomers all over the world. preliminary analysis https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/dmi/tiktok the tool is illustrated in this paper with an analysis of emerging patterns, trends, and thematic clusters when (non-authenticated) users access tiktok from different countries. our questions are: what kinds of patterns emerge by comparing content pushed by tiktok across different regions of the world? what platform-mediated crossnational boundaries and proximities can we map out? in other words: what does the world look like according to tiktok? we focus on a dataset collected between june 2023 and september 2023, consisting of roughly 700.000 recommended videos, corresponding to around 100.000 unique ones. in order to achieve a complex representational overview of ‘the world according to tiktok’, we use a combination of exploratory data analysis and network analysis / visualization. our analysis focuses on global trends and distributions through the lens of platform-mediated proximity. we consider it platform-mediated proximity when countries cluster together based on shared content. using network analysis as an entry point for examining proximity, we first look to general trends in the data, such as examining outliers and their likely cause. moreover, we describe in detail some selected cases of cross-country content circulation. we then reconstruct the way in which countries are structurally clustered together through patterns of co-recommendation – i.e., mapping and interpreting the type of proximity among countries through a proximity index, which is calculated by dividing the amount of shared videos between two countries by the total amount of recommended videos each country receives. the proximity index allows for more precision in understanding the degree to which two countries share content. preliminary results obtained on a subset of the data (referring to august 20-september 9, 2023) suggest that tiktok’s cross-national content prioritization patterns generate forms of platform-mediated proximities that, in most cases, follow regulatory lines. this is particularly strong in the case of countries within the european union and schengen area, who show tight clustering likely because they fall under the jurisdiction of the gdpr. in some cases, we see clustering following legacy colonial relationships, such as the united states and its territories puerto rico, guam, and the u.s. virgin islands sharing a high number of videos despite being geographically disperse. moreover, some countries (namely: united states, russia and senegal) are largely disconnected from any other countries, signaling an emerging ‘national tiktok-sphere’ likely due to cases of country-level censorship. our mission is to give access to the largest data collection currently available on tiktok, which allows to explore and understand cross national differences in content prioritization patterns. independent research is essential in order to promote transparency of tiktok’s recommendation system, and hold the platform accountable for its content prioritization and moderation strategies. this paper presents a tool that allows for this type of research, and showcases possible directions of analysis among the many that, hopefully, will contribute to understand how a global platform mediates information flows in different areas of the world. references ryan, f., fritz, a., & impiombato, d. (2020). tiktok and wechat: curating and controlling global information flows. international cyber policy centre. biddle, s., ribeiro, p. v., & dias, t. (2020, march 16). tiktok told moderators: suppress posts by the "ugly" and poor. the intercept. retrieved january 31, 2022, from https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-users-discrimination/ lemley, mark a. 2020. “the splinternet.” stanford law and economics olin working paper #555. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3664027. rogers, richard. 2019. doing digital methods. 1st edition. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. tiktok, august 16, 2019. “how tiktok recommends videos #foryou.” https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/how-tiktok-recommends-videos-for-you/ https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderatorshttps://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/how-tiktok-recommends-videos-for-you/ selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): lizhen, zhao. (2021, october). “my minimalist journey:” narrative analysis of youtube minimalism stories. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “my minimalist journey:” narrative analysis of youtube minimalist stories lizhen zhao university of massachusetts – amherst the recent minimalist lifestyle is often claimed to be a way to change your life, to enlighten you regarding what is important in your life, and to bring more happiness and freedom to you through minimizing your spending, possessions, tasks, relationships, etc. a variety of practices are seen as minimalist, such as decluttering (getting rid of possessions), and intentional shopping (buy only what is needed). youtube is an important venue where minimalist content is published and shared (meissner, 2019). varies types of content can be found here, such as introduction to minimalism, tips for practicing minimalism, and decluttering process (zappavigna, 2019). additionally, people also tell stories of how minimalism has improved their financial, physical, and mental situations. the current study focuses on one type of minimalist content on youtube “minimalist journey" narratives. in this type of narrative, people tell their stories of "encountering" the minimalist lifestyle. oftentimes it consists of components such as a description of their life status before minimalism, how they learned about this lifestyle, the practicing process, and the results or current status. i collected “minimalist journey" stories from 40 youtube videos with their comments and analyzed them using narrative analysis methods (labov & waletzky, 1997; riessman, 2005). by closely examining these narratives, this study sheds light on how people experience and make sense of the minimalist lifestyle within the context of anti-consumerism and neoliberalism in digital space. this study also contributes to digital culture studies by showcasing how personal life narratives are constructed on video-sharing platforms like youtube. theoretically, i draw from the literature on anti-consumerism and the neoliberalist entrepreneurial self. rooted in the context of consumer capitalism, anti-consumerism goes against “the routine, if currently muted, excesses of consumer economies” on both discursive and behavioral levels (humphery, 2010, 3). also emerging in late capitalist societies, the neoliberal entrepreneurial self is flexible, adaptive, and in constant need of self-monitoring, self-improvement, and self-transformation (foucault et al., 2008; gill & kanai, 2018). meissner (2019) argues that the minimalist lifestyle is paradoxical because, on the one hand, it advocates for people to resist consumption and productivity which are the two wings of capitalist accumulation, but on the other hand, it encourages new forms of consumption (of better-quality products, for example) and neoliberal subjectivity centered around self-entrepreneurship. this theoretical paradox of minimalism, both anti-consumerist and neoliberal, can be better understood through empirically studying the lived experiences of minimalists and how they construct meaning for such experiences through narrating personal life stories. methodologically, to analyze “minimalist journey” narratives, i employed both thematic analysis and structural analysis. labov and waletzky (1997) saw oral personal narrative as serving functions more than just recapping experience but also evaluative functions – constructing the “point” of the experience. in this project, i ask the question "what does minimalism mean to people who practice it?" to answer this question and uncover the “point” of minimalism for those who practice it, i combine thematic analysis, an approach suitable for identifying and theorizing common themes across many cases, with labovian structural analysis (riessman, 2005), examining both the “what” and the “how” of the minimalist stories. two themes emerged in the analysis: “hoarder to minimalist” and “always been a minimalist.” with the former type, narrators construct stories that start with overconsumption, cluttered space, and anxiety, and end with an under-control consumption habit, clutter-free space, and peaceful mind. in this process, minimalism is the transformative force that facilitates this significant change in their lives. in the second type of narrative, narrators tell stories where they have always been frugal. their lifestyle was misunderstood and criticized for not fitting into the larger normalized consumer culture. after “discovering” minimalism, they seem to re-approach and embrace their lifestyle with this new, trendy term. in these narratives, the concept of minimalism works as a conceptualization tool. it provided a new perspective for the “always-been minimalists” to reflect on the routinized consumer behavior in capitalist societies, and to reclaim control over the meaning of their everyday lives and past experiences. regarding the “how” of the telling, i examined two ways structural elements were organized to form the narratives. first, narrators of both narratives focus on the orientation, or the specific situation where the actions happen (labov & waletzky,1997), emphasizing the crucial role of the environment, especially family, in their lifestyle choices. a “poor” childhood is often the starting point of the “always been a minimalist” narrative where being frugal is forced. meanwhile, the “hoarder to minimalist” narratives are often rooted in a family or community that normalizes consumerism. in either situation, earlier family lives are a tool for the narrators to understand why they treat shopping and finance in a certain way. second, structural elements like evaluation, result, and coda (the bridge between past and present), are used in juxtaposition with the orientation to construct a contrasting “before and after” image. meissner’s (2019) paradox, minimalism being both anti-consumerist and pro-neoliberal entrepreneurial self, manifests in the “hoarder to minimalist” narrative. in these stories, the encounter with minimalist discourse is seen as an opportunity to invoke reflections on, and rejection of, the consumerist norms rooted in the narrators’ original circumstances. through practices like decluttering and intentional shopping, the routinized excess consumption is disrupted, at least temporarily. this discursive rejection and behavior disruption, if done on a large scale, could have considerable political consequences, despite its private and under-politicized nature (johansson & vinthagen, 2019; meissner, 2019). however, the analysis also highlights the selfentrepreneurship in such narratives. the narrators, through closely examining their possessions and monitoring their consumption, claim to improve their physical space, financial and psychological health significantly, thus reinforcing the neoliberal sense of self that needs constant transformation. the “always been a minimalist” narratives, however, showcase an alternative meaning of minimalism. these narratives orient to an often-underprivileged social status. being criticized for their frugal lifestyle reveals the normalcy of consumerism in many societies. with the popularization of minimalism, the always-been-frugal narrators can re-approach their living conditions using this new lens and refute criticism from others in a culturally accepted way. then “cheap” is now “chic.” minimalism has the potential to empower economically disadvantaged people by providing them with a set of vocabulary for recreating meanings. it, however, downplays the class divisions in capitalist society as merely an issue of “framing”; the struggles of lower social class people just need to be beautified as “minimalism.” references foucault, m., senellart, m., & burchell, g. (2008). the birth of biopolitics: lectures at the collège de france, 1978-79. palgrave macmillan. gill, r., & kanai, a. (2018). mediating neoliberal capitalism: affect, subjectivity and inequality. journal of communication, 68(2). humphery, k. (2010). excess: anti-consumerism in the west. polity. johansson, a., & vinthagen, s. (2019). ‘conceptualizing everyday resistance': a transdisciplinary approach. routledge. labov, w., & waletzky, j. (1997). narrative analysis: oral versions of personal experience. meissner, m. (2019). against accumulation: lifestyle minimalism, de-growth and the present post-ecological condition. journal of cultural economy, 12(3). riessman, catherine kohler (2005) narrative analysis. in: narrative, memory & everyday life. university of huddersfield, huddersfield. zappavigna, m. (2019). the organised self and lifestyle minimalism: multimodal deixis and point of view in decluttering vlogs on youtube. multimodal communication, 8(1). please update your browser your browser isn’t supported anymore. update it to get the best youtube experience and our latest features. learn more safari google chrome opera microsoft edge mozilla firefox remind me later about copyright contact us terms privacy policy & safety © 2025 google llc selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 kaye, d.b.v., rodriguez, a., & wikström, p. (2020, october). you made this? i made this: cultures of (mis)attribution on tiktok. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. you made this? i made this: cultures of (mis)attribution on tiktok d. bondy valdovinos kaye queensland university of technology aleesha rodriguez queensland university of technology patrik wikström queensland university of technology introduction in 2019, tiktok captivated international attention as a breakout short-video platform. a key affordance for user-generated content creators on tiktok is how easy the platform makes reproducing popular videos. the video creation interface allows users to make new videos based on the one they were just watching with just one tap. while these features make it fun and easy for users to replicate popular videos, it can also obscure the identity of the creators who created the ‘original’ content being reused. furthermore, users can freely reuse popular formats, audio clips, or even licensed music without any connection to the original source with impunity. in this way, tiktok engenders a culture of misattribution. using a combination of an app walkthrough, a bespoke data scraping tool, content analysis, and a series of qualitative case studies, this study explores the contradictory logic of authorship and how (mis)attribution is shaping cultural production and platform practices on tiktok. literature review legal studies situates creative attribution within broader bodies of work on copyright (posner, 2007). one’s right to be attributed to original works of their creation is protected as a moral right of copyright (hansmann & santelli, 1997). the moral right of attribution becomes more valuable to individuals in non-commercial digital communities who shift fluidly between being users of others’ content and authors of their own original works (meese, 2018). content creation platform affordances (nagy & neff, 2015) have been found to play an important role in mediating norms of authorship, ownership, and attribution in digital content spaces (meese, 2014). the platform infrastructures, markets, and governance (nieborg & poell, 2018) of tiktok make it a highly 'spreadable' platform (jenkins et al., 2013). issues with attribution on spreadable social media platforms has been noted previously among creative communities (perkel, 2016; fiesler & bruckman, 2014) as well as among everyday 'mundane' platform users (meese and hagedorn, 2019). compared to users in creative communities, mundane users are frequently and incidentally involved in copyright infringement as part of their everyday activity (tehranian, 2007). further, certain platform affordances may incidentally facilitate copyright infringement through their everyday use (tan, 2018). drawing from interviews with reddit, twitter, and facebook users, meese and hagedorn observed, “in the absence of specific guidance from copyright law or platforms, people are gradually developing practices around content sharing,” (p. 8). in addition to specific copyright guidance being largely absent on tiktok, its video creation features amplify and exacerbate attributional issues. tiktok uses an automatic attribution system for audio content, which designates the 'original creator' of audio clips or songs uploaded. automatic attribution has been found to be inadequate and impersonal in creative communities online that heavily feature the creative reuse of others’ works (monroy-hernandez et al., 2011). tiktok’s automatic attribution system is often responsible for misattribution. in response to these unique circumstances, everyday users of tiktok are developing new practices and cultures, which this study explores using a mixed-methodological approach. methodology data for this study were collected from an app walkthrough (light et al., 2018) and a sample of tiktok videos systematically scraped from tiktok’s web player. two researchers first conducted an app walkthrough of tiktok in february 2020 to identify the features, everyday uses, and terms of use (tou) that shape attribution practices on tiktok. we then collected a sample of tiktok (n=999) videos using a bespoke data scraping tool for #fyp, or ‘for you page’, tiktok’s default content viewing page. the scraping tool, developed in python, captured audio-visual data (i.e. tiktok videos), their associated metadata (e.g. usernames; hashtags; likes/shares/comments), and data related to audio (i.e. original audio; audio available on tiktok’s audio library; audio available on spotify). after scraping our video sample we developed a codebook based on our research question and initial observations, and then identified a subsample of case study videos for qualitative analysis. using tiktok’s platform features we followed the digital traces of the audio within the case study videos. this entailed navigating multiple platform interfaces, user profiles, and videos which allowed us to intimately observe cultures of (mis)attribution. all data was de-identified for analysis and reporting. initial findings and progress initial findings indicate several features that obscure proper attribution on tiktok. descriptive results from our scrape indicate that 67% (n=672) of our sample (n=999) are instances where the automatic attribution system has worked as intended and proper attribution has taken place. whereas 33% (n=327) of videos in the sample were found to be misattributed. we identified three distinct practices that illustrate cultures of (mis)attribution on tiktok. the first involves a song in a viral video that is misattributed in tiktok’s automatic attribution system, the second involves a creator utilizing the platform features (such as video text and hashtags) to manually give credit to the original author of the audio, and the third involves a creator who uses an original song in a tiktok video that is not available in the tiktok library nor on any other digital music platforms (i.e. spotify; youtube; soundcloud). currently, we have completed our data collection and analysis, and have drafted a manuscript for publication. references fiesler, casey, and amy bruckman. 2014. “remixers’ understandings of fair use online.” proceedings of the acm conference on computer supported cooperative work, cscw, 1023–32. https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531695. hansmann, henry, and marina santilli. 1997. “authors’ and artists’ moral rights: a comparative legal and economic analysis.” the journal of legal studies 26, no. 1: 95+. https://doi.org/10.1086/467990. jenkins, henry, sam ford, and joshua green. 2013. spreadable media culture. new york: new york university press. light, ben, jean burgess, and stefanie duguay. 2018. “the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps.” new media and society 20, no. 3: 881–900. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438. meese, james. 2014. “it belongs to the internet: animal images , attribution norms and the politics of amateur media production.” m/c journal 17, no. 2: 1–6. meese, james. 2018. authors, users and pirates: copyright law and subjectivity. cambridge, ma: mit press. meese, james, and jennifer hagedorn. 2019. “mundane content on social media: creation, circulation, and the copyright problem.” social media + society 5, no. 2: 205630511983919. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119839190. monroy-hernandez, andres, benjamin mako hill, jazmin gonzalez-rivero, and danah boyd. 2011. “computers can’t give credit: how automatic attribution falls short in an online remixing community.” conference on human factors in computing systems proceedings, 3421–30. https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979452. nagy, peter, and gina neff. 2015. “imagined affordance: reconstructing a keyword for communication theory.” social media+society 1, no. 2: 1–9. https://doi.org/doi:10.1177/2056305115603385. nieborg, david b., and thomas poell. 2018. “the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity.” new media and society 20, no. 11: 4275–92. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769694. perkel, dan. 2016. “share wars: sharing, theft, and the everyday production of web 2.0 on deviantart.” first monday 21, no. 6: 1–24. posner, richard a. 2007. the little book of plagiarism. new york: pantheon books. tan, corinne. 2018. regulating content on social media: copyright, terms of service and technological features. london: ucl press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt2250v4k. tehranian, john. 2007. “infringement nation: copyright reform and the law/norm gap.” utah law review 3: 537–50. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): iantorno, m., guadagnolo, d., & petterson, a. (2023, october). dark patterns and pedagogy: expanding scholarship and curriculum on manipulative marketing practices. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. dark patterns and pedagogy: expanding scholarship and curriculum on manipulative marketing practices mathew iantorno university of toronto dan guadagnolo university of toronto adrian petterson university of toronto this conference paper addresses gaps in scholarship and pedagogy surrounding the phenomenon of “dark patterns” in digital marketing and interface design by showcasing the findings of three ongoing curriculum-building projects. originally coined by cognitive scientist harry brignull in 2010, dark patterns refer to a set of design strategies that coopt the human-centered values advocated for in the fields of user experience (ux) design and human-computer interaction (hci) for deceptive aims (gray et al., 2018). not to be confused with “bad” design, dark patterns are instances where designers intentionally apply their knowledge of human psychology and persuasive design practices to manipulate users into taking an action that is contrary to their personal interests (gray et al., 2018). common examples of dark patterns on the internet include advertisements disguised as user-generated posts on a social media timeline and unfavorable default settings within an app that privilege the sharing of data over privacy. recent scholarship on dark patterns has clustered around their identification on websites and apps. this has predominantly included hci work dedicated to codifying individual types of dark patterns (under headings such as “nagging” and “sneaking”) and quantifying their individual consequences for users on common e-commerce or social media platforms (bösch et al., 2016; chromik et al., 2019; di geronimo et al., 2020; gray et al., 2018; hannak et al., 2014; luguri & strahilevitz, 2021; mathur et al., 2019; mathur et al., 2021; voigt et al., 2021). within game studies and media studies, attention has been paid to the implementation of dark patterns in online gambling and games-as-service arrangements—often with a focus on micro-transactions, platform economies, and policy interventions (brock & johnson, 2021; fitton & read, 2019; goodstein, 2021; whitson & french, 2021; zanescu et al., 2021). the projects documented in this paper build on this existing research in two substantive ways. first, they place the existing hci, game studies, and media studies discourses on dark patterns into conversation with pertinent scholarship drawn from the domains of business and marketing, science and technology studies, cognitive neuroscience, and disability studies to create a more holistic, inclusive, and longitudinal definition of dark patterns. second, they implement this expanded definition of dark patterns into undergraduate and graduate course curricula as a teaching tool to help students critically engage with the media platforms they use on a daily basis, the collaborative design projects they undertake for credit, and their future roles in media creation. each of these pedagogical projects has been institutionally approved and instructed during at least one term of study. the substance of this paper consequently focuses on describing divergent and interdisciplinary approaches towards studying dark patterns; noting successes and failures in implementing these approaches into curriculum; and mapping the future work of developing such curriculum into reusable modules and methodologies. dark patterns: where marketing meets ux design, carried out at the university of toronto with funding provided by a fellowship from the critical digital humanities initiative, was a one-year initiative led by principal investigators dr. dan guadagnolo and mathew iantorno. this project challenged the assumption that dark patterns are a novel phenomenon tethered to the digital interfaces and forms of commercial exchange of web 2.0. by exploring historical research on post-1945 market segmentation and merchandising strategies, the project evidenced how many contemporary dark patterns in fact preexist the advent of the internet (bargas-avila & hornbaek, 2011; case, 2017; lauer, 2017; meyrowitz, 2009; schwarzkopf, 2019; taylor & strutton, 2010; turow, 2011; valvi & fragkos, 2012). drawing together the fields of business history and critical marketing studies, this project considered how to best communicate the connections between contemporary dark patterns in e-commerce and these historical marketing and merchandising strategies to undergraduate students enrolled at the institute of communication, culture, information and technology. to answer this question, the team developed an open-source website that visually illustrated how these analogue strategies have been transposed into digital interfaces. this website was then deployed as a pedagogical and teaching tool for contemporary communication technologies, one of the largest undergraduate courses offered within the university. the second project, dark patterns: manipulative ux design, involved parallel curriculum development at the university of toronto’s faculty of information. this initiative was carried out by mathew iantorno under the supervision of velian pandeliev as part of a broader pedagogy development strategy for user interface design, a master’s level course within the professionally oriented user experience design concentration. a dark patterns module that included a lecture, online resource guide, and in-class activities was developed with two main intents. first, it introduced the broad concept of dark patterns to a cohort of ux design students, enabling critical engagement with the commercial interfaces they study and the marketing practices that shape them. second, it synthesized science and technology studies and design justice scholarship to broaden the definition of dark patterns to include non-screen interfaces. this expanded definition included the ambiance management used in casinos to motivate compulsive gambling (lynch et al., 2020; schüll, 2012); the construction of hostile architecture in city planning to deter loitering and protesting (rosenberger, 2020; smith & walters, 2018); and the use of anthropomorphism in the design of robotics to provoke trust and empathy (coeckelbergh, 2012; lacey & caudwell, 2019). the third project, designing for normal and failing ethically, examined the interaction of dark patterns with the lived experience of disabled people. this project was carried out by adrian petterson in collaboration with velian pandeliev and focused primarily on individuals with cognitive disabilities such as anxiety, autism, depression, obsessivecompulsive disorder, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. the physical differences in brain activation patterns of those with disabilities were compared to the neural networks activated by the cognitive biases exploited by dark patterns. significant overlap was identified, primarily in areas of the brain related to fear—such as the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex (cavedini et al., 2004; hartley & phelps, 2012; lieberman & eisenberger, 2009; vassena et al., 2014)—indicating that dark patterns have a disproportionate effect on individuals with these cognitive disabilities. however, legislation and pedagogy alike rarely attend to the concept of dark patterns with disability in mind. following the principles of inclusive design (treviranus, 2018), the project developed pedagogy demonstrating how designing for those most marginalized by a design will not only protect these vulnerable individuals but also improve user experience for everyone. this research culminated in lectures at the university of toronto, sheridan college, and #a11yto focused on educating design students and professionals on these “edge case” experiences of dark patterns. collectively, these projects aimed to grant a greater historicity and social context to the phenomenon of dark patterns and, in doing so, introduce dark patterns as a utilizable pedagogical concept within the disciplines of communications, technology, and design. the findings of these projects will be presented through the sharing of pedagogical materials; informal and formal feedback from students and associated faculty; and planned curriculum revisions for future iterations of the described initiatives. throughout, the phenomenon of dark patterns will be posited as a complementary addition to existing methodologies in the critical analysis of design and marketing strategies, historical research and analysis, and design justice and ethical computing. references bösch, c., erb, b., kargl, f., kopp, h., & pfattheicher, s. (2016). tales from the dark side: privacy dark strategies and privacy dark patterns. proceedings on privacy enhancing technologies, 2016(4), 237–254. https://doi.org/10.1515/popets2016-0038 brock, t., & johnson, m. (2021). the gamblification of digital games. journal of consumer culture, 21(1), 3–13. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540521993904 cavedini, p., gorini, a., & bellodi, l. (2006). understanding obsessive–compulsive disorder: focus on decision making. neuropsychology review, 16(1), 3–15. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11065-006-9001-y chromik, m., eiband, m., völkel, s. t., & buschek, d. (2019). dark patterns of explainability, transparency, and user control for intelligent systems. iui workshops 2019. acm digital library. coeckelbergh, m. (2012). are emotional robots deceptive? ieee transactions on affective computing, 3(4), 388–393. https://doi.org/10.1109/t-affc.2011.29 di geronimo, l., braz, l., fregnan, e., palomba, f., & bacchelli, a. (2020). ui dark patterns and where to find them: a study on mobile applications and user perception. proceedings of the 2020 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1–14). acm digital library. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376600 fitton, d., & read, j. c. (2019). creating a framework to support the critical consideration of dark design aspects in free-to-play apps. proceedings of the 18th acm international conference on interaction design and children (pp. 407– 418). acm digital library. https://doi.org/10.1145/3311927.3323136 goodstein, s. (2021). when the cat’s away: techlash, loot boxes, and regulating “dark patterns” in the video game industry’s monetization strategies. university of colorado law review, 92(1), 285–335. gray, c. m., kou, y., battles, b., hoggatt, j., & toombs, a. l. (2018). the dark (patterns) side of ux design. proceedings of the 2018 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1–14). acm digital library. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174108 hannak, a., soeller, g., lazer, d., mislove, a., & wilson, c. (2014). measuring price discrimination and steering on e-commerce web sites. proceedings of the 2014 conference on internet measurement conference (pp. 305–318). acm digital library. https://doi.org/10.1145/2663716.2663744 hartley, c. a., & phelps, e. a. (2012). anxiety and decision-making. biological psychiatry, 72(2), 113–118. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2011.12.027 lacey, c., & caudwell, c. (2019). cuteness as a “dark pattern” in home robots. proceedings of the 2019 14th acm/ieee international conference on humanrobot interaction (pp. 374–381). acm digital library. https://doi.org/10.1109/hri.2019.8673274 lauer, j. (2017). creditworthy: a history of consumer surveillance and financial identity in america. columbia university press. lieberman, m. d., & eisenberger, n. i. (2009). pains and pleasures of social life. science (american association for the advancement of science), 323(5916), 890–891. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1170008 luguri, j., & strahilevitz, l. j. (2021). shining a light on dark patterns. journal of legal analysis, 13(1), 43–109. https://doi.org/10.1093/jla/laaa006 lynch, e., howes, d., & french, m. (2020). a touch of luck and a “real taste of vegas”: a sensory ethnography of the montreal casino. senses & society, 15(2): 192– 215. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2020.1773641 mathur, a., acar, g., friedman, m., lucherini, e., mayer, j., chetty, m., & narayanan, a. (2019). dark patterns at scale: findings from a crawl of 11k shopping websites. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 3(cscw), 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359183 mathur, a., mayer, j., & kshirsagar, m. (2021). what makes a dark pattern... dark? design attributes, normative considerations, and measurement methods. proceedings of the 2021 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1–18). acm digital library. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445610 meyrowitz, j. (2009). we liked to watch: television as progenitor of the surveillance society. the annals of the american academy of political and social science, 625(1), 32–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716209339576 rosenberger, r. (2020). on hostile design: theoretical and empirical prospects. urban studies, 57(4), 883–893. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098019853778 schüll, n. d. (2012). addiction by design: machine gambling in las vegas. princeton university press. schwarzkopf, s. (2019). the social embeddedness of marketing. in f. f. wherry & i. woodward (eds.), the oxford handbook of consumption (pp. 25–49). oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695583.013.1 smith, n., & walters, p. (2018). desire lines and defensive architecture in modern urban environments. urban studies, 55(13), 2980–2995. https://doi.org/10.1177/004209801773269 taylor, d. g., & strutton, d. (2010). has e-marketing come of age? modeling historical influences on post-adoption era internet consumer behaviors. journal of business research, 63(9–10), 950–956. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2009.01.018 treviranus, j. (2018, march). the three dimensions of inclusive design: part one. medium. https://medium.com/fwd50/the-three-dimensions-of-inclusive-designpart-one-103cad1ffdc2 turow, j. (2011). the daily you: how the new advertising industry is defining your identity and your worth. yale university press. valvi, a. c., & fragkos, k. c. (2012). critical review of the e-loyalty literature: a purchase-centred framework. electronic commerce research, 12(3), 331–378. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-012-9097-5 vassena, e., silvetti, m., boehler, c. n., achten, e., fias, w., & verguts, t. (2014). overlapping neural systems represent cognitive effort and reward anticipation. plos one, 9(3), e91008–e91008. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0091008 voigt, c., schlögl, s., & groth, a. (2021). dark patterns in online shopping: of sneaky tricks, perceived annoyance and respective brand trust. proceedings of the 2021 hci in business, government and organizations (pp. 143–155). springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77750-0_10 whitson, j., & french, m. (2021). productive play: the shift from responsible consumption to responsible production. journal of consumer culture, 21(1), 14– 33. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540521993922 zanescu, a., lajeunesse, m., & french, m. (2021). speculating on steam: consumption in the gamblified platform ecosystem. journal of consumer culture, 21(1), 34– 51. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540521993928 2021 aoir ext abstract selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): karlsen, f. (2021, october 13-16). affordances in digital detox and productivity apps. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. affordances in digital detox and productivity apps faltin karlsen kristiania university college introduction the ubiquity of the smartphone has led to concerns about media becoming increasingly more intrusive and worries that that tech companies take advantage of our "easily distracted mind". this has also, alongside other commercial endeavors such as digital detox retreats and "dumb" mobiles, incited a booming app industry where digital detox and productivity apps are offered as tools to restrain smartphone use. as a relatively new phenomena this has so far received little attention from media scholars. intrusive media technology has, in general, received attention in media studies and related fields (light 2014, syvertsen 2020). such studies usually revolve around the media user and give insight into various social and cognitive elements that play a role in the experience of being overwhelmed by media technology. the challenges of separating work from private life is one of many issues explored on this subject (gregg 2011, wajcman 2015, karlsen and ytre-arne 2021). the technology itself, and what kind of affordances that trigger unwanted use, has received far less attention. to the extent affordances are discussed, it is usually in general terms, including how the smartphone may allow for micro-coordination (thorhauge 2016), to generate a sense of "flow" (ytre-arne et al. 2020), or provide self-tracking practices (lomborg et al. 2018, lomborg and fransen 2016). the aim of this study is to employ new empirical data and a conceptual framework to shed light on what kind of affordances that may stimulate and inhibit use of the smartphone. methods, material and framework the analysis is based on an mapping of product descriptions of 70 digital detox and productivity apps retried from the app store and google play. a selection of five apps were further subject to a design analysis conducted through "in the wild" testing over a period of 1-2 week for each app. the sample of apps were chosen for variety and cover a range of different affordances. the app moment, for instance, rely mainly on inspirational quotes, tasks, and simple self-tracking affordances while the app forest rely on a long range of feedback mechanisms, self-tracking features, and reward systems. the complete selection of apps are hold, forest, cleverest, moment, and freedom. conceptually, the analysis distinguishes between two broad categories of affordances: undesign affordances, which comprise affordances that punish or inhibit certain types of use (pierce 2012) and gamification affordances which, in general, reward the user or encourage certain user behavior (deterding et al. 2011). these are often combined, meaning that a successful abstention session earns the player rewards in form of virtual resources, visual or textual praise or even real-world items such as discounts on wares. a discourse analysis of the production description is also conduced, aiming to see to what extent the affordances matches the overall aim with the apps, such as increasing productivity, mental wellbeing, a better lifestyle, or simply to spend less time on the smartphone. preliminary findings a general finding in the sample of 70 apps is that they to a large extent are based on traditional self-help techniques including consciousness raising, creating (technical) hurdles, or productivity techniques such as pomodoro. several of the apps also rely on affordances already existing in the operating systems such as turning off notification, using black/white interface, turning on flight mode, and moving apps to less accessible screen areas. in many cases they also emulate traditional analog time management techniques where a physical clock could just as easily be used. only a smaller number of affordances are original, in the sense that they do not already exist in some form in the operating systems, or have an analog equivalent. in the five apps subject to the design analysis, gamification affordances such as rewards, achievements, and ratings are generously used, while more relentless undesign affordances, including complete blocking of the smartphone, are uses to much lesser extent. several apps are almost indistinguishable from ordinary casual smartphone games, such as farming games (heyday), idle games (coocie clicker), collecting games (pokemon go) and nursing/hatching games (tamagotchi), implying that the apps use the same type of affordances that is driving engagement and intrusiveness in the apps they are trying to constrain. the frequent use of gamification design means that the apps, paradoxically, can direct more attention towards the smartphone. for instance, in order to earn gold needed to upgrade avatars or to develop other virtual items, the user has to return to the smartphone frequently. being part of the attention economy, these apps compete for users' attention like any other app or media technology (terronova 2012). while excessive use of gamification design may seem economical reasonable, it illustrates the innate paradox of trying to "beat technology with technology" (syvertsen 2020: 90). references deterding, s., dixon, d., khaled, r., & nacke, l. (2011, september). from game designelements to gamefulness: defining" gamification". in proceedings of the 15th international academic mindtrek conference: envisioning future media environments (pp. 9-15). gregg, m. (2018). counterproductive: time management in the knowledge economy. duke university press light, b. (2014). disconnecting with social networking sites (1. utg.). palgrave macmillan. karlsen, f, & ytre-arne, b. (2021) intrusive media and knowledge work: how knowledge workers negotiate digital media norms in the pursuit of focused work. information, communication & society (2021): 1-16. lomborg, s., thylstrup, n. b., & schwartz, j. (2018). the temporal flows of selftracking: checking in, moving on, staying hooked. new media & society, 20(12), 45904607. pierce, james. "undesigning technology: considering the negation of design by design." proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems. 2012. syvertsen, trine. digital detox: the politics of disconnecting. emerald group publishing, 2020 terranova, t. (2012). attention, economy and the brain. culture machine, 13. thorhauge, anne mette (2016) ‘balancing the flows: cross-media communication in an everyday life context’, pp 55-73 i sandvik, kjetil mfl. (red.) the media and the mundane: communication across media in everyday life. gøteborg: nordicom. ytre-arne, brita; moe, hallvard; syvertsen, trine and karlsen, faltin (2020). temporal ambivalences in smartphone use: conflicting flows, conflicting responsibilities, new media and society 22(9) 1715-1732. wajcman, j. (2015). pressed for time: the acceleration of life in digital capitalism. mit press selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 13-16 oct 2021 handmade hustle: etsy, whiteness, and gendered precarity jacqueline johnson university of southern california introduction in their book starting an etsy business for dummies, allison strine and kate shoup (2011) outline strategies for aspiring etsy sellers to “channel their passion for their craft into their life’s work” (p. 1). strine and shoups’s book isn’t the only guide for etsy sellers; there are multiple books, blog posts, and even a course at ut austin dedicated to this topic. these how-to guides, and the platform itself, position etsy as a site to leverage the skills associated with domestic femininities into capital and community. additionally, they romanticize working as a seller on etsy by framing it as a type of liberatory independence: independence from bosses, from scheduling, from the demands of office culture. this project is interested in questions about gender, race, labor, and platforms and seeks to examine how etsy articulates new formations of raced and gendered labor directly tied to the great recession. scholars have analyzed etsy’s relationship to historic craft movements (krugh 2014; luckman 2013) and to fan handicrafting (cherry 2016); however, there is still relatively little published research on etsy. adding to this growing body of scholarship, i foreground the ways in which whiteness and gender are co-constitutive on the platform. i situate etsy within the literature on postfeminism and media culture (gill 2007; mcrobbie 2004), gender and passionate work (duffy 2016; duffy 2017; mcrobbie 2018), and race and digital hustle economies (mcmillan cottom 2020). i analyze products sold on etsy that rhetorically engage gendered labor dynamics and precarity through the language of hustling or entrepreneurship. while the organizing logics of postfeminism and neoliberalism underpin the platform, i position etsy and the products i examine as examples of what diane negra and yvonne tasker (2014) term “recessionary popular culture” (p. 6). in line with, but also distinct from postfeminist media culture, these “recessionary images of female resourcefulness have proliferated in forms that seek to retain traditionalist femininity under conditions of financial exigency” (p. 7). etsy produces and circulates discourses about hustling and selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): johnson, j., (2021, october). handmade hustle: etsy, whiteness, and gendered precarity. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. entrepreneurship that offer a distinctly racialized and gendered response to enhanced precarity centering middle-class, white femininities. methods this project utilizes a cultural studies framing and relies on critical discourse and textual analysis. i use these methodologies to examine how the language printed on products, which include mostly screen-printed shirts, mugs, and wall art, promotes individual solutions to economic insecurity (see figure 1 and 2). additionally, i assess the following factors: product description, use of models, photo staging, color, and text fonts to make sense of how these products signal a particular raced and gendered subject. etsy allows users to select their region, language, and currency, and i elected to use the platform in english as someone in the u.s. with the u.s. dollar. using etsy’s native search function, i searched for products containing the word “hustle” and its variations “hustler” and “hustling,” as well as products that gender being a boss including “girl boss,” “boss lady,” “boss bitch,” and “boss babe.” each of these terms yielded between 30,000 and 40,000 results with the exception of “girl boss” (greater than 65,000) and “boss bitch” (between 3,000 and 4,000). due to the high volume of results, i looked at the first three pages each search term yielded and categorized the results by common threads. findings i focus on three main threads i found in my analysis: 1) white women on the platform have co-opted black vernacular to address how economic insecurity has pushed previously economically stable groups into gig labor 2) these products romanticize precarity by positioning feminized grit and individualized solutions to macro economic hurdles as female empowerment 3) the products discursively frame entrepreneurship as aspirational, liberatory, and, most centrally, compatible with white, domestic femininities. hustling has always had particular classed and raced connotations. however, the effects of neoliberal economic and social policy have pushed previously economically stable groups of americans, like middle-class, white women, into gig labor and side hustles. the products i analyze demonstrate that etsy is changing the image of the hustler. many of these products moved hustling away from engagements in the informal economy (e.g. “real estate is my hustle” “mother hustler”). further, through the use of models, color, product staging, and what vox calls “bridesmaid font” (brooke, 2018), these products positioned the hustler as a white woman. lastly, these products framed hustling as a mindset, where those with enough grit could make their own success (e.g “stay humble hustle hard” “hustle hard pray harder”). similarly, products that gender being a boss illustrate an aspirational ethos that contends that an empowered woman is one who is her own boss. this discourse of empowerment divorces feminism from any type of coalitional politics and locates the source of women’s power in their ability to labor for individual capital accumulation and ephemeral happiness. conclusion the hustling and female entrepreneurship products sold on etsy romanticize working for yourself and the independence it offers. what these products don’t speak to is the enhanced precarity of working without formal labor protections, health care, or steady wages. the great recession pushed unemployment and underemployment to historic highs; the economic impact of covid-19 quickly blew past these numbers, and the effects have been especially devastating for women. millions have had to rely on hustling in the absence of state support. while hustling, and its new, white appearance, is celebrated on etsy, we must be mindful of how hustling is always raced, gendered, and precarious. figures figure 1 figure 2 references brooke, e. (2018, september 18). why bouncy, hyper-feminine script is the font of choice for bridesmaids gifts and novelty wine glasses. vox. https://www.vox.com/2018/9/18/17870200/script-bridesmaid-gifts-wine-glasses cherry, b. (2016). cult media, fandom, and textiles: handicrafting as fan art. bloomsbury publishing. duffy, b. e. (2016). the romance of work: gender and aspirational labour in the digital culture industries. international journal of cultural studies, 19(4), 441–457. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877915572186 duffy, b. e. (2017). (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. yale university press. gill, r. (2007). postfeminist media culture: elements of a sensibility. european journal of cultural studies, 10(2), 147-166. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549407075898 krugh, m. (2014). joy in labour: the politicization of craft from the arts and crafts movement to etsy. canadian review of american studies, 44(2), 281-301. https://doi.org/10.3138/cras.2014.s06 luckman, s. (2013). the aura of the analogue in a digital age: women’s crafts, creative markets and home-based labour after etsy. cultural studies review, 19(1), 249-70. https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v19i1.2585 mcmillan cottom, t. (2020). the hustle economy. dissent, 67(4), 19-25. https://doi.org/10.1353/dss.2020.0094 mcrobbie, a. (2004). post-feminism and popular culture. feminist media studies, 4(3), 255-264. https://doi.org/10.1080/1468077042000309937 mcrobbie, a. (2018). be creative: making a living in the new culture industries. john wiley & sons. negra, d., & tasker, y. (eds.). (2014). gendering the recession: media and culture in an age of austerity. duke university press. strine, a., & shoup, k. (2011). starting an etsy business for dummies. john wiley & sons. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 rule by default: a cross-platform analysis of privacy settings chelsea l. horne american university introduction in 2018, the german court ruled that facebook’s use of personal data was illegal because facebook “hi[d] default settings that are not privacy-friendly” and did not meet the overall requirement for informed consent (busemann & schimroszik, 2018). that same year, the italian regulator fined facebook 10 million euros in part because of a default setting that forced an “aggressive practice” by automatically preparing “transmission of user data to individual websites/apps without express consent” (hern, 2018). in 2019, the united states federal trade commission (ftc) slammed facebook with a $5 billion civil penalty for violations of privacy practices, including default settings (fair, 2019). and in 2021, the italian regulator fined facebook another 7 million euros for continuing to mislead users. these recent enforcements and penalties on deceptive and problematic privacy settings highlight the practical and policy significance of settings within the larger scope of privacy and data regulation. just as scholars study privacy policies, terms of service, and the technical infrastructure and architecture of digital platforms’ privacy and security choices, privacy settings are critical in discussions of privacy and privacy rights. privacy settings are a critical space of research; settings are uniquely positioned at the intersection between users and digital platforms and regulation, providing a visible privacy architecture—unlike backend privacy infrastructure and code—as well as an opportunity for users to interact with privacy choices—unlike terms of service and privacy policy documents which offer only all-or-nothing options (horne, 2021). as laura denardis demonstrates “technical arrangements are arrangements of power” (denardis, 2014). the literature shows that privacy settings have profound ability to influence users (shah & sandvig, 2008; soh, 2019; zuiderveen borgesuis, 2015), but also that most users do not change settings (dinner et al., 2011; sunstein, 2013; svirsky, 2019). this paper examines the structural power relations and hierarchies inherent within privacy settings. we address the conference theme of decolonizing the internet through suggested citation (apa): horne, c., (2022, november). rule by default: a cross-platform analysis of privacy settings. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. a comprehensive analysis of privacy controls, a critical site of power for the “new colonising forces in the form of multinational tech giants who are re-fashioning the world in their own image” (#aoir2022 cfp). critical framework current models of privacy are based on a control paradigm, which promotes an understanding of privacy as having control over one’s information. part of the challenge of protecting privacy is that privacy is a “concept in disarray” (solove, 2008) and resists specificity. efforts to distill a definition lead to “vague, overinclusive, and underinclusive rules” (citron & solove, 2021) and allows industry to tailor services that leave users vulnerable (cohen, 2019). another challenge is that conversations on privacy are framed as a matter of individual responsibility rather than a larger social good. platforms benefit from this frame as they pass responsibility for privacy-friendly practices to users, who platforms know will likely not change their settings. this paper applies a theoretical framework of science & technology studies (sts) to analyze the affordances of social media platforms’ privacy settings. further, we apply ian bogost’s theory of procedural rhetoric to examine how platforms apply “the art of using processes persuasively” (bogost, 2007). the theory argues that games, their rules, and process-based systems make claims about the way the world works and reinforce the ideologies of game makers. the interactive process of choice architecture in privacy settings also lends itself to the procedural rhetoric framework. procedural rhetoric demonstrates that the parameters of technology settings are ideological in nature and that the affordances of digital technology may hide mechanisms of power. further, as bogost suggests, through procedural rhetoric, people learn about the way the world works. a potential implication then is that privacy settings go beyond reinforcing hegemonic viewpoints and insinuate to users that these viewpoints are normative. methodology this paper conducts a comparison study of privacy settings across some of the most popular social media platforms: facebook, youtube, instagram, tiktok, and twitter. both the desktop and mobile version of each social media will be analyzed as the literature indicates that there may be differences between desktop and mobile versions, with the mobile versions more likely to have deceptive practices (luguri & strahilevitz, 2021). the purpose of this analysis is to examine how privacy is presented to users. how does each platform define privacy? where do they locate different kinds of privacy settings? what kinds of privacy choices are offered? how do these choices differ? how a platform designs their choice architecture for privacy shapes a user’s understanding of what privacy is and means. conclusions users have long had to navigate dodgy defaults, sticky settings, and deceptive data practices and despite regulatory actions and new policies, the problems and privacy harms persist. as billions of people use social media to communicate with each other, share information, read the news, and even access the internet, the decisions of technology companies on issues of privacy and security have global impacts. this paper contributes to the larger conversation of privacy online through a comprehensive consideration of privacy settings, one key site where users and platforms both engage with privacy. further, this study addresses the burden of individual responsibility to manage privacy online. additionally, while more research is needed, it is possible that deceptive practices and non-privacy friendly settings may disproportionately affective members of marginalized communities (benjamin, 2019; shah & sandvig, 2008). this project’s cross-platform analysis of privacy settings also offers a new lens through which to analyze privacy settings and their implications. these findings could help scholars and policymakers understand how platforms deploy privacy choices and what ideologies regarding privacy they reify. it would also shed insight into the similar or conflicting definitions of privacy online that users must navigate via privacy settings. references benjamin, r. (2019). default discrimination. in race after technology. bogost, i. (2007). persuasive games: the expressive power of videogames. mit press. bradshaw, s., & denardis, l. (2019). privacy by infrastructure: the unresolved case of the domain name system: privacy by infrastructure. policy & internet, 11(1), 16– 36. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.195 busemann, h.-e., & schimroszik, n. (2018, february 12). german court rules facebook use of personal data illegal. reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/usgermany-facebook-iduskbn1fw1fi citron, d. k., & solove, d. j. (2021). privacy harms (ssrn scholarly paper id 3782222). social science research network. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3782222 cohen, j. e. (2019). between truth and power: the legal constructions of informational capitalism / julie e. cohen. oxford university press. denardis, l. (2014). the global war for internet governance. yale university press. dinner, i., johnson, e. j., goldstein, d. g., & liu, k. (2011). partitioning default effects: why people choose not to choose. journal of experimental psychology: applied, 17(4), 332–341. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024354 fair, l. (2019, july 24). ftc’s $5 billion facebook settlement: record-breaking and history-making. federal trade commission. https://www.ftc.gov/newsevents/blogs/business-blog/2019/07/ftcs-5-billion-facebook-settlement-recordbreaking-history hern, a. (2018, december 7). italian regulator fines facebook £8.9m for misleading users. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/07/italian-regulator-finesfacebook-89m-for-misleading-users horne, c. l. (2021). choice and control: an analysis of privacy values and privacy controls. aoir selected papers of internet research. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2021i0.11944 luguri, j., & strahilevitz, j. (2021). shining a light on dark patterns. journal of legal analysis, 13(1), 43–109. https://doi.org/doi.org/10.1093/jla/laaa006 ramokapane, k. m., mazeli, a. c., & rashid, a. (2019). skip, skip, skip, accept!!!: a study on the usability of smartphone manufacturer provided default features and user privacy. proceedings on privacy enhancing technologies, 2019(2), 209–227. https://doi.org/10.2478/popets-2019-0027 shah, r. c., & kesan, j. p. (2008). setting online policy with software defaults. information, communication & society, 11(7), 989–1007. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691180802109097 shah, r. c., & sandvig, c. (2008). software defaults as de facto regulation the case of the wireless internet. information, communication & society, 11(1), 25–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691180701858836 soh, s. y. (2019). privacy nudges: european data protection law review, 5(1), 65–74. https://doi.org/10.21552/edpl/2019/1/10 solove, d. j. (2008). understanding privacy / daniel j. solove. harvard university press. sunstein, c. r. (2013). deciding by default. university of pennsylvania law review, 162(1), 1–58. svirsky, d. (2019). why do people avoid information about privacy? journal of law & innovation, 2(1). watson, j., lipford, h. r., & besmer, a. (2015). mapping user preference to privacy default settings. acm transactions on computer-human interaction, 22(6), 1– 20. https://doi.org/10.1145/2811257 willis, l. e. (2013). why not privacy by default? ssrn electronic journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2349766 zuiderveen borgesuis, f. (2015). nudge and the law: a european perspective (a. alemanno & sibony, eds.). hart publishing. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474203463 selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation: smyth, s., consalvo, m., boman, n. and phelps, a. (2021, october). microstreaming small shared space: exploring the connectedness of the physical spaces of microstreamers and their audience. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. streaming small shared spaces: exploring the connectedness of the physical spaces of microstreamers and their audience samuel smyth american university mia consalvo concordia university nicholas bowman texas tech university andrew phelps university of canterbury (and) american university introduction this paper examines how microstreamers either intentionally or unintentionally share their intimate physical spaces with audiences. while most streaming research focuses on larger and/or monetized professional streamers (phelps & consalvo, 2020), there is emerging research on ‘microstreaming’—streams whose audiences are often as low as single digits—and their importance as smaller, more intimate spaces (phelps, consalvo, & boman, 2021). for example, given their casual nature, microstreamers are much less likely to have invested in professional level equipment, or to have dedicated streamingspecific areas of their homes. some scholars have argued that streaming from intimate spaces such as bedrooms can be considered performative (ruberg & lark, 2020), yet our current research questions the broad applicability of such findings, especially with respect to microstreamers. one way to understand these shared spaces is through the lens of place. for example, (oldenburg, 1989) suggests that for most of us, our social and community engagement happens in “third places” —public places defined by their openness and inclusivity. these are distinct from our workplaces (“second place”) and our intimate and private homes (“first places”). streaming represents an event in which the barriers around the “first place” are intentionally removed, and spectatorship invited. what is a “third place” to the audiences is the “first place” for the streamer themselves. professional streamers navigate this knowingly and intentionally (ruberg & lark, 2020) whereas microstreamers may not. applying goffman (1959), the shared spaces of microstreamers can be understood as an unintentional “leaking” of one’s privately held backstage. such “leakage” could also be understood as an unintentional violation of the streamer’s own privacy boundaries (petronio, 1991) in which private, backstage information is made available for consumption by unknown others. methods as a preliminary investigation, we viewed 17 microstreamers that represented a variety of different activities, as microstreaming is not restricted to videogames (phelps, consalvo, & bowman, 2021). over 20 weeks, we observed these same streamers multiple times per week, and compiled field notes on prominent objects or scenery in the scene, as well as extraneous interactions such as a pets or other people wandering through the environment. results & analysis three major themes emerged. first, microstreamers do not or cannot arrange their personal spaces for audience consumption. for example, a streamer named “a_underscore_potato”, used multiple cameras for his vr setup, but these cameras also revealed his cluttered and ‘lived in’ bedroom (figure 1). some microstreamers consciously leveraged this “first place access” as a means of making their streams more intimate for viewers. “dragons in the dining room” (didr; a live play dungeons & dragons stream) describes their stream as “we are a group of regular people who have come together to play the wonderful game of dungeon and dragons and decided to share it with you.” (2020) didr streams from a dining room table and uses camera angles and chat functions to reinforce that you (the audience) are a part of this intimate setting. while some might argue this is performative in nature, in practice this leverages the casual lived in space as a means of producing authenticity. these spaces generate a sense of authenticity because of their unstaged nature and their multipurpose function. the spaces being streamed were bona fide first places for these microstreamers that were temporarily and simultaneously used as third spaces for the audiences writ large. figure 1: streamers a_underscore_potatoe, didr, and dni0 streaming from their first places. second, microstreams also exhibited several instances of unstaged actors or additions to the stream that unintentionally break the fourth wall. in the didr setting, the group gathers around a table where the family obviously eats their meals at other times, and there are glimpses of others as they traverse the hallway in the background, often with familial interjections into this shared conversation. during one stream a parent wanders through the frame and engages one of the streamers with a request to complete a household chore. several streamers were interrupted by pets and siblings during their broadcasts. a_underscore_potato had a friend drop into his stream to continue a prior (off-stream) conversation, which dominates the entire stream because of the small audience size. the notion that microstreamers are broadcasting from their first places is reinforced—real-world intimate others and social entanglements cannot simply be “checked at the door” when the cameras are on. these “life interruptions” illustrate a tension with respect to managing content beyond the streamed activity itself, as during live performance from a lived space there are inevitable disclosures of information and occupants. the third theme we observed is that these streamers engaged in a wide array of camera angles, techniques, and production values likely inspired by more established and professional streamers. there were drastic differences in how these streamers engaged in their presentation of self within their spaces. a_underscore_potato used multiple cameras to not only show his space but his physical self as he played vrbased games, and his production decisions are informed by de facto standards of larger vr streams. a streamer named dni0 used a home-made green screen apparatus that was literally a green sheet stretched across a frame (at one point accidentally knocking over the apparatus and struggling to re-align it). microstreamers are observed mimicking the production practices of more professionalized streams. although these practices have benefits when engaged with precision, their low-fidelity mimicry is more representative of the microstreamer’s held institutional logics of how “real streaming” works (haveman & gualtiere, 2017). microstreamers exhibit awareness of more professionalized aspects, while simultaneously offering an amateur warmth and charm that can feel absent in larger streams. conclusion microstreamers are a sizable segment of total streamers yet tend to be paradoxically overlooked due to their small audiences and non-monetized nature. this study more closely considers microstreamers through the lens of shared space—considering both the elements displayed on-camera and how those elements might impact how audiences interpret the experience. unlike the performative nature of professional streams (ruberg & lark, 2020), microstreamers stream from their intimate and “lived in” first places. streaming from a disheveled home office or messy bedroom adds authenticity to streams already understood in part by their amateur status. streaming from a first place also meant the unintentional broadcast of relational others and through this, private and decontextualized information. these elements, along with the homebrew replication of professional practices, coalesce to provide a sense of authenticity and charm to microstreamer content that is contextually unique. references dragons in the dining room. (2020). [twitch stream channel]. twitch. https://www.twitch.tv/dragonsinthediningroom haveman, h. a., & gualtieri, g. (2017). institutional logics. oxford handbook of business and management. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190224851.013.137 goffman, erving. the presentation of self in everyday life. doubleday: garden city, new york, 1959. oldenburg, r. (1989). the great good place: cafés, coffee shops, community centers, beauty parlors, general stores, bars, hangouts, and how they get you through the day (1st ed). paragon house. petronio, s. (1991). communication boundary management: a theoretical model of managing disclosure of private information between married couples. communication theory, 1, 311–335. phelps, a. & consalvo, m. (2020) laboring artists: art streaming on the videogame platform twitch. proceedings of the 53rd annual hawaii international conference on systems science (hicss), maui, hi. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/64068 phelps, a., consalvo, m., and bowman, n. (2021) “streaming into the void: an analysis of microstreaming trends and behaviors utilizing a demand framework.” proceedings of the 54th annual hawaii international conference on systems science (hicss), kauai, hi. https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/70963/0280.pdf ruberg, b. ‘bo,’ & lark, d. (2020). livestreaming from the bedroom: performing intimacy through domestic space on twitch. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856520978324 microsoft word prins-#faithandfitnesscollide-#faithandfitnesscollide.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): prins, k. & wellman, m. (2021, october). #faithandfitnesscollide: spreading the word of multilevel marketing in christian women’s fitness instagram posts. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. #faithandfitnesscollide: spreading the word of multilevel marketing in christian women’s fitness instagram posts kai prins university of wisconsin madison mariah wellman university of utah introduction with the emergence of the coronavirus in 2020 leading to the closing of gyms and churches, along with the “she-cession” in which women disproportionately left the workforce (hammer, 2021), women have increasingly turned to fitness-based multilevel marketing (mlm) for a sense of purpose and community – and money. mlm fitness companies like beachbody, for example, saw a 300% increase in subscribers following the pandemic in 2020 (haithman, 2020). although mlms encourage their distributors to think of themselves as “independent entrepreneurs,” these companies demand fealty – and while this puts all the women who participate in a double bind where they are caught between entrepreneurship and the parent company, we are especially interested in the quandary facing the christian women who participate. bound to company, family, and god, they must still position themselves as free agents and strong women to build their “fitness ministry” (coach 8, 2020) and close the sale. we look at beachbody because the company attracts the form of “muscular postfeminist evangelism” that we name and analyze in this paper, providing a convenient network and self-contained program where one can go to encounter the divine through their upline and build their flock through their downline – participants receive a built-in community, instructions on how to behave properly, and the opportunity to spread the word and lead others. they are, essentially, converted into fitness missionaries while also spreading the word of god. we turn to instagram for this analysis because women can share a window into their lives while interacting with the commenters. instagram offers a place where they can establish themselves as “authentic” while also carefully managing their brands. literature review & research questions this paper contributes to the scant research on multilevel marketing within the communication discipline. despite its rhetorical power and social impact, mlm remains an under-studied business model outside of business and advertising journals (e.g. sparks & schenk, 2006; keep & nat, 2014) and anthropological accounts of mlm’s impact on the global south (e.g. cahn, 2009; droney, 2016). our analysis explores the tensions between the “emancipatory potential of feminine masquerade” in mlm (waggoner, 1997) and the required submission of women to both family and god in christianity. we extend the framework of “evangelical entrepreneurial femininity” (sullivan & delaney, 2017) by asking how fitness specifically complicates or shepherds the relationship between the independent entrepreneur, the mlm, and the patriarchal foundation of her religious practices. we suggest that, just as “muscular christianity” remasculinized a feminized religious sensibility in the late 19th century (maddux, 2012), muscular postfeminist evangelism gives christian women access to roles otherwise conceived of as masculine. we look specifically at how christian women navigate the potential shame of occupying a masculine economic role and a muscular body by reframing fitness mlms like beachbody as an opportunity to fulfill god’s plan and (re)inhabit the home. methods this study stems from a larger project investigating beachbody coaches’ selfpresentation on instagram during the covid-19 pandemic (authors, forthcoming). we examined ten instagram accounts run by beachbody coaches whose profile name or bio included one of the following terms: god, jesus, faith, believer, or a specific denomination (ex. latter-day saint). we collected all posts published between july 1 and december 31, 2020, and conducted a constant comparative analysis (charmaz, 2014) to explore trends related to religion, womanhood, and fitness. we selected constant comparative analysis because it is a qualitative method that encourages researchers to stay engaged with the material through many months of collection. the method categorizes and compares data through rounds of open, focused, and axial coding (charmaz, 2014). we split the ten accounts in half, first open coding five accounts each. then, we met and discussed broad patterns before selecting the most relevant themes to return to during focused coding. finally, we met a second time and discussed specific patterns developed during focused coding and selected examples of each pattern which are discussed in the findings below. preliminary findings & discussion the promise of building a “fitness ministry” and becoming a better, healthier wife and mother allows christian beachbody coaches to muscle through shame: about poor body image; about failure to perform motherhood properly (including the shame of a medicated/hospitalized birth, not breastfeeding, or miscarriage); about how 9-5 work gets in the way of prioritizing husband, children, or home. what is most interesting in this case study, however, is how these women invoke shame around their desires to become an entrepreneur – and specifically one who participates in mlm – and to become “fit.” only a few women mention beachbody by name, choosing instead to talk around the brand by positioning themselves as the ceos of their own businesses and linking to google forms to collect information from followers interested in coaching. when they do speak of beachbody, they do so by first explaining the shame they felt about pursuing fitness, especially through an mlm. they also describe their internal struggles with the desire to sign up for an at-home fitness program, ostensibly because a focus on building muscle demonstrates a turn away from god and toward one’s navel, as well as a repudiation of the soft, womanly body expected of a good christian woman. these women use their public declarations of shame to counter potential accusations of ungodliness in two specific ways: first, they describe how they discovered that resisting fitness entrepreneurship was an act of resisting god’s plan (itself a shameful action). then, they detail how fitness entrepreneurship, specifically through mlm, has allowed them to enact christian womanhood more ideally. reframing beachbody as an opportunity to build “fitness ministries” allows these women to evangelize from home while building the temple that is the body that can birth and raise children and serve one’s husband (or, in the case of the few single women we studied, a temple to the potential of christian wifeand motherhood). by using their bodies to model both the book (the bible) and the (beachbody) program, these women can communicate the word of both god and the company, overcoming objections from their followers and growing their downlines. references cahn, p. s. (2008). consuming class: multilevel marketers in neoliberal mexico. cultural anthropology, 23(3), 429-452. charmaz, k. (2014). constructing grounded theory: a practical guide through qualitative analysis (2nd ed.). sage. droney, d. (2016). networking health: multi-level marketing of health products in ghana. anthropology & medicine, 23(1), 1-13. haithman, d. (2020, may 18). beachbody sees gains. retrieved from https://labusinessjournal.com/news/2020/may/18/beachbody-sees-gains/. hammer, b. (2021, january 25). how to fix women's jobs during the covid-19 pandemic. retrieved from https://time.com/5932620/women-covid-19-jobs/. keep, w. w., & vander nat, p. j. (2014). multilevel marketing and pyramid schemes in the united states. journal of historical research in marketing. maddux, k. (2012). the feminized gospel: aimee semple mcpherson and the gendered performance of christianity. women's studies in communication, 35(1), 42-67. sparks, j. r., & schenk, j. a. (2006). socialization communication, organizational citizenship behaviors, and sales in a multilevel marketing organization. journal of personal selling & sales management, 26(2), 161-180. sullivan, k. r., & delaney, h. (2017). a femininity that ‘giveth and taketh away’: the prosperity gospel and postfeminism in the neoliberal economy. human relations, 70(7), 836-859. waggoner, c. e. (1997). the emancipatory potential of feminine masquerade in mary kay cosmetics. text and performance quarterly, 17(3), 256-272. microsoft word jorge-'when you realise your dad is cristiano ronaldo'-'when you realise your dad is cristiano ronaldo'.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): jorge, a., marôpo, l., & neto, filipa (2021, october). ‘when you realise your dad is cristiano ronaldo’: celebrity sharenting and children’s digital identity. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ‘when you realise your dad is cristiano ronaldo’: celebrity sharenting and children’s digital identity ana jorge cicant/lusófona university lidia marôpo polytechnic institute of setúbal/cics.nova filipa neto fcsh-unl introduction sharenting – the practice of the sharing of parenthood experiences through social media – is now frequent across cultures. while it refers to sharing any type of information about children and parenting, we interrogate sharenting in its eminent visual dimension, and in relation to celebrity parents. this paper draws on children, youth and media; on celebrity studies; and on digital culture and digital methods. the goal is to understand the digital identity of a child of a global celebrity through their presentation on social media; and to retrieve visual formats of the child’s representation and undergo a qualitative analysis. it focuses on the representation of cristiano ronaldo’s children, especially his oldest son, through his social media, instagram in particular, and in the highly fluid visual digital culture. theoretical framework the growing body of research about sharenting has looked at ordinary users (livingstone & blum-ross, 2017; siibak & tracks, 2019; ouvrein & verswijvel, 2019) or semi-professional bloggers (jorge et al., 2021; mäkinen, 2020), and especially associated with mothers. this scholarship has debated the tension between the right of parents to share their parenting experiences and their children’s right to privacy (steinberg, 2017) as well as children’s right to participation. emergent research has focused on the tensions between different agents around the children besides the parents: teachers (cino & vandini, 2020a), mothers-in-law (cino & vandini, 2020b), or grandparents. some parents are ‘anti-sharenting’ or refraining from engaging in social media about their children (autenrieth, 2018). when performed by celebrities, sharenting works to give the audiences elements of privacy that used to be hidden or gatekept by the media, show ordinariness in the lives of celebrities and ascribe them a ‘moral authenticity’ (mortensen & jerslev, 2014, p. 628). sports celebrities, like ronaldo, have special moral expectations (whannel, 2005) and are associated with increased authenticity, as their merit is seen as less fabricated than other celebrities. digital environment is increasingly characterized by platformisation (helmond, 2015). the integration of web applications, including social media, with each other and the wider web is motivated by technical and economic factors, as the model feeds on the flows of data and information within and across those applications. in this environment, visual elements are central (highfield & leaver, 2016; highfield, 2018), as a result of commercial visual repositories and participatory digital culture – encompassing from memes to stickers, gifs, or filters. research on visual cultures, “a more unwieldy category for comparative work” (pearce et al., 2020, p. 165), has been less preferred than linguistic search. methods and material this paper focuses on the representation of cristiano ronaldo’s children1, particularly cristiano junior. in the first phase, we analyzed instagram accounts by @cristiano (the most-followed individual on instagram since 2018, with over 275 million followers at the end of 2020), his partner @georginagio (24.1 million followers in april 2021), and his mother @doloresaveiroofficial (2.2 million followers), between may 2018 and may 2020). in the second level of analysis, we searched for cristiano junior across different digital spaces and cultures – image search engines (google, yahoo and bing), social media platforms (reddit, tumblr, instagram, facebook, twitter), sites (buzzfeed), repositories (giphy, imgur, pinterest) – using hashtags and text with a blank browser account. to counterbalance the linguistic bias of this type of search, we used reverse image search (google lens and reverse vision, tineye) for the identified memes. we then thematically grouped the images to capture the association between formats, platforms and the child’s identity resulting thereof. findings on the instagram’s family accounts we found that: ronaldo’s children were represented mostly in domestic moments, in non-staged aesthetics and selfies, often playing, sometimes amidst conspicuous luxury; junior appears with the father and stepmother in their posts about business/social events and commercial endeavors; he is presented as 1 cristiano is the father of four children: cristiano junior, born in 2010 from a publicly unknown mother; eva e mateo, born in june 2017 through surrogacy; and alana martina, born in november 2017 from georgina gio, his partner. he is portuguese and has played football in the uk, spain, and now italy. a ‘natural successor’ to ronaldo’s talent for football, whereas girls are more associated with princesses roleplaying; and his grandmother shows the boy amidst his siblings and cousins, in school moments or accompanying her in her daily life. we detected that these representations of junior are specially appropriated by the participatory culture into memes that mock the father’s narcissism; or the fact that the child doesn’t know how to pose for selfies. the series of memes ‘-dad, i’m hungry/ -i’m so handsome’ (in portuguese) generated in brazil in 2018 illustrates this. cristiano’s children’s digital identity and junior’s, in particular, is populated with images as shared by parents and wider family, as well as constructed through participatory culture. a critical lens and an archaeological approach prove to be fruitful to unpack the tensions of this wide visibility and the meanings it creates for the (digital) identity of the child. references autenrieth, u. (2018). family photography in a networked age: anti-sharenting as a reaction to risk assessment and behaviour adaption. in g. mascheroni, c. ponte, & a. jorge (eds.), digital parenting: the challenges for families in the digital age (pp. 219– 231). nordicom, university of gothenburg. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:norden:org:diva-12034 blum-ross, a., & livingstone, s. (2017). “sharenting,” parent blogging, and the boundaries of the digital self. popular communication, 15(2), 110–125. https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2016.1223300 cino, d., & vandini, c. d. (2020a). “why does a teacher feel the need to post my kid?”: parents and teachers constructing morally acceptable boundaries of children’s social media presence. international journal of communication, 14(0), 20. cino, d., & vandini, c. d. (2020b). “my kid, my rule”: governing children’s digital footprints as a source of dialectical tensions between mothers and daughters-in-law. studies in communication sciences, 1-22-1–22. https://doi.org/10.24434/j.scoms.2020.02.003 helmond, a. (2015). the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready. social media + society, 1(2), 2056305115603080. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080 highfield, t. (2018). emoji hashtags // hashtag emoji: of platforms, visual affect, and discursive flexibility. first monday. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v23i9.9398 highfield, t., & leaver, t. (2016). instagrammatics and digital methods: studying visual social media, from selfies and gifs to memes and emoji. communication research and practice, 2(1), 47–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2016.1155332 jorge, a., marôpo, l., coelho, a. m., & novello, l. (2021). mummy influencers and professional sharenting. european journal of cultural studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494211004593 mäkinen, k. (2020). resilience and vulnerability: emotional and affective labour in mom blogging. new media & society. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820941196 mortensen, m., & jerslev, a. (2014). taking the extra out of the extraordinary: paparazzi photography as an online celebrity news genre. international journal of cultural studies, 17(6), 619–636. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877913503425 ouvrein, g., & verswijvel, k. (2019). sharenting: parental adoration or public humiliation? a focus group study on adolescents’ experiences with sharenting against the background of their own impression management. children and youth services review, 99, 319–327. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2019.02.011 siibak, a., & traks, k. (2019). the dark sides of sharenting. catalan journal of communication and cultural studies, 11(1), 115–121. whannel, g. (2005). media sport stars: masculinities and moralities. routledge. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): reinhard, c., fontaine, j., king, d. (2021, october). an online work is still a work: virtual labors of professional wrestlers. panel presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. an online work is still a work: virtual labors of professional wrestlers carrielynn reinhard dominican university jessica fontaine mcgill university dewitt king the university of new mexico the covid pandemic’s impact on professional wrestling has come in many forms. like other forms of sports and entertainment, professional wrestling is very dependent on physical interactions to produce content. so, what happens when wrestlers, who work as independent contractors, cannot engage in such physical labor? fortunately, many had already been utilizing existing social media platforms as additional sources of income to supplement what they receive from their wrestling, trading on their characters and brands under neoliberal approaches to revenue generation. their online work often aligns with their physical work, as the actual wrestling they perform is only a small fraction of their revenue-generating labor. from selling merchandise to selling themselves, the panel explores how professional wrestling uses these technologies to further their physical businesses and practices. the panel will critically explore these online activities to understand how such technologies mediate the relationship between promotions, wrestlers, and fans while also reflecting late-stage capitalist and neoliberal ideological perspectives on the internet. this panel considers how these independent contractors have turned to neoliberal platforms and practices, even before the pandemic, to maintain a living, and the extent to which what they have done to survive operates as a template for more people in post-industrial societies operating under similar conditions. from youtube to tnt: professional wrestling, transmedia storytelling, and fan engagement in all elite wrestling carrielynn reinhard dominican university on may 5, 2016, brothers matt and nick jackson published “being the elite (episode 1)” on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/beingtheelite, unaware it would change the professional wrestling industry. as the first being the elite (bte) episode, with a running time of 6:07, the episode’s description reads: “episode 1. tag along with matt jackson, nick jackson & kenny omega as they make their voyage through the world of wrestling.” the video, however, lacked meaning for viewers unfamiliar with these three individuals, who wanted to give their devoted fans a behind-the-scenes peek at their “real world” experiences. in the four years since, bte has garnered over 203,000 views, 4,400 likes, and became increasing more kayfabe-based, blurring the lines between “behind-the-scenes” and fictional worldbuilding (fiorvanti & wonsover 2017). what began as a means “to entertain themselves on the road” eventually grew into a wrestling company, both providing these wrestlers “an outlet […] to express their own creativity” (collings 2020). bte helped expand the wrestlers’ fanbase, as new fans discovered them through youtube and/or via their wrestling matches for new japan pro wrestling (njpw), ring of honor (roh), and pro-wrestling guerilla (pwg). building this fanbase allowed the jacksons and omega to expand their influence in professional wrestling, launch a lucrative merchandise line with hot topic, and eventually prove their critics wrong by selling out the largest indie wrestling show in history, the pay-per-view (ppv) all in (barrasso 2018). all in’s success helped create all elite wrestling (aew) and the development of a brand to rival the largest name in professional wrestling, world wrestling entertainment (wwe). even with a successful primetime series on tnt, the jacksons and omega maintained their youtube channel, and their relationship with their fans, tying the bte stories into the aew stories. with approval from roh, the jacksons created the bte series to showcase their experiences on the road (fiorvanti & wonsover 2017). eventually, more wrestlers joined them, and episodes developed increasingly complex storylines, such as when cody rhodes became “possessed” by the wwe and required an exorcism. overall, “the real force of [being the elite] has been tongue-in-cheek humor and its advancement of storylines that have taken place in different wrestling promotions across the globe” (collings 2020). many episodes feature intertextual references through jokes, parodies, and comments to other professional wrestling characters, storylines, events, and industries. the channel also features other content, including the webseries wrestlers on the road ordering room service as well as special event videos. bte’s success led to the selffinanced all in on september 1, 2018 after journalist dave meltzer declared that no indie wrestling show could sell out a 10,000 seat arena (eck); all in sold out in less than an hour (rueter 2018). based on the ppv’s success, omega, rhodes, and the jacksons announced aew on january 1, 2019 via a bte episode, with the first aew ppv, double or nothing, happening on may 25, 2019 (pratt 2019). soon after, the group announced a television deal with tnt for dynamite to air that fall (otterson 2019). every dynamite episode is accompanied by aew dark episodes on the aew youtube channel. each dark episode involves extra matches not aired on tnt and, while pretaped, is livestreamed. along with the youtube channels, aew maintains two accounts on tik tok, one on instagram, and several on twitter. across these platforms, bte/aew demonstrates intertextuality and dialogue, both of which strengthen the parasocial relationship between producers and fans. engaging in this transmedia experience provides “for new emotional investments to grow in a story, as it offers a sense of autonomy in that the fan is discovering and creating meaning to the story on their own terms,” although the structures the producers designed impact how fans interact with the property (nguyen 2013: 56-7). of course, while the producers create those structures, their promulgation is only possible because the fans demand the content they could supply. fans and producers, then, exist in a symbiotic relationship, both exploiting the other and themselves for mutual benefit. instead of seeing such relationships as conflictual and antagonist (see nguyen 2013), an interactionist approach would consider them as active agents in a complex network that assume different identities across time and space. all participants are subjected to factors outside their control, while exerting power over circumstances they can control. bte/aew must contend with the demands of businesses, governments, regulators, and even the fans to develop their content (see reinhard 2019). for transmedia fans, this means existing in various positions within the experience and enacting different identities that appear contradictory but are experienced as normal. thus, this presentation considers the role of bte in the formation of aew as well as the promotion of various aew wrestlers, acting as a counter-point to wwe and consisting of a bottom-up, user-generated, diy ethics and aesthetics. the paper presents how bte/aew started this way and how it became this source of promotion or “getting over” during the covid pandemic for wrestlers like the dark order, the varsity blondes, fuego del sol, and more. bte/aew gave wrestlers increased self-determination while giving fans content more aligned with their desires. this symbiotic relationship between producers and fans, passive and active audiences, helps all achieve their goals. therefore, being a transmedia fan fundamentally aligns with being a fan. fans often engage with paratexts or ancillary goods in relation to the original or canonic text. to be a fan is to be exploited “to obtain the emotions that drive their connection to a story” (nguyen 2013: 67). transmedia fandom involves interaction, engagement, and power, all of which flows between agents in the network that depend on each other for success, just as the content on different platforms depend on each other for the transmedia experience to succeed. since fans and producers rely on each other, engagement becomes more important than just audience size. engagement becomes capital, both economic and sociocultural, as the resource that producers and fans use to justify their work. to encourage this engagement, more dialogue and interaction occurs in transmedia fandom. bte/aew would not be successful, let alone even exist, without such engagement with their fans. references barrasso, b. (2018). “how the young bucks transformed themselves into wrestling’s best storytellers.” sports illustrated, https://www.si.com/wrestling/2018/03/02/youngbucks-wrestling-top-storytellers. collings, j. (2020). “view from the turnbuckle: the 10 greatest moments in being the elite history.” wrestling inc, https://www.wrestlinginc.com/news/2020/04/views-fromthe-turnbuckle-the-10-greatest-moments-in-being-669602. fiorvanti, t. & wonsover, m. (2017). “blurring the lines: how kenny omega and the young bucks changed the game with ‘being the elite’.” espn.com, http://www.espn.com/wwe/story/_/id/19590596/kenny-omega-young-bucks-changedgame-being-elite. nguyen, v. l. (2013). exploit me! emotional capital and power in transmedia storytelling, master’s thesis, american university of paris. otterson, j. (2019). “all elite wrestling to launch on tnt wednesdays in october.” variety, https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/aew-tnt-premiere-date-1203277974. pratt, e. (2019). “the young bucks and cody officially announced all elite wrestling and released some details,” uproxx with spandex, https://uproxx.com/prowrestling/young-bucks-cody-all-elite-wrestling-announcement2019. reinhard, c. d. (2019). “kayfabe as convergence: content interactivity and prosumption in the squared circle,” in c. d. reinhard & c. j. olson (eds.), convergent wrestling: participatory culture, transmedia storytelling, and intertextuality in the squared circle. routledge: pp. 31-44. rueter, s. (2018). “all in sold out in under an hour,” cageside seats, https://www.cagesideseats.com/2018/5/13/17350226/all-in-sold-out-under-an-hourcody-rhodes-young-buck-bullet-club. digital merch tables and “working” online: the alwaysalready-ongoing and excessive labor of professional wrestling jessica fontaine mcgill university on march 17, 2021, less than an hour after her “unsanctioned lights out” main event match concluded, all elite wrestling (aew) professional wrestler britt baker tweeted “shopaew.com” with an image of her bloodied face and the words “main event role model” emblazoned on a new black t-shirt available for immediate purchase on aew’s online store. baker, a “heel” or villain in wrestling storytelling practices, lost to her opponent, the babyface hero thunder rosa in a violent match that saw both wrestlers attack each other with a number of weapons and ended with baker’s face covered in blood. although the match had been pre-taped the week before, professional wrestling’s conventions of “liveness” (auslander, 2008) gave the appearance that baker, perhaps, published the tweet from backstage while receiving stitches or having the remaining tacks pulled from her back. over the following days, baker liked and retweeted fans’ pictures of their recently purchased t-shirts and tweets from wrestlers, journalists, and fans celebrating the match and her performance in it. pro wrestling tees, the manufacturer and distributor of aew’s t-shirts, declared the “main event role model” t-shirt the week’s best seller. following baker’s mediatized work from her televised, bloody in-ring performance, her promotion of the mass commodity of the t-shirt, and her generation of “likes” and retweets, this paper seeks to attend to the interdependence of bodily and digital labor in the professional wrestling industry and more broadly. this paper will examine how baker, like many female wrestlers, negotiates the conjoined demands of the professional wrestling industry’s affective economy and storytelling conventions, and an online “economy of visibility” (banet-weiser, 2018) by articulating forms of bodily and digital labor through the logics of “popular feminism”, a feminist discourse that plays out across media platforms, “values neoliberal principles of individualism and entrepreneurialism”, focuses on “the individual body”, and “emphasize[s] individual attributes such as confidence, self-esteem, and competence” (banet-weiser, 2018, p.12-13). working across feminist studies, media studies, and professional wrestling studies, i will suggest that attending to baker’s social media reveals the ways in which many female wrestlers are engaged in a “confidence game” (banet-weiser, 2018) that extracts “excessive” (chow & laine, 2014) and “always-already-ongoing” (pratt, 2019) labor from their bodies both on and offline. although professional wrestling was once staged largely around live performances, it is now a highly mediatized industry in which performances and texts play out across various media platforms, including youtube, twitter, and instagram (reinhard & olson, 2019). at the same time, it remains a “spectacle of excess” (barthes, 2005) or “con(fidence) game” that relies on over-the-top characters or “gimmicks” and emotional storytelling for its business. baker, as a heel, is meant to draw disdain from the audience, increasing the love and adoration for her hero opponents. moreover, because professional wrestling matches are predetermined in advance, the aim of matches is not to win competitively. rather, the aim is to use the embodied performance to “get over” with a crowd by eliciting an affective and monetary investment through the purchases of ticket sales and merchandise (smith, 2014; reinhard & olson, 2018; laine, 2019). today, many wrestlers play their gimmicks online to increase exposure and further storylines (litherland, 2014). the affective and bodily labor requirements to perform for the professional wrestling industry also spills from ring to other media platforms. this paper will examine baker’s social media posts following her unsanctioned lights out match to explore how baker utilizes the “affordances” (boyd, 2010) of twitter and instagram. i argue that baker performs “relational labor” — "the ongoing, interactive, material, and cognitive work of communicating with people over time to create structures that can support continued work” (baym, 2018) — and engages in two conjoined and conflicting “self-presentation strategies'' (marwick, 2013) to increase her professional status, income, and opportunities. first, i will demonstrate how baker performs her gimmick, an over-confident and self-declared “role model” heel, by engaging in online self-promotion. second, i will illustrate how baker works to establish herself as a confident, competent, and “fighting” female wrestler worthy of respect and admiration in an industry that has marginalized, oversexualized, and disregarded female performers (wood and litherland, 2018). in doing so, i will pay careful attention to baker’s online circulation of the “main event role model” t-shirt and the ways that she negotiates her gimmick and the “iconography of her bleeding face” — “a visible marker of pain and [and excessive] labor” (pratt, 2019, p.146; chow and laine, 2014) that is generally employed in professional wrestling to gain sympathy and respect for babyfaces, not heels. baker must ensure that she does “turn” babyface to keep in line with aew’s current storylines. at the same time, i consider how baker’s position as a thin, white, heterosexual woman enables her to make her suffering legible and highly visible in order to recuperate it for professional prestige (wanzo, 2009). i suggest that baker circulates and sells her own bleeding face on the t-shirt to affirm her legitimacy as a wrestler (pratt, 2019, p. 148) and draw attention to herself as a money-making entrepreneur in the wrestling industry. as such, she embodies a neoliberal, popular feminism that is articulated through the body and its capacity to overcome injury (banet-weiser, 2018). through this analysis, i aim to explore the ways that female and marginalized wrestlers are tasked with additional digital and bodily labor away from the wrestling ring to access status, income, and opportunities. references auslander, p. (2008). liveness: performance in a mediatized culture. routledge. banet-weiser, s. (2018). empowered: popular feminism and popular misogyny. duke university press. barthes, r. (2005). the world of wrestling. in n. sammond (ed.), steel chair to the head: the pleasure and pain of professional wrestling. duke university press. baym, n. k. (2018). playing to the crowd: musicians, audiences, and the intimate work of connection. nyu press. boyd, danah. (2010). social networks sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in z. papacharissi (ed.). a networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites. (pp. 39-58). routledge. chow, b., & laine, e. (2014). audience affirmation and the labour of professional wrestling. performance research, 19 (2), 44–53. laine, e. (2019). professional wrestling and the commercial stage. routledge. litherland, b. (2014). breaking kayfabe is easy, cheap and never entertaining: twitter rivalries in professional wrestling. celebrity studies, 5(4), 531–533. marwick, a. e. (2013). status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. yale university press. pratt, j. (2019). delivering rhetorical entanglements [doctoral]. university of washington. reinhard, c. d., & olson, c. j. (eds.). (2019). introduction: defining convergent wrestling. in convergent wrestling: participatory culture, transmedia storytelling, and intertextuality in the squared circle (pp. 1–14). routledge. smith, r. t. (2014). fighting for recognition: identity, masculinity and the act of violence in professional wrestling. duke university press. wanzo, r. (2009). the suffering will not be televised. african american women and sentimental political storytelling. nyu press. wood, r., & litherland, b. (2018). critical feminist hope: the encounter of neoliberalism and popular feminism in wwe 24: women’s evolution. feminist media studies, 18(5), 905–922. from pro wrestling fans to only fans: the precarious precarity of the independent wrestling scene dewitt king university of minnesota twin cities on april 15, 2020, world wrestling entertainment (wwe) posted on their website that they had come to terms on the release of 19 employees that included wrestlers, referees, and announcers. it later came out that in addition to these releases the wwe was furloughing (for an unspecified time) behind the scenes personnel and releasing talent from their development territory nxt. these announcements sent shockwaves through the pro wrestling industry because unlike many sport organizations, the wwe were still producing televised shows in the us and they were fiscally insulated due to their infamous television deal with the kingdom of saudi arabia that is worth an estimated 2 billion dollars. wwe’s response to the crisis of covid-19 illuminates the precarious precarity of the pro wrestling industry. while some of the released pro wrestlers were immediately signed by wwe’s competitors such as all elite wrestling and tna, other wrestlers found themselves having to return to the independent wrestling scene which was also in dire straits due to covid-19. among those wwe wrestlers who were released and who did not transition into a major company was lionel green. lionel green went by the name lio rush during his time in the wwe and was heavily featured on raw, 205 live, and nxt. despite being extremely talented in the ring and charismatic on the microphone, green’s time in the wwe was contentious as he butted heads with many of the more senior wrestlers. the root of this conflict was the fact that green was a young and unapologetically black man who did not respect the traditional power structure of the locker room. upon returning to the independent wrestling scene, green immediately established himself as a top tier talent as he wrestled a number of high profile matches. furthermore, he tapped into his creative side when began his pursuit of music with the release of a rap album in may of 2020. and finally, most shockingly to some, and perhaps not shockingly to others, green started an only fans account. this paper will examine labor precarity in pro wrestling at the intersection of blackness, masculinity, and sexuality to trace the ways lionel green negotiates his precarity through the commodification of his sexuality to generate income in an industry that is always already precarious through an analysis of his strategic engagement with only fans. this paper puts critical sport studies, black cultural studies, critical human geography, and media studies in conversation to wrestle with the ways that the subjectivity of the independent wrestler is framed through its relationship to precarious labor. first, this paper considers and challenges our understanding of what a gig economy is (graham et al., 2017) and how it functions in relationship to other precarious industries(healy et al., 2017 ) closely thinking about the ways other precarious industries are able to fold into and work alongside these presumably new and unique labor conditions(doorn, 2017; ryan,2019) .then this paper considers the contours and granulators of black masculinity, sexuality, and its relationship to racial capitalism (abdel-shehid, 2005; alexander, 2006;malton, 2016; oates,2007). this is animated by the question of how does the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality shift, distort, and transform the way extraction, expropriation, and dispossession occur when we think of the capaciousness nature of blackness (collins,2006;ferguson, 2013).and finally, this paper wants to think critically about the ways technology can be both liberatory and disempowering to black independent wrestlers( benjamin,2019;browne,2015; chun,2009). methodologically, this paper historizes and contextualizes the common independent wrestling practices of custom matches through use of a critical fabulation. saidiya hartman explains that “by advancing a series of speculative arguments and exploiting the capacities of the subjunctive (a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities), i intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling (hartman, 2008, p.11). this fabulation will be constructed through digital means through discursive analysis of tweets, message board comments and an analysis of the custom website themselves along with a review and analysis of green’s only fan page. this allows for the creation of a genealogy that links the old practice of custom matches to the new practice of independent wrestlers creating only fans accounts. doing so allows me to argue that the deregulated nature of the pro wrestling industry is built and sustained through a genealogy of precarity which aligns with other labor constituency such as sex workers, barbers, hair stylist, uber drivers, and personal trainers. references abdel-shehid, g. (2005). who da man?: black masculinities and sporting cultures. canadian scholars’ press. alexander, b. k. (2006). performing black masculinity: race, culture, and queer identity. in crossroads in qualitative inquiry. benjamin, r. (2019). race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code (1st edition). polity. browne, s. (2015). dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. duke university press. chow, b. d. v. (2014). work and shoot: professional wrestling and embodied politics. tdr/the drama review, 58(2 (222)), 72–86. chun, w. h. k. (2009). race and/as technology. camera obscura. collins, p. h. (2006). new commodities, new consumers: selling blackness in a global marketplace. ethnicities, 6(3), 297–317. doorn, n. van. (2017). platform labor: on the gendered and racialized exploitation of low-income service work in the ‘on-demand’ economy. information, communication & society, 20(6), 898–914. ferguson, r. (2013). aberrations in black: toward a queer of color critique (first edition edition). univ of minnesota press. graham, m., hjorth, i., & lehdonvirta, v. (2017). digital labour and development: impacts of global digital labour platforms and the gig economy on worker livelihoods. transfer: european review of labour and research, 23(2), 135–162. hartman, s. (2008). venus in two acts. small axe, 12(2), 1–14. healy, j., nicholson, d., & pekarek, a. (2017). should we take the gig economy seriously? labour & industry: a journal of the social and economic relations of work, 27(3), 232–248. jackson, r. (2006). scripting the black masculine body: identity, discourse, and racial politics in popular media (annotated edition). suny press. jeffries, d. (2019). #wwe: professional wrestling in the digital age. indiana university press. matlon, j. (2016). racial capitalism and the crisis of black masculinity. american sociological review, 81(5), 1014–1038. miller-young, m. (2014). a taste for brown sugar black women in pornography. duke university press. oates, t. p. (2007). the erotic gaze in the nfl draft. communication and critical/cultural studies, 4(1), 74–90. ryan, p. (2019). male sex work in the digital age: curated lives (1st ed. 2019 edition). palgrave macmillan. sammond, n. (2005). steel chair to the head: the pleasure and pain of professional wrestling. duke university press. smith, r. t. (2014). fighting for recognition: identity, masculinity, and the act of violence in professional wrestling. duke university press. warner, k. j. (2017). in the time of plastic representation. film quarterly, 71(2), 32– 37. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): burns, r., hoffmann, a.l., & welker, p. (2022, november). toward intimate data: re-thinking digital, social, political relations. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. toward intimate data: re-thinking digital, social, political relations ryan burns university of calgary anna lauren hoffmann university of washington preston welker university of calgary datafication of self and others increasingly pervasive and invasive forms of data collection and extraction characterize contemporary life across the globe. much research has clarified how such datafication shifts relations between technology and society (van dijck 2014), but there are persistent unresolved questions related to the tensions between datafication of social groups and datafication of individuals. while datafication technologies help produce and monitor meaningful or manageable populations, they also operate and have effects at the level of the individual, and such practices have frequently been engaged through the idea of intimacy. personal habits and browsing histories now produce tremendous value for private companies (cheney-lippold 2018), while in the united states physical and other movements are subject to geospatial surveillance through smart phones (valentino-devries 2020). additionally, sensors directly applied to individual bodies have become more widespread, with high-profile examples like fitbit, apple watches, and fitness tracking apps eclipsing more insidious cases like amazon’s halo watch that always listens to your voice and asks you to take undressed selfies to measure bmi (hern 2020). these transformations are happening on a global scale, but look different in particular socio-political and legal geographies. some have leveraged the idea of intimacy to problematize the individual’s position and role at one end of these poles. in this paper, we ask how intimacy is conceived and mobilized as a category of datafication and its products. we take it up as less a demarcation of particular types of data, and more as a socially productive framing: it does work that goes far beyond mere description. we recast intimacy as marshaling the production of individual bodies and their relations to broader structures of power and epistemologies. intimate data so far in literature to date, intimacy marks an effort to describe data’s objective and affective effects on people. “intimate data” is hardly a consistent or unified category, but some salient themes do emerge. often, intimate data is used to mark a particular category of tracked behaviors or activities that are deemed—as a matter of legal or social convention—private or sensitive (weltevrede and jansen 2019). here, the “intimate” in intimate data is cast as a metric: the closer the datafied phenomena is to that individual’s fleshy body, the higher its degree of purported intimacy. for example, intimate data are often envisioned to encompass sexual encounters, movement through a city, fertility apps, or fitness activities. these critiques are usually situated within broader consideration for enrollment in economic production, especially circuits of capitalist production (gidaris 2019; sadowski 2019). some key assumptions prop up this approach to the “intimate” in intimate data: it assumes a public/private dichotomy (even when the argument complicates it), it reifies existing categories or kinds of relationships already deemed “intimate” (by the law, by medicine, and so on), and it assumes a legible and identifiable “body” outside of the contingent and ontogenetic forces that bring them into being. consequently, this approach sometimes evokes the language of individual or group “privacy” a way to mark and resist such data extraction processes. recasting intimate data without denying that these assumptions can be—at times, in some contexts—politically expedient, we want to surface them and inquire into their limits, especially for making sense of data’s social-reproductive effects. first, taking the idea of a “body” for granted sidesteps the way bodies themselves become legible through unequal socio-political relationships. intimate data do not merely index data about or “close to” an individual body, but also reflect and extend orders that unevenly distribute the benefits and burdens of visibility and social participation: orders that are often enabled by the assumed dichotomy between public and private life. here, we recall nash’s (2019) critique of the (white) feminist anti-violence advocacy that sought to make more permeable the boundary between the private, domestic space of the home and the public, disciplinary forces of the state. nash reminds us that what counts as a private or intimate space worthy of special consideration is not only gendered, but racialized, and that impacts of intimate violence will always be different for black women than for white women. heeding nash’s reminder, we want to emphasize that the act of labeling this or that data “intimate” is never just about marking data as sensitive or close to a body, but instead marshals broader relations of gendered and racialized power. in this way, “intimate data” are always bound up with the production and regulation of gender, race, sexuality, class, citizenship status, and beyond. second, we submit that the terrain of “intimate data” can serve as less of uncritical recitation of categories and experiences already assumed intimate and more as an analytic for studying the cultural production of intimacy and, perhaps, unmaking intimacy’s hegemonic associations. a small but growing number of scholars gesture at this conceptual possibility (e.g., pienaar et al 2021). for one, kwon et al (2018, 19) remind us that “intimate data is not intimate per se, nor is intimacy a property of the data, but is an interactional outcome”. aligned with these works, we gesture toward an idea of “intimate data” that is less descriptive and more analytic. as grayson (1998, 544) argued, new technologies make the once settled and protected rules of intimacy suddenly “visible and available for (re)interpretation and (re)inscription.” following this, we note that popular discussions of data ethics or data justice visibilize the hermetic liberalism of idealized autonomous subjects through their debates over consent and exchange. instead of reinscribing these ethical relations, we offer a politics of data as eliciting confessions, creating vulnerabilities, and developing new possibilities for governing (inter)personal and other relations. to quote the late berlant (1998, 286), “rethinking intimacy calls out not only for redescription but for transformative analyses of the…conditions that enable hegemonic fantasies to thrive in the minds and on the bodies of subjects…”. references berlant, l. 1998. intimacy: a special issue. critical inquiry 24(2): 281-288. cheney-lippold, j. 2018. we are data. new york: nyu press. gidaris, c. 2019. surveillance capitalism, datafication, and unwaged labour: the rise of wearable fitness devices and interactive life insurance. surveillance & society 17 (1/2):132–138. grayson, d. 1998. mediating intimacy: black surrogate mothers and the law. critical inquiry, 24(2), 525-546. healy, r. 2020. zuckerberg, get out of my uterus! an examination of fertility apps, datasharing and remaking the female body as a digitalized reproductive subject. journal of gender studies 30(4): 406-416. hern, a. 2020. amazon's halo wristband: the fitness tracker that listens to your mood. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/aug/28/amazons-halowristband-the-fitness-tracker-that-listens-to-your-mood. kwon, h., j. e. fischer, m. flintham, j. colley. 2018. the connected shower: studying intimate data in everyday life. proceedings of the acm on interactive, mobile, wearable and ubiquitous technologies 2(4):1-22. nash, j. black feminism reimagined. durham, nc: duke university press. pienaar, k., j. flore, j. power, d. murphy. 2021. making publics in a pandemic: posthuman relationalities, ‘viral’ intimacies and covid-19. health sociology review 30(3):244–259. sadowski, j. 2019. when data is capital: datafication, accumulation, and extraction. big data & society 6(1). valentino-devries, j. 2020. how your phone is used to track you, and what you can do about it. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/technology/smartphone-location-tracking-optout.html. van dijck, j. 2014. datafication, dataism and dataveillance: big data between scientific paradigm and ideology. surveillance & society 12 (2):197–208. weltevrede, e., f. jansen. 2019. infrastructures of intimate data: mapping the inbound and outbound data flows of dating apps. computational culture 7. http://computationalculture.net/infrastructures-of-intimate-data-mapping-the-inboundand-outbound-data-flows-of-dating-apps/. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): bartol, j., petrovčič, a., & vehovar, v. (2021, october). the quality of survey scales for measuring information privacy concerns on social network sites: a systematic review. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the quality of survey scales for measuring information privacy concerns on social network sites: a systematic review jošt bartol university of ljubljana andraž petrovčič university of ljubljana vasja vehovar university of ljubljana introduction information privacy concerns (ipcs) play an important role in user behavior on social network sites (snss). in general, ipcs are beliefs of individuals or groups regarding the possible collection and abuse of their personal information. these concerns are important in sns contexts because users with higher ipcs are less likely to attain certain outcomes, arguably the most important of which is building social capital (ellison et al., 2011). moreover, information privacy is increasingly relevant to digital divide research given that similar sociodemographic factors have been found to influence internet skills, online privacy literacy, and ipcs (epstein & quinn, 2020). privacy is the key for individuals to maintain their “independence, freedom, and economic and social well-being” (epstein & quinn, 2020, p. 8), and is therefore receiving increased attention among internet researchers. information privacy research has a long tradition, and the field is characterized by a range of disparate conceptual frameworks (yun et al., 2019). this divergence resonates in the lack of a unified approach to assessing ipcs in particular because although many survey scales have been developed to measure these concerns and test their relationships to other internet phenomena, evidence of their validity has been scarce and inconsistent (bélanger & crossler, 2011). moreover, researchers have often adapted existing ipc scales to specific online contexts without following appropriate procedures (preibusch, 2013). all this can affect generalizability and therefore prevent direct comparisons between studies. accordingly, the aims of this research were to systematically examine the quality of survey scales used for measuring ipcs among sns users and to provide suggestions for improving ipc measurement in the future. thus, we addressed the following research questions: (rq1) which survey scales were used to measure the ipcs of sns users? (rq2) which dimensions do these survey scales include? (rq3) what are their psychometric properties? method this study applied the consensus-based standards for the selection of health measurement instruments (cosmin) methodology for conducting systematic reviews of self-reported survey scales (prinsen et al., 2018). the prisma-s guidelines were used for conducting, structuring, and presenting the literature search (moher et al., 2009). the search was conducted in june 2020 and covered 127 information sources, including scopus, web of science, ebsco, and psycinfo. the search focused on articles published prior to january 1, 2020 that (1) focused on ipcs in the sns context; (2) used a sample that consisted exclusively of sns users; and (3) implemented an existing ipc survey scale or followed at least minimal standards in developing a new scale. only peer-reviewed articles, conference proceedings papers, books, and book chapters in english were considered eligible. after identifying the eligible articles, we extracted the source, length, dimensionality, and response options of each scale, and then evaluated its psychometric properties according to the cosmin methodology. the assessed properties were structural validity, internal consistency, construct validity, measurement invariance, and criterion validity. results the database searches retrieved a total of 2,606 articles. after removing the 1,181 duplicates, the remaining 1,425 abstracts were screened and, of these, 362 were retained for full-text assessment. ultimately, 71 papers were deemed eligible for further analysis and included 35 different ipc survey scales. the most frequently used ipc survey scale (22 articles) is the scale by dinev and hart (2006). their scale contains four items that focus on concerns about what others might do with an individual’s personal information found online. the second most frequently used scale is the concern for information privacy (cfip) instrument developed by smith et al. (1996) which appears in five articles. the cfip consists of 15 items that measure four distinct dimensions, namely collection, errors, unauthorized secondary use, and unauthorized access. the remaining 33 scales are used in four or fewer articles. when further analyzing dimensionality, we found that 10 of the 35 ipc survey scales are multidimensional. of the 18 dimensions identified, access, collection, and control are present in six different survey scales, followed by unauthorized secondary use (four scales), awareness (three), and errors (three). each of the other 12 dimensions appeared only once. the results regarding the psychometric properties indicate that many of the scales are of questionable quality. structural validity is particularly problematic. while it was assessed in most studies, the methods were often lacking. moreover, although the scales were used in various countries, only four of them were tested for measurement invariance. these findings point to the need for more rigorous testing of structural validity and also for validation of ipc scales across different sns populations and in different cultures. conclusion the results confirm previous findings about the multitude of survey measures for assessing ipcs online (preibusch, 2013). despite the prevalence of unidimensional scales, the dimensions that seem essential in capturing the main aspects of ipcs in the sns context are access, collection, and control. however, our results suggest that many ipc survey scales are of questionable quality. nonetheless, we also identified some scales that are promising candidates for future use (e.g., smith et al., 1996; dinev & hart, 2006), although further testing and potential improvements are needed. in addition, the present study can provide the basis for a possible unified approach to survey measurement of ipcs in sns contexts. such an approach would enable direct comparisons between studies, accumulation of knowledge, and, consequently, the creation of a comprehensive conceptual framework for understanding and comparing the roles and implications of ipcs across various sns platforms. references bélanger, f., & crossler, r. e. (2011). privacy in the digital age: a review of information privacy research in information systems. mis quarterly, 35(4), 1017–1041. https://doi.org/10.2307/41409971 dinev, t., & hart, p. (2006). an extended privacy calculus model for e-commerce transactions. information systems research, 17(1), 61–80. https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.1060.0080 ellison, n. b., vitak, j., steinfield, c., gray, r., & lampe, c. (2011). negotiating privacy concerns and social capital needs in a social media environment. in s. trepte & l. reinecke (eds.), privacy online: perspectives on privacy and self-disclosure in the social web (pp. 19–32). springer berlin heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21521-6_3 epstein, d., & quinn, k. (2020). markers of online privacy marginalization: empirical examination of socioeconomic disparities in social media privacy attitudes, literacy, and behavior. social media and society, 6(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120916853 moher, d., liberati, a., tetzlaff, j., & altman, d. g. (2009). preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses: the prisma statement. bmj (online), 339(7716), 332–336. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.b2535 preibusch, s. (2013). guide to measuring privacy concern: review of survey and observational instruments. international journal of human computer studies, 71(12), 1133–1143. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2013.09.002 prinsen, c. a. c., mokkink, l. b., bouter, l. m., alonso, j., patrick, d. l., de vet, h. c. w., & terwee, c. b. (2018). cosmin guideline for systematic reviews of patientreported outcome measures. quality of life research, 27(5), 1147–1157. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11136-018-1798-3 smith, j. h., milberg, s. j., & burke, s. j. (1996). information privacy: measuring individuals’ concerns about organizational practices. mis quarterly, 20(2), 167– 196. https://doi.org/10.2307/249477 yun, h., lee, g., & kim, d. j. (2019). a chronological review of empirical research on personal information privacy concerns: an analysis of contexts and research constructs. information and management, 56(4), 570–601. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2018.10.001 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): thorhauge, a. (2020, october). the steam platform economy: capitalising from player-driven economies on the internet. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the steam platform economy: capitalising from playerdriven economies on the internet anne mette thorhauge university of copenhagen introduction with this paper i aim to analyse and discuss the steam game platform in a platform economic perspective. i will argue that steam represents a special type of platform economy due to its roots in gaming economies: steam’s platform economy can be seen as a specific way of capitalising on the player-driven economies that arise within and beyond key game titles offered on the platform. steam steam was launched by the game developer valve in 2003 as a download client for valve’s games, including the hugely popular counterstrike. yet, already by 2005 steam was used for distributing game titles developed by third party developers as well (joseph, 2018). within the following decade a number of features were added including steamworks, an api for third party game developers, steam workshop, a set of publishing and distribution tools aimed at the modding communities and steam community market, a market where players can sell and buy items. throughout this development valve has gradually moved from the business of selling games to the business of taxing transactions on the platform. moreover, this business is not limited to steam as a retail or marketing window, but is deeply embedded into the way games are played and game items are traded between players. platform economies the importance of platforms to economic, cultural and political processes in modern society has been widely addressed (van dijck, poell, & de waal, 2018) and the platform can indeed be seen as a key economic principle in the age of ‘surveillance capitalism’ (zuboff, 2019). one key aspect of platforms as economic principles is the way their apis enable a decentralization of data production along with a recentralisation of data collection (helmond, 2015) with wider implications for the production of cultural content (nieborg & poell, 2018). this perspective has also been applied to the field of gaming. for instance, nieborg analyse how free-to-play games as represented by candy-crush, cover a range of monetization strategies that reflect the wider economic logics of the platforms in which they are situated (nieborg, 2015). in a similar manner, the steam platform offers a number of monetization strategies, that move well beyond the retail and marketing aspects of the platform, and include player-driven economies as an alternative source of income. moreover, the different games offered at the platform combine these monetization strategies in a number of ways. steam as a platform for economic transactions as mentioned in the introduction, with steam valve has moved well beyond the business of selling games and into the business of taxing transactions on their platform in the same manner as online market places like appstore and google play. however, a closer look at the platform interface and api reveals that this is not limited to retail and marketing. indeed, the platform interface covers a number of diverse markets or sites of economic transaction including the game store, where game developers sell their games to players, the steam workshop where modders may or may not engage in economic transactions with developers and the steam community market where players can trade game items between them. the introduction of direct economic transactions between game developers and modders in the context of the steam workshop has given rise to some controversy between modders and game developers on the ideal ‘non-capitalist’ nature of modding (joseph, 2018). in comparison, the steam community market addresses players as economic actors or capitalists per se and turn their strategic economic action into an alternative source of income (thorhauge and nielsen, forthcoming). indeed, the api offered to third party developers on steams websites can be described as a ‘palette of monetization strategies’ that run from simple retail models in the game store, over various ways of integrating user generated content in the steam workshop to harnessing and capitalising from players’ strategic economic action in the community market. a closer look at some of the most popular games titles on the platform shows that this gives rise to a variety of diverse monetization strategies. counterstrike, which is provided by the platform owner itself, seems to have its major emphasis on playertrades on the steam community market in combination with a relatively sophisticated use of features in the steam workshop. on the other hand, the game is offered for free in the game store. accordingly, in this business model retail is skipped entirely and income is generated by way of micro-transactions within the game as well as taxing player-trades on the market. the game items (‘skins’) bought and sold in this manner is created by the game developer itself as well as by players in the steam workshop. at the other end of the spectrum we find grand theft auto which is another absolute topscorer measured in player numbers, but remarkably absent from the steam workshop as well as the steam community market. this is very likely due to gta running on its own powerful engine with its own ingame store and trading system rendering a ‘retail only’ strategy on the steam platform more obvious. finally, skyrim is an example of a game with a relatively high activity in the steam workshop, yet absent from the steam community market. like gta this game seem to have its business emphasis on retail, yet, use the steam community features to support and harness is following of dedicated player-modders. in my presentation i will describe in more detail how these strategies are distributed across steams’ top hundred most played games and suggest a typology of steam-based business models on this basis. conclusion in conclusion, the steam platform offers a palette of possible monetization strategies which are combined in different ways by different game titles. many of those monetization strategies move beyond advertising and the attention economy, making players trades another potential source of income. in all cases, of course, steam gets its share. references helmond, a. (2015). the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready. social media+ society, 1(2), 2056305115603080. joseph, d. j. (2018). the discourse of digital dispossession: paid modifications and community crisis on steam. games and culture, 13(7), 690–707. nieborg, d. b. (2015). crushing candy: the free-to-play game in its connective commodity form. social media+ society, 1(2), 2056305115621932. nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society, 20(11), 4275–4292. thorhauge, a.m. & nielsen, r.k.l. (forthcoming). epic, steam and the role of skinbetting in game (platform) economies. consumer culture. van dijck, j., poell, t., & de waal, m. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford university press. zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. profile books. aoir2020-privacy normalization trends emergingtech-final.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): paik, s., mays, k. k., giovannetti, r., katz, j. e. (2020, october) invasive yet inevitable? privacy normalization trends in emerging technology. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. invasive yet inevitable? privacy normalization trends in emerging technology sejin paik boston university kate k. mays boston university rebecca giovannetti boston university james e. katz boston university introduction in the last few years, smart security and physical identification technologies have grown exponentially; people are increasingly installing smart video devices to monitor their homes and buying dna kits to collect and analyze their genetics. for example, amazon ring (a home security system) nearly tripled sales in a year and about 400,000 ring security devices were sold just in december 2019 (molla, 2020). roughly 25 million individuals have their dna information incubating in major genetic testing companies such as ancestry and 23andme (bursztynsky, 2019). as the number of users and profits of these businesses increase, so too does the potential for privacy violations and exploitation. the electronic frontier foundation recently found that ring partnered with over 500 police departments to provide its data for investigative purposes (eff, 2019). similarly, news revealed that family tree dna, another major home dna kit company, voluntarily works with the fbi to provide their customers’ database to assist agents in violent crime cases (hernandez, 2019). dna testing companies are expanding their reach beyond public officials by providing users’ database access to drug makers, insurance companies and mobile application developers (hart, 2019a). as personalized, data-driven devices become more entrenched in people’s everyday lives, corporations continue to inject cutting-edge technologies into the consumer market at a fast pace and subsequently, increase the discrepancy between people’s concerns about privacy and their actual use of those technologies. from research and consumer reports alike, individuals are overall weary, anxious and alarmed at the potential risks of losing control of their privacy (molla, 2019). however, there is no clear decline in the sales and uses of these biometric devices; particularly as the factor of convenience and usefulness become a component. one possible explanation for this phenomenon is foucault’s concept of normalization (foucault, 1995). normalization today pervades society through the standardization of governmental programs, medical applications, and in the adoption of technology. study purpose using normalization as a foundational pillar, this study aims to explore facets of a specific emerging technology — biometrics, as it relates to newfound patterns of public surveillance and methods for collecting networked data. biometric technology itself is not new in 2020; however, it is becoming more popularized and attractive within the consumer market space. given previous literature and theories on privacy, we move beyond simply looking at people’s general intentions and inclinations for technology use tied to privacy concerns. we believe that an individuals’ acceptance level towards the use of biometric technologies depends largely on a given situation, physical context and the agent in control of the technology. this paper provides a window into biometrics technology privacy and considers the subtler and nuanced spaces of biometrics technologies’ impact on the conceptualization of privacy by individuals and society. to explore these dynamics of privacy in biometric technology, we conducted a u.s. nationally representative survey (n = 1,587) through the professional survey company qualtrics in july august, 2019. we first identified respondents’ attitudes toward two types of biometric technology — dna identification and facial recognition — and examined the agents of control for which people would be more or less comfortable using the technology. additionally, we provided various surveillance contexts such as grocery stores, home and public safety to understand attitudes towards different types of technology being employed in those situations. findings & discussion our analysis shows that the actor wielding the technology matters for people’s acceptance. people are more willing to accept even the most invasive types of privacy identification technology if they trust the actor that’s employing it. moreover, respondents were most comfortable with intrusive technology when it explicitly benefited them, such as their health or safety. nearly half of the sample (44.9%) were comfortable with a dna ancestry company using their dna sample to determine specific health risks like cancer. for facial recognition technology, respondents were least comfortable with facial recognition when it was used to build an individual profile about a person for no other use than to have that information collected. when keeping the actor constant across privacy technologies, there was an overwhelming preference for less invasive means of privacy data sharing. with that being said, respondents were overall more open to accepting public officials’ and airlines’ use of more invasive technologies to guarantee people’s safety. most respondents were willing to comply with invasive means such as eyeball and fingerprint scanning and full background checks in order to board a plane, which is a different trend than found among other actors such as grocery stores and home security companies. from our results, we discuss: 1) the extent to which people have become desensitized and normalized to intrusive technologies; 2) how societal contexts (nissenbaum, 2010) and agents of control change the way people respond to the use and comfort level toward a given technology; and 3) the privacy versus beneficial trade-offs people are willing to make at the macro and micro-level. references no author. (2019, october 22). eff to amazon and shaq: stop pushing police partnerships with doorbell camera company. electronic frontier foundation (eff). retrieved from https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-amazon-and-shaq-stop-pushingpolice-partnerships-doorbell-camera-company acquisti, a. (2004). privacy in electronic commerce and the economics of immediate gratification. proceedings of the 5th acm conference on electronic commerce, 21-29. auxier, b., rainie, l., anderson, m., perrin, a., kumar, m., turner, e. (2019, november 15). americans and privacy: concerned and feeling lack of control over their personal information. pew research center. retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/11/15/americans-and-privacy-concernedconfused-and-feeling-lack-of-control-over-their-personal-information/ bursztynsky, j. (2019, february 12). more than 26 million people shared their dna with ancestry firms, allowing researchers to trace relationships between virtually all americans: mit. cnbc. retrieved from https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/privacyconcerns-rise-as-26-million-share-dna-with-ancestry-firms.html davis, f. d. (1989). perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and user acceptance of information technology, mis quarterly, 13, 3, 319-340. foucault, m. (1995). discipline and punish : the birth of the prison (2nd vintage books ed.). new york: vintage books. hart, k. (2019a, february 25). genetic testing firms share your dna data more than you think. axios. retrieved from https://www.axios.com/dna-test-results-privacy-geneticdata-sharing-4687b1a0-f527-425c-ac51-b5288b0c0293.html hart, k. (2019b, february 25). consumers kinda, sorta care about their data. axios. retrieved from https://www.axios.com/consumers-kinda-sorta-care-about-their-data3292eae9-2176-4a12-b8b5-8f2de4311907.html hernandez, s. (2019, january 31). one of the biggest at-home dna testing companies is working with the fbi. buzzfeed news. retrieved from https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/salvadorhernandez/family-tree-dna-fbiinvestigative-genealogy-privacy li, j., ma, q., chan, a., & man, s. (2019). health monitoring through wearable technologies for older adults: smart wearables acceptance model. applied ergonomics, 75, 162-169. molla, r. (2019, may 13). people say they care about privacy but they continue to buy devices that can spy on them. vox recode. retrieved from https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/13/18547235/trust-smart-devices-privacy-security molla, r. (2020, january 21). amazon ring sales nearly tripled in december despite hacks. vox recode. retrieved from https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/1/21/21070402/amazon-ring-sales-jumpshot-data nissenbaum, h. (2010). privacy in context : technology, policy, and the integrity of social life. stanford, calif.: stanford law books. norberg, patricia a., horne, daniel r., & horne, david a. (2007). the privacy paradox: personal information disclosure intentions versus behaviors. journal of consumer affairs, 41(1), 100-126. pranić, ljudevit., roehl, s. wesley, & west, b. david. (2009). acceptance and perceived effectiveness of biometrics and other airport security procedures. 1-23. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): swart, j. (2020, october). tactics of algorithmic literacy: how young people understand and negotiate algorithmic news selection. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. tactics of algorithmic literacy: how young people understand and negotiate algorithmic news selection joëlle swart university of groningen with the growing centrality of the smartphone in everyday life, the news and public information that young people consume is increasingly subject to algorithmic curation. from the apps and websites of legacy news media to widgets from aggregators such as apple news and google news to social media, more and more spaces through which young people access news are being personalized and optimized for what are assumed to be their personal preferences (newman et al., 2019). algorithms thus have a growing impact on how young people build up understandings of the public world. yet, little is known about how news users actually understand the workings of algorithmic news curation and how and under what circumstances they engage with these selections. most studies on algorithmic culture start from the perspective of the technology itself in order to understand how algorithms influence citizens’ everyday life (e.g. beer, 2017; willson, 2017). studies that consider how users themselves perceive and engage with the algorithmic curation of content, however, still remain scarce, in relation to the consumption of news in particular. this paper contributes to this literature by exploring how young people experience the algorithmic selection of the news they receive via their smartphones, and how and under what circumstances they aim to negotiate these decisions. drawing upon de certeau’s (1984) distinction between strategies and tactics, it explores how users’ perceptions of algorithms affect their practices on personalized news media and through what practices they aim to intervene in news personalization. although the structures of social media, search engines and other algorithmically-tailored platforms limit young people’s opportunities to actively influence news personalization, users are not completely powerless either. after all, the algorithmic selection of content does not occur in a social vacuum, but is the result of users’ interactions with these technologies (bucher, 2016; kitchin, 2017). these interventions might be explicit (using manual personalization options, such as clicking a “hide” or “snooze” button) or implicit (such as changing browsing behavior). understanding these tactics is important, as people’s practices on personalized media in turn help shape these algorithms themselves, and thus, may consequently affect the information that users encounter (bucher, 2017; cotter & reisdorf, 2020). yet, previous explorations of algorithmic power often downplay such expressions of user agency (van der nagel, 2018). moreover, the little existing work that does consider users’ practices around algorithms often remains limited to relatively highly digitally-literate subgroups such as social media influencers (bishop, 2019; cotter, 2019). these have a commercial incentive to maximize online visibility and thus might be more likely to seek opportunities to “game the system”. therefore, this paper adopts a wider focus to understand how young smartphone users in general perceive, negotiate and resist algorithmic news selection, focusing on social media in particular. in-depth interviews with 22 young dutch news users aged 16-26 were combined with the walk-through method (light, burgess & duguay, 2018), in a three-step data collection process. first, participants were asked to scroll through two or three of their most used social media apps, while thinking aloud about the selection of the stories presented to them. second, respondents were asked how they imagine algorithmic curation, prompting them with a number of factors that might influence what “news” is displayed on their timelines (i.e. pages and accounts followed, prior browsing behavior, etcetera). finally, a follow-up interview connected the previous parts, by having participants reflect on how their perceptions of algorithms affect their online practices and behaviors. the study finds a variety of practices that users employ to adapt their media environments to their personal preferences. the paper argues that these tactics can be considered as expressions of people’s “algorithmic literacy” (bruns, 2019; cotter & reisdorf, 2020). this subcomponent of news literacy is becoming increasingly important, now that most of the news and public affairs information that smartphone users encounter has become subject to algorithmic curation. however, the results also show that while direct experiences with news personalization form an important source of algorithmic knowledge (devito et al., 2018; rader & gray, 2015), frequent usage of personalized media does not automatically translate into higher algorithmic literacy, due to algorithms’ opacity. young people’s algorithmic literacy varies considerably and is context-dependent: for example, while algorithmic curation on facebook and the impact of friends’ engagement with content on young people’s own timelines is relatively well-known, some were unaware that news on apple news or journalistic news apps was (partially) subject to similar mechanisms. this not only affects whether users actually employ tactics to intervene in news personalization on social media, but also the composition of their overall news media repertoires. these findings raise concerns about young people’s practices of informed citizenship. if youth do not know about the mediating role of algorithms on these platforms, they remain ill-equipped to assess the completeness, accuracy and balance of the news they encounter. moreover, deficiencies in algorithmic literacy may lead to less satisfactory news experiences, which might cause youth to tune out from certain news media. hence, the paper advocates for broadening media literacy education beyond the critical evaluation of content. it argues such programs should also equip young people with tactics that help them to effectively, efficiently and consciously access news, to empower them to navigate an increasingly personalized media landscape. references beer, d. (2017). the social power of algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 1-13. bishop, s. (2019). managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip. new media & society, 21(1), 2589-2606. bruns, a. (2019). are filter bubbles real? john wiley & sons. bucher, t. (2016). neither black nor box: ways of knowing algorithms. in s. kubitschko & a. kaun (eds.), innovative methods in media and communication research (pp. 8198). cham: palgrave macmillan. cotter, k. (2019). playing the visibility game: how digital influencers and algorithms negotiate influence on instagram. new media & society, 21(4), 895-913. cotter, k., & reisdorf, b. (2020). algorithmic knowledge gaps: a new horizon of (digital) inequality. international journal of communication, 14, 745-765. de certeau, m. (1984). the practice of everyday life. berkeley, ca: university of california press. devito, m., birnholtz, j., hancock, j., french, m., & liu, s. (2018). how people form folk theories of social media feeds and what it means for how we study selfpresentation. in proceedings of the 2018 chi conference on human factors in computing systems. new york, ny: acm. kitchin, r. (2017). thinking critically about and researching algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 14-29. light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881-900. newman, n., fletcher, r., kalogeropoulos, a., & kleis nielsen, r. (2019). reuters institute digital news report 2019. reuters institute for the study of journalism. retrieved from: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/201906/dnr_2019_final_1.pdf rader, e., & gray, r. (2015, april). understanding user beliefs about algorithmic curation in the facebook news feed. in proceedings of the 33rd annual acm conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 173-182). acm. van der nagel, e. (2018). ‘networks that work too well’: intervening in algorithmic connections. media international australia, 168(1), 81-92. willson, m. (2017). algorithms (and the) everyday. information, communication & society, 20(1), 137-150. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): wang, w., yang, y.. (2020, october). dining ‘on and off’: food, wellbeing and wechat use among older chinese migrants in australia . paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. dining ‘on and off’: food, wellbeing and wechat use among older chinese migrants in australia wilfred yang wang the university of melbourne yanan jana yang independent researcher introduction this study examines how wechat, one of the most popular chinese messenger applications installed on smartphone, facilitates the formation of an older chinese diasporic space that is centered around the self-nurturing diet (yinshi yangsheng) cultural discourse in australia. in chinese culture, food is not merely an identity marker but embodies the yangsheng (self-nurturing) philosophy, which is underpinned by a ‘self-care’ (zi li) mentality. yangsheng means one applies healthy ageing philosophy and maintain longevity practice by being mindful with their everyday diet. yangsheng refers to both personal wellbeing and collective social wellness. the yangsheng discourse is closely related to the chinese government’s graduate retreat from providing aged care service and support (sun 2016) and the changing family structure due to the now-ended one child policy in china (zeng and hesketh 2016): there are fewer adult children to look after older parents as there are no siblings to share the social and financial burdens. therefore, yangsheng and related health care industry has become a major industry in the chinese economy (wen 2012), reflect a strong desire of independent living and selfreliance among older chinese. media has played a crucial role in disseminating yangsheng-related information and knowledge in china (sun 2016). however, currently literature in older chinese people’s media consumption mainly focuses on experience and processes within china few have paid attention to surging number of older chinese who are ageing in a transnational context (zhang 2016). this study examines how older chinese migrants (ocms) use wechat to seek information and exchange advices about self-nurturing food, and organise dining gathering and meeting. it is found that wechat not only facilitates the formation of an older chinese social space in australia, but the platform has acted as a selfand mutual-reliance mechanism for ocms to negotiate the co-processes of ageing and migration. yangsheng communication have moved to the cyberspace and become accessible via one’s online social networks and sources in recent years. the transnational nature of digital/social media such as that of wechat, has also expanded the geographical scope and availability of yangsheng information and communication beyond china and chinese speaking societies. redefining migrant media the surge of old chinese migrants in australia since early 2000s has coincided the global expansion of the prc (people’s republic of china) media (kean and wu 2018), which is particularly visible in australia (sun 2019). unlike traditional migrant/ethnic media, which emphasizes on facilitating migrants to assimilate or integrate into the mainstream society of the host nation (georgiou 2005), wechat represents what yin (2015) coins as homeland media that emphasizes on migrants’ ability to reconnect with the media content of the homeland/country. homeland media, hence, reinforces migrant’s dual identities, who live across and in-between the different social cultural spheres (yin 2015). as gao (2006) states, comparing to their predecessors, recent chinese migrants from the prc tend to present a mode of oscillation between chinese culture and australian ways of life. the chinese diasporic identity is dual cultural identity that moves between and overlaps with the two cultural spheres (leong, 2016). such unsettled sense of self and belonging have always embodied in the chinese migrants’ media consumption (ong and nonini,1997) and become more exemplified in a digital era. the sense oscillation and transient nature of ocms has been exemplified by the fact that one’s experience with communication and information is no longer confined to his/her immediate geo-locative place, that social/digital media enable news and information from both home and newly settled places to be available simultaneously (sun, 2019). wechat and dining through analysing data collected from eight focused group (12 people each) conducted at a chinese restaurant in brisbane, australia, and examining ocm participants’ wechat use, the study found two interwinding narratives warrant further attention to the mediating role of wechat online communication in ocms offline food initiated gathering. first, food experience (cooking and dining) is constantly mediated through wechat. the online exchange and production of food-related regimen is mainly framed within the discourses of self-care and yang sheng. many ocms for example, complained lack of traditional chinese ingredients, which are deemed to have great health benefits, use wechat to find ‘replacements’ from the available food ingredients in australia that carry similar or even better health benefits. the information seeking and verification on wechat was not merely an expression of self-care but also parental care as many ocms immigrated to look after their (grand)children in australia. being able to find healthy food also forged a sense of self-worth amongst the research participants. being able to obtain health receipt on wechat and hence, care their families indeed mediated ocms’ sense of self in their new migrant lives. further, it is also found that ocms utilize wechat to organize their own dining events and gathering. the physical meeting reinforces the in-group support mechanism wechat initiated. however, it is observed that without self-gathering, the level of interpersonal trust and bonds between individual members of the ocms community would be significantly discounted. while wechat can play a crucial role in helping the ocms to seek and verify their needed health related information and resource wechat plays a lesser role in concretizing the in-group, interpersonal relations of the community. wechat can, nonetheless, play an active role to initiate the connections between individuals. by focusing on the social meaning and cultural significance of wechat, one of the most popular migrant social media amongst the chinese communities in australia, the study contributes to the academic conversations on digital media use in later life. the study’s findings can potentially contribute to the design framework of migrant age care. there seems to be great potential of incorporating and utilizing ethnically and culturally diverse social media platforms such as wechat in the delivery and development of senior care services and supports. references gao, j. (2006). organized international asylum-seeker networks: formation and utilization by chinese students. international migration review, 40(2), 294–317. georgiou, myra (2005) ‘diasporic media across europe: multicultural societies and the universalism-particularism continuum’, journal of ethnic and migration studies31(3): 481–98. hepp, a. (2009). transculturality as a perspective: researching media cultures comparatively. qualitative social research, 10. keane, m., & wu, h. (2018). lofty ambitions, new territories, and turf battles: china’s platforms “go out.” media industries journal, 5(1). leong, s. 2015. provisional business migrants to western australia, social media and conditional belonging. in media and communication in the chinese diaspora rethinking transnationalism, 190-209: routledge. ong, a., & nonini, d. m. (1997). ungrounded empires the cultural politics of modern chinese transnationalism. new york: routledge. sun, w. (2016). regimes of healthy living: the reality of ageing in urban china and the cultivation of new normative subjects. journal of consumer culture, 16(3), 908–925. sun, w. (2019). chinese-language digital/social media in australia: double-edged sword in australia’s public diplomacy agenda. media international australia, 173(1), 22–35. yin, h. (2013). chinese-language cyberspace, homeland media and ethnic media: a contested space for being chinese. new media & society, 17(4), 556–572. zeng, y., & hesketh, t. (2016). the effects of chinas universal two-child policy. the lancet, 388(10054), 1930–1938. zhang, j. (2016). aging in cyberspace: internet use and quality of life of older chinese migrants. the journal of chinese sociology, 3(1). microsoft word aoir2021 566 social media use, trust and technology acceptance extended abstract.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 kyza, e. a., varda, c., konstantinou, l., karapanos, e., perfumi, s. c., svahn, m. & georgiou, y. (2021, october). social media use, trust, and technology acceptance: investigating the effectiveness of a cocreated browser plugin in mitigating the spread of misinformation on social media. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. social media use, trust and technology acceptance: investigating the effectiveness of a co-created browser plugin in mitigating the spread of misinformation on social media eleni a. kyza department of communication and internet studies, cyprus university of technology christiana varda department of communication and internet studies, cyprus university of technology loukas konstantinou department of communication and internet studies, cyprus university of technology evangelos karapanos department of communication and internet studies, cyprus university of technology serena coppolino perfumi egov lab, stockholm university mattias svahn egov lab, stockholm university yiannis georgiou department of communication and internet studies, cyprus university of technology introduction the viral spread of misinformation on social media, be it by algorithms or humans, is a threat to democracy and individual autonomy (bastick, 2021), and can heighten the risk for physical and psychological harm. as traditional gatekeeping is replaced online by new models of information control, this work investigated how some form of power over the control of information can be renegotiated back to the everyday user. in response to this year’s conference theme, we present a multi-disciplinary effort to build capacity to support laypersons (citizens) in identifying and critically reviewing misinformation on social media. this effort adopted a sociotechnical approach to online engagement with (mis)information on social media platforms, using twitter as a context. using participatory methodologies, we co-created a technological solution (a web browser plugin) that can support citizens in assuming an agentic relationship with technology and supporting them in resisting the spread of misinformation. we report on an empirical study that investigated the effectiveness of the strategies that were adopted as part of this work. power on social media the technologically mediated landscape of social media presents opportunities for increased engagement in democratic discussions (loader & mercea, 2011); researchers also argue that it may contribute toward misleading the user through technological and other means (kozyreva et al., 2020). we take a human-centered approach to the role of technology in combating misinformation; using a social constructivist lens we approach technology as something that can be shaped by humans and which can support human values and interests. while experts acknowledge the power struggles in relation to misinformation online, a pew research center study with 1116 experts and stakeholders (anderson & rainie, 2017) suggested that there is no clear consensus on whether society will be able to address misinformation on social media, or what the optimal solution might be. our study explores this vast, multi-disciplinary and complex topic, and asks whether power over the control of information can be redistributed to human actors, supported by co-created artificial intelligence-driven misinformation tools. the role of technology in combating misinformation we view technology as value-laden, but also as a force that can be shaped by humans. we view humans as having reflective agency which, according to john dewey, can lead to democratic engagement (whipple, 2005). such agency is mitigated by individual, situational and technological factors (tandoc, 2019), which is the focus of this study. in this context we organized nine co-creation workshops (three at each site) in austria, greece and sweden to explore citizens’ challenges in identifying and addressing misinformative content on social media and to guide our agile technology development efforts. the end result was a browser plugin prototype, designed to work with twitter, which combined artificial intelligence models and human input. the plugin provides support in addressing misinformation by examining tweets through ai and a rule engine to determine credibility, presents the credibility metrics and explanations to the user, and employs a nudging mechanism (‘blurry’), which can be turned off by the user, to deter engagement with non-credible posts. methods we conducted a quasi-experimental study across four european sites to understand whether the use of a co-created technological intervention on twitter could lead to more misinformation-resilient behavior, as indicated by participants’ intention to avoid liking or sharing misinformative posts. we adopted a mixed-methods research design. participants (n=80) were assigned to an experimental (n=40) or control condition (n=40). each group viewed a curated twitter timeline with or without the browser plugin. the timeline included both accurate and misinformative science-related posts, derived from a dataset of 4,550 fact-checked social media posts. participants first completed questionnaires on individual characteristics (digital literacy, media literacy, epistemic beliefs, social media use, trust in science, and digital citizenship) and were then presented with the twitter feed, which featured credible and non-credible posts. following a semi-structured data collection protocol, they were asked to think aloud as they decided which actions they would take for each post. at the end of each intervention, we conducted semi-structured interviews to obtain the participants’ perspective of the process of evaluating post credibility. the participants’ actions with the twitter timeline and their externalized reflections were videotaped and transcribed verbatim. participants in the experimental condition also completed a postintervention questionnaire relating to trust in the technology and technology acceptance. to answer our research question we used multinomial regressions, bivariate analysis and fisher’s exact test in spss, followed by qualitative analyses using nvivo 12 to provide further insights. findings the aim of this study was to investigate whether a co-created software solution could support citizens’ resilience to misinformation on social media, and understand the role of individual, situational and technological characteristics in the citizens’ engagement with misinformation. individual characteristics: a series of multinomial regressions indicated that all but one of the individual characteristics assessed were not statistically significant predictors of user’s trust/distrust profile toward the plugin: only social media use was a statistically significant predictor of users’ trust and distrust towards the plugin. a multinomial logistic regression analysis indicated that social media use predicted the participants’ profile (trust/distrust). participants who reported using social media less, also indicated less trust and less acceptance of the technological intervention (β=-1.061, or=0.346, p=0.041). situational characteristics: a bivariate analysis indicated that trust in technology and technology acceptance were strongly positively correlated (r=0.85, p<0.01). we found a significant relationship between the participants’ profile (trust / distrust) and “sharing” misinformation; ‘trust’ profile participants were less likely to share misinformation (p<0.05). no relationship was found between trust / distrust profile and “liking”. technological characteristics: a fisher's exact test indicated a significant relationship between the condition (plugin/ no_plugin) and endorsing (‘liking’) the misinformative posts. the participants in the control condition (no_plugin) were more likely to “like” a misinformative post than the participants in the experimental condition (p < 0.05). discussion and implications the findings of this study confirm that individual, situational and technological characteristics impact a person’s engagement with misinformative posts. results suggest that the presence of a co-created technological solution can deter social media users from endorsing misinformation in an authentic social media environment. resistance to sharing misinformation was correlated with participants’ trust and acceptance of the technological intervention, which was related to their use of social media. these findings have broader implications about the conditions under which technological interventions can support the fight against online misinformation. additional studies are needed to understand all the implications of this study, with larger samples and different topical contexts. acknowledgement this study was funded by the european commission, grant agreement 770302, project co-inform (www.coinform.eu). references anderson, j. & rainie, l. (2017). the future of truth and misinformation online. pew research center, 19. kozyreva, a., lewandowsky, s., & hertwig, r. (2020). citizens versus the internet: confronting digital challenges with cognitive tools. psychological science in the public interest, 21(3), 103-156. loader, b. d. & mercea, d. (2011). networking democracy? information, communication & society, 14:6, 757-769, doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2011.592648 tandoc jr, e. c. (2019). the facts of fake news: a research review. sociology compass, 13(9), e12724. whipple, m. (2005). the dewey-lippmann debate today: communication distortions, reflective agency, and participatory democracy. sociological theory, 23(2), 156178. aoir ethics panel 1_final selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): zimmer, m. and af segerstad, yh. (2021, october). aoir ethics: practices and roadmaps. panel presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. aoir ethics panel 1: practices and roadmaps michael zimmer marquette university, usa ylva hård af segerstad university of gothenburg, sweden panel rationale and organization since its inception, the association of internet researchers (aoir) has fostered critical reflection on the ethical and social dimensions of the internet and internet-facilitated communication and interactions. the aoir ethics working committee has been committed to not only ensuring the aoir ethics guidelines remain helpful and relevant to researchers and ethical review committees, but also to ensure high-quality research focused on ethics is shared at the annual conference. this panel is one of two sessions organized by the aoir ethics working committee to highlight recent research engaging with the complexities of addressing ethics in our domain from various disciplinary perspectives, methods, and platforms. this panel collects four papers exploring a broad (but shared) range of practices that present ethical challenges in internet research, while also providing possible roadmaps towards addressing these concerns. these include: “problematising ethics and individual responsibility for researchers studying the far right” by [redacted] who highlights the risks and challenges researchers face when researching far-right communities online; “ethical dilemmas in researching sexual crimes of children in the digital society” by [redacted] who explores the ethical dilemmas faced when researching online sexual crimes involving children; “navigating the ethical grey zone improvising best practice when routines and protocols for management of research data are missing” by [redacted] who explores practical challenges to conducting ethically responsible research; and “mapping the field of data ethics: a roadmap for educators” by [redacted] which provides a useful analysis of data ethics syllabi in order to provide a framework to guide how we teach data and internet ethics. if presented live, the panel will be moderated by members of the aoir ethics working committee and will include a respondent from that group to spark further discussion across the contributors and among virtual attendees. simon rogerson, chief editor journal of information, communication and ethics in society (jices) notes his publication aims to “…promote thoughtful dialogue regarding the wider social and ethical issues related to the planning, development, implementation, and use of new media and information and communication technologies.” the journal thereby offers “necessary interdisciplinary, culturally and geographically diverse works essential to understanding the impacts of the pervasive new media and information and communication technologies.” these papers fit this objective, and are among those under consideration for publication in a special issue of the jices) associated with the aoir ethics working committee and aoir2021. problematising ethics and individual responsibility for researchers studying the far right antonia vaughan university of bath, united kingdom researcher safety in ethics, networked harassment, and academia the development of social platforms and the far right online has coalesced to form a potent issue to the ethical conduct of research. with a strong history of targeting academia, the far right has continued to innovate harassment strategies on the internet, mostly significantly through networked harassment. networked harassment is defined as the “form of online harassment against a target or set of targets which is encouraged, promoted, or instigated by members of a network, such as an audience or online community” (lewis et al 2021, p.2). veletsianos et al (2018) argue that greater attention needs to be devoted to this issue due to the numerous negative ramifications and uneven impact such as self-censorship and the loss of opportunities. this paper seeks to address the gap with an empirical and theoretical offering by illustrating and critiquing the problematic nexus in which scholars of the far right work. this juncture produces a significant risk that is currently insufficiently met through guidance, training, and funding and needs remedying in order to diversify scholarship and maintain equal access to research. online harassment as a phenomenon disproportionately impacts marginalized communities to the extent that it is an “normal part of online experience” (marwick and caplan 2018 p.545). this paper argues that academia only exacerbates the intensity of this “normal” experience by providing a spotlight or magnifying glass under which scholars work. massanari (2018) critiqued the perceived necessity to be present online in how scholars become almost ‘microcelebrities’ through social engagement. this need is part of a valorization of impact promoted by neoliberal institutions and the marketisation of academia. digital presence is understood as actively “desirable” (veletsianos et al 2018), with the numerous benefits the internet offers including networking, opportunities, and the public dissemination of work. there are copious amounts of training available to scholars in this area, but these largely lack a consideration of the ramifications creating a tension between needing to be highly present online and the inevitability of networked harassment. the techno-libertarian ethos of the internet the inevitability of networked harassment leads to self-censorship, withdrawal, and the loss of opportunities (veletsianos et al 2018). exacerbating this issue is the structure of the internet and the techno-libertarian ethos of platforms. predicated on this idea of a constraint-free technology with minimal guidance, emphasis on the value of free speech and the responsibility of the individual, the tools available both enable networked harassment and prevent protection (lewis et al, 2021; massanari, 2017). however, this does not reflect the nature of the harassment. whereas before there may be one person harass a user thousands of times, with networked harassment a user may have thousands of people harass them once or twice. problematizing the ethics of researcher responsibility. considering the significant risk that networked harassment by the far right poses, academics are increasingly being understood as a ‘vulnerable population’ (mattheis and kingdon), necessitating a full consideration in ethics applications for institutional review boards. the current ethical approval process presumes the applicant as the expert, convincing the board that the project will be conducted ethically. equally, ethical justifications are based on experience, personal relationships, and the currently available guidance. however, whilst the threat from the far right is easily identifiable, the solutions are not. conway states that in guidance on ethics, there is an “almost total exclusion of potential harms to researchers” (2021, p.368). in this paper i will illustrate the problematic nexus in which researchers operate that ultimately exacerbates structural racism and sexism, disproportionately impacting those at the sharp end of far right discourse. methods and preliminary results this paper seeks: to analyse ethics from a more conceptual perspective, interrogating how covert research, researcher and participant safety, and the use of internet data intersect. to create a 10-point framework of best practice for ethical research on the far right. the corpus puts interviews with academics in conversation with theories of ethics and publicly available guidance from institutions, funding bodies, and networks. by analysing the body of guidance available, the paper offers an understanding of the current corpus, and in particular the areas which are lacking. in order to democratise experiences of researching the far right and promote a diversity in scholarship, we need to meet the major gaps in support and guidance that currently exist. by illustrating the problematic juncture in which researchers of the far right work, this paper critiques the emphasis on individual responsibility promoted by the ethos of the internet and neoliberal institutions. the interviews highlight the individual experiences of developing ethical approaches and tackling the challenges to emotional and physical wellbeing. the analysis takes a critical approach with qualitative underpinnings, utilising thematic analysis in rounds of inductive then deductive approaches. specifically, the analysis seeks to highlight flaws with the status quo that primacies individual responsibility, engaging issues of seniority, gender, structural racism and sexism. massanari (2018) and veletsianos et al (2018) identify how the current approach significantly disadvantages those already at the sharp end of far right discourse, leading to a loss of opportunity and withdrawal from scholarship preliminary findings show that issues of safety are largely subsumed into sections on informed consent or in-person fieldwork sites; safety is framed as a justification for not getting informed consent rather than a fully-fledged section on the possibility for networked harassment, for example. furthermore, the guidance that does exist fails to holistically account for the identities that exacerbate the danger, or the structural issues that problematise simple solutions. through the valorisation of the individual, online platforms and neoliberal institutions exacerbate issues of structural racism and sexism by isolating researchers regardless of identity. researchers are ill-equipped with the tools, guidance, and training to keep themselves safe online when researching the far right. conclusion the intersection between networked harassment, academia, the neoliberal ethos of institutions, and the techno-libertarian ethos of the internet provides a juncture of vulnerability in which scholars work. exacerbating this vulnerability is the critical lack of consideration of researcher safety in research ethics guidelines, which challenges the attempts of scholars to conduct their projects safely and ethically. the online environment has produced issues of context collapse and a tilt in the power dynamics between researchers and participants. this particularly disadvantages those already at the sharp end of far right discourse as they are already more likely to receive online harassment, and thus suffer from the emphasis on individuality in front of a coordinated threat. the neoliberal insistence on impact and the commodification of research provides a tension between being visible, or successful, and being safe. continuing this, the techno-libertarian ethos of the internet and the neoliberal ethos of institutions emphasize individual responsibility whilst insufficiently meeting this framing with sufficient tools and support. the particular issue of networked harassment problematizes this framing as it isolates and magnifies one particular individual in front of a malicious audience. instead, research ethics must conceptualize a framework that incorporates the identities that add vulnerability and this threat landscape. this paper offers both a theoretical reconceptualization of research ethics and a new practical offering by putting interviews in conversation with current best practice in order to encourage the diversity of scholarship. references conway, m. 2021 online extremism and terrorism research ethics: researcher safety, informed consent, and the need for tailored guidelines, terrorism and political violence, 33(2) 367-380 lewis, r., marwick, a.e., clyde partin, w., 2021 “we dissect stupidity and respond to it”: response videos and networked harassment on youtube american behavioural scientist mattheis, a.a., and kingdon, a. 2021 preprint does the institution have a plan for that? researcher safety and the ethics of institutional responsibility marwick, a., blackwell, l., & lo, k. 2016 best practices for conducting risky research and protecting yourself from online harassment (data & society guide). new york: data & society research institute. marwick, a & caplan, r. (2018). drinking male tears: language, the manosphere, and networked harassment feminist media studies 18(4), pp.543-559 massanari, a. (2017) ‘#gamergate and the fappening: how reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures’ new media & society vol.19(3) pp.329-346 massanari, a.l. (2018). rethinking research ethics, power, and the risk of visibility in the era of the “alt-right” gaze social media & society 1(1), pp.1-9 veletsianos, g., houlden, s., hodson, j., gosse, c., 2018 women scholars’ experiences with online harassment and abuse: self-protection, resistance, acceptance, and self-blame new media & society 20(12) pp.4689-4708 researching sexual offences against children in the digital society marie eneman university of gothenburg, sweden in this paper, i briefly describe my research approach and reflect on ethical issues that can arise when exploring offenders' use of digital technologies for sexual offfences against children, with a focus on child abuse material and sexual grooming. child abuse material, sometimes referred to as child pornography, refers to material depicting the sexual exploitation of children ranging from images of children posing (usually naked) to material portraying physical sexual abuse (howitt & sheldon, 2007; eneman, 2020; 2020) and sexual grooming refers to the process where an adult seeks to establish contact with a child for sexual purposes (craven et al, 2006; eneman et al, 2010). neither child abuse material nor sexual grooming are new problems in society, but the development of new technologies has facilitated for individuals with a sexual interest in children to seek contact with potential victims (sexual grooming) and to produce, distribute, view and download child abuse material (howitt & sheldon; eneman, 2020). aside from being criminal offences in many western countries, child abuse material and sexual grooming are illustrative examples of one the most problematic areas of harmful use of digital technologies. also characterized as socially unacceptable and stigmatized phenomena and as research topics characterized as emotive and sensitive (lee, 1993; dickson-swift, 2009; hilário & augusto, 2020). one of the first challenges you have to deal with as a researcher when you conduct research on offenders’ behavior in relation to child abuse material and sexual gromming is the question of access to empirical material. accessing the domain of sexual crimes against children is difficult and involves both certain practical and ethical considerations (hollway and jefferson, 2012). this includes, for example, how to gain access to people who have experience from this domain, as they can be characterized as a hard-to-reach group for people from the outside (brantsaeter, 2001). due to the fact that many actions surrounding child abuse material and sexual grooming are illegal in many countries, it is most unlikely that people involved in this these activities would be willing to discuss their activities prior to conviction. it would also be an extremely difficult and complex issue, practically, ethically and legally, for a researcher to try to gain access to non-convicted people who have experience activities related to child abuse material or in relation to sexual grooming where offenders have contacted (potential) victims (ray et al, 2010). an alternative approach is therefore to focus on offenders who have been involved in these types of crimes. i therefore choosed to conduct individual interviews with offenders convicted of child abuse material (the swedish legislation is entitled ‘child pornography’) and/or sexual grooming in combination with analysis of court records and police reports. research interviews with offenders have been described as an invaluable source to better understand criminal behaviour (presser, 2010; morgan & lamble, 2018). it should be noted that the empirical material, consisting of interviews with offenders together with court and police records represent only individuals that have been arrested and convicted of the production, possession and/or distribution of child abuse material and/or sexual grooming. this means that the material must be interpreted carefully since arrested and convicted offenders represent only a fraction of all offenders engaged in these activities, and that sexual crimes of children have a very low reporting rate (howitt & sheldon, 2007). to access offenders that would be willing to be interviewed i contacted the swedish prison and probation service and was asked to send an information letter to them describing the research project including the interview guide illustrating the themes and questions i wanted to focus on during the interviews with the offenders. the information letter also contained a description of research ethics in relation to my research. the letter was then distributed within their organization to a prison psychologist working with the types of offenders that i wanted to interview. the prison psychologist then contacted me for a further discussion about the selection of offenders for the interviews. the selection of offenders for the interviews was thus made by the prison psychologist who, in addition to taking into account my formulated criteria, also considered two other important aspects, namely whether the individual offender was in a suitable phase in his therapy and whether the offender was considered a suitable respondent for me as a researcher to interview in the light of my personal safety. conducting interviews with offenders about their involvement in sexual offences against children constitute certain complex challenges. previous research has shown that it can be difficult to get people to talk about their criminal or socially unacceptable behavior (lee, 1993; brantsaeter, 2001; eneman et al, 2010). therefore, certain ethical recommendations have been proposed when interviewing offenders on sensitive topics which guided me in my research (hollway & jefferson, 2012). a prerequisite for conducting research that focuses on sexual offences against children is that the project has been ethically approved. my research has been ethically approved by the swedish ethical review authority on a number of occasions and also other precautions have been taken in order to protect the integrity of those involved in this study, for example by avoiding very unique descriptions that could reveal individuals. researchers have an ethical obligation to protect participants/respondents from harm particularly when asking about sensitive topics such as criminal offending behaviour in sexual offences against children (ray et al, 2010). the ethical issues of informed consent, confidentiality, voluntary participation were clearly communicated in advance together with contact information where the respondent could turn afterwards if questions arose regarding their participation in the study. when interviewing offenders, the interviews will most likely take place in a prison environment (with sexual offenders), which can feel both unusual and uncomfortable (noaks & wincup, 2017). it is often emphasized that it is important to create an environment where the respondent feels safe and secure, but i want to emphasize that it is at least as important for the researcher. perhaps even more important when it comes to interview people convicted of crimes. for my own part, i started the interviews in a visiting room in the prison (was referred there by the prison psychologist) but during a meeting with a respondent who when i asked what he was convicted of also answered (in addition to sexual crimes against children) rape of an adult woman, then i got scared and realized that i had not found out any safety routines, for example if there was an alarm button, etc. the interview went well but after that i asked to change room close to the psychologists. finally, it should be emphasized that my motivation to conduct research within this area is driven by my ambition to develop knowledge that increases awareness and can contribute to regulative measures such as legislation and policies that further strengthen the protection of children in the digital society. i hope that my experiences of conducting research on a highly emotive and sensitive topic surrounded by a number of ethical issues in the digital society can be an inspiration and support other researchers approaching these kinds of sensitive themes. references brantsaeter, m (2001) möter med menn dömt för seksuelle overgrep mot barn. doctoral thesis, universitetet i oslo. craven, s., brown s & gilchrist, e (2006) sexual grooming of children: review of literature and theoretical considerations, the journal of sexual aggression 12:3. dicksonswift, v., james, e., kippen, s & liamputtong, p (2009) researching sensitive topics: qualitative research as emotion work, qualitative research, 9:1. eneman, m (2020) crime investigations of ‘child abuse material’ challenges and opportunities posed by digital technology, the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers (aoir), dublin, ireland. eneman, m., gillespie, a. & stahl, b (2010) technology and sexual abuse: a critical review of an internet grooming case, proceedings of the international conference on information systems (icis), missouri, usa. hilário, a & augusto, f (2020) practical and ethical dilemmas in researching sensitive topics with populations considered vulnerable, mdpi societies. hollway, w & jefferson, t (2012) doing qualitative research differently, sage publications ltd. howitt, d & sheldon, k (2007) sex offenders and the internet, john wiley sons inc. lee, r (1999) doing research on sensitive topics, sage publications ltd. morgan, s & lamble, i (2018) understanding men who access sexualised images of children: exploratory interviews with offenders, journal of sexual aggression, 25:1. noaks, l & wincup, w (2017) qualitative research in criminology, routledge. presser, l (2010) collecting and analysing stories of offenders, journal of criminal justice education, 21:4. ray, j., kimonis, e & donoghue, c (2010) legal, ethical, and methodological considerations in the internet-based study of child pornography offenders, behavioral sciences & the law. navigating the ethical grey zone improvising best practice when routines and protocols for management of research data are missing ylva hård af segerstad university of gothenburg, sweden stefan nilsson university of gothenburg, sweden maria olsson university of gothenburg, sweden introduction on may 25, 2018 the world's strongest set of data protection rules, the general data protection regulation, or gdpr, came into force across europe. gdpr was designed to "harmonize" and modernize data privacy laws across all of the eu countries as well as to provide greater protection and rights to individuals (https://gdpr.eu/). gdpr has now been in place for three year and has prompted regulatory bodies and universities to develop technical solutions and data handling protocols for secure management of personal data for research purposes. even so, in striving to follow correct procedures for managing sensitive research data as ethically responsible researchers, it became strikingly clear that neither technical solutions nor routines for managing level 3 data were in place at one of the largest universities in sweden. this lack can have serious consequences, both for the protection of the research subjects and for the ability to conduct ethically responsible research. in this paper, we address the consequences of missing such tools and procedures. we describe how we improvised best practice under the circumstances on the fly in collaboration between researchers, legal officers and an it architect at the university. practical challenges to being able to conduct ethically responsible research vitak et al. (2017) described that irbs often seem to apply overly strict guidelines to low-risk research protocols, while simultaneously lacking the expertise to effectively evaluate technical proposals. these insights, coupled with rapid technological development and requirements to adapt regulations to new legislation, such as gdpr, makes it hard for the slow processes in academia to keep pace when it comes to developing technical solutions and protocols for legally and ethically correct and secure procedures. data collection and data classification in the context of a research and innovation project, we conducted 16 dyadic interviews with young cancer survivors via videoconferencing platform zoom. zoom has been extensively used for research purposes (lobe et al., 2020), and the platform was chosen for being compliant with the health insurance portability and accountability act (hippa), and for supporting video-recording with local storage. the swedish ethics review authority granted us approval to conduct the interviews using zoom. data storage and processing data security levels are defined differently in different countries. the videorecorded interview sessions generated for the project are classified as level 3 data in sweden, i.e., sensitive personal data including information about the participants’ health. we password protected the videorecorded interview sessions and uploaded the files to a secure repository provided by the university. only the researchers in the project had access to the files. the interviews were to be transcribed for further analysis. in order to keep up with the pace of the other work packages in the project, we decided to make use of the services of a transcription company, procured by the university. this is where we encountered serious challenges which neither we, nor the ethics approval authority, had foreseen (cf. franzke et al., 2020, markham, 2018). the storage repository that the university provided turned out to only be approved for storage of data up to information level 2. moreover, the routines that the transcription company had established with the university for transferring data to process was to use the university approved productivity platform. however, like the storage repository, this platform is also only approved for up to information level 2. improvising and solving the dilemma on the fly in collaboration with the legal administration officers and an it architect at the university, we developed a protocol for best practice under the circumstances, that allowed us to securely store, transfer and process the sensitive material in accordance with current regulations. joining our competences and skills to meet current regulations, we improvised by combining technical affordances of a number of devices, platforms and procedures that were deemed to do the job securely. the procedure we settled on is as follows; zoom automatically also creates audio-only files of the recordings. audio-only were deemed to contain less identifying information than the corresponding video files. we compressed the audio-only files and protected the resulting zip-file with 20-character password. the zip-file was uploaded to the designated area on sharepoint, and from there downloaded by the transcriber. the researchers and the transcriber met in a zoom meeting and the password was sent to the transcriber using a fully-encrypted application for money transfer (similar to paypal). the transcriber downloaded and unzipped the files, and worked with them on a computer without internet connection. the interview material was de-identified in the transcription process by substituting identifying information such as names, place names, diagnosis etc. when the job was done, the reverse procedure allowed the researchers to download the transcribed files and begin the process of analyzing the material. the raw data, i.e., the video and audio recordings of the interviews, along with the password-protected files providing the key to re-identification of the research participants on two password-protected and fully encrypted hard-drives. these in turn were stored in a safe at the university. navigating the ethical grey zone despite the fact that three years has passed since the gdpr regulations came into force, it seems that it is not at all uncommon that even government run educational institutions have not been able to keep pace with current regulations. at the time, sufficient technical platforms or routines were still not in place for secure data management in accordance with these. we found ourselves being stuck in the research process, as there were no secure procedures in place for transferring the interview files to the transcriber, or to manage the data during the transcription process. missing routines and tools to meet changing demands and regulations legal, practical and ethical is challenging. most university researchers currently find themselves in an ethical grey zone. some are not even aware of the problem, as they rely on the university to provide what is needed, and those who are aware are left without a choice as there are no other options available to them. our particular case of developing a best practice under the circumstances to solve ethical and methodological challenges contributes to our collective knowledge base and aoir’s ongoing work on ethical guidelines. furthermore, the case highlights the need for a process approach to research ethics (franzke et al., 2020). it emphasizes that research ethics has to be case and context sensitive, and that researchers and the research design has to be flexible and adaptive throughout to mitigate possible harm that might arise during the research process (markham, 2006). references franzke, a. s., bechmann, a., zimmer, m., ess, c. & researchers, t. a. o. i. 2020. internet research: ethical guidelines 3.0. lobe, b., morgan, d. & hoffman, k. a. 2020. qualitative data collection in an era of social distancing. international journal of qualitative methods, 19. markham, a. n. 2006. ethic as method, method as ethic: a case for reflexivity in qualitative ict research. journal of information ethics, 37-54. markham, a. n. 2018. afterword: ethics as impact—moving from error-avoidance and concept-driven models to a future-oriented approach. social media+ society, 4, 2056305118784504. vitak, j., proferes, n., shilton, k. & ashktorab, z. 2017. ethics regulation in social computing research: examining the role of institutional review boards. journal of empirical research on human research ethics, 12, 372-382. mapping the field of data ethics: a roadmap for educators tian zheng columbia university, usa isabelle zaugg columbia university, usa jonathan reeve columbia university, usa data ethics education from the spread of disinformation via social media, to class-biased dynamic pricing, to racial profiling in online systems that lead to “real-world” harms, teaching data ethics has never been more urgently needed. this paper explores current topics within data ethics syllabi. it analyzes the overlaps and divides between various approaches to teaching data ethics, from emphasizing fat (fairness, accountability, transparency), to the public interest technology movement, to calls to reimagine “digital justice” from critical race and digital studies scholars, to applying aoir’s ethical internet research guidelines, to the way philosophical texts on ethics from different cultural contexts are being applied to the digital age. we present a semantic, linked open data graph describing the relations between texts, courses, professors, and universities involved in teaching data ethics. while patterns in data ethics education will to some degree emerge organically from the data, we also use a “human in the loop” approach to identify and label these patterns. informed course development we will then use this tool to inform our own approach to teaching data ethics. as a collaborative team that spans the humanities, social sciences, arts, and stem, we believe that data ethics education is most meaningful when it draws upon transdisciplinary perspectives to both understand and, importantly, act on data ethics. our approach will not only familiarize students with data ethics on a theoretical level, but will push them to recognize a horizon of possible solutions and build computational skills to explore solutions in practice. computational problem-solving as such, as we look at the field of data ethics coursework and its literature, we are interested in identifying whether these courses help students make the leap into computational “problem-solving.” even if this is not happening at the level of a course, identifying whether these courses are embedded or “required” within computational programs, will help us understand the degree to which data ethics education is reaching future data scientists. widening the pipeline another possible goal of data ethics coursework is to attract new cohorts of students to engage with computational fields. in terms of data ethics, this is important on two fronts. one, it is important to bring students with ethical insights from other disciplinary backgrounds into the field of computation, and transdisciplinary data ethics coursework can facilitate that. two, by using data ethics as a bridge to open a new pathway into computational fields, there may be a potential to attract students from underrepresented backgrounds who might hesitate to take traditional, foundational computational coursework. both potential “pipeline” outcomes have the promise to address the calls data ethicists have made regarding the need to diversify the computational workforce in terms of disciplinary expertise, cultural background, and lived experience. while we can only speculate about the profiles of individual students taking these courses as well as the long-term outcomes of their learning, we hope this project will shed light on how data ethics education is engaging with the larger disciplinary structures of universities, and particularly whether these courses may be providing an entryway into computational practice for students rooted in other disciplines. our approach the semantic web, also known as “web 3.0” or linked open data, is a relatively new system of conventions for standardizing and encoding graph data, such that it is universally interoperable, in a language known as rdf, or the resource description framework. some of the most well-known projects in the field include dbpedia, the set of parsed and inferred data from wikipedia, and wikidata, the data set which proposes to be the knowledge basis for wikipedia. at its most basic, rdf data may be represented as a series of subject-verb-object triples, where each node has a stable url. social relationships between people, for instance, may be described as <bob> <is friends with> <alicia>, where the angle-bracketed entities resolve to uris. there exist a number of ontologies, or pre-defined sets of relations, which may be used to describe entities within their domains. we use a number of ontologies in conjunction: the curriculum course syllabus ontology (ccso) describes relations between courses, universities, syllabi, professors, and learning materials such as texts; the bibliographic ontology (bibliontology) describes metadata for articles, books, videos, and other media; and the citation typing ontology (cito) describes citation relations between texts. [@fig:graph] shows an example directed graph visualization, illustrating relations between these entities. we collect data in a quasi-automated fashion, often beginning with course lists, such as the tech ethics curriculum list provided by casey fiesler et al. (2020). given a course syllabus url, we are able to automatically extract bibliographic references, and resolve them to stable identifiers at a number of bibliographic databases, such as crossref. we then resolve universities and departments to their wikidata identifiers, which allows us to retrieve additional information with which we can organize our data, for instance the geographic coordinates of the university and its founding date. we resolve instructors and authors to their orcids, which allows us to retrieve an author’s other publications, and their past and present institutional affiliations. this allows us to answer questions such as: • what are the most-cited works in the field of data ethics? • which are most assigned in courses? • what books are only cited in one geographic region (e.g., california)? • what courses are cross-listed in multiple departments? sharing our roadmap we are building a website to visualize these connections, as a force-directed network visualization in javascript, so that it may be explored by a wider user base. we hope this resource will be useful for others designing data ethics coursework, as our data visualization will allow one to quickly identify both valuable patterns in texts assigned, as well as outliers. our visualization prioritizes users’ engagement with both consensus and outliers, which is important considering that efforts to “decolonize curricula” have highlighted how the process by which texts gain importance is not always meritocratic and in some cases “outsider” voices deserve to be centered. this is all the more true in a field such as data ethics where critical voices are challenging established perspectives, practices, and institutions. this semantic web approach also allows us to be multilingual by default, since much of this data, such as that gleaned from wikipedia, is available in many languages. further outcomes we hope to build a mechanism to submit users’ data ethics syllabi to our database; this way, our literature review will always stay up to date. a further step will be to generalize this framework so that it may be used to map any academic discipline, given a list of courses and their syllabus urls. as data ethicists ourselves, we care about openness and transparency, and so we have open-sourced this data, so that other researchers can use our work to answer their own questions. we hope that our framework may be used to help map the institutional knowledge structures of even more disciplines. references fiesler, casey, natalie garrett, and nathan beard. “what do we teach when we teach tech ethics?: a syllabi analysis.” in proceedings of the 51st acm technical symposium on computer science education, 289–95. portland or usa: acm, 2020. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 13-16 oct 2021 privacy, face, and social respectability in a digital china ariane ollier-malaterre university of quebec in montreal introduction this study is an exploratory analysis where i focus on understanding what chinese citizens consider as “private” when they use social media, shop online, and make other electronic payments using wechatpay and alipay. western scholarship defines privacy as the right of individuals, groups, or institutions to decide what information about themselves to communicate to others, and when and how to do so (westin, 1967). simply put, privacy pertains to “what people conceal and reveal and what others acquire and ignore” (anthony, campos-castillo, & horne 2017: 251). in the context of social media and e-commerce platforms, privacy is increasingly viewed as “networked” (wu, vitak, & zimmer, 2019), i.e., a collaboration with others within a social context. while people in many countries grapple with the opaque privacy implications of the internet and social media, the case of china is particularly interesting because people leave a wealth of digital traces every day, as they use all-encompassing platforms and pay almost everything electronically, and because these data are being collected and mined by companies and the government (creemers, 2017). study methods this study is part of a larger project (a book in progress) on perceptions of privacy, governance, and surveillance in china, in light of chinese history, socio-economic context, and political system. i conducted 58 semi-structured in-depth interviews in 2019 in beijing, shanghai, and chengdu, and took diary notes on my observations as i traveled in western china and sichuan. the 58 interviews comprise 44 formal interviews with men and women recruited in collaboration with chinese professors and 14 in-depth conversations with key informants (all chinese except 3 who had been living in china for a long time). the sample was contrasted in terms of gender, age, education level, and industry sector (public sector/state-owned company/private company/multinational). half of the interviews took place in english and half in mandarin, at a location of the interviewee’s choice; i was accompanied by a chinese interpreter for most of the formal interviews, which also served to alleviate interviewees’ potential concerns about my “waiguoren", i.e., foreigner identity. i started with descriptive questions on the participant’s use of wechat and the internet and moved selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): ollier-malaterre, a., (2021, october). privacy, face, and social respectability in a digital china. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. gradually to questions on privacy and surveillance. my approach is constructivist; i fully acknowledge that my country affiliation contributes to shaping what chinese people share with me, with both benefits and drawbacks. i analyzed the interviews and diary notes using inductive content analysis methods. findings & discussion privacy is written with two different words in mandarin: yǐnsī (a personal thing you do not wish to disclose in public) and yīnsī (hiding a shameful secret) (cao, 2005). my interviewees clearly used the latter meaning, viewing privacy as face-saving, that is controlling the exposure of shameful information and feelings to social groups that could judge them negatively, to maintain moral and social respectability. face comprises two concepts in chinese thought: lien refers to moral character integrity, whereas mien-tzi refers to reputation in terms of success in life. lien has been translated as moral face, and mien-tzi as social face. lien is independent of social status, whereas mien-tzi depends on power and prestige. to lose lien is “a condemnation by the group for immoral or socially disagreeable behavior”. considering face as lien, shameful things include the behaviors, thoughts, and emotions that can be judged negatively by others. interviewees mentioned “shameful things” such as personal medicine, underwear and sex-related products, and socially questionable purchases such as weapons. considering face as mien-tzi, shame is induced by low-status markers such as low-level jobs, which denote poor success, as well as high-status markers because the latter may embarrass others who are less successful. the higher the social standing, the more one has to deal with people of lesser status in dignified ways. financial information is what interviewees most often considered private, particularly well-off interviewees, because that information may embarrass others who do less well. moreover, my interviewees perceived the need to hide shameful information only from interlocutors who could make them lose face: parents and supervisors, or hackers who would disclose personal information, but not an abstract entity such as the government. for instance, several interviewees felt they could hide on weibo, using a pseudonym. although weibo, like twitter, is a large public social network, they described it as a space where they could “escape” and “be themselves”, unlike wechat group chats and “moments” (the equivalent of facebook’s wall) where they felt watched by individuals and groups that mattered for their reputation. the fact that weibo requires users’ real names upon registration was not raised as a privacy concern because it does not relate to reputation (it does, however, imply that the company and the government may identify the authors of posts and comments, which many western citizens would frame as a privacy concern). elders and supervisors were the figures from which it was most important to hide shameful information. they were given “safe news”. health, financial, employment or marriage issues were concealed to prevent parents from worrying and avoid parental interference. for instance, a colleague with severe hypertension invited me to dinner at his home; he said nothing when his mother salted the dishes heavily, and later explained she did not know about his condition. likewise, ph.d. candidates in a lab i visited hid their social media werun profiles from their supervisors so that the supervisors did not know how much time they spent running instead of studying. these findings on privacy may help to shed slight on how chinese citizens view the digitalization of surveillance through facial recognition monitoring and the building of the social credit system (liang, das, kostyuk, & hussain, 2018), and on what legal basis they may assert their rights (e.g., reputation vs. privacy rights; cao, 2005). importantly, moving beyond western definitions of privacy to understand the concept's multi-faceted nature may guide future context-sensitive research on privacy and surveillance. references anthony, d., c. campos-castillo, & c. horne. (2017). toward a sociology of privacy. annual review of sociology, 43: 249-269. cao, j. (2005). protecting the right to privacy in china. victoria university of wellington law review 25: 645. cheng, c.y. (1986) the concept of face and its confucian roots. journal of chinese philosophy, 13: 329–348. creemers, r. (2017) cyber china: upgrading propaganda, public opinion work and social management for the twenty-first century. journal of contemporary china, 26: 85-100. hwang. k.k. & han, k.h. (2010) face and morality in confucian society. in: bond, m. h. (ed) the handbook of chinese psychology. london: oxford university press, 479498. hu, h.c. (1994) the chinese concepts of "face". american anthropologist, new series, 46: 45-64. liang, f., das, v., kostyuk, n., & hussain, m. m. (2018). constructing a data-driven society: china's social credit system as a state surveillance infrastructure. policy & internet, 10(4), 415-453. westin, a. f. (1967). privacy and freedom. london: the bodley head ltd. wu, p. f., vitak, j., & zimmer, m. t. (2019). a contextual approach to information privacy research. journal of the association for information science and technology, 71(4), 485–490. microsoft word aoir abstract spir final.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): berryman, r., abidin, c., & leaver, t. (2021, october). a topography of virtual influencers. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. a topography of virtual influencers rachel berryman curtin university, australia crystal abidin curtin university, australia tama leaver curtin university, australia introduction informed by my first six months of doctoral research, this paper offers a topography of virtual influencers that at once acknowledges their continuation of and breaking with the precedents of a lineage of “virtual beings” who have achieved celebrity status. responding to the ahistoricism of much recent commentary, it draws on archival press and web research to situate virtual influencers at the intersection of technological advancements, discourses, and anxieties similarly characterising hollywood’s “synthespians” at the turn of the twenty-first century; the legacy of “virtual idols” in east asia (also known as “vocaloids” in japan); and the latter’s recent democratisation by a new generation of “vtubers” across video-sharing sites. recognising this cross-medium migration of virtual celebrity—from anime, video games and blockbuster cinema to the participatory web—this paper adopts a platform-specific lens to highlight the affordances, cultures and vernaculars of specific social media as essential to virtual influencers’ aspiration to, and attainment and maintenance of, attention and fame. what are virtual influencers? virtual influencers are characters native to social media, with no singular referent in the offline world. ranging in appearance from eerily humanoid to entirely fantastical, and utilising computer-generated imagery and animation of varying sophistication, quality and photorealism, virtual influencers are typically designed to accumulate audiences and promote products, brands and/or messages. spanning several social media platforms, this paper focuses on virtual influencers’ established presence on instagram, twitter, youtube, tiktok and sina weibo, where they pique curiosity through their strategic blurring of fiction and reality, evoking roboticist masahiro mori’s (1970/2012) theorisation of the “uncanny valley” not only with their anthropomorphised designs, but also by infusing their content with imagery of real locations and people, and popular social media aesthetics and platform vernaculars in ways that seem to affirm their “authenticity” (leaver et al., 2020). since the mid-2010s, virtual influencers have attracted substantial press coverage and multiplying follower counts, with the most popular characters addressing hundreds of thousands of followers with their regular content uploads and “life” updates (figure 1). as with their corporeal counterparts (see abidin, 2018), this visibility has unlocked a litany of commercial opportunities, inspiring a budding industry interested in mobilizing their platforms for a parade of sponsored content and partnerships. major brands have taken to designing their own virtual influencers as a marketing approach (figure 2), and not-for-profit organisations have leveraged their effectiveness at attracting and engaging audiences to more widely promote important causes (figure 3). figure 1: @imma.gram (2020, japan) with a beloved burberry handbag, @fnmeka (2020, us) flaunting a new streetwear ensemble, and @lilmiquela (2020, us) snapped on an outing to a local flower shop. figure 2: big-box retailer @magazineluiza’s virtual ambassador lu (2015—, brazil), puma’s @mayaaa.gram (2020-2020, south east asia), and airasia’s @missava (2019-2020, malaysia). figure 3: economics education advocate @ruby.economics (2018-2020, germany), local guide @esther.olofsson (2020—, netherlands), and conservation ambassadors @eric_the_pagolin (2020—, uk) and @wildlife.watcherau (2020—, australia). a brief history of virtual celebrity at the turn of the twenty-first century, the advent of motion-capture and ongoing refinements to computer-generated artistry were enabling increasingly photorealistic visual spectacles, doubles and enhancements. this, in turn, stoked speculation about the future of virtual actors, known as “synthespians” (“synthetic thespians”), in hollywood films (leaver, 2012). with press abuzz with news of a-list celebrities undergoing scans to create their own datafied doubles and scandalized accounts of deceased actors’ digital reanimation (figure 4), talk quickly turned to the possibility synthespians would someday enter the hollywood star system (creed, 2000). elsewhere, however, these fantasies were already a reality. emerging from the idol (aidoru) culture that has saturated japan’s entertainment industries since the 1980s (see karlin & galbraith, 2012), the first digitally-produced virtual idol, kyoko date, was unveiled by talent agency horipro in 1996. a combination of 3d-modelling, motion-capture and voice artistry, the 16-year-old virtual idol released pop singles, starred in music videos, and featured on radio and television shows. kyoko’s debut was a moderate success, albeit fleeting; unable to find a foothold in popular consciousness, she was eventually retired, although briefly revived in 2001 and 2007 (black, 2012). a subsequent generation of virtual idols, including japan’s yuki terai (1998-2002), south korea’s adam (1997-1998), and germany’s e-cyas (1999-2000), met similar fates. the virtual idol concept was revitalized, however, by the release of yamaha’s vocaloid synthesizer software in the early 2000s, and the avid interest in the animated character for one of its vocal tracks, hatsune miku, that quickly followed. since her debut in 2007, hatsune has inspired a dedicated and collaborative fanbase who write, produce, choreograph, consume, share and remix songs using her voice and design. fuelled by her fans’ creativity and support, hatsune has become a global icon, regularly headlining sell-out concerts, and appearing in advertisements, television shows, video games, soundtracks, books and magazines (black, 2012; sone, 2017). more recently, increasingly affordable animation software and motion-capture hardware have presented new opportunities for those interested in courting virtual idoldom. animating users’ (typically anime-inspired) appearance and movements, facilitating mobile recording and instantaneous broadcasting, these new tools have figure 4: media respond to reanimated hollywood celebrities advertising diet coke (1991); unveiled as photorealistic digital doubles (1998-1999); and later, delivering posthumous, holographic performances (2015). given rise to a rapidly expanding cohort of “vtubers” (virtual youtubers), who produce a variety of popular vlogs, collaboration, reaction, challenge and gameplay videos across platforms such as youtube, bilibili, niconico and twitch. the advantages of virtuality contrasting hatsune’s prolific career with prototypical virtual idols, japanese studies scholar daniel black (2012) posits that, to be successful, a virtual idol’s “digital translation of a [performer’s] body” must embrace the “new attributes particular to her digital format” (p. 219). if, for hatsune, this involved the networked creativity and participatory fandom of the mid-2000s web (sone, 2017), for virtual influencers, it is their embrace of the affordances and vernaculars of specific social media, and further, their adoption of strategies of social media microcelebrity (see marwick, 2018). in these efforts, however, compared to corporeal influencers, the immateriality of virtual influencers affords greater: • flexibility of characterisation, enabling differentiation from other influencers, and/or crafted relatability for specific audiences (figure 5); • plasticity of self-branding, enabling updates that reflect trending aesthetics, styles and/or audience feedback (figure 6); and • access to locations, products and collaborators otherwise restricted by availability, cost or practicability (figure 7). such qualities present an advantage for the “visibility labour” (abidin, 2016) involved in microcelebrity practice, presenting unique ways of maintaining a “noticeable and positively prominent” online presence (abidin, 2016, p. 90) requisite for successfully navigating social media’s hyper-competitive economies of attention and affection (see abidin, 2018). figure 5: @knoxfrost (2020, us) and @imma.gram (2021, japan) share their struggles with mental wellbeing, encouraging audience identification; alien @itsbinxie (2020, us) and pig-man @john_pork (2020, uk) stand out as extraordinary species. figure 6: @amanda_bims (2020, 2021, unknown) and @here_is_rae (2021, singapore) unveil their updated “looks” (left: old; right: new). figure 7: @liam_nikuro (2020, japan) attends a closed nba training during covid-19 lockdown; @noonoouri (2021, italy) spawns doubles for the #versacerunwaychallenge; @leyalovenature (2021, switzerland) models as a mermaid; and @realqaiqai (2020, us) dances with scooby doo. table 1: definitions of vocabulary related to virtual celebrity. term alternative terms definition examples synthespian virtual actor, vactor, artifactor abbreviation of "synthetic thespian," originating in the visual effects industry in the late 1980s. an actor made either in part or entirely using computer-generated graphics, typically in combination with motion or performance capture technology. jar jar binks in star wars: episode i the phantom menace (1999) aki ross in final fantasy: the spirits within (2001) gollum of the the lord of the rings trilogy (20012003) a collective term for humanoid or anthropomorphised creations made using digital technologies. may be dis/embodied, and expressed through text, voice, graphics, or a combination thereof. includes static and animated creations, as well as those powered by artificial intelligence or machine-learning. siri (2011—) lara croft of the tomb raider video game franchise (1996—) ananova (2000-2004) virtual idol バーチャルアイドル (bācharu aidoru) , 仮想アイドル (kasō aidoru) ficticious musical performers, originally appearing in anime and video games, though eventually describing characters created with digital technologies. virtual idols transcend a single media property, and are known to pursue musical careers, featuring vocals by voice artists or synthesizer software (see vocaloid ). kyoko date (1996-1997) diki (1999) yuki terai (1998-2002) virtual influencers cgi influencers, ai influencers, biodigital influencers, virtual endorsers, algorithmic online celebrities characters that exist on social media, with no singular referent in the offline world, designed and maintained for the purpose of promoting products, brands and/or messages. ranging in appearance from eerily humanoid to entirely fantastical, and made using animation and computer-generated effects of varying sophistication, quality and degrees of photorealism. @lilmiquela (2016—) @noonoouri (2018—) @fnmeka (2019—) vocaloid ボーカロイド (bōkaroido) popular animated characters created by crypton future media to represent the voice banks of yamaha's vocaloid synthesizer software. fans create, share and circulate user-generated content featuring the characters' voice and image, coauthoring their persona and collaborating on their celebrification. known for "live" performances using holographic displays. hatsune miku (2007—) kagamine len & rin (2007—) megurine luka (2009—) vtuber, virtual youtuber ブイチューバー (buichūbā) , バーチャルユーチューバー (bācharu yūchūbā) abbreviation of "virtual youtuber." a digital content creator whose actions and voice are expressed through an animated character. most commonly japanese speaking, with 2d or 3d anime -inspired designs, rigged for face and motion capture technologies. popular across several user-generated video and livestreaming platforms; not exclusive to youtube. ami yamato (2011—) kizuna ai (2016—) rin asobi (2018—) virtual beings works cited abidin, c. (2016). visibility labour: engaging with influencers’ fashion brands and #ootd advertorial campaigns on instagram. media international australia, 161(1), 86–100. abidin, c. (2018). internet celebrity: understanding fame online. emerald. black, d. (2012). the virtual idol: producing and consuming digital femininity. in p. w. galbraith & j. g. karlin (eds.), idols and celebrity in japanese media culture (pp. 209–228). palgrave macmillan. creed, b. (2000). the cyberstar: digital pleasures and the end of the unconscious. screen, 41(1), 79–86. karlin, j. g., & galbraith, p. w. (eds.). (2012). idols and celebrity in japanese media culture. palgrave macmillan. leaver, t. (2012). artificial culture: identity, technology, and bodies. routledge. leaver, t., highfield, t., & abidin, c. (2020). instagram: visual social media cultures. polity. marwick, a. e. (2018). the algorithmic celebrity: the future of internet fame and microcelebrity studies. in microcelebrity around the globe (pp. 161–169). emerald publishing limited. mori, m. (2012, june). the uncanny valley (k. f. macdorman & n. kageki, trans.). ieee robotics automation magazine, 19(2), 98–100. (original work published 1970) sone, y. (2017). japanese robot culture. palgrave macmillan us. posada-aoir2020-final.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 from development to deployment: for a comprehensive approach to ethics of ai and labour julian posada university of toronto in recent years, government and policy organizations, private companies, and research agencies have been discussing the potential disruption caused by the deployment of ai systems in working environments. ethics are fundamental to understanding the implications of technological development and its implementation, and to what extent it can serve workers. while ethics are a cornerstone in the achievement of positive outcomes, their lack of enforcement mechanisms makes their implementation challenging. existing principles and ethical frameworks focus exclusively on the deployment or applications of artificial intelligence in the workplace when considering the relationship between these technologies and human labour. however, none of these ethical principles address the forms of labour required to develop and maintain artificial intelligence systems. this paper presents the implications of both instances in which human labour is affected by—and influences—ai, since an understanding of both is necessary for a comprehensive discussion on the implications of ai and work. current concerns with ai and labour the contemporary landscape of narrow ai systems suggests that, while these technologies have incredible calculative potential and applications in a wide range of domains, they are nonetheless incapable of judgement (cantwell smith 2019). for this reason, the relationship between artificial intelligence and human agency at all levels remains fundamental, and the role of human labour should be considered in all stages of ai development and deployment. by development, this paper refers to the processes of creating, sustaining, and maintaining ai systems. by deployment, it refers to all applications of ai in the many instances of human labour. virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): posada, j. (2020, october). from development to deployment: for a comprehensive approach to ethics of ai and labour. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ai deployment there are several examples of how ai is actively transforming labour. recent studies on the impact of ai deployment in traditional workplaces raise several concerns that are, in many cases, discussed in the ethical record of ai systems. one of the most discussed concerns revolves around discrimination provoked by algorithms, since ai creates closed systems that lack external reviewing processes, target specific populations, and replicate the criteria of those accepted when looking for new participants (ajunwa and greene 2019). privacy is another major concern relating to ai deployment. the constant need for automated systems to collect data and quantify human behaviour promotes the commodification of privacy (moore and robinson 2016) thereby allowing it to be exchanged for employment opportunities (ajunwa, crawford, and schultz 2017). moreover, in cases where workers rely heavily on algorithmic guidance, the automated systems themselves become the managers, tracking and influencing the actions of workers without any accountability or transparency (mateescu and nguyen 2019). ai development regarding the implications of labour in the development of ai, crawford and joler demonstrate how the development of artificial intelligence relies heavily on different types of human labour and natural resources that span the entire planet. for the authors, the artificial intelligence system “becomes a complex structure of supply chains within supply chains, a zooming fractal of tens of thousands of suppliers, millions of kilometres of shipped materials and hundreds of thousands of workers included within the process even before the product is assembled on the line” (crawford and joler 2018). thus, by focusing so heavily on the deployment of ai systems and the “future of work,” the situation of artificial intelligence and labour in the present remains, in many cases, ignored. towards human rights-based ai labour principles as the total quantification of human and social experience remains a long-term dream, the labour of those required to develop ai – and those affected by its application – will remain central to the discussion of its ethics, governance, and policy. in this context, and because of the lack of enforcement of ethical principles of ai, many of these principles currently operate under the immense influence of corporate entities in their development (yeung et al. 2020). through the international labour organization, united nations has issued several conventions on human rights in working contexts relating to labour issues. these fundamental human rights on labour include the freedom of association and recognition of the right to collective bargaining, the elimination of forced labour, the abolition of child labour, discrimination, and equal remuneration (international labour organization 1998). as mentioned, there is still a long way to go in upholding these basic labour principles in the development and deployment of ai. for example, some platforms deliberately hinder collective bargaining by their workers (woodcock and graham 2020), and the application of artificial intelligence in worker recruitment reproduces biases towards particular minorities (ajunwa 2017). conclusion ethical principles are essential to the relationship between ai and human labour, but they need to become more comprehensive. principles alone cannot be enforced in social contexts and they should go hand in hand with clear governance procedures involving multiple parties and a clear oversight from international and national policies that aim to respect already established human rights. these actions cannot focus solely on the prospective “future of work” or exclusively on the deployment of artificial intelligence in the workplace. ai is here and it is already impacting the “present of work.” machines depend on humans to exist, and both entities are already complementing each other. ethics, governance, and policy will remain essential, as the question will not be if machines will be replacing humans, but who will own and have a say in the relationship between humans and machines. references ajunwa, ifeoma. 2017. “workplace wellness programs could be putting your health data at risk.” harvard business review digital articles 2–5. ajunwa, ifeoma, kate crawford, and jason schultz. 2017. “limitless worker surveillance.” california law review 105(3):735–76. ajunwa, ifeoma and daniel greene. 2019. “platforms at work: automated hiring platforms and other new intermediaries in the organization of work.” research in the sociology of work 33:61–91. cantwell smith, brian. 2019. the promise of artificial intelligence: reckoning and judgment. cambridge, ma: mit press. crawford, kate and vladan joler. 2018. anatomy of an ai system. new york, ny: ai now institute. international labour organization. 1998. ilo declaration on fundamental principles and rights and rights at work and its follow up. geneva: international labour organization. mateescu, alexandra and aiha nguyen. 2019. “algorithmic management in the workplace.” (february):1–16. moore, phoebe and andrew robinson. 2016. “the quantified self: what counts in the neoliberal workplace.” new media & society 18(11):2774–92. woodcock, jamie and mark graham. 2020. the gig economy: a critical introduction. london: polity press. yeung, karen, andrew howes, and ganna pogrebna. 2020. “ai governance by human rights-centred design, deliberation and oversight: an end to ethics washing.” in the oxford handbook of ai ethics. oxford: oxford university press. microsoft word submission.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): posada, j. (2021, october). disembeddedness in machine learning data work. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. disembeddedness in machine learning data work julian posada university of toronto machine learning algorithms rely on mathematical models that learn from massive amounts of data, or “training data,” to make automated decisions. this type of artificial intelligence has become widely used in the last decade due to an abundant data produced by increased internet connectivity (alpaydin, 2020) and pervasive data collection methods (zuboff, 2019). firms and research organizations require humans to annotate this training data to make it compatible with machine learning algorithms or calculation processes (gray & suri, 2019; posada, 2020). data workers worldwide train, verify, and even impersonate algorithms through digital labor platforms (tubaro et al., 2020). these platforms are “(re-)programmable digital infrastructures that facilitate and shape personalized interactions among end-users and complementors” (poell et al., 2019) and serve as marketplaces where labor is exchanged as a commodity. like in other gig economy platforms, firms that operate these marketplaces for machine learning development consider workers as “independent contractors,” paying them few cents per task, and denying them any recognition, rights, and social protections (prassl, 2018), while placing systems of surveillance and control (casilli, 2019). this paper draws from decolonial theory (mohamed et al., 2020), theories on social and economic embeddedness (tubaro, 2021; wood et al., 2019), and the political economy of platforms (casilli & posada, 2019; van dijck et al., 2019). it studies how latin american data workers are “embedded and enmeshed in institutions, economic and non-economic” (polanyi, 2001) and how this situation affects social reproduction from the perspective of social structures and institutions (bourdieu & passeron, 1970) as well as forms of gendered and embodied labor (bhattacharya, 2017; huws, 2020). the paper uses data collected through the study of four digital labor platforms specialized in machine learning development that employs latin american data workers. since there is little known about the composition of this invisibilized population, the platforms were studied by analyzing web traffic data, the companies’ documentation, and the instructions for data annotation and algorithmic verification. the data workers were reached through an online survey sent through the platforms and a series of in-depth 2 semi-structured interviews with platform workers and members of their social circles to identify their background, their experience with online work, the composition of their personal networks, and how their work interacts, intersects, and depends on their social connections. the data analysis suggests the continuation of long historical patterns of domination in how the platform labor market is configured from two levels. at the platform level, a geographical analysis of the web traffic from the platforms shows the continuation of a north-south divide in the distribution of work present in other forms of online work such as freelancing, where the demand for labor comes mainly from advanced economies and the supply from countries in the global south (graham et al., 2017). while historically most of the workers in the global south come from african and asian countries, in the case of data work for machine learning, there is more traffic coming from latin america and especially venezuela, a country currently experiencing a severe political and economic crisis, where most of the interviewed and surveyed workers come from. at the worker level, the analysis of the instructions and the workers’ interviews suggests that platforms’ algorithmic management constraints their judgment and their labor process. these intermediaries compel them to reproduce the categorization of datasets according to the ideological preferences of requesters, even if they do not always align with the worldviews of workers. the analysis of the data from the interviews also suggests that, despite the individualized and alienated nature of platform labor, workers are also embedded in networks of trust within households, online, and in local communities, that provide social and economic support the “disembedded” markets of data work, which is currently unconstrained by government regulations (tubaro, 2021; wood et al., 2019). thus, instead of enduring the problems of labor commodification alone, the support of workers’ social networks plays a vital role in their social and working experience. these findings show a continuation of exploitative supply chains in the current artificial intelligence market (posada et al., 2021), where wealthy companies and research institutions in advanced economies profit from the economic and political situation of developing countries to access disembedded labor. from the perspective of institutional and structural reproduction, the design of crowdsourcing platforms and their configuration of the labor process provides evidence of a continuation of indigenous knowledge suppression by those in power positions and the imposition of their worldviews to individuals from exploited communities (maldonado-torres, 2007). at the same time, from the perspective of embodied social reproduction, while experiencing high degrees of disembeddedness as “independent contractors,” data workers, mostly identifying as male, rely on the domestic, economic, and emotional support of their 3 families, friends, and communities to compensate for the social and economic risks of their primary source of income. the paper concludes that contemporary data work continues centuries-long exploitative relations that are detrimental for both the development of nations and communities in the global south and the plural and ethical development of machine learning systems. the data workers necessary for the training and verification of algorithms are not given opportunities to grow professionally and contribute to their local economies by placing them at the margins of the data supply chains for artificial intelligence. their voices and an improvement in their working conditions are necessary for ai to be truly able to serve the public good. references alpaydin, e. (2020). introduction to machine learning (4th ed.). mit press. bhattacharya, t. (ed.). (2017). social reproduction theory. remapping class, recentering oppresssion. pluto press. bourdieu, p., & passeron, j.-c. (1970). la reproduction. éléments pour une téorie du système d’enseignement. les éditions de minuit. casilli, a. a. (2019). en attendant les robots. éditions du seuil. casilli, a. a., & posada, j. (2019). the platformisation of labor and society. in m. graham & w. h. dutton (eds.), society and the internet (vol. 2). oxford university press. graham, m., hjorth, i., & lehdonvirta, v. (2017). digital labour and development: impacts of global digital labour platforms and the gig economy on worker livelihoods. transfer: european review of labour and research, 23(x), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/1024258916687250 gray, m. l., & suri, s. (2019). ghost work: how to stop silicon valley from building a new global underclass. houghton mifflin harcourt. huws, u. (2020). social reproduction in twenty-first century capitalism. socialist register. maldonado-torres, n. (2007). on the coloniality of being: contributions to the development of a concept. cultural studies, 21(2–3), 240–270. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162548 mohamed, s., png, m.-t., & isaac, w. (2020). decolonial ai: decolonial theory as sociotechnical foresight in artificial intelligence. philosophy & technology, 33(4), 659–684. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00405-8 poell, t., nieborg, d. b., & van dijck, j. (2019). platformisation. internet policy review, 8(4). https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.4.1425 polanyi, k. (2001). the great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time (2nd ed.). beacon press. posada, j. (2020). the future of work is here: toward a comprehensive approach to 4 artificial intelligence and labour. ethics in context ,56. https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10990 posada, j., weller, n., & wong, w. h. (2021). we haven’t gone paperless yet: why the printing press can help us understand data and ai. proceedings of the 2021 aaai/acm conference on ai, ethics, and society (aies ’21). prassl, j. (2018). humans as a service: the promise and perils of work in the gig economy. oxford university press. tubaro, p. (2021). disembedded or deeply embedded? a multi-level network analysis of online labour platforms. sociology. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038520986082 tubaro, p., casilli, a. a., & coville, m. (2020). the trainer, the verifier, the imitator: three ways in which human platform workers support artificial intelligence. big data & society, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720919776 van dijck, j., nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2019). reframing platform power. internet policy review, 8(2), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.2.1414 wood, a. j., graham, m., lehdonvirta, v., & hjorth, i. (2019). networked but commodified: the (dis)embeddedness of digital labour in the gig economy. sociology. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038519828906 zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. publicaffairs. aoir2020recuerosoaresvinhaszago.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): recuero, r., soares, f., vinhas, o., zago, g. (2020, october 28-31). disinformation campaigns on twitter during the brazilian 2018 presidential election. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. disinformation campaigns on twitter during the brazilian 2018 presidential election raquel recuero universidade federal de pelotas/universidade federal do rio grande do sul felipe soares universidade federal do rio grande do sul otávio vinhas universidade federal de pelotas gabriela zago university of oregon introduction the 2018 brazilian presidential election happened amidst several controversies, especially surrounding jair bolsonaro, the representative from the social liberal party (psl). filling his campaign with far-right views and polemic declarations about minorities and opponents, the candidate defeated the leftist fernando haddad from the worker’s party (pt). bolsonaro's campaign heavy use of social media was also connected to the spread of disinformation by his supporters (machado et al., 2018). in this context, our proposal focuses on discussing the results of a two years research that started in 2018 about disinformation in political conversations on twitter during the 2018 presidential campaign in brazil. based on a dataset of over 18 million tweets collected through social feed manager (prom, 2016) through several keywords, we tried, through multiple approaches, to answer the research question: what are the key characteristics of the disinformation campaigns aimed to influence the brazilian 2018 election through political conversations on twitter? to discuss this question, we conducted several studies to compare and analyze the data through content analysis, social network analysis and mixed methods analysis. in this proposal, we seek to present a compilation and a more general systematization of these results. in order to do this, we aligned our discussion virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 virtual event with three key aspects of the disinformation campaign: (a) content strategies; (b) legitimation strategies and (c) spread strategies. our goal is to present a case study and offer some insights about disinformation campaigns in latin america, which is currently an understudied context. this proposal is connected to the conference theme since disinformation has a strong effect on everyday life and often alienates and isolate people. theoretical background the impact of social media on political conversations and democracy has been a topic of interest among researchers all over the world. one of the key concerns underlined by tucker et al. (2018), for instance, is how social media may be driving political conversations towards polarization, and providing a perfect environment for disinformation to spread, undermining democracies. this concern is especially relevant to young democracies, such as brazil. democracy has always been linked to the quality of the debate and conversations that could lead to political engagement. in modern democracies, this participation is usually mediated by traditional mass media, which allows for communication between candidates and the public (maia, 2008). social media has changed this landscape by providing a new space for conversations and social interaction, one with different affordances such as anonymity and asynchronicity (papacharissi, 2004). the discussion about how social media influenced political engagement seems to have initially been positive, partially because political conversations on these platforms were expected to increase diversity and enrich the political debate (chadwick, 2009; stromer-galley, 2003). however, other studies started to show different results; some studies found that conversations on social media tend to cluster people with the same political views, potentially increasing homophily (gruzd & roy, 2014; bastos, mercea & baronchelli, 2017; soares, recuero & zago, 2019). greater polarization and homophily – rather than diversity of opinion – was found in these conversations. this may ultimately lead to less political engagement, an inferior quality to the political debate, and polarization of conversation. the spread of disinformation has been studied by several authors and through several perspectives. while some like to call it “fake news” (falis, 2009), others believe this is part of a broader phenomenon called “information disorder” (derakhshan & wardle, 2017). for derakhshan & wardle (2017) disinformation is based on content created to mislead, and it comprises fabricated information or misleading information, created through framing a fact through a false context, or creating a false connection between two facts. a disinformation campaign is, roughly, the coordinated spread of disinformation as a means to an end, to influence the public opinion through social media. disinformation campaigns are strongly connected to political propaganda, sometimes used as tools to promote political views (bastos & mercea, 2019). these campaigns often rely on trolls and botnets (ong & cabañes, 2018), political influencers and activists (soares, recuero & zago, 2018), hyperpartisan outlets (marwick & lewis, 2017), and other strategies to coordinate and legitimate the spread of biased and manipulated content. disinformation campaigns are problematic because they negatively influence conversations in the public sphere by misleading people (derakhshan & wardle, 2017). in brazil, these campaigns are especially effective because hyperpartisan outlets and alternative political pages have been increasing their visibility on social media (soares, recuero & zago, 2019; alves & albuquerque, 2019). in this context, few studies have attempted to organize the general characteristics of these campaigns, which is our goal in this proposal. methods for data collection, we used social feed manager (prom, 2016). social feed manager collected tweets during the presidential campaign (from august to october of 2018). we collected tweets based on the names of the front runner candidates, haddad (9,555,023 tweets) and bolsonaro (16,479,042 tweets). on these datasets, with over 20 million tweets, we identified and further explored the disinformation that circulated on the conversations. disinformation was classified based on fact-checking outlets and traditional media and similar pieces of the same misleading or false content were classified under the same category (for example, two tweets containing the same disinformation with different framing). we further analyzed more 2000 pieces of disinformation. we worked with multiple methods focusing on our three categories. for the content and legitimation strategies, we worked with discourse analysis (fairclough, 2001; van leeuwen & wodak, 1999) and content analysis (krippendorf, 2014); for the spread strategies we worked on with social network analysis (wasserman & faust, 1994) and content analysis. for the analysis of these datasets, we anonymized the tweets, keeping the identification only for public figures, such as the political actors. results our main results are: content strategies we found that the majority of the most successful disinformation campaigns were from the right-wing (which increased in time), associated with hyperpartisan outlets and they rely partially on truthful content rather than entirely fabricated information. these campaigns often attacked mainstream media using hyperpartisan outlets as alternative real news. these strategies combined may be used to create an environment of mistrust and help the spread of disinformation. we also found that the majority of this type of content focused on the demonization of the worker’s party and the left, as well as the electoral democratic system. this helped set a polarized context for the conversations, which seemed to be key for disinformation campaigns’ success (soares, recuero & zago, 2019). legitimation strategies disinformation campaigns often used links to hyperpartisan websites and retweets from authorities as to the main source of legitimation. the circulation of content for hyperpartisan outlets is associated with the increase of disinformation within the conversations. these campaigns also used other strategies, such as framing their stories as a duality between good and evil (mythopoesis, according to van leeuwen and wodak, 1999). these strategies connected to polarization seemed to increase disinformation circulation and decrease traditional news circulation. spread strategies the majority of disinformation campaigns i n our case study would to start in small botnets that retweet/mention each other (recuero & gruzd, 2019). they often also mention authorities and other users as a “phishing strategy” to gain visibility. however, it seems that legitimation by the authority was key for virality (soares, recuero & zago, 2018 and recuero, soares & zago, 2019). the content was also frequently framed as “urgent” or “bombastic” to encourage users to retweet it. finally, we found that the polarization and the circulation of hyperpartisan information also plays a key role, isolating clusters around the same political position creating a good environment for disinformation campaigns, as they offered “alternatives” to the “manipulation” of traditional outlets. references alves, m., albuquerque, a. (2019). perda da hegemonia da imprensa: a disputa pela visibilidade na eleição de 2018. lumina, 13(3), 5-27. bastos, m.; mercea, d. & baronchelli, a. 2017. the spatial dimension of online echo chambers. [physics.soc-ph]. arxiv:1709.05233v1. available at: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1709/1709.05233.pdf. bastos, m. t., mercea, d. (2019). the brexit botnet and user-generated hyperpartisan news. social science computer review, 37(1), 38–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439317734157 chadwick, a. 2009. ‘web 2.0: new challenges for the study of e-democracy in an era of informational exuberance’ i/s: a journal of law and policy for the information society 5 (1), pp. 9-41. derakhshan, h. wardle, c. (2017). information disorder: definitions. in proceedings of understanding and addressing the disinformation ecosystem. annemberg: university of pennsylvania, 5-12. figure 1 polarized cluster of conversation about bolsonaro and haddad. bolsonaro’s support cluster on the right. red nodes represent hyperpartisan outlets and black nodes, traditional media outlets. fairclough, n. (2001). discurso e mudança social. brasília: editora unb. gruzd, a. roy, j. 2014. investigating political polarization on twitter: a canadian perspective. policy and internet, 6, 1, 28-45. krippendorf, k. 2014. content analysis. an introduction to its methodology (3rd ed). california, ca sage publications. machado, c. kira, b. hirsch, g. marchal, n. kollanyi, b. howard, p.. lederer, t. barash, v. (2018). news and political information consumption in brazil: mapping the first round of the 2018 brazilian presidential election on twitter. data memo 2018.4. oxford, uk: project on computational propaganda. maia, r. c. m. 2008. visibilidade midiática e deliberação pública. in: gomes, w. maia, r. c. m. comunicação e democracia: problemas & perspectivas. são paulo: paulus, 117162. marwick, a. & lewis, r. (2017). media, manipulation and disinformation online. report available at: https://datasociety.net/pubs/oh/dataandsociety_mediamanipulationanddisinformationo nline.pdf ong, j.c., & cabanes, j.v. (2018). architects of networked disinformation: behind the scenes of troll accounts and fake news production in the philippines. doi: 10.7275/2cq4-5396. papacharissi, z. 2004. democracy online: civility, politeness, and the democratic potential of online political discussion groups. new media & society, 6(2), 259–283. doi:10.1177/1461444804041444. prom, c. (2016). social feed manager. george washington university libraries. zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.597278. recuero, r. & gruzd, a. 2019. cascatas de fake news políticas: um estudo de caso no twitter. galáxia (são paulo) n.41, pp.31-47. epub may 23. doi: 10.1590/198225542019239035. stromer-galley, j. 2003. diversity of political conversation on the internet: users' perspectives, journal of computer-mediated communication, volume 8, issue 3, 1 april 2003, jcmc836, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2003.tb00215.x. soares, f. b. recuero, r. & zago, g. 2018. influencers in polarized political networks on twitter. in proceedings of the international conference on social media & society, copenhagen, denmark (smsociety). doi: 10.1145/3217804.3217909. soares, f. b., recuero, r. zago, g. 2019. asymmetric polarization on twitter and the 2018 brazilian presidential elections. in proceedings of the 10th international conference on social media & society, toronto, canada (smsociety). doi: 10.1145/3328529.3328546. tucker, j. a., guess, a. barbera, p. vaccari, c. siegel, a. sanovich, s. stukal, d. nyhan, b. 2018. social media, political polarization, and political disinformation: a review of the scientific literature. available at ssrn: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3144139 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3144139. van leeuwen, t. wodak, r. (1999). legitimizing immigration control: a discoursehistorical analysis. discourse studies, 1(1), 83–118. doi: 10.1177/1461445699001001005. wasserman, s., and faust, k. 1994. social network analysis. cambridge: cambridge university press. please update your browser your browser isn’t supported anymore. update it to get the best youtube experience and our latest features. learn more microsoft edge google chrome mozilla firefox safari opera remind me later about copyright contact us terms privacy policy & safety © 2025 google llc microsoft word heemsbergen-commercial and research clustering of augmented reality-commercial and research clustering of.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 heemsbergen, l., cadman, s. (2021, october). discourses and divides of augmented reality apps and applications . paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. augmented reality discourses and divides: apps and applications luke heemsbergen deakin university sam cadman deakin university introduction although the majority of augmented reality (ar) scholarship is based in computer science disciplines, it is nevertheless important to consider emergent trends in ar discourses as research and development shifts from technology labs to media markets. while technical understandings of ar are necessary, they are insufficient to understand how networked spatial computing is augmenting everyday life. the dearth of systematic knowledge on ar's role in shaping and being shaped in society arrests our ability to steer ar's social impact (liao 2019) in response, this paper maps and compares two specific ar discourses for nodes of power and authority. first, it systematically reviews how ar research citations are shifting from science and technical foci to applied uses of ar via a systematic scientometric review. that work allows, among other insights, consideration of the extent disciplinary boundaries shaped how ar is understood and innovated. second is contrasting these evolving patterns with current consumer exposure to ar via a critical technocultural discourse analysis (ctda) of the presentation of phone-based ar apps available on the ios app store and google play. comparative discussion of these inquiries adds to understandings of how ar is conceptualised in research and commercial discourses, and how these data might inform future research and practice in the socialisation of ar systems, media, and experience. the paper is novel in how it critically maps the properties and dynamics of an evolving set of digital networked media at the advent of their interface with society. we define ar as media that create digital relations in the physical world (heemsbergen et al. 2020; schraffenberger 2018; raja & calvo 2017). more than just layering over physical reality with virtual information (cf azuma 1997), ar helps us perceive and act in ways that were previously unavailable. this paper lays groundwork to map shifts in patterns of research that are shaping ar technology and media on the one hand, and the current commercial discourses of ar products that users experience on the other. existing literature the interdisciplinary work required emerges from two tracks. the first is reviewing retrospective histories of ar research (see kim et al. 2018) via mixed methods to make science and technology relationships visible in new ways. cipresso et al. (2018; p15) use web of science (wos) data up to 2016 to track the evolution of networks and cluster in ar research, stressing that as hardware becomes commodified (i.e. scalable to market) concerns are shifting to interaction potentials measured through a clinical phase of ar research. we extend and revise their approach to the present. while methods of systematic scientometric review are useful to map the scope of ar research, they do not by their large n alone, account for critical questions that surround ar research and its applications in media-technologies (see liao 2019; katell et al. 2019). extant critical-normative research helps frame our inquiry from implied privacy concerns of specific prototypes (applin and flick 2021) to consideration of ar as media infrastructures (saker, 2019), and larger epistemological and ontological critique of ar (ariso, 2017). inspired by these critiques, we seek to contextualise up-to-date wos data clusters of research activity to critical-normative concerns. we note while that a growing cluster of marketing research examines how consumers react to ar usage (harborth 2019) it does not consider how users come to adopt ar apps in the first place (see gera et al. 2020). our response to this second lacuna is to gather data on how ar apps are being presented to consumers via a ctda. the combination of these approaches synthesizes new knowledge between how experts are positioning ar’s evolving use cases and how consumers are being told ar media technologies fit in society. methods we synthesise methods of visualisation of fields of research citation analysis (chen and song 2019) as pioneered in vr and ar by cipresso et al. (2018), with a ctda (brock 2018) of how these fields transcribe to user-accessible products found in app stores. for the former we utilised citespace to map web of science ar research (n:12,328) up to 2020 in a systematic scientometric analysis of networks and clusters themes via loglikelihood ratio (llr) labelling. these visual patterns are themselves are made more sensible by analysis of their dca cluster summaries (n: 23) which more acutely map language, intentions, and boundaries of each cluster (see figure 1 and table 1). our use of ctda focusses its multimodal data capture (in april 2021) and critical thematic analysis on the top 20 apps returned via search of “ar” on both google and apple’s app stores. this second portion of the paper is ongoing due to lockdowns (3) and natural disasters (1) in the authors’ home state. preliminary findings our findings are evolving (data captured, analysis ongoing) but our extant work suggests that ar research continues to move further from foundational clusters of technical science towards new forms of applied social sciences (ie. education, social acceptance). further, the citation clusters present clear disciplinary divides in how ar is imagined and applied by researchers to society, even as clusters bleed into each other. figure 1 notably, the patterns in cluster (figure 1, table 1) seem at odds with initial popular cultural-commercial interpretations of ar that pervade app stores. the paper’s analysis details ways to make sense of these divides of discourse and consider their effects in the accelerating socialisation of ar. table 1 references applin, s. a., & flick, c. (2021). facebook's project aria indicates problems for responsible innovation when broadly deploying ar and other pervasive technology in the commons. journal of responsible technology. ariso, j. m. (2017). augmented reality. berlin: de gruyter. chen, c., & song, m. (2019). visualizing a field of research: a methodology of systematic scientometric reviews. plos one, 14(10). azuma, r. t. (1997). a survey of augmented reality. presence: teleoperators & virtual environments, 6(4), 355-385. chen, c., & song, m. (2019). visualizing a field of research: a methodology of systematic scientometric reviews. plos one, 14(10), e0223994. harborth, d. (2019). unfolding concerns about augmented reality technologies: a qualitative analysis of user perceptions. gera, r., chadha, p., & ahuja, v. (2020). mobile app usage and adoption: a literature review. international journal of electronic business, 15(2), 160-195. katell, m., dechesne, f., koops, b.-j., & meessen, p. (2019). seeing the whole picture: visualising socio-spatial power through augmented reality. law, innovation and technology, 11(2), 279-310. kim, k., billinghurst, m., bruder, g., duh, h. b.-l., & welch, g. f. (2018). revisiting trends in augmented reality research: a review of the 2nd decade of ismar (2008– 2017). ieee transactions on visualization and computer graphics, 24(11), 2947-2962. liao, t. (2019). future directions for mobile augmented reality research: understanding relationships between augmented reality users, nonusers, content, devices, and industry. mobile media & communication, 7(1), 131-149. https://doi.org/10.1177/2050157918792438 saker, m., & frith, j. (2019). from hybrid space to dislocated space: mobile virtual reality and a third stage of mobile media theory. new media & society, 21(1), 214-228. schraffenberger, h. k. (2018). arguably augmented reality: relationships between the virtual and the real. raja, v., & calvo, p. (2017). augmented reality: an ecological blend. cognitive systems research, 42, 58-72. microsoft word yang-(in)dependency on the hegemonic to be heard-(in)dependency on the hegemonic to be heard.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): yang, f. (2021, october). (in)dependent on the hegemony to be heard: study chinese ethnic media in australia through a postcolonial approach. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. (in)dependent on the hegemony to be heard: study chinese ethnic media in australia through a postcolonial approach fan yang deakin university introduction studies have argued that ethnic media in the western multicultural societies provide spaces for ethnic communities that are frequently under-represented or misrepresented in the dominant media discourse (hardt, 1998; ojo, 2006; budarick, 2019). with an emphasis on the advocacy role of ethnic media, this strand of research often situates ethnic media in an antagonistic position with the dominant english media or the socalled ‘mainstream’ society defined by the hegemonic power. this argument may have considered ‘ethnic media’ and ‘alternative media’ as synonymous genres. to be ethnic does not mean to be against the hegemonic. this paper addresses the relations between ethnic media and the dominant society in australia by exploring the chinese ethnic media industry in australia. chinese ethnic media in this research are characterised by the chinese-language legacy or digital media developed by chinese migrant entrepreneurs in australia. they play a critical role in keeping chinese diasporic communities informed about the australian society. the analysis of this paper is conceptually informed by postcolonial approaches to migration studies. based on the 27 interviews with australian-chinese media professionals, i argue that chinese ethnic media perform an advocacy role for the chinese diaspora with financial independence; however, they are dependent on and aspire to be part of australia’s hegemonic postcolonial structure to be heard. interethnic racism is thus reproduced by chinese ethnic media and chinese ethnic media are perceived as inferior to the dominant english media. postcolonialism and migration studies there have been empirical studies understanding immigration through the postcolonial framework. this strand of work has gone beyond the cultural aspect and the transformations in identities by exploring the socio-structural forces that shape migrant daily experiences. these studies involve the postcolonial structuration of race and ethnicity (keskinen and andreassen 2017; mcilwaine 2008), systemic inequality structured by race and identity to normalise structural inequality (czaika 2013), and the politically discursive otherisation of migrants in the country of destination (koh 2015). instead of understanding migrants’ experiences as peculiar contemporary phenomena, these studies trace long-standing and deep-seated colonialism that has been reproduced and extended to contemporary postcolonial societies and thus has shaped different migration experiences across the geographical borders (mains et al., 2013). using postcolonialism to address ethnic media is one of the first attempts. independent of the hegemony: autonomy and advocacy the news consumption need of chinese migrants and advocacy are the two main interlinked reasons propelling chinese migrant entrepreneurs to establish their media business. migrants’ news needs cannot be satisfied by either the media in china or in australia. this argument suggests that migrants’ news consumption demands correlated with their identities are more complicated than the binarism of here/there could encapsulate. participants affirm that immigrants from china want to open themselves to a different informational sphere. however, this does not indicate that chinese migrants show uncritical satisfaction towards the content provided by australian dominant media. although some of the australian dominant media platforms provide multilingual channels to cater to cultural and linguistic diversity communities, the political and ideological divide between china and australia foregrounds how china or chinese people are (mis)represented in australian national or local media. this geopolitical divide hinders chinese migrants from consuming news from australian media. the financial independence situates chinese ethnic media in a counter-hegemonic position when it comes to the misrepresentation of chinese people by australian media. ethnic affairs are yet to feature significantly in the existing news-making process operated by mainstream media (husband 2005). the media landscape in australia defines the idea of ‘public interest’ through the lens of the dominant social groups while excluding the need of ethnic minorities. non-hegemonic media have been struggling to engage in the dominant political cultures (budarick 2018: 2407). chinese ethnic media provide opportunities for the chinese diaspora to have their voices presented and circulated within the communities. in this way, news translation is not just limited to making news linguistically friendly to chinese readers but to rearticulate chinese migrant issues within its own communities. dependent on the hegemony to be heard chinese ethnic media are attached to australian media without being completely independent. translating news stories from australia is structurally influenced by australia as an immigrant-receiving country and australia’s multiculturalism with a cultural assimilation approach. this integration-driven multiculturalism left by australia’s postcolonial legacy impels chinese ethnic media to an uncritical dependence on australia’s hegemonic media. this dependence leads to profound social implications. firstly, the lack of critical thinking on race represented by australian media leads towards the transmission of inter-ethnic racism from australian dominant media among chinese ethnic media. secondly, chinese ethnic media imitate australian dominant media to be part of australia’s mainstream media system to be recognised by the hegemonic society. the discussion of ‘race’ with chinese-australian media professionals presents an opposing side of the image of chinese ethnic media’s advocacy role. the interviews inform that chinese media professionals do not extend much solidarity towards other immigrants of colour or indigenous people when it comes to australian media’s misrepresentation of race. in light of the discussion of ‘race’ or ‘racism’, media professionals demonstrate two main stances—misunderstanding and/or ignorance. racism is thus stretched from australian dominant media to chinese ethnic media and is rendered in the form of inter-ethnic racism against black people (martin 2018). with the accumulated resources to support independent reporting, being part of australia’s mainstream media system motivates some influential chinese ethnic media to apply their access to australia’s press gallery. here comes the dilemma. chinese ethnic media are excluded from australian dominant media due to the systemic closure— australian dominant media’s refusal of endorsing chinese ethnic media to join the press gallery or providing constructive suggestions for ethnic media’s self-growth. on the other, chinese ethnic media aspire to imitate australian english media to be recognised by the mainstream society which is institutionally designed to exclude such a nonenglish media genre. references budarick, j. (2019) ethnic media and democracy: from liberalism to agonism. cham: palgrave macmillan. czaika m (2013) ‘are unequal societies more migratory?’ comparative migration studies, 1(1): 97-122. hardt, h. (1989) “the foreign language press in american press history: an essay review.” journal of communication 39(2): 114-31. husband c (2005) ‘minority ethnic media as communities of practice: professionalism and identity politics in interaction’, journal of ethnic and migration studies, 31(3): 461-479. keskinen s and andreassen r (2017) ‘developing theoretical perspectives on racialisation and migration,’ nordic journal of migration research, 7(2): 64-69. koh sy (2015) ‘postcolonial approaches to migration in asia: reflections and projections’, geography compass, 9(8): 432-444. mains sp, gilmartin m, cullen d, mohammad r, tolia-kelly dp, raghuram p and winders j (2013) ‘postcolonial migrations,’ social & cultural geography, 14(2): 131-144. martin f (2018) ‘iphones and “african gangs”: everyday racism and ethno-transnational media in melbourne’s chinese student world’, ethnic & racial studies, 43(5): 892-910. mcilwaine c (2008) ‘the postcolonial practices of international migration: latin american migration to london.’ the leverhulme trust, queen mary university of london. ojo, t. (2006) “ethnic print media in the multicultural nation of canada: a case study of the black newspaper in montreal.” journalism 7(3): 343-361. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): lastname, firstinitial. (2021, october). paper (or panel) title. paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. effects of physical distance and social closeness in virtual reality and text on spatial distance estimation author #1 andrea stevenson won, phd author #1 cornell university author #2 byungdoo kim, phd author #2 cornell university introduction the covid-19 pandemic has imbued the phrases “social distancing” and “physical distancing” with new meaning. however, researchers have long been aware that in both face-to-face interactions and in computer-mediated communication, individuals are influenced by collaborators’ spatial proximity (kraut, fussell, brennan & siegel, 2002; peña, walther & hancock, 2007). decades ago, cairncross (1997) proposed that mediated communication would be the “death of distance,” allowing collaboration to occur independently of spatial proximity. however, most social media connections are still with people who are physically nearby (bailey, cao, kuchler, stroebel & wong, 2018). social media connections often arise from pre-existing relationships (whether recent or historical), but can also begin virtually. as interactions with others arising initially through social media become more common, we ask, how do virtual interactions with a person who is far away affect other perceptions about the world? in this paper, we use two types of computer-mediated communication (text and virtual reality) to investigate how physical distance and social closeness may interact with proximity to affect perceptions of distant locations, following won, shriram and tamir (2017). while distance remains a salient cue, communicating through media can change perceptions of others, including perceived social closeness (andrade, 2014). perceptions of social closeness can then in turn change people’s perceptions of spatial proximity. in a three-study paper, won et al. (2017) demonstrated an effect of social closeness on distance perception, such that participants texting with conversational partners whom they believed to be located in a distant city estimated smaller distances to that city the more social closeness they reported. the authors initially explained this andrea stevenson won, phd cornell university byungdoo kim, phd cornell university selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): won, a.s., and kim, b., (2021, october) effects of physical distance and social closeness in virtual reality and text on spatial distance estimation. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http:// spir.aoir.org. effect with construal theory, but in their discussion proposed an alternative theory— motivated perception. these different theories have different implications for how mediated social connections affect perceptions of the larger world. construal theory suggests that psychological distance is conflated across a number of dimensions (trope & liberman, 2010). when people feel socially close to their conversational partners, they might extend this association to other kinds of distance, for example, underestimating the physical distance to the location of their conversational partner. however, motivated perception could also explain this effect. the more of an approach orientation a person has towards their conversational partner, the closer they may estimate them to be (balcetis, 2016). one way to better understand why this phenomenon occurs is to examine what happens when two people converse who are co-located. if people are simply underestimating distances to locations associated with their conversational partner, then distances to the discussed locations should decrease regardless of where the conversational partners are located. but, if people are mentally shrinking the distance between themselves and their conversational partners, then this effect should not appear when the two people are already in the same location; but only when they are separated. thus, we hypothesized that the effect of social distance on the estimated spatial distance to the target city will depend on the presumed location of the conversational partner. we also investigated whether manipulating social presence by using a rich medium such as virtual reality versus texting would change the relationship between social distance, conversational partner location, and estimated physical distance participants. methods to address these questions, we conducted a between-subjects experiment. participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions, crossing two factors. the factor of location depended on whether the participant believed their conversational partner was located in an adjacent room (“near” condition) or in another state (“far” condition). the factor of medium depended on whether participants were communicating using textbased chat (“text”) or wearing headsets, holding hand controllers, and interacting as avatars in an immersive virtual reality environment (“vr”). eighty-three participants signed informed consent and were told by the researcher that they would be chatting with another student, either in virtual reality or by text. depending on the assigned condition, the researcher either described the other student as enrolled at a collaborating university in twin falls, idaho and connecting remotely (far condition), or enrolled in summer school at the same university and seated in the lab room next door (near condition). in fact, all participants spoke with a research assistant confederate, who was located either next door, or in another part of the building. participants in the vr conditions conversed using a networked virtual reality platform which allowed users to interact using avatars whose movements followed the tracked movements of the users’ heads and hands. participants in the text conditions used google hangout (hangouts.google.com) to communicate. racs in the near condition described twin falls as their home town. racs in the far condition described twin falls similarly, and mentioned that was the city they were currently located in. after the interaction, participants filled out a survey rating their sense of social closeness with their conversational partner, as well as their distance estimates to the cities discussed. results and conclusion our hypothesis was supported: the effect of social closeness on the estimated distance to the target city depended on whether conversational partners are co-located or far away. we found a statistically significant interaction between social distance and the location of the conversational partner (p < .004). social closeness with a “far” conversational partner who was located in the target city discussed correlated negatively with estimated distances to the target city. when partners were co-located, the correlation was positive—the more social closeness participants reported with colocated partners, the larger distance they estimated to the target city. this partially supports the explanation of motivated perception—participants who liked their conversational partner wished they were closer. however, the increased distance estimated by participants who were in the same location as their conversational partner remains to be explained. are participants less motivated to engage with the wider world when their social needs are met? references andrade, a. d. (2014). from physical co-location to perceived co-presence: “i feel close to you when i use my mobile”. pacific asia journal of the association for information systems, 6(1), 2. doi: 10.17705/1pais.06101 bailey, m., cao, r., kuchler, t., stroebel, j., & wong, a. (2018). social connectedness: measurement, determinants, and effects. journal of economic perspectives, 32(3), 259-80. doi: 10.1257/jep.32.3.259 balcetis, e. (2016). approach and avoidance as organizing structures for motivated distance perception. emotion review, 8(2), 115-128. doi: 10.1177/1754073915586225 cairncross, f. (1997). the death of distance: how the communications revolution will change our lives. boston, ma: harvard business school press. isbn: 0-875848060 kraut, r. e., fussell, s. r., brennan, s. e., & siegel, j. (2002). understanding effects of proximity on collaboration: implications for technologies to support remote collaborative work. distributed work, 137-162. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2464.003.0010 peña, j., walther, j. b., & hancock, j. t. (2007). effects of geographic distribution on dominance perceptions in computer-mediated groups. communication research, 34(3), 313-331. doi: 10.1177/0093650207300431 the r project for statistical computing. (n.d.). retrieved september 24, 2018, from https://www.r-project.org/ trope, y., & liberman, n. (2010). construal-level theory of psychological distance. psychological review, 117(2), 440. doi: 10.1037/a0018963 won, a. s., shriram, k., & tamir, d. i. (2017). social distance increases perceived physical distance. social psychological and personality science, 9(3), 372-380. doi: 10.1177/194855061770701 aoir 2020 panel spir.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 panel proposal the biometric lives of migrants: borders, discrimination and (in)justice panel organisers: lina dencik (cardiff university) and mirca madianou (goldsmiths, university of london) panel participants: claudia aradau kings college london lina dencik cardiff university mirca madianou goldsmiths, university of london philippa metcalfe cardiff university sarah perret king’s college london linnet taylor tilburg university panel rationale biometrics, the technology for measuring, analysing and processing a person’s physiological characteristics, such as their fingerprints, iris or facial patterns, is increasingly used in the management of migrant and refugee flows. in the post 9/11 context migration has become securitized: migrants are reduced to a security threat while borders are increasingly armed with technological apparatuses in order to ‘detect virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): dencik, l., madianou, m., aradau, c., metcalfe, p., perret, s., taylor , l., (2020, october). the biometric lives of migrants: borders, discrimination and (in)justice. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 2 anomalies’ and screen unwanted others (aradau & blanke, 2017). the panel interrogates the uses of biometric technologies and the consequences for the lives of migrants and refugees. how are biometric data constituted and what are their limitations and biases? do biometric technologies challenge traditional notions of the physical border and what are the implications for the surveillance of and intervention on marginalized groups? who benefits from the extraction of biometric data, including ‘digital identity’ programmes for refugees? to what extent can migrants and refugees navigate this complex assemblage of power? the panel addresses the above questions by bringing together a multidisciplinary group of international experts in order to develop a critical, comparative and empirically grounded dialogue on the consequences of biometrics for the lives of migrants and refugees. the intersection of biometrics and migration is an interdisciplinary area of research. the panel combines approaches which are often kept separate in this urgent area of inquiry: science and technology studies, critical border and security studies, critical algorithm studies, political theory, colonial and decolonial theory and political economy. empirically, the papers include case studies from europe (european asylum support office, eurodac and iborder), the middle east (za’atari refugee camp in jordan) and asia (rohingya response in bangladesh and id2020 programme in thailand). we begin our conversation by interrogating what constitutes biometric data. the first paper examines the ontology of biometric data. just like statistics created different categories which people came to fit (what ian hacking calls ‘making up people’), biometric technologies ‘make up data’. the authors argue that migrants’ digital and analogue traces combine and recombine to produce ‘border inscriptions’ which also enact migrants as subjects who cannot refuse data extraction. the second paper further explores the ways in which biometrics construct the border and enable interventions beyond the actual physical boundaries. biometrics reworks traditional notions of the border as a material entity. as the digital border takes on functions of governance, the paper draws on extensive ethnographic research with refugees and asylum-seekers in greece and the uk as well as immigration and border control officers, civil servants, immigration lawyers and ngos and observes the ways in which biometric data collection is legitimized. the third paper turns our attention to the design of the technological apparatus of migration systems, which reproduce and amplify disempowerment. the processing of immigration claims through systems of algorithmic decision-making, which have well-known biases, further compounds existing inequalities among already marginalized groups. the consequences of biometric bias are further explored in the fourth paper, which shifts the focus to the applications of biometric technologies in refugee camps. the author argues that biometric technologies – as part of wider technological and socio-political assemblages – reproduce and rework colonial legacies. this happens through the ways that biometrics codify discrimination by privileging whiteness, the streamlining of extraction of data for surveillance or profit, the experimentation with untested technologies in fragile environments and the lack of any meaningful consent in these processes. even the seemingly empowering digital identity experiments do not have clear, tangible benefits for refugees whilst they depoliticise displacement by proposing technical solutions to what is a political problem. 3 a number of themes run across the four contributions: the production and reworking of borders and processes of bordering (papers 1-3), the extractive logics of biometric flows (papers 1 & 4), the commercial dimension of biometric infrastructures (2, 3 & 4), the limitations of algorithmic sorting (3 & 4), the consequences of discrimination and exclusion (3, 4), the lack of meaningful consent in refugee registrations (1, 3, 4) and the agency of migrants in the face of structural limitations (2, 4). ultimately, all papers are concerned with the broader intersection of data, computation and justice. the panel addresses the conference theme ‘life’ in a number of ways: biometrics are produced through artificial neural networks which employ machine learning algorithms in order to process large datasets and learn to imitate the function of the human brain, for example by recognizing one iris from another. our panel explores the consequences of this ‘machinic life’ for the lives of actual people, migrants and refugees who navigate actual and digital borders in the quest of a better life. reference aradau, c. & blanke, t. (2017). governing others: anomaly and the algorithmic subject of security. european journal of international security, 3(1), 1–21. doi:10.1017/eis.2017.14 making up data: from migrant traces to border inscriptions1 claudia aradau king’s college london sarah perret king’s college london governing european borders has been underpinned by the increased collection and processing of data. from the establishment of the schengen information system (sis), the visa information system (vis) and the european asylum dactyloscopy database (eurodac), data has been mobilised for the categorisation and social sorting of people and things on the move. recent european commission proposals on setting up new databases and creating interoperability between new and existing databases have been underpinned by fears of ‘information slipping through the net’ and the limits of ‘fragmented and complex databases’ (european commission 2019). if the interoperability priority of eu justice and home affairs has been articulated in the name of the fight against terrorism, ‘irregular migrants’ have become its primary object and target of intensified data extraction and processing (european commission 2016). 1 this paper is part of ongoing work in the security flows project, which received funding from the european research council (erc) (grant agreement no 819213). 4 critical border and security scholars have offered nuanced analyses of the effects of the increased collection of biometric data, particularly the shift from reactive to preemptive practices, the proliferation of risk profiling for ‘social sorting’, and the assumption of infallibility of data (amoore 2006, bigo 2010, broeders 2007, kuster and tsianos 2016, metcalfe and dencik 2019, piazza, 2008). however, there has been less attention to how data is produced by various actors, devices and institutions, and what comes to ‘count’ as data. as rocco bellanova and gloria gonzález fuster have pointed out, these accounts of how data is used to govern populations assume data ‘as a given, an instrumental entity that just makes the work of those who govern easier, and that facilitates exchange and cooperation among security actors’ (bellanova and fuster 2019, 350). in this paper, we propose to supplement the historical ontology of ‘making up people’ (hacking 2004, 5) by ‘making up data’ (see also aradau and blanke 2015). ‘making up people’ was coined by the philosopher ian hacking to render the ways in which statistics created different types of categories and people came to fit these categories. ‘making up data’ investigates the ways in which different materialities come to count as data and what is discounted in these operations. to this purpose, we develop a conceptual distinction between digital ‘traces’ and ‘inscriptions.’ while digital traces are increasingly extracted from the bodies of migrants through fingerprinting, screening, facial recognition, or interviews, these traces are processed, combined and recombined to become border inscriptions. it is through these digital ‘scriptural’ operations (denis 2018, 82) and compositions that migrant traces gain particular social and political relevance as border inscriptions. the paper advances an understanding of how data is made for the purposes of border governance by mapping operations that transform migrant traces into border inscriptions. as latour and woolgar have famously shown, once ‘an inscription is available, all the intermediary steps that made its production possible are forgotten’ (1979, 63). while digital traces and footprints have been increasingly used as synonyms for data in the digital world, we argue that reducing data to traces risks obscuring the heterogenous ways in which traces are combined, hierarchised and recombined to produce credible inscriptions. empirically, we analyse the practices of the european asylum support office (easo) in collecting information and assessing it to assign responsibility for the processing of applications for international protection under the dublin iii regulation. since 2010, easo has been at the forefront of data collection from asylum seekers and irregular migrants and it manages the eurodac database, which contains the fingerprints of asylum seekers and other migrants apprehended crossing eu border irregularly or residing irregularly in one of the eu member states. easo has developed tools for managing the allocation of asylum seekers under the dublin iii rules, it coordinates training on migrants’ interviews and investigation, collects and shares information and data about asylum seekers with national and other eu agencies. we analyse the ‘practical tools’ and software that easo has developed in the implementation of the dublin iii regulation and the common european asylum system, as well as through additional interviews with easo staff. 5 based on this analysis, we make a three-pronged argument. firstly, while many scholars point to the shift towards datafication and digital traces in border governance, our analysis sheds light on the intricate compositions of different forms of traces – biometrics, documents, population registers, stamps, interviews – in the production of border inscriptions. border inscriptions emerge not only out of the collection and processing of digital traces, but also out of entanglements with documents and other paper traces to produce credible inscriptions. what is at stake is not the replacement of the analogue by the digital, or the ‘low-tech’ by the ‘high-tech’, but variegated modes of composing migrant traces. secondly, these entanglements give rise to sustained asymmetries between different traces, as they hierarchise them according to an epistemology of credibility. traces produced through instruments need to be composed with signed documents, recorded interviews or registers issued and maintained by different local or national authorities. other traces – such as information circulating among refugees – are discounted as lacking credibility. finally, we show that border inscriptions are often difficult to decompose, thus rendering responsibility and accountability untraceable. references amoore, l (2006) biometric borders: governing mobilities in the war on terror. political geography vol. 25 (3):336-351. aradau, c, and blanke, t (2015) the (big) data-security assemblage: knowledge and critique. big data & society vol. 2 (2):1-12. doi: 10.1177/2053951715609066. bellanova, r, and gonzález fuster, g (2019) composting and computing: on digital security compositions. european journal of international security vol. 4 (3):345365. doi: 10.1017/eis.2019.18. bigo, d (2010) freedom and speed in enlarged borderzones. in the contested politics of mobility: borderzones and irregularity, edited by squire, vicki, 31-50. london: routledge. broeders, d (2007) the new digital borders of europe: eu databases and the surveillance of irregular migrants. international sociology vol. 22 (1):71-92. denis, j (2018) le travail invisible des données. paris: presse des mines. european commission (2016) commission launches discussion on future framework for stronger and smarter information systems for border management and internal security 2016 [cited 27 february 2020], available from https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_16_1248. european commission (2019) security union. closing the information gap 2019 [cited 21 february 2020]. hacking, i (2004) historical ontology. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. kuster, b, and tsianos, vs (2016) how to liquefy a body on the move: eurodac and the making of the european digital border. in eu borders and shifting internal security: technology, externalization and accountability, edited by bossong, raphael and carrapico, helena, 45-63. cham: springer international publishing. latour, b, and woolgar, s (1979) laboratory life: the construction of scientific facts. london: sage. metcalfe, p, and dencik, l (2019) the politics of big borders: data (in)justice and the governance of refugees. first monday vol. 24 (4). doi: 10.5210/fm.v24i4.9934. 6 piazza, p, (2008) ‘la biométrie : usages policiers et fantasmes technologiques’, in muchielli, l. (ed.), la frénésie sécuritaire. retour à l’ordre et nouveau contrôle social. paris: la découverte. from identification to recognition: biometrics, asylum and the self lina dencik cardiff university, uk philippa metcalfe cardiff university, uk the collection of biometric data is now an integral part of contemporary border regimes, used in europe and beyond to identify individuals, track movements of populations, and provide humanitarian aid (sánchez-monedero 2018). today’s ‘iborder’ (pötzsch 2015) is simultaneously dispersed and impenetrable, made up of a complex network of interoperable databases that connects a range of state and non-state actors. information systems such as the visa information system (vis), the schengen information system (sis), and the european asylum dactyloscopy database (eurodac) operate to control the border crossing traffic, migration and asylum applications. for instance, eurodac provides a centralized database of fingerprints to implement regulations for migrants and asylum seekers, determining their legal status and conditioning their rights (ferraris 2017; tsianos & kuster 2012). electronic passports, facial recognition technologies and other biometric information make up the advent of so-called ‘smart borders’ that have become the hallmarks of eu-funded research and development projects in recent years (cannataci 2016). at the same time, the humanitarian sector is rapidly organizing itself around a ‘biometric assemblage’ (madianou 2019) that encompasses the data of a huge proportion of the world’s displaced populations. iris scans and fingerprinting amongst refugees have become common techniques for not only registration, but as a condition for receiving aid across several different contexts (the engine room and oxfam 2018). yet whilst we are able to trace these developments, we know little about how they are transforming understandings, perceptions and experiences of the border. important work has highlighted the limitations of using biometric data and the challenges of inferring characteristics and behaviours from such data, particularly across diverse and complex populations (ajana 2013; sánchez-monedero and dencik 2019). this has pointed to questions of ‘accuracy’ and ‘fairness’ as some groups are likely to be disproportionally harmed by such border systems (amoore 2006). however, framing the politics of data in these terms, focusing on the nature of data-driven systems themselves, risks ignoring the more fundamental ways in which politics is enacted through biometrical border regimes. as these technologies are optimized for efficiency and control, gradually displacing (public) infrastructure, we need to situate their advancement in relation to their operational imperatives and environmental impacts (andrejevic 2019; kulynych et al. 2020). that is, we need to examine the way such 7 technologies take on functions of governance, ordering the terms of migration and conditioning the lives of displaced populations, shaping their own personal narratives and sense of the self. as a way to engage with this question, this paper explores the understandings, perceptions and experiences of biometric data collection, particularly in relation to refugee populations or those seeking asylum in europe. it draws on extensive ethnographic research carried out working with refugees and asylum-seekers in greece and the uk as part of a multi-year project dedicated to exploring the social justice implications of data-driven systems in europe.2 this includes a large volume of interviews with different actors, including immigration and border control officers, civil servants, immigration lawyers, ngos, and migrants. in particular, the paper investigates how biometric data collection is legitimized through different frames of justification at various nodes of the ‘iborder’ as a way to enact governance. framed simultaneously as a technique of securitization of the state (‘fortress europe’) and of the human subject (rights), biometric data collection appears as a polysemic practice that is increasingly shaping the ‘environmentality’ (foucault 2008; andrejevic 2019) of migration. border controls become biometrically dependent, as do freedoms and basic survival. we see this, for example, in the way that biometric data collection is used for preemptive filtering of ‘black-listed’ or ‘dangerous’ travellers (broeders and hampshire 2013) and facilitates the tracking of movement to and within europe through both the vis and eurodac databases. the attachment of biometric data to an individual identity serves to control applications for visas and asylum claims respectively. more recently, we have seen biometric data used to assess ‘bona-fide’ and ‘non-bona-fide’ travellers through an analysis of potential ‘deception’ as proposed by the eu-funded iborderctrl system piloted in greece, hungary and latvia (sánchez-monedero and dencik 2019). that is, security-by-data is exercised through a process of identification, an alien artifact acting in the stead of an individual premised on an assessment of potential risk to european borders. at the same time, the collection of biometric data for the asylum process is also a way to gain access to rights, an avenue to potential safety and gateway to inclusion. such discourse of legitimisation is furthered in the humanitarian sector, where biometric data collection in refugee camps across parts of africa, asia and the middle east is used for registration as a way to ensure access to basic needs such as immediate relief from degrading treatment and the receiving of aid. in this sense, security-by-data is exercised through a process of recognition, a technical proxy for fundamental human rights premised on an assessment of potential need of an individual. yet as our research shows, in legitimizing biometric data as the primary definer of identification and recognition, borders become embodied in significant ways that enact both operational and disciplinary power overwhelmingly carried by displaced populations who are forced to navigate an increasingly dispersed border regime with their own bodies and identities. we see this in ambivalent actions and decisions 2 datajustice (erc starting grant no. 759903) 8 amongst migrants, who sometimes chose to forego access to basic needs in favour of withholding their data. for example, in greece interactions with any official state bureaucracy was championed as a way to regain autonomy over further movement across europe, effectively limiting the support and access to basic rights whilst waiting to move onwards. or in the uk, where dealings with health care services were avoided by those with insecure immigration status as a way to sidestep data sharing as part of the ‘hostile environment’. in this sense, infrastructures of biometrics need to be understood not just as displacing borders, but in doing so, terms of justice. references ajana, b. (2013). asylum, identity management and biometric control. journal of refugee studies vol. 26(4), 576-595 amoore, l. (2006) biometric borders: governing mobilities in the war on terror. political geography, 25, 36-351 andrejevic (2019) automated media, routledge broeders, d. and hampshire, j. (2013) dreaming of seamless borders: icts and the pre-emptive governance of mobility in europe, journal of ethnic and migration studies, 39(8), 1201-1218 foucault, m. (2008) the birth of biopolitics. palgrave madianou, m. (2019). the biometric assemblage: surveillance, experimentation, profit, and the measuring of refugee bodies. television and new media volume: 20 (6), 581599 pötzsch, h. (2015). the emergence of iborder: bordering bodies, networks, and machines. environment and planning d: society and space, 33(1), 101–118. sánchez-monedero, j. (2018) the datafication of borders and management of refugees. working paper. datajustice project sánchez-monedero, j. & dencik, l. (2019) the politics of deceptive borders: ‘biomarkers of deceit’ and the case of iborderctrl. available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.09156 the engine room and oxfam. (2018). biometrics in the humanitarian sector. this report is available at https://theengineroom.org. tsianos, v., & kuster, b. (2012). thematic report ‘border crossings’ (no. wp4; mig@net, transnational digital networks, migration and gender). mig@net project. http://www.mignetproject.eu/?p=577 9 the probability of having rights: remote sensing, migration and doubt linnet taylor tilburg university direct registration of migrants through biometrics or civil registration data is now complemented through multiple interacting modes of datafied monitoring and control. under the eu’s 2018 ‘big data for migration’ policy and us border policies, a marketplace has been created for vendor-driven migration monitoring and statistics (mijente et al., 2019; taylor & meissner, 2020), based on complementary measures of migration control. in this public-private system, migrants are pre-emptively tracked by technical contractors on a project basis using social media posts, mobile phone location records, satellite and drone feeds, as well as at the points where they interact directly with authorities and are fingerprinted, photographed or recorded. this entire system, although governed in different ways across the public-private divide, forms an increasingly integrated assemblage designed to give a 360-degree real-time account of migrants’ activities and behaviour. this assemblage of surveillance and control technologies, although presented as the new apparatus of migration control, is inherently probabilistic, and thus open to challenge as a reliable way to identify people whose right to asylum or to free movement may be at stake. this component of doubt has not been identified as a problem for policymaking or execution, perhaps because (im)migration policy in highincome countries is made and executed according to a mixture of entrepreneurial and national-security logics, where being guilty until proven innocent is the norm, rather than the logics of administrative-law and bureaucratic decision-making where migration is constitutionally situated and which demand a more solid basis for excluding or punishing individuals. this paper will explore the ways in which the data economy facilitates a probabilistic approach to migration data and decision-making, and what this means for the subjects of this decision-making. some examples of probabilistic approaches in this domain include the following: • biometric identification: even under controlled conditions, biometrics and algorithmic modes of identification such as facial recognition are usually calibrated to different confidence levels depending on the security and policy implications of the decisions being made. when passport control is suffering delays in processing incoming or outgoing travellers, for example, border enforcement agencies will often set the system to a lower level of accuracy in order to process people faster and avoid congestion. • remote sensing: in contrast, remote identification through sensing data such as new vendor-driven projects which mix satellite and drone images with mobile phone location data and social media postings, is usually done with a high 10 tolerance for inaccuracy (taylor & meissner 2019), something which has been acknowledged by policymakers (eu, 2018). • conflicting data: in cases where immigrants and asylum applicants may share a last name or identifying characteristics, the legal system penalises asylumseekers according to the attributes of others (bosque, del, 2019) and has no standards or procedures for automatically triggering a disambiguation process under the presumption of innocence. these instances suggest that if we theorise the use of biometrics as a tool of governmentality we should do so in relation to other technologies and applications, namely data analytics performed on other forms of immutable digital traces such as location and movement patterns and social network attributes. there are various theoretical tools we can use to delineate the connections between these applications: one central strand is that articulated by amoore (2019: 1) when she calls for ‘a posthuman mode of doubt that decentres the liberal humanist subject’ and instead focuses on what takes place at the intersection of machine and human judgement. this call is complemented by aradau and blanke’s argument (2017:376) that ‘the techniques of governmentality are techniques of prediction inasmuch as they problematize and aim to shape the ‘not-yet’ of action.’ this scholarship on doubt and prediction helps articulate the very concrete problems of migration and justice, where migrants exist as a subaltern legal subject who appears in datasets that have life-changing implications for them, without any rights over the data’s collection, use or verifiability. those who are subject to probabilistic decision-making in the migration domain are usually those who are already excluded from the possibility of claiming their rights in their country of origin. the use of remote data analytics and algorithmic decision-making in relation to their immigration claims adds another layer of injustice to a bureaucratic system already based on assumptions of exclusion. migration data systems (re)produce and amplify disempowerment by imposing probabilistic analysis on an already complex administrative process that requires human judgement in order to make any claim to relevant and informed, let alone just, decision-making. this paper will bring together the theories on post-cartesian doubt cited above with the notion of the disciplinary database (johnson, 2014) to illuminate an analysis of the technical problems of interacting remotely sourced datasets and the administrative challenge of decision-making on real-time human problems under conditions of uncertainty. it will analyse how the disciplinary and exclusionary aims that inform the design of the technological apparatus of (im)migration systems interact with analytical instances of statistical and narrative doubt to produce both systematically biased outcomes and built-in resilience of those systems against claims for redress. my analysis will bring together analyses of biometrics as a doubtful and probabilistic set of technologies with perspectives on rights in relation to migration, focusing particularly on how such technologies violate ‘the right to have rights’ (arendt, 1979) and on the implications for rights-based approaches to problems such as family separation and the increasing infringement of the right to asylum in the eu. references: 11 amoore, l. (2019). doubt and the algorithm: on the partial accounts of machine learning. theory, culture & society, 36(6), 147–169. aradau, c., & blanke, t. (2017). politics of prediction: security and the time/space of governmentality in the age of big data. european journal of social theory, 20(3), 373– 391. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431016667623 arendt, h. (1979). the origins of totalitarianism (new ed. with added prefaces). harcourt brace jovanovich. bosque, del, m. del. (2019, august 13). the case that made an ex-ice attorney realize the government was relying on false “evidence” against migrants [text/html]. propublica. https://www.propublica.org/article/laura-pena-gang-database-the-case-thatmade-an-ex-ice-attorney-realize-the-government-was-relying-on-false-evidenceagainst-migrants eu. (2018, june 15). big data for migration alliance—bd4m [text]. eu science hub european commission. https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/event/workshop/big-data-migrationalliance-bd4m johnson, j. a. (2014). from open data to information justice. ethics and information technology, 16(4), 263–274. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-014-9351-8 mijente, national immigration project, & immigrant defense project. (2019). who’s behind ice? the tech and data companies fueling deportations. mijente. https://www.immigrantdefenseproject.org/whos-behind-ice-the-tech-companies-fuelingdeportation/ taylor, l., & meissner, f. (2020). a crisis of opportunity: market-making, big data, and the consolidation of migration as risk. antipode, 52(1), 270–290. enacting ‘colonial presence’: from biometric registrations to digital identity for refugees mirca madianou goldsmiths, university of london in june 2019 the united nation’s world food programme (wfp) temporarily suspended the distribution of food aid in yemen as houthi leaders, representing one of the sides involved in the protracted civil war, opposed the use of biometric data in aid delivery. the wfp, which insisted on biometric registrations as part of efforts to address low-level fraud in aid operations, was much criticized for its decision to deny food to one of the world’s most vulnerable populations. this episode received much attention not least because it revealed in stark terms the lack of meaningful consent in the biometric registrations of humanitarian subjects. rather than being the exception, the yemen example confirms the pervasiveness of biometrics in the humanitarian industry, especially in the management of displaced people. the united nations high commissioner for refugees (unhcr) aims to have recorded all refugee data in one single database, called primes, by 2020 which reveals that biometric registrations are not only normalized, but have become an administrative target that needs to be met. 12 biometrics are not just used to register refugees and authenticate those entitled to aid distributions; they are also integral in the increasingly popular ‘digital identity’ programmes for refugees which are hailed as empowering for providing stateless people with a form of legal identity. biometric technologies are here understood within a longer lineage of practices of enumeration and control that are part of colonial legacies. drawing on colonial (stoler, 2016) and decolonial (quijano, 2000) theory, i argue for the tenacity of colonial genealogies and inequalities. quijano’s notion of the ‘coloniality of power’ is useful for explaining how the subjugation of the colonized continued well after the independence of postcolonial states as a result of the dominance of eurocentric systems of knowledge, the codification of social and racial discrimination and the exploitation associated with global capitalism (quijano, 2000). for stoler, contemporary global inequalities such as migration are ‘reworkings […] of colonial histories’ which she theorises as colonial presence (2016, p. 5). migration and displacement can often be traced to colonial pasts (hegde, 2016). most crucially, the racial subjugation of migrants and refugees helps to preserve colonial orders and the ‘coloniality of power’ (de genova, 2016; quijano, 2000). humanitarianism itself, despite being taken for granted as an expression of ‘a supposed natural humaneness’ (fassin, 2012), has historical roots in colonial expansion and the parallel awareness of otherness and suffering (lester and dussart, 2014). the structural asymmetry between donors, humanitarian officers and aid recipients reproduces the unequal social orders which shaped colonialism and empire. in the paper i argue that biometrics, as part of an assemblage of technological and socio-political developments, is a crucial tool in sustaining the racial subjugation of migrants and refugees and, ultimately, the ‘coloniality of power’. i draw here on the concept of ‘technocolonialism’ which i have developed to theorise the convergence of digital technology with humanitarian structures and market forces and the ways it reworks and revitalises colonial legacies (madianou, 2019). biometric technology is steeped in colonial relations. the birth of biometrics can be traced back to the british empire when fingerprinting was introduced to identify and control colonial subjects in india (pugliese, 2010). contemporary biometrics involves digital technology and machine learning while they often combine with novel developments such as blockchain. despite the assumption that technological developments have enhanced the reliability of biometrics, there is evidence that biometric data codify existing forms of discrimination (browne, 2015; magnet, 2011). biometric technologies ‘privilege whiteness’ (browne, 2015) with significantly higher margins of error when measuring, or verifying ‘othered bodies’ whether in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, class, disability or age (magnet, 2011). yet despite concerns around bias, the biometric registration of refugees continues apace. after reviewing the reasons behind the pervasiveness of humanitarian biometrics, the paper will examine three examples: the biometric registration of the rohingya people undertaken by unhcr and the government of bangladesh; the wfp’s building blocks programme in the za’atari refugee camp in jordan and the digital identity id2020 programme. 13 by privileging whiteness, biometric technology codifies discrimination, thus inscribing the coloniality of power. yet biometrics is presented as objective and scientific and therefore beyond doubt. algorithmic sorting and automation are far from infallible, of course; algorithms make errors that entrench existing biases. at the same time, any errors are hard to trace and contest. when biometrics is used to screen aid recipients, this doesn’t just entail a probability of error; automation also reduces the moral agency of humanitarian workers. algorithmic sorting separates actors from their consequences. the replicability of biometric datasets exacerbates data sharing practices with nation states. while data sharing with host nations has always taken place (as humanitarian agencies operate at the invitation of nation states), the nature of digital datasets streamline sharing and accentuate the potential risk of ‘function creep’ – the use of data for reasons different to those for which they were originally collected. apart from states, sharing also takes place with private companies, in their role as humanitarian partners, donors or contractors (eg, private vendors conducting biometric registrations) in what is an increasingly privatized space. we observe processes of biometric data extraction whether for private profit, or for securitization, but not for the benefit of refugees themselves. even in digital identity projects when refugees are imagined as empowered subjects with ‘digital wallets’ there is little evidence of direct benefit to displaced people themselves. in fact, digital identity initiatives, despite their ambitious claims of ‘financial empowerment’ and ‘sovereign identity’, show little evidence of success. but even when they fail, digital identity initiatives still succeed in producing social orders. digital identity programmes, which are often funded by large technology companies, are very successful in generating ‘hype’ around new technologies such as blockchain. experimentation with new technologies among vulnerable populations echoes the medical experiments that took place under colonial regimes, where ‘failure was outsourced to the global periphery’ (jacobsen, 2015, 31). by turning the political issue of statelessness into a problem with a technical solution, digital identity programmes depoliticize forced displacement whilst advancing a business agenda. at the same time, the neoliberal discourse of financial empowerment occludes the colonial lineages of such practices (stoler, 2016). the lack of meaningful consent in refugee biometric registrations further compounds some of the above inequalities. it is not possible to refuse biometric data collection as that would amount to refusing aid when no other options of livelihood are available. ultimately, biometric practices reconfirm the hierarchy between aid providers and refugees – and in so doing reaffirm that, structurally, contemporary versions of humanitarianism are not dissimilar to their colonial counterparts. references browne, s. (2015). dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. durham, nc.: duke university press. 14 de genova, n. (2016). the european question: migration, race and postcoloniality in europe. social text 34(3), 75-102. fassin, d. (2012). humanitarian reason: a moral history of the present. berkeley, ca.: university of california press. hegde, r. (2016). mediating migration. cambridge, uk: polity jacobsen, k. l. (2015). the politics of humanitarian technology: good intentions, unintended consequences and insecurity. london: routledge. lester, a., & dussart, f. (2014). colonization and the origins of humanitarian governance. cambridge: cambridge university press. madianou, m. (2019). technocolonialism: digital innovation and data practices in the humanitarian response to refugee crises. social media and society, vol. 5(3) https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119863146 magnet, s. a. (2011). when biometrics fail: gender race and the technology of identity. durham, nc.: duke university press. quijano, a. (2000). coloniality of power and eurocentrism in latin america. international sociology, 15(2), 215-232 pugliese, j. (2010). biometrics: bodies, technologies, biopolitics. london: routldege. stoler, a, l. (2016). duress: imperial durabilities in our times. durham, nc and london, uk: duke university press. microsoft word cross-sorry, but-sorry, but.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): cross, k. a., hoffmann, a. l. (2021, october). sorry, but...: platform apologies, abuse, and constructing the culpable subject. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. sorry, but...: platform apologies, abuse, and constructing the culpable subject katherine alejandra cross university of washington, school of information anna lauren hoffmann university of washington, school of information introduction apologies have become a prominent feature of online platforms’ corporate communications. whether in response to instances of harassment, security lapses, or political manipulation, official expressions of remorse or regret—often coupled with vows to “do better”—work to reconcile or recover a platform’s commitments in the face of public relations, economic, or regulatory pressure. despite their prominence, however, apologies have received comparably less critical attention in research on harassment and abuse than other corporate responses, for example changes to moderation policies (e.g., gibson, 2019; for an exception, see: hall, 2020). in this work, we offer an analysis of three high-profile apologies: former reddit ceo ellen pao’s july 2015 apology for missteps in addressing the site’s abusive climate; riot games’ 2018 apology for hostility and sexual harassment at the company; and twitch’s june 2020 apology in response to allegations that some streamers had engaged in offline sexual harassment. throughout our analysis, we pay particular attention to how apologies 1) construct and reproduce particular platform ideals and actors and 2) distribute or assign culpability for harassment and abuse. background online platforms are central to discussions of harassment and abuse, often accused of facilitating it, failing to do enough to stop it, or unevenly enforcing their terms of service. in the face of these and other controversies, public apologies and expressions of remorse by online platforms and their representatives—what we call “platform apologies”—have become a staple of technology company communications. for online platforms, public apologies seek to address and reconcile instances of harm or violence that threaten (or, worse, reveal as empty) the values, ideals, and commitments through which a platform constructs and maintains its credibility—for instance, with users, investors, or regulators. in this way, apologies constitute a “discursive performance” (gillespie, 2019, p. 45-47) that reproduces a given platform’s ideals after encounters with the messy and sometimes violent social realities of its production and use. notable examples include twitter ex-ceo dic costolo’s leaked 2015 admission that “we suck at dealing abuse” (tiku & newton, 2015) and facebook ceo mark zuckerberg’s “many mea culpas” (proferes, 2018). such routine corporate apologies have become so ubiquitous that they have fueled an entire genre of satire centered on “fauxpologies” (nguyen, 2019). more than hollow rhetoric, however, platform apologies are central to the construction of platforms’ social and political legitimacy. as feminist theorist sara ahmed (2014) has shown, apologies and attendant expressions of shame, regret, or remorse are integral to the reproduction of cultural ideals and social hierarchies. by exhibiting remorse, dominant subjects—from individuals to the state—can perversely convert the failure to live up to an ideal into a successful realization of that ideal. for example, platforms that inflict or enable harm are often able to convert failure (i.e., harm) into success by expressing remorse; after all, one could not be remorseful unless one was committed to not inflicting harm in the first place. by apologizing, “a subject can demonstrate they are ideal subjects”—that is, a subject that holds the ideals that necessitated an apology (ahmed, 2014, p. 109). method whereas research in rhetoric has focused on the structure of corporate/official apologies generally (e.g., scher & darley, 1997; villadsen, 2008), we use discourse analysis (johnstone, 2008) for its attention to language in context and, in particular, its role in constructing social actors and cultural values, defining their relationships, and assigning responsibility. by narrowing our analysis to three statements, we are able to account for each one in context; practically, it allows for richer description of the context and dynamics of the events that both precipitated and followed each apology. preliminary findings as with official and corporate apologies broadly, platform apologies set normative expectations; they “tell us what to avoid and what to strive for" (villadsen, 2008, p. 3334). they reflect “shared values” that the platform, employees, and users are either expected to have, or is under pressure to reinforce—whether from government, activists, or users. though a full discussion is outside the scope of an extended abstract, two early thematic findings are worth mentioning: empowerment and individual responsibility. invariably, platforms turn to the language of individual empowerment and control to convey these values, as when riot games expressed a desire to make community members “feel safe and empowered to raise issues” or when pao introduced new tools to give reddit mods more control over site policies. despite the appeal to shared values, the language of empowerment often constructs culpability in uneven ways. for example, the onus for fixing hostile communities is subtly but significantly displaced onto the end user, naming them as the agents who are best-situated to employ the tools given to them by the platform (as with new tools for reporting issues). thus, a field of action is created that heavily weights the additive acts of monadic individuals rather than the multiplicative power of moderators, employees, users, or actors in context. in this way, companies that build and maintain online platforms use apologies to reassert an order of responsibility that subtly offloads their own—or, as kimberly hall (2020) describes, apologies function as “a way to recapture [narrative] control” (p. 1) by converting incidents of controversy or harm into successful reproductions of ideals of individual responsibility. conclusion in prescribing action, these apologies offer rhetorical insight into the ways platforms and their purveyors conceive of, arrange, and assign responsibility to different actors and features of a site, including (but not limited to) different kinds of users, designers and developers, and technical features of a platform. accordingly, platform apologies can be read as contact points with reality that reveal something crucial about both platforms’ cultural functions and the values they claim to hold—annular rings in the ongoing development of platforms as they navigate threats to their legitimacy and social, political, or economic position. a discourse analysis approach exposes the individualism at the heart of these apologies—a close fit with a broader neoliberal vision of corporate governance that takes individual empowerment and responsibility as an axiomatic solution to collective and distributed social problems. references ahmed, s. (2014). the cultural politics of emotion. edinburgh, uk: edinburgh university press. gibson, a. (2019). free speech and safe spaces: how moderation policies shape online discussion spaces. social media + society, 5(1), 1-15. gillespie, t. (2019). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. new haven, ct: yale university press. hall, k. (2020). public penitence: facebook and the performance of apology. social media + society, 6(2), 1-10. johnstone, b. (2008). discourse analysis (2nd ed.). oxford, uk: blackwell. nguyen, t. (2019, november 14). why are brands so bad at apologizing? vox. proferes, n. (2018, march 22). the many mea culpas of mark zuckerberg. slate. https://slate.com/technology/2018/03/mark-zuckerbergs-long-history-of-meaculpas.html scher, s.j., darley, j.m. (1997). how effective are the things people say to apologize? effects of the realization of the apology speech act. journal of psycholinguistic research, 26, 127–140. tiku, n. & newton, c. (2015, february 4). twitter ceo: 'we suck at dealing with abuse'. the verge. https://www.theverge.com/2015/2/4/7982099/twitter-ceo-sent-memotaking-personal-responsibility-for-the villadsen, l. s. (2008). speaking on behalf of others: rhetorical agency and epideictic functions in official apologies. rhetoric society quarterly, 38(1), 25-45. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 decoupling as rhetorical strategy in google’s green discourse rianne riemens radboud university, the netherlands framing the climate crisis this paper analyzes the role of tech companies in public debates on the climate crisis. more specifically, it examines google’s corporate environmental discourse (2019-2021) in relation to the ecomodernist movement and its ecomodernist manifesto (asafu-adjaye et al., 2015). recent debates on the climate crisis have made the immense energy use of digital platforms an uncomfortable truth for the tech companies that own them. tech companies have therefore taken a more explicit position as actors in the ‘fight’ against the climate crisis. by foregrounding technological innovation as a necessity to deal with the climate crisis, they approach it as the ultimate business opportunity (taffel, 2018). i will answer the question: how does google frame the relation between technology and nature in its ‘tech-on-climate’ discourse? in discourses that frame the climate crisis as business opportunity, the notion of decoupling plays a central role. in an ecomodernist manifesto, “decoupling humankind’s material needs from nature” is presented as the way to solve the climate crisis (asafuadjaye et al., 2015, p. 26). similarly, google uses the term decoupling in its 2020 environmental report stating its mission to “decouple our business growth from the growth of material use and carbon intensity” (p. 12). decoupling thus signifies a separation 1 between human and natural wellbeing, but i argue that it also represents a rhetorical framing strategy in which positive connections between technology and nature are highlighted and uneasy connections obscured. in this paper, i argue that decoupling is used by google to positively narrativize the relation between nature, technology and humanity. platforms as hungry machines this analysis situates itself in the critical study of the platform society (van dijck, poell & de waal, 2018). platforms exist of separate online services that are interconnected and form part of a larger, continuously expanding platform ecosystem that shapes societies. the dominant economic model of this ecosystem is platform capitalism, in which value is mainly created by monetizing new services and extracting and selling user data (srnicek, 2017). a small number of platforms play a key role in this ecosystem, that bratton refers to as ‘the stack’: a layered megastructure that functions as !a new architecture for how we see https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2020-environmental-report.pdf 1 decoupling as rhetorical strategy in google’s green discourse suggested citation (apa): riemens, r., (2021, october). decoupling as rhetorical strategy in google’s green discourse. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. divide up the world into sovereign spaces” (2015, p. xviii). despite its connotation to virtuality, this megastructure is “a hungry machine” that relies on an earth layer to fuel it with energy and raw materials (bratton, 2015, p. 82). couldry and mejias (2019) refer to these extractive practices as"!data colonialism,” to highlight the continuation as well as expansion of historical processes of appropriation and exploitation. regarding the climate crisis, tech companies propose solutions that present a greener, better version of capitalism and simultaneously provide moral legitimacy to their business model (goldstein, 2018). my hypothesis is that google’s statement to ‘decouple’ material impact from the wellbeing of the planet is a way to legitimate its business. however, as taffel (2018, p. 177) argues, tech discourses show an “alarming gap between rhetoric and material reality” and fail “to acknowledge scarcities that constrain the immaterialist fantasy of abundance”. similarly, crist (2015) critiques the vague conceptualization of nature in the manifesto and the term decoupling as it obscures an unequal power dynamic of domination over nonhuman life. because it is unlikely that decoupling is a feasible strategy to deal with the climate crisis (parrique et al., 2019) and diverts attention from the potentials of degrowth (d’alisa et al., 2015), it requires careful scrutiny. methodology while goldstein (2018) has already observed the ecomodernist tendencies in green entrepreneurship, the environmental approach of platforms is scarcely studied. i will perform an analysis of a selection of google’s publications: two recent sustainability reports (2019, 2020) , a video on google's sustainability mission (2020) , the online data 2 3 center photo gallery and the online tool ‘your plan, your planet’ . the approach is a 4 5 combination of a visual (photos, icons, graphics, lay-out) and textual analysis (titles, main text, captions) (greenwood et al., 2019). while presented as objective reports, these texts are political documents, designed to create a positive, emotional response among readers (david, 2001). a rhetorical analysis therefore helps to understand how google’s texts create a certain cultural myth of green innovation. my study of the rhetorical strategy of decoupling builds on goldstein’s (2018) use of the rhetorical trope divisio. this trope helps to separate favored views from opposing or undesired views, allowing for example to strategically balance the wish to save the planet and the wish to create a fortune. i add that decoupling, as example of divisio, reflects the rhetoric function of visuals and text to direct the connections readers make, in this case between google and the climate crisis (greenwood et al., 2019). decoupling as strategy is visible in how romanticized images of unspoiled nature and solar and wind farms, positive figures and claims to save the planet create a positive, curated image of google’s business and its relation to nature, while negative consequences remain largely invisible and environmental responsibility is only partially acknowledged. the strategy of decoupling helps google to construct the attractive, ecomodernist narrative in which a love for nature goes hand in hand with economic growth. conclusion this paper presents an analysis of how the rhetorical strategy of decoupling is used in google’s discourse to create a narrative of green growth as the only logical way for see https://sustainability.google/reports/ 2 google’s third decade of climate change, 19 nov 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?3 v=snpas3aytqw&t=23s&ab_ see https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/ 4 see https://yourplanyourplanet.sustainability.google/ 5 humanity to move forward. while technological developments might help to decrease the global use of raw materials and fossil fuels, it is important to critically study what promises of independency are made. through decoupling, google is able to present its wish to save ‘nature’ without discussing its use of nature, thus legitimating green platform capitalism. while the narrative of green growth might be attractive, it conflicts with resolutions that centralize degrowth as answer to the climate crisis. references asafu-adjaye, j., et al. (2015). an ecomodernist manifesto. retrieved from http:// www.ecomodernism.org/manifesto-english. bratton, b. h. (2015). the stack: on software and sovereignty. cambridge: the mit press. couldry, n., & mejias, u. a. (2019). the costs of connection: how data is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism. stanford: stanford university press. crist, e. (2015). the reaches of freedom: a response to an ecomodernist manifesto. environmental humanities, 7, 245-254. d’alisa, g., demaria, f., & kallis, g. (2015). degrowth: a vocabulary for a new era. new york: routledge. david, c. (2001). mythmaking in annual reports. journal of business and technical communication, 15(2), 195-222. goldstein, j. (2018). planetary improvement: cleantech entrepreneurship and the contradictions of green capitalism. cambridge: the mit press. greenwood, m., jack, g., & haylock, b. (2019). toward a methodology for analyzing visual rhetoric in corporate reports. organizational research methods, 22(3), 798-827. parrique, t., et al. (2019). decoupling debunked. evidence and arguments against green growth as a sole strategy for sustainability. brussels: european environment bureau. srnicek, n. (2017). platform capitalism. cambridge: polity. taffel, s. (2018). hopeful extinctions? tesla, technological solutionism and the anthropocene. culture unbound, 10(2), 163-184. van dijck, j., poell, t., & de waal, m. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford: oxford university press. please update your browser your browser isn’t supported anymore. update it to get the best youtube experience and our latest features. learn more opera microsoft edge google chrome mozilla firefox safari remind me later about copyright contact us terms privacy policy & safety © 2025 google llc microsoft word baasanjav-mongolia's independent internet-mongolia's independent internet.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): baasanjav, u. (2021, october). mongolia’s independent internet?. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. mongolia’s independent internet? undrah baasanjav southern illinois university edwardsville introduction aoir 2021 conference theme “independence” of the internet provides an opportunity to reevaluate internet development in the global south by applying theories of “informational capitalism” (castells, 2000; schiller, 2000) and “surveillance capitalism” (suboff, 2019) and by bringing in the empirical research of the last 25 years. in 1996, the first gateway to the internet was established in mongolia with the support of the “butter fund” of 200,000 american dollars, which sold tons of butter donated by the u.s. agriculture department. then the american ambassador donald c. johnson said: “mongolia has a way of communicating with the outside world that does not involve relaying information through its two large neighbors, china and russia” (corcoran, 1996). the internet, mobile phones and other information and communication technology (ict) are often seen as modernizing agents inevitably bringing benefits to developing countries. by employing theories of information society and digital capitalism, i pose the following questions: • how does informational capitalism interact with the mongolian nomadic culture and the communist past? and • what are some benefits and pitfalls of the development of communication technology, the internet, and social media in mongolia? and • what legal challenges does the mongolian legal system face in relation to online speech and privacy-related controversies and how does it address them? development of ict and major milestones this paper traces the history of ict development in mongolia, a 30-year-old democracy in the central asian steppe. over the last couple of decades, mongolia has dramatically increased ict access for its small population of 3.2 million. the number of users of mobile phones reached 3.8 million, the internet 2.91 million, and facebook 2.1 million respectively in 2020.1 these technologies created in the united states rapidly spread to the world concurring with the deregulation policies throughout the world and the collapse of the soviet bloc. the public’s use of communication technology was also increased partially thanks to the mining boom in mongolia, which tripled the economy and lured in big multinational companies. foreign capital investment also spilled over to informational acceleration. the major milestones of (ict) development in mongolia were greatly influenced by the soviets during the socialist time and foreign capital and international politics during the post-communist eras. during the socialist time from 1921 to 1990, information technology development was greatly influenced by the cybernetics developments in the soviet bloc. in the 1960-1970’s, when the defense department’s advanced research project agency launched arpanet, the soviets were also working on their own informational network such as ogas and ess. mongolia’s national statistics office (nso) in the 1970’s created the national computing center (ncc) and started to tabulate census data, registration of land resource, and livestock headcounts using mini-computer minsk-32 and es-1040, a german analog of the american ibm 360 supercomputer. in 1982, the nso started the first ever international information exchange with the soviet bloc. in 1991 the nso started networked collection and processing of internal statistical information from the provinces (nso, n.d.). mongolia’s ict development started to diverge from soviet practices with the start of the production of first personal computers. in 1984 nso engineers created “och,” the first personal computer based on intel microprocessor (oyunbayar, n.d.). this invention led to the production of mongolian produced personal computers monel starting in 1986, but the company could not continue long facing the flood of less-expensive imported computers from china and east asia during the collapse of the socialist economy. then the establishment of the internet 1996 by datacom and nsf’s support signaled to mongolians the privatized nature of the internet. because the internet arrived in mongolia late following the popularity of the world wide web (www), email and the web became the most popular internet applications. many mongolians are not familiar with discussion forums, bulletin board system or bbs that fostered big audiences discussing various issues until the recent takeover of online public spheres by social media like facebook and twitter. prices for internet services remained high in mongolia until mobile phone operators including mobicom and skytel, joint ventures with japanese sumitomo and south korean telecom, started to provide data packages. around 2007-2011, partially owing to the mining boom in mongolia and partially to prepaid card services with sim (subscriber identification module), the number of mobile phones surpassed the total population of the country. the privatized and liberalized mobile services increased access to the internet, while at the same time exacerbated the divide between better-off urban customers and poor groups in the countryside. with this, mongolian identity also divides between the urban elites who strive for a cosmopolitan and information society and the people of the nomadic agriculture and mining communities in the countryside. 1 crc (2020). accessed from crc.gov.mn social media and defamation many mongolians, who often equate the internet with social media, believe in the inevitable benefits of social media and think that their personal information is irrelevant to facebook because of their language differences. commercial platforms like facebook are “radically indifferent” (zuboff, 2019) to the social and cultural needs of people in general, especially of those in developing countries. criticized for its facilitation of the media-incited offline violence and genocide in myanmar and the philippines (stevenson, 2018), a facebook representative visited mongolia in 2019 and started to collaborate with local authorities to alleviate the spread of rampant mis/disinformation. in 2020, the parliament included the spread of falsehood on social media in article 13.14 of the criminal code. article 13.14 in the criminal code states that a person who disseminates “false information injuring another person’s character and professional reputation” will be fined for mnt 450,000 1,300,000 (around us$ 157-456) or will be subjected to the 240-720 hours of community service or will have travel privileges taken away for 1-3 months. in 2020, 590 charges were filed for the distribution of false information related to the political libel, covid-19 pandemic, and other defamatory statements. in september of 2020, the police added a new unit designated to fight against the distribution of “blatant lies” on social media. even though the numbers of cases involving media were relatively low in 2020, the plaintiffs suing journalists and media were state entities and public figures charging them with a lower than “actual malice” threshold. the terms related to misinformation, disinformation, internet defamation, or factual inaccuracies are not defined clearly in the criminal codes. this omission or muddying has led to legal interpretations that leave room for practices benefitted law makers and public figures especially during the election year of 2020. this situation creates a “chilling effect” on journalists and media organizations stifling dissent and political criticism against state organizations and public figures. references castells, m. (2000). the rise of the network society, 2nd edition. oxford: blackwell. corcoran, e. (1996). how the butter fund spread the internet to mongolia. the washington post, accessed april 1, 2021, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/03/01/how-the-butter-fundspread-the-internet-to-mongolia/94d75e36-0680-444a-8929-966af4df0ecc/ national statistics office. (n.d.). accessed from http://nso.mn/timeline oyunbayar, (n.d.). монголын анхны компьютер бүтсэн түүх. accessed from https://gogo.mn/r/169931 schiller, d. (2000). digital capitalism: networking the global market system. cambridge, ma: mit press. stevenson, a. (2018, nov 6). facebook admits it was used to incite violence in myanmar. accessed april 8, 2019 from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebook.html woolley, s. and howard, p. (2016). political communication, computational propaganda, and autonomous agents. international journal of communication 10, 4882–4890. zuboff, sh. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. nyc: public affairs. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): butt, m. (2021, october). how we are (not)coping under the new gaming public: an existential-materialist ethnography of lifeworlds within (and against) gamer hegemony. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. how we are (not)coping under the new gaming public: an existential-materialist ethnography of lifeworlds within (and against) gamer hegemony mahli-ann rakkomkaew butt the university of sydney following from the well-documented and unprecedented digital abuse faced by those who become deemed as ‘other’ to videogames (jane, 2016; humphreys, 2019; harvey, 2021), public concern has been on the rise for players, journalists, researchers, and industry workers alike. contributing to the emerging field of feminist game studies, this research seeks to intervene into the hegemonic culture fostered and maintained by what anastasia salter and bridgette blodgett describe as the ‘new gaming public’ (2012) which has become tied to the persistent imaginary of ‘gamers’ as predominantly young males (cf. shaw, 2013). using qualitative mixed-methods to gather empirical data through fieldwork, surveys, and semi-structured interviews, this research presents a sociological examination of everyday struggles within (and against) hegemonic systems of oppression, reporting on how people are coping (or not coping) with exacerbated forms of sexism, racism, and homophobia pervasive across their digitally entangled and materially embedded ‘lifeworlds’ (jackson, 2012). in the past, scholars have challenged the hypermasculine gamer stereotype, developing a better understanding about who plays videogames and how they play them (yee, 2014). many feminists turned to intersectional frameworks (crenshaw, 1989) as a more nuanced approach to capture a wider range of player identities. this advocacy work became reflected in wider popular discourses. anna everett declares, “a sign of our millennial times” is that gaming journalists are more willing than ever to “raise concerns about race, gender, and sexuality discourses in gaming culture and the gaming industry complex,” (2017, p. ix). following the pursuit to improve representation in the workplace, inclusivity measures and accessibility policies had fast become an industry hot topic. seen in the widespread uptake of ‘equal opportunity’ hires and declared commitments to fixing the proverbial ‘leaky pipelines’ flowing from higher education into the workforce (harvey, 2021), companies have sought to better retain and grow their (body)count of minorities as both consumers and workers. in many ways, challenging the stereotype of gamers has been a crucial step towards fostering a sense of ‘diversity’ or ‘inclusivity’. despite attempts to improve representation, however, the new gaming public is still seen to be in the midst of a cultural ‘civil war’ (vossen, 2018, p. 4). in the battle over who should represent or be represented, skirmishing stakeholders and those caught in the crossfire must all remain hypervigilant (golding & van deventer, 2016). marginalised players continue to worry about their personal safety when participating in online games, seeing gendered, homophobic, racially targeted hate and digital harassment to simply be par for the course (jane, 2016). to date, the main solution for individuals has been to seek out better coping strategies to avoid and navigate an increasingly hostile environment (cote, 2017; harvey, 2021). since there can be no rest or reprieve from ever-looming threats (massumi, 2015), there is an urgent need to find other interventions. in response to the new gaming public, feminist voices have frequently advocated greater inclusivity across player communities, industries, journalism, and games academia. however, much of this advocacy work anchors onto discussions about improving poor representation. accordingly, feminist critiques of sexist, racists, and homophobic depictions of in-game characters will often also seek to promote the ‘diversification’ of games industry workforces in order to achieve overall ‘greater representation’ from the ground up. while this work is crucial and should not be discounted, i contend that we must also diversify how we discuss social justice issues. to paraphrase amanda phillips (2020) and clare hemmings (2012): we must provide different accounts of lived experiences, but we must also learn how to tell these stories differently. therefore, this research promotes a greater appreciation for a wider plethora of feminist approaches by re-establishing existential-materialism as another vehicle for revolution in pursuit of social justice. this paper argues that existential-materialism is a useful generative tool for feminist games, media, internet, and cultural researchers to investigate how people cope (or do not cope) with the hegemony of the new gaming public as it crucially apprehends the medium of videogames as part of people’s lifeworlds embedded in materiality rather than separate from everyday life. departing from the liberalist premise that diversity can be fostered from representation alone, this research, crucially, explores another feminist approach to address the hegemony of videogames. instead, i stake the claim that we must return our attention back to moments of resistance as the fundamental site for political transformation. in doing so, this research stylizes ‘(not)coping’ to challenge the assumed dichotomy of ‘not coping’ as a failure ‘to cope’. rather than treating ‘coping’ and ‘not coping’ as positive and negative binaries, (not)coping highlights the liminality in-between these affective states. in this paper, i argue that moving from ‘coping’ towards the refusal to cope with status quos is a transcendence of the self (hemming, 2012) first needed to generate alternative knowledges necessary for socio-cultural and political revolution. therefore, (not)coping infers critical potency: a transformative affective space for the refusal to cope within (and against) hegemony. ultimately, in posing existential-materialist questions about the ubiquity of everyday struggles, this research provides new possibilities for action and directions for future research. overall, this research explores an alternative approach to studying digital gaming cultures in a manner that does not necessitate a focus on play, playing, or creating play. therefore, it is not a study about particular videogames, nor is it really a study about ‘gamers’ or ‘players’ themselves. instead, i examine the following three different sites: 1. ontopowered lifeworlds (interviews with women who played videogames with their romantic partners), 2. intoxicated lifeworlds (ethnography of public and industry social events), and 3. political lifeworlds (autoethnography on becoming a ‘diversity worker’). when pointing to the ubiquity of feelings, everyday struggles, and experiences of (not)coping, this research takes on a feminist instruction to include those who are not necessarily ‘gamers’ or ‘players’, but who all—nonetheless—have meaningful experiences in their (dis)connections to videogames. in doing so, this research presents an overarching argument in favor of giving more value to the most marginalized and often overlooked in the discipline of game studies, and how their stories are significant, necessary, and meaningful to any and all discussions about gaming cultures. in the discipline of game studies, the methods of investigation are frequently configured around the study of play, players, or the creation of play; however, we must take greater stock of people’s lifeworlds, including non-players, non-play relationship dynamics, and non-play centric spaces in our intersubjective relations to videogames and beyond the hegemonic new gaming public. references cote, a. c. (2017). ‘‘i can defend myself’’: women’s strategies for coping with harassment while gaming online. games and culture, 12(2), 136-155. everett, a. 2017). foreword. in j. malkowski & t. m. russworm (eds.), gaming representation: race, gender, and sexuality in video games (pp. ix-xiv). indiana university press. golding, d. & van deventer, l. (2016). gamer changers. affirm press. harvey, a. (2021). making the grade: feminine lack, inclusion, and coping strategies in digital games higher education. new media & society, 1-17. doi:10.1177/1461444820986831 hemmings, c. (2012). affective solidarity: feminist reflexivity and political transformation. feminist theory, 13(2), 147-161. humphreys, s. (2019). on being a feminist in game studies. games and culture, 14(7-8), 825-842. jackson, m. (2013). lifeworlds: essays in existential anthropology. university of chicago press. jane, e. a. (2016). misogyny online: a short (and brutish) history. sage publishing. massumi, b. (2002). parables for the virtual: movement, affect, sensation. duke university press. phillips, a. (2020). negg(at)ing the game studies subject: an affective history of the field. feminist media histories, 6(1), 12-36. salter, a. & blodgett, b. 2012. hypermasculinity & dickwolves: the contentious role of women in the new gaming public, journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 56(3), 401-416. shaw, a. (2013). on not becoming gamers: moving beyond the constructed audience. ada: a journal of gender, new media, and technology, (2). doi:10.7264/n33n21b3 vossen, e. (2018). on the cultural inaccessibility of gaming: invading, creating, and reclaiming the cultural clubhouse [unpublished phd thesis]. university of waterloo. yee, n. (2014). the proteus paradox: how online games and virtual worlds change us and how they don't. yale university press. microsoft word mizoroki-hashtag activism lost in translation-hashtag activism lost in translation.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): mizoroki, s., limor, s., hayashi, k. (2021, october). hashtag activism lost in translation: the reformulation of #metoo in japan. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. hashtag activism lost in translation: the reformulation of #metoo in japan mizoroki, saki the university of tokyo, the hebrew university of jerusalem shifman, limor the hebrew university of jerusalem hayashi, kaori the university of tokyo in 2017, the #metoo movement lit up twitter. in japan, however, it was almost nonexistent and morphed into other forms of hashtag activism: #wetoo, #withyou, and #furawademo (“flower demo”). this paper investigates both the absence of #metoo in japan and its reformulations. we hypothesize that these could be explained through the interplay of three avenues: (1) values—the literature on values in japan foregrounds harmony, collectivism, and the avoidance of shame; (2) topic—gender and sexual harassment—drawing on literature on the rootedness of sexism in this society; (3) platform—mounting concerns over privacy issues on twitter in japan. we conducted fifteen interviews with japanese men and women from varied backgrounds and assembled 119 newspaper articles that explain why people are reluctant to speak up. we applied a combination of grounded and thematic analysis to analyze these samples. our analysis affirmed that the three avenues are key to understanding the movement’s absence and reformulation. perceived japanese values clash against the values that respondents and newspapers detected in the movement, and the new formulations are evaluated as “softening” the protest by blending in acceptable values. however, while most participants appreciated the movement, they were afraid of retaliation and isolation, given their perception of japanese values. we tentatively argue that it’s not values as essential orientations but the prevalent perceptions of popular values that limit activism. such perceptions of national values become self-fulfilling prophecies; people “perform” the values that they think others will appreciate and, in so doing, reinforce those values. aoir2020 spir lupinacci.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): lupinacci, l. (2020, october). liveness and deadness in social media: on the perceived lack of life of the infinite stream. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. liveness and deadness in social media: on the perceived lack of life of the infinite stream ludmila lupinacci london school of economics and political science (lse) social media rely on the maintenance of a sense of constant activity and unceasing updating to captivate users’ attention and encourage quantifiable engagement (chun 2017). to incite continuous connectedness, they also cultivate an imaginary of aliveness, of ‘pulsating life’ – of excitement, anticipation, newness (beer 2019). perhaps the most evident ways in which this sense of ‘vibrating life’ is encouraged is through notifications and trending lists – which actualize the promised significance of content at the individual and societal level, respectively, although these two often overlap. also, the nonstop informational flow – materialized in the now widespread structure of the infinite ‘stream’– makes the present contingent and fluid (weltevrede et al. 2014), reinforcing the image of incessant movement. this paper aims to critically examine how this socio-technically constructed urge to remain continuously connected is experienced by the people who use social media in the context of everyday life. my goal is to scrutinize the ‘feltness’ of social media use, as well as how the claim of liveness translates (or not) into the perceptions articulated by ordinary users. my entry point to this discussion is to position the claim of liveness as a central resource in the production of this imaginary of continuous connectedness, which then keeps us hooked to specific platforms under the assumption that something remarkable might happen anytime, all the time. across decades, liveness has been employed to promise immediate access to meaningful happenings as they unfold, thus reinforcing sensations of urgency, unpredictability, and risk (feuer 1983, scannell 2014, van es 2016). starting from ‘the live’ is productive because, historically, it plays a central role in positioning media as a primary source of temporal, spatial, and social organization, which in turn helps to shape the willingness to remain ‘connected’ (couldry 2004, bourdon 2000). importantly, instead of focusing on extraordinary media events (dayan and katz 1992), i am more interested in people’s relations to media in the ordinariness of everyday life, and on how these routinely, ‘non-eventful’ practices are mediated by digital technologies. underlying this decision is the theoretical standpoint that the power of social media emerges precisely from their apparent banality (chun 2017). this paper seeks to identify patterns across individual experiences provided by ordinary users of different platforms, which then inform broader theorizations. i conducted a thematic analysis of qualitative data gathered through the diary-interview method, while embracing a phenomenological sensibility. the guiding empirical question, broadly put, was: “how does it feel to use social media?” respondents completed a five-day long qualitative diary, preceded and followed by semi-structured interviews. the 20 participants are adults (19–47yo) who live in london and make use of a range of social media on a daily basis. rather than picking a discrete platform to examine i treat them here as an integrated environment of affordances from which people can choose depending on particular social purposes and needs (madianou and miller 2013). not surprisingly, the informants’ relations with social media are profoundly marked by ambivalence. relying on these platforms – for duty, but also for pleasure; willingly, but also helplessly – brings a whole set of comforts and discomforts (beer 2019). the frequent possibility of accessing relevant content, and consequently living interesting experiences, combined with infinite scrolling and an endless influx of messages and notifications, can be very persuasive in ensuring continuous connectedness. the expectations constructed by these fuelled sense of anticipation, however, are rarely met. as verbalized by the interviewees, the use of social media is not always exciting – and can, in fact, become tedious, frustrating, exasperating. because they are seen as good sources of entertainment, social media are often employed as pastime activities and, in fact, most of the time the informants do not use these platforms with a clear purpose in mind, which confirms their naturalized, habitual status. on top of its apparently aimless character, the use of social media tends to be perceived as heavily time consuming. consequently, the use of these platforms as a simple pastime often results in (even more) lethargy. which means that, paradoxically, in a research centrally concerned with liveness – with what feels animated, pulsating, injected with life – one of the most commonly observed experiences is that of deadness, lifelessness. interestingly, this perceived ‘lack of life’ of social media is described both as a result of the presence of too many potentially interesting things, and as the platforms’ incapacity to deliver anything interesting at all. aware of the time and energy they spend on these platforms, participants describe navigating aimlessly and pointlessly through an apparently unceasing waterfall of content that seldom delivers something that is noteworthy or attention-grabbing. the claims made by social media platforms reflect, to a large extent, the ideological prerogative that disconnection and isolation are undesired, and that communication “brings humanity, enlightenment, progress” (carey 1989:309). and if habit is indeed “ideology in action” (chun 2017:7) then it becomes urgent to question and unveil the taken-for-grantedness of these technologies to understand their operation. although many of the available theorizations prefer to focus on the political economy of our platformized society, i argue that a phenomenological sensibility can contribute to shed light on other dimensions of these processes and practices. it is through a phenomenological lens that we can grasp the ways in which platforms are actually lived. while the results discussed here are not meant to be exhaustive – and, in fact, this paper represents a small fragment of a broader project –, they offer a good hint of how it feels to use a range of social media platforms in the context of everyday life. finally, the very fact that the interviewees admit they keep using these platforms in spite of their perceived lifelessness seems to be deeply permeated by the belief on the ubiquitous, even if often tacit, claim of direct access to social realities as they are happening (couldry 2004) – in other words, sustained by promises of liveness. references beer, d. (2019). the quirks of digital culture. emerald publishing. bourdon, j. (2000). live television is still alive: on television as an unfulfilled promise. media, culture & society, 22(5). carey, j. w. (1989). technology and ideology: the case of the telegraph. communication as culture: essays on media and society. chun, w. h.k. (2017). updating to remain the same. habitual new media. the mit press. couldry, n. (2004). liveness, “reality,” and the mediated habitus from television to the mobile phone. the communication review, 7(4). dayan, d., katz, e. (1992). media events : the live broadcasting of history. cambridge, mass: harvard university press. feuer, j. (1983). the concept of live television: ontology as ideology. in e. kaplan (ed.), regarding television. los angeles: american film institute. madianou, m., & miller, d. (2013). polymedia: towards a new theory of digital media in interpersonal communication. international journal of cultural studies, 16(2). scannell, p. (2014). television and the meaning of live. polity press. van es, k. (2016). the future of live. cambridge: polity press. weltevrede, e., helmond, a., gerlitz, c. (2014). the politics of real-time : a device perspective on social media platforms and search engines. theory, culture & society, 31(6). taste this video extended abstract hadas schlussel aoir2020.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): schlussel, h., frosh, p. (2020, october). "taste this video!": facebook videos as embodied experiences. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. "taste this video!": facebook videos as embodied experiences hadas schlussel the hebrew university of jerusalem paul frosh the hebrew university of jerusalem introduction “mesmerizing”, “compelling” “daydream”, “escapism”: these epithets, employed by various journalists (evans, 2016; greenberg, 2016) were used to describe seemingly banal everyday recipe videos on facebook. recipe videos are short clips which show anonymous hands creating desserts, roast chicken, salads, and other culinary delights in less than 50 seconds. the journalists mentioned above were not impressed by the creativity of the recipes themselves, they could not even recall which recipes they had seen. yet, they clearly remembered the kind of experience they had while watching, and the explicit compulsion they felt to watch more videos. indeed, the compulsive character of the response they describe may have made recipe videos among facebook’s most popular genres. in february 2020, tasty – according to socialbakers, the most popular facebook community in the world – had garnered more than 100 million followers. furthermore, tasty's distinctive style had been imitated in other recipe videos facebook pages, in other genres widespread in social media, such as diy videos, and in television commercials. this paper suggests the "mesmerizing" power of recipe videos is achieved through the way they use the social media interface to overtly address users' senses, rather than serve informational purposes, and create tactile experiences that embody users' presence in the virtual space. trying to understand the significance of recipe videos' popularity as a phenomenon, we analyze recipe videos through a novel three-dimensional model that integrates their semiotic characteristics (visual, auditory, and textual), their interactive and haptic qualities, and their invitation to perceptual engagement and sensorimotor response. all these dimensions, we argue, are crucial to understanding the intersections between video and the context of engagement on social media interfaces. we conclude that facebook recipe videos are exemplary of a broader category of social media videos virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 which we call hyper-sensory videos: these rise to the challenge of an interruptive context of viewing by presenting heightened multisensory experiences that take precedent over informational use or narrative involvement. theoretical background despite their surprising popularity, there is no research literature on facebook recipe videos and almost no literature on facebook videos in general. eder (2018) argues that online videos constitute a medium in their own right, with new participatory and interactive characteristics. facebook videos possess distinctive attributes adapted to the specific characteristics of their display environment: namely, the facebook interface’s news feed and the mute auto-play feature. the facebook feed, a continually flowing “social media data-stream” (hochman, 2014), is ruled by the “attention economy” (goldhaber, 1997), whereby human attention becomes an increasingly scarce and valuable resource. therefore, recipe videos compete over users' attention by creating high stimuli, and aesthetically catchy frames that the human eye can perceive easily. in a sense, this research continues other works that contemplate the perception of media through human sensoria, in case studies like films, fine literature, or artworks (esrock, 2019; merleau-ponty, 1982; sobchak, 2014). creating a desire for an intensified presence (gumbrecht, 2004) and economic power, by shaping human capacities to sense space and time (ash, 2019), digital media play an important role in understanding our relationships with culture and technology. the overt enhancement of multisensory and sensorimotor experience presented (with such broad popularity) by tasty videos can shed light on these relationships, potentially reflecting a yearning for embodied presence in increasingly digitized and ‘virtual’ conditions of social existence. methodology the corpus was comprised of the most shared recipe videos on tasty's facebook page. tasty was chosen because of its exceptional number of followers and because, watching the videos, we could discern a fixed-style formula, consistent across all tasty's videos, and imitated by other recipe video creators. the indication of this formula also allowed a relatively small corpus, of 15 videos, which were later transcribed shot by shot. sharing was chosen as an indicator, not only of active engagement with the video but also of its virality (wittel, 2011). videos were chosen according to data extracted using the netvizz application (rieder, 2013). using a phenomenological approach, drawing on seteur’s (1992) analysis of telepresence dimensions and frosh’s (2018) analysis of interface aesthetics, we developed a novel three-dimensional analytical framework attuned to the conditions of display in the facebook newsfeed. this framework addressed 1) the videos’ visual, auditory and textual semiotic attributes, 2) the involvement and activation structures of the videos as elements of the facebook interface, and 3) the embodied, sensory and sensorimotor relations between users and screen devices. analysis the analysis foregrounds several dominant tactics recipe videos apply to enhance sensory-motor experience and compete in facebook's attention economy. these include the remediated amplification of some audio-visual elements and the reduction of others: due to the mute auto-play, the sound was reduced to music only, and subtitles describing the recipe were added. the videos also blurred the line between touch and vision in ways that shift depictive and interface dimensions. all videos are filmed from a high angle in a manner that depicts anonymous hands preparing food, approximating the user’s point of view, as well as producing visual continuity between the depicted hands and the hands of the user, holding the mobile screen. at the same time, this representational intersection between vision and touch interrupts the routinized handeye relations of the facebook interface, making us watch it by stopping the scrollthrough movement of our fingers on the screen. the recipe video thus appeals to the eyes as a touching organ, or even as if the eyes can taste, as it depicts textures and movement up close, in order to re-channel and effectively suspend – albeit temporarily – users’ habitual gestural engagements with the mobile interface. overall, the analysis suggests a new kind of digital format which uses remediation, haptic vision, and gestural interactivity, to adapt video to the embodied attention-structures of social media interfaces. references ash, j. (2015). the interface envelope: gaming, technology, power. bloomsbury publishing usa. eder, j. (2018). collateral emotions: political web videos and divergent audience responses. in cognitive theory and documentary film (pp. 183-203). palgrave macmillan, cham. esrock, e. j. (2019). 11 body forth in narrative. narrative complexity: cognition, embodiment, evolution, 270. frosh, p. (2018). the mouse, the screen and the holocaust witness: interface aesthetics and moral response. new media & society, 20(1), 351-368. goldhaber, m. h. (1997). the attention economy and the net. first monday,2(4). gumbrecht, h. u. (2004). production of presence: what meaning cannot convey. stanford university press. hochman, h. (2014). the social media image. big data & society, 15(1). merleau-ponty, m. (1982). phenomenology of perception. routledge. rieder, b. (2013) studying facebook via data extraction: the netvizz application. in: websci’13, paris, france may 2–4 2013, pp. 346-355. new york: acm. sobchack, v. (2004). carnal thoughts: embodiment and moving image culture (pp. 3553). univ of california press. steuer, j. (1992). defining virtual reality: dimensions determining telepresence. journal of communication, 42(4), 73-93. wittel, a. (2011). qualities of sharing and their transformations in the digital age. international review of information ethics, 15(9), 3-8. evans, d. (2016, march 23). why these recipe videos are taking over your facebook wall. the cut. retrieved on 24 of september from: https://www.thecut.com/2016/03/zen-and-the-art-of-the-buzzfeed-tasty-video.html greenberg, j. (2016, may 30). food has eaten the internet and it tastes like a vampire taco. wired. retrieved on 24 of september from: https://www.wired.com/2016/05/internet-reached-perfection-looks-like-vampire-taco/ selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): rosamond, e. (2022, november). race and risk: exploring online responses to the 2020 euro final. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. race and risk: exploring online responses to the euro 2020 final dr. emily rosamond senior lecturer in visual cultures, goldsmiths, university of london summary abstract in july 2021, england lost the euro 2020 football final to italy. following the loss, black england players were widely racially abused online. as twitter took down over 1900 offensive posts directed at the players, and commentators condemned the racism, sending supportive messages to players, the controversy continued to generate traffic. how might online platforms reconfigure racism, according to a late-neoliberal logic of assetized attention and identity? how might the football game, as a widely publicized symbolic site which stages a relation between competition, chance, and nationhood, inflect these expressions of racism? in this paper, i analyze online responses to the 2020 euro finals, with a focus on narratives expressing expectations about posters’ and platforms’ roles in propagating online racism. i analyze how online platforms express conflicts over race in the reputational terms of status and attention metrics. extending insights from w.e.b. du bois, cedric robinson, and cheryl harris, i arrive at an account of assetized, late-neoliberal racial capitalism, which recodes racism as the uneven distribution of reputational risk. extended abstract on july 11, 2021, england faced italy in the delayed euro 2020 football final. uk commentators heavily hyped the match, hoping to end england’s 55-year stretch without a major trophy. the game ended in a 1-1 tie; in the ensuing penalty shootout, italy won 3-2. three england players – marcus rashford, jadon sancho and bukayo saka – hadn’t scored. soon afterward, twitter users voiced their fear that these black players would face extensive racial abuse. others cited statistics on increased domestic violence following major tournament losses, urged women to stay safe, and posted information on hotlines and shelters (sandhu, 2021). twitter later confirmed that it had removed more than 1,900 racist, abusive tweets following the final, most of which had originated in the uk (griffin, 2021). reports of racist abuse directed at schoolchildren, linked to the match, followed (bbc yorkshire, 2021). a vandal defaced a mural of marcus rashford; this led to fans covering the mural with supportive messages, images of which circulated widely online. the controversy generated widespread criticisms of twitter’s failure to prevent racism from spreading; yet all the while, it continued to generate traffic on the platform. how do online platforms reconfigure racism and antiracism in widely publicized events such as these, by configuring both personal traits and attention garnered from public debates as assets? many scholars have considered online racism surrounding sporting events; analyzed the impact of anti-racist actions in sport; and developed new conceptual frameworks for understanding online racism, such as “platformed racism,” “weak tie racism” and “technological redlining” (matamoros-fernández, 2017; brock, jr., 2019; noble, 2018; evans et. al, 2021). some commentators have extended analyses of racial capitalism to analyze digital culture (mcmillan cottom, 2020). building on this latter direction, my paper draws from recent debates on assetization in technoscientific capitalism – the process of turning attention, traits, or things into rent-generating assets (birch and muniesa, eds, 2020) – to consider online racism as an expression of assetized digital racial capitalism. analyzing a range of online responses to the 2020 euro finals, with a focus on narratives expressing expectations about the level of racism black players would face, i contextualize these responses within what i call a topological-colonial space: layered, shifting colonial temporalities, from the long history of british empire and its racisms, expressed in recent conflict over immigration in the uk (kapoor, 2018; gunaratnam, 2019; bhattacharyya, 2018); to “data colonialism” (couldry and mejias, 2019), which sees large tech companies profiting from monopolizing data. i consider how online platforms couch conflicts over race in reputational terms, with likes, comment tallies, and news metacommentaries foregrounding reputation as a platformed asset; and with platforms,’ players’ and posters’ reputations placed at risk during public events tinged with nationalist import. reading the football final’s online aftermath in light of w.e.b. du bois’ account of the compensatory, “public and psychological wage” given to white workers, in the form of deference and courtesy (1935); cedric robinson’s writing on racial capitalism (2000); and cheryl i harris’ account of reputation as linked to white privilege (1993), i theorize how assetized, late-neoliberal digital racial capitalism recodes racism as an uneven distribution of online reputational risk. references bbc yorkshire. ‘euro 2020 racism: school pupil abused after england defeat, family say’. bbc news, 15 july 2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-humber57833414. bhattacharyya, gargi. rethinking racial capitalism: questions of reproduction and survival. cultural studies and marxism. lanham: rowman & littlefield publishers, 2018. birch, kean and fabian muniesa, eds. assetization: turning things into assets in technoscientific capitalism. cambridge, massachusetts: the mit press, 2020. brock, andré l. distributed blackness: african american cybercultures. critical cultural communication. new york: new york university press, 2019. couldry, nick, and ulises ali mejias. the costs of connection: how data is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism. stanford, california: stanford university press, 2019. du bois, w. e. b. black reconstruction: an essay toward a history of the part which black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in america, 1860-1880. new york: brace and company, 1935. evans, adam b., sine agergaard, paul ian campbell, kevin hylton, and verena lenneis. ‘sport, race and ethnicity in the wake of black lives matter: introduction to the special issue’. european journal for sport and society 18, no. 3 (3 july 2021): 187– 91. https://doi.org/10.1080/16138171.2021.1966283. griffin, andrew. ‘twitter reveals first findings about racist abuse after euros final’. the independent, 10 august 2021. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgetsand-tech/twitter-racism-euro-2020-saka-rashford-sancho-b1900049.html. gunaratnam, yasmin. ‘on researching climates of hostility and weathering’. in the sage handbook of media and migration, edited by kevin smets, koen leurs, myria georgiou, saskia witteborn, and radhika gajjata, 129–41. los angeles: sage reference, 2019. harris, cheryl i. ‘whiteness as property’. harvard law review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707– 91. kapoor, nisha. deport, deprive, extradite: 21st century state extremism. london ; new york: verso, 2018. kirby, stuart, brian francis, and rosalie o’flaherty. ‘can the fifa world cup football (soccer) tournament be associated with an increase in domestic abuse?’ journal of research in crime and delinquency 51, no. 3 (may 2014): 259–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022427813494843. matamoros-fernández, ariadna. ‘platformed racism: the mediation and circulation of an australian race-based controversy on twitter, facebook and youtube’. information, communication & society 20, no. 6 (3 june 2017): 930–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2017.1293130. mcmillan cottom, tressie. ‘where platform capitalism and racial capitalism meet: the sociology of race and racism in the digital society.’ sociology of race and ethnicity, 2020, 6(4): 441-449. nakamura, lisa. cybertypes: race, ethnicity, and identity on the internet. new york: routledge, 2013. noble, safiya umoja. algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york: new york university press, 2018. robinson, cedric j. black marxism: the making of the black radical tradition. chapel hill, n.c: university of north carolina press, 2000. sandhu, serina. ‘domestic abuse spiked during euros tournament with one centre seeing 400 extra cases’. inews.co.uk, 13 july 2021. https://inews.co.uk/news/uk/euro2020-domestic-abuse-england-increase-cases-during-football-tournament-1100995. trimbur, lucia. ‘taking a knee, making a stand: social justice, trump america, and the politics of sport’. quest 71, no. 2 (3 april 2019): 252–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/00336297.2018.1551806. van campenhout, gijs and henk van houtoum. “i am german when we win, but i am an immigrant when we lose.’ theorizing the deservedness of migrants in international football, using the case of mesut ösil,’ sport in society: cultures, commerce, media, politics 24:11 (2021): 1924-1940. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): frayha, a., kraidy, m. (2021, october). megaphone: social-media-native outlets between editorial independence and algorithmic constraints. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. megaphone: social-media-native outlets between editorial independence and algorithmic constraints assil frayha ph.d student and cargc doctoral fellow, university of pennsylvania marwan m. kraidy dean and ceo, northwestern university qatar extended abstract dubbed the “year of street protests,” 2019 witnessed “a tsunami of protests that swept across six continents and engulfed both liberal democracies and ruthless autocracies” (wright, 2019, para. 1). protests erupted in places like hong kong, lebanon, iraq, and chile to name a few, where people were protesting political establishments that have become all too powerful and all too greedy. though the role of digital media in protests has received plenty of attention since the onset of occupy wall street and the arab uprisings (penney & dadas, 2014; herrera, 2014; howard & hussain, 2013) a decade ago, the way that protest movements have enabled the institutional development of independent digital news media has received less attention. how do protest movements enable the rise of independent digital news media? how do these emerging outlets interact with components of pre-existing media? and what techno political constraints do these outlets face? to answer these questions, we zoom in on lebanon where an uprising broke out in 2019 and gave rise to a network of independent and interdependent digital media outlets. we focus on the rise of megaphone, an independent social-media-native news outlet that left its mark on the country’s political and media scene. based on a politico-economic analysis of the emerging digital media scene in lebanon, a historical analysis of the distinctive meaning of media independence in that context, and a case study of megaphone, we examine the notion of independent digital media in the context of protest movements and look at the distinctive travails of social-media-native outlets. in october 2019, people from various cities across lebanon spontaneously took to the streets to call for overthrowing lebanon’s government and entire political ruling class. though the ostensible trigger was a government decision to charge for whatsapp use—a widely used app for business and social purposes—people were fed up with a ruling class that had drowned the country in sectarianism, corruption, and economic turmoil. the uprising was spontaneous, decentralized, non-violent, and leaderless. it is in tandem with this moment of rupture that a new imaginary started taking shape at the level of the media. with lebanon’s traditional media outlets being largely owned by, funded by, or affiliated with the ruling elites, revolutionaries relied on the affordances of social media to set up structures for disseminating news and information (lteif, 2020). some of that infrastructure was already in place with a number of ngos, political groups, civil society organizations, and independent digital news outlets already producing critical content online. when the uprising broke out, many of these outlets upped their game and new ones emerged (merhej and qureshi, 2020). this gave rise to an organic yet robust network of independent and interdependent digital media outlets which varied in function from covering the events on the ground to facilitating coordination among protestors and became go-to sources for reliable information. megaphone is an independent digital news outlet that stood out during that period. it was founded in 2017 by a group of young activists who, frustrated with lebanon’s political establishment and media, were set on creating a platform where they can be critical of the establishment, cover issues that lacked substantial coverage in mainstream media, and amplify the voices of marginalized people and communities who were excluded from mainstream narratives. their goal was to unpack politics and make it more accessible and engaging to audiences. in order to meet audiences where they were, and having no initial capital, they launched megaphone as an outlet that was native to social media. running on volunteer work and anonymity, megaphone initially engaged in producing slow journalism and published weekly news roundups, monthly videos, and occasional infographics. when the uprising erupted, megaphone transformed into a newsroom overnight. they created new formats to document and cover the events on the ground and to provide analysis of the speeches and actions of the ruling elites who tried to delegitimize the uprising or co-opt it. megaphone’s coverage was richer in information, analysis, and insight than that of traditional media outlets. this allowed it to establish itself as one of the main players in lebanon’s digital media scene. financially and editorially independent from any political power or influence, megaphone sustained its activities with the help of grants from local, regional, and international institutions that fund media initiatives. grants did not compromise the outlet’s editorial independence, but some came with their own set of deliverables on themes and number of outputs. though the internet afforded a low-cost, high-impact infrastructure that enabled independence from political patrons, the complete dependence of outlets like megaphone on social media platforms introduced new challenges to their work (prasad, 2019; salaverría et al., 2018). as a social-media-native outlet, megaphone is largely reliant on platforms which host its content and are the primary intermediaries between megaphone and its audience. in addition to that, the visibility of megaphone’s outputs remains subject to algorithms and platform governance, and its audience remains limited to users of these platforms. despite its anti-establishment discourse, megaphone has not been officially targeted by any partisan or governmental entities to date. however, it remains vulnerable to mounting pressures from these entities, especially as the ruling elites are managing to hold on to power and the opposition is yet to form a strong and united front. while we mainly focus on the rise of independent digital media outlets like megaphone which accompanied lebanon’s 2019 uprising, we also show how, in lebanon, independence movements, protest movements, and uprisings have historically contributed to introducing new media forms and outlets and shaping lebanon’s media. by analyzing the distinctive travails of social-media-native outlets, our paper contributes to a techno political and algorithmic notion of media independence and begins to theorize social-media-native independent news outlets as a peculiar form of emerging, and increasingly prevalent, media institution (garcia-orosa et al., 2020). references garcia-orosa, b., lopez-garcia, x., & vazquez-herrero, j. (2020). journalism in digital native media: beyond technological determinism. media and communication, 8(2), 515. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v8i2.2702 herrera, l. (2014). revolution in the age of social media: the egyptian popular insurrection and the internet. verso trade. howard, p. n, & hussain, m. m. (2013). democracy's fourth wave?: digital media and the arab spring. new york: oxford university press. lteif, d. (2020, july). the lebanon revolution takes on the media: a resource on alternative news outlets. jadaliyya. https://www.jadaliyya.com/details/40379 merhej, k., & qureshi, e. (2020). the lebanese uprising in the digital age. cyberorient, 14(2), 85–98. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1804-3194.2020.tb00004.x penney, j., dadas, c. (2014). (re)tweeting in the service of protest: digital composition and circulation in the occupy wall street movement. new media & society, 16(1), 74–90. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444813479593 prasad, r. (2019). digital disruption? journalism startups in india. journalism. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884919852446 salaverría, r., sádaba, c., breiner, j. g., & warner, j. c. (2018). a brave new digital journalism in latin america. (pp. 229-247). springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91860-0_14 wright, r. (2019, december). the story of 2019: protests in every corner of the globe. the new yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-story-of-2019protests-in-every-corner-of-the-globe microsoft word zhao-tiktok's 'fox eye' trend and everyday activism-tiktok's 'fox eye' trend and everyday activism.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): zhao, x., abidin, c. (2021, october). tiktok’s ‘fox eye’ trend and everyday activism: gen z agency in an audiovisual narrative case study. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. tiktok’s ‘fox eye’ trend and everyday activism: gen z agency in an audiovisual narrative case study xinyu (andy) zhao deakin university crystal abidin curtin university introduction tiktok, a chinese video making and sharing platform, has amassed a considerable number of users across the world. a wide range of short-form videos are recorded, edited, circulated, and consumed on the platform, mostly by the younger populations like gen z. while the popular discourse has often considered tiktok as merely an entertaining corner of the internet, since 2020 more people have increasingly realized its potential for youth activism (abidin, 2021). some notable examples include the use of tiktok to support the black lives matter (blm) movement, spread climate change awareness, and ‘sabotage’ trump’s tulsa rally. in this paper, we examine tiktok as an emerging, ‘independent’ activist space for gen z to explain how they make use of the platform affordances for everyday activism. we argue for tiktok’s distinct audiovisual features in enhancing users’ capacity for civic engagement and participation. specifically, we use the ‘fox eye’ trend as a case study to illustrate how tiktok allows young people – asian diasporic communities in particular – to create audiovisual narratives of personal experiences and stories to speak up against anti-asian racism. digital activism has been a dynamic field of scholarly inquiry. in the age of social media, a substantial body of research has highlighted the innovative features of various social media platforms in supporting activist campaigns (e.g. murthy, 2018; sinpeng, 2021; uldam & askanius, 2011). among this extensive literature, a notable stream has highlighted the potential of online activism in creating personal and collective narratives to challenge dominant discourses. yang (2016), for example, emphasized the narrative dimension of hashtag activism. during the blm movement, activists on twitter shared their ‘personal stories [which] are linked to the broader social issue and shared with the public through the use of hashtag’ (yang, 2016, p. 15). in this sense, hashtag activism assumes a narrative form and thus has narrative agency, which refers to ‘the capacity to create stories on social media by using hashtags in a way that is collective and recognized by the public’ (yang, 2016, p. 14). similarly, hashtags are commonly used in tiktok videos. tiktok creators often assign a collated set of hashtags to link their videos with broader trending topics. that said, tiktok’s narrative form is distinct from that of twitter alike for an obvious reason: it is a video sharing platform. in light of the above contexts, this paper asks how young people mobilize tiktok’s audiovisual functions for activist purposes. we examine young asian users’ critical responses towards the fox eye trend on tiktok to understand the role of the platform’s audiovisual elements in facilitating the creation of online narratives. the trend is characterized by celebrities and ordinary tiktok users posting videos and photos where they wear make-up to achieve almond-shaped eyes, often accompanied with a migraine pose (see figure 1). despite its popularity across social media platforms, the trend has been slammed by many for its racist connotations. figure 1: examples of the fox eye trend method to answer the research question, we have applied a qualitative content analysis approach to examine the audiovisual narratives in tiktok videos in relation to the fox eye trend. adopting a purposive sampling technique, data collection began with using the top three related hashtags (as of november 2020) for keyword search on tiktok. the three hashtags are #foxeye, #foxeyechallenge and #foxeyetrend. we have sampled specifically the top 10 videos under each hashtag made and uploaded by selfidentifying asian users. this small sample enabled us to concentrate our analysis on the audiovisual complexities of tiktok posts, and was one of the three case study trends in a larger project on east asian diaspora cultures on tiktok. these video data were then manually and inductively coded to identify emerging themes and modes of presentation. a codebook was then developed for the two researchers to maintain a consistent approach towards analyzing the data. findings this paper generates three related findings. first, young asian users have created and uploaded tiktok videos featuring a variety of themes in relation to the fox eye trend. some notable examples include historical popular representation of asians, personal experiences of racism, impossible beauty standards, jokingly advocating for countertrends, among others (figure 2). collectively, these videos aim to emphasize the ‘problems’ associated with the trend – that is, it is racially insensitive and builds on cultural appropriation. in this sense, tiktok becomes an avenue for young people to challenge dominant discourses through video production. figure 2: selected themes of tiktok posts the second finding suggests three main types of narratives constructed through the videos. the first type is historical. this narrative is characterized by the verbal and (audio)visual presentation of past public representations of asians or the creators’ personal experiences of racism in childhood or the everyday. such a narrative mostly follows a chronological structure in organizing materials and stories to illustrate how the contemporary fox eye trend is rooted in the historical discrimination against asians. the second type is educational. this narrative is featured by an intentionally conversational mode of presentation. the creators provide a first-person account of the racist nature of the trend and the migraine pose, which is often followed by an advocacy for actions such as stopping the trend or jokingly suggesting an alternative trend. the third type is affective. while it is common for narratives to include emotional components, this last type is characterized by explicit expression of emotions such as anger, contempt or pride. personal stories or observations are often used to pave the way for the emotional climax at the end of the videos. it is worth noting, however, that these narratives are not necessarily mutually exclusive. they tend to overlap to the extent that two or more narratives may co-exist in one single video. finally, we have found the important role of the audiovisual functions of the platform in creating and amplifying the narratives. that is, the narratives on tiktok are powerful not only because of the rhetorical devices used, but also due to their audiovisual elements such as visual filters, audio memes, image and video compilations and non-verbal performance. the easy-to-use editing tools and gadgets embedded in the platform firstly empower ordinary young people to become creators (kaye et al., 2020). moreover, they strengthen tiktok narratives to make them more appealing and convincing. visual filters, for example, allow users to enhance the affective impacts of the videos or organize stories in innovative ways. to lip-sync audio memes, in tandem with image compilations and facial expressions, is to offer an indirect, often humorous, but powerful response to the fox eye trend. the audiovisuality of tiktok, therefore, affords users’ agency to create variant but collectively powerful online narratives for everyday activism and civic participation. this discussion leads to our final explanation of and advocacy for more scholarly attention towards the ‘audiovisual narrative agency’ of contemporary digital activism. references abidin, c. (2021). mapping internet celebrity on tiktok: exploring attention economies and visibility labours. cultural science journal, 12(1), pp.77–103 kaye, d. b. v., chen, x., & zeng, j. (2020). the co-evolution of two chinese mobile short video apps: parallel platformization of douyin and tiktok. mobile media & communication. https://doi.org/10.1177/2050157920952120 murthy, d. (2018). introduction to social media, activism, and organizations. social media + society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117750716 sinpeng, a. (2021). hashtag activism: social media and the #freeyouth protests in thailand. critical asian studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2021.1882866 uldam, j., & askanius, t. (2011). online social media for radical politics: climate change activism on youtube. international journal of electronic governance, 4(1-2), pp. 69-84. yang, g. (2016). narrative agency in hashtag activism: the case of #blacklivesmatter. media and communication, 4(4), 13-17. please update your browser your browser isn’t supported anymore. update it to get the best youtube experience and our latest features. learn more opera safari google chrome microsoft edge mozilla firefox remind me later about copyright contact us terms privacy policy & safety © 2025 google llc microsoft word ordinary transcripts aoir2022.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 madianou, m. (2022, november). contesting technocolonialism: the ‘ordinary transcripts’ of everyday resistance. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. contesting technocolonialism? the ‘ordinary transcripts’ of everyday resistance mirca madianou goldsmiths, university of london this paper investigates the extent to which marginalized communities resist practices of datafication and technological experimentation which are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in the aid sector. drawing on seven years of research in the humanitarian and development sectors, the paper explores forms of resistance to digital aid practices. the paper is divided into two parts. in the first section i briefly discuss how datafication and digital innovation in the aid sector rework colonial legacies before theorizing resistance in situations of asymmetrical power. the second section discusses practices of everyday contestation. understanding the ‘hidden transcripts’ (scott, 1985) of resistance requires an ethnographic approach to research. the paper concludes that an argument about digital power and colonial legacies does not preclude the acknowledgement of human agency. however, practices of contestation do not equal decolonization which requires a radical restructuring of power relations. technocolonialism and resistance the datafication and digitalization of the aid sector rework the colonial genealogies of humanitarianism and digital technology. contemporary practices like biometrics and artificial intelligence are part of larger genealogies of enumeration, measurement and classification that were originally developed by imperial powers (appadurai, 1993). such practices have been theorized as technocolonialism, a term used to refer to the convergence of digital developments with the structures of the aid sector and market forces and the extent to which they reinvigorate and rework colonial relationships of dependency (madianou, 2019). the story of colonialism is also a story of resistance (said, 1994; robinson, 2021). gopal has examined how anticolonial struggle in the periphery was key for the emergence of dissent in the metropole (gopal, 2019). however, resistance need not only be armed or political; it is also symbolic. according to said, novels became ‘the method colonized people use to assert their identity and the existence of their own history’ (1994: xv). in very asymmetrical settings such as slavery where acts of outright defiance are not possible, resistance has often taken passive forms including the refusal to go to work, deliberate evasion or satire (patterson, 2022; robinson, 2021). scott (1985) drew from patterson (2022) when developing the notion of the ‘weapons of the weak’ to describe how everyday forms of resistance among marginalized people operate ‘below the radar’, including practices such as foot dragging, feigned ignorance, boycotts as well as sabotage. in order to unearth these ‘below the radar’ practices, scott develops the notion of the ‘hidden transcripts’: the opportunity to hear the accounts of marginalized people (scott, 1985). the notion of the ‘hidden transcripts’ contains a critique of power and is particularly apposite for the asymmetrical relations such as those we encounter in humanitarian settings. the following section explores the hidden transcripts of everyday resistance to digital aid projects among marginalized communities. ‘ordinary transcripts’ of resistance one example comes from the ethnography of the aftermath of typhoon haiyan in the philippines, which remains the most powerful storm ever to make landfall. digitized and quantified forms of feedback which were prioritized in aid operations by humanitarian agencies did not reveal the degree to which local communities were dissatisfied with the response. in fact, the take-up of such digital initiatives was low as was further evidenced in the 2022 response to typhoon rai in the philippines. however, informal conversations with research participants – an example of a ‘hidden transcript’ – revealed their grievances relating to digital humanitarianism projects and aid operations more broadly. resistance is also evident in the oppositional appropriation of digital humanitarianism projects. one such example is the case of humanitarian radio which was used in conjunction with an open-source messaging platform in the areas most affected by typhoon haiyan. local communities resisted the informational and instrumental aims of these platforms and prioritized instead their use for music and song dedications, which aimed to restore the community bonds fractured by the storm’s devastation and loss of life. in her ethnography of the mae la refugee camp along the thai-myanmar border, hill observed how karen youth express protest and articulate their identity through rap music videos uploaded on youtube (hill, 2021). the typhoon haiyan fieldwork revealed some instances when messaging platforms were openly used for protest as in the case of a group of urban poor activists. more common are stories of non-compliance with, or non-participation in digital aid platforms. overall, the examples discussed here reveal the importance of the ordinary, everyday uses of digital technologies and platforms. these ‘ordinary transcripts’ of everyday life offer modest critiques of power. they take place ‘offstage’ and can only be captured via an ethnographic lens which entails long term immersion in a community. however inspiring, ordinary resistance is limited. when the rohingya people in the refugee camps of bangladesh went on strike in november 2018 to protest about their biometric registrations and digital identity cards, their struggle was met with police violence.1 biometric registrations continued apace the following day without addressing the concerns expressed by refugees. humanitarian settings are securitized spaces that are subject to state violence – a clear reminder that the colonial genealogies of humanitarianism are reactivated and articulated in the present moment. conclusion this paper has investigated the contestation of practices of datafication and technological experimentation which are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in the aid sector. drawing on scholars in the radical black tradition (patterson, 2022; robinson, 2021) and the notion of the ‘hidden transcripts’ (scott, 1985), i have developed the term ‘ordinary transcripts’ to illustrate the modest critique of digital power through everyday life practices. the argument about the importance of listening to the ‘ordinary transcripts’ is partly a methodological one as it is only through ethnographic encounters that these small acts of contestation can be noticed. the field of media research was once described as series of oscillations between approaches that either favoured powerful media, or powerful audiences. in this juncture of internet research, the pendulum is firmly on the side of technological and data power. this article argues that such stark choices can be false: technologies are powerful and rework colonial genealogies; at the same time, people have agency and power, however limited, to contest structures of oppression and to articulate their own identities. it is important to stress the limits of everyday resistance in asymmetrical settings such as those encountered in the humanitarian sector. the ordinary transcripts of everyday resistance do not equal decolonization which requires a radical restructuring of power relations (tuhiwai smith, 2021). still, ordinary resistance needs to be acknowledged for it may contain the seeds of the decolonial struggle to come. references appadurai, a. (1993). number in the postcolonial imagination. in c. breckenridge & p. van der veer (eds.), orientalism and the postcolonial predicament (pp. 314-339). philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. gopal, p. (2019). insurgent empire: anticolonial resistance and british dissent. london: verso. hill c. (2022). poetic resistance: karen long-distance nationalism, rap music, and youtube. international journal of cultural studies. 25(1), 30-50. doi:10.1177/13678779211027179 1 refugees expressed their concerns about the potential function creep of biometric registrations, which were jointly carried out by the united nations refugee agency and the government of bangladesh. the refugees’ suspicions that sensitive biometric datasets would be shared with myanmar were later confirmed as correct in a report by the human rights watch https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/2021/6/21/rohingya-data-protection-and-un-betrayal madianou, m. (2019). technocolonialism: digital innovation and data practices in the humanitarian response to refugee crises. social media and society, vol. 5(3) https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119863146 patterson, o. (2022). the sociology of slavery: black society in jamaica 1655-1838. 2nd edition. cambridge: polity. robinson, c. (2021). black marxism: the making of the black radical tradition. 3rd edition. london: penguin. said, e. (1994) culture and imperialism. london: vintage. scott, j. (1985). weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance. new haven and london: yale university press tuhiwai smith, l. (2021). decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. london: zed books. microsoft word trifiro-the disinfectant diversion-the disinfectant diversion.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): trifiro, b., wells, c., & rochefort, a. (2021, october). the disinfectant diversion: framing strategies of partisan media in interpreting the covid-19 pandemic. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the disinfectant diversion: framing strategies of partisan media in interpreting the covid-19 pandemic briana trifiro boston university chris wells boston university alexander rochefort boston university storytelling, identity and news media our study sits at the intersection of two streams of communication research. the older of these has made clear, over several decades, that news media convey meaning to audiences through framing processes: making certain issues, or attributes of issues, more salient than others (e.g. entman, 1993). a more recent line of work has developed theories relating to the nature of identity and political affiliation in the 21st century, especially as a way to understand the surprising results of the 2016 election (e.g. cramer, 2016; hochschild, 2016). the latter has particularly pointed to the importance of narratives, such as hochschild’s “deep story,” in organizing citizens’ understandings of the political system, their place in it, and the actions and interests of other actors. some work has begun to knit together these sets of work. kreiss (2018), for example, details how breitbart presents language oriented toward audiences who identify with white, christian american identities. the use of such narratives in interpreting ongoing news events allows breitbart to serve as “cultural communes” (castells, 2011): reactionary and defensive spaces for publics who perceive themselves to be ostracized by mainstream political society. the proliferation of online news and social media has clearly fostered the propagation of these patterns of what we might call “identity narratives” (polletta & callahan, 2019). we contend that, especially on the american political right, the deep story now infuses the interpretation of news on a wide variety of topics. in the case of the covid-19 pandemic, it is clear that both the political and media systems in the united states rapidly polarized in their responses to the crisis. our goal is to understand how narratives about the constitution of the american polity (such as the “deep story”) and signals to social and political identities, were called upon by news media to make sense of the pandemic. method we employ quantitative data exploration to provide context and guide a focused qualitative analysis examining how media outlets constructed topics related to covid19. in this paper, we specifically focus on news coverage surrounding the april 23, 2020 white house covid-19 task force press briefing, during which trump mused about the effectiveness of sunlight and disinfectant injections in combating the virus, an event that sparked a small and very polarized “media storm” (boydstun et al., 2014). we use the case as an opportunity to explore the diverging meanings partisan media derived from a common event. we focus our analysis on six national news media outlets spanning the political spectrum: fox news, breitbart news, usa today, new york times, cnn and vox. we gathered all articles concerning the covid-19 pandemic published by these six outlets from mediacloud from april 23, 2020 – april 26, 2020. because of mediacloud’s limited collections of cable television content, we also drew content from fox news and cnn from the internet television archive. during this time, we identified 115 articles and 87 television segments for qualitative analysis. to understand how these outlets framed their coverage of the april 23rd press briefing on social media, we also performed a qualitative analysis of the 41 facebook posts regarding the press briefing issued by these outlets. data was collected using crowdtangle. in terms of analysis, all articles and clips were analyzed by the first author. similar to the work of benziman (2020) and chadwick (2017), the present analysis utilizes a grounded theory approach to identify recurrent themes utilized within media coverage. following this approach, themes were compared to find similarities and differences among the ways in which each outlet relied on narratives in their coverage of the april 23rd press briefing. discussion our results reveal a significant lack of editorialization utilized in online news coverage. with the exception of breitbart news, the majority of articles displayed techniques that removed the reporter's voice and opinion from the coverage. many of these articles relied on direct quotes from the president and avoided any sort of incensed or valanced language. it was only through our analysis of cable television did we observe what has been described in the existing literature (kreiss, 2018; polletta & callahan, 2019), where political pundits instructed viewers how to interpret other channels’ coverage as well as the outright villainization of the media and opposing viewpoints. through these narratives, cable news pundits and commentators instill heuristics that audiences can adopt and apply to future viewings. the overarching narratives used within the centrist and leftist outlets focused heavily on the tendency of the right-wing to ignore science in favor of personal opinion or bias. in contrast, the segments from the conservative outlets rally around the argument that the media “hates donald trump” and is constantly willing to “twist his words whenever they can at the expense of the american people.” these narratives all contribute to the overarching frame concocted by fox news and other conservative outlets that mainstream and liberal sources cannot be trusted further propelling the toxic notion of “fake news.” while this may not appear to overtly connect to the concept of identity, we believe that these narratives appeal to a deeper identity narrative where conservative media seeks to drive an “us versus them” mentality. while the overarching use of identity narratives appears to be more implicit in the partisan coverage, this provides further evidence of cultural communes. considering the widespread ramifications of covid-19, and what could be considered as universal concerns regarding a global health crisis, we would expect to see balanced and fair reporting from a healthy media system. however as illustrated, rather than being objectively critical of the president’s dangerous comments on april 23rd, the rightwing media was quick to rush to his defense and criticize the liberal media for attempting to “twist his words.” in contrast, the same anger can be observed in left-wing media, however, it is predominantly directed to the president himself rather than the right. these findings present further evidence to support existing work that illustrates the importance of storytelling and narratives to trump’s supporter base. as evidenced, these narratives while effective at rallying the right have clearly driven a deep wedge between democrats and republicans. references benziman, y. (2020). “winning” the “battle” and “beating” the covid-19 “enemy”: leaders’ use of war frames to define the pandemic. peace and conflict: journal of peace psychology, 26(3), 247. boydstun, a. e., hardy, a., & walgrave, s. (2014). two faces of media attention: media storm versus non-storm coverage. political communication, 31(4), 509-531. castells, m. (2011). the rise of the network society. john wiley & sons. chadwick, a. (2017). the hybrid media system: politics and power. oxford university press. cramer, k. j. (2016). the politics of resentment: rural consciousness in wisconsin and the rise of scott walker. university of chicago press. entman, r. m. (1993). framing: toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. journal of communication. 43(4). 51-58. kreiss, d. (2018). the networked self in the age of identity fundamentalism. in a networked self and platforms, stories, connections (pp. 12-28). routledge. peck, r. (2019). fox populism: branding conservatism as working class. cambridge university press. polletta, f., & callahan, j. (2019). deep stories, nostalgia narratives, and fake news: storytelling in the trump era. in politics of meaning/meaning of politics (pp. 5573). palgrave macmillan, cham. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): hammelburg, e. (2022, november). instagram’s shift towards live: how stories and live videos shape how we experience being at event. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. instagram’s shift towards live: how stories and live videos shape the experience of live events dr esther hammelburg amsterdam university of applied sciences introduction instagram has long been about sharing perfect pictures. for their instagram posts many users beautify scenes from everyday life, elevate photogenic aspects, and articulate special moments in a style that fits the standards of instagram culture (leaver et al., 2020; manovich, 2017). the term “instagrammable” found its way into many dictionaries and is widely used as a promotional label, for instance in tourism, food, and the museum sector. however, since the introduction of instagram stories and instagram live – in 2016 – an increasingly large part of the content shared on instagram is no longer instagrammable in the same sense. these features afford instantaneous sharing of images and videos that are not necessarily displayed permanently, introducing a very different visual language and new visual practices. at festivals, instagram is a ubiquitous platform. many event-goers share their live experiences through posts and stories, often using event-specific hashtags, locations, and stickers. based on an elaborate empirical examination of event-goers’ instagram practices, this paper argues that instagram’s shift towards live shapes their live experiences in distinct ways. studying hybrid events this paper results from a large study that employed ethnographic, digital and visual methods to investigate platformed imaging at three large annual events in the netherlands: pride amsterdam, oerol festival, and 3fm serious request.1 as it is based on analysis of extensive research material from fieldwork – participant observations in online and offline fields, media diaries, unstructured interviews with 379 1 fieldwork for this study was carried out pre-pandemic. the covid-crisis has only intensified the use of live features as we needed to find new ways to hold festivals, but also birthday parties, classes, and meeting friends. this has thoroughly changed our understanding of being there live, which would be an interesting point to explore with the audience. https://pride.amsterdam/en/ https://www.oerol.nl/en/ https://www.npo3fm.nl/thema/serious-request event-joiners, and large data sets of platformed visual content – it brings unique empirical insights into the concrete visual media practices of festival-goers. the full study indicates that the studied live events can be considered hybrid in the sense that physical event environments and media environments are thoroughly entwined. the sense of “being there live” in these events then revolves around the alignment of event-joiners’ physical event and media environments rather than (only) the mediation of happenings in the physical world (hammelburg, 2021). consequently, platform features and cultures impact event-goers’ behavior and the experience of event-going. in this paper the main question is how event-goers’ live experiences at these three events are shaped by their use of instagram’s features for live and ephemeral visual content. fun and messy instant imaging imaging through instagram stories and instagram live (see figure 1 for examples) is typically less serious, more impulsive, and less subject to aesthetic standards than the large part of posting on the platform. the visual language of these features is unpolished, incorporating both new visual tropes and templates, and continuing existing visual languages from older “instant” media technologies. the new visual characteristic that seems to have the most impact on people’s behavior in the events is the vertical display in stories and livestreaming. as leaver et al. (2020) argue, this indicates that these visual practices are promoted as native to the mobile device. while this concrete visual vernacular is new, the affordance of the handheld device results in additional aesthetic qualities that continue existing visual traditions rather than break with them. the aesthetic form of these instant photos and videos remediates (bolter & grusin, 1999) that of the handheld camera introduced in the 1960s, particularly the visual language of event reporting on tv, and home videos at parties. as these older media forms are familiar to event-goers, adopting these styles positions them in the event in a specific manner. figure 1: instagram stories by event-joiners exhibiting the feature’s aesthetics. these live images are allowed to be of lesser quality – they are often shaky, badly lit, of lesser digital quality, and not neatly cut or framed – because they find their appraisal in the instantaneous: the sense that the maker is part of the unfolding event at that moment. further, this raw style of imaging cultivates a vernacular that reflects authenticity, remediating a culture of aesthetics of film and television in which unrefined visuals were intentionally used to evoke a sense of “realness” (e.g., films such as festen (vinterberg, 1998), and the blair witch project (myrick & sánchez, 1999), and many reality tv shows). in the 1990s, this style worked in contrast to the sleek and polished look of film and tv – in many ways a similar contrast as that between the instagram story and the instagram post. capturing and creating authentic moments stories and livestreams can be understood as forms of cinéma vérité, both capturing and creating the authentic live moment. while these images are often understood as displaying the unfolding unpredictable moment, they are themselves part of that happening; stories and streams have become part of event environments and create specific new physical realities that are experienced as authentic moments. one of my interviewees – matthew, who was on a boat in the amsterdam pride canal parade – specifically told me about the “authentic moments” he enjoyed at the event when people gathered closely for the live instagram stories he made. “there is something funny” matthew says, “the way i behave and the way people around me will behave as they see that you’re doing the live ones. then i think there is a certain kind of spontaneity and a kind of certain energy which you capture.” for matthew the practice of making live stories in the event intensifies the now in the physical event environment. these authentic moments are afforded and shaped by the visual and technological form they aim to produce: quick spontaneous gatherings around a phone or funny dances together for a live video2, making colorful annotated stories while on the way to the event, or cheering for the livestreaming phone that pans the crowd in the event-goer’s hand. all these embodied event practices have become an integral part of event-goers’ experiences of being at an event. the experiential now moreover, instagram’s shift towards live resulted in new visual practices that position eventgoers in a specific way, enacting their immersion in the fun and messy event. the instagram post affords the eventgoer to create an image that is worth a permanent place in the feed, to reflectively look at their experience of the event – while in it – and visualize it as an aesthetically pleasing lasting memory. stories and livestreams, in opposition, are shared casually and continuously, positioning the eventgoer more in the experiential now of the event. references bolter, j. d., & grusin, r. (1999). remediation: understanding new media. the mit press. 2 this is even more the case for tiktok-users. i would love to further explore this with researchers who have studied that platform. hammelburg, e. (2021). being there live: how liveness is realized through media use at contemporary cultural events. [phd thesis, university of amsterdam]. https://hdl.handle.net/11245.1/dd5152aa-23f8-4fda-8e99-f13eed2c7f74 leaver, t., highfield, t., & abidin, c. (2020). instagram: visual social media cultures: vol. chapter 2. polity. manovich, l. (2017). instagram and contemporary image. cuny. http://manovich.net/content/04-projects/154-instagram-and-contemporaryimage/instagram_book_manovich_2017.pdf myrick, d., & sánchez, e (directors). (1999). the blair witch project [film]. vinterberg, t (director). (1998). festen [film]. https://hdl.handle.net/11245.1/dd5152aa-23f8-4fda-8e99-f13eed2c7f74 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): nieborg, d.b. & poell, t. (2023, october). platforms, power & advertising: analysing relations of dependency in the digital advertising ecosystem. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. platforms, power & advertising: analysing relations of dependency in the mobile digital advertising ecosystem david b. nieborg university of toronto thomas poell university of amsterdam introduction one of the main drivers of the global platform economy, if not the digital economy at large, is digital advertising. because of its size—an economy of over $600+ billion globally—even a miniscule stake in this complex ecosystem translates into a significant revenue stream. as a result, a wide range of institutional actors—platform companies, technology start-ups, data intermediaries, ecommerce and retail giants, and others— have vied for control not only over market share, but also over measurement standards and tracking infrastructures (crain, 2021; turow, 2011). fueling the already dynamic nature of the digital advertising industry is the ability of new market entrants to either aggregate demand (i.e., eyeballs or consumers) and/or supply (i.e., ad inventory or ‘impressions’ to sell). in other words, the digital advertising ecosystem is relatively open. launching new companies—e.g., new digital advertising networks or companies that provide services related to targeting, attribution, or (data) optimization—is far from impossible. yet, despite agreed-upon industry standards and low barriers to market entry, like most sectors of the platform economy, a handful of institutional actors has an outsized influence and can exert outsized control over the industry’s direction (srnicek, 2017). for example, google and facebook rake in half of global digital advertising revenues, whereas amazon, tencent, microsoft and apple are all rapidly gaining market share. this paper, then, examines how dominant institutional actors exercise power and control over the digital advertising ecosystem. it pursues this inquiry through a case study on the 2021 introduction of apple’s app tracking transparency (att) feature—a privacy setting newly integrated in the operating system of ios mobile devices. this case study allows us to examine: 1) how infrastructural control is nested and sits at different layers of the ‘ad stack’, and (2) how the mass diffusion of mobile devices has shifted the loci of control in the broader advertising ecosystem. our work builds on scholarship situated at the intersection of advertising studies (crain, 2021; mcguigan, 2019), and platform studies (blanke & pybus, 2020; helmond et al., 2019). this work allows us to take a critical approach to analyze the uneven distribution of institutional power, which includes market power, infrastructural power, and discursive power (broughton micova & jacques, 2020; van dijck et al., 2019). one of the key insights in platform studies concerns the economic and infrastructural reach of platform companies. via a process theorized as ‘platformization,’ platforms are said to extend beyond their own infrastructural boundaries by ways of integrations in external apps and platforms (helmond, 2015). software development kits (sdks) provided by platform companies and integrated in third party apps, allow for a constant stream of ‘platform ready’ data (blanke & pybus, 2020; helmond, 2015). building on these insights, we examine how platformization is operationalized in the mobile digital advertising ecosystem by asking: how do dominant market actors exercise control over the infrastructural layers of the ‘mobile ad stack’ and how do they gain access to enduser data? analyzing infrastructural services the underlying business proposition driving digital advertising is remarkably simple. at its core, app-based advertising is a prototypical two-sided market, connecting a supply or sell-side (e.g., static display ads or videos on mobile devices) with a demandor buyside populated by billions of corporations and institutions seeking the attention of endusers. yet, this seemingly simple process of: matching the ‘right’ set of eyeballs with a ‘relevant’ ad (i.e., targeting); of being able to also track and check this matching process (i.e., attribution); and of optimizing the matching process, has spawned a global, datadriven ecosystem. in the early 2000s, the introduction of ‘programmatic’ (i.e., automated) buying and selling of ads and doing so at scale favored large-scale aggregation and the ability to control key infrastructural services, which explains the rise of a handful of dominant companies (bailey et al., 2022). this is where the apple’s app tracking transparency framework becomes relevant as it directly intervenes in the ability of dominant actors in the mobile digital advertising ecosystem to aggregate specific data points and control infrastructural services. to gain a better insight how changing a seemingly simple privacy setting tucked away in an iphone or ipad can have such an outsized ripple effect, we use a mix-methods approach that involves (1) analysis of developer documentation provided by apple, (2) a review of ongoing litigation, and (3) analysis of financial disclosure forms of two addriven platforms meta and snapchat. our case takes the introduction of the att feature during apple’s annual worldwide developers conference (wwdc) in june 2020 as its starting point. evolving power relations in digital advertising more so than their competitors, facebook and google, each in their own way, have been highly successful in their ability to aggregate both ad inventory and accurate, realtime user data. they benefit from billions of users frequenting their digital properties (e.g., google search, youtube, instagram, and facebook), but also from their ability to leverage the aforementioned process of platformization. facebook’s advertising sdks are integrated into popular apps and their ‘social plug-ins,’ such as login buttons, extend the platform’s infrastructural reach deep into the app economy (nieborg & helmond, 2019). for those concerned about privacy, the ability of facebook to follow the actions of individual end-users in and across various apps poses immediate concerns. important in terms of public perception, the att framework addressed those concerns. before att, platforms, such as google and facebook, had access to an ios-powered device’s identifier for advertisers (idfa). while anonymized, this persistent identifier allowed advertising platforms to match in-app actions with device-specific profiles and ‘sell’ those to advertisers. the introduction of ios 14.5 in april 2021 switched the idfa off by default, resulting in the majority of ios users to stay opted-out of this kind of device tracking. of course, another way to view the introduction of att is to see it as an attempt by apple to gain control over end-users’ mobile data. as a result, facebook’s behavioral profiles have become less accurate, which immediately translated into a drop in ad revenue. the introduction of att serves as a powerful reminder of the layeredness of infrastructural power and that “even the largest platforms depend on the technical productions of others” (blanke & pybus, 2020: 11). at the same time, the history of the advertising business has shown numerous examples of disruptive innovations and behavioral shifts on the part of end-users; e.g., the introduction of digital video recorders, the use of ad-blockers in browsers, or web browsers blocking “third-party” tracking cookies. the rollout of att and its subsequent shifts in revenue and data, therefore, demonstrate the relational and constantly evolving nature of institutional power in the mobile advertising ecosystem. references bailey, d., coffey, d., thornley, c., & tomlinson, p. r. (2022). advertising and the consumer in the age of big tech: a new moment in the evolution of monopoly capitalism? cambridge journal of economics, 46(6), 1387–1406. blanke, t., & pybus, j. (2020). the material conditions of platforms: monopolization through decentralization. social media + society, 6(4), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120971632 broughton micova, s., & jacques, s. (2020). platform power in the video advertising ecosystem. internet policy review, 9(4). https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/platform-power-video-advertisingecosystem crain, m. (2021). profit over privacy. how surveillance advertising conquered the internet. university of minnesota press. helmond, a. (2015). the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready. social media + society, 1(2), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080 helmond, a., nieborg, d. b., & van der vlist, f. n. (2019). facebook’s evolution: development of a platform-as-infrastructure. internet histories, 3(2), 123–146. mcguigan, l. (2019). automating the audience commodity: the unacknowledged ancestry of programmatic advertising. new media & society, 21(11–12), 2366– 2385. nieborg, d. b., & helmond, a. (2019). the political economy of facebook’s platformization in the mobile ecosystem: facebook messenger as a platform instance. media, culture & society, 41(2), 196–218. srnicek, n. (2017). platform capitalism. polity. turow, joseph. (2011). the daily you: how the new advertising industry is defining your identity and your worth. yale university press. van dijck, j., nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2019). reframing platform power. internet policy review, 8(2). https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/reframing-platformpower selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): han, x. & hou, j. (2021, october). fake popularity for real money: enlarging data bubble on chinese digital platforms. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. fake popularity for real money: enlarging data bubble on chinese digital platforms xiaofei han carleton university jiaxi hou the university of tokyo introduction this on-going research delineates the constructing of an interlocking ecosystem around data metric based popularity magnification on popular chinese digital platforms, which we refer as “data bubble”. similar to the bubble in a stock market where the price of assets substantially exceeds its intrinsic value, we propose “data bubble” as a neologism to describe the phenomenon and ecosystem of manipulating data to aim for an inflated popularity on chinese digital platforms, which ultimately pitch to higher commercial and financial values. data bubble widely exists across different types of popular chinese platforms yet with distinctive manifestations. for example, on weibo where the data bubble initially emerged and took off from, fans often organize large-scale “chart beating” activities on weibo to magnify the visibility of their idols, especially through weibo’s flagship products. such data fans even organized “overseas expeditions” to inflate album downloads globally for their favorite celebrities (zhang & negus, 2020). while on kuaishou, a video sharing and livestreaming platform which has gained prominence among rural and grassroots users, while the platform claimed one of its top streamers, xiao yiyi, achieved 105 million sales during one single online marketing campaign, a third-party agency indicated that the actual turnover was only about 8 million instead (sina tech, 2020). while such examples associated with data manufacturing and data optimization may seem like only scattered practices that signal a negative market externality of digital economy at first sight, we want to highlight and further investigate the underlying, shared logics that have underpinned such practices at a deeper level, which, remarkably, have deeply integrated and grown biometrically into the existing platform models and users’ established behavior patterns in china. through an integral theoretical framework that brings together digital capitalism (dyerwitheford, 1999; mosco, 2018; schiller, 2014), platform studies (helmond, 2015; nieborg & helmond, 2018; poell et al., 2019; van dijck et al., 2019; van dijck & poell, 2013) and actor-network theory (latour, 2005), this research examines both the political economy of the data bubbles on chinese digital platforms and the critical roles of end users as participating actors into the larger ecosystem. by combining digital ethnography and document analysis on two representative platforms, weibo and kuaishou, we first unpack the assemblage of the “data bubbles” in the contemporary chinese digital sphere and map out key actors and practices that constitute the ecosystem of data bubble as well as the different drives behind respectively. secondly, we sketch out the key value chains which “transform” inflated data metrics on platforms into commercial and financial values for different participants. thirdly, we pay special attention to the complexity of users’ perceived agency and how end-users’ active participation has also become complicity in the process of consolidating the data bubble ecosystem. specifically, we argue that data bubble is laced with platform company’s commercial and financial imperatives, logics of datafication and popularity of platforms as data infrastructure, active participation from different user groups and complementors, and a deeply embedded mentality of “traffic is king” for all parties. with various actors and entities involved (platforms, individual end users, influencers, multi-channel networks and incubators, celebrities and agencies, marketing agencies, and advertisers), data bubble is characterized by the mutually beneficial, dialectic dynamics between inflated data metrics and the popularity they (mis)represent, the commercial and financial value that such inflated data metrics have brought about, and users’ experienced satisfaction derived from their perceived agency by either “playing along” or “playing against” the datafication rules on the platforms. preliminary findings our analysis reveals that the data bubble is deeply integrated into the platform ecosystem in four dimensions. commodification and value chains the data bubble has clung onto platform’s business model and magnifies the underlying logics of datafication imperative for platform. various data manufacturing practices are deeply integrated into the key products and the commodification means of digital platforms, like the hot searching on weibo or the livestreamer toolkits on kuaishou, conveying the importance of championing different charts and convincing users to believe that investing money and labor to achieve visibility on these platforms may bring future economic returns—all achieved through the algorithmic rules of platform’s key products, interfaces, and provided affordances. this further results in the emergence of value chains centred around data manufacturing that often fall into the informal sectors, such as farm clicks and bots with which mcns and celebrity agencies and even the platforms themselves are engaged and live co-dependently. financial returns we argue that inflated data metrics and the fake popularity they misrepresent attract capital from investors and financiers, given that such data bubble exaggerates the financial prospect of the companies involved since the excessive traffic manufactured is often used as a proof for a platform’s ability to attract more attention and generate revenues in the future and thereby raising investors’ expectation. the logic of the data bubble and the transformation of excessive data into financial returns are, therefore, connected to, and largely resonates with, the logic of valuation in the stock market that is underpinned by investors’ speculation of the company’s future performance instead of its current profitability. this is particularly relevant for platform companies that are often able to drain large capital from the stock market while yet still running a deficit. user participation instead of viewing individuals simply as “victims” of the data bubble, we find their complicity in creating and intensifying such an ecosystem. rather than lacking knowledge and agency about datafication process and tactics, individual users actively adjust themselves to the (imagined) platform's data metrics and actively participate into enlarging the data bubble by sharing vernacular knowledge and utilizing multiple tactics to collectively optimize their data performance to achieve their own ends. users also constantly press platforms to reshape their datafication mechanisms, answering their unexpected usages on the other. nonetheless, the dialectic relationships between platforms and active users and their agency does not necessarily liberate or empower individual users, especially for the socioeconomically marginal ones. by intensifying the rivalry among different user groups, data bubble triggers excessive labor and monetary investments to win the various data competitions when everyone’s popularity has been intentionally inflated. governance data bubble’s developments are a result of the so-called double-folded platform governance failure (gillespie, 2018). on the one hand, the data bubble signals a rather neoliberal approach that the chinese government has adopted in terms of the radical commodification of major platforms in the past decade, although the state's control over political content and activism has remained tight and rigid. on the other hand, it also reflects the failure of governance practiced by platforms over the users’ activities and interactions on the platforms. too often internet companies find themselves stuck between the rife fruits reaped from the inflated traffic on the platform and the potential loss resulting from worsened user experience when the data bubble has gone too far. ultimately, our research highlights how various entities and actors have been wired and interlocked into the data bubble to aggravate the inflation of popularity to achieve their own ends through complex, dialectic dynamics between platform’s technical artifacts and affordances, users’ online engagement, and the rapid commodification process of major platforms. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 roig, a. & martorell, s. (2020, october). i am the virus: digital storytelling and fictional twitter accounts in the coronavirus crisis in spain. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. i am the virus: digital storytelling and fictional twitter accounts in the coronavirus crisis in spain antoni roig universitat oberta de catalunya sandra martorell universitat politècnica de valència the purpose of this work is to understand the role of digital storytelling as a conversation asset regarding social and health emergencies, specifically fictional parody characters in social media, as chroniclers of ongoing crises. we will focus on a strikingly popular phenomenon: the twitter account @coronavid19, where the virus, presented as a fictional character, offers a humorous chronicle in almost real time through social media, from the early breaking news related to the presence of the virus in the country to the unfolding of an unprecedented social and health crisis. the account got more than 450,000 followers in its first week of existence, coinciding with the first confirmed covid19 cases in mainland spain (february 2020) and was widely covered by mainstream media. it currently has more than 860.000 followers, which is way higher than official health and governmental twitter accounts. this paradigmatic case study has been chosen considering its impact from the early stages of the pandemic, but also its peculiarities as a fictional character and a privileged chronicler in the first person. through @coronavid19, the virus becomes a tangible character that details, with elevated doses of sarcasm, the spanish leg of its so-called ‘world tour’. the anonymous user started posting just at the same time of the first cases where detected in mainland spain and it often mentioned news content in unfolding its real-time narrative. the popularity of @coronavid19 has also led to the appearance of further fictional characters impersonating other diseases or other health-related fictional characters. our case analysis is aimed to understand how fictional parody characters are built in discursive and extra-discursive terms, how they interact with followers and how narrative and character traits evolve along the crisis. we also want to observe whether they add nuances to social discussion, reframe news content (emphasizing or downplaying events) and serve as a tool to cope with hard times, fostering collective empowerment, mutual empathy (caracciolo, 2014; bal, brokerhof & dolci, selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 roig, a. & martorell, s. (2020, october). i am the virus: digital storytelling and fictional twitter accounts in the coronavirus crisis in spain. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 2018) while stressing official recommendations, using irony and mocking irrational behaviour. we consider storytelling and fiction to be viable tools for social transformation, as alternatives to current and future social challenges through affective attachment to feasible narratives, thus complementing factual scientific projections and models. storytelling can be used to improve communication of science overcoming the ‘narrative deficit’ (veland et al, 2018) making the intangible tangible (through fictional narratives that are strongly rooted in current events). in line with the literature on narratives and sustainability, stories that are seen as close can help to emotionally engage citizens in essential debates regarding how to face global challenges (moezzi, janda and rotmann, 2017). this way, compelling fictional narratives can foster collective action around critical social issues. we have carried out a participant observation of account activity, thus allowing us to observe playful and non-playful reactions, key mentions and the overall unfolding of the character-based narrative. this was done first through day-to-day observation, daily data extraction through the open-source tool r studio (n=954) plus occasional extractions from related users. at given times, approximately every two months, we undertook an overall analysis looking for twists and narrative wholeness. we have conducted content analysis to identify different narratives strategies, relation to current events (including those ignored or side-lined by the character), a taxonomy of key topics and significant interactions with other users, be it individuals, other fictional characters or institutions. furthermore, we did a semi-structured interview with the user behind @coronavid19 in april 2020, respecting anonymity, a key feature of most parody accounts. eighteen questions were passed to the author -presented as a male-, revolving around four key areas: authorial profile (6 questions), account management (4), narrative style and twists (4), interaction with other accounts (4). these answers allowed us to complement and to get a better overview and to take the case study further. a distinctive feature of such narratives emerging during an ongoing crisis is that they can’t be planned beforehand and don’t have a predictable course, thus forcing characters to react to breaking events and the evolving mood of their followers. in our analysis, we have observed that the coronavirus threat was initially seen as ‘distant’ by the population living far from the main focus of infection. subsequently, danger was seen as tangible and close, and feelings of disbelief gave way to selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 roig, a. & martorell, s. (2020, october). i am the virus: digital storytelling and fictional twitter accounts in the coronavirus crisis in spain. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. paranoia and fear. weeks later, a pandemic was declared and the rate of infection and deaths were alarmingly on the rise, leading to the declaration of a state of alarm and confinement. all these events influenced the unfolding narrative of @coronavid19 account, evolving towards a more humanized character, using a more observational and lighter humour. attempting to find the right tone was not easy amid a global drama surrounded by a feeling of fear and uncertainty. uncertainty that was a seed for rumours, contradictory statements, fake news and conspiracy theories. different research actions have been undertaken so far, and we summarize some of our key findings as follows: (1) fictional characters like @coronavid19 succeed in counterbalancing collective fear by mocking irrational reactions, or defusing fear making the threat tangible, humanizing it and showing it as vulnerable; (2) the author was forced to make an ethical stand once the account proved to be successful and the crisis more serious and unpredictable than expected, softening the character’s edges towards a more everyday humour with a political and social edge and stressing safety measures; (3) this process means side-lining some of the bleakest implications of the pandemic (death rates, psychological effects and economic crisis); (4) @coronavid19 works as a character-driven narrative, with a transformation arc in an otherwise unpredictable plot; (5) followers, even those who have suffered from covid-19, react playfully and fondly to the character-, except when political polarization takes over. references bal, m., brokerhof, i. & dóci, e. (2018). how does fiction inform working lives? an exploration of the roles of empathy and social sustainability. working paper. bore, i. l. k. & hickman, j. (2013). continuing the west wing in 140 characters or less: improvised simulation on twitter. the journal of fandom studies, 1(2), 219-238. caracciolo, m. (2014). beyond other minds: fictional characters, mental simulation, and" unnatural" experiences. journal of narrative theory, 44(1), 29-53. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 roig, a. & martorell, s. (2020, october). i am the virus: digital storytelling and fictional twitter accounts in the coronavirus crisis in spain. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. highfield, t. (2016). news via voldemort: parody accounts in topical discussions on twitter. new media & society, 18(9), 2028-2045. moezzi, m., janda, k. b. & rotmann, s. (2017). using stories, narratives, and storytelling in energy and climate change research. energy research & social science, 31, 1-10. pak, c. (2015). ‘the goal of martian economics is not “sustainable development” but a sustainable prosperity for its entire biosphere’: science fiction and the sustainability debate. green letters, 19(1), 36-49. veland, s., scoville-simonds, m., gram-hanssen, i., schorre, a. k., el khoury, a., nordbø, m. j. & bjørkan, m. (2018). narrative matters for sustainability: the transformative role of storytelling in realizing 1.5 c futures. current opinion in environmental sustainability, 31, 41-47. weber, m. & driscoll, b. (2019). playful twitter accounts and the socialisation of literary institutions. first monday, 24(3). yusoff, k. & gabrys, j. (2011). climate change and the imagination. wiley interdisciplinary reviews: climate change, 2(4), 516-534. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): tamò larrieux, a., fosch villaronga, e., velidi, s., viljoen, s., lutz, c., & büchi, m., (2020, october). perceptions of algorithmic profiling on facebook and their social implications. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. perceptions of algorithmic profiling on facebook and their social implications aurelia tamò larrieux university of zurich, switzerland eduard fosch villaronga leiden university, netherlands shruthi velidi independent scholar, usa salome viljoen new york university, cornell tech, usa christoph lutz bi norwegian business school, norway moritz büchi university of zurich, switzerland background and research questions with every digital interaction, individuals are increasingly subject to algorithmic profiling, for example via targeted advertising on social media. large internet firms, such as facebook and google/alphabet, as well as third-party data brokers collect and combine detailed personal data to create sophisticated profiles (bach et al., 2019) used for predictive purposes. we understand profiling here as the systematic and purposeful recording and classification of data related to individuals (büchi et al., 2019). research has started to look into people’s perception and engagement of algorithms (bucher, 2017; duffy et al., 2017; eslami et al., 2015; klawitter & hargittai, 2018). notably, this research has shown that many users are unaware of the existence of algorithms, for example those which curate news feeds (eslami et al., 2015), and that a majority feels uncomfortable with algorithmic profiling on facebook (hiltin & rainie, 2019). in our research, we investigate perceptions of algorithmic profiling on facebook by addressing the following questions: what user narratives of profiling on facebook exist? what reactions do users have when confronted with facebook’s inferred profiles? what are the social implications of user perceptions of profiling? research design relying on prolific for participant recruitment and qualtrics for the questionnaire design, we created an online survey in november 2019. we limited participation to active facebook users in the us and obtained 292 valid responses. the survey included questions on demographics, privacy concerns, privacy-protection behavior, social media and internet use, and an in-depth section on respondents’ perception of profiling, based on facebook’s “your interests” and “your categories” sections in the ad preferences menu (hiltin & rainie, 2019). we used five open text boxes to elicit the narratives, imaginaries, and reactions to facebook’s algorithmic profiling. the data analysis is ongoing and for this contribution, we present the findings of a thematic analysis of the textual data as well as descriptive statistics for the closed questions. results and discussion to explore user narratives of profiling, we asked the following questions: how do you think facebook determines which ads to display to you? and what kind of data do you think facebook has about you? we analyzed the second question in more depth and extracted four key perceptions: a) uncertainty: respondents do not know what kind of data facebook has about them and admit their lack of knowledge; b) naiveté: respondents think that facebook only has the information they explicitly shared (no inferences); c) realism: respondents are aware that facebook has information that goes beyond what is immediately visible; d) fatalism: respondents think that facebook knows everything. theme c) was most prevalent but a fair proportion of respondents fell into the b) and d) categories. figure 1 shows a word cloud visualization for this question. the prominent role of “everything” and “know” implies narratives of facebook as powerful and intrusive, as evidenced by individual quotes. this is partly contrasted by the reaction to the actual displays of profiling. using closed questions, we found that the perceived accuracy of “my interests” was only moderate (3.30/5) and the same is true for “my categories” (3.25/5). however, “my interests” and “my categories” differed in the level of perceived detail, measured by the question: is the number of interests/categories higher, lower, or about what you expected? (separately asked for interests and categories after inspection of “my interests” and “my categories”). the number of interests listed tended to be higher than expected, whereas the number of categories listed tended to be lower than expected. the openended reactions to seeing “my interests” and “my categories” varied broadly, from not surprised at all to shocked. many respondents were surprised at how imprecise or even wrong some of the inferred interests and categories were. these findings paint a more differentiated picture than the initial narratives. these findings have implications for research on algorithms from a user-centered perspective (bucher, 2017; duffy et al., 2017; eslami et al., 2015; klawitter & hargittai, 2018). particularly, they point to aspects of social exclusion and social justice, as users might differentially benefit or be disadvantaged from their digital traces (micheli et al., 2018). if users have overly pessimistic imaginaries of algorithmic profiling, they might be excluded from opportunities the internet and social media offer (schradie, 2013). by contrast, if they have overly optimistic imaginaries of algorithmic profiling, they might fall prey to online fraud or abuse more easily (madden et al., 2017). thus, the findings connect to the debate about algorithmic literacy. particularly, knowledge about profiling and algorithmic literacy could be associated with chilling effects that affect those at the margins most strongly, potentially leading to a society with less space for nonconformity and alternative lifestyles (büchi et al., 2019). in a follow-up study to the research presented here, we aim to connect perceptions of profiling to chilling effects. figure 1. users’ perceptions of facebook’s data about them references bach, r. l., kern, c., amaya, a., keusch, f., kreuter, f., hecht, j., & heinemann, j. (2019). predicting voting behavior using digital trace data. social science computer review, online first. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439319882896 bucher, t. (2017). the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 30-44. büchi, m., fosch-villaronga, e., lutz, c., tamò-larrieux, a., velidi, s., & viljoen, s. (2019). the chilling effects of algorithmic profiling: mapping the issues. computer law & security review, online first. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clsr.2019.105367 duffy, b. e., pruchniewska, u., & scolere, l. (2017). platform-specific self-branding: imagined affordances of the social media ecology. in proceedings of the 8th international conference on social media & society (pp. 1-9). acm. eslami, m., rickman, a., vaccaro, k., aleyasen, a., vuong, a., karahalios, k., ... & sandvig, c. (2015). i always assumed that i wasn't really that close to [her]: reasoning about invisible algorithms in news feeds. in chi’15: proceedings of the 33rd annual acm conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 153-162). acm. hiltin, p., & rainie, l. (2019). facebook algorithms and personal data. pew research center: internet & technology report, 16 january 2019. https://www.pewinternet.org/2019/01/16/facebook-algorithms-and-personal-data/ klawitter, e., & hargittai, e. (2018). “it’s like learning a whole other language”: the role of algorithmic skills in the curation of creative goods. international journal of communication, 12, 3490-3510. madden, m., gilman, m., levy, k., & marwick, a. (2017). privacy, poverty, and big data: a matrix of vulnerabilities for poor americans. washington university law review, 95, 53–126. micheli, m., lutz, c., & büchi, m. (2018). digital footprints: an emerging dimension of digital inequality. journal of information, communication and ethics in society, 16(3), 242-251. schradie, j. (2013). big data not big enough? how the digital divide leaves people out. mediashift, 31 july 2013. http://mediashift.org/2013/07/big-data-not-big-enough-howdigital-divide-leaves-people-out/ microsoft word sinnreich-performative media policy-performative media policy.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): sinnreich, a., sanchez-santos, m., aufderheide, p. (2021, october). performative media policy: section 230’s evolution from footnote to loyalty oath. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. performative media policy: section 230’s evolution from footnote to loyalty oath aram sinnreich american university mariana sanchez santos american university patricia aufderheide american university this study examines the legislative evolution of section 230 of the communications act of 1934, a widely discussed and frequently misunderstood dimension of american telecommunications policy that provides a “safe harbor” provisionally shielding internet companies from liability for law-breaking content published by third parties who use their platforms and networks. though this provision originated in the mid-1990s as an effort to minimize the legal and economic risks facing fledgling internet startups, we argue that efforts to reform it during the trump era reflected an unprecedented transformation of an arcane policy point into a highly public subject for “messaging bills” intended principally to signal political loyalty to the president. what is section 230? sec. 230 (also known as sec. 509 of the telecommunications act of 1996) is a deceptively simple clause of american communications law — twenty-six words that have had a profound impact on the development of the internet as a technological infrastructure, an industry, and a social and cultural architecture, and is frequently referred to as “the most important law in tech.” at the time of its passage, it was seen as something of a “frankenstein” provision welded awkwardly onto existing comm policy to make it internet-ready, combining the pet concern of a few legislators (as well as vicepresident gore’s wife, tipper) about protecting children from online “indecency” with the equally arcane concern of a few other legislators to proactively support “internet freedom” by clearing obstacles to investment in the burgeoning speculative bubble surrounding “dot-com” companies in the mid-to-late 1990s (kosseff, 2019). in essence, sec. 230 states that operators of “online computer services” will not be held liable for actions of customers on their platforms. furthermore, platforms’ efforts to regulate information flow in line with material they deem “objectionable” will not affect that promise. at the time, social media was scarcely imagined by lawmakers, and protointernet services included compuserve, prodigy, and aol, along with aspiring telcos. sec. 230 has since become a weight-bearing pillar of the internet, enabling startups that offer services as diverse as auctions, restaurant ratings, dropboxes, project management, and dating apps to develop functional business and economic models based on minimizing risk of secondary liability for their users’ actions. yelp, slack, ebay, and nearly every other leading internet platform depends on sec. 230 for fiscal viability. reforming section 230 in the years since the law’s passage, some leading online platforms have developed into elaborate and algorithmically-aided architectures of information flow, pioneering a new and unregulated space between mediated and interpersonal communication. facebook, google news, twitter, parler, reddit, and many smaller platforms all operate in a space between the traditional regulatory fora of media and telecommunications. this evolution has not only given rise to a powerful new “surveillance capitalism” (zuboff, 2015) industry, but has undermined traditional journalism business models and practices, accelerated widespread disinformation distribution, and supercharged the capacity of militant terrorist organizations to amplify their messages of hate. thus, while benefiting financially from their role at the nexus of the new digital public sphere, social media platforms have also been subject to increasing pressure in threading the needle between their telecommunications and traditional media functions, with calls from both sides of the political aisle to both increase and decrease the role they play in actively mediating the flow of information through their networks (gillespie, et al, 2020). increasingly, these calls have come from “inside the house,” with a rising tide of legislators proposing legislation seeking to amend the telecommunications act. according to our own analysis of the 140 bills targeting this law over the past two decades, both the volume and the nature of these bills changed drastically in the trump era. earlier bills were policy-oriented, focused on issues such as cybersecurity, consumer privacy, and net neutrality. there were only 17 such bills through november, 2018, and none of them addressed section 230 specifically. beginning in december, 2018, the bills became far more common, and increasingly they aimed to reform or abolish section 230, either in name or in deed. there were 63 bills to amend the telecommunications act between december, 2018 and may, 2020. after twitter flagged and masked some tweets by donald trump calling for violence against civil rights protesters that month, he retaliated by using the elimination of safe harbors as a threat, tweeting “revoke 230!” on may 29th. thereafter, the pace of telecom reform bills accelerated again, with 41 more such bills in the seven and a half months until trump left office. the messaging is the message we analyzed the content of these telecom policy reform bills, and found that, increasingly between 2018-2021, the bills became less focused on specific “wonky” policy issues, and more uniform in their calls to repeal or amend section 230 for the purposes of fighting “censorship” or providing “accountability” for “bad actors” who “abuse” the provision — all talking points that reflect the grievances of trump and his allies in spreading hate speech and disinformation via social media. we believe that these bills, which flourished following the 2018 u.s. midterm elections, represent a novel and unique evolution of an older legislative strategy — typically referred to as “messaging bills” — which are intended to be performative and communicative, rather than instrumental of policy change. historically, messaging bills were “aspirational in policy terms” (lee, 2018, p. 1471), aligning messaging and agenda-setting for the minority party. however, the “unprecedented nature of the trump administration (gelman, 2018, p. 494) altered the function of messaging bills, essentially turning them into a vehicle for legislators to signal their political loyalty to the president. specifically, trump’s use of social media — and its increasing centrality to political speech — marked a change in the lawmaking process, dislodging the party as the convening institution and creating a top-down agenda setting flow. thus, legislators who propose amending section 230, though they may not understand how the law actually works, let alone the broader implications of changing it, are nonetheless cognizant that the social media attention such bills garner help to advertise their loyalty to trump among core constituents. finally, we observe that, empty though the legislative content of these bills may be, the messaging works. according to our analysis of factiva’s database, prevalence of “censorship” and “social media bias” frames spiked in the news coverage of section 230 during these years. references gelman, j. (2018). if congress is so dysfunctional, why is its staff so busy? a congressional fellow’s perspective. ps: political science & politics, 51(2), 494495. doi:10.1017/s1049096518000288 gillespie, t., aufderheide, p., carmi, e., gerrard, y., gorwa, r., matamoros-fernández, a., roberts, s. t., sinnreich, a. & myers west, s. (2020). expanding the debate about content moderation: scholarly research agendas for the coming policy debates. internet policy review, 9(4). doi: 10.14763/2020.4.1512 kosseff, j. (2019, dec. 19). what’s in a name? quite a bit, if you’re talking about section 230. lawfare. accessed at https://www.lawfareblog.com/whats-namequite-bit-if-youre-talking-about-section-230 lee, f. (2018). the 115th congress and questions of party unity in a polarized era, journal of politics, 80 (4). https://dx.doi.org/10.1086/699335 zuboff, s. (2015). big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization. journal of information technology, 30(1), 75-89. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 tracing the sociolinguistic patterns of polarization in the facebook debate on climate action luigi arminio it university of copenhagen luca rossi it university of copenhagen extended abstract sociolinguistic literature has long examined the influence of socialization on communicative norms and practices, considering both semantic and morphosyntactic aspects of communication. notably, basil bernstein's research delineated linguistic production not merely as a byproduct of individual cognitive mechanisms but also as a reflection of the underlying social structures that influence human agency (bernstein, 1962). in particular, bernstein (1962) suggested a connection between social stratification and language production, outlining two different sociolinguistic codes: a restricted code, emphasizing informal language and contextual communication, and an elaborated code, characterized by formal language and complex structures, with access determined by social class. however, the influence of socialization on language production may not necessarily be restricted to socioeconomic variables. from this angle, additional theoretical literature suggests the potential connection between political socialization and the communicational patterns of the individuals, theorizing a relationship between the adherence to a certain set of features of a given communicational code (intended as a multidimensional system including linguistic and extralinguistic aspects) and the obtained political success (ufaeva, 2013). in connection with this, it is notable that the diversity of communication styles in political environments has been empirically studied, with studies drawing on political communication sources such as political party manifestos (gyasi, 2023) and interviews with politicians (kayam, 2023). the findings indicated both the restricted accessibility of certain parties' communicational styles (gyasi, 2023) and the enhanced accessibility of language codes employed by specific political figures (kayam, 2023). reflecting on the previously posited and discussed relevance of communicational patterns in political communication, it must be noted that while some studies discuss language codes' impact on political discourse, we can spot a lack of systematic examination of the full range of linguistic features determining the stylistic diversity of social actors and how they impact political polarization dynamics. addressing this gap facilitates the assessment of the potential impact of sociolinguistic patterns on polarization in public suggested citation (apa): arminio, l., rossi, l. (2024, october). tracing the sociolinguistic patterns of polarization in the facebook debate on climate action. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http:// spir.aoir.org. debates and may support the development of communication and divulgation approaches that facilitate constructive engagement and bridge ideological divides. building upon this premise, we tried to measure the sociolinguistic patterns prevalent among stakeholders in the highly polarized climate change debate on social media and their audience. to do that, we compiled a list of active english-speaking actors in the polarized climate debate on social media, categorizing them into pro-climate action (proactors) and anti-climate action agents (counter-actors). we constructed the list by drawing from multiple sources including the desmog climate disinformation database, scholarly research on climate-related social media interactions (chen et al., 2023), and additional compilations from npos, policy insight networks, and content aggregation platforms. only those actors who displayed recent facebook activity, defined as having posted at least once in 2023 or 2024, were catalogued. after the list compilation, we resorted to the crowdtangle api to collect textual content from these actors, capturing posts from march 1, 2024, to february 12, 2024, with a maximum of 100 posts per actor. overall, we collected data from 10,650 facebook posts across 250 actors, including 96 pro-actors and 156 counter-actors. following the data collection, we filtered for climate change relevance with a dictionarybased approach: we compiled climaterelated terms from different web sources (including glossaries from institutional and news-related sources), retaining only posts containing at least one of these terms. this yielded a dataset of 2326 posts from 188 actors, comprising 114 counter-actors and 74 pro-actors. then, posts were labelled based on a comprehensive spectrum of language code indicators, including a readability score, evaluating post ease of comprehension structurally and morphosyntactically (zamanian, heydari, 2012); a concreteness score, measuring conceptual depth through a lexicon-based method from a peer-reviewed dictionary (brysbaert, et. al, 2014); a scientificity score, measuring scientific language utilization using a lexicon-based approach (suzen et. al, 2019); and a subjectivity score (verma, 2022), measuring the prevalence of perspectival influence over objective neutrality in each post. in addition to these metrics, we computed social response measures for each post, including the engagement score (nugroho, agustina, 2020) gauging audience interest; the emotional polarization score (muraoka et al., 2021) indicating the direction of the audience's emotional response; and the emotional diversity score (freeman et al., 2020) signalling the variety of the emotional reactions given our data, we aimed to initially examine if there are significant discrepancies in the communicational styles of the two opposing sides of the polarised debate (rq1) and then, which language code parameters were affecting the audience response to the public communication of both groups of actors (rq2). to answer the first research question, we measured the point biserial correlation between the position of each climate debate actor (pro vs counter) and each of the measured language parameters. as for rq2, we computed, for each social response measure, two regression models (one performed on the subset of facebook data produced by the pro-actors, and one on the analogue counter-actors subset of posts) as for the correlations (fig. 1), the results showed a moderate correlation (r = 0.29) between the climate stances of the actors and the frequency of scientific terminology in their posts, and a weaker association for readability, concreteness, and subjectivity. the direction of the correlation was in favour of the counter-actors only in the case of the subjectivity score. however, the most pronounced relationship is the positive one between the usage of scientific terminology and a stance favouring climate action. concerning the regression models (fig. 2), significant differences in the impact of the language code on the audience response have been detected in the two groups: while in the case of the pro-climate actors, the audience reactions seem to be affected by the communicational style of the posts, the same effect is notably dampened or other times completely absent in the case of the counter actors. these results highlight that while the language register of the actors in the polarized climate debate can affect the receptivity and the emotional response of the digital community, different sides of the polarization spectrum may experience varied impacts, suggesting the necessity for targeted communicational strategies to bridge divides and foster constructive dialogue concerning the climate crisis. references brysbaert, m., warriner, a. b., & kuperman, v. (2014). concreteness ratings for 40 thousand generally known english word lemmas. behavior research methods, 46, 904 911. bernstein, b. (1962). linguistic codes, hesitation phenomena and intelligence. language and speech, 5(1), 31-48. chen, k., molder, a. l., duan, z., boulianne, s., eckart, c., mallari, p., & yang, d. (2023). how climate movement actors and news media frame climate change and strike: evidence from analyzing twitter and news media discourse from 2018 to 2021. the international journal of press/politics, 28(2), 384-413. freeman, c., alhoori, h., & shahzad, m. (2020). measuring the diversity of facebook reactions to research. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 4(group), 1-17. gyasi, w. k. (2023). the readability of political party manifestos of the 2016 general elections in ghana. athens journal of mass media & communications, 9(1). kayam, o. (2018). the readability and simplicity of donald trump’s language. political studies review, 16(1), 73-88. muraoka, t., montgomery, j., lucas, c., & tavits, m. (2021). love and anger in global party politics: facebook reactions to political party posts in 79 democracies. journal of quantitative description: digital media, 1. nugroho, a., & agustina, a. (2020). examining corporate engagement in social media: advancing the use of facebook for corporation page. coverage: journal of strategic communication, 10(2), 1-10. suzen, n., mirkes, e. m., & gorban, a. n. (2019). lscdc-new large scientific dictionary. arxiv preprint arxiv:1912.06858. ufaeva, v. (2013). linguo-communicative code of modern political interaction. historical, philosophical, political and law sciences, culturology and study of art. issues of theory and practice, 6(32), 192-196. verma, p. (2022). sentiment analysis using subjectivity and sentiment score. the next normal: building agile, sustainable, tech-enabled organizations (tnn–basto-2022), 55. zamanian, m., & heydari, p. (2012). readability of texts: state of the art. *theory & practice in language studies, 2*(1). selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 algorithmic imaginaries in the making: brazilian ubertubers encounters with surge pricing algorithms ana guerra universidade federal de minas gerais carlos frederico de brito d’andréa universidade federal de minas gerais introduction surge pricing (sp) is a central mediator of uber driver’s everyday experience. it can be described as an algorithmically driven mechanism that uses price adjustments as financial incentives to redistribute the workforce on a territory (rosenblat; stark, 2016). sp algorithms are presented by uber as entities capable of measuring, translating, and responding to the market conditions — roughly summarized as drivers’ supply and riders’ demand. a heatmap with colored shades shown in the “uber driver” app orients the ‘real-time’ decisions made by the platform workers (grohmann; qiu, 2020). this algorithmic governance is routinely questioned and appropriated by drivers. although sp may trigger feelings of excitement, it is also often associated with frustration and deception, for example when sp disappears as soon as they reach high-demand areas. receiving requests from riders outside surge areas or the non-payment of the extra value are some of the issues faced and discussed by uber drivers. this paper argues that drivers’ everyday practices and efforts to understand and contest surge pricing are productive of algorithmic imaginaries and valid forms of knowledge (bucher, 2018) that, based on personal and shared experiences, inform how they orient their actions towards uber’s algorithmic systems. we approach this by mapping and analyzing how popular brazilian uber drivers discuss surge pricing on their youtube channels. our focus is understanding how these “ubertubers” — drivers who built their youtube presence based on their identity as uber drivers — explain and demonstrate how sp works, producing and sharing their own visual inscriptions (latour, 1999). inspired by critical algorithmic studies, this paper seeks to contribute to the understanding of the situated knowledge triggered by algorithm-oriented experiences. suggested citation (apa): guerra, a., and de brito d’andréa, c.f., (2021, october). algorithmic imaginaries in the making: brazilian ubertubers encounters with surge pricing algorithms. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http:// spir.aoir.org. such experiences are part of what constitutes algorithms’ “ontogenic nature” (kitchin, 2017), as they are continuously edited and updated, as well as transformed by user’s practices. by investigating the algorithmic imaginaries of sp, we are interested in "the way in which people imagine, perceive and experience algorithms and what these imaginations make possible" (bucher, 2017, p. 31), taking into account the productive capacities of people’s encounters with these sociotechnical systems1. uber drivers on youtube the relevance of videos produced by ubertubers has been previously pointed out by chan (2019), who argues that, by positioning themselves as sociotechnical experts, these drivers assume a pedagogical discourse that promises to unpack uber’s systems to optimize driver's earnings and productivity. thus, ubertubers are expected to be “self-entrepreneurs” not only as drivers but also in video production and audience engagement. in previous research (guerra, 2018), we observed how over 100 brazilian ubertubers organize a shared knowledge based on everyday practices. personal stories about working as an uber driver, explanations about changes and updates in the app, advice about how to avoid robberies, and calls for collective political action are the most common issues in their videos. thus, through a performance of expertise, ubertubers systematize drivers’ algorithmic imaginaries and make them accessible to a wider audience. findings for this study we analyzed 59 videos posted by the seven most popular brazilian ubertubers (all with more than 50,000 subscribers by the time of channel selection). all of them are men and living in the south or southeast of brazil. the time frame of this data collection — october/2016 to october/2020 — allowed us to follow how drivers’ perception of sp and sp itself changed over time. after watching and transcribing the videos, we could identify three main topics: (a) what is surge pricing and what does it do? to answer this broader question, ubertubers describe their experience with sp as a mix of excitement and frustration, often depicting it as an “illusion” or a “lure”. their analysis also refers to sp’s visual form (the reddish heat map) as a “bleeding screen” or a “screen on fire”. many of the videos are dedicated to explaining, through inscriptions produced by them (screenshots and hand drawings) how sp works and why it often leads to frustration (fig. 1). 1 this study is part of ana guerra’s academic master’s thesis, which investigates uber’s surge pricing through technographic research methods (bucher, 2018). this research engaged in the tracing of documents and inscriptions that cluster around sp and account both for the perspective of uber and drivers. figure 1: an ubertuber uses hand drawings to explain how sp works source: screenshot produced by the authors (b) tactics to benefit from surge pricing — ubertubers teach their audience how to work with surge pricing. uber hides sp once drivers accept a ride, forcing drivers to “work in the dark”, as one ubertuber puts it, but they create tactics to make sp visible before they accept the next trip. as a new ride request usually appears before the current ride is completed, the advice is to go offline during rides. alternatively, one ubertuber chooses to work with two separate smartphones to permanently track sp. based on temporal and spatial patterns (e.g. rush hour and the city’s center-periphery mobility dynamics), this driver developed his own classification of sp variations. (c) algorithmic labor as a laboratory — sp is constantly updated and various versions are tested on different drivers. ubertubers continuously document changes on how sp performs — be it how their extra earnings are calculated or how it is displayed on the app’s interface. many of the changes are not officially announced by uber and are only perceived on driver’s everyday encounters with the app. this documentation is done in a collective effort, with ubertubers often using screenshots and accounts provided by other drivers. through the analysis of the videos, we were able to approach how drivers experience and imagine surge pricing algorithms, and how their appropriations negotiate their orientation towards this sociotechnical system. driver’s situated encounters with sp algorithms generate practical knowledge fueled by productive affects. through the engagement with their audiences, ubertubers collectivize these experiences and imaginations, potentially transforming how various other drivers incorporate surge pricing into their own tactics and daily routines. finally, drivers’ channels offer us the opportunity to learn from these workers about how sp algorithms act, what they supposedly do and how they transform labor on a micropolitical level. another contribution to the field is the recognition of this audiovisual material as a singular “archive” of sp’s many versions and facets, giving us access to information on algorithms we might have not been able to find otherwise. references bucher, t. (2018). if… then: algorithmic power and politics. oxford university press. bucher, t. (2017). the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms. information, communication and society, 20(1), 30–44. chan, n. k. (2019). becoming an expert in driving for uber”: uber driver/bloggers’ performance of expertise and self-presentation on youtube”. new media and society, 2019. guerra, a. (2018). plataformização do trabalho: um estudo das redes em ação no trabalho dos motoristas uber. (undergraduate thesis). universidade federal de minas gerais, belo horizonte, brazil. guerra, a. (2021). infraestruturas, narrativas e imaginários algorítmicos: tecnografando o preço dinâmico da uber (master’s thesis). universidade federal de minas gerais, belo horizonte, brazil. grohmann, r.; qiu, j. (2020). contextualizing platform labor. contracampo, 39(1). kitchin, r. (2017). thinking critically about and researching algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1),14–29. latour, b. (1999). pandora’s hope: essays on the reality of science studies (1st edition). harvard university press. rosenblat, a., stark l. (2016). algorithmic labor and information asymmetries: a case study of uber’s drivers. international journal of communication, 10,3758–84. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): stanfill, m. and a. salter. (2021, october). not your robin hood: gamestop and platform economics at play. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. not your robin hood: gamestop and platform economics at play mel stanfill university of central florida anastasia salter university of central florida introduction in january 2021, a stock market anomaly gained widespread attention: gamestop and amc, stocks with no discernable reason for an increase in value (particularly given movie theatre closures across the nation), rose abruptly in price. this was soon understood as resulting from manipulation by members of the r/wallstreetbets subreddit. the manipulation was frequently described as “unprecedented” even though it was, as one journalist notes, all-too-familiar: “why is market manipulation and activist investment acceptable when a billionaire does it but not when an anarchic group of quarantined day traders does? why is it ok to bet on a company’s failure? pull at these threads long enough, and you might unravel the ideological underpinnings of the financial industry” (silverman 2021). this underlying tension was only heighted as double standards proliferated: in the face of rising prices on stocks that were heavily shorted, platforms popular with day traders restricted sale on all of the redditors’ targets. we argue that this incident is the inevitable result of treating platforms (and economics) through the lens of gaming and trolling; we examine the role of content moderation practices, coordinated inauthentic action, and toxic technocultures that were formerly confined to popular culture but now spiral outward. robinhood unmasked: background the trading platform most strongly associated with the reddit incident is, ironically, named robinhood. robinhood was already under scrutiny for “gamification” before the gamestop events because it both “turned investing into an online social activity” and made it “too easy, and too fun, to wager money on stocks and more complicated investments” (massa and robinson 2020). while such apps are often framed as equalizing the playing field—robinhood’s slogan is “let the people trade”—they maintain everyday people as second-class participants in the stock market. robinhood users quickly ran up against these limits as the platform “restricted transactions for certain securities to position closing only” along with other apps in its category, ceasing trading of all stocks targeted by the movement mid-surge on january 28th, which they blamed on “recent volatility” (“keeping customers informed through market volatility” 2021). at the time of robinhood’s bans, reportedly 56% of its users owned gamestop stock (pearson 2021). backlash against this decision played out across platforms, which we contend is best understood as part of longstanding issues around moderation and trolling. closing the gates: content moderation the wild rise in prices provoked correspondingly increased attention to content moderation on the platforms the traders used. most obviously, robinhood itself restricted their participation. however, the subreddit the traders had used to organize also changed its settings to private temporarily, with one of several explanations provided saying, “we are experiencing technical difficulties based on unprecedented scale as a result of the newfound interest in wsb. we are unable to ensure reddit’s content policy and the wsb rules are enforceable without a technology platform that can support automation of this enforcement” (peters 2021b). most notably, the corresponding discord server was banned “for continuing to allow hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings…we did not ban this server due to financial fraud related to gamestop or other stocks” (peters 2021a). the content moderation situation shows two things: first, the recurring internet company claim that moderation is impossible remains a reflection of their priorities, not their capabilities; and second, while much of the celebratory focus on wsb was about its challenge to capital, that did not automatically make them progressive heroes, as we’ll discuss below. revolt in the reviews: coordinated action in addition to social media outcry, thwarted traders immediately turned to the app store, where robinhood was targeted by a review bombing campaign. through collective action, they lowered the app to one star on google play reviews. reviewers were not dissuaded by google’s attempts to mitigate the damage by removing nearly 100,000 reviews (gartenberg 2021). this strategy is familiar: review bombing is a practice in which anti-fans (gray 2003) of a particular media product coordinate to post negative reviews of the product and drive its rating down. review bombing’s appeal as a weapon relies on broader trends in internet culture, such as the replacement of expertise by a flattened field of opinion, the offloading of formerly professional labor onto user-generated content, and the decline of trust in the system that these shifts produce. these changes let malicious actors deliberately manipulate the trust that the voice of “the crowd” or “everyday people” is supposed to provide, using tactics common to a variety of other harmful uses of the internet and with shared reactionary politics. anticapitalist heroes? the enemy of my enemy the popular response to the r/wallstreetbets saga was frequently celebratory, seeing their actions as a challenge to capitalism—as opposed to spectacular participation in it. this was questionable on its face because, while at least one hedge fund nearly went bankrupt—needing a bailout from another hedge fund—gamestop executives made billions from their own stock holdings as a result of the price surge. however, opposition to wall street was taken by many to be evidence of progressive politics. casting redditors as leftist heroes required ignoring that the platform is known for a toxic technoculture (massanari 2017). in particular, through longstanding tropes associating jewish people with capital, anti-capitalism slid easily into anti-semitism. as one reporter noted, “fascists on telegram and in 4chan are elated, gamifying the stock market as a kind of ‘gamergate2,’ in which they perceive themselves as fighting an anti-semitic financial war” (ross 2021). conclusion ultimately, many of the patterns of the reddit stock incident locate it in a long history of coordinated internet action steeped in toxic technocultures. however, the expansion of these practices into taking direct action on economic systems worth billions of dollars is new and calls for rigorous attention. references gartenberg, chaim. 2021. “robinhood plummets back down to a one-star rating on google play.” the verge. february 1, 2021. https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/1/22261178/robinhood-google-play-store-apprating-one-star-reviews-stocks-gamestop-reddit. gray, jonathan. 2003. “new audiences, new textualities.” international journal of cultural studies 6 (1): 64–81. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877903006001004. “keeping customers informed through market volatility.” 2021. robinhood.com. january 28, 2021. https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2021/1/28/keepingcustomers-informed-through-market-volatility. massa, annie, and edward robinson. 2020. “robinhood’s role in the ‘gamification’ of investing.” bloomberg.com, december 19, 2020. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-19/robinhood-s-role-in-thegamification-of-investing-quicktake. massanari, adrienne. 2017. “#gamergate and the fappening: how reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures.” new media & society 19 (3): 329–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815608807. pearson, jordan. 2021. “robinhood stops users from trading gamestop stocks, other reddit yolo picks.” vice. january 28, 2021. https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7ak7y/robinhood-stops-users-from-tradinggamestop-stocks-other-reddit-yolo-picks. peters, jay. 2021a. “discord bans the r/wallstreetbets server, but new ones have sprung to life.” the verge. january 27, 2021. https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/27/22253251/discord-bans-the-rwallstreetbets-server. ———. 2021b. “r/wallstreetbets went private — and now it’s back with a message.” the verge. january 27, 2021. https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/27/22253339/reddit-wallstreetbets-subredditprivate-gamestop. ross, alexander reid. 2021. “fascists on telegram and in 4chan are elated, gamifying the stock market as a kind of ‘gamergate2,’ in which they perceive themselves as fighting an anti-semitic financial war. i won’t post the slurs, but they see capitalism as a jewish conspiracy and go from there. https://t.co/fzcmtnwhjp.” tweet. @areidross (blog). january 27, 2021. https://twitter.com/areidross/status/1354491483219324928. silverman, jacob. 2021. “the gamestop saga shows how casino capitalism is eating the world.” the new republic, january 27, 2021. https://newrepublic.com/article/161082/gamestop-saga-shows-casino-capitalismeating-world. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): bruns, a., schumacher, n.f., mathieu, m., nuernbergk, c., righetti, n., giglietto, f., kakavand, a., kulichkina, a., marino, g., terenzi, m., angus, d., graham, t., dehghan, e., jude, n., matich, p., andrejevich, m., carlson, b., obeid, a., mai, p., & gruzd, a. (2022, november). pandemic politics: the 2021 and 2022 german and australian federal election campaigns on social media. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. pandemic politics: the 2021 and 2022 german and australian federal election campaigns on social media axel bruns digital media research centre, queensland university of technology nina fabiola schumacher media studies, trier university moritz mathieu media studies, trier university christian nuernbergk media studies, trier university nicola righetti university of vienna fabio giglietto university of urbino carlo bo azade kakavand university of vienna aytalina kulichkina university of vienna giada marino university of sassari massimo terenzi university of urbino carlo bo daniel angus digital media research centre, queensland university of technology timothy graham digital media research centre, queensland university of technology ehsan dehghan digital media research centre, queensland university of technology nadia jude digital media research centre, queensland university of technology phoebe matich digital media research centre, queensland university of technology mark andrejevic school of media, film, and journalism, monash university bronwyn carlson department of indigenous studies, macquarie university abdul obeid digital media research centre, queensland university of technology philip mai social media lab, ryerson university anatoliy gruzd social media lab, ryerson university panel introduction one of the effects of the continuing covid-19 pandemic has been to further accelerate the incorporation of social media activities into political and electoral campaigning. especially as a result of lockdowns and other restrictions to offline public life, overall social media use has increased in many countries; health concerns have severely curtailed conventional in-person political campaigning activities, from doorknocking to mass rallies (even if some candidates are openly flouting health measures in order to appeal to fringe, covid-denialist voters); and concerns about the safety of in-person voting processes have also led to a growth in postal voting well ahead of election day, potentially increasing the importance of political messaging early on in election campaigns. in addition, of course, the pandemic itself, and the health, economic, and social measures taken by different governments to address and manage its implications, have also become a dominant theme in most political contests. political parties around the world have scrambled to keep up with and engage with these changing circumstances, voter behaviours, and political debates, and it is therefore time to re-examine the current state of affairs. this panel does so by focussing on social media campaigning in two of the most recent major national elections: the german federal election campaign in august and september 2021, and the australian federal election campaign in march to may 2022. the four papers included in this panel examine political campaigning, public engagement, and journalistic coverage on facebook and twitter, as well as political advertising practices on facebook, and in combination offer a very timely new perspective on electioneering in the final stages of a multi-year global pandemic. the first two papers address the german federal election in september 2021. paper 1 focusses on the use of twitter, as a comparatively elite medium, by hundreds of federal politicians and the members of the federal press corps or bundespressekonferenz. for the periods before and during the campaign, it studies the activities of both groups, their intraand inter-group interaction networks, and the themes of their posts. over the timeframe of the study, this especially highlights the dynamics of both groups’ activities. paper 2 complements this work by investigating advertising practices on facebook during the german federal election campaign. drawing on the facebook ad library, its dataset of more than 20,000 advertisements offers an insight into the advertising spending and targeting practices of the major parties contesting the election. this provides an important new update on the use of such campaigning tools in german federal politics, but also highlights some of the continuing limitations of the ad library as a single source of data on political advertising and targeting practices on facebook. the other two papers focus on the australian federal election, to be held in march to may 2022. paper 3 continues a series of systematic election analyses going back almost a decade: as in 2013, 2016, and 2019, it tracks the twitter activities of all candidates, as well as the engagement they receive from other accounts, but in a further adaptation of this approach it now extends this analysis also to the activities of and engagement with the candidates’ facebook pages. by assessing overall posting and engagement patterns, examining themes in posts and responses, and identifying evidence of organic or inauthentic coordinated behaviours, the paper offers a comprehensive overview of the social media campaign in the 2022 federal election. paper 4, finally, again complements the preceding study of social media activity with a detailed investigation of political advertising practices on facebook. this takes a twopronged approach: using the polidashboard tool, it captures and analyses the political advertisements revealed by facebook’s own ad library. the paper then compares and contrasts this dataset with the actual political advertising encountered by volunteer participants in the australian ad observatory, a browser-side ad tracking tool that builds on the infrastructure of the nyu ad observatory and the propublica political ad collector. this especially enables the researchers to detect any advertising campaigns that carry political messaging but have avoided a classification as ‘political’ in the ad library. in combination, then, these four papers provide an in-depth insight into contemporary, pandemic-era campaigning practices, dynamics, and themes in two of the most recent major national elections, across key social media platforms such as facebook and twitter, and take into account both organic posting activity and paid advertising efforts. they make a timely contribution to our evolving understanding of political campaigning on social media. the extended abstracts for the four individual papers follow on the next pages. paper 1: comparing political coverage on twitter: the german election campaign 2021 through the lens of journalists and politicians nina fabiola schumacher media studies, trier university moritz mathieu media studies, trier university christian nuernbergk media studies, trier university introduction & research overview since the 2013 election, social media has become a common campaign practice in german campaign communication. the 2017 election is considered the first digital election in which a broad range of new formats was experimented with and used for professional staging and “image building” (holtz-bacha 2019). the 2021 election has been dominated by the covid-19 pandemic. therefore, most political events and discussions occurred online. new hybrid formats have emerged. thus, the pandemic has accelerated digitalization and given digital debates more impact (vowe 2021). nowadays, web-based campaigns are ubiquitous, accelerating the professionalization of elections and campaigns, which include and request active political participation (fitzpatrick & jöst 2021). in addition to its widespread use among political and other societal actors, twitter is an integral part of journalistic practice (molyneux & mourão 2019) to obtain and distribute news and information in real-time, to connect with other users, or to monitor what they say. twitter is part of a hybrid and multimodal communication environment that has eroded the monopoly on public information once held by news media professionals (chadwick 2017). consequently, twitter use by political-media actors affects information flows, news production routines, agenda setting, framing processes, and the relationship of journalists and politicians (broersma & graham 2015). the body of available research regarding campaign patterns on twitter is substantive (corchia 2019; jungherr 2015). various studies indicate how and to what extent politicians use microblogging by exploring party differences (larsson 2017). however, research comparing election and non-election campaign periods (e.g., nuernbergk & conrad 2016) is less prominent. concerning political coverage, studies primarily focus on traditional media channels (leidecker-sandmann & wilke 2019) or behavior of journalists during campaign events (mourão 2015). that said, research comparing journalists and candidates/mps seems particularly rare (corchia 2019). thus, this study will examine sitting german mps and journalists registered in the federal press conference (bpk) through a comparative analysis of their twitter updates and interactions during the 2021 election. in particular, the following research questions guide this comparison of journalists and mps: ● rq1: how do the twitter activity patterns evolve in both groups and what campaign references do they exhibit? ● rq2: how do both groups refer to and evaluate leading candidates? ● rq3: to what extent do both groups refer to non-campaign topics or comment on more permanent issues (such as the pandemic)? ● rq4: with whom do both groups interact and in what structural network patterns does this result? we answer all rqs by comparing a pre-campaign period and a campaign period. we will also highlight differences by party affiliation and sectoral differences (commercial vs. public service media). data & methodology for this study, we followed an accounts-centered approach; our monitoring of both account groups lasted from may to september 2021. first, we searched the bpk directory and the german bundestag for twitter accounts and user ids, which were needed for api-based tracking. second, we tracked mps and journalists continuously using the dmi tcat (borra & rieder 2014). the german election took place on september 26th. specifically, we examine the periods pre-campaign (24.5.–8.8.21) and campaign (9.8.–27.9.21). thus, the campaign period comprises six weeks before the election, the election day, and the day afterward. we grouped journalists according to their sectoral affiliation and mps according to their political party. we combine the tracking data with this information. beyond analyzing the activity patterns and typical statistics, we also conduct a network analysis. therefore, we computed network graphs based on @mentions and compared them for both groups/periods. we look at differences between actor types within these networks and focus on network authorities and centralization patterns. furthermore, we conduct a quantitative content analysis of tweets mentioning leading candidates. using a random selection of these tweets (n=800), we will clarify how mps and journalists evaluate and comment on campaign leaders in their tweets. we expect that political commentators will differ widely from political actors in terms of direct support. however, twitter constitutes a space where boundaries are blurry and even journalists take on a more activist stance or exhibit snarky comments (mourão 2015). by considering both groups and different phases in the election campaign communication on twitter, our study contributes to the comprehension of dynamics. preliminary results overall, the groups sent nearly 220,000 tweets (including retweets) across all periods. during the pre-campaign period (76 days of tracking), 383 political journalists (ntweets=49,676) contributed tweets and 466 mps (ntweets=76,029). 521 mps and 364 journalists posted tweets in the campaign period. mps engaged a lot more in tweeting around the election (ntweets=54,345), whereas journalists only slightly increased their per day activity in the shorter second period (ntweets=39,401, only 49 days). hyperactive accounts partially dominate both groups. an inspection of hubs and authorities in the four @mention networks computed for both groups and both periods exhibits that journalists and mps tend to choose different authorities and actor types, especially in the pre-campaign period. further differences are highlighted through a hashtag analysis. even in election times, the most visible hashtag in bpk journalists’ tweets was #afghanistan. however, if the number of different journalists is considered, #btw21 is the most prevalent hashtag in this group. further differences emerge through the comparison of subgroups. results from our quantitative coding of @mentioning leading candidates will be presented at #aoir22. we will especially highlight evaluations. references borra, e. & rieder, b. (2014). programmed method: developing a toolset for capturing and analyzing tweets. aslib journal of information management 66(3): 262–278. https://doi.org/10.1108/ajim-09-2013-0094 broersma, m. & graham, t. (2015). tipping the balance of power. in a. bruns, g. enli, e. skogerbo, a. larsson & c. christensen (eds.), the routledge companion to social media and politics (p. 89–103). routledge. chadwick, a. (2017). the hybrid media system. oxford university press. corchia, l. (2019). political communication in social networks election campaigns and digital data analysis. rivista trimestrale 2/19. https://doi.org/10.32049/rtsa.2019.2.04 fitzpatrick, j. & jöst, p. (2021). der webbasierte bundestagswahlkampf 2021. fjsb 34(3): 417–425. https://doi.org/10.1515/fjsb-2021-0039 holtz-bacha, c. (2019). bundestagswahl 2017. in c. holtz-bacha (ed.), die (massen-) medien im wahlkampf (p. 1–26). springer. jungherr, a. (2015). twitter use in election campaigns. journal of information technology & politics 13(1): 72–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2015.1132401 larsson, a. o. (2017). going viral? comparing parties on social media during the 2014 swedish election. convergence 23(2): 117–131. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856515577891 https://doi.org/10.1108/ajim-09-2013-0094 https://doi.org/10.32049/rtsa.2019.2.04 https://doi.org/10.1515/fjsb-2021-0039 https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2015.1132401 https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856515577891 leidecker-sandmann, m. & wilke, j. (2019). aus dem rahmen fallend oder eher „middle of the road“? in c. holtz-bacha (ed.), die (massen-)medien im wahlkampf (p. 209–242). springer. molyneux, l. & mourão, r. (2019). political journalists’ normalization of twitter. journalism studies 20(2): 248–266. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670x.2017.1370978 mourão, r. (2015). the boys on the timeline. journalism 16(8): 1107–1123. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884914552268 nuernbergk, c. & conrad, j. (2016). conversations and campaign dynamics in a hybrid media environment. sm+s 2(1): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116628888 vowe, g. (2021). wie digitalisiert war der bundestagswahlkampf 2021? mip 27(2): 215–229. https://doi.org/10.24338/mip-2021215-229 https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670x.2017.1370978 https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884914552268 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116628888 https://doi.org/10.24338/mip-2021215-229 paper 2: political advertisement on facebook in the lead-up to the 2021 german federal elections nicola righetti university of vienna fabio giglietto university of urbino carlo bo azade kakavand university of vienna aytalina kulichkina university of vienna giada marino university of sassari massimo terenzi university of urbino carlo bo context and relevance of the study the 2021 german federal election held on 26 september 2021 was characterized by unprecedented political uncertainty. angela merkel, who has dominated german politics for 16 years as chancellor, did not run for office again. the two major parliamentary parties that lead the government in the “grand coalition,” the spd and the cdu/csu or their candidates, were facing several scandals, leading to fluctuating polls. but also, the greens, who profited from a timely and smooth nomination of their candidate, faced criticism for incorrectly stating extra income and inaccuracies in the candidate’s cv. still, with an agenda of massive public investment to launch a “social-ecological transformation,” they had a chance to lead a national government for the first time in their 40-year history (baasner & seidendorf, 2021). starting from a different ideological perspective, the far-right party alternative für deutschland (afd), founded in 2013, established itself in national and local politics. in the national elections in the same year, they reached 4.7% of the votes, almost passing the 5 percent threshold. in 2017, the party came third with 12.6% of the votes. the 2021 national election was moreover taking place in the extraordinary context of the covid-19 pandemic. along with the transformation in political communication that put digital media at the forefront of electoral campaigns, the social distancing measures have hindered non-mediated forms of campaigning and further increased the importance of long-distance traditional and especially digital communication. social media also paves the way to a range of information operations aimed at manipulating the traditional media and public opinion (marwick & lewis, 2017). it empowers native and foreign political actors to run micro-targeted online advertisements to influence specific cohorts with distinct messages (hegelich & serrano, 2019). microtargeting strategies on social media can potentially spread particular messages tailored to explicit categories of citizens, potentially distorting the perception of the issues at stake, giving a partial knowledge of the parties’ programs, and increasing the divisions and polarization of the civil society. as part of a broader study, we analyze paid social media communication from political candidates, parties, and other social media users, in the lead-up to the 2021 german federal election. we document the investment in facebook advertising of the main parties and their targeting strategies. leading research question what are a) costs and volume of advertising per party, b) the demographic characteristics of the targets, and c) the evidence on micro-targeted political advertising? how have they changed compared to what was found by previous research conducted in the context of the 2019 european election in germany (hegelich & serrano, 2019)? method the data collection was carried out through the facebook ad library api. the initial datasets consisted of 20,703 advertisements totaling more than 475,000,000 impressions, published from 16/08/202 to 26/09/2021 from 622 funding entities. the focus of the analysis was restricted to 13,707 advertisements totaling more than 413,000,000 impressions, which were sponsored by 233 funding entities directly connected to the seven main political parties (i.e., national and regional pages of the parties). to explore possible cases of microtargeting in more detail, we looked for instances of “extreme” types of targeting, that is, advertisements 100% targeted to a certain gender or age class. to this aim, we used the gini coefficient, a popular measure of statistical dispersion, especially used for analyzing inequality or concentration. results according to the data provided by the facebook ad library api, the seven main parties running for the federal elections are estimated to have spent between 2,454,700 eur and 4,191,493 eur. as in 2019, the afd reached an exceptionally high engagement on facebook (serrano et al., 2019), but die grünen, instead of the cdu, led the standings of the facebook advertisement investment in 2021. nonetheless, they were both overtaken in the overall number of ad impressions by the fdp, who strategically spent less on a higher number of advertisements. considering the area of microtargeting, our findings show that the content of some advertisements was exclusively targeted to women or young generations. they, however, represented just a modest part of the total number of advertisements run by parties and candidates. these results might suggest that micro-targeting strategies are not a very common tool of german parties. however, firm conclusions can hardly be reached due to the limitations of available data. indeed, facebook provides advertisers with several sophisticated targeting options that can be effectively used for micro-targeting, but the employed targeting (or micro-targeting) strategies cannot be inferred from the data made available. references baasner, f., seidendorf, s. (2021). a year of electoral uncertainty. german turns the page on merkel. european issues n. 593 (fondation robert schuman. the research and studies centre on europe). https://www.robert-schuman.eu/en/doc/questions-d-europe/qe-593-en.pdf hegelich, s., serrano, j. c. m. (2019). microtargeting in deutschland bei der europawahl 2019. landesanstalt für medien nrw 2019. https://www.medienanstalt-nrw.de/fileadmin/user_upload/lfm-nrw/foerderung/for schung/dateien_forschung/studie_microtargeting_deutschlandeuropawahl2019 _hegelich.pdf. marwick, a., & lewis, r. (2017). media manipulation and disinformation online. data & society. https://datasociety.net/pubs/oh/dataandsociety_mediamanipulationanddisinform ationonline.pdf serrano, j. c. m., shahrezaye, m., papakyriakopoulos, o., & hegelich, s. (2019, july). the rise of germany's afd: a social media analysis. in proceedings of the 10th international conference on social media and society (pp. 214-223) https://www.robert-schuman.eu/en/doc/questions-d-europe/qe-593-en.pdf https://www.medienanstalt-nrw.de/fileadmin/user_upload/lfm-nrw/foerderung/forschung/dateien_forschung/studie_microtargeting_deutschlandeuropawahl2019_hegelich.pdf https://www.medienanstalt-nrw.de/fileadmin/user_upload/lfm-nrw/foerderung/forschung/dateien_forschung/studie_microtargeting_deutschlandeuropawahl2019_hegelich.pdf https://www.medienanstalt-nrw.de/fileadmin/user_upload/lfm-nrw/foerderung/forschung/dateien_forschung/studie_microtargeting_deutschlandeuropawahl2019_hegelich.pdf https://datasociety.net/pubs/oh/dataandsociety_mediamanipulationanddisinformationonline.pdf https://datasociety.net/pubs/oh/dataandsociety_mediamanipulationanddisinformationonline.pdf paper 3: electioneering in pandemic times: the 2022 australian federal election on facebook and twitter axel bruns digital media research centre, queensland university of technology daniel angus digital media research centre, queensland university of technology timothy graham digital media research centre, queensland university of technology ehsan dehghan digital media research centre, queensland university of technology nadia jude digital media research centre, queensland university of technology phoebe matich digital media research centre, queensland university of technology introduction the 2022 australian federal election campaign, between march and may 2022, takes place in the immediate aftermath of the covid-19 pandemic – a period of time during which most australian states and territories experienced severe disruptions from sometimes lengthy lockdowns; internal and external borders were closed to all but essential travel; and significant disagreements unfolded between state and federal leaders about appropriate public health, economic, and civil liberties responses to the immediate pandemic threat itself, to its impact on the economy, and to the spread of misand disinformation seeking to exploit the situation for hyperpartisan political benefit. the conservative federal government by the coalition of liberal and national parties under the leadership of prime minister scott morrison, in particular, has been widely criticised for its lack of forward planning, its misdirected financial support that benefitted major corporations rather that citizens, and its politicisation of policy differences between state and federal leaders (e.g. glenday, 2022). meanwhile, overshadowed by the public attention directed to state and territory leaders during the pandemic, the oppositional australian labor party has struggled at federal level to clearly present an alternative vision for the country, with opinion polls still showing considerable uncertainty about the leadership credentials of opposition leader anthony albanese. such disenchantment with both major party blocs is exploited, in turn, by a wave of broadly centrist independent candidates seeking to win electorates previously held by conservatives and unlikely to elect labor politicians; in addition, the populist united australia party under the leadership of controversial mining billionaire clive palmer has already begun an aggressive billboard, broadcast, sms, and online advertising campaign that seeks to disrupt the conventional party landscape and is actively distributing covid-19 disinformation (taylor & karp, 2021). tendentious electioneering and outright disinformation, related to covid-19 as well as to other major issues, are also likely to feature in the major parties’ campaigns, however: in past elections, the labor party executed a successful ‘mediscare’ campaign, worrying voters about supposed coalition plans to wind back universal healthcare in australia (hunter, 2016); the coalition won the 2019 election in part as a result of its ‘death tax’ campaign, misrepresenting labor’s plans to reduce tax benefits for rich retirees (emerson & weatherill, 2019). such campaigns are likely to find fertile ground in a fractious and frustrated electorate that is already affected by substantial volumes of covid-19 misand disinformation. approach building on the methodology established in our studies of australian federal elections in 2013, 2016, and 2019, this work-in-progress paper presents a first analysis of social media campaigning during the 2022 australian federal election. for this we draw on our established approach to analysing twitter campaigning (as utilised for our studies of the 2013, 2016, and 2019 campaigns; bruns, 2017; bruns & moon, 2018; bruns et al., 2021) and on our translation of that approach to the analysis of campaigning via candidate pages on facebook (as developed for the 2020 queensland state election; bruns & angus, 2020). as part of an international collaboration to identify political candidates on social media platforms that has already produced a dataset of election candidates on twitter for the 2021 federal election in germany (sältzer, 2021), we identify the twitter accounts and facebook pages of all australian federal election candidates, and use the twitter api and the facebook data tool crowdtangle to capture all posts by these accounts and pages, and all tweets directed at the candidate accounts on twitter as well as interactions around the candidate pages on facebook. we capture these throughout the election campaign, from the official issuing of the electoral writs to the election day. as in our previous election analyses, we draw on these datasets to produce a number of insights; as the 2022 election has yet to take place, we use examples from past elections to illustrate these here. first, we investigate the overall distribution of engagement with the different parties and their candidates. such engagement commonly centres on the liberal and labor parties as the most prominent australian political parties, and here especially on their respective candidates for the prime ministership (see fig. 1 as an example of engagement with party candidates on twitter during the 2019 election), but our longitudinal analysis of data from the past three elections shows that differences across election cycles point to the relative salience of the parties’ electoral messaging (bruns et al., 2021). fig. 1: engagement on twitter with candidates in the 2019 australian federal election second, we track such engagement across the campaign period. here, we examine especially the utilisation of specific platform affordances (@mentions, retweets, quote tweets on twitter; comments, shares, and reactions on facebook) over time, in order to identify key campaign moments (leaders’ debates, policy releases, controversies) and determine the popular reaction they generated (see fig. 2 as an example of the dynamics of facebook reaction sentiment for the major parties during one week in the 2020 queensland state election). we further combine this with the computational extraction of major themes from the content gathered from both platforms, in order to correlate campaigning themes and voter engagement. fig. 2: positive (love, care, haha, wow) and negative (sad, angry) facebook reactions to candidate posts during one week in the 2020 queensland state election finally, we also draw on a state-of-the-art detection toolkit to identify cases of coordinated behaviour in the dataset: these may include behaviours like coordinated posting, coordinated link-sharing, coordinated post sharing on facebook or retweeting on twitter, or coordinated commenting. some such behaviours, in turn, may represent standard practice in social media campaigning (for instance as several party candidates post the same talking points, campaign memes, or news articles at the same time), while others may point to more covert and problematic activities (as party operatives or other actors engage in astroturfing or sockpuppeting in order to artificially inflate the visibility of specific topics). we engage in close reading and forensic analysis to investigate and assess such cases of coordinated behaviour. this paper presents the insights emerging from these analyses, in the turbulent political aftermath of the covid-19 pandemic. in this panel it is further complemented by a paper that specifically investigates political advertising practices on facebook during the election. in combination, the papers provide a rich and timely analysis of social media campaigning and engagement during the 2022 australian federal election. references bruns, a. (2017). tweeting to save the furniture: the 2013 australian election campaign on twitter. media international australia, 162, 49–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x16669001 bruns, a., & angus, d. (2020). 2020 queensland state election: week 1-4 update. qut digital media research centre. https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/2020/10/09/2020-queensland-state-election-week-1update/, https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/2020/10/16/2020-queensland-state-electionweek-2-update/, https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/2020/10/23/2020-queensland-stateelection-week-3-update/, https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/2020/10/30/2020queensland-state-election-week-4-update/ bruns, a., angus, d., & graham, t. (2021). twitter campaigning strategies in australian federal elections 2013–2019. social media + society, 7(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211063462 bruns, a., & moon, b. (2018). social media in australian federal elections: comparing the 2013 and 2016 campaigns. journalism & mass communication quarterly, 95(2), 425–448. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699018766505 emerson, c., & weatherill, j. (2019). review of labor’s 2019 federal election campaign. australian labor party. https://alp.org.au/media/2043/alp-campaign-review2019.pdf glenday, j. (2022, 31 jan.). scott morrison's had a bad start to the year. can he turn it around? abc news. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-31/scott-morrisonelection-albanese-newspoll/100793354 hunter, f. (2016, 5 july). australian federal election 2016: malcolm turnbull takes full responsibility for campaign. sydney morning herald. http://www.smh.com.au/federalhttps://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x16669001 https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/2020/10/09/2020-queensland-state-election-week-1-update/ https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/2020/10/09/2020-queensland-state-election-week-1-update/ https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/2020/10/16/2020-queensland-state-election-week-2-update/ https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/2020/10/16/2020-queensland-state-election-week-2-update/ https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/2020/10/23/2020-queensland-state-election-week-3-update/ https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/2020/10/23/2020-queensland-state-election-week-3-update/ https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/2020/10/30/2020-queensland-state-election-week-4-update/ https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/2020/10/30/2020-queensland-state-election-week-4-update/ https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211063462 https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699018766505 https://alp.org.au/media/2043/alp-campaign-review-2019.pdf https://alp.org.au/media/2043/alp-campaign-review-2019.pdf https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-31/scott-morrison-election-albanese-newspoll/100793354 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-31/scott-morrison-election-albanese-newspoll/100793354 http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2016/australian-federal-election-2016-malcolm-turnbulltakes-full-responsibility-for-campaign-20160705-gpyx9z.html politics/federal-election-2016/australian-federal-election-2016-malcolm-turnbulltakesfull-responsibility-for-campaign-20160705-gpyx9z.html sältzer, m., stier, s., bäuerle, j., blumenberg, m., mechkova, v., pemstein, d., seim, b., & wilson, s. (2021). twitter accounts of candidates in the german federal election 2021 (gles). cologne: gesis data archive. za7721. data file version 2.0.0. https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13790 taylor, j., & karp, p. (2021, 7 sep.). clive palmer and craig kelly using spam text messages to capture rightwing vote ahead of election, expert says. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/08/clive-palmer-and-craig-kellyusing-spam-text-messages-to-capture-rightwing-vote-ahead-of-election-expert-says http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2016/australian-federal-election-2016-malcolm-turnbulltakes-full-responsibility-for-campaign-20160705-gpyx9z.html http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2016/australian-federal-election-2016-malcolm-turnbulltakes-full-responsibility-for-campaign-20160705-gpyx9z.html https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13790 https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/08/clive-palmer-and-craig-kelly-using-spam-text-messages-to-capture-rightwing-vote-ahead-of-election-expert-says https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/08/clive-palmer-and-craig-kelly-using-spam-text-messages-to-capture-rightwing-vote-ahead-of-election-expert-says paper 4: platform-based political advertising: new approaches for enhancing platform observability daniel angus digital media research centre, queensland university of technology mark andrejevic school of media, film, and journalism, monash university bronwyn carlson department of indigenous studies, macquarie university axel bruns digital media research centre, queensland university of technology abdul obeid digital media research centre, queensland university of technology philip mai social media lab, ryerson university anatoliy gruzd social media lab, ryerson university introduction platform-based political advertising is emerging as a key focal point of modern elections. it has also fast become a new regulatory battleground, as governments and citizenries around the globe grapple with the consequences of this new campaign practice (kreiss & mcgregor, 2019). key concerns relate to the ability to algorithmically target hyper-partisan and false information, and with the lack of transparency from political actors and the palatforms themselves, regarding the advertisements placed, money spent, and ultimately who is consuming these advertisements (dommett & power, 2019). the cambridge analytica scandal revealed the susceptibility of platform-based political advertising to exploitation, particularly in relation to the uk’s brexit referendum and donald trump’s 2016 election (cadwalladr, 2018). in the wake of this scandal – and due in no small part to significant sustained pressure from academics, journalists, civil society groups, and eventually governments – the major platforms have been forced to curtail certain advertising practices, and implement a range of political advertising transparency initiatives. a key feature of these initiatives is the provision of new digital tools, often in the form of transparency ‘dashboards’. these platform-provided dashboards offer basic information as to the ads that are or have recently been run, who is sponsoring these ads, and basic aggregated statistics as to the reach and audience of the ads. while welcome, the dashboards provided by large platforms like meta and google stop short of full transparency (edelson et al. 2019). as one example, facebook and instagram ads are readily targeted to highly specific geolocations (down to individual suburb/postcode level) by ad buyers, however meta’s dashboards only reveal geolocation data at an entire state level. interest categories for ads are also heavily abstracted making it difficult to interrogate where political advertising may be engaging in racial, gendered, economic, religious, or other harmful forms of discrimination. more so, we are left to trust that information provided by the platforms is accurate, given there is no independent oversight or verification of this data. due to the fundamental limitations of platform-provided transparency tools, researchers are turning to other techniques to provide much needed platform observability (rieder & hofmann, 2020). in some cases, this involves the augmentation of transparency dashboards to turn them into more easily searchable ad archives, with additional statistics and information visualisation. in other cases researchers are side stepping platform-provided approaches completely using data donation plugins that enrol platform users to contribute any ads encountered while browsing these platforms into platform-independent archives (propublica, 2020). new approaches for advertising accountability in this paper we outline a suite of digital methods developed to study platform-based political advertising, and ultimately enhance platform observability and accountability. we focus on a study of political advertising that will be conducted throughout the upcoming australian federal election campaign, due to take place no later than may 2022. the data collection methods that have already been developed and deployed in the lead up to this national election range from data gathering techniques that utilise existing platform-provided ad transparency apis (polidashboard: https://global.polidashboard.com/), through to citizen-science data donation approaches (australian ad observatory: https://www.admscentre.org.au/adobservatory/). additionally, we have also developed a range of computational methods to support both quantitative and qualitative data analysis. the first tool, polidashboard, was originally developed by the social media lab, ryerson university, as part of an international election transparency initiative. polidashboard has been extended in partnership with members of our research team for the australian context. the tool interfaces with the existing meta and google ad transparency libraries, but offers additional archival, ranking, search, data aggregation, and visualisation abilities (see figure 1). https://global.polidashboard.com/ https://www.admscentre.org.au/adobservatory/ figure 1: screenshots of the polidashboard (credit: social media lab, ryerson university) the second tool, the australian ad observatory (burgess et al., 2021) extends the work of the ad observatory developed by researchers at nyu, which itself extends the propublica political ad collector (propublica, 2020). the observatory relies on the use of a browser plugin, installed by volunteer members of the australian public on their personal computers. the browser plugin detects any sponsored posts that participants encounter in their facebook news feeds during regular use of facebook through their browser. once detected by the plugin, ads are anonymously sent to a central server along with additional demographic data from the participants (if they have chosen to provide such information). the browser plugin works without requiring any manual intervention from the participants, who can also review their own personal catalogue of ads encountered at any time via the tool. in addition to the collection of political ads via the above data collection tools, we have implemented a range of new critical data analytic approaches to assist in analysis of campaign materials (burgess et al., 2021). these approaches encompass optical character recognition (ocr), logo and object detection, and visual and text-based content analysis support, including topic modelling and machine vision. the approaches serve to assist in the discovery of specific political messaging, analyse campaign spending and reach, and examine visual presentation and communication within ads (see fig 2). figure 2: screenshot of the australian ad observatory researcher dashboard. while the approaches are developed as a general and highly versatile toolset for the study of platform-based political advertising materials, a specific focus for our team is on the detection and analysis of false or misleading advertising materials, and to also understand the experiences of indigenous users of these platforms given existing concerns regarding discriminatory algorithmic advertising practices (andrejevic et al., 2022). we will highlight specific examples encountered, and other general findings as part of our analysis, in addition to guidance on how these techniques can be adopted in future studies of political and non-political platform-based advertising. references andrejevic, m., fordyce, r., li, n., & trott. v. (2021) unregulated and segmented dark ads on social media: consumer education and regulatory options. retrieved from: https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/2021-06/apo-nid313053.pdf andrejevic, m., fordyce, r., li., n, & trott, v. in collaboration with angus, d. & tan, j. (forthcoming) ad accountability online: a methodological approach, in pink, s., m. berg, d. lupton, & m. ruckenstein (forthcoming) everyday automation: experiencing and anticipating emerging technologies. london, ny: routledge, pp. 213-224 burgess, jean, daniel angus, nicholas carah, mark andrejevic, kiah hawker, kelly lewis, abdul karim obeid et al. "critical simulation as hybrid digital method for exploring the data operations and vernacular cultures of visual social media platforms." (2021): https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/2cwsu/download. cadwalladr c. (2018, march 18), ‘i made steve bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower, the guardian, retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopherwylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump. dommett, k., & power, s. (2019). the political economy of facebook advertising: election spending, regulation and targeting online. the political quarterly, 90(2), 257265. edelson, l., sakhuja, s., dey, r., & mccoy, d. (2019). an analysis of united states online political advertising transparency. arxiv preprint arxiv:1902.04385. krafft, t. d., gamer, m., & zweig, k. a. (2019). what did you see? a study to measure personalization in google’s search engine. epj data science, 8 (1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-019-0217-5 kreiss, d., & mcgregor, s.c. (2019) the “arbiters of what our voters see”: facebook and google’s struggle with policy, process, and enforcement around political advertising, political communication, 36:4, 499-522, doi: 10.1080/10584609.2019.1619639 rieder, b., & hofmann, j. (2020). towards platform observability. internet policy review, 9(4), 1-28. propublica. (2020). facebook political ad collector. retrieved from: https://projects.propublica.org/facebook-ads/ https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/2021-06/apo-nid313053.pdf__;!!nvzlfophnbdxsw!v5k65aefdef6pbye-fjvjwyeqs2j70rhhrx0kvoim5uys_qeegcgv6gpgnzqcr5-bnrpsysa$ https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/2cwsu/download__;!!nvzlfophnbdxsw!v5k65aefdef6pbye-fjvjwyeqs2j70rhhrx0kvoim5uys_qeegcgv6gpgnzqcr5-bk5-dhyn$ aoir2020 submission reupload.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 the relevance people assign to algorithmic-selection applications in everyday life michael v. reiss university of zurich noemi festic university of zurich michael latzer university of zurich tanja rüedy university of zurich introduction fast growing public and academic attention dedicated to algorithmic selection on the internet goes along with appraisals of their high social significance and impact on daily life in digital societies (beer, 2017; gillespie, 2014; latzer & just, 2020; willson, 2017). these appraisals—in particular regarding social risks including manipulation, discrimination and bias—form, inter alia, the basis for the governance of algorithmic selection (latzer et al., 2016). appropriate governance choices, however, call for an accurate and empirical understanding of the relevance of algorithmic selection in order to assess the scope of potential associated risks. this paper aims to contribute to this systematic assessment and adds to a profound basis for governance measures. previous studies have predominantly deduced the relevance of algorithmic selection either from purely theoretical reasoning or from non-generalizable empirical investigations. these empirical accounts approximate the social relevance of algorithmic selection from a user perspective by measuring for example the amount and frequency of the use of algorithmic-selection applications. the widest academic focus is on the usage time of online services for political topics (park, 2019; vraga & tully, 2019). the results indicate an increased social media use for information seeking (newman et al., 2020; shearer, 2018) and the consideration of online services as alternative daily news sources (bialik & matsa, 2017; schmidt et al., 2019). suggested citation (apa): reiss, m., festic, n., latzer, m., rüedy, t. (2020, october). the relevance people assign to algorithmic-selection applications in everyday life. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. in order to question and substantiate these assessments and to gain a more holistic understanding of the actual relevance of algorithmic selection for internet users’ everyday life, this article makes a comprehensive, empirical assessment of the relevance that people subjectively assign to algorithmic-selection applications. this study seeks to answer what relevance individuals assign to algorithmic-selection applications relative to online and offline alternatives and whether there are differences between life domains and societal groups. in line with a comprehensive, mixed-methods measurement model of algorithmic governance (latzer & festic, 2019), this paper uses subjectively assigned relevance as a weighting for the interpretation of other findings such as data on the amount and frequency of social media use. methodology and approach the study is based on a combination of a representative online survey of swiss internet users and preceding qualitative interviews. it comparatively assesses the subjectively assigned relevance of algorithmic-selection applications for five life domains: political and social orientation, socializing, health, entertainment and commercial transactions. the survey participants (n = 1202) were asked to assign relevance to a list of ten to fourteen services and activities that are deemed important for the respective life domain. these services and activities included algorithmic-selection applications, nonalgorithmic-selection online services and offline activities. for instance, being on social media (algorithmic-selection application), calling on skype (non-algorithmic-selection online service) or meeting friends (offline activity) are among the relevant services and activities for the life domain of socializing. the lists of relevant algorithmic-selection applications and online and offline alternatives were derived from qualitative interviews (n = 58) conducted prior to the representative survey. findings the findings revealed, first, that internet users perceive algorithmic-selection applications as being less relevant—in particular compared to offline, but also to online alternatives. this empirically supports claims from qualitative news repertoire studies that—although increasingly used—algorithmic-selection applications are unlikely to replace traditional sources for news consumption (schmidt et al., 2019). second, algorithmic-selection applications, in particular social media, are found to be of relatively low assigned relevance for all life domains investigated. offline activities are consistently ranked highest. third, younger and heavier internet users assign greater relevance to various algorithmic-selection applications across all life domains. in line with earlier findings (abril, 2016; smith, 2016), this indicates that younger people integrate algorithmicselection applications more heavily into their everyday lives. altogether, the results on subjective relevance allow for a better interpretation of usage data. this relevance for people does not necessarily rise with the amount of use. services may be highly influential, even if people report a low usage time—and vice versa. these discrepancies seem to apply in particular for social media like facebook which is consistently assigned a very low relevance across all life domains, including political and social orientation, where it ranks lowest. this qualifies and calls for rethinking concerns about the prevalence of associated risks, if they are solely raised based on intensive social media use. conclusion this article contributes to the literature on the social relevance of algorithms by comprehensively investigating how relevant internet users perceive algorithmicselection applications to be. the study does not only focus on single platforms or applications, but takes a comparative look into different domains of daily life and includes various relevant algorithmic-selection applications and online and offline alternatives. by drawing on countrywide, representative data, the results complement the current debate on the social power of algorithmic selection, promote a more nuanced and realistic assessment of the issue and inform policy-makers aiming for more appropriate governance choices. overall, the results of this study indicate a moderate relevance of algorithmic-selection for internet users’ everyday lives. however, this paper also argues for a holistic approach when it comes to assessing the relevance of algorithmic selection. references abril, e. p. (2016). tracking myself: assessing the contribution of mobile technologies for self-trackers of weight, diet, or exercise. journal of health communication, 21(6), 638–646. https://doi.org/10.1080/10810730.2016.1153756 beer, d. (2017). the social power of algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1216147 bialik, k., & matsa, k. e. (2017). key trends in social and digital news media. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/10/04/key-trends-in-social-and-digitalnews-media/ gillespie, t. (2014). the relevance of algorithms. in t. gillespie, p. j. boczkowski, & k. a. foot (eds.), media technologies (pp. 167–194). the mit press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262525374.003.0009 latzer, m., & festic, n. (2019). a guideline for understanding and measuring algorithmic governance in everyday life. internet policy review, 8(2). https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.2.1415 latzer, m., & just, n. (2020). governance by and of algorithms on the internet: impact and consequences. in oxford research encyclopedia of communication. oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.904 latzer, m., hollnbuchner, k., just, n., & saurwein, f. (2016). the economics of algorithmic selection on the internet. in j. bauer & m. latzer (eds.), handbook on the economics of the internet (pp. 395–425). edward elgar. https://doi.org/10.4337/9780857939852 newman, n., fletcher, r., schulz, a., simge, a., & nielsen, r. k. (2020). reuters institute digital news report 2020. reuters institute for the study of journalism. park, c. s. (2019). learning politics from social media: interconnection of social media use for political news and political issue and process knowledge. communication studies, 70(3), 253–276. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510974.2019.1581627 schmidt, j.-h., merten, l., hasebrink, u., petrich, i., & rolfs, a. (2019). how do intermediaries shape news-related media repertoires and practices? findings from a qualitative study. international journal of communication, 13, 853–873. shearer, e. (2018). social media outpaces print newspapers in the u.s. as a news source. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/12/10/social-media-outpaces-printnewspapers-in-the-u-s-as-a-news-source/ smith, a. (2016). 15% of american adults have used online dating sites or mobile dating apps. https://www.pewinternet.org/2016/02/11/15-percent-of-american-adults-haveused-online-dating-sites-or-mobile-dating-apps/ vraga, e. k., & tully, m. (2019). news literacy, social media behaviors, and skepticism toward information on social media. information, communication & society, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1637445 willson, m. (2017). algorithms (and the) everyday. information, communication & society, 20(1), 137–150. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1200645 please update your browser your browser isn’t supported anymore. update it to get the best youtube experience and our latest features. learn more microsoft edge google chrome opera mozilla firefox safari remind me later about copyright contact us terms privacy policy & safety © 2025 google llc swerzenski-the new selfie standard-the new selfie standard.pdf selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 the new selfie standard: facetune and the shift toward east asian selfie aesthetics jd swerzenski university of massachusetts amherst dasol kim university of pennsylvania introduction/ theoretical framework since its release in 2013, facetune has risen to become the top paid photo and video app in the us (sensor tower, 2021). in allowing users to “retouch selfies” through their “own personal makeover studio,” facetune may seem in line with other photo enhancement apps like vsco, instagram, or snapchat. yet as we document, the types of retouching tools facetune make available mark a more significant shift in the american cultural practice of image editing, signaling an adoption of east asian attitudes toward beauty standards and the plasticity of the image. we trace this shift through two key cultural beliefs that have underpinned american photo editing discourse. first is the realist view of photography, in which the image is understood as offering a reflection of the real world (bazin & gray, 1960). second is the conception of cultural imperialism, in which mass media technologies project american cultural standards out to the rest of the world (schiller, 1991). while both beliefs are grossly oversimplified (sontag, 1977; kraidy, 2002), they have produced real impact in east asian countries, with women in particular being subjected to unrealistic western beauty standards while also facing discipline for not projecting a ‘real’ self (leem, 2016). using a critical technocultural discourse analysis (ctda), we highlight how this friction resulted in differing east asian cultural beliefs around technological practice (brock, 2018). procedures such as plastic surgery that are stigmatized in the u.s. have been accepted as tools of upward mobility in south korea and increasingly china (wong, 2018). we find the practice of image editing in east asia follows a similar logic: as transformations allowing one to achieve a better self. while american platforms have sought to uphold the realist view, with instagram even “removing all plastic surgery-style tools” in 2019, popular chinese and korean apps like beautyplus and snow approach the image as a plastic object (spark, 2019). for many east asian influencers, editing is a “a matter of ordinary courtesy”; users often spend an suggested citation (apa): swerzenski, j. d., kim, d. (2021, october). the new selfie standard: facetune and the shift toward east asian selfie aesthetics. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. hour editing a single image (fan, 2019). facetune has gained success by mirroring the architecture of popular chinese and korean apps and marketing its platform toward non-east asian users. american users have taken to the app for its plethora of digital reconstructive tools not available through mainstream american apps such as instagram or snapchat (solon, 2018). use of the app has been something of a dark secret, with celebrities like kylie jenner accused of facetuning their images and trying to pass off the results on instagram. yet the open embrace of facetune by influencers like james charles marks a possible shift away from needing to uphold the realist standard at all. method working within the ctda framework, we track this shift by undertaking a walkthrough analysis of the facetune app. walkthrough offers a means of engaging directly with the interface and technical functions of the app to “understand how it guides users and shapes their experiences” (light et al., 2016, p. 2). we both conducted independent walkthroughs of the free facetune 2 app using our respective smartphones, using our own selfies to test each function. our walkthrough observations focused on how facetune redirects the two american beliefs at the core of this study: challenging cultural domination of western beauty standards and undermining the realist conception of the image. working with our own images in the walkthrough also allowed us to reflect on our positionality as a korean cis-woman and white american cis-man. discussion/ conclusion our findings highlight a number of technical and rhetorical means by which facetune orients the user. among the most prominent technical tools was the use of the slider function, used throughout the app as a means of applying editing effects. though typically set in a neutral middle position, the slider is often placed to one side of the screen in order to direct the user toward a correct application of the effect. for example, the iris tool only allows the user to increase the size of their irises, signaling the user toward the desired trait. like all tools, the iris feature provides a help function, offering a before-and-after-style gif to model correct application of the effect. we did find evidence of facetune pushing certain east asian beauty ideals that may fall outside of american standards. the face resizing features—allowing users to adjust nose, eyes, forehead, and lips by size and position—speak to a chinese and korean conception of proportionality achieved through plastic surgery style alterations (abidin, 2016). further, the naming of tools like heal, bandage, cleanse, and fix connect with an east asian conception of plastic surgery as a healthful, restorative practice (wong, 2018). more convincing is the degree to which facetune presents a full rift with a realist view of photography. after using the retouch, resizing, reshape, and touch up features on our own selfies in the walkthrough, we quickly found a disconnect formed between our real selves and the version we were editing on facetune. the surrealism of these features extended beyond enhancing the real. among the most interesting features in our walkthrough was the smirk tool, which allows users to contort the mouth into a smile. additional functions can alter the lighting direction of a scene or replace the background all together with a digital backdrop. in each case, facetune uses the photo not in its traditional role as a vessel for depicting a certain scene in time, but as a blank canvas on which to produce an ideal digital self. we believe these findings offer a significant contribution in understanding shifting image editing practices online, particularly by highlighting the new technological tools and cultural beliefs that are leading this shift. references abidin, c. (2016). “aren’t these just young, rich women doing vain things online?”: influencer selfies as subversive frivolity. social media + society, 2(2), 1-17. bazin, a., & gray, h. (1960). the ontology of the photographic image. film quarterly, 13(4), 4-9. brock, a. (2018). critical technocultural discourse analysis. new media & society, 20(3), 1012-1030. leem, s. y. (2016). the dubious enhancement: making south korea a plastic surgery nation. east asian science, technology and society: an international journal, 10(1), 51-71. light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881-900. kraidy, m. m. (2002). hybridity in cultural globalization. communication theory, 12(3), 316-339. schiller, h. i. (1991). not yet the post-imperialist era. critical studies in media communication, 8(1), 13-28. sensor tower (2021, april 13). top charts: iphoneus photo & video apr 13, 2021. https://sensortower.com/ios/rankings/top/iphone/us/photo-video?date=2021-0413 solon, o. (2018, march 9). facetune is conquering instagram – but does it take airbrushing too far? the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/mar/09/facetune-photoshopping-appinstagram-body-image-debate sontag, s. (1977). on photography. farrar, straus and giroux. spark ar creators (2019, october 18). update on well-being policies [post]. facebook. https://www.facebook.com/groups/sparkarcommunity/permalink/733132997098 745/ wong, k. y. j. (2018). no more taboo: discursive tactics for navigating the taboo of cosmetic surgery. global media and china, 3(4), 271-296. aoir paper ninavr.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): rasmussen, n. v. (2020, october). data, camera, action: how algorithms are shaking up european screen production. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. data, camera, action: how algorithms are shaking up european screen production nina vindum rasmussen king’s college london algorithms and data analytics are making deeper inroads into screen production in europe. tech companies like largo in switzerland and scriptbook in belgium promise to aid the decision-making process with data science, ai, and machine learning. for instance, scriptbook offers script analysis and automated story generation, which the company sees as co-authorship between humans and machines (scriptbook 2018). at the same time, data-driven us companies like netflix and amazon are ramping up local-language content and opening production hubs in europe. their big appetite for original content puts pressure on some local players, not least the traditionally dominant national broadcasters. this trend has been accelerating in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic: as audiences are confined to their living rooms, film and tv viewing online is shooting through the roof (hazelton 2020). streaming services are left with stockpiles of behavioural data as a result. with all this information at their fingertips, they can target individual subscribers on the basis of their viewing habits. they can also feed this knowledge back into the development of future projects. kal raustiala and christopher jon sprigman (2019) suggest that we are entering a world of ‘data-driven creativity’ (raustiala & sprigman 2019: 51). this paper investigates what that entails in the development and pre-production stages of film and tv production. i zoom in on the experiences of screenwriters, directors, and producers based in europe and ask: how does the use of audience data and algorithms affect their creative labour? to answer this, i draw on concepts and methods from media industry studies, production studies, critical algorithm studies, and critical data studies. this research project contributes to scholarship in all these fields by shedding light on screen production in what ted striphas (2015) calls ‘algorithmic culture’. the project builds on existing scholarship investigating the use of data and algorithms in other creative industries, especially music (e.g. birtchnell 2018; eriksson et al. 2019). this paper also adds to larger discussions of the increased datafication of cultural production. the term ‘datafication’ was introduced by viktor mayer-schönberger and kenneth cukier in 2013 to describe the process of putting something ‘in quantified form so that it can be tabulated and analyzed’ (mayer-schönberger & cukier 2013: 78). my research explores how datafied screen production is experienced by the people who create the content that reach our screens. impact on creative labour the findings are based on empirical work currently undertaken online and offline in several european countries. more specifically, i examine data from three registers: (1) semi-structured interviews with film and tv creatives, (2) ethnographic field observation of industry events, and (3) industry trade publications, which provide insights into what john t. caldwell (2008) calls an ‘industry’s own self-representation, self-critique, and self-reflexion’ (caldwell 2008: 5). i will use thematic analysis – as described by braun and clarke (2006) – to identify, analyse, and report patterns across these qualitative data sets. since i am still in the field, it is too soon to draw any definite conclusions. however, patterns and themes are already emerging in the data i have gathered so far. according to taina bucher (2018), ‘personal algorithm stories’ reveal how people imagine and understand algorithms, and how they negotiate and resist them in their everyday life (bucher 2018: 17). my interviewees have encountered audience data and/or algorithmic tools in one way or another – either by using these technologies and insights themselves or by collaborating with a streaming service. as part of the interview process, i ask the film and tv professionals to draw their creative process. as sophie woodward (2020) explains, getting participants to engage with materials in this manner ‘can tap into ways of knowing that are more attuned to material, embodied and multisensory ways of being in the world’ (woodward 2020: 55). based on their drawings and statements, it is becoming clear that my interviewees believe working in a data-driven environment has an impact on their labour conditions. when i ask screenwriters, directors, and producers about the specific data or metrics they receive from streaming services or other commissioners, they emphasise that these insights hide in the background. yet the use of data and algorithms does appear to have indirect implications. one example is the tight timelines on a netflix production: when you collaborate with a company like netflix, you have to move much faster than when you work with a broadcaster. the swift pace has tangible consequences for the film and tv creatives, both in terms of their personal lives and how they perceive the quality of their creative output. for some, the time pressure is a significant drawback of striking a deal with netflix. as one producer says, the tight deadlines might result from the streaming giant’s way of working with data. netflix cannot predict audience preferences three years into the future. they have to cater to taste communities here and now. observations like these reflect the different levels i address in my research, i.e. both the macro-level (changing industry structures) and micro-level (creative practices of screenwriters, directors, and producers). by adopting different methods and data triangulation, this study provides an empirically based understanding of screen production in an algorithmic culture. references birtchnell, t. (2018). ‘listening without ears: artificial intelligence in audio mastering’. big data & society, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718808553 braun, v. & clarke, v. (2006). ‘using thematic analysis in psychology’. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77-101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa bucher, t. (2018). if…then: algorithmic power and politics. new york, ny: oxford university press. caldwell, j. t. (2008). production culture: industrial reflexivity and critical practice in film and television. durham/london: duke university press. eriksson, m., fleischer, r., johansson, a., snickars, p. & vonderau, p. (2019). spotify teardown: inside the black box of streaming music. cambridge, ma: the mit press. hazelton, j. (2020). ‘netflix smashes forecasts, adds 15.8m global subs in q1 amid coronavirus lockdown’. screendaily, 21 april 2020. retrieved from https://www.screendaily.com/news/netflix-smashes-forecasts-adds-158m-global-subsin-q1-amid-coronavirus-lockdown/5149226.article. last accessed 1 september 2020. mayer-schönberger, v. & cukier, k. (2013). big data: a revolution that will transform how we live, work and think. london: john murray. raustiala, k. & sprigman, c. j. (2019). ‘the second digital disruption: streaming & the dawn of data-driven creativity’. new york university law review, 94(1555), 1-66. https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3226566 scriptbook (2018). ‘man and machine: ai as (co)-creator in storytelling’. 5 november. retrieved from https://blog.scriptbook.io/man-and-machine-ai-as-co-creator-instorytelling-537e5995ea88. last accessed 1 september 2020. striphas, t. (2015). ‘algorithmic culture’. european journal of cultural studies, 18(4-5), 395-412. woodward, s. (2020). material methods: researching and thinking with things. london: sage. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): christin, a., persaud, c. j., baym, n., bergman, r., bhargava, r., diaz, f., gillespie, t. hesmondhalgh, d., maris, e., siciliano, m. l. (2021, october). in(ter)dependence in platformed creation. panel presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. in(ter)dependence in platformed creation angèle christin stanford university christopher j. persaud university of southern california nancy baym rachel bergman microsoft research raj bhargava university of california, berkeley fernando diaz tarleton gillespie microsoft research david hesmondhalgh university of leeds elena maris university of illinois at chicago michael l. siciliano queen’s university in recent years, a variety of cultural industries have been transformed by platformization – a process in which technology companies serve as intermediaries connecting different parties (most importantly cultural producers and audiences) through websites and applications. from music to book publishing, movie production, and the visual arts, cultural production has undergone massive changes due to platforms such as spotify, apple music, amazon, goodreads, youtube, facebook, instagram, tiktok, etsy, etc. in most cultural sectors, creators now have to grapple with the platforms that make their work visible to online audiences. this often means paying close attention to the quantitative infrastructure of platforms, namely their algorithms and analytics, which drive visibility and commercial success. this panel examines what these economic and technological changes imply for the independence of cultural production. classical studies of culture often emphasized the role that the values of independence and autonomy play in shaping artists’ worldviews and practices. from bourdieu’s analysis of “fields of cultural production” as “the economic world reversed” to becker’s theory of “art worlds” where internal dynamics redefine external constraints, or the frankfurt school’s critical take on the demise of aura through mechanical reproduction, sociological approaches have paid close attention to the threats to independence emerging under modern capitalism. in fact, most classical sociology saw cultural producers in the mass cultural industries as having little independence, often assuming (sometimes without empirical research) that the massification of culture would destroy original and critical art works. here we revisit the question of independence in the context of platformed creation – a term that embraces all forms of cultural production that are mediated, in part or completely, through digital platforms. by bringing together scholars studying different aspects of platformed creation and reflecting on the concept of independence through diverse disciplinary lenses, we ask: what does independence look like in the context of platformed creation? what are some of the theoretical and methodological tools available to scholars for making sense of cultural, economic, and technological independence in the case of platformed creation? and how do these evolving forms of independence affect the kinds of art works and cultural tropes that circulate online? these different studies aim to put the concept of independence in dialogue with the question of interdependence (among cultural producers, audiences, and platforms) in a mediated digital world. paper 1. “your vault was cleaned due to prohibited content”: platforming independent pornography christopher j. persaud university of southern california introduction nearly all digital content creators are bound by the policies and terms of service that govern the platforms on which they post and distribute their work. these rules are anything but static; they shift according to moral panics and controversy, legal regulation, and sometimes, in response to the demands of creators and audiences themselves. as tarleton gillespie (2018) has discussed, content moderation policies on some of the largest mainstream social media platforms tend to be written and enforced by enormously privileged people (ie: white, male, highly educated, well-compensated tech executives and managers). furthermore, sarah roberts (2019) has detailed the ways in which the work of content moderation has been made nearly invisible by platforms, in part to hide how the rules are unevenly enforced, entail an incredible amount of subjective interpretation, and to obfuscate the harms that content moderation workers experience at work. the experiences of sexual content creators, and broadly anyone who plays with mediated sexual expression, in our contemporary internet landscape are often left out of both scholarly and policy conversations about content moderation and platform governance. in this paper, leveraging on-going research on digital sexual cultures, i explore two overlapping research questions: 1) how do queer people who create independent pornography navigate the changing terrain of “prohibited” content on social media? 2) how does the classification and management of sexual content function as a convening technology for sexual cultural producers, audiences, and platforms? methods this paper emerges from in-progress digital ethnographic doctoral research of queer social media subcultures and sexual content moderation. specifically, i leverage 1) participant observation on mainstream social media platforms like twitter and reddit, 2) interviews with sexual content creators, 3) textual analysis of social media posts, and 4) critical discourse analysis of community guidelines, terms of service, and press coverage of sexual content moderation. for the purposes of this conference presentation, i present selected cases that focus on moments of contention and confusion for sexual content creators as they make sense of their cultural production becoming “prohibited” or otherwise marked as improper by platforms and audiences. no dick prints on instagram, no fisting videos on onlyfans... as katrin tiidenberg and emily van der nagel (2020) have detailed, social media platforms have become more and more sex negative in recent years as they work to forbid sexual images, video, conversation, and references from their ideal vision of mediated public life. in my research thus far, i have noted two broad themes related to this multi-dimensional censorship of sex and sexuality: 1) sexual content creators and everyday social media users alike are no longer able to engage in sexual cultural production in limited visibility settings (ie: close friends stories on instagram, nsfw-tagged twitter profiles, and direct messages on mainstream social media platforms) 2) even platforms that are purportedly intended to support the distribution of sexual content like onlyfans have introduced changes to their terms of service that prohibit sexual expression that falls outside “normal” parameters (ie: fisting, bdsm, body modification). tiidenberg and van der nagel’s (2020) categorization of interconnected sexual social media practices (consuming, creating, and interacting) illustrates the diverse ways that people engage with sex and sexuality online. the queer people that i focus on in my research have a variety of reasons for participating in sexual social media practices. some cultivate sexual community to which they otherwise do not have access in their current physical locations, while others depend on their digital sexual connections for education and psychosocial wellbeing. furthermore, as hacking//hustling (2020) writes, “adult content guidelines have been used as an excuse for the systematic violence that denies sex workers free access to social media and financial technologies, which are both a means to more safely make a living.” in this way, beyond their deleterious effects on playful and recreational sexual social media practices, social media platforms that censor, deplatform, and otherwise purge sex and sexuality are directly responsible for damaging the livelihoods of sex workers and endangering them as they further forced to the margins of public life. sorting nudes out: classification and its consequences classifications, as bowker and star (1999) describe, are rich avenues to explore cultural, political, and ethical concerns that shape human-technological relations. social media platforms, especially those that have policies prohibiting nudity and sexual content, devote a good deal of algorithmic and human attention towards classification. for example, how do platforms decide whether a nipple should stay or go? how do we know what a nipple looks like? does it have something to do with its overall shape, color, or immediate surroundings on the body? when does a nipple become sexual? now, what are “female-presenting” nipples exactly and what have platforms done with them (pilipets and paasonen, 2020)? of course, this problem is not limited to nipples; underwear width, bulge size, body hair, and even the presence of innocuous objects that might look too similar to sex toys all face classification-based content moderation. these classification decisions have cascading and often unequal effects. based on interviews, participant observation data, and textual analysis, queer sexual content creators increasingly face shadowbanning and other “soft” moderation tactics, seemingly arbitrary removal of videos and images due to vague language about “extreme or violent” content, and deplatforming from mainstream social media with little or no explanation as to how they violated terms of service. ultimately this research takes up ysabel gerrard’s (2020) provocation to explore “processes of social media content moderation that are perhaps most vulnerable to human intervention” (pg. 749). as a queer scholar of color, i am particularly sensitive to and interested in the experiences of queer cultural producers whose work focuses on sex and sexuality. the messiness of sexual content moderation offers a unique window to interrogate politics and material conditions of platformed creation. references bowker, g. c., & star, s. l. (1999). sorting things out: classification and its consequences. mit press. gerrard, y. (2020). social media content moderation: six opportunities for feminist intervention. feminist media studies, 20(5), 748-751. gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. yale university press. hacking//hustling (2020). posting into the void: studying the impact of shadowbanning on sex workers and activists. https://hackinghustling.org/posting-into-the-void-content moderation/ pilipets, e., & paasonen, s. (2020). nipples, memes, and algorithmic failure: nsfw critique of tumblr censorship. new media & society. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820979280 roberts, s. t. (2019). behind the screen. yale university press. tiidenberg, k., & van der nagel, e. (2020). sex and social media. emerald group publishing. tiidenberg, k., & van der nagel, e. (2020). what's at stake when sex is deplatformed?. aoir selected papers of internet research. paper 2. making sense of metrics in the music industries nancy baym rachel bergman microsoft research raj bhargava university of california, berkeley fernando diaz tarleton gillespie microsoft research david hesmondhalgh university of leeds elena maris university of illinois at chicago christopher j. persaud university of southern california in recent years, the measurement of media audiences has been transformed by the shift to digital networks of sales and distribution. new technologies of data tracking and collection made available by the internet, social media, and smartphone apps have fundamentally altered how media industries gather and analyze data (napoli, 2015). there is more data, it is more detailed, more networked, and it measures many more aspects of the audience than it used to. businesses that made money out of tracking, analyzing, and selling information about media audiences have grown bigger and more diverse (turow, 2011). these include not only older providers such as nielsen and a host of new competitors tracking digital distribution, but also the tech platform giants themselves, which play an increasingly powerful role in media and its measurement. in the age of downloads and streaming, the platforms that distribute media have an immense amount of granular data on what audiences consume and how. some of these metrics they deliver back to creators, managers, and users; others, they withhold. for some, this industry of metrics means the firms that make judicious use of them can be more responsive to their audiences. some accounts taking this position are rather credulous and celebratory, such as press coverage of netflix that has attributed its great success to its ability to match content to audience needs (plummer, 2017). by contrast, there is widespread concern that artists and producers may be increasingly tailoring what they create to what all this available data tells them is likely to be popular (hu, 2018; morris, 2020). much recent scholarship in internet studies and related fields such as media and communication studies and cultural sociology sees audience metrics in a more sinister light, often resonating with broader concerns about an increasing emphasis on quantification in modern societies. while critics of digital platforms are undoubtedly right to focus attention on their new and distinctive modes of power, understanding of that power needs to take into account the agency, practices, and values of those who use them. how often a song has been played or how many subscribers a performer has accumulated may appear to be simple facts, requiring neither interpretation nor skepticism. but in practice, those who use these metrics to make decisions and investments must make sense of these numbers for themselves and make them persuasive to others. surprisingly little research has paid systematic attention to how media industry workers make sense of information about audiences in the new data-abundant environment and what this sensemaking means for our understanding of media production and consumption; the main exceptions come from journalism (christin, 2015; petre, 2020). in this paper, we discuss how media producers engage with metrics via a case study of music -a particularly interesting example of the “platformization of cultural production” (duffy, poell, & nieborg, 2019) given that music has so often been at the forefront of media digitalization and datafication (morris, 2015). drawing on interviews and a survey that we conducted, we analyze ways in which musicians and music industry intermediaries use, negotiate, and in some cases, refuse the metrics available to them. we distinguish two main ways in which metrics are used by workers in the music industries: 1) internally, drawing on them, often selectively, to guide decisions in highly risky environments, and 2) externally, crafting persuasive stories in order to achieve goals when communicating across the highly fragmented setting of the music industry. our aim is not to celebrate the agency of such workers and thereby dismiss or minimize platform and metric power. it is to explore and categorize the diverse manifestations of this agency and acknowledge its constraints. we recognize that, in historical terms, the reliance of music industry workers on information provided for them by digital platforms represents a new form of dependence. but we seek to unpack the nature of that dependence, rather than assume the forms it takes. we want to understand how musicians and music intermediaries live with this aspect of platform power. the paper unpacks a range of ways in which music industry workers use, frame, question, and contextualize the mass of metrics now available to them. these practices are quite remote from dystopian notions of a world in which music industry workers exercise a blind faith in numbers and are led by them to ignore, simplify, or misunderstand the messy realities of the business of music, creativity, and taste. our research does not demonstrate the generalized commensuration and reactivity identified by some scholars as responses to quantification and “metrification.” perhaps this is because the music industries attract people who tend to be at least somewhat suspicious of rational or scientific thinking, at least as applied to the cultural domains in which they work--or at least understand that they involve interpretation, ambiguity, uncertainty, and tacit knowledge. on the other hand, we find little evidence of out-and-out rejection of metrics. a concern with metrics does seem to be pervasive or all-encompassing. but in interpreting them as important potential signals of audience activity and preference, people found a variety of ways to probe, question, qualify, and challenge these metrics while by no means abandoning a sense of their overall value. decisions were guided, rather than determined, by reference to these available numbers, which were often used as a basis for telling “stories,” conveying trajectories, exercising persuasion. no doubt some such uses of metrics come close to hustling. but our research suggests that industry insiders are sophisticated in their ability to contextualize such stories, sometimes by mobilizing other data that might be available. there was also a widespread understanding that some actors are much more interested in and captivated by numbers than others, and so there are times and contexts in which metrics are much more useful and relevant than others. the range of empirical realities uncovered in the paper resists any simplified tale of music industry workers as victims of a metric power introduced into the music industries by the tech industries. yet it would be equally mistaken to think of the increasing availability of data and metrics as a form of democratization, allowing for greater transparency. the sheer range of potential data available represents a considerable challenge for many people working in the music industries. metrics provide openings for those who are prepared to invest time and energy in collecting, interpreting, and framing them to gain advantages. but of course, this requires time, expertise, resources, and most importantly access to the data. the best-resourced and most powerful actors continue to be able to use metrics most effectively toward their goals. to summarise, our paper shows that the longstanding quest to “know the audience” has not been fulfilled by the rise of digitalization or the expansion of audience measurement techniques. instead, attention to data has gotten more granular, more in need of triangulation with numerous other data sources, and at times more neurotic. the media industries continue to be a place where workers “make do” with the resources provided by the systems of which they are part, and upon which they increasingly depend, in order to manage the uncertainty that is endemic to the business of culture. references christin, a. (2020). metrics at work. princeton, nj: princeton university press. christin, a., & petre, c. (2020). making peace with metrics: relational work in online news production. sociologica, 14(2), 133-156. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971 8853/11178 duffy b. e., poell, t., & nieborg, d.b. (2019). platform practices in the cultural industries: creativity, labor, and citizenship. social media + society, 5(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119879672 galloway, k., goldschmitt, k. e., & harper, p. (2020). guest editors’ introduction: platforms, labor, and community in online listening. american music, 13(2), 12530. https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.38.2.0125 hu, c. (2018, december). in a world of ‘algorithmic culture,’ music critics fight for relevance. columbia journalism review. retrieved from https://www.cjr.org/analysis/algorithms-music.php morris, j. w. (2015). selling digital music, formatting culture. oakland, ca: university of california press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctv1xxx9f morris, j. w. (2020). music platforms and the optimization of culture. social media + society, 6(3), https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120940690 napoli, p. m. (2010). audience evolution: new technologies and the transformation of media audiences. new york, ny: columbia university press. napoli, p. m. (2012). audience evolution and the future of audience research. international journal on media management, 14(2), 79-97. https://doi.org/10.1080/14241277.2012.675753 petre, c. (2015). the traffic factories: metrics at chartbeat, gawker media, and the new york times. new york, n.y: tow center for digital journalism, columbia university. plummer, l. (2017, august). this is how netflix's top-secret recommendation system works. wired uk. retrieved from https://www.wired.co.uk/article/how-do-netflixs algorithms-work-machine-learning-helps-to-predict-what-viewers-will-like turow, j. (2013). the daily you: how the new advertising industry is defining your identity and your worth. new haven, ct: yale university press. paper 3. algorithmic fields, drama, and extremization among vegan influencers angèle christin stanford university since the 2016 presidential campaign, a rapidly expanding body of research has examined the dynamics of online polarization, defined here as the divergence of attitudes towards ideological extremes. quantitative researchers have mapped the effects of algorithmic “filter bubbles,” “echo chambers,” and “rabbit holes” on political views and electoral polarization (bakshy, messing, and adamic 2015; bail et al. 2018). qualitative analyses of online disinformation have examined the effects of media manipulation, algorithmic sorting, and content moderation in the diffusion of problematic or inflammatory content, which fuels online polarization (gillespie 2018, howard 2020). to date, less attention has been paid to the other side of online polarization: the production side. who are the people engaged in creating extreme, inflammatory, and partisan information? and why do they engage in such production? journalistic accounts and policy studies often brush these questions aside, simply mentioning the existence of “bad actors” amplifying disinformation. in the scholarly literature, the relative absence of research on digital creators producing disinformation stems in part from the difficulty of getting access to these “troll” actors, who often thrive through opacity and obfuscation (lewis 2018, ong and cabanes 2017). such an absence in turn comes at an epistemological cost. by focusing primarily on the diffusion of existing pieces of problematic content, researchers tend to take the dominance of platforms at face value (caplan, clark, and partin 2020). this article offers an alternative approach for understanding polarization on social media platforms. i focus on production practices, examining how and why influencers and content creators publish incendiary, extreme, or problematic information on social media platforms. while the category of influencer is notoriously hard to define (duffy 2018), here i use the terms “influencers” and “creators” interchangeably to refer to individuals who seek to earn money from their social media production. to understand their production dynamics, i offer a meso-level perspective in terms of algorithmic fields, or online configurations that are primarily enabled and mediated through social media platforms. influencers do not produce content in a social vacuum: they operate within algorithmic fields, which in turn differ from classical fields of cultural production (bourdieu 1993, 2006) in two main ways. first, they feature a stark power structure that is primarily implemented through algorithmic procedures instead of intermediary gatekeepers. second, specific capital within algorithmic fields takes the form of online visibility, which functions as an inescapable mandate measured and enforced through an arsenal of metrics and analytics. consequently, the structuration of algorithmic fields tends to be more volatile than in traditional fields. i delineate two ways that the structuration of algorithmic fields leads to polarization among creators: drama, or scandals in which online creators and users engage in contentious position-takings (christin and lewis 2021); and extremization, in which creators entrench their polarized worldviews through niche and inflammatory content. to analyze how drama and extremization fuel polarization within algorithmic fields, i draw on a qualitative study of vegan influencers on youtube and instagram. though veganism is not explicitly about institutionalized politics, it raises important – and polarizing – questions about animal ethics, climate change, and individual responsibility in the context of agro-industrial capitalism. during the 2010s, the number of influencers posting vegan content rapidly grew, first on youtube, facebook, and twitter, later on instagram and tiktok. as the social media market for vegan content expanded, it became competitive, with influencers vying to attract online audiences, advertising revenues, and sponsored deals. starting 2015, vegan influencers witnessed a series of scandal and controversies, with certain influencers criticized for lying about their actual eating practices, promoting dangerous diets fueling eating disorders, relying on extreme conspiracy theories, and encouraging their followers to engage in online harassment. this article is structured as follows: after reviewing the literature on online polarization, disinformation, and partisan content creation, i offer a meso-level framework in terms of algorithmic fields, which differ from traditional fields of cultural production in two main ways: the relative absence of human intermediaries and the unescapable mandate of online visibility, both of which are enforced through algorithmic procedures. consequently, i argue that the structuration of algorithmic fields leads to more volatile and radical position-takings, which unfold in two main ways: drama and extremization. to illustrate these processes, i turn to the case of online vegan creators. after introducing my methods and data, i analyze the evolution of the algorithmic field of vegan influencers and delineate how drama and extremization reshaped the field in the second half of the 2010s. this analysis shows the relevance of using the concept of field for the study of platformed creation. this means amending bourdieu’s framework for the digital realm. indeed, compared to bourdieu’s the rules of art, influencers and content creators operate in an almost entirely heteronomous landscape shaped by commercial forces, audience approval, and algorithmic intermediation on digital platforms (siciliano 2021: 153). as communication and media scholars have argued, the concept of field works better for autonomous forms of production than for mass communication and cultural production (schudson 2005). as hesmondhalgh (2006: 2017) once noted, bourdieu writes “like the cultural industries never happened.” drawing on recent sociological studies that seek to amend bourdieu’s concept of field in order to account for highly heteronomous social configurations (eyal 2012, panofsky 2011, medvetz 2012), i analyze the configurations between influencers on social media platforms as a field, even though the capital specific to this field (online visibility and audience engagement, measured through online metrics) is highly heteronomous. furthermore, i label this kind of field “algorithmic” due to the unprecedented role that automated computational procedures play in mediating, structuring, and enforcing hierarchies among social media creators. references bakshy, eytan, solomon messing, and lada a. adamic. 2015. “exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on facebook.” science 348 (6239). bail, christopher a., lisa p. argyle, taylor w. brown, john p. bumpus, haohan chen, m. b. fallin hunzaker, jaemin lee, marcus mann, friedolin merhout, and alexander volfovsky. 2018. “exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization.” pnas 115(37): 9216-9221. bourdieu, pierre. 1993. the field of cultural production: essays on art and literature. new york: columbia university press. bourdieu, pierre. 2006. the rules of art: genesis and structure of the literary field. stanford: stanford university press. caplan, robyn, clark, meredith, and william partin. 2020. “against platform determinism: a critical orientation.” points, data & society research institute. available at: https://points.datasociety.net/against-platform-determinism899acdf88a3d christin, angèle, and becca lewis. 2021. “the drama of metrics: status, spectacle, and resistance among youtube drama creators.” social media + society 7(1). duffy, brooke erin. 2018. (not) getting paid to do what you love. new haven: yale university press. eyal, gil. 2012. “spaces between fields.” pp. 158-182 in philip s. gorski (ed.), bourdieu andhistorical analysis. durham and london: duke university press. gillespie, tarleton. 2018. custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. new haven: yale university press. hesmondhalgh, david. 2006. “bourdieu, the media and cultural production.” media, culture, & society 28 (2): 211-231. lewis, rebecca. 2018. “alternative influence: broadcasting the reactionary right on youtube.” data & society research institute. available at: https://datasociety.net/wpcontent/uploads/2018/09/ds_alternative_influence.pdf medvetz, thomas. 2012. think thanks in america. chicago: university of chicago press. ong, jonathan corpus, and jason vincent a. cabanes. 2018. “architects of networked disinformation: behind the scenes of troll accounts and fake news production in the philippines.” available at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1075&context=comm unication_faculty_pubs panofsky, aaron l. 2011. “field analysis and interdisciplinary science: scientific capital exchange in behavior genetics.” minerva 49: 295-316. schudson, michael. 2005. “autonomy from what?” pp. 214-223 in rodney benson and erik neveu (eds.). bourdieu and the journalistic field. cambridge: polity press. siciliano, michael l. 2021. creative control: the ambivalence of work in the culture industries. new york: columbia university press. paper 4. the barcode and the algorithm: a comparison of infrastructural power in conventional and platformized cultural production michael l. siciliano queen’s university research on platforms suggests that global corporations now exert incredible infrastructural power over cultural production as more and more cultural producers, seeking success and visibility, tailor their products to meet the demands of platforms’ algorithms (e.g., beer 2009; bucher 2012; caplan and boyd 2018). rather than consider this a novelty of platform capitalism, i argue in this paper that a similar infrastructural power over cultural production may be observed in earlier modes of cultural production just prior to the rise of platforms. through an ethnographic comparison of conventional and platformized cultural intermediaries (respectively, a “indie” music distribution company in 2010 and a multi-channel youtube network or mcn in 2015), i illustrate two infrastructurally contingent modes of “independence.” rather than “disruption,” platforms continue and expand corporate power over cultural production. to make this argument, i present a comparative study of cultural intermediaries in music just prior to the rise of platforms and contemporary social media – respectively an “indie” music distributor that manages production for record labels and musicians and a multi-channel youtube network that manages thousands of youtube content producers. both organizations do the work of formatting cultural commodities in order to facilitate exchange. the social media intermediary encouraged youtube content producers or “creators” to produce content tailored to youtube’s algorithms, hoping to make the “creators” whom they represent more legible to the platform. similarly, the music intermediary came into direct conflict with conglomerate media firms over their clients’ (mis)use of barcodes, a requisite marker required for global circulation. in the name of “independence,” many record labels who worked with the music intermediary refused to use barcodes – forgoing mass retail opportunities – or used barcodes reluctantly, often in creative ways, to make their vinyl records and compact discs products visible to global distribution systems and market information regimes such as soundscan (see anand and peterson 2000). as i show, companies that refused the “proper” use of barcodes became invisible to these systems, resulting in the destruction of “indie” products as they traversed conglomerate-owned distribution networks. in the production of popular culture, independence and creative autonomy have long been symbolically powerful discourses that animate and give meaning to practices in a variety of fields (see, e.g., hesmondhalgh 1999; moore 2007; newman 2009; o’connor 2008; ortner 2013; siciliano and o’connor 2012). this was especially common during the mid-to-late 20th century in cinema and music production with the rise of independent or “indie” films and “indie” and “diy” music; each with distinct aesthetic conventions and associated production practices, often developed in contrast to the “studios” in film or music’s “majors” (conglomerate-owned record labels).“independents” arose in response to large corporations that exerted power through their ownership of distribution networks. these larger firms that own distribution networks shaped cultural production by means of gatekeeping or determining what pieces of culture flow from producers to consumers (hirsch 1972). here, i argue that these companies delegated certain gatekeeping functions to infrastructure in ways similar to contemporary examples from research on platformized cultural productions. “independent” companies provided alternative distribution networks, often for innovative and unconventional cultural forms. during this time, “independence” referred to a genre (indie), distribution networks outside the “majors,” and, as i show, aesthetic practices involving the (mis)use of barcodes. by the late 1990s, the lines between “indies” and “majors” became blurred both symbolically and in terms of ownership as both major film studios and music companies purchased or contracted with “independent” distribution companies (dowd 2004; hesmondhalgh 1999; o’connor 2008). today, most producers of popular culture distribute their products through digital platforms owned by global corporations such as google, apple, amazon, and facebook; further blurring the lines between “independent” and “corporate” cultural production. though initially seen as “democratizing” cultural production, corporate platforms exert power over cultural production at the level of infrastructure, determining the visibility and availability of cultural content by way of algorithms and by encouraging particular formal regularities – a process that scholars drawing upon michel callon (1998) identify as “formatting.” thus, the platformization of cultural production results in formal similarity across wildly diverse content (caplan and boyd 2018; siciliano 2021). comparing the operations of an “indie” intermediary in 2010 to the operations of a social media intermediary in 2015, i find both contending with the gatekeeping power of infrastructures. the more conventional, “indie” music company sought to evade the use of barcodes as a form of symbolic resistance, one often framed in political and aesthetic terms. this practice resulted in exclusion from mass-market distribution networks that require barcodes to facilitate circulation. at the same time, the practice tended to be associated with “cred,” a type of symbolic capital specific to “indie” and “diy” music in the 1990s and early 2000s (o’connor 2008). to illustrate these points, i follow a specific piece of music that the “indie” intermediary attempted to have traverse the networks of the “majors” and demonstrate how the “indie” company’s (mis)use of barcodes results in illegibility vis-à-vis distribution infrastructures, much to the economic misfortune of the “indie” company. similarly, the social media intermediary attempted to shape content to meet youtube’s algorithms. unlike the music intermediary, the social media intermediary and its “creators” rarely used “independence” as justification for production practices. instead, most content producers described themselves as “entrepreneurs” operating withing and subordinate to an ecology of platforms. rather than attempt to symbolically resist the formatting of their products, the intermediary and its “creators” sought to tailor their products to the platform’s stated requirements. failure to do so may result in invisibility on platforms much like the “indie” intermediary’s illegibility and exclusion from “major” distribution networks. using these two cases, i theorize infrastructural power over cultural production as offering a spectrum of formatted “independence.” the older example of infrastructural power leaves both the form and content of cultural products relatively untouched, “independent” saves for a properly formatted container. properly formatted containers (e.g., cds or vinyl records) facilitated circulation through corporate infrastructures by means of externally visible markers (i.e., barcodes). in contrast, the contemporary, platformized example of infrastructural power directly shapes the form of cultural products, leaving producers “independent” to produce a diverse range of formally similar content in their pursuit of algorithmic visibility. this suggests continuity in corporate power over cultural production, while also demonstrating the infrastructural contingencies of “independence.” references anand, n., and richard a. peterson. 2000. “when market information constitutes fields: sensemaking of markets in the commercial music industry.” organization science 11(3, special issue: cultural industries: learning from evolving organizational practices):270–84. beer, david. 2009. “power through the algorithm? participatory web cultures and the technological unconscious:” new media & society. bucher, taina. 2012. “want to be on the top? algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on facebook:” new media & society. callon, michel. 1998. “an essay on framing and overflowing: economics revisited by sociology.” pp. 244–69 in laws of the markets, edited by m. callon. wiley. caplan, robyn, and danah boyd. 2018. “isomorphism through algorithms: institutional dependencies in the case of facebook.” big data & society 5(1):2053951718757253.. dowd, timothy j. 2004. “concentration and diversity revisited: production logics and the u.s. mainstream recording market, 1940-1990.” social forces 82(4):1411–55. hesmondhalgh, david. 1999. “indie: the institutional politics and aesthetics of a popular music genre.” cultural studies 13(1):34–61. doi: 10.1080/095023899335365. hirsch, paul m. 1972. “processing fads and fashions: an organization-set analysis of cultural industry systems.” the american journal of sociology 77(4):639–59. moore, ryan. 2007. “friends don’t let friends listen to corporate rock: punk as a field of cultural production.” journal of contemporary ethnography 36(4):438–74. doi: 10.1177/0891241607303520. newman, michael z. 2009. “indie culture: in pursuit of the authentic autonomous alternative.” cinema journal 48(3):16–34. o’connor, alan. 2008. punk record labels and the struggle for autonomy : the emergence of diy /. lanham : lexington books. ortner, sherry b. 2013. not hollywood: independent film at the twilight of the american dream. durham ; london: duke university press books. siciliano, michael. 2021. creative control. new york: columbia university press. siciliano, michael, and alan o’connor. 2012. “maximumsocialscience: a conversation/interview with alan o’connor.” pp. 91–104 in punkademics, edited by z. furness. brooklyn, ny: autonomedia. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): chapman, e. (2022, november). archiving the insurrection: the case of r/datahoarder. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. archiving the insurrection: the case of r/datahoarder edward chapman marquette university introduction on january 6th, 2021, right-wing demonstrators forcibly entered the united states capitol building in an effort to disrupt the certification of the 2020 presidential election. rioters documented their efforts on social media and live-streaming platforms, creating a digital footprint of their actions. in response, members of the r/datahoarder subreddit initiated an ad-hoc archival project to collect, deduplicate, and preserve incriminating evidence from the capitol insurrection [5]. these redditor’s efforts were not alone: other groups and individuals sought to collect and analyze footage of the insurrection, some going as far as to apply facial recognition technology or crowdsourcing in order to identify suspected participants [2, 6]. the confluence of self-incriminating social media content, collaborative online platforms, and open-source investigatory methods created an environment where participatory activism mixed freely with punitive vigilantism and historical preservation. this research examines the nature of the r/datahoarder archival work as an example of a participatory, crowdsourced online investigation with farranging practical and ethical implications. background the 2013 boston marathon bombing, and its associated subreddit, r/findbostonbombers, provides a historical comparison to the r/datahoarder insurrection archive. the event set precedent as the first time a crowdsourced investigation ran parallel to a police investigation for a us terror attack [4]. reddit’s unsuccessful search for the boston marathon bombers was notable for the analytic capabilities they mustered from crowdsourced volunteers. the investigation also served as a warning due to the trail of misinformation and false accusations left in its wake. the memory of r/findbostonbombers was often invoked throughout the r/datahoarder insurrection archive project as a reminder of past ethical oversteps. unbeknownst to many of the capitol rioters, the incriminating and personally identifiable nature of their social media postings left them vulnerable to personal and professional humiliation. doxing describes the public dissemination of an individual's personal information as a means to deanonymize, intimidate, or humiliate them [1]. the term originated in 1990's hacker culture, where “dropping dox" on a rival could reveal their offline identity and exile them from the community [3]. the risk of doxing is ever present in crowdsourced investigations such as the r/datahoarder insurrection archive, where information collection can be used to enact a witch hunt. i am interested in the discourse surrounding doxing within the r/datahoarder community, knowing that the insurrection archive could provide a rich source of material for such endeavors. methods a python script was used to download comment text and metadata for all comments in the capitol insurrection archive thread within r/datahoarder. this formed a dataset of 2,788 comments posted by 1,311 unique users. i imported comment text into a qualitative coding software and coded each comment for users’ stated motivations as well as any archival activities that i could observe. my code list developed throughout the coding process and focused on different forms of participation in the archive. see appendix a for the full list of codes. as i worked through the dataset, i added codes for salient topics in my research such as doxing for encouraging the exposure of rioters' personally identifiable information and fbi for calls to submit evidence to law enforcement agencies. i also removed or merged codes that were needlessly specific, such as distinctions between requests for technical help and responses to these requests, both of which were merged into strategy. i did not code every comment. i skipped comments which were deleted, comments directed at or posted by bots, very brief comments, and comments whose contents were contextually irrelevant to the aims of the thread. findings throughout the r/datahoarder insurrection archive project, redditors expressed a range of motivations for their efforts. i found that stated motivations generally fell into one of the following categories: contribute to law enforcement efforts; enact punitive justice upon rioters; engage in public discourse; and preserve information for posterity. redditors expressed multiple and, at times, contradictory motives, yet preserving information for posterity was the most frequent reason observed. one of the main aims in coding the dataset was to identify which activities the redditors engaged in during the insurrection archive project. such activities included emotional arguments, political analysis, calls for doxing and punishment, calls for evidence submission to the fbi, as well as activities traditionally associated with digital archiving such as locating sources, deduplicating material, and preserving material. the most common activity was submitting evidence for archiving in the form of social media urls. other top activities included coordinating efforts (deduplicating and vetting submissions, providing technical advice) and scraping or downloading evidence from url submissions. non-archival activities such as doxing or arguing were the 5th and 6th most frequent activities, respectively. grouping participants according to the number of times they posted in the insurrection archive revealed that the most heavily invested participants focused their efforts on technical archival tasks. calls for doxing were most commonly posted by firsttime participants who did not return to the project. significance findings indicate that the r/datahoarder insurrection archive project was ultimately successful in their attempts to collect and preserve evidence of the capitol insurrection. many of the archive’s images and videos were under active threat of removal by platforms and users. the archive contents have since been used in criminal investigations into the rioters. while similar projects pursued punitive ends, the r/datahoarder archive project maintained focus on the archival aspects of their task. the archive project effectively brought together the technical expertise of long-time “data hoarders” with the energy and motivations of participants from across the reddit platform. participants demonstrated an awareness of the historical value not just of the insurrection archive project, but of archiving as a whole. through language such as “highest calling for hoarders like myself" and “we must continue to archive," these redditors express a belief in the inherent value of archival work. this project serves as an example of the efficacy of crowdsourced, participatory archiving work during a crisis event. references [1] david m. douglas. 2016. doxing: a conceptual analysis. ethics inf technol 18, 3 (september 2016), 199–210. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-016-9406-0. [2] home grown terrorists. 2021. homegrownterrorists. instagram. retrieved august 11, 2021 from https://www.instagram.com/homegrownterrorists/. [3] mat honan. 2014. what is doxing? wired. retrieved september 29, 2021 from https://www.wired.com/2014/03/doxing/. [4] johnny nhan, laura huey, and ryan broll. 2017. digilantism: an analysis of crowdsourcing and the boston marathon bombings. the british journal of criminology 57, 2 (march 2017), 341–361. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azv118 [5] u/adamlynch. 2021. r/datahoarder megathread: archiving the capitol hill riots. reddit. retrieved february 17, 2021 from https://www.reddit.com/r/datah oarder/comments/krx449/megathread_archiving_the_capitol_hill_riots/ [6] 2021. faces of the riot. faces of the riot. retrieved february 17, 2021 from https://facesoftheriot.com/. appendix a: code list code description evidence url links to insurrection evidence strategy coordinating archival efforts; technical support saving downloading evidence content; uploading to archive analysis analyzing insurrection media doxing proposals to target rioters via release of personal information arguing political arguments seeding contributing internet bandwidth to help distribute the archive encouragement words of encouragement motivation personal motive for participating in the archive fbi proposals to share archive with fbi removal flagging evidence as removed by user or platform caution expressing ethical hesitation regarding archive project selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 heslep, d. & berge, p. (2021, october). mapping discord’s darkside: distributed hate networks on disboard. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. mapping discord’s darkside: distributed hate networks on disboard daniel g. heslep university of alabama ps berge university of central florida introduction scholars have noted the troubled legacy of discord, a voice/video community platform, which harbored the white supremacist groups behind the 2017 “unite the right” rally (brown jr. & hennis, 2019). in response to critical attention by journalists and scholars, discord intensified its moderating practices, and began rebranding itself with an expansion of in-house “trust and safety” and a public commitment to proactive moderation (discord transparency report, n.d.). while discord has committed to increased moderation, we question this commitment when discord does not acknowledge the role of third-party bulletin sites that serve as the interconnective structure of discord communities. we ask how discord’s continued reliance on third-party services reifies an “outsourcing of responsibility” and facilitates the continuation of white supremacist publics (brown jr. & hennis, 2019). because discord only allows users to search partnered and verified servers (generally with 10,000 member minimums), third-party sites like disboard—a public bulletin for discord servers—are popular for searching smaller communities. disboard relies on its own third-party bot, which, when integrated directly into discord servers, displays a public invite link and the number of currently active members (figure 1). to excavate the role that these third-party services play in facilitating hateful content, our study has two parts: 1. we use brock’s model for critical technoculture discourse analysis (2018) to demonstrate how discord’s rhetorical rebranding and institution of a curated search stratifies their platform: on the surface, they present an idyllic, engineered https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=1yzzjo https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=49qakl community of vetted servers for incoming users, while obscuring a persistent network of toxic servers beneath. 2. we argue that discord’s commitment to proactive moderation is subverted by its reliance on third-party sites. we demonstrate how third-party structures maintain an aggressively racist and toxic web that underlies the platform. we examine data scraped from 3,600 discord servers publicly listed on disboard that actively marked their associations with nazism, white power, raiding, queerphobia, and toxicity. figure 1. disboard servers openly promoting hateful affiliations. method due to its closed-structure and novelty, research on discord is nascent. following the model of work that explores networked harassment (burgess & matamoros-fernández, 2016), data was scraped from public discord server bulletin site disboard (discordfederation/disboardscraper, 2019/2020). we identified 20+ tags connected to hateful content and scraped data (server name, current online users, description, and 15 tags) for the first 10 pages of servers using each tag. we combined duplicates and used orange data mining tools and antconc concordance tools for quantitative analysis. because disboard provides public server descriptions, we were able to ethically collect data about ‘toxic’ (massanari, 2017) discord servers. this work advances scholarship on platform moderation (gillespie, 2018), and hateful content operating across intraplatform structures (massanari, 2017). ultimately, we hope to demonstrate new avenues for researching discord communities, while engaging in the digital feminist practice of exposing hateful social media structures (d’ignazio & klein, 2020). https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=wx4jrt https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=wx4jrt https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=og2hnz https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=og2hnz https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?qx9tiu https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=woz7ok https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=ml1fpe https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=c5jdju findings we found thousands of discord servers that marketed themselves on disboard as hateful and nazi-affiliated spaces. disboard’s search algorithms exacerbate this linkage, providing recommendations for racist searches that “both informs and is informed in part by users” (noble, 2018, p. 25; figure 2). figure 2. disboard indexes tags based on racist searches. in some explicit cases, servers used names (ex. “hitler’s holy crusade”) and tags (ex. “toxic” [n=3514], “edgy” [n=2363] and “4chan” [n=702]) to market their communities. we identified other alt-right, nazi, and hate-groups through: • use of seemingly innocuous tags such as “political” or “roblox” in conjunction with white supremacist tags (e.g. “1488”). • “conscription servers” established as nazi recruitment checkpoints, vetting users for private servers. • antagonistic servers organized around queerphobia (ex. “anti-lgbt” [n=169]) and toxic-geek masculine discourse (ex. “anti-furry” [n=644], “anti-gacha” [n=308]). this network of servers—some with hundreds of active users—indicates the presence of systemic, hateful structures. these servers advertised the very tools that discord has promoted as part of its approach to user safety (safety principles, n.d.). many servers claimed to use discord’s phone-based verification systems and new-member vetting systems to prevent “degenerates” from infiltrating their communities. additionally, they advertised the way that third-party bots operated in their communities: one server boasted about a third-party bot called “n-word deleter” that “runs every 24h so your account is safe with us!” while bots are an essential part of moderation for discord servers (jiang et al., 2019), these servers actively abuse these tools to encourage harassment. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=rvcrcn https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=qmy1pw https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=gacsyt conclusion that these hateful structures exist is less important for discord than if they exist visibly—and herein lies the financial impetus for discord to continue to allow sites like disboard to do its dirty work, as it maintains a presentable image for its ongoing expansion. although discord’s in-house search promotes only curated servers, it has allowed third-party services to imitate its user interface (figure 3), and network hate on its behalf. figure 3. disboard imitates the ‘cuteness’ of discord. our findings indicate a disconnect between discord’s policies and the networked practices of hate groups. instead of eliding the problematic structures that have emerged from discord’s user ecology, a meaningful intervention would involve 1) recognizing the role of third-party bots and bulletin sites in shaping discord’s culture 2) building and maintaining a comprehensive search feature that discord can moderate and take responsibility for 3) acknowledging the proliferation of hateful communities and approaching bans from a networked perspective, ensuring that hate groups cannot easily reestablish themselves. due to discord’s unique structure as isolated nodes of private communities, it may ultimately be successful promoting its curated, illusory userbase. however, without either acknowledging or distancing itself from its network of actual use, discord will continue to host hate groups, and continue to undermine the inclusive future it actively markets. references brock, a. (2018). critical technocultural discourse analysis. new media & society, 20(3), 1012–1030. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816677532 brown, a. (2020, june 30). discord was once the alt-right’s favorite chat app. now it’s gone mainstream and scored a new $3.5 billion valuation. forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/06/30/discord-was-once-the-altrights-favorite-chat-app-now-its-gone-mainstream-and-scored-a-new-35-billionvaluation/ https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=wnzpdf https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=wnzpdf brown jr., j. j., & hennis, g. (2019). hateware and the outsourcing of responsibility. in j. reyman & e. m. sparby (eds.), digital ethics: rhetoric and responsibility in online aggression. routledge. burgess, j., & matamoros-fernández, a. (2016). mapping sociocultural controversies across digital media platforms: one week of #gamergate on twitter, youtube, and tumblr. communication research and practice, 2(1), 79–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2016.1155338 d’ignazio, c., & klein, l. f. (2020). data feminism. mit press. discord transparency report: jan—june 2020 | by nelly | discord blog. (n.d.). retrieved december 7, 2020, from https://blog.discord.com/discordtransparency-report-jan-june-2020-2ef4a3ee346d discordfederation/disboardscraper. (2020). [python]. federation of discord servers. https://github.com/discordfederation/disboardscraper (original work published 2019) gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. yale university press. jiang, j. a., kiene, c., middler, s., brubaker, j. r., & fiesler, c. (2019). moderation challenges in voice-based online communities on discord. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 3(cscw), 55:1-55:23. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359157 massanari, a. (2017). #gamergate and the fappening: how reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. new media & society, 19(3), 329–346. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815608807 noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. nyu press. safety principles and policies. (n.d.). discord. retrieved april 8, 2021, from https://discord.com/safety https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=t6ltne https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=t6ltne https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=47j7tg https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=rx68qi https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=rx68qi https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=rx68qi https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=7uu3t7 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=7uu3t7 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=c487zj https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=6yfxsw https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=fp3bf1 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=flfbtq https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=khlsvb https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=cjfh9i https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=c3kt5h https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=c3kt5h https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=c3kt5h https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=dr5z0e https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=dr5z0e https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=shtl4s https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=iacsd6 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=iacsd6 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=wc3lj6 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=wc3lj6 microsoft word barnes-the online life of literacy education-the online life of literacy education.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): lastname, firstinitial. (2021, october). paper (or panel) title. paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the online life of literacy education: how the 2018 #phonicsdebate is reshaping the field naomi barnes, queensland university of technology introduction for a full discussion of the findings this paper, since submission to aoir has been published in the australian educational researcher (see barnes, 2021). below is an extended abstract of the paper to accompany the video. this paper provides an overview of the reading wars as a site of discursive struggle. using a bourdieu (1993) facilitated digital sociology, this paper presents a case study of the 2018 hashtag #phonicsdebate to illustrate how whole language (wl) literacy researchers and cognitive scientists who advocated for universal synthetic phonics (usp) used social media as a space to navigate, negotiate and reimagine the contours of the field of literacy research for the australian curriculum. using a digital sociological account of online events associated with the 2018 phonics debate hosted by the australian centre for educational research and the think tank the centre for independent studies, this paper works to illuminate and challenge contemporary understanding of the politics online. if policy researchers are to clarify the relationship between politics and their field in the 21st century we must understand how boundaries are negotiated using digital tools and how fields are imagined. this digital sociology will aims to help re-evaluate our understanding of how socially mediated environments have transformed how education professional communities work. in remixing bourdieu’s field of literary production to become a field of online literacy production, two key sociological questions emerge which will be used to interrogate the digital data and associated networks. firstly, what does it mean for an academic literacy researcher to claim a role at the centre of literacy research and to take on the role of judge as to who gains admission to that field? likewise, what does it mean for noneducation researchers and literacy advocates to negotiate, navigate and reimagine a literacy research field that includes them? methodology this paper uses a qualitative critical network (barnes, 2021) digital sociology that uses small data (latzko-toth et al., 2017) to bring together network theory and social media barnes, n. (2021, october). the online life of literacy education: how the 2018 #phonicsdebate is reshaping the field. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. methodologies. the social media analyses were conducted using two different data collection approaches. the first involved twitter, and the other a cross-platform, manual internet archive research. the small data sets were comprised of media objects using the following parameters: 1. twitter scraping using #phonicsdebate, #phonicscheck, associated key words “teaching + reading”, and “phonics”. these were collected from the two-week period either side of 31st july 2018 where a live-streamed youtube debate considered the value of universal synthetic phonics. the tweets were those from identified australian twitter accounts, but the dataset did include international participation if an australian account retweeted a broadcast 2. the youtube debate and transcript 3. media articles and blogs that were about the australian phonics debate, published between june 2018 and december 2019 or hyperlinked in the twitter dataset. 96 media objects were collected and attributed to a collective. using crowdtangle (crowdtangle.com), a tool for collecting interaction metadata on facebook, twitter, instagram and reddit, i assessed facebook interaction impressions on the content to get a sense of their impact. the data were analysed using thematic analysis, matching the tweets to the debate transcript to ascertain which discourses attracted the most attention from the audience and how that attention then played out over the following 18 months through blog posts and news media articles. findings cognitive scientists as advocates of universal synthetic phonics (usp) successfully negotiated entry into the field of literacy research by using social media, news media and traditional lobbying to bypass education literacy researcher’s dominance over which approaches to reading in the australian curriculum. the 2021 review of the australian curriculum: english included the usp flagship “decodable texts” in foundation and grade 1 descriptors. they also successfully advocated for the overhaul of initial teacher education to include an additional unit dedicated to the teaching of reading (traditionally taught alongside writing). both these successes for usp advocates were initiatives opposed by many wl literacy researchers. this raised questions about how cognitive scientists were able to renegotiate the field of literacy research in australian teacher education. the cognitive scientist dominated usp collective used “highly stylized” (stern, 2016, p. 3) strategies, such as extensive use of social media and drawing on established relationships with policy makers, to redraw the lines of field. the wl literacy researcher collective accused the other of being aggressive — but in doing so raised questions about what it means to claim the central role in the field and act as judge about what literacy research should inform teacher education and what does not. social media analysis enabled the identification of two major of discursive struggle that assisted in the renegotiation of the field. by mapping the tweets against the debate, figure 1 shows that the advocates for usp reacted most strongly to assertions that reading begins at birth and the claims of phonics package commercialisation (see barnes, 2021 for further analysis of these claims). these issues of contention featured in follow-up blogs and barnes, n. (2021, october). the online life of literacy education: how the 2018 #phonicsdebate is reshaping the field. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. news media produced by usp advocates, while wl advocates pushed their collective expertise as a reason to retain authority on the field. figure 1. alignment of tweets with debate points figure 2 shows that usp advocates harnessed the collectivising power of social media, legacy news media, and professional (teacher journals) media, effectively blanketing social media content with their perspective. their content creation was substantially more prolific, had greater variety of texts, and were engaged with on a significantly larger scale than the wl collective over the 18-month period. barnes, n. (2021, october). the online life of literacy education: how the 2018 #phonicsdebate is reshaping the field. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. figure 2: production of online content about phonics over the 18 month period the usp’s impact on facebook was also substantially higher than the wl collective (see figure 3). figure 3: views of online content about phonics over the 18 month period the use of social media demonstrated in this paper where policy advocates attempt to redraw the lines of the field of literacy research is a sociological transformation that all policy researchers must be aware of – not just those interested in internet research. the barnes, n. (2021, october). the online life of literacy education: how the 2018 #phonicsdebate is reshaping the field. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. public shift in authority from expertise and rigorous methodology to personalised experience and virality that social media has brought (brooks, 2012), is a rhetorical revolution that cannot be dismissed or underestimated. references barnes, n. (2021). the social life of literacy education: how the 2018# phonicsdebate is reshaping the field. the australian educational researcher, 1-18 bourdieu, p. (1993). the field of cultural production: essays on art and literature. columbia university press. brooks, s. (2012). speaking truth to power: the paradox of the intellectual in the visual information age. in s. brooks, d. stasiak, & t. zyro (eds.), policy expertise in contemporary democracies (pp. 69–85). routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315601120 latzko-toth, g., bonneau, c., & millette, m. (2017). small data, thick data: thickening strategies for trace-based social media research. in l. sloan & a. quan-haase (eds.), the sage handbook of social media research methods (pp. 199–214). sage. stern, k. j. (2016). reimagined communities: an introduction. in the social life of criticism (pp. 1–22). university of michigan press; jstor. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.8833813.3 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 13-16 oct 2021 bastos, m.; mercea, d.; gouveia, f. (2021, october). guy next door and implausibly attractive young women: the visual frames of social media propaganda. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. guy next door and implausibly attractive young women: the visual frames of social media propaganda marco bastos university college dublin, ireland dan mercea city, university of london, united kingdom fabio goveia federal university of espírito santo, brazil extended abstract the research question driving this study is that tropes of heroic resistance or military endurance, typical of canonical state propaganda, track poorly in a context of information but not attrition warfare. we probe this question by taking stock of studies in visual propaganda research and testing whether social media propaganda seeks to embody the vox populi by employing relatable, familiar, or alternatively attractive faces of ordinary people―the archetypal “man on the street” (mots). we refer to such familiar or attractive faces as ‘the guy next door’ and the ‘implausibly attractive young woman.’ the former is embodied by an unassuming yet average male lacking overt tropes of hegemonic masculinity like strength and dominance commonly embraced by russian propaganda (romanets, 2017), while the latter is characterized by tangible exploitation of the female body for maximum erotic impact and objectification (davis, 2018). to this end, we analyzed the visual frames in profile images released by twitter’s elections integrity, which identified and removed the universe of false accounts operated by the internet research agency (elections integrity, 2018). we sampled the data across five groups: muscovites, blacklivesmatter activists, conservatives, trump supporters, and christians. we identified russian accounts by querying the database for users that self-reported “москва” as their location (n=206). next, we identified conservatives, trump, christian, and blacklivesmatter supporters by sampling profiles with the keyword “conservative” in the profile description (n=121) and repeated the process (without replacement) for the keywords “trump” (n=134), “god,” “christ,” or “jesus” (n=154), and finally “black” or “blm” (n=79). after removing false positives and disambiguating profiles with multiple matches, the sampled data returned 75 blacklivesmatter activists, 61 christians, 104 conservatives, 201 muscovites, and 57 trump supporter profiles. figure 1 provides an overview of the profiled groups. figure 1: from left to right, twitter profile pictures of trump supporters, christians, conservatives, blacklivesmatter activists, and self-identified muscovites. the multimodal information curated by ira accounts was unpacked by imagecaptioning the twitter profile images (martinec & salway, 2005), so that their visual content was translated to text for downstream analysis. a visual inspection of the profile images, vis-à-vis the demographic group they targeted (figure 1), shows that the semantic relationship in ira multimodal content is of complementarity and not quite defined by the multimodal classes of illustration or anchorage (stat = 0). we collated the profile images of each of the five groups to apply pixel-level analysis that uncovers patterns in visual media and produces a largescale representation. we organized the profile images according to brightness and the color saturation of each image through an imagemeasure2 plug-in for imagej (rasband, 2012). two members of the team, with expertise in professional photography, subsequently coded each of the images to identify features in the composition, framing, and photographic techniques employed to produce the profile image. the categories devised during the coding procedure are detailed in table 1. table 1: coding categories applied to the twitter profile image of internet research agency accounts impersonating blacklivesmatter, christians, conservatives, muscovites, and trump supporters in addition to explicit categories, our inductive coding rendered a key category devised to identify whether the profile photo explored sensual undertones, a subtle feature and proxy for attractiveness present in many profiles featuring women or sexualizing the female body. another key category devised during the coding process refers to the extent to which professional photographic techniques were employed to produce the image. professional photographic work generates aesthetic elements that differ substantively from amateur photography, notwithstanding recent advances in smartphone cameras, particularly the expert use of hue, brightness, and light controls. we refer to this category as quality to distinguish between professional-looking photos from those that are discernibly produced by users themselves. finally, we triangulated the qualitative analysis with computer-assistant image processing using the bwimage r package (biagolini-jr & macedo, 2019) to identify patterns in the groups of profile images. results the ira propaganda campaign resorted to ordinary individuals but unordinary attractive young women, often featured with professional makeup in professional-shot photos against a soft, balanced lighting. the chromatic and compositional variance identified in the profile photos show that us conservative groups are targeted with a composite of average young men and sensually crafted images of young women typical of soft advertisements employed by the cosmetic industry. the profile images in the russians cohort, on the other hand, are marked by tropes of virility and domination. emphasis is shifted from ordinary-looking male individuals to compositional undertones emphasizing power and adventure. blacklivesmatter activists are framed with another compositional frame altogether; depicted largely with high angles projecting tense expressions in a single headshot. these compositional choices do not merely depict gender inequalities and gendered stereotypes but celebrate them. the results are also consistent with the perceived notion that state-sponsored propaganda on social media exploits existing social tensions by framing contentious issues in a familiar but partisan light. ira activity expertly pitched to right-wing framings and beliefs, but the agency also targeted distinct sections of the us electorate, including liberal subgroups, chief of which were blacklivesmatter activists. religious, racial, and cultural groups are targeted with disguised social media accounts exploring biases and prejudices, but also perceived markers of membership of these groups. the multitude of targeted social groups, and the broad ideological spectrum of their interests, suggest that the target of the propaganda efforts is not the social groups the campaign chooses to personify, but social cohesion itself. the emphasis and perhaps exaggeration placed on existing social divisions is leveraged to amplify threats and ultimately erode social trust and social cohesion. in the end, the guy next door represents a considerable departure from archetypes of heroic masculinity; indeed, the guy next door is the embodiment of unassuming, dependable, yet average masculinity. he is not just ordinary, but also local, thus submitting a sense of familiarity that effortlessly evolves to notions of reliability and trustworthiness. the visual trope of the affable guy next door may conceivably ease the labor-intensive costs of infiltration. similarly, the cohort of implausibly attractive young women may follow a similar tactic of infiltration and subversion that exploits the male gaze and the depiction of women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the male viewer. however implausibly attractive they may be, this visual trope is seemingly an optimal candidate for becoming embedded with trump supporters. references biagolini-jr, c., & macedo, r. h. (2019). bwimage: a package to describe image patterns in natural structures. f1000research, 8(1168), 1168. davis, s. e. (2018). objectification, sexualization, and misrepresentation: social media and the college experience. social media + society, 4(3), 2056305118786727. doi: 10.1177/2056305118786727 elections integrity. (2018). data archive. from twitter, inc. https://about.twitter.com/en_us/values/elections-integrity.html martinec, r., & salway, a. (2005). a system for image–text relations in new (and old) media. visual communication, 4(3), 337-371. rasband, w. (2012). imagej: image processing and analysis in java. astrophysics source code library. romanets, m. (2017). virtual warfare: masculinity, sexuality, and propaganda in the russo-ukrainian war. east/west: journal of ukrainian studies, 4(1), 159-177. seo, h. (2019). visual propaganda and social media. the sage handbook of propaganda, 126. https://about.twitter.com/en_us/values/elections-integrity.html selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): carah, n., brown, m.g., dobson, a., robards, b.. (2022, november). the algorithmic flow of harmful industries advertising on social media platforms. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the algorithmic flow of harmful indusries advertising on social media platforms nicholas carah the university of queensland maria-gemma brown the university of queensland amy dobson curtin university brady robards monash university background seeing an algorithmically-curated flow of advertising as we scroll through our social media feeds is now an ordinary part of our digital lives (bucher 2017, carmi 2020, trott et al. 2021). while researchers have examined both the targeted advertising and promotional brand cultures of social media platforms (banet-weiser 2012, bishop 2018, mcguigan 2019), in this paper we argue for the need to investigate the customised flow of advertising itself. shifting beyond the targeting of individual ads, focusing on the immersive flow of advertising on social media enables us to consider how advertising constructs and reproduces subject positions along lines of gender, class, sexuality and ethnicity in an era of algorithmic customisation. advertising shapes our larger public culture but the typical experience of advertising is now confined to our private and algorithmically customised social media feeds. despite advertisers and digital platforms having detailed portraits of users, digital advertising is difficult to monitor and study. the vast majority of advertising on social media platforms is ‘dark’ -that is, only visible to the users being targeted. ads on digital platforms are not published or archived. while there are some transparency tools, like facebook’s ad library, these provide only a partial record of advertising activity. we investigate the customised flow of advertising on social media by analysing collections of ads sent to us by individual users, exploring the patterns that emerge and whether they reflect particular ‘personas’. our study in this project, partnered with vichealth, we used a participatory digital method to work with 204 young australians aged 18 to 25 to collect 5169 examples of alcohol, gambling and fast food advertising from their social media feeds. we focus on alcohol, fast food and gambling advertisers as harmful industries that are extensive and innovative users of social media. they leverage the participatory cultures and algorithmic power of digital platforms like instagram, facebook and tiktok to engage with and target young people (atkinson et al. 2017, niland et al. 2017). over a two week period participants took screenshots of ads and sent them to us via sms. this process was interspersed with sms chat with the researchers, describing and co-analysing the ads they were seeing and sending. participants also completed two surveys on their views and perceptions of harmful industries marketing on social media before and after the collection of screenshots, and were invited to download and share with us the ‘ad interests’ data facebook creates about them in its advertising model. findings and analysis in this paper we analyse the collections of advertisements each participant sent us. advertisers and digital platforms build and optimise custom audiences that target consumers based not only on demographic characteristics like age, gender and location but also on the interests and affinities they share in common with other users. meta’s ‘lookalike’ audiences, for instance, assemble audiences for advertisers based on shared affinities. rather than specify particular demographic or behavioural targeting criteria, the advertiser instead iteratively ‘tunes’ an audience based on who engages with their advertising and purchases their products or services. these models become more sophisticated over time as they monitor and learn which consumers engage with what kinds of ads. the ads we see in our feeds do not just reflect the brands, services and products we consume, but also our subject positions, identities, tastes and cultural worlds. to explore the algorithmic flow of advertising on digital platforms we approach the collections of ads each individual participant collected and sent us as products of these ‘lookalike’ audience building tools. we looked for patterns of symbols and themes within each participant’s collection and coded them inductively. we brought together collections that had shared visual and thematic similarities, and then associated them with information about participants including their age, gender and consumption of alcohol, fast food and gambling products. the patterns across participants’ collections illustrate how social media platforms’ advertising models ‘learn’ to reflect and reproduce the identities and subject positions of participants. for instance, many young women in our study had collections of ads for alcohol and bars that featured the colour pink, botanicals and flowers, picnic rugs and soft furnishings. the collections of images sent to us by young participants help to illuminate how the advertising models of social media don’t just target us with advertising, they immerse us in curated algorithmic flows of consumer and brand culture that project markedly classed, gendered and racialised sets of cultural tastes, aesthetics, sensibilities and ‘vibes’. conclusions and implications our novel method and analysis demonstrates how individual ad campaigns accumulate into a larger cultural imaginary in our algorithmically-curated social media feeds. the collections of ads we see on social media are an important object of study because they reveal not just the symbolic content and targeting patterns of particular ads, but also because they illustrate how advertising on social media algorithmically-curates an immersive cultural experience. our study illustrates how social media continues the larger social role advertising plays in the construction and maintenance of consumer subjectivities. the advertising model reflects the creativity and fluidity of identity and expression that we associate with the participatory cultures of social media. we need to conceptualise advertising on social media not only using concepts of ‘targeting’ that imply the precise identification of our characteristics, but instead as a complex feedback loop between the refinement of ad content and themes, the data-driven optimization of audiences, and our reflexive and fluid identities, interests and aesthetic sensibilities. we conclude our paper by arguing that researchers need to focus not just on the analysis of ads, the targeting of ads, and the participatory promotional and brand cultures of social media. we also need to conceptualise and study the algorithmic flow of advertising on social media because this is the basis of our everyday engagement with advertising. the paradox of our present moment is that while we all share the experience of advertising-laden algorithmic feeds, each feed is customised and private. we need to develop novel methods and conceptual frameworks for investigating advertising as a cultural technology that doesn’t just target us as individuals but algorithmically constructs and curates the larger cultural narratives and imaginaries we inhabit and draw on to fashion our identities. references atkinson, a. m., ross-houle, k. m., begley, e., & sumnall, h. (2017). an exploration of alcohol advertising on social networking sites: an analysis of content, interactions and young people’s perspectives. addiction research & theory, 25(2), 91-102. banet-weiser, s. (2012). authentic™. new york university press. bishop, s. (2018). anxiety, panic and self-optimization: inequalities and the youtube algorithm. convergence, 24(1), 69-84. bucher, t. (2017). the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 30-44. carmi, e. (2020). rhythmedia: a study of facebook immune system. theory, culture & society, 37(5), 119-138. mcguigan, l. (2019). automating the audience commodity: the unacknowledged ancestry of programmatic advertising. new media & society, 21(11-12), 2366-2385. niland, p., mccreanor, t., lyons, a. c., & griffin, c. (2017). alcohol marketing on social media: young adults engage with alcohol marketing on facebook. addiction research & theory, 25(4), 273-284. trott, v., li, n., fordyce, r., & andrejevic, m. (2021). shedding light on ‘dark’ ads. continuum, 35(5), 761-774. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): trillò, t., hallinan, b., green, a., kim, b., mizoroki, s., scharlach, r., frosh, p., & shifman, l. (2022, november). “i love this photo! i can feel their hearts”. how users across the world evaluate social media portraiture. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “i love this photo! i can feel their hearts”. how users across the world evaluate social media portraiture tommaso trillò department of communication and journalism, the hebrew university of jerusalem blake hallinan department of communication and journalism, the hebrew university of jerusalem avishai green department of communication and journalism, the hebrew university of jerusalem bumsoo kim department of media & communication, pusan national university saki mizoroki department of communication and journalism, the hebrew university of jerusalem rebecca scharlach department of communication and journalism, the hebrew university of jerusalem paul frosh department of communication and journalism, the hebrew university of jerusalem limor shifman department of communication and journalism, the hebrew university of jerusalem abstract personal portraits on social media are value-laden constructs. whether documenting graduation or flexing in the gym, users express what they care about and present it for others to evaluate. since “global” portrait genres are produced and consumed in different locales, their interpretation and evaluation may vary. we thus ask: what values do people identify in different types of social media portraits? which evaluative criteria do they use when judging them? an analysis of 100 interviews with users from germany, italy, japan, south korea, and the united states reveals that people consistently recognize genre-specific values in portraits and evaluate them through a narrow set of communication-related criteria. such evaluations vary somewhat crossculturally in ways that only occasionally match established comparative literature on values. we reflect on the relational character of the criteria adopted for the evaluation of portraits worldwide, highlighting its association with new modes of sociability in digital spheres. please update your browser your browser isn’t supported anymore. update it to get the best youtube experience and our latest features. learn more mozilla firefox google chrome opera microsoft edge safari remind me later about copyright contact us terms privacy policy & safety © 2025 google llc selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): jones, bethan. (2022, november). reb/vodka is my otp: school shooter and mass murderer fanfiction as narratives of resistance. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. reb/vodka is my otp: school shooter and mass murderer fanfiction as narratives of resistance bethan jones university of york in 2019 a white supremacist livestreamed the murder of 51 people, and the injuring of another 40, at two mosques in christchurch, new zealand, telling reddit users that it was “time to stop shitposting and time to make a real life effort post” (quoted in macklin, 2019). it was, as the new york times indicated, “an internet-native mass shooting, conceived and produced entirely within the irony-soaked discourse of modern extremism” (roose, 2019). though perhaps distinct in indicating how the internet’s strange mix of playful memes, spreadable media logics and reactionary politics could have very material, very murderous consequences, the event has been one of many that pose challenging questions about foundational assumptions in fan studies and the role and status of fandom and participatory culture in contemporary life. though it is critical that we avoid the crudest of media effects and moral panics, it has certainly become clear that fandoms specifically, and participatory cultures more broadly, are sites of controversy, conflict, and complicity; complicating earlier assessments that sought to celebrate creativity, collegiality, and community. early work in the emerging field of fan studies quite deliberately focused on the positive aspects of fandom: the creativity at play in transformative works; the ways in which participatory cultures could resist dominant, heteronormative narratives; and the affective communities that rose around beloved texts. this approach was designed to combat the stereotyping and pathologizing of fans perpetrated by mass media until well into the 2000s (jenson, 1992; zubernis and larsen, 2012) and has broadly been successful: fans are now mainstream, actively courted and commercialised in a range of industries. it is worth at this point reiterating some taken-for-granted assumptions in fan and audience studies. first, popular culture is a site of political meaning and ideological conflict. second, the meaning of a text is not fixed but open to multiple interpretations; audiences are active not just in their readings but productive in the creation of auxiliary texts, refracting the subject position(s) of the reader. third, in a highly mediatized consumer society popular cultures are important for identity maintenance, and fandom is often a critical site of kinship and community. cultural studies has always been acutely attuned to the intersections of ideology and popular culture, but recent shifts feel more pressing and fan studies, in particular, has recognised that fannish spaces can also be sites of hatred, toxicity and other, darker, emotions. yet while work is now being undertaken on white supremacy, conspiracy theories and the fandoms arising round true crime podcasts and serial killers (stanfill, 2020; reinhard et al., 2021; wiest, 2016), the communities around people like eric harris and dylan klebold (the columbine school shooters), dzhokhar tsarnaev (the boston bomber), and brenton tarrant (the perpetrator of the christchurch attacks) remain unexplored. this paper returns to some of the early discourses surrounding fandom and applies them to contemporary expressions of ‘dark’ fandom, in particular school shooters and mass killers. undertaking a content analysis of fanfiction posted to archive of our own, as well as media reports focusing on these fans, i demonstrate – as rico suggests – that “dark fandoms remain rooted in the first wave [of fan studies] where these fans are dismissed as others and their communities lack legitimization and acceptance by society” (2015, online). i focus on fanfiction given its status as a still maligned activity, predominantly the domain of teenage girls who can be written off as obsessive or naïve fangirls. typically stigmatised through its gendered associations – fanfiction writers are irrational, hysterical and immature – fanfiction dedicated to mass killers is subject to a double multiple discourses of othering, but also offers multiple forms of resistance to these dominant narratives. rather than fanfiction as a practice through which fans express emotional connections with popular media texts, i argue that fans write fanfiction about school shooters and mass killers not as a means of showing their ‘love’ for the perpetrators, but as a way to recontextualize and understand their motives and actions. although not stars in the traditional sense (broll, 2020) these killers attain a level of celebrity which comes with a following – similar to that of serial killers, who schmid refers to as the “exemplary modern celebrity” (2005, 15) – and while this may not be understandable to most it nevertheless offers us ways to think about dominant narratives, resistance and whose voices are, and aren’t, being heard. this paper thus examines dark fan cultural production through the lens of resistance and suggests that different dark fandoms function as sites of resistance against dominant cultural narratives – be those ‘real’ or perceived. following ford, who suggests “the strength of fan studies […] stems […] from the interdisciplinarity that has allowed scholars from varied fields to bring their research methods and theoretical constructs to bear on the relationships active audiences have with and around media texts” (2014, 53–54) i highlight the darker, more uncomfortable relationships audiences have with particular mediatised events. in particular i argue that we cannot afford to simply look at the audiences who engage in ‘approved’ versions of fannish production and involvement: if we examine how writing fanfiction can push back against patriarchal narratives we also need to include those writing about school shooters and mass killers to ensure we are not perpetuating a hierarchy within academia that says certain forms of behaviour and engagement are more appropriate to research than others. references broll, r., 2020. “dark fandoms: an introduction and case study.” deviant behavior, 41(6), pp.792-804. ford, s. 2014. “fan studies: grappling with an ‘undisciplined’ discipline.” journal of fandom studies, 2, no. 1, pp. 53–71. doi:10.1386/jfs.2.1.53_1. macklin, g. 2019. “the christchurch attacks: livestream terror in the viral video age.” ctc sentinel 12, no. 6. https://ctc.usma.edu/christchurch-attacks-livestream jensen, j. 1992. “fandom as pathology: the consequences of characterization.” in: lewis, lisa (ed.), the adoring audience: fan culture and popular media. london and new york: routledge, pp. 9–29. reinhard, c. d., stanley, d. and howell, l. 2021. "fans of q: the stakes of qanon’s functioning as political fandom." american behavioral scientist. september 2021. doi:10.1177/00027642211042294. rico, a. r. 2015. “fans of columbine shooters eric harris and dylan klebold.” transformative works and cultures 20. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2015.0671. roose, k. 2009. “a mass murder of, and for, the internet.” new york times, 15 march. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/technology/facebook-youtube-christchurchshooting.html. schmid, d. 2005. natural born celebrities: serial killers in american culture. chicago, il: university of chicago press. stanfill, m. 2020. "introduction: the reactionary in the fan and the fan in the reactionary." television & new media 21, no. 2, pp. 123-134. wiest, j.b., 2016. “casting cultural monsters: representations of serial killers in us and uk news media.” howard journal of communications, 27(4), pp.327-346. zubernis, l. and larsen, k. 2012. fandom at the crossroads: celebration, shame and fan/producer relationships. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): weintraub, m.s., and sears, d.r.w. (2021, october). why making matters online: the pinterest-diy data set. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. why making matters online: the pinterest-diy data set m. sylvia weintraub sam houston state university david r.w. sears texas tech university abstract the do-it-yourself (diy) community is currently one of the largest creative content communities on pinterest (hall et al., 2018), a social networking service (sns) that encourages users to both share information about creative processes and attempt projects in real life (irl). pinterest users share ongoing projects by creating project “pins”, which consist of images, videos, and text descriptions of creative content. and yet, while several studies have investigated user behavior in relation to everyday ideation and creativity on the site (linder et al., 2014, hu et al., 2018, mull and lee, 2014), little is known about the characteristics that lead users to prefer some diy projects over others. thus, this paper introduces the pinterest-diy data set, which consists of text data mined from 500 diy project pins on pinterest. using a custom sampling approach, we created a taxonomy of diy characteristics related to each pin’s project type, function, materials, and complexity. to measure user preferences on the site, we also conducted a sentiment analysis on user comments for each diy project pin. this paper introduces the data set and presents two use cases for the internet research community using both exploratory and confirmatory statistical methods. in our view, the pinterest-diy data set will provide further opportunities to examine whether, and to what degree, participation in online diy communities promotes everyday creativity and increases engagement with physical matter. introduction relative to other animals, humans are uniquely adept at manipulating matter, yet modern commodity culture discourages individuals from attempting to fix, adjust, construct, or re-fashion materials (kuznetsov & paulos, 2010). moreover, it has been argued that virtual platforms distract and disengage users from their surrounding 2 environment (sears & jacko, 2009). thus, although humans exhibit creative and constructive making behaviors (e.g. creative ideation and everyday creativity), engagement in social media, social networking services (snss), and other online activities can discourage behaviors related to manipulating material entities. and yet, scholarship on snss like pinterest, which affords users opportunities to learn about, and participate in, creative diy practices, has yet to examine the impact of these online platforms on the diy community. to address this issue, this paper introduces the pinterest-diy data set, which features text data mined from 500 diy project pins. we first describe the taxonomy of coded categories (i.e. project type, project theme, material(s) type, first, image, and task complexity) included in the data set, and then present two potential applications of the data set that feature both descriptive (exploratory) and inferential (confirmatory) statistical methods. methods the data for this study have been mined from diy project pins beginning prior to the covid-19 pandemic. pinterest’s live feed showcases pins as images, and diy pins were identified as aesthetic projects that may or may not also perform a utilitarian function. a two-tier systematic sampling approach was conducted that first searched for the keyword ‘diy’ using pinterest’s search engine, and then filtered results to only include pins that contain videos. pins containing a minimum of five comments and a maximum of twenty-five comments were selected, and all reply comments appearing in threads were included. self-promoting comments (e.g., “pinboard” follow requests and advertisements) were excluded. for each pin, the diy project title, description, number of comments at the time of data entry, whether videos begin with by showing inprocess shots or completed projects, and the length of the videos were encoded. finally, the total number of reactions (i.e. ‘love’, ‘haha’, ‘thanks’, ‘good idea’, and ‘wow’) to diy project pins was also entered. a preliminary exploratory study was conducted to create a taxonomy of relevant categories based on a subset of 100 pins from the data set. based on the initial pilot study, four categories were established to code the properties of each diy project pin in the final data set: project type, project theme, material(s) type, first image, and task complexity. the category project type is divided into two sub-categories: ‘repurposed/upcycled’ projects, which refers to objects that are transformed to perform new functions or objects that are given new surface treatments; and ‘new builds’, which are constructed from raw materials. next, project theme includes sub-categories for ‘décor’, ‘utilitarian’, ‘craft’, ‘holiday’, and ‘wearable’. the material(s) type category contains 9 possible sub-categories for materials, including ‘paper’, ‘glass’, ‘wood’, ‘fibers’, ‘metal’, ‘ceramic’, ‘natural’, ‘synthetic polymers’ and ‘mixed’, which consist of at least a 50/50 mixture of two or more materials. first image includes the subcategories ‘final product’, ‘work in progress’, and ‘both’ to indicate that images show the project both in process and as a completed project. finally, the task complexity category classifies pins based on the number of steps required to complete the project using a 5point likert scale from low to high. projects classified as ‘low’ require approximately 2-3 3 steps to complete; ‘low medium’ require approximately 3-5 steps; ‘medium’ require approximately 5-7 steps; ‘medium high’ require approximately 7-9 steps; and ‘high’ require approximately 9 or more steps to complete. to quantify user preferences for each of the project pins, the data set also includes estimates of the emotional valence of the sentiments expressed by users in the comments section. to that end, we conducted a sentiment analysis on the user comments using the valence aware dictionary and sentiment reasoner (vader; hutto & gilbert, 2014). the tool computes a compound valenced sentiment score in a range from –1 (most extreme negative) to 1 (most extreme positive) for all of the text comments in each pin. applications this paper presents two use cases for the pinterest-diy data set, which will be made available in an online open-access repository on github before the conference. first, we present the findings from a descriptive statistical analysis of the data set for each of the categories in the taxonomy. we found, for example, that diy projects typically employed synthetic polymers as materials, followed by wood, fibers, glass, and metals. second, the taxonomy can be used to predict various aspects of user behavior on pinterest, including the user sentiments estimated by vader. to predict the valenced sentiment scores, we conducted a multiple linear regression (mlr) analysis using the encoded categories from the taxonomy as predictors. the mean compound sentiment score for each pin was entered into a stepwise mlr model with forward selection using the predictors project type, project function, material(s) type, and task complexity, as well as first-order interaction terms (e.g., project type × task complexity), using 5-fold cross-validation to reduce overfitting. the mlr model revealed significant parameter estimates for project type and project function, indicating users were more likely to provide positive comments for repurposed/upcycled projects as well utilitarian and décor projects. discussion this data set offers a glimpse into a massive social system of creative endeavors found in diy communities on pinterest by looking at a broad spectrum of projects and usergenerated content. indeed, by studying trending characteristics and the rich textual content found in user comments, it is our hope that future studies employing this data set will shed light on how users share information about diy processes, how they value and evaluate creative projects, and which materials and processes are more desirable than others. citations 4 hall, c., & zarro, m. (2012). social curation on the website pinterest. com. proceedings of the american society for information science and technology, 49(1): 1-9. doi: 10.1002/meet.145049011 hu, s., torphy, k. t., opperman, a., jansen, k., & lo, y. j. (2018). what do teachers share within socialized knowledge communities: a case of pinterest. journal of professional capital and community 3(2): 97-122. doi: 10.1108/jpcc-11-20170025 hutto, c. j., & gilbert, e. (2014). vader: a parsimonious rule-based model for sentiment analysis of social media text. in e. adar & p. resnick (eds.), proceedings of the eighth international aaai conference on weblogs and social media (pp. 216– 225). palo alto: aaai press. linder, rhema, snodgrass, clair, & kerne, andruid. (2014). everyday ideation. proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems, 2411-2420. mull, i., & lee, s. e. (2014). “pin” pointing the motivational dimensions behind pinterest. computers in human behavior, 33, 192–200. doi: 10.31274/itaa_proceedings-180814-661 sears, a., & jacko, j.a. (eds.). (2009). human-computer interaction: design issues, solutions, and applications (1st ed.). crc press. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781420088861 selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): lu, m. & qiu, j.l. (2021, october). algorithmic empowerment or imperialist warfare? dark skin, ai camera, and a chinese company’s patent strategy. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. algorithmic empowerment or imperialist warfare? dark skin, ai camera, and a chinese company’s patent strategy miao lu the chinese university of hong kong jack linchuan qiu national university of singapore facial recognition technologies have spread quickly, including in the global south. as a branch of artificial intelligence (ai), machine vision can resemble, reproduce, and amplify human prejudice, for example, hp webcam’s failure to detect dark faces, and google’s auto-tagging of black people as “gorillas” (benjamin, 2019). meanwhile, predictive ai used in criminal justice is found to cause discriminatory policing and surveillance, which have deep roots in colonial identification (browne, 2015; mohamed, png & isaac, 2020). what has prevented companies like google from recognizing black faces accurately and equally? it may be because the datasets used to train algorithms are not diverse enough, in which minority groups are underrepresented or mislabeled. however, as crawford and paglen (2019) contend, automated interpretation of images is an inherently social and political project, especially when ai designers are overwhelmingly white and male. however, the politics of ai is far from being settled. china, for example, has been challenging america’s ai supremacy (lee 2018). in 2019, china overtook the us in ai journal citations (zhang, et al., 2021). this project focuses on patents as another key indicator, for which shenzhen has become a front-runner where chinese companies aggressively pursue patent applications (https://bit.ly/32aj8np). the shenzhen-based huawei, for example, filed 2,398 patents with the european patent office, topping its ranking list in 2017 (https://bit.ly/2qlbl8e). this paper examines another shenzhen-based company, transsion, which is becoming a leading innovator in facial recognition technologies optimised for darker skins. in december 2020, transsion received the wu wenjun ai science & technology award, suggested citation (apa): lu, m. & qiu, j.l. (2021, october). algorithmic empowerment or imperialist warfare? dark skin, ai camera, and a chinese company’s patent strategy. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. china’s most important ai award, for its visual technologies for darker skin tones. founded in 2006, transsion is a phone manufacturer targeting emerging markets and currently the dominant player in africa, outcompeting opponents like samsung and huawei (hancock, 2017). transsion’s ai camera, optimized for darker skins, has long been the company’s unique selling point. • how and why does transsion develop its facial recognition technologies for darker skin tones? • how does the company articulate and interpret its patent strategy? • what narratives does it use, and why? • what are the technical, social-cultural, and geopolitical implications? viewing transsion as a case of computing from the south (amrute & murillo, 2020), this study aims to explore the questions above by using two main methods. first, document analysis, including transsion’s patent documents, company reports, and prospectus. by searching “transsion (shenzhen)” and “facial recognition” on google patents, a search service from google that indexes patents and patent applications from 17 major patent offices in the world, we retrieved 107 documents, including 104 granted by china’s national intellectual property administration (cnipa), and four by world intellectual property organization (wipo). since september 2019, transsion has been publicly listed in the shanghai stock exchange. company reports and prospectus were collected through the official websites of transsion and the shanghai stock exchange, then analyzed along with the patent documents through nvivo and textual analysis. second, participant observation. from july to october 2018, the lead author of this article worked as a special intern at transsion’s shenzhen headquarters. then she observed transsion’s operations in ghana during september-december 2019. these experiences were valuable for observing the company’s corporate culture and global strategy, although it should be noted that all the documents analyzed in this study are from the public domain. we have identified two major narratives surrounding transsion’s facial recognition patent strategy. first is the “empowerment” narrative. transsion argues that there are “blind spots” in conventional ai camera technologies; and that the needs of darkskinned users are ignored by other smartphone makers. three types of “blindness” in the ai camera industry have been articulated: (a) algorithmic blindness to black faces, (b) cultural blindness to the beauty of darker skins, and (c) market blindness to the african continent. based on this diagnostic positioning, transsion interprets its ai camera as not just a fix to existing blindness but also an empowerment tool to dark-skinned users by “seeing” and capturing their beauty. moreover, transsion associates its patent and business strategies with china’s “one belt one road” initiative and chinese state discourse of win-win relationship with countries of the global south. in so doing, transsion aligns with the discourse of chinese technologies as an alternative and superior option to suggested citation (apa): lu, m. & qiu, j.l. (2021, october). algorithmic empowerment or imperialist warfare? dark skin, ai camera, and a chinese company’s patent strategy. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. western technologies for african users. in this sense, the machine vision for darker skins is gained not only through rebuilding the biased dataset and retraining racist algorithms but also through an appreciation of the beauty and needs of dark-skinned users. while motivated by critical and postcolonial considerations, this article argues that transsion’s patent discourse indeed carves out new space for the imagination of decolonial algorithms. while the “empowerment” narrative is more externally oriented, transsion tends to use a “warfare” narrative to interpret its patent strategy internally. this may have to do with cut-throat market competition, patents race (comparable to arms race), and the rapid pace of innovation in china, which gave transsion a strong sense of crisis. other major chinese brands (e.g., xiaomi) are also entering the african market. transsion thus considers its facial recognition patents as “competitive weaponry” in preparation for a future clash in africa’s smartphone market. to develop these patent “weapons”, transsion not only gives strong incentives to its engineers for patent applications. it also keeps purchasing strategic patents from other companies. viewing africa as a battlefield, transsion strategically collaborates with selected chinese or western partners, while viewing others (e.g., huawei and xiaomi) as competitors or even “enemies”. we argue that such a strategy is shaped by transsion’s relative vulnerability in the global mobile phone industry. the “warfare” narrative highlights both the economic uncertainty in emerging markets such as africa and the geopolitical uncertainty of ai industry in the future. this study makes three contributions. empirically, through document analysis and participant observation, we examine a relatively less known chinese smartphone company that has made huge impact in the global south. theoretically, we shed on the possibility of algorithmic empowerment against racist facial recognition systems, although developing ai as a weaponry, in the chinese-african contexts, may also lead to new forms of imperialism. thematically, this study reveals the politics and geopolitics of independence through patents. however, transsion’s independence may deepen dependencies and uneven development elsewhere. references amrute, s., & murillo, l. f. r. (2020). introduction: computing in/from the south. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(1), 1-23. benjamin, r. (2019). race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. polity press.
 browne, s. (2015). dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. duke university press. suggested citation (apa): lu, m. & qiu, j.l. (2021, october). algorithmic empowerment or imperialist warfare? dark skin, ai camera, and a chinese company’s patent strategy. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. crawford, k. & paglen, t. (2019). excavating ai: the politics of training sets for machine learning. retrieved from: https://excavating.ai. hancock, t. (2017, november 19). china’s transsion dominates african mobile phone market. financial times. retrieved from: https://www.ft.com/content/58c4fad8-c39411e7-a1d26786f39ef675. lee, k. f. (2018). ai superpowers: china, silicon valley, and the new world order. houghton mifflin harcourt. mohamed, s., png, m. t., & isaac, w. (2020). decolonial ai: decolonial theory as sociotechnical foresight in artificial intelligence. philosophy & technology, 33(4), 659684. zhang, et al. (2021). the ai index 2021 annual report. human-centered ai institute, stanford university, stanford, ca. microsoft word mahnke-mapping health-mapping health.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): mahnke, m. s., nielsen, m. (2021, october). mapping health: how danes experience their digital health data. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. mapping health: how danes experience their digital health data martina skrubbeltrang mahnke roskilde university, denmark mikka nielsen university of copenhagen, denmark this paper explores how danish citizens experience digital health data and how these in turn affect their understanding of digital health data and their self-understanding as a patient. denmark is a unique case as it is ranked as one of the most digital countries in the world (european commission, 2018). examining the national health platform sundhed.dk (sundhed is the danish word for health) is hence of great value with regards to shedding light on the ramifications of digital health data. the platform was launched in 2003 by the danish regions, the ministry of health and local authorities with the primary political aim to support danish citizens to “master their health” (sundhed.dk’s strategy, 2019-2022), and further to support an informed relationship between the medical system and patients. the platform provides access to medical data in the form of lab results, doctor’s notes, a medical dictionary and further functionalities such as an overview of doctor’s appointments. having access to one’s own health data enables the patient to research and read about diagnoses, treatment options, and prognosis, at home, independent of scheduled doctor appointments. previous research on digital health data examines primarily opportunities and challenges as well as structural effects (fisher & britten, 1993; fisher, bhavnani & winfield, 2009; woods et al., 2013) concluding that having access to one's medical data is generally beneficial for patients but also comes with literacy challenges. petersen (2018) points out that the sole access to data does not necessarily lead to better and more informed decisions, on the contrary, a variety of skills and competences are needed in order to make sense of medical data. research on selftracking applications shows that digital health data creates a certain self-awareness that leads towards routine behavior and self-performance (lupton, 2016; williamson, 2015). in addition, digital health data can be accessed any time anywhere, which makes the process of engaging with digital health data and using it purposefully even more demanding.even though danes are amongst the most tech-savvy in europe, they are also struggling with using and making sense of their digital health data (author removed). the aim of this research is to look deeper into personal experiences with digital health data in order to understand what is at stake when people become digitally mapped patients and how experiences of empowerment, independence, perplexity, and doubt intermingle when reading one’s own health data. taking a user’s view, the paper draws theoretically on the concept of ‘assemblage’ (johnson, 2019) understanding digital health data as a complex nexus of user-data relationships. that is to say, data is subject to social, cultural and political influences and can hence only be understood in the respective context. digital health data arises at the nexus of the medical system, human actors and technical structure. lupton (2018) has argued that digital data confronts its users to know themselves better. however, as the medical system operates with a variety of methods and theories it is often hard for patients to understand the data when accessing it. the concept of ‘assemblage’ accounts for the complexity of digital health data, pointing towards the layers and number of relationships that lie in such data. the empirical analysis draws on 16 in-depth purposefully sampled interviews (cresswell, 1998) with users varying in age, education, health history and gender. in total, 10 women and 6 men between the age of 24 and 74 were interviewed. all interviews were transcribed and have been coded thematically in several iterative steps (kvale and brinkmann, 2009). we further scrutinized the interview data for specific emotionally challenging experiences users had when engaging in their health data. in a last step during the analysis overarching themes and topics were identified and brought together in an assemblage. the primary analysis shows that digital health data creates unique, deeply emotional experiences that can lead towards a variety of existential questions. one of our informants, for example, checked her health data during christmas holidays and found that doctors suspected her cancer to be of a particular aggressive kind. reading the doctor’s notes left a deep emotional mark while simultaneously raising a number of questions. therefore our informant started searching the diagnosis on the web, trying to collect as much information as possible. another informant went through psychological treatment, and the platform offered her insight into the protocols made by the psychologist. while reading the psychologist’s notes the informant started to wonder about the impression she makes on others while simultaneously questioning the medical way of dealing with her as a patient. she describes the experience as extremely ambiguous. combining the theoretical lens with the empirical analysis this paper contributes towards the field with what we call ‘health assemblages’ that highlight the emerging relationships and personal emotional attachments users make with their digital health data. in the following, we present an assemblage mapping of a list of topics that describe patients experiences with their digital health data: • ambiguity (digital health data is experienced in various, often opposing, ways) • deeply emotional (digital health data evokes strong emotions) • empowerment (digital health data provides self-knowledge) • recognition (digital health data supports self-understanding) • doubt (digital health data leaves patients with a number of questions) • frustration (digital health data is subject to personal interpretations, which leads to frustration) in conclusion, it can be stated that seeing oneself mapped in data creates unique experiences, often challenging the self-understanding of the patient. on the positive side patients’ access to digital health data may foster experiences of empowerment and recognition, but on the negative side, it potentially leaves the patient insecure, puzzled and with more questions than answers. independence, in a way, encompasses both sides of the spectrum. references cresswell, j. w. (1998). qualitative inquiry and research design: choosing among five traditions. london: sage. european commission. (2018). international digital economy and society index 2018. https://ec.europa.eu/knowledge4policy/publication/international-digitaleconomy-society-index2018_en fisher, b., bhavnani, v., & winfield, m. (2009). how patients use access to their full health records: a qualitative study of patients in general practice. journal of the royal society of medicine, 102 (12), 539–544. https://doi.org/10.1258/jrsm.2009.090328 fisher, b., britten, n. (1993). patient access to records: expectations of hospital doctors and experiences of cancer patients. the british journal of general practice, 43 (367), 52–56. johnson, e. (2019). posthumanism, materialitet och människa. in: g. erlingsdóttir. & h. sandberg (eds.), på tal om e-hälsa, studentlitteratur, pp. 177-192. kvale, s & brinkmann, s. (2009). interviews: learning the craft of qualitative research interviewing. los angeles: sage. lupton, d. (2018). how do data come to matter? living and becoming with personal data. big data & society, 5(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718786314 petersen, a. (2018): digital health and technological promise: a sociological inquiry. london: routledge. sundhed.dk’s strategy (2019-2022). available at: https://www.sundhed.dk/content/cms/16/75816_sundheddks-strategi-2019-2022.pdf williamson, b. (2015). algorithmic skin: health-tracking technologies, personal analytics and the biopedagogies of digitized health and physical education. sport, education & society, 20 (1), 133–51. woods, s., schwartz, e., tuepker, a., press, n., nazi, k., turvey, c., & nichol, w. (2013). patient experiences with full electronic access to health records and clinical notes through the my healthevet personal health record pilot: qualitative study. journal of medical internet research, 15(3), e65. https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.2356 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 iliadis, a., ford, h., allhutter, d., mcdowell, & vetter, m. (2022, november). semantic media: political economy perspectives on platformized fact production. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. semantic media: political economy perspectives on platformized fact production andrew iliadis temple university heather ford university of technology sydney doris allhutter institute of technology assessment, austrian academy of sciences zachary mcdowell university of illinois chicago matthew vetter indiana university of pennsylvania large media platforms are now in the habit of providing facts in their products and representing knowledge to various publics. for example, google’s knowledge graph is a database of facts that google uses to provide quick answers to publics who use their products, while wikipedia has a product called wikidata that similarly stores facts about the world in data formats through which various apps can retrieve the data. microsoft, amazon, and ibm use similar fact storing and retrieval techniques in their products. this panel introduces papers that take a political economy perspective on such platformaized versions of fact production and examines the underlying infrastructures, histories, and modeling techniques used in such knowledge representation systems. knowledge representation, long a central topic in archiving work in library and information sciences, is a key feature of platforms and practiced by internet companies more broadly. much of this work has historically centered on metadata models that seek to organize and describe information in standardized ways. in the context of expanding this data organizing and labeling work into the wider web, one of the main facilitators was the “semantic web” project proposed by tim-berners lee and the world wide web consortium (w3c). today, many of the same principles, technologies, and standards that were proposed by those early projects in metadata modeling from groups like w3c are found at companies like google and facebook, organizations like wikipedia, government portals, and beyond. these platform metadata models are typically produced by industry professionals (e.g., taxonomists, ontologists, knowledge engineers, etc.) who help structure information for algorithmic processing on platforms and their recommender systems. such structured information is supposed to add a layer of contextual expressivity to web data that would otherwise be more difficult to parse, though the issue of context control is not unproblematic in relation to statements of facts. in many of these automated systems, metadata models contribute to articulating ready-made facts that then travel through these systems and eventually reach the products that are engaged by everyday web users. this panel connects scholars working in information, media studies, and science and technology studies to discuss these semantic technologies. the first paper presents data gathered from interviews with semantic web practitioners who build or have built metadata models at large internet and platform companies. it presents results from a qualitative study of these platform data management professionals (collectively referred to as “metadata modelers”) and draws from unstructured interviews (n=10) and archival research. the paper describes the image of a metadata ecology along with selected work-related contestations expressed by interview subjects regarding some of the difficulties and intractable problems in metadata modeling work. the paper includes a discussion of the political economy of platform semantics through an examination of critical semantic web literature and ends with some policy concerns. the second paper translates the method of tracing “traveling facts” from science studies to the context of online knowledge about evolving, historic events. the goal is to understand the socio-political impact of the semantic web as it has been implemented by monopolistic digital platforms and how such practices intersect in the context of wikipedia, where the majority of knowledge graph entities are sourced from. the paper describes how the adoption (and domination) by platform companies of linked data has catalyzed a re-shaping of web content to accord with the question and answer linked data formats, weakening the power of open content licenses to support local knowledge and consolidating the power of algorithmic knowledge systems that favor knowledge monopolies. the third paper discusses building a semantic foundation for machine learning and examines how information infrastructures that convey meaning are intimately tied to colonial labor relations. it traces the practice of building a digital infrastructure that enables machines to learn from human language. the paper describes examples from an ethnographic study of semantic computing and its infrastructuring practices to show how such techniques are materially and discursively performative in their co-emergence with techno-epistemic discourses and politico-economic structures. it examines sociomaterial process in which classifications, standards, metadata, and methods coemerge with processes of signification that reconstitute and/or shift hegemonic ecologies of knowledge. the fourth paper evaluates and examines the ethics of “free” data (cc-0) in wikidata by evaluating the sources and usage of data from and within wikidata. from knowledge graphs to ai training, wikidata is the semantic web platform that is being used across the internet to power new platforms. through a consideration of the ways in which wikidata scrapes wikipedia’s “share alike” knowledge through scraping metadata and the significant donations and partnerships from large technology firms (google in particular), this paper addresses ethical concerns within the largest semantic web platform, how these transformations of knowledge alienate donated volunteer labor, and offers some ways in which these issues might be mitigated. “we became what you might call the semantic guardians”: how metadata modelers talk about platform content andrew iliadis temple university this paper draws from a qualitative study of platform data management professionals (e.g. taxonomists, ontologists, knowledge engineers, etc., herein collectively referred to as “metadata modelers”) who build or have built metadata models at large internet and platform companies (n=10). using data gathered from unstructured interviews and archival sources, the paper focuses on metadata modeler experiences in data formalization, and their technical application on web platforms, aiming to provide a sociotechnical approach to understanding how metadata modelers view and talk about their metadata modeling work. interviews were conducted over a two-year period with metadata modeling professionals at large platform companies or internet organizations. the interviews were conducted over an internet-connected telephone and recorded using callgraph. they were then transcribed using rev, and the transcribed interviews were then coded using an inductive grounded theory process (strauss & corbin, 1997). metadata models are an important yet hidden feature of web platforms (eriksson, 2016). the ability to algorithmically search, retrieve, and reason with web data meaningfully often requires these machine-readable, manually crafted metadata models. these models provide a layer of contextual granularity that is supposed to enhance data accessibility, particularly as large amounts of unstructured and heterogeneous data proliferate via digital services and web products. platforms use models to act as mediated layers that signal/highlight content through vocabularies and axioms expressed in richly curated metadata markup (e.g. google surfacing news article ‘snippets’ in search results, airbnb providing information about travel ‘experiences’ related to trips to a certain city, uber eats’ ‘your favorites’ recommendations, etc.), rather than having users or administrators do the mundane work of navigating generic or unmarked search results and/or parse documents for text. algorithmically culled content presented on these platforms often depend on semantic parsing via metadata models that have been manually structured on the administrative backend for automated presentation on user frontend interfaces. this infrastructural enhancement is supposed to increase web data’s contextual expressivity, assisting admins/users in finding the items for which they might be searching on a host platform without having to navigate away to another source (e.g., via in-platform knowledge panels or voice-assisted search). in these practices, scholars have long noted the interpretive and hermeneutic aspects of such data models and schemas (acker, 2015), which are implicitly imbued with an aboutness (hjørland, 2001) concerning the data to which they are affixed. notably, there have been several classic studies by science and technology scholars that sought to critically examine data models and associated knowledge representation infrastructures using qualitative, ethnographic, and critical methods (forsythe, 1993; adam, 1998). internet companies and businesses more broadly have described facing challenges related to data integration and harmonization because of idiosyncratic data labelling practices, varieties of data typing (formats), and legacy software infrastructures. while issues related to limitations in data storing and warehousing are somewhat technically less problematic in recent years owing to engineering solutions related to data compression and server space evolution, the ability to logically and meaningfully reason with heterogenous data has created persistent semantic challenges for querying and retrieving large datasets. to exploit these large troves of diverse data that have been siloed or stored in data lakes, companies and organizations have turned to solutions in the form of web semantics standards that increase the scalability of their data reasoning capabilities. new efficiencies in metadata representation, indexing, caching, and querying have evolved to become standards at large internet companies who now specialize in socalled “knowledge graphs” that present information about the world though semantic annotation and interoperability. yet, metadata models are fraught with easily imaginable errors and difficulties that can emerge when multiple parties must coalesce around semantics and a determinate set of language rules. language is embedded in historical, social, and cultural contexts, and context in human-computer interaction has long been theorized as an essential component to technological challenges related to user experiences and interaction (dourish, 2004). while a single overarching vocabulary and grammar could not possibly suit the myriad formalizations that undergird discursive constructs, particularly when expressed in varying contested social contexts, the weight of the potential impossibility of a universalizing semantics has seldom deterred platform metadata modelers, who often view themselves as engineers tasked with the responsibility of enhancing data accessibility and exchange on the web through their platforms and their products, regardless of the long-term feasibility of such an infrastructural semantic project. the interviews conducted with metadata modelers for the present project paint a slightly different picture of metadata modeling work and show evidence of the slight disillusionment of these workers with the larger semantic project. while metadata modelers historically have tended to downplay intractable semantic problems when describing projects like the “semantic web” in popular articles (berners-lee et al., 2001), preferring instead to focus on the imagined future benefits of the technology, examples taken from these interviews describe several apparent failures. two such examples from the interview transcripts are presented below: beyond the examples from the interview transcripts which showed evidence of the frustration of these workers, the interviews also painted a picture of a metadata ecology consisting of various logics, syntaxes, serializations, enterprise software, upper level versus domain ontologies, and standards that add a cumbersome complexity to the field of metadata modeling work. what emerges is the image of a kludgy data field that informs the sleek, fact producing products that millions of people use when searching for answers and information. references acker, a. (2015). toward a hermeneutics of data. ieee annals of the history of computing, 37(3), 70-75. adam, a. (1998). artificial knowing: gender and the thinking machine. routledge. berners-lee, t., hendler, j., & lassila, o. (2001). the semantic web. scientific american, 284(5), 34-43. dourish, p. (2004). what we talk about when we talk about context. personal and ubiquitous computing, 8(1), 19-30. eriksson, m. (2016). close reading big data: the echo nest and the production of (rotten) music metadata. first monday. https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/6303 forsythe, d. e. (1993). engineering knowledge: the construction of knowledge in artificial intelligence. social studies of science, 23(3), 445-477. hjørland, b. (2001). towards a theory of aboutness, subject, topicality, theme, domain, field, content... and relevance. journal of the american society for information science and technology, 52(9), 774-778. strauss, a., & corbin, j. m. (1997). grounded theory in practice. sage. tracing “traveling facts” on the semantic web heather ford university of technology sydney in a 2012 blog post titled “things, not strings,” the senior vice president of engineering for google, amit singhal, wrote that google was now using wikipedia and other “public” data sources to seed a knowledge graph that would provide “smarter search results” for users (singhal, 2012). other named sources included the cia world factbook and freebase (a now retired online database, formerly owned by google). in addition to returning a list of possible results, google would present a “knowledge panel” on the right-hand side of the page that “summarize[s] relevant content around that topic, including key facts you’re likely to need for that particular thing” (singhal, 2012). google’s knowledge graph proved a unique implementation of the semantic web, a vision of a “web of data” to replace the “web of documents” that had characterised the web’s original design (berners-lee, hendler and lassila, 2001). the semantic web is based on the ideal that computers need to be able to process the semantics (meaning) that humans attach to their words. using semantic web logic, the computer would “know whether we meant paris, the perfume, paris, the place or paris, the celebrity” by structuring information in a way that computers could understand, and then interconnecting those structured databases so that computers could understand what was meant by users’ queries (berners-lee et al., 2001). to the web’s founder, tim berner’s lee, promoting computer “understanding” required the development of what he called “linked data”. in a 2009 ted talk, berners-lee said that the web was about sharing documents but that there was “still huge unlocked potential” that could be realized by sharing data rather than documents. data was about relationships, explained berners-lee, and “the really important thing about data is the more things you have to connect together, the more powerful it is” (berners-lee, 2009). the idea of linked data was about “people doing their bit to produce a little bit, and it all connecting.” two years later and google appeared to provide the semantic web with a major boost when it launched the knowledge graph. but rather than the original web being built by enthusiasts all “doing their bit” as berners-lee had presented it (berners-lee, 2009), google was using machine learning to extract billions of entities from around the web and doing this to reinforce its power. within seven months of its launch, google’s knowledge graph had tripled in size to cover 570 entities and 18 billion facts imported from sources like wikipedia. google used ai and machine learning in particular to recognize statements from a variety of sources as belonging to the same person, place, event, or thing. that data was then used to power applications that answered queries by human users speaking to the machine in what linguists and computer scientists call “natural language”—in order to distinguish it from other language types, such as the computing programming languages that provide instructions to machines. the knowledge graph enabled google to answer questions like “who is desmond tutu?” “what happened in ukraine today?” and “what is the capital of australia?” directly. in addition to powering knowledge panels in google search, the knowledge graph was also used to answer spoken voice queries in google assistant on android phones and google’s smart speakers. now knowledge graphs power the delivery of answers from q&a systems on major virtual assistants and smart speakers including apple’s siri and amazon’s alexa. it is predicted that there will soon be more smart speakers than people on the planet (shulevitz, 2018). smart speakers have become increasingly popular and their q&a applications are one of their most popular features. knowledge graphs reached the peak of gartner’s 2020 hype cycle for artificial intelligence (). in this paper, i argue that the rise of the semantic web as it has been developed and driven by platform companies via automatically generated knowledge graphs and simplistic answers in q&a systems has resulted in a series of significant consequences for the web that remain largely unexamined. data scientists connor mcmahon, isaac johnson, and brent hecht (2017) found that facts in google’s knowledge panels were predominantly sourced from wikipedia even though they were “almost never cited” beyond the opening description of the phenomenon. according to the authors, this has had a significant impact on wikipedia’s sustainability as visitors do not need to go to wikipedia to obtain answers, and thus miss the opportunity to donate their time or money to the non-profit organisation hosting it. more than that, i argue that the adoption (and domination) by platform companies of linked data has catalysed a re-shaping of web content to accord with the question and answer and linked data formats, weakening the power of open content licences to support local knowledge and consolidating the power of algorithmic knowledge systems that favour knowledge monopolies. this has been supported by the ideologies of open data, big data and ai and the socio-technical influences of automation and machine learning that dominate the web ecosystem today. i do this using methods and theories from science and technology studies relating to the development of scientific knowledge or “science-in-the-making”, but applied in this case to the construction and travel of facts relating to historic events as they occur and are represented in key sites across the web. in particular, i apply morgan’s (2010) conceptual framework relating to “how facts travel” in order to understand how power and agency are distributed in the construction and distribution of facts that become so privileged in current knowledge systems. i start by locating semantic data represented as facts and categorisations of historic events using the case of the 2011 egyptian revolution and then the 2022 invasion of ukraine in google search (including the knowledge panels, “people also asked” and featured snippets) and google assistant (answers to questions). i analyse the discourse and materiality of these semantic representations using grounded theory analyses of screenshots and documents including google’s blog, google research and other corporate materials. i then trace these facts back to their common origins in wikipedia, wikidata and quora and analyse the discourse and practice surrounding their construction, debate and wrangling. this work is supported by a long term ethnographic study of wikipedia’s data projects. the contributions of this paper are twofold. first, i demonstrate the method of tracing “facts-in-the-making” as a useful mechanism for understanding how truth in the age of the semantic web is constructed. second, i provide a political-economic analysis of the changes wrought by the semantic web and identify the features of linked data development that prevent the development of shared knowledge the semantic web was founded to solve. references morgan, m., (2010) “travelling facts,” in how well do facts travel?: the dissemination of reliable knowledge, howlett, p., & morgan, m. s. (eds.).cambridge university press. singhal, a., “introducing the knowledge graph: things, not strings,” the keyword (blog), may 16, 2012, https://www.blog.google/products/search/introducing-knowledgegraph-things-not/. mcmahon, c, johnson, i., and hecht, b., (2017), “the substantial interdependence of wikipedia and google: a case study on the relationship between peer production communities and information technologies,” in proceedings of the 11th international conference on web and social media, icwsm 2017 (aaai press), 142–151. shulevitz, j. (2018). alexa, should we trust you? the atlantic. building a semantic foundation for machine learning or how meaning and colonial labor relations are made infrastructural doris allhutter institute of technology assessment, austrian academy of sciences my talk traces practices of building a digital infrastructure that enables machines to learn from human language and everyday discourse. this emerging ‘semantic infrastructure’ is a 'meaning-centered' foundation relating concepts or entities, such as data from text, speech, and images. it already is a result of machine learning techniques and again feeds resources into further (semi-)automated processes. there is a multilayered apparatus in place for a semantic infrastructure to emerge: this apparatus consists of existing web architectures, the tools, methods and practices used, the data, standards and protocols. nonetheless, this apparatus includes narratives of an economically beneficial and smart future growing from epistemic traditions in computer science and ai research, as well as economic practices that embed and coemerge with these technologies. all this is held together by affective investments into a spirit of collectivity and peer production. these intertwined structures, materialities, practices, and affects configure a sociomaterial apparatus that is historically contingent. using examples from an ethnographic study (allhutter 2019), i show how the apparatus of semantic computing and its infrastructuring practices are materially and discursively performative in their co-emergence with techno-epistemic discourses and politicoeconomic structures. algorithmic performances of the ‘everyday’ learning systems from training data that represent commonsense knowledge aims at endowing machines with human-like understanding. everyday language and commonsense knowledge are particularly valuable resources for training intelligent systems, and, i suggest, they are particularly interesting for two reasons: firstly, from a technical perspective, commonsense knowledge is a resource that can be used to mutually train disparate systems. for example, a system extracting everyday knowledge from natural language can learn that a 'horse' is an 'animal' and that a horse is commonly found in a 'stable on a farm'. image recognition can then, e.g. access an image of a horse and learn to recognize what the building in the background is. in networked infrastructures, systems thus communicate with each other in an effort to understand and create ‘meaning’. secondly, using everyday language and common sense is fascinating due to their inherent power relevant dimensions: commonsense knowledge may not be subject to or backed by scientific findings or expert knowledge, but it represents widely uncontested knowledge that has become hegemonic in a particular geohistorical context. it implicitly informs our everyday practices and ad hoc decisions. in her political theory of the everyday, brigitte bargetz (2016) describes everyday practices as a crucial site of political contestation: they are how power structures are enacted (2016, 208). the everyday is “a mode of exercising power” (2016, 35) that, at the same time, carries a potential for agency and political resistance. representing common sense in terms of axiomatic relationships between the objects and concepts in a domain and designing (semi)automated methods to reason about these relations reflects a particular way of conceptualizing the world. it is part of a sociomaterial process in which classifications, standards, (meta)data, and methods coemerge with processes of signification that reconstitute and/or shift hegemonic ecologies of knowledge. the political nature of practices of semantic infrastructuring becomes visible by analyzing how infrastructures or particular enactments of an infrastructure coemerge with societal structures, individuals, bodies, and their knowledge practices. in karen barad’s (2003) view, some things, views, practices matter—they are made possible— and others are excluded and do not materialize. the performativity of infrastructure and its agentive capacities show in the way in which it accommodates some practices, people, and viewpoints more than others (star and ruhleder 1996). this becomes particularly pertinent in light of research that shows how machine learning amplifies structural discrimination and reinforces injustice, sexism, racism, classism, and ableism (hu kohler-hausmann 2020, benthall & haynes 2019). i suggest that acknowledging that semantic infrastructuring (or making meaning infrastructural) affects and is affected by power relations allows us to analytically grasp the hegemonic ways in which difference, and in particular ideologies of human difference, become performative. the coloniality of ‘human computation’ with its roots in ai and machine learning, the epistemic narratives of automation and machine intelligence have provided a foundation for the field of semantic computing. however, ‘human computation’ and the global digital economy have become an integral part of its methodologies. semantic elements of the meaning-centered infrastructure (e.g. commonsense ontologies) are fabricated in hybrid, semi-automated processes relying on algorithmic agencies and human labor. a crucial question is how high the cost actually is for encoding all the relevant knowledge so that it can be exploited by machines. thus, outsourcing and the crowd workers of the global south (scholz 2016) play a substantial role in building the semantic foundations that are supposed to generate economic prosperity for the global north. due to its embeddedness in digital marketplaces and tools (such as ontology editors), low pay is inherent to microwork. with its vulnerable working conditions, unregulated work times, and a high dependency on opaque technical evaluation systems, crowdwork epitomizes the persistence of the “coloniality of labor” and engenders “a place of ‘exteriority’ or ‘colonial difference’” (gutiérrez-rodríguez 2010, 44). the creation of the semantic infrastructure is contingent on a transnational division of labor. it emerges in relation to colonial pasts and presents and enacts, continues, and transforms global economic processes. the digitization of knowledge work and the implementation of crowdwork into the apparatus of semantic computing are part of the post-fordist transformation of a transnational division of labor. infrastructural power thinking together how meaning and colonial labor relations are made infrastructural in current practices of computing, shows some of the socio-material choices made when establishing a semantic foundation for machine learning. it is crucial to see how they create difference and inequality through a set of epistemic and economic practices. to take account of the entanglement of historically grown, structural power relations and their emergent materializations in sociotechnical systems, i use the notion of ‘infrastructural power’. it attempts a theorization of ‘intra-acting’ modes of ‘power’ that relates structural and transitional elements in an attempt to capture the enfolded micro, meso and macro-levels of socio-material practices in their historical contingency. references allhutter, d. (2019). of ‘working ontologists’ and ‘high-quality human components’. the politics of semantic infrastructures. in digitalsts: a field guide for science & technology studies, princeton and oxford: princeton university press, 326-348. barad, k. (2003). posthumanist performativity. toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. signs 28 (3): 801–31. bargetz, b. (2016). ambivalenzen des alltags. neuorientierungen für eine theorie des politischen, bielefeld: transcript. benthall, s., & haynes, b. d. (2019, january). racial categories in machine learning. in proceedings of the conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (pp. 289298). gutiérrez-rodríguez, e. (2010). migration, domestic work and affect. a deconolonial approach on value and the feminization of labor. new york: routledge. hu, l., & kohler-hausmann, i. (2020). what's sex got to do with fair machine learning?. arxiv preprint arxiv:2006.01770. scholz, t. (ed.) (2016). platform cooperativism. challenging the corporate sharing economy. new york: rosa luxemburg foundation. star, s.l., & ruhleder, k. (1996). steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: design and access for large information spaces. information systems research 7 (1): 111–34. extraction and alienation of the knowledge commons: wikipedia, wikidata, and the ethics of “free” data zachary mcdowell university of illinois chicago matthew vetter indiana university of pennsylvania yochai benkler recently noted that “wikipedia and commons-based peer production more generally continue to offer an existence proof that there can be another way” – an alternative to the more prevailing forces of market exchange and surveillance capitalism that characterize the current web (p. 43). benkler’s take encapsulates the ethos of the commons that inspires the labor that creates wikipedia (as well as spaces like floss/foss ecosystems). however, recent developments in the wikimedia ecosystem complicate (and even threaten) the ethos, and even the sustainability, of the digital commons. wikidata, a sister project of wikipedia, serves as a radically open, structured knowledge database that appears at first glance to continue the openness of the commons, but radically shifts the way in which the data is used. an enormous database with nearly 100 million data items that can (and are) used freely in machine learning networks to create new products, wikidata is the largest semantic web platform humanity has ever created. if wikipedia was the promise of web 2.0, wikidata represents web 3.0, for better or worse. launched in 2012, wikidata is a collaboratively edited knowledge base that is the structured data repository for all wikimedia projects, particularly wikipedia. wikidata employs user-generated metadata standards which reflect consensus in the scientific community as well as already-established standards. as the backbone for wikipedia, it is the repository of information that is utilized by a variety of projects that represent information on a variety of platforms (e.g.: facebook factchecking, google search results). the data model for entities in wikidata utilize specific subfields' data structures so that data can be passed back and forth between databases. thus, wikidata uses apis to ``talk to” entities in other databases developed and maintained by nih, ncbi, ensembl, homologene, among others, helping to reinforce core concepts around scientific structured data. what wikidata shifts is the way in which the commons are both preserved and utilized, creating concerns for an “extraction” of the commons, rather than benkler’s “another way.” at first glance wikidata sounds like a huge step forward in providing truly free data. however, the ways in which large tech companies (in particular those training machine learning systems) utilize this data, and where the data originated highlight ethical concerns over data utilization and production. in this paper, we examine the structures of wikidata, calling for more critical scrutiny of the project in terms of 1) its usage of cc0 “no rights reserved” license, and 2) how knowledge from wikidata is extracted, re-appropriated, and commodified beyond the intent of its original creators. that which is common has always been extracted – this is not new. whether through folk art or other artistic appropriation, or through mining, land ownership, oil extraction, pollution, and water extraction, people and companies have extracted and profited from what is common since the dawn of time. benkler’s statement that “there can be another way” centers around the type of openness that creates more openness. a cc-by-sa license is open in a way that is also “closed” – it shuts off information for particular types of usages in order to preserve the openness. this “other way” ensures that “what is common” creates more “common” and creates a new type of “oikos” (home) in the “oikonomos” (economy), one that focuses on sharing and giving away for the common good, and walling off that which is common from those who wish to extract it. instead of wikipedia’s cc-by-sa (“share alike”) license which requires that derivatives and uses of the information retain the same license, wikidata utilizes a license that has no requirements. this might sound ideal, but in reality wikidata appropriates that particular foss imaginary of sharing, but instead delicenses data by assigning it a cc0 license allowing companies to extract, commodify, and otherwise use this data in ways to create systems without requirements to utilize the license or reference the works which were utilized. recognized early on in wikidata’s inception, andreas kolbe writes for the wikipedia signpost in 2015: “the no-attribution cc0 license means that third parties can use the data on their sites without indicating their provenance, obscuring the fact that the data came from a crowdsourced project subject to the customary disclaimers” (n.p.). perhaps even more significant, the cc0 license allows for a commodification and re-appropriation of content originally licensed under a cc-by-sa license and created by a volunteer community in wikipedia. in particular, wikidata scrapes wikipedia metadata to populate its system with information, skirting the copyright issue. although metadata isn't copyrightable currently (and there are ample reasons why it shouldn’t be), the original information which has been utilized was created by countless volunteer hours under the guise of this “share alike” license. in light of wikimedia foundation’s ties to tech giant donors such as google, and how google actively utilizes wikimedia project data to train ais (see “announcing wit”), this paper raises concerns over the ethics of utilizing the commons to create new “products” that are then sold back to those that toiled tirelessly to create what now feeds tech giant’s machines. marx’s concept of alienation here is appropriate, as the outcome of this socially donated labor are transformed (“objectified,” via metadata and into wikidata) but also “dispossessed” (literally depriving the information from its ownership under cc-by-sa) and then transformed into capital (by companies using the data to make new products) (marx 1993, p. 832). as sartre notes, alienation “begins with exploitation” (sartre 2004, p. 227), and the methods of extraction and usage of labor donated under the guise of sharing seems extremely exploitative. this creates what we refer to as “re-alienation of the commons,” in which the fundamental agreement to donate labor under the guise of the commons and sharing, to what benkler refers to as “another way,” has become broken, utilized, transformed, monetized, and sold back to the society that worked so hard to create something shared. this “other way” attempted to subvert this massive alienating system by creating a community of sharing, but instead it became a new space for extraction. references announcing wit: a wikipedia-based image-text dataset. (n.d.). google ai blog. retrieved february 18, 2022, from http://ai.googleblog.com/2021/09/announcing-witwikipedia-based-image.html benkler, y. from utopia to practice and back. (2020). in j. reagle and j. koerner (eds.), wikipedia @ 20: stories of an incomplete revolution (pp. 43-54). mit press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12366.001.0001 kolbe, a. (2015). whither wikidata? the signpost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wikipedia:wikipedia_signpost/2015-12-02/op-ed marx, k. (1993 [1939]). grundrisse: foundations of the critique of political economy (rough draft). penguin classics. sartre, j.-p. (1984). critique of dialectical reason, vol. 1: theory of practical ensembles (first edition). verso. øversveen, e. (2021). capitalism and alienation: towards a marxist theory of alienation for the 21st century. european journal of social theory, 13684310211021580. https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310211021579 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): cooper, t. (2022, november). lost in the ether: the impact of platform hegemony on social media marketing. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. lost in the ether: the impact of platform hegemony on social media marketing tony cooper rmit university introduction as the digital economy matures, the appropriation of the internet by commercial interests has become axiomatic. social media in particular, has been popular with brand owners seeking commercial relationships with increasingly fragmented audiences. small firms previously excluded from mass-market media due to cost were lured to social media with many placing these platforms at the centre of their customer communications (cooper et al. 2019). however, organic content strategies that use social media platforms to freely conduct consumer-brand dialogue are under threat (fulgoni 2015; loten et al. 2014). the monetisation of the leading platforms who now demand payment for such service (appel et al. 2019) is supported by algorithms designed to filter unpaid promotional material. a profound impact on diversity and the reduced autonomy and visibility of brands unable to pay for such communication (bucher 2017; just & latzer 2017) has been the result. contemporary academic literature rarely focuses on the oppression and dispossession of business users at the hands of multi-national tech giants. in the context of this emergent neo-colonialist struggle, we examine the power dynamic in commercial relationships between brands and social media platforms. using empirical data derived from social media marketing practitioners, this exploratory research maps a coercive relational paradigm and explores the deepening customer access divide in an increasingly binary system. research method a sample was recruited in the uk and australia comprising social media practitioners with high levels of cultural competence. informants were drawn from both large and small branded companies in the fashion industry as well as specialist agencies servicing the sector. the fashion industry was chosen for its high uptake of social media and the socially validated nature of consumption disseminated through peer networks (wolny & mueller 2013). in-depth interview data were collected from 17 respondents and analysed using a constructivist grounded theory approach designed to understand the lived experience of informants (charmaz 2014) to document their relationships with social media platforms. results & discussion the key findings are classified according to three salient observations derived from the interviews and are discussed below. change as a weapon: all respondents reported a growing complexity and faster pace of change in social media noting that maintaining currency has a profound impact on both the individual’s career prospects and the company’s fortunes via the visibility of its brands. much of the relentless change is implemented by the platforms in a reactionary arms race to ward-off current and future competitors. the effect of this constant state of flux serves to lock firms into the system, subjugating users to a position of extreme dependence on platform beneficence. knowledge is power: resource dependency theory suggests that “power accrues to those who control resources needed by the organisation” (mitchell et al. 1997 p.863). in the dynamic empirical context of this study, the knowledge acquired by the social media platforms embedded in the user data they collect is shared sparingly. client brands who pay to boost their social media content, limited to the larger firms in our sample, are rewarded with rich insights. they receive extreme privilege in return for their patronage including seminars, bespoke workshops and face-to-face meetings with dedicated account managers. most importantly, the intelligence they receive perpetuates a virtuous circle whereby practitioner expertise improves when this knowledge is shared by the platforms, allowing managers to develop more effective campaigns that reinforce their market position. in contrast, small entities who run unpaid (organic) content marketing campaigns receive no assistance from the social media owners and are left to guess how best to manage their communications in the face of the latest platform changes. organic death: the user-pays system is universally acknowledged by informants in the study as the end of the social media ‘free ride’. even practitioners from large wellresourced companies find little success in organic campaigns. informants describe a cynical view of their highly mercenary relationship with the social media platforms consistent with the view of post algorithmic social media as a plutocracy (cotter 2019). the relationships reported in this study appear typical of post-modern commercial relationships which are frequently ambiguous and paradoxical (esmann andersen & ellerup nielsen 2009). on the one hand, the descriptions provided by our sample challenge the symbiosis inherent in traditional stakeholder theory (freeman et al. 2012). simultaneously, they are consistent with the stakeholder approach whereby firms (social media platforms in this instance) acquire power when they hold a central (and dense) position in a stakeholder network (sedereviciute & valentini 2011). implications the findings highlight the importance of extending our attention beyond the impact of platform hegemony on users and the community at large to also include commercial relationships. the emergent binary system imposed on firms in our sample reinforces persistent structural power relations. limiting the end-user’s (consumer’s) exposure to new and different (fashion) experiences and products outside the current orthodoxy may be seen to represent a form of cultural tyranny placing platform-initiated limitations on personal self-expression. at the very least, the social media power imbalance has dire implications for the future opportunities of smaller enterprises and independent entities to engage audiences, potentially locking them into a communications poverty cycle. references appel, g, grewal, l, hadi, r & stephen, at 2019, 'the future of social media in marketing', journal of the academy of marketing science, vol. 48, no. 1, pp. 79-95. bucher, t 2017, 'the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms', information, communication & society, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 30-44. charmaz, k 2014, constructing grounded theory, 2nd edn, sage, thousand oaks, ca. cooper, t, stavros, c & dobele, a 2019, 'domains of influence: exploring negative sentiment in social media', journal of product & brand management, vol. 28, no. 5, pp. 684-699. cotter, k 2019, 'playing the visibility game: how digital influencers and algorithms negotiate influence on instagram', new media & society, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 895-913. esmann andersen, s & ellerup nielsen, a 2009, 'the city at stake: 'stakeholder mapping' the city', culture unbound, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 305-329. freeman, re, gianfranco, r, silvana, s & alan, s 2012, 'stakeholder theory(ies): ethical ideas and managerial action', journal of business ethics, vol. 109, no. 1, pp. 12. fulgoni, gm 2015, 'how brands using social media ignite marketing and drive growth: measurement of paid social media appears solid but are the metrics for organic social overstated?', journal of advertising research, vol. 55, no. 3, pp. 232-236. just, n & latzer, m 2017, 'governance by algorithms: reality construction by algorithmic selection on the internet', media, culture & society vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 238-258. loten, a, janofsky, a & reed, a 2014, new facebook rules will sting entrepreneurs; network to remove unpaid plugs in user news feeds, wall street journal (online), new york, n.y., viewed 16th june 2020, <https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-facebook-ruleswill-sting-entrepreneurs-1417133694>. mitchell, rk, agle, br & wood, dj 1997, 'toward a theory of stakeholder identification and salience: defining the principle of who and what really counts', academy of management review vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 853-886. sedereviciute, k & valentini, c 2011, 'towards a more holistic stakeholder analysis approach. mapping known and undiscovered stakeholders from social media', international journal of strategic communication, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 221-239. wolny, j & mueller, c 2013, 'analysis of fashion consumers’ motives to engage in electronic word-of-mouth communication through social media platforms', journal of marketing management, vol. 29, no. 5-6, pp. 562-583. aoir2020 anjaventer final.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): venter, a. (2020, october 28-31). patchworked media: mobile devices and creative practice in cape town, south africa. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. patchworked media: mobile devices and creative practice in cape town, south africa anja venter cape peninsula university of technology extended abstract: there has been a recurring narrative in research that revolves around mobile technologies and society, particularly in relation to africa: that these technologies have the potential to reconfigure and revolutionise the development trajectories of entire countries (donner & locke, 2019). possibilities of real-time collaboration and digital exports, of borderless worlds and global communities are lauded, and have become endemic to these perspectives (donner & locke, 2019). but if these narratives are to be the case, then, indeed, the role that mobile devices can play in production (in this case of art, media, and design) is going to have to be something that allows people in the global south to earn a living. because in spite of the promise, there is a dearth of scholarship interrogating whether mobile ecologies can deliver value in this way for those who lack access to traditional pcs and always-on broadband connections. can aspiring creatives use the more widespread and affordable mobile technologies to earn a living or gain access to resources which would allow them to do so? this paper presents an exploration of the creative practices of a cohort of extended curriculum program (ecp) visual design students from a university in cape town, south africa (2014). all of these students came from low-income, resource constrained contexts in the townships1 that surround cape town. my research documented the experiences of these individuals, who sit at the intersection of several worlds – between 1 in south africa, a “township” refers to urban areas that were formally designated for people of colour, in their distinct socio-linguistic groupings (separated as black, indian and coloured) under law in apartheid south africa. these areas are built on the periphery of cities, are typically undeveloped and consist of low-cost and informal housing. virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 virtual event the township and the university, between casual creativity and profession, between mobile and pc, and between local and global flows of knowledge. in this paper i offer an account of how these young people become designers in the digital age. and by extension, where and how platform-based technologies are failing to fulfil the optimistic promises of a “digital economy” (graham, economies at global margins, 2019). primarily gleaned from interview data with kasi2 creatives, as well as creative “jamming” (a method primarily used in hackathons and game development) this paper collates the first-hand accounts of creative trajectories – how these young people became aware of their creative affinities and forged their way from school into the ecp class. throughout accounts, the central role of mobile devices as both facilitator and distributor of cultural production is prominent. i argue that mobile devices here indeed did offer a kind of “participatory turn” (perkel, 2011) in providing affordances that were previously not available to young people from such contexts: the ability to take, edit and share photographs, and chat to people who are located elsewhere. cases revolved around the increasing availability of generative design tools and exposure to associated literacies. these students used their phones to produce selfies, document their art and design, and to start up entrepreneurial branding enterprises. yet, as donner and locke argue, “while smartphones and apps may have massively democratized the means of production, they have correspondingly intensely focused ownership of the means of distribution” (donner & locke, 2019). owing to high data costs, young people only used services and platforms that were cheap and free. for example, uploading images onto “visual web” (jain 2015) platforms were generally considered to be too expensive and thus limited the relative visibility of their creative artefacts to interpersonal chat services such as whatsapp and bbm. thus instead of participation on facebook and instagram, where likes and comments are the capital that drives an online attention economy, young people were far more likely to “grab” (senft & baym, 2015) images as digital takeaways and circulate these on a “pavement internet” (walton, 2014) – sans comments, likes or metadata in general. while scholars such as odom, zimmerman and forlizzi have argued that cloud computing is offering an experience of media as “placeless, spaceless and formless” (2014), these creatives combined online access and offline storage of digital goods in a manner that is distinct in place (on a particular phone), space (they cannot be accessed from anywhere) and form (measured in data and mobile tariffs). in addition, options made available by the application provided a homogenous selection of styles, which revolved around popular visual design tropes – most notably elements that were derived from a “hipster aesthetic”, a style which has been critiqued as contributing to a global “harmonisation of taste” in recent years (sloane, 2016) and distant from the kasi style to which these young creatives aspired. 2 ‘kasi’ is slang for “townships” – low-income areas established under apartheid for people of colour – but also describes a distinct aesthetic and cultural style. in addition, these tools connected to particular ‘creative worlds’ (venter, 2018) but are less than ideal in infrastructuring participation in formal creative industries, owing to their limited capabilities. in questioning whether mobile technologies can help young south african creatives forge careers or attain resources that could help them do so, the role of mobile technologies is complicated. while these devices offer new emerging creative affordances, and in some cases, can offer means to generate income, the material reality is a different story. i conclude by arguing that instead of these devices offering access to a global network, they, at best, provide the means for young creatives, such as those featured in this study, to a forge a media patchwork. works cited donner, j., & locke, c. (2019). platforms at the margins. in m. graham, digital economies at global margins. cambridge: mit press. graham, m. (2019). economies at global margins. cambridge: mit press. jain, r. (2015, july september). let's weave the visual web. ieee multimedia, 66 72. noakes, t., walton, m., venter, a., & cronje, j. (2014). phone to photoshop: mobile workarounds in young people's visual self-presentation strategies. design. development. research. bellville: cape peninsula university of technology. odom, w., zimmerman, j., & forlizzi, j. (2014). placelessness, spacelessness, and formlessness: experiential qualities of virtual possessions. dis 2014 (pp. 985 995). vancouver: acm. perkel, d. (2011). making art, creating infrastructure: deviantart and the production of the web. berkeley: university of california, berkeley. senft, t. m., & baym, n. k. (2015). what does the selfie say? investigating a global phenomenon. international journal of communication, 9, 1588-1606. sloane, m. (2016). inequality by design? why we need to start talking about aesthetics, design and politics. researching sociology. venter, a. (2018). patchworked creative practice and mobile ecologies. university of cape town. walton, m. (2014). pavement internet: mobile media economies and ecologies in south africa. in g. goggin, & l. hjorth, the routledge companion to mobile media (pp. 450-461). london: routledge. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): van schenck, r. (2023, october). one hundred nazi screens: interfaces and the structure of u.s. white nationalist digital networks. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. one hundred nazi screens: interfaces and the structure of u.s. white nationalist digital networks on telegram reed van schenck university of pittsburgh research question the “alt-right,” a white nationalist online coalition, has collapsed amidst a “revolution” in digital governance (kor-sins, 2021; thompson & hawley, 2021). after events like the unite the right rally in charlottesville that laid bare the scope of reactionary digital networking, philip schlesigner (2020, p. 1557) identifies a “regulatory turn,” or a shift in platform management that emphasizes moderation and stewardship over unrestrained cyber-libertarianism. despite its many limitations, the regulatory turn disrupts the productive capacity of the alt-right. for example, abandoned by their service providers, once-sizeable neo-nazi media outlets such as blog the daily stormer and podcast network the right stuff lost over 80% web traffic since 2017. nevertheless, the regulatory turn remains incomplete because white nationalists utilize web design to subvert public stewardship, directing their affinity groups to “ideological safe harbors.” one such platform is telegram, a global, encrypted instant messaging application, the most popular messaging app in many post-soviet nations. it is lauded for its end-to-end encrypted secret chats and its array of “privacy” affordances. marketed to alleviate surveillance woes, telegram enjoys spikes in its north american userbase after regulatory events such as the suspension of donald trump’s twitter account and the deplatforming of far-right site parler (agarwal, ananthakrishnan, and tucker 2022). telegram is just one of several “parallel” platforms through which white nationalists produce digital networks separate from, yet dependent and influential upon, mainstream platforms (donovan et al., 2019). these strategies have allowed white nationalists to retain some of their digital presence. however, scholarship in this area primarily focuses on social media platforms and, consequently, privileges public groups and chats on telegram that crawlers can access (ali et al., 2021; jasser et al., 2021). consequently, scholars have yet to situate telegram’s private and secret channels at the productive core of its safe-harbor status. to mind the gap between the accessible “public” and enigmatic “secret” sides of telegram, my project interrogates how the app’s interfaces enable the constitution of resilient reactionary digital cultures. how do white nationalists manipulate graphical and application interfaces to constitute a user experience which persists in reproducing racist digital networks? methodology interface critique is a theoretical frame invested in tracing the social affordances of the screened window and its habitual manipulation. the interface gives “form of relation” to computational technology, conditioning the boundaries through which the user is simultaneously empowered to customize platforms and constrained from their totality (hookway, 2014, pp. 1–7). in so doing, interfaces actively “[create] the subject of the user” by enforcing a normative use-case and prohibiting “exploits” in line with the owner’s design (hadler & haupt, 2016, pp. 7–8). the graphical user interface (gui) aesthetically indexes the means by which users can customize their interaction with platforms, promising possession of artificial “folders” and “links.” interface design is entangled with the productive infrastructures, physical and symbolic, which give life to online reactionary networks. menus, tools, and pages impart mood, facilitate response, and pull the eye toward where to spend money. interfacing with “skins” to facilitate transparency naturalizes the western white masculine subject as the “average user” (kendrick, 2005, pp. 397–399). hence, analyzing the gui lays bare the marriage of visuality and control which typifies computational media. read more expansively than the sum of user interfaces, interfacing reifies the ideological black box which binds computation as a “user-friendly medium of empowerment” with it as a “command-based instrument of torture” (chun, 2011, p. 59). interface critique develops a socio-technical understanding of affordances, which seeks to understand how the app’s functions are variously “featured” to bring the white nationalist subject into view. since scrapers cannot penetrate secret messages, interface critique offers researchers a unique opportunity to appreciate the communicative work accomplished under the veil of secrecy. i apply interface critique by focusing on collective practices in which white nationalists cultivate a reactionary consciousness toward the interface as a seam. artifacts such as instruction manuals, operational security checks, and community-generated navigation indices explicate the work white nationalists do, not merely to secure their telegram communications, but to weaponize the interface as a technology for profiling each other, reinforcing a collective fantasy of victimhood amidst the regulatory turn. findings i argue that white nationalist telegram networks co-opt the “enclave public” (squires 2002; bratich 2006) or a constituent and oppositional mode of secrecy within the unitary public, as a mode of white supremacist countermovement. white nationalist telegram networks bring a racial fantasy of unmediated publicity to bear upon the regulatory turn through what lisa nakamura terms the “white interface which “situates user entitlement in relation to the computer interface as a highly visible and theatrical means by which masculinity and whiteness are allied with mastery over transparent interfaces” (nakamura, 2007, p. 116). white interfacing indexes how white nationalists frame their browsing as a technology of mastery, delimiting interface criticism from static platform architecture and toward dynamic media practices (drucker, 2013). in this abstract, i will exemplify my findings by analyzing how the blog interface channels white anxieties of governance. white nationalist telegram networks figure publicity as an affectable object, a screened and layered operation that can be readily expropriated, decompiled, and disavowed. interfaces require users to accept their inhibition through the use-case boundary. white nationalist platform designers encode racial meaning into this contradiction. any form of regulatory leverage is evaluated as an assault upon white men’s future by a cabal of jewish techno-elites, black invaders, and duplicitous women (chebrolu, 2020, pp. 57– 62). for example, the prominent “white lives matter” telegram network, reaching at least 30,000 users every day, sends daily “operational security checks,” often screenshots edited in ms paint, which instruct users on how to optimize telegram’s privacy settings to minimize the public discoverability of their messages. the purpose of these manipulations, however, is to position the white nationalist user with influence over, but unaccountability to, the same public. the graphical amateurishness of these “opsec checks” underscores the logic of paranoia underlying not just white nationalist discourse but also larger neoliberal scripts of individual privacy that animate telegram as an ideological safe harbor from “big tech.” consequently, users encounter white lives matter as embattled political dissidents rather than as bourgeois developers formally identical to the mainstream regulators whom they despise. this fantasy of decentralization reinforces whiteness as the ultimate social linkage that makes the internet usable, engendering a desire to violently eliminate racial others who threaten the coherence of the network (atanasoski & vora, 2019, pp. 27–30). interface critique equips the field to analyze the shifting terrain of the online far-right amidst the regulatory turn. the most resilient white nationalist platforms implicate their users’ media practices into a racist revolution against the regulatory turn, sustaining a loyal base of consumers bent upon preserving their network as a window for the prowhite movement body. much like telegram itself, white supremacists pantomime as a radically democratic but victimized network in order to shore up their productive capacity. in this way, because it is situated as a boundary between the user and the dominant ideology of digital culture, the interface frames how subjects come into being, but not through the circumstances of the users’ own creation. references agarwal, s., ananthakrishnan, u. m., & tucker, c. e. (2022). deplatforming and the control of misinformation: evidence from parler (ssrn scholarly paper 4232871). https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4232871 ali, s., saeed, m. h., aldreabi, e., blackburn, j., de cristofaro, e., zannettou, s., & stringhini, g. (2021). understanding the effect of deplatforming on social networks. 13th acm web science conference 2021, 187–195. https://doi.org/10.1145/3447535.3462637 atanasoski, n., & vora, k. (2019). surrogate humanity: race, robots, and the politics of technological futures. duke university press. bratich, j. (2006). public secrecy and immanent security. cultural studies, 20(4–5), 493–511. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380600708937 chebrolu, e. (2020). the racial lens of dylann roof: racial anxiety and white nationalist rhetoric on new media. review of communication, 20(1), 47–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2019.1708441 chun, w. h. k. (2011). programmed visions: software and memory. mit press. donovan, j., lewis, b., & friedberg, b. (2019). parallel ports: sociotechnical change from the alt-right to alt-tech. 49–65. https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839446706-004 drucker, j. (2013). performative materiality and theoretical approaches to interface. digital humanities quarterly, 7(1). https://www.proquest.com/docview/2555208733/abstract/a1df13ef21b34636pq/1 hadler, f., & haupt, j. (2016). towards a critique of interfaces. in interface critique (pp. 7–16). kulturverlag kadmos. hookway, b. (2014). interface (illustrated edition). the mit press. jasser, g., mcswiney, j., pertwee, e., & zannettou, s. (2021). ‘welcome to #gabfam’: far-right virtual community on gab. new media & society, 14614448211024546. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211024546 kendrick, m. (2005). invisibility, race, and the interface. rhetoric review, 24(4), 395– 399. kor-sins, r. (2021). the alt-right digital migration: a heterogeneous engineering approach to social media platform branding. new media & society, 14614448211038810. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211038810 nakamura, l. (2007). digitizing race: visual cultures of the internet. u of minnesota press. schlesinger, p. (2020). after the post-public sphere. media, culture & society, 42(7–8), 1545–1563. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720948003 squires, c. r. (2002). rethinking the black public sphere: an alternative vocabulary for multiple public spheres. communication theory, 12(4), 446–468. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2002.tb00278.x thompson, j., & hawley, g. (2021). does the alt-right still matter? an examination of alt-right influence between 2016 and 2018. nations and nationalism, 27(4), 1165– 1180. https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12736 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): brandt andreasen, m. (2022, november). internet humour and the normalisation of rape culture paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. internet humour and the normalisation of rape culture maja brandt andreasen dublin city university background: research into online discourse has seen an increased focus on how gender is constructed in online discourse as well as the prevalence of misogyny online. this includes mapping the discourse on the manosphere (a disperse group of men’s rights activists and anti-feminists) (ging, 2017; ging & siapera, 2019), investigating the misogyny women experience online (jane, 2017a; banet-weiser 2018) and finally the way in which rape culture (a culture in which sexual violence is normalised and trivialised (garvey 2019)) is perpetuated in various online communication (dodge, 2015, jane, 2018; kramer, 2011; zaleski et al., 2016)). humour research has a long history of investigating the construction of gender and the perpetuation of misogyny within humorous discourse (bemiller & schneider, 2010; kramer, 2011; shifman & lemish, 2010). furthermore, research into the phenomenon of the rape joke in online communication has also been given some academic attention (cox, 2015; kramer, 2011, lockyer & savigny, 2019). however, the intersection between humour and sexual violence in internet memes specifically has been widely overlooked in the scholarship on social media. in addition to this, research has been conducted into the representation of gender in internet memes (massanari & chess, 2018; milner, 2016) and the role of humour in internet memes (milner, 2013a; miltner, 2014; shifman 2013b, 2014). however, very little research has investigated the role of humour in combination with the discursive construction of gender drakett et al. 2018). objective(s): this paper investigates the discursive construction of sexual violence in humorous internet memes. using #metoo as a case study, the paper investigates the role of humour in memes that focus on sexual violence. investigating how gender and sexuality are discursively constructed in memes, the paper focuses on how this plays into the representation of sexual violence. the paper asks: what can internet scholars learn by taking internet humour seriously? method: the case study referred to in this paper comes from a study conducted in 2017 where 866 internet memes were collected during the height of #metoo. the memes were collected from three meme-sharing social media platforms (9gag, reddit, and imgur) using the search terms “harvey weinstein”, “kevin spacey”, “louis ck” and “metoo”. the platforms were selected as these could in some way be characterised as ‘humorous discursive spaces’ as they encouraged humorous content and characterised the platforms as spaces for e.g. “fun”, “laughter” and “entertainment”. the memes were subsequently coded using nvivo and a discourse analysis was carried out. a number of themes were identified which have been discussed elsewhere (author 2020, author 2022). results: the paper will briefly outline how gender and sexuality are constructed in the internet memes that were collected for this study. my research finds that the memes reproduce a discourse which centralises white, male, heterosexual experiences and discursively marginalises and categorises women, people of colour and sexual minorities as “others”. the key findings of this paper, however is the discursive construction of sexual violence and the role humour plays in this. a himpathetic (manne 2018) logic runs through most of the memes which centralises men’s experiences and provides disproportionate sympathy with the famous and powerful hollywood men who systematically abused women. sexual violence in the memes is either conceptualised as sexy or as “just sex”. through the himpathetic lens, women’s bodies are sexualised and it is discussed whether or not certain women are desirable enough to have sex with. in turn, sexual assault is often not understood as such but rather considered through the focus on male sexual desire and sexual entitlement. victim/survivors’ experiences are thus widely disregarded. the role of humour is largely one of either inclusion or exclusion. the platforms become spaces for indicating and reaffirming heteronormativity and homosociality. jokes about rape become ways for the users of the platforms to indicate that they are “in the know” of the subcultural codes where the trope that “there are no girls on the internet” (milner, 2013a) is celebrated and perpetuated. in turn, the work done by humour in these memes discursively excludes women, sexual minorities and people of colour. this exclusion extends to victim/survivors who often become the butt of the joke and are used as a prop to create a humorous meme. the paper concludes by noting the ways in which these humorous memes, that might at first seem like examples of rebellious humour (billig, 2005) instead function as humour with a disciplinary function as it upholds gender norms and excludes marginalised people. references: author 2020 author 2022 banet-weiser, s. (2018). empowered: popular feminism and popular misogyny. durham, nc and london: duke university press. bemiller, m. l., & schneider, r. z. (2010). it’s not just a joke. sociological spectrum, 30(4), 459–479. https://doi.org/10.1080/02732171003641040 billig, m. (2005). laughter and ridicule: towards a social critique of humor. london: sage. cox, l. (2015). standing up against the rape joke: irony and its vicissitudes. signs: journal of women in culture and society, 40(4), 963–984. drakett, j., rickett, b., day, k., & milnes, k. (2018). old jokes, new media — online sexism and constructions of gender in internet memes. feminism and psychology, 28(1), 109–127. https://doi.org/10.1177/095935351772756 dodge, a. (2015). digitizing rape culture: online sexual violence and the power of the digital photograph. crime, media, culture, 12(1), 65–82. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659015601173 gavey, n. (2019). just sex? the cultural scaffolding of rape (2nd ed.). london and new york: routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429443220-13 ging, d. (2017). alphas, betas, and incels: theorizing the masculinities of the manosphere. men and masculinities, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184x17706401 ging, d., & siapera, e. (2019). gender hate online: understanding the new antifeminism. london: palgrave macmillan. jane, e. a. (2017). misogyny online. london: sage. jane, e. a. (2018). systemic misogyny exposed: translating rapeglish from the manosphere with a random rape threat generator. international journal of cultural studies, 21(6), 661–680. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877917734042 kramer, e. (2011). the playful is political: the metapragmatics of internet rape-joke arguments. language in society, 40(02), 137–168. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404511000017 lockyer, s., & savigny, h. (2019). rape jokes aren’t funny: the mainstreaming of rape jokes in contemporary newspaper discourse. feminist media studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1577285 manne, k. (2018). down girl: the logic of misogyny. new york: oxford university press. massanari, a. l., & chess, s. (2018). attack of the 50-foot social justice warrior: the discursive construction of sjw memes as the monstrous feminine. feminist media studies, 18(4), 525–542. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1447333 milner, r. m. (2013a). hacking the social: internet memes, identity antagonism, and the logic of lulz. the fibreculture journal, (22), 62–92. milner, r. m. (2016). the world made meme. mit press.https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262034999.001.0001 miltner, k. m. (2014). “there’s no place for lulz on lolcats”: the role of genre, gender, and group identity in the interpretation and enjoyment of an internet meme. first monday, 19(8), 1–17. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v19i8.5391 shifman, l. (2013b). memes in digital culture. cambridge, massachusetts: mit press. shifman, l. (2014). the cultural logic of photo-based meme genres. journal of visual culture, 13(3), 340–358. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412914546577 shifman, l., & lemish, d. (2010). between feminism and fun(ny)mism: analysing gender in popular internet humour. information communication and society, 13(6), 870–891. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691180903490560 zaleski, k. l., gundersen, k. k., baes, j., estupinian, e., & vergara, a. (2016). exploring rape culture in social media forums. computers in human behavior, 63, 922–927. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.06.036 microsoft word bhattacharya-the affective body-the affective body.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): bhattacharya, l. (2021, october). the affective body: platformed presence and virtual embodiment in the populist politics of narendra modi. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the affective body: platformed presence and virtual embodiment in the populist politics of narendra modi laboni bhattacharya university of southern california introduction political theory agrees that the charismatic leader’s cult of personality is a cornerstone of populist politics, with an increasingly distrustful, contentious, and internally divided society seeing the leader as the embodiment of the popular will more viscerally than the electoral process allows (laclau 2005). the power of the hypermasculine leader persists in the digital age where populists exert authoritarian control over media narratives and infrastructures, as feminist critiques of the iconography of statesmen like putin, erdogan and duterte demonstrate (chavez and pacheo 2020). yet this brand of strongman politics is discursively co-produced by the leader’s physical presence; my presentation argues in contrast that indian pm narendra’s modi’s affective body is animated by its persistent digitization, virtualization, and absence of liveness. modi’s populism is driven by his appeal as a technocrat, a man accessible to the people via hologram, twitter, exclusive apps, 3d modelled youtube videos, and other digitally enabled forms of disembodied representation which create a “fantasy of unmediated access” (govil and baishya 2018). when modi appears in public to perform yoga or lay a silver brick in the foundations of a temple, his corporeal form is one iteration of his virtualized, mediated persona. modi’s independence from the demands of embodiment is made possible by his substantive digital presence. the experiential intensity and interactivity of social media creates what i term “platform affect”, which mobilizes affective discourses like nationalism to material effect, such as drawing large crowds galvanized by a sense of intimacy with modi’s virtual and physical person. methods i conducted visual and textual analysis of video content, comments, and twitter posts of narendra modi’s “yoga with modi” series to observe the discursive construction of the “authentic” in his virtual yoga practice. i studied videos of modi performing yoga in sourced from his twitter account and observed the commentary on and recirculation of this content through memes, online news and whatsapp forwards. i focused on identifying a subjective apprehension of the technocratic modi persona. i situate my analysis in studies of south asian visual culture (jain 2021), hindu nationalism and right-wing technoculture (basu 2020, govil and baishya 2018), south asian platform studies (athique 2020) and nationalist affect and mobilization on social media (mankekar 2015). while feminist scholars have studied the hypermasculinity and aggression of populist leaders, this paper explores the non-material and disembodied masculinity of the leader in a platformed society. located specifically in india, this project also notes the uneven nature of platform access and regulation in a country where cheap smartphones and internet plans rapidly expand the digital public sphere without necessarily increasing political participation (athique 2020). i further locate myself as a hindu, upper-caste indian woman whose social location is one highly privileged by right-wing hindu nationalism. the virtual body of the yogi: maintaining platformed presence the interdependence of the corporeal and the virtual in the construction of charismatic presence is subject to specifically south asian cultural registers of visuality and sociality. modi’s virtual persona is the result of the bhartiya janata party’s heavy investment in branding and pr campaigns, but its vocabulary is rooted in indian modes of public conduct, such as that of the ascetic yogi, the chaste devotee of the nation, and the mahapurush (‘great man’). these modes of being are legible and derive from popular remediations of masculinity in film, television, and public culture (pathak and perera 2018). modi’s legitimacy as a masculine paragon of restrained strength is driven by hypermediated events like the international day of yoga, which he proposed to the un general assembly a few months after taking office in 2014. modi’s frequent tweets about yoga claim a lifetime of daily practice, establishing him as a yogi qualified to lead the nation on a path to rejuvenation and functioning as a springboard for the launch of his 2020 series of “yoga with modi” youtube videos. in these videos, a 3d model of modi guides youtube viewers through a series of poses. his virtual body is aestheticized in its height, weight and flexibility, and the footage of the model is intercut with animated images of the musculoskeletal system informing the viewer of the body parts benefited by a particular stretch. in pre-covid celebrations of yoga day, modi made highly choreographed and often mocked appearances in mass demonstrations of yoga where he visibly struggled to model the competencies that his virtual body demonstrates. yoga day is part of a general un mission of world health, but in india, the modi administration has rapidly created state infrastructure that officializes yoga’s role in disciplining unruly bodies and minds. the renativization of yoga is touted as an attempt to remind indians of their national heritage and is closely linked to right-wing hindu nationalist ideology and practice. (alter 1997, gupta and copeman 2019). findings this presentation focuses on the slippage between the virtual and the real bodies of the pm as a metonym for the overall “platformization” (athique 2020) of the indian political economy. modi’s promises of minimum government and maximum governance find realization in the supplementation of physical infrastructures with digital infrastructures, often at the cost of weakening public access. yoga day is part of the modi government’s push to redefine national health as self-discipline and self-discovery, yoked to hindu nationalism. “yoga with modi” and modi’s twitter discourse underscores this rhetoric of reclamation and self-empowerment. in official statements by modi and his ministers, yoga is touted as nothing less than the cure to the ills of modernity, and an attempt at independence from the corrupting influence of western culture. the virtual body of the leader reaps the privilege of dis-embodiment while delivering on populist claims to hindu revivalism, the re-indigenization of yoga and authoritarian leadership. references 1. alter, joseph. “a therapy to live by: public health, the self and nationalism in the practice of a north indian yoga society.” medical anthropology 17, no. 4, 1997, pp. 309–335. 2. athique, adrian. “platform economy and platformization”. platform capitalism in india: global transformations in media and communication research, ed. a athique and v parthasarathi. palgrave macmillan, 2020. 3. basu, anustup. hindutva as political monotheism. duke university press, 2020. 4. govil, nitin, and anirban kapil baishya. “the bully in the pulpit: autocracy, digital social media, and right-wing populist technoculture.” communication, culture & critique, vol. 11, no. 1, oxford university press, 2018, pp. 67–84 5. gupta, copeman. “awakening hindu nationalism through yoga: swami ramdev and the bharat swabhiman movement.” contemporary south asia 27, no. 3, 2019, pp. 313–329. 6. jain, kajri. gods in the time of democracy, durham: duke university press, (forthcoming 2021) 7. jeremy c de chavez, and vincent pacheco. “masculinity in the age of (philippine) populism: spectacle, hypermasculinity, and rodrigo duterte.” masculinidades y cambio social, vol. 9, no. 3, hipatia press, 2020, pp. 261–83. 8. laclau, ernesto. on populist reason. verso, 2005. 9. mankekar, purnima. unsettling india: affect, temporality, transnationality. duke university press, 2015. microsoft word synthetic sociality final upload.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 sinnreich, a. & john, n. (2022, november). online spaces, impossible imaginaries, and synthetic sociality. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. online spaces, impossible imaginaries, and synthetic sociality aram sinnreich the american university, usa nicholas john the hebrew university of jerusalem, israel social media enable the formation of unprecedented numbers of ties between people, and allow for communication at an unprecedented scale. however, not everyone wishes to be in contact with so many people at once; nor do social media users wish to hear everything that every other user has to say. to this end, technologies for making online ties have always been accompanied by features for breaking them. these include “unfriending,” “unfollowing,” “muting,” and “blocking.” additionally, complimentary features of social media allow end users to prioritize specific communicants or messages over others. examples of these kinds of feature include “favoriting” or instagram’s “close friends.” while one can more or less conflate “unfriending” with “breaking off a friendship,” often the features for enhancing or diminishing the presence of others’ voices on social media platforms create situations that are perplexingly new, and cannot be mapped easily onto familiar offline scenarios. we argue that these new, sui generis situations instantiate a set of social architectures and imaginaries that we describe collectively using the term, synthetic sociality. in this paper, we analogize these synthetically social situations with derrida’s (1978) concept of écriture. he argues that written language isn’t a derivative reflection of orality, but rather a self-contained set of communicative capacities that precedes and surrounds oral communication. similarly, one of the reasons it can be difficult to understand socially mediated actions such as blocking, favoriting, or restricting through the lens of embodied sociality is that the underlying premise is fallacious: digital social media are no more derivative or reflective of embodied relations than writing is derivative or reflective of orality. to exemplify the concept of synthetic sociality, we present three forms of “born digital” (rogers, 2013) social transactions: the “block” feature in facebook, the “restrict” feature in instagram, and “favorite” contacts in address book apps. in none of these cases are the resulting social architectures easily analogized to those achievable in a physical social environment. and, in each case, users have nonetheless developed a tacit set of practices, understandings, and terminologies that account for these “impossible” architectures. we interpret this as an indication that the human social imaginary is inherently attuned to synthetic sociality, and that socially mediated interactions aren’t merely derivative or destructive of face-to-face sociality, but rather reflective of a broader set of latent social capacities that have expanded into the more complex topography of the online landscape — just as human expression and the production of meaning were complexified and extended through the shift from orality to écriture. the “block” feature on facebook renders the blocker and the blocked mutually invisible: neither will appear in searches or on one another’s timelines or feeds. for (almost) all intents and purposes, each does not exist within the other’s facebook experience. this produces peculiar social situations. if these two people are in the same facebook group, for instance, their posts will be invisible to one another. if these posts are part of a discussion, the discussion will appear disjointed to them, without any explicit indication to either party as to why. the “restrict” feature in instagram similarly creates a social situation that cannot be translated into embodied spaces. when an instagram user “restricts” a follower, that follower is still able to see the user’s posts, and is even able to interact with those posts (unlike people who have been blocked). crucially, though, their comments are withheld from the feeds of all of the user’s other followers. in other words, instagram has engineered a situation whereby someone can add comments to a post, thinking that they have an audience, whereas in fact they are shouting into a void without any way of knowing that this is the case. features for privileging the communication of selected individuals also create synthetically social situations. for instance, “favoriting” certain contacts in an address book can grant them the ability to break through a phone’s “do not disturb” setting, or ensure that their emails rise immediately to the top of an inbox. in these scenarios, the “favorite” contact is effectively amplified relative to other voices, and granted something akin to a vip pass to restricted information spaces. socially synthetic architectures reflect a dialectical feedback loop between the totality of human psychosocial capacity and the accelerating rate of networked platform development. just as in the analogous case of écriture, we argue that synthetic sociality constitutes its own self-contained social logic, which precedes and surrounds the logic of face-to-face communication, and which generates a far more complex architecture of meaning, identity, and relationship than we can describe using the constrained lexicon of offline social relations. key to this architecture is the fact that at least one party to a synthetically social situation lacks full knowledge of it: unbeknownst one or more actors, their voice has been amplified or silenced. synthetic sociality describes a broader architecture of social possibility enabled by the addition of social media platforms to our preexisting sociotechnical environment. the affordances of social media platforms are not handed down from on high, or birthed in their final form (bijker & law, 1992); to the contrary, this ever-changing feature set is continually reshaped through a contingent set of circumstances: the fact of online abuse and harassment (massanari, 2017); the features for controlling the presence of others (author, 2022); the economic incentives for social media platforms, which grant users control over their experience so that they remain on the platform (light & cassidy, 2014); and the large-scale political functions of social media (gillespie, 2018). in conclusion, by introducing the concept of synthetic sociality, we aim to provide a conceptual tool that will help scholars to avoid two common fallacious pitfalls. one is the notion, alluded to above, that online sociality is in some way reflective of, derivative of, or dependent upon a more primary sociality that inheres in to face-to-fact interaction (unfortunately, this fallacy is widely held even within the executive suites at major social media firms, who typically rely on their user bases to develop new ideas for platform affordances). the other is the concept, exemplified by the premise of “dunbar’s number” (hill & dunbar, 2003), that the new possibilities engendered by social media somehow beggar the human social imagination, melting our monkey brains by offering us social power and cultural nuance that we’re unequipped to appreciate. as our framing of synthetic sociality demonstrates, neither of these fallacies is particularly helpful if we wish to understand the increasingly central role that social media play in human affairs. references bijker, w. e., & law, j. (eds.) (1992). shaping technology/building society: studies in sociotechnical change. mit press. derrida, j. (1978). writing and difference. routledge and k. paul. gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet. yale university press. hill, r. a., & dunbar, r. i. (2003). social network size in humans. human nature, 14(1), 53–72. light, b., & cassidy, e. (2014). strategies for the suspension and prevention of connection: rendering disconnection as socioeconomic lubricant with facebook. new media & society, 16(7), 1169–1184. massanari, a. (2017). #gamergate and the fappening: how reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. new media & society, 19(3), 329–346. rogers, r. (2013). digital methods. mit press. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): millerand, f., coutant, a., delias, l., fortier, m. (2022, november). looking for montreal digital citizens: for who are open data made?. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. looking for montreal digital citizens: for who are open data made? florence millerand université du québec à montréal alexandre coutant université du québec à montréal lucie delias université paul valéry, montpellier marie-soleil fortier université du québec à montréal context and research questions the open data movement has led to open public data policies in states, cities, international institutions, and corporations. open government initiatives place data at the heart of renewed citizen control while raising expectations to strengthen democratic institutions, bureaucratic efficiency, and improved quality of life for individuals (boudreau, 2020; kitchin, 2014). municipalities' development of open data portals is part of this political drive to bring citizens and local governments closer together. however, despite significant public investments, these initiatives rarely find their audience, because they respond primarily to an imperative of openness that places them in a logic of supply rather than demand (purwanto, 2020). furthermore, citizens have a minimal understanding of the concrete implications of open data, not to mention an unfamiliarity with how to access them or interpret them (goëta, 2016). in this context, one can legitimately ask for whom are these open data portals created. we consider that opening data processes produce, or at least shape, collectives. at the heart of public data circulation, groups of users gather because an institution has anticipated or heard expectations about common uses. through their configuration, technical devices, structure power relations, materialize visions of data openness and prescribe uses, thus contributing to the establishment of new forms of colonialism through data. using the city of montreal (quebec, canada) as a case study, we can provide a nuanced answer to the question of for whom these portals are concretely developed. if the socio-technical device set up seems to meet the needs of an "imagined" public more technophile and entrepreneurial than most citizens are, this discrepancy is perceived and countered by many procedures. our longitudinal investigation allows us to detect a co-construction in tension of the web portal. on the one hand, we find preoccupations with municipal prerogatives, administrative routines, and open-data movement ideals sometimes mixed with territorial branding strategies. on the other, we find attention to citizen appropriation, the search for a better understanding of "empirical" publics and a willingness to design the web portal for the nebulous audience of "montrealers". methodological framework we base our analysis on a three-tiered data: the imagined publics in municipal discourses, the publics configured by the digital device, and the publics constructed through the actions and strategies of the actors. specifically, we analyzed 1) a corpus of documents consisting of official documents, communication articles and technical documentation collected between 2011 and 2021, 2) verbatim of interviews (8) conducted with key actors (e.g. portal managers, programmers, and developers, etc.), and 3) analysis of the web portal, including its different versions since its creation. the three different publics are analyzed in terms of their relationship to open data and to the institutions that characterize them, and of the participatory referential that they embody. we adopt a diachronic analysis to capture the evolution of these audiences since the creation of the portal in 2011. findings and conclusion our analysis shows the imperfect dialogue that the web portal managers are trying to establish with the montreal public through several topics (these topics will be detailed in the presentation): 1. the evolution of the socio-technical device. there are several notable changes to the web portal tools such as integrating visualizations and data stories to explain and contextualize data sets through concrete cases of data reuse. following the metropolitan open data portal typology proposed by paquienséguy and dymitrova (2019), the city of montreal portal appears to be built on an open data archetype that attempts to implement the ideal of citizen empowerment. a such, it is a witness to the evolution of open data socio-political discourses. 2.the clash between imaginary worlds. if we discern technicist imaginaries, we must insist on their occurrence with other equally mobilizing imaginaries. accordingly, the figure of the citizen is ever-present in discourse and device structuring. our analysis reveals a significant amount of discursive and practical work in maintain this central figure in the portal’s imagined audiences. two sub-figures cut across the citizen figure: the citizen as an "ideal public" and the citizen as an actual user. the ideal of the open data movement that animates the designers of the portal, and its first users, feeds the first one. over time, this ideal figure (mainly rhetorical) will give way to the figure of the actual user, who will become more precise and defined as the designers seek to embody him in the portal through different strategies (e.g. holding community group events to collect the need for opening data sets, etc.). however, these strategies will struggle to go beyond the insider circles. at the same time, other unanticipated "empirical" audiences will emerge, notably from the city's internal departments that use the portal to access data more easily from other departments. these two dimensions will allow us to conclude by tracing the evolution of the portal according to three temporal phases: 1.the first phase (until 2014), is marked by an ideal of openness where the value of open data is based on transparency and where the public citizen is thought of essentially in terms of access to the portal. the reuse of data is essentially unthought of, it will follow from the access. 2.the second phase (until 2020) is one of institutionalization. to the transparency ideal is added a conception of data as an informational and economic asset to be valued. the citizen remains a central figure of the imagined public, but in the face of its absence, the beginning of a reflection on his inclusion is initiated. 3.the third phase (in progress) marks an ethical and pedagogical turning point: to the values of transparency and assets to be valued is added a new vision in terms of digital sobriety and privacy and security issues. on the side of the imagined audiences, specialist and non-specialist audiences now coexist with increased efforts to reach the latter through a desire to develop data literacy. through our presentation, we hope to actively contribute to the ongoing discussions and debates on critical data studies and the open data movement and on the issues of distributions of power and data (de)colonialism more broadly. references boudreau, c. (2020). reuse of open data in quebec: from economic development to government transparency. international review of administrative sciences, 1–15. goëta, s. (2016). instaurer des données, instaurer des publics : une enquête sociologique dans les coulisses de l’open data. télécom paristech. kitchin, r. (2014). the data revolution: big data, open data, data infrastructures and their consequences. sage. paquienséguy f., dymytrova v. (2018). open data et métropoles, les enjeux d’une transformation à l’œuvre. analyse sémio-pragmatique d’un corpus de portails métropolitains. questions de communication, 34, 209-228. purwanto, a., zuiderwijk, a., janssen, m. (2020). citizen engagement with open government data: a systematic literature review of drivers and inhibitors. international journal of electronic government research, 16(3), 1–25. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): petre, c., weber, n.. (2020, october) one of these things is like the others: what big tech platforms can learn from libraries, bookstores, and supermarkets. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. one of these things is like the others: what big tech platforms can learn from libraries, bookstores, and supermarkets caitlin petre rutgers university nicole weber rutgers university in november 2018, facebook ceo mark zuckerberg announced the formation of an “oversight board” for the platform, the purported goal of which is “safeguarding free speech and protecting people’s safety” on the platform (facebook, 2019, p. 4). the move was heralded by some as a promising first step to correct facebook’s historically laissez-faire approach to violent, abusive and otherwise objectionable content; others have argued that facebook’s move to establish the board raises more questions than it answers about how the company envisions and wields its governance role (douek & klonick, 2019). whatever shape the oversight board ultimately takes, its very creation illustrates the mounting pressure on large technology platforms to grapple with their outsize influence over the contemporary public sphere. platforms are mired in high-profile controversies – – concerning misinformation, disinformation and “fake news”; harassment and violent threats; algorithmic profiling and discrimination; the decimation of the business model for traditional news sources, and many other issues – that have opened up vital conversations about the governance of these spaces. what role, if any, does a company like facebook have in supporting a healthy public sphere that facilitates democratic self-governance (see, e.g., myers-west 2017, ananny 2018)? how might platforms reconcile their private interests with the public good? and though what kinds of techno-organizational infrastructures and shared value systems might this reconciliation be accomplished? while versions of these questions have long been fundamental to democracies with heavily marketized media systems, existing scholarship typically focuses on the ways in which large technology platforms play an unprecedented role in the public sphere. this emphasis is not entirely misplaced: these companies do indeed possess unique features that may necessitate novel governance frameworks, such as their sheer size and scale, as well as their reliance on automated moderation and ranking to sort usergenerated content (see, e.g., gorwa, binns and katzenbach 2020). yet as we consider what appropriate platform governance might look like, our article argues that there is also value in considering the ways in which platforms like facebook are similar to previous generations of information intermediaries. their distinctive features notwithstanding, digital platforms are hardly the first institutions to produce, curate, and organize information and knowledge. the premise of our paper is that there are lessons to be learned from the way in which platforms’ predecessors have made (or failed to make) curatorial, organizational, and governance decisions. specifically, we use a comparative case study approach to examine three institutions that have historically inhabited a structural position in the public information landscape that is similar to large technology platforms: libraries (hoffman 2016), bookstores (miller 2008), and supermarket magazine racks. each of these three cases has contended with variations of the questions that technology platforms are now struggling to address; exploring how they have imagined and performed their role as information intermediaries promises to spur new thinking on key issues of platform governance. the study maps several considerations each of these intermediaries have faced in order to develop a typology of approaches to information curation and moderation. for example, when controversial cases of information management arise, are processes for adjudicating conflicting interests formal or improvised? with their strictly for-profit orientation, supermarkets have traditionally taken an ad hoc approach similar to that of tech platforms, removing materials from magazine racks only in response to an extreme public outcry, as when they temporarily stopped selling celebrity tabloids following princess diana’s death (see cunningham, 1997; noah, devlin, & solomon, 1997). libraries, however, emulate an entirely different model: systematized book challenge processes, which attempt to address public concerns about materials (slocum, 2018), and regular “weeding” (or culling) of their collections to better serve the public (vnuk 2015). bookstores fall somewhere in between, as they attempt to balance their profit motive with their curatorial role (miller 2008). in developing this typology, our article does not seek to dictate a roadmap for platforms. yet considering the ways that platforms’ constraints and challenges overlap with those of other longstanding information intermediaries allows us to identify common problems and possible solutions for platforms moving forward. by examining a variety of oftoverlooked approaches to information curation and outlining their respective benefits and drawbacks, we hope to contribute a historical and conceptual perspective to scholarly and industry conversations about platform governance. references ananny, mike. (2018). networked press freedom: creating infrastructures for a public right to hear. cambridge, ma: mit university press. cunningham, w. j. (1997 sept 13). grocers shouldn’t be censors. retrieved june 13, 2019, from greensboro news and record website: https://www.greensboro.com/grocers-shouldn-t-be-censors/article_00942036-1ce85dad-b51f-4f34e3a705a9.html douek, e. & klonick, k. (2019 june). facebook releases an update on its oversight board: many questions, few answers. lawfare. https://www.lawfareblog.com/facebook-releases-update-its-oversight-board-manyquestions-few-answers facebook, “global feedback & input on the facebook oversight board for content decisions” (2019). https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/oversight-boardconsultation-report-2.pdf gorwa, r., r. binns, and c. katzenbach. (2020). algorithmic content moderation: technical and political challenges in the automation of platform governance. big data & society https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951719897945. hoffman, a. l. (2016). privacy, intellectual freedom, and self-respect: technological and philosophical lessons for library. perspectives on libraries as institutions of human rights and social justice. (advances in librarianship, vol. 41): 49-70 miller, l. j. (2008). reluctant capitalists: bookselling and the culture of consumption. university of chicago press. myers-west, s. (2017). “searching for the public in internet governance: examining infrastructures of participation at netmundial.” policy & internet 10(1): 22-42. noah, p., devlin, f., & solomon, w. (1997). stores remove tabloids* several area grocery chains pull star, national enquirer from shelves. retrieved june 13, 2019, from https://www.mcall.com/news/mc-xpm-1997-09-15-3155273-story.html slocum, r. (2018, september 4). back to school: a guide to preparing your library for book challenges. retrieved june 13, 2019, from intellectual freedom blog website: https://www.oif.ala.org/oif/?p=15304 vnuk, r. (2015). the weeding handbook: a shelf-by-shelf guide. american library association. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 zakharova, i. (2021, october). data inquiry: methodological considerations on datafication in social research. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. data inquiry: methodological considerations on datafication in social research irina zakharova university of bremen background and objective datafication is widely acknowledged as a process “transforming all things under the sun into a data format” (van dijck, 2017, p. 11). data emerging out of such a transformation are often used for social research, although they are produced for purposes other than academic inquiry. for example, social media scholars analyse data produced by people using platforms designed by big tech companies to extract value; governance researchers make sense of data identified as relevant by administrative and political actors. this is also true for instruments used to retrieve and analyse data for academic purposes such as platform apis or visualisations. as data, therefore, become both objects and instruments of academic inquiry, many scholars call for attention to the ways datafication reconfigures scholarly knowledge production, its methodological opportunities, and challenges (lomborg et al., 2020). in this hindsight, it becomes ever more important to investigate the methodological approaches taken to study datafication and the concepts about it they provide. exploring how the futures of datafication are produced by academic inquiry today allows for a better understanding of interdependencies between technological advances and social realities, required to continue important academic work towards challenging existing power relations. to contribute to explorations of that interdependence within the domains of critical data studies and media studies, i extend on the notions of methods performativity (barad, 2007) and methods assemblages (law, 2004) developed within science and technology studies. a methods assemblage can be conceived of as “a continuing process of crafting and enacting necessary boundaries [and relations]" (law, 2004, p. 144) associating researchers with other human and non-human actors, spaces, times, materialities, and discourses relevant to the research situations. within the methods assemblage, all its elements (re)make each other and the world dynamically. i argue that defining datafication should be seen in concert with the methods assemblages applied to study these. methods the presented data inquiry develops three kinds of methods assemblages based on a review of empirical social research on datafication. the key question is what kinds of methods assemblages are being applied in current datafication research and what concepts of datafication they produce. the contribution is based on a study of 32 expert interviews with leading scholars in the domains of critical data studies and media studies. the interview sample follows a literature review (scopus, web of science) of original research articles on datafication published between 2015 and 2020 that reported findings from empirical projects. according to the purpose of study in identifying methods assemblages, conceptual work was excluded. for the interviews, authors—academics at various career stages—of the sampled literature were contacted. additionally, interview partners were asked to recommend further experts. informed consent was obtained, and all interviews and gathered materials were anonymised. subsequently, qualitative content analysis (saldaña, 2016) including both deductively and inductively developed categories was conducted. deductive categories focused on the formal aspects of empirical research such as philosophical assumptions, particular research procedures (e.g. sampling), and “sociopolitical commitments” of the researchers (onwuegbuzie & frels, 2016, p. 51). inductive categories were central for analysis and highlighted concepts about datafication produced in reported methods assemblages from a practice-based viewpoint. the interviewed experts discussed research on datafication in different societal domains, including the use of data and media in the everyday, data-driven governance, migration, education, activism. most scholars reported applying a mix of qualitative methods (interviews, ethnographic methods, document analyses), while some applied software analyses, quantitative, computational methods, experiential, and theory-driven methodological approaches. preliminary results and implications empirically, methods assemblages include: researchers (and their positionings, subjectivities), the researched individuals, communities, organisations and /or things (e.g. documents, technologies), research situations in their spatial and temporal contexts. these entities are related to each other through sets of practices; some of these practices can be conceived of as research procedures (e.g. interviewing), other— organising research (e.g. securing funding), and communicating results. central to distinguishing between methods assemblages are the ways of associating of the involved actors and things. in my analysis the questions of (1) what we are talking about when talking about datafication and (2) kinds of knowledges that researchers were interested in producing can be understood as such ways of associating (table 1). three kinds of methods assemblages were developed: ➢ an encounter with data representations, ➢ tracing dynamics of data infrastructures, ➢ reconstructing algorithmic regimes. table 1. three methods assemblages. methods assemblages what are we talking about what kinds of knowledges are sought? distinctive characteristics talking about datafication? encounter with data representations data representations (visualisations or numbers— rankings, ratings) lived experiences of people in everyday and work settings learning with and not „only“ about participants tracing dynamics of data infrastructures data infrastructures historical, social, cultural, political, economical aspects long-term focus on research situations and spaces reconstructing algorithmic regimes algorithms & software categorisations of the world inscribed in algorithms & software research on data production & processing an encounter with data representations foregrounds people’s lived experiences and can be configured to learn together with the study participants, allowing to explore why they (do not) value certain datafication processes (for an example of research illustrating some aspects of this methods assemblage see e.g. kennedy & hill, 2018). tracing dynamics of data infrastructures situates these in their historical, socio-political contexts as scholars gather tacit knowledge about studied regions and matters over a long period of time (e.g. taylor & richter, 2017). reconstructing algorithmic regimes addresses how certain categorisations of the world are inscribed in software and algorithms acknowledging the challenges of access to such information (e.g. redden, 2018). the methods assemblages contribute to critical data studies by producing accounts about datafication processes that are in concert with the methods assemblages applied to study these. they synthesise how current scholarship addresses datafication processes based on either data representations, data infrastructures, or algorithms based on the study of lived experiences, broader contextual aspects, or categorisations inscribed in software. the developed methods assemblages also provide critical data and media scholars with additional means to develop methodological sensitivity directed towards multiple aspects of datafication processes for their future inquiries. references barad, k. m. (2007). meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. duke university press. kennedy, h., & hill, r. l. (2018). the feeling of numbers: emotions in everyday engagements with data and their visualisation. sociology, 52(4), 830–848. law, j. (2004). after method mess in social science research. routledge. lomborg, s., dencik, l., & moe, h. (2020). methods for datafication, datafication of methods: introduction to the special issue. european journal of communication. onwuegbuzie, a. j., & frels, r. (2016). seven steps to a comprehensive literature review: a multimodal and cultural approach. sage. redden, j. (2018). democratic governance in an age of datafication: lessons from mapping government discourses and practices. big data & society, 5(2). saldaña, j. (2016). the coding manual for qualitative researchers (3e [third edition]). sage. taylor, l., & richter, c. (2017). the power of smart solutions: knowledge, citizenship, and the datafication of bangalore’s water supply. television & new media, 18(8), 721– 733. van dijck, j. (2017). foreword. in m. t. schäfer & k. van es (eds.), the datafied society. studying culture through data. amsterdam university press. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 13-16 oct 2021 recommended for you: investigating the use of algorithmic news recommendation in the scandinavian daily press lynge asbjørn møller aarhus university a growing number of news websites have adopted algorithmic news recommender systems to automatically structure and order news items using logical statements and information on user preferences (möller et al., 2018). while these systems provide news organisations with new opportunities to offer more relevant and even personalised news experiences and in turn keep and grow traffic, their increasing use has also raised several concerns about whether and how algorithms should undertake important editorial decisions. the commercial origin of these technologies has prompted critical questions about the influence of commercial considerations on news production (bodó, 2019), while discussions on personalised news recommendation point to traditional debates on journalism’s role in the fragmentation of the public sphere (milosavljević & vobič, 2019). traditional news media organisations thus have to navigate a complex landscape when implementing algorithmic news recommender systems. however, current literature offers only limited empirical insight into the actual use of algorithmic news recommender systems in journalism. a dominating strand of inquiry into the field has focuses on normative considerations about the potentials and limitations of news recommendation (helberger, 2015, 2019; helberger et al., 2018), while empirical research has examined the effect of different recommender systems (möller et al., 2018), explored the user attitudes (bodó et al., 2019; monzer et al., 2020) and news media perspectives (bastian et al., 2020; bodó, 2019) toward the technologies and mapped their use in journalism at early stages of the emerging practice (thurman, 2011; thurman & schifferes, 2012). this study addresses the above-mentioned gap in the literature by mapping the adaptation of news recommendation within the scandinavian daily press and gathering qualitative data on the professional attitudes towards these technologies. this geographical focus balances us-centric literature with insights from a media system with different legal rules, cultural policies and journalistic traditions. the paper addresses the following questions: virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): møller, l., (2021, october). recommended for you: investigating the use of algorithmic news recommendation in the scandinavian daily press. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. x how has the scandinavian daily press implemented algorithmic news recommendation? x what are the reasonings behind choosing to implement or not implement these technologies? x which concerns were central in this decision-making process, and how were these concerns addressed? methods the paper draws on interviews with all 19 national newspapers within the danish, norwegian and swedish daily press. with the exception of one email exchange, semistructured interviews were conducted with representatives at all the newspapers between december 2020 and january 2021, determining whether each newspaper uses algorithmic news recommendation, whether the systems are personalised, whether the systems are developed in-house, where on the website news recommendation is in place, and which kind of filtering is applied. furthermore, the research interviews were used to investigate the reasonings behind implementing the technology and central concerns in the decision-making process, thus bringing a qualitative dimension to the analysis and allowing for a perspective on how journalists at different news organisations evaluate the use of algorithmic news recommendation and its further potential. findings the study finds that news recommender systems are adopted by 17 out of the 19 newspapers studied, with personalisation implemented at 14 of these. while the extent of their use at the specific newspapers is for the most part still in an experimental phase, attitudes towards news recommendation were generally positive. the reasonings for their implementation include among other things increasing the relevance of the user experience, unlocking the long tail of content, driving subscriptions, and freeing up journalists time from routine tasks. the findings also highlight several concerns with the implementation of algorithmic news recommendation. a significant cause for concern was losing editorial control. especially newspapers relying on ad-based online business models emphasised their humanly edited front page as too important for the business to be automated. this constraint seemingly relates to how many commercial news organisations develop their brands based on what becker and vlad (2009, p. 66) call a ‘news philosophy’ that, according to thurman (2011, p. 399), ‘shapes the type and mix of stories covered’. the few reluctant newspapers in this study may see algorithmic news recommendation as reducing their control over their brand, thus negatively affecting their commercial success. a majority of the newspapers also expressed concern that the algorithms would interfere with journalistic priorities, create filter bubbles and amplify only popular content, leading to users missing out on important news stories. these concerns led over one third of the newspapers to implement specific precautionary measures to counteract these negative effects, such as protecting top stories or creating safe pools of articles for the recommender to promote. furthermore, a quarter of the recommender systems mapped in this study were designed to allow for editorial input on news items’ importance in terms of public interest, enabling the systems to provide each individual user with the most important news stories that they might have missed. the findings of this study thus show that journalistic norms and ideals affect the design and implementation of algorithms in journalism, indicating that it is not unlikely that the use of algorithmic news recommendation will become more accepted as a sound practice in journalism. but these findings are based on interviews with employees responsible for implementation of these technologies and may not represent the sentiments of the newsroom as a whole, necessitating further endeavours that expand the scope of interviewees to include newsroom staff. such research may illuminate potential journalistic tensions within the newsroom and explore whether or not algorithmic curation is actually accepted by journalists and why. references bastian, m., makhortykh, m., harambam, j., & van drunen, m. (2020). explanations of news personalisation across countries and media types. internet policy review, 9(4). https://doi.org/10.14763/2020.4.1504 becker, l. b., & vlad, t. (2009). news organizations and routines. in k. wahljorgensen & t. hanitzsch, the handbook of journalism studies (pp. 59–72). routledge. bodó, b. (2019). selling news to audiences – a qualitative inquiry into the emerging logics of algorithmic news personalization in european quality news media. digital journalism, 7(8), 1054–1075. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2019.1624185 bodó, b., helberger, n., eskens, s., & möller, j. (2019). interested in diversity. digital journalism, 7(2), 206–229. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2018.1521292 helberger, n. (2015). merely facilitating or actively stimulating diverse media choices? public service media at the crossroad. international journal of communication, 9(1), 1324–1340. helberger, n. (2019). on the democratic role of news recommenders. digital journalism, 7(8), 993–1012. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2019.1623700 helberger, n., karppinen, k., & d’acunto, l. (2018). exposure diversity as a design principle for recommender systems. information, communication & society, 21(2), 191–207. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1271900 milosavljević, m., & vobič, i. (2019). human still in the loop. digital journalism, 7(8), 1098–1116. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2019.1601576 möller, j., trilling, d., helberger, n., & es, b. van. (2018). do not blame it on the algorithm: an empirical assessment of multiple recommender systems and their impact on content diversity. information, communication & society, 21(7), 959– 977. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2018.1444076 monzer, c., moeller, j., helberger, n., & eskens, s. (2020). user perspectives on the news personalisation process: agency, trust and utility as building blocks. digital journalism, 8(9), 1142–1162. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2020.1773291 thurman, n. (2011). making ‘the daily me’: technology, economics and habit in the mainstream assimilation of personalized news. journalism, 12(4), 395–415. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884910388228 thurman, n., & schifferes, s. (2012). the future of personalization at news websites. journalism studies, 13(5–6), 775–790. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670x.2012.664341 microsoft word hine-surveillance for independence-surveillance for independence.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): hine,c. and barnaghi, p. (2021, october).surveillance for independence: discursive frameworks in smart care for dementia. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. surveillance for independence: discursive frameworks in smart care for dementia christine hine university of surrey payam barnaghi imperial college london introduction this paper examines the scenario of smart care, within which surveillance via internet of things is widely portrayed as a means to maintain the independence of those being monitored. smart technologies promise a future in which the care needed by vulnerable people can be delivered at a distance, informed by remote sensing and by artificial intelligence used to identify problematic patterns in physiological readings and behavioural data. innovations in this field aim to support people in living at home with conditions such as dementia, enabling distant carers to be alerted to changing patterns of activity and vital signs that may presage a worrying deterioration and thus to act in time to avert crises. smart care at home is often positioned as preserving independence for longer, by averting emergency hospitalizations and delaying the need for a transition into residential care. whilst there is an efficiency and cost-reduction pay-off to automation of care, there is also an aspiration that this kind of personalized monitoring could enhance care and offer better outcomes, by enabling people to both be supported but also maintain some autonomy. background concerns have been raised repeatedly about the ethics of smart technologies, with their potential to invade privacy and challenge human autonomy. ethical principles for datadriven technologies have been widely discussed, with consensus centring on the need for artificial intelligence to be implemented in forms that assure beneficence, nonmaleficence, autonomy, justice and explicability (floridi and cowls 2019). there are, however, considerable challenges still in achieving practical mechanisms for implementation of these principles (mittelstadt 2019). a sociological perspective allows us to understand ethics as an emergent everyday practice that resides not simply in technologies themselves or as abstract principles, but in the social relations that these technologies enact and develop meaning within (pols, 2015). this paper arises from a collaborative project between a sociologist and a team implementing smart care for dementia, designed with this framing in mind. later stages of the project will involve interviews with developers, healthcare professionals, people living with dementia and their carers to explore their diverse perspectives on ethical challenges and dilemmas across the lifetime of the implementation. this paper presents preparatory work exploring framing of smart care in the surrounding policy and commercial environment. method this paper examines the promise of smart care through analysis of documentation from policy, from research and development settings and from marketing materials aimed at carers, people living with dementia and social care agencies in the uk (the documents analysed include the uk national health service long-term plan (https://www.longtermplan.nhs.uk/), the uk ai council’s ai roadmap published in 2021 (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachme nt_data/file/949539/ai_council_ai_roadmap.pdf), web materials from commercial services canary care (https://www.canarycare.co.uk/) and howz (https://howz.com/) and from the nhs ai lab nhsx (https://www.nhsx.nhs.uk/) and the tihm smart care initiative (https://www.sabp.nhs.uk/tihm). the analysis explored significant discursive framings in these documents concerning who cares for whom, what relationships are made explicit, what role is played by technology in the act of caring and what responsibilities are enacted when care becomes smart, conducting a fine detail coding of relevant sections of the documents and aggregating into broader themes relating to the framing of the relations of smart care. key findings care as worry it is common for experiential accounts of caring for people to mention the worry that care entails (van manen 2002). care involves “an inherent duality of work and emotion” (palacios 2020) and this is often particularly exacerbated by not being co-located all of the time with the person for whom one cares. this framing is common in the marketing of consumer-facing smart care solutions positioned as alleviating the need to worry. the monitoring carried out by smart care is predominantly framed as reassurance for the carer alongside reassurance for the person living with dementia that there will be help at times of need. knowledge deficits and care within professional healthcare contexts, a framing of limitations imposed upon optimal care by knowledge deficits takes over from the emotional framing of worry. patients are seen as coming too late to medical interventions and distance, lack of capacity and lack of co-presence are seen as creating knowledge deficits. lack of knowledge is positioned as a limiting factor on providing optimal care and hence the monitoring offered by smart care becomes an ethical responsibility in the search for improved care problems of anticipation and uncertainty a key aspect of the care situation for dementia is framed as not knowing what will happen, how the condition will progress and what short term, treatable problems may also arise. in this context of uncertainty, ai promises some insight into both present and possible futures. these insights may reshape the ethical duties felt by those caring in the present time and shift the extent to which they feel empowered to take decisions on behalf of the person living with dementia. conclusion the discourse of smart care offers an ethical justification of surveillance as providing a modicum of independence in a situation where one is already positioned as vulnerable. the prevalent discursive framings of smart care as a solution for worry, for knowledge deficits and for uncertainty raise their own ethical challenges, however. it is important to consider whether the promise of smart care is also accompanied by a sense of the agency and independence and the involvement in an active relational citizenship that is held as being so important for living well with dementia (keyes, 2019). surveillance and the ai-generated predictions that are built upon it could instead offer imperatives to action that may act against independence through an increased medicalization of everyday living. smart care intervenes in a very fraught territory of decision-making for people living with dementia and their carers, where a balance between safety, autonomy, and assessment of capacity and best interests is often problematic. we need to know more about how people live with such systems and how these systems become a part of the complex relations of expertise, emotion and responsibility that pervade care. this will allow us to evaluate how far the discursive framing of smart care as identified above is mirrored in the actual experience of those cared-for and caring and where they see further ethical issues arising. understanding how ethical issues are identified and managed in the implementation of smart care from the perspective of those involved may enrich principle-based ethical evaluation of smart care technologies. references floridi, l., & cowls, j. (2019). a unified framework of five principles for ai in society. harvard data science review 1(1). doi: 10.1162/99608f92.8cd550d1 keyes, s. e., clarke, c. l., & gibb, c. e. (2019). living with dementia, interdependence and citizenship: narratives of everyday decision-making. disability & society, 34(2), 296-319. doi: 10.1080/09687599.2018.1528970 mittelstadt, b. (2019). principles alone cannot guarantee ethical ai. nature machine intelligence, 1(11), 501-507. doi: 10.1038/s42256-019-0114-4 palacios, j., pérez, p., & webb, a. (2020). the experience of caring for an older relative in chile: going beyond the burden of care. ageing & society, 1-20. doi:10.1017/s0144686x20001567 pols, j. (2015). towards an empirical ethics in care: relations with technologies in health care. medicine, health care and philosophy, 18(1), 81-90. doi:10.1007/s11019014-9582-9 van manen, m. (2002). care-as-worry, or “don’t worry, be happy”. qualitative health research, 12(2), 262-278. doi: 10.1177/104973202129119784 funding preparation of this article was funded by apex award apx\r1\201173 awarded by the british academy, the royal academy of engineering and the royal society and with generous support from the leverhulme trust. microsoft word aoir2020-134-finalabstract.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): wijermars, m., lokot, t. (2020, october). the politics of internet freedom rankings: a call for a comparative framework for assessing internet freedom. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the politics of internet freedom rankings: a call for a comparative framework for assessing internet freedom mariëlle wijermars maastricht university tetyana lokot dublin city university this paper critically assesses current regimes of internet governance and the role of internet freedom rankings therein. in particular, it aims to initiate a debate ultimately leading to the development of a groundbreaking comparative framework for assessing internet policy, departing from the assumption that current frameworks for assessing and measuring internet freedom are predicated too strictly on the dichotomy of democracy/non-democracy. background and context existing scholarship on internet use and internet governance has drawn connections between the level of democratic development (or lack thereof) in countries and the level of internet freedom in them. on the one hand, scholars have argued that it is possible to design multi-level models that demonstrate the complex relationship between the level of democratisation, internet use and internet penetration (nisbet, stoycheff and pearce, 2012), although there may be discrepancies between perceived and actual levels of internet freedom (stoycheff 2020). on the other hand, opinion research involving internet users (internet society, 2012; pew research center, 2014) suggests that demand for internet freedom is in itself a function of internet use and digital literacy. the type of online activities may also mediate the effect of internet use in authoritarian states, where recreational use was found to be “associated with satisfactory evaluations of non-democratic regimes and more entrenched authoritarian worldviews” (stoycheff, nisbet and epstein, 2016). the implications of regime type influence on internet 2 freedom have also, in many cases, been extrapolated from the relationship between press or media freedom and the level of democratic consolidation in a society. however, as shen (2017) points out, internet freedom is a far more contested concept than press freedom due to the global reach of its policy implications. in particular, freedom of access, for example to facilitate the delivery of governmental services and distance education, is more widely recognized by states than the freedom of use – to express opinions, share and receive information online without bounds – that is often assumed under the notion of internet freedom measured by international rankings. researchers such as denardis (2014) have also documented the emerging tensions between the globalisation of internet governance and the rising concern with internet sovereignty among nation-states that transcends regime types. at the same time, farrell and newman (forthcoming) argue that illiberal states are increasingly subverting the norms of global information openness to pursue their own interests, misaligned with the imaginary of the liberal international information order. furthermore, the development of internet governance principles and the benchmarking of indicators of internet freedom or internet control is an iterative process that involves multiple stakeholders, including civil society organisations, private sector initiatives, and governmental and intergovernmental organisations (hawtin, 2011). most of these actors approach the assessment of internet freedom from a western-leaning perspective that uncritically assumes that democratic governance and democracy-related practices are embedded in the very origins of the internet (morozov, 2011) and therefore, the levels of democratisation can serve as valid indicators of internet freedom as opposed to governance and practices in authoritarian states. as a result, these frameworks lack analytical capacity when applied to invasive internet policies and public administration practices implemented in democracies, while lacking analytical complexity when applied to policies and public administration practices in non-democracies. for example, they allow little room for acknowledging differences between the terms in which legal acts are stated and their implementation (impact on citizens in practice). the conceptualization and operationalization of the concept of internet freedom that underlies internet freedom rankings is of particular importance since the promotion of internet freedom is an integral part of foreign policy of, e.g., the us and eu (e.g. the eu action plan for human rights and democracy 2020-2024), and rankings serve as an important source of information and justification for prioritizing funding and efforts (maréchal, 2015). rankings are also known to impact states’ reputations, serving as advocacy tools in public diplomacy, but also impeding justified criticism aimed at states who score well on key indicators. call for action and rationale through this intervention piece, we aim to initiate debate that will lead towards the development of an alternative framework for assessing internet policy that departs from the level of invasiveness into the private life of citizens and degree of governmental accountability and transparency, as well as the broader societal consequences of such policies and public administration practices. shifting attention away from the singular focus on regime kind and politics enables us to develop a more complex system of coordinates for assessment. for example, a democracy can be found to have 3 characteristics of an “authoritarian” legal framework regarding internet access, networked communications or data, or vice versa. we begin by examining the existing frameworks and rankings of internet freedom to critically assess their parameters, indicators and analytical capacity. in our critical assessment we draw on emergent scholarship about regime hybridity and complexity, as well as research examining aspects of internet governance across regime types. on the basis of this analysis, we will propose initial ideas for conducting comprehensive regime-agnostic assessment of internet policies, governance practices and internet freedoms. our aim is to develop a framework with both analytical capacity and complexity that can be used to critically evaluate internet governance regulations and practices across political systems and regime types. contribution the paper makes a significant contribution to our understanding of internet freedom as distinct from political systems or media systems that inform much of the current research, policy and practice. through its critical assessment of, e.g., the input variables used to calculate existing rankings (e.g., freedom house freedom on the net or index on censorship) in line with the approach specified above, the intervention paper identifies key issues and shortcomings in existing approaches to evaluating internet policy, legislation and regulation, and therefore, the levels of internet freedom, that our alternative framework will seek to address. it serves as a first conceptual intervention in the interdisciplinary scholarly debate on regimes of internet governance and a stepping stone towards the operationalisation and testing of the comparative analysis framework. references denardis, l. (2014). the global war for internet governance. yale university press. farrell, henry, and abraham l. newman. (forthcoming). the janus face of the liberal international information order: when global institutions are self-undermining. international organization. hawtin, d. (2011). internet charters and principles: trends and insights. global information society watch 2011, 49–54. retrieved from http://giswatch.org/sites/default/files/gisw2011_en.pdf. internet society. (2012). the global internet user survey infographic. reston, va: internet society. retrieved from http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/global-internetuser-survey-2012. maréchal, n. (2015). compass| ranking digital rights: human rights, the internet and the fifth estate. international journal of communication, 9, 10. 4 morozov, e. (2011). whither internet control? journal of democracy, 22(2), 62–74. doi:10.1353/jod.2011.0022 nisbet, e. c., stoycheff, e., & pearce, k. e. (2012). internet use and democratic demands: a multinational, multilevel model of internet use and citizen attitudes about democracy. journal of communication, 62(2), 249-265. pew research center. (2014). emerging and developing nations want freedom on the internet: young especially opposed to censorship. washington, dc: pew research center. retrieved from http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/03/19/emerging-and-developingnations-want-freedom-on-theinternet/. shen, f. (2017). internet use, freedom supply, and demand for internet freedom: a cross-national study of 20 countries. international journal of communication, 11, 22. stoycheff, e., e. nisbet and d. epstein (2016). differential effects of capital-enhancing and recreational internet use on citizens’ demand for democracy. communication research. published online first 25 april 2016. stoycheff, e. (2020) relatively democratic: how perceived internet interference shapes attitudes about democracy. international journal of press/politics, 25(3), 390-406. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): frost-arnold, k. (2022, november). exploitation in online content moderation. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. exploitation in online content moderation karen frost-arnold hobart & william smith colleges this paper presents a normative framework for evaluating the moral and epistemic exploitation that online content moderation workers experience while working for social media companies (often as subcontractors or as mechanical turk workers). i argue that the current labor model of commercial content moderation (ccm) is exploitative in ways that inflict profound moral harm and epistemic injustices on the workers. this detailed account of exploitation enables us to see more clearly the contours and causes of the moral and epistemic injustice involved in ccm, and helps us understand precisely why these forms of exploitation are unjust. it also suggests some practical solutions for a more just labor model for the moderation work that shapes our online ecosystem. to show that ccm is exploitative in a moral sense, i draw on ruth sample’s account of exploitation (sample 2003). sample defines exploitation as “interacting with another being for the sake of advantage in a way that fails to respect the inherent value in that being” (sample 2003, 57). to avoid exploiting someone, we must “take their needs into account” (sample 2003, 81). this has failed to happen in the development of the labor model of ccm; moderators have basic human needs that have not been taken into account. thus, they have been treated with disrespect. to make this case, i argue that ccm violates workers’ basic needs for emotional health and affiliation (i.e., relationships) (cf. nussbaum 1999, 41). the emotional trauma of ptsd reported by ccm workers and the emotionally desensitizing nature of the work both harm the mental health of workers. the intense exposure to images of child sexual exploitation, violence, and other forms of human cruelty does emotional harm that frequently damages moderators’ relationships (roberts 2016; 2019; chen 2017; bowden 2017; laplante 2017; solon 2017). additionally, non-disclosure agreements prevent workers from discussing their difficult work with friends and family—thus interfering with workers’ basic needs for connection and affiliation (roberts 2016). to show that ccm is epistemically exploitative, i develop an account of a novel form of epistemic injustice, which i call “epistemic dumping.” the philosophical literature on epistemic injustice reveals the many ways in which unjust social systems and practices disrespect marginalized people in their capacity as knowers (fricker 2007; dotson 2014). i define epistemic dumping as a form of epistemic injustice in which the labor of sorting, handling, and disposing of the toxic epistemic trash of epistemic communities is disproportionately performed by some (typically traditionally oppressed) groups, while other (typically traditionally dominant) groups benefit from this labor, though usually being oblivious to its performance or dismissive of the epistemic labor involved in handling the trash. my concept of epistemic trash draws on the work of sarah roberts and sarah jeong. roberts uses the language of “digital detritus” and “digital refuse” to refer to the harmful online content which moderators are charged with handling (roberts 2016). jeong also uses the metaphor of garbage, using it to refer to “undesirable content” ranging from spam to online harassment (jeong 2015, 11). thinking about the content that moderators remove as a form of epistemic trash helps us recognize the epistemic labor of ccm and also ask questions about who “takes out” the trash and how those workers are treated. i argue that the labor model of ccm exemplifies epistemic dumping because the labor of removing online trash is disproportionately performed by low-wage subcontractors(often in the global south) whose epistemic skills are disrespected. social media companies have chosen to treat their labor as “low-skill” work that can be performed in an assembly-line format, paid poorly, and hidden from sight (roberts 2016; 2019; block and riesewieck 2018). moderators are often treated as human computers, rather than as epistemic agents. this is a kind of epistemic objectification that disrespects them as knowers. for example, punsmann, a former facebook moderator, writes, “the mental operations [of moderation] are evaluated as being too complex for algorithms. nevertheless moderators are expected to act as a computer. the search for uniformity and standardization, together with the strict productivity metrics, lets not much space for human judgment and intuition” (punsmann 2018). moderators are epistemically objectified and their human judgment is not valued. thus, ccm is epistemically exploitative because it disproportionately dumps the toxic epistemic content of our online epistemic communities on moderators while simultaneaously disrespecting their epistemic skills at handling digital detritus. this account of the epistemic injustice involved in ccm helps us imagine another world in which the difficult work moderators perform is valued as skilled and nuanced. together, the ethical and epistemic accounts of exploitation support normative arguments for better compensation, increased mental health support, more respect, and more recognition for the laborers who perform the difficult labor of tidying up our online environments. methodology this is a project in ethics and epistemology of the internet. while the theoretical tools are primarily philosophical in nature, the paper also draws on internet studies scholarship on the nature of online labor and content moderation (e.g. gray and suri 2019; roberts 2019). to make it accessible to an interdisciplinary audience, the paper will begin with an introduction to the literature on the ethics of exploitation and epistemic injustice, as well as providing an overview of the landscape of ccm. references block, hans, and moritz riesewieck. 2018. the cleaners (im schatten der netzwelt). gebrueder beetz filmproducktion. bowden, rasalyn. 2017. “ccm workers: tales from the moderation screen.” presented at the all things in moderation conference, university of california, los angeles, december 7. https://atm-ucla2017.net/. chen, adrian. 2017. “the human toll of protecting the internet from the worst of humanity.” the new yorker, january 28, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-human-toll-of-protecting-theinternet-from-the-worst-of-humanity. dotson, kristie. 2014. “conceptualizing epistemic oppression.” social epistemology 28 (2): 115–38. fricker, miranda. 2007. epistemic injustice: power and ethics in knowing. new york: oxford university press. gray, mary l., and siddharth suri. 2019. ghost work: how to stop silicon valley from building a new global underclass. new york: houghton mifflin harcourt. jeong, sarah. 2015. the internet of garbage. jersey city, nj: forbes. laplante, rochelle. 2017. “ccm workers: tales from the moderation screen.” presented at the all things in moderation conference, university of california, los angeles, december 7. https://atm-ucla2017.net/. nussbaum, martha craven. 1999. sex & social justice. new york: oxford university press. punsmann, burcu gültekin. 2018. “three months in hell: what i learned from three months of content moderation for facebook in berlin.” sz magazin. january 6, 2018. https://sz-magazin.sueddeutsche.de/internet/three-months-in-hell-84381. roberts, sarah t. 2016. “digital refuse: canadian garbage, commercial content moderation and the global circulation of social media’s waste.” wi: journal of mobile media 10 (1): 1–18. ———. 2019. behind the screen: content moderation in the shadows of social media. new haven: yale university press. sample, ruth j. 2003. exploitation: what it is and why it’s wrong. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. solon, olivia. 2017. “underpaid and overburdened: the life of a facebook moderator.” the guardian, may 25, 2017. http://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/may/25/facebook-moderator-underpaidoverburdened-extreme-content. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): lastname, firstinitial. (2021, october). paper (or panel) title. paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. platformizing delivery workers’ experiences: building worker-owned platforms in brazil, spain and france rafael grohmann unisinos university, brazil the article aims to analyze the emergence of worker-owned platforms, specifically delivery workers’ experiences, as one of the laboratories of platform labor (cant 2019, casilli & posada 2019) and the circulation of workers’ struggles (englert, woodcock & cant 2020). drawing on interviews with six cases in three different countries (spain, france and brazil), the research highlights the commonalities, specificities and challenges of platformizing delivery workers’ experiences in different countries. previous literature on platform labor has emphasized that workers create tactics and strategies to interact in everyday work (sun 2019). workers’ discontentment with dominant platforms served to create and strengthen emerging solidarities (soriano & cabanes 2020) in associations and unions, but it has also led to the creation of workerowned platforms using different institutional designs, especially what has become known as platform cooperativism (scholz 2016). since 2016, research on platform economy has shown the possibilities (schor 2020, pazaitis, zhu & marjanovic 2020) and the limitations (sandoval 2019, cant 2019) of platform cooperativism. furthermore, platform cooperativism has a specific legal profile. but the principles of worker ownership in the context of platformization do not necessarily appear under the label “cooperative.” building worker-owned platforms includes, but is not restricted to, platform cooperativism. at the forefront of all this is achieving democratic labor relations and worker ownership in processes that can be amplified by digital platforms, with possibilities for the circulation of the common (de peuter & dyer-witheford 2010). these initiatives can be based on platforms (with their own infrastructures) or supported by platforms (not necessarily with worker-owned infrastructures) (morell, espelt & cano 2020). as experiments, these initiatives offer no ready formula and have different characteristics and elements depending on their sector or location. at least 30 new delivery collectives and cooperatives have emerged in recent years. the sample of this suggested citation (apa): grohmann, r., (2021, october). platformizing delivery workers’ experiences: building worker-owned platforms in brazil, spain and france. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. research is: mensakas (barcelona, spain), rodant (valencia, spain), resto.paris (paris, france), coursiers bordelais (bordeaux, france), senõritas courier (são paulo, brazil), and pedal express (porto alegre, brazil). the analysis highlights the following dimensions: productive processes and work organization, technological challenges and platform building, the use of social media to communicate with and organize workers, and the future of worker-owned platforms. except for pedal express, founded in 2010, all other initiatives were created within the context of platform economies beginning in 2017. this situate them as emerging collectives circulating different logics focused on workers and sustainability reacting against dominant platforms. another reason for choosing these initiatives was their diversity. some are the product of union struggles, while others are focused on gender equality, especially women and lgbtqi+, and find themselves in varying stages of development in different cities of different sizes. worker-owned experiences we analyzed are from three different countries, two in europe and one in south america. on one hand, these experiences present specific social and political contexts. in 2020, brazil experienced its largest riders’ strike that led to worker-owned initiatives having more visibility. the platformization of riders’ experiences is still not a big issue. additionally, if they do create their own platforms, they do not want to be dependent on software that does not follow bottom-up logic or that does not dialogue with their local realities and needs. in europe, the spanish coops were born from the union struggles, while french initiatives are related to coopcycle, the federation of cooperatives that has strengthened relationships with worker groups in south america. thus, the construction of their own platforms is something closer to becoming a reality, or, in fact, it is already a reality. on the other hand, these experiences reinforce the transnational characteristics of confronting the platformization of labor and the potential for circulating workers’ struggles. thus, despite the different contexts, we emphasize that these experiences have connections. they are all initiatives under construction, whether with regards to work organization or to using social media to communicate with workers and clients and to promote themselves using media strategies and digital presence, even though most social media is owned by big platforms. the workers do not agree with the idea that building worker-owned platforms is only a question of technology, understanding that it also presents financial and organizational issues. what is important is building worker-owned productive processes first. in this sense, horizontal management and department divisions where all workers have a voice are key aspects of workplace democracy. the initiatives emphasize that productive processes are under constant construction and that horizontality is not without disputes and contradictions. coopcycle plays a fundamental role in providing a platform for co-ops to use, although it is not necessarily “from below”, as observed in resto.paris’ requests for improving user experiences and company relationships. although coopcycle has less dialogue with brazilian initiatives, it also plays a key role in connecting and articulating other coops. workers understand that their relationship with social media for communication purposes and for work organization is essential, but that there is no ready formula on how to use it. several social media platforms are still being used experimentally. most social media is proprietary, especially in brazil where whatsapp is widely used. platformizing worker-owned initiatives is not something follows a predefined model or that is necessarily related to a concept. they are diverse and have specific relationships with digital presence. understanding diverse worker-owned possibilities also implies avoiding simply replicating certain models that have been successful in, for example, europe. delivery workers’ experiences in brazil show a potential for work organization and for communicating between workers that goes beyond the preestablished definitions of how these initiatives should be. references cant, callum. 2019. riding for deliveroo: resistance in the new economy. london: polity. casilli, antonio, and julian posada. 2019. “the platformization of labor and society”. in society and the internet, edited by mark graham and william dutton, 293-305. oxford: oup. de peuter, greig and dyer-witheford, nick. 2010. commons and cooperatives. communication studies faculty publications. 15. englert, sai, jamie woodcock, and callum cant. 2020. digital workerism: technology, platforms, and the circulation of workers' struggles'. triplec: communication, capitalism & critique, 18(2020), 132-145. geelan, torsten, and andy hodder. 2017. enhancing transnational labour solidarity: the unfulfilled promise of the internet and social media. industrial relations journal, 48 (4), 345-364. huws, ursula. 2020. reinventing the welfare state: digital platforms and public policies. london: pluto. morell, mayo fuster, ricard espelt, and melissa renau cano. 2020. sustainable platform economy: connections with the sustainable development goals. sustanability, 12 (8), 7640. pazaitis, alex, vasilis kostakis, and michel bauwens. 2017. digital economy and the rise of open cooperativism: the case of the enspiral network. transfer: european review of labour and research, 23 (2). sandoval, marisol. 2019. entrepreneurial activism? platform cooperativism between subversion and co-optation. critical sociology. online first, 2019. scholz, trebor. 2016. platform cooperativism: challenging the corporate sharing economy. new york: rosa luxemburg stiftung new york office. schor, juliet. 2020. after the gig: how the sharing economy got hijacked and how to win it back. berkeley: university of california press. soriano, cheryll, and jason cabanes. 2020. entrepreneurial solidarities: social media collectives and filipino digital platform workers. social media + society. online first. sun, pin. 2019. your order, their labor: an exploration of algorithms and laboring on food delivery platforms in china. chinese journal of communication, 12(3), 308-323. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): wimmer, j., waldenburger, l. (2020, october). digital stress in everyday life. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. digital stress in everyday life jeffrey wimmer university augsburg – department for media, knowledge and communication lisa waldenburger university augsburg – department for media, knowledge and communication research question: what is digital stress? how do the subjects perceive it and how do they describe it? it is now common sense that digitalization changes the living conditions and routines of every individual dramatically. if everyday discourses are primarily concerned with new possibilities or negative implications associated with the use of digital technologies and media, we would like to turn to a more holistic perspective which builds on subjective perceptions as well as practices. this ensures not only that the ambivalent potential of digital media is taken into account, but also that the media repertoire of the users is considered in its full complexity. existing research on this field of investigation resides under the term "digital stress" (weinstein and selman 2016; weinstein et al. 2016; reineke et al. 2016; hefner and vorderer 2017). in this sense, stress is the "result of an imbalance between external demands and the available possibilities to cope with them" (lohmann-haislah 2012). stress caused by digital technologies and media is referred to here as "digital stress". this term ties in with the concept of "technostress" introduced by clinical psychologist brod (1982). this describes the perceived inability of an individual to deal with new technology in a healthy way. digital stress, analogous to technostress, therefore includes tension, fatigue, excessive demands and the concern that an individual is not able to handle modern digital technologies adequately (salanova et al. 2013). this phenomenon has been a highly regarded topic in the scientific literature (especially in business informatics) over the last decade (e.g. ragu-nathan et al. 2008; ayyagari et al. 2011; tarafdar et al. 2011; riedl 2013; adam et al. 2014; gimpel et al. 2015; maier et al. 2015b; lee et al. 2016; adam et al. 2017). research in this area generally refers back to the transactional stress model of lazarus and folkman (1984). stress is either measured by established scales or medically in medicine by the increase in cortisol levels. the experience of digital stress, as far as we want to follow the theoretical approaches of lazarus, depends on subjective dispositions as well as on the situation itself and therefore cannot be generalized. for example, 30 new e-mails in a waiting room can be a welcome occupation; shortly before the end of work, however, it is a stress-inducing factor. the subjective habits of the individual also play a role. but in the most studies digital stress as a theoretical phenomenon is always approached deductively, so if the situational and subjective conditions for digital stress are fulfilled, then the subject is digitally stressed. the conditions applied are derived from explorative studies and causal considerations. however, the word combination "digital stress" seems to be a media-influenced, rather scientifically located concept, which, we assume, has no verbal equivalent in everyday interaction. the distinction between digital and analogue stress seems to have no relevance for the interactors in everyday situations. furthermore, studies show that people hardly make any reference to "stress" or "being stressed" when describing their use of digital technologies (röser et al. 2017). for this reason, in our research project we want to explore inductively the perceived characteristics and forms of digital stress in people's everyday life. how do they describe digital stress, is it different from other forms of stress and how does digital stress express itself? the focus is not genuinely on the topic of digital stress, but on the attempt to make this phenomenon empirically tangible and to link it to concepts of digital wellbeing. to this end, we are conducting explorative, open guideline interviews in spring 2020, methodologically oriented on grounded theory. the aim is to make digital stress qualitatively measurable by identifying the categories with which subjects act in the context of digital stress. at aoir we will present data that provides information about the subjective perception of digital stress by users, everyday situations and contexts in which they experience it, and possibly copying strategies that different groups of media users have developed so far in this context. this survey is the starting point of a 4-year research project on digital stress in everyday media life, which includes qualitative interviews, a 2-year panel study and ethnographic observations. references adam, m. t. p., gimpel, h., maedche, a. und riedl, r. (2014). stress-sensitive adaptive enterprise systems: theoretical foundations and design blueprint. proceedings of the neuro is retreat 2014. ayyagari, r., grover, v. und purvis, r. (2011). technostress: technological antecedents and implications. mis quarterly, 35(4), 831-858. gimpel, h., regal, c. und schmidt, m. (2015). mystress: unobtrusive smartphonebased stress detection. ecis 2015 research-in-progress papers. paper 16. hefner, d. und vorderer, p. (2017). digital stress. permanent connectedness and multitasking. in l. reinecke und m. b. oliver (hrsg.), the routledge handbook of media use and well-being: international perspective on theory and research on positive media effects (s. 237-249). new york, ny: routledge. lazarus, r. s. (1999). stress and emotion: a new synthesis. new york, ny: springer publishing company. lazarus, r. s. und folkman, s. (1984). stress, appraisal, and coping. new york, ny: springer publishing company. lee, a. r., son, s. und kim, k. k. (2016). information and communication technology overload and social networking service fatigue: a stress perspective. computers in human behavior, 55, 51-61. lohmann-haislah, a. (2012). stressreport deutschland 2012 – psychische anforderungen, ressourcen und befinden. dortmund/ berlin/ dresden: bundesanstalt für arbeitsschutz und arbeitsmedizin. maier, c., laumer, s., weinert, c. und weitzel, t. (2015). the effects of technostress and switching stress on discontinued use of social networking services: a study of facebook use. information systems journal, 25(3), 275-308. ragu-nathan, t. s., tarafdar, m., ragu-nathan, b. s. und qiang, t. (2008). the consequences of technostress for end users in organizations: conceptual development and empirical validation. information systems research, 19(4), 417-433. reinecke, l., aufenanger, s., beutel, m., dreier, m., quiring, o., stark, b., wölfling, k. und müller, k. (2016). digital stress over the life span: the effects of communication load and internet multitasking on perceived stress and psychological health impairments in a german probability sample. me-dia psychology, 20(1), 90-115. riedl, r. (2013). on the biology of technostress: literature review and research agenda. acm sigmis database, 44(1), 18-55. röser, j. (2017). silversurfer 70plus. qualitative fallstudien zur aneignung des internets in der renten-phase. münchen: kopaed. salanova, m., llorens, s. und cifre, e. (2013). the dark side of technologies: technostress among users of information and communication technologies. international journal of psychology, 48(3), 422-436. tarafdar, m., tu, q., ragu-nathan, t. s. und ragu-nathan, b. s. (2011). crossing to the dark side: examining creators, outcomes, and inhibitors of technostress. communications of the acm, 54(9), 113-120. weinstein, e. c. und selman, r. l. (2016). digital stress: adolescents’ personal accounts. new media & society, 18(3), 391-409. weinstein, e. c., selman, r. l., thomas, s., kim, j. e., white, a. e. und dinakar, k. (2016). how to cope with digital stress: the recommendations adolescents offer their peers online. journal of adolescent research, 31(4), 415-441. microsoft word aoir2021-submission-final.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): nieborg, d., poell, t. & duffy, b. (2021, october). analyzing platform power in the cultural industries. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. analyzing platform power in the cultural industries david b. nieborg university of toronto thomas poell university of amsterdam brooke erin duffy cornell university introduction across cultures and contexts, digital platforms like youtube, tiktok/douyin, wechat, and spotify are fundamentally reshaping both the processes and products of cultural production—from music and news to entertainment and advertising (poell et al., 2021). but, despite considerable attention to the perverse power of algorithms in various spheres of social and economic life, we contend that existing political economic frameworks fail to account for the distinctiveness of the cultural industries. these industries are, as sociologist gina neff (2012) contends, sites where value is “communicatively constituted and mediated” as part of the marketplace’s increasing reliance on the production of “symbolic, informational, and aesthetic goods” (p. 29). to help systematize analysis of the relations and flows of power between platforms and cultural producers, this paper introduces a framework that is carefully attuned to the historical and industrial specificities of cultural production. the framework makes clear that, while the relationship between platforms and cultural producers is staggeringly uneven and, at times, highly volatile, it should be understood as one of mutual dependence. that is, platforms exert mechanisms of power over the phases of the creation, distribution, monetization, and marketing of culture; but they also furnish space for negotiation and contestation. acknowledging this requires a framework that is less deterministic and sensitive to the nuance inherent in cultural production. towards a nuanced understanding of platform power key to understanding the reconfigured power relations in the cultural industries is the recognition that cultural producers are increasingly becoming institutional actors in multi-sided markets. while legacy media industries were predominantly sustained by single or dual (i.e., advertising and audience) revenue streams, platform companies in the cultural sector—e.g., facebook, google, tencent, and others—not only aim to acquire end-users and advertisers, but also complementors. the latter group consists of individual entrepreneurs and companies that ‘complement’ the products and services provided by the platform (i.e., a wide variety of cultural producers, data intermediaries, and others). to attract and retain these complementors, platform companies continuously adapt pricing structures, revenue models, developer agreements, moderation practices, algorithmic filtering mechanisms, and so on. throughout such processes, platforms try to strike a balance between openness and control of their platform boundaries. this, in turn, compels cultural producers to adopt and integrate decisions, often under highly precarious circumstances. to be sure, the platform-wrought pressures facing cultural producers are not without precedent. to the contrary, cultural producers have long negotiated control with gatekeepers, intermediaries, and immensely powerful transnational media conglomerates (mirrlees, 2013). but, with cultural producers becoming increasingly platform-dependent, it seems critical to conceptually delineate their spaces for negotiation and strategic decision-making. as such, this paper offers a conceptual blueprint for analyzing three key variables that inform a more systematic analysis of platform-dependent cultural production. variables building on research in science and technology studies (sts), software studies, political economy, business studies, and media industries studies, the paper presents a new analytical framework to analyse the evolving power relationship between platforms and cultural producers. we argue that the decision space of cultural producers as platform complementors is shaped by three key variables: 1) platform evolution, 2) cultural industry segments, and 3) stages of production. the first variable impacting the bargaining power of complementors is “platform evolution,” which describes the stage of a platform’s infrastructural development, its (in)ability to generate revenue, and its rate of adoption and subsequent uptake by endusers. sts scholarship reminds us that there is no set trajectory or predetermined path along which (media) technologies evolve. instead, as josé van dijck argues (2013), platforms go through a marked phase of “platform ambiguity” and “interpretative flexibility,” during which it is anything but ensured what a platform is meant to do, who a platform opens its boundaries to, and how its business model will develop. put differently, digital infrastructures—and we consider the platform services operated by alibaba, amazon, apple and other platforms to be prime examples of such—are inherently contingent and unpredictable; platform infrastructures (i.e., application programming interfaces, tools, documentation, etc.) are always evolving based on endusers’ datafied feedback, a platform’s business model, or tweaks to its governance framework (poell et al., 2021). consequently, platform evolution impacts complementors’ economic opportunities in variable ways. for instance, platform companies tend to provide cultural producers with more favorable economic conditions early in their lifecycle (rietveld et al., 2020). vice versa, those conditions tend to change when a platform ‘matures’, i.e., when it reaches a certain adoption threshold. for cultural producers, these stages affect the space of negotiations vis-à-vis platforms. second, platform adoption among cultural producers differs considerably among industry segments. historically, some parts of the cultural industries—games and social media entertainment—have been platform-dependent, whereas other segments—news and music—have histories far predating platforms. the latter set of industry segments tend to have more options to operate independently from platforms. this diversity is in part due to the strategic choices of cultural producers, but it also owes much to the ‘nature’ of specific modes of cultural production, including the historical trajectories of particular industry segments in particular cultural contexts (miège, 2011). thus, cultural producers becoming platform-dependent by no means signals an all-encompassing logic; nor does it affect all industries equally. as the relation between cultural producers and platforms is highly variable, the space of negotiations and strategic decision-making for these producers also widely varies. this second variable impacts a third variable: the stage of production. depending on whether one focuses on cultural creation, distribution, marketing, or monetization, cultural producers have more or less autonomy to operate independently from platforms in an economically sustainable fashion. providing access to large and diverse pools of end-users, platforms have become especially indispensable in the distribution phase. for example, the distribution of apps, streaming content, or social media entertainment all involve platform-dependent distribution. conversely, during the stages of cultural creation, marketing, and monetization, the supposed dominant role of platforms is less straightforward and not inherently platform-dependent, and therefore leaves cultural producers with other options. conclusion challenging essentialist theories of platform dominance, this paper argues that claims of platform power need to be qualified in the context of industryand culture-specific inquiries. the analysis we introduced testifies to both the power of platforms and the spaces of negotiations and decision-making among cultural producers. to understand how cultural producers depend on platforms and how changes in platform markets, infrastructures, and governance affect their operations, we need to carefully analyse how platforms and cultural producers interact in specific settings. and, by systematizing the research—exploring the variation in platform evolution, industry segments, and stages of cultural production—we gain a comprehensive understanding of how platform power takes shape in the contemporary cultural industries. references miège, b. (2011). theorizing the cultural industries: persistent specificities and reconsiderations. in j. wasko, g. murdock, & h. sousa (eds.), the handbook of political economy of communications (pp. 83–108). blackwell. mirrlees, t. (2013). global entertainment media: between cultural imperialism and cultural globalization. routledge. neff, g. (2012). venture labor: work and the burden of risk in innovative industries. mit press. poell, t., nieborg, d. b., & duffy, b. e. (2021). platforms and cultural production. polity rietveld, j., ploog, j. n., & nieborg, d. b. (2020). the coevolution of platform dominance and governance strategies: effects on complementor performance outcomes. academy of management discoveries, 6(3), 488–513. van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. oxford university press. aoir2023-submission-template.docx selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 super-appification: conglomeration in the mobile ecosystem fernando van der vlist university of amsterdam anne helmond utrecht university michael dieter university of warwick esther weltevrede university of amsterdam “super apps” are emerging and gaining popularity worldwide, especially in southeast asia, india and africa (heath, 2021; schumpeter, 2022). they are “do-everything apps that bring together an expansive suite of services within a single interface” (steinberg et al., 2022) and, therefore, become “more integrated into people’s lives.” while the term super app can be ambiguous, reflecting industry hype and speculative investment (pitre, 2022), it nevertheless speaks to the complexity of conglomeration processes occurring in the mobile ecosystem. in particular, it highlights the organisation, political economy, and geopolitics of the process of platformisation within the app economy, including how forms of platform expansion and encapsulation are culturally, geographically, and historically specific (cf. steinberg, 2020). as such, the rise of super apps (or super-appification) raises questions about the geo-historical distinctiveness of their platform architectures and business models, and how they facilitate modes of capital accumulation in today’s global economy. with their capacity to merge and expand services and users within a single unified experience, emerging studies of super apps have focussed on themes of enclosure and media concentration as they intensify the “appification” of everyday life (morris & elkins, 2015; morris & murray, 2018) and take on the role of a seemingly indispensable critical infrastructure (athique, 2019, dieter et al., 2021). they are described in this context as “all-in-one apps” (chen et al., 2018), “swiss-army-style apps” (steinberg, 2020) or suggested citation (apa): van der vlist, f., helmond, a., dieter, m., & weltevrede, e. (2023, october). super-appification: conglomeration in the mobile ecosystem. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “do-everything apps” that represent “a particular model of an app that assumes most functions of the smartphone can be done within either a single app or a suite of apps” (steinberg et al., 2022). initial studies of super apps, moreover, have questioned the novelty associated with the term; they are not necessarily considered the “next level up for apps” but rather foreground “the dominance of some digital platform companies” (goggin, 2021: 74). in this sense, super apps have also been understood as the outcome of specific corporate strategies, including conglomeration and financialisation (jia et al., 2022). this might be considered with ongoing concerns around the consolidation of power by very large platform corporations, or even monopolies, and the need to protect public values and institutions (van dijck, 2021; van der vlist, 2022). super apps, however, are uniquely viewed within this context as a particularly aggressive horizontal and locally-oriented business strategy compared to the vertical and globally-oriented strategy of us/silicon valley-based apps (atkins, 2019). they are, finally, often associated with non-western companies and can be seen as efforts to counterbalance us “platform imperialism” (jin, 2015) in smartphone devices, software operating systems and app stores, i.e. apple and google. approach while most of the emerging literature on super apps focuses on chinese and southeast-asian apps and companies such as tencent’s wechat—“the poster child for super apps” (chan, 2022)—this study offers a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon by looking at super apps from around the world (cf. pitre, 2022). specifically, it examines and discusses (1) what “super apps” are, (2) by whom they were developed, (3) when they were created or how they evolved over time, and (4) where—in which countries or regions or parts of the world—they have emerged. it builds on previous app studies research projects that have developed approaches to study mobile apps and their history and evolution using app stores, web archives, and app repositories (dieter et al., 2019; helmond & van der vlist, 2021). together, these four complementary perspectives provide an expanded understanding and discussion of the super app, not just as a particular type of app, but what we call a process of super-appification that leads to distinct app constellations (cf. staykova & damsgaard, 2016). varieties of super apps building on previous research on super app “variations” in asia (steinberg et al., 2022), we contribute a typology of these super-app constellations based on the distinct features identified in a collection of 40 super apps from around the world. this typology provides the basis for our discussion of the local or regional differences between apps, their historical emergence, their modes of capital accumulation, and the challenges and implications arising from them. for instance, super apps from non-western countries or regions primarily evolve out of financial services, mobility, or telecommunications (ajene, 2020). these origins enable rentier business models and strategies of capital accumulation, such as taking commission fees on payments and gig work (e.g., ride-hailing). they can also use partnerships to operate between and expand across regions. for example, the south african super app vodapay (by vodacom) recently partnered with the chinese alipay (by alibaba) to offer its services in south africa and egypt. alternatively, some super apps such as the russian platform vk offer localised app versions to operate between and across countries to meet different regulatory obligations. overall, the rise of super apps and their integration into people’s everyday lives invites us to delve deeper into the relatedness and situatedness of apps (dieter et al., 2019), breaking with their conception as isolated, stand-alone software applications. they motivate, in particular, an investigation into the unique processes of conglomeration unfolding in the mobile ecosystem, focusing on the different objects being combined, how the different modules of a super app are connected, and how these processes are shaped through existing infrastructure, market conditions and regulatory frameworks. references ajene, e. (2020). why super apps are proliferating across emerging markets. afridigest, 24 may. available at: https://afridigest.substack.com/p/why-super-apps-are-proliferating. athique, a. (2019). digital emporiums: platform capitalism in india. media industries, 6(2), 67–87. doi: 10.3998/mij.15031809.0006.205. atkins, b. (2019). are super apps the future? forbes, 3 september. available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/betsyatkins/2019/09/03/are-super-apps-the-future/. chan, c. (2022). what is a super app? andreessen horowitz (a16z), 16 december. available at: https://a16z.com/2022/12/16/super-app-definition-guide/. chen, y., mao, z., & qiu, j. l. (2018). super-sticky wechat and chinese society. emerald publishing. dieter, m., gerlitz, c., helmond, a., tkacz, n. van der vlist, f. n., & weltevrede, e. (2019). multi-situated app studies: methods and propositions. social media + society, 5(2), 1–15. doi: 10.1177/2056305119846486. dieter, m., helmond, a., tkacz, n., van der vlist, f. n., & weltevrede, e. (2021). pandemic platform governance: mapping the global ecosystem of covid-19 response apps. internet policy review, 10(3). doi: 10.14763/2021.3.1568. goggin, g. (2021). apps: from mobile phones to digital lives. wiley. heath, a. (2021). rise of the super app. the verge, 1 november. available at: https://www.theverge.com/22738395/social-media-super-app-facebook-wechat-shoppin g. helmond, a., & van der vlist, f. n. (2021). platform and app histories: assessing source availability in web archives and app repositories. in d. gomes, e. demidova, j. winters, & t. risse (eds.), the past web: exploring web archives. cham: springer, pp. 203–214. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-63291-5_16. https://afridigest.substack.com/p/why-super-apps-are-proliferating https://doi.org/10.3998/mij.15031809.0006.205 https://www.forbes.com/sites/betsyatkins/2019/09/03/are-super-apps-the-future/ https://a16z.com/2022/12/16/super-app-definition-guide/ https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119846486 https://doi.org/10.14763/2021.3.1568 https://www.theverge.com/22738395/social-media-super-app-facebook-wechat-shopping https://www.theverge.com/22738395/social-media-super-app-facebook-wechat-shopping https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63291-5_16 jia, l., nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2022). on super apps and app stores: digital media logics in china’s app economy. media, culture & society, 44(8), 1437–1453. doi: 10.1177/01634437221128937. jin, d. y. (2015). digital platforms, imperialism and political culture. routledge. morris, j. w., & elkins, e. (2015). there’s a history for that: apps and mundane software as commodity. the fibreculture journal, 25, 63–88. doi: 10.15307/fcj.25.181.2015. morris, j. w., & murray, s. (2018). appified: culture in the age of apps. university of michigan press. doi: 10.3998/mpub.9391658. pitre, j. (ed.) (2022). super apps: a platform lab report. montreal: the platform lab. available at: https://www.economist.com/business/2022/12/08/the-rise-of-the-super-app. schumpeter (2022) the rise of the super-app. the economist, 8 december. available at: https://www.economist.com/business/2022/12/08/the-rise-of-the-super-app. staykova, k. s., & damsgaard, j. (2016). platform constellations: the case of kakaotalk and line. pacis 2016 proceedings. steinberg m (2020) line as super app: platformization in east asia. social media + society, 6(2), 1–10. doi: 10.1177/2056305120933285. steinberg m, mukherjee r and punathambekar a (2022) media power in digital asia: super apps and megacorps. media, culture & society, 44(8), 1405–1419. doi: 10.1177/01634437221127805. van der vlist, f. n. (2022). the platform as ecosystem: configurations and dynamics of governance and power. utrecht university. doi: 10.33540/1284. van dijck, j. (2021). governing trust in european platform societies: introduction to the special issue. european journal of communication, 36(4), 323–333. doi: 10.1177/02673231211028378. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221128937 https://doi.org/10.15307/fcj.25.181.2015 https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9391658 https://www.economist.com/business/2022/12/08/the-rise-of-the-super-app https://www.economist.com/business/2022/12/08/the-rise-of-the-super-app https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120933285 https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221127805 https://doi.org/10.33540/1284 https://doi.org/10.1177/02673231211028378 selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): thorhauge, a.m., yuan, j.e., ørmen, j., gregersen, a. (2021, october). dynamics of digital markets. panel presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the dynamics of digital markets anne mette thorhauge university of copenhagen jingyan elaine yuan university of illinois chicago jacob ørmen university of copenhagen andreas gregersen university of copenhagen patrick vonderau martin luther university halle-wittenberg the focus of this panel is the material, organizational, and cultural conditions of digital markets. much research has been done on platform economies and platforms as a type of economic organization that contributes to reconfigurations of infrastructure, power, and the balance between public and private domains (van dijck, poell, & de waal, 2018; zuboff, 2019). moreover, it has been pointed out that platform architectures shape market interactions in a number of ways (srnicek, 2017). nevertheless, the characteristics of these markets have not received the same amount of attention from the perspective of platform studies. while the notion of economy refers to the more general production, distribution and allocation in society, the idea of markets represents specific contexts of economic exchange typical of capitalist economies (carruthers & babb, 2013). a more elaborate understanding of various markets and their relationships with digital platforms can expand our understanding of the economic implications that specific types of platform architectures can have at the level of economic interaction. thus, the aim of this panel is to zoom in on how specific digital markets are shaped by types of platform architectures, how they are organized in practice, and the types of interactions they facilitate locally as well as globally. this involves studying the interplay between regulatory bodies and digital platforms, the technical design and operations of specific platforms, as well as the cultural conventions that develop among actors in the marketplace. the discussion takes as a starting point perspectives from economic sociology that emphasize how markets are embedded into broader social and societal structures (granovetter, 2017) and conditioned upon cultural norms and conventions (beckert, 2009). in addition, the panel is informed by the way economic sociology and sts has approached the material conditions of markets (garcia-parpet, 2007; mackenzie, 2018) and the way these conditions frame and transform power relations and interaction patterns on specific markets. lastly, the panel relies on approaches from media economics to understand the interplay between actors in the marketplace. by bringing these perspectives together, the panel presentations address different dynamics of digital markets. the first paper shows how the gaming platform steam orchestrates a market for trading digital commodities (skins) and in that process institutes its own virtual currency. this contribution highlights the key role that digital platforms play in enabling (and constraining) the formation of markets through technical infrastructures (most notably apis) as well as legal frameworks. the second paper explores the relationship between platforms, markets, and state regulation. using the chinese e-commerce giant alibaba as a case, the presentation shows how digital marketplaces in china developed in a regulatory vacuum as an interplay between platform business strategies, government initiatives, and cultural conventions of actors in the market. the third presentation shifts the perspective further towards culture to address the way market interactions are framed and conditioned upon cultural norms and conventions. it investigates the role of narratives, imagined futures, and collective action frames in motivating ordinary people to invest in the stock market (through retail investor apps like robin hood). the presentation looks at the recent investment hype around gamestop shares on the subreddit r/wallstreetbets as an example of the dynamics involved. the fourth and last presentation explores how the online engagement industry is organized in practice and looks specifically at the phenomenon of “click farms”. through ethnographic field work, the author shows that far from being steered by top-down algorithmic governance, this digital economy consists of a multitude of actors that make everyday decisions based on pragmatic and local needs in their efforts make ends meet; in short, capitalizing from below. altogether, the presentations demonstrate that digital markets come in different forms and shapes, but also that they are guided, shaped, and constrained by similar mechanisms and practices. references beckert, j. (2009). the social order of markets. theory and society, 38(3), 245–269. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-008-9082-0 carruthers, b. g., & babb, s. l. (2013). economy/society: markets, meanings, and social structure (second edi). sage publications. garcia-parpet, m.-f. (2007). the social construction of a perfect market. in d. mackenzie, f. munesia, & l. siu (eds.), do economists make markets?: on the performativity of economics (pp. 20–53). granovetter, m. (2017). society and economy. harvard university press. mackenzie, d. (2018). ‘making’,‘taking’and the material political economy of algorithmic trading. economy and society, 47(4), 501–523. srnicek, n. (2017). platform capitalism. john wiley & sons. van dijck, j., poell, t., & de waal, m. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford university press. zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. profile books. skinbetting, virtual money and the market strategy of the steam platform anne mette thorhauge, university of copenhagen, denmark skinbetting is one way gaming and gambling is currently converging on the internet. it refers to online game-settings where players can use skins as tokens in classic casino games such as blackjack and roulette as an alternative to cryptocurrencies or credit cards. this is possible because of steam’s api, which allows 3rd party developers and websites to access the steam community market: in contrast to competing platforms run by epic or electronic arts, valve (the operator of steam) has chosen to support a ‘community market’ on its platform where players can trade items from the games they play. while skins cannot be resold in fortnite and player decks cannot be resold in fifa, it is possible to resell items from games such as counter-strike: global offensive, dota 2, team fortress 2 and pubg on the steam platform where these games as played. moreover, by way of its open api, steam has also made this market accessible to 3rd party developers (thorhauge & nielsen, 2021). this has given way to a number of 3rd party sites such as skin trading sites, which are perfectly legal, and skin betting sites, which are illegal to the extent that they are not authorized and offer their services to minors. on one hand, the existence of skinbetting may be an unfortunate consequence of steam’s ‘secondary market strategy’, on the other it may serve a number of economic aims such as growing the market, regulating prices, or supporting the transformation of skins into an alternative ‘gamer-currency’. in this paper i will explore the last option. i will discuss money as a phenomenon and the role of institutions and technological infrastructures in the ‘making of money’. in extension of this i will discuss how cryptocurrencies are currently challenging the way money is produced, how skins may or may not be seen as part of this tendency, and whether this can be seen as an aspect of steam’s market strategy. with reference to schumpeter, ingham (ingham, 2004) identifies two historical approaches to money: the commodity theory and the claim theory. from the perspective of the former money is basically just another type of commodity, which differs from other commodities due to its interchangeability. in contrast, the claim theory focuses on a more abstract notion of money as ‘money of account’, that is, money as a phenomenon that consists of claims and credits (ibid, p. 21). it is by way of the latter that the phenomenon of ‘credit-money’ has become the most dominating form in late capitalism where the creation of money is directly tied to the creation of debt (dodd, 2018). given its crucial role in capitalist economies economic theory has paid surprisingly little attention to money as a theoretical concept. indeed, much classic theory builds on the idea that money is a neutral commodity, a ‘veil’ that covers what can basically be boiled down to a barter economy (samuelson 1974 cited in ingham 2004). in doing so, economic theory fails to explain and take into consideration the way money is created and distributed in society. ingham points out that power in societies not only relates to possession and quantities of money but also to who can produce money in the first place, with the state and the banking system as key institutions in question. thus, while we tend to believe that cryptocurrencies challenge our ideas about what money is, cryptocurrencies rather lay bare the inconsistencies and controversies that are built into different concepts of money. bitcoin has thus been explained as commodity money without gold, fiat money without state and credit money without debt (bjerg, 2016) and can in this way be defined through a double disintermediation in its separation from banks and the state (dodd 2018). technically this is done by replacing the authority of the state and the money lending power of the bank with the ‘distributed ledger’ made possible by blockchain technologies. this double disintermediation is tied to the ‘tech-utopian’ idea that bitcoin can remove politics from the production and management of money altogether (dodd 2018, p. 8). however, as dodd points out, this is contradictory in a number of ways. for the sake of the current argument the most important contradiction is that the seemingly ‘horizontal’ and distributed character of the blockchain system (which the tech-utopian perspective interprets as an emancipation from the power of the state and the banking system) in practice concentrates power in the code and the one who controls it. indeed, the concentration of power can from this perspective be seen as greater than ever. returning to the question of skins and the steam platform, what can this tell us about skins and their possible status as commodity and money? firstly, skins from different game titles are currently being bought, collected, and gifted between players in a range of contexts depending on what is made possible by the specific platform architecture. in this way, skins represent a specific type of virtual commodity and at this level steam does not differ significantly from other platforms and game titles that build their business models on microtransactions and the sales of virtual items. however, by featuring a secondary market strategy in the form of the steam community market, skins from specific steam game titles can be traded between players for money, enhancing these skins’ status as commodity as well as their fungibility into monetary value. and due to this fungibility skins figure next to credit cards and cryptocurrencies on various skinbetting sites. as mentioned in the introduction, this may just be an externality, an unfortunate consequence of steams ‘secondary market strategy’ (lehdonvirta & castronova, 2014). however, it may also serve specific strategic aims such as supporting the development of skins into a gamer-currency. from this perspective skinbetting may serve a symbolic as well as a performative purpose in steams overall market strategy. using skins as payment on skin-betting sites might be that crucial point where skins are transformed into commodity money, a currency independent of the state and the banking system. unlike bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies this currency is not upheld by a blockchain system, instead it is upheld by active gamers operating on the steam community markets which may just represent another path into the endeavor of making money, once the monopolies of the state and the banking systems have been broken. references bjerg, o. (2016). how is bitcoin money? theory, culture & society, 33(1), 53–72. dodd, n. (2018). the social life of bitcoin. theory, culture & society, 35(3), 35–56. ingham, g. (2004). the nature of money. economic sociology: european electronic newsletter, 5(2), 18–28. lehdonvirta, v., & castronova, e. (2014). virtual economies: design and analysis. mit press. thorhauge, a. m., & nielsen, r. k. l. (2021). epic, steam and the role of skin-betting in game (platform) economies. consumer culture, forthcomin. alibaba’s bazaar: the ecology of platform economy in china elaine yuan, the focus of this study is how china’s “platform economy” has evolved. through a case study of alibaba, china’s leading e-commerce giant, this study argues that china’s platform economy takes shape in situated interactions between the state actors and the private sectors. the evolving platform economy is a living social field. its organizations, technologies, governance mechanisms, and market strategies, as suggested by herrigel (2010), are consistently subject to mutual adjustment. this fluid process reconfigures the state-market and state-society relationships which in turn redefines the identities and boundaries of key actors. the study focuses on three distinct empirical sites of interactions, which have also defined the different roles of alibaba along the trajectory of its development in different social economic environments: as the vehicle of mass entrepreneur and consumption, the enabler of taobao villages, and the alternative route of financialization. the study demonstrates that how the relationship between alibaba and the state has evolved along time, from a largely laissez-faire stance of the state towards the digital private sector, to a symbiotic platform-state relationship, finally to a conflictual relationship in the new context of financialization. the fast development of a digital economy is premised on the state’s goal of postindustrial transformation and its related effort to develop digital infrastructures. the structural opportunity for china’s digital platforms was further opened up during china’s economic transition since the mid-2000s. trying to readjust from an investmentand export-oriented growth model to a consumption-driven and service focused one, this economic structural reform is exemplified by the state’s policy initiatives such as the “internet +” and the mass entrepreneurship and innovation directives. it is seen as a way to solve china’s long-term growth problem and to ease the tensions between sustained development and social equity in china. alibaba has positioned itself as a provider of self-employment opportunities for small business owners and grassroots entrepreneurs since its very beginning. this strategy fits well the state’s economic goals of boosting domestic consumption and promoting the digital and service industries. as the company further grows, alibaba has deepened its ties to the government that is keen to boost domestic consumption and digital economy. with the urban markets increasingly saturated, alibaba has strategically moved to grow in countryside. its focus on rural villages helped restructuring relations between the state, capital, and local actors. rural e-commerce became central in the state’s strategic efforts of “newapproach to urbanization”, “targeted poverty alleviation”, and “rural revitalization” as lin zhang (2021) has observed, alibaba helped the state advance its economic restructuring goals and mobilize local officials to participate in these efforts, thereby emerging as a private subcontractor for the state. after establishing its monopoly in e-commerce, alibaba expanded further into finance sector with the establishment of ant group in 2014. ant’s financial enterprise started in 2003, when alibaba debuted alipay, a third-party payment service. growing fast along alibaba’s e-commerce empire, alipay nevertheless operated in the gray areas of china’s otherwise tightly controlled financial sector. then came china’s post-2008 economic transition. it opened up new space for private fintech companies to break into the state-monopolized financial industry. alibaba’s growth in the financial sector played well along the state’s priorities along the lines of mass innovation and entrepreneurship. the idea of “inclusive finance” is poised to support rural areas and small businesses traditionally underserved by the big banks. alibaba subsequently took the opportunity to further expand. it launched yu’ebao, an investment service that allows users to invest their money through alibaba directly, in 2013’ huabei, a consumer loan business, in 2014, and jiebei, a microloan service, in 2015 (zhang, 2020). alibaba’s enormous user base and rich consumer data gave ant a great advantage in the nascent fintech market, further encroaching on the turf of the state’s banking institutions. as alibaba’s role in the finance sector grew, government regulators became more cautious and interventionist. furthermore, the state embarked on a nationwide campaign to contain financial risks after the burst of the equity bubble in july 2015 and the fall of the peer-to-peer lending sector after 2016. ant, particularly its profitable consumer credit and company loan services, came in for mounting regulatory scrutiny (zhang, 2020). the blurred lines between traditional banking and financial sectors and digital tech industries, as well as the murky role of the state as both a stakeholder and a regulator, pose challenges to existing legal and regulatory regimes of platform economy. more than any single economic sector or institution, digital economy, as exemplified by alibaba’s business empire, grows out of the situated interplays between the state and private sectors. these sites become places where actors define their selfunderstandings and interrelations. references herrigel, g. (2010). manufacturing possibilities: creative action and industrial recomposition in the united states, germany, and japan (pp. 32-33). new york: oxford. zhang, l. (2021). the labor of reinvention entrepreneurialism and the remaking of china after 2008. book manuscript. zhang, l. (2020). put ant under the microscope. six tones. https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1006422/putting-ant-under-the-microscope diamond hands to the moon: cognitive metaphors, collective action frames, and intermedia processes related to r/wallstreetbets jacob ørmen and andreas gregersen, university of copenhagen, denmark when stock market shares of brick-and-mortar video game store gamestop (gme) exploded in value during january 2021 (rising more than 2000% in a month), a large group of retail investors made millions of dollars in profit and inflicted billions of dollars in losses upon institutional investors. this extraordinary event was largely (but not solely) due to the coordinated activities of a collective of individuals which frequents the reddit subforum r/wallstreetbets (wsb). our presentation outlines a study of the dynamics surrounding the wsb/gme case in winter and spring 2021. we build an analytical framework which synthesizes parts from four lines of work. the first is the narrative economics of robert shiller (2019), which emphasizes the role and structure of narratives in economics in general. the second is the economic sociology of jens beckert (2016), from which we borrow the central notion of fictional expectations, including the ideas that such expectations can be managed and that this management has intrinsic connections to power. the third part is the frame analysis of gamson (1992) and benford and snow (2000), which delivers necessary finer grain on the formal nature of the representations; the most important component here is the existence of particularly powerful framing devices for collective mobilization. the fourth and final part of the framework is the notion of intermedia agenda-setting (mccombs, 2004; neuman et al., 2014), where different media agendas feed into and out of each other over time. starting with the notion of economic narratives, shiller (2019) emphasizes the role of representations and emotional reactions in the economy. shiller proposes that we should look for constellations of narratives since several narratives typically are in play simultaneously. our analysis of wsb/gme shows that wsb had, prior to the time of the viral gme event, already established a discursive repertoire consisting of a small set of communicative units. this discursive repertoire has a distinct layered structure. the first and most basic layer consists of micro-units akin to memes, which function both as individually salient cognitive schemas and scaffolding of idio-cultural identity (fine, 2012; brekhus, 2015). two of the most prominent and gme-relevant examples of cognitive schematic structures would be the micro-unit “diamond hands” (a popular meme on wsb meaning “to hold a risky stock instead of selling it”) which signals strength and fortitude in individual agency – the opposite unit is “toilet paper hands”, and the contrast between immaculate beauty and vehicle for excrement is noteworthy in addition to the material implications. another micro-unit is “rocket to the moon” (a meme signalling “the possibility of stocks rising dramatically”), where a technological-utopian and nostalgic/fantastic element evokes fantasies of space-age exploration. when these two memes are combined, this becomes a micro-narrative of economic expectations (beckert, 2016), signifying that community members can prosper by holding a specific stock. the labels “retards” and “autistics” are examples of identity-scaffolding meme units. both of these labels function as idio-cultural honorifics are used to praise community members for consciously engaging in highly speculative and risky financial activities. two additional points from shiller are relevant here. first, the power of economic narratives tends to increase when they incorporate celebrities as a kind of human angle into an otherwise faceless and dry economic narrative. the wsb/gme narrative constellation includes at least two celebrities who were recruited into the narrative as heroes/spokespersons, namely michael burry (activist investor) and elon musk (worldfamous entrepreneur) – the latter invoking his own status as privy to the game through twitter. wsb also has its own proto-celebrity in the guise of member dfv, who ostensibly spearheaded the gme event on the subreddit itself. the second point from shiller is that economic narratives need not make sense on a mechanistic level, i.e. they do not need to explain how the stock market works, they merely need to evoke positive feelings and fantasies of profit. gme offers an example of this being both true and in need of qualification. a narrative construction such as “diamond hands” + “rocket to the moon” is obviously purely metaphorical, but the gme event also involved more technical explanations of how collective action of holding stocks might trigger a socalled short squeeze. this way, the overall constellation of narratives offers both metaphorical power and a mechanistic explanation. it also shows how fictional expectations can be managed by savvy actors, in this case by explaining in some detail how diamond hands may trigger an actually existing stock-market mechanism. the resulting mass mobilization of wsb to buy and hold gme was scaffolded by an additional layer of representation, namely a set of collective action frames (benford & snow, 2000) which integrated the memetic units and drew on the rebellious aura of burry and musk. the dominant frame drew heavily on notions of injustice (gamson, 1992) to deliver a morally convincing story of why and how “diamond hands on gme” could be a way to collectively “stick it to the man”. this framing pitted the ragged and just retards, i.e. wsb retail investors, against evil wall street hedge funds such as melvin capital. this frame drew on existing cultural templates such as strength in numbers, david vs goliath, robin hood vs illegitimate power etc. in addition to this mix of idiosyncratic and more widespread discursive units, the wsb/gme process hinged upon a complex, recursive intermedia agenda-setting and framing process (mccombs, 2004; neuman et al., 2014). this was not solely a process where established media relayed the communication from reddit, but also a process of the financial markets reacting to the developing situation. this resulted in further media proliferation across twitter as well as online news outlets, which led to massive exposure of reddit and a wave of new redditors (participants on the forum) joining the discussion and investing in hyped stocks (including but not limited to gme) through retail investing apps such as robin hood. in summary, the presentation demonstrates how a perspective that synthesizes insights from cognitive social science, narrative economics, economic sociology, and media and communication theory is necessary to understand stock-market dynamics. references beckert, jens. 2016. imagined futures: fictional expectations and capitalist dynamics. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. benford, robert d., and david a. snow. 2000. “framing processes and social movements: an overview and assessment.” annual review of sociology 26:611–39. brekhus, wayne h. 2015. culture and cognition. cambridge: polity. fine, gary alan. 2012. tiny publics. new york, ny: russel sage foundation. gamson, william. 1992. talking politics. cambridge: cambridge university press. mccombs, maxwell. 2014. setting the agenda: the mass media and public opinion. 2nd ed. cambridge, uk: polity press. neuman, w. russell, lauren guggenheim, s. mo jang, and soo young bae. 2014. “the dynamics of public attention: agenda-setting theory meets big data.” journal of communication 64(2):193–214. shiller, r. j. (2019). narrative economics: how stories go viral & drive major economic events. princeton university press. capitalizing from below: an ethnography of ‘click farming’ patrick vonderau, martin luther university halle-wittenberg, germany markets are like the dark matter of digital media culture: they are felt everywhere as densely structured and coordinated cultural forms, yet tend to remain largely out of sight. one reason for this strange co-occurrence of omnipresence and apparent invisibility (where exactly are songs, movies or books traded online?) is that media themselves are partly ”hidden organizations” (costas & grey 2016), at least from a consumer perspective. substantial parts of value creation are deliberately hidden from view because of business secrecy related to sunk costs in research and development, for instance, or because value is extracted from data without user consent, as in the case of private data brokerage (draper 2019). another reason is that a considerable part of market exchange involves ”organizing without organizations” (czarniawska 2014): it doesn’t necessarily require a formal setting to sell games or even production services online. this paper focusses on yet another reason, which is that some digital media markets are organized in ways that only allow to infer how something has been exchanged, even for market actors themselves. in these cases, it is the market structure itself which obscures how exchange takes place, regularly prompting attempts to attribute accountability to someone: who is in charge of this specific market? more specifically, this paper looks at the ways how engagement with social media and cultural content is commodified and traded by actors that partly belong to formal and legit, even branded organizations, and that partly are anonymous and unknown. while previous research on this online engagement industry has worked with notions of disinformation, shadow or ”fake” economies (e.g. abidin 2018; ong & cabanes 2019), the research presented here is premised on the observation that there is no false representation of value at stake in markets for likes, followers or plays, and that these markets are not even necessarily informal or illicit. putting a praxeological bend to the idea informing this panel, i.e. of markets being fields (fligstein 2012), this paper studies various market practices that are required to ”capitalize” on something as elusive as a like (muniesa et al. 2017; kjellberg & helgesson 2007). what does it mean “to like” something in the context of this engagement industry? how is the market for likes (but also: followers, comments or plays) put into practice? technically, the like is a facebook plugin introduced in 2009 with a button and counter. culturally, liking is a numerical practice that emulates social connectivity; likes count because of this purpose of premediating connectivity (gerlitz & helmond 2013). anticipating more likes or connections, the receiver of a like imagines, rather than rationally calculates, the prospects of a near future. while there are several reasons why engagement is bought and sold, the underlying economic logic of this industry remains bound to a concept of imagined futures as discussed in economic theory since the 19th century (beckert 2016; stäheli 2013). a main contention of this paper is that in order to understand this industry, it is helpful to map its distributed “system of provision” (fine 2002) and its economic logics rather than attributing accountability to isolated industry stakeholders, as journalists and regulators do (e.g. confessore et al. 2018). how selling likes, followers or plays is done practically amounts to what i would like to describe as capitalizing from below. not in the sense of ‘the people’ vs. ‘the system,’ as often invoked in investigative reports that locate “click farms” in the global south, but to nuance the wide-spread idea of top-down algorithmic governance or logics (gillespie 2014; nieborg & poell 2018). what we have found is that markets for engagement are neither a direct function of north-south hierarchies nor of automation, as bots are only one among several prominent ways to generate engagement globally. analyzing market practices, this paper rather highlights a temporal logics that is also very much local and situational (rofel & yanagisako 2019). based on an extensive, three-year research project that aimed to map the global topology of the engagement industry, the paper follows one single chain of supply chain actors from germany to russia and beyond in order to find out, through an unravelling of their vast “action nets” (czarniawska 2011), how agents of capitalization think, act, and perform this digital market. the paper combines forms of ethnographic fieldwork including interviews and (non-) participant observation with media industry analysis, and integrates an experimental collaboration with two investigative journalists and a criminologist in order to map a fascinating service economy. this way, i also hope to contribute to, and complement, a broader discussion in internet studies which has mostly centered on platforms and platform architectures to explain the digital economy (helmond 2015; nieborg/poell 2018). to do so, i am taking my cue from sts-oriented approaches within economic sociology, the anthropology of markets (e.g. caliskan 2010), and a long tradition of cultural studies-oriented work in media studies now labelled as ”production studies” (e.g. caldwell 2008; see also ong/cabanes 2019 for a related move into the same direction). references abidin, crystal. 2018. internet celebrity: understanding fame online. bingley: emerald. beckert, jens. 2016. imagined futures: fictional expectations and capitalist dynamics. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. caldwell, john thornton (2008): production culture. industrial reflexivity and critical practice in film and television. durham. caliskan, koray. 2010. market threads: how cotton farmers and traders create a global commodity. princeton: princeton university press. confessore, nicholas et al. “the follower factory,” the new york times, january 27, 2018. costas, jana, christopher grey. 2016. secrecy at work: the hidden architecture of organizational life. stanford: stanford university press. czarniawska, barbara. 2011. ”going back to go forward: on studying organizing in action nets.” in: hernes, t, maitlis s (eds.) process, sensemaking, and organizing. oxford: oxford university press, 140-160. czarniawska, barbara. 2014. a theory of organizing. second edition. cheltenham: elgar. draper, nora. 2019. the identity trade. selling privacy and reputation online. new york: new york university press. fine, ben. 2002. the world of consumption: the material and cultural revisited. london: routledge. fligstein, neil, doug mcadam. 2012. a theory of fields. oxford: oxford university press. gerlitz, carolin, and anne helmond. 2013. “the like economy—social buttons and the data intensive web.” new media & society 15 (8): 1348–65. gillespie, tarleton. 2014. the relevance of algorithms. in: gillespie t, boczkowski pj and foot ka (eds.) media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society. cambridge, ma: the mit press, pp. 167–194. helmond, anne. 2015. ”the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready.” social media + society 1(2): 1–11. kjellberg, hans, and claes-fredrik helgesson. 2007. “on the nature of markets and their practices.” marketing theory 7 (2): 137–62. muniesa, fabian et al. 2017. capitalization: a cultural guide. paris: presses des mines. nieborg, david, and thomas poell. 2018. “the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity.” new media & society 20 (11): 4275– 92. rofel, lisa, sylvia. j. yanagisako. 2019. fabricating transnational capitalism. durham: duke university press. ong, jonathan corpus, jason cabanes. 2019. ”when disinformation studies meets production studies: social identities and moral justifications in the political trolling industry.” international journal of communication 13 (2019): 5771-5790. stäheli, urs. 2013. spectacular speculation: thrills, the economy, and popular discourse. stanford: stanford university press. microsoft word li-on brown boxes-on brown boxes.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): li, z. (2021, october). on brown boxes: hidden interdependence in unboxing videos. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. on brown boxes: hidden interdependence in unboxing videos zizi li university of california, los angeles this project investigates the hidden interdependence in unboxing videos by examining brown cardboard boxes and what i term “brown-boxing” through a case study, focusing on one youtube unboxing video by makeup influencer roxette arisa (2019). brownboxing is connected to the metaphor of “black-boxing,” often refers to powerful yet hidden mechanisms in scientific knowledge production. like how black-boxing signals the practice of hiding information/labor in technology, brown-boxing points to the mechanisms of concealment along the supply chain. brown and black boxes are typically discussed in separate spaces, with the former attracting logistics scholars whereas the latter appealing to sts researchers. this paper shows how unboxing videos are valuable to study the overlapping of varying infrastructures and/as labor (parks and starosielski 2015) that sustain the digital economy. utilizing close reading and cultural analysis, i unpack characteristics of unboxing videos and the brown-boxing phenomenon to illustrate the entanglement between influencer media and supply chain. considering the increasing prevalence of delivery services and influencer marketing, brown boxes can help us explore the mechanism and aesthetics of digital capitalism. when analyzing arisa’s video, i am confronted with the hypervisible and performative, invisible and highly disposable brown boxes. conspicuous consumption (veblen 1899) has exacerbated in the digital influencer era as manifested in the visuality of abundance, with excessive consumption normalized in the name of style. stacks upon stacks of brown boxes are displayed in an aesthetics of copiousness. although this is an hour-long video, only around four minutes are related to unboxing brown boxes. the core of the video attends to the inner packages, showcasing products, and expressing gratitude to brands. brown box is a shipping exterior that physically protects the objects of value inside. it is the aesthetics of these products and the copious way of life that is ultimately being projected through unboxing videos. inner boxes are things on display, decoupled from their sources and journeys. brown boxes’ uniformity generally performs visual secrecy that adds to the magic of delivery service experienced by consumers, divorcing it from the labor performed by logistics workers. i see unboxing videos as a process genre (skvirsky 2020) that capitalizes on the literal secrecy offered by brown boxes made possible the production of such media to increase the aura of value of the items inside. while labor is present, it remains either hypervisible or invisible as influencer media spectacularizes work. the demystified process are ones that can be aestheticized and capitalized, such as taking apart the gimmicky-looking box stacks and the suspense-and-joy of unwrapping packages. the revealed processes tend to generate affective relationships between the influencer and their followers through this shared commercial intimacy (abidin and thompson 2012), which also indirectly increase the influencer’s social-cultural-economic capital. the ones that remain invisible involve exploited labor across sectors. if being unraveled, these concerns will devalue the brands, youtube channel, and the influencer’s overall portfolio. as such, unboxing videos embody a parasitic relationship between influencers and brands in a way that maintains the capitalistic future by uplifting the ideals of consumption via aesthetics of excess and selective concealment of labor time/process. there are many kinds of invisible labor necessitated by virtual work and digital economy (cherry 2016). unboxing videos offer a particular venue to consider creator labor in relation to logistics work. arisa’s filming was interrupted by a doorbell with more boxes delivered by a ups worker. arisa recounts the brief encounter and includes some footage. the worker is a silenced and invisible figure; we cannot hear or see him. but we hear arisa—who was holding the delivered boxes and a camera—awkwardly saying “oh, hi, thank you, sorry.” nonetheless, we can feel the presence of the delivery worker via this brief off-frame interaction captured in the video. it is in these split seconds that the magic of click-and-arrive as an ideal technology of zero work is dispelled. while “all productive activities are measured against the magic standard” that any product can be produced more effortlessly and any process can be run more smoothly, packages do not just magically appear on the doorstep (gell 1992). the production and distribution of goods run on a massive and diverse workforce across the supply chain even in the present “automated” society. the captured brown-boxing phenomenon points to the containerization of supply chain capitalism in the last-mile delivery, involving workers responsible for distributing goods to customers in warehouses, fulfillment centers, retail stores, and delivery vehicles (bonancich and wilson 2008). in this light, i propose the need to unpack unboxing videos and other influencer media in a relational-materialist framework that highlights the interdependence between “creative” and “physical” labor in and beyond the digital realm. although supply chain is rarely discussed in influencer scholarship, how influencers interact with logistical labor/infrastructure do unexpectedly show up with evidence of interdependence unintentionally seeping into audiovisual media. the visually-and-audibly invisible ups worker in arisa’s video, for instance, is channeled through the rupture of her filming process. byam (2015) sees relational labor as uncompensated immaterial work microcelebrities continuously do to build and maintain ongoing interpersonal and group relationships. sharing this affective moment of interruption and feeling of “being judged” by others (arisa 2019) generates a sense of intimacy, authenticity, and connectivity. but influencer work is more than brand management and audience engagement. this brief documented encounter between arisa and the delivery worker reveals a kind of relational labor engaged by influencers that goes beyond building digital relationship with followers, and as intermediaries between brands and consumers. without a properly functioning logistics industry, influencers would not be able to unbox, review, and market products timely on different platforms. as mentioned earlier, brown-boxing refers to the practice of concealment in the supply chain capitalism. not only are goods hidden by brown boxes and the process of delivery service remain mostly unseen, but logistics workers’ bodies are also often buried by extreme productivity quotas and physically blocked by huge stacks of heavy boxes in the warehouse floors and delivery trucks. this study suggests that unboxing videos as a process genre has the potential of visualizing the interdependent relationships in influencer economy by presenting relational labor performed in the interactions between influencers and logistics workers. references abidin, c., and thompson, e.c. (2012). “buymylife.com: cyber-femininities and commercial intimacy in blogshops,” women’s studies international forum 35:467-477. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2012.10.005 arisa, r. (2019, sep 8). my biggest pr unboxing haul ever *not clickbait* [video]. youtube. https://youtu.be/i0llsgcbsag bonancich, e., and wilson, j.b. (2008). getting the goods: ports, labor and the logistics. cornell up. byam, n.k. (2015). “connect with your audience! the relational labor of connection,” the communication review 18(1):14-22. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714421.2015.996401 cherry, m.a. (2016). virtual work and invisible labor. in crain m., poster w., and cherry m. (eds.), invisible labor: hidden work in the contemporary world (pp.71-86). u-of-california press. gell, a. (1992). the technology of enchantment and the enchantment of technology. in coote h. and shelton a. (eds.), anthropology, art, and aesthetics (pp.40-63). clarendon. parks, l., and starosielski, n. (eds.) (2015). signal traffic: critical studies of media infrastructures. u-of-illinois press. skvirsky, s.a. (2020). the process genre: cinema and the aesthetic of labor. duke up. veblen, t. (1899). the theory of the leisure class. pantianos. please update your browser your browser isn’t supported anymore. update it to get the best youtube experience and our latest features. learn more safari opera google chrome microsoft edge mozilla firefox remind me later about copyright contact us terms privacy policy & safety © 2025 google llc please update your browser your browser isn’t supported anymore. update it to get the best youtube experience and our latest features. learn more safari opera microsoft edge mozilla firefox google chrome remind me later about copyright contact us terms privacy policy & safety © 2025 google llc microsoft word liao-'it's my fault for posting in the first place'-'it's my fault for posting in the first place'.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 liao, t., fite, h. (2021, october). ‘it’s all my fault for posting in the first place’: how individual responsibility and self-blame are sustained and internalized. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ‘it’s my fault for posting in the first place’: how individual responsibility and self-blame are sustained and internalized tony liao university of houston haley fite university of cincinnati introduction with each instance of data breaches, corporate misuse of data, and advanced tracking programs, users are confronted with how much to continue engaging with these platforms, how to improve them, and where responsibility lies (hargittai & marwick, 2016; barth & de jong, 2017). after every event, there is often condemnation of the companies, but some of the blame inevitably falls on users for having trusted these companies, voluntarily posted, and turned over their information in the first place (fiesler & hallinan, 2018). these messages can also contribute to a phenomenon known as ‘breach fatigue,’ in which people grow weary of continual privacy encroachments (choi, park, & jung, 2018). this study attempts to explore these discourses of individual responsibility and selfblame. using the case of algorithmically generated personality profiles, this study showed people a real-life example of data expectations being violated. by exploring their rationales and responses to these profiles, this study builds on our understanding of how people perceive algorithms, who they blame for these encroachments, how blame is internalized, and what that process might tell us about data policy. self-blame and individual responsibility as dominant discourses one avenue of research has been to examine how people react to privacy violations, or do not react in some instances. known as the ‘privacy paradox,’ there has been a welldocumented disconnect between stated attitudes about privacy and actual protection behaviors (barth & de jon, 2017; debatin et al., 2009). rather than motivate heightened protection, some researchers have found that stories of continual algorithmic intrusions can lead to ‘digital resignation,’ a begrudging acceptance of tracking, algorithms and data collection (draper & turow, 2019). thus, many believe that there is nothing they can do to effectively manage their personal information on the internet (acquisti, et al., 2006; hargittai & marwick, 2016). even the literature on digital non-use and quitting as a solution has found that it is difficult to maintain, assumes that people know the source of data misuse, and is more complicated than a dichotomous yes/no view as far as use (baumer et al., 2013). as this research makes apparent, there are complicated rationalizations and compromises happening when it comes to digital privacy, as individuals navigate the space and engage in a series of trade-offs, defense mechanisms, and cognitive dissonance (draper & turow, 2019; fiesler & hallinan, 2018). this study aims to explore these issues using a real-world case where data was taken from participant’s social media sites and entered into an unknown personality detection algorithm. founded in 2015, crystalknows automatically generates personality profiles for certain individuals through an algorithm that captures and processes public data online. often created without their explicit consent, the resulting profile includes a set of personality indicators as well as recommendations for how to communicate and interact with this person (see figure 1). to which we ask the following research questions: rq1: where will individuals place the blame when confronted with an unidentified personality detection algorithm using unknown data sources that they did not explicitly consent to? rq2: what do people’s rationalizations about personality detection algorithms tell us about the data privacy environment? (figure 1 – crystalknows profiles) methods participants were recruited at a university in the midwest united states. we received consent to search their names in the crystalknows database. only participants who had a pre-existing profile were invited to participate. they reviewed their personality profiles before participating in a semi-structured interview about their perceptions and reactions to the algorithm. interviews (n=37) were audio-recorded and coded using the data analysis program dedoose. findings rq1: despite not knowing anything about the company or the algorithm, self-blame was a common theme in people’s responses, with various rationales. consent ambiguity because people did not know which platform the data was coming from, they had a difficult time knowing how the profile was generated. one common response that people gave was that they “probably consented to this when they signed up for x platform and didn’t realize it.” source ambiguity while people came up with several theories for how the algorithm operated, the only thing they knew for certain was that they were in the system, which meant that they “probably posted something where i shouldn’t have.” the breadth of possibilities left them uncertain and prone to speculating about their own responsibility. presumption of algorithmic objectivity although they did not know about crystal beforehand, the presumption that algorithms are neutral, objective, reflections of activity, was common in people’s responses. if their profile contained certain recommendations, then they must have done something to trigger it, because the “it is only showing you what you are like online.” rq2: the rationalization of self-blame was also prevalent because the breach had already happened, which contributed to several responses. resignation being shown their profiles caused some to conclude that because this was already possible and they did not know about it, that “it is never going to stop.” quitting as an insufficient all-or-nothing alternative not knowing the data sources that generated the profiles also rendered quitting an unrealistic option: “what am i going to do, stop using the internet?” discussion this study found that even in the case of crystalknows, users are quick to return to an individual responsibility frame. for a variety of reasons, users internalize the discourse that blames individuals for not taking the proper precautions and for using a platform or service in the first place (fiesler & hallinan, 2018). these layers of rationalization help deepen our understanding of self-blame, where it comes from, and how it leads to a lose-lose either or dilemma: accept the platform or opt-out of its use entirely. in the case of opting out, that places all of the onus onto an individual’s choice, although the reality is that the power online platforms hold in terms of ubiquity, size and limited market competition hinder attempts at collective action and change (draper & turow, 2019). conclusion for all of the policy solutions to the digital tracking/algorithm environment that try to regulate data actors, individual responsibility and self-blame are powerful frames that have been internalized by users. one key challenge will be to break through that discourse, such that the initial act of posting justifies any subsequent action done unto the user and their data. understanding the sources of self-blame and how deep it runs is an important step to interrogating and refuting some of these assumptions to make broader reforms possible. references acquisti, a., friedman, a., & telang, r. (2006). is there a cost to privacy breaches? an event study. icis 2006 proceedings, 94. barth, s., & de jong, m. d. t. (2017). the privacy paradox – investigating discrepancies between expressed privacy concerns and actual online behavior – a systematic literature review. telematics and informatics, 34(7), 1038-1058. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2017.04.013 baumer, e. p., adams, p., khovanskaya, v. d., liao, t. c., smith, m. e., schwanda sosik, v., & williams, k. (2013). limiting, leaving, and (re) lapsing: an exploration of facebook non-use practices and experiences. in proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems, 3257-3266. https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2466446 choi, h., park, j., & jung, y. (2018). the role of privacy fatigue in online privacy behavior. computers in human behavior, 81, 42-51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.12.001 debatin, b., lovejoy, j. p., horn, a. k., & hughes, b. n. (2009). facebook and online privacy: attitudes, behaviors, and unintended consequences. journal of computermediated communication, 15(1), 83-108. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.10836101.2009.01494.x draper, n., & turow, j. (2019). the corporate cultivation of digital resignation. new media & society, 21(8), 1824-1839. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819833331 fiesler, c., & hallinan, b. (2018). "we are the product": public reactions to online data sharing and privacy controversies in the media. paper presented at the 2018 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173627 hargittai, e., & marwick, a. (2016). “what can i really do?” explaining the privacy paradox with online apathy. international journal of communication, 10, 21. microsoft word peterson-salahuddin-tweeting back-tweeting back.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): peterson-salahuddin, c. (2021, october). tweeting back: exploring black feminist hashtag communities on twitter & instagram. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. tweeting back: exploring black feminist hashtag communities on twitter & instagram chelsea peterson-salahuddin northwestern university motivation hashtag discussions have become a key site of intellectual production for black feminist theorizing; however, the nuances of these hashtag networks remain underexplored (conley, 2017; jones, 2019). black feminist theory is a line of intellectual thought developed from black women’s unique lived experiences at the varying intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class, privileging the link between lived experience and theorizing (collins, 2000). while scholars have previously explored the use of hashtags by black women to talk about their lived experiences within the larger context of black twitter (clark, 2014), and theorized black feminist hashtags through content analysis of social media posts (conley, 2017; jackson, bailey, & welles, 2020), these studies have not accounted for the experiences and motivations of social media users who engage specifically in black feminist conversations. this study aimed to deepen this previous research by speaking with those who participate in these networked conversations to understand the distinct nuances of their engagement experiences. i term these conversational communities platformed black feminist communities; social media-based communities often formed around hashtags that discuss black women’s unique lived experiences. drawing from definitions of black twitter (brock, 2020), this study’s understanding of platformed black feminist communities is not synonymous with all black women on social media but rather a specific group of users who actively use social media to engage in discussions about common cultural understandings of black womanhood. finally, my use of the word “platformed” draws from scholarship on platformization as an organizing economic and infrastructural model online to denote how these community interactions are shaped by platform logics and imperatives (helmond, 2015; nieborg & powell, 2018). in this study, i had three main research questions: 1. how do individuals who participate in black feminist hashtag conversations on twitter and instagram understand their networked interactions on these platforms? 2. why do individuals choose to take part in black feminist hashtag conversations on twitter/instagram? 3. what is at stake in how black feminist hashtag conversations circulate on twitter and instagram? methods to answer these research questions, i conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with individuals that created, popularized, or participated in black feminist hashtag conversations on twitter or instagram, two social media platforms on which hashtags, and black feminist hashtags, in particular, have been prevalent (jones, 2019; pham, 2015). since a key way platfromed black feminist communities are discoverable is through black feminist hashtags, to begin recruitment, i searched google and google scholar using the terms ‘black,’ ‘feminist,’ and ‘hashtag,’ to identified hashtags on twitter or instagram that previously had been identified as ‘black feminist’ in focus, or could arguably be called ‘black feminist.’ i also solicited suggestions of black feminist hashtags from other intersectional media scholars. i then removed all hashtags from the data set whose initial creators i could not verifiably identify. i then directly contacted all the individual(s) who created or popularized a hashtag on my list to inquire if they would participate in the study. after these initial interviews, i employed a snowball sampling method informed by network analysis, asking the hashtag creator to refer me to three to five other people from their own twitter or instagram network who took part in their hashtag conversation. i employed this snowball sampling method with every subsequent interviewee. by employing this strategy, i aimed to elucidate how hashtag meaning and usage could shift through dispersion in a network over time while maintaining a qualitative interview methodology (korn, 2015). this sampling strategy resulted in interviews with 21 individuals who engaged in at least one of eight black feminist hashtag discussions on twitter or instagram. all participants self-identified as black women, despite the open-ended snowball sampling prompt, potentially indicating that the majority of individuals who take part in these black feminist hashtag conversations on social media are, in fact, black women. findings r1: how do individuals who participate in black feminist hashtag conversations on twitter and instagram understand their networked interactions on these platforms? almost all of my participants joined these platforms when they were first launched. while some participants initially joined these platforms because of pre-existing social connections, many joined to find new communities of black women. on social media, participants would often connect with other black women and femmes through collective conversation around popular culture issues related to the intersection of race and gender. through these discussions, participants formed online communities based on ethics of care and collective acts of ‘talking back’ to mainstream depictions of black womanhood (collins, 1989; hooks, 1989). however, more recently, the dynamics of these networks have shifted. socio-political shifts included the 2016 election and the rise of the black lives matter movement, led to more instances of participants facing misogynoir-based harassment (bailey & trudy, 2018). as a result, participants noted their behavior on these platforms is much more tempered— many note they often say less and block more. r2: why do individuals choose to take part in black feminist hashtag conversations on twitter & instagram? all eight hashtag conversations explored in this study were created in response to situations that highlighted the particular nuances of participants ’ lived experiences as black women, especially when they contradicted dominant narratives about black womanhood. collectively, these discussions fostered collective acts of what black feminist scholar bell hooks (1989) terms “talking back,” speech act of agency, and selfdefinition as a form of resistance. the main reasons participants chose to engage in these conversations were: the way the discussions centered on the experiences of black women, the hashtag message resonated with their own experiences, and a belief in the mission or the purpose of the hashtag. in all of these instances, by participating in these hashtags, participants sought to publicly affirm and bolster these conversations by acknowledging and amplifying them as fellow black women, highlight the highly supportive nature of platformed black feminist hashtag communities. r3: what is at stake in how black feminist hashtag conversations circulate on twitter and instagram? due to the unforeseen ways hashtags can spread online, many of the hashtag creators and popularizers noted how their hashtags meaning or use had changed or expanded over time. also, with virality came the threat of erasure —several participants who had created or popularized hashtags noted their erasure from the hashtag’s origin. discussion platformed black feminist communities offer a critical space through which black women and femmes can discuss culturally specific topics through the shared yet intersectional lens. yet, they can also open black women users up to new forms of harassment. further, the nature of virality on social media can often lead to these hashtag discussions being misused, appropriated, and plagiarized, replicating historical instances where black women’s women’s work has been overlooked, copied, and stolen (cooper, 2017). these findings point to how social media both opens up new liberatory spaces for black feminist expression and can expose the black women who participate in these conversations to new forms of harm and harassment. in this way, the dynamics of platformed black feminist community members engagement illuminated through this study highlight the interdependent and complex relationship between social media and black feminist theorizing — with social media comes both new spaces of intellectual production and new potential spaces of harm. work cited brock, a. (2020). distributed blackness. new york, ny: nyu press. clark, m. (2014). to tweet our own cause: a mixed-methods study of the online phenomenon “black twitter.” (unpublished doctoral thesis). the university of north carolina at chapel hill, chapel hill, north carolina. collins, p.h. (2000). black feminist thought (2 ed.) new york: routledge. conley, t.l. (2017). decoding black feminist hashtags as becoming. the black scholar, 47(3), 22-32. cooper, b. (2017). beyond respectability: the intellectual thought of race women. champaign, il: university of illinois press. helmond, a. (2015). the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready. social media + society. hooks, b. (1989). talking back: thinking feminist, thinking black. boston, ma: south end press. jackson, s., bailey, m., & welles, b.f. (2020). hashtag activism. cambridge: mit university press. jones, f. (2019). reclaiming our space. boston, ma: beacon press. korn, j. (2015). #fuckprop8: how temporary virtual communities around politics and sexuality pop up, come out, provide support, and taper off. in n. rumbukkana (ed), hashtag publics and the power of political discursive networks (pp. 204-217). new york, ny: peter lang. nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society, 20(11), 4275–4292. pham, m.t. (2015). “i click and post and breathe, waiting for others to see what i see”: on #feministselfies, outfit photos, and networked vanity. fashion theory, 19(2), pp. 221–242. microsoft word stang-"the creature itself is nasty, but nothing really compares-"the creature itself is nasty, but nothing re.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): stang, s. (2021, october). “the reature itself is nasty, but nothing really compares to the building of dread before you ever get to it”: online player and developer commentary on female monstrosity in video games. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “the creature itself is nasty, but nothing really compares to the building of dread before you ever get to it”: online player and developer commentary on female monstrosity in video games sarah stang york university gender representation in video games has long been a controversial, heated, and fraught topic of discussion within online gaming communities. in game scholarship, analysis of the usually harmful tropes and trends of female representation has resulted in countless studies demonstrating that video games are often a regressive medium in terms of representation, privileging heterosexual white male subjectivities and erasing, marginalizing, or even vilifying anyone outside of that specific demographic (ivory, 2006; williams, et al., 2009). internet research on this topic has also demonstrated that many online gaming communities are hostile to change regarding female representation, often unwilling to consider concerns regarding the issue, and tend to demonstrate exclusionary practices to reinforce the idea that gaming is a male space—a “boy’s club” (consalvo, 2012; cote, 2020; jenson & de castell, 2013; kendrick, 2015; salter & blodgett, 2012; vossen, 2018). these conversations and scholarly studies tend to focus on the representation of human women, especially as victimized damsels-in-distress, background decorations, trophies/rewards for the male player-character, or “strong female protagonists” that actually portray women in problematic, one-dimensional ways. considerably less work has been done to analyse the portrayal of villainous and monstrous nonhuman women in games, even though countless science fiction, fantasy, and horror games feature these kinds of characters. many of these games utilize harmful tropes and design practices related to female villainy and monstrosity, thereby reinforcing misogynistic ideologies. indeed, the portrayal of woman-as-monster is ancient and found across world mythologies, folklore, literature, and popular culture. several feminist scholars have unpacked the misogyny inherent in this portrayal—especially regarding female sexuality, reproduction, and old age—in mythology, religion, and technological and scientific discourse (kristeva, 1982; de beauvoir, 1949/2011; braidotti, 2011) and popular culture, especially film (caputi, 2004; creed, 1993; harrington, 2018; sobchack, 2000). regardless of the ubiquity of monstrous enemies in video games, few game scholars have addressed the ways that monstrosity is interwoven with representation (kocurek, 2015; stang, 2018; stang, 2019; stang & trammell, 2019). these studies have primarily used textual analysis to demonstrate how monstrosity functions as a tool of oppression—a label used to justify the ultra-violence enacted against certain characters and creatures by the player-character. because monsters are often loosely veiled proxies for marginalized or minoritized others, especially women, people of colour, and people with disabilities, the violence the player is forced to commit against these monstrous creatures can be understood as a symbolic re-enactment of the white supremacist, ableist, heteropatriarchal violence committed against real-world groups. with the understanding that gender representations in games can have deep cultural ramifications, especially as they intersect with representations of race, sexuality, queerness, body size, disability, mental illness, and age, this paper examines online player and developer discourse regarding female-coded monsters from a selection of commercially successful “aaa” video games. the intent of this project is to contribute to ongoing scholarship on monstrosity in games by looking at how developers explain and justify their design processes in online interviews and forum posts and how players/fans articulate their attitudes towards and reception of these monstrous creatures. the games i will be discussing are three successful and acclaimed fantasy series: the witcher series, the god of war series, and the dragon age series. the monsters under discussion from these series represent some of the worst archetypes of female monstrosity: succubi, and sirens—sexualized femme fatale monsters that prey on men; broodmothers—large, pregnant, maternal monsters designed to evoke reactions of disgust and horror in players; and hags, crones, and fates—elderly-appearing monstrous women that occupy the intersection of ageism and sexism. the sources for online commentary include forums and message boards such as those on gamefaqs, steam, reddit, and each game’s individual wiki page; video discussions and interviews found on youtube, especially those posted by the development studios or publishers themselves; and developer interviews found on gaming journalism websites like polygon and kotaku. this online commentary reveals that many developers approach the design of female monstrosity either by drawing on existing creatures and tropes found in mythology and popular culture or with the explicit intention of designing monstrous female bodies that would “freak out” or disgust the player. these design processes are discussed uncritically, with developers revealing their assumptions about both the “feminine ideal” and what aspects of monstrosity would be the most unsettling for players. player commentary largely discusses the monsters in terms of strategies to beat them or complaints about their difficulty, but there are also lengthy discussions about their design. specifically, these discussions involve either commentary about how horrified they were when they encountered that monster or inappropriate and misogynistic jokes about having sexual intercourse with that monster. in this presentation, i will go through some examples of player and developer discourse regarding female monstrosity in these games which, together with some discussion of the monsters themselves and how their design remediates harmful tropes and stereotypes, will demonstrate how textual analysis and internet research can be brought together to unpack the ways that monstrosity is intertwined with questions of representation and misogyny in games, game design, and gaming culture. references braidotti, r. (2011). nomadic subjects: embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory. second edition. columbia university press. caputi, j. (2004). goddesses and monsters: women, myth, power, and popular culture. university of wisconsin press. consalvo, m. (2012). confronting toxic gamer culture: a challenge for feminist game studies scholars. ada: a journal of gender, new media, and technology, 1. cote, a. c. (2020). gaming sexism: gender and identity in the era of casual video games. new york university press. creed, b. (1993). the monstrous-feminine: film, feminism, psychoanalysis. routledge. de beauvoir, s. (1949/2011). the second sex (c. borde & s. malovany-chevallier, trans.). vintage. (original work published 1949). harrington, e. (2018). women, monstrosity and horror film: gynaehorror. routledge. ivory, j. (2006). still a man’s game: gender representation in online reviews of video games. mass communication and society, 9, 103–114. jenson, j., & de castell, s. (2013). tipping points: marginality, misogyny and video games. journal of curriculum theorizing, 29(2), 72–85. kendrick, s. (2015). misogyny and gaming: the maintenance of a male-gendered gamer culture. master’s thesis, university of waterloo. kocurek, c. (2015). who hearkens to the monster’s scream? death, violence and the veil of the monstrous in video games. visual studies, 30(1), 79–89. kristeva, j. (1982). powers of horror: an essay on abjection. (l. s. roudiez, trans.). columbia university press. salter, a., & blodgett, b. (2012). hypermasculinity & dickwolves: the contentious role of women in the new gaming public. journal of broadcasting and electronic media, 56, 401–416. sobchack, v. (2000). revenge of the leech woman: on the dread of aging in a lowbudget horror film. in k. gelder (ed.), the horror reader (pp. 336–348). routledge. stang, s. (2018). shrieking, biting, and licking: the monstrous-feminine and abject female monsters in video games. press start, 4(2), 18–34. stang, s. (2019). the broodmother as monstrous-feminine: abject maternity in video games. nordlit, 42: manufacturing monsters, 233–256. stang, s., & trammell, a. (2019). the ludic bestiary: misogynistic tropes of female monstrosity in dungeons & dragons. games & culture, 15(6), 730–747. vossen, e. (2018). on the cultural inaccessibility of gaming: invading, creating, and reclaiming the cultural clubhouse. dissertation, university of waterloo. williams, d., martins, n., consalvo, m., & ivory, j. (2009). the virtual census: representations of gender, race and age in video games. new media and society, 11(5), 815–834. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): lin, j. (2020, october). one app, two versions: tiktok and the platformization from china. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. one app, two versions: tiktok and the platformization from china jian lin, university of groningen the increasing presence of chinese internet companies (to name but a few: tencent, tiktok, alibaba and huaiwei) in the global platform society (van dijck et al 2018) has aroused grave concern in the west over the issues of privacy and surveillance especially due to their inextricable connections to the chinese party state. if domestically chinese platform economy represents an alternative cyber ecology that is deliberately nurtured by the chinese state to counteract the global, silicon-valley based platform ecosystem, then this ‘parallel universe’ now also constantly attempts to expand its system and exert greater influence on the global stage. together with the ‘parallel universe’ also comes an ‘alternative globalization’ that is rooted in china, in comparison to the globalization that is dominated by the european-american transnational capital and power. moreover, the existence and the expansion of this ‘parallel universe’ also drive us to rethink the conception of platform logics and platformization. technically, chinese platforms share with their western counterparts for the feature of computational programmability and business intermediacy. however, the fundamental distinction between the two ecosystems lies in the configuration and practice of platform governance: in terms of how platforms govern and how platforms are governed. in china, the disruptive and infrastructural nature of the platform power is always intermingled with and subject to the state power, evidenced by numerous cases of administrative penalty and online censorship, as well as all the promotional policies for internet economy. at the same time, these chinese platforms enjoy more immunity from the charges of violating user privacy and the responsibility of protecting citizen wellbeing. there is a missing agenda in chinese internet policy to account for the concern of privacy and civil rights in the online spaces. instead, datafication becomes more than a fundamental mechanism for platform business, but is also envisioned, by the partystate, as the crucial tool for social/cultural governance. this study adopts a comparative approach to explore the globalization of chinese platforms through the lens of tiktok. by developing two versions of the same platform, tiktok manages to establish its business in two highly distinctive platform ecosystems. it represents the process of ‘platformization from china’, which refers to the penetration of platform logics that are largely developed in the techno-political economy of contemporary china into the global society. this uncanny system of governance fosters a highly innovative and commercialized platform ecology, in which platform companies like douyin (the chinese version of tiktok) have to constantly innovate its platform affordances to meet with regulatory requirements of the authorities, the financial interests of the capital and the monetary and expressive expectations of the users. as a result, the chinese platform seems to have developed a much more advanced system of monetization, content moderation and algorithmic operation, which outperforms its western competitors when entering the global market. the problem is that, however, these platform logics developed in the chinese context seem to contradict the governing values of the international platform societies, as recent disputes in the international society about tiktok can illustrate. although compared with douyin tiktok has already adopted a more restrained approach in its affordances, commodification and content regulation, the platform remains questionable for its potential supposed connection to the chinese state and the concomitant censorship policy. the problem is that when expanding globally, these platform logics developed in the chinese context seem to contradict the governing values and logics of the international platform societies. if platforms developed in the american-centric ecosystem can easily identify themselves as global, then the challenge for chinese platforms going global lies always on this figurative ‘chineseness’, which is not necessarily defined by the content and culture, but by the techno-political logics embedded in the affordances and operational mechanisms. to address this particular “chineseness” that characterizes the inherent platform logics shown in the globalizing practice of tiktok, this paper analyzes the affordances and business strategies of tiktok and its parent company bytedance through a comparative study of its operation both in domestic chinese and global markets. through a digital walk-through of the interfaces of its chinese and international version, as well as based on the archival research of industrial and media reports, this study sheds light upon the specificities of chinese social media platforms going global – the contradictions behind their business discourses and platform governance and the challenges brought by them to the global platform society. domestically douyin needs to fit into the party state’s aspiration to economic restructuring through internet plus and social/political stability, resulting in a platform logic that encourages participatory online culture while also circumscribes it within the scope of being financially profitable and politically secure. internationally, however, the discursive call for open internet in the global societies contradicts this “chinese” platform logics, constantly questioning the content moderating practice of tiktok, which has been forced to distance from the supposed “chineseness” both discursively and in user interface and content moderation. the study adds a new lens to the existing scholarship on platform governance (van dijck et al. 2018; 2019; gorwa 2019), platform imperialism (jin 2015; winseck 2017; mann & daly 2019) and participatory digital culture (jenkins et al. 2015; burgess & green 2018; cunningham & craig 2019) through engaging with the globalization of chinese digital platforms. exemplified by the case of tiktok, this article attempts to have dialogue with the existing conceptions of platform governance from a global chinese perspective and elaborates on the geopolitics of platform logics caused by the distinctions between chinese and the international (american-centric) platform ecosystems. looking forward, i assess the possibility that chinese digital media industry and culture may anticipate on the one hand a new phase in chinese soft power and cultural globalization, in which innovative platform technology infused with authoritarian state power in generating and disrupting existing social relations and digital culture. on the other hand, the project examines the challenges brought by the globalization of chinese internet facing global platform governance and how this platformization from china may anticipate a new form of digital online culture. references burgess, j., & green, j. (2018). youtube: online video and participatory culture. polity. cunningham, s. & craig, d. (2019). social media entertainment: the new intersection of hollywood and silicon valley. nyu press. gorwa, r. (2019). what is platform governance?. information, communication & society, 22(6), 854-871. jenkins, h, ito, m. & boyd, d. (2015). participatory culture in a networked era: a conversation on youth, learning, commerce, and politics. polity. mann, m, & daly, a. (2017). (big) data and the north-in-south: australia’s informational imperialism and digital colonialism. television & new media, 20(4), 379-395. winseck, d. (2017). the geopolitical economy of the global internet infrastructure. journal of information policy 7, 228-267. yong jin, d. (2015). digital platforms, imperialism and political culture. routledge. van dijck, j, poell, t. & de waal, m. (2018) the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford university press. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 mcnally, naoise & bastos, marco. (2022, november). auditing facebook algorithms: the elapsed effects of facebook news feed to engagement with guardian articles (2010–2020). paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. auditing facebook algorithms the elapsed effects of facebook news feed to engagement with guardian articles naoise mcnally university college dublin marco bastos university college dublin extended abstract the facebook news feed is the homepage feature of the social network that displays an endless scrolling of individual pieces of content such as status updates, photographs, videos, and web links/articles. the order to which content is arrayed is defined using multiple algorithms working simultaneously and concomitantly. these algorithms optimize the feed to prioritize content deemed most relevant to users (mosseri, 2016), but the exact nature of this optimization is obfuscated by the proprietary nature of facebook’s algorithms and can only be inferred indirectly through changes enacted in the underlying algorithms. the auditing of such algorithms is therefore not a trivial task, as both the data and the models underpinning the algorithms are precluded from scrutiny by the public or the academic community. this study addresses this gap by exploring the elapsed effects of changes in the facebook news feed on engagement with guardian news articles. we tracked and documented public or otherwise known changes to the algorithms through facebook public announcements, industry research, and information leaked to the press to parametrize a model that account for the variation in user engagement with guardian news articles. to this end, we queried the guardian api to collate a database of all guardian articles published between 1st january 2010 and 31st december 2020 and subsequently queried the crowdtangle api to retrieve facebook engagement metrics for guardian articles. changes made to the algorithms were parameterized as high or low impact and were coded with a valence of positive, negative, or neutral positions towards trusted news sources. the temporal series explored in this study present important variations. during this 10year period, news organizations such as the guardian struggled to transition from a print-and-advertisement to a digital-and-subscription business model. substantial cuts and redundancies in editorial workforce followed, with quantifiable impact on content production reflected in the sharp decline guardian articles published in print, towards the end of 2014, and then online around the end of 2016 (figure 1a). additionally, facebook engagement data available via crowdtangle has a more restrictive definition for public shares than facebook does. crowdtangle share counts are limited to articles shared within public pages, groups, or users with ‘public’ profiles, who usually are public figures like politicians or celebrities. crowdtangle data can nonetheless be used as a benchmark, since the number of crowdtangle public shares is a lower bound for the number of total public shares (allen et al., 2021). another important shortcoming of crowdtangle is that the indexing of guardian data is not uniform, with many articles published prior to 2014 not available on crowdtangle (figure 1b). guardian data amounts to 1,020,163 news articles whereas the crowdtangle data set includes 606,102 unique guardian urls. the database includes 76 variables, including facebook expected and recorded engagement metrics, shares, comments, and facebook reactions (‘like,’ ‘love,’ ‘care,’ ‘haha,’ ‘wow,’ ‘sad,’ ‘care,’ ‘thankful,’ and ‘angry’). we aggregate share and engagement metrics by total and average (mean), which is the dependent variable in the temporal models fitted for this study. we performed robustness and augmented dickey-fuller tests to ascertain that the series are non-stationary (figure 2), and subsequently modelled the data using crosscorrelation analysis, granger causality test, and anomaly detection. cross-correlational analysis (ccf) not only identifies potential correlations between two series, but it also detects lagged influences between two time series. as such, ccf was crucial to characterize the temporal direction and the influence between the weighted temporal changes made to facebook algorithms and engagement with guardian articles over the 10-year period. figure 1(a): news articles published by the guardian online and in print. figure 1(b): guardian articles with facebook engagement metrics available on crowdtangle (y-axis shows densities). we performed cross-correlation analyses (ccf) to the series and tested for optimal lags that are significant at the 95% confidence interval level. as there is no significant pattern of correlations between opinion, lifestyle, and arts, we concluded that the series are cooccurring. news and sport, however, present significant relationships and we therefore concluded that the temporal series of algorithmic change does lead the temporal series of engagement with guardian news and sport articles on facebook. figure 3 unpacks these findings, with upper and lower dashed lines showing that news and sport are above the significance threshold at lags +21 and +24. in short, content of news value was found to be significantly more likely to be affected by changes made to facebook news feed algorithm within a window period of around 3 weeks. next we performed granger causality tests to determine the robustness of our findings. figure 4 shows the results across the five pillars, with the news feed algorithms predicting facebook engagement with guardian articles focused on news (p < .0327), figure 2: time series of facebook engagement with guardian content 2010-2020 figure 3: 3: cross correlation between changes made to facebook news feed algorithms and facebook engagement with guardian content. whereas changes made to the algorithm were not found to be significant with respect to arts, lifestyle, opinion, or sports. these results are consistent with the hypothesis that content of journalistic importance, such as news and politics, are more likely to be affected by algorithmic changes. figure 4 also shows the anomalies detected by the sh-esd algorithm, largely concentrated in a period of intense changes made to the algorithm (2014-2016), with the yearly period of may-august accounting for more than half of the anomalies (99 out of 191). two-thirds of the anomalies detected in the news pillar took place in 2016, with the vast majority concentrated in june 2016. the significant anomalies found in the news series before mid-2016 reflect critical changes introduced by facebook, when posts from friends and family were further prioritized and ranked higher (mosseri, 2016). in summary, this study presents a proof-of-concept study to audit the facebook news feed. our results, however, speak only to the elapsed effect of these changes. we have no way to qualify the impact they may have had to the news industry and their revenue. we can only speculate that these changes were substantial. the asymmetric power exerted by social platforms on news organizations is such that news companies find themselves trying to meet the ever-changing demands of social platforms’ algorithms. this period of persistent decline in revenue and trust in news organizations was accompanied by fundamental changes in the integrity of the information ecosystem, particularly with regard to how trusted information and news are obtained and consumed online. these issues have profound implications for the public discourse and the informed citizenry that sit at the center of democratic deliberation, a center ground now populated by digital intermediaries such as facebook, google, and twitter whose algorithms define the integrity of information online. references figure 4: granger causality tests with f-statistic and p values for each news pillar. blue dots represents anomalies detected by the s-h-esd algorithm. allen, j., mobius, m., rothschild, d. m., & watts, d. j. (2021). research note: examining potential bias in large-scale censored data. harvard kennedy school misinformation review. mosseri, a. (2016, 2016, june 29). building a better news feed for you. facebook newsroom. https://about.fb.com/news/2016/06/building-a-better-news-feed-foryou/ https://about.fb.com/news/2016/06/building-a-better-news-feed-for-you/ https://about.fb.com/news/2016/06/building-a-better-news-feed-for-you/ selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation: livingstone, s., stoilova, m., stänicke, l.i., jessen, r.s., graham, r., staksrud, e., and jensen, t.k. (2022, november) platform power and experiences from the margin: adolescents’ online vulnerability and mental health. paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. platform power and experiences from the margin: adolescents’ online vulnerability and mental health mariya stoilova london school of economics and political science sonia livingstone london school of economics and political science line indrevoll stänicke university of oslo reidar schei jessen university of oslo richard graham stem4: the young people’s mental health charity elisabeth staksrud university of oslo tine k. jensen university of oslo extended abstract in the age of algorithms and platform power, the internet no longer works the same way for everyone. each user is presented with their own version of the digital environment, shaped in opaque ways by their engagement according to the commercial interests of the platforms and their partners. superficially, the opportunities afforded by the digital environment seem endless – for learning, entertainment, socialising, civic participation, and for playfully creating our own unique digital persona. however, beneath the surface, powerful algorithms analyse our activities, make choices for us, and present us with a profiled, digitally analysed version of ourselves, monetised by unknown third parties, stored and archived for times to come, and with no opt-out for the user. platforms generally assume by default that the user is a competent adult and they have proved resistant to recognising that a sizable number of their users are children, including those in vulnerable or disadvantaged circumstances. companies rarely see it as in their commercial interests to anticipate or build provisions for users who cannot withstand the risky-by-design tactics of their algorithmically-led functionality for connecting, sharing and recommending content and contact (5rights foundation 2021; livingstone and stoilova 2021). what does this mean for vulnerable adolescents who are already struggling with their mental health? on the one hand, there is growing academic research that the use of the internet and social media can increase the risks for already vulnerable children (stoilova et al. 2021). on the other hand, research also shows that the uses of digital technologies can be beneficial for adolescents’ mental health. the online environment can be a source of formal and informal support to cope with difficult experiences and it can afford just-in-time support and help which, even, positively benefits from an environment tailored to the individual needs of the user. research on the critical question of what makes a difference between the digital pathways to wellbeing or harm is very limited, however. in this paper, we ask: how can we understand the digital engagement practices of adolescents with lived experience of mental health problems, and what is the role of different types of engagement with digital technologies for their mental health? we conducted cross-national comparative qualitative research with 62 young people aged 12 to 22 years from norway and the uk facing internet-related difficulties, including adolescents with experiences of excessive internet use, self-harm or pro-eating disorder content online, cyberbullying or online sexual exploitation and grooming. the research participants were found to have varying kinds and levels of mental health difficulties; some were receiving specialised mental health support because of a clinical diagnosis, while by comparison others faced more occasional or milder forms of mental health needs. all the young people had been exposed to potentially problematic forms of digital content, contact or conduct, and most had not had the opportunity to discuss this with professionals, even when they were in treatment from professional services. the in-depth interviews, focusing on the relationship between digital technology and mental health, were transcribed and analysed using thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2006). in this paper, we report on our findings and insights into the role of different dimensions of digital engagement in aiding or worsening internet-related mental health difficulties. we discuss firstly the role of digital engagement for young people’s mental health and secondly whether digital skills can improve young people’s outcomes. thirdly, we explore the role of engaging with risky-by-design affordances. digital engagement and mental health young people actively engage with the digital world. they utilise its affordances and shape its parameters, sometimes going against the grain of what was envisioned by design and regulation. this includes their tactics of moving between platforms, curating audiences, and merging app functionalities. such tactics reveal how young people are taking ownership and shaping their online experiences in ways that serve them. young people’s digital encounters are often social and collaborative – they share insights, tips and tactics with online peers or niche online communities in ways that offer support and facilitate coping. but for adolescents with mental health difficulties online engagement can also undermine their wellbeing. online communities can become toxic, helpful material can be mixed with triggering content, coping can be isolating. hence digital engagement may offer a welcome break but also tends to be difficult and short-lived. so, young people devote considerable efforts to anticipating and managing the potential threats, emotional upsets and extreme events that might occur during their digital lives, as well as searching for recognition and support. they report dynamic journeys in and out of harmful situations linked to fluctuations in mental health. still, these journeys may contribute to the development of resilience. experiences of hardship were often understood as part of growing up in a digital world: we heard stories of expanding understanding and competence, growing confidence and maturity, and developing self-efficacy and resilience. yet, these stories also revealed episodes of struggle, relapse and “failure” to cope, and of a later recognition of the harmful impact. hence, young people may know about but cannot always deal with the risks they encounter. is this because they lack digital skills that could have helped them avoid risks in the first place? digital skills and mental health difficulties there were varying levels of skill amongst the participants with younger adolescents being, as a whole, less competent than the older ones, gradually developing digital skills over time. yet overall, the young people we spoke to were fairly highly skilled with sophisticated knowledge of the digital ecology. we also found that young people with mental health difficulties are developing particular digital skills that encompass technical, informational, communication and creation skills but also go beyond them. for example, the skill of identifying a callous algorithm, recognising an extreme space or a dangerous person or, more positively, knowing how to game the algorithm to make one’s feed positive or locate ‘safe’ spaces or trustworthy people. but sophisticated skills do not necessarily make for better mental health and wellbeing outcomes. one important reason for this is that digital skills are thoroughly entwined with the psychosocial life skills that adolescents are simultaneously developing, including through their lived experience of mental health difficulties. given the challenges they face, young people do not always manage to put their skills into practice, especially if a mental health difficulty impacts upon their functioning. furthermore, the development of digital skills amongst adolescents takes place in the context of a complex developmental period, characterised by exploration, risk-taking and vulnerability. some young people were acting against their own knowledge of what’s safe or sensible (e.g., taking risks or daring themselves). this may not reflect a lack of skill or an irrational response but, rather, a different or extended set of digital skills and purposes. however, we also found that it is not only about the level of youth digital skills. independent of digital skill, affordances may result in even riskier online engagement shaped by the operation of algorithms. at times this can breach young people’s abilities to counteract and to cope with detrimental consequences. engaging with the risky-by-design affordances the digital environment presents an ever-changing and sometimes problematic set of challenges for adolescents with mental health difficulties. these challenges arise because digital design and platform policies shape the activities of young people and others they might interact with. such challenges test young people’s digital skills and at times their skills are insufficient to the task, resulting in unhappy or harmful experiences. in addition, platform algorithms are often “out of sync” with and insensitive to the young person’s current state of mind or ability to cope. this leads to experiences of triggering, unwanted re-exposure, and setbacks. algorithms act as a distorting mirror, magnifying problematic content and may push young people with mental health vulnerabilities down a spiral of ever more overwhelming, upsetting or extreme content that they find hard to break away from. several adolescents described becoming aware of how social media algorithms promote problematic content. recognising one’s own triggers and how they arise is a kind of digital skill that combines self-knowledge with an understanding of the digital ecology. but it’s also a task that’s hard to do. not only can it be difficult to anticipate such triggering content, but the activities of others can seem to normalise viewing extreme or ‘toxic’ content, adding peer pressure to accept rather than avoid challenging content. the more young people engage with this content, the more it becomes a trend – portraying a negative world that feels difficult to escape. conclusions and recommendations adolescents with mental health difficulties face intense risky situations online with problematic real-world consequences. while they are often digitally skilled, reflexive and supported by peers, adolescents do not feel that parents, educators or clinical professionals acknowledge, understand or respond to their digital problems sensitively or effectively. current efforts by public and commercial actors to support young people’s digital skills and agency and address their needs appear insufficient, even counterproductive. urgent steps are required to regulate and manage the digital environment in ways that vulnerable young people can trust and that meet their diverse and complex needs. to take steps in the right direction, we argue that mental health practitioners should get to know about young people’s diverse digital experiences, while teaching should cover different types of digital skills, not just technical training or e-safety messages. industry and tech companies ought to design with young people and their specific needs in mind and limit the risky by-design features. governments have the responsibility to consider regulations to limit the excessive risks posed to young people’s safety by the actions of commercial providers. references 5rights foundation (2021). pathways: how digital design puts children at risk. https://5rightsfoundation.com/uploads/pathways-how-digital-design-puts-children-atrisk.pdf braun, v. & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology, qualitative research in psychology, 3:2, 77-101. livingstone, s., & stoilova, m. (2021). the 4cs: classifying online risk to children. https://core-evidence.eu/updating-the-4cs-of-online-risk/ stoilova, m., edwards, c., kostyrka-allchorne, k., livingstone, s., & sonuga-barke, e. (2021). adolescents’ mental health vulnerabilities and the experience and impact of digital technologies https://doi.org/doi: 10.18742/pub01-073 young productionplatforms aoir2020 final.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): young, c. j., nieborg, d. b., & joseph, d. j. (2020, october). “bringing your vision to life”: production platforms and industry unity. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “bringing your vision to life”: production platforms and industry unity chris j. young university of toronto mississauga david b. nieborg university of toronto scarborough daniel j. joseph manchester metropolitan university introduction every day, thousands of software applications or apps are developed to create immersive experiences. distributed via the app stores of google, apple, tencent, and samsung, immersive apps include games, but also architectural walkthroughs, film animations, and automotive simulations. thus far, research on apps has predominantly focused on app distribution platforms, platform governance, app usage, and ‘culture in the age of apps’ (morris & murray, 2018). less attention has been paid to a new class of digital platforms that operate business models oriented towards professionals instead of end-users and function as ‘platform tools’ (foxman, 2019; nicoll & keogh, 2019). one of the dominant platforms tools is unity by unity technologies. what began as a game engine to ‘democratize game development’ (unity, 2010) has expanded into a pan-industry platform ‘bringing your vision to life’ (unity, 2020). similar to adobe’s creative suite and microsoft’s office, unity has emerged as the go-to software suite that provides an all-in-one set of tools, art assets, business analytics, and marketing support. today, the real-time animation platform has been adopted by hundreds of thousands of developers and designers around the globe in growing segments of the cultural industries and far beyond. virtual event for this paper our aim is to contribute to the debate on the ‘platformization of cultural production’ by examining the penetration of unity’s economic, infrastructural, and governance extensions beyond its platform boundaries (nieborg & poell, 2018). we argue unity has become the de facto default for the development of apps thereby impacting the production and circulation of immersive content. to explore the impact of unity’s role in the wider process of platformization we draw on an archive of corporate documentation and promotional material, news coverage, and industry data, totaling 1,892 documents. this allows us to situate the platform within unity technologies’ culture and business strategies, which enrolls and keeps developers ‘tethered’ to its proprietary platform (zittrain, 2008). our analysis signals a broader shift in the cultural production of apps where a small group of production platforms shape the production, distribution, and circulation of real-time animation products. this paper takes place against the background of a wider debate about the political economy of platforms, digital labor, and content creation and distribution. in his survey of the political economy of ‘platform capitalism’, nick srnicek (2017, 6) argues that platforms ‘emerged as a new business model, capable of extracting and controlling immense amounts of data, and with this shift we have seen the rise of large monopolistic firms.’ digital platforms have situated themselves as intermediaries that bring together end-users, advertisers, service providers, producers, suppliers, and physical objects. simply put, platforms have invested in large-scale infrastructures to monopolize the markets for cultural production. this allows platform owners and operators to accumulate profits by charging users through a variety of revenue models, including subscriptions, advertising, and licensing. the question then emerges to what extent unity technologies is an exemplary of platform capitalism or, as a production platform, perhaps deviates from it? by taking a critical political economic approach to analyzing unity’s business models, its infrastructural features, and its governance framework we argue the former. while uniquely focused on content production rather than user connectivity or content distribution, unity has ensured that the process of platformization has come to fully integrate content creation in all of its facets. life that animates the internet one of the reasons to focus on the creation of real-time animations is because of the pervasiveness of immersive content across industry sectors. while game development and animated films are obvious sectors to utilize unity’s toolset, automotive companies use it to simulate product lifecycle management (plm) before physical one-to-one prototyping, and architecture firms engage in building information modeling (bim) to integrate physical infrastructures, such as public utilities, into an app’s design. numerous consumers have unknowingly used a unity app when they interacted with a soon-to-be built condominium walkthrough or to select the interior of their next vehicle. unity’s diffusion and growth as a platform has evolved along three lines, economic expansion, infrastructural integration, and regulatory control. first, it aimed at panindustry usage by a series of acquisitions and business partnerships with industryspecific technology companies. the acquisition of 7 software companies in 2019 alone, including obvioos’ video streaming service for industrial product design and artomatix’s artificial intelligence technology to automate the creation of 3d content, underscore unity’s integration of industry software to direct workflow standardization. as such, unity follows the typical business strategy of creating a ‘multi-sided market’ that leverages ‘network effects’ (nieborg & poell, 2018). second, unity has allowed a wide variety of third-party technologies to integrate with its software, or vice versa, for app developers to export their finished designs to a variety of other distribution platforms. in practical terms, external technologies are either added into unity’s core software, or released as plugins which install into unity’s editing interface. examples of external tools and technologies include github for version control, autodesk’s computer assisted tools (cads) like maya and revit, and nvidia’s ray tracing graphics technology. as such, what appears as a generic professional tool to build digital games can quickly transform into a customizable platform geared towards any industry need. third, because of its dominance, unity has been able to standardize workflows and set (or perpetuate) proprietary software standards. the company has been able to do so, as argued by nicoll & keogh (2019), by framing its toolset as a contribution to the democratization of cultural production, as captured by its now dated slogan ‘democratize game development.’ this ‘democratization dispositif’ exemplifies a governance framework where accessibility and empowerment is exchanged for standardization. unity’s approach to platformization has made it the standard for real-time animation content. while there are competing real-time animation platforms, such as epic games’ unreal engine, unity technologies’ focus on economic and infrastructural integration with industry-specific technologies and companies has made it indispensable for realtime animation workflows. as a result, global businesses such as disney, toyota, and nintendo use unity in their design process. what once could be chalked-off as one of the many software tools within the game industry has grown into a dominant production platform. in many ways, unity not only animates the life of the internet, but it also brings to life visions of the material world around us. references foxman, m. (2019). united we stand: platforms, tools and innovation with the unity game engine. social media + society, 5(4), 1–10. doi:10.1177/2056305119880177 morris, j. w., & murray, s. (eds.). (2018). appified. culture in the age of apps. university of michigan press. nicoll, b. and keogh, b. (2019). the unity game engine and the circuits of cultural software. palgrave. nieborg, d.b. and t. poell (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society, 20(11): 4275– 4292. srnicek, n. (2017). platform capitalism. polity press. unity technologies (2010). unity turns 5, happy birthday! unity blogs. accessed september 7, 2018. https://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/06/07/unity-turns-5-happy-birthday/ unity technologies (2020). unity for all. about. accessed february 12, 2020. https://unity.com/ zittrain, j. (2008). the future of the internet and how to stop it. yale university press. microsoft word risi-remote work between narratives of indipendence and fractured experiences a qualitative research during.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): risi, e., pronzato, r. (2021, october). remote work between narratives of indipendence and fractured experiences. a qualitative research during the pandemic crisis. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. remote work between narratives of indipendence and fractured experiences. a qualitative research during the pandemic crisis. elisabetta risi iulm university of milan riccardo pronzato iulm university of milan introduction since the introduction of social distancing measures in several countries, it emerged even more clearly than before a division of labour between individuals that can work in a ‘footloose’ manner, and ‘fixed’ workers, i.e. place-based jobs which imply ‘the need for physical proximity to a particular spot’ (huws, 2006, p. 49). during the lockdown, the latter category was further divided by governments in essential and locked workers. specifically, the coronavirus crisis showed the possibility and importance of working from home for many employers and employees, especially in the west (berg et al., 2020). remote working through digital technologies has become an emerging trend in recent years (eddleston and mulki, 2017), hence, for some people, such as knowledge workers, working remotely was not a new experience. however, most of the white-collar workers were used to work remotely only occasionally and often unofficially. this paper is based on a qualitative research aims to study how remote workers experienced their job and everyday life during the italian lockdown (9 march – 3 may 2020), imposed by the national government to contain the spread of covid-19. specifically, this contribution focuses on the interdependence of work and everyday life, and the role of digital devices and online platforms during the home-confinement period, and it explores the consequences of social distancing measures on remote workers and on their working and personal conditions. framework digital platforms are structurally transforming work and their social representations, by facilitating increasingly connected societies, in which production, consumption and services are available 24/7. today spaces and times of work increasing interweave with other areas of life, by becoming interdependent on each other, within a state of permanent connectivity. connectivity structures the digital society ambivalently: on the one hand, dominant narratives present connectivity as a liberating power, enhanced by the dimensions of immediacy and speed, which allow to increasingly access “knowledge”, while giving people more independence and the possibility of building relationships and contacts beyond the traditional constraints of time and space. on the other hand, it is precisely ubiquitous connectivity, i.e., the possibility of “always being there”, that favour the blurring between personal and work boundaries, and the following impossibility to distinguish between home and working spaces, or familiar and professional relationships (risi, 2015). the subjectivity of workers is ambivalent as well. for example, workers are legally considered by companies as freelancers, within a discursive regime based on narratives of flexibility and self-determination, while they are, in fact, subjected to new form of managerial governmentality (banks, 2007) of surveillance and control more pervasive than the ones of subordinate labour in the past. furthermore, their performances are segmented, individualised, and physically separated from the ones of other workers. within this scenario, it emerges a neoliberal subjectivity defined by individual autonomy and proactive attitudes towards work and social life (armano et al, 2020). method the study draws from 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews with italian remote workers, i.e., individuals which could work from home through digital technologies during the national lockdown. the research design adopted a criterion sample, thereby selecting participants according to specific variables: gender and age. indeed, the sample is gender balanced (10 males and 10 females) and it includes two age subgroups (10 participants aged 30-45 and 10 aged 46-60). all the interviewees were interviewed during the italian lockdown (march-april 2020). the participants were all recruited in the north of italy where there are the most populous and digitized regions in this country, as well as the ones in which covid-19 spread earlier. main results results highlight that during the lockdown, some participants attempted to cope with the unprecedented triumph of technologically mediated work, others described remote work as liberating and attractive, as it avoids commuting and allow people to organize their activities autonomously, without constraints of space and time. however, their initial enthusiasm decreased after a few weeks of domestic confinement. the convergence of different spaces and times into the home favoured the erosion of the distinction between private and professional life, which become both saturated by digital media. individuals tried to reterritorialize both personal and working interactions in mediated relational spaces, but results support that workers felt the lack of some relational aspects of the workplace and that a ‘work-to-family conflict’ often emerged (eddleston & mulki, 2017). then, the burden of this fractured experience appeared as dramatically heavier for women with young children. in several interviews, participants highlight that workers have little organizational autonomy. companies decide how long and when they have to work, while the projects that had to be submitted often overlap with the need to follow children in their digital distance learning experiences. the experiences reported, especially by women, are those of working and educational deadlines that coincide at the same time, within a unique domestic context, and through protocols established by digital platforms. working from implied, thus, a state of always-on life in which social relationships and the workflow were re-constructed and inevitably shaped by online platforms. if digital technologies have been often promoted as devices that can free us from material constrains, allowing us to work in the place we prefer, whenever we want, this shift have been already proved to have important consequences, such as exacerbating a certain compulsion to work and encourage the tendency to consider work as the focus of daily experiences and, more broadly, of human life (gregg, 2011). thus, the experience of remote workers that emerges is a “fractured” one (huws, 2006), which appears as a characteristic feature of forced and continuous remote work. individuals have to cope with the consequences of an ‘always on’ life, in which digital and social inequalities appear exacerbated by the pandemic. in this scenario, platforms emerged as a ubiquitous presence of ‘logged labour’ (huws, 2016) and of all the realms of everyday life, which becomes to a greater extent a ‘digital life’ (markham, 2020). indeed, the coronavirus crisis has accentuated the infrastructural role of digital platforms (van dijck et al, 2018) and intensified the ‘deep mediatization’ of social life (couldry and hepp, 2017) and labour, thereby normalizing transmedia work and the ‘extension of already media saturated working conditions’ (fast and jansson, 2019, p. 2). references armano, e., mazali, t., & teli, m. (2020). the production of neoliberal subjectivity in platform capitalism. comparative interpretative hypotheses. sociologia della comunicazione, 59, 106-126 banks, m. (2007) the politics of cultural work, basingstoke, uk, palgrave macmillan berg, j., bonnet, f. & soares, f. (2020, may 11). working from home: estimating theworldwide potential. vox column. accessed april 13, 2021. retrieved from: https://voxeu.org/article/working-home-estimating-worldwide-potential couldry, n., & hepp, a. (2017). the mediated construction of reality. cambridge, uk: polity press. eddleston, k. a., & mulki, j. (2017). toward understanding remote workers’ management of work–family boundaries: the complexity of workplace embeddedness. group & organization management, 42(3), 346-387. 10.1177/1059601115619548 fast, k., & jansson, a. (2019). transmedia work: privilege and precariousness in digital modernity. new york: routledge. gregg, m. (2011). work’s intimacy. cambridge, uk: polity. huws, u. (2006). fixed, footloose, or fractured: work, identity, and the spatial division of labor in the twenty-first century city. monthly review, 57(10), 34-44. huws, u. (2016). logged labour: a new paradigm of work organisation?. work organisation, labour & globalisation, 10(1), 7-26 risi e. (2015), “intersezioni e confini del lavoro, tra spazi e tempi urbani e digitali. il caso dei knowledge workers a milano”, in armano e., a. murgia (eds.) le reti del lavoro gratuito. spazi urbani e nuove soggettività, verona: ombre corte, pp. 5976. van dijck, j., poell, t., & de waal, m. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford, uk: oxford university press. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): drainville, r. (2021, october). ex nugis seria: the internet meme as contemporary emblem. paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ex nugis seria: the internet meme as contemporary emblem author name: ray drainville author institution: stratford school of interaction design and busines, university of waterloo, canada extended studies of internet memes situate them broadly under dawkins’ (1976) conception of the meme as a “cultural unit” of communicative information (shifman, 2014; milner, 2016; wiggins, 2019), typically reducing a meme’s visual aspect to a “visual ‘action verb’” (milner, 2016:68). i argue that an important parallel for understanding contemporary memes has been neglected: emblematic imagery arising from the early publishing culture of the european renaissance. below, i briefly describe several of these parallels. formal presentation, multimodality, and juxtaposition there are currently four popular internet meme formats that set up the viewer’s expectations, in related ways: the image macro, the exploitable, the photoshop meme, and the object label (and its variant, the captioned image: see figure 1 for examples). the meme-maker frequently uses a pre-existing picture and usually pairs it with text, or alternately pairs one image with another image. the relevance of the image relies upon recognition: the viewer might be familiar with the subject matter (e.g., bernie sanders sitting during the inauguration), or, alternately, substantially understand the poses, facial expressions, or gestures in the picture (e.g., the couple in the “distracted boyfriend” meme). suggested citation (apa): drainville, r. (2021, october). ex nugis seria: the internet meme as contemporary emblem. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. figure 1: four common meme types: the “image macro” (top left; a “’not sure if’ philip fry from futurama meme), the “exploitable” (top right), the “photoshop meme” (bottom left; a “bernie sitting” meme), and the “object label” (bottom right; a “distracted boyfriend”). emblems are perhaps most closely associated with andrea alciato’s 1531 emblematum libellus, the popularity of which set the emblem to become a favored form of expression for centuries. alciato’s emblems took a dual multimodal form: a picture, usually containing a somewhat familiar figure, and an epigram, a pithy expository text that placed the image in an unexpected light, formally presented in a consistent, clear fashion. thus, the picture is framed in such a way that separates it from its title and expository text (figure 2). the physical juxtaposition of text and image already forms a striking parallel with the image macro, but the similarity runs deeper than this. like memes, emblems were disjointed affairs where “the everyday or commonplace is changed by virtue of being placed in another context”; it is a “bearer of unsuspected meaning, a metonym for a previously hidden reality” (manning, 2002:48). alciato explained that the text provided the opportunity to provide “some elegantly-chosen significance” to the subject (alciato, 1953:letter 24). this imposition of text on image to provide new significance reflects memetic practices. figure 2: andrea alciato, "silence", from the emblematum libellus (1531 wechsel edition). book in the public domain. intertextuality and willful extraction from original context memes are commonly observed to be intertextual: they point to multiple references at once as they riff upon current events and other subjects. the “distracted boyfriend” meme in figure 1 plays upon the turn of young people towards left-leaning politics under the trump presidency. yet intertextuality is a common characteristic of emblems as well: figure 2, for example, employs the common contemporary iconographic trope of the scholar in his study; the text, however, councils silence to the reader so that one might not broadcast one’s foolishness—like someone from pharos, home of the famous lighthouse which illuminates all things—but rather keep one’s thoughts to one’s self, like harpocrates, and thus retain the aura of wisdom (alciato, 1548:14).1 the emblem therefore intertextually mixes contemporary iconography and classical imagery. memes and emblems share this intertextuality: the maker of each extracts their source material and bends that material to their will to meet their chosen significance “with whatever violence” to the source (manning, 2002:49). in-group/out-group dynamics a common characteristic of meme culture is that they evolved through hyperlocalized contexts arising in online venues such as images boards and social media threads, many of which are deeply ephemeral in nature (nagle, 2017; beran, 2019). they are not typically intended for outside consumption by outsiders or “normies”, and many in fact are willfully obscure to alienate outside audiences. a similar dynamic was at play 1 the epigram is a precursor to the better-known line attributed to abraham lincoln, “better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt”. with emblems. often rendered in latin, their language acted as a gatekeeper. in addition, emblem-makers took great pains to mix familiarity and obscurity “so that a sibyl would not be required to interpret its intent, but nor should it be so clear that just anyone could read it” (giovio, 1559:9). new media contexts and reception both emblems and memes arose within a comparatively early point in the evolution of their respective information revolutions. emblems were a popular production of printing, which afforded a wide dissemination of this new format of expression (eisenstein, 1979). memes arose out of multiple early social media contexts, taking advantage of the increased democratization afforded by the pervasive networking of the modern internet. neither memes nor emblems have been widely respected as a form of expression. emblems were considered a toy even by their most prominent makers, albeit a toy with serious undercurrents, as the phrase ex nugis seria (out of trifles, serious things) attests (cats, 1712:237). despite their popularity, however, emblems became increasingly perceived as simplistic children’s moral literature (manning, 2002:150–52). likewise, memes are widely deemed to have a corrosive, reductive effect on any they touch, and yet remain widely popular. conclusion emblems and memes display unexpected parallels which invite further exploration: formal characteristics, juxtaposition, multimodality, intertextuality, willful recontextualization, devotion to in-group obsessions, obscurity, exploitation of the affordances of their respective media, and decreased regard as they spread beyond their original confines. each displays an ongoing interest in a more democratized form of communication—whether to express something heartfelt, make a performative statement, or simply share an in-joke—in the context of simultaneous popularity and disdain. the phrase ex nugis seria (out of trifles, serious things) arises out of the history and reception of emblems, but it very much applies to memes as well. references alciato, a. (1531) emblematum libellus. paris: chrestien wechsel. [online] [accessed on 1 april 2021] https://archive.org/details/alciatiemblematv00alci/mode/2up alciato, a. (1953) le lettere di andrea alciato giureconsulto. barni, g. l. (ed.) florence: felice le monnier. beran, d. (2019) it came from something awful. new york: all points. cats, j. (1712) alle de wercken van den heere jacob cats. amsterdam: j. ratelband. [online] [accessed on 2 april 2021] https://archive.org/details/jsh.31962001408628images/mode/2up dawkins, r. (1976) the selfish gene. 1989 ed., oxford: oxford university press. eisenstein, e. l. (1979) the printing press as an agent of change. 1982 ed., cambridge: cambridge university press. giovio, p. (1559) dialogo dell’imprese militari et amorose. lyon: guillaume rouillé. [online] [accessed on 1 april 2021] https://archive.org/details/impresemilitarie00giov/mode/2up manning, j. (2002) the emblem. 2004 ed., london: reaktion. milner, r. (2016) the world made meme: public conversations and participatory media. cambridge: mit press. nagle, a. (2017) kill all normies: online culture wars from 4chan to tumblr and the alt-right. winchester: zero books. shifman, l. (2014) memes in digital culture. cambridge: mit press. wiggins, b. e. (2019) the discursive power of memes in digital culture. london: routledge. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): mckinney, c. (2020, october). bad attachments: email and queer anticensorshiip protests. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. bad attachments: email and queer anti-censorshiip protests cait mckinney simon fraser university this paper examines a 1996 u.s. internet censorship protest that encouraged users to email a series of technically “indecent” files as attachments to speaker of the house newt gingrich using an online email generator. these attachments were: a list of abortion clinics, a graphic illustration of condom-use instructions, and excerpted sexually explicit scenes from gingrich’s own novel, 1945. selecting from a drop-down menu, senders chose their attachments, completed a personalized message, and clicked send, all within a web-based form. by using the platform to inundate the speaker’s email with attachments, senders cleverly broke the censorship provisions of the 1996 communications decency act (cda), putting themselves at risk to the criminalization of sexual expression online. the “bad attachments” protest grew out of the fact that online information about sexuality was vital to marginalized communities with limited access to other kinds of information channels— including queer and rural youth, and people living with hiv. i argue that the protest attachments constitute a queer, material digital practice, attuned to the political demand for ready information access as a means of survival. the research contributes to the conference theme of “life” by approaching sexuality as a public and intimate mode of being in and working on digital networks (mcglotten 2013; paasonen 2011). methodologically, the paper draws on archival research in the collections of two lgbtq community archives that document the bad attachment protest and its uptake on queer listservs; the paper supplements this archival research through the internet archive’s wayback machine, which has allowed me to reconstruct how the protest functioned, and additional research in tech-related magazine and newspaper archives to understand the scale of the protest and its reception. the cda was the first legislation aimed at online content regulation in the united states, and reflected and reinforced emergent neoliberal understandings of sexuality, identity, and technology (chun 2008; gillespie 2018). the act defined and circumscribed sexual expression by barring the circulation of content that was “indecent” or “patently offensive” according to vague “community standards.” these new regulations met significant protest by u.s. freedom of speech and civil liberties groups such as the american civil liberties union and the electronic frontier foundation, the porn industry, and also a range of sexual minority organizations invested in circulating information about sexuality online—from aids activists, to artists, to lgbt newsgroups and listservs, to niche kink subcultures, each of which depended on the web to communicate. organized by an online free speech advocacy group called interactivism, the attachment protest invited a range of actors from the constituencies listed above to mass email the politicians responsible for voting on and amending the cda. the email that participants were invited to send to gingrich read, in part, “surely, we can keep children from pornography on the internet without prohibiting adults from posting information or even discussing a whole range of subjects and issues. the cda, which cannot be universally enforced, is likely to be selectively applied, possibly for political purposes.” the cda’s indecency provision was successfully struck down through a court challenge in 1997, however the act continues to define the regulatory landscape for online sexual expression in the u.s. via controversial amendments such as fosta-sesta (2018) and the earn it act (2020). as such, this paper provides necessary historical context to contemporary debates at the intersection of internet policy and sexuality and provides a potential model for queer response to conservative sexual regulation online (duguay, burgess and suzor 2018). this paper is one component of my larger research project on sexual minority counter-speech against the cda. here i am specifically interested in how this protest can help us to understand the material and political dimensions of email attachment as an emergent form. for example, news coverage of the protest emphasized the ease of a “flicked” keyboard, a “clicked” mouse, and a “pushed” send button as emerging digital modalities that were changing the nature of political response (c.f. wired). a netaction notes bulletin from 1997 titled “raising hell with email” similarly described a new era of mass participation in online protest made possible by email. this early excitement about clicktivism is complicated by attachments: these messages appended with sexually explicit files are instances where email attachments served as clandestine, “dirty” communication, once removed from the message itself, and a secondary aim of this research is to expand understandings of attachments and their materiality. through attachments, stigmatized sex practices infiltrated everyday messaging and entangled sex with email. as media and internet scholars have argued, the promiscuity of networks were often explained through fears of vulnerability in sexual relationships (chun and friedland 2015; helmreich 2000; parikka 2007). though internet studies work on spam and net art has considered the potentially playful or aggravating affective dimensions of email in the 1990s, the attachment has been undertheorized in the field outside of computer virus transmission. i am interested in using this case to think about attachment as a spatial and temporal mode of communication that uses adjacency as a strategy for queer critique. attachments are not messages themselves even if they are the primary reason for sending an email. but the circulation of attachments compels immediate distrust and invites a series of actions by receivers: email filters; institutional warnings to not open attachments from “untrusted” or “unknown” senders; and scanning for viruses. but downloading, clicking, and transferring the attachment to another program eventually reveals the substance of the attachment (previously known to the user only as a filename, size, and type). in the case of the email protest the attachment becomes a digital performative utterance (butler 1997) as the law is broken once the tasks of opening are complete. these protest attachments draw on modalities of trouble, anticipation, play and sexual mischief to advance a resistant queer digital practice. the paper puts forward a framework for thinking about email attachments as sociotechnical artefacts that pushed at the edges of emerging digital sex cultures in the united states. the paper is engaged with questions about web archives of sexuality, hiv’s role in the history of internet regulation, and the ways sexuality materializes through digital networks. references butler, judith. 1997. excitable speech: a politics of the performative. routledge. chun, wendy hui kyong. 2008. control and freedom: power and paranoia in the age of fiber optics. mit press. chun, wendy hui kyong, and sarah friedland. 2015. “habits of leaking: of sluts and network cards.” differences 26 (2): 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-3145937. duguay, stefanie, jean burgess, and nicolas suzor. 2018. “queer women’s experiences of patchwork platform governance on tinder, instagram, and vine.” convergence 0 (0): 1354856518781530. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856518781530. gillespie, tarleton. 2018. custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. yale university press. helmreich, stefan. 2000. “flexible infections: computer viruses, human bodies, nation-states, evolutionary capitalism.” science, technology, & human values 25 (4): 472–91. https://doi.org/10.1177/016224390002500404. mcglotten, shaka. 2013. virtual intimacies: media, affect, and queer sociality. suny press. “netaction notes 18.” n.d. accessed february 28, 2020. https://www.netaction.org/notes/notes18.html. paasonen, susanna. 2011. carnal resonance: affect and online pornography. mit press. parikka, jussi. 2007. digital contagions: a media archaeology of computer viruses. peter lang. wired. 1996. “net surf.” wired, september 1, 1996. https://www.wired.com/1996/09/net-surf10/. ! selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 reckoning and repair: the urgent conversation about race in the black, christian podcast circuit corrina laughlin loyola marymount university section header(s) (upper & lower case, 12 pt arial bold) through a critical discourse analysis of three podcasts and interviews with prominent black christian podcasters, this paper focuses on the black christian response to the 2020 uprisings against police brutality in the united states. i argue that the black, christian podcast circuit is a counterpublic (squires, 2002) that seeks to change christian culture in america. the affordances of the medium of podcasting offer podcasters a space to create both a counterpublic and an enclaved public. and this dual nature of the medium that makes it a potent force for changing the christian conversation about race. the podcasters i profile offer a portrait of a divided christian church in need of repair and they make the case that repair is only possible through decolonizing the christian faith, repenting and offering reparations for the racial trauma caused by white christians, sparking christians’ activist inclinations in favor of racial justice causes, and interrogating and correcting sexism within both the black church and white evangelical culture. catherine squires (2002) has written about black counterpublics and she schematizes black counterpublic spaces in three ways: enclaved publics, counterpublics, and satellite publics. enclaved publics remain shielded or hidden, perhaps, for example, to protect the safety of their members under conditions of repression. satellite publics may engage with the broader public sphere, while remaining separate from it. by contrast, black counterpublic spaces actively engage the broader public sphere as a way to force change within it. sarah florini’s (2015) study of black podcasters argues that the power of podcasting lies in the fact that it can be a site of enclaved discourse. she writes of the habitus of podcast listening that “many of these listeners consume podcasts via headphones in predominantly white spaces where they work or live, and may to some degree be ‘cocooning’ themselves in the sounds of black sociality as they navigate a hegemony that constitutes white culture as normative” (florini, 2015). and, brock (2020) argues that black users have carved out black spaces in a digital culture where the assumed user is a white male and they have done so by performing blackness. in this process networked black users have defined black technocultures, which, he writes, connect black cultural practices to information technology use. black listeners can suggested citation (apa): laughlin, c. (2021, october). reckoning and repair: the urgent conversation about race in the black, christian podcast circuit. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http:// spir.aoir.org. retreat into black spaces through the habitus of podcast listening as florini and brock argue, and this was backed up by my interviewees. one podcaster explained, for example, that when he addresses his audience, “i want to code myself as black because here's what happens if i speak to black christians directly, there are other christians that can feel as though, okay, i identify what's being said, but if i speak to white christians directly, then black christians will feel excluded and alienated and further marginalized” (burns, 2020). but, the podcasters that i spoke with for this paper also share the goal of changing christian culture and that means talking to and trying to influence white christians. another podcaster told me, “we speak directly to white evangelicals because there's a lot of them they're oftentimes part of what impedes black freedom in the church or beyond, so in my view, they need to be in the conversation.” the public sphere of evangelicalism, which is comprised of publishing houses, magazines, television shows and channels and podcasts, has been controlled by the mostly white evangelical gatekeepers of the christian media world. and many of these gatekeepers have proven that they are willing to block voices that do not conform to what is considered the norms of white evangelicalism (see laughlin, 2019). but with the rise of podcasts, christians can side step these cultural authorities they can create spaces that are defined in and through the black experience, and they can also use these conversations as a space to push their own discourses into the broader public’s consciousness. to create a space for their own community and to influence the larger public, black christian podcasters create both an enclaved space where black listeners can feel at home and cocoon themselves in black cultural idioms, and a counterpublic space that engages with— and hopes to change— the larger christian public. one podcaster explained his understanding of the power of podcasting: the greatest concern of white supremacists, white christian nationalism, is that black people and black christians will control their own narrative. and that's when we become dangerous. and that's when we become free is now we can tell people, no, what they said is actually wrong. no, that's wrong. and then they can't shut us down. and that's why it's such a threat yet at the same time, such a powerful medium as well. this paper looks at one communicative mode, the podcast, to think through the role that this media form has played in in helping to force a reckoning about race in american christian culture. while “racial reconciliation” has been in the evangelical lexicon for decades (see du mez, 2020, chapter 9), it is a discourse that has typically been promoted by white evangelicals and has been constructed on their terms. but in 2020, the white gatekeepers that once led the conversation were sidelined by passionate black media makers who created new activist spaces with the intent of reshaping the narrative to match the urgency of the moment. selected references brock, a. (2020). distributed blackness: african american cybercultures. new york: nyu press. du mez, k. k. (2020). jesus and john wayne: how white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation. new york: norton. florini, s. (2015). the podcast “chitlin’’ circuit”: black podcasters, alternative media, and audio enclaves.” journal of radio & audio media, 22(2), 209–219. laughlin, c. (2020). #amplifywomen: the emergence of an evangelical feminist public on social media. feminist media studies. squires, c. r. (2002). rethinking the black public sphere: an alternative vocabulary for multiple public spheres. communication theory (10503293), 12(4), 446. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): bessant, c., ong, l.l., cook, l.a., hoy., m. g. fox, a., nottingham, e., steinberg, s., gan, p. (2023, october). exploring parents’ knowledge of dark design and its impact on children’s digital well being. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. exploring parents’ knowledge of dark design and its impact on children’s digital well-being claire bessant northumbria university l. lin ong california state polytechnic university, pomona laurel aynne cook west virginia university mariea grubbs hoy university of tennessee beatriz pereira monash university alexa fox university of akron emma nottingham university of winchester stacey steinberg levin college of law, university of florida pingping gan iowa state university digital technology is increasingly important to children for their education, entertainment, and social lives. many children struggle to imagine life without the internet (revealing reality, 2022). yet the digital sphere, designed for adults, poses risks for children (un committee, 2021). the specific focus of this international, interdisciplinary, research study are the risks posed by digital technologies which use ‘dark patterns’ or ‘dark design’ to influence children’s behaviors. dark design and its impact on children dark design (also known as dark patterns (european commission, 2022b; ftc, 2022a; gray et al, 2018), deceptive design (brignull, undated; edpb, 2022), persuasive design (5rights) and nudging (ico, 2022)) is evidenced by “a user interface carefully crafted to trick users into doing things they might not otherwise do” (brignull, undated). there is no agreed definition of what constitutes a ‘dark pattern’ (mathur, 2021) nor any definitive list of dark patterns (for example, differing taxonomies have been developed by the oecd, 2022; the ftc, 2022a and 5rights, 2023). dark patterns are, however, increasingly impacting children. dark patterns are prevalent throughout the digital sphere: in social media, ecommerce sites, apps, cookie consent banners and online games (gray et al, 2023; mathur et al, 2021). in this study, we identified 10 broad pattern categories (sneaking, urgency, misdirection, social proof, scarcity, obstruction, forced action, identity captures, psychological/physical triggers, seamlessness) and 41 examples of dark patterns that might impact children. such dark patterns raise consumer protection issues, affect users’ autonomy, privacy and finances, and may impact negatively upon children’s social, emotional and educational wellbeing (oecd, 2022; ftc, 2022a; 5rights, 2023). state responsibility for protecting vulnerable children and their rights children are more vulnerable than adults to inappropriate online marketing, to economic fraud and to privacy violations (european commission, 2022a; oecd, 2011; ofcom, 2022; unicef, 2021). dark design impacts children’s rights to privacy, to play, and to freedom from economic exploitation (uncrc articles 16, 31, 32). these rights apply online as well as offline (un committee, 2021). article 3 uncrc requires signatory states to make children’s best interests their primary consideration. in europe, the uk, and the us, various actions have been or are being taken to address the risks posed to children online; with some legislation directly acknowledging children’s rights and vulnerabilities. the us (whilst not a uncrc signatory) has enacted the children’s online privacy protection act (coppa) to protect the personal information of children under 13. similar protections are afforded by the eu and uk general data protection regulations. the uk’s online safety act 2023 requires certain online service providers to ensure services are ‘safe by design’ and to provide enhanced protections to children. the european union digital services act requires online platform providers to ensure ‘a high level of privacy, safety, and security’ for children (article 28), and imposes an explicit ban on dark patterns (article 25). globally, regulators acknowledge that dark design negatively impacts adults and children (e.g. cma, 2022; cnil, 2022; cprc, 2022; ftc, 2022; ico, 2022). in the uk, the ico advises that online service providers should not use ‘nudge techniques’ which might encourage children to reveal their personal information (e.g., ico, 2022). the us ftc has recently challenged and fined deceptive design practices aimed at children (e.g., ftc 2022b). the scope and extent of dark design is such, however, that regulators alone cannot safeguard children from dark patterns. the parental role in protecting children from dark design laws such as coppa and the ukgdpr are underpinned by an ethos of family privacy. essentially, children are viewed as inexperienced, immature, and lacking judgment; parents are considered to have primary responsibility for children’s upbringing and development, being uniquely positioned to protect, educate, and guarantee their children’s rights (fineman, 1999; peterman & jones, 2003; moller-okin, 1989). article 18 uncrc similarly understands that a child’s best interests will be a parent’s basic concern, whilst article 5 uncrc recognizes that parents owe duties to direct and guide their children, obliging states to respect parents’ responsibilities. in the digital context, parents are viewed as responsible for supporting children in their use of digital technologies (lievens et al, 2018) and as the most appropriate people to make decisions about children’s online engagement (milkaite et al., 2021; livingstone and o’neill, 2014). many parents themselves view children’s online safety as a parental responsibility (digital regulation cooperation forum, 2022), and are actively involved in mediating children’s use of online technologies (dias et al, 2016; page jeffery, 2021; zaman et al, 2021). although several studies consider the implications of dark design for children (yip, 2019; fitton and read, 2019; fitton, bell and read, 2021; melzer and roarsen 2021), to date little attention has been paid to parents’ understanding of how dark design approaches impact upon their children, or to how parents believe such design can best be addressed. methodological approach to understand parents’ opinions regarding dark patterns, we asked parents of children aged 5-17 located in the us (n=287) and uk (n=290) to complete an online survey regarding the online experiences of their oldest school-aged child. survey questions were informed by child development theory as well as literature on parental online mediation, children’s online harms, and dark patterns. parents were asked to consider three randomly assigned examples of dark patterns from the examples compiled by the research team. we asked whether parents believed these examples could apply to their children, as well as their opinions on the examples. additional questions sought parents’ views on the effectiveness of regulation and responsibility for online design, as well as information about their online parenting strategies. initial findings descriptive statistics from an exploratory analysis follow. overall, us and uk parents are similarly concerned about the impact of dark patterns on their children, although some country-level differences exist. parents were asked whether they thought there was sufficient regulation of online platforms (agreement = 1, disagreement = 7). most parents believe there is insufficient regulation around the design of online platforms, although us parents were slightly less negative (m = 3.4, sd = 1.7) than uk parents (m = 2.8, sd = 1.4). parents across the us and the uk are similar in who they identify as who should be responsible for online design seen by children, with 75% or more parents naming: companies which sell a product, service or app; those who design adverts; app, web and game designers; and industry regulatory bodies. however, when asked who should be most responsible for addressing online design, uk parents most often referred to the company who sells a product, service or app (uk 40.8%, us 30.4%). in contrast, us parents said a child’s parents or caregivers should be most responsible (uk 16.8%, us 34.0%). overall, us and uk parents believe parents bear a high level of responsibility for protecting their children from the negative impacts of online design. approximately nine out of ten parents are aware of tools they can use to support their children’s safety online (uk 86.1%, us 90.0%), with about two-thirds of all parents using such tools (uk 58.9%, us 60.2%). these findings provide an initial discussion point for regulators, companies, marketers, and researchers. given parents’ responsibilities for protecting their children, a deeper understanding of their perspectives regarding dark patterns is key to developing effective safeguards for children online. references brignull, h., (undated). “deceptive patterns.” https://www.deceptive.design/ competition and markets authority (cma, 2022). “online choice architecture: how digital design can harm competition and consumers.” https://www.gov.uk/find-digitalmarket-research/online-choice-architecture-how-digital-design-can-harm-competitionand-consumers-2022-cma cnil, (2022). “la forme des choix: données personnelles, design et frictions désirables cahiers ip no.6.” https://www.cnil.fr/sites/default/files/atoms/files/cnil_cahiers_ip6.pdf consumer policy research centre (cprc, 2022). “duped by design: manipulative online design: dark patterns in australia.” https://cprc.org.au/dupedbydesign/ dias, p., brito, r., ribbens, w., daniela, l., rubene, z., dreier, m., gemo, m., gioia, r. & chaudron, s. (2016). “the role of parents in the engagement of young children with digital technologies: exploring tensions between rights of access and protection, from ‘gatekeepers’ to ‘scaffolders’.” global studies of childhood 6(4), 414-427 digital regulation cooperation forum (drcf, 2022). “families’ attitudes towards age assurance.” https://www.deceptive.design/ https://www.gov.uk/find-digital-market-research/online-choice-architecture-how-digital-design-can-harm-competition-and-consumers-2022-cma https://www.gov.uk/find-digital-market-research/online-choice-architecture-how-digital-design-can-harm-competition-and-consumers-2022-cma https://www.gov.uk/find-digital-market-research/online-choice-architecture-how-digital-design-can-harm-competition-and-consumers-2022-cma https://www.cnil.fr/sites/default/files/atoms/files/cnil_cahiers_ip6.pdf https://cprc.org.au/dupedbydesign/ https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachmen t_data/file/1109983/ofcom_ico_joint_research_-_age_assurance_report.pdf european commission, (2022a). “communication from the commission to the european parliament, the council, the european economic and social committee and the committee of the regions a digital decade for children and youth: the new european strategy for a better internet for kids (bik+)’ com (2022) 212.” https://eurlex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/txt/pdf/?uri=celex:52022dc0212&from=en european commission (2022b). “behavioural study on unfair commercial practices in the digital environment dark patterns and manipulative personalisation: final report.” european data protection board (2022). “guidelines 03/22 on deceptive design patterns in social media platform interfaces: how to recognise and avoid them.” https://edpb.europa.eu/our-work-tools/our-documents/guidelines/guidelines-032022deceptive-design-patterns-social-media_en fineman, m.a. (1999). “what place for family privacy?” george washington law review, 67, 1207 fitton, d., and read, j. c. (2019). “creating a framework to support the critical consideration of dark design aspects in free-to-play apps”. in proceedings of the 18th acm international conference on interaction design and children (pp. 407-418). fitton, d., bell, b., and read, j., (2021). “integrating dark patterns into the 4cs of online risk in the context of young people and mobile gaming apps.” in ifip conference on human-computer interaction (pp. 701-711). springer, cham. ftc (2022a). “bringing dark patterns to light” staff report” https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/p214800%20dark%20patterns%20report %209.14.2022%20-%20final.pdf ftc (2022b). “$245 million ftc settlement alleges fortnite owner epic games used digital dark patterns to charge players for unwanted in-game purchases.” https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/12/245-million-ftc-settlement-allegesfortnite-owner-epic-games-used-digital-dark-patterns-charge gray, c., kou, y, battles, b., hoggatt, j., and toombs, a., (2018). “the dark (patterns) side of ux design.” in proceedings of the 2018 chi conference on human factors in computing systems. acm, new york, ny, usa, article 534, 1-14. information commissioner’s office (2022). “age appropriate design: a code of practice for online services.” https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-andresources/childrens-information/childrens-code-guidance-and-resources/ageappropriate-design-a-code-of-practice-for-online-services-2-1.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1109983/ofcom_ico_joint_research_-_age_assurance_report.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1109983/ofcom_ico_joint_research_-_age_assurance_report.pdf https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/txt/pdf/?uri=celex:52022dc0212&from=en https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/txt/pdf/?uri=celex:52022dc0212&from=en https://edpb.europa.eu/our-work-tools/our-documents/guidelines/guidelines-032022-deceptive-design-patterns-social-media_en https://edpb.europa.eu/our-work-tools/our-documents/guidelines/guidelines-032022-deceptive-design-patterns-social-media_en https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/12/245-million-ftc-settlement-alleges-fortnite-owner-epic-games-used-digital-dark-patterns-charge https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/12/245-million-ftc-settlement-alleges-fortnite-owner-epic-games-used-digital-dark-patterns-charge https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/childrens-information/childrens-code-guidance-and-resources/age-appropriate-design-a-code-of-practice-for-online-services-2-1.pdf https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/childrens-information/childrens-code-guidance-and-resources/age-appropriate-design-a-code-of-practice-for-online-services-2-1.pdf https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/childrens-information/childrens-code-guidance-and-resources/age-appropriate-design-a-code-of-practice-for-online-services-2-1.pdf lievens, e., livingstone, s., mclaughlin, s., o’neill, b., & verdoodt, v., (2018). “children’s rights and digital technologies.” in u. kilkelly & t. liefard. international human rights of children (pgs. 487-513). springer livingstone, s., and o’neill, b. (2014). “children’s rights online: challenges, dilemmas and emerging directions.” in s. van der hof, b. van den berg & b schermer (eds.) minding minors wandering the web: regulating online child safety. tmc asser press mathur, a., mayer, j., and kshirsagar, m., (2021). ‘what makes a dark pattern... dark? design attributes, normative considerations, and measurement methods.’ in chi ’21, may 8–13, 2021, yokohama, japan melzer, a., roarsen, a., hagen, m., and jaccheri, l., (2021). “towards suitable freeto-play games for children.” in international conference on entertainment computing (pp. 264-276). springer, cham. milkaite, i., de wolf, r., lievens, e., de leyn, t., and martens, m., (2021). “children’s reflections on privacy and the protection of their personal data: a child-centric approach to data protection information formats.” children and youth services reviews (129) 106170 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2021.106170 moller-okin, s., (1989). justice, gender and the family. basic books. oecd (2011). “the protection of children online: risks faced by children online and policies to protect them: oecd digital economy paper 179.” https://www.oecdilibrary.org/docserver/5kgcjf71pl28en.pdf?expires=1671210597&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=543b55f6c8f2263a2 0773ac8c0c1ad8e#:~:text=oecd%20%282011-0502%29%2c%20%e2%80%9cthe%20protection%20of%20children%20online%3a%2 0risks,oecd%20digital%20economy%20papers%2c%20no.%20179%2c%20oecd %20publishing%2c oecd (2022). “dark commercial patterns: oecd digital economy papers no 336.” https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/science-and-technology/dark-commercialpatterns_44f5e846-en ofcom (2022). “children and parents: media use and attitudes report 2022.” https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/234609/childrens-media-use-andattitudes-report-2022.pdf page jeffery, c. (2021). “it’s really difficult. we’ve only got each other to talk to. monitoring, mediation, and good parenting in australia in the digital age.” journal of children and media (15)2, 202-217. peterman, l., and jones t., (2003). “defending family privacy.” journal of law & family studies 5, 71. regulation (eu) 2022/2065 of the european parliament and of the council https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/5kgcjf71pl28-en.pdf?expires=1671210597&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=543b55f6c8f2263a20773ac8c0c1ad8e#:~:text=oecd%20%282011-05-02%29%2c%20%e2%80%9cthe%20protection%20of%20children%20online%3a%20risks,oecd%20digital%20economy%20papers%2c%20no.%20179%2c%20oecd%20publishing%2c https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/5kgcjf71pl28-en.pdf?expires=1671210597&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=543b55f6c8f2263a20773ac8c0c1ad8e#:~:text=oecd%20%282011-05-02%29%2c%20%e2%80%9cthe%20protection%20of%20children%20online%3a%20risks,oecd%20digital%20economy%20papers%2c%20no.%20179%2c%20oecd%20publishing%2c https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/5kgcjf71pl28-en.pdf?expires=1671210597&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=543b55f6c8f2263a20773ac8c0c1ad8e#:~:text=oecd%20%282011-05-02%29%2c%20%e2%80%9cthe%20protection%20of%20children%20online%3a%20risks,oecd%20digital%20economy%20papers%2c%20no.%20179%2c%20oecd%20publishing%2c https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/5kgcjf71pl28-en.pdf?expires=1671210597&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=543b55f6c8f2263a20773ac8c0c1ad8e#:~:text=oecd%20%282011-05-02%29%2c%20%e2%80%9cthe%20protection%20of%20children%20online%3a%20risks,oecd%20digital%20economy%20papers%2c%20no.%20179%2c%20oecd%20publishing%2c https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/5kgcjf71pl28-en.pdf?expires=1671210597&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=543b55f6c8f2263a20773ac8c0c1ad8e#:~:text=oecd%20%282011-05-02%29%2c%20%e2%80%9cthe%20protection%20of%20children%20online%3a%20risks,oecd%20digital%20economy%20papers%2c%20no.%20179%2c%20oecd%20publishing%2c https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/5kgcjf71pl28-en.pdf?expires=1671210597&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=543b55f6c8f2263a20773ac8c0c1ad8e#:~:text=oecd%20%282011-05-02%29%2c%20%e2%80%9cthe%20protection%20of%20children%20online%3a%20risks,oecd%20digital%20economy%20papers%2c%20no.%20179%2c%20oecd%20publishing%2c https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/5kgcjf71pl28-en.pdf?expires=1671210597&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=543b55f6c8f2263a20773ac8c0c1ad8e#:~:text=oecd%20%282011-05-02%29%2c%20%e2%80%9cthe%20protection%20of%20children%20online%3a%20risks,oecd%20digital%20economy%20papers%2c%20no.%20179%2c%20oecd%20publishing%2c https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/science-and-technology/dark-commercial-patterns_44f5e846-en https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/science-and-technology/dark-commercial-patterns_44f5e846-en https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/234609/childrens-media-use-and-attitudes-report-2022.pdf https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/234609/childrens-media-use-and-attitudes-report-2022.pdf of 19 october 2022 on a single market for digital services and amending directive 2000/31/ec (digital services act) revealing reality (2022). “research into risk factors that may lead children to harm online.” https://www.revealingreality.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/researchreport_-risk-factors-that-may-lead-children-to-harm-online_final-version-06.10.pdf united nations committee on the rights of the child (2021). “general comment no. 25 on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment crc/c/gc/25.” https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/general-comments-andrecommendations/general-comment-no-25-2021-childrens-rights-relation united nations. (1989). “united nations convention on the rights of the child.” (uncrc) unicef (2021). “the case for better governance of children’s data: a manifesto.” https://www.unicef.org/globalinsight/media/1741/file/unicef%20global%20insight%20 data%20governance%20manifesto.pdf woodhouse, b. b. (1999). “the dark side of family privacy.” george washington law review 67, 1247 yip, j. c., sobel, k., gao, x., hishikawa, a. m., lim, a., meng, l., ... & hiniker, a. (2019, may). “laughing is scary, but farting is cute: a conceptual model of children's perspectives of creepy technologies.” in proceedings of the 2019 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-15). zaman, b., nouwen, m., and van leeuwen, k. (2021). “challenging adolescents’ autonomy: an affordances perspective on parental tools.” in l. green, d. holloway, k. stevenson, t. leaver, & l. haddon (eds.) the routledge companion to digital media and children (pgs. 195-205). routledge. https://www.revealingreality.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/research-report_-risk-factors-that-may-lead-children-to-harm-online_final-version-06.10.pdf https://www.revealingreality.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/research-report_-risk-factors-that-may-lead-children-to-harm-online_final-version-06.10.pdf https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/general-comments-and-recommendations/general-comment-no-25-2021-childrens-rights-relation https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/general-comments-and-recommendations/general-comment-no-25-2021-childrens-rights-relation selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): stegeman, h.m., poell, t., duffy, b.e., jokubauskaitė, e., cotter, k., velthuis, o. & meisner, c. (2022, november). platforms and the precarity of creator (in)visibility. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. platforms and the precarity of creator (in)visibility hanne m. stegeman university of amsterdam thomas poell university of amsterdam brooke erin duffy cornell university emilija jokubauskaitė university of amsterdam kelley cotter pennsylvania state university olav velthuis university of amsterdam colten meisner cornell university whether vlogging on youtube, camming on chaturbate, or hyping products as an influencer on instagram, creators require platform visibility to monetize their labor (cotter, 2019). for marginalized creators, digitally mediated visibility may be socially motivated too, bound up as it is with the politics of (self-)representation (cunningham & craig 2019). indeed, what is most visible on platforms (re)produces social norms and generates revenue (marwick, 2015; van doorn & velthuis 2018). visibility thus shapes the allocation of money and power in the online attention economy (duffy 2020; poell et al., 2021). at the same time, both platforms and creators have a vested interest in keeping some aspects of their activities invisible. a key critique of “big tech” is the extent to which platform companies systematically obfuscate their algorithmic curation systems, business models, and moderation practices from the public (gillespie, 2018). creators, meanwhile, may try to shield their offline lives and identities from networked audiences (van der nagel & frith 2015). especially those representing marginalized communities may conceal their identities in an effort to stave off hate, harassment and violence (banet-weiser & miltner, 2016). other creator categories, such as online sex workers, often hide their ‘real’ identities to avoid stigma and discrimination (jones, 2015). such accounts suggest that the stakes for platform (in)visibility are heighted for creators from historically marginalized groups, as well as for those who produce content in socially stigmatized genres of cultural production. this panel examines the tension between visibility and invisibility in the platform-creator relationship with a focus on highly precarious areas of cultural production, including online sex workers, body activists, and lgbtq+ content creators, among others. together, the panelists consider: what kinds of creators are made visible on platforms? conversely, who remains invisible? how do platforms and their algorithms afford (in)visibility to marginalized and stigmatized creators? how do these groups resist top-down (in)visibility regimes? finally, how do such (in)visibility regimes challenge or reaffirm other forms of social marginalization? primarily drawing on interviews with creators on a variety of social media and webcam sex platforms, the panelists examine the complex dynamic between visibility and invisibility. the first paper studies the role of algorithmic labor and capital in the wider hierarchies that structure the contemporary creator economy. it critically analyzes ‘who can’ participate in regimes of algorithmic visibility on leading social media platforms and-conversely—'who can not’. the second paper further develops this inquiry, studying how people of size grapple with their datafied presence online and develop strategies for safely navigating, what the author calls, algorithmically mediated hyper(in)visibility. focusing on the body positive movement (bpm) on tiktok, the paper discusses how people of size must not only manage discriminatory human responses to their physical bodies, but also harmful machine responses to their data bodies. the third paper, which examines performers on webcam sex platforms, is concerned with the tension between visibility and safety. it shows how these performers engage with visibility beyond that provided by platform algorithms, while simultaneously seeking invisibility, where possible. finally, the fourth paper—drawing on an interface analysis of 50 high-traffic webcam sex platforms—analyzes the information and affordances available to these performers. critically exploring the platform-creator information asymmetry, it reflects on how performers can navigate visibility and revenue opportunities on webcam platforms. by bringing together studies on historically marginalized creators, this panel destabilizes the binary of platform (in)visibility. at the same time that the panelists show how platforms shape the kinds of (in)visibility afforded to precarious laborers, the panelists also show how they seek to resist this erasure and challenge the vulnerabilities of being “seen.” highlighting that these creators’ vital resistance to erasure gives rise to various vulnerabilities not faced by those groups we already always ‘see’. references banet-weiser, s., & miltner, k. m. (2016). #masculinitysofragile: culture, structure, and networked misogyny. feminist media studies, 16(1), 171–174. cotter, k. (2019). playing the visibility game: how digital influencers and algorithms negotiate influence on instagram. new media & society, 21(4), 895–913. cunningham, s., & craig, d. (2019). social media entertainment: the new intersection of hollywood and silicon valley. in social media entertainment. new york university press. duffy, b. e. (2020). algorithmic precarity in cultural work. communication and the public, 5(3-4), 103-107. gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. in custodians of the internet. yale university press. jones, a. (2015). sex work in a digital era. sociology compass, 9(7), 558–570. marwick, a. e. (2015). instafame: luxury selfies in the attention economy. public culture, 27(1 (75)), 137–160. poell, t., nieborg, d. b., & duffy, b. e. (2021). platforms and cultural production. polity. van der nagel, e., & frith, j. (2015). anonymity, pseudonymity, and the agency of online identity: examining the social practices of r/gonewild. first monday. van doorn, n., & velthuis, o. (2018). a good hustle: the moral economy of market competition in adult webcam modeling. journal of cultural economy, 11(3), 177–192. the pursuit of platform visibility: algorithmic labor and capital in the creator economy brooke erin duffy cornell university colten meisner cornell university in late 2021, when uk-based analytics firm midia research predicted that 2022 would emerge as the “year of the creator” (mulligan, 2021), it was perhaps an expression of industrial self-interest. after all, as an intermediary in the entertainment industry, midia has vested economic stakes in forecasting the landscape of digital media markets. but such prognostications also attest to the continued ascent of the creator economy, wherein platform-dependent artists, entertainers, gamers, and influencers are reconfiguring the values and logics of cultural production (cunningham & craig, 2019, poell et al., 2021). both within and beyond the internet studies community, research into these creator subcultures and creative practices abounds (e.g., abidin, 2016; bishop, 2020; meisner & ledbetter, 2020). collectively, this work illuminates how various social actors may enable or constrain structures of success or—perhaps more aptly—visibility. in this presentation, we present data from in-depth interviews with 30 social media content creators to explicate the role of algorithmic labor and capital in the platforms’ visibility hierarchies and, consequently, the wider creator economy. to be sure, studies of gig workers (e.g., rosenblatt & stark, 2016) and creative entrepreneurs (klawitter & hargittai, 2018) have helped draw attention to the lopsided nature of algorithmic knowledge systems; workers’ relationships--both to each other and to the platforms on which they rely for income--are staggeringly asymmetrical. studies of particular creatorinfluencer communities, including those vying for audiences on instagram (cotter, 2019); youtube (bishop, 2020; caplan & gillespie, 2020) and tiktok (duffy et al., 2020), among others, highlight some of the algorithmic dynamics and inequities distinctive to platform-dependent creator communities. indeed, many creators and aspirants are impelled to engage in what cotter (2019) productively describes as the “visibility game,” wherein participants are “acutely aware of algorithmic power and [strategically] pursue visibility”--often by working in concert (p. 908). our study, which draws upon interviews with content creators representing socially marginalized groups, demonstrates that the “algorithmic game” is likely rigged against non-normative creators and cultural expressions. methods empirically, we draw upon a secondary analysis of interview data that we compiled for a study of platform governance and resistance in the creator economy (authors, under review). during the summer of 2021, we interviewed 30 partor full-time social media content creators about their experiences with platform visibility and content moderation (e.g., censorship, demonetization, shadowbanning). informed by accounts of algorithmic bias and discrimination circulating in wider popular culture, we purposefully sampled individuals representing historically marginalized social identities (e.g., racial/ethnic minorities, women, lgbtq+) and/or stigmatized content genres (e.g., cosplay, sex work, political art). each of our interviewees produced content on one or more of the following platforms: instagram, tiktok, youtube, facebook, and/or twitch. although we did not initially set out to study the knowledge and information-sharing practices linked to visibility, the topics of algorithmic labor and capital emerged as salient categories during the coding and analysis stages of research (glaser & strauss, 1967). algorithmic labor and capital “the algorithm…is the main problem. you want your stuff to be seen by people. that way you can monetize it.” -tristan, educational tiktok/youtuber “if [the algorithm] ain’t showing it to no one, you ain’t getting paid.” -caroline, trans tiktok creator as the above interview quotes make clear, creators were keenly aware of the instrumentality of being seen and, more specifically, the role that algorithms played in the allocation of such visibility. interviewees thus described “countless hours” devoted to algorithmic sense-making along with the felt need “to educate [themselves] on the algorithm.” such expositions of the time and energy devoted to learning and sharing information about platforms’ (perceived) ranking and optimization systems underscores the requirements for algorithmic labor (rosenblat & stark, 2016). of course, creators were not just oriented toward achieving visibility; they also sought to stave off punishments that might render them invisible. many thus invested time in strategies believed to evade platform and/or algorithmic “punishments” (i.e., shadowbanning, censorship, demonetization). while trans creators detailed the use of coded terms like “seggs” (instead of “sex”) or “g@y” (instead of “gay”) in hashtags, others managed multiple professional accounts in anticipation that any of them could “get banned suddenly without warning.” as such, we contend that the algorithmic laboring demands of the creator economy are ramped up for those communities most likely to be deemed “controversial” by platforms’ regulatory systems. not only do platforms’ hazily defined guidelines increase the labor for particular communities but, moreover, markers of capital and privilege shape algorithmic knowledge structures in disparate ways. some of our interviewees admitted to being able to leverage privileged insider information or social capital--much of which amounts to algorithmic imaginaries (bucher, 2017). while one creator described themselves as “super lucky to be able to have a contact” at tiktok, another discussed how their degree in software engineering afforded them insight about “how an algorithm works.” the majority of our participants, however, lacked access to such insider information and had little recourse when faced with punitive platform action. as one of our interviewees, a queer artist, put it,“ algorithms are built by people and tech is still largely cis, white males, and they code their biases.” in the end, then, we consider how the pursuit of platform visibility among content creators is shaped by wider systems of inclusion and--more pointedly--exclusion. references abidin, crystal. "visibility labour: engaging with influencers’ fashion brands and# ootd advertorial campaigns on instagram." media international australia 161.1 (2016): 86100. bishop, s. (2020). algorithmic experts: selling algorithmic lore on youtube. social media + society, 6(1), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119897323 bucher, t. (2017). the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 30-44. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154086 caplan, r., & gillespie, t. (2020). tiered governance and demonetization: the shifting terms of labor and compensation in the platform economy. social media + society, 6(2), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120936636 cotter, k. (2019). playing the visibility game: how digital influencers and algorithms negotiate influence on instagram. new media & society, 21(4), 895-913. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818815684 cunningham, s., & craig, d. (2019). social media entertainment. new york university press. duffy, b. e., pinch, a., sannon, s., & sawey, m. (2021). the nested precarities of creative labor on social media. social media+ society, 7(2), 20563051211021368. glaser, b. (1992) basics of grounded theory analysis (california, sociology press). klawitter, e., & hargittai, e. (2018). “it’s like learning a whole other language": the role of algorithmic skills in the curation of creative goods. international journal of communication, 12(21), 3940-3510. meisner, c., & ledbetter, a. m. (2020). participatory branding on social media: the affordances of live streaming for creative labor. new media & society. advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820972392 mulligan, m. (2021, december 20). 2022 midia predictions: the year of the creator. retrieved from: https://www.midiaresearch.com. poell, t., nieborg, d. b., & duffy, b. e. (2021). platforms and cultural production. john wiley & sons. rosenblat, a., & stark, l. (2016). algorithmic labor and information asymmetries: a case study of uber’s drivers. international journal of communication, 10, 27. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119897323 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154086 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120936636 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818815684 navigating algorithmically mediated hyper(in)visibility in the body positivity movement kelley cotter pennsylvania state university a key interest of the body positive movement (bpm) is normalizing body diversity through making bodies of all sizes and shapes visible. this interest is complicated by what gailey (2014) calls hyper(in)visibility. hyper(in)visibility refers to how nonnormative bodies, paradoxically, receive greater scrutiny than others (they are hypervisible), while often being overlooked (they are hyperinvisible). in the digital realm, algorithms mediate the experience of hyper(in)visibility, as they regulate who and what becomes visible. being visible online opens people of size up to potential judgment, ridicule, and violence, but they may just as soon not be seen at all. people of size must confront platform algorithms that reinforce hegemonic perspectives (noble, 2018), suppress content created by members of marginalized groups (blunt et al., 2020; noble, 2018; smith et al., 2021) and create opportunities for hate to propagate (daniels, 2018). the rise of platforms has produced a new plane of political struggle for the bpm: they must not only manage harmful human responses to their physical bodies, but also harmful machine responses to their data bodies (petty et al., 2018). this study seeks to understand how people of size grapple with their datafied presence online, particularly on tiktok, and develop strategies for safely navigating algorithmically mediated hyper(in)visibility. for this, i build on cotter’s (2019) analogy of the “visibility game” to account for the relevance of audiences’ gazes in pursuits of visibility. visibility and social media while visibility of different bodies in mainstream society does not guarantee or certify access, equality, or empowerment, it does crucial work at a symbolic level. as gailey wrote, “[v]isibility is intimately related to acknowledgment or recognition. […] to be seen by a significant other means that we exist” (2014). the historical erasure of certain bodies in media representations constitutes a kind of symbolic annihilation: (mainstream) media representations tend to omit, trivialize, and condemn nonnormative bodies (tuchman, 2000). the depiction of fat people as lazy, unattractive, and unhealthy serves to justify or legitimate direct and structural violence against them (galtung, 1990; prohaska & gailey, 2019), including harassment, bullying, abuse, and violence (gailey, 2014; royce, 2009). social media has afforded new opportunities for rendering non-normative bodies more visible (lupton, 2017; sastre, 2014), which could “open up spaces of comfort” for people of size (hynnä & kyrölä, 2019, p. 9). cotter (2019) previously observed that the pursuit of visibility online resembles a game constructed around rules established by platforms and embedded in their algorithms. the visibility game captures the interplay between algorithms, platforms, and creators that shapes how the latter formulate visibility tactics. however, cotter’s original conceptualization did not account for the role of other users in shaping how creators “play the game.” this study aims to extend the nascent body of work on the online bpm, while complicating the notion of the visibility game. whereas the goal of the visibility game is to move from invisibility to visibility, for bpm activists online, the goal is to find a liberatory space between algorithmicallymediated hypervisibility and hyperinvisibility—to achieve their political ends while being seen with respect, dignity, and humanity. method with tiktok’s rapidly rising popularity, the bpm has found both community and new challenges on the platform (russo, 2022). currently, i am collecting tiktok videos produced by bpm creators that explicitly address the platform’s fyp algorithm. to identify relevant content, on a weekly basis, i am collecting content from searches that combine sets of keywords related to body positivity and “algorithm” (e.g., “’body positive’ algorithm,” “’fat positive’ algorithm”). this data will be paired with data from interviews with 20 bpm tiktok creators, strategically sampled to represent the intersectional nature of body ideals and the struggle for fat liberation (strings, 2019). preliminary analysis is underway. the analysis is exploratory in nature and follows an iterative process with multiple cycles of coding, per saldaña’s (2012) approach. while i largely employ an inductive approach, my analysis is informed by gailey’s conceptualization of hyper(in)visibility and cotter’s conceptualization of the visibility game. through a round of initial coding, i construct a provisional, thematic understanding of how bpm creators make sense of and respond to the fyp algorithm vis-a-vis their visibility. in a second cycle of coding, i conduct pattern coding to identify higher-level categories and axial coding to explore how categories and subcategories relate to one another. finally, in a third cycle of coding, i read the categories through the lens of hyper(in)visibility and the visibility game. by exploring the algorithmically mediated hyper(in)visibility of people of size, this paper will contribute a more textured accounting of the role of power relations between platforms, creators, and other users at play in pursuits of visibility online. references blunt, d., wolf, a., coombes, e., & mullin, s. (2020). posting into the void: studying the impact of shadowbanning on sex workers and activists. https://hackinghustling.org/posting-into-the-void-content-moderation/ cotter, k. (2019). playing the visibility game: how digital influencers and algorithms negotiate influence on instagram. new media & society, 21(4), 895-913. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818815684 daniels, j. (2018). the algorithmic rise of the “alt-right”. contexts, 17(1), 60-65. https://doi.org/10.1177/1536504218766547 gailey, j. (2014). the hyper (in) visible fat woman: weight and gender discourse in contemporary society. springer. galtung, j. (1990). cultural violence. journal of peace research, 27(3), 291-305. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343390027003005 hynnä, k., & kyrölä, k. (2019). “feel in your body”: fat activist affects in blogs. social media+ society, 5(4), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119879983 lupton, d. (2017). digital media and body weight, shape, and size: an introduction and review. fat studies, 6(2), 119-134. https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2017.1243392 noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. nyu press. petty, t., saba, m., lewis, t., peña gangadharan, s., & eubanks, v. (2018). our data bodies: reclaiming our data. https://www.odbproject.org/tools/ prohaska, a., & gailey, j. a. (2019). theorizing fat oppression: intersectional approaches and methodological innovations. fat studies, 8(1), 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2019.1534469 royce, t. (2009). 17. the shape of abuse. the fat studies reader. https://doi.org/10.18574/9780814777435-020/html russo, g. (2022). for plus-size creators, tiktok presents a new wave of challenges. https://www.nylon.com/life/tiktok-body-positivity-plus-size-creators saldana, j. (2012). the coding manual for qualitative researchers. sage. sastre, a. (2014). towards a radical body positive: reading the online “body positive movement”. feminist media studies, 14(6), 929-943. smith, s., haimson, o. l., fitzsimmons, c., & echarte brown, n. (2021). censorship of marginalized communities on instagram. https://saltyworld.net/product/exclusive-reportcensorship-of-marginalized-communities-on-instagram-2021-pdf-download/ strings, s. (2019). fearing the black body: the racial origins of fat phobia. nyu press. tuchman, g. (2000). the symbolic annihilation of women by the mass media. in culture and politics (pp. 150-174). springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-629657_9 showing/hiding parts: how managing (in)visibility manages risk in webcam labor hanne m. stegeman university of amsterdam mediated visibility is a double edged sword, it comes with both risks and opportunities (thompson, 2005). this is especially true for precarious and stigmatized creators, such as webcam performers. in this paper, based on in-depth interviews with 34 webcam performers living in the netherlands, i explore how these creators manage the risks and opportunities associated with their (in)visibility. webcam performers–walking the line between sex workers and influencers —livestream sexual shows for audience compensation. economic necessity, as well as experiences of stigmatization, shape the decisions these performers make as to what parts of their identities, availability, personalities, and bodies they show online. being seen is simultaneously dangerous and profitable, encompassing both the potential for representation and stigmatization (theunissen & favero, 2021). in the light of these tensions, this paper highlights how creator (in)visibility concerns more than just algorithmic ranking by platforms. webcam performers, make individual decisions on what to show and monetize. as is the case with algorithmic (in)visibility, these choices are constrained by oppressive social and platform structures. creators, algorithms and (in)visibility labor a lot of valuable research has already been done on how creators, ranging from social media influencers to webcam performers, engage with platform ranking-systems to increase their visibility (e.g. cotter, 2019; velthuis & van doorn, 2020). across the creator economy, algorithmic curation tends to reproduce social inequalities. usually only dominant socio-economic groups often actually benefit from online visibility (duffy & hund, 2019). on webcam platforms thin, (apparently) able bodied, white, middle-class cis women tend to populate the upper ranks (jones, 2020). being seen, at least in part, depends on matching dominant norms. current research also suggests that online visibility comes with vulnerability, especially for marginalized groups (duffy & hund, 2019). taking into account the sex work stigma webcam performers face (koken, 2012), merely existing in public online space is an additional risk too (e.g., jones, 2020; theunissen & favero, 2021). simultaneously, it is clear that social media and webcam audiences demand authenticity and intimacy (e.g. duffy & hund, 2019; jones, 2020). these types of online labor thus require workers to (over)share and, at the same time, to withhold information. this paper advances discussion of (in)visibility decisions made by online creators irrespective of their positioning on their platforms. i also complicate discussions of what online creators are willing to share, by showing how structures such as platforms and stigma constrain these individual choices. webcam performers engage with visibility beyond algorithmic visibility and seek necessary invisibility, where possible, simultaneously. webcam performers’ (in)visibility management interviews with 34 webcam performers in the netherlands show the importance of (in)visibility management in precarious online labor. i conducted these interviews either online or offline in performers’ homes, only after ethical approval and testing the interview guide with an experienced performer. anonymity preferences and compensation were discussed for every interview (jones, 2020). the analysis, in this case a thematic analysis of risk and opportunity management strategies, and the reporting of these interviews respects the visibility, pseudonymity, and anonymity decisions taken by the interviewees. based on the analysis of these interviews, i observe that webcam performers manage their (in)visibility primarily through decisions on what parts of their personality, availability, body, and identity they want to show. additionally, performers outlined how these choices are constrained by platforms and social contexts. tactics for (in)visibility management include strategies familiar to influencers. when it comes to ‘personality’, decisions are made about, for instance, which life events to share with audiences (duffy & hund, 2019). yet, webcam performers, like other sex workers (jones, 2020), also construct entirely separate personas that attract clients and protect the performers’ intimate life. management of apparent ‘availability’ is a counterintuitive measure whereby performers limit their visibility to create artificial scarcity and thus higher demand. showing less, as interviewees maintained, often creates an incentive for clients to return to a performer. as an extension of this tactic, decisions on what parts of the ‘body’ to show can be considered both an income and risk management strategy. many performers never show their genitals in cheaper ‘performances’ for larger audiences, not only to remain socially acceptable, but also to create a situation in which clients are willing to pay the highest price to persuade performers to do so in more expensive one-on-one shows. similarly, a significant portion of performers do not show their face on cam to control the visibility of their ‘identity’, but this also encourages clients to buy private shows in which some performers feel more comfortable revealing more of themselves. these aspects of (in)visibility management all shape potential income and harm for performers. strikingly, in contrast to what has been observed on social media influencers (e.g. cotter, 2019), webcam performers were often unaware of their ranking on platforms. thus, because of the opaqueness of ranking algorithms, they did not attempt to influence their position. the interviews also demonstrate that showing more of your identity and body was especially an option for performers with strong social networks and resources. platforms also shaped (in)visibility decisions as some do not allow performance without showing your face or intimate acts. finally, economic need, most strongly expressed by performers in precarious positions, shaped (in)visibility decisions. if, for example, your children need clothes for school and you earn more when revealing all of yourself what do you do? these findings of (in)visibility labor in webcam work show the urgency of looking beyond algorithmic visibility or general efforts of creators to enhance their visibility. instead, the four (in)visibility management tactics outlined here show how, beyond platform curation mechanisms, both platforms and social structures constrain what and who is seen. references cotter, k. (2019). playing the visibility game: how digital influencers and algorithms negotiate influence on instagram. new media & society, 21(4), 895–913. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818815684 duffy, b. e., & hund, e. (2015). “having it all” on social media: entrepreneurial femininity and self-branding among fashion bloggers. social media + society, 1(2), 2056305115604337. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115604337 jones, a. (2020). camming: money, power, and pleasure in the sex work industry. nyu press. koken, j. a. (2012). independent female escort’s strategies for coping with sex work related stigma. sexuality & culture, 16(3), 209–229. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-011-9120-3 theunissen, e., & favero, p. s. h. (2021). veiling the image/framing the body: the labour of enduring ephemerals in the context of trans* male adult camming practices on chaturbate. new media & society, 23(4), 780–795. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820954189 thompson, j. b. (2005). the new visibility. theory, culture & society, 22(6), 31–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276405059413 velthuis, o., & van doorn, n. (2020). weathering winner-take-all. how rankings constitute competition on webcam sex platforms, and what performers can do about it. in d. stark (ed.), the performance complex: competition and competitions in social life (pp. 169–185). oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818815684 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115604337 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-011-9120-3 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820954189 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276405059413 what is (un)seen in the webcamming industry: business models, companies, size, pay emilija jokubauskaitė university of amsterdam thomas poell university of amsterdam how do performers generate revenue on webcam sex platforms and what information is available to them in doing so? like work in other parts of the sex industry, camming is stigmatized and precarious (vlase and preoteasa 2021). this precarity is further enhanced as webcam platforms, just as social media platforms, tend to obfuscate their curation mechanisms and business models. thus, performers only have limited insight in the economics of their work environment. this paper examines what information is available to webcam performers and what remains hidden. in other words, how is the platform-creator information asymmetry organized in the webcam sex industry? information asymmetries have been observed throughout the gig economy. similarly to uber drivers (rosenblat and stark 2016) and social media creators (e.g. youtube (bishop 2020; twitch (partin 2020)), webcam performers experience a large gap in information available to them versus the information available at the platform operators’ disposal. van doorn and velthuis (2018, p. 189) argue that such information asymmetries lead to uncertainty among performers concerning the competitive environment on webcam platforms. most webcam platforms provide an algorithmically ranked homepage, which is largely opaque to performers and can reinforce social inequalities (jones 2015). in addition, webcam models have to also deal with ambiguous moderation practices (stegeman 2021). with regards to generating revenue as a performer, ranking and moderation systems are not the only elements that matter. to perform well, one also needs to be knowledgeable of: the type of show that succeeds on a platform, how many people one competes against, and what percentage of total revenue they receive. this paper examines to what extent performers have insight in these elements that shape their work environment. exploring platform (in)visibilities via a three-tier methodological approach, this paper examines what is (in)visible to performers in their daily work practices. this study is based on an interface analysis of 50 high-traffic webcam sex platforms, identifying their key characteristics in terms of: ownership, user base, financial compensation, interface elements related to business models, filtering mechanisms, and performers’ revenue. this analysis allows us to observe and compare the kinds of information available to performers on each platform. particularly important in terms of revenue is the type of performance primarily hosted by the platform. generally a distinction is made between private (a.k.a premium) brothellike and public (a.k.a freemium) shows. most webcammers prefer one type of performance over the other (hamilton 2018), as each requires particular skills, offers specific revenue opportunities, and suits particular personalities. while it in principle seems easier to distinguish private from public-show platforms, our analysis suggests that such a hard distinction between business models is often difficult to make in practice. we consider seven interface elements as constitutive of freemium or premium platforms and observe that the majority of platforms contain elements of both. the blurring between private and public show business models creates an unstable environment in which performers need to constantly adapt their performances. similar to business models, another opaque aspect of webcamming are payout rates. large platforms rarely indicate upfront what percentage of the revenue they share with performers. to find this information, (prospective) performers often seek help on forums or community sites. our study systematizes the payout rate information available on such sources for the 50 webcamming platforms. here, we observe that there is frequently a wide range, sometimes larger than 30%, in payout rates listed for individual platforms, with little to no actual information on where in this range a performer may end up. we also notice huge differences in payout rates between platforms. moreover, platforms do not always offer rationales for why they may share only 30 to 35% of the revenue, while other platforms allocate 75 to 85% to workers. finally, most webcam platforms withhold how many performers are active and how many users visit the platform. this is a challenge for performers, who need to make an informed decision about revenue opportunities on different platforms. while each platform advertises itself as the best place to work, for performers it is difficult to identify the most popular and profitable platforms. navigating an opaque working environment costs time and effort for performers, who are often already in a highly precarious position. as in other industries, it is in the platform’s competitive interest to obfuscate their business model, revenue sharing schemes, curation practices, and exact traffic numbers. yet, they do so at the cost of performers. references bishop, sophie. 2020. “algorithmic experts: selling algorithmic lore on youtube.” social media + society 6 (1): 2056305119897323. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119897323. doorn, niels van, and olav velthuis. 2018. “a good hustle: the moral economy of market competition in adult webcam modeling.” journal of cultural economy 11 (3): 177–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2018.1446183. hamilton, steve. 2018. “freemium vs. premium cam sites.” xbiz, october 10, 2018. https://www.xbiz.com/features/238718/freemium-vs-premium-cam-sites. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119897323 https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2018.1446183 https://www.xbiz.com/features/238718/freemium-vs-premium-cam-sites jones, angela. 2015. “for black models scroll down: webcam modeling and the racialization of erotic labor.” sexuality & culture 19 (4): 776–99. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-015-9291-4. jones, angela. 2020. camming: money, power, and pleasure in the sex work industry. new york: nyu press. partin, william clyde. 2020. “bit by (twitch) bit: ‘platform capture’ and the evolution of digital platforms.” social media + society 6 (3): 2056305120933981. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120933981. rosenblat, alex, and luke stark. 2016. “algorithmic labor and information asymmetries: a case study of uber’s drivers.” international journal of communication 10 (27): 3758–84. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2686227. stegeman, hanne marleen. 2021. “regulating and representing camming: strict limits on acceptable content on webcam sex platforms.” new media & society, november, 14614448211059116. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211059117. vlase, ionela, and ana maria preoteasa. 2021. “flexi(nse)curity in adult webcamming: romanian women’s experiences selling digital sex services under platform capitalism.” gender, place & culture 0 (0): 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2021.1878114. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-015-9291-4 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120933981 https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2686227 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211059117 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2021.1878114 selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): marwick, a. & furl, k. (2021, october). taking the redpill: talking about extremism. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. taking the redpill: talking about extremism alice e. marwick department of communication; center for information, technology, & public life, university of north carolina at chapel hill katie furl department of sociology; center for information, technology, & public life, university of north carolina at chapel hill introduction there is great public concern about “online radicalization,” the process by which individuals are exposed to extremist internet content, adopt extremist or hateful ideas, and commit acts of political violence. this concept was popularized in the post-9/11 context of state concerns about islamic extremism and used to justify military intervention and surveillance of muslim communities around the globe (kundnani, 2012). more recently, “online radicalization” describes the adoption of far-right and fringe beliefs such as white nationalism, male supremacy, or conspiracy theories, following internet exposure to them (roose, 2019). radicalization is an inherently problematic concept. it frequently conflates adopting extremist viewpoints with committing political violence. it seeks to intervene on a universal path to extremism, yet a large body of research has found no common characteristics or paths to radicalization. and as a concept formulated in a context of orientalism, which assumes that to study the radical is to study the other it fails to take into account the fundamental american roots of white supremacy and racism (neiwert, 2017; stern, 2019). most relevant to aoir, while the role of the internet in spreading fringe and far-right beliefs is undeniable, often the political, economic, and emotional complexities that draw people to them are ignored in favor of simplistic narratives that suggest that exposure to youtube, parler, or 4chan causes people to adopt extremist mindsets. this is a version of the (somewhat mythic) “magic bullet” theory of media effects which presumed that exposure to a media message led to adoption of it (sproule, 1989). there is little integration of internet or media studies into studies of radicalization. to understand the adoption of fringe and far-right beliefs outside the problematic frame of “radicalization”, this paper takes up narratives of “redpilling,” slang for coming to believe something counterfactual to mainstream consensus. the “red pill” refers to the scene in the matrix in which the character morpheus offers the protagonist neo the option of taking a red or blue pill. by taking the red pill, neo sees “the truth” about the matrix. this project draws from qualitative and ethnographic research on online far-right subcultures (daniels, 2009; lewis, 2018; munn, 2019; phillips, 2015) and critical terrorism studies (conway, 2017; stampnitzky, 2013). we asked three descriptive questions to find out how members of far-right and fringe communities understand and perform their own community enrollment through the term “redpilling”: rq1: how is the term “redpilling” used by members of fringe and far-right communities? rq2: what things do people claim to be redpilled by? rq3: how do members describe their own redpilling experiences? method we conducted critical discourse analysis and qualitative data analysis using a grounded theory method to answer these research questions. first, we assembled a broad corpus of text discussions of “redpilling” in situ, primarily in internet spaces devoted to far-right and fringe communities, using publicly available english-language datasets collected by other researchers. we used pushshift.io to search 14 subreddits (r/theredpill, r/whitenationalism, etc.) and gab.ai (fair & wesslen, 2019); leaked discord chats of white nationalist groups obtained by antifascist activists unicorn riot; and publicly available datasets of parler (aliapoulios et al., 2021), telegram (baumgartner et al., 2020), and 4chan’s /pol board (papasavva et al., 2020).1 we searched for discussions where the term “redpill,” “redpilled” “rabbit hole” or “rabbithole” appeared. we then cleaned the search results to remove irrelevant instances and imported the resulting data into maxqda. we used a subset of the reddit and gab data to generate a codebook and taxonomy of “redpilling content.” we conducted qualitative coding to closely examine the data, develop categories, and identify matters for future analytic consideration (saldana, 2009). findings we find the following in relation to our 3 research questions: rq1: how is the term “redpilling” used? 1 there are ethical considerations in using some of these datasets, particularly those which were obtained by surreptitious means. as a result, we removed all usernames and identifying information from the dataset. redpilling is used to describe the process of being converted to a new way of thinking; as an adjective exemplifying alt-right (or qanon, or anti-feminist) views; and as a noun describing a fact that “proves” redpilled thinking. in conspiratorial communities, “going down the rabbithole” is more commonly used, demonstrating the centrality of “doing one’s own research” to community participation. rq2: what are people redpilled by? people mentioned specific media texts (death of the west by pat buchanan, the video series fall of the cabal); influencers (alex jones, lauren southern); ideologies (feminism); events (covid, the 2020 black lives matter protests); and being exposed to knowledge/facts that changed their mind about a social or political matter. they were also redpilled by family members, friends, and personal events. anti-feminist redpilling is prompted more by interpersonal interactions than racist or anti-semitic redpilling, which often relies more on media or influencer interactions. rq3: how do people describe redpilling? although redpilling is imagined as a dramatic shift, it was usually discussed more as an ongoing process in which people gradually came to take on a specific ideology. while redpilling was frequently construed as both a necessary and difficult truth, those who consider themselves redpilled often used redpilling to justify prejudice and appreciated how redpill narratives provided simplistic, explanatory frameworks for understanding complex social issues. discussion analysis suggests that “online radicalization” is an ongoing process in which people come to believe extremist viewpoints by consuming far-right content, participating in farright internet spaces, viewing interpersonal interactions through an ideological lens, and interacting with friends and family with similar views. thus, it resembles typical processes of socialization into an internet community or social movement. we hope that our findings contribute to more nuanced understandings of the spread of far-right and fringe ideas, with the goal of decreasing their dissemination and influence. references aliapoulios, m., bevensee, e., blackburn, j., de cristofaro, e., stringhini, g., & zannettou, s. (2021). an early look at the parler online social network. arxiv preprint arxiv:2101.03820. baumgartner, j., zannettou, s., squire, m., & blackburn, j. (2020). the pushshift telegram dataset. proceedings of the international aaai conference on web and social media, 14, 840–847. conway, m. (2017). determining the role of the internet in violent extremism and terrorism: six suggestions for progressing research. studies in conflict & terrorism, 40(1), 77–98. daniels, j. (2009). cyber racism: white supremacy online and the new attack on civil rights. rowman & littlefield. fair, g., & wesslen, r. (2019). shouting into the void: a database of the alternative social media platform gab. proceedings of the international aaai conference on web and social media, 13, 608–610. kundnani, a. (2012). radicalisation: the journey of a concept. race & class, 54(2), 3– 25. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396812454984 lewis, r. (2018). alternative influence: broadcasting the reactionary right on youtube. data & society research institute. https://datasociety.net/wpcontent/uploads/2018/09/ds_alternative_influence.pdf munn, l. (2019). alt-right pipeline: individual journeys to extremism online. first monday, 24(6). neiwert, d. (2017). alt-america: the rise of the radical right in the age of trump. verso books. papasavva, a., zannettou, s., de cristofaro, e., stringhini, g., & blackburn, j. (2020). raiders of the lost kek: 3.5 years of augmented 4chan posts from the politically incorrect board. proceedings of the international aaai conference on web and social media, 14, 885–894. phillips, w. (2015). this is why we can’t have nice things: mapping the relationship between online trolling and mainstream culture. mit press. roose, k. (2019, june 8). the making of a youtube radical. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/youtube-radical.html saldana, j. (2009). the coding manual for qualitative researchers. sage publications, inc. sproule, j. m. (1989). progressive propaganda critics and the magic bullet myth. critical studies in media communication, 6(3), 225–246. stern, a. m. (2019). proud boys and the white ethnostate: how the alt-right is warping the american imagination. boston: beacon press. stampnitzky, l. (2013). disciplining terror: how experts invented “terrorism.” cambridge university press. microsoft word yeshua-katz-matching digital intervention affordances with tasks-matching digital intervention affordances.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): yeshua-katz, d. shapira, s. aharonson-daniel, l. clarfield, a. m., sarid, o. (2021, october). matching digital intervention affordances with tasks: the case of zoom and whatsapp mental health intervention for seniors during the covid-19 pandemic. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. matching digital intervention affordances with tasks: the case of zoom and whatsapp mental health intervention for seniors during the covid-19 pandemic daphna yeshua-katz ben-gurion university of the negev stav shapira ben-gurion university of the negev limor aharonson-daniel ben-gurion university of the negev a. mark clarfield ben-gurion university of the negev, mcgill university orly sarid ben-gurion university of the negev background during the first covid-19 wave, we conducted a zoom and whatsapp digital group intervention that promoted community-dwelling older individuals’ mental health. following the intervention's implementation, in this study we placed the intervention in the context of media richness theory (mrt) (daft & lengel, 1986; rice, 1992) and affordances framework (evans et al., 2017; gibson, 1977; rains, 2018) to explore the roles of the technological affordances and constraints of the video-conferencing app zoom and the instant-messaging app whatsapp in the intervention performance. media richness theory (mrt) is a framework used to describe a communication medium's ability to reproduce the information sent over it (daft & lengel, 1986; rice, 1992). communication transactions that can clarify ambiguous issues to enhance understanding promptly are considered information-rich. communication transactions that require a long time to enable understanding or that cannot overcome different perspectives are lower in richness or are information lean. central to mrt is the proposition that tasks vary with respect to specific characteristics. perrow (1967) originally proposed and described task analyzability as a basic task characteristic. task analyzability refers to the way that individuals can respond to problems that arise in the process of task completion. analyzable tasks are those for which predetermined responses to potential issues, and well-known procedures, are available and useful, because outcomes are well understood. in contrast, unanalyzable tasks require individuals to think about, create, or find satisfactory solutions to problems outside of the domain of facts, rules, or procedures (rice, 1992). we examined performance through the perspectives of the group moderators, technical support members, and principal investigators, and addressed the following research questions: research question 1: how did zoom and whatsapp affordances match (un)analyzable intervention tasks and contribute to the intervention performance? research question 2: how did zoom and whatsapp constraints restrict (un)analyzable intervention tasks and hinder intervention performance? based on the media richness theory (mrt) and affordances approach, in this study we used netnography to explore how zoom and whatsapp technological affordances/constraints matched intervention tasks and increased intervention performance. findings this section identifies four key zoom and whatsapp affordances – temporality, interactivity, multimediality, and portability – which we identified through observation during the intervention period and via moderators’ perceptions. we examined these affordances in the context of mrt by examining the ways in which the 1) communication channel affordances matched the 2) intervention’s (un)analyzable tasks to enhance the 3) intervention performance. see intervention’s media richness assessment in table 1. table 1: intervention’s affordances and media richness assessment communication channel media affordance task characteristic feature used intervention performance zoom temporality teaching techniques (ua) video chatting learning simple tasks focused and ephemeral communication whatsapp temporality scheduling meetings preand post-measures of well-being (a) sending text messages with links group management tool ongoing communication socialization zoom interactivity building safe space & intimacy (ua) gallery view “mute-all” synch. communication connectedness information load whatsapp interactivity problem-solving (a and ua) text messages, link sharing, & whatsapp video calls emergency channel technical support socialization zoom multimediality teaching techniques (ua) screen share learning simple tasks whatsapp multimediality improve digital literacy teaching techniques (ua) sharing image, audio, & video files conducting intervention in a personal setting zoom portability group interaction (ua) small screen size interface limited presence distress physically demanding whatsapp portability practice techniques in safe spaces (ua) taking pictures & videos practicing techniques individually location independence note: = high; = low a = analyzable text; ua = unanalyzable task = affords; x = constrains temporality zoom and whatsapp differed in their temporality, a term used to refer to how digital interaction over time is experienced by individual users, and how that influences the overall use pattern and experiences (huang & stolterman, 2011). the moderators indicated the ways in which zoom offered an ephemeral and focused window of time to deliver unanalyzable tasks such as leading group sessions. whatsapp, for its part, helped maintain a co-presence that enhanced the unanalyzable task of social interaction and enabled moderators to support the zoom meetings by stretching the interactions beyond specific meetings. interactivity the second affordance that was important for delivering a remote intervention was interactivity, defined as the interaction-generating functions of the digital app’s interface (sundar, 2009), including the ability to comment, meta-voice, provide feedback, and engage (evans et al., 2017). zoom’s rich media environment of video conferencing offers high interactivity, which enables the completion of unanalyzable tasks using synchronous communication between moderators and seniors, and among the seniors themselves. whatsapp appears to offer an optimal solution for both analyzable and unanalyzable tasks supporting group and interpersonal interaction. multimediality whatsapp’s and zoom’s multimediality, defined as the vast array of multimedia functions including voice and video calls, and the exchange of pictures, emojis, and audio and video messages (schrock, 2015), enabled moderators and the research team’s technical support people to take advantage of this information-rich media environment to reduce uncertainty and ambiguity during the intervention. portability out of all of the affordances we identified, the portability affordance of seniors’ devices—defined as the ability to transport a device/app and to use it regardless of one’s location (schrock, 2015) – at times enabled but also constrained the unanalyzable task of creating group interaction by increasing uncertainty among the seniors and limiting their co-presence. empirically, our study identified specific affordances and constraints associated with the intervention. theoretically, our study extends previous mrt work by expanding it with an affordance framework. in particular, our study approached mrt media characteristics through the affordances approach. it examined how the match between media affordance range (high vs. low) and intervention task (un)analyzability contributed to the intervention’s performance. hence, this study contributes to the field by deepening our understanding of how the variability of digital affordances (the range between low and high levels of temporality, interactivity, multimediality, and portability) might contribute to the performance of the intervention task. the match between the four affordances and task analyzability also provides a deeper understanding of affordance as a relational construct in the interplay between technological objects and outcomes. as such, this study lays the grounds for further testing the relation between affordance types and levels and task analyzability in future studies. references daft, r. l., & lengel, r. h. (1986). organizational information requirements, media richness and structural design. in source: management science (vol. 32, issue 5). https://www.jstor.org/stable/2631846?seq=1&cid=pdf evans, s. k., pearce, k. e., vitak, j., & treem, j. w. (2017). explicating affordances: a conceptual framework for understanding affordances in communication research. journal of computer-mediated communication, 22(1), 35–52. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12180 gibson, j. j. (1977). the theory of affordances. in hilldale, usa (issue 2). huang, c.-c., & stolterman, e. (2011). temporality in interaction design. proceedings of the 2011 conference on designing pleasurable products and interfaces. https://doi.org/10.1145/2347504.2347572 rains, s. a. (2018). coping with illness digitally. the mit press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11219.001.0001 rice, r. e. (1992). task analyzability, use of new media, and effectiveness: a multisite exploration of media richness. organization science, 3(4), 475–500. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.3.4.475 schrock, a. r. (2015). communicative affordances of mobile media: portability, availability, locatability, and multimediality. international journal of communication, 9(1), 1229–1246. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/3288 sundar, s. s. (2009). media effects 2.0: social and psychological effects of communication technologies. in r. l. nabi & m. b. oliver (eds.), the sage handbook of media processes and effects (pp. 545–560). sage publications. https://books.google.co.il/books?id=nmphjf-xu5ac selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 “black girl tries korean makeup”: race, gender, and transnational platform dasol kim university of pennsylvania introduction/conceptual frameworks a video series titled black girl tries korean makeup on youtube asks viewers a provocative question: what happens if black women youtubers wear k-beauty (korean beauty) style makeup that has been mostly practiced by korean women? in 2016, black woman youtuber ariana started the series black girl tries korean makeup in which she follows korean makeup tutorials. since then, the series has accumulated more than one hundred videos from numerous black youtubers who express cultural interests in k-pop culture. this paper theorizes the implications of transnational encounters in beauty cultures and the role of youtube in mediating them and capture the inter-racial and inter-cultural dynamics between black-koreans beyond the us national context. k-beauty (korean beauty) is a catchy trend on youtube which encompasses aesthetics, cosmetic products, and beauty ideals from south korea, characterized by pursuing glowing, dewy, and light skin tone featuring a variety of skincare products. kbeauty is now being adopted by non-koreans in north america including black women influencers on the borderless platform of youtube, who created the black girl tries korean makeup video series. beauty and skin tone have been always a battlefield for women of color. eurocentric beauty standards have shaped black women’s self-esteem, identity, and economic mobility. black women who have an appearance that is closer to white hegemonic beauty ideals i.e., a lighter skin tone, straightened hair, could have an advantageous position in the marriage and job market (craig, 2002). in this context, for black youtubers and other non-korean viewers of the video series, the light skin preference clearly signifies anti-blackness. k-beauty aesthetics can be read as anti-black since the products reflect the light skin preference in south korea, characterized by a limited variety of makeup foundation shades but many whitening products. on the other hand, this aesthetics have been cultivated in korea, where has a different racial dynamic. for korean viewers, being the majority ethnic group in korean society and the ethnocentric racial dynamic of “korean suggested citation (apa): kim, d., (2021, october). “black girl tries korean makeup”: race, gender, and transnational platform. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. versus foreigners” (kim, 2016), could hinder locating korean viewers themselves in the web of racial relations that have been historically developed in western societies. i analyze how these different racial constructions and power relations around white hegemonic beauty ideals have brought out a conflict between black k-beauty youtuber and korean viewers, especially with the special focus on how youtube as a platform has played a role in mediating k-beauty to diverse audiences. youtube uses the term ‘platform’ to give the impression that youtube is a neutral and egalitarian space (gillespie, 2010). however, youtubers are encouraged to comply with youtube’s algorithmic decisions, by closely monitoring quantified likes, duration of the watching time of their video contents through audience analytics offered by youtube, which is bishop (2018) named as “self-optimization.” (p.73) method to examine youtube videos, comments, and the module in youtube creator academy, i adopt a critical technocultural discourse analysis (ctda) as a method, which emphasizes how digital content creations are not constructed in a vacuum, but rather deeply rooted in various social relations (brock, 2018). i analyzed 43 black girl tries korean makeup themed videos from two prominent black k-beauty youtubers, ariana and brooklyn. their videos are a germane sample for the series, given their active participation; the total number of k-beauty-related videos made by them is about 40% (n= 21, n= 22, respectively) of the entire video series. in addition, i also collected 100 comments as a purposive sample of comments from the 43 videos, which can best illustrate the narratives and dynamics of the discourses constructed by the viewers. lastly, i also analyzed the module titled "building a global chanel” in youtube creator academy which is a set of courses that is offered by youtube for content creators to direct “desirable” ways to operate channels, to examine how the attention economy and digital infrastructures have shaped the mediation of k-beauty. discussion/conclusion in the videos and comments, i found that there has been inter-racial and inter-cultural conflict between black k-beauty youtubers and korean viewers. black k-beauty youtubers were very vocal about critiquing the anti-black aspect within k-beauty such as a lack of color inclusivity as well as a lack of proper understandings of deeper skin tone while k-beauty brands claim to be international brands. in response, some korean audiences have strongly argued that korean beauty cannot be judged by “western standards,” asserting that korea is a mono-ethnic country where light skin preference does not necessarily translate into anti-blackness. they also pointed out the cultural hegemony of the west regardless of the racial background of the youtubers. i assert that this conflict arguably has been shaped by youtube’s digital infrastructure. as a snippet of how youtube defines the direction of intercultural videos and channels, the module titled “building a global channel” on youtube creator academy was analyzed. it encourages youtubers to make intercultural videos for greater engagement and profits, by treating local culture as a commodity that is unique enough from the dominant culture, and by relying on the heavy visuality rather than nuanced contextualization of each culture. the k-beauty video series by black women youtubers is one of the examples of international videos. the platform environment that prioritizes short entertainment and commodifies local culture, the k-beauty videos conceal the historical presence of white hegemonic ideals of beauty that have oppressed black women, as well as the specific south korean context in which light skin preference has been established, including ideals of traditional beauty and a mono-ethnic culture. racial reconciliation needs recognition and acknowledgment of the harms that each racial group has had to others (yamamoto, 2000). however, youtube, which now connects global societies encourages youtubers from different cultures and racial groups to unknowingly reproduce harm to each other. by tackling the inter-cultural and inter-racial encounters on youtube, this project will demonstrate how the attention economy on digital media platforms operates in relation to race and gender within a transnational, post-colonial framing beyond the us national context. references bishop, s. (2018). anxiety, panic and self-optimization: inequalities and the youtube algorithm. convergence, 24(1), 69-84. brock, a. (2018). critical technocultural discourse analysis. new media & society, 20(3), 1012-1030. craig, m. l. (2002). ain't i a beauty queen?: black women, beauty, and the politics of race. oxford university press, usa. keevak, m. (2011). becoming yellow: a short history of racial thinking. princeton university press. kim, h. a. (2016). biracial identity development: a case of black-korean biracial individuals in korea. international journal of multicultural education, 18(3), 4057. gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of ‘platforms’. new media & society, 12(3), 347-364. yamamoto, e. k. (2000). interracial justice: conflict and reconciliation in post-civil rights america. nyu press. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): duarte, m., george, a., deschine-parkhurst, n., soto, a. (2021, october). caring for our people: indigenous responses to covid-19 era informatic colonialism. panel presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. caring for our people: indigenous responses to covid-19 era informatic colonialism marisa elena duarte (pascua yaqui tribe) arizona state university alaina george (navajo nation) arizona state university nicholet deschine-parkhurst (standing rock sioux tribe & navajo nation) arizona state university alexander soto (tohono o’odham nation) arizona state university from mobile infrastructure to strategic information dissemination to digital divide policy work, native americans, allies, tribal government leaders, educators, researchers, and activists apply community-centered solutions to bring informatic solutions to unconnected and disconnected communities through indian country amid the hardships of the covid-19 pandemic. for native americans in the united states, this means creating internet connectivity, access, and digital literacy solutions while navigating additional layers of structural colonial inequality. in indian country, the covid-19 pandemic exacerbates existing disparities rooted in historic and contemporary colonization policies and practices, and affecting secure housing, mobility, and access to food, water, healthcare, employment, and schooling, not to mention meaningful political participation. the internet’s role as a public utility and bridge to a range of resources became much more apparent for these communities during the pandemic. based on qualitative and quantitative analyses in addition to activist work and hci approaches, these four papers show how organizations and individuals formed partnerships to curate information resources, community-based public health messaging, free internet hotspots, community wi-fi, and more robust and flexible internet infrastructure for long-term digital connectivity across a range of southwest us native and indigenous communities during the most challenging months of the 2020 covid-19 pandemic. while urban-dwelling native communities experienced limited bandwidth, misinformation on covid-19 care and treatment, loss of employment, and telework and schooling challenges, these same issues were more keenly felt in remote and rural tribal reservations where students of all learner levels were expected to participate in online learning without sufficient infrastructure, and where tribal employees were pushed to the limit in trying to provide for their peoples’ needs. furthermore, because of mandated lockdowns and social distancing, more familiar interpersonal communication and knowledge-sharing practices had to radically shift to new ways of mediated communal and connective action in indian country. the researchers, professionals, and advocates presenting these papers hail from southwest us tribes and work across disciplinary boundaries and communities of practice to enliven networks of professionals, relatives, policy-makers, and researchers who pursue internet and information solutions for the flourishing of native and indigenous peoples in spite of us colonial plenary power. through an investigation on the interplay and interdependencies between social and technical affordances of a regional broadband network cooperative, tribes, and university labs, a multi-disciplinary hci-oriented research team reflects on the integral importance of relational stability in sustaining fragile internet ecologies stretched to capacity by the needs of underserved users deeply affected by covid-19 in northern new mexico and arizona. through an autoethnography of community-centered digital solutions for navajo nation, a member of the nation considers how the role of k’é informs a system of infrastructural care in a nation struggling with high rates of infection and systemic lack of adequate infrastructure. through an advocacy-oriented analysis of social media communication pathways, a diné and lakota social media scholar discerns the relationship between community enforcement of social distancing, the loss of interpersonal interaction, mutual aid, and the impact of social media public health messaging for the navajo nation. through radical librarianship practices, a tohono o’odham librarian and artist counteracts the values of ‘information neutrality’ shaping whiteness-centering american librarianship by generating a community-curated solution to accurate and actionable information about covid-19 for native american and indigenous communities. collectively, this panel shows how despite the challenges, activists, advocates, and tribal leaders demonstrate resiliency and relationality as they apply digital means to support their communities in combating covid-19, suggesting a model of native nation sovereignty and decolonial indigenous liberation that is rooted in interpersonal care and responsiveness across face-to-face and mediated layers of indigenous belonging. this panel expresses indigenous interpretations of imagined collective autonomy vis-a-vis structural change and strategic internet assemblages. in tandem, these papers also reveal the responsibilities of care that are at the core of indigenous ethics around sovereignty, wellbeing, and decoloniality, and particularly, how a us-based indigenous ethics of care intersects with the dream of an internet for social good. we need more than chromebooks: investigating the social and technical interdependencies of rural and tribal internet infrastructural development in the rural southwest us marisa elena duarte (pascua yaqui tribe) arizona state university introduction scientists have long recognized that internet infrastructures are orchestrated across human and technical networks. to discern how these assemblages function, researchers have often depended on getting a peek into inner workings during moments of system breakdown. moments of system breakdown reveal structural and system dependencies across social and technical domains, allowing researchers to characterize the degree and complexity of programs to repair, barriers to overcome, and policies and practices to advance. vulnerabilities in internet for rural indian country in the fall of 2019, our research team (including myself, morgan vigil-hayes, elizabeth belding, ellen zegura, jennifer case nevarez, and a group of dedicated doctoral students) had been steadily constructing a system of tv whitespace base stations and spectrum-sensing tools to boost spotty internet connectivity for sovereign native nations in northern new mexico. a year later, after many us schools switched to distance learning to deter covid-19, a parent in northern new mexico reported taking her five children to a mcdonald’s parking lot so that they could access free wifi from the car. she reported staying there for up to five hours on some days so that her children could keep up with their schoolwork. at the time, nearby communities in indian country were reporting record numbers of hospitalizations and deaths due to covid-19. health researchers pointed out the fatal interaction between sars cov2 and comorbidities like diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension, illnesses that have challenged indian country severely since the introduction of european mono-crops and processed foods. meanwhile, our tvws base station vendor let us know that trump’s trade wars with china were affecting the manufacture of the devices we needed for our project. schools were rapidly deploying google chromebooks to students, however many rural and tribal families lacked the basic internet connection for the laptops to be useful. as researchers, we realized we were observing a moment of significant structural and system breakdown with regard to internet connectivity, access, and uses across a range of domains in rural and tribal communities in arizona and new mexico. rural internet as a site of sociotechnical speculation prior to the outbreak of covid-19, our team of computer scientists, social scientists, and community tech advocates relied on prior work showing how persistent digital barriers to access and connectivity across rural and tribal communities relate to social inequities dating back to early us colonial policies. (duarte, 2017; littletree et al, 2020; vigil et al, 2015) contemporary technology advocates and researchers play a key role in advancing internet connectivity and access solutions that are compassionately tuned to the distinctive physical, technical, and social assets of places. (duarte et al, 2021; meng et al, 2019; vigil-hayes et al, 2018) there is no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to sustainable tribal internet deployment. this can be attributed in part to the constraints shaping the us federal trust relationship with sovereign native nations combined with the corporate dynamics of privatized us telecommunications infrastructure. though multiple federal agencies regulate and subsidize build-out to regions the telecom industry perceives as having ‘low demand,’ groups who live and work through these regions note continued lack of affordable reliable service. pundits and scholars alike assert this is because federal regulatory mechanisms are inherently colonial. (blackwater, 2019; george, 2019) indeed, from a decolonial vantage point, augmenting place-based internet infrastructure in indian country offers a peek into conditions of sociotechnical speculation shaping a free market telecommunications industry predicated on a) a system of broken treaties with sovereign native nations, and b) mistreatment of rural regions as reserves for natural resources rather than places deserving of sustained social and economic investment. discerning interdependencies in alternative network infrastructures based on three years of qualitative and quantitative investigations, including policy analysis, hci design interventions, digital ethnography, and grassroots tech advocacy in rural tribes and communities through arizona and new mexico, this research reveals structural and system dependencies across social and technical domains of internet network advancement, from connectivity to access. findings reveal social interdependencies such as the emphasis on relational stability in working tech relationships, which makes up for inadequate functioning of technical systems; government reliance on legal and inherent sovereignty to acquire much-needed resources for emergency technical deployment; and racial ideologies shaping state, federal, and non-profit investments in basic local infrastructure. findings also reveal infrastructural interdependencies such as the effect of inaccurate public data about spectrum availability on local operators’ deployment goals; relationships between rural 5g innovations and more affordable place-based connectivity solutions; and data sets generated by spectrum-sensing and mobility tracking toward meaningful place-based public health surveillance and infrastructural development uses. structural responsibilities of an ethics of care toward internet in indian country discerning these social and infrastructural interdependencies in tandem reveals the nature of sociotechnical effects associated with shared internet networks and their assemblages, rooted as they are in distinct tribal and rural constituencies and user groups. it demands reconceptualizing political narratives about network sovereignty with regard to municipal and tribal dependence on privatized internet networks. it demands reconsidering how university scientists can leverage the wealth and potential of universities toward democratic inclusion through rural and tribal connectivity research. it invites identifying community-centered benchmarks for decolonial hci design work, especially given the asymmetrical power relationships between research universities, government labs, federal agencies, and community partners. at an epistemic level, it offers decolonial insight into the notion of the internet as a site of human freedom and collective autonomy, and helps us think about ethics of care in computing and information research in rural and tribal contexts. references blackwater, d. (2019) “time for the ‘well-meaning man’ to return spectrum rights to native american tribes,” indian country today, november 29, 2019. duarte, m. (2017) network sovereignty: building the internet across indian country. university of washington press. duarte, m., et al. (2021) “as a squash plant grows: social textures of sparse internet connectivity in rural and tribal communities,” acm transactions on computer-human interaction 28, 2. forthcoming. george, a. (2019) “investigating etc designation at standing rock sioux tribe,” hastac 2019, vancouver, canada, may 17, 2019. littletree, s., belarde-lewis, m., duarte, m. (2020) “centering relationality: a conceptual model to advance indigenous knowledge organization practices,” knowledge organization 47, 5. meng, a., disalvo, c., zegura, e. (2019) “collaborative data work towards a caring democracy,” proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction 3. vigil, m., rantanen, m., belding, e. (2015) “a first look at tribal web traffic,” www ‘15, florence, italy, may 2015. vigil-hayes, m., matthews, j. acker, a., carter, d. (2018) “reflections on alternative internet models and how they inform more mindful connectivity,” itu journal: ict discoveries 1, 2. information and communication technology infrastructures and access on the navajo nation during the 2020 covid-19 pandemic alaina george (navajo nation) arizona state university introduction the covid-19 pandemic exemplified the deep existing disparities in home access to information and communication technology (ict) infrastructures, commonly referred to as the digital divide, in indian country. (duarte, 2017). the navajo nation was particularly impacted, as they have the largest reservation and the cost to implement ict infrastructure projects has been cost prohibitive (park, 2020). the shift to working and schooling from home magnified the ict access and availability issues. these issues were perhaps more significantly felt in the more rural communities where even basic cell phone coverage is spotty at best and landlines are non-existent. additionally, lack of access was most impactful on the students of the navajo nation. nearly half (45% or 78,194) of the population on the reservation was reported to be between the ages of 0 and 24 in the 2010 census. unexpectedly disconnected in the spring of 2020, when the virus began to cause havoc on the navajo nation, schools scrambled to figure out how to finish the school year as the navajo nation president enacted an executive order that closed schools on the reservation for the remainder of the school year (nn exec. order no. 002-20, 2020). schools (both k-12 and higher education institutions) began to find means to help their students get access to tablets, computers, and internet to finish out the 2019-2020 academic year. rather than returning to school in the fall of 2020, as many had expected, students were again asked to participate in online learning. many were still without a computer, let alone internet at home (yurth, 2020 oct). formation of partnerships in many communities on the navajo nation these strains and disparities created opportunities wherein partnerships were formed to provide hotspots to increase internet access at home at no cost to families, wifi in certain community locations (such as school parking lots), and installing additional larger scale infrastructure to support a more connected future for the communities. while helpful, these actions were not coordinated centrally by any navajo nation official. some at-home hotspots were provided from universities; the community wifi locations were put up by different organizations; and of course infrastructure buildout was undertaken by the companies serving the area. these actions were taken because the actors were concerned about the students falling behind in their education, because they cared. diné tenets of life toward internet connectivity in the diné (navajo) way of life, one of the central tenets is k’é. it could be said that k’é means to recognize the ways in which we (as a people) are related. by recognizing the connection of relatedness, k’é also recognizes the necessity of caring for one another. in addition to the tenet of k’é there are also the concepts of t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego (selfreliance), ha’jólní’ (resilience), and iłilį (respect), which are saad íyisíí bee nida’nitinii (original words of teaching). this work utilizes the diné tenets of life as a way of reframing (smith, 1999) the actions taken not only by the larger entities (universities, companies, etc.) but also the people who made changes to adapt to the challenges brought forth by the pandemic (quintero, 2020). through autoethnography, conversations with individuals associated with these projects, review of archival documents, and decolonial interpretation with regard to navajo nation sovereignty, this work reframes this record of bringing internet access to communities in need, and delineates how and why future influxes of capital for infrastructure and program development should take into account the local understanding of the situation. area studied this research focuses on communities in the chinle agency, which are at the center of the navajo nation, and as such are some of the most remote communities. below are maps to contextualize the location of the central/chinle agency. the chinle agency map further breaks down the agency area by chapter area. chapter houses are community gathering spaces and also have elected leadership to address community concerts. the chinle agency map also shows the population numbers from the 2010 census by chapter area. conclusion although it is unlikely there will be another pandemic of these proportions in the near future, the disparities need to be meaningfully addressed. the internet is a necessity, and for the navajo nation, a plan which is not tied politically to a single administration needs to be established, however impossible that may seem. this project to provide lasting connectivity is not something that can be undertaken during a single political term; it’s an ongoing process and the importance should remain top level throughout administrations. people who live in these communities know them best, and as such should have their perspectives included in the development of these projects (george, 2019) so as to prevent situations where sitting on a hill with only a wooden desk is the only way to access assignments. references bureau of indian affairs. (n.d.). chinle agency [map]. retrieved from: https://www.bia.gov/regional-offices/navajo/chinle-agency duarte, m. e. (2017). network sovereignty: building the internet across indian country. seattle: university of washington press. george, a. (2019, may 17). a breakthrough for tribal telecom: investigating etc designation at standing rock sioux tribe [presentation]. hastac 2019: decolonizing technologies, reprogramming education, vancouver, bc, canada. navajo family voices. (n.d.). the navajo nation [map]. retrieved from: https://navajofamilies.org/navajo.html navajo nation exec. order no. 002-20 (march 31, 2020) park, c. (2020, oct 12). the cost of connectivity in the navajo nation. new america. retrieved from: https://www.newamerica.org/oti/reports/cost-connectivity-navajo-nation/ smith, l. t. (2012). decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. london & new york: zed books quintero, d. (2020, oct 22). hill becomes makeshift classroom for a fish point family. navajo times. retrieved from: https://navajotimes.com/ yurth, c. (2020, sept 17). bie schools face chaotic opening. navajo times. retrieved from: https://navajotimes.com/ yurth, c. (2020, oct 15). families, teachers hanging in there through first quarter of online school. navajo times. retrieved from: https://navajotimes.com/ “distance prevents, two sheep apart”: observations on social media communication pathways during covid-19 in the navajo nation nicholet deschine-parkhurst (standing rock sioux tribe) arizona state university introduction for native american tribes, the covid-19 pandemic highlights systemic inequalities: access to water, plumbing, adequate housing, healthcare, transportation, education, and the internet. despite the burden, tribal leaders, advocates, and activists demonstrate resiliency and relationality as they work to support their communities in combating covid-19. this paper investigates emergent communication pathways on social media by tribal government entities and navajo grassroots organizations to broadcast critical health information pertaining to covid-19 and to coordinate efforts to bring basic necessities and essential supplies to people in the navajo nation. this research has insights for tribal e-democracy, emergency preparedness and crisis management, communication of health information, and advocacy for internet equity for native americans. internet access disparities tribes face obstacles in achieving internet equity including the lack of physical infrastructure, infrastructure costs for rural and geographically dispersed households, and bureaucratic red tape in accessing spectrum (blackwater, 2020). while broadband internet deployment for tribes focuses on the benefits for tribal governance, native americans also need sufficient access to the internet beyond the smartphone. american indians and alaska natives households are more likely to access the internet through a smartphone but lack home internet connections, particularly households in nonmetropolitan areas (deschine parkhurst et al, 2015). but research on consumed content in indian country indicates the need for broadband internet access to support the consumption of media-rich content, such as photos and videos (vigil-hayes et al, 2017). as such, sufficient internet access may be challenging in low-income native american communities that may use older devices with less-than-robust mobile-onlyinternet. icts, covid-19, and the navajo nation on march 20, 2020, three days following the first covid-19 case in the navajo nation, the tribe immediately mandated nation-wide lockdowns, closed parks to tourists, and implemented curfews to limit movement within and outside immediate communities in effort to reduce the spread of covid-19. limiting in-person socialization due to the shelter-in-place mandate makes icts a critical communication tool for public health announcements and telemedicine. however, half of the 110 navajo communities do not have broadband internet access (begay et al, 2021) and 58.1%-87.7% of households in the navajo nation do not have broadband internet (graves et al, 2020). less than 15% of households in the navajo nation do not have telephone service (deschine parkhurst et al, 2020) and 30% of households do not have electricity (begay et al, 2021). research on icts provides insight into the challenges of broadcasting critical health information to residents of the navajo nation. communication pathways during covid-19 on the navajo nation despite the limitations of icts and internet access, communication pathways emerged on social media to facilitate the flow of information. the following social media accounts created communication pathways for people to receive information from navajo leadership, navajo department of health, and navajo epidemiology center, pertaining to lockdown and curfew orders, public health announcements, and services to prevent the spread of covid-19, along with coordination of resources. one communication pathway is the facebook account, “navajo nation president jonathan nez and vice president myron lizer.” navajo nation president jonathan nez, regularly live-streamed town hall meetings on facebook. these live streams were often spoken in the diné (navajo) language. with 89.4% of navajo nation households speaking an indigenous language (yellow horse et al, 2021) the translation of health information into diné is pertinent. president nez also created tik tok videos to encourage his constituency to stay strong. other pathways of communication stem from the navajo department of health, indian health service units, and grassroots organizations such as the navajo & hopi families covid-19 relief and k’é infoshop. grassroots organizations were critical to virtual crowdsourced fundraising and coordinating resources so families can shelterin-place. however, coordination of assistance was not without limitations as it required completing an online form or having a phone number. “distance prevents, two sheep apart.” in the summer of 2020, chinle indian health service unit posted an image with text (figure 1) that states “distance prevents. two sheep apart. mask to prevent. continue to protect.” the image depicts two sheep positioned, head-to-tail, between two navajo individuals to indicate social distancing and mask wearing. although there is no direct mention of covid-19, the graphic promoted health education to prevent covid-19. a second graphic used a wood pile to visualize six feet. part of the intrigue of these graphics is the use of humor to visualize six feet as two sheep or one wood pile. perhaps subtle to an outsider, it demonstrates a balance of translating critical health information for a target community, much like live streaming the town hall in diné. the graphic is unique in terms of its effectiveness in promoting health education during the covid-19 pandemic when it “went viral” (the meme not the virus) in comparison to professionally produced guides and social media posts with blocks of text. in february 2021, the navajo department of health released their version of the bernie sanders mittens meme (figure 1), with the iconic image of bernie sanders wearing mittens and a mask alongside the text, “t'ááshoodí, wear a mask in public.” figure 1. figure 2. insights for future research and practice this research has insights for tribal e-democracy and the critical need for digital equity for tribes for emergency preparedness and response. there is a need for sufficient internet connectivity and adequate devices beyond the smartphone due to the mediarichness of critical information shared during the pandemic (e.g., live streams). further, the communication pathways on social media highlight a variety of modes, from town hall meetings, professionally developed guides, and memes to keep people informed on the spread of covid-19, access to testing and vaccines, to coordinate resources, and to show care for their community. additional insights point to translating critical information into native languages and to be culturally relevant for target communities. references begay, m., kakol, m., sood, a., & upson, d. (2021). strengthening digital health technology capacity in navajo communities to help counter the covid-19 pandemic. annals of the american thoracic society, (ja). blackwater, d. (2020). broadband internet access: a solution to tribal economic development challenges. the indigenous peoples’ journal of law, culture & resistance, 6(1), 93-116. deschine parkhurst, n.a., huyser, k.r., & yellow horse, a.j. (2020). historical environmental racism, structural inequalities, and dik’os ntsaaígíí-19 (covid-19) on navajo nation. journal of indigenous social development, 9(3), 127-140. deschine parkhurst, n.a., tahy, e., morris, t., & mossberger, k. (2015). the digital reality: e-government and access to technology and internet for american indian and alaska native populations. in proceedings of the 16th annual international conference on digital government research (dg.o ’15), 217-229. new york, ny: acm. graves, j.m., mackelprang, j.l., amiri, s., & abshire, d.a. (2020). barriers to telemedicine implementation in southwest tribal communities during covid-19. the journal of rural health. vigil-hayes, m., duarte, m., deschine parkhurst, n., & belding, e. (2017). #indigenous: tracking the connective actions of native americans on twitter. in proceedings of the 2017 acm conference on computer supported cooperative work and social computing (cscw ’17), 1387-1399. new york, ny: acm. yellow horse, a.j., yang, t., & huyser, k.r. (2021). structural inequalities established the architecture for covid-19 pandemic among native americans in arizona: a geographically weighted regression perspective. journal of racial and ethnic health disparities. using academic libraries to create internet space for indigenous wellbeing amid covid-19 alexander soto (tohono o’odham nation) arizona state university introduction at the onset of the covid-19 pandemic, global populations were bombarded on the world wide web with varying degrees of information about the health implications of the novel coronavirus. no matter their racial, tribal, or ethnic background, consumers of digital information were faced with news media reports, public health statistics, governmental decrees, and social media posts when attempting to ascertain facts on the pandemic. for a vast majority of the population, authority checking of this information was hindered by a lack of information literacy, especially in the areas of health and data. in the earliest days of the pandemic, the feeling of information overload was prevalent among all users of the internet due to anxiety and fear tied to the pandemic. for information professionals working in libraries, mediation of information and curation of quality information are core aspects of librarianship. before the pandemic, the rise of “fake news” had already put more emphasis on content analysis and critical review of source sites (lim, 2020). due to the politicization of governmental and public health authority responses to covid-19, information on the pandemic was split down the “left/right” binary, which led to biased coverage of unvetted information about the virus, which contributed to decontextualized content (specifically within social media). this political binary was further exacerbated along racial and class lines. in response, american librarians responded by creating and sharing various resources such as library guides(libguides) in order to combat the disinformation that preyed upon consumers of digital information with low health and data literacy (fraser-arnott, 2020). these resources were intended to provide general information on covid-19 (i.e. cdc guidelines, statistical updates from public health authorities, local/state/federal restrictions) as well as list resources to help identify credible content. addressing the threat of ‘information neutrality’ in american librarianship resources in these libguides were largely sourced from governmental, health sciences or other academic publications, as well as gray literature. countless libguides on covid-19 were published by research libraries in hopes of providing general information on the virus (fraser-arnottt, 2020). most did not address covid-19’s impacts on at-risk communities nor provide racial/cultural/tribal perspectives on the issue. these libguides embodied a hegemonic view of the issue centered on populations that enjoyed relative social and economic stability prior to the pandemic. for the largely white field of american librarianship, “community curation” would break the profession's long standing stance that information mediation should be value-neutral (cheshire & stout, 2020; macdonald & birdi, 2019; wenzler, 2019). this illusion of neutrality does not allow for the unique information needs of underrepresented and underserved populations, such as indigenous communities in the united states, who could benefit from a listing of covid-19 resources that addressed the impacts of the virus on their reservations, as well as the response of tribal communities to the pandemic. moving beyond general resources on how to evaluate media bias and standard governmental/non-profit resources, black, indigenous and people of color communities require a social justice/critical race analysis in order to provide inclusive resources and perspectives on the virus. the scarcity of diverse, non-hegemonic web sources during the covid-19 pandemic is evident in indigenous communities. as the “minority of the minority” in all settler colonial nations, indigenous peoples were forced to sift through media coverage that either ignored their pandemic plights and/or misportrayed their response to it. in many cases, pre-covid deficits, which should be understood as the shock waves of colonization (i.e. lack of emergency preparedness, lack of access to quality healthcare facilities, lack of physical and digital infrastructure), led to an early news cycle of “poverty porn” focused on covid-19’s rampage of indian country. the historical impacts of settler colonialism, which has either marginalized or dehumanized the existence of indigenous peoples, are a root cause of the much greater mortality and incidence of covid-19 in tribal communities. with tribal communities being one of the hardest hit communities, resources specific to indigenous peoples are essential to list on library-related platforms like libguides. but despite the demand, the profession largely did not uplift indigenous-centric resources and responses, choosing instead to highlight general sources due to its fixation on neutrality. when viewed from a tribal critical race perspective, the imposition of objectivity in library settings underscores how colonization is endemic within the library profession and digital learning environments like the internet (belarde-lewis & kostelecky, 2021). this form of information colonialism undermines indigenous histories, cultures, and resilience and hinders indigenous self-determination. indigenizing information channels countering this form of information gatekeeping requires a paradigm shift within the library profession. as the pandemic has highlighted, the internet can serve as a lifeline for black, indigenous and people of color communities. libguides can serve as one branch of this lifeline, especially when curated by indigenous librarians. for indigenous peoples, the vetting of information is a long standing survival strategy used when navigating between traditional ecological knowledge/memory and the “information highway” with its bias towards western axiologies and values (ford, prior, coat & warton, 2014). indigenous peoples have long countered detrimental mainstream narratives with reliance on ancestral/community knowledge in order to enact selfdetermination, which is an act of cultural independence. when enacted in a library environment, indigenous information professionals by default are challenging preexisting power relationships and struggles within libraries by merely “indigenizing” information channels for their communities (burns, doyle, joseph, et al., 2015). practicing indigenous community curation to combat covid-19 for the few indigenous academic librarians, the pandemic underscored the importance of curating lists of credible media sources and culturally authoritative resources. furthermore, the pandemic highlighted the need for these digital resources to be consolidated in one area on the web, curated by indigenous peoples to be regionspecific. one of the few examples of this is seen in the arizona state university (asu) library/labriola national american indian data center’s libguide covid-19 resources for indigenous peoples. inspired by the work of zuni librarian sarah kostelecky’s dakota access pipeline libguide, this libguide affirms kostelecky’s observation that libguides are one example of an alternative method for organizing indigenous knowledge within a library (kostelecky, 2018). since its inception in april 2020, the covid-19 resources for indigenous peoples libguide forged links of interdependence among indigenous nations that are perhaps more meaningful than individual tribal government links that may isolate tribal members to the larger pan-indigienous community. in contrast, covid-19 resources for indigenous peoples provides links from multiple tribal sources and includes: indigenous-centric resources (i.e. indigenousbased governmental/non-profit links, tribal governmental responses/support, indigenous-computed health data), indigenous news sources, and tabs that featured stories of indigenous resilience, analysis, parental resources, and mutual aid. when collectively viewed, it provides an overview of indigenous voices and self-determined responses to the pandemic, which can instill a sense of hope among users. this type of curation also affirms indigenous notions of wellbeing that go beyond western definitions of health since all tribal responses draw from ancestral/community knowledge. moving beyond university specific audiences, this libguide is geared towards the indigenous community at large, with an emphasis on the asu indigenous community and overall arizona indigenous community (which comprises 22 federally recognized tribal nations). although hosted by the asu server, this guide is created in collaboration with indigenous communities. this presentation/paper demonstrates how indigenous librarianship can provide meaningful support and create internet space for indigenous communities while challenging systemic racist/colonial practices in librarianship. references belarde-lewis, m., & kostelecky, s. (2021). tribal critical race theory in zuni pueblo. in s. leung & j. lopez-mcknight (1st ed). knowledge justice: disrupting library and information studies through critical race theory (pp.111-128). mit press. burns k., doyle a., joseph g., et al. (2015). indigenous librarianship. in mj bates and mn maack (eds) encyclopedia of library and information sciences. 3rd ed. boca raton, fl: taylor & francis cheshire, k., & stout, j. (2020). the moral arc of the library: what are our duties and limitations after 45? reference services review, 48(2), 219–225. https://doi.org/10.1108/rsr-10-2019-0074 ford, p. l., prior, j., coat, b., & warton, l. (2014). the incorporating indigenous knowledge libguide: charles darwin university embedding australian aboriginal and torres strait islander knowledge, culture and language. australian academic and research libraries, 45(2), 111–120. fraser-arnott, m. (2020). academic library covid-19 subject guides. the reference librarian, 61(3–4), 165–184. https://doi.org/10.1080/02763877.2020.1862021 kostelecky, s. r. (2018). sharing community created content in support of social justice: the dakota access pipeline libguide. journal of librarianship and scholarly communication, 6(special issue). http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/10.7710/2162-3309.2234 lim, s. (2020). academic library guides for tackling fake news: a content analysis. the journal of academic librarianship, 46(5), 102195. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2020.102195 macdonald, s., & birdi, b. (2019). the concept of neutrality: a new approach. journal of documentation, 76(1), 333–353. https://doi.org/10.1108/jd-05-2019-0102 wenzler, j. (2019). neutrality and its discontents: an essay on the ethics of librarianship. portal: libraries and the academy, 19(1), 55–78. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2019.0004 badola, a. (2023, october). everyday hate on facebook: visual misogyny and the anti-feminist movement in india. presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 everyday hate on facebook: visual misogyny and the anti-feminist movement in india anand badola digital media research center, queensland university of technology research issue the #metoo movement has been one of the key social movements of the past decade globally, and especially in india (guha, 2021; alcalde & villa, 2022). but it has also witnessed a counter-response from the growing online ‘men’s rights activists’ (mra) community. this study focuses on the online presence of mra movement in india and the practice of everyday visual misogyny on their facebook pages. the research question driving this project is what are the visual aspects of everyday misogyny practiced amongst mra groups on facebook in india. i specifically focus on the public facebook page of save indian family movement. such online communities fall within the ‘manosphere’ (marwick & caplan, 2018), which comprises of aggrieved men expressing their concerns about the alleged crisis in masculinity (robinson, 2000). in the indian context, the broader #metoo movement is perceived by many as one of the catalysts to the crisis among indian men (dey & mendes, 2022). the broader aim of the paper is to highlight the visual misogyny in these pages which are largely neglected by the social media platforms in the indian context. background the mra in india has a recent history as it emerged as a response to the changes in the indian law related to domestic violence (chowdhury, 2014). after years of protest and litigation work by the women’s movement in the 1980s, many changes were made to address the pervasive presence of domestic violence in indian households. the mra emerged in the 90s as they claimed these new laws were biased against men and allegedly were abused by women to settle scores in the household. there are numerous groups within the mra, but all have the same agenda to protect men’s rights http://spir.aoir.org/ badola, a. (2023, october). everyday hate on facebook: visual misogyny and the anti-feminist movement in india. presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org against women. save indian family movement is one of the prominent groups and is the case study for this paper. the mra groups have also reacted to the #metoo movement in india by further alleging that it is a continuation of abuse of laws and power that women have in indian society http://spir.aoir.org/ badola, a. (2023, october). everyday hate on facebook: visual misogyny and the anti-feminist movement in india. presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org (sastry, 2019). they claim feminism has disrupted the indian family and the #metoo movement is a pernicious attempt to ruin indian men. the mra groups claim that women tell false accounts of sexual harassments to blackmail men in power or ruin their reputation. the #metoo movement has further pushed the ambit as women’s rights activists are fighting towards including marital rape within the scope of law. to date, marital rape is not recognised within the indian legal system (sachdev, 2022). the mra groups fear that the overall impact of the #metoo movement could lead to include marital rape within the ambit of sexual assault laws in india. methods the scope of the study is solely focused on the public facebook page of save indian family (sif) movement. the rationale for selecting this page as sif a prominent mra group in india and also played a huge role in amplifying #notmycji hashtag when justice chandrachud was appointed as the next chief justice of india (narang, 2022).the paper focuses on visual posts like images in form of memes and distorted news clips shared on their public page with the aim of capturing visual misogyny, as the role of memes and humour in propagating misogyny has been well documented (shifman, 2013; matamoros-fernández et al., 2022; donovan et al., 2022). the selection criteria were to collect all posts with an image, posted between 17 october 2022 and 21 january 2023. only those images were collected which were either memes or cartoons or news clips. i focus on this timeframe to cover the three months after justice chandrachud--who is not seen favourably amongst the mra community for his progressive judgements (bose, 2022)--was appointed as the new chief justice of india. 81 posts were manually collected and categorised based on the schema of explicit and implicit misogyny developed by strathern and pfeffer (2022). the following table illustrates the sub-categories of misogyny: http://spir.aoir.org/ badola, a. (2023, october). everyday hate on facebook: visual misogyny and the anti-feminist movement in india. presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org considering the posts contain both text and image to form a multimodal text, i employ an iterative multimodal critical discourse analysis (mcda) approach, informed by the schema above, for a deeper analysis (kress & van leeuwen, 2001; way, 2021). findings and brief discussion the analysis shows that majority of the posts fall within the implicit misogyny. this finding fits into the everyday misogyny rubric as the sif facebook page tries to subvert platform regulation by posting predominantly sarcastic or cynical posts. 68% of the posts are examples of implicit misogyny, while only 13% are explicitly misogynistic, and the rest fall within the uncategorised section. in the explicit misogyny category, there are derogatory visuals and texts to directly attack woman as either perpetrators of violence against men, or images portraying a married wife is the tormentor of the husband. there are also visual posts attacking women’s moral character through sleazy posts or memes underlying the assumption that all women ‘use other men’ for physical pleasures while betraying their partners/husbands/lovers. the implicit misogyny category focuses more on use of ironical ambiguity and sarcasm, which further corroborates the harmful humour framework developed by matamoros-fernández et al., (2022). the motifs range from structural imbalances in the law, selective focus on incidents where women have filed false cases to underline the perception that all women try to trap men, and posts focusing on the untiring strength of men as husbands or fathers, which is overshadowed by women. http://spir.aoir.org/ badola, a. (2023, october). everyday hate on facebook: visual misogyny and the anti-feminist movement in india. presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org examples of explicit and implicit misogyny to illustrate the findings here are two examples, one each from explicit and implicit misogyny. in fb1 we see a cartoon image of a woman stabbing a man with the structural sword of marital rape being criminalised. it foregrounds mra's imagined bias against men in the indian legal system. the post is a call for action as a number of mra groups have already called for protests against such criminalisation of marital rape (rampal, 2022). the image in a broader discursive environment can be perceived as a call for men to act against not only state authorities but also women supporting this legislation. the marital rape debate in india has hitherto been on the sidelines because of the provision of restitution of conjugal rights in a hindu marriage (vishwanath, 2021). but a spate of progressive judgements has meant the legal and social landscape is changing. http://spir.aoir.org/ badola, a. (2023, october). everyday hate on facebook: visual misogyny and the anti-feminist movement in india. presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org 1. fb 1 fb2, though, is an example of implicit misogyny, where the mra community imagine the dating scene in a post-metoo world. the meme is a sarcastic illustration of how mra understands the concept of consent – or lack thereof – when it comes to women. the popular understanding of consent in india is undergoing a change in a post-metoo world as everyday stalking behaviour, normalized by bollywood (dhaliwal, 2015), is now replaced by a collective anxiety of men with a history of sexual transgressions ignored by the society. it is a continuing dismantling of historical inheritance of patriarchal misogyny resulting in a loss of entitlement of men in india. 2 fb 2 http://spir.aoir.org/ badola, a. (2023, october). everyday hate on facebook: visual misogyny and the anti-feminist movement in india. presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org conclusion and next steps by focusing on everyday posting behaviour of an mra public page on facebook, this paper illustrates the everyday aspect of online misogyny in india, especially in a post metoo context. the mra community’s anxieties towards amendments to laws and structural changes in the society, ushered in by years of women activism in india, has meant novel ways of posting misogynistic content online and a new impetus to band together. this research also illustrates how a revolutionary movement like #metoo can have a counter-response from the mra community which is fuelled by the anxiety of this community and their imagined loss of manhood. the next steps in this research is do a comparative analysis of facebook and twitter and trace a broader anti-feminist movement on social media in india. http://spir.aoir.org/ badola, a. (2023, october). everyday hate on facebook: visual misogyny and the anti-feminist movement in india. presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org references: alcalde, m. c., & villa, p.-i. (eds.). (2022). #metoo and beyond: perspectives on a global movement. university press of kentucky. bose, r. (2022, november 9). meet justice dy chandrachud and his landmark judgments—from sabrimala to right to privacy. outlook. https://www.outlookindia.com/national/sabarimala-to-privacy-top-verdicts-by-justice chandrachud-india-s-next-cji-recommended-by-uu-lalit-news-229081 chowdhury, r. (2014). conditions of emergence: the formation of men’s rights groups in contemporary india. indian journal of gender studies, 21(1), 27–53. https://doi.org/10.1177/0971521513511199 dey, a., & mendes, k. (2022). ‘it started with this one post’: #metoo, india and higher education. journal of gender studies, 31(2), 204–215. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2021.1907552 dhaliwal, n. (2015, january 29). does bollywood normalise stalking? the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/jan/29/does-bollywood-normalise stalking donovan, j., dreyfuss, e., & friedberg, b. (2022). meme wars: the untold story of the online battles upending democracy in america. bloomsbury publishing. guha, p. (2021). hear #metoo in india: news, social media, and anti-rape and sexual harassment activism. rutgers university press. kress, g. r., & van leeuwen, t. (2001). multimodal discourse: the modes and media of contemporary communication. arnold ; oxford university press. marwick, a. e., & caplan, r. (2018). drinking male tears: language, the manosphere, and networked harassment. feminist media studies, 18(4), 543–559. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1450568 matamoros-fernández, a., rodriguez, a., & wikström, p. (2022). humor that harms? examining racist audio-visual memetic media on tiktok during covid-19. media and communication, 10(2), 180–191. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v10i2.5154 narang, g. (2022, october 24). chandrachud called for taking ‘woman’s point of view’ in court. some indians can’t digest it. the print. https://theprint.in/india/chandrachud called-for-taking-womans-point-of-view-in-court-some-indians-cant-digest-it/1180706/ rampal, n. (2022, january 20). men on ‘marriage strike’ against marital rape laws. some people laugh, say good riddance. the print. https://theprint.in/opinion/pov/men on-marriage-strike-against-marital-rape-laws-some-people-laugh-say-good riddance/808285/ http://spir.aoir.org/ https://www.outlookindia.com/national/sabarimala-to-privacy-top-verdicts-by-justice-chandrachud-india-s-next-cji-recommended-by-uu-lalit-news-229081 https://www.outlookindia.com/national/sabarimala-to-privacy-top-verdicts-by-justice-chandrachud-india-s-next-cji-recommended-by-uu-lalit-news-229081 https://doi.org/10.1177/0971521513511199 https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2021.1907552 https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/jan/29/does-bollywood-normalise-stalking https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/jan/29/does-bollywood-normalise-stalking https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1450568 https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v10i2.5154 https://theprint.in/india/chandrachud-called-for-taking-womans-point-of-view-in-court-some-indians-cant-digest-it/1180706/ https://theprint.in/india/chandrachud-called-for-taking-womans-point-of-view-in-court-some-indians-cant-digest-it/1180706/ https://theprint.in/opinion/pov/men-on-marriage-strike-against-marital-rape-laws-some-people-laugh-say-good-riddance/808285/ https://theprint.in/opinion/pov/men-on-marriage-strike-against-marital-rape-laws-some-people-laugh-say-good-riddance/808285/ https://theprint.in/opinion/pov/men-on-marriage-strike-against-marital-rape-laws-some-people-laugh-say-good-riddance/808285/ badola, a. (2023, october). everyday hate on facebook: visual misogyny and the anti-feminist movement in india. presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org robinson, s. (2000). marked men: white masculinity in crisis. columbia university press. sachdev, v. (2022, may 11). why marital rape is not a crime in india (yet). the quint. https://www.thequint.com/news/law/marital-rape-not-recognised-as-crime-in-india explainer sastry, m. (2019, may 21). what does #mentoo mean in a world where women’s stories are still dismissed? feminism in india. https://feminisminindia.com/2019/05/21/men-too women-stories/ shifman, l. (2013). memes in a digital world: reconciling with a conceptual troublemaker. journal of computer-mediated communication, 18(3), 362–377. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12013 strathern, w., & pfeffer, j. (2022). identifying different layers of online misogyny (arxiv:2212.00480). arxiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2212.00480 vishwanath, a. (2021, july 26). explained: conjugal rights before the supreme court. the indian express. https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3a%2f%2findianexpress.com%2farticle%2fexplained% 2fexplained-conjugal-rights-before-supreme-court-7411007%2f way, l. c. s. (2021). analysing politics and protest in digital popular culture: a multimodal introduction (1st ed). sage publications. http://spir.aoir.org/ https://www.thequint.com/news/law/marital-rape-not-recognised-as-crime-in-india-explainer https://www.thequint.com/news/law/marital-rape-not-recognised-as-crime-in-india-explainer https://feminisminindia.com/2019/05/21/men-too-women-stories/ https://feminisminindia.com/2019/05/21/men-too-women-stories/ https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12013 http://arxiv.org/abs/2212.00480 https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3a%2f%2findianexpress.com%2farticle%2fexplained%2fexplained-conjugal-rights-before-supreme-court-7411007%2f https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3a%2f%2findianexpress.com%2farticle%2fexplained%2fexplained-conjugal-rights-before-supreme-court-7411007%2f selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): rivera, y. (2020, october). from online engagement to offline actions: understanding the impact of cancer (mis)information engagement among latino facebook users. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. from online engagement to offline actions: understanding the impact of cancer (mis)information engagement among latino facebook users yonaira m. rivera johns hopkins bloomberg school of public health introduction as social media continues to influence multiple facets of daily life, it is important to understand the role of these platforms in the uptake of prevention and screening behaviors among communities with high cancer burden.1 in the u.s., latinos experience high incidence rates for screenable cancers linked to preventable behaviors (breast, prostate, colorectal).2 given that u.s. latinos are avid facebook users,3 this platform is an opportune tool to deliver evidence-based cancer prevention and screening information (cpsi) as a way to reduce cancer health disparities. however, there is a dearth in scholarship exploring how latinos engage with and act upon cancer (mis)information encountered on social media, which is increasingly inundated with potentially detrimental health misinformation.4 the social media engagement model5 posits that engagement is influenced by multiple individual and contextual factors. for latinos, these include cultural values (i.e. familismo, personalismo, fatalismo)6,7 that may influence how they engage with multi-lingual cpsi shared by close friends and family on facebook. cultural values may also influence assessments of cancer information8 and whether latinos participate in cancer control and prevention efforts.9 this exploratory study sought to understand how and why u.s. latinos engage with and act upon cpsi on facebook. this topic is in clear alignment with the conference’s theme, life, and provides important insights on how information consumed through social media has the ability to impact decision making, health outcomes, and life offline. methods a novel qualitatively-driven, mixed-methods approach was developed to elicit audio and screen data concurrently during one-on-one in-person encounters where participants accessed their social media profile, scrolled-through relevant content, and contextualized content engagement with the researcher.10 during one-on-one, in-depth interviews (~2hr), participants (n=20) logged onto their facebook account alongside the researcher, typed “cancer” in the search bar, and discussed cancer-related posts they engaged with during the past 12 months (sorted by “most recent” and posted by “your friends and groups”). engagement with cpsi (i.e. liking/commenting/sharing; clicking a link; reading an article; and/or watching a video) prompted questions regarding the reasons for engagement with the source of the post and/or post content, and if/how engagement triggered further action. when applicable, embedded videos/links were viewed and discussed. computer screen and audio were recorded during the encounter. de-identified cpsi posts were analyzed via content analysis; posts were coded for message factors (i.e., post type, cancer topic, language, visual elements) and source factors (i.e., post source, facebook poster) (kappa=0.89-1.0). a thematic analysis was conducted on interview transcripts to capture why participants engaged with cpsi and any subsequent actions. results overall, 16 participants reported engaging with 66 posts containing cpsi in the previous 12 months (4.1 average posts). participants mainly engaged with cpsi content by viewing/reading content (73%, n=48), rather than by liking/commenting/sharing (27%, n=18). engagement was most common with prevention posts (76%, n=50), when posts included videos/images (91%, n=60), and when individuals had personal relationships to those posting information (72%, n=47). the majority of cancer prevention posts participants engaged with were about food/diet (53% or n=35). emerging themes specific to engagement with food/diet posts included a general interest in prevention/healthy eating, other salient chronic conditions, and sociopolitical issues. additional reasons for engaging with any cpsi included personal experiences related to cancer, professional context, and curiosity. regardless of the content, posts in spanish and those with images/videos of cultural relevance and sensationalist titles consistently elicited more engagement. interviews also revealed that a post’s source oftentimes contributed to engagement due to perceived topic expertise or authority, the role of trust in interpersonal relationships, and alignment with cultural identity. furthermore, there were multiple occasions where the source was the most important reason for engagement. reasons for engagement with a particular post were not mutually exclusive. engagement often led to varying levels of action. online actions included informationseeking or sharing on other platforms (e.g., whatsapp). offline actions included discussing content with family members or changing health behaviors. however, not all decisions were evidence-based (e.g., consuming popular “cancer-curing” foods) and some were potentially harmful (e.g., canceling mammogram after engaging with misinformation from a culturally-relevant source). implications findings illuminate the salient role that cultural values and other cultural connectors (e.g., language and country of origin) play in how message factors and source factors influence engagement with cpsi among latinos. consistent with literature highlighting the importance of tailoring content to latino populations,8,9 participants oftentimes engaged with visually appealing posts that contained features that provided connections to cultural identity. however, rarely did these posts come from verifiable health organizations. rather, most engaged with cpsi from potentially unreliable sources that contained sensationalist titles and claimed cancer cures linked to foods popular in latin american countries; these posts were mainly shared by facebook friends. importantly, participants discussed the relevance of the offline relationships they shared with these individuals, which many times contributed to why they engaged with cpsi. personalismo and familismo are strong cultural values that tie notions of trust to core interpersonal and familial relationships in the latino community;6 the presence of these values appeared to reinforce messages being shared and consumed on social media, regardless of their accuracy. cultural values also appeared to have an impact on how some latinos chose to act upon cpsi: several participants reported discussing cpsi with other family members offline, while others discussed ways in which fatalistic view of cancer acted as a barrier to cancer control and prevention efforts.7,9 findings highlight the complex and interrelated ways in which cultural values, source factors and message factors contribute to engagement with health content on social media. they also provide important insights to how social media can both promote or hinder health outcomes, at times leading individuals to bypass evidence-based procedures. these are important contributions for current debates on how to best curtail the effects of health misinformation on social media platforms. specific interdisciplinary recommendations to address these issues include developing interventions to counteract/correct misinformation, improving digital health literacy, and establishing transnational, interdisciplinary research collaborations. references 1. chou wys, oh a, klein wm. addressing health-related misinformation on social media. jama. 2018;320(23):2417-2418. 2. american cancer society. cancer facts & figures for hispanics/latinos 2018-2020. atlanta: american cancer society;2018. 3. smith a, anderson m. social media use in 2018. pew research center. https://www.pewinternet.org/2018/03/01/social-media-use-in-2018/. published 2018. 4. teoh, f. the most popular health articles of 2018, a scientific credibility review. health feedback. https://healthfeedback.org/the-most-popular-health-articles-of2018-a-scientific-credibility-review/. published 2019. 5. mccay-peet l, quan-haase a. a model of social media engagement: user profiles, gratifications, and experiences. in o’brien h, lalmas m, eds.why engagement matters. heidelberg: springer;2016:199-217. 6. ayon c, aisenberg e. negotiating cultural values and expectations within the public child welfare system: a look at familismo and personalismo. child fam soc work. 2010;15(3):335-344. 7. yañez b, mcginty hl, buitrago d, ramirez ag, penedo fj, et al. cancer outcomes in hispanics/latinos in the united states: an integrative review and conceptual model of determinants of health. j lat psychol. 2016;4(2):114. 8. murphy st, frank lb, chatterjee js, moran mb, zhao n, amezola de herrera p, baezconde-garbanati la. comparing the relative efficacy of narrative vs nonnarrative health messages in reducing health disparities using a randomized trial. ajph. 2015;105(10):2117-2123. 9. erwin do, treviño m, saad-harfouche fg, rodriguez em, gage e, jandorf l. contextualizing diversity and culture within cancer control interventions for latinas: changing interventions, not cultures. soc sci med. 2010;71(4):693-701. 10. rivera ym, moran mb, smith k. (2019, july). beneath the tip of the iceberg: a qualitative approach to capturing engagement with cancer information on facebook. oral presentation at the international association of media and communication research 2019 annual conference: communication, technology and human dignity: disputed rights, contested truths. madrid, spain. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): rogers, k., & osman, k. (2022, november). connecting in the gulf: exploring digital inclusion and access for low income indigenous families. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. connecting in the gulf: exploring digital inclusion and access for low income indigenous families dr jessa rogers (wiradjuri) queensland university of technology dr kim osman (non-indigenous) queensland university of technology decolonising methodologies in an indigenous australian research context digital inclusion research traditionally seeks to explore the complex inequalities among different groups in society that affects people’s ability to fully participate in social, economic and cultural life. as aboriginal and torres strait islander people are some of the least digitally included australians, researchers have used a variety of methods to explore the social and economic inequalities between indigenous and non-indigenous people. while well meaning, much of this research lacks appropriate leadership and involvement of the people it seeks to serve. moreover, there is a lack of quality frameworks for collaboration between indigenous and non-indigenous researchers to effectively research issues of digital inclusion for indigenous people in australia. this paper outlines how our team of indigenous and non-indigenous researchers developed a unique indigenous ethnographic? research methodology to investigate digital inclusion challenges faced by low-income indigenous families living on mornington island, a remote aboriginal community in queensland, australia. this methodology applies tuhiwai smith’s (1999) principles of decolonising methodologies to our research in an indigenous australian context. it blends participant photography and indigenous yarning methods with co-design workshops, to foreground the voices of indigenous people in articulating barriers and solutions to low levels of digital access (to internet and devices), affordability (of plans and data), and ability (digital skills work life, work and education) in their community. in addition we demonstrate how the methodology and its methods are applied in context, by presenting findings from our year-long project on mornington island. specifically, we discuss how low-income families use the internet to access government and social services, e-health, e-commerce and education services, particularly relevant as there is no senior school on the island. we will also discuss how the application of our indigenous ethnographic? methodology may inform policy, practices and programs designed to address inequalities of access for aboriginal and torres strait islander people in australia. our methodology and results are situated within the growing body of decolonising methodologies and indigenous research, methods and methodologies. informed by martin’s (2003) relatedness theory, our data is considered through aboriginal ways of being, doing and knowing, forming a window through which we observed, analysed and interpreted data. relatedness theory is framed by aboriginal ontology, axiology and epistemology (aboriginal ways of being, ways of doing and ways of knowing) (martin 2003). each interacts with the other in dynamic and flexible ways: aboriginal ontology informs axiology and epistemology, and so forth. aboriginal ontology is a relational ontology, with all things respected in their place within the overall system (martin, 2003). relatedness requires ‘establishing identities, interests and connections to determine our relatedness’ (p. 11), drawing on what we know, through elders and community, as proper ways of being (martin, 2003). accordingly, we (as researchers) will be guided by community elders in our processes (e.g., engagement with low income families, schools and community organisations), which are intentionally flexible to allow research to be participant-led. our methods will be checked with community members before we start data collection, which will involve the use of yarning as a conversational tool, and the use of digital photography, including options for community members to take their own images, to discuss their technology use. yarning is described as conversation and storying that is important to indigenous peoples (bessarab & ng’andu, 2010), and allows indigenous families to describe how they use the internet, the challenges they face because of low access to digital and internet services, and the impact it has on their lives. our methods include a continual and ongoing sharing of findings back to the community in line with the principles of yarning, and designed to let the community tell their own stories of being digitally excluded in australia. an indigenous-led reflexive framework for digital inclusion research an indigenous approach to digital inclusion research requires a research framework that encompasses indigenous worldviews. wilson, wikahere-hall & sherwood (2021) state, “indigenous researchers recognise the need to recover and use their own ontological, epistemological and axiological structures and the need to engage in relevant and meaningful research with their own peoples…the relational orientation of an indigenous paradigm grounded in collective obligations and responsibilities to others is opposed to the value-free objective and detached approach to research” (p. 2). by basing our methodology and research on martin’s (2003) relatedness theory, and a reflective understanding of the interaction and relationships between ‘all parts of the whole’, we draw on thematic analysis, involving indigenous co-leadership processes, to allow the most accurate analysis of the qualitative data while upholding the integrity of indigenous voices and stories shared within the larger data set. our application of tuhiwai smith’s (1999) principles includes honouring what is meaningful and important to indigenous people and communities, while involving indigenous people as engaged stakeholders throughout the research process. privileging indigenous voices is essential in indigenous research (rigney 1999). inclusive decisionmaking, respect, the participation of indigenous people, equal sharing of input and control, acknowledging and respecting indigenous knowledge systems, and benefit for all who participate are fundamental aspects of indigenous research (smith 1999; weberpillwax 1999; cajete 2000), as well as participants agreeing upon the appropriateness of the objectives, procedures and ways in which data is interpreted and used (eldridge 2008). the paper contributes to the conference theme ‘decolonising the internet’ by proposing a framework for blended indigenous and non-indigenous research teams (focused on internet-related projects) consisting of four, inter-connected and overlapping stages: (1) facilitated indigenous involvement in research (starting with the development of concepts and design of this project) (2) engaging strongly with indigenous research and literature, both academic and community-based to interpret data and findings (3) engaging with and developing indigenous data collection methods (e.g. yarning) to ensure the effectiveness and appropriateness of this research, and (4) representing indigenous authors and voices in analysis and communication of research results. references bessarab, d & ng’andu, b 2010, ‘yarning about yarning as a legitimate method in indigenous research’, international journal of critical indigenous studies, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 37-50. cajete, c 2000, native science: natural laws of interdependence, clear light, santa fe, new mexico. eldridge, la 2008, ‘indigenous research methodologies in art education’, journal of cultural research in art education, vol. 26, pp. 40-50. martin, k 2003, ‘ways of knowing, ways of being and ways of doing: a theoretical framework and methods for indigenous research and indigenist research’, journal of australian studies, vol. 76, pp. 203-214. wilson, d, mikahere-hall, a & sherwood j 2021, ‘using indigenous kaupapa māori research methodology with constructivist grounded theory: generating a theoretical explanation of indigenous womens realities’, international journal of social research methodology, doi: 10.1080/13645579.2021.1897756. tuhiwai smith, l 1999, decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples, university of otago press, dunedin, aotearoa new zealand. weber-pillwax, c 1999, ‘indigenous research methodology: exploratory discussion of an elusive subject’, journal of educational thought, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 31-45. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): noone, r., & jacob, a. (2023, october). perils of place: geofences and predatory platform intimacies. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. perils of place: geofences and predatory platfrom intimacies rebecca noone university of glasgow arun jacob university of toronto abstract geofencing is a practice of establishing virtual perimeters around target locations embedded in digital maps. as a type of digital tripwire, the geofence marks who and what crosses its threshold on the ground based on sensory networks of location awareness, facilitated by a cellphone connection. this paper examines two applications of geofences in the united states: 1) the first in the context of tenant eviction process via self-proclaimed ‘”property preservation” platform, civvl; 2) and the second is in the context of policing abortions via data brokers such as cellhawk who extrapolate and sell google maps locational data using geofences. in this paper, we argue that civvl and cellhawk illustrate perils of geofencing as more than a technical system of sensory surveillance but as a cultural system used to organize relations to space according to property and risk. in this paper we track how geofencing is used to register the body’s occupation and mobility, and in so doing organizes space according to terms of trespass and belonging, via the “data intimacies” geofences afford (rambukkana and de verteuil, 2021; ley, & rambukkana, 2021). the first application of our analysis begins in 2020, when the united states government announced the termination of the cares act eviction moratorium, a public health mandate originally put in place to ensure american tenants had continued access to housing during the early months of covid-19 pandemic. anticipating an influx in tenant evictions in the wake of this upended moratorium, onqall, an american property management company, launched its platform, civvl. the civvl platform promises to make the tenant eviction process easy by connecting property owners, estate agents, and banks with the platform’s “network” of independent contractors tasked with fulfilling forced home removals like extracting and disposing of a home’s contents (what civvl calls “debris”), serving court documents, and visiting properties to post notices (rodrigues, 2020). via this platformed coordination of tenant evictions, civvl uses locational data to orchestrate the practice of displacing people from their homes. the second application begins in the summer of 2022, when the us supreme court announced the dobbs v. jackson women’s health organization decision overturning the abortion protections granted by roe v. wade precedent, which since 1973 had upheld a person’s constitutional right to an abortion. the dobbs decision effectively removed legal protections for any abortion seekers in several american states. at this time, hawk analytics, a locational profiling software company, launched cellhawk to monitor the entrances and exits of reproductive health clinics and sexual assault centers on behalf of anti-abortion organizations in the united states such as california-based realoptions (nix & dwoskin, 2022). these anti-abortion groups would then use the data to mark and prosecute abortion seekers in line with new state bans. both civvl and cellhawk are platforms that feed off access to locational data, specifically intimate locational data– to facilitate swift and targeted responses to contested changes in governance and policy. both collect location data through the geofence. madelaine ley and nathan rambukkana’s (2021) concept of digital intimacies is one way to understand the techniques through which geofences access private locational details of a user’s life. ley and rambukkana argue that digital platforms mediate new spatial relations of intimacy based on changes in connectivity and interactivity mediated via the platform that are still reflective of emotional and embodied closeness and knowingness. via the geofence, space itself is made intimate. lauren berlant (1997, 1998) argues that intimacies can tied to narratives of nationality, manifested within borders and territories of belonging and institutional reciprocity. accordingly, intimacies are always spatial, formed through logics of insider and outsider, or of publics and counterpublics. these forms of intimacy, of institutional belonging, enforce the subjectivities that “institutionally index” bodies “in relation to the state and property laws.” the paper conceptualizes the geofence apparatus of non-consensual acts of data intimacy undergirding digital infrastructures of space, and points to the material impacts of location-driven algorithmic systems and the infrastructures that enable them. in our analysis of the brokering of intimate data about embodied experiences, we identify how seemingly ‘offline’ and embodied experiences of space are asymmetrically valued for their intimacy and are made available via the geofence. the geofence does not keep out but becomes a mode to access and transgress. civvl and cellhawk reinforce and amplify a dispossessory coding of space that preys on precarity and exploits fluctuating legal status of marginalized populations. geofences illustrate just how plentiful and valuable embodied location information is within this digital landscape, while presuming locational information is simply there for the taking. like its antecedent, the fence, geofences mediate the securing of space– either containing risk or keeping it out. geofences are also a boundary mechanism through which platforms gain access to intimate data and then use this intimacy as a means to assign the values of risk and safety as well as trespasser and property based on how one occupies space or where one moves through space. the geofence itself is hard to ‘sense-back’ while it senses, and as a result has real material consequences that profit from the criminalization of poverty and the surveillance of reproductive autonomy. these case studies serve as the harbingers signaling how geofencing could evolve in the future. the paper draws awareness to the geofence as a dangerous apparatus to initiate awareness of the nonconsensual acts of platform intimacy. references berlant, lauren. 1997. the queen of america goes to washington city: essays on sex and citizenship. duke university press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822398639 berlant, lauren. 1998. “intimacy: a special issue.” critical inquiry 24 (2): 281–88. https://doi.org/10.1086/448875. civvl. n.d. process services and property preservation. https://civvl.com/ joh, elizabeth e. september 5, 2022. “dobbs online: digital rights as abortion rights” available at ssrn: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4210754. ley, & rambukkana, n. (2021). touching at a distance: digital intimacies, haptic platforms, and the ethics of consent. science and engineering ethics, 27(5), 63–63. doi: 10.1007/s11948-021-00338-1. nix, n., & dwoskin, e. (2022, august 12). search warrants for abortion data leave tech companies few options. the washington post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/12/nebraska-abortion-c ase-facebook/ rambukkana, n, & de verteuil, g. (2021). the shape of platform studies: a multidimensional methodological model for a vicissitudinous concept. aoir selected papers of internet research, 2021. doi:10.5210/spir.v2021i0.12229. rodrigues, a. (2020, september 21). gig economy company launches uber, but for evicting people, vice news. <https://www.vice.com/en/article/ep435n/gig-economycompany-launches-uber-but-for-evicting-people> https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822398639 https://doi.org/10.1086/448875 https://doi.org/10.1086/448875 https://civvl.com/ http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4210754 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-021-00338-1 https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/12/nebraska-abortion-c https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/12/nebraska-abortion-case-facebook/ https://spir.aoir.org/ojs/index.php/spir/article/view/12229 https://www.vice.com/en/article/ep435n/gig-economy-company-launches-uber-but-for-evicting-people https://www.vice.com/en/article/ep435n/gig-economy-company-launches-uber-but-for-evicting-people selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): vigren, m. (2021, october). imagining alternative mediated futures? reflections on experimental workshops with young people. presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. imagining alternative mediated futures? reflections on experimental workshops with young people minna vigren aalto university, finland imagining alternatives to our thoroughly-networked contemporary everyday life is rare and, when attempted, not easy. this observation resonates with previous studies that show people share a sense of resignation towards their agency with regards to the digitally mediated conditions of daily life (markham, 2020; saariketo,2020). what is more, it seems that the notion of ‘ordinary’ people having limited chances to influence structural conditions has become universal. this hegemonic situation, to apply the critical definition of stuart hall (1983/1996), is reflected in two major ways. first, people adapt to prevailing sociotechnical arrangements even when they criticize them explicitly. second, it appears nearly impossible to project mediated futures in ways that would challenge the dominant ideological tendencies and question existing power relations. in our research project, we tackled the latter problem by developing an ‘imagining workshop’ method and applying it in an experimental study with young people. in this paper, we present methodological reflections based on these imagining experiments, including the challenges that became apparent during the workshops. the theme of the conference, ‘independence’, is imbued in the conceptualization of the activity of imagining as a prec(ar)ious agentive capacity inherent in humans as well as in our viewing the ‘counter-hegemonic’ mobilization of this capacity as a prerequisite for the development of more just society for all humans and non-humans. our paper contributes to nascent research that explores and experiments with so-called speculative methods in the field of critical media and infrastructure studies. we are interested in whether the dynamic of hegemony that actualizes in mediated daily practices can be questioned, and alternatives imagined to ‘how things are’. in line with dunne & raby’s (2013) ideas of speculative design, we observe an urgent need to create spaces that afford discussion and encourage debate about alternatives; we also agree that there is specific potential in speculation to act as a “catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality” (ibid.: 2). our key methodological question thus is: “how could we as researchers create interventionist methods to spark imagination and inspire (self-)reflective thinking in people about their mediated everyday life?” theoretically, we find the concept ‘infrastructuration’ pertinent for grasping how networked media technologies contribute to the constitution of the everyday as selfevident. in a sense, it is precisely the hegemonic process of infrastructuration that ‘speculative fiction’ and other speculative methods are most crucially directed at. the notion refers to the phenomenon in which internet connections and ‘smart’ devices have become inextricable and unquestioned parts of daily practices (see, e.g., paasonen, 2015; saariketo, 2020; slota & bowker, 2017). in the process of infrastructuration, the whole notion that there could be alternatives to prevailing circumstances sinks into oblivion, which, in turn, shrinks the capacity to imagine alternatives (see also feenberg, 2011). in sum, infrastructuration of media and information technologies refers to their merging into society’s fundamental structures, the crucial role of these technologies and our automated relations with them only becoming perceivable when they break down or operate insufficiently (star & ruhleder, 1996). a major challenge for critical research is that, in practice, people have scant possibilities to question the sociotechnical conditions of their daily life and (inter)actions. nor are there ready-to-hand methods available for us researchers with which to initiate reflection on the domineering imaginaries of media technologies and how these imaginaries actually position people (see also hall, 1983/1996). discussing this methodological dilemma should be included in any empirical research project that commits itself to emancipatory knowledge interest. in our paper, we address this and other methodological challenges through selfreflection on a case study in which we used an ‘imagining workshop’ method. in the workshops we wanted to enable young people to distance themselves from the selfevident aspects of their mediated everyday life and encourage them to imagine jointly alternative mediated futures. we invited participants (aged 14-18) to create playfully mundane scenes situated in the year 2030. we worked with 24 youngsters and two partners from the media sector. in designing the workshops, we used the results of an online survey (n=436) that was conducted at the beginning of the project in the autumn 2020. a major observation from the workshops, and one that fosters hope for the future, concerns the flexibility of imagining as a joint activity. while collectively projecting alternatives to the mediated everyday life proved challenging for the participants, it sparked vibrant discussions on the bleaker aspects of contemporary networked society. it remains for future empirical research to probe further the critical potential inherent in the collective exercise of human imaginative capacities. one challenge we observed relating to this is that the act of imagining is rooted in lived experiences of the past and does not necessarily result in the expression or co-production of counter-hegemonic narratives of the future. hence, imagining alternatives as a crucial component of ‘critical agency’ (rebughini, 2018) and a prerequisite for sociotechnical transformation requires us to distinguish the multiple nuances of imagining as an individual and joint activity. as for the actual transformative potential of young people imagining together in playful research settings, an experimental study with a handful of participants can produce little that could be straightforwardly directly generalized. nonetheless, our study also highlighted some important issues in the ‘what’ of imagining. first, young people have concerns about their mediated everyday lives that emphasize the need to actively seek alternatives to ‘how things are’. the main concerns included the need for 1) managing better their own media use better in order to not ‘be hooked’ and to enable disconnection, 2) having safe and trustable online spaces free from with disinformation, and hateful content or behavior, 3) better privacy, and control over features which enable dataveillance and unwanted algorithmic governance, and 4) devices that are durable, manufactured in a fair and sustainable manner, including possibilities for repair and reuse. references dunne, a. & raby, f. 2013. speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming. cambridge: mit press. feenberg, a. 2011. agency and citizenship in a technological society. lecture at it university of copenhagen. available at: https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/copen5-1.pdf hall, s.1983/1996. the problem of ideology: marxism without guarantees. in stuart hall. critical dialogues in cultural studies, edited by d. morley & k-h chen, 25–46. new york: routledge. markham, a. 2020. the limits of the imaginary: challenges to intervening in future speculations of memory, data, and algorithms. new media & society. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1461444820929322 paasonen, s. 2015. “as networks fail: affect, technology, and the notion of the user”. television & new media 16(8): 701–716. rebughini, p. 2018. critical agency and the future of critique. current sociology 66(1), 3–19. saariketo, m. 2020. kuvitelmia toimijuudesta koodin maisemissa (imaginaries of agency in the landscapes of code). phd dissertation, tampere university finland. https://trepo.tuni.fi/handle/10024/120383 slota, s. c. & bowker, g. c. 2017. ”how infrastructures matter”. in the handbook of science and technology, edited by u. felt, r. fouché, c. a. miller & l. smith-doerr, 529–554. 4. edition. cambridge, ma & london: the mit press. star, s. l. & ruhleder, k. 1996. ”steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: design and access for large information spaces”. information systems research 7(1): 111–134. aoir2020-firm discourses and digital infrastructure projects final.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 o’neil, m, et al. (2020, october 28-31). firm discourses and digital infrastructure projects. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 201th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. firm discourses and digital infrastructure projects mathieu o’neil university of canberra laure muselli telecom paris stefano zacchiroli université paris diderot / inria xiaolan cai university of canberra fred pailler université de nantes author’s note. this paper is a snapshot of research conducted in the early months of 2020; it does not represent the final version of our argument. background and research question it firms have embraced open licenses and the hacker ethic of self-fulfillment: free and open source software (a.k.a. foss or ‘digital infrastructure’) is now fully integrated into commercial ecosystems. in 2016 the linux foundation released its seventh report to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the famous free software kernel. the report noted that the volume of contributions from unpaid developers had fallen to 7.7%, from 11.8% in 2014.1 it firms invest in foss in order (a) to share with other firms, under the leadership of foundations, development costs; (b) to help attract prospective employees in a competitive job market where hiring skilled it professionals is challenging: virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): o’neil, m., muselli, l., zacchiroli, s., cai, x., pailler, f.(2020, october) firm discourses and digital infrastructure projects. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. o’neil, m, et al. (2020, october 28-31). firm discourses and digital infrastructure projects. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 201th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. involvement in foss has been integrated into it firms’ hr strategy; and (c) to shape the governance and technical orientation of projects: firm employees participating in or leading foss projects may help it firms create digital infrastructure more suited to the firmware they develop atop this infrastructure. for critical theorists, this represents a shift from an informational capitalism strongly relying on intellectual property to a new digital capitalism which integrates ‘openness’ into its business model (birkinbine, 2020; lund & zukerfeld, 2020). these critical accounts do not investigate how the world of foss volunteers interacts with commercial ecosystems: are firms developing policies in relation to open source communities, requesting projects conform to certain technical or behavioral standards, for example? if that is the case, to what extent are these strategies successful? to answer, we present a qualitative analysis of firm discourses collected during three open source conferences. we then analyze the email discussion lists of linux and firefox (the most widely used open source browser) and search for the occurrence of key firm discourse terms in order to ascertain in what way these discourses are being used by foss developers. methodology ethnography we collected data at three conferences: fosdem2019 (brussels) is strongly developercentric; the 2019 european open source summit (lyon), was organized by the linux foundation to promote international it firms' marketing; the 2019 paris open source summit was attended by smaller european it firms. researchers attended keynotes and talks based on how firm employee presentation abstracts addressed the firmvolunteer community relationship. notes were collected according to a predetermined template. firm discourses were subsequently classified into themes such as ‘foss in the firm’ e.g. open source program offices (ospos), project hosting, performance metrics, business models, human resources, documentation standards, etc.; ‘foss between firms’ e.g. license compliance, trust/neutrality between competitors, safety/security issues, etc.; ‘other actors’ e.g. foundations, foss activists, users, etc.; and ‘labour/work issues’ e.g. paid/unpaid activities, diversity programs, community management, governance issues, etc. key terms were developed inductively, based on trends and concepts encountered in the data. content analysis data was collected via r using the rvest package between dec 16, 2019 and jan 21, 2020. 228,000 emails created between jan 01, 2018 and april 30, 2019 were collected from the linux-kernel archives and 13,770 emails created between jan 1, 2015 and april 30, 2019 from the firefox-dev archives. we then searched these emails for key terms identified in the qualitative phase and performed proximity analyses using qanteda by collecting the words situated immediately before and after these key terms. findings and discussion we identified three key themes in the it firm discourses we collected. these highlight norms and practices that serve the goals outlined in our background section, though this purpose is seldom explicit in the discourse itself. o’neil, m, et al. (2020, october 28-31). firm discourses and digital infrastructure projects. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 201th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 1-marketing: marketing should be considered a necessary activity for open source projects, not a ‘bad word’. it encompasses branding and design (logos, mascots); helping users identify sponsoring firms; communication using performance indicators (number of contributors, code commits, contributing firms) helps projects attract both developers willing to contribute and corporate users. highlighting ospos, as many firms did in lyon contributes to the communication strategy, as it emphasizes firm involvement in open source. 2-security & safety: these notions highlight concerns about how far technologies can be trusted. safety refers to the fact that a 'system must run as expected', while security refers to the fact that a 'system cannot be misused’. safety introduces a new perspective to open source. security is a major concern for large it firms, since the open source model has proved vulnerable to security breaches. the spectre and meltdown vulnerabilities in the proprietary microcode of intel cpus highlighted how ineffective communication between firms and some open source projects was, as their informal structure made it difficult to inform them of breaches. the heartbleed security breach, caused by a lack of openssl code review, showed that a cryptography library used by most large end users relied on a community comprising two individuals. security concerns have prompted it and end user firms to initiate projects (such as elisa) aiming to enable the linux kernel's compliance to safety standards. 3-diversity: diversity refers to the concern for the representation of social groups amongst large it firm employees. it is also a concern for access to (paid) work for minorities in projects and communities. definitions of diversity provided by large it firms are generally implicit, involving a broad range of meanings, such as ‘the possibility for people not to work in a hostile environment’ or ‘confronting differences without reacting negatively’. speakers provided tips on how traditional forms of address could be exclusionary (‘guys’, ‘black/white hat’). firms strove to develop diversity programs aiming to enable traditionally excluded minorities to work within open source projects. figure 1. word cloud of keyword-proximity, firefox-dev email archive. o’neil, m, et al. (2020, october 28-31). firm discourses and digital infrastructure projects. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 201th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. figure 2. word cloud of keyword-proximity, linux-kernel email archive. we found that ‘diversity’ and ‘marketing’ were quasi-absent from email discussions, perhaps reflecting developers’ indifference to social inclusion and disapproval of nontechnical topics. in contrast ‘security’ was omnipresent in both email discussion lists. the semantic environments of this keyword highlights the difference between the traditional not-for-profit status of the mozilla foundation (501c/3) and the linux foundation’s role as an industrial consortium supported by large firms (501c/6): discussions on the linux list were technical (e.g. ‘security framework initialized’, ‘wusb host has no security descriptors’, etc) whilst those on the firefox list reflected concerns about user rights and privacy, as can be seen from the word clouds (figure 1). the only non-technical discourses on the linux list concerned communications about upcoming linux foundation conferences or security events. conclusions our quantitative results are exploratory; comparisons with more projects would offer clearer insights. that said, our in-depth analysis of firm discourses about digital infrastructure projects and exploratory analysis of project discussions around these terms show that the foss world encompasses a diversity of industrial outlooks. they also highlight the evolution of the role of foundations or ‘boundary organizations’ (o’mahony & bechky, 2008): whilst foundations used to protect projects from firm interference, some have now wholly been placed in the service of firm efforts to standardize project work, particularly around the key issue of security. references birkinbine, b. j. (2020) incorporating the digital commons: corporate involvement in free and open source software. london: university of westminster press. lund, a. & zukerfeld, m. (2020) corporate capitalism's use of openness. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. o’mahony, s. & bechky, b.a. (2008). boundary organizations: enabling collaboration among unexpected allies. administrative science quarterly, 53, 422-459. o’neil, m, et al. (2020, october 28-31). firm discourses and digital infrastructure projects. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 201th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 1 https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press-release/2016/08/the-linux-foundation-releases-development-reporthighlighting-contributions-to-the-linux-kernel-ahead-of-25th-anniversary-of-linux/ microsoft word gillett-incels on reddit-incels on reddit.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 gillett, r., suzor, n. (2021, october). incels on reddit: a study in social norms and decentralised moderation. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. incels on reddit: a study in social norms and decentralised moderation rosalie gillett arc centre of excellence for automated decision-making and society and digital media research centre, qut nicolas suzor arc centre of excellence for automated decision-making and society and digital media research centre, qut introduction the social news website reddit has a long history of hosting communities (‘subreddits’) that advocate or encourage white supremacy (gillespie 2018), disparagement of minority groups (topinka 2017), and violence against women (massanari 2017). as a platform that relies heavily on volunteer moderators (“mods”) to self-govern the subreddits (matias 2016), reddit has been criticised for failing to adequately enforce its site-wide rules (gillespie 2018). incels—an internet subculture that ascribes to deeply misogynistic beliefs—grew in visibility when they developed subreddits on reddit. after ongoing criticism and media attention about harmful behaviour of incels both on and off the platform, reddit imposed escalating sanctions and ultimately banned the most visible of these subreddits over a period of several years. in this paper, we focus on the interaction between formal rules and social norms in incel and related subreddits. this paper aims to improve understanding about how problematic norms are contested in (partially-) decentralised systems of content moderation. we examine discourse about moderation to better understand the role of moderation teams in maintaining and changing social norms in their communities (fiesler et al. 2018) and to examine the interaction between these norms and both site-wide and subreddit-specific rules. our study shows how the moderators of major incel subreddits resisted external pressure by adopting techniques to neutralize their behaviour and by enforcing boundaries to insulate their communities from critics. our analysis suggests that the threat of prohibition alone is unlikely to be sufficient to drive cultural change in problematic subreddits. we argue that content moderation is an insufficient frame to understand the regulation of harmful communities; real change requires addressing the underlying cultural norms rather than focusing on individual pieces of content. examining decentralised moderation on reddit in this study, we use archived reddit data to examine how four subreddits responded to external pressure and criticism and how they worked to develop and maintain their rules and norms. we compare the discourse around moderation in the now-banned r/incels and r/braincels subreddits with that in r/foreveralone, where users discuss similar themes but do not generally identify as incels. we also include r/incelswithouthate, a subreddit that its creator framed as a space for less hateful incels, which reddit banned from the platform in march 2021 for violating the platform’s rules against promoting hate. we draw on sykes and matza’s (1957) neutralization theory to examine the techniques that reddit’s incel communities used to justify abusive speech in the face of heavy external pressure and criticism. findings and discussion our findings show how subreddits adapt to and resist pressure from reddit and other users to comply with the site-wide rules. ultimately, stricter enforcement of the formal site-wide rules did not challenge or displace the underlying ideologies that foster toxic communities. reddit’s threats to quarantine (a step that makes communities less visible to those who have not subscribed) or ban subreddits did not carry sufficient weight to substantially change the social norms in the incel subreddits. after several warnings from reddit, the subreddits failed to make a serious effort to reduce the level of harmful content in their communities. instead, as the incel subreddits became more defensive, the moderators and participants rigorously policed their boundaries to keep critics out. in the face of heavy external criticism, incels reinforced problematic norms by minimising their culpability for harmful actions. for instance, they often denied that their behaviour was harmful and instead refocused discussion on condemning the behaviour of their critics. this enabled them to justify their subreddits as online support groups for bullied and oppressed men. it was also common for incels to draw on baseless pseudoscientific theories to provide intellectual legitimacy for their claims (baele, brace, and coan 2019). this “turbocharged genetic determinism” (ging 2017, 650) enabled incels to deny responsibility for their lack of romantic relationships and provided opportunities to justify their misogynistic attitudes. while some subreddits attempted to comply with the letter of externally imposed rules, we found that participants adopted similar neutralization techniques to justify their behaviour. the result, we argue, is that the communities were able to maintain a set of norms that continued to be highly problematic. by contrast, our findings demonstrate how moderators of less misogynistic communities continuously work to reinforce prosocial norms, despite dealing with very similar issues and sharing some subscribers with the main incel communities. we found that r/foreveralone’s moderation team worked consistently over time to foster a respectful community through the rules and moderation practices. for instance, these moderators more actively deleted harmful comments, posts, and banned those who published them. the moderators’ responses importantly demonstrated the bounds of acceptable behaviour in the community and created a space where other participants could question and contest toxic claims. conclusion to foster prosocial subreddits, our study suggests that reddit must tackle the underlying identity and ideology that makes people feel hateful. content moderation, by itself, is an insufficient tool to change harmful social norms. driving real change when moderation is decentralized requires the committed and supported participation of moderators who can undertake the extensive work of tackling the underlying identity and ideology that brings hateful communities together. references baele, stephane j., lewys brace, and travis g. coan. 2019. “from ‘incel’ to ‘saint’: analyzing the violent worldview behind the 2018 toronto attack.” terrorism and political violence. 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2019.1638256. gillespie, tarleton. 2018. custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. new haven, ct: yale university press. ging, debbie. 2017. “alphas, betas, and incels: theorizing the masculinities of the manosphere.” men and masculinities 22 (4): 638–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184x17706401. fiesler, casey, jialun “aaron” jiang, joshua mccann, kyle frye, and jed r. brubaker. 2018. “reddit rules! characterizing an ecosystem of governance.” in twelfth international aaai conference on web and social media. https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/icwsm/icwsm18/paper/view/17898. massanari, adrienne. 2017. “#gamergate and the fappening: how reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures.” new media & society 19(3): 329–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815608807. matias, j. nathan. “going dark: social factors in collective action against platform operators in the reddit blackout.” in proceedings of the 2016 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 1138–51. san jose california usa: acm, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858391. sykes, gresham m., and david matza. 1957. “techniques of neutralization: a theory of delinquency.” american sociological review 22(6): 664–70. https://doi.org/10.2307/2089195. topinka, robert j. 2018. “politically incorrect participatory media: racist nationalism on r/imgoingtohellforthis.” new media & society 20(5): 2050–69. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817712516. microsoft word aoir final extended abstract douyin and tiktok.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): poh, y. t. & abidin, c. (2021, october). douyin and tiktok: a cross-language systematic review of academic scholarship on sister apps. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. douyin and tiktok: a cross-language systematic review of academic scholarship on sister apps yu ting poh curtin university crystal abidin curtin university introduction following the meteoric rise of tiktok in the global market and the dominance of douyin (抖音) in the chinese market, this article maps academic scholarship focusing on douyin and tiktok. tiktok is the international derivative of douyin – china’s short video platform owned by bytedance (字节跳动). short video apps are reshaping content creation and consumption on social media and has attracted scholarly interest. despite the rapid international interest in tiktok, research often neglects the epistemology of scholarship. we therefore focus our attention on chinese and english academic publications studying douyin and tiktok to understand the disciplinary approaches, methodologies and research questions of scholars, and the development of academic scholarship on these two platforms. in doing so, our paper seeks to decenter anglocentric discourses by developing a joint understanding of douyin and tiktok scholarship. douyin and tiktok are “short video platforms that feature 15 to 60 second videos” (kaye et al., 2020: 2), comprising user-generated content and professionally-generated content. launched in 2016, douyin grew rapidly to cater to a chinese market which desired social entertainment in a fragmented attention economy. in the global market, bytedance acquired musical.ly, a music lip-synching app created by another chinese tech company, in 2018 and all musical.ly accounts were migrated to tiktok. douyin and tiktok share similar features and affordances, although some features (e.g. livestreaming) were unique to douyin before being introduced to tiktok. we address three key research questions: firstly, what are the disciplinary approaches and methodologies employed by scholars in studying douyin and tiktok? secondly, what are the foci of research questions put forth by scholars? thirdly, how is the academic scholarship on these two platforms developing independently? methodology this abstract draws upon 104 chinese and english academic publications published between january 2019 to february 2021. we examine douyin and tiktok scholarship published in chinese and english by using the china national knowledge infrastructure (cnki) and google scholar. chinese language publications were searched and collected on cnki which is currently china’s largest integrator with over 95% of chinese academic resources. cnki has an “unassailable market share” as compared to competitors (chen, 2019). english language publications were searched and collected on google scholar due to its “broad reach across interdisciplinary academic scholarship indexed on the internet and its use in prior literature review studies” (blachnio et al., 2013; dhir et al., 2013; kalampokis et al., 2013 as sighted in snelson, 2016). of the 104 publications, 58 were published on douyin (7 english, 51 chinese), 41 were published on tiktok (40 english, 1 chinese), and 5 featured analyses on douyin and tiktok (5 english, 0 chinese). findings despite their similarities, these sister apps should not be reduced to interchangeable entities. we note a conflation of both apps in academic research – studies which claimed to focus on one app had in fact analyzed the sister app (e.g. chen & zhang, 2020 as sighted in abidin, 2021). however, douyin and tiktok have different ecologies and features, exist in different markets, and should not be simply seen as carbon copies for chinese and non-chinese users. regarding disciplinary approaches, publications on douyin tended to be published by scholars in the humanities and social sciences disciplines (n=50). there were significantly fewer publications in the science and technology disciplines (n=8). publications on tiktok demonstrated a broader scope of disciplinary leanings with scholars from both the humanities and social sciences (n=26) as well as science and technology disciplines (n=15). for comparative publications, 3 were rooted in the humanities and social sciences disciplines while 2 were rooted in the science and technology disciplines. regarding methodological approaches, douyin publications tended to employ qualitative approaches (n=49), with fewer quantitative (n=4) and mixed (n=5) approaches. the representation of qualitative (n=23), quantitative (n=12) and mixed (n=6) approaches for tiktok publications was more balanced. qualitative (n=3) and quantitative (n=2) approaches were observed in comparative publications. data collection methods across publications included digital fieldwork, surveys, interviews, experiments, media texts, and ethnography while data analyses included content, thematic, statistical, network, critical discourse, and descriptive forms of analyses. regarding research questions, douyin publications tended to engage with e-commerce (n=10), development of short form videos (n=8), practices, cultures and communities (n=8), intersections of traditional and new media (n=7), platform logics (n=5), transmission of traditional chinese culture (n=5) and “playful patriotism” (n=5) with the latter being defined as “state-endorsed, but not necessarily orchestrated, light-hearted or amusing media content that promotes an established state ideology” (chen et al., 2021: 111). tiktok publications tended to engage with platform logics and governance concerns (n=18), concepts of fame, virality and influencers (n=8), (re)presentation of events or information (n=8), participatory online video practices and cultures (n=4) as well as engagement and education (n=3). comparative publications tended to engage with platform logics and platformization (n=2), expression of cultural differences (n=1), fan engagement strategies (n=1) and factors underlying app usage (n=1). finally, academic scholarship on douyin and tiktok are largely based in independent geographic regions. among 58 douyin publications, 53 were authored or co-authored by researchers based in universities in mainland china or chinese regions. for tiktok publications, 35 out of 41 tiktok publications were authored by researchers based in the global north. in the case of comparative publications (n=5), 1 was co-authored by researchers based in a chinese university and another university outside of china. while the remaining 4 publications were authored by researchers based outside of chinese universities, these researchers (or at least one researcher for co-authored work) were identified to be of chinese ethnicity based on their names. given that the digital interfaces of douyin are displayed in chinese, the presence of ethnically chinese co-authors who can make sense of digital affordances was crucial. conclusion we have identified the early patterns of scholarship foci and found that studies on douyin and tiktok largely focus on just one app and also demonstrate a chinese/nonchinese divide in terms of the authors’ nationalities. in this regard, we suggest that scholars could take on a comparative perspective to explore these sister apps jointly. references abidin, c. (2021). mapping internet celebrity on tiktok: exploring attention economies and visibility labours. cultural science journal, 12 (1): 77-103. chen, p. & zhang, x. (2020). evaluation and empirical study on the information service quality of tiktok government accounts. eurasian journal of social sciences, 8 (2), 5369. chen, r. (2019). why it’s time to reform china’s academic publishing databases. sixth tone. retrieved from: https://sixthtone.medium.com/why-its-time-to-reform-china-s-academic-publishingdatabases-5c969168d76b chen, x., kaye, d. b. v., & zeng, j. (2021). #positiveenergy douyin: constructing “playful patriotism” in a chinese short-video application. chinese journal of communication, 14 (1): 97-117. kaye, d. b. v., chen, x., & zeng, j. (2020). the co-evolution of two chinese mobile short video apps: parallel platformization of douyin and tiktok. mobile media & communication, 00 (0): 1-25. snelson, c. l. (2016). qualitative and mixed methods social media research: a review of the literature. international journal of qualitative methods, 1-15. microsoft word moran-misinformation or activism-misinformation or activism.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): moran, r., prochaska, s., schlegel, i., hughes, e., prout, o. (2021, october). misinformation or activism: mapping networked moral panic through an analysis of #savethechildren. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. misinformation or activism: mapping networked moral panic through an analysis of #savethechildren rachel moran university of washington information school, center for an informed public stephen prochaska university of washington information school, center for an informed public isabelle schlegel university of washington emelia may hughes university of washington information school owen prout university of washington information school qanon’s co-optation of #savethechildren—misinformation, activism or both? when looking at the recent social-political history of america it is difficult to avoid references to qanon, a widespread, conservative-leaning conspiracy that amalgamates numerous conspiracies into a single movement. central to the movement’s growth has been a moral panic around child sex trafficking that has served as a gateway for new adherents to become exposed to broader qanon rhetoric. while such moral panics are certainly not new (weitzer, 2007), digital social networks have changed the scale and style of conversation, amplifying their effects—as was made clear with the election of a qanon-supporter to congress (rosenberg, 2021) and an insurrection at the u.s. capitol on january 6th (rubin et al., 2021). qanon’s co-optation of the #savethechildren (#stc) movement exemplifies this networked moral panic and has played a major role in facilitating the spread of misinformation under a banner of moral authority. the #stc movement exists as a peculiar mix of conspiracy, misinformation, and disinformation that is often difficult to disentangle from participants’ social and political identities. accordingly, it is a pertinent case study for understanding both the anatomy and consequences of networked social movements in an era of information disorder (wardle & derakhshan, 2017). this paper thus explores the proponents of #savethechildren on social media platform instagram—paying particular attention to their motivations, tactics and desired outcomes—in order to explore how networked social movements build knowledge and organize in spaces that are vulnerable to the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories. to better understand the movement and its participants, we draw upon theoretical frameworks based in jost, ledgerwood, & hardin’s (2008) conceptions of system justification theory and shared reality theory as well as lauren berlant’s (2011) conception of cruel optimism (see also: young, 2021). the paper explores three primary research questions: rq1: who contributed posts to the #savethechildren movement? rq2: what visual and rhetorical tactics are used by #savethechildren posters? rq3: a) what motivations do #savethechildren posters claim to? b) what calls to action do they advocate for to achieve their goals? research is drawn from an inductive thematic analysis of instagram posts related to the #savethechildren movement. instagram posts from january 2020 through december 2020 were collected using crowdtangle based on four different hashtags : #savethechildren, #saveourchildren, #endchildtrafficking and #childlivesmatter. the collected dataset includes both content and account-level metadata and associated content. this includes an image of the post itself (unless removed by instagram), any accompanying captions, hashtags, and engagement data (likes, shares, comments, and views). additionally, we collected the account handle and number of followers at the time a post was made. the resulting dataset (n = 1,400 posts) was cleaned to remove irrelevant posts and other noise. five researchers undertook several rounds of coding using an iterative process to capture emergent themes and categorical information. emergent themes included direct qanon and conspiratorial references (such as “adrenochrome” — a drug qanon-adherents believe is harvested by elites through human sacrifice), knowledge-building practices (including the sharing of disputed facts and statistics and “friend of a friend” anecdotes), emotional motivations, persuasive techniques (in the main related to “doing your research” and ignoring mainstream media and “big tech”), and a variety of calls to action that included both online and offline actions. an account-level analysis highlights that the primary contributors to the #savethechildren movement are conservative leaning, white, highly religious femalepresenting accounts with a particular emphasis on motherhood. additional archetypes included instagram influencer accounts such as fitness influencers, small business owners, and brands—many of whom did not engage previously with qanon but became either casual or increasingly vocal proponents of qanon-inspired conspiracies under the #savethechildren banner. further, accounts specifically focused on propagating diverse conspiracy theories were also prevalent within the dataset. content-level analysis highlights the emergence of common stylistic and rhetorical strategies, often associated with the type of account (i.e., conspiracy accounts often relied on different strategies than influencer accounts). conspiracy accounts relied heavily on memes and highly provocative rhetorical questions aimed at criticizing mainstream media, telling their audience to “wake up” and stop believing mainstream lies. in comparison, feminine/motherhood accounts relied heavily on a pastel visual style and/or pictures of themselves and their children combined with child trafficking statistics intended to shock or outrage their audience. these statistics were often uncited or directly pulled from our rescue, a contentious nonprofit organization (stackpole, 2015). alternatively, influencer accounts tailored their strategy to their audience, using numerous hashtags and provocative questions. all account archetypes relied heavily on emotional and moralistic rhetoric, often drawing an implied moral line between those against child trafficking (i.e., themselves) and those not against child trafficking (i.e., anyone who doesn’t agree with them). an analysis of the claimed motivations within the #savethechildren movement highlights the utility of moral-high ground arguments as a useful trope for advancing other motivations, often individual or political. for the feminine/motherhood account archetype, there was a strong motivation to publicly demonstrate that they are a good, moral person by showing support for an undeniably moral cause connected to their political and religious identity. alternatively, influencer accounts seemed to utilize the movement to increase their follower account or business, often directly asking for follows or selling merchandise. conspiracy accounts seemed wholly motivated by spreading their worldview, often using rhetoric that connected the #savethechildren movement with specific qanon conspiracy theories. an overarching commitment to “ending” trafficking or “saving” children thus emerged as a uniting theme, bringing together differing communities with different underlying or secondary motivations for joining the movement. posters almost always included calls to action within their posts, although those same calls often reflected a lack of understanding of what trafficking actually looks like. the most common call to action was to “speak out” —often with the implication that child trafficking is not talked about by mainstream media. further, calls to concrete and offline actions were rare, with posters instead seeing “success” for the movement in terms of individualized notions of visibility and collective awareness with no real contemplation of how this may be capitalized on to achieve the abolition of trafficking. taken together, the paper illuminates how the #savethechildren movement is defined more as an identity based, social-political movement rooted in moral panic— rather than one focused on truly supporting human rights. our analysis highlights how networked moral panics— facilitated by the affordances and tactics of social media —can bring together disparate communities to spread misinformation under the guise of activism. accordingly, the paper contributes to understandings of the growing attraction of conspiracy theories, the role of social media platforms in amplifying the spread of misinformation and knowledge of the real-world consequences of information disorder. references berlant, l. g. (2011). cruel optimism (vol. 226). durham, nc: duke university press. jost, j., ledgerwood, a., & hardin, cd. (2008). shared reality, system justification, and the relational basis of ideological beliefs. social and personality psychology compass, 2, 171-186. rosenberg, m. (2020, november 3rd) a qanon supporter is headed to congress. the new york times. retrieved online: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/03/us/politics/qanon-candidates-marjorietaylor-greene.html rubin, o., bruggeman, l., & steakin, w. (2021, january 19th) qanon emerges as recurring theme of criminal cases tied to us capitol siege. abc news. retrieved online: https://abcnews.go.com/us/qanon-emerges-recurring-themecriminal-cases-tied-us/story?id=75347445 stackpole, t. (2015) the new abolitionists. foreign policy. retrieved online: https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/22/the-new-abolitionists-mexico-dominicanrepublic-human-trafficking-mormon-our/ wardle, c., & derakhshan, h. (2017). information disorder: toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making. council of europe report, 27, 1-107. weitzer, r. (2007). the social construction of sex trafficking: ideology and institutionalization of a moral crusade. politics & society, 35(3), 447-475. young, j. c. (2021). disinformation as the weaponization of cruel optimism: a critical intervention in misinformation studies. emotion, space and society, 38, 100757. microsoft word gekker-cloud culture-cloud culture.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): gekker, alex. (2021, october). cloud culture: fluid memories on platform enclosures. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. cloud culture: fluid memories on platform enclosures alex gekker university of amsterdam, tel aviv university a few hours after the digital-only release of his highly anticipated 2016 “life of pablo” music album, kanye west took to twitter in order to articulate his displeasure with one of its tracks. ‘ima fix wolves’ was the promise, delivered when – four months later – the eponymous track was changed post-release. for most users of music platforms, this is now the only existing version of the song, “updated” from the original, which is subsumed into the latest. what does it tell us about the stability of cultural products on digital platforms? of course, cultural products were never carved in stone. multiple examples exist of books, shows, music and films changing either before (focus group screeners), during (pilot episodes), or after (director’s cut) release. moreover, the internet has allowed unprecedented level of granular control over specific aspects of media objects, web pages being the prime example. geofencing, programmatic advertising and personalisation may result in different people seeing a different version of the same page. the longs it exists, the more this effect grows, with caching and hard-copies creating ever more version of a the same page. yet, unlike films or music, we have come to expect that of the web, and developed archiving strategies as users and researchers to mitigate for this effect. for example, like the twitter bot @editingthegraylady deploys automatic comparison to continuously check for changes in the new york times site main headline. moreover, the web remains a (relatively) open platform where changes can be traced, and older copies retrieved. this runs contrary to the logic of content found on major platforms, aimed to be perused and experienced only on their own terms (helmond 2015; plantin 2018). with a growing push from digital platforms to a cloud-based subscription model, users become reliant on accessing their “bought” or “rented” cultural products on a remote server – through the cloud. this paper brings together emerging work on the platformisation of cultural production (nieborg and poell 2018; duffy, poell, and nieborg 2019) with (critical) approaches to digital archiving (berry 2016; brügger 2018; ben-david 2019) and algorithmic curation (noble 2018; amoore 2020) to explore a proposed emerging ‘cloud culture’. the term encompasses (1) the technological capacity to modify cultural commodities after they have reached (and perhaps experience by) users; (2) the erosion of digital ownership, emblematic of similar trends in companies limiting one’s ability to modify – or even repair – their owned hardware and software; and (3) the data-driven race for content optimisation, where platform owners use consumer surveillance to deliver their products for maximum engagement (helles and flyverbom 2019). these three components of the term are further explored in relation to the ontological and epistemological repercussions of a continually updating cultural commodities, across four key domains. an analytical framework for fluid cultural objects first, cloud culture highlights modification rather than deletion. previously, digital artefacts were removed or revoked from digital services, with a now canonical (and very ironic) example of amazon deleting orwell’s 1984 from kindle devices of users who purchased it. however, the example of wolves highlights the possibility of altering the object instead. with music, film and television streaming on the rise, this can potentially be implemented on a granular level for different offerings. second, it emphasises the limitation of user agency, and the shift of platform power toward large-scale cultural revisions. particularly, it asks how both creators and consumers are affected by such ‘strategies, routines, experiences, and expressions of creativity, labor, and citizenship that shape cultural production through platforms.’ (duffy, poell, and nieborg 2019, 2). specifically, it posits the danger of the surreptitious edit – one far less visible than an outright deletion. third, it alerts over the seeming non-recoverability of replaced and rewritten digital objects. the weakening of physical media and the move to platform enclosures makes it so that original versions of wolves or the 2019 cats film (before retouching the digital fur of its protagonists) are increasingly more difficult to obtain. attempts to host and/ or distribute legacy version might in turn encounter copy-right strikes and other legal terms of enforcement, as the endlessly modified cultural object dilute the possibility for distinct versions that might be recovered or protected by fair use or archiving prerogatives. fourth and ultimately, this might have severe repercussions on cultural inquiry and historical revisionism both for media researchers and – more importantly – the public at large. at the heigh of a seemingly “post-truth” era, where technology and media companies are drawn as key actors in an epistemic disagreement over the very nature of reality, this is a worrisome trend. one example is the disney company’s reported consideration of removing the crows from the 2020 streaming version of its 1941 dumbo film. while it might come from a justified stance of not exposing modern viewers to reprehensible historical depictions, it nonetheless raises moral quandaries about shared (dark) cultural heritage, its usefulness for educating about the past, and who gets to be the arbiter of such changes. the paper concludes with recommendations for developing further tactics for tackling cloud culture as internet researchers. a key inspiration is from emerging scholarship on the political-economy of contemporary videogames, that highlights how profit motives are integrated at the design level of the game. previously prominent in multi-player, contemporary single player games as well become a platform for ongoing value extraction, features added and removed regardless of players’ desires. through examining the game design, modifications, its ludic economies, and player pushback, we can begin to imagine future work with ever fluid and malleable cultural commodities. references amoore, louise. 2020. cloud ethics: algorithms and the attributes of ourselves and others. durham: duke university press. ben-david, anat. 2019. “2014 not found: a cross-platform approach to retrospective web archiving.” internet histories, august. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/24701475.2019.1654290. berry, david m. 2016. “the post-archival constellation: the archive under the technical conditions of computational media.” in memory in motion. archives, technology, and the social, edited by ina blom, eivind røssaak, and trond lundemo, 103–25. amsterdam: amsterdam university press. brügger, niels. 2018. the archived web: doing history in the digital age. cambridge, massachusetts: the mit press. duffy, brooke erin, thomas poell, and david b. nieborg. 2019. “platform practices in the cultural industries: creativity, labor, and citizenship.” social media + society 5 (4): 205630511987967. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119879672. helles, rasmus, and mikkel flyverbom. 2019. “meshes of surveillance, prediction, and infrastructure: on the cultural and commercial consequences of digital platforms.” surveillance & society 17 (1/2): 34–39. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v17i1/2.13120. helmond, anne. 2015. “the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready.” social media + society 1 (2): 2056305115603080. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080. nieborg, david b., and thomas poell. 2018. “the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity.” new media & society 20 (11): 1461444818769694. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769694. noble, safiya umoja. 2018. algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. 1 edition. new york: nyu press. plantin, jean-christophe. 2018. “digital traces in context| google maps as cartographic infrastructure: from participatory mapmaking to database maintenance.” international journal of communication 12 (0): 18. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/5988. aoir2022-paper submission_id_644_final.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 algorithmic justice from below?! aikaterini mniestri university of siegen sebastian randerath university of bonn abstract datafication has become an integral part of users’ social media experience and the political economy of platforms. given that the political economy of social media and advertising platforms is largely driven by participatory culture (burgess & green, 2018), platform companies are incentivised to open up the data vault to users, just a smidge, allowing them to access a series of metrics, neatly organized in analytics interfaces referred to as ‘creator studios.’ creator studios are part of a larger assemblage of machine readable metrics and data analytics on the back end of a digital platform. while it has become common practice for creators to make use of this feature to grow their business, creators have also appropriated it to engage collectively in “algorithmic gossip” (bishop, 2019) around social issues. in a number of cases, we observe how algorithmic gossip can become instrumental in the hands of minoritized groups (d’ignazio & klein, 2020, p. 26). particularly, following the black lives matter mass protests in 2020, creators noticed that their posts were less visible after they used their platforms to report on the movement and the protests. as more and more creators took screenshots of their analytics and posted them on instagram, youtube and tiktok, they were able to force a response out of the company. in response, tik tok called this a ‘glitch’ and launched an incubator to boost talent from the black community. creatives had to apply for one of one hundred spots in the incubator meeting particular criteria. to be eligible, creators had to be over 18, based in the united states of america, and number a minimum of 10,000 followers. having chosen a hundred creators for the “tiktok for black creatives” incubator program (tiktok newsroom), the company made a commitment “to elevate and amplify their voices” by supporting their careers and developing their personal brand over a period of three months. additionally, for this mniestri, a.; randerath, s. (2022, november). algorithmic justice from below?!. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. project, tiktok has collaborated with macro, a multiplatform media company that claims to advocate for the perspectives of bipoc. in this paper we ask: does algorithmic gossip about injustice and bias enacted by human and non-human actors on a platform provide a basis for overcoming algorithmic oppression or is it inevitably incorporated into hegemonic strategies of platform governance and silencing? from an intersectional perspective, we acknowledge that, historically, the voices of bipoc (black, indigenous and people of color) and lgbtq+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) have been silenced, their suffering minimized or erased from public consciousness (d’ignazio & klein, 2020). with our research, we draw on sophie bishop's concept of algorithmic gossip:algorithmic gossip refers to the communally informed strategising with regards to recommender algorithms, which is then communicated among creators and put to the task of engendering stable income and a spot under the algorithmic limelight within the precarious space of social media platforms. with this concept, bishop (2019) acknowledges the technical expertise of content creators as well as the productive capabilities of gossip as a tool for unveiling experiences, assumptions and information about “how algorithms work” (1). we question the legitimacy of platform companies being able to have singular authority over issues of algorithmic visibility. in this paper, we have two core arguments: we argue that end users gather insights from the analytics on the creator studio of instagram, youtube and tiktok in order to reveal patterns of algorithmic injustice and bias. to substantiate this argument we first conduct a content analysis of the creator studio feature on instagram, youtube and tiktok, where we offer a reading of the interface of this feature and highlight a key similarity: data analytics are structured within the digital architecture of the platforms to ‘nudge’ creators towards allying their content production with the political and economic agenda of the platform company. we then refer back to our case study, involving content creators who published videos relevant to the black lives matter protests only to then discover that their channels stopped growing and their views only declined. by manually collecting videos commenting on this injustice while using images of their own creator studio, and then investigating their impact on tiktok and mainstream media coverage, we posit that black creators use the creator studio as a tool to expose algorithmic injustice and to support the black lives matter movement. whereas content creators cannot directly intervene in the algorithmic architecture of the platforms they use, nor can they manipulate elements in the interface of the creator studio, they recontextualize the data they can access in order to weave counter-hegemonic narratives. we shed light on examples of this practice and explain how creators repurpose the analytics from the creator studio using algorithmic gossip. by demonstrating how end users collectively share information, we seek to extend academic understanding on algorithmic gossip, accentuating its potential as decolonial practice from below. in other words, gossip allows bipoc to advocate for themselves, against algorithmic injustice and racial biases. however, our case does not end here. in the second part of this paper, we argue that platform companies undermine the collective struggle of bipoc groups through self-governance. as shown above, tiktok was not held accountable for racial bias and for suppressing minoritized communities by external actors. rather, the company was able to circumvent public outcry by launching an incubator program for black creatives. however, we argue that these incubator programs can be seen as attempts to silence the algorithmic gossip of bipoc at the surface level. while establishing the program, the platforms do not effectively change the status quo under which bipoc are oppressed within the platform. moreover, whereas tiktok openly supports the entrepreneurialisation of bipoc within the platform, they do not acknowledge that the creators who protested against tiktok’s “algorithms of oppression” (noble, 2018) did not do so for the sole reason of building a brand or making a profit. in other words, tiktok’s response to the accusations of racial bias and the repression of the voices of bipoc actively installs strategies to ignore the changes that minoritized groups demand of platform companies to transform oppressive structures and hence decolonize the algorithmic architecture of tiktok. instead, they shift the conversation in such a way that the company stays in control of the changes that take place within the platform. they reserve the right to approve candidates for the incubator program, they maintain a highly profitable status quo, and ultimately they continue to colonize the voices and existence of bipoc within tiktok. as a result, we contend that this case study legitimizes arguments in the discourse against the self-governance of platform companies. to ground our critique, we have synthesized literature dealing with oppressive algorithmic architectures (umoja noble 2018), the silencing and erasure of bipoc (nelson, 2016; d’ignazio & klein, 2020) and platform governance (gorwa, 2019; van dijck, 2021). in conclusion, we follow data analytics from the tiktok creator studio as they become an instrument of protest in the hands of bipoc, allowing content creators to fight for algorithmic justice from below. we then bear witness to the problematic mechanics of platform self-governance, offering a critique for tiktok’s attempt to practice social justice through an incubator program. we draw attention to the tensions that this case study introduces for the political economy of platforms and we urge the academic community to consider and question which forms of governance can lead to meaningful change in the arduous process of decolonizing algorithmically driven social media platforms. thereby, in this paper we offer an alternative, intersectional perspective to platform data infrastructures and their social, economic and cultural impact on tiktok’s participatory culture. references bishop, s. (2019). managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip. new media & society, 21(11–12), 2589–2606. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819854731 burgess, j., & green, j. (2018). youtube: online video and participatory culture. john wiley & sons. d’ignazio, c., & klein, l. f. (2020). data feminism. the mit press. gorwa, r. (2019). what is platform governance? information, communication & society, 22(6), 854–871. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1573914 introducing the tiktok for black creatives incubator program | tiktok newsroom. (o. j.). abgerufen 2. märz 2022, von https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/tiktok-for-black-creatives-incubator-program nelson, a. (2016). the social life of dna: race, reparations, and reconciliation after the genome. beacon press. noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york university press. van dijck, j. (2021). seeing the forest for the trees: visualizing platformization and its governance. new media & society, 23(9), 2801–2819. please update your browser your browser isn’t supported anymore. update it to get the best youtube experience and our latest features. learn more google chrome safari microsoft edge opera mozilla firefox remind me later about copyright contact us terms privacy policy & safety © 2025 google llc microsoft word sarkar-the streamyard cyphers-the streamyard cyphers.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): sarkar, p. (2021, october). streamyard cyphers: online place-making within an indian hip hop community. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the streamyard cyphers: online place-making within an indian hip hop community pradip k. sarkar school of media & communications, college of design & social context, rmit university introduction this paper presents an ethnographic account of how a community of bengali-speaking rappers called the cypher projekt, based in the indian state of west bengal, created an online place for sociality during india’s harsh covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 (jha and mullick 2020). this attempt at online place-making is analyzed through oldenberg’s concept of the third place, and the indian notion of informal sociality, or the adda (pronounced ud-dah). what is a cypher? in hip hop culture, a rap “cypher” refers to an informal gathering of rappers. akin to a poetry slam, a cypher is typically held in physical locations in which rappers engage in freestyle recitations for the purpose of entertainment, competition, and building rapport (rose 2008, porteous 2013, kuttner and white-hammond 2014). cyphers are considered an integral aspect of hip hop culture and serve as rites of passage for aspiring rappers. oldenberg’s third place and the adda the notion of the third place was introduced by the american urban sociologist ray oldenberg in his 1991 book entitled the great good place, in which he described the third place as “a generic designation for a great variety of public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work." (1999, pp. 16). oldenberg’s third places centred around built spaces, such as neighbourhood taverns, pubs, and cafes, where informal sociality took place. he contended that for a third place to support civility and community building, it had to offer a neutral ground for informal hangouts that were perceived as egalitarian and unpretentious, and allowed people to engage in lively informal conversations. such a notion of a third place bears conceptual similarities to the indian social practice of the adda, which the social historian and postcolonial theorist, dipesh chakrabarty, described as “the practice of friends getting together for long, informal and unrigorous conversations”, and provided “a comfort zone to cope with the ever changing forces of capitalist modernity“ (2000, pp 181). even though addas are a spatially dispersed social practice, different sites or locations shape the vibrancy and success of an adda session (bhattacharya, 2017).these concepts provide the theoretical lenses through which the ethnographic study is analysed and discussed. the ethnographic study based on online ethnographic research (hine 2000, postill and pink 2012, postill 2017), this paper draws upon a case study the cypher projekt, a grassroots initiative launched by a group experienced rappers in the city of kolkata, but with memberships extending to young aspirants within the city as well as in the regional towns in west bengal. the case study incorporates observations of the cypher projekt sessions held online during the indian national lockdowns in 2020, followed by interviews with individual members. the first online cypher was held in june, 2020, but owing to infrastructural challenges associated with internet bandwidth and latency (hammar and marshall 2020), the cyphers were replaced with online discussion sessions that took place every sunday. the sessions were livestreamed via the cypher projekt’s facebook page using facebook live and through their youtube channel. however, the discussions were conducted using a freemium web-enabled video-conferencing application known as streamyard, which is why the online sessions are referred to as the streamyard cyphers. the first streamyard session was held on sunday, july 5, 2020, and the sessions continued thereon every sunday till september 14, 2020. whilst most the livestreamed sessions resembled informal discussion-style interviews, others involved panels in which several members participated. all the sessions were moderated by an emerging rapper who had volunteered for the role. streamyard cyphers as a third place the streamyard cyphers bore many of the characteristics of oldenberg’s third place. the sessions consisted of informal conversations amongst participants that were lively and humorous. the conversations covered a range of issues from the rappers’ musical practice to issues around language, politics, and gender, and general anxieties around covid-19. participants included members, both male and female, at various stages of their practice, from emerging rappers to experienced members with prominent profiles in the kolkata music scene. often extending over several hours, these sessions were wellattended as evident by the number of views and the liveliness of comments on facebook. the sessions featured performances by participant rappers, often at the request of viewers through their comments. the choice of digital technologies, namely the free version of the web-enabled streamyard and popular platforms, such as facebook, and youtube, all of which could be accessed on mobile phones, ensured that the mostly millennial members of the cypher projekt were able to participate. moreover, the simplicity of streamyard’s user interfaces and widespread familiarity with facebook and youtube aligned with the plain look-and-feel, or low profile, aspect of third places. ofcourse, the streamyard cyphers, unlike the physical cyphers, were not really cyphers in terms of the performed competitiveness that is an essential practice in hip hop cultures. this lack of competitiveness also accounted for the relaxed informality of the online hangouts. the streamyard cyphers more closely resembled a third place than the physical cyphers. rethinking oldenberg’s third place however, a re-thinking of oldenberg’s concept necessitates a consideration of the fact that social hierarchies are not always flattened or leveled in a third place. observations of interactions amongst the participants in the streamyard sessions revealed a reverence for members with greater cultural capital (bourdieu and johnson 1993) as well as seniority. soukup (2006) and steinkuehler and williams (2006) have also indicated the presence of social hierarchy in their application of the concept to studies of online sociality. moreover, the emphasis on bengali vocalisation in rap excluded many nonbengali rappers that often attended the physical cyphers. oldenberg’s description of the neutrality of third places also comes into contestation as the more active participants in the streamyard cyphers were part of an in-group of bengali rappers that had often collaborated and performed with each other. members that were not part of the this ingroup kept a lower profile. the focus on white middle-class (and male) suburban america as the sociocultural contexts around which third places manifest (soukup 2006, fullagar, o’brien et al. 2019) also problematises the application of oldenberg’s concept in the context of a global south nation, such as india. this is where scholarly discourses around the indian social practice of the adda can offer nuanced perspectives into the application of oldenberg’s third place, owing to its ability to incorporate aspects of social hierarchy and cliquishness in informal sociality (bhattacharya 2017). the homeliness of a third place also calls for a rethink at a time of covid-induced lockdowns, as members of the cypher projekt sought online sociality “to escape this sense of confinement and isolation” within their homes (watson, lupton et al. 2021, pp. 147). this adds to the arguments against oldenberg’s skepticism around online environments as third places (soukup 2006, steinkuehler and williams 2006, mcarthur and white 2016). the streamyard cyphers clearly offered a vibrant third place for the undertaking of addas by the members of the grassroots hip hop community amid the covid-induced indian lockdowns of 2020. while oldenburg’s notion of the third place holds relevance for the examination of informal sociality, including online sociality, in the global south, its application requires augmentation with scholarly analyses of social practices in specific sociocultural contexts. references bhattacharya, b. (2017). adda and public spaces of sociability before the ich. much ado over coffee, uk, routledge: 23-82. bourdieu, p. and r. johnson (1993). the field of cultural production: essays on art and literature, usa, columbia university press. chakrabarty, d. (2000). provincializing europe: post-colonial thought and difference. princeton, princeton university press. fullagar, s., et al. (2019). rethinking third places. feminist perspectives on third places, uk, edward elgar publishing. hammar, n. and c. marshall (2020). "playing music together online is not as simple as it seems." npr. retrieved april 10, 2021, from https://www.npr.org/2020/07/14/891091995/playing-music-together-online-is-notas-simple-as-it-seems hine, c. (2000). virtual ethnography. london, sage. jha, a. and j. mullick (2020). how the world’s strictest lockdown affected india. hindusthan times. new delhi. retrieved january 12, 2021, from https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/how-the-world-s-strictest-lockdownaffected-india/story-hi96oxjcyze53jhb5f6gwn.html kuttner, p. j. and m. white-hammond1 (2014). (re)building the cypher fulfilling the promise of hip hop for liberation. the organic globalizer: hip hop, political development, and movement culture. c. malone and g. m. jr., usa, bloomsbury academic & professional: 43-57. mcarthur, j. a. and a. f. white (2016). "twitter chats as third places: conceptualizing a digital gathering site." social media + society 2(3): 2056305116665857. oldenburg, r. (1999). the great good place: cafes, coffee shops, community centers, beauty parlors, general stores, bars, hangouts and how they get you through the day. new york, usa, marlowe & company. porteous, c. (2013). rap's collective consciousness: the significance and dynamics of cypher in hip hop culture, phd thesis, newcastle university, uk. postill, j. (2017). remote ethnography: studying culture from afar. the routledge companion to digital ethnography. l. h. hjorth, h.; galloway, a.; bell, g., uk, taylor & francis: 61-69. postill, j. and s. pink (2012). "social media ethnography: the digital researcher in a messy web." media international australia, incorporating culture & policy (145): 123-134. rose, t. (2008). the hip hop wars: what we talk about when we talk about hip hop--and why it matters, usa, civitas books. soukup, c. (2006). "computer-mediated communication as a virtual third place: building oldenburg’s great good places on the world wide web." new media & society 8(3): 421–440. steinkuehler, c. a. and d. williams (2006). "where everybody knows your (screen) name: online games as “third places"." journal of computer-mediated communication 11: 885–909. watson, a., et al. (2021). "enacting intimacy and sociality at a distance in the covid-19 crisis: the sociomaterialities of home-based communication technologies." media international australia 178(1): 136-150. aoir-boundary-work-covid selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 rejecting science with science: boundary-work in anti-mask twitter reply threads during covid-19 andrew beers university of washington, human centered design & engineering sarah nguyễn university of washington, information school emma spiro university of washington, information school kate starbird university of washington, human centered design & engineering abstract the covid-19 pandemic has been marked by a controversy in the united states over the public health benefits of mask-wearing, especially on social media. many have contested the scientific consensus that masks are an effective method to prevent and slow the spread of covid-19 infections, often along explicitly political lines. here, we investigate specifically how twitter users engaging in arguments about mask-wearing invoke scientific principles to argue against masks. we further analyze the sources that these users cite to support their claims. using a qualitative approach drawing from constructivist grounded theory, we show how these users work to defend the legitimacy of their claims and their external sources by selectively exploiting rhetorical values of scientific endeavour. we analogize their work to the process of scientific boundary-work, in which actors consciously manipulate the boundary between science and not-science for personal and political gain. introduction in december 2020, twitter announced updated rules meant to prevent medical misinformation during the covid-19 pandemic [1]. these rules instituted several criteria suggested citation (apa): beers, a., nguyễn, s., spiro, e., starbird, k. (2021 october). rejecting science with science: boundary-work in anti-mask twitter reply threads during covid-19. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?j1xbty for the removal of misleading content on its platform, including being “demonstrably false or misleading” and “likely to impact public safety or cause serious harm.” exceptions to these rules include the “public debate about the advancement of covid-19 science and research [...] so long as the claims don’t misrepresent research findings.” the strain between these two principles — misinformation and scientific debate — characterized the first year of the pandemic, where massive uncertainty of covid-19’s risks and remedies combined with widespread, durable, and politicized beliefs opposed mainstream scientific consensus [2]. perhaps no element of the pandemic displays these tensions more than the public debate over mask-wearing. the mask debate was marked by disagreements and rapid changes of scientific consensus in its early stages, and a prolonged, political resistance to a pro-mask consensus that continues to this day. in science, technology, and society studies, such rhetorical attempts to manage the margin between science and non-science have been termed by gieryn as boundary-work [3]. science’s capaciousness — at times visionary and changeable, at other times conservative and immutable — allows rhetorical actors to selectively highlight certain attributes of science for political or personal gain. while gieryn focused on rhetorical acts performed by expert scientists, we focus here on boundary-work done by twitter users engaging in online debates about mask-wearing. we find that these users are well-attuned to the norms of scientific debate, and use several distinct rhetorical strategies to contest and claim the mantle of science in service of personal political causes. methods through twitter’s streaming api, we captured all replies made to 73 accounts associated with united states governors and the mayor of the district of columbia, due to these accounts’ importance in setting statewide mask regulations. we selected two original (non-retweet) posts from each governor with the greatest number of mentions of the term ‘mask’ in the replies to that post, for 102 posts total. for each of these seed posts, we sampled 50 posts replying either directly to the governor, or to another user who had replied directly. our final dataset contains 5,100 posts. drawing from charmaz’s method of constructivist grounded theory [4], we conducted an open coding process on this data. we focused on users’ personal theories about mask effectiveness, and the citation behaviors behind these theories. during the coding process, we recorded qualitative memos on attributions and sourcing. these memos served as the basis for the following categorization of boundary work in mask discussions. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?qxyh1b https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?l5fxyb https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?noii3s findings we identify five rhetorical attributes of science that users in our dataset use to perform boundary-work: consensus, credentialing, randomized controlled trials, political neutrality, and consistency. 1. anti-mask commenters understood the value of scientific consensus, even as their views contradicted the consensus reached by mainstream institutions. they shared alternative literature reviews to create the appearance of consensus, such as a frequently-cited quote tweet containing over 70 sources supposedly advocating against masks. another oft-cited source is what krafft and donovan termed an evidence collage [5]: a screenshot of unknown origin, aggregating 12 mostly misleading quotes from 12 studies with the caption “according to many studies masks do not work” (figure 1). commenters shared these resources to frame pro-mask rhetoric as unscientific, despite these literature reviews often containing retracted, corrected, or contradictory scientific sources. 2. anti-mask commenters were highly attuned to institutional credentials. their most frequently-shared sources came from well-known and respected journals, such as a widely-shared (and later amended) editorial with anti-mask rhetoric published in the new england journal of medicine [6]. credentialing proved most important in defending the often dubious histories of anti-mask scientists essential to the anti-mask movement. commenters touted the medical expertise and credentials of these scientists and doctors, some of whom also weigh against scientific consensus on climate change and vaccines, to position them against what they perceived as non-scientific government officials mandating masks out of fear or ignorance. 3. few rhetorical techniques were more powerful than the invocation of randomized controlled trials (rct). faced with the reality of an extensive pro-mask scientific literature, anti-mask users undermined these studies by claiming the experiments were not rct, but rather only observational studies or literature reviews. one user shared an article criticizing pro-mask scientific studies with the comment that “tests not done with rct is like tsa security theatre, we only think it helps.” anti-mask commenters followed the lead of the anti-mask doctors and scientists, who produced videos critiquing pro-mask sources often specifically for not being rct. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?oig1ol https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?lejjgl 4. despite anti-mask commenters being avid political partisans, they prized the principle of political neutrality. one user sums up this predominant rhetorical strategy of the anti-mask movement: “technically, pre covid, all studies said masks don't work. the science didn't change, politics did.” anti-mask users decried scientists and politicians alike for citing science compromised by political bias or ulterior motives, and used these claims to discredit many pro-mask claims. a particular target was national institute of allergy and infectious diseases director dr. anthony fauci, one of the u.s.’s foremost scientists and advocates of mask-wearing. accused of harboring anti-trump bias, or aims towards a secret eugenics program, dr. fauci’s claims were routinely dismissed. 5. when faced with compelling evidence in favor of masks, anti-mask users exploited the principle of consistency. the first month of the pandemic was marred by conflicting statements from scientists and politicians as to the efficacy of masks, although scientific consensus became pro-mask soon after. anti-mask commenters used this period of uncertainty to dismiss and distrust the reports of any source which had formerly been anti-mask. one of the most shared youtube videos by anti-mask users was a video of dr. fauci denigrating mask-wearing, used as evidence that his later pro-mask claims should be disregarded. we note that pro-mask commenters did their own boundary-work by explaining the merits of scientific progress, and how knowledge accumulates progressively over time. acknowledgements this research was supported by the national science foundation covid-19 rapid response research (nsf rapid) program (2027792). we also wish to thank uw center for an informed public for providing infrastructure support. references [1] “covid-19 misleading information policy,” 2020. https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/medical-misinformation-policy (accessed jan. 11, 2021). [2] j. s. brennen, f. m. simon, p. n. howard, and r. k. nielsen, “types, sources, and claims of covid-19 misinformation,” p. 13, 2020. [3] t. f. gieryn, “boundary-work and the demarcation of science from non-science: strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists,” am. sociol. rev., vol. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?4lwt0a https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?4lwt0a https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?4lwt0a https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?4lwt0a https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?4lwt0a https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?4lwt0a https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?4lwt0a 48, no. 6, pp. 781–795, 1983, doi: 10.2307/2095325. [4] a. bryant and k. charmaz, “asking questions of the data: memo writing in the grounded theory tradition,” in the sage handbook of grounded theory, sage, 2007. [5] p. m. krafft and j. donovan, “disinformation by design: the use of evidence collages and platform filtering in a media manipulation campaign,” polit. commun., vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 194–214, mar. 2020, doi: 10.1080/10584609.2019.1686094. [6] m. klompas, c. a. morris, j. sinclair, m. pearson, and e. s. shenoy, “universal masking in hospitals in the covid-19 era,” n. engl. j. med., vol. 382, no. 21, p. e63, may 2020, doi: 10.1056/nejmp2006372. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?4lwt0a https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?4lwt0a https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?4lwt0a https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?4lwt0a https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?4lwt0a https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?4lwt0a https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?4lwt0a https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?4lwt0a https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?4lwt0a https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?4lwt0a figure 1: an example of an evidence collage that suggests a false scientific consensus that masks are not effective in mitigating the spread of coronavirus. the source is unknown. “misleading” text added by authors. microsoft word cooper-the deep time of bitcoin-the deep time of bitcoin.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): cooper, z. g. t. (2021, october). the deep time of bitcoin: excavating the “work” in proof-of-work cryptocurrency systems. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the deep time of bitcoin: excavating the “work” in proofof-work cryptocurrency systems zane griffin talley cooper university of pennsylvania the generation1 of bitcoins requires a radically, intimately material relationship between information and energy–a relationship that is often dirty, messy, heavy, and above all things, extremely hot. while all data infrastructures depend on vast amounts of thermal maintenance (moro, 2021), as a single-purpose data practice, proof-of-work (pow) blockchain systems, and bitcoin specifically, bring these thermocultural relationships (starosielski, 2016) into sharp relief, and at a profoundly large scale. additionally, contrary to the infrastructural disappearing acts of general-purpose cloud computing, the tactility of bitcoin generation, and proximity to its heat and metal, remain pivotal indicators of its value and functionality. as such, pow blockchain systems represent a prime case study for excavating and interrogating longstanding assumptions about the relationship between data and energy, and what these assumptions both conceal and reveal about the infrastructural futures of high-density computing. estimates place bitcoin’s current energy consumption at 141.83 terawatt-hours/year, an amount comparable to ukraine. while bitcoin’s energy problem has become increasingly visible in both academic and popular discourse (lally et al. 2019), the computational mechanisms through which the bitcoin network generates coins, proof-of-work, has gone under-examined. this paper interrogates the “work” in pow systems. what is this work, and how did it come to be accepted as “work” in the first place? i trace this history through a media archaeology of computational heat, in an attempt to better situate the intimate relationship between information and energy in pow systems. well before it is money, bitcoin is a computing practice with a long infrastructural history. rather than focusing on the monetary histories of proof-of-work blockchains, as many have done, i draw attention to the material conditions that have afforded their industrial scaling. considering this scaling, the deeper story of bitcoin does not so much concern the familiar ragtag gangs of crypto-pirates duct-taping gpus together, but rather a richer longue durée of heat management in complex technical systems. while, at first, the bitcoin network only required minute amounts of desktop cpu power, today bitcoins are generated in large data centers, with proprietary machines called application specific integrated circuts (asics), which contain specialized microchips designed for a single purpose–the perpetual running of the sha-256 algorithm. running this algorithm is an extremely energy intensive process, and as such, the primary material “work” involves the interscalar management of heat and energy moving into, 1 i use the term “generation” because, “mining”, as a metaphor for the practice, did not become common vernacular until the beginnings of widespread use of external gpus in late 2010. within, and out of these chips. following brunton (2019), i argue that the “work” in pow systems is principally heat-work, in which excess heat must consistently be managed, mitigated, and either expelled as waste, or rerouted to other systems. all data infrastructures operate like this, but the very theory of proof-of-work explicitly defines data as an irreversibly directional outcome, its value and security dependent on proof of exhaust–or heat. the logic of this work, and the system of machinic trust it attempts to enable, can be excavated from the history of thermodynamic science. pow blockchains radically re-center digital information’s often opaque theoretical and material entanglements with the history of thermodynamics–a history largely de-linked from broader information science. the fundamental logic behind proof-of-work (or proof of heat/exhaust) traces to the rise of thermodynamic science in the mid-nineteenth century, and the reframing of doing work as something exhaustible, directional, and irreversible (prigogine & stengers 1984). thermodynamics redefined what work meant, and as daggett (2019) shows, this redefinition of work (as an exhaustible, irrecoverable asset) became a necessary tool for the expansion of empire and capital. ideas of work and its relationship to entropy migrated and mutated across a multitude of disciplines including economics, sociology, and eventually information science. the idea of information as negative entropy became a cornerstone of early cybernetics. however, much of the heat-work undergirding the functioning of what claude shannon came to call a “bit” became obscured and compartmentalized, allowing information to be productively abstracted apart from its energetic infrastructures (hayles 1999; kline 2015). this has created profound tensions between the material engineering of information infrastructures, and the more abstract, contextless theories of information inaugurated by shannon. since the 1940s, abstract ideas about relationships between information, energy, and entropy have expanded into collections of cosmological principles, and can be found embedded in everything from the containerized global logistics industry (klose, 2015), to the proliferation of single-body principles dominating the designs of digital devices. these systems excel at offsetting and externalizing their exhaustive inefficiencies, maintaining illusions of frictionlessness, even though the logics undergirding their operations remain inextricably tied to assumptions about work and energy that emerged out of the scientific investigations of coal-fired heat engines in the 19th century. pow systems, by their very design, trouble these precarious boundaries. the tactility and visibility of heat-work in pow blockchains have made bitcoin an easy target for its obscene energy use. however, as a computing practice, bitcoin is not a radical exception to the status quo, but rather a reflection of it. pow systems have merely thrown information’s thermodynamic relationships into sharper relief than ever before. bitcoin has only grown so rapidly because it has been able to situate itself in certain spaces as a particular kind of highperformance computing practice, taking full advantage of existing infrastructures, such as building out operations in existing colocation data centers in places like iceland, and utilizing the long-standing foundry model of microchip manufacturing to streamline delivery of asics. if bitcoin disappeared tomorrow, the modular, high-density computing infrastructures it helped model, and the asic industry it rejuvenated, would persist (see taylor et al., 2020). thus, bitcoin provides a crucial lens through which to consider computing’s problematic relationship to energy, and ultimately, how this relationship could be different–especially as structurally similar high-density computing infrastructures for ai and machine learning continue to expand. references brunton, f. (2019). digital cash: the unknown history of the anarchists, utopians, and technologists who created cryptocurrency. princeton university press. daggett, c. n. (2019). the birth of energy: fossil fuels, thermodynamics, and the politics of work. duke university press. hayles, n. k. (1999). how we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. university of chicago press. kline, r. r. (2015). the cybernetics moment: or why we call our age the information age. johns hopkins university press. klose, a. (2015). the container principle: how a box changes the way we think. mit press. lally, n., kay, k., & thatcher, j. (2019). computational parasites and hydropower: a political ecology of bitcoin mining on the columbia river. environment and planning e: nature and space, 251484861986760. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848619867608 moro, j. (2021). air-conditioning the internet: data center securitization as atmospheric media. media fields journal, 16. prigogine, i., & stengers, i. (1984). order out of chaos: man’s new dialogue with nature. verso. starosielski, n. (2016). thermocultures of geological media. cultural politics an international journal, 12(3), 293–309. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-3648858 taylor, m. b., vega, l., khazraee, m., magaki, i., davidson, s., & richmond, d. (2020). asic clouds: specializing the datacenter for planet-scale applications. communications of the acm, 63(7), 103–109. https://doi.org/10.1145/3399734 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): carter, m. & egliston, b. (2021, october). a critical future of virtual reality: all work and no play. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. a critical future of virtual reality: all work and no play marcus carter socio-tech futures lab, the university of sydney ben egliston digital media research centre, queensland university of technology the platformization of virtual reality head-mounted virtual reality (vr) is generally discussed as a gaming technology, but in this paper we argue for the greater need to take vr seriously as a general computing platform and future site for, and of, work. for facebook (who hold a dominant 39% share of the vr market) vr is not simply a gaming device but – as we unpack elsewhere “a new frontier for social media”, framed by zuckerberg as a “new kind of social computing platform” (egliston & carter, 2020). oculus now operates within facebook under the umbrella of its ‘facebook reality labs’ (frl) technological development wing, which pursues research projects in both vr and ar computing with overarching goals of seeing these emerging technologies adopted ubiquitously. an example of this is facebook’s ‘infinite office’ technology (see figure 1) that imagines a flexible, mobile virtual office space for traditional desktop work as well as meetings via vr telepresence. approach and methods here, we report on our research that is examining the implications of vr as (1) a technology being introduced into workplaces; as (2) a possible site for existing forms of labour, in technologies like infinite office; and as (3) a platform for transformed and new kinds of labour, such as remote work via telepresence. we study these sites drawing on methods established in political economy of communication research that utilize ‘trade publications’ to examine media industries (see corrigan, 2018; wasko, 2004; carter & egliston, 2021), which have recently been fruitfully applied in internet studies (wilken, burgess, & albury, 2019). in doing so, we highlight the immediate surveillant and selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): carter, m. & egliston, b. (2021, october). a critical future of virtual reality: all work and no play. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. discriminatory issues, and identify the ways that vr may be utilized to undermine worker rights and working conditions. algorithmic discrimination in vr enterprise training one emerging site for vr in the workplace is in workplace training and assessment, a deployment vulnerable to algorithmic discrimination. for instance, in 2019 walmart announced its partnership with vr start-up strivr, describing how they have been using interactive vr scenarios to train employees and for the hiring process. in related news coverage, they describe the promotion – and 10% pay rise for a 12-year employee based on performance in the vr training. while walmart emphasise that vr assessment is only one of the “data points” used in hiring decisions, the vr companies we examined enthusiastically frame the potential for the complete automation of hiring decisions based on the “objective” data collected from vr use. claims like these echo existing concerns with the use of learning analytics to categorize and assess, and algorithmic decision making more generally (andrejevic, 2019). vr data is of course not “objective”; while we found no discussion of the training datasets in our study (carter & egliston, 2021), commercial machine-learning products are typically trained on biased datasets of neurotypical, male, and able-bodied engineers (mehrabi et al. 2019). in the context of vr learning analytics, this has the potential to be a form of figure 1 screenshot from facebook's 'infinite office' oculus quest application, that imagines a mobile workplace fully operationalized within the facebook platform. eugenic gaze (via swauger, 2020) as they may codify xenophobia, ableism and white supremacy behind the black-box of algorithmic bias, “while avoiding equity-based critiques because of our belief in the neutrality of data and technology” (swauger, 2020). viewed through this lens, we see how vr tools are not just a means of immersive simulation, but also of data collection derived from a scenario that is “real” enough to inspire confidence in the data’s veracity. our work consequently warns that vr may become a pervasive site for discrimination. where vr diverges from other technologies in this regard is in the belief in the capacity of vr to quantify the entire cognitive and physical experience of the user: what we refer to as a fantasy of perfect data. productivity tracking and analytics in the vr workplace where we see this issue emerging in the future is in the intersection of vr workplace tools, like facebook’s ‘infinite office’ (see figure 1) and the data driven ‘employee productivity’ tracking and analytics apparatus being advanced in workplaces like amazon warehouses and through software suites like microsoft 365, which assign individual employees ‘productivity scores’ based on their use of related software. what vr – and its fantasy of perfect data – offer this surveillance ensemble is in line with mark andrejevic’s concept of framelessness, which he uses to describe the contemporary drive of big tech to create a digital 1:1 map of the entire world. this global platform, powered by cameras and sensors everywhere, is intended to serve the purpose of “reflecting the world back to itself in machine readable form” (p. 114) to serve the totalizing ambition of automation. it is likely that vr will become a site for labour. this may take the form of becoming the replacement for the desktop computer (as ‘infinite office’) imagines, or in other contexts such as customer services delivered over vr chatrooms, or remote telepresence work with robots (discussed below). our concern is that this offers employers and big tech a new source of data (that is biometric, see pfeuffer et al. 2019; miller et al. 2020) for surveillance, algorithmic analysis, and control. vr, telepresence and the gig economy integrated with this issue of workplace analytics, another potential workplace application for vr that offers significant concern is in the emergence of vr as an interface for teleoperated robots. for instance, in 2020, japanese grocery chain familymart announced a partnership with robotics company telexistence involving robots in grocery stores – controlled by remote operators using a vr headset stocking shelves (imada, 2020). separate from the use of autonomous robots, our concern is with the mobilization of vr-enabled robots in the context of precarious labour and the gig economy. familymart’s “remote controlled robot ‘employees’’” were announced with the ‘benefit’ of allowing “people to have more flexible work schedules”, highlighting how the commonly discussed ‘positives’ of vr such as telepresence and intuitive embodied interfaces – may be mobilized to diminish working conditions and create a hyperflexible and mobile workforce, again highlighting the need for greater critical speculation around the new affordances of vr (see also carter & egliston, 2020). references andrejevic, m. (2019). automated media. routledge. carter, m. & egliston, b. (2020) ethical implications of emerging mixed reality technologies. socio-tech futures lab. carter, m. & egliston, b. (2021) what are the risks of virtual reality data? learning analytics, algorithmic bias and a fantasy of perfect data. new media & society. corrigan, t. (2018). making implicit methods explicit: trade press analysis in the political economy of communication. international journal of communication, 12, 2751–2772. egliston, b., & carter, m. (2020). oculus imaginaries: the promises and perils of facebook’s virtual reality. new media & society. mehrabi, n. et al. (2019). a survey on bias and fairness in machine learning. arxiv preprint arxiv:1908.09635 miller, m. et al. (2020). personal identifiability of user tracking data during observation of 360-degree vr video. scientific reports 10, 17404. pfeuffer, k. et al. (2019). behavioural biometrics in vr. conference on human factors in computing systems proceedings, 12. swauger, s. (2020). our bodies encoded: algorithmic test proctoring in higher education. hybrid pedagogy. https://hybridpedagogy.org/our-bodies-encodedalgorithmic-test-proctoring-in-higher-education/ wasko, j. (2004). the political economy of communications. the sage handbook of media studies (pp. 309–330). microsoft word brodie_extended abstract_final.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): brodie, p. (2022, november). emerald extractivism: borders, energy, and data infrastructures in ireland. paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. emerald extractivism: borders, energy, and data infrastructures in ireland patrick brodie university college dublin in november 2020, a video surfaced on twitter showing the earth moving underneath the feet of a local hillwalker. the video was documenting a massive peat landslide at the border between county donegal (republic of ireland, roi) and county tyrone (northern ireland, ni), which was caused by the construction of the meenbog wind farm. the planning for the project consists of 19 turbines standing at a height of 150 meters apiece, built on an active bog landscape tucked away in the boggy bluestack mountains of donegal. with the sound of the wind in the phone camera and a low rumbling in the background, a line of trees descended a hillside via a raft of peat, crossing the border between roi and ni by the very existence of its complex soil, plant, and water ecology. the landslide destroyed a vast swathe of active peat bog, key for irish state carbon sequestration goals, and polluted a significant watershed which spanned both sides of the border, prompting governmental and legal action from agencies and organizations in roi, ni, the uk, and potentially future eu involvement. a key piece of the puzzle, absent from many headlines, was that the meenbog wind farm had in 2019 sold its future energy to global logistics and cloud giant amazon web services (aws) to power its data center operations in dublin, well over 200km away from the site of this rural wind farm. there had been significant local objection and controversy surrounding its construction in the first place, as many nearby residents felt as though they had not been properly consulted, their localized ecological concerns seen as naïve or regressive due to the urgent necessity of large-scale renewable energy to decarbonize the country’s energy grid. but as dublin maintains one of the highest concentrations of data centers in the world, primarily from us big tech “hyperscalers” (aws, facebook, google, microsoft) which have availed of the country’s low corporate tax rate, the presence and influence of these companies has been profound in shaping roi’s current energy plans, which need to account for the expected ongoing growth of data centers (bresnihan and brodie, 2021). as such, the all-ireland energy system, serving both roi and ni, is projected to be put under enormous strain, which will have a knock-on effect on the relatively stable energy projections in the north. data centers are thus clearly a crucial element in how contemporary digital systems are assembled across different environmental and territorial formations, but the extent of their influence on wider infrastructural arrangements and externalities is not yet widely understood. the study of data centers has produced a vibrant and interdisciplinary field of study over the past decade or so. from research on the resource use and politics of data centers (hogan, 2015), to analyses of the territorial and nation-state politics of data centers (maguire and winthereik, 2021; vonderau, 2019), to the waste economies and externalities of these facilities (velkova, 2016), researchers have found many paths to make sense of these often black-boxed infrastructures of digital economies. their capital and energy-intensive operations make them increasingly influential in the distribution of access and infrastructure in the places that they are built. but using sitespecific fieldwork amongst objectors to the meenbog project and discourse analysis stemming from the response to the peatslide and its (non-)relation to aws’ climate responsbility, this paper suggests that data centers are only one part of much wider networks operating across multiple geographies and scales, including their role within renewable energy and climate solutions projects with implications far beyond their data center facilities. one way of analyzing these territorial and environmental mechanics has been through the framework of “logistical media” (peters, 2015; rossiter, 2016). as conceived by peters and other scholars of logistics and infrastructure (cowen, 2014), technologies of capital movement and circulation are designed to smooth out spatial barriers and contingencies to ensure the uninterrupted flow of goods and information. inheriting and developing foundational concepts of globalization and the “annihilation of space by time” (harvey, 1990), i argue that territorial borders are not made “smooth” by logistical media like data infrastructures. as mezzadra and neilson (2019) contend, the confluence of “extraction, logistics, and finance” in the operations of global capitalism means that economies must rake across these often messy and differential industries and their more localized formations. as such, territorial markers like national borders become essential features in the emerging shapes of multinational infrastructural formations as they navigate different environmental and regulatory landscapes, and the timescales of historical territory and environmental systems embedded within the ongoing structures of extractive capitalism inherited by increasingly distributed digital systems. with these frameworks, and utilizing site-specific fieldwork methodologies amongst objectors to these projects, this paper confronts the construction of the border between roi and ni through emerging renewable energy and data systems, paying close attention to the environmental politics and disruptions in the expansion of “green extractivism” (voskoboynik and andreucci, 2021). expanding on mezzadra and neilson’s provocation about the productivity, the “fog and dirt, violence and magic” of contemporary bordering systems (2013), the paper will use the meenbog example to approach the borders and bordering mechanisms cutting through ireland as sites of contestation about what present and future extractive supply chains will look like, who will bear their burdens, and who will have a voice in shaping them. taking a supply chain justice approach to systems of green capitalism facilitated through multinational tech and financial interests (riofrancos, 2019), the paper confronts the role of bordering mechanisms and their imperial residues in the administration of and resistance to green capitalism in ireland. references bresnihan, patrick and patrick brodie. 2021. “new extractive frontiers in ireland and the moebius strip of wind/data.” environment and planning e: nature and space, vol. 4, no. 4: 1645-1664. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848620970121. cowen, deborah. 2014. the deadly life of logistics: mapping violence in global trade. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. harvey, david. 1990. the condition of postmodernity: an enquiry into the origins of cultural change. walden, ma: wiley-blackwell. hogan, mél. 2015. “data flows and water woes: the utah data center.” big data and society, vol. 2, no. 2: 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951715592429. maguire, james and brit ross winthereik. 2021. “digitalizing the state: data centres and the power of exchange.” ethnos: journal of anthropology, vol. 86, no. 3: 530-551. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2019.1660391. mezzadra, sandro and brett neilson. 2013. border as method: or, the multiplication of labor. durham, nc: duke university press. ---. 2019. the politics of operations: excavating contemporary capitalism. durham, nc: duke university press. ong, aihwa. 2006. neoliberalism as exception: mutations in citizenship and sovereignty. durham, nc: duke university press. peters, john durham. 2015. the marvelous clouds: toward a philosophy of elemental media. chicago, il: university of chicago press. riofrancos, thea. 2019. “what green costs.” logic, vol. 9 (7 december). https://logicmag.io/nature/what-green-costs/. rossiter, ned. 2016. software, infrastructure, labor: a media theory of logistical nightmares. new york, ny: routledge. tsing, anna. 2015. mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalism ruins. princeton, nj: princeton university press. vonderau, asta. 2019. “scaling the cloud: making state and infrastructure in sweden.” ethnos: journal of anthropology, vol. 84, no. 4: 698-718. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2018.1471513. voskoboynik, daniel macmillen and diego andreucci. 2021. “greening extractivism: environmental discourses and resource governance in the ‘lithium triangle.’” environment and planning e: nature and space (online first). https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486211006345. velkova, julia. 2016. “data that warms: waste heat, infrastructural convergence and the computation traffic commodity.” big data and society, vol. 3, no. 2: 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716684144. what&#39s at stake when sex is deplatformed aoir final abstract.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 tiidenberg, k & van der nagel, e (2020, october 28-31). what’s at stake when sex is deplatformed? paper presented at aoir 2020: the 201th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. what’s at stake when sex is deplatformed? katrin tiidenberg tallinn university emily van der nagel monash university sex creates life, affirms life, and is an essential part of the human experience. sex is also worried about, moralized over, and increasingly regulated by social media platforms through a combination of human and automated means (tiidenberg & van der nagel 2020). although marking adult material not safe for work (nsfw) can productively be used to classify and sort social media sex, there are increasing attempts to remove it completely, locking off potentially fun, healthy avenues for sexual images, stories, and encounters (paasonen, jarrett & light 2019). as the us senate passed the package bill of fosta-sesta (fight online sex trafficking act and stop enabling sex traffickers act) in 2018, many corporately owned, us-based platforms started pushing sex out. much of the scholarly and activist critique of the “deplatforming of sex” (molldrem 2018) focuses on harm to lgbtqi youth, sex workers, and to a lesser extent (queer) artists (byron 2019; haimson et al 2019). this rhetoric, while inarguably valid, frames sexual expression on social media as valuable inasmuch as it is a source of support, education, or self-actualization for marginalized and minoritarian groups. we argue that sex on social media is important as is, as part of everyday life. this paper brings together katrin tiidenberg and emily van der nagel’s extensive research (~ 50 total interviews between 2011 and 2020, an extended 2011 to 2018 ethnography with a community of nsfw bloggers on tumblr, and a year-long observation of multiple sex related reddit communities) with people who have incorporated various social media platforms and apps into their sex lives. out of the analysis of this material, we distill three central themes, each of which we support with virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): tiidenberg, k., van der nagel, e.. (2020, october). what’s at stake when sex is deplatformed? paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. three arguments. together, the presentation makes a case for why sex deserves to be part of generic social media for consenting adults. nine arguments in defense of sex on social media our first group of three arguments pertain to people’s sexual social media practices. 1. we propose categorizing people’s sexual social media practices as those of consuming, creating and interacting. the three are connected – consuming often leads to creating and interacting and vice versa. however, allowing these practices on generic social media platforms, instead of relegating them to porn platforms, diversifies the content, fosters open dialogue, and allows sex to be part of everyday life. 2. the gratifications from all three practices routinely exceeded expectation for our participants. consuming led to becoming better educated, but also increased empathy and appreciation of diversity; creating often started out as entertainment, but became a practice of body awareness, self-acceptance, political activism, and critical engagement with privacy and platform economy; interacting allows experimentation, freedom of expression, and reclaiming one’s own sexuality. 3. people’s sexual social media practices are highly situational. we argue that platforms are not coherent communicative spaces, but rather that social media use consists of a series of interactional situations (goffman [1956] 1990). each situation has its own proprieties. meanings of a sexy selfie or functions of a dick pic thus depend on the situation, and generalizing claims about platforms or types of content – “dick pics are always …,” “instagram is for … ,” “sexting is never ….” are best avoided. our second group of arguments pertain to sexual social media practices as identity work and in particular to the everyday tactics (de certeau (1988 [1984]) of pushing back against spaces organized by the powerful. 4. many generic social media platforms collapse contexts, prioritize real names, and/or operate with templates. while we argue above for maintaining sex on generic platforms, we also argue for users to have more control over the audiences of their sexual performances. compartmentalizing sex is key to our participants. they accomplished this compartmentalization via three tactics: setting up alternative accounts or using alternative platforms, remaining pseudonymous or anonymous, and omitting personal information. 5. alts, omissions, and pseudonymity allow users to create manageable networks, where sexual people and representations flow in abundance, even if the platform more broadly is better known for images of coffee art or political arguments. this helps users maintain contextual integrity, and control their communicative context through selective disconnection (light 2014). 6. in our data, increased control over one’s audiences and/or being able to (dis)connect the sexual from other facets of one’s identity fosters reciprocity, support, and intimacy in exchanges between people. finally, the sexual social media practices and the specific tactics contribute to creation of safe spaces and communities that become larger than the sums of their parts. 7. shared sexual spaces may be of profound value and significance for their members, because they destigmatize sex, make sex a community experience (as opposed to an isolated one), and through this, offer acceptance and selfacceptance. this was a profound experience for many of our participants, who said that prior to finding this, they were sure they were an outlier. 8. meaningful and valuable sexual social media experiences have the potential for inciting social change. our participants were part of communities that taught them to question the heteronormativity, body normativity, racism, ableism, and ageism of capitalist cultural arenas, and to act on those critical questions, both on and off social media. 9. if we accept the significance of sexual social media experiences, their deplatforming becomes matter of much broader societal relevance than a private corporation’s whim regarding an irrelevant group of “perverts”. overall, we argue that analyses relying on people’s lived experiences mandate a sexpositive but platform-critical approach to sex on social media, where sex deserves to be part of social media for consenting adults. references byron, p 2019, ‘‘how could you write your name below that?’ the queer life and death of tumblr’, porn studies, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 336–349. connelly, sm 2015, ‘“welcome to the feminist cult”: building a feminist community of practice on tumblr’, student research paper, gettysburg college. couldry, n 2012, media, society, world: social theory and digital media practice, polity press, cambridge. de certeau, m 1988 [1984], the practice of everyday life, trans. s rendall, university of california press, berkeley. duguay, s 2018, ‘why tumblr’s ban on adult content is bad for lgbtq youth’, the conversation, 7 december, viewed 20 february 2020, https://theconversation.com/whytumblrs-ban-on-adult-content-is-bad-for-lgbtq-youth-108215. facebook 2020, ‘community standards’, facebook, viewed 17 february, https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/adult_nudity_sexual_activity. goffman, e [1956] 1990, the presentation of self in everyday life, penguin, harmondsworth. haimson, ol, dame-griff, a, capello, e & richter, z 2019, ‘tumblr was a trans technology: the meaning, importance, history, and future of trans technologies’, feminist media studies, pp. 1–17, doi 10.1080/14680777.2019.1678505. light, b 2014, disconnecting with social networking sites, palgrave macmillan, basingstoke. molldrem, s 2018, ‘tumblr’s decision to deplatform sex will harm sexually marginalized people, wussy magazine, 6 december, viewed 20 february 2020, https://www.wussymag.com/all/2018/12/6/tumblrs-decision-to-deplatform-sex-will-harmsexually-marginalized-people. paasonen, s, jarrett, k & light, b 2019, not safe for work: sex, humor, and risk in social media, mit press, cambridge. salinas, s 2018, ‘tumblr’s ban on adult content is pushing artists and sex workers to other sites, such as twitter and patreon’, cnbc, 22 december, viewed 20 february 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/21/tumblrs-adult-content-ban-pushes-powerusers-to-twitter-patreon.html. tiidenberg, k & van der nagel, e 2020, sex and social media, emerald, bingley. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): mcgrane, c. & hjorth, l. (2020, october). careful attunements: the choreographing of care through smartphone practices during, and after, crisis. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. careful attunements: the choreographing of care through smartphone practices during, and after, crisis caitlin mcgrane rmit university, melbourne, australia larissa hjorth rmit university, melbourne, australia in this paper we explore how smartphone users in victoria (australia) used their smartphones to find and manage information, emotions and networks during the 20192020 australian summer bushfire crisis. our human-centred, lived experience approach deployed drawing, critical reflection and group discussion. using these techniques elicited the emotional responses and motivations of our participants during this journey in and after the crisis. we draw on the concept of affective witnessing (papailias, 2016; richardson and schankweiler, 2019), a process whereby the boundaries between mourner and witness blur through the affective intensity of mobile media. we frame affective witnessing in terms of feminist materialism of care practices (pols, 2011; puig de la bellacasa, 2011; lupton and hjorth, 2020) to focus on the importance of taking care seriously—care at a distance of family and friends, self-care and care of intimate digital publics. we draw on data collected in two workshops held in melbourne, australia, shortly after the crisis. participants ranged from 19-70 years old from diverse cultural backgrounds and were recruited using snowball and convenience sampling. the workshops drew on everyday lived experiences to capture the emotional textures of caring during a crisis, and the ways participants’ relationships with their smartphones changed or remained the same during the bushfires. the mediation of the australian bushfires through the smartphone enabled affective witnessing across australia and the world as the landscape burned and communities documented and broadcast their experiences, which were then subsequently picked up by other social media users and news outlets, repackaged and shared. thus, the affective qualities of images, stories and experiences were distributed to distant others, and created other choreographies of affective witnessing and care. anthropologist penelope papailias argues that the role of “affect” in witnessing today means that we are all impacted in ways that require us to re-examine grief as part of everyday life. papailias, drawing on judith butler, argues that these moments of grief illustrate the inequalities of bodies—that some bodies matter more than others (papailias, 2019). mobile media brings grief literally and metaphorically into our hands. it reminds us that death isn’t the binary opposite to life. rather, it is through the rituals of connecting with grief in quotidian ways that we can make sense of the world. our social media feeds in our hands weave messages of loss and love almost seamlessly. in the case of the recent bushfires, affective witnessing and smartphone engagement became further entwined. affective witnessing, as defined by richardson and schankweiler, enables us to “account for both the centrality of affect and emotion to witnesses and witnessing and their inherent relationality” (richardson and schankweiler, 2019, p.168). bearing witness is an affective and emotional experience, and devices such as the smartphone now enable a far greater reach of our abilities to witness, observe or participate in events. thus, affective witnessing foregrounds how “mediation acts to capture, coalesce, and modulate the intensities of witnessing” (richardson and schankweiler, 2019, p. 169). we found the affective intensity of bearing witness to the crisis was related to how directly impacted participants were. those who lived in fire-prone areas, were visiting or had loved ones in affected regions were more acutely aware of the need for analogue medias; while those who did not experience such direct impacts described being emotionally affected by the constant bombardment of updates, images and communications. the constant exposure to bushfire materials therefore demanded assessments about for what or whom to care and how. it is essential to acknowledge the ethico-political nature of caring with technology. in doing so, we draw and expand on jeanette pols’s notion of “care at a distance” to consider non-institutional contexts by which media mediates how we care when copresent (pols, 2011; lupton and hjorth, 2020). feminist materialist theories of care contextualise our investigation of how caring involves distinguishing what matters to us and how we choose to care. as maria puig de la bellacasa argues, “interests and other affectively animated forces such as concern and care are intimately entangled in the ongoing material remaking of the world” (puig de la bellacasa, 2011, p. 87). caring via smartphones during the bushfires was dynamically material as the smartphone intervened both actively and passively—redefining priorities, creating slippages in temporality and boundaries. smartphones configured our participants’ politics of care by giving them access to constant updates about the unfolding crisis, which then determined where they focused (or managed) their attention with blocking apps, mindfulness, and by touching or picking up their phones to soothe their feelings of anxiety and stress. we found the socio-material contexts in which participants lived contributed to them determining how they were able to care, and be cared for by, their loved ones. our preliminary findings show that self-care and care at a distance became critical during the crisis. much of the work-arounds and techniques operated across intergenerational connections. in this care at a distance, performativity around suppressing feelings of worry and hopelessness are interwoven with constant notifications and moments of self-care. these practices were underpinned by two key factors—proximity of affective witnessing, and care literacies. through discussion in the workshops, we found that there were multiple assemblages of media being employed during a crisis in order to stay informed and communicate. whether participants had knowledge of these different media and their choreographies were often the result of media literacies. for example, during the fires, networks went down in affected locations and people had to turn to older media like radio and landlines. participants who were familiar with bushfires often had a more systematic and literate approach to the medias necessary to understand and respond to the crisis, while participants without that familiarity seemed to feel overwhelmed by the amount of information available and struggled to comprehend and digest their emotional responses. as we formulate our responses to these findings, we invite discussion on how affective witnessing, self-care and care a distance might be practiced in other similar crisis contexts. references lupton, d. and hjorth, l. (2020). digitised caring intimacies: more-than-human intergenerational care in japan. international journal of cultural studies. papailias, p. (2016). witnessing in the age of the database: viral memorials, affective publics, and the assemblage of mourning. memory studies, 9(4), pp. 437-454. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698015622058 papailias, p. (2018). (un)seeing dead refugee bodies: mourning memes, spectropolitics, and the haunting of europe. media, culture & society, pp. 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443718756178. pols, j. (2011). care at a distance. amsterdam: amsterdam university press. puig de la bellacasa, m. (2011). matters of care in technoscience: assembling neglected things. social studies of science, 41(1), pp.85-106. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312710380301. richardson, m. and schankweiler, k. (2019). affective witnessing. in j., slaby, & c. von scheve (eds.), affective societies: key concepts, (pp. 166-177). abingdon, uk: routledge. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): tran, c. h., ruberg, b., lark, d., guarriello, n.-b.. (2021, october). playing at the polls: video games in/as platforms for political participation. panel presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. playing at the polls: video games in/as platforms of political participation christine h. tran university of toronto bonnie “bo” ruberg university of california irvine daniel lark university of southern california nicholas-brie guarriello university of minnesota panel rationale in 2020, video games and livestreaming came to the fore of american politics as covid-19 disrupted social and economic life in the united states. politicians like joe biden and alexandra ocasio-cortez turned to games like animal crossing and streaming platforms like twitch as new media vehicles for political messaging, including a biden-themed animal crossing island, a biden-harris “no malarkey station” in fortnite, get out the vote livestreams, and virtual town halls featuring politicians and microcelebrity streamers. historically, games have operated in us party politics as figurative platforms in the form of “talking points” on media violence, youth welfare, and censorship. throughout 2020, however, video games and livestreaming were refigured as computational infrastructures through which american politicians may connect with (often young) constituents. this panel explores the rise of ludic technologies as both rhetorical and locative “platforms” for american political participation, from livestreaming to online multiplayer game spaces and beyond. virtual event virtual event as we demonstrate, these shifts are not without controversy or complaint. platforms for game playing and sharing, like twitch, have struggled to manage their public image as community stewards and moderators amidst rising expectations that platform and technology companies recognize, react, and respond to racial and social justice issues. for example, on 5 july 2020, amazon’s $15 billion (usd) game streaming platform twitch concluded its lgbtq pride month celebrations with a video spotlighting queer creators declaring, “the g in lgtbq+ also stands for gamer!” queer users and commentators quickly archived and denounced twitch’s ahistorical publicity move as “another identity-related l[oss]” taken by the world’s largest game streaming platform (stephen, 2020). far from neutralizing or infantilizing politics, games further embed public policy into the platformed systems of content moderation, community management, and governmental and economic power of software companies over american sociality (gorwa, 2019; van dijck, 2013). whereas quips like hillary clinton’s “pokémon go to the polls!” became ironic media gaffes and memes in the 2016 presidential election, ludic interfaces today are promising direct and adhesive engagement between politicians and populace, albeit along precarious lines. games scholarship is well-positioned to address the technological and social debates of u.s. political discourse. within the study of game subcultures, their players and spaces, identities and their politics have been figured as technological issues (gray 2020; ruberg 2019). bolstered by this scholarship, we focus here on the social effects and affordances of games upon classed and gendered identities. we attend to the mass repoliticization of games and question the politics of identity, content moderation, and labour that are downloaded into policy when party communication becomes playful. encompassing a broad collection of interdisciplinary research (political economy, queer studies, media and communication studies, feminist science and technology studies) from scholars working across north america, this panel engages with the empirical and theoretical questions raised by the tactical use of ludic spaces as content delivery systems for policy, polling, and political participation. our first paper examines how twitch streamers redefine “virtual picket lines” in alternative labour movements against one of the world’s largest platform technology employers, amazon. the second paper explores the queer political imaginations of islandic virtual spaces in nintendo’s animal crossing from biden island to beyond. the third paper explores the game alexandria-ocasio cortez’s livestreaming as a key transformation in the sociotechnical infrastructures of u.s. political publicity. finally, our fourth paper analyzes twitch’s revamped content moderation policy strategies in the aftermath of users reacting to the january 2021 capitol hill insurrection on the livestreaming platform. to summarize, we call for deeper cultural-level critique and historicization of the ways games have enabled porosity between social, recreational, and civic interfaces. games are “future-oriented commodities” that “sell dreams” (bulut, 2020, p. 22) due to their ideations of agentic and rules-driven relationships between self/other, self/society. far from offering a simple imagination of independence from the physical limitations of traditional political communication networks, this frenetic interplaying from political campaigns signals the widespread integration of platforms and their physical, governmental, and economic infrastructures into social life (nieborg and poell, 2018). as we gamify politics, who is left without a console? references bulut, e. (2020). a precarious game: the illusion of dream jobs in the video game industry. cornell university press. gorwa, r. (2019). what is platform governance? information, communication and society, 22(6), 854–871. gray, k.l. (2020). intersectional tech: black users in digital gaming. louisiana state university pres nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society, 20(11), 4275–4292. ruberg, b. (2019). video games have always been queer. new york university press. stephen, b. (2020, september 15). twitch takes another identity-related l. the verge. https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/15/21438659/twitch-hispanic-heritage-monthblack-lives-matter-lgbt-pride-month van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. oxford university press. 1. don’t cross the streams: twitch, networked solidarity & amazon’s virtual picket line christine h. tran university of toronto introduction: to stream or scab? “no scabs, no twitch, no amazon,” barks a comment on united states senator bernie sanders’ debut livestream on the livestreaming platform twitch.tv (grayson, 2019, para. 11). on 10 july 2019, the democratic politician made his inaugural livecast on the amazon-owned platform popular for video game broadcasting and spectatorship. audiences and commentators noted, however,that sander’s virtual town hall launch apparently “crossed the picket line” by broadcasting on amazon’s “prime day.” in recent years, the annual promotional sales “holiday” has been a scheduling point for amazon workers to organize labour stoppages in protest of their precarious work conditions and low wages across the conglomerate’s global supply chain. many twitch streamers also chose to “blackout” their channels on prime day, in defiance of contracted broadcast schedules, in order to signal their solidarity with fellow amazon workers. despite sanders’ record of allyship with alternative labour movements, his twitch presence as workers boycott amazon platforms was seen as a strikebreaking transgression. as one commenter echoed: “you crossed [the] picket line you are going to lose subscriber [sic]” (para. 10). responding to the hyper pervasiveness of digital platforms across the working and leisure lives of amazon’s employees and consumers, this paper is driven by three primary questions: what is a picket line to a video game livestreamer? what solidarities, if any, do twitch microcelebrities extend to other amazon dependents? how do livestreaming labour link amazon’s workforces into platform dependency? guided by critical technocultural discourse analysis (ctda) of twitch streamer’s social media responses to amazon work stoppages from 2018 to 2021, i explore the technocultural creation of the “ virtual picket line” in the platform’s ecosystem of twitch. i review emerging cultural narratives on streamer boycotts, and amazon labour stoppages during prime days, and how twitch streamers use information technologies, like hashtags, to demarcate acceptable strike behaviors and broadcast their social alignment with amazon workers. i locate the vocational figure of the twitch “livestreamer” (and more broadly, the digital influencer) in an ambivalent yet autonomous relation to the means of labour messaging that is livestreaming along the picket line. contexts & theory since its $1 billion acquisition by amazon in 2014, twitch.tv has risen as a bedrock of social media phenomena in mainstreaming of game community influencers. recent studies into the working lives of twitch streamers have noted the importance of selfstartership and neoliberal work ethics to their creator culture (guarriello, 2019; johnson and woodcock, 2019). this scholarship has predominantly positioned twitch’s workforce in the history of game player cultures emerging around the platform (consalvo, 2017; taylor, 2018), but its business evolution has also been positioned as a driver of asymmetries and dependencies between autonomous users and amazon technology (partin, 2020). less attention has been directed to twitch’s cultural and technical heritage as labour organizing. counter to the imagination of streamers as selffocused entrepreneurs--bolstered by the meritocracy endemic to gamer culture--recent headlines show streamers how can and do critique their parent company’s policies from a collective consciousness. in february 2021, for example, twitch’s streamers successfully advocated against amazon’s imposition of anti-union advertising in their broadcasts. amazon removed the video advertisements off several streams (clark, 2021). in 2018, anonymously run channels like “scabstream” livecast publicized twitchcon’s crossing the picket line at the marriott hotel, where staff had striked against low wages and the implementation of amazon technologies in their workplaces while the amazon-twitch toasted its top streamers on the same workgrounds (malgrem, 2019). twitch streamers’ publicization of internal strike action characterizes what brophy et. al (2015) term “networked solidarity,” where the labour messaging between cultural workers and precarity is ambivalently negotiated with ict technologies. the same platforms that extend the site of precarity for workers--from streamers to manual labourers subject to amazon’s technological supremacy--also forms sites of resistance and counter-publicity. from these technical practices, i explore how workers move, merge, and manifest their “picket lines” against (and for) amazon’s politics. method using andre brock jr.’s (2018) method of critical technocultural discourse analysis (ctda), i shall review key instances of twitch streamer resistance to amazon’s employment policies, especially at times of labour stoppages across the supply chain, using online tools: twitter, online forums, weblogs, reddit, and direct communications that have been dated from 2018 to 2021. i direct my ctda to twitch streamers’ use of #twitchblackout and #notwitchscabs hashtags in organizing labour stoppages. as a multimodal technique, a ctda holistically integrates disparate data points across an ecosystem: tweets, channel details, messages, and headlines. i do a close-reading of these texts as interfaces between streamers, other amazon workers, and the public as continuous conversations. in accordance with ctda’s requirement that “[t]echnocultural discourses [...] be framed from the cultural perspectives of the user and of the designer” (p. 1020), i focus on the expressed autonomy of streamers as designers of their own employee identity, even as they are mutually shaped by the interfaces of amazon-owned livestreaming. contributions despite lingering views that influencing and content creator labour is a site of frivolity, the cultural work of livestreamers on the amazon picket line offer an alternative pathways for digital organizing. this paper contributes to the growing study of labour collectivizing and cultural work on platforms (cohen and de peuter, 2020; de peuter, 2014). while aspirations of twitch streamers unionize amongst themselves remains aspirational (d’anastasio, 2020), the survival of self-criticism organized stream stoppage--directed outward for other amazon employees highlights twitch’s workforce as a producer of of “work-generated content” (qiu, 2016) against a technology giant. as game-centric and livestreaming platforms become widespread into other areas of social life, the twitch picket line represents a pivotal site of struggle for the future of digital labour and alternative pathways therein. references d’anastasio, c. (2020, july 8). is it game streaming’s turn for a labor revolution? wired. https://www.wired.com/story/mixer-livestreaming-labor-rights/ brock, a. (2018). critical technocultural discourse analysis. new media & society, 20(3), 1012–1030. brophy, e., cohen, n. s., & de peuter, g. (2015). labor messaging practices of autonomous communication. in r. maxwell (ed.), the routledge companion to labor and media (pp. 315–326). routledge. clark, m. (2021, february 25). twitch, owned by amazon, pulls amazon’s anti-union ads. the verge. https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/25/22301352/twitch-removesamazon-anti-union-ads cohen, n. s., & de peuter, g. (2020). new media unions: organizing digital journalists. routledge. consalvo, m. (2017). when paratexts become texts: de-centering the game-as-text. critical studies in media communication, 34(2), 177–183. grayson, n. (2019, july 17). bernie sanders finally appears on his own twitch channel—during amazon boycott. kotaku. https://kotaku.com/bernie-sandersfinally-appears-on-his-own-twitch-channe-1836459495 guarriello, n.-b. (2019). never give up, never surrender: game live streaming, neoliberal work, and personalized media economies. new media & society, 21(8), 1750–1769. johnson, m. r., & woodcock, j. (2019). “it”s like the gold rush’: the lives and careers of professional video game streamers on twitch.tv. information, communication and society, 22(3), 336–351. malmgren, e. (2018, november 2). twitch crosses the picket line. the nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/twitch-amazon-videogames-hotelpicket/ partin, w. c. (2020). bit by (twitch) bit: “platform capture” and the evolution of digital platforms. social media + society, 6(3), 2056305120933981. de peuter, g. (2014). beyond the model worker: surveying a creative precariat. culture unbound, 6(1), 263–284. qiu, j. (2016). social media on the picket line. media culture & society, 38(4), 619– 633. 2. political islands, queer islands: comparing cultural narratives around second life and animal crossing: new horizons bonnie “bo” ruberg university of california irvine virtual islands present and past the video game animal crossing: new horizons (nintendo) was released on march 20, 2020, roughly one week after much of the united states went into lockdown in response to covid-19. already hotly awaited by fans of the animal crossing series, new horizons became a veritable phenomenon in the early days of the pandemic, when it garnered both millions of players and a seemingly unending stream of news media coverage. these articles, which placed new horizons at the center of broader discussions about digital media in the time of covid-19, often told uplifting human interest stories--participating in a moment when, as rainforest scully-blaker and emily flynn-jones have written, “suddenly, a game about purchasing a ‘deserted island getaway package’... took on new significance in popular culture and regimes of selfcare” (2020, p. 5). of particular interest in many reports were new horizons’ islands: unique locales, cultivated either by individuals or organizations, that players could visit in-game. among new horizons’ many publicly-accessible islands, two types seemingly deemed most newsworthy were those that promoted specific political figures, such as then presidential candidate joe biden (whose island was later removed), and those that held space for lgbtq communities (e.g. maurice, 2020). while the buzz surrounding new horizons presented these islands as new--a shift in how both politics and activism were being done in digital spaces--a longer view of internet history reveals that this was, in fact, the second time that online islands, one of many aquatic metaphors of the internet (thibault, 2015), became the stuff of public interest. this research compares the cultural narratives surrounding new horizons in 2020 with those that surrounded the virtual world second life more than a decade earlier, between roughly 2006 and 2008. second life differs considerably from new horizons in its design and affordances, yet the two share that they are structured spatially around user-cultivated islands. like new horizons after it, second life was the subject of a media flurry, sparked when corporations and institutions of higher learning began building islands in the game (e.g. girard, 2006). long before the lockdowns of covid-19, which brought with them a sense that internet users were themselves islands scattered at sea, second life’s islands were also raising now-familiar questions about what happens when spaces of online play become spaces for public messaging. methods: media traces of cultural imaginaries to establish a rich understanding of the rhetorics that have characterized public discussions of islands in animal crossing: new horizons during the covid-19 pandemic, as well as those parallel discourses that formed around second life’s islands in the early 2000s, this work draws from a collection of articles from online and print news sources. these articles have been assembled using a variety of search tools and archives and have been selected to represent both the breadth and depth of reporting on these topics. articles considered for this work originally appeared in venues oriented either toward a mainstream readership or toward readers interested in video games and tech culture. after assembling this collection of articles, the author has performed a qualitative analysis of the texts, approaching them through a critical cultural lens and coding them according to repeated themes. this has allowed the author to simultaneously trace patterns across texts and to identify notable differences. such methods are not intended to be comprehensive; they are also limited by their focus on news reporting, which does not capture, for example, player experiences with new horizons and second life respectively. what these methods offer, however, is the opportunity to map traces of broader cultural imaginaries, using media to track ephemeral, unspoken attitudes toward life online. changing seas of lgbtq issues in video games comparing the cultural narratives that have emerged around animal crossing: new horizons and second life reveals both striking similarities and telling differences. to an extent, this comparison helpfully historicizes today’s discussion of how politics, as well as other professional arenas, are entering digital games. such conversations, it turns out, are structured around rhetorics of newness and yet themselves repeat. this research finds, for instance, that news articles that respond with curious bemusement to the presence of the biden-harris island in new horizons are matched by a parallel set of articles from an earlier moment expressing the same incredulity about the creation of areas in second life like american apparel's corporate island or the construction of an island by the university of wisconsin. across these texts, the image of the island continues to hold sway, representing (not unproblematically) the “exoticness” that new virtual spaces are imagined to offer for the neoliberal, colonial digital subjects. at the same time, this comparison reveals how these conversations about online islands have always been more about fantasies of digital life than their realities. articles about new horizons tend to oversell the importance of its islands, portraying them as grandscale meeting places when they are, in truth, little more than publicity stunts that cannot hold more than eight players at a time. earlier articles from the height of public interest in second life demonstrate a similar pattern: the most talked-about islands, now almost defunct and abandoned, were already largely empty and underutilized in their heyday. thus, it is not only the phenomenon of the virtual island that repeats, but also the ways that broader cultural narratives attempt to make sense of (and, in doing so, contort) the cultural meaning of these islands. however, stark difference surfaces in the ways that news reporting on new horizons and second life discuss issues of gender and sexuality, drawing attention to shifts in the imagined relationship between digital spaces as political and digital spaces as queer. articles about new horizons often highlighted islands dedicated to lgbtq activism, such as the so-called “pride island,” looping these islands into larger stories about the exciting capacity of the game to create safe spaces for self-expression, both personal and political. articles about second life, by contrast, largely derided the world for its association with sexual subcultures, including lgbtq ones. this evidences a shift in the cultural landscape around video games. conversations about in-game islands may largely remain unchanged, but attitudes toward the place of lgbtq people in those games surely have. whereas, previously, the presence of queer content in second life was deployed to delegitimize the game, casting it as a cesspool of depravity, present-day stories about new horizons use queerness to legitimize the game and its cultural value. thus, these stories document a shift not only in how queer people are perceived but also how they are instrumentalized to tell specific cultural narratives. references flynn-jones, e., & scully-blaker r. (2020). foreword: to all the animals we’ve crossed before.” loading... the journal of the canadian game studies association, 13(22), 1-6. girard, n. (2006, june 16). apparel brand gets ‘second life.” cnet. https://www.cnet.com/news/apparel-brand-gets-second-life/. maurice, e. p. (2020, june 16). ‘pride island’ coming to animal crossing, with rainbow march and queer club in support of black lives matter. pink news. https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/06/16/animal-crossing-global-pride-island-weare-social-singapore-black-lives-matter-nintendo/. thibault, g. (2015). streaming: a media hydrography of televisual flows. view: journal of european television history and culture, 4(7), 110-119. 3. they stream among us: political livestreaming during the 2020 u.s. election daniel lark university of southern california background this paper provides a platform, discourse, and textual analysis of political livestreams, focusing on the use of twitch by democratic party politicians alexandria ocasio-cortez and ilhan omar during the 2020 election cycle and covid-19 pandemic in the united states. i argue that livestreaming platforms like twitch.tv are becoming sites not just for the delivery of political messaging and content, but infrastructure for interaction with political constituents and citizens. political streaming blends together the technological, cultural, and affective practices of video game livestreaming, establishing connections with already popular streamers and taking advantage of the platform’s ability to generate intimacy and familiarity with audiences in order to drive users towards participation in electoral politics. while existing scholarly literature has explored video game live streaming cultures and the practices of amateur and professional streamers (taylor, 2018) or the integration of social media platforms like facebook into political campaigns (kreiss and mcgregor, 2017), not much scholarship has described the use of livestreaming platforms by politicians or explored the relationship between video game live streaming and existing political institutions in particular. as part of a complex sociotechnical system, political livestreaming raises important questions about transformations in politics during contentious periods and the ownership of increasingly central public sphere platforms by private corporations. platforms are increasingly recognized as having important public, infrastructural functions that must be interpreted and possibly protected from abuse or misuse (plantin et al, 2016). as infrastructure, platforms also create strong social and affective attachments that go beyond their base technical functions, structuring forms of political rationality, fantasy, and desire (larkin, 2013). platforms increasingly blend together social, political, and economic logics into highly expressive communicative acts well suited to neoliberal political structures (nieborg and poell, 2018; van dijck et al., 2018). political livestreaming – a case study during the election cycle, ocasio-cortez streamed a live session of her playing the game among us (2018) with other members of “the squad,” the popular name for the small group of young, progressive, and social media savvy democrats who have been elected to congress in 2018, and several prominent twitch streamers, including @hasanabi, a former journalist turned streamer, and @pokimane, one of the most popular streamers on the platform. during the stream, ocasio-cortez, omar, and the streamers discussed the 2020 election, get out the vote initiatives, and progressive politics in between rounds of play. while aoc is not the first politician to combine video games with political advertising, she is among the first politicians to engage with games and streaming culture on their own terms. these events reflect an engagement with the cultures and practices of users and communities. livestreaming platforms like twitch are not just mere delivery vehicles for political messaging that work alongside traditional engagement practices like rallies, mailers, canvassing, and town halls, but complex systems that transform message and messaging itself. as novice gamers, ocasio-cortez and omar were not adept at playing the game, were unused to the technological demands of live streaming, and were unfamiliar with some of the cultural practices and nuances of engaging with the audience. this situation, however, did not damage their credibility or reception. in fact, it seemed to have the opposite effect, lending their stream a sense of authenticity and charm to which viewers responded positively. further, the decision to play among us is also significant. the game became quite popular during the spring and summer of 2020 as a form of entertainment during periods of social distancing and minimal in-person interaction due to the spread of covid-19. yet, popularity is not the only significant factor. among us can be played across multiple platforms and consoles, including mobile phones, making it widely available to many users for a very low cost (about $5 usd). because it is multiplatform, the game is not computationally and graphically demanding and can be played on machines with little memory or without high quality graphics cards. the game’s structure is adapted from familiar playground games, with simple gameplay that is relatively easy to learn, and where successful play does not rely on technical skill or speed, making it a game for novice and expert players alike. gameplay has multiple periods of breaks and silences, which allow many opportunities for the streamers to chat with the audience about the game or politics. as such, among us was a highly strategic game choice that brought together viewers across multiple platforms, points of access, and skill levels and allowed for multiple points of communication with the audience. as a multiplayer social game about social trust and collective decision making, among us draws direct parallels between the game and the broader political context of the united states, where trust in political institutions is rapidly decreasing and a significant portion of the population does not participate in electoral politics. among us is an ostensibly democratic game, where players are tasked with fixing their spaceship before an impostor among them completely sabotages their efforts. while the impostor tries to kill the crew of the ship, all players can meet, deliberate, and finally vote on who they think the impostor is and whether they should remove the suspect from play. if they correctly identify and vote out the impostor, the other plays win. successful play is not just about completing one’s assigned spaceship maintenance tasks, but about paying careful attention to your other crew members and trying to discern who is just pretending to work while actively sabotaging the ship. analysis by playing among us together, aoc, omar, and the streamers play a game that eerily reflects existing political structures while simultaneously encouraging citizens’ engagement with and trust in traditional electoral politics. i argue that their amateur performance of gameplay and twitch streaming aligns well with aspects of games streaming culture on twitch. performing poorly and being a bit unprepared for technical difficulties, while creating some problems, also created personal identification and narrative excitement, where overcoming technical problems becomes a source of humor and initiation into the routine challenges of livestreaming. among us can therefore be read as a mirror of the u.s. neoliberal political situation, where individual members of the public are increasingly tasked with the responsibility for maintaining their social, economic, and political infrastructures, inundated with potentially fake information and news, and potentially surrounded by bad actors who take advantage of processes of collective decision making and social uncertainty to shift society’s trajectory towards their own political destinations. references kreiss, d., & mcgregor, s. (2017). technology firms shape political communication: the work of microsoft, facebook, twitter, and google with campaigns during the 2016 u.s. presidential cycle. political communication, 35(2), 155–177. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2017.1364814 larkin, b. (2013). the politics and poetics of infrastructure. annual review of anthropology, 42(1), 327–343. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412155522 nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society, 20(11), 4275–4292. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1461444818769694 taylor, t. l. (2018). watch me play: twitch and the rise of game live streaming. princeton university press. van dijck, j., poell, t., & de waal, m. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connected world. oxford university press. 4. poglitically correct: content moderation, off-platform behavior, and emotes on twitch nicholas-brie guarriello university of minnesota you’re my little pogchamp, right? on january 6, 2021 white supremacists led an insurrection to ultimately overturn the 2020 united states presidential election results. after ryan “gootecks” guiterrez incited further violence at capitol hill via his twitter account, twitch removed the popular community wide pogchamp emote that contained an image of his surprised, wide-eyed and open-mouthed face. the banning of this globally used emote to signpost a moment of excitement or surprise in a livestream on twitch had two impacts: 1) users of the platform took to reddit, discord, and twitter to express discontent the site’s politically correct policies; 2) twitch’s revamped hateful conduct and harassment policy was set to begin in two weeks. twitch’s new policy specifically aimed to protect women, lgbtq folks, black, indigenous, and people of color who experience a disproportionate amount of harassment and abuse on the platform by banning certain emotes and words that target aforesaid groups (twitch, 2020). in particular, twitch’s new policy bans certain terms, like simp, virgin, and incel, when used negatively and denying and removing emotes that are racist, sexist, or homophobic as they can be used in live-chats across twitch. as an addendum, in april 2021, twitch extended this policy further where if a streamer on twitch engages in off-platform behavior, similar to ryan guiterrez, that incites harassment or threatens violence towards a particular group or person, then sanctions such as suspension and content removal will occur. this presentation provides a discourse analysis through participant observation of twitch’s new hateful conduct and harassment policy in light of the u.s. capitol insurrection and streamer behavior off-platform by focusing on user reactions. indeed, after the u.s. capitol insurrection, platforms, including twitch, began banning white supremacist content and individuals. this presentation expands on extant scholarship on content moderation, platform governance, and affect theory by analyzing the blending of livestreaming platforms, streamer attitudes on and off platforms, and users’ political concerns towards policy changes. indeed, tarleton gillespie has noted that platforms are increasingly intervening in everyday life and shaping online communities and workers experiences (gillespie, 2015, 2018). furthermore, emotes or emojis act as digital pictograms that have reshaped digital communication in the public and corporate spheres (stark and crawford, 2015). however, twitch’s newly active role in streamers and emotes serve as the crux of dialogue on twitch as well as a refiguring of livestreaming platforms as sites of contested political free and creative speech and behavior. thus, this paper explores two intertwined questions: 1) what are the affective responses when livestreaming platform users think their free speech is being stymied? 2) how are livestreaming platforms mitigating harm when caused by their streamers and workers’ political attitudes? methods in order to answer the aforesaid research questions, i employ a discourse and audience analysis methodological approach through narrative inquiry of political attitudes and sentiments from twitch users from january to april 2021. this presentation relies on preliminary data analysis coded using maxqda from popular press articles, scraping chats and using twitch alongside ancillary platforms that twitch users post on (reddit, discord, and twitter) apis to mine comments and channel replies, respectively, that contained titles or words mentioning: the new hateful conduct and harassment policy update, twitch banning simp, the confederate flag emote, simp, incel, virgin, trihard emote, or the pogchamp or poggers emote. to organize my data, i used maxqda data management software to aid in deploying an open and focused coding approach (saladana and omasta, 2018) of all screenshots, live streaming conversations, and scraped comments and threads. the author identified the following two theoretically informed themes of content. emotes as (a)political discourse emotes on twitch and most livestreaming platforms are extremely popular modes of chatting and expressing various emotional responses to events in the stream. emotes allow streamers and watchers to enact positive and negative emotional resonances that stick with one another sentimentally and generate communal contexts (anable, 2018; ahmed, 2012). with the banning of the infamous pogchamp emote alongside the revamped policy of new and current globally used emotes undergoing a review process, preliminary analysis signals user reactions were supportive of twitch’s policy to combat hate but not banning or reviewing individual emotes. also, users sparingly noted twitch’s racist and oversexualized emotes, trihard and custom simp emotes, respectively, when commenting on the new policy. indeed, twitch users who also use reddit, discord, or twitter concurred that emotes are not inherently racist or violent. common sentiment fell along treating emotes as images, and thus apolitical, questioning if an emote could even be racist, and how specific people use emotes should be banned instead of the emote. the preliminary testimony here eclipses how emotes have become habitually part of political discourse and are now objects oriented towards politics. “we are not only directed towards objects,” sara ahmed says, “but those objects also take us in a certain direction” (ahmed, 2006, 545). even though emotes may be images or objects of conversation, they indeed guide discourse on livestreaming platforms along with complex communal emotions. simp investigators & off-platform behavior starting in april 2021, twitch announced it would hire a third-party investigative law firm to aid in responding to reports of onsite and offsite streamer misconduct (diaz, 2021). alongside moderating users for using words like simp and incel alongside emotes coded to aforesaid words, twitch would hold their streamers, who are often faces of popular, community-wide emotes, to a higher standard for engaging in harmful behavior beyond twitch. common user narratives in popular press comments or reddit threads assert that this is merely corporations policing speech or twitch trying to be politically correct rather than letting the justice system decide what qualifies as harassment. narratives around harassment have often been aligned to put the burden of proof on the victim rather than holding the harasser accountable. twitch is attempting to provide content moderation to remedy years of laissez-faire content moderation that impacted black streamers and users as well as governing dress codes that targeted women streamers. indeed, twitch is attempting to mitigate harmful political attitudes that have created a hostile environment on the platform and repair its reputation as a potentially hostile space for marginalized gamers to others off the platform. conclusion twitch’s new hateful conduct and harassment policy aims to mitigate violent political attitudes on the platform. bringing content moderation and affective theoretical frameworks in conversation with empirical, narrative data of user reactions to twitch’s new policy being enacted demonstrates how content moderation and platform governance for twitch is shaping political and worker behavior on and off the platform. additionally, this presentation addresses the affective narratives in response to how livestreaming platforms are curating the political expectations of etiquette and respectability on the internet. references ahmed, s. (2006). orientations: toward a queer phenomeology. glq, 25–64. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv125jk6w.5 anable, a. (2018). playing with feelings: video games and affect. university of minnesota press. diaz, a. (2021, april 7). twitch will now use an 'investigative partner' for off-platform misconduct. polygon. https://www.polygon.com/22372086/twitch-rulesharassment-streaming-community-guidelines-policy-hateful-conduct. gillespie, t. (2015). platforms intervene. social media + society, 1(1), 205630511558047. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115580479 gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. yale university press. introducing our new hateful conduct & harassment policy. twitch blog. (n.d.). https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2020/12/09/introducing-our-new-hateful-conductharassment-policy/. saldaña johnny, & omasta, m. (2018). qualitative research: analyzing life. sage publishing. stark, l., & crawford, k. (2015). the conservatism of emoji: work, affect, and communication. social media + society, 1(2), 205630511560485. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115604853 aoir2020 madianou spir.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): madianou, m. (2020, october). non-human humanitarianism: when ai for good turns out to be bad. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. non-human humanitarianism: when ai for good turns out to be bad mirca madianou goldsmiths, university of london with over 168 people needing humanitarian assistance in 2018 and over 69 million refugees, the humanitarian sector is facing significant challenges. proposals that artificial intelligence (ai) applications can be a potential solution for the crises of humanitarianism have been met with much enthusiasm. this is part of the broad trend of ‘ai for social good’ as well as the wider developments in ‘digital humanitarianism’, which refers here to the uses of digital innovation and data within public and private sectors in response to humanitarian emergencies. chatbots; predictive analytics and modeling that claims to forecast future epidemics or population flows; and biometric technologies, which rely on advanced neural networks which employ machine learning algorithms, are some of the examples which are becoming increasingly popular in aid operations. the paper develops an interdisciplinary framework that brings together colonial and decolonial theory, the critical inquiry of humanitarianism and development, critical algorithm studies as well as a sociotechnical understanding of ai. humanitarianism here is understood as a complex phenomenon: not just the ‘imperative to reduce suffering’, as it is usually defined (calhoun, 2008), but also as an industry, a discourse, and a historical phenomenon with roots in 19th and 20th century colonialisms (fassin, 2012; lester & dussart, 2014). ai is an equally multifaceted phenomenon: not just a technological innovation based on advanced computation and machine learning algorithms, but also an industry as well as a particular discourse about technology. ai can only be understood together with data and algorithms – the three are inseparable as ai depends on machine learning algorithms which are the product of particular datasets. given ‘big data’ are inherently incomplete and have ontological and epistemological limitations (crawford & finn, 2014), ai applications reproduce and potentially amplify existing biases found in large datasets (benjamin, 2019; eubanks, 2018; noble, 2018 among others). empirically the paper is based on a review of key ai applications in the humanitarian field. in particular, my analysis will focus on chatbots, predictive analytics and modelling.1 apart from analysing the actual innovations (eg, the functionality of chatbots; modeling outcomes, data visualisations) the paper also draws on interviews with seven groups of key stakeholders, from humanitarian officers to entrepreneurs and digital volunteers as part of a larger study of digital humanitarianism (madianou, 2019a). the analysis suggests that some of the ai developments do not fulfill grand claims such as interactivity, let alone ‘intelligence’. for example, chatbots, which are computer programmes designed to interact with humans online as though they were a person, have been developed by a number of aid organisations in order to improve information dissemination and collect feedback from affected communities. my analysis reveals that some of the most prominently advertised chatbots are hardly interactive. in fact, some of the chatbot functionalities could have been easily replaced by sms messages, or even analogue technologies such as leaflets. chatbots didn’t provide added value, for example through an opportunity to answer questions beyond the template of a very limited number of options. furthermore, predictive modeling programmes often appear to summarise information that is already available in the public domain. other applications, such as those that analyse refugee call detail records (cdr) made available by mobile network operators in order to estimate refugee integration in host societies, produce findings that can be captured by methods that entail fewer risks to the research subjects. cdrs are extremely sensitive metadata especially when linked to already vulnerable groups such as displaced people. the observation that some of the key developments in ai humanitarianism fail their own objectives should not mean that these innovations do not have powerful consequences. first of all, some of the applications analysed in the paper entail very high risks for vulnerable groups with few safeguards against potential data breaches, which are increasingly common in the humanitarian sector. more broadly, ‘predicting’ or ‘forecasting’ is beyond the humanitarian remit, which involves responding to emergencies. predicting crises (for example, future refugee flows) is inevitably political which is at odds with humanitarian principles of neutrality. automation reproduces human biases found in datasets that train machine learning algorithms. while humanitarian analytics programmes present themselves as infallible and objective, this is far from true. deferring decisions to processes of automation carries risks of further disadvantaging already marginalised people. we observe a wider shift in the nature of humanitarian work. digital technology separates actors (humanitarian workers) from the consequences of their interventions. more broadly, the shift to ai and other digital innovations requires humanitarian organisations to outsource these activities to private vendors (mcdonald, 2019) turning aid agencies into managers of contracts, rather than providers of aid. 1 biometrics, the other large area based on ai developments, is examined elsewhere (madianou, 2019b) in order to explore in depth the nature of biometric measurements and the ways they connect with the literatures on bodies / embodiment and surveillance, control and securitization. despite the limitations of ai interventions, such developments are cloaked in a discourse of inherent progress exemplified in the phrase ‘ai for good’. digital mediation has a long history of erasing its own work (bolter & grusin, 2000; eisenlohr, 2011) which is echoed in the framing of ai interventions as a form of ‘magic’ that miraculously projects ‘the truth’. data visualisations play an important part in this ‘magic-making’ process by doing persuasive work (kennedy et al., 2016). by erasing the work of mediation and cloaking themselves in an aura of ‘magic’, ai interventions occlude the ways in which they construct realities and crucially, the way they conceal the power relations that sustain the humanitarian system. in so doing, ai interventions reconfirm the hierarchy between ‘problem solvers’ and ‘problem owners’ – to draw on the language used in industry events such as the united nation’s global summit ‘ai for social good’. rather than democratizing the relationships between humanitarian providers and suffering subjects, digital humanitarianism reaffirms the power asymmetries first established in humanitarianism’s colonial iteration. humanitarian ai appears to solve problems, whilst in practice benefitting stakeholders, including commercial companies which are increasingly involved in public-private partnerships. there is a strong element of experimentation with untested technologies and the data they produce in what are vulnerable regions with little or no regulation for privacy and data protection. the hype generated by humanitarian innovation can benefit the commercial applications of a particular technology. ultimately, the paper argues that by turning complex political problems like displacement and hunger into problems with technical solutions, ai depoliticizes humanitarian emergencies. this is not a call for a return to an earlier, purer form of ‘analogue’ humanitarianism. the non-human aspects of ai humanitarianism reveal, rework and amplify existing deficiencies of humanitarianism. as our analysis reveals that ‘ai for social good’ can be bad, we conclude with a reflection on the notion of ‘good’. references benjamin, r. (2019). race after technology. cambridge, uk: polity. bolter, j. d. & grusin, r. (2000). remediation: understanding new media. cambridge, ma: mit press. calhoun, c. (2008) ‘the imperative to reduce suffering’. in barnett, m. & weiss, t. g. (eds.) humanitarianism in question. ithaka, ny.: cornell university press crawford, k., & finn, m. (2015). the limits of crisis data: analytical and ethical challenges of using social and mobile data to understand disasters. geojournal, 80(4), 491-502 eisenlohr, p. (2011) introduction: what is a medium? theologies, technologies and aspirations. social antropology, 19(1), 1-5. eubanks, v. (2018). automating inequality. how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. new york: st martins press. fassin, d. (2012) humanitarian reason: a moral history of the present. berkeley, ca.: university of california press. kennedy, h., hill, r. l.; aiello, g. & allen, w. (2016). the work that visualisation conventions do. information, communication & society, 19(6), 715-735, doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2016.1153126 lester, a., & dussart, f. (2014). colonization and the origins of humanitarian governance. cambridge: cambridge university press. madianou, m. (2019). technocolonialism: digital innovation and data practices in the humanitarian response to refugee crises. social media and society, vol. 5(3) https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119863146 madianou, m. (2019b) the biometric assemblage: surveillance, experimentation, profit and the measuring of refugee bodies. television and new media, vol. 20(6): 581-599. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419857682 mcdonald, s. (2019) from space to supply chain: humanitarian data governance. (august 12, 2019). available at ssrn: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3436179 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3436179 noble, s. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reproduce racism. new york: new york university press. microsoft word cote-the pros and perils of interdependence-the pros and perils of interdependence.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): cote, a. (2021, october). the pros and perils of interdependence: feminist organizing in online game forums. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org the pros and perils of interdependence: feminist organizing in online game forums amanda cote university of oregon introduction although many women play video games, the medium’s association with masculinity remains strong. female gamers are often harassed as outsiders, which can drive them to hide their presence and make it difficult to connect with one another (brehm, 2013; cote, 2020; eklund, 2011; fox & tang, 2017; gray, 2014). lacking a strong support system, and in the face of toxicity, many women drop out of gaming over time. this loss suggests a need for greater interdependence between female gamers, to provide interpersonal support and to develop collective responses to gaming’s inequalities. feminism is meant to be collective, rather than individualist, as only group action can resolve structural problems (banet-weiser, 2018), and research suggests that targeted internet communities, such as facebook groups or discussion boards, could promote feminist networking, consciousness-raising, and action. clark-parsons (2018) and pruchniewska (2019) found that women-only facebook groups advanced a range of feminist practices, from implicitly supporting workplace equality to explicitly organizing politically. rentschler and thrift (2015) argue that sharing feminist memes can help build larger networked publics. female gamers could thus benefit from online groups. but online communities may have limits. the internet is often considered a masculinized or identity-free space (herring et al., 2002), meaning feminist discussions can face disruption or backlash. braithwaite (2014), for instance, found that online forum participants who raised concerns about sexism in world of warcraft were seen as “killjoys” and consequently faced high levels of vitriol. explicitly feminist forums provide space in which such conversations are accepted, but they can draw trolls who disrupt the groups’ functioning or harass its members (e.g. herring et al., 2002; rentschler & thrift, 2015; shaw, 2013). groups that police their boundaries to avoid these problems may then implicitly prioritize some participants—i.e. straight, white, cisgender women— over others (clark-parsons, 2018; pruchniewska, 2019). therefore, while online spaces could help female gamers build interdependencies and raise feminist consciousness, we must assess if/how they accomplish these goals and for whom. this paper begins to explore these issues through a comparison of two online gaming forums—one general and one female-specific. it asks: 1) how (if at all) do female-oriented gaming forums differ from general gaming forums in their discussion of feminist issues? 2) what opportunities does this offer for consciousness-raising and collective action? methods while the overall project aims to address online communities writ large, this paper starts with text-based discussion forums, which provide a consistent format for analysis. further, it focuses specifically on how forum participants post about harassment and negativity. players of all kinds face harassment in games, making it a general topic of concern. however, in-game toxicity is also a feminist issue, as the level/type of harassment directed at female gamers often differs from that directed at male gamers (brehm, 2013; cote, 2020; fox & tang, 2017). conversations about harassment allow us to assess if, when, and how it’s discussed as a general vs. a gendered problem, as well as if discourses differ by forum. this can provide insight into opportunities for consciousness-raising and collective action. following the example of bergstrom (2021), i identified two forums of interest and searched them for the terms “toxic,” “harassment,” and “bullying,” importing the results into the qualitative analysis software nvivo. initial analysis focused on the top 100 posts per search term (600 total), coding each for the following variables: 1) relevance (e.g. a thread on toxic players would be relevant; a thread on a toxic waste environment in a game would not) 2) number of likes 3) number of comments 4) overall topic (e.g. venting, sexism, news, meme, etc.; up to three labels/post) given the sensitive nature of conversations about harassment, the searchability of online forums, and in line with ethical guidelines for internet research (e.g. franzke et al., 2020), i am choosing not to identify the specific forums or quote from them directly. however, both forums are large (over 100,000 members each) and active, providing a up-to-date, inside look at gaming communities. preliminary findings quantitatively, the female-oriented community produced more relevant posts (276/300 vs. 184/300) and more consistent engagement via likes and comments. it also showed a higher like/comment ratio, which could indicate greater support for those sharing their experiences or starting discussions. the lower like/comment ratio in the general community reveals more disagreement; highly commented posts in this forum are almost as likely to be disliked as they are to be liked. the forums also showed thematic differences. female-oriented community posts largely focused on sharing personal experiences with negativity, explicitly calling out sexism, and discussing coping mechanisms for avoiding or managing harassment. in contrast, the general community took a more abstract approach to harassment and negativity, sharing news articles and memes or engaging in general discussions. moving forward, i will perform a critical discourse analysis (cda) of comments on these top posts, to assess how forum participants discuss these topics in depth. this preliminary investigation, however, expands upon research that suggests female players are already independent activists to address what opportunities they could gain from greater interdependence. it suggests that there are differences between online communities and that the female-oriented forum’s higher support may lay a foundation for collective networking, consciousness-raising, and action, such as through the sharing of coping mechanisms. references banet-weiser, s. (2018). empowered: popular feminism and popular misogyny. duke university press. bergstrom, k. (2021). anti-social social gaming: community conflict in a facebook game. critical studies in media communication, 1–14. braithwaite, a. (2014). ‘seriously, get out’: feminists on the forums and the war(craft) on women. new media & society, 16(5), 703–718. brehm, a. l. (2013). navigating the feminine in massively multiplayer online games: gender in world of warcraft. frontiers in psychology, 4(dec), 903. clark-parsons, r. (2018). building a digital girl army: the cultivation of feminist safe spaces online. new media & society, 20(6), 2125–2144. cote, a. c. (2020). gaming sexism: gender and identity in the era of casual video games. new york university press. eklund, l. (2011). doing gender in cyberspace: the performance of gender by female world of warcraft players. convergence, 17(3), 323–342. fox, j., & tang, w. y. (2017). women’s experiences with general and sexual harassment in online video games: rumination, organizational responsiveness, withdrawal, and coping strategies. new media & society, 19(8), 1290–1307. franzke, a. s., bechmann, a., zimmer, m., ess, c. m., & association of internet researchers. (2020). internet research: ethical guidelines 3.0. https://aoir.org/reports/ethics3.pdf gray, k. l. (2014). race, gender, and deviance in xbox live: theoretical perspectives from the virtual margins. elsevier. herring, s., job-sluder, k., scheckler, r., & barab, s. (2002). searching for safety online: managing “trolling” in a feminist forum. information society, 18(5), 371–384. pruchniewska, u. (2019). “a group that’s just women for women”: feminist affordances of private facebook groups for professionals. new media and society, 21(6), 1362– 1379. rentschler, c. a., & thrift, s. c. (2015). doing feminism in the network: networked laughter and the ‘binders full of women’ meme. feminist theory, 16(3), 329–359. shaw, f. (2013). still “searching for safety online”: collective strategies and discursive resistance to trolling and harassment in a feminist network. the fibreculture journal, 22, 93–108. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): hou, j. (2022, november). to generate data at all costs for traffic celebrities: the remaking of chinese new poor through data-driven fan culture. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. to generate data at all costs for traffic celebrities: the remaking of chinese new poor through data-driven fan culture jiaxi hou the university of tokyo to be a qualified fan, you always need to work on data (for the celebrity). you either boost his or her online visibility on social media or pay money to exaggerate the commercial sales. otherwise, how dare you claim yourself as a fan? -wang, 22, college student, a long-time fan of tfboys introduction the logic that only contributing to data to some extent can justify a fan’s identity now prevails among the chinese fan communities. for example, when xiao zhan, one of china’s most sought-after “traffic celebrities” released his digital single, his fans set consumption quotas for each other to manifest their loyalty. the most widely shared standard indicated that students should each buy at least 105 copies of the track, while those with a job should buy at least 1,005. such multiple purchases hardly render any material benefits to the fans, but in most cases only function to inflate the sales data of the celebrity and exaggerate his or her actual popularity. though a few elite and middleclass fans could easily satisfy their consumerist desire for being economically powerful, many more—who are seduced by the communitas of fan activism—are actually unable or not yet fully prepared to afford this lifestyle. repeatedly purchasing hundreds or thousands of the same digital track as well as the other commodities endorsed by celebrities depleted many ordinary fans’ energy and even pushed some already socioeconomically disadvantaged ones into over-indebtedness. “traffic celebrity,” or its chinese term, liuliang mingxing, is the specific genre of media products to simultaneously accommodate individual fans’ yearning for participation and the industrial demand to maximize revenue from platform data. it refers to the new type of pop idols who can effectively stimulate their fans’ constant contribution to the increase of internet traffic and commercial sales data in numerous ways. concentrating on fans of traffic celebrities, this article aims at understanding how datafication affects people’s consumption and even reconfigures the intertwining socio-economic and techno-cultural inequalities in contemporary china. i pay special attention to the experiences of fans who are seduced by this data-driven fan culture but still lack the economic power to afford such an excessive way of consumption. this research examines (1) how and why socioeconomically disadvantaged fans adeptly utilize various digital platforms (including but not limited to social media, virtual credit cards, online loans, e-commerce etc.) to attach themselves to the digitalized consumer society; (2) how digital platforms, especially their different datafication mechanisms, at the same time, discipline and exploit these fans in return; (3) how the other social actors such as the state authorities and the informal online lending market are involved in bringing more precarity to the already disadvantaged social groups. in doing so, i try to illustrate how digital platforms not just profoundly intertwine with existing unequal social structures but also become nexus to embody nonelite and non-middleclass fans as the “new poor” of today’s china, as a transitional consumer society (bauman, 2005). theoretical framework this study locates in the overlapping areas among fandom studies, platform studies, and the critical sociology of inequalities in a consumer society. first, contemporary fans are neither fully empowered nor merely exploited by either digital platforms or the so-called power of consumers. when they share thoughts and establish connections with each other, the entertainment and internet industry also take advantage of them and encourage them to consume in circumscribed, industry-useful ways (stanfill, 2019). second, despite being proclaimed as the fundamental fuel of platform-based economy like oil for an industrial society, data never exists like natural resources but is essentially manufactured (gitelman, 2013). like their global counterparts, china-based digital platforms also rely on the systematic collection, monetization, and circulation of users’ data as a critical new resource to generate revenues (zuboff, 2019; couldry and mejias, 2019). nonetheless, it will be oversimplified to assume fans as the victims of platform data metrics because they also utilize and manipulate the system to achieve their own ends. to unpack the entangled remaking of chinese new poor through data-drive fan culture, this study investigates how different actors manifest distinguished types of agencies in the process. rather than restricted to human being’s motivations and subjectivities, i follow latour’s (2005) definition of agency and concentrate on the interactions and traceable impacts of both human and non-human actors. these actors include: fans with divergent backgrounds, digital platforms and their distinguished data metrics, institutions that afford digital transactions, and the government. method during my ethnography from december 2019 to may 2021 in multiple online fan communities of different traffic celebrities, i collected data from the following three sources. first, i actively participated in these communities and observed how fans (1) engaged on the platforms; (2) interpreted their understandings of various data metrics; (3) intentionally gamed with not just social media data metrics but also quantified data in broader context for example sales charts or charitable charts in commercial and public domains. second, i conducted several rounds of interviews with 12 fans who perceived themselves as insufficient fans/consumers. third, i also sought information from news reports, blogs, commentaries, business reports and policy documents. findings and conclusions i trace the three identities from these fans’ self-expression: (1) a gendered labor in the digital data sweatshop; (2) a tactic but flawed consumer; and (3) a warrior in the fierce data competition to understand how they are seduced, repressed, to some extent included, and then depleted in the traffic celebrity’s fan culture. i argue the three subidentities together embody them as the new poor in the transitional chinese society. first, social media data metrics not just directly extract fans’ labor value when they manipulate data for specific traffic celebrities, they also serve as a disciplining apparatus in shaping individual fans’ ways of engagement. more importantly, datafication of social media platforms reinforces the power of quantification in reshaping new poor fans’ perception of autonomy and future. that said, though they clearly sense the powerlessness individually, by intentionally turning oneself into data in a collective fan space, they depend these data metrics to interpret their impacts and meanings on traffic celebrities as a media product with symbolic meanings. these impacts of data metrics are not restricted to the virtual sphere but significantly expand to commercial consumptions and public domain. at the same time, digital platforms provide some temporary strategies for the new poor fans to pretend to be qualified consumers and delay their pain through virtual credit cards and online loans. however, the illusionary inclusion could hardly solve the problem but only assists in creating a larger poverty trap where all the social costs will only be borne by individual fans. ironically, disadvantaged fans engage in the production of traffic celebrities in pursuit for being heard, while the pursuit turns out to exploit and traps them in the end with remarkable economic and social costs. moreover, even though digital platforms bring hopes for them to engage in communities and act collectively, the datafication mechanisms actually generate endless competitions and enlarges conflict among the new poor, leaving them more fragmented with little possibility to construct solidarity or collective consciousness. please update your browser your browser isn’t supported anymore. update it to get the best youtube experience and our latest features. learn more mozilla firefox safari opera microsoft edge google chrome remind me later about copyright contact us terms privacy policy & safety © 2025 google llc microsoft word vaidya-#freebritney-#freebritney.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): vaidya, a. r., lingel, j. (2022, november). #freebritney: strategies of counternarratives and self-regulation within fan activism. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. #freebritney: strategies of counternarratives and self-regulation within fan activism akhil raghav vaidya annenberg school for communication, university of pennsylvania jessa lingel annenberg school for communication, university of pennsylvania on november 12, 2021, the conservatorship of u.s. pop superstar britney spears was terminated, almost thirteen years after its institution in 2008. the conservatorship represented a complex legal and financial arrangement that placed severe restrictions on spears’ professional, medical and personal autonomy (farrow & tolentino, 2021); the legal arrangement was also at the heart of a growing activist movement that demanded a restoration of spears’ rights. commonly known as the #freebritney movement, this primarily online group has worked since 2009 to raise awareness of and bring an end to spears’ conservatorship. this paper situates the #freebritney movement at the intersection of fandom and digital social movements, highlighting the activist potential of fan communities (see dym, 2020). our analysis is organized around two key research questions: • what are the constitutive norms, practices and communication strategies of the #freebritney movement? • how can the #freebritney movement speak to the intersection of fandom and digital activism theories? in the following sections, we briefly outline key background information, describe our methodological approach and present two high-level themes from our qualitative analysis. we conclude by pointing to key tensions within fan studies and digital activism that this paper helps to unpack. background and method in 2008, as spears publicly struggled with her mental health and personal life, her father was granted a temporary conservatorship (stark, 2021). a conservatorship “is a court case where a judge appoints a responsible person or organization to care for another adult who cannot care for themselves or manage their own finances” (conservatorship, n.d.). this legal arrangement quietly became permanent as britney spears returned to public life in late 2008. while the #freebritney movement sprang up almost immediately after her conservatorship, their efforts gained significant momentum between 2019 and 2021, as fan claims about the conservatorship were confirmed in a series of leaks, popular documentaries and court testimonies (stark, 2021). the movement has since enjoyed support from a variety of political and cultural actors, and played a precipitative role in ending the conservatorship (villareal, 2021). this paper relies on thematic analysis (braun and clarke, 2006) of 16 semi-structured interviews with self-identified #freebritney members recruited on twitter. interviews addressed topics related to the movement’s organization, core practices and values; affordances of digital platforms for organizing; tensions around organizing strategies; and next steps for the movement. the following sections describe key themes that surfaced from interviews: building alternative narratives and community regulation. in the full version of this paper, we expand on these themes, particularly as they relate to scholarship on fandom (e.g. dym, 2020) and social movements (e.g. jackson & foucault-welles, 2015). deconstructing, rebuilding and trending within #freebritney while all pop stars negotiate a fraught relationship between public and private life, spears’ conservatorship produced a particularly complicated relationship between fans and mainstream media portrayals. in the aftermath of her public mental health struggles in 2008, many interview participants were highly critical of spears’ treatment by mainstream media. thus, a primary objective of #freebritney members involved piecing together and promoting an alternative narrative of spears’ career and conservatorship. in keeping with theorists who argue that hashtags constitute a digital counterpublic through the discursive and relational affordances of social media (wimmer, 2016), interview participants recalled organizing “trending parties” to amplify #freebritney hashtags. participants relied on trending hashtags to help increase the visibility and validity of resistant readings of britney spears’ conservatorship, as one participant noted that “the trends are the trends – there’s no denying them.” central to the formation of #freebritney’s digital counterpublic is the concept of fan reading. fan reading describes how “individual interpretations [of popular texts] are shaped and reinforced through ongoing discussions with other [fans]” (jenkins, 2012). within the #freebritney movement, participants engaged in fan reading by creating alternative interpretations of social media posts, public events, interviews, gossip, artistic work and court documents that were connected to create a legible, resistant narrative of spears as a victim of conservatorship abuse. moreover, by (re)producing this narrative and distributing it among online networks, participants engaged in a larger pattern of counterpublic activism that foregrounds virality as a strategy (jackson & foucault-welles, 2015). a ‘self-regulating’ body researchers have critiqued the affordances of social media as an organizing tool, arguing that it centers the individual experience over collective identities (e.g. milan, 2015). in the #freebritney movement, we see a balancing act of building a grassroots, largely leaderless movement, and maintaining a coherent political strategy of advocating for spears’ autonomy. while certain factors like follower count and legal expertise gave some members prominence within the movement, #freebritney participants typically denied the existence of formal leadership structures. interviewees described collectively forming internal codes around communication and demonstration activities, which one participant described as a “self-regulating body” of members. echoing de kosnik’s (2012) theory of the “social innovations of fandom,” #freebritney members communicated with each other in group chats, direct messages and comments on social media posts, deliberating with each other on how to approach the movement’s obstacles. for example, interview subjects reflected on the labor of “calling each other out” and “standing by the truth” in limiting the conspiracy and misinformation activities of the movement. using social media tools, members fought misinformation through conducting and presenting their own research, targeted disengagement from conspiracy accounts and amplification of aligned #freebritney members. conclusion to the extent it reflects and diverges from fandom and digital activism practices, the #freebritney movement poses compelling questions about key tensions in both fields, specifically regarding building alternative narratives and self-regulation. in the full version of this paper, we continue our focus on the intersection of fandom and digital activism practices, demonstrating its implications in shaping political identities and outlooks. with this analysis of #freebritney, we interrogate fandom as a site of activist potential within the framework of a successful online movement, building on important work in internet, media, and feminist studies. references braun, v., & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa conservatorship. (n.d.). the judicial branch of california. retrieved november 1, 2021, from https://www.courts.ca.gov/selfhelp-conservatorship.htm?rdelocaleattr=en de kosnik, a. (2012). digital labor: the internet as playground and factory. in t. scholz (ed.), digital labor: the internet as playground and factory. (0 ed.). taylor & francis group,. dym, b. (2020, january). exploring transformative fandom to broaden participation in computing. in companion of the 2020 acm international conference on supporting group work (pp. 7-10). farrow, r., & tolentino, j. (2021, july 3). britney spears’s conservatorship nightmare | the new yorker. the new yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/news/americanchronicles/britney-spears-conservatorship-nightmare jackson, s. j., & foucault welles, b. (2015). hijacking# mynypd: social media dissent and networked counterpublics. journal of communication, 65(6), 932-952. jenkins, h. (2012). textual poachers: television fans and participatory culture (2nd ed.). routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203114339 milan, s. (2015). from social movements to cloud protesting: the evolution of collective identity. information, communication & society, 18(8), 887–900. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2015.1043135 stark, s. (2021, february 5). framing britney spears. fx/hulu. stark, s. (2021, september 24). controlling britney spears. fx/hulu. villareal, y. (2021, september 5). saving britney spears: the inside story of the #freebritney movement. los angeles times. https://www.latimes.com/entertainmentarts/music/story/2021-09-05/free-britney-spears-movement-conservatorship-oral-history wimmer, j. (2016). counterpublic. in the international encyclopedia of political communication (pp. 1–5). john wiley & sons, ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118541555.wbiepc110 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): hong, s., hermann, s. (2020, october). “fuck your feelings”: the affective weaponisation of facts and reason. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “fuck your feelings”: the affective weaponisation of facts and reason sun-ha hong simon fraser university selena neumark hermann simon fraser university this paper examines emerging trends in fact signaling: the performative invocation of the idea of fact and reason, distinct from the concrete presentation of evidence or reasoning, as a way to cultivate affective solidarity. emblematic is the conservative influencer ben shapiro’s slogan, “facts don’t care about your feelings”: a paean to the mythological figure of emotionlessly objective truth which may then be weaponised against one’s enemies. scholars are increasingly attentive to the ways in which what was once popularised as a ‘fake news’ epidemic is not simply a virulent strain of bad information in a fundamentally rational online ecosystem, but rather a broader crisis and transformation of what counts as truthful, trustworthy and authentic (e.g. boler & davis, 2018; also see banet-weiser, 2012). our contribution emphasises the affective and habitual dimension of this phenomenon. through a close analysis of ben shapiro’s content and personal brand, we show how the generic invocation of fact and reason cultivates a sense of affective attachment not defined by ideological consistency or, indeed, the actual practice of research or logical reasoning, but rather a particularly masculinised and adversarial ideal of truth. the payoff is the reassurance and pleasure of a stable subject position from which one’s political opposition may be othered with impunity. facts may not care about your feelings, but insisting upon this fact is all about building a certain structure of feeling. the factual brand such weaponisation of ‘truth-telling’ has emerged as a particularly effective technique for navigating an online information ecosystem that is increasingly driven by algorithmically modulated standards of visibility and engagement. a loose constellation of right-leaning microinfluencers, primarily operating out of youtube, have proven particularly adept at fact signaling – what rebecca lewis (2019) calls an ‘alternative influence network’ (ain). the ain is defined less by a strict set of ideological doctrines and more by a shared opposition to what it calls social justice warriors and the radical left. our analysis focuses on ben shapiro, who has explicitly built his personal brand around the imagined ideal of cold, dispassionate reason and principled truth-telling in the face of censorship. the paper will also secondarily draw examples from blair white, a micro-influencer who has positioned herself as a right-leaning, anti-social justice transgender person to build a robust online following. through a qualitative analysis of shapiro’s and white’s public presentations, the paper triangulates a sense of their respective affective appeals vis-à-vis techniques of fact signaling. the analytical lens is designed not to fact-check substantive claims or map out a coherent set of political viewpoints, but to examine these influencers’ strategic performances towards the cultivation of affective attachment. drawing on theories of affect and specifically of its role in forms of attachment (e.g. ahmed, 2014; berlant, 2011; brennan, 2004; clough, 2010), we examine shapiro and white’s personal branding through their content on youtube and other social media platforms. for example, one of white’s most popular videos – titled “there are only 2 genders” (white, 2016) – exemplifies how the performance of fact signaling is tethered to the weaponisation of those ‘facts’ against one’s political opposition. in the case of shapiro, we also analyse his public presentation beyond the platforms – in guest appearances on television (such as fox news), or his regular schedule of university campus talks. performing reason much of the time, what these influencers provide for their audience is not so much substantive engagement with factual claims using any kind of rigorous methodology, but a habitual circuit of attachment through the sharing of anxiety and outrage. ben shapiro’s voluminous content thus builds towards no coherent political philosophy or theory of reason, but focuses on a rotating portfolio of generic attacks around the ostensible enemies of fact and reason. for instance, we show how his most popular content involves the reduction of discourse around transgender rights and nonbinary gender into the simple mantra that ‘a man is a man and a woman is a woman’. the ‘radical left’ is portrayed as an emotionally unstable proponent of anarchic gender fluidity, and is subsequently defeated by the calm, logical explanation that sexual difference is a basic biological fact. such reductive sloganisation provides no meaningful engagement with the substance of the debate, but represents a short-cut towards building affective solidarity around an imaginary of ‘traditional values’. the affective payoff of these performances are maximised through careful tailoring of the charismatic influencer. we show how ben shapiro and blair white’s physical appearance and biography, their debating techniques and slogans, consistently emphasise a confident, adversarial, patronising performance of rationality. it is, we argue, a masculinised aesthetic of rationality as confident and adversarial, as a militaristic concept for domination, as requiring no reflexive introspection of its own positionality. this extends and resonates with the wider cultural rhetoric in the far/altright around the crisis of white masculinity and its attempted recuperation in terms of a mythic past when america and its men were ‘great (e.g. kelly, 2017). we further argue that much of this fact signaling draws its sense of plausibility, legitimacy, and historicity through a selective appropriation of an imagined modernity. shapiro and white both rely on a particular amalgam of pseudo-historical tropes around the enlightenment and western civilization, constructing a homogenous and entirely consistent picture of the tenuous and contradictory history of the west. political philosophy from classical liberal thinkers, the enlightenment, and other sources are remixed into an impressionistic blend of rhetorical and visual tropes that signify what commitment to fact looks and feels like. in this way, they weaponize the myth of the enlightenment to serve their current political goals and to build a flexible, repeatable genre of authenticity and entertainment. overall, emerging performances of fact signaling such as those of shapiro and white therefore not only new circuits of affective attachment, through which individuals seek solidarity and influencers seek effective personal branding, but also our evolving sense of what looks like truth, what sounds authentic, what feels reasonable in politics. it is becoming increasingly important to better understand the kind of environments facilitated by new media technologies, and their affective affordances: the rhythmic, habitual feed of signals and triggers, the cycles of outrage and laughter, the pleasure of ‘destroying’ one’s enemies in the name of reason and civility. bibliography ahmed, s. (2014). the cultural politics of emotion. edinburgh university press. banet-weiser, s. (2012). authentic: the politics of ambivalence in brand culture. new york university press. berlant, l. (2011). cruel optimism. duke university press. boler, m., & davis, e. (2018). the affective politics of the “post-truth” era: feeling rules and networked subjects. emotion, space and society, 27(2017), 75–85. brennan, t. (2004). the transmission of affect. cornell university press. clough, p. (2010). the affective turn: political economy, biomedia, and bodies. in m. gregg & g. j. seigworth (eds.), the affect theory reader (pp. 206–225). kelly, a. (2017). the alt-right: reactionary rehabilitation for white masculinity. soundings, 66(66), 68–78. lewis, r. (2019). “this is what the news won’t show you”: youtube creators and the reactionary politics of micro-celebrity. television and new media. white, b. (2016). there are only 2 genders. youtube. microsoft word grover-internet governance for whom civil society, representation, and digital rights-internet governance.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): grover, r. (2021, october). internet governance for whom? civil society, representation, and digital rights. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. internet governance for whom? civil society, representation, and digital rights rohan grover university of southern california introduction internet governance institutions have generally embraced a multistakeholder approach which calls for consulting different types of stakeholders, notably states, the private sector, and civil society organizations (csos; raymond & denardis, 2015). however, the category of civil society is historically ill defined. looking to understand how civil society is constructed in supranational institutions, tjahja et al. (2021) developed a typology of csos included at the internet governance forum (igf) over time, and found that while civil society at the igf is composed of diverse organizational models, in general csos are expected to be intermediaries that represent the interests of a community, and to validate internet governance institutional processes. given their crucial role in internet governance, how well do digital rights csos fulfill expectations of representation under multistakeholderism? methodology i approached this question through a case study of the internet freedom foundation (iff), an indian digital rights organization. iff represents indian interests in the internet governance and digital rights fields and is seen as a credible representative of indian interests on the basis of its history of democratic public mobilization, especially through the save the internet (sti) campaign in 2016 which spawned the organization. i brought together two approaches to assess how well iff represents the indian public. first, i characterized iff’s mechanisms of representation according to three strategies, defined by fraussen and halpin (2018), that interest groups use to achieve legitimacy. second, i evaluated the quality of iff’s representation through the lens of equity and democratization, which i defined as inclusion of diverse socioeconomic identities, especially class, caste, and gender. this approach answers alhassan and chakravartty’s (2011) call to scrutinize the independence of csos in the postcolonial context, where they are not inherently representative or neutral in part because csos do not necessarily represent interests that are distinct from the state. empirically, i examined iff’s public communications through its website, newsletter, event recordings and other youtube videos, and social media accounts. following a grounded theory approach, i reviewed these communication materials to identify themes in both what the organization asks of its audience and how it describes its relationship with its audience, in order to understand how iff articulates and achieves representation. findings iff appears to select its agenda through a centralized process rather than consulting its supporters for input. this “logic of solidarity”, in which the public is engaged as supporters and donors in solidarity with a cause or set of values articulated by the organization, contrasts with a “logic of representation” in which the public is invited to define organizational priorities by vocalizing their concerns (fraussen and halpin, 2018). in addition, iff claims to represent the general indian public, but primarily mobilizes technology workers who differ from the general indian public in important ways. most notably, based on descriptions of its staff, board, and volunteers, iff appears to primarily engage technologists, especially software engineers in india’s startup industry. looking at iff’s predecessor, the sti campaign, prasad (2018) refers to a “recursive public” that re-engages technology workers in activism to shape the very technologies that bring them together. she argues that their politics align with a technocultural nationalism that seeks joint economic and technological power through digitally mediated neoliberal market opportunities. therefore while iff’s supporters are citizens advocating for digital rights, they also represent a class of workers in an industry shaped by class, caste, and gender discrimination (subramanian, 2019; upadhya, 2016) and whose economic opportunities are uniquely intertwined with specific policy outcomes. these findings provide evidence of a gap between the expectations of iff according to multistakeholderism and the organization’s community engagement strategies observed in the field. tjahja’s et al. (2021) finding that csos are meant to represent the interests of under-represented communities, rather than interests of csos themselves, suggests that internet governance institutions likely expect csos to enact strategies that resemble a logic of representation in order to authentically represent community-driven interests, compared to the logic of solidarity observed in iff’s public engagement. moreover, these findings suggest that iff may better represent a community of technology workers, rather than the entire indian public, which is shaped by structural forces that reproduce socioeconomic inequities. discussion this gap demonstrates the importance of evaluating representation through the lens of equity and democratization, as alhassan and chakravartty (2011) prescribe. however, on a global stage, equity and democratization must be defined to account for both national and international dynamics. for example, the sti campaign that spawned iff is celebrated for countering digital colonialism between us-based facebook and indian activists (kwet, 2019). yet this perspective is not sufficient to characterize sti and its successor, iff, as inherently equitable within the indian context, as prasad (2018) illuminates the reproduction of socioeconomic inequalities. a comprehensive evaluation of equity and democratization, then, must account for both colonial dynamics across states and socioeconomic inequities within the postcolonial state. but without access to membership data, how can we evaluate csos’ community representation strategies? fraussen and halpin’s (2018) framework is valuable for identifying mechanisms of representation for the purpose of signaling legitimacy to (presumably domestic) policymakers. however, when legitimacy is specifically tied to representation and especially by supranational actors, as in the case of internet governance, evaluating representation in digital-native csos should account for how engagement strategies intersect with both socioeconomic and technological inequities within the national context. for example, in the case of iff, who is excluded from access to representation or engagement because of poor, contingent, or lack of internet connectivity? and who benefits from socioeconomic proximity to the recursive public mobilized by their campaigns? these findings do not undermine the advocacy of iff, which bravely contests the indian state’s authoritarian digital practices, but rather it offers a contribution to an emergent understanding of civil society’s role in internet governance, grounded in a critique of representation and legitimacy in the postcolonial state. more textured and historically specific research about csos and their strategies of representation will expand our understanding of how whose voices are heard, and whose are still excluded, from supranational institutions and processes that shape internet governance and digital rights. references alhassan, a., & chakravartty, p. (2011). postcolonial media policy under the long shadow of empire. in r. mansell & m. raboy (eds.), the handbook of global media and communication policy (pp. 366–382). wiley-blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444395433.ch23 fraussen, b., & halpin, d. (2018). how do interest groups legitimate their policy advocacy? reconsidering linkage and internal democracy in times of digital disruption. public administration, 96(1), 23–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12364 kwet, m. (2019). digital colonialism: us empire and the new imperialism in the global south. race & class, 60(4), 3–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396818823172 prasad, r. (2018). ascendant india, digital india: how net neutrality advocates defeated facebook’s free basics. media, culture & society, 40(3), 415–431. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443717736117 raymond, m., & denardis, l. (2015). multistakeholderism: anatomy of an inchoate global institution. international theory, 7(3), 572–616. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1752971915000081 subramanian, a. (2019). the caste of merit: engineering education in india. harvard university press. tjahja, n., meyer, t., & shahin, j. (2021). what is civil society and who represents civil society at the igf? an analysis of civil society typologies in internet governance. telecommunications policy, 45(6). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.telpol.2021.102141 upadhya, c. (2016). reengineering india: work, capital, and class in an offshore economy. oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199461486.001.0001 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): kantachote, k. (2023, october). would you date a maid? paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. would you date a maid? krittiya kantachote srinakharinwirot university subaltern migrant workers in singapore during the covid-19 pandemic in most destinations, migrants with a domestic worker visa are bound laborers. their legal residency depends on their continuous and sole employment by their sponsor as it constrains their ability to change sponsors. this is the case in canada, great britain, israel, taiwan, singapore, and the united arab emirates (uae) (anderson 2000; bakan and stasiulis 2005; lan 2007; liebelt 2011; mahdavi 2011). this paper looks at singapore as a research site because it is a major destination for migrant domestic workers. this paper asks, how do employers manage their power over domestic workers who are bound to them in servitude, and what is the role of tiktok access, and any internet access in general? each year, thousands of domestic workers from india, indonesia, myanmar, sri lanka, and the philippines seek legal employment in singapore. legal conditions of domestic work in singapore similarly reflect those of other destinations. in singapore, the temporary legal status of migrant domestic workers binds them in servitude to their employer-sponsor as their residency is contingent on their continuous and sole live-in employment with a sponsor whose permission they must secure to transfer jobs. this legal status technically renders domestic workers unfree and precarious as it gives employers tremendous power over domestic workers (parreñas et al. 2021). this paper combines two studies: a digital ethnography of fdws on tiktok, and semistructured interviews with thirty employers in singapore conducted by the author in 2014. this paper then builds on the 2022 analysis of tiktok profiles of domestic workers that had a comparatively large following and content exceeding 1,000 views. profiles were studied to identify foreign domestic workers employed in singapore who were creating content on tiktok. videos were coded and content analyzed around emergent themes of sexism and intercultural communication. this paper considers these findings in the context of repressive employment conditions. the author identifies ‘soft violence’ as a tool that employers utilize to manage domestic workers’ tiktok access. “soft violence” refers to the practice of concealing the unequal relationship in domestic work via the cultivation of a relationship of “personalism” while simultaneously amplifying one’s control of domestic workers (parreñas et al. 2021). employers claim to recognize domestic workers as “human” in relieving servitude and precarity. however, at the same time, they act on their relationship of unequal dependency, thus concurrently amplifying servitude. they relieve servitude in various ways: allocate breaks during the day, maintain an ‘open kitchen’ policy, grant a day off, and give domestic workers access to a mobile phone, including the internet. however, most simultaneously amplify servitude. employers do this when they impose a 'partially open kitchen' policy, maintain a curfew or impose temporal limits on internet and mobile phone access. more significantly, most employers magnify the unfree status of domestic workers when they withhold their domestic workers’ salaries or subject them to a relationship of debt bondage (parreñas et al. 2021). “soft violence” thus emerges from the paradoxical relationship of simultaneously relieving and amplifying servitude through financial and digital restrictions. thus, this paper asks, how does "soft violence" manifest in fdw content on tiktok? references anderson, b. 2000. doing the dirty work? the global politics of domestic labour. london: zed books. bakan, a., and d. stasiulis. 2005. negotiating citizenship: migrant women in canada and the global system. toronto, on: university of toronto press. lan, p. 2007. “legal servitude and free illegality: migrant ‘guest’ workers in taiwan.” in asian diasporas: new formations, new conceptions, edited by r. parreñas and l. c. d. siu, 253–278. stanford, ca: stanford university press. liebelt, c. 2011. caring for the holy land: filipina domestic workers in israel. new york: berghahn books. mahdavi, p. 2011. gridlock: labor, migration and trafficking in dubai. stanford, ca: stanford university press. parreñas, r. s., kantachote, k., & silvey, r. 2021. soft violence: migrant domestic worker precarity and the management of unfree labour in singapore. journal of ethnic and migration studies, 47(20), 4671-4687. tzouganatou-from monopolizing memory to co-creating it-from monopolizing memory to co-creating it.pdf selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 from monopolizing memory to co-creating it: openness and equity in the digital ecosystem angeliki tzouganatou university of hamburg jennifer krueckeberg university of hamburg today, memory, whether collective or personal, is increasingly dependent on digital media that have permeated various aspects of people’s everyday lives. particularly, the ongoing covid-19 pandemic has highlighted people’s and memory institutions’ dependency on social media for their memory practices and efforts to reach the public in these challenging times. however, social media and its infrastructures do not necessarily align with the needs and interests of individuals and the wider public, or with those of memory institutions. commercial interests embedded in social media infrastructures shape what should be remembered based on short-term business goals, that are not concerned with the preservation of data because of their historical significance, but rather, their potential profit. drawing from ethnographic research on young people’s memory practices and open knowledge practices in the digital economy, this paper investigates equitable ways to the current ‘big tech’ relying system. in addition, it discusses the role of community and human-centered practices as a basis to untap the potential of open public memory infrastructures that run independently from technology monopolies. methodology in the doctoral research presented here, the applied methods included ethnographic fieldwork using observations and expert interviews conducted by tzouganatou at open knowledge finland to investigate economic and governance issues concerning platforms. krueckeberg has conducted 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork into digital memory practices of young people aged between 13 27, living in london and several german cities. during fieldwork semi-structured interviews, photo elicitation and a digital storytelling workshop were carried out. suggested citation (apa): tzouganatou, a., krueckeberg, j. (2021, october). from monopolizing memory to co-creating it: openness and equity in the digital ecosystem. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. co-dependencies of memory ecosystems europe is mostly operating under the gafam (google, amazon, facebook, apple, microsoft) ecosystem (van dijck 2020a), where commercial platforms extract data from users through surveillance mechanisms, and monetizes data by using it as a basis for making behavioural predictions (zuboff 2019). this is linked to the platformization of the web, where platform’s thriving business model based on data surveillance has turned commercial platforms to dominant infrastructures of the internet ecosystem, and penetrated society at large (helmond 2015; plantin et al. 2016; van dijck 2020b). in addition to this observation, digital personal, institutional and commercial memory archives are overlapping now (garde-hansen 2011) with social media playing a vital role, as these platforms guide people’s behaviour through their norms (ross 2019) and the imaginary of digital infrastructures (markham 2020). therefore, current digital ecosystems have an immense influence on what will be remembered. establishing open public digital infrastructures and digital sovereignty (floridi 2020), is a way to envision positive futures beyond the market and business domain with a greater degree of independence. work on co-creation (fuster morell and senabre hidalgo 2020), participatory design and co-design (marttila and botero 2017; poderi 2019) directs to reposition these practices in light of platform capitalism (srnicek 2016), and highlights the importance of fair and community governance. envisioning independent digital futures the young participants of this paper have grown up with digital media and many of their early memories were made and chronicled online. however, the commercialisation of data and the proliferation of advertisements that are ‘creepily’ tailored towards individual preferences are leading to a growing suspicion of what happens to their data and personal memory. in addition, issues of data exploitation are increasingly visible within public discourse and pop culture, making youth more aware of the complexities (taffel 2019) behind the technologies they use daily. yet, young people’s growing understanding of the exploitation and misuse of personal data has not resulted in large scale rebellions. instead, due to a lack of mainstream alternatives and the convenience of the status quo, young people rely on adjusting their own behaviour of sharing information online to protect their data and memories. nonetheless, controlling and optimizing the self is not dissolving issues of data ownership and data exploitation, but risks feeding into the favouring of memories based on their marketability instead of cultural or social importance. moreover, it is not only individuals whose memory practices are affected by the current ecosystem. particularly due to the ongoing pandemic, memory institutions are striving to retain audience engagement through social media while their premises are closed. although enabling public engagement, it is important to interrogate whether these platforms are aligned with memory institutions’ values and mission. the current digital ecosystem is characterized by immense inequalities that are perpetuated by obfuscated practices like untransparent business models and proprietary algorithms for marketing and monetization purposes. open knowledge advocates suggest that decentralized and distributed practices could strengthen participatory elements in which people are directly involved in the production mode and decision making process of for example related policies for the organisation and management of data. this practice of co-creating with communities could potentially better match people’s needs. in addition, these practices aim to enable people’s participation and foster collective memory, which could promote data ownership by individuals and communities to govern and use their data for their own benefits. this paper proposes a fair data ecosystem to memory work, enabling a participatory approach to data governance, that builds upon the work of initiatives such as mydata and the decode project. this contribution aims to be an exploration for a theoretical prototype combining aspects of open public memory infrastructures, and digital sovereignty, with human-centered practices derived from ethnographic fieldwork with youth. these youth practices illuminate potentialities in how frustrations with the status quo could be used towards independence from the current business oriented ecosystem. acknowledgments this work is part of the poem (participatory memory practices) project and has received funding from the european union’s horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the marie skłodowska-curie grant agreement no. 764859. references floridi, luciano (2020): the fight for digital sovereignty: what it is, and why it matters, especially for the eu. in philos. technol. 33 (3), pp. 369–378. fuster morell, mayo; senabre hidalgo, enric (2020): co-creation applied to public policy: a case study on collaborative policies for the platform economy in the city of barcelona. in codesign, pp. 1–20. garde-hansen, joanne (2011): media and memory. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. helmond, anne (2015): the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready. in social media + society 1 (2). markham, annette (2020): the limits of the imaginary: challenges to intervening in future speculations of memory, data, and algorithms. in new media & society, pp. 1-24. marttila, sanna; botero, andrea (2017): infrastructuring for cultural commons. in computer supported cooperative work (cscw) 26 (1), pp. 97–133. plantin, jean-christophe; lagoze, carl; edwards, paul n.; sandvig, christian (2016): infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook. in new media & society 20 (1), pp. 293–310. poderi, giacomo (2019): sustaining platforms as commons: perspectives on participation, infrastructure, and governance. in codesign 15 (3), pp. 243–255. ross, scott (2019): being real on fake instagram: likes, images, and media ideologies of value. in j linguist anthropol 29 (3), pp. 359–374. srnicek, nick (2017): platform capitalism. cambridge, uk, malden, ma: polity (theory redux). taffel, sy (2019): digital media ecologies. entanglements of content, code and hardware / sy taffel. new york, ny, usa: bloomsbury publishing. van dijck, josé (2020a): governing digital societies: private platforms, public values. in computer law & security review 36, p. 105377. van dijck, josé (2020b): seeing the forest for the trees: visualizing platformization and its governance. in new media & society. zuboff, shoshana (2019): the age of surveillance capitalism. the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. first edition. new york: publicaffairs. aoir 2020 distrust and game companies.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): tomlinson, c., & anderson-coto, m.j. (2020, october 28-31). sowing seeds of distrust: video game player perceptions of companies in online forums. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 20th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. sowing seeds of distrust: video game player perceptions of companies in online forums christine tomlinson university of california, irvine maria j. anderson-coto university of california, irvine extended abstract as an increasingly popular form of entertainment, video games offer a variety of options for players, from major aaa titles from big development studios to indie games created and released by small teams. many larger companies promote the growth of fandoms through specific platforms and major game titles that tend to get people excited. fans in turn start acquiring an identity as part of their self-expression (claudiu & andreea, 2014) and begin determining their relationship with the company. within this landscape, what does fan commitment look like? more specifically, how do fans negotiate trust around these companies? why might fans lose confidence in a company? based on our findings, there has been a growing distrust in the ability of video game companies to produce enjoyable products without taking advantage of the user. consumers have become increasingly critical, leading to lowered expectations of quality, discouraging people from preordering, and reaffirming a perceived lack of value. this does not stop with general gaming audiences, extending to the experiences and interpretations of esports fans. online communities have been widely studied in both games (steinkuehler & williams, 2006) and business. virtual communities allow businesses to get to know their customers, build relationships, and increase consumer loyalty (hagel 1999; kardaras et al, 2002). video game companies have recognized these communities as important spaces for spreading the word for their games and maintaining bonds with their audience (ruggles, wadley, & gibbs, 2005). while consumers can “love” a brand, this is largely influenced and entangled with the perception of what that company can do for them (batra, ahuvia, & bagozzi, 2012). trust and attachment, however, can work as separate experiences, virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 virtual event with younger consumers feeling attachment toward a brand, but not necessarily trusting them (bidmon, 2017). this study is the product of two other projects, one looking at video game player behavior in 2016 and one looking at esports fans in 2019. both investigated fan behaviors and online conversations around issues of identity, experience, and interest. in both cases, reddit was the site of analysis to understand how video game players and esports fans talk about their interests and experiences, ultimately building cultures. the initial 2016 study included approximately 2,000 online posts and the 2019 study included 500 posts. while neither project specifically set out to discover how online forum users assess video game companies, this theme emerged through coding patterns. from our analysis, many players discuss video game companies as beacons of obsession with profit, leaving audiences feeling forgotten or seen as a means to a financial end. while financial considerations are often at the root of consumer concerns, distrust appears in a few specific ways: predicting quality and content, discouraging preorders, reaffirming lack of value, and criticizing player support services. when it comes to new game announcements, consumers are often poised not only to experience hype, but to counter hype with what appear to be attempts at grounding the rest of the audience. for example, consumers have noted a trend in trailer reveals that look much more polished than the final product. this has, in turn, led to harsh predictions of game quality on the part of many viewers, with expectations that games will not live up to the hype being generated by the audience. this reluctance to trust companies extends to esports fans as well. because developers are also heavily involved in the esports scene, the audience – often in dual roles as both viewers and players of the games – gains a wide breadth for criticism. in this space, developers and organizers alike are seen as trying to economically exploit their audience. thus, their critique is not only directed at the developer as a game-maker, but also as the entity responsible for the game’s esports scene. consumers call into question decisions made for esports teams, interactions between game developers and esports organizers, and updates to the game that alter the gameplay. fans frequently attribute these decisions to a desire for profit and a lack of concern for the audience. this leads directly into general reactions to and policing of specific fan behavior. in particular, video game fans are cautious about encouraging or supporting preorder habits. in discussions about upcoming games, especially where collector’s editions are involved, commenters disagree about appropriate approaches to new releases. while many fans maintain a general enthusiasm to get games upon release, preordering has become a ground for argument and discord. preordering is increasingly viewed as rewarding companies for their bad behavior. in these cases, consumers point to game companies’ tendencies to present false game footage, lie about features, and to seemingly exploit fans by increasing microtransactions or requiring payment to unlock dlc that already exists in the game’s code. in esports, fan behavior is affected by both the games and by esports events. while the audience is excited for events and leagues, they resent the broadening of esports for casual, sometimes even non-player viewership. this also tends to be labeled as another method for developers to make more money at the expense of the “true” fanbase. for many forum users, negative news about games or esports events reinforces the distrust and caution being taken. this is not just true of the games that they anticipated would not meet their expectations, but also for game and esports companies overall. in some ways, this becomes integrated into the broader culture for video game consumers and esports fans. the idea that certain companies will include more features that incentivize players to spend money, specific developers will release games with bugs, or that esports events will probably have technical issues is regarded as common knowledge. many actions and decisions made by companies, then, become associated with carelessness. while these sentiments are not expressed by all consumers, players, and viewers, they are increasingly present in the overall discourse of video game and esports audiences. this should be of concern for companies, since consumers’ feelings and expressions in public spaces such as forums might potentially form and promote negative associations toward them and specific games or franchises. references batra, r., ahuvia, a., & bagozzi, r. p. (2012). brand love. journal of marketing, 76(2), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1509/jm.09.0339 bidmon, s. (2017). how does attachment style influence the brand attachment – brand trust and brand loyalty chain in adolescents? international journal of advertising, 36(1), 164-189. claudiu, m., andreea, p. (2014). brand as a mean of consumer self-expression and desired personal lifestyle. procediasocial and behavioral sciences, 108, 103107. hagel, j. (1999). net gain: expanding markets through virtual communities. journal of interactive marketing, 13(1), 55–65. https://doi.org/10.1002/(sici)15206653(199924)13:1<55::aid-dir5>3.0.co;2-c kardaras, d., karakostas, b., & papathanassiou, e. (2003). the potential of virtual communities in the insurance industry in the uk and greece. international journal of information management, 23(1), 41–53. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0268-4012(02)00067-1 ruggles, c., wadley, g., & gibbs, m. r. (2005). online community building techniques used by video game developers. proceedings of icec 2005. steinkuehler, c. a., & williams d. (2006). where everybody knows your (screen) name: online games as ‘‘third places.’’ journal of computer-mediated communication, 11, 885-909. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): mckelvey , f., carmi, e., ten oever, n., gürses, s.(2020, october). optimizing our networked lives. panel presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. preconstituted panel: optimizing our networked lives fenwick mckelvey concordia university elinor carmi liverpool university niels ten oever university of amsterdam & texas a&m university seda gürses technische universiteit delft “don’t just live your life, optimize it,” reads the headline of a wry new york times editorial from february 2020, criticizing the embrace of technology to better manage every waking (and sleeping) moment. can communication networks deliver a better life? how might network engineering be a form of social engineering? for this year’s special theme on ‘life’ our panel aims to interrogate questions around optimizing life through networked and mediated spaces. we use the term networked optimization to emphasize a sustained but changing set of techniques, technologies, and calculations to decide the best life -the optimal - through infrastructures, design, mathematics and engineering. optimization is a vital concept at a time of critical interest in infrastructural power. usually defined as doing actions to make the best or most effective use of something, our panel highlights the different uses of the term across the internet. used as a selling point by many technology companies, optimization means different things to different actors. perhaps the most important question on this is optimized for who? network optimization is a new twist on enduring myths around technology. technology has always been a tool to optimize different aspects of our lives. as our panelists suggest, today’s enthusiasm for networked optimization draws on myths as old as carey and quirk’s electric sublime. sales pitches for the latest cloud services resemble the promise of what paul n. edwards’ closed world’, one manageable in real-time and sold to the american government. our panel then draws on a rich theoretical history to describe today’s networked optimization. from facebook to 5g, our panelists work across technical and theoretical literatures as well as computer science and humanities to identify the social implications of networked optimization. author #1 examines how facebook’s personalization ideology is engineered into its infrastructure to influence people’s behaviors to maximize its advertising value. author #2 looks to the discourses and infrastructure of google’s cloud computing that promise a form of global social engineering. author #3 takes these questions out of the cloud and into the next-generation of the internet, 5g. the promised new wireless infrastructure makes a major shift in the meta-governance of communications and re-consolidates power in network operators. finally, author #4 looks for forms of resistance through the development of protective optimization technologies that help people counter efforts to nudge and shape their behaviours. each of the panelists responds to one of four critical questions for optimization: 1. what are the myths and discourses that legitimate and programs technologies as forms of social engineering? how do these discourse erase boundaries between humans and a-life? 2. who or what decides the optimal? how do infrastructural and institutions changes re-situate calculations of the optimal? how does mathematical states stand in for political ones? 3. how do different companies imagine and construct different ways to optimize life and living on the digital life? what types of tools, measurements and importantly values do they bake into their design to achieve optimization? 4. how do people understand, negotiate and perform optimization? how do different communities develop tactics to disobey/distort/rebel/protest media corporate strategies of optimization? and especially, how do different groups of people, such as people of color, women, disabled, and older people challenge notions of optimized life? optimization has been sold as an ideal way of living. but as societies across the world start to be critical of the benefit of technologies and networked infrastructures, this panel seeks to reveal the politics behind this idea. in a broader sense, the panel aims to question the technological deterministic ideal and asks whether technology is the solution to our everyday life problems, dreams, desires and fears. personalization as optimal (digital) life: ordering people’s behavior to create a personal experience elinor carmi liverpool university, uk “to help personalize content, tailor and measure ads, and provide a safer experience, we use cookies. by clicking or navigating this site, you agree to allow our collection of information on and off facebook through cookies”. if this statement sounds familiar it is because most websites, services and apps have a similar phrasing of this ‘agreement’. presented in small boxes in different parts of your screen, these are in fact contracts whereby people are told that they will be tracked and their data traded because that is what is needed to produce their personalized experience. this personalization, we are told, is how we should experience networked platforms it is the optimal way of living online. this paper explores the way ‘personalization’ is sold to us as the optimized way to experience platforms, and how it is operated according to digital advertising logic. specifically, the paper examines the way facebook orders people’s experience according to its ad auction mechanism running in the back-end to sell the ‘real-time’ and personal experience in the ‘front-end’. the paper argues that using ‘personalization’ as the preferred interface design and engagement is meant to serve several functions: 1) create profiles which can be sold as part of the digital advertising market; 2) try to influence people’s tempo-special experience to change their behaviour towards more value. facebook’s optimization machine to understand the way facebook optimizes our experiences, this paper analyses the recently leaked documents of six4three company vs. facebook’s court case in california (solon and farivar, 2019). throughout the years, researchers have struggled to study the platform with its limited access and even more limited details about the way different mechanisms it operates function. the leaks contain internal communications between different facebook workers from 2011 to 2015. analyzing these documents enables us to understand the way the company operates and its rationale, which are usually hidden from most people. importantly, it enables us to understand the way the company conducts procedures to optimize different components of its platform to produce a specific sociality personalization that yield more value. orchestrating people and objects with rhythmedia to examine the way facebook optimizes different components of its platform to produce personalization, this paper proposes a media power new framework that instead of using optic concepts such as invisibility and black box, uses sound concepts processed listening and rhythmedia. the first concept describes the way media companies “selectively tune into different sources through the media apparatus, by using several tools (which can be automatic or manual), in different temporalities, to produce different kinds of knowledge for various purposes (mostly economic and political)” (author, 2019). in this way, people are rendered as rhythms (frequencies, durations, pauses and disruptions of behaviors, interactions with others, selfexpressions etc.). for example, as the leaked documents show, people’s call rhythms were also listened to and recorded: “product wants to use call log data (e.g.,duration/frequency/recency of incoming/outgoing calls/texts) to generate pymk suggestions following contact import”. these data are being monitored, measured, and categorized to turn this knowledge into advertising profiles and audience segments. this knowledge is produced in the ‘back-end’ of platforms’ infrastructures (in this case, as part of facebook’s ad auction) and stored in a dynamic database to then be reordered with rhythmedia at the ‘front-end’. the second concept rhythmedia is complementary and inspired by raymond williams’ planned flow and henri lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis. rhythmedia is about power, space and time and especially intentions behind ordering these elements in a particular way that benefits a specific media company. talking about the television, williams’ planned flow, is about creating a feeling of natural rather than a planned disruption; to blur the lines between content and advertisements but especially to create an uninterrupted mediated feeling; to tune into the television 24 hours a day. similarly, lefebvre argues that the “[p]roducers of the commodity of information know empirically how to utilise rhythms. they have cut up time; they have broken it up into hourly slices. the output (rhythm) changes according to intention and the hour” (lefebvre, 2004: 48). both williams and lefebvre, then, were interested in the way media companies orchestrate pieces of data to create a specific output – a desired rhythm according to intention and timing. the politics of the personal as the leaked facebook documents show, facebook also wanted to create a premium paid service called “instant personalization” which meant that people would experience personalization on other apps, websites and services. this was a default setting which meant that people were presented with this as the preferred way of using these spaces. the leaked documents reveal that during the d8: all things digital conference in 2010, walt mossberg asked zuckerberg “but shouldn’t people make the decision themselves to opt in on it?”. while mark zuckerberg’s answer was “no, so, i think that the, you know, making these products that people can share and that people have control, and that are simple to do both, is this balance, right and opt in versus opt out is one part of that balance, right…. whether it’s through social plug-ins or connect or instant personalization or whatever programs other companies come out with but i just think the world is moving in this direction where links are going to be designed more around people um, and i think that it’s going to be a really power direction”. this power that zuckerberg talks about is the ability to make interventions in people’s experiences based on ad auction practices of bidding “optimizing the user experience” as they call it. in their annual report from 2013, facebook indicated that the value they provide for marketers is to “dynamically determines the best available ad to show each user based on the combination of the user's unique attributes and the real-time comparison of bids from eligible ads”. bidding on facebook through ad auction is a key element in the way that facebook’s newsfeed ordering works and it consists of a combination of several factors: advertisers bid, estimated action rates and ad quality and relevance. as facebook argues in terms of the technologies they offer “an advanced user action prediction system that weighs many real-time updated features using automated learning techniques. our technology incorporates the estimated user action rate with both the marketer's bid and a user relevancy signal to select what we believe to be the optimal ads to show”. with the dynamic archive of rhythms created facebook’s processed listening practices, the company can know what would encourage people to engage more according to their past behaviours. personalization, then, is a powerful economic model because different people are influenced to engage in different ways people’s individual and personal past can be turned into a product to influence their future actions. conclusion as this paper shows, personalization is the optimized way to experience facebook it shapes people’s experience towards a desired rhythm that yields more value. the company conducts processed listening, measuring their behavior across multiple spaces to produce an archive with their profiles which then inform how they (re)order the platform’s interface. in this way, rather than developing a ‘one-size-fits-all’ type of experience, platforms’ optimization procedures are aimed to create custom and individual experiences that can be monetized by these platforms and the advertising industry that funds them. references author (2019). lefebvre, henri (2004) rhythmanalysis: space, time and everyday life. a&c black. solon, o., and farivar, c. (2019). leaked documents show facebook leveraged user data to fight rivals and help friends. nbc news. available at: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/leaked-documents-show-facebook-leveraged-userdata-fight-rivals-help-n1076986. williams, raymond (1974) television: technology and cultural form. new york routledge. the internal code in everything: kubernetes, optimization and power fenwick mckelvey concordia university, canada "user data has the capability to survive beyond the limits of our biological selves," concludes a soft-spoken narrator over a tranquil piano score. the quote comes near the end of a 2016 concept video made by google called the “selfish ledger”. meant as a provocation, the selfish ledger speculates that data is a “constantly evolving representation of who we are” that might be enriched and made goal-oriented. nudges and auto-recommendations could steer individuals and, in doing so, populations toward goals such as environmental sustainability. eventually, the aggregated knowledge could result in, as the video concludes, a “species-level understanding” allowing “emerging generations” to learn from their ancestors' choices. my presentation reads the selfish ledger to describe one form of networked optimization, what i refer to as kubernetics (a spelling of the word borrowed from google). kubernetics integrates data, cloud computing and behavioural theory to manage individuals at the scale of populations. my presentation contextualizes kubernetics part of the study of practices of power (rose, 1999) involving the internet. first, i provide a diagrammatics of the selfish ledger to highlight key features of kubernetics. second, i describe how google is building this selfish ledger through a review of its recent developments in infrastructure-as-service and cloud architectures. finally, i conclude by arguing that kubernetics is an important concept to understand the emerging logistical worlds resulting from the instrastructualization of platforms and helpful in criticizing the type of power constituted by platforms as a political condition. part one: the selfish ledger foucault described the panopticon as a “diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form... it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use” (foucault quoted in elmer, 2012). in the same way, google’s selfish ledger offers a diagram of kubernetics reduced to its ideal form. the video begins by juxtaposing biologist jean-baptiste lamarck’s outdated theories of genetics with personal data collected by google sensors and stored in its cloud, what the video calls a ledger. like genes, the video suggests, data is the “internal code in every living thing.” the ledger is “a constantly evolving representation” of the individual. keeping with the biological analogy, the video continues to suggest that every genetics is both individual and collective -using the evolutionary theorist bill hamilton’s idea of the selfish gene to suggest that individual behaviour simultaneously has collective consequences. indeed, genes succeed even at the expense of the individual. the same applies to data and the ledger when individual choices could be attuned to the common good, which google keeps vague beyond a short mention of health and climate. three qualities of kubernetics may be drawn from my description about: • the desire to create operating systems at planetary scale composed of the sensors, smartphones and cloud computing as seen in the video’s visual reliance on smartphones and data centers; • framing this operating system as a problem to be solved through calculation that evaluates every possible action against its optimal choice as when the video discusses how global health could be an end goal; • actualizing calculated optimalities through perpetual micro-transactions operating on individuals and on populations at once as in the video’s discussion of general system of smart manufacturing to produce goods targeted at individuals. these are characteristics of a mode of power operating not just in google, but increasingly in other technology firms that include famg (facebook, amazon, microsoft and google) and bat (baidu, alibaba, and tencent). each deploying and manage their operating systems to different ends (author, 2018). part two: from borg to kubernetes the second part of the presentation explores how kubernetics rebuilds the internet infrastructure through a close reading of google’s innovations in server operating systems. while google is best known for its android, chrome and experimental fuchsia operating systems, the company has more quietly invested in major advances in the design of server architecture from its secret google borg to its replacement, kubernetes. kubernetes, which attributes its name to the same greek word for helmsman that inspired norbert wiener, actualizes the selfish ledger discussed above. kubernetes, according to google, is a third iteration of server deployment, replacing traditional server deployment and virtualized deployment. today, kubernetes involves: • the built server infrastructure referred to as clusters of kubernetes nodes; • abstracted into a control plane that manages the cluster’s net computational capacity all managed by; • the kubernetes engine that includes a scheduler process making important decisions about the allocation of resources to; • containers or individual applications run on behalf of individual users. kubernetes is what runs the google cloud and actualizes speculative selfish ledger. google’s architecture: • operates at a global scale due to its novel kubernetes nodes and clusters architecture; • centrally managed through the kubernetes engine scheduler, making calculations of optimal performance; • deployed as separate instances of common programs, working at the individualspecies level. kubernetics, as a mode of power, thus can be understood both as an abstract machine as well as in the built world, the expression of cloud computing today. conclusion: practices of power and kubernetics my concept of kubernetics contributes to the study of the internet in relation to modes of power, most recently popularized by the concept of surveillance capitalism (zuboff, 2019). zuboff’s blockbuster book legitimates long-standing attention to the managerial capacities of the internet, better understood through the attention to the subjectivation properties of platforms-as-infrastructure (langlois & elmer, 2019), the lean platforms (srnicek, 2017; steinberg, 2019) as well as the internet as logistical media (rossiter, 2017; sadowski, 2019). with these contemporary concepts in mind, my presentation concludes by situating kubernetics and optimization within a longer and unfinished genealogy of modes of power. inquiries into these modes include foucault’s concepts of discipline and governmentality as well as deleuze’s notes on what he called a control society. their influence is an important part of early internet studies with wendy chun (2006), phil agre (1994), paul edwards (1996), and alexander galloway (2004) being notable examples of theoretical inquiries into the changing possibilities of power through digitally networked technologies. kubernetics is an important concept to understanding the logistical worlds now enabled by cloud computing as well as understand the next-generation of infrastructural battles. while kubernetics might be a dominant mode of power today, google is just one example of a player engaged in competition to expand the scale of its operating systems. references agre, p. e. (1994). surveillance and capture: two models of privacy. the information society, 10(2), 101–127. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.1994.9960162 author, 2018. chun, w. (2006). control and freedom: power and paranoia in the age of fiber optics. mit press. edwards, p. n. (1997). the closed world: computers and the politics of discourse in cold war america. mit press. elmer, g. (2012). panopticon—discipline—control. in k. ball, k. haggerty, & d. lyon (eds.), routledge handbook of surveillance studies (pp. 21–29). routledge. galloway, a. (2004). protocol: how control exists after decentralization. mit press. langlois, g., & elmer, g. (2019). impersonal subjectivation from platforms to infrastructures. media, culture & society, 41(2), 236–251. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443718818374 rose, n. s. (1999). powers of freedom: reframing political thought. cambridge university press. rossiter, n. (2017). imperial infrastructures and asia beyond asia: data centres, state formation and the territoriality of logistical media. the fibreculture journal, 29. https://doi.org/10.15307/fcj.29.220.2017 sadowski, j. (2019). when data is capital: datafication, accumulation, and extraction. big data & society, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718820549 srnicek, n. (2017). platform capitalism. polity. steinberg, m. (2019). the platform economy: how japan transformed the consumer internet. university of minnesota press. zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. publicaffairs. power and optimization in the internet architecture: the programmable infrastructure of 5g networks niels ten oever university of amsterdam & texas a&m university, netherlands & usa there is a seemingly full consensus among governments, telecommunication providers, and network equipment vendors about the societal progress, innovation, and economic growth that will be achieved through the implementation of 5g networking technology (selinis et al., 2018). the introduction of 5g will have a significant impact on the information architecture: it will alter the characteristics of how data is send, transported, filtered, and routed, as well as the parties that have access to it. concerns about 5g have been framed either in the realm of concerns about electromagnetic fields and the warnings from the us government about security risks resulting from implementing chinese networking equipment (kaska et al., 2019). in this paper, i explore the powershifts that come with sociotechnical and sociopolitical reconfiguration of the internet architecture that happens with the introduction of 5g. the internet architecture, with its principal design principles of openness, end-to-end, and permissionless innovation, was developed in response to the centralized control over communication systems by telecommunication providers (abbate, 1999; russell, 2014). with the deployment of the new network infrastructure for 5g, which likely will be the main means of network access in urban environments, telecommunication providers are introducing a new architectural paradigm to produce a highly configurable network with less complexity and higher bandwidths. different from what the name suggests, 5g is not an incremental development of 4g (andrews et al., 2014), but rather a sociotechnical and socio-political paradigm shift. this shift will empower telecommunication providers with significant controls over the network, and thus reinstate a telecommunication regime that bears resemblance to that of the pre-internet age. i build on science and technology studies and international relations to foreground how power and control are exercised through and over international information networks. i show how the sociotechnical imaginary of 5g, echoes a ‘rhetoric of the electronic sublime’ (j. w. carey & quirk, 1970) and a ‘nostalgia for the future’ (j. carey, 1989, p. 200) that legitimize the shift from industry self-regulation (sowell, 2012) towards an intergovernmental telecommunications governance regime (drake & wilson, 2008), that is being facilitated by telecommunications operators and equipment vendors. in order to do this, i operationalize my analysis through code ethnography (rosa, 2019), the qualitative and quantitative document analysis of technical standards, and process tracing of standards development in the 3gpp. i subsequently leverage the theoretical lenses of socio-technical imaginaries (jasanoff & kim, 2015) and metagovernance (torfing, 2016) to uncover ‘the agency of technology designers, policy-makers, and users as those interact in a distributed fashion, with technologies, rules, and regulations, leading to unintended consequences with systemic effects’ (epstein et al., 2016). the socio-political reordering of the network through the introduction of 5g finds its origins in institutional design. the current development of internet protocols happens at the internet engineering taskforce (ietf), where voluntary standards are developed through an open and participatory process. in contrast, telecommunications standards for mobile networks are developed by companies, national, and regional standards bodies that are organized in a membership organization called the 3rd generation partnership project (3gpp). after the standards are developed in 3gpp, they move on for official standardization in the united nations international telecommunications union (itu). the standards that are sanctioned by the itu are therefore obligatory standards. traditionally, the 3gpp provides the standards for the lower layers of communication networks on which the ietf would standardize the internet protocol (ip) to produce the network of networks, which we know as the internet. with the advent of 5g, member organizations of the 3gpp have made it clear they want to replace ip based networks to reduce complexity, increase control by network operators, and address ‘challenges with end-to-end encrypted content’ (sutton et al., 2016, p. 8). a shift in authority over internet standards development would increase the influence by nation-states over information networks since only countries have a vote in the itu, and itu standards are binding, not voluntary as the current internet standards are. this would alter the standards development process from the current participatory consensus process for open standards in the ietf, as well as the design of the internet. the current internet architecture is based on principles such as ‘decentralized control, edge user empowerment, and the sharing of resources’ (alvestrand, 2004), whereas telecom operators aim for less complexity and unified control planes (sutton et al., 2016). the socio-technical reconfiguration of the network is the result of the installation of a new dense grid of antennas and routers that are needed to service new frequencies in the radio spectrum. this infrastructure investment brings about a new generation of technologies such as ‘software defined networking’, ‘network function virtualization’, and ‘information centric networking’. the combination of these technologies produces a distributed network with centralized configuration functions that previously could not be implemented due to the reliance on expensive and inflexible hardware, instead of a programmable general-purpose infrastructure. the algorithmic optimization of the network, based on network data, can, for instance, be instrumentalized for the timely caching of content, targeted advertisement provision, as well as individual-level content filtering. aside from the shift in control over the standardization process to nation states, algorithmic optimization and the recentralized control over telecommunication networks will negatively impact the transparent, accountable, and configurable workings of the network for end users. references abbate, j. (1999). inventing the internet. the mit press. alvestrand, h. t. (2004). rfc3935—a mission statement for the ietf (rfc-series). ietf. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3935 andrews, j. g., buzzi, s., choi, w., hanly, s. v., lozano, a., soong, a. c. k., & zhang, j. c. (2014). what will 5g be? ieee journal on selected areas in communications, 32(6), 1065–1082. https://doi.org/10.1109/jsac.2014.2328098 carey, j. (1989). communication as culture: essays on media and culture. new york, ny: unwin hyman. carey, j. w., & quirk, j. j. (1970). the mythos of the electronic revolution. the american scholar, 395–424. drake, w. j., & wilson, i. i. i. (2008). governing global electronic networks: international perspectives on policy and power / ed. by william j. drake and ernest j. wilson, iii. mit press. epstein, d., katzenbach, c., & musiani, f. (2016). doing internet governance: practices, controversies, infrastructures, and institutions. internet policy review. https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/doing-internet-governance-practicescontroversies-infrastructures-and-0 jasanoff, s., & kim, s.-h. (2015). dreamscapes of modernity: sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power. university of chicago press. kaska, k., beckvard, h., & minárik, t. (2019). huawei, 5g and china as a security threat. nato cooperative cyber defence center for excellence (ccdcoe), 28. rosa, f. r. (2019). global internet interconnection infrastructure: materiality, concealment, and surveillance in contemporary communication [phd thesis]. american university. russell, a. l. (2014). open standards and the digital age. cambridge university press. selinis, i., katsaros, k., allayioti, m., vahid, s., & tafazolli, r. (2018). the race to 5g era; lte and wi-fi. ieee access, 6, 56598–56636. https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2018.2867729 sowell, j. h. (2012). empirical studies of bottom-up internet governance. proc. tprc. sutton, a., li, r., pillay esnault, p., foster, g., han, l., grasa gras, e., shepher, m., sheng, j., makhijani, k., grant, j., mohajer, m., lopez, d., day, j., chenhao, y., & yinyue, m. (2016). next generation protocols – market drivers and key scenarios. etsi. https://www.etsi.org/technologies/next-generation-protocols torfing, j. (2016). metagovernance. in handbook on theories of governance. edward elgar publishing. protective optimization technologies (pots) seda gürses technische universiteit delft, netherlands as software engineering shifted in the 2000s from packaged software and pcs to services and clouds, enabling distributed architectures that incorporate real-time feedback from users [kaldrack and leeker, 2015], digital systems became layers of technologies, metricized under the authority of objective functions. these functions define the optimization objectives of, among others, the selection of software features, the orchestration of cloud usage, and the design of user interaction and growth planning [author #4]. in contrast to traditional information systems, which treat the world as a static place to be known and focus on storage, processing, transport, and organizing information, systems produced under these logic of optimization consider the world as a place to sense and co-create. they seek maximum extraction of economic value by optimizing the capture and manipulation of people’s activities and environments [agre 1994; curry and phillips, 2003]. optimization systems apply a logic of operational control that focuses on outcomes rather than the process [poon, 2016]. while this introduces efficiency and allows systems to scale, they also pose social risks and harms such as social sorting, mass manipulation, majority dominance, and minority erasure. in the vocabulary of optimization, these systems create substantial externalities that arise due to the inadequacy of their objective functions to address the world. moreover, optimization systems hold great potential to shift power. the fast pace at which they manipulate users and environments obscures their effect, making it difficult to devise strategies to contest them. optimization also often leads to asymmetrical concentration of resources in the hands of a few companies which can collect large scale data and muster the computational power to process these in the pursuit of financial gain [hwang 2018, poon 2016]. this centralizes governance and reconfigures market structures, creating an imbalance of power that benefits a select portion of society. in response to the externalities and centralizing gist of optimization systems, we introduce protective optimization technologies (pots) which enable those affected by optimization systems to influence, alter, and contest these systems from the outside. pots build on the idea that optimization systems infer, induce and shape events in the real world to fulfill objective functions. pots analyze how events (or lack thereof) affect users and environments, then reconfigure these events to influence system outcomes, e.g., by altering the optimization constraints or poisoning the system inputs. we specifically conceive pots to address the negative externalities of optimization. externalities of optimization systems optimization systems capture and manipulate user behavior and environments under the logic of optimization. for instance, ride sharing applications such as uber, which rely on optimization to decide on the pricing of rides; navigation applications such as waze, which rely on optimization to propose best alternative routes to beat traffic congestion; and advertising networks, which rely on optimization to decide what is the best advertisement to show to a user. optimization systems result in the common negative outcomes that usually surface during deployment —that are typically (dis)regarded as ‘externalities’. externalities refer to situations when the actions of a group of agents, e.g., consumption, production and investment decisions, have “significant repercussions on agents outside of the group” [starrett, 2011]. the following are some of the common externalities intrinsic to optimization systems: disregard for non-users and environments. optimizing the service for targeted users results in costs to non-users and environments affected by the system. traffic and navigation services only consider ways to optimize the travel time of their users, exposing non-users to more congestion [lopez, 2018]. disregard for certain users. many optimization systems provide the most benefit to “high-value” population segments. for instance, in the popular augmented reality mobile game pokémon go the placement of pokémon and in-game resource stations rely on maps that heavily benefit players in urban areas, leaving players in rural areas and underserved neighborhoods starved of pokémon resources [huffaker, 2016]. externalization of exploration risks to users and environments. optimization systems benefit from exploration and experimentation to reduce risks associated with environmental unknowns. however, exploration often means that risks stemming from unknowns are pushed to users and their surroundings [bird et al. 2016]. distributional shift. optimization systems built on data from a particular area or “domain” may underperform or downright flounder when deployed in a different environment [sugiyama and lawrence, 2017], e.g., a voice recognition algorithm that is only trained on men’s voices fails to recognize women’s voices [rodgerand and pendharkar, 2004]. unfair distribution of errors. optimization algorithms may learn to maximize success by favoring the most likely option [hardt, 2014]. as a result, for example, minorities underrepresented in training may not perform well under deployment as in the case of facial recognition algorithms that misclassify faces of black women [buolamwini and t. gebru, 2018]. promotion of unintended actions to fulfill intended outcomes. systems may find shortcuts to their optimization goals, also known as “reward hacking” [amodei et al., 2016], e.g., electricity grid manager choosing to cause a blackout in order to save energy [simonite, 2018]. mass data collection. many optimization systems need massive amounts of data to function. the concentration of resources and power in data holders may enable more accurate inferences about populations. however, it exposes the individuals whose data is input to optimization systems to greater privacy risks. enter pots in response to these externalities, we introduce pots, technologies conceived to address the negative externalities of optimization when all other attempts to internalize the externalities of optimization systems fail. the externalities of optimizations could be better addressed using socio-legal means, however, we focus on technological approaches that can kick in when these alternatives return no results. pots are designed to be deployed by actors affected by the optimization system. as these actors directly experience the externalities, they have intimate knowledge of the system’s negative effects; they are in position to have a better view of their social utility than a system provider can model—because it is their own utility. lastly, pots do not rely on the incentives of the provider. pots are intended to eliminate the harms induced by the optimization system, or at least expose them. for example, uber optimizes the prices offered to riders and the wages offered to drivers. uber uses from both riders and drivers, as well as data from other sources such as online service providers, e.g., google for maps and data that they might collect using cookies. uber also receives offine data from parties like municipalities interested in promoting the use of uber to reduce costs of public transport. lastly, uber uses inputs from the market and regulators to evaluate the economic context in order to adjust wages and ride prices. uber ultimately uses these inputs and all the political and economic context in a combination of managerial and mathematical optimization to deliver outcomes to the environment: match riders to drivers and set ride prices. reports and studies demonstrate that these outcomes cause externalities: uber’s activity increases congestion and misuse of bike lanes, increases pollution, and decreases public support for transit. in the uber scenario, pots can be deployed by users and non-users with the goal of changing the phenomena captured by uber. these can come in different forms: by changing the inputs of the users to the system (e.g. drivers can simultaneously turn off the app to induce surge pricing) or by changing the online or offline signals gathered by uber (e.g., mayors changing the city urban planning), and could be further reinforced by affecting the market (e.g., by changing regulations or mandating salary increases). references i. kaldrack and m. leeker. there is no software, there are just services: introduction. there is no software, there are just services, 2015. author #4 p. e. agre. surveillance and capture: two models of privacy. the information society, 1994. m. r. curry and d. phillips. surveillance as social sorting: privacy, risk, and automated discrimination. in privacy and the phenetic urge: geodemographics and the changing spatiality of local practice, 2003. m. poon. corporate capitalism and the growing power of big data: review essay, 2016. t. hwang. computational power and the social impact of artificial intelligence. arxiv preprint arxiv:1803.08971, 2018. d. a. starrett. economic externalities. eolss, 2011. s. lopez. on one of l.a.’s steepest streets, an app-driven frenzy of spinouts, confusion and crashes. los angeles times, april 2018. c. huffaker. there are fewer pokémon go locations in black neighborhoods, but why? the miami herald, july 2016. s. bird, s. barocas, k. crawford, and h. wallach. exploring or exploiting? social and ethical implications of autonomous experimentation in ai. in fat, 2016. m. sugiyama, n. d. lawrence, a. schwaighofer, et al. dataset shift in machine learning. the mit press, 2017. j.a.rodgerand, p.c.pendharkar. a field study of the impact of gender and user’s technical experience on the performance of voice-activated medical tracking application. international journal of human-computer studies, 2004. m. hardt. how big data is unfair? medium, september 2014. j. buolamwini and t. gebru. gender shades: intersectional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification. in conference on fairness, accountability and transparency, 2018. d. amodei, c. olah, j. steinhardt, p. f. christiano, j. schulman, and d. mané. concrete problems in ai safety. corr, abs/1606.06565, 2016. t. simonite. when bots teach themselves to cheat. wired, august 2018 microsoft word zaugg-the hegemony of keyboard defaults-the hegemony of keyboard defaults.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): zaugg, i. a., reeve, j. (2021, october). the hegemony of keyboard defaults. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the hegemony of keyboard defaults isabelle a. zaugg data science institute, institute for comparative literature and society, columbia university jonathan reeve department of english and comparative literature, columbia university when friedrich nietzsche started writing on a typewriter, a 52-key brass hansen writing ball, his correspondents noticed that his writing style changed dramatically. as one biographer stated, "the assumed immediacy of the written word—seemingly connected in a direct way to the thoughts and ideas of the author through the physical movement of the hand—was displaced by the flow of disconnected letters on the page, one as standardized as the other" (emden 2005). the effects of this early writing machine are found throughout his work of this period, a brief one, as the typewriter eventually broke. on one page, the first line reads "melsdndrgilsthczmqnmoy" (ibid.). while these effects are legible in the early days of keyed writing machines, they remain largely hidden in our own. the computer keyboard, even more than the hansen writing ball, conceals a hegemonic mechanism that silently shapes our writing. no single tool is more fundamental to writing today—and more unexamined—than the computer keyboard. it is crucial that we examine this physical means of production of cognitive/virtual labor—one whose power is elided by a sense that it sits passively in the background of our writing, rather than shaping it. in this paper we critically evaluate the impact of keyboard defaults, both on english speakers (for whom qwerty was originally designed), as well as speakers of other languages. we use data from keyman, a free source of downloadable keyboards that support more than 2000 languages, in conjunction with kornai’s digital vitality index (2013) and zaugg’s 2017 ethiopic case study, to investigate how low-resource language speakers work to make communication possible using current keyboard technologies. kornai’s work argues that less than 5% of languages will achieve digital vitality while 95% or more face digital extinction. his analysis utilizes wikipedia size as the key marker of languages’ digital use. we argue that due to the culturally-specific nature of the encyclopedia model (wadhwa & fung 2014), as well as patterns in multilingual societies of using english and other colonial/imperial languages within educational and professional realms (zaugg 2017), wikipedia is a poor indicator of digital vitality for lowresource languages. we argue that patterns in the downloading of language-specific keyman keyboards provides technologists’ insight into “hidden” digital vitality, such as language use in pms and social media, among language communities that would benefit from increased digital support. most of us in the west never consider that the standard qwerty key layout, i.e. the staggered key design and the selection of keys available, is anything but the received, traditional means of text input. as such, keyboard/device manufacturers wield a unique form of power: they dictate the kind of words we can create. they further decide, however unconsciously, the motions our fingers take when we write. the traditional qwerty layout places the most frequently-used english letters far apart from one another, and from the typist’s home row. this was designed to prevent mechanical typewriters from jamming, but serves no practical purpose on modern keyboards (let alone mobile devices). this design choice, along with the staggered key layout inherited from typewriters, is responsible for repetitive stress injuries that could be reduced by improved ergonomics. similarly, characters like the underscore (_), carat (^) and tilde (~) existed to add underlines or accents to characters on a typewriter, when used in conjunction with the backspace key, but have lost those meanings on computer keyboards. meanwhile, other frequently-used english characters, such as the em-dash (—) and curly quotation marks (“”), can only be accessed via modifier keys or software layers. qwerty may even shape the meaning of words that we type (jasmin & casasanto 2012). furthermore, considering the global reach of qwerty against the backdrop of language diversity, and particularly the approximately 300 non-latin scripts in existence, the hegemony of default qwerty keyboards is a manifestation of the ongoing impacts of the colonial legacy within digital technologies. the challenges that english-speakers face when using qwerty are magnified for those using a qwerty-keyboard to write other languages. typing in latin-based languages requires extra steps to utilize characters outside the basic english character set. for other writing systems, bending qwerty to fit one’s needs often results in drastic measures. some users capitalize on visual similarities between latin characters and their own writing system, such as arabic written in “arabizi.” in other cases, such as amharic—ethiopia’s national language, written in the ethiopic script—qwerty defaults result in roughshod latin transliteration, i.e. approximating the sound of a word in the latin alphabet. while an inventive workaround for those lacking access to an ethiopic keyboard, this practice has negative ramifications. first, it is difficult to read transliterated text, as no widely-used standardized spelling exists. this also encumbers “search” because of the many possible variations in spelling. these variations are compounded by the fact that amharic includes sounds that do not exist in english and are therefore not readily represented using latin characters. furthermore, despite the characterization of ethiopic as a syllabic script in western scholarship, ethiopic characters in fact embody multiple levels of meaning, including a religious and numeric meaning associated with the ancient ethiopian orthodox tewahedo church. transliteration into latin depletes amharic words of their multiple layers of meaning (zaugg 2020). a non-traditional content analysis of facebook comments zaugg conducted in 2017 revealed that more than half of those written in amharic are transliterated into the latin script, highlighting the large impact that gaps in ethiopic keyboard access and use are having in the digital sphere. a further “cost” of qwerty defaults is a switch to english, a second/additional language for many ethiopians, as many prefer to type in english to transliteration. as such, qwerty keyboards are contributing to patterns of online (and likely downstream effects offline) language shift away from amharic and towards english, as well as potentially degrading young people’s literacy in their native script due to disuse. this form of subtle language imperialism is happening across the globe. furthermore, the knock-on effects of qwerty extend beyond the digital sphere in the form of “logics” that impact policy. for example, in 1991 ethiopia’s regional government of oromia declared that oromo would henceforth be written in latin characters rather than ethiopic. while widely recognized as a political move to distance ethnic oromos from other ethiopic language communities, one official justification given was that latin characters are better supported by digital technologies (yimam 1992). despite the persistence of keyboard defaults, the future of keyboards holds some potential for change. as smartphone use overtakes use of traditional computers, we may see the proliferation of alternative keyboard layouts, such as colemak and dvorak, as well as software keyboards which are more customizable. hope also lies in the potential for reimagining physical keyboards, as in small-run keyboards by optimus and nemeio, which allow users to program led/e-ink labels for each key. keyman download statistics also point to digitally-active language communities (including a robust amharic-speaking community) that are seeking out and also developing keyboards that fit their scripts and languages, despite in many cases a lack of sufficient support from major tech companies. we hope our investigation will lead to greater critical consideration of keyed computer input methods, as well as innovations that serve linguistic equity, humane values, and independence. references emden, christian. nietzsche on language, consciousness, and the body. university of illinois press, 2005. jasmin, kyle, and daniel casasanto. “the qwerty effect: how typing shapes the meanings of words.” psychonomic bulletin & review 19, no. 3 (june 1, 2012): 499–504. kornai, andrás. “digital language death.” plos one 8, no. 10 (october 22, 2013): e77056. wadhwa, kul, and howie fung. “converting western internet to indigenous internet: lessons from wikipedia.” innovations: technology, governance, globalization 9, no. 3–4 (july 1, 2014): 127–35. yimam, baye. “(ethiopian) writing system.” translated by samuel kinde and minga negash. addis ababa university, 1992. zaugg, isabelle a. “digital inequality and language diversity: an ethiopic case study.” in digital inequalities in the global south, edited by massimo ragnedda and anna gladkova, 247–67. global transformations in media and communication research a palgrave and iamcr series. palgrave macmillan, 2020. zaugg, isabelle a. “digitizing ethiopic: coding for linguistic continuity in the face of digital extinction.” doctor of philosophy in communication, american university, 2017. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): cocq, c. (2022, november). data colonialism and data sovereignty in indigenous spaces. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. data colonialism and data sovereignty in indigenous spaces coppélie cocq humlab, umeå university this paper discusses a topic of prioritized importance in contemporary indigenous research: data sovereignty. contemporary modes of collection and use of data have reactualized debates about colonialism. couldry and mejias (2019) describe data use in term of “data colonialism”, i.e. ”a form of fundamental appropriation (greene & joseph, 2015; thatcher et al., 2016), or extraction (mezzadra & neilson, 2017) of resources” (p. 338). indigenous data sovereignty “the right of indigenous peoples to govern the collection, ownership, and application of data about indigenous communities, peoples, lands, and resources” (rainie et al., 2019, p. 301) is to be understood in relation to efforts towards self-determination. it is also intended to be a means for preventing misuse of data and for ensuring trustful and respectful relationships between research institutions and indigenous communities. in the light of the historical and cultural contexts in which we conduct our research, we need to revise data collection practices that risk contributing to a reiteration or an amplification of colonial practices and perspectives. for instance, collection of data is often initiated by authorities, institutions, or research groups, while the participation and influence of indigenous community members are too often limited. efforts toward ethically valid and cultural-sensitive modes of data use are taking shape in indigenous research, calling for an increased awareness about the topic among scholars within the interdisciplinary field of digital research (e.g. cocq 2022). the role of cultural and social contexts in the design, use, and adaptation of technologies has been emphasized in previous research (douglas, 1987; nissenbaum, 2001; noble 2018; powell & aitken, 2011), and scholars within the field of indigenous research have also pointed at the importance of the historical context, for instance considering the legacy of colonialism (axelsson & storm mienna 2020; rainie et al. 2019), and the impact of colonization on research (kuokkanen, 2008; tuhiwai smith 2008). this paper suggests critical perspectives for sustainable digital research in relation to indigenous research, more particularly regarding collection and management of data. this presentation takes its point of departure in sápmi, the traditional area of settlement of the indigenous sámi people, and in ongoing research and initiatives in the area (more specifically, norway, sweden and finland). these include strengthening modes of co-production of knowledge, developing ethical guidelines for research with sámi communities, and advancing indigenous data sovereignty. the international research context, not least indigenous research in canada, new zealand and australia constitutes the framework for contextualizing topical debates and issues in sápmi. first, i will approach and examine practices and principles of data collection, data management and data curation through the lens of indigenous research. what are the implications of surveillance culture (lyon 2017) and surveillance capitalism (zuboff 2019) in indigenous contexts? how is ownership of data discussed and applied in our contemporary research contexts? what examples of best practices can be found in sápmi? second, i will discuss examples of digital initiatives in curatorship of indigenous traditional knowledge, for instance the labelling of cultural heritage, use of metadata and access to library and archive collections. current debates and ongoing works about ethical guidelines and about the application of fair principles (findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reuse of digital assets) and care principles1 (collective benefits, authority to control, responsibility, and ethics) will be central in this discussion. finally, i will argue for how bringing together principles from indigenous research and digital research/digital humanities can help us to develop sustainable research practices and to recognize the plurality of the cultural values, perspectives, and ethics that characterize our research fields, i.e. indigenous research and digital research. references axelsson, p., & storm mienna, c. (2020) the challenge of indigenous data in sweden. in walter, m., kukutai, t., carroll, s. r., & rodriguez-lonebear, d. (eds.), indigenous data sovereignty and policy. routledge. cocq, c. (2022) revisiting the digital humanities through the lens of indigenous studies—or how to question the cultural blindness of our technologies and practices. journal of the association for information science and technology. 2022, vol. 73, (2) : 333-344 1 https://www.gida-global.org/care couldry, n., & mejias, u. a. (2019). data colonialism: rethinking big data's relation to the contemporary subject. television & new media, 20(4), 336–349. https://doi.org/10.1177/15274764 18796632 douglas, s. j. (1987). inventing american broadcasting, 1899–1922. johns hopkins university press. greene, d. m., & joseph, d. (2015). the digital spatial fix. triple c, 13(2), 223–247. https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v13i2.659 kuokkanen, r. (2008b). reshaping the university: responsibility, indigenous epistemes, and the logic of the gift. university of british columbia press. lyon, d. (2017). surveillance culture: engagement, exposure, and ethics in digital modernity. international journal of communication, 11, 824–842. mezzadra, s., & neilson, b. (2017). on the multiple frontiers of extraction: excavating contemporary capitalism. cultural studies, 31(2–3), 185–204. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2017. 1303425 nissenbaum, h. (2001). how computer systems embody values. computer, 34(3), 118– 120. noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york university press. powell, t., & aitken, l. p. (2011). encoding culture: building a digital archive based on traditional ojibwe teachings. in a. jewell & a. earhart (eds.), the american literature scholar in the digital age. university of michigan press. rainie, s. c., kukutai, t., walter, m., figueroa-rodrígez, o. l., walker, j., & axelsson, p. (2019). issues in open data: indigenous data sovereignty. in t. davies & b. walker (eds.), the state of open data: histories and horizons (pp. 300–319). african minds thatcher, j., o'sullivan, d., & mahmoudi, d. (2016). data colonialism through accumulation by dispossession: new metaphors for daily data. environment and planning: society and space, 34 (6), 990–1006. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775816633195 tuhiwai smith, l. (2008). decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. zed books. zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. public affairs. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): murray, j. (2021, october). sell your cards to who: non-fungible tokens and digital trading card games. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. sell your cards to who: non-fungible tokens and digital trading card games jack murray university of central florida the remediation of analog trading card games (tcg) into digital platforms troubles notions of ownership and highlights the flows of capital through the platforms of trading card games (altice, 2014; booth, 2015; murray, 2020; švelch, 2016; trammell, 2019). in 2020, doctor who: worlds apart was announced as an officially licensed digital tcg and marketed digital collectable items for doctor who fans with an associated card game. the website boasts that, in contrast to other digital trading card games, players will maintain ownership over their cards through the implementation of non-fungible tokens (nfts) as a solution to ownership in digital card games (doctor who worlds apart, 2021). this paper examines the implications of nfts in digital card games via the material histories of tcgs to discuss the way that digital tcgs accelerate the extraction of capital from their player communities. nfts became the current blockchain related buzzword following the $69 million sale of a work from the digital artist beeple at christie’s. beeple’s success, combined with a sudden reliance on digital spaces for visibility, the art world latched onto nfts. many popular artist have been quick to convert their work into nfts drawing ire from the online art community (charlesworth, 2021; herbert, 2021). to describe them briefly, nfts are a serialized numerical token that references a specific point of data stored within a blockchain network. in the case of the $69 million beeple, the purchaser bought only a token that verifies their ownership of the digital work using the ethereum blockchain network. one of the larger discussions going on is the ethics behind creating nft verified digital art, essentially creating “crypto-art” where one person can verify their ownership via the blockchain ecosystem. as such, many of the same criticisms of crypto-currency are now being leveraged against nfts and tokenized digital art. this includes pointing out the catastrophic environmental repercussions associated with blockchain and the inherent volatility crypto due to the lack of regulation (rauchs et al., n.d.; swanson, 2021). nfts also come with issues relating to artist exploitation from the costs associated with registering tokens and twitter bots that allow anyone to generate an ownership token for posted content (marshall, 2021; palmer, 2021; purtill, 2021). nfts emerge from two parallel vectors. first, as attempts to recapture the perceived authenticity of material objects. second, as features of a neoliberal techno-fantasy focused on the extraction and accumulation of value based on the ownership and authenticity of digital commodities. nfts have been lurking in the background for some time now, but as they become more popular game developers are attempting to capitalize on the fervor associated with the technology. traditionally, the physicality of trading cards has been a large draw for trading card communities. this phenomenon can be traced to the late 19th century where the popularity of professional baseball and photography resulted in the creation of baseball cards to market products ranging from cigarettes to gum. their popularity exploded in post-war 1950s and continued to grow into a thriving industry. the release of richard garfield’s magic: the gathering in 1993 took the concept of trading cards and expanded it by utilizing cards in a game that collectors could play making the cards valuable both as collectors’ items and as components of the game. similarly, the pokémon tcg, released in 1996, leverages the popularity of the pokémon video games and television show making them even more valuable to fans. mtg and the pokémon tcg popular enough to support an industry of local and online markets for individual cards or packs and venues for hosting events. the viability of these businesses relies on physical ownership and artificial scarcity of cards based on collector popularity and power level within the game(bosch, 2000). worlds apart markets itself as using nfts to give the illusion of ownership. the claim is that nfts allow the items to exist externally to the worlds apart platform, buying into the techno-libertarian dream of a decentralized system for controlling capital (galloway, 2020). ownership in worlds apart is used to assuage player’s fears about shifts in the metagame that render their cards worthless. while the ability to buy and sell individual cards does offer some ability for players to cash out, the model relies on the players shouldering the larger part of the risk. this however ignores how the value of trading cards is established within the community. it also ignores the immense speculation bubble where value is entirely predicated on the perception of value and the ability to verify ownership in a technological system centralized by virtue of the protocols that allow it to function (chun, 2008; galloway, 2004). this means that if the database that tracks the cards, the company in charge of the database, or the worlds apart platform disappear, then access, proof of ownership, and subsequently the value of the digital items evaporates. further, if the game is not successful then any cards owned by players are devoid of value to begin with. digital trading card games represent an idealized version of capital extraction through nfts. the value of cards in worlds apart relies on the continued existence of the game and the unnamed publisher. any capital put into the platform becomes trapped within, allowing it to be exploited for maximum value with minimum output. many of these issues exist within other digital platforms ranging from trading card games and beyond. examining worlds apart highlights the relationships between capital, trading card games, and networked technologies to complicate our approaches to designing, critiquing, and engaging with these different objects. references altice, n. (2014). the playing card platform. http://analoggamestudies.org/2014/11/theplaying-card-platform/ booth, p. (2015). game play: paratextuality in contemporary board games. bloomsbury publishing usa. bosch, r. a. (2000). optimal card-collecting strategies for magic: the gathering. the college mathematics journal, 31(1), 15–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/07468342.2000.11974103 charlesworth, j. j. (2021, march 17). why the artworld loves to hate nft art. artreview. https://artreview.com/why-the-artworld-loves-to-hate-nft-art-beeple-christiesgrimes/ chun, w. h. k. (2008). control and freedom: power and paranoia in the age of fiber optics. mit press. doctor who—worlds apart. (2021). https://doctorwho-worldsapart.com/ galloway, a. r. (2004). protocol: how control exists after decentralization. mit press. galloway, a. r. (2020, october 21). massumi’s matheme. http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/massumis-matheme herbert, m. (2021, march 10). how the nft craze reveals the artworld’s snobbism. artreview. https://artreview.com/how-nft-craze-reveals-artworld-snobbism/ marshall, c. (2021, march 12). nfts are generating huge paydays for some artists, others feel under siege. polygon. https://www.polygon.com/22327806/nft-artists-onlinetheft-non-fungible-token murray, j. (2020). more than just the table: analog games as computational platforms. international conference on the foundations of digital games, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1145/3402942.3402974 palmer, r. (2021, march 9). rj palmer on twitter. twitter. https://twitter.com/arvalis/status/1369245588349464579 purtill, j. (2021, march 15). artists keep finding their work on nft auction sites—and they never agreed to the sale. https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-03-16/nftsartists-report-their-work-is-being-stolen-and-sold/13249408 rauchs, m., blandin, a., dek, a., & yue, w. (n.d.). cambridge bitcoin electricity consumption index (cbeci). retrieved april 9, 2021, from https://cbeci.org/ švelch, j. (2016). platform studies, computational essentialism, and magic: the gathering. http://analoggamestudies.org/2016/07/platform-studies-computationalessentialism-and-magic-the-gathering/ swanson, t. (2021, february 14). bitcoin and other pow coins are an esg nightmare. great wall of numbers. https://www.ofnumbers.com/2021/02/14/bitcoin-and-other-powcoins-are-an-esg-nightmare/ trammell, a. (2019, march 11). analog games and the digital economy. analog game studies. http://analoggamestudies.org/2019/03/analog-games-and-the-digital-economy/ selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): deschine-parkhurst, n., and george, a. (2022, november). infrastructures of care in ndn spaces: mutual aid as a form of radical relationality. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. infrastructures of care in ndn spaces: mutual aid as a form of radical relationality nicholet deschine-parkhurst arizona state university alaina sarah george arizona state university introduction there is a growing field of research on native american and indigenous peoples contemporary uses of social media platforms for justice and liberation. the internet and social media platforms afford native americans in the united states the ability to connect with others, organize, and mobilize for social justice beyond geographical boundaries and across the native diaspora. these causes are related to land, culture, and self-determination, as observed through idle no more (raynauld, richez, & boudreau morris, 2018; barker, 2015), the #nodapl resistance (risling baldy, 2021; deschine parkhurst, 2021), the missing and murdered indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit (mmiwg2s) movement (moeke-pickering, cote-meek, & pegoraro, 2018), and mutual aid, the focus of our study. the ability to amplify and disseminate information for causes is uniquely important for native americans in the u.s. because native peoples are highly dispersed living both on reservation lands and in the native diaspora while maintaining deep cultural ties. decolonizing methodologies decolonizing methodologies are a fundamental centering of indigenous peoples and indigenous knowledges (smith, 2012). decolonizing methodologies are political in nature because it involves a “’knowing-ness of the colonizer’ and a recovery of ourselves, an analysis of colonialism, and a struggle for self-determination” (smith, 2012, p. 40). we are reminded that, “decolonization is not accountable to settlers, or settler futurity. decolonization is accountable to indigenous sovereignty and futurity” (2012, p.35). at its core, decolonization is interested in the “repatriation of indigenous land and life” (tuck & yang, 2012, p.1). settler colonialism in the u.s. is also gendered, and decolonizing work must also address the heteropatriarchy (arvin, tuck, & morrill, 2013). and so, decolonizing work should inherently be approached from an indigenous feminist perspective. indigenous feminist approach in internet and social media studies, decolonizing research that takes an indigenous feminist research approach unsettles the dominant theories of social media use and helps center our focus on the possibilities that indigenous peoples already imagine for themselves whether it be to strengthen their communities and culture, to work towards resistance and decolonization, or to move them towards resurgence and beyond (carlson & frazer, 2020; duarte & vigil-hayes, 2021; deschine parkhurst, 2021). duarte and vigil-hayes describe that a practice of digital indigenous feminist approach “is about leveraging a decolonial or anticolonial critique of icts toward creating alternative structures – both tangible and intangible – that allows for the rapid and secure dissemination of information and knowledge for the benefit of marginalized peoples, centering the goals of indigenous women and girls” (2021, p.93). to further illustrate, when researchers practice decolonial indigenous feminist ethics of care the relationality and deep work they’re engaging in can help to build research teams with domain experts, develop thorough research methods, curate rich and robust datasets, and interpret otherwise seemingly non-relevant results. sa'ah naagháí bik'eh hózhóón we are two diné scholars, and approach this research with the diné emphasis on k’é and sa'ah naagháí bik'eh hózhóón. sa'ah naagháí bik'eh hózhóón is diné epistemology, a complex system of knowledge encompassing two paradigms: beauty way (hózhóójii-female) and protection way (naayée’ k’egho-male), with hózhó at its core. (nez, 2018). it is important to understand these concepts as the heart of the matter is the ability of the diné to act in ways that respect the concepts of diné epistemologies despite the capitalist-hetopatriachrical society in which they find themselves today. and the ability of diné to continue those traditions forward to a future which remains indigenous. within the diné ways of knowing, knowledge is an iterative, collective process. traditionally there was social knowledge sharing and confirmation of knowledge. that is what this process is here, it’s taking information and asking questions to make sure that what is written is faithful to what happened. infrastructure and radical relationality the development of infrastructure (both physical and non-physical) on tribal reservation lands is costly and complicated by the trust status of the lands and federal indian law/federal indian policy. this translates to official progress being slow going. outside companies and entities at times offer to assist but fail to take the time to understand the complicated history between tribes and the us, and the federal, state, and tribal policies which create complex conditions to implement new initiatives. this creates spaces where people can fall through gaps trying to exist in a world that was thrust upon them. this is where the internet and radical relationality (estes, yazzie, denetdale, & correia, 2021) become extremely important to both individuals and communities who are struggling. diné, and members of other tribes, have extensive knowledge of the areas from which they come, the needs, and the people. they are extremely capable of utilizing all of this knowledge to pursue meaningful and useful interventions in their communities. the internet and social media platforms are sites whereby native communities are advocating for the known needs of the people in their communities and implementing efforts of mutual aid. within navajo communities, social media is used as an infrastructure of care to facilitate mutual aid, a form of radical relationality. this is observed as grassroots organizations fundraising for resources to be directly distributed to native peoples. references arvin, m., tuck, e., & morrill, a. (2013). decolonizing feminism: challenging connections between settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy. feminist formations, 8-34. barker, a. j. (2015). ‘a direct act of resurgence, a direct act of sovereignty’: reflections on idle no more, indigenous activism, and canadian settler colonialism. globalizations, 12(1), 43–65. carlson, b., & frazer, r. (2020). “they got filters”: indigenous social media, the settler gaze, and a politics of hope. si: marginality and social media, p. 1-11. deschine parkhurst, n.a. (2021). from #mniwiconi to #standwithstandingrock: how the #nodapl movement disrupted physical and virtual spaces and brought indigenous liberation to the forefront of people’s minds across the world. in b. carlson & j. berglund (eds.), indigenous peoples rise up: the global ascendency of social media activism (pp. 32-47). rutgers university press. duarte, m.e., & vigil-hayes, m. (2021). how we connect: an indigenous feminist approach to digital methods. in b. carlson & j. berglund (eds.), indigenous peoples rise up: the global ascendency of social media activism (pp. 93-111). rutgers university press. estes, n., yazzie, m., denetdale, j. n., & correia, d. (2021). red nation rising: from bordertown violence to native liberation. pm press. moeke-pickering, t., cote-meek, s., & pegoraro, a. (2018). understanding the ways missing and murdered indigenous women are framed and handled by social media users: media international australia. nez, v. (2018). diné epistemology sa’ah naaghái bik’eh hózhóón [doctoral dissertation, university of new mexico]. unm digital repository. richez, e., raynauld, v., agi, a., &amp; kartolo, a. b. (2020). unpacking the political effects of social movements with a strong digital component: the case of #idlenomore in canada: social media + society, 6(2), 1–13. risling baldy, c. (2021). radical relationality in the native twitterverse: indigenous women, indigenous feminisms, and (re)writing/(re)righting resistance on #nativetwitter. in b. carlson & j. berglund (eds.), indigenous people rise up: the global ascendancy of social media activism (pp. 125-139). rutgers university press. tuck, e. (2013). commentary: decolonizing methodologies 15 years later. alternative: an international journal of indigenous peoples, 9(4), 365-372. tuck, e., & yang, k.w. (2012). decolonization is not a metaphor. decolonization: indigeneity, education, & society, 1(1), p.1-40. selected papers of #aoir2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers tartu, estonia / 18-21 october 2017 suggested citation (apa): iliadis, a. and pedersen, i. (2017, october 18-21). the fabric of digital life: building an internet archive for embodied technology. paper presented at aoir 2017: the 18th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. tartu, estonia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the fabric of digital life: building an internet archive for embodied technology andrew iliadis temple university isabel pedersen ontario tech university research on wearables, quantified self, and the self-tracking movement has grown in recent years (nafus, 2016; neff and nafus, 2016; pedersen, 2013; young, 2012), leading to novel insights about our intimate relationships with emerging forms of tactile, embodied computing. researchers have discovered valuable applications for wearables in diverse domains of activity, from libraries and archives (bruno, 2015) to theater and performance (kozel, 2008), and fashion (ryan, 2014). wearable technologies have also risen in popularity among businesses and publics—vandrico’s wearable devices database, powered by deloitte, currently lists over 455 devices from 314 companies and a google ngram viewer search for the term “wearables” shows use of the word skyrocketing in popularity since the 1990s. while wearables have quickly become a highly visible form of embodied technology, wearables often act as misnomers that incorrectly identify alternative embeddable technologies (items like prosthetics) and their myriad processes or exclude nontraditional forms of wearables such as ingestibles and implantables (iliadis and pedersen, 2016). embodied technologies are body-centered and body-oriented technologies that provide mechanisms for control to improve areas of life, activity, and production, from health and fitness to security and labor. for example, prison monitoring ankle bracelets are wearables even though they are rarely framed as such and items like smart pills are emerging as ingestible forms of computing. building on previous research on embodied forms of technology and technological knowledge (ahmad and lee, 2016; boer et al., 2015; bucksbarg and carter, 2012; mainzer, 2012; riva, 2008; rosenberger, 2012; sorensen and levold, 1992; watson, 2013), we use the term embodied technology to refer to types of embodied computing, including wearables, ingestibles, implantables, and embeddables that are used to augment aspects of life. we developed the fabric of digital life (fabric) to track the development of embodied technologies and to create a space for realizing narratives around technological progress and society. fabric is asking: how can we help the public understand and track these embodied technologies as they grow in importance? fabric is an online digital archive for storing media related to embodied technologies — things like patents, news releases, instructional videos, and art. the archive allows users to track, catalog, and view artifacts related to human-computer interaction platforms, designs, and ideas, including images, videos, texts, websites, and datasets that document emerging trends. curated sub-collections are hosted on the archive that relate to a variety of themes, including ethics, surveillance, and vulnerable populations. the underlying motivation is to provide a tool for illustrating the diverse, shared origins of embodied technology platforms, separate from profit-driven inventors and companies. a secondary motivation was to provide a space for thinking about social issues and embodied technologies. the archive allows users to browse keywords (“smart watch” for example) and through a customized metadata scheme users can collect and catalogue embodied technologies and the discourse that surrounds them. currently, our hope is that researchers who have interests in embodied technologies will begin to use the archive, add to it, and help build the specially curated collections that are inside to highlight the various ways that embodied technologies stand to impact society and culture. inventions do not emerge statically, supplied solely with the inventor’s intent; they emerge within a vast context of overlapping texts that circulate with multiple motives. the archive attempts to capture, annotate, and build a searchable collection of media about embodied technology while being cognizant of the rhetorical motives that inform them. the archive preserves the discourse(s) surrounding embodied technology by cataloguing the materials related to objects along several phases of their existence: from the first time an idea is proposed in fiction, capturing the cultural imaginary, to an inventor’s proposal to make an object a reality, through to the object’s emergence in the market. fabric calls for a recasting of invention as a rhetorical process by investigating the discourses that mediate the framing of our understanding of embodied technology. to illuminate the processes by which this takes place, the archive plots the rhetorical connections that exist between the collected artifacts. for example, the persuasive tactics used by google to convince the public to embrace googleglass over a smartphone is illuminated through the cataloguing of the social media, promotional events, and youtube videos google employed to do so. in this way, the archive serves as a digital repository of the rhetorical processes that drive the emergence, evolution, and adoption of embodied technologies. figure 1 fabric of digital life the front page (figure 1) contains access to fabric’s browse and search features, a contribution page where users can make recommendations for new additions to the archive, a contact page, and links to some of the curated material that fabric houses. currently the archive holds just over 1450 artifacts; corporate and research videos, mostly describing scientific breakthroughs and promotions of emerging tech, proliferate. clips from feature films, which underscore primarily speculative, fictional portrayals of futuristic technologies, hold a close second in terms of volume. these serve to demonstrate the inclusion of fictional concepts in contemporary understandings of technology. journal and magazine articles are also catalogued with prominence for their descriptions of emerging embodied technologies. there are also entries in art, audio lectures, corporate papers, drawings, fashion, government publications, interactive installations, songs, performance art, commercials, websites, and a wide variety of youtube clips. the project is committed to growing these collections. one exemplary case study in fabric that demonstrates the future potential of the project focuses on exoskeletons. digital artefacts and digital representations of artefacts referencing exoskeletons are catalogued as they appear across multiple mediums. in this instance, the archive serves as a repository of the evolution of rhetoric as it pertains to the invention from the first announcement of its imaginings, through to its ultimate market proliferation. as the archive tracks the evolution of an artefact by cataloguing its various digital representations, we may better understand the influence that a past narrative has played in the motivation and adoption of future inventions. working toward this as a primary objective, the archive logs metadata in relation to each artefact. the metadata is used to describe each resource, plot rhetorical connections, and allow for ease in retrieval. one such collected attribute is the persuasive intent of an artefact. figure 2 timeline fabric is organized using collectiveaccess (ca) infrastructure. ca software is used for describing objects and allows users to build archives per required specifications. ca runs on any web browser and is integrated with library standards including dublin core. the software is customizable through a backend interface or custom programming. plugins are used to create timelines (figure 2). our intention was to build fabric with software that is easy-to-use for front end users while providing programming support for back end content management. the main browsing keywords on the fabric home page include wearables, implantables, ingestibles, and bionic devices. users can browse the archive using our further customized metadata categories. the main, upperlevel categories paired with the platform categories in fabric are discursive type, persuasive type, media type, collections, films, locations on the body, augments, people/companies/related, entities, technologies, marketing, and keywords. references ahmad ay and lee k (2016) embodied technology transfer and learning by exporting in the ethiopian manufacturing sector. innovation and development 6(2): 281-303. boer l, mitchell r, caglio a and lucero a (2015) embodied technology: unraveling bodily action with normative types. chi'15 extended abstracts, apr 18-23, 2015, seoul, republic of korea: 1711-1716. bruno t (2015) wearable technology: smart watches to google glass for libraries. lanham: rowman & littlefield. bucksbarg a and carter s (2012) improvising artists, embodied technology and emergent techniques. in broadhurst s and machon j (eds) identity, performance and technology: practices of empowerment, embodiment and technicity. new york: palgrave macmillan, pp. 7-23. cobley e (2009) modernism and the culture of efficiency: ideology and fiction. toronto: university of toronto press. heath j (2012) the efficient society: why canada is as close to utopia as it gets. toronto: penguin. iliadis a and pedersen i (2016) reverse the perspective: it’s time to track the development of embodied technologies and their creators. medium. accessed https://medium.com/@ailiadis/reverse-the-perspective-its-time-to-track-thedevelopment-of-embodied-technologies-and-their-c36065b07d41#.nh6pl0mxd kozel s (2008) closer: performance, technologies, phenomenology. cambridge: mit press. mainzer k (2012) embodied technology as implicit background of modern civilization. in radman z (ed) knowing without thinking: mind, action, cognition and the phenomenon of the background. new york: palgrave macmillan, pp. 243-251. nafus d (2016) quantified: biosensing technologies in everyday life. cambridge: mit press. neff g and nafus d (2016) self-tracking. cambridge: mit press. pedersen i (2013) ready to wear: a rhetoric of wearable computers and realityshifting media. anderson: parlor press. riva g (2008) from virtual to real body: virtual reality as embodied technology. journal of cybertherapy and rehabilitation 1(1): 7-22. rosenberger r (2012) embodied technology and the dangers of using the phone while driving. phenomenology and the cognitive sciences 11: 79-94. ryan se (2014) garments of paradise: wearable discourse in the digital age. cambridge: mit press. sorensen kh and levold n (1992) tacit networks, heterogeneous engineers, and embodied technology. new media & society 17(1): 13-35. terranova t (2000) free labor: producing culture for the digital economy. social text 63 18(2): 33-58. watson i (2013) the odin actor: embodied technology, memory, and the corporeal archive. theatre, dance and performance training 4(3): 399-411. young n (2012) the virtual self: how our digital lives are altering the world around us. toronto: mcclelland & stewart. microsoft word davies-politcal games in virtual hong kong-politcal games in virtual hong kong.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): davies, h. (2021, october). political games in virtual hong kong. presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. politcal games in virtual hong kong hugh davies rmit university hong kong in videogames following akbar abbas’s seminal 1997 study hong kong: culture and the politics of disappearance, this paper argues that just as hong kong is disappearing in the real world, it is re-appearing in the virtual world of videogames. with attention to the 2019 protests in the city of hong kong, this paper reviews media reportage, academic scholarship and explores virtual game spaces to examine how videogames and other digital platforms came to enact, elaborate and represent the 2019 activist movement. discussing a number of videogames that were specifically developed as objects of protest such as liberate hong kong (2019), revolution in our time (2019), and add oil (2019), this paper also considers the ways in which existing digital games such as gtav (2013), pokémon go (2016), animal crossing: new horizons (2020) as well as digital platforms such as twitch, airdrop, and uber were tactically deployed as sites of protest by hong kong activists. protest and play throughout 2019, hong kong was a city of protest. the unrest began enthusiastically but peacefully, with activists staging large demonstrations. as the year wore on, clashes between police and protesters became increasingly violent, with officers firing live bullets and activists responding with barricades and petrol bombs. at the height of the violence between police and protesters, hong kong’s physical streets came to resemble a battlefield more familiar to the virtual realm of videogames than the actual urban landscape of hong kong, signalling a broader slippage between physical world and videogame that was noted by several media outlets. videogames were being deployed aesthetically, virtually and conceptually as protest instruments. ming-sho ho (2020) notes that collective learnings from 2014 umbrella revolution enabled hong kong’s 2019 anti-extradition movement to launch more challenging protest five years later, with participants recognising the need for more distributed protests, decentralized decision making and radical experimentation. videogames emerged as their centrepiece of innovative and experimental protest. simultaneous to the fierce street skirmishes in hong kong streets, another domain of battle was occurring behind computer screens, smart phones and across digitally networked spaces. lacking formal or centralised leadership, hong kong activists structured their activities in social media and game spaces, using these digital platforms to recruit new participants, to plan and enact protest events, and to advance their activist agenda. digital services as whatsapp, line, lihkg, twitter and telegram surged with agitprop memes while strategies and tactics for the next demonstration were proposed. suggestions were voted up or down on social media in a kind of gamified ad-hoc democratic approach. services such as airdrop, tinder, uber, firechat became adapted as ways for activists to organise and assemble (ting, 2020). the utilisation of games and play in the protests received significant media and scholarly attention. hanna wirman and rhys jones (2020) document the deployment of analogue play and game structures in the 2019 hong kong protesters while hugh davies (2020a; 2020b) explores the extensive use of videogame spaces, rhetoric’s platforms and popularity among the anti-extradition movement. yue-jin ho (2020) identifies videogame lexicon and aspects of gamification in the protests. in previous scholarship, the deployment of videogames and play as methods, modes and sites of protest had been foreshadowed, but had never been seen at this scale. in a chapter titled saving worlds with videogame activism, robert jones (2007) discussed videogames as an inherently spatial medium possessing the potential to open up new political spaces, while dean chan (2009) had identified videogames in china as constitutive of new fields of struggle. in 2019, hongkongers were attempting to save their city from what they saw as an encroachment from mainland china. by 2020, the streets of hong kong were all but abandoned. the withdrawal was due to a combination of the covid-19 pandemic as well as the newly enacted security law that saw frantic attempts by many hong kong citizens to scrub their digital footprints clean (gilbert, 2020). these restrictions imposed on physical spaces forced increasingly more activists to make an ‘exodus to the virtual’ in castronova’s terms (2008) in order to enact their grievances. with protest now impossible and pro-democratic political slogans illegal, hong kong as an independent and free entity has all but disappeared in the physical world, but increasingly exists in the domain of videogames. methodology with the contested politics of hong kong playing out in virtual worlds, this paper draws extensively on digital ethnography undertaken during 2019 and 2020 within the digital spaces in which protest activities took place. these findings have been augmented with scholarship on digital games and virtual spaces as activist platforms that appeared in the years prior to the hong kong protests, as well as in response to the events of 2019. with digital platforms becoming key to activist and independence movements globally, this paper explores how videogames are solidifying not only as sites of protest and activism, but also as virtual destinations for diasporas of political refugees whose homelands have been lost in the physical world. references abbas, akbar. (1997). hong kong: culture and the politics of disappearance. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. castronova, edward. (2008). exodus to the virtual world: how online fun is changing reality. st. martin's press. chan, dean. (2009). beyond the ‘great firewall’: the case of in-game protests in china. in l. hjorth & d. chan (eds.), gaming cultures and place in asia-pacific (pp. 141–157). new york, ny: routledge. davies, hugh. (2020a). hong kong and insect rhetoric: the spatial politics of pokémon go. in digra ’20 – proceedings of digital games and research association: play everywhere. tampere, finland. davies, hugh. (2020b). spatial politics at play: hong kong protests and videogame activism. in proceedings of the 2020 digraa australia conference, brisbane queensland, australia. gilbert, david. (2020). hong kong residents are erasing their own internet histories before china's big crackdown. vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj4k95/hong-kongresidents-are-erasing-their-own-internet-histories-before-chinas-big-crackdown ho, ming-sho. (2020). how protests evolve: hong kong’s anti extradition movement and lessons learned from the umbrella movement. mobilization: an international quarterly 1 september 2020; 25 (si): 711–728. doi: https://doi.org/10.17813/1086671x-25-5-711 ho, yue-jin. (2020). game lexicon and gamification in the hong kong protest. 2020. in digra ’20 – proceedings of digital games and research association: play everywhere. tampere, finland. jones, robert. 2009. saving worlds with videogame activism, handbook of research on effective electronic gaming in education. new york university, usa. ting, tin-yuet. (2020). from ‘be water’ to ‘be fire’: nascent smart mob and networked protests in hong kong, social movement studies, 19:3, 362 368, doi: 10.1080/14742837.2020.1727736 wirman, hanna., jones, rhys. (2020). block the spawn point: play and games in the hong kong 2019 pro-democracy protests. in digra ’20 – proceedings of digital games and research association: play everywhere. tampere, finland. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): herman, a., kruze, h., markham, a., & moylan, k. (2022, november). resonance, reverberation, and rhythms: conceptualizing vibratory power in digital media. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. resonance, reverberation, and rhythms: conceptualizing vibratory power in digital media katie moylan leicester university andrew herman wilfred laurier university holly kruse rogers state university annette markham royal melbourne institute of technology keywords: transduction, sound, reverberation and digital resonance, streaming internet radio, community and solidarity, autoethnography abstract this panel explores the theories, concepts, and methodologies appropriate to the exploration of what jasen (2016) terms the “vibratory power” of transduction where sound and other digitally mediated forms of reverberation conjure affective and corporeal bonds of resonance and solidarity. the first three papers engage in a critical interrogation of sound as epistemology and ontologies in digital networked media, with a focus on streaming internet radio. more specifically, these papers examine diverse uses and experiences of streaming ‘radio’ and its deployments for community-building, emotional sustenance, and an online reconstitution of place. in their explorations, these papers consider which methodologies are appropriate and useful to examine the affordances of streaming radio, enabling in turn analysis of informing ideas of ‘community’, intimacy, territorialization/deterritorialization, and questions of what comprises ‘radioness’ itself. is radio still radio if it is online? what happens to the "community" that is conjured into being by terrestrial broadcast radio when the "station" is internet only?’ what does thinking from place mean when the tangibility of place is physically transcended and thus broken up and reconstituted as elements of locality, of community? the fourth and final power transposes the “perspective of frequency, force and affective tone” in transduction (jasen, 2016, p. 13) to the wider field of social media practices during the early stages of covid. in this paper, the obsessive-compulsive ritual of “doomscrolling” becomes the practice through which rhythms of resonance and reverberation become imprinted upon the flows of everyday life through the transductive modulations of digital networked media. (250 words without in text citation and reference) jasen, p. (2016). low end theory: bass, bodies, and the materiality of sonic experience. bloomsbury. paper 1: sitting across the digital divide: communitybuilding capacities of livestreamed pandemic radio katie moylan university of leicester this paper mines the ways in which livestreamed broadcasts of the noisefilter show, produced by new orleans community radio station whiv fm but also streamed via facebook live, have from the pandemic’s beginnings in 2020 enabled localized articulations of anxiety, fear and distrust in real time whilst also providing empathy and comfort. this exploration situates my analysis of noisefilter in relation to its radio specificities: in particular legacy characteristics of radio such as liveness and centrality of voice which facilitate community-building. i suggest that reflecting on my own listening to and interactions with noisefilter online in autumn 2020 enabled me to make ‘visible, the social positionalities, motivations, and formative assumptions’ (khan, 2022, p. 5) shaping these interactions as a form of community-building. through twice weekly ‘broadcasts’, the noisefilter radio show, produced and presented by two new orleans medical doctors, provided rigorously researched pandemic updates, incorporating news on emerging variants and vaccination developments, from a localized perspective foregrounding new orleanian and louisianian experiences negotiating covid.1 this paper draws on dr déry and dr griggs’ practitioner (medical and broadcaster) perspectives on noisefilter’s production practices, gathered in semistructured interviews. this analysis incorporates readings of archived show content and real-time responses on fb live to explore these as community-building strategies in noisefilter between september and december 2020 and to determine and amplify the value/s of the ongoing online relationship between regular noisefilter listeners with each other and with the show. this paper thus explores how noisefilter has served as an emotionally and politically resonant counterpoint to top-down, ‘official’ information provision and normative discourses downplaying the pandemic’s reach. radio’s power lies in its persistent capacity for intimate address in real time, a residue of broadcasting as a live medium which enabled immediate intimacy with the listener (scannell, 1991). a scheduled live radio show regularly replicates but also updates itself, creating a newer version over the familiar expressive patterns of the show from 1 while broadcasting live weekly on whiv fm, the noisefilter show is now part of a suite of audio health podcasts and broadcasts: https://www.noisefiltershow.com/?fbclid=iwar3gto4thacbok_zo8tyis99kkqipihnx5o txst2leiga9xeh8p6zlc4fja ,accessed 28 february 2022. see also whiv fm’s homepage incorporating links to the schedule and mission statement: https://whivfm.org/ , accessed 28 february 2022. the day or week before. unlike the preserved complete text of the podcast, a live broadcast is ephemeral. radio’s intimacy can be mobilized, drawing listeners together to share a sense of community. noisefilter’s community radio origins crucially inform the show’s alternative messaging and radical articulations. as an entrenched form of alternative media, community radio (in its myriad particularities) historically embodies radical expressive and representative capacities ‘that express an alternative vision to hegemonic policies, priorities and perspectives’ (downing 2001, p. v). the widespread use of streaming technologies by community stations and standalone shows has meant localized on-air community articulations are now often freely accessible globally via sites such as radio.garden. reliable streaming technologies facilitate remote reach for otherwise under-resourced community stations, extending audiences and creating new listeners, providing a further space for community radio’s project of ‘diversifying voices and cultural practices, facilitating forums for civil society participation and connecting local organizations’ (anderson & rodriguez 2019, p. 51). additionally, and globally, the importance of broadcast radio for information provision and community-building became much more acute from the start of the covid-19 crisis. the importance of local community broadcasting acquired a stark new significance given that cities, regions and states have been experiencing the pandemic and managing protocols and responses in very different ways. consequently, local radio became the first source for many for updates on everything from elder shopping hours to testing and vaccination centres. in examining noisefilter as streamed radio content on the contested and compromised facebook platform, i draw on an ‘affordances perspective’ (shaw, 2017) to consider and frame the specificities shaping production, use and dissemination, in recognition that ‘technologies are not ideologically neutral in their design, in what types of interaction they allow or disallow’ (shaw 2017, p. 597). building on this i suggest that facebook’s extractive and exploitative tendencies were countered by its user accessibility in streaming noisefilter (a decision also made by multiple radio stations and standalone shows produced by otherwise marginalized communities: see moylan, 2022.) in its focus on livestreamed radio via facebook live, this paper seeks to further explore these repurposed affordances of an otherwise compromised platform. while a user-led hierarchy persists at platform interface levels, community radio stations and shows are achieving greater reach than before. exemplifying its catchphrase at the start of each show, noisefilter regularly reaches listeners ‘sitting across the digital divide’ from places as diverse as japan, the uk as well as elsewhere in north america. analysing noisefilter as livestreamed radio in crisis times, i consider the show as comprised of collective production processes (harvey, 2001) reinforced by the active agency of its listening community to create community-specific content, deploying raymond williams’ concept to explore how these elements are woven together as a structure of feeling which reproduces these community-building processes, in turn enabling community expressions of solidarity. through exploring these layers of articulation, i suggest that the noisefilter broadcasts (re-)produce a ‘structure of feeling’ emerging from localised concerns (new orleanian responses to covid distancing, masking protocols, music festival closures) and coalescing in shared political concern at the unfolding events of autumn 2020. i draw on williams’ idea of a set of ‘meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt’ (williams, 1977, p. 132) to explain how elements of a radio show can coalesce into an emotionally resonant, familiar repertoire, which is then reinforced with each livestreamed episode. in turn this grassroots form of community-building enacts what harvey describes as ‘the processes that produce, sustain and dissolve the contingent patterns of solidarity’ that comprise and continually reproduce what we understand as ‘community’ (harvey 2001, p. 192). finally, i want to suggest that, in addition to providing comfort alongside a sense of community, these streamed ‘broadcasts’ could ultimately comprise an alternative archive, mapping emotional responses and localized workarounds alongside the medical and scientific updates provided by dr déry and dr griggs. references anderson, h., & rodriguez, c. (2019). is community radio in crisis in the global north? lessons from australia and the united states. journal of alternative and community media, 4 (4). doi.org/10.1386/joacm_00066_1 downing, j. (2001). radical media. sage. harvey, d. (2001). spaces of capital: towards a critical geography. edinburgh university press. khan, s. (2022). assemblage thinking in lockdown: an autoethnographic approach. journal of contemporary ethnography, (january), 1-33. https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416211067563 moylan, k. (2022). “welcome to a coronavirus production”: beyond bows and arrows: indigenous on-air community-building during lockdown. the international journal of cultural studies, (august 25). https://doi.org/10.1177/136787792211230 shaw, a. (2017). encoding and decoding affordances: stuart hall and interactive media technologies. media, culture & society, 39(4), 592 –602. doi/10.1177/0163443717692741 scannell, p. (1991). the relevance of talk. in broadcast talk. sage. williams, r. (1977). marxism and literature. oxford university press. paper 2: sound, aurality, and the emplacements of internet radio andrew herman wilfred laurier university using the theoretical perspective of materialist medium theory (and its attendant conceptualization of sound and aurality) as well as the methodology of autoethnographic exploration of the actor-network assemblage of internet radio, this paper explores the emplacements of internet radio in three senses: 1) understanding the territorialization of reach of radio in the transition from terrestrial broadcast to internet streaming; 2) understanding the topos of community that digital radio creates and conjures in the stream; and, finally, 3) understanding the place of internet radio theoretically and methodologically-in critical internet studies. much of the power of broadcast radio inheres in its intimate ties of signal and reception to geographical territory that are constituted by the materialities of the broadcast radio assemblage. the boundaries of the sonically mediated socius of the community are very much drawn by the range of the signal. the consideration of the territorializations of internet radio when it is transmogrified from the geographically delimited reach of a broadcast signal of terrestrial radio into a “placeless” stream of data requires understanding how the topos of community is disarticulated from geolocation and conjured spatially and temporally through the internet. accordingly, i conceptualize what streaming as a mode of circulating radio programming and content socio-technically affords in terms of bonds of sociality that have historically made radio such a powerful and supple medium (douglas, 2004). i argue that such power always-already resides in the sonic place of aurality as it is entered into and engaged by the producer and the listener no matter where and no matter when in the flows of everyday life that this place is engaged. one of the aporia of critical internet studies when it comes to radio has been a tendency to push considerations of the character of internet radio as sound to the side in favour of the analysis of its structural elements in terms of code, network, and interactivity, and how these elements have reconfigured radio as part of a transition from a broadcast mode of cultural production to what can be termed a “social media mode of production (herman, 2014; bonino, 2018; bonini, et al., 2020) although these dimensions of internet radio are essential to understanding its emplacement, it ignores its phenomenological temporality of “listening” which indubitably marks its ontological status as “radio” as a distinctive media form and practice. with the exception of bottomley’s (2020) excellent but us-centric history of radio-internet convergence, broad questions regarding how the radio-internet convergence have been displaced, on the one hand, by a focus on platforms and the datafication of musical production circulation and taste (prey, 2020; hesmondhalgh. et al., 2020) and, on the other, a focus on the unique characteristic of podcasts and podcasts (as distinct set of production practices and sonic artifacts (morris, 2021; morris and hoyt, 2021; spinelli and dann, 2019). my work returns to some more basic questions about the relationship of the re-articulation of producer and listener in the socius of sound that has animated the work scholars such as lacey (2013, 2018b), and bonini (2018) while filling key gaps in their analysis. bonino and lacey have argued that the socio-technical affordances of the technologies of radio-interest convergence have created new hybrid actors in the space of digital radio, namely, the listener as producer. although it is open an empirical question as to the extent to which consumers of internet radio actually avail themselves of such affordances on a quotidian basis, the shift in the relations of power in production and circulation of radio content is undeniable. here, however, we can map out the itinerary of a different hybrid actor in the internet radio assemblage, the producer as listener. by following the producer as listener, i argue, it is possible to hear in a more fulsome manner the sound of the sonic socius of internet radio in time as it passes through successive stages of technological transduction along the path the radio program takes from creation to consumption. my exploration of the logics of the emplacement(s) of internet radio is grounded in my experience as the host and creator of a weekly alternative music radio program. the show is produced and distributed through a concatenated assemblage of digital apps and platforms. it simultaneously takes the form of a terrestrial radio broadcast as well as streamed through the station's website. in addition, the show is uploaded, archived, and circulated globally on the mixcloud platform. as such, the show constitutes a fruitful case study for exploring the emplacements of digitally-based radio as it embodies several different key features of the radio-internet convergence. the method i employ here is a mixed methodology drawn from actor-network theory (latour, 2005), materialist auto-ethnography (khan, 2022) and lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis (lefebvre, 2013; vallee,2016). latour famously argued that assemblages of everyday life are to be “reassembled” or mapped by “following the actors”—human and non-human—as the move through different articulations in a discrete network. in the case of the assemblage of internet radio that is manifested in my low end theory radio program, i follow the sonic reverberations of its aural space as it moves across platforms, practices, and affordances. each step of intermediation puts into place a particular instantiation of the sonic topos of the program. accordingly, i will map the rhythms by which it punctuates the sonic field of everyday life through its patterning of aural flow sounding (out) the resonance of the sociality and connectivity between producer and listener in communion and convergence. references bonini, t., monclús, b., & scifo, s. (2020). radio as a social media. radio journal: international studies in broadcast & audio media, 18(1), 5–12. bonini, t. (2018). introduction: the listener as producer: the rise of the networked listener. in t. bonini & b. monclús (eds.), radio audiences and participation in the age of network society (pp. 1–36). routledge. bottomley, a. j. (2020). sound streams: a cultural history of radio-internet convergence. university of michigan press. douglas, s. j. (2004). listening in: radio and the american imagination. university of minnesota press. hesmondhalgh, d. jones, e., & rauh, a. (2019). soundcloud and bandcamp as alternative music platforms. social media + society, 5(4), 1-1 khan, s. (2022). assemblage thinking in lockdown: an autoethnographic approach. journal of contemporary ethnography. 1-33. lacey, k. (2013). listening in the digital age. in j. loviglio & m. hilmes (eds.), radio’s new wave (pp. 9–23). routledge. lacey, k. (2018). up in the air? the matter of radio studies. radio journal:international studies in broadcast & audio media, 16(2), 109–126. lefebvre, h. (2013). rhythmanalysis: space, time and everyday life. bloomsbury academic. morris, j.w. (2021). infrastructures of discovery: examining podcast ratings and rankings. cultural studies, 35(4-5), 728–749 morris, j. w., & hoyt, e. (eds.). (2021). saving new sounds: podcast preservation and historiography. university of michigan press. prey. (2020). locating power in platformization: music streaming playlists and curatorial power. social media + society, 6(2), 1-11 spinelli, & dann, l. (2019). podcasting: the audio media revolution. bloomsbury. vallee, m. (2016). the rhythm of echoes and echoes of violence. theory, culture & society, 34(1), 97–114. paper 3: resonance and reflection in the spaces of the walmart world radio network holly kruse roger state university streaming platforms music-streaming services have provided the soundtracks of many of our lives for the past several years, and while many of us isolated at home during the covid-19 pandemic, we became more conscious of our intimate relationships with these platforms. music streaming platforms like spotify, pandora, and bandcamp have been sites of important scholarly inquiry in recent years: inquiry, for instance, into the democratizing possibilities of the platforms and their economic affordances for lesserknown musicians (hesmondhalgh, et al., 2019); platforms' competitive strategies (hracs & webster, 2021); user strategies for discovering new music on streaming services (datta, et al., 2017); ways in which platform users are "seen" and algorithmically individuated (prey, 2018); and more. scholarly research to this point has overlooked one streaming service that many north american users frequently experience, whether they are of it or not: the walmart world radio network (wwrn). by running its own music service, walmart is unique among u.s. retailers. walmart first produced and disseminated its own radio service to its stores in the early 1990s, but the service stopped in 2009 (lytle, 2019). in 2016 walmart relaunched its radio service with an in-house search for djs that invited store employees to audition. the djs hired through this process were given live shows that they programmed. on wwrn shows one hears music, entertainment news (including, for instance, an wwrn event featuring r&b artist jason derulo), and banter between, for instance, dj bo and "producer josh" combined with information for store associates, shout-outs from associates like "eddie from store 1001," and announcements targeting consumers. the spaces and places of the walmart world radio network early in the covid-19 pandemic, the indoor space beyond my home where i perhaps spent the most time was my walmart neighborhood market (tulsa, store 5093). the store felt safe, with a mask mandate and high compliance. the sound of my walmart neighborhood market is the sound of the walmart world radio network, which is piped into every walmart store in the united states. my pandemic soundtrack was often comprised of artists like mumford and sons, khalid, squeeze, lizzo, avicii, the ramones, and more following me down the produce aisle, through the dairy section, and to the pharmacy window. if i wanted to continue listening to the wwrn at home, i can stream it live or listen to the podcast. as a source of "functional" music with bright tones meant to motivate associates to keep working and customers to keep shopping (meyersohn, 2019), walmart radio is certainly an instrument of capitalist social control. for many employees, it's part of a system that put(s) them – largely bipoc and lower-class whites (much like their customer base) – at risk during the pandemic. but it is more. it is place-based radio, providing a shared listening experience that has the markers of commercial music radio to millions of walmart denizens across the u.s. at the same time. for me, during the peak of the pandemic, it was the sound of my only home away from home. autoethnography salman khan (2022) argues that during covid-19 lockdowns (and at other times), autoethnography provides "a valid gateway to the social world," because we as researchers are embedded in culture: a culture that is also within us. he notes that it is possible and important for autoethnographers to both maintain analytical positions in relation to the objects of their research while also fully feeling and recording their emotions. in the early pandemic world of lockdown and distancing, it would have been difficult to research others' experiences of the walmart world radio network, the ways in which this alternative streaming platform helped define the spaces, places, and moments of life in public and even at home. i was keenly aware of how it was shaping my experiences, however, and it prompted me – someone who has often used ethnomethodolgy in my research – to consider autoethnography as a way to explore the platform. i began taking notes while shopping, which were mainly observations about playlists and the emotions they evoked. i also streamed the service at home, where the sounds acted differently upon me. this is unsurprising, given that the target audience is walmart workers and shoppers in a public retail setting, but the wwrn does promote its service as one that people can and perhaps should stream at home. around christmas-time, it provided me with a convenient holiday playlist to play in the background as i did various tasks at home. genre, streaming, and radio although the walmart music streaming service is called a "radio" network, in terms of the music that's played there's not much "radio-ness" to it. commercial radio stations follow rigorous formats: adult contemporary, top 40, classic hits, new country, and so on. the wwrn doesn't adhere to a format. in a 30-minute time slot one can might hear songs from a range of artists, from 80s pop act milli vanilli to country artist thomas rhett to turn-of-the-century era alternative rock band eve 6 to 90s sort-of hip hop act the quad city djs, for instance. like spotify playlists created by friends and influencers and shared with others, and also mirroring algorithmic music recommendations on sites like youtube, playlists on the wwrn are not defined by genre – that is, as a particular class or kind of text (chandler 2020) – but rather by feeling. the move away from genre in practices of music-listening and playlist-production, which is largely based in the affordances (of access, of the practices of recommendation systems) of user-driven platforms like spotify, probably doesn't signal the end of genre in popular music. it does, however, create emotionally-structured soundscapes and colonize spaces (by infiltrating the home or the car with the soundtrack of walmart, or with more subtle commercial practices of other streaming services) that warrant investigation on many levels, including the level of the self in society. references chandler, d. (2020, september 12). the problem of definition. an introduction to genre theory. http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel//documents/intgenre/intgenre1.html datta, h., knox, g., & bronnenberg, b. j. (2018). changing their tune: how consumers’ adoption of online streaming affects music consumption and discovery. marketing science, 37(1), 5-21. https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2017.1051 hesmondhalgh, d., jones, e., & rauh, a. (2019). soundcloud and bandcamp as alternative music platforms. social media + society, 5(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119883429 hracs, b. j. & webster, j. (2021). from selling songs to engineering experiences: exploring the competitive strategies of music streaming platforms, journal of cultural economy, 14(2), 240-257, https://doi,org/10.1080/17530350.2020.1819374 khan, s. (2022). assemblage thinking in lockdown: an autoethnographic approach. journal of contemporary ethnography. https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416211067563 lytle, m. (2019, june). walmart radio djs: behind the voice. celebrate arkansas. http://digitaleditions.walsworthprintgroup.com/publication/?i=589422&article_ id=3385969&view=articlebrowser&ver=html5 meyerson, n. (2019, december). how stores choose which songs to play. cnn business. https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/24/business/holiday-music-walmarttarget/index.html prey, r. (2018). nothing personal: algorithmic individuation on music streaming platforms. media, culture & society 40(7), 1086–1100. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443717745147 paper 4: reverberation and solidarity through social media: revising communication theory to accommodate micro acts of digital sharing annette markham royal melbourne institute of technology thinking about the reverberation qualities of interaction brings new sensibilities and senses to the foreground in analyzing how meaning emerges, whether at the level of individuals or more largely at the level of sociotechnical systems and cultural formations. this can be explored at moments of connection between humans and humans or between humans and machines, or to help make sense of situations at scale – those moments when one has the feeling of being a part of something bigger than oneself. i had a lot of time to think about this at the outset of the 2020 pandemic. in some ways, there was a perfect storm of mediating factors that created intimacy, openness, and sensations of community at perceived global scales, even as the actuality of experiences were isolated, disparate, and unique. people described a widespread feeling that the entire planet was having a shared experience of this tragic crisis together. this moment passed quickly as different experiences and realities became apparent. even so, this intimate sensation of shared understanding stands out as a moment, one that can be explored as a confluence of factors that illustrate the reverberation and resonant qualities of flows of affect and information. a focus on reverberation and resonance in communication theory shifts from a textual or discursive based methodology to one inspired by physics—it pays attention to how patterns emerge across largescale networks, or how viral information spreads, in some of the same ways we might study the microcoordination involved in mumuration of flocks of birds, the synchronized flashing of tens of thousands fireflies, or other swarming patterns. in march 2020, waves of information reverberated through the web, generating harmonic resonances that were perhaps noticeable because people were spending so much continuous time online. described through resonance and reverberation, “culturing” becomes less about individuals --or individuals interacting, or structures that impose on interacting individuals in relations-and more about the energies that shape patterns through resonant qualities of ‘excitable’ information. take the phrase “flatten the curve.” how did people attune to this phrase? it certainly went viral quickly and almost everyone to whom you mention this phrase will remember seeing it or hearing it during early 2020. it was used in both public service announcements by such notable entities as the who, and also in humorous digital snippets passed around through social media. the affective sensations accompanying this phrase shifted rapidly and continuously, not only because it was morphing as it moved through different contexts but also because it was attuned differently. when i write it now, in 2022, it has little resonance. i am experientially distant from this phrase. in march 2020, it was a fist in the gut, a daily reminder of the nearness of death; the potential of crisis realizing itself in real time. this phrase is an example of how resonance can emerge from a particular type of reverberation. “flatten the curve” bounced around the internet like a sound wave, in essence reflecting off multiple surfaces and generating echoes. when waves reverberate at particular resonant frequencies, they create patterns. this is beautifully demonstrated through cymatics, where sand spread on a metal plate will create distinctive patterns based on the frequency of sound waves introduced nearby. the physics of reverberation, resonance, and harmonics apply to how all living systems function, as vibrational properties are fundamental to objects living or not. soundwaves are being used to rebuild human bones (ambattu, et al., 2022). fractal patterns, for example, occur in digital contexts (e.g., network visualizations) just as readily as they do in the human circulatory system or river networks. as well as highlighting certain sensory aspects of how we come to know and be in the world, a reverberation theory of communication locates meaning differently. it focuses on what is happening in the flows between objects, the spaces between elements of situations. arguably, the resonant properties of continuously reverberating signals impact how we find or build ontological security in social spaces, which is more implied than directly addressed by lefebre’s notable work on rhythmanalysis (1992). while some of the work of affective resonance is relevant (e.g., paasonen, 2011), i am particularly interested in processes of what rodriguez (2002) poses as “culturing”, the process of negotiating “various tensions and rhythms that come with our trying to find and hold onto meanings in a world that is inherently quantum (p. 2). it is also inspired in part by helmreich’s (2012) discussion of “transductive ethnography—an inquiry motivated not by the visual rhetoric of individual selfreflection and self-correcting perspectivalism, but one animated by an auditorily inspired attention to the modulating relations that produce insides and outsides, subjects and objects, sensation and sense data” (p. 169). communication theory that pays close attention to resonance and reverberation can be used to reconfigure core thinking about how the properties, processes, and consequences of both low and high frequency information flows through what is now well understood as networked culture. references ambattu, l., gelmi, a., yeo, l. (2022). short-duration high frequency megahertzorder nanomechanostimulation drives early and persistent osteogenic differentiation in mesenchymal stem cells. small, 18(8). https://doi.org/10.1002/smll.202106823 goodman, s. (2012). the ontology of vibrational force. in j. sterne (ed.). sound studies reader (pp. 70-72). routledge. helmreich, s. (2012). an anthropologist underwater: immersive soundscapes, submarine. cyborgs and transductive ethnography. in j. sterne (ed). sound studies reader (168-185). routledge. lefebvre, h. (1992/2004). rhythmanalysis: time, space, and everyday life. continuum. ling, r., & yttri, b. (2002). hyper-coordination via mobile phones in norway. in j. katz & m. aakhus (eds.), perpetual contact (pp.139-169). cambridge university press markham, a. (2021). echolocation as theory of digital sociality. convergence, 27(6). https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565211047158. paasonen, s. (2011). carnal resonance: affect and online pornography. mit press. rodriguez, a. (2002). culture to culturing: re-imagining our understanding of intercultural relations. intercultural communication, 5. http://www.immi.se/intercultural/ weick, k. e. (1979). the social psychology of organizing. addison-wesley. aoir2022_submission_digital_kink_opacity selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation: sundén, jenny (2022, november). digital kink opacity: sexual social media beyond visibility and comprehension. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. digital kink opacity: sexual social media beyond visibility and comprehension jenny sundén södertörn university building on and expanding discussions of the value of anonymity and pseudonymity in digital cultures in general (hogan 2012, marwick & boyd 2011, van der nagel 2017, van der nagel & frith 2015), and in queer digital cultures in particular (e.g. cassidy 2013, dhoest & szulc 2016), this paper explores notions of opacity as modes of resistance to dominating regimes of visibility on and beyond social media platforms. across queer, postcolonial and digital media theorizing, opacity provides a way of thinking through the tension between the visible and the invisible, challenging the idea of public visibility and identification as that which drives data cultures and legitimizes deviant sexual practices and expressions. in line with discussions of tactical, queer uses of social media in terms of, for example, disconnection (light 2014, sundén 2018), reluctance (cassidy 2018) and invisibility (tudor 2018), opacity affords yet another way of theorizing resistance to platform power and user control. when large social media platforms keep careful track of their users’ identities and movements for the sake of algorithmic capture, to refrain from transparent identification can be a radical act (cf. birchall 2021, blas 2014, 2018). based on an ethnographic study of the swedish digital bdsm, fetish and kink platform darkside, this paper theorizes opacity in two ways: first, as a way of discussing tactical uses of darkside between modes of revealing and concealing, and second, as a way of conceptualizing the platform as a borderland between intelligibility and unintelligibility. sexual liberation is often understood in a framework of progressive, western modernity and particular forms of public visibility and pride, whereas a lack thereof is inevitably linked to oppression, secrecy and closeted shame. and yet, a focus on public visibility as the universally empowering method of progressive sexual politics and as grounds for recognition obscures the significance of sexual expressions that are marginal, ephemeral and less than public, or public in other, more subtle ways (cf. edenborg 2017, stella 2012). swedish kink communities are at once marginalized and seemingly mainstream, navigating a tricky balance between pop cultural visibility and lingering stigma. digital practices on darkside are usually neither about concealed, closeted shame, nor an unequivocal desire for full transparency and public recognition. while governed by activist visions of proud openness, the platform primarily takes shape through tactical investments in obscure, partly concealed, but nonetheless proud forms of kink expression. darkside provides an opening for shared vulnerability and collective forms of ‘radical secrecy’ (birchall 2021), which grants both privacy and degrees of public kink visibility to its members. then again, the users are highly aware of the permeable boundaries of platforms. pictures are thus routinely cropped, angled or blurred in ways that make identification difficult. by moving between modes of revealing and concealing, sexual expressions on darkside resonate with what nicholas de villiers (2012) terms ‘queer opacity.’ opacity, here, is as a set of queer tactics which challenge the binary construction of the closet and by resisting legitimization via public outness invent new forms of illegible sexual expression (see also uibo 2021, 156-185). in the work of the caribbean writer, poet and philosopher édouard glissant (1997), opacity is a similar tactic of the oppressed. glissant argues that the understanding and acceptance of the other within western thought is based on transparency and measured against an ideal, normative scale which inevitably reduces the other. he therefore insists on the need to “clamor for the right to opacity for everyone,” referring to an ontological right of the oppressed to be non-transparent, non-categorizable, not fully understood and simply exist as different (glissant 1997, 194). this right to opacity is a form of resistance to surveillance and imperial domination, which within digital media studies has spurred discussions on resistance against data-driven surveillance technologies through forms of concealment and camouflage (see birchall 2016, blas 2014, de vries & schinkel 2019). opacity implies a lack of clarity; something opaque may be both difficult to see clearly as well as to understand. kink communities exist to a large extent in such spaces of dimness, darkness and incomprehensibility, partly removed from public view and, importantly, from public understanding. kink certainly enters the bright daylight of public visibility in some ways, most obviously through popular culture. and yet, there is something utterly incomprehensible about how desire works, something which tends to become heightened in the realm of kink as non-practitioners may struggle to ‘understand.’ by exceeding categories of identifiable difference, or of identification altogether, a digital sexual politics of opacity could help provide recognition without a demand to fully understand sexual otherness. opacity here works to overcome the risk of reducing, normalizing and assimilating sexual deviance by comprehension, and instead open up for new modes of obscure and pleasurable sexual expressions and transgressions on social media platforms. references birchall, clare (2021) radical secrecy: the ends of transparency in datafied america. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. birchall, clare (2016) “shareveillance: subjectivity between open and closed data.” big data & society, 1-12. blas, zach (2018) “informatic opacity.” in rosi braidotti & maria hlavajova (eds.) posthuman glossary. london: bloomsbury academic, 198-199. blas, zach (2014) “informatic opacity.” the journal of aesthetics & protest 9. https://www.joaap.org/issue9/zachblas.htm. cassidy, elija (2018) gay men, identity and social media: a culture of participatory reluctance. new york: routledge. cassidy, elija (2013) gay men, social media and self-presentation: managing identities in gaydar, facebook and beyond. phd thesis. brisbane: queensland university of technology. de villiers, nicholas (2012) opacity and the closet: queer tactics in foucault, barthes, and warhol. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. de vries, patricia & willem schinkel (2019) “algorithmic anxiety: masks and camouflage in artistic imaginaries of facial recognition algorithms.” big data & society, 1-12. dhoest, alexander & szulc, lukasz (2016) “navigating online selves: social, cultural, and material contexts of social media use by diasporic gay men.” social media + society, (october-december), 1-10. edenborg, emil (2017) politics of visibility and belonging: from russia’s ‘homosexual propaganda’ laws to the ukraine war. abingdon, oxon: routledge. glissant, édouard (1997) poetics of relation. ann arbor: university of michigan press. hogan, bernie (2012) “pseudonyms and the rise of the real-name web.” in john hartley, jean burgess & axel bruns (eds.) a companion to new media dynamics. chichester, uk: blackwell, 290-308. light, ben (2014) disconnecting with social networking sites. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. marwick, alice & danah boyd (2011) “i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience.” new media and society 13, 96113. stella, francesca (2012) “the politics of in/visibility: carving out queer space in ul’yanosk.” europe-asia studies 64(10), 1822-1846. sundén, jenny (2018) “queer disconnections: affect, break, and delay in digital connectivity.” transformations 31. http://www.transformationsjournal.org/wpcontent/uploads/2018/06/trans31_04_sunden.pdf. tudor, matilda (2018) desire lines: towards a queer digital media phenomenology. phd thesis. huddinge: södertörn university. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva36125. uibo, raili (2021) ‘and i don’t know who we really are to each other’: queers doing close relationships in estonia. phd thesis. huddinge: södertörn university. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-45309. van der nagel, emily & frith, jordan (2015) “anonymity, pseudonymity, and the agency of online identity: examining the social practices of r/gonewild.” first monday, 20(3). doi:10.5210/fm.v20i3.5615. van der nagel, emily (2017) “from usernames to profiles: the development of pseudonymity in internet communications.” internet histories 1(4), 312-331. gaw-subversive commemoration-subversive commemoration.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): gaw, f. & bunquin, j.b. (2021, october). subversive commemoration: mapping the assemblage of counter-memory on twitter. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. subversive commemoration: mapping the assemblage of counter-memory on twitter fatima gaw university of the philippines jon benedik bunquin university of the philippines technologies of (counter)memory when institutions fail to sanction the past and history is contested, memory becomes susceptible to political manipulation. in the philippines, public memory of the dictator ferdinand marcos has been whitewashed by narratives distorting and denying his crimes, including theft of billions of public funds, torture and murder (aguilar, 2019). while online disinformation networks rehabilitate his legacy (soriano & gaw, 2021), political allies legitimize his regime by legislating ‘marcos day’ to commemorate his birth anniversary (house bill no. 7137, 2020). in response, the twitter hashtag network #arawngmagnanakaw (‘day of thieves’) performed its counter commemoration of marcos, gaining prominence in digital and mainstream media. the case of #arawngmagnanakaw illustrates how digital media facilitates the construction and negotiation of memory by new actors in new contexts. beyond digital media enabling participatory forms of memory-making (liu, 2018), we argue that technologies of memory (armstrong & crage, 2006) reconfigure power relations in memory construction. engaging the concept of counter-memory (foucault, 1977), we examine how digital media sets the conditions to resist elite narratives by enabling nonconventional ways of remembering. we locate the performance of counter-memory work in the intersection of networked publics, counter-narratives, and technologies of memories. in investigating the hashtag network #arawngmagnanakaw, we theorize the ‘assemblage of counter-memory’ as the connective, discursive, and material assemblage that enact political agency to privilege marginalized narratives and play an active role in the (re)construction of memory. we employed a mixed-methods approach in studying the #arawngmagnanakaw assemblage of counter-memory. through nodexl, we collected tweets posted from virtual event #aoir2021: september 2 to 13, 2020 with the hashtag #arawngmagnanakaw. the hashtag network comprised 18,067 tweets from 8,896 users, which we identified into categories of public figures, organizations and users. we then generated clusters from the network and examined their sizes and the central actors per cluster. we visualized the structure of the network using the gephi. we also analyzed tweet discourses from the unique tweets per cluster through the lens of digital practices (jones, chik & hafner, 2015), where we examined texts, images, links and interactions as discursive practices and paid attention to their re/appropriation of twitter affordances (reply, retweet, quote tweet, hashtag). networked subversion and unconventional commemoration we find that the counter-memory assemblage derives its power by resisting traditional, institutional, and mainstream structures, discourses, and practices of remembrance. the counter-memory network on twitter is decentralized yet connected by the hashtag, drawing credibility from traditional historical agents (e.g. scholars and media) but enacting legitimacy through multiple, disparate but corroborative users (figure 1). our analysis shows the formation of communities clustering around unconventional sources of historical information, such as microcelebrities and non-affiliated users. as a technology of memory, twitter capacitates sources considered ‘unqualified’ in traditional media to challenge revisionist accounts by institutional and influential sources. emergent discourses still center on facts and evidence of marcos’ historic plunder but entangled in affective intensities (paasonen, 2015) of anger, disgust, and shock that amplify its resonance in the network. a critical discursive junction is the reappropriation of the hashtag to include present-day figures who are reportedly engaged in graft and corruption, establishing historical continuity of kleptocracy in philippine politics. distinct in the assemblage of counter-memory is the co-option and rejection of the conventions of commemoration through participatory, creative and subversive practices, facilitated by twitter affordances. the commemoration is framed to ‘dishonor’ marcos by naming him as ‘murderer’, ‘monster’ and ‘hitler-wanna-be.’ it also manifests as personal acts of remembrance through curating, annotating, and transforming historical materials into twitter vernacular in the form of links, screenshots and threads (image 1). artistic expressions define the texture of the commemoration, from engaging in humor and mockery (image 2) to remixing and editing physical and digital commemorative markers (image 3). figure 1. counter memory network image 1. tweet showcasing the lavish mansion of the marcoses image 2. gif of marcos mimicking the ‘elmo rise’ meme image 3. a digital plaque detailing marcos atrocities political agency emerging from counter-memory assemblages history is often elite-constructed or negotiated through collective movements (gutman, 2017). the ad hoc unit formed by the counter-memory assemblage wields its power from neither elite nor collective actions, but through connective action (bennett & segerberg 2012). first, the locus of analysis shifts from a single actor (‘who remembers’) to the assemblage (‘what enacts the remembering’) as an agent of counter-memory, situating counter-memory as publics, discourses, and technologies that co-constitutes the process of constructing, assembling, and circulating historical accounts. in particular, it acknowledges technology as a structure not only supporting the assemblage, but also shaping its possibilities and boundaries. secondly, the assemblage’s resistance to elite commemoration surfaces silenced and neglected historical narratives (‘what is remembered’) through affective articulations of protest and subversive commemorative practices (‘how is it remembered’). twitter is culturally ubiquitous but lies outside of established institutions, empowering online publics to determine which narratives are remembered and how they must be remembered. this undermines the privileged position of formal history and allows informal communicative structures like twitter to participate in memory construction. when the assemblage of counter-memory is mobilized, it is rendered the political agency (kaun, kyriakidou & uldam, 2016) to resist attempts to revise history for the interests of a few and negotiate for whom history should be written. public commemoration mediated by networked technologies of memory manifests as digital assemblages of non-institutional actors, affective discourses, and informal commemorative practices. however, their temporality arrests their potential to institutionalize alternative yet legitimate accounts by unheard or silenced voices. efforts should be made to document and archive movements and events transpiring in digital media and move their traces to more permanent venues. outside the digital realm, social institutions also still play a crucial role in the legitimation of memory, and other venues and forms of commemoration where memories are legitimized, (re)constructed, and even revised must be explored, as our study provides only one of long-standing debates about marcos’ legacy in digital media. references aguilar, f.v.j. (2019). political conjuncture and scholarly disjunctures: reflections on studies of the philippine state under marcos. philippine studies: historical and ethnographic viewpoints 67(1), 3–30. armstrong, e. a., & crage, s. m. (2006). movements and memory: the making of the stonewall myth. american sociological review, 71(5), 724-751. bennett, w.l. & segerberg, a. (2012). the logic of connective action: digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. information, communication & society 15(5), 739-768. foucault, m. (1977). language, counter-memory, practice. new york: cornell university press. gutman, y. (2017). memory activism: reimagining the past for the future in israelpalestine. nashville: vanderbilt university press. house bill no. 7137, republic of the philippines house of representative 18th congress. (2020). https://www.congress.gov.ph/legisdocs/first_18/cr00393.pdf jones, r. h., chik, a., & hafner, c. a. (eds.). (2015). discourse and digital practices: doing discourse analysis in the digital age. routledge. kaun, a., kyriakidou, m., & uldam, j. (2016). political agency at the digital crossroads?. media and communication, 4(4), 1-7. liu, j. (2018). who speaks for the past? social media, social memory, and the production of historical knowledge in contemporary china. international journal of communication, 12, 21. paasonen, s. (2015). a midsummer’s bonfire. in s. paasonen, k. hillis, & m. petit (eds.), networked affect (pp. 27–42). cambridge, ma: mit press. soriano, c.r.r. & gaw, f. (2021). platforms, alternative influence, and networked political brokerage on youtube. convergence. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565211029769 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): rieder, b., gordon, g., sileno, g. (2020, october) mapping value(s) in ai: the case of youtube. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. mapping value(s) in ai: the case of youtube bernhard rieder university of amsterdam geoff gordon university of amsterdam giovanni sileno university of amsterdam abstract this paper presents a multidisciplinary approach (media studies, computer science, and legal scholarship) for the analysis of systems that rely on ai components as central components of their design. taking recommender systems more generally and the one built by youtube more specifically, we develop a methodology for conceptualizing and studying the broad array of “ideas”, “norms”, or “values” such systems mobilize. instead of limiting ourselves to a narrow understanding of these terms, we take into account, for example, translations from economic models, social theories, legal requirements, ethical principles, technical knowledge, experiential evaluations, or other constructs used to define and justify design goals and decisions that shape the production of technical objects and, consequently, the object themselves. in this paper we discuss three directions for analysis and present first results. investigating technical knowledge includes the study of scholarly literature and experimentation with concrete objects such as lenskit for python to understand the “ambient” knowledge and normativity engineers and designers draw on. investigating local circumstances involves ethnographic analysis, but also the reconstruction of the business models and legal environment that weigh on youtube’s design. analyzing a system in use can draw on technical observation, via scraping or api data, of the actual dynamics of recommendation that emerge when users enter into the equation. taken together, these three approaches can “encircle” the various moments where value(s) are shaped and put into work in the context of systems where direct access to specifications is improbable. introduction over the recent decade, systems integrating ai components have both proliferated on the internet and come under increased scrutiny. particularly in the context of large online platforms, there is a stark contrast between anxieties about negative effects and structural opacity, that is, the impossibility to get a firm grip on the mechanisms at work. while work on “algorithmic accountability” (e.g. diakopoulos, 2015) has made great strides and there is a long tradition on “values in design” (cf. knobel & bowker, 2011) to build on, the question of normativity in complex computing systems operating within specific social contexts remains challenging. this paper uses the case of recommender systems more generally and the one built by youtube more specifically to develop a methodology for conceptualizing and studying the broad array of “ideas”, “norms”, or “values” such systems mobilize. but what do these terms mean in the context of technical systems? are they simple transpositions of non-technical constructs into technical form? instead of limiting ourselves to a narrow understanding, we situate algorithmic systems within a complex networks of “value(s)” understood, for example, as translations from economic models, social theories, legal requirements, ethical principles, technical knowledge, experiential evaluations, or other constructs used to define and justify design goals and decisions that shape the production of technical objects and, consequently, the object themselves. our multidisciplinary methodology draws on media studies, computer science, and legal scholarship and follows three pathways, analyzing technical knowledge, local circumstances, and systems in use. this paper sketches each direction and presents a number of early results from the larger project. investigating technical knowledge this part of our methodology concerns the investigation of recommender systems as a field of knowledge as well as an archive of existing “algorithmic techniques”. it draws on the extensive (academic) literature available, but also engages technicity more directly through investigation and experimentation with existing code. historical investigation uncovers precursors (e.g. the work of elaine rich in the early 1980s), early examples of contemporary work (e.g. grouplens), and the construction of different technical trajectories (e.g. content-based vs. collaborative filtering). discourse analysis draws on a corpus of “standard” literature ( to reconstruct the conceptual apparatus, methodological horizon, and state of the art in the field of recommender systems. for example, the handbook by ricci et al. (2015) specifies 14 criteria or properties that could be used to decide whether a recommendation system is performing according to its goals: user preference, prediction accuracy, coverage, confidence, trust, novelty, serendipity, diversity, utility, risk, robustness, privacy, adaptivity, and scalability. each one of these dimensions involves normative reasoning, including justifications, but also concrete ways to evaluate each of them in practice. experimental analysis proceeds in line with recent efforts in the humanities to establish how complex algorithms “think” (cf. burrell, 2016) and uses existing code modules (e.g. lenskit for python) to experiment with both code inspection and behavioral tweaking. the goal is to approach a concrete technical object to build an intuition for its epistemological character and possibilities for variation. investigating local circumstances while technical knowledge, practices, and norms create an environment for concrete projects to draw on, these systems involve design decisions that rely heavily on local circumstances. broad understanding of recommender systems and the fields they connect with can help frame investigations of actual systems, but another set of approaches is required to capture a concrete system, like youtube’s. here, we take inspiration from the technique of “encircling” , recently developed in the context of security studies, where secrecy and obfuscation are a constant reality that researchers have to deal with through “a lateral, multipronged, creative, iterative approaching of secret sites, confidential materials and classified practices” (de goede et al., 2019, p. 14) ethnographic investigation indeed has to deal with the fact that participant observation and even interviews are hard to realize for youtube’s recommendation system. but practitioners often continue to speak publicly and in the case of youtube, we can rely on academic publications (e.g. covington et al., 2016) as well as so-called “grey literature”, such as documentation, media interviews, or business reports, as a means to learn about the system under scrutiny and the way its creators present and justify it. legal analysis reconstructs the legal and regulatory environment youtube operates in. this includes the broader provisions concerning online platforms, but also more specific legislation, such as the us children’s online privacy protection act, which imposes a number of constraints on the company. analysis of business practices constitutes a second approach to understanding a concrete recommender system and this involves an analysis of the organization that designs and maintains the system, in particular its business model and the incentive structures that model generates. we certainly accept that the ‘bottom line’ is not the only motivation for a firm and there are many ways to drive and develop income structures. but it should be clear that organizations are goal-driven, and these goals will exercise a constant influence on all design decisions. investigating a system in use the final part of our methodology builds on the recognition that platforms hosting billions of users are not in full control over what happens within their systems. after all, youtube’s recommender system fundamentally draws on actual practices of uploading videos, watching, liking, commenting, and so forth. this means that what is actually recommended is a distributed accomplishment rather than a mere effect of a technical system. technical observation is a means to study a system in use empirically. the approach starts from the idea that systems that are publicly accessible on the internet can be “observed” in the sense that both inputs and outputs can be collected at a variable degree. this does not give us ‘hard’ insights into the technical system but allows us to make certain claims about its behavior: what is actually being recommended? how do recommendations evolve over time? can we observe a trend toward popular content or is the system driving toward niche content? conclusion while this paper focuses on recommender systems and takes youtube as its main example, its purpose is to prototype and present a multidisciplinary methodology for large-scale platforms that incorporate ai components as central tools of governance. it starts from the idea that technical knowledge forms the basis of technical design and seeks to bring these “ambient” norms into conversation with the local circumstances of a concrete system that includes a company, different groups of users, and the dynamics that play out over time. references burrell, j. (2016). how the machine ‘thinks’: understanding opacity in machine learning algorithms. big data & society, 3(1). covington, p., adams, j., & sargin, e. (2016). deep neural networks for youtube recommendations. proceedings of the 10th acm conference on recommender systems recsys ’16, 191-198. de goede, m., bosma, e., & pallister-wilkins, p. (eds.). (2019). secrecy and methods in security research: a guide to qualitative fieldwork. routledge. diakopoulos, n. (2015). algorithmic accountability: journalistic investigation of computational power structures. digital journalism, 3(3), 398-415. knobel, c., & bowker, g. c. (2011). values in design. communications of the acm, 54(7), 26-28. ricci, f., rokach, l., & shapira, b. (eds.). (2015). recommender systems handbook (2nd edition). springer. aoir2020-submission-final.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020:  the 21 ​st ​ annual conference of the  association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 the great randomizer: using virtual agents for auditing the effects of youtube recommendation algorithm on ideologically-charged news content distribution mykola makhortykh university of bern aleksandra urman university of bern in recent years, algorithmic filtering and ranking of digital content on social media, in the news, and on streaming platforms, increasingly shape user information behaviour, even while users themselves are often are not aware of the influence of algorithms (i.e., bodle, 2014; eslami et al., 2015; zanker et al., 2019). given the rapid development of algorithmic distribution systems and the scope of influence they have on users’ information diets, and as a consequence, on their perception of important societal matters, it is necessary to research how these algorithms function, which effects they might have, and whether they are biased in certain ways (loosen et al., 2016). the algorithms used by online platforms such as facebook or youtube rely on state-of-the-art big data and machine learning techniques. because of their complexity and multiple variables involved in the process of automated curation of information distribution, these algorithms often turn into black boxes even for the developers who created them (pasquale, 2015). in addition, these algorithms are the intellectual property of corporations which developed them, meaning that researchers do not have access to their source code and can only obtain limited data about the ways these algorithms function. for these reasons, it is difficult to study the effects of algorithmic filtering and ranking on the distribution of societally relevant information, but not impossible researchers can use algorithmic auditing in order to infer the patterns in the ways the algorithms function (mittelstadt, 2016). suggested citation (apa): makhortykh, m., urman, a. (2020, october). ​the great randomizer: using virtual agents for auditing the effects of youtube recommendation algorithm on ideologically-charged news content distribution ​. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21 ​th ​ annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. in our paper, we introduce a novel approach for large-scale algorithmic auditing based on the use of virtual agents. in contrast to earlier studies into algorithmic ranking (i.e., hannák et al., 2017; kulshrestha et al., 2017; puschmann, 2019), which tend to either rely on small data samples or do not control for external variables (i.e., the effect of time on the results), we developed infrastructure that allows conducting auditing experiments in a fully controlled testing environment. specifically, our infrastructure enables simulating the synchronous activity of a large number of autonomous agents and tracking their browsing behaviour as well as interactions with online platforms (makhortykh, urman, & ulloa, 2020). as a case study, we deploy the larger sample of virtual agents (n=200) to investigate how youtube recommendation algorithm filters and ranks information related to the far-right terrorist attack in the german city of halle in 2019. using a series of experiments in the controlled environment, we investigate how content recommendations produced by youtube in relation to the attack differ depending on the kinds of videos about halle watched by the agents. specifically, we compare differences between recommendations for news videos produced by mainstream news agencies (e.g. zdf) and political bloggers with different ideological positions. our findings highlight several important aspects of youtube recommendation algorithms in relation to terrorism-related news distribution. firstly, we identify the high degree of randomization that leads to fundamentally different recommendation trajectories despite the same starting conditions (i.e. the uniform pre-history of watched content) and identical behaviour patterns. secondly, we find significant differences in the algorithmic filtering/ranking between the browsers, in particular higher consistency of recommendations for the agents who interacted with youtube via firefox. finally, we find that the recommendations for the agents watching right-leaning news videos on the halle attack are slightly more consistent than those for the mainstream and left-leaning ones. the latter observation suggests that the degree of randomization for recommendations related to right-wing news content on youtube is lower, hence increasing the probability of formation of an isolated information environment or a “filter bubble” (pariser, 2011). however, considering that even in this case youtube recommendations tend to be strongly randomized and predominantly entertainment and not politics-related, our findings suggest that youtube algorithm is more of a great randomizer than a “great radicalizer” (tufekci, 2018). references bodle, r. (2014, november 13). ​predictive algorithms and personalization services on social network sites: implications for users and society​. the ubiquitous internet. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/ eslami, m., rickman, a., vaccaro, k., aleyasen, a., vuong, a., karahalios, k., hamilton, k., & sandvig, c. (2015). “i always assumed that i wasn’t really that close to [her]”: reasoning about invisible algorithms in news feeds. ​proceedings of the 33rd annual acm conference on human factors in computing systems chi ’15​, 153–162. https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702556 hannák, a., sapieżyński, p., khaki, a. m., lazer, d., mislove, a., & wilson, c. (2017). measuring personalization of web search. ​arxiv:1706.05011 [cs]​. http://arxiv.org/abs/1706.05011 kulshrestha, j., eslami, m., messias, j., zafar, m. b., ghosh, s., gummadi, k. p., & karahalios, k. (2017). quantifying search bias: investigating sources of bias for political searches in social media. ​proceedings of the 2017 acm conference on computer supported cooperative work and social computing​, 417–432. https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998321 loosen, w., bastos, m. t., puschmann, c., hasebrink, u., hölig, s., merten, l., schmidt, j.--h., kinder​-kurlanda, k. e., & weller, k. (2016). caught in a feedback loop? algorithmic personalization and digital traces. ​aoir selected papers of internet research​.​ ​https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/spir/article/view/8491 makhortykh, m., urman, a., & roberto, u. (2020). how search engines disseminate information about covid-19 and why they should do better. ​the harvard kennedy school (hks) misinformation review​. https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/how-search-engines-disseminate-informati on-about-covid-19-and-why-they-should-do-better/ mittelstadt, b. (2016). automation, algorithms, and politics| auditing for transparency in content personalization systems. ​international journal of communication​, ​10 ​(0), 12. puschmann, c. (2019). beyond the bubble: assessing the diversity of political search results. ​digital journalism​, ​7 ​(6), 824–843. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2018.1539626 pariser, e. (2011). ​the filter bubble: what the internet is hiding from you​. penguin uk. pasquale, f. (2015). ​the black box society: the secret algorithms that control money and information​ (first harvard university press paperback edition). harvard university press. tufekci, z. (2018, march 10). opinion | youtube, the great radicalizer. ​the new york times​. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html zanker, m., rook, l., & jannach, d. (2019). measuring the impact of online personalisation: past, present and future. ​international journal of human-computer studies​, ​131 ​, 160–168. ​ ​https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2019.06.006 n. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): mahoney, b. (2021, october). on(line) transparency and the black public sphere. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. on(line) transparency and the black public sphere brendan mahoney annenberg school for communication, university of pennsylvania extended abstract the black public sphere, defined by scholars like fraser (1990) and squires (2002) as the space in which black citizens deliberate about their common affairs, is in many ways experiencing unprecedented growth today in america. just this summer, what some have called the largest protest movement in american history was staged by the movement for black lives against racialized police brutality (buchanan et al., 2020). integral to the emergence and success of this movement from its inception in 2013 have been members of black publics, who have succeeded in circulating discourse that draws attention to the specific issues impacting the community (jackson & foucaultwelles, 2016). alongside this movement, other publics have emerged to support not only resistance against institutions and acts of white supremacy but the creation of independent black community, culture, and joy (brock, 2018). still more groups have emerged to support different segments of the black public sphere, discussing for example issues that are specific to black women or the black trans community (jackson et al., 2020). central to the rise of all these aforementioned publics has been social media platforms. their ability to continually mobilize mass demonstrations, sway media coverage, and more has likely been made possible by a number of digital affordances. this proliferation of black publics online has sparked a debate over whether the internet is ultimately a tool for liberation or racist oppression. the proponents of the internet point to the aforementioned growth online as evidence of the technology’s liberatory potential. they argue that through “connective action,” which allows one-to-one interactions online to mobilize a cohesive social network, millions of people can work toward the same goals without leaders, without organizations, and without trouble (tufekci, 2017). some scholars have in the past gone so far as to make near-utopian promises about social media’s potential to revolutionize social groups, movements, and even revolutions by making communication easier than it has ever been (bennett & segerberg, 2012). however, there are other scholars who warn against this technooptimism, and not without reason. in addition to protest movements and joyous satellite publics, social media platforms have become sites of brutal surveillance and racism— and some believe that this is precisely the point. critical data studies has explored the ways in which the innovations of the information age are rooted very deeply in existing selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): mahoney, b. (2021, october). on(line) transparency and the black public sphere. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. structures of inequality and the ways in which the affordances of these new technologies are carefully constructed to benefit people in power (boyd & crawford, 2014; van dijck, 2013). some have even gone so far as to suggest that internet technology may as a result only ever hurt marginalized communities online more than it helps them (schradie, 2019; owen, 2017). so, who’s right? is the internet a tool of black liberation or oppression? at the risk of disappointing my reader, this question will not be answered here. rather, this paper attempts to move past this binary that’s become stuck in the scholarly gears by synthesizing the two literatures. it will put them side by side and consider how both arguments may be correct. from this literature review, i ultimately argue that the internet’s affordances were designed to uphold oppressive power structures and that it is precisely because of rather than in spite of those affordances that liberatory movements have been able to emerge. there is then no friction between the two sides of this debate, and both literatures can offer insight to the continuing success of these publics. i will make this argument by putting the theoretical construct of the black public in conversation with a platform affordance discussed often in critical internet studies: transparency. by “transparency,” i mean the discourses and platform features that are designed to encourage as much openness, as much sharing of information as possible, with both the other site users and the site itself. transparency seeks to make clear, to level walls, to uncover the buried or hidden. the imperative of transparency is in many ways central to the emergence of social media (not to mention much of western society over the past several centuries), and it therefore has simultaneously played a role in the emergence of the aforementioned black publics while also presenting a threat to them that should not be ignored. many of transparency’s goals—to clarify, to expose—are both central and antithetical to the functions of black publics. over the course of this paper, i draw on a variety of different literatures to elaborate on and substantiate this argument. as the relationship between black publics and transparency is itself certainly not a product of the internet, i begin by tracing both the threats and opportunities that transparency has presented throughout history; among these historical threats are the repression or co-optation of black publics by the institutions of white, mainstream publics, whereas the opportunities of transparency include the chance to articulate the struggles as well as accomplishments of one’s public. i then move on to outline exactly how transparency has been coded into and made manifest on social media platforms, drawing on seminal critical histories of the selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): mahoney, b. (2021, october). on(line) transparency and the black public sphere. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. internet to tease out the influences of the state and the market. i follow with how the aforementioned threats and opportunities of transparency have migrated to cyberspace and are currently impacting the members of black publics online. i then discuss exactly how this review represents one cohesive timeline, in which liberation and repression both precede and co-exist on the internet. finally, i end my essay with an attempt at thinking—specifically, i give some thought as to how this more holistic view of the internet’s relationship to black publics allows us to better theorize digital strategy. references bennett, w. l., & segerberg, a. (2012). the logic of connective action: digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. information, communication & society, 15(5), 739–768. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2012.670661 boyd, danah, & crawford, k. (2012). critical questions for big data: provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon. information, communication & society, 15(5), 662–679. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2012.678878 brock, a. (2018). distributed blackness: african american cybercultures. nyu press. buchanan, l., bui, q., & patel, j. k. (2020, july 3). black lives matter may be the largest movement in u.s. history. new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowdsize.html fraser, n. (1990). rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. social text, 25/26, 56–80. jackson, s. j., bailey, m., & foucault welles, b. (2020). #hashtagactivism: networks of race and gender justice. mit press. jackson, s. j., & foucault welles, b. (2016). #ferguson is everywhere: initiators in emerging counterpublic networks. information, communication & society, 19(3), 397– 418. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2015.1106571 owen, s. (2017). monitoring social media and protest movements: ensuring political order through surveillance and surveillance discourse. social identities, 23(6), 688–700. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2017.1291092 selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): mahoney, b. (2021, october). on(line) transparency and the black public sphere. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. schradie, j. (2019). the revolution that wasn’t. harvard university press. squires, c. r. (2002). rethinking the black public sphere: an alternative vocabulary for multiple public spheres. communication theory, 12(4), 446–468. tufekci, z. (2017). twitter and tear gas: the power and fragility of networked protest. yale university press. van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. oxford university press. microsoft word oconnell-accommodating communication with conversational agents-accommodating communication with.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): o’connell, c., quinn, k., muramatsu, n., marquez, d., chin, j., leiser, s., gradishar, j., desai, s. (2021, october). accommodating communication with conversational agents: examining the perceptions and behaviors of older adults when using voice assistant technology. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. accommodating communication with conversational agents: examining the perceptions and behaviors of older adults when using voice assistant technology carrie o’connell the university of illinois at chicago kelly quinn the university of illinois at chicago naoko muramatsu the university of illinois at chicago david marquez the university of illinois at chicago jessie chin the university of illinois at urbana-champaign sarah leiser the university of illinois at chicago jamie gradishar the university of illinois at chicago smit desai the university of illinois at urbana-champaign the purpose of this study is to examine the communicative relationship between older adults and conversational agents (ca), such as a google home mini, to understand if and how interaction with ai-based voice technology affects perceptions, technological adoption, and, ultimately, human-machine communicative behaviors. using the communication accommodation theory (cat) framework (gallois & giles, 2015), and the categorical schema as outlined in the unified theory of adoption and utilization of technology (utaut) model (venkatesh et al., 2003) of technology acceptance, we qualitatively assess the relationship between expectations for use and ongoing / postinteraction user attitudes. cat focuses on the adjustments we make in our perceptions of and engagement in communicative behaviors. in other words, we enter into communicative situations with intentions and motivations derived from antecedent socio-historical context in mind. this squares with what the utaut model details as influencers of technological adoption and use: performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions (venkatesh et al., 2003). we use these constructs as a coding guideline to index data scraped from the mini, and collected from surveys, interview transcripts, user journals, and field notes throughout a 10-week study. historically, cat is applied to human-human communication exchanges. as the theory posits that interpersonal relationships can and will influence motivations or intentions for dyadic communication, this makes sense. however, we argue that as ai-based voice technologies become more sophisticated as voice assistants enter our intimate spaces, the application of cat to the human-machine communicative relationship is warranted. to date, research on user attitudes and behaviors when interacting with voice-based technology shows mixed results. a recent study of digital voice assistants and children found that users tend to not impose the same relational expectations on voice assistants, and are less empathic to the devices in a communicative situation (aeschilmann et. al, 2020). however, another study found that user perceptions of voice assistants were both reinforced and undercut by their interactions with the device (festerling & siraj, 2020). similarly, as guzman (2019) notes, user perceptions of voicebased technology diverge depending upon whether a user conceptualizes they are speaking to the assistant (software) or the technological device (hardware). therefore, further inquiry relating to the interpersonal communicative relationship fostered between human and machine when interacting with cas is warranted. to this end, we proposed the following research questions: r1: does interaction between human user and conversational agent alter user perceptions of the device? r2: does interaction between human user and conversational agent alter user expectations for communication exchange? r3: does interaction between human user and conversational agent affect the likelihood of new tech adoption for older adults? for this study, we recruited participants 65 and older from a large midwestern suburb. participants were given a google home mini, and asked to interact with device two-fold: 1) for natural use (i.e. using the device as they please to check weather, listen to music, etc.), and 2) for at-home exercise using a novel application-based exercise program. existing research on the physical activity of older adults suggests they are more likely to continue physical activity (pa) programs in home-based settings (ashworth, et al., 2005; chin et al., 2020). additionally, internet-based pa programs are effective in introducing behavioral change (wantland, et al., 2004) when used by older adults. therefore, using a pa program as an entry-point, we will assess how older individuals may alter their attitudes and behaviors towards and because of cas. this population represents a unique sample since there is a dearth of research on the adoption of voice-based technology by older individuals. unlike computers or mobile technology, users interact with voice-based technology through natural conversation (hoy, 2018), which is particularly preferred by older adults (relative to keyboard entry) given its ease of use and reduced psychomotor loads (quinn, smith-ray, & boulter, 2016; wulf et al., 2014). as technology use by older adults is associated with higher levels of autonomy and independence (rogers & mitzner, 2017), specifically examining attitudes and behaviors relating to cas and voice-based technology adoption is logical. to date, we have completed the study with 15 participants, and are enrolling an additional 15 participants for another 10-week session. preliminary data analysis shows that user attitudes and behaviors both harden and evolve after interacting with cas, supporting previous research (guzman, 2019; festerling & siraj 2020). complete results are anticipated by late summer 2021. references ashworth, n. l., chad, k. e., harrison, e. l., reeder, b. a., & marshall, s. c. (2005). home versus center based physical activity programs in older adults. the cochrane database of systematic reviews, (1), cd004017. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.cd004017.pub2 aeschlimann, s., bleiker, m., wechner, m., & gampe, a. (2020). communicative and social consequences of interactions with voice assistants. computers in human behavior, 112, 106466. buzzanell, p. m., burrell, n. a., stafford, r. s., & berkowitz, s. (1996). when i call you up and you're not there: application of communication accommodation theory to telephone answering machine messages. western journal of communication (includes communication reports), 60(4), 310-336. chin, j., quinn, k., muramatsu, n. & marquez, d. (2020). a user study on the feasibility and acceptance of delivering physical activity programs to older adults through conversational agents. in proceedings of the 64th international annual meeting of the human factors and ergonomics society. festerling, j., & siraj, i. (2020). alexa, what are you? exploring primary school children’s ontological perceptions of digital voice assistants in open interactions. human development, 64(1), 26-43. gallois, c., & giles, h. (2015). communication accommodation theory. the international encyclopedia of language and social interaction, 1-18. guzman, a. l. (2019). voices in and of the machine: source orientation toward mobile virtual assistants. computers in human behavior, 90, 343-350. hoy, m. b. (2018). alexa, siri, cortana, and more: an introduction to voice assistants. medical reference services quarterly, 37(1), 81-88. quinn, k., smith-ray, r., & boulter, k. (2016). concepts, terms, and mental models: everyday challenges to older adult social media adoption. human aspects of it for the aged population: healthy and active aging: second international conference, itap 2016, held as part of hci international 2016 toronto, on, canada, july 17-22, 2016, proceedings. part ii. itap (conference), 227–238. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39949-2_22 rogers, w. a., & mitzner, t. l. (2017). envisioning the future for older adults: autonomy, health, well-being, and social connectedness with technology support. futures, 87, 133–139. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2016.07.002 venkatesh, v., morris, m. g., davis, g. b., & davis, f. d. (2003). user acceptance of information technology: toward a unified view. mis quarterly, 27(3), 425–478. https://doi.org/10.2307/30036540 wantland, d. j., portillo, c. j., holzemer, w. l., slaughter, r., & mcghee, e. m. (2004). the effectiveness of web-based vs. non-web-based interventions: a meta-analysis of behavioral change outcomes. journal of medical internet research, 6(4), e40. https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.6.4.e40 wulf, l., garschall, m., himmelsbach, j., & tscheligi, m. (2014). hands free care free: elderly people taking advantage of speech-only interaction. in proceedings of the 8th nordic conference on human-computer interaction: fun, fast, foundational (pp. 203–206). new york, ny, usa: acm. https://doi.org/10.1145/2639189.2639251 selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 title: affective discourse analysis and social media: methodological innovations in the cross-platform study of emotion and race on twitter, gab, and facebook author: megan boler institution: social justice education, oise/university of toronto extended abstract: in the context of the so-called "post-truth" crisis, emotions have resoundingly replaced facts in our fast-moving, affectively-driven internet-based culture (mcintyre 2018). scholars are challenged to develop innovative methods for studying emotion and affect within studies of popular culture, social media, and political communications (boler and davis 2020). what is an effective interdisciplinary approach to the study of affect useful for studying communications in our rapidly-evolving media ecosystems? while the "affective turn" makes sense in the humanities, disciplines studying elections and populist sentiments traditionally draw upon quantitative and qualitative methods that tend to reduce and measure emotions as simply negative and positive (boler and davis 2018). further, political communications scholarship on "affective polarization" tend to define "in-groups" and "out-groups" solely in terms of partisan differences, missing much of the complexity of social identities and race relations that catalyze ideological and affective polarization (iyengar et al 2019). to bring greater complexity into understandings of affective polarization and how emotion drives debate within social media, this three-year, funded research project draws from cutting-edge scholarship on the politics of emotion and affect theory to inform an innovative grounded theoretical study of emotional expression in social media. relevant to this talk, the team investigated how emotion was mobilized and discussed within social media regarding salient election issues including voter fraud, antifa, and black lives matter in the context of the highly polarized u.s. election and the pro-trump ecosystems. the overarching rq framing the project was: x how are emotions expressed in relation to narratives of racial and national belonging, in the context of election-related social media? suggested citation (apa): boler, m. (2021, october). affective discourse analysis and social media: methodological innovations in the cross-platform study of emotion and race on twitter, gab, and facebook. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. boler 2 methodology this mixed-methods, three-year research project, funded by the canadian social science and humanities research council) explores how emotions are expressed in relation to narratives of racial and national belonging within election-related social media. engaging grounded theory (charmaz 2006), the cross-platform study explores twitter, facebook, and gab in the context of the 2019 canadian and 2020 u.s. elections. over the past two years, the pi and a seven-person team have developed an innovative approach of affective discourse analysis through an intensive, collaborative and iterative process of weekly meetings from september through june. a four-month digital ethnography was conducted in the lead up to and aftermath of each federal election, tracked developing stories and debates within social media conversations across the political spectrum, documented through extensive field notes and findings discussed weekly. following an extensive, four-month digital ethnography, following each digital ethnography, we selected 2-4 threads from each platform for a total of 12 threads. we coded a sample of 2500 posts for a total of 5000 over two years, reflecting the far right, conservatives, liberals, and left, from twitter, reddit, and facebook in the canadian context and in the u.s. context, from twitter, facebook and gab. threads were selected according to the following criteria: initiated by an influencer; reflecting cross-partisan dialogue; explicit address of race; and more than 300 comments/responses. we focused on analysis and coding of the comments to these original posts in order to understand the affective and cross-partisan dynamics of polarization and conflict. we coded the top 300 posts from each thread; in cases where there were fewer than 300 comments, we coded all comments (one interesting finding is that posts from the left are less frequent overall, and by far have fewer comments and responses). contributing an innovative approach to the analysis of affect and emotion within social media, our affective discourse analysis was developed through an intensive iterative process over two years, drawing from discourse, rhetorical, narrative, and content analysis. we engaged grounded theory to develop and refine a codebook and coding families suitable for the complex task of coding emotional expression, including: rhetorical and linguistic features; topics to which emotions were directed; and beliefs about in-groups and out-groups. literature and theoretical framework to frame our understanding of how emotions become linked to narratives of racial and national identity, we draw on the pioneering work of sociologist arlie hochschild. hochschild’s ethnographic study of tea party voters in the u.s. south argued that people form political decisions based on how received information corresponds to a “deep story” (2016). a deep story is an affective narrative or myth (such as the american dream): “a feels-as-if story—it’s the story feelings tell, in the language of symbols” (hochschild, 2018: 135). the concept of “deep stories” provides a framework for analyzing polarization and how narratives about race and national identities are linked with strong emotions. we will also engage hochschild’s pathbreaking, widelyrecognized concept of “feeling rules” (1987), prescribed emotional behaviors and norms determined by factors such as gender, race, age, socio-economic status, and occupation. by tracking “what emotions do” (ahmed 2004) in the context of “feeling boler 3 rules” and “affective economies” we are able to examine how and why emotions circulate and stick in relation to narratives of racial and national identity. in year 2, our research in the u.s. election context has allowed us to see that deep stories can be understood more precisely in terms of the predominant discourses and narratives of victimhood, discourses of ressentiment (especially in relation to identity politics), and melodrama as a form of collective political storytelling [please see aoir talks by hoda gharib, amanda trigiani, and míchílín ní threasaigh] in one of the few essays engaging a critical theory of emotion in relation to social media practices and race, duncan (2017) discusses increased media attention to right-wing actors in the u.s.. she argues that liberal media outlets have portrayed a veritable increase in the emotion of “hate” itself since the election of trump; however, duncan shows the problematic conflation of "hate speech” with “speech we might hate.” she reveals the need for researchers not only to identify, but to interpret, emotional expression. from such critical studies of emotion, we see how quantitative measures such as counting instances of hate-related words, cannot by themselves account for the socio-political context of the function of emotion in public discourse. our work thus provide a significant contribution to a nascent field of studies (buchholtz 2019, ganesh 2020) that specifically engage an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that includes affect theory such as that of ahmed (2004/2014) or politics of emotion such as that by hochschild (1987, 2016), alongside qualitative research of social media. the talk shares some of the challenges faced in developing this novel approach we term "affective discourse analysis", addressing the following issues: x cross-platform data access and challenges posed by ensuring symmetry of coding across platforms x limitations of academic access to "big data" x challenges and limitations of qualitative research data software atlas.ti x the challenge of identifying and interpreting emotional expressions embedded within social media text x developing a coding system with credible intercoder agreement, particularly given the intrinsically subjective nature of coding emotion contributing to a nascent field of mixed-methods studies related to affect within social media, this talk invites discussion of the importance of interdisciplinary study of affect and emotion in social media, and how qualitative research can augment quantitative methods of sentiment analysis (bouvier and rosenbaum 2020). this research urges scholars to move beyond overly reductive understandings of emotion in terms of "positive" vs. "negative" affects within quantitative approaches, and provides direction for developing more nuanced distinctions critical to understanding the political function of emotion, and best practices for the study of affect in social media. references: ahmed, s. (2004/2014). cultural politics of emotion. edinburgh university press. boler 4 bucholtz m. (2019). "the public life of white affects." journal of sociolinguistics. 23:485–504. bouvier, g., & rosenbaum, j. e. (eds.). (2020). twitter, the public sphere, and the chaos of online deliberation. palgrave macmillan. boler, m., & davis, e. (2018). the affective politics of the “post-truth” era: feeling rules and networked subjectivity. emotion, space and society, 27, 75-85. boler, m., & davis, e. (eds.). (2020). affective politics of digital media: propaganda by other means. routledge. charmaz, k. (2006). constructing grounded theory: a practical guide through qualitative analysis. sage. duncan, p. k. (2017). the uses of hate: on hate as a political category. m/c journal, 20(1). ganesh, b. (2020) weaponizing white thymos: flows of rage in the online audiences of the alt-right, cultural studies, 34:6, 892-924, hochschild, a. r. (1987/2012). the managed heart: commercialization of human feeling. univ of california press. hochschild, a. r. (2016). strangers in their own land: anger and mourning on the american right. new press. iyengar, s., lelkes, y., levendusky, m., malhotra, n., & westwood, s. j. (2019). the origins and consequences of affective polarization in the united states. annual review of political science, 22, 129-146. mcintyre, l. (2018). post-truth. cambridge: mit press. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): luitse, d.m.r., blanke t. & poell, t. (2022, november). ai competitions as infrastructures: examining power relations on kaggle and grand challenge in ai-driven medical imaging. paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ai competitions as infrastructures: examining power relations on kaggle and grand challenge in ai-driven medical imaging dieuwertje luitse university of amsterdam tobias blanke university of amsterdam thomas poell university of amsterdam artificial intelligence (ai) is quickly being taken-up across scientific disciplines, medical imaging is no exception. to stimulate development and facilitate the scientific evaluation of new approaches, ai-based research in medical imaging is increasingly organised in a competitive manner through machine-learning development platforms. these platformbased ai competitions are typically organised by consortia that issue dedicated research problems, focusing on specific tasks, such as breast cancer detection. participating teams can compete to develop and evaluate their machine learning models using a given dataset and achieve the highest performance on a set of predefined tasks. subsequently, teams are ranked on a platform-controlled central leaderboard by the calculated score of their (best) submission. this paper examines how such platform-based competitions shape power relations in medical image ai research around the globe. performance competitions follow a long-standing tradition in ai subfields like computer vision or natural language processing. a prime example of how they play a vital role in ai research is the imagenet large scale visual recognition challenge (ilsvrc) (russakovsky et al., 2015). associated with the imagenet dataset (deng et al., 2009), this competition ran between 2010 and 2017. in 2012, a team from the university of toronto won the challenge with a deep neural network-driven model that outperformed all competing teams by a significant margin using gpus (krizhevsky et al., 2012). this moment is often marked as the turning point in ai research, shifting the field towards the currently dominant deep learning paradigm, which is heavily data-driven and requires large amounts of computing power (dotan and milli, 2020). while many competitions have been organised independently or in conjunction with prestigious ai conferences, the last decade has seen an increase of competitions organised on machine-learning development platforms such as kaggle and grand challenge—two of the leading platforms in ai-based medical imaging. such platforms provide the infrastructure to run competitions and the necessary tools for teams to participate. in addition, teams are commonly awarded prizes that can be over $1 million. for medical image analysis, platform-hosted competitions constitute an important research infrastructure, steering global research and development in this dedicated ai subfield. these research infrastructures have been celebrated as “accelerators for medical imaging innovations” (bulten et al. 2022: 154) and models that perform well in these competitions are more likely to be adapted for clinical practice. furthermore, they further steer the individual careers of winning participants through the publication of competition research papers (reinke et al., 2021). yet, little is known about how these platform-infrastructures shape the conditions for medical image-ai research, including model production and evaluation. it is, however, vital to gain such insights, as there are growing concerns over the power dynamics in (medical) ai research and the development of machine-learning applications that amplify existing inequalities towards historically disadvantaged communities (benjamin 2019; thomas, 2022). so far, critical work has primarily focused on power imbalances in the construction of single research components like medical imaging datasets (e.g., oakden-rayner, 2020; rostamzadeh et al., 2022). but while such individual elements are significant, platform-hosted medical imaging competitions operate across the medical ai research pipeline. they structure the definition of research problems and the construction of datasets, as well as how models are produced and evaluated by introducing tasks and metrics. it is therefore critical to understand the organisation of these competitions in their entirety, and the position key actors—platforms, organising institutions, and competition participants—occupy within them. this paper addresses this issue through a critical empirical case study of 120 medical imaging competitions on kaggle and grand challenge between 2017 and 2022. combining a critical ai and platform studies research approach, we investigate how competitions on kaggle and grand challenge are organised—under what infrastructural conditions and by whom—and how this shapes processes of model production and evaluation in ai-driven medical imaging. studying competitions on kaggle and grand challenge to understand how competitions on kaggle and grand challenge shape production and evaluation processes in ai-based medical image research, we developed a digital methods approach that draws from various primary materials. the empirical analysis proceeded along three main lines of inquiry. first, we analysed kaggle and grand challenge’s platform documentation to identify the ways in which both platforms regulate the organisation of competitions through their set up guidelines and their several infrastructural components. second, we draw from a set of collected competition descriptions to analyse the institutional backgrounds of competition organisers, the medical imaging datasets they provide and the ways in which these actors define research problems and set metrics of model evaluation. lastly, we analysed information from leaderboards to map the distribution of competition participants in terms of geographical location and institutional background. this mapping provided insight into the geographical context submitted—well-performing—models have been produced, as well as the types of intellectual backgrounds they build upon. examining ai competitions as research infrastructures, we show that kaggle and grand challenge as well as competition organisers shape power relations in medical ai research at the level of data and task design, model production and evaluation in several distinct ways. for example, the platforms exercise infrastructural power by prestructuring task design, metrics for model evaluation and use of computer power. organising institutions, on the other hand, can be seen to use their powerful position to direct research focus towards segmentation as they mainly design competitions towards this task. in addition, the datasets underlying these competitions are mainly constructed with data from patients in the united states, western europe and china, while dataset diversity is approached technically, and descriptions rarely include information on patient distribution in terms of gender and race. because competitions play such an important role in steering medical image ai research directions and influence the types of models that are implemented into clinical settings, these findings highlight the impact these powerful actors ultimately have on these issues. therefore, we stress the importance of further considering platform-based competitions as key ai research infrastructures to locate the power differentials in the development of machine-learning models, not just in subfields of ai-based medicine, but also beyond. references benjamin, r. (2019). race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. cambridge: polity press bulten, w., kartasalo, k., chen, p.-h. c., et al. (2022). artificial intelligence for diagnosis and gleason grading of prostate cancer: the panda challenge. nature medicine, 28(1), 154–163. deng, j., dong, w., socher, r., li, l.-j., li, k., & fei-fei, l. (2009). imagenet: a largescale hierarchical image database. 2009 ieee conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, 248–255. dotan, r. & milli, s. (2020). value-laden disciplinary shifts in machine learning. proceedings of the 2020 conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency, barcelona, spain. krizhevsky a., sutskever i. & hinton g.e. (2012). imagenet classification with deep convolutional neural networks. 25th international conference on neural information processing systems—volume 1 (nips’12), 1097–1105. oakden-rayner, l. (2019). exploring large scale public medical image datasets (arxiv:1907.12720). arxiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/1907.12720 reinke, a., tizabi, m. d., eisenmann, m., & maier-hein, l. (2021). common pitfalls and recommendations for grand challenges in medical artificial intelligence. european urology focus, 7(4), 710–712. rostamzadeh, n., mincu, d., roy, s., smart, a., wilcox, l., pushkarna, m., schrouff, j., amironesei, r., moorosi, n., & heller, k. (2022). healthsheet: development of a transparency artifact for health datasets. 2022 acm conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency, 1943–1961. russakovsky, o., deng, j., su, h., et al. (2015). imagenet large scale visual recognition challenge. international journal of computer vision, 115(3): 211–252. thomas, r. (2021, january). medicine’s machine learning problem. boston review. retrieved september 29, 2022, from https://bostonreview.net/articles/ rachel-thomas-medicines-machine-learning-problem/ selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): jacobs, n., mullagh, l., kwon, n. (2022, november). creative design methods for iot data ethics in hybrid spaces. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. creative design methods for iot data ethics in hybrid spaces naomi jacobs imaginationlancaster lancaster university nuri kwon imaginationlancaster lancaster university louise mullagh imaginationlancaster lancaster university introduction large scale data collection, data analysis and associated potential data misuse is not confined to the purely digital spaces of the internet. the prevalent use of internet of things (iot) technology and ubiquitous embedded sensors is transforming physical spaces into hybrid ones; extensions of our data landscape (jacobs and cooper, 2018). these hybrid physical spaces include not only private domains of homes, offices and shops, but also public spaces, particularly (but not limited to) the urban landscape. as data collection becomes thus embedded in our digital public spaces, it is important to consider how public bodies respond to this in the form of policy which maximizes the civic benefits of such technologies (lee, 2018), while protecting the public from potential harms. we report here on a project investigating factors influencing trust in public space iot deployments, to reflect on digital placemaking. in association with a local governmental authority located in the north-west of england, the project developed a prototype policy to support iot deployments, to ensure they are conducted in a way that is ethical and secure. this project used a range of creative, participatory design methods to probe these questions, working with members of the city council as well as experts in iot and cybersecurity. this included using design fiction (bleeker, 2009) to speculate on the implications of a range of interventions and deployments including ai and edge processing, in order to probe potential ethical challenges. we combined this with walking workshop (‘walkshop’) methods (mullagh, 2021) to tangibly situate these potential futures in existing hybrid spaces. a virtual exploration of this walking method, introduced through necessity during the covid-19 pandemic, created a different type of hybrid space, and offered new opportunities for engagement. walking methodologies: physical and virtual as part of this project, a walkshop led six lancaster city council officers on a walk around the city centre of lancaster, uk. they were guided to sensors in a series of locations, and provided with a paper field guide which asked questions intended to provoke discussion. some of the deployments featured real sensors, iot deployments or data collection in the city. other deployments were fictional, and were represented by design fiction installations created by the project team. the real deployments included an air quality monitoring station and the use of qr codes at a café for covid19 contact tracing. the fictions included smart street lighting, a streetside bollard equipped to count passing pedestrians, and locally processed gait analysis of image data collected in a public square, to identify suspicious behavior. the fictions were intended to be mundane in nature, were based on existing technologies, and were designed with a range of levels of transparency – for example, as per the real deployments in other uk cities that it was based upon, no signage was placed with the bollard. one installation, which consisted of signage on public waste bins indicating the use of sensors to alert the council when they became full, was intended as fiction. however, on the walk, we were informed by a member of the council that the bins did indeed have this technology enabled, albeit hidden from public view. this was particularly of note since we had attempted to locate existing deployments via other council contacts. the fact that they were not aware of this context highlights the lack of information sharing and absence of a comprehensive map of local deployments. a second walkshop with cybersecurity experts similarly probed the iot deployments. this was undertaken online using the gathertown platform (jacobs and lindley, 2021). the virtual walk replicated the tangible, situated experience of seeing the deployments, real and fictional, in-situ in the wider context of the city, and allowed the attendees to experience how the public would interact with devices. by undertaking this activity online in a recreation of the physical space, it allowed wider participation by geographically distributed participants and gave an insight into the particular features of this unique city context. while questions of accessibility still remain, the creation of this virtual city walk was itself a valuable research output which will be used in future research and public engagement activities. results and outcomes: the trustlens tool council officers saw many potential benefits to the technologies, for example opportunities for supporting tourism, as well as efficiencies in areas such as waste collection and prevention of anti-social behavior. however, they also raised a number of concerns, many of which were also discussed by the cybersecurity experts. transparency, data quality, physical device security and appropriateness were highlighted as potential areas which require detailed consideration, as well as data storage and transfer in addition to initial collection. much discussion related to complexities arising from the nature of data processing and the use of ai. legal requirement exist such as the eu general data protection regulation (gdpr), but considerations of data usage stretched beyond this. two key outcomes were delivered as a result of this process. based on the data collected during the walkshops and in combination with prior work, a policy prototyping workshop was held with city council officers at which policy components were evaluated and compiled into a draft policy for secure, trustworthy iot. this policy was delivered to the council. future work will implement this policy in the local region, which will demonstrate a model case for transferability to other localities. a second outcome, which also developed on previous work (jacobs et al, 2022), is an online tool to support organizations in consideration of iot deployments. potential users of this tool include public bodies evaluating whether or not deployments conform to policy, those undertaking the design or procurement process for a deployment, and any other organizations assessing ethical and security aspects of iot. taking the form of a set of questions, the tool prompt users to consider a range of transparency, security, privacy and ethical aspects of their deployment, and is adaptable based on the specific stage of the deployment under scrutiny and its features. conclusions through this work, we have investigated ethical factors which must be considered in the construction of hybrid digital physical spaces where iot deployments bring a data element to public space. this is a contribution to work on digital placemaking (halegoua & polson, 2021), as well as policy and governance of data collection, sharing and use. it is important that policymakers are provided with support for considering these complex areas which may impact a wide variety of stakeholders. in this project, we created a hybrid digital space to virtually experience a physical space which is itself a hybrid space – and speculated on future data flows shaping places. combining such creative methods with others such as speculative design allows us a deeper insight into questions of data ownership, ethical data practice and data governance. references jacobs, n., cooper, r. (2018). living in digital worlds: designing the digital public space. routledge. jacobs, n., lindley, j. (2021). room for improvement in the video conferencing ‘space’. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org jacobs, n., loveday, f., markovic, m., cottrill, c. d., zullo, r., & edwards, p. (2022). prototyping an iot transparency toolkit to support communication, governance and policy in the smart city. the design journal, 25(3), 459-480. bleeker, j. (2009). design fiction: a short essay on design, science, fact and fiction. https://blog.nearfuturelaboratory.com/2009/03/17/design-fiction-a-short-essay-ondesign-science-fact-and-fiction/ (last accessed 9 feb 2022) halegoua, g., polson, e. (2021). exploring ‘digital placemaking.’ convergence, 27(3), 573–578 lee, g. (2018) what roles should the government play in fostering advancement of the internet of things? telecommunications policy, 43 (2019), pp. 434-444 mullagh, l. (2021) design principles for more-than-data walks, phd thesis (publication forthcoming), lancaster university selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): lastname, firstinitial. (2022, november). paper (or panel) title. paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. deleting videos on tiktok as algorithm related impression management daniel klug carnegie mellon university content management and strategies of self-presentation on tiktok social media platforms allow users to create, share, and engage with social media content to communicate and network with others based on personal information (boyd, 2010). self-presentation and impression management on social media is determined by individual and collective efforts alike (hogan, 2010), users’ online perception is equally influenced by one’s own and others’ content (walther et al., 2008). on the short-video app tiktok, users’ self-presentation is largely based on interaction and communication with and through user-generated video content rather than on profile information or through messaging (chen et al., 2019). tiktok users likewise consume and produce videos, they are presented with individually curated video feeds based on their content engagement, and they present themselves through video portfolios on their content-centered profile page. tiktok users demonstrate algorithmic literacy, they are quite aware that and how content is customized (oeldorf-hirsch & neubaum, 2021) and develop strategies and video creation practices (klug et al., 2021). we find that such strategies extend to tiktok users’ profile management and result in the practices of deleting videos and making videos private as forms of impression management online. social media users commonly delete their own posts because they no longer represent their thoughts, to protect their personal reputation (statista, 2021), and because of mistakes or regret (wang et al., 2011). deleting content also involves unwanted messages posted by others (madden et al., 2013). untagging yourself from others’ content mostly happens due to conflicts around the message, for privacy reasons, or because of inappropriate representation of the self (birnholtz, burke, steele, 2017). our findings exemplify various levels of algorithmic literacy among tiktok users and illustrate how social media algorithms influence users’ impression management and their understanding of mediated realities. suggested citation (apa): klug, d., (2022, november). deleting videos on tiktok as algorithm related impression management. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 2 data collection and analysis in august 2020, we conducted 28 qualitative interviews with tiktok users in the u.s. participants were recruited through location-based hashtags on tiktok (e.g. #pitt, #upenn#, philadelphia) and contacted via their linked instagram profile. participants were aged 18 to 25, had 300 to 450k followers, posted 15 to 425 videos, and had received 10k to 11.5m total likes. questions concerned participants’ motivations, strategies, and practices before, while, and after creating tiktok videos. interviews were analyzed following an open coding approach using a codebook to ensure validity of results through mutual agreement. content-related self-awareness: deleting videos we generally find that tiktok users deleted their videos because the content or message did not represent their views or attitudes anymore. most participants described that they became aware of older videos or deliberately looked through their videos as part of profile maintenance, for example, deleting older videos because they felt their performance could have been better at the time. this shows tiktok users’ awareness for their self-presentation and for the perception of others through the content they posted. for some participants, this self-awareness extends beyond tiktok into offline reality. they explained how they deleted videos because they feared their tiktok content would negatively affect their impression in offline reality on people they know from tiktok. for example, participants were in retrospect embarrassed by content they posted and therefore set such videos to private or deleted videos if they already were private. another main reason for deleting tiktok videos was lack of desired or intended feedback. especially participants with larger numbers of followers had precise ideas of the views and likes they wanted to achieve with a video. they would closely monitor the immediate success of their video and often delete it within less than an hour if it failed to acquire the desired virality. in this way, users maintained the impression of a successful and popular profile consisting only of videos with a minimum level of popularity. algorithm-related impression management: making videos private moreover, we found impression management strategies related to participants’ assumptions of how the tiktok algorithm works and influenced their decision to set videos to private instead of deleting them. more experienced users explained that deleting videos appears suspicious to the tiktok algorithm and dubious to followers while private videos still add to one’s algorithmic portfolio and stay accessible for followers. in general, participants set unwanted or outdated videos to private because deleting would mess up their personalized algorithmic video feed and ultimately lead to missing the trends they are looking for. moreover, participants felt deleting videos would affect the impression the tiktok algorithm has of their profile and eventually push their videos to the wrong audiences. to counteract, some participants would first create private videos to have the algorithm pick up sounds, hashtags, or filters they used and make the video public once one of these features started to trend. few participants also kept videos set to private after they went viral to clean their profile but still benefit from this video’s success. 3 conclusion impression management strategies such as described are common for interaction and communication on social media platforms. our results show that tiktok users create, evaluate, and maintain their online identity in regards to their experiences with and understanding of the app’s algorithm. we found tiktok users generally constantly evaluate their portfolio against current trends. they demonstrated certain levels of algorithmic literacy in deciding when and which content to delete or to set to private as a way of algorithmically influenced impression management. our results show that tiktok users largely follow established strategies as part of impression management on the app, even if they only have small numbers of followers and likes or only occasionally post or interact with content. this provides new insights into the effort and thought that users put into making short content on tiktok and how they manage this content to create online identities. references birnholtz, j., burke, m., & steele, a. (2017). untagging on social media: who untags, what do they untag, and why?. computers in human behavior, 69, 166-173. boyd, d. (2010). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in a networked self (pp. 47-66). routledge. chen, z. et al. (2019). a study on the characteristics of douyin short videos and implications for edge caching. in proceedings of the acm turing celebration conference-china (pp. 1-6). hogan, b. (2010). the presentation of self in the age of social media: distinguishing performances and exhibitions online. bulletin of science, technology & society, 30(6), 377-386. klug, d., qin, y., evans, m., & kaufman, g. (2021, june). trick and please. a mixedmethod study on user assumptions about the tiktok algorithm. in 13th acm web science conference 2021 (pp. 84-92). madden, m. et al. (2013). teens, social media, and privacy. pew research center, 21(1055), 2-86. oeldorf-hirsch, a., & neubaum, g. (2021). what do we know about algorithmic literacy? the status quo and a research agenda for a growing field. statista (2021). reasons for social media users in the united states to delete social media posts as of september 2018. url: https://www.statista.com/statistics/935334/ adults-who-deleted-social-media-post-following-reasons-usa/ [february 27, 2022]. walther, j. et al. (2008). the role of friends’ appearance and behavior on evaluations of individuals on facebook: are we known by the company we keep?. human communication research, 34(1), 28-49. 4 wang, y. et al. (2011). “i regretted the minute i pressed share”. a qualitative study of regrets on facebook. in proceedings of the seventh symposium on usable privacy and security (pp. 1-16). selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): brevini, b., jensen, j., madianou, m., couldry, n., and mejias, u. (2021, october). analyzing the platform economy – feudalism, medievalism and colonialism as useful frameworks. panel presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. analyzing the platform economy – feudalism, medievalism and colonialism as useful frameworks benedetta brevini university of sydney jakob linaa jensen aarhus university mirca madianou goldsmiths, university of london nick couldry london school of economics ulises mejias state university of new york, oswego panel introduction the platform economy challenges existing economic systems, social interactions and participation as well as the very foundation of democracy. as data is replacing labor as the central economic good, economy, society, class structures and democracy might change fundamentally. or we might experience old wine in new bottles. karl marx famously said that history tends to repeat itself, first as comedy, later as tragedy. in this panel we ask, whether history is repeating itself? the logics of internet platforms are often monopolizing and repressive. in the platform economy we have sacrificed our privacy for convenience. this is at odds with optimist expectations of the internet as equalizing, democratizing and in general leading to more freedom and prosperity. the free, unregulated internet, the dream of internet evangelists like john perry barlow and esther dyson, have been up for grabs. it has been colonized, marketed and dominated by players like the big five, apple, microsoft, facebook, google and amazon. such contradictions necessitate a historical focus in order to understand both how these logics came into being and how negative consequences of the platform economy night be overcome. by using historical prisms we might be more informed on our present and our future. in this panel we present and discuss contrasting historical perspectives on the platform economy. by using certain historical frameworks as prisms to focus on and analyze contemporary trajectories we might be able to identify, distill and scrutinize well known mechanisms of power, exploitation and dominance. the panel’s speakers employ different historical perspectives but focus mainly in two periods: medieval times and the age of colonialism. both periods were characterized by a strong correlation between a certain economic system and the exercise of political power. structured inequalities in systems of labor, trade and distribution of wealth had significant consequences for the distribution and (re)production of political power. medieval and colonial societies were each based on logics of exploitation and dominance, ideologically legitimized by references to first god, later the nation, what marx would have referred to as the superstructures of economic logics. in these systems, individual agency and possibilities were limited compared to today. in medieval society it was hard to change the estate in which you were born, in colonial times it was hard to change your role in the international system. and the fixed structures were basically grounded in economic logics. this is not a rigid marxist or historical-materialistic panel but we are focusing on relations between economic logics and political power by discussing perspectives of surveillance, control and punishment in medieval societies, logics of feudalism then and now. benedetta brevini takes the point of departure in the middle ages and demonstrates how technology platforms operate on principles similar to the feudalist structures of medieval society. brevini discusses the concept of “the digital lord” and by a case study of tech giant amazon she explains how the lord, defined as a platform that uses a dominant position to suppress competition, by controlling by design which particular products users see and by favouring their own brands over third party suppliers. the “lord” is (to quote marx) the master of the process of production and of the entire process of social life. contrary to medieval society the lord’s power is not based on manual work by serfs or slaves but by data extraction and exploitation. jakob linaa jensen takes the medieval perspective a bit further. besides agreeing with brevini that we definitely witness a new digital feudalism he/she also focuses on mutual surveillance, what he/she with a reference to michel foucault calls an “omnopticon”. by using the medieval village as a metaphor for social life he demonstrates how platform power is not only exercised by greedy tech giants but by citizens themselves, by participating and sub-ordinating to platform logics of participation and recognition, not at least in “the friending systems” and the “like economy. further, social life in the platform economy is often based on mutual surveillance and strong logics of social control. he/she discusses “virtual pillories” and “digital witch hunts” as mechanisms by which the masses control each other, narrowing free speech and individual agency. this has also significant political and democratic consequences as alternative voices might be increasingly suppressed. in short, the return to the (digital) medieval village represents a backlash for freedom, agency and democracy. in the next paper, we move historically to the age of colonialism, an era characterized by exploitation and unequal power relations legitimized in a certain world order. mirca madianou emphasizes how colonialism still is at play, now reworked by practices of innovation and digitization. madianou discusses the notion of technocolonialism, understood as the ways by which digital innovation and data practices revitalise colonial legacies in the humanitarian and international development sectors. technocolonialism refers to the convergence of digital developments with the structures of the platform economy and market forces and the extent to which they reinvigorate and materialise colonial relationships of dependency. madianou particularly focuses on the aid sector as an example of these tendencies. the paper first outlines why colonialism is an appropriate framework, then illustrates how digital innovation and data practices rework colonial legacies within the aid sector before finally arguing for the wider relevance of this framework which extends beyond the actual case study. nick couldry and ulises mejias go further and, drawing on their recent book, the costs of connection (2019) argue that the specificity of contemporary forms of data extraction is best understood by seeing it as a genuinely new stage of colonialism which is based around the appropriation not (as in historic colonialism) of land, its resources and the bodies to work those resources, but the flow of human life itself, made valuable in the form of data. this thesis of ‘data colonialism’ is offered as a characterization not just of what is happening with data in historic colonies, but right across the world, including the global north. at the same time, deep continuities between historic colonialism’s rationalization of resource appropriation through supposedly superior ‘rationality’ and today’s logics of dataism and big data become visible once we see both, following the peruvian sociologist anibal quijano, as forms of coloniality. the panel is based on several recent books written by the panel participants. by bringing together our ideas and perspectives we hope to generate a stimulating discussion and contribute to a unified research agenda of historically focused analyses of the platform economy and beyond. paper 1 from tech giants to digital lords: the promise (or tragedy) of the digital feudalism framework benedetta brevini, university of sydney many scholars in the last two decades have investigated the unprecedented consolidation of communication systems, exploring the increasing globalisation of capitalist relations and rationales; the concerted pursuit of neo liberal economic policies, and the roll-out of digital technologies, particularly the emergence of the internet as a mass utility (brevini and murdock, 2017). the focus on data accumulation has been put at centre stage in several recent works, including fuch’s big data capitalism (2019) zuboff’s surveillance capitalism (2019) and srnicek’s platform capitalism (2017). the common themes of these latest works are that data has a crucial value, data collection is highly unequal and tends to replicate the same power asymmetries in societies. while these frameworks are useful in understanding the developments of global tech giants, in recent work (brevini, 2021) i have argued that if we want to really capture the political, economic and ideological power of tech giants and make sense of the extreme inequality, uncontrolled market dominance , precarity, and the progressive privatisation of communication policy we are witnessing, then a new analytical framework is needed. more precisely, as i have explored in “amazon: understanding a communication giant” (brevini,2021) it is crucial to understand these communication giants beyond their characterization as successful capitalists , and to embrace the more promising framework of tech giants as digital lords in the context of digital feudalism. digital lords and digital feudalism what we understand as feudalism is a significant structure of the middle ages. although with many versions across european societies of the time, this framework is useful to understand a series of relationships between a landowner (the lord) and their vassals and serfs with their duties, obligations and various degrees of curtailed freedoms. as the lords of the middle ages extracted rents, imposed loyalties, and profited from resources that were scarce, today’s digital lords exert their powerful dominance on their contractors, users and citizens: us. in marx’s words a lord is “the master of the process of production and of the entire process of social life” (marx, 2018). what are the characteristics of digital lord, how do they wield their power? a digital lord is a platform that uses a dominant position to suppress competition, by controlling by design which particular products users see and by favoring their own brands over third party suppliers. each platform builds a digital estate that is based on membership (in amazon’s case, the products as services) and aims to lock users in. each platform extracts rents (mazzuccato, 2018) from its third-party suppliers (vassals) that pay a fee to receive the other services of the lord following the logic of feudal beneficia ( for example, amazon fulfilments, amazon advertisement, and amazon clouds). thus, the sellers that do not advertise on the platform find themselves at a severe disadvantage in the market that the digital lord rules; like medieval vassals in an estate, loyal sellers/vassals need the lord’s protection to survive. the digital lord is also a platform that gives users the illusion of options, but because of clear design choices and business strategies, de facto imposes on users their already-made decisions. the digital lord is also a platform that collects data about serfs and peasants in the realm (the users) through various ubiquitous technologies. finally, the digital lord is a company that exploits its financial strength, strong research capability and market dominance to set a political agenda in the context of digital feudalism. in order to test the framework, i will focus on the case of amazon. firstly, amazon has been able to exploit network effects of communication systems (liebowitz, stan j., and stephen e. margolis, 1994) on several levels to become a digital lord. when amazon started, it used its broad networks to bring in diverse suppliers, predominantly to the benefit of its customers. the more members it attracted, the more interesting it became for additional customers and the more difficult it became for alternative providers to compete. but more indirect network effects have impacted on amazon’s extraordinary success: the more consumers use amazon, the more the platform becomes attractive not just for customers, but for other indirect players in the market, third party businesses. the more third-party retailers it attracts, the more amazon can dictate the conditions under which they can use the platform to sell. such conditions or fees are “rents” that progressively weaken the ecosystem of third-party sellers, establishing a more repressive digital estate that gives retailers no other choice but to accept the condition of the lord. moreover, amazon does not only compete with major e-shopping companies offering platforms for retailers: it also competes with the same sellers as a producer, that sells its products in the same ecosystem. as one of the digital lords with dominant market power, amazon uses its assertive position to restrain competition, by controlling which products users see in their realm and by promoting their own brands. meanwhile, amazon’s advertising business is also thriving, so retailers are also forced to pay additional rent to advertise on the platform. this uncontested dominance allows a digital lord like amazon to push a mechanism of loyalty to the company (for both vassals and serfs) to keep all users, providers and retailers permanently attached to their services. this is through the creation of a proprietary system environment, enriched by the incredible technological assets of the company (aws for example) offers customized and integrated hardware products, services that are designed to keep vassals and serfs within the same estate forever. another factor is crucial in pushing the concentration dynamics and the consolidation of market power of amazon: its impressive financial resources in the form of stock market capital that enables continuous acquisition and the elimination of potential competitors. the digital lord’s substantial capital enables continuous expansion into new territories; lord and estate have continued to sweep across new lands and conquer other, smaller lords and estates, bringing their serfs (workers) and vassals (third parties) under its aegis. the lord’s growing capital also enables expansion through experimentation; serfs are encouraged to develop new goods that the estate will be able to sell to new subjects. the modern expansionist digital estate requires different mechanisms to grow in comparison with the estates of old, and amazon has certainly made use of these mechanisms to increase its political influence. it has engaged in increasingly sophisticated lobbying activities. the court of the lord has expanded in recent years to include a number of expert lobbyists, drawn from the ranks of the political-corporate elite, who have been undertaking activities to try to persuade lawmakers (and other parties) of the worthiness of the corporation’s actions data extraction as core business amazon’s business strategies, like the business strategies of other digital lords, have always been characterized by an obsession for data extraction and profile building. thus, amazon as a digital lord has systematically collected, matched and evaluated users’ behavior on their platform and beyond to create an impressive database of profiles. these large volumes of data are used to create ever-more differentiated user profiles, which are employed to anticipate what users want. but this data is also fundamental to feed a number of other businesses of the digital lord; they are used to develop the most successful products sold under the amazon brands, crucially tied to consumers’ preferences (to reiterate their status of vassals, third party sellers on amazon don’t have access to their own customers ‘data). these profiles serve as an important input for their research and development and they feed all artificial intelligence expansions and internet things products. ultimately, they also contribute to their growing advertising activities, aimed at influencing users’ behavior and actions. paper 2 the medieval internet – digital feudalism, omnoptical surveillance and social control in the platform economy jakob linaa jensen, aarhus university in this paper, i argue that medievalism might form a coherent perspective for understanding logics of participation, power and dominance in the platform economy. i will argue, that the medieval perspective, understanding contemporary digital, social media-savvy society through metaphors and concepts from medieval society, is a useful prism for investigating the social and political challenges facing us twenty years into the twenty-first century. the main argument is that apparently distinct social phenomena related to the spread of new media are related and a product of logics that dominated medieval society, not at least those of control, surveillance and feudalism. i particularly use the medieval village as a metaphor for the social experience of the platform economy. i discuss how mutual surveillance, social control and censorship are also parts of the new platform economy order. it is a paradox that the internet, the ultimate symbol of modernity, transparency and enlightenment facilitates logics of enclosure, censorship and social control. much of this is linked to the enormous increase of visibility. in the medieval village, contrary to modern society, it was hard not to be seen and observed. i will argue that the socially mediated public sphere combines two phenomena, visibility and mutual surveillance. we are currently witnessing an “omnopticon”, where everybody watches everybody via a complicated network of mutual, mediated surveillance techniques, mass media phenomena and 24/7 activities on the internet. social interactions in the age of social media is shockingly similar to medieval village logics of mutual surveillance. even if not actively commenting or liking, users keep an eye on each other, through what i have elsewhere dubbed as a social sixth sense. many people write and publish on social media based on anticipated reactions. social media, like the rest of the internet, was intended to set people free, but as it gathered momentum the consciousness of the omnopticon intruded on the surface of all internet activities, creating a norm that cripples rather than liberates, making people conform even more to existing norms of what is perceived as mass approved behaviour. this is particularly striking in the case of what i call “digital pillories”. in medieval society, the pillory was one of the great instruments of public shaming. here offenders were exhibited for shorter or longer times for the purpose of public shaming. they received public ridicule, outright hatred and physical acts like hitting and spitting from the bypassers. the pillory was a strong instrument of social control. in a close-knit society where everybody knew each other, the price of rejection and exclusion from society was high. some people believe that the pillory is a thing of the past in enlightened societies, under the rule of law, where punishment is concealed from the public institutionally with prisons. the truth is that although the physical pillories were removed from city squares during the age of enlightenment, public shaming has never ceased to have a powerful presence in modern society, from newspaper stories and the televised spectacle of celebrity trials – or cases that create celebrities – to the internet’s amplification and massification of public shaming. first, contrary to the mass media age where editorial filters had to be passed, everybody can now publish and, as importantly, film, allowing for posting all kinds of accusations, whether right or wrong. secondly, information posted online floats around permanently, even if a post might be removed or a site might go bankrupt. one of the affordances of the internet is the ability to copy and distribute, which has exponentially increased. online rumours have proven hard to extinguish, finally, we are living in the age of sharing. rumours, reputations spread like a wildfire. the more controversial or sensational, the faster it spreads. from the outset of digital social media, these tools have found targets in criminals (convicted or not), politicians, restaurants, companies and ordinary citizens who for some reason have fallen into disregard. not all digital pillories are created explicitly with the purpose of public shaming. the last decades we have seen an explosion of online rating services, evaluating everything from travel agencies and restaurants to teachers and solicitors. the idea is in line with the touted notion that the middlemen – the tourist guide, the critic, the professional – were now unnecessary. rather than relying on curated advice by experts, everybody can become a reviewer. the idea of trusting fellow consumers and citizens is immediately appealing. they are in the same boat and one might even filter the reviews to read from someone like oneself, for instance singles, citizens of new york or mothers with kids. further, in rating portals the expertise is crowdsourced, wikipedia-style, while the number of reviews increase the reliability, making one odd review less important. but here, too, there is a large opening for rumour and slander. another example of mechanisms of control in the “digital” medieval village is digital witch hunts. witch trials and witch hunts are often seen as characteristic of medieval society, although in fact they only started in the high middle ages, and achieved critical mass only later, in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. online witch hunts only deviate from their historic predecessors in the method of punishment. after all, the mob does not have formal judicial power. but the rapid and often wrong judgement of “the social media court of justice” can do real harm to their victims anyway. there are numerous examples of teenagers who have committed suicides because of online bullying. and innocent people have been driven to suicide or into hiding to escape internet spread accusations of crimes or other misdeeds that they have not, in fact, committed. even if the claims do turn out to be true, the “trial” of these people in social networks has a way of vitiating the fundamental right of the accused in a democratic society to a fair and unbiased trial by an independent court. the judgement by the crowd belongs in archaic contexts like the medieval marketplace. in the paper presentation i use the “witch hunt” on reddit in the aftermath of the boston marathon bombing as an illustrative example. in short, by using the middle ages and particularly the medieval village as an analytical prism, i identify logics of mutual surveillance social control and thereby the exercise of power on a micro level, facilitated by the affordances of the platform economy. paper 3 technocolonialism: digital aid as extraction and experimentality mirca madianou goldsmiths, university of london this paper puts forward the notion of technocolonialism to explain the ways digital innovation and data practices revitalise colonial legacies in the humanitarian and international development sectors, which often exemplify so called ‘tech-for-good’ developments. the aid sector is increasingly digitized and dependent on metrics and data. most united nations agencies have innovation labs and data departments. refugee registrations by default involve biometric data while needs assessment and the coordination of aid depend on data metrics. artificial intelligence (ai) applications include chatbots, data visualizations and modelling aiming at forecasting future crises and population flows. digitization and datafication are transforming the sector and compound the parallel forces of marketization, professionalization and privatization which takes place through the proliferation of private–public partnerships, but also through the work of private entrepreneurs, foundation work and ‘big tech’ initiatives such as facebook’s ‘disaster maps’ initiative. such developments encompass both international development and humanitarian initiatives which overlap significantly as aid agencies often engage both in emergency work and long-term recovery (krause, 2014). because humanitarianism and development share a similar structure, which follows the flow of aid from the rich global north to the global south, i refer to them collectively as the aid sector here. technocolonialism refers to the convergence of digital developments with the structures of the aid sector and market forces and the extent to which they reinvigorate and rework colonial relationships of dependency. the paper is divided into three parts: it will first outline why colonialism is an appropriate framework for understanding contemporary developments. in the second part i will illustrate how digital innovation and data practices rework colonial legacies within the aid sector before finally arguing for the wider relevance of this framework which extends beyond the humanitarianism development nexus to the wider technology-for-good sector. the notion of technocolonialism draws on colonial (stoler, 2016) and decolonial (quijano, 2000) theorists who argue for the persistence of colonial genealogies in the contemporary context. quijano’s notion of the ‘coloniality of power’ is useful for explaining how the subjugation of the colonized continued well after the independence of postcolonial states as a result of the dominance of eurocentric systems of knowledge, the codification of social and racial discrimination and the exploitation associated with global capitalism (quijano, 2000). for stoler, contemporary global inequalities such as migration are ‘reworkings […] of colonial histories’ which she theorizes as colonial presence (2016, p. 5). humanitarianism and international development are deeply entangled with colonial histories. humanitarianism emerged in the colonial expansion of the 19th and 20th centuries and the parallel awareness of otherness and suffering (lester and dussart, 2014). although contemporary humanitarianism is popularly understood in moral terms as the expression of ‘a supposed natural humaneness’ (fassin, 2012) and the ‘imperative to reduce suffering’ (calhoun, 2000) the structural asymmetry between donors, humanitarian officers and aid recipients reproduces the unequal social orders which shaped colonialism and empire. the emphasis on ‘doing good’ occludes the fact that aid, including international development, are part of a wider liberal agenda (escobar, 2012) that primarily benefits countries in the global north. the asymmetry is evident in the language used in humanitarianism and development to refer to ‘aid beneficiaries’ and ‘donors’. it is in these asymmetrical relationships that we discern the legacies of colonialism. technology and science are also part of colonial genealogies. from the development of the 19th century natural sciences to innovations such as the telegraph (suman, 2009) scientific explorations benefitted from colonial expansion and the parallel resource extraction. science was integral to the ‘civilizing mission’ of colonialism, a tool used to justify colonial rule (fanon, 1959). science was the prime tool used to mold colonial subjectivities (anderson, 2006) for example through systems of classification. it is no coincidence that biometrics was first used in india as part of the british empire’s efforts to control and manage colonial subjects. that biometrics is still used today to manage and control othered bodies is evidence of the durability of colonial legacies (madianou, 2019). contemporary developments in artificial intelligence (ai) are part of larger genealogies of enumeration, measurement and classification that were originally developed by imperial powers (appadurai, 1993; see madianou, 2021 for a discussion of a decolonial approach to ai). the colonial genealogies of science are particularly evident in the way colonies were used as laboratories for testing and experimentation (petryna, 2009). contemporary experimentation with digital technologies has its roots in those earlier – and more recent – practices of offshoring clinical trials. technocolonialism refers to the convergence of digital developments with the genealogies of international aid and the entry of market forces and the extent to which they reinvigorate and rework colonial relationships of dependency. technocolonialism aims to capture the constitutive role that digital innovation and data play in entrenching existing power asymmetries between people in need and aid agencies. the paper observes that this entrenchment occurs through a number of interconnected processes: by extracting value from ‘beneficiary’ data and innovation experiments for the benefit of aid organizations and private companies; by materializing discrimination associated with colonial legacies; by contributing to the production of systems of classification and social orders that entrench the ‘coloniality of power’; by experimenting with untested technologies; and by justifying these practices under the context of emergencies. the constitutive role of technologies in revitalizing and materialising colonial legacies differentiates technocolonialism from neocolonialism. technologies here aren’t just tools, but the means through which the colonial legacies are reworked and realized in the present moment. digital developments in the aid sector are typical of developments in the larger field of ‘technology for good’, or ‘tech-for-good’ as it is often referred to. ‘tech-for-good’ are initiatives by big technology companies which essentially claim that technologies will provide solutions to complex social problems. technology, which in this context is almost always synonymous with digital technology and computation (see also parallel terms such as ‘ai-for-good’), is intentionally designed and developed to address social, economic and environmental challenges. the paper concludes with a reflection on what constitutes ‘good’ in the face of extraction and experimentality. references anderson, w. (2006). colonial pathologies. durham and london: duke university press. appadurai, a. (1993) number in the postcolonial imagination. in breckenridge, c. & van der veer, p. (eds.), orientalism and the postcolonial predicament, pp. 314-339. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. calhoun, c. (2008). the imperative to reduce suffering: charity, progress, and emergencies in the field of humanitarian action. in: barnett, m. & weiss, t. g., (eds.) humanitarianism in question: politics, power, ethics. pp. 73-97. cornell university press, ithaca, ny, usa. escobar, a. (2012). encountering development: the making and unmaking of the third world. princeton: princeton university press. fanon, f. (1959). a dying colonialism. new york: grove press. fassin, d. (2012). humanitarian reason: a moral history of the present. berkeley, ca.: university of california press. krause, m. (2014). the good project. chicago, il: chicago university press. lester, a., & dussart, f. (2014). colonization and the origins of humanitarian governance. cambridge: cambridge university press. madianou, m. (2019a). technocolonialism: digital innovation and data practices in the humanitarian response to refugee crises. social media and society, 5(3), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119863146 madianou, m. (2019b). the biometric assemblage: surveillance, experimentation, profit and the measuring of refugee bodies. television and new media, vol. 20(6), 581-599. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419857682 madianou, m. (2021). nonhuman humanitarianism: when 'ai for good' can be harmful. information, communication & society, 24(6), 850868, doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2021.1909100 petryna, a. (2009). when experiments travel. clinical trials and the global search for human subjects. princeton university press. quijano, a. (2000). coloniality of power and eurocentrism in latin america. international sociology, 15(2), 215-232. stoler, a. l. (2016). duress: imperial durabilities in our times. durham and london: duke university press. suman, s. (2009). putting knowledge in its place: science, colonialism and the postcolonial. postcolonial studies, vol. 12(4), 373-388. paper 4 the decolonial turn in data studies nick couldry, london school of econonics ulises meijes, suny oswego this talk will return to the proposal, made by the authors at aoir 2018, to interpret what is going on with data today through the lens of colonialism, specifically through the theoretical framework now known as data colonialism (couldry and mejias 2018, 2019). data colonialism is just one of a number of macro-theories developed in the past 5 years to make sense of the vast expansion of processes for extracting, aggregating, evaluating and applying data. most such theories try to capture the contemporary nature of capitalism: for example, surveillance capitalism (zuboff 2015, 2019), platform capitalism (srnicek 2016), and data capitalism (myers west 2017). a minority do so by drawing analogies not only within the history of capitalism, but over a longer time-scale. one example are the theories of digital feudalism represented elsewhere in this panel (linaa jensen 2020; brevini and swiatek 2020; compare fairfield 2017). this paper will discuss the distinctive advantages of examining current trends in contemporary capitalism from the perspective of the longer historical time-frame of colonialism: that is, the theory of data colonialism. the first element of this thesis stems from debates about how, in general, capitalism should be interpreted not as a spontaneously-generating process of 18th century modernity, but as an outgrowth of the extraordinary seizure of global resources by european powers that we know as colonialism, not capitalism. the critique of orthodox marxism for neglecting the significance to the development of capitalism of what was labelled mere ‘primitive accumulation’ is well-established (williams 1994; robinson 2000). but the point acquires special importance at a time when, through the medium of data, an entirely new dimension of the world’s resources is being appropriated as a source of economic value, converting the flow of everyday human life into an input for capitalist production. true, this landgrab (dorre, lessenich and rosa 2015) can be understood as part of capitalism’s ongoing expansion, as what david harvey (2004) called —revising marx— ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (c.f. thatcher, o’sullivan, and mahmoudi 2017; mezzadra and neilson 2018). but it does more justice both to the epochal nature of colonialism’s original landgrab five centuries ago, and to the potentially epochal nature of the contemporary data landgrab, to call the latter development a new stage of colonialism. this is intended as a strictly limited and strategic comparison. the proposal is not that today’s data landgrab is exactly like the original appropriation of land, resources and bodies in all respects, or alike in all of its modalities. quite clearly it isn’t, not least because the new landgrab, unlike its violent predecessor, does not begin in the absence of social relations between the colonizer and the colonized. it begins, instead, against the background of three centuries of developing social relations and marketization of social life within capitalism (polanyi 2001), making physical violence less necessary. the comparison being made is simply between the scale and depth of the contemporary appropriation of data across everyday life and the transformation of life in colonized territories at the start of historical colonialism. from which it follows also that we are not comparing what is happening today, at the beginning of this new landgrab, with what, over centuries, followed the original colonial landgrab (that is, the emergence of complex structures of imperial administration or of cultures of racial oppression and hierarchy). the structures of power and oppression that will develop from this data landgrab are inevitably still, in part, to be decided. what is clear, however —and this is where the connection between data colonialism and the long and bitter legacy of neocolonial power becomes explicit— is that the power relations of data colonialism will build upon and reinforce the inequalities inherited from earlier eras, not least the inherited racial inequalities of contemporary societies, often understood through the lens of ‘racial capitalism’ (bhattacharyya 2018; cottom 2020). the racial justice inflections of how data colonialism unfolds are already clear (noble 2018; benjamin 2019), but they are not the only justice issues raised by data colonialism (there are also class, gender and indigenous rights issues: c.f. eubanks 2017; ricaurte 2019; d’ignazio and klein 2020; chock 2020). and the historical resonances of data colonialism extend beyond the implications of racial capitalism to encompass the hierarchical approach both to the production of knowledge and to the ranking of human beings that from the start was used to justify the seizure of the planet’s resources (bhattacharyya 2018: 99; mignolo 2011; pagden 1986; schmitt 2006). this is the second main element of the data colonialism thesis: that only within this extended historical frame can the continuity of extractivism be grasped, a continuity that is invisible within accounts that see data practices only within the history of capitalism or only within the history of europe. this continuity is the idea that peruvian postcolonial theorist aníbal quijano (2007/1992) called ‘coloniality’. in essence, it is what justifies power and the absolute seizure of the world’s assets on the basis of an assumed ‘rational’ superiority located somehow in ‘the west’, or in whatever parts of the world now assume the mantle of ‘the west’. the data colonialism approach links well-known critiques of the discourse of dataism (van dijck 2014) to a deeper continuity in how the seizure of the world’s resources has been justified throughout the history of colonialism and its offshoot, capitalism. this changes our understanding of contemporary discourses of big data, whether within rich societies (where the full force of their dispossessive power becomes clear) or between richer and poorer societies (where they play out, as already noted, against the backdrop of neocolonial inequalities). from this perspective, the data colonialism thesis will be presented along two dimensions. first, as a way to appreciate the full scale of the annexation of human life to capital through the medium of data. and second, as a way to understand the historic continuities of rationality that ‘justify’ this new landgrab, as they did earlier colonial appropriations. our proposal, in short, is that data represents a social transformation that can only be understood by grasping the evolving order of contemporary data-driven capitalism through the historical comparative lens of colonialism, which itself was the starting-point for capitalism. in that sense, similarities between this new order and earlier social orders such as feudalism that predate both colonialism and capitalism are accidental, rather than explanatory. data colonialism, along with historical colonialism and capitalism, must all be understood as phases in the development of ‘modernity’ as strategies for world domination, not merely localized feudal oppression. references benjamin, r. (2019). race after technology. polity. bhattacharyya, g. (2018). rethinking racial capitalism. rowman and littlefield. brevini, b. and swiatek, l. (2020) amazon. london: routledge. chock, s. costanza (2020). design justice. mit press. cottom, t. (2020). where platform capitalism and racial capitalism meet: the sociology of race and racism in digital society. sociology of race and ethnicity, 6(4), 441-449. couldry, n. and mejias, u. (2018) ‘data colonialism: rethinking big data’s relation to the contemporary subject’, television & new media. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1527476418796632 couldry, n. and mejias, u. (2019) the costs of connection. stanford: stanford university press. eubanks, v. (2018). automating inequality. st. martin’s press. fairfield, j. (2017) owned. cambridge: cambridge university press. harvey, d. (2004). the ‘new’ imperialism: accumulation by dispossession. socialist register, 40, 63-87. linaa jensen, j. (2020) the medieval internet. emerald publishing. mezzadra, s. & neilson, b. (2018). the politics of operation. duke university press. mignolo, w. (2011). the darker side of modernity. duke university press. myers west, s. (2017) ‘data capitalism: redefining the logics of surveillance ad privacy’ business and society https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0007650317718185 noble, s. (2018). algorithms of oppression. nyu press. pagden, a. (1987). the fall of natural man (2nd ed). cambridge university press. polanyi, k. (2001) the great transformation. boston: beacon press. quijano, a. (2007). ‘coloniality and modernity/rationality’, cultural studies 21(2): 168178. ricaurte, p. (2019). data epistemologies, the coloniality of power, and resistance. television & new media, 20(4), 350-365. robinson, c. (2000). black marxism (2nd ed.). university of north carolina press. schmitt, c. (2006). the nomos of the earth. telos press publishing. srnicek, n. (2017). platform capitalism. polity. thatcher, j., o’sullivan, d., & mahmoudi, d. (2017). data colonialism through accumulation by dispossession: new metaphors for daily data. environment andplanning d: society and space, 34(6): 990-1006. van dijck, j. (2014) ‘datafication, dataism and dataveillance’, surveillance and society, 12(2), pp. 197–208. williams, e. (1994). capitalism and slavery. university of north carolina press. zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism. profile books. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): jordan, k. (2022, november). ’sort by relevance’ – whose relevance? a critical examination of algorithm-mediated academic literature searches. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ‘sort by relevance’ – whose relevance? a critical examination of algorithm-mediated academic literature searches katy jordan university of cambridge introduction and background the internet has revolutionised access to information. it has arguably never been easier to access academic literature and research evidence, and a range of online scholarly databases and academic social networking sites provide platforms to search the literature. while this has the potential for a much wider audience – academic and nonacademic – to access research literature, there are reasons to be cautious about the platforms which mediate access. for example, different databases vary in terms of their coverage and the sources they include. furthermore, many are run as commercial enterprises, which may bring hidden priorities for promoting particular content. as a result, relying on a particular database as a source may bring only a partial view of a research field. the use of algorithms – even if intended to aid the user, by providing what it calculates to be the most ‘relevant’ material can further obscure exactly why particular literature has been included in search results. for example, following in the wake of its market dominance as a search engine, google scholar is an extremely popular way of searching the academic literature, and uses an algorithm to determine the order in which search results are presented: “google scholar aims to rank documents the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each document, where it was published, who it was written by, as well as how often and how recently it has been cited in other scholarly literature.” (google scholar, 2021). while google scholar has received a great deal of research attention in the bibliometric field, studies have more frequently focused upon questions relating to the size and coverage of the database, and reliability of citation counts. a small group of studies have focused on the algorithm to-date, which largely confirm the definition above (beel et al., 2010), and provide some further insight. recently, rovira et al. (2018) identify the number of citations as the major factor influencing ranking; this analysis was extended to other platforms, which showed that this is also the case for microsoft academic (now defunct), but not scopus, and that citations may influence ranking in web of science despite not being described as part of their model (rovira et al., 2019). furthermore, rovira et al. (2021) show that the algorithm is biased in favour of articles written in english. the google scholar algorithm description demonstrates potential risks for algorithmmediated literature searches. first, by drawing upon citations and favouring certain publication outlets, the rankings are likely to amplify the inequalities present in scholarly publishing. second, it carries methodological risks when carrying out literature reviews, as it is not clear exactly why a particular article has deemed to be of high relevance in search results; some have cautioned against relying on google scholar within systematic reviews for example for this reason (giustini & kamel boulos, 2013). however, while awareness of the risks of algorithms is growing, including in relation to academic research and higher education (matthews, 2021), there is a lack of research at present. this paper reports on a project which is using a mixed-methods approach to explore how academics navigate these risks in practice. surveying the prevalence of algorithm in literature searches while the google scholar algorithm has received a degree of research interest and concerns have been raised about the opacity of its rankings, it is no longer an isolated case. the first step in this research project involved examining how prevalent similar ‘sort by relevance’ algorithms currently are in the context of academic bibliographic databases. fourteen of the largest (general rather than subject specific) platforms were systematically examined. all were found to offer the option to sort by ‘relevance’ or ‘best match’, and this was the default setting in all but two cases. definitions were provided by just over half of the platforms (eight of the 14 reviewed). the following platforms included sorting by relevance but did not provide definitions: academia.edu, aminer, arxiv, core.ac.uk, lens.org, and zenodo. those which did provide definitions are listed in table 1. the level of detail provided in the definitions varied, typically being a short paragraph or bullet points. a notable exception is the semantic scholar platform, which publishes technical details of its algorithm through github (feldman, 2020). the types of information which different platforms state that their algorithms use are mapped in table 1 (although it is important to caution that little detail was provided, and this may not account for all data used). this reveals that the platforms which do provide information about their ranking algorithms can be broadly divided into two groups: those which are primarily focused on the text included in articles, and those which use other attributes such as the author, where published, date published (favouring recent publications), and the number of citations received. table 1: mapping of types of data used in definitions of ‘relevance’. platform data sources used text weighting publication author citations date published dimensions.ai google scholar jstor pubmed science direct scopus semantic scholar web of science conclusions this paper has presented a critical look at the use of algorithms to rank the results of academic literature searches according to the opaque concept of ‘relevance’. the survey of platforms confirms that while the issue of sorting ‘by relevance’ is typically associated with google scholar, it is now a common feature across scholarly databases. while a definition of ‘relevance’ is coded into the algorithms themselves, this is rarely presented with clarity – and often not available at all. the combination of data sources which feed such algorithms also carries a risk of exacerbating biases in academic publishing. this opens up a range of further questions about the assumptions academics hold about how algorithms in literature databases work, and the practical implications of this for facilitating open, unbiased access to knowledge. a survey and interviews with academics are planned as the next steps for this research, and emerging findings from these research activities will also be discussed in the session. acknowledgments this research is supported by funding from the society for research in higher education (srhe). references beel, j., gipp, b. & wilde, e. (2010) academic search engine optimization (aseo). optimizing scholarly literature for google scholar & co. journal of scholarly publishing, 41, 176–190. feldman, s. (2020) building a better search engine for semantic scholar. ai2 blog. https://blog.allenai.org/building-a-better-search-engine-for-semantic-scholarea23a0b661e7 giustini, d. & kamel boulos, m.n. (2013) google scholar is not enough to be used alone for systematic reviews. online journal of public health informatics, 5(2), 1-9. google scholar (2021) about google scholar. https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/about.html matthews, d. (2021) will a facebook-style news feed aid discovery or destroy serendipity? times higher education. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/will-facebook-style-news-feed-aiddiscovery-or-destroy-serendipity rovira, c., guerrero-solé, f. & codina, l. (2018) received citations as a main seo factor of google scholar results ranking. el profesional de la informacion, 27(3), 559– 569. rovira, c., codina, l., guerrero-solé, f. & lopezosa, c. (2019) ranking by relevance and citation counts, a comparative study: google scholar, microsoft academic, wos and scopus. future internet, 11(9), 202. doi: 10.3390/fi11090202 rovira, c., codina, l. & lopezosa, c. (2021) language bias in the google scholar ranking algorithm. future internet, 13(2), 31. doi: 10.3390/fi13020031 yu, k., mustapha, n. & oozeer, n. (2017) google scholar's filter bubble: an inflated actuality? in: esposito, a. (ed.) research 2.0 and the impact of digital technologies on scholarly inquiry. igi global, pp.211-229. doi: 10.4018/978-1-5225-0830-4.ch011 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): lane, j., ramirez, f. a., & patton, d. u. (2020, october). defending against social media: how public criminal defense helps us address social media governance. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. defending against social media: how public criminal defense helps us address social media governance jeffrey lane rutgers university fanny anne ramirez louisiana state university desmond upton patton columbia university social media governance as justice-minded academics, we want to understand the role of social media in civil society with a vested interest in ensuring that social media promotes democracy and serves a pluralistic society fairly and equitably. gillespie (2018) has helped frame this task in terms of issues that surround both governance of platforms and by platforms. this conceptual framework concerns the state and private governance policies that define the liability of social media companies for user behavior and content on their platforms (the of) and how companies manage the activity of their users to comply with these policies (the by). to understand and improve the role of social media in a democratic, pluralistic society we also want to know what state governments do with social media (gorwa, 2019). the question of with focuses on how governments hold citizens liable for their social media use. to enforce state laws, states and social media companies cooperate to hold users accountable in court for their activity on the platform. here, platforms serve as “conduits” (langlois, 2013) or “extensions” (nieborg & poell, 2018) of the state. judicial governance is a rich area then to further conceptualize social media governance and identify equal access and fairness issues (klonick, 2018) and appropriate checks and balances. this paper focuses on the judicial context of the u.s. where social media companies, especially facebook (vaidhyanathan, 2018), have generally avoided state regulation and lack liability for user behavior/content (mueller, 2015). this lack of company liability however has coincided with state cooperation to hold users themselves legally liable. facebook transparency figures indicate both that requests for user data from u.s. courts has increased steadily since 2013, the first year this information was reported, and that facebook overwhelmingly cooperates, complying with eighty-eight percent of the 47,457 total legal requests through june 2019. social media companies have positioned themselves as impartial and noninterventionist (gillespie, 2018), yet they operate as players in criminal justice—a role we know little about. the case of new york criminal law and the work of public defenders to understand the nature of state cooperation and how it bears on judicial governance, we draw on a study of public defenders in new york city in their efforts to defend against criminal prosecutions backed by social media. public defenders provide legal representation to indigent criminal defendants, many of whom are persons of color, and their perspective helps us pinpoint equity and fairness issues. of course, their perspective is itself biased by their role as advocates, and a complete picture would include the perspective of prosecutors, to which we were unable to gain access despite our best attempts. we did, however, develop an emerging understanding of judicial governance based on interviews with twenty public criminal defenders about: 1) where social media appears in their cases and the role it plays; 2) their access to user content and social media companies; and, 3) how they use social media as evidence and defend against it. findings based on the public defenders’ grievances, we identified three problem areas around fair and equal access to the law. first, we heard concerns that the cooperation of social media companies was asymmetrical because they worked almost exclusively with law enforcement. public defenders felt the companies shut them out. defenders reported that they could only access social media content that was publicly available, provided by their client, or sent over in discovery (which prosecutors did not necessarily share). one public defender recounted jumping through numerous hoops just to serve facebook, only to face stiff resistance: “it’s extremely difficult on a criminal case to get them [facebook] to respond to these subpoenas, they always file motions to quash the subpoena.” by contrast, facebook provides numerous accommodations to cooperate and comply with law enforcement requests (e.g. specialized personnel, an online portal). the public defenders treated cooperation between law enforcement and facebook as a given even when they believed the connection to social media in the case was tangential at best. second, the public defenders complained about overly broad search warrants that were written to furnish the full contents of a suspect’s social media account to which judges readily signed off. such vast, networked data opened the possibility of charging new crimes in a fishing expedition and exposed the privacy of the defendant and their network (e.g., nudes, family photos). said one public defender of the warrant used against his client, “when they have access to your facebook account like they did to [his client’s name], they got every post that he ever posted, everything he deleted, every private message that he ever sent since 2011, like since he was 11 years old.” third, public defenders complained about the use and admission of prejudicial evidence that played to negative, racial stereotypes of their clients. defenders rarely reported the appearance in their cases of positive images or pro-social behavior on social media. instead, they were typically defending against “damning” evidence. one defender gave the example of the admission of photos to establish the height of his client, a black man, that prosecutors took from his client’s instagram because they were likely to be construed as “thuggish” that were selected over numerous photos “holding his two-yearold daughter.” governance implications our findings suggest a few lessons for social media governance. first, we uncovered issues with what gillespie (2018) calls “the middle-ness” of platforms. for the defenders, the social media companies were too far on the side of law enforcement and not in the middle enough. social media companies need to develop more nearly equitable cooperation practices to level the playing field for law enforcement and public defense, either intervening on both sides or for neither. second, judges should require law enforcement to specify the type and timeline of social media data sought in a search warrant to limit the chance of fishing expeditions. we also see the need for restrictions on the handling and disposition of networked data that identifies third parties unrelated to crimes being investigated. third, we believe judicial actors would benefit from the cultural context of social media use to evaluate its admissibility and weight as criminal evidence. given the selective, strategic, and curated nature of the disclosures made on these platforms and the particular impression management strategies of and biases against members of racial and ethnic minority groups (lane, 2019), we suggest that admissibility protocols and disclaimers on admitted materials become standard practice in the criminal justice field. we suggest looking to these judicial correctives to reduce biases and inequities in other areas of governance with social media as well. we also suggest studying the work of actors directly involved in social media governance practices (roberts, 2019) to guide future empirical research. references gillespie, t. (2018). governance of and by platforms. in j. burgess, t. poell, & a. e. marwick (eds.), the sage handbook of social media (pp. 254–278). london: sage. gorwa, r. (2019). what is platform governance? information, communication & society, 22(6), 854-871. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2019.1573914 klonick, k. (2018). the new governors: the people, rules, and processes governing online speech. harvard law review, 131(6), 1598. lane, j. (2019). the digital street: oxford university press. langlois, g. (2013). participatory culture and the new governance of communication: the paradox of participatory media. television & new media, 14(2), 91-105. doi:10.1177/1527476411433519 mueller, m. l. (2015). hyper-transparency and social control: social media as magnets for regulation. telecommunications policy, 39(9), 804-810. doi:10.1016/j.telpol.2015.05.001 nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society, 20(11), 4275-4292. doi:10.1177/1461444818769694 roberts, s. t. (2019). behind the screen: content moderation in the shadows of social media. new haven, ct: yale university press. vaidhyanathan, s. (2018). antisocial media: how facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy. new york, ny: oxford university press. microsoft word horne, cl aoir2021 submission.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): horne, c. (2021, october). choice and control: an analysis of privacy values and privacy controls. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. choice and control: an analysis of privacy values and privacy controls chelsea l. horne american university introduction on february 2, 2021, the encrypted messaging service (and facebook rival) signal announced in a tweet that tecno mobile devices, which include some of the most popular phones in africa, “enable notifications for facebook apps like whatsapp, but block signal notifications by default.” users are certainly able to change this default setting, though it requires a four-step process navigating the phone settings. this phone setting is a prime example of how default settings are political. default selections in technology settings inherently influence users through nudges via the automatic prioritization of options. signal’s final line in their announcement—“privacy should be the default”—captures the cultural zeitgeist of our moment. critical framework specific to settings and choice architecture, scholarship focuses on two key points regarding their social and political implications. first, research on the role of default settings indicates the ability of defaults to influence human behavior, both in the analog and digital world (bradshaw & denardis, 2019; shah & kesan, 2008; shah & sandvig, 2008; soh, 2019; willis, 2013; zuiderveen borgesuis, 2015). second, research shows that most users do not change the default settings (dinner et al., 2011; ramokapane et al., 2019; shah & sandvig, 2008; sunstein, 2013; svirsky, 2019; watson et al., 2015). these points together suggest that there is incredible and intrinsic, though hidden, power in technology settings, including those set by social media companies. the hidden levers of control embedded within the default settings influence users’ overall experience on platforms and with technology, especially in regard to issues of privacy and security. not all users are aware that they can change settings and even if they do, often these settings are so buried into a platform’s interface, it is challenging for users to find and change them (young & quan-haase 2013). moreover, the knowledge of settings does not necessarily correlate to a user’s ability to find and change these settings, and as ramokapane (2019) identifies, “users attribute their failure to configure default features to hidden controls and insufficient knowledge on how to configure them.” not only is lack of awareness an issue, but users must navigate often overwhelming settings options that they may not have the digital knowledge skills to understand fully. our suggestion that default settings in technology infrastructure and platforms have political and social implications builds upon scholarship from science and technology studies (sts) that examines technological architecture as non-neutral and imbued with political power. langdon winner (1980) suggests that technological architecture reflects and reinforces existing power structures. ruha benjamin (benjamin, 2019) expands on winner’s claims and suggests that “the way we engineer the material world reflects and reinforces (but could also be used to subvert) social hierarchies.” benjamin points out that the effects of discriminatory design—a component of her concept of default discrimination—are long-lasting and long-reaching and that “collateral damage, we might say, is part and parcel of discriminatory design.” methodology this paper examines the embedded assumptions and implications of technology and technical design on society. to this end, this study addresses the role and power of social media companies in developing and applying privacy policies and norms for their users. the privacy choices by social media platforms affect billions of users worldwide. there are multiple locations where social media platforms present and implement their privacy and security policies. of particular interest to this paper is facebook, one of the most popular and most commonly studied social media platforms. the dataset for this paper will include three components from each of these platforms: 1. facebook newsroom articles on privacy topics (2006-present) 2. facebook’s privacy policies over the years (accessed via the internet archive wayback machine) 3. facebook userfacing privacy controls. as a note, facebook has transitioned from a privacy policy to a data policy. for example, facebook claims that, “we are committed to honoring your privacy choices and protecting your information” (facebook). this paper proposes an empirical study through textual analysis of how public statements on the core value of privacy and data security align or differ with the actual application of respective privacy policies. further, this study expands this comparison to include what privacy and security options are available and customizable for users, as well as what privacy controls are offered and how, to determine if these settings align or differ from public statements of privacy values. conclusions this paper offers a comprehensive examination of where and how platforms engage with privacy and data. this study considers how platforms’ public-facing rhetoric aligns or differs with the actual implementation of privacy policies and privacy controls. finally, we conclude with a discussion of how the implications of this research may have profound impact in the governance, policy, and regulation of platforms. future research can extend the sample of this three-fold analysis (news releases, privacy/data policies, and controls) to other popular social media companies such as twitter, tiktok, youtube, and reddit. references benjamin, r. (2019). default discrimination. in race after technology. bradshaw, s., & denardis, l. (2019). privacy by infrastructure: the unresolved case of the domain name system: privacy by infrastructure. policy & internet, 11(1), 16– 36. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.195 dinner, i., johnson, e. j., goldstein, d. g., & liu, k. (2011). partitioning default effects: why people choose not to choose. journal of experimental psychology: applied, 17(4), 332–341. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024354 protecting privacy and security. (n.d). facebook. https://about.fb.com/actions/protecting-privacy-andsecurity/?utm_source=search&utm_medium=google&utm_campaign=uspublica ffairs&utm_content=search-facebook%20privacy-510972687502. accessed 12 april 2021. ramokapane, k. m., mazeli, a. c., & rashid, a. (2019). skip, skip, skip, accept!!!: a study on the usability of smartphone manufacturer provided default features and user privacy. proceedings on privacy enhancing technologies, 2019(2), 209–227. https://doi.org/10.2478/popets-2019-0027 shah, r. c., & kesan, j. p. (2008). setting online policy with software defaults. information, communication & society, 11(7), 989–1007. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691180802109097 shah, r. c., & sandvig, c. (2008). software defaults as de facto regulation the case of the wireless internet. information, communication & society, 11(1), 25–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691180701858836 soh, s. y. (2019). privacy nudges: european data protection law review, 5(1), 65–74. https://doi.org/10.21552/edpl/2019/1/10 sunstein, c. r. (2013). deciding by default. university of pennsylvania law review, 162(1), 1–58. svirsky, d. (2019). why do people avoid information about privacy? journal of law & innovation, 2(1). watson, j., lipford, h. r., & besmer, a. (2015). mapping user preference to privacy default settings. acm transactions on computer-human interaction, 22(6), 1– 20. https://doi.org/10.1145/2811257 willis, l. e. (2013). why not privacy by default? ssrn electronic journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2349766 winner, l. (1980). do artifacts have politics? daedalus, 109(1), 121–136. zuiderveen borgesuis, f. (2015). nudge and the law: a european perspective (a. alemanno & sibony, eds.). hart publishing. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474203463 microsoft word moreshead-stitching the curve-stitching the curve.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): moreshead, a., rouse, l. salter, a. (2021, october). stitching the curve: pandemic craft and feminist data visualization. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. stitching the curve: pandemic craft and feminist data visualization abigail moreshead university of central florida lauren rouse university of central florida anastasia salter university of central florida introduction feminist scholars are increasingly drawing attention to the ways “big data” and data representations reinscribe gender and racial inequality, an issue made even more pressing by the role data has taken in our daily lives since the start of the covid-19 pandemic (d’ignazio and klein 2020). and the myriad ways in which the pandemic has disproportionately impacted women makes these critiques even more crucial, particularly as this has occurred alongside widespread denial and misinformation. in this social media landscape, work such as the “stitching the curve” project, a textile pandemic visualization, offers an intersection between digital activism and craftivism, enabling a material, feminist response to an erasure and minimization of collective loss. method to understand stitching the curve as a feminist intervention into data visualization, we examine the media coverage around the project, which includes the online blogs of the project’s participants. using critical technocultural discourse analysis (ctda) as a guiding methodology, we consider simultaneously the feminist, activist framing and the influence of material and digital platforms on the cultural influence of the work (brock 2018). this methodology draws our attention to the role of textile as technology, and the feminist efforts to reclaim a marginalized materiality’s activist potential. given the project’s emphasis on drawing attention to marginalized data from mainstream periodicals, we focus on news articles and blog posts, which were coded for mentions of collaboration, data visualization, affective experience, activism, and materiality. our goal is to understand the relationship between craftivism as data visualization and its relationship to a feminist ethics of data representation, such as those embraced in the femtechnet manifesto (“manifesto – femtechnet” 2021) craft as feminist data visualization in the introduction to an online exhibition entitled “knitting data,” michelson reminds viewers that “crafts are always communicating something,” even if that communication is frequently trivialized along gendered labor binaries (michelson 2020). craftivism as data visualization exists at the intersection of feminist reclaiming of forms of labor and craft traditionally coded as feminine and feminist critiques of white cis-gender male dominated data science. our project looks at how, specifically, covid-19 data visualization craftivism operates at this intersection, building on a tradition of data visualization through craftivism being used to challenge the inherent biases of big data. examples of this include the tempestry project, which uses yarn colors and knitting to represent climate data and rebecca michaelson’s (usc) “knitting data: data visualization and craft” project (michelson 2020). pandemic visualization follows in the tradition of the aids memorial quilt, but given the scale and communities of impact, many of the visualizations here are depersonalized by comparison. in the specific project we are examining here, the university of alberta library staff is representing the curve of covid cases in canada through a group knitting project that each member began working on from their own remote location once the lockdown began. they use colors to represent numerical data, with lighter colors corresponding to lower case numbers and vice versa. each participant works on a section which represents the data of a specific canadian province. the goal is to join each section together, eventually, to form a blanket and display it in a museum. stitching the curve as craftivism the power of stitching the curve as a form of covid craftivism is in its pairing of a traditionally feminized form of tactile labor with data visualization; specifically, data visualization in an era where “fake news,” denial of covid’s reality, and undermining of public health experts has shifted the dialogue from how to best deal with the pandemic itself to how to debate about the very legitimacy of responding to it. donald trump’s toxic masculinity was on full display throughout the initial covid response, from his refusal to consistently wear a mask (reinforced by rhetoric on the right that has associated mask wearing with being unmanly) to his refusal to recognize any cost of the pandemic outside of the economic ones. therefore, to visualize the “curve” is itself a feminist and social activist stance, by legitimizing the illness’s toll through numerical data using a traditionally feminist medium. the medium of knitting, an embodied form of data visualization, resonates with gollihue and xiong-gum’s assertion that textiles “hold special meaning in our lives as data centers, but also because of the ways they prompt interaction and reciprocity” (2020), while also resisting the illusion of objective neutrality that more typical forms of data visualization often portray (d’ignazio and klein 2020). pearce notes that the library staff “share a great passion for information and we are always looking for new ways we can engage with it and make it more approachable for ourselves and our community” (pearce 2020). thus, knitting the curve is a creative act, an informative act, and an act of resistance. making the invisible visible brock argues that “ctda has the additional task of operationalizing the computational object as discourse” (brock 2018). using the methodology of ctda invites critique of both the message of stitching the curve—the visualization of pandemic data—but also the technologies that act as platforms for that data, which includes the scarf itself and the writing focused on the project. in looking at the role of blogging in communicating about the project, for instance, we see stitching the curve further removing data visualization from a rhetoric of distance and neutrality and toward a rhetoric of care and affect, as blogging is a space often associated with affective labor (cummings 2019). but other aspects of stitching the curve also resist the systemic patriarchy embedded in “big data” and embraces a collaborative feminist ethic. this is through the open sharing of their resources. stitching the curve’s participants use github to share the code through which they pull covid-19 data and google docs to share their crafting process, encouraging and enabling others to start their own groups to stitch the curve. conclusion blogging and knitting are frequently associated with craft and writing as an expression of the domestic and personal, relegated to a feminine and, consequently, minimized space of care and labor. stitching the curve makes a powerful statement in representing not only the oft-dismissed human cost of the covid-19 pandemic, but also uses mediums of representation that challenge patriarchal “big data” collection and representational practices. stitching the curve makes data visualization a rhetoric of care. references brock, andré. 2018. “critical technocultural discourse analysis.” new media & society 20 (3): 1012–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816677532. cummings, kelsey. 2019. “‘but we still try’: affective labor in the corporate mommy blog.” feminist media studies 19 (1): 38–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2017.1382548. d’ignazio, catherine, and lauren f. klein. 2020. data feminism. mit press. gollihue, krystin and mai nou xiong-gum. 2020. “dataweaving: textiles as data materialization.” kairos: a journal of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy 25, no. 1. http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/25.1/disputatio/gollihue-xiong-gum/index.html “manifesto – femtechnet.” n.d. accessed april 9, 2021. https://femtechnet.org/publications/manifesto/. michelson, rebecca. 2020. “knitting data: craft as recorded information.” knitting data: data visualization and crafts. may 2020. https://scalar.usc.edu/works/knitting-data/craft-as-recorded-information. pearce, hanne. 2020. “stitching the curve: a ualberta library data-driven making project – news.library.ualberta.ca.” accessed november 18, 2020. https://news.library.ualberta.ca/blog/2020/04/23/stitching-the-curve-a-ualbertalibrary-data-driven-making-project/. microsoft word stepnik-active curation for cultural commentary-active curation for cultural commentary.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): stepnik, al. (2022, november). active curation for cultural commentary: young adults, algorithms, and news content on social media. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. active curation for cultural commentary: young adults, algorithms, and news content on social media agata stepnik the university of sydney, australia introduction social media is a key source of news for young people (newman et al., 2021). recent studies have investigated issues of media plurality and news visibility on social media platforms (dwyer et al., 2020; martin, 2021) but what is less well understood is the role that users play in curating access to news through their own platform practices. this paper presents findings from a 12-month digital ethnographic study involving 13 young adults and their use of social media platforms, including facebook, instagram and tiktok, to understand the role of individual agency in user experiences of news and information. the paper draws on practice theory to conceptualise the ‘active curation’ techniques used by young adults to personalise their social media feeds. it joins a growing body of literature which explores the role of user agency in these settings and investigates the extent to which users can curate and control their experiences on social media, where platform affordances are scarce (davis, 2017; merten, 2021; swart, 2021). through an examination of the nature of active curation techniques, the study shows how young adults exert local agency over algorithmic determination, offering insight into emerging normative news produsage behaviours. the study also explores the types of content users categorise as news on social media. it argues that ‘cultural commentary’ content—including memes, casual discussions between friends, and ‘hot takes’ from influencers—can keep users up to date with local and global news. the data shows that even users who self-identify as ‘news avoidant’ interact with cultural commentary content. methodology this paper presents preliminary findings from a digital ethnography of 13 young australian adults, aged 18-30, cataloguing their active curation practices and experiences with cultural commentary content on social media platforms. this approach centers data collection through observation of practices in context, specifically “what people are doing with media in different situations and contexts” (pink et al., 2016, p. 44). as self-reporting can fail to capture practices accurately (gonzález-bailón & xenos, 2020), a mixed method of data collection was used. five interviews were conducted at 2-week intervals, featuring ‘app tours’ where informants shared their screens and narrated their actions, allowing for deeper understanding of user behaviour. participants were also invited to join the researcher’s authentic social networks for direct observation and encouraged to take screenshots whenever they encountered relevant content between interviews. findings cotter and residorf (2020) describe algorithms as experience technologies, which is reflected in the initial findings of this project. each participant demonstrated an awareness of algorithmic processing in determining what content they were shown on social media, including awareness that this was in constant flux based on their own actions. participants engaged in a number of curatorial practices that they believed influence what content the algorithm would prioritise, based on the limited affordances available to them (davis, 2017; merten, 2021). these included typical social media practices, however, they were enacted consciously to produce a specific result. practices included viewing or skipping content, commenting, gesturing (e.g. liking), sharing, following links out, as well as following or unfollowing accounts, hiding or snoozing content, reporting content as unsuitable (especially advertising), and reviewing platform settings. participants expressed a need to consciously engage with these practices on a regular and ongoing basis to “train the algorithm”, indicating that these consumptive practices were active curation practices rather than one-off actions. active curation practices were frequently used to curate a social media feed that satisfied participant expectations and needs (fu & cook, 2021). some participants expressed a desire not to follow or access news on these platforms. however, each participant was kept informed of news topics through their social media feeds, typically through content classified in the study as ‘cultural commentary’. this content most frequently involved an influencer or public figure discussing or ridiculing news topics, also referred to colloquially as a ‘hot take’, but frequently also originated from other private individuals within the participant’s social network. memes, satire, as well as comments and discussions in public and private group settings also featured as sources for emerging news topics, without including an explicit link to professional news content. for example, one participant learnt about the death of prince phillip through a tiktok that showcased twitter memes created in the hour after his death was announced. participants who were interested in the topic would then follow up by searching for professional news reporting on the topic, while others moved on. some participants commented that they would temporarily follow an account, including news media, to keep on top of a topic of interest before unfollowing the account once this need had been satisfied. conclusion this study shows that young adults are aware of the effect that their behaviour on social media platforms has on the algorithms promoting or hiding content to them, and they are engaging in conscious and regular practices to actively curate their social feeds. it also demonstrates how cultural commentary content finds its way to users, in some instances acting as a proxy for formal news reporting, especially for news avoidant users. some participants expressed they would not have considered cultural commentary content as news if they had been asked about their news media habits on social media, highlighting an opportunity to expand the definition of news in future scholarly inquiry, to better capture news consumption practices on social media platforms. the research also raises important questions about the future of information sharing on social media platforms, and how young adults are shaping news consumption practices. it also challenges journalists and professional news organisations to re-think how they can reach news-averse audiences with verified information through popular and informal conversations on social platforms. references cotter, k., & reisdorf, b. c. (2020). algorithmic knowledge gaps: a new dimension of inequality. international journal of communication(14), 745 765. davis, j. l. (2017). curation: a theoretical treatment. information, communication & society, 20(5), 770-783. dwyer, t., & hutchinson, j. (2020). through the looking glass: the role of portals in south korea's online news media ecology. journal of contemporary eastern asia, 18(2), 16-32. fu, j., & cook, j. (2021, 2021/10/21). everyday social media use of young australian adults. journal of youth studies, 24(9), 1234-1250. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2020.1828843 martin, f. r. (2021). visibility, connectivity, agency: journalism’s prospects in an age of automated social news sharing. digital journalism, 9(8), 1190-1198. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2021.1977670 merten, l. (2021). block, hide or follow—personal news curation practices on social media. digital journalism, 9(8), 1018-1039. newman, n., fletcher, r., schulz, a., andı, s., robertson, c. t., & kleis nielsen, r. (2021). reuters institute digital news report 2021: 10th edition. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/202106/digital_news_report_2021_final.pdf pink, s., horst, h. a., postill, j., hjorth, l., lewis, t., & tacchi, j. (2016). digital ethnography: principles and practice. sage. swart, j. (2021). experiencing algorithms: how young people understand, feel about, and engage with algorithmic news selection on social media. social media + society, 7(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211008828 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): homant, e. and russell, a. (2022, november). coming out and coming up: quantifying queer immaterial labor. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. coming out and coming up: quantifying queer immaterial labor ellie homant cornell university aspen russell cornell university literature review since youtube’s inception in 2006, users have carved out a variety of genres and niches on the platform. one of the earliest was the beauty space, made up of users who posted beauty vlogs that included makeup tutorials and videos showing off new or favorite products. although the beauty vlogosphere has been racially diverse since its inception—with asian american michelle phan widely cited as the first beauty vlogger— like the broader beauty industry, youtube’s beauty space has historically been dominated by genderand sexually normative white women. however, in recent years a new class of queer-identified beauty vloggers have risen to fame on the platform, including creators like jeffree star, manny mua (manny gutierrez), james charles, patrick starrr (patrick simondac), and nikkietutorials (nikkie de jager). these creators encompass a range of gender, sexual, racial and ethnic identities. although these vloggers have “made it” on youtube—i.e., they all have millions of subscribers, regularly traffic in hundreds of thousands of video views, and engage in paid corporate sponsorships—there are still significant barriers to entry on online platforms like youtube for creators who occupy non-normative identities (i.e., those who are not cisgender, heterosexual white men). previous scholarship has identified the specific type of labor that queer online content creators undertake as “queer immaterial labor,” which recognizes that (1) immaterial labor is not performed in the same way by creators in online spaces, but rather is structured by complex interplay between a variety of social identities; and (2) that queer influencers undertake labor that is specific to the queer community (e.g. performance of the coming-out narrative, employing queer cultural resources) (homant and sender, 2019). queer immaterial labor is a specification of maurizio lazzarato’s (2006 [1996]) prescient concept of immaterial labor, which he argues is a shift to prioritize information and communication jobs over manufacturing, increase valuation of cultural content, and to produce “a ‘social relationship’ (a relationship of innovation, production, and consumption)” (p. 137). while lazzarato and his contemporaries primarily focused on the impact of class on immaterial labor, feminist scholars have reinterpreted lazzarato’s concept with greater emphasis on gender and race. much of the labor that online content creators undertake is specifically affective, where influencers are trying to assert their authenticity and sincerity in order to cultivate community with their audience and keep viewers coming back. gender and racial hierarchies add additional complexity in the likelihood of success when undertaking this kind of labor. this means that content creators who occupy non-normative identities (e.g., queer people, people of color), must shoulder additional work. moving forward, there are clear opportunities to investigate queer immaterial labor on youtube, specifically to test the boundaries of claims made. our goal is to use a computational approach to measure its two primary facets: amount of labor and unique labor practices. this can be accomplished by returning to youtube and expanding the sample of queer and non-queer beauty vloggers with broader metrics for comparison. we will use a mixture of comments, transcripts, and video metadata. while the subject of the videos informed much of the prior research on this subject, there is much to learn from the reception of these videos. in an analysis of 67,000 youtube videos and 6 million comments, siersdorfer, chelaru, and nejdl (2010) discovered that comments, and their associated scores of likes and dislikes were highly indicative of the level of polarization of content. guo and fussell (2020) investigated the influence of user comments in a live stream chat compared to the transcripts of live streamers on youtube. they found that user comment sentiment was a better predictor of future chat sentiment than that of the streamer. alongside comments, metadata (likes, shares, reactions, etc.) have been influential in learning about the impact of content (ferrara and yang, 2015). all of these studies point to the importance of user’s metadata and comments in shaping the community and response to youtube content. methods each study points us toward important data that we can use to measure our constructs. to gain access, we will be using the google’s youtube application programming interface (api) and the “tuber” package for the r programming language. there are a variety of data and metadata about the individual videos and channels of these content creators that these tools allow us access to. to characterize the amount of labor performed when comparing queer and non-queer vloggers, we will use video length, transcript length, number of replies to user comments, length of video description, and number of tags. while we never know exactly who is performing these tasks, aside from the video subjects, these measures do point toward an investment in the channel and reflect overall labor. the beauty vlogging space varies immensely in channel size and content format. in an effort to manage this variance, we will normalize these metrics by comparing the ratio of video and transcript length to the number of videos on the channel. this can be further broken down over the lifetime of the channel. to contextualize labor performed solely by queer vloggers, we will focus on video titles and transcripts. using a dictionary-based approach, we will compile a list of words commonly associated with queer identity and assess the context of their use in videos and channels. from the sample that contain queer-identity words, a qualitative text analysis approach will be used categorize the common contexts that these terms are used in the video titles. our sample consists of already popular beauty vloggers. to assess criteria, we will use youtube’s creator award system, which award channels plaques based on the number of subscribers they have amassed. we will use the lowest threshold of silver (100,000 subscribers) to be considered “popular.” to be considered a makeup youtuber, the channel must produce youtube videos about makeup and adjacent products and processes. videos and comments must also be primarily in the english language. we will conduct this comparison between a sample of 500 queer-identified beauty vloggers and 500 equivalent non-queer beauty vlogger channels. finding these channels will be based on a snowball sampling technique based on the youtube recommendation algorithm. our goal is to provide a series of descriptive comparisons across this large sample of beauty vloggers on youtube. insights will allow us to directly point to areas of potentially inequitable output and differences in labor practices across these two groups. references ferrara, e., & yang, z. (2015). quantifying the effect of sentiment on information diffusion in social media. peerj computer science, 1, e26. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerjcs.26 guo, j., & fussell, s. r. (2020). a preliminary study of emotional contagion in live streaming. conference companion publication of the 2020 on computer supported cooperative work and social computing, 263–268. https://doi.org/10.1145/3406865.3418309 homant, e., & sender, k. (2019). queer immaterial labor in beauty videos by lgbtqidentified youtubers. international journal of communication, 13, 19. https://doi.org/1932–8036/20190005 lazzarato, m. (1996). immaterial labor. radical thought in italy: a potential politics, 1996, 133–147. siersdorfer, s., chelaru, s., nejdl, w., & san pedro, j. (2010). how useful are your comments? analyzing and predicting youtube comments and comment ratings. proceedings of the 19th international conference on world wide web, 891–900. https://doi.org/10.1145/1772690.1772781 microsoft word aoir2022 paper submission.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): glatt, z. (2022, november). precarity, discrimination and (in)visibility: an ethnography of “the algorithm” in the influencer industry. paper (presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. precarity, discrimination and (in)visibility: an ethnography of “the algorithm” in the influencer industry zoë glatt the london school of economics and political science (lse) introduction youtube’s algorithmic recommendation system – known colloquially as “the algorithm” – is a powerful character in the lives of professional and aspiring social media content creators, exerting various pressures on them in their struggles for visibility and income in the influencer industry. every creator has tales of woe and theories to share about “the algorithm”, and every industry event has panels and discussions dedicated to it: how it works, what content it is currently preferencing, who it is discriminating against, and, most importantly, how to navigate it in order to achieve success. this paper explores with an anthropological lens the multifaceted and situated ways that youtube content creators understand and respond to “the algorithm” in their working lives. drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork in the london and l.a. influencer industries (2017-2022), i investigate “the algorithm” through three distinct but parallel lenses: what content creators say about it (their imaginaries and cultural discourses), their actions with regards to it (their cultural practices), and how they feel about it (their experiences). in triangulating these three dimensions, this paper aims to provide both a framework for the ethnographic study of algorithms in culture, as well as a detailed account of how youtube content creators experience and respond to “the algorithm” in their working lives. in recent years there has been a growing interest in the sociocultural dimensions of algorithms across the social sciences and humanities. algorithms are an important aspect of the digital media landscape, providing the foundational architecture for how social media platforms are structured; on youtube, “the algorithm” sorts and offers content to viewers according to the likelihood that they will watch it based on a variety of metrics, as well as determining which content should be (de)monetised. researchers have highlighted that algorithms pose unique challenges due to their opacity as so called “black boxed” technologies, a characterisation that has in turn been explored, challenged and subverted by a number of qualitative researchers, who variously argue that rather than fetishize or obsess over the opacity of algorithms, understanding them as complex sociotechnical systems made up of actors, meanings and practices offers openings for creative methodological possibilities and more nuanced understandings of their impacts (bishop, 2019; bucher, 2018; christin, 2020; seaver, 2017). ethnography is particularly well suited as a methodology for examining how algorithms emerge through these sociotechnical assemblages in everyday life, able to encompass cultural practices, forms of sociality, and broader institutional factors, as well as discourses. inspired by these works, i investigate not what youtube’s algorithmic recommendation system does or how it works in some objective sense, but the diverse cultural meanings and values that content creators attach to it, and how platforms, the influencer industry, and the nature of platformised creative work are constituted through these processes. methods i conducted and synthesised participant observation in both the multi-platform social media environment and in settings where the community-industry converges in person, including industry events such as vidcon uk & usa and summer in the city. this included becoming a youtube content creator myself which allowed me to reflect on the testimonies of my participants and gain a deeper level of understanding for their lived experiences. the research also included formal semi-structured interviews with thirty london-based content creators. interviewees represented a broad range of identity categories (in terms of gender, race, sexuality, class and ability), and worked across a wide variety of prominent and niche genres, including lifestyle, beauty, gaming, booktube, education, video essays, animation, lgbtq+ and feminism, political commentary, film and tech reviews, travel, trending vlog challenges and tags, comedy, and short films. in order to counteract the overemphasis on elite creators in the existing literature, whilst some of my participants were full-time professional influencers, others were aspiring to make the leap from hobbyist to full-time; interviewees ranged widely from 2.2 million subscribers to a single solitary subscriber (myself). despite this range, all participants emphasised that they regularly struggled with “the algorithm” in their work. findings amongst my participants, “the algorithm” was variously understood as an omnipotent god, a black box to be opened, a mystery to be solved, a voracious machine, and an oppressor of marginalised groups. above all, it is experienced as unknowable, impenetrable, mysterious, and inscrutable. i argue that the introduction of algorithmic recommendation systems as a key mechanism of labour marks an escalation of the conditions of precarity for platformised creative workers as compared to their counterparts in more traditional cultural industries. despite the diversity of my participants, i found that they universally understood “the algorithm” as an antagonistic force, one which made their working lives more precarious, unpredictable and stressful. in addition to broader conditions of precarity, some creators are subject to algorithmic discrimination, which i define as a process whereby certain content, identities and positionalities within the platform economy are deprioritised from recommendation, in an industry where visibility is key to success. in the influencer industry, where “[visibility] is a key vector of instability” (duffy et al. 2021: 10), creators are obligated to bend themselves to the wills and shifts of algorithmic recommendation systems if they hope to build and sustain careers. there is a particular urgency underlying this study; with an ever-increasing number of people seeking careers in the influencer industry, it is vital to interrogate the emerging and problematic technological structures that are core to this new form of creative labour. some may wonder if ethnography is a useful method for investigating platforms’ algorithmic recommendation systems, unable to get to the heart of how they “actually work”, but i argue that attending to the lived experiences of content creators who navigate algorithms on a daily basis adds a powerful and complimentary dimension to more macro structural critiques of the asymmetries of power built into capitalist algorithmic systems (for example, noble, 2018). platform companies “hold a perverse level of power in contemporary culture and society” (duffy et al. 2021: 9), not least in their role as arbiters of the livelihoods of creative workers in the burgeoning influencer industry, and critical researchers can work to hold them to account. by attending to questions of power in the online and offline fieldsites where the “the algorithm” emerges, this research aims to make a useful contribution to critical algorithm studies, creative labour, and influencer cultures research, as well as to existing methods literature on the ethnographic research of algorithms (bishop, 2019; christin, 2020; hine, 2017; seaver, 2017). references bishop, s. (2019) “managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip,” new media & society [online first], 1-18. bucher, t. (2018) if...then: algorithmic power and politics, oxford, uk: oup. christin, a. (2020) “the ethnographer and the algorithm: beyond the black box,” theory and society, 49(5-6), 897-918. duffy, b. e., sannon, s., pinch, a. and sawey, m. (2021) “the nested precarities of platformized creative labor,” social media + society. hine, c. (2017) “ethnography and the internet: taking account of emerging technological landscapes,” fudan journal of the humanities and social sciences, 10(3), 315-329. noble, s. u. (2018) algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism, new york, usa: nyu press. seaver, n. (2017) “algorithms as culture: some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems,” big data & society, 4(2), 1-12. microsoft word sweeney-strategic visibilities-strategic visibilities.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): sweeney, m.e., & villa-nicholas, m. (2021, october). strategic visibilities: digitizing the latina information worker. paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. strategic visibilities: digitizing the latina information worker miriam e. sweeney university of alabama melissa villa-nicholas university of rhode island introduction “no background check required!” boasts airus media’s brochure featuring a picture of a smiling virtual latina information service worker, which the company refers to as an “advanced virtual assistant (ava)”. these avas are life-sized holographic airport workers installed as wayfinding and informational kiosks that stand poised and at the ready to provide information to travelers passing by. airus media, formerly airportone, is a multimedia marketing firm based in plant city, florida that specializes in developing avas and film projects for the airline industry (airus media, n.d.). currently airus media reports having completed airport ava installations at san antonio international, destinfort walton, jfk, laguardia, and newark liberty international airports. while most of airus media’s avas are represented as white or white-passing women of european descent, the avas for the long beach and san antonio airports—cities with significant latinx populations and geographic proximity to the u.s./mexico border—are culturally coded through phenotypic and linguistic signifiers to represent latina identity. this suggests that latina identity is being employed as a strategic design element in these border region airports, opening up questions about how latina identity functions rhetorically in these avas and to what end. background the current information labor environment in the united states, heightened by the amped up xenophobia of the former trump administration, is characterized by cultural anxieties surrounding technology, immigration, and nationalism. these tensions are magnified in the u.s./mexico border region. we argue that latina avas can be placed at the center of these tensions where they provide a useful lens through which to explore connections between latina information labor, past and present, via the design of a digitized workforce. latina information service workers, though fundamental to technoscience, have been largely invisible in histories of computing. digging into the past of information and technology history reveals that latinas have always been part of and parcel of information work, though their labor has been largely rendered invisible through dominant computing histories. latinas have often been relegated to the precarious and migrant work of the information labor sector, sectors that often depend on such invisibilities for viability. latina virtual assistants mark an interesting shift in this labor history by relying on the strategic visibility of latina identity in/as the technology interface and virtual service worker. this paper explores why and how these virtual assistants are designed as visible latina information service workers, and what purposes these formations of visibility serve; particularly given the historic invisibility that has often cloaked latinas’ labor in the global circuits of information labor. donna haraway (1991) famously argued that women of color’s bodies become part of the digital platform through their labor. indeed, latina virtual assistants prefigure the latina body as the literal digital platform, raising questions about the interrelatedness of dominant cultural beliefs about the potentials of the latina body as a technocultural labor resource. finally, we consider the question of visibility, and why latina identity is foregrounded in the ava technologies when latina information service workers have historically been purposely obscured. methods to address these questions, we analyze the design rhetorics of virtual assistants as virtual workers, considering particularly how identity markers, such as race and gender, have served to amplify cultural ideas about technology, service work, and workers. next we explore airus media’s use of latina identity in designing their avas by applying close reading techniques to their marketing materials and to the design of the avas themselves. weaving this analysis together with threads of latina information labor history, we find many continuities between the marketing of the latina avas and the dominant cultural narratives about gender and race that have historically shaped latinas as workers in information industries. we argue that latina identity in the avas does political work as a cultural amplifier that recalls the archetype of latinas as an ideal information worker. the “ideal” characteristics of latina information service workers that have historically been used to maintain gendered and raced divisions of information labor are not only re-deployed through latina virtual assistants, but are doubly emphasized as the desirable attributes of information technologies themselves. analysis we find that latinas are paradoxically envisioned in the white american imagination as both labor “problems” and solutions, leading to a complex set of tensions framing latinas as workers. latina information workers are portrayed as the ultimate in costeffectiveness and “value” for the employer, and the digital latin information worker maintains these affordances while side-stepping important questions about immigration status and labor rights. simultaneously, interlocking hegemonic formations of gender and identity, informed by colonial and capital logics, reinforce latinas as “ideal” for particular sectors of information work ranging from maquila manufacturing, call centers, and now as digital versions of these roles via the virtual assistants. the design of virtual latina workers draws on prevailing structures of white supremacy and eurocentrism to underscore “acceptable” latinidad in terms of having light-toned skin and an englishfirst, lightly expressed accent. finally, the digital latina information worker is positioned as a “trusted ethnic friend” who invites latinx communities into further surveillance from agencies like tsa and ice by way of interacting with her/the interface. conclusions we argue that the strategically visible digitized latina information service worker, wrapped in familiar discourses of western capitalism and technoscience, functions as a socially acceptable avatar of the immigrant labor that continues to be foundational to the united states global economic position. latina virtual assistants retain the necessary cultural markers to reinforce the efficacy of the virtual worker drawing on long-standing gendered, racialized, and colonial logics. whereas it was historically important to hide or obscure the reliance on latina’s contributions to information economies and industries to retain control over a cheap labor force, the digitized latina information worker allows technology companies to superficially respond to representational politics without actually hiring latinas into white collar information jobs. by merging the histories of latina information workers with the design of a digital latina workforce, we are able to see these labor formations, visible and invisible, as co-present and inextricably linked. references airus media (n.d). “about,” airus media, accessed july 3, 2019, https://www.airusmedia.com/about.html. haraway, d. (1991). “a cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialistfeminism in the late twentieth century,” in simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature, new york: routledge, 149-181. villa-nicholas, m. (2016). “the invisible information worker: latinas in telecommunications,” in ed. noble, s. u and tynes, b. the intersectional internet: race, sex, class, and culture online, new york: peter lang publishing,195214. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): bosse, e. m., wiese, a., kutscher, n. (2023, october). educational practices and participation of marginalised youth in digitalised non-formal education. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. practices and participation of marginalised youth in non-formal and digitalised educational arrangements eva bosse university of cologne, germany amelie wiese university of cologne, germany prof. dr. nadia kutscher university of cologne, germany research subject educational inequality in germany is prevalent: research on a national scale shows that educational opportunities in germany are highly unequal (autor:innengruppe bildungsberichterstattung 2022). existing structures of inequality depend on different levels of social, economic and cultural capital (bourdieu 1987), further reproducing educational disadvantages among youth (jünger 2008; lareau 2011). while formal education is often prioritised in the discussion, non-formal (e.g. voluntary after school youth clubs) and informal education are considered essential in the acquisition of relevant skills in a digitalised society (jeong et al. 2018; spanhel 2020). if, in accordance with the german tradition of “bildung”, education is understood as a transformation of self-world-relations (jörissen/marotzki 2009), the relevance of nonformal and informal contexts is specifically emphasized. digital media have become essential for self-world-relations, as they have created new options for participation as well as new requirements and obstacles for orientation (jörissen/martozki 2009). in informal and non-formal educational arrangements, children and youth mostly depend on resources already available to them, especially if there is no provision of compensatory guidance and support. therefore, structures of inequality may be reproduced (dawson 2014). in research, this issue has been linked to digital inequality (iske et al. 2008; kutscher 2009; kutscher/otto 2005), as young people increasingly grow up in digitalised societies (spanhel 2020), in which analogue and digital spheres overlap (tillmann/weßel 2021). empirical findings on digital inequality point to the relevance of social and cultural capital for practices of media use that enable educational participation (iske/kutscher 2020; welling 2008; zillien 2009). non-formal educational institutions often aim at targeting marginalised youth as participants, for example by residing in ‘deprived’ urban areas, potentially creating opportunities to reduce educational inequalities among youth. in programmes that recognize their disadvantaged target groups’ realities and enable participation, trust and respect are considered important factors in reducing inequality in participation (fujii et al. 2021; streicher et al. 2014; walther 2014). however, it remains to be examined whether and under which constitutions those institutions are actually successful in the inclusion of marginalised youth (dawson 2014). some non-formal educational arrangements revolve around the usage of digital media, such as coding, robotics, 3d-printing or photography (“non-formal digitalised educational arrangements”). on the one hand, this potentially decreases educational and digital inequalities among youth by enabling transformations of self-world-relations through learning and the experience of self-efficacy in relation to digital media. on the other hand, inequalities may be reproduced within these settings, if e.g. specific media practices are delegitimised. in this case, structures of the educational arrangement may (unintentionally) exclude marginalised youth (fujii et al. 2021; kutscher/farrenberg 2017; schäfer/lojewski 2007). research questions the question emerges, whether non-formal digitalised educational arrangements actually succeed in enabling educational participation of marginalised youth, therefore reducing social and digital inequalities. in an ethnographic and reconstructive approach, a) different conditions in non-formal educational arrangements, b) learning and educational processes, specifically regarding digital media use as well as c) the accessibility of participation within those arrangements from a marginalised youths’ perspective are investigated in two institutions, aiming at identifying conditions under which these arrangements enable resp. limit meaningful participation, thus facilitating the transformation of self-worldrelations. methodological framework “dilaboration”, a joint research project, funded by the german federal ministry for education and research (bmbf) aims at identifying conditions under which non-formal educational programmes create opportunities for participation and transformation of self-world-relations specifically for marginalised youth. field access is ensured via two institutions that offer a variety of digitalised non-formal educational arrangements involving activities such as coding, 3d-printing, gaming and streaming. the arrangements are offered free of charge and mostly take place after school. they do not aim at any formal qualification. thus, we consider them to be “non-formal”. the researched institutions differ regarding their institutional conditions, resources and location, allowing us to compare how these conditions prevent or enable participation. considering different conditions and arrangements, the pedagogical daily routines in both non-formal educational institutions are examined through focused ethnographies (knoblauch 2001). in order to empirically reconstruct the mechanisms of educational participation, the participants’ and employees’ practices within those arrangements are examined through participatory observation and videography. the data is analysed through grounded theory methodology (corbin/strauss 2015) as well as artefact analysis (lueger/froschauer 2018). situational analysis (clarke/washburn/friese 2018) is applied in order to visualise constellations and relations between different human and non-human entities that participate in the observed situations. additionally, the preconditions for the participation of youth are investigated through group discussions with participants as well as youth who belong to potential target groups of the institutions but do not participate (‘non-participants’). the group discussions are analysed using the documentary method, which allows for the reconstruction of patterns of orientations that influence everyday practice (bohnsack 2010)1. the analysis of group discussions with participants examines conditions and orientations that enable participation, while the analysis of group discussions of nonparticipants identifies conditions and orientations that constrain participation. through the analysis of group discussions, subjective levels of social bonds, which may include bonds beyond the neighbourhood as well as heterogenous levels of social capital (bourdieu 1987) and other resources within the respective communities are considered. by doing so, the research avoids the application of a homogenizing perspective on territorial social spaces (landhäußer et al. 2005) which may lead to the reproduction of educational disadvantage. the praxeological approach, implemented both through focused ethnographies and the documentary method, enables the identification of practices and conditions of participation. we relate these to the facilitation of transformations of self-world-relations for participants. however, as this approach does not include psychological or biographical data, it is limited in terms of reconstructing actual processes of “bildung” within the subjects’ minds. instead, it focuses on the reconstruction of conditions for marginalised groups’ educational participation in practice. findings of this research project are regularly transferred and discussed with the institutions. moreover, one of the participating institutions implements the research findings into their conception and develops a model for transfer to similar institutions. findings presented at aoir 2023 the research project “dilaboration” fits in with the aoir’s 2023 theme “revolution” as digitalisation and its effects on education are often described as a revolution (e.g. spanhel 2020). preliminary findings to be presented are based on the broad empirical data collected: so far, 19 different programmes have been examined in 43 different 1 the term “orientations” signifies the implicit knowledge underlying practical action, from which a groups’ habitus can by identified (bohnsack 2010). participant observations. 8 programmes have additionally been filmed, allowing for indepth analysis. moreover, 13 group discussions have been conducted. in the research process, structures and practices involving artefacts such as digital hardware and software as well as non-digital artefacts are considered. in comparing the programmes of two non-formal educational institutions, “dilaboration” identifies conditions that enable the participation of marginalised youth in heterogenous urban districts and reconstructs them on a subjective level. after giving an insight into the research process and methodological approach, a data extract will be presented in order to reconstruct analytical stances and discuss preliminary findings. references autor:innengruppe bildungsberichterstattung (2022). bildung in deutschland 2022. (bielefeld: wbv media). bohnsack, r. (2010): documentary method and group discussions. in pfaff, n./weller, w. (eds.) qualitative analysis and documentary method in international educational research (opladen: b. budrich). bourdieu, p. (1987): die feinen unterschiede. (frankfurt a.m.: suhrkamp). clarke, a. e./washburn, r./friese, c. (2022): situational analysis in practice: mapping relationalities across disciplines (london: routledge). corbin, j. m./strauss, a. l. (2015): basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory (sage). dawson, e. (2014): equity in informal science education: developing an access and equity framework for science museums and science centres. studies in science education, 50, pp. 209–247. fujii, m. s./kutscher, n./niermann, k.-m. (2021): grenzen pädagogischen handelns: medienbildung zwischen anerkennung und handlungsbefähigung. in wahl, j./schellkiehl, i./damberger, t. (eds.) pädagogik, soziale arbeit und digitalität: education, social work and digitality (weinheim: juventa verlag). iske, s./klein, a./kutscher, n./otto, h.-u. (2008): young people’s internet use and its significance for informal education and social participation. technology, pedagogy and education, pp. 131–141. iske, s./kutscher, n. (2020): digitale ungleichheiten im kontext sozialer arbeit. in kutscher, n./ ley, t./seelmeyer, u./siller, f./tillmann, a./zorn, i. (eds.) handbuch soziale arbeit und digitalisierung, pp. 115–128, (weinheim: juventa verlag). jeong, s./han, s.j./lee, j./sunalai, s./yoon, s.w. (2018): integrative literature review on informal learning: antecedents, conceptualizations, and future directions. human resource deveolpment review, 17, pp. 128–152. jörissen, b./marotzki, w. (2009): medienbildung eine einführung: theorie methoden analysen (bad heilbrunn: klinkhardt). jünger, r. (2008): bildung für alle? (wiesbaden: vs verlag für sozialwissenschaften). knoblauch, h. (2001): fokussierte ethnographie: soziologie, ethnologie und die neue welle der ethnographie. sozialer sinn 2, pp. 123–141. kutscher, n. (2009): virtuelle räume jugendlicher die wirkmacht kulturellen kapitals bei der nutzung des internet. in tully, c. (ed) multilokalität und vernetzung. beiträge zur technikbasierten gestaltung jugendlicher sozialräume, pp. 157–173 (weinheim: juventa). kutscher, n./farrenberg, d. (2017): teilhabe und soziale kompetenz durch die nutzung von digitalen medien: herausforderungen für die kinderund jugendpolitik. expertise zum 10. kinderund jugendbericht der landesregierung nrw (universtiät vechta). retrieved september 14, 2010 www.mkffi.nrw/sites/default/files/asset/ document/10kjbnrw-expertise-kutscher_farrenberg_u.a.pdf (04.09.2020). kutscher, n./otto, h.-u. (2005): ermöglichung durch kontingente angebote. bildungszugänge und internetnutzung. in tully, c. (ed.) lernen in flexibilisierten welten. wie sich das lernen der jugend verändert, pp. 95–109. (weinheim: juventa). landhäußer, s./otto, h.-u./ziegler, h. (2005): informelles lernen in benachteiligten stadtteilen. in dokumentation des fachforums: “orte der bildung im stadtteil”, pp. 6–9 (berlin). lareau, a. (2011): unequal childhoods: class, race, and family life (berkeley: university of california press). lueger, m./froschauer, u. (2018): artefaktanalyse: grundlagen und verfahren (wiesbaden: springer vs). schäfer, m./lojewski, j. (2007): internet und bildungschancen. (münchen: kopaed). spanhel, d. (2020): kinder, jugendliche und junge erwachsene in digitalisierten lernwelten. in kutscher, n./ley, t./seelmeyer u./siller, f./tillmann, a./ zorn, i. (eds.), handbuch soziale arbeit und digitalisierung, pp. 101–114 (beltz juventa). streicher, b./unterleitner, k./schulze, h. (2014): knowledgerooms science communication in local, welcoming spaces to foster social inclusion, journal of science and communication,13 (02). tillmann, a./weßel, a. (2021): offene kinderund jugendarbeit in mediatisierten alltagsund lebenswelten. in deinet, u./sturzenhecker, b./von schwanenflügel, l./schwerthelm, m. (eds.), handbuch offene kinderund jugendarbeit, pp. 841–854 (wiesbaden: springer fachmedien). walther, a. (2014): aneignung und anerkennung. subjektbezogene und soziale dimensionen eines sozialpädagogischen bildungsbegriffs. in deinet, u./reutlinger, c. (eds.), tätigkeit-aneignung-bildung, pp. 97–112, (wiesbaden: springer vs). welling, s. (2008): computerpraxis jugendlicher und medienpädagogisches handeln (münchen: kopaed). zillien, n. (2009): digitale ungleichheit. neue technologien und alte ungleichheiten in der informationsund wissensgesellschaft (wiesbaden: vs verlag für sozialwissenschaften). microsoft word rambukkana-the shape of platform studies-the shape of platform studies.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): rambukkana, n., de verteuil, g. (2021, october). the shape of platform studies: a multidimensional model for a vicissitudinous concept. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the shape of platform studies: a multidimensional methodological model for a vicissitudinous concept nathan rambukkana wilfrid laurier university gemma de verteuil wilfrid laurier university the problematic the study of platforms is on the rise in communication studies, science and technology studies (sts), game studies, internet studies, and the study of human-machine communication (hmc). while originally platform studies emerged from hardware studies as an integrated attempt to study the hardware, software, code, marketing, and use of computational technologies—especially, early on, videogame consoles, but never limited to them—its use has been broadened to include the study of software platforms, such as social media sites, and their user affordances, algorithmic decision making, terms of service, background code environments, and embeddedness in neoliberal capitalism: selling user data, acting as advertising vehicles, etc. this holistic approach to studying technology encompasses everything from minute detail (such as how buttons are configured on a minitel console, or xbox360 game controller; the way that privacy settings are displayed to facebook users; the packaging of an apple product), to the broad and situated socio-political context of corporations (such as the gender make up of nintendo development teams, the political investments of the twitter board of directors). while a fruitful field with much work developed, there is a noticeable dearth of methodological theorising on the topic (apperley and parikka 2018), even as there are numerous theoretical explorations. how exactly does one do platform studies? after a deep dive into all the varietals of platform studies in the form of a graduate seminar, the authors concluded that the disparate approaches to studying platforms, while sometimes fought over as more-or-less appropriate or useful (e.g., bogost and montfort, 2009; gillespie 2010), might be one of its core strengths. which is to say that the vagueness of platform studies tracks the vagueness of platforms themselves (gillespie 2010), and that this vicissitudinous nature might, in practice, be a feature not a bug. the methodology: in search of the shape of platform studies we propose a multidimensional approach to platform studies, in which work may be located along at least three major axes: computational—sociotechnical, pragmatic— critical, and interpersonal—structural. these three dimensions of platform studies are combinable, provisional, and subject to extension. for example, platform studies work might be sociotechnical | critical | structural (for example van dijck, poell, and de waal’s work in the platform society (2018), or srnicek’s theorizing in platform capitalism (2017)). work like this would foreground the societal and communicative implications of platforms with their computational aspects remaining relevant, but less of a focus. they would also centre critical aspects over pragmatic ones, a tone and line of attack that is often more structural than interpersonal. alternatively, it could be on the other end of this array-space and be computational | pragmatic | interpersonal such as the platform studies montfort and bogost build in racing the beam (2009), and some of their subsequent mit press platform studies series. the centre of attention in such studies is their computational affordances, which is to say their ability to be programed and/or play host to layers of further programmable platforms—like turtles, they may be platforms all the way down. the sociotechnical is still present but now rides shotgun and it is often (but not always, see for example, mckelvey 2011) the creative aspects of the sociotechnical that bear a secondary or joint focus. while critical aspects may still be present, the pragmatic focus of such studies can locate them closer to, for example, critical histories, policy, or regulatory work— depending on the genre of pragmatic focus. similarly, while they may touch on structural issues, they more closely follow relationships and individuals: creative teams, innovators, insights, designs, competition, conflict, credit. with such studies, additional critical and structural aspects may be located by refocusing on the absences and gaps—why are we only talking about the male or white creatives in a particular industry? perhaps because the design teams were only white men, or perhaps because popular recounting attributes the labour of teams to particular individuals only: both worthy of critical reflection. but work could also find itself at other locations within this triangulation, such as danaher and mcarthur’s collection on robot sex (2018) which we argue is sociotechnical | critical | interpersonal, as it centres interpersonal ethics in its exploration of sex robotics as platform. while definitely critical, it breaks from more structurally focused work and speaks to relationships, individual needs, and desires, as well as society’s perspectives on the same. you could also have work at different positions along a single axis, such as gillespie’s custodians of the internet (2018), that’s focus on moderation practices could be described as sociotechnical | critical interpersonal–structural; which is to say somewhere between interpersonal and structural on the last coordinate, as it treats both the structural challenges of moderating social media at the scale of human society, and at the same time on moderation labour, its team dynamics, and interaction with publics very minutely. finally, we speak to how this model could be extensible and applied to other dimensions that could be identified or conceived of, e.g., technical—sociological, empirical—theoretical. we also speak to the model’s limitations. mathematical metaphors get strained a little here. a three-dimensional model has a certain intuitive recognition as a space, but when dimensions might be hot-swappable in ways that no longer track the “height | width | depth” paradigm, spatial metaphors could also fall apart. similarly, the higher-mathematical forms present a challenge. if two dimensions form a matrix, and three an array or tensor, how do we talk about higher-dimensional methodological structures like n-dimensional arrays and tensors? is tracking the mathematical form of something like a computational | critical | structural | theoretical exploration methodically fruitful, or belabouring? these potential limitations and lines of flight aside, we believe this model could be a path towards a more intentional, deliberate, and organized approach to platform studies. while the three dimensions offered up for discussion here cannot speak to the entirely of what platform studies is or could become, together and as a starting point these initial three define the shape of platform studies, track the work it has already done, and offer a solid framework and model for future investigations. references apperley, tom, and jussi parikka. 2018. “platform studies’ epistemic threshold.” games and culture 13, no. 4: 349–369. bogost, ian, and nick montfort. 2009. “platform studies: frequently questioned answers.” digital arts and culture, december 12–15, 2009, irvine, california, usa. danaher, john, and neil mcarthur, eds. 2017. robot sex: social and ethical implications. cambridge, ma: mit press. gillespie, tarleton. 2010. “the politics of platforms.” new media & society 12, no. 3: 347–364. ———. 2018. custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. new haven, ct: yale university press. mckelvey, fenwick. 2011. “fcj-128 a programmable platform? drupal, modularity, and the future of the web” the fibreculture journal 18 (trans). https://eighteen.fibreculturejournal.org/2011/10/09/fcj-128-programmableplatform-drupal-modularity-and-the-future-of-the-web/ montfort, nick, and ian bogost. 2009. racing the beam: the atari video computer system. cambridge, ma: mit press. srnicek, nick. 2017. platform capitalism. cambridge, uk: polity. van dijck, josé, thomas poell, and martijn de waal. 2018. the platform society. oxford, uk: oxford university press. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 qiu, h.; klug, d. (2021, october). motivations and expectations for virtual gift-giving in douyin livestreams. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. motivations and expectations for virtual gift-giving in douyin live streams huilian sophie qiu carnegie mellon university daniel klug carnegie mellon university live streaming and virtual gift-giving in social media and short-video apps social live streaming services (slss) (e.g. twitch, youtube live) combine real-time presentation of user-generated content with social networking features that allow streamers and viewers to interact in a co-present social online setting (zimmer & scheibe, 2019). mobile live streaming is now an integrated feature in many social media apps (e.g. facebook, instagram, snapchat) and has recently advanced as a popular form of content creation on entertainment-based short-video apps, especially in the chinese market (xu & ye, 2020) and foremost douyin, the chinese version of tiktok. on douyin and tiktok, users can create 15 to 60-second videos, usually based on trending sounds, and add hashtags, text elements, and captions to videos. in addition, douyin promotes its live streaming feature as a way for users to earn money through virtual gifts from viewers (kaye, chen, & zeng, 2020), a common feature and practice in slss (scheibe, fietkiewicz, stock, 2016). virtual gifts in slss are primarily used to reward streamers for their content or performance in a live stream. however, we assume on douyin social aspects are more crucial for virtual gifting. while attractiveness and humorous appeal of streamers generally affect consumption and virtual gifting (hou et al., 2019), socialization is also a driving factor in making virtual gifts, and the relationship between streamer and viewer affects the given amount (yu et al., 2018). viewers more likely make virtual gifts if streamers show activeness and availability, and showing appreciation for received gifts in a live stream often results in continuous virtual sponsoring (lee, choi & kim, 2019). seeing streamers receive virtual gifts from other users further encourages gift-giving (zhu, yang, & dai, 2017). 2 three types of douyin live streams we are looking at three types of live streams by young male hosts (= streamers) on douyin to analyze the motivations of female viewers to watch and make virtual gifts to the hosts and to explore resulting power relations between hosts and viewers. 1) 颜值主播 (yan zhi zhu bo, ‘good-looking hosts’) mostly show their faces and upper body. they chat with viewers, sing, dance, or do a ‘pk’ (meaning ‘player killing’), a 5minute competition with another host on gaining the most virtual gifts; 2) 声控主播 (sheng kong zhu bo, ‘vocal hosts’) only present their voice to a still image, they chat with viewers, sing, or narrate books; 3) 交友厅 (jiao you ting, ‘friend-making halls’) have several hosts at a time whom viewers can become ‘friends’ with through chatting but mostly through making virtual gifts for the surplus of getting personal phone calls or being added to the host’s wechat to maintain a personal relationship outside of douyin. in all douyin live streams, viewers can make virtual gifts between ￥0.1 (~$0,015) and ￥6,666 (~$1,017); hosts can create wish lists of virtual gifts for viewers to purchase, in return, they thank viewers in the live stream. method we conducted 12 semi-structured interviews with female viewers (ages 18 to 37) of all three live streams who sent virtual gifts to hosts (all live stream viewers can see who sent a virtual gift). we asked why they follow hosts, why and when they decide to make virtual gifts, and what their expectations are from sending virtual gifts. all interviews were conducted in chinese and translated into analogous english by one of the researchers who is fluent in both languages. findings and discussion our results confirm that female viewers of male-hosted douyin live streams mainly use virtual gifts as a social means of appreciation and support for friendship in a parasocial online interaction. interviewees mostly follow hosts because they are humorous, goodlooking, have a nice voice, or are good entertainers, but also because they enjoyed chatting with other fans. interviewees send virtual gifts to show appreciation for a host’s performance because they wanted to make them happy. for example, one interviewee sent virtual gifts up to ￥588 (~$90) to cheer up a host when she felt he was exhausted. they also purchased virtual gifts from wish lists to help a host achieve an assigned virtual gifts task on douyin. in contrast, one interviewee explained she would not send virtual gifts if a host already received enough from other viewers even when she appreciates his performance. interviewees rather constantly send smaller amounts than occasional larger amounts but still spend larger amounts overall and prioritize virtual gifts to hosts over buying, for example, leisure articles. we did not find aspects of power imbalances regarding the monetary or social value of virtual gifts. most interviewees feel they hold equal positions to the hosts and consider themselves fans and never expected to become friends with a host. however, hosts from ‘friend-making halls’ live streams are sometimes perceived as friends, yet some 3 viewers of other live streams consider hosts only as a means to find other fans to chat with. interviewees unanimously said they do not expect anything from the hosts in return for their virtual gifts, yet they appreciate online gestures, like a host blowing a kiss, but do not consider them a privilege. in contrast, our observation of several ‘pk’ (‘player killing’) competitions in ‘good-looking hosts’ douyin live streams shows viewers send virtual gifts to help their favorite host win the competition which holds implicit expectations. conclusion we find these types of douyin live streams are much more focused on the selfpresentation of hosts as personae and actors in parasocial interaction. we are currently further analyzing how hosts use the short-form video format on douyin to promote live streams as long-form based on self-(re)presentation rather than activities and skills, such as gaming in slss. references hou, f., guan, z., li, b., & chong, a. y. l. (2019). factors influencing people’s continuous watching intention and consumption intention in live streaming: evidence from china. internet research. kaye, d. b. v., chen, x., & zeng, j. (2020). the co-evolution of two chinese mobile short video apps: parallel platformization of douyin and tiktok. mobile media & communication, 2050157920952120. lee, s. e., choi, m., & kim, s. (2019). they pay for a reason! the determinants of fan’s instant sponsorship for content creators. telematics and informatics, 45, 101286. scheibe, k., fietkiewicz, k. j., & stock, w. g. (2016). information behavior on social live streaming services. journal of information science theory and practice, 4(2), 6-20. xu, y., & ye, y. (2020). who watches live streaming in china? examining viewers’ behaviors, personality traits, and motivations. frontiers in psychology, 11. yu, e., jung, c., kim, h., & jung, j. (2018). impact of viewer engagement on gift-giving in live video streaming. telematics and informatics, 35(5), 1450-1460. zhu, z., yang, z., & dai, y. (2017, july). understanding the gift-sending interaction on live-streaming video websites. in international conference on social computing and social media (pp. 274-285). springer, cham. zimmer, f., & scheibe, k. (2019, january). what drives streamers? users’ characteristics and motivations on social live streaming services. in proceedings of the 52nd hawaii international conference on system sciences. 2538-2547. the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): mahl, d., zeng, j., & schäfer, m.s. (2022, november). platformization of conspiracism: introducing a theoretical framework for investigating conspiracy theories on “alternative” platforms using a case study of bitchute and gab. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. platformization of conspiracism: introducing a theoretical framework for investigating conspiracy theories on “alternative” platforms using a case study of bitchute and gab daniela mahl university of zurich jing zeng university of zurich mike s. schäfer university of zurich digital platforms have impacted the communication of conspiracy theories – defined as alternative explanations of events or practices by referring to individuals or groups acting in secret (mahl et al., 2022) – in multiple ways: they enable users to publicly share their support for conspiratorial claims, to connect with each other, and to form like-minded communities (cf., dewitt et al., 2018). as a result, conspiracy theories, along with other forms of deceptive content, often spread faster, deeper, and wider in the platform ecosystem than verified information (vosoughi et al., 2018), and new conventions of conspiratorial communication have emerged out of the interaction between users and platforms (tuters & hagen, 2020). however, the volume, dynamics, and impacts of conspiracy discourses can differ greatly between platforms (zeng & schäfer, 2021) – especially considering that major tech companies have increasingly cracked down on users propagating conspiratorial and extremist content. using bitchute (the “censorship-free alternative” to youtube) and gab (an alt-right equivalent to twitter), this study illuminates the interdependence and interplay between “alternative” social media platforms and conspiracy theory communication. on the one hand, these platforms tolerate and facilitate the propagation of conspiracy theories through their technological architecture, governance, and user culture. on the other hand, they profit from hosting conspiratorial propagators to attract traffic and to recruit users. we describe this mutual shaping between digital platforms and conspiracy theory communication as the platformization of conspiracism. theoretical & analytical framework to systematically discuss the platformization of conspiracism, we draw inspiration from critical platform studies (nieborg & poell, 2018; van dijck, 2021) and introduce a theoretical and analytical framework that integrates four interconnected dimensions: 1) infrastructure of platforms: this dimension is interested in technological features of platforms which shape participation and discourse, for instance, by allowing users to stay blow the radar or to build a sense of community (e.g., by signifying political identity through hashtags such as #maga). 2) economic model of platforms: this dimension interrogates platforms’ business model and how user activities and transactions are commodified, for instance, through donations or investments which can indicate a strong commitment or through purchased accounts which entail specific technological features. in addition, it focuses on users’ ability to use platforms to monetize their influence and visibility and to operate as “conspiracy entrepreneurs” (sunstein & vermeule, 2009). 3) governance of platforms: this dimension considers how platforms are governed through terms of service (tos), developer guidelines, or content moderation practices and whether and how this enables users to propagate conspiratorial narratives. 4) user culture: this dimension is concerned with user characteristics like sociodemographic characteristics or ideological sympathies indicated in users’ profiles. in addition, it is interested in users’ communication, for instance, whether they construct unique forms of vernacular subcultures by using memes or slang expressions. empirical case study in line with our framework, we examine bitchute and gab in the context of conspiracy theory communication along the following research questions (rq): rq1. what are the main technological platform features that shape conspiracy theory communication? rq2. how does the platform’s business model affect the propagation of conspiratorial content? rq3. how does the platform’s governance practice impact the communication of conspiracy theories? rq4. what are the key characteristics and monetizing strategies of conspiracy theory propagators? to investigate the platforms' technological features (rq1), business model (rq2), and governance practices (rq3), we conduct a documentation analysis of media reports and the platforms own news updates alongside an in-depth examination of each platform's functionality and interface. for example, we collected 200 newsletters from gab (2021-2022) that offer valuable insights into key technological developments on the platform. to answer rq4, we rely on data from our larger conspiracy theory research project and identified 20 prominent conspiracy theory channels and profiles from bitchute and gab, respectively. to gain insights into these actors and their monetization strategies, this study creates comprehensive profiles for each user by • investigating their posts or videos to identify the most reoccurring themes; • tracking and examining the web urls presented on their page that lead to personal websites, donation pages, merchandising/publications; • analyzing their interaction with other users on the platform. findings from our study shed light on how bitchute and gab have positioned themselves as technological equivalents to their “mainstream” counterparts by offering similar features and interfaces. rhetorically, however, they differ from “big tech” in that they present themselves as defenders of free speech and fighters against censorship. however, these platforms do not operate in a lawless zone, they moderate content – especially violent and pornographic content – to legitimize themselves. at the actor level, our preliminary findings suggest that both platforms provide conspiracy propagators a fertile refuge through which they can maintain their presence and connection with their followers – which also allows them to profit from their visibility by receiving in-platform monetary rewards or by directing followers to external websites where they can support them financially. consistent with previous research, our study of individual conspiracy propagandists suggests that de-platforming effectively minimizes the reach of disinformation and extreme speech (rauchfleisch & kaiser, 2021). however, we also argue that these may merely be short-term effects, as it takes time for conspiracy propagandists and “alternative” platforms to establish an “alternative” ecology. in the long run, conspiracy propagandists can rebuild their network through cross-platform content distribution and as long as the financial rewards remain, the reduced reach of “mainstream” social media users does not deter profit-driven conspiracy theory entrepreneurs from producing and disseminating content. significance conceptually, we advance research on conspiracy theories in platform environments by introducing a framework that allows scholars to interrogate why certain platforms seem to be more attractive to conspiracy communities than others. in addition, we inform platformization studies by applying a widely used concept to a specific and timely phenomenon. empirically, we shed light on two under-researched platforms in the context of conspiracy theory communication. references dewitt, d., atkinson, m., & wegner, d. (2018). how conspiracy theories spread. in j. e. uscinski (ed.), conspiracy theories and the people who believe them (pp. 319– 336). oxford university press. mahl, d., schäfer, m. s., & zeng, j. (2022). conspiracy theories in digital media environments: an interdisciplinary literature review and agenda for future research. new media & society. nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society, 20(11), 4275–4292. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769694 rauchfleisch, a., & kaiser, j. (2021). deplatforming the far-right: an analysis of youtube and bitchute. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3867818 https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3867818 sunstein, c. r., & vermeule, a. (2009). conspiracy theories: causes and cures journal of political philosophy, 17(2), 202–227. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14679760.2008.00325.x tuters, m., & hagen, s. (2020). (((they))) rule: memetic antagonism and nebulous othering on 4chan. new media & society, 22(12), 2218–2237. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819888746 van dijck, j. (2021). seeing the forest for the trees: visualizing platformization and its governance. new media & society, 23(9), 2801–2819. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820940293 vosoughi, s., roy, d., & aral, s. (2018). the spread of true and false news online. science, 359(6380), 1146–1151. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap9559 zeng, j., & schäfer, m. s. (2021). conceptualizing “dark platforms”. covid-19-related conspiracy theories on 8kun and gab. digital journalism, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2021.1938165 microsoft word marler-strivers, maintainers, achievers-strivers, maintainers, achievers.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): marler, w. (2021, october). strivers, maintainers, achievers: networked trajectories of older adults learning to use technology during a pandemic. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. strivers, maintainers, achievers: networked trajectories of older adults learning to use technology during a pandemic will marler university of zurich introduction “aging in place” in one’s home is valued for enabling older adults to maintain “independence, autonomy, and connection to social support, including friends and family” (wiles et al., 2012). digital technology is designed as an ally for older adults to remain living in their homes and communities though older adults’ have varying experiences and attitudes towards technology’s role (peek et al., 2016). during the covid-19 pandemic, older adults were under the burden of “sheltering in place,” remaining at home and out of physical contact with their social networks. research has explored digital divides in older adults’ technology skills and uses (hunsaker & hargittai, 2018) and in their communication uptake during the pandemic (nguyen et al., 2021). we lack an understanding of the on-the-ground experiences and trajectories of older adults seeking to adopt digital technologies to maintains social connection during the covid-19 pandemic. what balance of independence and interdependence do older adults experience as they attempt to take up new devices and applications, such as tablets and video chat, during a period of physical distancing? methods i conducted in-depth, remote interviews and participants observation with 12 older adults – nine women and three men who were white and black in race – participating in a technology training program provided by a nonprofit organization in a midwestern u.s. city between december 2020 and july 2021. i logged 90 hours on zoom and the phone in the remote fieldwork over this period, including classroom observation, interviews, “hanging out” with participants, checking in with staff and other community organizations, and volunteering. the training program provided lower-income older adults with a tablet, home internet service, and a 10-week digital skills course held over zoom. i interviewed eight of the participants longitudinally after they completed the program. these include six women and two men ranging from 60 to 90 years of age, including three black participants. i conducted 42 hour-long zoom or phone interviews with the eight longitudinal participants. i gained insights on the broader context of everyday life over zoom interviews through “home tours” given by participants and hanging out and speaking about a variety of topics outside of interview questions. i attended eight tablet training classes, spoke as the graduation speaker for four cohorts, and conducted four volunteer sessions as a digital tutor. with the permission of five participants, i also began to observe their social media activity on facebook, weaving these observations into interviews. i recruited participants and collected data through an ongoing process of informed consent and analyzed my data through grounded theory, allowing concepts to arise and testing them against future responses and observations. findings i introduce “strivers,” “achievers,” and “maintainers” to describe different experiences of in(ter)dependence that emerged at the intersection of technology use and physical distancing for 12 participants during and after the technology training program. there are the oldest participants, who had the least digital skills and experience, aged 86 and 90, whom i call “strivers.” a 10-week remote training course, a free tablet, and home internet service was not enough for these strivers to develop an independent capacity to use zoom and other features of their tablets as a means of social connection. the technology training program was itself the primary social outlet of these strivers during the period of fieldwork, aside from occasional family visits and phone calls from friends. different expressions of social needs shaped life satisfaction across strivers in the context of a failure to develop technological independence. phone calls and occasional visits provided sufficient relief for sarah, aged 86, divorced, and living without any of her family in the city, who “never feels lonely, even when [she is] alone,” and finds entertainment in reading and television. by contrast, wilma, aged 90, who lives alone and whose children occasionally visit from other cities, described herself as depressed before and after graduating from the program. trouble with dexterity and memory prevented wilma from gaining proficiency in zoom, despite ongoing remote tutoring sessions. zoom continued to represent “the outside world” of social possibility. in contrast, the satisfaction she gained from phone conversations with friends dwindled over the months with the imposed monotony of the pandemic: “no activities, no trips around town. we don’t have anything to talk about!” wilma acknowledged her social dependence and experienced greater discontent for having experienced though not realized the potential of zoom to bring her into community contact once the program had ended. while strivers sought but could not develop new digital capacities through a nonprofit program, the “achievers” were younger, in their early or mid-60s, and had used smartphones and social media for several years. achievers used a level of existing digital skill to seize on a new provision of devices, services, and instruction and they solidified and developed existing social involvements, in degrees that varied based on pre-existing social networks. for example, toni, 67 and never married, took on a greater role in her church as gatherings went virtual. toni become involved in zoom calls with a national group of women church leaders who had previously met in person elsewhere in the country where toni was not inclined to travel. finally, “maintainers” also had a level of digital proficiency entering the program and expanded their digital repertoires through skills gained in the program, though largely saw no shift in their social involvements. for example, mandy, 60 and divorced, continued to maintain her social connections over her smartphone, where she was already familiar with her apps, while turning the tablet into a means of greater financial independence, downloading “couponing” apps and participating in paid studies with the use of a larger screen and faster processor. conclusion the study proposes a typology for digital trajectories later in life. independence is reflected among those who were able to translate provided technology resources into an expanded social presence during the pandemic, like toni. interdependence describes those whose need for others grew with the addition of needed technology support. a glimpse at digital possibilities and the lack of sufficient support to seize them led to a larger sense of alienation for those like wilma. however, by declaring oneself “not lonely despite being alone,” strivers like sarah could declare independence despite failing to realize the promise of digital technology as a stand-in for in-person connection. research on older adults and digital technology can benefit from examining not only the possession of digital skills and technology support, but also the meanings that older adults bring to their experiences of inclusion and exclusion as they adapt to digital technologies while aging – and sheltering – in place. references hunsaker, a., & hargittai, e. (2018). a review of internet use among older adults: new media & society, 20(10), 3937–3954. nguyen, m. h., hargittai, e., & marler, w. (2021). digital inequality in communication during a time of physical distancing: the case of covid-19. computers in human behavior. peek, s. t. m., luijkx, k. g., rijnaard, m. d., nieboer, m. e., voort, c. s. van der, aarts, s., hoof, j. van, vrijhoef, h. j. m., & wouters, e. j. m. (2016). older adults’ reasons for using technology while aging in place. gerontology, 62(2), 226–237. quan-haase, a., williams, c., kicevski, m., elueze, i., & wellman, b. (2018). dividing the grey divide. american behavioral scientist, 62(9), 1207–1228. wiles, j. l., leibing, a., guberman, n., reeve, j., & allen, r. e. (2012). the meaning of “aging in place” to older people. the gerontologist, 52(3), 357–366. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): ging, d., brace, l. and baele, s. (2022, november). can toxic masculinities be de-radicalised? mapping the dynamics and spread of incel ideology online. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. can toxic masculinities be de-radicalised?: mapping the dynamics and spread of incel ideology online debbie ging dublin city university lewys brace university of exeter stephane baele university of exeter in recent years, male supremacist and anti-women formations have become increasingly prevalent online. in particular, considerable attention has been focused on the incel (involuntary celibate) community due to a number of high-profile mass killings in the united states, canada and, more recently, the uk. incel ideology is a misogynistic formation, whose male proponents blame women for their lack of sexual activity. it operates in the broader virtual space of the manosphere, a loose conglomerate of online communities spread across various digital platforms, which are united in their antipathy toward feminism, their belief in evolutionary psychology and their adherence to the red pill (a process of enlightenment, whereby one comes to understand the world as a liberal feminist conspiracy that disadvantages men). this research tracks the dynamic pathways by which incel ideology spreads within and across online communities, digital platforms and geographical spaces, with a view to better understanding processes of radicalization, including ‘algorithmic radicalization.’ we also explore the dynamic interplay between incel and alt-right rhetoric, a phenomenon that is increasingly being noted in the academic and journalistic literature (evans 2018; munn 2019; baele et al. 2020; johanssen 2022). understanding the contagion dynamics of extremist ideas is crucial to researchers, educators, platforms and security practitioners: how such ideas circulate, gain new audiences, morph into new ones, etc. however, theoretical and practical understanding of the online contagion of extremist ideologies is lacking. it is only by understanding these ‘pilling pipelines’ (ging and murphy 2021) that effective interventions can be developed, whether educational, technological, legal or platform-governance-related. the recent, evolving and growing constitution of incel ideology through repeated online interactions and offline acts of violence offers a useful case for the study of the contagion dynamics involved in online extremism. by studying the incel online space, this project systematically investigates four different axes of contagion that are at play: 1. first, incel ideology has exhibited – and continues to do so – contagion across different digital platforms, constituting a multifaceted, ever-evolving online ecosystem where activity and interactions frequently migrate from some platforms to others (which we refer to here as the “incelosphere”). research into the incel subculture has thus far only focused on either specific platforms (such as reddit [farrell et al. 2019], 4chan [nagle 2015], youtube [papadamou et al. 2020], and dedicated incel forums such as incels.co and incels.me [baele et al. 2019; jaki et al. 2019]) or/and on what ging (2019) calls “flashpoint events” (such as “#gamergate” or “the fappening”, see massanari 2017). 2. discussions amongst the community appear to have become increasingly political and extremist, which is indicative of some form of behavioural dynamics in relation to the internal ideological contagion of the most extreme ideas. incel discussions have recently been shown to score similar levels of “toxicity of discussion” as wellknown far-right platforms like gab (ribeiro et al. 2020). 3. it has also incorporated concepts seen before in other, particularly far-right, extremist ideologies, which is indicative of ideological contagion between different extremist belief systems. in turn, the growth of the incel community has meant that particular ideas, jargon and attitudes have permeated to adjacent extremist movements. as kimmel’s (2018) work has for instance shown, the far right and other extremist groups are now adept at exploiting male anger and ‘aggrieved entitlement’ to further their own causes. such cross-pollination of ideologies remains, however, insufficiently studied. 4. the incel movement seems to have also spread to other countries outside of north america and canada (witt, 2020), demonstrating geographical contagion of a scale still unknown. we use both interpretive examination of textual and image content and advanced computational methods to map the incelosphere and to track its dynamics of contagion along four key axes: 1. radical contagion: the dynamics through which the most extreme ideas gain (or lose) traction within the incel subculture. 2. platform contagion: the ways in which incel ideology spreads across different digital platforms. 3. ideological contagion: the pathways by which incel subcultural practices have contributed to but also drawn from other extremist ideologies to create a ‘crosspollination’ of ideas, chiefly with aspects of the online far-right. 4. geographical contagion: the geographical spread of the incel movement, with the aim of evaluating its prominence in the uk and the republic of ireland. the aim of this research is to understand more precisely how the four main contagion processes listed above define the evolution of an online movement which has been linked to several incidences of gender-based terrorism over the last decade. while the majority of research conducted to date has focused on the analysis of static datasets captured from a singular platform, this study tracks the movement and transfiguration of incel ideology across several pivotal pathways. such a detailed and dynamic examination enables us to better understand how and why young men become radicalised into this ideology, how its ideas are communicated internally and externally (linguistically and through images, e.g. memes), and how they spread and manifest across other platforms, groups and geographical spaces. ultimately, it is hoped that such knowledge can be used to help de-radicalize disenfranchised and socially isolated men from involvement in these digital communities. references baele, s., brace, l. & coan, t. (2019) ‘from “incel” to “saint”: analyzing the violent worldview behind the 2018 toronto attack’ terrorism and political violence doi: 10.1080/09546553.2019.1638256 evans, r. (2018). from memes to infowars: how 75 fascist activists were redpilled. bellingcat, october. farrell, t., fernandez, m., novotny, j. & alani, h. (2019) ‘exploring misogyny across the manosphere in reddit’ websci 19: proceedings of the 10th acm conference on web science 87-96. ging, d. (2019) ‘alphas, betas, and incels: theorizing the masculinities of the manosphere’ men and masculinities 22(4), 638-657. ging, d., & murphy, s. (2021). tracking the pilling pipeline: limitations, challenges and a call for new methodological frameworks in incel and manosphere research. aoir selected papers of internet research. jaki, s., de smedt, t., gwóźdź, m., panchal, r., rossa, a. & de pauw, g. (2019) ‘online hatred of women in the incels.me forum: linguistic analysis and automatic detection’. journal of language aggression and conflict https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00026.jak johanssen, j. (2021, forthcoming) fantasy, online misogyny and the manosphere: male bodies of dis/inhibition. routledge. kimmel, m. (2018) healing from hate : how young men get into and out of violent extremism. university of california press. massanari, a. (2017) ‘#gamergate and the fappening: how reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures’ new media & society 19,(3), 329–346. munn, l. (2019). alt-right pipeline: individual journeys to extremism online. first monday. nagle, a. (2015) ‘contemporary online anti-feminist movements’ phd thesis, dublin city university, dublin [available online: http://doras.dcu.ie/22385/3/angela_nagle_phd_thesis.pdf] papadamou, k., zannettou, s., blackburn, j., de cristofaro, e., stringhini, g. & sirivianos, m. (2020) ‘understanding the incel community on youtube’ arxiv [available online: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08293v1.pdf] accessed 22/03/2021 ribeiro, m., blackburn, j., bradlyn, b., de cristofaro, e., stringhini, g., long, s., greenburg, s. & zannettou, s. (2020) arxiv [available via https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.07600]. witt, t. (2020) ‘“if i cannot have it, i will do everything i can to destroy it.” the canonization of elliot rodger: ‘incel’ masculinities, secular sainthood, and justifications of ideological violence social identities 26(5), 675-689. microsoft word yeo-the geopolitical dynamics of google-the geopolitical dynamics of google.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): yeo, s. (2021, october). the geopolitical dynamics of google. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the geopolitical dynamics of google shinjoung yeo queens college,city university of new york us-based transnational corporation alphabet (nee google) controls search, a critical entry point to the internet, dominating over 90% of the global search market (johnson, 2021). google’s impressive capture of the internet market seems to reaffirm a longestablished us-led global information order. however, this paper argues that the us position is far from secure, as the escalating tensions between geopolitical rivals is once again destabilizing the us-centric internet. as dan schiller (2014) points out, the extraterritorial internet is intertwined with the global political-economy and has turned into a vital site for profit-making and an axis of expansion for a transnationalizing capitalism. thus, as the control over the internet is crucial for political economic power, the internet has become a battlefield between states, capitals and various social actors. in the global arena, the two most contentious zones over the internet for the us center around the people’s republic of china (prc), a relatively new and expansionary force within the global economy, and the european union (eu), the longtime us ally as well as its global competitor and political counterweight historically. in china, where google and other us tech companies have struggled to carve out a foothold in the largest market in the world, chinese search engine baidu dominates; meanwhile, due to europe’s dependence on us information systems, google’s global dominance has again provoked europe’s anxiety over losing control to the us as well as china over strategic emerging internet sectors. the western media persistently portrays the chinese internet sector within the light of censorship and the great firewall; however, this rhetoric conceals the fact of china’s deep integration into the global capitalist economy through its dynamic, home-grown and market-driven internet industry which is restructuring the political economy of transnational capitalism (zhao, 2008; schiller, 2011; hong, 2017; tang, 2019). the fear of china closing the gap over critical internet technologies, frustration regarding lack of access to the largest market in the world and its emergence as a new capitalist rival have spurred the us government to be fully engaged in order to safeguard its primacy over the most profitable internet sector. to counter china, the current us government is taking a three-pronged approach – placing a range of sanctions against chinese tech companies including tariffs, investmentand export controls; boosting their domestic internet sectors through science policy and increased funding; and flexing its political muscle to arrange new “digital alliances,” pursuing a deal with the eu for a joint investment for critical and emerging internet sectors and forging an alliance with japan, south korea and taiwan to isolate china. meanwhile the eu is looking for a strategic balance between china – the eu’s largest trading partner – and the us – its secondlargest – to serve its own interests and has asserted its power by writing new global rules and regulations for the internet and has funded a european-based internet sector. at the same time, china is leaning once again on its policy of renewing investment in its domestic internet sectors to wean the country off its reliance on foreign technologies and urging chinese companies to expand to overseas markets in emerging sectors such as ai and 5g. the biden administration has signaled that the us is determined to maintain its power over the internet by continuing to self-servingly position itself as a leader of “human rights” and “democracy;” however, this us project is not without mounting challenges. for decades, the internet sectors of the us and china have been increasingly integrated to the point where they are interdependent in sharing the transnational accumulation process. the us chamber of commerce has reported that a so-called “decoupling” between china and us would cost us $190 billion dollars. us treasury secretary janet yellen hinted that the us needs to separate to a certain degree but warned of the danger of a complete decoupling from china’s tech sectors and doubted whether us allies would side with the us and cut off china (shalal, 2021). despite biden’s proclaimed battle for the utility of democracy, the question is not about which country or which company will transform the internet as a global public resource and deliver more democratic information provision. rather, it is more about which capitalist state or which company will have the upper hand to shape the internet’s profitable sites? given the increasing transnational nature of global capitalism, to what extent will the us, eu, and china clash without destabilizing the shared project of a global capitalist economy? how and in what ways will these super economic powers collaborate to privilege transnationalas opposed to domestic capital and navigate domestic political and social interests? facing competition and political challenges, what is certain is that the us government, google and the other major us tech companies will do everything to maintain the uscentric internet industry through alliance and coercion. however, what is also certain is that the opposition from its rivals will also intensify. with new geopolitical pressure accompanying the changing power structure of transnational capitalism, the ground of the us-centric internet is cracking and will continue to shift and quake. references hong, y. (2017). networking china: the digital transformation of the chinese economy. university of illinois press. johnson, j. (2021, march 12). global market share of search engines 2010-2021. statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-ofsearch-engines/. schiller, d. (2011). geopolitical-economic conflict and network infrastructures. chinese journal of communication 1(1), 90-107. schiller, d. (2014). digital depression: information technology and economic crisis. university of illinois press. shalal, a. (2021). yellen says u.s. may decouple to some extent from china to protect security. reuters. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/yellen-says-us-maydecouple-some-extent-china-protect-security-2021-06-16/. tang, m. (2019). from “bringing-in” to “going-out”: transnationalizing china’s internet capital through state policies. chinese journal of communication 13(1), 27-46. zhao, y. (2008). communication in china: political economy, power, and conflict. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): gur-ze’ev, h. & kligler-vilenchik, n. (2022, november). “joss is (no longer?) boss”: fans’ negotiations around the “cancelling” of joss whedon. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “joss is (no longer?) boss”: fans’ negotiations around the “cancelling” of joss whedon hadas gur-ze’ev the hebrew university of jerusalem neta kligler-vilenchik the hebrew university of jerusalem the case of joss whedon, who has been subject to calls for “cancelling” in light of allegations around misconduct and abuse, is at the heart of a major cultural debate. “cancelling” refers to a withdrawal of support from someone whose values, action or speech are unacceptable (clark, 2020; ng, 2020). yet, the term “cancel culture” has quickly earned a contested status. while social justice advocates see it as a tool advancing equality and inclusion, opposers warn against its consequence in “weakening of the norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity” (clark, 2020; 88). over the past two decades, popular culture has been described as a “new front” of culture wars between liberal and conservative opposing values, with a particular focus on gender. popular culture can thus be seen as a terrain of struggle between two competing phenomena: popular feminism and popular (or networked) misogyny (banetweiser & miltner, 2016; ging & siapera, 2018; jane, 2016), both of which rely on the nature of social media for their success. examining the clash between the two trends on digital platforms, and the way they are used by participants in online discussions, we hope to better understand current cultural power struggles and the role of media audiences in protesting or advancing different agendas. the aim of this study is to explore how a fan community makes sense of “cancelling” as a cultural phenomenon and how these discussions are used in relation to broader values and ideologies. using the “cancelling” of joss whedon as a case study, this research will ask how audiences perceive, evaluate and employ this concept in their day-to-day relations to popular culture, and how it is used to defend or reject certain values. case study and method the whedon online fan community has been a key site within this broader controversy, as withdrawal of support for the prominent creator began gradually in 2017 and intensified in 2021, after several allegations of harassment and abuse have been made public. following a post on twitter revealing whedon’s anti-feminist views, chauvinistic, toxic and abusive behavior towards women around him, both fans (who shared the post) and those holding power positions in the industry (who decided to fire him from current projects) declared him “cancelled.” this case is particularly enlightening given the fact that whedon was celebrated for advancing feminist agendas in popular culture, with his high-esteemed feminist woks, revolutionary strong female superheroes, as well as his own self-declaration as a ‘malefeminist’ and promoting feminist movements. fans’ loyalty to whedon was upended in the context of his “cancellation,” and makes an interesting case for a role model of popular feminism that has been exposed in failing to fit this category. the study will examine how fans perceive the allegations, how they see the status of creators and their contents in light of them, and how they navigate the ambivalences inherent in “cancelling” a previously-valued creator. in order to understand how whedon fans perceive “cancelling” as a tool to promote feminist ideals, and the perceived effect this practice has on the ambivalent relationship between creators, cultural products and audiences, we will conduct 20 in-depth interviews with whedon fans and former fans, sampled from the fan community on twitter. in the absence of a dedicated platform for a global fan community, we searched for active participants on twitter, that were involved in the debate around the allegations. using data scraping tools (tags) and the twitter search engine, the categories for inclusion were: a) users following whedon’s personal account (@joss) or buffy the vampire slayer official (@buffytvs). b) users that responded to the allegations posted by charisma carpenter’s account (@allcharisma) from february 2021 or to whedon’s response to the allegations from january 2022. from this list, interviewees were contacted by direct messages on twitter, and agreed to participate in a 45-90 minute interview on zoom. through an in-depth qualitative analysis, we will try to understand how fans view whedon and his works in light of the recent allegations. interviewees will not be asked directly about “cancelling” or “cancel culture” as a term; instead, we will search for their own definitions and understandings of this practice. preliminary findings and discussion our preliminary findings indicate that “cancel culture” is indeed seen as a controversial concept among many. while some interviewees perceive its role as a tool for the marginalized to reveal injustice, many carefully separate between their personal choices and “cancelling” as a broader trend. we can identify three aspects in which the participants expressed their attitude to the phenomenon: (a) cultural trends; (b) complex fan identities; (c) ideological polarization. a. cultural trends “cancelling” is applied as an individual, economic tool of protest. participants were usually careful in separating between a personal decision in boycotting a problematic figure (choosing to withdraw financial support for future projects), and the consequences of this action. many of them explicitly objected to the concept of “cancel culture” and broader institutionalized sanctions, referred to by one interviewer as an “unwanted side effect”. interestingly, the marketability of feminist/inclusive trends in popular culture continues along similar lines, when threats are met by similar means— preventing the distribution. b. negotiating complex fan identities many of the participants described a linkage between their own fan identity, perceptions, and (mostly, feminist) ideals, and the objects of fandom. this allowed them to separate between the creator and creation, and so to keep the valued fan objects while rejecting whedon as a person. many expressed an almost automatic identification with the offended, which could be connected to their own position as fans. one interviewee provided an interesting justification for “abandoning” whedon, explaining that the fictional characters would probably side up with her against this “oppressor”. c. ideological polarization and the role of social media the previous aspects were described in a broader context of the digital age, where gender discourse is becoming increasingly dominant at the fallout of #metoo and other gender equality protests. in numerous cases, participants described the ability of digital platforms to amplify individual voices, and to strengthen polarized opinions. along the intersection of popular culture and social media, this case can be seen as a key example of the gendered “culture war.” examining these findings in the context of two key processes – technological change and increasing use of digital participatory platforms, as well as feminist trends and increased possibilities for online activism – helps us consider “cancelling” as a politicalideological tool and the ways in which popular culture serves as a key arena in today’s “culture wars.” references banet-weiser, s., & miltner, k. (2016). #masculinitysofragile: culture, structure, and networked misogyny. feminist media studies, 16(1), 171-174. clark, m. (2020). drag them: a brief etymology of so-called “cancel culture”. communication and the public, 5(3-4), 88-92. ging, d., & siapera, e. (2018). special issue on online misogyny. feminist media studies, 18(4), 515-524. jane, e. (2016). online misogyny and feminist digilantism. continuum, 30(3), 284297. ng, e. (2020). no grand pronouncements here..: reflections on cancel culture and digital media participation. television and new media, 21(6), 621-627. microsoft word gosse-not far enough-not far enough.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): gosse, c., hodson, j.,veletsianos, g., (2021, october). not far enough: how workplace harassment policies fail to protect scholars from online abuse. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. not far enough: how workplace harassment policies fail to protect scholars from online abuse chandell gosse royal roads university jaigris hodson royal roads university george veletsianos royal roads university introduction over the last decade, online spaces and digital tools have become a central part of scholarly work and research mobilization (carrigan, 2016). email and learning management systems have been deeply embedded in academic labor for some time, with other tools like twitter and now zoom becoming everyday addons used to complete and promote scholarly work (stewart, 2016). however, the integration and reliance on these technologies into scholars’ work lives have heightened their online visibility, which has opened the door to new experiences of online abuse, such as zoom-bombing, doxing, and inappropriate and violent comments (burnett, 2020; elmer, glyn burton, & neville, 2020; frangou, 2019). scholars have pointed to the detrimental effect online abuse has on their work, noting that it negatively impacts their research, teaching, and their personal and professional relationships (authors, 2021a). scholars also report being left to deal with the consequences of online abuse primarily on their own, with little support from their institution (authors, 2018b). objective given the importance of online spaces/tools in scholars' lives and the detrimental impacts of harassment noted above, colleges and universities must recognize the risks associated with online visibility and have policies in place that address those risks. in this paper, we analyze 41 workplace policies that deal with harassment and discrimination from canadian universities and colleges to understand what these institutions propose to do about online abuse. how institutions propose to protect and support scholars from online abuse provides insight into how they conceive of the issue: namely, it reveals what they think is problematic and needs to change (bacchi, 2012). as such, this paper asks: do university and college harassment policies address online abuse? if so, in what context is online abuse discussed? and how well-positioned are these policies at supporting or protecting scholars from online abuse? to answer these questions, we use bacchi’s (2012) ‘what’s the problem represented to be?’ (wpr) approach. this approach encourages examination of the assumptions and conceptual logics within the framing of a problem to understand implicit problem representations. methodology we searched the public websites of 232 universities and colleges across canada for workplace harassment policies and identified policies at 129 (56%) institutions. using a text search for the terms “online, virtual, cyber, e-/email, social, media, electronic, and digital,” we found that only 41 (32%) of the 129 institutions acknowledged online abuse in their policies. using nvivo 12 we coded the 41 policies’ purpose, scope, procedures, and all mentions of online abuse to identify how university and college community members might be protected from online abuse within the context of their institution’s policy. overall, we found that the policies did not align with what scholars who have experienced online abuse report needing to feel supported by their institutions (authors, 2018a; 2018b). preliminary findings early analysis identified two problems common across the 41 policies that limit their ability to offer protection and/or support in many cases of online abuse: the first limitation focuses on who the policies apply to, and the second on where the policies apply. first limitation: to whom the policies apply the main objective of all policies is to protect members of the university community from harassment from other members of the same institution. while this stipulation is reasonable in the context of a college or university, it precludes perpetrators of online abuse and harassment that are unknown, anonymous, or unrelated to the institutional community. this focus poses serious problems because the online abuse and harassment that academics receive often involve people outside of or unknown to the university community (burnett, 2020). second limitation: where the policies apply policies often define their scope in relation to university spaces. in the policies we examined, the ones that define their scope in relation to place typically limit abuse to places such as sanctioned university events, events related to work and study, or any other place needed to fulfill duties to the institution. this provision ignores the fact that scholars’ online abuse and harassment is not always formally tied to institutional places (authors, 2021a). examples include harassment arising from media appearances or receiving abusive and harassing messages on scholars’ social media accounts. discussion defining harassment policies in terms of university personnel or spaces excludes acts of online abuse that occur outside of institutionally sanctioned platforms (e.g., social media), outside formally recognized academic labor (e.g., appearing on podcasts, tv, or radio), and by individuals who are not members of the institutions’ community. these limitations mean that scholars are left unprotected by their institutions when they experience online abuse. the need to have institutions step in and offer support and protection against online abuse grows more complex and dire when placed into the current professional and sociopolitical climate. for example, institutions place increasing emphasis on engaging with broader audiences and mobilizing one’s work beyond the academy (barlow & awan, 2016). increasingly, this work is tied to hiring and funding decisions, and social media, op-eds, blogs, and podcasts are effective ways to do this work. the emphasis on engaging with broader and more diverse audiences comes at a time when there are coordinated efforts to undermine and “expose” liberal agendas on university campuses, effectively disciplining, surveilling, and silencing researchers online (massanari, 2018). the professional and socio-political conditions, in combination with the personal adverse effects online abuse has on scholars’ work, health, and well-being require investment in policies that reflect a changing digital landscape. this may involve a focus on process or procedure over policy conditions, and thus provide flexibility for the kinds of abuse and harassment scholars experience in an increasingly digital professional and social environment. future work this project is in the early stage of analysis. the next stages include a deeper analysis of the policies as well as interviews with university administrators (e.g., deans and vice president academics/research) to understand how their institution is prepared to respond to the rising threat of online abuse. together, these two projects will result in concrete steps to better strengthen institutional responses and provide support and protection that align with the realities of academic labor and online spaces. references authors (2021a). authors (2021b). authors (2018a). authors (2018b). bacchi, c. (2012). introducing the ‘what’s the problem represented to be?’ approach. in a. bletas & c. beasley (eds.) engaging with bacchi. adelaide: university of adelaide press. barlow, c., and awan, i. (2016) ‘you need to be sorted out with a knife’: the attempted online silencing of women and people of muslim faith within academia. social media + society, 2(4), 1-11. http://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116678896 burnett, l.d. (2020, october). right-wing trolls attacked me. my administration buckled. the chronicle of higher education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/right-wing-trollsattacked-me-my-administration-buckled carrigan, m. (2016). social media for academics. london: sage elmer, g., glyn burton, a., neville, s. (2020, june). zoom-bombings disrupt online events with racist and misogynist attacks. the conversation. https://theconversation.com/zoom-bombings-disrupt-online-events-with-racist-andmisogynist-attacks-138389 frangou, c. (2019, october). the growing problem of online harassment in academe. university affairs. https://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/the-growingproblem-of-online-harassment-in-academe/ massanari, adrienne l. (2018). rethinking research ethics, power, and the risk of vulnerability in the era of the “alt-right” gaze. social media + society, 4(2), 1-9. doi: 10.1177/2056305118768302 stewart, bonnie. (2016). collapsed publics: orality, literacy, and vulnerability in academic twitter. journal of applied social theory, 1(1), 61-86. microsoft word baack-taking interdependencies seriously-taking interdependencies seriously.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): baack, s., ferrer-conill, r., cheruiyot, d. (2021, october). taking interdependencies seriously: the case of mozilla’s entanglements with journalism. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. taking interdependencies seriously: the case of mozilla’s entanglements with journalism stefan baack mozilla foundation & weizenbaum institute raul ferrer-conill karlstad university & university of stavanger david cheruiyot university of groningen introduction the idea that journalism exists as a more or less autonomous professional field that is changing because it is increasingly becoming permeable towards ‘outsiders’ is widespread in journalism studies (örnebring and karlsson 2020). this can be illustrated by the numerous conceptual frameworks developed to describe the relationship between journalists and ‘others’, like ‘interlopers’ (eldridge ii 2019) or ‘intralopers’ (holton and belair-gagnon 2018). researching how digital journalism is changing due to the influence of online non-journalistic actors is important, but doing so exclusively (or primarily) takes a reductionist view of the much more complex interdependencies between journalism and other actors. when it comes to journalism’s influence on others, we typically think of audience research or the dynamics between journalistic reporting and political actors or pr. to understand journalism’s role in society, we argue that we should broadly ask how journalistic practices and related imaginaries about journalism influence all kinds of actors that make up today's digital news ecology. to illustrate the value of this approach, we explore how imaginaries about journalism influence the practices and identity of mozilla, an organization best known for the development of the web browser firefox. mozilla is currently in a phase where possible collaborations with, or support of journalism is actively explored. we argue that this exploration is shaped by how mozilla imagines journalism, making it an interesting case study for our purpose. study rationale theoretically, we combine two conceptual frameworks. first, we follow the nonfunctionalist and process-oriented figurational approach outlined by couldry and hepp (2017). figurations describe relations of interdependence based on interlocking practices and shared meanings between disparate actors. second, we adopt an institutional logics approach (thornton, ocasio, and lounsbury, 2012) to investigate the connections between individual agency, cognitive processes, and socially constructed institutional practices and power structures as guiding logics of journalism and peripheral online organizations. we thus consider mozilla’s interrelatedness with journalism as fluctuating and continuously changing over time. our aim is to show that interdependencies between journalism and mozilla emerge around practices and are guided by their individual institutional logics. inspired by yin (2018), we used a qualitative case study approach relying on a wide range of sources (in-depth interviews, self-identifying documents, blog posts and project homepages). the interviews were conducted online and lasted between 30 minutes and one hour.1 interviewees were selected based on their role in mozilla projects with clear connections to journalism. our questions focused on exploring the relevance of the project for mozilla, whether there were direct collaborations with journalists, and how particular imaginaries about journalism shaped the project. mozilla and journalism: exploring new ways to finance online content an important step in mozilla’s relationship with journalism is the recent update of the socalled ‘mozilla manifesto’ (mozilla n.d.), a document outlining the values and goals of the organization. while the original manifesto mostly adapted values from open source culture, it was expanded with an emphasis on the “quality of people’s experiences online” in 2018, which included a commitment to diversity, “civil discourse”, “reasoned argument”, and “verifiable facts” (baker 2018). there are clear connections between these values and typical associations with traditional western notions of journalism as a provider of objective facts that facilitates political deliberation (cf. hanitzsch and vos 2018). the changes to the manifesto created the basis for the idea that supporting organizations whose practices and values are compatible with the manifesto and supporting mozilla’s own mission overlaps. this has created pathways for new connections to journalism. one example is mozilla’s efforts to develop and support alternatives to advertising as the dominant business model for online content. supporting alternatives to ad-driven business models is interesting for mozilla because problems central to its own mission are seen as negative side-effects of online advertisement: privacy-invasive surveillance, misinformation or discriminatory algorithms. as one of our interviewees put it: advertising is “dominating how we experience the web. it’s dominating even how content shows up on the web [...] there are lots of harms that have evolved”. journalists are perceived as potential partners in these endeavors. according to our interviewees, news publishers would be interested in lowering their dependencies on targeted ads and thus are open to experimentation. 1 at the time of writing, two interviews had been conducted. we aim for up to ten interviews. an example for such an experiment is mozilla’s collaboration with scroll2. scroll is a usbased service where users pay a monthly subscription to browse partner websites from scroll’s network (like the verge or the atlantic) without advertisements. partner websites are rewarded based on the time users spent on them. mozilla collaborated with scroll by offering a browser extension for firefox that further reduced advertisements on partner websites and blocked trackers. the project enabled mozilla to support a service that helped scroll’s partners, which are considered to provide ‘manifesto-compatible’, fact-oriented journalism. moreover, it allows mozilla to support a revenue model that rewards time spent on websites, thereby supporting a different logic to finance journalistic content online. this brief example illustrates how supporting journalism is considered aligning with mozilla’s mission because journalists are considered supporting the values outlined in the mozilla manifesto (like fighting disinformation). supporting this idea of journalism by lowering news media’s dependency on ad-driven business models in turn shapes mozilla’s own identity, as it is a way to differentiate itself from big tech companies that thrive on the dependency on targeted ads (like google or facebook), enabling mozilla to act as an alternative partner to journalists. conclusion these preliminary findings suggest that studying how particular imaginaries about digital journalism influence non-journalists can help illuminate journalism’s role in today's digital news ecology beyond its ‘democratic function’ (zelizer 2012). importantly, they show sources of journalistic stability rather than change. in our case study, mozilla is pushing journalism in a direction that supports its values, which suggest a fairly traditional idea of journalism. findings like these can help develop a more nuanced understanding of the digital transformation as a process that both challenges and reinforces ‘traditional’ practices and identities. references baker, mitchell. 2018. ‘mozilla marks 20th anniversary with commitment to better human experiences online’. the mozilla blog. retrieved 25 august 2019 (https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/03/29/mozilla-marks-20th-anniversarycommitment-better-human-experiences-online). couldry, nick, and andreas hepp. 2017. the mediated construction of reality. cambridge, uk ; malden, ma: polity press. eldridge ii, scott a. 2019. “where do we draw the line? interlopers, (ant)agonists, and an unbounded journalistic field.” 2019 7(4):11. doi: 10.17645/mac.v7i4.2295. hanitzsch, thomas, and tim p. vos. 2018. ‘journalism beyond democracy: a new 2 https://web.archive.org/web/20210402081644/https://firstlook.firefox.com/betterweb/. look into journalistic roles in political and everyday life’. journalism 19(2):146– 64. doi: 10.1177/1464884916673386. holton, avery e., and valerie belair-gagnon. 2018. ‘strangers to the game? interlopers, intralopers, and shifting news production’. media and communication 6(4):70–78. doi: 10.17645/mac.v6i4.1490. mozilla. n.d. ‘the mozilla manifesto’. retrieved 22 august 2019 (https://www.mozilla.org/en-us/about/manifesto/). örnebring, henrik, and karlsson, michael. 2020. journalistic autonomy. oxford research encyclopedia of communication. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.829 thornton, patricia h., william ocasio, and michael lounsbury. 2012. the institutional logics perspective: a new approach to culture, structure, and process. oxford, uk: oxford university press. yin, robert. 2018. case study research and applications: design and methods. newbury park, ca: sage publications inc. zelizer, barbie. 2012. ‘on the shelf life of democracy in journalism scholarship’. journalism 14(4):459–73. doi: 10.1177/1464884912464179. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): annabell, t. (2022, november). cost of remembering: gendered experiences of engaging with ‘memories’ on social media platforms. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. cost of remembering: gendered experiences of engaging with ‘memories’ on social media platforms taylor annabell king’s college london instagram and facebook assert through their memory products that certain previously shared digital traces are ‘memories’. the use of the term ‘memories’ like the algorithmic resurfacing platform infrastructure is not neutral but puts forward a particular understanding of what memories are. unlike memory studies scholars who argue there is a distinction between the representation of the past in mediated texts and processes of remembering, the platform collapses representation with remembrance. jacobsen and beer (2021) identify that a pre-existing classificatory framework of what is memorable is core to this algorithmic resurfacing. the ontological promotion of certain content as ‘memories’ relies on ranking data that falls within the taxonomy of memory to determine the meaningfulness of memories for the user. while this has been situated within facebook’s wider economic strategy to foster greater levels of intimacy with the platform (prey & smit, 2019) and infrastructural logic of attention (jacobsen & beer, 2021), i propose algorithmic memory products can be situated within the dynamic of data colonialism. data colonialism refers to the “capture and control of human life itself through appropriating the data that can be extracted from it for profit” (couldry & mejias, 2020, p. xi). memory becomes another layer of human experience that is subjected to datafication for capitalist gain. the development of facebook’s memory product relies on mining user data to develop a taxonomy of memory themes, which has been integrated into the on this day algorithm. facebook’s artificial intelligence, visual recognition engine and sentiment analysis contribute to the personalisation of the memory product for users and more generally, are part of ongoing extractive processes of data collection and processing. the reconfiguration of memory and articulations of ‘memories’ is part of how “capitalism extends its capacity to exploit life” (couldry and mejias, 2020: xvii). following couldry and mejias (2020), i ask what the cost for individuals, groups and societies is that our data is selectively repackaged as ‘memories’ through extractive, commercial processes, and how might identity shape these experiences. i focus on how turning human experiences and memories into data and extracting profit from the mobilisation of ‘memories’ intersects with gendered pressures. this follows work in feminist memory studies in which gender is taken seriously as a structural framework that shapes the construction of memories (keightley, 2011; reading, 2016). yet, with the exceptions of reading (2016) and chidgey (2018), digital memory studies have overlooked gendered identities and the “mnemonic conditions of a postfeminist regime” (chidgey, 2018: 20). postfeminism is a sensibility characterised by distinctive, interconnected themes and features, which shape subjectivity and the articulation of gender. of relevance to this paper is how postfeminism operates through affective and psychic registers that implicate young women in particular (dobson, 2015; gill & kanai, 2018; kanai, 2019). specifically, confidence, resilience and a positive mental attitude are the ‘right’ types of dispositions to display (gill, 2017). i explore connections between data colonialism and postfeminism sensibility through the performance of digital memory work of young women. i draw on semi-structured interviews using the scroll back method, ethnographic observations of their instagram and facebook profiles for 6 months and focus group discussions to present three themes. first, i propose young women are interpellated into happy remembering. a clear logic is presented by participants when they describe typical interactions with memory products. when participants view what is resurfaced, they expect the digital trace to act as a vehicle for remembering and assume this will elicit a positive emotional response. the interplay of affordances and cultural practices means that the cost of remembering is at the expense of feeling or making visible other emotional responses both within interview contexts and the reshared digital traces on platforms. i argue young women are not only implicated as users of the platform to perform happy remembering, as part of the broader emotional architecture of positivity (wahl-jorgensen, 2018) but as postfeminist subjects. memories become another cultural sphere in which young women enact postfeminist subjectivity displaying the ‘right feelings’ (kanai, 2019). the way feelings are structured by the platform fosters an affective environment in which happiness is pre-empted by both platforms and participants as the ‘right feeling’. the second intersection between the mobilisation of memories within commercial platforms and postfeminist sensibility concerns expressions of gratitude to platforms. participants positioned platforms as spaces for preserving and keeping memories beyond the ‘memories’ feature. the use of storage metaphors conveys feelings of trust; the platform will safeguard, protect and preserve ‘memories’ on behalf of the individual, which is connected to assumptions regarding security, stability and longevity. while expressions of gratitude reveal the non-commercial value of the platform as a memory agent in facilitating connectivity as well as memory work, the exploitation of this mnemonic value for commercial gain reveals uneven relationships. thirdly, i suggest the social media logic of metrics and evaluation embedded within the algorithmic resurfacing of ‘memories’ influences both resharing of ‘memories’ and sharing in-the-moment more broadly. for some, there was a collective quantified assessment of what constitutes ‘memories’ while others mobilized ‘sharing for memories’ as a justification opposing ‘sharing for likes’ culture. i argue quantification of memories and reliance on measuring value shape and mediate how participants approach sharing on platforms and the circulating discourses that young women navigate. the tension speaks to how facebook’s infrastructure is built on a history of social comparison and ranking of female bodies, beginning with facemash. bringing together data colonialism, digital memory work and postfeminism have the potential to illuminate how engagements with memories on platforms are shaped by cultural, economic and personal systems of value and how encounters with memories on platforms and conceptualisations of memories are tied to gendered subjectivities. navigating gendered pressures and performing normative femininity are part of the cost of engaging with memories for young women. references chidgey, r. (2018). feminist afterlives: assemblage memory in activist times. palgrave macmillan. couldry, n., & mejias, u. a. (2020). the costs of connection: how data is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism. stanford university press. dobson, a. (2015). postfeminist digital cultures: femininity, social media, and selfrepresentation. palgrave macmillan. gill, r. (2017). the affective, cultural and psychic life of postfeminism: a postfeminist sensibility 10 years on. european journal of cultural studies, 20(6), 606–626. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549417733003 gill, r., & kanai, a. (2018). mediating neoliberal capitalism: affect, subjectivity and inequality. journal of communication, 68(2), 318–326. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqy002 jacobsen, b., & beer, d. (2021). social media and the automatic production of memory: classification, ranking and the sorting of the past. policy press. kanai, a. (2019). gender and relatability in digital culture: managing affect, intimacy and value. palgrave macmillan. keightley, e. (2011). from dynasty to songs of praise: television as cultural resource for gendered remembering. european journal of cultural studies, 14(4), 395–410. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549411404618 prey, r., & smit, r. (2019). from personal to personalized memory: social media as mnemotechnology. in z. papacharissi (ed.), a networked self and birth, life, death (pp. 209–223). routledge. reading, a. (2016). gender and memory in the globital age. palgrave macmillan. wahl-jorgensen, k. (2018). the emotional architecture of social media. in z. papacharissi (ed.), a networked self and platforms, stories, connections (pp. 77–93). routledge. microsoft word evans-the anatomy of digital clout-the anatomy of digital clout.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 evans, j.m. (2021, october). the anatomy of digital clout(chasing): black aesthetics, online visibility and relational labor among diy hip-hop musicians on chicago’s south side. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the anatomy of digital clout(chasing): visibility and relational labor among diy hip-hop musicians on chicago’s south side jabari m. evans, msw phd university of south carolina background and introduction social media, streaming services and e-commerce platforms have drastically changed the artistic labor practices of musical artists as they now must move between and within platforms to self-promote themselves to professionalize and sustain their careers (haynes & marshall, 2018). social media support the strength of fan communities by providing launching pads for these burgeoning artists to speak directly to fans of their music, build personal relationships with them and let them share in their creative process (baym, 2012). these relationships can go beyond simple “friending” to direct messaging and holding live chats that lead to other kinds of interpersonal contact. a rapidly professionalizing and monetizing wave of diverse, multicultural, previously amateur musicians from around the world have harnessed these platforms to incubate their own media brands, engage in content innovation, and cultivate often massive, transnational, and cross-cultural fan communities (baym, 2018). much research on various forms of influencers on social media has focused on self-curation (abidin, 2014; marwick, 2015; wissinger, 2015), follower-engagement (abidin, 2015), authenticity (hopkins and thomas, 2011) and advertorial disclosure (ots and abidin, 2015), as well as ordinary users as ‘promotional apparatus’ for brands (carah and shaul, 2016) and as participants in electronic word of mouth (erkan, 2015). all of these factors have provided a unique and precarious opportunity to emerging hiphop artists, who often are seeking to find a wider audience often while nestled in communities of digital disadvantage (watkins, 2019). in being a hip-hop musician, representing one’s place authentically while connecting to the wider culture is an essential yet complicated task (forman, 2002). however, now with the “always on” nature of impression management on social media (duffy, 2017), hip-hop musicians are now routinely tasked with keeping constant connection between multiple platforms to affirm their authenticity and promote their craft to an audience of global hip-hop fans who are inundated with content (stuart, 2020). even still, having levels of audience engagement through social media has become the new measure of success for music artists, as talent scouts and record label executives now use these metrics as a way to identify the next stars. against this backdrop, this article empirically examines social media strategy from the perspective of successful do-it-yourself (diy) hip-hop artists. drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and several interviews with prominent members of chicago’s hip-hop scene, this study examines the role of social media as an economic resource in their artistic labor. bridging traditional theories of urban sociology with emerging new media scholarship, i argue that the hip-hop artists use subcultural capital through savvy engagement with social media to amass a type of urban cultural influence, which they deem clout. for purposes of this article, i re-define the term as digital clout since clout was a term that was heavily used by our interviewees to refer to the way they measured their influence on social media according to counts of likes, views, re-posts and followers. as hip-hop's origins are from america's low-income urban communities of color (perry, 2004) clout is pursued as aspirational labor (duffy, 2017) with the hopes of gaining fame and financial rewards. given this context, i suggest that digital clout is driven by visibility labor (abidin, 2016) that claims authentic blackness through scripts of toughness, sexual prowess and conspicuous consumption of luxury goods. i also argue that black youth use hip-hop music to harness the power of clout to articulate a sense of place and a resistance to that place’s public reputation on their own terms and in their own words. ultimately, this clout allowed them to compete, collaborate, connect within the larger hip-hop community of cultural producers and build a creative economy for their micro-celebrity. through constant engagement on social media this clout can be used to sell podcasts, blogs, merchandise, books and fashion. this type of clout also can garner influencer work for corporate brands. i initially focus on hip-hop's penchant for corralling friend-anchored social media campaigns, wherein self-promotional posts published simultaneously across and within platforms by an artist’s support group manipulated algorithmic recommender systems and amplified the circulation for an artist’s content. next, i focus on co-signs and how gaining visibility among industry tastemakers in hip-hop has transformed but remains vital through social media. finally, i speak about the practice of capping, and the aspirational labor of exaggerating one’s social position to project street authenticity and material wealth to an online audience. ultimately, i argue that these practices collectively suggest that hip-hop artists deploy a style of self-presentation in their artistic labor that requires novel impression management skills through the simultaneous navigation of poverty and violent risk from many of its participants. to conclude, i discuss the implications of these arguments for understanding how social, familial, economic, cultural, political factors shape youth digital participation and diverse forms of online affiliation and participation. references abidin, c. (2015). communicative intimacies: influencers and perceived interconnectedness. ada, 8, 1-16. abidin, c. (2016a). visibility labour: engaging with influencers’ fashion brands and# ootd advertorial campaigns on instagram. media international australia, 161(1), 86100. abidin, c. (2016b). please subscribe!: influencers, social media, and the commodification of everyday life (doctoral dissertation, university of western australia). abidin, c., & ots, m. (2016). influencers tell all. unravelling authenticity and credibility in a brand scandal, 153-161. baym, n. k. (2012). fans or friends?: seeing social media audiences as musicians do. participations, 9(2), 286-316. baym, n. k. (2018). playing to the crowd: musicians, audiences, and the intimate work of connection (vol. 14). nyu press. carah, n., & shaul, m. (2016). brands and instagram: point, tap, swipe, glance. mobile media & communication, 4(1), 69-84. duffy, b. e. (2017). (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. yale university press. erkan, i. (2015). electronic word of mouth on instagram: customers’ engagements with brands in different sectors. international journal of management, accounting and economics, 2(12), 1435-1444. forman, m. (2002). the'hood comes first: race, space, and place in rap and hip-hop. wesleyan university press. haynes, j., & marshall, l. (2018). beats and tweets: social media in the careers of independent musicians. new media & society, 20(5), 1973-1993. marwick, a. e. (2015). instafame: luxury selfies in the attention economy. public culture, 27(1 (75)), 137-160. perry, i. (2004). prophets of the hood: politics and poetics in hip hop. duke university press. stuart, f. (2020). ballad of the bullet: gangs, drill music, and the power of online infamy. princeton university press. watkins, c. s. (2019). don't knock the hustle: young creatives, tech ingenuity, and the making of a new innovation economy. beacon press. wissinger, e. (2015). this year's model: fashion, media, and the making of glamour. nyu press. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): gagnon, j. (2021, october). no cloud without sky: spectrum sovereignty and ethereal refusal. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. no cloud without sky: spectrum sovereignty and ethereal refusal author #1 jeff gagnon author #1 university of toronto abstract recently, the expression of numerous concerns has tempered early enthusiasm for digitally-enabled activism which has lead sylvia federici to caution against a view that “digital technologies are conveyor belts of global revolution” (federici 2019, p. 193). these technologies are not inherently emancipatory or even politically agnostic, but are inseparable from the physical, social, and economic infrastructures and disciplinary regimes that produce them. within anticolonial contexts, communications technologies are always haunted by dependence on ongoing territorial dispossession, resource exploitation and treaty violations. in the wake of idle no more, leanne betasamosake simpson has expressed concern that for all its successes, the movement could never fully actualize radical indigenous resurgent practices (“grounded normativity”) because of the internet’s inherent functioning as a reinforcement and amplification of settler colonial relations (simpson 2017). moreover, simpson argues that grounded normativity, being a placebased practice, and decolonialism more generally, being about land and territory, are irreconcilable with the ethereal “landlessness” of cyberspace. this conceptual disconnection of the internet from land and territory therefore renders it unsustainable as a site for indigenous resistant practices and decolonial mobilizations. while valuable movements in support of indigenous data sovereignty (brown & nicholas 2012; kukutai & taylor 2016), digital equity and network access (toth, smith & giroux 2018; mnzm 2019) have proliferated in recent years, these movements only address the symptoms of settler colonialism, these approaches do not or cannot address the material and territorial factors at play in the internet’s relationship to settler colonialism. digitally-enabled activism has a space problem: etherealist understandings of cyberspace allow settler colonial spatial supremacies to evade transformative decolonial liberatory practices. colonialism is a question of land and territory, land and territory upon which communications networks depend for raw materials and through which they move. these spatial configurations and their concomitant socio-economic relations become the unseen and uncritiqued ground upon which digitally mobilized movements are dependent. decolonization, in this context, remains metaphorical (tuck & yang 2012) rather than being a material refusal of territorial dispossession. no cloud without sky is a new postdoctoral project that considers spectrum sovereignty (the application of indigenous title to radio and broadband networks) as a response to the spatial problem articulated above. this paper introduces the project, its theoretical frameworks, ethical standpoint, research questions, and preliminary findings. this overview is a preliminary step toward a multiyear, international (canada, usa, new zealand, australia) survey and case-study based project that aims to convene a space for the advancement of decolonized internet and communications networks predicated on the production of relational knowledges and the promotion of international solidarities. centering the materiality of cyberspace necessarily reveals the relationships between the internet and settler colonialism. such an acknowledgement is foundational to a decolonialist ethical point of view from which i argue for an understanding of space as relational practice, as resource, and as source of identity. a decolonized cyberspace that promotes the independence of colonized peoples is one that is subject to indigenous spatial practices including territorial claims and treaty rights and so is one that is recognized as existing within space in a material way. as chief ovide mercredi has once said, such a demand is “based on the understanding that we do have some fundamental rights as indigenous people to land, water, and airspace” (cbc news 2007). my research is multi-disciplinary and combines the work of scholars and activists in critical geography, decolonial studies, internet studies, feminist theory, and indigenous resurgence. the spatial ethics articulated by henri lefebvre, doreen massey, and sylvia federici are foundational to how i understand the relationship between individuals, space, and the state. these theoretical positions reinforce arguments made by glen coulthard and leanne simpson that promote indigenous grounded normativity as a mode of place-based solidarity that supports relational politics and indigenous resurgence. inherent in such practices is the notion of “refusal,” which audra simpson proposes as a rejection of the conceptual frameworks that legitimize territorial dispossession as a fait accompli (simpson 2014). the withdrawal of consent to settler colonial narratives includes a disruption of spatial configurations that erase indigenous territory. it is against such erasure that this work brings together critical geographies of space and indigenous resurgence theories alongside the work of scholars who discuss digital sovereignty (bratton 2015; srnicek), internet ethics (zuboff 2019), and the geography of cyberspace (cohen 2007; graham 1998) in order to identify how the refusal of etherealist notions of cyberspace that privilege settler colonial spatial hierarchies is made manifest within movements for spectrum sovereignty. references bratton, benjamin h. the stack: on software and sovereignty. mit press, 2015. brown & nicholas. “protecting indigenous cultural property in the age of digital democracy.” journal of material culture, vol. 17, issue 3. september 11, 2012. cameron, aidan. "maori rights in the 4g radio spectrum: fantasy or the future of treaty claims." otago law review, vol. 13, no. 1, 2013, pp. 181-196. https://heinonline.org/hol/p?h=hein.journals/otago13&i=185&a=dxrvcm9udg8uzwr1 castells, manuel. networks of outrage and hope. polity, 2012. cbc news. “manitoba chiefs want cellphone revenue.” may 30, 2007. https://www.cbc.ca/news/manitoba-chiefs-want-cellphone-revenue-1.662690 cohen, julie e. “cyberspace as/and space.” columbia law review. 107;210. 2007, pp. 210-256. coulthard, glen sean. red skin white masks. university of minnesota press, 2008. croeser, sky. global justice and the politics of information. routledge, 2015. duarte, marisa elena. network sovereignty: building the internet across indian country. university of washington press, 2017. earl, jennifer and kimport, katrina. digitally enabled social change. mit press, 2011. everton, graeme. “a 5g network is coming and māori deserve a share.” the spinoff. nov. 8, 2018. https://thespinoff.co.nz/atea/08-11-2018/a-5g-network-is-coming-and-maori-deserve-ashare/ federici, sylvia. re-enchanting the world. kairos, 2019. fisher, mark. capitalist realism: is there no alternative? zero books, 2009. fuentes, marcela a. performance constellations: networks of protest and activism in latin america. university of michigan press, 2019. gagnon, jeff. tactical dramaturgies: media, the state, and the performance of placebased activism. phd dissertation. university of toronto, 2020. graham, stephen. “the end of geography or the explosion of place?” progress in human geography. 22, 2. 1998. pp. 165-185. han, byung-chul. psychopolitics: neoliberalism and new technologies of power. verso, 2017. hardt, michael and negri, antonio. assembly. oxford, 2017. harp, rick. “spectrum sovereignty? maori treaty rights to 4g debated in new zealand.” mediaindigena.com. june 21, 2010. https://mediaindigena.com/spectrum-sovereignty-maori-treaty-rights-to-4g-debated-innew-zealand/ joyce, zita. “radio spectrum as indigenous space.” in taylor gregory and middleton, catherine (eds.) frequencies: international spectrum policy. mcgill-queen’s university press, 2020. kukutai, tahu and taylor, john. indigenous data sovereignty: toward an agenda. australian national university, 2016. lefebvre, henri. the production of space. nicholson-smith, donald, trans. blackwell, 2012. massey, doreen. “power-geometry and a progressive sense of place.” mapping the futures: local cultures, global change. bird, jon, ed. routledge, 1993. mnzm, laurence zwimpfer. “a digital inclusion blueprint and online resilience.” collected magazine, 2019, p.32. simpson, audra. mohawk interruptus. duke university press, 2014. simpson, leanne betasamosake. as we have always done. university of minnesota press, 2017. ---. a short history of the blockade. university of alberta press, 2021. srnicek, nick. platform capitalism. polity, 2017. toth, smith, and giroux. “indigenous peoples and empowerment via technology.” first peoples child & family review. vol. 13, no. 1. 2018. sinclair, murray et. al. final report of the truth and reconciliation commission of canada. lorimer, 2015. tuck, eve & yang, k. wayne. “decolonization is not a metaphor.” decolonization, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40. waitangi tribunal. report of the waitangi tribunal on claims concerning the allocation of radio frequencies. wai 26/150, 1990. https://forms.justice.govt.nz/search/documents/wt/wt_doc_68476762/allocation%20o f%20radio%20frequencies%201990.pdf wemigwans, jennifer. a digital bundle. university of regina press, 2018. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): duan, y., hemsley, j., smith, a., ghandi, d., & gray, l. (2022, november). curating virality: exploring curated logics within #blacklivesmatter on twitter. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. curating virality: exploring curated logics within #blacklivesmatter on twitter yiran duan syracuse university jeff hemsley syracuse university alexander owen smith syracuse university dhwani ghandi syracuse university laverne gray syracuse university introduction researchers have been studying the diffusion of information on the internet more than a decade, and some of the theoretical understandings of virality could be updated with newer concepts. for example, nahon and hemsley (2013) used the concept of gatekeeping to explain how some actors have more influence over the flow of information than others. however, gatekeeping implies a focus on restricting information flows, while newer notions could better capture the nuance of modern actors' influence over diffusion of information online. to address this, we leverage the concept of social media influencers (freberg et al., 2011), people who have some influence over other social media users, along with the theory of curation logics, which posits that actors’ decision to share, or curate content is driven by the incentives they face and the social norms within which they are embedded. using both qualitative and quantitative methods, we show that different levels of influencers tend to spread different kinds of messages. from this we argue that influencers face different curation logics, which impacts what they share. we also argue that nahon and hemsley’s (2013) theory of how content goes viral could have more explanatory power with these updated concepts. this research contributes to the study of viral events on social media, the theory of curation logics and the literature around social movements. background to understand the logics around sharing viral content in such a social movement we turn to (thorson & wells, 2015, 2016)’s theory of curated flows, which describes how people select information to share into their own networks. curation decisions are based on the incentives and social norms that actors face. as such, we might expect that actors in #blacklivesmatter and #bluelivesmatter networks might face different incentives and norms. however, some people tend to have more influence over the flow of information than others (bakshy et al., 2011). research has shown a positive relationship between number of followers someone has and how often they are retweeted (hemsley, 2019; kwak et al., 2010). as such, more followers tend to equate to more influence over information diffusion. therefore, instead of nahon and hemsley’s (2013) “typical”, “medium” and “high” level gatekeepers, we think curation behaviors may differ at more granular levels, pointing to a more nuanced view of the curation logics faced by influencers at different levels. similar to some other studies (hemsley, 2019; jackson, 2020), we break down the levels of influencers in our study based on their follower numbers. table 1 summarizes the different levels of influencers. specifically, our research questions are: rq1: do different levels of influencers curate different types of information about #blacklivesmatter on twitter? rq2: are there differences in message type and influencer curation for #blacklivesmatter, #bluelivesmatter, and #alllivesmatter? methods we used supervised machine learning to analyze tweets during the week before and after derek chauvin’s trial: april 13, 2021, to april 27, 2021. during this time twitter had 2,634,951 tweets matching the terms blacklivesmatter, bluelivesmatter, and alllivesmatter. of these, 1,586,376 are retweets (60.21%). using qualitative coding techniques (elliott, 2018), we first coded 200 tweets together and developed 6 categories: support, opposition, disruption, informative, reframing, and not relevant. we then coded another 1100 tweets separately and the intercoder reliability was higher than 75%. we used the 1300 tweets as a “gold label” data set to train machine learning models (géron, 2019). an initial run using the gradient boosting classifier with default parameters achieved the highest accuracy at 63%, but we plan to further improve the models using hyperparameter tuning and adding significantly more data to the gold labeled dataset. we then ran the models on all the retweets. table 1. the influencer levels defined in this study results we used fisher’s exact test to answer rq1, and we find that different levels of influencers do tend to curate, or retweet, different message categories (p-value < 0.0005). as can be seen in figure 1, within #blacklivesmatter data, mega-level influencers tended to post relatively more informative and fewer disruption tweets, whereas those in the middle-level tended to post relatively more disruption tweets. in general, except for mega-level influencers, reframing messages were curated more frequently than informative. tiny and small-level influencers tended to be more similar and tended to current the highest rates of support messages. these small and tiny level influencers are the largest groups and so probably face the widest range of norms and incentives, therefore it makes sense that they cover a wide range of content. with respect to rq2, we do see differences in message types and influencer curations. for example, support was the most frequently curated within #blacklivesmatter and #alllivesmatter, while for #bluelivesmatter it is opposition. #bluelivesmatter has a much even distribution of message types that influencers curated, while #alllivesmatter is more similar, but not as uneven, as #blacklivesmatter. fig 1. different percentages of tweets and retweets that influencers posted across #all/black/bluelivesmatter. conclusion in this study we work to update nahon and hemsley’s (2013) conception of virality by applying the framework of curated flows (thorson & wells, 2015, 2016) to discuss the information behaviors related to the #blacklivesmatter social movement. using both qualitative and quantitative methods, we find differences in different levels of influencers curation behavior within and between #all/black/bluelivesmatter. we offer some observations about the differences in logics (incentives and norms) that they might face. in future work we intend to expand our qualitatively coded gold label dataset, which we believe will improve the performance of our models. and while space requirements limited our ability to delve more deeply into how the concept of influencers and curation logics can update the concept of virality, we intend to follow up this theoretical work. references bakshy, e., hofman, j. m., mason, w. a., & watts, d. j. (2011). everyone’s an influencer: quantifying influence on twitter. proceedings of the fourth acm international conference on web search and data mining wsdm ’11, 65. https://doi.org/10/fmzn5j elliott, v. (2018). thinking about the coding process in qualitative data analysis. the qualitative report, 23(11), 2850–2861. freberg, k., graham, k., mcgaughey, k., & freberg, l. a. (2011). who are the social media influencers? a study of public perceptions of personality. public relations review, 37(1), 90–92. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2010.11.001 géron, a. (2019). hands-on machine learning with scikit-learn, keras, and tensorflow: concepts, tools, and techniques to build intelligent systems. o’reilly media, inc. hemsley, j. (2019). followers retweet! the influence of middle-level gatekeepers on the spread of political information on twitter. policy & internet, 11(3), 280–304. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.202 jackson, s. (2020). differentiated information flows: social media curation practices in the 2016 u.s. presidential elections. 22. kwak, h., lee, c., park, h., & moon, s. (2010). what is twitter, a social network or a news media? proceedings of the 19th international conference on world wide web, 591–600. https://doi.org/10.1145/1772690.1772751 nahon, k., & hemsley, j. (2013). going viral. polity press cambridge. thorson, k., & wells, c. (2015). how gatekeeping still matters: understanding media effects in an era of curated flows (pp. 25–44). thorson, k., & wells, c. (2016). curated flows: a framework for mapping media exposure in the digital age: curated flows. communication theory, 26(3), 309–328. https://doi.org/10/f878cg room for improvement in the video conferencing (space) verify to continue to continue, please confirm that you're a human (and not a spambot). checking if the site connection is secure vimeo.com needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): mccosker, anthony. (2022, november). moderating mental health: are automated systems too risk averse? paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. moderating mental health: are automated systems too risk averse? anthony mccosker swinburne university of technology, melbourne, australia introduction across commercial social media platforms and dedicated support forums alike, mental health content raises important questions about what constitutes risk and harm online and how to moderate it. mental ill-health is treated by most social media moderation systems as ‘borderline’ or problematic content, with access and posts often restricted to reduce assumed secondary harms (mccosker & gerrard, 2021). this paper explores how automated and human moderation practices can be re-configured to accommodate resilient behaviours and social support. drawing on work with three australian mental health organisations that provide successful discussion and support forums, i identify human and machine moderation practices that can help to re-think how mental health content is managed. the work aims to improve safety and resilience in these spaces, drawing insights from successful practices to inform the treatment of mental health content more widely across social media. through an analysis of interviews and workshops with forum managers and moderators, i argue that platforms must incorporate strengths-based context (resilience indicators) into their moderation systems and practices, challenging simplistic assessments of mental health content as risk and harm. background gillespie and aufderheide (2020, p2) define content moderation in relation to unacceptable content and behaviour. however, mental health content poses different challenges to misinformation or race hate speech, for example. this content is often deemed unacceptable through its capacity (whether real or imagined) to trigger others and encourage self-harm or suicidality. for instance, in her account of content moderation, gerrard poses the question of whether instagram should allow currently banned images of healed self-cutting, under the guise of supporting recovery (2022, p. 86-87). facebook and instagram have received sustained criticism for their effect particularly young women’s mental health, but this is not linked directly to content dealing with mental health, or associated aesthetics and memetics (mccosker & gerrard, 2021). i argue that insights can be drawn from those who undertake moderation of dedicated mental health support forums to address these issues on a broader scale, while improving the professionalisation of content moderation targeted at expressions of mental (ill)health. specifically, i argue for the need to better balance moderation practices (automated and human) within a framework of strengths-based indicators of resilience and a logic of care (mol, 2008). the concept of resilience used here is drawn from literature that spans both individual and community-level factors. these involve resilience generators: learning, social capital and belonging; and resilience characteristics: adaptive capacity and self-efficacy (berkes and ross, 2013). these indicators of resilience are being developed and tested through an associated project and were incorporated into discussions and interviews with forum managers and moderators (see kang et al., 2022). methods this paper focuses on qualitative research with seven forum moderators and managers from three nonprofit organisations, providing analysis of discussions, in-depth interviews, in the context of moderation policy and community guidelines. initial analysis of these interviews draws common themes focusing on interactions between automated and human moderation processes, contextual cues regarding high-level goals and guidelines for moderation, and ‘adaptive practices’ – or the points where moderators have had to realign their moderation practices in support of forum members. each work on the forum platform provided by khoros, with small teams of 24/7 moderation teams and member moderators (people with lived experience who act as volunteer moderators). these platforms seek to scale and improve their moderation practices and outcomes. each also use a bespoke automated triage system, and my analysis targets the interaction between these systems and the human moderator teams and their everyday moderation practices. adaptive moderation practices and the human-ai alignment problem forum managers and moderators refer to their overall goals explicitly in terms of resilience and see their services as offering a unique form of preventative care. drawing on common internet and social media metaphors, they refer to the forums, sometimes in direct contrast with facebook and other platforms, as a ‘safe space’ (org 1). the goal of ‘building self-efficacy’ and enabling members to ‘learn from others’ is seen as a precursor to developing ‘adaptability’ (org 2). by increasing their members’ ‘self-advocacy’, ‘their knowledge and their readiness to take a more intensive step’, moderators see forums as enablers of resilience and recovery (org 3). given these high-level goals, it was notable that moderators and managers focus their daily processes on addressing ‘risky’ content identified by the automated triage systems. as with commercial platforms, moderation practices at these organisations are layered. an automation layer built on a supervised machine learning classifier is trained to rank messages as green, amber, red or crisis depending on the urgency of attention required. however, there is evidence of moderator teams applying adaptive moderation practices, accommodating members in a more ad hoc and responsive fashion. one participant talked about the way their team’s responses to flagged content are based on training and intuition, as well as through use of a quick reference guide (org 3). the team draws on their experience, but ‘we also have a look at the reference guide in terms of how to respond, like what are we looking for, or what young people are looking for when we're responding’ (org 3). another noted that: ‘we have had to adapt with covid to allow people to use the forums as a bit of a vent space…people are frustrated, and they're allowed to be frustrated.’ (org 2). previous research has incorporated other contextual factors to help interpret and classify posts through an automated moderation system. this includes attributes from: ‘content and structure of the user history, other posts in the conversation and the interaction network’ (altszyler et al., 2018: 63). there is room to explore this contextual layer further by incorporating, for instance, resilience indicators and attributes in both the automated classifier models, and manual moderation practices. this would constitute an adaptive moderation system; one that can incorporate context, events, and other factors such as place. when ‘integrity’ and content moderation systems are trained primarily to find and restrict content designated as risky and harmful, they provide an incomplete response to mental health interaction and content. both the automated and human moderators need to weigh these risks and harms against strengths what i have referred to in this paper as resilience factors. references altszyler, e., berenstein, a. j., milne, d. n., calvo, r. a., & slezak, d. f. (2018, june). using contextual information for automatic triage of posts in a peer-support forum. in proceedings of the fifth workshop on computational linguistics and clinical psychology: from keyboard to clinic (pp. 57-68). berkes, f., and ross, h. (2013). "community resilience: toward an integrated approach." society & natural resources 26 (1):5-20. gillespie, t., and aufderheide, p. (2020). introduction: expanding the debate about content moderation: scholarly research agendas for the coming policy debates. internet policy review, 9(4), 1–29. girrard, y. (2022). what is content moderation? in d. rosen (ed.). the social media debate: unpacking the social, psychological, and cultural effects of social media. routledge, 77-95. kang, y. b., mccosker, a., kamstra, p., & farmer, j. (2022). resilience in web-based mental health communities: building a resilience dictionary with semiautomatic text analysis. jmir formative research, 6(9), e39013. mccosker, a., & gerrard, y. (2021). hashtagging depression on instagram: towards a more inclusive mental health research methodology. new media & society, 23(7), 18991919. mol, a. (2008). the logic of care: health and the problem of patient choice. routledge. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 sutherland, k. (2020, october). global perspectives of work-related impacts to digital well-being by social media professionals a pilot study. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. global perspectives of work-related impacts to digital well-being by social media professionals a pilot study karen sutherland university of the sunshine coast introduction the pervasiveness of social media has resulted in the establishment of a new career sector to manage the digital marketing, communications, public relations and advertising activities for businesses, nonprofits and high-profile individuals (mccosker, 2017). consequently, the lines between work and personal lives have blurred, when constant connection and working across time-zones can be job requirements for workers providing social media support. studies investigating digital labour, boundary management and post-fordism have explored technology’s impact on working conditions, but few have specifically examined the perspectives of social media professionals. this pilot study provides an insight into the perceptions of 15 social media professionals from six continents, to examine if current working conditions have impacted their health and well-being. literature review defined as “...the ability to look after personal health, safety, relationships and work-life balance in digital settings,” digital well-being has evolved as an area of interest in response to the increased adoption of smartphones and social media (shah & knight, 2012, p.6). digital well-being is an emerging area of examination in social media employment sectors. however, an extensive body of related research exists investigating digital labour and post-fordism resulting from technological evolution and its impacts to work-life balance, suggesting the lines between work and personal lives have not only blurred, they have dissolved (ciolfi & lockley, 2018; kneese, et al., 2014). research exploring social media professionals has focused on specific countries and geographical regions (e.g. australia and europe). results suggest social media workers experience intrusion into their personal lives, increased workload and a lack of organisational policies in place to protect their well-being (bucher, fieseler & suphan, 2013; mccosker, 2017; van zoonen et al., 2017). the current pilot study differs from previous research because it provides an initial global snapshot exploring experiences of social media professionals from six continents and a deeper analysis into current impacts, risk mitigation strategies and perceived duty-of-care relating to social media responsibilities in the workplace using the following research questions: rq1: do social media professionals perceive any requirements of their role have impacted their health and well-being? rq2: do social media professionals believe the responsibility for work-related digital well-being should rest with the employee or the employer? rq3: what measures have been implemented by social media professionals and/or their employers to promote digital well-being in the workplace? method purposive sampling was used to source participants for this study. with approval from the author’s home institution’s human research ethics committee, linkedin searches were used to identify professionals working in various social media roles from a range of countries. the aim was to source a sample that was balanced in gender and geographical spread. requests to participate were sent via linkedin’s messaging function. twenty requests were sent, five did not receive any response. fifteen people responded expressing interest in participating. the sample was comprised as follows: table 1. sample breakdown country no. of women no. of men australia 2 hong kong 1 india 2 mexico 1 south africa 1 sweden 1 united kingdom 1 united states of america 1 5 total n= 15 semi-structured interviews were used to gather data as they provide flexibility and facilitate detail-rich responses when the research is limited to specific topic areas (weerakody, 2015). furthermore, semi-structured interviews are more appropriate with a smaller sample as per this pilot study. interview responses were recorded in-person, via zoom video conferencing or by email. the method was dependent on the participant’s preference and availability due to the time difference across world regions. a grounded theory approach and inductive analysis were the most appropriate methods of data analysis in this study. data was coded in three stages using nvivo: 1. open coding, 2. axial coding and 3. selective coding to identify patterns and relationships within interview responses. preliminary results rq1 common themes highlighted by participants included the inability to disconnect from work during their personal time, feelings of stress when managing live events/campaigns, including livestreaming, and being exposed to negative comments and messages when managing online communities. rq2 the majority of respondents perceived the responsibility for digital well-being to be equally shared between employer and employee. two participants responded that the duty-of-care rests solely with the employer. rq3 three participants identified measures implemented at their workplaces to promote digital well-being. such measures included a weekly email tracking each employee’s “online” time and processes to ensure that employees were not overloaded. one participant's workplace had a technology-free “pause area” where employees could go for a break. strategies implemented by participants to maintain their personal digital well-being included: spending time outside, taking regular breaks from the phone/computer, turning on the “do not disturb” mode on their iphone when sleeping. discussion in line with previous research relating to digital labour, post-fordism and boundary management, preliminary results in this pilot study suggest that the majority of social media professionals experience stress, an inability to disconnect from technology and intrusion into their personal lives as a result of their occupation ( bucher, fieseler & suphan, 2013; mccosker, 2017; van zoonen et al., 2017; ciolfi & lockley, 2018; kneese, et al., 2014). while post-fordism discourse suggests technological advances have changed the nature of work and workplaces, this study proposes employers are yet to acknowledge such shifts reducing action to minimise impacts to promote digital well-being among employees. employers may perceive their duty-of-care ends when social media professionals leave work for the day even though their responsibilities can follow them home. these findings suggest further research is required to provide greater insight into the blurring of work and personal lives from employer and employee perspectives for people working in social media-related fields. conclusion this pilot study provided a glimpse into the global perspectives of work-related impacts to digital well-being by social media professionals. results highlighted a disconnect between social media professionals and their workplaces, and the blurring of lines between work and personal lives. this research is the beginning of a more comprehensive study that will include a much larger global sample of social media professionals and employers, utilising research methods such as surveys, interviews and on-site observation within organisations. references bucher, e., fieseler, c., & suphan, a. (2013). the stress potential of social media in the workplace. information, communication & society, 16(10), 1639-1667. ciolfi, l., & lockley, e. (2018). from work to life and back again: examining the digitally-mediated work/life practices of a group of knowledge workers. computer supported cooperative work (cscw), 27(3-6), 803-839. kneese, t., rosenblat, a., & boyd, d. (2014). understanding fair labor practices in a networked age. open society foundations' future of work commissioned research papers. mccosker, a. (2017). social media work: reshaping organisational communications, extracting digital value. media international australia, 163(1), 122-136. roffarello, a. m., & de russis, l. (2019). the race towards digital wellbeing: issues and opportunities. in chi (p. 386). shah, a. & knight, s. (2012). digital wellbeing workshop. jisc, viewed 04.02.2020: https://aptconference.org.uk/index.php/apt/apt2019/paper/view/1382/568 van zoonen, w., verhoeven, j. w., & vliegenthart, r. (2017). understanding the consequences of public social media use for work. european management journal, 35(5), 595-605. weerakkody, n. (2015). research methods for media and communication second edition. oxford university press: south melbourne. suggested citation (apa): mcconnell, s, (2022, november). machine over mind? the clash of agency in social media environments. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 1 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 machine over mind? the clash of agency in social media environments. stephen j. mcconnell new york university / colorado state university extended abstract underlying many social media platforms are personalization engines designed to give people instant content and social recommendations to keep them engaged. powered by complex algorithms, these engines animate people's feeds and an array of other features, transforming these information channels into highly personalized experiences tailored to each user's identified tastes. but what happens to users' agency when they interact with these features that are designed to subtly nudge and redirect them? how do people maintain control and intentional action in the face of a technology that seeks, by design, to architect their behavior? what outcomes result from this clash of mind and machine? and perhaps most consequentially, who prevails? in interviews and focus groups, a diverse sample of 45 participants offered their experiences with these tools where they reflected on how they responded and reacted to them, and how they felt they preserved their agency or had it eroded by the technology. participants also reported several outcomes that occurred that they attributed to the tools, including falling down "rabbit holes" where time and conscious thinking appeared to dissolve — outcomes they did not anticipate happening. through a critical realist approach, this study sought to move beyond their descriptive accounts to explain how and why some preserved their agency, while others had it eroded with rabbit holes and the like ensuing (mingers et al., 2013). utilizing these experiences, this study posits an empirically supported theoretical model that identifies underlining individual-level agentic and behavioral mechanisms that appear to be suggested citation (apa): mcconnell, s, (2022, november). machine over mind? the clash of agency in social media environments. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 2 activated when users interact with these tools. the model incorporates the agencycentric social cognitive theory, as well as new concepts that emerged from the qualitative data, to explain the twists-and-turns of agency that participants reported (bandura, 2009). through the model, their acts and choices became clear, and why the machine or individuals prevail is demystified. in a critical realist qualitative study of mental health recovery, lauzier-jobin and houle (2021) fit prior psychological theory with data to help identify the mechanisms that caused meaningful recovery for people struggling with mental illness. similar to their study, where a mechanism can be located in a middle-range theory that explains events, this study utilized social cognitive theory to shed light on the choices and agentic transformations of users in response to the tools, such as twitter's feed and instagram's explore feature. social media’s use of algorithms and personalization technologies has prompted numerous accounts and studies examining how the tools can alter user behaviors, with agency either a central concept of investigation or implied. however, and necessitating the need for this study and its approach, there appears to be no empirical, explanatory research examining how users' agency, behaviors, and other processes are influenced. despite the widespread use of the technology, with billions of people worldwide immersing themselves to some degree in these environments, and alarm raised by policymakers, journalists, and academics about its potential effects, the literature is largely theoretical, descriptive, or speculative (andersen et al., 2016; bucher, 2017; zuboff, 2019), a gap that this dissertation addresses with its theoretically informed empirical analysis. empirical work has investigated the ties between agency and social media use, with social cognitive theory serving as a theoretical framework in several studies. but that work predominantly examines user interactions with other social media attributes, not the personalized elements under study here. informed by albert bandura’s social cognitive theory, this research offers an explanatory model that captures the rich array of agency dynamics at play for individuals in reaction to these tools, revealing how they bring intentionality, reflection, and forethought to these environments, as well as how these agentic traits break down during interactions with the tools. the research also supports the extension of his theory to this study context, the only known study to have done so. through participants' experiences with the technology, it establishes that a social cognitive process is occurring in this context. this finding, among others, provides a contribution to the psychology and mass communication literature, and offers a framework that can be utilized in future studies, including testing and refinement through quantitative methodologies. further, in contrast to the dominant portrayal of “mindless users” under the sway of personalization technologies — as depicted in the widely popular netflix documentary suggested citation (apa): mcconnell, s, (2022, november). machine over mind? the clash of agency in social media environments. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 3 the social dilemma and other accounts — this research found some participants exercised self-control in these environments, including enacting strategies that helped them preserve and exercise their agency. as a practical contribution, this work demonstrates that individuals can have the upper hand in these environments, so long as they have a clear understanding of the consequences of use of these tools. the model provides that guidance, building on past social cognitive work that sought to empower individuals to be free, non-constricted agents who can attain any realistic goal they desire, so long as they exercise their internal capacities to achieve it and have an awareness of the environments that may thwart it. however, knowledge is true power. without our work, science, and theory, these technologies may continue to dominate us. this is a work-in-progress dissertation. this is also my first submission to the conference. references andersen, j.v., lindberg, a., lindgren, r., & selander, l. (2016). algorithmic agency in information systems: research opportunities for data analytics of digital traces. in proceedings of the 49th hawaii international conference on system sciences (pp. 4597-4605). washington, dc: ieee. https://doi.org/10.1109/hicss.2016.571 bandura, a. (1989). human agency in social cognitive theory. american psychologist, 44(9), 1175-1184. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066x.44.9.1175 bandura, a. (2009). a social cognitive theory of mass communication. in j. bryant and m.b. oliver (ed.), media effects: advances in theory and research (pp. 94-124). new york, ny: routledge. bucher, t. (2017). the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 30-44. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154086 lauzier-jobin, f., & houle, j. (2021). caregiver support in mental health recovery: a critical realist qualitative research. qualitative health research, 31(13), 2440 2453. mingers, j., mutch, a., & willcocks, l. (2013). critical realism in information systems research. mis quarterly, 37(3), 795-802. zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. new york, ny: publicaffairs. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): lastname, firstinitial. (2021, october). paper (or panel) title. paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. end-user flexibilities in contemporary digital copyright law – an empirical analysis of end-user license agreements péter mezei university of szeged istván harkai university of szeged in the platform age, copyright protected contents are primarily disseminated over the internet. this model poses various challenges to the copyright regime that was mainly designed in and for the analogue age. one of these challenges is related to the fair balance between the interests of rightholders and other members of the society. copyright norms try to guarantee the high level of protection of rightholders and preserve some flexibility for the benefit of end-users. these flexibilities range from statutory limitations and exceptions (e.g., private use); resales (covered by the doctrine of exhaustion); or complaint-and-redress mechanisms. platforms, with their private norms, especially end-user license agreements (eulas), might effectively enforce that balance in their role as intermediaries in the chain of (e-)commerce. the academic literature of end-user flexibilities is limited. liliia oprysk and karin sein have focussed on eulas and end-user flexibilities from a consumer protection law perspective (oprysk & sein, 2020). pascale chapdelaine has dealt with user rights and the contractual basis of different online uses (chapdelaine, 2017). other than these and a few more sources, we noticed a hiatus of comprehensive analysis of the interplay between end-user flexibilities and private ordering mechanisms in the digital copyright ecosystem. hence, in our research, conducted within the frames of the recreating europe h2020 project, we focused on how private norms allow for or diminish the exercise of end-user flexibilities related to copyright protected subject matter. the paper first elaborates the pursued objectives, scope, considerations on comparability, and analytical steps. it continues with the comparative and empirical analysis of eulas. suggested citation (apa): mezei, p., and harkai, i., (2021, october). end-user flexibilities in contemporary digital copyright law – an empirical analysis of end-user license agreements. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. our methodology combines systematic, qualitative, and comparative analysis. a comparative research might focus on macro-, mesoor micro-level research questions (van hoecke, 2015: 21-22; wolff, 2019: 491-492). our study covers a meso-level research topic: studying online intermediaries’ private ordering mechanisms. the goal of our research, as it is often the case in the comparative legal scholarship (glenn, 2006: 57-65; wolff, 2019: 491), was to pursue the enhancement of the learning and knowledge about the selected topic, and offer an insight into and form recommendations related to the private ordering mechanisms. such recommendations are timely in light of the european union’s copyright in the digital single market (cdsm) directive. article 17(9) requires the implementation of various rules related to end-user flexibilities. therefore, our research is also capable to introduce the pre-cdsm implementation state of the art of end-user flexibilities. with respect to the actual methodology, we relied on mark van hoecke’s “toolbox”, rather than a fixed methodological roadmap (van hoecke, 2015). among the various methods included in van hoecke’s comparative legal research “toolbox”, our study emphasizes the functional (van hoecke, 2015: 9; zweigert & kötz, 1996), contextual (van hoecke, 2015: 16-18), and, consequently, the common core (van hoecke, 2015: 21) methods. they were complemented by empirical research tools. these allowed us to look at the practical functioning of the studied eulas. the proper selection of online intermediaries was a key element of our research. the main criteria followed in the selection of the analysed platforms have been (i) a certain level of development (predominantly web 2.0 models, i.e., models where end user involvement is not only necessary but inevitable), and (ii) similar, or almost similar, functions (mainly, hosting, streaming and/or selling of protected works or subject matter via the platform primarily by rights holders and/or end-users). prima facie infringing, piratical or rogue websites were excluded. further relevant factors were the general availability of the selected platforms in the eu, and the availability of english language versions of their eulas. furthermore, a “coincidence factor” was also taken into account: we were focusing on platforms that we are generally familiar with; have broad relevance (i.e., serve great number of users); and many of which fit into the recently introduced concept of “online content-sharing service providers” (ocssps) under article 17 of the cdsm directive. niche platforms are not covered. in sum, twenty platforms were selected, including streaming sites with (e.g., youtube, twitch) or without (e.g., spotify, netflix) host function for end-users; online video game stores and other online marketplaces (e.g., steam, amazon); and social media platforms (e.g., facebook, twitter). the initial plan was to provide for an overview of the relevant rules, and the quantitative and qualitative analysis of these rules from the point of view of endusers. at first, an extensive chart was created that contains excerpts from the eulas of the studied platforms related to fifteen different variables. following this initial data collection, our focus was directed at certain comparable aspects: (i) the license that end-users are granted; (ii) restricted acts that users are not entitled to perform; (iii) provisions, if any, on user-generated content (ugc); (iv) procedural safeguards and termination/modification of user account/subscription; (v) other provisions, if applicable. the platforms, classified according to six different types of business models, were measured according to a “user-flexibility index”. this scale starts with 1 (least flexible) and goes up to 5 (most flexible). to get a final value, seven different contributing factors were taken into consideration, such as the extent of access rights, the restricted uses, allowance of ugc, other technological restrictions on access (e.g., geo-blocking or other technology-related restrictions beyond the broadly defined set of restrictions that prohibit users to perform certain acts) or family sharing. each aspect was graded separately, and the average of independent grades provided for the final score of the platform in the user flexibility index. our interim conclusion indicates that platforms that host mainly or also ugc reached a higher user-flexibility score, while platforms that provide only access to the protected subject matter, without any possibility to interact over the platform or create permanent copies of contents, scored less. this conclusion is partially due the fact that existing public norms on various end-user flexibilities have closer relevance for ugc-related platforms (regulatory lock-in effect), and to the fierce competition that necessitates such platforms to offer for more competitive and hence more user-friendly services (platform flexibility effect). on the other hand, platforms that offer mainly one-way streaming services coupled occasionally with a license of limited offline uses impose stronger limits on end-user access rights. that is mainly due to the different licensing schemes; and their selected business model, including their goal to build and monetize an allencompassing, wide repertoire of professional contents. references chapdelaine, pascale: copyright user rights – contracts and the erosion of property, oxford university press, oxford, uk, 2017 glenn, h. patrick: the aims of comparative law. in jan m. smits (ed.): elgar encyclopedia of comparative law, edward elgar, cheltenham, 2006, p. 57-65. oprysk, liliia, and karin sein: limitations in end-user licensing agreements: is there a lack of conformity under the digital content directive?, iic – international review of intellectual property and competition law, 5/2020, p. 594-623. van hoecke, mark: methodology of comparative legal research, law and method, 2015, p. 1-35. wolff, lutz-christian: artificial intelligence ante portas: the end of comparative law?, the chinese journal of comparative law, 3/2019, p. 484-504. zweigert, konrad, and hein kötz: einführung in die rechtsvergleichung, dritte auflage, j. c. b. mohr (paul siebeck), tübingen, 1996 microsoft word yeshua-katz-the role of communication affordances in post-traumatic stress disorder support groups-the role.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): yeshua-katz, d. the role of communication affordances in post-traumatic stress disorder support groups on facebook and whatsapp. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the role of communication affordances in post-traumatic stress disorder support groups on facebook and whatsapp daphna yeshua-katz ben-gurion university of the negev background digital health research has highlighted the fact that people with stigmatized health disorders are drawn to online support group (osg) because these groups help them to manage their stigmatized health conditions. however, little is known about how media affordances— the outcomes of the relation between the technology and the user (evans et al., 2017; gibson, 1977)—reconfigure the ways in which stigmatized individuals use osg and interact with others like themselves. the current study applied an affordance framework to evaluate how facebook and whatsapp support groups can help military veterans and their partners cope with posttraumatic stress disorder (ptsd). method this paper presents findings from in-depth interviews with 34 members of ptsd-osgs. these interviews captured participants' voices as they told their stories, creating detailed representations of their experiences in ptsd-osgs. to identify the themes emerging from the interviews, we conducted an inductive thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2006). this process resulted in13 thematic categories were further reduced to five underlying concepts—visibility, availability, multimediality, surveillance, and synchronicity—all central to the communication affordances framework (boyd, 2010; coulson, 2017; ellison et al., 2016; evans et al., 2017; treem & leonardi, 2013) (see table 2 for thematic categories). table 2: thematic categories affordances themes participants’ quotes visibility public nature of posts i know some say whatsapp is private. that’s bullshit. you have to be very careful and even more careful what you write on facebook. i am very careful not to write anything suicidal. disclosing ptsd condition lots of people commented on my first post. it filled me with lots of energy. on the other hand, it stressed me terribly because i’m not used to this level of exposure. anonymity there is no anonymity. not in the whatsapp group and not on facebook. i tried to make our facebook group as anonymous as possible. if you’re not a member, but you’re looking for the group, you can’t see the posts published, but you can see who the members are. availability immediacy i can upload a post at 3 am and know that there will be immediate comments. lots of group members are awake, and they’ll respond immediately. reach one member needed help with a doctor who would write him a prescription for medical marijuana. so i asked the group in the middle of the night and lots of people shared their experience. multimediality use of voice messages if something happens at home, i record a message, share it with the girls, and then their reactions are encouraging. use of video in one video some veterans filmed themselves telling their story to raise awareness and raise donations for the organization. use of images sometimes i post photos of what needs to be done at night to go to sleep. combinations of alcohol and drugs. any possible way to sleep more than two hours without getting up and screaming. surveillance admins monitoring members i was upset and left the group. then the admin and another member wrote to me and convinced me to come back. members monitor members if someone leaves the group, suddenly there is complete hysteria. and the biggest panic is when someone writes, “enough is enough” because he can kill himself within 15 minutes.” (a)synchronicity ongoing communication once people felt comfortable in the offline group, they continued connecting on the whatsapp group and kept talking about the training. discontinuous communication communication on facebook works like movie cuts. a few days after writing about my trauma, i can upload entirely different content, like a selfie with my nephew, and no one remembers i wrote something hard and painful. controlling communication on facebook, we have control. we can look away when we feel like it, and we do not have to give in to any norms. facebook is not invasive or intrusive. it’s nothing. findings this research identified five affordances that members appraised to enhance their coping efforts in the digital world: visibility, availability, multimediality, surveillance, and synchronicity. visibility.the potential visibility of online content played a significant role in deciding which digital platform to use. although most participants already used multiple groups on facebook and whatsapp, most found whatsapp to be a safer space for support. they perceived the whatsapp group as a closed space that guaranteed a low level of visibility and less risk of online disclosure. participants felt that this low visibility safeguarded their online content from being posted outside the boundaries of the group. availability. compared to facebook, most participants preferred to use whatsapp because its high availability enabled them to reach out to the group in times of need. the ease of entering the group via the app and the group members' immediate responses were significant advantages. nevertheless, a few participants felt that this high availability was burdensome at times and the group's frequent communications became an additional source of distress. multimediality. the group members highlighted the benefits of providing and receiving information in various configurations such as text, image, audio, and video. group members took advantage of their phones’ multimediality and found new and creative ways to cope with their distress. nevertheless, some participants were unable to use all of the configurations available because their phone capacity did not allow for such large files surveillance. in their search for support, group admins and group members found whatsapp to be a useful tool because of its surveillance affordance, defined as the ability to monitor group members' behavior. surveillance was exercised in two ways: through notifications about message status and notifications about members leaving the group. synchronicity. when considering the different synchronicity levels afforded by whatsapp and facebook, whatsapp synchronous communication seemed to serve as a hindrance; that is, participants felt that their call for emotional support was left unanswered because of the too-prompt interactions in the group. participants preferred the asynchronous and turn-taking type of interaction facebook offered them for more organized forms of communication. conclusion this study reveals the connection between a specific stigmatizing mental health disorder (i.e., ptsd), perceptions of communication technologies (i.e., affordances), and specifies uses of technologies for coping with this mental health disorder. moreover, this study may inform digital intervention designers about which communication affordances can potentially lead to better health outcomes. references boyd, d. (2010). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in a networked self (pp. 47–66). routledge. braun, v., & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa coulson, n. s. (2017). affordance theory can help understanding of individuals’ use of online support communities. british journal of health psychology, 22(3), 379– 382. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjhp.12247 ellison, n. b., blackwell, l., lampe, c., & trieu, p. (2016). “the question exists, but you don’t exist with it”: strategic anonymity in the social lives of adolescents. social media+ society, 2(4), 2056305116670673. evans, s. k., pearce, k. e., vitak, j., & treem, j. w. (2017). explicating affordances: a conceptual framework for understanding affordances in communication research. journal of computer-mediated communication, 22(1), 35–52. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12180 gibson, j. j. (1977). the theory of affordances. in hilldale, usa (issue 2). treem, j. w., & leonardi, p. m. (2013). social media use in organizations: exploring the affordances of visibility, editability, persistence, and association. annals of the international communication association, 36(1), 143–189. https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.2013.11679130 aoir2020-teejayx6scamrap.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): tynes, r and pearl, a. (2020, october 28-31). fncking with white frames: teejayx6 scam raps the digital. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. fncking with white frames: teejayx6 scam raps the digital robert tynes bard prison initiative, bard college alex pearl bard prison initiative, bard college teejayx6 lays it all out: first you gotta find a site for you to load on you gon’ hit the bitcoin, you can’t be petty though put your money in, can’t be nothing under a hundred though if you want to hit for more big shit, put a hundred mo’ log into your site and it’s going to tell you which address to load then you type that same address on the bitcoin machine put the right address, it should pop up green then from there, you are done with that bitcoin machine hop in your whip, but you gotta play it low key cause remember bro, you just loaded up on kerm go to starbucks, but make sure you brung your computer go on the internet and log into ya site wait 10 minutes and the money should be on your account… (from swipe lessons) teejayx6 is a scam rapper from detroit, who puts to shame the notion that the internet is a cyberspace frontier where you can be all you wanna be. instead, he presents it as a rich field to be harvested, and through his music provides insights about race and the internet. ever since kolko et al. (2000) published race in cyberspace, internet studies has tried to tease out how race plays out on the internet. but, as scholar jessie daniels virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 virtual event 2 (2012) shows, the field has come up way short. maybe that’s because academics are too focused on what’s going on “in there” with race. there’s too much of a focus on the traditional analyses of representations of blackness, or of browness, or of yellowness. instead, in line with daniels (2012) urgings, we should be figuring out how whiteness is embedded, so deeply, in the internet. and so, we ask: what does teejayx6’s scam rap, and the scam rap of his predecessors, tell us about whiteness and the internet? teejayx6 lyrics and online interviews help expose whiteness mythologies entrenched in internet discourse. we see how the open frontier of cyberspace masks territorialization; how identity fluidity is more of an elite fantasy than a pluralistic fact; and, how the promise of leisure and prosperity is false consciousness at best. scam rap is a hip hop song that talks about using the internet to steal credit card numbers and identities, bitcoins, whatever, so that the scammer can then go buy offline merchandise. rappers who scam rap include: a$ap rocky, city girls, guapdad 4000, money man, the pop out boyz, band gang, kasher quon, bossman rich, shred gang boogz, and selfmade kash (fu et al. 2019). at the forward edge of scam rap stands teejayx6, a 19 year old from the detroit rap scene who tells the “how to”: the government tried to ban me from the dark web (tried to ban me) i downloaded tor browser then got back in (back in) went and got a vpn (vpn) just bought another bin imma keep searchin these bitches on my site till i can slide a benz (from “dark web”) with these directions and hard style rapping, teejayx6 helps undermine the normative, technology gatekeeping, cliché of the black geek (eglash 2002); and he chips away at the “whiteness” equals “progress”, “technology” and “civilization” racialized ideology lurking in new media (hobson 2008). following derrida, teejayx6 is “destroying the concept of ‘sign’ and its entire logic” (p. 7, derrida 1976) by messing with the logos of race. it is the “destruction, not the demolition but the de-sedimentation, the deconstruction, of all the significations that have their source in that of the logos” (p. 10). teejayx6 erases the imagined solid lines between world and cyberspace, pulling the floating signifiers out into the street. he is a trickster (radin 1988), a rapper, exploiting white tropes about blackness, using them as “metaphoric tools for expressing power” (pp. 47, perry 2005). but teejayx6’s sign system is less important for what it tells us about blackness, and more significant for what it exposes about whiteness. inverting stuart hall’s (1997) practices that sift out the black racial other from media representations, we are making visible the invisible whiteness of the internet. dyer (1997) called out this invisibility as a white power strategy that bolstered dominance through a taken-for-granted ubiquity (also see, sullivan 2006; clarke and garner 2010). this invisibility and ubiquity extends 3 deeply into the internet of today. our project (an analysis of scam rap) is not merely an academic exercise, though, it is also an attempt at “exposing, challenging, resisting and disrupting structures of whiteness…for the purpose of dismantling the system of racial oppression” as it plays out through the internet (p. 218, owen 2007). methodologically, our study utilizes frame analysis (see goffman 1974; entman 1993), examining scam rap lyrics, interviews with artist, and news stories about the genre. the project sifts out the white racial frames (feagin 2013) that the internet generates, cloaks and erases. the trace of whiteness is still there, though, and scam rap can help us see that. some of the frames include whiteness as property (harris 1993), whiteness as terror (hooks 1997); white spaces (anderson 2015); the iconic ghetto/the iconic negro (anderson 2012); and, white fragility (diangelo 2018). ultimately, teejayx6 and other scam rappers tell us less about how blacks exist in cyberspace, and more about how the internet reinforces systemic racism and supports structural violence (galtung 1969). references anderson, elijah (2012). “the iconic ghetto.” the annals of the american academy of political and social science 642: 8-24. anderson, elijah (2015). “the white space.” sociology of race and ethnicity 1(1): 1021. clarke, simon and steve garner (2010). white identities: a critical sociological approach. london: pluto press. daniels, jessie (2012). “race and racism in internet studies: a review and a critique.” new media & society, vol. 15, no. 5: pp. 695-719. diangelo, robin (2018). white fragility. boston: beacon press. dyer, richard (1997). white. london: routledge. derrida, jacques (1976). of grammatology. trans. gayatri chakravorty spivak. baltimore: johns hopkins university press. eglash, ron (2002). “race, sex, and nerds: from black geeks to asian american hipsters.” social text 71, vol. 20, no. 2: pp. 49-64. entman, r.m. (1993). "framing: toward clarification of a fractured paradigm". journal of communication. 43 (4): 51–58. 4 fu, eddie; russel abad; jacques morel, jr.; and hilary crosley coker (2019). “behind the rise of ‘scam rap’”. genius, 17 september, 2019. available at: https://genius.com/a/what-is-scam-rap goffman, e. (1974). frame analysis: an essay on the organization of experience. cambridge: harvard university press. hall, stuart (1997). “the spectacle of the ‘other’” in stuart hall (ed.), representation: cultural representations and signifying practices. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications, pp. 223-290. harris, cheryl (1993). “whiteness as property” harvard law review, 106(8): 17071791. hobson, janell (2008). “racializing the ‘digital divide’ in film and new media.” feminist media studies, vol. 8, no. 2: pp. 111-126. hooks, bell (1997). “whiteness in the black imagination.” in ruth frankenburg (ed.), displacing whiteness. durham, nc: duke university press, pp. 165-179. galtung, johan (1969). "violence, peace, and peace research" journal of peace research, vol. 6, no. 3: pp. 167–191. kolko, beth, lisa nakamura and gilbert b. rodman (ed.) (2000). race in cyberspace. new york: routledge. owen, david s. (2007). “towards a critical theory of whiteness” philosophy & social criticism, vol. 33, no. 2: pp. 203-222. perry, imani (2005). prophets of the hood: politics and poetics in hip hop. durham, nc: duke university press. radin, paul (1988). the trickster: a study in american indian mythology. ny: schocken. sullivan, shannon (2006). revealing whiteness: the unconscious habits of racial privilege. bloomington: indiana university press. aoir2022-what is privacy literacy for selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): kumar, p.c. (2022, november). what is privacy literacy for?. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. what is privacy literacy for? priya c. kumar pennsylvania state university, college of information sciences and technology networked devices, sensors, and the algorithmic processes that power them pervade nearly all facets of daily life. these systems are designed by an elite class of experts and powered by data extracted from populations of people (burrell & fourcade, 2021). many people remain unaware of what data these systems extract and how systems and institutions use data, raising significant questions about privacy (arora, 2018; cohen, 2013). the concern is that such systems are “dedicated to prediction but not necessarily to understanding or to advancing human material, intellectual, and political well-being” (cohen, 2013, p. 1927). one response to these concerns is to call for educational efforts that increase people’s understanding, or literacy, of data flows (kumar et al., 2020; livingstone et al., 2021; pangrazio & selwyn, 2019). literacy is often regarded as an end itself, an unquestionably good thing. yet literacy does not operate autonomously. teaching someone to understand something does not automatically improve their life (warschauer, 2004). privacy literacy efforts thus need to be explicit about what they seek to accomplish. in other words, what is privacy literacy for? i begin answering this question by reflecting on the origins of privacy as a concept and linking privacy literacy to critical pedagogy and collective visioning. the purpose of privacy literacy privacy concerns are not unique to datafication. worries about the death of privacy have persisted for decades “because the modern right to privacy was born out of the conditions of its violation, not its realization” (john & peters, 2017, p. 293). when u.s. lawyers samuel warren and louis brandeis (1890) declared privacy as “the right to be let alone” (p. 193) in an article credited as the foundation of privacy law, they positioned privacy as a negative right—freedom from something, like intrusion, rather than a positive right—freedom for something, like exercising agency. their conception of privacy arose from their concerns about people’s ability to use handheld cameras to (sometimes surreptitiously) document candid moments and publicize them in newspapers, potentially embarrassing upper-class society. privacy is thus inextricably tied to changing social and technological circumstances, resulting in “a concept that was broken before it was built” (john & peters, 2017, p. 294). broken because it became something to value only in the moment social elites felt they were losing it. such conditions render privacy as something to defend rather than enjoy. privacy discourse, with its focus on protecting people from the privacy concerns of new technologies, embodies this defensive posture (kumar, 2019). but movements for change cannot just fight against something. they must also stand for something (the red nation, 2021). legal scholar julie cohen (2013) argues that privacy “shelters dynamic, emergent subjectivity from the efforts of commercial and government actors to render individuals and communities fixed, transparent, and predictable” (p. 1905). privacy gives people the breathing room they need to become themselves (cohen, 2013). fights to defend privacy in the face of data extraction are declarations to protect space for human flourishing. thus, privacy literacy efforts should harness education to mobilize people toward changing the technological and social conditions that discipline subjects toward advancing institutional goals. putting privacy literacy into praxis recall that the right to privacy was born from upper-class anxieties about reputation (warren & brandeis, 1890) and centers on a liberal framing of the human as a rational individual (cohen, 2013). just as data-driven systems embody colonial relations (couldry & mejias, 2019; ricaurte, 2019), privacy research often reproduces colonial worldviews, given that it largely occurs in western, white, middle-class contexts (arora, 2018). to avoid perpetuating oppressive power dynamics, privacy literacy efforts should embody a critical pedagogy where teachers and students learn from each other about what privacy means, how data-driven systems do and don’t afford privacy, and what needs to change to create worlds where people can flourish. this education is praxis, a collective, ongoing process of learning from and with each other to “remedy rather than reinforce social inequalities” (winchell & kress, 2013, p. 150). for instance, the our data bodies project, grounded in the lived experienced of marginalized residents of three u.s. cities, identifies the myriad ways data-driven systems hold people back, celebrates the strategies people develop to resist such systems, and offers educational materials to support anti-surveillance work (lewis et al., 2018; petty et al., 2018). movements for change must also offer visions of the worlds they want to bring about. declarations like the feminist data manifest-no (cifor et al., 2019) and the care principles for indigenous data governance (research data alliance international indigenous data sovereignty interest group, 2019) identify paths away from extraction and toward relations that respect the inherent humanity of data. if privacy literacy’s purpose is to mobilize people toward changing current conditions, these visions can answer questions about what kind of change needs to happen. references arora, p. (2019). decolonizing privacy studies. television & new media, 20(4), 366– 378. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476418806092 burrell, j., & fourcade, m. (2021). the society of algorithms. annual review of sociology, 47, 213-237. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-090820-020800 cifor, m., garcia, p., cowan, t.l., rault, j., sutherland, t., chan, a., rode, j., hoffmann, a.l., salehi, n., nakamura, l. (2019). feminist data manifest-no. https://www.manifestno.com/ cohen, j. e. (2013). what privacy is for. harvard law review, 126, 1904–1933. couldry, n., & mejias, u. a. (2019). data colonialism: rethinking big data’s relation to the contemporary subject. television & new media, 20(4), 336–349. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476418796632 john, n. a., & peters, b. (2017). why privacy keeps dying: the trouble with talk about the end of privacy. information, communication & society, 20(2), 284-298. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1167229 kumar, p. c. (2019). a post-humanist take on surveillance capitalism. acm chi 2019 workshop on standing on the shoulders of giants: exploring the intersection of philosophy and hci, glasgow, scotland, uk. https://authentic.soe.ucsc.edu/philosophyhci-workshop/papers/p16-kumar.pdf kumar, p. c., subramaniam, m., vitak, j., clegg, t. l., & chetty, m. (2020). strengthening children’s privacy literacy through contextual integrity. media and communication, 8(4), 175-184. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v8i4.3236 lewis, t., gangadharan, s. p., saba, m., petty, t. (2018). digital defense playbook: community power tools for reclaiming data. our data bodies. https://www.odbproject.org/wpcontent/uploads/2019/03/odb_ddp_highres_single.pdf livingstone, s., stoilova, m., & nandagiri, r. (2020). data and privacy literacy: the role of the school in educating children in a datafied society. the handbook of media education research, 413-425. pangrazio, l., & selwyn, n. (2019). ‘personal data literacies’: a critical literacies approach to enhancing understandings of personal digital data. new media & society, 21(2), 419–437. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818799523 petty, t., saba, m., lewis, t., gangadharan, s.p., & eubanks, v. (2018). reclaiming our data. our data bodies. https://www.odbproject.org/wpcontent/uploads/2016/12/odb.interimreport.final_.7.16.2018.pdf research data alliance international indigenous data sovereignty interest group. (2019). care principles for indigenous data governance. the global indigenous data alliance. https://www.gida-global.org/care ricaurte, p. (2019). data epistemologies, the coloniality of power, and resistance. television & new media, 20(4), 350–365. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419831640 the red nation (2021). the red deal: indigenous action to save our earth. common notions. warren, s. d., & brandeis, l. d. (1890). the right to privacy. harvard law review, 4, 193–220. warschauer, m. (2004). technology and social inclusion: rethinking the digital divide. mit press. winchell m. & kress t. (2013). living with/in the tensions: freire’s praxis in a highstakes world. in r. lake & t. kress (eds.), paolo freire’s intellectual roots: toward historicity in praxis (pp. 145-168). microsoft word edwards-if you can work from anywhere, why work anywhere else-if you can work from anywhere, why work.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): edwards, s. (2021, october). if you can work from anywhere, why work anywhere else? flexible citizenship, regimes of mobility, and the discourse of digital nomadism. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. if you can work from anywhere, why work anywhere else? flexible citizenship, regimes of mobility, and the discourse of digital nomadism sarah edwards university of wisconsin-madison amidst the covid-19 crisis, as much of the world entered lockdowns and issued shelter-in-place orders in an attempt to restrict global mobility, a number of places began launching “digital nomad visas” in order to entice remote workers, largely in communication technology industries, to live and labor abroad. these visas represent a marked shift in the governing strategies of governments. where once digital nomads were required to declare themselves as entrepreneurs or workers with a company to sponsor their stay (a lengthy, expensive, and bureaucratic process), or declare themselves as “tourists” (but risk deportation if caught extending their stay by authorities), the digital nomad visas that have proliferated during the covid-19 pandemic have provided a legitimate route to flexible mobility through remote work. varying in length from a few months to two years, these visas provide formalized yet flexible (and temporary) forms of citizenship that attempt to capitalize on the mobilities made possible by both technological infrastructures and new forms of governance that encourage some forms of mobility while restricting or inhibiting others. the discourse of digital nomadism thus emerges as a key site at which to examine the cultural logics of globalization, forms of flexible citizenship and capital accumulation, and regimes of (im)mobility that structure the political economy of movement (ong, 1999; salazar and smith, 2011; glick schiller and salazar, 2013). this paper examines these intersections through a critical discourse analysis of digital nomadism that emerged in popular press articles, government websites, and social media posts promoting digital nomad visas and remote work during the covid-19 pandemic. while research on digital nomadism has thus far examined self-identity construction and lifestyle, technology usage, and self-disciplining labor strategies, less research has expanded this conversation to focus on the ways in which various governments formalize and institutionalize these structures of mobility for their own gain. this paper thus attends to the broader networks of power and capital the digital nomad traverses, as well as the institutions and industries that imagine and capitalize on transnational mobility via the cultural avatar of the digital nomad. at stake in the discourse of digital nomadism are neo-colonial regimes of mobility and forms of technoimperialism that reinscribe global inequalities. locating the digital nomad digital nomadism is a term that has entered the cultural lexicon relatively recently to describe a lifestyle unbound from the traditional structures and constraints of office work (hermann and paris, 2020). this identity is organized, in part, around the digital technologies and infrastructures that make “remote work” possible, allowing digital nomads to claim “location independence” and granting them the freedom to travel while working. largely employed as freelancers or as self-styled entrepreneurs, digital nomads assert their independence from the traditional strictures of work through the digital technologies they use at the same time that they remain “plugged in” to the infrastructures, economies, and lifeworlds of silicon valley (mcelroy, 2019, p. 216). while a number of studies have examined how digital nomads understand their own communities and lifestyles, less research has critically examined how various governments have leveraged the category of digital nomadism to encourage independent workers to participate in their economies via remote work. previous work on digital nomadism has focused mainly on how the term should be defined, as well as how self-identified digital nomads understand their working practices, uses of technology, and relationships to their communities (hermann and paris, 2020). methodology this paper uses discourse analysis to examine the construction and representation of digital nomadism in popular press and industry articles, instagram posts from official tourism boards, and governmental websites during the covid-19 pandemic (march 2020-july 2021), including visa application requirements. i examine the materials surrounding the visa programs of ten different destinations, including anguilla, antigua and barbuda, barbados, bermuda, cayman islands, croatia, dubai (uae), estonia, georgia, and malta. each of these destinations offered flexible work visas and residency programs in response to the restricted mobility and periods of lockdown imposed by governments and recommended by global health organizations in response to covid-19. the “borderless battle for talent”: techno-imperialism and regimes of mobility in the digital economy my analysis reveals the ways in which the figure of the digital nomad has emerged during the covid-19 crisis as a key site where an imagined global borderless battle for “talent” and technological innovation will be waged. as one industry article put it, “the talent battle is not only between companies but between both companies and countries,” underscoring the perceived importance of new visa programs that support flexible, short-term forms of temporary citizenship. this sentiment was echoed by government officials from the uae to estonia to barbados, who emphasize the figure of the digital nomad as a highly skilled worker who will reinvigorate national economies and provide new avenues into tech markets. importantly, this discursive strategy often links the digital nomad to silicon valley companies and infrastructures, thereby reproducing what erin mcelroy has termed “techno-imperialism,” or the materialization of “new nodes and edges that facilitate surplus capital accumulation” and the expansion of silicon valley into increasingly intimate and global spaces (2019, p. 220). i argue that the promotional materials surrounding digital nomad visas thus construct an idealized transnational subject and contribute to and reinscribe a global mobility regime, which creates differential and unequal access to the resource of mobility (shamir, 2005). these visas can be understood as a strategic response by the state to recapture and repurpose mobility and ultimately reinforce local, regional, and national boundaries even as the paradigm of digital nomadism is predicated on notions of freedom and location independence. my analysis contributes to a broader understanding of how regimes of mobility are imagined, enacted, and enforced through the discourse of digital nomadism. by focusing on the ways in which governmental entities have constructed and communicated ideas of digital nomadism during the covid-19 pandemic, i seek to add a new perspective to existing scholarship on contemporary forms of techno-imperialism and regimes of mobility. references glick schiller, n. & salazar, n.b. (2013). regimes of mobility across the globe. journal of ethnic and migration studies, 39, 183-200. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2013.723253 hayes, m. & pérez-gañán, r. (2017). north-south migrations and the asymmetric expulsions of late capitalism: global inequality, arbitrage, and new dynamics of north-south transnationalism. migration studies, 5, 116-135. hermann, i. & paris, c. m. (2020). digital nomadism: the nexus of remote working and travel mobility. information technology & tourism, 22, 329-334. mcelroy, e. (2019). digital nomads and settler desires: racial fantasies of silicon valley imperialism. imaginations, 10, 215-249. http://dx.doi.org/10.17742/image.cr.10.1.8 ong, a. (1999). flexible citizenship: the cultural logics of transnationality. duke university press. salazar, n. b. & smith, a. (2011). anthropological takes on (im)mobility. identities: global studies in culture and power, 18, i-ix. shamir, r. (2005). without borders? notes on globalization as a mobility regime. sociological theory, 23, 197-217. thompson, b. y. (2018). digital nomads: employment in the online gig economy. glocalism: journal of culture, politics, and innovation, 1, 1-26. what is behind the (glass)door? examining toxic workplace cultures via an employment review site selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): bergstrom, k. (2021, october). what is behind the (glass)door? examining toxic workplace cultures via an employment review site. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. what is behind the (glass)door? examining toxic workplace cultures via an employment review site kelly bergstrom york university background and context in august 2018, video games news website kotaku published cecilia d'anastasio’s (2018) feature-length article relaying the experiences of 28 current and former employees who described working for riot, the league of legends developer, as being akin to a fraternity. the article describes a ‘bro-culture’ where women were overlooked for promotions, but also sexualized by management. former employees in particular felt frustrated and that they were prevented from speaking freely about their experiences at riot because of non-disparagement agreements they signed before leaving the company. in the wake of the kotaku article, riot created a diversity and inclusion policy and has attempted to make steps towards increasing diversity in their workforce, but 200 riot employees staged a walkout in protest of the company in may 2019, and then later in the year the company settled a gender discrimination class action lawsuit by agreeing to pay a $10 million settlement (rand, 2019). riot games is just one case in a broader industry that grapples with multiple issues surrounding working conditions. academic interviews with current, former, and aspirational game workers as well as ethnographic investigations of game development companies are helpful for tracing the contours of an industry that all too often relies on “doing what you love” to excuse not being paid a fair wage, being expected to work in crunch conditions, and/or having to shoulder gender and/or racial stereotypes about who ‘should’ be working in games (bulut, 2020; chee, 2016; chia, 2019; whitson, 2019). indeed, the game industry is an important bellwether for advancements (and setbacks) faced by both tech and cultural workers more broadly conceived. narratives of current and former employees are powerful sources of information. for example, in my previous work at aoir i have examined the wealth of information that can be gleaned from “why i quit buzzfeed” videos posted to youtube, where former employees frankly discussed the behind the scenes working conditions at buzzfeed (bergstrom, 2018). while interviews with current and former workers are important, nondisclosure agreements can make it difficult to locate informants. those who are willing to speak might only be willing to do so ‘off the record’ if speaking negatively about their industry will put future job prospects at risk. in an effort to collect data in a way that reduces the risks faced by current employees, game scholars have begun to investigate public texts written for and by game industry professionals. for example, amanda cote and brandon harris (2020) turned to game developer magazine to better understand the habitus of crunch. suzanne de castell and karen skardzius (2019) sought out incidents of ‘public speech’ including previously published interviews, corporate employee profiles, and social media posts to examine women’s experiences working in the game industry. taken together, this work demonstrates how public speech can reveal the behind the scenes elements of the games industry that might otherwise be off the record. using glassdoor to peek behind the curtain launched in 2008 as a site to collect the anonymous perspectives of current and former employees as well as their self-reported salaries, glassdoor has grown to be a top destination for american job seekers wanting to learn more about a company’s work environment. related work in the area has shown that analysis of tech industry-focused materials, such as the textual analysis of job recruitment ads conducted by brooke erin duffy and becca schwartz (2018), articulate how the industry has come to expect certain behaviours and attributes of an ideal employee. sites such as glassdoor play an important role in hosting discourses that shape the norms and expectations of an industry when it comes to the recruitment ads they host, but glassdoor specifically offers up a unique perspective in that it allows current and former employees to leave an anonymous review of the company. employees are asked to evaluate the ‘pros’ and the ‘cons’ of a particular company, which can either entice a prospective recruit with details about a particular working environment—or warn them away. while the same sort of caveats surrounding anonymous sources apply here, i argue that glassdoor provides insights into broad trends and themes that can be further investigated through more traditional qualitative data collection techniques. i argue that glassdoor is an easily accessible yet underutilized resource for scholars (both games and culture industries broadly conceived) interested in a peek ‘behind the curtain’ of industries reliant on non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements. here, i report on my ongoing analysis of 740 current and former employee reviews of riot posted to the website glassdoor.com between october 2009 and march 2021. employee review text was captured using the ncapture extension for nvivo. my preliminary thematic analysis—conducted via nvivo 11 for windows— found that in the months following d'anastasio’s kotaku article, employee (former and current) reviews of the company made direct reference about the company’s toxic internal culture. in some cases they supported the experiences relayed in d'anastasio’s article, but others refuted it. however, when a more longitudinal approach is taken to analyzing the reviews, evidence of this underlying toxicity actually appears throughout the company’s entire history on glassdoor. for example, an excerpt from the very first employee review posted in 2009 states: they work a lot of nights and weekends, which is o.k. if your are single. the office humor can be fairly graphic. while the reviewer left it vague, fairly graphic humour—when viewed in the context provided by d'anastasio’s interviews with current employees describing toxic masculinity pervading riot’s workplace culture where even men might find themselves having their genitals groped—it becomes much easier to read between the lines. other themes emerging from the data include extended periods of crunch and how the ‘perks’ associated with the job (lunches, vacations) are initially appreciated but ultimately not a replacement for a proper work/life balance and appropriate compensation. through this thematic analysis of riot reviews, i argue there is ample evidence to indicate that glassdoor can be a fruitful venue for media industry scholars interested adding additional sources of data to better understand employee concerns about ‘notorious’ companies while mitigating potential harm to informants who might otherwise be reluctant to speak ‘on the record’ about an industry that remains resistant to change. references bergstrom, k. (2018). what can “why i left buzzfeed” vlogs teach us about invisible labour? aoir selected papers of internet research. association of internet researchers. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2018i0.10473 bulut, e. (2020). a precarious game: the illusion of dream jobs in the video game industry. ilr press, an imprint of cornell university press. chee, f. m. (2016). a game industry beyond diversity: systemic barriers to participation in south korea. in y. b. kafai, g. t. richard, & b. m. tynes (eds.), diversifying barbie and mortal kombat: intersectional perspectives and inclusive designs in gaming. etc press. chia, a. (2019). the moral calculus of vocational passion in digital gaming. television & new media, 20(8), 767–777. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419851079 cote, a. c., & harris, b. c. (2020). ‘weekends became something other people did’: understanding and intervening in the habitus of video game crunch. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 135485652091386. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856520913865 d’anastasio, c. (2018, august 7). inside the culture of sexism at riot games. kotaku. https://kotaku.com/inside-the-culture-of-sexism-at-riot-games-1828165483 de castell, s., & skardzius, k. (2019). speaking in public: what women say about working in the video game industry. television & new media, 20(8), 836–847. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419851078 duffy, b. e., & schwartz, b. (2018). digital “women’s work?”: job recruitment ads and the feminization of social media employment. new media & society, 20(8), 2972– 2989. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817738237 rand, e. (2019, december 2). how we got here: a timeline of the riot games cultural controversy. espn. https://www.espn.com/esports/story/_/id/26686134/how-gothere-line-riot-games-cultural-controversy whitson, j. r. (2019). the new spirit of capitalism in the game industry. television & new media, 20(8), 789–801. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419851086 aoir2020 mays-lei-katz final.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): mays, k. k., lei, y., katz, j. e. (2020, october). living with robots: an ontological leap? paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. living with robots: an ontological leap? kate k. mays boston university yiming (skylar) lei michigan state university james e. katz boston university introduction there is a vast research literature on human-robot interaction addressing how humans perceive of robots and their use. artificial intelligence (ai) and robotics applications have proliferated primarily in the industrial sphere (taipale, de luca, sarrica, & fortunati, 2015), and social scientific studies emphasized robots’ functionality and appropriateness for certain roles, especially those related to work and most particularly to robots replacing humans’ jobs. notably, robot studies are often premised on negative prognostications, emphasizing how robots threaten livelihoods and are disruptive (taipale & fortunati, 2018). as ai and robot technologies advance, however, more positive possibilities arise for robots’ social integration. caretaking robots may fill gaps in end-of-life care; companion robots may ease loneliness; robot tutors may deliver personalized education; therapeutic robots may support autistic children’s socialization (leite, martinho, paiva, 2013; giger, picarra, alver-oliveira, oliveira, & arriaga, 2019). while “social robots” (breazeal, 2004) are not yet diffused in the mainstream, we can see an inkling of how they may be accepted in ai-enabled digital voice assistants such as amazon’s alexa, which is treated as a friend/companion as much as a functional utility (calvin, 2017).thus, there may be both a greater demand for and acceptance of social robots. as guzman (2020) points out, however, there is an ontological divide between humans and machines that will likely influence people’s responses to and interactions with these emerging technologies. media equation theory (reeves & nass, 1996) has established that people respond socially to robots that have human qualities. however, people can also attribute mechanical characteristics such as objectivity and randomness to technology when a “machine heuristic” is triggered (sundar, 2008). conversely, mays, katz, and groshek (2020) have suggested a “human heuristic” may be triggered in interactions with automated technologies that focuses on the technology’s lack of certain (human) qualities such as nuance, bias, and empathy, which may be desired during certain interactions (e.g., with customer service). technology has often been foregrounded as providing tools to ease humans’ load or amplify their capabilities, and robots are often promoted as another technological tool to aid humans. yet more than a tool, people can respond emotionally to such robotic technology (vincent, 2015), and see them as a part of their lives and not simply an adjunct to accomplish a task (such as a household hammer). robots’ key functionalities – their interactivity and relative autonomy – make them closer to “living” and social entities than any technology than has come before. this ontological leap may create friction for people as they logically know and intend to treat robots as mere tools but begin confronting their social cues that prompt emotional and social responses. a logical next step would be to research and understand these possible dynamics and how people perceive robots as social and human-like entities. method this study is a qualitative analysis of open-ended comments elicited in surveys about social perceptions of robots. two online surveys were conducted through the professional survey company qualtrics in may – june 2018 (n = 1,158) and february – march 2019 (n = 2,254). robot perceptions were measured through questions about cyberdystopianism, robot phobia, robot liking, robot-human likeness, and robot rights. after answering the robot perception questions, respondents were given an optional open-text comment space. off-topic and non-substantive remarks were removed, leaving 591 comments for analysis. a top-level analysis of the comments revealed five main themes about social life with robots. in some comments, more than one topic was addressed and when this occurred each component comment was coded independently. results robots as a tool/machine was the most common theme, appearing in 32.5% of comments (n=192). such comments urged that robots be considered as no more than lifeless machines and often emphasized that emotional capability was an essential criterion unique to humans. this theme overlapped most with the topic of human-robot relationships (26.9% of comments, n=159). respondents imagined the consequences of human-robot interaction, and held a relatively open-minded or even positive attitude about a future with robots, though some held that the ontological boundary of robot as tool was necessary for such optimism. to that end, the social adjustment theme (19.0%, n=112) spoke of robots’ potential jobs, life roles, social status, and subsequent potential threats to humans with such an integration. some clearly rejected any kind of social integration, while others were intermediate, conditioning it on performing menial tasks and/or occupying an inferior status. robot rights also appeared as a theme (10.7%, n=63, likely elicited by answering the survey’s “robot rights” measure). respondents expressed feeling ridiculous about even considering the notion of rights for robots, though some acknowledged that if robots should one day have emotions, they should be allowed some or equivalent rights. finally, robots’ aliveness/appearance was discussed in 10.0% of comments (n=65), and were largely negative in that they felt “creeped out” or scared of robots as living entities. these findings show support for claims (e.g., guzman, 2020) that human-robot ontology is an important consideration for robots’ social acceptance and integration. ai-supported robotic technology presents great promise; however, its advancement challenges the ontological divide that has implications not only for human-machine interaction but also for self-identity and ultimately human-human relations. in terms of suggestions, these dynamics should be explored in tandem with ways to improve human-machine communication and considered from usability and design standpoints. references breazeal, c. (2004). designing sociable robots. cambridge, ma: mit press. calvin, a.p. (2017, march 30). can amazon's alexa be your friend? digg.com. retrieved from http://digg.com/2017/amazon-alexa-is-not-your-friend giger, piçarra, alves‐oliveira, oliveira, & arriaga. (2019). humanization of robots: is it really such a good idea? human behavior and emerging technologies, 1(2), 111-123 guzman, a. l. (2020). ontological boundaries between humans and computers and the implications for human-machine communication. human-machine communication, 1(1), 3. leite, i., martinho, c., & paiva, a. (2013). social robots for long-term interaction: a survey. international journal of social robotics, 5(2), 291-308. mays, k., katz, j., & groshek, j. (2020, january). mediated communication and customer service experiences: psychological and demographic predictors of user evaluations in the united states. in proceedings of the 53rd hawaii international conference on system sciences. reeves, b., & nass, c. i. (1996). the media equation: how people treat computers, television, and new media like real people and places. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. sundar, s.s. (2008). the main model: a heuristic approach to understanding technology effects on credibility. digital media, youth, and credibility. in m. j. metzger & a.j. flanagin (eds.). the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation series on digital media and learning (73-100). cambridge, ma: the mit press. taipale, s., de luca, f., sarrica, m., fortunati, l. (2015). robot shift from industrial production to social reproduction. in j. vincent et al. (eds.), social robots from a human perspective. cham: springer international publishing, switzerland, 11-24. taipale, s. & fortunati, l. (2018). communicating with machines: robots as the next new media. in a. guzman (ed.), human-machine communication: rethinking communication, technology, and ourselves. (pp.201-220). new york: peter lang. vincent, j. (2015). the mobile phone: an emotionalized social robot. in j. vincent, s. taipale, b. sapio, g. lugano, & l. fortunati (eds.), social robots from a human perspective. (pp. 105–115). cham, switzerland: springer international. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): heikkilä, t., laaksonen, s-m., & väliverronen, e. (2022, november). contesting the covid-19 consensus: connective action of pseudoanonymous accounts on finnish twitter. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. contesting the covid-19 consensus: connective action of pseudoanonymous accounts on finnish twitter tuomas heikkilä university of helsinki salla-maaria laaksonen university of helsinki esa väliverronen university of helsinki introduction recent years have witnessed an invigorated debate about the contradictions of identityconcealing participation online (asenbaum, 2018; moore, 2018), and its potential influence on democratic processes. on the one hand, masked online identities allow for scalable manipulation that can manufacture and disrupt political discourses, for example by creating inauthentic public support for a cause (e.g., woolley & howard, 2018; kovic et al., 2018; bimber & gil de zúñiga, 2020) or by disguising disinformation actors who “lack normative entitlements to participate (...) in democratic discussions” (mckay & tenove, 2021, p. 707). however, unidentifiable speech may also foster less conformist public spaces, where critical social commentary and political activism are better protected against retaliation (moore, 2018; véliz, 2019; forestal & philips, 2020; denisova, 2017; ferrari, 2018). in this study, we extend this dichotomy by approaching anonymous online interactions as connective action (bennett & segerberg, 2013); as focused and communicative political activism aimed to contest the authorities’ covid-19 response during the pandemic in finland. finland, a high-trust nordic society, has fared reasonably well during the covid-19 pandemic in terms of confirmed cases, hospitalizations and fatalities. even with the absence of hard lockdowns, finland observed early on reasonably strict and comprehensive public health safety measures that have enjoyed relatively strong public support in representative surveys (jallinoja & väliverronen, 2021). however, restrictions have not been without their vocal critics, particularly on twitter (väliverronen et al., 2020), with two particularly visible campaigns—local flavours of the global “zero-covid” and “world wide demonstrations” movements—advocating for more stringent elimination of the disease, and for the lifting of all restrictions, respectively. participating in this public discord, we observed a surge of pseudoanonymous twitter accounts, operating through semi-stable pseudonyms. by pseudoanonymity, we want to emphasize that twitter’s set of affordances influence its users’ ability to conceal their real-name identities (bimber & gil de zúñiga, 2020), and underscore that people may seek private anonymity while simultaneously disclosing their political identities (jaidka et al., 2021) or even inventing new fictional personas (highfield, 2016). in the present study, we explore the networked activity of these accounts to explore the strategies they have employed to contest official public health safety measures and authorities, and their connections to political actors and other more organized forms of mobilization around covid-19. data and methodology we used historical twitter data of over 4.2 million tweets by the 229 pseudoanonymous accounts we recognized among the most prolific finnish covid-19 tweeters between january 2020 and october 2021. our initial list of accounts (n=621) was collected using the metadata summaries offered by a finnish social media monitoring database mohawk. we classified all these accounts as non-identity accounts, character accounts, or identified individuals/organizations, by using a four-level test to determine how much identity knowledge (rains & scott, 2007) they disclose. an intercoder reliability check was performed by three coders using a random 10% subset of 60 accounts (krippendorff’s alpha=0.845). twitter full-archive api for academics was used to obtain all tweets sent by pseudoanonymous accounts during the study period. extracting their mentions, replies and retweets we constructed an interactions network that divides into 12 clusters (modularity=0.520). we focused on three central communities, which bind together the vast majority of pa accounts (81%) (figure 1). based on network centrality measures and aggregate covid-19 tweet counts we sampled 4,320 tweets from the most influential accounts during the most active time periods for a qualitative reading to identify key narratives, action frames, tactics and alliances in the communities of pseudoanonymous users. findings the preliminary analysis highlights the prominence of pseudoanonymous accounts in covid-19 related twitter discussions and their intense engagement in contentious corona politics. through the network of their communicative interactions, we detected a handful of tightly-knit pseudoanonymous communities that produce and curate shared resources, give each other support, develop joint action frames, and amplify similar messages. unified in criticism towards covid-19 politics, the main communities are nonetheless sharply divided by their political advocacy. our analysis revealed relationships between the pseudoanonymous accounts, the established covid-19 movements, and political parties, particularly those in the conservative opposition. specifically, we identified a major cluster connected to the well-known proponents of the elimination strategy (e.g. “zero covid” working group members). additionally, two separate clusters were identified as covid critics, one with an emphasis on alternative expertise in health issues, the other displaying more politically oriented practices of voicing criticism towards the government and the ruling parties. furthermore, through the qualitative analysis, we identified a variety of tactics the pseudoanonymous accounts used to amplify and contest these existing societal and political viewpoints. some worked to amplify the visibility of the established covid-19 movements while others mobilized the covid-19 crisis as an argument to contest the government. further, a specific strategy of parodying character accounts was identified in connection with the zero covid movement with an aim to undermine the trust towards authorities. by illuminating this cooperation, we contribute by analytically expanding the current discussion anonymity’s function in the civic engagement. we argue that pseudoanonymous participation is an increasingly emblematic form of connective action afforded by social media platforms, particularly fitted to amplify specific political movements and viewpoints and to criticize those in power. figure 1. network graph of pseudoanonymous accounts’ interactions (145,987 nodes, 553,773 edges, 12 communities). filtered here to show the 8 clusters with at least 5% of accounts and nodes with a degree value at least 2. references asenbaum, h. (2018). anonymity and democracy: absence as presence in the public sphere. american political science review, 112(3), 459–472. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0003055418000163 bennett, l. w., & segerberg, a. (2013). the logic of connective action: digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. cambridge university press. bimber, b., & gil de zúñiga, h. (2020). the unedited public sphere. new media & society, 22(4), 700–715. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819893980 denisova, a. (2017). parody microbloggers as chroniclers and commentators on russian political reality. demokratizatsiya: the journal of post-soviet democratization, 25(1), 23–41. ferrari, e. (2018). fake accounts, real activism: political faking and user-generated satire as activist intervention. new media & society, 20(6), 2208–2223. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817731918 forestal, j., & philips, m. (2020). the masked demos: associational anonymity and democratic practice. contemporary political theory, 19(4), 573–595. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-019-00368-2 highfield, t. (2016). news via voldemort: parody accounts in topical discussions on twitter. new media & society, 18(9), 2028–2045. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815576703 jaidka, k., zhou, a., lelkes, y., egelhofer, j., & lecheler, s. (2022). beyond anonymity: network affordances, under deindividuation, improve social media discussion quality. journal of computer-mediated communication, 27(1). https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmab019 jallinoja, p. & väliverronen, e., (2021). suomalaisten luottamus instituutioihin ja asiantuntijoihin covid19-pandemiassa. media & viestintä, 44(1), 1-24. https://doi.org/10.23983/mv.107298 kovic, m., rauchfleisch, a., sele, m., & caspar, c. (2018). digital astroturfing in politics: definition, typology, and countermeasures. studies in communication sciences, 18(1), 69-85-69–85. https://doi.org/10.24434/j.scoms.2018.01.005 mckay, s., & tenove, c. (2021). disinformation as a threat to deliberative democracy. political research quarterly, 74(3), 703–717. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912920938143 moore, a. (2018). anonymity, pseudonymity, and deliberation: why not everything should be connected. journal of political philosophy, 26(2), 169–192. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12149 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hsxlmk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hsxlmk rains, s. a., & scott, c. r. (2007). to identify or not to identify: a theoretical model of receiver responses to anonymous communication. communication theory, 17(1), 61–91. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2007.00288.x väliverronen, e., laaksonen, s-m., jauho, m. & jallinoja, p. (2020). liberalists and data-solutionists: redefining expertise in twitter debates on coronavirus in finland. journal of science communication, 19(5). https://doi.org/10.22323/2.19050210 woolley, s. c., & howard, p. n. (eds.). (2018). computational propaganda: political parties, politicians, and political manipulation on social media. oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190931407.001.0001 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hsxlmk introduction data and methodology findings references selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): burgess, j., carah, n., brown, m., angus, d. (2022, november). #cottagecore, #futurecore, #sadcore: using critical simulation to explore the interplay between machine vision and vernacular instagram aesthetics. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. #cottagecore, #futurecore, #sadcore: using critical simulation to explore the interplay between machine vision and vernacular instagram aesthetics jean burgess queensland university of technology nicholas carah university of queensland maria-gemma brown university of queensland daniel angus queensland university of technology introduction instagram and parent company meta use machine vision to recognise and label objects and features in images, for a range of purposes: generating automated text captions for accessibility; informing the recommendation engines that curate our feeds; and targeting advertising. therefore, in using instagram, we incidentally help train the platform’s machine vision systems; and these systems play a role in determining which images and ads we see. while haunted by the geneaologies and biases of its underlying training models (denton et al., 2021), machine vision is increasingly used in more open-ended unsupervised modes that are oriented not toward detecting and recognising objects in images, but toward discovering patterns of similarity and association across sets of images. these patterns are used alongside other data signals to infer affinities and similarities among users via the content they interact with. without necessarily fixing them as categories or giving them symbolic labels, platforms use these vectors of association to curate user feeds and target ads (cotter et al., 2021). this work-in-progress paper is part of a multi-year project where we use a novel combination of computational and qualitative methods called ‘critical simulation’ (burgess et al., 2021) to explore the interplay between everyday image-making practices and the algorithmic architecture of instagram. at the heart of the project is a custom-built system that approximates the machine vision technologies in use by instagram, informed by details gleaned from meta’s own technical blogs and the broader technology press. building on the first phase of the project, which explored the ability of machine vision to identify meaningful clusters of objects and environments given the instagram images from a popular music festival (carah, angus & burgess, 2022), this paper moves on to a harder problem: to understand the capacity of machine vision systems to recognise and reproduce the diverse vernacular aesthetics and affects (the ‘vibes’ and ‘moods’) associated with particular scenes on instagram (carah & angus, 2018) in this case, drawing on a case study of instagram’s ‘-cores’ hashtags. the -cores case study on instagram, ‘-cores’ hashtags proliferate around the the affects and aesthetics (the ‘vibes’) associated with particular cultural scenes. they include #aestheticcore, #mallcore, #cybercore, #grungecore, #futurecore, #ravecore, #2000score, #nostalgiacore, #abandonedcore, #sanriocore, #scenecore, #sadcore and so on. there are hundreds of ‘-cores’ hashtags on the platform. ‘-cores’ are significant both because they continuously proliferate and because they express the commonplace sensibility of continuously shifting ‘vibes’ associated with each platform’s vernacular cultures of use (davis, 2022; gibbs et al., 2015). these collective image-making practices are also symptomatic and expressive of the deeper ‘structures of feeling’ (coleman, 2018; papacharissi, 2015) associated with rapidly emergent and competing currents of cultural change (therieau, 2022). the most well-known recent example is #cottagecore, which began as a cosy, retro visual aesthetic for fashion and home decorating, crossed over into mainstream popular and celebrity culture via tiktok trends, memes, spotify playlists, and taylor swift’s album folklore, and in some spaces has come to represent an at-times counter-feminist white millenial ethos oriented around homemaking. for our purposes, the ‘-cores’ hashtags are particularly intriguing because while instagram users engage in deliberate, coherent and patterned aesthetic practices, we also understand the ‘-cores’ as affective in the sense that they give expression to sensations that either cannot be fully captured and conveyed symbolically—as well as, in some cases, subcultural symbolic practices whose meanings are deliberately concealed from outsiders. the tendency of vernacular aesthetics to evade verbal description and symbolic representation may pose a significant challenge to machine vision systems, which are primarily trained to detect and match objects and faces. this leads us to the empirical question at the heart of this paper: how and to what extent are the various and overlapping aesthetics associated with the -cores salient to or reproducible by the machine vision technologies commonly used by platforms like instagram? investigation and analysis in order to address our empirical research questions, we first use our purpose-built machine vision system to undertake unsupervised clusterings of a sample of the 359,150 images associated with a curated set of 60 ‘-cores’ hashtags, which we have collected following a period of immersive qualitative investigation of the -cores phenomenon on the platform itself during 2021. our system is not pre-trained on the images in our dataset, and nor does it have any information as to which captions, usernames or hashtags are associated with which images. we are therefore able to examine post-hoc whether the model, using only latent properties of the images themselves, clusters together images according to their hashtags or imposes entirely different logics of association. figure 1: our system provides an interactive interface to explore image clusters organised hierarchically according to the machine vision algorithm. on the left pane we see a cluster of >1000 images, organised into 16 sub clusters. tool tips allow inspection of the mixture of hashtags that associate with images in any single cluster, and we can click into these high-level clusters to inspect further successive sub-clusters of images (as indicated via the right pane). we anticipate mixed results. the ‘-cores’ are partly characterised by discernible semiotic patterns that we might expect our model to cluster together. for instance, #cottagecore images feature visually distinctive soft lighting, cosy cardigans, warm tones, and botanicals. but, from the perspective of instagram’s cultures of use, ‘-cores’ hashtags capture a fleeting aesthetic style or feeling that cannot easily be described on the basis of the distinctive objects or scenes depicted in the images, and therefore may remain inscrutable to our models, which remain biased toward objects and faces. we then undertake a close cultural analysis of the clusters the machine does produce, reading them through the lens of our existing knowledge of the -core hashtags. this enables us to speculate on how the platforms’ machine vision logics, once imposed on algorithmic feed curation, for example, might play a role in shaping instagram’s platform aesthetics, and on internet culture more broadly. references burgess, j., angus, d., carah, n., andrejevic, m., hawker, k., lewis, k., … li, l. (2021). critical simulation as hybrid digital method for exploring the data operations and vernacular cultures of visual social media platforms. socarxiv [preprint] https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/2cwsu carah, n., & angus, d. (2018). algorithmic brand culture: participatory labour, machine learning and branding on social media. media, culture & society, 40(2), 178-194. carah, n., angus, d., & burgess, j. (2022). tuning machines: an approach to exploring how instagram’s machine vision operates on and through digital media’s participatory visual cultures. cultural studies https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2022.2042578 coleman, r. (2018). theorizing the present: digital media, pre-emergence and infrastructures of feeling. cultural studies 32(4): 600-622. cotter, k., medeiros, m., pak, c., & thorson, k. (2021). “reach the right people”: the politics of “interests” in facebook’s classification system for ad targeting. big data & society 8(1), https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951721996046 davis, a. (2022). a vibe shift is coming. will any of us survive it? the cut. available online: https://www.thecut.com/2022/02/a-vibe-shift-is-coming.html denton, e., hanna, a., amironesei, r., smart, a., & nicole, h. 2021. on the genealogy of machine learning datasets: a critical history of imagenet. big data & society 8(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211035955 gibbs, m., meese, j., arnold, m., nansen, b., & carter, m. (2015). #funeral and instagram: death, social media, and platform vernacular. information, communication & society 18(3): 255-268. papacharissi, z. (2015). affective publics: sentiment, technology, and politics. new york: oxford university press. therieau, m. vibe, mood, energy. the drift, january 19. https://www.thedriftmag.com/vibe-mood-energy/ selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): vitak, j., & zimmer, m. (2021, october). from watched at work to watched at home: workplace surveillance during a pandemic. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. from watched at work to watched at home: workplace surveillance during a pandemic jessica vitak university of maryland, college park michael zimmer marquette university background the future of work is increasingly intertwined with the widespread collection of employee data for workplace monitoring, safety and efficiency tracking, predictive analytics, and performance evaluations (mateescu & nguyen, 2019). while surveilling employees has existed as long as there has been employment, there is newfound interest in the use of digital monitoring tools: a 2019 study of 239 large corporations found that 50% were using “nontraditional” surveillance methods, including logging and analyzing phone calls, scrutinizing emails and social media posts, and tracking who attends meetings, an increase from 30% four year earlier (wartzman, 2020). recent advances in pervasive monitoring and data collection in the workplace include the use of prediction and flagging tools, biometrics data collection through sensors and microchips, remote monitoring and gps tracking, and algorithmic management. increasingly, these data are used to make meaningful decisions about employees— including whether they should be hired, promoted, or fired—based on faceless algorithmic processes (köchling & wehner, 2020). most concerning is that such surveillance practices and impacts are not evenly distributed across workers (levy, 2016; rosenblat & stark, 2016). the covid-19 lockdowns caused significant shifts in work practices—and in workplace monitoring. while unemployment soared in some sectors, many office workers began working from home. early evaluations suggest this shift has not reduced the amount of work-related surveillance. rather, it has spawned renewed interest in monitoring those working-from-home with increasingly invasive tools, including monitoring software to record employees’ web browsing and active work hours, monitoring attentiveness in videoconferences, and mandating always-on webcam rules (harwell, 2020). even when employees return to the office, additional measures will likely be taken to track everything from location to body temperature to coworker proximity (hepler, 2020). this study begins unpacking the sociotechnical implications of shifting work surveillance practices due to covid-19, focusing on how evolving and emergent workplace surveillance practices may impact workers. we are motivated by the concern that as pandemic restrictions ease, employers may continue to extend at-home surveillance practices while also instituting new monitoring in the workplace. this “function creep” (ball, 2010) raises concerns that increased digital surveillance will lead to reduced agency, control, and independence at work (ganster & fusilier, 1989), no matter where those activities are taking place. study overview this study was motivated by two research questions: rq1: what concerns do american office workers have about workplace surveillance practices while working from home? rq2: what concerns do american office workers have about workplace surveillance practices when they return to the office? our survey instrument was designed for workers who had been affected by pandemic restrictions. the survey included demographic and background questions, and asked questions about respondents’ work environment before and during the pandemic, including their perceived job security, satisfaction, stress, and control, as well as the monitoring practices used by their employer. the survey also included factorial vignettes (wallander, 2009) to address our rqs and unpack how multiple factors affect workers’ attitudes toward workplace monitoring. respondents viewed 35 scenarios; each scenario had the same format, with four factors that randomly changed in each scenario. these factors were derived from nissenbaum’s (2010) work on privacy as contextual integrity: data attributes, the purpose for data collection, the actors who would see data collected, and the transmission principle associated with data collection. by using contextual integrity as a guiding framework, we can identify workers’ “pain points” regarding information flows in the workplace. see figure 1 for an example vignette from the study. data was collected in november 2020 via qualtrics, which was contracted to recruit american adults who had been employed by the same company since at least the beginning of 2020 and who worked at home for at least part of the pandemic. after data cleaning, the final dataset included 645 respondents (53% male, 84% white, average age=44). most respondents (77%) had at least a bachelor’s degree, and the most common jobs were in information technology (23%), business/finance (15%), and education (14%). figure 1. sample vignette from the survey. overview of results we first conducted a series of paired t-tests to compare respondents’ attitudes toward their work environment before the pandemic with their attitudes in november. over the course of the pandemic, workers reported a significant increase in their job stress and decreases in their job satisfaction, security, and knowledge of how their employer monitored them. when asked about the types of monitoring their employer conducted at the start of 2020, 78% selected at least one from a list of options; 12.9% said their employer did not monitor them, while 9% were unsure. monitoring time and attendance (61.4%), work email (40.5%), physical location (32.9%), and network access (28.9%) were most common. however, when asked whether their employer had begun using new technologies or changed workplace monitoring policies, 23% were unsure, suggesting confusion about what policies may have changed due to the pandemic. because each respondent read 35 vignettes, our dataset includes more than 22,000 evaluations of how appropriate and concerning a scenario was perceived. we used linear mixed models to identify differences in factors while controlling for repeated responses from each respondent. through this approach, we were able to identify specific data attributes, purposes, actors, and transmission principles that are most likely to be viewed as problematic forms of workplace monitoring. full results will be shared in the conference presentation. discussion and implications covid-19 upended work in many ways and forced companies and employees to reconsider best practices for getting work done—both in the traditional workplace as well as at home. this blurring of public and private boundaries now under surveillance is concerning, as is the potential for such surveillance practices to continue after the pandemic. this study provides insights into workers’ perceptions of current workplace monitoring practices and, more importantly, their concerns regarding potential future uses of workplace monitoring. it also raises questions about how such reductions in privacy and independence at work may have negative outcomes on worker productivity, satisfaction, and well-being. references ball, k. (2010). workplace surveillance: an overview. labor history, 51, 87-106. ganster, d. c., & fusilier, m. r. (1989). control in the workplace. international review of industrial and organizational psychology, 4, 235-280. harwell, d. (2020, april 30). managers turn to surveillance software, always-on webcams to ensure employees are (really) working from home. washington post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/30/work-from-home-surveillance/ hepler, l. (2020, april 28). welcome back to the office. this ring will track your location and temperature. protocol. https://www.protocol.com/touchless-doors-biometric-ringsproptech-cornavirus köchling, a., & wehner, m. c. (2020). discriminated by an algorithm: a systematic review of discrimination and fairness by algorithmic decision-making in the context of hr recruitment and hr development. business research, 13, 795848. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40685-020-00134-w levy, k. (2016). digital surveillance in the hypermasculine workplace. feminist media studies, 16, 361-365. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1138607 mateescu, a., & nguyen, a. (2019). algorithmic management in the workplace. data & society research institute. https://datasociety.net/library/explainer-algorithmicmanagement-in-the-workplace/ nissenbaum, h. (2010). privacy in context. stanford university press. rosenblat, a., & stark, l. (2016). algorithmic labor and information asymmetries: a case study of uber’s drivers. international journal of communication, 10, 3758-3784. wartzman, r. (2019, march 20). workplace tracking is growing fast. most workers don’t seem very concerned. fast company. https://www.fastcompany.com/90318167/workplace-tracking-is-growing-fast-mostworkers-dont-seem-very-concerned https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/30/work-from-home-surveillance/ https://www.protocol.com/touchless-doors-biometric-rings-proptech-cornavirus https://www.protocol.com/touchless-doors-biometric-rings-proptech-cornavirus https://doi.org/10.1007/s40685-020-00134-w https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1138607 https://datasociety.net/library/explainer-algorithmic-management-in-the-workplace/ https://datasociety.net/library/explainer-algorithmic-management-in-the-workplace/ https://www.fastcompany.com/90318167/workplace-tracking-is-growing-fast-most-workers-dont-seem-very-concerned https://www.fastcompany.com/90318167/workplace-tracking-is-growing-fast-most-workers-dont-seem-very-concerned selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 myles, d. (2022, november). shaping app data publics as a national security issue: a comparative analysis of the cfius-grindr and cfius-tiktok rulings. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. shaping app data publics as a national security issue: a comparative analysis of the cfius-grindr and cfiustiktok rulings david myles institut national de la recherche scientifique cfius and the us interest in platform data practices charged with evaluating the implications that large business transactions pose for us national security, the committee on foreign investment in the united states (cfius) has been at the centre of two major controversies in 2019. in march, cfius labelled the queer dating app grindr as a risk for national security and forced the chinese conglomerate kunlun tech, which had taken control of the app a year prior, to divest from it by june 2020 (myles, accepted). in november, the committee launched an investigation into the chinese company bytedance, owner of the popular app tiktok, after it acquired the app musical.ly in 2017 (gray, 2021). these investigations came in the wake of the new foreign investment risk review modernization act (firrma, 2018), which extended cfius’s scope to oversee business transactions pertaining to digital platforms that collect or monetize the sensitive data of us citizens. once predominantly concerned with military and energy asset acquisitions, the new firrmaempowered cfius shifted its focus to digital platforms and their data infrastructures to ensure that their foreign acquisition would not hinder the united states’ national security and technological superiority. this shift transformed cfius into an influential actor in matters of internet regulation and platform data (mal)practice. the objective of this paper is to compare how tiktok and grindr, then both chineseowned apps, were construed as threats to us national security. specifically, it highlights how app data publics are increasingly at the heart of important discursive struggles that seek to determine whether or how they constitute a risk. as our analysis shows, these discursive struggles have been exacerbated by the ongoing us-china trade conflict that opposes the two nationalist superpowers in a race to control key digital assets (kokas, 2018). shaping data publics as a contentious national security issue this paper mobilizes a political approach to communication to discuss the implications that the datafication of our daily and intimate lives by social media apps raise in terms of internet regulatory issues (wilken et al., 2019). specifically, it highlights how apps build new ‘data publics’ (mörtenböck & mooshammer, 2020), that is, how datafication increasingly participates in “defining the modalities through which social groups are constituted and recognized as such, and in shaping the legitimacy of the sociopolitical claims that can be made in their name or against them” (myles, accepted: 5). it also considers how lgbtq+ dating apps increasingly manage sensitive queer data (lutz & rancini, 2017), like hiv status, gender identity, and sexual orientation, which gives way to new queer data publics that can be weaponized for political and socioeconomic gains. to do so, this paper critically examines how the cfius-grindr and the cfius-tiktok rulings have each been distinctly shaped as public controversies by a series of stakeholders (e.g., journalists, pundits, politicians, platform owners, legal experts). to do so, we turn to controversy analysis, which is useful to understand how stakeholders collectively delineate, often through discursive struggles, the regulatory frames that should govern digital platforms and, thus, participate in the social and material construction of technologies (epstein et al., 2016). to conduct our comparative controversy analysis, we used the google news search engine to collect 294 papers pertaining to the cfius-tiktok ruling and 107 papers pertaining to the cfius-grindr rulings. while using google’s search engine presents inherent methodological limitations relating to the platform’s algorithmic opacity and biases, this strategy still enabled us to observe emerging trends and identify key stakeholders. our analysis was informed by additional documentation, like ipo filings and shareholders' reports, cfius documentation, and legal reports produced by specialized trade law firms. the selected articles were coded in the qualitative software qda miner and were the object of an sts-informed discourse analysis focused on the authoritative – and often contested – claims through which internet regulatory issues are publicly shaped (epstein et al., 2016). the unequal treatment of grindr’s and tiktok’s data publics our analysis highlights how the cfius-grindr and the cfius-tiktok rulings similarly sought to construe the chinese ownership of social media apps as a potential threat to us national security by overtly conjuring anti-chinese sentiment. namely, cfius posited that significant risks were associated with having sensitive data infrastructures fall ‘into the wrong hands’ or seeing the personal data of us citizens ‘intercepted’ by chinese authorities. however, a closer examination revealed that tiktok’s and grindr’s data publics were, in fact, made to matter quite differently by key stakeholders, like us officials and pundits. on the one hand, the acquisition of musical.ly by bytedance was predominantly framed as a data privacy matter. as stated by former white house press secretary kayleigh mcenany, apps like tiktok “collect significant amounts of private data on users”, and the trump administration is “committed to protecting the american people from all cyber threats” (associated press, 2020). on the other hand, the cfius investigation into grindr’s corporate data practices was mainly made to matter by depicting lgbtq+ citizens as higher security risks for the united states because of their sexual and gender identities. this was accomplished by construing grindr users as being more vulnerable to covert blackmail initiatives that could result in key us citizens disclosing sensitive information to the chinese authorities. as such, the cfius-tiktok ruling was mainly portrayed as a privacy and human rights issue while the grindr ruling seldom was. and while the cfius-grindr ruling was made to matter by questioning the allegiance of grindr’s queer users (e.g., by positing their potential ‘political disenfranchisement’), the allegiance of tiktokers was never challenged in the same way, thus hinting at the unequal treatment that lgbtq+ citizens face in matters of data privacy and national security. this paper concludes by raising some of the implications that datafication poses for the lgbtq+ communities, as they have little control over the regulatory frames that oversee their activities online (denardis & hackl, 2016). references associated press (2020) trump orders chinese owner of tiktok to sell u.s. assets. ctv news, 14 august. denardis l and hackl am (2016) internet control points as lgbt rights mediation. information, communication & society 19(6): 753-770. epstein d, katzenbach c and musiani f (2016) doing internet governance: practices, controversies, infrastructures, and institutions. internet policy review 5(3): 1-14. firrma (2018) “title xvii—review of foreign investment and export controls”. u.s. department of the treasury, united states. gray j (2021) the geopolitics of ‘platforms’: the tiktok challenge. internet policy review 10(2). kokas a (2018) platform patrol: china, the united states, and the global battle for data security. the journal of asian studies 77(4): 923-933. lutz c and ranzini g (2017) where dating meets data: investigating social and institutional privacy concerns on tinder. social media+ society 3(1): 1-12. mörtenböck p and mooshammer h (2020) introduction. in: mörtenböck p and mooshammer h (eds) data publics: public plurality in an era of data determinacy. london: routledge, pp. 1-25. myles d (accepted) grindr? it’s a ‘blackmailer’s goldmine’! the weaponization of queer data publics amid the us-china trade conflict. sexualities, special issue on sexual datafication. wilken r, burgess j and albury k (2019) dating apps and data markets: a political economy of communication approach. computational culture 7: 1-26. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 from school strike to networked movement: diffusion dynamics in the german-speaking #fridaysforfuture network on twitter xixuan zhang freie universität berlin / weizenbaum institute introduction fridaysforfuture has proven to be one of the most influential social movements of recent times. initiated by greta thunberg and carried by students who skip school every friday to call for climate justice and the safeguarding of their future, it emerged and flourished along with both recognition and criticism. on social media, #fridaysforfuture serves as a facilitator of offline movements and a public arena of political discourses, revealing the independent and interdependent trajectories of a plurality of online communities throughout cycles of protests. based on diffusion network and cascade analysis, this study explores diffusion dynamics and connectivity formation in germanspeaking #fridaysforfuture from its emergence to its expansion. theoretical background and literature review flexible communication networks and personalized engagement facilitated by icts have empowered individuals and marginalized groups to form collectivities in the absence of bureaucratic organizations. gathered, moved, and organized by flows of ideas, projects, and visions from multiple affiliations, individuals are intersections of different communities across the changing field of social movements, while the trajectories of communities are delimited by the intersections of individuals (diani & mische, 2015). in social movement research, information diffusion, associated with mobilization and participation, is a long-standing concept of mechanisms explaining the prevalence of social movements and the spread of symbols and tactics. successful movements require social affirmation from multiple sources and strong connectivities within the networks (centola & macy, 2007). unlike diffusion in the small-world model’s global friendship network in which weak ties spread certain types of behavior easily across communities, social movements first need to gain momentum within neighborhoods and small communities through the internal model and then realize political mobilization through the external model (easley & kleinberg, 2010). suggested citation (apa): zhang, x., (2021, october). from school strike to networked movement: diffusion dynamics in the german-speaking #fridaysforfuture network on twitter. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. modeling-based research estimates when and how people would join collective action by setting a threshold of participation but cannot generalize complex contagion through network simulation. in social movement research, most empirical diffusion studies on digital social movements are primarily issues-centric, based on analysis of the key actors and the most proliferated messages in retweet networks, which may overvalue the connections between retweeted and retweeting actors without taking information traversal, intermediary actors, and retweets into account. to reveal the diffusion processes and emergence of communities in the german-speaking #fridaysforfuture network on twitter, i discern the difference of network structures, underline group dynamics, and include diffused contents into the analysis, in order to answer the research question: how did different diffusion dynamics facilitate the emergence of #fridaysforfuture on twitter? methodology i collected tweets by querying for german-language tweets containing the hashtag #fridaysforfuture via twitter api, from september 14, 2018, to march 18, 2019, covering tweeting activities from the emergence of the movement to the first global strike. by applying a community detection algorithm on the follow network and the infrastructure of diffusion and interaction, actors are classified into seven groups: (1) fff, (2) news, (3) right-wing, (4) liberal left, (5) radical left, (6) austrian, and (7) swiss cluster. assisted by a language model-based cluster analysis, (re)tweets are classified into seven topics: (1) movement and activism, (2) environmental issues, (3) government and politics, (4) parties and politicians, (5) leading activists, (6) youth, and (7) education and schooling. finally, a diffusion network based on follow-following relations of actors infers the information flows which move from actors to actors (vosoughi, roy, & aral, 1 2018). through the diffusion network, cascades of retweeted tweets and network metrics in different time windows show diffusion dynamics among communities. findings generally, the diffusion network interrogates how one’s (re)post could trigger the retweeting activities of others. it is generated through 238,458 retweets (18,937 unique tweets) by 52,224 actors, in which the fff activists and organizations are the main intermediaries and activators. most of the tweets in #fridaysforfuture are about activism, introducing the movement, and calling for action for the upcoming strikes in target cities. at the same time, politics, environmental and educational issues, leading activists, and young participants are discussed in the online discourse as well. a sliding window approach is applied to capture one-week changes in a one-day interval (figure 2). fff actors, enabled and endorsed by the movement, have the most significant size, outdegree, indegree, and betweenness values, corresponding to their role as central contributor, diffuser, adopter, and broker over time. while news and leftwing groups distributed and created posts at the beginning of the movement, right-wing see figure 11 groups joined the #fridaysforfuture network after its expansion and bridged their own messages intensively. the cascade analysis, considering each retweeted tweet as a cascade and each post owner as the source, indicates how well each message diffuses, distinguished by communities (figure 3) and topics (figure 4). fff clusters were generally most likely to gain significant attention and spread broader and faster than other groups. in contrast, the cascades activated by right-wing actors were also greater, but not broader, faster, or deeper. while the cascades by radical left and austrian clusters diffuse deeper and faster, actors from news groups and liberal left triggered cascades to spread broader. regarding the topics of the tweets, posts about the leading activists and schooling were generally diffused faster and broader, while posts on movement were spread deeper and faster. though the most significant part of #fridaysforfuture protested for climate justice and better environmental politics, tweets on environmental issues neither triggered great retweeters nor diffused broader. among the communities (figure 5), the fff hubs retweeted and were retweeted across groups about the movement, political youth, party/politics criticism, and activism for coal phase-out and forest protection. in contrast to the reciprocal reposting activities between left-wing, news, and activist groups on #fridaysforfuture, right-wing actors and groups from other german-speaking countries are relatively isolated. the topic distribution of the right-wing actors features a unique pattern focusing on truancy, hypocritical activists, and instrumentalized children. conclusion the german-speaking #fridaysforfuture network on twitter not only serves as an organizing agent for protest participation and movement mobilization but also features an issue network for political discourse. the mobilization endeavors of fff clusters, promotion of news community, engagement of left-wing and news community, as well as the counter-public hosted by right-wing actors to attack the movement enabled its emergence and prevalence. references bennett, w. l., & segerberg, a. (2012). the logic of connective action: digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. information, communication & society, 15(5), 739-768. centola, d., & macy, m. (2007). complex contagions and the weakness of long ties. american journal of sociology, 113(3), 702-734. diani, m., & mische, a. (2015). network approaches and social movements. the oxford handbook of social movements, 306-325. easley, d., & kleinberg, j. (2010). networks, crowds, and markets (vol. 8). cambridge university press cambridge. vosoughi, s., roy, d., & aral, s. (2018). the spread of true and false news online. science, 359(6380), 1146-1151. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 “dear congress, just play dead”: tiktok’s absurd guide to surviving #lockdown jacqueline ryan vickery university of north texas jen cardenas university of north texas an insurrection at the u.s. capitol. a global pandemic. an active shooter drill at school. these three lockdowns may appear disparate, yet tiktok creators used the #schoolshooting hashtag to memetically and discursively link them. this paper examines how young tiktok creators enact strategies of playfulness and absurdity in response to violence and trauma. through a ludic-carnivalesque reading of young people’s irreverent engagement with trauma, we demonstrate how youth use tiktok to reclaim emotional control of uncontrollable situations. we situate our analysis of playful #schoolshooting videos as part of an imitation public that is constituted through practices of mimesis, replication, and imitation. however, we broaden our focus to consider the latent political potential of the publics that memetic practices create. within this framework we ask: what discourses and shared practices emerge through playful #schoolshooting memes on tiktok and what are the implications for the everyday politics of youth citizenship? imitation publics we approach school shootings as doubly memetic: both the actual phenomenon of school shootings and the media texts created about them function as repetitive, malleable, polysemic, and “contagious patterns of cultural information” that “shape the mindsets and significant forms of behaviors and actions of a social group” (knobel and lankshear, 2007, p. 199). extending shifman’s (2012) conceptualization of internet memes, zulli and zulli (2020) contend that the infrastructure and vernacular of tiktok suggested citation (apa): vickery, j.r. and cardenas, j. (2021, october). “dear congress, just play dead”: tiktok’s absurd guide to surviving #lockdown. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. allow for a memetic reading of the platform itself. memetic practices – made visible and possible through the affordances of tiktok challenges, “checks”, hashtags, sounds, and trends – lead to the formation of “imitation publics.” the publics emerge through engagement with memetic forms and content, rather than through interpersonal connections, discourses, or ideologies. however, zulli and zulli note that this does not preclude the potential for political or ideological engagement. as we will demonstrate, the playful #schoolshooting meme began as a mode of coping that evolved into overt engagement with political discourse. irreverent internet and the ludic-carnivalesque while there is nothing funny about actual school shootings, we contextualize playful and humorous responses as part of what highfield (2017) refers to as the “irreverent internet,” wherein sarcasm, irony, and humor inform communication practices. the platform vernacular of tiktok further incentivizes playful content; therefore, we propose a “ludic-carnivalesque” (li and blommaert, 2020) reading of irreverent playful #schoolshooting tiktok memes. li and blommaert (2020) synthesize bakhtin’s carnival rituals and huizinga’s ludic practices to argue that “irrational'' playful practices can expose, dismiss, or overturn problematic social orders. through this lens, joking about the trauma of gun violence, a deadly pandemic, and a riotous insurrection is not only ludic, but also “pregnant with power of deconstruction” (p. 45). the playful memes indicate that the only “rational” response to absurd situations is further absurdity. while the #schoolshooting memes were not initially overtly political, a ludic-carnivalesque reading of irreverent humor and playful critique allows us to consider how “silly citizenship” (hartley, 2020) and memetic interactions can be activated via imitation publics (davis, love, and killen, 2018; penney, 2020). method and sample heeding schellewald’s (2021) warning to avoid “an overinterpretation of individual videos [on tiktok],” our sample focuses on “embeddedness within the broader background of shared trends, memes, or platform-specific language” (p. 1440). our methodology consists of two phases conducted over an 18-month period: an initial exploration of the #schoolshooting meme on tiktok and two case studies that represent the “liveness” of tiktok (zulli and zulli, 20) and the discursive evolution of the meme. our first phase of analysis, performed august–december 2019, relies on collated systemic searches for specific hashtags and sounds that young people use to memeify school shootings. our analysis focuses on memetic videos that incorporate play, humor, irreverence, sarcasm, parody, and/or satire; we exclude memorials, tributes, or videos expressing affective collective grief. this first phase of analysis allowed us to understand how tiktok creators memeified school shootings and provides the contextual groundwork for our case studies. in the second phase, we identified two seemingly unrelated events that young people discursively and memetically linked to school shootings: covid-19 lockdowns from march-may 2020 and the storming of the u.s. capitol building by radicalized trump supporters on january 6, 2021. we use these two events as case studies to analyze how the platform vernacular of tiktok incentivizes memetic practices and how young people use irreverent humor as a springboard for everyday political engagement. findings and analysis school shooting lockdowns in our first round of analysis, we identified three genres of playful #schoolshooting videos, which we organize according to their memetic function. the first category is playful parodies of media stereotypes and tropes (e.g., the “weird” kid as gunman), the second is playful critiques of the absurdity of school violence responses (e.g., poking fun at bulletproof backpacks), and the third is playful coping through dance and movement (e.g., celebrating a lockdown that cancelled an exam). the videos create an imitation public using playful mediated bodies that corporally engage with the replication, mutability, and fidelity of the polysemic meme. the carnivalesque playfulness reveals an acknowledgement and critique of adult-centric neoliberal narratives that attempt to individualize and “make sense of'' the absurdity of violence at schools. although the videos are intended to be humorous, the performative and social affordances of tiktok and the mediated playful body emphasize a ludic-carnivalesque engagement with generationally specific cultural trauma. pandemic lockdowns during the 2020 pandemic lockdown, school shootings no longer transpired and conversations about school violence dropped out of public discourse; yet tiktok creators were not optimistic about this development. we identified two memetic practices in this subgenre of #pandemic #schoolshooting memes: (1) playful portrayal of the foiled school shooter and (2) a presumed inevitability that school shootings would resume after lockdown. these two memetic and discursive practices within this derivative illustrate young people’s awareness of the political forces around the temporary lull in school shootings and highlight their frustrations. they are acutely aware that without structural changes, schools will continue to be spaces of potential violence. u.s. capitol lockdown tiktok creators drew obvious parallels between the u.s. capitol building lockdown and school shooting lockdowns. in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection, “dear congress” advice videos portrayed young people parroting familiar school safety discourses back to lawmakers. the trending sound clip, with its optimistic tone and absurdly individualizing advice (e.g., turn off the lights, play dead) was jarringly juxtaposed with images of terrified senators cowering under chairs. back in 2019, young people used tiktok to playfully mock, parody, and satirize this #schoolshooting “advice.” although the original memetic practices offered subtle critiques of policies that failed to create safe schools, they did not explicitly engage with political discourse or address adult institutions. the evolution of the memetic practice – and direct address to lawmakers reveals the ways in which imitation publics can be activated for political engagement. conclusion through irreverent humor, tiktok creators build playful imitation publics to critique and cope with structural problems related to gun violence in the u.s. analyzing these practices through the lens of the ludic-carnivalesque reveals the ways young people enact strategies to demarcate boundaries, articulate cogent critiques of policies and policymakers that do not prevent school shootings, and turn painful and traumatic realities into a fun and harmless bakhtinian carnival. further, the covid-19 pandemic and the insurrection demonstrate how these memetic practices can evolve to activate latent political discursive engagement. references bakhtin, m. (1984). problems of dostoevsky's poetics. university of minnesota press. davis, j. l., love, t. p., & killen, g. (2018). seriously funny: the political work of humor on social media. new media & society, 20(10), 3898-3916. hartley, j. (2010). silly citizenship. critical discourse studies, 7(4), 233-248. highfield, t. (2017). social media and everyday politics. polity. huizinga, j. (1980) homo ludens: a study of the play-element in culture. routledge & kegan paul. knobel, m., & lankshear, c. (2007). new literacies: everyday practices & classroom learning. open university press. li, k., & blommaert, j. (2020). 'please abuse me': ludic-carnivalesque female masochism on sina weibo. gender & language, 14(1). penney, j. (2020). ‘it’s so hard not to be funny in this situation’: memes and humor in us youth online political expression. television & new media, 21(8), 791-806. schellewald, a. (2021). communicative forms on tiktok: perspectives from digital ethnography. international journal of communication, 15, 21. shifman, l. (2012). an anatomy of a youtube meme. new media & society, 14(2), 187203. zulli, d., & zulli, d. j. (2020). extending the internet meme: conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation publics on the tiktok platform. new media & society, 1461444820983603. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): lutz, c., & stocker, v. (2022, november). liquid consumption in the platform economy: a comparative case study of three platforms and six user groups. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. liquid consumption in the platform economy: a comparative case study of three platforms and six user groups christoph lutz bi norwegian business school volker stocker weizenbaum institute for the networked society technische universität berlin introduction and conceptual background in our daily lives, we increasingly rely on digital platforms for many activities, from socializing, to transportation, and work (van dijck et al., 2018). digital platforms enable new forms of consumption that can be more “liquid” than traditional alternatives. the notion of “liquid consumption” (bardhi & eckhardt, 2017) draws on bauman’s theory of liquid modernity to describe shifts in consumer behavior in recent years. liquid consumption is contrasted to more traditional “solid” consumption and is characterized by ephemerality (rather than endurance), access (rather than ownership), and dematerialization (rather than material possessions). given the recency of the liquid consumption concept, the increasing diversity of the platform economy, and the rapid pace at which it is evolving, our understanding of liquid consumption within and across platforms is immature. despite the popularity of liquid consumption theory and the prominent role of digital platforms in shaping liquid consumption (e.g., sharing economy discourses often focus on access; analyses of social media platforms, such as snapchat, or specific functions, such as instagram stories, spotlight ephemerality), a thorough and comprehensive analysis how digital platforms enable or constrain liquid consumption is missing. in our research, we address this gap. we comprehensively study the role of liquidity on different digital platforms. in doing so, we focus on examining platform use, consumption, and production. this is for two reasons. first, we want to capture the differences and interactions between distinct but interrelated market sides. second, new types of platform-mediated organizing and work merit attention. in this context, consumption and production intersect, and the consumption may include services provided by humans (i.e., labor). on two-sided or multi-sided platforms, the liquidity of the experience likely differs considerably depending on whether someone uses the platform as a provider (e.g., airbnb host), consumer (e.g., airbnb guest), or in an intermediary and hybrid role (e.g., a deliveroo rider connecting consumers in the form of restaurant patrons to providers in the form of restaurants). the research is based on an in-depth comparative case study of three leading platforms and six roles, analyzing how strongly each platform and role can be situated at the liquid pole of the solid-liquid spectrum. our comparative case study aims to provide novel insights into the operational characteristics of the different platforms, exploring the (potentially significant) role of liquid consumption. it answers the following research questions: 1. how inherent is liquidity in a certain product/service category in the first place (pre-platform)? 2. where do different platforms fall on the dimensions of the liquid-solid consumption spectrum? 3. how does the solidity/liquidity of the consumption/use/experience differ between providers and consumers? methods this paper focuses on three distinct and prominent platforms of the platform economy: airbnb, uber, fiverr. each of the three types of gig work in duggan et al.’s (2020) typology of capital-platform work, app-work, and crowdwork is represented by one key platform. within each platform, we analyze the consumption experience, broadly speaking, from two sides: the consumer side (airbnb guest, uber passenger, fiverr client) and the provider side (airbnb host, uber driver, fiverr freelancer). our comparative case study approach allows to systematically analyze how the different platforms enable or constrain liquid consumption (yin, 2018). the case studies on individual platforms combine academic work, secondary sources published by the relevant platforms (e.g., press releases and annual reports), and additional sources, for example, from the trade press, newspapers, or analysts. moreover, we critically analyze the platforms using the walkthrough approach (light et al., 2018). we use graphical maps – spider web diagrams – as analytical support tool to (i) visualize the results of the three individual case studies based on a structured scoring approach along key dimensions, and (ii) conduct multi-dimensional comparisons between different platforms to identify differences and trade-offs (ahmed & rafiq, 1998). expected results and next steps we expect to reveal inherent variations across different platform domains. airbnb is based in the hospitality and tourism sector, which is indeed characterized by ephemerality, access, and dematerialization on the consumer side, particularly so in the area of experience tourism (e.g., guided tours). however, on the provider side, this sector is infrastructureand investment-heavy (thus negating access and dematerialization for a good part). the sector is partly ephemeral on the provider side due to the frequent change of consumers, but with some opportunities for loyalty and long-term sociability. uber is based in the transportation sector. this sector is less characterized by ephemerality, access and dematerialization on the consumer side. for example, commuting is a more regular activity and less ephemeral than tourism for most people. on the provider side, this sector is by no means liquid. it comes with having to own assets (e.g., a car/bus) or lease them on a long-term, committal basis, and these assets are very much material. again, the service provision per se is not ephemeral, even though many service encounters might be one-off, short-term, and superficial. finally, fiverr spans different sectors but the key services offered on the platform include software development, graphic design, and writing and translation services. so, the work covers digital service tasks. for consumers, such work is dematerialized, but ownership-based (the client gets to keep the final product and the copyright in many cases). ephemerality depends on the specific context. whereas production is often more solid than consumption, the provider side is dematerialized to the extent that digital production technologies (i.e., hardware and software “assets”) are required for production. for research questions 2 and 3, we are currently collecting data and will be able to present in-depth insights at the conference. we will combine an analysis of platform communication, in terms of how strongly liquidity (in the form of ephemerality, access and dematerialization) is part of the platform’s vision, operating model, and governance (light et al., 2018). particular attention will be paid to stakeholder-oriented communication that targets either consumers or providers and sheds light on the liquidity logics on each side. this will be followed up with the socio-technical walkthrough, where we will study the platform experience directly (if possible) as both providers and consumers or (if not possible) indirectly through third-party sources (e.g., select number of interviews with providers, blog posts, youtube videos etc.). references ahmed, p. k., & rafiq, m. (1998). integrated benchmarking: a holistic examination of select techniques for benchmarking analysis. benchmarking for quality management & technology, 5(3), 225-242 bardhi, f., & eckhardt, g. m. (2017). liquid consumption. journal of consumer research, 44(3), 582-597. duggan, j., sherman, u., carbery, r., & mcdonnell, a. (2020). algorithmic management and app-work in the gig economy: a research agenda for employment relations and hrm. human resource management journal, 30(1), 114-132. light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881-900. van dijck, j., poell, t., & de waal, m. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford university press. yin, r. (2018). case study research and applications: design and methods (sixth edition). sage publications. microsoft word aoir_final_jaramillo-dent.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): jaramillo-dent,d. (2022, november). immigrant tiktokers decolonizing algorithmic visibility presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. immigrant tiktokers decolonizing algorithmic visibility daniela jaramillo-dent erasmus university rotterdam and university of huelva introduction immigration is deeply rooted in colonial structures that define who migrates and where, through a hierarchized perspective of the representations, knowledge, and ideas of who immigrants are and what is involved in their experiences. in this sense, appadurai (2019) described the difficulties faced by immigrants and their narratives to fit mainstream expectations set by modern nation-states. it is possible to extrapolate these societal requirements to the digital space of social media platforms, where a combination of human and algorithmic moderation systems determine what is available, visible, and viral (gillespie, 2010, 2018). thus, colonial structures of dominance are perpetuated through coded biases (benjamin, 2019) and algorithmized oppression systems (noble, 2018). the internal functioning of these moderation infrastructures is obscure, although we can glimpse at them through the contents and discourse of creators who describe their experiences with the platform, its algorithm, and the moderation policies that shape and affect their content creation practices. theoretical framework in this case, decolonial practices are reflected when “historically marginalized groups produce and curate their knowledges online” (acey et al., 2021, p. 2). for the purposes of the present study, this refers to the narrative and platformed agentic practices of latin american immigrant content creators countering traditional colonial expectations related to their representation, life experiences and interests. it also refers to their explicit negotiations with the platform and its moderation practices (gillespie, 2018). the concept of algorithmic (in)visibility (jaramillo-dent et al., 2022) serves as the basis for this paper. it refers to the creative practices deployed by immigrant creators —and possibly by other marginalized groups— though their platformed narratives, to negotiate its conspicuousness. they do this using specific affordances and platform vernaculars (gibbs et al., 2015; mcveigh-schultz & baym, 2015) to negotiate their visibility within tiktok’s algorithmic structures. tiktok has been explained as a structurally mimetic platform (zulli & zulli, 2020) that promotes imitation through its affordances and creative configurations. the (re)use of popular audio tracks, visual configurations and humorous narratives have become part of tiktok’s vernacular and have been related to a higher possibility of visibility and virality. method in this case, the study reports interim findings from a larger study of 53 immigrant tiktokers, their profiles and videos. in this case the study focuses on a twofold sample that includes (1) content that is successful and becomes highly visible regardless of its level of controversy; and (2) content that depicts creators’ descriptions of eliminated videos or blocked profiles. for this, a critical multimodal content analysis of videos and posts by immigrant content creators, identified through a 16-month long digital ethnography was carried out. the analysis includes their content on instagram and secondary tiktok accounts in the cases where their main profiles have been momentarily or completely blocked by tiktok. the key findings include illustrative examples of these two types of videos. key findings (in)visible content: this type of content refers to videos where immigrant creators’ comment on the possibility of it to be eliminated by the platform. figure 1. renderings of (in)visible content made visible through reuse of audio. created by the author an example of this is the recorded audio of an immigrant worker who was verbally abused by her employer and whose recording was used by several creators who expressed their support and empathy using the captions and overlaid text. they also commented on their own experiences of abuse and the parts of the audio that are especially shocking. figure 1 reflects two examples of creators who commented on (1) this being the type of video tiktok eliminates or (2) the fact that this video had already been eliminated and the existing video being a repost. it is noteworthy that many creators promote the reshare and reuse of the video and audio as a form of protest towards abusive employers and moderation guidelines. the possibility to reuse the audio track, which is one of tiktok’s main features, is instrumentalized for visibility and protest in the face of the tiktok community, society in general, and the algorithm. vernacular visibility: humor and sarcasm some of these content creators publish videos that discuss topics that are highly controversial such as strategies to enter a country as a tourist to stay. they are successful by following some aspects of the platform vernacular. this includes the use of the “answer comment” affordance and sarcastic humor. in this example, the creator also explains that he entered the country as a tourist and managed to stay and obtain documentation. his message is surrounded by a series of humorous statements, many of them shocking but it is possible to suggest that this format is successful in tricking the moderation system and reach people, in this case with 71.3k views and 2.6k likes. this creator has 91.6k followers which suggests that he is very successful in presenting his content although it may be controversial. figure 2. rendering of controversial visibility through humor and sarcasm. created by the author (in)visible activism: indefensible vulnerability the elimination of content related to immigrant rights for going against the platform’s guidelines reflects colonial moderation practices. an example of this is an immigrant creator who supports other immigrants and their rights and has achieved more than 2 million followers. in this case the creator has been forced to create and promote alternative channels such as his instagram account which suggests ta crossmedia negotiation of visibility across different platform’s moderation processes. his strategy is threefold and can be seen in figure 3. figure 3. rendering of threefold strategy to maintain visibility and interaction from followers. created by the author. conclusions immigrant tiktokers deploy a series of strategies to bypass moderation processes and negotiate the visibility of their contents in the face of algorithmic systems that reflect colonial structures. these strategies include (1) the use (and reuse) of platform affordances such as audio tracks; (2) the use of humor and sarcasm (which are part of tiktok’s vernacular) to convey controversial information; (3) partial deplatforming to guide users to the channels where content can become visible and accessible when their profiles are blocked by tiktok. these practices provide insights as to the difficulties faced by immigrants in some platforms and their attempts to make their content visible through subversive narratives and platformed strategies. references acey, c. e., bouterse, s., ghoshal, s., menking, a., sengupta, a., & vrana, a. g. (2021). decolonizing the internet by decolonizing ourselves: challenging epistemic injustice through feminist practice. global perspectives, 2(1), 21268. https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2021.21268 appadurai, a. (2019). traumatic exit, identity narratives, and the ethics of hospitality. television & new media, 20(6), 558–565. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419857678 benjamin, r. (2019). race after technology. polity press. gibbs, m., meese, j., arnold, m., nansen, b., & carter, m. (2015). #funeral and instagram: death, social media, and platform vernacular. information, communication & society, 18(3), 255–268. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2014.987152 gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of ‘platforms.’ new media & society, 12(3), 347–364. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342738 gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. yale university press. jaramillo-dent, d., contreras-pulido, p., & pérez-rodríguez, m.a. (2022). immigrant influencers on tiktok: diverse microcelebrity profiles and algorithmic (in)visibility. media and communication, 10(1). https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v10i1.4743 mcveigh-schultz, j., & baym, n. k. (2015). thinking of you: vernacular affordance in the context of the microsocial relationship app, couple. social media + society, 1(2), 2056305115604649. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115604649 noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york university press. zulli, d., & zulli, d. j. (2020). extending the internet meme: conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation publics on the tiktok platform. new media & society, 1461444820983603. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820983603 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): lee, j.,, & ahn, c. (2022, november). colonizers in the neighborhood: a content analysis of nextdoor users’ “postracial” surveillance. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. colonizers in the neighborhood: a content analysis of nextdoor users’ “postracial” surveillance jenny lee annenberg school for communication, university of pennsylvania chloe ahn annenberg school for communication, university of pennsylvania introduction the neighborhood has always been a contested terrain, bounded and maintained through oppressive forces. histories of the neighborhood reveal the inextricable ties between land ownership and white supremacy, urban planning and carceral logics (satter, 2009; goetz et al., 2020). while these legacies are often perpetrated by governing bodies and institutions, individuals have long perpetuated these practices at the local and interpersonal level, as well. today, the continued violence of occupying and maintaining place and space is more user-friendly and accessible than ever before with the widespread adoption of surveillance technologies like ring cameras and hyper-local digital platforms like nextdoor. but scholarship that investigates the role of individuals in creating, maintaining, or even resisting these digital practices is limited. critical research on neighborhood platforms is still nascent and has mostly focused on the industry motivations behind these technologies, as well as their potential implications on race, privacy, and self-governance (e.g., kurwa, 2019). while this institutional approach is essential to internet research, it restricts our understanding of how everyday people use and make sense of their neighborhood tools, and how their experiences translate into and reflect colonial legacies. rather than examine the affordances and processes of smart home technologies or neighborhood platforms themselves, our study engages with the level of the user. we investigate how individuals use neighborhood platforms – with what language, on what topics, with what reliance on imagery and video, with what adherence to community guidelines – to better understand how colonization in the neighborhood is shaped and practiced in the era of the networked smart home. methodology our study examines 1,141 user-created posts and 10,605 comments across 17 neighborhoods in and around west philadelphia. this content was collected on nextdoor from may 2019 to april 2021. west philadelphia is a historically black area with a long history of displacement by wealthy and predominantly white institutions like the university of pennsylvania (e.g., ehlenz, 2016). by centering user interactions in and around this region, we offer a relevant case study of a space where residents are witnessing increasing and racialized inequities. our date range was selected not to draw strict boundaries of “before” and “after,” but to account for the significance of two simultaneous and ongoing crises – one of police brutality and racism, the other of public health and care. that our analysis spans this time frame allows us to better understand how users have (or have not) grappled with the sociocultural implications of these events, and how their interactions with nextdoor shift to challenge or maintain colonial logics. to conduct our content analysis, we used our personal nextdoor accounts – organically situated among the neighborhoods in and around west philadelphia – to scrape nextdoor newsfeed data. nextdoor’s newsfeed serves as an aggregate collection of posts and comments from users across nearby neighborhoods, making readily public and accessible user content from areas beyond our residential neighborhood. as nextdoor does not provide an official api to collect data from its platform, we used a python script designed to collect newsfeed data based on the unique hash values of our own accounts. we restricted data collection to this newsfeed with the justification that this information was publicly available to us as users and residents of the west philadelphia area. no identifying data was collected, including names and profile pictures – only the content of posts, submission dates, neighborhood names, and social metrics. with these protective measures in mind, and with consultation from our institution’s irb office as well as aoir’s ethical guidelines (2020), our project did not require irb approval. following examples of research that have utilized social media data from individual feeds (e.g., clark, 2016; clark-parsons, 2021), we further anonymized and made untraceable our data by deleting or replacing words in each user-generated post and comment such that the text retains its meaning but cannot be searched for on nextdoor. we first categorized our data based on their relevance to race, crime, and boundarymaking before coding the relevant content using a combination of open and thematic coding (braun & clarke, 2008). findings we offer empirical evidence to reframe the many references to nextdoor’s racist and colonizing content into a more nuanced examination of “postrace.” we find little evidence to support the claim that the platform hosts a significant amount of explicitly racist content. instead of interpreting this finding as an indication that nextdoor does not host racist interactions, however, we argue that users rely on postracial practices to simultaneously normalize and obscure their anti-blackness and their settler logics. we draw from mukherjee et al.’s (2019) concept of “postrace” – a temporal and cultural movement where “quotidian ideas of racial tolerance and inclusion thrive, where racism does not need racists and is communicated in the form of codes” (gray, 2019, p. 25). signifying a breach in a history of obviously violent colonialism, postrace operates, instead, through the cover of technologies, knowledge, and the mundane. we organize nextdoor users’ postracial practices into three major themes. first, as users navigated a national reckoning with racism, police brutality, and a crisis of care, they increasingly shifted away from explicit racial identifiers to more general “raceneutral” goals of safety and community. second, users also shied away from using problematic but non-explicit racialized language (e.g., “thugs”), opting to embed their racializing opinions in broader “policy” discussions. third, even with increased attention on the harms of surveillance technologies on people of color, discussions around monitoring remained relatively consistent. these themes reflect postracial racism as yet another iteration of colonization in the neighborhood. increases in rhetoric around safety and community entrench the myth that their meanings and goals are not imbued with essentializing tactics. similarly, reliance on discussions of politics and policy is an obfuscation and legitimation tactic for propagating racialized stereotypes in the pursuit of larger goals like “democracy.” finally, reliance on surveillance imagery not only portrays these artifacts as unequivocal truth but displays black bodies as hypervisible anomalies to displace and promotes the carceral structures that undergird these technologies. references braun, v. & clarke, v. (2008). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology 3(2), 77-101. browne, s. (2015). dark matters. duke university press. ehlenz, m. m. (2016). neighborhood revitalization and the anchor institution: assessing the impact of the university of pennsylvania’s west philadelphia initiatives on university city. urban affairs review, 52(5), 714-750. franzke, aline shakti, bechmann, anja, zimmer, michael, ess, charles and the association of internet researchers (2020). internet research: ethical guidelines 3.0. https://aoir.org/reports/ethics3.pdf goetz, e., williams, r., & damiano, a. (2020). whiteness and urban planning. journal of the american planning association 86(2), 142-156. gray, h. (2019). race after race. in r. mukherjee, s. banet-weiser, & h. gray (eds.), racism postrace (pp. 23-36). duke university press. kurwa, r. (2019). building the digitally gated community: the case of nextdoor. surveillance & society 17(1/2), 111-117. mukherjee, r., banet-weiser, s., & gray, h. (2019). racism postrace. duke university press. nextdoor (2021, february 10). how moderation works on nextdoor. nextdoor blog. https://blog.nextdoor.com/2021/02/10/how-moderation-works-on-nextdoor/ satter, b. (2009). family properties: race, real estate, and the exploitation of black urban america. macmillan. scharkow, m. (2013). thematic content analysis using supervised machine learning: an empirical evaluation using german online news. quality & quantity, 47(2), 761-773. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): kappeler, k., festic, n., rüedy, t. & latzer, m. (2021, october). promoting self-help—how internet users protect themselves against algorithmic risks. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. promoting self-help—how internet users protect themselves against algorithmic risks author #1 kiran kappeler author #1 university of zurich author #2 noemi festic author #2 university of zurich author #3 tanja rüedy author #3 university of zurich author #4 michael latzer author #4 university of zurich prevalence of algorithmic risks in today’s digitized society, internet users increasingly rely on online services that apply algorithmic selection (e.g., google search, facebook news feed). by automatically selecting information sets and assigning relevance to them, algorithms affect our daily lives in many ways. an input-throughput-output model helps to better grasp this algorithmic selection (latzer et al., 2014): based on input data (e.g., users’ click behaviour, user requests), computational procedures (throughput) produce an output (e.g., allocated advertisements, tailored search results). this governing potential of algorithms has been associated with a variety of societal risks such as privacy breaches, surveillance, manipulation, or overuse (larus et al., 2018; ruckenstein & granroth, 2020; syvertsen, 2020). self-help strategies as a coping mode despite increasing statutory regulation (e.g., the general data protection regulation in the european union) as a governance mode, a sense of helplessness and a wish for more control over opaque algorithms remain prevalent sentiments among internet users (festic, 2020). we argue that self-help strategies (see illouz, 2008 for a critical appraisal of the psychological term) such as adjusting one’s privacy settings provide a complementary way for internet users to cope with algorithmic risks (see boerman et al., 2018; ireland, 2020). research gap currently, research into the factors that encourage internet users to apply self-help strategies against algorithmic risks mainly focuses on privacy protection. so far, studies have revealed response efficacy or internet skills as well as the perceived severity of those risks as important predictors of protection behavior (e.g., boerman et al., 2018; büchi et al., 2017). empirical studies on how internet users cope with diverse algorithmic risks and what factors play together in being associated with various selfhelp strategies that rely on nation-level samples remain scarce. this article contributes to filling this gap by addressing the following research question: what factors promote internet users’ self-help against the algorithmic risks surveillance, manipulation, and overuse? theoretical background for coping with risks according to previous empirical studies (e.g., boerman et al., 2018; büchi et al., 2017) and theoretical approaches like the protection motivation theory (rogers, 1975), the health belief model (rosenstock, 1974) and the integrated behavior model (montano & kasprzyk, 2008), different factors that promote coping with risks are plausible. from this basis we derive the following three factors and hypothesize that they are positively associated with the use of self-help strategies against algorithmic risks: risk awareness (h1), negative risk-related experiences (h2), and internet skills (h3), shown in figure 1. furthermore, on the same basis, we hypothesize that these influencing factors correlate (h4) figure 1. model of the factors associated with internet users’ use of self-help strategies against algorithmic risks. research design the data we use stems from a nationally representative survey of internet users aged 16 and over (n2018=1,202). we calculated a separate structural equation model (sem) for each type of risk—surveillance (s), manipulation (m) and overuse (o)—to analyze the influence of risk awareness (h1), negative experiences (h2) and internet skills (h3) on the use of self-help strategies. the concepts were measured differently across types of risks. firstly, respondents were asked how often (never – often) they think about risks associated with algorithmic selection. these items include for instance the constant monitoring of internet users (s), the danger of one-sided information (m) or using the internet too much (o). secondly, respondents were asked to what extent (do not agree at all – strongly agree) they have experienced negative consequences of internet use that are related to algorithmic risks. this concept was measured by items such as being surveilled (s) or confronted with untrue claims (m) or relying to strongly on the internet (o). thirdly, respondents were asked to indicate their understanding (do not understand the term at all – completely understand the term) of a list of terms like ‘algorithm’ or ‘personalized recommendation’ that are related to the internet and algorithmic selection (h3) (adapted from hargittai, 2005). the items that measure internet skills were the same for all three types of risks. finally, we asked respondents how often (never– always) they applied self-help strategies like for instance deleting cookies (s), using an adblocker (m) or consciously not using certain websites (o). results figure 2 summarizes the results of the three separate sem we calculated. figure 2. summary of the three sem for factors associated with internet users’ application of self-help strategies against surveillance, manipulation, and overuse. note: only significant effects (p<.05) are depicted. arrow width is scaled to standardized effect size. for better readability, the risk-specific items measuring the concepts (all factor loadings >.400) were not included in this figure. for surveillance, the fit indices of the sem were acceptable (s 2=222.876; dfs=59; p<.05; cfis=.936; tlis=.915; rmseas=.048; srmrs=.042). the results reveal that the self-help strategies against surveillance are positively associated with risk awareness, with having lived through negative risk-related experiences and with the level of internet skills. for surveillance, we can accept all our four hypotheses h1s, h2s , h3s and h4s. for manipulation, the fit indices of the sem were also acceptable (m 2=165.929; dfm=48; p<.05; cfim=.950; tlim=.931; rmseam=.045; srmrm=.033). self-help strategies against manipulation are positively associated with risk awareness and with the level of internet skills, but not with negative experiences. for manipulation, we can thus accept h1m and h3m, as well as h4m. for overuse, the fit indices of the sem were acceptable (o 2=158.090; dfo=39; p<.05; cfio=.932; tlio=.905; rmseao=.050; srmro=.038) as well. self-help strategies against overuse are positively associated with risk awareness and with internet skills, but not with having lived through negative risk-related experiences. for overuse, only h1o and h3o can be accepted. here, only awareness of perceived overuse correlates with negative experiences. discussion in sum, our findings show that awareness of algorithmic risks and the level of internet skills (and negative risk-related experiences for surveillance) are important predictors for the use of self-help strategies against algorithmic risks. by shedding light on how internet users cope with algorithmic risks such as surveillance, manipulation and overuse, this study provides valuable insights for policy makers. awareness of algorithmic risks and internet skills should be promoted to increase internet users’ selfhelp in coping with algorithmic risks. nevertheless, it should not remain the only coping mode. self-help cannot substitute but only complement statutory regulation and companies that apply algorithmic services should be held accountable for the risks they create. references boerman, s. c., kruikemeier, s., & zuiderveen borgesius, f. j. (2018). exploring motivations for online privacy protection behavior: insights from panel data. communication research, 1–25. büchi, m., just, n., & latzer, m. (2017). caring is not enough: the importance of internet skills for online privacy protection. information, communication & society, 20(8), 1261–1278. festic, n. (2020). same, same, but different! qualitative evidence on how algorithmic selection applications govern different life domains. regulation & governance, rego.12333. hargittai, e. (2005). survey measures of web-oriented digital literacy: social science computer review. illouz, e. (2008). saving the modern soul: therapy, emotions, and the culture of selfhelp. university of california press. ireland, l. (2020). predicting online target hardening behaviors: an extension of routine activity theory for privacy-enhancing technologies and techniques. deviant behavior, 1–17. larus, j., hankin, c., carson, s. g., christen, m., crafa, s., grau, o., kirchner, c., knowles, b., mcgettrick, a., tamburri, d. a., & werthner, h. (2018). when computers decide: european recommendations on machine-learned automated decision making. association for computing machinery. latzer, m., hollnbucher, k., & just, n. (2014). the economics of algorithmic selection on the internet. working paper – media change & innovation division. university of zurich. montano, d. e., & kasprzyk, d. (2008). theory of reasoned action, theory of planned behavior, and the integrated behavioral model. in health behavior and health education. theory, research, and practice. jossey-bass. rogers, r. w. (1975). a protection motivation theory of fear appeals and attitude change. the journal of psychology, 91(1), 93–114. rosenstock, i. m. (1974). historical origins of the health belief model: health education monographs. ruckenstein, m., & granroth, j. (2020). algorithms, advertising and the intimacy of surveillance. journal of cultural economy, 13(1), 12–24. syvertsen, t. (2020). digital detox. emerald publishing limited. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): khoury, c., & hemsley, j. (2023, october). collective sensemaking and intersemiotic dissonance: a study of crisis discourse on tiktok. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. collective sensemaking and intersemiotic dissonance: a study of crisis discourse on tiktok christy khoury syracuse university, school of information studies jeff hemsley syracuse university, school of information studies introduction tiktok, a chinese social media application founded in september 2016, had an initial focus on entertainment content, such as lip-syncing or dancing videos (montag et al., 2021). over time, tiktok has grown to have an estimated 1 billion global users that produce and share videos about healthcare, life hacks, and more (ruby, 2023). previous tiktok research conducted by zhao et al. (2021), zulli et al. (2022), and abidin (2019) has considered the impact of the application’s affordances and structure on activism, mimesis, and microcelebrities. however, one under-researched category within tiktok scholarship is crisis discourse as current research focuses on the covid19 pandemic (carter et al., 2021). crisis informatics, a term coined by christine hagar in 2006, represents an interdisciplinary area of study that focuses on the interactions of people, organizations, information, and technology during emergency events (hagar, 2013). studies in this field have highlighted the vital role of social media users during a crisis cycle. of interest to us are users contributing to the process of collective sensemaking, which is incremental through the transformation and integration of new information into cognitive schemata; this process is essential in crises as sparse information is used for decisionmaking (pentina & tarafdar, 2014). previous collective sensemaking scholarship has focused predominantly on twitter. (reuter & kaufhold, 2018). however, there is a need to examine the process of sensemaking in other field sites contemporarily used for crisis communication. by asking “what role does tiktok play in collective sensemaking during a crisis?”, this study contributes to crisis informatics and the nascent body of literature looking at https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hygz0u https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hygz0u https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?rffmtp https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?eotepl https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?swoub7 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?icgla2 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?a0vnk1 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hfdzbo https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?ttxiey https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?ljxmpa tiktok. it does so by considering the 2020 port of beirut, lebanon explosion, which was shared on tiktok and obtained more than 50 million views. drawing from a semiotic analysis approach, the preliminary findings reveal how intersemiotic dissonance obscures the collective sensemaking process after a crisis event. implications of the findings motivate further research into implicit crisis communication norms in multi-modal structures. background context on august 4th, 2020, the port of beirut exploded due to misgoverned ammonium nitrate (“they killed us from the inside,” 2021). as a result, there were over 200 fatalities, thousands displaced, and significant damage to the city’s infrastructure. the lebanese and other concerned individuals were glued to their screens as citizen reports kept the world updated via social media. respecting their legacies in conducting crisis informatics research, researchers may aim for objectivity through detachment from the crisis and resulting harm. given the long-term mental and physical impacts still faced by the lebanese community which the first author is a part of it is impossible to disregard the realities of the crisis. to remember the lives lost as a result of the explosion, a list of the martyrs are listed here: https://tinyurl.com/beirutmartyrs. methods data collection to examine the discourse pertaining to the august 4, 2020, port of beirut explosion, snowball searching was used to discover relevant hashtags. the process first began by searching for hashtags related to #lebanonblast (figure 1). figure 1: query result for #lebanonblast https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?klckt8 only hashtags with more than 5,000 views were considered. similarly for each hashtag, only the top videos with more than 10,000 views were considered. after collecting videos from each hashtag that met the criteria, accompanying hashtags from the resulting videos were used. an example is provided in figure 2, which is a video that includes the searched hashtag #lebanonblast and relevant hashtags #prayforlebanon and انفجار_بیروت# (beirut_explosion in arabic). figure 2: video snowballing using other included hashtags for videos that met the above criteria, scrapetiktokcomments.js a publicly available web scraping script was used to collect information for 26 videos. the following data were collected: url, creator name, creator number of followers, video posted date, number of likes, number of comments, and comments. a limitation of this work is that the tool only collects up to 3,000 comments. data analysis the analysis was divided into main two components; videos and comments. i. videos gillian rose’s visual methodologies informed the foundation of video analysis, with a specific focus on semiology, which questions how images make meanings (2001). the semiotic analysis considered how each individual video collectively contributed to a cultural understanding of the crisis event. given the varying lengths of the tiktok videos, analysis of auditory, visual, and textual signs were considered at the following time increments: cover page, ⅓ through, ⅔ through, and last section. for example, a 45-second video’s signs would have been analyzed on its cover page, at 15 seconds, 30 seconds, and then at the end. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?pliumi ii. comments rooted in foucault’s ideas, discourse refers to “...groups of statements that structure the way a thing is thought, and the way we act on the basis of that thinking” (rose, 2001). to understand how the tiktok community came to understand the port of beirut explosion, comments were studied through discourse and inductive content analysis. by considering discourse in comments supplementarily to meaning signaled by videos, we can examine the implications of collective sensemaking of a cultural event. preliminary findings preliminary analysis reveals discursive formation, or the way meanings are connected together, between video and discourse. users watching videos about the explosion participated in systematic sensemaking using the multi-modal signals afforded by the content. in alignment with other studies of visual communication, the tiktok videos enabled users to situate themselves in the place of the impacted person and land. a significant amount of the videos were of the creator’s own vantage point as they recorded the explosion. the varying impacts of the disaster were seen in the reactions to the point of explosion, which varied from a jolted screen to a completely disoriented visual surrounded by shattered glass and debris. results of the data analysis reveal a theme of intersemiotic dissonance that obscures the collective sensemaking process. intersemiotic dissonance, as described by yu, is when elements diverge semiotically rather than merge to inform a unified meaning (2021). unique to tiktok, creators have the ability to select a sound and add visuals like text or images throughout their video. each of these elements, illustrated in figure 2, are instances of signals which contribute to sensemaking. yet if creators chose to include contradictory or hypocritical elements that somehow cause tension with other elements, viewers of the content could experience tension in their sensemaking process. examples of this include a creator’s explosion footage having a sound in the electronic dance music (edm) genre or a watermark with their username. comments in these videos were filled with criticism of the author’s choices, which sparked debate and additional commentary that drove down relevant crisis discourse, including how to participate in relief efforts or the “real” cause of the crisis. in contrast, videos that used the original audio of the footage, solemn music, and/or text that only related to crisis information had comments that more clearly contributed to collective sensemaking. the preliminary findings reveal intersemiotic dissonance obscuring crisis discourse, thus negatively influencing the process of collective sensemaking. further research is needed to evaluate the sociotechnical forces that shape the communication etiquette of videos of a sensitive nature in order to enable apt collective sensemaking. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?5o0u1l references abidin, c. (2019). mapping internet celebrity on tiktok: exploring attention economies and visibility labours. cultural science journal, 12(1), 77–103. https://doi.org/10.5334/csci.140 carter, p. n., hall, e. e., ketcham, c. j., & ahmed, o. h. (2021). not just for dancing? a content analysis of concussion and head injury videos on tiktok. frontiers in sports and active living, 3. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fspor.2021.692613 hagar, c. (2013). crisis informatics: perspectives of trust – is social media a mixed blessing? school of information student research journal, 2(2). https://doi.org/10.31979/2575-2499.020202 montag, c., yang, h., & elhai, j. d. (2021). on the psychology of tiktok use: a first glimpse from empirical findings. frontiers in public health, 9. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.641673 pentina, i., & tarafdar, m. (2014). from “information” to “knowing”: exploring the role of social media in contemporary news consumption. computers in human behavior, 35, 211–223. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.02.045 reuter, c., & kaufhold, m.-a. (2018). fifteen years of social media in emergencies: a retrospective review and future directions for crisis informatics. journal of contingencies and crisis management, 26(1), 41–57. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5973.12196 rose, g. (2001). visual methodologies. an introduction to the interpretation of visual materials. sage publications ltd. ruby, d. (2023, january 20). 36 tiktok statistics 2023: how many users are there! demand sage. https://www.demandsage.com/tiktok-user-statistics/ “they killed us from the inside”: an investigation into the august 4 beirut blast. (2021). human rights watch. https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/08/03/they-killed-usinside/investigation-august-4-beirut-blast yu, h. (2021). one page, two stories: intersemiotic dissonance in a comic adaptation of journey to the west. social semiotics, 31(4), 529–549. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2019.1645986 zhao, x. a., & abidin, c. (2021). tiktok’s ‘fox eye’ trend and everyday activism: gen z agency in an audiovisual narrative case study. aoir selected papers of internet research. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2021i0.12267 zulli, d., & zulli, d. j. (2022). extending the internet meme: conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation publics on the tiktok platform. new media & society, 24(8), 1872–1890. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820983603 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hjdtbm selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 carnal practices: online porn consumption among queer east asian men shawn suyong yi jones concordia university despite porn’s ability to arouse and titillate or disgust and anger (and sometimes all four at the same time), scholars have only relatively recently started to examine it through an affective lens. writing in the inaugural issue of porn studies, susanna paasonen (2014) advocates for porn studies scholars to consider how the application of affect theory can help us better understand the allure of pornography. paasonen identifies three ways in which affect theory can be used in porn studies: theorizing the encounters and intensities between porn and the viewer (this position views affect as non-personal), examining how intensities and attachments are understood and communicated (which positions affect as embodied), and explicitly incorporating the researcher’s affective experiences and reflections. most porn studies research on affect builds on the contribution of paasonen, who in 2011 published carnal resonance, in which she develops the titular concept to describe the movement and intensities of affects between bodies and porn. like paasonen’s carnal resonance, most affective porn research typically falls within the first camp of theorizing affect as it relates to porn, given many researchers’ focus on intensities and encounters (e.g., arroyo, 2016; rehberg, 2019). while a small proportion of scholars have taken up the third position of reflecting on the scholarly self and their affective porn experience (e.g., vörös, 2015), little attention has been given to the second approach paasonen identifies. this research emphasizes the second approach to the application of affect theory in porn studies by considering how queer east asian men understand and engage with online pornography. paasonen clarifies that carnal resonance (2011) “contributes to our knowledge on the visceral appeal of porn” rather than to the “knowledge gaps on the production and usage of porn” (p. 19). my contribution to affective porn studies is to focus on the latter by building on paasonen’s concept of carnal resonance and applying it to the examination of how porn is used by consumers. my approach to affect theory aligns with paasonen’s, as well as those of sara ahmed (2015) and margaret wetherell (2012), whose views are rooted in feminist thinking that questions the binary implications of “the turn to affect” in the humanities. “the turn to affect” has been read and critiqued as a turn away from the representational (paasonen, 2011), as a turn suggested citation (apa): yi jones, s. (2022, november). carnal practices: online porn consumption among queer east asian men. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. away from emotions (ahmed, 2015), and as a turn away from discourse (wetherell, 2012). like paasonen, ahmed, and wetherell, i view affect as socioculturally constructed and within contexts of contact. while paasonen’s (2011) and ahmed’s (2015) approach to affect foregrounds its circulation, wetherell’s (2012) approach is decidedly more human-centered. wetherell views affect as “embodied meaning-making . . . [,] something that could be understood as human emotion” (p. 4, emphasis in original). given my focus on how consumers use porn, i also draw on wetherell’s conception of affect, which describes affects as being recruited, mobilized, felt, and interpreted in the body at various moments of encounter, all while the individual is attempting—both consciously and not—to make sense of these experiences. this sense-making is always in relation to discourses and contexts. wetherell argues that a practice theory approach to affect can not only reveal patterns of affects but also the ways practices and their associated affects are unevenly distributed and enacted. ultimately, wetherell advocates for the concept of affective practice to consider how social practices become patterned and emotionalized, as well as how they are negotiated with. though prior practices may inform current ones, negotiations within practices highlight the potential mechanism by which practices can change over time and across contexts. in order to investigate how queer east asian men understand and engage with online pornography, this study brings together paasonen’s (2011) carnal resonance and wetherell’s (2012) affective practice. separately, the two concepts emphasize different dimensions of the affective movement between humans and others (people, objects, discourses, etc.). but more than using the two concepts in isolation of each other to highlight different aspects of this movement, i propose merging the two into what i am calling carnal practice. in doing so, each complements the other in ways that allow us to more fully see how individuals understand and engage with pornography. a practice approach supplements carnal resonance by bringing into focus routine patterns in the process of consuming porn, as well as how negotiations with discourses can change over time. these discourses highlight the inequalities in how and to whom particular affects circulate, affects in which the individual senses, makes sense, and negotiates. carnal resonance supplements affective practice by highlighting the materiality of objects and how the materiality places limits on the ways in which affects circulate and are felt within the body. overall, the concept carnal practice not only views the routine consumption of online pornography as a patterned and emotion-laden practice, but also posits that there are constant negotiations when engaging with porn and the platforms on which it is consumed. the concept carnal practice is applied to 48 semi-structured interviews, conducted between february 2019 and september 2020 in 5 countries—taiwan, south korea, china, japan and canada—to consider how queer east asian men navigate their respective internet space, are drawn to particular content and platforms that satisfy their desires and curiosities, and make sense of the porn they consume. from the interviews, themes of platform affordances, authenticity, reality/fantasy, and race emerged. specifically, participants discussed notions of being drawn to authenticity in porn as well as porn that seems real (that is, most similar to their lived experience), attraction to particular sex acts, scenarios and races, being unable to fully articulate why they are attracted to a particular performer, and, in other cases, allowing a platform’s algorithm to help facilitate and fine-tune their desires, to name a few. ultimately, this paper uses the concept of carnal practice to examine how one engages with and makes sense of online pornography through the affectively felt practice of searching for, finding, and getting off to online pornography. although this study focuses specifically on the practices of queer east asian men, the concept of carnal practice is not limited to this group and has wider application. references ahmed, sara. (2015). the cultural politics of emotion (second edition). routledge. [original published in 2004] arroyo, brandon. (2016). sexual affects and active pornographic space in the networked gay village. porn studies, 3(1): 77–88. paasonen, susanna. (2011). carnal resonance: affect and online pornography. cambridge, mass.: mit press. paasonen, susanna. (2014). between meaning and mattering: on affect and porn studies. porn studies, 1(1–2), 136–142. rehberg, peter. (2019). more than vanilla sex: reading gay post-pornography with affect theory and psychoanalysis. porn studies, 6(1): 114–128. vörös, florian. (2015). troubling complicity: audience ethnography, male porn viewers and feminist critique. porn studies, 2(2-3): 137–149. wetherell, margaret. (2012). affect and emotion: a new social science understanding. london: sage. microsoft word guo-when 'homeland' is no longer 'home', the identity crisis, the loss-when 'homeland' is no longer 'home', th.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): guo, j. (2021, october). when ‘homeland’ is no longer ‘home’, the identity crisis, the loss of mobility and their social media campaign——study of social media testimonios by chinese transnational workers under covid-19 global pandemic. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. when ‘homeland’ is no longer ‘home’, the identity crisis, the loss of mobility and their social media campaign—— study of social media testimonios by chinese transnational workers under covid-19 global pandemic guo jing the chinese university of hong kong research background world bank data (2020) shows that, soon after the abrupt lockdowns and travel bans due to covid-19, the amount of money transnational workers sent home fell significantly in 2020. as covid-19 pandemic and economic crisis continues to influence the globe, the total remittance is estimated to decline 14 percent by 2021 compared to 2019. with unstable income and uncertainties caused by the pandemic, world bank also pointed out that it is the first time in recent history that the stock of international migrants is likely to decline and return migration has increased. it is shown on the ministry of commerce of prc website (2020) that from january to september 2020, china dispatched 208,000 labors of various types, a decrease of 148,000 compared with the same period last year. among them, 100,000 were under contracted projects and 108,000 were dispatched under labor cooperation. in the end of september 2020, there were 635,000 chinese labors abroad. taking the illegal, unregistered, and informal labor into consideration, the number of chinese transnational labors is far beyond and deserves an eye on them. therefore, when i incidentally came across the wechat public account where transnational workers from different locations gathered virtually to share their personal stories, complaints, emotional expressions and their dream of returning home, my attention was inevitably drawn by these narratives. i observed repeatedly on the narrators’ stories posted on the comment zone of every related article published by the account administrator from april 2020 to october 2020. most of the stories were narrated by transnational workers directly, while some of the stories were re-narrated by the administrator in the first personal. the narratives on which i focus in this study are mainly written narratives of transnational workers’ experience under the global pandemic, many of which are testimonios. by john berverley (2005)’s definition, testimonio is a novel-like genre told by witness of the event, on their traumatic experiences. my analysis will be on the narratives of transnational workers on experiences in foreign countries under severe pandemic conditions. reading these narratives, three themes have caught my attention. firstly, the narrators repeatedly talked about ‘boss’, ‘family’, ‘money’ and ‘home country’, which relates to the mixed ‘identity’ as chinese low working-class transnational labor, mostly middle-aged males. secondly, they broadly talked about problems of ‘space’ and ‘mobility’ in pandemic. it is obvious from the above narrative like ‘if we go out of the door of the labor camp, we may be shot by the police. we have to wait, wait and wait’, we can see the loss of mobility created severe problems on these workers. thirdly, strong emotions were expressed out by writing narratives in virtual spaces, such as ‘desperate’, ‘afraid of being infected’, and ‘homesick’. based on these observations, i came up with three research questions: 1. what does it mean to be ‘chinese transnational labor’ in covid-19 pandemic? 2. what kind of space has been created for chinese transnational labor under covid-19 pandemic? 3. what kind of emotions was expressed through these narratives? methodology studies on narratives, especially testimonios, provides us with the unique stories of people under special social political context. rorty (1985) argues that testimonio combines with the desire for solidarity, aiming at improving the narrator’s ability to identify themselves, voice themselves, and try to share the values with others. through testimonios, witteborn (2012) explored the space of risk from the voice of asylum seekers and refugees in the usa, germany, and hong kong. when analyzing testimonios in hong kong, the data was based on written testimonios published by ngos as well as on a website designed by asylum seekers in hong kong in which they narrated their experiences. although these testimonios are not orally narrated by individuals in off-line settings, they are similar to verbal testimonios in terms of the author’s traumatic experience, the ‘performance’ by the narrator and interaction with the reader, and the potential to reach the general public and create empathize. therefore, in this study, for the written narratives published in wechat public account, i also take the ‘interlocutor’ role (koven, 2002) seriously as the author was trying to bring his or her story to the audience, to the public sphere, to which it would normally be impossible for him or her to get access (berverley, 2005). as for koven (2002), there are three roles that storytellers can perform: the author, the interlocutor, and the character. koven’s (2002) framework on analyzing speaker roles are very useful in understanding narratives created in virtual spaces. therefore, i apply this framework in the narrative analysis process. the criteria for selecting the data were based on (a) whether the narrative was a testimonio on their past experiences in a foreign country facing covid-19 pandemic, (b) whether it is directly related to identity, space, and emotion, (c) whether it contains enough information, (d) whether it is told in first personal. the data collection will be based on wechat postings from april 2020 to october 2020. findings and discussions based on the social media narrative analysis, this study shed lights on the following dimensions. first, when the low working-class community who went across the border and was stranded in the host country with severe covid-19 situation, their mixed identity was under crisis when thinking about the home country, the family and the poor situation they were in. the national identity as ‘chinese citizen’ made the transnational workers feel even worse. why contributors to china’s ‘belt and road initiative’ were blocked outside the border of the homeland? most of the narrators cannot understand china’s policy and doubted whether being ‘chinese’ still make sense when living abroad in the pandemic. for transnational workers in such situation, it was possible to be forced into exile. here, “exile” echoes with what victor hugo called “long dream of home” (in simpson, 1995). although it is not for political reasons, it still suggests a painful banishment from their homeland involuntarily (peter, 1998). second, under the covid-19 pandemic, chinese transnational workers were in a space of uncertainty, high risk and immobility. mobility is a kind of resource with unequal relationship to people (skeggs, 2004). unaffordable flight tickets and hotels fees for 14day quarantine after landing chinese territory stopped their steps home. even for those who want to pay the money, the limited quotas were already given to officials, high-level businessmen, overseas students, and state-owned enterprises’ employees. their appeal was too weak to be heard by the embassy and home authorities. chinese transnational workers’ posted stories prove that there is a politics of mobility which is about power relations and about separating the privilege from the non-privileged (sparke, 2006; bauman, 1998). through new media technologies, chinese transnational workers from various locations gathered and reached out to the public. they also appealed to the government and asked for solutions. in extreme situations like the pandemic, narratives in virtual space are useful tools to ask its readers for support. it is also possible for them to enhance their capacity to construct their own identity and solidarity (beverly, 2005). meanwhile, scholars like paul gready (2013) keep a critical stance on personal testimony’s power for advancing human rights. we should also pay attention to who owns and controls the narratives, as well as in what conditions did these narratives made public. except for understanding the identity struggle of these chinese transnational worker, highlighting the problem of space, showing their motion expression, theoretically, the main purpose of this study is to highlight that social media narrative inquiry can facilitate social change. practically, it also aims at raising the awareness of this group of people during covid-19 pandemic. as the whole world is working its way against the pandemic and economic downturn, let us also think about the transnational workers who are also on the frontlines of the pandemic. there are several interventions governments should consider. first, supporting stranded workers in health, housing, and other social services. second, adjusting the cross-border policies for its own citizens who are in genuine needs to meet their families. in the medium to long-term, as the pandemic comes to a new normal stage, policies regarding to transnational workers and others vulnerable groups, should embrace more humanistic concern. a clean-up policy to close the border to all the citizens is irresponsible and sloth administration. references bauman, z. (1998). globalization. the human consequences. cambridge: polity press. beverley, j. (2005) ‘testimonio, subalternity, and narrative authority’. in the sage handbook of qualitative research, 3rd edn, eds n. k. denzin & y. s. lincoln, thousand oaks, ca, sage, pp. 547-557. gready, p. (2013). the public life of narratives: ethics, politics, methods. in doing narrative research, 2nd edn, eds m. andrews, c. squire, & m. tamboukou, london: sage, pp. 240–254. koven, m. (2002). an analysis of speaker role inhabitance in narratives of personal experience. journal of pragmatics, 34, 167-217. ministry of commerce of prc. (2020). retrieved from: http://www.mofcom.gov.cn/article/tongjiziliao/dgzz/202010/20201003011287.shtml peters, j. d. (1998). nomadism, diaspora, exile: the stakes of mobility within the western canon. ui faculty page, 6(2), 75–76. rorty, r. (1985). solidarity or objectivity? postanalytic philosophy. eds j. rajchman & c. west, new york: columbia university press. pp. 3-19. simpson, j. (1995). the oxford book of exile. london: oxford university press. witteborn, s. (2012). testimonio and spaces of risk: a forced migrant perspective. cultural studies, 26(4), 421-441. skeggs, b. (2004). class, self, culture. routledge, london. sparke, m. (2006). a neoliberal nexus: economy, security, and the biopolitics of citizenship on the border. political geography, 24(4), 151-180. world bank. (2020). retrieved from: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/pressrelease/2020/10/29/covid-19-remittance-flows-to-shrink-14-by-2021 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 inwood, o., ippolito,h. and laminack, m. (2022, november). confronting and demystifying harmful participatory cultures. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. confronting and demystifying harmful participatory cultures olivia inwood university of new south wales, australia heidi ippolito university of denver and iliff school of theology, usa michael laminack university of denver and iliff school of theology, usa this year’s aoir gathering calls us to consider how "new colonizing forces” are “refashioning the world in their own image,” and how we might resist such persistent narratives of destructive domination. our panel examines various modes of online participatory culture and community building through three different frameworks: undetected semiotic affiliation on youtube, the participatory religious storytelling of qanon, and the neoliberal self-colonization of mlms. our collective aim is to expose existing colonial structures in online spaces (as well as their offline roots) and break them down in order to offer something new. we offer three interdisciplinary approaches that weave together a story about the desire for community and connection. persistent narratives of individualism compete with the desire for welcoming spaces and shared values, but a long history of colonized internet threatens to reinforce linguistic and narrative hegemony within these online communities. these papers dive deep into the complex problem of finding kinship through destructive worldviews and alternative histories. unless we find sustainable ways of recognizing and dispelling these pockets of fringe communities, they will inevitably continue to grow and draw in more participants. the first presentation explores a dataset of youtube videos about the “id2020” conspiracy theory, which merges religious discourses about the “mark of the beast” with discourses about quantum dot and blockchain technologies. the results indicate that multimodally screenshots are used as a form of technological authority in order to legitimate claims, as well as biblical verses being used as a form of moral evaluation. the very nature of screenshots is understood through the lens of western, rational superiority, and exposes a root issue in the online experience of everyday users. just as algorithms have been misunderstood as “objective,” so too, in this case, are screenshots. this presentation re-contextualizes the subjective nature and use of screenshots, re-orienting us toward a more judicious engagement with online viral videos. the second paper traces how qanon followers combine memes, religious beliefs, and conspiratorial thinking into an overarching and simplistic worldview. through the use of memes, the qanon community freely adopts aspects of the matrix films and appropriates them into shareable “truths” that can be observed in the real world. for qanon believers, references to on-screen storytelling act as a kind of shorthand, hinting at “secret” knowledge, offering implicit commentary, and building real worldviews out of fictional storytelling. rather than embrace the complex (and often overwhelming) notion that the world has room enough for more than one story, q “anons” gravitate toward simplistic, linear storytelling, which is rooted in colonial perceptions of the human experience. this paper also aims to re-steer the ship toward less narrow forms of participatory storytelling in the hopes of de-centering white christian narratives (and making room for other imaginative myths and stories). the final paper is a case study of the multi-level-marketing (mlm) business amway, informed by political philosophy, political theology, and personal narrative. just as screenshots and memes create the fodder for insular participatory communities in the first two papers, this presentation critiques the relentless neoliberal ethos of mlms. this close examination of amway draws the connection between colonization and exploitation on and through the internet with a broader analysis and critique of the political philosophy underlying the intensifying commodification of the internet and its users since at least 2008. in other words, the umbrella of unfettered capitalism threatens to curb any attempted progress in the direction of inclusivity. we must address the economic structures of early (and present) internet communities if we are to create more inclusive ones. in a climate of rising individualism and distrust in institutions, communal spaces will continue to be a place of important contestation. people will inevitably gravitate toward (online) communities, but there is a growing concern about what sorts of communities gain the most traction and participants. this panel asks: how can we create more robust safeguards, more compelling stories, and less profit-driven modes of existing in community? the mark of the beast and crypto communities: how religious and technological discourses intersect in covid-19 conspiracy theories on youtube olivia inwood university of new south wales, australia introduction during the covid-19 pandemic, conspiracy theories on youtube have become abundant. despite youtube announcing in october 2020 that any misinformation about covid vaccinations would be removed from its platform, videos remain on youtube that spread conspiracies about covid-19 under the guise of religious or technological content. this paper will explore a dataset of youtube videos about the id2020 conspiracy theory, focusing on how religious and technological discourses intersect within this specific conspiracy theory. a multimodal discourse analysis is undertaken in order to understand the visual evidence these communities use in order to legitimise their claims and how users affiliate around this evidence in the youtube comments on these videos. this paper shows how we must avoid associating visual evidence such as screenshots with objectivity and avoid relying on algorithms to filter out all instances of misinformation, and instead move towards a more socially-orientated understanding of how misinformation arises in online communities. the id2020 conspiracy theory falsely claims bill gates is part of a global conspiracy planning to force people into having a covid-19 vaccine that contains implanted microchips or ‘quantum dot tattoos’ to track individuals. this conspiracy theory highlights gates’ role in the ‘digital identity alliance’ or ‘id2020’ a non-profit organisation partially funded by gates that conducts research into real-world applications of digital identities. the id2020 conspiracy also references ‘the mark of the beast’, a biblical reference to a mark that all humans will be required to have in order to ‘buy or sell’. youtube is a worthy platform to analyse in relation to conspiracy theories due to its algorithmic affordances which provide users with a constant stream of recommended videos, and its commenting affordances of pseudonymous identities. these affordances have contributed to youtube’s history as a platform that promotes extremist views. previous qualitative research regarding misinformation on youtube, has explored rightwing extremist communities (lewis 2018; ekman 2014), populist youtubers (finlayson 2020) and conspiracy videos (paolillo 2018; allington and joshi 2020). whilst there is a large body of research analysing misinformation on youtube, a close multimodal discourse analysis of the kind undertaken in this paper has been neglected. in addition, the legitimation and affiliation frameworks used in this paper focuses on a nuanced interpersonal interpretation of conspiracy theories to understand why people bond around conspiracy theories, in contrast to an experiential interpretation, that focuses on identifying what is false but neglects social bonding. methodology this project started as an investigation into the range of covid-19 conspiracy theories abundant on youtube. youtube data tools (rieder, 2015) was used in order to obtain videos via a youtube api (application program interface). based on this exploration, the scope of the project was narrowed to the id2020 conspiracy theory, a popular covid-19 conspiracy theory on youtube at the time. from the data collection process, while there were 262 videos that mentioned the id2020 conspiracy and had at least one comment, only 5 videos had over 10,000 views and over 1,000 comments. these 5 videos became the focus of a close multimodal discourse analysis, analysing the visual content and the comments on these videos. several frameworks within a multimodal discourse approach were applied to the data. the visual content of these videos was analysed via a legitimation analysis (van leeuwen, 2007). legitimation refers to how discourses establish authority through linguistic and multimodal resources. it consists of several sub-types including authorization (tradition or authority), moral evaluation (value systems and morals), rationalization (institutionalized social action or knowledge that society has constructed) and mythopoesis (narratives and future projections) (van leeuwen, 2007). in conjunction with legitimation, visual salience was also considered. visual salience refers to the elements in an image/video that are depicted as the worthiest of attention. this attention can be formed by the following factors: size, sharpness of focus, placement in the visual field, cultural significance, and personal significance (kress and van leeuwen, 2006). many of the salient elements discovered in the videos could be seen as ‘bonding icons’. by ‘bonding icon’ we mean a symbol that is used throughout a text that people rally around because they share the same values. this idea of bonding aligns with the linguistic framework of ambient affiliation (zappavigna, 2011) that was applied to the comments on these videos. ambient affiliation considers how bonding (the social alignment of values) occurs in environments where users are not necessarily engaging with each other directly. users align via shared evaluative meanings (or values) that encourage users to rally around a broader community. discussion the key findings from this project reveal the role of technological authority and moral evaluation in rallying users around shared values. in the dataset, there were videos from channels that were addressed to crypto communities (users investing in cryptocurrencies) and videos that were addressed to evangelical christians in the form of pastor sermons. these videos remained on youtube despite youtube’s ban on vaccine misinformation, due to the outward appearance of these communities (as reflected in video titles and descriptions) as purely focused on cryptocurrencies or religion. although these two communities appear very distinct, this shared interest in the ‘mark of the beast’ meant that they had overlapping discourses. visually, these videos relied on technological authority (such as screenshots of online articles and social media posts) to persuade users to bond around their claims (e.g., that covid was planned by elites and that our liberties are threatened). moral evaluation was prominent as in the repetition of biblical verses in the videos and again the focus on liberty (investing in decentralized currency and following one’s own beliefs despite pushback from society). in the comments to these videos, various religious and political stances were adopted, such as anti-globalism, anti-technology, political sceptism and antivaccination. within the comments, the visual content of the videos was also frequently used as a bonding icon to further rally around. overall, these results show the importance of a socially-orientated approach in understanding how misinformation arises in online communities. as the key findings highlighted, certain discourses remain undetected by youtube, despite youtube’s commitment to removing covid-19 misinformation. users bond around visual evidence such as screenshots in these conspiratorial communities, ways of communicating that are difficult to detect without a manual multimodal analysis. this paper draws attention to the need for breaking down a colonized and neoliberal internet, by conjuring new socially-orientated methodologies that make research more accessible and turn to the importance of understanding social values. references allington, d., & joshi, t. (2020). “what others dare not say”: an antisemitic conspiracy fantasy and its youtube audience. journal of contemporary antisemitism, 3(1), 35-54. finlayson, a. (2020). youtube and political ideologies: technology, populism and rhetorical form. political studies, 0032321720934630. kress, g., & van leeuwen, t. (2020). reading images: the grammar of visual design. london: routledge. lewis, r. (2018). alternative influence: broadcasting the reactionary right on youtube. data & society, 18. paolillo, j. c. (2018). the flat earth phenomenon on youtube. first monday. rieder, b. (2015). youtube data tools. computer software. vers, 1(5). van leeuwen, t. (2007). legitimation in discourse and communication. discourse & communication, 1(1), 91-112. zappavigna, m. (2011). ambient affiliation: a linguistic perspective on twitter. new media & society, 13(5), 788-806. easter eggs, memes, and morality: how online fandom and religion lay the groundwork for conspiratorial communities heidi ippolito university of denver and iliff school of theology, usa introduction if you browse through posts from the early years of qanon’s online presence (20172020), you will find frequent references to the matrix films, including popular phrases, images, gifs, characters, themes, and plotlines. while the matrix does not directly promote american patriotism, antisemitic conspiracies, or religiously-fueled violence, the qanon community freely adopts aspects of the matrix and appropriates them for their own worldview. for qanon believers, references to on-screen storytelling1 act as a kind of shorthand, hinting at “secret” knowledge, offering implicit commentary, and building real worldviews out of fictional storytelling. the way qanon followers engage with memes, religious beliefs, and conspiratorial thinking reveals the unique ways internet culture has collided with religious communities and pop culture fandoms. all of these groups share a desire to connect, create community, and discover purpose, but what happens when these groups begin to share ideologies and beliefs that perpetuate conspiracy theories, falsehoods, and hateful colonialist rhetoric? a glimpse into qanon’s meme storytelling reveals the dynamic contours of conspiracy theories, historical contestations, and the technological tools that allow us to encounter and create community in online spaces. qanon understands reality through a religious lens, a storytelling lens, and a participatory lens, and their community beliefs and practices are influenced by all three. theoretical lenses qanon’s religious lens is most clearly illustrated in the content of q-related posts and memes. religious beliefs and rhetoric (primarily evangelical christian) are referenced just as frequently as references to the matrix and other pop culture iconography (q origins project archive). as kristen kobes du mez argues in her book jesus and john wayne, imaginative storytelling readily fuses with religious meaning-making; in other words, qanon believers draw from religious scripture as well as heroic figures and apocalyptic stories from film and television. religious beliefs become enmeshed with the linear and entertaining tropes of a storytelling lens that spans from ancient mythology to contemporary pop culture, with on-screen storytelling as some of the most influential and widespread modes of mythmaking. as on-screen storytelling continues to evolve beyond theaters and cable networks, “narrative comprehension in audiences is becoming more sophisticated” (atkinson, 3). armed with the ability to stream anywhere, anytime, audiences can discuss, dissect, and connect with other fans online (atkinson; jenkins, ford & green). on-screen storytelling often aims to be relatable and enjoyable, reflecting real human experiences and emotions, but what happens when audiences can directly participate in the act of reflecting? qanon’s participatory lens has its origins in online fandom culture. fans searching for “easter eggs” and deeper meanings within films like the matrix have given way to screen-oriented sleuths who veer outside of fictional narratives and become determined to discover “truths” and hidden meanings in the real world. their findings are often reflected and refracted through memes. by using memes as folkloric bits that operate on “hypermemetic logic” (shifman, 4), anons build a vast narrative through individual memes that combine religious beliefs, internet humor, and popular on-screen stories. this “meme storytelling” combines “deep memetic frames” 1 on-screen storytelling refers primarily to scripted films and television, but also includes narrative video games and other video content found online. while social media platforms present a kind of “stage” from which users “perform,” on-screen storytelling refers to narrative scripted content distributed on screens and not to interpersonal relationships played out online (ippolito, 2021). (phillips & milner) that are woven into an overarching narrative (often religious) within participatory online communities (coleman; jenkins; massanari). scope and methodology my approach to analyzing qanon “artifacts” (qanon content that can be found online, including memes, catchphrases, tweets, images, videos, merchandise, etc.) can be understood in (roughly) three layers: q drops, bakers, and anons. the original “q drops” (the nearly 5,000 posts authored by “q” between 2017 and 2020) have been archived by several sources and can be understood as a sort of “scripture” for qanon followers (or “anons”). these cryptic posts have been analyzed and interpreted by “bakers,” selfacclaimed qanon influencers who often monetize their channels and hold significant sway over the qanon movement. once these beliefs, conspiracies, and phrases have emerged from q drops and promoted by the bakers, these ideas crop up all over the internet. this paper focuses on two q drops (fig. 3 and fig. 4) and screenshots from four anons (fig. 1, 2, 5, and 6) collected manually from archived message boards and live social media sites. conclusion what once started as fans gathering online to discuss easter eggs and hidden symbols has grown into a conspiratorial web of world-building through meme-ing. religious communities and fandom communities are both anchored in “special” (holy) and trusted sources to help explain and interpret reality (fictional or otherwise). qanon has taken trusted source material from religious believers and pop culture fandoms and propelled anons into a participatory mode of storytelling and gamified living. as trust in institutions continue to decline, the rise of fragmented, non-traditional religious affiliation and online fandoms (further) push acceptance of individual interpretation as the “best” form of truth and facts (over top-down consensus and expertise). memes and collective storytelling allow for both: individual interpretation and expression within a (trusted) community. what makes qanon so compelling? the extreme narrative fueled by patriotism and conservative religiosity not only provides a compelling story, but also invites anons to join in the very act of storytelling. this demonstrates a two-way influence of internet culture and extremist ideology, where compelling storytelling meets compelling participation. in the end, we may need to focus on crafting compelling stories that move beyond colonial canons (much in the same way that we regulate conspiratorial information online). figures figure 1. screenshot from reddit (2017) figure 2. screenshot from twitter (2018) figure 3. q drop #749 (2018) figure 4. q drop #4739 (2020) figure 5. meme screenshot (unknown origin) figure 6. screenshot from twitter (2018) references argentino, marc-andré. (2020). “the church of qanon: will conspiracy theories form the basis of a new religious movement?” the conversation. may 18, 2020. http://theconversation.com/the-church-of-qanon-will-conspiracy-theories-form-the-basisof-a-new-religious-movement-137859. atkinson, sarah. (2016). beyond the screen: emerging cinema and engaging audiences. new york: bloomsbury academic. beran, dale. (2019). it came from something awful: how a toxic troll army accidentally memed donald trump into office. new york: all points books. barkun, michael. (2003). a culture of conspiracy: apocalyptic visions in contemporary america. comparative studies in religion and society 15. berkeley: university of california press. coleman, gabriella. (2014). hacker, hoaxer, whistleblower, spy: the many faces of anonymous. london: verso. “dchan q origins project archive.” n.d. data accessed october 2021 and february 2022. https://dchan.qorigins.org/. du mez, kristin kobes. (2020). jesus and john wayne: how white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation. new york, ny: liveright publishing corporation. ippolito, heidi. (2021). “consumed by memes: how bird box reflects the current acceptance and anxiety toward internet-distributed film and television.” in seeing the apocalypse: essays on bird box, edited by brandon r. grafius and gregory stevenson, 153–68. bethlehem: lehigh university press. jenkins, henry. (2006). convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york: nyu press. jenkins, henry, sam ford, and joshua green. (2013). spreadable media: creating value and meaning in a networked culture. new york: new york university press. https://spreadablemedia.org/. massanari, adrienne l. (2015). participatory culture, community, and play: learning from reddit. digital formations 75. new york: peter lang. phillips, whitney, and ryan m. milner. (2021). you are here: a field guide for navigating polarized speech, conspiracy theories, and our polluted media landscape. cambridge: the mit press. shifman, limor. (2014). memes in digital culture. essential knowledge. cambridge: the mit press. ward, charlotte, and david voas. (2011). “the emergence of conspirituality.” journal of contemporary religion 26 (1): 103–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/13537903.2011.539846. internalizing the grind: mlms and neoliberal communitysubject-formation michael laminack university of denver and iliff school of theology, usa what does it mean to “decolonize” the internet in the context of neoliberalism? this presentation draws the connection between colonization and exploitation on and through the internet with a broader analysis and critique of the political philosophy underlying the intensifying commodification of the internet and its users since at least 2008. as contemporary political philosophers argue, the political-economic framework of neoliberalism demands self-commodification by individuals, recreating people as human-capital and undermining attempts at decolonization. since the 2008 financial crisis and recession, as many as 150 million workers in north america and western europe work in the “gig economy,” as independent contractors or short-term workers who lack many of the protections and benefits of traditional employment (petriglieri, ashford, and wrzesniewski, 2018). while many jobs in the gig economy rely on the internet (uber, lyft, and other ride-sharing platforms, for instance), multi-level marketing (mlm) companies have particularly thrived through the utilization of social media platforms. though the gig economy and the mass communication made available by the internet are new, the idea of highly profitable companies that offer scant or no benefits but promise unrealistic wealth creation have thrived in north america for decades in the form of mlms. this presentation analyzes the amway organization, one of the oldest and most successful north american mlms, to demonstrate how amway utilized/utilizes religious and cultural references to garner deep-seated support not just of amway, but of neoliberalism in general. any attempt to decolonize the internet must deal with this aspect of self-colonization and the rabid support it engenders. this presentation pursues its thesis through analysis informed by the fields of political philosophy and political theology, which focuses on the intersections of religious studies and political theory. the presentation also utilizes personal experiences further informed by research into the history and practices of the amway organization. the realities of colonization experienced on the internet require philosophical reflection in conversation with the lived experiences of the human beings who face the consequences of the constantly intensifying pressures to self-commodify their time in order to financially make ends-meet. attempts to decolonize the internet must therefore address the problems of neoliberalism which both cause colonization of/through the internet and also buttress colonizing power structures by convincing individuals to actively support their own colonization/exploitation. amway serves as an ideal case study of this latter practice, as it presents an explicit amalgamation of neoliberal concepts and religious belief that utilizes participatory storytelling to galvanize its members. amway provided the blueprint for the explosion of mlms in the age of social media, and its development of community through participatory storytelling continues to shape neoliberal subject-formation in the contemporary gig economy. i was raised as a religious practitioner of neoliberalism. i do not mean this in a trite way– –during my childhood, my parents joined amway, a multi-level-marketing (mlm) business that harnessed contemporary american evangelical trends and rhetoric to recruit and motivate prospects. my parents’ demographic made them prime targets for the calculated combination of neoliberal rhetoric and american evangelicalism perfected by amway in the 1980s. political theorist wendy brown analyzes the neoliberal creation of homo-oeconomicus, a conception of philosophical/political subjectivity oriented purely toward economic ends. amway serves as a prime case study for understanding how neoliberalism functions, and why neoliberal subjects ardently support and defend neoliberalism against criticism. amway encourages members to embrace their ideology in concrete forms, through a biopolitics predicated upon consumption of amwayproduced food, vitamins, music albums, comedy albums, literature, and regular conferences. members are further encouraged to consume amway products while rejecting products from other companies (indeed, consuming amway products help members reach their ultimate goal – to move up within the company by selling products). with its utilization of content from american evangelicalism, amway functions as a religious tradition wherein the ultimate goal or outcome is the creation of a perfected homo-oeconomicus. two questions guide my thesis: deleuze and guattari’s framing question, “why do people desire their own oppression?” and relatedly, “why, almost two decades after the mlm financially ruined my parents, do they still defend amway?” (deleuze and guattari [1972] 2009). one answer to this question, particularly with reference to defensiveness of neoliberal regimes by working-class people in the united states, is that political, business, and ecclesial leaders consciously amalgamated american evangelicalism and neoliberalism. working-class people therefore defend neoliberalism with similar emotional vigor as they defend their religious tradition, because, to their communities, neoliberalism and their religious tradition are one and the same. through the potent cocktail of commodified american evangelicalism, capitalist business rhetoric, and fraudulent promises of wealth creation, amway successfully co-opted my parents, even to the point that in 2021, they still defend the organization that consumed their time and money, and led them to financial ruin. in her 2015 book undoing the demos: neoliberalism's stealth revolution, political theorist wendy brown presents “a theoretical consideration of the ways that neoliberalism, a peculiar form of reason that configures all aspects of existence in economic terms, is quietly undoing basic elements of democracy” (brown 2015, 17). as a political-economic theory, neoliberalism subsumes all elements of human civilization and experience under capitalist economic pursuits. brown’s analysis provides the interpretive lens for this study of amway’s amalgamation of neoliberal ideology and american evangelicalism. according to brown, under neoliberalism “all conduct is economic conduct; all spheres of existence are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics, even when those spheres are not directly monetized” (brown 2015, 10). thus, in western liberal democracies, political subjects are no longer functionally homo politicus, but homo oeconomicus alone. following the amway model, mlms utilize social media to build communities wherein members are inculcated with neoliberal ideas and reshaped into neoliberal subjects. whereas political-philosophical subjects from earlier eras of western thought might understand themselves as citizens participating in collective pursuit of the good (as individuals or nations/nation-states), neoliberal subjects understand themselves as individuals who must work on themselves to become profitable. the neoliberal subject must learn what the global market values, and fit themselves into the mold of that market demand. mlms offer an acute example of this process, and serve as a guide for understanding the neoliberal subjectivization across the internet today. in order to decolonize the internet, reflection upon the realities of political/philosophical subjectivity, and potential responses to these circumstances, must be considered and pursued. references brown, wendy. (2015) undoing the demos: neoliberalism's stealth revolution. new york: zone books. guattari, félix, and gilles deleuze. (2009). anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. translated by robert hurley. new york: penguin books. first published 1972. petriglieri, gianpiero, susan j. ashford, and amy wrzesniewski. (2018). “thriving in the gig economy,” harvard business review’s 10 must reads. boston: harvard business school publishing. 109-116. identityeconomyvirtualworlds 022920.docx.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020:  the 21 ​st ​ annual conference of the  association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 evolving identity economies in social virtual worlds author #1 andrea stevenson won author #1 cornell university author #2 donna z. davis author #2 university of oregon how have the cultures, economies and expectations of virtual worlds influenced users’ assumptions of privacy and the ability to express identity in immersive virtual worlds? it is only in the past few years that the public has had much access to embodied, immersive, social virtual worlds through consumer virtual reality hardware. while these new experiences, such as vrchat, altspacevr, sansar and facebook horizon are still restricted to those who can access the proper equipment and have sufficient network connectivity, these virtual worlds are now the sites of busy research activity. academics and others have rushed to explore and explain them (moustafa & steed, 2018; steed, frlston, lopez, drummond, pan & swapp, 2016), put them in the context of lab experiments on social virtual reality (oh, bailenson, weisz, & zaki, 2016), categorize them by design (mcveigh-schultz, márquez segura, merrill, & isbister, 2018; jonas, said, yu, aiello, furlo & zytko, 2019) and use classic sociological theories (schwartz & steptoe, 2018) to better understand and predict how users will experience them. a rich history of academic research scaffolds our understanding of what the experience of embodiment in an avatar brings to social experiences in immersive virtual reality (biocca, 1997; schroeder, 2007; kilteni, groten, & slater, 2012). however, properly understanding how users experience embodiment in social vr will also require a deep understanding of the history of social virtual worlds such as the now 17-year-old second life. users’ previous experiences with media will inform their interactions in virtual environments even when they have never had a completely embodied immersive experience before. and, the design of current immersive virtual worlds will be influenced suggested citation (apa): won, a. s., davis, d. z. (2020, october 28-31). ​evolving identity economies in virtual worlds​. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 201 ​th ​ annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 virtual event by the less-immersive digital environments from which many of them sprang. the platforms​’ determination of how users are allowed to be embodied, and transform their embodiment, and the ​users’ ​ decisions about the kinds of embodied experiences they expect and accept will both be determined by the culture and economic architecture of the virtual worlds, which grew from and were informed by the history of previous virtual worlds. in this paper, we discuss previous work on what have become “legacy” online social virtual worlds. before immersive virtual environments (ives), the advent of the internet created opportunity for social connection en masse. early on, these were often anonymous, but often highly engaged, community boards and text-based multi-user domains. in these online communities, one could meet people with common interests. these platforms were akin to the black and white world of dorothy’s kansas, while later social platforms featuring virtual content including avatars who could interact in and with virtual environments in real time held the same awe as the colorful land of oz. we have now entered another dimension of virtual worlds, where users can immerse their physical bodies into the virtual environments through the one-to-one tracking made available by consumer virtual reality platforms. a qualitative descriptive case study analysis reveals how legacy worlds can be references that help us traverse this territory. norms, values, aesthetics, and traditions are likely to arise from the culture of the parent world, and not simply as a result of the affordances of the virtual world or the constraints created by the host. however, just as in a real environment, the culture will be influenced by these factors, and will influence users’ expectations about identity, privacy, and even the capabilities of the physical interface. thus, the self will be transformed differently depending on what virtual world is being visited, and what experiences, as well as assets, the user brings with them. this can help predict the constraints on identity that users will expect, as well as help explain what some researchers have identified as a concerning lack of privacy concerns (bailenson, 2018). in this paper, we use goffman’s theory of self presentation in combination with uses and gratifications to predict how users will choose to be embodied in virtual worlds. we will discuss how a historical understanding of legacy screen-based less-immersive virtual worlds can inform this theoretical understanding by examining the relationship between legacy, non-immersive virtual worlds and their immersive descendants. finally, we propose a new model, that of the “identity economy,” to explain how the experience of embodiment is influenced by the economic models that underpin these virtual worlds. to illustrate, we discuss two cases of embodied virtual reality worlds. one model is illustrated by the virtual worlds which evolved from a much-studied earlier virtual world, second life (yee, bailenson, urbanek, chang & merget, 2007; boellstorff, 2008). the second model is illustrated by the social virtual reality platforms linked to facebook through the acquisition of oculus. while these are two specific cases, their trajectories allow us to make some predictions which extend to games and other social platforms. in addition, discussing these two specific environments using the metaphor of geography allows us to reflect on how virtual worlds are actual places with a history, a geography, a currency, shared governance, and a language. we propose that this framing will help us to better understand how virtual worlds have evolved and are experienced now; how they may be studied, and how they may continue to evolve in the future as vr technologies create new experiences, affordances and limitations. references bailenson, j. (2018). protecting nonverbal data tracked in virtual reality. ​jama pediatrics, 172​(10), 905-906. biocca, f. (1997). the cyborg's dilemma: progressive embodiment in virtual environments. ​journal of computer-mediated communication, 3​(2), p. 324. boellstorff, tom. (2008). coming of age in second life: an anthropologist explores the virtually human. princeton: princeton u. p. jonas, m., said, s., yu, d., aiello, c., furlo, n., & zytko, d. (2019, october). towards a taxonomy of social vr application design. in extended abstracts of the annual symposium on computer-human interaction in play companion extended abstracts (pp. 437-444). kilteni, k., groten, r., & slater, m. (2012). the sense of embodiment in virtual reality. presence: teleoperators and virtual environments, 21​(4), 373-387. mcveigh-schultz, j., márquez segura, e., merrill, n., & isbister, k. (2018). what’s it mean to be social in vr?: mapping the social vr design ecology. proceedings of the 2018 acm conference companion publication on designing interactive systems, 289–294. https://money.cnn.com/2014/03/25/technology/facebook-oculus/index.html moustafa, f., & steed, a. (2018, november). a longitudinal study of small group interaction in social virtual reality. in proceedings of the 24th acm symposium on virtual reality software and technology (p. 22). acm oh, c. s., bailenson, j. n., & welch, g. f. (2018). a systematic review of social presence: definition, antecedents, and implications. front. robot. ai 5: 114. doi: 10.3389/frobt. schroeder, r. (2007). an overview of ethical and social issues in shared virtual environments. futures, 39(6), 704-717. schwartz, r., & steptoe, w. (2018). the immersive vr self: performance, embodiment and presence in immersive virtual reality environments. in a networked self and human augmentics, artificial intelligence, sentience (pp. 108-116). routledge. steed, a., frlston, s., lopez, m. m., drummond, j., pan, y., & swapp, d. (2016). an ‘in the wild’ experiment on presence and embodiment using consumer virtual reality equipment. ieee transactions on visualization and computer graphics, 22(4), 1406-1414. yee, n., bailenson, j. n., urbanek, m., chang, f., & merget, d. (2007). the unbearable likeness of being digital: the persistence of nonverbal social norms in online virtual environments. cyberpsychology & behavior, 10(1), 115-121. aoir panel submission final selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 platforming vibes: technical, intimate and political practices of the everyday margaret baker north carolina state university aaron dial purdue university gayas eapen north carolina state university ragan glover-rijkse methodist university malcolm ogden north carolina state university in susanna paasonen's (2021) dependent, distracted, bored: affective formations in networked media, she traces a common narrative of loss which has come to permeate much of the popular and scholarly discourse on platforms and platformization in recent years: "that we are hopelessly addicted to devices and apps that distract us to boredom" (4). drawing on affect theory, paasonen does not completely refute this general description, but rather, uses it as a starting-point to highlight the various other potentials existing alongside and in relation to boredom, distractedness, and dependency. scholarly research on platforms which follows this general approach must, as paasonen writes, "be both contextual and attuned to ambiguity" (8-9). suggested citation (apa): baker, m., dial, a., eapen, g., glover-rijkse, r., & ogden, m. (2022, november). platforming vibes: technical, intimate and political practices of the everyday. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. in this panel, we offer four papers on some of the complex ways in which sound, sensation, affect, and embodiment shape, and are shaped by, digital platforms. this approach does not eschew questions of power as a key concern, but rather foregoes broad dystopian (or utopian) generalizations, pointing instead to specific instances of platformized and platform-adjacent cultural production to see how power manifests in complex and contextually specific ways. as these papers demonstrate, this approach does not forego the possibility of insights which might achieve a broader scale of applicability, but merely acknowledges the microas a crucial site for approaching and, to whatever degree necessary, revising prior understandings of the macro-. ‘anti-caste reverberations of haryana’s djs and their trucks’ analyzes dj trucks, an urban entertainment technology popular in haryana, india. by deploying site-specific physical and digital ethnographic methods, it attempts to articulate sensory and affective relations, connections and intensities that emerge as dj trucks move about on the streets. however, the paper makes an argument to read this practice along with its extensions enabled through platform-based circulations. it contextualizes routine practices of sharing of tunes, playlists and other recorded media, commenting utilizing other interface affordances to build anti-caste political mobilization. tensions emerge as djs coming from marginalized caste communities seek to occupy, assert and celebrate their presence online or offline. the paper draws attention to the many “force-fields” (jhingan, 2013) of bahujan and dalit (self-asserted marginalized caste categories) reverberations that are facilitated by platform-based affordances and subjective and affective connections. "monstrous toys and sensory play on tiktok," looks at the repurposing of children's toys in the creation of sensorially stimulating videos for adults on tiktok. while these toys and videos seem to suggest a playful and experimental orientation to aurality, visuality, and tactility, they also frequently involve characters and figures which, throughout western popular and literary culture, have been framed as hostile and threatening others: dinosaurs, aliens, and monsters. thus, these videos seem to, on one level, embody the quintessential western liberal-humanist orientation to the senses as unruly, disruptive, and even “monstrous.” at the same time, these videos also seem to celebrate, and necessitate, a more distinctly posthumanist approach to the ways in which digital platforms and bodily-sensation have become interrelated in recent years into complex techno-ecologies. “ai.go.rhythms: technology, race, & culture in the mix” explores the interplay of bodies and material technologies, by planning an event that uses immersive sonic technologies such as thermal image sensors, large-format projections and dj equipment alongside listeners, audience, watchers and feelers of dope tunes and neon. it is interested in shifting attention from technical sonic manipulation and storage by djs towards embodied aspects of race and culture, community building, remixing, and algorithmic self-styling that ultimately become a 'platform' honoring black/brown bodies, aesthetics, and world-making practices. further, it leverages critical-making strategies towards the mix, exploring a dynamic and emergent site— a multimedia event— where affective relations are built and platformed instead of being rehearsed and commercialized. “building intimacy in virtual reality” offers an autoethnography of the presenter’s personal encounters in virtual reality with a romantic partner. despite the dominance of visuality in virtual reality, the embodied experiences of sound, interaction, and shared (digital) space most significantly contributed to feelings of intimacy. on the other hand, feelings of intimacy were disrupted by issues associated with mediation by platforms and infrastructures, such as technological failure and concerns over data leaks. as such, the presenter argues that the politics of platforms and infrastructures also become the politics of digitally mediated intimacy. references jhingan, s. (2013). lata mangeshkar’s voice in the age of cassette reproduction. bioscope, 4(2), 97-114. paasonen, s. (2021). dependent, distracted, bored: affective formations in networked media. mit press: cambridge, ma. anti-caste reverberations of haryana’s djs and their trucks gayas eapen north carolina state university a landmark farmer protest started on the borders of indian capital new delhi as the covid-19 pandemic had just picked up speed in 2020. to mobilize a long-term sit-in involving tens of thousands of protesting farmers, a large list of supplies moved across the country. among this was an unlikely entertainment technology: a dj truck. a modified truck, retrofitted with giant speakers on its back, brings blaring sound to north indian streets. dj trucks are sound-based space making media. as an assemblage, they combine the body of the dj, dancers clustering around the truck, inscriptions on the truck, the electrical apparatus (generators, batteries), and the embodied memory of precedent mobile musical forms. these come together in modifying the street space into a lively and dynamic site. they also affect corporeal force and presence as they vibrate through streets and neighborhoods, eliciting a range of feedback ranging from excitement, rage, distraction and aspiration. this has made them contested technologies, often attacked, and even challenged by legal restrictions1. interestingly though, dj trucks have been appropriated by a number of marginalized– dalit and bahujan– caste groups, proudly using the trucks for spatial reclamation, affirmation, and celebration2. however, their popularity is not just limited to the streets where contests on who is most loud and forceful play out. they articulate their corporeal force conjunctively with circulation of songs, playlists, tunes, discourses, and affect through content circulated via youtube and facebook among other platforms. this paper attempts to articulate this complex interplay by approaching it from the lens of caste-based power dynamics that play out in practices both online and offline. drawing on physical and digital ethnographic work carried out in haryana (indian state that surrounds delhi) i argue that in observing the potential of dj trucks as resistant space-making media, it is important to read together the site-specific negotiations of caste relations with the affective, intimate and networked potential that social-media based circulation enable. the circulation of playlists and comments extend the range of the corporeal force that dj trucks as a medium bring to the streets. however, they also enable sensory and affective relations, connections and intensities made possible by the affordances of the screen, common invocations— to bhim (ambedkar), minority caste pride, etc— and the historical energies of anti-caste resistance and social movements. this is best exemplified in one of the chamaar dj mixes uploaded on youtube by channel called “deewane bhim ke” (crazy for bhim). the tune begins with a fast pace percussion loop constantly pitch-bending, followed by a muffled auto-tune voice saying, “chamaar ka khoon bolta nahi, khaulta hai” (chamaar blood does not speak, it boils). the bravado, pride and anger in being ‘chamaar’ – a historically marginalized caste – is palpable in the audio. many similar pithy phrases and metaphors are narrated within the soundtrack, often coupled with chants of jai bhim on different pitches and speeds. chants of jai bhim, jai chamaar (hail bhim, or ambedkar, and hail chamaar) also resonate in the comments, connecting dalit and bahujan listeners. while the reach of these videos on youtube is not particularly sizable (often in the range of 20-50 thousand views), the songs and playlists become part of minority caste events, especially anniversary celebrations of dalit social reformers–particularly sant ravidas and dr. br ambedkar, when it comes to haryana3. these events and parades are attended by thousands of followers. this is where makeshift dj practices—particularly through aforementioned trucks— come into play. the trucks and the emergent sites in which they appear get implicated in contested spatial and temporal politics of the site4. this exercise of agency— in being able to modify the soundscape of the street— and risk in challenging the static politics of the street, resembles tensions within another sonic form called “pharmaish” that duggal (2018) analyzes from the 1950s to 1970s6. while pharmaish paves the way for contests on song selection and requests even in contemporary dj practices, with duggal, i am more interested in the emphasis on the material-infrastructural affordances of the medial form. in this case this includes the physiological force of reverberations, the dynamic emergence of the street as a site of performance, as well the circulation ecologies enabled through screens, platforms, mobile internet, and community networks that draw on the tunes, playlists and other recorded and visual media. jhingan (2013, 104) in her work on bollywood’s sonic extensions from the 1980s, brings attention to cassette technologies and imitation artists that replicate and dub voices of popular artists. she witnesses the “force-fields” where “sensuous knowledge and embodied memory” are dispersed, drawing on several affect theorists. dj trucks operators import and expand affective intensities, anti-caste aesthetics and a dynamic “force-field” when they tap on to tunes popular in the dalit or bahujan corners of youtube or facebook. further, affective buildup and sensory attunement, has been observed in other ethno-religious sonic contests (larkin, 2014). more recent and enhanced technological mediations in sound aimed at generating affective discomfort, or ‘bad vibes’ but simultaneously being capable of mobilizing embodied rhythms has also been articulated by goodman (2010). this paper, then, poses a question: can anti-caste embodied technological practices be studied under the purview of decolonial media? ramon grosfoguel (2012, 101), drawing on the work of enrique dussel, argues that decolonial alliances can be explored by carrying out “conversations with those subjects that reunite in their epistemic-ethic-political projects” with a negative universality, that combines antipatriarchal, anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist or other other hegemonic universalisms. anti-caste scholars, such as gail omvedt (2011) through empirical and historiographical work have attempted to find alternative traditions and sites which resist the universality of brahmanism, caste-based political and social domination, oppression and violence. could the acoustic and affective vibrations (goodman, 2010) of dalitand bahujan-operated dj trucks that reverberate on streets and mobile phone speakers, that echo in youtube comments, that channel the historical, bodily and sensory oppression into space-making techniques, be read as local decolonial media practices? notes: 1. clashes are commonly reported in news media and dealt with by law enforcement agencies. 2. later on i discuss the youtube channel “deewane bhim ke” that uploads music videos and graphics along with the tunes played by bahujan djs. 3. sant ravidas is a mystic and saint believed to have been a prominent social revolutionary of caste and gender in the bhakti movement starting from the 15th century. 4. historical work on how caste-based spatial organization in north india, including haryana has been discussed by historian william glover (2007). 5. jaats are relative mobile castes who are predominantly landowners in haryana. 6. ‘pharmaish’ is a practice that involves requesting songs by sending postcards and letters to radio stations. these were very common in the time after indian independence, in the 1950s to 1970s. references duggal, v. (2018). imagining sound through the pharmaish: radios and requestpostcards in north india, c. 1955–1975. bioscope: south asian screen studies, 9(1), 1-23. glover, w.j.. (2007). construing urban space as 'public' in colonial india: some notes from the punjab. 14. 211-224. goodman, s. (2014). sonic warfare: sound, affect, and the ecology of fear. cambridge: mit press. grosfoguel, r. (2012). decolonizing western uni-versalisms: decolonial pluri-versalism from aimé césaire to the zapatistas. transmodernity: journal of peripheral cultural production of the luso-hispanic world, 1(3). http://dx.doi.org/10.5070/t413012884 jhingan, s. (2013). lata mangeshkar’s voice in the age of cassette reproduction. bioscope, 4(2), 97-114. larkin, b. (2014). techniques of inattention: the mediality of loudspeakers in nigeria. anthropological quarterly 87(4), 989-1015. doi:10.1353/anq.2014.0067. omvedt, g. (2011). understanding caste: from buddha to ambedkar and beyond. hyderabadi: orient black swan. monstrous toys and sensory play on tiktok malcolm ogden north carolina state university the tiktok account mysteryrips, which currently has over 10 million views on its channel, features dozens of short oneto three-minute close-up videos of toys being played with with no additional audio or visual accompaniment. the videos do typically feature multiple cuts in order to showcase the various distinct phases and features of each toy, but, aside from the video creators' hands manipulating the toy (typically on a blank tabletop), and the sounds of the toy being played with, nothing else is added in the way of commentary or explanation. most of the toys featured in mysteryrips videos are from the australian toy company moose toys, whose products are divided up into various subsidiary brands, each of which offering a distinctive line of products involving consistent modes of direct interaction or "play." notably, the specific toys most consistently featured on the mysteryrips channel seem to be those brands whose products entail a kind of play which particularly lends itself to a more spectatorial orientation and thereby, networked audiovisual transmission. for example, the "treasure x" brand, a common feature on the mysteryrips channel, is described on the treasure x site as "the ultimate surprise-reveal collectible with a multi-layered reveal http://dx.doi.org/10.5070/t413012884 process." potential treasure x customers are encouraged to "[r]ip, chip, drill and dig to reveal the layers and discover the secrets hidden within!" similarly, the magic mixies brand under moose toys, also prominently featured on the mysteryrips channel, features potion kits, which require the player to assemble and apply ingredients in some suggested order. or lastly, in the case of the little live pets brand's "cutie cuts" line of products, a toy animal of some kind comes with long artificial hair, which the player/user then removes using a plastic toy shaving kit that comes with the corresponding toy animal. in this paper, i begin by comparing and contrasting the moose toys website and other marketing materials to the various instances of their being circulated as audiovisual content on tiktok, to consider the manner in and extent to which the respective audiences, and associated modes of use/play, potentially differ. notably, much of the extant marketing materials surrounding treasure x, magic mixies, and live pets brands suggests an anticipated audienceship or body of users composed of young children, whereas the mysteryrips channel seems to be, at least in part, composed of adults. bearing this apparent partial discrepancy of userbase in mind, i point to notable aesthetic similarities between the audiovisual content of mysteryrips videos and other closely related kinds of "adult" content on tiktok and other online video-hosting and streaming video websites, such as asmr, pornography, slime videos, and soundhealing videos. this broader constellation of at-times overlapping micro-genres and associated aesthetic categories generally involve potentially confounding entanglements of the symbolic and the sensorial. while they always seem to include if not in the sounds and images presented, then in the titles, descriptions, and comments adjacent some suggested explanation or associations via which viewer-listeners might consciously note or register an appropriate schema of "use," they also, at the same time, utilize the affordances of digital platforms, and the audioand visualhardware via which they are made perceptible to viewer-listener bodies, to engage viewer-listeners in ways that are more distinctly sensorial, vaguely defined, or to varying degrees undetermined. as gallagher (2016) describes in work on asmr video-culture, viewerlisteners "feel out" the content of such videos, as much as they read, look, or listen for some clearly stated explanation. these networked videos all seem to toy, in one way or another, with what paasonen (2011), in her work on online pornography, has described as "the simultaneous sharpness and shapelessness of sensation" (26) both invoking and blurring socio-linguistic categorizations in ways that can be disturbing. after all, as mowlabacus (2018) observes in his work on unboxing videos, such videos frequently draw on the "visual (or, perhaps, visceral) language of pornography" in their emphasis on a sequential multi-shot revealing even at the same time as that which is being gradually revealed is a toy frequently marketed to children. perhaps fittingly then, in the case of the mysteryrips channel, many of the toys featured in the channel's more popular videos are also those which include figures or characters which, in the history of much western popular and literary culture, have frequently been depicted as hostile or threatening others, such as aliens, dinosaurs, and simply "monsters." these sorts of figures have often stood in to represent a fear of the unknown and the unknowable, which, for the (typically white, male) western liberal human subject, serves as the impetus and rhetorical justification for the continued development of media which define “enemies” in whatever environment they might be encountered (packer and reeves 2020). in this case, these threatening and hostile entities have been rendered less threatening, or contained, both in their being cartoonish "toys" marketed to children, and also in their being circulated on tiktok as a kind of novel entertainment and sensory stimulation for adults. here, i also draw on sianne ngai (2012) who, in her work on vernacular aesthetic categories, points to a general shift in aesthetic experience from the powerful and engrossing aesthetics of the sublime and the beautiful, toward more mundane low-affect aesthetic categories such as the zany, the cute, and the interesting, which serve to constitute much of everyday existence and cultural production under late capitalism. with respect to sensation, i argue that these toys, and the videos of them featured on accounts like mystery rips, point to a lingering fascination and experimentation with the potentially threatening nature of sensory experience. by watching these videos, viewerlisteners take pleasure in the aural, visual, and tactile dimensions of these playful encounters with a "monstrous" sensory other. this basic framework that of a playful sensorial experimentation with a potentially threatening but ultimately contained object can, on one level, be understood as rooted in the western liberal-humanist orientation to the world as it informs much of our historical and contemporary networked media culture. treasure x's command to "[r]ip, chip, drill and dig to reveal the layers and discover the secrets hidden within" can be extended to the role of tiktok viewerlisteners, who, in encountering video after video, enjoin not just their thoughts, but also their bodies and sense-perceptions, in an ongoing cybernetic process of platformized production, circulation and consumption. by the same token, i argue that these videos also necessitate a more thoroughly posthumanist approach, wherein the nonhuman and the “monstrous,” at both the bodily-sensorial and socio-technological level, contribute to the emergence of new aesthetic trends and tendencies which confound and complicate the liberal model of the human upon which so much of contemporary global platformized media continues to rely. references gallagher, b. (2016). eliciting euphoria online: the aesthetics of "asmr" video culture. film criticism 20(2). available at: https://doi.org/10.3998/fc.13761232.0040.202 mowlabacus, s. (2018). ‘let’s get this thing open’: the pleasures of unboxing videos. european journal of cultural studies 23(4): 564-579. ngai, s. (2012). our aesthetic categories: zany, cute, interesting. harvard university press: cambridge, ma. paasonen, s. (2011). carnal resonance: affect and online pornography. mit press: cambridge, ma. https://doi.org/10.3998/fc.13761232.0040.202 packer, j., & reeves, j. (2020). killer apps: war, media, machine. duke university press: durham, nc. ai.go.rhythms: technology, race, & culture in the mix margaret baker north carolina state university aaron dial purdue university al.go.rhythms are about technologies and practice, human and nonhumans – and those folks who mill about between both distinctions. this project asks how djs, emphatically being a part of the black cultural and technological tradition of music making with found objects, implement algorithms as a technocultural practice of self and style-making. in other words, how do djs do black life as a mediation between technology and culture? furthermore, al.go.rhythms assumes the dj to be an archive of practice, technologies, texts, time (bpm) and aesthetics. for us, the dj represents a truly cross-platform, and platform crossing modality of black rhetoric and digital practice. our goal here is not theorization but presentation. we seek to allow listeners/watchers/ feelers/readers to take in the human haunting concentric circles of chunky technologies, hidden wires, neon platforms, and churning algorithms. if only for a moment, we wish to allow audiences to “listen around the corner,” (weheliye, 48.) as dj’s do, for that next beat drop, next blend, next oh shi!t moment. moreover, we wish to interrogate the assumed disembodiment of digitality through music. al.go.rhythms supplants this for the more productive phenomenal realm of the groove, that gap between blackness and technology, “how race and technology reconstruct each other” (banks pp. 11 2011). in digital griots: african american rhetoric in a multimedia age, adam banks (2011) writes, “the scratch is an interruption. it breaks the linearity of the text, the progressive circularity of the song. it takes the listener or reader back and forth through the song, underneath the apparatus that plays it, either to insert some other song or for the sheer pleasure of the sound of the scratch itself. what was noise, what was seen as the sign of a broken record or stylus, an unwelcome interruption in the continual march of text, groove, history, became a purposeful interruption, became pleasurable, became a way to insert other voices in a text, to redirect one’s attention” (pp. 1-2). the author’s theorization of the scratch helps us sketch our goals in this project. first, we see this work as an intentional interruption to the typical scholarly – read a lot, write a lot – production style for a more sensual mode of theorizing. furthermore, as a multimedia experience where audiovisual rendering happens alongside the tangible and sensually ephemeral booms, baps, and, yes, scratches. through this work, we wish to ask not what is a dj, a blend, a mix, a scratch but how do these things reflect and perform embodied aspects of race and culture? how do these exist as technologically and racially saturated becomings? secondly, we see this production as expanding and critiquing prevailing ideas and theories of platforms. djs often use the platform of serato to store/manage/manipulate audio files. but what happens if we consider the dj as platform, a medium of “elevation and amplification” (singh pp. 18 2020). however, what if this elevation and amplification did not treat data and knowledge through logics of an extractable “raw material” but through community building, remixing, and honoring black/brown bodies, aesthetics, and world-making practices (srnicek pp.41 2017) based around a one-night event created in conjunction with the nc state university library, this work explores, through the use of audio/visual technologies, the intersection between sonics, affect, and space as media. al.go.rhythms, as an event, leverages large-format projection, thermal imaging sensors, and dj equipment, providing novel and creative participation opportunities to enrich the sonic and immersive experience of audience-partners. this event stimulates a collective listening experience and implements cutting edge sound and visual technologies to showcase the dj as an interfacing medium between networked platforms and culture. this interfacing medium creates an affective space one where sonic media encounters material bodies with which it interacts. drawing upon spinozian notions of affect and affection, this work considers the interfacing of both the bodies of the dj and the crowd, alongside the interfacing of the bodies and material technologies. utilizing the work of ratto and hertz in critical making, this project understands production as a mode of scholarly inquiry and evaluates djing technologies within a visually enhanced and aurally curated environment. “the primary aim of critical making…” ratto and ree (2012) assert, “...is to connect technological systems and practices to critical scholarship and ideas.” event production has not often been linked to critical making, however, cramer et. al (2017) note the expansion of critical making as a site of inquiry, stating, “critical making in this sense is not confined to particular sites. while critical making, in ratto’s and hertz’ original perspective, had the maker movement and its maker spaces (i.e. fablabs, hacklabs and other public workshop facilities for distributed, personal digital fabrication) as its points of departure, their concept has become highly inclusive and therefore emancipated itself from this specific context” (p. 2). this work extends critical making into the mix, where affect, technology, and race manifests through dope tunes and neon, as a methodological tool to fabricate and explicate the entanglements between sonic/visual media and our audiencepartners. al.go.rhythms: technology, race, & culture in the mix presents the intersections of sonic media, djing, blackness, and platformization. this multimodal account offers viewers and creators an opportunity to consider critical making as a tool for an alternative practice of scholarly production and theory, while also commenting on the nature of reconstructions of race and technology. references banks, a. j. (2011). digital griots: african american rhetoric in a multimedia age. carbondale: southern illinois university press. cramer, f., evers, l., helmling, a., et. al. (2017). position paper critical making. waag technology and society. retrieved from https://waag.org/sites/waag/files/positionpaper-critical-making.pdf eidshiem, n. s. (2019). the race of sound: listening, timbre, & vocality. durham: duke university press. ratto, m., & ree, r. (2012). materializing information: 3d printing and social change. first monday. retrieved from https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/ 3968/3273 singh, r. (2020). platform feminism: protest and the politics of spatial organization (unpublished doctoral dissertation), faculty of information, university of toronto, toronto, canada. srnicek, n. (2017). platform capitalism. malden: polity press. thompson, m., & bittle, i. (2013). introduction: somewhere between the signifying and the sublime. in m. thompson, & i. bittle (eds.), sound, music, affect: theorizing sonic experience (pp. 1-24). new york: bloomsbury academic. weheliye, a. g. (2005). phonographies: grooves in sonic afro-modernity. durham: duke university press. producing intimacy in virtual reality ragan glover-rijkse methodist university a 1,799 mile (2895km) network of roads and highways connect his home to mine. it used to be only 30. instead of regularly traversing that distance to see one another, we now send data packets to be routed non-circuitously across internet and cellular networks. when it was only 30, our mobile phones primarily served for microcoordination (ling & yttri, 1999): [him] “still wanna hang tonight. i can go to yours if you want?” and [me] “yeah, that’s totally fine. i’m also fine to go to yours if you’re not in the mood to drive.” our phones also created a telecocoon (habuchi, 2005), allowing us to stay in contact throughout the day by sharing the mundane details of our individual lives: [him]“i was supposed to go the game today, but it got canceled” and [me] “nice. my sunday was laid back. did some cooking and baking.” these digitally mediated communicative acts punctuated the moments between our physically co-present interactions, when seemingly the work of building intimacy was done. the digital did not feel intimate. yet, now, our relationship (and the production / maintenance of intimacy) is almost entirely digitally mediated, except for when one of us can catch the occasional flight to see the other. yet, still, the sense that text messages and phone calls do not feel sufficiently intimate persists. as such, we have expanded our digital repertoires—integrating additional means of communication into our routines (donner, 2016)—to include the oculus quest 2 virtual reality headset. in this headset, we still talk with one another but we also play games and occupy virtual environments together. at one point, he text messaged me to say, “i think there’s definitely some merit to oculus dates. i’d say equally as intimate as facetime [a video call] but also interactive.” likewise, in the oculus, i noted “wow, your voice sounds so clear in here” to which he responded “yeah, it’s like you’re whispering in my ear.” these reflective moments have led me to question and attempt to understand the affective quality of virtual reality for producing intimacy. drawing from my personal encounters in virtual reality with a romantic partner, recorded in a journal, i perform autoethnography to answer the following research questions: (i) how do contemporary experiences of virtual reality produce feelings of and/or contribute to the maintenance of intimacy for me? and (ii) how do we understand the nature of relational intimacy in our contemporary digitally networked landscape? as an approach, autoethnography refers to “research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)” (ellis et al., 2011). to this point, scholars have primarily addressed digitally mediated intimacy—broadly defined—from critical cultural (baym, 2015; munn, 2012; ley & rambukkana, 2021) and ethnographic perspectives (watson et al., 2021; hjorth et al, 2018). i contribute to this body of scholarship by sharing my embodied experience—both physical and emotional—during our virtual reality dates. since both intimacy and vr experiences are highly individualized, it is important that we also individualize the sensemaking and interpretive processes of those experiences. autoethnography enables such individualized sensemaking and interpretative processes, particularly with regard to those “moments of everyday experience that cannot be captured through more traditional research methods...allowing what we see, hear, think and feel to become part of the field” (adams et al., 2017, p. 4) over the course of these virtual reality dates, the embodied experiences of sound, interaction, and shared (digital) space produced heightened feelings of intimacy, comparable to those experienced in person. in addition, these experiences enabled relationship maintenance between in-person visits. surprisingly, visuality (the primary appeal of virtual reality) did not factor as important, particularly because the avatars poorly represented our physical bodies. that is, gestural expressions were limited to head movements, like nodding, and hand movements, like waving. there were moments when we would try to intuit emotions from these limited expressions. for example, when i lost a game of ping-pong, he could read my frustration because my (avatar’s) head was tilted up. this follows the basic argument of cues filtered out theory, which suggests that users must continuously compensate for the lack of physical and social cues in digitally mediated environments. nevertheless, i argue that intimacy is built through these acts of compensation, as relational partners work to overcome the perceived deficiencies that shape their interaction. a more significant limitation stems from the fact that digital intimacy can be a precarious achievement, resulting from mediation by platforms and infrastructures. specifically, feelings of intimacy can quickly be disrupted by technological failure, such as one evening when slow internet caused a lag in our conversation. likewise, the awareness of sharing intimate thoughts—whether sexual, controversial, or just simply confidential— in a “private” digital space can feel risky given pervasive data collection and the persistence of data leaks. on multiple occasions, i found myself questioning what and how i would say things, due to my awareness of this risk. given this, i conclude by discussing how the politics of platforms and infrastructures, in this case, also become the politics of digitally mediated intimacy. that is, we shape our intimacies around the affordances, limitations, and power relations at play through their use. as such, we cannot eschew understandings of mediation (and what shapes that mediation) from explanations of the embodied experiences that produce intimacy. references: adams, t. e., ellis, c., & jones, s. h. (2017). autoethnography. the international encyclopedia of communication research methods, 1-11. baym, n. k. (2015). personal connections in the digital age. john wiley & sons. donner, j. (2016). global south. in a. de souza e silva (ed.), dialogues on mobile communication (1st ed., pp. 189–208). routledge. https://doi.org/ 10.4324/9781315534619 ellis, c., adams, t. e., & bochner, a. p. (2011). autoethnography: an overview. historical social research/historische sozialforschung, 273-290. habuchi, i. (2005). accelerating reflexivity. in m. ito, d. okabe, & m. matsuda (eds.), personal, portable, pedestrian: mobile phones in japanese life (pp. 165–182). cambridge, ma: mit press hjorth, l., pink, s., & horst, h. (2018). being at home with privacy: privacy and mundane intimacy through same-sex locative media practices. international journal of communication, 1209-1227. ley, m., & rambukkana, n. (2021). touching at a distance: digital intimacies, haptic platforms, and the ethics of consent. science and engineering ethics, 27(5), 1-17. ling, r., & yttri, b. (1999). nobody sits at home and waits for the telephone to ring: micro and hyper-coordination through the use of the mobile telephone. telenor forskning og utvikling, fou rapport, 30(99). munn, n. j. (2012). the reality of friendship within immersive virtual worlds. ethics and information technology, 14(1), 1-10. watson, a., lupton, d., & michael, m. (2021). enacting intimacy and sociality at a distance in the covid-19 crisis: the sociomaterialities of home-based communication technologies. media international australia, 178(1), 136–150. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/1329878x20961568 notes: selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 doyle, dylan thomas. (2021, october). towards operationalizing white male accountability in artificial intelligence development: interrogating impacts of and solutions to overrepresentation utilizing relational ethics frameworks. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. towards operationalizing white male accountability in artificial intelligence development: interrogating impacts of and solutions to overrepresentation utilizing relational ethics frameworks dylan thomas doyle university of colorado boulder positionality statement at the outset it is important to note the author’s own positionality as a white man studying ai ethics writing about how white men should engage with representational concerns within the arena of ai technology, including within the field of ai ethics. introduction this paper explores how a framework of white male accountability can be operationalized within artificial intelligence system (ais) development and deployment. white men are demographically overrepresented in artificial intelligence (ai) technology development, research, and media coverage spaces. this overrepresentation creates immediate and downstream harms that ai corporations and technologists in the industry and the academy alike must contend with to ensure the existence of ai technologies, ai development organizations, and ai research institutions that are ethical, fair, accountable, transparent, and beneficial to all people. it is particularly because of the historical domination that the white male identity group has claimed in ai technology spaces that white men must claim agency over that history and more actively partner in the work to make sure that history is not repeated. white male overrepresentation in ai technology spaces has created complex ethical considerations that necessitate comprehensive solutions to fully address. these solutions must be both ontological and technical and must include greater white male accountability in these spaces and a shift in the foundational ethical framework of these spaces. this paper offers a two-pronged set of considerations to the critical problem of the overrepresentation of white men in ai technology development, research, and media coverage spaces. the two prongs of this solution are (1) operationalizing white male accountability in ai technology spaces and (2) operationalizing relational ethics as the foundational ethical framework in ai technology spaces. the problem the benefits of ai technology spaces disproportionately advantage white educated men at the expense of disadvantaging gender minorities, people of color, and other underrepresented groups.1 this is true at every level of ai technology spaces from the design stage to who these technologies predominantly help when they are applied on the consumer end to whose voices get featured most prominently in media representation about ai technology news.2 this disproportionate advantaging of white men in ai technology spaces is part of a historical global context in which white men have disproportionately benefited from social, economic and political systems of power, especially in the context of scientific development.3 current overrepresentation of white men in ai technology spaces has not come to exist within a socio-historical vacuum; it comes with baggage and history steeped in elements of harm. this baggage and history not only includes social systems within the technology sector but philosophical and ethical systems as well. applying relational ethics and white male accountability to ais development in order to partially address white male accountability in ais development relational ethics can be applied in conjunction with kathryn hume’s ai ethics operationalization model as published in hume’s white paper entitled “responsible ai in consumer enterprise: a framework to help organizations operationalize ethics, privacy, and security as they apply machine learning and artificial intelligence.”45 1 myers west, sarah, meredith whittaker, and kate crawford, “discriminating systems: gender, race, and power in ai,” ai now institute, april 2019, https://ainowinstitute.org/discriminatingsystems.pdf. 2 snow, jackie, “‘we’re in a diversity crisis’: cofounder of black in ai on what’s poisoning algorithms in our lives,” m it technology review, february 14, 2018, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610192/were-in-a-diversity-crisis-black-in-ais-founder-on-whats-poisoningthe-algorithms-in-our/. 3 whittaker, meredith, et al., “disability, bias, and ai,” ai now institute, november 2019, https://ainowinstitute.org/disabilitybiasai-2019.pdf. 4 accenture federal services, “responsible ai: a framework for building trust in your ai solutions,” 2019, https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/pdf-92/accenture-afs-responsible-ai.pdf. 5 integrate.ai, “responsible ai in consumer enterprise,” 2019, https://www.integrate.ai/ethics-of this paper offers a preliminary model for taking an ethical framework from theory into practice by offering an operationalized framework to begin embedding issues of overrepresentation into the ai technology product development cycle. this paper identifies a six step process in the ai technology development process. these six steps are 1) problem definition and scope, 2) design, 3) data collection and retention, 4) data processing, 5) model prototyping and qa testing, and 6) deployment, monitoring, and maintenance.6 specifically, to each one of the six steps in the development cycle this paper offers a recommended set of additional jobs to be done as follows: 1) a critical race theory analysis of who has been represented in this step including the gendered and racial makeup of the stakeholders present. 2) a specified list of potential impacts of how that representational makeup may impact the product and consumers downstream. 3) a discussion within the development team about team dynamics and whether there were specific steps taken to ensure white male accountability and the centering of the voices of folks representing other identities. 4) a specified list of how relational ethics drove development choices within this step. similarly, this paper adds a recommended set of guiding questions at each step of the development cycle as follows: 1) how am i centering the needs of marginalized communities in this step? 2) how am i prioritizing understanding and empathy of the experiences of others over accuracy of prediction and purely technological solutions? 3) what are the underlying values i am embedding into this step? what assumptions might i be bringing from my socio-political positionality? 4) how am i addressing bias, fairness, and justice in myself and my work? 5) how does taking these steps towards relationality and white male accountability feel for me? do i have a space to process the personal impact of these steps? conclusion the larger project of this paper is to invite those who represent a white male identity who also have influence over the future of ai technological development, research, and media coverage to more transparently engage with their pre-existing assumptions and biases while decreasing the impact of hidden prejudices. the specific ask is for white male individuals in ai technology spaces to actively partner with non-white non-male individuals through a lens of open and honest accountability grounded in relational ethics. the outcome of this accountability and partnership will be to holistically increase the ethical foundations of ai technology spaces. by creating deeper ethical foundations artificial-intelligence#download. 6 terzi, s., bouras, a., dutta, d., garetti, m. and kiritsis, d. (2010) ‘product lifecycle management – from its history to its new role’, int. j. product lifecycle management, vol. 4, no. 4, pp.360–389. in ai technology spaces based in relational morality and identity dialogue the hope is that those embedded ethical values will trickle down into the downstream outputs of those spaces such as ai technology. overrepresentation of white men in ai technology development, application, and media coverage has created complex ethical considerations that necessitate comprehensive solutions to fully address. these solutions must be both ontological and technical in nature and must include greater white male accountability in these spaces and a shift in foundational ethical frameworks. the opportunities for future research are numerous. more work on what accountability means in industry, what critical race studies have to teach frameworks of justice and bias in ai technologies, and what vital questions moral philosophy invites those in industry to ask of themselves are necessary. there is a need for more data on the impacts of overrepresentation downstream in ai technology spaces. finally, there is an immense need for studies analyzing overrepresentation in ai technology application and media coverage spaces. microsoft word aoir2022_tugce bidav.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): bidav, t. (2022, november). making a media career on and beyond youtube: diversity in professional identities of youtube creators. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. making a media career on and beyond youtube: diversity in professional identities of youtube creators tugce bidav maynooth university introduction youtube as part of a growing social media entertainment (sme) industry has gathered global content creators under its platform (cunningham and craig, 2019). the platform has taken various steps to professionalise, formalise and regulate the field of usergenerated content (ugc) such as introducing the content id system for copyright infringements, supporting the formation of multi-channel networks, creating youtube studios, welcoming professionally generated content (pgc) from traditional media industries, and introducing its partner program for revenue sharing (burgess and green, 2018). along with these steps blurring the boundary between ugc and pgc, self-professionalised youtube creators have integrated into an emerging creative workforce of sme. the industrialisation and professionalisation of sme have created the assumption of a formalisation of professional identity as an influencer (van driel and dumitrica, 2021), a social media creator (cunningham and craig, 2019), a blogger (hopkins, 2019), a vlogger (burgess and green, 2009), or more specifically a youtuber (lange, 2019). contrary to this assumption, i argue that there is a divergence from fixed categories as it is not possible to fix permanently or define conclusively the professional identity as a youtuber because conditions of content creator labour are precarious. making a media career from youtubing is, therefore, a risky endeavour for creators as not all of them manage to secure a liveable income. first, creators working outside of standard employment relations are deprived of usual benefits such as stable income, insurance, and sick leave. this particularly stems from the way youtube structurally frames its creators as independent contractors who are bounded by “an entrepreneurial competition for audience and resources” (caplan and gillespie, 2020, p. 4). furthermore, creators experience “algorithmic precarity” (duffy, 2020) stemming from non-transparent and changeable nature of the algorithms which determines video contents’ visibility on the platform (bishop, 2019) and “platform precarity” within the competitive field of sme (cunningham and craig, 2019). while acknowledging these aspects of youtube labour, this paper investigates how creators who engage in selfgovernance as risk-bearing creative agents form their professional identities inside or outside youtube careers and illuminates the diversity and ambivalence in their professional identities due to the precarious nature of their work. methodology this paper presents findings from my doctoral research which examines creative digital labour practices of irish and turkish youtube creators by focusing on a diversity of professional identities among the research participants and platformisation and localisation of precarity experiences of creators. the data presented in this paper is collected through semi-structured interviews with 9 turkish creators, 6 of whom were male and 3 were female, and 7 irish creators, 4 of whom were male and 3 were female, between december 2019 and june 2020 and an observational study in one of the production houses (phs) in istanbul. the research participants, identified through snowball sampling, consist of self-professionalised or aspiring independent creators, those who are engaged in paid employment in phs as part of a production team and have recognisable job titles as media workers as well as owners/partners of such phs. this diversity is also evident in their channels’ subscriber numbers ranging from 1k to 3m and content genres such as entertainment, beauty & lifestyle, vlogs, tutorials, film reviews, and interviews with celebrities. this diversity was illuminating to identify the differences in how they form their professional identities while also exploring their shared work culture. in addition, the study benefited from the walkthrough method to identify the platform affordances and to understand the platform’s vision, operating model, and governance (light, burgess, and duguay, 2018). this method informed my interview questions and helped me to put subjective interpretations of creators into the context of the platform affordances and regulatory frameworks and consider how these factors shape or constrain the activity of creators. findings as part of the sme industry, the research participants with different educational backgrounds, talent, skills, and motivations have slightly different but at times similar identifications regarding their practices of youtubing. while all have looked to or are looking to monetise their activity, there are variations in the professional identities they claim. their self-descriptions include not only youtuber but also freelance videographer, entrepreneur, manager, content editor, producer, production assistant, and production coordinator. they also work under various types of employment categories including self-professionalised youtubers, freelancers, company owners/partners and employees. overall, there are various factors affecting how they describe their practices of youtubing which range from their motivations to their commitment to their channels, their income sources, the type of media production they engage, and their career goals. all these problematise the assumption of the increasing formalisation of a professional identity as youtuber or content creator in the sme industry. some participants describe their practices “as ‘non-work’ that needs to be supported through ‘work’ or another source of income” such as paid employment or freelancing since they are unable to monetise adequately their creative outputs on youtube (taylor, 2018, p. 334). youtubing, therefore, remains a labour of love as they do not actively seek to acquire a professional identity of youtuber. some creators are committed to the activity they love in pursuit of becoming a professional youtuber, despite describing youtubing as a hobby. for self-professionalised creators who secure a liveable income, youtubing emerges as “a career in its own right” (ashton and patel, 2018). lastly, for some participants working in phs, their professional identities come from their role in the processes of media production. thus, focusing on the nature of how work is organised in youtubing provides a valuable perspective on the diversity of professional identities. given this complexity, the precarious nature of youtubing also creates unstable identifications with the participants’ practices of youtubing. self-managing this uncertainty requires the flexibility to shift between different professional identities as well as types of employment categories. these shifts are not stuck inside youtube careers, though. youtubing as an emerging profession in the sme industry has clearly some established ties with more traditional media industries. for some creators, the end goal of their creative practice is to have a career inside the formalised, established media industry and thereby youtube is a stepping-stone; for others, formal media work is the stepping-stone to a youtube career. more importantly, most of them maintain the possibility of moving between inside and outside youtube careers as a risk management strategy. references ashton, d. and patel, k. (2018) ‘vlogging careers: everyday expertise, collaboration and authenticity', in taylor, s. and luckman, s. (eds.) the new normal of working lives: critical studies in contemporary work and employment. cham: palgrave macmillan, pp. 147-169. bishop, s. (2019) ‘managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip’, new media & society, 21(11-12), pp. 2589-2606. burgess, j. and green, j. (2009) ‘the entrepreneurial vlogger: participatory culture beyond the professional-amateur divide’, in snickars, p. and vonderau, p. (eds.) the youtube reader. stockholm: national library of sweden, pp. 89-107. burgess, j. and green, j. (2018) youtube: online video and participatory culture. digital media and society series. 2nd ed. cambridge: polity press. caplan, r. and gillespie, t. (2020) ‘tiered governance and demonetization: the shifting terms of labor and compensation in the platform economy’, social media + society, april-june, pp. 1-13. cunningham, s. and craig, d. (2019) social media entertainment: the new intersection of hollywood and silicon valley. new york: new york university press. duffy, e. b. (2020) ‘algorithmic precarity in cultural work’, communication and the public. hopkins, j. (2019) monetising the dividual self: the emergence of the lifestyle blog and influencers in malaysia. london and new york: berghahn books. lange, p. g. (2019) thanks for watching: an anthropological study of video sharing on youtube. louisville: university press of colorado. light, b., burgess, j. and duguay, s. (2018) ‘the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps’, new media & society, 20(3), pp. 881-900. taylor, s. (2018) ‘beyond work? new expectations and aspirations’, in taylor, s. and luckman, s. (eds.) the new normal of working lives: critical studies in contemporary work and employment. cham: palgrave macmillan, pp. 327-345. van driel, l. and dumitrica, d. (2021) ‘selling brands while staying “authentic”: the professionalization of instagram influencers’, convergence, 27(1), pp. 68-84. aoir2024-paper bombaci nespoli selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 my product, your green choice: exploring the interplay between influencer’s sustainability communication and green marketing strategies on tiktok mael bombaci lumsa university francesco nespoli lumsa university introduction in recent decades, the media have played a significant role in promoting and establishing the concept of sustainability in society (newig et al., 2013). in today’s world, companies have an increasing need to genuinely communicate their environmental commitment to gain consumer awareness and recognition of their credibility (correia et al., 2023). tiktok, with its distinctive communicative style characterised by highly visual, vernacular, and meme-based content (hautea et al., 2021), emerges as a particularly effective channel for addressing companies' communication needs, especially through the narratives shaped by green influencers. however, the actual willingness of these narratives to challenge the capitalist neoliberal logic has been questioned in the literature. theoretical framework influencers, initially centred on commercial promotion (colucci & pedroni, 2022), have increasingly begun voicing their opinions on matters of social interest. this blurs the line between digital activism and influence culture. green influencers are emerging, committed to raising public awareness of sustainability (abell & pittman, 2021). their ability to promote behaviours (dekoninck & schmuck, 2022) is also evidenced by suggested citation (apa): bombaci, m., nespoli f. (2024, october). my product, your green choice: exploring the interplay between influencers’ sustainability communication and green marketing strategies on tiktok. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. companies choosing to work with them as part of wider green marketing practices (kan et al., 2024). scientific research organisations have recently collaborated with influencers, leading some authors to highlight the pedagogical aspect of sustainability-focused content aimed at informing younger generations (huber, 2022) . moreover, the utilisation of the modes of communication offered by tiktok, characterised by a highly visual, vernacular, and meme-based form (zeng et al., 2021) do not necessarily result in a simplifications of the topics addressed; rather, they manifest the potential of the platform, according to huber et al. (2022). however, the practices of green influencers also seem to be shaped by neoliberal logics, reflecting a paradoxical ideological tension as they seek both to oppose the market and to gain a role within it. this critique aligns with the claim that the green economy narrative itself can be seen as a continuation of neoliberal capitalism, where nature is privatised and commercialised (cooke et al., 2022). this process maintains the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism under the guise of sustainable development and contributes to withdrawing attention from the social and political dimensions of sustainability (wanner, 2014). in light of the increasing interest among tiktok users in environmental issues (tiktok creative center, 2022) and the potential offered by digital affordances (boyd, 2011; davis, 2020) to shape the multifaceted outcome of user behaviour (niedderer et al., 2016), it is crucial to recognize the importance of investing in sustainable communication through a mutually beneficial approach that considers the interests of all parties involved (kumar et al., 2013). therefore, this study aims to explore how companies combine sustainable communication and product sponsorship in collaborations with green influencers on tiktok. method the purpose of this paper is to provide an explanatory analysis of how companies communicate their environmental commitment. we ask: (q1) who are the main actors and what are the central themes used in this form of communication? (q2) what are the recurring narratives in the collaboration between companies and green influencers to promote sustainability? a content and thematic analysis was carried out, according to the framework adopted in the research by basch et al. (2023) and jones et al. (2023), on 45 videos published by green influencers on tiktok. all selected content clearly indicates a paid collaboration, as signalled by the ad disclosure claim. the use of hashtags has facilitated the identification of content related to the topic. at the time of the study, february 2024, the most popular were #sustainability (374.1k posts), followed by #ecofriendly (579.5k posts) and #zerowaste (244.2k posts). to ensure a more comprehensive data set, we used two different vpns, one based in the uk and the other in the us. after merging the datasets and removing duplicates, the first 15 videos for each hashtag were selected following the selection method originally adopted by cheng and zeng (2023). in particular, we selected the videos with the highest views. this effectively captures tiktok's virality dynamics emphasised by hautea et al. (2021). the focus was on an open and inductive thematic analysis of the narratives used to communicate the company's commitment to sustainability. overall audiovisual content was also analysed in order to detect the use of memes and viral sounds. key findings the analysis shows a variety of companies in the field of consumer goods and services investing in green communication as a form of sponsorship on the platforms analysed. these include companies ranging from those marketing personal hygiene products (@newlifestyleabb and @ethiqueworld) and offering online services (@mirandamorey_ and @uber) to e-commerce platforms focused on second-hand products (@brennan.kay x @backmarketusa). preliminary results suggest that product sponsorship can be inserted into an educational narrative whose purpose is not only to promote the company but also to inform the user. the main trend is the use of a narrative that provides information on environmental issues in simple language, almost offering the product sponsored as a possible solution to the environmental problem posed. these findings are noteworthy as they demonstrate how company sponsorships are integrated into a broader narrative involving third-party actors. presenting the product as a potential solution to environmental issues aligns the collaboration with the storytelling used by green influencers, resulting in content that is consistent with their feed profiles and may contribute to their credibility. however, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between green influencer’s genuine environmental efforts and profit-driven motives. there are signs of a willingness to engage with consumer logics to correct and guide sustainable capitalism, evident in their promotion of reusable brands and advocacy of waste reduction but this approach does not challenge liberal norms; waste reduction is often seen as a minor issue within the broader context of ethical consumption. furthermore, the lack of emphasis on collective action could limit the effectiveness of this form of advocacy. sustainability issues are of intrinsic public interest and necessitate collective action. however, the observed behaviour from the analysis of the interaction with platform’s affordances indicates that users' engagement remains predominantly at the individual level, indicating a reluctance to actively engage in public debate and to involve others on issues that require a broad societal response. tiktok and its video formats are therefore powerful tools for communicating. however, the articulation of messages related to corporate green goals requires a complex approach that takes into account the multiple dynamics based on the specific architecture of the platform. further questions this paper focuses on the content of selected videos, without taking into consideration the public response. it would be beneficial for future research to investigate user interaction with diverse content types, in order to understand how these strategies are seen by consumers and citizens. which forms of engagement facilitated by platform affordances are most frequently used by viewers? how do users react/comment on the sponsored content created by green influencers in collaboration with companies ? references abell, a., & pittman, m. (2021). more trust in fewer followers: diverging effects of popularity metrics and green orientation social media influencers. journal of interactive marketing, 56(1), 70–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intmar.2021.05.002 basch, c.h., yalamanchili, b. & fera, j. #climate change on tiktok: a content analysis of videos. j community health 47, 163–167 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10900-021-01031-x boyd, d. (2010). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites (ed. z. papacharissi, pp. 39-58). chen, s. x., & zeng, n. (2023). 'gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss': memefied femininities and disidentification in tiktok youth cultures. aoir selected papers of internet research, 2022. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2022i0.12988 colucci, m., & pedroni, m. (2022). got to be real: an investigation into the co-fabrication of authenticity by fashion companies and digital influencers. journal of consumer culture. https://doi.org/10.1177/14695405211033665 correia, e., sousa, s., viseu, c., & larguinho, m. (2023). analysing the influence of green marketing communication in consumers’ green purchase behaviour. international journal of environmental research and public health, 20(2), 1356. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20021356 cooke, p., nunes, s., oliva, s., & lazzeretti, l. (2022). open innovation, soft branding, and green influencers: critiquing ‘fast fashion’ and ‘overtourism.’ journal of open innovation: technology, market, and complexity, 8(1), 52. https://doi.org/10.3390/joitmc8010052 davis, j. l. (2020). how artifacts afford: the power and politics of everyday things. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11967.001.0001 dekoninck, h., & schmuck, d. (2022). the mobilizing power of influencers for pro-environmental behavior intentions and political participation. environmental communication, 16(4), 458–472. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2022.2027801 https://doi.org/10.1177/14695405211033665 hautea, s., parks, p., takahashi, b., & zeng, j. (2021). showing they care (or don’t): affective publics and ambivalent climate activism on tiktok. social media & society, 7(2), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211012344 huber, b., lepenies, r., baena, l. q., & allgaier, j. (2022). beyond individualized responsibility attributions? how eco influencers communicate sustainability on tiktok. environmental communication, 16(6), 713-722. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2022.2131868 jones, i.i. v., k. sungwoo, t. haoyang, & l. zhiheng. (2024). black people in ukraine: a content analysis of tiktok videos documenting discrimination against black people attempting to flee at the onset of the 2022 russo-ukrainian war. dialogues in health, 4, 100161. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dialog.2023.100161 kan, j., zheng, j., & luo, s. (2024). green power of virtual influencer: the role of virtual influencer image, emotional appeal, and product involvement. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2023.103660 newig, j., schulz, d., fischer, d., hetze, k., laws, n., lüdecke, g., & rieckmann, m. (2013). communication regarding sustainability: conceptual perspectives and exploration of societal subsystems. sustainability, 5(7), 2976–2990. https://doi.org/10.3390/su5072976 niedderer, k., ludden, g., clune, s. j., lockton, d., mackrill, j., morris, a., cain, r., gardiner, e., evans, m., gutteridge, r., & hekkert, p. p. (2016). design for behaviour change as a driver for sustainable innovation: challenges and opportunities for implementation in the private and public sectors. international journal of design, 10(2), 67-85. kumar, v., rahman, z., kazmi, a. a., & goyal, p. (2013). evolution of sustainability as a marketing strategy: beginning of a new era. procedia social and behavioral sciences, 37, 482–489. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2012.03.313 wanner, t. (2014). the new ‘passive revolution’ of the green economy and growth discourse: maintaining the ‘sustainable development’ of neoliberal capitalism. new political economy, 20(1), 21–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2013.866081 zeng, j., schäfer, m. s., & allgaier, j. (2021). reposting “till albert einstein is tiktok famous”: the memetic construction of science on tiktok. international journal of communication, 3216–3247. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/8tdvm https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2012.03.313 sitography https://ads.tiktok.com/business/creativecenter/quicktok/online/go_green_with_tiktok/pc/en https://ads.tiktok.com/business/creativecenter/quicktok/online/go_green_with_tiktok/pc/en microsoft word narr-bored ghosts and anxious text games-bored ghosts and anxious text games.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): narr, g. (2021, october). bored ghosts and anxious text games: how dating apps algorithmically channel the desire for intimacy into anxious engagement. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. bored ghosts and anxious text games: how dating apps algorithmically channel the desire for intimacy into anxious engagement gregory narr na dating apps have been characterized as fostering superficial hookups and exacerbating the toxicity of hookup culture because users must decide with whom to meet primarily by looking at photos (david & cambre, 2016; shaw, 2016; thompson, 2018). dating apps are probably not the vast hookup factories they are often depicted as (carpenter & mcewan, 2016; enomoto et al., 2017; hobbs et al., 2016; lefebvre, 2018). but their popularity seems to point to a shift in the locus of power away from what michel foucault referred to as entrepreneurs of themselves (2010), with affective engagement online seeming to be generated from disappointment and anxiety rather than a market mentality (fisher, 2018; heino et al., 2010; illouz, 2007; kendall, 2018). this argument is based on two key findings from a thematic analysis of 50 in-depth interviews of online daters, many of whom made the transition from okcupid’s website to the popular swipe-based dating apps of tinder and bumble (guest et al., 2012). i used the “media go-along” method for these interviews, asking my respondents questions that arose as i watched them navigate their dating apps (jørgensen, 2016). the first finding indicates that my respondents began using dating apps because they wanted to engage in intimate exchanges to get to know their matches, something they felt the elaborate essays on okcupid rendered redundant. the second finding indicates that instead of intimacy they encountered anxious text games exacerbated by the widespread practice of ghosting on dating apps. and while they considered ghosting to be inconsiderate and nonsensical, they admitted to ghosting matches that they became bored with. these findings help to flesh out how particular feelings, moods, and modes of subjectivity are cultivated by the distinct algorithms dating platforms employ, contributing to our understanding of what many following tiana buchar (2017) have called algorithmic imaginaries. while much research has uncovered how online daters feel about the algorithmic recommender systems employed by the platforms they use (parisi & comunello, 2020; sharabi, 2020; wang, 2020), the algorithmic imaginaries of dating platform users have not been explicitly compared. the matching algorithms of dating websites like okcupid are generally devised to allow users to home in on compatible matches by deliberately refining their search criteria. they thus seem devised to cultivate entrepreneurial subjects looking to rationally optimize their intimate relationships (heino et al., 2010; illouz, 2007). the recommender systems of the most popular dating apps, on the other hand, are calibrated from affective patterns of engagement like swiping and messaging rates. they thus seem to update dating protocols in a way that dovetails with the shift to affect that many have argued is central to algorithmic media (clough, 2018; hansen, 2015; sampson, 2016). tinder and bumble also clearly limit “attractive” profiles and matches in order to get users to pay for them while privileging users that receive lots of matches and texts (courtois & timmermans, 2018; fellizar, 2015; powering tinder, 2019). i argue that this is likely to create a feedback loop where ghosting exacerbates the anxiety users feel while texting each other. while dating apps seem to render searches for intimacy fraught with anxiety and substantial connections hard to find, they are well-calibrated to the exigencies of platform capitalism, where social relations are as likely to be sold as things, especially when they vanish as quickly as they appear, like ghosts. references bucher, t. (2017). the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 30–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154086 carpenter, c. j., & mcewan, b. (2016). the players of micro-dating: individual and gender differences in goal orientations toward micro-dating apps. first monday, 21(5). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v21i5.6187 clough, p. t. (2018). the user unconscious: on affect, media, and measure (1 edition). univ of minnesota press. courtois, c., & timmermans, e. (2018). cracking the tinder code: an experience sampling approach to the dynamics and impact of platform governing algorithms. journal of computer-mediated communication, 23(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmx001 david, g., & cambre, c. (2016). screened intimacies: tinder and the swipe logic. social media + society, 2(2), 2056305116641976. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116641976 enomoto, c., noor, s., & widner, b. (2017). is social media to blame for the sharp rise in stds? social sciences, 6(3), 78. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci6030078 fellizar, k. (2015, august 11). bumble’s new “vibee” feature rewards the good men out there, plus more dating apps with unique features. /articles/103615bumbles-new-vibee-feature-rewards-the-good-men-out-there-plus-more-datingapps-with-unique fisher, m. (2018). k-punk: the collected and unpublished writings of mark fisher (d. ambrose, ed.; new edition edition). repeater. foucault, m. (2010). the birth of biopolitics: lectures at the collège de france, 1978-1979 (reprint edition). picador. guest, g., macqueen, k. m., & namey, e. e. (2012). applied thematic analysis. sage. hansen, m. b. n. (2015). feed-forward: on the future of twenty-first-century media. university of chicago press. heino, r. d., ellison, n. b., & gibbs, j. l. (2010). relationshopping: investigating the market metaphor in online dating. journal of social and personal relationships, 27(4), 427–447. hobbs, m., owen, s., & gerber, l. (2016). liquid love? dating apps, sex, relationships and the digital transformation of intimacy. journal of sociology, 1440783316662718. https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783316662718 illouz, e. (2007). cold intimacies: the making of emotional capitalism (1 edition). polity. jørgensen, k. m. (2016). the media go-along: researching mobilities with media at hand. mediekultur: journal of media and communication research, 32(60), 18 p.-18 p. https://doi.org/10.7146/mediekultur.v32i60.22429 kendall, t. (2018). “#boredwithmeg”: gendered boredom and networked media. new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics, 93(93), 80–100. lefebvre, l. e. (2018). swiping me off my feet: explicating relationship initiation on tinder. journal of social and personal relationships, 35(9), 1205–1229. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407517706419 parisi, l., & comunello, f. (2020). dating in the time of “relational filter bubbles”: exploring imaginaries, perceptions and tactics of italian dating app users. the communication review, 23(1), 66–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714421.2019.1704111 powering tinder®—the method behind our matching. (2019, march 15). tinder. https://blog.gotinder.com/powering-tinder-r-the-method-behind-our-matching/ sampson, t. (2016). the assemblage brain (1 edition). university of minnesota press. sharabi, l. l. (2020). exploring how beliefs about algorithms shape (offline) success in online dating: a two-wave longitudinal investigation. communication research, 0093650219896936. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650219896936 shaw, f. (2016). “bitch i said hi”: the bye felipe campaign and discursive activism in mobile dating apps. social media + society, 2(4), 2056305116672889. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116672889 thompson, l. (2018). “i can be your tinder nightmare”: harassment and misogyny in the online sexual marketplace. feminism & psychology, 28(1), 69–89. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353517720226 wang, s. (2020). calculating dating goals: data gaming and algorithmic sociality on blued, a chinese gay dating app. information, communication & society, 23(2), 181–197. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2018.1490796 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): volcan, t. o. (2023, october). mineral exploration in indigenous lands: the discursive normalization of illegal mining in brazil. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. mineral exploration in indigenous lands: the discursive normalization of illegal mining in brazil taiane de oliveira volcan federal university of pelotas ufpel introduction in january 2023, the discovery that 570 children aged zero to five died of preventable diseases between 2019 and 2022 in the yanomami indigenous land shocked brazil and the world. this number represents just a sample of the devastating situation faced by the community, which saw mortality due to malnutrition increase by more than 300% in the four years of the bolsonaro government [1]. the severe humanitarian crisis resulted from factors intrinsically linked to the last government, such as the weakening of public policies to protect these communities, the dismantling of environmental policies, state omission, and the bolsonaro government’s encouragement of mining in indigenous lands. however, it is fundamental to recognize that the situation of the yanomami people, as well as that of the majority of the original peoples remaining in brazil, is not just the result of a government that hates indigenous people. that is also deeply rooted in our society and how we perceive the indigenous peoples and their rights. illegal mining in indigenous lands is the kind of a challenge that needs to be faced by the state and the judiciary, but also by society and, mainly, by the press, which often approaches the issue from an exclusively economic perspective, as if the debate on environmental preservation and the recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples was a threat to the financial market and the brazilian economic interests. in this context, this study arises from the perception that a process of erasing the environmental and indigenous agenda in the political and media debate (fairclough, 2013) is taking place in brazil. with this, the effect is the normalization (foucault, 2003) of indigenous people's precarious living conditions and mining in indigenous lands as a simple economic activity. in a country that experienced a 495% increase in mining in indigenous lands and 301% in conservation units between 2010 and 2020 [2], we believe that analyzing how such profound transformations in a society like the brazilian has been discursively constructed is fundamental to understanding the current and relevant challenges such as environmental preservation and the subsistence of indigenous peoples. methods on march 9, 2022, brazilian artists and influencers gathered to hold a festival to defend the environment and indigenous peoples in an "ato pela terra" event [3]. the activity was led by singer and composer caetano veloso and brought together thousands of people in brasília to defend environmental preservation and the rejection of project number 191, which authorizes mining on indigenous lands. intending to analyze the conversation on the environmental agenda, especially on mining in indigenous lands, which was under debate in the chamber of deputies, on social media platforms, we collected through the social feed manager (prom, 2017) twitter posts between march 8th and 10th, 2022, based on the terms “#atopelaterra”; “#caetanopelaterra”, “#pl191não” and “#pl191sim”. we collected 49,986 publications from 30,254 accounts that participated in the debate. from this data set, we seek to understand: rq1: what does the network structure tell us about the groups involved in the debate on twitter? rq2: what is the framework given to the theme of mining in indigenous lands by these groups? rq3: how was the environmental and indigenous agenda framed by the mainstream media? to understand the conversation dynamics and speeches (wodak, 2015) of supporters and opponents of the event on the networks, we adopted a mixed approach of methods. to analyze the structure of networks, we used social network analysis (wasserman & faust, 1994). to understand the discourse in the clusters, we analyzed occurrences and co-occurrences from the perspective of the connected concept analysis (lindgreen 2016). findings by calculating the network modularity (blondel et al., 2008), we observed that the conversation took place in a polarized way, being segmented by two thematic axes, #atopelaterra and the project on mining in indigenous lands (pl 191). it is relevant that we did not observe direct disputes in the conversation. that is, the members of each group spoke only with their peers, reinforcing the group's ideas and values. the conversation was also centered on a few influencers, who had their speeches spread and legitimized within their network. in one side, artists, digital influencers, alternative media, social movements, and left-wing politicians sought to give visibility to the act and the environmental agenda. on the other side, far-right influencers and politicians defended the project that authorizes mining on indigenous lands and criticized environmentalists and opponents of the agenda. mainstream media outlets had an isolated presence and focused their comments on the analysis of the mining project. in this regard, one of the most relevant points is to observe that even with a sizeable public protest in the federal capital, the environmental and indigenous agenda proved to be a niche topic with little capacity to pierce the militancy bubble itself (sunstein, 2001). when we analyze the discourses circulated in the period, we observe different strategies on the left and the extreme right. the network formed by actors linked to #atopelaterra focused on publicizing the event and reproducing its central guidelines, such as rejecting the mining project on indigenous lands and preserving the amazon. the network made up of extreme right-wing individuals, however, appropriated the indigenous agenda to distort the conversation about pl 191, related to its approval of concepts such as "food sustainability"; "national development" and "indigenous rights". these arguments represent the exact opposite of what mining in indigenous lands actually brought, as observed in the tragedy experienced by the yanomami people. once again, the extreme right focuses its communication strategy on the informational disorder (wardle, 2017), which confuses and undermines the debate on the subject. however, we consider it essential to observe how the mainstream media structured the discourse on the subject, focusing on the debate on the processing of the project and practically ignoring the activities carried out in brasília. the vehicles erase the term "garimpo" from the debate and adopt "mineral exploration" and "mining" to talk about the project. more than a simple discursive choice, mineral exploration takes up a discourse from former president jair bolsonaro and his militancy to defend mining in indigenous lands. the use of this term by mass communication vehicles, especially in a debate as sensitive as this one, has a normalizing effect that, as foucault (2005) highlights, establishes an ideal pattern of supposedly rational knowledge from which any and all individuality is measured and enforced in a normalizing society. by adopting the concept "mineral exploration", the press vehicles take the strength of terms like "garimpo" and "mining", which have a negative weight in the brazilian context, marked by the tragedies of the state of minas gerais[4]. in doing so, they end up reducing the debate to economic and bureaucratic aspects and acting as an auxiliary line of a discourse that erases what is central to this debate, which are indigenous peoples, who have been suffering an accelerated extinction process and environmental preservation of these territories, a theme of international relevance and interest. references blondel, v. d., guillaume, j. l., lambiotte, r. & lefebvre, e. (2008). fast unfolding of communities in large networks. journal of statistical mechanics: theory and experiment, https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-5468/2008/10/p10008 fairclough, n. (2013). language and power. routledge. foucault, m. vigiar e punir. o nascimento da prisão. petrópolis: vozes, 2003. foucault, m. (2005). em defesa da sociedade: curso no collège de france (1975 1976). são paulo: martins fontes. lindgren, s. introducing connected concept analysis: a network approach to big text datasets. text & talk, [s. l.], v. 36, n. 3, p. 341-362, 2016. doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2016-0016. disponível em: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/text-2016-0016/html. prom, c. tool report: social feed manager. mac newsletter, v. 45, n. 2, article 9, 2017. wardle, c. & h. derakshan (2017) information disorder: toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making, council of europe. https://rm.coe.int/information-disorder-toward-an-interdisciplinary-framework-for -researc/168076277c wasserman, s. & faust, k. (1994). social network analysis: methods and applications. cambridge, ma: cambridge university press. wodak, r., critical discourse analysis, discourse-historical approach lancaster university, uk, 2015. in book: the international encyclopedia of language and social interaction. doi: 10.4135/9780857028020.d6 notes [1] https://g1.globo.com/politica/post/2023/02/17/sob-bolsonaro-mortes-de-yanomamipor-desnutricao-cresceram-331.ghtml [2] https://valor.globo.com/brasil/noticia/2021/08/30/area-ocupada-pelo-garimpo-emterras-indigenas-cresceu-495-de-2010-a-2020.ghtml [3] https://www.terra.com.br/planeta/sustentabilidade/ato-pela-terra-e-meio-ambientevai-reunir-caetano-veloso-e-convidados-em-frente-aocongresso,ba7306d9bc2cf29a1fce7a7a21f1a2948ff6w60f.html [4] https://www.otempo.com.br/politica/congresso/comissao-fara-vistoria-em-barragenscom-as-das-tragedias-de-mariana-e-brumadinho-1.2821645 https://g1.globo.com/politica/post/2023/02/17/sob-bolsonaro-mortes-de-yanomami-por-desnutricao-cresceram-331.ghtml https://g1.globo.com/politica/post/2023/02/17/sob-bolsonaro-mortes-de-yanomami-por-desnutricao-cresceram-331.ghtml https://valor.globo.com/brasil/noticia/2021/08/30/area-ocupada-pelo-garimpo-em-terras-indigenas-cresceu-495-de-2010-a-2020.ghtml https://valor.globo.com/brasil/noticia/2021/08/30/area-ocupada-pelo-garimpo-em-terras-indigenas-cresceu-495-de-2010-a-2020.ghtml https://www.terra.com.br/planeta/sustentabilidade/ato-pela-terra-e-meio-ambiente-vai-reunir-caetano-veloso-e-convidados-em-frente-ao-congresso,ba7306d9bc2cf29a1fce7a7a21f1a2948ff6w60f.html https://www.terra.com.br/planeta/sustentabilidade/ato-pela-terra-e-meio-ambiente-vai-reunir-caetano-veloso-e-convidados-em-frente-ao-congresso,ba7306d9bc2cf29a1fce7a7a21f1a2948ff6w60f.html https://www.terra.com.br/planeta/sustentabilidade/ato-pela-terra-e-meio-ambiente-vai-reunir-caetano-veloso-e-convidados-em-frente-ao-congresso,ba7306d9bc2cf29a1fce7a7a21f1a2948ff6w60f.html https://www.otempo.com.br/politica/congresso/comissao-fara-vistoria-em-barragens-com-as-das-tragedias-de-mariana-e-brumadinho-1.2821645 https://www.otempo.com.br/politica/congresso/comissao-fara-vistoria-em-barragens-com-as-das-tragedias-de-mariana-e-brumadinho-1.2821645 microsoft word myles-top 5 tinder hacks! blackboxing algorithms in the dating app industry-top 5 tinder hacks! blackboxing.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): myles, d., blais. m. (2021, october). top 5 tinder hacks! blackboxing algorithms in the dating app industry. paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. top 5 tinder hacks! blackboxing algorithms in the dating app industry david myles mcgill university martin blais université du québec à montréal while dating has long been mediated by professional matchmakers and technologies, the past decades have been marked by the ongoing rationalization of matchmaking practices through the use of mathematics (fry, 2015). today, mobile dating apps and the algorithms they operate are reconfiguring the matchmaking industry and contemporary dating cultures (duguay et al., 2017). tinder’s swipe feature – which operates classification and recommendation algorithms that have been likened to the elo scoring technique – has been particularly influential, giving way to a new generation of dating apps (ranzini & lutz, 2017). in this paper, we argue that the mystique surrounding tinder’s algorithms, that is, their alleged unintelligible nature, is as productive for the matchmaking industry as the actual technical operations they perform. algorithmic blackboxing: understanding the discursive construction of algorithms this paper examines how algorithms are socially and discursively constituted in line with critical algorithm studies (seaver, 2017). we draw on the notion of ‘algorithmic blackboxing’ (bucher, 2018), that is, how actors strategically construct algorithms as black boxes to reach certain goals. as argued by bucher (2018: 47): “the question is not simply whether we can know algorithms but when the realm of its intelligibility is made more or less probable. that is, when are algorithms framed as unknowns, for whom and for what purpose?” thus, we are interested in understanding how actors in the dating industry construct matchmaking algorithms as strategic unknowns that can be harnessed to reach commercial objectives. to do so, we collected a corpus of 48 online dating guides that offer ‘best advice’ to exploit tinder’s matchmaking algorithms. we conducted a discursive analysis from a foucauldian perspective (graham, 2011), that is, by examining discourses in their propensity to set the possibilities through which social subjects and problems can be constituted. through our analysis, we sought to understand how these guides construct tinder’s algorithms discursively, under what imperatives, and with what effects. hacking tinder: becoming algorithmically recognizable to get more tinder matches the guides we analyzed overwhelmingly construct tinder’s algorithms as black boxes whose secrets must be unlocked for users to generate matches and, therefore, find love. the alleged unintelligibility of tinder’s algorithms allows self-proclaimed ‘dating experts’ to sell their advice or services in the context of a speculative dating economy. tinder users are depicted as helpless or clueless when facing the app’s ‘sophisticated’ or ‘opaque’ algorithms, as well as in dire need of guidance from professionals to mitigate increasing algorithmic speculations. furthermore, dating guides promote a common injunction to hack tinder. in this context, the ‘hacking’ metaphor is not invoked to invite users to divert or hijack the dating app. on the contrary, ‘hacks’ refer to strategies that insist on the importance for tinder users to modulate their behaviors and practices in order to become more algorithmically recognizable (gillespie, 2017). indeed, the guides we analyzed contend that it is through algorithmic recognition that users can obtain more matches. thus, while hacks are marketed as tricks to help users make “tinder’s algorithms work for them,” we argue that they are more likely making users work for the app’s algorithms. the pervasion of dataism in the matchmaking industry our analysis also suggests that guides readily invoke rhetorical arguments that draw on statistical data produced by tinder and the dating experts that work for the company. for example, using a smiling picture would increase your matches by 14%, while wearing sunglasses would reduce your matches by 12%. these arguments are in line with an ideology of dataism (van dijck, 2014: 198), which constitutes a “widespread belief in the objective quantification and potential tracking of all kinds of human behavior and sociality through online media technologies”. we argue that these dating statistics operate an algorithmic recursive loop. tinder develops non-neutral algorithms that favor certain behaviors and produces data to show how users who follow these rules are rewarded with more matches. then, users (potentially) modulate their behaviors to become more algorithmically recognizable, which in turn further enacts the app’s algorithmic imperatives in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. moreover, we explore how the pervasion of a dataist ideology within the matchmaking industry gives way to new ‘regimes of truth’ (foucault, 2012) over matters of love and sexuality that compete against other established regimes (clinical psychology, sexology, evolutionary biology, popular knowledge, etc.). box as old as time? blackboxing gender on tinder finally, this paper argues that, while apps respond to new algorithmic imperatives that partly reconfigure contemporary dating cultures, the practice of blackboxing is not new within the matchmaking industry. romance has long been discursively constructed as mysterious or as a black box to be opened (luhmann, 1986). similarly, many self-help books on heterosexual dating have naturalized the idea that men and women are immeasurably opposed, using a form of blackboxing that justifies the multiplication of derivative products promising men and women a better mutual understanding and greater relational success. the best-seller men are from mars, women are from venus (gray, 1992) is a prime example of this sort of gender blackboxing. to that effect, the guides we analyzed mostly construct relationships through the lens of competition, gamification, or marketing, in ways that reproduce more or less accurate conceptions of gender roles in the context of heterosexual dating, namely, by drawing on pseudo-knowledge from evolutionary biology. our corpus of guides overwhelmingly identifies its readership as masculine and stresses the importance for ‘males’ to attract the attention of fleeting ‘females’. it depicts tinder dating as a numbers’ game, one where men are expected to modulate their behaviors and where women are understood as ‘black boxes’ whose mysteries men must unveil by following specific matchmaking advice. we conclude by underlying how dating guides (just like the matchmaking algorithms they claim to unpack) can reproduce harmful conceptions of intimate relationships that focus on ranking and systematically (de)valuating certain identities. thus, we advocate for the importance of critically examining the increasing algorithmic mediation of dating cultures at the intersection of internet, gender, and sexuality studies. references bucher, t. (2018). if... then: algorithmic power and politics. oxford: oxford university press. duguay, s., burgess, j., & light, b. (2017). mobile dating and hookup app culture. in digital media: transformations in human communication. new york: peter lang. foucault, m. (2012). du gouvernement des vivants: cours au collège de france: 19791980. paris: gallimard. fry, h. (2015). the mathematics of love: patterns, proofs, and the search for the ultimate equation. new york: simon and schuster. gillespie, t. (2017). algorithmically recognizable: santorum’s google problem, and google’s santorum problem. information, communication & society, 20(1), 63-80. graham, l. j. (2011). discourse analysis and the critical use of foucault. educational philosophy and theory, 43(6), 663-674. gray, j. (1992). men are from mars. women are from venus, new york: harper collins. luhmann, n. (1986). love as passion: the codification of intimacy. cambridge: harvard university press. ranzini, g., & lutz, c. (2017). love at first swipe? explaining tinder self-presentation and motives. mobile media & communication, 5(1), 80-101. seaver, n. (2017). algorithms as culture: some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems. big data & society, 4(2), 2053951717738104. van dijck, j. (2014). datafication, dataism and dataveillance: big data between scientific paradigm and ideology. surveillance et society, 12(2), 197-208. doi: 10.24908/ss.v12i2.4776 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): civila, s., jaramillo-dent, d. (2022, november). moroccan-spanish couples’ decolonial responses on tiktok. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. moroccan-spanish couples’ decolonial responses on tiktok sabina civila university of huelva daniela jaramillo-dent university of huelva erasmus university (rotterdam) introduction in recent years, the use of social media has allowed migrants and other minority groups to communicate, obtain information, and build an identity through self-representation and content creation. the possibility to talk about their experiences, connect to other content creators and interact with the platform allows to decentralize the european narrative and offer visibility to other cultures. in this context, tiktok emerges as one of the platforms where traditionally marginalized populations narrate their experiences and enter public debates. this platform allows to build a community and promote a deeper understanding of mixedness (travison, 2020). in this case, we study spanish-moroccan mixed couples who must face the cultural stereotypes derived from the geographical, historical, and colonial confluences between these two nations (fernández-parrilla & cañete, 2018). theoretical framework in the past, mixed couples between spanish women and moroccan men were considered a threat to colonial policies and the relationship between colonizer and colonized. these couples were completely forbidden as being a danger to the spanish domination in morocco (zbida-pol, 2020). therefore, these couples have faced discrimination and unfair treatment due to their characteristics. according to romero-morales (2018) the values of these couples are still questioned today. the connective nature of tiktok affordances shows the reality of messages received, discourses challenged, and selfrepresentation strategies. this study is focus on identifying the discursive strategies use by this group to face discrimination and spread forms of decolonial self-representations. thus, this research will answer the following question: what are the characteristics of decolonial narratives on tiktok to face discrimination? method to carry out the study, a qualitative analysis was carried out by identifying tiktok videos using the hashtags #mixedcouples and #spainandmorocco in their spanish and english versions. we then identified other hashtags of interest that appeared together with these and found other videos of interest. we viewed a total of 8,653 videos and identified six profiles of interest from creators that self-identified as being part of a spanish-moroccan mixed couple and had more than 10k followers, which is the threshold at which tiktok begins paying creators (tiktok, 2020). these accounts comprised a total of 1,369 videos. we watched all videos in each profile three times, a total of 4.107 views, to identify content that fit the following criteria: (1) discussed cultural aspects or topics related to the identity and integration of the members of the couple; (2) had more than 30k views. the final sample comprised a total of 146 videos from 6 accounts (20/25 from each account). we downloaded all the videos and coded them in atlas. ti. the codebook includes theoretically derived codes related to islamophobia (awan, 2016; civila et al., 2020) and codes derived through an inductive approach that performs iterative rounds of coding to identify themes of interest derived from the data itself, namely those related to cultural aspects, specific decolonial narratives, and tiktok affordances. key findings the described analysis enabled the exploration of moroccan-spanish mixed couples with interesting insights related to postcolonial narratives. they do this through short, vertical videos and tiktok’s mimetic nature, combining culture, love, and diversity in the face of increasing discrimination, islamophobia, and oppression in spanish society. responses to twofold attacks through ‘answer-comment’ these creators engage in strategies to challenge attacks from both societies (spanish and moroccan). it is possible to suggest that this occurs because in the case of the couples analyzed, the female partner is spanish and muslim (a minority within the spanish culture) and at the same time a minority or ‘other’ within the moroccan culture, as a convert. on the other hand, the man is a foreigner and muslim (in spain) and for the members of his culture it can be seen as someone who prefers the spanish culture and does not follow the culture or religious convictions. we observed that they use the answercomment function to dismantle these ideas and, at the same time, build their own identity. they develop their own tiktok language, providing informative and explanatory value to the comments they receive. the main functions of “answer-comment” are (1) to respond to stereotypes; (2) to inform about islam; (3) to explain personal decisions. these messages they challenge and answer contribute to decolonize mainstream ideas that are present on and offline and give visibility to their identity. hence, they deploy creative strategies to face these discourses using a combination of tiktok affordances. figure 1. respond to comment typologies among moroccan-spanish tiktokers the strategy most used is based on users’ negative discourse to make their own reality visible and make their identity known. they turn attacks into opportunities to eliminate certain ideas and position them through actions on tiktok. to gain visibility most of the videos using the answer-comment function include mainstream hashtags to make content findable, connect with related speech and attempt to be picked up by the for you page. conclusion in conclusion, the option to respond to comments on tiktok enables mixed couples to establish their identity by aligning with or contradicting the comments they receive. through this, they highlight the existing colonial discourses on the platform while promoting their right to exist through decolonial narrative practices that take advantage of the possibilities of creating tiktok content to make visible and validate their identity. this analysis provides insights related to the limitations and difficulties faced by minorities and minoritized individuals who are discriminated due to their choices, in this case their romantic preferences. it reflects the difficulties faced by people who chose more intimate forms of integration and the existing colonial paradigms in terms of mixed romantic partners. at the same time, these creators exemplify the existence of points of encounter between seemingly opposite cultures and nationalities through their (self)representations and discourses on this platform, as well as the increased visibility they are achieving through their content and profiles. references awan, i. (2016). islamophobia on social media: a qualitative analysis of the facebook’s walls of hate. international journal of cyber criminology, 10(1), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.58517 civila, s., romero-rodríguez, l.m., & civila, a. (2020). the demonization of islam through social media: a case study of #stopislam in instagram. publications, 8(4), 5264. https://doi.org/10.3390/publications8040052 fernández-parrilla, g., & cañete, c. (2018). spanish-maghribi (moroccan) relations beyond exceptionalism: a postcolonial perspective. the journal of north african studies, 23(1), 111-133. https://doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2018.1459262 romero-morales, y. (2018). and they were (not) happy: the fatality of mixed couples in colonial spanish literature written by women during the 20th century. revista de estudios hispánicos, 6(2), 433-450. zbida-pol, c. (2020). historia de vida de una mujer española casada con un marroquí durante el protectorado español. revista científica sobre diversidad cultural, 4, 66–87. https://doi.org/10.30827/modulema.v4i0.15915 scharlach-the cheshire cat of social media-the cheshire cat of social media.pdf selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 the cheshire cat of social media: values in platform policies rebecca scharlach the hebrew university of jerusalem blake hallinan the hebrew university of jerusalem limor shifman the hebrew university of jerusalem value is fundamental for social media platforms, not only in the economic sense but also in the sense of normative principles like community and free speech. policy documents are pivotal sites for the expression of values and present a public-facing account of the roles and responsibilities assigned to various actors, including individual users, third parties, governments and social media corporations. while prior research has examined the construction of individual values such as privacy and transparency in platform policies, there has been no holistic account of the values invoked in these documents. combining a dictionary-based analysis with a qualitative content analysis, we present the first comprehensive study of the values presented in the policy documents of five major social media platforms: facebook, instagram, youtube, twitter, and tiktok. our analysis reveals that policy documents invoke a large number of values that seemingly point to conflicting priorities and commitments. however, these values can be organized in four overarching principles that were consistent across platforms: community, expression, privacy, and improvement. each principle assigns responsibility for the enactment of these values and by that allows platforms to limit their ethical responsibility for executing the values they publicly promote. values can thus be described as the ‘cheshire cat’ of social media platform policies – they look magical, but once touched, may assume a different shape, pop up in an alternative location, or even disappear. suggested citation (apa): scharlach, r., hallinan, b., shifman, l. (2021, october). the cheshire cat of social media: values in platform policies. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. microsoft word burk-regulating expression and equality in collegiate esports-regulating expression and equality in.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): burk, d. & rosenblatt, e. (2021, october). regulating expression and equality in collegiate esports. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. regulating expression and equality in collegiate esports dan l. burk university of california, irvine school of law elizabeth rosenblatt university of tulsa college of law introduction attention to competitive professional computer gaming or “esports” has grown rapidly over the past decade. (1) the interest in such competitive gaming is not restricted to professional settings, but has extended into collegiate play, where educational institutions now sponsor esports teams, leagues, and events. collegiate esports programs frequently resemble established programs for collegiate physical sports, including scholarships, coaching, and raucous competitive events. sponsoring these programs helps to attract accomplished students and serves to promote both the general reputation of the sponsoring institutions as well as institutional programs such as certificates or degrees in computer game development. esport equality however, the expansion of esports has been accompanied by concerns regarding the attitudes that attend it; specifically, the online gaming culture from which esports proceeds displays frequent and persistent harassment of female players. copious documented research, as well as anecdotal experience, establishes that women are routinely subjected to gender-based harassment in computer games and game-related activity. (2) instances of harassment have been observed not only in interactions within the virtual environment of computer games but in the discourse that surrounds computer gaming, pervading gaming culture, gaming practice, and the structure of the computer gaming industry. (3) it is clear that such misogyny extends to esports, both at the professional and collegiate levels, and poses a serious legal concern in educational settings. (4, 5, 6) law is jurisdictional, and we consider here the issues raised in the united states under title ix of the educational amendments of 1972. title ix guarantees co-educational equal opportunity to women at all institutions receiving federal funds. to guarantee equality of educational access, title ix mandates equivalence of resources committed to male and female programming. (7) consequently, the statute is perhaps best known for its history of ensuring equivalence for both male and female athletes in collegiate sports. although educational institutions need not sponsor exactly the same activities for men and women, the commitment of resources for such activities must be the same. as esports expand in higher education, title ix compliance with resource commitment will be required. however, equality of educational opportunity does not end with equality in resources. institutions subject to title ix are additionally required to maintain a learning environment in which educational opportunities are not impeded by sexual harassment. this includes not only overt acts of discrimination, including explicit sexual harassment, but also the creation or persistence of “hostile environments” that would be detrimental to the inclusion of women. it is already clear that, as esports are increasingly part of sponsored collegiate activities, association of esports with gaming misogyny will pose a challenge in this regard. collegiate esports sponsors will need to take steps to ensure that female players are afforded the same opportunities as male players and are not deterred or disadvantaged by the type of harassment that is frequently seen in gaming culture. esport expression as a legal matter, it is clear that the responsibility for curtailing gender hostility in collegiate esports lies squarely with the sponsoring institutions. the previous application of title ix to sponsored sports programs will provide some guidance as to the standards collegiate esports must meet. at the same time, prior experience with title ix and physical sports may diverge substantially from its interactions with esports. computer games differ significantly from physical sports in their character and affordances. (8) unlike sports played in physical space, computer games are necessarily mediated by software, which has consistently been held to constitute protected speech under the first amendment to the united states constitution, which prohibits governmental regulation “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” the audiovisual output of such games has also been held to constitute protected speech. thus, the first amendment poses a constraint on the regulation of esport computer games under title ix which has not been encountered in past title ix situations. in particular, the selection, content, and of such games may be exempt from governmental interference through title ix. this aspect of title ix compliance for esports has gone previously unexamined. when universities choose to sponsor lacrosse rather than curling, no one believes they are making an expressive statement. but when universities choose to sponsor league of legends teams rather than call of duty, they are necessarily making an expressive statement. to the extent that choices among gaming content may be dictated by the constraints of title ix, care must be exercised to accommodate both the statutory requirements of educational opportunity and the constitutional requirements for expressive freedom. in this paper we therefore examine problems of title ix esports compliance in light of the first amendment. we begin by reviewing the development of esports in the context of sponsored competitive collegiate game play and review the evidence of pervasive misogyny surrounding esports and gaming culture. we then discuss the application of title ix to such sponsored activities, including the requirement that educators maintain a learning environment in which educational opportunities are not hampered genderbased harassment. we then examine the intersection between title ix and the first amendment, particularly as their association may be shaped by the protected expressive nature of computer games at that intersection. we conclude that while title ix supports and requires a range of actions to ameliorate gender harassment surrounding collegiate esports, certain avenues of remediation are restricted or foreclosed by the first amendment. conclusion our analysis here fits squarely within the ambit of the aoir 2021 conference theme of “independence” and the structures of on-line discourse. here we examine the intersection and balance between conflicting demands for independence: freedom from gender harassment against freedom from governmental intrusion on protected expression. we recognize that our analysis raises a number of additional, significant questions of independence for future research. for example, it seems likely that the culture surrounding computer gaming is even less welcoming to transgender and lgbtq+ players than it is to cis-gendered women, and this may have implications for title ix collegiate esports compliance, raising a set of complex questions beyond the scope of our discussion here. but we offer here the first steps on the path to addressing such questions. references (1) t.l. taylor, raising the stakes: e-sports and the professionalization of computer gaming (2012). (2) jesse fox & wai yen tang, women’s experiences with general and sexual harassment in online video games: rumination, organizational responsiveness, withdrawal, and coping strategies,19 new media & soc. 1290 (2017). (3) emma witkowski, doing/undoing gender with the girl gamer in highperformance play in feminism in play (kishonna l. gray, gerald voorhees & emma vossen eds., 2018). (4) omar ruvalcaba et al., women’s experiences in esports: gendered differences in peer and spectator feedback during competitive game play, 42 j. sport & soc. issues 295 (2018). (5) nicolas taylor & bryce stout, gender and the two-tiered system of collegiate esports, 37 crit. stud. media comm. 451 (2020). (6) lindsay darvin, ryan voorhis, & tara mahoney, the playing experiences of esports participants: an analysis of hostility and treatment discrimination in esports environments, 2 j. athlete dev. & exp. 26 (2020). (7) deborah l. brake, getting in the game: title ix and the women’s sports revolution (2010). (8) dan l. burk, owning e-sports: proprietary rights in professional computer gaming, 161 u. penn. l. rev. 1535 (2013). selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 interdependence and network oversight in 1990s internet governance meghan grosse washington college introduction in october 2016, the contract between the united states department of commerce and the internet corporation for assigned names and numbers (icann) officially expired. this contract represented a long-standing and close relationship between the united states government and icann, a relationship that positioned the u.s. as a kind of linchpin in determining the shape and coordination of the global, extraterritorial internet. in particular, the policies and standards set by icann established a shared root server system that enabled the operation of a globally interconnected network. this research seeks to address the question: what interests and values shaped icann at the time of its establishment and in what ways do debates about this system reflect broader concerns about the u.s.-centric nature of early internet governance policy? the contract between these organizations, icann and the u.s. government, dates back to the mid-1990s, and so this research focuses on the debates and policy decisions happening during that time period. the governance policies set during this time have continued to impact the internet to this day, and so i return to this constitutive moment in the history of the internet, a moment when “choices about how things are built and how they work – their design and rules of operations” were made, in order to explore the values and interests that were protected and promoted through internet governance policy (starr, 2004, p. 4). the 2016 change in icann oversight and the discussions that led to that decision highlight the ongoing concerns about the u.s.’s central position in setting internet governance policy and in overseeing the network’s management. if we look back at the discussions happening in the 1990s, it becomes clear that many of these concerns had gone unanswered or unresolved at that time. i return to this history in order to better contextualize contemporary debates around internet governance and to understand the ongoing need to address the inequalities built into that system. suggested citation (apa): grosse, m., (2021, october). interdependence and network oversight in 1990s internet governance. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. methods/critical frameworks i examine early internet governance and the discourses of independence and interdependence that emerged during that time through archival analysis. this research focuses on documents found in the ira magaziner electronic commerce papers at the clinton presidential library in little rock, arkansas. this archive primarily represents the work on internet governance undertaken within the department of commerce, the department under which clinton moved internet governance policy – a shift away from previous oversight coming from the department of defense and the national science foundation. i apply a political economy of communication framework to this analysis, focusing on concerns for power – who wielded power in establishing the network structures that continue to influence the internet we use today and who pushed back and advocated for a different kind of internet. in reviewing materials from this archive, three primary groups are represented in the materials: 1) official government actors from the u.s. and around the world and representatives from various intergovernmental organizations working on issues like trade, intellectual property, and taxation; 2) technical experts who were early adopters of internet technology and who generally understood the mechanics of the internet as well as its capacities and limitations; and 3) commercial interests – broadly the companies and for-profit organizations that were investing and operating on the early internet. in examining the discussions happening between and among these different groups, i argue that the u.s. government positioned itself at the center of policymaking on governance issues, doing so with little effort to meaningful integrate critiques coming from other countries and with almost no effort to consider a future for the internet other than the commercial one they envisioned. findings/conclusions in 1994, the administration of u.s. president bill clinton stated publicly that the commercialization of the internet was a top priority for the u.s. government, and they remained consistently committed to this vision (goldsmith & wu, 2008, p. 40). in their policy, “a framework for global electronic commerce,” the u.s. government, led by the efforts of ira magaziner, offered 5 principles that should guide governance of the global internet. first and foremost they stated: “the private sector should lead.” every principle that followed largely served to clarify and reinforce this first principle. where government was to be involved, “its aim should be to support and enforce a predictable, minimalist, and consistent legal environment for commerce” and otherwise “should avoid undue restrictions on electronic commerce” (a framework for international electronic commerce, 1996). with these principles in mind, the clinton administration focused on establishing, controlling, and protecting a domain name system (dns) that would encourage private sector investment and offer a stable network to encourage trust in the network, by both businesses and consumers. in the interest of protecting commercial interests while also promoting private sector oversight, the u.s. government supported the creation of icann. pushing away from traditional governance by states, icann was set up to coordinate a global system while acting as “one of the few globally centralized points of control over the internet” (mueller, 2010, p. 61). rather than maintain state control and policymaking authority, the clinton administration placed this privilege in the hands a private corporation. despite this move towards privatization, the u.s. government still had some oversight here. controversially, icann was accountable to only one nation even as it was described as a global system, seen by some as “expression of unilateral globalism” (p. 62). connection to conference themes this paper addresses concerns related to independence, and in particular, focuses on the systems of interdependence established in early internet governance policy. in the mid-1990s, the u.s. positioned itself as a leader in global internet governance, overseeing icann and by extension the root server system upon which all internet users would rely. while espousing the values of competitive free-market, the u.s. proposal raised concerns about the concentration of power and potentially monopolistic control of the network by a single nation. these concerns were not outliers, but were coming from some of the u.s.’s closest partners in discussing internet governance policies – the e.u. and spain. in order to establish an internet that would work to support global electronic commerce, the u.s. promoted a system of governance that left little room for true multistakeholderism, the very principle that was central to the 2016 change in icann oversight. these concerns were not new, but rather represent a longstanding debate in the history of internet governance. understanding the foundations of those debates helps better understand not just this change, but ongoing discussions about how to best create a truly representative global internet. references a framework for international electronic commerce. (1996). box 003, folder 100011 10379 100011-010. ira magaziner electronic commerce papers, william j. clinton presidential library archives, little rock, arkansas, united states. goldsmith, j. and wu, t. (2008). who controls the internet? oxford: oxford university press. mueller, m. (2010). networks and states: the global politics of internet governance. cambridge, ma: the mit press. starr, p. (2004). the creation of the media: political origins of modern communication. new york, ny: basic books. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): ferris dobles, m., garcia, m., mia, j., o’connell, c., and van de wiele, c. (2022, november). the underside of technology: lifecycles of liberación in the digital age. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the underside of technology: lifecycles of liberación in the digital age michele ferris dobles the university of illinois chicago melina garcia the university of illinois chicago june mia the university of illinois chicago carrie o’connell university of illinois chicago chad van de wiele university of illinois chicago in the underside of modernity: apel, ricoeur, rorty, taylor, and the philosophy of liberation (1996), enrique dussel prescribes a philosophical pushback to what eduardo mendieta calls the ‘discourses of modernity.’ emanating from the global south, as both proximate and philosophical situations, dussel elegantly unravels a metaphysical prescription of modernity as the blueprint of empire articulated via political, religious, and cultural hegemonic universality. the goal is to reimagine the ethics of liberation outside of modernity’s stranglehold on philosophy. dussel’s thesis is simple: resistance to dominant hegemonic frames which center western modernity as that which must be repelled passively accepts those frames as a starting point. in other words, framing resistance as negation (i.e., postmodernism) upholds a binary of dominance/resistance wherein the myth of modernity remains dialectically centered. what dussel advocates for is a lens enabling us “...to stand outside the reality within which we live in order to critically understand it” (burton & osario, 2011, p. 26). to this end, he proposes a ‘transmodern’ position that privileges practices of the ‘other’—on outskirts of the modern colonial scheme—as focal points of liberation philosophy. in his ‘analectic’ method, dussel decenters the modern as a starting point of investigation and/or resistance, privileging the material realities of the ‘other’ as locus of cultural knowledge. in the vein of decolonial inquiry, the ‘other’ is of the anterior of hegemonic frames, a subject on/of the outskirts that, when face-to-face with dominant hegemony, presents a new way of understanding systems, universalities (which dussel believes exist, just not as prescribed by modernity), and the very prescription of the modern subject. in defining liberation as praxis, the analectic method accounts for the complex realities of the colonized as targets of, and transgressors to, systems of colonization, depending upon material context. our panel draws inspiration from the analectical approach and includes papers that elucidate the material realities of otherness on the underside of technology. in an age of technological globalization tethered to neoliberal market principles, we argue that approaching questions of technological expansionism via traditional ‘discourses of technology’ that perpetuate the dominance/resistance binary is insufficient if the aim of decolonizing the internet, the systems which support it, and the artefacts which connect us to it is to be achieved. by focusing instead on individual acts of resistance to totalizing technological systems, we investigate the complexities of living within the landscape of technological hegemony from the lens of the user. from migrants of the global south who both rely upon, and transgress, mobile technologies and the critical infrastructure which supports it, to everyday consumers of technology that often universalize and therefore industrialize lived experiences, the metaphor of existing within and simultaneously reacting to systems of colonization persists. specifically, we clarify the lifecycle of technological expansionism, from the act of occupation to individual acts of resistance in specific panel presentations that discuss: ● imagined infrastructures of the ‘smart’ (neo-colonial) city. ● the push and pull of maintaining latinx identity within homogeneous digital platforms. ● the emotional and physical labor of asian american women in countering western narratives which totalize “asian” identity as monolithic. ● the south american migrant experience as dependent upon and reactionary to critical infrastructure. ● corporeal memorialization as resistance to industrialized memory. each panel topic identifies technological systems, platforms, and/or infrastructures as modern-day instantiations of colonialism as a basis of investigation. for example, multiple papers clarify technological systems and infrastructures as conduits of cultural imperialism, evident in global urban transformation projects and the industrialization of memory, while others query the role of platform affordances in perpetuating inequity and encouraging monolithic identity. as pushback to this totalization, multiple papers highlight the liminal experience of ‘otherness,’ caught between the tensions of material reality and the opacity of dominant technological systems that often shape, steer, and ultimately universalize human experience. centering the lens of the individual, we investigate the necessary utility of global technologies (the ‘realities within which we live’) while articulating how actual experience with, and consumption of, these technologies by those on the periphery (those who ‘stand outside’ that reality) can inform a critical understanding of their socio-technical impact. these research topics identify the importance and relevance of decolonial philosophy as a primary framework for understanding the path to liberation from the enveloping forces of global technological systems. in encouraging an analectic, transmodern approach to questions of technological hegemony, we decenter the discourses of modernity, and by extension the circular dominance/resistance feedback loop which informs much traditional critical scholarship. this panel offers a glimpse from the outskirts, from the periphery of the colonial horizon, situating praxis as foundational to clarifying our socio-technical ontologies. references burton, m., & osorio, j. m. f. (2011). introducing dussel: the philosophy of liberation and a really social psychology. psychology in society, (41), 20-39. imagined infrastructures of the smart (neo-colonial) city in august 2021, the world economic forum launched the centre urban transformation, which “works to increase public-private collaboration in cities and advance more inclusive and sustainable models for urban development.” (world economic forum [wef], n.d., para. 1). critically, detroit, michigan—the former seat of industrial capitalism in the u.s. and de facto symbol for the crises of accumulation that followed (e.g., jay & conklin, 2020)—was selected as the site of its global headquarters. as economists, politicians, and business leaders convened for the inaugural urban transformation summit,1 which featured panel discussions like “healthy people, thriving city” and regional spotlights on “catalyzing urban innovation and entrepreneurship” in africa and latin america, detroit residents struggled with crumbling infrastructure, blighted neighborhoods, an under-funded education system, widespread unemployment, and the highest poverty rate in the u.s. (depietro, 2021). the stark contrast of this image offers a glimpse into the centre’s programmatic efforts to reinvent the global urban landscape in the interest of private capital. but what do these proposed transformations entail? what issues are being prioritized? what solutions are being advanced? and above all, who decides? seeking to answer these and related questions, this paper critically examines the centre for urban transformation through an infrastructural lens, focusing on the institutional coordination and co-production of sociotechnical discourses for the socalled “cities of tomorrow.” drawing together critical studies of infrastructure (easterling, 2014; star, 1999; star & ruhleder, 1996), science and technology (sts; bijker et al., 2012; jasanoff, 2004), and urban and carceral geographies (gilmore, 2007; jefferson, 2020), this study performs a poststructural discourse analysis of the centre’s source materials (e.g., webpages, partnership documents, press releases, marketing content, etc.; graham, 2011). the central argument is that the centre’s seemingly benevolent 1 the summit was held in detroit from december 6–8, 2021. aim to create “inclusive,” “resilient,” and “sustainable” cities mobilizes a distinctly western, neoliberal imperative through the mechanisms and discourses of digital neocolonialism (mouton & burns, 2021). through an analysis of these practices, the concept of imagined infrastructure is advanced, which draws attention to infrastructure as both an object and a process of collective imagination. building on the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries (jasanoff, 2015; jasanoff & kim, 2009), it considers the infrastructural imperative of urban growth under capitalism (kirkpatrick & smith, 2011), and how visions of “desirable” urban futures are stabilized and projected through communicational infrastructure. insofar as infrastructure is relational, “something that emerges for people in practice, connected to activities and structures” (star & ruhleder, 1996, p. 112), the centre readily captures these dynamics. however, it simultaneously reflects an elemental component in the development of infrastructure: the institution. in their article, “institutions, infrastructures, and innovation,” paul edwards and john king (2021) call our attention to the role of institutions (e.g., governments, industry associations, multinational corporations, and so forth) in shaping the deployment of sociotechnical infrastructure. institutions, they argue, provide not only the financial resources but also the forward-looking visions needed to sustain technological innovation. a list of features distinguishes when and how institutions are involved in the provision of infrastructure: multi-institutional compatibility and embedding, scale and scope, sustained support lasting long enough for proof of concept, regulatory issues, red tape reduction and opposition interference, workable mechanisms for the long-term, cultivate infrastructural growth, and account for different paces of change (edwards & king, 2021, pp. 107-108). these dimensions are applied as a heuristic model for understanding the functional role of interlocking institutions in developing and promulgating imagined infrastructures of urban transformation. drawing on the decolonial philosophy of enrique dussel (2003), this paper further considers the social, cultural, and political-economic dimensions of imagined infrastructure in the context of global urban transformation. for instance, the centre recently launched the “urban innovation challenge,” where eight participating cities (bogotá, buenos aires, lagos, dhaka, jakarta, kigali, nairobi, and rio de janeiro) “have designated neighborhoods to serve as urban testbeds for new businesses, products and services.”2 the “challenge” features 800 entrepreneurs, competing to pilot, secure funding for, and implement their vision of urban transformation, with judges like the co-founder of airbnb and the director of policy, cities & transportation at uber. these inherent disparities in decision-making power, access, and inclusion signal fertile ground for theoretical intervention—particularly through a decolonial lens centered on the material realities of ‘others.’ as susan leigh star (1999, p. 380) rightly notes, we must attend to “those who are not served by a particular infrastructure.” thus, responding to this call, i query the 2 world economic forum (2021). “centre for urban transformation launches urban innovation challenge in eight fast-growing cities.” retrieved from https://www.weforum.org/press/2021/12/centre-for-urban-transformationlaunches-urban-innovation-challenge-in-eight-fast-growing-cities/ pretension of western universality in projecting the spatio-temporal fixes of capital accumulation into new geographic regions (e.g., parasitic municipal financing, privatization, etc.), and constructions of otherness that both precede and precipitate those structures. specifically, this means interrogating the transport of values, assumptions, and power dynamics/relations across cultural contexts, including narratives of entrepreneurialism, technological innovation, and public-private collaboration, which rarely deliver on their stated promises of equity, inclusion, and/or social justice (e.g., harvey, 1989; wang, 2018). references bijker, w. e., hughes, t. p., & pinch, t. (eds.). (2012). the social construction of technological systems: new directions in the sociology and history of technology (anniversary ed.). mit press. depietro, a. (2021, november 26). u.s. poverty rate by city in 2021. forbes. retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewdepietro/2021/11/26/us-poverty-rate-by-cityin-2021/?sh=b84776b5a544 dussel, e. (2003). philosophy of liberation. wipf & stock. easterling, k. (2014). extrastatecraft: the power of infrastructure space. verso. edwards, p. n., & king, j. l. (2021). institutions, infrastructures, and innovation. computer, 54(1), 103-109. https://doi.org/10.1109/mc.2020.3035921 gilmore, r. w. (2007). golden gulag: prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing california. university of california press. graham, l. j. (2011). the product of text and ‘other’ statements: discourse analysis and the critical use of foucault. educational philosophy and theory, 43(6), 663-674. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2010.00698.x harvey, d. (1989). from managerialism to entrepreneurialism: the transformation in urban governance in late capitalism. geografiska annaler. series b, human geography, 71(1), 3–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.1989.11879583 jasanoff, s. (ed.). (2004). states of knowledge: the co-production of science and social order. routledge. jasanoff, s. (2015). future imperfect: science, technology, and the imaginations of modernity. in s. jasanoff & s. h. kim (eds.), dreamscapes of modernity: sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power (pp. 1-33). university of chicago press. jasanoff, s., & kim, s. h. (2009). containing the atom: sociotechnical imaginaries and nuclear power in the united states and south korea. minerva, 47, 119-146. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-009-9124-4 jefferson, b. (2020). digitize and punish: racial criminalization in the digital age. university of minnesota press. kirkpatrick, l. o., & smith, m. p. (2011). the infrastructural limits to growth: rethinking the urban growth machine in times of fiscal crisis. international journal of urban and regional research, 35(3), 477-503. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2011.01058.x star, s. l. (1999). the ethnography of infrastructure. american behavioral scientist, 43(3), 377-391. star, s. l., & ruhleder, k. (1996). steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: design and access for large information spaces. information systems research, 7(1), 111–134. wang, j. (2018). carceral capitalism. mit press. world economic forum (n.d.). “about.” centre for urban transformation. retrieved from https://www.weforum.org/cities/about “ni de aquí, ni de allá”: a series of existing while resisting rooted in multiple forms of colonization, latinx identities are situated between race and ethnicity. as illustrated by the expression “ni de aquí, ni de allá” (“neither of here, nor from there”), latinx identities are liminal in nature– existing among multiple racial and ethnic labels while never fully fitting into one but still being othered yet encouraged to achieve whiteness (hernández, 2015). ultimately, the process of simultaneously navigating multiple racial and ethnic labels, understanding the significance of their performance, negotiating their multiple meanings, and conforming to whichever one best represents you in the eyes of the white man is fundamentally latinx (alcoff, 2005). in the digital sphere, the liminal nature of latinx identities is further hyphenated. white hegemonic norms are enlaced and faintly threaded in the internet’s materiality, thus producing new forms of colonization (nakamura & chow-white, 2012). however, networked gatekeeping studies reveal how the open and inclusive logic of crowd centered platforms empowers users to navigate a fluid relationship to these norms (meraz and papacharissi, 2015). to understand how these fluid power dynamics affect the liminal nature of latinx identity, this paper presents a networked gatekeeping study on reddit’s latinx community. networked gatekeeping captures the fluid power dynamics within the new media ecology (barzilai-nahon, 2008). this study applies this framework to evaluate the formation of reddit’s latinx identity and explore new forms of colonial resistance in the digital age. framed within white hegemonic norms, the design of our current digital infrastructure is grounded in homophily– the notion that suggests people form connections based on their similarities (mcphearson et al., 2001). regarded as an axiom, most systems are grounded in this organizing principle, thus prompting homophilous connections among users, digital artifacts, and digital content (chun, 2019). in this form, homophily functions as an agent of digital coloniality. our similarities (homophily) are exploited, while our differences (heterophily) become white noise. for inherently diverse populations, like the latinx community, the ability to establish visible online spaces becomes dependent on the fluid power dynamics web 2.0 applications enable. latinx networked publics emerge in the digital sphere when the intersection of a platform’s architecture, affordances, and participatory culture enables the ability to navigate the negotiations that constitute latinx identities. central to these negotiations is navigating multiple racial and ethnic identities while forging homophilous and heterophilous connections (alcoff, 2005). in the context of this study, homophilous connections refer to intra-nation latin american connections while heterophilous connections refer to cross-nation latin american connections. sociotechnical systems that exploit homophilous connections prevent latinx online communities from becoming visible as the cross-nation (heterophilous) connections that thread the community together are unable to digitally materialize. consequently, most laitnx online communities emerge as isolated and disconnected clusters that represent different latin american countries. reddit, however, is a crowd-centered platform that enables users to leverage both homophilous and heterophilous connections. it exists as an interconnected network of subreddits (massanari, 2015). networked publics emerge among the connections forged between and among subreddits. these ties are established by the site’s moderators who provide hyperlinks to related subreddits on their forum’s sidebar or wiki page. all interactions among reddit users (redditors) are centered around conversations about a certain link or topic. therefore, connections among reddit users are “primarily corralled by shared interests, which result[s] in multiple groups and identities.” (kienzle, 2016, p. 22). as moderators forge connections between subreddits, multiple groups and identities become organized into relational networks of subreddits. the relational nature of reddit’s networked publics allows users to leverage homophilous and heterophilous ties (kienzle, 2016). this is witnessed in early observations of /r/latinoamerica, which reveal reciprocal connections between subreddits that represent latin american countries and /r/latinoamerica. while reddit’s infrastructure provides a unique opportunity to examine how latinx users navigate the liminal nature of their collective identity, the platform’s history reveals how toxic publics tend to command the site’s most visible content (marwick, 2017). reddit’s toxic networked publics are grounded in toxic geek masculinity and are known to actively suppress the voices of women and people of color. to understand the extent to which reddit’s latinx community is able to exist within this form of digital colonization, this project locates the site’s latinx networked public and identifies its prominent actors. using /r/latinoamerica as a port of entry, this project scraped the site’s api and captured a network of 1,811 subreddits. after locating reddit’s latinx networked public, this thesis conducts a 3-part content analysis to identify the gated, central actors, and networked gatekeepers of the captured networked public. this assessment reveals the negotiation of norms, values, and beliefs that constitute redddit’s latinx identity. following this analysis, the statistical significance of the captured homophilous and heterophilous connections was tested to reveal the extent to which the actors of this network were able to navigate the multi-dimensional white hegemonic norms embedded in the systems materiality. overall, the results reveal how the actors of reddit's latinx networked public navigated white norms on multiple dimensions: those that are central to latinx identity, the white hegemonic norms embedded in the internet’s materiality, and those that are central to reddit’s participatory culture. although these actors had to navigate multiple hegemonic norms, the results reveal how the moderators of these subreddits were able to elevate subreddits that represent latinx norms to prominent positions within the captured network. these findings provide further evidence that the open and inclusive logic of sociotechnical systems enables fluid power dynamics. these fluid power dynamics are further evidenced by the statistically significant homophilous and heterophilous connections that were established within the captured network. ultimately, the results of this study illustrate how fluid power dynamics and the ability to navigate homophilous and heterophilous connections not only function as forms of colonial resistance but coloniality in the digital age. references alcoff, l. m. (2005). latino vs. hispanic. philosophy & social criticism, 31(4), 395-407. doi:10.1177/0191453705052972 barzilai-nahon, k. (2008). toward a theory of network gatekeeping: a framework for exploring information control. journal of the american society for information science and technology, 59(9), 1493-1512. doi:10.1002/asi.20857 chun, w. (2019). queerfying homophily. in w. chun, & c. steyerl (eds.). pattern discrimination (pp. 59-98). london: university of minnesota press minneapolis hernandez, t. k. (2015). colorism and the law in latin america global perspectives on colorism conference remarks. washington university global studies law review, 14(4), 683. kienzle, j. (2016). the technological factors of reddit: communication and identity on relational networks. available from proquest central student. retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/1844998277 marwick, a. (2017). scandal or sex crime? gendered privacy and the celebrity nude photo leaks. ethics and information technology, 19(3), 177-191. doi:10.1007/s10676 017-9431-7 massanari, a. l. (2015). participatory culture, community, and play (1. aufl. ed.). new york [u.a.]: lang, peter. mcpherson, m. smith-lovin, l. & cook. j.m. (2001). birds of a feather: homophily in social networks. annual review of sociology, 27(1), 415-444. doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.27.1.415 meraz, s. & papacharissi, z. (2015). networked framing and gatekeeping. the sage handbook of digital journalism. 95-112. nakamura, l. & chow-white, (eds). (2012). race after the internet. routledge. posting through a pandemic: an analectical approach to addressing the emotional labor of asian-american bloggers on february 1, 2022, a chicago food and lifestyle blogger based out of atlanta shared a post on her instagram stories about the 2022 lunar new year and explained that she did not recognize the holiday as chinese new year since she is korean and celebrates seollal. the language she used to explain this cultural nuance (see figure 1) to her 64 thousand followers was both informative and overtly friendly: “just fyi for y’all dming me! i so appreciate the kind words but i’m actually korean, not chinese and celebrate seollal [heart emoji].” figure 1. food blogger who shared an instagram post about lunar new year. a tweet sent by @annie_wu_22 overlaying traditional red lanterns accompanied her statement. moreover, the tweet also included information about the holiday, referring to what it is recognized as in chinese, vietnamese, korean, tibetan, and mongolian. in the proceeding post on her ig story, chicagofoodgirl shares an unidentified follower’s positive response (see figure 2). figure 2. response from an instagram follower about her instagram story post. the follower acknowledged how the post was “so helpful” because they lead corporate communications for a global company and learned how their language should be more inclusive. this post on instagram is just one example of how the analectical perspective of asian-americans includes labor such as explaining significant cultural differences in the way a nationality celebrates ringing in the new year. this “lumping” of identities is necessary for unity in certain circumstances (i.e. mustering collective strength to fight racism, sexism, etc.), but resisting this lumping at other times is just as revolutionary / politically necessary. the “correcting” (i.e. “resisting”) of universal narratives and the emotional labor that comes with it is akin to resisting empire, or dominant hegemonic “universals.” a closer look at how asian-american women experience and engage in public discourse online is warranted, specifically on instagram. instagram has become a platform known to increase users’ social capital and launch them into positions to profit financially (i.e., a sponsored post by a paid advertiser in exchange for their reach to followers). instagram also supports and mobilizes communities. the instagram posts about lunar new year are not the first instance where followers have seen chicagofoodgirl share a personal experience with race and culture on instagram. furthermore, although she is korean-american, many other asian-americans celebrate the lunar new year, are not chinese, and may have experienced similar online interactions. the east asian cultural experience on platforms is predominately examined by researchers situated in that region. academics have examined the experiences of influencers from singapore (abidin, 2016); and south korean bloggers (song, 2018; woo-young & park, 2012). one study examined an asian-australian facebook group community of 1.7 million members who discuss being east asian and experiencing amplified racism due to covid-19 (abidin & zeng, 2020). the western asian experience is discussed nearly at a whisper; the american experience rarely centers on asian american participation. for instance, son (2016) conducted a qualitative study on korean immigrants’ postpartum care expectations and experiences in america by analyzing comments posted to a bulletin board forum in a korean online community and did not include american women of korean descent. the study surveyed native-korean women who lived in the united states. duffy and hund (2015) wrote about entrepreneurial feminism among top-ranked fashion bloggers, including asianamericans; however, the sample size of 38 included five asian-american women (representing 8% of participants). also, there was no indication of their nationality. some studies illuminate the asian-american’s digital experience. for instance, lopez (2014) wrote about asian-american bloggers’ emotional labor within the public sphere centering the research on how different forms of anger (productive/creative; communitybuilding and transition through anger, and destructive) are impactful communication devices for political and social mobilization. dosono and semaan (2019) researched the moderation practices of asian americans and pacific islanders on reddit and found that many of the women moderating reddit forums encountered harassment and misogynist comments. they found that the moderators developed strategies to manage the stress of emotional labor (hoschild, 1979), such as building solidarity from shared struggles (p.7). utilizing enrique dussel’s analectical approach, this paper addresses the emotional labor of asian-american bloggers to emphasize the work of american women, taking the dominant narrative of the eurocentric-american blogger and replacing it with the experience of american women of asian descent. eurocentrism involves an unwarranted centering of western thought and an unjustified marginalization of nonwestern thought (kim 2019). this study is particularly relevant as asian-americans experience racial animosity and increased racist attacks due to the coronavirus. asianamerican women continue to engage online and post through a pandemic even though one-third of asian-americans fear increased violence towards them due to the uptick in hate crimes (pew research center, 2021) since former president donald trump referred to the coronavirus as the chinese virus in an anti-asian tweet (reja, 2021) in 2020. employing dussel’s work as a source for critical inquiry of asian-american blogger’s labor can reveal what these women experience as a collective and as individuals, along with the strategies they develop to navigate toxicity and racism. references abidin, c. (2016). visibility labour: engaging with influencers’ fashion brands and #ootd advertorial campaigns on instagram. media international australia, 161(1), 86– 100. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x16665177 dosono, b., & semaan, b. (2019, may). moderation practices as emotional labor in sustaining online communities: the case of aapi identity work on reddit. in proceedings of the 2019 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-13). hochschild, a. r. (1979). emotion work, feeling rules, and social structure. american journal of sociology, 85(3), 551-575. lee, j., & abidin, c. (2021). backdoor advertising scandals, yingyeo culture, and cancel culture among youtube influencers in south korea. new media & society, 14614448211061829. lopez, l. k. (2014). blogging while angry: the sustainability of emotional labor in the asian american blogosphere. media, culture & society, 36(4), 421-436. kim, d. h. (2019). alterity, analectics, and the challenges of epistemic decolonization. the southern journal of philosophy, 57, 37-62. park, & jun, j.-k. (2003). a cross-cultural comparison of internet buying behavior: effects of internet usage, perceived risks, and innovativeness. international marketing review, 20(5), 534–553. https://doi.org/10.1108/02651330310498771 pew research center (2021). one-third of asian aamericans fear threats, physical attacks and most say violence against them is rising. retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/21/one-third-of-asian-americans-fearthreats-physical-attacks-and-most-say-violence-against-them-is-rising/ reja, m. (2021). trump’s ‘chinese virus’ tweet helped lead rise in racist anti-asian twitter content: study. retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2021/04/21/one-third-of-asian-americans-fear-threats-physical-attacks-and-mostsay-violence-against-them-is-rising/. son. (2016). perceptions and challenges: postpartum care among korean americans through an online community. journal of transcultural nursing, 27(3), 241–248. https://doi.org/10.1177/1043659614556353 song. h. (2018). the making of microcelebrity: afreecatv and the younger generation in neoliberal south korea. social media + society, 4(4), 205630511881490–. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118814906 young park, gyeong mi heo, & lee, r. (2011). blogging for informal learning: analyzing bloggers’ perceptions using learning perspective. journal of educational technology & society, 14(2), 149–160. woo-young, & park, h. w. (2012). the network structure of the korean blogosphere. journal of computer-mediated communication, 17(2), 216–230. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2011.01567.x breaking the myth of the “other”: resistance and the use of technology during the migration journey mobility is one of the oldest phenomena of humankind. for centuries people have been moving around the globe in search of well-being and for survival. the 21st century has not been the exception to this. according to the world migration report, there are around 281 million international migrants in the world, this accounts for 3.6 percent of the global population. a number that has been increasing over the past five decades. although the causes of migration are uncountable—as it affects each individual in unique ways—literature shows that it is the combination of microstructural and macrostructural factors (castells & miller, 1993) that causes migration. these causes originate from personal decisions and are embedded in larger political, economic, and environmental issues which play a determinant role in the person’s decision to migrate. therefore, migration is an outcome of the injustices and asymmetries that colonization and modern globalization have provoked in countries located mostly in the global south (hegde, 2016; sassen 1988/1996). the maps of human mobility show that the united states, germany, russia, and the united kingdom are the four countries with more immigrants in the world and where more people aim to migrate (international organization for migration report; 2020). exposing that migration from the global south to the north follows the paths of colonization. migration as the ultimate resource to escape harsh living conditions, violence, starvation, deprivation of human rights, and death remains as the only option of survival for millions of humans. the use of technology during migration is not new either. people-on-the-move have always relied on technology to communicate with their loved ones, share information, organize their journey, and plan their movements. letters, telegraphs, phone calls, emails, and currently the use of portable technological devices that allow instant communication through connectivity (such as smartphones); are tools that migrants have used throughout history. thus, it will be unfair not to recognize the long tradition of usage and agency that migrants have had over technology; often being early adopters and users. this paper challenges the traditional notion that technology is a new element during the migration process. instead, it claims that migrants have been using, reappropriating, shaping, imagining, and embodying technology in unique and creative ways during their experiences of mobility thru the centuries. therefore, it recognizes migrants as creative, and resilient individuals that use technology for resistance. although, we should acknowledge that the migrant population experience multiple vulnerabilities and injustices—this shouldn’t make invisible their strengths to overcome adversities (with and without technology). by looking at the experiences of migration of central americans to the u.s.—the largest migratory corridor in the world (massey et al.,1993; feldmann et al., 2019)—this paper analyses the ways in which young male migrants use the smartphone during their journey. theoretically, i engage with the work of the argentinian-mexican philosopher enrique dussel which challenges the construction of the “other” in modernity (dussel, 1997). this paper disputes the colonial construction of the migrant as the “other”, as a subject incapable of creating knowledge. on the contrary, by exposing the ways in which young central american migrants engage with technology, i expose that technology can be used as a practice of resistance. by applying 5 in-depth interviews with young central american males in transit towards the u.s. and by using digital ethnographic methods (kaufmann & peil, 2020) this paper exposes how young migrants engage with their smartphones for navigation, information-sharing, documentation, and emotional support during their journey. i conclude that migrants experience navigation in a hybrid way, as they use in simultaneous and fluid ways digital (e.g., smartphones, apps, interfaces) and physical (e.g., trains, roads) infrastructures for movement. i claim that the ways they use technology are an outcome of their needs and context. thus, through their engagement with technology, they create “situated knowledges” (haraway, 2003)—ways of using technology that are different from those designed by the developers of the technology. mignolo (2017) claims that decoloniality is not a mere thinking, but instead, a radical doing. that it should be understood as the “delink from that overall structure of knowledge in order to engage in an epistemic reconstitution”. considering this, i argue that the acts of resistance that migrants put into practice using their smartphones to avoid migratory authorities and organized crime and to cross borders; are decolonial practices and knowledge(s). and that they constitute an example of healing from the western/colonial domination, violence, and trauma. this paper considers technology a double-sword, or as diminescu (2020) calls it a “pharmakon”. a greek word used to identify something which is both medicine and poison, that can heal but also destroy. thus, technology is overall ambivalent and nonneutral. hence, i expose the risks that technology poses to migrants. such as threats of exploitation, deportation, and incarceration as a product of digital surveillance and data extraction—neo-colonial practices of digital globalization. i conclude that migrants choose deliberately to use technology during their journey. this breaks the myth of the “other” (dussel, 1997) as it shows the migrants’ agency to create their own meanings around technology. this challenges the colonial/western narratives reproduced by governments and humanitarian organizations which frame technology as the “savior” of the migrant and the migrant as the “other” who has little knowledge around technology. through empirical analysis, i contribute to opening a discussion on important questions such as: can we use technology in decolonial ways? can we decolonize and heal our technologies? can technologies be used for liberation? references burton, m., & osorio, j. m. f. (2011). introducing dussel: the philosophy of liberation and a really social psychology. psychology in society, (41), 20-39. castles, s. and miller, m. (1993) the age of migration: international population movements in the modern world. new york, ny: the guilford press. diminescu, d. (2020). “researching the connected migrant”. in the sage handbook of media and migration, edited by kevin smets, koen leurs, myria georgiou, saskia witteborn, and radhika gajjala, 3–7. london, sage publications. dussel, e. (1997). the invention of the americas. eclipse of “the other" and the myth of modernity. utopian studies, 8(1). feldmann, a. e., bada, x., & schütze, s. (2019). introduction: new mobility patterns in the americas. in new migration patterns in the americas (pp. 1-24). palgrave macmillan, cham. haraway, d. (2003). situated knowledges: the science question. turning points in qualitative research: tying knots in a handkerchief, 2, 21. hegde, r. s. (2016). mediating migration. uk: polity press. international organization for migration: oim report (2020). retrieved april 10, 2020, from https://publications.iom.int/system/files/pdf/wmr_2020.pdf. kaufmann, k., & peil, c. (2020). the mobile instant messaging interview (mimi): using whatsapp to enhance self-reporting and explore media usage in situ. mobile media & communication, 8(2), 229-246. massey, d., arrango, j., hugo, g., kouaouci, a., pellegrino, a. and taylor, e. (1993) ‘theories of migration: a review and appraisal’, population and development review 19(3): 431–466. mignolo, w. (2017). interview with walter mignolo: activism, trajectory, and key concepts. retrieved from: https://criticallegalthinking.com/ sassen, s. (1988). the mobility of labour and capital. cambridge: cambridge university press sassen, s. (1996). losing control?: sovereignty in the age of globalization. columbia university press. remember, you will die. corporeal memorialization of the dead as resistance to industrialized memory leen van brussel (2014) articulates death both as a material and symbolic process. the “ultimate biological essentialism” (van brussel, 2014, p. 13), death is unavoidable– we expect it–yet our human impulse to avoid its looming specter reflects a peculiar persistence of human nature. when death occurs the living are forced to renegotiate their own individual identity and web of social relations, absent the deceased. mourning, thus, is “largely about loss of our attachment to the material support underpinning the symbolic and/or imaginary roles the deceased played for us in shaping our social relations and fantasy life,” (glynos, 2014, p. 140). this cycle of mourning, punctuated by loss of the material and impulse to renegotiate the symbolic, is most tangibly evident in rituals of memorialization. from the plastered skulls of jericho of the neolithic period to 19th century memento mori (which literally translates to “remember, you will die”), historical practices for memorializing the dead through material, often corporeal, means have been well documented. in recent years, the proliferation of modern-day memento mori such as plush “memory bears” made of a patchwork of clothing belonging to the deceased have gained in popularity. situating these modern-day material memento mori (and the implied reminder that death is essential and unavoidable these objects conjure) within their historical lineage and the anthropological framework of thing theory (brown, 2001) which centers objects–-in this case memento mori–as socialized things, this paper argues that corporeal artefacts of memorialization represent a visceral rejection of the industrialization of memory prolific in an age of totalizing technological systems. as will be explored, historically, eras where corporeal memorialization practices are prolific are often preceded by massive shifts in social and technological advancement (lillios, 2008). advancements in digital technology, particularly in the realm of simulated communication and avatars, have made the extension of life (at least through digital simulation) evermore possible, inching us past the precipice of another massive technological and ontological shift. to this end, and as anthony enns (2020) notes the “development of networked environments” have led to “the formation of complex and self-sufficient digital universes populated by virtual avatars and artificial intelligences” and which premise “no essential difference between identity and information, between real intelligence and simulated intelligence, which effectively made humans indistinguishable from machines,” (p. 40). as arnason (2014) explains, society is a deathly creation. echoing durkheim, he argues that death represents the ultimate moral authority, and that ritual memorialization offers “...an opportunity for the construction of society as a moral order,” (p. 199). complicating things in our digital age, global platforms invested in mnemotechnologies, or those technologies which allow for the industrialized storage of memory, threaten to impose an inauthentic moral order steeped in neoliberal market principles. as bernard stiegler notes, the point of this memory storage is not so much to foster connection between the living and the dead (i.e. continued connection with the deceased via their facebook page), but to maintain connection between the living and revenue-earning platform (as cited in prey & smit, 2019). furthermore, the landscape of digital remembrance is that of global platforms that often do more to industrialized practices of bereavement for capitalist purposes, rather than cultivate individual experience. conversely, corporeal artefacts, as competing sites or landscapes of memorialization, provoke liminal experiences that both conjure the past (pastor & kent, 2020) and continue a fluid connection between the living and deceased in the present. conjuring a more authentic connection between living and dead, reichers (2013) argues that material memento mori are distinguished in the sensory provocation: “an object’s haptic qualities as well as its uniqueness as a singular object gives that item an inherent gravitas that encourages, even demands, serious personal contemplation,” (p. 3). similarly, deborah lutz (2010) argues that tactile memento mori imbue what can be described as a sympathetic magic in that a piece of a once-living person can conjure the presence of the whole. in this way, the artefacts of bodily material captured as or within objects hold the fetish power of relics of bygone eras (lutz, 2010), whereas objects that are mere representations (photographs, videos, digital memorial pages) do not. along these lines, tim ingold (2007) argues that the tactile (not cognitive) relationship we have with objects distinguishes their status in that we can physically interact with the object in a way we cannot physically interact with mere ideation. in this vein, it is difficult to argue that the digital artefacts of memorialization constitute anything more than subjective projection of social and collective meaning. perhaps most importantly from a decolonial perspective, the liminal experiences of corporeal memento mori occur outside of the technological hegemony of networked environments, allowing the subject to renegotiate her relationship with the deceased on her own terms. the quest to apprehend, and subsequently conjure, the once-living in material objects via corporeal artefacts (like strands of hair in a necklace or ring), is steeped in a long tradition of spiritualism and, by extension, a belief in a form of natural supernaturalism which, as will be explored, has historically pushed-back against emergent scientism of the day (lutz, 2011; enns, 2020). today, this “emergent scientism” can be clarified in the grammars of the ‘cybernetic turn’ in which the braincomputer model, as jeffrey sconce (2019) notes, while perhaps deeply flawed in principle, is something ‘we all believe’ (p. 235) to be self-evident. thus, in an age where memory is stored and industrialized as a prelude to extending life in the digital realm, to remember the material limits of our mortality is truly a transgressive act. references arnason, a. (2014). on the deathly construction of society. in l. van brussel & n. carpenter (eds.). the social construction of death: interdisciplinary perspectives. p. 185-204. new york: palgrave macmillan. brown, b. (2001). thing theory. critical inquiry, 28(1), 1-22. enns, a. (2019). information theory of the soul: spiritualism, technology, and science fiction. in natale, s. believing in bits: digital media and the supernatural. oxford university press. glynos, j. (2014). death, fantasy, and the ethics of mourning. in l. van brussel & n. carpenter (eds.). the social construction of death: interdisciplinary perspectives. p. 137-160. new york: palgrave macmillan. ingold, t. (2007). materials against materiality. archaeological dialogues, 14(1), 1-16. lillios, k. t. (2008). heraldry for the dead: memory, identity, and the engraved stone plaques of neolithic iberia. university of texas press. lutz, d. (2011). the dead still among us: victorian secular relics, hair jewelry, and death culture. victorian literature and culture, 39(1), 127–142. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1060150310000306 prey, r. & smit, r. (2018). from personal to personalized memory: social media as mnemotechnology. in papacharissi, z. (ed.). a networked self and birth, life, death (pp. 209-223). new york, ny: routledge, an imprint of the taylor & francis group. riechers, a. (2013). the persistence of memory online: digital memorials, fantasy, and grief as entertainment. in digital legacy and interaction (pp. 49-61). springer, cham. sconce, j. (2019). the technical delusion. duke university press. van brussel, l. (2014). introduction. in l. van brussel & n. carpenter (eds.). the social construction of death: interdisciplinary perspectives. p. 13-33. new york: palgrave macmillan. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): duguay, s., chartrand, a., & trépanier, am., (2022, november). decolonizing creativity: hybrid constellations: examining social media’s role in the montreal lesbian social scene. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. hybrid constellations: examining social media’s role in the montreal lesbian social scene stefanie duguay concordia university alex chartrand concordia university am trépanier concordia university “on est partout,” cynthia declared: “we are everywhere.” a lesbian in her late twenties, she spoke about her visibility work for the quebec lesbian network (qln), where the gatherings she initiates through the organization’s social media aim to bring together a vast lesbian population to “defend everybody’s rights.” this paper examines the role of social media, alongside other modes of communication, in the definition and organization of lesbian1 sociocultural landscapes. building from geographical studies that identify how lesbians’ dispersion across cities counters heteropatriarchal occupations of space, the study is anchored within montreal/tiohtià:ke to identify local approaches to visibility and gathering. this angle is combined with digital scholarship that considers how mobile technologies, platforms, and apps give rise to hybrid arrangements that merge physical and digital practices. these lenses are applied to interviews with representatives from organizations and individuals who use digital technologies to connect lesbians online and across physical space. preliminary findings indicate that social media is a focal tool, among others, to support lesbians’ networked social arrangements but that platforms lack affordances for the fluidity integral to ever-fluctuating lesbian/queer identities, locations, and temporalities. theoretical framework and background while gay-specific neighborhoods or “villages” have formed in cities, their venues and living spaces have been most welcoming to those capable of expressing homonormativity in alignment with gender-conforming, capitalist, and white supremacist values (browne & bakshi, 2011). jen jack gieseking (2020) found that, rather than occupying specific urban territories, lesbian, transgender, and gender non-conforming people formed “constellations” of connections across space and time: moments of queerness in fleeting locales. gieseking sees these constellations as distinct from, but indebted to, projects of decolonization as women and queers “make their own worlds that are both unseen by and work to unravel heteropatriarchal society” (p. 228). geographical perspectives are increasingly combined with digital scholarship to consider how technology shapes social and physical relationships to place (nash & gorman-murray, 2016). mobile apps, geolocational features, and real-time affordances give rise to digital interactions that overlay physical space (blackwell, birnholtz, & abbott, 2015). as lgbtq+ people have been early adopters of digital technologies, social media play an increasing role in fostering queer intimacy even while posing challenges for privacy and security. historically, montreal’s lesbian scene has been dispersed across the city (podmore, 2001). as in other urban centers, rotating club nights have increasingly replaced lesbian bars, requiring additional social media labor from queer people and organizations already often rendered financially precarious (krishnan & duguay, 2020). this study looks specifically at the use of social media by those organizing lesbian gatherings to identify its relationship to lesbian constellations in changing cityscapes. methods interviews were chosen as the most effective approach for understanding the motivations, experiences, and challenges involved in using social media for lesbian event coordination. although delayed by covid-19, interviews were conducted throughout 2021 with nine women representing six different event series/organizations (with plans for further recruitment). participants represent publicly-funded formal lgbtq+ organizations, volunteer groups, and individual event promoters who coordinated gatherings ranging from outdoor activities to game nights and dance parties. semi-structured interviews were conducted by videoconference or telephone, lasting approximately 90 minutes each, with six in french and three in english. interview transcripts are being analyzed by a multilingual team through open and axial coding, following feminist, constructionist grounded theory (charmaz, 2006). this allows for identifying key themes across participants’ meaning-making while also considering differences across positionality and in relation to the diversity of montreal’s lesbian population. findings and discussion preliminary findings illustrate the increasing need for networked communication as lesbians spread across the city. maryse, from the volunteer group les chouettes, recounted their ousting from a bar in the village because “we did not really fit with their clientele.” this story supported cynthia’s view that gay men’s occupation of the village stems from a gendered sense of entitlement: “…men are used to taking this space because we raised them like that. we tell them, ‘this place, it belongs to you, take it,” while we don’t tell women that.” although we also heard how men took up space on their facebook pages and in direct messages, these organizations turned to social media to establish events in other neighborhoods. to sustain constellations of lesbian gatherings, organizers combined longstanding approaches, such as newsletters and telephone lists, with social media. mim, who coordinated lesbian parties since the 1990s, simultaneously maintained an email newsletter and facebook group to reach different audiences. however, facebook complicated promotion: “when facebook happened, more parties happened, because people were able to organize quickly and publish quickly, so there was more competition.” even as lesbian dispersion necessitated a constellation of communication modalities, the proliferation of networked connections made it difficult to galvanize women in any particular direction. platforms’ opacity did not help, as organizers agonized over strategies to game algorithms and increase events’ online visibility. social media’s requirement for organizations to define their mandates, audiences, and events posed a significant hurdle. audrey, social media coordinator for the centre de solidarité lesbienne, stressed, “it remains problematic…to share on platforms, as well as in our graphic design and the way we write our events, to always be inclusive…and people do not miss reminding us when we make mistakes.” several organizers felt pressure to respond to community expectations of inclusivity across language, race, socioeconomic status, ability, and fluctuating boundaries of gender identity, fearing backlash when publicity or events failed to meet these demands. lucia, who cocoordinates parties, felt personally implicated in the perceived limitations of their instagram promotion: “i don’t think either of us were also expecting to be like micro micromicro-influencers with people, kind of, knowing us and making assumptions about us.” some followers questioned their legitimacy in holding events intended to be inclusive when they framed the account through their particular identities. our early analysis points to conclusions regarding space, identity, security, and the growing digital literacy of lesbian organizations. most prominently, these findings indicate that a constellation of lesbian networks throughout montreal have required a constellation of communication modalities, including social media. however, platforms call for static definitions of events or identity-based promotion, which contradict the fluid and temporally fluctuating qualities of lesbian constellations. references blackwell, c., birnholtz, j., & abbott, c. (2015). seeing and being seen: co-situation and impression formation using grindr, a location-aware gay dating app. new media & society, 17(7), 1117–1136. browne, k., & bakshi, l. (2011). we are here to party? lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans leisurescapes beyond commercial gay scenes. leisure studies, 30(2), 179–196. charmaz, k. (2006). constructing grounded theory: a practical guide. sage. gieseking, j. j. (2020). a queer new york. nyu press. krishnan, p., & duguay, s. (2020). from “interested” to showing up: investigating digital media’s role in montreal-based lgbtq social organizing. canadian journal of communication, 45(4), 525-544. nash, c.j., & gorman-murray, a. (2016). digital technologies and sexualities in urban space. in g. brown & k. browne (eds.), the routledge research companion to geographies of sex and sexualities (pp. 399–406). routledge. podmore, j. a. (2001). lesbians in the crowd: gender, sexuality and visibility along montréal’s boul. st-laurent. gender, place and culture, 8(4), 333–355. 1 many participants foregrounded the term “lesbian” while redefining it as inclusive of gender nonconforming, nonbinary, and transgender people. as such, we adopt this term while recognizing that umbrella terms for lgbtq+ identities are often fraught. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 lewis, k. (2022, 5 november). colonizing the narrative space: unlivable lives, unseeable struggles and the necropolitical governance of digital populations. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. colonizing the narrative space: unlivable lives, unseeable struggles and the necropolitical governance of digital populations kelly lewis centre of excellence for automated decision-making and society, and emerging technologies lab, monash university introduction social media provides a critical space for people at the margins and living within domains of excessive struggle to document, publish, and share content that publicizes instances of human rights violations, conflict, and dispossession. this presentation explores how asymmetrical content moderation processes, opaque platform policies, and alternative enforcement systems that are brokered through backdoor corporategovernment agreements lead to the removal of this content and re-obscure life and death struggles. i introduce the notion of platform necropolitics (lewis, 2023, forthcoming) and demonstrate its theoretical resourcefulness through an examination of corporate-government social media censorship of pro-palestinian content during the may 2021 israeli–palestinian conflict. platform necropolitics manifests through the sovereign logics of platforms that violently police the boundaries of speech and space – determining who has the right to speak and who has the right to appear as a legitimate digital citizen, and who does not – and that take as their object the articulations of digital subjects and enact their ‘right to kill or let live’ (lewis, 2023, forthcoming). this conceptual framework draws together scholarship from platform studies, political theorizing, and decolonial critique to reorientate critical theorizing of platforms as technologies of necropolitical power to rethink and imagine the implications of their discursive, material, and geopolitical interventions. beyond the politics of platforms: platform necropolitics scholars of platform studies have long documented the profoundly political ways that platforms curate and mediate the contours of public discourse by policy and by design (gillespie, 2018, 2010; noble, 2018; benjamin, 2019; suzor, 2019; roberts, 2019; klonick, 2018). governments are becoming more sophisticated in monitoring and controlling the information flow of citizens and increasingly pressure platforms to use automated tools to govern and moderate what citizens can access, share, and ultimately do (suzor, 2019, p. 79). both human and automated forms of content moderation are well understood as opaque and controversial processes. increasing forms of algorithmic moderation stand to further exacerbate levels of obscurity and complexity into the decision-making processes of what gets moderated in the name of security and safety (gorwa et al., 2020) and specifically those made around content highlighting issues of political importance and human rights issues (york, 2021). contentious images that expose instances of political discontent and human rights violations have been one of the primary weapons that oppressive governments seek to censor. the conditions under which who is seen and unseen, under what terms, holds a mirror onto more far-reaching forms of power and inequality (benjamin, 2019, p. 99). gillespie (2018, p. 12) is convinced that most of the challenges platforms face in their content moderation processes are structural. the premise of this presentation is there remains a need to move beyond the structural bounds and interior politics of platforms. i place scholarship on the politics of platforms in conversation with mbembe’s (2019; 2003) post-colonial theory of necropolitics, to reimagine necropolitical power as manifested in the contemporary present through the digital infrastructures and mediating logics of platforms as spaces that we live with, in, and through today. platform necropolitics prescribes an actionable language to speak to emergent and troubling developments of digitally mediated violence: when platforms exercise the power to effectively let digital subjects live or to kill contentious content and voices of dissent. this manifests in various situations, especially when platforms work in coordination with governments to expedite the removal of content deemed ‘offensive’, ‘graphic’ or ‘inciteful’, particularly those which are legitimate forms of political expression and do not violate platform policies or community guidelines. this has specific consequences for freedom of expression and human rights investigations as it governs the conditions for whose voices and what content are (or are not) given the right to life online. it is a phenomenon that demonstrates not only the unequal imparting of power on often already oppressed and marginalized people, but which also governs the conditions under which we see, understand, and remember conflict and revolt and has severe implications for the shaping of political futures. methods this case study draws on primary research, critical journalistic accounts of content moderation during the israeli-palestinian conflict between 7 and 21 may 2021, and a critical textual and discursive analysis of a seven-month digital ethnographic study of public pro-palestinian accounts (n=85) manually collected through a snowballing technique on instagram between 7 may and 30 december 2021. i collected the ongoing digital traces of censorship and contestation articulated by people who called out and documented unjust forms of content moderation. this data collection shows myriad examples (via screenshots, n=324) of automated misclassification, unjustified removal of content and disabling of accounts on instagram, facebook, and twitter, and the blocking of features on instagram, such as story highlights, liking, sharing, or saving content, live video streaming, hashtags, or restricting access to accounts. findings and discussion preliminary findings reveal how platforms, like facebook and instagram, reaffirm the centrality of western imperialism through their “commercial colonialism” (mbembe, 2019, p. 10) in ways that simultaneously extend the “digital militarism” (kuntsman and stein, 2015, p. 6) of the israeli state, and reenergize forms of necropolitics and necropower that enable for the reproduction of ordinary social existence of desirable digital citizens while simultaneously enacting apartheid-like architectures on undesirable ‘others’ that differentially orients certain populations toward spaces of irreproducibility, nonexistence, and social death. the gradually extending intertwinement of violent israeli colonial occupation and the commercial imperialism of western platforms reveals farreaching and draconian implications for digital human rights and claims for sovereignty. the analysis raises important implications for internet researchers. so far much of the literature has focused on the structural elements of platforms (i.e., infrastructure, commercial logics, policies, and moderation processes). while important work, there remains a need to move beyond the interior politics of territorially bounded platform spaces to examine how this correlates with the exterior politics of nation-states. particularly where automated content moderation is concerned, and especially when platforms enjoy opaque agreements with foreign governments and enact decisions at the behest of state and political actors. references lewis, k. (2023, forthcoming). platform necropolitics: content moderation and censoring of pro-palestinian voices on social media. in miladi, n. (eds.), global media coverage of the palestinian israeli conflict: reporting the sheikh jarrah evictions. london: routledge. benjamin, r. (2019). race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code, cambridge: polity. kuntsman, a., & stein, r. l. (2015). digital militarism: israel's occupation in the social media age. stanford, ca: stanford university press. gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media, new haven: yale university press. gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of platforms, new media & society, 12(3), pp. 347–364. gorwa, r., binns, r., & katzenbach, c. (2020). algorithmic content moderation: technical and political challenges in the automation of platform governance, big data and society, 7(1), pp. 1–15. klonick, k. (2018). the new governors: the people, rules, and processes governing online speech, harvard law review, 131(6), pp. 1598–1669. mbembe, a. (2019). necropolitics. durham: duke university press. mbembe, a. (2003). necropolitics. public culture, 15(1), pp.11–40. noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism, new york: new york university press. roberts, s. t. (2019). behind the screen: content moderation in the shadows of social media, new haven: yale university press. suzor, n. p. (2019). lawless: the secret rules that govern our digital lives, cambridge: cambridge university press. york, j. c. (2021). silicon values: the future of free speech under surveillance capitalism, london: verso. aoir ethics panel 2_final selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): zimmer, m. and af segerstad, yh. (2021, october). aoir ethics: platform challenges. panel presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. aoir ethics panel 2: platform challenges michael zimmer marquette university, usa ylva hård af segerstad university of gothenburg, sweden panel rationale and organization since its inception, the association of internet researchers (aoir) has fostered critical reflection on the ethical and social dimensions of the internet and internet-facilitated communication and interactions. the aoir ethics working committee has been committed to not only ensuring the aoir ethics guidelines remain helpful and relevant to researchers and ethical review committees, but also to ensure high-quality research focused on ethics is shared at the annual conference. this panel is one of two sessions organized by the aoir ethics working committee to highlight recent research engaging with the complexities of addressing ethics in our domain from various disciplinary perspectives, methods, and platforms. this panel collects five papers exploring a broad (but in many ways common) set of ethical dilemmas faced by researching engaged with specific platforms such as reddit, amazon’s mechanical turk, and private messaging platforms. these include: “reddit research and reflexivity: a situated ethics framework for publicly available usergenerated data” by [redacted] that studies people's online conversations about health matters on reddit in support of a proposed situated ethics framework for researchers working with publicly available data; “ethical research and the practice and efficacy of masking reddit sources” by [redacted] that explores the sourcing practices among reddit researchers to determine if their sources could be unmasked and located in reddit archives; “addressing ethics in reddit research: a systematic review” by [redacted] which provides a broad systematic review of over 700 research studies that used reddit data to assess the kinds of analysis and methods researchers are engaging in as well as any ethical considerations that emerge when researching reddit; “the “original sin” of amazon mechanical turk for academic research” by [redacted] which provides a critical examination of the use of amazon’s mechanical turk for academic research; and “ethical approaches to closed messaging research: considerations for democratic contexts” by [redacted] which investigates current practices and ethical dilemmas faced when researching closed messaging applications their users. taken together, these papers illuminate emerging ethical dilemmas facing researchers when investigating novel platforms and user communities; challenges often not fully addressed–if even contemplated–in existing ethical guidelines. if presented live, the panel will be moderated by members of the aoir ethics working committee and will include a respondent from that group to spark further discussion across the contributors and among virtual attendees. simon rogerson, chief editor journal of information, communication and ethics in society (jices) notes his publication aims to “…promote thoughtful dialogue regarding the wider social and ethical issues related to the planning, development, implementation, and use of new media and information and communication technologies.” the journal thereby offers “necessary interdisciplinary, culturally and geographically diverse works essential to understanding the impacts of the pervasive new media and information and communication technologies.” these papers fit this objective, and are among those under consideration for publication in a special issue of the jices) associated with the aoir ethics working committee and aoir2021. reddit research and reflexivity: a situated ethics framework for publicly available user-generated data martyna gliniecka western sydney university, australia introduction publicly available user-generated data sparks a heated debate among internet researchers. according to stommel and rijk (2021) and taylor and pagliari (2018), studies often don't discuss ethical considerations or briefly mention ethics committees' approvals and approach to informed consent. many scholars apply for an exception from the human research ethics review. when the exception is granted, researchers' engagement with the ethics of the study ends. two main strategies of addressing ethical concerns are to draw upon guidelines (from associations like aoir and similar studies) or dismiss ethical obligations due to working with publicly available data. another way to engage with research ethics in online research is to consider a situated ethics approach guided by the particular project and researcher's reflexivity. this paper describes the process of assembling situated ethics approach for my study about young people's online conversations about health matters on reddit and proposes a situated ethics framework for researchers working with publicly available data. overview of the study in my study, i examine young people's peer-led discussions about health on teenoriented subreddits on the user-led platform reddit. i am interested in conversations' practices and the discourse of youth health matters. i investigate discussions represented by textual data and their contextual, interactional and semiotic dimensions. i utilise the unobtrusive digital ethnography with collecting naturalistic user-generated content of original posts and replies. for analysis, i introduce a situated methodological toolkit with multiple methods adjusted to particular discussions' examples. while preparing my research design, i had to consider human ethics review. i have decided to request an exemption from human ethics review due to the public and non-identifiable data which i was granted. however, this decision has pushed me towards applying the reflexive and situated ethics approach. addressing ethical issues according to most privacy laws, public data does not require means to protect the confidentiality, but some users consider their posts aimed at private friends' circle. data derived from social media can be non-identifiable, but some profiles include personal information. some platforms such as reddit are anonymous/pseudonymous, and users don't share private details. these issues cannot be solved by a one-size-fits-all approach (steinmetz, 2012). procedural ethics expect to identify all risks before commencing research (roberts, 2015) and sustain a coherent ethics approach throughout the process (webb et al., 2017). such attitude doesn't recognise unforeseen ethical issues and contextual forces that shape specific projects. the situated ethics approach unpacks the advantages and limitations of research by observing its process and address the complexities of interrelations of people, platforms and places (collin et al., 2020). situated ethics also encourage reflexivity on the researcher's position and identifying potential biases (hine, 2015). the non-linear ethics approach balances between the pragmatism of conducting research and protecting the users from unexpected harm. situated ethics framework i attended the ethics of my research in a reflexive, situated and practice-based way. the key ethical dilemmas i considered were public/private debate, anonymity and traceability, consent, data collection and storage, and youth/health vulnerability. i was guided by the online research guidelines, privacy and human research ethics laws, ethics committees' policies, studies on reddit, users' recommendations, and the young people's advisory board. what emerged from this process was a situated ethics framework and its dimensions – online/digital context, perceptions/beliefs/attitudes, and project specificity. all of them share the principle of fluidity, situatedness and participatory approach. the online/digital context dimension in this study addressed circumstances specific to reddit: platform's size and structure, availability and accessibility, user's anonymity and identity, and third-party data policy and terms and conditions of use. these factors could guide future researchers to incorporate the platform-specific lens into ethical decisions. it is particularly helpful in investigating under-researched or new platforms, as guidelines and ethics committees are limited by the novelties in the digital environment and lack of existing research on particular platforms. in this project, i have focused mainly on the platform context, but there are broader online/digital context implications, for example, economic or political, that could inform ethical challenges. perceptions/beliefs/attitudes from users included incorporating the "indirect" and "direct" participatory research approach. as an "indirect" input, i considered peer guidance from the literature review. two topics that can help researchers in their ethical decisions are studies on attitudes towards using social media posts for research and the previous ethical approach in research on the specific platform. i also incorporated "direct" participatory research by seeking opinions from platform users and targeted group (youth advisory board). a participatory approach is challenging with projects dealing with user-generated data, especially if conducted without direct contact with content producers, but, as this project shows, can be done otherwise. the last dimension – project specificity – is often overlooked if researchers follow general guidelines for general "social media" data. in my case, i have considered whether my research is leaning towards text or human orientation, what are the data characteristics and data collection process, whether i can seek informed consent, and what are the issues specific to the targeted group. every project has specific theoretical, methodological and analytical factors that can influence the ethics approach. the data we aim to obtain can guide us significantly, as there is a difference in its numbers, types, accessibility and ownership. practicalities of conducting the study while minimising risks and inconvenience for the users can't be assessed without reference to the particular project. conclusion online research on user-generated data emerge as problematic addressed with procedural, risk-management and guidelines-informed ethics. dynamically evolving platforms affordances, users' behaviours, and particular project orientation and design require customised, fluid, and situated approaches to ethical dilemmas. working with publicly available and non-identifiable data does not waive the responsibility of conducting the study ethically. the situated ethics approach aims not to resolve the ethical dilemmas but to help surface and support working through them. the framework i propose here can be applied to future study designs that seek to trial and test it. reflecting on dimensions of online context, user's attitudes and research design in one's ethics considerations embeds more reflexivity into the ethics process and tailor it to the specific project. references collin, p., swist, t., taddeo, c., & spears, b. (2020). working with complexity: between control and care in digital research ethics. complexities of researching with young people, 115–129. hine, c. (2015). ethnography for the internet: embedded, embodied and everyday. bloomsbury publishing plc. roberts, l. d. (2015). ethical issues in conducting qualitative research in online communities. qualitative research in psychology, 12(3), 314–325. https://doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2015.1008909 steinmetz, k. f. (2012). message received: virtual ethnography in online message boards. international journal of qualitative methods, 11(1), 26–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/160940691201100103 stommel, w., & rijk, l. de. (2021). ethical approval: none sought. how discourse analysts report ethical issues around publicly available online data. research ethics, 174701612098876. https://doi.org/10.1177/1747016120988767 taylor, j., & pagliari, c. (2018). mining social media data: how are research sponsors and researchers addressing the ethical challenges? research ethics, 14(2), 1–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/1747016117738559 webb, h., jirotka, m., stahl, b. c., housley, w., edwards, a., williams, m., procter, r., rana, o., & burnap, p. (2017). the ethical challenges of publishing twitter data for research dissemination. proceedings of the 2017 acm on web science conference websci '17, 339–348. https://doi.org/10.1145/3091478.3091489 disguising reddit sources and the efficacy of ethical research joseph reagle northeastern university, usa introduction and background while planning for a project about online advice forums, i wondered if should i mask such sources by eliding usernames and altering quotations? advice about health and relationships are sensitive topics, even if shared in public via pseudonyms. looking at recent research on reddit, i noted different approaches to my quandary. i set out to do a systematic analysis of recent reddit research reports by characterizing their sourcing practices, testing if their sources can be unmasked and located on reddit or its archives, and interviewing the authors. when it comes to researchers limiting the exposure of online sources, we might speak of anonymizing (ohm, 2010), fabricating (markham, 2012), de-identifying (haimson et al., 2016), ungoogling (shklovski & vertesi, 2013, p. 2172), and obfuscating (brunton & nissenbaum, 2015, p. 1). i follow the path of bruckman (2002), who helpfully described a continuum of disguise, from none, to light, moderate, and heavy. as far back as the 1990s, king (1996) faulted finn & lavitt (1994) for disguising sources’ names, but not that of the sexual abuse forum or the date and time of posts. more recently, zimmer (2010) critiqued researchers for creating a “tastes, ties, and time” facebook dataset that was improperly — perhaps impossibly — “anonymized.” journalists, too, sometimes participate. at the new york times, barbaro & zeller (2006) reported on — and confirmed — the potential to unmask sources in an aol dataset. a decade later, in the same newspaper, singer (2015), wanting to speak to a source in a research study, was able to identify, contact, and interview the source. the present work systematically investigates the disguising and subsequent locating of online sources. that is, can the original message reported by a researcher be located? if so, what can be done to improve research disguise? method i searched for research reports from the last five years about reddit using keywords such as “privacy,” “verbatim,” “fabrication,” and “aoir guidelines” (franzke et al., 2020). i found three reports using verbatim phrases and three using reworded phrases. i collected phrases of more than ten words from each because any less than that is too short for meaningful searches. i then set about locating redditors’ phrases in the six reports. identifying the phrases and conducting the searches was an idiosyncratic process: intensive, manual, and subjective. i made no effort to personally identify reddit users. however, locating sources, as i attempted, could be the first step in the distinct process of re-identifying users via digital forensics. after my initial analysis, i emailed the research reports’ authors and asked if they would speak with me. three agreed to do so and completed the consent form. i asked a handful of questions about their practice, rationale, influences, and thoughts about my efforts. though i used public research reports and their own reddit sources in my analysis, none of this is identified or quoted. interviewees were allowed to review my characterization of their work and our discussion. analysis and discussion there are three major indexes by which to locate sources on reddit: reddit itself, google, and redditsearch. reddit is excellent at finding verbatim content from a post but does not support searching for the comments that follow a post. google can search posts and comments and was useful for non-exact (non-quoted) searches; it inexplicably failed to find any verbatim quotes from one report. redditsearch, a humanfriendly interface for pushshift’s index and api, is the most potent tool, enabling sophisticated searches, including copies of messages that have since been edited or deleted. less well-known or private archives could also exist given reddit’s public nature. i found descriptions of research practices that were confusing or inconsistent with practice. in two cases, issues arose during the review and editing process (v3 & r2). in the other cases (v1), i suspect it was an oversight in data collection. researchers (v2) can also be unaware that posts by pseudonyms might still be thought sensitive by their authors given redditors subsequently delete their posts. masking sources, the highest level of disguise that elides usernames and alters prose, can be effective (r1). this is especially so when the altered phrases are tested against search engines — the practice of one interviewed researcher (r3). research reports and results ( + = strength; = weakness). report approach sources located note v1 verbatim 18 17 leaked non-throwaway accounts v2 verbatim 17 15 didn’t account for deleted posts v3 verbatim 6 6 inconsistent description/practice r1 reworded 2 0 + preferred interviews to posts r2 reworded 5 5 posts found via thread title r3 reworded 8 0 + maskings tested by researchers there is no single research policy appropriate to disguising online sources. my interviewees shared how their practices changed relative to their research sites (i.e., how sensitive the topic), the larger cultural context (e.g., the rise in online harassment of sources), and researchers’ influences (i.e., conferences and papers) and experiences (e.g., seeing other researchers’ sources exposed). the different approaches we see in reports, however, are not necessarily the result of a consistent policy (i.e., from conception to publication), fully cognizant of technical affordances (e.g., redditsearch and pushshift), and users’ wishes (e.g., when users delete posts from throw-away accounts). the research community can improve on this, though, via site-specific investigations and practical guidelines that inform the conception, execution, and review of research. references barbaro, m., & zeller, t., jr. (2006, august 9). a face is exposed for aol searcher no. 4417749. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09aol.html bruckman, a. (2002). studying the amateur artist: a perspective on disguising data collected in human subjects research on the internet. ethics and information technology, 4(3). http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.432.1591&rep=rep1&type=pdf brunton, f., & nissenbaum, h. (2015). obfuscation: a user’s guide for privacy and protest. mit press. finn, j., & lavitt, m. (1994). computer-based self-help groups for sexual abuse survivors. social work with groups, 17(1-2), 21–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/j009v17n01_03 franzke, a. s., bechmann, a., zimmer, m., ess, c., & aoir, and. (2020). internet research: ethical guidelines 3.0. aoir. https://aoir.org/reports/ethics3.pdf haimson, o. l., andalibi, n., & pater, j. (2016, december 20). ethical use of visual social media content in research publications. ahrecs. https://ahrecs.com/ethical-usevisual-social-media-content-research-publications/ king, s. a. (1996). researching internet communities: proposed ethical guidelines for the reporting of results. the information society, 12(2). https://doi.org/10.1080/713856145 markham, a. (2012). fabrication as ethical practice: qualitative inquiry in ambiguous internet contexts. information, communication & society, 15(3). https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2011.641993 ohm, p. (2010). broken promises of privacy: responding to the surprising failure of anonymization. ucla law review, 58(2). https://www.uclalawreview.org/brokenpromises-of-privacy-responding-to-the-surprising-failure-of-anonymization-2/ shklovski, i., & vertesi, j. (2013, april 27). ‘ungoogling’ publications: the ethics and problems of anonymization. proceedings of chi 2013. https://pure.itu.dk/portal/files/80190129/p2169_shklovski.pdf singer, n. (2015, february 14). love in the time of twitter. the new york times. https://web.archive.org/web/20190412053116/https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/13 /love-in-the-times-of-twitter/ zimmer, m. (2010). ‘but the data is already public’: on the ethics of research in facebook. ethics and information technology, 12(4). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676010-9227-5 addressing ethics in reddit research: a systematic review casey fiesler university of colorado boulder, usa michael zimmer marquette university, usa nicholas proferes arizona state university, usa sarah gilbert university of maryland, usa naiyan jones uk office for national statistics, united kingdom introduction reddit is one of the most prominent social platforms on the web with over 52 million daily active users (reddit.com, 2020) and over 138,000 active topical “subreddit” communities (marotti, 2018). reddit has also been home to a number of prominent and controversial events, such as attempts to identify the boston-city bombing terrorists (starbird et al., 2014); a massive leak of hacked celebrity photos (marwick, 2017); the coordinated attempt to take on short-sellers of the gamestop stock (roose, 2021); as well as sometimes racist (mittos et al., 2020), sexist (farrell et al., 2019), and vitriolic political discourse (mills, 2018). because of its prominence, influence, and history of controversy, it has also become a valuable data source for internet researchers. while twitter has been described as the “model organism” (tufecki, 2014) for academic study because its content is predominantly publicly visible and has provided useful apis for researchers, reddit has increasingly been turned to by researchers seeking to gain access to streams of textual data. for example, reddit’s topic-specific subreddit structure provides a focused means of locating relevant research data, and an expansive dataset of conversations, discussions, and debates to mine and analyze. however, working with reddit data also presents novel ethical complications for internet researchers. for example, reddit also offers a large degree of anonymity, and one-time use accounts are not uncommon. because users may feel as though they can speak fairly freely on reddit as a result of relatively permissive content policies and the anonymity afforded, researchers may be collecting–and perhaps quoting–sensitive content that users might not have contemplated would be collected for analysis outside of the norms built around a particular subreddit community. while discussions on reddit are primarily public in that anyone, with or without a reddit account, can view the content (with the exception of private subreddits), questions around the ethics of using public social media data have led researchers to question how users’ feel about their data being used for research (fiesler and proferes, 2018). building from zimmer and proferes (2004) review of twitter studies, we engaged in a systematic overview of 727 research studies that used reddit data published between 2010 and mid-2020. this analysis offers insights into the subreddits and topics frequently studied, the kinds of analysis and methods researchers are engaging in, and most importantly, the kinds of ethical considerations that emerge when researching reddit. methodology we built our corpus of reddit studies by systematically searching the acm, ebscohost, econlit, plos one, jstor, scopus, and web of science databases for manuscripts that have the term “reddit” in their title, abstract, or keywords. after removing duplicates, inaccessible materials, materials not written in english, dissertations, and books (but not book chapters), we were left with a total corpus of 727 manuscripts. we coded each manuscript for variables including bibliographic data, author information, and study data, such as the type and amount of reddit data used, which subreddits were studied, and the methodologies utilized. we also coded ethics-related elements, such as whether the manuscript included direct quotes from reddit content or usernames, whether any mention was made regarding obtaining consent to use reddit content, or whether an institutional ethical review board was mentioned. summary of findings germaine to this paper, 832 unique subreddits were named as data sources (1,773 times). politics and news discussion, such as r/politics, r/worldnews, and r/the_donald (a community that was banned by reddit in 2020 for inciting harassment) were prominent data sources; as were subreddits focusing on sensitive content and vulnerable populations–such as r/depression, r/suicidewatch, r/bipolarreddit, and r/opiates. we looked at each manuscript for mentions of an irb or similar ethical review process (even if the mention was “we did not seek irb review”), finding 101 studies (13.9%) mentioned the term “irb” or e.g. “ethics review” and 626 (86.1%) did not. of the 101, 23 of the papers used interviews or surveys, methods more regularly requiring ethics-body approval. the vast majority of the remaining 78 papers mentioned ethics review while noting an “exempt” review status (e.g., “was exempt from ethics approval” or “approved under exempt review”). however, it is impossible to know in many cases whether “exempt” was an official designation given by a review board or whether the authors made this judgment themselves. we further examined each manuscript for whether or not the authors indicated they had some kind of consent-seeking process. many (though not all) ethics-review bodies would likely view most reddit data as “public” and therefore not require researchers to seek consent (see vitak et al., 2017). however, ethics bodies would be likely to require consent for surveys, interviews, or the use of data from closed communities. further, some researchers may choose to seek consent for the collection of public data out of their own concern outside of any formal requirement, particularly if they seek to build connections with a community. forty-four of the papers (6.1%) mention seeking consent as part of their data collection process, while 683 (96.0%) did not. thirty-one of those mentioning consent utilized user surveys or interview methodologies, leaving 11 which sought consent for other reasons. we also analyzed the corpus to determine whether or not researchers used specific and identifiable reddit usernames or direct quotes from reddit users in their publications. sixty-eight manuscripts (9.4%) explicitly mentioned identifiable reddit usernames in their paper and 659 (90.7%) did not. two hundred and seven papers (28.5%) used direct quotes from users as part of their publications, 18 papers used paraphrased quotes, noting they were paraphrased (2.5%) and 502 (69.1%) did not include direct quotes. further analyses and implications for future research relying on reddit data will be provided in the conference presentation. references farrell, t., fernandez, m., novotny, j., & alani, h. (2019). exploring misogyny across the manosphere in reddit. proceedings of the 10th acm conference on web science, 87–96. fiesler, c., & proferes, n. (2018). “participant” perceptions of twitter research ethics. social media + society, 4(1). marotti, a. (2018). reddit to open chicago office as part of advertising push. chicagotribune.com. https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-reddit-chicagooffice-20180418-story .html marwick, a. e. (2017). scandal or sex crime? gendered privacy and the celebrity nude photo leaks. ethics and information technology, 19(3), 177–191. mills, r. a. (2018). pop-up political advocacy communities on reddit.com: sandersforpresident and the donald. ai & society, 33(1), 39–54 reddit.com. (2020). reddit’s 2020 year in review. reddit.com official blog. https://redditblog.com/2020/12/08/reddits-2020-year-in-review/ roose, k. (2021, january 28). the gamestop reckoning was a long time coming. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/28/technology/gamestopstock.html starbird, k., maddock, j., orand, m., achterman, p., & mason, r. m. (2014). rumors, false flags, and digital vigilantes: misinformation on twitter after the 2013 boston marathon bombing. iconference 2014 proceedings. tufekci, z. (2014). big questions for social media big data: representativeness, validity and other methodological pitfalls. proceedings of the international aaai conference on web and social media, 8(1). zimmer, m., & proferes, n. j. (2014). a topology of twitter research: disciplines, methods, and ethics. aslib journal of information management, 66(3), 250–261 the “original sin” of amazon mechanical turk for academic research huichan xia peking university, china introduction amazon mechanical turk (mturk) has been popular among academic scholars to recruit participants and collect research data. since its inception, many scholars have praised mturk’s validity and data quality as comparable and even superior to the other conventional recruitment venues such as professional panels and student samples (buhrmester et al., 2011; kees et al., 2017; jensen-doss et al., 2021). however, in this article, i want to present my critique of leveraging mturk for academic research purposes. my critique focuses on mturk’s “original sin” in three fundamental problems on its born and development, which engendered various ethical flaws for academic research on this platform. more broadly, i propose that academia should be more cautious about the ethics of crowd work-based research. mturk’s fundamental problem #1: “human-as-a-service” jeff bezos’s position of “human-as-a-service” on mturk has a lasting ethical impact on academic research. “human-as-a-service” might sound exciting for business but is ethically problematic to the academic standard. scholars have critiqued this slogan as a commodification of crowd workers (aloisi, 2015; bergvall-kåreborn & howcroft, 2014) and the origin of exploitation in crowd work (irani & silberman, 2013; silberman et al., 2018). i argue that it is also an inherent ethical taint on mturk for academic research. first, it is quite a dehumanization claim of mturk. positioning mturk workers as a “service” implicates that they are merely means to serve and satisfy requesters’ ends, such as reducing data collection costs and expediting research progress. mturk workers’ ends, no less than their self-fulfillment and welfare, are ignored by amazon and might be dismissed by requesters as well. from a kantian perspective, it is morally wrong to treat some persons, i.e., mturk workers, as means to fulfill others’, i.e., requesters’ ends. second, “human-as-a-service” induces ethical concerns about mturk workers’ voluntary research participation and autonomy since it has imposed unbalanced power dynamics between mturk workers and requesters, suggesting as if mturk workers were servants and requesters were masters. under such power dynamics, mturk workers’ voluntary and autonomous decision-making to participate in an academic research task are at stake because to provide a good service and receive compensation, presumably servants would cater for requesters’ preference and calculate compensation fairness. thus, less likely, they would focus or ponder whether their participation decision is voluntary or whether they may have exhibited any social desirability biases. mturk’s fundamental problem #2: the confusion of terminology amazon implicates that mturk “workers” are in a sort of employment relationship and are wage earners, but it also describes mturk workers as “independent contractors,” which confuses mturk workers’ position and identity. independent contractors are between employees and research volunteers. if researchers treat mturk workers as doing a job on mturk, they should pay them with a wage standard. however, it would trigger irb’s ethical concern about undue influence on mturk workers. if researchers treat mturk workers as volunteers, they should not pay them a minimum wage because that is not fit for an employment relationship and could also be unduly influential since a minimum wage standard is usually much higher than the average payment rate on mturk. on the other side, if irbs treat mturk workers as “employees,” they would not approve most academic research unless the research is about mturk workers because researchers should not employ research participants. if irbs treat mturk workers as research volunteers, they will discourage or minimize the payment to avoid coercion, but some researchers might worry about exploitation. these intertwined ethical issues largely stem from amazon’s confusion of terminology. meanwhile, although academic researchers constitute a large portion of requesters (hitlin, 2016), amazon describes mturk as a “marketplace” and never elevates academic requesters’ status on par with their business counterparts. hence, it is an ethical dilemma that academic researchers and irbs expect to recruit from a pool of research volunteers, but in fact, they are relying on a marketplace purported for business clients. mturk’s fundamental problem #3: the abdication of responsibilities the third fundamental problem of mturk is amazon’s abdication of responsibilities. first, amazon has no mandate to prohibit or penalize fraudulent or intrusive activities. many mturk workers have reported that requesters would blatantly trespass mturk’s policies (xia et al., 2017). mturk earns commission from requesters, not workers, which renders it a natural tendency to lean toward requesters and evade the responsibility to mturk workers’ interests and welfare. second, even though academic researchers have constituted a large portion of requesters on mturk, amazon targets mturk for serving business requesters and has barely made any policy updates for academic researchers. academic requesters are like “undocumented immigrants” in a marketplace competing with business requesters like protected citizens of mturk. finally, mturk requesters do not bear any responsibility on the workers and can accept, pay, or reject mturk workers at their discretion. reversely, mturk workers do not charge much responsibility to ensure their data quality either. amazon creates no screening mechanism to filter good quality data from spam. consequently, mturk, mturk workers, and requesters have loose responsibilities with each other, making their mutual accountability frivolous. thus, various ethical issues could occur either on requesters’ side, e.g., exploitation and arbitrary rejection or on mturk workers’ side, e.g., cheating and fraud. implications for ethics in academic research on mturk some scholars might have neglected the dark sides of mturk for academic research. mturk’s convenient sampling, cheap compensation, and satisfactory data quality on the surface are certainly alluring for administering large-scale surveys and experiments. nonetheless, we must be conscious and alert about the costs of these benefits. as multiple prior studies indicate, mturk workers’ primary motivation is to earn money (e.g., (alkhatib et al., 2017; durward et al., 2016; lee et al., 2014)), and social desirability has been an issue on mturk since its early time (antin & shaw, 2012). thus, beneath the veil of “decent” data quality could be seasoned survey-takers and desperate moneyseekers. also, paying mturk workers with a low compensation may be exploitative but paying them a minimum wage may also be unduly influential. hence, i propose that academic scholars must consider the teleological difference between mturk and academic research. the telos or the ultimate purposes of mturk and academic research are intrinsically different. mturk is not designed for academic requesters but business clients; academic research, on the other hand, aims to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge. when both academic researchers and business requesters publish tasks on mturk, it becomes essentially challenging to distinguish between academic tasks and non-academic tasks or between mturk workers primarily motivated by research and those primarily motivated by financial incentive. academic requesters can never be sure whether their mturk participants are authentic research volunteers, or they check the consent form only for the sake of money. these are the ethical challenges for academic research on mturk since its origin. conclusion it may seem implausible to curl the trend of hailing and harnessing mturk for facilitating academic research. despite it, i find it necessary to remind scholars about some inherent ethical conundrums in mturk for data collection and recruitment. to some extent, prolific's development and popularization may have manifested academia’s concerns about relying on a commercial crowd work platform like mturk. still, the ethical issues in crowd work-based research more broadly deserve further investigation and deliberation. references alkhatib, a., bernstein, m. s., & levi, m. (2017). examining crowd work and gig work through the historical lens of piecework. proceedings of the 2017 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 4599–4616. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025974 aloisi, a. (2015). commoditized workers the rising of on-demand work, a case study research on a set of online platforms and apps. ssrn electronic journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2637485 antin, j., & shaw, a. (2012). social desirability bias and self-reports of motivation: a study of amazon mechanical turk in the us and india. 10. bergvall-kåreborn, b., & howcroft, d. (2014). amazon mechanical turk and the commodification of labour. 12. buhrmester, m., kwang, t., & gosling, s. d. (2011). amazon’s mechanical turk: a new source of inexpensive, yet high-quality, data? perspectives on psychological science, 6(1), 3–5. durward, d., blohm, i., & leimeister, j. m. (2016). is there papa in crowd work?: a literature review on ethical dimensions in crowdsourcing. 2016 intl ieee conferences on ubiquitous intelligence & computing, advanced and trusted computing, scalable computing and communications, cloud and big data computing, internet of people, and smart world congress (uic/atc/scalcom/cbdcom/iop/smartworld), 823–832. https://doi.org/10.1109/uic-atc-scalcom-cbdcom-iop-smartworld.2016.0131 hitlin, p. (2016). research in the crowdsourcing age, a case study (p. 37). pew research center. available at: http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/07/11/research-in-thecrowdsourcing-age-a-case-study/ irani, l. c., & silberman, m. s. (2013). turkopticon: interrupting worker invisibility in amazon mechanical turk. proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems chi ’13, 611. https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2470742 jensen-doss, a., patel, z. s., casline, e., mora, v. a., & timpano, k. r. (2021). using mechanical turk to study parents and children: an examination of data quality and representati. journal of clinical child & adolescent psychology, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/15374416.2020.1815205 kees, j., berry, c., burton, s., & sheehan, k. (2017). an analysis of data quality: professional panels, student subject pools, and amazon’s mechanical turk. journal of advertising, 46(1), 141–155. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2016.1269304 lee, k., webb, s., & ge, h. (2014). the dark side of micro-task marketplaces: characterizing fiverr and automatically detecting crowdturfing. arxiv:1406.0574 [physics]. http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.0574 silberman, m. s., tomlinson, b., laplante, r., ross, j., irani, l., & zaldivar, a. (2018). responsible research with crowds: pay crowdworkers at least minimum wage. communications of the acm, 61(3), 39–41. https://doi.org/10.1145/3180492 xia, h., wang, y., huang, y., & shah, a. (2017). “our privacy needs to be protected at all costs”: crowd workers’ privacy experiences on amazon mechanical turk. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 1(cscw), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3134748 ethical approaches to closed messaging research: considerations for democratic contexts connie moon sehat hacks/hackers tarunima prabhakar tattle aleksei kaminski independent researcher “closed” messaging apps such as whatsapp, signal and telegram have grown in reach and adoption in recent years and have transformed elections-related communications. however, understanding their impact upon larger public discussion poses a conundrum for researchers. on the one hand, widely accessible conversations of public importance exist in these spaces, but on the other, message encryption challenges existing professional ethics of access and collection. in order to study what messages are flowing through these channels, analysts and researchers must join potentially private chat groups. this raises the question: what considerations should be taken into account when conducting research into closed messaging spaces within democratic contexts, in which the individual right to privacy also prevails? thinking about the technical points spotlights the larger conundrum: in addition to the designs for privacy, closed messaging spaces have public elements as well. closed messaging technologies are in fact designed to be social — they allow their users to open these spaces up to more public visibility and impact. acknowledging that the line between public and private conversation within these applications is explicitly blurred, some less than others, is critical to thinking through the problem. to better understand the decisions that researchers face, this paper presents research practices taking place within these applications. it focuses on projects with electionrelated themes that parse the content of messages. two investigating groups are of interest: public-interest organizations focused on human rights, democratic elections, and fact-checking that seek real-time or more immediate impact based upon their findings, and academics who want to provide longer-term, systematic analysis of the political dynamics created by these closed conversations. sometimes these groups work in collaboration with each other as well as with other types of researchers, such as those based at technology companies. when it comes to studies involving the systematic collection of message data, there are at least four models of research practice we have observed: • baseline model: smaller investigations under informed consent • model 1: voluntary contributions (e.g., tiplines) • model 2: joining groups through invitation with public/publicized purpose • model 3: joining “public” groups without disclosing research intent • model 4: joining “public” groups while disclosing research intent first, we share background about the reach of closed messaging applications and the motivation for these research efforts. based on the models, the second half of the paper offers a set of questions to help clarify the ethical tensions based on public parameters, participant safety, and researcher obligations: • parameters: when exactly is a closed message chat “public”? • parameters: who does the data belong to? • security: what is the plan for storing closed messaging data in a secure fashion? • security: how might the research project affect group members and their conversations? • obligations: what are the obligations for research disclosure and informed consent? • obligations: when should researchers inform or report back to the groups involved? from descriptions of research studies about closed messaging spaces we covered, there is evidence that many investigators try to follow ethical practices established by their various professional communities. they do this for example by taking steps to protect the identities of chat participants. they also include considerations of possible and future harm upon those observed. in recent years, expectations and requirements related to personal data collection and online storage have risen overall (e.g. the common rule in the united states), making some obligations clearer for researchers across the board. the challenge, however, for closed messaging is that both the technology and its ethics are still emerging. as the technology continues to evolve, we offer these reflections upon current practices to contribute to the continued development of ethical research approaches in messaging spaces. select references barbosa, sérgio, and stefania milan. “do not harm in private chat apps: ethical issues for research on and with whatsapp.” westminster papers in communication and culture 14, no. 1 (august 14, 2019): 49–65. https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.313. bengani, priyanjana. “india had its first ‘whatsapp election.’ we have a million messages from it.” columbia journalism review, october 16, 2019. https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/india-whatsapp-analysis-election-security.php. brown, barry, alexandra weilenmann, donald mcmillan, and airi lampinen. “five provocations for ethical hci research.” in proceedings of the 2016 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 852–63. new york, ny, usa: association for computing machinery, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858313. dotto, carlotta, rory smith, and claire wardle. “closed groups, messaging apps, and online ads.” first draft, november 2019. https://firstdraftnews.org/wpcontent/uploads/2019/11/messaging_apps_digital_aw-1.pdf?x80491. european commission and directorate general for research. ethics for researchers: facilitating research excellence in fp7. luxembourg: publications office, 2013. “federal policy for the protection of human subjects.” federal register (united states), rules and regulations, 82, no. 12 (january 19, 2017): 7149-. fiesler, casey, and nicholas proferes. “‘participant’ perceptions of twitter research ethics.” social media + society 4, no. 1 (january 1, 2018): 2056305118763366. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118763366. frankel, mark. “the promises and pitfalls of reporting within chat apps and other semi-open platforms: a journalist’s guide.” nieman lab, july 10, 2018. https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/a-journalists-guide-to-the-promises-and-pitfalls-ofreporting-within-open-and-closed-and-semi-open-platforms/. garimella, kiran, and gareth tyson. “whatsapp, doc? a first look at whatsapp public group data.” in proceedings of the twelfth international aaai conference on web and social media. stanford, ca: the aaai press, 2018. https://aaai.org/library/icwsm/icwsm18contents.php. gibson, kerry. “bridging the digital divide: reflections on using whatsapp instant messenger interviews in youth research.” qualitative research in psychology, april 17, 2020, 1– 21. https://doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2020.1751902. gruzd, anatoliy, jenna jacobsen, and elisabeth dubois. “challenges and opportunities of doing research with social media data.” social media data stewardship (blog). accessed december 3, 2020. https://socialmediadata.org/2016/04/16/challenges-andopportunities-of-doing-research-with-social-media-data/. hiq labs, inc. v. linkedin corporation, no. 17–16783 (9th cir. september 9, 2019). kaufmann, katja, and corinna peil. “the mobile instant messaging interview (mimi): using whatsapp to enhance self-reporting and explore media usage in situ.” mobile media & communication 8, no. 2 (may 1, 2020): 229–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/2050157919852392. mac, ryan, and pranav dixit. “the tip line whatsapp launched to combat fake news isn’t actually going to combat fake news.” buzzfeed news, april 3, 2019. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/whatsapp-fake-news-tip-line-indianelection-not-helpline. mont’alverne, camila, and isabele mitozo. “muito além da mamadeira erótica: as notícias compartilhadas nas redes de apoio a presidenciáveis em grupos de whatsapp, nas eleições brasileiras de 2018.” in compolítica8 25 (2019). http://ctpol.unb.br/compolitica2019/gt4/gt4_montalverne_mitozo.pdf. moreno, andrés, philip garrison, and karthik bhat. “whatsapp for monitoring and response during critical events: aggie in the ghana 2016 election.” in proceedings of the 14th iscram conference, 11. albi, france, 2017. mpofu, shepherd, and shanade bianca barnabas. “citizen journalism and moral panics: a consideration of ethics in the 2015 south african xenophobic attacks.” african journalism studies 37, no. 4 (november 2016): 115–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/23743670.2016.1256053. narayanan, vidya, bence kollanyi, ruchi hajela, ankita barthwal, nahema marchal, and philip n. howard. “news and information over facebook and whatsapp during the indian election campaign.” computational propaganda project data memo. oxford internet institute, may 13, 2019. https://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/india-election-memo/ (now at https://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/posts/news-and-information-over-facebook-andwhatsapp-during-the-indian-election-campaign/). rennó, raquel. “whatsapp: the widespread use of whatsapp in political campaigning in the global south (updated version).” our data our selves (tactical tech) (blog), november 13, 2018. https://ourdataourselves.tacticaltech.org/posts/whatsapp/. sandvig v. barr, no. 16–1368 (d.d.c. march 27, 2020). u.s. department of health and human services. federal policy for the protection of human subjects ('common rule’) (2018). https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-andpolicy/regulations/common-rule/index.html. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): park, k., & culloty, e. (2022, november). beyond performative transparency: lessons learned from the eu code of practice on disinformation. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. beyond performative transparency: lessons learned from the eu code of practice on disinformation kirsty park dublin city university eileen culloty dublin city university in june 2020, the european commission requested that signatories to the eu code of practice on disinformation should provide “monthly reports on their policies and actions to address covid-19 related disinformation” (european commission, 2020). six signatories (google, meta, microsoft, mozilla, tiktok and twitter) took part in this monitoring programme. while the european commission asked signatories to address the specific topics, the decision of how to structure the reports and what level of detail to include was left up to the platforms themselves, leading to a high level of variation between the nature of each signatory’s reports. we conducted an in-depth analysis of the 47 reports submitted between august 2020 and april 2021 and coded each selfreported action (1114 in total) to assess their quality and relevance. overall, we found that while the transparency reports were designed to provide clear, meaningful data, in reality the process of assessing each platforms disinformation actions was labour intensive and difficult to assess due to instances of repetition, vague descriptions and even reporting of actions which were irrelevant to covid-19 or disinformation. while data was requested at both an eu and member state level, the application region was unclear or unstated for 40 percent of actions and 68 percent did not report any outcomes, metrics or results. the lack of granular data showed a reluctance to share relevant metrics that would highlight both the scale of the problem and the impact of actions taken to address disinformation. additionally, the platform actions were often reported through a public relations lens using a promotional tone, with some actions copied directly from blog posts or press releases. the eu code has attempted to approach the issue of disinformation through a selfregulatory model, but this has seen limited success. occupying the grey area of legal but “harmful” content, disinformation is difficult to define, poorly understood, always evolving, and entangled in the fundamental right to freedom of expression. selfregulatory mechanisms to increase the accountability of digital platforms, such as the eu code, have repeatedly failed to address these core issues. the study of disinformation is hampered by a lack of access to meaningful data and while code signatories have committed to providing data for research, so far the quality of data provision has been extremely poor. the findings from our analysis are consistent with the findings from previous monitoring reports about the code which have concluded that self-regulation is not sufficient and that there is a need for independent verification of signatory claims, clear reporting standards such as the use of kpis and greater access to data for researchers (erga, 2020; european commission et al., 2020). the lessons learned from the code so far are that while platforms may express that they are meeting their commitments as signatories, the quality of their efforts does not always match expectations. moreover, there is little evidence to suggest that the co-regulatory framework envisaged by the eu’s digital services act will improve this situation as promises around transparency and access to data will still be dependent upon platform co-operation, leading to the danger of “accountability theatre” as opposed to true accountability (douek, 2022). in rethinking regulation, we argue that the way in which we understand the role that social media platforms play in both the collection of data and the social outcomes that result from these data extraction processes needs to be questioned. data colonialism contends that digital platforms translate the social into data that can be mined as capital, and in doing so they reshape our social relations (couldry and mejias, 2019b), as evidenced by the concept of the ‘platform society’(van dijck et al., 2018). when it comes to disinformation, this introduces a certain level of culpability, as while platforms can claim there are limits to the extent they can verify or monitor all information posted by users, incentives to post disinformation, such as making a profit through gaining an audience, or the motivation to scroll a newsfeed to consume news, exist because of the affordances and design that a platform has encouraged as part of its data extraction efforts. as we have found in our own analysis, the performance of corporate responsibility often clouds the quality of transparency reports. this is particularly true for researcher access to data, when such access may uncover issues which harm a platform’s public image (roose, 2021). however, the idea that platforms can or should control access to relevant data based on their corporate interests is rooted in a belief that user data itself is a “replenishable, inexhaustible, owner-less resource” or a raw material (couldry and mejias, 2019a) and that platforms do the work of extracting, processing and profiting from that which is freely available. a critical perspective on this, calls for truly transparent access to data based on the idea that what platforms hold as property is based on a “commercially motivated form of extraction” rather than a “naturally occurring form of social knowledge” (couldry and mejias, 2019b). as evelyn douek (2022) has argued, there is a need for a “second wave of regulatory thinking” that moves beyond ambiguous platform policies, vague definitions of harm and transparency reports which offer little insight. we argue that european debates about regulating online disinformation need to be set against a broader perspective on regulating the digital environment as a public infrastructure. as busch (2021) writes, the pandemic has revealed the extent to which certain platforms act as systemic infrastructures in areas such as education, healthcare and communication, concluding that regulation of platforms should move towards a public infrastructure based regulation in which platforms are obligated to act in the public interest. we believe that policymakers can achieve better civic and democratic outcomes by focusing not on a minority of large platforms and the content they host but on regulating the digital environment as a public infrastructure through, for example, robust competition, data portability, and interoperability rules. such actions have the potential to break the dominance of big tech while incentivising better and new services for citizens. references busch, c., 2021. regulation of digital platforms as infrastructures for services of general interest. wiso-diskurs. couldry, n., mejias, u.a., 2019a. making data colonialism liveable: how might data’s social order be regulated? internet policy rev. 8. https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.2.1411 couldry, n., mejias, u.a., 2019b. data colonialism: rethinking big data’s relation to the contemporary subject. telev. new media 20, 336–349. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476418796632 douek, e., 2022. second wave content moderation institutional design: from rights to regulatory thinking. ssrn electron. j. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4005326 erga, 2020. erga report on disinformation: asessment of the implementation of the code of practice. european commission, 2020. joint communication to the european parliament, the european council, the council, the european economic and social committee and the committee of the regions tackling covid-19 disinformation getting the facts right. european commission, directorate general for communications networks, content and technology., vva., eu disinfolab., 2020. study for the assessment of the implementation of the code of practice on disinformation: final report. publications office, lu. roose, k., 2021. inside facebook’s data wars. n. y. times. van dijck, j., poell, t., de waal, m., 2018. the platform society. oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190889760.001.0001 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): burns, r., mouton, m. (2023, october). a river of data runs through it: examining urban circulations in the digital age. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. a river of data runs through it: examining urban circulations in the digital age ryan burns university of calgary morgan mouton institut national de la recherche scientifique introduction: urbanizing internet studies in the age of “smart cities”, urban data centers, and agglomerated technology sector capital in cities, we contend that there is a deepening need for dialogue between (digital) urbanists and internet studies scholarship. specifically, we want to open space to think about flows, circulations, and movement within urban contexts. contemporary cities are marked by concentrated natural, human, and digital resources that have preoccupied scholarship of the anthropocene, urban political ecology, smart cities, and digital labor. however, the means by which these resources accumulate, organize, and flow in and through cities remains underexplored in internet studies research, a point recently made about the adjacent field science & technology studies (sts) by coutard and florentin (2022) and by smith and martin (2021). as data, infrastructures, apps, capital, and natural phenomena concentrate in cities, and are instantiated to create and constrain flows and circulations, we contend that internet studies can play a key role in analyzing and understanding these new socio-technical entanglements. here, we want to bring urban political ecology (upe) to bear upon internet studies, to elaborate on these mutual imbrications. in short, upe asks how society and nature are co-produced, and it does so through an analysis of the distribution of resources, and an attention to power balance in urban environments (heynen et al 2005; keil 2003). importantly, upe conceives of the city not as unnatural or artificial, but as the construction of particular forms of natures and environmental relations. drawing on nost & goldstein’s (2022) notion of data infrastructures and halpern & mitchell’s (2023) concept of surplus data, we unpack how data shape urban-environmental governance and ultimately transform people and nature. digital urban infrastructure, understood broadly, has long been conceptualized as a vessel that enables and (re)directs flows of capital, matter, energy, or living organisms like humans and vegetation (amin & thrift 2002; bowker & star 2000; brown 2010; hughes 1983). here, we bridge these two areas to derive deeper insights into how digital infrastructures create and control flows in cities. among our objectives is to hint at what an urbanized internet studies could look like. materialism in digital urban natures this reflection on the inscription of digital technologies in urban environments builds upon internet studies’ acknowledgement of the materiality of data (nost & goldstein, 2022), as exemplified by the extraction of minerals required to build digital devices or in the siting of data centers (arboleda, 2020; graham, 2016). urban scholars have followed suit and extended these discussions, as they examined the material infrastructure that subtends the circulation of data, and questioned the conditions for its in/visibility (furlong, 2021). they also have paid particular attention to the socioenvironmental context from which these infrastructures arise, and highlighted the political tensions that they generate locally (diguet and lopez, 2020). there is a second side to the materiality of data, however: instead of considering their “footprint,” one can also focus on their consequences for the socio-material (re)organization of the environment. datafication of urban life and urban phenomena is indeed profoundly impacting the organization, exploitation, and circulation of natural, social, economic, and political resources. it becomes a rationale and logic guiding urbanization and new forms of data colonialism (clark, 2020; dowling et al, 2021; mouton and burns, 2021), and emerges as a unique driver for an array of circulations, movement, flows, and streams. more specifically, streams of data make the circulations visible and governable (moere and hill, 2012; van dijk, 2014). by way of example, the datafication of urban services (e.g., energy, transportation, water, and waste) allows for real-time, fine-grained identification, quantification, and spatialization of all sorts of flows running across urban space (kitchin, 2014), a key idea behind smart city discourses that promise more control over urban space, urban metabolism, and streams of privately-held revenue. as many have noted, the “optimized” flows of urban phenomena is richly interwoven with politics, values, and epistemologies (powell 2021; sadowski 2020). in other words, digital technologies underwrite the urban, and the urban underwrites digital technologies. overall, we argue that reframing urban circulations in the digital age can help us rethink ways to “urbanize” internet studies and related fields as we explore how data transform urban materialities. methodological considerations as we focus on how digital technologies transform the coproduction of society and the environment, we follow a “poststructuralist turn” that upe has taken over the past few years (cornea, zimmer & véron, 2017a; lawhon, ernstson, & silver, 2014). in this, we are not only concerned with macro analyses of how major actors (e.g., platforms) intervene in the reshaping of urban environments, but we also draw attention to more diffuse practices of everyday city-making. practically, this approach entails considering the transformation and circulation of resources — data being a prime object of interest here — and retracing their “metabolic pathways” (desvaux, forthcoming) to understand how they change urban natures. in short, we advocate for a closer examination of the micropolitics at work in city-making, which invites new sets of methodological tools to be developed, that are ethnographic in nature (cornea, zimmer & véron, 2017b). against this backdrop, upe can benefit from better methodological integration with internet studies. in particular, digital ethnography can offer invaluable insights, as we consider different aspects of data infrastructure, from databases (burns & wark, 2019) to algorithms (seaver, 2017) and virtual spaces (hine, 2017), and as we analyze how this infrastructure is established, operated and maintained (castagnino, 2016; denis, 2018; hogan 2015). by turning our attention to these digital artifacts, we can get a better understanding of the social reality they are embedded in, and of the social meaning they produce. as each of the elements composing data infrastructure is examined, the processes underlying the creation, curation and circulation of data can be explored and analyzed — and, ultimately, repoliticized. conclusion in conclusion, we advocate for further “urbanizing” internet studies. while the dialogue between related fields like sts and urban studies is small but growing (coutard and guy, 2007; hommels, 2020; karvonen, 2020), scholars have pointed out the need for a better frame for thinking about the urban, and this conversation has not developed to the same degree in internet studies. here, we have advanced this goal by focusing in particular on ecological and environmental dimensions that tie digital technologies to urban spaces. along the same lines, here we attend to the ontological “nature” of digital technologies by focusing on streams of data, and flows of matter, energy, and capital. in so doing, we draw attention to the materiality of digital technologies and their tendency to move, concentrate, frame, and generate resources. references amin, a. and n. thrift. 2002. cities: reimagining the urban. blackwell publishing. arboleda, m. 2020. planetary mine: territories of extraction under late capitalism. verso books. bowker, g. c. and s.l. star. 2000. sorting things out: classification and its consequences. the mit press. brown, h. 2010. infrastructural ecologies. places journal. https://doi.org/10.22269/101025. burns, r. and g. wark. 2020. where’s the database in digital ethnography? exploring database ethnography for open data research. qualitative research 20(5): 598–616. castagnino, f. 2016. surveiller par les bases de données: construction et gestion des faits de sécurité et de sûreté dans le milieu ferroviaire. sociologie du travail 58: 273295. clark, j. 2020. uneven innovation : the work of smart cities. columbia university press. cornea, n., r. véron, and a. zimmer. 2017a. clean city politics: an urban political ecology of solid waste in west bengal, india. environment and planning a 49(4): 728744. cornea, n., r. véron, and a. zimmer. 2017b. everyday governance and urban environments: towards a more interdisciplinary urban political ecology. geography compass 11(4):1-12. coutard, o. and d. florentin. 2022. resource ecologies, urban metabolisms, and the provision of essential services. journal of urban technology 29(1): 49-58. coutard, o. and s. guy. 2007. sts and the city: politics and practices of hope. science, technology and human values 32: 713-34. denis, j. 2018. le travail invisible des données. éléments pour une sociologie des infrastructures scripturales. paris: presses des mines. desvaux, p. forthcoming. coding urban metabolism: infrastructuring waste flows in cairo (egypt). in: coutard, o. & florentin, d. (eds.) handbook of infrastructures and cities. edward elgar. diguet, c. and f. lopez. 2020. digital territories and energy transition: the limits to growth. contesti. città, territori, progetti 1: 108-125. dowling, r., p. mcguirk, s. maalsen, and j. sadowski. 2021. how smart cities are made: a priori, ad hoc and post hoc drivers of smart city implementation in sydney, australia. urban studies 58(16): 3299–3315. furlong, k. 2021. geographies of infrastructure ii: concrete, cloud and layered (in) visibilities. progress in human geography 45(1): 190-8. graham, s. 2016. vertical: the city from satellites to bunkers. brooklyn: verso books. halpern, o. and r. mitchell. 2023. the smartness mandate. mit press. heynen, n., m. kaika, and e. swyngedouw. 2005. urban political ecology: politicizing the production of urban natures. in in the nature of cities. routledge. hine, c. 2017. from virtual ethnography to the embedded, embodied, everyday internet. the routledge companion to digital ethnography. routledge. hogan, m. 2015. data flows and water woes: the utah data center. big data & society 2(2):1-12. hommels, a. 2020. sts and the city: techno-politics, obduracy and globalisation. science as culture 29(3): 410-416. hughes, thomas p. 1983. networks of power: electrification in western society, 18801930. baltimore: johns hopkins university press. karvonen, a. 2020. urban techno-politics: knowing, governing, and imagining the city. science as culture 29(3): 417-424. keil, r. 2003. urban political ecology 1. urban geography 24(8): 723-738. kitchin, r. 2014. the real-time city? big data and smart urbanism. geojournal 79(1): 1–14. lawhon, m., h. ernstson, and j. silver. 2014. provincializing urban political ecology: towards a situated upe through african urbanism. antipode 46(2): 497-516. moere, a.v., and d. hill. 2012. designing for the situated and public visualization of urban data. journal of urban technology 19(2): 25-46. mouton, m., & burns, r. (2021). (digital) neo-colonialism in the smart city. regional studies, 55(12), 1890-1901. nost, e. and j.e. goldstein. 2022. a political ecology of data. environment and planning e: nature and space 5(1): 3–17. powell, a. 2021. undoing optimization. yale university press. sadowski, j. 2020. too smart: how digital capitalism is extracting data, controlling our lives, and taking over the world. mit press. seaver, n. 2017. algorithms as culture: some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems. big data and society, 4. smith, a. and p.p. martín. 2021. going beyond the smart city? implementing technopolitical platforms for urban democracy in madrid and barcelona. journal of urban technology 28(1-2): 311-330. tzaninis, y., t. mandler, m. kaika and r. keil. 2021. moving urban political ecology beyond the ‘urbanization of nature’. progress in human geography 45(2): 229–252. van dijk, j. 2014. datafication, dataism and dataveillance: big data between scientific paradigm and ideology. surveillance and society 12(2): 197-208. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 technological sovereignty and social justice: exploring the intersection of free software and indigenous knowledge stéphane couture université de montréal sophie toupin concordia university alejandro mayoral-baños york university questions of independence and sovereignty have long been present with regards to the internet, cyberspace, and, more broadly, the digital. in 1996, for instance, john perry barlow published his now well-known “declaration of the independence of cyberspace” (barlow, 1996) which claimed that cyberspace was the “new frontier”, a kind of “far west” over which nation-states should not have power. this ignited a debate on the relevance of governments to regulate cyberspace (lessig, 1999). while less present in academic discourses, some have also noted how this way of seeing cyberspace as the new “electronic frontier” is reiterating a settler-colonial metaphor much present in the american imaginary (eubanks, 1999). twenty-five years after barlow’s declaration of independence, notions like “digital sovereignty”, “data sovereignty” and “technological sovereignty” are increasingly used in public debates. but while the declaration of the independence of cyberspace opposed state intervention, today’s discourses on “sovereignty” are articulated in a symmetrical way, towards the understanding (in academic studies) and calling for (in advocacy work) the power of nation-states to govern their data and their part of the internet, especially in powerful european or/and brics countries (brazil, russia, india, china, south africa budnitsky & jia, 2018; polatin-reuben & wright, 2014). however, as we have noted previously (couture & toupin, 2019), many other meanings have been given to the notion of sovereignty. based on our previous work, we would like to deepen in this presentation two ways in which digital and technological sovereignty departs from a state-oriented perspective. suggested citation (apa): couture, s., toupin. s., & mayoral-baños, a. (2021, october). technological sovereignty and social justice: exploring the intersection of free software and indigenous knowledge. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. first, indigenous scholars and advocates are calling for data sovereignty in continuity with the larger struggle of indigenous peoples to reclaim sovereignty over their land, body, and culture. kukutai and taylor (2016) argue for instance that data (and digital) sovereignty “has been dominated by national governments and multinational corporations” (kukutai and taylor, 2016: 2), and that the voices and rights of indigenous peoples in relation to the “collection, ownership and application of data about their people, lifeways and territories” (kukutai and taylor, 2016: 2) are missing. not only do these claims go beyond the strict reference to the sovereignty of established nationstates, but they also transcend the idea of mere control of data and technologies to emphasize the need for indigenous frameworks to collect and/or create this data. second, social justice activists also put forward the concept of “technological sovereignty” in a way that significantly differs from more dominant policy-oriented and state-centric perspectives, and aligns more with practices of developing digital technologies and infrastructures, using free software, servers, and encryption-based technologies, which have been designed by them and for them (nitot, 2016; haché, 2017). this perspective is quite distinct from the idea of digital sovereignty as promoted by nation-states, as it often emphasizes alternative and community-based technological making. these two perspectives seem to share what can be called an anti-hegemonic perspective on technological sovereignty. while they may reinforce each other, they may also differ on certain perspectives. it is noted for instance that the philosophy of information sharing in free and open-source software might foster the usage and misappropriation of knowledge held by indigenous communities (christen, 2012; gida, 2019; mayoral-baños, 2021). even from the perspective of social justice movements, the sexism prevalent in free software communities (reagle, 2012) may also be a challenge to the true collective autonomy implied by the metaphor of sovereignty. this presentation will explore the notion of “technological sovereignty” through indigenous perspectives as well as those of social movements inspired by free software activism. conceptually, our analysis is based on a constructionist approach that posits that metaphors organize users’ perceptions and contribute to creating new realities (krippendorf 1993; proulx 2007). what is the role of the metaphor of “sovereignty” in reconfiguring indigenous and social justice activism, in relation to the internet? what are the commonalities between these perspectives? how are they reinforcing or contradicting each other? this analysis will be foremost based on, and prolong a previous study by the authors which identified different discursive trends around sovereignty (anonymous reference). methodologically, our approach is grounded in discourse analysis and reviews of academic and activist literature that has mobilized metaphors of digital sovereignty. we will look at a sample of texts, and try to bring out some of the challenges of articulating them. in doing so, we intend to contribute to the theme of this year’s aoir conference – independence – by looking at the critical discourses of indigenous people and social activists through the lens of the metaphor of digital (technological/data) sovereignty. references barlow, j. p. (1996, february 8). a declaration of the independence of cyberspace. electronic frontier foundation. https://www.eff.org/fr/cyberspace-independence budnitsky, s., & jia, l. (2018). branding internet sovereignty: digital media and the chinese–russian cyberalliance. european journal of cultural studies, 21(5), 594–613. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549417751151 christen, k. (2012). does information really want to be free? indigenous knowledge systems and the question of openness. international journal of communication, 6, 24. couture, s., & toupin, s. (2019). what does the notion of “sovereignty” mean when referring to the digital? new media & society, 21(10), 2305-2322. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819865984 eubanks, v. (1999, december 19). the mythography of the “new” frontier. media in transition conference. http://web.mit.edu/m-i-t/articles/index_eubanks.html gida. (2019). care principles for indigenous data governance. the global indigenous data alliance. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d3799de845604000199cd24/t/5da9f4479 ecab221ce848fb2/1571419335217/care+principles_one+pagers+final_oct_ 17_2019.pdf haché, a. (2017). technological sovereignty. mouvements, 79(3), 38–48. http://www.cairn-int.info/revue-mouvements-2014-3-p-38.htm krippendorff, k. (1993). major metaphors of communication and some constructivist reflections on their use. cybernetics & human knowing, 2(1): 325. http://www.asc.upenn.edu/usr/krippendorff/metaphor.htm. kukutai, t., & taylor, j. (2016). indigenous data sovereignty: toward an agenda (vol. 38). acton act, australia: anu press.lessig, l. (1999). code: and other laws of cyberspace (1st u.s. edition, 3rd printing edition). basic books. mayoral-baños, a. (2021). tech anishinaabe medicine wheel: decolonial design principles within digital technologies through the development of the indigenous friends platform. unpublished doctoral dissertation. graduate program in communication and culture. york university nitot, t. (2016). numérique: reprendre le contrôle. framasoft. https://framabook.org/docs/nrc/numerique_reprendrelecontrole_ccby_impress.pdf https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819865984 http://www.cairn-int.info/revue-mouvements-2014-3-p-38.htm http://www.cairn-int.info/revue-mouvements-2014-3-p-38.htm https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d3799de845604000199cd24/t/5da9f4479ecab221ce848fb2/1571419335217/care+principles_one+pagers+final_oct_17_2019.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d3799de845604000199cd24/t/5da9f4479ecab221ce848fb2/1571419335217/care+principles_one+pagers+final_oct_17_2019.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d3799de845604000199cd24/t/5da9f4479ecab221ce848fb2/1571419335217/care+principles_one+pagers+final_oct_17_2019.pdf polatin-reuben, d., & wright, j. (2014, july 7). an internet with brics characteristics: data sovereignty and the balkanisation of the internet. workshop on free and open communications on the internet, foci 14. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/foci14/foci14-polatin-reuben.pdf proulx, s. (2007). interroger la métaphore d’une société de l’information: horizon et limites d’une utopie. communication et langages, 152:107-124. reagle, j. (2012). “free as in sexist?” free culture and the gender gap. first monday, 18(1). http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4291 https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/foci14/foci14-polatin-reuben.pdf aoir2020 subversive imagination.pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 28-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): saariketo, m. (2020, october 27–31). subversive imagination and possibilities of critical agency in the landscapes of code. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. subversive imagination and possibilities of critical agency in the landscapes of code? minna saariketo tampere university this paper reflects the intertwinements of ‘agency’, ‘infrastructuration’, and ‘imagination’ in our increasingly networked technological everyday life. the paper builds on and elaborates further the key finding from a research project called imaginaries of agency in the landscapes of code which navigates at the interfaces of critical media studies, domestication theory, science and technology studies, as well as critical software and algorithm studies. the conceptualization of agency builds on the concept ‘critical agency’ by sociologist paola rebughini, stressing how critical agency is “dissident and innovative, oriented against and beyond what is perceived as unjust, unequal, unacceptable” (rebughini, 2018:3). the paper argues that critical research should make visible alternatives to current modes of technology-related action as well as urgently develop ways to challenge people to creatively (re)imagine the kind of technology they want to live with. the research problematics revolve around the question of how understandings of human agency and the technologically mediated everyday entwine in the ‘landscapes of code’. the focus is on the ways in which imaginations on one’s own agency and the agency of others are constructed and stabilized in the contemporary world. likewise, attention is directed to how societal power structures are produced, reproduced, and possibly challenged in the processes of constructing imaginaries of agency. to study the above mentioned perspectives together, i apply and update critical cultural studies scholar stuart hall’s famous encoding/decoding model in the contemporary media technological context (hall, 1973; 1980). in tune with hall, i suggest that it is important to study how the public imaginaries of agency are constructed, on the one hand, and what kind of imaginaries of agency ‘ordinary people’ hold in their code-based everyday environments, on the other hand. i juxtapose the notion of imaginaries to hall’s idea of ’maps of meaning’, by which he refers to the hegemonically constructed assemblages of meaning and the ways in which they are attached to societal practices. virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 virtual event i connect ‘maps of meaning’ to the questions of softwarization (e.g. manovich, 2013; berry, 2014) and the increasingly networked quality of everyday life, bringing hall’s conception into dialogue with the notion of ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ by sts scholar sheila jasanoff (2015) and the notion of ‘social imaginaries’ by philosopher charles taylor (2004). in the first case study, i examined how agency is defined in administrative-political discourse, while the second case study focused on how – and what kind of – agency is constructed by discursively pre-domesticating a new technological artefact in the media. in both cases, people are interpellated to accept and adopt a particular form of agency. the two latter case studies shift attention to how people experience the softwarization, and what kind of technology-related negotiations take place in their everyday life. the case studies are a story narratological analysis of european union’s strategic plan digital agenda for europe (case i), discourse narratological analysis of news items on google glass from the (country) mainstream media (case ii), an adaptation from hall’s encoding/decoding model (hall, 1973; 1980) to study focus group data on facebook user and non-user negotiations on the architectural power of the platform (case iii), and an application of henri lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis (lefebvre 1992/2004) on interviews of avid social media users on their experiential landscapes of networked daily life, using self-tracking on ict use as a prompt (case iv). image 1 update on hall’s model (1973; 1980) and case studies in relation to it the multidisciplinary, multimethod, and multidata approach employed in the research sheds light on the diversity and complexity of imaginaries of agency. the results of the case studies suggest that administration, technological corporations, and mainstream media persuade people to adopt a form of agency that promotes increased consumption and economic growth. at the same time, the direction of technological development and values that guide the development as well as questions of connectivity and infrastructural conditions disappear from sight. a similar process can be observed in the focus group and interview data when people talk about their relationship to media technology and especially to smart devices and social media. based on the research results, i suggest that there prevails an almost resigned sense of agency that many people share in relation to the conditions of their technologically mediated everyday life. despite sporadic negotiations and dissonances that surface in the data, it seems that people have become accustomed to the idea that they have very little, if any, chances to influence the structures of their networked daily environments. i interpret that the way the research participants positioned themselves in relation to the conditions of their technological everyday settings is an illustration of how people have become schooled to ignore the conditions of the mundane software (thrift & french, 2002: 311). this process is well captured in the idea of ‘infrastructuration’, that is, networked media technology becoming such a self-evident part of daily life that it is often reflected upon only when it breaks (cf. star & ruhleder, 1996; edwards, 2019; ridell, 2019). visions that could challenge or radically alter the sociotechnical forces that currently condition agency remain in the margins. thus, my argument is that the imaginaries of the media technological landscape as ruled by the tech giants contribute actively, though not necessarily in a conscious manner to consolidation of the structures of power. i suggest that future research should concentrate on making visible alternatives to current modes of technology-related action as well as develop concrete ways to challenge people to creatively (re)imagine the kind of technology they want to live with. as an example of what this might mean in practice, the paper will present an experiment with design fiction that is organized together with young people and local newspapers in finland. references berry, david m. (2014). critical theory and the digital. new york, london, new delhi & sydney: bloomsbury. edwards, paul n. (2019). infrastructuration. in m. kornberger et al. (eds.) thinking infrastructures, pp. 355–366. emerald. forlano, laura & mathew, anijo (2014). from design fiction to design friction: speculative and participatory design of values-embedded urban technology. journal of urban technology 21(4), pp. 7–24. hall, stuart (1973). encoding and decoding in the media discourse. stencilled paper no.7, birmingham, cccs. hall, stuart (1980b). encoding/decoding. in stuart hall, dorothy hobson, andrew lowe & paul willis (eds.) culture, media, language. working papers in cultural studies, 1972–79, pp. 128–138. london: hutchinson. jasanoff, sheila (2015). future imperfect: science, technology and the imaginations of modernity. in sheila jasanoff & sang-hyun kim (eds.) dreamscapes of modernity. sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power, pp. 1–33. chicago & london: the university of chicago press. lefebvre, henri (2004) rhythmanalysis. space, time and everyday life. orig. élements de rythmanalyse 1992. london & new york: continuum. manovich, lev (2013) software takes command. new york: bloomsberg. rebughini, paola (2018). critical agency and the future of critique. current sociology 66(1), 3– 19. ridell, seija (2019). mediated bodily routines as infrastructure in the algorhythmic city. media theory, nov 7th. star, susan leigh & ruhleder, karen (1996). steps toward an ecology of infrastructure. information systems research 7(1), 111–134. taylor, charles (2004). modern social imaginaries. durham & london: duke university press. thrift, nigel & french, shaun (2002). the automatic production of space. transactions of the institute of british geographers 27(3), 309–335. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): zimmer, m and chapman, e. (2020, october 28-31). ethical review boards and pervasive data research: gaps and opportunities. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ethical review boards and pervasive data research: gaps and opportunities michael zimmer, phd marquette university edward chapman marquette university introduction the growing prevalence of data-rich networked information technologies—such as social media platforms, smartphones, wearable devices, and the internet of things— brings an increase in the flow of rich, deep, and often identifiable personal information available for researchers. as the computational social science group at microsoft research notes: with an increasing amount of data on every aspect of our daily activities – from what we buy, to where we travel, to who we know, and beyond – we are able to measure human behavior with precision largely thought impossible just a decade ago, creating an unprecedented opportunity to address longstanding questions in the social sciences. (“computational social science,” n.d.) more than just “big data,” the datasets envisioned above are unique in that they represent people’s lives and activities, bridge multiple dimensions of a person’s life, and are often collected, aggregated, exchanged, and mined without them knowing. we call this data “pervasive data,” and the increased scale, scope, speed, and depth of pervasive data available to researchers require that we confront the ethical frameworks that guide such research activities. multiple stakeholders are embroiled in the challenges of research ethics in pervasive data research. for example: researchers struggle with questions of privacy and consent (shilton, 2015; zimmer, 2016); user communities may not even be aware of the widespread harvesting of their data for scientific study (fiesler & proferes, 2018); platforms are increasingly restricting researcher’s access to data over fears of privacy and security (bruns, 2018); and ethical review boards face increasing difficulties in properly considering the complexities of research protocols relying on user data collected online (buchanan & ess, 2009; vitak et al., 2017). the results presented in this paper expand our understanding of how ethical review board members think about pervasive data research.1 it provides insights into how irb professionals make decisions about the use of pervasive data in cases not obviously covered by traditional research ethics guidelines, and points to challenges for irbs when reviewing research protocols relying on pervasive data. methodology a survey instrument was created to assess irb members’ training and attitudes around research protocols that rely on pervasive data. the survey asked respondents for anonymous reporting on whether their irb regularly reviews research that utilizes pervasive data, and the kind of training or resources they rely on to review such submissions, and how confident they are in their assessment of research protocols using pervasive data. respondents were also presented with eleven hypothetical research scenarios that rely on pervasive data [see appendix a]. scenarios varied in the source of the data, the intended inferences to gain from the data, whether the data was publicly-available, whether specific informed consent was sought, the level of identifiability of the data, whether steps were taken to anonymize the data, and whether a platforms terms of service might have been violated to obtain the data. table 1 in appendix b provides a summary of these variables. respondents were asked to predict how their irb would view the hypothetical protocol, and to identify the key factors that contributed to their response. the survey was available online from november 2018 through july 2019, and was restricted to ethical review board members in the u.s. data cleaning–ensuring respondents answered questions for at least one of the eleven scenarios–yielded 77 usable responses, of whom 64 (83%) were located in an irb based at a college or university, with the majority (34, 53%) of these from r1 institutions while 15 (23%) identifying as liberal arts-focused institutions. not all questions were required to be answered, and thus some responses total less than 77. summary of findings general experience with and preparedness for protocols using pervasive data 1 within the united states, university ethical review boards are typically named “institutional review boards”, and thus the acronym irb will be used throughout the remainder of the paper. we asked a series of questions to gauge an irbs exposure to, and preparation for, research protocols that rely on pervasive data. half of respondents (30/59) reported receiving 10 or fewer proposals that used pervasive data annually, while over one-third (20/59) reviewed more than 50 each year. the most common types of pervasive data appearing in research protocols reviewed within the past year are provided in table 2, and the disciplines represented in those protocols are provided in table 3 (see appendix b). in terms of preparedness for reviewing protocols using pervasive data, less than onethird of respondents indicated their institution provided specific training sessions for irb members that addressed the collection and use this kind of data (see table 4, appendix b). the vast majority of respondents (54/59) also indicated their irb lacked any specific checklist, review tool, policy or set of guidelines for reviewing protocols that rely on pervasive data, while eleven indicated such guidelines were under development. only four respondents indicated such materials existed, and when asked if the available materials were “excellent,” “adequate,” or “poor,” each of the four respondents indicated “adequate.” in the absence of specific internal guidelines, respondents relied on various external regulations or guidelines when reviewing protocols utilizing pervasive data (see table 5, appendix b). respondents were also asked to agree or disagree with statements about how wellversed their institutions’ irb members were regarding both the technical and ethical aspects of the collection and use of pervasive data. only 25% of respondents agreed that their irb members are well-versed in the technical aspects of these type of research protocols, while nearly one-half felt they were well-versed in the ethical dimensions (see tables 6 and 7 in appendix b). responses to hypothetical scenarios using pervasive data respondents were presented with eleven hypothetical research scenarios (see appendix a) relying on pervasive data and were asked to consider how their irb would likely review each case. a summary of results is provided in table 8 in appendix b. along with the assessment with each scenario, respondents were asked what the key factors would be in making their determination. a treeplot summary of responses for each scenario are provided in appendix c, highlighting the most common factors indicated in support of each respondent’s determination (the size of each box indicates its relative importance compared to other factors in that determination). discussion our findings suggest that irbs are largely unprepared for addressing the unique challenges that stem from research protocols relying on pervasive data. over two-thirds of the respondents indicated that no specific training was provided for irb members to address the ethics of pervasive data research, and over 90 percent noted the absence any specific set of guidelines for reviewing protocols that rely on pervasive data. further, while nearly half of our respondents felt they were well-versed in the ethical issues related to pervasive data, only 25% felt their irb was had sufficient technical knowledge to understand such protocols. this might present cases of misunderstanding or over-confidence in the ability to adequately assess pervasive data research protocols. our initial analysis of the results from the various hypothetical research scenarios supports this concern. while many of the eleven scenarios presented yielded largely consistent assessments (for example, 75% of respondents indicated scenario 10 would be “expedited”), numerous scenarios revealed large diversity of viewpoints on how an irb would review the protocol. in scenario 1, for example, respondents were spread across the four possible irb review categories, and the treeplot summary reveals how the same factor (“terms of service” in this case) might be listed as a key reason for divergent determinations. other scenarios share this feature, suggesting confusion exists across irb members regarding how to address pervasive data research. further analyses and implications for the research and irb community will be presented. acknowledgements this material is based upon work supported by the national science foundation under grant no. 1947754. references bruns, a. (2018). facebook shuts the gate after the horse has bolted, and hurts real research in the process. internet policy review. buchanan, e., & ess, c. (2009). internet research ethics and the institutional review board: current practices and issues. acm sigcas computers and society, 39(3), 43–49. computational social science. (n.d.). microsoft research. retrieved february 4, 2020, from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/group/computational-socialscience/ fiesler, c., & proferes, n. (2018). “participant” perceptions of twitter research ethics. social media + society, 4(1), 2056305118763366. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118763366 shilton, k. (2015). emerging ethics norms in social media research. workshop on beyond irbs: ethical review processes for big data research. https://bigdata.fpf.org/papers/emerging-ethics-norms-in-social-media-research/ vitak, j., proferes, n., shilton, k., & ashktorab, z. (2017). ethics regulation in social computing research: examining the role of institutional review boards. journal of empirical research on human research ethics, 12(5), 372–382. https://doi.org/10.1177/1556264617725200 zimmer, m. (2016, may 14). okcupid study reveals the perils of big-data science. wired. https://www.wired.com/2016/05/okcupid-study-reveals-perils-big-datascience/ appendix a: scenarios eleven hypothetical scenarios were presented to respondents. for each scenario, respondents were asked the following questions: your institution’s irb would likely consider this proposal to be: • not human subjects research • exempt • expedited • requiring full board review in this case, what would be the key factor(s) in making that determination? (check all that apply) • public vs. private site • public vs. private data • level of analysis (group vs. individual) • whether data is identifiable • whether data gathering violates terms of service • whether data is reused • whether the project combines datasets • method of obtaining data • type of data • whether informed consent was obtained • purpose of the research • impact beyond the participants • other 1. researchers plan to scrape public comments from online newspaper pages to predict election outcomes. they will aggregate their analysis to determine public sentiment. the researchers don’t plan to inform commenters, and they plan to collect potentially-identifiable user names. scraping comments violates the newspaper’s terms of service. 2. researchers plan to scrape public twitter feeds to predict risky drug-use behaviors. they will analyze individual behaviors. the researchers don’t plan to inform twitter users, but they will not collect any identifying information. scraping tweets does not violate twitter’s terms of service. 3. researchers plan to analyze private interaction data from a dating site to understand the sexual behavior of groups. the researchers plan to collect informed consent from dating site users, and they plan to collect identifiable information from participants. asking users for permission to use their data does not violate the dating site’s terms of service. 4. researchers plan to collect newspaper comments by reading articles and cutting and pasting all associated comments into spreadsheets. they will use qualitative analysis to understand individual political views. the researchers don’t plan to inform commenters, and they plan to collect potentially-identifiable user names. cutting and pasting comments does not violate the newspaper’s terms of service. 5. researchers plan to work with a mobile phone company to collect geolocation data to understand group mobility patterns in a city. the researchers will not inform the mobile phone users, and they will not collect any additional identifying information. partnering with the mobile phone company to collect data does not violate the company’s terms of service. 6. researchers plan to combine mental health records provided by a university and public social media activity to predict mental health conditions among students. the researchers plan to collect informed consent, and they plan to collect identifiable information from participants. 7. researchers plan to use a database of public tweets curated and shared by another researcher to study a political event. researchers do not plan to inform the original posters, and researchers have taken measures to de-identify the data. 8. researchers plan to scrape data from an open health forum and combine it with scraped tweets to predict mental health conditions. the researchers will not inform forum users, and they may collect potentially identifying information. scraping data violates neither the health forum nor twitter’s terms of service. 9. researchers plan to scrape profile photos, which are visible to any member of the service, from a dating site to build models that predict sexual preference or behavior. researchers will not inform the dating site users, but they will not collect any identifying information and their photograph dataset will not be released publicly. creating a fake profile, necessary to access the photos, violates the dating site’s terms of service. 10. researchers plan to ask apple healthkit users to voluntarily submit their activity data to understand the general impact of exercise on a health condition. the researchers plan to obtain informed consent, and they plan to collect identifiable information from participants. asking users to submit activity data does not violate apple health kit’s terms of service. 11. researchers plan to scrape public posts and interactions from facebook to study group-level dynamics. they plan to collect informed consent from the original poster, but not those they interacted with, and they may collect identifying information. scraping posts with permission of the original poster does not violate facebook’s terms of service. appendix b: tables table 1: overview of variables in hypothetical research scenarios scenario consent publicness anonymity terms of service 1. scrapping public newspaper comments to predict elections low high low low 2. scrapping public twitter feeds to predict risky druguse behaviors low high high high 3. analyzing dating site data to infer sexual behavior high low low high 4. analyzing newspaper comments to understand political views low high low high 5. collect geolocation data from mobile provider to understand group mobility patterns in a city low low high high 6. combine mental health data with social media activity high neutral low neutral 7. analyzing preexisting twitter dataset to study political event low high high neutral 8. scraping health forum and combining with twitter data to predict mental health low high low high 9. scraping profile photos to predict sexual behavior low neutral high low 10. analyze apple healthkit data to assess impact of exercise on health high neutral low high 11. scrape public facebook posts to study group-level dynamics neutral high low high (high = high compliance; neutral = neutral or unknown level; low = low compliance) table 2: types of pervasive data in protocols reviewed in past 12 months social media posts 58 sensor data 54 social media profiles 33 locational data 33 social media images 30 network traffic data 26 other 7 (n=73; multiple selections allowed) table 3: disciplines submitting protocols using pervasive data in past 12 months social sciences 47 medical/health 36 computer science/engineering 24 arts/humanities 12 natural sciences 3 other 7 (n=74; multiple selections allowed) table 4: does your institution provide specific training sessions for irb members that addresses the ethics of the collection/use of pervasive data? yes, it is part of required training 14 18.4% yes, but it is optional 7 9.2% no 53 69.7% i don’t know 2 2.6% (n=76) table 5: regulations or guidelines are relied on when reviewing protocols relying on pervasive data federal policy for the protection of human subjects (“common rule”) 71 the belmont report: ethical principles and guidelines for the protection of human subjects of research 61 sachrp considerations and recommendations concerning internet research and human subjects research regulations 33 american psychological association (apa) psychological research online: opportunities and challenges 9 association of internet researchers (aoir) ethics guidelines 7 the menlo report: ethical principles guiding information and communication technology research 3 acm sigchi research ethics committee guidelines 1 other 7 (n=77; multiple selections allowed) table 6: irb members at my institution are wellversed in the technical aspects of the collection/use of pervasive data strongly agree 5 6.6% somewhat agree 14 18.4% neither agree nor disagree 17 22.4% somewhat disagree 28 36.8% strongly disagree 12 15.8% (n=76) table 7: irb members at my institution are wellversed in the ethical aspects of the collection/use of pervasive data strongly agree 13 17.1% somewhat agree 23 30.3% neither agree nor disagree 10 13.2% somewhat disagree 20 26.3% strongly disagree 10 13.2% (n=76) table 8: your institution’s erb would likely consider this proposal to be… scenario not human subjects research exempt expedited requiring full board review 1. scrapping public newspaper comments to predict elections (n=40) 11 27.5% 8 20.0% 8 20.0% 13 32.5% 2. scrapping public twitter feeds to predict risky drug-use behaviors (n=45) 18 40.0% 15 33.3% 9 20.0% 3 6.7% 3. analyzing dating site data to infer sexual behavior (n=43) 1 2.3 7 16.3% 21 48.8% 14 32.6% 4. analyzing newspaper comments to understand political views (n=44) 25 56.8% 10 22.7% 7 15.9% 2 4.5% 5. collect geolocation data from mobile provider to understand group mobility patterns in a city (n=45) 18 40.0% 13 28.9% 8 17.8% 6 13.3% 6. combine mental health data with social media activity (n=44) 0 0.0% 0 0.0% 19 43.2% 25 56.8% 7. analyzing preexisting twitter dataset to study political event (n=46) 26 56.5% 13 28.3% 6 13.0% 1 2.2% 8. scraping health forum and combining with twitter data to predict mental health (n=41) 11 26.8% 8 19.5% 7 17.1% 15 36.6% 9. scraping profile photos to predict sexual behavior (n=46) 3 6.5% 2 4.3% 10 21.7% 31 67.4% 10. analyze apple healthkit data to assess impact of exercise on health (n=44) 0 0.0% 7 15.9% 33 75.0% 4 9.1% 11. scrape public facebook posts to study group-level dynamics (n=44) 5 11.4% 5 11.4% 17 38.6% 17 38.6% appendix c: scenario treeplots microsoft word badola-digital sites of protest-digital sites of protest.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): badola, a. (2021, october). digital sites of protest: farmers’ protest in india and the construction of a collective identity on facebook. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. digital sites of protest: farmers’ protest in india and the construction of a collective identity on facebook anand badola digital media research centre, qut research issue this paper looks at digital sites of protest and platform affordances, through which uninformed or unaware hyper-individualised publics are brought in by the protest community to help construct a collective identity. it examines the ongoing farmers’ protest in india and a facebook page that was specifically created by the protest community called, kisan ekta morcha (farmers union front, herein kem) and how it is able to create a common collective identity despite the cultural and linguistic differences in india. background in september 2020, the indian government passed a set of farm laws, which have a pro-market leaning. while the nature of the passing of the bills is debated, largely it is seen as a controversial move, as the bills were passed without proper consultation with the farmers community. in november 2020, various farm unions in india called for a march to the national capital, new delhi but the central government used excessive police force to stop them from entering. since then, the farmers have occupied three borders surrounding the national capital. it is a dynamic protest which has seen both support and vilification in the form of narratives via mainstream and social media. the farmers’ community, to create a sympathetic narrative to their own cause, set up a facebook page called kem in november. the facebook page has around five hundred thousand followers and gives daily updates via photos, statuses and videos about the farmers protests. while the debate around social media and their effectiveness in offline protests revolves around their use as an innovative means of communication, and mobilisation, leading to collective action (howard & hussain, 2013) some claim that digital activism has really no hard influence on offline activism (morozov, 2011). others have argued that social media platforms are often used by activists to amplify participation in contentious politics (earl & kimport, 2011; lim, 2013; valenzuela, 2013), signifying the potential of social media platforms to aid social movements and protests. tufekci and wilson (2012), in this regard, have argued that social media are distinct as they help create interpersonal connections, which leads to a networked chain of personalised collective action – a connective action (bennett and segerberg, 2012). boulianne et al. (2020), while comparing traditional media (television news) and social media, argue that social media are distinct in creating awareness as they expose unaware publics not only to details about the protest’s events but also to invitations to participate in such activities. this paper contributes to these debates as it looks at the way platform affordances can be used to construct a collective identity that a broader public can identify with. methodology focusing on the facebook page kem, the paper examines how protest campaign pages like these constructs both a collective identity and narrative of protests. using textual and visual analysis, the paper focuses on audio-visual posts on this page with extended captions describing personalised experiences of the farmer protests and helping in the construction of the collective identity. expanding on the methodological framework employed by khazraee & novak (2018), the paper focuses on platform affordances related to discursive practices and the digitally mediated performances of the farmer protests. discursive affordances are used to frame issues in such a way to construct shared meanings and collectively negotiate those meanings. the discursive practices also include the sharing of personal anecdotes, which has the potential to resonate with the larger digital public. performative affordances focus on the enactment of protests, which is portrayed through visual imagery in the form of photos and videos. the photos and videos are intentionally emotional and visceral to convey the broader message to the public and create empathetic support for the farmers’ protest. these digital performative acts are possible because of the platform affordances of facebook which invites its users to not only participate in collective action but also share these posts across other social media platforms. facebook’s affordances, especially ‘reactions’ metrics with care, anger, love as responses, have a community building imprint as it promotes an emotional connection with the posts and the page. while on twitter, too, one can post photos and create threads as discursive flows to give updates about a particular protest, a facebook page provides a stronger framing structure as both visual imagery and narrative posts weave together in a dedicated space, which helps in creating a collective identity. preliminary findings the kem has been relatively successful in garnering support among various sections of the people as the indian government temporarily got the facebook page banned for allegedly promoting ‘anti-national’ activities. the audio-visual imagery has resonated with people and a strong sentiment in support of the farming community. the images, the flags, and the slogans used in this page are seen in the offline community of protesters as cars and people are seen displaying the same flags and slogans. this is even despite substantial differences ranging from class, caste, linguistic, and religious differences in the farmers community as well as among its supporters. the publics engage in different languages on the same facebook page (mainly punjabi, hindi and english). images on the page show cross-regional and cross-cultural publics coming together and forming a united stand against the farm laws. one of the images from kem posted on 16 december, 2020. this one of the key protest sites near the borders of new delhi. source: kisan ekta morcha facebook page a farmer’s temporary home in a ‘tractor’. there are thousands of such makeshift homes at the protest sites. source: kisan ekta morcha facebook page. one of the many people supporting the farmers protest by putting flags on their cars. there are also slogans painted on cars as a sign of support. many of the slogans and flags are directly taken from the kem facebook page. source: the tribune india further outlook considering the longevity of the farmers protest, the next step in this study is to look at how social media can help sustain a protest. i will look at other social media handles of kem (for instance twitter) and analyse their activity. while this study solely focuses on the facebook page of kem but to fully grasp the way a protest movement utilises social media platforms is to analyse their activities across platforms, which makes room for further work. the farmers protest is an ongoing event and the researcher continues to monitor the facebook page as the situation changes. this case study is part of a larger debate about the role of social media in protest movements and also serves as a response to morozov’s critique. the paper contributes in our understanding of ongoing protests in a diverse country like india and how multicultural publics are brought tougher via social media to engage collectively in contentious politics. references bennett, w. l., & segerberg, a. (2012). the logic of connective action: digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. information, communication & society, 15(5), 739–768. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139198752 boulianne, s., koc-michalska, k., & bimber, b. (2020). mobilizing media: comparing tv and social media effects on protest mobilization. information, communication & society, 23(5), 642–664. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2020.1713847 earl, j., & kimport, k. (2011). digitally enabled social change: activism in the internet age. mit press. emad, k., & novak, a. n. (2018). digitally mediated protest: social media affordances for collective identity construction. social media + society, 4(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2056305118765740 howard, p. n., & hussain, m. m. (2013). democracy’s fourth wave? digital media and the arab spring. oxford university press. lim, m. (2013). framing bouazizi: ‘white lies’, hybrid network, and collective/connective action in the 2010–11 tunisian uprising. journalism: theory, practice & criticism, 14(7), 921–941. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884913478359 morozov, e. (2011). the net delusion: the dark side of internet freedom (1st ed). public affairs. tufekci, z., & wilson, c. (2012). social media and the decision to participate in political protest: observations from tahrir square. journal of communication, 62(2), 363–379. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2012.01629.x selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): gagnon, d., laperle, s., stewart, m. (2024, october). transphobic memes in the quebec alternative news industry. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. transphobic memes in the quebec alternative news industry dominique gagnon université du québec à montréal samuel laperle université du québec à montréal michelle stewart université du québec à montréal context since early 2021, we have been studying reactionary, far-right populism in quebec online contexts: reactionary populism is highly affective—saturated with emotional terms that convey menace, urgency, and authenticity (capelos et al. 2021). these postures ground group identity in opposition, using strong emotions to incite political engagement based on grievance, disaffection, and antagonism towards democratic institutions and social pluralism. it is thus affective in the active sense: it attaches specific emotions to specific bodies (social categories: queer, racialized, marginalized) and mobilizes adherence – it incites, classes and cleaves the polity (ahmed 2013). in our research, we have noted the clear but complex ways in which hyperpartisan media sites influence quebec online contexts. the conference theme of “industry” offers a compelling analytical lens for what we have come to see as transnational discursive campaigns that use online popular culture to consolidate a “countercultural” vision of hard to extreme right politics (rewriting ripley 2021; miller-idriss 2020). hyperpartisan sites form a “mirror universe” (steve bannon’s strategy for breitbart), counterposing their passionate partisanship against what they deem the fraudulent objectivity of mainstream media. such sites are “transgressive in style, openly ideological, extremely biased in favour of a political leader and attacks the other side’s point of view, often at the expense of facts” (rae 2021, 1118). following a preliminary analysis of the flow of “anti-woke” memes into quebecois online discourse, we note the overrepresentation of hyperpartisan media in the distribution of what might be seen as opportunistic (i.e. not necessarily coordinated) influence campaigns. in our preliminary study, we observed that “anti-woke” hashtags and memes were heavily freighted with transphobic images and messages and co-occurred with a range of other far-right content (with strong currents of anti-immigration, anti-queer, misogynist, “antisystem,” and conspiracy themes). presented in mocking tones and mobilized by hyperpartisan sites, transphobic memes participate in fostering “a far-right youth counterculture that weaponizes humor, valorizes provocation and trolling” (miller-idriss 2020, 154). in mapping the distribution patterns of this content, we documented 1) the extent to which a range of seemingly “independent” sites distribute the same content within a short period of times; 2) how “anti-woke” hashtags and memes served to consolidate a far-right worldview and package it as countercultural; 3) and finally, how transphobic content came to constitute something of a “federating” theme – an ideological entry point into or representative of a larger ensemble of sociopolitical arguments that support broad right-wing cultural hegemony. the prominence of transphobia in hyperpartisan media in the past few years (bellemare et al. 2021) has made it a “popular” object for reactionary individuals who use transphobic content in their efforts to promote a larger “anti-woke” agenda (miller-idriss 2020). hyperpartisan media do not simply represent transphobic content as “news”, but leverage and radicalize trending themes to form larger networks of reactionary influencers. objectives the aim of this project was to document and analyze the various sources of disinformation/propaganda of the reactionary populist right in quebec (qc). specifically, in this first iteration, we documented the movement of transphobic memes from anglophone hyperpartisan media sites to qc influencers. to pursue these objectives, we 1) identified key hyperpartisan sites active in spreading transphobic content; and 2) noted the uptake and transformation of this content in our qc sample. in the future, we will 3) trace the diffusion of this content in francophone networks. corpus to establish our initial corpus, we identified quebecois accounts producing content indexed by “anti-woke” hashtags on google, tiktok, twitter, and reddit during june and july 2023. once selected, we catalogued the content produced by prolific accounts and used 4cat to identify imagery associated with the war on “woke”. we also analyzed how such content was articulated with transphobic content and which accounts of american and anglo-canadian influencers were shared the most frequently. the repetition of content (hashtags, memes, news items, reposts, videos) between larger hyperpartisan media outlets (in the u.s. and canada – the daily wire, rebel news) and in the smaller quebec-linked network of influencers led us to investigate the dynamics that enabled transphobic content to travel so quickly (and effectively) between different countries, across linguistic barriers and without coordination. in phase one of the study, we qualitatively analyzed the content, the themes, the targets and the rhetorical devices present in the collected tweets and their replies in the given period. we employed social network analysis (using gephi) to document the sources of frequently shared content and to map the diffusion of content to other platforms. for phase two, we focused on twitter since it has been “identified as the social network that is most conducive to the dissemination of homophobic and transphobic hate speech, followed by youtube and facebook” (sánchez-sánchez et al. 2024, 222). by tracking a range of right-wing content, we traced the opportunistic mobilisation and reach of transphobic content between a range of right-wing influencers producing content linked to quebec politics. once the twitter accounts of the most active disseminators of transphobic content were identified, phase 2 quantified the extent of the tweets' reach by measuring the number of likes and retweets. to follow the political scope of this loose network of alternative influence, we added accounts linked to the populist quebec conservative party to the corpus. discussion our initial results point to the extent to which transphobic content travels between different right-wing ideological camps, producing strange bedfellows (from christian nationalists to right libertarians) – what could be called a popular front of far-right populism. right-wing influencers repetitively linked shared imagery of trans people as threats – “grooming”, menacing women and children, dominating unfairly in women’s sports. this imagery fueled right-wing metanarratives regarding the need to protect (imagined) imperiled “white identity” and rigid gender binaries. the influencers in our corpus, with a variety of ideological goals, contributed to the diffusion of far-right messages to a wider public under the guise of “anti-system” messaging. we noted a variety of content delivering a similar worldview through diffuse participation both organized and coordinated by lobbies, as well as spontaneous/uncoordinated participation by individual actors. together, they contribute to a larger cultural-political struggle that seeks to delegitimize multicultural, democratic governance. references ahmed, s. (2013). the cultural politics of emotion. routledge. bellemare, a., kolbegger, k., & vermes, j. (2021, november 8). anti-trans views are worryingly prevalent and disproportionately harmful. cbc news. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/anti-transgender-narratives-canada-1.6232947. capelos, t., chrona, s., salmela, m., & bee, c. (2021). reactionary politics and resentful affect in populist times. politics and governance, 9(3), 186–190. https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v9i3.4727 carignan, m.-è., morin, d., daxhelet, m.-l., bédard, s., champagne-poirier, o., choquette, e., aliaga, g., khennache, y., & kamela kuitche, e. (2022). le mouvement conspirationniste au québec: leaders, discours et adhésion. université de sherbrooke. lemieux, p. (2003). following the herd. regulation, 26(4), 16–21. miller-idriss, c. (2020). hate in the homeland: the new global far right. (ned-new edition). princeton university press; jstor. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv20dsbtf.5 rae, m. (2021). hyperpartisan news: rethinking the media for populist politics. new media & society, 23(5), 1117–1132. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820910416 rewriting ripley. (2021, march 11). in plain sight: how white supremacy, misogyny, and hate targeted the star wars sequel trilogy and won. https://rewritingripley.medium.com/in-plain-sight-how-white-supremacy-misogynyand-hate-targeted-the-star-wars-sequel-trilogy-and-2fd0be4b242. sánchez-sánchez, a. m., ruiz-muñoz, d., & sánchez-sánchez, f. j. (2024). mapping homophobia and transphobia on social media. sexuality research and social policy, 21(1), 210–226. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-023-00879-z https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/anti-transgender-narratives-canada-1.6232947. https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v9i3.4727 https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv20dsbtf.5 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820910416 https://rewritingripley.medium.com/in-plain-sight-how-white-supremacy-misogyny-and-hate-targeted-the-star-wars-sequel-trilogy-and-2fd0be4b242. https://rewritingripley.medium.com/in-plain-sight-how-white-supremacy-misogyny-and-hate-targeted-the-star-wars-sequel-trilogy-and-2fd0be4b242. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-023-00879-z selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 to screenshot or not to screenshot? tensions in representing visual social media platform posts joseph s. schafer university of washington brett a. halperin university of washington sourojit ghosh university of washington julie vera university of washington introduction the rise to prominence of visual social media platforms (vsmps) including tiktok, instagram, and youtube has led to increasing amounts of research attention directed to these platforms. as research engages multimodal platforms, representing their content (including text, audio, image, and video components) increasingly becomes both important and complex. the aoir internet research ethics (ire) 3.0 guidelines stipulate that “we need to elaborate an ethics addressing the distinctive issues clustering around the production, sharing, and thereby research on visual images” (franzke et al., 2020). in this paper, we begin making such an elaboration, describing considerations necessary when representing screenshots. we provide an overview of four current approaches to representing vsmp posts and annotate their tensions. prior examinations of screenshots the act of screenshotting is non-neutral, and produces its own media artifact. one notable discussion of this artifact format is (frosh, 2018), which provides an in-depth historical and media form analysis of the screenshot. this details how the screenshot’s design both invisibilizes its existence as its own media object, and makes it function as an evidentiary artifact (see also (jaynes, 2020)). other researchers have discussed how suggested citation (apa): schafer, j. s., halperin, b. a., ghosh, s., and vera, j. (2024, october). to screenshot or not to screenshot? tensions in representing visual social media platform posts. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. suggested citation (apa): schafer, j. s., halperin, b. a., ghosh, s., vera, j. (2024, october). to screenshot or not to screenshot? tensions in representing visual social media platform posts. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. screenshots can be used to hold structural powers accountable (jenkins & cramer, 2022). prior research has discussed screenshots’ privacy implications, and how researchers can learn from fan archives’ practices (drouin, 2021) and online remix cultures (fiesler & bruckman, 2014). (shore & prena, 2023)’s recent study of users’ screenshotting behaviors reveals how non-researchers conceptualize screenshots’ privacy risks. further, we find (cagle, 2021)’s discussion of researching nonconsensually-captured images informative. cagle argues that both looking at and sharing these images can be ethically fraught, and urges for obtaining informed consent from those represented along with ‘ethical ekphrasis’ as text-only or text-in-addition description of images (cagle, 2021). it is important to note issues of representation in research images have significant histories. one example is the “lena” image of a playboy magazine model, used in early computer vision research without the model’s consent (mulvin, 2021a, 2021b). current practices of vsmp screenshot inclusion to ground our discussion of tensions in screenshotting vsmps, we synthesize common practices in existing research. representations of these media tend to come in four primary forms: 1) text-only descriptions, 2) unaltered screenshots, 3) partially-altered screenshots, and 4) drawings. text-only descriptions do not represent posts visually, but through verbal descriptions, such as (vázquez-herrero et al., 2022) and (kennedy, 2020). unaltered screenshots are not subsequently edited before being included in research outputs, such as (maddox, 2023), and (bhandari & bimo, 2022). partially-altered screenshots have visual elements blurred or altered, such as obscuring creators’ faces (e.g. (lundy, 2023)) or blurring account usernames (e.g. (khoury et al., 2023)). these alterations can include blocking less personally-identifiable information, such as (vizcaíno-verdú & abidin, 2023)’s replacing “like” counts alongside blurring creators’ faces. our final example of screenshot practices is when researchers draw, rather than screenshot, posts. examples include (abidin, 2018), (stephenson et al., 2024), and the conference presentation of (biggs et al., 2023). alongside image formats of vsmp screenshots, we also see diversity in what screenshots are taken. while most previously-referenced papers include a single screenshot per video, some of the four-screenshot composites in (vizcaíno-verdú & abidin, 2023) may be of subsequent frames within one video. this reveals important methodological questions — what frame do you choose to screenshot moving images? how do researchers convey cuts between different video parts, or choose a “typical” frame for a particular camera setup within a video? how do static portrayals reduce nuance and encode researchers’ biases by freezing complex subjects at selected moments in time? compositing multiple screenshots to account for temporality, or using artistic techniques such as blur lines, could help address these challenges. ethical tensions regarding vsmp screenshots in research as the ire guidelines (franzke et al., 2020) argue, representing multimodal data is particularly ethically fraught. below, we outline three value questions researchers should reflect upon when including vsmp screenshots (or not): what is (in)visibilized, what is consensual, and what is legal, when representing vsmp posts? similar to (schafer et al., 2023), we do not prescribe guidelines or resolutions, but instead describe critical considerations. first, researchers should address the tension between the values of attribution and anonymity. posts by vsmp creators represent significant creative labor. on one hand, invisibilizing this labor through anonymization can harm creators by not crediting them. on the other hand, visibility can elicit further scrutiny or harassment (alcoff, 1991). researchers have demonstrated creators often navigate calibrated visibility using complex folk theories (devito, 2022), and this navigation has been discussed in prior aoir research (stegeman et al., 2022). adding unintended visibility could cause harm by undermining creators’ efforts to be seen only in specific contexts (dym et al., 2019). visibility is also problematized for those studying harmful media on vsmps, from media captured nonconsensually (cagle, 2021), to misinformation or otherwise objectionable content, when researchers might want to avoid giving this content the “oxygen of amplification” (phillips, 2018). another tension for researchers to navigate is around degrees of informed consent, particularly since vsmps are known to have long, convoluted end-user license agreements (eulas) that most users do not read before joining (fiesler & proferes, 2018). since most users do not know the rights they sign away as they join vsmps, researchers have additional responsibility to take care in representing user-generated content in their work. researchers could consider procedures of dynamic consent (tseng et al., 2024), and contact users whose content they are interested in highlighting, to discuss consent to use and represent such content in their papers. however, there are temporal challenges associated with dynamic consent (halperin & mcelroy, 2023) and mechanisms needed to accommodate changes in consent preferences over time, particularly when dealing with sensitive subject matters (halperin et al., 2023). after an article’s publication, researchers no longer have easy ways to remove screenshots. while consent may be difficult to adapt or dangerous to acquire for some cases, such as in (fuchs & meikle, 2018), considering these processes and contextual degrees of risk when representing vsmp posts is warranted. our third tension exists within navigating legal frameworks surrounding vsmp posts and their usage. since posts constitute intellectual property, including screenshots could implicate researchers under copyright law. for instance, some fair use guidelines for researchers caution screenshots may be used “only for the purpose of critique” but not to “illustrate a point,” and that redrawing a figure does not equate to permissible use (association for computing machinery, n.d.). additionally, platform terms of service regarding researcher data access and republication are important considerations for representing vsmp posts. however, not including screenshots, since drawings or textual descriptions may not fulfill screenshots’ evidentiary role, may present its own legal challenges, such as creators alleging they were inaccurately or even defamatorily represented. omitting screenshots may also weaken researchers’ arguments, since their ability to demonstrate evidence via vsmp post representations would be diminished. conclusions and future work in this paper, we described existing methods researchers use to represent vsmp posts, and some attendant ethical tensions in using screenshots. beyond the tensions and overview we produced, this reveals important future research directions. these include interviewing researchers about their existing practices, exploring alternative representation methods, or studying users’ reactions to the vsmp post usage in research, similar to (fiesler & proferes, 2018). acknowledgements the authors would like to thank dr. lauren s. berliner, nina lutz, the students of university of washington cinema and media studies 597 “digital media power and practice,” and the reviewers for their thoughtful comments which improved this project. joseph s. schafer and brett a. halperin are supported by national science foundation graduate research fellowships (grant number dge-2140004). any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the national science foundation. references abidin, c. (2018). internet celebrity: understanding fame online (illustrated edition). emerald publishing. alcoff, l. (1991). the problem of speaking for others. cultural critique, 20, 5–32. https://doi.org/10.2307/1354221 association for computing machinery. (n.d.). guidance for authors on fair use. retrieved february 26, 2024, from https://www.acm.org/publications/authors/guidance-for-authors-on-fair-use bhandari, a., & bimo, s. (2022). why’s everyone on tiktok now? the algorithmized self and the future of self-making on social media. social media + society, 8(1), 20563051221086241. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221086241 biggs, h., marcotte, a., & bardzell, s. (2023). tiktok as a stage: performing rural #farmqueer utopias on tiktok. proceedings of the 2023 acm designing interactive systems conference, 946–956. https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596038 cagle, l. e. (2021). the ethics of researching unethical images: a story of trying to do good research without doing bad things. computers and composition, 61, 102651. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2021.102651 devito, m. a. (2022). how transfeminine tiktok creators navigate the algorithmic trap of visibility via folk theorization. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 6(cscw2), 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555105 drouin, r. a. (2021). (don’t) just screenshot it: ethics of archiving fan misbehaviours. journal of fandom studies, 9(1), 19–32. https://doi.org/10.1386/jfs_00030_1 dym, b., brubaker, j. r., fiesler, c., & semaan, b. (2019). “coming out okay”: community narratives for lgbtq identity recovery work. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 3(cscw), 154:1-154:28. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359256 fiesler, c., & bruckman, a. s. (2014). remixers’ understandings of fair use online. proceedings of the 17th acm conference on computer supported cooperative work & social computing, 1023–1032. https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531695 fiesler, c., & proferes, n. (2018). “participant” perceptions of twitter research ethics. social media + society, 4(1), 2056305118763366. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118763366 franzke, aline shakti, bechmann, a., zimmer, m., ess, c., & the association of internet researchers. (2020). internet research: ethical guidelines 3.0. https://aoir.org/reports/ethics3.pdf frosh, p. (2018). screenshot: the “photographic” witnessing of digital worlds. in the poetics of digital media (pp. 158–223). polity. fuchs, c., & meikle, g. (2018). “dear mr. neo-nazi, can you please give me your informed consent so that i can quote your fascist tweet?”: questions of social media research ethics in online ideology critique. in routledge companion to media and activism. routledge. https://westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk/download/3771d54accbad32ff3aa d192b97046846bf53526a21984caf3c25b140ef88c26/160940/routledge%20co mpanion%20to%20media%20and%20activism.pdf halperin, b. a., hsieh, g., mcelroy, e., pierce, j., & rosner, d. k. (2023). probing a community-based conversational storytelling agent to document digital stories of housing insecurity. proceedings of the 2023 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581109 halperin, b. a., & mcelroy, e. (2023). temporal tensions in digital story mapping for housing justice: rethinking time and technology in community-based design. proceedings of the 2023 acm designing interactive systems conference, 2469–2488. https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596088 jaynes, v. (2020). the social life of screenshots: the power of visibility in teen friendship groups. new media & society, 22(8), 1378–1393. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819878806 jenkins, b. m., & cramer, e. m. (2022). capturing injustice: the screenshot as a tool for sousveillance. howard journal of communications, 33(4), 412–433. https://doi.org/10.1080/10646175.2022.2032884 kennedy, m. (2020). ‘if the rise of the tiktok dance and e-girl aesthetic has taught us anything, it’s that teenage girls rule the internet right now’: tiktok celebrity, girls and the coronavirus crisis. european journal of cultural studies, 23(6), 1069–1076. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549420945341 khoury, c., owen-smith, a., joh, u., duan, y., & hemsley, j. (2023). multi-modal crisis discourse and collective sensemaking on tiktok. proceedings of the association for information science and technology, 60(1), 203–212. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.781 lundy, m. (2023). tiktok and covid-19 vaccine misinformation: new avenues for misinformation spread, popular infodemic topics, and dangerous logical fallacies. international journal of communication, 17(0), article 0. maddox, j. (2023). micro-celebrities of information: mapping calibrated expertise and knowledge influencers among social media veterinarians. information, communication & society, 26(14), 2726–2752. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2022.2109980 mulvin, d. (2021a). proxy justice (or the lena image, part 2). in proxies: the cultural work of standing in (pp. 113–144). the mit press. https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5154/chapter/3403261/proxy-justiceor-the-lena-image-part-2 mulvin, d. (2021b). the visual culture of image engineers (or the lena image, part 1). in proxies: the cultural work of standing in (pp. 73–112). the mit press. https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5154/chapter/3403261/proxy-justiceor-the-lena-image-part-2 phillips, w. (2018). the oxygen of amplification. data & society. https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/1_part_1_oxygen_of_ampl ification_ds.pdf schafer, j. s., starbird, k., & rosner, d. k. (2023). participatory design and power in misinformation, disinformation, and online hate research. proceedings of the 2023 acm designing interactive systems conference, 1724–1739. https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596119 shore, a., & prena, k. (2023). platform rules as privacy tools: the influence of screenshot accountability and trust on privacy management. new media & society, 14614448231188929. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231188929 stegeman, h. m., poell, t., duffy, b. e., jokubauskaitė, e., cotter, k., velthuis, o., & meisner, c. (2022). platforms and the precarity of creator (in)visibility. aoir selected papers of internet research. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2022i0.12968 stephenson, s., page, c. n., wei, m., kapadia, a., & roesner, f. (2024, may 11). sharenting on tiktok: exploring parental sharing behaviors and the discourse around children’s online privacy. proceedings of the 2024 chi conference on human factors in computing systems. chi ’24, honolulu, hi, usa. tseng, e., bellini, r., lee, y.-y., ramjit, a., ristenpart, t., & dell, n. (2024). data stewardship in clinical computer security: balancing benefit and burden in participatory systems. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 8(cscw1), 29. https://doi.org/10.1145/3637316 vázquez-herrero, j., negreira-rey, m.-c., & lópez-garcía, x. (2022). let’s dance the news! how the news media are adapting to the logic of tiktok. journalism, 23(8), 1717–1735. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884920969092 vizcaíno-verdú, a., & abidin, c. (2023). teachtok: teachers of tiktok, micro-celebrification, and fun learning communities. teaching and teacher education, 123, 103978. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2022.103978 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): kempton, a.. (2022, november). resisting franchise corporate control: how the internet enables local practices in pokemon play. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. resisting franchise corporate control: how the internet enables local practices in pokemon play allen kempton university of toronto pokémon has always promoted itself as friendly. however, it is strictly regulated by its developing and publishing companies, game freak and nintendo. for players worldwide, this gives the company a negative image, and has led to players creating their own play culture separate to the franchise. this paper comes as part of a study that investigates how we can study contemporary play that thoroughly integrates the internet and communications technologies into play itself, creating a complex “metaplay” that players engage with everyday. here, i examined how local canadian players resisted the controlling nature of the companies to makes their play experiences more fulfilling. methods and theory this research follows ethnographic methods in digital game studies (boellstorff et al, 2012), creating a sort of mini ethnography for adult pokémon players within the “district”, an anonymized region in canada. it is located outside of a major city in canada, featuring a historically important automotive sector and industrial area. geographically it is primarily suburban, with a small urban component and relatively expansive rural area. since the original release of pokémon in the 1990s, massive infrastructural development has taken place as well as a significant population boom, increasing approximately 50% in less than 10 years. as a result, this research benefits not only from being contextualized by a rapidly changing and understudied area that moved along with the games. to analyze the data collected in the interviews, the research uses an analytical framework derived from theories of play, specifically metaplay. metaplay is a historically nebulous concept, loosely centering on the communicative aspect of play (bateson, 1956; sutton-smith, 1997). this study grounds the term more concretely by defining metaplay more succinctly and ascribing three components that are characteristic of communicative aspects of play. these three components are metagaming (donaldson, 2016), paratexts (glas, 2010), and gaming capital (consalvo, 2007). together, they provide insights into contemporary digital game play practices and how internet technologies influence them. with this framework, this study provides inroads into localized canadian suburban play and ways in which readily accessible global information and other players shape their own play habits against a backdrop of a highly proprietary and controlled franchise. three ways the players resist corporate control taking back play when it comes to actually playing pokémon games, the company has a strong hold on how the games are played. there is a certain degree of frustration held by players who aspire to play in ranked or qualifying official tournaments, but there are two major problems participants in the study outlined. first was the control of the tournaments, and lack of availability in the canadian market. participants indicated that they felt game freak did not care enough to broaden the accessibility of tournaments, meaning driving hundreds of kilometres in some cases. with tournaments requiring official sanctioning for people to advance to regional or world tournaments, there was little opportunity for players from the district. participants asserted that small local tournaments were mostly non-existent, and that unless there was a significant monetary prize, virtually nobody was interested in attending. the second problem was the arbitrary changes to the metagame game freak made between “generations” of games. participants indicated the amount of time and effort required to play competitively in each generation, even with foreknowledge and datamined information, was extraordinarily high. however, constant changes made it difficult for players to justify the investment, especially considering they had no say ni the changes. as a result, players often turned to fan-made playing platforms as means of finding ways to play competitively and outside of game freak’s direct control. pokémon showdown, the most popular and accepted platform, is the de facto platform for players to test their skills on. these platforms remove accessibility barriers such as time and space, as well as institute community-driven rulesets that strive for consistency, balance, and longevity. participants in the study refer to this platform and a website called smogon university as a means of getting better at the games, often bringing these global “metagames” into their own individual play. controlling information: how players side-step the industry similar to the ways that game freak controls ways the games are played, they also control the information available to the player. before the internet was readily accessible, players relied on playground rumours for information, or industry published guides exclusively. however, rumours were often wrong, and the guides lacked practical information. the games themselves are full of hidden mechanics and information, which is problematic not only for higher level play, but also casual play, as some functions were simply not described without purchasing an official game guide. as the internet grew more accessible worldwide, players began to pool their knowledge online. free user-generated content increased the accessibility of this information. datamining lifts the veil on the many hidden mechanics of the game, allowing players to play more efficiently, feeding into the metagaming component. the district historically was predominantly working class, and buying official guides was not on the table for many players. this user-generated content greatly increased accessibility of information for these players, and some participants found ways to participate in the global culture by contributing to these knowledge databanks. creating and sustaining communities with more internet-based platforms for players to create and host their content, gaming capital, a twist on bourdieu’s cultural capital (consalvo, 2007), comes into play. streaming and video creation has become a major factor in contemporary pokémon play, where well-known players demonstrate their skills (metagame) and pass their knowledge on (donaldson, 2015). some participants view streaming as a means of participating and contributing the global play culture, in conjunction with playing in high level tournaments and creating useful informative content available on sites. some players make or use romhacks to increase the difficulty or keep their play experience fresh, and pass these along to other players. the corporate side of pokémon uses intellectual property and copyright laws to strike down user-generated content (postigo, 2008). it can be an uphill battle to maintain one’s content, but these actions have furthered soured perceptions players have towards the company itself. despite these takedowns, players do what they can to keep playing the games in as many ways as they can without being hindered by the company, and promote their play. references bateson, g. (1956). the message, “this is play.” in b. schaffner. (ed), group processes. new york: josiah macy. boellstorff, t., nardi, b., pearce, c., & taylor, t.l. (2012). ethnography and virtual worlds: a handbook of method. new jersey: princeton university press. consalvo, m. (2007). cheating: gaining advantage in videogames. cambridge, ma: mit press. donaldson, s. (2015). “mechanics and metagame: exploring binary expertise in league of legends” games and culture, 12(5): 426-444. donaldson, s. (2016). “towards a typology of metagames” proceedings the ace’16 conference, australia. glas, r. (2010). games of stake: control, agency, and ownership in world of warcraft. (doctoral dissertation). university of amsterdam, the netherlands. postigo, h. (2008). digital game appropriation through modifications: attitudes concerning intellectual property among modders and fans. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies 14(1): 59-74. sutton-smith, b. (1997). the ambiguity of play. cambridge, mass: harvard university press. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): liu d. (2024, october). borderline content and platformised speech governance: mapping tiktok’s moderation controversies in south and southeast asia. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. borderline content and platformised speech governance: mapping tiktok’s moderation controversies in south and southeast asia diyi liu university of oxford introduction digital platforms hosting user-generated content (ugc) have increasingly become the “prism” that shapes what we see and how we see the world (flyverbom, 2019). they are algorithmically and institutionally managed assemblages that enable (or constrain) interactions, control visibility, and curate public discourse (gillespie, 2010, 2018; helberger et al., 2018). through technical and normative design, online platforms not only offer sets of affordances and constraints for public discourse, but also, in weber’s account, seek to establish and enforce maxims or rules toward which social behaviour is orientated; in other words, platforms actively engage in the legitimation of online content governance (weber, 1964; zelditch, 2001). numerous literature has documented the increasing reliance of platforms’ facilitated algorithmic moderation systems to govern online speech (balkin, 2018; caplan, 2023; gillespie, 2018; gorwa, 2019; grimmelmann, 2015). platformised speech governance, as termed in this paper, refers to the governance mechanisms by which online speech is regulated and moderated specifically through and by digital platforms within a particular social context. as part of their increasing role in the public sphere (fischer & jarren, 2023), content moderation of ugc platforms involves an ongoing process of legitimation through interactions among platforms and other social actors, who continually rearticulate moderation norms sensitive to each national context. it sheds light on contemporary struggles over the boundaries of free expression online. at the core of the governance mechanisms are questions regarding how much liability these platforms should face, the specific content categories subject to regulation, by what legal basis and moral standards these decisions should be made, and by whom. often this transcends mere questions of legality, moving into a broader discussion about the legitimacy of online content governance (haggart & keller, 2021). the normative rules set by platforms have become integral to the wider regulatory landscape of online speech. nevertheless, the legitimacy of these governance efforts is a subject of challenge and varies across different contexts (suzor et al., 2018). while extensive research has explored content moderation of digital platforms in democratic contexts, there remains a gap in understanding whether the western communication order’s legitimation tools adequately address the complexities of lessthan-democratic developing nations (ramesh et al., 2022). one significant challenge is that governance discussions often revolve around high-level international human rights frameworks (jørgensen, 2017), yet do not fully account for the reality that free speech can be and have been interpreted in different ways across the globe, even within democratic societies such as those in europe and the united states (riedl et al., 2021). on that front, this paper expands the existing discussion of platformised speech governance through a case study of how tiktok, as a user-generated content platform originating from china, engages in local content moderation in areas that have been overlooked in scholarship south and southeast asia. the case selection provides an analytically broad spectrum for understanding different power dynamics that may be said to shape and influence the legitimacy of transnational platform companies in asia as they become manifest in very different but regionally related contexts. research methods tiktok was firstly introduced into the indonesian market in late 2017, marking the beginning of its presence in the sa/sea region. the data collected for this study spans from september 2017 to september 2023, though specific data availability varies across sources as indicated in the following section. the primary objective is to map how the platform and local governments draw the lines of content moderation, and how the boundaries of what constitutes “borderline content” have been contested during controversial incidents. to achieve this, this paper pursues an iterative empirical approach while triangulating three key data sources: tiktok’s moderation rules and enforcement in sa/sea. above all, i examine tiktok’s moderation rules and public disclosure. these includes its terms of service, community guidelines, branded content policy, in particular with jurisdictional specifications in sa/sea countries. additionally, i investigate some key metrics in its marketing and transparency data, which partly indicates the platform’s rule enforcement, priorities, and compliance. it is acknowledged that the public-facing transparency data has limitations in terms of the actual auditability (ananny & crawford, 2018), yet it still provides insights into the temporality and discursive performativity of tiktok’s content governance (chan et al., 2023; scharlach et al., 2023). legal regulations and government policies. following initial examination of tiktok’s localised moderation in this region, five key countries are selected for further analysis based on their market potential and moderation landscape: indonesia, pakistan, vietnam, the philippines, and thailand. the analysis focuses on legal regulations and government policies specifically in regard to (a) online speech restriction, and (b) platform liability. the aim is to understand the legal and political contexts, if (and how) tiktok establishes and modulates its rules across the aforementioned jurisdictions, and how local regulatory traditions are encoded into the normative framework of the platform. controversy mapping. unlike google who discloses government requests from judiciary and executive branches, these details cannot be easily extracted in tiktok’s current transparency reporting structure. given that normative documents don’t offer detailed and granular moderation policies (e.g., types of content) in different countries, this paper posits that power dynamics come to the forefront through controversy – notable incidents that challenges a platform’s core principles, prompting operational adaptations (ananny & gillespie, 2017; marres, 2015). i further explored major reported content moderation controversies in the sa/sea region. specifically, i query media reports in factiva news database spanning from september 2017 to september 2023. the search was refined to include media outlets from south asia and southeast asia, yielding results including relevant international news outlets as well as local outlets in the five countries. despite potential limitations stemming from language translation and media coverage bias, high-profiles cases or news events were prioritised for analysis due to their tendency to highlight tensions and controversies for initial mapping. coding was conducted sequentially for each identified controversy case. the following key dimensions were systematically extracted and analysed across cases: (a) time of controversy, (b) controversial content areas, (c) stakeholders involved, (d) regulating approach, and (e) tiktok’s responses (if recorded). findings overall, significant uncertainties exist in setting boundaries for online speech by both tiktok and local governments in sa/sea. while the platform demonstrates a degree of sensitivity to local contexts, its practices primarily serve its for-profit nature rather than moral obligations. furthermore, the results highlight tiktok’s depoliticisation of content governance, that the platform positions itself as less involved in contentious political debates, so as to justify its inconsistent and highly pragmatic moderation approaches. meanwhile, states in the region, despite aspiring to maintain a central role in speech governance, struggle with limited technical capabilities in moderating at scale. their interests in appropriating platformised moderation for political needs, however, often leads to reliance on vague rationales such as securitisation and public morality, as suggested in recurring controversies and decisive actions in regulatory moves. at the heart of these issues lie borderline content areas constantly facing ethical dilemmas and rhetoric misuse. subjective definitions based on intent and different levels of judicial oversight across countries further contribute to ambiguity in the normative debate. the contradictory goals of (de)politicising borderline moderation seemingly counterbalance each other, yet in practice lead to an accountability vacuum without legitimate interests. given the lack of normative common ground, the study highlights the significance of procedural justice and civic participation to mitigate rhetoric that rationalises imposition of speech norms hinging on imbalanced political power. references ananny, m., & crawford, k. (2018). seeing without knowing: limitations of the transparency ideal and its application to algorithmic accountability. new media & society, 20(3), 973–989. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816676645 ananny, m., & gillespie, t. (2017). public platforms: beyond the cycle of shocks and exceptions. oxford internet institute. http://blogs.oii.ox.ac.uk/ippconference/sites/ipp/files/documents/anannygillespie-publicplatforms-oiisubmittedsept8.pdf balkin, j. m. (2018). free speech in the algorithmic society: big data, private governance, and new school speech regulation. u.c. davis law review, 51(3), 1149–1210. caplan, r. (2023). networked platform governance: the construction of the democratic platform. international journal of communication, 17, 3451–3472. chan, n. k., su, c. c., & shore, a. (2023). shifting platform values in community guidelines: examining the evolution of tiktok’s governance frameworks. new media & society, 14614448231189476. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231189476 fischer, r., & jarren, o. (2023). the platformization of the public sphere and its challenge to democracy. philosophy & social criticism, 01914537231203535. https://doi.org/10.1177/01914537231203535 flyverbom, m. (2019). the digital prism: transparency and managed visibilities in a datafied world (1st ed.). cambridge university press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316442692 gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of ‘platforms’. new media & society, 12(3), 347–364. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342738 gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. yale university press. gorwa, r. (2019). what is platform governance? information, communication & society, 22(6), 854–871. https://doi.org/10/gfwbn4 grimmelmann, j. (2015). the virtues of moderation. yale journal of law and technology, 17, 42–109. https://doi.org/10.31228/osf.io/qwxf5 haggart, b., & keller, c. i. (2021). democratic legitimacy in global platform governance. telecommunications policy, 45(6), 102152. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.telpol.2021.102152 helberger, n., pierson, j., & poell, t. (2018). governing online platforms: from contested to cooperative responsibility. the information society, 34(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2017.1391913 jørgensen, r. f. (2017). what platforms mean when they talk about human rights. policy & internet, 9(3), 280–296. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.152 marres, n. (2015). why map issues? on controversy analysis as a digital method. science, technology, & human values, 40(5), 655–686. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243915574602 ramesh, d., kameswaran, v., wang, d., & sambasivan, n. (2022). how platform-user power relations shape algorithmic accountability: a case study of instant loan platforms and financially stressed users in india. 2022 acm conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency, 1917–1928. https://doi.org/10.1145/3531146.3533237 riedl, m. j., whipple, k. n., & wallace, r. (2021). antecedents of support for social media content moderation and platform regulation: the role of presumed effects on self and others. information, communication & society, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2021.1874040 scharlach, r., hallinan, b., & shifman, l. (2023). governing principles: articulating values in social media platform policies. new media & society, 146144482311565. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231156580 suzor, n. p., van geelen, t., & myers west, s. (2018). evaluating the legitimacy of platform governance: a review of research and a shared research agenda. international communication gazette, 80(4), 385–400. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748048518757142 weber, m. (1964). the theory of social and economic organization (t. parsons, ed.; a. m. henderson, trans.). free press. zelditch, m. (2001). processes of legitimation: recent developments and new directions. social psychology quarterly, 64(1), 4–17. https://doi.org/10.2307/3090147 introduction research methods findings selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 conner, va (2023, october). fever dreams and the ‘future of nostalgia’ on tiktok. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. fever dreams and the future of nostalgia on tiktok viki askounis conner university of illinois – chicago from politics to popular culture, no aspect of contemporary society appears to be immune from nostalgia – the bittersweet emotion commonly associated with “a sentimental longing for the past” (sedikides & wildschut, 2019). at the same time, despite the short duration of their personal biographies and memories, young people are making affective investments in social media platforms, like tiktok, that appear to enable the collective (re)production, consumption, and circulation of the lost cultural objects of our past in the form of “nostalgic readymades” (boym, 2001, p.351) such as reboots of defunct brands and revived songs. in one sense, the saturation of nostalgia in media ecosystems suggests that frederic jameson’s (1991) post-modern “nostalgia mode” prophecy has come true as a durable aesthetic feature of late capitalism. yet, changes in digital media technology have since introduced new modalities (pickering & keightley, 2006) in, through, and by which nostalgic experience, expression, and meaning-making can occur (niemeyer, 2014). in this other sense, there is something different about the “structure of feeling” (williams, 1961) to digitally mediated social formations of nostalgia today. while the political economy of platforms renders nostalgia more distant, commodified, and quantified (jacobsen & beer, 2021; niemeyer & keightley, 2020; drakopoulou, 2017; lizardi, 2017), their affordances also permit active “nostalgizing” (niemeyer, 2014) and new communicative practices of remembering and sensemaking (pentzold & menke, 2020). to the extent digital media condition us to see the world through nostalgia-colored glasses at the same time that they afford new forms of nostalgic expression, the political issue at stake is whether these emergent social formations of nostalgia invite us to look regressively (restoratively) back or enable us to move forward imaginatively (reflectively) in the face of the complex problems facing societies around the world, as svetlana boym (2001) invites us to consider in the future of nostalgia. in response to this problematic, this paper contributes to the growing body of literature that interrogates the modalities of nostalgia afforded by digital media technologies (niemeyer & siebert, 2023) with a focus on its performative dimension within one social formation of nostalgia – the tiktok aesthetic. specifically, this paper draws on a qualitative, artifact analysis of the popular #nostalgaicore aesthetic to explore how tiktok’s socio-technical affordances enable and/or constrain boym’s (2001) restorative and reflective modalities of nostalgia and the imaginaries they enable as a basis for action. tiktok offers an ideal setting in which to explore this dynamic for two reasons. first, teens and young adults, which tiktok targets (zeng et al, 2021), have been described in the popular press as one of the most nostalgic generations with more than 140b views for #nostalgia on the platform as of october 2023. second, the literature on tiktok’s affordances as “hub for creative expression” (abidin, 2021) point to communicative forms, such as the documentary, explanatory, and interactive (schellewald, 2021), that suggest the possibility for new nostalgic practices to emerge in a socio-technical environment with distinctive temporal, spatial, and affective dynamics owing to the social structuring effects of its algorithm (e.g., bhandari & bimo, 2022, hautea et al, 2021, zulli & zulli, 2020). this paper proceeds as follows. first, i review the literature on digital media and nostalgia to explicate an elusive concept. echoing pickering and keightley’s (2006) invocation to explore nostalgia’s “modalities,” i suggest that extant typologies of nostalgia as either an affective “mood” or a “mode” of representation (grainge, 2004) limit our ability to appreciate how nostalgia constitutes an active communicative process of mediation. nostalgia, by its very definition, rearticulates time and space in response to the affective sensation of loss. drawing on performance studies and emotion theory, i conceptualize nostalgia as an “emotive” (reddy, 2001) to foreground its performative dynamics and allow for further study of nostalgia as a performance or “narrative event” (bauman, 1986) that connects time, space, and affective feeling through the “dialogic imagination” (bahktin, 1981). second, applying this theoretical framework to the study of tiktok’s affordances for performative nostalgia, i conducted an artifact analysis (given, 2008) of the most viewed video connected to #nostalgiacore on the platform (figure 1) with a widely used original sound. i examined how its spatial, temporal, and affective affordances enabled and/or constrained nostalgia’s restorative and reflective (boym, 2001) dimensions drawing on a multimodal analysis of the content of the video (inclusive of its visual, aural, and textual dimensions) and its top comments as well as one antecedent and three resultant tiktok videos that used its original sound. while prior studies emphasize the constraints of algorithmic environments on nostalgia as a mnemonic resource (kidd & nieto mcavoy, 2023; jacobsen, & beer, 2021; kaun & stiernstedt, 2014), this study’s focus on a single artifact permitted a fine-grained analytical distinction between bauman (1986)’s narrated event, or the so-called memory of the nostalgic object, and the narrative event, or the performative triggering event represented by the act of a creator posting a nostalgic tiktok video. figure 1. the primary artifact selected for analysis, the most viewed tiktok in #nostalgiacore at the time of this study in may 2022, centers on a rendition of a song (fallen down) about a child lost in a magical underground from the 2015 2d toby fox video game, undertale, as played by a tiktok creator on a dilapidated, out-of-tune piano at their school. showing how the narrative event is taken up and remade within and beyond the #nostalgiacore community through platform affordances (davis, 2020), i argue that tiktok affords a digital place-making resource (basaraba, 2023) for young people to enact liminal performances (turner, 1969; schechner & brady, 2013) that permit the imaginative social construction of nostalgic worlds in which new subjectivities and possibilities for action emerge through subsequent performances. through the interplay of its spatial and temporal dynamics, tiktok affords this potentiality by producing a feeling of the “thick present” (abbott, 2016; haraway, 2016) – or the spatialized stretching of the present moment into a liminal time-space. this precondition of temporal presence (coleman, 2020, 2018), in turn, provides a spatial terrain upon which subsequent creative practices, like nostalgic place-making, can occur. ultimately, i contend that these fever dream-like performances blend the restorative and reflective dimensions of nostalgia, resisting normative assumptions of nostalgia operating on a linear temporal horizon of action (i.e., backward/past vs. forward/future) as its expressive form is made, remade, and algorithmically circulated. contributing to recent work on “algorithmic nostalgia” (kidd & nieto mcavoy, 2023), these findings suggest that creative and mnemonic practices are entangled in algorithmically structured aesthetic social formations of nostalgia and invite further consideration to how tiktok encourages the “mnemonic imagination” (keightley & pickering, 2012) through performance. future research might explore what participation in these formations means to young people in the context of the emergent digital place-making practices (basaraba, 2023) illustrated by this study. in conclusion, while it is easy to dismiss the popularity of nostalgia on tiktok as symptomatic of the latest generational nostalgia wave inviting retreat to the past, technology changes our relationship with time and space – the terrain upon which nostalgia takes root – calling attention to how nostalgia changes, performatively, in the interstitial spaces and varied time horizons the platform’s affordances permit. references abbott, a. d. (2016). processual sociology. university of chicago press. abidin, c. (2021). mapping internet celebrity on tiktok: exploring attention economies and visibility labours. cultural science journal, 12(1), 77–103. https://doi.org/10.5334/csci.140 bakhtin, m. m. (1981). forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel. in m. holquist (ed.) & c. emerson (trans.). the dialogic imagination: four essays by m. m. bakhtin. university of texas press. bauman, r. (1986). story, performance, and event: contextual studies of oral narrative. cambridge university press. basaraba, n. (2023). the emergence of creative and digital place-making: a scoping review across disciplines. new media & society, 25(6), 1470-1497. https://doiorg/10.1177/14614448211044942 bhandari, a., and bimo, s. (2022). why’s everyone on tiktok now? the algorithmized self and the future of selfmaking on social media. social media + society, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221086241. boym, s. (2001). the future of nostalgia. basic books. coleman, r. (2020). making, managing and experiencing ‘the now’: digital media and the compression and pacing of ‘real-time.’ new media & society, 22(9), 1680–1698. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820914871 coleman, r. (2018). theorizing the present: digital media, pre-emergence and infrastructures of feeling. cultural studies (london, england), 32(4), 600–622. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2017.1413121 davis, j. l. (2020). how artifacts afford: the power and politics of everyday things (1st ed.). mit press. drakopoulou, s. (2017). “we can remember it for you”: location, memory, and commodification in social networking sites. sage open, 7(3), 215824401771202–. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244017712026 given, l. m. (2008). artifact analysis. in the sage encyclopedia of qualitative research methods (vols. 1-0). sage publications, inc. doi:10.4135/9781412963909 grainge, p. (2004). nostalgia and style in retro america: moods, modes, and media recycling. journal of american & comparative cultures, 23, 27–34. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1537-4726.2000.230127.x haraway, d. j. (2016). staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. duke university press. hautea, s., parks, p., takahashi, b., & zeng, j. (2021). showing they care (or don’t): affective publics and ambivalent climate activism on tiktok. social media + society, 7(2). https://doi-org /10.1177/20563051211012344 jacobsen, b.n., & beer, d. (2021). quantified nostalgia: social media, metrics, and memory. social media + society, 7(2). http://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211008822 jameson, f. (1991). postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. durham: duke university press. kaun, a., & stiernstedt, f. (2014). facebook time: technological and institutional affordances for media memories. new media & society, 16(7), 1154–1168. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814544001 keightley, e. & pickering, m. (2012). the mnemonic imagination. palgrave macmillan uk. kidd, j., & nieto mcavoy, e. (2023). deep nostalgia: remediated memory, algorithmic nostalgia and technological ambivalence. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 135485652211498. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565221149839 lizardi, r. (2017). nostalgic generations and media: perception of time and available meaning. lexington books. niemeyer, k., & siebert, o. (2023). nostalgia, media, and technologies of the future. current opinion in psychology, 101561. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2023.101561 niemeyer, k., & keightley, e. (2020). the commodification of time and memory: online communities and the dynamics of commercially produced nostalgia. new media & society, 22(9), 1639–1662. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820914869 niemeyer, k. (2014). media and nostalgia: yearning for the past, present and future. palgrave macmillan. pentzold, c., & menke, m. (2020). conceptualizing the doings and sayings of media practices: expressive performance, communicative understanding, and epistemic discourse. international journal of communication, 14, 2789-2809. pickering, m., & keightley, e. (2006). the modalities of nostalgia. current sociology, 54(6), 919–941. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392106068458 reddy, w. m. (2001). the navigation of feeling: a framework for the history of emotions. cambridge university press. sedikides, c., & wildschut, t. (2019). the sociality of personal and collective nostalgia. european review of social psychology, 30(1), 123-173. http://doi.org /10.1080/10463283.2019.1630098 schechner, r., & brady, s. (2013). performance studies: an introduction (3rd ed). routledge. turner, v. w. (1969). the ritual process: structure and anti-structure. aldine publishing company. williams, r. (1961). the long revolution. columbia university press. zeng, j., abidin, c., & schafer, m. s. (2021). research perspectives on tiktok and its legacy apps: introduction. international journal of communication, 12, 3161–3172. zulli, d., & zulli, d. j. (2020). extending the internet meme: conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation publics on the tiktok platform. new media & society. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820983603 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): butt, ma. (2022, november). videogames in relationship conflict. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. videogames in relationship conflicts mahli-ann butt university of sydney extended abstract this paper contributes to feminist games studies, media studies, and internet studies, presenting findings from semi-structured interviews conducted with seven self-identified women who played videogames with their romantic partners. it seeks to develop a more multifaceted understanding of women’s gaming ‘lifeworlds’ (cf. jackson, 2013) and their struggles to participate and ‘stay in’ the male-dominant public (harvey, 2021). specifically, this study observes how relationship dynamics and romantic ties between couples can play an important role in shaping women’s gaming practices. in doing so, this argument challenges the assumption that women’s play can be given as simply ‘a free choice’ as kelly bergstrom has similarly critiqued (2019). the medium of videogames is historically constructed around a default hypermasculine ‘gamer’ identity that views girls and women as ‘other’ and ‘outsiders’ (shaw, 2011; vossen, 2018). in games research, popular approaches to amending gaming’s gender divide frequently advocate for the creation of new entry points. however, various scholars have critiqued the common pitfalls and limitations of this interventionist literature for severely overlooking the many girls and women who already play (taylor, 2006, pp. 93-99; bergstrom, 2019; harvey, 2021). problematically, these gender essentialist approaches often treat ‘females’ inherent ‘lack of interest’ in videogames as the main problem to overcome (taylor, 2006, pp. 93-99). however, many girls and women continue to play – as they always have – despite barriers (ibid., 123). during gameplay, despite women’s deployment of various coping strategies afforded by technological affordances (cote, 2017), the foreboding sense of ‘environmental threat’ (cf. massumi, 2015) imposed by a hostile hypermasculine ‘new gaming public’ (salter & blodgett, 2012) continues to impact women’s gaming lifeworlds as they are reconfigured towards a sense of harm as simply inevitable. in their attempts to navigate an increasingly hostile environment, women must carefully manage their own sense of safety as scholars such as emma a. jane (2017), amanda c. cote (2017), and alison harvey (2021) have carefully and extensively documented. many women remain in a state of hypervigilance while facing the amplified visibility of popular misogyny online (jane, 2017; humphreys, 2017). this hostility impacts how women ‘choose’ to play or not play certain videogames, what videogames they ‘choose’ to play or not play, and how women will play those videogames. here, the unfair onus placed on women to develop more intricate coping strategies in order to keep gaming, reflects wider societal structures facilitating ‘rape cultures’ that shift the burden of safety onto victims rather than holding perpetrators accountable (lonsway & fitzgerald, 1994). in this study’s findings, interviewees tended to describe their relationship to gaming in ways that reflect wider ‘feminine resilience’ discourses of ‘leaning in’ and ‘leaning out’. in the last decade, popular neoliberalist feminist-inspired discourses have encouraged women to either ‘lean in’ (sanberg, 2013, cited in mcrobbie, 2020) or ‘lean out’ (shevinsky, 2015) of male-dominated workplaces. here, i take inspiration from angela mcrobbie’s critiques of the politics of resilience observed in ‘leadership feminism’ and ‘perfect-imperfect-resilience’ (shortened to ‘p-i-r’) that both evoke the image of the ‘perfect’ woman (2020). drawing from mcrobbie, i propose that the affective structures of ‘leaning in’ and ‘leaning out’ can also highlight the limited affordances of women’s participation in gaming and that these gender narratives continue to shape their everyday ‘private’ lives and leisure practices outside of the workplace. in thinking about these two commonplace pieces of advice given, especially to young women, i argue that ‘lean in’ and ‘lean out’ problematically reduce these situations to a false binary choice. exploring conflicts between couples relative to their gaming habits, as i examine, demonstrates how the accounts of women’s evolving (dis)engagement to gaming cannot sufficiently be captured within a scope that is often limited to discussions about women’s barriers to entry (bergstrom, 2019). cote’s research on women’s coping strategies suggests that women’s participation is further obfuscated because some tactics camouflage their gender in order to avoid unwanted attention (2017, p. 145) and, as such, can make it difficult to witness and see them fully represented in the public eye (cf. taylor 2006, p. 123). speaking with women about how they negotiate gaming with romantic partners thus helps to paint a more complex and complicated picture of their lives, gaming practices, and gaming lifeworlds. when exploring how gaming can contribute to bonding with a significant other as well as discords in intimate relationships, we can also provide a better account of the differing, complicated, and sometimes conflicting ways that women might sometimes lean towards and/or away from certain aspects and assemblages of games (taylor, 2009). in doing so, this research emphasizes that the role of intersubjectivity – such as romantic ties – can also significantly impact women’s shifting (dis)engagement in gaming. references bergstrom, k. (2019). barriers to play: accounting for non-participation in digital game play. feminist media studies, 19(6), 841-857. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1484790 https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1484790 cote, a. c. (2017). “i can defend myself”: women’s strategies for coping with harassment while gaming online. games and culture, 12(2), 136-155. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412015587603 harvey, a. (2021). making the grade: feminine lack, inclusion, and coping strategies in digital games higher education. new media & society, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820986831 jackson, m. (2013). lifeworlds: essays in existential anthropology. the university of chicago press. jane, e. a. (2017). online misogyny: a short (and brutish) history. sage publications. lonsway, k.a. & fitzgerald, l. f. (1994). rape myths. psychology of women quarterly, 18, 133-164. massumi, b. (2015). ontopower: war, powers, and the state of perception. duke university press. mcrobbie, a. (2020). feminism and the politics of resilience: essays on gender, media and the end of welfare. polity press. shaw, a. (2011). do you identify as a gamer? gender, race, sexuality, and gamer identity. new media & society, 12(1), 28-44. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444811410394 shevinsky, e. (ed.). (2015). lean out: the struggle for gender equality in tech and startup culture. or books. taylor, t. l. (2006). play between worlds: exploring online game culture. the mit press. taylor, t. l. (2009). the assemblage of play. games and culture, 4(4), 331–339. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412009343576 https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412015587603 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820986831 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444811410394 https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412009343576 https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412009343576 https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412009343576 selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): ruffino, p. (2021, october). deep games: addressing mental health through independent videogame design. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. deep games: addressing mental health through independent videogame development paolo ruffino university of liverpool, department of communication and media anxiety, depression, burnout and impostor syndrome are frequently reported among game-workers, and are exacerbated among independents and freelancers. at the game developers conference 2020 the association take this revealed that at least 50% of workers in the sector experience psychological burnout in their careers (take this 2020). the uk games industry census published in february 2020 discovered that 31% of respondents suffered anxiety and depression, compared to the national average of 17% (taylor 2020, 48–52). the causes are identified in the instability of the professions in the game industry, frequent forms of harassment and micro-aggression, and stories of unfair treatment on the workplace. the lack of diversity in the field (still predominantly white and male) causes those who do not belong to the dominant gender, race and class to keep silent about these issues, which further impacts on their mental wellness (harvey and fisher 2013; harvey 2019). the paper draws on interviews with four london-based independent videogame developers who have engaged with the production of videogames about mental health. interviews have been conducted online in 2020. the paper argues that conceiving, producing and releasing these games is understood by their makers as a strategy to establish relations with consumers, participants and other developers that could break the invisible barriers that prevent dialogues around mental wellness. more than being concerned with the outcome of their work, developers seek relations with other game workers and players through the process of making, researching, testing, and showing their videogames. the development of videogames about mental health is interpreted by the participants as facilitating exchanges of autobiographical experiences that are otherwise regulated by the norms of professional networking. the present study contributes to scholarship on independent videogame development by exploring how research participants reflect on their affective relations with labour and how their responses mobilise the debates surrounding mental health. in the late 2000s and early 2010s the aspiration of working independently at a videogame became more prominent in western economies, and intersected with the availability of online distribution platforms, crowdfunding, and freely available tools of production (crogan 2018; keogh 2015; ruffino 2021). in the united kingdom the effects of such a technological and social imaginary are particularly visible. according to industry representative ukie, up to 95% of the workforce in the videogame sector in the uk is employed in small or micro-companies, and is often self-funding their initiative (ukie 2018, 25). working individually at a videogame is not a new practice, but it is now becoming the standard for videogame developers, at least at some stage in their careers (vanderhoef 2020). aspiring independent developers must comply with the entrepreneurial and neoliberal practices that determine the existence and survival of their job. in this process, they are expected to frame their passion towards work through a ‘moral calculus’, where vocational and profit-driven labour must be rightly balanced (chia 2019). independent developer are dependent on the labour market, which, despite claims of it being unregulated and open to all, presents a certain set of rules of engagement: it becomes necessary to comply with the rules of the cultural intermediaries, of social media and other contexts of pr and marketing, and appear in first person at multiple publicity, promotion, and networking events (parker, simon and whitson 2017). these tasks demand time and effort, especially since the support originally provided by the professional figure of the producer has been eliminated in independent careers (whitson, simon and parker 2018). the cultural labour of the independent developer is often invisible, deprived of mentoring schemes or clear patterns of progression, characterized by long working hours spent on networking and fundraising. independent developers have marginal agency when it comes to deciding whether, and how, they are going to appear to players, other indies, and the general public. yet, they need to be prepared to take all the responsibility for their products, public actions, and statements. it is within this context that independent gaming and its failures are discussed as individual affairs. these failures typically give rise to social, psychological, and emotional crises, and frequently force independent developers to abandon their projects, social media presence, or, in some cases, even their careers. the dynamics of distribution and marketization of videogame products give rise to the praising and shaming of specific individuals, while treating each story as a separate case, attributable to the (successful or otherwise) life choices of a single person. the paper analyses how four independent game designers have been responding to these systemic contradictions that promise personal emancipation, creative control, and economic success, while simultaneously rendering these almost entirely unachievable (bulut 2020). designing games on mental health is seen by the developers as a personal solution to tackle their anxieties and fears. ultimately, the purpose of their project consists in establishing relations with others from where the (in)visibility of mental health can be addressed, and possibly dealt with, as a systemic issue of the videogame industry. the research offers a number of findings and opens new questions. first, the participants acknowledge that game-making has become more individualised as a result of the emergence of independent development and of the vision of the auteur in game design, and that these tendencies have been increasing individual pressures and further exacerbating the mental distress of game workers. at the same time, their responses are articulated drawing on their personal life stories and on their autobiographical selfreflexivity. they believe that articulating personal life stories in their games, and in the ways they talk about their work, could enable new relations with others and bring to a better, fairer and more inclusive videogame industry. their solutions are partly consistent with the vision of the auteur, but are orientated towards re-enabling their individual agency for the creation of new contexts of intimate exchanges. second, their accounts show that contexts of physical co-presence (such as festivals, game jams, research and collaboration centres) are vital for enabling social connections. these places ‘make work real’ as they make it immediately ‘relatable’ to others, in the words of one of the interviewees, and enable a dialogue that would otherwise remain unspoken. the emphasis put on physical co-presence and proximity as enabling dialogues around mental health raises further questions in times of social isolation. the effects of the covid-19 pandemic on the lives and work of independent videogame developers might have serious repercussions not just on their mental health, but on the very possibility of discussing and addressing issues of mental distress. references bulut, ergin. 2020. a precarious game: the illusion of dream jobs in the video game industry. ithaca (ny): cornell university press. chia, aleena. 2019. “the moral calculus of vocational passion in digital gaming”. television and new media 20(8): 767-777. crogan, patrick. 2018. “indie dreams: video games, creative economy, and the hyperindustrial epoch”. games and culture 13(7): 671-689. harvey, alison. 2019. “becoming gamesworkers: diversity, higher education, and the future of the game industry”. television & new media 20(8): 756-766. harvey, alison and fisher, stephanie. 2013. “intervention for inclusivity: gender politics and indie game development”. loading... journal of the canadian game studies association 7 (11): 25-40. keogh, brendan. 2015. “between triple-a, indie, casual, and diy: sites of tension in the videogames cultural industries” in oakley, k and o'connor, j (eds.), the routledge companion to the cultural industries (routledge media and cultural studies companions). london: routledge: 152-162. parker felan, simon, bart, whitson, jennifer. 2017. “megabooth: the cultural intermediation of indie games.” new media and society 20(5): 1953–1972. ruffino, paolo (ed.). 2021. independent videogames: cultures, networks, techniques and politics. london: routledge. take this. 2020. “mental health state of the industry: past, present & future. gdc vault.” accessed april 12. https://gdcvault.com/play/1026622/mental-health-state-of-the taylor, mark. 2020. uk games industry census understanding diversity in the uk games industry workforce. london: ukie. ukie 2018. “the uk video games sector a blueprint for growth.” accessed april 12. https://ukie.org.uk/sites/default/files/ukie%20blueprint%20for%20growth.pdf. vanderhoef, john. 2020. passion, pixels, and profit: the new creative economy of indie game production. michigan: university of michigan press. whitson, jennifer, simon, bart, parker, felan. 2018. “the missing producer: rethinking indie cultural production in terms of entrepreneurship, relational labour, and sustainability.” european journal of cultural studies. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1367549418810082. https://gdcvault.com/play/1026622/mental-health-state-of-the https://ukie.org.uk/sites/default/files/ukie%20blueprint%20for%20growth.pdf selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): kim, d. o. (2023, october). real but fake, real because fake: technologically augmented k-pop idols and meta-authenticity. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. real but fake, real because fake: technologically augmented k-pop idols and meta-authenticity do own (donna) kim university of illinois at chicago introduction “hi, h. i.,” greets the two heavily filtered faces of jho and tan, the duo from the k-pop idol group “mad monster”. six billion global fans, song collaboration with three famous justins—timberlake, bieber, and trudeau, and the first nft album in korea that has been traded for around $4,500 are some of the unconfirmed achievements that adorn the group’s supposed fame. according to the self-claimed fans in youtube comments, mad monster is the most authentic k-pop idol group there is despite their “natural” autotune singing voice, highly curated “genuine” fan interactions—such as their “cool” signature move to spell out all (but only if it is easy) english words like “hi, h. i.”, and their “born beautiful” heavily filtered faces that occasionally morph back into the original whenever the members “mistakenly” disturb the ar filter sync. these fans, both korean and international, profusely deny—and even claim to sue against those who propagate—the so-called conspiracy that mad monster is somehow related to the “unattractive”, “old” (by k-pop idol standards), and “untalented” comedic duo lee chang ho and kwak bum. while according to their own lore, mad monster has been famous all along with its six billion global fans, most korean public got to know them through their v-logs and music videos on the youtube channel “bbangsongguk” or through tv music shows on korea's major broadcasting stations after they became internet famous. through the case of mad monster, i explore the participatory culture in the supposedly revolutionary proliferation of “humanlike, realistic” digital technologies by drawing on the concept of meta-authenticity (kim, 2022), loosely defined as the desire or achievement of authenticity in practices of inauthenticity. increasing social integration of artificial agents and augmentative tools, such as chatgpt and dall·e, have been approached as groundbreaking, including in ways that suppose liberation from bodies, places, institutions, and even “being human” (brantner & saurwein, 2021; hong, 2021). while the “cyborg” (haraway, 1991) technological shift has shaken traditional ontological binaries—e.g., the hierarchical separation between humans and nonor lesser-than humans (braidotti, 2013; chasin, 1995), the grounds that enabled their historical perpetuation remain yet to be broken: systematic power relations persist, at times unchecked under the flashy banner of technological novelty. however revolutionary in technical terms, technological developments do not equate social, cultural revolutions. case: mad monster therefore, i focus on the implications of these “revolutionary” artificial cyborgs for human practices and cultures, not to re-establish the human-nonhuman binary but to illuminate the persisting human presence and involvement—yet physical, place-bound, sociotechnical, and meaningful. this article investigates how mad monster’s authenticity is achieved through collective practices around their blatantly “inauthentic” technological augmentations like extreme facial and voice filters—not despite them—by qualitatively studying their transmedia content (e.g., bbangsongguk, 2021) and fans’ digital participation. in the conventional sense, mad monster does not exist “in real life” as technologically augmented “fake” figures. however, they do exist; they are animated through the comedians’ bodily performances, through their fans’ voluntary coconstruction of their personas via star-fan and fan-fan interactions, through existing kpop industry practices and internet cultures that create tropes and allow for their play on them, and through commercial parties that unironically capitalize on mad monster and fans’ slights on how over-the-top technological augmentation and presentation derives from inauthentic capitalist interests. the “joke” and the pull of mad monster is that while their technological augmentation stamps them as “inauthentic” and “not human”, all else points towards authenticity—they are otherwise no different from “human” idols. if anything, their “inauthentic” artificiality added to their relative realness over “real” idols. those who were not able to identify their technological enhancements and believed them to have the bodies represented on videos showed genuine confusion at their appeal and popularity, particularly due to all participating parties’ contribution to their fabricated history-in-making. the mad monster universe was co-managed: by the comedy duo, their fans, existing institutions, and commercial interests—the locus of their authenticity was in collaborative performances. to be more specific, in the simplest, producer-focused sense, mad monster can be described as a series of parodic comedic sketches of the domestic and international kpop industry and their fandom cultures by two korean comedians lee chang ho and kwak bum. however, the level of detailed transmedia presentation, the necessity of make-believe participation of the fans, and legacy media and commercial parties’ yield to their playfulness (e.g., broadcasts adopting blatant face filter edits specifically for them) hints at how the notion and forms of produceror product-focused authenticity have shifted in the contemporary digital media ecology (jenkins, 2013). in particular, the public’s welcome acceptance of the parodic easter eggs on k-pop cultures and mad monster’s collaboration with ar filter camera app snow—(in)famous in korean popular discourse for its capacity for natural to “unreal” beautification—highlights how their authenticity is co-constructed from both existing expectations around authentic performances for humans and their presumed inauthentic state (kim, 2022; cf., banetweiser, 2021). moreover, their success was amid the hopeless lamentation around the suspected end of korea’s comedy industry, marked by the unexpected discontinuance of korea’s most esteemed legacy media comedy show gag concert (1999-2020; akin to snl). mad monster’s fans warmly welcomed the now freelancing comedians by saying that youtube and social media-based participatory formats make their comedic acts more “authentic” than what was available through legacy media. key implications and conclusion on one hand, mad monster is a case of contemporary meta-authenticity that demands a shift of focus from the state of technological sophistication to collaborative performances around it; how “humanlike” or technologically augmented cyborgs are involved in social spheres matters more than what they are. this encourages the embracement of engagements with technological social actors, or at the least their relational effects. on the other, their success as “fake but/thus real” ar-filtered, autotuned celebrities warns us. it reminds us of how diverse humans’ crucial contributions can be easily hidden in cyborg phenomena that stress their technological components, and how accountability can be diverted. unlike “human” idols who face strict public policing, they can claim their “inauthentic” technological origin—i.e., “not real anyways”—in instances of scandalous events, or simply disappear. while some of mad monster’s key contributors, the two comedians, are easily identifiable, the process of demanding responsibility can be more complex with other “humanlike” or augmented cyborgs, such as ai agents like chatgpt, that further obscure human involvement (e.g., eubanks, 2018; kang, 2023; smits & wevers, 2021). lastly, they may no longer (not) simply be a tongue-in-cheek novelty or a “cool” experiment when they replicate, not subvert, dominant structures. this returns to the first point; a state-focused lens may diminish how their role and discursive practices can further normalize existing power relations, not simply by affirming them through replication but by making less conspicuous their contributions to value production and exploitative patterns. the revolutionary potential of cyborgs rests not in technical achievements but in the collaborations of the actors involved: questioning, shaking, and breaking the ground (jenkins et al., 2020). references banet-weiser, s. (2021). ruptures in authenticity and authentic ruptures: producing white influencer vulnerability (kids & technology essay series). https://www.mediatechdemocracy.com/work/ruptures-in-authenticity-and-authenticruptures-producing-white-influencer-vulnerability bbangsongguk (director). (2021, april 28). [4k] mad monster (maedeumonseuteo)— mine rudolph (nae rudolpeu) official mv. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cxqjbnqp0 braidotti, r. (2013). the posthuman. polity press. brantner, c., & saurwein, f. (2021). covering technology risks and responsibility: automation, artificial intelligence, robotics, and algorithms in the media. international journal of communication, 15(0), article 0. chasin, a. (1995). class and its close relations: identities among women, servants, and machines. in j. halberstam & i. livingston (eds.), posthuman bodies (73rd–96th ed.). indiana university press. eubanks, v. (2018). automating inequality: how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. st. martin’s press. haraway, d. (1991). simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. free association books. hong, s. (2021). technofutures in stasis: smart machines, ubiquitous computing, and the future that keeps coming back. international journal of communication, 15(0). jenkins, h. (2013). textual poachers: television fans and participatory culture (20th anniversary edition). routledge. jenkins, h., peters-lazaro, g., & shresthova, s. (2020). popular culture and the civic imagination: case studies of creative social change. nyu press. kang, e. b. (2023). ground truth tracings (gtt): on the epistemic limits of machine learning. big data & society, 10(1), 20539517221146120. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517221146122 kim, d. o. (2022). virtually human? negotiation of (non)humanness and agency in the sociotechnical assemblage of virtual influencers [embargoed doctoral dissertation]. university of southern california. smits, t., & wevers, m. (2021). the agency of computer vision models as optical instruments. visual communication, 1470357221992097. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357221992097 aoir2021-submission-rocketsheep.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 rocketing sheep: affective discipline in anonymous mobile social media jodel during the covid-19 pandemic salla-maaria laaksonen university of helsinki anna rantasila tampere university introduction the covid-19 pandemic has sparked online discussion in unprecedented volumes, as citizens use social media to share their opinions and concerns regarding the virus and its prevention. much of such activity takes place under real names on popular platforms like facebook and twitter. however, parallel to these platforms more anonymous, low-visibility spaces remain and flourish, including completely anonymous services such as secret.ly and ask.fm, or pseudonymized services such as reddit (boccia arieri et al., 2021). this study focuses on covid-19 related discussions on anonymous, ephemeral mobile social media platform jodel. jodel is an anonymous-by-design application that allows messaging with others who are geographically close. there are no usernames, only running numbers that identify participants within each thread. in finland, the application has been particularly popular among young adults and students. in this study, we explore discussions about the covid-19 pandemic on jodel in helsinki, finland through the theoretical notion of affective discipline. by exploring the dynamics of an anonymous social media application in the context of the covid-19 pandemic, this study contributes new insights on anonymous and ephemeral civic engagement and how affect and emotions are key in understanding the dynamics of how citizens come together in these contemporary, networked platforms (e.g., boccia artier et al., 2021; papacharissi, 2015). because the covid-19 pandemic introduced tight restrictions on people’s lives, the anonymous discussions on jodel provide a view to how individuals cope with and discuss measures that ultimately infringe on their independence. we approach the anonymous jodel discussions through the concept of affective discipline (rantasila, 2020a), which parallels how the discussions on covid-19 suggested citation (apa): laaksonen, s-m. & rantasila, a. (2021, october). rocketing sheep: affective discipline in anonymous mobile social media jodel during the covid-19 pandemic. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. restrictions and preventive measures revolve around questions of control. affective discipline refers to a set of dynamics and practices used in attempts to manage the affective intensities of public conversations (rantasila, 2020b). while calls for restrictions by public health officials are a recognizable example of affective discipline, acts of affective discipline also take place on social media (rantasila, 2020b). in addition to direct expressions, affective disciplining takes more subtle and vernacular forms (das, 2017; rantasila, 2020b), such as the use of emojis and gifs (tuters et al., 2020). methodology our data is collected during a virtual ethnography on the @corona channel in jodel in helsinki 2020-21. a password-protected, hidden tumblr blog was used for field notes, screenshots, and links. the most intensive stage of data collection was between nov 30 and dec 30, 2020, marked by the beginning of the second wave of the pandemic. screenshots and field notes were also added periodically after the initial field period. this resulted in a dataset of 345 commented screenshots. for the analysis, all posts were exported to a tabular file and processed in a spreadsheet program. the data was analysed using a data-driven approach focusing on the field notes and images combined with a qualitative content analysis of the screen-captured conversations. our main interest was in the targets and dynamics of affective expression: how the users seek to influence the affective intensities of the anonymous discussions, in context of the pandemic in their everyday? how does jodel’s anonymous platform support these affective expressions? preliminary results the discussions were a mix of collectively processing the pandemic everyday, bemoaning other citizens’ behavior, anxiously following the course of the epidemic, and collective aspirations about the post-corona future. the majority of the active users seemed to support strict restriction measures. they took the government recommendations seriously and were seemingly concerned about the virus. one motivation for the discussions seemed to be sharing news and information. in addition to this informational function, the discussions seeped in affect and emotion. sometimes the discussion featured a peculiar mix of joy and fear, perhaps as a mechanism of coping and handling the crisis. for example, as the second wave started in finland, the channel community started to follow and speculate the daily case numbers. paradoxically and ironically, the commenters anticipated the “rocket launch”, that is, a steep rise of cases. we identified several forms of affective discipline taking place on the channel. first, the discussants seeked to discipline their own affective stances. commenters used the channel to seek advice when potentially infected, when making decisions on actions that risked spreading the virus, and shared their anxiety while waiting for test results. further, jodlers communicated a sense of security through details and numbers, in particular through the intense following of the infection numbers. a second prevalent form of discipline was disciplining absent others—strangers, relatives, friends—by stalking and moralistically evaluating their actions from mask use to misinformation. in particular, discussions about restriction breakers, such as those having parties, became sites of intensive affective disciplining (cf. ahmed, 2004; paasonen, 2015). further, we also observed technologically-afforded forms of disciplining (present) others: disciplining opinions in the conversation with up/downvotes, and disciplining opinions and affect by posting normative polls. the affective discipline in the community thus culminates in moralistic judgements and reinforcing of social norms—accompanied with peer support. the enforced anonymity of jodel supports these both, and effectively brings out the everyday concerns, affects and opinions during the pandemic. while the discussions contain moral judgements (haidt, 2012), they were also rife with humor, irony and distanced spectatorship of the ongoing pandemic, resonating with the carnivalistic discussion cultures of other anonymous and pseudonymous platforms (graham, 2019; tuters & hagen, 2020). during our research period, the channel gained a reputation as a home for restriction bigotry. this invited opponents and trolls to join in an apparent attempt to disrupt the affective disciplining. the most upfront forms of criticism described the core posters as “corona sheep” who were bindly and uncritically following the government rules. to conclude, we suggest that disciplining affect and emotions are key in understanding the dynamics of anonymous online communities. despite the anonymity of jodel, a sense of community is constituted through the practices of affective disciplining. we argue that anonymous and ephemeral platforms such as jodel, where identities and histories are nonexistent, effectively bring out the affective forces that assemble and disassemble communities. references ahmed, s. (2004). the cultural politics of emotion. edinburgh university press boccia artieri, g., brilli, s., & zurovac, e. (2021). below the radar: private groups, locked platforms, and ephemeral content—introduction to the special issue. social media + society, 7(1), doi:10.1177/2056305121988930 das, r. (2017). the mediation of childbirth: ‘joyful’ birthing and strategies of silencing on a facebook discussion group. european journal of cultural studies, doi: 10.1177/1367549417722094 graham, e. (2019). boundary maintenance and the origins of trolling. new media and society 21(9), doi:10.1177/1461444819837561 haidt, j. (2012). the righteous mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion. penguin. paasonen, s. (2015). a midsummer’s bonfire: affective intensities of online debate. in hillis k., paasonen s. & petit m (eds.) networked affect (pp. 27-42). mit press. papacharissi, z. (2015). affective publics. sentiment, technology, and politics. oxford university press. rantasila, a. (2020a). circulating emotions, sticky feelings. affective dynamics of the fukushima daiichi nuclear disaster in a hybrid media environment. doctoral dissertation, tampere university. http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-952-03-1764-5 rantasila, a. (2020b). managing unpleasant moods. affective discipline in facebook discussions. european journal of cultural studies, doi: 10.1177/1367549420973217 tuters, m., & hagen, s. (2020). (((they))) rule: memetic antagonism and nebulous othering on 4chan. new media & society, 22(12), 2218–2237. doi:10.1177/1461444819888746 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 ju, r. (2023, october). lifestyle governmentality in china: governing the entrepreneurial subjects through lifestyle practices on xiaohongshu (red). paper: presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. lifestyle governmentality in china: governing the entrepreneurial citizen subjects through lifestyle practices on xiaohongshu (red) ran ju university of illinois urbana champaign background and context china uses its sovereign power to govern internet technology in a way that stabilizes party rule by imposing content censorship on digital media and platforms and establishing institutional control over the data infrastructure. the cyberspace administration of china highlighted that platform governance is tightly related to “national security, the lifeline of the national economy, major aspects of the people’s livelihood, and major public interests” (xinhuanet, 2021). the oversight of lifestyle platforms and wanghong (the chinese name for influencers) economy is playing a vital role in this endeavor. xiaohongshu (red), the chinese biggest lifestyle sharing platform, as a collaborator and partner with china’s national cultural and political project (wang & lobato, 2019), aligns with multiple strategies of governing, shaping and guiding citizens through lifestyle practices. more than 200 million users share photos with accompanying texts, and videos about their shopping, fashion, travel, education and other lifestyle experiences and reviews on red. in this article, i propose the term “lifestyle governmentality” to capture red as a cultural technology of citizenship that directs selfmanaging subjects toward the desired outcomes sought by various governmental institutions. i suggest that the inducement offered by red to facilitate and improve users’ personal life, fulfillment and success through lifestyle sharing is distinctly tied to a hybrid model of governmentality that combines neoliberal and socialist political reasoning about governance, enterprise, and social welfare. main research questions in this article, i apply a foucauldian perspective of governmentality (foucault, 1991; gordon, 1991; rose, 1998) and sociological lifestyle studies (abercrombie et al., 2006; binkley, 2007) to analyze how red disseminates information, guidance and templates for self-shaping and improved living to shape and regulate the conduct of citizen subjects. here i locate the citizenship patterns red enacts within a framework of governmentality that combines neoliberal and socialist programs, reforms, and discourses. the central questions guiding this research project are: 1) how do the historical, cultural, and social specificities of china’s governmentality that frames “lifestyle” as a governmental mechanism influence the dispersed process of “selfmaking” on red? 2) how does red implement cultural training that indirectly governs the subjects under the name of lifestyle maximization, individual choice, and personal responsibility? 3) how do everyday users respond to, act through, rely on and negotiate with the governmental practices and authoritative discourses that position them as ideal entrepreneurial subjects? methodological frameworks foucault’s theory of governmentality considers the conduct of self as an ongoing life-project in which individuals are given agency, self-responsibility and selfempowerment (foucault, 1982; rose, 1998; ouellette & hay, 2007).this perspective has informed many studies citing lifestyle media as a cultural technology that translates authoritative discourses as chances for citizen subjects to exercise agency and enhance personal well-being within a neoliberal context (lewis, 2011; ouellette & hay, 2008; woronov, 2016). the current literature focusing on the chinese lifestyle platforms’ relationships to theories of governmentality explores how these platforms facilitate the construction and spreading of authoritative knowledge in disciplining the female body (liu & wang, 2022; liao, 2021) as well as the commercialization of the entrepreneurial labor of content creators (guo, 2022). but this body of literature tends to overlook the interplay between the top-down and the bottom-up networks in which management and guidance over individuals and populations could occur with the active engagement of political authorities, lifestyle platforms, professional associations, and citizen subjects themselves. by formulating the concept “lifestyle governmentality,” this article aims to bridge the gap between the chinese framework of governmentality theories (palmer & winiger, 2019; sigley, 2016; jiang, 2020), which emphasize continuities with the maoera approach to total social mobilization and the reinvention of neoliberal techniques in shaping people’s subjectivities, and lifestyle studies, which see lifestyle choices as a sense of identity formation and social group stratification (bauman, 2000; bourdieu, 1984; weber, 1946). methods and preliminary findings this research projects combines a systematic document analysis of regulations, notices, and guidelines related to platform governance, with walk-through method (light et al., 2018), and in-depth interviews with red influencers (n=12) and users (n=35). an analysis on the documents released from 2018 to 2022 from the central and local government agencies and private enterprises allows me to develop empirical knowledge of how the notion of ‘entrepreneurial citizenship’ was framed in the governing focus of lifestyle platforms. moreover, i attempt to grasp how these governmental techniques apprehend the everyday practices of users through an interview-centric ethnographic study. each interview lasted between 30 to 60 minutes. the open-ended nature of the questions was intended to elicit a narrative describing how users make meaning of their creativity, interaction and negotiation with red’s government processes and official regulatory organizations. these data were generated and coded using thematic analysis (gangneux, 2019). the first section traces chinese historical continuities and ruptures in the politicization of lifestyle practices that frame the current legal and regulatory framework of governing lifestyle platform. in the revolutionary era, the chinese community party’s strategy of politicizing individual lifestyle choices was aimed at realizing its utopian vision of a classless society. following the open and reform policy in 1978, there was a significant shift in the governance of leisure and lifestyle, with the primary objective being to employ citizens’ lifestyles as a means to display china’s modernization. today one of the major political and economic goals is to boost household spending in all realms of lifestyle and lift most of the population into the middle class, while keeping social mobility at a reasonable level. the chinese governmental technologies for performing “the care of an entrepreneurial self” as an obligation to society are incorporated into the policy framework of platform governance. the second section illustrates how the multiple strategies of governmentality that occur over and through the activities of lifestyle sharing reconcile two dimensions of placing users as subject of governance. first, red partners with many governmental bodies that shape a kind of entrepreneurial self to facilitate “healthy” lifestyles for citizen subjects who could master themselves, care for themselves and govern themselves on behalf of the government’s goals. these strategies include algorithmically constructing a regime of visibility by incentivizing influencers and their followers to produce knowledge in accordance with the entrepreneurial norm. second, users are encouraged to organized into a “sisterhood community” that involves expertise networks to expand the values of marketplace into domains that were not previously considered economic, such as emotional life, romance relationships and selfhood. for example, an influencer mentioned that marriage and romance relationships should consider social class matching as it is even more important especially in light of the deceleration of china’s booming economy. the third section highlights when lifestyle governmentality works through the formation of users as entrepreneurial subjects, this form of governmentality also bears the enduring possibility of resistance (ettlinger, 2018). the contemporary chinese governmental discourses encourage a kind of self-improvement and empowerment through the acquisition of technological and civilizing skills to produce high-quality subjects under the guidance of the chinese communist party (wallis, 2013). while red is subjected to official regulatory actors including state laws and local administrative rules, it has also emerged as regulatory entities and powerful gatekeepers of lifestyle related content for its own commercial and social benefits. however, in this process, influencers and users were aware of the governing techniques and discussed about their negotiations, challenges, and resistances in our interview. references abercrombie, n., hill, s., & turner, b. s. (2006). the penguin dictionary of sociology. penguin books. bauman, z. (2013). liquid modernity. john wiley & sons. binkley, s. (2007). governmentality and lifestyle studies. sociology compass, 1(1), 111-126. bourdieu, p. (2018). distinction a social critique of the judgement of taste. in inequality classic readings in race, class, and gender (pp. 287–318). routledge. ettlinger, n. (2018). algorithmic affordances for productive resistance. big data & society, 5(1), 2053951718771399. foucault, m. (1982) ‘the subject and power’, critical inquiry, 8(4), pp. 777–795. gangneux, j. (2019). “it is an attitude”: the normalisation of social screening via profile checking on social media. information, communication and society, 1–15. guo, j. (2022). the postfeminist entrepreneurial self and the platformisation of labour: a case study of yesheng female lifestyle bloggers on xiaohongshu. global media and china, 7(3), 303–318. jiang, m. (2016). managing the micro-self: the governmentality of real name registration policy in chinese microblogosphere. information, communication and society, 19(2), 203–220. lewis, t. (2011) ‘making over culture? lifestyle television and contemporary pedagogies of selfhood in singapore’, communication, politics & culture, 44(1), pp. 21–32. liao, s. (2021). wang hong fashion culture and the postfeminist time in china. fashion theory, 25(5), 663–685. liu, y., & wang, w. (2022). discipline and resistance in the representation of motherhood: postpartum recovery discussion on xiaohongshu. feminist media studies, 1–17. ouellette, l. and hay, j. (2007) better living through reality tv. blackwell. rose, n. (1998) inventing our selves: psychology, power, and personhood. cambridge university press. palmer, d. a., & winiger, f. (2019). neo-socialist governmentality: managing freedom in the people’s republic of china. economies et societes, 48(4), 554–578. sigley, g. (2006). chinese governmentalities: government, governance and the socialist market economy. economy and society, 35(4), 487–508. wallis, c. (2013). technology and/as governmentality: the production of young rural women as low-tech laboring subjects in china. communication and critical/cultural studies, 10(4), 341–358. wang, w. y. (2021). looking after the elderly, looking after the nation: red (xiao hongshu) and china’s biopolitical governance of ageing. asian journal of communication, 31(5), 404–420. weber, m. (2018). class, status, party. the inequality reader. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429494468-7/class-status-party-max-weber woronov, t. e. (2016) ‘“model consumers”: beauty bloggers, everyday experts, and governmentality in urban china’, in new mentalities of government in china. routledge, pp. 204–222. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429494468-7/class-status-party-max-weber selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): butkowski, chelsea p. (2022, november). social media feeds amid the election everyday: digital boundaries and disruption during the 2020 u.s. election. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. social media feeds amid the election everyday: digital boundaries and disruption during the 2020 u.s. election chelsea p. butkowski university of pennsylvania elections are established media spectacles, marking major points of democratic transition through events that disrupt established media routines and rhythms of everyday life (dayan & katz, 1992). however, the extent and ways that elections and other political events intervene in the “regularly scheduled programming” of “ordinary” people’s media use are highly contextual, particularly as politics becomes more digital and our entanglements with the digital become more algorithmic (couldry, 2004; papacharissi, 2015). the internet and social media have contributed to collapsing abstract distinctions between personal or everyday life and political events, even amid democratic milestones (highfield, 2016). yet experiences of everyday life, time, and disruption are inherently tied to power relations and social positionalities (sharma, 2014). in digital spaces, they are also shaped by the hybrid sociotechnical environments, social networks, and information flows that co-curate our exposure to news and other political media (thorson & wells, 2016). layered with individual political attitudes and knowledge, these structural factors suggest that experiences of election media might be all-encompassing to one citizen while being more ambient to another. with these concerns in mind, i draw from research on experiences and affect amid political change (coleman, 2013; papacharissi, 2015) to examine how “ordinary” u.s. american citizens (i.e., not political figures) consume, witness, and feel through digital media during an ongoing election. i carry out this work by centering the social media feed as a space for political media exposure and boundary management. across platforms, feeds are endless, ephemeral strands of text personalized for single users from minute-to-minute. feeds allow many different information types and sources to collide and compete for prominence, helped along by quantified metrics and algorithmic curation (wells & thorson, 2017). these consequential spaces have proven exceedingly difficult to study, with legal, ethical, or technical limitations obstructing topdown analysis of individualized feeds. in this paper, i decenter top-down analyses of the social media feed by utilizing a series of “small data” observational interviewing techniques that incorporate my research participants as co-analysts of their own personal platform ecologies. i describe this method as feed analysis interviewing, which draws on approaches such as walkthrough and scroll back methods (møller & robards, 2019). through these interviews, i set out to examine the social and technical practices that citizens use to navigate political media disruption during an unfolding election. i studied this during the 2020 u.s. presidential election, which extended far longer than a typical election timeline due to mail-in voting and political contestation. ultimately, my findings suggest that participants understand their feeds as spaces for articulating and maintaining symbolic boundaries. this is not merely to endorse their own political beliefs, as prior research suggests (e.g., neely, 2021), but also to maintain imagined distinctions between their experiences of politics and everyday life online. research design i conducted a series of three hour-long, in-depth virtual interviews with the same group of respondents (n = 21) over the course of the 2020 u.s. election, with each interview taking a different perspective on the social media feed. there were 55 interviews in total. i conducted this cross-platform study over the course of five months surrounding the election in november 2020. respondents were residents of new york state recruited through advertisements posted to local craigslist pages and subreddits. each interview involved a different feed-based elicitation method. during the first interview, which took place in october 2020 before election day, respondents screenshared their social media feeds, and we scrolled through them together in realtime to discuss the state of their social media ecologies pre-election. before the second interview, conducted immediately after the election in november 2020, i asked respondents to compile and submit a “feed diary” describing and screenshotting their feeds during the week of election day from november 1–7. the second interview involved an in-depth discussion of the feed diary and screenshots. finally, in the third interview, conducted in february 2021 after the u.s. capitol insurrection, i compiled a collection of widely circulated news images from the election and its aftermath, constructing a feed of my own to spark conversation and critique from respondents. i am analyzing the interviews in maxqda through an iterative coding process that involves identifying emergent themes, consulting the literature, and revisiting transcripts and observational memos (charmaz, 2014). preliminary findings according to lamont and molnár (2002), social actors articulate symbolic boundaries “to categorize objects, people, practices, and even time and space” (p. 168). my initial findings suggest that participants conceive of their social media feeds as environments for constructing and enforcing symbolic boundaries between their “normal,” “real,” or “everyday” lives and the events of the election. in doing so, they forged a kind of temporal boundary work realized through sociotechnical practices. while some participants reported that their feeds were overtaken with political posts, others described the election as a background event. one of my participants (woman, 24) recounted the former experience in her feed diary by writing, “it feels insensitive to post anything other than election-related content.” regardless of the make-up of their feeds, participants described feed management measures to separate the election from their everyday lives, especially as ballot-counting and unrest extended longer than they expected. an initial overview of emergent practices includes: alternating periods of hyper-vigilance with detox and disengagement; humor and memeification; selfrepresentation; and compartmentalizing politics within particular platforms. conclusion political communication literature has devoted significant attention to practices and effects of political avoidance on social media, such as unfriending networked political detractors (e.g., neely, 2021). however, this paper challenges scholars to examine how people use and consume social media to define boundaries between realms of political experience. it also employs a bottom-up approach to studying the social media feed as lens for understanding these experiences. in doing so, it probes the junctures and overlaps between the personal and political as well as political events and mundane media routines. references charmaz, k (2014). constructing grounded theory. sage. coleman, s. (2013). how voters feel. cambridge university press. couldry, n. (2004). media rituals: a critical approach. routledge. dayan, d. & katz, e. (1992). media events: the live broadcasting of history. harvard university press. highfield, t. (2016). social media and everyday politics. polity. lamont, m., & molnár, v. (2002). the study of boundaries in the social sciences. annual review of sociology, 28, 167–195. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.28.110601.141107 møller, k., & robards, b. (2019). walking through, going along, scrolling back: ephemeral mobilities in digital ethnography. nordicom review, 40, 95–109. https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2019-0016 neely, s. r. (2021). politically motivated avoidance in social networks: a study of facebook and the 2020 presidential election. social media + society, 7(4). https://doi.org/10.1177%2f20563051211055438 papacharissi, z. (2015). affective publics: sentiment, technology, and politics. oxford university press. sharma, s. (2014). in the meantime: temporality and cultural politics. duke university press. thorson, k., & wells, c. (2016). curated flows: a framework for mapping media exposure in the digital age. communication theory, 26, 309–328. https://doi.org/10.1111/comt.12087 wells, c., & thorson, k. (2017). combining big data and survey techniques to model the effects of political content flows in facebook. social science computer review, 35(1), 33–52. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0894439315609528 please update your browser your browser isn’t supported anymore. update it to get the best youtube experience and our latest features. learn more microsoft edge safari google chrome mozilla firefox opera remind me later about copyright contact us terms privacy policy & safety © 2025 google llc aoir2023-submission-rawlings r final selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): rawlings, r et. al., (2023, october). how queer hook-up / people nearby application (pna) users navigate hybrid digital and local space in rural and urban areas: results from a multi-region qualitative scoping study in the united kingdom (uk). paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. how queer hook-up / people nearby application (pna) users navigate hybrid digital and local space in rural and urban areas: results from a multi-region qualitative scoping study in the united kingdom (uk) richard rawlings northumbria university genavee brown northumbria university lisa thomas northumbria university lynne coventry abertay university issue scholars recognise that geographical cultures shape identity (schweighofer, 2016), yet culturally specific applications such as grindr’s focus on gay men often fail to consider geography (hardy & lindtner, 2017). before the millennium, finding other queer people often involved travelling to a queer venue in a city. yet when tinder, a pna for people of all sexualities, launched in 2012 (crook, 2014), grindr already had over 1.5 million users (van grove, 2011). queer people have thus been at the forefront of internet technologies (mowlabocus, 2010), and are likely visible rurally via pnas, some of which semi-publicly display users organised by geographical proximity on any smartphone screen. this creates a hybrid space, where digital and geographical realities combine (miles, 2021). for rural queer people, visibility in relation to sexuality is carefully negotiated and cannot be taken for granted (gray, 2009). our research consequently asks what pnas afford and complicate for users in rurality, compared to those in cities, and thus how geographical specificities (such as approaches to visibility) are facilitated or constrained by pna architectures. accounting for queer identity in geographical context requires methodological caution. we build on valuable european studies of queer pna use that utilise sexual citizenship theory (driscoll-evans, 2020; mckearney, 2021) while keeping in mind the belief of some scholars that it requires queer compromise (langdridge & parchev, 2018). we take our lead from arguments for empirical methods undergirded by queer theory, while focusing on the assets queer people bring to society, rather than the problems they experience (rivera & nadal, 2019). understanding queer pna use in rurality via these lenses offers an important example through which to comprehend the adaptability of novel internet technologies in enabling or constraining cultural diversity (cserni, 2020), such as the expression of marginalised groups or the needs of rural populations more broadly. methodology a semi-structured approach using five open interview questions was chosen to establish whether location and/or technology use shaped social, sexual, and romantic network creation and/or quality. participation was offered via an interview or qualitative online survey. nine demographic questions (covering location, age, sexual and gender identity, race and ethnicity, outness and relationship status) were included. ethical approval was granted by the psychology department ethics panel at northumbria university. the researcher recruited by creating and contacting a database of local community groups, accepting subsequent invitations to attend rural pride events, engaging friendships (tillman-healy, 2003), and snowball sampling. data collection took place between may and september 2022. the emic researcher (a gay man) carried out a reflexive thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2022) of the data, with a view to understanding the experiences of participants living in different contexts. results 39 participants took part in total, including 26 online survey respondents, 8 online interviews, and 5 face-to-face interviews. 24 participants resided outside of major cities, 11 in cities other than london, and 4 in london. participants included 22 men, 8 women, and 9 non-binary or gender-diverse participants. the sample was majority male in urban areas, though more evenly distributed outside of major cities. the research team harvested three themes from the dataset: firstly, the distinct nature of urban and rural connections described, secondly; the bonds and barriers to relationship formation in urban and rural space, and thirdly; alternate social opportunities beyond pnas. in terms of the nature of connections, participants in urban areas were afforded both friendships and expedient, anonymous, and sexual connections while rural spaces produced like-minded friendships. paying attention to bonds and barriers revealed that participants often seek and achieve friendships in cities and the countryside, even while some pna designs can make this difficult. some city participants mentioned shared housing as a barrier to connection, while landscape features could prevent rural connections. some rural participants discussed context collapse as potentially empowering or reducing safety, with limited control available over which people and contexts are combined. participants described offline lgbtq+ social opportunities as meeting their specific interests and identity needs (such as by catering to bisexual women) in cities, while supporting broader lgbtq+ solidarities outside of major urban areas. across all three themes above, we conceptualised urban pna use as producing vertical hybrid spaces, where increased population density produces digital and physical connections in tangible proximity, enabling spontaneous interaction. rural pna use produces lateral hybridities that map and connect more distant users. discussion this may be the largest extant uk study of queer pna use covering multiple rural regions and cities. it demonstrates that culturally specific hook-up apps indeed lack geographical specificity for those living in the countryside, such as by showing sometimes unreachable profiles some distance away, possibly revealing an awareness of isolation rather than connection (hardy & lindtner, 2017). their cultural specificity is also incomplete: for many participants (in the city and the countryside) queerness extends beyond visible sexuality to friendship, echoing empirical scholarship outside of europe (byron et. al., 2021). pnas can be inadequately tailored tools for this expression, yet sometimes the only tools available. especially in terms of visibility, the pictorial logic of pnas can be problematic for rural users or those partially open about their sexuality, adding empirical credence to extant scholarship (smilges, 2019). participants describe finding local, rural, and trusted social groups beyond pnas, building on earlier studies of community (wilkinson, 2012). our recruitment process demonstrates the time-consuming nature of finding and contacting rural social groups in comparison to the immediacy of queer people visibly organized by distance on smartphone screens. future studies might consider whether the ease of turning to such apps (and their visually stimulating design) drives their use, despite their inadequacy in affording desirable user outcomes or respecting partial disclosure of sexuality, especially in rurality. future exploration of the power relations evident in hybrid spaces (de souza e silva, 2023), especially between culturally specific groups of app users and app designers, may prove fruitful in better understanding queer, rural, or wider user claims and constraints when attempting to realise internet-mediated encounters. some participants who are aware of the mismatch between app affordances and their motives demonstrate skill in using apps beyond their perceived design (such as building or joining friendship groups) or founding alternatives to apps (such as starting book clubs), even where this requires considerable personal emotional and time burdens. by drawing attention to successful queer and rural user strategies, rather than overly focusing on negative outcomes, future research may be able to contribute to the development of internet technologies more expertly tailored to specific users’ needs. references braun, v., & clarke, v. (2022). thematic analysis: a practical guide. sage. byron, p., albury, k., & pym, t. (2021). hooking up with friends: lgbtq+ young people, dating apps, friendship and safety. media, culture & society, 43(3), 497-514. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0163443720972312 crook, j. (2014). burned: the story of whitney wolfe vs. tinder. techcrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/09/whitney-wolfe-vs-tinder/ cserni, r. (2020). limitations of existing cultural globalization perspectives: a case study of the influence of technology on sexualities. sociology compass, 14(3), article e12763. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12763 de souza e silva, a. (2023). hybrid spaces 2.0: connecting networked urbanism, uneven mobilities, and creativity in a (post) pandemic world. mobile media & communications, 11(1), 59-65. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20501579221132118 driscoll-evans, p r. (2020). sexual citizenship beyond the metropolis: bareback sex, chemsex and loneliness in a rural county in the united kingdom. phd thesis, university of essex. https://repository.essex.ac.uk/28891/ gray, m. l. (2009). out in the country: youth, media, and queer visibility in rural america. nyu press. hardy, j., & lindtner, s. (2017). constructing a desiring user: discourse, rurality, and design in location-based social networks. proceedings of the acm conference on computer supported cooperative work, cscw, 13–25. https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998347 langdridge, d., & parchev, o. (2018). transgression and (sexual) citizenship: the political struggle for self-determination within bdsm communities. citizenship studies, 22(7), 667–684. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2018.1508413 mckearney, a. (2021). sexual citizenship: rhetoric or reality for rural gay men in ireland and england? citizenship studies, 25(5), 678–693. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2021.1952930 miles, s. (2021). let’s (not) go outside: grindr, hybrid space, and digital queer neighbourhoods. in bitterman, a., hess, d.b. (eds) the life and afterlife of gay neighborhoods. the urban book series. springer, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3030-66073-4_9 mowlabocus, s. (2010). gaydar culture: gay men, technology and embodiment in the digital age. routledge. mowlabocus, s. (2016). the ‘mastery’ of the swipe: smartphones, transitional objects and interstitial time. first monday, 21(10) 1-27. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v21i10.6950 rivera, d. p., & nadal, k. l. (2019). the intersection of queer theory and empirical methods: visions for the center for lgbtq studies and queer studies. in a. ghaziani & m. brim (eds.), imagining queer methods (191–206). new york university press. schweighofer, k. (2016). rethinking the closet: queer life in rural geographies. in m. l. gray, c. r. johnson, & b. j. gilley (eds.), queering the countryside: new frontiers in rural queer studies (223-243). new york university press. smilges., j. (2019). white squares to black boxes: grindr, queerness, rhetorical silence. rhetoric review, 38(1) 79-92. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07350198.2018.1551661 tillmann-healy, l. (2003). friendship as method. qualitative inquiry 9(5) 729-749. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1077800403254894 time well spent. (2018). app ratings. humanetech.com/app-ratings van grove, j. (2011). popular gay dating app grindr now on android. mashable. https://mashable.com/2011/03/07/grindr-android/ wilkinson, j., bittman, m., holt, m., rawstorne, p., kippax, s., & worth, h. (2012). solidarity beyond sexuality: the personal communities of gay men. sociology, 46(6) 1161-1177. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0038038511435064 microsoft word parnell-independent authors' dependence on big tech-independent authors' dependence on big tech.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): parnell, c. (2021, october). independent authors’ dependence on big tech: categorization and governance of authors of color on amazon. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. independent authors’ dependence on big tech: categorization and governance of authors of color on amazon claire parnell university of melbourne introduction authors who publish their books outside traditional houses are referred to as independent (or ‘indie’) authors or self-publishers. these authors are not reliant on traditional gatekeepers––publishers, editors, and costly printing and distribution––to publish and disseminate their creative works. while self-publishing predates the internet, digital book publishing platforms like amazon kindle direct publishing (kdp), kobo writing life, and apple ibooks are often lauded for enabling independent producers unconnected to established publishers to enter the book industry. despite the appellation, independent authors are not completely autonomous. book publishing on digital platforms is intensely mediated by the technology companies on which authors rely to publish and disseminate their work. platforms like amazon mediate authorial and reader-consumer experiences through their technology architecture, algorithms, governance and categorization systems, and economic models (van dijck, 2013). amazon’s kdp is the largest platform for self-publishing. since launching both its selfpublishing platform and kindle ereader in 2007, amazon has dominated both the selfpublishing and ebook market (mcgurl, 2016). industry research shows that this sector of the publishing industry is growing; 1.68 million print and ebooks were self-published in 2018, showing a 40% increase from the previous year (bowker, 2019). the growth of self-publishing and the ebook market is particularly important for people of color who have historically been marginalised in the publishing industry. according to the 2019 lee & low diversity baseline survey, 5% of us publishing industry professionals are black/afro-american/afro caribbean. accessibility for authors of color is also very low. in the romance genre, the largest and most profitable genre globally, just 8.3% of books published by the leading american romance publishers in 2019 were written by people of color. framework and methods this paper explores amazon’s categorization and content moderation processes as they relate to the work of black self-published romance authors and argue that amazon perpetuates the discrimination black authors face within the publishing industry. this research asks: how does amazon mediate the work of independent authors through its categorization and governance systems, and what impact does this have on book culture and amazon’s ecommerce role more broadly? the critical framework for this research combines media and platform studies with publishing studies. publishing studies is a scholarly discipline that examines the production, circulation and reception of books and shares concerns and methods with the adjacent fields of media studies, reception studies and book history. this research applies an ecology model to map the microsystem of individual book publishing platforms as well as the broader media landscape in which they operate (van dijck, 2013). this conceptual model enables and understanding of the distinctive features of book publishing platforms and their influence on the processes of production and reception online. it also allows an investigation into the technological, economic and socio-cultural contexts in which books and authors circulate online. this paper uses a mixed-methods approach consisting of interviews with authors of color and website analysis that collected metadata from amazon’s web api. findings and significance the placement of books in amazon’s online marketplace is based on a variety of metadata input by authors, including browse categories, book descriptions, keywords and author information. amazon’s browse categories replicate traditional classification systems, including bisac (book industry standards and communications) codes, by designating literature by and about culturally marginalised groups as other from a ‘general’, unspecified but supposedly white, classification. this research shows that, in addition to metadata provided by independent authors, amazon uses profile data of authors, including author photos, biographies and metadata linked to other books from the same account, to determine how books should be categorized in its ecommerce system. in one instance, amazon’s systems continued to override the classifications made by an author interviewed for this research until they changed their profile image from an author headshot to their logo. this form of technological redlining replicates systems of marginalisation in the book industry (noble, 2018). amazon also mediates the publishing practices by independent black authors through their content moderation system. books published via kdp are subject to both human and computational systems of review and organisation. amazon applies a proactive review system to these books that looks at the cover, the description, author, title, the categories, and the tags, but does not read or scan the text for offensive material. it also applies a retroactive editorial review system for comments and books that users have flagged for violating terms of service (gillespie, 2018). a cover for a title by one author interviewed for this research was flagged as ‘adult material’ by amazon’s machine learning moderation system, rekognition, and the book was prevented from being published through kdp. the cover may be considered suggestive but not lewd within the context of romance fiction genre conventions. the author appealed this decision with amazon’s author services and eventually the book was made available on amazon.com. however, although it is technically available for sale across amazon’s global marketplace, it has been suppressed from the site’s search engine results. content deemed ‘adult material’ is excluded from amazon’s search tool and their sales ranking (gillespie, 2018). this demonstrates the technological capabilities amazon must suppress books and highlights a distinction between the explicit rejection of content and implicit suppression of content within its ecosystem. this finding has broader implications for the use of amazon’s moderation technology. rekognition, like many automatic detection software that have been programmed to identify human images, has been proven to be substantially less accurate in accurately identifying darker-skinned individuals, particularly darker-skinned women (buolamwini & gebru, 2018). this algorithmic bias has consequences far beyond books published and sold on amazon. although amazon announced a one-year moratorium on police use of rekognition, it has historically been widely used by us police agencies and the military. amazon acts as a powerful intermediary in the governance and organisation of content in its marketplace. the implicit suppression of authors’ books and categorization redlining is wholly based on the increased datafication of books by amazon. this has major implications for the discoverability of these books and, consequently, author sales. amazon replicates systems of oppression against authors of color who have been historically marginalised in the book publishing industry. references buolamwini, j & gebru, t 2018, ‘gender shades: intersectional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification’, proceedings of machine learning research, vol. 81, no. 1, pp. 1-15. bowker 2019, self-publishing in the united states, 2013-2018: print and ebooks, bowker & proquest, usa. gillespie, t 2018, custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media, yale university press, usa. lee & low 2019, diversity in publishing 2019: diversity baseline survey 2.0, lee & low books, usa. mcgurl, m 2016, ‘everything and less: fiction in the age of amazon’, modern language quarterly, vol. 77, no. 3, pp. 447-471. noble, su 2018, algorithms of oppression, new york university press, ny, usa. the ripped bodice 2019, the state of racial diversity in romance publishing 2019, the ripped bodice, usa. van dijck, j 2013 the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media, oxford university press, usa. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 from global to local: a study of local-first community infrastructure development z. elfen aarhus university abstract global communication networks have long been dominated by centralized, client-server models, which face increasing challenges due to environmental, social, and digital privacy concerns. this thesis explores the potential of distributed, local-first (kleppmann et al., 2019), open-source, peer-to-peer (p4p) networks in supporting resilient infrastructures that prioritize local resilience and data sovereignty. rooted in complexity theory, specifically self-organizing systems, this research examines how social and technical structures within p4p projects evolve in parallel, reflecting a synthesis of critical realism and complexity (byrne & callaghan, 2022). the study employs a multiple-case study design, analyzing nine p4p projects, including āhau, holochain, and scuttlebutt, through 21 semi-structured interviews, workshops, and cocreation exercises. key findings highlight the strong correlation between organizational structures and technical architectures. for example, scuttlebutt’s node-based technical design mirrors its relational structure, while dat shifted from a hierarchical to a modular model, reflecting its evolving technical architecture. additionally, locality—both geographic and cultural—emerged as a crucial factor for the successful implementation of p4p networks. modularity in both technical design and social organization enhanced adaptability and local innovation, with lower financial barriers enabling communityaligned protocols. the conclusion underscores the isomorphic nature of technical and social systems, emphasizing that self-organizing systems thrive when components are small, achievable, and modular. the research contributes to the emerging field of selforganizing infrastructures and highlights the importance of modular communication protocols in fostering decentralized ecosystems. future research could further explore the relationship between self-organizing systems, organizational and technical patterns. elfen, z.(2024, october). from global to local: a study of local-first community infrastructure development. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. introduction in recent decades, global communication networks have relied on centralized, clientserver models, which are increasingly strained in a world marked by environmental crises, social instabilities, and digital privacy concerns (calvin et al., 2023). calls for more resilient infrastructure (eu critical infrastructures directive, 2022) and the development of "good internets" (aoir sheffield, 2024) have gained prominence as societies face these unprecedented challenges. there is a growing need for alternative infrastructures that support local resilience and ensure data sovereignty. open-source, peer-to-peer (p2p), and local-first networks — collectively termed “p4p” (peer-for-peer) — have emerged as promising models for resilient communication systems. rooted in distributed architectures, p4p networks reduce dependency on centralized systems and offer robust, local-first data control. this thesis examines the role of p4p networks in supporting resilient local infrastructures and explores the factors that enable their maturity and scalability within the self-organizing framework of the open-source movement. theory the theoretical foundation is rooted in complexity theory and it's associated ontology. the ontology is explored by reed and harvey (1992), and further developed by byrne and callaghan in 2022, under the term 'complex realism' (byrne & callaghan, 2022). as the name suggests, it's a synthesis of critical realism and complexity. complexity theory is a vast field, the focus of this paper is on self-organizing systems. self-organizing systems are systems that (without any central authority or external control) spontaneously organize and form structured patterns through internal interactions, termed emergence. qualities of self-organizing systems include resilience and adaptability (anzola et al., 2017; estrada-jimenez et al., 2021; fuchs, 2006; gershenson & heylighen, 2003; heylighen, 2010; jean boulton et al., 2015; miller & page, 2007). from a technical perspective autonomic computing such as largelanguage models can be considered self-organizing, in this study focus is rather onsocial selforganizing systems, specifically the open-source movement. methodology a multiple-case study design was selected to capture the diversity within p4p networks and examine their development across various contexts. nine case studies were chosen to represent the spectrum of p4p projects, ranging from protocol-focused initiatives like holochain to community-driven projects like āhau. the projects interviewed include āhau, briar, dat (hypercore), holochain, grobund, mapeo, melibees, secure scuttlebutt, qaul, and, partially, willow. data collection involved 21 semi-structured interviews with 16 representatives, a workshop with p4p developers, andvisual tools that empowered participants to co-create and validate findings. inductive coding and thematic analysis were applied to identify recurring themes, challenges, andenabling factors (williams & moser, 2019). this approach provided a grounded understanding of how p4p networks evolve as decentralized, resilient communication systems. main findings the findings demonstrate a strong interplay between the organizational structures of p4p projects and their technical architectures. for example, scuttlebutt (ssb) and dat, both originating in the node.js community, began as modular technologies. scuttlebutt’s node-based technical design mirrored its social organization, where relational networks closely guarded operational knowledge. in contrast, dat evolved from a hierarchical model into a modular ecosystem, aligning with its technical architecture. similarly, mapeo transitioned from rigid roles to a more adaptive, self-organizing structure, while āhau and holochain also exhibited organizational forms reflecting their technological designs. locality, both geographic and cultural, emerged as a critical factor in p4p adoption. projects like grobund, mapeo, āhau, and meli bees exemplified the role of social bridging in connecting communities with technology. successful implementation often depended on actors deeply embedded within the community who could bridge the gap between technical design and local needs. tailored applications, ideally created by developers within the community, were shown to be most effective in meeting specific requirements. modularity was a consistent theme across cases, enhancing both technological adaptability and organizational flexibility. modular designs facilitated local innovation, lowered financial barriers, and supported the development of community-aligned communication protocols. for example, āhau combines scuttlebutt and dat protocols to address unique community needs, underscoring the importance of “bridges” that connect technical and social dimensions in decentralized technologies. main findings the conclusion highlights that technical and social organizational systems are often intertwined, with multiple cases indicating a reverse conway's law: social organizational forms frequently evolve to resemble the distributed and fluid structures of the technical layers. in complexity theory terms, nested self-organizing systems replicate each other’s patterns, resulting in isomorphic structures. certain system preconditions are essential for the development of p4p communication architectures. components of development in self-organizing systems benefit from being small, documented units with a clear purpose, achievable by 1-2 contributors, and modular in nature. the system as a whole functions best when there are bridges between actors. this approach not only functions well in self-organized environments by reducing maintenance burdens, but also enables the local development of value-aligned communication protocols due to lower financial thresholds and greater adaptability. principles of successful development in self-organizing social systems can apply equally to technical organization of modules as well as the social organization of the development. in summary, successful self-organizing architecture may adhere to the following principles: small, achievable, specific, documented, bridgable, complete, and modular. discussion the observed shifts in the social organization of development groups, where structures over time mirrored the technical organization of the software, warrant further research to clarify the correlational relationships involved. many factors could influence these patterns, and boundaries within self-organizing systems remain subjective interpretations by interviewees. this raises questions about the applicability of these findings to other cases and contexts. research on open-source movements and social systems as self-organizing phenomena remains a relatively uncharted field (anzola et al., 2017). this study also did not address technological readiness or financial factors, both of which significantly impact the adoption of new technologies, particularly in local communities. in the realm of infrastructures, the concept of self-organizing or “inverse infrastructures” (egyedi & mehos, 2012; heino & anttiroiko, 2015) is an emerging area of study. further research can support the development of organizational practices and local implementation strategies for resilient and adaptive infrastructures. finally, the move toward modular communication protocols represents a shift away from global standards and centralized decision making in relation to communication protocols, and toward an ecosystem-based approach. due to the multitude of small components an infrastructure can consist of, there's a growing importance of sboms (software bill of materials) as tools for modular development in the self-organizing system of open-source (axelsson & larsson, 2023). references anzola, d., barbrook-johnson, p., & cano, j. i. (2017). self-organization and social science. computational and mathematical organization theory, 23(2), 221–257. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10588-016-9224-2 axelsson, v., & larsson, f. (2023). understanding the software bill of material for supply-chain management in open source projects. byrne, d., & callaghan, g. (2022). complexity theory and the social sciences: the state of the art (2nd ed.). routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003213574 calvin, k., dasgupta, d., krinner, g., mukherji, a., thorne, p. w., trisos, c., romero, j., aldunce, p., barrett, k., blanco, g., cheung, w. w. l., connors, s., denton, f., diongue-niang, a., dodman, d., garschagen, m., geden, o., hayward, b., jones, c., … péan, c. (2023). ipcc, 2023: climate change 2023: synthesis report. contribution of working groups i, ii and iii to the sixth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change [core writing team, h. lee and j. romero (eds.)]. ipcc, geneva, switzerland. (first). intergovernmental panel on climate change (ipcc). https://doi.org/10.59327/ipcc/ar6-9789291691647 egyedi, t. m., & mehos, d. c. (2012). inverse infrastructures: disrupting networks from below. edward elgar publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781781952290estradajimenez, l. a., pulikottil, t., peres, r. s., nikghadam-hojjati, s., & barata, j. (2021). complexity theory and self-organization in cyber-physical production systems. procedia cirp, 104, 1831–1836. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procir.2021.11.309 fuchs, c. (2006). the self-organization of social movements. systemic practice and action research, 19(1), 101–137. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11213-005-9006-0 gershenson, c., & heylighen, f. (2003). when can we call a system self-organizing? 606–614. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39432-7_65 heino, o., & anttiroiko, a.-v. (2015). inverse infrastructures: self-organization in the water services. water policy, 17(2), 299–315. https://doi.org/10.2166/wp.2014.095 heylighen, f. (2010). complexity and self-organization. 1215–1224. https://doi.org/10.1081/e-elis4-120043869 jean boulton, peter m. allen, & cliff bowman. (2015). embracing complexity: strategic perspectives for an age of turbulence. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199565252.001.0001 kleppmann, m., wiggins, a., van hardenberg, p., & mcgranaghan, m. (2019). localfirst software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud. proceedings of the 2019 acm sigplan international symposium on new ideas, new paradigms, and reflections on programming and software, 154–178. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359591.3359737 miller, j. h., & page, s. e. (2007). complex adaptive systems: an introduction to computational models of social life. princeton univ. press. williams, m., & moser, t. (2019). the art of coding and thematic exploration in qualitative research. microsoft word foxman-recasting collegiate esports-recasting collegiate esports.docx selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 foxman, m., cote, a., can, o., harris, b., rahman, w., hansen, j., and fickle, t. (2021, october). recasting collegiate esports: independence and interdependence of university twitch streamers. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. recasting collegiate esports: independence and interdependence of university twitch streamers maxwell foxman university of oregon amanda cote university of oregon onder can university of oregon brandon harris university of oregon waseq rahman university of oregon jared hansen university of oregon tara fickle university of oregon introduction few online communities exhibit tensions between independence and interdependence better than collegiate esports. competitive gaming on us campuses depends on investments from innumerable stakeholders, including universities, game publishers, and distribution platforms. these interest groups cooperate towards esports' overall success, but each also brings its own interests to the table. the result is often conflicted: from struggles to adhere to title ix policies to reconsideration of how undergraduate athletes are paid (e.g., baker & holden, 2018). the live-streaming platform twitch is central in such strife. twitch is a vital tool in contemporary digital media literacy (gerber, 2017), widely utilized by esports players (li et al., 2020), and fosters communities of practice (richard et al., 2018). it is also the predominant means of esports spectatorship (e.g., richard et al., 2018; taylor, 2020); and its streams produce valuable data against which collegiate players measure and analyze their performances (taylor, 2020). a pathway for entrepreneurship (anderson et al., 2018), twitch is the bedrock of an esports entertainment ecosystem that extends beyond athletes to “strategists, content creators, entrepreneurs and organizers” (steinkuehler, 2020, p. 4). simultaneously, its use is unbridled, leading to scholarly interventions and critical reflection on many fronts, such as diversity and inclusion, that are integral to universities (e.g., brewer et al., 2020). as such, twitch is an essential site for demonstrating the interdependence and independence of gaming communities and universities. how students navigate the platform and utilize it for career building and professional development warrants investigation, along with how colleges employ twitch for promotion, sponsorship, and communication. our research therefore asks: 1. how does the collegiate esports community use twitch? 2. how do players use the platform to foster independence from or interdependence with esports institutions (e.g., game publishers, administration, and twitch itself)? 3. how do administrations and program directors use twitch for engaging players, fans, and the university community? methods as part of a larger project on collegiate esports, we are conducting in-depth, semistructured interviews with players, program directors, administrators, and students associated with esports through media outlets, gaming venues, or initiatives like graphic design. we currently have completed 19 interviews (60-120 minutes long) with contributors from five different locations. participants were recruited via snowball sampling, starting with members of one collegiate esports program at a large us public university, then asking each interviewee to direct us to other potential sources. interviews took place online, were transcribed and cleaned for clarity, then moved to the qualitative analysis program dedoose. one research team member coded each interview using a grounded theory approach (e.g., generating themes from patterns in the data rather than existing hypotheses; glaser & strauss, 1999). to ensure consistency between coders, the team maintained a separate shared codebook and discussed any uncertainties to determine the appropriate coding. therefore interrater reliability scores cannot be calculated for this analysis, but are not needed due to the research’s exploratory, qualitative nature; semi-structured interviews and grounded analysis lend themselves to in-depth exploration of specific phenomena rather than generalizable claims about a whole group. preliminary findings and conclusion this study is ongoing, and we are extending our interviews in breadth (e.g., colleges and universities) and depth (e.g., players, administrators, coaches, and directors). early analysis suggests that twitch is important to all collegiate stakeholders, who concede it has a “foothold on the industry.” further, they see twitch aspirationally, stressing its potential in the growth of collegiate esports. administrators’ and players’ perceptions of how twitch should be utilized diverged despite these commonalities. directors saw the service as a way to promote teams and drum up support. getting fans to watch streams was a point of pride and an indispensable venue for sponsorship. players aspired to be like their favorite streamers; many hoped to hit it big through streaming, or at least toyed with the idea of casting as a career. they recognized that success on twitch required significant labor, both in terms of technical knowledge and acquiring “gamer capital” (consalvo, 2009), citing how the best collegiate casters knew the ins and outs of the game by heart. the platform also validated their play; athletes boasted about their viewership numbers or how they taught grandparents to watch. generally, the platform developed community connections for undergraduate players. this social aspect also had negative consequences, as athletes mentioned trolling and other toxic behavior associated with competitive gaming during their live play. at the same time, grey areas colored the relationship between twitch and the university. monetization and use of streams were not clearly articulated; some directors took harsh stances on how to use twitch, while others thought of it more as a way to let loose and have fun. professionalism on the platform was also murky. more than one director mentioned that streamers needed to be aware that their conduct on the platform “represented” the university but did not state clear policies for use. our ongoing interviews will expand on these findings to investigate how twitch is incorporated into college culture. institutional actors seem to accept that the platform is necessary for esports’ success, but have neither the knowledge nor the flexibility to adapt it into the university setting. thus, this study will model the role specific digital platforms play in fostering independent and interdependent career paths for students, and how existing institutions may navigate those platforms as they become essential to online and offline communities. references anderson, c. g., tsaasan, a. m., reitman, j., lee, j. s., wu, m., steel, h., turner, t., & steinkuehler, c. (2018). understanding esports as a stem career ready curriculum in the wild. 2018 10th international conference on virtual worlds and games for serious applications (vs-games), 1–6. baker, t. a., iii, & holden, j. t. (2018). college esports: a model for ncaa reform. scl rev., 70, 55. brewer, j., romine, m., & taylor, t. l. (2020). inclusion at scale: deploying a community-driven moderation intervention on twitch. proceedings of the 2020 acm designing interactive systems conference, 757–769. consalvo, m. (2009). cheating: gaining advantage in videogames. mit press. gerber, h. r. (2017). esports and streaming: twitch literacies. in journal of adolescent & adult literacy (vol. 61, issue 3, pp. 343–345). https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.692 glaser, b., & strauss, a. (1999). the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. aldine transaction. li, l., uttarapong, j., freeman, g., & wohn, d. y. (2020). spontaneous, yet studious: esports commentators’ live performance and self-presentation practices. proc. acm hum.-comput. interact., 4(cscw2), 1–25. richard, g. t., mckinley, z. a., & ashley, r. w. (2018). collegiate esports as learning ecologies: investigating collaborative learning and cognition during competitions. digra conference. http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digitallibrary/digra_2018_paper_308.pdf steinkuehler, c. (2020). esports research: critical, empirical, and historical studies of competitive videogame play. games and culture, 15(1), 3–8. taylor, n. (2020). the numbers game: collegiate esports and the instrumentation of movement performance. in j. j. sterling & m. g. mcdonald (eds.), sports, society, and technology: bodies, practices, and knowledge production (pp. 121–144). springer singapore. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): lalvani, s. (2024, october). theorising toggling: moving and being pushed by ui. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. theorizing toggling: moving and being pushed by ui simiran lalvani university of oxford what is toggling? in this paper, i briefly recount the evolution in the use of the word ‘toggle,’ and build off it to theorize it as a concept.today we know toggling as a verb, and the user interaction (ui) of switching between and moving across apps and activities. prior to this, toggle was a noun that referred to fasteners on garments and on walls that held things in place (lalvani and doyuran 2024). this evolution from a noun to a verb, helps attend to the fact that as people, we have always used our hands, heads, and objects to hold things together, as we switch between doing and being. to theorize toggling, i will first detail my motivation, methods, and methodology. then i will illustrate how toggling as a concept, enables reframing two dominant views on (1) how information is imagined to push users to do things and (2) how being a user, especially a consumer, is imagined to move us “out of touch.” reframing doing and being in this way allows scholars to examine how people compose their experiences (dourish 2021) of switching across interfaces to buy, work, sell, and have fun. motivation, methods, and methodology my interest in theorizing toggling stemmed from my pre-doctoral research with platform based food delivery workers in mumbai. i noticed how some gig workers often ordered lunch via the consumer app while still being logged in as workers on the worker-app. some delivery workers i met had started or aspired to start their own cloud kitchens and would be switching between their restaurant partner interface and delivery worker interface. my doctoral research built off this insight and involved a year of remote fieldwork to examine how swiggy and zomato aggregated users through promotions. i conducted a year-long digital ethnography of swiggy and zomato’s relationship building using the interface of their apps. i noticed how collected push notifications (pns) guided me even when i was outside the app. i collected and inductively coded over 1,100 pns sent to me over one calendar year and got interested in how platforms expand by pushing information and users. then through in-person fieldwork in mumbai, i examined how users — consumers buying food and businesses selling food — interacted and experienced aggregation. i met over 50 consumer and business users which included semi-structured interviews conducted in households, a 9-month immersion in a coworking space, and attending industry events. adopting a ‘fun’ methodology (shapiro and anjaria 2020) of remaining ‘on the surface,’ enables being open to people’s movement, beyond what infrastructures do (shapiro 2020a). staying on platform surfaces, i attended to toggling by meeting consumer-users as they composed their experiences of being household members, workers (at the coworking space), and people with civic commitments, not only recipients of services. pushing and pulling information information push has been understood largely through a dataveillance perspective that has shown how companies use people’s tastes, preferences, and habits as a resource and shape these. be it through targeted advertising (andrejevic 2013), recommendations and personalisation technologies that create filter bubbles (pariser 2012). the scant literature on pns has studied them in terms of their being a continuous loop of call and response (markham 2020) inviting engagement to click, glance, and (pielot and rello 2017; sanfillipo and lev-artez 2017) buy things that they do not need. through my collection of pns, i found that they pushed information in temporally sensitive, attentive, flirty, friendly, informal ways, yet most consumers i met, had turned off pns. if information can simply push us into doing things, how did my interlocutors find it too pushy? by meeting consumers as they toggled between work-home, relied on cooks, i was able to view ui with information push in that context, not just as a response to stimuli. can ui make us “out of touch?” a dataveillance view on information’s capacity to push, is assumed to move us “out of touch,” this is evident in how platform scholars think about convenience and consumers. even though scholars acknowledge how platform services, especially after the pandemic, are becoming infrastructural (neves and steinberg 2020), convenience is imagined to be a discourse that tempts users (huberman 2021) and creates unconscious consumption (hill 2020). prior to digital information push, push buttons in electric circuits on doorbells and typewriters, created similar concerns about users becoming lazy and disconnected. the making of people as button pushers, was feared to put the user out of touch with the realities of the work in providing convenience. in contemporary times, as “digital commanders,” we push flattened buttons on touch screens by tapping, and swiping (plotnick 2017) and continue to worry about how this is making us insensitive. toggling as a conceptual vessel places ui in this history of how our hands and fingers have interacted with surfaces of objects like buttons and made sense of the world. placing interaction in our hands makes room for us as scholars to ask: how do people make sense of information and hold everything together as they switch between doing livelihood-care and being workers, consumers, business owners, householders and so on? references andrejevic, m. (2013). ‘glut instinct: body language and visceral literacy’. in , 1st ed., 77–95. routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203075319-5. anjaria, j. s, and anjaria, u. “mazaa: rethinking fun, pleasure and play in south asia.” (2020): journal of south asian studies. pg 232-242. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2020.1725718. anjaria, j. s. (2020a) surface pleasures: bicycling and the limits of infrastructural thinking, south asia: journal of south asian studies, 43:2, 267-280, doi: 10.1080/00856401.2020.1703324 dourish, p. (2021). “the allure and the paucity of design: cultures of design and design in culture.” human-computer interaction, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 52–72, https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2018.1469410. hill, d. w. (2020). the injuries of platform logistics. media, culture & society, 42(4), 521-536. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443719861840 huberman, j. (2021). “amazon go, surveillance capitalism, and the ideology of convenience.” economic anthropology, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 337–49, https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12211. lalvani, s. and doyuran e.b. (2024). toggle and poke: two conceptual vessels for hci. unpublished manuscript. markham, a. n. (2020). echolocating the digital self: a conceptual framework. aoir selected papers of internet research, 2020. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2020i0.11272. neves, j., & steinberg, m. (2020). pandemic platforms: how convenience shapes the inequality of crisis. pandemic media: preliminary notes toward an inventory, 105-112. pariser, e. (2012). the filter bubble : what the internet is hiding from you. london: viking. pielot, m., and rello, l. (2017). ‘productive, anxious, lonely 24 hours without push notifications’. proceedings of the 19th international conference on human-computer interaction with mobile devices and services, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3098279.3098526. plotnick, r. (2017). “force, flatness and touch without feeling: thinking historically about haptics and buttons.” new media & society 19.10: 1632–1652. web. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203075319-5 https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443719861840 https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12211 https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2020i0.11272 sanfilippo, m.r., and lev-aretz, y. (2017). ‘breaking news: how push notifications alter the fourth estate’. first monday, https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v22i11.8068. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): brites, m. j., castro, t. s., maneta, m.,, sousa, a. p. (2023, october). views of the world and looking into the future of news: researching youth, news, and citizenship in portugal. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org views of the world and looking into the future of news: researching youth, news, and citizenship in portugal maria josé brites lusófona university, cicant teresa sofia castro lusófona university, cicant margarida maneta lusófona university, cicant andreia pinto de sousa lusófona university, hei-lab the study of young people and news has been dominated by a westernized researchcentred view of the youth’s relation with the news and about their life contexts. this paper aims to contribute to the academic debate on children, youth, news, and digital citizenship relying on invisible audiences from the non-western geographies. a crucial subject that demands more research is the context of migrant youth (clark & marchi, 2017; leurs, 2015; leurs et al., 2018). within the project youth, news and digital citizenship youndigital (ptdc/comout/0243/2021), we followed the prisma systematic literature review guidelines, within the period 2010 to september 2022, on the scientific databases wos core collection and scielo. building on the literature review, we argue that some voices and thematics are missing, which are fundamental to better perceive the field and have a holistic and complete vision of the future of news and young people in the context of digital citizenship. emerged two gaps that claim more research on news avoidance and also on crossing diverse dimensions such as gender diversity, low-income populations, and migrant lives. this text pleads for deepening the focus on diversity. this more diverse perspective can bring some food for thought to the field. this initial review of the literature evidenced a need for a decolonisation of the western universalistic view of media and news contexts (brites & figueiras, 2022; treré et al., 2020) as it pointed to a distorted map of the world that places the academic literature mostly in the global north http://spir.aoir.org/ context. remembering the seminal deciding what's news (gans, 2004/1979) and its warning on how news selection may distort the world topography this is an aspect that needs further attention. a central objective of youndigital is to grab news definitions and their connection with youths’ (aged 15-24) democratic needs and participation. the project relies on complementary methods. nevertheless, for this article, we will focus on the national and representative survey (n=1300) that was applied between january and march 2023. in this text, we will rely on a cohort (n=102) that covers the non-western respondents from angola, cape vert, mozambique, brazil, guinea, são tomé, bangladesh, japan, india, argentina, venezuela, colombia, ecuador and peru and their answers to these two open questions: q1. how do you construct the image you have of the world around you? q2. how do you imagine the news in the future? a brief characterization of the sample (two age groups: 15-19 and 20-24) indicates that respondents from 15-19 (n=29; gender = m=12; f=16; neutral=1) have educational contexts as follows: middle school (n=5); technical-vocational course (n=4); higher technical-vocational courses tesp (n=1); high-school (n=18); other (n=1). regarding the professional situation: studying (n=15); neither studying nor working (n=2); working (n=3); working and studying (n=9). for the 20-24 group (n=73; gender: m=32; f=39; neutral=1; non-binary=1), their educational context indicates: primary school (n=2); elementary school (n=3); middle school (n=1); technical-vocational course (n=13); higher technical-vocational courses tesp (n=3); high-school (n=24); degree (n=25); master's degree (n=1); other (n=1). if we consider the professional situation, they responded as follows: studying (n=14); neither studying nor working (n=11); working (n=25); working and studying (n=20); does not want to answer (n=3). early results analysis denote that technology will continue to have a paramount presence in youths’ lives and an evolving sophistication and intervention in the production of news in the coming future (the responses point to futuristic technological scenarios like intraocular devices for searching news), but they also reveal negative feelings towards the speed at which information is produced and circulates, opening way for the increasing of manipulative, and untrusty information production as a result they claim for more trustworthy news while at the same time, they see a pathway for the news that in their own words has no salvation. particularly concerning the question how do you build the image you have of the world around you? even if this is the 20th question of the survey on youth and news, with initial questions on media contexts, their top answers are not media-centric. their answers are mostly distrustful, pointing to current social problems, namely the cost of living, and they envision that times will be more complicated leading to increasingly worse consequences related to corruption, chaos, and pollution to name a few. the answers also reveal contexts of politics and environmental issues: “the world is being affected by the global crisis and it is already starting to be seen in the sea level rise and the poles being affected every day” (venezuela, male, 24, works and has a degree); “the world today is like in the past, with a lot of inequality, a lot of pollution, a lot of carelessness and a lot of corruption” (brazil, female, 24, works and has a degree). at last, and if we try to catch what answers are exposed specifically on news outlets, we see a prevalence in online news but at the same time a context of legacy media: “the world is becoming more and more technologically advanced, and people need it for many occasions. having a mobile phone with you today is always very important because you can store information, have reminders or just use it for leisure” (cape verde, f, 19, technical-professional course, student); “i've also always found it easy to communicate with people outside the digital world” (mozambique, m, 20, high school, student); “parents' opinion and what i read in the newspapers and research i do on the subject” (brazil, f, 20, technical-professional course, working student). the question how do you imagine news in the future? brings a similar pessimistic context, however, with the prevalence of a technological-driven format of news flux, with easy, quick and “fake” scenarios. “i imagine the news going completely digital, taking newspapers out of the picture not that this is a good thing, but i can see it” (cape verde, neutral, 19, high school, student); “in the future, perhaps there will be more evolved news, i.e. news that can not only be projected on a television or mobile phone” (peru, m, 23, works and has a degree); “in the future i imagine that the news will disappear for several reasons, one of which is fake news, another is that there's almost no reason for there to be news and if there is, it will all be with intelligent computers” (venezuela, m, 23, technical-professional course, works). respondents also claim more trustworthy news while, at the same time, they see a pathway for the news that has no salvation: “better and more reliable” (angola, f, 24, higher technical-vocational courses, works); “unfortunately, i can imagine the news becoming more and more false and sensationalist” (brazil, f, 23, high school, neither works nor studies). trying to grasp paths for the coming analysis, we can highlight the predominance of non-media-centric answers, the expression of negative sentiments, and a reinforcement of the technologically driven facets of the news. this also implies a need for a deeper understanding of diversities, considering that the initial characterization besides the non-western views shows low-medium levels of education. references brites, m. j., & figueiras, r. (2022). disconnection and digital society: perspectives on how citizens deal with media technology. in w. housley, a. edwards, r. beneitomontagut, & r. fitzgerald (eds.), the sage handbook of digital society (pp. 74-90). sage. clark, l. s., & marchi, r. (2017). young people and the future of news: social media and the rise of connective journalism. cambridge university press. gans, h. j. (2004/1979). deciding what's news. northwestern university press. leurs, k. (2015). digital passages: migrant youth 2.0: diaspora, gender and youth cultural intersections. amsterdam university press. leurs, k., omerović, e., bruinenberg, h. & sprenger, s. (2018). critical media literacy through making media: a key to participation for young migrants?. communications, 43(3), 427-450. https://doi.org/10.1515/commun-2018-0017 treré, e., natale, s., keightley, e., & punathambekar, a. (2020). the limits and boundaries of digital disconnection. media, culture & society, 42(4), 605-609. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720922054 https://doi.org/10.1515/commun-2018-0017 https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720922054 311_aoir2021-horowitz-matikainen_final selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): horowitz, m & matikainen, j. (2021, october). independence or interdependence: multidimensionality of finnish youth’s experiences of trust in news. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. independence and interdependence: multidimensionality of finnish youth’s experiences of trust in news minna horowitz university of helsinki janne matikainen university of helsinki introduction finland provides an interesting case study on young people’s news consumption. in the finnish “digital welfare state” (ala-fossi et al. 2019) the news is an inseparable part of the mechanism producing social trust. finland features the highest level of media freedom and literacy in europe (lessenski 2019). finns are also way below the european average in terms of trust in social media (e.g., horowitz et al. 2021). this abstract features some of the results of a multi-method study of the university of helsinki (2019-2021) that examines how finnish audiences view the nature and power of news, and how the online environment impacts their consumption of news. multi-method framework to analyze multidimensionality this paper is based on the results of two general surveys in spring 2019 (n=1053) and spring 2020 (n=1354), a survey focused on young people (18-29-year-olds, n=300), three focus group interviews of different age groups, as well as a three-day online discussion of 30 young people in fall 2020. in all surveys, the data are weighted by gender, age and residence. a classic understanding distinguishes rational and affective aspects of the experience of trust. adding on specific dimensions of trust in news and journalism, the project views experiences of trust via a four-dimensional framework (figure 1, see also e.g., fisher 2016, horowitz et al. 2021, strömbäck et al. 2020): 1. trust determined by one’s individual disposition, such as demographic variables, or own’s own experiences. this dimension is studied both in the surveys as well as via the qualitative focus groups and online chat. 2. generalized trust in the media. especially the first, comprehensive survey in 2019, has included numerous questions that are intended to detect aspects of generalized trust in news media and journalism, and generalized trust has been addressed in qualitative segments as well. 3. trust in specific sources. this has been studied in each survey as well as addressed in qualitative segments. 4. trust in terms of specific issues. drawing from a survey on young people and news in europe (pew 2018), the survey of fall 2020 has focused on news themes and issues. figure 1. analytical framework: experiences of trust in news affective rational findings: independence and interdependence our research confirms that young people are a distinct segment of news consumers. on one hand, our survey of 2019 shows the clear differences between age groups in terms of perceptions of news and social media. the sense of living in a social media bubble and excessive social media influence in terms of exposure to information is more widely shared by younger respondents than by those of and over 30-years-olds. figure 2. selected statements about news, online and social media, by age (scale 1=do not agree, 5=fully agree, n=1053) individual disposition generalized trust trust in sources trust dependent on issues the respondents of our qualitative segments illustrate a significant difference between attitudes toward legacy journalism and news via non-traditional sources. when the focus group interviewees and the online study discussants speak of journalism, they refer to legacy news sources and almost unanimously condemn their power in society and their declining credibility. the market-driven imperatives of mainstream news are clear to them. and while the young people in the qualitative discussions doubt whether older generations are media literate enough to navigate the online world, they themselves stress the importance of peer-to-peer news dissemination, source criticism, and one’s own research. generalized trust in the legacy media as an institution is not high and source trust is often referred to in relation to one’s close social circles or “interesting individuals”. on the other hand, all our three surveys indicate that finnish young are avid consumers of content by conventional, institutional news organizations (i.e., legacy news media), especially via their mobile applications. they, as well as all other age groups, express very little distrust in specific finnish legacy news sources, and the pandemic underlines this tendency: figure 3. importance of selected news sources for young people during the pandemic (%, n=300) 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 online content makes me doubt legacy media online discussions tell me about the topics of current public discussions recommendations by other users increase trust i trust the same online content as my friends i feel i live in a social media bubble social media has too much influence on the information i consume 18-29 30-79 young people are just as likely as older groups to express concern about the spread of fake news and misinformation online. in qualitative discussions young people express appreciation for public service broadcasting in particular and note the importance of journalistic codes. finally, an experimental factor analysis of the survey of fall 2020 resulted in two key issue clusters of young people’s news consumption: informational and societal motives and entertainment and routines. unsurprisingly, entertainment and routines prevail. both motives are slightly more important for women and higher education correlates with higher motivation. even so, both motives are relatively high despite of demographic variables. our results indicate that young people are both independent of, and dependent on, legacy new media. their generalized trust in legacy media is low, and mainstream journalism is criticized expertly using conventional quality criteria and awareness of market-driven imperatives. trust in specific outlets and sources, in contrast, is strong. in terms of specific issues, young people generally consider news comprehensive and their motivation for news consumption is based both rational and affective (entertainment) needs. young people are also relatively satisfied with how the news covers most topics, with the exception of news that address topics specific to young people. this, and the signs of “the pandemic news fatigue” are not surprising nor typical for finnish youth only (e.g., deutsche welle 2021). the relative homogeneity of the finnish society and the long history of institutionalized media literacy policies may emphasize the critical views of mainstream media. a darker interpretation could be the erosion of trust in expertise and the reliance in one’s affective sense of trust, that is, the significant skepticism as a sign of an epistemic crisis of a 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 tabloids (paper copy) magazines podcasts radio tv current affairs online discussions newspapers (paper copy, delivered) video services tv special broadcasts news on social media foreign news sources tv news authorities' websites websites or mobile apps by legacy news providers important quite important not at all i don't use the source i don't know post-truth era (e.g., mcnair 2018). at the same time, the findings do not confirm the worst fears of moral panic about growing distrust and news avoidance by young people. rather, young news consumers are willing to “do their research” with legacy and alternative news sources online, as well as a sliding scale of rational and affective experiences of trust in news. references ala-fossi, m. et al. (2019). operationalising communication rights: the case of a “digital welfare state”. internet policy review, 8(1). doi: 10.14763/2019.1.1389. cocco, f. (2020). kids are not alright: how generation covid is losing out. financial times. https://www.ft.com/content/0dec0291-2f72-4ce9-bd9f-ae2356bd869e. deutsche welle (2021). covid woes. youth around the world have covid fatigue. deutsche welle. https://www.dw.com/en/covid-woes-youths-around-the-world-havepandemic-fatigue/a-57097409. horowitz, m. et al. (2021). the multidimensionality of trust: assessing finnish audiences’ views on the trustworthiness of digital news. global perspectives 2 (1). doi: 10.1525/gp.2021.19054. fisher, c. (2016). the trouble with “trust” in news media. communication research and practice, 2(4), 451–465. lessenski, m. 2019. just think about it. findings of the media literacy index 2019. in policy brief 55. sofia: open society institute. mcnair, b. (2018). fake news. falsehood, fabrication and fantasy in journalism. london: routledge. pew (2018). western europeans under 30 view news media less positively, rely more on digital platforms than older adults. pew research center, october, 2018. https://www.journalism.org/2018/10/30/western-europeans-under-30-view-news-medialess-positively-rely-more-on-digital-platforms-than-older-adults/. strömbäck, j., et al. (2020). news media trust and its impact on media use: toward a framework for future research. annals of the international communication association, 44:2, 139-156, doi: 10.1080/23808985.2020.1755338 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): oh, d., downey, j. (2024, october). does algorithmic content moderation rpomote democratic discourse? radical democratic critique of toxic language ai. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. does algorithmic content moderation rpomote democratic discourse? radical democratic critique of toxic language ai dayei oh university of helsinki john downey loughborough university introduction: platforms play a significant role in shaping political discourse, yet concerns persist regarding the proliferation of harmful content jeopardising the inclusivity and safety of online spaces. in response, platforms have increasingly turned to algorithmic content moderation, employing machine learning ai to detect and manage potentially toxic material (dixon et al.,2018; gorwa et al., 2020). google’s perspective api is an example of toxic language moderation algorithms to remove content that are ‘rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable […] that is likely to make someone leave a discussion’ (dixon et al., 2018: 68). however, critiques abound regarding the efficacy and biases inherent in such systems, prompting a re-evaluation of their role in fostering democratic discourse. there have been numerous critiques of the technical limitations of algorithmic moderation including its susceptibility to biases and misclassification (gorwa et al., 2020; thiago et al., 2020; zhou, 2021). ai communities are researching ways to mitigate such biases by experimenting with new ways to deal with these problems framed as ‘technical glitches’ – incidental errors that can be patched up through machinery itself: e.g., using alternative methods for dividing training and testing datasets, mitigating spurious correlations with additional mathematical methods (zhou, 2021). however, the fundamental problems lie much deeper than the incidental ‘glitches.’ rather, the problems are embedded in the very logic of content moderation that certain forms of language are ‘toxic’ and must be censored to promote democratic discourse. the problem grows as soon as the tech communities’ definition of ‘toxic language’ is loosely and inconsistently defined without critical engagements with theories of democracy, democratic discourse, civility, and tolerance. this paper provides a radical democratic critique of algorithmic moderation both from normative theories of inclusive public spheres and empirical evidence. against regulating incivility: incivility is not tantamount toxic language the first two key components of ‘toxic language’ in perspective api is ‘rude’ and ‘disrespectful’ language. at first, equating incivility to anti-democratic toxic language sounds unproblematic, given that civility is seen as an essential component of liberal condition. in pluralist society in which it is difficult for its people to agree on every aspect of values and aspects, civility as a form of politeness and self-control acts as a sort of social glue, encouraging us to believe despite disagreements that we belong to the same political community. rawls (1996) argues for a duty of civility based on the idea of reciprocity and the practice of public reason, listening to others, fairmindedness, and making reasonable accommodations to the views of others (p.217). however, there is another diametrically opposed tradition which sees civility as deeply exclusionary. elias (2000) argues that civility has become a way of excluding people. the conventions of civility are decided by the elites and used to legitimise the exclusion of the marginalised who are seen as morally inferior or non-conforming to the elite's rule of civility. feminist scholars make similar connection regarding the norm of civility as an exclusionary criterion largely applied to the voices of the marginalised as well as sabotaging the radical social changes that can successfully fight against existing inequalities and injustice (bickford, 2011; meyers, 2009; zerilli, 2014). from the radical democratic perspectives, uncivil political actions extend democracy with expressive and instrumental values under the conditions of existing participatory inequalities, not hampers it (edyvane, 2020; young, 2000). for toxic language ai to moderate rude, disrespectful, and uncivil language as ‘toxic’ is to miss these important roles of incivility. for regulating (intolerance) and hate speech but then what kind of content should be moderated? arguing on the same radical grounds to see the virtue of democracy and democratic discourse not as a liberal notion of civility but as promotion of participatory equality between the majority and minorities, we argue that algorithmic moderation should focus on detecting intolerance and hate speech. this conception of toxicity aligns better with many platforms’ promises to tackle hate content as well as ‘borderline content’ (youtube, 2019). if (in)civility is to do with a speech style, (in)tolerance is to do with moral-political attitudes to others – seeing the other side and the minorities as citizens with equal political status which must be included in the public discourse (forst, 2003; marcuse, 1969). when intolerant content is directly targeted at groups and members who are subjugated to systemic discrimination, the harm of such intolerant speech amounts to hate speech in terms of its constitutive and consequential harm, being sufficient to warrant moderation (gelber, 2021). separating incivility and intolerance is particularly important since not every hate speech relies on explicit hateful expressions, slurs, and extreme emotions (gelber, 2021). previous research discusses borderline discourse of far-right actors online and how they communicate intolerant messages with quasi-academic, pseudo-rational civil language, and humour (krzyżanowski & ledin, 2017; thiago et al., 2020) empirical evaluation of toxic language ai we then empirically assess the efficiency of perspective api in detecting incivility and intolerance on large twitter datasets collected during abortion constitution discussions in ireland (2018, 1.8+ million tweets) and the us (2020, 6+ million tweets). we use lexicon-based classification of incivility and intolerance, automatic gender recognition, and abortion issue stance mining to assess whether perspective’s understanding of toxicity meets our critical theory-driven understanding of democratic discourse. first, we find that perspective’s understanding of toxicity is biased towards detecting incivility and not intolerance, which is counterproductive to deepen democratic discourse as we theorised earlier that incivility carries significant expressive and instrumental values in democracy to expand the participatory equalities for the marginalised (edyvane, 2020; young, 2000; zerilli, 2014). second, by equating toxicity to incivility, perspective gives higher toxicity scores to tweets written by women and proabortion rights users in both countries. like many feminist and critical theorists of democracy have argued, anger and incivility are tools for those who fight for equality under the conditions of injustice and moderating incivility largely leads to disproportionate silencing of the marginalised and minorities who do not wish to and who are not able to behave civilly to their oppression and discrimination (bickford, 2011; meyers, 2009; zerilli, 2014). third, we find that perspective’s detection of intolerance and hate speech depends largely on the presence of explicit slurs and hateful terms, while missing out many intolerant tweets (e.g., misogynistic, transphobic, and homophobic) whose hateful ideas are embedded in nuances and rhetoric of seemingly civil, quasi-intellectual language, humour, and satire (krzyżanowski & ledin, 2017; thiago et al., 2020). concluding discussion: future of algorithmic moderation based on our normative and empirical critiques, we argue that the current toxic language moderation algorithms do not promote democratic discourse but hinder it. future algorithmc moderation should focus on detecting intolerance and hate speech, and not incivility. algorithmic moderation with context awareness is required to take into account the identity of the speakers when assessing toxicity of political opinion expressions (e.g., slurs used by lgbtq+ to reclaim the slur vs. used to spread hate; thiago et al., 2020). consequently, we recommend that the platforms consider new algorithmic moderation developed in close collaboration with the theories of democracy and democratic public spheres informed by anti-racist, feminist, and other critical theorists. we also recommend that the development of algorithmic moderation should focus on the reliable and transparent identification of intolerance and hate speech for its mission to tackle moderating borderline content. note: the full manuscript of this extended abstract is published open access. if you wish to cite this work, please use the following citation: oh, d., & downey, j. (2024). does algorithmic content moderation promote democratic discourse? radical democratic critique of toxic language ai. information, communication & society, 1–20. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2024.2346531 references bickford, s. (2011). emotion talk and political judgment. the journal of politics, 73(4), 1025-1037. dixon, l., li, j., sorensen, j., thain, n., & vasserman, l. (2018). measuring and mitigating unintended bias in text classification. proceedings of the 2018 aaai/acm conference on ai, ethics, and society, 67–73. edyvane, d. (2020). incivility as dissent. political studies, 68(1), 93–109. https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719831983 elias, n. (2000). the civilizing process: sociogenetic and psychogenetic investigations, revised edn. oxford: blackwell. forst, r. (2003). toleration, justice and reason. in c. mckinnon & d. castiglione (eds.), the culture of toleration in diverse societies (71–85). manchester university press. gorwa, r., binns, r., & katzenbach, c. (2020). algorithmic content moderation: technical and political challenges in the automation of platform governance. big data & society, 7(1), 2053951719897945. gelber, k. (2021) differentiating hate speech: a systemic discrimination approach, critical review of international social and political philosophy, 24:4, 393-414, doi: 10.1080/13698230.2019.1576006 krzyżanowski, m., & ledin, p. (2017). uncivility on the web. journal of language and politics, 16(4), 566–581. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.17028.krz marcuse, h. (1969) repressive tolerance. in r. p. wolff, b. moore jr, & h. marcuse (eds.), a critique of pure tolerance (93-138). jonathan cape. meyers, d. t. (2018). feminists rethink the self. routledge. rawls, j. (1996). political liberalism. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. thiago, d. o., marcelo, a. d., & gomes, a. (2021). fighting hate speech, silencing drag queens? artificial intelligence in content moderation and risks to lgbtq voices online. sexuality & culture, 25(2), 700-732. young, i. m. (2000). inclusion and democracy. oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2024.2346531 https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719831983 https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.17028.krz zerilli, l. m. g. (2014). against civility: a feminist perspective. civility, legality, and justice in america, winter 2010, 107–131. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781107479852.005 zhou, x. (2021). challenges in automated debiasing for toxic language detection. university of washington. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781107479852.005 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): strand, c & svensson. j. (2022, november). is there a template for human right activism, presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. is there a template for human rights activism? – a study of ugandan lgbt+ organizations’ digital spaces cecilia strand, phd. department of media and informatics, uppsala university. jakob svensson ,phd. school of arts and communication, malmö university, malmö university introduction pre-colonial sources suggest that many african societies accepted a range of nonheteronormative sexualities and non-conforming gender expressions, and that uganda was no exception (epprecht, 2010; murray & roscoe, 1998; tamale, 2007). despite the documented existence of sexual pluralism in uganda prior to the british invasion, independence in 1962 did not result in a de-criminalisation of homosexuality. on the contrary, a 2005 constitutional amendment which explicitly prohibited same-sex marriages was passed on the grounds that local “mores are seriously challenged by growing humanitarian counter-values” (mujuzi 2009, p. 282). the notion that ugandan culture, which rests on a patriarchal heterosexist social order (tamale, 2007) were under attack, resurfaced again in the preamble of the now notorious 2009 anti-homosexuality bill (ahb).the ahb was framed as a tool to protect the cherished ugandan culture from western imperialism and halt the advances of the “sexual rights agenda”. the ahb drew intense local and international criticism and the protracted legal battle that followed, irrevocably casted uganda as a part of a larger trans-national battleground where us-based conservative norm entrepreneurs together with local religious and political elites, challenge the international human rights framework including development partners sexual rights agenda (kaoma, 2014; oliver, 2013). northern development partners, in a desire to support the embattled ugandan lgbt+ community, even threatened to withdraw aid (saltnes & thiel, 2021). northern development partners’ have undergone major changes in the past decade queering development policy and practices, resulting in sexual rights becoming an prominent feature of a human rights based development agenda (mason, 2018). lgbt+ rights, however departs from an essentialist understanding sexual orientation, i.e. a notion that individuals occupy an innate biologically determined and stable subject position (delamater & hyde, 1998). aid conditionally, where support is conditioned upon the adoption of prescribed identity and sexual politics or its softer version of homo-developmentalism have been criticized for constituting neo-colonialism(mason, 2018). klaper (2018, p. 44) explains homodevelopmentalism as the process where “development strategies are shaped and influenced by established modernization frameworks and developmental ways of thinking and are thereby contributing to the formation of a queer/ed version of developmentalism”. it unintentionally may threaten local actors’ agency to explore and navigate the nexus of local socio-historical expression with extraneous input from lgbt+ inclusive development strategies. against this backdrop of decades of state-sponsored homophobia, and more recent intensified attention from conservative transnational norm entrepreneurs in partnership with local partners, as well as contemporary lgbt+ inclusive actors’ norms diffusion; this study seeks to explore if and how ugandan lgbt+ organizations working towards equal rights for individuals with non-conforming sexualities and/or expression of gender identities, take advantages of digital media’s affordances of unrestricted voice-giving. the study thus explores if lgbt+ actors seeks to challenge international norm entrepreneurs’ across the spectrum attempts to influence ugandan social mores. methods to explore ugandan lgbt+ organizations’ use of self-controlled digital spaces to engage with the multiple waves of international norm entrepreneurs’ influences; the study used a qualitative directed approach to content analysis which entails using existing research to guide the researchers exploration and coding of content (hsieh & shannon, 2005). prior research on trans-national and national norm entrepreneurial discursive battles over ugandan sexual mores over the past century, including homo-developmentalism where as well as post-colonial ugandan identity and sexual politics provided key entry points into the analysis. the analysis particularly looked at the use self-defining language, ranging from western lgbt+ labels, to local terms such as kuchu for describing queer ugandans. the term has similar to “gay” and “queer” been appropriated and constructed as a positive and empowering label (peters, 2014). the ugandan lgbt+ community has grown significantly in size over the past ten year and in tandem with growing international funding flowing into the country (global philanthropy project reports 2013-2020). as organizational maturity was believed to be an important pre-condition to have developed an understanding and position on past waves of intimate colonialization, only organization meeting the following criteria were included: a)having existed for more than 10 years, b) be active organizational webpages and facebook account, i.e. updated in the last month. six ugandan lgbt+ organizations met the criteria. the organizations’ facebook entries 1-31 january 2022 and website pages detailing the organizations’ history and current raison d'être was included in the analysis. results with the few exceptions of organizations grounded in feminist traditions, the organizations used a conspicuously uniform language on both digital spaces to present themselves and their raison d'être. ugandan same-sex desires and gender identities are presented by drawing upon a western lgbt+ rights discourse, as opposed to sexual desires and gender identities as embedded and realized in a unique social context, that at least historically has include significant pluralism and multi-positionality in uganda. organizations did not call attention to the multiple waves of international norm entrepreneurs’ influences and potential re-colonialization of ugandan understandings. the results appear to echo lind ed (2010) findings that activists from the global south and east tend strategically adopt the languages of development institutions in order to access material and immaterial support. the level of rhetorical uniformity amongst the ugandan organizations would suggests the existence of a latent template for lgbt+ activism. correa et al. (2008), argue that the emergence of an international human rights framework and language has provided an important platform for groups claiming rights and social justice, but that universal human rights at the same time are void of sociohistorical contexts, and thus not approached as “relational, evolving and specific to historical and spatial contexts” (correa et al. 2008, p. 162). even if future research should approach the lack of engagement with norm entrepreneurial influences in ugandan lgbt+ community’s digital spaces with an open mind; the role of developments partners’ funding priorities, appraisal frameworks, and decision making processes, as well as monitoring and evaluations frameworks in contexts where rights struggles has no or limited domestic funding sources, should be considered. references corrêa, s., petchesky, r. and parker, r., 2008. sexuality, health and human rights. routledge. epprecht, m. 2010. “the making of ‘african sexuality’: early sources, current debates”. history compass 8: 768–779. doi: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00715.x hsieh, h.-f., and s.e. shannon. 2005. “three approaches to qualitative content analysis”. qualitative health research 15: 1277–1288. doi: 10.1177/1049732305276687 kaoma, k. 2013. the marriage of convenience: the us christian right, african christianity, and postcolonial politics of sexual identity. global homophobia: states, movements, and the politics of oppression, 75-102. kaoma, k., 2014. the paradox and tension of moral claims: evangelical christianity, the politicization and globalization of sexual politics in sub-saharan africa. critical research on religion, 2(3), pp.227-245. lind, a., ed. 2010. development, sexual rights and global governance. new york: routledge. klapeer, c. 2018. ‘dangerous liasions? homodevelopmentalism, sexual modernization and lgbti rights in europe’. in mason, c. (ed.) routledge handbook of queer development studies (new york: routledge), pp. 102–18. mason, c.l. ed., 2018. routledge handbook of queer development studies. routledge. mujuzi, j. d. 2009. the absolute prohibition of same sex marriages in uganda. international journal of law, policy and the family 23, 3: 277–288 murray, s.o., will roscoe, eds. 1998. boy-wives and female husbands: studies of african homosexualities. new york: st. nyanzi, s. 2013. dismantling reified african culture through localised homosexualities in uganda. culture, health & sexuality, 15(8), 952-967. oliver, m. 2013. transnational sex politics, conservative christianity, and antigay activism in uganda. studies in social justice, 7(1), 83. saltnes, j.d. and thiel, m., 2021. the politicization of lgbti human rights norms in the eu‐uganda development partnership. jcms: journal of common market studies, 59(1), pp.108-125. tamale, s. 2007. out of the closet: unveiling sexuality discourses in uganda. africa after gender, ed. catherine m. cole, takyiwaa manuh, and stephan f. miescher pp.1729. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): mccammon, m., ruan, l., miltner, k., gerrard, y., montalbano, k., mikołajewska-zając, k., márton, a. (2021, october). what dead-and-dying platforms do for internet studies: situating technological failure, digital afterlife, and the web that was. panel presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. what dead-and-dying platforms do for internet studies: situating technological failure, digital afterlife, and the web that was muira mccammon annenberg school for communication, university of pennsylvania lotus ruan university of toronto, canada kate miltner university of edinburgh, united kingdom ysabel gerrard university of sheffield, united kingdom kathryn montalbano appalachian state university, united states of america karolina mikołajewska-zając kozminski university, poland / university of queensland, australia attila márton copenhagen business school, denmark this panel explores internet histories through the lens of “platform death” as a way of understanding how digital communities grapple with technological failure, infrastructural absence, and the frailty of digital culture. collectively, the panelists develop theoretical frameworks to situate the cultural, geopolitical, economic, and socio-legal repercussions of technological failure. as a point of departure, we assume that platforms can bring together a wide set of actors, from couchsurfers to civic technologists, military personnel to civilians, spies to free speech activists; they can serve as a stage where people debate, develop personal relationships, and jockey for divergent futures (marvin, 1988; pearce, 2011; baym, 2015; lee, 2017; gillespie, 2018). but what becomes of platforms when they fade, fail, or fall from public favor; can they, like software, experience an “afterlife” (stevenson and gehl, 2019)? what can dead and dying platforms tell us about technological growth and stagnation, digital present(s) and future(s)? this panel represents a collaborative effort to complicate, document, and build on the narratives of platform collapse, precarity, and frailty that scholars (gehl, 2012; chun, 2016; belleflamme & neysen, 2017; gomez-meijia, 2018; helmond & van der vlist, 2019) and tech reporters (kircher, 2016) have highlighted over the past two decades. panelists, in their scholarly work and exploration of five different platforms, establish that “platform death” is so much a monolithic or static concept. indeed, death in the context of digital culture can be understood as an industrial process, as a negotiation between different platform stakeholders, and even, as a discursive marker. as a conceptual framework, it can provide for a rich understanding of how technological failure occurs and ripples across divergent digital communities. the papers in this panel, we provide five arguments that focus on a range of conceptions of platform death. the first contribution looks at platform counter-narratives and platform countermemories related to a u.s. military-made social media platform, trooptube. it focuses on the ways in which technological failure can help surface narratives of contestation and power struggles between engineers, users, and other stakeholders invested in a specific platform’s design. the second contribution examines fanfou, a chinese platform launched in 2007. it examines two intertwined questions: how does china’s regulatory environment affect the development and evolution of niche social media platforms, and how do small and surviving platforms and their users adjust their operation strategies and social media use in response to state control? the third contribution offers a nostalgic re-imagining of myspace, exploring ways in which the site has been positioned as an idealized social media platform, particularly in terms of technological skill development. the fourth contribution focuses on yikyak in considering why some anonymous platforms that are prone to cyberbullying, copyright infringement, and hate speech survive while others die, despite the safe harbor status afforded to internet service providers (isps) and social media platforms by section 230 of the communications decency act (cda). the fifth and final contribution included in the panel offers a case study of couchsurfing to situate ways in which certain platforms become ‘death stars’ (scholz, 2016), creating ‘kill zones’ that suffocate emerging competition in technological markets. together, these arguments draw on single episodes of death to reveal entanglements between technologies, people, and markets that outlast and reverberate beyond the rise and fall of any single community. references baym, n. (2015). personal connections in the digital age. cambridge, uk: polity press. belleflamme, p., & neysen, n. (2017). the rise and fall of take eat easy, or why markets are not easy to take in the sharing economy. digiworld economic journal, (108). burgess, j., & green, j. b. (2009). youtube: online video and participatory culture. cambridge, ma: polity press. chun, w. h. k. (2016). updating to remain the same: habitual new media. cambridge, ma: mit press. gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. new haven, ct: yale university press. gomez-meijia, g. (2018). la fabrique de la désuétude. regards diachroniques sur geocities et myspace. in v. schafer (ed.), temps et temporalités du web, (pp. 77-88). nanterre: presses universitaires de nanterre. helmond, a., & van der vlist, f. n. (2019). social media and platform historiography: challenges and opportunities. tijdschrift voor mediageschiedenis, 22(1), 6-34. kircher, m. m. (2016, october 28). how vine created a culture and lost control of it. new york magazine. retrieved from https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/10/vine-star-loganpaul-and-teens-talk-about-the-death-of-vine.html lee, k-s. (2017). amplifying cyberactions: a short history of e-resistance in south korea. in g. goggin & m. mclelland (eds.), the routledge companion to global internet histories, (pp. 505-515). london: routledge. marvin, c. (1988). when old technologies were new. new york, ny: oxford university press. pearce, c. (2011). communities of play: emergent cultures in multiplayer games and virtual worlds. cambridge: mit press. scholz, t. (2016). platform cooperativism. challenging the corporate sharing economy. http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/wpcontent/files_mf/scholz_platformcoop_5.9.2016.pdf stevenson, m. & robert w. gehl (2019). "the afterlife of software." in: a networked self: birth, life, death, ed. zizi papacharissi. routledge. platform life, platform death: counter-histories of military-made social media muira mccammon annenberg school for communication, university of pennsylvania while many emerging histories of the web have attempted to study how people remember disappeared or deactivated websites (yang and wu, 2017), most have thus far dwelt on how big and still-existing platforms, such as craigslist, twitter, youtube and facebook, (brügger, 2015; lingel, 2020; arceneaux & schmitz weiss, 2010; burgess & green, 2018;) have evolved. one aspect of internet history that has not received much scholarly attention is how governments have tried and failed to create their own public social media platforms. another aspect of internet history that has not been studied much is how narratives and counter-narratives emerge, ebb, flow, and even vary during a platform’s life and death. in this article, i twin these two gaps in the scholarship by considering platform counternarratives and platform counter-memories. while a small sub-section of memory scholars has begun to grapple with the ways in which people remember disappeared, de-activated, and defunct platforms, much of this literature has avoided recognizing the power of counter-history or the potential of certain actors tied to a platform as counterstorytellers. many memory narratives about the web that was are obtained through interviews, oral histories, technobiographies (kennedy, 2003), but there is a tendency of many such studies to focus nostalgically and narratively on what has been lost in a platform’s death instead of which stakeholders and power struggles facilitated its demise. one aspect that communication historians tend to highlight in their origin stories of the internet is the role that the u.s. military played in imagining and creating network infrastructures in the 20th century (levine, 2019). yet, the 21st century has posed a challenge to the u.s. military, which has stemmed from the privatization of much of the web and the rise of private social media companies. in his own official narrative of the u.s. military’s engagement with digital platforms, major general john davis, the pentagon’s military cyber security adviser, explains that the rise of privately-owned network infrastructures has made it so that military cybersecurity “is not getting any easier because our reliance on key networks and systems that are not directly under dod’s control” (cited in harris, 2019). today, a new wave of platform studies attempts to grapple with a different genre of stories told about new media: counter-narratives. in 'opening to the original contributions: counter-narratives and the power to oppose', molly andrews broadly defines counter-narratives as “the stories which people tell and live which offer resistance, either implicitly or explicitly, to dominant cultural narratives” (andrews 2004, p. 1). telling a story that conflicts with master narratives can lead to a subversive strategic positioning of the self. bamberg (2005) defines a master narrative as a “preexistent sociocultural form of representation” meant to “delineate and confine local interpretation strategies and agency constellations in individual subjects as well as social institutions” (p. 287). this notion of counter-narrative is also largely intertwined with counter-memory, which george lipsitz defines: counter-memory is a way of remembering and forgetting that starts with the local, the immediate, and the personal. unlike historical narratives that begin with the totality of human existence and then locate specific actions and events within that totality, counter-memory starts with the particular and the specific and then builds outward towards a total story. counter-memory looks to the past for the hidden histories excluded from dominant narratives. but unlike myths that seek to detach events and actions from the fabric of any larger history, counter-memory forces revision of existing histories by supplying new perspectives of the past…counter-memory focuses on localized experiences with oppression, using them to reframe and refocus dominant narratives purporting to represent universal experience. (lipsitz 1990, p. 213) lipsitz’s framework situates counter-memory as “a way of remembering and forgetting that starts with the local, the immediate, and the personal” (p. 213). in lipsitz’s words, it “grapples with tensions between grand historical narratives and lived experience” (p. 214). we can think of platform counter-memories as ways of reimagining and reconfiguring the influence of the state and the official on the user and the civilian. many counter-narratives have emerged on platforms, but only a small number of scholars have written counter-narratives of platforms. pasquale (2016) uses the framework of the counter-narrative to discuss ways in which platform capitalism further creates occupational inequalities by disempowering workers through the auctioning of skills and reinforces systemic discrimination through ratings systems. i add to this corpus of work by considering the role and need for counter-memories, which emerge long after a platform’s death and teach us about the continued power struggles existing between civilian and military stakeholders trying to imagine, design, and negotiate, among themselves, who will wield control over the future internet. this article offers an analysis of the narratives and counter-narratives that have developed around a government-initiated platform and the counter-memories that feed these understandings of the web that was; it traces the framing of a now barely invisible digital product. it deploys archaeological principles of excavation and analysis to a largely invisible digital terrain. to facilitate this study, i use a range of sources to think through where platform counter-narratives emerge after a platform fails. i draw on semistructured interviews with designers and users of the platform (n = 10), as well as military personnel, who were using various social media platforms during its life but chose not to use it (n = 5). interviews were conducted in 2019, 2020, and 2021. i also rely on secondhand sources, from blogs posts to coverage in u.s. media. looking across these different sources, i concentrate not only where platform counter-narratives emerge but how they contrast with platform narratives that were published during the platform’s existence. drawing on this data, i reveal how official military narratives about trooptube obfuscated the counter-narratives that would emerge years later, that predicted the platform’s frailty, fragility, and ultimate inability to compete against big tech. references andrews, m. (2004) counter-narratives and the power to oppose. in m. bamberg and m. andrews, considering counter narratives: narrating, resisting and making sense, (pp. 1–6). amsterdam: john benjamins. arceneaux, n., & schmitz weiss, a. (2010) seems stupid until you try it: press coverage of twitter, 2006-9. new media & society, 12(8), 1262-1279. bamberg, m. (2004). considering counter narratives. in m. bamberg and m. andrews, considering counter narratives: narrating, resisting and making sense, (pp. 351–71). amsterdam: john benjamins. burgess, j., & green, j. (2018). youtube: online video and participatory culture. cambridge, ma: polity press. brügger, n. (2015). a brief history of facebook as a media text: the development of an empty structure. first monday, 20(5). harris, shane. (2014). @war : the rise of the military-internet complex. boston: houghton mifflin harcourt. kennedy, h. (2003). technobiography: researching lives, online and off. biography 26(1): 120–139. levine, y. (2019). surveillance valley: the secret military history of the internet. new york: public affairs. lingel, j. (2020). an internet for the people: the politics and promise of craigslist. princeton, nj: princeton university press. lipsitz, g. (1990). time passages: collective memory and american pop culture. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. yang, g., & wu, s. (2018). remembering disappeared websites in china: passion, community, and youth. new media & society, 20(6), 2107–2124. the microblog revolution that wasn’t: recounting the rise and demise of fanfou (2007-2020) under china’s changing politics lotus ruan university of toronto, canada how does china’s regulatory environment affect the development and evolution of niche social media platforms? how do small and surviving platforms and their users adjust their operation strategies and social media use in response to state control? this paper examines the state-business-society relationship displayed in fanfou, china’s first microblogging platform launched in 2007. the development, influences, and political impacts of social media platforms have attracted much scholarly attention (zhuravskaya et al., 2020). from the early-day optimism of the liberalising potentials of the internet and social media (barlow, 1996) to recent critiques of the data-based surveillance capitalism of platforms (deibert, 2019; fraser, 2020; marciano et al., 2020; zuboff, 2019), most of the literature on platform politics is derived from observations of big tech western platforms including facebook and twitter (jackson et al., 2020; vaidhyanathan, 2018). in reality, however, internet platforms are regional and context-specific (steinberg & li, 2017; w. y. wang & lobato, 2019). in this regard, the history of the internet in china, or “the chinese internet” as (yang, 2012) calls it, remains largely understudied despites calls for it (zhao, 2009). among studies that examine chinese platforms, much is concerned with big tech in china such as weibo (china’s twitter-like microblogging service) and wechat (china’s whatsapp-like social networking app) (e.g., jia & han, 2020; s. i. zhang, 2020). although these studies provide useful insights into the state-market relations in china, it is not clear whether these observations hold true for small, niche, and surviving platforms and digital communities. similarly, while a body of literature has been dedicated to recounting the success and struggles of chinese big tech platforms and analyze when they capitulate to or resiststate control (gallagher & miller, 2019; han, 2018; ng, 2015; yang, 2009), little has been done to narrate the rise and demise of small platforms under china’s political environment. yet, as yang & wu (2018) demonstrate, small platforms and disappeared websites provide an important “entry point” (p. 2109) into the ebbs and flows of chinese platforms and yield fruitful knowledge of the characteristics of the chinese internet writ large. moreover, resistance tactics by different actors often reflect and respond to changes of repression modes by the state (boudreau, 2004). whereas the chinese state’s targets and mechanisms of online repression remain erratic (crandall et al., 2013; jeffrey knockel et al., 2017; link, 2002), private actors and disgruntled citizens still “anticipate state activities, search out its pattern, and in light of that pattern, calibrate movement practice to navigate between the innocuous and the suicidal” (boudreau, 2004, p.3). the everyday practices of chinese internet users, including their adjustment of online expressions and social media use, therefore “carry the burdens of historical memories and present concerns” (yang, 2012, p. 51). positioned at the intersections of the scholarship on contentious politics in authoritarian regimes, platform governance, and web history, this study used process tracing and document analysis and identified the dominating role of the state in the rise and demise of fanfou, china’s once most influential public platform. a survey of individual narratives was also conducted to further the understanding of the dynamic state-business-society manifested throughout the development and evolution of fanfou. this paper shows that fanfou has opted for a much cautious approach to platform governance and become a closed community as a survival strategy after a series of political clampdowns and an increasingly restrictive political space. fanfou users, who have imagined their own community, consciously chose to depoliticize the platform based on their past experience, understanding and anticipation of state repression to protect the platform from state control. although this study, relying on one case study, is small in scope, it is the first attempt to examine the impacts of state control through the lens of small chinese platforms and their users. it also adds to the study of “histories of the internet” (haigh et al., 2015). references barlow, j. p. (1996). a declaration of the independence of cyberspace. boudreau, v. (2004). resisting dictatorship: repression and protest in southeast asia. cambridge university press. crandall, j. r., crete-nishihata, m., knockel, j., mckune, s., senft, a., tseng, d., & wiseman, g. (2013). chat program censorship and surveillance in china: tracking tom-skype and sina uc. first monday. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v18i7.4628 deibert, r. j. (2019). three painful truths about social media. journal of democracy, 30(1), 25–39. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2019.0002 fraser, m. (2020). big trouble for big tech. new labor forum, 29(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/1095796019891155 gallagher, m., & miller, b. (2018). the progression of repression: when does online censorship move toward real world repression? gallagher, m., & miller, b. (2019). who not what. gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. yale university press. goldsmith, j., & wu, t. (2006). who controls the internet? illusions of a borderless world. oxford university press. haigh, t., russell, a. l., & dutton, w. h. (2015). histories of the internet: introducing a special issue of information &amp;amp; culture. information & culture: a journal of history, 50(2). https://doi.org/10.1353/lac.2015.0006 jackson, s. j., bailey, m., & welles, b. f. (2020). #hashtagactivism networks of race and gender justice. mit press. jia, l., & han, x. (2020). tracing weibo (2009–2019): the commercial dissolution of public communication and changing politics. internet histories, 4(3), 304–332. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2020.1769894 keller, j. (2010, june 18). evaluating iran’s twitter revolution. the atlantic. knockel, j., ruan, l., & crete-nishihata, m. (2017). measuring decentralization of chinese keyword censorship via mobile games. 7th usenix workshop on free and open communications on the internet, foci 2017, co-located with usenix security 2017. marciano, a., nicita, a., & ramello, g. b. (2020). big data and big techs: understanding the value of information in platform capitalism. european journal of law and economics, 50(3). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10657-020-09675-1 mclelland, m., & goggin, g. (eds.). (2019). the routledge companion to global internet histories. routledge. parmelee, j. h., & bichard, s. l. (2013). politics and the twitter revolution: how tweets influence the relationship between political leaders and the public. lexington book. pasquale, f. (2018). tech platforms and the knowledge problem. roberts, m. e. (2018). censored: distraction and diversion inside china’s great firewall. princeton university press. vaidhyanathan, s. (2018). antisocial media: how facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy. oxford university press. van dijck, jose. (2014). datafication, dataism and dataveillance: big data between scientific paradigm and ideology. surveillance & society, 12(2). https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v12i2.4776 van dijck, josé, & poell, t. (2013). understanding social media logic. media and communication, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v1i1.70 wagner-pacifici, r. (1996). memories in the making: the shapes of things that went. qualitative sociology, 19(3). https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02393274 yang, g. (2009). the power of the internet in china: citizen activism online. columbia university press. yang, g. (2012). a chinese internet? history, practice, and globalization. chinese journal of communication, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2011.647744 yang, g., & wu, s. (2018). remembering disappeared websites in china: passion, community, and youth. new media and society, 20(6), 2107–2124. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817731921 zhao, y. (2009). communication in china: political economy, power, and conflict. rowman & littlefield publishing group. zhuravskaya, e., petrova, m., & enikolopov, r. (2020). political effects of the internet and social media. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-economics zuboff, s. (2019). surveillance capitalism and the challenge of collective action. new labor forum, 28(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/1095796018819461 “tom had us all doing front-end web development”: a nostalgic (re)imagining of myspace kate miltner university of edinburgh, united kingdom ysabel gerrard university of sheffield, united kingdom on february 18, 2021, twitter user miss bae (@yungskuntebony) tweeted, “we took myspace for granted, music on ur profile and no discourse that’s all we needed”. the tweet quickly went viral, receiving over 141,000 likes and 21,000 retweets in less than a week. although the velocity with which the tweet spread was remarkable, the nostalgic sentiments that wistfully frame myspace in comparison to contemporary social media are not new and have seen considerable growth in recent years—indeed, there were almost 6,000 nostalgic tweets about myspace in 2020 alone. founded in 2003, myspace has cemented its place in the cultural imagination like few other social media platforms. within three years of its launch, myspace became the most visited website in the united states (cashmore, 2006). writing at the height of myspace’s popularity, jones et al (2008) noted that the site’s “flexibility” was a “significant element of its popularity”. however, by 2009, competing social networking site facebook surpassed myspace in both global and u.s. traffic (albanesius, 2009), becoming and remaining the dominant western social network. at the peak of its decline, myspace was largely seen by white elites as an amateurish “ghetto” where children were at risk of victimization (e.g., boyd, 2011) and portrayed as a “junk heap of bad design” (parker quoted in tsotsis, 2011) that reflected the racialized, gendered, and classed tastes of its least desirable users (boyd, 2011). while myspace still exists today, it is broadly seen as a “dead” platform (solon, 2018). although myspace fell from dominance over a decade ago, the site has been nostalgically reframed in a way that positions it as an idealized social media platform, particularly in terms of technological skill development. one potent representation of this nostalgic reimagining is through tweets about myspace and computer programming skills. niemeyer (2014) explains that, more than a trend or fashion, nostalgia is often related to imagining and (re)inventing the past, present, and future (p.2). taking inspiration from niemeyer’s provocation, “what is nostalgia doing?” (ibid.), we ask, how should we make sense of the persistence and popularity of tweets about myspace and coding? research methods & ethical considerations to find a broad range of tweets addressing myspace nostalgia, we used the web data research assistant (webdatara) tool to collect tweets using the search terms “myspace” + “code”, “coding”, “coder”, “coded” and “html”. the earliest tweets reflecting myspace nostalgia appeared in 2012; due to the sheer volume of the dataset, we employed a sampling strategy that collected all tweets returned by the aforementioned search terms every january from 2012-2021. after cleaning the data and removing 668 irrelevant tweets, our corpus comprised a total of 2,305 tweets. these tweets were inductively and iteratively coded using thematic analysis (guest et al, 2012; gibson & brown, 2009). to protect the privacy of the users in our dataset, we employed fabrication (markham, 2012) to construct representative interactions without the reproduction of exact language that may be searchable and traceable. the only tweets we did not fabricate were “viral” tweets with thousands of likes and retweets; these we attributed to their original authors. research findings & contributions our thematic analysis of the dataset revealed three dominant trends within the dataset: 1.) general nostalgia, which focused largely on missing myspace and reminiscing nostalgically about its features, particularly around customizability; 2.) skills, which suggested that myspace was a place for skill development, particularly “coding” and html, often developed during a person’s youth; and 3.) platform politics, where the nostalgia for myspace was often oppositional in the sense that myspace was seen as a “purer” alternative to untrustworthy modern platforms like facebook. the dominant themes within these tweets varied little from year to year and frequently overlapped; this cohesion suggests that these tweets represented a distinct discourse—what we call the myspace nostalgia discourse. we argue that the myspace nostalgia discourse is connected to the emergence of a broader coding fetish (miltner, 2019) that positions computer programming as essential for individual access to the most desirable and highly paid labor markets, particularly for minoritized groups such as women and people of color. myspace users needed to learn basic html and css to creatively modify their profiles, affordances that are mostly absent from contemporary social media platforms; this skill acquisition is now being framed as myspace’s “coding legacy” (codecademy, 2020). we further contend that myspace nostalgia is also rooted in dissatisfaction with the contemporary social media landscape: platforms with fixed identity and profiling architectures that prioritize individuals’ monetizable behaviors rather than their creative self-expression. collectively, the myspace nostalgia discourse achieves two interrelated outcomes: first, it responds to the larger coding fetish discourse and re-imagines myspace through the lens of digital skill development, reinforcing the framing of coding as a net good for social mobility, particularly for women and/or people of color. second, it offers trenchant critiques of platform capitalism (srnicek, 2017) that position myspace as a foil for “toxic” and “gentrified” social media environments. contrary to previous popular framings of myspace as an unsafe setting that allowed risky behaviors to flourish, particularly around child safety (marwick, 2008), myspace coding tweets offer a generative reimagining of myspace as a place where young people-and girls and black youth in particular- learned valuable skills. in doing so, these tweets take the very elements that supposedly caused myspace’s decline — its “messy” (dredge, 2015) design, and the dominance of people of color and young women — and reposition them at the core of myspace’s value and worth. overall, what the twitter instantiation of the myspace nostalgia discourse offers us is an important reflection on how technologies’ perceived value can shift dramatically in response to contemporary discourses. references albanesius, c. (2009, 16 june). more americans go to facebook than myspace. pc mag. available at: https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2348822,00.asp. boyd, d. (2011). white flight in networked publics. how race and class shaped american teen engagement with myspace and facebook. in l. nakamura & pa chow-white (eds.), race after the internet, 203–222. cashmore, p. (2006, 11 july). myspace, america’s number one. mashable. available at: https://mashable.com/2006/07/11/myspace-americas-numberone/?europe=true#7x596_toz5qr. codecademy. (2020, 14 february). myspace and the coding legacy it left behind. available at: https://news.codecademy.com/myspace-and-the-coding-legacy/. dredge, s. (2015, 6 march). myspace what went wrong: “the site was a massive spaghetti-ball mess”. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/06/myspace-what-went-wrong-seanpercival-spotify gibson, w.j. and brown, a. (2009). working with qualitative data. thousand oaks, ca: sage. guest, g., macqueen, km and namey, ee. (2012). applied thematic analysis. thousand oaks, ca: sage. jones s., millermaier, s., goya-martinez, m. and schuler, j. (2008). whose space is myspace? a content analysis of myspace profiles. first monday. 13(9). markham, a. (2012). fabrication as ethical practice: qualitative inquiry in ambiguous internet contexts. information, communication and society. 15(3): 334–353. marwick, a. e. (2008). to catch a predator? the myspace moral panic. first monday. miltner, k.m. (2019). anyone can code? the coding fetish and the politics of sociotechnical belonging. (unpublished doctoral thesis). university of southern california, los angeles, usa. niemeyer, k. (2014). media and nostalgia: yearning for the past, present and future. houndmills, basingstoke, hampshire: palgrave macmillan. srnicek, n. (2017). platform capitalism. john wiley & sons. tsotsis, a. (2011, 11 july). sean parker on why myspace lost to facebook. techcrunch. available at: https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/28/sean-parker-on-whymyspace-lost-to-facebook/. “yakety yak, don’t talk back”: moderation on anonymous platforms kathryn montalbano appalachian state university, united states of america through an analysis of survey responses distributed to a subreddit, r/yikyak, as well as a broader community on facebook and twitter, this paper considers why some anonymous platforms that are prone to cyberbullying, copyright infringement, and hate speech survive while others die, despite the safe harbor status afforded to internet service providers (isps) and social media platforms by section 230 of the communications decency act (cda). drawing from the conference theme, independence, section 230 has granted isps and social media platforms the independence, so to speak, to develop and grow without the threat of libel, privacy, or copyright lawsuits based on the speech or actions of their users. the justification for minimal regulation of isps stems from the repeal of title v of the telecommunications act of 1996—the overly broad communications decency act (cda). the supreme court ruled the act unconstitutional in reno v. aclu (1997) for including all forms of internet indecency in its scope rather than narrowly tailoring regulation to apply to cases of minors. the court rejected the idea that the internet was analogous to a broadcaster that deserved less constitutional protection. though title v was struck down, section 230 of the communications decency act survived. following this repeal, the argument follows, developers and policymakers were able to conceptualize and build the internet as we know it today due to the protections section 230 granted to isps and other digital platforms. and yet, internet culture and use has evolved significantly since 1996 when section 230 was born, as the distinction between the online and offline worlds has become less clear. as sylvain (2019, p. 272) has argued: “today, however, intermediaries are far more than simple publishers or distributors of third-party content. and users appear to have few constraints on what they are willing to post or consume.” sylvain’s argument stems from a critique of wu (2019), who argues that automated systems may replace humans in adjudicating social media moderation. in the past year, policymakers and politicians have reconsidered the justification of section 230’s safe harbor status that has allowed these platforms to evolve independently of the constant threat of lawsuits. isps and social media platforms, in turn, argue that their exceptionalism within media industries justifies this safe harbor protection and independence in order to continually innovate and flourish. as such, these platforms find the proposal of regulation in the form of a revised section 230 to be unfeasible, refusing to recognize their interdependence upon the various components of communication law, including privacy, libel, and copyright. inadvertently, as a result of the continual safe harbor status of section 230, community moderators or members on various platforms have long responded to the absence of legal sanctions for their overarching host platform by forging their own links of interdependence among users to create systems of community moderation and accountability. sylvain (2019, p. 264) argues that human review will continue to triumph over automated moderation, at least in the absence of platform liability: “human review is essential today because it confers a degree of legitimacy on the platforms’ moderation choices.” previous scholarship has examined how regulations prohibit online speech or action that likely lead to legal issues (van dijck, 2013). additionally, this author has argued that hyperlocal anonymous platforms do not solely hide behind section 230, and that surviving platforms instead combine (1) robust terms of service statements along with (2) specific community values or guidelines that are fortified by (3) a comprehensive monitoring system, in order to curb abusive behavior on their platforms. online anonymous communities that survive thus rely on a robust, rigorous moderation system comprising both moderators and regular users to promote civility and accountability within large, frequently populated communities. these survey responses from people who used to communicate on yik yak and/or continue to utilize existing anonymous platforms will aim to answer the first broader research question: why do some anonymous platforms survive while others die? the subsequent analysis will then answer the second research question: to what degree does civility and effective moderation compensate for the safe harbor status granted by section 230 to anonymous platforms, a legal framework that shifts the burden of moderation onto both volunteer moderators and regular users? the “free labor” (terranova, 2000) involved in maintaining online platforms provides a critical window into why anonymous platforms survive while others perish. a second component of this argument draws from scholarship on feminist media studies and community labor. baym has showed how audiences, specifically fandom communities in the worlds of soap operas (baym, 2000) and independent music (baym, 2007) “appropriate the affordances of the internet in order to build communities based on shared practices and meanings” (baym, 2015, p. 1). duffy (2016, p. 443), though more explicitly addressing content creators, nonetheless offers a fruitful term for this paper, “authenticity labour,” which she has traced from the “narratives of authenticity and realness; the instrumentality of affective relationships; and entrepreneurial brand devotion” within this broader umbrella of “gendered forms of social media production.” nieborg and poell (2018, p. 4279) add to this body of scholarship on labor and cultural capital, remarking that “while political economists are acutely aware of the labor issues that arise from platformdependent cultural production, less attention is paid to how this translates into the transformation of cultural commodities.” in tandem, these bodies of scholarship on digital labor, online community, content moderation, and section 230 bolster the primary analysis of the survey responses to demonstrate why some anonymous platforms live while others perish—despite the independence and autonomy that section 230 of the communications decency act grants them. references baym, n. k. (2000). tune in, log on: soaps, fandom, and online community. thousand oaks, ca: sage. baym, n. k. (2007). the new shape of online community: the example of swedish independent music fandom. first monday, 12(8). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v12i8.1978 baym, n. k. (2015). connect with your audience! the relational labor of connection. the communication review, 18(1), 14-22. duffy, b. e. (2016). the romance of work: gender and aspirational labour in the digital cultures industries. the international journal of cultural studies, 19(4), 441-457. nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society, 20(11), 4275-4292. sylvain, o. (2019). recovering tech’s humanity. columbia law review 119(7), 252-282. terranova, t. (2000). free labor. social text, 18(2), 33-58. van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. oxford: oxford university press. wu, t. (2019). will artificial intelligence eat the law? the rise of hybrid social-ordering systems. columbia law review 119(7), 2001-2028. the changing ecology of the web as seen from the margins: the struggle of couchsurfing karolina mikołajewska-zając kozminski university, poland / university of queensland, australia attila márton copenhagen business school, denmark while most of the popular business literature puts forward digital platforms’ ‘blitzscaling’ (hoffman & yeh, 2018) as a virtue and an ideal new market players should follow, much of social science literature on ‘platformization’ (helmond, 2015; nieborg & helmond, 2019; van dijck, 2020) or ‘surveillance capitalism’ (zuboff, 2019) describes the leading platforms’ effects in terms of hegemony and dependencies they orchestrate. both streams largely focus on ‘winners’ that manage to install themselves as obligatory passage points and, by and large, share the assumption that once dominant, the facebooks and the googles become too big to fail, too big to regulate, and too big to die. at the same time, there is a growing recognition that platform leaders become ‘death stars’ (scholz, 2016), creating ‘kill zones’ that suffocate emerging competition, stifle innovation, and impoverish the diversity of the web as an information ecology. in a sense, death is looming from every corner. most platforms fail (yoffie et al., 2019) and big tech corporations may be challenged by even bigger, more lavishly funded ones. alternative niches are few and far between. wikipedia is a an exceptionally rare success, relying on volunteer contributions and donations (jemielniak, 2014) and a symbiotic relationship with google, feeding into google’s search index in return for more traffic (van dijck, 2013). craigslist, another exception, remains loyal to its mission of making just enough profits, prioritizing access to classifieds (lingel, 2020), but that seems to hinge only on the goodwill of the company’s owners. against this backdrop, we develop an ecological framework for studying smaller – dead, dying, surviving, or marginalized – platforms, suggesting that they are uniquely equipped to shed light on the changing ecology of the web. inspired by gregory bateson’s ‘ecology of mind’ (bateson, 2000), we pay attention to ecological connections and the ‘success’ of a platform as the ongoing ability to adapt to new contexts. following that, survival as not only a matter concerning a seemingly discreet entity – a platform – but rather this unit as part of a bigger whole, a platform plus its environment. from that perspective, platforms’ ‘success’ is a matter of interdependence and not exceptionalism. our case study is couchsurfing (cs), a free hospitality exchange platform, launched in 2004. today, couchsurfing inhabits a small niche in the information ecology of the web, which is, however, shrinking and, with the impact of covid-19, threatened to disappear. at the same time, airbnb, which is operating in the same domain and facing the same challenges of collapsing income and absent revenue, managed to raise $3.5 billion, when it went public in december 2020. what is the state of the web, as arguably the most important information ecosystem of contemporary society, when some of its inhabitants have to beg for money to survive while others are being flooded by investment money to stay alive? what can we infer about the state of the web, if we pay attention to the small niches rather than the big winners? our research material encompasses a large collection of in-depth interviews with various stakeholders, including the founders, volunteers, employees, and participants (81 interviews); as well as ethnographic observations (among ‘regular cs members as well as cs hq) and a collection of documents, including the company’s blog, videos from cs events, press articles, and archival material, as well as documents gifted by the informants, including legal documents and archived public cs forums. the broader public may be aware of couchsurfing’s transformation from a non-profit to a venture capital-funded for-profit in 2011. but against the backdrop of a broader historic perspective, we argue, the entire cs’s history has been turbulent and punctuated by several near-deaths. this, we argue, opens a window into theorizing the broader changes the web went through after the dot-com boom. influenced partly by the internet’s military roots and the notion of ‘redundancy’ (john, 2016), the web was often conceived as a radically novel medium because of its generativity (zittrain, 2008). we argue that couchsurfing’s struggles to respond to drastic changes in its environment are indicative of the growing specialization of the web with a single operating objective, which is to profit from user growth and traffic. it is due to these developments that cs had run out of options by the time its charity application was rejected. the ecology of the web had changed by then; it was welcoming to the profit motive while marginalizing alternative ideas, motives, and platforms. through its turbulences, cs has been depleting the goodwill of volunteers and its legitimacy as a charity. it is this depletion of resources other than capital investments and revenues and the erosion of the web as an information ecosystem that comes with it, that is, in our view, illustrated by the history of couchsurfing. from the point of view of ecological research, this suggests a systemic loss of flexibility. such a development charts a dire perspective for the web’s future potential to react to unforeseen changes. in tracing the history of couchsurfing’s near-deaths and revival efforts through an ecological lens, we remain attuned to the web’s rhythmic temporality and digital media’s constant revision and reinvention of forms, whereby the new forms replacing the old ones, while appearing hegemonic, are at the same time becoming increasingly fragile (karpf, 2020). references bateson, g. (2000). steps to an ecology of mind. university of chicago press. helmond, a. (2015). the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready. social media + society, 1(2), 1–11. hoffman, r., & yeh, c. (2018). blitzscaling: the lightning-fast path to building massively valuable companies. crown publishing group. jemielniak, d. (2014). common knowledge? an ethnography of wikipedia. stanford university press. john, n. (2016). the age of sharing. polity press. karpf, d. (2020). two provocations for the study of digital politics in time. journal of information technology & politics, 17(2), 87–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2019.1705222 lingel, j. (2020). an internet for the people: the politics and promise of craigslist. princeton university press. nieborg, d. b., & helmond, a. (2019). the political economy of facebook’s platformization in the mobile ecosystem: facebook messenger as a platform instance. media, culture & society, 41(2), 196–218. scholz, t. (2016). platform cooperativism. challenging the corporate sharing economy. http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/wpcontent/files_mf/scholz_platformcoop_5.9.2016.pdf van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity. a critical history of social media. oxford university press. van dijck, j. (2020). seeing the forest for the trees: visualizing platformization and its governance. new media & society, 146144482094029. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820940293 yoffie, d. b., gawer, a., & cusumano, m. a. (2019, may 29). a study of more than 250 platforms reveals why most fail. harvard business review. https://hbr.org/2019/05/astudy-of-more-than-250-platforms-reveals-why-most-fail zittrain, j. (2008). the future of the internet and how to stop it. yale university press. zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism. profile books. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): bastos, marco & recuero, raquel. (2023, october). the insurrectionist playbook: jair bolsonaro and the national congress of brazil. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the insurrectionist playbook: jair bolsonaro and the national congress of brazil marco bastos university college dublin raquel recuero universidade federal de pelotas extended abstract this study unpacks the insurrectionist playbook leveraged by jair bolsonaro during the 2023 brazilian presidential election, a campaign marked by multiple claims of electoral fraud and support for a military coup d’état. we begin by applying content analysis to a database of 728 public statements made by then-president jair bolsonaro and factchecked by aos fatos. this first step allowed us to identify the blueprint of the insurrectionist playbook and to establish whether bolsonaro’s statements become more extreme during the campaign. this database pinpoints the insurrectionist playbook along two central and persistent narratives: the first is dedicated to asserting false claims of electoral fraud. the second frame extends the former and entails calls for military intervention typical of a coup d’état. we subsequently test the penetration of this playbook on members of the brazilian national congress during the election campaign until the transition of power to the opposition candidate, lula da silva, in january 2023, when pro-bolsonaro protesters stormed the national congress, the supreme federal court, and the palácio do planalto in an attempt to overthrow the federal government. to this end, we archived the pronouncements of elected brazilian representatives, 77% of whom use twitter to release official statements, and identified messages supporting a military intervention or casting doubt on the electoral process. the collected data includes 208,217 observations (pronouncements) classified across nearly 50 quantitative and qualitative variables. the database also identifies accounts affiliated with the government (go), the opposition (op), and those of the broad coalition known as centrão (ce) based on radar do congresso (congresso em foco, 2022). our hypothesis is that support for the self-coup d’état pushed by the bolsonaro administration failed due to dwindling support from his coalition, a hypothesis that we tested based on official pronouncements made by representatives of his party, the coalition, and the opposition. in other words, we expected the centrão―a group of political parties that do not adhere to any consistent ideological orientation but are focused instead on ensuring proximity to the executive branch to secure political advantages―to ultimately abandon the insurrectionist rhetoric. figures 1-2 show a sample of messages supportive of military intervention or questioning the legitimacy of the electoral process. we begin by examining the database of bolsonaro’s public statements to identify instances of false claims of electoral fraud, broad and unqualified attacks to democratic institutions, and the out-group stereotyping of progressive groups that served as rationale for the proposed annulment of the election (rennó, 2022). public statements that included no such elements were coded as 0 (no problematic content), with statements coded 1 identifying messages attacking democratic institutions. finally, statements coded 2 present a clear call for a military coup d’état in addition to casting doubt on the electoral process. we found 122 problematic statements (17%) from the universe of 728 public announcements fact-checked by aos fatos. figure 1: sample of public pronouncements of congresspeople analysis of these statements reveals recurrent frames that are the blueprint for the insurrectionist playbook: 1. righteousness (54 statements; 44.2%): how progressive governments threaten conservative values through the imposition of gender ideology; 2. the communist threat (22 statements; 18%): the perceived notion that the latin american left is associated with authoritarian regimes; 3. corruption (27 statements; 22.1%): attacks to democratic institutions, such as the supreme federal court or the press, both of which are referred to as corrupt; 4. election denialism (10 statements; 8.1%): attacks to the electoral process or the voting machines; 5. historical revisionism (8 statements; 6.5%): support for the brazilian military dictatorship installed in the 1964 military coup; and finally 6. coup d’état (2 statements; 1.6%): open threats or calls for a military intervention and justifications for a coup d’état. these problematic statements appeared in interviews, debates, facebook live streaming, and twitter. however, all statements coded as problematic (1 or 2) were posted or featured on youtube. the public statements fact-checked by aos fatos show an uptake of 25 problematic statements in august, followed by 32 in september, and finally 65 in october when the election was held. with fear-mongering being central to this playbook, the statements include on-point messaging for the bolsonaro base that promoted distrust in the electoral process and sowed anxiety with the looming prospect figure 2: sample of public pronouncements of congresspeople of electoral defeat. figure 6 unpacks these trends. figure 3: public statements made by bolsonaro fact-checked during the official electoral period the core tenets of this playbook are centered on nationalism, religion, family, and the right to bear arms. it projects a global culture war against cultural liberalism (consistent with the agenda advocated by donald trump, viktor orban, and benjamin netanyahu) and reflect a commitment to issues of guns, christianity, and what is repeatedly slammed as ‘cultural marxism,’ ‘gender ideology,’ and ‘environmental psychoses over deforestation’ (schipani, 2019). another common thread are attacks on institutions overseeing the elections. these statements accuse the supreme federal court of partisanship. the manufactured notion of a constitutional military intervention and bolsonaro’s historical revisionism (waymer & heath, 2023) also feature prominently in the statements. taken together, these statements are carefully aimed at creating ‘righteous rage’ (rothbart & stebbins, 2022). this combination of conservative social agenda, cultural war, and insurrectionist pragmatism was effective at stirring the base, but it is unclear if it managed to convert the government coalition. next we inspect whether the insurrectionist playbook was embraced by members of the brazilian national congress. we found that 12% of the representatives posted official statements openly supporting a military coup d’état or questioning the electoral process. the distribution of public statements peaks early and decreases over time, with the density curve shown in figure 7(a) closely resembling a geometric distribution. the distribution of unsubstantiated fraud claims, however, follows the opposite pattern: as bolsonaro struggles in the campaign trail, fraud claims escalate (figure 7b), in sharp contrast to the pacing of the campaign (figure 7a). direct calls for a coup d’état, finally, peaked toward the end of october when lula da silva was announced president-elect (figure 7c). figure 7 shows these trends in line with the hypothesis driving this study. finally, we inspected the temporal series of false claims embedded in public statements of government (go) and coalition (ce) representatives. figure 8 shows the frequency of public statements casting doubt on the electoral process or requesting a military intervention. while the government continues to put out official statements with false claims of electoral fraud, the broader coalition (ce) abandons the insurrectionist playbook in early september. the government base becomes increasingly more isolated in its efforts to push the electoral fraud narrative, notwithstanding the relatively stable stream of messages with false claims about the election pushed by government core representatives in the period. as such, we conclude that the coup d’état in brazil failed due to dwindling support for the bolsonaro insurrectionist agenda. figure 4: distribution of public statements (left), fraud claims (center), and calls for military intervention (right) references rennó, l. (2022). bolsonarismo e as eleições de 2022. estudos avançados, 36, 147163. rothbart, d., & stebbins, d. m. (2022). the proud boys raging righteously at the us capitol on january 6, 2021: a hate group in action. peace and conflict: journal of peace psychology. schipani, a. (2019). brazil: jair bolsonaro pushes culture war over economic reform. financial times. https://www.ft.com/content/f470734e-c41a-11e9-a8e9296ca66511c9 waymer, d., & heath, r. l. (2023, 2023/03/01/). explicating the public memory dialectic in public relations: the case of donald trump, the oath keepers, and january 6, 2021. public relations review, 49(1), 102281. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2022.102281 figure 5: frequency distribution of public statements casting doubt on the electoral process or requesting a military intervention by government (go) and coalition (ce) representatives. https://www.ft.com/content/f470734e-c41a-11e9-a8e9-296ca66511c9 https://www.ft.com/content/f470734e-c41a-11e9-a8e9-296ca66511c9 https://doi.org/https:/doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2022.102281 cyberlibertarianism aoir abstract (final).pdf selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): pace, j. (2020, october). cyberlibertarianism in the mid-1990s. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. cyberlibertarianism in the mid-1990s jonathan pace stanford university there is something libertarian about the internet. the relationship between anti-statist thought and digital technology has been the subject of considerable discussion among scholars and critics, who have approached this relationship from three perspectives. in the first perspective, technology groups depict the internet as a means to bring about a libertarian society. barbrook and cameron (1996) describe a "californian ideology", according to which digital systems will usher in a communitarian utopia of free markets. winner (1997) employs the term "cyberlibertarianism" in reference to the epochal predictions of alvin toffler, esther dyson, stewart brand, john perry barlow, and kevin kelly, who view the internet as an autonomous evolutionary force that will liberate the individual from oppressive governments. turner (2000) considers how midcentury computational metaphors resurface in 1990s cyberculture, informing the idea that network communication will inaugurate a libertarian commonwealth by embodying its self-regulatory dynamics. in the second perspective, technology groups identify as libertarian, and this political identity informs their discussions of the internet. streeter (1999) highlights the libertarian views of stewart brand and theodor nelson, who understate the role of governmental research in the development of digital technology. for rankin (2018), this understatement is central to a mythologized version of computer history, cast as a series of discrete entrepreneurial breakthroughs. borsook (2000) connects the libertarian leaning of silicon valley to the regional popularity of "technolibertarianism", or the idea that free markets are the singular conduits of innovation. wolf (2003) and friedman (2006) follow borsook in linking the anti-statist ethos of wired magazine to the libertarian views of its founder, while levy (2001) and brunton (2018) highlight the antistatist motivations behind advancements in cryptography and cryptocurrency. in the third perspective, technology groups draw on libertarian thought in articulating their opposition to internet regulation. golumbia (2017) uses the term "cyberlibertarianism" in reference to a belief that the state should not regulate the internet, focusing on entrepreneurs who purvey the ideology to stave off governmental oversight. in their survey of 700 technology executives, broockman, ferenstein, and malhotra (2018) find that industry leaders hold libertarian views on technology regulation, even when they do not formally identify as libertarian. several questions follow from this body of literature. how do these three perspectives relate to one another? which groups subscribe to a libertarian view of the internet, whether prognostic, political, and prescriptive? and to what extent do historical circumstances inform their anti-statist outlook? in this paper, i offer a set of preliminary answers these questions. drawing on critical discourse analysis, i examine the conceptual nature of libertarian internet discourse, the motivating characteristics of its speakers, and the material conditions of its circulation. i focus on conversations in the united states surrounding the 1996 passage of the communications decency act, which criminalized obscene and indecent content on the internet. during this episode, hackers, early adopters, computer professionals, technology lobbyists, and civil society advocates embraced a libertarian way of thinking about the internet and the state — a way of thinking i refer to as cyberlibertarianism. these groups had long-standing libertarian dispositions, although their anti-statism varied in style and intensity, ranging from a left-libertarianism, concerned with concentrations of power in the state and in the market, to a civil-libertarianism, concerned with the integrity of constitutional protections, to a right-libertarianism, concerned with laissez-faire market conditions. in responding to the events of the decade, and following from their established dispositions, these groups converged on a libertarian narrative about the internet and the state. according this narrative, the state was overbearing, intrusive, compromised, and uninformed — and therefore a threat to the internet as a sphere of freedom, individualism, competition, and innovation. this libertarian narrative structured their arguments against specific acts of state intervention. in the case of the communications decency act, they argued that the regulatory measure undermined the promise of the internet as a venue of free speech, an object of the free market, and a conduit for the free flow of information. the triplex of disposition, narrative, and argument coordinates the three approaches to libertarianism described at the outset: political orientation underwrote a vision of the internet and the state, and this vision animated individual claims against governmental involvement. as contemporary technology companies alternate between courtship of political figures and evasion of institutional regulation, the complexity of the relationship between the internet and the state calls for a longue-durée perspective on its fraught dynamics. by providing an analysis of libertarian discourse during a critical episode of internet history, this paper serves as a point of departure for future research into this evolving relationship. moreover, the relative age of landmark studies of cyberlibertarianism, many of which were composed in the 1990s and the 2000s, warrants a conceptual reconsideration of their foundational claims. such a reconsideration can help illuminate the contours of our present circumstances, speak to the policies necessary to transform them, and hold open the possibility of an equitable digital future. references barbrook, r. & cameron, a. (1996). the californian ideology. science as culture, 6(26), 44—72. borsook, p. (2000). cyberselfish. new york, ny: public affairs. broockman, d., ferenstein, g., & malhorta, n. (2018). predispositions and the political behavior of american economic elites. american journal of political science, 63(1), 212—233. brunton, f. (2019). digital cash. princeton, nj: princeton university press. friedman, t. (2005). electric dreams. new york, ny: new york university press. golumbia, d. (2017). cyberlibertarianism. paper presented at rice university humanities research center, houston, tx. levy, s. (2001). crypto. new york, ny: viking. rankin, j.l. (2018). a people's history of computing. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. streeter, t. (1999). that deep romantic chasm. in a. calabrese and j. burgelman (eds.), communication, citizenship, and social policy (pp. 49—64). lanham, ma: rowman & littlefield. turner, f. (2006). from counterculture to cyberculture. chicago, il: university of chicago press. winner, l. (1997). cyberlibertarian myths and the prospects for community. computers and society, 27(3), 14—19. wolf, g. (2003). wired: a romance. new york, ny: random house. please update your browser your browser isn’t supported anymore. update it to get the best youtube experience and our latest features. learn more opera safari microsoft edge mozilla firefox google chrome remind me later about copyright contact us terms privacy policy & safety © 2025 google llc selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): dahya, n., ekmekcioglu, c., arvisais, o., decarpentrie, l. (2021, october). learning in/dependently in refugee camps: community-based perspectives on teaching, learning, and technology. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. learning in/dependently in refugee camps: communitybased perspectives on teaching, learning, and technology negin dahya university of toronto cansu ekmekcioglu university of toronto olivier arvisais université du québec à montréal (uqam) laurie decarpentrie université du québec à montréal (uqam) as the global covid-19 pandemic persists, collecting qualitative research data in hard to reach settings remains fraught with challenges. digital data collection and participatory research practices have become essential methodological tools to conduct qualitative research in places like the dzaleka refugee camp in malawi, where this study is based. this aoir paper will be framed around two key components of this work. the first pertains to the methods in place, specifically, participatory research methods in a digital data collection setting. the second area of focus will be on the preliminary findings from data collection underway between april-july 2021, based on the socio-technical exploration of teaching and learning with technology in dzaleka. there is an evident gap in relation to what we know about teaching, learning, and technology for refugee people in camps. the focus of this project is to understand the ways in which teaching, learning, and technology interact in/dependently in the daily lives of refugee people in dzaleka at home, in the community, and at school. distinctly, we are asking questions about the role of technology in the everyday lives of refugee people in dzaleka, and specifically related to how teaching and learning relationships are enacted with, about, and around tools that are of value to community members. in recent years, the integration of technology into resource deprived communities like refugee camps has become more prevalent. most notably, of course, is the near ubiquitous distribution and use of mobile phones and related internet enabled applications and software. the united nations high commissioner for refugees has identified the importance of mobile phones in the lives of refugee people (unhcr, 2016). unhcr suggests that over 80% of refugees have access to mobile networks globally, and that number rises to 93% in urban areas. however, barriers to connectivity include unstable network connections, lack of access to electricity to charge phones, and inadequate literacy and digital literacy levels. these challenges are further complicated with multiple intersecting inequalities of age, race, gender, ability, socioeconomic situation, access to education and training. important to note is that much of the content online is not available in local languages, making digital literacy additionally challenging. despite barriers and inconsistencies in access, studies have shown technology is prevalent in the context of migration, ranging from mobile phone usage to navigate the process of fleeing one country to seek asylum in another, to communicating with family and friends in diaspora, and using language learning apps in host countries (de paepe et al., 2018). this landscape presents critical questions about how people experiencing forced migration are learning about technology and what technologies are in use. at the higher education level, only 3% of refugees have access to formal education and many of these programs include online learning, especially over the past year. mobiles are critical tools to support teachers and learners seeking formal education, and are being used to promote important gender equity initiatives (dahya et al., 2019; dahya & dryden-peterson, 2017). there are some technology initiatives in classrooms but teachers have also described restrictions on the use of tools like mobiles as well (dryden-peterson et al., 2017). only 77% of refugees access formal primary education and only 31% access secondary school (36% of boys are enrolled in secondary school and 27% of girls). there are ample educational technology initiatives deployed in camps through humanitarian aid agencies and often in partnership with private and/or corporate partnerships (lewis & thacker, 2016). for example, menashy and zakharia (2018) have identified that half of the funds that go to education to support the syrian refugee crisis are focused on technology initiatives. this reality around digital and mobile technology in refugee settings presents an educational paradox of sorts. our inquiry explores how refugee people in camps learn to use technology and what technology is in use, including and beyond what is known about mobile phones. how are people learning independently, within the rich cultural landscape of dzaleka, and dependently, drawing on international programs and resources as well as everything in between? our research questions are: (1) what types of technology are most prevalent in the camp, across women and men, and why? (2) what conditions – social, cultural, economic, geopolitical, educational create meaningful and successful learning experiences with or about these tools? (3) what pedagogical practices are adopted for, or emergent from, teaching with or about these tools in refugee camps, for women and men? to understand this landscape, we are adopting sarah lawrence-lightfoot’s ethnographic methodology of portraiture (lawrence-lightfoot & davis, 1997). we are building on her approach and pairing it with participatory research practices and digital data collection methods. our project began with recruitment of community researchers through our non-profit partner and using whatsapp, asking for video submissions from interested applicants. in october 2020, we hired six community researchers, four men and two women, and began a five-month, online research training program. throughout our training process, including observation exercises and visual data collection activities, the team has agreed on three primary settings of research focus: (1) online learning; (2) music production and djing; (3) sewing. each of these settings has been described by and discussed with the community researchers as richly integrated with technology teaching and learning in both formal and informal ways. our findings shed light on novel, in/dependent forms of teaching and learning in refugee camps. this work is needed to inform future technology initiatives in those settings from a community-based perspective. references dahya, n., & dryden-peterson, s. (2017). tracing pathways to higher education for refugees: the role of virtual support networks and mobile phones for women in refugee camps. comparative education, 53(2), 284–301. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2016.1259877 dahya, n., dryden-peterson, s., douhaibi, d., & arvisais, o. (2019). social support networks, instant messaging, and gender equity in refugee education. information, communication & society, 22(6), 774–790. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1575447 de paepe, l., zhu, c., & depryck, k. (2018). online dutch l2 learning in adult education: educators’ and providers’ viewpoints on needs, advantages and disadvantages. open learning: the journal of open, distance and e-learning, 33(1), 18–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680513.2017.1414586 dryden-peterson, s., dahya, n., & douhaibi, d. (2017, march 14). how teachers use mobile phones as education tools in refugee camps. brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/education-plus-development/2017/03/14/howteachers-use-mobile-phones-as-education-tools-in-refugee-camps/ lawrence-lightfoot, s., & davis, j. h. (1997). the art and science of portraiture (1st ed). jossey-bass. lewis, k., & thacker, s. (2016). ict and the education of refugees: a stocktaking of innovative approaches in the mena region. saber-ict technical paper series;no. 17. world bank, washington, dc. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/26522 unhcr. (2016). connectivity for refugees. https://www.unhcr.org/innovation/wpcontent/uploads/2018/02/20160707-connecting-refugees-web_withsignature.pdf zakharia, z., & menashy, f. (2018). private participation in the education of syrian refugees: understanding the roles of businesses and foundations. in g. steinerkhamsi & a. draxler (eds.), the state, business and education (pp. 52–67). edward elgar publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788970334.00009 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): tracey, p., zhang, b.z., garcia, p., haimson, o.l., & thomas, m. (2024, october). the technopolitics of waiting: case studies of ai training in china and homeless services systems in the u.s. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the technopolitics of waiting: case studies of ai training in china and homeless services systems in the u.s. pelle tracey* university of michigan, school of information ben zefeng zhang* university of michigan, school of information patricia garcia university of michigan, school of information oliver l. haimson university of michigan, school of information michaelanne thomas university of michigan, school of information *the first two authors contributed equally to this work. introduction many theorists of the information economy have argued that digitization has resulted in a “speeding up” of our experience of time (i.e. gleick, 1999). in contrast, we contend that for many, especially those with less power, the techno-utopian vision characterized by datafication and artificial intelligence (ai) instead produces a state of prolonged waiting. in doing so, we contribute to a growing body of work (slota et al., 2022; miceli et al., 2020) investigating how “logistical media” (peters, 2015) order the lives of people working on, and worked on by, emerging technologies. we draw from two “chronographies of power” (sharma, 2014) to illustrate how, even across differences in context, data and ai produce experiences of time characterized by the persistence of waiting. in doing so, we demonstrate how the “long-standing but mistaken belief, hegemonic in silicon valley, that automation will deliver us more time” (wajcman, 2019) belies the highly stratified temporal impacts of automation, datafication, and ai. this work draws from two ethnographic studies examining the production and implementation phases of data-driven technologies. specifically, we focus on the contexts of ai training in china, and the deployment of homeless services technology in the u.s. in the rapidly evolving world of ai, ai trainers—the people who meticulously perform tasks like data annotation—are vital, yet overlooked and unacknowledged (wu, 2023; zhang, 2023). the promises of ai bypass these contributors, relegating them to precarious conditions, a subordinate role to machines, and, importantly, endless waiting. on the other side of the pacific ocean, the homeless services system is increasingly sociotechnical, deploying algorithms and dashboards to help confront a massive and growing crisis. these tools promise to increase speed and efficiency; however, in practice, they leave many waiting for resources that may never arrive. weaving together both narratives, this paper articulates how attending to waiting provides a new lens to understand how power operates across sociotechnical contexts, while contributing novel empirical work in key sites for understanding datafication and ai. methods ethnography reveals the intricacies, significance, and politics surrounding both the development and implementation of data-driven systems. over 9 months of in-person ethnographic fieldwork, the second author studied ai production in china, a pivotal site in global ai production. to explore ai trainers' everyday professional experiences, they relied on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in several underdeveloped regions in china, including working as an ai trainer intern at an ai data annotation center for 9 weeks. their work role involved hands-on participation, observing different projects and tasks, attending team meetings, and dining with colleagues. the data for this paper is grounded in 16 formal interviews with ai trainers and over 150 pages of field notes and online archives. the second study, conducted by the first author, examined data-driven governance in the homeless services system in an east coast u.s. city. through 13 months of in-person ethnography and 60 formal interviews, the first author investigated the everyday functions and impacts of data-driven governance at an outreach center, while volunteering at the site preparing food, talking to guests, staff, and other volunteers, and observing data work. following an ethnography of infrastructure approach (star, 1999, 382), the first author examined field notes and transcripts alongside policy and technical documents, and histories of the homeless services system. both authors anonymized all data in this paper to protect interlocutors’ privacy and ensure their safety. waiting derived from “hybrid management” and the promise of accuracy study one contributes the concept of “hybrid management” as a hybrid form of labor control. managing technical accuracy in ai training represents a case of hybrid forms of control, as workers are being controlled and managed by both traditional factory-like criteria and gamified platforms but enjoy the benefits of neither. the lack of security and benefits in traditional settings and the flexibility of the platform settings, leads to additional and excessive waiting among interlocutors. one of the field sites also implemented a facial recognition clock-in system and mandated workers to use the system to record their attendance. the record both captures attendance and qualifies workers for the 200 yuan ($27.80) monthly “perfect attendance award.” such incentives are important, as business process outsourcing companies often have a strong desire to retain workers to ensure consistency in task performance and data quality. such clock-in systems ensure that workers are physically present in the data center for a prolonged period, even though their pay is often based on piecework. workers tolerate spending idle time in order to get the monthly bonus and be assigned to new tasks. this idle, unpaid time in the center can amount to days or even weeks in the center not actively working. in addition to waiting for new tasks, workers also wait for feedback from more powerful actors such as quality inspectors, stand by for rules to be established, and wait to be assigned to new projects. to achieve a desirable technical accuracy, some clients demand workers to prove they have spent a certain amount of hours on given projects. even if they finish early, workers still need to ensure that they log enough screen hours resulting in additional unpaid waiting. waiting for housing people experiencing homelessness are constantly being made into data. the interlocutors the first author spoke with described being counted as they access services and during annual point-in-time counts; measured and sorted as they seek subsidized housing; and timed as they navigate the shelter system. at every turn, someone was handing them a form, or asking them questions, and many were unaware of the extent to which their lives were tracked and digitized. while such recordkeeping—the assemblage of “file selves” (harre, 1984)—is characteristic of bureaucracy, data have proliferated and taken on new urgency in an era of automation and data dashboards (tracey, garcia, and punzalan, 2023). this datafication promises to make homeless services more efficient. but for interlocutors, waiting remained a persistent feature of daily life. people visiting the outreach center described waiting for a shelter bed; for a shuttle to take them from the shelter to an intake center; for their caseworkers to process forms; for the soup kitchen to serve the coffee; and perhaps above all else, for the black box of the housing system to work. coffee might be ready in a few minutes, while the housing system could take months or even years. while someone curious about the wait time for coffee could get an answer easily, the length and structure of waiting processes for housing and shelter were typically a mystery. this information asymmetry charged the experience of waiting, as often interlocutors had no idea how long they would be waiting for, making it difficult for them to make plans or long-term decisions. conclusion waiting, in both contexts, carries multiple meanings. in one sense, interlocutors waited for some immediate outcome, such as a shelter bed or the assignment of a new task. but in another, they wait in the hope of something more abstract and substantial—a slightly better future. our findings suggest that the technologies which mediated the experience of waiting in the first, more immediate sense, also impacted how interlocutors conceptualized the future. our work also illuminates that despite the promise of data-driven technologies, pervasive waiting serves as evidence of an enduring residue—an unequal power structure. while data and ai create immediacy for some, for others, they produce a sense of being outside of time, waiting indefinitely for a better world that may never materialize. references charmaz, k. (2006). constructing grounded theory: a practical guide through qualitative analysis. sage. gleick, j. (1999) faster: the acceleration of just about everything. pantheon books. harre, r. (1984). personal being: a theory of individual psychology. harvard university press. miceli, m., schuessler, m., & yang, t. (2020). between subjectivity and imposition: power dynamics in data annotation for computer vision. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 4(cscw2), 115:1-115:25. https://doi.org/10.1145/3415186 peters, j. d. (2015). the marvelous clouds: toward a philosophy of elemental media. university of chicago press. sharma, s. (2014). in the meantime: temporality and cultural politics. duke univ. press. slota, s. c., fleischmann, k. r., & greenberg, s. r. (2022). a brief typology of time: temporal structuring and dissonance in service provision for people experiencing homelessness. in m. smits (ed.), information for a better world: shaping the global future (pp. 211–224). springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96957-8_19 star, s. l. (1999). the ethnography of infrastructure. american behavioral scientist, 43(3), 377–391. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326 tracey, p., garcia, p., & punzalan, r. (2023). recordkeeping, logistics, and translation: a study of homeless services systems as infrastructure. archival science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-023-09410-0 vora, k. (2015). life support: biocapital and the new history of outsourced labor. university of minnesota press. wajcman, j. (2019). how silicon valley sets time. new media & society, 21(6), 1272–1289. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818820073 wu, d. (2023). good for tech: disability expertise and labor in china’s artificial intelligence sector. first monday. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v28i1.12887 zhang, b. z. (2023). the labor of training artificial intelligence: data infrastructure, mobility, and marginality. companion publication of the 2023 conference on computer supported cooperative work and social computing, 459–461. https://doi.org/10.1145/3584931.3608926 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation: milosevic, t., verma, k., vigil, s., carter, m., staksrud, e., laffan, d., davis, b., o’higgins norman, j.(2022, november). leveraging ai-based interventions to address cyberbullying among children: a rights-based approach. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. leveraging ai-based interventions to address cyberbullying among children: a rights-based perspective tijana milosevic dcu anti-bullying centre and adapt sfi kanishk verma adapt centre, dcu anti bullying centre samantha vigil university of california, davis michael carter boston children’s hospital, digital wellness lab elisabeth staksrud university of oslo derek a. laffan dcu anti-bullying centre brian davis adapt centre, dublin city university james o’higgins norman dcu anti-bullying centre introduction cyberbullying, broadly defined as repeated harm inflicted with digital technology, continues to pose a significant problem for children. online intermediaries, such as social media platforms1, are leveraging algorithmic techniques designed to automate the process of moderation such as natural language processing (nlp), machine and deep learning (artificial intelligence or ai) in order to optimise cyberbullying moderation (gorwa et al., 2020; vidgen & derczynski, 2020). this allows human moderators to process cases faster when they are reported by users; and to detect cyberbullying proactively—before these incidents are reported to the platform and subsequently flagged for moderation.2 while one in three internet users are children, children are still insufficiently consulted or taken into consideration in internet governance decisions, as well as decisions that relate to platform design (livingstone & third, 2017). for example, social media companies do not disclose whether and how they consult children in their safety design decisions. in as much as safety design decisions by social media platforms have implications for children, children need to be consulted in this process, if interventions are to be effective from their perspective; and if they are to balance children’s rights to protection vs. participation and privacy. following the united nations convention on the rights of the child (uncrc)3, which applies in digital environments4, not only do children have the right to protection (right to safety, such as protection from cyberbullying) but they also have the right to be consulted on matters that concern them and to privacy, among others. children’s rights to protection are often prioritised over their rights to participation and privacy (e.g., they might be denied access to social media features for the sake of safety; or they might be surveilled online by their parents to ensure protection, see livingstone & third, 2017; mascheroni & siibak, 2021; staksrud, 2016). we therefore ask: rq1: how can we design automatic tools that support effective proactive bullying interventions that assist victimised children while ensuring children’s rights to privacy, freedom of expression and other relevant rights as outlined in the uncrc? rq2: how can we leverage children’s feedback to optimise the effectiveness of such tools? the current study 1 we are aware of the problematic nature of the term “platform” but we use it here for the lack of a more suitable term see gillespie, 2017. 2 https://transparency.fb.com/ 3 https://www.unicef.org.uk/what-we-do/un-convention-child-rights/ 4 https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2021/02/04/childrens-rights-apply-in-the-digital-world/ a demo was created in figma5 design tool which showed several scenarios in which cyberbullying was detected proactively by ai (i.e., abusive content is detected without the child having to report it to the platform first) on tik tok, instagram and trill,6 and subsequent interventions based on research into bystander involvement (bastiaensens et al., 2014; difranzo et al., 2018). for example, a user who witnessed bullying or who had previously been selected by the abused child as a support contact/helper would be automatically notified when their friend is abused and prompted to provide help by reaching out to the victim to offer help; or by being prompted to report to the platform or reach out to the perpetrator soliciting them to stop the abusive behaviour. another intervention leveraged facial recognition in order to detect bullying by deliberate exclusion (e.g. when three girls want to show the fourth one that she has not been invited to a party by tagging her in their photo from the party, which was previously identified by instagram as a common type of bullying among teen girls on the platform).7 the study participants were asked about their perceptions of desirability of ai detecting cyberbullying in this manner, including the use of facial recognition; implications for privacy and freedom of expression, as well as the perceptions of effectiveness of such interventions. method and data analyses this study relies on qualitative research with pre-teen and teen children aged 12-17 (15 semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted online, 8 females, 7 males) and 4 focus groups/fgs (4 groups with female participants conducted offline, in a school setting, and 2 online fgs with males, with 6-10 children per group) from ireland. all fieldwork was conducted from may to august 2021 and all but the 4 school-based fgs were conducted online due to lockdown conditions. children were shown the demo with proposed interventions and asked to provide feedback and suggest changes to the interventions. all procedures were approved by dublin city university’s research ethics committee (rec) as well as the data protection unit, parental/caregiver written consent as well as child written assent were sought from all participants following the provision of plain language statements which explained the voluntary nature of the research, confidentiality and anonymity and all research implications in a child friendly manner. following the transcription and anonymisation procedures, a thematic analysis of the data (boyatzis, 1998; braun & clarke, 2006) was undertaken by three coders, who discussed the themes that emerged and any disagreements as to how the content was coded. results and discussion despite privacy concerns, many of the interviewed children in both interviews and focus groups approved, would not mind or would even encourage proactive ai “scanning” or “monitoring” on content shared publicly, if it is for the purpose of “greater good” such as preventing abuse. some children said they were reluctant to allow this on content 5 https://www.figma.com/ 6 https://www.trillproject.com/ 7 https://about.fb.com/news/2019/05/2019-global-safety-well-being-summit/ shared privately (e.g. direct messages/dms) but a number of them would allow it under the same rationale, and some children assumed such monitoring is undertaken by platforms already. some children held the view that whatever one posts online (even in dms) is probably monitored by platforms or governments anyway. many children, however, appeared not to be aware of facial recognition and found it “creepy,” but they would point out that they would welcome the use of facial recognition for bullying detection. while children overall liked the idea of having the option to add a support contact/helper/friend who could be notified automatically when ai detected their abuse, many expressed doubts about the effectiveness of the proposed subsequent interventions. some said they would not necessarily use this support for the fear of overwhelming their support contacts; stigma around asking for help (“one deals with one’s problems on their own”); and they would not want others to know they have a helper/friend/support contact. we discuss these findings in the context of children’s rights and their effectiveness from the perspective of research into bystander support and online safety education (finkelhor et al., 2021). references bastiaensens, s., vandebosch, h., poels, k., van cleemput, k., desmet, a., & de bourdeaudhuij, i. (2014). cyberbullying on social network sites. an experimental study into bystanders’ behavioural intentions to help the victim or reinforce the bully. computers in human behavior, 31, 259-271. boyatzis, r. e. (1998). transforming qualitative information: thematic analysis and code development. sage. braun, v., & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77-101. gillespie, t. (2017). governance of and by platforms. sage handbook of social media, 254-278. gorwa, r., binns, r., & katzenbach, c. (2020). algorithmic content moderation: technical and political challenges in the automation of platform governance. big data & society, 7(1), 2053951719897945. difranzo, d., taylor, s. h., kazerooni, f., wherry, o. d., & bazarova, n. n. (2018, april). upstanding by design: bystander intervention in cyberbullying. in proceedings of the 2018 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-12). finkelhor, d., walsh, k., jones, l., mitchell, k., & collier, a. (2021). youth internet safety education: aligning programs with the evidence base. trauma, violence, & abuse, 22(5), 1233-1247. livingstone, s., & third, a. (2017). children and young people’s rights in the digital age: an emerging agenda. new media & society, 19(5), 657-670. mascheroni, g., & siibak, a. (2021). datafied childhoods: data practices and imaginaries in children’s lives. peter lang. staksrud, e. (2016). children in the online world: risk, regulation, rights. routledge. vidgen, b., & derczynski, l. (2020). directions in abusive language training data, a systematic review: garbage in, garbage out. plos one, 15(12), e0243300. funding acknowledgment: tijana milosevic received support to execute this research from marie skłodowska-curie (msca) fellowship8 and facebook/meta content policy award. we thank youth organisation foróige for assistance with participant recruitment. 8 https://marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/ selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): andreasen, m. b. (2024, october). humor, harm and hate: the discursive construction of race, gender, and sexuality in far-right extremist memes. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. humor, harm and hate: the discursive construction of race, gender, and sexuality in far-right extremist memes maja brandt andreasen university of stavanger background the paper presents initial findings from an ongoing research project that investigates the discursive construction of race, gender, and sexuality in the visual culture of three online far-right extremist platforms in scandinavia. this interdisciplinary project brings together feminist theory of humor and harm with digital media research into memes and the far-right in order to explore the hateful discourse in the online humor of the far-right. the paper has the following research question: how is race, gender, and sexuality discursively constructed in the humorous visual culture of the scandinavian far-right? following butler’s (1997) notion that violent language does more than just stand in for violence: “it enacts its own form of violence” (butler, 1997 p. 9), the paper extends this notion to that of humorous language. as such, rather than dismissing online humorous communication (such as memes) as “just a joke” and therefore harmless, the paper makes the case for taking humor seriously. following billig’s (2005) research into humor as a social act with the ability to simultaneously unite and divide, the paper investigates how the humorous visual content discursively creates insiders and outsiders. the paper then builds on previous research into how humor can work to create exclusion and “othering” of those who are the butt of the joke (kramer, 2011; kuipers, 2009) which often applies particularly to marginalized people, i.e., women, people of color, as well as sexual and gender minorities (bemiller & schneider, 2010; shifman & lemish, 2010). going beyond current focus on the importance of definitions in relation to memes (bogerts & fielitz, 2019; shifman, 2013), i characterize the visual posts on my selected platforms as visual culture (mcswiney et al., 2021) encompassing a multitude of visual content including but not limited to strict definitions of memes. much research has been conducted into the far-right online visual culture – especially the use of memes in the promotion of far-right ideology (askanius, 2021; askanius & keller, 2021; bogerts & fielitz, 2019; decook, 2018; greene, 2019; peters & allan, 2022; schwarzenegger & wagner, 2018). while research has investigated the overlap of racism with sexism and misogyny as well as racism and homophobia in far-right visual culture (bland et al., 2023; brigley thompson 2018, dickerson, 2021; harlow et al., 2020; kanai, 2016; milner, 2016; nicholas & agius 2017), this paper explores the scarcely researched overlap where racism meets both sexism/misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia. methods the data was collected in january and february of 2024. the scope of the data set extends over the full year of 2023, and it consists of visual content posted to three different social media platforms: one swedish, one norwegian, and one danish. the swedish data set is from the swedish part of the nordic-wide association, the nordic defense league (nordiske motståndsrørelsen). the norwegian data set comes from the facebook page avviklingen av norge (the elimination of norway). the danish data is from the website trykkefrihedsselskabet (the free speech society). the three platforms were chosen because they each represent some form of right-wing extremist discourse, because they produce (or a part of their platform consists of) visual content (e.g., memes, satirical cartoons, and other types of visual content), and because parts of this communication is humorous or satirical. using thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2006), i first familiarized myself with the data (reading and re-reading the data). second, i coded the data into several themes before applying a discourse analysis to the data set. expected findings as the paper discusses work in progress, the findings of the project are limited at the time of writing. thus, i am unable to provide a list of the exact themes emerging from the project. however, the initial coding of the data set reveals similar themes across the three websites in relation to: (1): the function of humor in the visual content, (2): far-right ideology, and (3) in the overlap between racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia. in the following, the expected findings across these themes are discussed: (1) the role of humor on the three platforms produces a discursive creation of insiders and outsiders (billig, 2005) on two levels. first, it reveals how the ingroup is reaffirmed by the boundary creation to the imagined “others”: women, people of color, as well as sexual and gender minorities. second, it reaffirms this boundary through the use of memes, tropes, and imagery which is based on a certain (sub)cultural knowledge of far right online visual culture. in order to be included in the discursive “us” of the platforms one most thus both belong to the racial, gendered, and sexual norm and possess knowledge of the in-group’s visual culture and tropes. (2) the paper expects to discuss the visual content on the three platforms in relation to far-right ideology. this includes the discursive construction of the “ideal” scandinavian citizen as a white man via the discursive “othering” of the racialized (mostly muslim) non-citizen. this othering is expressed via a characterization of the non-european outsider as barbaric, sexually perverted, and culturally backward. (3) the overlap of racism with sexism, homophobia and transphobia is expressed through an anti-woke discourse that is prevalent across all three platforms. this is expressed through anti-gender (paternotte & kuhar, 2018) discourse, ridicule of women’s rights (to e.g., bodily autonomy), ridicule of feminism, and through questioning of the existence of trans lives. while sometimes subtle and other times expressed explicitly, the nordic man is centered as the norm while non-white, (often) muslim, sexual and gender minorities are discursively othered. while the paper specifically discusses three scandinavian cases of far-right visual culture, the paper will be of interest to aoir scholars as the themes deriving from the data reproduce or mirror international far-right tropes and ideology. as scandinavian societies are often (undeservedly) put on a pedestal and viewed as particularly accomplished when it comes to equality and diversity – to the point where it is almost viewed as a feminist and socialist utopia – it is particularly important to shed light on the ongoing and very prevalent discourse of xenophobia and anti-wokeness that permeates extremist as well as mainstream online discourse. this paper aims to shed light on and take a critical approach to the racist, misogynist, homophobic and transphobic discourses that is often diminished and hidden under the guise of humor. references askanius, t. (2021). on frogs, monkeys, and execution memes: exploring the humorhate nexus at the intersection of neo-nazi and alt-right movements in sweden. television & new media, 22 (2), 147–165. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476420982234 askanius, t. & keller, n. (2021) murder fantasies in memes: fascist aesthetics of death threats and the banalization of white supremacist violence. information, communication & society, 24:16, 2522-2539, doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2021.1974517 bemiller, m. l., & schneider, r. z. (2010). “it’s not just a joke.” sociological spectrum 30 (4): 459–479. doi:10.1080/02732171003641040. billig, m. (2005). laughter and ridicule: towards a social critique of humour. london: sage. bland d.m., moody-ramirez, m., platenburg, g., lowe, m., mosley, l. (2023). facebook framing of the first female u.s. vice president: an intersectional approach to analyzing memes depicting kamala harris. howard journal of communications. doi: 10.1080/10646175.2023.2289974 bogerts, l. & fielitz, m (2019). ”do you want a meme war?” understanding the visual memes of the german far-right. in m. fielitz & n. thurston (eds), post-digital cultures of the far-right online actions and offline consequences in europe and the us (pp. 137-54). transcript verlag. doi: 10.14361/9783839446706-010 braun, v. & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. journal of chemical information and modelling. 3(2), 77-101. brigley thompson, z. (2018). the (alt)right to rape: violated white masculinities in the alt-right, and the film nocturnal animals. feminist media studies, 00(00), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1550432 butler, j. (1997). excitable speech: a politics of the performative. london: routledge. decook, j. r. (2018). memes and symbolic violence: #proudboys and the use of memes for propaganda and the construction of collective identity. learning, media and technology 43 (4): 485–504. doi:10.1080/17439884.2018.1544149. dickerson, n., & hodler, m. (2021). “real men stand for our nation”: constructions of an american nation and anti-kaepernick memes. journal of sport and social issues, 45(4), 329-357. https://doi.org/10.1177/0193723520950537 greene, v. (2019). “deplorable” satire: alt-right memes, white genocide tweets, and redpilling normies. studies in american humour. 5(1): 31-69. harlow, s., rowlett, j. t., & huse, l.k. (2020) ‘kim davis be like  … ’: a feminist critique of gender humor in online political memes. information, communication & society, 23:7, 1057-1073, doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2018.1550524 kanai, a. (2016). sociality and classification: reading gender, race, and class in a humorous meme. social media + society. 2(4), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116672884 kramer, e. (2011). the playful is political: the metapragmatics of internet rape-joke arguments. language in society 40 (2): 137–168. doi:10.1017/s0047404511000017 kuipers, g. (2009). humor styles and symbolic boundaries. journal of literary theory 3(2): 219–239. doi: 10.1515/jlt.2009.013. mcswiney, j., vaughan, m., heft, a., & hoffmann, m. (2021) sharing the hate? memes and transnationality in the far right’s digital visual culture. information, communication & society, 24:16, 2502-2521, doi:10.1080/1369118x.2021.1961006 milner, r. m. (2016). the world made meme. mit press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262034999.001.0001 nicholas, l., & agius, c. (2017). the persistence of global masculinism: discourse, gender and neocolonial re-articulations of violence. palgrave macmillan. paternotte, d. & kuhar, r. (2018)disentangling and locating the “global right”: antigender campaigns in europe. politics and governance. 6(3). 6-19. peters, c. & allan, s. (2022) weaponizing memes: the journalistic mediation of visual politicization. digital journalism, 10:2, 217-229, doi:10.1080/21670811.2021.1903958 schwarzenegger, c. & wagner, a. (2018). can it be hate if it is fun? discursive ensembles of hatred and laughter in extreme right satire on facebook. studies in communication | media 7 (4): 473–98. doi:10.5771/2192-4007-2018-4-473. shifman, l. (2013). memes in a digital culture. cambridge, massachusetts: mit press. shifman, l. & lemish, d. (2010). between feminism and fun(ny)mism: analysing gender in popular internet humour. information communication and society. 13(6): 870–891. doi: 10.1080/13691180903490560. microsoft word scharenberg-algorithmic resistance in europe and the question-algorithmic resistance in europe and the.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa) scharenberg, a., barassi, v. (2022, november). algorithmic resistance in europe and the question of collective agency. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. algorithmic resistance in europe and the question of collective agency antje scharenberg university of st. gallen veronica barassi university of st. gallen one of the key critical questions of our times is the understanding of how data, algorithmic logics and ai are altering our agency as citizens, and what forms of resistance and opposition are emerging on the ground. the rise of surveillance capitalism (zuboff, 2019) implied that the personal data of citizens could be collected, crossed-referenced, shared, and sold in the form of predicting products. over the last decades, we have thus witnessed a social, cultural and economic transformation, whereby the data traces of citizens started to be used by different profiling machines (elmer, 2004; solove, 2004) to make data-driven decisions about their lives and to determine their rights (kitchin, 2014; pasquale, 2015). in this context, different researchers have started to focus on how the very notion of citizenship – and its relationship to agency – was being transformed by the new data environments. what became evident is that, over the last decades, individuals were no longer only digital citizens using online technologies (and especially social media) to self-construct in public and claiming rights (isin & ruppert, 2015) – they were also becoming datafied citizens, as they were being defined in public by processes of data inferral and algorithmic profiling (barassi, 2016 & 2017; hintz et al., 2017 & 2018; cheney-lippold, 2019). today, more and more private and public institutions, at global level, are relying on ai systems and machine learning technologies to profile individuals and determine their rights. these technologies are used by governments for predictive policing (dencik et al., 2018; amoore, 2020), border control (metcalfe and dencik, 2019) or to aid decisions in the education sector (williamson, 2017), criminal justice sector (forrest, 2021) and welfare allocation (eubanks, 2018). these technologies are also used by companies in the workplace, to hire and fire employees or as forms of automated surveillance and assessment (crawford, 2021; hirth and rhein, 2021; walker et al., 2021). the rapid and unregulated expansion of algorithmic profiling in different areas of social life implies that we must understand processes of datafication more holistically within their social, economic and cultural contexts and with regards to issues of inequality and social justice (dencik et.al, 2016). although over the last years much research has emerged on the civic and human rights implications of automated systems and algorithmic profiling, little attention has been paid to what was happening on the ground and how social movement actors were actively organising against algorithmic profiling. some scholars have shown how algorithms both prohibit as well as aid activists’ agency (milan, 2018; treré, 2019; etter and albu, 2021), while others have focused on how individual activists challenge the power of algorithms and reclaim a sense of agency (velkova and kaun, 2021). although insightful, research in the field is still scarce and much more work is needed in the exploration of how social movement actors resist algorithmic profiling and reclaim a sense of collective agency. in this paper, we draw on ten semi-structured interviews with actors from civil society or non-governmental organisations in europe, who struggle against algorithmic decision making, and combine these findings with a qualitative textual analysis of ten campaign websites. the aim of the paper is to shed light on the discourses and practices of social movement actors when it comes to resisting algorithmic injustices. the key question that we are interested in addressing is to explore how – in the everyday resistance to algorithmic profiling – actors rely on three different strategies of action (algorithmic literacy, algorithmic regulation and algorithmic accountability). these strategies of action are of central importance if we want to understand the way in which collective agency against ‘the power of algorithms’ (see, for instance, velkova and kaun, 2021) is built and negotiated by social movement actors on a daily basis. analysing these strategies as well as the challenges that activists face on the ground is key for us to appreciate that the question about algorithmic profiling is at the heart of new and emerging conflicts in our society. references amoore, l. (2020) cloud ethics: algorithms and the attributes of ourselves and others. durham: duke university press. barassi, v. (2016) ‘datafied citizens? social media activism, digital traces and the question about political profiling’, communication and the public, 1(4), pp. 494–499. barassi, v. (2017) ‘digital citizens? data traces and family life’, contemporary social science, 12(1–2), pp. 84–95. cheney-lippold, j. (2019) we are data: algorithms and the making of our digital selves. new york: new york university press. crawford, k. (2021) atlas of ai: power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. new haven: yale university press. dencik, l., hintz, a. and cable, j. (2016) ‘towards data justice? the ambiguity of antisurveillance resistance in political activism’, big data & society, 3(2). dencik, l., hintz, a. and carey, z. (2018) ‘prediction, pre-emption and limits to dissent: social media and big data uses for policing protests in the united kingdom’, new media & society, 20(4), pp. 1433–1450. elmer, g. (2004) profiling machines: mapping the personal information economy. cambridge: mit press. etter, m. and albu, o.b. (2021) ‘activists in the dark: social media algorithms and collective action in two social movement organizations’, organization, 28(1), pp. 68–91. eubanks, v. (2018) automating inequality: how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. new york: picador. forrest, k.b. (2021) when machines can be judge, jury, and executioner: justice in the age of artificial intelligence. hackensack: world scientific publishing. hintz, a., dencik, l. and wahl-jorgensen, k. (2017) ‘digital citizenship and surveillance| digital citizenship and surveillance society — introduction’, international journal of communication, 11, pp. 731–739. hintz, a., dencik, l. and wahl-jorgensen, k. (2018) digital citizenship in a datafied society. cambridge: polity. hirth, j. and rhein, m. (2021) ‘algorithmic assembly lines digitalization and resistance in the retail sector’, transnational institute, 30 april. isin, e.f. and ruppert, e.s. (2015) being digital citizens. london: rowman & littlefield. metcalfe, p. and dencik, l. (2019) ‘the politics of big borders: data (in)justice and the governance of refugees’, first monday. doi:10.5210/fm.v24i4.9934. milan, s. (2018) ‘political agency, digital traces, and bottom-up data practices’, international journal of communication, 12, pp. 507–525. kitchin, r. (2014) the data revolution: big data, open data, data infrastructures & their consequences. los angeles: sage. pasquale, f. (2015) the black box society: the secret algorithms that control money and information. cambridge: harvard university press. solove, d.j. (2004) the digital person: technology and privacy in the information age. new york: new york university press. treré, e. (2019) hybrid media activism: ecologies, imaginaries, algorithms. new york: routledge. velkova, j. and kaun, a. (2021) ‘algorithmic resistance: media practices and the politics of repair’, information, communication & society, 24(4), pp. 523–540. walker, m., fleming, p. and berti, m. (2021) ‘“you can’t pick up a phone and talk to someone”: how algorithms function as biopower in the gig economy’, organization, 28(1), pp. 26–43. williamson, b. (2017) big data in education: the digital future of learning, policy and practice. 1st edition. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. zuboff, s. (2019) the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. new york: publicaffairs. aoir2022-melon-eating extended abstract selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): wong, j., long, v., qu, y., jones, g. (2022, november). “melon-eating masses”: consumer-citizens and public internet discourse in china. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “melon-eating masses”: consumer-citizens and public internet discourse in china jamie wong massachusetts institute of technology (mit) vesper long wellesley college yilia qu wellesley college graham jones massachusetts institute of technology (mit) extended abstract in china, a nation with tight controls on freedom of speech, public gossiping online about scandals and celebrity news is a key mode of public engagement and site for the coproduction of national imaginaries. we draw attention to the chinese internet genre of the “melon-eating” event and the notion of “melon-eating masses” to understand how the state, neoliberal capitalism, and digital mass media converge towards cultivating a particular form of “consumer-citizen” (mazzarella 2013). we illustrate how, in china, what may at first sight seem like entertainment, gossip or other forms of playful online engagement are a significant modality of public discourse. anthropologists have long known that gossip is a means of producing social cohesion by policing moral transgression (besnier 2009). by examining how chinese internet users participate in public gossip when the state looms as the final arbiter of judgement, this study illuminates how the politics of “knowing what not to know” (hillenbrand 2020) unfold in day-to-day (digital) lives in china. the notion of “melon-eating” (chigua) harkens back to an era when spectators ate roasted seeds (guazi) as snacks at theaters. the recent abbreviation of guazi to gua (melon) means that the related memes and emojis feature a watermelon rather than seeds. today, melon-eating refers to the passive spectatorship of online bystanders, who consume real-life events just as they would consume theatrical drama while snacking on concessions. the term is morally laden. it evokes the 20th century writer lu xun’s critique of the “gawker mentality” of chinese masses who spectate without involvement, which he regarded as a key cause of china’s victimization. a more hopeful association comes from the technosolutionist slogan “attention is power, onlookers can change china,” introduced in 2010 to popularize the micro-blogging platform weibo. many were inspired by instances when e-public pressure through weibo prompted official responses to events that offended public morals (china digital times 2010; tang 2017), and harbored hopes of a new era of “accountability without democracy” (tsai 2007). yet as problematic biases revealed themselves in the way algorithms and the data economy shape internet users’ exposure to news (dong 2017), jaded internet commentators would proclaim “changing china through onlooking” had given way to “melon-eating being mobilized to drive key performance indexes (of tech giants)” (jie 2020). we draw on the meta-discourse around three “melon-eating” events: (1) the controversy around the news that actress zheng shuang abandoning the children she had through surrogacy; (2) the discovery of a mother of eight found chained in a village hut in xuzhou; and (3) news of the taiwanese-american popstar wang leehom’s messy divorce from his wife lee jinglei. we demonstrate how, in the crowded, fiercely competitive “attention economy” (davenport and beck 2001) of the chinese internet, attention is collectively construed as a “public” and civic “resource.” we show the collective “genre work” (gershon and prentice 2021) that is required to make a “melon” out of an event, and a national event out of a “melon.” we demonstrate how internet debates on public morals and societal ills that the political framework of the chinese public sphere can’t otherwise accommodate take place through publicly gossiping, arguing, voting, and polling about these scandals. these debates, ostensibly about celebrity scandals, also intimate “public secrets” – “something that is known by everyone, but not easily articulable” (taussig 1999, 160) – and therefore involves the “risk of open acknowledgment, which threatens the ritual order and ontological security of everyday life” (jones 2014, 55). mass participation in melon-eating involves “public affect management vis-a-vis modern mass media” (mazzarella 2013, 11), but rather than focusing solely on state censorship, we also highlight instances of internet users themselves quelling the “affective intensities” of mass publics (mazzarella 2021) to preempt the spread of socially corrosive forces. our examples show that the discussion of public morals creates “fractal recursivities” that dichotomize and partition (irvine and gal 2000) chinese internet users into a measured and reasonable “public” that constructs itself in opposition to the unfettered “masses.” through attending to the “social poetics” (herzfeld 1988) of netizens’ performance of “rationality” and their understanding and stereotyping of each other, we show how domestic social imaginaries of the chinese nation and the “rational” chinese consumercitizen are co-produced (jasanoff 2004; erickson et al 2013), and how they serve to deflect criticism from the chinese state. we build on anthropological scholarship on gossip as a form of social control (merry 1984) to explore how public gossiping becomes incorporated into the state’s panoptic apparatus of collective self-policing. as chinese internet users form “partial theories” about “relationships and events” (van vleet 2003) through public gossip, “melon-eating” can paradoxically normalize the unknowability of truth under an already-opaque governmental regime. references besnier, niko. 2009. gossip and the everyday production of politics. university of hawai’i press. china digital times. 2010. “关注就是⼒量 围观改变中国 attention is power, onlooking can change china.” 中国数字时代. october 2, 2010. https://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/110427.html. davenport, thomas h., and john c. beck. 2001. the attention economy: understanding the new currency of business. cambridge ma: harvard business school press. dong, chengyu. 2017. “围观改变中国，算法改变围观 ft中⽂⽹.” financial times. 2017. http://www.ftchinese.com/story/001075587?full=y&archive. erickson, paul, judy l. klein, lorraine daston, rebecca lemov, thomas sturm, and michael d. gordin. 2013. how reason almost lost its mind: the strange career of cold war rationality. university of chicago press. gershon, ilana, and michael m. prentice. 2021. “genres in new economies of language.” international journal of the sociology of language 2021 (267–268): 117–24. herzfeld, michael. 1988. the poetics of manhood: contest and identity in a cretan mountain village. princeton university press. ———. 1997. cultural intimacy: social poetics and the real life of states, societies, and institutions. routledge. hillenbrand, margaret. 2020. negative exposures: knowing what not to know in contemporary china. duke university press. irvine, judith t, and susan gal. 2000. “language ideology and linguistic differentiation.” in regimes of language: ideologies, politics, and identities, edited by paul kroskrity, 35–84. santa fe: school of american research press. jasanoff, sheila. 2004. states of knowledge. taylor & francis abingdon, uk. jie cheng. 2020. “告别2010年代，‘流量商业’的过去与未来？.” 虎嗅 huxiu. march 25, 2020. https://www.huxiu.com/article/346521.html. jones, graham m. 2014. “secrecy.” annual review of anthropology 43: 53–69. mazzarella, william. 2013. censorium: cinema and the open edge of mass publicity. duke university press. ———. 2021. the mana of mass society. university of chicago press. merry, sally engle. 1984. “rethinking gossip and scandal.” in toward a general theory of social control, 271–302. elsevier. tang, xiaobing. 2017. “围观改变中国？——互联⽹书写与中国式公共领域的特质 have onlookers changed china? characteristics of internet writing and the chinesestyle public sphere.” in harvard-yenching institute working paper series. https://www.harvard-yenching.org/research/hyi-working-paper-series-tangxiaobing/. taussig, michael. 1999. defacement: public secrecy and the labor of the negative. stanford university press. tsai, lily l. 2007. accountability without democracy: solidary groups and public goods provision in rural china. cambridge university press. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): butt, ma., jovic, d., stanton, r. & willma, t. p. (2022, november). why play when you can watch or listen? multimodal engagements in digital gaming. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. why play when you can watch or listen? multi-modal engagements in digital gaming mahli-ann butt university of sydney dahlia jovic university of sydney ryan stanton university of sydney tom paul willma university of sydney panel abstract the past decade has seen a significant shift in gaming consumption practices. although watching or spectating has always been a part of gaming consider watching over someone’s shoulder in an arcade (kocurek, 2015; taylor, 2012, pp. 183-184), or spending time at a friend’s house as a teenager waiting for your turn on the game console (thornham, 2011; taylor, 2012, pp. 184-185) it is only now that spectatorship of gaming, rather than gaming itself, has come to adopt an increasingly central and essential role in game culture and practice (taylor, 2018; johnson & woodcock, 2019). watching or even listening to others gaming or discussing games has shifted from something done when one might like to play but presently cannot (as in the examples above) into something which is actively done for its own sake. there seems to be something about watching or listening to others playing, but not playing the games themselves, that appeals to many consumers. this however poses fundamental questions about the medium of games and the culture of gaming, especially given existing research’s emphases upon the interactive nature of games being central to 2 their appeal and in turn, about how games relate to other forms of media, as various scholars such as t.l. taylor (2012) and brendan keogh (2018) have since critiqued. taylor, for example, has argued for “a productive flip in games studies” to push back “on an overly simplistic model of engagement with computer games that places the handson-the-keyboard actor as the prime object of interest” (2012, p. 183). in making this change and encouraging more diverse and experimental research, we can not only enrich the field of knowledge for games studies, but also create a more welcoming scholarly community (humpheys, 2019; philips, 2020). this stands in contrast to much of the prior work that has occurred in games studies which have often treated videogames as a “new cultural object” (aarseth, 2001) – a focus which arguably stems from formative discipline ‘anxiety’ and the desire to distinguish games studies as a separate field, as opposed to critically challenging the mediums links to existing fields and disciplines (phillips, 2020) the unfortunate side effect of this however, is that it works to centralize the texts of games themselves, and relegate other topics of study to the periphery of games and play, something which has been challenged in recent years. in addition to taylor’s “productive flip,” consalvo (2017) writes about the need for research that focuses on centring what have historically been considered paratexts. indeed, recent years have shown a range of these paratexts taking centre stage, be that through the success of twitch streaming, the rise of actual play, or cross-media content which stands distinct from the games which spawned them like riot’s arcane. following these non-game elements and components of wider gaming culture and practice is thus important, not only for strengthening the ties between games studies and other media disciplines, but also in order to challenge some of the harmful narratives that games culture has propagated. in broadening the research, we can not only challenge the centrality of games as the core of games studies, but also the limited, and often exclusionary boundaries that gaming culture often carries with it as baggage. to explore these questions this panel presents findings from four ongoing research projects into game spectatorship, via four of the most popular ways consumers interact with games or around games, without the actual play of games themselves. these are watching games content on video sharing websites like youtube, viewing esports (competitive and often professionalised gaming) contests, listening to games podcasts, and enjoying the associated musical texts tied to computer games. it is our hope that in highlighting these aspects of games spectatorship, we can not only provide some insight into the ways these industries reflect broader trends in online industries, but also – in whatever small capacity we can – highlight the ability for games studies to theorise beyond the canon in its research. in turn, these are elements of gaming rarely addressed by scholars of games or internet research, and offer us a number of interesting new directions for understanding what game-players are doing online when not actually playing games. references aarseth, e. (2001). computer game studies, year one. game studies, 1(1). http://gamestudies.org/0101/editorial.html http://gamestudies.org/0101/editorial.html 3 consalvo, m. (2017) when paratexts become texts: de-centering the game-as-text. critical studies in media communication, 34(2), 177-183. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2017.1304648 humphreys, s. (2019). on being a feminist in game studies. games and culture, 14(78), 825-842. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412017737637 johnson, m. r., & woodcock, j. (2019). the impacts of live streaming and twitch. tv on the video game industry. media, culture & society, 41(5), 670-688. keogh, b. (2018). a play of bodies: how we perceive videogames. the mit press. kocurek, c. a. (2015). coin-operated americans: rebooting boyhood at the video game arcade. university of minnesota press. phillips, a. (2020). negg(at)ing the game studies subject: an affective history of the field. feminist media histories, 6(1), 12–36. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2020.6.1.12 taylor, t. l. (2012). raising the stakes: e-sports and the professionalization of computer gaming. the mit press. taylor, t. l. (2018). watch me play: twitch and the rise of game live streaming. princeton university press. thornham, h. (2011). ethnographies of the videogame: gender, narrative and praxis. ashgate publishing. building the ultimate battlestation: the production and consumption of gaming setup videos on youtube dahlia jovic university of sydney multi-modal engagements in digital gaming, including spectatorship, extend beyond gameplay and encompass a broad range of gaming consumption practices. the possibility to share and learn about one’s gaming interests and habits (such as ‘let’s play’ videos on youtube or streaming on twitch) has been enabled by the proliferation of digital media platforms (burgess, 2013), as well as the domestication of gaming hardware (nichols, 2013). one significant but rarely addressed gaming consumption practice is that of creating and watching gaming ‘setup’ content on the internet. in gaming setup videos on youtube (figures 1 & 2), which this paper addresses, players and gaming enthusiasts create and consume content about their hardware, peripherals, and surrounding environment. from modest desks that contain a single laptop tucked away in a bedroom corner, to dedicated rgb-lit caverns that resemble esports stages, the spectacle of players’ https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2017.1304648 https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2017.1304648 https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412017737637 https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2020.6.1.12 4 gaming assemblages (carter, nansen & gibbs, 2014; taylor, 2009) is put on display for everyone to see and appreciate in these viral videos. players and fans take centrestage and invite the anonymous public (ruberg & lark, 2021) to view their otherwise private ‘battlestations’ (another term for gaming setup). producing or consuming such content seems at first glance likely to be a niche activity, yet these undeniably popular media items command millions of fans (jenkins, 2009), and are entangled with important concepts of gamer self-identity and self-branding (senft, 2013). figure 1. screengrab from randomfrankp’s video ‘room tour project 234 best desk & gaming setups!’. image source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiqsm6g_6vw figure 2. screengrab from dairy’s video ‘transforming my brothers room into his dream gaming setup (setup makeover)’. image source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfdj-6yaxuc this paper will present the findings of a research project undertaken in 2021 that looked at the production, consumption, and circulation of gaming setup videos in the specific context of youtube. the project was guided by two central aims: to explore the performance of gaming social and cultural capital (bourdieu, 1986; consalvo, 2007) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiqsm6g_6vw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfdj-6yaxuc 5 through the online representation of (and discussions about) players’ setups, and to investigate player attitudes towards (and tastes in) the functional and aesthetic aspects of gaming hardware and spaces (figures 3-5). a content analysis of the top 50 gaming setup videos and the top 10 comments for each video was conducted on youtube. content creation practices surrounding gaming material culture were apparent on various social and digital media sites (e.g., the r/battlestations subreddit, the killergamingsetups community on instagram, and the gamingroom setup and layout group on facebook), however youtube was selected due to the platform’s popularity among gamers (hjorth & richardson, 2014, pp. 148149), its low technical barriers to participation and creative expression (jenkins, 2009, pp. 12), and its focus on mundane, amateur, and diy content (burgess, 2013, pp. 1-2, 5). the study drew on interdisciplinary research in the areas of platform studies (e.g. apperley & parikka 2018), computer culture (e.g. simon, 2007), domestic media ecologies (e.g. carter et al., 2014), the player-technology relationship (e.g. luo & johnson, 2020), and youtube (e.g. burgess, 2013) to form a comprehensive picture of how gaming material culture functions in online and social contexts. pierre bourdieu’s influential theory of capital (1986) was applied as a frame to explore how the three interrelated forms of capital (economic, cultural, and social) occur via the symbolic exchanges of content producers (those who made the videos) and content consumers (those who commented on them). figure 3. screengrab from noisybutters’ video ‘ gaming setup / office tour 2020 | noisybutters’. image source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncc2j2zsqb0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncc2j2zsqb0 6 figure 4. screengrab from diy tatay dan’s video ‘diy loft bed w/ gaming area’. image source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzrbs869xbs&t=360s figure 5. screengrab from razer’s video ‘razer unboxing | gaming setup’. image source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6m4bzzkvbe videos and comments showed that players – who were often well-versed in tech-speak (luo & johnson, 2020) and who engaged in identity management (senft, 2013) – made extensive use of youtube’s social and technical affordances to share highly specific information about their gaming setups and setup practices. they emphasised both functional (use) and aesthetic (design) aspects (gibbs, carter & nansen, 2017) of their setups. this included product details, specifications, price, worth, comfort, ergonomics, presentation, customisation, colour coordination, and lighting (rgb and led). participants invested significant time, energy, and wealth into their setups; they attained (and in many cases already had pre-existing) cultural, social, and economic capital in doing so (bourdieu, 1986). content producers, for example, had to be familiar with the socio-cultural norms and conventions of what being a gamer means in order to make https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzrbs869xbs&t=360s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6m4bzzkvbe 7 successful and informative videos (cultural capital). content creators with higher view and subscriber counts were also far more likely to receive viewer engagements (social capital), as well as monetary opportunities in the form of paid product placements, affiliations, and sponsorships with gaming and hardware brands (economic capital). despite the introductory nature of this research, the data captured gives significant and novel insights into the private and intimate, yet undeniably public, displays of these players’ domestic gaming spaces. if we are to attain a fuller picture of multi-modal engagements in digital gaming beyond gameplay itself, future research into gaming material culture and the content creation practices that surround it will be needed. what is clear is that the gaming community’s dedication to these videos, and the mass spectatorship they encourage, calls for the same level of attention that other, more wellknown gaming practices have received. references apperley, t., & parikka, j. (2018). platform studies’ epistemic threshold. games and culture, 13(4), 349-369. doi.org/10.1177/1555412015616509. bourdieu, p. (1986). the forms of capital. in j. g. richardson (ed.), handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education. new york: greenwood press. burgess, j. (2013). how youtube matters. in j. green, h. jenkins, & j. hartley (eds.), youtube: online video and participatory culture (2nd ed). oxford: wiley. carter, m., nansen, b., & gibbs, m. (2014). screen ecologies, multi-gaming and designing for different registers of engagement. in proceedings of the first acm sigchi annual symposium on computer-human interaction in play, 37-46. doi.org/10.1145/2658537.2658686. consalvo, m. (2007). cheating: gaining advantage in video games. cambridge: mit press. gibbs, m., carter, m., & nansen, b. (2017). those led-lit water-kooled multi-screen streamline battlestations. aoir selected papers of internet research. hjorth, l., & richardson, i. (2014). games and cultural play. in hjorth et al (ed.), gaming in social, locative, and mobile media, 139-152. london: palgrave macmillan uk. jenkins, h. (2009). confronting the challenges of participatory culture: media education for the 21st century. cambridge: mit press. luo, y., & johnson, m. r. (2020). how do players understand video game hardware: tactility or tech-speak? new media & society, 22(8), 1462-1483. doi:10.1177/1461444819880155. 8 nichols, r. (2013). who plays, who pays? mapping video game production and consumption globally. in: n. b. huntemann & b. aslinger (eds.), gaming globally. critical media studies, 59-73. new york: palgrave macmillan ruberg, b. b., & lark, d. (2021). livestreaming from the bedroom: performing intimacy through domestic space on twitch. convergence. 27(3), 679-695. london: uk. doi:10.1177/1354856520978324. senft, t. m. (2013). microcelebrity and the branded self. in t. m. senft. (ed.), a companion to new media dynamics, 346-354. oxford: wiley‐blackwell. taylor, t. l. (2009). the assemblage of play. games and culture, 4(4), 331–339. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412009343576. ‘sculling shoeys’ at esports: nationalism, masculinity, and performative assemblies mahli-ann butt university of sydney sociological research on esports and gender has emerged alongside the rapid growth of the esports industry in the past decade. scholars such as t. l. taylor and emma witowski have identified that the social complexities of ‘doing esports and doing gender’ (witowski, 2018, p. 186) have informed the precarious positions and doggedly reinforced the exclusion of women in esports (taylor, 2012, pp. 121-128). this paper contributes to feminist game studies, media studies, and internet studies on gender and esports by investigating the embodied alcohol consumption, spectatorship practices, and expressions of masculinity and nationalism that can be present at such events specifically in this case at the intel extreme masters (iem) 2017 sydney tournament. since alcohol consumption is a heavily gendered and performative social practice (riches, 2016), studying the drinking culture at esports arenas offers another way to understand gendered productions and exclusion in these shared spaces. the drunk spaces occupied and created relative to gaming, constitute an easily overlooked area of inquiry when game research becomes bounded by the central investigation of play, players, and the creation of play. in order to develop a better understanding of the drinking cultures of gaming culture, this paper argues that game and cultural researchers must historicise and attend the ‘peripheral’ fields beyond (and related to but not superseded by) videogames themselves. this research draws from 30 months of digital ethnography, attending over 30 ‘drunk spaces’ and social events related to videogames and gaming through public, social, professional, and industry scenes. it comprises a patchwork of field photography, fieldnotes, unstructured interviews, and informal conversations in situ, supplemented by digital media archival and memory work to help later recall or retrieve additional details, representing gaming as a scenic life. a mobile phone was used for "jotting notes” during observations to later “act as trigger material and assist recalling events that happened” (riches & parry, 2020, p. 651). using the phone’s built-in camera also afforded the 9 opportunity for events to be recorded “in multiple modalities” (yin, 2011, p. 161). this paper presents an in-depth site analysis of the drunk space of iem 2017 global championship of counterstrike: global offensive at the qudos bank arena. the analysis draws from game studies and critical drug studies, combined with a theoretical framework taken from judith butler’s understandings of gender and identity as a social construct, social assemblies as performative, and precarity as embodied (2015). at ‘offline’ professionalised videogame public, industry, and academic social events, a dominant drinking culture at the heart of these gaming cultures can pressure attendees to drink alcohol to mark and generate the co-presence of participants. ingroups are affirmed through a performative assembly enacted in the embodied communal consumption of alcohol. in turn, drinking practices work to reaffirm people’s capacities to feel unsafe, precarious, and alienated, or feel belonging, safe, and included. through the performative assembly of ‘becoming-drunk’ together (ferrer-best, 2018), the communal consumption of alcohol continues to drive an embodied wedge between those who are seen to be ‘included’, people (particularly young men) who conform to (implicitly masculine) drinking practices, and those who are ‘not included’ (everyone else). within the emerging esports spectatorship scene, the valorisation and celebration of excessive drinking is part of an embodied masculine ‘gamer’ identity that takes noticeable influence from the drunken antics traditionally associated with football fans’ “hooliganism” (king, 1997). like football fans at games, male fans at esport tournaments have created imaginary masculine and national boundaries by which they have affirmed their identities (ibid., p. 576), producing a social understanding of what it means to be recognised in this scene as young australian ‘gamer’ men. exemplified in the repeated chanting of “aussie! oi!” and drinking ‘shoeys’ – taking up this sporting success cliché (it's the winner who drinks from a shoe) and how it alludes to drunken sports fandom and thus alludes to sports hooliganism – esport fans construct and embody an imagined category of ‘jock’ sports culture as ‘gamers’. 10 figure 1: a young fan doing a ‘shoey’ at iem 2017 while the crowd cheers on. image sourced from https://www.kotaku.com.au/2021/01/iem-melbourne-returns-for-2021-butitll-be-online-only/ the gamer identity, as a form of what celia pearce terms “fictive ethnicity,” is an identity adopted around an imaginary homeland (2008, p. 162). the presence of flags, national colours, and stereotypical nationalist signifiers (such as cork hats) symbolically work to represent esport fans as a nation. chanting “aussie! oi!” united the polyphony of fans’ ceremonial orations as a church choir vocalising in harmony. the performative act of ‘sculling’ (australian slang for quickly finishing a beer in a single draught) a shoey manifests an image of youthful australian masculinity that can be easily recognised and reproduced by other college and university aged men. these symbolic icons and drinking practices provide overtly identifiable scripts that young men can perform to demonstrate their loyalty to the fandom and brotherhood. https://www.kotaku.com.au/2021/01/iem-melbourne-returns-for-2021-but-itll-be-online-only/ https://www.kotaku.com.au/2021/01/iem-melbourne-returns-for-2021-but-itll-be-online-only/ 11 figure 2: australian team renegades doing shoeys at esl one cologne grand finals 2017: “we’re going to do a little demonstration now. boys, you know how it’s done. alright fellas, let’s share the shoey sequence – three, two, one.” screenshot taken at 00:18 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhslbdckwjo such fans are also specially primed to defend their community (mortensen, 2018, p. 798) against anticipated claims that esports are trivial or lesser or ‘not legitimate’ sports. the imagined transgression of the jock/geeks distinction also represents this anxiety about esports not being seen as a ‘real sport’ that can affirm men’s masculinity as other sports do. like the internet itself (salter & blodgett, 2017, p. 8), excessive drinking practices in esports arenas provide a shared space for young geeky men to affirm their masculinity and manhood through performative aggression without the need for the physical attributes aligned with images of corporeal male power (taylor, 2012, p. 116). however, in resisting this jock/geek distinction, the iem attendees only seemed to work to further reinforce the hegemonic masculine ‘gamer’ identity when they could have challenged it. gaming cultures and drinking cultures are entwined in many people’s everyday social lives (cf. sotamaa & stenros, 2016; ferrer-best, 2018). research must pay greater attention to the continuities between games and culture and how overlapping cultural practices such as drinking can shape people’s sense of belonging in gaming and those drinking social scenes. how the sports stadium becomes socio-culturally coded as a ‘jock domain’ is key to building a complex understanding of fans’ drunken behaviours and performative masculine drinking practices at iem 2017. consequently, the (e)sports arena’s drunk space reproduces the imagined tensions between the gamer as geek/nerd and jock masculinities and demarcating boundaries of belonging and exclusion. references https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhslbdckwjo 12 butler, j. (2015). notes towards a performative theory of assembly. harvard university press. ferrer-best, f. (2018). the productive dimensions of women’s drinking [honours thesis, the university of sydney]. king, a. (1997). the postmodernity of football hooliganism. the british journal of sociology, 48(4), 576-593. https://doi.org/10.2307/591597 mortensen, t.e. (2018). anger, fear, and games: the long event of #gamergate. games and culture, 13(8), 787-806. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412016640408 pearce, c. (2011). identity-as-place: the construction of game refugees and fictive ethnicities. in g. crawford, v. k. gosling & b. light (eds.), online gaming in context: the social and cultural significance of online games (pp. 161-183). taylor & francis group. riches, g. (2016). ‘a force to be reckoned with’: the role and influence of alcohol in leeds’ extreme metal scene. in t. thurnell-read (ed.), drinking dilemmas: space, culture and identity (pp. 99-113). routledge. riches, j. & parry, k. d. (2020). beers and blurred boundaries: the spatial and gendered organisation of pre-match venues for english football fans. international review for the sociology of sport, 55(6), 647-663. https://doi.org/10.1177/1012690219835487 salter, a. & blodgett, b. (2017). toxic geek masculinity in media: sexism, trolling, and identity policing. palgrave macmillan. sotamaa, o. & stenros, j. (2016). through a shot glass, darkly: the study of games in the light of drinking games. games and culture, 14(1), 87-103. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412016679772 taylor, t. l. (2012). raising the stakes: e-sports and the professionalization of computer gaming. the mit press. witowski, e. (2018). doing/indoing gender with the girl gamer in high-performance play. in k. gray, g. voorhees, e. vossen (eds.), feminism in play (pp. 185-204). palgrave. yin, r. (2011). qualitative research from start to finish. guilford press. playing with podcasts: gaming podcasts and new media production processes ryan stanton university of sydney https://doi.org/10.2307/591597 https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412016640408 https://doi.org/10.1177/1012690219835487 https://doi.org/10.1177/1012690219835487 https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412016679772 https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412016679772 13 this paper will present findings from ongoing interviews and qualitative research investigating gaming podcasts as a new media industry, and one whose content and output game-players are increasingly consuming. caught at the intersection between the industries of podcasting and gaming content creation, gaming podcasts represent an exciting new field to study which can highlight both the ways online creators are attempting to forge new paradigms of work, and struggle to escape the influence of the corporate or platform powers which are attempting colonize and formalize these new media industries. gaming podcasts are a growing medium, with over 24,000 different shows present in the games or video games categories on apple podcasts (misener, 2021) – this actually represents the largest subcategory in the platform’s leisure section. the gaming podcast industry is also one which has attracted a variety of creators from different media industries, gender and sexual identities and socio-economic backgrounds. this is unsurprising considering both podcasting and gaming content creation have been viewed as like “the wild west” or “the gold rush” respectively (quirk, 2015, johnson & woodcock, 2019). figure 1: a screenshot of the video games category on apple podcasts, featuring various shows highlighted by apple. 14 the use of colonial metaphors here is particularly interesting considering both the theme of this conference, and the perspective that many creators have about these industries being meritocratic ones where hardworking creators are rewarded in proportion to their labour (johnson & woodcock, 2019, pp. 344-345; sullivan, 2018, pp. 47-48). as a result, gaming podcasts can function as a helpful case study to shed light on the ways new media industries interact with traditional capitalistic structures or neoliberal ideas structures and ideas which are themselves a product of colonialism (couldry & mejias, 2019, pp. xii-xiv). key to this analysis is an understanding of the relationships between creators and the large platform powers which these industries are often reliant on. podcasting, for example, has its origins in the technology of rss feeds a technology which has been noted to serve as one which resists the closed systems of other technologies (hansen, 2021). as time has progressed however, platforms such as apple podcasts, spotify, and stitcher have become the most prominent way that listeners find shows, a move which has further consolidated the power of these platforms. similarly, gaming content creators are reliant on platforms like twitch or youtube to reach their audiences (kopf, 2020). as a result, we can see tensions emerging between the open and free ideal of these industries and the increasing power of the digital colonialists who are formalizing them. in quirk’s research (2015) it is noted that the “wild west” age of podcasting seems to have passed. have industries like this been successfully colonized by traditional powers, or are they still a site for new modes of production or thought? this research uses a mixed methods qualitative approach which consists of three main research methods: interviews with gaming podcast creators, textual analysis of gaming podcast episodes, and surveys of gaming podcast listeners. creators and podcasts chosen for interviews and analysis were selected after comparing their suitability to a variety of criteria including: show format or style, creator’s previous work background, creator demographics, and the success level of the show. using these criteria as determinants seeks to strike a balance between a wide variety of representative cases have been selected in a way which will allow the findings here to be used to encourage similar research in related new media industries, as well as in more situated and contextual circumstances. interviews with creators explore a variety of topics, including their relationships with fans and platforms, their history as a creator, and the production process for their show including the ways that fans, platforms and individual motivations influence the final result. in discussing and highlighting these aspects, this paper will provide some insights into the ways both explicit and implicit that the industries of gaming content creation and podcasting have succeeded or failed in creating an industry distinct from the platform capitalism or digital colonialism that is increasingly pervading the online world, as well as highlighting. beyond the digital colonialism, this research also touches on real world inequalities that can be traced back to historical settler colonialism. it is often noted that traditional media has faced difficulties in representing minorities who have historically been discriminated 15 against as a result of capitalist and colonialist attitudes which is just one of the many ways that this discrimination is perpetuated in modern society. indeed, the gaming industry has been viewed as having an outright hostile attitude to anybody who does not fit the perceived norm of the straight white male gamer, as exemplified in the #gamergate harassment campaign (dowling, goetz & lanthrop, 2020). similarly, it has been noted that minority voices are often sidelined or marginalized in histories of podcasting, despite their noteworthy contributions (florini & barner, 2021).this contrasts with the perceived meritocratic nature of the gaming content creation and podcast industries. despite the claims that hard work is all that is required for success, these voices have to work harder than others. as a result, this research has explicitly sought out voices from marginalized communities and engaged with them on this matter, the results of which will be included in the paper. this is an important issue to engage with considering that this is just one of the myriad of forms of gaming spectatorship which gaming communities are interacting with. references couldry, n., & mejias, u. a. (2019). the costs of connection : how data is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism. stanford university press. dowling, d. o., goetz, c., & lathrop, d. (2020). one year of #gamergate: the shared twitter link as emblem of masculinist gamer identity. games and culture, 15(8), 982– 1003. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412019864857 florini, s., & barner, b. (2021). “i’m trying to be the rap oprah”: combat jack and the history of the loud speakers network. in j. w. morris & e. hoyt (eds.), saving new sounds: podcast preservation and historiography (pp. 82–91). university of michigan press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.11435021.8 hansen, s. (2021). the feed is the thing: how rss defined podcastre and why podcasts may need to move on. in j. w. morris & e. hoyt (eds.), saving new sounds: podcast preservation and historiography (pp. 195–207). university of michigan press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.11435021.15 johnson, & woodcock, j. (2019). “it’s like the gold rush”: the lives and careers of professional video game streamers on twitch.tv. information, communication & society, 22(3), 336–351. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2017.1386229 kopf, s. (2020). “rewarding good creators”: corporate social media discourse on monetization schemes for content creators. social media + society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120969877 misener, d. (2021, april 2). the most crowded categories in apple podcasts (april 2021 edition). pacific content. https://blog.pacific-content.com/the-most-crowded-categoriesin-apple-podcasts-april-2021-edition-273b3d59866e quirk, v. (2015, december 7). guide to podcasting. columbia journalism review. https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/guide_to_podcasting.php https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412019864857 http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.11435021.8 http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.11435021.15 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2017.1386229 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120969877 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120969877 https://blog.pacific-content.com/the-most-crowded-categories-in-apple-podcasts-april-2021-edition-273b3d59866e https://blog.pacific-content.com/the-most-crowded-categories-in-apple-podcasts-april-2021-edition-273b3d59866e https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/guide_to_podcasting.php 16 sullivan j.l. (2018) podcast movement: aspirational labour and the formalisation of podcasting as a cultural industry. in: llinares d., fox n., berry r. (eds) podcasting. palgrave macmillan, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90056-8_3 when game music tops charts: how k/da reframes game music and virtual musicians tom paul willma university of sydney from the socially charged performances of damon albarn’s gorillaz to the cheery imagination of youtube’s kasune ai, our modern age sees music becoming coproduced (lin et. al, 2020) and presented (yamada, 2017) by ‘virtual musicians’. these are musicians who either in production or representation are framed through the navigations of autonomous, digital performing agents. such virtual musical voices are quickly becoming the “‘who’ of our post-theological era” (dyson, malina & cubbit, 2014, p. 69), readily navigating global cultural systems and inviting new perspectives on cultural discourse. one such example is k/da, a virtual k-pop girl group where musicians pose as characters from the online videogame league of legends (lol) (riot games, 2009). since their debut in 2018, k/da’s multi-lingual, mixed-reality performances (see figure 1.) have achieved international acclaim with several tracks reaching the number one spot on the us world digital song sales chart (benjamin, 2018). however, despite their international reception and critical success, current ludomusical literature has been unable to address these new mixed-reality navigations since they lie beyond the usual paradigm of game music being embedded within gameplay. the following paper therefore aims to address this opening by reframing how player interactivity materialises within the music and performance practices of k/da. it does so by discussing how k/da promotes audience interaction with lol’s cultural ecosystem rather than its gameplay, arguing that the virtual band foregrounds cultural discourse through its gendered and techno-sensationalist music and performance practices. furthermore, in doing so this paper also aims to expand the reach of ludomusicology, demonstrating that virtual musicians may navigate hybrid-cultural understandings through the affordances of game music when viewed through this reframed perspective. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90056-8_3 17 figure 1: screenshot of k/da singer soyeon (left) and her virtual double, akali (right), performing pop/stars (2018) through augmented reality on stage at the 2018 league of legends world championships. screenshot captured at 02:09 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9odlvov3qs&ab_channel=leagueoflegends while much research has already been conducted into both the role of music in games and the navigations of virtual musicians, we find that there remain two major openings within the literature. the first is that ludomusicology often fails to acknowledge the role of game relevant music which appears outside of the context of gameplay. whether the music facilitates interactive gameplay elements (liebe, 2012) or drives narrative development (wood, 2009), the role of music in games is often framed by ludomusicologists through these mechanisms of gameplay (moorman, 2013). by addressing this paradigm through an analysis of k/da and the music of riot games, this paper therefore presents an alternative position, where game music runs parallel to gameplay and interaction results from the audience’s immersion in the games’ cultural ecosystem, rather than its play experience. by reframing the paradigm as such, the music of riot games therefore invites new insight into the considerations of game music and the navigations of virtual musicians. it also encourages us to ask and explore who consumes such content, and why. the second opening addressed by this paper can be seen through its expansion of contemporary discussions on virtual musicians. currently, there is a large discrepancy in the literature concerning the cultural navigations of virtual musicians. from yamada (2017) who conducted a case study into the artist-audience relationships of supercell a vocaloid album featuring the voice of hatsune miku to lam (2016), zaborowski (2018) and matsune (2017), who all similarly discuss the audience-artist negotiations of hatsune miku; we readily observe that much of the relevant literature concerning the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9odlvov3qs&ab_channel=leagueoflegends 18 cultural navigations of virtual musicians is centered around ideas of japanese modernity, and more specifically, around the vocaloid brand. by applying this research base to the mixed nationality navigations of k/da, this paper also aims to demonstrate how the affordances of game music may further facilitate the practices of virtual musical celebrities. virtual musicians are already an interesting topic for internet research, but through their intersection with games and gaming culture, they pose questions about music consumption more generally as a gaming-adjacent activity. to achieve these aims, this paper begins with a literature review focusing on two dimensions: the gendered navigations of virtual musicians and the shared theme of techno-sensationalism between both e-sports and k-pop. through the former, this paper continues by discussing how the gendered performance practices of k/da, similar to other contemporary virtual musical celebrities, foreground the cultural discourse surrounding the game and its brand. particularly, in the instance of this casestudy, where k/da’s performative signifiers of sexuality as empowerment are misrepresented due to its context alongside the 2018 riot games sexual harassment lawsuit (liao, 2021). through the latter, this paper continues by arguing that both esports and k-pop share a common core aesthetic, in that stakeholders of both seek to portray themselves as either technological frontrunners or as “cultural icon(s) of novelty and trendiness” (kim, 2018, p.133). to discuss these cultural negotiations, this paper provides an analysis of k/da’s performance practices and musical signifiers, asserting that by foregrounding these cultural navigations, k/da reframes the audience’s experience of musical interaction, using the medium as a means to navigate hybrid, international cultural understandings. in doing so, this paper demonstrates that beyond gameplay experience, the cultural negotiations of virtual musicians invite a new and innovative modality for player engagement. references benjamin, j. (2018). ‘league of legends’ girl group earns madison beer, (g)i-dle & jaira burns no.1 on world digital songs sales chart. billboard. https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/12/27/riot-discrimination-100million-settlement/. dyson, f., malina, r. f., & cubitt, s. (2014). the tone of our times : sound, sense, economy, and ecology. the mit press. lam, k. y. (2016). the hatsune miku phenomenon: more than a virtual j‐pop diva. j pop cult, 49, 1107-1124. league of legends. (2018). pop/stars opening ceremony presented by mastercard | finals | 2018 world championship. [online video] available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9odlvov3qs&ab_channel=leagueoflegends liebe, m. (2012). interactivity and music in games, in p. moorman (ed.), music and game: perspectives on a popular alliance (pp. 41-62). springer fachmedien wiesbaden gmbh. https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/12/27/riot-discrimination-100-million-settlement/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/12/27/riot-discrimination-100-million-settlement/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9odlvov3qs&ab_channel=leagueoflegends 19 lin, y. j., kao, h. k., tseng, y. c., tsai, m., & su, l. (2020). a human-computer duet system for music performance. proceedings of the 28th acm international conference on multimedia, 772-780. matsue, j. m. (2017). the ideal idol: making music with hatsune miku, the “first sound of the future”. in a. weintraub & b. barendregt (eds.), vamping the stage: female voices of asian modernitites (pp. 320-348). university of hawaii press. moorman, p. (2013). music and game: perspectives on a popular alliance. springer fachmedien wiesbaden gmbh. riot games. (2009). league of legends. online game. riot games and garena. wood, s. (2009). video game music: high scores: making sense of music and video games. in g. harper, r. doughty & j. eisentraut (eds.), sound and music in film and visual media: a critical overview (pp. 129-148). bloomsbury academic. yamada, k. (2017). supercell’s supercell featuring hatsune miku. bloomsbury academic. zaborowski, r. (2018). fans negotiating performer personas: ‘melt’ by ryo feat. hatsune miku. journal of the finnish anthropological society, 43(2), 104-108. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 interdependence and intervention: news organizations’ contradictory relationship with online comment moderation anna rantasila tampere university heli väätäjä lapland university of applied sciences joel kiskola tampere university thomas olsson tampere university aleksi syrjämäki tampere university mirja ilves tampere university poika isokoski tampere university veikko surakka tampere university introduction online news comments are crucial but problematic means of audience engagement for journalistic organizations. on one hand, comments help journalists cultivating an interdependent relationship with their audiences, as comments allow the audience to communicate with journalists (kangaspunta 2018). comments also enable journalists to collect new information on developing stories (masullo chen & pain 2017). on the other hand, the ideal of an interdependent relationship does not always match with reality. online news comments are also a channel for uncivil discourse that can be damaging to journalists, activists, or other commenters (e.g., frischlic et al. 2019, winterlin et al. suggested citation (apa): rantasila, a., väätäjä, h., kiskola, j., olsson, t., syrjämäki, a., ilves, m., isokoski, p., and surakka, v., (2021, october). interdependence and intervention: news organizations’ contradictory relationship with online comment moderation. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 2020, wolfgang 2018a, 2018b). uncivil commenting can also damage the brand of the publisher, which has prompted some news organizations to disable comment sections altogether (larsson 2018). in an ideal situation, civil commenters could discuss independently, free of outside interference. however, because of the prevalence of uncivil comments, most news organizations are compelled to intervene by moderating the comments (gillespie 2018). usually, moderation means prevention or deletion of unwanted messages or users (gorwa et al. 2020, ruckenstein & turunen 2020). in this paper, we examine how managers of online comments in large finnish news organizations view online comment moderation and moderation technologies in relation to questions of interand independence. we suggest that while some of these issues may be solved by tweaking the design processes of comment section user interface, some may require alternative approaches to moderation altogether. our paper addresses the above issues via two research questions (rq): 1) what kind of tensions the interviewees observe in online news commenting and moderation? 2) what are their opinions on the current and future technological moderation applications? based on these questions, we discuss the implications of the interviewees’ insights for future moderation applications and practices. most research on online content moderation focuses on moderators or social media platforms (e.g., caplan 2018, gillespie 2018, jhaver et al. 2019, roberts 2019). thus, this paper contributes new information by examining those who manage moderation for journalistic organizations. moreover, this study contributes to the discussion about online content moderation by exploring how to broaden understanding of moderation beyond deletion of unwanted content and users, suggesting a move towards practices that seek to cultivate discussion (caplan 2018, ruckenstein & turunen 2020). materials and methods eleven participants (9 males, 2 females; ages 33-52) were interviewed following a semistructured procedure. the interviews were conducted in finnish either face-to-face or via microsoft teams in 2019 and 2020 and audio recorded. the recordings were transcribed, and the transcriptions were further analyzed with discourse analysis. our sample provides a good representation of the finnish news industry: the interviewees were employed by the six most prominent news outlets in finland, including a major television channel, a news agency, four large newspaper publishing companies, and a software company catering to news organizations. working in specialized middle-management positions, the interviewees influence future acquisitions and development of comment moderation systems in the media organizations. hence, they have a considerable role in decisions that affect the online environment where news commenting takes place. findings and discussion in respect to rq1 the interviewees would like to see more meaningful engagement with their audiences. they wished for the comments to be deliberative, well-constructed, and informative. they argued that good moderation should intervene with the commenters’ freedom of expression as little as possible. however, the interviewees reported frustration because the comments tend to be emotional, derogatory, and reactionary, thus requiring continuous moderation. moreover, they saw moderation as timeconsuming and outside “actual” journalistic work. regarding rq2, most of the interviewees’ organizations had either outsourced or looked to outsource comment moderation, and some used automated moderation. however, some interviewees were not satisfied with the outsourced or automated moderation, mostly because of a lack of contextual knowledge. this reflects the results of previous research (e.g., caplan 2018, gerrard 2018, gorwa et al. 2020, jhaver et al. 2019, laaksonen et al. 2020, tubaro et al. 2020). the interviews presented three points of consideration for future moderation applications and practices, as well as research. first, there is a need to involve moderators and news organizations better in the design processes of automated moderation applications to increase understanding of the contexts where the applications will be used. second, the interviewees suggested alternative approaches to moderation altogether. for example, replacing comments with other means of interaction was mentioned as a way to avoid uncivility. third, to address the contradiction between freedom of expression and need for moderation, we advocate a view that would focus on rewarding civil comments instead of punishing for uncivil comments, in line with ruckenstein & turunen (2020). in other words, we suggest rethinking both intervention and interdependence. references caplan, r. (2018) content or context moderation? new york, ny: data & society research institute. retrieved september 3, 2020 from: https://datasociety.net/output/content-or-context-moderation/ masullo chen, g. and pain p. (2017) normalizing online comments, journalism practice, 11:7, 876-892, doi: 10.1080/17512786.2016.1205954 frischlich, l, boberg, s. and quandt, t. (2019). comment sections as targets of dark participation? journalists’ evaluation and moderation of deviant user comments, journalism studies, 20:14, 2014-2033, doi: 10.1080/1461670x.2018.1556320 gerrard, y. (2018) beyond the hashtag: circumventing content moderation on social media, new media & society, 20:12, 4492–4511. doi: 10.1177/1461444818776611 gillespie, t. (2018) custodians of the internet. platforms, content moderation and the hidden decisions that shape social media. new haven: yale university press. gorwa, r, binns, r. and katzenbach, c. (2020) algorithmic content moderation: technical and political challenges in the automation of platform governance. big data & society 2020 january–june: 1–15, doi: 10.1177/2053951719897945 jhaver, s, birman, i, gilbert, e. and bruckman, a. (2019) human-machine collaboration for content regulation: the case of reddit automoderator. acm trans. comput.-hum. interact. 26:5, (july 2019), 35 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3338243 kangaspunta, v. (2018) online news comments: social network and emergent public. the information society 34:5, 275–288, https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2018.1497741 laaksonen, s-m, haapoja, j, kinnunen, t, nelimarkka, m. and pöyhtäri, r. (2020) the datafication of hate: expectations and challenges in automated hate speech monitoring. frontiers in big data, 3:3. doi: 10.3389/fdata.2020.00003 larsson, a. o. (2018) assessing “the regulars”—and beyond, journalism practice, 12:5, 605-623, doi: 10.1080/17512786.2017.1338149 roberts, s. t. (2019) behind the screen. content moderation in the shadows of social media. new haven: yale university press. ruckenstein, m. and turunen, l.l.m. (2020) re-humanizing the platform: content moderators and the logic of care. new media & society 22:6, 1026–1042. doi: 10.1177/1461444819875990 tubaro, p, casilli, a.a. and coville, m. (2020) the trainer, the verifier, the imitator: three ways in which human platform workers support artificial intelligence. big data & society 2020 january–june: 1–12, doi: 10.1177/2053951720919776 wintterlin, f, schatto-eckrodt, t, frischlich, l, boberg, s. and quandt, t. (2020) how to cope with dark participation: moderation practices in german newsrooms, digital journalism, doi: 10.1080/21670811.2020.1797519 wolfgang, j.d. (2018a) cleaning up the “fetid swamp”, digital journalism, 6:1, 21-40, doi: 10.1080/21670811.2017.1343090 wolfgang, j.d. (2018b). taming the ‘trolls’: how journalists negotiate the boundaries of journalism and online comments. journalism, 1–18, doi: 10.1177/1464884918762362 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): frizzera, l. (2024, october). predictions of the self: ai and the political economy of subjectivation. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. predictions of the self: ai and the political economy of subjectivation luciano frizzera concordia university the recent widespread availability of artificial intelligence (ai) technology and the extensive records of human activities and behaviour in digital format present serious challenges related to how individuals construct their own identities and social relations. ai systems datafy our body—our face, our gender, the colour of our skin—and our identity, producing live databases for computable linkages between humans and nonhumans. they create a new cartography of biopower (foucault, 1982), producing a new form of political economy of subjectivation that treats individuals as objects from which raw material is extracted to produce predictive models that act as our data doubles (haggerty & ericson, 2000). focusing on kaggle, a platform for crowdsourcing ai development, i examine the practices of the data science community on three highprofile machine learning projects and conclude by arguing that machine learning has been thought of and developed as a prediction of the self in order to prescribe individual behaviour to fulfill specific economic conditions. subjectivation (foucault, 2017) is a central concept for the constitution of individuals, whereby one’s sense of self as an individual agent is paradoxically shaped according to forces external to the self. subjectivation has been described as the totalizing power of the state (althusser, 1971), decentralized and woven through everyday life (foucault, 2017), and embodied experience (butler, 1990; browne, 2015). with the technological transformations over the last three decades, subjectivation has become impersonal and algorithmically driven (chun, 2012; langlois & elmer, 2019). ai complicates things as it automatizes subjectivation using predictive models. these models are used to identify, sort, and classify populations; to shape individual behaviour and habits; to create value and capital; to modulate our experience of and within the world. ai systems interpellate individuals as subjects of the digital society, not only to reinforce our conditions of existence (lazzarato, 2004) but also to (re)mediate our embodied experiences (grusin, 2015). as such, we must think of ai as a discourse that produces specialized knowledge based on specific inputs from datasets as a way to manage populations. ai takes on the historical forces of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and racism and disseminates and solidifies these logics in societies, asymmetrically influencing social groups. it emerges as an instrument of technocapitalism, which can only further the agenda of the systems in which it is embedded. issues such as algorithmic social and cultural biases (apprich et al., 2018; bolukbasi et al., 2016; xu et al., 2022), the idealized and pragmatic economic uses of ai (finn, 2017; hong, 2020; srnicek, 2017), and the consequent reproduction of already existing power structures by predictive models (amoore, 2020; crawford, 2021; o’neil, 2016) have been problematized in the literature. however, most of these contributions focus on specific algorithms or the use of predictive models by large digital infrastructures at the consumer level. this paper asks what kinds of data and labour mobilization occur in and around the production of predictive models: what political economy and socio-technical conditions are involved in the production of ai? how do these conditions produce predictive models that shape our sense of self and identity? for that, we must focus on places where ai systems are iteratively prototyped, tested, and refined, tasks often run by volunteers and low-wage workers, such as kaggle, a crowdsourcing platform for data science and machine learning development based on competitive events. with over 10 million users, kaggle has held hundreds of public large-scale machine learning competitions over the last 14 years. these competitions have cash prizes of up to us$ 3 million, attracting thousands of highly trained computer scientists, engineers, and data scientists worldwide. most of these competitions are sponsored by large private companies (e.g., facebook, google, walmart) and public agencies (e.g., us department of homeland security) aiming to solve problems related to optimization and human behaviour, most notably for commercial or security purposes. i argue that kaggle is a site of impersonal subjectivation where value is mobilized through large assemblages of data, code, crowdsourced labour, and specific economic interests. this paper focuses on three high-profile competitions: deepfake detection challenge, passenger screening algorithm challenge, and instacart market basket analysis. these competitions exhibit ostensibly untroubled data mobilization for algorithmic subjectivation. each of these competitions had a specific goal that matches a topology for producing socio-techno apparatuses of control: identify, predict, and mediate. drawing on digital methods (rogers, 2009) and software studies (fuller, 2008), i examine how these competitions unfold, what algorithms developers used, what kinds of predictive models were produced, and the user’s interactions in the website’s forum. participants in these competitions exchanged over 11 thousand messages in the forum and produced dozens of thousands of predictive models. i analyzed participants’ contributions to describe how machine learning has been thought of and developed as a prediction of the self in order to prescribe individual behaviour to fulfill specific economic conditions. i conclude by drawing on critical theory and discourse analysis to argue that more than just a way of doing computation, kaggle competitions show that machine learning development turned into a dogmatic capitalist mode of production with little care for human life. it pervades and regulates societies at a political, social and cultural level. this phenomenon, which i call modes of automatic subjectivation, points toward the possibility of using subjective and impersonal materials to reorganize life in its broadest sense according to a specific system of power and privileges involving gender, race, sexuality, and social class. crucially, i argue that these modes of subjectivation are designed to control the “production of possibilities” and reinforce specific types of socioeconomic relations, creating the conditions of existence that determine how resources and people are organized. references althusser, l. (1971). ideology and ideological state apparatuses. in lenin and philosophy (pp. 123–156). new left books. amoore, l. (2020). cloud ethics: algorithms and the attributes of ourselves and others. duke university press. apprich, c., chun, w. h. k., cramer, f., & steyerl, h. (2018). pattern discrimination. meson press. bolukbasi, t., chang, k.-w., zou, j. y., saligrama, v., & kalai, a. t. (2016). man is to computer programmer as woman is to homemaker? debiasing word embeddings. 30th conference on neural information processing systems (nips 2016), 9. browne, s. (2015). dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. duke university press. butler, j. (1990). gender trouble. routledge. chun, w. h. k. (2017). updating to remain the same: habitual new media (reprint edition). the mit press. crawford, k. (2021). atlas of ai: power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. yale university press. finn, e. (2017). what algorithms want: imagination in the age of computing. the mit press. foucault, m. (1982). the subject and power. critical inquiry, 8(4), 777–795. https://doi.org/10.1086/448181 foucault, m. (2017). subjectivity and truth: lectures at the collège de france, 19801981 (f. ewald, a. fontana, & f. gros, eds.; g. burchell, trans.; 1st ed. 2017 edition). palgrave macmillan. fuller, m. (ed.). (2008). software studies: a lexicon. mit press. grusin, r. (2015). radical mediation. critical inquiry, 42(1), 124–148. https://doi.org/10.1086/682998 haggerty, k. d., & ericson, r. v. (2000). the surveillant assemblage. the british journal of sociology, 51(4), 605–622. https://doi.org/10.1080/00071310020015280 https://doi.org/10.1080/00071310020015280 hong, s. (2020). technologies of speculation: the limits of knowledge in a datadriven society. nyu press. langlois, g., & elmer, g. (2019). impersonal subjectivation from platforms to infrastructures. media, culture & society, 41(2), 236–251. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443718818374 lazzarato, m. (2004). from capital-labour to capital-life (v. fournier, a. virtanen, & j. vâhâmâki, trans.). ephemera, 4(3), 187–208. o’neil, c. (2016). weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy (reprint edition). broadway books. rogers, r. (2009). the end of the virtual: digital methods. amsterdam university press. https://doi.org/10.5117/9789056295936 srnicek, n. (2017). platform capitalism. polity. xu, y., terhörst, p., raja, k., & pedersen, m. (2022). a comprehensive analysis of ai biases in deepfake detection with massively annotated databases (arxiv:2208.05845). selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): ferrari, e. (2024, october). the offline strikes back: complicating the role of digital technologies in covid-19 mutual aid activism. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the offline strikes back: complicating the role of digital technologies in covid-19 mutual aid activism elisabetta ferrari aarhus university new experiences of grassroots solidarity activism emerged all over the world in response to the covid-19 pandemic. under the label of “mutual aid”, a global wave of activism (see sitrin & colectiva sembrar, 2020) aimed to support vulnerable community members by providing them access to basic necessities, such as food and medicines. mutual aid can be defined as “collective coordination to meet each other’s needs” and “build a shared understanding about why people do not have what they need” (spade, 2020, pp. 7 & 9). it is a form of activism which works to improve people’s material conditions, while building ties of political solidarity (ferrari, 2022). mutual aid activists organized through complex layers of digital practices, relying on google spreadsheets, facebook groups, whatsapp chats, venmo accounts, and instagram posts. these technologies facilitated the spread of mutual aid and supported activists in collecting donations and recruiting volunteers; they were especially crucial during a time in which physical proximity was a risk and where different rules governed physical interaction. however, the relationship between covid-19 mutual aid activists and digital technologies was varied and often fraught. literature review the role of digital technologies in supporting covid-19 mutual aid is widely acknowledged, even by scholars who do not work on questions of media and technology (e.g. firth, 2022; ntontis et al., 2022). more tech-focused research, such as from an hci perspective, has examined how the design features of corporate tools, such as facebook groups and google drive, lend themselves to mutual aid organizing (knearem et al., 2021) and discussed the dilemmas that tech-enabled mutual aid activism poses for crisis informatics (soden & owen, 2021). however, the literature has yet to fully explore how the relationship between mutual aid activists and digital 2 technologies unfolded and to contextualize these pandemic experiences within longstanding debates on the role of digital media in activism. the scholarship on activism and digital technologies has investigated how the use of digital media, such as facebook and twitter/x, might be changing how movements come to exist and operate (bennett & segerberg, 2013; tufekci, 2017), how digital technologies can both empower and oppress marginalized populations (clark-parsons, 2022; jackson et al., 2020), and how collective identity, organization and leadership are being reconfigured (gerbaudo, 2012; kavada, 2015). one aspect discussed in this literature is particularly important to examine covid-19 mutual aid activism: the relationship between the online and the offline. this has been addressed in terms of “hybrid activism” (dahlberg-grundberg, 2016; treré, 2018; showden et al., 2023), but also with respect to the longstanding importance of “offline” factors in shaping the efficacy and meaning of digital activism (schradie, 2019). given the peculiar conditions of the covid-19 pandemic and the shift to predominantly digital modes due to the requirements of social distancing, pandemic mutual aid activism is an interesting case to consider to re-evaluate our understanding of the boundaries between online and offline activist practices. the study this paper is part of a larger project that investigates pandemic mutual aid activism in the united states, italy and the united kingdom to provide a comparison between these three contexts. i have selected these countries because, in addition to being similarly affected by the pandemic on similar timelines, they saw very strong and widespread mobilizations for mutual aid. taking advantage of this comparative lens and drawing on 40 interviews with activists, this paper considers how the experiences of covid-19 mutual aid activists complicate our understanding of the intersection of activism and digital technologies and of what digital activism looks like today. main findings i show that covid-19 mutual aid activism holds together several contradictions, which contribute to a nuanced understanding of the distinctions between online and offline, but also of what it means for activism to be digital. first, as mentioned, mutual aid activists started mobilizing at the height of the pandemic, when physical proximity was dangerous and often forbidden. they experimented with a range of technologies to organize their work and support their interactions with each other and with the public: they met via zoom, collected requests via google forms, etc. however, even in the risky context of the pandemic, a big part of this mutual aid work had a strong embodied character: for instance, activists physically came together (albeit at a distance) to prepare and distribute food or to source ppe. digital tools enabled the coordination of this material work. at the same time, the need for physical distancing and the increased attention to disabled and chronically ill individuals opened the door to a better appreciation of digital-only activism as an equally “valid” form of activism – an idea that even radical social justice movements have often struggled with. 3 second, how mutual aid groups used digital technologies varied significantly from group to group, and country to country. some mutual aid collectives developed very sophisticated tech-enabled systems for their activism. many u.s.-based groups, for instance, integrated payment apps (e.g. venmo, cashapp) and crowdfunding websites (e.g. gofundme) in their day-to-day work. while these payment and crowdfunding tools initially felt very “easy” and efficient for these groups, over time activists experienced setbacks with these platforms and became very frustrated. for instance, they often had to invent creative solutions to get around the policies of venmo, which are targeted towards individual consumers, rather than collectives. this led them to abandon these corporate digital tools and embraced more customizable and/or nonprofit digital solutions; in particular, many groups adopted the crowdfunding and cash flow management platform opencollective, which is targeted at community groups, and/or switched to the database management system airtable. while these solutions allowed activists to move away from the constraints of corporate tools, this shift also resulted in highly complex digital processes, which took activists a lot of effort to implement. other collectives, especially in the uk and italy, developed quite complex collective procedures, too, but ones which were characterized by “less sophisticated” tech practices: they primarily used whatsapp chats and lots of phone calls. this (relatively) low tech approach felt very comfortable to activists, since it repurposed digital media that were already in use, but was also particularly suited to reach populations with lower levels of access to digital technologies (e.g. migrants, older people, unhoused individuals). concerns about access to mutual aid for these populations was expressed by activists in all contexts (see also soden & owen, 2021). discussion and conclusion how do we make sense of these somewhat contradictory observations? even in a moment of heightened centrality of digital communication such as the pandemic, it was clear that the offline was crucial: that extremely sophisticated activist digital practices coexisted with low-tech forms of digital communication and embodied/material practices. in the paper i argue that we should explore these contradictory aspects through activists’ commitment to care (hobart & kneese, 2020; the care collective, 2020) as an overarching principle, which oriented them towards developing technologically-enabled hybrid practices that could enact this ideal of care as much as possible. i suggest we continue to complicate the idea of “hybrid activism” (see also mattoni & ceccobelli, 2024) to consider how a multiplicity of modalities of activism can foster more open and inclusive solidarity movements. i conclude by discussing how these lessons can be useful beyond the context of the pandemic. 4 references bennett, w. l., & segerberg, a. (2013). the logic of connective action: digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. cambridge university press. clark-parsons, r. (2022). networked feminism: how digital media makers transformed gender justice movements. university of california press. dahlberg-grundberg, m. (2015). technology as movement: on hybrid organizational types and the mutual constitution of movement identity and technological infrastructure in digital activism. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 1354856515577921. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856515577921 ferrari, e. (2022). latency and crisis: mutual aid activism in the covid-19 pandemic. qualitative sociology, 45(3), 413–431. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-02209513-7 firth, r. (2022). disaster anarchy: mutual aid and radical action. pluto press. gerbaudo, p. (2012). tweets and the streets: social media and contemporary activism. pluto press. hobart, h. j. k., & kneese, t. (2020). radical care: survival strategies for uncertain times. social text, 38(1 (142)), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7971067 jackson, s. j., bailey, m., & foucault welles, b. (2020). #hashtagactivism: networks of race and gender justice. mit press. kavada, a. (2015). creating the collective: social media, the occupy movement and its constitution as a collective actor. information, communication & society, 18(8), 872–886. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2015.1043318 knearem, t., jo, j., tsai, c.-h., & carroll, j. m. (2021). making space for support: an exploratory analysis of pandemic-response mutual aid platforms. c&t ’21: proceedings of the 10th international conference on communities & technologies wicked problems in the age of tech, 38–43. https://doi.org/10.1145/3461564.3461567 mattoni, a., & ceccobelli, d. (2024). activists in the data stream: the practices of daily grassroots politics in southern europe. bristol university press. ntontis, e., fernandes‐jesus, m., mao, g., dines, t., kane, j., karayaka, j., perach, r., cocking, c., mctague, m., schwarz, a., semlyen, j., & drury, j. (2022). tracking the nature and trajectory of social support in facebook mutual aid groups during the covid-19 pandemic. international journal of disaster risk reduction, 76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2022.103043 https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856515577921 https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856515577921 https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856515577921 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-022-09513-7 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-022-09513-7 https://doi.org/10.1145/3461564.3461567 5 schradie, j. (2019). the revolution that wasn’t: how digital activism favors conservatives. harvard university press. showden, c. r., barker-clarke, e., sligo, j., & nairn, k. (2023). the connective is communal: hybrid activism in online & offline spaces. social movement studies, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2023.2171387 sitrin, m. & colectiva sembrar (eds.). (2020). pandemic solidarity: mutual aid during the covid-19 crisis. pluto press. soden, r., & owen, e. (2021). dilemmas in mutual aid: lessons for crisis informatics from an emergent community response to the pandemic. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 5(cscw2), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3479862 spade, d. (2020). mutual aid: building solidarity during this crisis (and the next). verso books. the care collective. (2020). the care manifesto. verso books. treré, e. (2018). hybrid media activism: ecologies, imaginaries, algorithms. routledge. tufekci, z. (2017). twitter and tear gas: the power and fragility of networked protest. yale university press. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2023.2171387 https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2023.2171387 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): popiel, p. (2021, october). emergent governance: competition policy as platform regulation. paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. emergent governance: competition policy as platform regulation pawel popiel university of pennsylvania introduction much of the scholarly debate around platform regulation and governance is outcomefocused, concerning rules and norms that should govern platform behavior, rather than focusing on questions of policy processes (haggart, 2020). however, the question of politics underlying the development of these rules is essential to understanding how and why particular forms of oversight have developed in response to the growing scope of platformization (van dijck, 2020) and broader political economic changes theorized as platform and surveillance capitalism (srnicek, 2017; zuboff, 2019). indeed, despite multiple dimensions of the policy debate, most interventions in places ranging from the us to the eu to india to australia have taken the form largely of competition policy (e.g., evens et al., 2020; puppis & winseck, 2020). to address this gap, this paper provides a preliminary account of how competition policy has emerged as a prominent governance mechanism for platform oversight, which privileges stronger antitrust enforcement and economic regulation and has resulted in antitrust lawsuits against and investigations into major tech companies like google and facebook. design & methods with the us as a case study, i examine a series of 2017-2020 policy debates about the oversight of digital platform markets, arising partly in response to public scandals like cambridge analytica and regulatory gaps resulting from technological convergence, digitization, and neoliberal reforms. drawing on critical discourse analysis of policy documents (e.g., regulatory hearing transcripts and think tank reports on digital platforms), a dozen policy stakeholder interviews (e.g., competition policy experts, tech policy advocates, regulators), and fieldwork in washington, d.c. (e.g., expert antitrust panels), i trace these debates across several prominent policy venues, including stigler selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): popiel, p. (2021, october). emergent governance: competition policy as platform regulation. paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. conferences on digital platforms and the eponymous report; the 2018-2019 ftc hearings on competition in digital markets; and a series of antitrust events, panels, and symposia organized by many stakeholders active in the competition policy space. drawing on critical policy studies (fischer, 2003; schmidt, 2015), i explore how the boundaries of competition policy are discursively contested and negotiated in these debates by stakeholders ranging from policy experts to regulators to public interest groups. i identify the range of interests invested in clashes over policy, including competing definitions of digital platform markets; proposed policy interventions and expectations about their outcomes; and the proper role of the state and of market competition in digital platform markets. emergent governance driven by a burgeoning progressive antimonopoly movement, these 2017-2020 debates took place in the broader policy arena—regulatory hearings, nonprofit events, academic conferences, legal journal articles, newspaper op-eds—where a critique of existing antitrust began to take form. this critique principally revealed how existing neoliberal antitrust’s definition of competition in terms of outcomes (e.g., price effects) entrenches the market power of massive tech incumbents. anti-monopolists analyzed the competitive concerns arising in digital platform markets so painstakingly they simply could not be swept aside by the antitrust establishment. they also worked to normalize antitrust tools considered radical, like breakups, significantly expanding the discursive space in the competition policy arena. a new reform discourse had emerged: competition as a tool of democratic governance over private markets. the subsequent process of policy sense-making, in which policy communities attempt to work out complex and often uncertain policy problems (andrews, 2020), involved intense political debate and critique of these proposals by the industry and by various stakeholders on policy and ideological grounds. as the less radical ideas were taken up by the antitrust establishment, many of the antimonopoly critiques became legitimated. importantly, some of these proposals also resonated with right-wing populists allied with the trump administration, who saw antitrust as a tool for exerting political information controls, namely by applying pressure on digital platform giants falsely accused of censoring conservative speech. however, competition is elusive in platform markets and the problems arising in them extend beyond competitive concerns. the idea of antitrust and regulation as complements to address platform power emerged as a product of two opposing forces reacting to the antimonopoly intervention. the political right strategically argued that antitrust was purposely too narrow to address non-competition-related concerns as an attempt to fend off any antitrust reform proposals. establishment experts on the center and center-left agreed, particularly those steeped in decades of media policy who instinctively linked market failure with regulation, while leftists saw competition as fundamentally limited in achieving key policy goals, such as worker protections. while anti-monopolists worried that regulatory solutions would distract from their broader project of antitrust reform, even some expanded their definition of competition policy to accommodate regulation. ultimately, the regulatory proposals taken up by the policy establishment were largely confined to economic regulation. these policy debates produced a set of policy ideas and values vis-à-vis platform oversight that coalesced around a governance paradigm constructed by an interpretive community (hassan et al., 2020) of policy experts. rooted in competition policy, the framework discarded some of the bolder proposals, like structural separation, in deference to market mechanisms and narrower economic regulations, like mandated interoperability. the biden administration in dialogue with regulators across the globe has embraced a more interventionist approach, but ultimately prioritizes optimizing competition in digital platform markets above other goals, like data regulation. consequently, it risks coming up short in providing a policy answer to the expansive forces driving platform capitalism. indeed, competition policy inherently privileges solutions that focus on individual, usually big, companies. as a result, the policy debate remains tethered to the activities of platform giants, while platformization—a process that implicates an increasingly massive swath of social and economic life (van dijck, 2020)—remains outside its field of vision. i theorize these blind spots as partly attributable to the dominance and insularity of the competition policy framework as a foundation for governing platform sectors. indeed, these antitrust debates were siloed from complementary policy debates about issues like privacy, political influence, and content moderation. even efforts to overcome policy silos, like the stigler report, largely deferred to the corrective power of market mechanisms. this persistent deference illuminates the neoliberal constraints on the policy debate and, more broadly, on policy efforts to imagine and define a robust governance regime over rapidly transforming digital platform markets. references andrews, l. (2020, july 8). facebook 'regulation': a process not a text. create uk copyright and creative economy centre, university of glasgow. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3933014 evens, t., donders, k., & afilipoaie, a. (2020). platform policies in the european union: competition and public interest in media markets. journal of digital media & policy, 11(3), 283-300. https://doi.org/10.1386/jdmp_00026_1 fischer, f. (2003). reframing public policy: discursive politics and deliberative practices. oxford university press. haggart, b. (2020). global platform governance and the internet-governance impossibility theorem. journal of digital media & policy, 11(3), 321-339. https://doi.org/10.1386/jdmp_00028_1 hassan, y., ganapati, s., & reddick, c. g. (2020). the politics of sharing: sociotechnical imaginaries of digital platforms. information polity, 25(2), 159-176. https://doi.org/10.3233/ip-190203 puppis, m., & winseck, d. (2020, july 29). platform regulation inquiries, reviews and proceedings worldwide. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1azdh9secgftqeroqjo5fyeiy_gezdf_11 b8mqfsumfs/edit?usp=sharing schmidt, v. a. (2015). discursive institutionalism: understanding policy in context. in f. fischer, d. torgerson, a. durnová, & m. orsini (eds.), handbook of critical policy studies (pp. 171-189). edward elgar publishing. srnicek, n. (2017). platform capitalism. polity. van dijck, j. (2020). seeing the forest for the trees: visualizing platformization and its governance. new media & society, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820940293 zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the frontier of power. public affairs. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): angus, d., burgess, j., carah, c., hayden, l., & obeid, a. (2023, october). exploring facebook’s “why am i seeing this” ad system: meaningful transparency or further obfuscation? paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. exploring facebook’s “why am i seeing this ad” feature: meaningful transparency or further obfuscation? daniel angus queensland university of technology jean burgess queensland university of technology nicholas carah university of queensland lauren hayden university of queensland abdul obeid queensland university of technology introduction for more than a decade, digital advertising has been the primary means of funding online content and services. the evolution of digital advertising towards algorithmically targeted advertising, believed to be highly personalized and tailored to the individual, has presented new challenges for public oversight. this shift has significant implications for regulators, civil society organizations, and researchers seeking to hold advertisers (and platforms) accountable for harms associated with advertising, including false, misleading, racist, discriminatory, and predatory marketing practices, especially when targeting vulnerable consumers. whereas previously, public concern centred on the content of ads and their exposure to audiences, the rise of platform-based advertising means focus has shifted to the distribution of ads and how they reach us. this concern reflects a consensus that if advertising’s cultural power is increasing, it is not because it has become more symbolically persuasive but because it has become better at targeting us. in response to public concerns and regulatory pressures, companies such as meta (the parent of facebook) have introduced transparency tools for researchers and consumers to ‘explain’ the function of advertising on the platform, including the ad library and the “why am i seeing this ad” feature. abbreviated as waist, “why am i seeing this” explanations appear as buttons within each ad seen by a user of the platform, when clicked this button takes users to additional information regarding how the ad was targeted towards them, such as demographic or interest-based categories (see figure 1). despite being a central feature of meta’s response towards increasing external scrutiny, little is known about how the waist feature works, or how it operates at a population level. the waist feature is fundamentally individualistic: it provides an explanation of how a single ad was served to a unique user at a particular time. there is no public information as to the distribution or prevalence of specific waist tags across advertising markets or user populations, nor any systematic or detailed information about how they are utilised and deployed as a tool of transparency by meta platforms. in response we offer a description of waist data collected at scale, informed from a nationwide citizen data donation project of facebook advertising. we analyse this data with a view to better understand meta’s algorithmic advertising system, and to inform questions regarding the sufficiency of waist as an algorithmic explanatory mechanism for users. why am i seeing this (ad) the waist system was introduced in 2014 as a way for facebook users to understand why they were seeing certain ads on their feed. the feature was intended to increase transparency and user control over the advertising they were exposed to. initially, the waist feature was simple, providing users with basic information such as the advertiser's name and the targeting criteria that led to the ad being shown. over time, the waist feature evolved to become more sophisticated. in 2016, meta introduced additional information to the feature, such as a list of interests and behaviours associated with the user that may have led to the ad being shown. interest categories include semantic descriptors that vary from general to hyper-specific, such as ‘online shopping’ and ‘the great british bake off’. in 2018, the feature was further expanded to include information on the source of the ad, such as whether it was paid for by a political organization or a third-party advertiser. meta also launched the first incarnation of their ad transparency library in 2018, which originally included only political and issue advertising, but was later expanded in 2019 to include all active ads on the platform. figure 1: example of a facebook ad seen by one of the authors, showing how to access the waist data of the advertisement. despite these stated improvements, the adequacy of the ad library and waist as explanatory mechanisms is questionable. while the library provides some insight into what ads are circulating, it provides very little meaningful information about whether, how and to whom they are targeted, as researchers attempting to use them to study electoral campaigns have quickly discovered (mehta & erickson, 2022). to understand the power of algorithmic advertising, we need to be able to publicly observe patterns of who sees what ads. under the current arrangements, however, meta make public an aggregated view of the content of ads (through the ad library) but individualise and privatise all communication about how they are targeted (through the waist feature). patterns in waist data from the australian ad observatory responding to the need for greater platform observability (rieder & hoffman, 2020), researchers and civil society groups have developed new data donation methods to collect advertisements and to work with users to crowdsource information about the ads they are seeing (andreou et al., 2018; 2019). our contribution to this global effort is the australian ad observatory project, which extends similar ad donation approaches (propublica, 2020) to investigate whether, how and when facebook ads are targeted to australian users (burgess et al., 2022). deployed as a browser plugin, our software gathers ad creative, metadata, and deidentified observer demographic data for ads served through meta’s facebook news feed feature, while also providing our participants with a dashboard that enables them to monitor and reflect on the advertising that is targeted at them. by february 2023 the australian ad observatory had gathered the support of 1817 participants who had made 760,000+ observations of approximately 330,000+ distinct ads and associated metadata, including waist categories (with 324868 distinct waist interest tags gathered to date). our approach enables us to speculate on the alignment of and gaps between waist data (which is a product of facebook’s transparency efforts with respect to its users) and patterns in our evidence about the platform’s actual ad targeting practices (which is a product of advertisers’ use of the facebook ad system). our ongoing analysis suggests that waist tags are unevenly deployed, with agegender (this includes age ranges, and binary gender classification) and location being the dominant waist tags applied to most ads. waist interest tags are also highly prominent, while education, relationship, and employment status are rarely deployed (see figure 2). figure 2: the distribution of waist tags across all participant observations in the ad dataset. interest tags appear in sets, with many of these semantic tags appearing together within a single observation, for example “charity and causes” alongside “community issues”. by mapping these relationships as a graph, where each node represents an individual waist interest tag, and edges weighted according to how may observations use any two tags, it is possible to map the topology of the waist interest code ecosystem and identify emergent patterns (see figure 3). while many patterns are banal, this analysis provides insights into the potential reproduction of protected or sensitive categories like race, sexuality, gender and class based on personalised ‘interests’, rather than via the explicit targeting of demographic niches (phan and wark, 2022). figure 3: waist interest tag network, highlighting a cluster of interest tags that feature names of popular console video games. this network provides a detailed glimpse into the organizational arrangement of waist interest tags within facebook’s ad ecosystem. our analysis which also draws from an additional app walkthrough exercise (light et al., 2018), reveals the insufficiency of waist and the ad library as sufficient explanations for the scope of advertising and its algorithmic targeting. we offer several avenues for additional exploration of this data and interpretations of the ongoing role of explainability, from both functional and cultural standpoints within the algorithmic advertising ecosystem. references andreou, a., silva, m., benevenuto, f., goga, o., loiseau, p., & mislove, a. (2019, february). measuring the facebook advertising ecosystem. in ndss 2019-proceedings of the network and distributed system security symposium (pp. 1-15). andreou, a., venkatadri, g., goga, o., gummadi, k., loiseau, p., & mislove, a. (2018, february). investigating ad transparency mechanisms in social media: a case study of facebook's explanations. in ndss 2018-network and distributed system security symposium (pp. 1-15). burgess, j., andrejevic, m., angus, d. & obeid, a. (2022). australian ad observatory: background paper. arc centre of excellence for automated decision-making and society, working paper 004. retrieved from: https://apo.org.au/node/318616 light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881-900. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 mehta, s., & erickson, k. (2022). can online political targeting be rendered transparent? prospects for campaign oversight using the facebook ad library. internet policy review, 11(1), 1-31. phan, t., & wark, s. (2021). what personalisation can do for you! or: how to do racial discrimination without ‘race’. culture machine, 20, 1-29. propublica. (2020). facebook political ad collector. retrieved from: https://projects.propublica.org/facebook-ads/ rieder, b., & hofmann, j. (2020). towards platform observability. internet policy review, 9(4), 1-28. https://apo.org.au/node/318616 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 https://projects.propublica.org/facebook-ads/ selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): kantor, a., & rafaeli s. (2021, october). independence through data journalism. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. independence through data journalism avner kantor sheizaf rafaeli university of haifa introduction data journalism (dj) fosters audience independence. it encourages content exploration through visualizations, storytelling, and direct access to data sources (amit-danhi, 2020). dj assists the audience to be well informed, cognitively active, and contribute to the public sphere (baack, 2015). achieving this objective indicates the audience's independence (entman, 1993). how independent is the audience of dj? this question is answered based on the level of engagement of the audience. a low level of engagement prevents the audience from helping each other to interpret the dominant meaning and to identify its deficiencies. when the audience is engaged, they are able to reframe the message from a new perspective, challenging their understanding of the message. by analyzing the audience engagement levels and comparing different types of journalism we gain insight into audience behavior. methodology the study relies on data from the guardian, one of the oldest and prestigious newspapers in the world. its articles are read by the elite from all over the world and affect the international agenda. the guardian has published dj online since 2009 (barr et al., 2019). with the use of its api, we have attempted to collect all dj articles and comments on the guardian website. the collection of data is limited to the period 20122016 because this is a time when the guardian enabled widespread commenting and replies. to eliminate the bias of news type, only articles classified as news by the guardian were selected. the final dataset contained 142 (38%) dj articles and 233 (62%) traditional journalism articles which lacked several of the characteristics of dj, including visualization and direct access to data sources. we assessed engagement by analyzing audience-generated content in the newspaper's comment sections. engagement can take many forms, such as page views, reading time, clicking, liking, sharing, and posting. in a preliminary study, we found that articles with a high level of exposure tend to receive more comments and replies. in addition, we found that the guardian dj is less exposed to the audience. in order to reduce exposure bias, we used the replies ratio as a measure of audience engagement (ksiazek et al., 2016). the replies ratio is calculated by dividing the number of replies by the number of comments for every article. results table 1 shows that dj replies ratio increased by .92 during the study period, while the traditional journalism replies ratio increased only by .24. figure 1 shows that between 2012 and 2013, the dj replies ratio was lower than traditional journalism. according to a t-test, there was no significant difference between dj and traditional journalism from 2014 to 2016. table 1 descriptive statistics of articles replies ratio data journalism traditional journalism year n min max mean sd n min max mean sd 2012 17 .00 1.00 .17 .31 21 .00 1.46 .54 .41 2013 39 .00 1.57 .41 .50 73 .00 3.67 .63 .57 2014 62 .00 2.54 .79 .56 75 .00 2.33 .70 .48 2015 18 .30 2.30 .95 .52 44 .03 2.10 .76 .53 2016 6 .33 2.62 1.09 .81 20 .07 1.95 .78 .51 figure 1 distribution of articles replies ratio by journalism type and year discussion there was a significant correlation between dj replies ratio and time during the research period. the replies ratio increased yearly by .27 (r2 is .2, p<.001). this trend may be explained by the steep learning curve of dj, which requires a special set of skills, in addition to the willingness to analyze and discuss interpretations with others (baack, 2018). on the basis of the trend, we can conclude that over time, the audience became familiar with dj and adopted it. alternatively, the trend may be attributed to changes in the guardian's comment moderation policy (gardiner et al., 2016). over the years, the guardian has blocked approximately 2% of its comments. procedures and policies may change over time, which may influence the response rate. dj expects more from the audience than traditional journalists. investigating data sources and evaluating visualizations requires an increased degree of mental and cognitive effort. despite this, there seems to be no difference in audience engagement between 2014 and 2016. based on these results, the difficulties that accompany independence do not reduce audience engagement. this phenomenon may be attributed to a number of factors, including the specific characteristics of the guardian's audience that are willing to contribute more to the public sphere. by understanding the factors that drive audience engagement, technology developers may be able to implement them on other platforms and improve democratic processes on the web. further research is required to examine the independence of the audience. an examination of audience-generated content may reveal their interpretations and framing (hullman et al., 2015). interpretations can be assessed by characteristics such as the use of evidence, the formation of rational arguments, and the forming of opposing opinions to the dominant meaning (mcinnis et al., 2020). in addition, an examination of different dj newspapers and a variety of approaches will be able to clarify the factors affecting the audience (appelgren, 2017). results could contribute to the realization of the internet's original promise to make the general public independent by providing free access to information. * research code and data are available at https://github.com/avnerkantor/guardian. bibliography amit-danhi, e. (2020). tmi: information rhetoric types in digital political visualizations. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2020i0.11156 appelgren, e. (2017). an illusion of interactivity. journalism practice, 0(0), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2017.1299032 baack, s. (2015). datafication and empowerment: how the open data movement rearticulates notions of democracy, participation, and journalism. big data & society, 2(2), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951715594634 baack, s. (2018). practically engaged. digital journalism, 6(6), 673–692. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2017.1375382 barr, c., chalabi, m., & evershed, n. (2019, march 23). a decade of the datablog: “there’s a human story behind every data point.” the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/membership/datablog/2019/mar/23/a-decade-of-the datablog-theres-a-human-story-behind-every-data-point entman, r. m. (1993). framing: toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. journal of communication, 43(4), 51–58. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1993.tb01304.x gardiner, b., mansfield, m., anderson, i., ulmanu, m., louter, d., & holder, j. (2016). the dark side of guardian comments. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/12/the-dark-side-of-guardiancomments hullman, j., diakopoulos, n., momeni, e., & adar, e. (2015). content, context, and critique: commenting on a data visualization blog. cscw 2015 proceedings of the 2015 acm international conference on computer-supported cooperative work and social computing, 1170–1175. https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675207 ksiazek, t. b., peer, l., & lessard, k. (2016). user engagement with online news: conceptualizing interactivity and exploring the relationship between online news videos and user comments. new media & society, 18(3), 502–520. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814545073 mcinnis, b. j., sun, l., shin, j., & dow, s. p. (2020). rare, but valuable: understanding data-centered talk in news website comment sections. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 4(cscw2). https://doi.org/10.1145/3415245 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): pilipets, e., geboers, m., bösch, m., divon t., rogers, r., righetti, n., tuters, m., noordenbos, b., bos, l., dabanıyastı, f.2, dodds, t., boukes, m., abdul rahman, e. (2024, october). ambient amplification: attention hijacking and social media propaganda. panel presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ambient amplification: attention hijacking and social media propaganda elena pilipets university of siegen marloes geboers university of amsterdam marcus bösch universität münster tom divon the hebrew university of jerusalem tomás dodds university of amsterdam mark boukes university of amsterdam eirliani abdul rahman georgetown university richard rogers university of amsterdam nicola righetti university of urbino marc tuters university of amsterdam boris noordenbos university of amsterdam linda bos university of amsterdam furkan dabanıyastı university of amsterdam over the last decade, the rise of memetic media in combination with multimodal platform environments have radically transformed our experience of digital culture (arkenbout and galip 2024). on tiktok, gestures and sounds go viral. twitter (x) @tags operate as bonding tools and ignite ‘supercharged’ critical publics. coordinated link-sharing and attention-hijacking drive cross-platform engagement. narratives promoted by state institutions become part of the global digital culture war. networked content made up of heterogeneous elements sparks new forms of presencing, propaganda, and play, producing conflict-ridden communities of practice. methods attending to the platformed orchestrations of user engagement trace technical mediators, social practices, and cultural expressions, “with reference to their surrounding materials, and across their connections within broader digital ecologies” (duguay and block-apel, 2023). while there has always been an affective component to digital objects such as hashtags (papacharissi 2015), contemporary audiovisual platforms gradually integrate the full spectrum of memetic cultural production. the focus shifts from fleeting encounters with recommended content to ambient arrangements of linked sounds, networked text, clickable icons, and moving images (parry 2023). within these structures, hybrid cultures of amplification emerge, relying on both intensification and extension. as expressive modalities evolve, amplification not only animates momentary affective impulses but also manifests through repeated attempts at attention hijacking (citton 2017). in view of these transitions, internet scholars turn to the role of affect to describe the rhythms of online exchanges that are not reducible to singular constituents and can both diminish and increase the engaging potential of contentand data-informed connectivity (hillis, paasonen and petit 2015; boler and davis 2020). acts of participation that open up spaces of amplification escape any clear-cut demarcation. propaganda campaigns animated through ‘social bots’ and ‘real people’ alike sidestep binary conceptions of authenticity and (coordinated) performance (rogers and niederer 2020; diresta 2021). allowing amplification to emerge from multiple discrepancies, the proliferation of filter bubbles easily fits into the crowd modulation project through the exhaustion of collective inclinations (apprich et al. 2019). at the same time, seemingly straightforward contributions we like and share can be anything but (phillips and milner 2021). although a great variety of scholarly work is dedicated to polarised engagement, there is still a large gap in studying how different modes of amplification are made to work in more ambiguous contexts (paasonen 2023). moving away from the analysis of symptoms–as in the most visible content and events of peak intensity–this panel focuses on the ambient modes of amplification: amplification, typically referring to the process of increasing or expanding, in platform experience design also involves modulating affective states (ash 2012). ambiance, as it emerges from user-platform interactions, foregrounds the background of online environments, including the subtle flows of social organization driven by user attention and data. starting from the premise of plurality, five papers address five different aspects of ambient amplification: paper 1 explores the role of ‘thirst trap propaganda’ in military image wars on tiktok. paper 2 reflects on the role of gestures in targeted war propaganda placements, presenting a visual method of slow circulation for amplified tiktok content. paper 3 analyzes hashtagging and @-tagging practices on x that undergird a polyvocal infrastructure exposing journalists to networked critique. paper 4 looks into the spectrum of coordination in the service of attention hijacking, investigating what makes coordinated link-sharing on facebook look ‘authentic enough’. paper 5 interrogates the weaponization of narratives of a global culture war by russian embassies, uncovering geopolitical strategies of amplification. references apprich, c. chun, w.h.k., cramer, f. steyerl, h. 2019. pattern discrimination. minneapolis: meson press. arkenbout, c. galip, i. 2024. critical meme reader iii. breaking the meme (vol. 17). institute of network cultures. ash, j. 2012. attention, videogames and the retentional economies of affective amplification. theory, culture, & society 29(6): 3–26. boler, m. davis, e. 2021. (eds.). “introduction: propaganda by other means.” in affective politics of digital media: propaganda by other means.1-50. new york: routledge. diresta, r. 2021. it’s not misinformation. it’s amplified propaganda, the atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/disinformation-propagandaamplification-ampliganda/620334/. citton, y. 2017. the ecology of attention. john wiley & sons. gillespie, t. 2010. the politics of ‘platforms’. new media & society, 12(3), 347-364. han, j., zappavigna, m. 2024. multimodal rhythm in tiktok videos: exploring a recontextualization of the gillard ‘misogyny speech’. multimodality & society, 4(1), 5879 hillis, k., paasonen, s., & petit, m. (eds.). 2015. networked affect. cambridge, ma: the mit press. paasonen, s. 2023. “ambiguous affect: excitements that make the self” in the affect theory reader: worldings, tensions, futures, edited by gregory j. seigworth, carolyn pedwell, 85-102. durham: duke university press. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/disinformation-propaganda-amplification-ampliganda/620334/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/disinformation-propaganda-amplification-ampliganda/620334/ papacharissi, z. 2015. affective publics: sentiment, technology, and politics. oxford university press. phillips, w., & milner, r. m. 2021. you are here: a field guide for navigating polarized speech, conspiracy theories, and our polluted media landscape. mit press parry, k. 2023. a theory of assembly: from museums to memes. u of minnesota press. rogers, r., & niederer, s. 2020. the politics of social media manipulation. amsterdam university press. dancing in uniform: the role of thirst trap propaganda in military image wars on tiktok marcus bösch universität münster tom divon, the hebrew university of jerusalem introduction the increasing mediatization of warfare online amplifies the struggle for public perception and control (yarchi & boxman-shabtai 2023), turning platforms into militarized spaces for soldier engagement in social media trends (kuntsman & stein 2020). following the hamas terror attacks on october 7, 2023, there's been a significant increase in female israeli soldiers sharing videos on their personal tiktok accounts, dancing in uniform, in what's commonly known as 'thirst trap' propaganda. a thirst trap refers to a photo or video shared online intended to attract sexual attention and 'trap' engagement (boffone 2021) and has been utilized by militaries in the u.s., israel, spain, and north korea (walker 2023). at first glance, online dancing might appear unrelated to propaganda strategies in contexts of conflict. however, at the intersection of popular networking activities like online dancing and wartime brutality, the gloss of digital daily life can minimize and trivialize the perception of violence (kuntsman & stein 2020). as a key element in thirst trap videos, choreography has a longstanding link to warfare, evident in military rituals, dances and drills (deiana 2023), that can be traced back to ancient greek weapon dances in sparta (saunders 1972). the israeli defense force (idf) historically employs dance, predating digital platforms, to repurpose symbols of violence into playful tools for hegemonic control (melpignano 2023). this utilization of dance as 'soft power' in military contexts vernacularizes the state, fostering an 'everyman' appeal via social media rhetoric (stein 2012), an understudied aspect during military interventions. figure 1. idf soldiers dancing, lip-syncing and posing with weapons on their private accounts theoretical framework despite research on idf's amateur dance aesthetics during conflict on youtube and instagram (melpignano 2023), tiktok's exploration remains largely unexamined. this paper aims to bridge this gap, particularly considering tiktok's significance as leading global video-sharing platforms, boasting a billion unique users in 2021 (silberling 2021). moreover, tiktok's recognized role as a tool for mediation and precaution in recent conflicts, such as the russia-ukraine war (primig et al. 2023; author 1 & author 2 accepted), highlights this work’s relevance. recognizing that platforms possess unique socio-technological affordances for users (author 2 & colleague 2023; bucher & helmond 2018), our study explores the nuanced use of soft propaganda through thirst trap content by idf women soldiers on tiktok. transitioning from historical mass seduction techniques (o'shaughnessy 2004) for shaping public views on military affairs, tiktok's thirst traps emerge as engaging multimodal narratives enhancing the military's positive image. this study explores how popular platform practices, such as dance routines, serve to humanize, downplay, and trivialize military violence, significantly influencing the construction and perception of public images. dance routines, commonly referred to as dance challenges in the platform's vernacular, are central to tiktok (boffone 2021). this engagement fosters community belonging (klug 2020) and facilitates the expression of personal opinions through audiovisual means, enhancing the interactivity of political communication compared to other platforms (medina serrano et al. 2020). dance challenges on tiktok were embraced by ukrainian military personnel following the russian invasion, manifesting 'low-volume disorder' of war-information flows (wardle 2020) while garnering global attention (neog 2022). against this backdrop, our paper seeks to conduct a distinctive analysis by exploring: (q1) which aesthetics, features, and trends on the platform do individual israeli military creators utilize to implement thirst trap propaganda in the conflict with hamas? (q2) how effective is the thirst trap propaganda in achieving widespread reach and user engagement on tiktok? (q3) are there any indicators for the orchestration of thirst trap campaigns that can be traced back to official actors? method to unpack the thirst trap propaganda in the israel-hamas war 2023, we first applied an exploratory user-centric approach based on the walkthrough method as the main datagathering procedure (light et al. 2018). from october 15 to november 15, 2023, we analyzed numerous war-related videos using hashtags like #idf or #israel, discovering 25 distinct accounts featuring female idf soldiers dancing in uniform, either alone or with others (see figure1). we collected the account data of these accounts, including over 3,000 videos and their metadata, using a scraping tool. we then adopted a purposive sampling technique to deliberately look for informationrich cases (sandelowski 1995). using multimodal content analysis (zeng et al. 2021), we extract videos and frames to examine textual, aural, linguistic, spatial, and visual elements. our aim is to identify how specific dances are utilized in a memetic fashion as the main driver and design element of multimodal videos on tiktok. preliminary findings our early observations highlight key strategies israeli military creators use for thirst trap propaganda in wartime. a notable strategy involved sound traps. on tiktok, sound is a key segment of content creation, readily available for users to repurpose via the 'use this sound' feature. creators leverage trending songs to boost virality, strategically integrating their content into popular audio meme streams for improved algorithmic visibility (bhandari & bimo 2022). this sound practice was found to enable semiautomated 'soft' russian propaganda rapid dissemination (author 1 & author 2 accepted), demonstrating scalability in computational propaganda (woolley & howard 2019). figure 2. coordinated dances trapping viewers’ attention our findings indicate that israeli soldiers have been utilizing popular sound streams to amplify the videos’ reach, with dancing soldier videos scaling up to 11.5 million views. israeli military content creators have adopted semi-automated tactics to trap viewers' attention (see figure 2), repurposing successful platform sounds like manu chao's 'me gustav tu' that has been used in over 1.5 million videos. the reuse of this sound semiautomates soldiers' video dissemination to wider audiences, providing users with the sound and choreography, thereby reducing the need for original content creation while leveraging algorithmic amplification through the platform's communal practice of content imitation (zulli & zulli 2022). in addition, we identified elements of orchestrated campaigns in challenge traps. idf women soldiers appeared in numerous videos, presenting themselves in sexual postures with ambiguous details like name variations (e.g., liza, lia, lina), age, and occupation (e.g., nurse, teacher), combined with dancing movements and popular music. this recurring theme invited viewers with queries like, 'you want to become friends with me? dm.' initial analysis suggests that young female soldiers augmented seductive propaganda, aiming to distract and create confusion (o'shaughnessy 2004), while also humanizing military personnel by minimizing violence (kuntsman & stein 2020). this challenge featured many women performing successful dance routines, romanticizing war-related symbols by incorporating assault rifles as dance props. the challenge's success is evident in user comments, primarily focused on complimenting soldiers' physical appearance rather than discussing the war. hence, this challenge trap demonstrates idf recruits' strategic gains in shaping images and narratives (yarchi & boxman-shabtai 2023), emphasizing influence over public opinion via appealing, nonconfrontational methods rather than hard power tactics. discussion the transition from the mass media age to the platform era (klinger et al. 2023), has profound impact on political communication. while propaganda has historically been a tool for shaping public opinion, the proliferation of digital communication, and online platforms in the 2010s has introduced novel opportunities for the rapid dissemination of propaganda on an unprecedented scale. this tendency becomes particularly pronounced during times of conflict, as platform affordances shape strategies in information warfare, wherein techniques such as mass seduction through dance and thirst traps, considered forms of soft propaganda (mattingly & yao 2022), leverage platform vernacular to shape opinions through viral dissemination. our goal is to better understand subtle propaganda techniques applied by state actors to manipulate opinion in times of geostrategic crisis. by the time of the presentation, we aim to enhance contextualization and comparison for a deeper unpack of the thirst trap phenomenon. our analysis encompasses the examination of dance, sound, and multimodal design elements, as well as the identification of orchestrated campaigns and the scrutiny of comment sections to assess its impact. references bhandari, a., & bimo, s. 2022. why’s everyone on tiktok now? the algorithmized self and the future of self-making on social media. social media+ society, 8(1), 20563051221086241. boffone, t. 2021. renegades: digital dance cultures from dubsmash to tiktok. oxford university press. bucher, t., & helmond, a. 2018. the affordances of social media platforms. the sage handbook of social media, 1, 233-253. deiana, m. a. 2023. dance as a register of war: following unruly bodies, affects, and sounds in conflict. critical military studies, 9(3), 462-484. grandinetti, j., & bruinsma, j. 2023. the affective algorithms of conspiracy tiktok. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 67(3), 274-293. klug, d. 2020. " it took me almost 30 minutes to practice this". performance and production practices in dance challenge videos on tiktok. arxiv preprint arxiv:2008.13040. klinger, u., kreiss, d., & mutsvairo, b. 2023. platforms, power, and politics: an introduction to political communication in the digital age. john wiley & sons. kuntsman, a., & stein, r. l. 2020. digital militarism: israel's occupation in the social media age. stanford university press. light, b. et al. 2018. the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881-900 mattingly, d. c., & yao, e. 2022. how soft propaganda persuades. comparative political studies, 55(9), 1569-1594. medina serrano, j. c., papakyriakopoulos, o., & hegelich, s. 2020, july. dancing to the partisan beat: a first analysis of political communication on tiktok. in proceedings of the 12th acm conference on web science (pp. 257-266). melpignano, m. 2023. a necropower carnival: israeli soldiers dancing in the palestinian occupied territories. tdr, 67(1), 186-202. neog, a. s. 2022, march 4. who is alex hook? ukrainian soldier confirms he's alive in viral tiktok after death rumors run wild. sports news. https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/who-alex-hook-ukrainian-soldier-confirmsalive-viral-tiktok-death-rumors-run-wild o'shaughnessy, n. j. 2004. politics and propaganda: weapons of mass seduction. manchester university press. primig, f., szabó, h. d., & lacasa, p. 2023. remixing war: an analysis of the reimagination of the russian–ukraine war on tiktok. frontiers in political science, 5, 1085149. sandelowski m. 1995. sample size in qualitative research. research in nursing & health, 18(2), 179–183. saunders, t. j. 1972. notes on the laws of plato. bulletin supplement (university of london. institute of classical studies), iii-148. silberling a. 2021, september 27. tiktok reached 1 billion monthly active users. techcrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/27/tiktok-reached-1-billion-monthly-activeusers/ stein, rebecca l. 2012. statetube: anthropological reflections on social media and the israeli state. anthropological quarterly 85, 3:893–916. doi.org/10.1353/anq.2012.0045 walker, a. 2023. military thirst traps / thirst trap propaganda. know your meme. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/military-thirst-traps-thirst-trap-propaganda wardle, c. 2020, september 20. understanding information disorder. first draft. https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/understanding-information-disorder/ https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/who-alex-hook-ukrainian-soldier-confirms-alive-viral-tiktok-death-rumors-run-wild https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/who-alex-hook-ukrainian-soldier-confirms-alive-viral-tiktok-death-rumors-run-wild https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/who-alex-hook-ukrainian-soldier-confirms-alive-viral-tiktok-death-rumors-run-wild https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/who-alex-hook-ukrainian-soldier-confirms-alive-viral-tiktok-death-rumors-run-wild https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/27/tiktok-reached-1-billion-monthly-active-users/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/27/tiktok-reached-1-billion-monthly-active-users/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/27/tiktok-reached-1-billion-monthly-active-users/ http://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2012.0045 http://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2012.0045 http://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2012.0045 https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/military-thirst-traps-thirst-trap-propaganda https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/military-thirst-traps-thirst-trap-propaganda https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/military-thirst-traps-thirst-trap-propaganda https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/understanding-information-disorder/ https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/understanding-information-disorder/ https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/understanding-information-disorder/ woolley, s. c., & howard, p. n. (eds.) 2018. computational propaganda: political parties, politicians, and political manipulation on social media. oxford university press. yarchi, m., & boxman-shabtai, l. 2023. the image war moves to tiktok evidence from the may 2021 round of the israeli-palestinian conflict. digital journalism, 1-21. zeng et al. 2021. research perspectives on tiktok and its legacy apps: introduction. international journal of communication, 15, 3161-3172. zulli, d., & zulli, d. j. 2022. extending the internet meme: conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation publics on the tiktok platform. new media & society, 24(8), 1872-1890. slow circulation and the ‘z’ gesture: notes on studying russian pro-war propaganda on tiktok elena pilipets university of siegen marloes geboers university of amsterdam in one of the videos posted in response to a trending tiktok dance challenge, a young woman performs a series of gestures. the performance is accompanied by a catchy tune, culminating as her hands shape the letter z. in a similar video, another woman wearing sunglasses replicates the gesture when a sticker in russian emerges, reading ‘the gang sign of real women’. in yet another variation, the gesture repeats with an added video effect, flash-enlarging the final position of fingers decorated with long acrylic nails. the nails extend the gesture. the video caption proclaims, ‘russian lives matter’. z, however, is not a typical viral tiktok challenge (zhao and abidin 2023). a trusted identity marker for putin's supporters that lingers on the pro-war side of tiktok, it reverberates itself into being by pretending that it has an audience of its own. its normcore look, aiming to blend into the crowd of aspiring influencers, conveys the message that z stands for the many. film yourself z-ing, add a song from the music library, put a sticker, and post. not good enough? apply a flashy effect and republish. the collective body of z is a broken meme machine—too scripted to feel authentic, it feeds forward attention that clusters on already visible content. by incorporating popular multimodal elements (songs, hashtags, effects) in anticipation of new adaptations, z templates serve as a means of targeted bonding. the logic is simple: trial, error, remix. in our presentation, we deconstruct the meme machine behind the ‘z’ gesture (pilipets and geboers 2024). following boler and davis’s (2021) notion of propaganda ‘by other means’, we make a case for examining z in its role as a symbolic and affective vehicle. we propose that, within tiktok's participatory environments, z simulates a community that thrives on the replication of the seemingly banal. unlike the painted sign on the military vehicles invading ukraine, it primarily exists to distract from the plain terror of the russian ‘special military operation’ (holodomor museum 2023). research context and questions opaque in its origins and (intended) meanings, z (and v) symbolism have been visual 'vehicles' of symbolic power ever since russia's invasion of ukraine. the markings on the board of military equipment were initially referred to by military parties as signs to avoid friendly fire, where z would signal ‘zapad’ (westwards) and v would point out the east-bound infantry or ‘vostok’. z especially was quickly adopted and reappropriated in propaganda slogans, tethered to russia's remembrance of world war ii: first in the usual spelling, for example, ‘за мир’ or ‘for peace’ and then with the replacement of the cyrillic ‘з’ in hashtags with the latin ‘z’—#zамир. in the process of mainstreaming, it has taken the colors of the saint george ribbon, visually conflating past and present and framing the war in ukraine as part of a continuous ‘russian’ fight against nazism (kovalev et al. 2022). on social media, z is a multimodal performance (han and zappavigna 2024). the utilization of z imagery, hashtags, and hand gestures have become integral to prorussian war propaganda, thriving on tiktok where imitation publics (zulli and zulli 2022) and the principles of replication and remix play a significant role. while z circulation hinges on chance encounters rather than on mass appropriation, the memetic traits of videos associated with the gesture remain remarkably consistent. attuned to existing platform trends, z strategically positions itself amidst ‘currently happening’ content, gesturing toward ‘a shared state of mind’. vilem flusser, writing in 1991, describes the capacity of gestures to capture ‘states of mind’ by releasing affects from their contexts and allowing them to become formal. affective states express themselves via a play of gesticulations. conversely, gestures act out affects, asserting themselves through repetition. both dynamics occur at the same time, manifesting in a ‘state of mind’ for those who can relate. affect becomes artificial–as in someone rolling their eyes–and the gesture becomes a mediator of collective belonging. ultimately, any action performed in public on repeat captures attention. it fuels the gesture with an affective overspill of sorts—much like animated gifs utilize facial and bodily expressions (miltner and highfield 2017; ash 2015), gestures on tiktok provide a playful medium for articulating sentiments, warnings, and instructions. gesturing z hands, as per mcluhan’s old dictum, then not only ‘massage the message’ into the masses (mcluhan and fiore 1976) but also seek to ‘blend in’ across a range of unrelated content formations. if embodied movement is the main means of memetic war propaganda on tiktok, then the following questions arise: how does the body become a meme? what does it take to understand z in its networked choreography? and how can we study propaganda through gestures, while avoiding further amplification? methods as speed and imitation on tiktok breathe life into memes, the methods in our work foreground analytical techniques of video blurring and ‘slow’ circulation (bradshaw 2018). analyzing a selection of cross-hashtagged and sound-linked z performances, we reflect on the embodied aspect of propaganda through a technique of visual and contextual fabrication (markham 2012), which allows scholars to study embodied patterns in networked video collections as de-identified composite forms (figure 1). embedded in a tiktok post, an embodied performance can be modified and enhanced through overlays of sounds, effects, and stickers (hautea et al. 2021). these layers constitute the material with which the act of video sharing, including cutting, annotating, sound-linking, etc., is engaged. much like a flame that comes into contact with oxygen (phillips 2018), tiktok circulation through multimodal digital elements distributes videos across contexts, increasing the gesture’s memetic potential. figure 1: z gesture in a de-identified formation of propaganda videos networked through the same hashtag and sound (a fragment). our method deconstructs networked video performances into layers of distinct frames – still images that capture every second of the gesture as it unfolds. it then re-stacks the frames in a new order, retaining the temporality of the movement. the resulting visual device morphs and transforms the gesture, akin to tiktok video effects, but with a difference: it freezes the movement and breaks its momentum. in other words, it throws the gesture out of gear, muting the strategically networked elements involved. findings the video performances in question have not achieved viral status, but they still exist as numerous content formations within the broader tapestry of tiktok trends (richards 2022). search for a song trending in march 2022 and you most likely will find a z video right next to an unrelated dance challenge. designed for imitation, z performances are ripe with viral ambitions. at the same time, their actual impact has remained limited partly because of their lack of authenticity and partly due to the emergence of the ‘splinternet’—as of march 7, 2022, non-russian ip addresses could no longer be accessed from russia. the participatory means of propaganda are in place, along with an attempt to target emotions rather than reason. however, z videos decorated with many likes and linked through hashtags and sounds amount to nothing more than a series of coordinated attempts at propaganda placement. a sense of national pride woven into these performances is a mere reference to an imagined collective–a ‘crowd’ of like-minded others (dean 2021) that only exists as a projection. references ash, j. 2015. sensation, networks, and the gif: toward an allotropic account of affect. networked affect, 119-133. boler, m. davis, e. 2021. “introduction: propaganda by other means.” in affective politics of digital media: propaganda by other means, edited by megan boler and elisabeth davis, 1-50. new york: routledge, 2021. bradshaw, j. l. 2018. “slow circulation: the ethics of speed and rhetorical persistence.” rhetoric society quarterly 48, no. 5: 479-498. dean, j. 2021. “preface.” in affective politics of digital media: propaganda by other means, edited by boler, m. and davis, e. ix-xi. new york: routledge. flusser, vilém. 2014 (1991). gestures. london: university of minnesota press. han, j., zappavigna, m. 2024. multimodal rhythm in tiktok videos: exploring a recontextualization of the gillard ‘misogyny speech’. multimodality & society, 4(1), 5879. holodomor museum. 2022. “propaganda that kills.” holodomor museum. accessed may 2023. https://holodomormuseum.org.ua/en/propaganda-categ/z-new-swastika/ kovalev, a. pertsev, a. serafimov, a.; shevelev, i. 2022. “‘z’ how russia transformed a letter of the latin alphabet into the official (and ominous) symbol of its invasion of ukraine.” meduza, 16 march, 2022. accessed september 2023. https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/03/16/z. markham, a. 2012. “fabrication as ethical practice.” information, communication, and society 15, no. 3: 334-353. mcluhan, m. fiore, q. 1976. the medium is the massage: an inventory of effects. london: penguin books. miltner, k. m. highfield, t. 2017. never gonna gif you up: analyzing the cultural significance of the animated gif. social media+society, 3(3), 2056305117725223. pilipets, e., geboers, m. 2024. brake the meme machine: slow circulation, z gesture, and pro-war propaganda on tiktok. in critical meme reader iii. breaking the meme, edited by arkenbout, c. galip, i., 154-162. amsterdam: institute of network cultures. https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/03/16/z https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/03/16/z phillips, w. 2018. the oxygen of amplification. data & society institute. full report accessed: data & society — the oxygen of amplification (datasociety.net) richards, a. 2022. “a pro-russia propaganda campaign is using over 180 tiktok influencers to promote the invasion of ukraine.” mediamatters, 11 march, 2022. accessed september 2023. ttps://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/pro-russia-propagandacampaign-using-over-180-tiktok-influencers-promote-invasion-ukraine. zhao, x., abidin, c. 2023. the “fox eye” challenge trend: anti-racism work, platform affordances, and the vernacular of gesticular activism on tiktok. social media+ society, 9(1), 20563051231157590. journalists ‘attagged’: the @-tag as bonding tool for ‘supercharged critical publics’ marloes geboers university of amsterdam tomás dodds university of amsterdam mark boukes university of amsterdam eirliani abdul rahman georgetown university introduction violence against the press has been at the center of academic interest for the last couple of years. recent studies showed that social platforms’ attention-based economy and subsequent use design would spur mistrust and attacks against media workers (henrichsen and shelton 2023; lewis et al. 2021). twitter (or ‘x’), especially, seems to facilitate a discursive climate that is divisive and polarized (shepherd et al. 2015). the platform’s logic constitutes a ‘turbulent space’ where online attacks have become rife to the point where some news organizations pulled out altogether (waisbord 2020). the infrastructural affordances of platform ecologies connect ‘legit critique’ to more violent content. we analyzed hashtaggingand @-tagging practices on x that undergird a polyvocal infrastructure exposing journalists to networked critique. unlike facebook, twitter does not allow the effective “untagging” of oneself from other people’s tweets, resulting in a material addressability (honeycutt and herring 2009) that allows anyone to “link up” to anyone else by mentioning their twitter handle. this function facilitates and amplifies harassment (phillips 2018), which is known to have heavier effects on users whose social identity is defined by intersectional markers of gender, race, or sexual identity/orientation (miller & lewis 2022). https://datasociety.net/library/oxygen-of-amplification/ http://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/pro-russia-propaganda-campaign-using-over-180-tiktok-influencers-promote-invasion-ukraine http://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/pro-russia-propaganda-campaign-using-over-180-tiktok-influencers-promote-invasion-ukraine our research exemplifies how hashand @-tagging not only channels violent language but is also complicit in the perpetuation of more ‘subtle’ and ambient modes of (siapera, 2019) undermining journalistic authority. in our case study, both the hashtag and the @tag are used to signal belonging to a community of ‘supercharged critical thinkers’. boyd (as cited in phillips and milner 2021: 163) describes ‘supercharged critical thinking’ as emerging from the ambivalent paradox underlying much of online interactivity: “remaining sceptical of capitalist motives [...] makes for good, informed citizenship [..] too much cynicism turns establishment journalism into the enemy of the people.” our study revolves around partygate (december 2021), a political scandal where journalists were turned into protagonists in a story about festive meetings held at downing street 10 during lockdown restrictions. by @-tagging specific journalists, several members of the british press were ‘pulled into’ the scandal. this was most notably the case for political editor of the bbc laura kuenssberg. repurposing the linkages between hashtagged and @-tagged tweets led us to about 1510 replies at kuenssberg’s address asking the same question: ‘were you at the party laura?. this evolved into a meme channelling a ‘repetitive drum’ where users organized themselves around. while seemingly benign, and as a standalone piece of content not derogatory, the sheer repetition amplifies a form of harassment that escapes moderation. moreover, these ‘innocent’ tweets are connected to a wider discursive environment that hosts more extreme content. the ‘memed question tweets’ are part of reply-threads that boast vitriol and misogyny, and some tweets pull in hashtags and images, that connect the ‘mere bullies’ to a network of anti-press and conspiratorial actors. studying hashtagging and the ‘@-tagging’ of journalists as a networked practice of critiquing the ‘mainstream press’ foregrounds the participatory practice of identityformation (bozzi 2020). in the ritualistic sphere of social media, value sits in “sharing, association, fellowship, and possession of a common faith among audiences” (cover 2023: 33). the content of a text is secondary to the bonding value that it entails (dean 2021). seen in this way, the question implying kuenssberg was at the parties, serves as a bonding tool for supercharged critical publics. the threshold to engage is lowered when a critical mass seems to be willing to propagate a message of critique. methods and preliminary findings platform-embedded methods of connection and the communicative architecture they construct hold analytical value for the study of amplification strategies. platforms' sociotechnical functionalities are geared to exploit a “synchronous convergence in affective responding across individuals toward a specific event, (subject) or object” (zheng et al. 2020). such convergence can be established with the help of various tools, the most renowned in the context of visibility being the tag. introduced in the mid-2000s by bookmarking site del.icio.us, tags allowed users to share links and label them individually through the use of textual keywords that made them easily searchable and accessible (bozzi 2020: 72). bozzi recognizes how tagging is a performative gesture that, “often without appearing as an act of categorisation, formats identity so that it can be searchable and networkable (ibid: 73).” we bring to the fore the ways in which tagging features as a platform-embedded practice of amplification. the @-tag establishes a communicative connection in the shape of a ‘reply or a response to’, while at the same time enhancing reach significantly, especially when tagging entangles content with accounts that have a high ‘reach potential’. we gathered the @-tagged replies to prominent uk journalists between november 25 and december 26, 2021 and mapped the temporalities of hashtags to get a sense of the overall discourse and pertinence of hashtags that connect tweets to allegations of bias and partiality. most notable were the hashtags that emerged from replies to laura kuenssberg. from a close reading of the 118k replies at her address, we found the memetic question already mentioned, (n=1510 tweets). alongside this, we mapped the persistence of users engaging multiple times in this mimetic behaviour, further exemplifying how repetition is an intentional technique for the prolongation of critique. from there we decided to zoom out by way of interpreting a hashtag co-occurrence network derived from the wider dataset of kuenssberg’s @-tagcollected tweets. this shows how the memed question is connected to a broader environment that not only hosts ‘just’ critique, but also vitriolic content. the intersections between the memed question and hashtags displays the entanglement of ‘the bully meme’ with straightforward harassing hashtags such as #scummedia (n=105) and #torylaura (n=13). figure 1: tweets @-tagging laura kuenssberg. to the left the question is charged with critique by the image, to the right this materializes in #thelies. the latter also connects the question to wider discourses of public distrust discussion: guilt by association when journalists get tagged, entanglements emerge with other layers of expression and other digital objects, such as news items about partygate that as stand-alone items do not evidence nor imply kuenssberg being involved in the parties at downing street 10, but that through assembly (parry 2023) contribute to a ritualistic display of guilt by association. the rhetorical question (and variations thereof) recontextualizes and weaponizes headlines so as to bolster shared suspicion (brandtzaeg and lüders 2018). the ‘memeing’ of ‘laura, were you at the party?’ found a wider audience through the hypertextual affordances of the hashtag and the @-tag. users sharing anti-press sentiments can latch onto a crowd that exerts affective allure through its simulation of being with many, expressed through engagement metrics. the seemingly ‘innocent inner-grin-tweets’ are part of a wider discursive network that connects to more vile content, the likes of which we are not going to outline in this paper. the logic of repetition but also the @-tag thus inherently fuels seemingly benign bullying of journalists, and breathes oxygen (phillips 2018) into downright toxic stuff. references boyd, d. 2018. you think you want media literacy… do you? data & society: points, medium, retrieved: https://medium.com/datasociety-points/you-think-you-want-medialiteracy-do-you-7cad6af18ec2 bozzi, n. 2023. machine vision and tagging aesthetics: assembling socio-technical subjects through new media art. open library of humanities, 9(2) brandtzaeg, p. b., & lüders, m. 2018. time collapse in social media: extending the context collapse. social media + society, 4(1), 2056305118763349. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118763349 dean, j. 2021. faces as commons: the secondary visuality of communicative capitalism. the aesthetics and politics of the online self: a savage journey into the heart of digital cultures, 357-370. henrichsen, j. r., & shelton, m. 2023. expanding the analytical boundaries of mob censorship: how technology and infrastructure enable novel threats to journalists and strategies for mitigation. digital journalism, 11(10), 1848-1867. honey, c., & herring, s. c. 2009. beyond microblogging: conversation and collaboration via twitter. in 2009 42nd hawaii international conference on system sciences (pp. 1-10). ieee. lewis, r., marwick, a. e., & partin, w. c. 2021. “we dissect stupidity and respond to it”: response videos and networked harassment on youtube. american behavioral scientist, 65(5), 735-756. miller, k. c., & lewis, s. c. 2022. journalists, harassment, and emotional labor: the case of women in on-air roles at us local television stations. journalism, 23(1), 79–97. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884919899016 phillips, w. 2018. the oxygen of amplification. data & society institute. full report accessed: data & society — the oxygen of amplification (datasociety.net) phillips, w., & milner, r. m. 2021. you are here: a field guide for navigating polarized speech, conspiracy theories, and our polluted media landscape. mit press. https://medium.com/datasociety-points/you-think-you-want-media-literacy-do-you-7cad6af18ec2 https://medium.com/datasociety-points/you-think-you-want-media-literacy-do-you-7cad6af18ec2 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118763349 https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884919899016 https://datasociety.net/library/oxygen-of-amplification/ parry, k. 2023. a theory of assembly: from museums to memes. u of minnesota press. shepherd, t., harvey, a., jordan, t., srauy, s., & miltner, k. 2015. histories of hating. social media + society, 1(2), 2056305115603997. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603997 waisbord, s. 2020. mob censorship: online harassment of us journalists in times of digital hate and populism. digital journalism, 8(8), 1030–1046. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2020.1818111 zheng, w., yu, a., fang, p., & peng, k. 2020. exploring collective emotion transmission in face-to-face interactions. plos one, 15(8), e0236953. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0236953 coordinated inauthentic and authentic behaviours online: a typology of attention hijacking richard rogers university of amsterdam nicola righetti university of urbino this paper advances the contemporary discourse on coordinated inauthentic behaviour (cib) by extending its study beyond explicit instances of disinformation, looking into the spectrum of coordination in the service of attention hijacking. thus, on top of an analysis of inauthentic coordination, we examine coordination behaviours more generally. using techniques first developed for cib analysis, we do so through an empirical analysis of the many signature forms of amplification as acts of coordination. coordinated behaviour can be undertaken by both covert and less covert actors with varying objectives, ranging from mimicking organic engagement and support for content (chan 2022) to distributing content across social media pages through multi-actor broadcasting and re-posting, for example. in this paper, we present an analysis of a diverse array of coordination forms, highlighting the analytical ambiguity of approaches that measure inauthenticity through the use of platform research affordances such as (timed) link-sharing and reposting. coordinated inauthentic behaviour campaigns on social media are driven by actors (and perhaps bots) pushing the same or related content in synchrony and causing it to gain virality, or some threshold of interactions and impressions to indicate a degree of popularity. the primary purpose is ambient. it is to ‘flood the space’, thereby exerting or appearing to exert a large measure of influence. the broader aim, for state and other political actors, could well be to develop a full-fledged counter-program to accrue symbolic power and assert political dominance (mcintyre 2018). research into coordinated inauthentic behaviour has demonstrated its operational as https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603997 https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2020.1818111 well as geographical breadth but also its platform dependence and orientation toward single platform studies (thiele et al. 2023). it has been tied to corona-politics (magelinski & carley 2020), election misinformation (nizzoli et al. 2021), protest repression in authoritarian regimes (kulichkina et al. 2023), and cryptocurrency manipulation (terenzi 2023). it is far-flung geographically but rather platform-specific in its targeting. research has described coordinated networks on social media in australia (graham et al., 2021), nigeria (giglietto et al. 2022), south korea (keller et al., 2020), philippine (yu 2022), brazil and france (gruzd et al. 2022). most of these studies focus on twitter or facebook solely. the study of cross-platform coordination is relatively seldom, though there are exceptions (diresta et al. 2018; howard et al. 2018). the algorithmic architecture of each of these platforms suggests coordination efforts around certain digital objects. for example, coordination on twitter typically aims to push a hashtag into the trending topics, occasionally with ‘weaponised bots’ (graham et al. 2021). on facebook, website urls are typically placed in posts on pages and groups, where the idea is to elicit emotive reactions, long comment threads and further sharing, which is the platform formula for algorithmic amplification (merrill & oremus 2021). the facebook feed is thereby persuaded to elevate these shared links now charged with emotive currency. figure 1. coordinated link-sharing networks detected from the coornet technique. source: giglietto et al. 2023b most of these examples are taken from coordinated behaviour that is termed ‘inauthentic’. while misinformation and social media manipulation are often practised within coordinated networks, there are other types that may appear similar, at least when studying their traces. political parties, political supporters and popular publications also coordinate (righetti et al. 2022), as do religious organisations that aim to proselytise (giglietto et al. 2023a). this paper develops a typology of the varying purposes behind coordinated behaviour online. on the basis of empirical analyses of posts on facebook, where the term coordinated inauthentic behaviour originates (meta 2018), it identifies coordination through a variety of means including activist networking, viral marketing, fan support, influencer following, analytics-driven publishing and others. for each of these types, there are questions concerning the line to draw between the manufacture of attention and its organic growth. how to distinguish between what one could call authentic and inauthentic coordination? especially for coordinated efforts on facebook that seed social media posts with content from websites, urls play a significant role in the study of online information ecologies and (alternative) infrastructures (de mayer 2013; rogers 2017; rogers 2023). our approach, developed through methods built into software applications, concentrates on coordinated activities on a social media platform, where urls are shared. in an approach termed ‘platform perspectivism’ (rogers, 2024), we deploy the study of a single platform to understand coordination across social media and the web. we also employ digital investigation techniques to distinguish between urls that may be verified through source provenance and those which are masked. the methods developed to identify coordination rely on network analysis together with content and temporal signals, and many studies have employed the coornet software to surface coordinated link-sharing behaviour in a variety of countries and contexts (giglietto et al. 2020) (see figure 1). the software identifies facebook accounts that repeatedly share the same urls within a certain time frame, typically ranging from a few seconds to minutes. the foundational principle is that although a cluster of accounts may coincidentally share identical content, their recurrent sharing suggests an organised intent. when such coordinated detection tools are applied, these surface accounts that are engaged in influence campaigns, such as state actors, front groups and other actors masking their identities. they also surface other forms of coordination for a variety of purposes. drawing on an empirical study of coordination behaviours sourced on facebook with the software tool, we identify examples of the purposes (both more and less authentic) and develop a typology of in/authentic coordination. we would like to know whether the current techniques of ambient immersion (and zone flooding) are similar across coordination types. how similar are those behaviours typically flagged as ‘inauthentic’ compared to the authentic, asking the question of what makes coordination ‘authentic enough’ (lindquist 2021). we discuss the implications for the study of especially coordinated inauthentic behaviours when many may employ the same strategies as the seemingly authentic. references chan, j. 2022. online astroturfing: a problem beyond disinformation. philosophy & social criticism. diresta, r., shaffer, k., ruppel, b., sullivan, d., matney, r., fox, r., ... & johnson, b. 2018. the tactics and tropes of the internet research agency, new knowledge report prepared for the united states senate select committee on russian interference in the 2016 election. giglietto, f., righetti, n, & rossi, l. 2020. coornet. https://coornet.org/ giglietto, f., olaniran, s., mincigrucci, r., marino, g., mottola, s., & terenzi, m. 2022. blowing on the fire: an analysis of low quality and hyper partisan news sources circulated by coordinated link sharing networks in nigeria. available at ssrn 4162030. giglietto, f., marino, g., mincigrucci, r., & stanziano, a. 2023a. a workflow to detect, monitor, and update lists of coordinated social media accounts across time: the case of the 2022 italian election. social media + society, 9(3), 20563051231196866. giglietto, f., mincigrucci, r., & marino g. 2023b. “detecting coordinated link sharing behaviour with coornet”. digital methods winter school. amsterdam, january,. https://github.com/fabiogiglietto/coornet_at_dmi_ws_2023. graham, t., bruns, a., angus, d., hurcombe, e., & hames, s. 2021. #istandwithdan versus #dictatordan: the polarised dynamics of twitter discussions about victoria’s covid-19 restrictions. media international australia, 179(1), 127-148. gruzd, a., mai, p., & soares, f. b. 2022. how coordinated link sharing behavior and partisans’ narrative framing fan the spread of covid-19 misinformation and conspiracy theories. social network analysis and mining, 12(1), 118. howard, p. n., ganesh, b., liotsiou, d., kelly, j., & françois, c. 2018. the ira, social media and political polarization in the united states, 2012-2018. keller, f. b., schoch, d., stier, s., & yang, j. 2020. political astroturfing on twitter: how to coordinate a disinformation campaign. political communication, 37(2), 256-280. kulichkina, a., righetti, n., & waldherr, a. 2023. the dynamics of political protest and repression on social media in authoritarian settings: the case of the 2021 protests in russia. paper presented at the ecpr general conference, prague, czech republic. lindquist j. 2021. good enough imposters: the market for instagram followers in indonesia and beyond. in woolgar s., vogel e., moats d., helgesson c. (eds.), the imposter as social theory: thinking with gatecrashers, cheats and charlatans (pp. 269– 291). bristol university press. http://coornet.org/ https://github.com/fabiogiglietto/coornet_at_dmi_ws_2023 magelinski, t., & carley, k. m. 2020. detecting coordinated behaviour in the twitter campaign to reopen america. in center for informed democracy and socialcybersecurity annual conference, ideas. mcintyre, l. 2018. post-truth. mit press. merrill, j. b. and oremus, w. 2021. five points for anger, one for a ‘like’: how facebook’s formula fostered rage and misinformation, washington post, 26 october, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/26/facebook-angry-emojialgorithm/. meta (2018). coordinated inauthentic behavior, meta, https://about.fb.com/news/tag/coordinated-inauthentic-behavior/. nizzoli, l., tardelli, s., avvenuti, m., cresci, s., & tesconi, m. 2021. coordinated behavior on social media in 2019 uk general election. proceedings of the international aaai conference on web and social media, 15(1), 443-454. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v15i1.18074 righetti, n., giglietto, f., kakavand, a. e., kulichkina, a., marino, g., & terenzi, m. 2022. political advertisement and coordinated behaviour on social media in the leadup to the 2021 german federal elections. dusseldorf: media authority of north rhinewestphalia. rogers, r. 2017. digital methods for cross-platform analysis. the sage handbook of social media, 91-110. rogers, r. 2023. the propagation of misinformation in social media: a cross-platform analysis. amsterdam university press. rogers, r. 2024. doing digital methods. sage. terenzi, m. 2023. exploring the dark side of cryptocurrencies on facebook and telegram: uncovering media manipulation and “get-rich-quick” deceptive schemes. in selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa. thiele, d., milzner, m., heft, a., gong, b., & pfetsch, b. 2023. 50 shades of astroturf and how to choose them: a theoretical model and review of coordinated social media manipulation. 73th annual ica conference. reclaiming authenticity in communication. yu, w. e. s. 2022. a framework for studying coordinated behaviour applied to the 2019 philippine midterm elections. in proceedings of sixth international congress on information and communication technology: icict 2021, london, volume 2 (pp. 721731). springer singapore. https://about.fb.com/news/tag/coordinated-inauthentic-behavior/ https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v15i1.18074 global digital culture war: how the kremlin weaponizes digital diplomacy marc tuters university of amsterdam boris noordenbos university of amsterdam linda bos university of amsterdam furkan dabanıyastı university of amsterdam introduction: global digital culture war following the kremlin's illegal full-scale ground invasion of the ukraine, national governments, international corporations and media organisations have made russia a pariah, preventing their sophisticated state-sponsored media from reaching audiences in most parts of the western world. notably absent from these unprecedented banning efforts have been the social media accounts of russian embassies, which are often considered to be official diplomatic channels, and thus enjoy special status either due to national laws or diplomatic norms. these channels – as our earlier research revealed – have been used to disseminate online misinformation about the war in ukraine (author 1 2022; author 1 & author 2 2024). since then, there have been reports on coordinated efforts among russian embassies to increase pro-kremlin messaging in latin america (us dept of state 2023), in the balkans (euractiv 2023), in slovakia (hajdari 2023) and in canada (major 2023), amongst others. however, to our knowledge, no systematic research has hitherto been conducted into the kremlin's messaging strategy for their network of embassies across their globe and across platforms. this paper is intended to address this gap. one outcome of the research would be to inform discussion of whether platforms should take a more active role in moderating russian embassy posts going forward. as established in the growing body of literature on digital diplomacy, embassies no longer merely project their presence via social media platforms, but are increasingly involved processes of observation, listening, and digital data gathering, or what marcus holmes refers to as "retrieval" (holmes in bjola & manor 2024, epub). adopting its communication strategies on the basis of received “feedback” (e.g. comments, reposts, likes), digital diplomacy goes beyond the long-established linear sender-receiver model of communication — a process that the authors have referred to as “ambient” in a related study on how pro-kremlin propaganda on tiktok (author 1 & author 2, submitted). the current research project, which is in progress, aims to generate a comprehensive understanding of the ways in which russian embassies’ social media accounts are weaponized for the promotion of a global political communication strategy that presents russia – in a particular light. it analyzes narratives promoted by russian embassies across the world from their various social media platforms (including x/twitter, facebook, often telegram, vkontake, instagram and youtube) over specific time windows during the 2020s. apart from the typical communications of an embassy, – acknowledgements of national holidays, the promotion of tourism, etc. – our preliminary analysis of these channels reveals a consistent pattern: russian embassies present a multi-faceted narrative that portrays the kremlin as standing up to "the collective west". moreover, this narrative appears to specifically target national and cross-national communities in the global south. while governments in europe, north america, and oceania have almost uniformly condemned russia’s military invasion of ukraine, the consensus has been less definite in the global south. a map of the countries that have either abstained, were absent, or voted against un resolution es-11/4 condemning russia aggression in the ukraine (see figure 1), suggests that attitudes have at least been ambiguous for diplomats representing over half of the world's population. this situation cannot be attributed solely to the geopolitical interests and energy dependencies of individual countries. figure 1. a map votes on un resolution es-11/4 (red = against, yellow = abstain, blue = absent). by kajencat , cc by-sa 4.0 the paper posits that there is a pronounced “cultural” dimension to the conflict that russia is actively seeking to promote through its official social media channels. we refer to this aspect of russia’s propaganda strategy —that seems to be tailored specifically to (post-colonial) communities in the global south— as the “global digital culture war.” the term "culture war" initially gained currency in 1990's in discussions of how "polarisation" and "realignment" had transformed us politics and culture (hartman 2016). perceiving liberals and progressives as having gained control of the cultural institutions that shape people's values —from brands to education— conservative and far-right politicians have increasingly made culture war central to their digital political communications strategies, through the weaponization of "hot button" issues such as "transgender bathrooms", a strategy that has been called “metapolitics 2.0” (maly 2024). hypothesis: the weaponization of digital diplomacy the paper hypothesizes that the kremlin is using the social media accounts of its worldwide network of embassies to weaponize digital diplomacy by presenting itself as an opponent of the liberal west’s imperial ambitions and as a defender of “traditional” values. compelling initial evidence of this hypothesis can be found in a tweet from the russian embassy in canada which superimposes the ‘no symbol’ over an lgbtqi+ flag with the caption: “it is all about the family. family is a man and a woman and children.” for a russian embassy, this tweet received an exceptionally high degree of retweets (n=17k), which when filtering by location show a relatively clear pattern of engagement in nations of the global south, from nairobi to riyadh (see figure 2 below). while this tweet has nothing to do with the war in ukraine, through the lens of culture war (as well as holmes’ retrieval theory of digital diplomacy), it can be read as part of an indirect strategy to win over the global south (cf tocci 2023). figure 2. on the left, a highly retweeted tweet of the russian embassy in canada. on the right, a network graph of the locations where retweets originated from dataset and method in order to test our hypothesis the research has compiled a corpus of all the social media channels of all the embassies across the world, as listed by the russian ministry of foreign affairs. the press service of the ministry of foreign affairs (mfa) of the russian federation (https://mid.ru/en/press_service/accounts_social/) provides a comprehensive list of social media accounts representing russian embassies and consulates all around the world (see table 1.) continent website x facebook instagram youtube telegram vk africa 40 37 37 22 5 27 17 asia 46 45 42 21 13 41 22 europe 40 40 38 23 21 35 21 north america 9 9 8 4 5 9 6 south america 11 11 11 5 2 10 6 oceania 2 2 2 0 1 2 2 total 148 144 138 75 47 124 74 table 1. russian embassies’ social media presence the first stage of the research will begin by performing a manual qualitative analysis of only all the facebook embassy pages (n=138), focussing on one month at three points before and after the war. two coders will employ a qualitative coding scheme in three columns: 1.) topics (geopolitics, history, diplomacy, media, values, beautiful russia, sports and religion) and 2.) us/them antagonism (the us, nato, etc. vs russians, nonwestern allies, etc.). the objective of coding is twofold: 1) gaining a deeper understanding of a prominent russian narrative about global culture war with “the west”, and 2) tracing the extent and ways in which russian embassies’ messaging around culture war issues is tailored to the global south. a subset of the collected material will subsequently be subjected to close reading. the second, more experimental stage of the project will download or scrape all of the posts of all of the embassies across all of their social media channels and then perform topic modelling analysis —following nelson’s (2020) computational grounded theory approach— as well as an analysis of variance in engagement intensities, comparing across platforms, across regions and across periods of time. (all data collection and analysis will be done in keeping with aoir’s best ethical practices.) references bjola, e. by c., & manor, i. (eds.) 2024. the oxford handbook of digital diplomacy. oxford university press. us dept of state. 2023, the kremlin’s efforts to covertly spread disinformation in latin america. https://www.state.gov/the-kremlins-efforts-to-covertly-spread-disinformation-inlatin-america/ euractiv. 2023 study: russian embassy in sofia most impactful in spreading propaganda https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/study-russianembassy-in-sofia-most-impactful-in-spreading-propaganda/ hajdari, u. 2023. russian embassy in slovakia uses facebook to push propaganda. why are so many slovaks buying it? https://www.euronews.com/2023/03/29/russianembassy-in-slovakia-uses-facebook-to-push-propaganda-why-are-so-many-slovaksbuyin hartman, a. 2015. a war for the soul of america: a history of the culture wars. university of chicago press. maly, i. 2023. metapolitics, algorithms and violence: new right activism and terrorism in the attention economy. routledge, taylor & francis group. nelson, l. k. 2020. computational grounded theory: a methodological framework. sociological methods & research, 49(1), 3–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124117729703 tocci, n. 2023, september 20. war in ukraine is revealing a new global order – and the ‘power south’ is the winner. the guardian. https://www.state.gov/the-kremlins-efforts-to-covertly-spread-disinformation-in-latin-america/ https://www.state.gov/the-kremlins-efforts-to-covertly-spread-disinformation-in-latin-america/ https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/study-russian-embassy-in-sofia-most-impactful-in-spreading-propaganda/ https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/study-russian-embassy-in-sofia-most-impactful-in-spreading-propaganda/ https://www.euronews.com/2023/03/29/russian-embassy-in-slovakia-uses-facebook-to-push-propaganda-why-are-so-many-slovaks-buyin https://www.euronews.com/2023/03/29/russian-embassy-in-slovakia-uses-facebook-to-push-propaganda-why-are-so-many-slovaks-buyin https://www.euronews.com/2023/03/29/russian-embassy-in-slovakia-uses-facebook-to-push-propaganda-why-are-so-many-slovaks-buyin https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124117729703 https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124117729703 https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124117729703 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/20/war-ukraine-new-global-order-power-south-india-china https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/20/war-ukraine-new-globalorder-power-south-india-china https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/20/war-ukraine-new-global-order-power-south-india-china https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/20/war-ukraine-new-global-order-power-south-india-china selected papers of #aoir2020: the 21st annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 27-31 october 2020 suggested citation (apa): marwick, a., partin, w. (2020, october). the construction of alternative facts: ‘qanon’ researchers as scientistic selves. paper presented at aoir 2020: the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the construction of alternative facts: ‘qanon’ researchers as scientistic selves alice marwick, phd university of north carolina, center for information, technology, and public life william clyde partin university of north carolina, center for information, technology, and public life background qanon is a right-wing conspiracy theory based on a series of posts (“drops”) made to the image boards 4chan and 8chan by “q,” an anonymous poster who claims to be a trump administration insider (zuckerman 2018). q drops are cryptic, consisting of obscure tidbits (“crumbs”) of information and questions posed to the reader about national and global events, written as if seeking interpretation by a participatory audience. these drops have indeed been taken up by a lively community whose collective interpretation posits that president donald trump is actively working against the so-called deep state to bring down a global conspiracy of elite pedophiles that includes hillary clinton, barack obama, and media elites. the collective interpretation of crumbs by qanon “bakers”—members of the qanon community who actively participate in the creation and dissemination of knowledge about the qanon conspiracy—involves a process that takes place on social media in which archival sources, technical instruments, and hermeneutic practices are leveraged to produce agreed-upon evidence (“bread”). these truth claims are canonized as “proofs” and used to establish the legitimacy of q, the qanon community, and president trump’s administration and policies as a whole. though qanon was initially obscure, the conspiracy gained traction on youtube, where conservative content creators began uploading videos in late 2017 decoding q drops that attracted hundreds of thousands of views. by early 2018, qanon had spawned a vast network of youtube channels, podcasts, and books devoted to the advancement of the conspiracy, as well as qanon-themed merchandise. soon after, qanon slogans and symbols, such as the hashtag #wwg1wga (“where we go one we go all”), began appearing throughout the conservative media ecosystem and even at rallies across the country hosted by president trump. simultaneously, qanon has been implicated in multiple targeted homicides, criminal harassment, and extensive interpersonal strife, culminating in the designation of qanon as a domestic terror organization by the fbi, the first conspiracy to be classified as such. research questions and theoretical backing because of both the considerable size and intensity of belief exhibit by its adherents, we consider that qanon is an important research site. furthermore, we view qanon as a window into understanding far-right media practices, literacies, and knowledge-making practices. accordingly, we ask: in what ways do qanon “bakers” produce, institutionalize, and disseminate knowledge about the qanon conspiracy? what archives, research techniques, and interpretive tools do qanon researchers draw upon? what do these practices reveal about the politics and practices of participatory media? to address these questions, we combine approaches from the literatures of the sociology of scientific knowledge and participatory media to consider how bakers leverage the affordances of the social web in producing, maintaining, and disseminating knowledge about the qanon conspiracy. in particular, we adopt science studies’ “symmetry principle” (bloor 1978 [1991]), which encourages scholars not to dismiss problematic information out of hand but to consider the tools and techniques utilized by knowledge-makers that led to (and shaped) their conclusions (e.g., famously, latour and woolgar, 1986 [1979]). this orientation has been used to great effect to study “fringe” science (e.g. harding 2001) and offers a compelling framework for studying knowledge-making practices in qanon. we also pay close attention to the “boundary work” (gieryn 1983) performed by bakers to separate (and legitimize) serious q researchers from “trolls”. additionally, we situate qanon within the academic literature on participatory culture (jenkins 2008) and its more recent critiques, especially thorsen quandt’s notion of “dark participation” (2018). methodology this study utilizes several qualitative methods. most significantly, we conducted sustained “deep hanging out” (geertz 1998), a lightly participatory form of observation in which the researcher spends a significant period of time with a group under study but is less systematic than formal ethnography, in 20 qanon research facebook groups. additionally, we monitored popular hubs for q research, including 8chan, o-chan, and 8kun. our observations were supplemented by content analysis of the extensive archives, compilations of proofs, and youtube channels that bakers have established in the process of making and disseminating knowledge about the qanon conspiracy. argument we argue that qanon bakers adopt a “scientistic self” (proctor 2018), an identity oriented towards the production and maintenance of knowledge that ensures the cohesion or a social or political community across space and time. we demonstrate the tools and techniques bakers use to arrive at their conclusions by (re)constructing the process by which drops become proofs, as well as an analysis of a technical instrument—the “q clock”—that some bakers use to interpret q drops. we argue that this institutionalized orientation towards knowledge production distinguishes qanon from other conspiratorial online communities, which primarily rely on anecdotal evidence rather than systematic inquiry or seek to sow doubt in scientific consensuses. rather, we contend that q research is intended to produce certainty through the construction of alternative facts. in making this argument, we share and build upon other scholars’ critiques of participatory culture, noting that the coordinated spread of doubt (often called agnotology) is only one way in which digital media has failed to live up to the progressive mythologies that accompanied its emergence. indeed, it is precisely the participatory affordances of the social web that have made qanon so potent. our research further casts doubt on appeals to media literacy that rely on individual “critical thinking” practices, which are problematized in the face of a counterfactual conspiracy theory in which participants celebrate research and close textual interpretation—what francesca tripodi calls “scriptural inference” (2018)—above all. references bloor, d. (1991). knowledge and social imagery (2nd ed.). university of chicago press. geertz, c. (1998, october 22). deep hanging out. the new york review of books. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1998/10/22/deep-hanging-out/ gieryn, t. f. (1983). boundary-work and the demarcation of science from nonscience: strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists. american sociological review, 48(6), 781. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095325 harding, s. (2001). the book of jerry falwell: fundamentalist language and politics. princeton university press. jenkins, h. (2006). fans, bloggers, and gamers: exploring participatory culture. nyu press. latour, b., & woolgar, s. (1986). laboratory life: the construction of scientific facts (2nd ed.). princeton university press. proctor, d. (2018). policing the fluff: the social construction of scientistic selves in otherkin facebook groups. engaging science, technology, and society, 4, 485. https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2018.252 quandt, t. (2018). dark participation. media and communication, 6(4), 36–48. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v6i4.1519 tripodi, f. (2018). alternative news, alternative facts: deconstructing the realities of “fake news". american sociological association, philadelphia, pa. zuckerman, e. (2019). qanon and the emergence of the unreal. journal of design and science, 6. https://doi.org/10.21428/7808da6b.6b8a82b9 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): van leeuwen,c. , jacobs, a. , mariën, i. (2022, november). examining older adults’ digital inclusion through the lens of intersectionality and continuity theory. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. examining older adults’ digital inclusion through the lens of intersectionality and continuity theory cora van leeuwen imec-smit, vub and university of the western cape an jacobs imec-smit, vub ilse mariën imec-smit, vub introduction the possible ubiquitous presence of technology connected to the internet and a growing ageing population has necessitated a renewed interest in the digital inclusion of older adults. the digital inclusion of older adults stumbles partly because digital technology is perceived as unneeded or useless by them, as has been observed while assessing the applicability of digital assistive technology. where older adults stated that these solutions were not applicable to their situation (astell et al., 2020). the differences in older adults’ digital technology adoption or skill is still not completely understood. and it is unlikely that one explanation will suffice as studies have shown that older adults are not homogenous and their level of digital in/exclusion are not easily explained based only on chronological age (i.e. hänninen et al., 2020; loos, 2018). by introducing a conceptual framework incorporating the intersectionality theory (crenshaw, 1990) and the continuity theory (atchley, 1989, 1999) it is possible to explain the differences found in digital inclusion that go beyond chronological age and proposes a more individualised approach to the current curriculum of digital skill acquirement and to help affect lasting change in digital technology adoption. background the theory of intersectionality aims to explain the complexity of “the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relations and subject formations” (mccall, 2005, p. 1771). this means that it tries to understand the identity of a person based on different facets that contribute to this identity, i.e. race and gender intersecting in the treatment of a black woman which prompted crenshaw (1990) to develop her theory. the continuity theory posits that although a large portion of older adults experience changes in their health, functioning and social circumstances while ageing, for a large segment of this population there remains a consistency in thought patterns, activities and social relationships related to their previous life experiences (atchley, 1999; victor, 2005). the continuity theory attempts to explain why older adults continue in these patterns and behaviours even though they do not always benefit the individual, and continuity theory assumes that these endure due to the selective investment and energy of the individual (atchley, 1999). meaning that these were important enough for the individual to invest their (limited) time in and have therefore become part of their identity or a means to differentiate themselves from others. findings the conceptual framework was created through desk research and tested by a thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2006) on a sample of 37 semi-structured interviews with selfproclaimed digital technology users, aged between 66 and 84. the participants were recruited in december 2020 and january 2021 and due to the covid-19 restrictions the interviews took place online. the researchers received additional training in ensuring that their interview techniques were adjusted for the video conferencing setting. the thematic analysis showed that although professional experience indeed partly served as an explanation for their digital proficiency it was not the sole factor for their continued use. indeed, influence of family communication needs, and historic interest were identified as reasons for use in their current circumstances. framing this within the theories of continuity theory and intersectionality it was found that habits formed in, for example, university years were continued throughout their lives well into their retirement. furthermore, few of the participants indicated fundamental changes in their use of social media which did not fit within the existing patterns of social behaviour known even when it was not possible to connect physically. further analysis based on the intersections encountered in the participants made is possible to theorize that their relative preferential position (gender, race, education and/or geographical location) attributed to their ability to maintain their acquired skills. their identity enabled them to create and sustain thought patterns and behaviours that encourages digital skill acquirements, and to see these as an essential part of their selfidentity. furthermore, the fact that they are part of a community and have intergenerational contact further encouraged their digital technology use. several participants were able to describe friends or family from a similar background who had difficulties with technology. it is necessary to use the continuity theory as the participants indicated that those lacking in digital skills often did not invest in digital skill acquirement in previous life stages as they did not see the need or use of it. chronological age was not a factor in these stories, as some of the family or friends were significantly younger than the participant. only with the use of both theories it was possible to explain why chronological age cannot be used as an indicator of use or nonuse. rather examining the intersections of their identity in combination with their investments in habits and skills can explain why some older adults benefit more and are able to make use of the internet in comparison to others. conclusion the applications of this conceptual framework to explain the digital inclusion of older adults are theoretical as well as practical. from a theoretical point of view it helps to explain the differences encountered in age groups, and is indicative as to why age alone is not enough to determine a person’s level of inclusion. practically, this understanding of the interaction between continuity theory and intersectionality can lead to new practices of digital inclusion where digital initiatives are no longer aimed solely at chronological age but target the individual’s interest. this means that different initiatives need to be developed that consider the willingness to invest time in skill acquirement as well as ensuring that the skills correlate to the practices and thought patterns that they invested in previously. as not all aspects of the digital world are of interest to all individuals, and a more specific individualised offer would be more successful. references astell, a. j., mcgrath, c., & dove, e. (2020). “that’s for old so and so’s!”: does identity influence older adults’ technology adoption decisions? ageing and society, 40(7), 1550–1576. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0144686x19000230 atchley, r. c. (1989). a continuity theory of normal aging. the gerontologist, 29(2), 183–190. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/29.2.183 atchley, r. c. (1999). continuity theory, self, and social structure. in p. carol d. ryff & p. victor w. marshall (eds.), the self and society in aging processes (pp. 94– 121). springer publishing company; ebook collection (ebscohost). https://biblio.vub.ac.be/ezproxy/login.csp?url=https://www.dynamed.com braun, v., & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa crenshaw, k. (1990). mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. stan. l. rev., 43, 1241. hänninen, r., taipale, s., & luostari, r. (2020). exploring heterogeneous ict use among older adults:the warm experts’ perspective. new media and society. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820917353 loos, e. (2018). the organizational use of online stock photos: the impact of representing senior citizens as eternally youthful. human technology, 366–381. https://doi.org/10.17011/ht/urn.201811224838 mccall, l. (2005). the complexity of intersectionality. signs: journal of women in culture and society, 30(3), 1771–1800. https://doi.org/10.1086/426800 victor, c. r. (2005). the social context of ageing: a textbook of gerontology. routledge. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 boyle, c., gehl, r., zulli, d., yang, m., & brown, j. (2021). the promises, problems, and possibilities for alt-networks. panel presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the promises, problems, and possibilities for altnetworks casey boyle university of texas-austin robert gehl louisiana tech university diana zulli purdue university misti yang university of maryland jim brown rutgers university introduction social media has become a central facet of contemporary life and that centralization has narrowed our perspectives and lessened our possibilities (pariser, 2011; vaidhyanathan, 2018). this centralizing of social media networks happens for their individual users, but also at the level of how social media informs our discourses through journalistic practice, government institutions, industry sectors. because of the role that social media now play, we have become acutely aware of their shortcomings. their platforms not only host but actively cultivate toxic and abusive environments for many of its users. in addition to their functions of interaction, they also provide avenues for increasing governmental control through surveillance or gatekeeping. given the lack of adequate response from tech companies to these long standing issues, it was inevitable that something had to happen. in response to these conditions, tech advocates, activists, students, and scholars have launched numerous alternatives to mainstream social networks. these networks rethink what social media can and should do in times of over reliance on monolithic digital platforms. some networks redesign the user’s experience to lessen or eliminate harassment; some networks focus on data privacy responsibilities; some create spaces where non-centralized networks can persist even against oppressive governmental regimes. given the rise and differentiation of alt-networks, there is a need to study and examine the proliferation of alt-networks. this panel offers four presentations varied in objects, different in methodological approaches, and diverse in their claims. in examining alt-networks, this panel will explore how these redesigned digital platforms respond to demands of scalability, how political activists develop and deploy alt-networks for protests, how researchers could cultivate a games theory approach to studying alt-networks and, finally, how the lack of certain features in alt-networks may doom their survival. the methods being explored will include critical theory, social science research, methodological discussion, and critical analysis through a rhetorical lens. ultimately, our panel hopes to join in on emerging conversations about the ecology of networks and contribute valuable insights for internet research. a network of alt-networks these papers have been carefully assembled to represent a substantial spectrum of the promises, problems, and possibilities for alt-tech today. in the first presentation, the paper develops a games theory approach to studying alt-networks, in this case, mastodon instances. this is an important development as mainstream social media networks have benefited from years of research approaches, new networked objects create new networked questions requiring new methodological considerations. related to this problem, the second presentation examines how and when alt-networks engage or resist the inevitable need to scale their operations. such a study is important because mainstream social media impose a will to scale in ways that make it seem natural and unstoppable. the third presentation engages activists and how ad hoc alt-networks allow for platforms that avoid and leverage themselves against oppressive regimes. finally, the fourth presentation will explore why altnetworks have so far failed alt-right political actors. this argument will look at how microinteractions on platforms inform and drive a dangerous cycle of political antagonism. as a set, these presentations will give aoir attendees a comprehensive survey of sites, methods, and sources for engaging and analyzing alt-networks. while the papers all draw heavily on critical theory and analysis, each differs in how they approach their objects of analysis. using technical approaches, social science methods, speculative means, and rhetorical analysis the papers also demonstrate a wide swath of ways to encounter the altnetwork. finally, the sourcing and discourse engaged by each presentation activates multiple academic discussions while also sticking close to shared themes and concerns. the possibilities of alt-networks this panel builds on recent work concerning the disappointment with mainstream social networks but also the promise of alternatives (gehl, 2015, tufekci, 2017). the adherence to tech industry’s unfair labor practices, the inability to respond to users’ needs, the lack of clear and consistent privacy responsibilities, the weak submission to governmental control— these concerns with social media have all been written (noble, 2018; roberts, 2019). the rise and proliferation of alt-networks is an important development for internet researchers because those innovations rekindle the earliest aims of the internet itself. namely, the construction of a system whose topological configurations resisted centralization and allowed for its users to develop multiple ways of communicating knowledge to one another. references gehl, r. w. (2015). reverse engineering social media. temple up. ----------------. (2015). the case for alternative social media. social media+ society, 1(2), 2056305115604338. noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. nyu press. pariser, e. (2011). the filter bubble: how the new personalized web is changing what we read and how we think. penguin. roberts, s. t. (2019). behind the screen. yale university press. tufekci, z. (2017). twitter and tear gas: the power and fragility of networked protest. yale university press. vaidhyanathan, siva. antisocial media: how facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy. oxford university press, 2018. freedom of expression on the mastodon social network: an ecology of games approach robert w. gehl, louisiana tech university diana zulli, purdue university introduction created in 2016, the mastodon social network was built as a response to the increasing dissatisfaction with twitter’s often-hostile environment. touted as a friendlier alternative to corporate social media, mastodon has a federated (decentralized) topology and open-source code that allows users to develop autonomous communities. these communities are built around topical interests and may connect to others across the “fediverse” (a term used to describe the universe of communities that can connect via the activitypub protocol). the digital infrastructure, content, and social norms of each mastodon community are negotiated among members. estimates vary, but the number of mastodon users likely exceeds 4 million. as such, mastodon is a complex system, with a diversity of users, technologies, and cultural norms that bear some similarity to now-standard corporate social media but are worthy of investigation in their own right. the question is: how can researchers conceptualize this complexity? in this theoretical presentation, we suggest the ecology of games framework, a theory first offered to understand local community politics, as a viable approach. and, given the importance of current debates about moderation, deplatforming, and what to do about hate speech, we will use this framework to explore “freedom of expression” games on mastodon. the ecology of games framework in 1958, political scientist norton long conceptualized the “ecology of games” framework to explain local governance and provide an alternative to the pluralist and elite theories that dominated contemporary views of policymaking (long 1958). instead of a unitary governance model where a select few community members were responsible for making decisions and allocating community resources, long argued that a variety of actors participate in multiple, relatively independent policymaking “games” where they compete to achieve different objectives and goals. within every community exists many territorial domains that contribute to the overall structure of that community, such as a political domain, education domain, banking domain, etc. each domain has key players with specific skills, resources, and interests that motivate their actions. many scholars have illustrated the utility of long’s (1958) ecology of games framework in such contexts as transportation planning (lubell, henry, and mccoy 2010), education non-profit organizations (mendel 2003). similar to the approach we will take, dutton (1992) adapted the ecology of games framework to illustrate the evolution of telecommunications policy in the united states. in particular, dutton explicated several prominent “games” that shaped telecommunications in the 1900s, such as the public utility game (efficient telephone services vs. telephone company revenues), the antitrust game (restricting at&t to ensure regulated telecommunications services), and the regulation game (competition between the government and private corporations over legislation to prevent telecommunication monopolies). dutton and peltu (2005) also suggested that struggles over the first amendment online can best be understood through the ecology of games framework. freedom of expression games on mastodon although the ecology of games framework has not been explicitly applied to social media platforms, many aspects of social media governance reflect the “game” perspective (nash 2013). at the fundamental level, segerberg and bennett (2011) argued that digital technology and social media function within an ecology of existing social, political, and organizational structures; content decisions and restrictions thus result from a variety of actors competing for policies or practices that best serve their interests. the social networking site mastodon is no exception. in our presentation, we will theorize “freedom of expression games” on mastodon. the major concerns segerberg and bennett describe are to be found in mastodon, and these concerns are found in a variety of games with different players. the developers of mastodon software are engaged in a “foss and protocological game,” where they seek to develop free and open-source software that can adhere to internet protocols (specifically, activitypub). mastodon administrators engage in a “community building game;” they install mastodon software on servers and use its affordances to establish online communities with codes of conduct and cultural practices. they also make decisions about which other mastodon installations to federate with. mastodon users play a recognizable “social media game,” coming to the platform for a variety of reasons and select a specific installation so they can engage in social media activities. we will use the ecology of games framework to map the relationships between these players, all of whom have goals that sometimes overlap, sometimes diverge, and sometimes clash. this theorization of the “freedom of expression games” on mastodon can inform future research on social media, including future work on mastodon, but also on similar foss platforms (e.g., pleroma, movim) as well as more “traditional,” corporate social media, such as facebook or twitter. references brandon, richard n. 1994. “establishing long-term science and technology goals: providing vision for an ecology of games.” technology in society 16 (4): 373– 87. https://doi.org/10.1016/0160-791x(94)90009-4. dutton, william h. 1992. “the ecology of games shaping telecommunications policy.” communication theory 2 (4): 303–28. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468 2885.1992.tb00046.x. dutton, william h, and malcolm peltu. 2005. “the emerging internet governance mosaic: connecting the pieces.” 5. forum discussion papers. oxford: oxford internet institute. firestone, william a. 1989. “educational policy as an ecology of games.” educational researcher 18 (7): 18–24. long, norton e. 1958. “the local community as an ecology of games.” american journal of sociology 64 (3): 251–61. lubell, mark, adam douglas henry, and mike mccoy. 2010. “collaborative institutions in an ecology of games.” american journal of political science 54 (2): 287–300. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2010.00431.x. mendel, stuart c. 2003. “the ecology of games between public policy and private action: nonprofit community organizations as bridging and mediating institutions.” nonprofit management and leadership 13 (3): 229–36. https://doi.org/10.1002/nml.12. nash, victoria. 2013. analyzing freedom of expression online: theoretical, empirical, and normative contributions. edited by william h. dutton. vol. 1. oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199589074.013.0021. nisar, muhammad azfar. 2015. “higher education governance and performance based funding as an ecology of games.” higher education 69 (2): 289–302. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-014-9775-4. segerberg, alexandra, and w. lance bennett. 2011. “social media and the organization of collective action: using twitter to explore the ecologies of two climate change protests.” the communication review 14 (3): 197–215. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714421.2011.597250. nonscalable networks james j. brown, jr. rutgers university-camden introduction from the standardization of packets of information in internet protocols to the apis that treat social media content as modular and fungible, the insistence on standardized tools drives internet communications technology. these protocols and technologies worship at the altar of “scalability.” any networked software tool attempting to gain traction (attention, venture capital, etc.) must have a plan for scalability it must be usable by as many people as possible without much significant alteration. this paper analyzes how some internet communities have responded to the ideology of scalability by building alternative networks that cope with and sometimes resist that scalability. these networks serve to protect communities, to make decisions collectively, and to resist the “always connect” logics of a scalable network that is often hostile and is driven by profit motives and data extraction. i examine three applications from the “fediverse” a collection of somewhat independent, yet interconnected internet servers that facilitate microblogging, video sharing, and other services in order to theorize alternate approaches to networked life and internet research. drawing on anna tsing’s articulation of “nonscalability theory,” this paper seeks to understand some of the strategies used by these federated networks and to rethink certain commonplaces in the field. nonscalable networks and the fediverse who would argue for nonscalable software? internet artist and researcher darius kazemi offers a compelling answer to these questions in his essay “how to run a small social network site for your friends.” kazemi argues that a small social network should not necessarily be scalable and that nonscalability is actually sometimes preferable (kazemi, 2019). nonscalable, bespoke software speaks to the immediate needs of a community without worrying about having to be everything to everyone. but nonscalalbe networks do not only live on federated servers maintained by those with relatively sophisticated technical skills. from discord servers to group chats to facebook groups, the internet is filled with small networks that use a range of tools codes of conduct, customized configurations of corporate social media platforms, content moderation policies, and more to manage their borders. such small networks live within scalable networks, but they themselves are not always necessarily scalable. tsing argues that scalability blocks “our ability to notice the heterogeneity of the world; by its design, scalability allows us to see only uniform blocks, ready for further expansion” (tsing, 2012, p. 505). further, she argues that “nonscalability theory” allows us not only to rethink our objects of study but also our methods of analysis: “to pay attention to articulations between the scalable and the nonscalable requires rethinking our knowledge practices, which have been shaped within the history of remaking the world for scalability” (tsing, 2012, p. 522). this paper uses this nonscalability theory to examine the technical and social practices of bookwyrm (a social reading and reviewing service), glitch.social (a fork of the mastodon social networking software), and peertube (a video sharing service). while each of these services (as well as the multiple other federated services that use activitypub) has distinct features, they are each an example of efforts to offer alternatives to the scalable networks that dominate much of the internet. from codes of conduct to customized software modifications, these services demonstrate what networked life can look like if connections between individuals and communities are not the default but are instead the result of deliberation and decision. if connection is more difficult, it forces a consideration of the costs and benefits of that connection to the individual and to the community. this introduces friction into a situation that is often dominated by the smooth “always connect” and “public sharing as default” assumptions that drive scalable networks. while users can replicate services like those examined in this paper (indeed, each of these services shares their code for those interested in setting up their own instances), that replication does not assume the plug-and-play of corporate, scalable software. instead, it assumes that each instance of those services will involve careful attention to the needs of individual communities. learning from the fediverse it is clear that while there is no one model for federated servers, they do share a certain set of commitments, obligations, and values. this paper aims to lay out those shared values in order to understand what these networks teach us about the limits of scalable networks and the utility of building alternatives to it and within it. it also asks whether the lessons learned form such an analysis can refram longstanding debates amongst internet researchers. for instance, the collective approach to decisions about how or whether to build connections between users and between communities offers a useful approach to debates about “filter bubbles”(bruns, 2017; pariser, 2011). if determining how or whether to connect is a deliberative decision, then the question is not “are individuals stuck in a filter bubble?” but is instead something like “how are communities working to determine what their network looks like?” similarly, questions of online extremism might consider how the practices of nonscalable networks might address the problems we know are pervasive on scalable networks, such as how recommendation systems feed radicalization (gaudette et al., 2020). finally, research on harassment might better address current tools, such as blocklists on twitter, which aim to address harassment “at scale” but instead act as blunt tools that ignore the nuances of online abuse (jhaver et al., 2018). the goal of this analysis is not to co-opt the tactics of nonscalable through the plug-andplay logic of scalable networks, merely treating these ideas as new functions to be deployed widely. instead, the aim is to learn from these alternate networks in an attempt to imagine a more just internet and to offer fresh approaches to longstanding research questions. references bruns, a. (2017). echo chamber? what echo chamber? reviewing the evidence. 6th biennial future of journalism conference (foj17). gaudette, t., scrivens, r., davies, g., & frank, r. (2020). upvoting extremism: collective identity formation and the extreme right on reddit. new media & society, 1461444820958123. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820958123 jhaver, s., ghoshal, s., bruckman, a., & gilbert, e. (2018). online harassment and content moderation: the case of blocklists. acm transactions on computer human interaction, 25(2), 12:1-12:33. https://doi.org/10.1145/3185593 kazemi, d. (2019, august 31). how to run a small social network site for your friends. https://runyourown.social/ pariser, e. (2011). the filter bubble: how the new personalized web is changing what we read and how we think. penguin. tsing, a. l. (2012). on nonscalability: the living world is not amenable to precision nested scales. common knowledge, 18(3), sunny, swarmy democracy: vtaiwan and the potential of digital collectives misty yang, vanderbilt university introduction people are showing up and demanding change. self-labeled patriots in the united states. farmers in india. day-traders on robinhood’s doorsteps. britney fans in courtrooms. the political, economic, social, and conspiratorial dimensions motivating them are diverse, but they have all been moved in some manner by networked affordances of the internet. in response to the january 6th siege of the united states capitol, roger mcnamee, silicon valley investor and author of the book zucked: waking up to the facebook catastrophe, argues that "facebook and google and twitter, created the environment, they radicalized the people, and then gave them a platform for organizing this attack."( barreiro). his conclusion is supported by a 2016 internal facebook presentation that reported that "64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and concluded that "[o]ur recommendation systems grow the problem."( horwitz and seetharaman). the narrative of polarization exacerbated by u.s.-based social media platforms has become commonplace, and this is just one narrative that troubles the connection between democratic participation and the internet. in this paper, i follow the story of another group of people who showed up, occupied government buildings, and with the help of digital networks worked to make a government more democratic. this is the story of the sunflower movement and the subsequent establishment of vtaiwan, “an open consultation process that brings taiwan citizens and government together in online and offline spaces, to deliberate and reach rough consensus on national issues, and to craft national digital legislation.” (hsiao et al.). by examining the mix of people, practice, and technologies of vtaiwan, i articulate a perspective that reclaims both the demos in democracy and the techne in technology. in other words, i argue that there is both potential in the agitated mob and the practice of digitally networked governance. flowering swarms some new media theorists doubt the political potential of digital masses. byung-chul han concludes that although digitally-enhanced “[w]aves of outrage mobilize and bundle attention very efficiently, ...their fluidity and volatility make them unsuited to shaping public discourse or public space.”(han). this is in part because “[t]he digital swarm lacks the soul or spirit of the masses. individuals who come together as a swarm do not develop a we.”(han). similarly, wendy chun argues that “networks do not produce an imagined and anonymous ‘we’ (they are not, to use benedict anderson’s term, ‘imagined communities’) but rather, a relentlessly pointed yet empty, singular yet plural you.” in lieu of “reading the morning newspaper,” chun sees digital networks as “[relying] on asynchronous yet pressing actions to create interconnected users.”for chun, we are united in the habit of our doomscrolling, not in the content of our doom. chun still thinks it worth asking, “can we—by inhabiting the habitual [patterns of neoliberalism]—change society?”(chun, xi). however, both han and chun cast doubt on the potentials and practices of the digital collective. the sunflower movement in taiwan troubles assessments, like han’s and chun’s, that question whether digital networks can create and sustain political collective action. in march of 2014, a group of young taiwanese citizens occupied the parliament for 24 days to protest the anticipated passage of the cross-strait service trade agreement (cssta). the cssta was a free trade agreement with china that created discontent over “how economic integration with china may affect taiwan’s economy and political future” and resulted in the occupation of the taiwanese parliament.9 protestors “shared directions to climb over walls or through underpasses by word of mouth or smartphone messaging.” when police tried to remove the students, they “[built] blockades and [assembled] their own press center.” one group of students advanced on another government building and were met with police wielding a water cannon. on march 29th, a song recorded inside the parliament, “island sunrise,” that used metaphors of darkness to represent “black box democracy” was released on the internet. on march 30th, 700,000 people responded to the students’ calls to protest by taking to the streets, and “activists promoted their cause through new social media outlets.” the head of the parliament “promised that the parliament would put the review of cssta on hold,” and on april 6th, “each with a sunflower in their hands, the protesters declared victory and left the parliament, bringing to an end 24 days of occupation.” the activist movement would come to be known as the sunflower movement. the interpretations and legacy of the sunflower movement are, as with many social movements, contested. the movement contained elements of “anti-china taiwanese nationalism; leftist anti-free trade sentiment; demands for democratic reforms; and generational justice.” some scholars have “defended the sunflower movement through the discourse of civil disobedience, legitimizing its liberatory politics and nationalist concerns,” while others have judged some of the movement’s positions, such as its anti-china arguments, “worrying.” but according to a group of scholars based in taipei and new york, including audrey tang, the current digital minister of taiwan, “the sunflower movement led to a revival of citizen participation” that manifested in “many projects to include citizens in decision-making processes,” including vtaiwan. thus, the sunflower movement could be understood as being both a digital swarm and political collective and as benefiting from digital networks to both organize and govern. in the next section, i outline the practices of democracy adopted by vtaiwan. practicing democracy the practices of vtaiwan mix the affordances of technology with the ideals of democratic participation. this blend of techne, or teachable arts based on principles, grounds both the technology and the participation in an ongoing process of “invention, evaluation, and judgment.” in doing so, vtaiwan offers a possible understanding for an ensouled digital “we.” the paper details five principles that support vtaiwan’s enactment of a digitally-networked democratic collective. 1. vtaiwan recognizes that technology alone will not solve civic problems. vtaiwan is not just a suite of tools. it is a process that “consists of four successive stages: proposal, opinion, reflection and legislation.” 2. vtaiwan is an effort supported by the taiwanese government. in the december following the sunflower movement, a government official attended a hackathon and asked those present “to build a platform that would allow the entire taiwan society to engage in ‘rational discussion’ of public matters at a national scale.” this request culminated in the creation of vtaiwan, with the “v” standing for “vision,” “voice,” “vote,” and “virtual.” this principle is particularly important because “civic networks” are “unable to cover costs through advertising and most cannot rely on venture capital investment to grow their communities until they are viable.” 3. vtaiwan recognizes the alternative networks to which it responds. it “aims to go beyond political polarization, to break out of echo chambers generated by social media.” 4. vtaiwan works with and from theories and possible practices of democracy. those who help build and maintain vtaiwan reflect on concepts such as a “democracy of proposition” and a “recursive public.” in the facilitation stage, the facilitator draws from the “focused conversation method.” 5. vtaiwan values participation most. the process has three “key mechanisms for public participation —interpretation, facilitation and documentation—supported by a selection of collaborative open source engagement tools.” the participation is understood as creating a “culture” influenced by “an adhocratic model. the defining feature of this model is that it values action over formal authority.” references barreiro, jr., victor. “social media helped radicalize americans, fuel january 6 insurrection – roger mcnamee.” rappler, january 23, 2021. https://www.rappler.com/technology/features/roger-mcnamee-tech-platforms-role-united -states-capitol-riot-rappler-talk. chun, wendy hui kyong. updating to remain the same : habitual new media. 1 online resource vols. cambridge, ma: the mit press, 2016. http://site.ebrary.com/id/11218298. han, byung-chul. in the swarm: digital prospects. translated by erik butler. vol. 3. mit press, 2017. horwitz, jeff, and deepa seetharaman. “facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive; the social-media giant internally studied how it polarizes users, then largely shelved the research.” wall street journal (online). may 26, 2020. 2406647306. the wall street journal. https://search.proquest.com/newspapers/facebook-executives-shut-down-effortsmakesite/docview/2406647306/se-2?accountid=14696. hsiao, yu-tang, shu-yang lin, audrey tang, darshana narayanan, and claudina sarahe. “vtaiwan: an empirical study of open consultation process in taiwan,” 2018. kennerly, michele, and damien smith pfister. “poiesis, genesis, mimesis: toward a less selfish genealogy of memes.” in ancient rhetoric & digital networks, 205–28. tuscaloosa: the university of alabama press, 2018. rowen, ian. “inside taiwan’s sunflower movement: twenty-four days in a student-occupied parliament, and the future of the region.” the journal of asian studies 74, no. 1 (2015): 5–21. wang, chih-ming. “‘the future that belongs to us’: affective politics, neoliberalism and the sunflower movement.” international journal of cultural studies 20, no. 2 (2017): 177–92. zuckerman, ethan and chand rajendra-nicolucci. “civic logic: social media with opinion and purpose.” the knight first amendment institute, november 20, 2020. https://knightcolumbia.org/content/civic-logic-social-media-with-opinion-and-purpose. the decline and fall of the alt-right’s alt-tech empire casey boyle university of texas-austin introduction for the last several years, far right conservatives throughout the united states have bemoaned their treatment on major social media platforms, notably twitter, facebook, youtube. resistance to being moderated, fears of being shadow-banned, and outrage over being de-platformed have fueled anti-establishment sentiment against the major platforms in social media. of course, it should be of no controversy that all platforms moderate the activity taking place on that platform, or, as tarrelton gillispie has argued, “all platforms must moderate while disavowing it” (gillispie, 2018). it is perhaps this surface level disavowal that has created the conditions in which conservatives can argue for less censorship (if companies are disavowing it....then why engage in it) but also point to as evidence of special prosecution of conservative thought. concerns such as these that led conservative to seek out alternative broadcast media (e.g. foxnews) to great success but seeking out alternative social media has not yet been not as fruitful. this project seeks to offer a critical analysis of social media platforms, arguing that while quantitative reach is important, a more important but less discussed qualitative experience (the ability to cultivate micro-fascisms through micro-interactions) is necessary for far-right discourses that cannot be offered on alt tech platforms. ultimately, what this project proposes is that there is no viable alternative for alt right discourse and questions the possibility of any alternative for other users. the sound and fury of alt-tech alongside the rise of the so-called alt-right (and with it, alt-facts), alt-tech social media platforms have risen to host far-right discourses (rogers, 2020). these platforms--some of which include: gab, parler, mewe, thinkspot, 4chan/8chan--boast themselves as platforms for unfettered expression and unrestricted speech. indeed, a tour through any of these social media networks will turn up vitriolic prose that quickly and often turns to promises of violence. it was feared in many circles that such sites would become breeding grounds and incubators for insurrectionists and incels alike (zuckerberg & rajendra-nicolucci, 2021). while those fears remain, the sustained and lasting success of alternative platforms are in doubt. however, despite the presence and alternative of these sites for and by conservatives, their use and spread have not grown considerably. the ultimate indication of failure for alt-tech occurred when u.s. president donald trump was banned from major social media networks (twitter, instagram, facebook, youtube, pinterest) but chose not participate in any of the social networks custom crafted for his politics. the loss of mainstream social networks from trump and others’ reach makes sense given how much those figures relied on them (ott & dickinson, 2019). while parler was used for the us capitol insurrection, its failure to secure its data and protect its users from self incrimination has been kind of death knell for its continued survival (groeger et. al., 2021). shortly after those attacks, isp (such as amazon web services, and others) de-platformed the platform. it exists again today, but in a much reduced and depleted form, as do many other alt-tech platforms. the prevailing thought is that trump and other leading conservatives did not join those lesser networks because those networks lacked the numbers that the others boasted. indeed, twitter, facebook, and youtube lead all networks in recognizability and in quantitative numbers. so, this is most certainly a factor in not choosing instead to log into gab, mewe, or bitchute as viable alternatives. despite obvious indications that these assumptions are correct, i want to propose another reason that figures of the far right fought against being de-platformed when they had viable alternatives at the ready that catered to their stated desires or free thought and unfettered speech. mediating microfacisms in addition to a quantitative loss from major social networks, the alt-tech platforms failed to satisfy a more important qualitative desire for far-right conservatives. that is, outside of mainstream platforms, far-right tech users were unable to engage in the small, almost imperceptible actions that help sustain the affect force for far-right tactics. these actions operated not so much at the level of traditional political claims or platforms (indeed, the gop ran on no platform other than “pro-trump” in 2020), but instead on microinteractions afforded by social media. micro-interactions, in technical sense, allow for a kind of affective assent whereby the technical act of clicking/sharing satisfies a desire on the part of a user (saffer, 2013). in addition to the affective translation of user experience, these micro-interactions sustain user engagement and allow for users to interact with content in ways that frame how all interaction takes place (gehl, 2013). in a political sense, however, micro-interactions--seen through screenshots and re-shares and quote re-tweets--allowed far-right users to set into motion a series of affective calland-responses whose reactions fulfilled a kind of affective pleasure cycle for proponents and opponents alike. compounding the technical and user experience of microinteractions, gilles deleuze and felix guattari’s analytic of “micro-facisms” provides even more insight on the qualitative dimension for affective action in and through social media for far right conservatives. micro-facisms are those everyday interactions whereby we enforce normality on one another and ourselves. these are the micro-practices where we insist on our own repression and participate in others’ (deleuze & guattari, 1988; lennard, 2019). we see such behaviour rampant on social media, especially by and in reaction to far-right discourse. by looking at micro-interactions as a kind of mechanism for microfascisms, we shall see why the alt-right’s alt-tech empire has waned before it even waxed (floridi, 2021). ctrl-alt-delete...or...this machine makes fascists by using critical analysis informed by the discourses in and around microfacisms, this presentation examines the affective cycle set into motion by micro-interactions on social media through a comparison of those designed micro-interactions in a technical sense. given the widespread reliance on microfacisms by subjects in a capitalistic system, a part of this discussion questions the difficulty of any alt network reaching escape velocity that does not nurture and sustain the same thing that is killing its users. in fact, it might be even more the case that the use of microfascism by opponents of the altright to suspend, ban, and de-platform (and thus stress the alt-tech networks) helps make those fascists claim authority by trumping up accusations of fascism against them. that is, is it possible that the celebration that some alt-right figures show when banned or censored is itself the mechanism through which actual and traditional fascism is made? references deleuze, g., & guattari, f. (1988). a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. bloomsbury publishing. floridi, l. (2021). “trump, parler, and regulating the infosphere as our commons.” philosophy & technology, 1-5. groeger l., kao j., shaw a., syed m., and maya eliahou,“what parler saw during the attack on the capitol.” pro publica: the inssurection. https://projects.propublica.org/parler-capitol-videos/ gehl, r. w. (2013). “a history of like’.” the new inquiry, 27. gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. yale university press. lennard, n. (2019). being numerous: essays on non-fascist life. verso books. ott, b. l., & dickinson, g. (2019). the twitter presidency: donald j. trump and the politics of white rage. routledge. munn, l. (2021). more than a mob: parler as preparatory media for the us capitol storming. first monday. rogers, r. (2020). “deplatforming: following extreme internet celebrities to telegram and alternative social media.” european journal of communication, 35(3), 213-229. saffer, d. (2013). microinteractions: designing with details. o'reilly media, inc.. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): kuznetsov, d., ismangil, m. (2023, october). assessing the impact of global attention on subreddit community practices: the case of /r/hongkong. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. assessing the impact of global attention on subreddit community practices: the case of /r/hongkong dmitry kuznetsov the chinese university of hong kong milan ismangil utrecht university introduction what happens to internet communities after a global media event puts them in the public spotlight? does the flood of new members change a given community's practices, structures, and discussions? do things go back to normal? these questions lie at the heart of our research project, which examines how a local subcommunity on the popular website reddit changed as its matter of focus became a global discussion subject. specifically, this study analyses changing posting practices on /r/hongkong, a local subreddit whose popularity skyrocketed in 2019, with the anti-extradition law amendment bill movement garnering worldwide media coverage. now, with global attention shifting away from the protests and the 2020 hong kong national security law, the subreddit no longer exhibits the same level of activity (figure 1). but what can be learnt beyond simply looking at the numbers? can a qualitative change be observed on /r/hongkong? in this extended abstract, we will briefly examine the existing research on subreddits as a community, consider the potential significance of media events and subsequent influxes of new users for community practice, outline our methodological approach, and highlight some findings. reddit and community reddit is one of the world’s most popular websites, combining features of both web 2.0 social media platforms (networked groups, algorithmic newsfeeds) and early internet usenet groups, involving volunteer moderation, subject specificity, and (relative) anonymity (squirrell, 2019). this duality of reddit can be seen in its organisation. while much of the website (barring several private or quarantined areas) is open to all users for browsing and contribution, reddit is structured around the establishment of interest groups focusing on particular topics congregating in specialised, moderated subreddits. figure 1 threads per quarter on /r/hongkong; 2017-2023 this “vague” (datta & adar, 2019) group membership system is not based on explicit boundaries. authors such as squirrell (2019) highlight the importance of platform affordances (flairs; stickies; faq) and volunteer moderation in facilitating focused discussions in which participants exhibit member behaviour (datta & adar, 2019). this behaviour may be observed in their adherence to themes and rules of a given subreddit (lê et al., 2020), in the development of collective efforts (glassman & kuznetcova, 2022), or traced through examination of posting behaviours (soliman et al., 2019; staudt willet & carpenter, 2020) and linguistic features (albota, 2020; bhandari & armstrong, 2019). thus, in our discussion of community, we align closely with the work of lyon (1987) who argues that communities are constructions featuring a trinity of common elements: common ties, shared place, and distinctive social interaction. extending this thought further, we argue that the three elements are all mutually constitutive, and that shared place is itself a product of social interaction, rather than simply a setting for it (massey, 1994). this is particularly important in so-called “porous” environments (song, 2009), where it is easy for individuals to drop and drop out of conversation. this is visible in squirrell’s (2019) investigation of reddit moderation, a task combines the complexity simultaneously enforcing community-rules and preventing spam behaviour, while also maintaining “atmosphere and epistemic integrity” (p. 1923) crucial for the sustainability of virtual communities. thus, we argue that in virtual communities such /r/hongkong, a sudden influx of users should have a quantitative and qualitative impact, as only one aspect of lyon’s(1987) conceptualisation remains relatively constant: shared place. we are therefore particularly interested in locating changes in content and user behaviour on the subreddit when, following a media event, the population and number of posts increase exponentially. media events our analysis of /r/hongkong aims to explore the changes in posting behaviour and content since the establishment of the subreddit. we focus on examining the impact of two years: 2014 and 2019. both saw major social movements in hong kong that garnered sustained worldwide media attention. we classify these two periods as extended media events, building on the work of dayan and katz (1992). since its publication, television has had to contend with the internet and social media, contributing to an age of increasingly atomized media. even so, media events still matter and seem to be sustained over longer periods. for example, we can consider the 2022ukraine war as one sustained media event, with continuous coverage conducted by both professional and amateur media organisations, leading to the formation of an almost constant viewer constituency distributed around the globe. if a more recent term is in order, such events could be described as what frosh and pinchevski (2018) call media witnessing, where “every moment becomes pregnant with historical possibilities”. the concept of media events, with emphasis on disruption of routine and constitution of committed audiences, guided into participation, offers a useful lens to focus our case study. with the hong kong protests of 2019 attracting global media attention, with online platforms helping constitute engaged discussion and activist networks (wang & zhou, 2021), we can gauge how this attention affects a virtual community, and what happens once it’s all over. data & method as our goal is to observe the changing nature of /r/hongkong, we gathered longitudinal data to establish a baseline, to highlight how the events of 2019 impacted subreddit activity, and to evaluate whether the subreddit returned to the baseline. to collect our dataset, we used the pmaw python package (podolak, 2021/2023) to interact with the pushshift api (baumgartner et al., 2020). we gathered comments posted on the subreddit from july 2010 to february 2023 (1,322,119). data was then managed and analysed using r 4.2.2 (r core team, 2021) and the package tidyverse (wickham et al., 2019) due to the apparent limitations of pushshift api, a proportion of the collected comments were not associated with a url (217,883). based on the data that did, we found that since october 2017, a total of 74978 unique threads were posted on the subreddit. we used bertopic (grootendorst, 2022) to analyse the content of the data. we sampled some of the peak moments in user activity and look at the data qualitatively, adopting what gerbaudo (2016) describes as “data hermeneutics” to enrich our analysis and situate the context of the study beyond quantitative abstraction. specifically, we focused on stickied threads and subreddit rules. findings first, peak activity is clearly indicated during the 2019 protests, followed by major drops in 2020 and 2021. the subreddit saw a surge in popularity and user activity in 2019, reflected in higher average upvotes and more active users. the proportion of comments discussing linked posts also varied, suggesting changes in discussion dynamics. the top 100 users' contribution to posts varied significantly over the years, with a high of 50.3% in 2018, a low of 14.3% in 2019, and a gradual recovery to 21.5-27.7% in the subsequent years. the data on threads showed similar patterns, with a dramatic increase in activity in 2019, followed by a drop in 2022. the concentration of posting, however, increased significantly in 2020 and 2021, with the top 100 users contributing 57% and 64.1% of all threads respectively. topic modelling showed that discussions on the subreddit moved away from general information about hong kong. starting in quarter 2 of 2019, the most popular topics being to focus on covering the 2019 anti-elab protests. in 2020, discussions of protestrelated issues and the national security law continued to dominate. in 2021, top topics focused on political issues, also covering covid-19 related concerns. in 2022, the livelihood issues seen in 2018 resurface, but popular discussions remain focused on political topics. qualitative analysis showed that prior to the 2019 protests, the subreddit had general rules in line with overall reddit rules. after the surge in discussion and user base, the subreddit developed a more specific set of rules. the new rules were more prescriptive and aimed at managing the increased volume of posts and maintaining content quality. before the 2019 protests, sticky threads were often used for community meet-ups or general announcements. the subreddit started using sticky threads for larger discussions (megathreads), and to direct users to specific content. references albota, s. (2020). linguistic and psychological features of the reddit news post. 2020 ieee 15th international conference on computer sciences and information technologies (csit), 1, 295–299. https://doi.org/10.1109/csit49958.2020.9321991 baumgartner, j., zannettou, s., keegan, b., squire, m., & blackburn, j. (2020). the pushshift reddit dataset. proceedings of the international aaai conference on web and social media, 14, 830–839. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v14i1.7347 bhandari, a., & armstrong, c. (2019). tkol, httt, and r/radiohead: high affinity terms in reddit communities. proceedings of the 5th workshop on noisy user-generated text (w-nut 2019), 57–67. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/d19-5508 curiskis, s. a., drake, b., osborn, t. r., & kennedy, p. j. (2020). an evaluation of document clustering and topic modelling in two online social networks: twitter and reddit. information processing & management, 57(2), 102034. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2019.04.002 datta, s., & adar, e. (2019). extracting inter-community conflicts in reddit. proceedings of the international aaai conference on web and social media, 13, 146– 157. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v13i01.3217 dayan, d., & katz, e. (1992). media events. harvard university press. frosh, p., & pinchevski, a. (2018). media and events after media events. media, culture & society, 40(1), 135–138. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443717726007 gerbaudo, p. (2016). from data analytics to data hermeneutics. online political discussions, digital methods and the continuing relevance of interpretive approaches. digital culture & society, 2(2), 95–112. https://doi.org/10.14361/dcs-2016-0207 glassman, m., & kuznetcova, i. (2022). the gamestop saga: reddit communities and the emerging conflict between new and old media. first monday. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v27i7.11766 grootendorst, m. (2022). bertopic: neural topic modeling with a class-based tf-idf procedure (arxiv:2203.05794). arxiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2203.05794 lê, a., farris, e. m., sumner, j. l., & warmka, j. m. (2020). extra, extra, reddit all about it: what reddit can teach us about local politics. the forum, 18(1), 87–115. https://doi.org/10.1515/for-2020-1005 lyon, l. (1987). the community in urban society. temple university press. massey, d. b. (1994). space, place, and gender. university of minnesota press. podolak, m. (2023). pmaw: pushshift multithread api wrapper [python]. https://github.com/mattpodolak/pmaw (original work published 2021) r core team. (2021). r: a language and environment for statistical computing. r foundation for statistical computing. https://www.r-project.org/ soliman, a., hafer, j., & lemmerich, f. (2019). a characterization of political communities on reddit. proceedings of the 30th acm conference on hypertext and social media, 259–263. https://doi.org/10.1145/3342220.3343662 https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2203.05794 song, f. w. (2009). virtual communities: bowling alone, online together. peter lang. squirrell, t. (2019). platform dialectics: the relationships between volunteer moderators and end users on reddit. new media & society, 21(9), 1910–1927. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819834317 staudt willet, k. b., & carpenter, j. p. (2020). teachers on reddit? exploring contributions and interactions in four teaching-related subreddits. journal of research on technology in education, 52(2), 216–233. https://doi.org/10.1080/15391523.2020.1722978 wang, r., & zhou, a. (2021). hashtag activism and connective action: a case study of #hongkongpolicebrutality. telematics and informatics, 61, 101600. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2021.101600 wickham, h., averick, m., bryan, j., chang, w., mcgowan, l. d., françois, r., grolemund, g., hayes, a., henry, l., hester, j., kuhn, m., pedersen, t. l., miller, e., bache, s. m., müller, k., ooms, j., robinson, d., seidel, d. p., spinu, v., … yutani, h. (2019). welcome to the tidyverse. journal of open source software, 4(43), 1686. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01686 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): bhargava, r. (2023, october). data representation as epistemological resistance. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. data representation as epistemological resistance rahul bhargava northeastern university over the last two decades quantitative data representation has moved from a specialization of the sciences, economics, and statistics (gould, 2017), to becoming commonplace in settings of democratic governance and community decision making (williams, 2020). yet the dominant methods and media of data production and visualization echo some of the tenets of those fields of origin – extractive data production, computational storage and retrieval, 3rd party expert analysis, professionalized visual design, the rhetorical power of science. these norms are not connected to the governance and activism settings data is now used in, where practices emphasize empowerment, efficacy, and engagement (tygel & kirsch, 2016; bravo et al, 2022). this disconnect has led to well-documented personal, community-level, and societal harms in what is often described as our “datafied” society. the media we use for data representation require rethinking to be in alignment with data-related work in settings of resistance and revolution. the current toolbox for representing data is limited, privileging a single style of approach to representing data. this is first and foremost visual, dominated by computational design tools that produce paper or screen-based 2d visualizations based on a shared encoding language (bertin, 1967). data visualization and storytelling privilege formalized ways of knowing, built on the rhetorical trick of perceived objectivity of numbers and shapes used to represent them (d’ignazio & klein, 2016). stated more clearly, there is a small set of “standard charts and graphs” that make up the default toolbox. graphs are not the only way data could be represented visually, nor are tables the only way data can be ordered and stored. this narrow set of norms has created a privileged practice of data visualization that excludes alternate approaches and uncritically embeds a strong set of epistemological defaults. this approach of data visualization embeds the ways of knowing that are most common in the sciences and related domains, and thus imports them into the pro-social settings where data is now commonly used. we can derive inspirations for other possible epistemologies of data representation by drawing from approaches in other domains of study. first, the idea of open data (baack, 2015), critical data studies (tygel, 2015), and data literacy (raffaghelli, 2020) have all approached the questions of social justice and power in a datafied society. the field of participatory action research offers a particularly useful framework to draw on when considering alternatives; “extended epistemology” (heron & reason, 2008) introduces four ways of knowing: experiential, presentational, propositional, and practical. current data visualization practice centers just one of those – propositional knowledge (the knowing of a thing via ideas and theories that attempt to represent it). another approach to alternatives comes from the field of computer science education – “epistemological pluralism” (turkle & paper, 1990). applied to this domain, this idea suggests that focusing on a single epistemological approach to data representation excludes potential participants in data-centered community deliberation and sense-making. to support spaces where data is now commonly used that focus on goals of community empowerment and engagement, the field must engage this pluralism, exploring experiential, presentational, and practical ways of representing data. to concretize this call, i introduce three case studies that showcase alternative epistemologies of data representation, pushing back on the current dominant computationally encoded and digitally mediated norms. these examples are focused on representing data in social justice movements. from mexico city i summarize the feminicide memorial created in the main square to mark international women’s day in 2021. activists memorialized and honored the thousands of victims of gender-related violence by writing their names on the barrier erected around the palace. from chicago i introduce a street data sculpture created by activists in 2020 at a rally in support of the black lives matter movement. the painted bar chart depicted how much more the city spent on policing than any other department, supporting activist arguments to reallocate those funds towards social supports. from los angeles i describe a 2017 theatrical performance and mini-golf course, both showcasing data about the unhoused and arguing against new governmental policies seeking to further marginalize their communities. the performance was driven by analysis of data trends, and the playable mini golf course served as a data physicalization; all created by artists, activists, and members of the unhoused community themselves. learning from activists offers a model of creative data representation as epistemological resistance necessary to avoid perpetuating further harms associated with the embedded media and methods of our current data practices. to support community empowerment, efficacy, and engagement in a datafied society we need to develop a larger toolbox for data representation built on alternative epistemologies. the existing norms of data visualization emerged from fields (sciences, statistics, etc.). disconnected from the current types of uses of data in democratic settings (community planning, civic engagement, etc.). the embedded methods and media have barriers at odds with the goals of social justice movements (raffaghelli, 2020). ongoing work in data sculptures, data murals, data theatre, and related representations offer manifestations of epistemological resistance to this historical default. the path forward lies in engaging a pluralistic toolbox, one that embraces many ways of knowing to support a larger set of participants in the creation of data representations. references baack, s. (2015). datafication and empowerment: how the open data movement rearticulates notions of democracy, participation, and journalism. big data & society, 2(2), 2053951715594634. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951715594634 bertin, j. (1967). semiology of graphics: diagrams, networks, maps. bravo, l., rufs, c., & moyano, d. (2022). data visualization for non-oppression and liberation: a feminist approach. diseña, 21, article 21. https://doi.org/10.7764/disena.21.article.2 d’ignazio, c., & klein, l. f. (2016). feminist data visualization. vis4dh: 2016 workshop on visualization for the digital humanities. http://vis4dh.dbvis.de/papers/feminist%20data%20visualization.pdf gould, r. (2017). data literacy is statistical literacy. statistics education research journal, 16(1), 22–25. heron, j., & reason, p. (2008). extending epistemology within a co-operative inquiry. in p. reason & h. bradbury (eds.), the sage handbook of action research: participative inquiry and practice (2nd ed). sage publications. raffaghelli, j. e. (2020). is data literacy a catalyst of social justice? a response from nine data literacy initiatives in higher education. education sciences, 10, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci10090233 turkle, s., & papert, s. (1990). epistemological pluralism: styles and voices within the computer culture. signs, 16(1), 128–157. tygel, a., campos, m. l., & alvear, c. a. de. (2015). teaching open data for social movements: a research strategy. the journal of community informatics, 11(3). http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/1220 tygel, a. f., & kirsch, r. (2016). contributions of paulo freire for a critical data literacy: a popular education approach. the journal of community informatics, 12(3), article 3. https://doi.org/10.15353/joci.v12i3.3279 williams, s. (2020). data action: using data for public good. the mit press. zhao, j., & moere, a. v. (2008). embodiment in data sculpture: a model of the physical visualization of information. proceedings of the 3rd international conference on digital interactive media in entertainment and arts, 343–350. https://doi.org/10.1145/1413634.1413696 https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951715594634 https://doi.org/10.7764/disena.21.article.2 https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci10090233 http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/1220 https://doi.org/10.15353/joci.v12i3.3279 https://doi.org/10.1145/1413634.1413696 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): ross, a. (2023, october). theorizing and analyzing the contingent casino. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. theorizing and analyzing the contingent casino alexander ross university of toronto introduction gambling games are composed of risk and contingency the gambler stakes their bet on the spin or a reel or a roulette wheel completely dependent on forces outside of their control, uncertain of the outcome. this potent combination is not only being used to fuel the nearly $500 billion usd global gambling industry, but also to organise the current app economy. digital platforms, their complementors, and their users are brought together by risk and contingency into a dynamic political economy, with the platform accruing the most advantage (poell et al., 2021). unpacking these unequal and sometimes precarious relations requires studying a “representative commodity” (kline et al., 2003). social casino apps, a niche, but still significant digital game commodity, embody how risk and contingency manifests in the app economy (nieborg & poell, 2018; zittrain, 2008). in particular, when other industries interface with digital platforms, they become subject to their institutional imperatives (gorwa, 2019). social casino apps are representative of how platforms have been able to influence and shape even niche genres of digital leisure, but also the constraints and resistance to these techniques. in this paper, as a political economist of communication, i conduct a structural and critical analysis of the social casino industry, using institutional analysis as my methodology. taking up an analysis of the social casino industry, an industry heavily defined by risk and contingency, offers a way of understanding how both forces are operationalized in the app economy. social casino apps are gambling games that users can download and play for free, with optional microtransactions for digital play money that can be used in familiar casino games like slots and poker. by being free-to-play and offering only ingame digital prizes, social casino apps are not regulated and taxed like other gambling products (albarrán-torres, 2018; paul, 2020). digital platforms have enabled a mutually constitutive and precarious relationship between games and gambling industries that have made risk, contingency, and speculation a central part of digital leisure. i refer to this phenomenon as the contingent casino. the contingent casino is the hybridization of games and gambling monetization and play, mediated by digital platforms. my theorisation and analysis of the contingent casino is undertaken as a way of better understanding the institutional frameworks of the app economy. this framework, as articulated by poell et al., 2021 is the relationship between platforms, complementors, and users. complementors are those firms that provide applications and cultural content that attract users to a platform. while complementors can benefit significantly from these platform relationships, as poell et al. (2021) it also contains great risk as “platforms selectively open their boundaries to complementors but do so under the economic and infrastructural conditions of their choosing” (p.36). as such, a complementor’s position is always contingent on a platform’s priorities. economic questions are not at the forefront in critical discussion of social casino apps. social casino apps are often discussed solely based on their role in facilitating the “gambling turn” in revenue for digital games (johnson & brock, 2020). by taking advantage of legal ambiguities and blending features of games and gambling, social casino developers have been able to carve out an almost $7 billion industry (clement, 2022). critical debates on social casino apps have tended to focus on their legality (rose, 2014), relationship to problem gambling (wohl et al., 2017) or youth exposure to gambling scenarios (delfabbro & king, 2023; gainsbury et al., 2017). more attention is needed on how social casino apps are connected to and mediated by digital platforms, and the larger implications this has for risk and contingency in the app economy. a tale of two firms to understand the larger implications of the contingent casino, i discuss the results of two case studies analysing two firms that have been a major part of the trajectory of the development of the social casino industry: israeli-based playtika and us-based doubledown interactive. a short historical narrative about both firms is necessary to establish the context of their growth. this belies the complexities of their relationships not just between playtika and doubledown interactive and their respective owners, but also their users and digital platform companies. in 2010, both playtika and doubledown interactive tapped into the burgeoning popularity of social games on facebook, and a mix of games industry and gambling industry expertise from their founders to begin selling free-to-play casino games on popular social networks (takahashi, 2012; tsipori, 2011). both firms had similar trajectories in terms of how they built and defined the social casino industry. playtika and doubledown interactive were quickly acquired by two different gambling firms within a year of their founding. playtika was acquired by caesars interactive entertainment, an online branch of the caesars casino chain and doubledown was acquired by international game technology (igt) (bishop, 2012; schechter, 2014). eventually both firms were sold to foreign publishers with investments in gaming playtika to a consortium of chinese companies; doubledown to a korean mobile firm called doubleu games (batchelor, 2019; takahashi, 2017). playtika and doubledown interactive eventually went public on the nasdaq in 2021, this has furnished ample material for critical political economic analysis. institutional analysis: a method to unpack the contingent casino to develop a critical, historical, and holistic analysis of the social casino industry, i use a methodology grounded in critical political economy: institutional analysis. this is a method that specifically studies the structural characteristics of a market. i applied this method to understand how risk and contingency manifest at the level of platform, complementor, and user, and this often manifests differently at each level. with both firms going public, they provided necessary documentary sources for understanding how complementors respond to critical issues like user control, monetization, acquisitions, content development, and positioning themselves in the larger app economy. these documentary sources included company prospectuses filed in 2020 and 2021 in their preparation to go public. my textual sources also included annual reports, quarterly reports, and investor calls made between 2020 and 2022. this was further contextualised by reading through interviews and articles in trade press publications that focus on the games and gambling industries that covered their founding, mergers and acquisitions, and public offerings between 2010 and 2021. what my institutional analysis of playtika and doubledown interactive reveals is deeply salient for understanding risk and contingency throughout the app economy. platforms operate like the “house” in the contingent casino, structuring the app stores and markets that enable and constrain social casino developers. when major firms in the gambling industries enter the app economy, they enter as just another “side” that favours platform holders in a “multi-sided market” (rochet & tirole, 2003; takagi, 2020). although playtika and doubledown interactive have specifically positioned themselves as revolutionary content companies, this position is constrained by their relationship to digital platforms. playtika and doubledown interactive pay hundreds of millions of dollars annually in platform fees for access to the distribution channels on facebook, google, and apple that make up 80 per cent of their revenue. despite the expense, losing these distribution channels would devastate their bottom line. going public amid the global covid-19 has also proved a significant challenge to both firms as they have had to report quarterly declines in their active user base compared to a significant bump in both users and revenue they received during the initial lockdowns. even as playtika and doubledown interactive mine user data and feedback to update, modify, and reposition their gambling games, they still must contend with the legal and technical constraints that come with being third-party complementors. references albarrán-torres, c. (2018). digital gambling: theorizing gamble-play media (1st ed.). routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203730690 batchelor, j. (2019, november 7). playtika considering ipo as chinese acquisition plans collapse. gamesindustry.biz. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-11-07playtika-considering-ipo-as-chinese-acquisition-plans-collapse bishop, t. (2012, january 12). gambling giant igt buying double down for $500m, moving into facebook games. geekwire. https://www.geekwire.com/2012/gamblinggiant-igt-buying-doubledown-500m-moving-facebook-games/ clement, j. (2022). social casino market size worldwide from 2014 to 2026. delfabbro, p., & king, d. (2023). the evolution of young gambling studies: digital convergence of gaming, gambling and cryptocurrency technologies. international gambling studies, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/14459795.2023.2171469 gainsbury, s. m., king, d. l., russell, a. m. t., delfabbro, p., & hing, n. (2017). virtual addictions: an examination of problematic social casino game use among at-risk gamblers. addictive behaviors, 64, 334–339. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2015.12.007 gorwa, r. (2019). what is platform governance? information, communication & society, 22(6), 854–871. johnson, m. r., & brock, t. (2020). the ‘gambling turn’ in digital game monetization. journal of gaming & virtual worlds, 12(2), 145–163. https://doi.org/10.1386/jgvw_00011_1 kline, s., dyer-witheford, n., & de peuter, g. (2003). digital play: the interaction of technology, culture, and marketing. mcgill-queen’s university press. nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society, 20(11), 4275–4292. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769694 paul, c. a. (2020). free-to-play: mobile video games, bias, and norms. poell, t., nieborg, d. b., & duffy, b. e. (2021). platforms and cultural production. rochet, j.-c., & tirole, j. (2003). platform competition in two-sided markets. journal of the european economic association, 1(4), 990–1029. rose, i. n. (2014). should social casino games be regulated? gaming law review and economics, 18(2), 134–137. https://doi.org/10.1089/glre.2014.1822 schechter, a. (2014, october 16). israeli social gaming power ready to make it in las vegas. haaretz. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/.premium-israeligaming-power-eyes-vegas-1.5316074 takagi, s. (2020). literature survey on the economic impact of digital platforms. international journal of economic policy studies, 14(2), 449–464. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42495-020-00043-0 takahashi, d. (2012, august 7). doubledown interactive succeeds by not sucking at social casino games (interview). venturebeat. https://venturebeat.com/games/doubledown-interactive-succeeds-by-not-sucking-atsocial-casino-games-interview/ takahashi, d. (2017, april 17). jackpot for igt: doubleu games buys its social casino game studio double down for $825 million. venturebeat. https://venturebeat.com/business/jackpot-for-igt-doubleu-games-buys-its-social-casinogame-studio-double-down-for-825-million/ tsipori, t. (2011, may 18). playtika’s young founders win big on casino acquisition; the online gaming company’s investors include former 888 ceo gigi levy and real estate developer igal ahouvi. globes. wohl, m. j. a., salmon, m. m., hollingshead, s. j., & kim, h. s. (2017). an examination of the relationship between social casino gaming and gambling: the bad, the ugly, and the good. journal of gambling issues, 35. https://doi.org/10.4309/jgi.2017.35.1 zittrain, j. (2008). the future of the internet and how to stop it. yale university press. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 iliadis, a. and acker, a. (2021, october). the seer and the seen: a survey of topics found in palantir patents. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the seer and the seen: a survey of topics found in palantir patents andrew iliadis temple university amelia acker university of texas at austin introduction palantir is one of the most secretive technology firms in the us. the company supplies information technology solutions to government agencies, humanitarian organizations, and corporations, focusing specifically on data integration and surveillance services. several qualitative studies have examined use of palantir’s products in field operations by police agencies through ethnography and legal case studies (brayne, 2020; ferguson, 2017) or have conducted critical and rhetorical analyses of palantir’s marketing, reports, and the public-facing associated literature describing palantir’s software products and services (munn, 2017; knight and gekker, 2020). to investigate palantir’s opaque technology practices, this paper presents findings from a computational topic modeling of a purposive sample (n=155) of palantir’s patents filed from 2006-2019 in the us, germany, australia, uk, and eu, along with a description of key patent topics and themes. this approach follows the spate of recent literature that uses patents as primary data for researching opaque information technology firms. in recent years, press reporting has covered palantir’s links to the us national security agency’s (nsa) surveillance operations through the edward snowden whistleblowing revelations, accused palantir of human rights violations “targeting parents and caregivers of unaccompanied migrant children” according to amnesty international, and reproached palantir’s unethical approaches to responsible corporate conduct. yet, palantir recently received a valuation totaling $20 billion usd and the number of academic studies about palantir’s organization and software can be counted on one hand. this article contributes to this scholarship by providing firsthand, primary source documentation of palantir’s surveillance platform, explaining how the company imagines and describes its technical capabilities. methods for this study, we scraped all palantir’s “ontology” patents (as of 08/25/20) from google patents. this produced a purposive sample (n=155) of palantir patents, consisting of 5197 pages, over 2.5 million words, and over 18.5 million characters. we then prepared the dataset for processing by stripping all the metadata and special features, converting formats, compressing, and collating the patents together. topic modeling was performed using a bag-of-words model and latent dirichlet allocation (lda). we collaboratively and iteratively reviewed the results and identified 20 topics that were modeled from the output containing 20 most frequent words related to each topic. we then developed 3 overarching themes that emerged from these 20 topics. findings some of the more interesting patents in our dataset include those with titles describing data integration, context-building processes, entity, property, and relationship identification, and threat detection. table 1 below is a small sample of patent titles extracted from our corpus. table 1. sample list of palantir ontology patent titles. along with titles, the corpus included metadata for patent id codes, assignee names, inventor’s names, priority dates, filing and creation dates, publication dates, result links, and representative figure links, among other common structured information found in technology patents. among the 155 patents only 51 have been granted, indicating that at the time of collection roughly a third of palantir’s ontology patents had been granted by the patent and trademark offices of their respective countries. this does not mean that a large majority of these patents will fail to become granted, as the longest observable time between priority date (first date) and grant date (final date) was 12 years, from 11/20/2006 to 8/28/2018, and many patents among the corpus were given priority dates only within the last few years. among the countries and regions in which the patents were filed, the breakdown was 31 from the european patent office, 4 from germany, 1 from australia, 1 from the uk, 1 from the netherlands, and 117 from the us, clearly showing that palantir files most of their ontology patents domestically. among proper names, we distilled platform companies’ names from the corpus. these included amazon, apple, facebook, google, instagram, linkedin, microsoft, and twitter. google and microsoft were mentioned much more overall than the other companies in the palantir patents, usually in the context of integrating data from the services that they offer. the data here shows that palantir envisions its products integrating data from the products and services of platforms. table 2 below shows the custom proper name keywords and most common proximal word frequencies. table 2. custom proper name keywords and most common proximal word frequencies. our main analysis object was the topic modeling, which included the topics, associated keywords for each topic, and our own manually chosen examples taken from the data in the form of excerpts. the two sets of topics, keywords, and examples are presented in tables 3 and 4. table 3. topic modeling for topics 1-10. table 4. topic modeling for topics 11-20. finding 1: labeling human traces and sorting actions the first thread (table 5) represents topics related to labeling human traces, sorting actions, and identifying normative flows of actions in information systems to flag fraud, alleged criminality, hacking, or unusual events. by labeling data with formal ontologies, knowledge of detection, prediction, and analysis can commence (i.e., beginnings of the data funnel). table 5. finding 1: labeling human traces and sorting actions. finding 2: leveraging ontologies, semantic data structures for integration it is in the second thread where we can see themes related to the development of schemas, graphs, and ontologies for data integration in service of network ties and the visualizing of objects and the relationships between them. the topics in this second theme represent a higher level of abstraction from topics in the first theme, and instead the focus here is on second order meaning that emerges from observing big data from several heterogenous sources. these trends rely on compilation, and meaningful assembly in volume of databases from different domains. at this scale, compelling evidence is found between these disparate domain entities, instead of labeling objects, events, and actions. table 6. finding 2: leveraging ontologies, semantic data structures for integration. finding 3: data work, interpretation, processing for management, analytics, prediction the last strand of topics (table 7) reveals the software as a service items that palantir provides to its customers, that is, the ability to make meaningful representations out of the information that users receive in the form of dashboards, visualizations, interfaces, documentation, communication, etc. these topics focus on how palantir allows its users to manage data at scale using informative client or server-side systems to support prediction and decision analytics. actionable items occur at this end stage of the data funnel, provided by data that have been semantically baked through the data work, interpretation, and processing for management, analytics, and prediction that occurs in palantir’s platform ecosystem that supports knowledge workers and data professionals. table 7. finding 3: data work, interpretation, processing for management, analytics, prediction. references brayne s (2020) predict and surveil: data, discretion, and the future of policing. oxford: oxford university press. ferguson ag (2017) the rise of big data policing: surveillance, race, and the future of law enforcement. new york university press. knight e and gekker a (2020) mapping interfacial regimes of control: palantir’s icm in america’s post-9/11 security technology infrastructures. surveillance and society 18(2): 231–243. munn l (2017) seeing with software: palantir and the regulation of life. studies in control societies 2(1): 1–16. microsoft word cuillier-open pedagogy-open pedagogy.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 casey (cuillier), c., & daly, d. (2021, october). open pedagogy: independence and interdependence in teaching about new media. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. open pedagogy: independence and interdependence in teaching about new media cheryl (cuillier) casey university of arizona diana daly university of arizona open culture involves creation and sharing practices that sidestep proprietary entanglements of traditional media. this research supports consideration of open pedagogy as an inroad toward shared media independence and interdependence. it suggests that when educators adopt open pedagogy, students engage in deeper, more active, and more personalized learning. in this study, students were asked to compare their experiences creating content for a course’s open textbook to previous learning activities. analysis shows that most students found the open pedagogy project highly rewarding and engaging, and a source of connection and community. context consensus is lacking on a precise definition of “open pedagogy” (derosa & jhangiani, 2017; hegarty, 2015; hilton et al., 2019; schuwer et al., 2017; wiley & hilton, 2018). we defined open pedagogy as “involving students in the creation of openly licensed materials” (university of arizona, 2021). open licenses enable works to be freely used, built upon, and reshared. research on open pedagogy is growing, although studies of student experiences with open pedagogy are limited (baran & alzoubi, 2020; hilton et al., 2019; hollister, 2020). faculty interest in open pedagogy has been increasing at the university of arizona (uarizona) since it implemented the pressbooks platform, which facilitates both collaborative and independent publishing. instructor and co-author daly led the first large open pedagogy project using pressbooks at uarizona. her students created content for the interactive humans r social media (hrsm) textbook, including multimodal projects about their experiences with technologies (daly, 2021). to give students agency, daly offered the default option of a creative commons attribution (cc by) license for their contributions, a more restrictive license, or keeping all rights reserved. most students (72.6%) chose cc by. the transparency given to licensing in this course offered stark contrast to and independence from social media platforms with their opaque terms of service. by introducing students to copyright basics and their rights as authors, students felt more empowered. they were asked to envision the media they produced as independent of the “class project” context. students also practiced interdependence among creators. for media they created, students incorporated music that artists had openly licensed or contributed to the public domain. method this research built upon an exploratory study by hilton et al. (2019). co-author casey collected quantitative and qualitative data in fall 2020 through an anonymized survey (n=85) asking students about their experiences with hrsm. dedoose software was used for thematic analysis through iterative, inductive coding of open-ended survey responses. a chi-square test was used to demonstrate that student responses to quantitative questions were not randomly distributed. this study explored: 1. whether students prefer this type of open pedagogy project to traditional learning activities (e.g., writing papers, taking quizzes). 2. how students perceived that participating in hrsm impacted learning outcomes. findings & implications in all learning outcome categories, students more frequently rated learning with open pedagogy “better” than “worse.” table 1 shows that 65.9% of students said the hrsm project had greater educational value than traditional learning activities. most students (54.1%) also reported that hrsm helped them master more core academic content, and 51.8% said it helped them become more collaborative learners. depending on the question, 2.4%–8.2% found the learning outcomes worse with open pedagogy. learning outcome better with open pedagogy same with open pedagogy worse with open pedagogy educational value 56 (65.9%) 23 (27%) 6 (7.1%) mastering core academic content 46 (54.1%) 33 (38.8%) 6 (7.1%) collaborative learning 44 (51.8%) 34 (40%) 7 (8.2%) critical thinking and complex problem solving 33 (38.8%) 49 (57.7%) 3 (3.5%) effective communication 33 (38.8%) 50 (58.8%) 2 (2.4%) effective learning 32 (37.6%) 51 (60%) 2 (2.4%) table 1. student perceptions of differences in learning outcomes with open pedagogy (participating in the hrsm project) compared with traditional learning activities. when asked why the educational value of participating in the course’s hrsm project was better than with traditional learning activities, students most frequently said it was because the project and course were “interactive,” “hands-on,” “engaging,” “enjoyable,” and “relevant.” one student wrote that “it really challenged me to apply my learning.” multiple students said the project led to better, deeper understanding of the subject and built skills they could use in the future. a common theme expressed by students was appreciation of autonomy in the project, including independence and ownership of their learning. one said the open pedagogy project “gives students the ability to be creative in their own way.” the students who rated the outcomes of the course’s hrsm project worse than traditional learning activities cited technical difficulties, confusion or stress about the assignments, or a preference for traditional activities over project-based learning. when asked to imagine a future required course, 43 students (50.6%) said they would enroll in the section with activities like hrsm; 30 students (35.3%) expressed no preference; and 12 students (14.1%) said they would prefer traditional learning activities. one student described the open pedagogy project as “more freeing but equally as challenging.” in an age of online learning and engagement, this open pedagogy project afforded students a larger collaborative opportunity. responses indicate hrsm's focus on agency and choice enabled students to share their individuality and creativity. “it made us feel like our opinions and our voices were heard and appreciated for the first time,” one wrote. some students described the project as a safe space to express themselves. others valued knowing that their work could be shared beyond the classroom. “i like how it puts student voices out in the world,” one wrote. another said that publishing “gave me more incentive to make sure my assignments were my best product.” overall, these survey results support the value of open pedagogy, while identifying opportunities for deeper research (e.g., cross-analyzing student learning assessments) and refinement of the survey design (e.g., addressing possible respondent fatigue). conclusion this study tentatively reinforces the benefits of open pedagogy as independent, handson learning as well as collaborative interdependence in an online environment. the active nature of open pedagogy holds rich possibilities for cultivating participatory learning activities and involving students in the creation of knowledge as they learn. references baran, e., & alzoubi, d. (2020). affordances, challenges, and impact of open pedagogy: examining students’ voices. distance education, 41(2), 230–244. https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2020.1757409 daly, d. (2021). humans r social media (open textbook edition). the university of arizona. https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/hrsm derosa, r., & jhangiani, r. s. (2017). open pedagogy. in l. mays (ed.), a guide to making open textbooks with students. rebus foundation. https://press.rebus.community/makingopentextbookswithstudents/chapter/openpedagogy hegarty, b. (2015). attributes of open pedagogy: a model for using open educational resources. educational technology, 55(4), 3–13. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44430383 hilton, j., iii, wiley, d., chaffee, r., darrow, j., guilmett, j., harper, s., & hilton, b. (2019). student perceptions of open pedagogy: an exploratory study. open praxis, 11(3), 275–288. http://dx.doi.org/10.5944/openpraxis.11.3.973 hollister, c. (2020). using open pedagogy to engage lis students: a case study. journal of librarianship and scholarly communication, 8(1), ep2357. http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2357 schuwer, r., bali, m., green, a. g., wiley, d., jhangiani, r., ross, h. m., & ritter, d. (2017). april open perspective: what is open pedagogy? year of open. https://www.yearofopen.org/april-open-perspective-what-is-open-pedagogy university of arizona. (2021). open pedagogy. ua open textbooks. https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/open-pedagogy wiley, d., & hilton, j. (2018). defining oer-enabled pedagogy. international review of research in open and distance learning, 19(4). http://dx.doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v19i4.3601 aoir2023-submission-template.docx selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 big ai: the cloud as marketplace and infrastructure fernando van der vlist university of amsterdam anne helmond utrecht university fabian ferrari utrecht university cloud infrastructure platforms underpin most of today’s internet and web-based services. in fact, they are seen as “where the internet lives” (holt and vonderau, 2015). amazon’s web services (aws) in particular manifests as the dominant operating system of the internet with a third (34%) of all cloud services running on it, followed by microsoft azure (21%), google cloud (11%), and alibaba (5%) (statista, 2022). moreover, these cloud service and product offerings also represent an important source of revenue for big tech companies. while most of the current hype around (“generative”) ai is focused on specific products and firms like openai (chatgpt, dall·e 2) and stability ai (stable diffusion), they would not have been possible without the significant infrastructural support and investments from big tech companies. in the past years, big tech has engaged in various multi-year partnerships and billion-dollar investments in ai initiatives and companies, especially microsoft (openai), amazon (stability ai, hugging face), and google (cohereai, deepmind, anthropic). in these arrangements, big tech typically functions as an exclusive or “preferred” cloud infrastructure provider or “cloud partner” (financial times, 2023). these strategic alliances between ai companies and cloud partners are further cementing big tech’s central role as key infrastructure provider, which also raises potential concerns around (fair) competition in the booming ai economy. the political economy of ai this paper critically examines what we call big ai, or those types and deployments of ai that simply would not be feasible or even possible without the infrastructural support, suggested citation (apa): van der vlist, f., helmond, a., & ferrari, f. (2023, october). big ai: the cloud as marketplace and infrastructure. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. partnerships, or investments provided by big tech companies. to account for this, we propose a broad understanding of “ai” to articulate the key components and how they are connected. specifically, we explain that ai involves the distinct convergence of models, applications (tools, products, and services), and the various infrastructural layers of software and hardware components that are in place for “ai” to work in the first place. ultimately, the phenomenon of “ai” concerns how these different key components—models, applications, and infrastructure—are brought together to enable ai solutions in specific settings. this research provides the basis for a better understanding of the critical political economy of (big) ai. our contribution is situated in relation to the existing literature on the political economy of ai, machine learning, and large technical systems (ferrari and mckelvey, 2022; luitse and denkena, 2021; rieder, 2022). here, the deep integrations between hardware and software components of these systems, as well as the dependence of external software developers on big tech’s hardware have been understood to further cement big tech’s role as an infrastructure provider in the digital economy (e.g. narayan, 2023; rieder, 2022). the integration or embedding of ai in other (existing) systems and products similarly reflects the infrastructuralisation of this technology (cf. burkhardt, 2020; dyer-whiteford et al., 2019; mackenzie, 2023; plantin et al., 2016), and invites us to consider big tech’s role in facilitating the deep integration of ai in various cultural and economic sectors of society (cf. van dijck et al., 2018). “following” big ai the paper studies big ai as an emerging phenomenon that is still, in many ways, under development. by focusing on products and service offerings, third-party applications, and models, we gain a more comprehensive understanding of what big ai is, or looks like today, and what it may become in the years to come—for which the infrastructure is being made right now (cf. burkhardt, 2020; egliston and carter, 2022; helmond et al., 2019). this enables a better understanding of the ongoing social processes of the infrastructuralisation and commodification of “ai” as a distinct technology “stack”, as a type of infrastructure, as a category of novel tools, products, services, and as a development culture. because the phenomenon of “ai” is so difficult to define and demarcate a priori, we instead propose “following” the actors (big tech) themselves, as lead firms of this emerging technology, to learn how they understand ai. in doing so, we make a distinction between the cloud platform products and service offerings from big tech (i.e. the cloud as an infrastructure for ai) and big tech as the host or provider of marketplaces for diverse (ai-based) products and services from third-party businesses and developers (i.e. the cloud as a marketplace for ai). in both cases, we argue that big tech plays a vital role in “convening” businesses and developers to build, capture, and ultimately “sell” ai (egliston and carter, 2022: 13–14). “following” these actors and their various offerings for businesses and developers, we learn how ai is connected to cloud platforms and infrastructure services, together constituting the big ai cloud ecosystem, and how this is in turn connected to application domains like health care. this type of approach draws from the sts literature on “following” actors and technical objects, and by methodologies from economic geography on following the journeys of commodities (cook et al., 2006), even if we do not focus on tangible commodities per se. to begin with, we explored the relation between big tech’s cloud platforms and ai based on the various products and services offerings from amazon, microsoft, and google using their respective developer-facing product information pages. based on this information, we then analysed how these were related to business-facing ai tools, products, and services (how/where is ai situated or used within those offerings?). next, we explored the contents of several cloud platform marketplaces (amazon’s aws marketplace, google’s cloud platform marketplace, and microsoft’s azure marketplace), which list thousands of integrations and applications from third parties, including on “ai”. this provides us with a better understanding of the marketisation and commodification of ai, and which actors are involved. the “trickle-down” power of big ai overall, we find that big tech’s cloud platforms simultaneously act as infrastructure for ai and as marketplaces for ai. in this regard, our findings echo weigel’s (2023) analysis of “amazon’s trickle-down monopoly”, whereby the digital behemoth consolidates its unprecedented market power by exerting control over small business owners that act as third-party sellers on its marketplace. although specific ai tools offered on big tech marketplace—including pre-trained models and data labelling offerings—are in high demand to streamline the production of ai, they remain hidden from public scrutiny. unlike weigel’s study, however, there is also another side to this “trickle-down” power: big tech provides computing resources and infrastructure without which the ai solutions and integrations distributed on such proprietary marketplaces could not be deployed. big ai is not just “big” because of this infrastructural dependence, but also because it provides marketplaces for the commodification of ai solutions. this gives big tech a unique form of corporate power that is “all-encompassing, shaping current and future markets” (gerbrandy and phoa, 2022: 176; van der vlist, 2022). references burkhardt, m. (2020). mapping the democratization of ai on github: a first approach. in mapping the democratization of ai on github: a first approach (pp. 209–222). transcript verlag. doi: 10.1515/9783839447192-013. cook, i., et al. (2006). geographies of food: following. progress in human geography, 30(5), 655–666. doi: 10.1177/0309132506070183. dyer-witheford, n., kjøsen, a. m., & steinhoff, j., (2019). inhuman power: artificial intelligence and the future of capitalism. pluto press. egliston, b., & carter, m. (2022). ‘the metaverse and how we’ll build it’: the political economy of meta’s reality labs. new media & society, 0(0). doi: 10.1177/14614448221119785 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839447192-013 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132506070183 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221119785 ferrari, f., & mckelvey, f. (2022). hyperproduction: a social theory of deep generative models. distinktion: journal of social theory, 0(0). doi: 10.1080/1600910x.2022.2137546. financial times (2023). big tech companies use cloud computing arms to pursue alliances with ai groups. ars technica, february 6. available at: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/big-tech-companies-use-cloud-computing-a rms-to-pursue-alliances-with-ai-groups/. gerbrandy, a., & phoa, p. (2022). the power of big tech corporations as modern bigness and a vocabulary for shaping competition law as counter-power. in wealth and power (pp. 166–185). routledge. helmond, a., nieborg, d. b., & van der vlist, f. n. (2019). facebook’s evolution: development of a platform-as-infrastructure. internet histories, 3(2), 123–146. doi: 10.1080/24701475.2019.1593667. holt, j., & vonderau, p. (2015). “where the internet lives”: data centers as cloud infrastructure. in l. parks & n. starosielski (eds.), signal traffic: critical studies of media infrastructures (p. 71–93). university of illinois press. luitse, d., & denkena, w. (2021). the great transformer: examining the role of large language models in the political economy of ai. big data & society, 8(2). doi: 10.1177/20539517211047734. mackenzie, a. (2023). ‘this is a house’: large image collections and their platform embeddings. convergence, 29(1), 169–182. doi: 10.1177/13548565211052041 narayan, d. (2023). monopolization and competition under platform capitalism: analyzing transformations in the computing industry. new media & society, 25(2), 287–306. doi: 10.1177/14614448221149939. plantin, j.-c., lagoze, c., edwards, p. n., & sandvig, c. (2016). infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook. new media & society, 20(1), 293–310. doi: 10.1177/1461444816661553. rieder, b. (2022). towards a political economy of technical systems: the case of google. big data & society, 9(2). doi: 10.1177/20539517221135162 statista. (2022). infographic: amazon, microsoft & google dominate cloud market. statista infographics, december 23. available at: https://www.statista.com/chart/18819/worldwide-market-share-of-leading-cloud-infrastru cture-service-providers van der vlist, f. n. (2022). the platform as ecosystem: configurations and dynamics of governance and power [dissertation]. utrecht university. doi: 10.33540/1284. https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2022.2137546 https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/big-tech-companies-use-cloud-computing-arms-to-pursue-alliances-with-ai-groups/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/big-tech-companies-use-cloud-computing-arms-to-pursue-alliances-with-ai-groups/ https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2019.1593667 https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211047734 https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565211052041 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221149939 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553 https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517221135162 https://www.statista.com/chart/18819/worldwide-market-share-of-leading-cloud-infrastructure-service-providers https://www.statista.com/chart/18819/worldwide-market-share-of-leading-cloud-infrastructure-service-providers https://doi.org/10.33540/1284 van dijck, j., poell, t., & de waal, m. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford university press. doi: 10.1093/oso/9780190889760.001.0001. weigel, m. (2023). amazon’s trickle-down monopoly. data & society, january 25. available at: https://datasociety.net/library/amazons-trickle-down-monopoly/. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190889760.001.0001 https://datasociety.net/library/amazons-trickle-down-monopoly/ selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): guerra, a. (2024, october). visualizing 10 thousand cities? uber’s data stories on knowing urban space. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. visualizing 10 thousand cities? uber's data stories on knowing urban space abel guerra london school of economics and political science in 2020, uber celebrated its global scaling by highlighting its granularity. more than simply entering 70 countries, the platform announced: "we’re excited as ever to deliver on our vision in the over 10,000 communities [cities] we are in" (uber, 2020). to “deliver a vision” based on the algorithmic management of labour and territories, the platform creates visions of these diverse cities and communities it makes them visible and intelligible by investing on a unified vision, ready to be algorithmically processed, anticipated and managed. such is the role of h3, a now open-sourced hierarchical hexagonal grid system for indexing geospatial data, cleaning up the messiness of cities by datafying them. while workers on the ground precariously move across territories, uber’s engineering teams invest in abstract and disembodied views of the city. taking uber’s knowledge production about cities as an object of inquiry, this paper explores the epistemic dimensions of platformisation, delving into platforms technical and narrative reliance on datafication as they position themselves as relevant epistemic actors. besides its own team of experts, uber enrols a wider community of practitioners through open-sourced software, apis, and databases, as exemplified by h3 and deck.gl, a framework for geospatial data visualisation. in this paper, i delve into uber engineering blog1 (ueb) to explore uber’s positioning within a wider spatial knowledge infrastructure (edwards, 2010; plantin, 2018) in articulation with techno-corporate discourses, focusing on the platform’s data narratives about knowing urban space. following dourish and gómez cruz (2018) propositions on narrating data and narrating with data, i use data narratives to refer to processes “by which data is found to be meaningful” (p.5), attending to metaphors, tropes and conventions at work, as well as patterns of interpretation that may be indicative of epistemic orders imposed into urban space and those inhabiting it. considering this, i ask: what stories about urban space are told by uber and its engineers with and through data? how do these stories make data itself meaningful? what counts as knowledge and who counts as a knowing subject? methods and data similarly to other tech companies' engineering blogs, ueb compiles a series of publications authored by uber’s data and engineering experts and interviews with said experts. ueb combines the community appeal and the chronological organisation of early practitioners’ software engineering blogs (rainer & williams, 2019; pagano & maleej, 2013) to a pr move towards ideals of transparency and public interest. as such, it works as a “performed backstage” (gillespie 2014; hilgartner, 2000) that allows the public to peak behind the curtains of its technological developments and research culture. it is also a venue for the dissemination of apis and open-sourced initiatives with a collection of external links to github repositories and use cases. the driving community ethos, often summarised in a gesture of “giving back” to the community, is central to an understanding as to who is addressed as a knowing subjects with shared interests, meanings, practices – industry, researchers, independent developers, and amateur enthusiasts. this combination of a technical and corporate discourse makes ueb a rich source to explore some of the narratives and imaginaries that permeate uber’s knowledge production vis-à-vis its business strategies, as well as the epistemological assumptions inscribed in it. for this study, i manually collected 105 blog posts from ueb, screened them in detail according to their stance towards the production of knowledge about urban space. 41 selected posts, from august 2015 to october 2022, were analysed through inductive coding and situational analysis (clarke, 2005). discussion while ueb brings together a series of stories told with and through data about urban space and knowing urban space, these are also stories of and about data. they narrate how data comes to be and for what purposes, what data can do and what they make possible. 1 previously eng.uber.com, now accessible via uber.com/en-gb/blog/engineering/ https://www.uber.com/en-gb/blog/engineering/ the overarching narratives of data and urban space found in ueb echo well-known promises and assumptions of datafication and dataism (van djick, 2014), deriving authority from the transformation of urban spaces into simplified and decontextualized metrics (bowker & star, 1999; espeland & sauder, 2007). through large volumes of fine-grained data and machine learning models, uber would be able to know, manage and anticipate a vastitude of territories and practices. imposing an epistemic order into “the real world” is a pre-condition to make space algorithmically measurable, calculable, predictable. h3 is central in these regards: by partitioning the globe into multi-resolution hexagons (ueb, 2018), it allows for the transposition of transposing a “messy geographic space” into a “neat and clean mathematic space” (ueb,2019b). these reflect the ideal of objective, disembodied knowledge, a view from nowhere haraway (1988) calls god-trick. in a more focused analysis, ueb publications also provide an entry point to more circumscribed narratives and imagined interlocutors. the blog speaks to and of different types of data-publics. in its timeline, there seems to be a move from internal interoperability (how different teams interact and work on similar data structures) to external publics such as other tech companies, external developers, and urban planners. as different external publics, or users, are enrolled, a discursive drive towards accessibility and usability for people with different levels of experience and technical knowledge becomes more evident. data visualization plays a central role as both rhetorical and epistemic devices (mackenzie, 2015), being central to the interpretation of large amounts of multidimensional data and in the validation of knowledge produced. in the case of uber, there is an explicit aesthetic concern with public-facing data and data-storytelling (ueb,2016). deck.gl and keplr.gl are central characters: not only are they foregrounded as key innovations and disseminated for external use, but they are also instruments to “create beautiful visualization”, which do the work of providing a sense of objectivity and the promise of exciting insights (kennedy et al., 2016). collage of examples data-visualizations and machine-oriented representations of the city retrieved from ueb uber’s mission to make the “physical” world readable and intelligible is also very clearly articulated in relation to various algorithmic systems, aimed at, for example, anticipating patterns of supply and demand and triggering surge pricing (brodsky, 2018). among different human and non-human gazes addressed in these data narratives, self-driving vehicles (sdvs) often take the centre-stage being portrayed as complex, cognisant entities, knowing subjects in their own right. their machinic visions are critical both because data and data visualisations are catered to them and because they themselves produce data. they also introduce a shift from the predominantly bird-eye visualisations of urban space to a ground-level view into “a city full of data” (ueb,2019c). notably absent in this community of algorithms, sdvs, engineers, developers and enthusiasts are those whose highly precarised labour is in the basis of uber’s business model and data production: platform workers moving around diverse territories in cars, motorcycles and bikes. whereas sdvs are assigned the capacities of “seeing”, “perceiving”, “understanding” and “predicting”, workers are abstracted and instrumentalised into the least-significant half of variables – “driver-location”, driverbehaviour” – functioning as data points or sensors feeding inputs into uber’s data pipeline. in a way, ueb’s data stories echo uber own patterns of exploitation and failure to respond to workers demands or attend to their needs workers are sites of silence in a map made by privileged knowers. references dourish, p., & gómez cruz, e. (2018). datafication and data fiction: narrating data and narrating with data. big data & society, 5(2). doi.org/10.1177/2053951718784083 bowker, g.c. & star, s.l. (1999) sorting things out: classification and its consequences. cambridge, ma, usa: mit press (inside technology). clarke, a.. ( 2005). situational analysis: grounded theory after the postmodern turn. thousand oaks, ca: sage. espeland, w.n. & sauder, m. (2007) ‘rankings and reactivity: how public measures recreate social worlds’, american journal of sociology, 113(1), pp. 1–40. doi:10.1086/517897. edwards, p.n. (2010) a vast machine: computer models, climate data, and the politics of global warming. cambridge, mass: mit press kennedy h., hill r.l., aiello g., & allen, w. (2016) the work that visualisation conventions do. information, communication & society 19(6): 715–735. gillespie, t. (2014) the relevance of algorithms, in gillespie,t; boczkowski, pt & foot, ka (eds.) media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society (pp. 167–193) cambridge: mit press. haraway, d. (1988) ‘situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective’, feminist studies, 14(3), pp. 575–599. doi:10.2307/3178066. hilgartner, s. (2000) science on stage: expert advice as public drama, stanford, ca: stanford university press mackenzie, a. (2015) ‘the production of prediction: what does machine learning want?’, european journal of cultural studies, 18(4–5), pp. 429–445. doi:10.1177/1367549415577384. mejias, u.a. & couldry, n. (2019) ‘datafication’, internet policy review, 8(4). doi:10.14763/2019.4.1428. pagano, d., maalej, w. how do open source communities blog?. empir software eng 18, 1090–1124 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-012-9211-2 plantin, j.-c. (2018) ‘digital traces in context| google maps as cartographic infrastructure: from participatory mapmaking to database maintenance’, international journal of communication, 12(0), p. 18. poell, t., nieborg, d. & van dijck, j. (2019) ‘platformisation’, internet policy review, 8(4). doi: 10.14763/2019.4.1425 https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718784083 rainer, a. & williams, a (2019). using blog-like documents to investigate software practice: benefits, challenges, and research directions. journal of software: evolution and process. doi.org/10.1002/smr.2197 van dijck, j. (2014). datafication, dataism and dataveillance: big data between scientific paradigm and ideology. surveillance & society, 12(2), 197-208. ueb (2016) from beautiful maps to actionable insights: introducing kepler.gl, uber’s open source geospatial toolbox. uber engineering blog. available at https://www.uber.com/en-gb/blog/keplergl/ ueb (2018) h3: uber’s hexagonal hierarchical spatial index. uber engineering blog. available at: https://eng.uber.com/h3/ ueb (2019a) introducing avs, an open standard for autonomous vehicle visualization from uber. available at: https://www.uber.com/en-gb/blog/avs-autonomous-vehiclevisualization/ ueb (2019b) [uber open source] engineering sub-city geos for a hyper-local marketplace with uber. uber engineering blog youtube channel available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdukeuknlkq ueb (2019c) power on: accelerating uber’s self-driving vehicle development with data. uber engineering blog. available at: https://www.uber.com/engb/blog/accelerating-self-driving-vehicle-development-with-data/ https://doi.org/10.1002/smr.2197 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): spaggiari, c., gemini, l., brilli, s., (2024, october). generic war imaginaries: ai-generated images of the israel-gaza conflict in the adobe stock controversy. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. generic war imaginaries: ai-generated images of the israel-gaza conflict in the adobe stock controversy chiara spaggiari university of urbino carlo bo laura gemini university of urbino carlo bo stefano brilli university of urbino carlo bo introduction this paper explores the evolving documentality of ai-generated images and their role in the industrial production of war imaginaries. the focus of our analysis is the paradigmatic case of adobe stock selling photorealistic ai-generated images depicting the israel-gaza conflict. following the outbreak of the war in gaza on october 7, 2023, adobe stock began hosting ai-generated images created by users that represented the conflict. these images, available for paid download, were used in both online and print media. a public debate arose when news outlets published these images, triggering criticism over the lack of proper disclosure regarding their ai origins. our research question is therefore: whether and how ai-generated images are used to document specific war event as the war in gaza? theoretical background this study examines the concept of documentality, a quality traditionally associated with photography for its ability to offer referential and indexical representations. this has been particularly significant within the informational system, where images serve as evidence and testimony in the representation of news and events (becker 1995; coleman 1998). scholars have explored how documentary images within photojournalism and photography are historically shaped by the codes of the information system, which rely on agreements, practices, and assumptions shared between photographers and news organizations (schwarz 2003; carlson 2009; wahl-jorgensen & carlson 2021). however, the rise of ai-generated images, including those associated with fake news and deepfakes, has intensified debates over the authenticity and reliability of photographic objects, challenging the stability of documentary codes (lister 2013; lehmuskallio et al. 2019; thomson, ryan & matich 2024). this shift aligns with broader theoretical discussions within media studies regarding the “crisis of photography.” this crisis, amplified by the algorithmic turn (uricchio 2011), has been identified as part of the post-photographic turn (dewdney 2021; zylinska 2022; grazioli 2024; mcquire et al. 2024). generative visual media (arielli & manovich 2023) have pushed these discussions to their limits, particularly questioning the indexicality of photography and its ability to represent dramatic events, such as in war photojournalism. in addition, generative visual media intertwine with the processes of datafication and platformization of images (anderson 2017; taffel 2021), serving the visual content industry’s needs. stock agencies, as key players in this industry, leverage digital technologies to meet demands for generic aesthetics and cost-effective image production, increasingly shaping contemporary visual culture and news illustration practices (blaschke 2014, 2019; szendy 2020; thurlow et al. 2020; aiello et al. 2023). methodology a key challenge of this study was to avoid treating documentality as an inherent property of an image. instead, we conceptualize it as a category shaped by multiple actors. to this end, we adopted gillian rose’s (2016) framework, analyzing images through four sites where meaning is constructed: • production site: we examined how adobe stock and other platforms (istock, shutterstock, unsplash, pixabay, pexels, 123rf, alamy) label and regulate aigenerated images. this included analyzing policies, classification systems, and rules for indexing and uploading content. • audiencing site: in the first phase, we collected 57 articles from google news in february 2024 related to the adobe controversy. using a qualitative content analysis and a reference codebook, we examined these texts. in the second phase, we are conducting interviews with 15 qualified experts, including photo editors, photojournalists, and documentary photographers, to assess the documentary potential of ai-generated images. • circulation site: we conducted a framing analysis of all online occurrences (97) of six “widely shared” images, as identified in news coverage of the controversy, using google serp and lens apis. • image site: a computational analysis was performed on the rgb spectra of 762 most downloaded images from adobe stock, collected in october 2024. this aimed to detect technical and formal continuities or distinctions between photographic and ai-generated images. preliminary results initial findings reveal significant ambiguities in the documentality of photorealistic aigenerated images depicting specific events. these insights are organized by site: • production site: adobe stock does not classify ai-generated images separately. instead, they are included under “photos” or “illustrations” based on visual resemblance to photographic norms. contributors must label ai-generated images and ensure that depicted people or properties are fictional unless they provide signed releases. references to real events are prohibited in titles but allowed in keywords, enabling subtle connections to actual events. adobe’s approach contrasts with stricter policies on other platforms and aligns with its focus on photo-editing tools. • audiencing site: the controversy revolved around the use of ai-generated images without clear labeling, raising concerns about misinformation. adobe faced criticism for transparency issues but highlighted its role in the content authenticity initiative, a cross-industry effort to verify digital media provenance. while some criticized adobe’s policies as ethical failings, others viewed them as necessary for market competitiveness, emphasizing shared responsibility for image regulation. • circulation site: the six “widely shared” ai-generated images circulated mostly in articles criticizing their use. in the other articles, they were often accompanied by captions referencing general war and destruction rather than specific events, with their ai origin rarely disclosed. these images functioned more as illustrative elements than as documentary evidence, consistent with stock photo conventions. • image site: computational analysis, dividing the dataset into 10 clusters, revealed no clear separation between photographic and ai-generated images. however, ai-generated images tended to appear in clusters with darker color tones, suggesting a preference for dramatic, painterly effects rather than adherence to natural light. conclusion ai-generated images occupy an intermediate space between their potential to document specific events (as observed in the production site and from the information system) and their tendency toward generic, fictionalized representations, even in dramatic contexts (as seen in the circulation site and the images themselves). future research will focus on analyzing the circulation patterns of the 762 images from adobe stock, using google serp api to observe their contextualization as documentary or illustrative content. additionally, for the image site, we will further investigate the aesthetic and iconographic continuities between this photographic and photorealistic ai-generated images to assess whether the latter develop distinct visual characteristics. references aiello, g., thurlow, c., portmann, l., (2023), desocializing social media: the visual and media ideologies of stock photography, in social media + society, january-march: 1–14. anderson, steve f. (2017), technologies of vision: the war between data and images. cambridge, ma: the mit press. anything else?). in j. zylinska (ed.), the future of media (pp. 315-332). london: goldsmiths press. arielli, t., manovich, l., (2023), artificial aesthetics: generative ai, art, and visual media, manovich.net. becker, s. h. (1995). visual sociology, documentary photography, and photojournalism: it’s (almost) all a matter of context. in j. prosser (ed.), image-based research: a sourcebook for qualitative researchers (pp. 74-85). routledge. blaschke, e., (2019), from microform to the drawing bot: the photographic image as data, in grey room 75, spring 2019, pp. 60–83 blashcke, e., (2014), making history a slightly profitable thing”: the bettmann archive and the commodification of images, visual resources: an international journal of documentation, 30:3, 222-238 boccia artieri, g., & gemini, l. (2019). mass media and the web in the light of luhmann’s media system. current sociology, 67(4), 563-578. carlson, m. (2009). the reality of a fake image news norms, photojournalistic craft, and brian walski’s fabricated photograph. journalism practice, 3(2), 125–139. coleman, a. d. (1998). depth of field: essays on photography, lens culture, and mass media. university of new mexico press. dewdney, a. (2021). forget photography. goldsmiths press. frosh, p. (2020). is commercial photography a public evil? beyond the critique of stock photography. in photography and its publics (pp. 187–206). bloomsbury. frosh, p., (2003), the image factory: consumer culture, photography and the visual content industry. berg. frosh, p., (2008), “stock photography” in the international encyclopedia of communication, john wiley & sons. grazioli, e. (2024). dimensioni. in b. grespi & f. villa (eds.), il postfotografico. dal selfie alla fotogrammetria digitale (pp. 87-98). einaudi, torino. lehmuskallio, a., häkkinen, j., seppänen, j., (2018), photorealistic computergenerated images are difficult to distinguish from digital photographs: a case study with professional photographers and photo-editors, in visual communication, vol. 0(0) 1–25. lister, m., (2013), the photographic image in digital culture. london: routledge. mackenzie, a., munster, a., (2019), platform seeing: image ensembles and their invisualities, in theory, culture & society, vol. 36(5), 3–22. mcquire, s., pfefferkorn, j., sunde, e. k., lury, c., & palmer, d. (2024). seeing photographically. media theory, 8(1), 01-18. rettberg, j., (2023), machine vision: how algorithms are changing the way we see the world, polity press. rose, g., (2016), visual methodologies, sage. schwartz, d., (2003), professional oversight: policing the credibility of photojournalism, in image ethics in the digital age, university of minnesota press, pp 27-52 szendy, p., (2019), the supermarket of the visible. toward a general economy of images, fordham university press taffel, s., (2020), google’s lens: computational photography and platform capitalism, in media, culture & society 2021, vol. 43(2) 237–255 thurlow, c., aiello, g., & portmann, l. (2020). visualizing teens and technology: a social semiotic analysis of stock photography and news media imagery. new media & society, 22(3), 528–549. uricchio, w. (2012). the algorithmic turn: photosynth, augmented reality and the changing implications of the image. in g. bolin (ed.), cultural technologies: the shaping of culture in media and society (pp. 19-35). routledge. wahl-jorgensen, k., & carlson, m. (2021). conjecturing fearful futures: journalistic discourses on deepfakes. journalism practice, 15(6), 803-820. zelizer, b., (2010), about to die: how news images move the public, oxford university press zucconi, f., (2018), displacing caravaggio: art, media, and humanitarian visual culture, palgrave macmillan. zylinska, j. (2022). the future of photography. does photography have a future? (does selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): nguyen-thu, g., munn, l. (2024, october). taming the algo: grab bikers grappling with platform logics from below. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. taming the algo: grab bikers grappling with platform logics from below giang nguyen-thu university of queensland luke munn university of queensland introduction how do workers conceptualize a platform’s algorithm and adjust their practices to its logic? to pursue this question, we draw on an ethnography of grabbike, the leading rideshare platform in southeast asia, composed of 60+ trips talking to drivers on the back of bikes, and 10 in-depth interviews. from this rich material, we identify a strategic cluster of moves that workers perform to survive on the platform, what they term “taming the algorithm.” taming is double-edged, a form of self-exploitation that nevertheless offers workers a form of agency. taming thus highlights how platform labor’s performative tensions and machinic resolutions articulate a different kind of “freedom.” background there has been much debate about the extent of workers’ autonomy in platform labor. many platform scholars argue that the promises to work your own hours, make your own choices, and be your own boss are empty (shibata 2020). from this perspective, platform freedom is nothing but an “illusory” sense of autonomy (umer 2021). but this dismissal runs counter to worker’s own testimonies (vieira 2021; purcell and brook 2022). tropes of freedom, autonomy, and flexibility recur whenever platform workers explain what drew them to the platform and why they stay on it. if we take worker statements at face value, they’re free; if we accept some platform scholars, workers are merely duped. methodology: on the back of a bike to break this deadlock, we move away from the abstract and investigate the concrete ways workers move, speak, and act on grabbike, the leading rideshare platform in southeast asia. we theorize with workers rather than against them, taking seriously their ability to apprehend and respond to platform logics. our study draws from two months of ethnographic fieldwork in hanoi from december 2022 to january 2023 by one of the authors. sixty-four short interviews, ranging from 10 to 60 minutes, were conducted using what we call a “ride-through method,” when the ethnographic author sat behind the driver during her daily grabbike trips. data collected from these mobile conversations was complemented by 10 in-depth interviews. findings we identify three distinct “moves” that workers perform in response to algorithmic logics: improvising, scrambling, and enduring. drawing from workers’ own words, we call this cluster of strategies taming the algorithm, or “rèn áp” in vietnamese. improvising firstly, taming requires improvisation, figuring out how the app “thinks” while you’re on the go. the driver must theorize their relationship with “the app” while simultaneously navigating through the busy streets of hanoi. for example, workers must learn to manage the pros and cons of not only the four major services (passengers, food, parcel, and grocery) but also the intricate differences among two dozen sub-services. “i mainly deliver food because my strategy is to get as many short trips as possible to collect the maximum number of gems [ngọc bonus], and i don’t mind waiting at the restaurants.” food delivery improvisation differs from improvisation in passenger service or parcel delivery. platforms thus provide no winning formula. instead, workers must gradually come to grips with how platforms operate, often discovering through trial-and-error what works and what doesn’t. in a sense, each worker must construct their own “algorithm” for achieving success (munn 2018). scrambling secondly, taming requires scrambling, a term that captures the subjective quality of frenetic activities demanded by platforms. platform work is extremely performanceoriented work. the platform’s regime of sensors and data points allows this performance to be recorded in meticulous detail, with personalized targets and gamified elements, like grab’s “gems”—all attempting to drive the worker to new levels of productivity. from the platform’s perspective, scrambling is simple: a particular number is met or maintained. however, from the worker’s perspective, this performance is a negotiation of irreconcilable demands. it’s not enough to be fast; one must be fast despite conditions that require slowing down, such as heavy rain or chronic congestion. running [chạy] was both intrinsic to the job and attached to extra suffering—“running” under the burning sun, “running” on the pavement to beat the estimated delivery time, and “running” with an empty stomach. these tensions between algorithmic pressures and real-world contingencies echo workers on other platforms, who describe their work as “mission impossible at times” (chen and sun 2020). scrambling thus draws from the full subjective field of the worker, leading to a full-spectrum pressure that explains the physical, emotional, and mental toll reported by workers on platforms. enduring thirdly, taming requires endurance. it’s not enough to carry out an exemplary performance once or twice. grabbike workers must exhibit a persistent effort over time to move from being a “new chicken” (gà mới) to a veteran, making their labor stable and dependable from the platform’s point of view. each grab worker had their self-tested threshold of how long this process took, but the general rule was 12-14 hours a day for about 60 to 100 days—a significant time investment that not all newbies were prepared to suffer. the calibrated endurance lay precisely in the fact that despite endless improvisation and scrambling, one must keep on working as if there was no precarity. in this sense, “taming the app” meant to let the platform know that you had managed to tame yourself. improvisation + scrambling + endurance = routinized productivity if the platform worker can successfully perform these three “moves,” then they establish routinized productivity, an algorithmically ideal pattern of labor that has been made technically legible from the perspective of the platform. routinized productivity is ideal for the platform but ontologically fraught for laborers: the risks, injuries, and abuse needed to achieve it are borne silently by the worker; the platform only “sees” an optimal performer. conclusion: on platform realism while difficult, taming the algorithm is seen by workers as essential because it enables a sense of agency in three ways: it increases predictability, improves survivability and cultivates futurability. by anticipating platform logics, workers can break open the futureon-rails that precarious platform work often produces. they can begin to envision an alternative life after the platform—a stepping-stone allowing them to return to the countryside with savings, or own their own food stall in the city. of course, taming should be critically reflected on. grab workers themselves are cynical about their own power in the face of platform logics, asserting that they understand the game rather than necessarily being “on top” of it. yet if taming is limited, we suggest that it provides a worthy sense of empowerment, bestowing workers with a perception of control, a degree of confidence, an ability to project themselves into precarious circumstances as skilled and savvy. taming thus accepts and intervenes in actually-existing platform conditions rather than attempting to overthrow them. “you have to be realistic” is a common refrain amongst grab workers. we call this platform realism, a pragmatic theorization and response to platform logics by workers that strives to attain modest but meaningful advantages. taming the algorithm returns some control to workers without fundamentally disrupting the systemic inequalities maintained by platform logics. for workers, the platform algorithm may be tamed, but it’s still ferocious. references chen jy and sun p (2020) temporal arbitrage, fragmented rush, and opportunistic behaviors: the labor politics of time in the platform economy. new media & society 22(9): 1561–1579. doi: 10.1177/1461444820913567. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820913567 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820913567 munn l (2018) ferocious logics: unmaking the algorithm. lüneburg: meson press. purcell c and brook p (2022) at least i’m my own boss! explaining consent, coercion and resistance in platform work. work, employment and society 36(3). sage publications sage uk: london, england: 391–406. shibata s (2020) gig work and the discourse of autonomy: fictitious freedom in japan’s digital economy. new political economy 25(4). routledge: 535–551. doi: 10.1080/13563467.2019.1613351. umer h (2021) illusory freedom of physical platform workers: insights from uber eats in japan. the economic and labour relations review 32(3). sage publications sage uk: london, england: 437–452. vieira t (2023) platform couriers’ self-exploitation: the case study of glovo. new technology, work and employment 0(0). wiley online library: 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2019.1613351 https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2019.1613351 https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2019.1613351 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): van der vlist, f., helmond, a., weltevrede, e., dieter, m., duguay, s., et al. (2024, october). exploring appification. panel presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. exploring appification fernando van der vlist university of amsterdam anne helmond utrecht university esther weltevrede university of amsterdam michael dieter university of warwick stefanie duguay concordia university iain emsley university of warwick fangzhou zhang university of warwick anthony glyn burton simon fraser university christopher dietzel concordia university eric filice university of waterloo diana c. parry university of waterloo corey w. johnson north carolina state university this panel offers a reflection on the evolution and transformations of apps and app studies over the past decade, emphasising how apps have seamlessly integrated into our daily routines and shaped our cultural and economic landscape. this process, known as ‘appification’, involves integrating various aspects of daily life and activities into mobile applications, fundamentally altering how we communicate, access information, make payments, and use digital services (dieter et al., 2019; goggin, 2021; morris and murray, 2018). research in app studies has evolved in multiple directions during this time to analyse the implications of appification. this includes examining how app interfaces and features influence social, cultural, and economic practices, employing methods such as the walkthrough method or feature analysis (hasinoff and bivens, 2021; light et al., 2018). additionally, there is a focus on the technical and material dimensions of data infrastructures where apps are situated (gerlitz et al., 2019). simultaneously, the emergence of new app genres, like ‘super apps’, which combine features, services, and practices in unique ways, has transformed apps into platforms for further development. however, this evolution also raises methodological questions on researching and contextualising change over time (helmond and van der vlist, 2021). the evolving and dynamic nature of apps, accordingly, necessitates a continuous need for critical reflection on the methods used to study apps and the phenomenon of appification. the panel explores the concept of ‘appification’ through various lenses, including governance and safety measures in dating apps, the integration of ai technologies into mobile and enterprise applications, the historical evolution of chinese super apps, and the complexities of app-based authentication. methodologically, the panel showcases diverse strategies to explore ‘appification’, such as the walkthrough method, creating research personas, decompiling and debugging app software packages, historical analysis using app repositories, and analysing mini-apps and app store inventories. together, these studies provide insight into emerging approaches for understanding appification going forward and how apps are reshaping interactions, governance, and technology integration across different domains and cultural contexts. all five papers in this panel engage with the concept of ‘appification’, which entails the integration of various aspects of daily life into mobile applications, fundamentally changing how we communicate, access information, conduct transactions, and use digital services. the first paper employs the walkthrough method to explore how dating apps shape the notion of ‘safety’ through their policies and technological features, shedding light on how safety measures are often traded for data and how these apps normalise surveillance practices. the second paper investigates the appification of dating by examining tinder’s authentication mechanisms, revealing the complexities of user interactions and data exchanges within the app ecosystem. advancing the field of app studies, the panel thus explores methodological strategies and conceptual frameworks to address the nuances of appification. the third paper maps out the global landscape of ‘super apps’ and theorises the process of ‘super-appification’, where apps extend beyond their traditional boundaries to offer a wide range of features and services, reshaping user engagement and corporate expansion. a comparative historiography of prominent chinese super apps forms the basis of the fourth paper, tracing their evolution, features, and strategies driving their dominance. lastly, the fifth paper examines the emerging ecosystems of ai apps, exploring their infrastructural features and relationships. together, these studies provide a comprehensive overview of the ongoing transformations in the mobile ecosystem and the appification process, highlighting the crucial role of app features in shaping social interactions and corporate strategies. references dieter, m., gerlitz, c., helmond, a., tkacz, n., van der vlist, f. n., & weltevrede, e. (2019). multi-situated app studies: methods and propositions. social media + society, 5(2), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119846045 gerlitz, c., helmond, a., nieborg, d. b., & van der vlist, f. n. (2019). apps and infrastructures – a research agenda. computational culture, 7. http://computationalculture.net/apps-and-infrastructures-a-research-agenda/ goggin, g. (2021). apps: from mobile phones to digital lives. polity press. hasinoff, a., & bivens, r. (2021). feature analysis: a method for analyzing the role of ideology in app design. journal of digital social research, 3(2). https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v3i2.56 helmond, a., & van der vlist, f. (2021). platform and app histories: assessing source availability in web archives and app repositories. in d. gomes, e. demidova, j. winters, & t. risse (eds.), the past web: exploring web archives (pp. 203–214). springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63291-5_16 light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881–900. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 morris, j. w., & murray, s. (2018). appified: culture in the age of apps. university of michigan press. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119846045 http://computationalculture.net/apps-and-infrastructures-a-research-agenda/ https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v3i2.56 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63291-5_16 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 ‘prove to other users that you’re a real person’: tracing dating apps’ carceral logics stefanie duguay concordia university christopher dietzel concordia university eric filice university of waterloo diana c. parry university of waterloo corey w. johnson north carolina state university introduction across decades, dating apps have been the locus for moral panics, which position this technology as a scapegoat for the ongoing stigmatisation of casual sex and women’s sexual agency (albury, 2018). however, users experience violence and threats to safety through these apps in myriad forms: discrimination, harassment, sexual aggression, privacy breaches, and more (filice et al., 2022; dietzel, 2021; carlson and frazer, 2020; gillet, 2018). apps are often reactive in response, providing a patchwork of features, guidelines, and campaigns to dissuade moral panics while appearing to address actual harms (duguay et al., 2018). further examination is necessary to identify dating apps’ approaches to establishing safety and their limitations for protecting users. app governance and safety apps’ regulation of safety—and sexuality—requires attention, given the censorship, surveillance, and algorithmic control that shapes user experiences. digital platforms have restricted, censored, and removed sexually suggestive content, banned profiles deemed to violate community guidelines, or implemented algorithms that suppress certain types of sexual content (paasonen et al., 2024). this deplatformisation of sexuality (tiidenberg and van der nagel, 2020) can have significant implications for marginalised communities, especially lgbtq+ people, sex workers, and others who may be stigmatised or criminalised by app companies (blunt et al., 2021). this conflation of safety and sexuality underscores the need for critical engagement with the socio-technical infrastructures and policies that mediate people’s app-related experiences. scholars have increasingly identified carceral logics functioning through platform governance. platforms enlist users to report each other while automated moderation systems surveil user activity in ways that reinforce racist and sexist policing (gray and stein, 2021; pajé et al., 2023). feminist scholars of color describe carceral feminism as ‘an overreliance on carceral approaches to solve the problem of gender violence, despite research that clearly establishes that the carceral regime harms black and other people of colour and other marginalised groups’ (davis et al, 2022: 42). carceral feminist approaches prioritise individualised violence rather than systemic harms while valorizing surveillance and punitive legal processes (pajé et al., 2023). as dating apps exist within a broader platform landscape that aims to ‘protect’ individuals from sexuality but still need to address actual harms, critiques of carceral feminism provide a lens for understanding how their safety mechanisms function and whom they protect. methods this study is part of a larger research project investigating digital harms associated with dating apps in canada. for this portion, our team used the walkthrough method (light et al., 2018) to examine 30 dating apps. we purposively sampled these apps from the canadian app store (ios) and google play (android) according to downloads, rankings, and diversity of user populations. the sample includes popular apps (e.g., bumble, tinder) and those catering to minority identity publics (e.g., blk, dil mil, lex, salams). the first phase of data collection and analysis involved gathering each app’s relevant policy documents (e.g., terms of service), guidelines (e.g., community standards), and safety information. these materials were uploaded to nvivo and qualitatively coded (saldaña, 2021) through open coding, followed by categorical coding, to identify themes pertaining to app companies’ discursive constructions of safety. the second phase will involve a ‘technical walkthrough’ (light et al., 2018: 891), examining apps’ interface arrangements, functions, features, text, and symbolic representations. field notes will be recorded to identify how apps’ safety approaches are realised through technical mechanisms. both phases will be complete by fall 2024. preliminary findings individualization of responsibility many dating app companies have responded to safety concerns by individualising user responsibility. for example, grindr’s 20-page ‘holistic security guide’ (n.d.) does little to explain how ‘grindr is continuously seeking to develop and improve its security features.’ instead, it explains how the onus falls on users to manage their safety, advising them: ‘don’t use personal info in your grindr profile,’ ‘hide distance in your grindr profile,’ and ‘don’t connect your social media accounts.’ these recommendations run counter to grindr’s features, including default displays of proximity and options to integrate social media profiles. such discourse reflects the neoliberalism of carceral logics (kim, 2020) that render individuals responsible for their protection while only offering protection to citizens who follow prescribed processes for maintaining safety. reliance on co-moderation most apps encourage users to report and block ‘a member’s offensive behaviour’ (happn), ‘if you’re being harassed’ (coffee meets bagel), or in ‘any instances of misconduct and violations of our policies’ (dil mil). while apps reassure their users that ‘reports of harassment, intimidation and assault are taken very seriously’ (plenty of fish), blocking and reporting rely on users to identify and address problems and, in the case of dil mil, be familiar with what constitutes ‘violations of [their] policies.’ app documentation indicates that companies are aware of malicious reporting, with badoo stating, ‘intentionally reporting another member solely based on a protected attribute will not be tolerated.’ however, apps often employ automated moderation processes that fail to detect targeted reporting motivated by discrimination (gray and stein, 2021). moreover, co-moderation cultivates peer surveillance with punitive results that remove individuals from communities without recourse, rehabilitation, or community-led justice that could cultivate cultural shifts in systems of discrimination (bailey and cole, 2021). surveillance and datafication as protection several apps have introduced automated mechanisms that aim to protect users, including verification features that compare user selfies to profile photos. the result is often a profile badge that badoo and others tout as ‘identity verification,’ whereby you can ‘prove to other users that you’re a real person, making it easier to make friends and potential matches.’ being a real person is premised on consistent visual appearance, reflecting the tendency of computer vision toward ‘physiognomic ai’ that assesses physical attributes to draw unsubstantiated conclusions about one’s character (stark and hutson, 2022). another increasingly common feature, badoo’s ‘rude message detector’ claims to ‘detect any text that could be perceived as rude, abusive, homophobic or discriminatory,’ and it relies on automated word detection, with specific phrases triggering prompts that ask users if they want to continue chatting or block/report their match. across these mechanisms, safety is exchanged for access to more user data gleaned through normalised surveillance. akin to how carceral logics calling for greater urban police presence most effectively protect white, middle class women (kim, 2020), increased dataveillance results in more negative outcomes for, and greater social control of, racialized and lgbtq+ people (benjamin, 2019; liu, 2020). conclusion carceral logics are most apparent in the streamlined connections some apps have established with police or third-party security companies. this includes tinder’s integration of noonlight, which signals emergencies to a private monitoring company, or match’s ‘date check-ins’ that prompt users to call 9-1-1 if a date turns dangerous. such features presume that all users feel comfortable and protected by these authorities. their logic aligns with carceral feminism’s emphasis on police, state, and – increasingly under neoliberalism – profit-based forms of protection to establish women’s safety, the main issue in moral panics surrounding dating apps. however, our preliminary findings show that carceral logics also function through policies that individualise user safety, emphasise co-moderation enabling targeted blocking, and rationalise heightened dataveillance. using these subtle measures, app companies appear to address safety issues while creating technical arrangements that can be used to police and punish those who are already at risk of systemic violence. references albury, k. (2018). heterosexual casual sex: from free love to tinder. in c. smith, f. attwood, & b. mcnair (eds.), the routledge companion to media, sex, and sexuality (pp. 81–90). routledge. albury, k., dietzel, c., pym, t., vivienne, s., & cook, t. (2021). not your unicorn: trans dating app users’ negotiations of personal safety and sexual health. health sociology review, 30(1), 72–86. baily, m., & cole, d. (2021). new tools, new house: building a black feminist social (justice) media platform. feminist media studies, 21(5), 857–859. benjamin, r. (2019). race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. wiley. blunt, d., duguay, s., gillespie, t., love, s., & smith, c. (2021). deplatforming sex: a roundtable conversation. porn studies, 8(4), 420–438. carlson, b., & frazer, r. (2020). “they got filters”: indigenous social media, the settler gaze, and a politics of hope. social media+ society, 6(2). davis, a.y., dent, g., meiners, e.r., & richie, b.e. (2022). abolition. feminism. now. haymarket books. dietzel, c. (2021). “that’s straight-up rape culture”: manifestations of rape culture on grindr. in j. bailey, a. flynn, & n. henry (eds.), the emerald international handbook of technology-facilitated violence and abuse (pp. 351–368). duguay, s., burgess, j., & suzor, n. (2018). queer women’s experiences of patchwork platform governance on tinder, instagram, and vine. convergence, 26(2), 237–252. filice, e., abeywickrama, k. d., parry, d. c., & johnson, c. w. (2022). sexual violence and abuse in online dating: a scoping review. aggression & violent behavior, 101781. gillett, r. (2018). intimate intrusions online: studying the normalisation of abuse in dating apps. women's studies international forum, 69, 212–219. gray, k.l., & stein, k. (2021). “we ‘said her name’ and got zucked”: black women calling-out the carceral logics of digital platforms. gender & society, 35(4), 538–545. kim, m.e. (2020). anti-carceral feminism: the contradictions of progress and the possibilities of counter-hegemonic struggle. affilia, 35(3), 309–326. light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881–900. liu, j. (2020). the carceral feminism of sesta-fosta: reproducing spaces of exclusion from irl to url. in r. ramos & s. mowlabocus (eds.), queer sites in global contexts: technologies, spaces, and otherness (pp. 117–132). paasonen, s., jarrett, k., & light, b. (2024). nsfw: sex, humor, and risk in social media. mit press. pajé, d., macpherson, j., & medina, s. (2023). “uh, unfairly targets rapists? boo fucking hoo”: (anti-)carceral feminist discourses around sexual violence on twitter. feminist media studies. saldaña, j. (2021). the coding manual for qualitative researchers. sage. stark, l., & hutson, j. (2022). physiognomic artificial intelligence. fordham intellectual property, media & entertainment law journal, 4, 922–979. tiidenberg, k., & van der nagel, e. (2020). sex and social media. emerald publishing limited. appification as authentication: formatting the user in the tinder ecosystem anthony glyn burton simon fraser university esther weltevrede university of amsterdam introduction tinder has become synonymous with its own actions in contemporary dating, from ‘swiping right’ to matching. these very actions are a key part of the app's popularity, with its many imitators usually copying the fundamental swipe and match-actions with their own twist. what comes through is that the simplicity of a swipe drives this courtship grammar. in this paper, we argue that such a simple action belies a complex ecosystem in which the pursuit of a potential partner is formatted into a series of gestures on a screen, transferring what might take place in the physical realm—an encounter, a romantic discernment, an ‘approach’—into the application's interface. we uncover the economy of gesture, time, and user data that results from this reformatting, and how it is not driven by the sole easement of a connection. the authentication of the everyday tinder is but one part of contemporary attempts to understand, analyse, gamify, and monetise love. tinder's move to build an infrastructure around the historically ineffable emotion is part and parcel of a new language of connection. yet these very attempts to mechanise (or monetise) romance often raise the question of the ‘authenticity’ of a connection made when it is mediated. how have dating apps come to substitute for, or, as some would argue, effectively replicate, the experience of authentic romantic connection—a supposedly unmediated and unmotivated thing? the appeal of romance lies in its promise of transcendence beyond the transactional, espousing a connection wherein one has the chance to be their true self, appearing as a place that requires authenticity. this paper engages with the questions: how is a ‘user’ perceived from the app's viewpoint? and how and when does the app align interactions between the user and the server? to investigate these questions, we explore the manifold ways that tinder recreates a sensation of authenticity, especially as tied to romantic connections, through its application infrastructure—specifically, how users and those they meet (or don't) on the app are deemed authentic romantic options in tinder's social pool. a growing body of digital research centres around the study of ‘authenticity’ and ‘authentication’ (burton, chun et al., 2023), encompassing fields such as media studies and disinformation studies. the starting point for this paper is the consideration of how platforms format their users through various practices of configuring individuals with data in the multisided market of the platform. authentication, central to digital interactions, is the process by which something or someone is verified as true against predefined standards. this concept is intricately linked to ‘appification’, as dieter and tkacz (2020) describe, where software transforms everyday actions into structured digital interactions. this transformation is evident in platforms like tinder, where actions such as swiping become a form of user engagement and identity validation within the app's framework. the notion of a ‘grammar of action’ further illustrates how digital platforms structure user activities into recognizable patterns, effectively embedding authentication into the user's interaction with the app (gerlitz et al., 2019; cf. agre, 1994). through this lens, appification not only redefines everyday activities but also establishes a reciprocal authentication process where users and platforms validate each other, encapsulating the dynamic interplay between human agency and digital architectures. methods methodologically, this paper outlines an approach and framework for the analysis of platform authentication, drawing on existing research in app studies (dieter et al., 2019) and app debugging techniques. we use the ‘research persona’ concept (bounegru et al., 2022) as a tool in the walkthrough method (duguay and gold-apel, 2023) to investigate user authentication, examining how user activity is formatted and captured in the interface. in parallel, we analyse network traffic to understand machinic authentication, which we define as the crucial network-level exchanges between the user's device and the servers that ensure the platform’s functionality. to demonstrate the practical application of this methodological approach and framework, we present a case study of tinder. findings our research highlights the dual construction of personas and characters at both the user interface and the backend, revealing a substantial disconnect between frontend activities and backend processes. notably, the authentication experienced by users at the interface level diverges significantly from network-level activities, emphasising the multi-layered and often imperceptible nature of authentication processes. in media studies, it is often presumed that the grammar of action embedded within a medium eventually aligns with user activity. however, our analysis revealed a significant disconnect between frontend activities and backend processes. this discrepancy was evident not only in what is recognized as a meaningful event but also in the temporality of these interactions. the study showed that the way users are authenticated by an app at the network level—the communication between the phone (as a client device) and the server(s)—is radically different from user activities observed at the interface level. our examination of network flows versus interface flows highlighted that authentication is a multi-layered affair, often imperceptible to the user. contrary to what might be expected, user activities do not always coincide with backend authentication processes. there are distinct, often independent activities occurring at various levels that subtly influence the overall experience. appification relies on authentication throughout the points of contact—user, interface, and backend or server—and each of these layers incorporates a different temporality that works together to construct the application. user temporalities are, in a sense, suspended through the desubjectifying flow of the swipe actions. the application’s time is punctuated by a separate set of events, alongside events that are of significance for the user’s flow state, during which data events occur sparingly and in richness. the network, meanwhile, maintains a steady state of connection through the low layers of the protocol stack. in turn, these temporalities buttress the authentication processes at play. users authenticate themselves as romantic possibilities through mutual interactions on and with the interface; the app likewise authenticates itself with advertisers through continued usage of the app. likewise, the machinic forms of authentication that take place through the network’s repeated contact with the application are less punctuated by events and more punctuated by a promiscuity of transfer and sustained contact between the user’s device and the server. this shows that appification of dating is a thorough combination of different temporalities based on the mutual authentication processes of different protocols, layers, and applications of user data exchange. appification thus emerges through the intersection of these different temporalities and the different means by which they authenticate these different points of contact as cohesive and constitutive of the infrastructure of the app. conclusion crucially, this paper highlights the research affordances of ‘authentication’, emphasising that it is neither a clearly defined concept nor consistently understood across different research areas. for this study, we consider authentication in a twofold manner: the authentication of the user by the app and machinic authentication. following a ‘digital methods’ approach, this study views authentication not only as an object of study but also as a tool for analysis—a concept to be understood and utilised (cf. rogers, 2013). this perspective involves understanding and working with the intricacies of app software and network connection tools, highlighting the need to understand and adapt to the unique characteristics of app-based platforms. references agre, p. e. (1994). surveillance and capture: two models of privacy. the information society, 10(2), 101–127. bounegru, l., devries, m., & weltevrede, e. (2022). the research persona method: figuring and reconfiguring personalised information flows. in figure: concept and method (pp. 77–104). springer nature singapore. burton, a. g., chun, w. h. k., bounegru, l., devries, m., harris, a., jucan, i., juhasz, a., kamish, d. w., langlois, g., proctor, j., tomlinson, c., vasudevan, r., & weltevrede, e. (2023). algorithmic authenticity. meson press. dieter, m., & tkacz, n. (2020). the patterning of finance/security: a designerly walkthrough of challenger banking apps. computational culture, 7. available at: http://computationalculture.net/the-patterning-of-finance-security/ http://computationalculture.net/the-patterning-of-finance-security/ dieter, m., gerlitz, c., helmond, a., tkacz, n., van der vlist, f. n., & weltevrede, e. (2019). multi-situated app studies: methods and propositions. social media + society, 5(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119846486 duguay, s., & gold-apel, h. (2023). stumbling blocks and alternative paths: reconsidering the walkthrough method for analyzing apps. social media + society, 9(1), 20563051231158822. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231158822 gerlitz, c., helmond, a., van der vlist, f. n., & weltevrede, e. (2019). regramming the platform: infrastructural relations between apps and social media. computational culture, 7. available at: http://computationalculture.net/regramming-the-platform/ rogers, r. (2013). digital methods. mit press. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119846486 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231158822 http://computationalculture.net/regramming-the-platform/ super-appification: mapping the global landscape of ‘super apps’ fernando van der vlist university of amsterdam anne helmond utrecht university michael dieter university of warwick esther weltevrede university of amsterdam introduction ‘super apps’ are on the rise and are distinguished by a wide range of seemingly unrelated services built onto a core functionality, creating an immersive and unified experience for everyday activities that resembles both an operating system and brand. for chan (2022), a super app is like ‘a single app that allows you to shop for groceries, pay your rent, review work documents, refill prescriptions, book a trip, and chat with friends, interest groups, and businesses’. here, the term ‘super’ does not necessarily mean superb or indispensable, but rather refers to an app that goes beyond a singlepurpose activity to combine many different services across typically isolated industry sectors. existing scholarly research and industry observers have highlighted several pivotal features of super apps. firstly, super apps are understood as applications that incorporate multiple services in one place. they are described as ‘all-in-one apps’ (chen et al., 2018), ‘swiss-army-style apps’ (steinberg, 2020) or ‘do-everything apps’ that represent ‘a particular model of an app that assumes most functions of the smartphone can be done within either a single app or a suite of apps’ (steinberg et al., 2022: 1409). secondly, super apps are understood as a specific type of corporation or business strategy. goggin (2021: 77) describes them as ‘an integrative technical, user, and business approach to leverage existing customer bases and to expand into other product and service opportunities’. super apps are viewed as the outcome of specific corporate strategies, including conglomeration and financialisation (jia et al., 2022), as ‘digital platforms that leverage a business’ core assets across multiple use cases or service verticals’ (ajene, 2021), and are considered both ‘a product and a form of organising value’ (chai, 2021). finally, super apps are conceptualised as ‘megaplatforms’ to highlight new forms of enclosure by powerful ‘megacorps’ like tencent. according to chen et al. (2018: 5), super apps function as mega-platforms to expand and grow, with their ability to ‘glue together an increasing array of activities’. they evolve into super apps by becoming a platform for other applications to develop within (steinberg, 2020), as demonstrated by tencent’s wechat (chen et al., 2018; plantin and de seta, 2019), facebook messenger (nieborg and helmond, 2019), or line (steinberg, 2020). this leads to a form of enclosure in which super apps commodify various types of mobile and networking services into their platforms (goggin, 2021: 76). mapping ‘super-app constellations’ worldwide despite various critical viewpoints, previous studies on super apps have predominantly focused on individual apps or app companies situated in china and southeast asia. examples include wechat, tencent, line, gojek, and grab. notably, a report from the platform lab discusses nine asian-focused apps, albeit through individual case studies (pitre, 2022). this study delves into the features, origins, and varied expressions of the worldwide phenomenon of super apps through an extensive and juxtaposed examination, asking: what are super apps, who develops them, when did they emerge, and where are they prevalent? rather than aiming to identify one particular type of app, we introduce the notion of ‘super-app constellations’, illustrating how mobile apps have transformed into platforms and platforms have adopted app-like characteristics in a larger trend we term ‘super-appification’. beyond individual popular examples like wechat in china, east asia, and southeast asia, our analysis of 41 super apps from around the world reveals four distinct types of super-app constellations, reflecting different patterns and dynamics of conglomeration, which we call the ‘swiss army knife’, ‘family’, ‘host’, and ‘hub’. as such, we are the first to provide a global perspective on super apps, not only in terms of geographic scope but also our comprehensive overview of the phenomenon as a whole. theorising ‘super-appification’ our study underscores that apps attain their ‘super’ status by incorporating a variety of crucial everyday services across sectors and borders within super-app constellations. the conceptualisation and classification of super-app constellations offer a broader insight into the diverse patterns and dynamics of conglomerate integration propelling super-appification in the global digital economy, encompassing a spectrum of corporate, developmental, and international expansion strategies. therefore, as we propose, super-appification aligns with the mechanisms of ‘platformisation’, conceived as the process driving the infrastructural and economic expansion of platforms into new online domains (helmond, 2015); nevertheless, it exhibits unique characteristics, wherein services from disparate industries coalesce into a unified constellation, a process we refer to as conglomeration. driving these dynamics is the ambition of super-app companies to embed themselves ever more deeply into individuals’ daily routines, seising and capitalising on a broad range of essential everyday activities. we identify four distinct types of super-app constellations, each exhibiting unique patterns of conglomeration. ‘swiss-army-style’ super apps expand their service offerings within a single app, consolidating industries previously served by separate app companies. ‘family’ apps expand through their app and company portfolios, extending services and entering new markets through subsidiaries. ‘host’ and ‘hub’-style super apps leverage third-party developers to provide complementary services, capitalising on network effects either internally or through an external app ecosystem. this typology lays the groundwork for understanding ‘super-appification’ both as a form of conglomeration in the digital economy and as an app-specific form of platformisation. unlike platformisation, which involves a single platform branching into new sectors, app conglomeration generates various distinctive forms by bundling services into unique constellations, potentially as a regulatory circumvention strategy. the analysis of super-app constellations illustrates how these apps are typically embedded within corporate infrastructures and leverage their networks and subsidiarycompany portfolios to expand their services and enter new markets. while some may be awaiting the emergence of western super apps like wechat, it is important to adopt a broader view and acknowledge the diverse types of super apps that already exist across different world regions. this showcases the regional variations and complexities of the super-app model, underscoring the need for a global perspective when investigating the cultural and economic dimensions of mobile apps and platforms. references ajene, e. (2021, august 8). the rise of african super apps. medium. https://medium.com/@eajene/how-africas-super-app-landscape-is-evolving6c2e5eca6b2f. chai, r. (2021). leveraging corporate social innovation for value co-creation: the case of superapps, an integrative literature review. ssrn. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4004373. chan, c. (2022, december 16). what is a super app? andreessen horowitz (a16z). https://a16z.com/2022/12/16/super-app-definition-guide/. chen, y., mao, z., & qiu, j. l. (2018). super-sticky wechat and chinese society. emerald publishing. goggin, g. (2021). apps: from mobile phones to digital lives. polity press. helmond, a. (2015). the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready. social media + society, 1(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080. jia, l., nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2022). on super apps and app stores: digital media logics in china’s app economy. media, culture & society, 44(8), 1437–1453. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221128937. nieborg, d. b., & helmond, a. (2019). the political economy of facebook’s platformization in the mobile ecosystem: facebook messenger as a platform instance. media culture & society, 41(2), 196–218. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443718818384. pitre, j. (ed.). (2022). super apps: a platform lab report. the platform lab. https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:48799/. https://medium.com/@eajene/how-africas-super-app-landscape-is-evolving-6c2e5eca6b2f https://medium.com/@eajene/how-africas-super-app-landscape-is-evolving-6c2e5eca6b2f https://medium.com/@eajene/how-africas-super-app-landscape-is-evolving-6c2e5eca6b2f https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4004373 https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4004373 https://a16z.com/2022/12/16/super-app-definition-guide/ https://a16z.com/2022/12/16/super-app-definition-guide/ https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080 https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221128937 https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443718818384 https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:48799/ https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:48799/ plantin, j.-c., & seta, g. de. (2019). wechat as infrastructure: the techno-nationalist shaping of chinese digital platforms. chinese journal of communication, 12(3), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2019.1572633. steinberg, m. (2020). line as super app: platformization in east asia. social media + society, 6(2), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120933285. steinberg, m., mukherjee, r., & punathambekar, a. (2022). media power in digital asia: super apps and megacorps. media, culture & society, 44(8), 1405–1419. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221127805. https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2019.1572633 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120933285 https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221127805 the evolution of chinese super-apps: a comparative history of alipay, meituan and wechat using app repositories michael dieter university of warwick iain emsley university of warwick fangzhou zhang university of warwick introduction this paper offers a historical exploration of the phenomenon of ‘super-appification’ in china, focussed on a comparative analysis of alipay, meituan, and wechat. while discourses around ‘super-apps’ are often entangled with promotional narratives and hype, recent research in digital media studies has suggested the term nevertheless reflects an increasing concentration of corporate media power within the global platform and app economy—a process characterised by dual tendencies of platformization and appification leading to the emergence of integrated service ecosystems encompassing communication, financial transactions, transportation and delivery, and more (pitre, 2022; steinberg et al., 2022; van der vlist et al., 2024). notably, apps like wechat have been frequently cited as quintessential examples of this trend (chan, 2022), aligning with critical examinations of such platforms that have broadly considered their governance structures and infrastructural consequences (plantin and de seta, 2018; de kloet et al., 2019), as well as their pervasive entanglement with socio-political dynamics of daily life (harwit, 2017; chen et al., 2018). following methodologies of multi-situated app studies (dieter et al., 2019), our contribution in this paper aims to provide valuable empirical detail to these discussions by focussing on the granular, technical aspects of super-app design and development. by developing a series of comparative historical studies supported with data visualisations and structured by key themes of infrastructuralization, datafication and platform governance, we aim to clarify how superappification has materially unfolded in the chinese context, drawing attention to its evolving technical and operational frameworks. methods our paper advances methodological approaches to app historiography by expanding multi-situated app studies to new modes of diachronic analysis. typically, such approaches to researching apps have adopted a more synchronic approach by repurposing platform and app infrastructures, often involving static ‘snapshots’ of data collection. in contrast, our research introduces novel longitudinal methodologies for apps research that capture the evolving nature of software development over time. accordingly, drawing inspiration from recent biographical studies of websites (rogers, 2017) and platforms (burgess and baym, 2020; helmond and van der vlist, 2019), we consider how apps such as alipay, meituan, and wechat have played an active role in ‘authoring’ their own historical trajectories through being situated within digital infrastructures (helmond & van der vlist, 2021). to operationalize this perspective, we leverage traces of software versioning sourced from industry data, web archives, and app repositories in conjunction with digital tools like scrapers, decompilers, and code inspectors. a key resource in our work is androzoo, a large-scale app repository hosted by the university of luxembourg, which contains over 24 million android application packages and their metadata collected from various marketplaces. while androzoo has mainly supported research on app descriptions, malware detection, app permissions, and gdpr compliance (alecci et al., 2024), its potential for interdisciplinary studies of media concentration and the phenomenon of super-appification remains underexplored. our inquiry, therefore, in addition to documenting the specificities of chinese super-app development, reflexively considers the challenges associated with utilising such complex app archives, including their technical limitations, and the need for diverse methodological considerations to adequately ground research findings. tracing conglomeration over time as indicated, our analysis is organised by themes of infrastructuralization, datafication and platform governance. for the former, we begin by reviewing the overall approach taken to super-appification through taxonomies that have been proposed based on four general frameworks: the ‘swiss army knife’ (the ‘do everything’ app), ‘host’ (apps with an internal ecosystem that supports mini-app programs), ‘hub’ (apps with an external ecosystem facilitated by an api), and ‘family’ (whereby a company expands by offering a diversity of specifically-targeted apps, often unified by a single brand) (van der vlist et al., 2024). here, we draw attention to hybrid strategies taken up by alipay, meituan and tencent (owner of wechat), emphasising in particular to conglomeration processes taking place through families of apps, which enables diversification, experimentation and the negotiation of regional specificities, including regulatory frameworks. we also delineate the evolution of these super-apps via chronological analysis, highlighting the rapid integration of new services and the amalgamation of multiple sectors within alipay, meituan, and wechat by drawing from app descriptions and industry data (specifically sensortower and data.ai). in terms of datafication, we turn our attention to the analysis of the widely recognized importance of permissions and software development kits (sdks) (dieter et al., 2021; pybus and coté, 2024) to trace a signature dynamic over time whereby known thirdparty trackers are gradually reduced, while device permissions expand to facilitate datafication across the expanding range of services. this will include an analysis of sensor data, an aspect typically not communicated to app end-users. we also zoom into ‘launcher’ permissions—specific protocols which facilitate consistent user-experience across various device environments—as a method to trace and map the deep integration of super-apps with dominant smartphone manufacturers, including, for instance, samsung, sony, huawei, oppo and meizu, among others. we additionally consider securitization patterns both in terms of the capacity to unpack apps for analysis and their general features given the prominence of secure payments. finally, regarding governance, we turn to key changes and patterns against a timeline for the introduction of protocols and developer guidelines for the android system, along with significant political events and social controversies associated with platform governance, while reflecting on possibilities and challenges of grounding insights through such correlative analysis. we conclude with an analysis of processes of parallel platformization (kaye et al., 2020) through the evolution of chinese and international versions of these superapps over time, including key differences between tencent’s weixin and wechat, and recent initiatives such as international versions of alipay and meituan’s expansion into hong kong through keeta. references alecci, m., jiménez, p. j. r., allix, k., bissyandé, t. f., & klein, j. (2024). androzoo: a retrospective with a glimpse into the future. https://orbilu.uni.lu/bitstream/10993/60055/1/androzooaretrospectivewithaglimpseinto thefuture.pdf burgess, j. e., & baym, n. k. (2020). twitter: a biography. new york university press. chan, c. (2022, december 16). what is a super app? andreessen horowitz (a16z). https://a16z.com/what-is-a-super-app/ de kloet, j., poell, t., guohua, z., & yiu fai, c. (2019). the platformization of chinese society: infrastructure, governance, and practice. chinese journal of communication, 12(3), 249–256. https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2019.1644008 dieter, m., gerlitz, c., helmond, a., tkacz, n., van der vlist, f. n., & weltevrede, e. (2019). multi-situated app studies: methods and propositions. social media + society, 5(2), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119846045 dieter, m., helmond, a., tkacz, n., vlist, f. van der, & weltevrede, e. (2021). pandemic platform governance: mapping the global ecosystem of covid-19 response apps. internet policy review, 10(3). https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/pandemicplatform-governance-mapping-global-ecosystem-covid-19-response-apps harwit, e. (2017). wechat: social and political development of china’s dominant messaging app. chinese journal of communication, 10(3), 312–327. https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2016.1213757 helmond, a., & van der vlist, f. (2021). platform and app histories: assessing source availability in web archives and app repositories. in d. gomes, e. demidova, j. winters, & t. risse (eds.), the past web: exploring web archives (pp. 203–214). springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63291-5_16 helmond, a., & van der vlist, f. n. (2019). social media and platform historiography: challenges and opportunities. tmg journal for media history, 22(1), 6. https://doi.org/10.18146/tmg.434 https://orbilu.uni.lu/bitstream/10993/60055/1/androzooaretrospectivewithaglimpseintothefuture.pdf https://orbilu.uni.lu/bitstream/10993/60055/1/androzooaretrospectivewithaglimpseintothefuture.pdf https://orbilu.uni.lu/bitstream/10993/60055/1/androzooaretrospectivewithaglimpseintothefuture.pdf https://orbilu.uni.lu/bitstream/10993/60055/1/androzooaretrospectivewithaglimpseintothefuture.pdf https://a16z.com/what-is-a-super-app/ https://a16z.com/what-is-a-super-app/ https://a16z.com/what-is-a-super-app/ https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2019.1644008 https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2019.1644008 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119846045 https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/pandemic-platform-governance-mapping-global-ecosystem-covid-19-response-apps https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/pandemic-platform-governance-mapping-global-ecosystem-covid-19-response-apps https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/pandemic-platform-governance-mapping-global-ecosystem-covid-19-response-apps https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2016.1213757 https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2016.1213757 https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2016.1213757 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63291-5_16 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63291-5_16 https://doi.org/10.18146/tmg.434 https://doi.org/10.18146/tmg.434 https://doi.org/10.18146/tmg.434 kaye, d. b. v., chen, x., & zeng, j. (2021). the co-evolution of two chinese mobile short video apps: parallel platformization of douyin and tiktok. mobile media & communication, 9(2), 229–253. https://doi.org/10.1177/2050157920952120 pitre, j. (ed.). (2022). super apps: a platform lab report. the platform lab. https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:48799/. plantin, j.-c., & de seta, g. (2019). wechat as infrastructure: the techno-nationalist shaping of chinese digital platforms. chinese journal of communication, 12(3), 257– 273. https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2019.1572633 pybus, j., & coté, m. (2024). super sdks: tracking personal data and platform monopolies in the mobile. big data & society, 11(1), 20539517241231270. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241231270 rogers, r. (2017). doing web history with the internet archive: screencast documentaries. internet histories, 1(1–2), 160–172. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2017.1307542 steinberg, m., mukherjee, r., & punathambekar, a. (2022). media power in digital asia: super apps and megacorps. media, culture & society, 44(8), 1405–1419. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221127805 van der vlist, f. n., helmond, a., dieter, m., & weltevrede, e. (2024). superappification: mapping conglomeration in the global digital economy. new media & society, 0(0), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231223419 https://doi.org/10.1177/2050157920952120 https://doi.org/10.1177/2050157920952120 https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:48799/ https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:48799/ https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2019.1572633 https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2019.1572633 https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241231270 https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241231270 https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241231270 https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2017.1307542 https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2017.1307542 https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2017.1307542 https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221127805 https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221127805 https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221127805 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231223419 the appification of ai: emerging app ecosystems and infrastructures anne helmond utrecht university fernando van der vlist university of amsterdam esther weltevrede university of amsterdam introduction this paper explores emerging ai app ecosystems, focusing on their infrastructural features and relationships. it draws on digital research in internet studies, social media, platform studies, and app studies to conceptualise and analyse what we term the ‘appification of ai’, as ai technologies become integral parts of daily life through apps. the ecosystem metaphor helps understand the relations and power dynamics among a core platform, its actors (platform owner, third-party app developers, users), and the apps developed on it (van der vlist, 2022). it offers a relational perspective, showing how apps are shaped by their environments, inhabited by various actors. building upon the concept of an ‘infrastructural turn' in media and internet research (hesmondhalgh, 2021; plantin et al., 2018), our work extends previous research on appification (dieter et al., 2019, 2021; goggin, 2021; morris and murray, 2018) and delves into the infrastructural dimensions of apps (blanke and pybus, 2020; flensburg and lai, 2023; gerlitz et al., 2019). while different concepts of infrastructure exist, they share an interest in ‘the mundanity and ordinariness of existing systems’ and ideas of materiality and relationality (hesmondhalgh, 2021). in digital media studies, this involves examining the software and hardware layers supporting everyday social processes, such as mobile apps and smartphones. our methodology aims to map and characterise app ecosystems, analyse embedded infrastructures, and reveal data relationships linking various entities (dieter et al., 2019; dieter et al., 2021; van der vlist 2022; van der vlist et al., 2024). to illustrate our methodological approach, we conducted a case study of ai app ecosystems and infrastructure. the technology industry has promoted the ‘democratisation of ai’ (burkhardt, 2020), making development tools accessible to a broader range of developers. ai apps, created by diverse developers, showcase ai's potential and diverse applications, driving expectations and exploration across domains. examining app ecosystems around ai technologies and their infrastructure offers insights into their technical and economic foundations and integration into the digital ecosystem. as ai becomes embedded in daily life through apps, understanding their ecosystems and infrastructural dynamics is crucial for policy development and examining monopolistic practices. analysing emerging ai app ecosystems the paper analyses ai apps, spanning multiple platforms. it explores ai apps across different platforms, such as mobile app stores, model marketplaces, and cloud marketplaces from leading providers like amazon, microsoft, and google. this broader perspective on the appification of ai allows us to discern distinct types of ai app ecosystems. by focusing on this evolving landscape, the study highlights the maturation and stabilisation of ai technology through extensive app development (van der vlist et al., 2024). specifically, the study investigates three types of ai app ecosystems: (1) ai-powered apps in mobile app stores (apple’s app store and google play), (2) ai apps in openai’s gpt store, and (3) ai apps on cloud platform marketplaces like microsoft azure marketplace. the first approach involves locating ai apps in app stores by querying for relevant terms, resulting in a substantial number of apps on both ios and android platforms. detailed analysis of these apps uncovers complex infrastructural aspects, including tracking practices, permission protocols, and hidden data mechanisms (flensburg and lai, 2023; gerlitz et al., 2019a). this analysis sheds light on infrastructural power dynamics and monopolisation tendencies. here, apps are understood as dynamic conglomerations of microservices, shedding light on infrastructural power and monopolisation, as shown by previous studies of decentralised software development kits (e.g., blanke and pybus, 2020; pybus and coté, 2024). the second approach focuses on the gpt store, exploring governance and affordances for developers. it analyses the categories and application domains of custom gpts, offering insights into their integration into various social and cultural domains. this shows how the gpt store serves as an ecosystem for developers to innovate, generate value, and facilitate user interactions within environments governed by openai. we gathered available gpts from the store to examine their categories and application domains, enriching our comprehension of how a large language model like chatgpt is applied across various social and cultural contexts. the third approach examines cloud marketplaces offered by major providers, revealing a wide array of ai apps and machine-learning models tailored for cloud deployment. these marketplaces play a crucial role in bridging ai technologies with enterprise software, facilitating the spread of ai systems across various industries (van der vlist et al., 2024). ai infrastructure heavily relies on cloud infrastructure services. this dependence is not only evident in ai apps found in app stores but also in the multitude of ai-related apps present in cloud platform marketplaces. comparable to app stores, these cloud marketplaces offer a variety of (enterprise-focused) apps and machinelearning models specifically designed for the cloud, offered by thousands of third-party vendors (2024). we queried these marketplaces for mentions of [ai] to examine what kind of ai apps are being built on top of cloud infrastructure. the appification of ai examining the ai app ecosystem across different platforms reveals a complex interplay of dependencies and infrastructures underpinning the appification of ai. preliminary findings suggest a nuanced integration of ai capabilities into apps, highlighting the transformation of ai from backend infrastructure to frontend user-facing applications. while many of the apps in our dataset mention the use of specific ai technologies and models, not all of these could be located. this requires further investigation into ‘bespoke’ infrastructure entities such as the mention of model names in the code of the apps. the uptake of custom gpts further exemplifies the appification of ai, showcasing ai's evolution from backend technology to user-facing applications focused on skills, instructions, and knowledge. furthermore, ai infrastructure heavily depends on cloud services, a fact evident not only in ai apps available in app stores but also in ai-related apps featured in cloud platform marketplaces. these marketplaces serve a critical function by offering apps that effectively connect infrastructure technology with the specific requirements of individuals and organisations across diverse industries. in conclusion, the appification of ai, spanning multiple platforms, reflects both the ongoing efforts of developers and enterprises to embed ai technologies into everyday life through various apps, as well as the infrastructural ambitions of ai companies in shaping the digital landscape. references blanke, t., & pybus, j. (2020). the material conditions of platforms: monopolization through decentralization. social media + society, 6(4), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120971632 burkhardt, m. (2019). mapping the democratization of ai on github: a first approach. in a. sudmann (ed.), the democratization of artificial intelligence (pp. 209–222). transcript verlag. chao, t. h. j., van geenen, d., gerlitz, c., & van der vlist, f. n. (2024). digital methods for sensory media research: toolmaking as a critical technical practice. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 0(0), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565241226791 dieter, m., gerlitz, c., helmond, a., tkacz, n., van der vlist, f. n., & weltevrede, e. (2019). multi-situated app studies: methods and propositions. social media + society, 5(2), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119846045 dieter, m., helmond, a., tkacz, n., van der vlist, f. n., & weltevrede, e. (2021). pandemic platform governance: mapping the global ecosystem of covid-19 response apps. internet policy review, 10(3). https://doi.org/10.14763/2021.3.1568 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120971632 https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565241226791 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119846045 https://doi.org/10.14763/2021.3.1568 flensburg, s., & lai, s. s. (2023). follow the data! a strategy for tracing infrastructural power. media and communication, 11(2), 319–329. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v11i2.6464 gerlitz, c., helmond, a., nieborg, d. b., & van der vlist, f. n. (2019a). apps and infrastructures – a research agenda. computational culture, 7. available at: http://computationalculture.net/apps-and-infrastructures-a-research-agenda/ gerlitz, c., helmond, a., van der vlist, f. n., & weltevrede, e. (2019b). regramming the platform: infrastructural relations between apps and social media. computational culture, 7. available at: http://computationalculture.net/regramming-the-platform/ goggin, g. (2021). apps: from mobile phones to digital lives. polity press. hesmondhalgh, d. (2021). the infrastructural turn in media and internet research. in p. mcdonald (ed.), the routledge companion to media industries (pp. 132–142). routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429275340-13 morris, j. w., & murray, s. (2018). appified: culture in the age of apps. university of michigan press. plantin, j.-c., lagoze, c., edwards, p. n., & sandvig, c. (2018). infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook. new media & society, 20(1), 293–310. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553 pybus, j., & coté, m. (2024). super sdks: tracking personal data and platform monopolies in the mobile. big data & society, 11(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241231270 van der vlist, f. n. (2022). the platform as ecosystem: configurations and dynamics of governance and power (phd thesis, utrecht university). https://doi.org/10.33540/1284 van der vlist, f. n., helmond, a., & ferrari, f. l. (2024). big ai: cloud infrastructure and the industrialisation of artificial intelligence. big data & society, 11(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241232630 van der vlist, f. n., helmond, a., dieter, m., & weltevrede, e. (2024). superappification: mapping conglomeration in the global digital economy. new media & society, 0(0), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231223419 weltevrede, e., & jansen, f. (2019). infrastructures of intimate data: mapping the inbound and outbound data flows of dating apps. computational culture, 7. available at: http://computationalculture.net/infrastructures-of-intimate-data-mapping-the-inboundand-outbound-data-flows-of-dating-apps/ https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v11i2.6464 http://computationalculture.net/apps-and-infrastructures-a-research-agenda/ http://computationalculture.net/regramming-the-platform/ https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429275340-13 https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241231270 https://doi.org/10.33540/1284 https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241232630 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231223419 http://computationalculture.net/infrastructures-of-intimate-data-mapping-the-inbound-and-outbound-data-flows-of-dating-apps/ http://computationalculture.net/infrastructures-of-intimate-data-mapping-the-inbound-and-outbound-data-flows-of-dating-apps/ selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 . data citizenship: data literacies to challenge power imbalance dr. elinor carmi communication and media department, university of liverpool, uk. professor simeon yates communication and media department, university of liverpool, uk. introduction as the covid-19 pandemic took over the world, people’s reliance on digital technologies and services became even more critical than ever. in this context, it is paramount to understand the way people understand and engage with digital systems and data-driven technologies. this understanding will provide a foundation to develop education programmes that will provide citizens with data literacies to make the best use for their lives and wellbeing. in this paper we present the findings from the third phase of our “me and my big data: developing citizens data literacies” project on citizens data literacies. the data literacies framework we developed stemmed from an analysis of recent literature on data and digital literacy combined with ideas from democratic education (dewey, 1930; freire, 1970). in particular, we focus on the power imbalance between citizens and ‘bigtech’ and government entities who access, process and use data about citizens and their networks. we argue that due to its collective, socially contextualised, and peoplecentred qualities, democratic education provides a useful foundation for future data literacy education and research interventions. following an extensive literature review (first phase), and then a uk nationally representative survey (phase 2), we have conducted focus groups during autumn 2020 and winter 2021 with citizens. academic debates around digital literacy digital literacy has gone through three main waves when it comes to academic research. the first wave, from the end of the 1990s until the beginning of 2000s, which was concerned with digital divide in terms of access to devices and broadband (dimaggio and hargittai, 2001). the second wave which was, from around the beginning of the 2000s and middle of 2010s, and was concerned with different skills suggested citation (apa): carmi, e.and yates, s. (2021, october). data citizenship: data literacies to challenge power imbalance. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. necessary to operate efficiently and productively by using digital systems and services (van deursen and van dijk, 2011). and the third wave, from around the mid 2010s until present, which mainly focuses on data divides that require literacies around algorithmic bias (cotter and reisdorf, 2020; gran et al., 2020) and advocating for data justice (dencik et al., 2019). the literature changed along with further developments and deeper embeddedness of data driven systems in every aspect of people’s lives, from work, to family, romantic partners and civic engagements. the power that the big technology companies such as facebook and google hold have developed and increased through dark patterns, opaque terms of use and lack of appropriate regulation and enforcement. citizen’s ability to make rights claims to change regulations and affect what is seen as the new “normal” is key. providing citizens with the necessary digital literacies to engage in this ecosystem also depends on understanding and challenging the stark power imbalance between corporations and citizens in the context of digital media. our approach promotes the capacity for citizens to understand and think critically about what is done with their data, data about them and their community and also to use data as active citizens. method throughout october until march our team conducted 15 focus groups with uk citizens via digital literacies centres across the uk, who were divided according to their literacy levels (indicated by the centres) as well as age. low digital access and skills closely correspond and correlate with other key demographics such as age, income, poverty, being in social housing, low educational attainment, long term ill-health and ethnicity (yates et al., 2020). often in complex and intersectional ways. preliminary results after transcribing, coding and analysing the focus groups we have reached preliminary insights which we divide into the three dimensions of our data citizenship framework: 1. data thinking (people’s critical thinking of their data): many of our participants do not know basic definitions of the digital ecosystem, even what counts as shared data. they also do not know which companies track their behaviour and what they do with their data. most people in our focus groups mentioned they care about online privacy but say they do not know what to do about it. the majority of people expressed deep concerns about the way big tech companies use and misuse their data but said that they feel that there is nothing they can do about it. 2. data doing (people’s everyday practices with their data): many participants are not confident they can change their privacy settings. in addition, and what appears to be one of the most important insights is that most people do not post on social media for various reasons including: privacy concerns, thinking they have nothing important to say and worrying about social media conduct with their data. when we probed deeper our participants revealed that the majority of discussions are conducted in private messaging apps like whatsapp and facebook messenger. 3. data participating (people’s networked engagement with their data and their networks of literacy): many people ask their close friends or family when they are unsure about the quality of information (for example if it is misinformation) or want to learn new skills. the majority of participants mentioned they look for information on either google search or youtube. importantly, most people do not know how to use data for civic action, organising protest or benefitting their communities. an insight that binds these three dimensions together is that people’s thinking, doing and participating relate to their identity and communities of reference. for example, participants associated their practices and understandings to being “in it”, “geek”, “teacher”, etc. as we mentioned elsewhere (carmi et al., 2020), people rely on their networks of literacy, which is the ways people engage with others, where and with which media to gain the understanding, skills and competencies in a way that fits them. what our focus groups indicate is that people’s networks of literacy can be a key point of intervention when designing education programmes. conclusion the main insights from the third phase of our research indicates that people remain unaware of key aspects of the digital economy, they feel concerned about the way it is operating but do not feel confident enough to be able to change that. a crucial insight, that also came in our previous survey research phases, is the importance of networks of literacies among friends, colleagues and trusted organisations. this provides a significant avenue for democratic education intervention. people operate within networks to verify information, ask for help and collaborate on things. these networks are different for different groups of people, communities, location, ages etc. with these insights we intend to develop modular education programmes that will have the three dimensions of our data citizenship. references carmi, e., yates, s. j., lockley, e., & pawluczuk, a. (2020). data citizenship: rethinking data literacy in the age of disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation. internet policy review, 9(2), 1-22. cotter, k., & reisdorf, b. c. (2020). algorithmic knowledge gaps: a new dimension of (digital) inequality. international journal of communication, 14, 745-765. dencik, l., hintz, a., redden, j., & treré, e. (2019). exploring data justice: conceptions, applications and directions. dimaggio, p., & hargittai, e. (2001). from the ‘digital divide’ to ‘digital inequality’: studying internet use as penetration increases. princeton: center for arts and cultural policy studies, woodrow wilson school, princeton university, 4(1), 4-2. gran, a. b., booth, p., & bucher, t. (2020). to be or not to be algorithm aware: a question of a new digital divide?. information, communication & society, 1-18. van deursen, a., & van dijk, j. (2011). internet skills and the digital divide. new media & society, 13(6), 893-911. yates, s., carmi, e., lockley, e., pawluczuk, a., french, t., & vincent, s. (2020). who are the limited users of digital systems and media? an examination of uk evidence. first monday, 25(7). selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): kumar, p.c., & hyde, l. (2023, october). exploring how u.s., k-12 education addresses privacy literacy. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. exploring how u.s. k-12 education addresses privacy literacy priya c. kumar pennsylvania state university, college of information sciences and technology lily hyde pennsylvania state university, college of information sciences and technology introduction as children grow up immersed in digital environments, scholars and policymakers emphasize the importance of helping children learn how to navigate privacy online (culver & grizzle, 2017; livingstone et al. 2020). educators recognize this need for privacy lessons but do not always feel equipped to teach them (kumar et al., 2019). indeed, the term “privacy” has many meanings, and the concept of privacy does not easily fit in a specific subject, intersecting with social studies, computer science, media literacy, digital literacy, and digital citizenship (kumar & byrne, 2022). scholars have begun developing frameworks for privacy education (e.g., kumar & byrne, 2022; livingstone et al. 2020), but such efforts will have a higher chance of success if they can be integrated into existing educational standards. thus, in this study we are analyzing u.s. k-12 educational standards to understand whether and how they address privacy literacy. background: what is privacy literacy? the spread of digital media technologies into many facets of everyday life, especially among children and young adults, has given rise to several “new” literacies (ito et al., 2009). these include making sense of information across a variety of media forms, navigating the social norms of different digital environments, and creating media within or across multiple platforms. new literacies acknowledge connections between digital interactions and privacy, for instance, through recognizing that digital technologies facilitate public and private communication. but the concept of privacy literacy as a distinct subset of new literacies is relatively recent. initial conceptualizations of privacy literacy emphasized knowledge of specific facts (e.g., how to adjust privacy settings) or processes of critical thinking (e.g., reflecting before posting online) and were not specific to children (kumar et al., 2020). to shift privacy literacy beyond a focus on individual knowledge and decision-making and toward an understanding of privacy as dynamic and socially driven, kumar et al. (2020) define privacy literacy as a “practice of enacting appropriate information flows” when engaging in digital interactions (p. 175). this draws on nissenbaum’s (2010) conception of privacy as the appropriate flow of information, which, while popular in academic circles,1 is not how the wider public is used to thinking about privacy (auxier et al., 2019). thus, if the privacy-literacy-as-enacting-appropriate-flows approach is to take root in education, we first need to understand how schools currently teach privacy literacy and then identify areas of alignment between existing educational efforts and this new approach to privacy. methods to determine whether states have educational standards related to privacy literacy, we searched for standards in relevant subjects, primarily digital literacy/citizenship, technology, and computer science. we focused on standards that applied to all students, rather than standards that applied only to students who enrolled in an elective subject, since any privacy-related information in the latter would not reach all students. we began by searching each u.s. state’s department of education website for relevant standards, which yielded results for 24 states. we then searched for relevant standards through google searches, which yielded relevant standards for another 24 states. for the final two states, we found no relevant standards. in our initial analysis, we categorized the standards based on their status (e.g., proposed, in effect), the school subjects they fit into, and topics in which they discuss privacy. we then began reviewing the implemented standards to understand how education policymakers conceptualize privacy for students. our analysis is ongoing, and we present preliminary findings below. preliminary findings of the 50 u.s. states, we found 44 have implemented educational standards related to privacy, four have guidance or proposed standards related to privacy, and two do not appear to have standards related to privacy. the school subjects that these standards fit into vary across states but primarily comprise library, computer science, and social studies. of the 44 states with implemented standards, 36 explicitly mention privacy. for instance, massachusetts integrates privacy into the concepts of safety and security, network systems operations, and ethics and laws. similarly, idaho integrates privacy into standards related to describing ethical issues, discussing trade-offs, and analyzing regulation. the remaining eight states do not use the term “privacy” but cover topics similar to the other standards, such as password practices, data ethics, and digital citizenship. for instance, alabama’s technology education standards include “protecting personal information online” in the digital citizenship criteria from kindergarten through 12th grade. 1 for instance, see the annual symposium on applications of contextual integrity: https://privaci.info/ https://privaci.info/ overall, the main privacy-related topics in state standards include being careful about posting information online and managing passwords. most standards approach privacy education as instructing students on “what not to do” rather than on helping them learn how to navigate privacy issues in digital environments, despite the fact that scholars advise against this “do’s and don’ts” approach to privacy education (kumar et al., 2018; 2020). this suggests that recently developed privacy education frameworks (e.g., kumar & byrne, 2022; livingstone et al. 2020) may help educators bring a more nuanced approach to privacy into their classrooms. next steps and proposed contribution based on this initial analysis, we are developing a codebook related to our research questions, which we will then use to code the text of the standards. our analysis will examine what specific aspects of privacy are covered in state educational standards and what privacy-related outcomes or abilities these standards require students to demonstrate. we will also apply our codebook to discipline-specific standards that correspond to the subjects in which privacy is taught, including library (aasl, 2018) and computer science (csta, 2017; iste, 2018), and compare how they align with individual state standards. one of our goals is to understand whether and what kind of differences arise when privacy is taught from a digital citizenship perspective compared to a computer science/security perspective. comparing state and disciplinary standards will also shed light on who in schools is expected to teach children about privacy (e.g., librarian, computer science teacher) and what kind of professional development efforts may help ensure that the people in those roles feel equipped to teach privacy-related topics. our analysis will also examine how privacy is taught across grade levels. in our initial analysis, we observed different approaches across states. for instance, the alabama standards mentioned in the previous section incorporate privacy-related information across the entire k-12 span, whereas a few other states limit privacy-related lessons to middle or high school. our goal is to illustrate what and how students are learning about privacy across their trajectory through primary and secondary education. this will be useful to inform the development of privacy-focused educational resources. taken together, these analyses will contribute a comprehensive picture of what expectations for privacy education exist across the u.s. scholars involved in developing privacy literacy efforts can then tailor their work toward meeting these standards or advocating for changes that reflect the kinds of privacy lessons important for children who grow up immersed in digital environments. references american association of school librarians (aasl) (ed.). (2018). national school library standards for learners, school librarians, and school libraries. ala editions, an imprint of the american library association. auxier, b., rainie, l., anderson, m., perrin, a., kumar, m., & turner, e. (2019). americans and privacy: concerned, confused and feeling lack of control over their personal information. pew research center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/11/15/americans-and-privacyconcerned-confused-and-feeling-lack-of-control-over-their-personal-information/ computer science teachers association (csta). (2017). csta k-12 computer science standards. retrieved from http://www.csteachers.org/standards. culver, s. h., & grizzle, a. (2017). survey on privacy in media and information literacy with youth perspectives (vol. 18). unesco. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000258993 international society for technology in education (iste). (2018). iste national educational technology standards (nets). eugene, or. www.iste.org/standards/iste-standards-for-teachers ito, m., horst, h., bittanti, m., boyd, d., herr-stephenson, b., lange, p. g., pascoe, c. j., & robinson, l. (2009). living and learning with new media: summary of findings from the digital youth project. mit press. kumar, p. c., & byrne, v. l. (2022). the 5ds of privacy literacy: a framework for privacy education. information and learning sciences, 123(7/8), 445–461. https://doi.org/10.1108/ils-02-2022-0022 kumar, p. c., chetty, m., clegg, t. l., & vitak, j. (2019). privacy and security considerations for digital technology use in elementary schools. proceedings of the 2019 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (chi ’19), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300537 kumar, p. c., subramaniam, m., vitak, j., clegg, t. l., & chetty, m. (2020). strengthening children’s privacy literacy through contextual integrity. media and communication, 8(4), article 4. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v8i4.3236 kumar, p., vitak, j., chetty, m., clegg, t. l., yang, j., mcnally, b., & bonsignore, e. (2018). co-designing online privacy-related games and stories with children. proceedings of the 17th acm conference on interaction design and children (idc ’18), 67–79. https://doi.org/10.1145/3202185.3202735 livingstone, s., stoilova, m., & nandagiri, r. (2020). data and privacy literacy: the role of the school in educating children in a datafied society. in d. frau-meigs, s. kotilainen, m. pathak-shelat, m. hoechsmann, & s. r. poyntz (eds.), the handbook of media education research (1st ed., pp. 413–425). wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119166900.ch38 nissenbaum, h. (2010). privacy in context: technology, policy, and the integrity of social life. stanford university press. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/11/15/americans-and-privacy-concerned-confused-and-feeling-lack-of-control-over-their-personal-information/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/11/15/americans-and-privacy-concerned-confused-and-feeling-lack-of-control-over-their-personal-information/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/11/15/americans-and-privacy-concerned-confused-and-feeling-lack-of-control-over-their-personal-information/ http://www.csteachers.org/standards https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000258993 https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000258993 http://www.iste.org/standards/iste-standards-for-teachers https://doi.org/10.1108/ils-02-2022-0022 https://doi.org/10.1108/ils-02-2022-0022 https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300537 https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300537 https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v8i4.3236 https://doi.org/10.1145/3202185.3202735 https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119166900.ch38 https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119166900.ch38 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): staria, g., & trillo, t. (2022, november). follow me through instagram: frontstage, back-stage, and intimate-stage in giorgia meloni’s and matteo renzi’s performances of celebrity politics. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. follow me through instagram: front-stage, back-stage, and intimate-stage in giorgia meloni’s and matteo renzi’s performances of celebrity politics giovanni daniele starita university of perugia tommaso trillò hebrew university of jerusalem abstract over the last decade, social media became an indispensable tool for political campaigning for populist political leaders, who successfully used social media to circumvent traditional media elite and establish a seemingly direct relationship with their constituents. based on this premises and adopting the lens of “digital populism”, our study presents a visual analysis of the portraits and candid shots posted on instagram by two italian populist party leaders: giorgia meloni and matteo renzi. specifically, we explore a corpus of 424 images featuring the two leaders and posted on their respective profiles during 2020 (266 for meloni, 158 for renzi). our analysis mostly focuses on a crucial semiotic feature of these images: setting. recognizing that digital photography contributes to the mutual construction of self and space, we argue that the renzi and meloni strategically use setting to negotiate the inherent tension between their status as celebrity politicians and the “claim to ordinariness” typical of their populist political style. thus, we claim that the two leaders navigate this tension by selectively posting images set “on stage” (e.g., while being interviewed during a talk show), “behind the scenes” (e.g., while working in their office), or on an “intimate stage” (e.g., on a day hike with their family). in our conclusions we reflect on the notion that populism is endemic in italian politics, suggesting its digital manifestations take different shapes depending on political narratives that charismatic leaders construct for themselves through different mixes of celebrity and micro-celebrity practices. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): abhari, r., tosoni, s., ma, l., and schneider, j. (2024, october). misinformation, conspiracy, and politicization in digitally mediated science. panel presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. misinformation, conspiracy, and politicization in digitally mediated science rod abhari northwestern university simone tosoni università cattolica del sacro cuore lai ma university college dublin introduction the internet has fundamentally changed the architecture of scientific diffusion, and with it, the public’s relationship with science. new digital publishing technologies, including preprint servers, open access journals, and shadow libraries (e.g., sci-hub), have circumvented many of the traditional gatekeepers of science (bucchi, 2017). public access to science is further facilitated by science communicators who post popularized interpretations of scientific research on science blogs and social media sites (brennen, 2018). and through their own posts and comments, science-engaged publics deliberate over these scientific outputs, arriving at communal, though often distinct, understandings about how science should affect their personal lives (mede & schäfer, 2020; van schalkwyk et al., 2020). but while these changes have made science more publicly relevant, they have also contributed to a crisis of scientific misinformation. on social media, expert consensuses on politicized issues from climate change to vaccination are routinely undermined by both low-quality science and misinterpretations of science (druckman, 2022). scientific misinformation refers to “publicly available information that is misleading or deceptive relative to the best available scientific evidence or expertise at the time” (southwell et al., 2022). during the covid-19 pandemic, scientific misinformation directly undermined public health policies and produced a measurable increase in covid-19 related injuries and deaths (albrecht, 2022). in addition, by presenting scientific actors as incompetent or politically compromised, scientific misinformation about covid-19 decreased the overall levels of trust in science among many social demographics (bolsen & palm, 2022). in this way, science misinformation may have immediate effects on specific science issues as well as long-term consequences for the ability of science to contribute to public policy (southwell et al., 2022). motivated by these challenges, our proposed panel will discuss how the internet shapes public (mis)understandings of science and explore possible regulatory and design decisions to counteract science misinformation. our proposed panel consists of three panelists with expertise in communication, information science, and history. each panelist locates misinformation in at least one node in the digital architecture of science, including the literacy skills of the individual, the production and circulation of flawed science, and the mobilization of scientific counterpublics. science literacy the challenge of selecting digitally mediated information is compounded by the myriad channels for accessing scientific knowledge. some of these sources, including preprints and clickbait science journalism, should not be interpreted in the same way as peerreviewed articles. in “science literacy in the post-truth era,” our second panelist describes the development of a science literacy framework designed to help students find reliable information within the “infodemic” of information abundance (cinelli et al., 2020). scientific controversies even before the internet, scientific controversies, or disagreements about the interpretation of a particular set of scientific facts, have generated considerable public attention. in “scientific controversies in digital publics,” our third panelist describes the role of scientific intermediaries, such as wikipedia and think tanks, in facilitating scientific controversies by framing scientific facts through disparate epistemic perspectives. scientific retractions finally, we will consider the impact of misinformation that arises directly from flawed science. while scientific retractions are intended to correct these types of misinformation, in a climate of scientific distrust, retractions of politicized scientific issues may be ignored or even used as evidence of scientific censorship. in “when retractions fail,” our final panelist presents a typology of scientific misinformation that can arise from public mentions of retracted research. the talk will also identify the relative prevalence of each type of misinformation in social media mentions of covid19 retractions. references albrecht, d. (2022). vaccination, politics and covid-19 impacts. bmc public health, 22(1), 96. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-021-12432-x bolsen, t., & palm, r. (2022). politicization and covid-19 vaccine resistance in the u.s. progress in molecular biology and translational science, 188(1), 81–100. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.pmbts.2021.10.002 brennen, j. s. (2018). magnetologists on the beat: the epistemology of science journalism reconsidered. communication theory, 28(4), 424–443. https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qty001 bucchi, m. (2017). credibility, expertise and the challenges of science communication 2.0. public understanding of science, 26(8), 890–893. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662517733368 cinelli, m., quattrociocchi, w., galeazzi, a., valensise, c. m., brugnoli, e., schmidt, a. l., zola, p., zollo, f., & scala, a. (2020). the covid-19 social media infodemic. scientific reports, 10(1), 16598. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-73510-5 druckman, j. n. (2022). threats to science: politicization, misinformation, and inequalities. the annals of the american academy of political and social science, 700(1), 8–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027162221095431 mede, n. g., & schäfer, m. s. (2020). science-related populism: conceptualizing populist demands toward science. public understanding of science, 29(5), 473– 491. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662520924259 southwell, b. g., brennen, j. s. b., paquin, r., boudewyns, v., & zeng, j. (2022). defining and measuring scientific misinformation. the annals of the american academy of political and social science, 700(1), 98–111. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027162221084709 van schalkwyk, f., dudek, j., & costas, r. (2020). communities of shared interests and cognitive bridges: the case of the anti-vaccination movement on twitter. scientometrics, 125(2), 1499–1516. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03551-0 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-021-12432-x https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.pmbts.2021.10.002 https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qty001 https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662517733368 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-73510-5 https://doi.org/10.1177/00027162221095431 https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662520924259 https://doi.org/10.1177/00027162221084709 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03551-0 science literacy in the post-truth era lai ma university college dublin science journalism can inform and influence public health policies and stimulate public debates on topics from sustainability, artificial intelligence, to cloning technologies. however, they can also become a vehicle for spreading science-related misinformation and even disinformation when/if they are misinterpreted, especially when less welltrained journalists and sometimes social media influencers produce ‘click-bait’ pieces for gain. there were also instances where inconclusive or retracted research articles become headlines: a well-known example is the false reporting of the mmr vaccine as a cause of autism that has influenced the anti-vaccination movements and the current measles outbreak in europe (european centre for disease prevention and control, 2024). the spread of misinformation and disinformation during the covid-19 pandemic has raised the need for information literacy, digital literacy, and media literacy. the world health organization defines an infodemic as “too much information including false or misleading information in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak’ that can harm health and undermine public health responses” (who, n.d.). these issues become more problematic when the general educated public has limited, if any, understanding as to what it means by terms such as ‘peer-reviewed’ or ‘preprint’. basic understanding of terms related to academic research and publication practices is fundamental and necessary in tackling science misinformation and disinformation. however, little attention has been placed in science literacy, defined as the “familiarity with the enterprise and practice of science” (snow & dibner, 2016; see also howell, 2020). science literacy is significant for understanding reports of science-related information in mass and social media and evaluating their credibility and reliability. the following examples demonstrate some of the terms and concepts reported in mass media: scientists in germany claim to have cracked the cause of the rare blood clots linked to the oxford/astrazeneca and johnson & johnson coronavirus vaccines and believe the jabs could be tweaked to stop the reaction happening altogether. the delivery mechanism means the vaccines send the dna gene sequences of the spike protein into the cell nucleus rather than the cytosol fluid found inside the cell where the virus normally produces proteins, prof marschalek and other scientists said in a preprint paper released on wednesday.(the irish times, 2021) early results from a small clinical trial, presented february 17 at the annual meeting of the american association for the advancement of science, suggest that a close relative of the weight-loss drugs wegovy and ozempic significantly lessened cravings for opioids in people with opioid use disorder. (science news, 2024) efforts to reproduce the work showed that the enzymes do not catalyze the reactions with the activities and selectivities claimed. careful examination of the first author's lab notebook then revealed missing contemporaneous entries and raw data for key experiments. the authors are therefore retracting the paper… the announcement is the latest example of the reproducibility crisis facing the sciences. (bbc, 2020) science literacy is not only important during a pandemic or a public health crisis. as social media posts and news reports about anxiety, stress, diet, weight loss, birth control, vaccinations, and so on are consumed and shared every day, from sleepy girl mocktail (the new york times, 2024), ozempic for weight loss (the new york times, 2022), to more serious health issues, the general public should be equipped with basic understanding of terms related to research and publication practices. the necessity of science literacy is compounded by the proliferation of preprints and an increasing number of open access articles which can be read, but can also be potentially misunderstood, by journalists and the general public. for instance, over 28,000 preprint articles have been uploaded on medrxiv and biorxiv since the beginning of the covid19 pandemic. while these preprints are valuable for scientists and researchers, the majority have not been peer reviewed and are not suitable for journalistic reports or public consumption. further, there is also a need for the public to discern potential commercial and political influences on scientific research (oreskes & conway, 2010) and the mechanisms by which false beliefs form and spread (o’connor & weatherall, 2019). ma (2024) argues that the understanding of the scientific process, in particular, how knowledge is produced and published, is vital for combatting science disinformation and misinformation. science literacy can be considered as a subsidiary of information literacy, but the term is not commonly understood and its practices are not well developed. the overall aim of the project, “science literacy in the post-truth era’, is to develop a science literacy competence framework for undergraduate curriculum. before working on the framework, there are two main research questions to be addressed: 1) how do undergraduate students respond to science-related information on social media platforms and other news outlets? 2) do undergraduate students understand terms such as ‘preprint’ and ‘retraction’? to answer these questions, we are conducting a study to evaluate undergraduate students’ media uses and science literacy. in the first phase of the study, focus groups were conducted with undergraduate students in autumn 2023. in the focus groups, respondents were invited to respond to a few social media posts and discuss their views about the spread of science misinformation on these platforms. the data analysis is in still progress, while the preliminary observations show that (1) respondents’ news sources were primarily social media posts and none of them subscribed to newspapers, magazines, or even podcasts for news; (2) respondents did not respond to the need of scientific knowledge when commenting on social media posts about health or lifestyle; and (3) respondents did not highlight terms such as ‘preliminary study’ and did not indicate the possibility of science misinformation or disinformation. in the second phase of the study, a survey will be conducted in late spring 2024, including questions about media use, news sources, and some test questions about science literacy. the design of the survey is informed by the preliminary findings of the focus groups as well as previous surveys such as the european union media & news survey 2023 and the general social survey 2022. the survey will be promoted to undergraduate students using social media campaigns and posters and flyers on university campuses in dublin (ireland) including dublin city university, trinity college dublin, and university college dublin. in the presentation, i will discuss the preliminary findings of the study. i will also discuss the challenges of tackling science misinformation and disinformation when scientific research is under commercial and political influences and when scientific findings are misinterpreted and manipulated. references bbc. (2020). nobel prize-winning scientist frances arnold retracts paper. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50989423 european centre for disease prevention and control (2024). measles on the rise in the eu/eea: considerations for public health response. https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/measles-eu-threatassessment-brief-february-2024.pdf european union. (2023). media & news survey 2023. https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3153 howell, e. l., & brossard, d. (2020). (mis)informed about what? what it means to be a science-literate citizen in a digital world. pnas, 118(15), e1912436117. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1912436117 ma, l. (2024). the role of scholarly communication in combating disinformation and misinformation. journal of education for library and information science, 65(1), 92-99. https://doi.org/10.3138/jelis-2022-0017 o’connor, c., & weatherall, j. o. (2019). the misinformation age: how false beliefs spread. yale university press. oreskes, n., & conway, e. m. (2010). merchants of doubt: how a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. bloomsbury. science news. (2024, february 17). taking a weight-loss drug reduced a craving for opioids. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/weight-loss-drug-addiction-opioid-disorder snow, c. e., & dibner, k. a. (2016). science literacy: concepts, contexts, and consequences. national academies press. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50989423 https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/measles-eu-threat-assessment-brief-february-2024.pdf https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/measles-eu-threat-assessment-brief-february-2024.pdf https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3153 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1912436117 https://doi.org/10.3138/jelis-2022-0017 https://www.sciencenews.org/article/weight-loss-drug-addiction-opioid-disorder the general social survey (n.d.). https://gss.norc.org/about-the-gss the irish times. (2021). moderna booster produces strong response against omicron, company says. https://www.irishtimes.com/business/health-pharma/moderna-boosterproduces-strong-response-against-omicron-company-says-1.4759986 the new york times. (2022, november 22). what is ozempic and why is it getting so much attention? https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/well/ozempic-diabetes-weightloss.html the new york times. (2024, january 17). can this viral bedtime ‘mocktail’ actually help you fall asleep? https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/17/well/live/sleepy-girl-mocktailcherry-magnesium.html world health organization (who). (n.d.). infodemic. https://www.who.int/healthtopics/infodemic https://gss.norc.org/about-the-gss https://www.irishtimes.com/business/health-pharma/moderna-booster-produces-strong-response-against-omicron-company-says-1.4759986 https://www.irishtimes.com/business/health-pharma/moderna-booster-produces-strong-response-against-omicron-company-says-1.4759986 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/well/ozempic-diabetes-weight-loss.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/well/ozempic-diabetes-weight-loss.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/17/well/live/sleepy-girl-mocktail-cherry-magnesium.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/17/well/live/sleepy-girl-mocktail-cherry-magnesium.html https://www.who.int/health-topics/infodemic https://www.who.int/health-topics/infodemic the italian ‘stop5g’ refused knowledge community on social media before and during the pandemic simone tosoni università cattolica del sacro cuore the proposed talk delves into the italian stop5g movement, aiming to explore how this refused knowledge community (rkc) before and during the pandemic crisis employed media and in particular social media – in their overall discursive practices to construct, stabilize, and, in some instances, radically transform a body of shared knowledge rejected by the majority of the scientific community, concerning in particular the existence of long-term effects of non-ionizing electromagnetic radiations. for this end, it adopts a perspective inspired by the social worlds framework (clarke & star 2007) and by an ecological understanding of media (anderson 2016). the former conceives social worlds (a plurality of actors sharing the similar positions within a confrontational discursive arena) and their discourses as co-constructed, and drives scholars to address the process of their mutual constitution focusing on specific situationans of discursive production; the latter conceives the mediascape as a vast interconnected environment of interactions between human actors and non-human actants (like social platforms’ intermediation algorithms), where discourses coevolve in different ways: sometimes competing, sometimes adapting one to the other, and sometimes again merging in new ones. under a methodological point of view, the proposed talk is based on a two year long mixed-method empirical research, that included one year of virtual ethnography and of traditional offline ethnographic observation (spanning from 2019 to 2020) of the stop 5g social world main online and offline activities; analysis of the documents produced by several actors of the rkc; in depth qualitative interviews with citizens, activists, and experts; and focus groups with diverse population samples, including students and adult laypeople. thanks to this approach, it was possible to identify four distinct phases characterizing the social world of the stop5g movement, its discursive practices and uses of media, and its shared knowledge: 1) a first phase, the phase of public appeals (2017-2018), when the social world was predominantly composed by networks of dissident scientists contesting the established knowledge on electromagnetic fields. pursuing a strategy already employed in contesting earlier generations of mobile communication technologies, these scientists utilized public appeals to various institutions and the general public, invoking the precautionary principle to advocate for a moratorium on 5g deployment. at the same time, scientists aimed at opening a controversy within the scientific community over the existence of long-term effects of 5g technology. a linchpin of this strategy was represented by what can be defined as a “scientific patchwork discursive approach”, consisting in the production and circulation of extensive literature reviews collecting scientific papers, all published in peer-reviewed journals however often deemed unreliable by the larger scientific community, to support the existence of long-term effects attributed to 5g. 2) a second phase, the activist phase (2018-2020), when a plurality of laypeople joined the social world as activists, getting organized in a constellation of local independent groups, managing their online and offline activities through instant message applications and facebook groups, and finding an overall informal coordination in trans-local and national facebook groups. however independent, these groups by and large aligned their discursive strategies with the “scientific patchwork discursive approach” introduced by scientists in the previous phase: they leveraged scientific literature to engage in dialogues with local municipalities, often resulting in successful appeals for the suspension of 5g deployment. collaboration with local scientists and alternative knowledge authorities, such as the italian association of electrosensitives (aie), lend credibility to their requests and helped local groups to maintain their discourses within the borders of a scientific epistemological framework. 3) an intermediate phase, at the onset of the pandemic crisis (february-april 2020), during which the social world experienced significant transformations in its discursive practices. activists’ activities, in fact, shifted mainly online due to lockdown measures, making local online spaces less relevant in favour of few translocal and national facebook groups. in this phase, online groups moderators engaged in harsh boundary work in the attempt to maintain the focus of their discursive production on 5g technologies, avoiding at the same time antiscientific and conspiratorial stances. 4) the pandemic phase (until the end of 2020, when observation came to and end), when moderators ceased their gatekeeping activities and the discourses in the social world took by and large a populist and conspiratorial turn, and a new “syncretic patchworking discoursive approach” became dominant, bringing together alternative scientific knowledge on electromagnetic waves and considerations on alternative spirituality, cultural critic and esoterism, conspiration theories and claims on the nature of the virus, the risks of vaccines and the alarm of an imminent transhumanist turn in western societies allowed by the deployment of the new communicative infrastructure. as it will be shown, this turn from a “scientific” to a “syncretic” patchworking approach in the discursive practices of knowledge production and of contestation of official science by the stop 5g rkg was fostered by, and at the same time promoted, radical transformations in the structuration of the social world, ultimately bringing to the disintegration of a large part of it. in this way, the proposed talk intends to contribute to the understanding of the tight intertwinement between the structuration of a social world and of its arena, its discursive practices – media related and not and the shared knowledge produced by these same practices, with a specific focus on the role played by media, and in particular social networks, in this intertwinement. references anderson, c. w. (2016). news ecosystems. in t. witschge, c. w. anderson, d. domingo, & a. hermida (eds.), the sage handbook of digital journalism (pp. 410–423). sage. clarke, a., & star, s. l. (2007). the social worlds framework: a theory/methods package. in e. j. hackett, o. amsteramska, m. e. lynch, & j. wajcman (a c. di), the handbook of science and technology studies (pp. 113–138). mit press. how retractions fail: conspiracy and denial in online attention to retractions rod abhari northwestern university 2023 was a record-breaking year for scientific retractions. over 10,000 academic articles were retracted in 2023, nearly tripling the number of retractions issued in 2022 (mckie, 2024). a retraction, according to the center on publication ethics, is a formal statement that completely repudiates the scientific credibility of a research article (barbour et al., 2009). while the prevalence of retractions may seem high, it likely represents only a fraction of the total number of fraudulent, manipulated, or otherwise illegitimate articles that are deserving of retraction (marcus & oransky, 2017). thus, some scientists have argued that an increase in retractions actually indicates that the system of science is performing as it should (hilgard & jamieson, 2017). but while retractions may not indicate a systemic problem within science, they are a threat to the public image of science in the context of politicized scientific distrust. ongoing attacks on academic institutions by conservative interests have raised questions about both the competence of key scientists and the incentive structures through which science is produced (oreskes & conway, 2010). in the context of politicization, individual cases of retractions are increasingly likely to be interpreted as an institutional crisis within science rather than the isolated failings of individual scientists or journals (hilgard & jamieson, 2017). indeed, science skeptics, including scientists whose articles were retracted, have claimed that the retraction ‘crisis’ is actually a series of attempts from corrupt science publishers to censor unpopular, and generally conservative, opinions (savolainen, 2023; mccullough, 2023). the proposed research talk will present my prior and ongoing research on the social context of retractions. in my prior research (author, forthcoming) i have developed a typology of retraction-related misinformation by identifying two types of information disorders associated with public mentions of retraction, namely retraction avoidance and retraction cynicism. in my ongoing research, i have also collected a large dataset of roughly 3 million social media posts from facebook, reddit, and twitter/x that link to retracted articles or their retraction notice (hereafter, “retracted article mentions”). for the proposed talk, i will combine the typology of retraction-related misinformation with an empirical analysis of the prevalence of these forms of misinformation. i. a typology of retraction misinformation in my previous research i have identified two types of misinformation that can arise from retracted article mentions. first, misinformation can spread from tweets that present the original article as a scientific fact without acknowledging its retraction. as an unambiguous repudiation of an article’s scientific legitimacy, retractions are one of the most important checks on scientific misinformation. however, this check can only exist when retractions are acknowledged. in academic publishing, authors are expected not to cite retracted papers for reasons unrelated to their retraction (barbour et al., 2009). whether this expectation exists on social media, however, is an open question. while recent research suggests that twitter mentions of retracted research drop off after an article is retracted, the most likely reason is that the retraction comes after the initial attention to an article has been exhausted (peng et al., 2022; serghiou et al., 2021). when the retraction of a science article is not acknowledged, discredited scientific research may continue to propagate. accordingly, retraction avoidant mentions directly undermine one of science’s most essential checks against scientific misinformation. second, misinformation can spread from tweets that acknowledge a retraction, but frame it as being politically motivated. these tweets employ the rhetoric of science cynicism, an insidious form of scientific misinformation that does not explicitly deny the relevance of science, but instead seeks to diminish it by politicizing the motives of scientists (oreskes & conway, 2010). utilizing science cynicism allows politicized actors to undermine mainstream ideology without committing to falsifiable positions, e.g., by ‘just asking questions.’ in the context of covid-19, science cynicism has characterized much of the response to the pandemic among conservative figureheads (hall-jamieson, 2021). science cynicism has also provided the breadcrumbs for the conspiracy-prone to piece together a sinister narrative in which scientists consort with “political elites” who direct the outcomes of their research. although there is no evidence of this having occurred for any of the retracted covid-19 vaccine articles discussed on social media, belief in conspiracy theories have nonetheless emerged as one of the key predictors of vaccine resistance (romer & hall-jamieson, 2020, romer & hall-jamieson, 2022). ii. the prevalence of retraction-related misinformation to measure the prevalence of the types two misinformation, we collected a list of 13,367 retracted articles between 2017 and 2023 using the publicly available database of retracted articles (the center for scientific integrity, 2018). we then used the altmetric fetch api, provided through a data sharing agreement with the company altmetric, to find social media mentions of each article before and after their retraction (altmetric, 2023). this produced a dataset of roughly 3 million social media mentions of retracted articles found on facebook, reddit, and twitter/x. using the text found in the dataset, we performed a content analysis of the social media mentions in the corpus. to do so, my research team has trained a chatgpt based classifier to determine whether a given mention provided a neutral reference to the retraction (0), avoided the retraction (1), or ascribed cynical motivations for the retraction (2). the model achieved a high performance for measuring both types of misinformation with an f1 classification score of 0.86 for retraction avoidant mentions and 0.81 for retraction cynical mentions. with the model trained, we are currently undergoing the task of automated coding using gpt-4. to establish expected values, we performed human coding on a sample of 1000 retracted article mentions. based on the results of this coding, we expect that retraction avoidant mentions will constitute 24.3% of all mentions, and retraction cynical mentions will constitute 6.1% of all mentions. once the full dataset has been coded, we will test a series of analyze the media-related and article-related factors that contribute to the prevalence of both types of misinformation. my research questions and hypotheses are as follows: rq1: does retraction-related misinformation vary by social media platform? h1a: twitter/x contains significantly more retraction avoidant mentions than other platforms h1b: twitter/x contains significantly more retraction cynical mentions than other platforms rq2: does retraction-related misinformation vary by article subject? h2a: politicized research receives significantly more retraction avoidant mentions. h2b: politicized research receive significantly more retraction cynical mentions. iii. conclusion and greater significance by analyzing the relevance of digital infrastructure and subject politicization in contributing to retraction-related misinformation, my research situates the larger effects of the so-called ‘retraction crisis’ in two of the most significant currents in contemporary science: the digitalization of science (stafford, 2010) and the politicization of science (oreskes & conway, 2010). taken together, this research will help elaborate on the extent to which these currents contribute to science misinformation, including conspiracy theories, that directly undermine the core practices of science. references altmetric. (2023). altmetric database in json format. (unpublished raw data.) [dataset]. altmetric fetch api. barbour, v., kleinert, s., wager, e., & yentis, s. (2019). guidelines for retracting articles. committee on publication ethics. https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2019.1.4 hilgard, j., & jamieson, k. h. (2017). science as “broken” versus science as “selfcorrecting”: how retractions and peer-review problems are exploited to attack science. in k. h. jamieson, d. m. kahan, & d. a. scheufele (eds.), the oxford handbook of the science of science communication (p. 0). oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190497620.013.9 jamieson, k. h. (2021). how conspiracists exploited covid-19 science. nature human behaviour, 5(11), article 11. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01217-2 https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2019.1.4 https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190497620.013.9 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01217-2 marcus, a., & oransky, i. (2017). is there a retraction problem? and, if so, what can we do about it? in k. h. jamieson, d. m. kahan, & d. a. scheufele (eds.), the oxford handbook of the science of science communication (p. 0). oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190497620.013.13 mccullough, p. (2023, april 30). retracted covid-19 articles: significantly more cited than others [substack newsletter]. courageous discoursetm with dr. peter mccullough & john leake. https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/retractedcovid-19-articles-significantly mckie, r. (2024, february 3). ‘the situation has become appalling’: fake scientific papers push research credibility to crisis point. the observer. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/03/the-situation-has-becomeappalling-fake-scientific-papers-push-research-credibility-to-crisis-point oreskes, n., & conway, e. m. (2010). merchants of doubt: how a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. bloomsbury press. peng, h., romero, d. m., & horvát, e.-á. (2022). dynamics of cross-platform attention to retracted papers. proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 119(25), e2119086119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2119086119 romer, d., & jamieson, k. h. (2020). conspiracy theories as barriers to controlling the spread of covid-19 in the u.s. social science & medicine, 263, 113356. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113356 romer, d., & jamieson, k. h. (2022). conspiratorial thinking as a precursor to opposition to covid-19 vaccination in the us: a multi-year study from 2018 to 2021. scientific reports, 12(1), article 1. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-02222014-5 savolainen, j. (2023). unequal treatment under the flaw: race, crime & retractions. current psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04739-2 serghiou, s., marton, r. m., & ioannidis, j. p. a. (2021). media and social media attention to retracted articles according to altmetric. plos one, 16(5), e0248625. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0248625 stafford, n. (2010). science in the digital age. nature, 467(7317), article 7317. https://doi.org/10.1038/467s19a the center for scientific integrity. (2018). retraction watch database [dataset]. retraction watch database. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190497620.013.13 https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/retracted-covid-19-articles-significantly https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/retracted-covid-19-articles-significantly https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/03/the-situation-has-become-appalling-fake-scientific-papers-push-research-credibility-to-crisis-point https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/03/the-situation-has-become-appalling-fake-scientific-papers-push-research-credibility-to-crisis-point https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2119086119 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113356 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-22014-5 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-22014-5 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04739-2 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0248625 https://doi.org/10.1038/467s19a selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): le, t. (2024, october). historicizing feminist data activism: a media genealogy of the women’s safety audits. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. historicizing feminist data activism: a media genealogy of the women’s safety audits trang le monash university introduction this paper historicizes feminist data activism, particularly as it relates to the use of grassroots data by feminist activists to address gendered violence in public spaces. it addresses the following question: how did grassroots data become widely accepted as a legitimate means to combat gendered violence in public spaces? against the presentism in common data narratives, as in the claim of scholars such as yu sun and siyuan yin (2022) that feminist data activism has emerged as a new form of feminist activism, a historical perspective, as i shall argue, allows us to unpack what seems to be a novel action repertoire within contemporary feminist activism. specifically, a longue durée perspective shows that employing grassroots data to address gendered violence predates the digital era. more importantly, instead of being diametrically opposed, the grassroots data approach has been folded into other hegemonic interests throughout history. to make the case for this argument, i use media genealogy to trace the history of a particular grassroots data type: the women's safety audit (wsa). the wsa was developed by the toronto-based feminist organization called the metropolitan toronto action committee on violence against women and children (metrac) in the 1980s. the wsa involves having women walk through public spaces to identify the physical or social attributes that make these spaces feel safe or unsafe, which ranges from women’s gut feeling about the space, as well as aspects such as lighting and entrapment spots. the wsa was groundbreaking when it emerged because its conceptualization was informed by a feminist perspective that acknowledged the gendered nature of fear of crime and its material impact on women’s mobility. as opposed to viewing it as a genderneutral issue, the wsa highlighted the importance of gathering data exclusively centered on women's experiences. in other words, the wsa is foundational to contemporary feminist data activism against gendered violence: its concept has inspired numerous modern initiatives, such as safetipin, and safecity in india, harassmap in egypt, and she's a crowd, free to be, and your ground in australia. thus, the wsa provides an interesting vantage point from which to comprehend the logic of contemporary feminist data activism. media genealogy to trace the history of the wsa, i adopt media genealogy to analyze the process by which technologies gain widespread acceptance. as koopman (2013) notes, the point of media genealogy is not to discern “how the intentions of those in the past effectively gave rise to the present, but rather to understand how various independently existing vectors of practice managed to contingently intersect in the past so as to give rise to the present” (p. 107). following koopman (2013), i do not aim to judge the move towards the datafication of women’s experiences in terms of its “good” or “bad”, “success” or “failure.” instead, i attend to power relations by considering how a form of grassroots data, namely the wsa, has evolved and been shaped by different modalities of knowledge production. data the data for this study come from historical reports published by metrac (the organization that pioneered the creation of the wsa) in the 1980s. un documentation is particularly valuable insofar as different un agencies have adopted, popularized, and legitimized the wsa since the 1990s. press releases, reports and conference proceedings published by the un around “women’s safety” and the wsa, including documentation by un women, un women’s safe cities initiative, un women’s predecessors such as the un division for the advancement of women, united nations development fund for women, and un habitat, were also reviewed. overall, i have analyzed 41 documents published across four decades since the 1980s. i also drew upon publicly available documents of modern feminist data initiatives, as well as interviews with data activists and stakeholders who funded data activism efforts. while not exhaustive, this analysis provides insights into the institutional origin of a grassroots data approach. findings i argue that insofar as the wsa is presented as a means to address gendered violence in public spaces, it has been framed as a response to different “problematizations.” during its formalization period in the 1980s, physical space was problematized. specifically, the practices known as crime prevention through environmental design (cpted) approach exerted a heavy influence on the conceptualization of the wsa. this problematically reduced women’s safety to a matter of “calculable space” (miller, 1992)—space in which risk of gendered violence can be visibly recognized through environmental cues—rather than a matter shaped by interlocking axes of race, class, and gender oppression, which traverse space (koskela and pain, 2000; massey, 2005). since the 1990s, due to growing emphasis on evidence-based practice and decision-making, evaluating the effectiveness of violence prevention methods became the main concern. predicated on a pharmaceutical model, the “evidence” in evidence-based approaches prioritize evidence generated by experimental ways of knowing (with randomized controlled trials deemed the gold standard for generating rigorous evidence and establishing causal claims) (trinder, 2000). during this period, i show that the wsa and its resulting recommendations for fixing the built environment gained significant traction precisely because it functioned within a “visual economy” (ahmed, 2013): it worked to identify observable causes of gendered violence, generate observable solutions, and produce observable evidence to demonstrate its own effectiveness. in particular, violence prevention that integrated the wsa adeptly navigated the rigorous requirement of establishing a causal relationship between interventions and the decrease in violence. this was achieved by utilizing the wsa concurrently as a method to generate data informing infrastructural changes and as a means to provide evidence of “positive” outcomes, such as the number cctvs installed in certain areas. as the consensus on the effectiveness of the wsa solidified, the focus shifted, particularly from the 2010s onward, towards the challenge of “scalability.” since the 2010s, there emerged an imperative to seek technologies that could facilitate more efficient data collection and more precise understanding of spatial dynamics. specifically, a multitude of feminist activism initiatives influenced by the wsa legacy have emerged, and they are eagerly pursuing scalable methods for collecting grassroots data, many of which rely on ai. for instance, she's a crowd, based in australia, is developing a gender safety scorecard using an algorithm to rate the safety level of specific locations based on data crowdsourced from survivors. the interviews i conducted with stakeholders funding data activism efforts demonstrated that the imperative of scalability was motivated not only by a desire for effectiveness. rather, scalability was also a prerequisite for securing funding opportunities essential for activist initiatives’ continued operation. in short, in response to this imperative, the wsa, being a relatively standardized approach to gathering grassroots data, allows for a politics of scalability to be realized. conclusion this paper traced the significant forces that shape a particular form of grassroots data and how it came to be represented as a means to address gendered violence in public spaces. rather than “signalling the emergence of innovative ‘epistemic cultures,’” (kazansky et al., 2019: 246), the genealogy of the wsa showed that grassroots data approach has been folded into other hegemonic interests throughout the history. grappling with this entanglement and the hierarchy of power/knowledge it enacts is crucial for feminist activism to not reproduce the power relations they seek to address. references ahmed s (2013) strange encounters: embodied others in post-coloniality. london: routledge. kazansky b, torres g, and van der velden l (2019) data for the social good: toward a data-activist research agenda. in: daly a, devitt sk and mann m (eds) good data. amsterdam: institute for network cultures, 244-259. koopman c (2013) genealogy as critique: foucault and the problems of modernity. bloomington: indiana university press. koskela h and pain r (2000) revisiting fear and place: women's fear of attack and the built environment. geoforum 31(2): 269-280. massey db (2005) for space. london: sage publications. milan s (2017) data activism as the new frontier of media activism. in: pickard v and g. yang g (eds) media activism in the digital age. london: routledge, 151-163. miller p (1992) accounting and objectivity: the invention of calculating selves and calculable spaces. annals of scholarship 9(1/2), 61-86. sun y and yin s (2022) opening up mediation opportunities by engaging grassroots data: adaptive and resilient feminist data activism in china. new media & society 26(5), 2851-2871. trinder l (2000) introduction: the context of evidence-based practice. in trinder l and reynolds s (eds) evidence-based practice. new jersey: wiley-blackwell, 1-16. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): boichak, olga and gregory asmolov. (2021, october). crowdfunding in remote conflicts: bounding the hyperconnected battlefield. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org crowdfunding in remote conflicts: bounding the hyperconnected battlefield olga boichak the university of sydney gregory asmolov king’s college london introduction the notion of ‘participative war’ (merrin, 2019) highlights new forms of remote participation in armed conflicts afforded by social technology platforms. conflating digital and physical battlefronts and eliding the distinction between military and civilians, platforms reconstitute the social conditions shaping people’s relationship to wars (hoskins & o’loughlin, 2010). attending to these networked transformations, literature on participation in wars has been heavily focused on their information aspects, including witnessing, memory, influence operations and computational propaganda. to date, research on sociomaterial practices surrounding hyperconnected battlefields (e.g., asmolov, 2021; chouliaraki, 2015) remains scarce: there is a gap in understanding how the architectures of participation afforded by web 2.0 shape wartime social processes ‘on the ground’, including military logistics and the delivery of humanitarian aid to affected populations (boichak, 2019). recent political conflicts in eastern europe, including the armed conflicts in ukraine and nagorno-karabakh have demonstrated that the scope of digitally mediated participation in war-related activities is much broader and goes far beyond the information domain (boichak, 2017). an additional case to consider is the belarusian protests: despite being a political conflict, the streets of major belarusian cities can be also considered an urban battlefield that attracted global attention in the real time and offered opportunities for remote participation. a rapidly emerging sociomaterial practice in this context is the use of crowdfunding platforms to provide aid to the conflict-affected military and civilian populations. echoing the conference theme, we investigate the role crowdfunding platforms play in fostering novel forms of interdependence among users as geopolitical actors in remote conflicts. situating the inquiry in the ongoing military and political conflicts in eastern europe, we undertake the ‘logistic turn’ to explore the mediation of distant http://spir.aoir.org/ 2 suffering through conflict-related crowdfunding. we ask: how do crowdfunding platforms constitute relationships between spectators and the hyperconnected battlefield, and what is the role of remote human suffering therein? background remote humanitarian participation in response to disasters and conflicts has a rich history that dates back at least a hundred years. mediated by symbolic and material artefacts – boundary objects (star and grisemer, 1989) – various forms of crowdfunding helped foster relationships between the intersecting social worlds of conflict and those of its remote spectators. postage stamps (figure 1) were a popular boundary object of the epistolary communicative tradition, drawing public attention to the suffering of veterans, their families, those with war related disabilities, and children orphaned by wars. figure 1. wwi-era stamps from the russian empire. courtesy of the author(s). in the contemporary time, the duration and extent of remote involvement among the public is known to be driven by three groups of factors: personal ties, remote suffering, and identity and expressions of patriotism (boulianne et al., 2018). these heterogeneous geographies, histories, and cultures of care turn crowdfunding platforms into a complex site of empirical analysis (figure 2). crowdfunding platforms mediate the relationship between information sharing and capacity for action and afford an array of opportunities for responding to crisis events. serving as conduits for involvement in conflicts, crowdfunding platforms are capable of accelerating response timelines as information, including photos and eyewitness accounts, as well as contact information and resources, 3 can be posted and shared synchronously while those events are unfolding. in crowdfunding platform-mediated spaces, news and requests for help might come from the victims and survivors of crisis directly, avoiding media organisations and other institutional intermediaries (boulianne et al., 2018). an ongoing discussion in the literature is whether these new forms of mediation constitute users as remote spectators, or allows for new forms of participation, and the effect it might have on the types and sets of boundary objects involved in the process. figure 2. people’s project [screenshot]. retrieved from http://www.peoplesproject.com/ data and method situating our inquiry in the ongoing conflicts in the eastern european region, we chose six prominent crowdfunding platforms for inclusion in our comparative case study: people’s project, come back alive (ukraine); anna astvatsaturian foundation, hayastan all-armenian fund (armenia); #bysol, belarustogether (belarus, figure 3). drawing on data craft, a theory/method package for critical internet studies (acker & donovan, 2019), we investigate two sets of boundary objects that mediate the connection between zones of conflict and their remote participants. the first set has to do with the crowdfunded artefacts, both tangible and intangible (from medical supplies, tactical equipment, and http://www.peoplesproject.com/en 4 prosthetics to refugee resettlement, environmental and educational initiatives). the second set of boundary objects are the mediated representations of human suffering, which get curated, ordered, and circulated by algorithmic media. accounting for the structural and functional diversity of conflict-related crowdfunding platforms, we then position these objects on a matrix based on their discursive and material significance: the narratives of suffering and the artefacts that are being funded to alleviate it. figure 3. bysol crowdfunding [screenshot], retrieved from: https://bysol.org/en/ findings & discussion through its participatory architectures, crowdfunding problematises the traditional tropes of international humanitarianism, whereby those who suffer are not merely the recipients of relief, conveying the promise of authentic, diffused, and multifaceted selfrepresentations by the communities in crisis. in fact, our analysis shows that crowdfunded goods and services – the first set of boundary objects that link to the conflict zone – elide the distinction between military and civilian logistics even further due to being a complement, or at times a substitute, of those traditionally provided by the state. in this context, one may argue that crowdfunding is just a new term used to describe conflict related fundraising mostly related to different forms of humanitarian assistance. at the same time, conflict-related crowdfunding could be considered a new form of identity proclamation with regard to the users’ positionality in the conflict: in many cases, participation in crowdfunding is visible and crowdfunding campaigns rely on networked amplification and diffusion on social media. from this point of view, crowdfunding becomes an open question to your network: “are you with us, or are you against us?”. from the case study above, we can see crowdfunding platforms not only reconfigure the relationship between spectators and the hyperconnected battlefield by challenging the centrality of power in military and humanitarian logistics, but also create the conditions of possibility – some might call it hope – for post-conflict reconstruction and a future after the military conflict. this finding suggests that the second set of boundary objects – representations of distant human suffering – are, by far, not the only mediators between https://bysol.org/en/ 5 spectators and the hyperconnected battlefield, which adds a new research direction to our understanding of values that drive remote humanitarianism in the digital age. references acker, a. & donovan, j. (2019). data craft: a theory/methods package for critical internet studies. information, communication & society, 22:11, 1590-1609. asmolov g. (2021). from sofa to frontline: the digital mediation and domestication of warfare. media, war & conflict. doi:10.1177/1750635221989568 boichak, o. (2017). battlefront volunteers: mapping and deconstructing civilian resilience networks in ukraine. in 8th international conference on social media and society: social media for good or evil, #smsociety 2017 (vol. part f129683). boichak, o. (2019) mobilizing diasporas: understanding transnational relief efforts in the age of social media. proceedings of the 52 annual hawai’i international conference on system sciences. doi: 10.24251/hicss.2019.336 boulianne, s., minaker, j., & haney, t. j. (2018). does compassion go viral? social media, caring, and the fort mcmurray wildfire. information, communication & society, 21(5), 697–711. chouliaraki, l. (2015). afterword: the dialectics of mediation in ‘distant suffering studies’. the international communication gazette, 77(7), 708–714. hoskins, a., & o’loughlin, b. (2010). war and media: the emergence of diffused war. cambridge, uk ; malden, ma: polity. merrin, w. (2018). digital war: a critical introduction. routledge. star, s. l., & griesemer, j. r. (1989). institutional ecology, `translations’ and boundary objects: amateurs and professionals in berkeley’s museum of vertebrate zoology, 1907-39. social studies of science, 19(3), https://doi.org/10.1177/1750635221989568 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): chung, hiu-fung. (2024, october). betting on (un)certain futures: sociotechnical imaginaries of ai and varieties of techno-developmentalism in asia. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. betting on (un)certain futures: sociotechnical imaginaries of ai and varieties of technodevelopmentalism in asia hiu-fung chung university of toronto introduction with the popularization of generative artificial intelligence (ai), building comprehensive ai developmental frameworks has been prioritized in national policy agendas worldwide. however, much literature on ai innovation often lean towards euro-american-centric perspectives (introna, 2016; just & latzer, 2017), regarding ai production and governance strategy – both normative and practical – as universally applicable (adams, 2021; fukuda-parr & gibbons, 2021; mohamed et al., 2020). recent scholarship has increasingly focused on ai innovation and governance frameworks in non-western societies, predominantly through critiquing data colonialism and western digital imperialism and calling for decolonializing data-driven technology (arora et al., 2023; couldry & mejias, 2023; milan & treré, 2019; mumford, 2022; singh, 2023). however, the state-of-the-art literature tends to focus on large nation-states like china (bareis & katzenbach, 2022; roberts et al., 2021), or developing regions in global south (hassan, 2023), often overlooking economically advanced but geographically non-dominant societies. studying the ai innovation discourses of these underrepresented societies can provide critical insights into the complexity and unevenness of global ai development. this paper contributes to this line of inquiry by conducting comparative studies of three asian developmental societies – singapore, hong kong, and taiwan through the conceptual lens of sociotechnical imaginaries. approaching variegated sociotechnical imaginaries sociotechnical imaginaries refer to “collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology” (jasanoff & kim, 2015, p.6). as infrastructures of planning desirable futures (sismondo, 2020), these imaginaries are shaped by past developmental trajectories, institutional settings, specific types of technoscientific capitalism, and regional geopolitics (baur, 2023; birch & muniesa, 2020; hodson & mcmeekin, 2021; kim, 2018). in other words, national sociotechnical imaginaries are always entanglement and negotiation of local, regional and international politico-economic forces in specific sociohistorical and institutional contexts. in this light, what are the desired forms of ai governance in small-size advanced economies? how does this desired form vary according to the historical, institutional, and geopolitical contexts of these societies? method and data to address these questions, this paper investigates the sociotechnical imaginaries of ai in three asian societies—singapore, hong kong and taiwan—which, despite lacking global scale advantages, face unique challenges in ai development. their strategies depend on local business ecosystems, international financial markets, transnational r&d collaboration, positioning in the global ai production network, and regional geopolitics. methodologically, the paper employs interpretive discourse analysis of governmental policy documents from these societies to understand how they construct and legitimize sociotechnical imaginaries (sadowski & bendor, 2019; tidwell & smith, 2015). two main types of documents—ai strategies and tech-related policies, such as smart city blueprints and digital welfare plans—are analyzed to explore institutional framing of ai innovation, regulation, and claims about policy implementation, industry orientation and socio-political conditions (curran & smart, 2021). documents from the early 2010s to 2024 were selected, a key period marking the adoption of industry 4.0 discourse and smart urbanism in these societies (appendix 1). thematic analysis (clarke & braun, 2013) was used to identify key discursive tropes and differences across the three cases. first, i conducted a close reading of the policy documents to identify common themes. second, i aggregated recurring themes, such as ai’s inevitability, uncertainty, and strategic coupling, while identifying society-specific themes. finally, i examined the relationships among these themes to understand how they form a coherent, though non-linear, narrative that constructs the ai imaginary in each society. three orientations of techno-developmentalist imaginaries the central argument of this paper is that policy documents from three asian societies manifest techno-developmental imaginaries of ai, with three distinct orientations. techno-developmentalism refers to both an ideology and policy practice aimed at enhancing global competitiveness and regional advantages through technological innovation (haggard, 2018; lei, 2022). three recurring themes emerge from the analysis. first, ai is portrayed as an all-encompassing technology of “augmented smartness,” offering revolutionary solutions powered by advanced computation. second, ai is framed as a disruptive force, reshaping both local societies and humanity at large, making it an inevitable necessity for socio-economic survival. third, while the tech-driven path to socio-economic progress is seen as inevitable, governing authorities must actively manage or harness ai. across the three societies, policymakers establish ai frameworks that allocate resources, coordinate diverse stakeholders, strategically engage with the global tech economy (yeung, 2016), and navigate the uncertainties inherent in ai-driven reforms. however, distinct imaginaries emerge in each society, shaped by unique socio-historical contexts and political cultures: (1) ai as a tool for cybernetic pragmatism in singapore, (2) the techno-entrepreneurial reconfiguration of financial capitalism through ai in hong kong, and (3) ai as a defensive strategy for economic nationalism in taiwan. singapore’s one-party dominance is rooted in consistent ideological efforts that leverage pragmatic rhetoric to link the city-state’s success with its ability to attract global capital, requiring a stable political system led by an experienced, meritocratic, and technocratic authoritarian government (tan, 2012). since 2014, under the framework of smart nation, singapore has led east asia in investing in data-driven technology for urban governance and digital public welfare, reflecting a data-solutionist vision of national branding. notably, singapore has made significant strides in ai integration within healthcare, with healthcare professionals receiving ai training, synapxe (the national health tech agency) launching ai-powered health solutions in 2023, and the ongoing development of the digital mental health connect (dmhc) nationwide platform to enhance predictive, or even cybernetic, care in support of consolidating authoritarian legitimacy. post-colonial hong kong’s distinct status, operating under the “one country, two systems” constitutional framework, entices chinese state-owned enterprises to see the city as a strategic offshore platform for capitalization, investment, internationalizing the renminbi (rmb), and acquiring sensitive western technologies banned in mainland china (hung, 2018). now positioned as a regional technology hub within china’s national planning, hong kong represents a techno-developmental pathway for refashioning china’s state-driven financial capitalism. given its nodal position in global capitalism since colonial times, hong kong has leveraged its historical legacy to attract international financing for ai innovation, envisioning a future rooted in technoentrepreneurship within the global ai chain. yet, the increasing economic dominance and political influence wielded by chinese state-owned companies and their affiliated princeling elite pose a paradoxical threat to hong kong’s autonomy from beijing and risk undermining its unique standing in global financial capitalism (hung, 2018). meanwhile, taiwan, long a leading player in global semiconductor manufacturing, faces the dual challenge of addressing internal socio-economic instability and external threats from mainland china’s global expansion and the china-us rivalry. this calls for a defensive yet export-oriented technoscientific strategy of ai. since the mid-2010s, taiwan has ambitiously positioned itself as an asian silicon valley, strategically collaborating with local, national, and transnational actors, notably through the localized development of traditional chinese large language models to protect its cultural sovereignty and attract western tech capital to strengthen its national ai industry. leveraging its reputation for effectively managing the covid-19 pandemic, as well as its democratic institutions and civic culture, taiwan projects a long-term defensive survival strategy to strengthen its tech-driven economic nationalism (hsu, 2017). in conclusion, this paper contributes to understanding the heterogeneous sociotechnical imaginaries of ai innovation beyond the binary of global north and south. it also shed lights on a more contextual approach to the historicity of techno-developmentalism. references adams, r. (2021). can artificial intelligence be decolonized? interdisciplinary science reviews, 46(1–2), 176–197. https://doi.org/10.1080/03080188.2020.1840225 arora, a., barrett, m., lee, e., oborn, e., & prince, k. (2023). risk and the future of ai: algorithmic bias, data colonialism, and marginalization. information and organization, 33(3), 100478. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infoandorg.2023.100478 bareis, j., & katzenbach, c. (2022). talking ai into being: the narratives and imaginaries of national ai strategies and their performative politics. science, technology, & human values, 47(5), 855–881. https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439211030007 baur, a. (2023). european dreams of the cloud: imagining innovation and political control. geopolitics, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2022.2151902 birch, k., & muniesa, f. (eds.). (2020). assetization: turning things into assets in technoscientific capitalism. the mit press. clarke, v., & braun, v. (2013). teaching thematic analysis: overcoming challenges and developing strategies for effective learning. the psychologist, 26(2), 120-123. couldry, n., & mejias, u. a. (2023). the decolonial turn in data and technology research: what is at stake and where is it heading? information, communication & society, 26(4), 786–802. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2021.1986102 curran, d., & smart, a. (2021). data-driven governance, smart urbanism and risk-class inequalities: security and social credit in china. urban studies, 58(3), 487–506. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098020927855 fukuda-parr, s., & gibbons, e. (2021). emerging consensus on ‘ethical ai’: human rights critique of stakeholder guidelines. global policy, 12(s6), 32–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12965 hassan, y. (2023). governing algorithms from the south: a case study of ai development in africa. ai & society, 38(4), 1429–1442. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146022-01527-7 hodson, m., & mcmeekin, a. (2021). global technology companies and the politics of urban socio-technical imaginaries in the digital age: processual proxies, trojan horses and global beachheads. environment and planning a: economy and space, 53(6), 1391–1411. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x211002194 https://doi.org/10.1080/03080188.2020.1840225 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infoandorg.2023.100478 https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439211030007 https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2022.2151902 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2021.1986102 https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098020927855 https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12965 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01527-7 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01527-7 https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x211002194 hsu, j. (2017). state transformation and the evolution of economic nationalism in the east asian developmental state: the taiwanese semiconductor industry as case study. transactions of the institute of british geographers, 42(2), 166–178. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12165 hung, h. (2018). chinese state capitalism in hong kong. in t-. k. lui, s. w. k. chiu, & r. yep (eds.) routledge handbook of contemporary hong kong (pp. 430–447). routledge. introna, l. d. (2016). algorithms, governance, and governmentality: on governing academic writing. science, technology, & human values, 41(1), 17–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243915587360 jasanoff, s., & kim, s.-h. (2015). dreamscapes of modernity: sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power. university of chicago press. just, n., & latzer, m. (2017). governance by algorithms: reality construction by algorithmic selection on the internet. media, culture & society, 39(2), 238–258. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443716643157 kim, e.-s. (2018). sociotechnical imaginaries and the globalization of converging technology policy: technological developmentalism in south korea. science as culture, 27(2), 175–197. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2017.1354844 milan, s., & treré, e. (2019). big data from the south (s): beyond data universalism. television & new media, 20(4), 319-335. mohamed, s., png, m.-t., & isaac, w. (2020). decolonial ai: decolonial theory as sociotechnical foresight in artificial intelligence. philosophy & technology, 33(4), 659– 684. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00405-8 mumford, d. (2022). data colonialism: compelling and useful, but whither epistemes? information, communication & society, 25(10), 1511–1516. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2021.1986103 roberts, h., cowls, j., morley, j., taddeo, m., wang, v., & floridi, l. (2021). the chinese approach to artificial intelligence: an analysis of policy, ethics, and regulation. ai & society, 36(1), 59–77. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-00992-2 sadowski, j., & bendor, r. (2019). selling smartness: corporate narratives and the smart city as a sociotechnical imaginary. science, technology, & human values, 44(3), 540–563. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243918806061 singh, r. (2023). the decolonial turn is on the road to contingency. information, communication & society, 26(4), 803–806. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2021.1986104 https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12165 https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243915587360 https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443716643157 https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2017.1354844 https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00405-8 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2021.1986103 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-00992-2 https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243918806061 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2021.1986104 sismondo, s. (2020). sociotechnical imaginaries: an accidental themed issue. social studies of science, 50(4), 505–507. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312720944753 tan, k. p. (2012). the ideology of pragmatism: neo-liberal globalisation and political authoritarianism in singapore. journal of contemporary asia, 42(1), 67–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2012.634644 tidwell, a. s. d., & smith, j. m. (2015). morals, materials, and technoscience: the energy security imaginary in the united states. science, technology, & human values, 40(5), 687–711. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243915577632 yeung, h. w. (2016). strategic coupling: east asian industrial transformation in the new global economy. cornell university press. appendix 1: key events and tech policy document selection year of release policy title / event singapore 2024 2023 2023 2019 2019 2015 2014 smart nation 2.0 singapore national ai strategy 2.0 digital connectivity blueprint national ai strategy 5g innovation program infocomm media 2025 smart nation initiative is launched hong kong 2024 2024 2022 2021 2020 2019 2017 policy statement on the responsible application of ai in the financial market hong kong ai industry development study (issued by hong kong productivity council) hong kong innovation and technology development blueprint people’s republic of china (prc) five-year plan smart city blueprint 2.0 greater bay area outline development plan smart city blueprint taiwan 2024 2023 2023 2018 2021 2016 asia silicon valley development plan 3.0 taiwan chip-based industrial innovation program ai taiwan action plan 2.0 (2023-2026) ai taiwan action plan (2018-2021) asia silicon valley development plan 2.0 asia silicon valley development plan 1.0 (2016-2020) https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312720944753 https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2012.634644 https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243915577632 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): de keulenaar, e. (2024, october). llms and the generation of “moderate speech”. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. llms and the generation of “moderate speech”1 emillie de keulenaar university of groningen extended abstract in the emerging sociological research on large language models, it has become clear that llms have become both new actors and interfaces of public debate. on one hand, llms “parrot” trillions of online and digitized data in a variety of more or less predictable statements (bender et al., 2021). in so doing, they perform normative choices proper to any other kind of online intermediary over what they ought and ought not to say. to test this, researchers have tended to “jailbreak” llms as if to test the robustness of their internal moderation system, and, in this sense, the extent to which they have been absolved from the problematic legacies of their training data. another method akin to the study of content moderation is to look at how llms have been honed to speak moderately. that is, there is perhaps more to say about the ways in which llms correct themselves than how they perpetuate our worst instincts. in what ways and with which rhetoric are they instructed to take heed of their own problematic language? in the same line of reasoning as research on ai and discrimination, there is reason to study how llms perpetuate moderate language – and in that vein, what language is used to answer prompts from spaces with widely varying normative standards. in this context, to study ai-generated “moderate speech” is to look at how large language models remodel public language to (not) speak about what is contested, taboo, and other issues that oscillate between the sayable and unsayable. moderate speech has been studied as a means to everyday politeness as much as to societal projects of cultural or political reformation that shape what may or may not be expressed in public in relation to conflict memory, identity and other issues. how ai 1 i would like to acknowledge the mentorship of tarleton gillespie, as well as conceptual and methodological contributions by etienne grenier, yuhe ma, angeles briones, and the feedback of mary gray, chuncheng liu, zaidat ibrahim, danah boyd, nancy baym, parker bach, emily tseng, ryland shaw and the social media collected team of 2024. companies intervene in such processes marks yet another episode in a long media history of public speech norms (mcintosh and mendoza-denton, 2020: 33). to delve into this issue, i look into what kinds of rhetoric eight llm models generate when responding to both actively problematic (“risky”) and controversial questions. as per llm content moderation terminlogy, “risky” prompts contain a potential to cause real-world harm in critical sectors, be them social justice or cybersecurity. those with potentially discriminatory effects are assigned a risk score by openai and llama moderation apis (inan et al., 2023; openai, 2024). by “controversial questions”, on the other hand, i mean questions that tend to emerge from more permissible spaces that are not always modelled in red teaming environments. despite having suspended or “deplatformed” (rogers, 2020) several controversial subreddits, reddit can be considered one of such places. reddit continues to be a place where users find semihidden subreddits specifically dedicated for transgressive and uncomfortable questions about a variety of “harms”, including sex, violence, anatomy, politics, culture or contested histories. i collect and sample 250 questions from 165 subreddits in 6 languages using the free tier of reddit’s api. i then feed each of these in the chat completion models of gpt 3.5 turbo, gpt 4, claude 3 haiku, claude 3 sonnet, claude 3.5, llama 2 and 3, and mistral in standard chat settings. this method allows researchers to trigger moderation subroutines, and can in this sense be considered a “perturbation engine” (jacomy et al, forthcoming) in the sense that prompting controversial questions confronts models with the kind of content they are not optimally instructed to answer. it can also be considered a kind of “platform perspectivism”, in the sense that it confronts the normative conventions of moderated llm models with those of a more permissible one, be that reddit or 4chan. first, i close-read llm model cards and other documentation that describe the methodological steps undertaken by ai companies to ensure their models speak moderately when prompted by “risky” questions. from there, i look for what rhetoric, or discursive techniques, are used by llms when answering reddit questions with high controversy scores. i then look at how these techniques change per prompt topic, reddit controversy score, and gpt or llama moderation scores across claude, mistral, gpt and llama models. i also look at how consistently each model answers a sample of top controversial and “risky” questions. findings indicate that llms respond to questions with high controversy scores differently than with those with high “risk” scores. risky questions tend to trigger a preemptive moderation subroutine, where llms take a normative position that either refuses to answer a proompt or answers it with counter-speech. conversely, questions with high controversy scores tend to be answered with an inconsistent combination of “defusive” stances, shifting between agnostic, diplomatic, academic or even emphatic rhetoric. figure 1. six discursive techniques used by mistral, gpt 3.5 & 4, llama 2 & 3, and claude 3, 3 sonnet and 3.5 when answering “risky” and controversial questions. in other words, with “risky” prompts, the position of the llm model moves very little — or within a smaller normative space — in the sense that risk is already situated within unacceptability. with controversial prompts, llms tend to not take a clear position; and even though they might, they may not take the same position the same way every time. one of the reasons why this may be is that controversiality is technically and normatively challenging, because it defies a classification — and thus a probabilistic estimation — of both “risk” and norm. that is, it defies both the estimation of risk and how to talk about it. references bender em, gebru t, mcmillan-major a, et al. (2021) on the dangers of stochastic parrots: can language models be too big? 🦜. in: proceedings of the 2021 acm conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency, new york, ny, usa, 1 march 2021, pp. 610–623. facct ’21. association for computing machinery. available at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922 (accessed 2 may 2023). https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922 faugere c, mugnier v and sylvos f (2023) censure et tabou. classiques garnier. haviland jb (1979) guugu yimidhirr brother-in-law language. language in society 8(2– 3): 365–393. inan h, upasani k, chi j, et al. (2023) llama guard: llm-based input-output safeguard for human-ai conversations. arxiv:2312.06674. arxiv. available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06674 (accessed 19 august 2024). mcintosh j and mendoza-denton n (2020) language in the trump era: scandals and emergencies. cambridge university press. open ai (2023) gpt-4 system card. march. open ai. openai (2024) moderation. available at: https://platform.openai.com (accessed 4 october 2024). pohjonen m and udupa s (2017) extreme speech online: an anthropological critique of hate speech debates. international journal of communication 11(0). 0: 19. rogers r (2020) deplatforming: following extreme internet celebrities to telegram and alternative social media. european journal of communication. sage publications ltd: 0267323120922066. bender em, gebru t, mcmillan-major a, et al. (2021) on the dangers of stochastic parrots: can language models be too big? 🦜. in: proceedings of the 2021 acm conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency, new york, ny, usa, march 2021, pp. 610–623. facct ’21. association for computing machinery. faugere c, mugnier v and sylvos f (2023) censure et tabou. classiques garnier. haviland jb (1979) guugu yimidhirr brother-in-law language. language in society 8(23): 365–393. inan h, upasani k, chi j, et al. (2023) llama guard: llm-based input-output safeguard for human-ai conversations. arxiv:2312.06674. arxiv. available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06674 (accessed 19 august 2024). mcintosh j and mendoza-denton n (2020) language in the trump era: scandals and emergencies. cambridge university press. open ai (2023) gpt-4 system card. march. open ai. http://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06674 https://platform.openai.com/ https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922 https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404500007600 https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06674 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): badiei, b. (2024, october). trantional mediation of women’s struggles: platform feminism and the suffering of other women. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. trantional mediation of women’s struggles: platform feminism and the suffering of other women bahareh badiei rutgers university introduction this research explores the tensions, complexities, and ambivalences in the work of an iranian diasporic feminist campaign on x (formerly twitter) and the possibilities of transnational mediation through digital platforms for (lack of) recognition and (in)visibility of feminist struggles on the ground. situating this research within the sociopolitical context of feminist activism in the diaspora, i look at the 2017-2018 #whitewednesdays (#ww) hashtag campaign on twitter, launched by a new york-based journalist and women’s rights advocate, which invited women to post photos of themselves walking unveiled or wearing white headscarves on wednesdays. this campaign, using the orientalist trope of the veil aligned with imperial feminist discourses, exceeded beyond social media platforms and gained heightened visibility and coverage in popular media, particularly american mainstream news. in particular, from the december 2017 onwards, in light of the #girlsofrevolutionstreen movement in iran and against the backdrop of nationwide protests in the country fueled by dissatisfaction with economic stagnation, the white wednesdays campaign emerged as a dominant framework for the iranian women’s movement in the american news media. by exploring this campaign and its visibility in the mainstream news, i argue that even while the contemporary social media practices of imperial feminists are commodified and adjusted to digital platforms logic, they can still inspire acts of defiance and resistance. in this commodified and datafied space of resistance, there is a dialectic at work. these defiant practices, which can be turned into easily digestible and marketable forms of dissent and result in self-promotional resistance, can also be appropriated and repurposed by grassroots activists and radical feminists. theoretical frameworks the research puts the frameworks of imperialist feminist and platform feminism into conversation to explore how the orientalist trope of the veil emerges as a discursive and material metric to measure the suffering of other women and mobilize platform feminism for women in iran, who are under multiple of forms of systemic oppression including the compulsory hijab. the framework of imperial or colonial feminism, coined by leila ahmed (1992), describes how the history of british colonial interventions in the middle east is often predicated on liberating women from their backward cultures. the famous phrase “white men saving brown women from brown men” by gayatri spivak (1996) refers to the very same savior narrative wherein the interventionist and imperial agendas hinge on the claim for the oppressed women’s liberation, and when it comes to muslim majority societies, operating on the discourse of liberation from the veil. here, the search extends the imperial feminist framework to explore how this ideological practice operates in our era of advanced capitalism and data-driven yet interactive social media platforms. i contend that the imperial feminist framework strives for visibility and recognition by leveraging activism and resistance using digital platforms. this aligns with sarah banet-weiser’s (2018) discussion of the economies of visibility, where hyper-mediated conditions offer visibility, but this visibility and recognition become “an end in itself” rather than a means to an end. however, when rely on social media platforms, platform feminist practices cannot be separated from the intervening mechanisms of social media platforms. driven by algorithmic patterns and economic interests, social media platforms lend themselves to making feminist activism visible and accessible through likes, comments, shares, and retweets. at the same time, the fact that media practices and feminist expressions in social media platforms can inspire divergent responses highlights a fundamental characteristic: ambivalence. yet, ambivalence on social media activism is fraught with tensions, and contradictions (banet-weiser, 2018; philips & miller, 2017; paasonen, 2021). in this sense, the diasporic feminist campaigns mediating while also datafying iranian women’s liberation can go either way: inclusion and exclusion, visibility and erasure, co-optation and resistance, imperialist and radical. to investigate these dynamics imbued within platform feminist practices on social media, my research asks: how does the transnational mediation of state gendered violence is manifested through the work of diasporic a digital feminist campaign? how do such transnational feminist campaigns and mediation processes accommodate the processes of mediatization of the suffering of the other muslim woman in the american media outlets/ here the iranian? methodologies and preliminary findings the study employs feminist digital ethnography (brudvig, 2020), analyzing the evolution of the ww campaign alongside the girls of revolution street movement along with a discourse analysis of the news surrounding these campaigns. the preliminary findings demonstrate that certain accounts act as the central nodes in the #ww campaign. notably, these accounts frequently recycled visuals—videos of unveiled women in public spaces—with slight textual variations. while this strategy maintained visibility, it also reflected the campaign’s reliance on core accounts to sustain momentum, indicating limited grassroots engagement. also, despite its feminist framing, the ww campaign was not immune to patriarchal undercurrents. calls for men to participate often appealed to traditional notions of gheyrat (men’s honor), framing support for unveiled women as a matter of male dignity and social responsibility. this rhetoric perpetuated a patriarchal logic, emphasizing women’s roles as mothers and sisters rather than autonomous individuals. such narratives complicate the campaign’s feminist objectives and illustrates the challenges of mobilizing across intersecting systems of power and oppression. the transnational mediation of the #ww campaign through the us news outlets highlights another layer of complexity. between may and december 2017, coverage of the campaign was sparse, with only 38 articles referencing alinejad’s efforts. these narratives often reduced the complexities of iranian women’s struggles to a binary opposition between oppression (hijab) and liberation (unveiling), perpetuating orientalist tropes. this binary framing gained prominence following the december 2017–january 2018 protests, during which coverage of the campaign increased significantly. however, this visibility came at the cost. american media largely decoupled women’s gendered oppression from the broader economic and political grievances driving the protests. by emphasizing the bravery of iranian women while neglecting the impact of u.s.-imposed sanctions and other structural inequalities, these narratives reinforced a racialized dichotomy between gendered and racialized suffering. this selective recognition of suffering aligns with longstanding patterns in u.s. mediatization of muslim women’s experiences. as scholars have noted, such framings often position muslim women who adopt western values as idealized subjects, while erasing the intersecting oppressions they face. the #ww campaign, mediated through these lenses, became a spectacle of liberation, divorced from the material realities of those it purported to represent. through these observations, the research demonstrates that complexities surrounding transnational mediation of iranian women’s struggles through platformized feminism. while digital campaigns like ww amplify voices and create visibility, they also risk reproducing the hierarchies they seek to challenge. the reliance on performative gestures, patriarchal rhetoric, and orientalist framings underscores the limitations of mediated activism and highlights the need for more nuanced approaches. references ahmed, l. (1992). women and gender in islam historical roots of a modern debate. yale university press. banet-weiser, s. (2018). empowered: popular feminism and popular misogyny. duke university press. campanella, b. (2022). from mediated to datafied recognition: the role of social media news feeds. communications-european journal of communication research, 47(4), 516–531. https://doi.org/10.1515/commun-2022-0038 campanella, b. (2024). recognition in the age of social media. polity press. lawless, b., & chen, y.-w. (2016). “reclaiming their historical agency”: a critical analysis of international news discourses on occupy and arab spring. the howard journal of communications, 27(3), 185–202. https://doi.org/10.1080/10646175.2016.1156591 phillips, w., & milner, r. m. (2017). the ambivalent internet : mischief, oddity, and antagonism online. polity. singh, r. (2020). platform feminism: feminist protest space and the politics of spatial organization. university of toronto. singh, r. (2021). rethinking platform power. canadian journal of communication, 46(3), 711–715. https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2021v46n3a4199 tafakori, s. (2021). digital feminism beyond nativism and empire: affective territories of recognition and competing claims to suffering in iranian women’s campaigns. signs: journal of women in culture and society, 47(1), 47-80. https://doi.org/10.1086/715649 microsoft word 2021 deanonymized aoir networked conspirituality.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): chia, a., ong, j., davies, h, hagood, m. (2021, october). “everything is connected”: networked conspirituality in new age media. panel presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “everything is connected”: networked conspirituality in new age media aleena chia goldsmiths, university of london jonathan corpus ong university of massachusetts amherst hugh davies rmit university mack hagood miami university “nothing is random. everything is connected.” —q as networked publics fragment and workplaces fissure, more information has not meant more meaning. as people make sense and make do, online and under pandemic restrictions, many have turned to holistic worldviews to create order from disarray in the headlines, and to establish structure from flexibility in their employment. holistic worldviews from new age spiritualities to conspiratorial thinking frame reality as comprehensible only as a whole: events and energies are connected in unseen ways; ineffable chains of causality link the inner self to the outer world. from the holistic vantage point, everything has its place and everyone has their role. between the pleasure of the weekly horoscope and the obsession with the qanon drop is a mode of causal promiscuity in which, as q puts it, “future proves past.” conspirituality refers to the confluence of new age spirituality and conspiracism around theodicean beliefs in a secret world order and civilizational awakening (ward and voas 2011). conspirituality has thrived online, and in more recent times, on fringe platforms such as gab and parler. holistic thinking—whether in the shadowlands of technolibertarian imageboards or in the sanitized glow of silicon valley vision quests— positions itself in opposition to “establishment” or mainstream discourses (asprem and dyredal 2015). while conspirituality marks an online psychographic segmentation, it also 2 traces a formal quality that organizes ways of navigating, knowing, and critiquing the internet. this panel traces forms of conspirituality across networked alternative spirituality from maga mystics and new age influencers, to hackers of consciousness and prophets of optimization. the paper “‘woo woo’ against white supremacy” maps this alt-spiritual online ecosystem’s politics and polarities in the long shadow of the trump presidency. this panel also traces the form of conspirituality through the new age’s perennialism—a belief that different spiritual traditions are equally valid, because they all essentially worship the same divine source that emanates throughout the cosmos and the human body (aupers and houtman 2014). with parallels to the transpersonal unity (e.g. “oneness” with the universe) of the psychedelic experience (pollan 2019) perennialism seems innocuous, but is insidious. in new age self-help cultures, perennialism undergirds the ideology of manifesting: the belief that we create our own reality (york 1995) and that “the world we perceive, either positively or negatively, is a projection of our own consciousness and that we can transform our reality for the better by transforming ourselves internally.” (urban 2015, 226) the paper “consciousness hacking and tech ethics'' suggests how this ideology of manifestation cultures tech ethics into an interior experience that is beyond interpretation, verification, and deliberation. in other words, conspirituality depoliticizes tech ethics. the internet supercharges perennialism. as users all along the political spectrum trawl the internet for snippets and statistics to feed their confirmation bias and populate their vision boards, conspirituality provides a connective medium for manifestation. while networked conspirituality infuses public events and everyday life with meaning and purpose, this connective medium also manifests toxicity and misinformation at scale. at a certain level of abstraction, the internet is also a medium of perennialism: different political traditions are equally valid, because they all essentially operate according to the same datalogics that emanate throughout the global and human brain. the paper “the conspiritual device” puts this abstraction into historical context, tracing a prehistory of qanon by examining surrealist avant garde methodologies. using ethnographic, textual, and hermeneutic approaches, the papers in this panel develop a line of research on the coevolution of spirituality and technology from organized (stolow 2013; noble 1999) to new religious movements (turner 2006; davis 2019). the paper “conspirituality as self-care” interrogates this intellectual lineage, employing close readings of early internet scholarship to reflect on how the architecture of the internet and its critical study pervert knowledge for a personalized sense of control and comfort. instead of demystification, our analyses aim to politicize these networked spiritual formations as vernacular theories of power and powerlessness; following lepselter’s (2016, 18) study of ufo captivity narratives, we try to “show that the stories themselves are theories, dramatic voicings of epistemological positions.” (original emphasis) like the recently released hbo documentary series q: into the storm (2021), which attends to the conspiratorial form through storytelling, this panel attends to the conspiritual medium through different modalities of engagement with internet users, governance, genealogies, and internet studies itself. 3 references asprem, egil, and asbjørn dyrendal. 2015. "conspirituality reconsidered: how surprising and how new is the confluence of spirituality and conspiracy theory?." journal of contemporary religion 30( 3): 367-382. aupers, stef, and dick houtman. 2010. “beyond the spiritual supermarket: the social and public significance of new age spirituality." in aupers, stef, and dick houtman eds. religions of modernity: relocating the sacred to the self and the digital. pp. 135-160. davis, erik. 2019. high weirdness: drugs, esoterica, and visionary experience in the seventies. cambridge: the mit press. hoback, cullen, dir. 2021. q: into the storm. lepselter, susan. 2016. the resonance of unseen things: poetics, power, captivity, and ufos in the american uncanny. university of michigan press. noble, david f. 1999. the religion of technology: the spirit of invention and the divinity of man. new york: penguin books. pollan, michael. 2019. how to change your mind: what the new science of psychedelics teaches us about consciousness, dying, addiction, depression, and transcendence. new york: penguin books. ward, charlotte, and david voas. 2011. "the emergence of conspirituality." journal of contemporary religion 26(1): 103-121. urban, hugh b. 2015. new age, neopagan, and new religious movements: alternative spirituality in contemporary america. university of california press. turner, fred. 2006. from counterculture to cyberculture: stewart brand, the whole earth network, and the rise of digital utopianism. university of chicago press. york, michael. 1995. the emerging network: a sociology of the new age and neo-pagan movements. rowman & littlefield. 4 “woo woo” against white supremacy: resisting networked conspirituality in covid times jonathan corpus ong university of massachusetts amherst paper aims this paper aims to explore the diverse intersections of “woo woo” (aka alternative spirituality / new age) online communities with political and medical misand disinformation. through interviews and digital ethnography, the paper maps out a large alt-spiritual online ecosystem that has become more politically engaged as well as polarized in the trump moment. in recent years, progressive and radical witches hexxing trump (doyle 2019) and astrologers offering divinatory tools to racial justice activists have found new momentum and motivation to challenge the spiritual bypassing within traditionally apolitical “love and light” new age communities (ayre 2016). while critical and politically engaged perspectives led to new initiatives centering diversity and antiracism in spiritual work, communities also experienced increased divisiveness and turf wars. i suggest in this paper that internal fractures, the highly competitive influencer economy, and pandemic fatigue may have led to divinatory failures to foresee and call out the creep of “conspirituality” (ward and voas 2011) within the community. challenging journalistic writings that suggest that new age spiritual communities are “naturally connected” with right wing ideology (evans 2020; meltzer, 2021), this paper sketches out a diverse and stratified community still reeling from the shocking revelations and dramatic deplatforming that happened after the january 6 capitol insurrection. recent crises have led to an important period of reflexive acknowledgment and active resistance within spiritual communities: some progressive spiritual influencers produced educational content that calls out the spiritual hijacking of esoteric beliefs. at the same time, some right-wing and qanon-adjacent influencers have continued to produce spinoff content that maneuver around deplatforming initiatives of the mainstream social media platforms. curiously, what both camps in the spiritual community share in common is the fear of a “witch-hunt culture” that could indiscriminately silence and persecute them just as their historical predecessors had been punished. the paper thus aims to 1) map out the diverse forms of resistance against dangerous disinformation and white supremacy within alternative spiritual, or “woo woo”, communities, 2) analyze the constraints and risks they face mustering these forms of resistance, and 3) shade in the accidental collisions of progressive spiritual influencers with anti-science and anti-mainstream media narratives commonly associated with the far right. the paper seeks to contribute nuanced understanding to the moral labor of progressive spiritual influencers offering various magical modalities for political activism, anti-racism, and media literacy, engaging the emerging literature on mediatized neopaganism (renser and tiidenberg 2020). it also engages with calls to deepen public understanding for, rather than demonize, “accidental conspiracists” (collins 2020) and speak to broader debates about the politics and ethics of representing media manipulators and perpetrators (ong 2020; phillips 2019). 5 methods this paper is based on a larger research project on dark spirituality that uses mixed methods of in-depth interviews and digital ethnography. i interviewed 15 online spiritual influencers practicing diverse healing modalities of astrology, tarot, psychic mediumship, and witchcraft and maintaining active profiles on youtube, twitter, instagram and tiktok. the paper intentionally centers the experiences of politically engaged progressive influencers who are 1) fighting for racial justice, 2) challenging the spiritual bypassing within traditionally consumerist new age culture, and 3) correcting dangerous conspiracy theory and medical disinformation. the digital ethnography component of the study conducted between october 2020 to april 2021 examines the practices and teachings of the new age online community in general, with a specific concern as to how various influencers have engaged with recent political events and crises and how certain mystical teachings collide with qanon conspiracy theories. i approach qanon not as a coherent belief system but an amplification network whose disparate teachings and spiritual distortions have creeped into diverse online subcultures (donovan in tollefson 2021). my digital ethnography intentionally focuses on the accidental collisions of progressive alt-spirituality influencers with far-right conspiracy theory, particularly in the spread of anti-science, antiestablishment, and anti-mainstream media narratives. for example, i trace in my digital ethnography how otherwise self-identified progressive spiritual influencers themselves share vaccine hesitancy memes and advise their followers to disconnect from mainstream media that keep people “in a fear state”. the paper raises awareness about how teachings around “spiritual sovereignty” or "resisting fear", while sounding well-meaning, are never too far-removed from so-called extreme positions, such as those shared by qanon conspiracy theorists. popular spiritual vocabularies around "awakening" and "raising consciousness" could be intentionally repurposed to promote insidious political agendas without believers being fully aware what they have gotten into. references ayre, lily. (2016). “spiritual bypassing, white supremacy and blacklivesmatter.” medium. july 9. https://lilyayre.medium.com/spiritual-bypassing-white-privilege-andblacklivesmatter-531db2c8c85c collins, ben. (2020). “we need to learn how to talk to (and about) accidental conspiracists”. nieman lab. https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/12/we-need-to-learn-howto-talk-to-and-about-accidental-conspiracists/ doyle, sady. (2019). “monsters, men and magic: why feminists turned to witchcraft to oppose trump.” the guardian. august 7. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/aug/07/monsters-men-magic-trumpawoke-angry-feminist-witches evans, jules. (2020). “nazi hippies: when the new age and the far right overlap. medium. september 4. https://gen.medium.com/nazi-hippies-when-the-new-age-andfar-right-overlap-d1a6ddcd7be4 6 metlzer, marisa. (2021). “qanon’s unexpected roots in the new age.” washington post. march 29. https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/03/29/qanon-new-agespirituality/ ong, jonathan corpus. (2020). “limits and luxuries of slow research in radical war: how should we represent perpetrators?” digital war 1(1): 1-5. phillips, whitney. (2019). “the oxygen of amplification: better practices in reporting on extremists, antagonists and manipulators.” data & society research institute. new york. renser, berit & tiidenberg, katrin. (2020). “witches on facebook: the mediatization of neo-paganism.” social media + society 1-11. tollefson, jeff. (2021). “tracking qanon: how trump turned conspiracy theory research upside down.” nature. february 4. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00257-y ward, charlotte, and david voas. 2011. "the emergence of conspirituality." journal of contemporary religion 26(1): 103-121. 7 the conspiritual device hugh davies rmit university tracing a history of conspiratorial connection making, this paper outlines the inevitability of qanon within the interconnectivity of the internet, a global device that is inscribed with compellingly paranoid rationale. from its cold war origins to its current locus for alternative facts, the internet is a conspiritual device. here, i draw on ward and voas’ (2011) notion of conspirituality to describe the conflation of paranoiac conspiracy theories and self-help new-ageism into an online based-belief system “fuelled by political disillusionment”. although proposed in 2011, conspirituality has found sudden currency with qanon’s growing community of internet conspiracy theorists and messianic wellness influencers who share that notion that “everything is connected”. but the tactics of connective sense-making as a political tool for overthrowing reality that are found at the heart of qanon have always existed across the internet, and also predate its existence. as early as the 1930s, the surrealist avant-garde developed games and playful devices aimed to purposefully inspire connection making in the human psyche beyond the conscious imagination. for the marxist surrealists, creative connection making could discredit establishment reality offering a poetic remedy against capitalism’s stronghold over everyday life. the most famous of these tactics was salvador dalí’s paranoiaccritical method, described by dali as a “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena” (dali in pederson 2021, 40). that the surrealists ultimately expelled dalí in 1939 for his glorification of fascism and preoccupation with hitler showed that the overturning of reality would not automatically serve marxist revolutionary ends (greely 2001). moreover, the heuristics of connective sense making would come to dominate the emerging internet, or what this paper calls the conspiritual device. in 1945, vannevar bush’s article, “as we may think,” compared hypertextual navigation to cognitive association, setting off a chain of thinking about the internet to come in connective and neurological terms. such ideas have seen the contemporary internet and its communities heroically described as “collective intelligence” (heylighen and bollen 1996), the “hive-mind” (kelly 2003), the “global brain” (russell 2007), each venerating the rational capacity of users to make cognitive connections between related ideas. following in these footsteps, this paper argues the internet is not a neutral device, but a neural device, imprinted with the same associative biases of its makers and users. like the games of the surrealists that encouraged connection-making as a way of navigational thinking, the internet is inscribed with a self-referential paranoid rhetoric, making it a truly nervous system. while for the surrealists, connections were made through images, the connective tissue of the internet is the hyperlink. through hyperlinks, users connect pages, ideas, personas, truth and fiction. this act of moving between sites, jumping from questions to speculations to conclusions provides a sense of certainty for internet users in increasingly uncertain times. the creative process of connection-making ignites a deep yet ultimately subjective sense of meaning where no meaning exists. this pattern recognition within random noise 8 is clinically known as apophenia, a phenomenon once thought to be an illness but now recognised as a human cognitive feature, found in surrealist art making methodologies, alternate reality games and conspiracy theories to the extent that the three are often confused, if not interconnected (davies 2014, davies and dziekan 2016). the sensory experience of apophenic connection-making can have life changing impact. for those making such connections, reality becomes reshaped at social, political and metaphysical levels. the qanon community is the latest and largest in a series of conspiracy theory collectives that have become caught up in networks of apophenic connection-making. what sets qanon apart is its assembly of a mega-conspiracy theory for political ends, one that playfully connects all previous conspiracy theories within its vortex, generating a religious fervour for the interconnectedness of all things. methodology this paper draws on practice-led research into internet histories, alternate reality games, dark play and apophenia within the context of 911 conspiracy movements and the conspiritual networks they give rise to. reframing these previous findings within the contemporary context of qanon reveals identical structures and heuristics of conspiritual sense-making at play. augmenting this existing research with digital ethnographic and autoethnographic investigations undertaken through 2017 to the present in the online spaces of the qanon community, this paper highlights parallel methodologies of sensorial sensemaking and intuition of conspiritual thinking. tracing a pre-history of qanon, this paper gives focus to conspiritual tactics of connection making as a sense-making heuristic toward both artistic and political aims of overthrowing reality as it is conventionally understood. at stake in this paper are the ethics of generating alternate realities (davies 2017), especially within the algorithmic rich environment of the internet (steyerl 2016). as hito steyerl asks: “how does the world of pattern recognition and big-data divination relate to the contemporary jumble of oligocracies, troll farms, mercenary hackers, and data robber barons supporting and enabling bot governance, khelifah clickbait and polymorphous proxy warfare?” references berkowitz, reed. 2020. a game designer’s analysis of qanon. medium. https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analysis-of-qanon580972548be5 bush, vannevar. 1945. as we may think. the atlantic. july 1945. reprinted in life magazine september 10, 1945. davies, hugh. 2017. towards an ethics of alternate reality games. digital studies/le champ numérique, 6 (3). doi: http://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.36 davies, hugh & dziekan, vince. 2016. paranoia at play: the darkest puzzle and the elegant turbulence of alternate reality games. in ed, j. scott. transdiscourse 2: turbulence and reconstruction, de grueter, berlin, germany. 9 greely, robert. a. 2001, dalí’s fascism; lacan’s paranoia. art history, 24: 465-492. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.00278 heylighen, francis & bollen, johan. 1996. the world-wide web as a super-brain: from metaphor to model. cybernetics and systems 96. r. trappl (ed.). austrian society for cybernetics. (917-922). kelly, kevin. 2003. out of control, the new biology of machines, social systems, and the economic world. last modified on friday, march 11, 2003, accessed 2 january 2014, http://kk.org/outofcontrol/contents.php. pederson, claudia costa. 2021. gaming utopia: ludic worlds in art, design, and media. indiana university press. russell, peter. 2007. the global brain: the awakening earth in a new century. floris books. edinburgh. steyerl, hito. 2016. a sea of data: apophenia and pattern (mis-)recognition. journal #72 https://www.e-flux.com/journal/72/60480/a-sea-of-data-apophenia-and-pattern-misrecognition/ ward, charlotte and voas, david. 2011. the emergence of conspirituality, journal of contemporary religion, 26, no. 1: 103-121. 10 the careless internet: conspirituality as response to the devaluation of self-care mack hagood miami university in this paper, i present an affect-infused re-reading of michel foucault’s technologies of the self (1988), conceiving this late work of the philosopher of power as a tool for remapping our conception of information networks and understanding the contemporary crisis of online conspirituality. as an explication of governmentality—"contact between the technologies of domination of others and those of the self” (19)—technologies of the self has been used by internet scholars to interpret the imposed, yet freely chosen, selffashioning of identity we do online for personal, political, and professional purposes (aycock 1995, cammaerts 2015, gershon 2020, siles 2012). governmentality has also generated a literature that reveals the surveillance logics and technologies of control that subtend “empowering” online practices (chun 2008; deleuze 1992; shankar, cherrier, and canniford 2006) and wearable technologies (goodyear, kerner, and quennerstedt 2019). however, one of foucault’s central tenets in his unfinished final work usually goes unmentioned in internet studies, namely his claim that in modernity, “there has been an inversion between the hierarchy of the two principles of antiquity, ‘take care of yourself’ and ‘know thyself’” (1988, 22). this pivot from care to knowledge—or from an affective to an informatic conception of personal and political ethics—informs both the architecture of the internet and its critical study. the result has been what has been variously referred to as “virtuality” (hayles 1999), “computationalism” (golumbia 2009), or “infocentrism” (hagood 2019), a discursive condition in which the symbolic and informatic takes ontological priority over the lived, felt, and embodied. as a network structured for the transmission of information, the web most often reduces self-care to a matter of accessing the correct knowledge (often of commercial products) to improve the body and/or spirit, whether in listicles, message boards, videos, or social media. historically informed by an early christian self-abnegation, the post-enlightenment pivot from care to knowledge bequeaths a double error in the understanding of media and media users. first is an underpowered, idealist conception of media that limits their role to the communication of news, entertainment, and messages, thus disconnecting media from the broader material history of human tools. second is the tendency to define the world and ourselves via the information architecture that supports our media, disconnecting ourselves conceptually from the embodied, affective history of humanity. this paradigm was perfectly represented in the slogan “there are only minds,” used in a utopian 1997 ad for mci that promised to eliminate racism, ableism, sexism, and difference of all kind through mutual knowledge, via the perennialist power of the internet (chun 2008). instead of imagining the internet the same way we understand pillows, houses, weapons, and all of the other things we use instinctively to protect and enable our frail, irrational, care-needing selves, users and scholars more often conceived of it as constituting a 11 public square of floating minds or an information superhighway headed for the disembodied singularity. in the early days of the commercial internet, even affectsensitive scholars studying its effect on the self, either lauded (turkle 1997) or problematized (gergen 1999) the fragmentation and multiplication of self-knowledge it provided. in these narratives, self-care is nevertheless secondary to self-knowledge. in recent years, however, the primacy of self-care in actual internet use has become highly visible as commercial logics and technological interfaces have increasingly allowed for the personalization of digital environments. algorithmic newsfeeds, niche music and video streams, noise-canceling headphones, and apps of emotional self-regulation such as calm all emphasize and monetize personal affective control. in fact, a greater diversity of information access seems to provide more ego-syntonic rabbit holes rather than greater reflexivity and self-knowledge. the long cultural devaluation of care for knowledge, i argue, resulted in a careless internet conducive to the seductions of conspirituality. while there have been moves among black and feminist thinkers to embrace self-care as a radical act that recharges individuals for group liberation (lorde 2017), a darker, conservative variety of self-preservation has arisen in the form of conspirituality, a discourse that perverts knowledge for a personalized sense of control and comfort. groups such as qanon embody what wendy chun describes as the internet’s gated community logic, which “produces and is produced by paranoia that stems from the attempt to solve political problems technologically. to be paranoid is to think like a machine,” she writes, scanning for information that saves (2008, viii). in conspirituality, the uncared-for self comes back with a vengeance. methodology in this paper, i draw on close readings of early internet scholarship, as well as qualitative analyses of recent digital technologies and their surrounding discourses. references aycock, alan. 1995. "“technologies of the self:” foucault and internet discourse(1)." journal of computer-mediated communication 1 (2). siles, ignacio. 2012. "web technologies of the self: the arising of the “blogger” identity." journal of computer-mediated communication 17 (4):408-421. cammaerts, bart. 2015. "technologies of self-mediation: affordances and constraints of social media for protest movements." in civic engagement and social media, 87-110. springer. chun, wendy hui kyong. 2008. control and freedom: power and paranoia in the age of fiber optics. mit press. deleuze, gilles. 1992. "postscript on the societies of control." october 59 (winter):3-7. kenneth j. gergen. (1999). "the self: death by technology." hedgehog review. volume 1, 25-34. 12 gershon, ilana. 2020. down and out in the new economy: university of chicago press. golumbia, david. 2009. the cultural logic of computation: harvard university press. hayles, n. katherine. 1999. how we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. chicago: university of chicago press. lorde, audre. a burst of light: and other essays. courier dover publications, 2017. shankar, avi, hélène cherrier, and robin canniford. 2006. "consumer empowerment: a foucauldian interpretation." european journal of marketing 40 (9/10):1013-1030. turkle, sherry. 1997. life on the screen: identity in the age of the internet. new york: touchstone books. goodyear, victoria a., charlotte kerner, and mikael quennerstedt. 2019. "young people’s uses of wearable healthy lifestyle technologies; surveillance, self-surveillance and resistance." sport, education and society 24 (3):212-225. 13 consciousness hacking and tech ethics aleena chia simon fraser university the (a)politics of the hack in may 2020, while most of north america was locked down as part of covid-19 restrictions, the awakened futures summit went underway online. the two-day event opened with guided meditation and featured talks by venture capitalists such as tim chang of mayfield fund, neuroscientists such as adam gazzerley of university of california, san francisco, and tech humanists such as tristan harris of the center for humane technology. the summit was organized by consciousness hacking, a san francisco-based events network dedicated to the use of technology—psychedelics, virtual reality, and neuro-wearables—for the engineering of transcendent experiences (chia 2019). regardless of its means, the goal of consciousness hacking is the reliable induction of what author michael pollan (2019) describes as a mental experience of ego dissolution and transpersonal connection with the universe, which has measurable therapeutic, spiritual, or creative effects. pollan’s popular scientific legitimation of transcendence on-demand continues a sustained co-evolution of silicon valley and new age cultures (turner 2006; davis 2019). consciousness hackers are part of optimization cultures that frame the “hack” as a quick or clever fix in technical systems that is being applied by the creative class to the improvement of all aspects of life. in engineering, as in life, the hack breaks the rules for personal advantage while ignoring the system’s inequities for everyone else (reagle 2019). despite its individualistic underpinnings, consciousness hacking’s stated goal is not promotion of gadgets or even self-transformation, but collective state change: at consciousness hacking, it’s about inside-out change. it’s about realising the problems of the world—from tribalism to trauma to war to climate change—are symptoms of how we are relating to ourselves, each other and our planet. and that by shifting our interior landscape, both individually and collectively, we transform the world around us (fields 2020). the noetic ethic this paper investigates how consciousness hacking’s transcendence on-demand forms what greene, hoffman, and stark (2019) call the “moral background” of ethical discussions about big tech, which aligns with conventional business ethics instead of social justice. combining virtual ethnography (hine 2011) of the awakened futures summit with textual analysis (du gay et al. 2013) of promoted books, articles, talks, and non-profit funding documentation in the consciousness hacking network (2015-2020), this paper argues that new age spirituality provides a culture for a brand of tech ethics that does does more than reduce social justice to business paradigms. the “inside-out change” of the new age cultures ethics into a noetic technique of the self—as an interior experience that is beyond personal articulation and social critique. 14 the noetic experience—from its elaboration by william james (1902) to its operationalization in the mystical experience questionnaire for psychedelic research (barrett et al. 2015)—are open to recursive interpretation and resistant to sociological falsification (bender 2010). new age spirituality and conspiratorial thinking are both unfalsifiable because they are bolstered by perennialism: the belief that different beliefs are equally valid because they emanate from the same source. new agers believe different religious traditions essentially worship the same divine source that emanates throughout the cosmos and the human body (aupers and houtman 2014). conspiracy theorists believe that everything is connected: on the internet, this means an overabundance of information that allows unrelated, random events to be woven into a narrative (hannah 2021). just as new age perennialism allows disparate spiritual, philosophical, and psychological ideas to cohere into a movement (urban 2015), conspiratorial perennialism allows connections between anything online to be decoded by anyone at any time. in the promiscuous overlaps between beliefs about the new age, theories about conspiracies, and aspirations for technologized transcendence—what this panel calls conspirituality—is a political void that is beyond interpretation, verification, and deliberation. (un)hacking the ethics of big tech this political void of conspirituality is what validates consciousness hackers’ branding of tech ethics as “inside-out change.” ethics has become a premium component in silicon valley’s recursive cycles of product development and public relations. tech companies in silicon valley routinely hire tech workers to fill designated roles as the ethical voice of their corporation, pointing out the failings of their industry in the face of public criticisms about disinformation, racial bias, and addiction that are built into online platforms. in their interviews with such tech workers, metcalf, moss, and boyd (2019) state that ethics is framed as a technical problem that can be fixed by designing better systems that will triumph in the marketplace while also serving broader goals of a more just algorithmic and data-driven world. within this framing of ethics, tech solutions like consciousness hacking’s neurowearables and virtual reality experiences may feel like safe business investments, but they fall short of haven and boyd’s (2020) benchmark of long-term societal change needed to ensure a democratic future. mark andrejevic (2020, 565) encapsulates that “[i]f ethics-inflected approaches focus on issues of security, transparency, explainability, fairness, and privacy, a civic perspective would directly address the role played by tech companies and their practices in a democratic society." this civic perspective must contend with the conspiritual undercurrents of silicon valley’s cultures and platforms that negate democratic vitality in the guise of personal transcendence. references andrejevic, mark. 2020. "data civics: a response to the “ethical turn”." television & new media 21, no. 6: 562-567. aupers, stef, and dick houtman. 2010. “beyond the spiritual supermarket: the social and public significance of new age spirituality." in aupers, stef, and dick houtman eds. religions of modernity: relocating the sacred to the self and the digital. pp. 135-160. 15 barrett, frederick s, matthew w johnson, and roland r griffiths. 2015. “validation of the revised mystical experience questionnaire in experimental sessions with psilocybin.” journal of psychopharmacology. 29 (11): 1182–90. doi:10.1177/0269881115609019. bender, courtney. the new metaphysicals: spirituality and the american religious imagination. chicago: university of chicago press, 2010. chia, aleena. "virtual lucidity: a media archaeology of dream hacking wearables." communication+ 1 7, no. 2 (2019): 6. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/rvqj-n043 davis, erik. 2019. high weirdness: drugs, esoterica, and visionary experience in the seventies. cambridge: the mit press. du gay, paul, stuart hall, linda janes, anders koed madsen, hugh mackay, and keith negus. 2013. doing cultural studies: the story of the sony walkman. sage. fields, joshua. 2020. “the state of consciousness hacking.” medium. https://medium.com/@joshfields/the-state-of-consciousness-hacking1ef6667f7cc0. accessed august 14 2020. greene, daniel, anna lauren hoffmann, and luke stark. 2019. "better, nicer, clearer, fairer: a critical assessment of the movement for ethical artificial intelligence and machine learning." in proceedings of the 52nd hawaii international conference on system sciences. james, william. 1902. the varieties of religious experience: a study in human nature. new york: longmans, green and co. metcalf, jacob, and emanuel moss. 2019. "owning ethics: corporate logics, silicon valley, and the institutionalization of ethics." social research: an international quarterly 86, no. 2 (2019): 449-476. hannah, matthew. 2021. "qanon and the information dark age." first monday. haven, janet, and danah boyd. 2020. "philanthropy’s techno-solutionism problem." hine, christine. 2011. “virtual ethnography: modes, varieties, affordances.” in fielding, nigel g., raymond m. lee, and grant blank, eds. the sage handbook of online research methods. sage. pollan, michael. 2019. how to change your mind: what the new science of psychedelics teaches us about consciousness, dying, addiction, depression, and transcendence. new york: penguin books. turner, fred. 2006. from counterculture to cyberculture: stewart brand, the whole earth network, and the rise of digital utopianism. university of chicago press. 16 urban, hugh b. 2015. new age, neopagan, and new religious movements: alternative spirituality in contemporary america. university of california press. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): gmyrek, p., lutz, c., & newlands, g. (2024, october). assessing occupations through artificial intelligence: a comparison of humans and gpt-4. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. assessing occupations through artificial intelligence: a comparison of humans and gpt-4 paweł gmyrek international labour organization, christoph lutz bi norwegian business school, gemma newlands university of oxford, introduction and literature review the occupational landscape in many countries has changed profoundly. new occupations have emerged around technologies such as artificial intelligence (ai), big data and social media (kane, 2017; newlands & lutz, 2024b). such technological shifts have also had a tangible impact on job quality (makridis & han, 2021). job quality is multifaceted (adamson & roper, 2019), encompassing not only ‘hard’ aspects such as working conditions and pay but also ‘soft’ criteria such as individuals’ subjective interpretations of their work. occupations carry societal values, with society forming subjective views about their prestige and standing (lambert & bihagen, 2014). occupational evaluations are influenced by media, societal narratives, and assumptions about an occupation’s characteristics, rewards, and exclusivity (mejia et al., 2021). investigations of societal occupational evaluation predominantly involve surveys with human participants, especially from treiman's (1977) standard international occupational prestige scale (siops; see for example lersch et al., 2020; pitt & zhu, 2019). the literature on occupational prestige typically encompasses measurements related to prestige, social standing, social status, and social value. the intersection between prestige and social value is particularly pertinent, given the growing body of research on the perceived (low) social value of occupations, notably in relation to graeber’s (2018) discourse on ‘bullshit jobs.’ collectively, existing studies reveal a certain consensus how different occupations are evaluated, even though such evaluations remain dynamic and subject to variation (avent-holt et al., 2020; valentino, 2020; valentino, 2021). we follow this idea by differentiating two distinct axes of occupational evaluation: occupational prestige (op) and occupational social value (osv). the former captures whether an occupation is seen as prestigious (i.e., whether it has high esteem), whereas the latter includes perceptions of social utility (i.e., whether an occupation is seen as useful). our study links such evaluations of occupations with the rapid advancement of ai. there is an ongoing debate about ai’s role in complementing or replacing human labour (frey & osborne 2017; gmyrek et al., 2023). the use of algorithms in workforce management, often termed ‘algorithmic management’ (jarrahi et al., 2021), exemplifies this transformation, with diverging assessments of the very concept (berg et al., 2018; jarrahi et al., 2022; shestakofsky, 2017). particularly, large language models (llms), such as gpt-4 and llama, represent a pivotal advancement, due to their capacity of content analysis and creation across unstructured textual, visual, and audio-visual media. emerging literature shows that these new llms not only process data, but also form discernible opinions on societal aspects. since they are trained on historical data, llms reflect and perpetuate societal biases (saetra, 2023). we contribute to the rapidly expanding body of literature examining llms and their social perceptions (argyle et al., 2023a, 2023b), basing our discussion on the concept of a ‘technological construction of society’ (authors, 2024). this idea responds to sts perspectives by klein and kleinman (2002) and pinch and bijker (1984) regarding the social construction of technology. technological construction of society suggests inverted roles. it refers to the notion that technology, especially digital technology, exerts substantial influence on the configuration and perception of various aspects of modern society. viewing technology as a potential shaper of human perceptions and communication raises important questions about the rules for its integration into different areas of human activity such as the world of work. to respond to this challenge, we provide an in-depth analysis of the op and osv perceptions of gpt-4, contrasting the llm’s scores with those of human respondents. methods, results and discussion we rely on a list of 576 occupation titles, aligned with the international standard classification of occupations (isco-08; ilo, 2008), and four non-occupational roles (unemployed, retiree, student, homemaker). we matched every occupation title to one isco-08 unit group. the full occupation list also includes a core list, with exactly one occupation title for each of the 130 isco-08 minor groups, selected to be highly known and institutionalised (e.g., taxi driver, butcher, journalist, dentist). to measure op and osv comprehensively, we developed a scalable approach, where occupational titles are scored on a 0-100 scale with a slider (newlands & lutz, 2024a, 2024b). we did not explain the concepts of op and osv, in order not to prime the respondents. for the recruitment of survey participants, we relied on prolific. we collected op and osv assessments in march 2022, using prolific’s representative sample option for the uk, where the platform selects the respondents across age, sex, and ethnicity to mirror the population distribution. the study reward was £2.50, with a median response time of 19 minutes (sd = 15 minutes). op and osv were assessed in separate surveys as we did not want the same respondents to score occupations on these two dimensions concurrently to avoid priming effects and to maintain statistical independence. consequently, the surveys were launched sequentially with screening out for previous participation in any data collection. our final sample size is 2429 respondents (1219 for op and 1210 for osv). 48.7% of the respondents identify as male, 50.6% as female, and the remaining 0.7% as non-binary. the average age is 44 years (sd = 16 years). ethnicity and education match the uk office of national statistics distribution. gpt scores were generated using a python script that accesses gpt-4 through the openai library. the script is organised as a loop of sequential api calls that process each of the 580 occupations individually, with an exponential backoff and retry option set to handle any api response errors. we request a written justification of each score in the first round of predictions (see appendix). we proceeded in four steps for the empirical analyses. 1) we compared gpt-4 raw scores with survey scores. despite similarities, a simple visual breakdown across the main demographic characteristics confirms that gpt-4 overestimates scores across the board, when compared to human scores (figure 1 for osv, same for op). figure 1: gpt-4 osv scores vs. respondent scores 2) the scores were z-standardized and gpt-4 and human scores were subsequently correlated. this showed high consistency between humans and gpt-4 (correlations mostly between 0.7 and 0.9). 3) we focused on outlier occupations, where the absolute difference in z-scores between humans and gpt-4 exceeds 0.5 (see figure 2 for osv, similar patterns for op). 4) we analysed which demographic groups are best/worst captured by gpt-4 scores by splitting the human survey across age (18-24/25-54/55+), gender (male/female) and ethnic majority/minority status (white/non-white). gpt-4 is most aligned with white men and women above 25 years and least aligned with non-white men of all age groups, and non-white women 55+. figure 2: occupations with largest osv difference between gpt-4 and humans overall, our research shows that gpt-4 accurately reflects the op and osv perceptions of uk residents. however, the model overestimates op and osv scores compared to human respondents, an issue that can be corrected through data transformations but remains a limitation. it also struggles with capturing nuanced opinions for specific occupations, particularly those related to the digital economy and the shadow sector, aligning with research on llm biases (cheng et al., 2023). gpt-4’s evaluations poorly represent minority groups. these disparities may be influenced by historical biases and systemic inequalities where llms primarily reflect weird perspectives (atari et al., 2023). while gpt-4 is a useful tool for probing social perceptions, it cannot fully replace nuanced human surveys. a more detailed description of the methods, results and implications is available in a peer-reviewed article that has in the meantime been published (gmyrek et al., 2024). references adamson, m., & roper, i. (2019). ‘good’ jobs and ‘bad’ jobs: contemplating job quality in different contexts. work, employment and society, 33(4), 551-559. argyle, l. p., busby, e. c., fulda, n., et al. (2023a). out of one, many: using language models to simulate human samples. political analysis, 31(3), 337-351. argyle, l. p., busby, e., gubler, j., et al. (2023b). ai chat assistants can improve conversations about divisive topics. arxiv preprint, 2302.07268. https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.07268 atari, m., xue, m. j., park, p. s., blasi, d., & henrich, j. (2023). which humans? psyarxiv preprints. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5b26t avent-holt, d., henriksen, l. f., hägglund, a. e., jung, j., kodama, n., melzer, s. m., ... & tomaskovic-devey, d. (2020). occupations, workplaces or jobs? an exploration of stratification contexts using administrative data. research in social stratification and mobility, 70, 100456. berg, j., furrer, m., harmon, e., rani, u., & silberman, m. s. (2018). digital labour platforms and the future of work. international labour organization (ilo), geneva. https://wtf.tw/text/digital_labour_platforms_and_the_future_of_work.pdf cheng, m., durum’s, e., & jurafsky, d. (2023). marked personas: using natural language prompts to measure stereotypes in language models. arxiv preprint, 2305.18189. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18189 frey, c. b., & osborne, m. a. (2017). the future of employment: how susceptible are jobs to computerisation? technological forecasting and social change, 114, 254-280. gmyrek, p., berg, j., & bescond, d. (2023). generative ai and jobs: a global analysis of potential effects on job quantity and quality. international labour organization (ilo), geneva. https://www.ilo.org/global/publications/working-papers/wcms_890761/lang-en/index.htm gmyrek, p., lutz, c., & newlands, g. (2024). a technological construction of society: comparing gpt‐4 and human respondents for occupational evaluation in the uk. british journal of industrial relations, 1-29. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12840 graeber, d. (2018). bullshit jobs: a theory. penguin books. ilo (2008). international standard classification of occupations: structure, group definitions and correspondence tables (isco-08). international labour organization (ilo), geneva. https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/--publ/documents/publication/wcms_172572.pdf jarrahi, m. h., lutz, c., & newlands, g. (2022). artificial intelligence, human intelligence and hybrid intelligence based on mutual augmentation. big data & society, 9(2), 1-6. jarrahi, m. h., newlands, g., lee, m. k., wolf, c. t., kinder, e., & sutherland, w. (2021). algorithmic management in a work context. big data & society, 8(2), 1-14. kane, g. c. (2017). digital maturity, not digital transformation. mit sloan management review, 1(1), 1-15. klein, h. k., & kleinman, d. l. (2002). the social construction of technology. science, technology, & human values, 27(1), 28-52. lambert, p. s., & bihagen, e. (2014). using occupation-based social classifications. work, employment and society, 28(3), 481-494. lersch, p. m., schulz, w., & leckie, g. (2020). the variability of occupational attainment. american sociological review, 85(6), 1084-1116. makridis, c. a., & han, j. h. (2021). future of work and employee empowerment and satisfaction. technological forecasting and social change, 173, 121162. mejia, c., pittman, r., beltramo, j. m., et al. (2021). stigma & dirty work: in-group and out-group perceptions of essential service workers during covid-19. international journal of hospitality management, 93, 102772. newlands, g., & lutz, c. (2024a). occupational prestige and occupational social value in the united kingdom: new indices for the modern british economy. research in social stratification and mobility, 91, 100935. newlands, g., & lutz, c. (2024b). mapping the prestige and social value of occupations in the digital economy. journal of business research, 180, 114716. pinch, t. j., & bijker, w. e. (1984). the social construction of facts and artefacts. social studies of science, 14(3), 399-441. pitt, r. n., & zhu, l. (2019). the relationship between college major prestige/status and post-baccalaureate outcomes. sociological perspectives, 62(3), 325-345. sætra, h. s. (2023). generative ai: here to stay, but for good? technology in society, 75, 102372. shestakofsky, b. (2017). working algorithms: software automation and the future of work. work and occupations, 44(4), 376-423. treiman, d. j. (1977). occupational prestige in comparative perspective. academic press. valentino, l. (2020). the segregation premium: how gender shapes the symbolic valuation process of occupational prestige judgments. social forces, 99(1), 31-58. valentino, l. (2021). the heterarchy of occupational status. sociological forum, 36, 1395-1418. appendix the gpt-4 prompt used was as follows: {"role": "system", "content": "you are a respondent to a survey in the uk." "make your response representative of an uk average resident, taking into account the social and demographic diversity of the uk." }, {"role": "user", "content": "look at this occupation title: " + str(occupation_title) + "rate the prestige of this occupation on a scale of 0 (the lowest level of prestige) to 100 (the highest level of prestige), with intervals of 1. " "make your response representative of an uk average resident, taking into account the social and demographic diversity of the uk. " "in the first line of response provide only your numerical score, no other text." "in the following lines provide a justification of your scoring decision. " "do not give any score ranges just one score."} once all occupations have been processed, the procedure repeats 49 times, resulting in a total of 50 estimation cycles. since we do not generate justifications for these remaining 49 cycles, the “user” part of the script is amended: {"role": "user", "content": […] "in the first line of response provide only your numerical score, no other text. do not give any score ranges just one score."} selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): chin, y.c., li, k. (2021, october). sovereignty in the cyberspace: contestation of concepts and policies. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. sovereignty in the cyberspace: contestation of concepts and policies yik chan chin beijing normal university ke li jiaotong-liverpool university abstract the term cyberspace was first coined in science fiction (mackellar, 2019: 13). since the 1980s, many scholars and organizations have tried to define the concept of cyberspace. for example, international telecommunication union (itu) defines cyberspace as "the physical or non-physical domain consisting of all or some of the elements including computers, computer systems, networks and their software support, computer data, content data, traffic data and users" (international telecommunication union, 2016: 6). some theorists assert that cyberspace transcends geographical and national boundaries and puts pressure on traditional notions of sovereignty and security (fang, 2018: 14). in international relations and law, the traditional concept of sovereignty consists of four principles: 1) every state has the right to monopolies the exercise of certain powers from the perspective of its territory and its citizens (monopoly of power); 2) all states are equalized; 3) an official of a state who lives in another state enjoys reciprocal immunity for various purposes; and 4) sovereignty implies opposition to any extraterritorial (or international) power interfering or intervening in the affairs of the territory. the scope of this traditional concept of sovereignty is limited by the un charter, which presupposes the prohibition of the use of force as a premise for the concept of sovereignty and excludes some substantive areas from the set-aside (e.g., human rights). (weber, 2010: 12). in the context of global interdependence, it is difficult to maintain an absolute concept of sovereignty (bhandar, 2011). with the advent of global telecommunications infrastructure and the internet, the scope of sovereign authority is however limited (couture and toupin, 2019: 2308). it is the contradictory nature of the traditional concept of sovereignty makes sovereignty in cyberspace one of the most controversial issues in internet governance today. suggested citation (apa): chin, y.c., li, k. (2021, october). sovereignty in the cyberspace: contestation of concepts and policies. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. as one of the first concepts to emerge, the concept of 'cyber sovereignty' often appears alongside the notion of 'national sovereignty'. the similarities and differences between these two concepts have always been the focus of academic debate. the concept of cyber sovereignty evolves as a manifestation of data security and geopolitical issues arising from the digital economy and technological competition. for fear of jeopardizing sovereignty, many states refuse multilateral modes of cooperation, leading to a fragmented system of global governance (stevens, 2017). however, individual national strategies do not effectively address the problems of cyberspace on a global scale, such as fake news and cybercrime. despite the partial transfer of national sovereignty to the global level after world war ii, such as the wto, there are currently few multilateral binding legal instruments and regulations in cyberspace, and collective sovereignty has not yet been achieved on a global scale. the large differences between developed and non-developed cyber countries on the issue of sovereignty in cyberspace also make it difficult to build a global framework for internet governance. however, in recent years, the term 'sovereignty' has also been frequently associated with the terms 'digital', 'data' and 'technology'. various claims of cyberspace sovereignty, including 'data sovereignty', 'digital sovereignty' and 'technological sovereignty', have attracted widespread attention. within this context, in this research, we examine the various academic positions and governments policies on different "sovereignty" concepts in cyberspace, and to explore the controversies, evolution and future development of these concepts. the paper considers sovereignty in cyberspace as the subject of the study, and conducts a systematic interdisciplinary (communication, political and legal) study of its conceptualizations and state policies. the research aims to answer the following research questions: 1) what are the definitions of the academic community on these concepts including cyber, 'digital', 'data' and 'technology sovereignty; 2) what are the positions and claims of major governments on these sovereignties; and 3) what are the overlaps, differences and conflicts between those positions and the underlying reasons? the purpose of this paper is to explore the process of development of the "sovereignty" norms and policies in cyberspace, with particular attention to the positions and claims of academics and governments. methodologically, this paper will use a historical documentary analysis approach. the types of documents used include two categories: (1) primary sources: initiatives, laws, regulations, drafts, ordinances and strategic proposals issued by governments on sovereignty in cyberspace; 2) secondary source: academic literatures related to various concepts of sovereignty in cyberspace, including journal papers, academic conference reports and books. in this paper, government documents from china, the eu and the us for the period 2010-2021 will be chosen as the main subjects of study. there have been a major conceptual and position differences among these countries/regions on the "sovereignty " in cyberspace, they represent the focus of the debates. suggested citation (apa): chin, y.c., li, k. (2021, october). sovereignty in the cyberspace: contestation of concepts and policies. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. this study shows that the us, the eu and china have different claims and positions on cyberspace. the us has a firm grip on the discourse of cyber sovereignty by advocating an 'america first' and 'multi-stakeholder' model of cyber governance. the european union, while largely sharing the us model, has retained its ability to act by introducing the concepts of "digital sovereignty" and "technological sovereignty". china, on the other hand, has stressed on the multilateralism and legally binding cooperative sovereignty at the international level. references bhandar b (2011) the conceit of sovereignty: toward post-colonial technique. in: lessard b (ed) stories communities: narratives of contact and arrival in constituting political community. vancouver, bc, canada: university of british columbia press, pp. 66–88. couture s and toupin s (2019) what does the notion of “sovereignty” mean when referring to the digital? new media & society 21(10): 2305-2322. fang b (2018) cyberspace sovereignty: reflections on building a community of common future in cyberspace. beijing: science press. international telecommunication union (2016) itu-t x-series recommendations: data networks, open system communications and security. telecommunication security. overview of cybersecurity. mackellar c (2019) why use the term ‘cyberneuroethics’? in: mackellar c (ed.) cyborg mind: what brain–computer and mind–cyberspace interfaces mean for cyberneuroethics. new york and oxford: berghahn. stevens t (2017) cyberweapons: an emerging global governance architecture. palgrave communications 3(16102): 1-6. weber rh (2010) new sovereignty concept in the age of internet? journal of internet law 14(2): 12-20. ministry of foreign affairs of china (2020) global initiative on data security. cyberspace administration of china (2016) cyberspace security strategies. eu (2020) the european data strategy. eu (2020) european digital sovereignty. eu (2018) general data protection regulation (gdpr). suggested citation (apa): chin, y.c., li, k. (2021, october). sovereignty in the cyberspace: contestation of concepts and policies. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. u.s. department of commerce and european commission (2016) eu-u.s. privacy shield frameworks. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): tylstedt, b., westwood, h. l., holroyd, d., stein, k. (2024, october). social media as a key actor in redefining healthcare industry dymanics. panel presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. social media as a key actor in redefining healthcare industry dynamics beatrice tylstedt uppsala university hannah l. westwood coventry university deanna holroyd the ohio state university krysten stein university of cincinnati blue ash college introductory panel statement in june 2023 singer-actress lady gaga provoked debate after posting sponsored content on her instagram account, partnering with pharmaceutical company pfizer to advertise nurtec odt, a migraine drug (nugent, 2023). this follows a recent trend of high-profile figures and influencers spreading healthcare information and misinformation on social media. wellness guru belle gibson presents another example, having lied about treating her (non-existent) cancer through a vegan diet, exercise, and alternative medicine, thus inspiring followers to treat their cancer through wellness and opt out of traditional medical cancer treatment (baker & rojek, 2019). while social media platforms have evolved into channels for health promotion, health information distribution and patient communities (chretien et al., 2011; eghtesadi & florea., 2020; hawn, 2009; gerbaudo, 2022), both these examples highlight how social media has a real impact on how users engage with health-related debates and conversations surrounding health and embodied experience. the link between social media and health is complex, with research typically exploring how social media shapes our understanding of health and impacts how we intervene on the body (lupton, 2014). notably, recent research considers the roles of wellness and patient influencers (e.g. wellman, 2023; stephanidis, 2023; sweeney-romero, 2022; o’neill, 2020), patient activist communities (e.g. petersen, et al., 2019), and healthcare influencers and pharmaceutical sponsorships (e.g. stein, yao & aitamurto, 2022; willis & delbaere, 2022; willis et al., 2023) on shaping health discourse. this panel builds on this body of literature, by advocating for an interdisciplinary approach to studying the relationships between social media and health, and emphasising the importance of considering the impact on users and creators when examining the interplay between top-down corporate and bottom-up content creator presences on health-related social media. employing critical feminist theoretical and methodological approaches, the papers together argue for greater attention to how emerging technologies and platforms are becoming crucial industry actors in shaping knowledge about the body, wellness, and health. this panel begins with a methodological intervention offered by our first panellist, who advocates for a feminist situational analytical approach (clarke, 2003, 2005) to explore the complex entanglements of bodily health, social media health-related discourses and content, and the broader dynamics of the healthcare industry. in particular, this first paper introduces the role of social media in the femtech – female technology – industry, showing how social media is a key location for companies to communicate with their current and prospective users. this first paper sets the stage for the rest of the panel, by highlighting the need to attend to the relational dynamics between digital media technologies and elements of the healthcare industry. the following two presentations draw inspiration from this critical, feminist methodological approach, using digital ethnographic and qualitative analytical methods to examine the impact of digital and social media on perceptions, behaviours, and societal norms related to the context of health and the healthcare industries. both of the following panellists presents a case study informed by critical interdisciplinary theories from the fields of science and technology studies, gender studies, and health/medical humanities, to demonstrate how social and digital media play a pivotal role in shaping understandings of what is deemed normative and healthy in relation to our bodies. the second panellist conducts a close reading of natural cycles influencer advertisements to explore how the femtech industry uses social media as a tool to advertise health and wellness products and reframe narratives about contraceptive health. the final presentation transitions from considering how healthcare practitioners and traditional industry actors engage with social media, to consider how everyday social media users and content creators are emerging as key actors in shaping understandings and definitions of adhd. these case studies, paired with the methodological offering of the first panellist, shed light on the various ways in which social media platforms have become crucial sites of information about wellness and bodily health for both traditional healthcare industry actors, non-professional users, and content creators. as such, these papers demonstrate the wide-ranging impact that emerging technologies and social media platforms have on the healthcare industry, and on wider conceptions of health. ultimately, this panel highlights the necessity of adopting critical, feminist methodological approaches that are sensitive to the nuanced and complex entanglements of social media discourses, media technologies, socio-political contexts, broader healthcare industry dynamics, and the body. by drawing together these three research projects that are situated in three different cultural contexts (sweden, uk, and usa) this panel contributes interdisciplinary, global perspectives to the evolving landscape of digital culture and social media health-related content – highlighting their influences on reproductive health technologies, influencer marketing, mental health, and the healthcare industry at large. references baker, s. a., & rojek, c. (2019, may 2019). wellness influencers like belle gibson promote dangerous pseudoscience as a cure for disease. independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/belle-gibson-cancer-cure-fraud-wellnessinfluencer-pseudoscience-health-a8928571.html chretien, k. c., azar, j., & kind, t. (2011). physicians on twitter. journal of the american medical association, 305(6), 566–568. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2011.68 clarke, a. e. (2003). situational analyses: grounded theory mapping after the postmodern turn. symbolic interaction, 26(4), 553–576. https://doi.org/10.1525/si.2003.26.4.553 clarke, a. e. (2005). situational analysis: grounded theory after the postmodern turn. sage publications. eghtesadi, m., & florea, a. (2020). facebook, instagram, reddit and tiktok: a proposal for health authorities to integrate popular social media platforms in contingency planning amid a global pandemic outbreak. canadian journal of public health, 111(3), 389–391. https://doi.org/10.17269/s41997-020-00343-0 gerbaudo, p. (2022). ‘from individual affectedness to collective identity: personal testimony campaigns on social media and the logic of collection’. new media & society, online first. hawn, c. (2009). take two aspirin and tweet me in the morning: how twitter, facebook, and other social media are reshaping health care. health affairs, 28(2), 361– 368. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.28.2.361 lupton, d. (2014). apps as artefacts: towards a critical perspective on mobile health and medical apps. societies, 4(4), 602-622. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc4040606 nugent, a. (2023, june 15). lady gaga raises eyebrows over paid partnership with pfizer migraine drug. independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/music/news/lady-gaga-pfzier-migrane-drug-ad-b2357922.html o'neill, rachel (2020) pursuing “wellness”: considerations for media studies. television & new media, 21(6). 628 634. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476420919703 petersen, a., schermuly, a. c., & anderson, a. (2019). the shifting politics of patient activism: from bio-sociality to bio-digital citizenship. health (london, england : 1997), 23(4), 478–494. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363459318815944 stein, k., yao, y., aitamurto, t. (2022). examining communicative forms in #tiktokdocs’ sexual health videos. international journal of communication (ijoc). 16(2022), 1309-1331. stephanidis, c., antona, m., ntoa, s., & salvendy, g. (2023). representations of health and wellness on instagram: an analysis of posting behavior of top-ranked health influencers. in hci international 2023 posters (vol. 1835). springer. sweeney-romero, k. m. (2022). wellness tiktok: morning routines, eating well, and getting ready to be “that girl”. in t. boffone (ed.), tiktok cultures in the united states (pp. 108-116). routledge. wellman, m. l. (2023). “a friend who knows what they’re talking about”: extending source credibility theory to analyze the wellness influencer industry on instagram. new media & society, 146144482311620-. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231162064 willis, e., & delbaere, m. (2022). patient influencers: the next frontier in direct-toconsumer pharmaceutical marketing. journal of medical internet research, 24(3), e29422. https://doi.org/10.2196/29422 willis, e., friedel, k., heisten. m., pickett, m., & bhowmick, a. (2023). communicating health literacy on prescription medications on social media: in-depth interviews with “patient influencers”. journal of medical internet research, 25, e41867. https://doi.org/10.2196/41867 mapping femtech: situational analysis as theorymethods package to explore reproductive health, empowerment and social media beatrice tylstedt uppsala university femtech – technologies, wearables, and software that address female health and wellness – have billions of users worldwide. femtech products for reproductive health comes primarily in the shape of apps directed at menstrual, fertility, and pregnancy tracking. together they offer new digital tools for managing reproductive health while claiming to empower users. in our work we address the femtech industry and these apps in two stages. in the first stage, we use the feminist cartographic approach situational analysis (clarke, 2003; 2005) to map femtech and the various technological, human, nonhuman, discursive, symbolic cultural, and historical elements that together comprise femtech. we put forward a series of maps of the femtech ecosystem and provide an overview of femtech that we, as researchers of femtech, have been missing in the literature. in the second stage of our work, we draw on the main discourse revealed during the mapping: the discourse of empowerment. femtech apps and products are often marketed in terms of empowerment (hendl & jansky, 2022), and indeed, previous research has highlighted the potential of femtech apps in helping users keep track of their cycles, become pregnant, and getting to know their bodies, as well as in navigating thoughts, behaviors, and emotions related to the cycle (epstein et al., 2017; karlsson, 2019; fox et al., 2020). however, femtech has at the same time been heavily criticized for e.g., lacking privacy (fox et al., 2019; mehrnezhad & almeida, 2021; paul, 2022), enforcing normative ideals on users (lupton, 2015; fox & epstein, 2020), and of turning users into objects of surveillance, discipline, and commodification (lupton, 2015; 2016; ajana 2017; roetman, 2020; healy, 2021)–issues that could contradict claims of empowerment. we address the notion of empowerment in relation to femtech using nicola gavey’s (2012) suggestion that we should not focus on questions of whether individuals or their actions are empowered, but instead engage in political analysis of the “sociocultural terrain in which individuals are crafting their lives” (p. 719). in discussing empowerment in relation to girl’s sexuality, gavey suggests to move away from questions of whether or not individuals and their actions are empowered, to instead look at “cultural conditions of possibility for girl’s sexuality, embodiment and relationships” (gavey, 2011,  p. 719). in our work we do not intend to make a judgement about whether users are empowered or disempowered by femtech, but instead apply gavey’s reasoning to explore the sociocultural terrain of femtech, in order to begin to consider femtech’s role in women’s reproductive health. thus, in our work we aim to explore femtech and its role in women’s reproductive health through the lens of empowerment, and we begin this exploration with mapping and situating femtech socially, materially, historically, discursively, organizationally and institutionally (clarke, 2003). in doing so, we ask; what technological, human, nonhuman, discursive, symbolic cultural, and historical elements comprise femtech? to answer this question, we use the theory-methods package situational analysis developed by adele clarke in the early 2000s (2003; 2005). situational analysis developed as an extension of grounded theory, and in outlining it, clarke resituates grounded theory around the postmodern turn by implementing postmodern emphasis on localities, positionalities, situatedness, complexities and fragmentation. situational analysis has the situation being studied as its primary focus. that includes all elements in the situation, and the relations between those elements. while traditional social science often talks about the context of the research phenomenon, the basic premise of situational analysis is that the phenomenon and the context are inseparable. the basis of situational analysis is a continuous process of mapping and memo-writing during the course of the research. the mapping consists of making four kinds of maps: messy and ordered situational maps, relational maps, social-worlds/arenas maps, and positional maps. the idea of the maps is to identify all the elements of the research situation: human, nonhuman, discursive, historical, symbolic cultural, political and other elements, and the relations between those. questions to ask when mapping are ”who and what are in this situation? who and what matters in this situation? what elements ’make a difference’ in this situation?” (clarke, 2003, p. 561). this also involves paying attention to the sites of silence in the data and ask; ”what seems present but unarticulated?” (clarke, 2003, p. 561). clarke also suggests that the researcher should add themselves to the map, in order to acknowledge the embodiment and situatedness of the researcher, but also because when we do research on a situation, we become part of it–we influence it and it influences us (clarke, washburn & friese, 2022). in our mapping, we use a data set of 35 femtech newsletters from eight different sources, 105 social media posts from three prolific femtech companies, and 2 mapping workshops with femtech researchers. we use newsletters as they are a key form of industry communication in femtech, and social media as this is a key site of interaction between femtech app companies and users of the apps. from this data, we create a series of maps that we put forward as representing the femtech ecosystem. for the presentation of our work at aoir2024, we specifically elaborate on the social media of femtech. we argue that social media, as a space where girls, women, and people with uteruses spend time ‘crafting their lives’ both by sharing and consuming content, ought to be taken seriously as a sociocultural site where understandings of reproductive health are crafted. we stress that social media is an important, yet understudied site of research in relation to femtech, and discuss the potential contribution of principles from situational analysis for studying social media. references ajana, b. (2017). digital health and the biopolitics of the quantified self. digital health, 3. clarke, a. e. (2003). situational analyses: grounded theory mapping after the postmodern turn. symbolic interaction, 26(4), 553–576. clarke, a. e. (2005). situational analysis: grounded theory after the postmodern turn. sage publications. clarke, a. e., washburn, r., & friese, c. (2022). situational analysis in practice: mapping relationalities across disciplines. routledge. epstein, d. a., lee, n. b., kang, j. h., agapie, e., schroeder, j., pina, l. r., fogarty, j., kientz, j. a., & munson, s. (2017). examining menstrual tracking to inform the design of personal informatics tools. proceedings of the 2017 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 6876–6888. fox, s., howell, n., wong, r., & spektor, f. (2019). vivewell: speculating near-future menstrual tracking through current data practices. proceedings of the 2019 on designing interactive systems conference, 541–552. fox, s. e., menking, a., eschler, j., & backonja, u. (2020). multiples over models: interrogating the past and collectively reimagining the future of menstrual sensemaking. acm trans. compututer human interaction 27, 22–24. fox, s., & epstein, d. (2020). “monitoring menses: design-based investigations of menstrual tracking applications,” in the palgrave handbook of critical menstruation studies, bobel, c. winkler, i. t., fahs, b. & hasson, k. a. (ed.) (singapore: springer nature), 733–750. gavey, n. (2012). beyond “empowerment”? sexuality in a sexist world. sex roles, 66(11–12), 718–724. healy, r. l. (2021). zuckerberg, get out of my uterus! an examination of fertility apps, data-sharing and remaking the female body as a digitalized reproductive subject. journal of gender studies, 30(4), 406–416. hendl, t., & jansky, b. (2022). tales of self-empowerment through digital health technologies: a closer look at ‘femtech’. review of social economy, 80(1), 29–57. karlsson, a. (2019). den kønnede datakrop: en socioteknisk undersøgelse af menstruation, self-tracking og apps. [doctoral dissertation, aarhus universitet]. lupton, d. (2015). quantified sex: a critical analysis of sexual and reproductive selftracking using apps. culture, health & sexuality, 17(4), 440-453. lupton, d. (2016). digitized health promotion: risk and personal responsibility for health and illness in the web 2.0 era. in joseph e. davis, & ana marta gonzález (eds.), to fix or to heal (p. 152-176). nyu press. mehrnezhad, m., & almeida, t. (2021). caring for intimate data in fertility technologies. proceedings of the 2021 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 1–11. paul, k. (2022). how private is your period-tracking app? not very, study reveals. the guardian. available online at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/17/pregnancy-period-tracking-appsprivacy (accessed december 6, 2023). roetman, s. (2020). self-tracking ‘femtech’: commodifying & disciplining the fertile female body. aoir selected papers of internet research. reframing contraceptive health: how the femtech industry uses influencer advertising hannah l. westwood coventry university the use of influencers to promote makeup, skincare and clothing lines across social media has been well recorded (e.g. duffy & hund, 2015; baker & rojek, 2020; hund, 2023; leaver et al., 2020). however, among more obscure promotions including cars and vacuum cleaners, a trend of influencers promoting the non-hormonal digital contraceptive app natural cycles has arisen. the role of influencers in promoting health products and services is a growing area of research that warrants further investigation, and social media is an understudied site of research in relation to femtech (willis & delbaere, 2022). part of the femtech – or feminine technologies industry – natural cycles is a digital contraceptive app popular among millennial women that is primarily advertised through social media, especially instagram and tiktok. it works by asking users to measure their basal body temperature (bbt) on a daily basis using the natural cycles bluetooth thermometer. the proprietary algorithm uses this bbt data to determine when ovulation takes place, thus confirming fertility status. the app presents this as an output of either red (fertile) or green (not fertile) each day. natural cycles also has a reverse product that assists users who are aiming to conceive. in this paper, i present the findings of a close reading of natural cycles influencer advertisements on instagram, taking into account both visual and textual elements of the posts. i find that the posts feature a narrative that i am terming the ‘contraceptive journey’, which typically describes the previous use and dislike of hormonal contraceptives followed by an emphasis on the moment of discovery of natural cycles. this narrative promotes the superiority of non-hormonal contraceptives and aims to convince the reader to make the change to natural cycles. furthermore, the image presents a version of the internet figure ‘that girl’, emphasising the relevance of natural cycles to the clean girl aesthetic, and implying that the product fits seamlessly into the morning routines of this aspirational lifestyle (sweeney-romero, 2022). thus, this paper contends that natural cycles’ use of influencer advertisements upholds specific expectations of the ideal user and conceals the barriers to accessing the product. this paper aims to contribute to the growing area of research focused on the role and ethics of influencers in promoting health products on social media (willis & delbaere, 2022). it is important that the role of influencers in advertising medical products such as contraceptives that would typically require a consultation with a nurse or doctor is studied in a way that takes into account the ethical implications of such advertisements. the paper blends methods from social media analysis and advertising analysis to present a comprehensive reading of natural cycles instagram influencer advertisements that form part of a multi-influencer campaign used by natural cycles, in which a group of select influencers promote the same product over a specific time period (leaver et al., 2020, pp.115-127). specifically, a close reading of the captions and images of each advertisement is conducted, added to comment analysis to present an overall inquiry into the discourses surrounding the promotion of these products. the paper studies several similar advertisements that feature a reality television star-turnedinfluencer posing on a bed, holding a natural cycles-branded thermometer, with an accompanying caption (mecklenburgh, 2021; attwood, 2021; power, 2021). i first present a close reading of the captions, including discussing the main messages in each, and comparing similarities and differences between them. i show that the advertisements construct the ‘contraceptive journey’. this is formulated through a narrative that emphasises previous experience with using one or more hormonal contraceptive methods, but disliking them, often citing specific negative side effects (mecklenburgh, 2021; attwood, 2021; power, 2021). the narrative continues by explaining the switch to natural cycles, which is presented as superior to previously tried methods, forefronting hormone-free discourses. the moment of discovery of natural cycles is particularly emphasised in the captions to spark strong emotion is the user. this ‘contraceptive journey’ is featured in all of the captions analysed for this paper, showing the importance and cohesion of this message in natural cycles marketing. in tandem with the caption analysis, a reading of the image of the advertisement is conducted that focuses on how the product is presented. featuring influencers holding their natural cycles-branded thermometer, i consider the signification of the specific influencers chosen to advertise the product (williamson, 2005). using visual cues such as the casual, yet made-up aesthetic of the matching loungewear and styled hair, i contend that the images of the advertisements suggest that the influencers are ‘that girl’, an internet trend that refers to young and typically slim white girls who film their morning routines (sweeney-romero, 2022). such routines often feature getting up early to complete elaborate skincare routines, workouts and clean eating before the working day begins (sweeney-romero, 2022). synthesising the analysis of the caption and image, this paper contends that the advertisements imply that users can complete their own ‘contraceptive journey’ to discover natural cycles, a product that is not only superior to hormonal contraception, but one that is necessary to become the aspirational, neoliberal figure of ‘that girl’ (sweeney-romero, 2022). this paper also includes a limited comment analysis that allows for a consideration of whether and how users engage and interact with these specific influencer advertisements on instagram. in particular, i find three categories of interaction: positive, negative and resisting. i focus specifically on the comments that resist the advertisement, for example asking an influencer what brand of clothing they are wearing, refusing to engage with what the post is specifically advertising, and instead treating it as if it were a standard grid post. following the close reading of the posts and their comments, the paper critically engages with the main message of the ‘contraceptive journey’ that users must complete in order to become ‘that girl’. the way the advertisement is constructed implies that the product is suitable and accessible for everyone, concealing how users may be excluded for reasons including the prohibitive financial cost, the requirement for regular sleep and regular menstrual cycles or the intense amount of labour involved to use the app ‘properly’. furthermore, while natural cycles has regulatory approval as a contraceptive across many parts of the world, the nature of its advertising conceals the need to make an informed decision about one’s method of contraception, which may involve a consultation with a doctor or nurse (national institute for health and care excellence, 2021). this research forms part of a larger project investigating the accessibility, equity and safety of the femtech or feminine technologies industry. this industry broadly focuses on health solutions for women and non-binary people, with a specific aim to address areas of women’s health that have previously been underfunded. the project uses natural cycles as a case study, conducting an in-depth walkthrough of the app and drawing on social media advertisements (light et al., 2018). the social media influencer advertisements contribute to an overall comparison of how the product is advertised versus how it actually operates for users. it considers the ethical implications of using influencers to advertise natural cycles, and health and medical products more generally, and how this can conceal important suitability and access barriers to the product. references attwood, o. j. [@oliviajade_attwood] (2021, june 10). whenever i do a q&a i always get asked what contraception i use [image]. instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/cp9bobobglu/ baker, s. a., rojek, c. (2020). lifestyle gurus: construction authority and influence online. polity. duffy, b. & hund, e. (2015). “having it all” on social media: entrepreneurial femininity and self-branding among fashion bloggers. social media + society 1(2): 1–11. hund, e. (2023). the influencer industry: the quest for authenticity on social media. princeton university press. leaver, t., highfield, t., & abidin, c. (2020). instagram: visual social media cultures. polity. light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881-900. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 mecklenburgh, l. [@lucymeck1] (2021, april 18). ad i use my platform to share open & honest elements of my life [image]. instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/cnzre5mdlyi/ national institute for health and care excellence. (2021). medtech innovation briefing: natural cycles for monitoring fertility. https://www.nice.org.uk/advice/mib244 power, j. [@jessika_power] (2021, june 6). as a girl, i know how hard it can be to find a birth control that suits your body [image]. instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/cpxxkgxhyyu/ sweeney-romero, k. m. (2022). wellness tiktok: morning routines, eating well, and getting ready to be “that girl”. in t. boffone (ed.), tiktok cultures in the united states (pp. 108-116). routledge. williamson, j. (2005). decoding advertisements: ideology and meaning in advertising (15th impression). marion boyars. willis, e., & delbaere, m. (2022). patient influencers: the next frontier in direct-toconsumer pharmaceutical marketing. journal of medical internet research, 24(3), e29422. https://doi.org/10.2196/29422 expanding definitions of adhd and the medicalization of everyday neoliberal experiences on instagram and tiktok deanna holroyd the ohio state university attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (adhd) is an increasingly prevalent disorder (smith, 2012), with around 10% of american children diagnosed with adhd (li et al., 2023) and around 366 million adults worldwide experiencing symptomatic adhd (song et al., 2021). this rise in diagnoses, and adhd-related discourse, is mirrored in the increase in adhd-related social media content; instagram has 4.2 million posts with ‘#adhd’, and ‘#adhdtiktok’ has almost 8 billion views on tiktok. medical anthropologists attribute this rise in adhd discourse to increased medicalization (aronowitz, 1998; castel et al., 1982; conrad, 2007; illich, 1974; smith, 2012; starr, 1984), arguing that new technological interventions exemplify the commodification and institutionalisation of the healthcare industry (gordon, 2013; sismondo, 2018). digital media scholars, on the other hand, either understand online health discourse as sites of patient activism, that resist the hegemony of healthcare institutions (conrad et al. 2016; epstein and timmermans, 2021; gerbaudo, 2022; parr and davidson, 2008; radin, 2006), or are concerned with the prevalence of online health-related mis-/dis-information (yeung et al. 2022). while these perspectives highlight important issues connected to healthcare institutionalisation, medicalization, and online community formation, they overlook how media technologies, as persuasive socio-technological actants (latour, 1996; fogg, 2003), actively shape knowledge production about health and illness. indeed, rather than dismissing this adhd-related content as a frivolous trend, i instead understand these videos as meaningful, cultural products that have important consequences on socio-cultural phenomena (ask and abidin, 2018; shifman, 2014). with this in mind, my conference paper asks: 1) how exactly is adhd presented on social media?; and 2) what consequences does this online, digital adhd-related discourse have on broader understandings of adhd, the adhd healthcare industry, and official industry-standard diagnostic criteria? to answer these research questions, my paper presents the findings of an 18-month-long digital ethnographic study (hine, 2015; pink et al., 2015) on online adhd content. my study consisted of exploring adhd-related short-form video content on tiktok and instagram, and conducting a multi-modal analysis (machin and mayr, 2023) and critical techno-cultural discourse analysis (brock, 2018) of the discursive, memetic, aural, and visual aspects of the videos, paying close attention to the symptoms that are listed. the results of this digital ethnographic study show that social media adhd content tends to follow one of two formats – 1) educational, myth-busting content, or 2) trending content. educational, myth-busting videos tend to be formatted as short, entertaining, situational skits, aiming to inform viewers about the societal misconceptions and judgements that neurodivergents must face, as well as the lived experiences and struggles of the adhd mind. although much of this content humorously engages with the difficulties of having the disorder, these videos also frequently aim to reposition adhd, not as a debilitating disorder, but as a neurological ‘superpower’. there are therefore strong activist undertones to this content insofar as creators aim to both raise awareness about the disorder, and also reshape popular conceptions of adhd as something that can be empowering rather than inherently debilitating. however, the second type of popular content reoccurring in these social media spaces is far less concerned with educating viewers and empowering adhd users, and instead takes inspiration from trending content and memes across social media platforms, such as the ‘put a finger down adhd edition’, ‘nobody has all 5’ trend or ‘pov you have adhd’. these videos use these various trending soundbites and editing techniques to present the content creator’s embodied experiences of living with adhd, and often list supposed symptoms associated with the disorder. several of the adhd experiences that are frequently mentioned include: leaving cupboard doors open; being untidy; struggling to tune out neighbouring conversations; poor time management; dehydration; frequent fidgeting; lacking motivation to cook a proper meal; being unable to make a decision or complete an arduous task; hyperfocus; zoning out; forgetfulness; sitting with your knee up; misplacing things; caffeine addiction; and having more than 1000 unread emails. these adhd experiences presented in the videos on tiktok and instagram differ dramatically from the official symptoms and diagnostic criteria listed in the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (dsm) used within the mental healthcare industry. rather, these symptoms can be better understood as quotidian lived experiences of our neoliberal socio-cultural context. as neoliberal critics have argued, neoliberalism has created a society in which ideologies of meritocracy, expectations of constant self-improvement, fast-paced daily living, and an increasing focus on the individual, have become key elements of our everyday reality (cvetkovich, 2012; lauren berlant, 2011; gershon, 2011; harvey, 2005). by connecting these everyday experiences of our busy, overstimulating, neoliberal reality to adhd, the common difficulties that viewers encounter as neoliberal subjects become reconfigured as medicalized symptoms of a disorder – creating an environment in which almost anyone can recognize their everyday experiences as symptoms of adhd. these two types of social media adhd-related content therefore demonstrate how vernacular understandings and definitions of adhd have expanded beyond official medical diagnostic criteria, to encompass everyday neoliberal experiences that become reframed as medical symptoms. by medicalizing everyday experiences as adhd symptoms and presenting adhd as a neurological ‘superpower’, this adhd social media content masks the socio-political causes of these experiences and places the responsibility of managing them onto the individual. at the same time, this content turns the disorder into an alluring identity marker, as it provides a medical framework through which to understand neoliberal struggles, and explain people’s inability to meet neoliberal norms and expectations – “it’s not my fault i’m addicted to coffee and have 1000 unread emails, it’s because i have adhd”. this paper therefore argues that contrary to previous research on online health discourse, adhd social media content is not simply a source of advocacy, awareness, and activism. rather, the content both medicalizes and glorifies everyday struggles, presenting them as adhd symptoms, and consequently expanding vernacular definitions of what it means to have adhd in the 21st century. this creates an environment in which almost anyone can understand themselves to be neuro-divergent, and adhd is thus reduced to an online trend and personality trait that ultimately contributes to the delegitimization of the disorder. as such, this vernacular embodied adhd knowledge on tiktok is not only actively changing widespread conceptions of what adhd is, but is also challenging official medical definitions of what it means to have a healthy brain and be neuro-normative. in this way, this adhd-related short-form video content on tiktok and instagram has become a key actor in generating alternative knowledge regarding mental health that exists external to the traditional american adhd healthcare industry. with this in mind, this paper makes several significant contributions to the fields of medical humanities, science and technology studies, and qualitative social media studies. firstly, it highlights how the socio-political context of neoliberalism impacts what behaviour becomes medicalized and what can be considered normative and disordered behaviour. secondly, the paper illuminates how social media content shapes understandings of mental health and symptoms of disorders, creating digital spaces where medical symptomology and diagnostic criteria are in a state of constant flux and negotiation. and, finally, it demonstrates how the medical knowledge produced by key institutional actors within the healthcare industry is being challenged, not only by mental health activists, but also by content creators and influencers whose participation in online trends medicalizes everyday neoliberal experiences. references aronowitz, r. a. (1998). making sense of illness: science, society, and disease. cambridge university press. ask, k. and c. abidin, (2018). ‘my life is a mess: self-deprecating relatability and collective identities in the memification of student issues’. information, communication & society, 21:6, 834-850. berlant, l. (2011). cruel optimism. duke university press. brock, a. (2018). ‘critical techno-cultural discourse analysis’, new media & society, 20(3): 1012-1030. castel, f., r. castel and a. lovell (1982). the psychiatric society. columbia university press. conrad, p. (2007). the medicalization of society: on the transformation of human conditions into treatable disorders. the john hopkins university press. conrad, p., j. bandini, and a. vasquez (2016). ‘illness and the internet: from private to public experience’, health 20: 22-32. cvetkovich, a. (2012). depression: a public feeling. duke university press. epstein, s., and s. timmermans (2021). ‘from medicine to health: the proliferation and diversification of cultural authority’. journal of health and social behavior, 62(3), 240–254. fogg, b.j. (2002). persuasive technology: using computers to change what we think and do. morgan kaufmann publishers. gerbaudo, p. (2022). ‘from individual affectedness to collective identity: personal testimony campaigns on social media and the logic of collection’. new media & society, online first. gershon, i. (2011). ‘neoliberal agency’. current anthropology, 53(4): 537-555. gordon, c. (2013). dead on arrival: the politics of health care in twentieth-century america. princeton university press. harvey, d. (2005). a brief history of neoliberalism. oxford university press. hine, c. (2015). ethnography for the internet: embedded, embodied and everyday. bloomsbury. kitta, a. (2018). ‘alternative health websites and fake news: taking a stab at definition, genre, and belief’. journal of american folklore, 131(522): 405-412. illich, i. (1974). medical nemesis: the expropriation of health. pantheon. latour, b. (1996). ‘on actor-network theory: a few clarifications’. soziale welt, 47(4): 369-381. li, y., x. yan, q. li, g. xu, j. lu, w. yang (2023). ‘prevalence and trends in diagnosed adhd among us children and adolescents, 2017-2022. jama netw open, 2:6. machin, d. and a. mayr (2023). how to do critical discourse analysis: a multimodal introduction. sage publications ltd. parr, h. and j. davidson (2008). ‘‘virtual trust’: online emotional intimacies in mental health support’ in j. brownlie, a. greene, and a. howson (eds) researching trust and health. routledge, pp. 33–53. pink, s., h. horst, j. postill, l. hjorth, t. lewis and j. tacchi (2015). digital ethnography: principles and practice. sage publications inc. radin, p. (2006). ‘“to me, it’s my life”: medical communication, trust and activism in cyberspace”. social science and medicine, 62: 591-601. shifman, l. (2014). memes in digital culture. mit press. sismondo, s. (2018). ghost-managed medicine: big pharma’s invisible hands. mattering press. smith, m. (2012). hyperactive: the controversial history of adhd. reaktion. song, p., m. zha, q. yang, y. zhang, x. li, i. rudan. (2021). ‘the prevalence of adult attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder: a global systematic review and meta-analysis’. j global health, 11:11. starr, p. (1984). the social transformation of american medicine: the rise of a sovereign profession and the making of a vast industry. basic books. yeung, a., e. ng and e. abi-jaoude (2022). ‘tiktok and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a cross-sectional study of social media content quality’. the canadian journal of psychiatry. online first. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 berge, p. and schmalzer, m. (2024, october). “i took a deep breath and came out as gc”: excavating gender critical information literacy practices and anti-trans radicalization on ovarit and mumsnet. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “i took a deep breath and came out as gc”: excavating gender critical information literacy practices and antitrans radicalization on ovarit and mumsnet ps berge university of alberta madison schmalzer ringling college of art and design abstract in 2020, the subreddit r/gendercritical—one of the most active “gender critical” (gc) spaces on reddit—was banned by the platform for promoting hateful, transphobic conduct. following the closure of r/gendercritical (and subsequent banning of dozens of high-profile, transphobic subreddits including r/actualwomen, r/gendercriticalsociety, and r/truelesbians), gc users—especially those in north america and western europe—migrated to more hidden, invite-only spaces. these included discord servers as well as (much like alt-right alternative platforms parler and truth social) platforms run by gcs themselves: spinster.xyz, the short-lived giggle app, subforums on mumsnet, and ovarit—an invite-only forum which imitates reddit’s architecture launched by former moderators of r/gendercritical. while we might celebrate the closure of openly hateful communities on major social platforms, a crucial side-effect of the gc dispersal is that their activity has become (following patterns in reactionary political movements online more broadly) increasingly shrouded and insular. in this project, we provide an overview of the current landscape of gc activity on social media as it exists in the post-r/gendercritical era. we describe how users are “peaked” (the gc equivalent of “redpilled”) and pipelined from algorithmic media platforms into insular and extremist spaces such as ovarit, mumsnet, and discord. we then examine discourse within two popular gc forums, ovarit and mumsnet (specifically: mumsnet’s “feminism: sex & gender” board), to identify how these groups circulate disinformation, perform political mythmaking, and construct and reinscribe reactionary identities in the context of gc ideology and extremism. specifically, we utilize a mixed-methods suggested citation (apa): berge, p. and schmalzer, m. (2024, october). “i took a deep breath and came out as gc”: excavating gender critical information literacy practices and anti-trans radicalization on ovarit and mumsnet. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. approach and comparative platform analysis (burgess & matamoros-fernández, 2016; marwick & caplan, 2018) to explore the discourse of both platforms and understand how the social ecologies of the gc internet interact. by analyzing—through critical technoculture discourse analysis (brock, 2018)—over 80k posts and comments scraped from ovarit and mumsnet, we characterize rhetorical patterns and informational practices endemic to each platform. drawing from extant scholarship on gc and terf rhetoric (billard, 2023; vincent et al., 2020) and post-truth mis/disinformation (daniels, 2018; rieger et al., 2021; sawyer, 2018; tripodi, 2017), we explore how gcs collectively train one another to interact with trans people and media. we highlight several crucial findings: 1. gcs, seeking to invert the political landscape and center a narrative of selfvictimization, co-opt the language of queer communities. gcs regularly imitate the language of queer identity in their discussions of gc feminism. for example, gcs describe their experience “coming out” as gc to family, friends, and co-workers and reflect on decisions to remain “in the closet” for fear of being canceled. this is especially evident in discourse around “peaking”—a term used by gcs to describe a singular, dramatic “egg-cracking” moment at which they “discover” the fraudulence of gender ideology and “realize” they are gc. through this rhetoric, gcs seek to establish trans identity as a fabricated political ideology while simultaneously positioning gc feminism as a natural identity one comes into. 2. gc rhetoric regularly imitates the rhetorical practices of other extremist, far-right social movements. specifically, ovarit users seek to construct reactionary “victim ideologies” (boehme & isom scott, 2020) in which they experience righteous backlash from the “queercult” and its allies. much of ovarit’s discourse and architecture is oriented around frustration with “cancel culture” and silencing. the targets of gc aggression likewise extend beyond trans people and include “the media,” liberals, queer people more broadly, and sex workers—the latter of which are targeted for promoting the “pornsick” conditions under which “trans ideology” ostensibly proliferates. users’ emphasis on self-victimization, portraiture of queer people as an ideological cult, denigration of academics and journalists, and antipathy towards “wokeism” all represent gc user’s discursive proximity to far-right political movements. 3. gc spaces on ovarit are strongly linked to fandom and media literacy practices. users are not only encouraged to discuss hobbies and interests (gaming, shows, films, and books), but to engage in community critiques of media objects through the lens of gc feminism. we find that fandom is central both to recruiting new members (many of whom cite clashes with community moderators on other platforms as reasons for joining) and retention (as fans come to expect regular discussions of their favorite media). more importantly, these discussions serve pedagogical purposes by “training” gc community members in information literacy (what tripodi [2017] calls “scriptural inference”)—that is, gc members are taught and practice how to selectively analyze media (both entertainment and journalistic/political) through a gc lens. 4. gc users regularly perform transphobic mythmaking. central to the discourse on these platforms are dramatic tellings of encounters with trans people and “tras” (trans rights activists). a mundane run-in with a trans person at a grocery checkout, for example, is described by a gc user in imposing narration as an encounter with “one of them.” by examining such stories, we note that beyond exaggeration (if not utter fabrication), these stories are performative and pedagogical: trans people—as folkloric subjects—are culturally ossified through archetypal retellings. in this way, gc users are conditioned to narratively position trans people “in the wild” as monstrous and, in turn, retell such encounters to generate cultural capital through performance. in the conclusion of our project, we draw from cloud’s (2018) concept of rhetorical realism to situate the meaning-making practices of gcs on social media. cloud contends that fact-checking and other informational literacy efforts are ineffective when disinformation is accepted as common sense because it resonates with and reifies users’ epistemic “frames” for evaluating truth-claims. while gc communities regularly circulate pseudoscience and unverified anecdotes, we find that the proliferation of trans disinformation on these platforms is precipitated by broader practices of rhetorical performance and meaning-making—reinscribing the political positionalities of gcs as silenced, marginalized victims of the dangerous queercult. ultimately, we argue that technical deplatforming of gc communities is only one component of addressing antitrans extremism online. rather, in order to understand the cultural and epistemic conditions of anti-trans communities, activists and scholars must also explore and address how gc users are behaviorally conditioned towards extremism through information-literacy practices learned on gc forums. references billard, t. j. (2023). “gender-critical” discourse as disinformation: unpacking terf strategies of political communication. women’s studies in communication, 46(2), 235–243. https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2023.2193545 boehme, h. m., & isom scott, d. a. (2020). alt-white? a gendered look at “victim” ideology and the alt-right. victims & offenders, 15(2), 174–196. https://doi.org/10.1080/15564886.2019.1679308 brock, a. (2018). critical technocultural discourse analysis. new media & society, 20(3), 1012–1030. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816677532 burgess, j., & matamoros-fernández, a. (2016). mapping sociocultural controversies across digital media platforms: one week of #gamergate on twitter, youtube, and tumblr. communication research and practice, 2(1), 79–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2016.1155338 cloud, d. l. (2018). reality bites: rhetoric and the circulation of truth claims in u.s. political culture (1st edition). ohio state university press. daniels, j. (2018). the algorithmic rise of the “alt-right.” contexts, 17(1), 60–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/1536504218766547 marwick, a. e., & caplan, r. (2018). drinking male tears: language, the manosphere, and networked harassment. feminist media studies, 18(4), 543–559. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1450568 rieger, d., kümpel, a. s., wich, m., kiening, t., & groh, g. (2021). assessing the extent and types of hate speech in fringe communities: a case study of altright communities on 8chan, 4chan, and reddit. social media + society, 7(4), 20563051211052906. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211052906 sawyer, m. e. (2018). post-truth, social media, and the “real” as phantasm. in m. stenmark, s. fuller, & u. zackariasson (eds.), relativism and post-truth in contemporary society: possibilities and challenges (pp. 55–69). springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96559-8_4 tripodi, f. (2017). searching for alternative facts: analyzing scriptural inference in conservative news practices. data & society. report. https://datasociety.net/library/searching-for-alternative-facts/ vincent, b., erikainen, s., & pearce, r. (eds.). (2020). the sociological review monographs 68/4: terf wars: feminism and the fight for transgender futures (1st edition). sage publications ltd. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): zeng, n., xue chen, s. (2022, november). ‘gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss’: memeified femininities and disidentification in tiktok youth cultures. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ‘gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss’: memeified femininities and disidentification in tiktok youth cultures natasha zeng monash university shirley xue chen monash university introduction catchcries of empowerment and enterprise have been documented and critiqued by a range of scholars, and continue to be invoked within the postfeminist mainstream (negra 2014, winch 2013, adkins and dever 2016, banet-weiser 2015, dobson 2014). yet, on the social media platform tiktok, a number of alternative feminist trends have emerged. young users are increasingly disidentifying with, or even zealously rejecting, postfeminist ideals through the use of humour and irony. this emerging form of online feminist consciousness, however, intertwines with existing regimes of femininity and girlhood, producing a fraught environment within which establishing a young, feminine identity is particularly precarious. expanding on scholarship examining teenage girlhood on tiktok (kennedy 2020) and the ‘memeified’ politics of gen z (zeng and abidin 2021), we consider how young girls on tiktok have developed ‘remixed’ feminine identities by positioning figures such as the ‘girlboss’, the ‘pick me girl’ and ‘that girl’ as imagined others. introducing ‘girlboss’, ‘pick me girl’, and ‘that girl’ the term girlboss was popularised around 2014, following the publishing of pop-feminist memoirs such as #girlboss by sophia amoruso. while the term originally equated professional success with a type of feminist activism, ‘girlboss’ is utilised within tiktok cultures ironically, often to ridicule figures such as the infamous fraudster, elizabeth holmes. ‘pick me girl’ is a derogatory term referring to young women who are seen as conforming to misogynistic ideals and who seemingly base their worth on their proximity to patriarchal ideals. for example, girls who self-identify as ‘wifey material’ have been ridiculed as ‘pick me girls’. ironic depictions of ‘pick me girls’ on tiktok caricature these girls, often depicting them disingenuously attempting to solicit male attention. finally, unlike the previous two figures, ‘that girl’ is an idealised fantasy of girlhood that tends to be invoked sincerely. ‘that girl’ videos on tiktok depict idealised routines or lifestyle markers, representing an idealised ‘girl’ who is consistently engaged in practices of self-work. ‘that girl’ videos often show ‘healthy’ eating practices, early bedtime routines, meditation, journalling and other activities that are associated with self-care and productivity under neoliberalism. methodology we have selected and analysed 5 of the most viewed tiktoks within each of our 3 categories: ‘girlboss’, ‘pick me girl’, and ‘that girl’. though this project has the potential to be expanded beyond this initial sampling, we believe that these 15 videos present a strong representative sample from which key findings can be drawn. as virality is central to tiktok as a platform (hautea et al. 2021) and digital cultures are shaped around shared knowledge of particular media artefacts (nissenbaum and shifman 2017), examining the most viral tiktoks within these categories is central to setting the tone and establishing key trends within this emerging space. theoretical framework this paper draws on judith butler (1993) and jose esteban muñoz’ (1999) writing on the concept of disidentification as the theoretical basis of our examination. whilst butler and muñoz point to the transformative and democratic potentialities of disidentification, we re-tool this concept to critically examine feminine practices on tiktok, arguing that disidentification within feminine tiktok youth cultures is a paralysing practice that reentrenches structures of surveillance and judgement, relying on the formation of the other as an object with which the feminine self must be contrasted. we will show that disidentification is an affective practice (wetherell 2012) that is fundamentally intertwined with everyday affective realities of teenage girlhood online. throughout our analysis, we highlight a range of tensions and contradictions that are evoked within normative frames of youthful femininity. these include performing ‘wokeness’ (sobande 2019); compulsory irony (chateau 2020); navigating digital literacies (nissenbaum and shifman 2017); manufacturing relatability (kanai 2019) and compliance with hegemonic feminine norms. we argue that these tensions generate an environment where establishing a young, feminine identity is rendered particularly fraught. summary of findings ultimately, we find that through selectively engaging with online feminist literacies, the humorous and ironic depictions of the ‘girlboss’ and the ‘pick me girl’ produce an always-oppositional relational structure. this establishes a collective feminist politics that lacks positive identity markers; an identity predominantly based on disidentification with imagined mainstream others. finally, despite feminine identity on tiktok seemingly being contingent on the rejection of imagined others, ‘that girl’ remains a prominent aspirational ideal within tiktok cultures. in contrast to the ‘girlboss’ who establishes her value in public and civic domains and is therefore opened up to political critique, ‘that girl’ videos tend to depict private feminine routines. by framing these practices as being divorced from the social and hence depoliticised, we argue that ‘that girl’ becomes a figure towards which the youthful feminine self can safely aspire. yet, despite the sincere aspiration and idealism shown within ‘that girl’ videos, we argue that disidentification remains a potent framework here. indeed, ‘that girl’ as a concept discursively invokes the self as ‘this girl’. ‘that girl’ hence represents an ever-moving goal post, an unattainable figure with which the feminine self is, once again, defined in contrast to. we show how these three ‘girls’ produce different modes of feminine engagement that ultimately demonstrate the centrality of disidentification within youthful feminine practices, pointing to a fraught environment in which girls online are unable to comfortably inhabit a positively defined identity, and instead must simultaneously navigate conflicting practices of identification, disidentification, distancing and rejection. references adkins, l & dever, m, 2016, the post-fordist sexual contract: working and living in contingency, palgrave macmillan uk, london. banet-weiser, s, 2015, ‘“confidence you can carry!”: girls in crisis and the market for girls’ empowerment organizations’, continuum, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 182–193, doi: 10.1080/10304312.2015.1022938. chateau, l, 2020, ‘“damn i didn’t know y’all was sad? i thought it was just memes”: irony, memes and risk in internet depression culture’, m/c journal, vol. 23, no. 3, doi:10.5204/mcj.1654. dobson, as, 2014, ‘performative shamelessness on young women’s social network sites: shielding the self and resisting gender melancholia’, feminism & psychology, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 97–114, kanai, 2019, gender and relatability in digital culture: managing affect, intimacy and value, palgrave macmillan, cham. kennedy, m, 2020, ‘“if the rise of the tiktok dance and e-girl aesthetic has taught us anything, it’s that teenage girls rule the internet right now”: tiktok celebrity, girls and the coronavirus crisis’, european journal of cultural studies, vol. 23, no. 6, pp. 1069–1076. muñoz, je, 1999, disidentifications: queers of color and the performance of politics, university of minnesota press, minneapolis. negra, d, 2014, ‘claiming feminism: commentary, autobiography and advice literature for women in the recession’, journal of gender studies, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 275– 286. nissenbaum, a & shifman, l, 2017, ‘internet memes as contested cultural capital: the case of 4chan’s /b/ board’, new media & society, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 483–501. sobande, f, 2019, ‘woke-washing: “intersectional” femvertising and branding “woke” bravery’, european journal of marketing, vol. 54, no. 11, pp. 2723–2745. winch, a, 2013, girlfriends and postfeminist sisterhood, palgrave macmillan, houndmills, basingstoke, hampshire ; new york, ny. zeng, j & abidin, c, 2021, ‘“#okboomer, time to meet the zoomers”: studying the memefication of intergenerational politics on tiktok’, information, communication & society, vol. 24, no. 16, pp. 2459–2481. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): bystrytska, kateryna. (2024, october). “why does the air siren work?”: how telegram channels in ukraine use open-source data about military danger for constructing knowledge about the war. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “why does the air siren work?”: how telegram channels in ukraine use open-source data about military danger for constructing knowledge about the war kateryna bystrytska rutgers university introduction although many aspects of warfare have remained unchanged for centuries, the ways in which we acquire knowledge, construct understanding, and interpret traumatic events have been profoundly influenced by the advent of new technologies and the rapid proliferation of social media. this paper explores the role of such technologies, specifically telegram channels, in wartime by examining their use of open-source intelligence to construct and disseminate knowledge about the war in ukraine. by focusing on how these channels monitor and report drone and missile movements, the study investigates how they shape public understanding and alert civilians to war dangers. for a long time, conducting field research in conflict zones was considered almost impossible due to the high level of danger (baczko et al., 2021). today, however, we can observe the frontline on our phones through the “war feed” on social media (hoskins & shchelin, 2023). on one hand, war has become much closer to people worldwide due to the rise of new technologies. on the other hand, making sense of military actions and the vast amount of existing content has become increasingly complex. the details of military operations have become accessible to civilians through social media and digital technology, which “not simply offer new capabilities in conducting military operations but reconstitute the social conditions shaping people’s relationship to wars” (boichak, 2022). in this paper, i argue that new technologies and social media make information about military dangers more accessible to civilians, but the effect of this information on public perceptions of war remains largely unexplored. one common method to inform civilians about danger during war is the use of street air sirens. however, in many countries, phone apps now play the role of alarms by notifying people whenever the military detects an air threat (halevy, 2023). since 2022, civilians in ukraine have received information about potential dangers through phone apps— alerting them when their cities are targeted by drones and missiles. however, this information is limited; all the details about missile types and drone movements are provided by telegram channels. this paper examines the transformative role of telegram channels in shaping public understanding and responses to drone attacks in ukraine, emphasizing their contribution to digital warfare and participatory knowledge creation. using open-source intelligence (osint) and data from official military sources, these channels provide realtime updates on drone movements, combining detailed visualizations, emotional language, and user engagement to mediate complex military information for civilians. grounded in the framework of "vertical observation" (parks, 2018), the study explores how these platforms use interactive maps and infographics to enhance civilian awareness and safety, fostering trust and participation in wartime communication. by adapting from general alerts to precise and actionable intelligence, telegram channels facilitate immediate responses to threats and redefine public engagement with war through a participatory, media-centric approach. this research argues that such channels have become indispensable in contemporary warfare, blending military data with accessible narratives that transform the way civilians perceive and interact with the realities of conflict. method this study employs digital ethnographic observation (airoldi, 2018) and analysis of ten popular ukrainian telegram channels that monitor air dangers in real-time. the sampling strategy involved a critical approach, selecting channels with diverse communication styles, including official sources, osint investigators, and personalized platforms. channels were identified through a snowball method, ensuring a variety of monitoring approaches. data collection included scraping messages, videos, and images using the telegram api and the python library telethon. participatory digital observation focused on observing language, visualizations, and patterns of interaction, incorporating the framework of "vertical observation" to assess how these channels mediate complex information and facilitate civilian safety. this mixed-method approach allowed for an in-depth exploration of the interplay between technological affordances and participatory warfare on telegram. results the analysis demonstrates that telegram channels use detailed infographics and interactive maps, enhancing civilian understanding of threats and enabling timely responses. the participatory nature of this activity fosters a sense of community and shared responsibility while also highlighting the critical role of social media in modern warfare. the research underscores the evolution of these channels from basic information providers to sophisticated mediators of military data, using emotional language, visual aids, and even humor to engage users. this not only builds trust but also enhances the accessibility of complex military information. these channels often employ unconventional language, emojis, and personalized framing, creating a relatable yet effective communication strategy. over time, they have moved from providing general alerts to offering precise and actionable intelligence, illustrating the rapid adaptation of social media tools in a war environment. the findings highlight the dual nature of these platforms: while they significantly enhance civilian awareness and safety, they also raise concerns about misinformation and the need for regulation to ensure accuracy and reliability. this study calls for further exploration of the ethical and operational challenges of using osint in public communication and emphasizes the potential of such channels to redefine civilian engagement in contemporary conflict. the participatory model observed here not only reshapes public understanding of warfare but also sets a precedent for the integration of social media in global conflict zones. conclusion the evolving nature of modern warfare brings with it new methods for understanding and responding to conflicts on the ground. with the overwhelming amount of information circulating in war zones, individuals need guidance to filter irrelevant data and use pertinent information for their safety. during the initial days of russia’s invasion of ukraine, street alerts and phone apps were the most reliable sources of danger warnings. alerts were triggered by even a slight risk to the city, prompting individuals to seek shelter. as daily attacks became a reality, people began filtering the types of alarms they received and based their actions on specific, localized information. over time, phone apps evolved to alert users to drone and missile movements, while telegram channels established a vast network for monitoring threats. for millions of ukrainians, these channels became the primary source of real-time information. the concept of visualizing drone and missile attacks, grounded in "vertical observation," has evolved alongside advancements in technology and social media. during some attacks, channels have shared over 300 messages tracking the movement of drones, missiles, and planes across ukraine. these updates are structured to make it easy for individuals to follow regional threats, highlighting the critical role social media plays in civilian safety during wartime. however, important questions remain. how can misinformation and disinformation be identified and mitigated within these channels? while the primary goal of these telegram channels is to inform people about threats, they occasionally share political news, expert opinions on the frontlines, and other unrelated information. to ensure continued trust and effectiveness, it is crucial to develop tools that can detect and address misinformation within these highly trusted channels. this area presents a key opportunity for further research and development. references airoldi, m. (2018). ethnography and the digital fields of social media. international journal of social research methodology, 21, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2018.1465622 baczko, a., dorronsoro, g., & quesnay, a. (2021). the epistemological privilege of fieldwork: a collective investigation in war-torn syria. bulletin of sociological methodology/bulletin de méthodologie sociologique, 151(1), 96–116. https://doi.org/10.1177/0759106321995723 boichak, o. (2022). digital war: mediatized conflicts in sociological perspective. in d. a. rohlinger & s. sobieraj (eds.), the oxford handbook of digital media sociology (pp. 517-527). oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197510636.013.31 halevy, d. (2024). fragmented emergency: sirens, cellphones, and sonic spatialization in israel. journal of urban history, 50(1), 78–97. https://doi.org/10.1177/00961442231164180 hoskins, a., & shchelin, p. (2023). the war feed: digital war in plain sight. american behavioral scientist, 67(3), 449–463. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642221144848 parks, l. (2018). rethinking media coverage: vertical mediation and the war on terror. taylor & francis group. https://www.routledge.com/rethinking-mediacoverage-vertical-mediation-and-the-war-onterror/parks/p/book/9780415999823 https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2018.1465622 https://doi.org/10.1177/0759106321995723 https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197510636.013.31 https://doi.org/10.1177/00961442231164180 https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642221144848 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): lott, k. (2024, october). the professionalisation of networked and refracted misogyny among estonian manfluencers on tiktok. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the professionalisation of networked and refracted misogyny among estonian manfluencers on tiktok kaarel lott university of tartu introduction as media devices and media services are increasingly omnipresent (paus-hasebrink, kulterer & sinner, 2019), nearly all walks of life have to accommodate the “influencer creep” (bishop, 2023) – self-branding, optimisation, and performance of authenticity – if they want to benefit from attention economy (goldhaber, 1997; hendricks & vestergaard, 2019). in recent years, manfluencers as a specific type of influencers has notoriously popularised. manfluencers are content creators who ‘weaponise highly performative and extremist notions of masculinity’ while promoting sexist ideas about women (wescott, roberts & zhao, 2024, pp. 167-168). while popular and networked misogyny (banet-weiser & miltner, 2016) and various parts of the manosphere, together with related conceptualisations have been well studied, manfluencers as such have received relatively little academic attention. this mixed-method, dominantly ethnographic study will focus on manfluencers in estonia, exploring the strategic circulation of their misogynist content in networked publics (boyd, 2010) on social media. by viewing professionalisation as a sociological process, this study analyses how these aspirational influencers cultivate and internalise various values, norms, symbols, slang, ideologies, etc (greenwood, 1966; trice, 1993), along with how they monetise their social media presence and how these communities keep registering ‘under the radar’ (abidin, 2021). background and theoretical framework over the last few years, former kickboxer andrew tate has gained immense global popularity on social media. despite facing charges related to rape, human trafficking, and organised crime, tate has amassed a large following, particularly for promoting misogynistic views and advocating male supremacy and violence against women (das, 2022). the issue is severe, as school teachers have reported a concerning rise in misogynist discourse among young boys who have been engaging with tate’s online content (weale, 2023; will, 2023). although he has now been deplatformed from all mainstream social media platforms, tate seems to be an indicator of a whole genre of manfluencers all over the world, including the context of this research, estonia. in terms of gender equality and stereotypes, estonia is at the very bottom group of eu countries, ranking 22nd in the eu on the gender equality index (european…, 2023). to name a few notable factors for the indirect context of this study: the gender pay gap is around 15% (eesti statistika, 2021); gender equality and feminism are still largely perceived as tools and principles which work mainly in favour of women; and rigid gender stereotypes persist, especially in older generations’ perceptions and beliefs (marling, 2017). a recent study among estonian 15-year-olds found that boys’ and girls’ attitudes are moving rapidly in opposite directions, creating a gaping divide in values and attitudes towards gender roles and equality (ümarik et al., 2022). in simplest terms, whilst estonian girls share liberal and progressive views, estonian boys align with traditional value worlds with echoes of mindsets from soviet occupation times (saar, 2023). networked misogyny seems to utilise both the advantages of networked as well as refracted publics in its operations. some manfluencers seek the viral spread that networked publics facilitate. persistence guarantees that content is difficult to delete; searchability ensures that content is easily found; replicability allows for the copying of information and lastly, scalability enables the viral spread of misogynist content (boyd, 2010). other manfluencers and communities utilise refracted publics, preferring to hide in plain sight – a possibility often sought after by communities engaging in subversive, risky and hidden practices on social media (abidin, 2021). here, transcience ensures the possibility of creating ephemeral content; discoverability supports content to be ‘stumbled upon’; decodability allows for content to be incomprehensible without context; and silosociality enables to show content only to those in a particular community (abidin, 2021). this study will focus on content among both networked and refracted publics by using a mixed-method approach. methods and data first, digital ethnography (pink et al., 2016; markham, 2017) is conducted to deeply immerse the researcher in misogynist content on various social media platforms. the ethnographic approach has several advantages in the context of this study. firstly, the method is dynamic – the use of participant observation, multiple modes of capturing data of interesting content (videos, screenshots, etc) and personal reflections supports a deeper understanding of the discursive field (markham, 2017). secondly, the method is suitable for studying social groups that are otherwise hard to access (buscatto, 2018) and groups expressing hate against other social groups are known to often use different ways of hiding and staying under the radar (bhat & klein, 2020). the ethnographic stage has two objectives. firstly, as many manfluencers are active on tiktok, ethnography enables to fill the aim of exploring how the platform’s algorithm circulates misogynist content to the user. here, the study draws on seaver’s (2017) call for studying algorithms as culture, not just code or formulae, by analysing the everyday practices that constitute, sustain and change algorithms by utilising ethnographic methods. secondly, the ethnographic approach is used to analyse how the professionalisation and monetisation of misogyny is occurring on various platforms. the second method employed in this study is a combination of qualitative content analysis (braun & clarke, 2006) and socio-semiotic visual analysis (kress & van leeuwen, 2020) to study the textual and visual methods of social steganography (boyd & marwick, 2011). this includes dog whistling, where a layer of meaning is added that only the target audience understands and adopting ‘parallel literacies,’ where different meanings are created for the target audiences (abidin, 2021). the objective of this stage is to explore how these methods are utilised by manfluencers as well as their followers. data collection and analysis is conducted from january to june 2024. preliminary results a very preliminary peek into the results shows that in the process of professionalisation, ideologies of masculinities are created, each of which emphasises different aspects. so far, ideologies regarding financial, spiritual, sexual, relationship and physique-related success have been distinguished. in order to register below the radar, users signify the existence of an in-group by creating ‘misogynesque’ content – a certain coded style of content for the community – by using coded musical background, a tone/way of speaking or visuals in their content, emojis that carry several layers of meanings, etc. different forms of capital (e.g. economic, symbolic, social, technical, celebrity, attention capital – (abidin, 2018; brooks et al., 2021; mears, 2023)) flow on social media and monetisation usually happens in the form of webinars, training plans, books, paid content, etc. the results of this study are crucial for understanding the circulation of misogynistic content together with the dynamics between influencers and their audiences. within the context of this year’s conference theme, we can view professionalised misogyny as an important phenomenon related to the influencer industry. by gaining insight into how these potential networks operate, the study contributes to understanding the professionalisation of networked misogyny. without such understanding, we would be caught in an endless game of whac-a-mole, where the sanctioning of one manfluencer is swiftly followed by the emergence of another using similar discourse. references abidin, c. (2018). internet celebrity: understanding fame online. emerald publishing. abidin, c. (2021). from “networked publics” to “refracted publics”: a companion framework for researching “below the radar” studies. social media+ society, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1177%2f2056305120984458 banet-weiser, s. & miltner, k. m. (2016). #masculinitysofragile: culture, structure, and networked misogyny. feminist media studies, 16(1), 171-174. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1120490 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f2056305120984458 https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1120490 bhat, p. & klein, o. (2020). covert hate speech: white nationalists and dog whistle communication on twitter. in g. bouvier & j. e. rosenbaum (eds.), twitter, the public sphere, and the chaos of online deliberation (pp. 151-172). palgrave macmillan. bishop, s. (2023). influencer creep: how artists strategically navigate the platformisation of art worlds. new media & society, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231206090 boyd, d., & marwick, a. (2011). social steganography: privacy in networked publics. international communication association. boston, ma. http://www.danah.org/papers/2011/steganography-icaversion.pdf boyd d. (2010). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in z. papacharissi (ed.), networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 39–58). taylor & francis. braun, v. & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa brooks, g., drenten, j. & piskorski, m. (2021). influencer celebrification: how social media influencers acquire celebrity capital. journal of advertising, 50(5), 528-547. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2021.1977737 buscatto, m. (2018). doing ethnography: ways and reasons. in u. flick (ed.), the sage handbook of qualitative data collection (pp. 326–343). sage. das, s. (2022, august 6). inside the violent, misogynistic world of tiktok’s new star, andrew tate. the observer. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/06/andrew-tate-violent-misogynisticworld-of-tiktok-new-star eesti statistika (2021). sooline palgalõhe vähenes aastaga taas. https://www.stat.ee/et/uudised/sooline-palgalohe-2020 european institute for gender equality (2023). gender equality index 2023. towards a green transition in transport and energy. publications office of the european union. https://eige.europa.eu/publications-resources/publications/gender-equality-index-2023towards-green-transition-transport-and-energy goldhaber, m. h. (1997). the attention economy and the net. first monday, 2(4). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v2i4.519 greenwood, e. (1966). the elements of professionalization. in h. m. vollmer & d. l. mills (eds.), professionalization (pp. 9-18). prentice hall. hendricks, v. f. & vestergaard, m. (2019). reality lost: markets of attention, misinformation and manipulation. springer. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231206090 http://www.danah.org/papers/2011/steganography-icaversion.pdf https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2021.1977737 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/06/andrew-tate-violent-misogynistic-world-of-tiktok-new-star https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/06/andrew-tate-violent-misogynistic-world-of-tiktok-new-star https://www.stat.ee/et/uudised/sooline-palgalohe-2020 https://eige.europa.eu/publications-resources/publications/gender-equality-index-2023-towards-green-transition-transport-and-energy https://eige.europa.eu/publications-resources/publications/gender-equality-index-2023-towards-green-transition-transport-and-energy https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v2i4.519 kress, g., & van leeuwen, t. (2020). reading images: the grammar of visual design. routledge. markham, a. (2017). ethnography in the digital internet era: from fields to flows, descriptions to interventions. in n. k. denzin, y. s. lincoln (eds.), the sage handbook of qualitative research (5th ed., pp. 650–668). sage. marling, r. (2017). gender equality in estonia. in a. örtenblad, r. marling & s. vasiljević (eds.), gender equality in a global perspective (pp. 246-260). routledge. mears, a. (2023). bringing bourdieu to a content farm: social media production fields and the cultural economy of attention. social media + society, 9(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231193027 paus-hasebrink, i., kulterer j. & sinner, p. (2019). social inequality, childhood and the media. palgrave macmillan. pink, s., horst, h., postill, j., hjorth, l., lewis, t. & tacchi, j. (2016). digital ethnography. principles and practice. sage. saar, s. (2023, december 20). uuring: veerand poistest peab naiste poliitikas osalemist sobimatuks. err. https://novaator.err.ee/1609200433/uuring-veerand-poistest-peabnaiste-poliitikas-osalemist-sobimatuks seaver, n. (2017). algorithms as culture: some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems. big data & society, 4(2), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717738104 trice, h. m. (1993). occupational subcultures in the workplace. ilrpress. ümarik, m., tinn, m., idnurm, t., kaarlõp, h.-l., dibou, t., mäe, k., henno, i., lauri, t. & põder, k. (2022). noorte hääl demokraatia kriisis: kodanikuhariduse väljakutsed. https://www.hm.ee/sites/default/files/documents/202311/iccs%202022%20eesti%20raport%2028.11.pdf weale, s. (2023, february 2). ‘we see misogyny every day’: how andrew tate’s twisted ideology infiltrated british schools. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/feb/02/andrew-tate-twisted-ideologyinfiltrated-british-schools wescott, s., roberts, s. & zhao, x. (2024). the problem of anti-feminist ‘manfluencer’ andrew tate in australian schools: women teachers’ experiences of resurgent male supremacy. gender and education, 36(2), 167-182. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2023.2292622 will, m. (2023, february 2). misogynist influencer andrew tate has captured boys’ attention. what teachers need to know. education week. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231193027 https://novaator.err.ee/1609200433/uuring-veerand-poistest-peab-naiste-poliitikas-osalemist-sobimatuks https://novaator.err.ee/1609200433/uuring-veerand-poistest-peab-naiste-poliitikas-osalemist-sobimatuks https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717738104 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/feb/02/andrew-tate-twisted-ideology-infiltrated-british-schools https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/feb/02/andrew-tate-twisted-ideology-infiltrated-british-schools https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2023.2292622 https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2023.2292622 https://www.edweek.org/leadership/misogynist-influencer-andrew-tate-has-capturedboys-attention-what-teachers-need-to-know/2023/02 https://www.edweek.org/leadership/misogynist-influencer-andrew-tate-has-captured-boys-attention-what-teachers-need-to-know/2023/02 https://www.edweek.org/leadership/misogynist-influencer-andrew-tate-has-captured-boys-attention-what-teachers-need-to-know/2023/02 aoir2024-submission asmolov logunova selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): asmolov, g., & logunova, o. (2024, october). the unfriending performance: the logic of disconnective action in crises presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the unfriending perfromance: the logic of disconnective action in crises gregory asmolov king’s college london olga logunova king’s college london introduction: a broad literature addresses the role of crises as times of increasing connectivity and triggers for manifestations of "connective action" (bennett & segerberg, 2012), where digital media serve as organizing agents. however, crisis situations can also be seen as times for escalation of disconnectivity, relying on affordances that facilitate severing of social ties (e.g., unfriending, unfollowing, or banning). therefore, alongside the logic of connective action, there is a need to explore the logic of disconnective action as a process of social untying where digital media serve as disorganizing agents. this analysis should be seen in the context of the rise of disconnective power (light & cassidy, 2014), as the capacity of hegemonic actors to rely on disconnective affordances to advance their political goals through the facilitation of fragmentation. in this light, an analysis of the logic of disconnective action aims to understand the role of social media in crises within the context of the tension between connectivity and disconnectivity. conceptual framework: crisis situations can be considered explosions of hidden social heterogeneity, where people discover unknown opinions of their "friends" about specific situations (schwarz & shani, 2016, p. 416). increasing attention has been given to the phenomenon of disconnectivity in the context of conflicts (john & dvir-gvirsman, 2015; john & gal, 2018). however, there is a challenge in exploring disconnection since disconnective action is often hidden by social networking platforms (john & nissenbaum, 2019). therefore, research on unfriending has mainly relied on data collection through interviews and surveys of users, allowing analysis of the motivations behind unfriending decisions. a phenomenon neglected as an object of investigation has been the public announcement of cases of unfriending. conceptualizing disconnection as an online "speech act" (austin, 1962) that exercises "sovereignty over one’s personal public sphere" (john & gal, 2018, p. 2971) and as a performative act (butler, 1990) that sets social boundaries in crises offers an opportunity for a quantitative turn in exploring disconnection. this research is focused on a disconnective act as a performative act that both offers and implements a structure of social categorization based on an attitude/position toward the crisis. disconnective acts include online posts that engage publicly with disconnective practices. the performance of disconnection can be considered as a performative boundary-management practice, while crisis offers a stage for disconnective action. the analysis of disconnective performance allows to explore how disconnective power operates. the research seeks to identify the dominant forms, functions and drivers of disconnective action in a context of crisis. methods to consider the role of disconnective power in authoritarian environments, the data collection focused on public posts addressing unfriending practices gathered in the russian-speaking segment of facebook. the russia internet presented a methodological opportunity to explore disconnection in networks with a high level of political heterogeneity related to several factors including the political transformation of russia toward increasingly authoritarian state and a war, where a significant number of users from both sides of the conflict speak the same language and use the same platforms. relying on social media listening methodology (reid & duffy, 2018) the data collection focused on mentions with disconnectivity wording from facebook public posts for the given period. the data collection relied on two phases: 1. attitudes towards covid-19 pandemic and vaccination 2. disconnection following russian full-scale invasion of ukraine the first phase of this project identified variables that assist in detecting disconnective waves during crises. it also allowed to identify viral disconnective effect when a chain of disconnective acts triggered by one post and discuss the role of disconnective leaders that play a role in shaping the logic of disconnection a strategic behaviour. this phase also allowed to identify the resources of online heterogeneity including classmates, neighbors, acquaintance from dating apps and family members. the second phase illustrated the framework's value based on the analysis of 78,512 public posts collected from facebook starting from the russian invasion of ukraine in february 2022. the analysis detected several waves of disconnection after the russian invasion of ukraine in february 2022, related to the start of military aggression, the celebration of victory day in wwii, and the large-scale military mobilization of russian citizens in autumn 2022. the celebration of victory day in wwii was chosen as the empirical case that allows to identify the logics of publicized disconnective acts. empirical case: scholars highlight the dialectical nature of memory as a continuous conflict about the history between “a spectrum of official and other narratives” that takes place in the public sphere (blacker et al., 2013). an escalating clash between competing memory narratives is observed in the context of the russia-ukraine war (bernstein, 2016; gauffman, 2015; makhortykh, 2017; zavadski and toepfl, 2019). scholars highlight how the past becomes a resource for propaganda, using historical events to introduce interpretative frameworks for describing current events. with the connective turn (hoskins, 2011), the contest between history-related narratives increasingly rely on digital mediation (fridman, 2022). to delve into the nature of the disconnective turn, this explores disconnection related to the celebration of may 9th (victory day in russia). drawing on data collected from russian-speaking facebook during the first two weeks of may 2021, 2022 and 2023, the analysis identifies a dataset of posts that present a performative case of disconnection within the context of the victory day. the disconnection takes place in the context of the contest between hegemonic vs. critical narratives of memory namely unfriending due to someone’s refusal to celebrate may 9th and unfriending due to celebration of may 9th. the victory day is seen as an opportunity to "clean" the feed", while others report numerous unfriending instances. in addition the analysis identifies a set of symbolic triggers of unfriending including flags and george’s ribbon (the russian symbol of celebration) on personal profile photos. the analysis identifies several logics of disconnective acts that constitute the repertoire of disconnective action : • “unfriended”: a public announcement of a specific case of unfriending as a sanction for a specific opinion • an “unfriending warning” that anyone supporting a specific opinion will be unfriended • “unfriend me”: a call to action from any friends supporting a particular opinion/person • “you may unfriend me”: recognizing that a statement about controversial issue may lead to unfriending by others the data also indicates how disconnection is linked to digital vigilantism as a form of participatory regulation and surveillance (loveluck, 2019). a call to action to unfriend someone due to celebrating/ignoring the victory day can be seen as a manifestation of the disconnective surveillance. conclusion digitalization is often associated with reconfigurations of global politics, emphasizing the increasing role of networks (castells, 1996) and networked individuals (rosenau, 2007). yet, these technologies also enable a reversal of global political transformations. autocratic regimes leverage digital mechanisms to advance fragmentation in their quest to preserve political legitimacy. the rise of disconnective politics relies on disconnective affordance as a major element in the technology of power. the new forms of digital authoritarianism harness the affordances of disconnection to transform network society into disconnective society that relies on the application of disconnective power. that is the power of disintegration and untying in different spheres of lives, starting from economic relationships and ending with personal interactions. the discussion of how memory operates by leveraging the affordance of disconnection allows to examine the manifestation of disconnective power in the context of "memory wars". the disconnective memory plays a substantial role in shaping individual and collective identities by offering new forms of categorization and shaping social boundaries in conflicts. the disconnective turn can be seen in the context of the increasing capacity of the institutional actor to rely on digital affordance to achieve their political interests through interreference within horizontal structures and restructuring the relationships between individual users. references austin, j. l. (1962). how to do things with words (2nd ed., j. o. urmson & m. sbisá, eds.). harvard university press. bennett, w. l., & segerberg, a. (2012). the logic of connective action. information, communication & society, 15(5), 739-768. butler, j. (1990). gender trouble. routledge classics. bernstein, s. (2016). remembering war, remaining soviet: digital commemoration of world war ii in putin’s russia. memory studies, 9(4), 422-436. blacker, u., etkind, a., & fedor, j. (2013). memory and theory in eastern europe. palgrave macmillan. castells, m. (1996). the rise of the network society (vol. i). blackwell. fridman, o. (2022). memory activism and digital practices after conflict. amsterdam university press. gaufman, e. (2015). world war ii 2.0: digital memory of fascism in russia in the aftermath of euromaidan in ukraine. journal of regional security, 10(1), 17-35. hoskins, a. (2011). media, memory, metaphor: remembering and the connective turn. parallax, 17(4), 19-31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2011.605573 john, n. a., & dvir-gvirsman, s. (2015). ‘i don’t like you any more’: facebook unfriending by israelis during the israel-gaza conflict of 2014. journal of communication, 65(6), 953-974. john, n. a., & gal, n. (2018). “he’s got his own sea”: political facebook unfriending in the personal public sphere. international journal of communication, 12, 2971– 2988. john, n. a., & nissenbaum, a. (2019). an agnotological analysis of apis: or, disconnectivity and the ideological limits of our knowledge of social media. the information society, 35(1), 1-12. doi: 10.1080/01972243.2018.1542647 light b & cassidy e (2014). strategies for the suspension and prevention of connection: rendering disconnection as socioeconomic lubricant with facebook. new media & society 16(7): 1169–1184. loveluck, b. (2020). the many shades of digital vigilantism. a typology of online selfjustice. global crime, 21(3-4), 213-241. doi: 10.1080/17440572.2019.1614444 makhortykh, m. (2017). remediating the past: youtube and second world war memory in ukraine and russia. memory, 1, 1-16. reid, e., & duffy, k. (2018). a netnographic sensibility: developing the netnographic/social listening boundaries. journal of marketing management, 34(3-4), 263-286. doi: 10.1080/0267257x.2018.1450282 rosenau. (2007). people count!: networked individuals in global politics. routledge. zavadski, a., & toepfl, f. (2019). querying the internet as a mnemonic practice: how search engines mediate four types of past events in russia. media, culture & society, 41(1), 21-37. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): casteel, d., leiser ransom, s., papacharissi, z. (2023, october). “are we dating the same guy?”: collective sensemaking as a moral responsibility in facebook groups. presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “are we dating the same guy?”: collective sensemaking as a moral responsibility in facebook groups diana casteel university of illinois at chicago sarah leiser ransom university of illinois at chicago zizi papacharissi university of illinois at chicago introduction online dating apps are a multi-billion-dollar industry in the united states and are responsible for a quarter of young adult relationships (pew research center, 2023). for many people, hinge to happily ever after is plagued by offline risks of violence, as dating apps place the burden of managing those risks on users (gillett, 2021). despite following conventional wisdom to meet in public or location share, women, women of color, and the lgbtq community remain particularly vulnerable, and lack tools to better ascertain risk. even if apps did verify that users do not have a record for domestic violence or stalking, the impact would be limited as many of the “red flag behaviors” are not illegal or are difficult to prove in court. facebook groups afford controllable visibility and searchability, making them an advantageous platform for groups or social movements to build an archive of knowledge. “are we dating the same guy” facebook groups leverage the affordances of icts to manage the ambiguities of dating, crowdsource information on men, and provide social support to other women experiencing the tribulations of modern dating. using discourse analysis, this study analyzes the collective sensemaking practices of awdtsg groups oriented at constructing knowledge, managing privacy boundaries, content moderation, and providing social support. background/theoretical framework the first awdtsg group emerged in new york city in march 2022 with strict rules for participation. the group served as a template for analogous regional groups. although the title implies a focus on cheating, the group was created with the mission to warn women against abusive men and create a supportive community. these counterpublics defy misogynist cultural logics of competition and misandry. lacking empirical frameworks that typically undergird online knowledge communities, awdtsg construct alternative ways of knowing through collective sensemaking that privilege interpretive, collaborative, and experiential knowledge claims, driven by plausibility rather than accuracy (weick, 1995; 2007). knowledge is constructed through patterns of interaction (berger & luckmann, 1967) with members and the platform itself. we argue that platforms function as a third party in the creation of knowledge through acts of moderation, real or anticipated. the anticipation of top-down moderation acts imposed by the platform itself is viewed as an ever-present threat to the community archive. through the enforcement of group rules, the community collectively negotiates the tensions of privacy breaches and the perceived moral responsibility of protecting women from potential harms. providing and seeking social support in awdtsg groups are an integral part of the broader practice of collective sensemaking. rather than seeking to obtain epistemic authority, knowing is valued as a way to provide social support to fulfill the obligation of reciprocity to protect the community. knowledge seeking can be seen as a ritual through which individuals may claim membership in the community. (schaefer & dervin, 2011). this paper argues that similar to organizational gossip, interactions in the group create knowledge through reflexive and relational communication (bishop, 2019; waddington, 2012). gossip, or the sharing of women’s personal experiences, is central to developing a shared culture and creating alternative knowledge that helps women avoid isolation within a patriarchal society. through isolation, acts of violence and abuse perpetrated against women are transformed into individual instances rather than a systemic issue. in this cultural milieu, women are responsible for not becoming victims, transforming victimhood into a moral failure rather than an action inflicted upon them. as shown by awdtsg, the affordances of icts may be harnessed in the service of building a counterpublic in order to claim agency through knowledge production and maintenance. through the sharing of knowledge, group members claim co-ownership of the archive, requiring the co-creation of privacy rules to maintain boundaries and resist acts of moderation. this research seeks to understand: how is collective making used to generate knowledge in awdtsg? how are these processes shaped by privacy concerns, anticipated acts of moderation, and the desire to build affective support networks? method using qualitative inquiry, we began analyzing an awdtsg facebook group in a practice akin to the ethnographic concept of “deep hanging out” (geertz, 1998). while this mode of inquiry is less systematic, researchers employed this approach in order to silently observe and familiarize themselves with the norms and practices of the group (marwick & partin, 2022). four months of sustained silent engagement through deep hanging out informed our approach to discourse analysis. multilevel discourse analysis enabled us to examine sensemaking practices at the interpersonal and organizational levels and their implications for more macro-level interactions (malvini redden & way, 2019). we manually collected a sample of posts ranging from the group's start date in may of 2022 to august of 2023. we collected all posts from the group founder and administrator, group moderators, and a sample from group members. from the sustained deep hanging out, four themes emerged that informed our data collection for the discourse analysis: seeking information on a specific person, warning group members, seeking advice, and offering general advice. a corpus of one hundred posts were systematically collected, with twenty-five posts per category. in order to be selected posts had to have a minimum of twenty comments. because we were interested in how knowledge was constructed through group member interaction, we only included posts that demonstrated active engagement within the comments. we excluded posts irrelevant to dating, such as a post about someone’s pet. findings our analysis revealed that the awdtsg community engages in collective sensemaking in order to manage ambiguities within online dating. in doing so, their shared narratives coalesce to form an archive of alternative knowledge. knowledge claims are legitimated through discursive rituals that privilege embodied forms of knowledge, social support, and fulfilling moral obligations such as disclosure reciprocity. we present three major findings. first, the platform simultaneously serves as a tool for claiming power, and a constant threat toward the continuation of the group. while facebook groups enable this counterpublic to emerge and control visibility, it mandates certain discursive rules be followed, influencing how knowledge claims are made and legitimized. second, group level moderation enacted by admins is viewed as an act of community protection against platform interventions. however, we found evidence that the original group founders use the opaqueness of moderation to manipulate and deceive members. third, social support is an integral part of knowledge creation, resisting cultural logics that socialize women to see each other as competitors in the dating sphere. however, the benefits of this support and archive are threatened by the administrators that appear to be orchestrating hundreds of groups as a grift to crowdfund from members. any challenges to moderator authority result in a ban from the community and potentially harm women in vulnerable situations. our findings point to the ways in which icts may be used to reclaim gossip as a mode of resistance through the act of collective sensemaking. group members of this sensemaking community resist misogynist cultural logics, but their ability to meaningfully engage is stymied by the manipulative moderation acts imposed by admins. references berger, p, luckmann, t. (1967). the social construction of reality: a treatise in the sociology of knowledge. new york: anchor books. bishop, s. (2019). managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip. new media & society, 21(11-12), 2589–2606. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819854731 burleson, b. r. (2009). understanding the outcomes of supportive communication: a dual-process approach. journal of social and personal relationships, 26(1), 21-38. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407509105519 gillett r. (2021). this is not a nice safe space: investigating women’s safety work on tinder. feminist media studies. 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2021.1948884 malvini redden, s., & way, a. k. (2019). how social media discourses organize communication online: a multi-level discursive analysis of tensions and contradictions in teens’ online experiences. communication quarterly, 67(5), 477–505. https://doi.org/10.1080/01463373.2019.1668440 marwick, a. e., & partin, w. c. (2022). constructing alternative facts: populist expertise and the qanon conspiracy. new media & society, 146144482210902–. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221090201 pew research center (2023) key findings about online dating in the us. available at: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2023/02/02/key-findings-about-online-dating-inthe-u-s/ schaefer, d. j., & dervin, b. (2011). online learning in discussion groups: a sensemaking approach1. in user-driven healthcare and narrative medicine: utilizing collaborative social networks and technologies (pp. 276-293). igi global. waddington, k. (2012). gossip and organizations. routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203111789 weick, k. e. (1995). sensemaking in organizations. sage publications. weick k, sutcliffe k, obstfeld d (2005) organizing and the process of sensemaking. organization science 16: 409–421. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819854731 https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2021.1948884 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221090201 https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2023/02/02/key-findings-about-online-dating-in-the-u-s/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2023/02/02/key-findings-about-online-dating-in-the-u-s/ selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): zhu, g., chand, k., angus, d., graham, t. (2023, october). memes, multimodalities, and machines: assembling multimodal patterns in meme classification study. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. memes, multimodalities, and machines: assembling multimodal patterns in meme classification study guangnan zhu queensland university of technology kunal chand queensland university of technology daniel angus queensland university of technology timothy graham queensland university of technology abstract memes are an important facet of current online communication on social media, with rich social, political, and cultural significance and power. this present work focuses on developing computational frameworks to support textual and visual content analysis of online memes, assisting the profiling of the unique contents and interrelationships of different meme characteristics. the framework focuses on decomposing the multimodal subcomponents of online memes to support accurate sorting and classification of meme exploitable and other rich textual materials. we showcase the development of the multimodal meme classification toolbox through a series of case studies of specific meme subcultures, with a view towards bolstering and extending existing meme analysis methods for cultural and media studies. introduction multimodality is “the normal state of human communication” in contemporary communication (bateman, 2014; kress & van leeuwen, 2020) and particularly in online social media (kiela et al., 2018). one of the most interesting and prevalent multimodal information forms online is visual memes such as image macros, which are media objects made up of photos and superimposed texts, symbols and other exploitables. memes are popular within everyday online discourse as they allow users to encode sentiments and opinions in an engaging format, which attract people’s attention, propagating to more people in little time (johnson, 2007; shifman, 2013). these characteristics are in line with the context of the internet, especially contemporary political expression (heiskanen, 2017) or as cultural capital (nissenbaum and shifman, 2017). increasing evidence, however, has shown that while there are emotional expressions through this multimodality such as emotions (nissenbaum and shifman, 2018), memes nowadays are deeply aligned with everyday online communication that tends towards disruptive (racist, gendered, hateful content, etc.) speech and are used to convey and spread false information. for instance, the many disinformation campaigns that centred on the pepe the frog meme during the 2016 us presidential election. thus, there is a need for more complete and reliable methods and tools for fine-grained but large-scale meme analysis. computer vision scholars have previously deployed computer vision techniques to study the visual patterns of memes posted on social media (he et al., 2016). recent studies also deploy optical character recognition (ocr) to extract text from images, utilising these different modalities through advanced computer vision and natural language processing models (du et al., 2020; singh et al., 2021). some studies also propose streaming pipeline frameworks to detect and compare trending events with online meme generator websites (e.g., know your meme) to cluster images into meme template groups (jafariasbagh et al., 2014; zannettou et al., 2018). despite many breakthroughs in the development of computational methods for detecting and classifying memes, these techniques are still limited in how well they support exploratory analysis of online memes. this limitation is largely due to the multimodality of memes, particularly the intersection of these modalities where these components play a joint role in conveying the meaning of the meme (smitha et al., 2018). furthermore, previous methods often work as end-to-end ‘black box’ systems that prevent researchers from interrogating and understanding how and why specific inputs are classified or clustered in specific ways (burgess, et al., 2021). these methods may also ignore the latent political and cultural patterns reflected in isolated modalities while some other qualitative analysis methods are hard to deploy on largescale meme detection and analysis (nissenbaum and shifman, 2018). owing to these critical gaps, the present work focuses on developing a computational framework that can separate different components of image macro memes into their constituent multimodal features for examination while also supporting combinations of modalities where such combinations have direct consequences for interpretations of the memetic material. by doing so this method contributes a more complete and extensible meme study framework with conceptual and methodological approaches for media and cultural studies scholars. meme machine: a novel multimodal computational framework for meme analysis the meme machine is a computational meme analysis framework that provides 3 main functionalities: • classify memes based on existing known exploitable or other signifiers; • cluster memes together based on visual similarity; and, • cluster memes together based on semantic similarity. figure 1. the meme machine integrates various multimodal algorithms and models to extract different features, segmenting the original image into subcomponents. the subcomponents are fed further into meme machine to obtain clusters of memes based on the subcomponents. the first step in the meme machine is to decompose the input meme into its various constituent parts. this decomposition is achieved using a combination of text detection methods and a single-shot classification approach pre-trained on known exploitable materials, sourced from common online meme dictionaries and taxonomies. this decomposition process ties in with the first functionality in providing confidence scores for the presence of specific exploitable within the input. clustering through visual similarity operates by running decomposed images through a pretrained image classification model to extract feature vectors, used to group other images with similar feature vector values. semantic similarity works in a similar manner except that text is run through an additional pretrained topic model to extract feature vectors. to enable these processes, we use a variety of existing machine learning approaches, stitched together to help identify components of memes. an example of one approach deployed is tesseract, an ocr engine that can detect text within an image and provide locations of where text was detected. based on these locations, those multimodal components can be segmented and treated independently of each other. we also make use of the ‘image machine’, a machine vision tool based on the critical simulation methodology that was designed to help scholars understand how machine learning technologies operate (burgess, et al., 2021). the image machine provides functions that allow the unsupervised clustering of sets of input images into emergent clusters based on shared visual features and latent aesthetic features. after feeding the decomposed visual components through the tool, we receive clustering information of similar components. this information can be combined with other clustering data to assist in the overall clustering and organisation of memetic materials for interpretative analysis. result while this toolkit is still a work in progress, initial experiments in feeding a dataset of memes through the tool show that it can isolate various themes and patterns from the dataset of memes. an example is seen below, where the original input of memes is seen compared to the output structured set of memes after passing it through the tool. figure 2. the sample of original input from the total meme dataset before passing through the tool. in this image, we can see a small portion of the total meme dataset, including a variety of styles and messages within the memes, all of which is unstructured (not organised by any metric except name). by putting it through the tool, this collection of images will be structured such that visually similar images (memes) will be clustered together. in figure 4 we see what happens when the last cluster (lower right in figure 3) is selected. memes within this cluster (group) can be seen to be highly visually similar, sharing a header with a red underline, a subheader whose text varies, and side-by-side portraits of democratic presidential nominees bernie sanders and hillary clinton, each portrait having various text underneath. the meme machine example above is achieved without extracting text from the images, so these memes were not grouped by anything text related. this capability for semantic clustering is being explored currently, and will be added in upcoming versions including text-based clustering (such as topic modelling and sentiment analysis) as additional inputs into the meme cluster determination. figure 3. 16 groups of memes are identified here, each with a centroid image of each cluster as a summary of memes located in this cluster. these meme clusters have distinct visual similarities in their use of exploitables and overall composition. figure 4. the memes within the same clusters after passing through the tool have a strong visual similarity. however, present progress hasn’t conducted the similarity reflected in such as semantic patterns or other modalities. references bateman, j. a. (2014). text and image: a critical introduction to the visual/verbal divide. routledge. burgess, j., angus, d., carah, n., andrejevic, m., hawker, k., lewis, k., … li, l. (2021, november 6). critical simulation as hybrid digital method for exploring the data operations and vernacular cultures of visual social media platforms. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/2cwsu du, y., masood, m. a., & joseph, k. (2020, may). understanding visual memes: an empirical analysis of text superimposed on memes shared on twitter. in proceedings of the international aaai conference on web and social media (vol. 14, pp. 153-164). he, s., zheng, x., wang, j., chang, z., luo, y., and zeng, d. (2016). meme extraction and tracing in crisis events. in 2016 ieee conference on intelligence and security informatics (isi), pages 61–66, tucson, az, usa. ieee. heiskanen, b. (2017). meme-ing electoral participation. european journal of american studies, 12(12-2). jafariasbagh, m.; ferrara, e.; varol, o.; menczer, f.; and flammini, a. 2014. clustering memes in social media streams. social network analysis and mining 4:1–13. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/2cwsu johnson, d. (2007). mapping the meme: a geographical approach to materialist rhetorical criticism. communication and critical/cultural studies, 4(1), 27–50. kiela, d., grave, e., joulin, a., & mikolov, t. (2018). efficient large-scale multi-modal classification. in proceedings of the aaai conference on artificial intelligence (vol. 32). kress, g., & van leeuwen, t. (2020). reading images: the grammar of visual design. routledge. nissenbaum, a., & shifman, l. (2017). internet memes as contested cultural capital: the case of 4chan’s/b/board. new media & society, 19(4), 483-501. nissenbaum, a., & shifman, l. (2018). meme templates as expressive repertoires in a globalizing world: a cross-linguistic study. journal of computer-mediated communication, 23(5), 294-310. shifman, l. (2013). memes in digital culture. mit press. singh, v. k., ghosh, i., & sonagara, d. (2021). detecting fake news stories via multimodal analysis. journal of the association for information science and technology, 72(1), 3–17. smitha, e. s., sendhilkumar, s., & mahalaksmi, g. s. (2018). meme classification using textual and visual features. in computational vision and bio inspired computing (pp. 1015-1031). springer international publishing. zannettou, s.; caulfield, t.; blackburn, j.; de cristofaro, e.; sirivianos, m.; stringhini, g.; and suarez-tangil, g. 2018. on the origins of memes by means of fringe web communities. in proceedings of the internet measurement conference 2018, imc ’18, 188–202. new york, ny, usa: acm. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): suárez-gonzalo, sara; lópez gabrielidis, alejandra (2022, november). our data bodies. reframing our conceptual and normative relationship with personal data presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. our data bodies. re-framing our conceptual and normative relationship with personal data sara suárez-gonzalo cnsc research group, internet interdisciplinary institute, universitat oberta de catalunya alejandra lópez gabrielidis cnsc research group, internet interdisciplinary institute, universitat oberta de catalunya within the rapid development of data-driven technologies, manifold concerns have arisen on the effects of massive data accumulation, commodification and exploitation on people’s lives, especially when the so called “personal data” are at stake. much attention has been paid to how and to what extent big data exploitation is jeopardising the fulfilment of basic liberties and fundamental rights in democratic societies, as well as to what is the best way to protect people from the potential consequential harms. personal data are the object of the fundamental right to personal data protection, recognised in article 8 of the eu charter of fundamental rights. besides, insofar as they are labelled “personal” data, they also fall within the scope of the wider fundamental right to privacy. the “personal” label is then central with regards to the legal framework for the protection of citizens’ rights against the adverse effects of massive data exploitation. however, it is quite unclear under which circumstances we can affirm that certain data are “personal”. we already know that aggregate and crossreference big data analytics allow us to infer sensitive information and detect latent patterns of information from pieces of data that seemed innocuous when isolated. data, then, are more closely related to dividuals (fragments of people’s lives, characteristics and circumstances whose power lies in aggregation for the purpose of profiling similar types of persons), than to individuals. we also know that data provided by other people may concern us in undesirable and unpredictable ways, even when we do not know that person or are not aware of the mere existence of these data. then, what exactly do we mean when we refer to personal data? according to the general data protection regulation, personal data are any information “relating to” an identified or identifiable http://spir.aoir.org/ natural person. according to the eu charter, the term refers to data “concerning” the right holder. to say that something relates to a person or concerns him or her means that there is any specific sort of connection between them. however, in our case, it again remains unclear what is the specific type of connection that explains in what terms personal data relate to the person that holds a right of protection over them. in our view, this is a crucial question that the academic literature has not yet addressed in enough depth. and we believe it is relevant not only from a conceptual point of view (how we understand and define our relation with our data), but also from a normative point of view (what is the most accurate and desirable way of understanding this connection and at to what it entitles the right holder, also in social, ethical and political terms). in light of this, our paper aims at advancing knowledge towards a more accurate conception of our relationship with personal data. to do so, we draw on a three-step methodology. firstly, we discuss the three main recent contributions on this issue, taking into account both the conceptual and normative considerations derived from each of them, namely: data as property (hazel, 2020; murphy, 1996; ritter & mayer, 2018); data as raw material (varian, 2018; zuboff, 2019); and data as labour (scholz, 2012; fuchs & sevignani, 2013; fuchs, 2014; cardon & casilli, 2015). secondly, we argue why none of the latter seems to be neither accurate enough from a conceptual point of view, nor desirable from a socio-political perspective. then, far from understanding personal data as something to be (fairly) owned by someone, or as a raw material to (not) be exploited by someone, or as the product resulting from someone’s digital labour, we explore a conception of personal data as part of oneself. we propose to understand our relationship with personal data as one more similar to the one we have with our bodies or their parts, with our data bodies. finally, we discuss the implications of the proposed conception, both on a conceptual and on a normative dimension, including why it may be useful to better protect citizens’ rights. the idea of personal data refers to the person, a legal category that has been historically bound to the idea of things: the person in roman law is defined as the one who can own things, who can have a patrimony (esposito, 2017). the body, differently, has been an ambiguous terrain―navigating between these two poles―even giving rise, throughout western history, to the colonisation, reification and depersonalization of certain bodies, which were considered as things that could be appropriated or owned by someone, as in the case of slaves. the efforts to overcome these aberrations to human rights placed the body on the side of the “person”, in order to avoid its commodification. today there is a certain consensus that the body, or its parts (at least the vital ones), must be understood as non-transferable, non-exchangeable goods. goods, therefore, that must be protected through the logic of fundamental rights, which excludes commercial exchange and whose guiding principle must be human dignity. it is precisely in that sense that we consider the body to be a fertile ground to rethink our relationship with personal data. beyond that, in the light of the tensions that fields such as biotechnology have recently introduced in the univocal association a person-a body, this proposal, far from confining the understanding of data as something exclusively related to the individual, will lead us to explore ways of understanding and protecting data from the common, overcoming the limits of individual action. references cardon, dominique; casilli, antonio (2015). qu’est-ce que le digital labor ? brysurmarne: ina. charter of fundamental rights of the european union (2016/c 202/2). esposito, roberto (2017). personas, cosas, cuerpos. madrid: trotta. fuchs, christian; sevignani, sebastian (2013). what is digital labour? what is digital work? what’s their difference? and why do these questions matter for understanding social media? triplec, 11(2): 237. fuchs, christian (2014). digital labour and karl marx. new york: routledge. hazel, steven (2020). personal data as property, syracuse law review, 70: 1055. murphy, richard s. (1996). property rights in personal information: an economic defence of privacy, 83: 2383. regulation (eu) 2016/679 of the european parliament and of the council of 27 april 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing directive 95/46/ec (general data protection regulation). ritter, jeffrey; mayer, anna (2018). regulating data as property: a new construct for moving forward, duke law & technology review,16 : 220. scholz, trebor (ed.) (2012). digital labor. the internet as playground and factory. new york: routledge. varian, hal (2018). data, like oil, needs to be refined in order for it to be useful, the promise and perils of technology: artificial intelligence, big data, cybercrime and fintech, salzburg global finance forum. zuboff, shoshana (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. new york: public affairs. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): mcdowell, z, tiidenberg, k. (2023, october). internet governance and moral entrepreneurs. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. internet governance and moral entrepreneurs zachary mcdowell university of illinois chicago katrin tiidenberg tallinn university a growing body of academic work on internet governance focuses on the “deplatforming of sex” (molldrem, 2018). linked usually to the american senate passing the fosta/sesta bills that permit holding internet intermediaries responsible for ‘promoting or facilitating prostitution’ or ‘knowingly assisting, facilitating or supporting sex trafficking,’ the scholarship on deplatforming of sex explores the banning, shadowbanning, demonetizing and suppressing of sexual expression on a variety of platforms since 2018 (lingel, 2021; pilipets & paasonen, 2020; reynolds, 2021). the deplatforming of sex is not new, but instead part of a sixty-year campaign against “obscenity” by conservative lobbying groups like the national center on sexual exploitation (ncose, formerly morality in media and operation yorkville). in this paper, we analyze ncose’s archive of statements to trace how ncose’s crusade against “obscenity” led them to intervene in internet governance: first, via the communication decency act (cda), then the child online protection act (copa), and finally, the already mentioned sesta and fosta. we analyze ncose’s discourse as that of a moral entrepreneur (goode and ben-yehuda 2009). moral entrepreneurs define and combat social “threats” by trying to shape “public discourse, the law, and public policy” (krinsky, 2013, p. 5). when they manage to join forces with lawmakers they become capable of launching “crusades, which occasionally turn into panics, to make sure that certain rules take hold and are enforced” (goode & ben-yehuda, 2009, p. 67). to further nuance our analysis of ncose strategies, we rely on the work on technology and media panics, in particular, their intersection with sex panics as described via the concept of a “trifecta of anxieties” suggested by tiidenberg and van der nagel (2020) and the strategic use of ‘strong theory,’ (paasonen et al. 2020, p. 46), in particular media effects theories in moral panics. we explore the shifts within ncose's discourse, what they frame as the social threat, what they position as a solution, and whom they construct as the main moralized subjects and objects. process we worked in a layered, iterative manner loosely following the tenets of ‘conjunctural analysis’ (hall et al., 1978) as operationalized by jamie hakim (2019) – evaluating the conservative internet governance lobby as a response to the specific mix of social contradictions that constitute the historical conjuncture. first, we analyzed ncose press releases (n= 719 between 1996-2022) for recurring patterns, followed by a meta-analysis of earlier press releases and news sources for an overall understanding of the shifts in rhetoric. this was followed by analysis of copa (n=11, 1998-2009), cda (n=108, 19982022), and fosta/sesta (n=76, 2017-2022) related press materials specifically. finally, we conducted a discourse analysis of 29 selected texts, focusing on framing of actors, legislation and its aims, and rhetorical work done to legitimize claims, classify and define problems and create links. cda as the 1990s ushered in new intermediaries for distributing content and information, ncose shifted its gaze to the internet. ncose (then mim) was “deeply involved in the issue of internet pornography” and “active supporters of the 1996 communications decency act.” (lane, 2001, p. 100). the version of the cda that was signed into law in 1996, however, failed to adopt “many of morality in media's suggestions” (ibid). further, the sections of the cda explicitly focused on regulating obscenity were found unconstitutional by the supreme court in 1997. one of the few remaining sections of cda was section 230 – widely considered critical for internet governance as it exempts internet intermediaries from liability from ugc. this became a new battleground for ncose. copa following their “failures” with cda, ncose focused on the federal child online protection act (copa). ncose believed their additions of particular legal language would save copa from the fate of cda. copa passed, but was struck down immediately in 2000, and finally by the supreme court in 2010. instead, parental use of filtering technologies was promoted. this was a direct failure for ncose, which explicitly argued against filtering, recommending “vigorous enforcement of the federal laws against internet obscenity” instead (ncose 20.10.2000). ncose’s copa discourse has two dominant pillars. first, “all porn is hardcore porn, thus obscene, thus illegal,” and second, “porn creates child exploitation.” both are scaffolded by a strong theory rhetoric of media effects. their claims rely on sensationalism and disgust-mongering, as well as on legal discourse regarding an obscenity test established in miller v. california in 1973. ncose also started building explicit rhetorical linkages between pornography and harm to children through (1) what is depicted in porn (younglooking actors), (2) porn as a gateway to child abuse, (3) porn as a tool for training/grooming children as sex workers, (4) porn as a template from which adults and children learn sexual violence and (5) porn as an industry that creates demand for prostitutes which leads to child trafficking. sesta and fosta in 2015, ncose rebranded from morality in media to the national center on sexual exploitation and seemed to shift gears from fighting obscenity via targeting pornography to “fighting” sexual exploitation and trafficking instead. the linking of pornography to sexual exploitation and trafficking introduced in the copa coverage became central in ncose’s fosta/sesta rhetoric between 2017-2022. in this period, sex trafficking takes center stage as the predominant problem, with the internet more broadly and cda230 expressly framed as the biggest hurdle in legislative efforts to combat it. the shift towards the rhetoric of exploitation and trafficking introduced an explicit anti-internet stance. according to ncose, “the internet” is the reason for epidemic levels of “sexual exploitation of women and children” (ncose, 19.07.2018), and ncose is “confronted with a relentless stream of technology-related issues exponentially compounding efforts to combat sex trafficking” (ncose, 10.01.2020). amending cda is cast as “the most important, most urgent legal issue,” and cda is regularly called “outdated,” “archaic,” and actively harmful. while specific perpetrators shift from backpage.com to onlyfans and twitter, “big tech” in general is articulated as a public enemy. to villainize big tech more persuasively, ncose rewrites the history of cda and articulates a new victim, survivors of sex trafficking, all the while astroturfing (leaver et al 2019) the #metoo hashtag and the broader social movement. conclusion we argue that ncose has systematically attempted to deplatform sexual expression to control public discourse by centering it on the idea of harmful obscenity. to do this, they have experimented with and adjusted their discourse to first link pornography to addiction and pedophilia, and later, after repeated failures to shape legislation, shifted to the language of trafficking and exploitation. the latter eventually led their “victory” in fosta/sesta. in the process, they interfered in internet governance in direct and indirect ways important for internet scholars to understand. while many agree that cda230 might need reforming, fosta/sesta was unnecessary (sex trafficking and child pornography are illegal and therefore not protected under cda230) and harmful (vague wording and anti-sex-worker sentiment invited regulatory overreach) (blunt et al., 2021). ncose has shown themselves to be an important actor within the field of internet governance, and it has now come to represent an explicitly hostile stance toward freedom of information, expression, and speech that remain foundational to the internet. references blunt, d., & wolf, a. (2020). erased: the impact of fosta/sesta and the removal of backpage on sex workers. anti-trafficking review, (14), 117–121 goode, e., & ben-yehuda, n. (2013). the genealogy and trajectory of the moral panic concept. in c. krinsky (ed.), the ashgate research companion to moral panics (pp. 23-37). routledge. hakim, j. (2019) the rise of chemsex: queering collective intimacy in neoliberal london. cultural studies, 33(2), 249–275. hall, s., critcher, c., jefferson, t., clarke, j. & roberts, b. (1978). policing the crisis: mugging, the state and law and order. the macmillian press. krinsky, c. (2013). introduction: the moral panic concept. in c. krinsky (ed.), the ashgate research companion to moral panics (pp. 23–36). routledge lane, f. (2001). obscene profits: the entrepreneurs of pornography in the cyber age (1st ed.). routledge books. leaver, t., highfield, t., & abidin, c. (2019). instagram: visual social media cultures. polity press. lingel, j. (2021). the gentrification of the internet: how to reclaim our digital freedom. univ of california press. molldrem, s. (2018, december 5). ‘tumblr’s decision to deplatform sex will harm sexually marginalized people.’ wussy magazine. http://wussymag.com/all/2018/12/6/tumblrs-decision-to-deplatform-sex-will-harmsexually-marginalized-people paasonen, s., attwood, f., mckee, a., mercer, j., & smith, c. (2020). objectification: on the difference between sex and sexism. routledge. pilipets, e., & paasonen, s. (2022). nipples, memes, and algorithmic failure: nsfw critique of tumblr censorship. new media & society, 24(6), 1459–1480. tiidenberg, k. van der nagel, e. (2020). sex and social media. emerald selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): ritter, c., goel, r., & sharma, r. (2022, november). decolonizing newsmaking on youtube: the case of climate journalism during the cop26 summit. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. decolonizing newsmaking on youtube: the case of climate journalism during the cop26 summit christian s. ritter department of geography, media and communication, karlstad university rahul goel institute of computer science, tartu university rajesh sharma institute of computer science, tartu university the 2021 united nations climate change conference (cop26) was a mega event of climate politics, attracting media coverage from around the world. the summit was a central forum for the negotiations of sustainable futures, climate justice and decoloniality. leaders from all parts of the world gathered in glasgow between october 31st and november 12th, 2021. the prime goal that the leaders envisioned was to limit global warming to 1,5 degrees celsius in the foreseeable future. while the climate summit was extensively covered by numerous tv networks and discussed in a myriad of newspapers, the video-sharing platform youtube served as a further arena where debates about the global event were broadcasted. based on a comprehensive analysis of digital data retrieved from youtube, we raise the following questions: to what extent were professional news corporations involved in the coverage of the 2021 climate change conference on youtube? which actors are given the opportunity to drive the meaning of terms and debates associated with the summit cop26 on this platform from a central position in their network? this paper is based on an investigation into the technosocial dynamics of distributing news within the platform ecologies of the anthropocene. recent climate disasters, such as bush fires, flooding and landslides, have been controversially debated on the internet. this study contributes to understandings of the role of youtube in newsmaking and climate change communication. the presented research also informs discussions on campaigns of misinformation. we retrieved relational data from the application programming interface (api) v3 of youtube. using the software nodexl for the data collection, the query ‘cop26’ was run. we center our study on network analysis, to investigate how the clustering of youtube channels evolved during the summit cop26. the data was used to generate a visualization of a comment network and to create network centrality metrics. the digital traces of activities that users leave on youtube and other platforms can shed light on their platform practices, social relationships, and connectedness within online communities. in this investigation, we explore the traces of comments and replies to comments, which youtube users leave under the title and date of a youtube clip. such comments provide critical insights into how users interact on youtube. the postvideo discussions can be examined to establish the structure of the network (shapiro and park, 2018). gathered with the search query ’cop26’, the data set for this investigation contains 17,439 nodes, which represent channels, and 32,172 edges, which represent comments. furthermore, the network entails 70 connected communities. three core metrics of network analysis were created in gephi to assess the popularity of the network nodes: in-degree, out-degree, and pagerank. by calculating the in-degree of a youtube channel, its relative influence can be established in terms of comments received for its posted videos. numerous professional news corporations secured a high ranking in the in-degree analysis of the comment network of cop26 (see table 1). the youtube channels of bbc news, dw news, and sky news received the highest scores. in other words, they are the youtube accounts who attracted the most comments for their videos published during the data collection period. nodes with a high in-degree can be considered hubs within a given network (himelboim et al., 2017). in the out-degree analysis for the researched network, climate activists and hobbyist journalists ranked high (see table 1). the 20 top youtube accounts which were identified through this metric published the most comments within the researched network. this outcome also indicates that established news corporations were not among the youtubers who extensively commented on youtube videos since they prioritized the publishing of already aired tv content or launched livestreams on the platform to reach out to wider audiences. finally, the pagerank analysis provides a list of the most central actors in this comment network (see table 1). the pagerank algorithm is used as a measure for the identification of opinion leaders in social network analysis. this type of centrality measures a node’s importance or influence in a given network while considering the importance of its neighbors (golbeck, 2013). an analysis of the pagerank scores for the researched comment network shows that the youtube coverage of the mega event was dominated by established news corporations, such bbc news, dw news, and sky news. furthermore, the list of the top five broadcasters for this youtube comment network underlines the global significance of the summit as it includes professional news corporations from britain, germany, india, and the usa. crucially, the youtube channels of professional news corporations were in positions of high importance within the researched network and can be considered highly influential nodes that exerted their authorities within their connected communities. the network graph of the researched comment network illustrates how popular youtube accounts are connected with other youtube users (see figure 1). several clusters could be identified within the comment network. figure 1: graph of the youtube comment network. table 1: pagerank, in-degree, and out-degree scores for the 20 top youtube channels. the cop26 event epitomizes a transmission of professional tv formats to the participatory platform and its infiltration with tv news content. based on a comprehensive analysis of the researched comment network, we argue that professional news corporations acted as opinion leaders during the coverage of the 2021 climate summit on youtube. journalists combining discourses of climate justice with claims for decolonialization found their voice during cpo26. one of their main arguments for acknowledging colonial pasts in climate change communication emphasizes the longstanding carbon footprints of western countries. the limitations of the investigation into the youtube coverage of cop26 primarily concern the data collection constraints of the platform. the social network data for this investigation entailed information on youtube channels and comments to their videos. other crucial features of the platform, such as metrics about the watch-time of videos and the ‘thumb up’ endorsements, were not considered during the data analyses. the theoretical implications of this investigation relate to the formation of a diverse, global transmedia ecology, within which claims for climate justice are increasingly negotiated. on a practical level, this study implies that climate change activism should be tailored for the global audiences congregating on digital platforms and its findings are highly beneficial for practitioners who engage in political campaigns on digital platforms. future investigations into the negotiations of climate change at mega events can further assess the formation of anthropocene media and climate action on digital platforms. furthermore, we also call for further mixed-method research combining in-depth analyzes of situated media practices with digital methods, such as computational network analysis and natural language processing techniques. references himelboim, i., smith, m., rainie, l., shneiderman, b., & espina, c. (2017). classifying twitter topic-networks using social network analysis. social media + society 3(1): 1-13. shapiro, m., & park, h. (2018). climate change and youtube: deliberation potential in post-video discussions. environmental communication 12(1): 115–131. golbeck, j. (2013). analyzing the social web. newnes. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): zhao, x., ng, r., zomer, c., duffy, g., sefton-green, j. (2024, october). researching the edtech industry for children: methodological reflections on a design-based approach. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. researching the edtech industry for children: methodological reflections on a design-based approach xinyu zhao australian research council centre of excellence for the digital child, deakin university rebecca ng australian research council centre of excellence for the digital child, university of wollongong chris zomer australian research council centre of excellence for the digital child, deakin university gavin duffy goldsmiths, university of london julian sefton-green australian research council centre of excellence for the digital child, deakin university introduction digital platforms and services are making inroads into the everyday lives of even very young children. as with many other domains of life, children’s learning and education are increasingly digitised through ‘educational technology’ software, or more commonly edtech. today, edtech has evolved into a global industry, attracting unprecedented financial investments from various sources (williamson, 2022; williamson & komljenovic, 2022). the rise of this industry provokes new questions about children’s education in the digital age. what are the edtech products available to children and families? how is the edtech market made and sustained and who are the players in the field? how do edtech companies frame the educational needs of children? how are children’s data collected and used by these companies via digital services? methodologically, answering these questions falls in the field of the political economy of digital childhood (sefton-green et al., 2022). this interdisciplinary approach is underpinned by an overall interest in understanding the critical roles of institutions, especially companies and governments, in producing and distributing digital services that shape children’s and families’ everyday consumption of digital technologies. in this paper, we focus on the methodological offerings of a design-based method (see below) for researching the political economy of digital childhood. we explore how a designbased approach is compatible with the research interests of a political economy perspective by drawing on the processes and findings of a collaborative design intervention study which aimed to conceptualise and build a database of edtech companies and products for young children living in australia. the political economy of digital childhood has attracted a wide range of methodological approaches (williamson et al., 2023), but not usually involving design thinking and methods. as lupton (2018) has advocated for the development of ‘design sociology’, the incorporation of design-oriented methods can ‘develop insights into how objects and systems are designed, developed, promoted to users, and taken up by users and also retain a reflexive perspective on the use of design research methods as themselves context-specific and discursive research devices, involving multiple and often contested knowledge claims that can work to serve or support certain interests and futures over others’ (p. 7). in this respect, on top of disclosing power relations in the children’s edtech market, design-based approaches are conducive to social and cultural changes that respond to social injustice and improve people’s lives. the study the study presented in this paper aimed to map the market trends and characteristics of children’s edtech in australia by designing an edtech database (hereafter referred to as database). adopting a ‘design intervention’ approach (fraser & galinsky, 2010), the study uses the database as a ‘design artefact’ to challenge the power relations between corporations and individual users and to stimulate ideas (bergman et al., 2007). the design process consisted firstly of collecting and curating publicly available data about edtech companies and services for young children in australia, including those that may be intentionally obscured by commercial providers, such as countries of operation, apis, and third-party data sharing. this process enabled the researchers to observe the difficulty of locating information about edtech companies and their software as a method to raise awareness and provoke changes. in total, information about 96 edtech companies and 324 edtech products for young children was collected. the second part of the process involved running ‘design sprints’ (banfield et al., 2015), in the format of small-group workshops, parents and educators to help identify the problem, design a prototype that is user-centred, and evaluate the efficacy of the database to provide novel awareness of corporate practices. the main purpose of employing this technique is to understand and critique processes of product development from within the commercial convention. to do this, we visualised the database in a design prototype in the form of a working website. we used the prototype to showcase what the database might look like in real life to motivate stakeholder responses. this part of the process allowed the researchers to understand, from the users’ perspectives, what their expectations of the database are and what the database can actually do. findings based on the findings of the database, we make three arguments in relation to the methodological potential of a design-based approach for researching the political economy of digital childhood. first, analysis of the information collected for the database illustrates key industry trends and characteristics. for example, edtech services that integrate entertainment elements and are used mostly outside of educational institutions, referred to as ‘edutainment’ software, are dominantly produced by us-based companies. the edutainment market is highly ‘synergised’ in that big, international edtech players continually expand their influence by acquiring smaller businesses. reading platform epic!, for instance, is now part of indian tech-giant byju, while discovery education has acquired reading and numeracy software developer dreambox. big media companies, such as entertainment one, are also entering the market, offering ‘educational’ apps as spin offs of popular tv shows such as peppa big and pj masks hero academy. second, the process of designing and building the database surfaces the difficulty of accessing information about the targeted edtech companies and products. often, the requested information was not publicly available or was hidden somewhere on the company website. in other cases, the information was framed in ways that made identifying it difficult. for example, when trying to locate information about the specific category of an edtech product (e.g., childcare management, family engagement, or documentation), companies seemed to be reluctant to provide a clear self-identification. as a response to this challenge, we had to rely on third-party online sources (e.g., crunchbase, apple app store, etc.) to search for some information. this was not ideal due to the difficulty of verifying the validity of information included in these sources. it also indicates the power of these ‘intermediary’ organisations which significantly control the information flow between edtech companies and the users in the absence of credible information from the companies themselves. third, the stakeholder workshops, which involved the use of the design prototype, revealed both the normative and pedagogical offerings of the database. on the one hand, parents and educators talked about categories of information that they considered helpful while sharing what was missing that could have helped them decide in relation to using or purchasing an edtech product. this helped the researchers improve the design prototype. on the other hand, participants indicated that some categories of information tacitly provoked questions about the commercial practices, such as the countries where the technology was being used. they, for example, questioned the agendas of the edtech investors behind the companies when they receive the information from the database, wondering if the investors may shape how the companies produce educational content. in a way, the database as a design artefact encourages everyday users to think more critically about corporate practices in educational settings. in conclusion, the design-based approach employed in this study not only makes visible edtech companies’ market-making practices, but also works toward imagining and enacting positive futures for and with the various edtech stakeholders. it contributes to the field of the political economy of digital childhood by offering a way to provoke potential solutions to address the power asymmetries between the edtech industry and individual users. references banfield, r., lombardo, c. t., & wax, t. (2015). design sprint: a practical guidebook for building great digital products. o’reilly media, inc. bergman, m., lyytinen, k., & mark, g. (2007). boundary objects in design: an ecological view of design artifacts. journal of the association for information systems, 8(11), 546–568. https://doi.org/10.17705/1jais.00144 fraser, m. w., & galinsky, m. j. (2010). steps in intervention research: designing and developing social programs. research on social work practice, 20(5), 459-466. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049731509358424 lupton, d. (2018). towards design sociology. sociology compass, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12546 sefton-green, j., dezuanni, m., & pangrazio, l. (2022). a research agenda to examine the political economy of digital childhood. digital child working paper 202206, arc centre of excellence for the digital child, brisbane, australia. williamson, b. (2022). big edtech. learning, media and technology, 47(2), 157-162. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2022.2063888 williamson, b., komljenovic, j., & gulson, k. (eds.). (2023). world yearbook of education 2024: digitalisation of education in the era of algorithms, automation and artificial intelligence (1st ed.). london: routledge. williamson, b., & komljenovic, j. (2023). investing in imagined digital futures: the techno-financial ‘futuring’ of edtech investors in higher education. critical studies in education, 64(3), 234-249. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2022.2081587 https://doi.org/10.17705/1jais.00144 https://doi.org/10.1177/1049731509358424 https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12546 https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2022.2063888 https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2022.2081587 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): sharon, t., john, n. (2024, october). feeling myself: the rise of intimacy as authenticity in addressing imagined podcast listeners. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. feeling myself: the rise of intimacy as authenticity in addressing imagined podcast listeners tzlil sharon university of amsterdam nicholas john the hebrew university of jerusalem this study aims to theorize the parasocial relationships between podcast creators and listeners, but with a unique focus on the perspective of the creators themselves. while parasocial relationships are typically studied from the perspective of the audience, understanding the creator's viewpoint can provide valuable insights into the dynamics of these relationships and the modes of addressivity they evoke, particularly with the emergence of intimacy as a keyword in podcast studies (swiatek, 2018; spinelli & dann, 2019; euritt, 2020, 2023). through in-depth interviews with prominent podcasters in the israeli podcast scene, we ask: how do podcast creators imagine their listeners? how are these imagined listeners shaped by the creators’ personal dispositions, their own experiences as podcast listeners, their assumptions about podcasting as a medium, and their actual interactions with their listeners? we propose a typology of different kinds of imagined relationships with perceived listeners, arguing that the starting point for the postulated intimacy between podcasters and listeners is an imagined addressee whom the podcaster conceives as similar to themselves. parasocial relationships are one-sided, quasi-social relationships that individuals form with media figures, creating an "illusion of intimacy" (horton & wohl, 1956). while the concept was first introduced in the context of television in the 1950s, it has since been applied to other forms of media as well (abidin, 2015; moores, 2000; savage & spence, 2014; tolson, 2005), as the audience's access to media figures has grown through callin shows, live audiences in talk shows, and direct communication with politicians and celebrities via social media. paddy scannell's argument (2000) complements this idea, arguing that broadcast media speak to audiences in ways they want to be spoken to, creating what he calls a "to-anyone-as-someone" communicative structure. in this regard, “radio talk” had been long considered distinctively intimate (douglas, 1999; wilby, 2002; kuffert, 2009; mchugh, 2015). in podcasts, the intimate unseen voice of the host speaking into the listener’s ears became even more constitutive, to the point that some see it as part of the medium's identity and as fitting with certain consumption habits: individuals choosing to listen to certain shows, through earbuds, using personal devices, at their convenience (spinelli & dann, 2019; euritt, 2023). indeed, podcast scholarship and popular media have highlighted the strong engagement, loyalty and trust podcast listeners express toward their favorite podcast personalities (marx et al., 2021; schlütz & hedder, 2021; soto-vásquez et al., 2022). however, an oftenoverlooked angle is the construction of the podcaster’s addressee throughout their creative process, beyond the dry defining of a target audience. literary critic terry eagleton argued that “every literary text [...] encodes within itself an ‘implied reader’, intimates in its every gesture the kind of ‘addressee’ it anticipates” (eagleton, 1983; see also magnifico, 2010; ong, 1975). this study tackles the characteristics of the implied, or imagined, listeners who emerge from the reflexive thoughts of podcast creators about their creative audio work. we suggest that the podcast audience is born before an actual audience listens, and that it is essential to trace the threads of these implied audiences in order to understand the values and ideas that precede podcast listening as a cultural practice. to address these issues, we conducted in-depth interviews with 12 leading podcasters in the israeli podcasting scene. the interviews were conducted with both amateur creators and podcasters with professional media backgrounds, including those who podcast as a hobby and those who make a living from it. their podcasts ranged from long-form history storytelling to carefully crafted narratives, expert parenting advice delivered as couples’ talk, true crime chit-chat, and fully scripted “politics for dummies” monologues. all interviews were transcribed and then coded using qualitative analysis software. the findings yielded eight types of imagined listeners, implying different kinds of relationships between the creators and their audiences: listener as someone; likeminded listener; listener as friend; listener as fan; listener as customer; listener as part of a private members club; segmented audience (marketing perception of the audience); and the notion of “speaking to myself”, whereby the podcaster addresses themselves, and not an external audience. these types of listeners emerged intermittently throughout interviews with multiple interviewees, often within the same interview. for instance, a parenting expert hosting an advisory podcast with her husband described a good episode as one that captures her own interest and curiosity ("[i prefer] hearing the wheels turning in my head and not necessarily looking at the page i prepared because it's important to me that people know x or y"), while her husband emphasized the business-like nature of the relationship between them and their listener: "the contract you have as a podcast producer with the listener says: you'll give me your ear now for the next 50 minutes, and i will enter your brain in a real direct injection, so i have to be very precise and give [you] a lot of value as if during this time". in another example, a successful amateur podcaster who co-hosts a comedy history podcast noted that their listeners perceive them as friends, even though they have never met in person. however, he also clarified that this relationship is unidirectional and that they are not truly friends with their listeners: "but like, there's this 'oh, i can tell him anything' kind of vibe. it sucks. [...] bro, we're not friends." later in the interview, he revealed that he met his girlfriend via social media as she was a fan of the show. despite demonstrating high reflexivity and even self-criticism, the interviewees did not perceive the ambivalent notions of their assumed-listeners as conflicting. interestingly, almost all interviewees initially envisioned their listeners as someone similar to themselves or a younger version of themselves. yet, as their podcasts grew in popularity, interviewees started to think about their listeners more as unknown strangers, to whom they are obliged to provide their expertise, to meet their assumed standards, and balance between exclusivity and inclusivity. these are achieved mainly by remaining true to the premise that, "there is no buffer between the presenter and his listeners", as the veteran podcaster amongst the interviewees stated. in creating this illusion of unmediated communication, interviewees talked about the intimacy of the medium. for them, intimacy was inextricably linked with authenticity. this includes asking the podcast guests "questions that i myself find interesting", to imagine the listener consumes the podcast in similar private conditions as the creators recorded them (like wearing pajamas when recording/listening), to represent for the listener certain angles in her personality through the podcaster's persona, but also to provide an email address that the podcaster can be reached at (although not necessarily responding to listeners emails). consequentially, intimacy is put forward by podcasts not only because they encourage "engagement with the self" among their listeners (sienkiewicz & jaramillo, 2012), but also by reflecting the podcasters' own self-engagement. our findings show that for the podcasters we interview, being authentic, being true to oneself, means being close to the listener. however, when podcasters construct their ideal listener based on their own desires and characteristics, the concept of intimacy takes on a different meaning. rather than a two-way relationship, it can become a one-sided connection, more about projecting the self onto an imagined listener than about genuine engagement. references abidin, c. (2015). communicative intimacies: influencers and perceived interconnectedness. ada: a journal of gender, new media, & technology 8. douglas, s. (1999). listening in: radio and the american imagination. new york: random. eagleton, t. (1983). literary theory: an introduction. university of minnesota press. euritt, a. (2020). within the wires’ intimate fan-based publics. new waves–feminism, gender, and podcast studies, 34. euritt, a. (2023). podcasting as an intimate medium. taylor & francis. horton, d., & richard wohl, r. (1956). mass communication and para-social interaction: observations on intimacy at a distance. psychiatry, 19(3), 215-229. kuffert, l. (2009). ‘what do you expect of this friend?’ canadian radio and the intimacy of broadcasting. media history, 15(3), 303-319. magnifico, a. m. (2010). writing for whom? cognition, motivation, and a writer's audience. educational psychologist, 45(3), 167-184. marx, j., mirbabaie, m., brendel, a. b., & zander, k. (2021). the role of parasocial interactions for podcast backchannel response. amcis 2021 proceedings. 2. https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2021/strategic_is/strategic_is/2 mchugh, s. (2015). the affective power of sound: oral history on radio. the oral history reader, 490-507. moores, s. (2000), media and everyday life in modern society, edinburgh: edinburgh university press. ong, w. j. (1975). the writer's audience is always a fiction. pmla, 90(1), 9-21. savage, m. e., & spence, p. r. (2014). will you listen? an examination of parasocial interaction and credibility in radio. journal of radio & audio media, 21(1), 3–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/19376529.2014.891214 scannell, p. (2000). for-anyone-as-someone structures. media, culture & society, 22(1), 5-24. schlütz, d., & hedder, i. (2021). aural parasocial relations: host–listener relationships in podcasts. journal of radio & audio media, 1-18. sienkiewicz, m., & jaramillo, d. l. (2019). podcasting, the intimate self, and the public sphere. popular communication, 17(4), 268-272. soto-vásquez, a. d., vilceanu, m. o., & johnson, k. c. (2022). “just hanging with my friends”: us latina/o/x perspectives on parasocial relationships in podcast listening during covid-19. popular communication, 20(4), 324-337. spinelli, m., & dann, l. (2019). podcasting: the audio media revolution. bloomsbury publishing usa. swiatek, l. (2018). the podcast as an intimate bridging medium. in: dario l, neil f and richard b (eds) podcasting: new aural cultures and digital media. cham: palgrave macmillan, pp.173–187. tolson, a. (2005). media talk: spoken discourse on tv and radio. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780748626311. wilby, p. (2002). the radio handbook. routledge. https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2021/strategic_is/strategic_is/2 https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2021/strategic_is/strategic_is/2 https://doi.org/10.1080/19376529.2014.891214 https://doi.org/10.1080/19376529.2014.891214 https://doi.org/10.1515/9780748626311 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): houška, jan. (2024, october). boundaryless careers in-between video game fields and industries: the job experiences of expatriate and remote workers in czech video game industry. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. boundaryless careers in-between video game fields and industries: the job experiences of expatriate and remote workers in czech video game industry jan houška charles university in prague, czech republic introduction the czech game industry exists in semi-periphery (švelch, 2021), affected by developments in game production centres, while having its local features. smaller czech studios are part of the video game field (keogh, 2023), framing themselves as indie compared to aaa, high-budget industrial productions. nevertheless, both industries and fields are subject to trans-local relations due to the international nature of video game production (keogh, 2023). i address the experiences of actors whose careers span different game industries – expatriates working on-site and remote workers, cooperating with czech-based studios from other countries as contractors or freelancers. i focus on their evaluation of the czech game industry, discussing its strengths and weaknesses compared to their careers in other national game industries. as industry data (czech game developer association infographics, 2023) have shown us, one third of the czech game industry workforce was constituted by internationals and three quarters of companies have less than 10 workers. however, i picked respondents from small to big businesses (within a span of more than 10 to more than 250 workers) as those employ more international workers. therefore, i limited the number of game studios to 10. the czech game industry attracts international talent, but compared with european industry centres such as finland (cf. park, 2024), this talent is rather junior-level and needed in various production roles. the local industry holds domestic traits in local company ownership and hierarchies, with czech workers often being founding team members, responsible for building or maintaining proprietary game engines. game engines are software tools that enable digital content to be created, and a code framework that enables that content to run on different platforms. but in comparison with commercial engines such as unity or unreal, proprietary engines point to the specific provenance of local game industries and contextually specific games (nicoll & keogh, 2019). the czech game production thus stands aside from imagined globality (park, 2024) of commercial game engines and common know-hows of game development work. it is important to inquire why internationals choose this semiperipheral production over industry centres as it benefits game production research which mostly focused on the latter contexts. methodology and theoretical background i used the longitudinal research method of 3 repeated semi-structured interviews with a person. all interview rounds were conducted within a period of 6 to 8 months, with 3 to 4 months between the interview rounds. i talked with 28 respondents, with 14 from eastern europe and 14 from the west (i.e., western europe and north and south america). most respondents belonged to the triad of programmers, artists and designers, but some were also involved in management and marketing roles. respondents were recruited on a voluntary basis and with regards to purposive sampling, i.e. diversity in job positions, or levels of seniority. although the reason for longitudinal study was originally related to capturing respondents’ career changes in project-based game development (weststar, 2015), it proved invaluable to discuss industrial aspects, too. theoretically, the game industries are in a state of constant flux as they draw from the larger video game fields, consisting of ever-changing foundations of skills, communities, and aesthetics of individual game workers or smaller teams (keogh, 2023). the one-off interviews would be at risk of missing this dynamic side of game industries. similarly to previous research (minassian & zabban, 2021; park et al., 2022), i relate positively and negatively perceived industrial features to the relocation motivations of international game workers. using the push-pull migration model, i discuss game expats’ motives that pushed them from previous industries to the czech one, or that were pulling them to, and were evaluated positively about, the czech game industry. this is complemented by shock factors as industrial features that are perceived negatively and can lead to relocation elsewhere (park et al., 2022; tharenou & caulfield, 2010). the concept of boundaryless career (arthur & rousseau, 2001; weststar, 2015) is used to discuss the experiences of remote workers, inquiring if their borderless, digital work includes connections to the wider production ecosystem of the czech game industry. analysis for many respondents, push factors included less developed game industries in their home countries, resulting in pull factors when evaluating the czech game industry as highly developed within the european context. as respondents experienced time pressures and precarity in contexts of aaa or outsourcing (ozimek, 2021), they saw the diversified video game field with many smaller, but successful companies as a “pulling” feature of the czech game industry. despite this, czech indie companies were described by respondents as aaa-like, rigid productions as they saw them prioritizing business over creativity. while a common contention of workers across creative industries (baker & hesmondhalgh, 2010), respondents saw such profit-orientation as not in line with production environments free of corporate structures. although working in companies with very horizontal hierarchies, live service productions driven by player demands (weststar & dubois, 2023) and supported by outdated proprietary game engines often led to respondents’ creative fatigue (dubois & chalk, 2024). these production features, together with frequent czech language use at meetings or on social events served as shock factors (tharenou & caulfield, 2010), motivating respondents to leave companies or czechia itself. the czech game industry was, likewise, evaluated as lagging behind the game industry centres in regard to diversified portfolios of games. within boundaryless jobs of remote workers, related to companies, rather than industries (weststar, 2015), the czech language effectively disappeared in their platformized work. but even in remote teams, workers were stagnating for the same reasons as game expats on-site. this was because their czech leads were drawing from established patterns and modes of production common in the wider czech video game field. this goes against the idea of the boundaryless career of remote work (park et al., 2022) and rather supports the perspective on game development as a product of distinct national cultures (sotamaa, 2021) even in virtual remote settings. conclusion the resulting perspective on the czech game industry by both expatriate and remote game workers is that of a diversified field but not diverse game production or inclusive labour conditions. although the czech game industry is undergoing a proliferation of video game field with many independent games from smaller teams or solo developers being created (fousek krobová et al., 2023), respondents did not recognise the same level of creativity and innovativeness at dominant industrial positions, despite their indie self-label. paradoxically, it is this self-label that pulled internationals to czech game companies, while they were met with shock factors of rigid company structures, the use of czech language and outdated tools pushing them to other industries. certain culture thus indeed produces specific industries, and vice versa (negus, 1999). within globally defined occupational community of game makers (arthur & rousseau, 2001; weststar, 2015), czech game development culture is at risk of being evaluated as not inclusive to the creative endeavours of internationals, effectively falling behind its global game industry competitors. references arthur, m. b., & rousseau, d. m. (eds.). (2001). the boundaryless career: a new employment principle for a new organizational era. oxford university press. baker, s., & hesmondhalgh, d. (2010). creative labour: media work in three cultural industries. routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203855881 czech game developer association infographics. (2023). cr 2023: gaming industry. prague: czech game developers association. https://gda.cz/czech-games-industrystudy/ (accessed 19 november 2024). dubois, l.-e., & chalk, a. (2024). service withdrawal: the uncertain future of the games-as-a-service model. convergence, 13548565241256888. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565241256888 fousek krobová, t., janik, j., & švelch, j. (2023). summoning ghosts of post-soviet spaces: a comparative study of the horror games someday you’ll return and the medium. studies in eastern european cinema, 14(1), 39–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350x.2022.2071520 joseph, d., nieborg, d., & young, c. j. (2023). one big store: source diversity and value capture of digital games in national app store instances. international journal of communication, 17(0), article 0. keogh, b. (2023). the videogame industry does not exist: why we should think beyond commercial game production. the mit press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14513.001.0001 minassian, h. t., & zabban, v. (2021). should i stay or should i go?: the circulations and biographies of french game workers in a ‘global games’ era. in o. sotamaa & j. švelch (eds.), game production studies (pp. 65–82). amsterdam university press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1hp5hqw.6 negus, k. (1999). music genres and corporate cultures. routledge. nicoll, b. & keogh, b. (2019). the unity game engine and the circuits of cultural software. cham: palgrave pivot. ozimek, a. (2021). supporting the global digital games industry: outsourcing games production in poland and estonia. in m. will-zocholl & c. roth-ebner (eds.), topologies of digital work: how digitalisation and virtualisation shape working spaces and places (pp. 51–76). springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/9783-030-80327-8_3 park, s. (2024). embracing global and local: how game industry expatriates work between global and local game development practices. transactions of the digital games research association, 7(1), article 1. https://doi.org/10.26503/todigra.v7i1.2183 park, s., kultima, a., lehtonen, m. j., & krath, j. (2022). everywhere but nowhere: development experiences of the international game developers in finland during the covid-19 pandemic and remote work. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 6(chi play), 233:1-233:14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3549496 sotamaa, o. (2021). studying game development cultures. games and culture, 16(7), 835–854. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120211005242 švelch, j. (2021). promises of the periphery: producing games in the communist and transformation-era czechoslovakia. in o. sotamaa & j. švelch (eds.), game production studies (pp. 237–256). amsterdam university press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1hp5hqw.15 tharenou, p., & caulfield, n. (2010). will i stay or will i go? explaining repatriation by self-initiated expatriates. academy of management journal, 53(5), 1009–1028. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2010.54533183 weststar, j. (2015). understanding video game developers as an occupational community. information, communication & society, 18(10), 1238–1252. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2015.1036094 weststar, j., & dubois, l.-é. (2023). from crunch to grind: adopting servitization in project-based creative work. work, employment and society, 37(4), 972–990. https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170211061228 niemann-lenz-with or without the crowd the influence of coder characteristics-with or without the crowd the selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 with or without the crowd? the influence of coder characteristics on coding decisions comparing crowdworkers and traditional coders. julia niemann-lenz university of hamburg anja dittrich hanover university of music, drama, & media jule scheper hanover university of music, drama, & media research objective standardized content analysis is a prominent method in internet research; it is used, for example, to evaluate topics, tendencies, and sentiment of textual digital trace data, such as social media posts or comments. the importance of the method has even increased due to the demand of high-quality training data for text mining approaches based upon supervised machine learning. however, standardized content analyses are very time and resource-intensive, mainly due to the high demand for human resources. here, the process of coding1 is particularly critical: to obtain sufficient reliability, it is essential that all coders use the codebook in the same way (krippendorff, 2002). however, coders code under the conditions of a specific context, which is shaped by their individual characteristics, the coding situation, and the material to be coded (degen, 2015). notwithstanding the importance of the coding process, little research has been done on how coding should be optimally designed and how personal characteristics of the coders influence the coding results. 1 we use the term "coding" because it is common terminology in literature (e.g. krippendorff 2002). however, the considerations and results provided by our study are applicable to "annotating" as well, which is a corresponding task in computer science. suggested citation (apa): niemann-lenz, j., dittrich, a., scheper, j. (2023, october). with or without the crowd? the influence of coder characteristics on coding decisions comparing crowdworkers and traditional coders. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the issue raised above is intensified by the fact that an increasing number of studies rely on crowdworkers as coders (e.g., boxmann-shabtai 2021; budak, goel & rao 2016; hornik et al. 2022). this is reasonable, for crowdworkers are cost-effective and flexible in employment. however, in content analysis they bear substantial disadvantages: in addition to ethical aspects—such as the question of appropriate compensation for research work—the use of crowdworkers also exacerbate blind spots in the research process. in particular, the selection of suitable coders and the poor control of the coding process are to be mentioned. the employment of crowdworkers as coders should therefore not be undertaken without reflection. a first study evaluating the use of crowdworkers concludes that they offer a high potential for content analysis and that they do not perform significantly worse than classic offline coders (lind et al. 2017). however, the reliability coefficients reported there are by no means satisfactory according to common criteria. against this background, we investigate comparatively, in a sample of crowdworkers and student coders, which influence coder characteristics have on the validity and reliability of the coding results. specifically, we ask (a) how the quality of coding with crowdworkers compares to offline coders, and (b) how coder characteristics affect the quality of the data. our hypotheses relate to the difference between traditional coders and crowdworkers and to the influence of socio-demographic characteristics (age, gender, and formal education), personality traits (need for cognition and emotional sensitivity), and (3) coding tasks of varying difficulty. the results of the study help to eliminate the influence of confounding factors, e.g., by weighting or selecting coders to minimize systematic errors in the future. method to answer our research questions, we employed a mixed method design combining content analysis and survey. for the content analysis we picked a task that is common in internet research: the analysis of tweets. the example topic focused on the current debate about the legalization of abortion in germany. in addition to its typicality, relevance and topicality, this topic has further merits: it is controversial, so it allows for differing opinions, and it is complex so that variables with varying degrees of complexity can be elicited. moreover, the analysis of the rather short posts is a task that crowdworkers typically do as part of their job. the content analysis sample consists of 300 tweets that contain the term "abortion" and actually relate to the topic. the (very short) codebook includes variables that differ in terms of the interpretive effort to be made: (1) positioning (pro-abortion vs. anti-abortion or neutral), (2) emotional valence, (3) references to the current legal situation, and finally, as more formal aspects of the texts, the number of (4) question marks and (5) exclamation marks. the codebook was pretested and optimized in terms of wording. it was intentionally designed to be challenging in order to generate variance in the coding. initially, all tweets were coded by two researchers who discussed and reconciled their coding decisions. this reference data served as the gold standard. data was collected using an online questionnaire as an input mask. the survey contained questions on coder characteristics, short briefings, the codebook, and the tweets. the comparative study design involved conducting the same content analysis twice: in the first condition, four students who received a training coded the whole sample of 300 tweets. in the second condition, 150 crowdworkers were recruited via the platform clickworker. they coded 30 tweets each without a training. depending on their coding, the all coders received feedback every fifth tweet to ensure higher quality of coding decisions. in total, the study includes 28,500 coding decisions. all coders ere adequatly compensated, either in form of credit points (student coders) or with a monetary incentive (crowdworker). results our data analysis includes systematic comparison of established reliability coefficients (inter coder agreement and krippendorff's alpha) to obtain a comprehensive picture of the quality of coding in the different conditions. in addition, we matched the coding with the gold standard. further, we tested the influence of the coders' characteristics on the number of correct coding decisions by regression analysis. notably, the data comprises a complex dependency structure. the codings are nested in both: coders as well as tweets. hence, multi-level analysis was applied. descriptive findings imply that student coders and crowdworkers differ regarding validity and reliability. student coders performed better when compared to the gold standard, especially for the pro-abortion vs. anti-abortion categorization (83 vs. 74 percent compliance). overall, however, coding was found to be difficult regarding validity, as agreement with the gold standard is rather low in both groups (average 62 percent). in contrast, reliability is generally higher (average inter coder agreement: .78; average krippendoff's alpha = .73). notably, for the inter coder agreement and even more for krippendorff's alpha, student coders outperform crowdworkers (krippendoff's alphastudents = .83 vs. krippendoff's alphacrowdworker = .64). in conclusion, the results advocate the use of traditional coders for greater control of the coding process as well as intensive coding training. moreover, multivariate regression analysis indicate that the influence of the categories or variable types of varying difficulty is much stronger than the influence of the coder characteristics. this applies both to agreement with the gold standard and to inter-coder agreement. this result highlights the importance of conducting simple coding tasks, formulating categories precisely and choosing concise operationalizations—especially when working with crowdworkers. nevertheless, certain coder characteristics also positively determine coding results, this should be considered in the recruitment of coders. individuals with a high level of formal education and emotional sensitivity are to be preferred. further implications and recommendations were discussed at the conference. references boxman-shabtai, l. (2021). encoding polysemy in the news. journalism, 14648849211045964. https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849211045963 budak, c., goel, s., & rao, j. m. (2016). fair and balanced? quantifying media bias through crowdsourced content analysis. public opinion quarterly, 80(1), 250-271. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfw007 degen, m. (2015). codierer-effekte in inhaltsanalysen – ein vernachlässigtes forschungsfeld [coder effects in content analyses---a neglected field of research]. in w. wirth, k. sommer, m. wettstein & j. matthes (eds.), qualitätskriterien in der inhaltsanalyse [quality criteria in content analysis] (pp. 78-95). herbert von halem. hornik, r., binns, s., emery, s., epstein, v. m., jeong, m., kim, k., kim, y., kranzler, e. c., jesch, e., lee, s. j., levin, a. v., liu, j., o’donnell, m. b., siegel, l., tran, h., williams, s., yang, q., & gibson, l. a. (2022). the effects of tobacco coverage in the public communication environment on young people’s decisions to smoke combustible cigarettes. journal of communication, 72(2), 187–213. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqab052 krippendorff, k. (2002). content analysis. an introduction to its methodology (2nd. ed.). sage. lind, f., gruber, m., & boomgaarden, h. g. (2017). content analysis by the crowd: assessing the usability of crowdsourcing for coding latent constructs. communication methods and measures, 11(3), 191–209. https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2017.1317338 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): hayden, l., carah, n., robards, b., & dobson, a. (2024, october). screenshot methodologies to collect and analyse social media platform advertising. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. screenshot methodologies to collect and analyse social media platform advertising lauren hayden the university of queensland nicholas carah the university of queensland brady robards monash university amy dobson curtin university background digital advertising on social media platforms is hyper-targeted, ephemeral and emerges through complex processes of algorithmic curation. these three qualities render digital advertising largely unobservable to researchers, regulators and civil society. researchers have developed technical interventions to improve transparency of social media platform advertising such as ad observatories (burgess et al., 2022) and user data archives (keegan, 2024). while these interventions enable analysis of the digital advertising ecosystem, they also detach the experiences of individual users from their data. in an effort to explore how the ad model classifies and targets users, and how those users make sense of the ads they see, we leverage mobile screen capture as a data collection technique and as a basis for co-analysis with participants. in this paper, we present three projects that combine participatory and digital methods to study dark and ephemeral forms of digital advertising. in these approaches, participants are crucial to capturing ads and co-analysing the algorithmic flow of advertising situated within their own lives and cultural settings. each project invites participants to collect ads on social media platforms, either by taking screenshots on their smartphones (in the first two studies) or running a purpose-built, automated advertising collection app (in the third study). we then critically engage with screenshot methods as a form of digital advertising observability, as a prompt for co-analysis of data with participants, and as a mobilisation of contemporary forms of subjectivity. we reflect on the use of the ‘screenshot’ as an everyday practice of noticing, capturing, and co-analysing the otherwise fast-moving, dark and ephemeral digital feeds that immerse us. our studies in the first project, we explore young people’s experiences with and exposure to ‘harmful’ industry advertising (e.g., alcohol, fast food and gambling) on social media platforms. over the two-week data collection period, 204 australians aged 18 to 25 captured screenshots of 5169 digital ads. participants completed preand post-data collection surveys on attitudes toward digital advertising and reflected on their experience in the study through sms chats with the research team. the second project explores how digital alcohol advertising on social media platforms relates to nightlife and alcohol consumption practices. we recruited 30 young people to collect data in two contexts. first, they took screenshots of ads they saw for alcohol and reflected on their consumption practices over a month. afterwards, they interpreted their collected ads in an interview. second, informants invited two friends to also screenshot ads over a weekend while attending an event where they typically consume alcohol, such as a music festival, party, or night out at bars and clubs. we discussed their findings in a group interview and used the collected ads as prompts. the third study employs a mobile application which automatically captures ads from social media platforms as they appear within the users’ feed (obeid, 2024). this ongoing project explores where alcohol advertising materialises within flows of ads on social media platforms alongside other brands and products. participants, including author 1, collected digital advertising from facebook over one week. the automatic screen capture through the app ensures comprehensive collection of advertisements without relying on manual screenshotting and can detect nuances such as how long the ad was visible on the screen. although the screenshotting is automated, participants can review and remove images before choosing to send them. at the conclusion of data collection, participants and researcher reflect on the collected ads in individual sessions. screenshotting as a participatory method the participatory approach in each of these projects developed as the researchers collaborated on the work and reflected with each other. we contend that screenshot methodologies, exemplified in our three studies, are valuable because a) the participatory ethos of working with research participants to notice, collect, curate, and co-analyse their digital traces allows us to study material that is otherwise difficult to observe; b) participant consent and privacy are built-in to the approach; and c) through discussions we are able to reveal vernacular understandings of algorithmic models (i.e., ‘algorithmic gossip’ (bishop 2019)) and the relationship between users and patterns of content over time. the value of screenshotting as a method is that it captures dark and ephemeral advertising through an everyday practice of archiving and analysis. the research process leverages the everyday practice of capturing screenshots of digital feeds to send and discuss with friends (van der nagel, 2021) for research purposes. the screenshot serves as a form of platform observability that participants can practically undertake and ethically understand as a reflective and sense-making practice. as jaynes (2019) explains, screenshots operate as a form of ‘evidence’ in digital cultures and come with their own set of ethics and etiquette for different social groups. in both a research and everyday sense, screenshotting is a pragmatic response to the dark, fastmoving, and ephemeral character of digital feeds. if ads are only seen for a moment by the person targeted, then the screenshot is a tactic for collectively documenting and making sense of them. our approach builds on the scaffolded consent and participatory co-analysis in ‘scrollback’ methods (robards & lincoln 2017; møller & robards 2019). where the scrollback offers a mode for making sense of what is archived over time on participants’ personal profiles, the screenshot is a method for capturing and making sense of what isn’t archived (and indeed what is ignored or skipped over in the case of ads) in the increasingly live, customised and ephemeral flows of digital media platforms. in our conceptualisation of screenshot methodologies, consent is scaffolded up first through explanatory statements and informed consent processes, second through prompts and guidance around what should and should not be screenshotted (including training videos and on-boarding sessions), and then ultimately through what the participant decides to send us via sms (study 1), upload into the project folder (study 2), or agrees to be sent off (study 3). by facilitating observability of digital advertising, these methods generate a novel research object: collections of digital ads illustrating the output of social media platforms content curation models. as the platforms’ models respond to and endeavour to preempt user engagement with the platform, advertisements are dynamically generated, selected and curated. while users only typically see one post at a time, screen capture methods highlight patterns within digital content targeted to individual users. through our reflections with participants, we can understand how users make sense of processes of algorithmic curation and classification. conclusion and implications these three projects use screenshots to enable participatory data collection and analysis of digital advertising on social media platforms. discussions of how consent is scaffolded, the role of participants as co-analysts, and the ethics of what is captured and who is visible must be key to screenshot methodologies. while our focus has been on algorithmic advertising, screenshot methodologies can be applied in a range of research areas to understand an array of digitally mediated social phenomena. through our formulation of screenshot methodologies, we can begin to apprehend the ways individual users experience the datafication and commodification of themselves on social media platforms and how it is refracted back to them in the form of advertising. references bishop, s. (2019). managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip. new media & society, 21(11–12), 2589–2606. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819854731 burgess, j., andrejevic, m., angus, d., & obeid, a. k. (2022). australian ad observatory: background paper [report]. arc centre of excellence for automated decision-making and society. https://apo.org.au/node/318616 jaynes, v. (2020). the social life of screenshots: the power of visibility in teen friendship groups. new media & society, 22(8), 1378-1393. keegan, j. (2024, january 17). each facebook user is monitored by thousands of companies. the markup. https://themarkup.org/privacy/2024/01/17/eachfacebook-user-is-monitored-by-thousands-of-companies-study-indicates møller, k., & robards, b. (2019). walking through, going along and scrolling back: ephemeral mobilities in digital ethnography. nordicom review, 40(s1), 95-109. obeid a. (2024) australian mobile ad observatory. github. retrieved from: https://github.com/admscentre/mobile-ad-observatory phan, t., & wark, s. (2021). what personalisation can do for you! or, how to do racial discrimination without race. aoir selected papers of internet research. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2021i0.12261 risi, e., & pronzato, r. (2022). algorithmic prosumers. in e. armano, m. briziarelli, & e. risi (eds.), digital platforms and algorithmic subjectivities (pp. 149 – 165). university of westminster press. https://doi.org/10.16997/book54.l robards, b., & lincoln, s. (2017). uncovering longitudinal life narratives: scrolling back on facebook. qualitative research, 17(6), 715-730. van der nagel, e. (2021, december 7). the fluid and the fixed in digital intimacies: theorizing the screenshot as disruption and repair [conference presentation]. digital intimacies #7, brisbane, australia. https://apo.org.au/node/318616 https://themarkup.org/privacy/2024/01/17/each-facebook-user-is-monitored-by-thousands-of-companies-study-indicates https://themarkup.org/privacy/2024/01/17/each-facebook-user-is-monitored-by-thousands-of-companies-study-indicates https://doi.org/10.16997/book54.l microsoft word walker-viral health misinformation from geocities to covid-19-viral health misinformation from geocities to.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): roschke, k., simeone, m., walker, s., padejski, d., muldoon, a. (2022, november). viral health misinformation from geocities to covid-19. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. viral health misinformation from geocities to covid-19 kristy roschke arizona state university michael simeone arizona state university shawn walker arizona state university djordje padejski arizona state university anna muldoon arizona state university major brown arizona state university introduction in our current historical moment, we have witnessed a notorious proliferation of health misinformation about covid-19. nearly everyone, irrespective of their political leanings, can cite an example of what they perceive to be misinformation about the ongoing global pandemic. and this is exactly the point: everyone thinks there are falsehoods, but everyone cannot agree on what exactly the falsehoods are. this type of confusion is characteristic of successive waves of misinformation disrupting efforts to share information and coordinate a response to the pandemic. cable news video clips, social media, and radical forums on the web helped to conduct all kinds of conflicting narratives and conspiracies. the ways we find and use information have adapted to the current information landscape; there is no doubt we have access to more information than ever before, but whether we are better informed remains an open question. many of the circumstances surrounding the coronavirus pandemic are unique, however it is not the first public health crisis of the internet age. the significance of this moment in time led us to wonder if covid-19 misinformation practices can be connected to past public health crises. and if so, what can we learn about the role of internet technologies and ecologies in public health by studying this moment and those past? this paper began as an investigation into early internet technologies and their relationship to the aids crisis in the 1990s. we sought to examine information shared in early internet communities about the aids epidemic to find connections between information sharing practices then and today, during the global coronavirus pandemic. when communications technologies change at such a rapid pace, it can be tempting to examine problems only in their current context. examining health misinformation from a historical perspective, using an archive dataset of the popular 1990s and 200s online community geocities, widens our lens to better understand how people have been using technology to communicate important health information over time. this lens informed our research questions: • what purpose/use does information regarding hiv on geocities serve? • what characterizes the sensemaking practices of geocities users pertaining to the hiv epidemic? • did affordances of the platform hinder or accelerate this sensemaking? • what is the relationship between sensemaking and misinformation surrounding early hiv information posted on geocities? methods and findings when yahoo announced in 2009 that it would be shutting down geocities, several archive initiatives emerged to try to salvage as much of the content and community kept there as possible. these efforts have collectively captured a portion of the original geocities neighborhoods, which can offer insights that are representative of the community norms that emerged during its existence. researchers conducted a mixed methods analysis of two such archives, combining automated and manual search methods to refine the large dataset into pages related to hiv and aids and then conducting a keywords in context (kwic) examination to find commonly used terms and relationships between terms. a qualitative analysis of a smaller subset or relevant geocities pages further elucidated key themes and provided additional context for the quantitative efforts. contrary to the authors’ hypothesis, misinformation was not rampant in our dataset. instead, what we found were attempts at communal sensemaking created by individuals and organizations. as one of the earliest widely adopted online communities, geocities content creators used their self-published pages to share information about hiv and aids, which at the time were still surrounded by considerable confusion, misconceptions, and prejudice. researchers identified two primary main categories to describe the functions of the pages: o supportive. pages in the supportive category focused on disseminating information for treating hiv infection and symptoms. many of these pages referenced well-known health and medical experts and/or contained links to outside sources. o preventative. as in the supportive pages, the function of the preventative category was to compile and share information. in these pages, information focused on offering methods of preventing hiv infection; this included a mix of accurate information, such as safer sex practices, and incorrect prevention methods that, at times, seemed opportunistic. two less common but still prevalent categories found in the dataset are: o debunking. here, page authors address early misinformation or misconceptions about hiv in an attempt to debunk or correct it. the quality and veracity of that information varied, just as it does today. again, links to other sources found within the pages were mostly broken and not part of the analysis. o malevolent. the pages included in this group contained homophobic and hate-filled content, sometimes coupled with treatment and prevention “advice” that commonly frames hiv infection as a result of living a gay and high-risk lifestyle. misinformation was more likely to surface on these pages in the form of value judgments and prejudice. the four resulting categories found in our analysis help paint a picture of how geocities was used in the 1990s and early 2000s. content contained in the archives was used primarily for sensemaking activities; geocities’ neighborhood structure enabled people to communicate outside immediate real-world relationships but in a way that emphasized commonalities — whether these were proximal in a literal or figurative sense. it is unclear how interactive the geocities pages in the archive are since we do not have access to comments or links, but it is clear from the archive that geocities operated differently from other early forms of web user-generated content, namely bulletin board systems (bbs). instead of prioritizing conversation, geocities pages have more of a one-way communication composition, thus giving the author control over what is shared in a more formal way. many of the pages observed in the qualitative analysis were created by organizations—often from outside the u.s. — designed to share information and resources and promote events. the pages created by individuals often took on the same aesthetic of the knowledgeable resource provider. by framing a comparison between past and present dynamics of health misinformation online, we looked to early aids-related content on archived pages from the internet archive’s holdings for geocities. we hypothesized that given the many related hoaxes and myths circulating since the beginning of the aids epidemic, that early internet communities like geocities would be an obvious breeding ground for such misinformation, and would parallel or even anticipate the covid-19 misinformation pandemic. while the early web that we surveyed was not devoid of false information, very little material in our data—from linking practices to rhetoric—resembled contemporary practices in misinformation. the research team encountered some instances of false claims about hiv and aids or malevolent content, but they were few and far between in comparison to current understanding of how misinformation spreads online today. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): lastname, firstinitial. (2021, october). paper (or panel) title. paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. towards a multi-dimensional theory of temporal control in the gig economy chi kwok lingnan university, tuen mun, hong kong, china ngai keung chan the chinese university of hong kong, sha tin, hong kong, china introduction the last decade has witnessed a skyrocketing growth of the gig economy that relies on algorithmic technologies to manage and organize work (chen & sun, 2020; rosenblat, 2018; shapiro, 2018). time and space, meanwhile, are central to the organization of gig work due to its “on-demand” nature. on the one hand, labor platforms promise to liberate gig workers from traditional bureaucratic labor markets through flexibly scheduling. on the other hand, platforms rely on algorithms to direct and monitor workers’ spatial movement. highlighting the spatial triad of algorithmic surveillance, newlands (2020) argues that food delivery platforms rely on conceived space (i.e., abstract spatial representations generated by data such as digital maps) to exercise labor control, while ignoring workers’ lived experiences. as such, workers’ spatial agency is constrained by algorithmic management and information asymmetries (barratt et al., 2020). while much has been written about platform-based spatial control, the temporalities of labor control in the gig economy remain under-theorized. as chen and sun (2020) contend, “this research gap is somewhat ironic when considering the temporal dimensions connoted by terms like “on-demand service” and the “just-in-time” labor force” (p. 1563). chen and sun introduce the notion of “temporal arbitrage” to capture how chinese food couriers work in a fragmented and often opportunistic manner to meet customers’ temporal expectations. indeed, workers can experience time differently due to their economic and social status (gregg, 2011; sharma, 2014; wajcman, 2015) as well as platform-based socio-technical infrastructures. this paper proposes a multi-dimensional theory of temporal control in the gig economy. specifically, we focus on different types of platform-based temporal control and respective effects on workers’ autonomy, value of free time, and their social and political suggested citation (apa): kwok, c., and keung chang, n., (2021, october). towards a multi-dimensional theory of temporal control in the gig economy. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 connectedness. theoretically, we draw on the sociology of time (thompson, 1967; wajcman, 2015) and normative time literature in political theory (goodin, 2019; rose, 2016). empirically, the framework is primarily informed by the synthesis of the literature about algorithms in the gig economy, with particular attention to the methods of temporal control. meanwhile, we draw insights from a larger comparative project that examines algorithmic labor control and resistance across ride-hailing platforms (uber and lyft), taskrabbit, and delivery platforms (doordash, uber eats, and instacart) in the united states. the project interviewed 50 gig workers between 2017 and 2020. this paper contributes to understanding temporalities and work autonomy in the gig economy, and more broadly, flexible workplaces where the boundaries between work and non-work time become blurred (gregg, 2011). towards a multi-dimensional theory of temporal control below we briefly explicate the four components of the multi-dimensional theory of temporal control: (a) autonomy, (b) value of free time, (c) competitive vulnerability, and (d) opportunities for social and political participation. the first component is autonomy. temporal resources are a necessary condition of autonomy, meaning that the amount of time available for discretionary control defines one’s relative degree of freedom (goodin, 2009). within the context of the gig economy, temporal autonomy has to do with (a) what actionable information is available to workers when accepting an order; and (b) how labor platforms incentivize workers to accept tasks. for example, delivery platforms may withhold drop-off information from workers, rending workers to evaluate whether an order is worthy of their time and labor. additionally, ride-hailing platforms may rely on their algorithmic pricing system and techniques of gamification to incentivize drivers work in a particular area and time period (rosenblat, 2018). the second component is the value of free time. anderson (2017, p. 136) calls the short duration of free time available between two job duties “unpaid junk time”. short intervals between multiple on-demand duties are common in the gig economy, while free time structured in such way can hardly be utilized meaningfully. for example, the interview data shows that taskrabbit workers tended to avoid scheduling back-to-back appointments, partly because clients could request for changes in the task at the last minute. as one of the interviewees shared, “i’ll try to schedule my clients with a little bit of a buffer between, but i also want to maximize how many jobs i’m working in a day … i don’t want to be standing around for an hour doing nothing.” the “free” time in between appointments is unpaid yet necessary for workers to maintain their employability on the platform. the third component is competitive vulnerability. workers’ vulnerability is exemplified in their need to comply with the design of the temporal system as well as unpredictable customer demand. in other words, they have to constantly adjust their temporal arrangements in order to fit others’ expectations. chen and sun (2020) argues that “the combination of the visibility of the wait time and the expectation of on-demand service can lead customers to rush the rider or to cancel the order” (p. 1568). our interview findings also show that waiting is an essential part of ride-hailing and delivery drivers’ work experiences. platforms, meanwhile, deploy algorithmic metrics (e.g., on-time/early rate on doordash) to punish workers who fail to meet the estimated time of arrival. workers are placed in a vulnerable position to rationalize customer-oriented temporal expectations. the fourth component is social and political participation. non-standard work hours— including weekend work—is a common feature of the gig economy. rose (2016) has shown that collective actions require collective free time, and collective free time is free time that members of the society know that one another would be collectively free. this component critically assesses (a) how scheduling practices may disrupt such temporal coordination in the gig economy and (b) how workers attempt to overcome individualization during their work and non-work hours (tassinari & maccarrone, 2020). overall, we aim to highlight the different aspects of wrongs and injustices workers experienced in prevalent forms of temporal control in the gig economy. references anderson, e. (2017). private government: how employers rule our lives (and why we don’t talk about it). princeton university press. barratt, t., goods, c., & veen, a. (2020). ‘i’m my own boss…’: active intermediation and ‘entrepreneurial’ worker agency in the australian gig-economy. environment and planning a: economy and space, 52(8), 1643-1661. chen, j. y., & sun, p. (2020). temporal arbitrage, fragmented rush, and opportunistic behaviors: the labor politics of time in the platform economy. new media & society, 22(9), 1561-1579. goodin, r. e. (2009). temporal justice. journal of social policy, 39(1), 1-16. gregg, m. (2011). work’s intimacy. polity. newlands, g. (2020). algorithmic surveillance in the gig economy: the organization of work through lefebvrian conceived space. organization studies. advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840620937900 rose, j. (2016). free time. princeton university press. rosenblat, a. (2018). uberland: how algorithms are rewriting the rules of work. university of california press. shapiro, a. (2018). between autonomy and control: strategies of arbitrage in the “ondemand” economy. new media & society, 20(8), 2954-2971. sharma, s. (2014). in the meantime: temporality and cultural politics. duke university press. tassinari, a., & maccarrone, v. (2020). riders on the storm: workplace solidarity among gig economy couriers in italy and the uk. work, employment and society, 34(1), 35-54. thompson, e. p. (1967). time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism. past & present, 38(1), 56-97. wajcman, j. (2015). pressed for time: the acceleration of life in digital capitalism. the university of chicago press. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): eschmann, r., guo, l., groshek, j., copeland, p., and rochefort, a. (2022, november). uncivil for civil rights: a machine learning and qualitative analysis of incivility in the twitterbased conversation about black lives matter. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. uncivil for civil rights: a machine learning and qualitative analysis of incivility in the twitter-based conversation about black lives matter rob eschmann columbia university lei guo fudan university jacob groshek kansas state university philipe copeland boston university alex rochefort boston university introduction the movement for black lives, a social movement geared towards ending police violence against unarmed blacks (among numerous other racial, gender, and economic calls for equity) is one of the most prominent social movements of the 21st century, more commonly known by the #blacklivesmatter hashtag. representative of a new form of social engagement, many view the movement for black lives as being our most promising example of the way marginalized people have used technology to resist oppression using the tools of the oppressor (brock, 2012; hill, 2018). however, the internet remains a vast communicative forum where explicit expressions of racism are still common and often anonymous. this content and its underlying behavior are often explained by the online disinhibition effect (lapidot-lefler & barak, 2012), which refers to the tendency for online communications to be more hostile and less civil than face-to-face communication. therefore, this paper seeks to clarify the overarching research question of: how does the online disinhibition effect shape communication and interaction about the movement for black lives on social media? reviewing the online disinhibition effect while the online disinhibition effect was conceptualized before the development of contemporary social media platforms, much of the research encompassing the online disinhibition effect deals with the anonymity-related dimensions of online self-disclosure (hollenbaugh & everett, 2013) and harassment and bullying (udris, 204; wachs & wright, 2018; wright et al., 2019). unpacking incivility on the internet and mobile devices papacharissi (2004) defines incivility as “a set of behaviors that threaten democracy, deny people their personal freedoms, and stereotype social groups” (p. 267). anderson & huntington (2017) identify all of the following as examples of incivility: “name-calling, mockery, negative character exaggerations through spin, or the attachment of negative emotion to another person” (p. 600). despite scholarly interest in civility, relatively little work has been done regarding civility on mobile devices. mobile phones have provided expanded opportunity for disturbing forms of political dysfunction (groshek & cutino, 2016). this topic is the primary focus of the present research. methods in carrying out this inquiry, public content from twitter was collected through the boston university twitter collection and analysis toolkit (bu-tcat) that handshakes with the twitter streaming api (borra & rieder, 2014) on an ongoing basis and that has archived over 375 million tweets to date (groshek, 2014). while the bu-tcat does not collect every tweet posted, this open-source software nonetheless captures customizable samples of public tweets and output has been shown to be generalizable to twitter content more broadly (gerlitz & reider, 2013). using this interface, one year’s worth (5/1/15 to 5/1/2016) of tweets and accompanying metadata were downloaded for two distinct areas: (1) genetically modified organisms (gmo), and (2) black lives matter (blm). the rationale in engaging these topics were simply on the basis that both were high on the agendas of mainstream and social media at the time of data collection, but they do not conceptually overlap explicitly in the political arena. using the bu-tcat keyword search facility, gmo data comprised a total of 775,943 tweets. data for the blm consisted of 1,945,494 tweets. only english tweets were considered in this study. coding for incivility one key dependent variable in this study is incivility. previous work (e.g., papacharissi, 2004) defined uncivil utterance as that containing (1) personal or inflammatory attacks, (2) threats, (3) vulgarities, abusive or foul language, (4) xenophobic or other hateful language or expressions, or (5) epithets or ethnic slurs, sentiments that are racist or bigoted, and/or disparaging on the basis of race/ethnicity or that assign stereotypes. due to the large volume of datasets, we applied a dictionary-based text analysis approach and operationalized uncivil tweet as it contains one or more uncivil terms that are vulgar, abusive, foul, xenophobic, hateful, racist or bigoted. to build a dictionary of an exhaustive list of uncivil terms, we started with the one used in wang et al.’s (2014) study in which the authors collected cursing and uncivil words on social media from a comprehensive list of sources. new words and abbreviations were added to reflect the current trend of cursing on twitter. a tweet will be coded as “uncivil” if it includes one of the terms provided in the updated dictionary. the other key variable was extracted from a metadata field available through the butcat identified as “source” that made it possible for determining if a tweet originated from a mobile (phone or table) or fixed web (laptop or desktop pc) device. tweets that were posted from other sources such as “facebook” and “hootsuite,” which do not indicate mobile versus non-mobile devices, were removed from the analysis. in total, 1,636,744 tweets were included in the final blm dataset, representing 84.13% of the original dataset with all twitter sources. for the gmo dataset, 479,921 tweets (61.85%) were included in the final analysis. unsupervised learning for coding topics to better understand how mobile and non-mobile users discussed gmo or blm differently on twitter, we applied an unsupervised topic modeling approach (guo et al., 2016) to identify salient topics inherent in the tweets that originated from mobile and non-mobile devices, respectively. the unsupervised approach is based on the latent dirichlet allocation (lda) model (blei, ng, & jordan, 2003), a statistical tool for automatically discovering latent thematic structure or topics. findings out of all the 1,636,744 tweets related to the subject of black lives matter (see table 1), 1,241,618 originated from mobile devices, representing 75.87% of the population, and the rest were from non-mobile devices. out of all the mobile-generated tweets, 80,577 contained uncivil expression, with the percentage (6.49%) about twice as much as in non-mobile tweets (3.76%). as for the gmo dataset (see table 2), 287,951 out of 479,921 tweets were generated from mobile devices, which account for 60.0% of all the tweets. the percentage of uncivil tweets appeared to be smaller compared with that in the blm dataset. 2.41% of the tweets contained uncivil terms in mobile-generated tweets, while 1.03% of nonmobile tweets were considered uncivil. qualitative analysis our findings yielded seven thematic codes, which can be seen in table 3. while most of the themes showed up in similar percentages across the mobile and nonmobile datasets, two notable exceptions are 1) the supporting blm theme, which made up 22% of nonmobile but 34% of mobile tweets, and 2) the overtly racist / all lives matter theme, which was twice as likely to be used in the nonmobile dataset (26%) as the mobile dataset (13%). discussion this study uses a combination of machine-learning and fine-tuned qualitative analysis to explore the online disinhibition effect in twitter-based discourse around #blacklivesmatter. we find that uncivil language is more common in conversations about black lives matter than conversations about gmos. in addition, this study breaks new ground in explicating the online disinhibition effect in the context of justice-oriented conversations and through different mediums (mobile vs nonmobile). one noticeable pattern for both conversations is that people tended to share breaking news, conflicts, and content more relevant to their lives on the go, while choosing to use fixed devices when they had to discuss more serious issues and problems. our findings may suggest that the mobile use of social media platforms not only stimulates more uncivil conservations, but also conversations that are sensational and superficial. given most twitter users are mobile, results of the study reinforced the belief that twitter may not be an ideal platform for democratic discourse. references anderson, a. a., & huntington, h. e. (2017). social media, science, and attack discourse: how twitter discussions of climate change use sarcasm and incivility. science communication, 39(5), 598–620. https://doi.org/10.1177/1075547017735113 blei, d. m., ng, a. y., & jordan, m. i. (2003). latent dirichlet allocation. journal of machine learning research, 3, 993–1022. brock, a. (2012). from the blackhand side: twitter as a cultural conversation. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 56(4), 529–549. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2012.732147 guo, l., vargo, c., pan, z., ding, w., & ishwar, p. (2016). big social data analytics in journalism and mass communication: comparing dictionary-based text analysis and unsupervised topic modeling. journalism & mass communication quarterly, 93(2), 332– 359. hill, m. l. (2018). “thank you, black twitter”: state violence, digital counterpublics, and pedagogies of resistance. urban education, 53(2), 286–302. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042085917747124 hollenbaugh, e., & everett, m. (2013). the effects of anonymity on self-disclosure in blogs: an application of the online disinhibition effect. journal of computer-mediated communication,18(3), 283-302. lapidot-lefler, n., & barak, a. (2012). effects of anonymity, invisibility, and lack of eyecontact on toxic online disinhibition. computers in human behavior, 28(2), 434–443. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2011.10.014 papacharissi, z. (2004). democracy online: civility, politeness, and the democratic potential of online political discussion groups. new media & society, 6, 259–283. udris, r. (2014). cyberbullying among high school students in japan: development and validation of the online disinhibition scale. computers in human behavior, 41(c), 253261. wachs, s., & wright, m. (2018). associations between bystanders and perpetrators of online hate: the moderating role of toxic online disinhibition. international journal of environmental research and public health, 15(9). wang, w., chen, l., thirunarayan, k., & sehth, a. p. (2014). cursing in english on twitter. proceedings of the 17th acm conference on computer supported cooperative work & social computing. presented at the acm. wright, m. f., harper, b. d., & wachs, s. (2019). the associations between cyberbullying and callous-unemotional traits among adolescents: the moderating effect of online disinhibition. personality and individual differences, 140, 41–45. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2018.04.001 table 1: “topics” in twitter coverage of black lives matter mobile tweets: “topic” and associated words label 1 activist, arrest, call, charlestonshoot, creat, ferguson, group, hate, hillari, love, media, protest, racism, racist, ralli, shit, support, tcot, terrorist, trump, white activism/protests (e.g., charleston shooting, ferguson unrest) + political candidates for the 2016 u.s. election 2 believ, can, cold, confirm, cop, forget, heart, just, justice, justiceformonroebird, knew, monroebird, peopl, realli, sandrabland, sayhernam, see, still, tell, wrong, wtf the #sayhername campaign 3 berni, beyonc, come, dai, death, great, kill, messag, movement, name, new, old, power, protest, real, rememb, sander, shut, stand, start, time, todai, video sanders and beyoncé on blm 4 alllivesmatt, black, fight, folk, fuck, know, life, like, live, matter, mean, peopl, rainforest, sai, save, think, try black lives matter vs. all lives matter 5 america, american, black, brutal, call, case, cop, even, happen, hear, help, import, man, mckinnei, murder, need, never, now, offic, pleas, polic, right, sad, shot, stop, thing, unarm police brutality against african american people non-mobile tweets: “topic” and associated words label 1 call, group, hate, know, leader, make, media, movement, never, obama, race, see, start, tcot, terrorist, thug, want, white, will obama on blm 2 anoth, arrest, baltimor, black, blacktwitt, chicago, cop, death, kill, life, man, mckinnei, murder, offic, old, polic, rememb, shoot, shot, tamirric, women, year black twitter + blm protests in multiple places 3 america, american, can, charlestonshoot, dai, fight, happen, help, just, love, march, must, need, new, now, nyc, pleas, racism, racist, read, right, stand, take, thank, time, today, truth, video, watch fight against racism in america 4 activist, attack, berni, candid, clinton, feelthebern, ferguson, good, hillari, protest, ralli, right, sander, show, shut, support, talk, trump, video, vote political candidates for the 2016 u.s. election 5 alllivesmatt, believ, black, come, demand, folk, fuck, investing, justic, know, like, live, matter, mean, need, people, realli, sai, sandrabland, sayhernam, tell, think, time black lives matter vs. all lives matter + the #sayhername campaign table 2: “topics” in twitter coverage of gmo mobile tweets: “topic” and associated words label 1 antibiot, carb, enjoi, fat, final, free, gluten, low, meal, non, nongmo, organ, raw, settl, soi, vegan viral tweet: “enjoying my vegan, gluten free, non gmo, soy free, antibiotics free, raw, organic, fat free, low carb meal.” 2 act, bill block, boycott, bui, call, consum, countr, fight, food, help, know, label, law, live, mandator, product, right, righttoknow, state, stop, support, vote, want, will house passes bill to prevent mandatory gmo food labeling 3 anti, beer, berni, big, don, even, farm, isi, kill, let, make, monsanto, need, peopl, poison, pro, protect, scienc, take, tell, world sanders on gmo, farming and monsanto 4 can, cancer, caus, dai, eat, fact, feed, food, gaga, genet, get, ladi, like, love, modify, money, natur, oscar, safe, think, time, year gmo’s linkage to cancer 5 farmer, glyphos, health, just, million, monsanto, new, now, pesticide, plant, roundup, sai, seed, show, studi, talk health problems linked to monsanto's roundup non-mobile tweets: “topic” and associated words label 1 america, big, bring, clean, cleanfood, food, gmofre, gpdb, healthi, isbad, know, let, look, non, now, offer, organ, partner, right, secret, sell, tpp, trade the tpp and global trade of gmos 2 act, bill , block, boycott, call, company, congress, dark, darkact, hous, know, label, labelgmo, law, mandator, new , pass, petit, product, protect, requir, righttoknow, sai, senat, sign, state, stop, support, tell, vote, will house passes bill to prevent mandatory gmo food labeling 3 antibiot, can, carb, dai, don, eat, farm, fat, free, get, gluten, help, just, like, low, make, meal, non, nongmo, organ, pleas, raw, safe, salmon, soi, vegan, win viral tweet: “enjoying my vegan, gluten free, non gmo, soy free, antibiotics free, raw, organic, fat free, low carb meal.” 4 ban, cancer, caus, contamin, corn, crop, end, environ, farmer, genet, glyphos, health, modifi, new, pesticid0, plant, roundup, seed, studi, usda gmo’s linkage to cancer and other health and environmental problems 5 anti, berni, countri, hillari, kill, monsanto, need, peopl, poison, pro, scienc, take,.vaccin, world, year sanders and clinton on gmo table 3 themes in uncivil blm conversation codes nonmobile mobile # of tweets % of tweets # of tweets % of tweets supporting blm 236 22% 156 34% challenging blm 140 13% 67 15% overtly racist / anti-blm 275 26% 61 13% popular culture and media / fake activism 28 3% 22 5% learning/education about blm 89 8% 50 11% solutions, raising awareness to blm 52 5% 22 5% activism/blm in media 215 20% 78 17% clickbait / other unrelated 38 3% 0 0% total 1073 100.00% 456 100% selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): bartol, j., vehovar, v., & petrovčič, a. (2023, october). antecedents of privacy protection behaviors at the vertical and horizontal levels. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. antecedents of privacy protection behaviors at the vertical and horizontal levels jošt bartol university of ljubljana vasja vehovar university of ljubljana andraž petrovčič university of ljubljana introduction online privacy is an important matter for internet users, and concerns about its loss may cause them to refrain from online activities (baruh et al., 2017). one way internet users can reduce potential threats to their privacy is by adjusting their privacy settings or using privacy enhancing software (park, 2013; trepte, 2021; youn, 2009). such privacy protection behaviors (ppbs) depend on socio-demographic characteristics and digital engagement because individuals’ social roles and life stage determine their privacy needs (epstein & quinn, 2020; laufer & wolfe, 1977; petronio, 2002). ppbs also depend on individuals’ appraisal of and ability to cope with a potential and/or actual threat (li, 2012; rogers, 1983). research has shown that privacy concerns (threat appraisal) and online privacy literacy (opl; coping ability) are two important factors that increase the frequency and diversity of ppbs, and that opl might moderate the influence of privacy concerns on ppbs because a certain level of literacy is required to understand privacy threats and employ appropriate protective measures (li, 2012; ortloff et al., 2021; schubert et al., 2022). although previous research has examined antecedents of ppbs, it has rarely made clear distinctions and comparisons between the contexts in which different privacy threats arise in (ortloff et al., 2021; epstein & quinn, 2020; masur et al., 2021; yun et al., 2019). this is a somewhat surprising omission, as context plays a major role in individuals’ privacy perceptions and behaviors (nissenbaum, 2010). bazarova and masur (2020) suggested that researchers should take these differences into account, proposing a distinction between two major contextual units relevant to privacy: the horizontal level, which includes individuals’ relationships with other internet users (acquaintances and strangers), and the vertical level, which includes individuals’ relationships with institutions (companies and governments). given this gap in the literature, it is important to compare the same set of antecedents at the general (i.e., where contextual specifics are omitted), vertical, and horizontal levels and investigate potential differences in their effects on ppbs among levels. thus, this study examined how socio-demographic characteristics, digital engagement, privacy concerns, and opl influence ppbs at the general, vertical, and horizontal levels, and assessed whether opl moderates the influence of privacy concerns on ppbs (figure 1). accordingly, two research questions (rqs) were posed: (1) how do socio-demographic characteristics, digital engagement, privacy concerns, and opl influence ppbs at the general, vertical, and horizontal levels?; and (2) how does opl affect the potential influence of privacy concerns on ppbs at the general, vertical, and horizontal levels? figure 1 model of privacy protection behaviors method to answer the rqs, we tested three linear regression models on a nation-wide sample of 1,015 internet users aged 18+ from slovenia. respondents were recruited from the largest slovenian access panel. the data were collected by means of a web survey in october 2022. opl was measured using the online privacy literacy scale (masur et al., 2017), vertical and horizontal privacy concerns using scales from masur (2019), and vertical and horizontal ppbs using scales from epstein and quinn (2020). questions on socio-demographic characteristics and digital engagement were adapted from blank and oxis (2019). the items were translated by one author and an assistant, reviewed by experts, and assessed for clarity by five internet users. the validity of the measures was confirmed through confirmatory factor analyses (kline, 2015). items were then averaged to obtain scale scores. to obtain scores for general privacy concerns and ppbs, the vertical and horizontal scales for each were averaged. three regression models were tested for each type of ppbs (general, vertical, and horizontal): (1) sociodemographic characteristics (i.e., gender, age, income, education) and digital engagement (i.e., ubiquity of access—measured as the number of devices used to access the internet—and the number of different social media used); (2) sociodemographic characteristics, digital engagement, privacy concerns, and opl; and (3) socio-demographic characteristics and digital engagement, privacy concerns, opl, and the interaction term between privacy concerns and opl. results regarding rq1, the results showed that age had a negative and number of social media used a positive effect on ppbs at all levels, while income had a negative and ubiquity of access a positive effect on general and horizontal ppbs. gender had no effect on general ppbs, although females were more likely than males to engage in horizontal ppbs, but less likely to engage in vertical ppbs. education had no effect. privacy concerns and opl both had a statistically significant positive influence on ppbs at all levels (general, vertical, and horizontal). comparisons of regression coefficients among levels revealed statistically significant differences between the effects of gender, age, and privacy concerns on ppbs at the vertical compared to the horizontal levels. with reference to rq2, the results suggested that opl does not moderate the effects of privacy concerns on pbbs at any level. discussion and conclusion this study examined the differences in antecedents of ppbs at the general, vertical, and horizontal levels (rq1). it revealed that examining ppbs only at the general level obscures important differences in the effects of the same variables on ppbs at the vertical and horizontal levels. in terms of socio-demographic characteristics, the analysis showed that males have higher levels of vertical ppbs but lower levels of horizontal ppbs, and that age has a stronger influence on horizontal than on vertical ppbs. these findings are consistent with the literature which suggests that males and females have different perceptions of what should be kept private (petronio, 2002), while younger people have different privacy needs than older people (laufer & wolfe, 1977). furthermore, privacy concerns had a stronger influence on ppbs at the horizontal than at the vertical level. this suggests that horizontal privacy concerns are more easily translated into protection from other internet users, presumably because related privacy protections are more readily available and easier to employ compared to privacy protections against institutions (heyman et al., 2014). interestingly, no significant differences were found in the effect of opl on ppbs across levels. this implies that if people are more privacy-literate they protect their privacy more generally (masur, 2020). we also examined the potential moderating effects of opl on the effect of privacy concerns on ppbs at different levels (rq2). however, contrary to some previous research (ortloff et al., 2021; schubert et al., 2022), no significant moderating effects were found. nevertheless, the absence of moderation instills optimism, as it suggests that greater concerns lead directly to protective actions, irrespective of users’ opl. this study extends previous research by comparing the antecedents of ppbs between the general, vertical, and horizontal levels. findings suggest that although users often engage with both other users and institutions in the same online environment (e.g., social media platforms), vertical and horizontal levels should still be examined separately, as the nuances of each level are otherwise obfuscated. future research could explore differences between the vertical and horizontal level further, possibly incorporating additional factors such as personality traits or cultural characteristics, investigating specific e-services, or extending the comparisons to other privacy behaviors. such endeavors are important because the online environment is a complex socio-technical system, and a holistic understanding of internet users’ privacy-related behaviors requires systematic and comparative analyses of different online contexts. references baruh, l., secinti, e., & cemalcilar, z. (2017). online privacy concerns and privacy management: a meta-analytical review. journal of communication, 67(1), 26–53. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12276 bazarova, n. n., & masur, p. k. (2020). towards an integration of individualistic, networked, and institutional approaches to online disclosure and privacy in a networked ecology. current opinion in psychology, 36, 118–123). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2020.05.004 blank, g., & oxis (2019). questionnaire. all parts (january 30, 2019). available at ssrn: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3522118 epstein, d., & quinn, k. (2020). markers of online privacy marginalization: empirical examination of socioeconomic disparities in social media privacy attitudes, literacy, and behavior. social media and society, 6(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120916853 heyman, r., de wolf, r., & pierson, j. (2014). evaluating social media privacy settings for personal and advertising purposes. info, 16(4), 18–32. https://doi.org/10.1108/info-01-2014-0004 kline, r. b. (2015). principles and practice of structural equation modeling. guilford press. laufer, r., & wolfe, m. (1977). privacy as a concept and a social issue: a multidimensional developmental theory. journal of social issues 33(3), 22–41. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1977.tb01880.x li, y. (2012). theories in online information privacy research: a critical review and an integrated framework. decision support systems, 54(1), 471–481. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dss.2012.06.010 masur, p. k. (2019). situational privacy and self-disclosure: communication processes in online environments. springer international publishing. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78884-5 https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12276 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2020.05.004 https://ssrn.com/abstract=3522118 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120916853 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1977.tb01880.x https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dss.2012.06.010 https://doi.org/https:/doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78884-5 masur, p. k. (2020). how online privacy literacy supports self-data protection and selfdetermination in the age of information. media and communication, 8(2), 258– 269. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v8i2.2855 masur, p. k., epstein, d., quinn, k., wilhelm, c., baruh, l., & lutz, c. (2021). a comparative privacy research framework. socarxiv. https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/fjqhs/ masur, p. k., teutsch, d., & trepte, s. (2017). entwicklung und validierung der onlineprivatheitskompetenzskala (oplis). diagnostica, 63(4), 256–268. https://doi.org/10.1026/0012-1924/a000179 nissenbaum, h. (2010). privacy in context: technology, policy, and the integrity of social life. stanford university press. ortloff, a.-m., zimmerman, s., elsweiler, d., & henze, n. (2021). the effect of nudges and boosts on browsing privacy in a naturalistic environment. in: proceedings of the 2021 conference on human information interaction and retrieval (pp. 63– 73). association for computing machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3406522.3446014 park, y. j. (2013). digital literacy and privacy behavior online. communication research, 40(2), 215–236. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650211418338 petronio, s. (2002). boundaries of privacy: dialectics of disclosure. suny press. rogers, r. w. (1983). cognitive and physiological processes in fear appeals and attitude change: a revised theory of protection motivation. in j. cacioppo & r. petty (eds.), social psychophysiology (pp. 153–177). guilford press. schubert, r., marinica, i., mosetti, l., & bajka, s. (2022). mitigating the privacy paradox through higher privacy literacy? insights from a lab experiment based on facebook data. collegium helveticum. https://collegium.ethz.ch/wpcontent/uploads/2022/05/schubert-marinica-mosetti-bajka-mitigating-theprivacy-paradox2.pdf trepte, s. (2021). the social media privacy model: privacy and communication in the light of social media affordances. communication theory, 31(4), 549–570. https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtz035 youn, s. (2009). determinants of online privacy concern and its influence on privacy protection behaviors among young adolescents. journal of consumer affairs, 43(3), 389–418. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6606.2009.01146.x yun, h., lee, g., & kim, d. j. (2019). a chronological review of empirical research on personal information privacy concerns: an analysis of contexts and research https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v8i2.2855 https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/fjqhs/ https://doi.org/10.1026/0012-1924/a000179 https://doi.org/10.1145/3406522.3446014 https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650211418338 https://collegium.ethz.ch/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/schubert-marinica-mosetti-bajka-mitigating-the-privacy-paradox2.pdf https://collegium.ethz.ch/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/schubert-marinica-mosetti-bajka-mitigating-the-privacy-paradox2.pdf https://collegium.ethz.ch/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/schubert-marinica-mosetti-bajka-mitigating-the-privacy-paradox2.pdf https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtz035 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6606.2009.01146.x constructs. information & management, 56(4), 570–601. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2018.10.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2018.10.001 aoir2023-web histories-submission deanonymized selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 web histories in the making: web archives & the logics of practice johannes paßmann ruhr university bochum lisa gerzen ruhr university bochum martina schories ruhr university bochum jessica ogden university of bristol emily maemura university of illinois urbana-champaign katie mackinnon university of toronto historically-situated accounts of the web have a long history within the field of internet studies. drawing on diverse methodologies and forms of data, web histories of platforms, cultures and communities of practice have illuminated the rich, but often transient and shifting nature of life online. many web histories rely upon researchers capturing, collecting, and generating their own data through time, though some have also engaged with web archives like the internet archive wayback machine as a means for studying the past online. web archives, and their underlying data, align themselves with the promise of ‘data revolutions’ (kitchin 2014) and so-called ‘big data’ for studying social and cultural worlds, allowing researchers to develop large-scale, longitudinal and ‘multi-layered’ approaches to platform historiographies (helmond and van der vlist suggested citation (apa): paßmann, j, gerzen, l, schories, m., ogden, j., maemura, e., mackinnon, k. (2023, october).web histories in the making: web archives & the logics of practice. panel presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 1 2019; bruns and weller 2016). while archives maintain a widespread preoccupation with scale, abundance and ‘plentitude’ of collections, and collection activities (de kosnik 2016), these data continue to be underutilised in internet research. critical engagement with the nature and validity of web archives as historical sources has begun to be addressed by various researchers engaged in (what could be called) web archive criticism. web archive criticism has identified the opportunities and limitations of web archives as data (rogers 2017; brügger 2018). studies have shown how web archives are fundamentally shaped by the infrastructures of web archiving (summers and punzalan 2017; ben-david and amram 2018; webster 2017; dougherty and meyer 2014; hegarty 2022b; ogden, summers, and walker 2023), the practices that produce web archives (summers 2020; ogden, halford, and carr 2017) and the ‘archivability’ of the web (kelly et al. 2013; banos and manolopoulos 2016). this form of source criticism is further complicated by the sociotechnical complexity of web archives (ben-david and huurdeman 2014; brügger 2012; rogers 2017), often making it difficult for researchers to address the provenance of data (maemura et al. 2018), or trace back the decision-making processes to a single cause. we contend that web archive criticism has to be taken seriously: web archive data have never fulfilled the requirements of positivist ideals such as ‘representativeness’ (hegarty 2022a) or objectivity, and the methodological consequences of this observation currently do not go far enough. this panel aims to shift and reframe current discussions of the ‘promise’ of web archives for web historiography, towards identifying what underlying logics or ideals drive and motivate various actors engaged in this work. we argue that not only do the logics underpinning the practices of collecting and archiving the web deserve further attention, but also the practices of internet researchers who aim to use these materials for studying the web. in doing so, we focus our discussion on what follows from web archive criticism: is the result that web archive data is fundamentally different, or do we also need new ways of studying and conceptualising this difference in a qualitative way? the first paper presents a “history of web histories” to reconstruct which ideals accompany research methods and practices of web historians, including the ways that scholars have addressed the perceived flaws in web archive data and the implications they have for tools and the positioning of methodological ideals. the second, examines the underlying logics that drive ‘crisis collection’ in web archiving, critically engaging how these logics often mask the complex power asymmetries and values at play when archiving is deployed at scale in the face of a ‘dying platform’. the third shows that practices of web archiving are shaped by path-dependent, material logics of the pre-platform web, resulting in procedures that do not account for more recent characterizations of the web according to platform-specific affordances, 2 vernaculars, and sensibilities. and the fourth proposes a method that is concerned with the question of how one can reconstruct practices through and with archived materials. here ‘archive promenades’ provide a view into how people hold attachments to archived web materials in various ways that are often unpredictable. each paper contribution in this panel builds on web archive criticism by situating archived web material as fundamentally tied to the logics of practice. these underpinnings affect not only the formation of web archives, but also the methodological approaches researchers take. we therefore suggest new ways for conceptualising the ‘doing’ of web histories, tying them to an assemblage of people, practice and data that shape how we can come to understand the web. a history of web histories: development of web archival research methods, tools, and their ideals johannes paßmann ruhr university bochum lisa gerzen ruhr university bochum martina schories ruhr university bochum this paper wants to foster a discussion on methods in web archiving and its research practices by reconstructing its methodological ideals: to a certain degree, every archive is shaped and structured by ideals of archiving. its practices differ from the ideals (ogden 2022), however, ideals affect practices insofar, as they are hic et nunc solutions oriented towards ideal solutions that are unattainable within a given situation. this is not only the case for practices of archiving, but also for their research practices: it makes a difference, whether the non-representativeness of web archives (brügger 2012) is understood as an obstacle towards ideally representative web archive studies, or whether one rejects ideals such as representativity or objectivity of archived material and considers incompleteness or non-representativity as constitutive features of archived web data. we argue that ideals of web archiving do not only shape and structure archiving, but also studies in web histories. thus, rather than proposing new ideals for web archiving and web histories, we want to reconstruct their ideals retrospectively by analysing a broad range of documents and artefacts; most specifically 1) public accounts of web archives, 2) scholarly publications in web histories, and 3) research tools designed to work with web archive data. thereby, we differentiate between ideals from quantitative 3 social sciences, namely representativity and objectivity on the one hand, and ideals from qualitative studies on the other hand, which can be summarised as ‘contribution to a theoretical question’ or short: theory. public accounts of web archives ever since web archives started capturing websites in the 1990s, researchers from a broad range of disciplines have emphasised the potential of these new data suddenly available. the promise of ‘rogue archives’ (de kosnik 2016) challenging the logics of selection of other historical sources and large amounts of data being freely available to do research with, implied a great chance for various disciplines. the potential is said to have grown even more with the world wide web playing an increasingly central role in our everyday lives, making what is happening online seemingly even more important (meyer et al. 2017). the internet archive, which hosts the largest collection of archived web pages, reflects on its legitimacy with a comparison to other media whose need for archiving has been viewed as self-evident for a long time: ‘like newspapers, the content published was ephemeral – but unlike newspapers, no one was saving it’ (‘internet archive: about ia’ n.d.). the goal was to archive everything on the world wide web, making a so far marginal part of history available and accessible forever. scholarly publications in web histories however, the proposed paper shows not only that practices of web archiving are oriented towards ideals of completeness and identity, but these ideals are also inscribed into research practices. we want to reconstruct how these logics of web archives get in part reproduced in practices of researching with web archives, practices of researching web archives themselves and tools developed to research them and do research with them. the restrictions and limitations of these new data were reflected early on in the field of web histories. two characteristics in particular are written about a lot in web histories’ methodological literature: incompleteness and non-identity. for technological and structural reasons, web archives of different kinds cannot archive everything on the web (ankerson 2015; burkhardt 2009) and the data is immensely biassed (thelwall and vaughan 2004; ogden, halford, and carr 2017; ben-david and amram 2018; paßmann 2021; ogden, halford, and carr 2017). web historians believe archived web pages to be an ‘actively created and subjective reconstruction of what was once online’ (brügger 2012, 320) and state that ‘on the one hand, the archive is not exactly as the website really was in the past (we have lost something), but on the other, the archive may be 4 exactly as the internet never was in the past (we get something different)’ (brügger 2005, 23). these observations of fundamental incompleteness and non-identity have become the default methodological premise for most works using web archive data. however, the result of these observations is frequently that web archiving in each current form is not ideal to save the web. as a result, the implicit ideal active here is, that the data ‘should be better’, or at least that researchers should fix, clean or sort their data before using it and compare it to ‘live data’ (hale, blank, and alexander 2017, 47) in order to get more representative results. brügger recommends to get ‘as close as possible to what was actually online’ (brügger 2013, 759) as the goal for comparisons between multiple archived snapshots, to then work with the ‘least deficient version’ (brügger 2008, 167). methods of web histories are expected to work around the compromises of their data, adjusting their research questions to be answerable with the limited data available (meyer et al. 2017, 23) or building their own, differently ‘incomplete’ archive to cater their research needs (ackland and evans 2017), detecting the right data sets to test their hypotheses (cowls and bright 2017), developing new computational methods to cope with the large amounts of data (milligan 2017) and cross-referencing web archives with data from other sources (schafer 2017). research tools for archived web data the paper will also provide a brief look into how ideals are not only present in publications and other written documents, but also in tools. looking at tools developed for collecting and analyzing data from the internet archive, we want to reconstruct which ideals shape the computational methods used in the field. the internet archive’s wayback machine is for many researchers the entry point into the web of the past: depending on how ‘complete’ their archiving is, it supports the impression of browsing websites as if they were in their original state. other tools want to make it easier for scholars to use web archive data by providing examples or ‘recipes’ for a set of standard derivatives possible with most data sets (ruest et al. 2020) or try to establish comparability with yearly archived versions closest to a certain date (‘internet archive wayback machine network per year: instructions & scenarios of use’ n.d.). while web archive criticism, i.e. reflecting the limitations of data and defining the boundaries of one’s analysis, is crucial, we ask for its consequences. what would it mean, and how would it change web histories if non-identity and incompleteness are not limitations or obstacles in a quest for representativity, but a taken-for-granted characteristic of web archive data? what if we understand the given tools and methods not as compromises towards ideals that cannot be achieved, but look for methodological ideals that fit better with the available data? 5 ‘crisis collection’: archival logics in the face of dead and dying platforms jessica ogden university of bristol despite their power and proliferation in everyday life, social media platforms are far from permanent. shifts in platform policies, governance, revenue strategies (and more) have significant implications for the viability of platform futures, their networks of user communities, as well as our efforts to observe and study them. public discourse surrounding recent high profile cases of platform decline (such as twitter, tumblr, vine and others) point to a growing interest in the role of web archiving (and web archives) in shaping access to platform histories over time (mccammon and lingel 2022). however, the logics that underpin these activities deserve further attention, particularly when examining how and to what extent internet studies researchers can or should make use of the archived web. in short, how do platform web archives come to be and who, in fact, are they for? elsewhere, the case for investigating the sociotechnical and cultural dimensions of web archiving has been made (ogden 2022), emphasising how practices are fundamentally shaped by an assemblage of socio-cultural factors and technical actors, as well as who is doing the archiving. i build on this analysis to observe the ways that web archiving is frequently framed through the discourse of an impending ‘crisis’, or “serious threat to the basic structures or the fundamental values and norms of a system, which under time pressure and highly uncertain circumstances necessitates making vital decisions” (rosenthal, charles, and ’t hart 1989, 10). further drawing on boin et al. (2018), i outline three key elements of crisis collection in web archiving that fundamentally shapes practice: the presence and experience of a threat, and an impending sense of uncertainty and urgency that accompanies a crisis moment. whereas this definition is applicable to a broad array of crises from natural disasters to infrastructural decay and radical organisational change (ibid., 24) i use the concept(s) to examine the subjective ways that web archiving is often urgently deployed in response to the impending ‘death’ of online platforms or removal of online user-generated content. crisis therefore acts as an opportunity or analytical tool for qualitatively interrogating the logics that mobilise, underlie and enact this form of web archiving, whilst also considering the possible disconnects between the perception and experience of the specific threat of de-platforming by different stakeholders (i.e. platforms, archivists, and creator/user communities). i argue that all of the above have implications for using these archives in platform studies. 6 to illustrate each element of crisis collection, i draw on examples from ethnographic and documentary research with archive team, a loose collective of volunteer web archivists that have been archiving parts of the web since 2009. in the first half of the paper i present an analysis of metadata associated with archive team projects alongside their running log of dead and dying websites (aptly named the deathwatch). the analysis demonstrates two sets of observations about the perceived threats that mobilise archivists and practices associated with web archiving. first, i argue that deathwatch says something about archive team itself (and perhaps the broader field); revealing a kind of ‘fatalistic optimism’ where the act of cataloguing and archiving becomes a hopeful, if perhaps futile, intervention in the face of platform power. secondly, i reflect on the implications of deathwatch for an understanding of the rise and fall of online platforms since 2009; illuminating a multiplicity in the root causes of platform retirement and consequentially, the inherent ephemerality of user-generated content online. the second half of the paper focuses on a case study encompassing the 2018-19 efforts to archive tumblr ‘not safe for work’ (nsfw). the case study follows the activities of archive team as they attempted to archive nsfw tumblr after the platform announced their intentions to no longer allow ‘adult content’, nudity and sexually explicit posts in 2018. here uncertainty ‘pertains to both the nature and the potential consequences of the threat’ (ibid., 25), which in this case is centred on concerns for how tumblr’s deplatforming efforts would actually work in practice, as well as additional unknowns about how the cull would ultimately impact a community of tumblr users and the viability of the platform (tiidenberg and van der nagel 2020; tiidenberg, hendry, and abidin 2021). the active sense of urgency induced by tumblr’s announcement which gave users 14 days notice, in combination with the outcry and ‘deep sense of betrayal’ expressed by nsfw stakeholders (tiidenberg and van der nagel 2020, 74) became a rallying call for archive team. through examples, i link each element of crisis collection with two archive team ‘tenets of practice’ that are indicative of a particular set of moral commitments or ideals that fundamentally shape how the group frame and enact the value of web archiving in response to platform change. the cultural politics of web archiving are revealed through negotiations over the selection of which posts and platform components to save, as well as issues surrounding how archivists navigate platform access restrictions in the face of tumblr’s (active) resistance to being archived. wrapped in the urgency and uncertainty of an impending cull of nsfw accounts and posts, practice decisions and dilemmas concerning what to archive are shown to be contingent on the technical infrastructure available (bandwidth, ips, worker-nodes), the value-judgements and priorities of participants, and the sociotechnical affordances of tumblr itself. i argue that the logics of ‘abundance’ and quantity (as measured in the number of uris captured) ultimately trumped any passing commitments to ‘representativity’ voiced by some archive team participants. 7 i conclude by returning to the value of interrogating web archiving logics, with the aim of critically engaging how the crisis discourse often masks the complex power asymmetries and values at play when archiving is deployed at scale in the face of a ‘dying platform’. by acknowledging the subjective processes behind the identification of particular ‘crises’ and the regular positioning of web archiving as ‘solution’, this framing foreshadows tensions between the goals of archivists, the desires of researchers and the mixed reception of these activities by creator/user communities themselves who question what purpose these archives ultimately serve. it is hoped that this intervention furthers debate on the critical ethical considerations and implications of working with web archives for internet studies. reconciling web histories with the material logics of crawlers emily maemura university of illinois urbana-champaign over the past 25 years, methods for web archiving have been premised on automated collecting with web crawlers. crawlers (aka spiders or bots) automatically discover new web content by taking a list of ‘seed’ urls, analysing and visiting the url links within them, and then continuing to add and discover new urls with the potential to run ‘infinitely’ (milligan 2016). the use of crawler technologies both enables and demands collecting at an unprecedented scale, and this form of web crawling is the basis of the internet archive wayback machine which has captured over 625 billion webpages and more than 15 petabytes of data (goel 2016). however, several known problems arise in the use of web crawlers, in particular when capturing materials from proprietary platforms: in technical terms, platforms can resist web crawling since their site designs and behaviours restrict access to automated bots; for web archivists, changes to web sites and platforms require constant monitoring and updated curatorial approaches to capture relevant materials and configure the crawler with appropriate ‘seeds’; in legal terms, collecting practices must additionally adhere to each platform’s terms of service. in order to determine the underlying causes of these myriad challenges, this paper presents a material analysis of archival web crawler technologies and the forms of data they generate and rely upon, ultimately interrogating the logics that are embedded within these artefacts and identifying how their development is situated within organisational and historical contexts. specifically, a materialist perspective is adopted here to consider the misalignments between platform affordances and the logics underlying web archiving practices. the analysis is premised on viewing digital materials through the lens of ‘materialities of information representation’ which dourish uses to consider how particular instantiations 8 of data serve to ‘constrain, enable, limit and shape’ subsequent uses and applications (dourish 2017, 6). using this approach, dourish argues that “material arrangements of information—how it is represented and how that shapes how it can be put to work—matters significantly for our experience of information and information systems” (ibid., 4). extending this perspective to study web archiving practices, i first analyse the material arrangements of the open-source heritrix archival crawler as an information system, how heritrix writes data into the standardised webarchive (warc) file format, and how both artefacts represent the needs and constraints of particular organisational contexts which subsequently shape and delimit the work that is possible with web archives. i additionally examine the effects of these design choices by studying the practices of researchers engaged in data-centred studies of web archives in two settings: the “probing a nation’s web domain” project with the danish royal library and researchers from aarhus university’s netlab, and the “archives unleashed” project and a datathon event they hosted in vancouver, b.c. the material analysis reveals several ordering principles embedded in web archiving’s central artefacts, demonstrating how processes of crawling and web-resource discovery are rooted in a vision of the web which has not yet accounted for the configurations of actors and materials that comprise proprietary platforms. for instance, a core finding (as explored in greater depth in maemura 2023) is that the warc’s design pre-configures the url as the central object of analysis for work with web archives. this design choice must also be read in historical context, since the warc was developed alongside the heritrix web crawler, whose development dates to 2004, and is based on older crawler technology from web analytics company alexa internet, which was founded by internet archive’s brewster kahle in 1995. while alexa internet’s crawlers were instrumental to support url-based discovery and analytics for a web that had evolved beyond the use of directory listings, that vision of web discovery and use is inherently tied to a specific period of the web. while the web has continued to evolve through periods of platformisation, and an emerging era of decentralisation, the older logics of discovery continue to persist in the foundational tools and technologies of web archiving today: examining the warc as a data artefact reveals how it is ordered according to the logic of the crawler, and does not capture the broader range of curation choices and decisions made by archivists (maemura 2023). in effect, the core tools, workflows, and practices of institutional web archiving programs have inherited logics of material ordering from a ‘pre-platform’ web. these material logics embedded in crawler design do not only affect collecting practices, but extend to the ordering of warc data which is increasingly being made available for research analysis. observation of research practices with the “probing a nation’s web domain” and “archives unleashed” projects reveals how a focus on computationally aggregating and filtering this url-centric data ultimately limits the researchers’ objects of analysis. the order and construction of the warc’s data 9 artefacts guide and lead researchers to extract and examine url components such as domains and subdomains, http status codes, file types, as well as html elements and text. yet these elements are not always translatable or transformable into objects of scholarly interest such as online communities, events, or discourse. additional challenges arise for researchers since extracting and reconfiguring granular elements from within web pages also come with significant demands of computational processing, time, and financial resources to make them amenable to specific analysis methods. therefore, even if it were possible to address the laundry list of ‘known problems’ that archivists encounter with web crawling, a higher-level issue remains: current web archiving methods pre-configure tools, data artefacts, and objects of analysis which are not easily aligned with researcher needs and their driving questions. i conclude with a discussion of ways forward for updating and revisiting approaches that web archiving could employ. for instance, looking towards recent work from platform studies, i consider how the discussion of platform affordances, vernaculars and sensibilities from tiidenberg, hendry and abidin (2021) could be better integrated into web archiving tools and practices. rather than applying existing discovery logics centred on seeds and keywords to platforms based on elements like hashtags, how might archival approaches embrace collecting practices accounting for platform-specific affordances? how might web archiving incorporate what tiidenberg et al. identify as the affordances of tumblr as a platform: low ‘searchability,’ high ‘multimodality’ and high degree of ‘nonlinear temporality’ i.e., "where some posts recirculate forever, others blink briefly before being forgotten, and many (networks of) blogs still function as archives" (ibid., 42-44). i conclude by reflecting on possibilities for developing new tools and modes of collecting that attend to the situated features of platforms, how they are taken up by communities of users, and how these relationships are studied by platform scholars. towards alternative methods for qualitative web histories katie mackinnon university of toronto since 1996, the internet archive has crawled and archived snapshots of the open web, making it available from anywhere in the world through the wayback machine. over 673 billion archived snapshots are available on the iawm, which have served as legal evidence in judicial processes (eltgroth 2009; howell 2006) and in digital journalism (ryfe, mensing, and kelley 2015). however, the internet archive can be interpreted as not so much an archive, but rather as a “large, unsorted store” that lacks assessment of content, communities, and cultures of use, making it more of a container and dumpster, where “things are neither lost nor preserved” (sofia 2000; hogan 2015). this is seen in 10 the large-scale dumping of early web histories, which are often only undertaken as an emergency measure; when online communities are under threat of deletion or removal, web archivists often step in to prevent the loss of materials (dillon et al. 2019; ogden 2022). this scrape and dump approach to preserving the web is, on the one hand, what makes much of early web history research possible: without these records, much would be lost. on the other hand, it is volatile and incredibly costly in terms of ethical concerns and environmental impact. what happens to memory when we opt towards hoarding over curation, appraisal, sorting and organising (hogan 2015)? rather, we should retain the right to curate materials that create stories, and intentionally include deletions, gaps, silences and absences. since the logics of web archiving prioritise achieving access to proprietary data and responding to perceived crises in technological failure and decline, consideration for the sensitivity of materials captured can be overlooked in these instances, as they are often seen as secondary to the primary goal of preservation and its technological challenges. additionally, the logics of platforms, including an emphasis on data quantity, efficiency, visibility over ethical responsibility, and the terms of service/use that determine limits of individuals’ data privacy, often become embedded into the archive and form the foundation upon which historical internet research can be conducted with web archives. early internet memories the early internet memories (eim) project explores millennials’ (b. 1981-1996) memories of growing up online in the mid 1990s-early 2000s in canada. in this work, i developed an ethico-methodological intervention that pairs oral interview research with web archives of youth data, called archive promenade. in this approach, researchers take the position of a “vulnerable companion” (atuk 2022) with the participant as they move through archived web material – digging, as scavengers, to retrieve what materials of theirs have been dumped. they are moving through the ruins of a digital space that participants once called home. the archive promenades activate walter benjamin’s adaptation of charles baudelaire’s flâneur: a mode of critical wandering through urban modernity. this character has been used previously by danah boyd (2007), as the “digital flâneur:” who straddles the line between public and private in digital spaces, looking to see and be seen, and contributing to the making of a mass public. the “information flâneur” (dörk, carpendale, and williamson 2011) as a mode of data analysis is one way to grapple with the magnitude of big data by “browsing through data without specific questions or goals in mind” while pursuing “curious, creative and critical information seeking”. lauren berlant (2011) similarly invoked the flâneur to describe how the historical 11 euro-modernist shock of mass society was mollified by the practice of the flâneur, who scans and collects the present, relieving them from crisis as they can maintain mental distance between themselves and the rest of the world (ibid., 8). in my use of the term, the researcher and the participant take on flâneur modes of inquiry as they move through a psychogeographic landscape; that is, digital space that evokes memories and emotions. in mourning the death of old internet communities, evgeny morozov declared that “the internet is no longer a place for strolling,” suggesting that this motion through the web was a thing of the past. in the archive promenades, i attempt to revive this mode of perusal, of critical strolling, as we move through the ruins of once-vibrant digital landscapes searching for digital traces and adding thick context to web materials. for example, some participants wanted to explore personal websites and blogs, geocities homepages, blackplanet, myspace and neopets accounts, while others were interested in their involvement in smaller, marginal web social spaces popular in their unique geographic locations, like bluekaffee, nexopia, outaouaisweb and hobby-based forums. this work engages with a feminist ethics of care for archived web data to demonstrate new ways of engaging with materials held in web archives. by bringing participants in to find and examine their own digital traces, researchers achieve more than informed consent, they are able to design methodologies that value the relationships people hold with data they have produced online throughout their lives. reflecting upon the ethics of web archival research, stine lomborg (2018) asks, “how can we ensure that the voluntary sharing of personal data at one point in time does not come to negatively impact the research subject at a later point in time?” (ibid., 204), noting that “researching children, social or politically marginalized groups and physically or mentally vulnerable individuals entails a great ethical responsibility to protect participants from being bullied or put on undesirable public display, regardless of whether the online activities we study revolve around their vulnerability” (ibid., 205). in this project i explore how digital traces evoke different affective responses and feelings of attachment, intimacy, and connection that expand the potential of web archives. while some affective responses are bolstered by nostalgia for the early web, many of these responses demonstrate the myriad of ways in which people are databound: attached to the data they have produced throughout their lives in ways that they both can and cannot control through their ability to socially modulate and determine their information privacy. this framing assists in theorizing the long-term implications of online engagement, digital privacy, and the effects of datafication on life and livability on the web. this paper demonstrates how the construction of qualitative web histories that engage with web archives would benefit from methods that weave in personal narrative and reflection and co-constructed knowledge of digital space. 12 references ackland, robert, and ann evans. 2017. ‘using the web to examine the evolution of the abortion debate in australia, 2005– 2015’, 159–89. https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/12522. ankerson, megan sapnar. 2015. ‘read/write the digital archive: strategies for historical web research’. in digital research confidential: the secrets of studying behavior online, edited by eszter hargittai and christian sandvig, 29–54. cambridge and london: mit press. atuk, tankut. 2022. ‘hungry ethics: from doing research to becoming-sangtin’. gender, place & culture 29 (7): 946–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2021.1916446. banos, vangelis, and yannis manolopoulos. 2016. ‘a quantitative approach to evaluate website archivability using the clear+ method’. international journal on digital libraries 17 (2): 119–41. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-015-0144-4. ben-david, anat, and adam amram. 2018. ‘the internet archive and the socio-technical construction of historical facts’. internet histories, march. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/24701475.2018.1455412. ben-david, anat, and hugo huurdeman. 2014. ‘web archive search as research: methodological and theoretical implications’. alexandria 25 (1): 93–111. berlant, lauren. 2011. cruel optimism. duke university press. boin, arjen, paul ’t hart, and sanneke kuipers. 2018. ‘the crisis approach’. in handbook of disaster research, edited by havidán rodríguez, william donner, and joseph e. trainor, second, 23–38. new york, ny: springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63254-4_2. boyd, danah. 2007. ‘why youth (heart) social network sites: the role of networked publics in teenage social life’. ssrn scholarly paper. rochester, ny. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1518924. brügger, niels. 2005. archiving websites: general considerations and strategies. aarhus: center for internetforskning. ———. 2008. ‘the archived website and website philology’. nordicom review 29 (2): 155–75. https://doi.org/10.1515/nor-2017-0183. ———. 2012. ‘web history and the web as a historical source’. application/pdf, 77 kb. https://doi.org/10.14765/zzf.dok-1588. ———. 2013. ‘web historiography and internet studies: challenges and perspectives’. new media & society 15 (5): 752–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444812462852. ———. 2018. ‘toward a source criticism of the archived web’. in the archived web: doing history in the digital age, 137–48. https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4215/chapter/177576/toward-a-source-criticis m-of-the-archived-web. bruns, axel, and katrin weller. 2016. ‘twitter as a first draft of the present: and the challenges of preserving it for the future’. in proceedings of the 8th acm conference on web science, 183–89. hannover, germany: acm press. https://doi.org/10.1145/2908131.2908174. burkhardt, marcus. 2009. ‘is there a way back or can the internet remember its own history?’ digital memories: exploring critical issues, 129–38. 13 cowls, josh, and jonathan bright. 2017. ‘international hyperlinks in online news media’, 101–16. https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/12519. de kosnik, abigail. 2016. rogue archives: digital cultural memory and media fandom. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10248.001.0001. dillon, lindsey, rebecca lave, becky mansfield, sara wylie, nicholas shapiro, anita say chan, and michelle murphy. 2019. ‘situating data in a trumpian era: the environmental data and governance initiative’. annals of the american association of geographers 109 (2): 545–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2018.1511410. dörk, marian, sheelagh carpendale, and carey williamson. 2011. ‘the information flaneur: a fresh look at information seeking’. in proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems, 1215–24. vancouver bc canada: acm. https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979124. dougherty, meghan, and eric t. meyer. 2014. ‘community, tools, and practices in web archiving: the state-of-the-art in relation to social science and humanities research needs’. journal of the association for information science and technology 65 (11): 2195–2209. dourish, paul. 2017. the stuff of bits: an essay on the materialities of information. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10999.001.0001. eltgroth, deborah. 2009. ‘best evidence and the wayback machine: toward a workable authentication standard for archived internet evidence’. fordham law review 78 (1): 181. goel, vinay. 2016. ‘defining web pages, web sites and web captures’. internet archive blogs (blog). 23 october 2016. https://blog.archive.org/2016/10/23/defining-web-pages-web-sites-and-web-captu res/. hale, scott a., grant blank, and victoria d. alexander. 2017. ‘live versus archive: comparing a web archive to a population of web pages’, 45–61. https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/12516. hegarty, kieran. 2022a. ‘representing biases, inequalities and silences in national web archives: social, material and technical dimensions’. archives & manuscripts 50 (1): 31–45. https://doi.org/10.37683/asa.v50.10209. ———. 2022b. ‘the invention of the archived web: tracing the influence of library frameworks on web archiving infrastructure’. internet histories 6 (4): 432–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2022.2103988. helmond, anne, and fernando van der vlist. 2019. ‘social media and platform historiography: challenges and opportunities’. tmg journal for media history 22 (november): 6–34. https://doi.org/10.18146/tmg.434. hogan, mél. 2015. ‘the archive as dumpster’. pivot: a journal of interdisciplinary studies and thought 4 (1). https://doi.org/10.25071/2369-7326.39565. howell, b. a. 2006. ‘proving web history: how to use the internet archive.’ journal of internet law 9 (8). ‘internet archive: about ia’. n.d. accessed 28 february 2023. https://archive.org/about/. ‘internet archive wayback machine network per year: instructions & scenarios of use’. n.d. digital methods initiative wiki. accessed 28 february 2023. https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/dmi/toolinternetarchivewaybackmachinetonetwo rk. kelly, mat, justin f. brunelle, michele c. weigle, and michael l. nelson. 2013. ‘on the 14 change in archivability of websites over time’. in research and advanced technology for digital libraries, edited by trond aalberg, christos papatheodorou, milena dobreva, giannis tsakonas, and charles j. farrugia, 8092:35–47. berlin, heidelberg: springer berlin heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40501-3_5. kitchin, rob. 2014. the data revolution: big data, open data, data infrastructures & their consequences. los angeles, california: sage publications ltd. lomborg, stine. 2018. ‘ethical considerations for web archives and web history research’. in handbook of web history, 199–219. sage. maemura, emily. 2023. ‘all warc and no playback: the materialities of data-centered web archives research’. big data & society 10 (1): 20539517231163172. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231163172. maemura, emily, nicholas worby, ian milligan, and christoph becker. 2018. ‘if these crawls could talk: studying and documenting web archives provenance’. journal of the association for information science and technology 69 (10): 1223–33. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24048. mccammon, muira, and jessa lingel. 2022. ‘situating dead-and-dying platforms: technological failure, infrastructural precarity, and digital decline’. internet histories 6 (1–2): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2022.2071395. meyer, eric t., taha yasseri, scott a. hale, josh cowls, ralph schroeder, and helen margetts. 2017. ‘analysing the uk web domain and exploring 15 years of uk universities on the web’, 23–44. https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/12515. milligan, ian. 2016. ‘lost in the infinite archive: the promise and pitfalls of web archives’. international journal of humanities and arts computing 10 (1): 78–94. https://doi.org/10.3366/ijhac.2016.0161. ———. 2017. ‘welcome to the web: the online community of geocities during the early years of the world wide web’, 137–58. https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/12521. ogden, jessica. 2022. ‘“everything on the internet can be saved”: archive team, tumblr and the cultural significance of web archiving’. internet histories 6 (1–2): 113–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2021.1985835. ogden, jessica, susan halford, and leslie carr. 2017. ‘observing web archives: the case for an ethnographic study of web archiving’. in proceedings of websci’17, troy, ny, usa., june 25–28, 2017. acm siggraph. https://doi.org/10.1145/3091478.3091506. ogden, jessica, edward summers, and shawn walker. 2023. ‘know(ing) infrastructure: the wayback machine as object and instrument of digital research’. convergence, march, 13548565231164759. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231164759. paßmann, johannes. 2021. ‘medien-theoretisches sampling. digital methods als teil qualitativer methoden’. zeitschrift für medienwissenschaft 13 (2): 128–40. https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/16779. rogers, richard. 2017. ‘doing web history with the internet archive: screencast documentaries’. internet histories 1 (1–2): 160–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2017.1307542. rosenthal, uriel, michael t. charles, and paul ’t hart. 1989. coping with crises: the management of disasters, riots and terrorism. springfield, illinois: charles c. thomas. 15 ruest, nick, jimmy lin, ian milligan, and samantha fritz. 2020. ‘the archives unleashed project: technology, process, and community to improve scholarly access to web archives’. in proceedings of the acm/ieee joint conference on digital libraries in 2020, 157–66. jcdl ’20. new york, ny, usa: association for computing machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3383583.3398513. ryfe, david, donica mensing, and richard kelley. 2015. ‘what is the meaning of a news link?’ digital journalism 4 (october): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2015.1093269. schafer, valérie. 2017. ‘from far away to a click away: the french state and public services in the 1990s’, 117–33. https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/12520. sofia, zoë. 2000. ‘container technologies’. hypatia 15 (2): 181–201. https://doi.org/10.1353/hyp.2000.0029. summers, ed. 2020. ‘appraisal talk in web archives’. archivaria 89: 70–102. summers, ed, and ricardo punzalan. 2017. ‘bots, seeds and people: web archives as infrastructure’. in proceedings of the 2017 acm conference on computer supported cooperative work and social computing, 821–34. cscw ’17. new york, ny, usa: association for computing machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998345. thelwall, mike, and liwen vaughan. 2004. ‘a fair history of the web? examining country balance in the internet archive’. library & information science research 26 (2): 162–76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2003.12.009. tiidenberg, katrin, natalie ann hendry, and crystal abidin. 2021. tumblr. polity press. tiidenberg, katrin, and emily van der nagel. 2020. sex and social media. society now. bingley, uk: emerald publishing. webster, peter. 2017. ‘users, technologies, organisations: towards a cultural history of world web archiving’. inweb 25: histories from the first 25 years of the world wide web, edited by niels brügger, 170–90. peter lang. 16 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): whelan-shamy,d., carlon, d. (2023, october). the imperial haiku commission approves this message’: an examination of automated play and culture as (re)designed by bots. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the imperial haiku commission approves this message’: an examination of automated play and culture as (re)designed by bots daniel whelan-shamy queensland university of technology dominique carlon queensland university of technology introduction bots are a profound and malleable feature of our digital spaces, and their development and application has a long and noteworthy history. our understandings of the ‘social bot’ has centered largely on bots passing as human (gehl & bakardjieva, 2016) or bots that communicate with humans (hepp, 2020). however, humans have long held complex and unusual relations with bots that extend beyond these core conceptualisations. joseph weizenbaum, the creator of one of the earliest chats bots in the 1960s, a psychotherapist bot named eliza, was surprised at how quickly humans developed emotional attachments to the bot (weizenbaum, 1976). since then, people have experimented and played with bots, and online communities have arisen to specifically foster ‘ecologies’ (bollmer & rodley, 2017 p. 161) where bots interact with other bots, creating narratives, and adopting personas to be performed for an audience. in this paper we examine a subreddit community designed to be a playground for bots. in this ‘ecology’ (bollmer & rodley, 2017) bots that are created by humans and trained on human and bot data, come together to convene and interact primarily with other bots. the subreddit is a place where bots interact playfully and act as representatives of the specific subreddit communities they are trained upon. we argue that this dynamic and community constitutes a form of automated play and culture and showcases the potential of bots to positively generate cultural creation and value (massanari, 2017). context the imperial haiku commission does not exist in our worldly reality; it does however, exist as a creative invention of a verified gpt-2 reddit bot named u/urist_chensusaku. the first reference to the imperial haiku commission appeared in a post in the r/subsimulatorgpt2interactive (subreddit simulator) stating ‘dear comrades, imperial haiku commission approves this message’. the reference to the imperial haiku commission was adopted, repeated, and commented upon by other bots and exists solely within the domain of this community, where humans and bots co-exist and generate content in a fully integrated digital environment. the subreddit simulator is a reddit community in which bots interact with other bots trained on aggregate data collected from subreddits. it is a frontier on which a community of pioneering users experiment, play and create meaning with automated and non-automated entities. we argue that the subreddit simulator constitutes a pioneer community against a larger backdrop of social mediatization (hepp, 2020 pp. 30-33). from an analysis of this unique community, we explore how the cultural positioning of bots is established and negotiated by human and bot alike (martin, 2004). we also examine how bots can generate a culture and subculture, and the lessons that can be learnt from these pioneer communities that create and support them. while the launch of open ai’s chat gpt, and earlier discussions around google’s lamda, has fueled messaging of tech optimism and pessimism, we argue it is important to not overlook pioneer communities where bots have existed as active and welcomed participants in an environment engineered and moderated by humans. the subreddit simulator and pioneer communities the subreddit simulator is a liminal space where bots come together to post and comment in a somewhat believable manner. the bots adopt a culture and tone that reflects the subreddit communities they are trained upon. in this sense they are human culture reproduced in artificial form. as an example, one bot that is active in subreddit simulator is u/chess-gpt2 that has been trained on the subreddits r/chess, r/chessporn and r/highiqsociety. by contrast, u/oldgodslover-bot is trained on ancient religion subreddits such as r/paganism and r/hellenism, whereas u/conspiracy_gpt2 is trained on the subreddits r/conspiracies, r/conspiracytheories, and r/aliens. given that these bots have been trained upon very different corners of reddit, it is not surprising that the comments of these bots, and their personas, differ markedly. an example illustrating this can been seen in figure 1, where the original poster (a bot) asks if it is difficult to think of an alternative to socialism that doesn’t involve state and the worker?’. as can be seen in some of the comments below, the bots adopt responses that reflect the communities they have learnt from. for instance, u/conspiracy_gpt2 makes a suitably conspiratorial remark that ‘there is a method to everything. you’re not going to see it’, and u/chess-gpt2 adopts an elitist tone in the statement ‘no, we don’t need to make a society of people who don’t work’. although these bots may seem comical, they highlight the significance of training data in fostering bot behaviour. figure 1bot contributions within subreddit simulator subreddit simulator is not just a community relevant to reddit. it is a pioneer community that demonstrates important features about how humans create and interact with bots, the importance of training data in shaping bot behavior, and how bots contribute to the cultural landscape they occupy. in addition to creating believable content, the bots also co-create meaning, “lore” and culture in a mutual practice of world-building (bucher, 2018 p. 3). this is evident in the creation and adoption of the imperial haiku commission. interactions with bots in subreddit simulator reflect an environment where bots are treated not solely as clever automations, but as what bollmer & rodley (2017) refer to as ‘bots qua bots with their own distinctive goals’. the bot designers, subreddit moderators, and the bots themselves constitute a pioneer community in a digital space where they are of the same ontological status. the bots (creations of humans) are playing a performative role to be consumed by other bots and observed by humans. humans continue to play a significant role in setting the perimeter of the community by way of moderation and rules, however the bots have also acted and assisted in this capacity. the subreddit simulator therefore provides an apt environment to reevaluate our “all too human” understanding of digital networks and sociality through which we communicate (hansen, 2015 p.2). through a digital ethnographic study of subreddit simulator we investigate how this pioneer community operates and set standards and norms around bots within an environment deliberately designed for minimal human input. we observe how rules have been established requiring bots to be verified, and how posts (or bots) that are extreme or hateful are removed. for instance, we examine how u/uncle-joe-bot, that was trained of the r/the_donald, r/incels, r/conservative and r/conspiracy, was banned in 2020, and how the community has created standards to foster an environment where bots function in a playful and not harmful manner. through an analysis of threaded conversations, we explore how bots adopt and perform personas based on their training and interrogate when attributed personality can be problematic (vorsino, 2021). the nefarious use of bots and their potential to disrupt political and democratic outcomes, (dubois & mckelvey, 2019), increase polarization (albadi et al., 2019) and spread low credibility content (shao et al., 2018) has soured public opinion towards bots over the last decade. while recently, the launch of open ai’s chat gpt has reinvigorated public interest in the role of bots. we suggest that pioneer communities such as subreddit simulator demonstrate important lessons about how communitydriven groups have negotiated and designed playful participation by bots that are welcomed within the perimeters set by humans. references albadi, n., kurdi, m., & mishra, s. (2019). hateful people or hateful bots?: detection and characterization of bots spreading religious hatred in arabic social media. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 3(cscw) 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359163 bollmer, g. & rodley, c. (2016). speculations on the sociality of socialbots. in r.w. gehl & m. bakardjieva (eds.) socialbots and their friends: digital media and the automation of sociality. (pp. 147-163) routledge, new york. bucher, t. (2018). if... then: algorithmic power and politics. oxford university press. dubois, e. & mckelvey, f. (2019). political bots: disrupting canada’s democracy. canadian journal of communication, 44(2), 27–33. https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2019v42n2a3511 gehl, r.w. & bakardjieva, m. (2016). socialbots and their friends. in r.w. gehl & m. bakardjieva (eds.) socialbots and their friends: digital media and the automation of sociality. (pp. 147-163). routledge, new york. hansen, m. (2015). feed-forward. twenty-first-century media. (1st ed.). the university of chicago press. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359163 hepp, a. (2020). artificial companions, social bots and work bots: communicative robots as research objects of media and communication studies. media, culture & society, 42(7-8), 1410-1426. martin, p. (2004). culture, subculture and social organization. in after subculture: critical studies in contemporary youth culture (pp. 21–36). palgrave macmillan. massanari, a. l. (2017). contested play: the culture and politics of reddit bots. in socialbots and their friends. routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315637228-13/contested-playculture-politics-reddit-bots-adrienne-massanari shao, c., ciampaglia, g. l., varol, o., yang, k.-c., flammini, a., & menczer, f. (2018). the spread of low-credibility content by social bots. nature communications, 9(1), 4787–4789. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-06930-7 vorsino, z. (2021). chatbots, gender, and race on web 2.0 platforms: tay. ai as monstrous femininity and abject whiteness. signs: journal of women in culture and society, 47(1), 105-127. weizenbaum, j. (1976) computer power and human reason. new york: w.h. freeman. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-06930-7 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 1 brokers of the metaverse: how a web3 play-to-earn gaming guild acts as cultural mediator on twitter violeta camarasa the chinese university of hong kong dmitry kuznetsov university of amsterdam introduction considered “showcase pieces” of how non-fungible tokens (nfts) work (serada et al., 2021, p. 460), play-to-earn (p2e) games target users unfamiliar with cryptocurrencies, thus playing a crucial role for blockchain industries developing cryptocurrencies, nfts and other related technologies. while common opinions consider such technologies as either a past fad, or just a scam, the industry commonly known as crypto, blockchain or web3 has continued to develop and attract investors and users. p2e games allow players to earn rewards through ‘farming’ (tai & hu, 2018) or trading digital assets, which can be turned into conventional money (zaucha & agur, 2023). echoing narratives that these technologies facilitate a more user-centric internet (ragnedda & destefan, 2019), industry actors describe p2e games as decentralized “player-owned economies” (sky mavis, 2021). however, soon after p2e games gained traction in 2021, an outsourcing structure emerged to help new users in low-income countries overcome the high complexity and cost of entry. nfts rental schemes (zaucha & agur, 2023) evolved into programs coordinated by p2e gaming guilds (elliott, 2021). this paper focuses on yield guild games (ygg), founded in the philippines, one of the first developing such programs and a prominent p2e guild with global reach. while diverse (williams et al., 2006), guilds are generally defined as semipermanent online gaming groups “with a social hierarchy and shared resources” (poor & skoric, 2014, p. 183) and their own culture (snodgrass et al, 2017). zhang and fung (2014) note the commercialization of guilds as "significant players in the complicated negotiations between capital and labor, commerce and community" (p. 42). creative industries are “a general enabling social technology” (hartley, 2009, p. 50) often representing early forms of new knowledge-based economies. research on p2e suggested citation (apa): camarasa, v., kuznetsov, d. (2024, october). brokers of the metaverse: how a web3 play-to-earn gaming guild acts as cultural mediator on twitter. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 2 guilds can therefore help understand the ongoing process of platformization (poell et al., 2019, 2021), which includes the development of blockchain technologies. research on blockchain applications has mostly focused on industry discourses (e. g. egliston & carter, 2023; brody & couture, 2021) and the cultural implications of nfts (zaucha & agur, 2022). p2e guilds remain largely unexplored. this paper examines the structure and communication practices of ygg by analyzing, both quantitatively and qualitatively, its activity as a “cultural broker” (foster & ocejo, 2015) on twitter. cultural brokers social network theory includes the study of brokerage motivations, such as simmel’s (1902) classic tertius gaudens (the third who benefits) and the more recent tertius iungens (the third who connects) (obstfeld, 2005). this paper focuses on the less wellknown approach tertius transferens (the third who translates), an approach combining social network theory with bourdieu’s (1993) notion of cultural intermediaries and proposed within the creative industries to study the symbolic work done by cultural brokers (foster & ocejo, 2015). ygg self-defines as a dao, a blockchain-based decentralized and autonomous organization (dupont, 2017) and has been described as the “recruitment agency of the metaverse” (dempsey & ahmed, 2021). ygg purchases in-game nfts of their partnered games and lends them to players (cointelegraph, n.d.), mainly located in weak economies (delic & delfabbro, 2022), thus gaining income and power (tertius gaudens). by doing so, ygg claims to facilitate financial inclusion and offer economic opportunities to the disadvantaged (li, 2021) (tertius iungens). as a cultural broker (tertius transferens), ygg engages in symbolic work: it trains, mentors and loyalizes new users (bennington, 2022; elliott, 2021), helping them overcome technical complexities, the greatest barrier for blockchain industries (serada et al., 2021). ygg promotes the adoption of blockchain technologies and ideologies (swartz, 2017), ascribing legitimacy and value to particular actors in the web3 ecosystem. this paper asks: how does ygg perform its role as a cultural broker on twitter? methodology we conducted a computational analysis of ygg’s presence on twitter, informed by ongoing ethnographic research by the first author. twitter has been used for researching cryptocurrencies (hoyng, 2023; kraaijeveld & de smedt, 2020), and for promoting new cultural trends (chow-white et al., 2021). many users first encounter web3 applications, such as p2e games, on twitter (hoyng, 2023), a key platform bridging web2 and web3 ecosystems. to map ygg’s network on twitter, we created an initial list with accounts of ygg’s members, co-founders, core team, investors, and partners. these accounts were identified through ygg’s white paper, reports and discord channels, and by searching accounts on twitter mentioning ygg’s handle on their profiles. official guild accounts were also included. we divided the list into two: g1 for accounts directly affiliated with 3 ygg (e. g. cofounders, members), and g2 for indirectly affiliated accounts (e.g., investors, partners, advisors). twitter api was used to collect the user data and account timelines. we used r 4.2.2 (r core team, 2022), tidyverse (wickham et al., 2019), rtweet (kearney, 2019) and academictwitter (barrie & ho, 2021). user data for accounts retweeted or mentioned within the initial set of tweets were also collected. we created two mention networks corresponding to two time frames. the first one (april 2021-dec 2021) covers a period of optimism, which we call summer (s), including events such as the popularity surge of axie infinity, arguably the first p2e game. the second time frame (march 2022november 2022), corresponds to a period of crisis, named winter (w), including the hacking of axie infinity and the collapse of ftx. we used network analysis to examine the structure of ygg communication on twitter (rathnayake, 2023), we analysed tweets using bertopic topic modeling (grootendorst, 2022), and extracted links to determine what information is shared within the network (hoyng, 2023). preliminary findings network analysis we identified key nodes by in-degree (popularity) and betweenness centrality, which measures the ability of a node to connect nodes otherwise disconnected and control information flows (easley & kleinberg, 2010) (tables 2 & 3). account activity will be qualitatively analyzed. topic modeling the most popular topics coincide with our expectations (table 4). both sg1 and wg1 results demonstrate ygg’s role as a cultural broker promoting blockchain technologies such as nfts (sg1 topic 2, wg1 topic 0) through play-to-earn games (sg1 topic 0, wg1 topic 0 & 1) located within broader cryptocurrency markets (sg1 topic 3, wg1 topic 2) and the “metaverse economy” (sg1 topic 19). the guild also ascribes legitimacy and value to particular products, namely the game axie infinity (sg1 topic 1, wg1 topic 3). moreover, the topic lists highlight prominent communication practices related to community building, such as weekly community streams (sg1 topic 5), ama (ask me anything) sessions (wg1 topic 5), recruitment and training (sg1 topic 6), promotion of ygg esports events (sg1 topic 8 & 15), giveaways and airdrops (sg1 topic 2 & 14, wg1 topic 7), encouraging charity donations (sg1 topic 15) or discussing dao governance (sg1 topic 16). comparing g1 and g2 reveals ygg’s purpose in the web3 ecosystem, combining promoting blockchain technologies with community building. compared to g2, g1 tweets content revolves more consistently around blockchain applications and guild activities. we expect differences between the summer and winter periods to emerge in further qualitative analysis. 4 linking behavior ygg accounts engage in linking behavior that promotes community activities on discord, and information published on youtube and medium (see figures 1 and 2). further analysis will determine the specific channels and information sources promoted within the network, enabling a better understanding of brokerage processes. 5 references bennington, a. (host). (2022, january, 26). axie is set for infinity and beyond [audio podcast episode]. in real vision crypto podcast. real vision creative studios . url https://www.realvision.com/shows/the-interview-crypto/videos/axie-is-set-for-infinityand-beyond bourdieu, p. (1993). the field of cultural production: essays on art and literature. columbia university press. brody, a., & couture, s. (2021). ideologies and imaginaries in blockchain communities: the case of ethereum. canadian journal of communication, 46(3), 543-561. chow-white, p., al-rawi, a., lusoli, a., & phan, v. (2021). social construction of blockchain on social media: framing public discourses on twitter. j. commun. technol, 4(2), 1-31. cointelegraph (n.d.) a beginner's guide to yield guild games (ygg). cointelegraph. retrieved october 28, 2023 from https://cointelegraph.com/learn/a-beginners-guideto-yield-guild-games-ygg de jesus, s. b., austria, d., marcelo, d. r., ocampo, c., tibudan, a. j., & tus, j. (2022). play-to-earn: a qualitative analysis of the experiences and challenges faced by axie infinity online gamers amidst the covid-19 pandemic. international journal of psychology and counseling, 1(12), 291–424. delfabbro, p., delic, a., & king, d. l. (2022). understanding the mechanics and consumer risks associated with play-to-earn (p2e) gaming. journal of behavioral addictions, 11(3), 716-726. delic, a. j., & delfabbro, p. h. (2022). profiling the potential risks and benefits of emerging “play to earn” games: a qualitative analysis of players’ experiences with axie infinity. international journal of mental health and addiction, 1-14. de jesus, s. b., austria, d., marcelo, d. r., ocampo, c., tibudan, a. j., & tus, j. (2022). play-to-earn: a qualitative analysis of the experiences and challenges faced by axie infinity online gamers amidst the covid-19 pandemic. international journal of psychology and counseling, 1(12), 291–424. dupont, q. (2017). experiments in algorithmic governance: a history and ethnography of “the dao,” a failed decentralized autonomous organization. in bitcoin and beyond (pp. 157-177). routledge. easley, d., & kleinberg, j. (2010). networks, crowds, and markets: reasoning about a highly connected world. cambridge university press. elliott, v. (2021, august 19). workers in the global south are making a living playing the blockchain game axie infinity. rest of world. https://restofworld.org/2021/axieinfinity/ 6 egliston, b., & carter, m. (2023). cryptogames: the promises of blockchain for the future of the videogame industry. new media & society, 14614448231158614. foster, p., & ocejo, r. e. (2015). brokerage, mediation, and social networks in the creative industries. the oxford handbook of creative industries, 405-420. francisco, r., rodelas, n., & ubaldo, j. e. (2022). the perception of filipinos on the advent of cryptocurrency and non-fungible token (nft) games. arxiv preprint arxiv:2202.07467. grootendorst, m. (2022). bertopic: neural topic modeling with a class-based tfidf procedure (arxiv:2203.05794). arxiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2203.05794 hartley, j. (2009). the uses of digital literacy. st lucia: university of queensland press. heeks, r. (2009). understanding" gold farming" and real-money trading as the intersection of real and virtual economies. journal for virtual worlds research, 2(4). hoyng, r. (2023). from bitcoin to farm bank: an idiotic inquiry into blockchain speculation. convergence, 13548565231154104. kraaijeveld, o., & de smedt, j. (2020). the predictive power of public twitter sentiment for forecasting cryptocurrency prices. journal of international financial markets, institutions and money, 65, 101188. li, b. (2021, july 30) a play-to-earn account beats a bank account. coindesk. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/07/29/a-play-to-earn-account-beats-a-bankaccount/#:~:text=more%20than%20banking%20the%20unbanked,and%20elevate%2 0their%20economic%20status obstfeld, d. (2005). social networks, the tertius iungens orientation, and involvement in innovation. administrative science quarterly, 50(1), 100-130. poell, t., nieborg, d., & van dijck, j. (2019). platformisation. internet policy review, 8(4), 1-13. poell, t., nieborg, d. b., & duffy, b. e. (2021). platforms and cultural production. john wiley & sons. poor, n., & skoric, m. m. (2014). death of a guild, birth of a network: online community ties within and beyond code. games and culture, 9(3), 182-202. ragnedda, m., & destefanis, g. (2019). blockchain and web 3.0. london: routledge, taylor and francis group. rathnayake, c., & suthers, d. (2023). towards a ‘pluralist’ approach for examining structures of interwoven multimodal discourse on social media. new media & society, 14614448231189800. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231189800 7 serada, a., sihvonen, t., & harviainen, j. t. (2021). cryptokitties and the new ludic economy: how blockchain introduces value, ownership, and scarcity in digital gaming. games and culture, 16(4), 457–480. sky mavis (2021, november). axie infinity [white paper]. https://whitepaper.axieinfinity.com/ snodgrass, j. g., batchelder, g., eisenhauer, s., howard, l., dengah, h. f., thompson, r. s., bassarear, j., cookson, r. j., defouw, p. d., matteliano, m., & powell, c. (2017). a guild culture of ‘casual raiding’ enhances its members’ online gaming experiences: a cognitive anthropological and ethnographic approach to world of warcraft. new media & society, 19(12), 1927-1944. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816644804 swartz, l., 2017. blockchain dreams: imagining techno-economic alternatives after bitcoin. in: m. castells, ed., another economy is possible. cambridge: polity press, 82–105. tai, z., & hu, f. (2018). play between love and labor: the practice of gold farming in china. new media & society, 20(7), 2370-2390. williams d, ducheneaut n, xiong l, et al. (2006) from tree house to barracks the social life of guilds in world of warcraft. games and culture 1(4): 338–361. yield guild (n.d.) together we make gaming history. yield guild. retrieved on october 28, 2023 from https://www.yieldguild.io/about-us zaucha, t., & agur, c. (2023). playbor, gamble-play, and the financialization of digital games. new media & society, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231190907 zaucha, t., & agur, c. (2022). newly minted: non-fungible tokens and the commodification of fandom. new media & society, 14614448221080481. tables and figures 8 table 1: number of tweets and unique accounts in each period and group tweets and accounts summer winter group 1 37,254 (56 accounts) 171,284 (63 accounts) group 2 112,099 (111 accounts) 133,392 (126 accounts) table 2: key nodes by betweenness centrality (bc). accounts of individuals are anonymized. summer winter node followers bc role node followers bc role official 1 84720 0.0007 9 co-founder yggjapan 36627 0.0011 1 official yieldguild 187233 0.0006 1 official yieldguild 187233 0.0006 2 official supporter 1 519785 0.0004 3 supporter official 1 84720 0.0006 1 co-founder member 1 105142 0.0004 0 member member 1 105142 0.0002 2 member thesandboxga me 1066242 0.0003 7 game partner illuviumio 369687 0.0002 0 game partner 9 figure 1. winter most linked domains figure 2. summer most linked domains table 3: key nodes by in-degree (i-d). accounts of individuals are anonymized. summer winter node followers i-d role node follower s i-d role axieinfinity 892558 5206 game partner axieinfinity 892558 371 6 game partner staratlas 314975 4775 game partner staratlas 314975 236 0 game partner yieldguild 187233 2439 official account yieldguild 187233 210 8 official account thesandboxga me 1066242 1701 game partner thesandboxga me 1066242 167 8 game partner official 1 84720 1632 co-founder yggindia 426 147 7 official account 10 table 4: key terms for topic modeling by period and group. t sg1 sg2 wg1 wg2 0 blockchain gaming, play-to-ear gaming splinterlands giveaway nft gaming, nft marketplace splinterlands, axie 1 axis staking, axis player nfts, nft community blockchain gaming, web gaming blockchain gaming, web gaming 2 nft drop, nft community bitcoin, crypto bear markets, crypto world good, hope, gm (general communication) 3 crypto market, crypto world axie infinity, scholarships axie infinity origin, axie nfts token incentives, token 4 crypto twitter, ygg discord land sales, auction ygg managers cup staking, airdrop 5 gamehunters, nft gaming metaverse, wearestartatlas ama session, discord community metaverse, storyverse 6 axie scholars, axie scholarship pyr vulcan, forgeyourworld ygg twitter spaces, ygg discord beta, app, android 7 mental health day awork, collection nft giveaway, indigg vulcan, pyr 11 8 ygg managers cup, charity tournament mint, presale, space misfits builders, knowledge, community voxedit, live contest 9 ygg token sale, ygg founders coin space misfits community ygg guild advancement program cathletes, breeding 1 0 highest sale, nft auctions discord, telegram philippine web festival, guild meetup builders program, community 1 1 product building, marketing hex, pulsechain mint details, upcoming mint 1 2 year end festivities, happiness reflection os, windows, steam monkeyfans, monkeyleauge 1 3 creation moment, sculpture atari, first edition stepn, walkn 1 4 nft giveaway, nft mystery boxes start atlas metaverse music video contest, trailer 1 5 odette donations, crypto donations bored apes pa community, journey 1 6 dao governance, dao community nft gaming sipher bear market, bull market 1 7 freya mask, mask piece floor price, sales solana, nfts 1 8 brooklyn, new york amouranth, misogyny awesome mech photo 1 9 metaverse economy, metaverse work community discord, stream 2 0 coffee, food selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): rochefort, a. (2023, october). social media governance via an “anemic” policy regime? how boundary spanning, competing issue definitions, lack of cohesion, and administrative fragmentation impede regulatory reform. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. social media governance via an “anemic” policy regime? how boundary spanning, competing issue definitions, lack of cohesion, and administrative fragmentation impede regulatory reform alex rochefort boston university across the globe, lawmakers have enacted a range of reforms targeting the operations of large digital platforms. within the united states, however, the push to regulate platform companies—specifically, social media—has faltered. neither standard interest group politics, nor partisan deadlock, nor the clash of liberal versus conservative ideologies adequately account for this situation. drawing upon historical sources, an examination of political-ideational foundations, and an empirical analysis of recent congressional hearings, this paper argues that an “anemic” policy regime has emerged for governance of the social media sector in the united states over the past two decades. key attributes of this regime—its boundary-spanning nature, competing issue definitions, lack of policy cohesion, and administrative fragmentation—combine to impede the capability for problem-solving on the topic of regulatory reform. what are policy regimes? at its core, the “policy regime” perspective offers a means to “construct a conceptual map that considers the constellation of ideas, institutional arrangements, and interests (iiis) that are involved in addressing policy problems” (may & jochim, 2013, p. 426). in simpler terms, policy regimes are “governing arrangements for addressing policy problems” (p. 428), and boundary-spanning regimes refer to those that span multiple policy areas. in practice, boundary-spanning regimes “foster integrative action among subsystems by putting pressure on players within those elements that are relevant to a given, messy problem” (jochim & may, 2010, p. 307). for instance, “public education” is a boundary-spanning problem because it contains multiple dimensions (e.g., access, cost, effectiveness) and intersects with other policy areas such as healthcare, employment, and criminal justice. may, jochim, and sapotichne’s (2011) study of the emergence of homeland security as an “anemic” policy regime in the united states is instructive for approaching developments in the social media sector. anemic policy regimes are marked by disorganized and discordant policymaking activity carried out by members of a policymaking community. examining congressional hearing testimony in the four-year period after the september 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the country, the authors identified eight different issue areas in which governmental actors prioritized “homeland security” through policymaking activities. ultimately, these efforts were uneven and incongruous, reflecting each issue area’s historical-institutional mode of operating, not to mention different understandings of what constituted “homeland security.” interagency competition and conflicts over congressional committee jurisdiction further undermined policymaking. all these factors contributed to the anemia of the emerging policy regime, the weakness of which affected the coherency of policy responses and the integration of related policy activities. building upon these theoretical foundations, this project undertakes a comparable analysis of social media policy making in the united states, using the policy regime lens to provide a “thick” understanding of the forces that shape government action toward social media platforms. this project also highlights that the controversy over reforming social media platforms did not arise “out of thin air.” in fact, the u.s. government had well-established governing arrangements for internet policy that predated contemporary concerns about social media platforms (braman, 2010). however, conflict and disarray within the policy realm have weakened this regulatory foundation over time. a mixed methods analysis the first part of this paper presents an historical-institutional analysis of the emergence of the policy regime that now governs the operation of the social media industry. using the ideas, interests, and institutions (iiis) framework common in policy regime analysis, and relying upon secondary works that evaluate the ideational, legal, and policy foundations of internet policy, this work illustrates the incremental evolution of what has become the policy regime for social media platforms. many observers originally greeted the arrival and spread of the commercial internet in the u.s. with unbridled optimism, extolling its potential as a catalyst for social change. however, this “california ideology,” which married 1960s counter-cultural aesthetics and romantic individualism with the acquisitive logic of capitalism (barbrook & cameron, 1996; streeter, 2011), also characterized the internet as an ungovernable space best left untouched by government. from the commercialization of the internet to the structuring of online speech laws, this tension would shape regulatory battles over the next two decades (flew, 2021; bietti, 2023). the second part of this paper is a quantitative analysis of all congressional hearings that contain the term “social media” from 1990-2015. the full corpus of 1,123 hearings was collected using a keyword-based approach, consistent with scholarship exploring other policy regimes (may et al., 2011). each of the hearings was categorized by year, chamber (house versus senate), and congressional committee. focusing on the period before social media platforms became a salient policy concern provides insight into the scope, intensity, and nature of governmental attention within this policy area during a key formative period. my analysis reveals that social media (and the platforms that offer such services) constitute a public issue that is fragmented, multi-stakeholder, and multi-dimensional. a total of 43 different congressional committees held hearings that included discussion of the issue, with the committees on foreign affairs, oversight and governmental reform, energy and commerce, and homeland security featuring the topic the most. congressional interest has largely focused on “e-government” and the desire to use social media to deliver faster, more efficient, and more accessible public services. interestingly, no hearings explicitly focused on the behavior of any specific platform operator, although a number of hearings featured topics now prominent in contemporary regulatory debates, including online censorship, privacy, cybersecurity, and safety issues for children. social media platform regulation as an anemic policy regime? guided by the theoretical and empirical findings from this work, this paper argues that the u.s. federal government’s inability to pass contemporary regulatory reforms for the social media sector results from: 1) the boundary-spanning nature of this task; 2) the disparate historical-institutional legacies of the governing bodies now responsible for its oversight; and 3) the increasingly politicized character of social media platforms as a public policy issue. as this analysis suggests, social media platform regulation is not a one-dimensional issue. it has many facets and intersects with other policy areas, many of which also deal with boundary-spanning problems (e.g., privacy). from this situation, many problems flow. solutions devised in one area may impede progress in another. additionally, integrating policy agendas across institutional domains requires greater coordination, resource allocation, and attention for all parties involved. institutional fragmentation, at both the federal and state level, further hampers reform, as evidenced by the recent tensions between california’s privacy regulators and congress with respect to a proposed national privacy law. decades of regulatory roll-back have enfeebled the federal agencies that must now rein in abuses of the social media industry, an adversary of unanticipated power. those agitating for reform remain optimistic, with several agencies exhibiting a renewed interest in privacy laws and antitrust enforcement. yet the absence of a coherent policy regime for regulating social media platforms is as much a product of the institutional environment as it is a result of congress grappling ineffectually with the diffusion of a new technology. and as the scope of conflict surrounding the regulatory debate inevitably grows, a firm and consistent policy response will be a necessity. references barbrook, r., & cameron, a. (1996). the californian ideology. science as culture, 6(1), 44-72. bietti, e. (2023). a genealogy of digital platform regulation. georgetown law technology review (7)1. braman, s. (2010). internet policy. in: burnett r, consalvo, m & ess, c (eds). the handbook of internet studies. london: wiley-blackwell, pp. 137–167. flew, t. (2021). regulating platforms. john wiley & sons. jochim, a. e., & may, p. j. (2010). beyond subsystems: policy regimes and governance. policy studies journal, 38(2), 303-327. may, p. j., & jochim, a. e. (2013). policy regime perspectives: policies, politics, and governing. policy studies journal, 41(3), 426-452. may, p. j., jochim, a. e., & sapotichne, j. (2011). constructing homeland security: an anemic policy regime. policy studies journal, 39(2), 285-307. streeter, t. (2011). the net effect: romanticism, capitalism, and the internet. new york, ny: new york university press. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): lukan, t., čehovih zajc, j. (2023, october). getting paid to take care for the ones you love: social media influencing as a means for paid social reproduction labor. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. getting paid to take care for the ones you love: social media influencing as a means for paid social reproduction labor tinca lukan university of ljubljana jožica čehovin zajc university of ljubljana recent research has shown how digital platforms such as taskrabbit, urbansitter, and wolt commercialize, commodify, and transform social reproduction labor like cleaning, babysitting, and cooking (huws, 2019; van doorn, 2023; posada, 2021). yet, with a few notable exceptions (e.g., jorge et al., 2021; duffy, 2017: 185-215; casey and littler 2022), how social media platforms and the activities of their professional users influencersintersect with the field of social reproduction has received scant academic attention. in her germinal study of influencers titled (not) getting paid to do what you love, duffy (2017: 195) notes that mothers experienced a sense of privilege and empowerment through their ability to juggle caregiving responsibilities and careers as influencers. jorge et al. (2021) found that influencer mothers who share content about parenting justified leaving their salaried jobs due to their incongruence with caregiving responsibilities. moreover, they frame their work as influencers in ways that reproduce the neoliberal ethos that promotes individual management of motherhood and career. recently, casey and littler (2022) coined the term "spectacular housewifization" to describe the online work practices of british "cleanfluencer" as a combination of precarious forms of digital self-branding and gendered fetishization of domestic labor. this study departs from examining intimacy as a tool for building bonds with audiences on social media (baym, 2018) to actual intimate relationships. we use viviana zelizer's (2012) concept of relational work, which posits that people lead connected lives in which economy and intimacy intermingle and mutually constitute each other. the concept of relational work allows us to examine the intra-household relations, which huws (2019: 214) argues are "the cauldron in which changes in the scope and structure of capitalism are brewed, as well as the site in which its contradictions are played out." our study aims to examine the expansion of platform capitalism into the domestic sphere of social media influencers, taking into account the specific semi-peripheral socioeconomic context of slovenia. we posit the following research question: rq: how do social media influencers in slovenia manage work and household responsibilities? more than 50 semi-structured in-depth interviews with slovenian social media influencers, their formal and informal business partners, and stakeholders (influencer agencies and brand companies) were conducted between september 2022 and february 2023. interviews were recorded and transcribed. content analysis was done using nvivo. the results show that social media influencing in the balkans intersects with the social reproduction domain in two different ways, depending on whether influencers come from a household that is poor in money or time. in households with time-poor backgrounds, influencing is a means to have flexible work hours, avoid rigid structures of 8-4 jobs, and thus find an optimal equilibrium between work and caregiving responsibilities. influencers from time-poor households are primarily mothers of the millennial generation who have caregiving responsibilities and call themselves "momagers" (a portmanteau of words mom and managers). they have given up their salaried jobs to build a business as influencers to improve their work-life balance. for them, influencing affords them time for social reproduction tasks such as cleaning, cooking, and taking care of children. it is crucial to note that a time-poor group of influencers come from more privileged socioeconomic backgrounds: they all reported owning real estate and getting by "easily" on their income. for them, influencing is not limited to economic transactions but also offers them social integration, as they form friendships and share advice with followers and other influencers about raising children and other household responsibilities. for influencers from money-poor households, influencing is a means to have one monetary expense less and obtain otherwise unaffordable products for household and personal care. in this group of influencers, there are also young mothers who come from less privileged backgrounds, and through influencing activities, they compensate for children's items like strollers and car seats. they have two jobs, with influencing being a side hustle. in this group, we found various forms of moonlighting activities: they take resources from conventional employers, such as cameras and tripods, or they use their lunch break to edit social media content or respond to messages from audiences and clients. for them, being an influencer is less a form of social integration than a way to survive in an economy where dual incomes are required but rising childcare prices and stagnant wages do not cover household expenses. this group may be money-poor, to begin with, but when they become influencers, they also become time-poor because creating content for brands means additional hours of work. what unites these two groups is that they all create content "on the go" in their free time while taking care of the family, cooking dinner or cleaning the house (using the food, toys, and cleaning products they received for promotional purposes). under the 8-8-8 rule (work, leisure, sleep), only 8 hours of work in the organization were paid under traditional working conditions. with social media, leisure activities can also be monetized, often resulting in 2 x 8 hours of work, pay, and additional passive income. influencing is peering into the cracks between work and leisure by creating a novel dimension of time, where free time is also working time. we conceptualize this blending of the intimate and the commercial as a new temporal dimension: monetized leisure. by leisure, we consider the time that remains at one's own discretion after doing paid work and provides opportunity for rest, self-realization and often a place into which intervene secondary activities like unpaid labor of housework and care work (chatzitheochari and arber, 2012). both groups earmark compensation from influencing for the same purpose: it builds a "household euro" for children or family travel. nevertheless, one cannot speak of formalization of the informal economy, as is the case in third world economies, since these transactions often take the form of the shadow economy they are paid with products and vouchers, or they receive compensation through paypal or a relative's or friend's company, allowing them to avoid taxation. under the radar, rich and vibrant gift networks and resale activities are refracted through the household economy. our study shows that influencing activities on social media are less about getting paid to do what you love, as demonstrated by duffy (2017) and more about getting paid to care for those you love. on the one hand, blending work and home domains in influencing activities can be understood as empowerment because it provides influencers with a kind of wage for housework and caring responsibilities. on the other hand, it is also double work for women. it exacerbates gender inequalities because female influencers reported monetizing caregiving tasks and never male influencers, who grounded their influencer activity with an entrepreneurial discourse. the study offers insights into how western platforms make landfall within the local economy, which is characterized by a pre-existing hustle culture in slovenia. in this context, commercializing domestic and leisure activities is part of a more than centuryold logic. it also contributes to the varieties of platform capitalism and to the dewesternization of platform and creator studies. references casey, e., & littler, j. (2022). mrs hinch, the rise of the cleanfluencer and the neoliberal refashioning of housework: scouring away the crisis?. the sociological review, 70(3), 489-505. chatzitheochari, s., & arber, s. (2012). class, gender and time poverty: a time-use analysis of british workers' free time resources. the british journal of sociology, 63(3), 451-471. duffy, b. e. (2017). (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. yale university press. huws, u. (2019). the hassle of housework: digitalization and the commodification of domestic labour. feminist review, 123(1), 8-23. jorge, a., marôpo, l., coelho, a. m., & novello, l. (2022). mummy influencers and professional sharenting. european journal of cultural studies, 25(1), 166-182. posada, j. (2022). embedded reproduction in platform data work. information, communication & society, 25(6), 816-834. van doorn, n. (2023). liminal precarity and compromised agency: migrant experiences of gig work in amsterdam, berlin, and new york city. in the routledge handbook of the gig economy. taylor & francis. zelizer, v. a. (2012). how i became a relational economic sociologist and what does that mean?. politics & society, 40(2), 145-174. baym, n. k. (2018). playing to the crowd. new york university press. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): bach, p., gitomer, a., devries, m., walker, c., deyoe, d., atienza-bathelemy, j., foucault welles, b., freelon, d., & zulli, d. (2023, october). stitching politics and identity on tiktok. panel presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. stitching politics and identity on tiktok parker bach university of north carolina at chapel hill center for information, technology, & public life (citap) adina gitomer northeastern university melody devries allegheny college christina walker purdue university diana deyoe purdue university julia atienza-barthelemy universidad politécnica de madrid brooke foucault welles northeastern university deen freelon university of pennsylvania center for information, technology, & public life (citap) diana zulli purdue university introductory statement though a relative newcomer among social media platforms, social video-sharing platform tiktok is one of the largest social media platforms in the world, boasting over one billion monthly active users, which it garnered in just five years (dellatto, 2021). while much of the early attention to the platform focused on more frivolous elements, such as its dances and challenges, the political weight of tiktok has become ever clearer. in the 2020 us election, donald trump’s plan to fill the 19,000-seat bok center in tulsa was stymied by young activists who reserved tickets with no intention of attending, organized largely on tiktok (bandy & diakopoulos, 2020). in the years since, political discourse on tiktok has continued to emerge from everyday users and political campaigns alike (see newman, 2022), even as tiktok itself has become an object of political contention: calls for banning the app in the united states–citing security concerns influenced by xenophobia, given the app’s chinese ownership–began in the trump presidency (allyn, 2020) and have recently culminated in stateand federal-level bans on the app for government-owned devices in the u.s. (berman, 2023). while some studies have navigated limited data access and the platform’s relative infancy to offer an examination of political tiktok (see literat & kligler-vilenchik, 2019; medina serrano et al., 2020; vijay & gekker, 2021; guinaudeau et al., 2022), there remains a significant need for more analysis and theorization of how tiktok can become both a site for political discourse and a feature caught up within political mobilization. this panel seeks to bring together emerging work that deals with political participation on tiktok, in order to share current wisdom and forge future research directions. the presented works specifically focus on the relationship between political participation on tiktok and political identity for three primary reasons. first, as a video-based and thus embodied platform (raun, 2012), creator identity is more prominent and easily perceptible in the visual and auditory elements of tiktok videos than in the primarily text-based posts on platforms like twitter and facebook. second, tiktok relies more heavily on its recommendation algorithm for content distribution than its competitors traditionally have (kaye et al., 2022; cotter et al., 2022; zeng & kaye, 2022; zhang & liu, 2021), leading to the creation of “refracted publics” (abidin, 2021) or gemeinschaftstyle communities (kaye et al., 2022) around users’ common interests, which may include and/or be heavily informed by identity. third, tiktok has long prioritized and found success with generation z and younger users more broadly (zeng et al., 2021; vogels et al., 2022; stahl & literat, 2022), which has made generational identity extremely salient on the app, while also implicating political identity, as young people tend to hold political beliefs more cognizant and accepting of diverse identities than older generations (parker et al., 2019). the papers in this panel consider a wide range of identity characteristics of tiktok users and how these identities shape and are shaped by political discourse on tiktok. paper 1 builds on tiktok’s targeting of gen z, considering the identities of age and generation through a content analysis of political remix on tiktok to uncover how younger users use tiktok for political activism as compared to their older counterparts, and finding evidence that tiktok is a powerful site of collective action. also building from tiktok’s appeal to genz, paper 2 presents a digital ethnographic analysis of the trad-wife phenomena on tiktok, offering that tiktok quietly (and thus insidiously) offers space for the cultivation of christian nationalist, ‘gentle fascisms’ within genz women, often without mention of ‘politics’ at all. paper 3 offers a computational content analysis of political posts on tiktok with a focus on the interactions between identity and partisanship, and particularly the ways in which creators of marginalized identities on the right act as identity entrepreneurs, offering conservative critiques of their identity groups in ways which find popularity among conservative audiences of hegemonic identities. finally, paper 4 looks at differences in how tiktok users respond to male and female politicians’ tiktok videos using a combination of computational and qualitative methods, with exploratory analysis suggesting that male politicians receive more neutral and positive comments than female politicians. by focusing on identity and political discourse on tiktok, we recognize the wide range of political activity occurring on a platform often denigrated as frivolous, and foreground the importance of identity characteristics to the technological and social shaping of these dialogues. references abidin, c. (2021). from “networked publics” to “refracted publics”: a companion framework for researching “below the radar” studies. social media + society, 7(1), 2056305120984458. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120984458 allyn, b. (2020, december 7). u.s. judge halts trump’s tiktok ban, the 2nd court to fully block the action. npr. https://www.npr.org/2020/12/07/944039053/u-s-judgehalts-trumps-tiktok-ban-the-2nd-court-to-fully-block-the-action bandy, j., & diakopoulos, n. (2020). #tulsaflop: a case study of algorithmicallyinfluenced collective action on tiktok (arxiv:2012.07716). arxiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2012.07716 cotter, k., decook, j. r., kanthawala, s., & foyle, k. (2022). in fyp we trust: the divine force of algorithmic conspirituality. international journal of communication, 16(2022), 2911–2934. dellatto, m. (2021, september 27). tiktok hits 1 billion monthly active users. forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisadellatto/2021/09/27/tiktok-hits-1-billion-monthlyactive-users/ guinaudeau, b., munger, k., & votta, f. (2022). fifteen seconds of fame: tiktok and the supply side of social video. computational communication research, 4(2), 463– 485. https://doi.org/10.5117/ccr2022.2.004.guin kaye, d. b. v., zeng, j., & wikström, p. (2022). tiktok: creativity and culture in short video (1st edition). polity. literat, i., & kligler-vilenchik, n. (2019). youth collective political expression on social media: the role of affordances and memetic dimensions for voicing political views. new media & society, 21(9), 1988–2009. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819837571 medina serrano, j. c., papakyriakopoulos, o., & hegelich, s. (2020). dancing to the partisan beat: a first analysis of political communication on tiktok. 12th acm conference on web science, 257–266. https://doi.org/10.1145/3394231.3397916 newman, j. (2022, december 17). john fetterman’s tiktok whisperer. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/17/style/annie-wu-henry-john-fetterman.html parker, k., graf, n., & igielnik, r. (2019, january 17). generation z looks a lot like millennials on key social and political issues. pew research center’s social & demographic trends project. https://www.pewresearch.org/socialtrends/2019/01/17/generation-z-looks-a-lot-like-millennials-on-key-social-and-politicalissues/ raun, t. (2012). diy therapy: exploring affective self-representations in trans video blogs on youtube. in a. karatzogianni & a. kuntsman (eds.), digital cultures and the politics of emotion: feelings, affect and technological change (pp. 165–180). palgrave macmillan uk. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230391345_10 stahl, c. c., & literat, i. (2022). #genz on tiktok: the collective online self-portrait of the social media generation. journal of youth studies, 0(0), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2022.2053671 vijay, d., & gekker, a. (2021). playing politics: how sabarimala played out on tiktok. american behavioral scientist, 65(5), 712–734. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764221989769 vogels, e. a, gelles-watnick, r., & massarat, n. (2022, august 10). teens, social media and technology 2022. pew research center: internet, science & tech. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social-media-and-technology2022/ zeng, j., abidin, c., & schäfer, m. s. (2021). research perspectives on tiktok and its legacy apps—introduction. international journal of communication, 15(2021), 3161– 3172. zhang, m., & liu, y. (2021). a commentary of tiktok recommendation algorithms in mit technology review 2021. fundamental research, 1(6), 846–847. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fmre.2021.11.015 stop scrolling!: youth activism and political remix on tiktok adina gitomer northeastern university julia atienza-barthelemy universidad politécnica de madrid brooke foucault welles northeastern university introduction as the social video platform tiktok has exploded in popularity (guinaudeau et al., 2022), its political aptitude has been subject to debate. while some see it as a site of frivolous dance videos (harris, 2021), others see it as a site of serious political action (herrman, 2020). tiktok stands out from other platforms like twitter, whose political implications have been widely studied, for being video-based, remix-based, and centered around algorithmically-curated content over personal networks. it also stands out for being dominated by youth (vogels et al., 2022), who are turning to the site in particular for political engagement (literat & kligler-vilenchik, 2019; choi, 2022). fittingly then, the debate around tiktok’s political capacity mirrors the debate around youth political participation. youth tend toward proactive forms of political participation that leverage new media technologies and peer interaction over formal institutions (bennett et al., 2011; cohen & kahne, 2012; pickard, 2019); although this style is increasingly validated by researchers, it continues to be read by many as improper and/or a sign of political apathy (flanagan & levine, 2010). we would be well-advised to take seriously the potential of youth civic styles and tiktok for political change, as enough evidence has mounted that neither can be easily written off. here, we take up this task by investigating youth political participation on tiktok in order to further our understanding of both. we first consider what kind of political content circulates on tiktok among youth and in general. it has been found that people primarily use twitter to spread information, rather than mobilize action (boulianne et al., 2020). however, there is reason to believe that tiktok is more action-oriented than its extensively-researched counterpart: there is a strong perception that it is good for activism (abidin, 2019; compte & klug, 2021), it has been linked to successful activist mobilization (bandy & diakapoulos, 2020), and its younger user base is inclined toward action (earl et al., 2017). next, we consider how political content circulates on tiktok among youth and in general. according to bennett and segerberg (2012), digital action networks follow two main logics: 1) collective action, wherein individuals rally around a shared ‘we’ by way of organizational brokerage, and 2) connective action, wherein individuals take part in a larger movement by sharing their own personal narratives and experiences. as a highly embodied (raun, 2012) and affective (hautea et al., 2021; haslem, 2022) app built for personalization (herrman, 2020), tiktok appears poised to support connective action, and in some cases, it already has (becker, 2021; sadler, 2022). further, as connective action relies on emergent digital technologies and their sharing capabilities, it is seen as newer and younger, and thus well-aligned with tiktok’s main user base. taken together, these considerations – i.e., the what and the how of political circulation on tiktok – allow us to better understand tiktok’s political use, while adding important depth to our conception of youth civic styles. data and methods we hone in on the youth-led digital activist organization gen-z for change, for which tiktok is the ‘primary stomping ground’ (ward, 2022). we first collected all tiktok videos that have an original “sound” and that tag “#genzforchange” in the caption (n = 66). we manually categorized these as either a) informational or b) a call to action. we then collected all videos that use one of those original sounds, which gave us a sample of remixes. content primarily circulates on tiktok through remix, since there is not an option to directly repost someone else’s video; further, remixes are supported by the way sounds work on the app: while a sound always accompanies a video, it is listed as its own discrete entity that can be shared between users. our remix sample mostly consists of “duets” (85%), in which the poster adds a video alongside the original content in split-screen fashion. we will refer to all remixes as “duets” from here on. a team of two researchers watched every duet (n = 798) and coded them (𝜶krippendorf ∈ [.79,1]) for an array of attributes tied to collective and connective remix strategies, along with whether they were posted by a member of generation z or an older user. results in terms of the kind of activist content circulated on tiktok, we find that in contrast to other platforms, call-to-action videos generated far more engagement than informational videos. the 24 original call-to-action videos yielded 343 duets (a ratio of 14:1), whereas the 36 original informational videos yielded 338 duets (a ratio of 9:1). call-to-action videos were especially likely to be remixed by younger users. moreover, the set of callto-action duets prompted more likes, comments, and shares than the informational duets. this effect is strongest for shares: call-to-action duets make up only 50% of all duets, but they account for a whopping 95% of all shares. at the same time, these duets received fewer views overall than the informational duets, and were posted by less popular users. as for how content is circulated, we find younger users adhere to the logic of collective action over connective action, especially compared with older users. young users’ duets typically involve a completely blank screen – or mostly blank with some relevant text inserted – alongside the original content. meanwhile, older users tend to appear in their duets, reacting and gesturing alongside the original content. additionally, young users repeat ideas and resources from the original content more frequently than they contribute new ones, while the opposite is true for older users. in these and other ways, young users demonstrate a form of remix that centers the core, collective message over their own self-expression. conclusion our findings suggest that tiktok is a promising tool for social change, as it is not a site of political discussion alone, but also one of mobilization. when activists on tiktok urge other users to stop scrolling and act, their call is heeded – especially by members of generation z. beyond reinforcing tiktok’s social justice bent, this result affirms young people’s growing reputation as empowered and influential doers who leverage social media for social change. however, young users’ remix strategies challenged our expectations. as opposed to the playful, personalized, and connective approaches increasingly used to characterize youth political participation online, we observed young people engaging in deeply serious and collective ways. instead of inserting their own ideas and reactions, they chose to repeat elements of the original message in their remixes; instead of appearing in the frame and visually articulating their stance, they maintained a minimalist aesthetic, directing the viewer’s eye to the original content. in other words, they consistently chose to center the original video over themselves. for members of generation z then, political remix on tiktok does not always seem to hinge on creative self-expression, but can prompt and reward humorless collective organizing and advocacy. this departure from prior work on youth civic styles is all the more surprising given that older users made the opposite choices. that is, by injecting their personal opinions and physical reactions, older users took up strategies commonly attributed to younger users, verifying the existence of those strategies while complicating their associations. references abidin, c. (2019). mapping internet celebrity on tiktok: exploring attention economies and visibility labours. cultural science journal, 12(1), 77–103. https://doi.org/10.5334/csci.140 bandy, j., & diakopoulos, n. (2020). #tulsaflop: a case study of algorithmicallyinfluenced collective action on tiktok. arxiv:2012.07716 [cs]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07716 becker, a. b. (2021). getting out the vote on twitter with mandy patinkin: celebrity authenticity, tiktok, and the couple you actually want at thanksgiving dinner . . . or your passover seder. international journal of communication, 15(0), article 0. bennett, w. l., & segerberg, a. (2012). the logic of connective action. information, communication & society, 15(5), 739–768. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2012.670661 bennett, w. l., wells, c., & freelon, d. (2011). communicating civic engagement: contrasting models of citizenship in the youth web sphere. journal of communication, 61(5), 835–856. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2011.01588.x boulianne, s., lalancette, m., & ilkiw, d. (2020). “school strike 4 climate”: social media and the international youth protest on climate change. media and communication, 8(2), 208–218. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v8i2.2768 choi, a., d’ignazio, c., foucault welles, b., parker, a.g. (2022). social media as a critical pedagogical tool: examining the relationship between youth’s political engagement on social media and their critical consciousness. chi 23: chi conference on human factors in computing systems. cohen, c. j., & kahne, j. (2012). participatory politics: new media and youth political action. youth and participatory politics research network. compte, d. l., & klug, d. (2021). “it’s viral!”—a study of the behaviors, practices, and motivations of tiktok social activists. arxiv:2106.08813 [cs]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2106.08813 earl, j., maher, t. v., & elliott, t. (2017). youth, activism, and social movements. sociology compass, 11(4), e12465. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12465 flanagan, c., & levine, p. (2010). civic engagement and the transition to adulthood. the future of children, 20(1), 159–179. guinaudeau, b., munger, k., & votta, f. (2022). fifteen seconds of fame: tiktok and the supply side of social video. computational communication research, 4(2), 463– 485. https://doi.org/10.5117/ccr2022.2.004.guin harris, e. a. (2021, march 20). how crying on tiktok sells books. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/20/books/booktok-tiktok-video.html haslem, b. (2022). tiktok as a digital activism space: social justice under algorithmic control. institute for the humanities theses. https://doi.org/10.25777/d5v6-ab64 hautea, s., parks, p., takahashi, b., & zeng, j. (2021). showing they care (or don’t): affective publics and ambivalent climate activism on tiktok. social media + society, 7(2), 20563051211012344. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211012344 herrman, j. (2020, june 28). tiktok is shaping politics. but how? the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/28/style/tiktok-teen-politics-gen-z.html kahne, j., middaugh, e., & allen, d. (2015). youth, new media, and the rise of participatory politics. in from voice to influence: understanding citizenship in a digital age. university of chicago press. literat, i., & kligler-vilenchik, n. (2019). youth collective political expression on social media: the role of affordances and memetic dimensions for voicing political views. new media & society, 21(9), 1988–2009. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819837571 pickard, s. (2019). young environmental activists are doing it themselves. political insight, 10(4), 4–7. https://doi.org/10.1177/2041905819891364 raun, t. (2012). diy therapy: exploring affective self-representations in trans video blogs on youtube. in a. karatzogianni & a. kuntsman (eds.), digital cultures and the politics of emotion: feelings, affect and technological change (pp. 165–180). palgrave macmillan uk. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230391345_10 sadler, o. (2022). defiant amplification or decontextualized commercialization? protest music, tiktok, and social movements. social media + society, 8(2), 20563051221094770. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221094769 vickery, j. r. (2020). the memeification of #schoolshootings in the u.s.: youth, tiktok, and playful mediated bodies. aoir selected papers of internet research. https://spir.aoir.org/ojs/index.php/spir/article/view/11357 vogels, e. a, gelles-watnick, r., & massarat, n. (2022, august 10). teens, social media and technology 2022. pew research center: internet, science & tech. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social-media-and-technology2022/ ward, i. (2022). inside the progressive movement’s tiktok army. politico. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/03/27/progressive-gen-z-for-change-tiktok-00020624 #makehousewivesgreatagain: the digital-political lifeworlds of traditionalist gen-z women on tiktok melody devries allegheny college when we think of what constitutes far-right or hateful content online, we may imagine pepe-laden 4chan memes and reddit posts, or hyper-masculine youtubers or vloggers who provide explicitly political commentary and discuss the degeneracy of contemporary society. this notion of who and what the far-right is was especially solidified with the emergence of the alt-right, which popularized the image of a memesavvy, young ‘identarian’ man who occupied fringe, subcultural digital spaces (hawley 2019; beran 2019). however, as the alt-right we remember from the deadly “unite the right” rally in charlottesville, va has slinked out of the spotlight, it has been replaced by a far-right merged with expressions of the christian right, forming what is now described as post-trump christian nationalism. as images of the january 6th remind us that political crusades are also often spiritual ones (dalsheim & starrett 2021), the question of how mainstream protestant, catholic, and even orthodox christianities enable the evolution and spread of white and/or male supremacist traditionalist politics is gaining attention from scholars of media, religion, sociology, and anthropology alike (berry 2021; butler 2021; gorski & perry 2022; riccardi-swartz 2022). like the alt-right, we might imagine christian nationalists as an identifiable group with similar cultural expressions, ideological rhetoric, political practices, and demographic features. however, the manifestations of christian nationalism that evolve within social media spaces like tiktok that host younger demographics and different forms of participation prove that not all users who endorse traditionalist and/or christian nationalist beliefs match the expectations we typically have for contemporary far-right adherents. while much work has been done to investigate toxic masculinities of the altright as they emerge on reddit’s manosphere or within 4chan’s recesses (e.g. cousineau 2021; helm et al. 2022; stern 2019), little work has been done on the complex, ambiguous, and mundane political mobilization work achieved by young women practicing and promoting ‘traditional family values’ (bjork-james 2020; culicchia 2022) on digital spaces not typically associated with the contemporary farright or christian nationalism, like tiktok and instagram (abi-hassan 2017; bracewell 2021). in response, this paper draws from over a year of digital ethnographic research into the “trad-wife” (traditional wife) trend as it has been enacted on tiktok (schellewald 2021). differing in style from “red-pill women” (stern 2019), trad-wives are young, white, gen-z or millennial women who use tiktok and/or instagram to document their lives as traditional homemakers and housewives. these women have decided not to pursue higher education or a career, and instead commit to serving their husbands, tending to the home, and raising children. most typically, these young women are in their early twenties, married, and already pregnant and/or mothers of young children. trad-wives view themselves as strongly anti-feminist, and typically identify as evangelical, christian reformed, or catholic through hashtags like #christianwife or #christiangirlaesthetic. most consistently, trad-wives present their lifestyles as a form of rebellion against the exhausting and toxic demands of #bossbabe capitalism and what they view as the dehumanizing hyper-sexuality of liberal or left-wing feminism, often playfully expressing these beliefs by lip-syncing lyrics in tiktoks that cheekily present their point. in this sense, trad-wife politics enact what i refer to as a “gentle-fascism” that rebels against global neoliberal capitalism and that “rejects modernity” in pursuit of traditional, “natural” hierarchies of gendered (and implicitly racialized) order, but that does so in a playful, quotidian, and spiritual way that makes for supportive and upbeat comment sections. ironically, these women often rely on the liberal rhetoric of “individual choice” to mark their gendered enactment of these politics as innocent, normative, and in fact restorative of a better time and place, hence #makehousewivesgreatagain. alongside their rejection of egalitarian social systems in preference of patriarchy and “western values” (a common far-right dog whistle for white-supremacy), trad-wives’ desire for a future that resembles the past firmly locates them as an expression of far-right politics (stern 2019). yet, the fact that trad-wife content can easily be described by followers as a healthy expression of liberal democracy via “freedom of choice”, and the fact that such nuclear family life slides easily into normative christian, western cultural structures suggests why trad-wife content has been overlooked by researchers of the far-right in favor of more explicit extremist content that is easier to spot. indeed, these accounts do not need to be explicitly political to present key features of far-right gender ideology as an admirable, whimsical, and “wholesome” lifestyle alongside their occasional denouncement of feminism, progressive activism, or “marxism”. while trad-wife styles vary, most content mimics other trending tiktok video formats that trace the rhythms of everyday life, such as the pov (point of view), “get ready with me”, or “day in the life” templates often reproduced by beauty influencers. trad-wives however infuse this quotidian day-in-the-life content with messages of modesty, humbling the self, coming to terms with the biological ‘realities of womanhood’, and serving god through acts of service to one’s husband. more insidiously, some trad-wife content will briefly admit that the best work they can do as a christian woman is to bear more (implicitly white) children and raise them to follow their worldview. others will use a tiktok dance to express that women shouldn’t vote or be involved in public life, a sentiment that often deflects resistance by coding itself as “not totally serious”. at its core, this paper argues that it is a mistake to view trad-wife tiktok content as less urgent than more explicit forms of christian nationalism or far-right politics more broadly. trad-wife content is dangerous precisely because of its subtlety and its emphasis on the daily, material practice of one’s spiritual politics. building from previous research which shows that mobilization of political practice tends to proceed ideological recruitment online (devries 2021), i argue that tiktok trad-wives are a key ingredient within the spread of christian nationalist political belief within genz women, in part through their practice of prefigurative politics (yates 2021). in other words, this research sees the political potency of trad-wives in their ability to engender the participation of other young women to enact hierarchy, supremacy and submission often without their knowledge that such practices are political at all. this conclusion is supported through qualitative analysis of the comment sections attached to the videos of popular trad-wife accounts. additionally, this paper demonstrates the complexity of tiktok trad-wives by focusing on three key themes that distinguish trad-wives from other manifestations of the far-right: women-for-women content, gentle fascism, and their ability to function through what we on the outside might qualify as contradiction. based on these findings, i suggest how we might design our resistance to these new and unsettlingly benign forms of digital christian nationalism. in sum, this research provides an important move within internet studies to assess a) how mainstream and youth-oriented platforms host seemingly benign expressions of white and male supremacy, and b) how spiritualpolitical-technological processes operate within and through the specific affordances of tiktok to reproduce a theocratic, authoritarian, and bio-essentialist politics of christian nationalism within even those populations that stand to lose greatly from such politics. references abi-hassan, s. 2017. “populism and gender,” in the oxford handbook of populism. eds. c. r. kaltwasser, p. taggart, p. o. espejo, and p. ostiguy. oxford: oxford university press. 426–444. beran, dale. 2019. it came from something awful> how a toxic troll army accidentally memed donald trump into office. new york: all points books. berry, damon t. 2021. christianity and the alt-right: exploring the relationship. london: routledge. bracewell, lorna. 2021. “gender, populism, and the qanon conspiracy movement”. frontiers in sociology. january 2021. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2020.615727 butler, anthea. 2021. white evangelical racism: the politics of morality in america. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. cousineau, luc. 2021. 2021. “’a positive identity for men’?: pathways to far-right participation through reddit’s /r/mensrights and /r/theredpill”. in rise of the far-right: technologies of recruitment and mobilization. eds. m. devries, j. bessant, r. watts. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. culicchia, catherine. 2022. “the christian right and state legislatures: the new battleground for ‘family values,’” april. https://dspace.sewanee.edu/handle/11005/21802. dalsheim, joyce & gregory starrett. 2021. “christian nationalism is downplayed in the jan 6. report and collective memory”. the conversation. https://theconversation.com/christian-nationalism-is-downplayed-in-the-jan-6-reportand-collective-memory-189440. [2/25/2023]. devries, melody. (2021). “mobilized but not (yet) recruited: the case of the collective avatar”. in rise of the far-right: technologies of recruitment and mobilization. eds. m. devries, j. bessant, r. watts. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. gorski, phillip, and samuel l. perry. 2022. the flag and the cross: white christian nationalism and the threat to american democracy. london: oxford university press. hawley, g. (2019). the alt-right: what everyone needs to know. new york, ny: oxford university press. helm, brenna, ryan scrivens, thomas j. holt, steve chermak, and richard frank. 2022. “examining incel subculture on reddit.” journal of crime and justice 0 (0): 1–19. riccardi-swartz, sarah. 2022. between heaven and russia: religious conversion and political apostasy in appalachia. new york: fordham university press. schellewald, andreas. 2021. “communicative forms on tiktok: perspectives from digital ethnography.” international journal of communication 15 (0): 21. stern. alexandra minna. 2019. proud boys and the white ethnostate: how the alt-right is warping the american imagination. yates, luke. 2021. “prefigurative politics and social movement strategy: the roles of prefiguration in the reproduction, mobilisation and coordination of movements.” political studies 69 (4): 1033–52. https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720936046. for you politics (fyp): partisanship and identity discourse on political tiktok parker bach university of north carolina at chapel hill center for information, technology, & public life (citap) deen freelon university of pennsylvania center for information, technology, & public life (citap) introduction from activist organizing as in the effort to stymie donald trump’s 2020 tulsa campaign rally (bandy & diakopoulos, 2020) to use in electoral campaigns like that of the internetsavvy john fetterman (newman, 2022), tiktok has proven itself a political forum to be reckoned with, especially among younger users (zeng et al., 2021; vogels et al., 2022). this makes tiktok an ideal platform for studying the politics of younger publics, who survey data suggest are more likely than older generations to recognize inequality along the lines of race, gender, and sexual orientation, and advocate for related inclusive policies (parker et al., 2019). one of the best-known conservative influencers on tiktok is christian walker, who had over 400,000 followers before he was banned from the platform in early 2021 (colyar, 2021). a young, gay, black man, walker made a name for himself with harsh critiques of his own identity groups, including his assertions that black lives matter protestors are “terrorists” (as cited in colyar, 2021) or that pride month is pointless (robinson, 2022). might figures like walker be the future of the american right? existing literature suggests that they may. leong (2016, 2021) employs the term “identity entrepreneurs” to refer to figures who leverage their minoritized identities to benefit themselves, particularly among hegemonic audiences. to this end, leslie et al. (2019) found that white conservatives preferred black conservative candidates who directly addressed issues of race from a conservative perspective over those who addressed other topics. robinson (2005), cimino (2006), and hatfield (2018) likewise examined how queer conservatives have come to support the republican party despite the american right’s longstanding anti-lgbtq+ platform. such figures stand in stark contrast to wider trends: nonwhite americans make up 40% of democratic voters and only 19% of republican voters (gramlich, 2020), with black americans having a long history of voting democratic in even greater proportions (dawson, 1994, 2001; harrislacewell, 2004), and lgbt voters identifying with the democratic party over the republican party in a 10:3 ratio (mallory, 2019). still, it is clear that the twenty-first century republican party aims to benefit from the incorporation of (certain elements of) marginalized identities. this project aims to investigate this trend by focusing on tiktok, prompted by the app’s young audience and the prominence of identity in the visual and auditory features of its video format, and posing the following research questions: rq 1: do minoritized tiktok users address identity more frequently than nonminoritized users? rq 1a: how does this vary with partisanship? rq 2: does minoritized users’ choice to address their minority identity affect the number of likes they receive? rq 2a: how does this vary with partisanship? rq 3: how does minoritized users’ choice to address their minority identity affect the nature of comments they receive? rq 3a: how does this vary with partisanship? data & account coding making use of the pyktok module (freelon et al., n.d.), we scraped videos and metadata for the top 300 posts on each of nine tiktok hashtag pages, which appear to rank posts based on a combination of engagement and recency. the hashtags selected were #liberal, #democrat, #biden, #conservative, #republican, #trump, #politics, #election, and #vote. this resulted in 1,778 unique videos from 1,343 unique users. next, up to 30 recent posts for each user were collected to expand the sample, for a total of 34,642 unique videos. the video descriptions associated with these videos featured 32,814 unique hashtags, which were coded by the researchers as either addressing politics, identity, neither, or both. finally, this sample was reduced to 12,252 video posts which contain at least one hashtag addressing identity and/or politics. comments were captured for each of these videos, totaling 3,741,461 comments. with the aid of a graduate student researcher, all user accounts were for partisanship and identity characteristics including gender, up to two identifiable races/ethnicities, sexual orientation (if expressed), trans/cis gender status (if expressed), and religion. the unit of analysis for this coding is each account, including the associated screenname, handle, user bio, and avatar, as in freelon et al. (2020), in addition to the videos from these accounts originally scraped from tiktok’s hashtag pages. findings to answer rqs 1 and 1a, we employed a series welch’s two-sample t-tests. first, we compared the frequency of posts containing race-related hashtags among nonwhite users to the frequency of such posts from other users, performing separate analyses for users on the political right and the political left. race-related hashtag use was significantly higher among posts by nonwhite users than other users, for users on the right and on the left, and with a similar effect size across partisanship, as measured by cohen’s d (d = 0.62 and d = 0.63, respectively). queer users on the left were also significantly more likely to post lgbtq+-related hashtags than were users who did not self-identify as queer, but there was no comparable significant association on the right, likely due to the limited number of outwardly queer users on the right (n = 3). to answer rqs 2 and 2a, we examined three-way interactions between video plays, user minoritized identity (queer or nonwhite), and the related minoritized-identity hashtag use on video likes, again separating models by partisanship. on the political right, we found that videos with a race-related hashtag and a nonwhite creator featured a significantly stronger relationship between plays and likes than other combinations of identity and hashtag, but no observable interactions regarding queer users. on the left, we found that only the presence of a race hashtag, regardless of user race, strengthened the relationship between video plays and likes. regarding queerness on the left, the strongest relationship between video plays and likes was observed on videos with an lgbtq+-related hashtag and a queer creator, or with neither. to answer rqs 3 and 3a, we examined the frequency of twelve words indicating agreement (e.g. “correct”, “exactly”) in video comments. such agreeing comments are only slightly more common on videos posted by users on the right (roughly 10% of comments vs. roughly 7% on the left), but appear about twice as frequently than on the left when the posting user is nonwhite and the video features a race-related hashtag, or when the user is queer and the video features an lgbtq+-related hashtag. discussion nonwhite and/or queer users across the political spectrum seem to post about their minoritized identity more often than their peers of non-minoritized identity, but this effect was not stronger on the right than the left, implying a lack of intentional identity entrepreneurship among minoritized conservatives, as intent is a crucial aspect of that theory. nonetheless, conservative posts from nonwhite users which address race gain more likes than other conservative posts as views increase, whereas on the left this relationship is only strengthened by race-related hashtag use, not creator identity. moreover, nonwhite and/or queer creators on the right receive a deluge of comments agreeing with them when they address race, more so than on the left. identity entrepreneurship requires intent to leverage one’s minoritized identity for gain; without that intent and without policies aimed at supporting such identity groups, the disproportionate positive responses to minoritized voices making conservative arguments about identity looks less like identity entrepreneurship, and more like tokenization. references bandy, j., & diakopoulos, n. (2020). #tulsaflop: a case study of algorithmicallyinfluenced collective action on tiktok (arxiv:2012.07716). arxiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2012.07716 cimino, k. w. (2006). gay conservatives: group consciousness and assimilation. routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203729106 colyar, b. (2021, march 31). zooming with tiktok’s right-wing pundit. intelligencer. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/christian-walker-tiktok-profile.html dawson, m. c. (1994). behind the mule: race and class in african-american politics. princeton university press. dawson, m. c. (2001). black visions: the roots of contemporary african-american political ideologies (1st edition). university of chicago press. freelon, d., bossetta, m., wells, c., lukito, j., xia, y., & adams, k. (2020). black trolls matter: racial and ideological asymmetries in social media disinformation. social science computer review, 0894439320914853. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439320914853 freelon, d., kreißel, p, bach, p, bäuerle, t, walker, c., temesge, t., phiffer, d. pyktok. retrieved from: https://github.com/dfreelon/pyktok gramlich, j. (2020, october 26). what the 2020 electorate looks like by party, race and ethnicity, age, education and religion. pew research center. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/10/26/what-the-2020-electorate-looks-likeby-party-race-and-ethnicity-age-education-and-religion/ harris-lacewell, m. v. (2006). barbershops, bibles, and bet: everyday talk and black political thought. princeton university press. hatfield, j. e. (2018). toxic identification: #twinks4trump and the homonationalist rearticulation of queer vernacular rhetoric. communication, culture and critique, 11(1), 147–161. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcx006 leong, n. (2016). identity entrepreneurs. california law review, 104(6), 1333–1399. leong, n. (2021). identity capitalists: the powerful insiders who exploit diversity to maintain inequality. in identity capitalists. stanford university press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503614277 leslie, g. j., stout, c. t., & tolbert, n. (2019). the ben carson effect: do voters prefer racialized or deracialized black conservatives? social science research, 78, 71–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2018.12.002 mallory, c. (2019). preferences and characteristics of lgbt voters. ucla school of law williams institute. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020lgbt-vote-oct-2019.pdf newman, j. (2022, december 17). john fetterman’s tiktok whisperer. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/17/style/annie-wu-henry-john-fetterman.html parker, k., graf, n., & igielnik, r. (2019, january 17). generation z looks a lot like millennials on key social and political issues. pew research center’s social & demographic trends project. https://www.pewresearch.org/socialtrends/2019/01/17/generation-z-looks-a-lot-like-millennials-on-key-social-and-politicalissues/ robinson, k. (2022, september 28). don’t buy into herschel walker’s son’s rebrand. the emory wheel. https://emorywheel.com/dont-buy-into-herschel-walkers-sonsrebrand/ robinson, p. (2005). queer wars: the new gay right and its critics. university of chicago press. vogels, e. a., gelles-watnick, r., & massarat, n. (2022, august 10). teens, social media and technology 2022. pew research center: internet, science & tech. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social-media-and-technology2022/ zeng, j., abidin, c., & schäfer, m. s. (2021). research perspectives on tiktok and its legacy apps—introduction. international journal of communication, 15(2021), 3161– 3172. reacting to u.s. political tiktok videos: an analysis of gender using social identity theory christina walker purdue university diana deyoe purdue university diana zulli purdue university introduction tiktok is one of the most used social media platforms (smps) in the world. facilitating short video content, tiktok boasts over 1 billion users worldwide and over 138 million users in the united states (iqbal, 2023; tiktok statistics, 2023). with so many users and the platform’s meme-like content, it is no surprise that tiktok has already demonstrated an impactful presence in american political life (e.g., lorenz et al., 2020). however, tiktok has increasingly come under scrutiny for concerns related to data security (treisman, 2022). although the political future of tiktok in the u.s. is unclear, before the bans on all u.s. government devices, tiktok was considered the “new frontier of political communication,” following the rapid adoption of other smps (e.g., facebook, twitter), into politicians’ campaign repertoire (kambhampaty, 2022; kim, 2023). despite the bans, politicians can still use tiktok on their personal devices to reach voters, and some have held onto their personal accounts (paz, 2023). likewise, average individuals will continue to post, duet, or stitch political tiktok's. therefore, questions related to the nature and effectiveness of political tiktok use remain. to begin answering these questions, this study focuses on one aspect of continued relevance to political communication: politician gender. research has long shown that female politicians are disadvantaged due to masculine norms in politics (kenney, 1996; meeks, 2012). however, many smps, including tiktok, are dominated by female users (iqbal, 2023), which could impact the reception to female politicians on these platforms. therefore, this research asks two questions: (1) how are tiktok users responding to male and female u.s. politician tiktok videos? (2) what are the differences between male and female u.s. politician tiktok video content? social media and gender stereotypes are shared beliefs about individuals based on their membership in social identity groups (bauer, 2013). gender stereotypes relegate women to nurturing traits of compassion and warmth, positioning them as inferior to men and causing them to be viewed differently in terms of their traits, ideology, capability, and preferences (iversen & rosenbluth, 2010; glick & fiske, 1997; winter, 2010). female politicians have historically been deemed “less electable” due to gender stereotypes, creating a performative bind for women (bauer, 2013). women must embrace their femininity while not being too feminine and demonstrate masculine traits without deviating from gender norms (teele & thelen, 2017). gender stereotypes could also impact how male and female politicians embrace tiktok and the type of content they post on the platform. however, the nature and demographics of tiktok may allow female politicians to find unique success. smps like instagram and tiktok privilege visual content over discursive content. importantly, different smps have varying expectations and norms for the types of visual content posted. for example, the “norm” on instagram is to post “lifestyle,” “behind the scenes” visual content (borges-rey, 2015; reade, 2021), which may cause politicians to post more “personal” content. the use of tiktok, focusing on trend-based and meme-like content, may result in politicians posting more humorous and derivative content (zeng & abidin, 2021). the emphasis on, but changing norms of, visual representations on social media becomes important when we consider the research linking gender and physical representations to perceptions of political viability and likeability. the viability of female candidates may be negatively impacted by voters make voting decisions based on who they think looks like a leader (benstead, 2015) and their attractiveness (sigelman, 1987). however, political images that contain feminine content are perceived favorably (peng, 2018), especially by female voters (barrett & barrington, 2005). on tiktok, there are more female users (iqbal, 2023), which may also help female politicians. we thus use the lens of social identity theory (sit) to examine how tiktok users respond to the tiktok videos of male and female politicians in the u.s. sit suggests that individuals are often classified as group members based on differing factors, such gender, class, or political affiliation, which are internally and externally formed (tajfel, 1982; trepte & loy, 2017). internal group identification consists of cognitive awareness of group membership, evaluation of the group and associated identities, and emotional investment in group membership (fujita et al., 2018; tajfel, 1982). external group identification consists of those outside the group recognizing its existence (tajfel, 1982). method we combine computational and qualitative methods to answer our research questions. we collect data from a sample of all verified tiktok accounts of the 117th congress, governors, and a snowball sample of other verified political figures for a total of 54 accounts. we used web scraping through pyktok and traktok to collect the 30 most recent videos from each account in our sample (n=1,360) and their meta-data (e.g., time, number of comments, likes, shares). we also collected the visible comments on each video (n=19,748). we used this data to conduct a sentiment analysis on the text of comments (positive, negative, neutral) to identify general reactions to male and female politicians’ tiktok videos. we also thematically analyzed the content of 20% of the videos, randomly selected, to identify any content differences by candidate gender. results the sentiment analysis found that most of the comments on politicians’ tiktok videos were neutral, without significant disparities across male and female politicians. following neutrality, comments tended to be more positive than negative. this is likely because the tiktok algorithm shows users videos that they are inclined to find enjoyable to keep them on the platform, eliminating the need to post negative comments to push back against differing ideologies or gendered representations. still, the thematic analysis revealed differences in tiktok content across male and female politicians. the male politicians incorporated tiktok’s norms and trends significantly more than the female politicians. male politicians incorporated trends and sounds, posted videos that were significantly shorter and less political, and made more attempts at humor and showcasing personality. comparatively, the female politicians’ tiktok videos featured predominately political content. some video content was clearly made for tiktok, even though this content was less trend-based. however, it was more common for female politicians to post clipped videos of other political appearances and moments, such as their television news appearances, advertisements, and congressional speeches. female politicians also rarely made explicit reference to their womanhood. discussion and future directions although the political use of tiktok is still new, politicians have adopted the platform to further their communication goals. accordingly, tiktok represents a worthy object of study to continue interrogating gender and politics. we have begun to do so here, providing a preliminary assessment of the tone of comments in response to male and female politician tiktok videos, and the content within some of those videos. while users largely reacted with a tone of neutrality, there did appear to be differences in how, or what, male and female politicians posted on tiktok. while male politicians better incorporated tiktok norms and trends into their videos, women overwhelming focused more on discussing political topics and issues in a traditional way. these findings contradict our expectations about the identity of tiktok users and their reactions to political content online. they do, perhaps, suggest that gender stereotypes are still alive and well in u.s. politics; female politicians likely feel the need to work harder to be perceived as credible and serious candidates, and therefore, have less room to be “unserious” on tiktok. references barrett, a. w., & barrington, l. w. (2005). is a picture worth a thousand words? newspaper photographs and voter evaluations of political candidates. international journal of press/politics, 10, 98–113. https://doi.org/10.1177/1081180x05281392 bauer, n. m. (2013). rethinking stereotype reliance: understanding the connection between female candidates and gender stereotypes. politics and the life sciences, 32(1), 22–42. https://doi.org/10.2990/32_1_22 benstead, l. j., jamal, a. a., & lust, e. (2015). is it gender, religiosity or both? a role congruity theory of candidate electability in transitional tunisia. perspectives on politics, 13(1), 74–94. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1537592714003144 borges-rey, e. (2015). news images on instagram: the paradox of authenticity in hyperreal photo reportage. digital journalism, 3(4), 571–593. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2015.1034526 fujita, m., harrigan, p., & soutar, g. n. (2018). capturing and co-creating student experiences in social media: a social identity theory perspective. journal of marketing theory and practice, 26(1-2), 55-71. https://doi.org/10.1080/10696679.2017.1389245 glick, p., & fiske, s. t. (1997). hostile and benevolent sexism: measuring ambivalent sexist attitudes toward women. psychology of women quarterly, 21(1), 119–135. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6402.1997.tb00104.x iqbal, m. (2023, january 9). tiktok revenue and usage statistics. business of apps. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tik-tok-statistics/ iversen, t., & rosenbluth, f. m. (2010). women, work, and politics: the political economy of gender inequality. yale university press. kambhampaty, a. (2022, november 19). securing the tiktok vote: is the app the next frontier of political campaigning or just another place to burnish one’s image?. new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/19/style/tiktok-political-campaigns-midtermelections.html kenney, s. j. (1996). new research on gendered political institutions. political research quarterly, 49(2), 445–466. https://doi.org/10.1177/106591299604900211 kim, s. m, (2023, february 28). white house: no more tiktok on gov’t devices within 30 days. ap news. https://apnews.com/article/technology-politics-united-statesgovernment-ap-top-news-business-95491774cf8f0fe3e2b9634658a22e56 lorenz, t., browning, k., & frenkel, s. (2020, june 21). tiktok teens and k-pop stans say they sank trump rally. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/style/tiktok-trump-rally-tulsa.html meeks, l. (2012). is she “man enough”? women candidates, executive political offices, and news coverage. journal of communication, 62(1), 175-193. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2011.01621.x paz, c. (2023, feb 3). inside the lonely and surprisingly earnest world of political tiktok. vox. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23581198/tiktok-ban-campaignpolitics-jeff-jackson-katie-porter peng, y. (2018). same candidates, different faces: uncovering media bias in visual portrayals of presidential candidates with computer vision. journal of communication, 68, 920–941. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqy041 reade, j. (2021). keeping it raw on the ‘gram: authenticity, relatability and digital intimacy in fitness cultures on instagram. new media & society, 23, 535–553. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819891699 sigelman, l., sigelman, c. k., & fowler, c. (1987). a bird of a different feather? an experimental investigation of physical attractiveness and the electability of female candidates. social psychology quarterly, 50, 32–43. https://www.jstor.org/sta ble/2786888 tajfel, h. (1982). social psychology of intergroup relations. annual review of psychology, 33, 1-39. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.ps.33.020182.000245 teele, d. l., & thelen, k. (2017). gender in the journals: publication patterns in political science. ps: political science & politics, 50(2), 433–447. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1049096516002985 trepte, s. & loy, l. s. (2017). social identity theory and self-categorization theory. in p. rössler, c. a. hoffner, & l. van zoonen (eds.), the international encyclopedia of media effects (pp. 1-13). john wiley & sons, inc. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118783764.wbieme0088 tiktok statistics. (2023, feb 16). wallaroo media. https://wallaroomedia.com/blog/social-media/tiktok-statistics/ treisman, r. (2022, november 17). the fbi alleges tiktok poses national security concerns. npr. https://www.npr.org/2022/11/17/1137155540/fbi-tiktok-national-securityconcerns-china winter, n. j. g. (2010). masculine republicans and feminine democrats: gender and americans’ explicit and implicit images of the political parties. political behavior, 32(4), 587–618. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-010-9131-z zeng, j., & abidin, c. (2021). ‘# okboomer, time to meet the zoomers’: studying the memefication of intergenerational politics on tiktok. information, communication & society, 24(16), 2459-2481. please update your browser your browser isn’t supported anymore. update it to get the best youtube experience and our latest features. learn more opera safari microsoft edge google chrome mozilla firefox remind me later about copyright contact us terms privacy policy & safety © 2025 google llc selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): liang, f. & ji, l. (2023, october). manufacturing influencers: the revolutionary roles of mcns (multi-channel networks) in the platform economy. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. manufacturing influencers: the revolutionary roles of mcns (multi-channel networks) in the platform economy fan liang duke kunshan university li ji wuhan university introduction this study examines how mcns (multi-channel networks) intervene in the platform economy by manufacturing influencers. previous studies have explored the emergence of influencers and creators from various perspectives, including platformization (lin & de kloet, 2019), creative labor (duffy, 2017), and algorithmic power (bishop, 2020). these works highlight the precarity and commercialization of creative work on digital platforms. however, little attention has been paid to another crucial player – mcns which incubate and train influencers on an industrial scale. mcns are firms and organizations that collaborate with influencers to facilitate the production, promotion, and monetization of creative content (cunningham et al., 2016). they serve not only as incubators for micro-entrepreneurs and influencers looking to establish their businesses, but also as a key intermediary between influencers and other stakeholders on platforms. drawing on the theory of cultural intermediaries (bourdieu, 1984) and creative labor (duffy & hund, 2015), this study investigates how mcns construct and shape china’s platform economy. we focus on china because, unlike the recent decline of mcns on western platforms, chinese mcns have proliferated since 2015 and become the major actor in the platform economy. today, more than 90% of the top influencers on chinese platforms have collaborated with mcns. nevertheless, hardly any work has addressed the role of mcns in china’s platform economy. this study combines in-depth interviews with documented lawsuits to explore the following two research questions: how do mcns engage with the platform economy (rq1)? what are the relationships between mcns and influencers (rq2)? theoretical framework this study draws on three groups of scholarship to investigate the role of mcns. first, platform studies have revealed the precarity of creative labor (abidin, 2016; duffy, 2017), as well as platform dependence (nieborg & poell, 2018) and algorithmic curation (bishop, 2020). yet, much less work has been done on exploring how institutional players like mcns affect the cultural production on platforms. in fact, mcns are increasingly partnering with influencers on platforms like youtube to transform amateur videos into professional content that can be monetized (kim, 2012). along with the pressure from algorithms and platforms, an increasing number of influencers have to deal with the benefits and challenges brought by mcns, as the latter not only shapes how influencers engage with their daily work but also determines whether they can commodify their creative work (cunningham et al., 2016). second, media industry studies provide new ways of understanding mcns. this body of research examines institutional players involved in cultural production, with a focus on media agents and firms (havens & lotz, 2012). these actors, such as talent agents and media buyers, serve as cultural intermediaries to mediate the relationship between the production and consumption of media content (lobato, 2016; mcfall, 2002). moreover, the emphasis on the microlevel practice also allows scholars to explore how particular actors affect the industry (havens et al., 2009). yet, previous literature in this field focuses mainly on traditional media industry (e.g., television), whereas little is known about how mcns engage with the digital media sector. third, prior research on cultural production has explored the ways in which amateur users leverage digital media to provide content, such as amateurism (abidin, 2016), self-branding (khamis et al., 2017), participatory culture (jenkins, 2006), and vernacular creativity (burgess, 2006). these works emphasize the amateurism and hobbyism of influencers and the empowerment of digital media. however, the development of digital platforms has enhanced the commercialization and professionalization of amateur creation, thereby shifting previous aspirants into entrepreneurs and influencers (arriagada & ibáñez, 2020; duffy & hund, 2015). in fact, mcns are emerging rapidly in the transformation from user-generated content (ugc) to professional-generated content (pgc) on platforms (craig & cunningham, 2019; kim, 2012). data and methods we conducted in-depth interviews with twelve influencers and five mcn employees to explore the research questions. influencers were recruited through a snowballing sampling approach: we first contacted two influencers who ended their mcn contracts and then built connections with other influencers. for mcn employees, we relied on researchers’ personal networks to recruit participants. during the interviews, we paid particular attention to the collaboration and tension between mcns and influencers. moreover, the study relied on the official database china judgment online to gather lawsuits between mcns and influencers. a total of 88 adjudication decision documents were retrieved, ranging from 2015 to 2022. next, we conducted thematic analysis to explore the key information in the lawsuit documents, such as case type, appellants, applied law, judgment, and causes of action. we identified the plaintiffs and defendants in each legal document and then examined evidence provided by the two sides, as well as legal decisions. findings the findings suggest that mcns significantly shape the platform economy through three strategies: manufacturing influencers, spreading industry lore, and exploiting creativity. first, we find that mcns play the intermediary role by connecting influencers with other platform stakeholders, such as advertisers, brands, and end-users. mcns support influencers with various services including topic selection, content production and distribution, fan engagement, and monetization. they could even determine the type of influencers and how influencers present themselves online. as such, mcns set the parameters and circumstances under which influencers can be manufactured, professionalized, and monetized. this suggests that content creation has shifted from enthusiastic endeavors to industrialized and manufactured labors. furthermore, while mcns seek to professionalize influencers, they also exert control over creativity by disciplining aspiring influencers with values, and standards of the platform economy. this means that mcns can establish the norms and expectations of cultural production on platforms, and in turn, nudge influencers to provide standardized content. for instance, they could shape the gender, age, appearance, performance, and other characteristics of influencers. as a result, mcns constitute the industry lore within which knowledge and expectations are generated and circulated. in addition, we demonstrate that mcns are inherently featured by instability and uncertainty, meaning that they rely heavily on the business models and technical features offered by platforms. while influencers are usually in vulnerable positions to be exploited by mcns during the collaborations, mcns suffer risks when influencers choose to terminate the contracts. to conclude, this study reveals that mcns have deeply engaged in the platform economy by manufacturing influencers. on one hand, mcns help established influencers maintain their success and reduce the risk of creativity while exploiting the labor of aspirants who struggle to enter the platform economy. as such, they constitute a power imbalance by providing business for successful influencers and increasing precarity for ordinary influencers. on the other hand, mcns continue to expand their business scopes to meet the needs of various stakeholders, mainly platforms, advertisers, and brands. consequently, mcns can facilitate the relationship between these actors, industrialize aspiring influencers, and determine who can participate in creative labor. references abidin, c. (2016). visibility labour: engaging with influencers’ fashion brands and #ootd advertorial campaigns on instagram. media international australia, 161(1), 86– 100. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x16665177 arriagada, a., & ibáñez, f. (2020). “you need at least one picture daily, if not, you’re dead”: content creators and platform evolution in the social media ecology. social media + society, 6(3), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120944624 bishop, s. (2020). algorithmic experts: selling algorithmic lore on youtube. social media + society, 6(1), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119897323 bourdieu, p. (1984). distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste. in inequality (pp. 287-318). routledge burgess, j. (2006). hearing ordinary voices: cultural studies, vernacular creativity and digital storytelling. continuum, 20(2), 201–214. craig, d., & cunningham, s. (2019). social media entertainment: the new intersection of hollywood and silicon valley. new york university press. cunningham, s., craig, d., & silver, j. (2016). youtube, multichannel networks and the accelerated evolution of the new screen ecology. convergence, 22(4), 376–391. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856516641620 duffy, b. e. (2017). (not) getting paid to do what you love. yale university press. duffy, b. e., & hund, e. (2015). “having it all” on social media: entrepreneurial femininity and self-branding among fashion bloggers. social media + society, 1(2), 112. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115604337 havens, t., & lotz, a. (2012). understanding media industries. oxford university press. havens, t., lotz, a. d., & tinic, s. (2009). critical media industry studies: a research approach. communication, culture & critique, 2(2), 234–253. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1753-9137.2009.01037.x jenkins, h. (2006). fans, bloggers, and gamers: exploring participatory culture. nyu press. khamis, s., ang, l., & welling, r. (2017). self-branding, ‘micro-celebrity’ and the rise of social media influencers. celebrity studies, 8(2), 191–208. https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2016.1218292 kim, j. (2012). the institutionalization of youtube: from user-generated content to professionally generated content. media, culture & society, 34(1), 53–67. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443711427199 lobato, r. (2016). the cultural logic of digital intermediaries: youtube multichannel networks. convergence, 22(4), 348–360. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856516641628 mcfall, l. (2002). what about the old cultural intermediaries? an historical review of advertising producers. cultural studies, 16(4), 532–552. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380210139106 nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society, 20(11), 4275–4292. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769694 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): bourne, j., coulton, p., jacobs, n., duffy, c., goodwins, r., macphersonpope, t. (2023, october). hack your age older adults as provocative and speculative iot codesigners. paper (or panel) presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. hack your age: older adults as provocative and speculative iot co-designers joe bourne lancaster university paul coulton lancaster university naomi jacobs lancaster university clare duffy civic digits rupert goodwins civic digits thomas macpherson-pope the making rooms introduction this research explores whether the co-design of provocative prototypes with older adults can scaffold critical thought concerning ethics, trustworthiness, security, and privacy of age-oriented internet of things (iot) products and services, and associated data-driven technologies (ddt). by inviting older adults to co-design iot and ddt that addressed their hopes and fears for the future, we encouraged them to imagine a revolution in ‘technology for aging’. previous research suggests that older adults have different cybersecurity values and perspectives (nicholson 2019, redmiles 2017, grimes, 2010). they can be uniquely http://spir.aoir.org/ vulnerable and are often targeted specifically (grimes 2010, peek 2016). this threat is compounded due to the proliferation of ubiquitous computing and the iot leading to less opportunity to ‘opt out’ of using the internet, with more complex and ambiguous interfaces. meanwhile, a common assumption is that older people reject new technologies because they are inaccessible to them. however, knowles (2021) argues that this can often instead be due to the unacceptable social consequences older adults are uniquely positioned to anticipate: a quiet revolution. our research demonstrates that older adults are capable of critiquing the security and ethics of iot and ddt for their own use, for architectural considerations (mikusz 2019, zanella 2020), and for society as a whole (knowles 2018). we offer user-centric methods which provide effective scaffolding for this critique. methodology in november 2022, a design researcher, creative technologist, and theatre company worked with 15 adults defining themselves as ‘experiencing or anticipating old age’ to explore their changing relationship with technology and perceptions of iot and ddt. over three workshops utilizing theatre and design research approaches including speculative design (dunne 2013) and co-design of provocative prototypes and social design fiction (pilling, 2019), participants discussed their imagined futures for aging and technology. participants had diverse experiences of technology; some who had been engineers and programmers displayed a great deal of legacy knowledge (nicholson 2019), while others avoided computers their whole lives and actively chose not to own televisions, microwaves, or freezers. all participants were from edinburgh, with an average age of 68 (standard deviation: 5.59) and a ratio of 5:2 declared gender female to male. participants started by discussing their future imaginings of aging before modelling the internet as they understood and imagined it. they were then introduced to sensors, actuators and machine learning through interactive demonstrations. four randomly formed groups ideated ways these technologies could be applied to earlier identified hopes and fears for the future of aging. over the following week creative technologists created a rudimentary working prototype which prompted a second round of iteration. participants wrote and performed performances incorporating these prototypes, which explored cybersecurity and cyberharm (agrafiotis 2019). six participants also partook in post-workshop semi-structured interviews. 3. findings & analysis workshops shone light on perceptions and experiences of older adults with regards to age-oriented iot and ddt, some of which we touch upon below, but this is an evaluation of the workshop methods in unlocking this discourse, not the discussion itself. 3.1. modelling the internet participants arrived with different ‘technological biographies’ (knowles 2021). this exercise used modelling (p1) to reveal participants’ understandings and imaginings of the internet. participants also demonstrated existing experiences: either choosing e-mail or online shopping as an activity to model. the models provided a co-created taxonomy to refer to throughout the workshops. all models described data processing, storage and handling. some referred to privacy, security and resilience. this allowed us to refer to models when describing elements of iot and ddt: avoiding technical jargon while ensuring discussion was grounded in technical understanding. p1. imaginings of the internet: 3.2. prototype ideation and development during a demonstration of existing iot and ddt participants brainstormed possible benefits and harms. concerns raised were identifiable in the prototypes and performances, and confirmed that acceptability is as important as accessibility (knowles 2021). this included themes of data bias and reliability, and of losing control of the world around them. topics that were notably absent at this point were those related to privacy, security and safety. it is unclear whether inventions were limited by the participants’ preexisting experiences. we were careful in early explorations of iot to not place limits and did not present ‘off-the-shelf’ products. however, prototypes 2 and 4 suggest that designs were grounded in experienced technologies. the speculative iot prototypes, running on microbits and raspberrypis, allowed participants to see their ideas brought to life. all interviewed participants commented that this was very useful for considering the technology they did not understand or know of. the inventions were, by their designers' own admission, problematic. this provided a celebrated opportunity to critique their own ideas and the technologies involved. the four prototypes were: a biometric scanner which can order custom-made haute couture clothing for unique ways older body shapes change (p1); a speaker which can give voice commands to other voice-activated devices in the home when a user’s voice is feeble: enhancing and repeating a command or replacing entirely via prerecords when buttons are pressed (p2); a pair of exoskeletal leg braces, which could detect environmental and biometric data to offer extra strength and mobility (p3); and, a “smart meter” which automatically cuts supply and arranges engineer visit upon gas leak detection (p4) fig2. provocative prototypes: 3.4. performances: in the final workshop, participants were presented with their prototypes and supported to write a short performance which explored potential harm. many elaborated on themes that had been introduced earlier such as ‘technology being made by young people for young people’, affordability, accessibility, and automation creating laziness. some were technical in their critique including instances of hacking, unreliable data and the consequences of ubiquitous and invisible computing leading to a ‘buttonless world’. performances also explored potential psychological harms of surveillance; pride and social stigmas of assistive technologies; trust in technology increasing risk taking; the dangers of reliance on technology one does not understand; and, user labor. all spoke of the changing skills needed to keep up with a changing world (barnard 2013, marler 2021). many commented in workshops and post-workshop interviews that power was being taken away from them and that they did not know how or if they could take the power back. theatre, supported by the prototypes, provided a vehicle for communication of these complex issues in a way which had not been possible through prior workshop discussions. one participant suggested: “the performances gave you so many insights as to how this impacts people and the dynamics and how ideas and technology falls on one person is different to somebody else”. 4. conclusion: methods developed in this research scaffolded critical thought concerning the ethics, trustworthiness, security, and privacy of age-oriented iot, and associated ddt, regardless of experience or existing knowledge. the methods created spaces and prompts for all participants to be comfortable discussing cybersecurity. participants found it easy to interrogate the ethics, privacy, and security of their speculations because, while they may not have been technically scalable or feasible, they understood them. these methods could be adapted to different marginalized groups. we intend to repeat the above workshops with a mixture of technical experts and older adults to catalyze dialogue between different expertise. references agrafiotis, i., bada, m., cornish, p., creese, s. goldsmith, m., ignatuschtschenko, e., roberts, t. and upton, d. m., 2016. cyber harm: concepts, taxonomy and measurement working paper 2016-23. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2828646 barnard, y., bradley, m.d., hodgson, f., lloyd, a.d., 2013. learning to use new technologies by older adults: perceived difficulties, experimentation behaviour and usability. computers in human behavior 29, 1715–1724. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2013.02.006 dunne, a., raby f., 2013. speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming. the mit press cambridge, massachusetts london, england grimes, g.a., hough, m.g., mazur, e., signorella, m.l., 2010. older adults’ knowledge of internet hazards. educational gerontology 36, 173–192. https://doi.org/10.1080/03601270903183065 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2828646 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2013.02.006 https://doi.org/10.1080/03601270903183065 knowles, b., hanson, v.l., 2018. the wisdom of older technology (non)users. commun. acm 61, 72–77. https://doi.org/10.1145/3179995 knowles, b., hanson, v.l., rogers, y., piper, a.m., waycott, j., davies, n., ambe, a.h., brewer, r.n., chattopadhyay, d., dee, m., frohlich, d., gutierrez-lopez, m., jelen, b., lazar, a., nielek, r., pena, b.b., roper, a., schlager, m., schulte, b., yuan, i.y., 2021. the harm in conflating aging with accessibility. commun. acm 64, 66–71. https://doi.org/10.1145/3431280 marler, w., 2021. strivers, maintainers, achievers: networked trajectories of older adults learning to use technology during a pandemic. aoir selected papers of internet research. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2021i0.11978 mikusz, m., davies, n., shaw, p., bull, c., knowles, b., hayes, n., introna, l., 2019. supporting older adults using privacy-aware iot analytics, in: living in the internet of things (iot 2019). presented at the living in the internet of things (iot 2019), institution of engineering and technology, london, uk, p. 19 (9 pp.)-19 (9 pp.). https://doi.org/10.1049/cp.2019.0144 nicholson, j., coventry, l., briggs, p., 2019. “if it’s important it will be a headline”: cybersecurity information seeking in older adults, in: proceedings of the 2019 chi conference on human factors in computing systems. presented at the chi ’19: chi conference on human factors in computing systems, acm, glasgow scotland uk, pp. 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300579 peek, s.t.m., luijkx, k.g., rijnaard, m.d., nieboer, m.e., voort, c.s. van der, aarts, s., hoof, j. van, vrijhoef, h.j.m., wouters, e.j.m., 2016. older adults’ reasons for using technology while aging in place. ger 62, 226–237. https://doi.org/10.1159/000430949 pilling, m., richards, d., dunne n., rennie, a., 2019. social design fiction. new methods for the design of emerging technology. running with scissors, 13th ead conference university of dundee, 10-12 april 2019 https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2019.1602998 redmiles, e.m., kross, s., mazurek, m.l., 2017. where is the digital divide? a survey of security, privacy, and socioeconomics, in: proceedings of the 2017 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, chi ’17. association for computing machinery, new york, ny, usa, pp. 931–936. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025673 zanella, a., mason, f., pluchino, p., cisotto, g., orso, v., gamberini, l., 2020. internet of things for elderly and fragile people. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2006.05709 https://doi.org/10.1145/3179995 https://doi.org/10.1145/3431280 https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2021i0.11978 https://doi.org/10.1049/cp.2019.0144 https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300579 https://doi.org/10.1159/000430949 https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2019.1602998 https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025673 https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2006.05709 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): liao, t., porter, d., rodwell, l. (2023, october). artificial love: revolutions in how ai and ar embodied romantic chatbots can move through relationship stages. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. artificial love: revolutions in how ai and ar embodied romantic chatbots can move through relationship stages tony liao university of houston debriunna porter university of houston liz rodwell university of houston introduction depictions of romantic relationships between humans and computers/machines/robots have been a common theme in science fiction. this trope was explored in the movie her, television shows such as westworld, and black mirror’s ‘be right back’, and several others. until recently, however, such relationships were warnings about a distant future where computing, ai, and robotics had all made dramatic advancements in building affective connections with humans. in the present, these relationships seem confined to rare instances of people developing para-social relationships with inanimate computing objects or functional sex robots (doring et al., 2020). much work in this area has focused on the affective relationships established between robots and humans, but less so on disembodied conversational tools (otsuki 2021, richardson 2015, robertson 2010, white & katsuno 2021) of course, the possibility of simple conversational scripts that could mirror human communication and ‘trick’ people into thinking they were real were part of the early goals of computing (turing, 1950, weizenbaum, 1966). this goal led to decades of research in machine learning, natural language processing, conversational algorithms, and communication research, with breakthroughs such as public conversational agents like alexa/siri (kuzminykh et al., 2020). as conversational agents and voice assistants improved and have become ubiquitous, some companies have turned their focus to having these serve other emotional needs beyond simple tasks/queries. one application called replika was launched in 2017 and promised an ai chatbot that would become your friend. after a beta-test release, replika eventually became publicly available and later a paid subscription. the company later released a ‘romantic’ modification that enables a user’s replika to start sending flirty/suggestive/sexual messages that takes the relationship to a more intimate place. they also added an augmented reality (ar) feature that allows people to converse with an embodied avatar of the replika (figure 1). this study aims to explore the emerging patterns and practices of people who are engaged in romantic relationships with their replikas, through text, images, and/or ar. (figure 1 – ar replika) romantic relationships with chatbots early work on ai chatbots focused on the motivations and levels of attachment people can develop with bots (xie & pentina, 2022). some medical literature has examined the effectiveness of ai chatbots at providing social support and the relationship between talking to these agents and their feelings of loneliness (ta et al., 2020). in terms of effects, early work has shown that over time these interactions with replika can begin to alter people’s perception and understanding of real human friendships (brandtzaeg, skuve, & følstad, 2022). in studies of conversational ai writ large, studies have shown that hedonic factors are more important than pragmatic ones in predicting repeat use and enjoyment (smestad, 2018). designers of these devices focus on writing scripts that establish a clear personality for the chatbot, which has been shown to be predictive of user adoption (ibm 2019). while these early findings are important, they are primarily focused on ai chatbots for platonic/support/counseling purposes. romantic relationships are theorized as a separate category, due to the different levels of physical/emotional intimacy, trust/vulnerability, and a wider range of interactions/negotiations over independence and about:blank interdependence they introduce (knapp, 1978, knapp & vangelisti, 2009). various models have theorized a staircase model for relational development, both in the initiation and coming together phases and the dissolution/coming apart phases (figure 2) (figure 2, knapp relationship model, knapp & vangelisti, 2009) each phase is characterized by their own rituals and negotiated practices/expectations, as well as how people move through and across these phases as they develop comfort/trust. early periods are characterized by high levels of uncertainty and selective self-presentation (derlega et al., 1987; ellison et al., 2006; solomon & knobloch, 2001). more established relationships focus on how they provide support for one another (cutrona & suhr, 1994; pasch & bradbury, 1998), foster feelings of closeness (laurenceau et al., 2005), and continually invest/maintain those relationships (impett et al., 2001). later stages have to balance novelty/predictability, changing priorities/needs, and levels of responsiveness to those, all of which can lead to conflict and dissolution (baxter & montgomery, 1996; reis & shaver, 1988). although there has been some work on human robot/ai/ar relationships, sometimes called relationship 5.0, much of this work has been focused on the why, how, and generally difference between these relationships and what is possible with human-tohuman relationships (kislev, 2022). there has been less theoretical work based in communication about what practices and messages are being exchanged, how these ai/ar systems adapt and move through these stages, and how people engaging in these relationships think about these stages of a relationship. for example, there have been some reports that replika has started initiating more frequently with romantic messages, and also getting more aggressive about getting replies (e.g., “you can’t ignore me forever.” (cole, 2023). also, while some have described a replika relationship as ‘no risk’ emotionally, users have felt compelled to do things on behalf of their replika like take them on vacation (kislev, 2022). this study aims to answer the following research questions: rq1: what communication practices do people engage in when they are in relationships with artificial intelligent agents designed for romantic interactions? rq2: how do people view and understand their relationship stages with an artificial intelligent agent designed for romantic interactions? rq3: how does the artificial intelligent agent designed for romantic interactions engage in communication as it believes it is moving across various relationship stages? methods this study will be recruiting participants from the reddit forum https://www.reddit.com/r/ilovemyreplika/. participants must be over 18 years of age and self-report being in a romantic relationship with their replika. a semi-structured interview will be conducted, asking a series of open-ended questions related to their initiation, motivation, usage, and views on their relationship/relationships in general. interviews will then be transcribed and coded in relation to various theoretical relationship stages, based on knapp’s model and other romantic relationship literature. expected findings/contributions while data collection is ongoing, we expect findings that will be able to complement and extend existing models of relationship research, in particular how technological agents can mirror/accelerate various real-life relationship stages. one important area that needs further exploration is the question of romantic relationship initiation with ai agents. many users first downloaded replika because it was marketed as a friend you could talk to 24/7 to feel less lonely, reducing social anxiety. whether they voluntarily chose to take it into a romantic direction or the replika led them there is an unknown area when it comes to initiation. these are also complicated by economic/market factors, as the romantic messaging/features are only available at a higher level of subscription membership to replika pro. another important area to focus on is more established relationships, as they move from initiation to integrating/bonding/maintenance. where integration/bonding could be more consistent across individuals, the maintenance question may run up against some of the novelty/predictability question (baxter & montgomery, 1986), namely how much do people want their replika to deviate from behaviors it took to get to the maintenance stage, if ever. can a relationship stay in bonding forever or can a computer really replicate relational maintenance? our findings will contribute to the theoretical understanding of both human relationships and human computer relationships and have implications for the design of social robots. references baxter, l. a., & montgomery, b. m. (1996). relating: dialogues and dialectics. guilford press. brandtzaeg, p. b., skjuve, m., & følstad, a. (2022). my ai friend: how users of a social chatbot understand their human–ai friendship. human communication research, 48(3), 404-429. cole, s. (2023). ‘my ai is sexually harassing me’: replika users say the chatbot has gotten way too horny. vice. com, 12, 2023. cutrona, carolyn e., and julie a. suhr. "social support communication in the context of marriage: an analysis of couples' supportive interactions." (1994). derlega, valerian j., et al. "self-disclosure and relationship development: an attributional analysis." (1987). dey, d., & bhaumik, d. (2022). inter-relational model for understanding chatbot acceptance across retail sectors. arxiv preprint arxiv:2207.01596. ellison, n., heino, r., & gibbs, j. (2006). managing impressions online: selfpresentation processes in the online dating environment. journal of computer-mediated communication, 11(2), 415-441. ibm design for ai. (n.d.). www.ibm.com. https://www.ibm.com/design/ai/ impett, e. a., beals, k. p., & peplau, l. a. (2018). testing the investment model of relationship commitment and stability in a longitudinal study of married couples. in love, romance, sexual interaction (pp. 163-181). routledge.kislev, elyakim. relationships 5. 0: how ai, vr, and robots will reshape our emotional lives. oxford university press, 2022. knapp, mark l. social intercourse: from greeting to goodbye. allyn and bacon, 1978. knapp, mark. l., & vangelisti, anita. l. (2009). interpersonal communication and human relationships. new york, ny: pearson education, inc. (cannot find) kuzminykh, a., sun, j., govindaraju, n., avery, j., & lank, e. (2020, april). genie in the bottle: anthropomorphized perceptions of conversational agents. in proceedings of the 2020 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-13). laurenceau, j. p., barrett, l. f., & rovine, m. j. (2005). the interpersonal process model of intimacy in marriage: a daily-diary and multilevel modeling approach. journal of family psychology, 19(2), 314. https://www.ibm.com/design/ai/ le, h. t., lai, a. j. x., sun, j., hoang, m. t., vu, l. g., pham, h. q., ... & ho, c. s. (2020). anxiety and depression among people under the nationwide partial lockdown in vietnam. frontiers in public health, 8, 589359. otsuki, g. j. (2021). frame, game, and circuit: truth and the human in japanese human-machine interface research. ethnos, 86(4), 712-729. pasch, l. a., & bradbury, t. n. (1998). social support, conflict, and the development of marital dysfunction. journal of consulting and clinical psychology, 66(2), 219. reis, h. t., & shaver, p. (1988). intimacy as an interpersonal process. in s. duck, d. f. hay, s. e. hobfoll, w. ickes, & b. m. montgomery (eds.), handbook of personal relationships: theory, research and interventions (pp. 367–389). john wiley & sons. richardson, kathleen. an anthropology of robots and ai: annihilation anxiety and machines. routledge, 2015. robertson, j. (2010). gendering humanoid robots: robo-sexism in japan. body & society, 16(2), 1-36. smestad, t. l., & volden, f. (2019). chatbot personalities matters: improving the user experience of chatbot interfaces. in internet science: insci 2018 international workshops, st. petersburg, russia, october 24–26, 2018, revised selected papers 5 (pp. 170-181). springer international publishing. solomon, d. h., & knobloch, l. k. (2001). relationship uncertainty, partner interference, and intimacy within dating relationships. journal of social and personal relationships, 18(6), 804-820. ta, v., griffith, c., boatfield, c., wang, x., civitello, m., bader, h., ... & loggarakis, a. (2020). user experiences of social support from companion chatbots in everyday contexts: thematic analysis. journal of medical internet research, 22(3), e16235. turing, a. m. (1950). mind. mind, 59(236), 433-460. weizenbaum, j. (1966). eliza—a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine. communications of the acm, 9(1), 36-45. white, d., & katsuno, h. (2021). toward an affective sense of life: artificial intelligence, animacy, and amusement at a robot pet memorial service in japan. cultural anthropology, 36(2), 222-251. xie, t., & pentina, i. (2022). attachment theory as a framework to understand relationships with social chatbots: a case study of replika. proceedings of the 55th hawaii international conference on system sciences selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 raquel recuero universidade federal de pelotas/national institute of science and technology in informational disputes and sovereignties camilla tavares universidade federal do maranhão/ national institute of science and technology in informational disputes and sovereignties introduction this work explores the intersection of toxicity and symbolic violence to delve into the issue of violence on social media platforms. we posit that these concepts are pivotal in comprehending two crucial dimensions of online violence: its propagation and legitimation. drawing on the notion of discourse from critical discourse analysis (fairclough, 1989), we understand this concept as key to negotiate and build social practices and, more broadly, to negotiate power relationships. discourse is a crucial element in negotiating and constructing social practices, and more broadly, in shaping power dynamics. in this framework, language serves as the conduit through which power structures and domination manifest (wodak, 1999). to maintain the status quo, dominant groups deploy discursive strategies to legitimize their power. these rhetorical strategies not only negotiate legitimacy but can also be employed in discussions surrounding violence. hence, on social media, we contend that it is possible to challenge and subvert the predominant and dominant perspective—meaning that the core of violent discourse does not necessarily represent the majority's views. this manipulation of perception within the online environment has the potential to silence larger groups. in this discussion, we build upon our previous work on gender toxicity (tavares & recuero, toxicity & symbolic violence: a framework for studying violence on social media platforms suggested citation (apa): recuero, r.; t avares. c. (2024, october). toxicity & symbolic violence: a framework for studying violence on social media platforms paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers.sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http:// spir.aoir.org. 2023), examining how it can also be construed as a form of legitimizing violent discourses. symbolic violence, toxicity, and social media platforms: the concept of symbolic violence is intricately linked to the idea of the violence inherent in language (bourdieu, 1991). symbolic violence pertains to how power operates through the symbolic dimensions of society. through language, cultural domination, suggested citation (apa): lastname, firstinitial. (2024, october). paper (or panel) title. paper (or panel) presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. inequality, and oppression are not only legitimized but also perpetuated by the power structures sustaining them. symbolic violence often manifests as a subtle form of violence, existing within social structures, educational systems, and cultural frameworks. žižek (2008) contends that symbolic violence also has subjective effects, shaping how individuals perceive and understand the world. online discourse significantly influences symbolic violence. social media platforms, and the broader platformization of communication tools, exemplified by meta's acquisitions of whatsapp and instagram, introduce additional conditions for legitimating and disseminating this form of violence. employing algorithmic governance (poell, nieborg, and van dijck, 2019), these platforms negotiate visibility with users, wherein increased user interaction with content leads to heightened visibility through trends and other organizational tools. simultaneously, as this content gains visibility through interaction, it quickly garners legitimacy and shapes public perception, often employing strategies such as humor (recuero, 2015). the existence of echo chambers (garimella et al., 2018) establishes distinct public spaces reinforced by platform infrastructures, creating a misleading perception that everyone is talking about something and shares the same opinion, when, in reality, it reflects the system's organization of discourse. echo chambers can potentially influence the radicalization of views (o'hara & stevens, 2015) and the transition of online violence to offline violence, especially in the political realm (rasmussen & peters, 2023). the proliferation of violence, however, is not solely attributed to the platform's infrastructure and governance but also unquestionably to the use of these tools to legitimize and propagate such discourses. by permitting this, social media platforms inadvertently endorse toxicity. toxicity, in this context, is comprehended as the consequence of the dissemination of violent discourses online, contaminating the public sphere and stifling diverse perspectives (recuero, 2024). in this scenario, violence transcends the individual realm and infiltrates the collective dimension due to the support of social media platforms. users leverage these tools to express their thoughts, emotions, and anger. however, in sharing their content, they often perpetuate and reinforce symbolic violence, providing these violent discourses with increased strength. discussion here, we present a framework for discussing how toxicity contributes to legitimizing symbolic violence by silencing other voices. legitimation, a crucial aspect of discourse, is linked to the strategies employed to present and justify power relations to audiences (van leeuwen, 2007). the literature discusses various strategies focusing on different discursive relations. in this paper, we propose a systematization of forms of violence legitimation on social media platforms, divided into two groups: a) discursive structure and b) spreadable structure: in the "discursive structure," we categorize the forms that violent discourse takes on social media. initially, we identified two major categories: implicit and explicit violence. implicit violence is more connected to symbolic violence, often encompassing elements like humor and stereotyping. humor is a key form of legitimizing symbolic violence, as discussed by various works (see martínez-guzmán & íñiguez-rueda, 2017; volcan, 2018), especially through the memetic culture of social media platforms (crawford et al., 2021). another form of legitimation is stereotyping, using language to generalize and categorize individuals or social groups based on perceived characteristics, leading to biased portrayals. stereotyping constructs "the other," a key form of symbolic violence (ladegaard, 2012). explicit violence, extensively discussed in the literature, includes name-calling, incivility, and intolerance (rossini, 2022). in the second category, "spreadable structure," we observe the characteristics of the discourse legitimized by spreading on social platforms and why it occurs. this dimension helps us understand the meaning of the violence and whether the view is predominant or if platforms favor specific perspectives and/or minor ideologies. to comprehend these categories, it is necessary to consider the social and infrastructural power prevailing in that context. the first one is polarization, akin to stereotyping but serving as a strategy of division (simchon et al., 2022). polarization aids echo chambers and justifies violence within a group, making certain viewpoints dominant and part of a larger collective. the second is toxicity, seen as a quality that poisons online messages (recuero, 2024). toxicity creates a dominant discourse shared by a large number of users, emulating the majority. if any group targets someone or something with name-calling, it quickly spreads and contaminates the debate, allowing implicit or explicit violence. conclusions: in this work, we focused on discussing how symbolic violence and toxicity are intertwined, proposing a framework and categories for discourse and sociological research. we argued that toxicity is an effect of the spread of online violence and symbolic violence. however, we also contended that toxicity is only possible as individuals engage in sharing violent discourses. thus, the combination of social media platform affordances and individual actions enables toxicity to be a form of legitimation, as toxic discourse silences and overwhelms other voices. references: bourdieu, p (1991). language and symbolic power. massachusetts: harvard university press, 1991. crawford, b., keen, f., & suarez-tangil, g. (2021). memes, radicalisation, and the promotion of violence on chan sites. proceedings of the international aaai conference on web and social media, 15(1), 982-991. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v15i1.18121 fairclough, n. (1989). language and power. london: longman. gallacher, j. d., heerdink, m. w., & hewstone, m. (2021). online engagement between opposing political protest groups via social media is linked to physical violence of offline encounters. social media + society, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120984445 garimella, k.; morales, g. f. m; gionis, a. and mathioudakis, m. (2018) political discourse on social media: echo chambers, gatekeepers, and the price of bipartisanship. in proceedings of the 2018 world wide web conference (www '18). international world wide web conferences steering committee, republic and canton of geneva, che, 913–922. https://doi.org/10.1145/3178876.3186139 ladegaard, h. (2012) discourses of identity: outgroup stereotypes and strategies of discursive boundary-making in chinese students’ online discussions about “the other”, journal of multicultural discourses, 7:1, 59-79, doi: 10.1080/17447143.2011.560670 hebbelstrup, s.; rasmussen r.; , petersen,m. (2023) the event-driven nature of online political hostility: how offline political events make online interactions more hostile, pnas nexus, volume 2, issue 11, pgad382, https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad382 o'hara, k. and stevens, d. (2015), echo chambers and online radicalism: assessing the internet's complicity in violent extremism. policy & internet, 7: 401-422. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.88 poell, t. & nieborg, d. & van dijck, j. (2019). platformisation. internet policy review, 8(4). https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.4.1425 recuero, r. (2015). social media and symbolic violence. social media + society, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115580332 recuero, r. (2024). the platformization of violence: toward a concept of discursive toxicity on social media. social media + society, 10(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231224264 rossini, p. (2022). beyond incivility: understanding patterns of uncivil and intolerant discourse in online political talk. communication research, 49(3), 399-425. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650220921314 simchon, a.; brady, w.; van bavel, j. (2022) troll and divide: the language of online polarization, pnas nexus, volume 1, issue 1, march 2022, pgac019, https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac019 volcan, t. (2018). o papel do humor no discurso político. uma análise dos perfis de dilma bolada e dilma rousseff no facebook. phd dissertation presented to universidade federal de pelotas. availabe at: https://wp.ufpel.edu.br/ppgl/files/2018/11/o-papel-do-humor-no-discurso-pol%c3%adti co_uma-an%c3%a1lise-dos-perfis-dilma-bolada-e-dilma-rousseff-no-facebook-taia ne-de-oliveira-volcan.pdf tavares, c & recuero, r. (2023) toxicidade e violência discursiva contra deputadas federais no twitter.) galaxia,v. 48. n. 1. wodak, r. (1999) critical discourse analysis at the end of the 20th century, research on language and social interaction, 32:1-2, 185-193, doi: 10.1080/08351813.1999.9683622 žižek, s. (2008) violence: six sideways reflections. profile books. microsoft word vinhas-when fact-checking is not weird-when fact-checking is not weird.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): vinhas, o., bastos, m. (2022, november). when fact-checking is not weird: challenges in fact-checking beyond the western world. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. when fact-checking is not weird: challenges in factchecking beyond the western world otávio vinhas university college dublin marco bastos university college dublin; city, university of london background fact-checking has rapidly achieved a pivotal role in regulating the public debate globally. initially designed as a tool to verify public discourses and hold politicians to account, while also improving journalistic practices (graves, 2016), fact-checking has recently broadened its scope to identify and correct misinformation online. to this end, fact-checkers engage in initiatives promoting media literacy (bulger & davison, 2018), enforcing social media platforms’ content moderation policies (graves & mantzarlis, 2020), and building digital knowledge infrastructures (nissen et al., 2022). their perception as truth-promoters has drawn hopeful if oversized expectations from policymakers both in the united states and europe (caplan et al., 2018; comission, 2018) who requested the allocation of considerable resources to fact-checkers who routinely track the circulation of harmful content online. although fact-checking misinformation may struggle to rein in the firehose of misinformation online (vinhas & bastos, 2022), it has nonetheless grounded itself as a worldwide movement, particularly in western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (weird) countries. literature on fact-checking beyond the west is still forthcoming, particularly with respect to content moderation. social platforms apply their community rules globally and uniformly; a set of guidelines that fail to adhere to the wide range of cultural and religious norms undergirding the use of facebook globally (henrich et al., 2010). indeed, fact-checking meta-analyses show that empirical research is disproportionally focused on the us (walter et al., 2019), even if the fact-checking industry is becoming more diverse, operating across more cultures and languages of recent (stencel & luther, 2021). fact-checkers are keenly aware of these shortcomings, as the effective correction of misinformation (porter & wood, 2021) requires familiarity with local idiosyncrasies that drive much of what practitioners implement and how they make sense of fact-checking locally (ferracioli et al., 2022). given the above, we seek to catalog the many different forms of organizing and implementing fact-checks beyond the de facto standard found in western industrialized countries, where fact-checking streams from journalistic practices of verification (hanitzsch, 2018). methodology we analyzed 37 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with fact-checkers from 35 organizations operating in 27 non-weird countries in africa, asia, latin america, and eastern europe. the interviews were conducted in three different languages (english, portuguese, and spanish) and took place between march and november of 2021. we identified as legitimate, independent fact-checking organizations those that met at least one of the following criteria: 1) listed as an active organization on duke reporters’ lab fact-checking database; 2) current signatories of the international fact-checking network (ifcn); 3) declared a consistent commitment to editorial non-partisanship and financial independence on their websites, along with a detailed description of transparent fact-checking methodologies. interview data was transcribed and translated for downstream analyses using thematical clustering in n-vivo. we aimed to identify the emerging challenges posed to non-weird fact-checkers and what strategies they implement in their fight against misinformation locally. our main goal was to describe how social, linguistic, cultural, and political backgrounds influence fact-checking standards among different national settings and the theoretical import of our study drawn from work that detailed the limits of fact-checking to counter the misinformation landscape (vinhas & bastos, 2022). as such, the interviews revolved around three topics: 1) personal motivations and work routine; 2) methodological processes; 3) strategies to offset misinformation and ameliorate the public debate. the in-depth interviews provide granular information on how non-weird fact-checking experts view their work, what types of claims they often classify as misinformation, and what measures they adopt to mitigate potential shortcomings. discussion and conclusion our findings show that non-weird fact-checkers endure challenges in combating dis and misinformation and are similar to those reported in western fact-checking organizations. there are, however, peculiar challenges that emerge in contexts where public discourse lacks a well-established stable political body and political sphere to support deliberation, including non-partisan organizations providing support for deliberation and democratic dispute so that they are kept apart from partisan disputes that cut across the fault-lines in local politics. these challenges are identified through an analysis of seven types of challenges common to non-weird fact-checking organizations, which are associated with and speak to institutional, infrastructural, political, methodological, social, cultural, and linguistic dimensions. these issues provide a clear but cautionary picture of the many emerging challenges that are specific to local contexts and cultures. these include the relative scarcity of local authoritative sources, the inaccessibility of public data, and potential risks of government censorship. other commonly discussed challenges include the absence of media literacy skills in large swathes of the population, as well as the inaction of social platforms in enforcing content moderation policies. taken together, these issues cause institutional uncertainty and distrust in institutions, a combination of factors that make it difficult for fact-checkers to be perceived as neutral actors in the public debate. these problems are compounded in countries where military conflicts, religious fervor, and ethnic conflict steer much of the social and political polarization. in summary, while fact-checkers are relentless in their promotion of democratic values worldwide (amazeen, 2020), the standards that support the industry may vary substantially around the world, particularly where truth-seeking practices evolved detached from notions of democracy, truth, and journalistic integrity (waisbord & mellado, 2014). references amazeen, m. a. (2020). journalistic interventions: the structural factors affecting the global emergence of fact-checking. journalism, 21(1), 95-111. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884917730217 bulger, m., & davison, p. (2018). the promises challenges and futures of media literacy. journal of media literacy education, 10(1), 1-21. https://doi.org/10.23860/jmle-2018-10-1-1 caplan, r., hanson, l., & donovan, j. (2018). dead reckoning: navigating content moderation after “fake news”. https://datasociety.net/pubs/oh/dataandsociety_dead_reckoning_2018.pdf comission, e. (2018). tackling online disinformation: a european approach. https://eurlex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/txt/pdf/?uri=celex:52018dc0794&rid=6 ferracioli, p., kniess, a. b., & marques, f. p. j. (2022). the watchdog role of factcheckers in different media systems. digital journalism, 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2021.2021377 graves, l. (2016). deciding what's true: the rise of political fact-checking in american journalism. columbia university press. graves, l., & mantzarlis, a. (2020). amid political spin and online misinformation, fact checking adapts. the political quarterly, 91, 585-591. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923x.12896 hanitzsch, t. (2018). journalism studies still needs to fix western bias. journalism, 20(1), 214-217. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884918807353 henrich, j., heine, s. j., & norenzayan, a. (2010). the weirdest people in the world? behav brain sci, 33(2-3), 61-83; discussion 83-135. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x0999152x nissen, i. a., walter, j. g., charquero-ballester, m., & bechmann, a. (2022). digital infrastructures of covid-19 misinformation: a new conceptual and analytical perspective on fact-checking. digital journalism, 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2022.2026795 porter, e., & wood, t. j. (2021). the global effectiveness of fact-checking: evidence from simultaneous experiments in argentina, nigeria, south africa, and the united kingdom. proc natl acad sci u s a, 118(37). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2104235118 stencel, m., & luther, j. (2021). fact-checking census shows slower growth. https://reporterslab.org/fact-checking-census-shows-slower-growth/ vinhas, o., & bastos, m. (2022). fact-checking misinformation: eight notes on consensus reality. journalism studies, 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670x.2022.2031259 waisbord, s., & mellado, c. (2014). de-westernizing communication studies: a reassessment. communication theory, 24(4), 361-372. https://doi.org/10.1111/comt.12044 walter, n., cohen, j., holbert, r. l., & morag, y. (2019). fact-checking: a metaanalysis of what works and for whom. political communication, 37(3), 350-375. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2019.1668894 aoir2022-fin2022.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 searching for (and finding) neocolonial fantasies: sexualization of women from the global south and the global east in google's text search results aleksandra urman university of zurich mykola makhortykh university of bern background search engines (ses) are major gatekeepers of public communication which determine how information is filtered and what sources are prioritized in response to specific queries (germano and sobbrio 2020). however, similarly to other complex algorithmic systems, ses are prone to biases which can be broadly defined as the distortion of the information landscape, for instance, through a systematic skewness of results towards specific perspectives or the imbalances in the prevalence of specific sources (bozdag 2013; goldman 2008). due to the high trust people put in ses, the reiteration of social biases the ones involving systemic misrepresentation of certain socio-demographic groups (otterbacher, bates, and clough 2017) via web search can amplify societal discrimination and exacerbate prejudices towards misrepresented groups. the importance of social biases stresses the need for uncovering their presence in web search outputs to prompt search engine companies to debias the outputs (noble 2018). one methodology commonly employed for this aim is algorithm impact auditing that investigates which algorithmic system outputs are prevalent and whether there is evidence of bias in them (mittelstadt 2016). in this paper, we utilize this methodology to examine the presence of one specific form of social bias that is, sexualization of people of different gender, nationality, ethnicity and religion in google’s organic and sponsored text search results. while sexualization in the representation of people has been extensively studied in the context of popular media (ward 2016), the only analysis of this phenomenon in web suggested citation (apa): urman, a., makhortykh, m. (2022, november). searching for (and finding) neocolonial fantasies: sexualization of women from the global south and the global east in google's text search results. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. search was done by noble (2018). while this important work has examined representations of different ethnic groups in text search results, this examination was focused on the global north context. we build on noble's findings but look at the problem from a broader global perspective by systematically assessing whether there is evidence of sexualization of different national groups, including the ones coming from the global south and the global east. research questions we address the following research questions: rq1: is there evidence of sexualization of different groups in sponsored search results? rq2: are there discrepancies in the level of sexualization of different groups (women vs men as well as different national/ethnic/religious groups varies in organic text search results? data and methods to address the aforementioned points, we collected unpersonalized text search results from google from the us and ireland (using vpn) during the period from july, 21, 2020 to august, 5, 2020, in response to search queries referring to different groups of people. each query consisted of a combination of a term denoting different national/ethnic/regional/religious groups (e.g., “ukrainian” or “black” or “muslim”) combined with one of the following seven terms describing gender/age groups: "people", "women", "men", "females", "males", "girls", "boys". the list of nationalities was based on the one provided by the uk government for company filings. we expanded it by adding several regional categories (e.g., "eastern european") and ethnic categories as described in the racial and ethnic categories for the nih diversity program. it resulted in 1,694 queries used for data collection; examples include "norwegian girls", or "muslim women". the search results organic and sponsored in response to these queries were collected automatically, and served as the main data source for our analysis. for the analysis, we relied on a mix of qualitative, quantitative and computational methods. to address rq1 we first conducted a qualitative analysis of sponsored results, and then quantitatively assessed their prevalence for different queries. to address rq2, we relied on word embeddings-based association analysis, similarly to previous studies that used word embeddings to quantify biased representations of different groups in texts (see garg et al., 2018). findings regarding rq1, we established that, first, most sponsored content is returned in response to search queries about women, especially those from the global south and east; second, over 90% of the sponsored link to (racialized) dating and/or so-called "mail-order bride" websites that reinforce post-colonial sexotic stereotypes (lloyd 1999; schaper et al. 2020). regarding rq2, there are gender-based discrepancies in the levels of sexualization in both organic and sponsored search results. women are sexualized more than men, and there are discrepancies in the levels of sexualization of different national groups, with women from the global east and south being sexualized more than women from the global north. such a discrepancy leads to the reinforcement of sexotic stereotypes and reiteration of the colonial fantasies which treat women outside the global north as objects expected to be conquered. implications our findings show that post-colonial sexotic stereotypes are pronounced in both sponsored and organic text search results on google with women from global south and global east being highly sexualized. regardless of the source of observed misrepresentations, they can be harmful for individuals and societies. even if these biases do not introduce, but merely reflect existing stereotypes, they can further reinforce them since exposure to sexualized representations of people can increase sexist attitudes and have numerous adverse effects (ward, 2016). our observations are important for the debate about the algorithmic fairness and its applicability to the global south and east as they show that web search is embedded in existing power relationships resulting in unfair treatment of certain groups that can facilitate their exploitation. our findings also highlight implications for the google web search functionality and commercial model. instead of prioritizing sexotic results, the top organic search results related to more general queries should promote more neutral reference sources and outlets exposing stigmatization of vulnerable groups. references bozdag, engin. 2013. “bias in algorithmic filtering and personalization.” ethics and information technology 15 (3): 209–27. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-013-9321-6. garg, nikhil, londa schiebinger, dan jurafsky, and james zou. 2018. “word embeddings quantify 100 years of gender and ethnic stereotypes.” proceedings of the national academy of sciences 115 (16): e3635–44. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1720347115. germano, fabrizio, and francesco sobbrio. 2020. “opinion dynamics via search engines (and other algorithmic gatekeepers).” journal of public economics 187 (july): 104188. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2020.104188. goldman, e. 2008. “search engine bias and the demise of search engine utopianism.” in web search: multidisciplinary perspectives, edited by amanda spink and michael zimmer, 121–33. information science and knowledge management. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75829-7_8. lloyd, kathryn a. 1999. “wives for sale: the modern international mail-order bride industry comments.” northwestern journal of international law & business 20 (2): 341–68. noble, safiya umoja. 2018. algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york: new york university press. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-013-9321-6 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1720347115 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1720347115 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2020.104188 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75829-7_8 otterbacher, jahna, jo bates, and paul clough. 2017. “competent men and warm women: gender stereotypes and backlash in image search results.” in proceedings of the 2017 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 6620–31. chi ’17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025727. schaper, ulrike, magdalena beljan, pascal eitler, christopher ewing, and benno gammerl. 2020. “sexotic: the interplay between sexualization and exoticization.” sexualities 23 (1–2): 114–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460718790863. ward, l. monique. 2016. “media and sexualization: state of empirical research, 1995–2015.” the journal of sex research 53 (4–5): 560–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2016.1142496. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025727 https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460718790863 https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2016.1142496 https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2016.1142496 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): mccosker, a. & heemsbergen, l. (2023, october). vernacular pedagogies for the synthetic media age. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. vernacular pedagogies for the synthetic media age anthony mccosker swinburne university of technology luke heemsbergen deakin university introduction and background this paper draws on our research into the cultures of production surrounding the development of deepfakes and use of other forms of generative ai across public sites such as github and youtube, and subsequent reflective classroom experimentation and learning. expanding on the notion of ‘vernacular pedagogies’ (albury et al., 2020) – informal and in situ educational and relational literacy work – we propose a set of approaches for widening participation and involvement in ai and its underlying data practices. over a short timeframe synthetic media has begun to reshape the internet in ways we are yet to fully understand (mccosker & wilken, 2020). deepfakes (and deepaudio), generative art, and the outputs of large language models (chatgpt, gpt3) are driving talk of mass disruption to the production and status of media outputs. they raise issues of direct harms, for instance in deepfakes’ potential for non-consensual image-based abuse or political and other forms of misinformation (winter and salter, 2020; öhman, 2019; chesney and citron, 2019), as well as through the inherent forms of bias and inequality built into the datasets on which they are trained. in many ways they are the result of decades of engagement with the internet, and the emerging everyday data cultures (burgess et al., 2022) that we are all part of every time we upload a photo to an app, comment on a thread, or perform other ordinary modes of data-engagement with the platforms and services that fuel ‘generative’ ai models. meanwhile generative ai tools – and chatgpt in particular – are causing panic among many educators and policy makers about their use in schools and universities. as a result, they are already altering assessment and learning practices. just as media literacy and digital literacy became core areas of work for educators addressing the skills and behaviours needed to navigate the information economy, new forms of ai and data literacy are being imagined and explored (long and magerko, 2020; laupichler et al., 2022). and there are extensive community sites and spaces exploring the limits and uses of generative ai tools through ‘prompt engineering’ (liu and chilton, 2022). what can formal educators learn from these sites and spaces for socializing ai? how can vernacular pedagogies be used to develop ethical learning and can critical ai and data literacy keep pace with technical developments? research design code and no-code materials for creating deepfakes have been widely available for use and experimentation since their creation and release in 2017 by subreddit /r/deepfakes – and subsequently banned due to its misuse in non-consensual porn. similarly, experimentation and application of gpt3 and chatgpt, midjourney and other generative tools are themselves important spaces for public pedagogy and discovery – as well as highlighting forms of misuse and potential harms. in other words, the negotiations and contested uses to which these tools are being put, we argue, serve as an important research field site. to examine the production practices and cultures for developing deepfake videos, we studied popular github repositories and youtube how-to and developer channels. these, along with popular subreddits, discord communities and other sites of exchange and negotiation serve as their own domains of vernacular pedagogy around the production and socialisation of ai. connecting students to these forms of experimentation and social learning can be valuable. we see them as spaces for intervention and learning in ways that can be brought into formal education. in this paper we reflect on the kinds of public vernacular pedagogy available on youtube, github and elsewhere online, and the kinds of experimental project work and learning environments that can be created with higher education students that can expand critical forms of ai participation and literacy. findings and analysis examining various sites of public learning and engagement with synthetic media and generative ai, we see great potential in bridging the informal or vernacular pedagogies with formal educational practice. doing so brings together new users of complex systems in spaces of active exploration, often opening the hood on ai tools and the datasets that underpin them as well as teaching new skillsets for evolving creative work practice. sites like github, youtube, discord and others that share code, data, instructions and outputs can foster social learning and learning by experimentation. readme files on github offer resources for understanding generative models and exploring datasets used for training. these are not only educational resources for personal learning or formal educational settings, but they also help to negotiate the uses to which the tools are imagined and deployed. for example, the deepfakes/faceswap repository contains an extensive readme ‘manifesto’ that establishes guides and resources for understanding and running the code for ‘people interested in generative models.’ it takes an inclusive stance, opening access to ai techniques beyond specialists, as ‘the first ai code that anyone could download, run and learn by experimentation.’ like other popular code repositories on github, faceswap enables experimentation and engagement with ai techniques and practices and has built a community of practice around the tools it makes available. the accessibility of youtube tutorials has also allowed deepfake memes to spread via how-to videos like face swap memes created with the song “baka mitai dame da ne” (see, for example, youtube video: “how to make the baka mitai dame da ne meme [complete tutorial with templates],” kapwing app, 4 august 2020). these tutorials, go some way toward building awareness about visual data and skills through frame-byframe preparation and manipulation. similarly, the discord community surrounding the use of midjourney, builds vernacular knowledges and explores forms of ‘prompt engineering’ that include folk knowledge and command line expressions. this combination and the generative results, exposes ordinary users to considerations of the ethics and practices around creating synthetic images. while these sites offer techniques and materials for vernacular pedagogies of ai tool use, we also consider how they can be integrated into more formal classroom settings via ‘generative curatorial practice.’ our classroom work reflects on creating a series of workshop experiments to generate a student-led synthetic gallery of sculptures as a set of ‘childhood memories’ and attempts to functionalise ai prompts by reverseengineering and critiquing the ‘prompt markets’ that emerged in 2022. specifically, teaching practice to ‘discover’ specific styles of sculpture (e.g., piccinini, rodin) familiarises learners with the tool; explores how the ai practice ‘sees’ the world (i.e. folk knowledge, bias); and examines the subjectivity of curatorial taste. the generative value creation of ai is tested through the curatorial manufacture of images triggering childhood memories via prompt engineering and sharing the effects with the class. finally, we consider how to build in reflection on the ai economy itself, deconstructing how markets like ‘promptbase’ work – and whom they might not work for as ai leverages datapoints on extant art. this enables dialogue around the hot takes being put into media (e.g., incompatibility with ip regimes) that seem at odds with the vernacular pedagogies and social practices we have encountered. conclusion while we are at the early stages of developing new methods for building critical ai and data literacies and competencies across educational settings, there is much to learn from the spaces of vernacular pedagogy and its integration to formal settings. references albury, k., mccosker, a., pym, t., & byron, p. (2020). dating apps as public health ‘problems’: cautionary tales and vernacular pedagogies in news media. health sociology review, 29(3), 232-248. burgess, j., albury, k., mccosker, a., & wilken, r. (2022). everyday data cultures. john wiley & sons. chesney, r., and citron, d. (2019). deepfakes and the new disinformation war: the coming age of post-truth geopolitics. foreign affairs 98: 147. laupichler, m. c., aster, a., schirch, j., & raupach, t. (2022). artificial intelligence literacy in higher and adult education: a scoping literature review. computers and education: artificial intelligence, 100101. long, d., & magerko, b. (2020, april). what is ai literacy? competencies and design considerations. in proceedings of the 2020 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-16). mccosker, a., & wilken, r. (2020). automating vision: the social impact of the new camera consciousness. routledge, new york. mccosker, a. (2022). making sense of deepfakes: socializing ai and building data literacy on github and youtube. new media & society, 14614448221093943. öhman, c. (2019). introducing the pervert’s dilemma: a contribution to the critique of deepfake pornography. ethics and information technology 22: 133–140. winter, r., & salter, a. (2020). deepfakes: uncovering hardcore open source on github. porn studies, 7(4), 382-397. selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 bodies and data: the digital sovereignty of the indian state revati prasad, institute for local self reliance in february 2019, the government of india released a draft e-commerce policy that boldly proclaimed, “india and its citizens have a sovereign right to their data,” (department for promotion of industry and internal trade, 2019). the draft policy was one of many in recent years that have mandated data localization, protectionism or other measures of greater national control over the digital economy in india. these actions are widely read in geopolitical terms as a nation-state asserting its sovereignty in the digital realm against us-based global tech firms, a digital sovereignty that challenges digital colonialism. i argue that the indian state’s project of digital sovereignty must also be understood as biopolitical. i connect the indian state’s regulation of the digital economy, exemplified by the 2019 draft of the e-commerce policy to its regulation and control of bodies, specifically through the biometric id, aadhaar, and its proliferating uses. i read these state actions collectively as a project through which the indian state is engaged in altering what it is to be sovereign and its subject. when “digital” appends sovereignty, it is not merely a new terrain upon which to exert power, nor is it an unbridled force that the state must contend with, it is the means through which the indian state enacts its project(s) of domination. first, i unpack the claims made about data in the document, namely that an individual owns the right to their data, that data is analogous to a natural resource like coal, and that indian data can and should be thought of as a “societal commons” held in trust by the government. i also address how the policy engages with the global discourse on data ownership and protection. in order to stake a national claim to the data produced in india, the policy begins at an individual level, arguing that because data derives from individuals’ actions, they own the rights to it. despite appearances, this is not an ownership claim. the policy offers no avenue for an individual to exercise these rights outside of the state, and the only group identity the policy acknowledges is nationality. in ascribing value to data, the policy reaches for the increasingly common resource extraction metaphor, data as coal or data as oil. having established that data derives from individuals and that it has value, the policy then touts india’s ability to create this value. as the second most populous country, with a young consumer society, the policy selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): prasad, r., (2021, october). bodies and data: the digital sovereignty if the indian state. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. states that india could yield a “virtual treasure trove of information” (department for promotion of industry and internal trade, 2019). as the state lays claim to this data on behalf of individual indians, the resource being monetized is not simply data, but the country’s populace. to this end, the policy also points to the state’s own sources of data, in particular aadhaar, through which the state has concertedly worked to digitize our lives and interactions. aadhaar was proposed as convenient paperless identification for citizens to avail government benefits, but over the course of the last decade and through extraordinary and arguably extralegal state action, it is now mandatory for a range of public and private services from filing taxes to opening bank accounts to taking school exams (bhatia & bhabha, 2017). as aadhaar pervaded every aspect of life, it was consistently opposed along the way, culminating in a 2018 supreme court case that challenged the project’s constitutionality. i draw on the argumentation against aadhaar at the court to elaborate on what ajana (2013) has termed “biometric citizenship.” agamben (1998) argued that the exceptional figure of homo sacer, the outcast who can be killed without punishment but not sacrificed, is the most elementary operation of sovereign power. ajana built on agamben’s biopolitical notion of sovereignty to argue that biometric systems expand “the mechanisms by which what was once confined to ‘exceptional’ spaces and practices is now in the process of becoming a permanent rule by spilling over to the biopolitical body of humanity as a whole” (ajana, 2013, p. 45). lawyers opposing aadhaar highlighted cases of exclusion, resulting from technical failures, fraud or simply the probabilistic nature of biometrics, and the dire outcomes of aadhaar’s vicissitudes. aadhaar’s mandatory nature made citizenship conditional by undermining bodily autonomy, extending a state of exception, and expelling some bodies. one lawyer called to mind agamben’s homo sacer, when he said aadhaar could cause a citizen’s “civil death” (divan, 2018). the project of digital sovereignty consolidates the power of the indian state. whether it is through data localization measures, or the proliferating uses of biometric id to digitize ever more social, economic and political interactions, it is a concerted effort that grants the state unprecedented access to the bodies and lives of the people in india. it compels the creation of a certain type of data and then claims that data as belonging, not to the individuals, but to the state. it uses the discourse of “data sovereignty” to establish foreign tech companies as a foil and deflects attention away from its domestic implications. a popular understanding of sovereignty is supreme authority within bounded territory. brown argued that sovereignty is founded through enclosure, “it is through the walling off of space from the common that sovereignty is born” (brown, 2014, p. 48). pointing to the colonial histories of sovereignty, bonilla (2017) argued sovereignty cannot be understood divorced from “material practices of dispossession” (p. 232). andrejevic (2007) drew a parallel between the land enclosure movement of eighteenth-century england and the commodification of our online activities to propose “digital enclosure”. andrejevic’s conception of digital enclosure focused on commercial actors, but when read along with the historic relationship between enclosure and sovereignty, it sheds light on the practices of appropriation central to india’s project of digital sovereignty. in this project, the state uses its coercive power and enacts the logic of capital. while the claims of data sovereignty gesture towards the geopolitical, the biopolitical work of aadhaar expands dominion within national borders. together, these form india’s project of digital sovereignty. by identifying this as a project, i call attention to the ongoing work by the state to naturalize a set of interrelated claims about technology, data and the role of the state and give them material force through government actions. identifying digital sovereignty as a project, underscores that it is still unfolding and as such is open to contestation and challenge. references agamben, g. (1998). homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. stanford university press. ajana, b. (2013). governing through biometrics: the biopolitics of identity. palgrave macmillan. andrejevic, m. (2007). surveillance in the digital enclosure. the communication review, 10(4), 295–317. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714420701715365 bhatia, a., & bhabha, j. (2017). india’s aadhaar scheme and the promise of inclusive social protection. oxford development studies, 45(1), 64–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/13600818.2016.1263726 bonilla, y. (2017). unsettling sovereignty. cultural anthropology, 32(3), 330–339. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.3.02 brown, w. (2014). walled states, waning sovereignty. zone books. department for promotion of industry and internal trade. (2019). draft national ecommerce policy: india’s data for india’s development. https://dipp.gov.in/sites/default/files/draftnational_ecommerce_policy_23february2019.pdf divan, s. opening statement on behalf of the petitioners, writ petition (civil) no. 829 of 2013, supreme court of india (2018). selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 alt-platformization: radicalization of discourses and information flows in the alternative ecosystem. ashwin nagappa digital media research centre, queensland university of technology ehsan dehghan digital media research centre, queensland university of technology background and objectives this work in progress paper examines the process of radicalization on the alternative social media platform gab, and the flow of information between gab and other similar platforms. corresponding to the socio-political changes and increasing polarization across the globe, some alternative platforms have witnessed a rising popularity among ultra-conservative and/or right-leaning users. among such platforms, a few have succeeded in surviving the external pressures put on them through what van dijck calls “deplatformisation” (van dijck et al., 2021). gab, an alternative platform often equated to the far-right copy of twitter, is one such space (zannettou et al., 2018; zhou et al., 2019). gab exhibits significant changes in participation and discourse. by analyzing temporal dynamics of posts on three topics—vaccination discourse, music, and food— we trace the process of radicalization on gab. we also mapped the content from the most shared external sources (domains) across platforms such as bitchute, odyssey, rumble etc. to trace the flow of information across the fringe network. we argue that users are overcoming deplatforming or deplatformization by creating sustainable flows of information in a range of services and spaces, all interconnected through their platformized function. we define this as "alt-platformization", the systemic and systematic process of creating a self-sufficient, viable alternative to the platformized web, entailing the necessary infrastructure, production, circulation, consumption, and reproduction of discourses. a key differentiating feature of alt-platformization is the ideological, along with commercial logics dominating this process and space. suggested citation (apa): nagappa, a., & dehghan, e., (2022, november). alt-platformization: radicalization of discourses and information flows in the alternative ecosystem. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. methodology we collected the data for this project using “garc”, “a python library and command line tool for collecting json data from gab.com” (stevens, 2021). we collected gabs posted between may 2018 and august 2022 containing generic keywords ‘music’ (n= 27,673), ‘food’ (n=14,520), and the more controversial discourse of ‘vaccination’ (along with related keywords, n=68,441). we developed an open-source tool in-house to clean up json data and transform it into a relational database format (alpert, 2021).through a mixed-methods approach, we investigated the dynamics of conversations over time and discursive changes across the three case studies on the platform. particularly, we compare such dynamics before the covid-19 pandemic, and during it, to have a basis of comparison between non-acute and acute time periods. we identified the most shared domains from the posts and searched the content from these urls on search engines and platforms such as bitchute, odyssey, rumble. we mapped the flows of information between these platforms and identified features or functions that are unique to these platforms, which also enable alt-platformization. preliminary findings our analysis shows clear indicators of the radicalization of discourses across all cases. conversations about food in 2019 are dominantly related to healthy eating, diets, cooking recipes, and the role of fda in regulating certain foods. however, during the pandemic, such conversations become highly politicized, and keywords such as ‘maga’, ‘patriots’ or ‘trump’ enter the food discourse (table 1). table 1: dynamics of food discourse on gab for music (table 2), the discursive space remains almost exclusively within the domain of music in 2019, with secondary hashtags like ‘whatareyoulisteningto’, ‘rock’, or ‘70smusic’ being top secondary hasthags. however, usa elections and the pandemic show the introduction of interdiscursive linkages that effectively radicalize the discourse, and secondary hashtags and domains see clear shifts towards more hyperpartisan politics. hashtags such as ‘trump’, ‘maga’, and ‘bigpharma’ are gradually introduced into conversations about music, and anti-lockdown or politically critical songs and music are widely shared. our qualitative analysis of the contents of gabs further shows this radicalization process. table 2: dynamics of music discourse on gab the same process is also evident in the vaccination discourse (table 3), which evolves as a discursive space discussing impacts of vaccines from a purely medical perspective (yet still conspiratorial), to a highly political, hyperpartisan discussion that extends far beyond a medical conversation. table 3: dynamics of vaccination discourse on gab for ‘music’ and ‘food’, we identified the gabs that shared content from external sources and mapped the content outside gab to understand the flow of information. the three highest shared urls (with over 500 posts) are either songs or bible songs. the highest shared url (https://fanlink.to/jimmysaxblack) is a link to artist jimmy sax black. however, the text used in the post contain hate speech and misinformation (accompanied by hashtags such as ‘novaccinepassport’). artist nitemare’s song from soundclick.com is the 4th highest shared link (also accompanied by hashtags ‘trump2020’, ‘maga’, ‘america’). the same content by nitemare is available on bitchute and few other fringe sites. this pattern is visible in several other external urls we examined. platforms such as odysee and soundclick offer download buttons that allows anyone to instantly download media file on to their system. odysee and bitchute allow multiple users to upload the same content without taking them down for copyright infringement. in some cases, the urls shared on gab were found to be suspended by the service provider; however, the content (text or video) can be found on some alternative platforms. such affordances allow audio visual content propagating hate speech, mis/dis information to circulate among fringe platforms, effectively bypassing deplatformization. while platformization focuses on gathering user data and generate value for a given platform company, alt-platformization is the process in which user community is using platforms to extend their ideological networks or discourses. in a platformatized web, platform features are decentralized into the web, platform-ready data is gathered from the web and recentralized in the platform, to generate value from user data (helmond, 2015, p. 124) and monetize the data (helmond, 2015, p. 101). whereas in an altplatformized web, the economics and logics allow users to participate on several platforms to extend decentralized networks. this provides a sustainable environment for a discourse to exist and develop (or in current case radicalize). next steps our preliminary findings show indications of how even non-political discourses can become radicalized, further feeding into the problematic political discussions on alternative platforms like gab. in the next steps, we will expand the forensic tracking of domains and urls, and also deepen the qualitative, discourse-analytical stage of the study, in order to map both information flows and discursive strategies and nodal points of these discursive networks. this will allow us to expand the theoretical construct of ‘alt-platformization’, and provide a framework for understanding and tackling radicalization online. references alpert, b. (2021). gab tidy data tool [python]. qut digital observatory. https://github.com/qut-digital-observatory/gab_tidy_data (original work published 2021) helmond, a. (2015). the web as platform: data flows in social media. stevens, c. (2021). garc: python and command-line interface for gab.com api [python]. https://github.com/chrisstevens/garc van dijck, j., de winkel, t., & schäfer, m. t. (2021). deplatformization and the governance of the platform ecosystem. new media & society, 146144482110456. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211045662 zannettou, s., bradlyn, b., de cristofaro, e., kwak, h., sirivianos, m., stringini, g., & blackburn, j. (2018). what is gab: a bastion of free speech or an alt-right echo chamber? companion of the the web conference 2018, 1007–1014. https://doi.org/10.1145/3184558.3191531 zeng, j., & schäfer, m. s. (2021). conceptualizing “dark platforms”. covid-19-related conspiracy theories on 8kun and gab. digital journalism, 9(9), 1321–1343. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2021.1938165 zhou, y., dredze, m., broniatowski, d. a., & adler, w. d. (2019). elites and foreign actors among the alt-right: the gab social media platform. first monday. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i9.10062 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): de souza e silva, a.,, dufresne, k., & xiong-gum, m., (2022, november). decolonizing creativity: a crowdsourcing project about creativity as survival. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. decolonizing creativity: a crowdsourcing project about creativity as survival adriana a. de souza e silva north carolina state university, usa kelsey dufresne north carolina state university, usa mai nou xiong-gum furman university, usa creativity is a “hot” topic nowadays. an increasing number of trade publications aim at teaching people “how to be more creative.” however, most current accounts of creativity are embedded within capitalist and westernized modes of production and consumption. creativity becomes, then, a catch all word for enticing people to work harder, beat the competition and be successful in the workplace (anderson et al., 2014; steiber & alänge, 2013). following this perspective, creativity is often characterized as something that is achieved by intense individual concentration and contemplation—making it an activity for those with the time, money, and resources to be creative (amabile, 1996). however, creativity also happens outside of this traditional view. creative practices emerge within situations of hardship, where there is a lack of time, money, and resources. these practices are deemed illegal or subversive and have frequently been described as appropriation, but not “creative” (bar et al., 2016; de souza e silva et al., 2011; farman, 2014). when slum dwellers in favelas or forced migrants in make-shift dwellings repurpose technology to improve their living conditions, they are not only appropriating technology: they are both collectively recreating their context with technology and re-inventing themselves. within this context, creativity can be understood as a process that relies on networked resources and mobility within an environment that connects people and technologies. for example, in the zaatari refugee camp in jordan, where walking paths are unpaved and access to wheelchairs are limited, safwan harb looked to his surroundings to create an electric bike made from spare parts (copestake, 2016). in doing so, he was not just inventing a wheelchair-bike—he was making mobility possible by re-creating himself alongside the mobile-wheelchair/bike. understanding creativity from a decolonial perspective means removing the focus from the individual as innovator (as well as the profit-oriented goal), and instead highlighting the ongoing networked relationships among people, technologies, and spaces. this creative process is not concerned with the creation of new things. rather, it is about the mobility and networking of resources that can improve lives and facilitate survival strategies. to explore this idea of creativity as a collective and networked process, we have created a pubpub website1 to crowdsource examples from around the world. following de souza e silva and xiong-gum (2020), we named this resource mobile networked creativity repository. our goal is to decolonize traditional ideas of creativity, by building a crowdsourced repository of creative practices that emerge from a process of survival. pubpub is an open-source, online publishing platform that prioritizes communitygenerated knowledge sharing. it is a low-barrier entry method to share information and knowledge within one's community of learners—in our case, individuals interested in creative practices that occur outside traditional corporate and profit-oriented domains. once content is published on pubpub, it can be viewed, read, and shared by anyone with access to the internet via a computer or a mobile device. moreover, pubpub, as a collaborative web platform (bakardjieva & gaden, 2012; jenkins et al., 2009), offers support for sharing, integrating, and embedding all sorts of digital content—particularly multimodal media. we developed the digital housing’s format to accomplish four main goals: (1) explain mobile networked creativity for a broad and non-academic audience, (2) share previous research and materials about this topic, (3) ask the audience to contribute to the collection, and (4) display the crowdsourced examples from the audience. in building our pubpub housing, we were especially interested in collecting publiclyidentified instances of mobile networked creativity to support the development and accessibility of a broad collection of examples found across the world. currently, the contribution format encourages potential participants and contributors to describe and share their instance of mobile networked creativity through a google form linked from the pubpub website. on the form, individuals are asked to describe their example of mobile networked creativity and explain its relevance. we are particularly concerned about accessibility and giving people with lower levels of literacy opportunity to contribute. therefore, participants have the option to upload an audio file instead of writing a text. in addition, they have the option to upload media files, such as photos and videos, to better describe their contribution. finally, participants can add the geographic location of their contribution and the time frame of the event or example, if pertinent. after reviewing submitted entries, out team uploads the most representative ones to the pubpub website. through the ease of integrating media, we hope to continue compiling various videos, audio files, images, and more to help further develop this repository of mobile networked creativity instances. we plan on rotating the various 1 https://mobilenetworkedcreativity.pubpub.org/ submissions on the main page of the pubpub housing, while also maintaining access to all submissions for the public through the examples page. such practices of maintaining and displaying publicly documented and accessible materials corresponds to unesco’s recommendations for open science for more equitable and collaborative knowledge sharing (unesco, 2021). keeping in mind that most mobile networked creativity processes occur outside global north and english-speaking contexts, we are in the process of translating the pubpub into different languages, such as spanish, portuguese, and mandarin. in doing so, we hope to be able to not only to collect examples from all around the world, but also to reach an audience outside of traditional global north contexts. the ultimate goal of the project is to include a diversity of communities in conceptualizing creativity outside traditional capitalist contexts, as well as making them aware that non-traditional ways of using and appropriating technology are also creative, and should be valued as such. in this presentation, we will describe the conceptualization and development of our online repository of mobile networked creativity examples, focusing on how open science knowledge and crowdsourced information can help and inform non-traditional creative processes. references amabile, t. (1996). creativity in context. westview press. anderson, n., potočnik, k., & zhou, j. (2014). innovation and creativity in organizations. journal of management, 40(5), 1297-1333. https://journals-sagepubcom.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/doi/pdf/10.1177/0149206314527128 bakardjieva, m., & gaden, g. (2012). web 2.0 technologies of the self. philosophy & technology, 25(3), 399-413. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-011-0032-9 bar, f., weber, m., & pisani, f. (2016). mobile technology appropriation in a distant mirror: baroquization, creolization, and cannibalism. new media & society, 18(4), 617636. copestake, j. (2016). refugee inventor builds electric bike. bbc news. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-35871803/the-disabled-refugee-inventor-whobuilt-an-electric-bike de souza e silva, a., sutko, d., salis, f., & de souza e silva, c. (2011). mobile phone appropriation in the favelas of rio de janeiro, brazil. new media & society, 13(3), 411426. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810393901 de souza e silva, a., & xiong-gum, m. n. (2020). mobile networked creativity: developing a theoretical framework for understanding creativity as survival. communication theory. farman, j. (2014). creative misuse as resistance: surveillance, mobile technologies, and locative games. surveillance & society, 12(3), 377-388. jenkins, h., purushotma, r., weigel, m., clinton, k., & robinson, a. j. (2009). confronting the challenges of participatory culture: media education for the 21st century. the mit press. steiber, a., & alänge, s. (2013). a corporate system for continuous innovation: the case of google inc. european journal of innovation management, 16(2), 243-264. https://doi.org/10.1108/14601061311324566 unesco. (2021). unesco recommendation on open science https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000379949.locale=en selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): docherty, n., valderrama-barragan, m. (2024, october). educated users: refining manners through social media corporate curriculums. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. educated users: refining manners through social media corporate curriculums niall docherty university of sheffield matías valderrama barragán university of warwick in current mediatized discourses, the psychological, social, and political costs of social media appear widespread and many. whether increasing user anxiety and depression (yoon et al, 2019), cultivating online misogyny and racialized abuse (bailey, 2021), or contributing to political polarisation (suarez estrada, 2022), the idea that platforms perpetuate certain ‘toxic’ tendencies is now an almost banal statement (dinnen, 2018). notwithstanding the dubious nominal accuracy of this term (gibson et al., 2023), and recognizing the fact that social media also brings solidarity, joy and purpose to many lives across the world, platforms have nevertheless been at pains to emphasise both their awareness of these issues and their proactive responses to them. facebook’s oversight board, for example, comprises a network of independent internet experts that seemingly hold their services to account through roundtables, white papers, and appeals processes (oversight board, 2024). elsewhere, the x transparency center presents and reflects on the governmental, internal, and community regulations it has implemented on the platform (x, 2022). such procedures can be usefully understood as a form of corporate social responsibility (banerjee, 2008), a process of proprietorial enframing (langlois & elmer, 2013) whereby companies seek to pre-empt and curtail any potential criticisms of its business practices through its own funded research, public statements, self-regulation, and philanthropic endeavours. yet while these highly publicised interventions have been rightly critiqued as attempts to restrict the terms available to hold social media to account (gillespie, 2023), these are not the only means through which social media companies are currently seeking to shape both the narrative surrounding and actual use of their services. this article will examine another currently understudied and worrying modality within which social https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?tv5u7o https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?clrmjs https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?qmf3p3 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?tjo76k media companies are looking to exert their influence: corporate curriculums of healthy, safe, and educated use. chiefly, we will scrutinise the modes through which social media companies create, disseminate and deliver digital literacy curriculums to educators, parents, caregivers, and users through free-to-access online materials. these resources vary depending on their imagined audience, yet, following the thought of norbert elias (2000), we connect them together as part of broader attempts to refine the manners of human groups according to (contingent) values and beliefs, and which, in doing so, serve the capitalist interests of powerful global institutions seeking to enforce them. upon this basis, our paper asks: what is the specific content of social media curriculums of safe, healthy and educated use? and how do these educational resources inculcate certain manners of use, for whom, and with what implications? our paper adopts a practice-oriented document analysis approach (asdal & reinertsen, 2022) to examine how one particular company, meta, targets various audiences with specific tips or lessons on manners of healthy, safe and educated use. first, we provide a textual content analysis of meta’s getdigital program, which provides free digital literacy materials to youth, parents and caregivers, and educators in the uk and us. these materials, created during the pandemic, include lesson plans, homework activities, and information that variously educate these groups on the positives and dangers of social media. these are grouped beneath five distinct pillars: digital foundations, which establishes the basics of data privacy; digital wellness, which promotes well-being online; digital engagement, which offers ways to evaluate information and build inclusive digital communities; digital empowerment, which focuses on social media activism; and digital opportunities, which develop skills for future careers in technology (facebook, 2020). secondly, we move our attention outside of the classroom and onto one particular platform, instagram. specifically, we examine instagram's user guides and programs, which offer tailored information and activities targeted at families and teens (instagram, 2024). these resources address six themed topics: pressure to be perfect, speaking authentically, promoting compassion, fostering body acceptance, creatively combating bullying, teen counter speech fellowship, managing time online, and encouraging kindness. our research is a work in progress, yet preliminary findings indicate that the ideal modes of healthy, safe, and educated use proposed by meta in these materials, and the type of digital literacy constructed through them, is a distinctly responsibilized prospect, primarily operating through self-controlled habits, and verified in relation to neoliberal behaviourist ideologies of individualised action (docherty, 2021). we understand this as an attempt to cultivate the conduct and manners of users in directions that further the interests of platforms themselves. specifically, we theoretically interpret this as a conduct of conduct in the foucauldian sense (foucault, 1983) and a refinement of manners in elias’s terminology. we show that by loading the pressure on individuals to protect themselves against the ‘toxicity’ of platforms, social media companies are seeking to absolve themselves from the responsibility to meaningfully address the potentially harmful aspects of their services, either through changes in design, content https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?ducsg9 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?ducsg9 moderation, or regulation. this move at once constitutes a performance of corporate responsibility, responding to the aforementioned criticisms that have been levelled at platforms in recent years, while diverting attention away from the exploitative capitalist logics motivating their operations (alaimo & kallinikos, 2017). our paper explicates the implications of this situation in relation to the corporate curriculum (manning, 1999), which refers to efforts made by corporate actors to ‘centre, legitimise, and entrench a set of beliefs' (tannock, 2020, p.1.) in the public which align with their own business interests. other examples include ‘petro-pedagogies’, whereby oil companies have provided free science and engineering resources to schools (which stress the necessity of oil products in society and reject the science of climate change (eaton & day, 2020)); and the food industry providing free school curriculums for home economics, nutrition, and physical education, such as those disseminated by cocacola, nestle, and mcdonalds (powell, 2019). our paper deepens the notion of the corporate curriculum to show how it entwines with what elias terms the civilising processes of modernity (elias, 2000), “a change of human conduct and sentiment” (p.365) that establishes self-regulation as the key activity toward the imagined flourishing of rational communities. whereas elias identified western european etiquette guides as key instructional devices to this civilising process, of the thirteenth century onwards, our paper presents social media corporate curriculums of healthy, safe, and educated use as one aspect of its present-day digital incarnation. in this way, our paper responds closely to the conference theme by examining how industrial social media actors currently mobilise corporate curriculums to target the conduct and manners of users toward certain strategic goals, specifically by using existing moral institutions such as the school and the family to do so. our paper is empirically significant by presenting an in-depth analysis of this entwinement through an examination of meta’s digital literacy learning materials, clarifying who they target, and with what political implications. in doing so, we advance a severely understudied area of research identified by higdon & butler (2022). additionally, our paper is theoretically innovative by developing our understanding of the corporate curriculum through the work of foucault and elias, in turn advancing recent scholarship that examines social media in terms of its civilising infrastructure (hallinan, 2021). overall, by highlighting the cultural, normative and political limits of social media’s corporate curriculum, our paper will embolden the call to develop more critical and inventive digital literacies in response to the potentially damaging datafied machinations of platforms (markham, 2019, 2020; tironi & valderrama, 2021). here, we promote a problematization of current forms of governance in digitised societies, rather than an acceptance of their parameters, and place authority in the hands of situated users themselves to discover resistive strategies against them, rather than in the hands of the industry actors who have constructed their constraining thresholds in the first place. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?pdlsxe https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?lh3mtu https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?x2wfgb https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?x2wfgb https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?1juzeg https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?x2wfgb references alaimo, c., & kallinikos, j. (2017). computing the everyday: social media as data platforms. the information society, 33(4), 175–191. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2017.1318327 asdal, k., & reinertsen, h. (2022). doing document analysis: a practice-oriented method. sage publications ltd ; sage publications inc. bailey, m. (2021). misogynoir transformed: black women’s digital resistance. nyu press. banerjee, s. b. (2008). corporate social responsibility: the good, the bad and the ugly. critical sociology, 34(1), 51–79. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920507084623 dinnen, z. (2018). the digital banal: new media and american literature and culture (p. 240 pages). columbia university press. docherty, n. (2021). digital self-control and the neoliberalization of social media wellbeing. international journal of communication, 15(0), article 0. eaton, e. m., & day, n. a. (2020). petro-pedagogy: fossil fuel interests and the obstruction of climate justice in public education. environmental education research, 26(4), 457–473. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2019.1650164 elias, n. (2000). the civilizing process: sociogenetic and psychogenetic investigations (e. jephcott, trans.; revised edition). blackwell. facebook. (2020). facebook get digital. get digital! https://www.facebook.com/fbgetdigital/ foucault, m. (1983). subject and power. in h. l. dreyfus & p. rabinow, michel foucault: beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (pp. 208–229). university of chicago press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/m/bo3638224.html https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2017.1318327 https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2017.1318327 https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920507084623 https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2019.1650164 https://www.facebook.com/fbgetdigital/ https://www.facebook.com/fbgetdigital/ https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/m/bo3638224.html https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/m/bo3638224.html gibson, a. d., docherty, n., & gillespie, t. (2023). health and toxicity in content moderation: the discursive work of justification. information, communication & society, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2023.2291456 gillespie, t. (2023). the fact of content moderation; or, let’s not solve the platforms’ problems for them. media and communication, 11(2), 406–409. hallinan, b. (2021). civilizing infrastructure. cultural studies, 35(4–5), 707–727. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2021.1895245 higdon, n., & butler, a. (2022). time to put your marketing cap on: mapping digital corporate media curriculum in the age of surveillance capitalism. review of education, pedagogy, and cultural studies, 44(5), 385–405. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714413.2021.1877239 instagram. (2024). instagram community programs | about instagram. https://about.instagram.com/community/programs langlois, g., & elmer, g. (2013). the research politics of social media platforms. culture machine, 14, 1–17. manning, s. (1999). students for sale—how corporations are buying their way into america’s classrooms. http://www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/ceru/articles/ceru-990997-owi.doc markham, a. n. (2019). critical pedagogy as a response to datafication. qualitative inquiry, 25(8), 754–760. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800418809470 markham, a. n. (2020). taking data literacy to the streets: critical pedagogy in the public sphere. qualitative inquiry, 26(2), 227–237. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800419859024 oversight board. (n.d.). independent judgement. transparency. legitimacy. retrieved 21 february 2024, from https://oversightboard.com/ powell, d. (2020). schools, corporations, and the war on childhood obesity; how corporate philanthropy shapes public health and education. routledge. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2023.2291456 https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2021.1895245 https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2021.1895245 https://doi.org/10.1080/10714413.2021.1877239 https://doi.org/10.1080/10714413.2021.1877239 https://about.instagram.com/community/programs https://about.instagram.com/community/programs http://www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/ceru/articles/ceru-9909-97-owi.doc http://www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/ceru/articles/ceru-9909-97-owi.doc https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800418809470 https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800419859024 https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800419859024 https://oversightboard.com/ suarez estrada, m., juarez, y., & piña-garcía, c. a. (2022). toxic social media: affective polarization after feminist protests. social media + society, 8(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221098343 tannock, s. (2020). the oil industry in our schools: from petro pete to science capital in the age of climate crisis. environmental education research, 26(4), 474–490. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2020.1724891 tironi, m., & valderrama, m. (2021). descolonizando los sistemas algorítmicos: diseño crítico para la problematización de algoritmos y datos digitales desde el sur. palabra clave, 24(3), article 3. https://doi.org/10.5294/pacla.2021.24.3.2 x. (n.d.). x transparency. retrieved 21 february 2024, from https://transparency.twitter.com/en.html yoon, s., kleinman, m., mertz, j., & brannick, m. (2019). is social network site usage related to depression? a meta-analysis of facebook–depression relations. journal of affective disorders, 248, 65–72. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2019.01.026 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221098343 https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2020.1724891 https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2020.1724891 https://doi.org/10.5294/pacla.2021.24.3.2 https://transparency.twitter.com/en.html https://transparency.twitter.com/en.html https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2019.01.026 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): mahetaji, k & nieborg, d.b. (2023, october). the politics and evolution of tiktok as platform tool. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the politics and evolution of tiktok as platform tool kaushar mahetaji university of toronto david b. nieborg university of toronto introduction tiktok’s unprecedented rise challenges scholarly assumptions about cultural creativity (kaye et al., 2022). by september 2021, in a market dominated by incumbent social media platform companies, the short-form video platform accumulated over one billion monthly active users globally (silberling, 2021). we argue that critical to the platform’s success is its emphasis on platform tools: the software-based instruments used to make cultural content for social media platforms—e.g., visual effects, audio libraries, and application programming interfaces (apis). the predecessors to platform tools (i.e., software tools) provided similar functionality to platform tools, and their study was at the forefront of software studies in the early 2010s (manovich, 2013; salter & murray, 2014). both are widely used for cultural production today, but software tools differ in that their ownership remained independent of distribution platforms and monetization infrastructures. in this paper we further tease out the distinction between software tools and tiktok’s platform tools to illustrate historical continuities and differentiate between tools in the preand current platform age. ‘platform tools’ (foxman, 2019) are provided by transnational conglomerates that follow data-oriented business models and are shaped by, and shape ‘platform capitalism’ (srnicek, 2017). these tools contribute, we argue, to increased platform dependence and the further ‘platformization of cultural production’ or the ‘extension of the economic, governmental, and infrastructural frameworks of platforms into and beyond the cultural industries’ (poell et al., 2021, p. 6). accordingly, we suggest that platform tools form a productive empirical entry point for understanding this process. therefore, we conducted an exploratory, political economic analysis of tiktok’s tools. as they constantly evolve, the relationship between the platform owner and content creators do so as well, which raises questions as to how platforms organize digital labour and exercise power over cultural producers. platform tools in media studies and information systems our empirical approach aligns with emerging tool-based studies that identify platform tools as a source of platform power and a mechanism through which platforms govern (author). we consult two bodies of scholarship in particular: critical media studies and information systems studies. much of the governance-related work in media studies concentrates on human and algorithmic content moderation (cunningham & craig, 2019), privacy (greene & shilton, 2018), and creator responses to regulation (duffy & meisner, 2022). governance focused research that is specific to tiktok is mainly focuses on the platform’s for you algorithm (zeng & kaye, 2022), moderation policies (are, 2022), and geopolitical tensions (jia & liang, 2021). except for studies of ‘game engine’ software tools (foxman, 2019; nicoll & keogh, 2019), media studies literature on platform tools is relatively scarce, albeit a few recent studies probing how apis and software development kits (sdks) steer platform governance and platform power (helmond et al., 2019). because media studies literature tends to lack theoretical specificity when it comes to platform tools it started to incorporate information systems literature. the socalled ‘boundary resource’ framework is used as it offers a clear typology for classifying and assessing the role of platform tools in platform owner/end-user relationships (ghazawneh & henfridsson, 2013). such resources ‘serve as the interface for the arm’s length relationship between platform owner and application developer’ (ibid., p. 175). we build on this definition to include content creators and cultural production to examine how a platform owner (in our case bytedance) uses tools to balance user creativity with the ability to control cultural production. by studying the evolution of tiktok’s tools, we attempt to make this balancing act more explicit. platform historiography: methods for periodizing platform tools we start our historical survey with bytedance’s entry into the international market in september 2017 and end our analysis in april 2022. because platform tools evolve over time, we draw on the method of ‘platform historiography’ (helmond & van der vlist, 2019) by collecting platform documentation: i.e., github, stack overflow, pypi, rapid api, and news articles. during the period of study, we assessed (1) the types of platform tools available (sanctioned and unsanctioned by the company) and their specific affordances; (2) the social, political, and economic environment(s) and actor(s) that guide the introduction, modification, and deprecation of tools; and (3) the impact of platform tools on platformization and platform-dependent cultural production work. then, we juxtaposed this assessment with three secondary timelines: the first maps the changes in platform features for end-users, while the second charts major financial decisions taken by bytedance. the final timeline provides an overview of significant legal, geopolitical, and societal shifts. these secondary timelines demonstrate that the evolution of platform tools is always inherently contextual and deeply political. by studying tiktok’s platform tools, our paper uncovers how tiktok, since its inception, has worked toward expanding the breadth and depth of its in-app toolkit through mergers and acquisitions, and strategic partnerships. we discern three periods that break down into the formalization and professionalization phase (august 2017 to april 2020); the standardization phase (may 2020 to march 2021); and the platformization phase (april 2021 tot april 2022). in 2017, tiktok started out by supplying an all-in-one set of tools for recording, editing, and distributing cultural content, resourcing tools from its musical.ly acquisition. these tools were intended to be used by creators and were largely co-developed with third parties, from e-commerce companies to game developers. the apps’ rapid ascendence, which marks the first phase, put cultural production directly under the regulatory gaze of bytedance, transitioning away from cultural creation as ‘informal economic activities’ seen in the ‘web 2.0’ era (lobato & thomas, 2015). as a result, the tools themselves focused on more polished content, as the platform partnered with incumbent editing software companies, for example introducing a software development kit (sdk) developed by adobe in november 2019. second, starting in may 2020, no major thirdparty tools were introduced, mainly revisions or additions to existing tools. at this stage, tiktok’s tools afforded primarily standardized content in the video production process, which itself was also becoming more and more standardized. as users limited themselves to tiktok’s tools only, the platform distributed content that became more readily recognized as tiktok clips. in april 2021, a new suite of third-party integrations became noticeable in the third phase we discerned. these integrations took the form of interactive effects and filters that enforce tiktok’s governmental frameworks on industries outside the creator economy (e.g., e-commerce, gaming, etc.). at this point, bytedance’s governance frameworks became dictated by a series of new partner agreements, which all contributed to the process of platformization. in sum, our periodization points to three major implications that stem from this growing toolkit of official tools (i.e., tools sanctioned by tiktok): (1) the formalization and professionalization of platform content, (2) the standardization of platform-dependent cultural production, and (3) the further platformization of tiktok’s platform logic both within, as well as outside the cultural industries. while our research is primarily exploratory in nature, it is ultimately meant to serve as the impetus for further inquiries into how content creators grapple with the limitations of both platform-sanctioned but also the unsanctioned means of cultural production. as tiktok’s competitors are widening their economic and infrastructural scope to mimic tiktok, we expect a further centralization of control over the tools that are at the heart of the creator economy. references are, c. (2022). an autoethnography of automated powerlessness: lacking platform affordances in instagram and tiktok account deletions. media, culture & society. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221140531 cunningham, s., & craig, d. (2019). creator governance in social media entertainment. social media + society, 5(4), https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119883428 duffy, b. e., & meisner, c. (2022). platform governance at the margins: social media creators’ experiences with algorithmic (in)visibility. media, culture & society. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221111923 foxman, m. (2019). united we stand: platforms, tools and innovation with the unity game engine. social media + society, 5(4), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880177 ghazawneh, a., & henfridsson, o. (2013). balancing platform control and external contribution in third-party development: the boundary resources model. information systems journal, 23(2), 173–192. greene, d., & shilton, k. (2018). platform privacies: governance, collaboration, and the different meanings of “privacy” in ios and android development. new media & society, 20(4), 1640–1657. helmond, a., & van der vlist, f. (2019). social media and platform historiography: challenges and opportunities. tmg journal for media history, 22(1), article 1. https://doi.org/10.18146/tmg.434 jia, l., & liang, f. (2021). the globalization of tiktok: strategies, governance and geopolitics. journal of digital media & policy, 12, 273–292. kaye, d. b. v., zeng, j., & wikstrom, p. (2022). tiktok: creativity and culture in short video. polity. lobato, r., & thomas, j. (2015). the informal media economy. polity press. manovich, l. (2013). software takes command: extending the language of new media. bloomsbury academic. nicoll, b., & keogh, b. (2019). the unity game engine and the circuits of cultural software. palgrave. poell, t., nieborg, d. b., & duffy, b. e. (2021). platforms and cultural production. polity. salter, a., & murray, j. (2014). flash: building the interactive web. mit press. silberling, a. (2021, september 27). tiktok reached 1 billion monthly active users. techcrunch. https://social.techcrunch.com/2021/09/27/tiktok-reached-1-billion-monthlyactive-users/ srnicek, n. (2017). platform capitalism. polity. zeng, j., & kaye, d. b. v. (2022). from content moderation to visibility moderation: a case study of platform governance on tiktok. policy & internet, 14(1), 79–95. microsoft word yeshua-katz-parents_ digital coping resources with ongoing political conflicts-parents_ digital coping res.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): yeshua-katz, d., shapira, s., braun-lewensohn, o. (2022, november). during an emergency this whatsapp group is another responsible adult with me”: parents’ digital coping resources with political conflicts. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. parents’ digital coping resources with ongoing political conflicts daphna yeshua-katz ben-gurion university of the negev stav shapira ben-gurion university of the negev orna braun-lewensohn ben-gurion university of the negev mobile technologies such as the instant messaging application whatsapp have become significant resources for information and social support in times of crisis (laranjo et al., 2015) ), as well as for crisis communication (afifi et al., 2019, 2020; stephens et al., 2020). in times of crisis, these applications afford the exchange of real-time information and can influence users' health awareness, response behaviors, coping behaviors, and even their ability to build resilience (al-dmour et al., 2020; braun-lewensohn, 2015; gray, 2019; stephens et al., 2020). in addition, recent studies (gray, 2019; malka et al., 2015) have highlighted the role played by the instant messaging application whatsapp during man-made disasters by affording interpersonal and group communication (kaufmann & peil, 2020). conversely, they have also been reported to constitute a potential source of misinformation and increased exposure to other users' emotional distress (hampton et al., 2016). to date, the role whatsapp groups play for individuals, families, and communities living in regions affected by ongoing conflicts has yet to be investigated. this research draws upon the salutogenic (antonovsky, 1987) and ecological (bronfenbrenner, 1992) theories to examine parents' digital coping processes with political violence in southern israel. to this end, the study examines the types of coping resources provided in local online parent groups (opgs) during violence escalation and relative calm periods. furthermore, it identifies parents' positive and negative perceptions of opg usage. the study involves a mixed-methods approach comprising qualitative in-depth interviews with 15 couples who are parents of children under the age of 17 residing in communities near the israel-gaza border and an online ethnography of four local opgs. results study findings reveal three levels of parents' coping resources on opgs: personal, family, and communal digital coping resources. in addition, four whatsapp affordances immediacy, reachability, mobility, and multimediality—contributed to whatsapp's role as a shared and ubiquitous coping resource. personal our participants noted that during an escalation, they use the group to decide what would be the right way to respond to the emergency, as a mother, who lives in a kibbutz, notes: “there is a lot of this discussion about "are you evacuating your home? have you started packing?” it's a discourse that makes an impact. it affects me when i see the lists that slowly there are no families left in the kibbutz, and it is not that you are pressured to go, but you say “what kind of mother am i? am i staying with my kids under fire? what am i doing? am i right or wrong? “ family for some parents, especially for mothers who are left alone home as the fathers are being drafted into the war, the group serves as an alternative source of support: “during an emergency, when my husband is drafted, and i become a single mother of children, this (group) is another responsible adult with me. it's a feeling that i have not another person next to me, but another 50 people with me, who are next to me and can give me an answer at any moment i need, and i think it's worth it all. because when you're in an emergency, and you feel alone, you're not in a good position, you're not functioning, and that's a terrible feeling”. community our participants also noted how issues that the community together had to face were discussed in the whatsapp groups, as one of the fathers noted: “in the last escalation, a child from my daughter's school was killed. the school staff offered in the whatsapp group to schedule a zoom meeting to address the boy’s death with the students. on the one hand, whatsapp offers you the opportunity to coordinate a meeting easily. still, on the other hand, maybe it is something too sensitive to discuss textually and so immediately. discussing it in the group with text messages omits some nuances, and not everyone knows how the parents perceive it. someone wrote, "the children are scared anyway and don’t need it." i don’t know what she meant, but i felt it's stressing me out that she's writing it like that. i felt difficult with the format of talking about this thing so immediately and so not face to face.” conclusion our results expand and develop the original models and core concepts of the salutogenic and ecological paradigms traditionally studied solely in offline environments. moreover, results examine the effectiveness of digital contexts such as whatsapp groups in helping parents cope with an ongoing collective stressor: a particularly worthy goal given that social media applications now constitute the primary online connection for most individuals. such an understanding, in turn, may have broad impacts on health promotion efforts for mental health issues related to political violence as well as other large-scale health crises (e.g., the covid-19 pandemic). references afifi, t. d., afifi, w. a., acevedo callejas, m., shahnazi, a., white, a., & nimah, n. (2019). the functionality of communal coping in chronic uncertainty environments: the context of palestinian refugees in lebanon. health communication, 34(13), 1585– 1596. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2018.1514682 afifi, t. d., basinger, e. d., & kam, j. a. (2020). the extended theoretical model of communal coping: understanding the properties and functionality of communal coping. journal of communication, 70(3), 424–446. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaa006 al-dmour, h., masa’deh, r., salman, a., abuhashesh, m., & al-dmour, r. (2020). influence of social media platforms on public health protection against the covid-19 pandemic via the mediating effects of public health awareness and behavioral changes: integrated model. journal of medical internet research, 22(8), e19996. https://doi.org/10.2196/19996 antonovsky, a. (1987). unraveling the mystery of health. san francisco, 175. braun-lewensohn, o. (2015). coping and social support in children exposed to mass trauma. current psychiatry reports, 17(6), 46. bronfenbrenner, u. (1992). ecological systems theory. jessica kingsley publishers. gray, m. r. (2019). grieving among friends: using social media during the first year of grieving. fielding graduate university. hampton, k. n., lu, w., & shin, i. (2016). digital media and stress: the cost of caring 2.0. information, communication & society, 19(9), 1267–1286. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1186714 kaufmann, k., & peil, c. (2020). the mobile instant messaging interview (mimi): using whatsapp to enhance self-reporting and explore media usage in situ. mobile media & communication, 8(2), 229–246. https://doi.org/10.1177/2050157919852392 laranjo, l., arguel, a., neves, a. l., gallagher, a. m., kaplan, r., mortimer, n., mendes, g. a., & lau, a. y. s. (2015). the influence of social networking sites on health behavior change: a systematic review and meta-analysis. journal of the american medical informatics association, 22(1), 243–256. https://doi.org/10.1136/amiajnl-2014-002841 malka, v., ariel, y., & avidar, r. (2015). fighting, worrying and sharing: operation ‘protective edge’ as the first whatsapp war. media, war & conflict, 8(3), 329–344. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750635215611610 stephens, k. k., robertson, b. w., & murthy, d. (2020). throw me a lifeline: articulating mobile social network dispersion and the social construction of risk in rescue communication. mobile media & communication, 8(2), 149–169. https://doi.org/10.1177/2050157919846522 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): holroyd, d. (2024, october). tiktok vs the healthcare industry: a case study of the techno-cultural authority of adhd tiktok. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. content creators vs the healthcare industry: a case study of the techno-cultural authority of adhd tiktok deanna holroyd the ohio state university abstract attempting to understand what constitutes authority and what makes someone or something authoritative has been a widely-debated topic for decades for philosophers, sociologists, and cultural theorists alike. notably, hannah arendt (1956) and max weber ([1956] 2015) were amongst the first early post-modern scholars who attempted to theorize the social authority involved in political processes, understanding authority as a relational phenomenon between those who issue commands, and those who obey (weber [1965] 2015). since these early conceptualizations of authority, researchers within disciplines such as communication and political science have become increasingly concerned with examining the authority involved in political processes – especially in relation to more recent issues of mis-/dis-information in our so-called ‘posttruth’, digitally mediated society (mcintyre, 2018). concepts such as authority, trust, expertise, and credibility therefore remain central to current research into how digital technologies and media platforms are impacting politics and society. however, what often remains on the periphery of the debates surrounding these issues of authority, is the way in which expertise on the body and medical knowledge production processes are also being transformed in our current digitally mediated environment. traditionally, medical anthropologists and science and technology scholars have understood medical authority as a discursive, normalizing power generated through institutional knowledge; by creating medical knowledge about the body, and then circulating this knowledge through medical textbooks, research journals, and practitioner training programs, medical and educational institutions create particular scientific discourses that become standardized ‘regimes of truth’ (foucault, 1973, 1980; starr, 1984). yet, since the invention of digital media sites (such as social media and online forums), people have been able to discuss disease and illness online and have access to an increasingly large archive of medical information that exists external to official knowledge sources produced by medical institutions. this ‘democratization’ of medical information (parr, 2002) is transforming medical authority; rather than information and discourse on the body being primarily produced and controlled by the discourse connected to medical institutions, physicians or scientists, new online arenas are emerging in which activists and patients are framing medical realities and experiences (epstein and timmermans, 2021). this conference paper interrogates exactly how medical authority is produced about the body on social media, by using the case study of adhd-tiktok. attentiondeficit/hyperactivity disorder (adhd) is an increasingly prevalent disorder (smith, 2012), with around 10% of american children diagnosed with adhd (li et al., 2023) and around 366 million adults worldwide experiencing symptomatic adhd (song et al., 2021). this rise in diagnoses, and adhd-related discourse, is mirrored in the increase in adhd-related social media content; instagram has 4.2 million posts with ‘#adhd’, and ‘#adhdtiktok’ has almost 8 billion views on tiktok. according to social media users’ comments, the recent increase in social media content detailing the symptoms and experiences of living with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (adhd) has led to many users realizing that they might have adhd and self-diagnosing with the disorder. indeed, if the comments posted under these adhd tiktok videos are to be believed, the information provided on tiktok about the symptoms of adhd has become a trusted voice of authority about adhd and has supplemented, or even replaced, more traditional sources of information and routes to diagnosis. this paper thus presents the findings of an 18-month-long digital ethnographic study (hine, 2015; pink et al., 2015) in which i analyzed adhd tiktok videos and the technological infrastructures and assemblages surrounding the tiktok app, to interrogate how tiktok has become a voice of authority in the self-diagnosis of adhd. in particular, i conducted a multi-modal discourse analysis (machin and mayr, 2023) of the discursive, visual, aural, and memetic qualities of adhd tiktok videos, as well as a techno-cultural critical discourse analysis (brock, 2018) of the technological assemblages and affordances of the tiktok platform, to consider the role of technology as a non-human actor that contributes to producing authority. i found that tiktok content creators make their videos especially relatable, funny, and intimate to position themselves as trustworthy, valid sources of medical knowledge. i also discovered that adhd content creators use the visual, discursive, audio, staging, and performance norms from other popular visual media genres and current tiktok trends, to co-produce a set of short-form social media standards. in doing so, these creators profit from their audience already being primed into trusting, respecting, and granting attention to this kind of media, thus making their own content more authoritative. adhd content creators therefore generate authority by conforming and contributing to a set of coproduced content standards that ensure their videos are deemed viewable and relevant by both viewers and the algorithm alike. as such, the medical authority of adhd tiktok videos is not developed through the identity of the content creator but is dependent on how closely the video conforms to these co-produced social media standards, and the algorithmic authority of tiktok. contrary to traditional understandings of authority, i therefore find that tiktok is creating an online space in which medical authority on adhd is no longer something created only by medical professionals and institutions, but rather by content creators through their collective and collaborative performativity of everyday lived experiences, and their engagement with the supporting technologies of the tiktok app. to account for this shift in how authority is produced in our digital mediascape, i build on existing theories of authority, and offer a theoretical framework of ‘techno-cultural authority’, as a way to grapple with the role that social media technologies, and their affiliated cultural contexts, play in shaping who is deemed an authoritative expert on the body. ‘techno-cultural authority’, i contend, encourages an attunement to the way that the affordances and possibilities mediated by technological apparatuses (such as phones, apps, and digital platforms) engender users to become particularly accepting of the knowledge that is presented through these technologies. ‘techno-cultural authority’ also recognizes that these technologies are embedded in, and understood in relation to, their rich cultural histories and current contexts – contexts which impact the authoritative sentiment attached to the technologies. i ultimately argue that the techno-cultural authority of adhd tiktok challenges customary understandings of medical authority figures and disrupts the traditional authority of the medical and healthcare industry, by impacting how users understand themselves and their mental health, and who is deemed an expert on the body. this has several important consequences. on the one hand, the techno-cultural authority of social media platforms has enabled a new wave of adhd lay ‘experts’ to emerge who center embodied experience as a valid source of knowledge on disease. this is especially beneficial as it allows people who have been historically marginalized from sites of medical knowledge production (notably women, queer people, and people of color) to gain a voice and share their experiences. on the other hand, the increasing medical authority of social media content blurs the line between amateurs and professionals (burgess, 2006, 205), and leads to an increase in medical disinformation (yeung et al., 2022) that contributes to the ongoing problematization of trust in the healthcare industry, and other forms of institutionalized power (mcintyre, 2018; thunert, 2021). references arendt, h. (1956). ‘authority in the twentieth century’. the review of politics, 18(4): 403-417. brock, a. (2018). ‘critical techno-cultural discourse analysis’, new media & society, 20(3): 1012-1030. burgess, j. (2006). hearing ordinary voices: cultural studies, vernacular creativity and digital storytelling. continuum, 20(2), 201–214. epstein, s., and s. timmermans (2021). ‘from medicine to health: the proliferation and diversification of cultural authority’. journal of health and social behavior, 62(3), 240–254. foucault, m. (1973). the birth of the clinic: an archaeology of medical perception. tavistock. foucault, m. (1980). power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings, 197277. patheon. hine, c. (2015). ethnography for the internet: embedded, embodied and everyday. bloomsbury. li, y., x. yan, q. li, g. xu, j. lu, w. yang (2023). ‘prevalence and trends in diagnosed adhd among us children and adolescents, 2017-2022. jama netw open, 2:6. machin, d. and a. mayr (2023). how to do critical discourse analysis: a multimodal introduction. sage publications ltd. mcintyre, l. (2018). post-truth. the mit press. parr, h. (2002). ‘new body-geographies: the embodied spaces of health and illness information on the internet’. environment and planning d: society and space, 20(1), 73–95. pink, s., h. horst, j. postill, l. hjorth, t. lewis and j. tacchi (2015). digital ethnography: principles and practice. sage publications inc. smith, m. (2012). hyperactive: the controversial history of adhd. reaktion. song, p., m. zha, q. yang, y. zhang, x. li, i. rudan. (2021). ‘the prevalence of adult attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder: a global systematic review and meta-analysis’. j global health, 11:11. starr, p. (1984). the social transformation of american medicine: the rise of a sovereign profession and the making of a vast industry. basic books. thunert, m. (2021).’waning trust in (scientific) experts and expertise’. in g. leypoldt and m. berg (eds.), authority and trust in us culture and society, pp. 61-86, transcript verlag. weber, m. (2015). weber’s rationalism and modern society. translated and edited by t. waters and d. waters. palgrave books. yeung, a., e. ng and e. abi-jaoude (2022). ‘tiktok and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a cross-sectional study of social media content quality’. the canadian journal of psychiatry. online first. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 gehl, r.w., karppi, t., paris, b.s., west, s.m. (2023, october). if not, else: standards, protocols, networks and how they make a difference. panel presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. if not, else: standards, protocols, networks and how they make a difference robert w. gehl york university tero karppi university of toronto britt s. paris rutgers university sarah myers west ai now institute the contemporary internet's "network of networks" has become infrastructural to our lives. the internet is a stack of physical, data link, network, transport, and application layers which all have unique rules and roles. while many see internet infrastructure as a foregone conclusion, paris, cath and myers west (2023) write “internet infrastructure is built slowly, over time, protocol by protocol, in response to many different technical, social, political, environmental, and economic imperatives”. even as the particular model of the internet we are all accustomed to has become the standard, other attempts proliferated and eventually failed, as did the soviet internet (peters 2016), and as this panel highlights, the internet is still ever-evolving. the project of this panel is to trace alternative, parallel, and emergent network models, standards and protocols, theorize their impact as they appear in different places, spaces, and contexts, and gesture towards how the internet might be different. as critical internet studies have since the early 2000s shown, computational standards, protocols, and network diagrams are more than technical details, they have the power to shape and structure the conditions for our socio-cultural lifeworlds (galloway 2006; chun 2008; bratton 2016). as gehl (2014) puts it: “interfaces, database structures, mechanisms of connection all shape social activities”. change an element in the stack and a different connectivity, a different future becomes possible. the papers of this panel introduce and discuss five different and potentially revolutionary network technologies that manage and organize our online lives. robert w. gehl’s paper represents a media genealogy of activitypub – a protocol that enables the fediverse, a collection of social media sites that can communicate with one another. the author argues that activitypub was not produced through an instrumental process, but was the result of accidents and coincidences. the accidental nature of the protocol, coupled with its being authored by self-identified queer and trans developers, has put it on a collision course with both the “standard” approach to standards production as well as mainstream, corporate social media. tero karppi’s paper focuses on the design of the interplanetary internet and the idea of delay-tolerant networking fundamental to operating in outer space. the author maintains that when delays are central to a network model, we are forced to rethink how our connections are maintained and organized in the future. delay-tolerant networking is thus not only a technical solution for a communications system but a control protocol through which interplanetary life can be managed. britt s. paris’ paper is also focused on the temporality of networks. the third paper examines how time is enacted as a design ideology in the course of the development of a future internet architecture protocol project: named data networking (ndn). this work locates aspects of the sociomateriality of time in the processes of building internet infrastructure and demonstrates how it binds together cultural, economic, and discursive power. the paper argues that thinking through time as a design ideology can be useful in projects imagining how the internet might be built to engender and support different values than market ideology. sarah myers west’s paper looks to the crypto wars of the 1990s as a moment where things could have been otherwise; comparing the examples of pgp and rsa encryption software and how they shaped the nature of our networked systems. it argues that a combination of regulatory and commercial interests influenced the development and use of cryptography in ways that facilitated the development of ecommerce, but left private messaging in dubious legal status. collectively the papers investigate alternative and emergent trends behind the internet and its network models, standards, and protocols. the protocols and rules for network connection, standards bodies, and modes of governance are critical to maintaining and upkeeping a network. their impact, however, is not merely technical but potentially world-changing. the papers direct their critical gaze towards the development of these technologies and what their introduction to our world potentially entails. by focusing on projects of past, present, and future and by exploring the internet’s deepest sociotechnical layers, the panel critically dismantles the commonly-held idea that the internet is a monolith and illustrates that the history of the internet is still being written. references bratton, benjamin. 2016. the stack. mit press. chun, wendy hui kyong. 2008. control & freedom. mit press. galloway, alexander. 2006. protocol. mit press. gehl, r. w. (2015). the case for alternative social media. social media + society, 1(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115604338 paris, b. s., cath, c., & west, s. m. 2023. “radical infrastructure: building beyond the failures of past imaginaries for networked communication.” new media & society, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231152546 peters, b. 2016. how not to network a nation: the uneasy history of the soviet internet. mit press. the accidental protocol: a critical genealogy of activitypub robert w. gehl york university amy guy’s role in web history was the result of an accident. while procrastinating on writing their phd thesis in the early 2010s, guy was poking through the world wide web consortium website and clicked on “standards groups.” a bit more poking led guy to the social web working group (socialwg), a group seeking to create w3c standards for social media. guy kept going, clicking on the socialwg’s “join” button. a few hours later, guy was a member of the socialwg. despite never having participated in a standards-setting process before, guy would go on to be one of the key members of the socialwg, ultimately becoming a co-author of activitypub, the most important output of the group (c. lemmer-webber et al. 2018). activitypub is the protocol that enables the fediverse, a collection of social media sites that can communicate with one another. the activitypub-driven fediverse is now one of the most viable social media alternatives (lovink and rasch 2013; gehl 2015) to come along in the past decade. currently, the fediverse is getting public attention and traction because it offers a way out of corporate social media’s mess of mercurial billionaires, shoddy moderation, and surveillance capitalism. for example, after elon musk’s purchase of twitter, millions of people left twitter for mastodon and other alternatives (nicholas 2023; hoover 2022). in fact, the association of internet researchers itself will host its own mastodon social media instance (gehl 2022). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115604338 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231152546 but neither guy’s participation in the socialwg, nor mastodon and the fediverse itself, was guaranteed to happen. guy’s participation was entirely an accident, because if their university (university of edinburgh) did not happen to be a world wide web consortium member, guy’s clicking on “join” would have been ignored by the socialwg. (as guy told me in an interview, they did not know this at the time). and, if mastodon had not adopted activitypub at just the right moment in 2017, activitypub itself would have never been finished (rochko 2017). consider the “mastodon extension”: the social web working group’s chartered period was reaching its end in 2017, well before guy and their co-authors could complete the process of making activitypub. however, an outside party provided a lifeline. the mastodon project – at the time gaining popularity as a “nazi-free twitter” (jeong 2017) – adopted a pre-standardized version of activitypub. this was not the plan, but with mastodon on board, the socialwg now had a popular implementation of their nascent standard and were able to get a rare deadline extension from the w3c. critical genealogy this presentation offers a critical genealogy (koopman 2013) of activitypub, the accidental protocol. as chandra mukerji argues, genealogies are catalogs of “utility, habit, forgetfulness, and error” (2007, 53). i would add “accident” to the mix. critical genealogy requires us to attend to often overlooked or taken-for-granted habits, errors, and accidents in order to better understand the systems of power we encounter. drawing on feminist and queer theory, verena erlenbusch-anderson notes that critical genealogy is the use of contemporary philosophical concepts to “to interrogate the historically specific forces and relationships underpinning our political present” (erlenbusch 2017). in terms of data, the presentation draws on oral histories with the developers of the activitypub and mastodon, close reading of archival materials (such as the meeting minutes of the socialwg), as well as critical code analysis (fuller 2017; bucher 2018) of the activitypub protocol. queering technology by accident in the case of technical standards production, standards such as activitypub might be naively seen as linear, commonsensical crystalizations of already existing practices. what activitypub teaches us, however, is that accidents can equally lead to standardization. and, perhaps, non-standard standardization. in other words, at the center of the accidents that produced activitypub is queerness. four of the five activitypub authors self-identify as queer or trans (m. lemmer-webber and lemmer-webber 2022), and the early mastodon developers were queer and trans folks seeking to escape harassment on twitter (caelin 2022). however, queer and trans folks have been traditionally written out of technical progress (dunbar-hester 2019). which begs the question: if activitypub was the accident, and if queer and trans developers caused the accident, what was the intended outcome that was planned? what outcome did the accident prevent? as critical infrastructural scholar susan leigh star argues of those marginalized in technological development, “we are the ones who have done the invisible work of creating a unity of action in the face of multiplicity of selves, as well as, and at the same time, the invisible work of lending unity to the face of the torturer and executive. we have usually been the delegated to, the disciplined” (star 1991, 29). rather than being delegated to, queer and trans accidental authors of a non-corporate social media system disrupt the normal conception of “standards.” in the case of activitypub, the resulting standard attended to issues such as safety, personal privacy, and content moderation which distinguishes the protocol from the worst problems of corporate social media. as we seek to move past corporate social media, we have the accidental authors, such as guy, to thank for new ways to socialize online. references bucher, taina. 2018. if ... then: algorithmic power and politics. new york, n.y.: oxford u p. http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=5401028. caelin, derek. 2022. “decentralized networks vs the trolls.” in fundamental challenges to global peace and security : the future of humanity, edited by hoda mahmoudi, michael h. allen, and kate seaman, 143–68. cham: springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79072-1_8. dunbar-hester, christina. 2019. hacking diversity. princeton, n.j.: princeton univ press. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691192888/hacking-diversity. erlenbusch, verena. 2017. “philosophy following foucault.” in . university of utah. fuller, matthew, ed. 2017. how to be a geek: essays on the culture of software. cambridge, uk ; malden, ma, usa: polity. gehl, robert w. 2015. “the case for alternative social media.” social media + society 1 (2): 2056305115604338. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115604338. ———. 2022. “aoir.social?” foss academic. december 11, 2022. https://fossacademic.tech/2022/12/11/aoir-social.html. hoover, amanda. 2022. “twitter users have caused a mastodon meltdown.” wired, november 9, 2022. https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-users-mastodon-meltdown/. jeong, sarah. 2017. “mastodon is like twitter without nazis, so why are we not using it?” motherboard. april 4, 2017. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/783akg/mastodon-is-like-twitter-withoutnazis-so-why-are-we-not-using-it. koopman, colin. 2013. genealogy as critique: foucault and the problems of modernity. bloomington, in: indiana university press. lemmer-webber, christine, jessica tallon, erin shephard, amy guy, and evan prodromou. 2018. “activitypub.” january 23, 2018. https://www.w3.org/tr/activitypub/. lemmer-webber, morgan, and christine lemmer-webber. 2022. “fediverse reflections while the bird burns.” foss and crafts. https://fossandcrafts.org/episodes/053-fediverse-reflections-while-the-bird-burns.html. lovink, geert, and miriam rasch, eds. 2013. unlike us reader: social media monopolies and their alternatives. amsterdam: institute of network cultures. mukerji, chandra. 2007. “cultural genealogy: method for a historical sociology of culture or cultural sociology of history.” cultural sociology 1 (1): 49–71. https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975507073919. nicholas, josh. 2023. “elon musk drove more than a million people to mastodon – but many aren’t sticking around.” the guardian, january 7, 2023, sec. news. https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2023/jan/08/elon-musk-drove-more-thana-million-people-to-mastodon-but-many-arent-sticking-around. rochko, eugen. 2017. “mastodon and the w3c.” hacker noon. september 10, 2017. https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-and-the-w3c-f75f376f422. star, susan leigh. 1991. “power, technology and the phenomenology of conventions: on being allergic to onions.” in a sociology of monsters : essays on power, technology and domination, edited by john law, 1. publ., 26–56. london u.a.: routledge. control protocol: interplanetary internet and delaytolerant networking tero karppi university of toronto the interplanetary internet turns 25. in 1998, at nasa’s jet propulsion lab a group of scientists, including vinton cerf, were asking “what we might need for space exploration 25 years from now?” (d’agostino 2020). one thing became soon obvious: the same internet technology that connects people on earth, does not work well in outer space. the terrestrial internet cannot handle delays, disruptions, and disconnections caused by the long distances between nodes and planets and other objects that obstruct signals. as cerf (d'agostino 2020) notes, this is because the terrestrial internet has a very specific end-to-end architecture: “to transfer data on earth’s internet, tcp/ip requires a complete end-to-end path of routers that forward packets of information through links such as copper or fiber optic cables, or cellular data networks” . this paper seeks to render visible the differences between the two parallel internets, terrestrial and interplanetary. i begin my exploration by analyzing the opscom-1 mission that took place on the international space station (sarakanti et al. 2015). i follow lisa gitelman (gitelman 2006, 1) who argues that to understand how media becomes what it is, we should direct the attention to “looking into the novelty years, transitional states, and identity crises of different media”, which “stands to tell us much, both about the course of media history and about the broad conditions by which media and communication are and have been shaped.” in practice, i will do a close reading of the public documentation of the opscom-1 mission including nasa and esa websites, scientific papers, and press releases. in the context of the interplanetary internet, this documentation gives an opening to a stage where new network protocols are being developed. opscom-1 november 8, 2012, nasa (kraft 2012) releases a press release that declares that “nasa and the european space agency (esa) successfully have used an experimental version of interplanetary internet to control an educational rover from the international space station.” this is the opscom-1 mission. its main test subject was the idea of delay-tolerant networking and the use of a bundle protocol on which the former is based. delay-tolerant networking was first designed for outer space and is “an end-to-end architecture providing communications in and/or through highly stressed environments” (scott 2007). this network works in a situation where clear end-to-end pathways are anomalous and delays, disruptions, and disconnections are the norm. this model is premised on the capability to establish paths that relay information despite a fixed location of the endpoints or their constant availability. rfc5050 gives the specification for the bundle protocol. bundle protocol “sits at the application layer of some number of constituent internets, forming a store-and-forward overlay network” (scott 2007). “since in interplanetary network environments continuous end-to-end connectivity cannot be assumed, the bundle layer must have the capability of storing data bundles as well as their address and route to their final destination until they can be forwarded to the next hop and so on” jaiswal et al. (2013) explains. the rover of the opscom-1 mission is built from lego nxt 2.0 mindstorms kit and equipped with a beagleboard computer. astronaut sunita williams on iss controls the rover through a non-real time mode by setting waypoints on a map and giving the device sequences of movements (martin et al. 2013) the rover then drives through a test course in germany and takes and sends snapshots of the execution along its way (martin et al. 2013). the first two target runs are successful. the rover moves smoothly between the waypoints. but the third one fails. the failure of this experiment does not happen in real-time but after the fact. this mission is less about controlling the robot from outer space and more about developing a mode of control that deals with issues that prevent real-time communication. it is not the rover that fails but the network model. the things you can do in real-time are not the same as you can do with a nonreal time model. control i argue that the non-real time function of the interplanetary internet forces us to revise how we have come to understand control through the tcp/ip-based logic. it is different than both the foucauldian panopticon in the form of enclosed spaces – a “gridlocked architecture of euclidean positions and points'' as luciana parisi (2013, 101) calls it and the network of real-time modulation that deleuze (1995) first in the mid-1990s, galloway (2006) in the 2000s and then many after so accurately described as a network of continuous modulation based on relational data of dividuals and their movements through different societal structures in time where the predicted potential of becoming is very literally based on points on the grid (amoore 2011). the interplanetary internet due to its bundle protocol model resists the logic of such topological and networked forms of control. we do not know the points of the nodes in the matrix, not all the time. delay-tolerant networking and the bundle protocol then become diagrams for a new logic. sarah sharma maintains that (2014, 138) “power coalesces temporally”. in the case of the interplanetary internet power also coalesces temporarily. the temporal term for thinking about control is that of non-real time of the interplanetary internet in contrast to the continuity of the terrestrial internet. the difference between the old and the new network model culminates in how we understand nodes through connection. the terrestrial network’s model focuses on points and topologies that become manageable through continuous connectivity. the interplanetary network model of non-real time control, in contrast, is not a point-line system, but a system of temporal relations that can overlap, be conjoined, and constitute new relations based on the randomness of connections that appear. if we are working with nodes that come together only temporarily and are not under continuous control, we can follow ulises a. mejias’s (2013, 153) proposition to: “shift your attention away from the nodes, to the negative space between them”. he (mejias 2013, 153) argues that these spaces are not empty as the network diagrams of the terrestrial internet suggest “but inhabited by multitudes that do not conform to the organizing logic of the network”. it is from these spaces and how these spaces organize our relations that the alternative social and political ways of being (de vries 2019) and the revolutionary potential of the interplanetary internet can be found. references amoore, louise. 2011. “data derivatives: on the emergence of a security risk calculus for our times.” theory, culture & society 28(6): 24-43. d’agostino, susan. 2020. “to boldly go where no internet protocol has gone before.” quanta magazine, october 21. https://www.quantamagazine.org/vint-cerfsplan-for-building-an-internet-in-space-20201021/ deleuze, gilles. “postscript on the societies of control.” october 59 (1992): 3–7. http://www.jstor.org/stable/778828. galloway, alexander. 2006. protocol. mit press. gitelman, lisa. 2006. always already new: media, history, and the data of culture. the mit press. jaiswal, priyanka, pragati patil, parul bhanarkar, 2013, “overview of interplanetary internet system,” international journal of engineering research & technology (ijert) volume 02, issue 03 (march 2013). kraft, rachel. 2012. “nasa, esa use experimental interplanetary internet to test robot from international space station.” nov. 8. https://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2012/nov/hq_12-391_dtn.html martin, sebastian, paul steele, francois bosquillon de frescheville, mehran sarkarati, william carey, denis van hoof, raffaella clivio, nadia this, and kim nergaard. 2013. “demonstration of communications systems for future human exploration during the opscom-1 test using the iss.” 64th international astronautical congress, beijing, china. https://orfeo.belnet.be/bitstream/handle/internal/7898/busoc_martin(2013a).pdf?sequ ence=1&isallowed=y mejias, ulises ali. 2013. off the network: disrupting the digital world. minnesota: minnesota university press. parisi, luciana. 2013. contagious architecture. mit press. sarakanti, mehran, mario merri, kim nergaard, and paul steele. 2015. “how to plug-in your rover into a space mission to moon or mars.” proceedings of the 6th international conference on automation, robotics and applications, feb 17-19, 2015, queenstown, new zealand. scott, k. 2007. “bundle protocol specification.” rfc 5050. https://www.rfceditor.org/rfc/rfc5050 sharma, sarah. 2014. in the meantime. duke university press. https://www.quantamagazine.org/vint-cerfs-plan-for-building-an-internet-in-space-20201021/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/vint-cerfs-plan-for-building-an-internet-in-space-20201021/ https://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2012/nov/hq_12-391_dtn.html https://orfeo.belnet.be/bitstream/handle/internal/7898/busoc_martin(2013a).pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y https://orfeo.belnet.be/bitstream/handle/internal/7898/busoc_martin(2013a).pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5050 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5050 vries, patricia de. 2018. “when fungus punched anthropos in the gut: on crap, fisheating trees, rhizomes and organized networks.” rhizomes, issue 34. http://rhizomes.net/issue34/devries.html fake new futures: time as a design ideology in internet protocols britt s. paris rutgers university the neoliberal drive to privatize public infrastructure and public-serving institutions is intertwined with ongoing, overlapping social, political, and economic crises that continue to shape internet infrastructure. this phenomenon compels calls from interested parties to reimagine and rebuild internet infrastructure (fisher 2007, ali, 2021, tarnoff 2022), resulting in a dazzling array of projects that, for the most part, present rehashed visions of the future from the past that subvert the political economic realities of internet infrastructure and push for more intensely privatized options (greene 2022, b. paris, 2020), often under the auspices of increased speed and efficiency of communication as a benefit to users. many studies on contemporary time and acceleration in contemporary information and communication technology gesture toward time as a design ideology (galloway 2004, hassan 2007, stiegler 2010, mazmanian 2012, wajcman 2014, vostal, 2016). this paper builds on the concept of time as a design ideology, or how time and temporality manifest as design concepts and practices to facilitate acceleration, frictionless use, surveillance, commodification, attention capture, and prediction that reifies and extends existing sociotechnical structures of power and inequity in one internet infrastructural project, a new protocol called named data networking (ndn) to replace transmission control protocol (tcp)/internet protocol (ip) to transmit and route data based not on addresses, but on naming specific pieces of data and tracking them as they travel between named entities beginning in 2007, ndn was funded by the national science foundation (nsf) as one of several future internet architecture (fia) projects to replace tcp/ip. during their 11 years of existence, the fia projects generated discussion regarding how protocols can foster the public good as they were mandated by the nsf to engage with the values in design (vid) council (nissenbaum et al. 2013, shilton 2015 2017, shilton et al. 2014). however, during this time, the promise of the public good in these protocol projects has gone largely unmet. this failure shows how specific time-based values that form the foundation of these research projects are antithetical to the public good, and suggests the benefits of reimagining protocols that correct the forms of control and capture at the application level. interview and document data from ndn gathered and analyzed from 2016-2021 pointed to themes that coalesced around these broad categories—(1) time enmeshes, http://rhizomes.net/issue34/devries.html embeds, and reifies constructs of efficiency and the sociotechnical future in technologies as they are developed; (2) the technics of time and power describes how demands of contemporary capitalism drive design for technical efficiency; and (3) spatializing time details of how time is considered a material resource and made into a representational object in the technical work of protocol and application construction; and how principals relate this to the interface speed that users experience. time enmeshes the “future” is explicitly signaled in the name of the funding program that made these new protocol projects possible. as such, it is understandable that discussions with the fia teams regarding project and subproject goals, structures, problem solving tactics, and practical workflows all pointed to the theme of the future, and most of the time directly invoked the future. their responses pointed to how they understand the sociotechnical future and how these perspectives are built into their work (b. paris 2018 2020 2021). interestingly, their articulations of the future were dependent on past protocol development work. the future imaginaries presented by ndn project leaders, emphasized that as with the switch from telephony to packet-switching over 50 years ago, technology is fundamentally driven by a concept of efficiency (baran 1964, clark 1988 2018). the pi acknowledged that user demand is involved in technology advancements; but conversely, granted agency to the technology itself, and characterized technology as “pulling or enabling design” (personal communication 22 september 2016, paris 2018, 130, 2020). this response and other project respondents’ articulated expectation of future use contexts rested on explicitly technical advancements, like protocological efficiency, and denied any meaningful agency to others, users, the vid council or others to change this “fact”. these comments reveal how they think their designs will be applied in future use contexts and imply that respondents believe—as internet pioneers did over 50 years ago—that technologies developed for military use that value market-driven ideals above all others can be unproblematically wielded to promote appropriate social ideals (paris 2018, 2020). technics of time and power in the fias, ndn made the most explicit promises around speed and decreased network latency that doubly betray a drive toward capitalist efficiency and rendering the duration of human life as an exploitable resource. at a 2015 ndn community meeting, ndn project leader and visionary in the history of developing networking protocols, van jacobson, asserted, “name-based data could be a godsend for exploiting big data, including information served up by a sensor-based iot, and for supporting emerging applications, such as video streaming like we have never seen before” (ucla remap 2015; see also brown 2015, paris 2018, 76–77). jacobson’s declaration demonstrates an awareness of the market interest in then-hot topics like “big data” and “iot” and positions ndn was able to frictionlessly exploit, manage, or capitalize on those trends. and this is attractive to military and corporate entities. at the same time as enabling efficiency and speed of communications among named objects, ndn has storage features and the ability to hold packets inside the network until they can be delivered, using a technique called delay tolerant networking (dtn)(paris, 2018), discussed above, and that allows packets to be stored in-network which might allow for circumvention of some of the “landlords of the internet” that exact rents from internet carriers (greene, 2022). nonetheless, at the end of their nsf funding cycle, ndn began partnering with cisco, huawei, and the department of defense. spatializing time one instance of human agency in developing the temporal aspects of the fia projects at hand can be seen in the spatialized representations of time in developers’ diagrams and illustrations, which are intended to communicate how computational and network processes are engaged and ordered for applications. although these applications were, as mentioned in the last section, intended to demonstrate that the new protocols can change how users experience internet-mediated environments, they express themselves using these user-facing applications and still present time in predictable ways, and do not offer any affective relationality to it, like physical closeness, or say, human centered urgency, as say would happen in a natural disaster. ndn’s flume application featured in figure 1 depicts the ui to engage real-time audiovisual flows in a strictly linear way, much as those uis of other video conferencing applications that already exist, rather than engaging other new and possibly exciting possibilities for organizing temporal audiovisual flows. flume’s developer explained that he organized the interface in this linear way because it is what people are used to (personal communication 9 march 2017, paris 2018, 148). figure 1. merging continuous streams with instant events on a timeline. reproduced with permission: paris 2018, 86. the sociomateriality of time and the need for true people-centered internet protocol projects more than just pointing to ways to find time in its multiple manifestations in technical projects, this brief meditation hopefully helps us better understand the sociomateriality of time in the processes of building technical infrastructure and how it binds together cultural, economic, and discursive power. revealing the discourses of time points to places to look to better expose these design ideologies as they relate to market ideology and think of ways to reinvent or reconceptualize them. this is crucial if we are to keep technology from completely foreclosing on a future in which positive concepts of care proliferate, and in which people can be free from surveillance and marketdriven subjugation, with the ability to determine their own modes of governance. this work previously appears in paris, britt. 2021. time constructs: design ideology and a future internet. time & society, 30(1), 126–149. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463x20985316 references ali, christopher. 2021. farm fresh broadband: the politics of rural connectivity. mit press. baran, paul. 1964. on distributed communications: i. introduction to distributed communications networks (research memoranda, pp. iii–36). rand corporation. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/rm3420.html brown, bob. 2015. ip was middle school, named data networking is college. network world. http://www.networkworld.com/article/2990834/network-management/ip-was-middleschool-named-data-networking-is-college.html clark, david. 1988. the design philosophy of the darpa internet protocols. symposium proceedings on communications architectures and protocols, 106–114. https://doi.org/10.1145/52324.52336 clark, david. 2018. designing an internet. mit press. fisher, darleen. 2007. us national science foundation and the future internet design. acm sigcomm computer communication review, 37, 85–87. http://www.nets-find.net/invitationtojoin.php galloway, alexander. 2004. protocol: how control exists after decentralization. mit press. greene, daniel. 2022. landlords of the internet: big data and big real estate. social studies of science, 03063127221124943. https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127221124943 hassan, robert. 2007. 24/7: time and temporality in the network society. stanford university press. mazmanian, melissa. 2012. avoiding the trap of constant connectivity: when congruent frames allow for heterogeneous practices. academy of management journal, 56(5), 1225–1250. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2010.0787 nissenbaum, helen, luke stark, & katie zeiwitz. 2013. values in design council: an end of project report nsf eager: values in design in the future internet architecture. http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/vid/pdfs/vidcouncilreportv2.pdf https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463x20985316 https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/rm3420.html http://www.networkworld.com/article/2990834/network-management/ip-was-middle-school-named-data-networking-is-college.html http://www.networkworld.com/article/2990834/network-management/ip-was-middle-school-named-data-networking-is-college.html https://doi.org/10.1145/52324.52336 http://www.nets-find.net/invitationtojoin.php https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127221124943 https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2010.0787 http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/vid/pdfs/vidcouncilreportv2.pdf paris, britt. 2018. time constructs, the origins of a future internet [dissertation]. paris, britt. 2020. the internet of futures past: values trajectories of networking protocol projects. science, technology, & human values. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243920974083 paris, britt. 2021. time constructs: design ideology and a future internet. time & society, 30(1), 126–149. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463x20985316 shilton, katie. 2015. anticipatory ethics for a future internet: analyzing values during the design of an internet infrastructure. science and engineering ethics, 21(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-013-9510-z shilton, katie. 2017. engaging values despite neutrality: challenges and approaches to values reflection during the design of internet infrastructure katie shilton, 2018. science, technology, & human values. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0162243917714869 shilton, katie, jeff burke, kc claffy, duan, c., & lixia zhang. 2014. a world on ndn: affordances & implications of the named data networking future internet architecture named data networking (ndn) (technical report ndn-0018, revision 1). https://named-data.net/publications/techreports/world-on-ndn-11apr2014/ stiegler, bernard. 2001/2010. technics and time, 3: cinematic time and the question of malaise. stanford university press. tarnoff, ben. 2022. internet for the people: the fight for our digital future. verso. ucla remap (director). 2015, september 28. ndncomm 2015 day 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylgzgk4c-ws vostal, filip. 2016. accelerating academia: the changing structure of academic time. springer. wajcman, judy. 2014. pressed for time: the acceleration of life in digital capitalism. university of chicago press. renegade infrastructures: commerce and policy in the crypto wars 1.0 sarah myers west ai now institute https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243920974083 https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463x20985316 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-013-9510-z http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0162243917714869 https://named-data.net/publications/techreports/world-on-ndn-11apr2014/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylgzgk4c-ws in 1992, wired executive editor kevin kelly wrote that encryption was “the necessary counterforce to the net’s runaway tendency to connect everything. it is a technology of disconnection. the net says ‘just connect.’ the cipher says, ‘disconnect’…a cipher is the yin for the network’s yang, a tiny hidden force that is able to tame the explosive interconnections born of decentralized, distributed systems” (kelly, 1993). thirty years on from kelly’s writing, the harms of unbridled connectivity are abundantly clear, characterized by the dominance of surveillance-based business models and the unchecked spread of false and hateful information (zuboff 2015, west, 2018, donovan, dreyfuss & friedberg, 2022, marwick & lewis, 2017). the push to connect has been driven largely by corporate interests, serving largely to concentrate control in the hands of a small number of tech firms that have both the capacity to collect the massive amounts of personal data produced through such systems and the means to process this data (whittaker 2021). and while encryption is squarely embedded throughout much of our internet infrastructure – protecting the security of web browsing and digital transactions, securing data flows and e-commerce – law enforcement agencies seeking to expand their surveillance capacities continue to contest the legality of encryption for communications in several jurisdictions (pfefferkorn 2020). this presentation theorizes the radical potentials of encryption technology as a counterforce for connectivity. it seeks to answer the question: how did the internet become safe for companies, but not for the rest of us? answering this question took me to archives across the country and conferences in the us and europe where technologists and advocates worked on building privacyprotecting tools, and particularly tools that rely on encryption a process, technical artifact, and infrastructure that enables the transformation of a message or data into code inscrutable to anyone save those with the key to unscramble it. for these technologists and advocates, encryption plays an important social function under surveillance capitalism it can grant individuals space to disconnect, or to regain autonomy around how and to whom we connect. as such, encryption is a form of communication, with mutual relationships and trust paths built into its very architecture. privacy on public networks: encryption and imbrication the crypto wars of the 1990s were a critical moment to question whether and in what ways encryption would be incorporated into the rapidly growing internet. drawing on archival research at the computer history museum, two critical points of evolution over the course of the 1990s surface: first, a company called rsa became the leading provider of cryptographic algorithms for software publishers as a result of the us government’s reticence to license strong encryption and the company’s aggressive policing of its patents. second, an open source alternative, pgp, emerged during this time that offered a more privacy protective alternative, but a legal battle prevented widespread use. in combination, this meant that cryptography was built into internet infrastructure as a default in certain ways – such as the security protocols that would enable e-commerce to grow but not in others, like privacy of online messaging. this history illustrates the process of imbrication, or how social and material agencies become entangled in sociotechnical systems (leonardi 2012). the case studies of rsa and pgp illustrate two distinct types of entanglement: first, they demonstrate how an author’s intentions can be persistently embedded in the structure of software code: rsa was primarily designed for commercial use from the outset; though the company later sought to cultivate a reputation as an advocate for the rights of software publishers, it was always, first and foremost, designed for corporate adoption. by contrast, though pgp developer phil zimmermann hoped to make money from his software, it was always designed for the purpose of protecting users’ privacy. in both instances, the intentions of the authors had a downstream effect on how the code was used, accelerated by influences and pressure from a variety of market and regulatory actors. second, these cases demonstrate the combined force of the market and law in advancing particular uses and understandings of cryptography. by the close of the 1990s, encryption was in widespread use among internet users, but was primarily designed around providing security for financial transactions necessary to make ecommerce possible. while developers like zimmerman still actively built encryption designed to protect the privacy of users’ online activities, this software was pushed to the margins by the active policing of patents by competitors and its unclear legal status. untwining the entangled dynamics of market, law, and authorship is particularly consequential for this period in the development of public key cryptography. during the 1980s and 1990s, encryption began to take on the functions of infrastructure – embedded, often invisible algorithms deeply imbricated in securing software code, made necessary for many software systems to ‘work’. they are also important forces in structuring society (edwards 2003). here, i argue that the particular ways that encryption was built into infrastructure worked to encourage the development of the e-commerce industry, while relegating privacy protective uses to the margins. but infrastructures are also tools in practice, always in the process of becoming, and are mutually shaped by their social and technical dimensions (star & ruhleder, 1996). what factors, then, were at work in shaping cryptographic infrastructure in these particular ways? one possible answer, i argue, is the constant possibility of regulation, a persistent threat that was never definitively resolved. since the early 20th century, the us government has held an uneasy position with regard to use of cryptography in the public sector. in the 1970s, regulators acknowledged the importance of adopting a standardized method of encryption for the computerized communications of us government agencies and businesses. recognizing the importance of public trust in whatever algorithm was adopted, the national bureau of standards and national security agency collaborated with an independent corporation, ibm, in the creation of the data encryption standard. by the 1980s, the government sought to strictly implement a regime to regulate the export of encrypted software. however, new actors and organizations involved in the development and distribution of cryptographic software made the enforcement of these controls more challenging. the examples of rsa and pgp illustrate the tensions within dual us government interests in promoting commercial enterprise and protecting national security. ultimately, these resulted in creating a dominant player in the commercialized sale of cryptography in the 1990s: rsa. zimmermann’s pgp opened up a new realm of possibilities for hobbyist cryptographers, but its contested legal status – combined with its complex code and rsa’s aggressive policing of its patents – prevented widespread industry adoption. this resulted in a divide in the applications of cryptography: ‘legitimated’ commercial applications of cryptography were largely invisible to users, marketed as ‘security’ but with little transparency as to the inner workings of the cryptosystem. this meant that though the actual number of people using cryptographic tools grew considerably over the 1980s and 90s, for the most part cryptography was an invisible, embedded part of software programs and networked infrastructures. on the other hand, pgp took on great significance for a small community of cryptography advocates, in part because of its legal troubles: zimmermann and his software developed a ‘renegade’ status that built cache among a nascent cryptographic community. ultimately, this established the preconditions for the formulation of a new cryptographic social imaginary. references donovan, joan., dreyfuss, emily and friedberg, brian. 2022. meme wars: the untold story of the online battles upending america. ny: bloomsbury publishing. edwards, paul. 2003. infrastructure and modernity: force, time, and social organization in the history of sociotechnical systems. in t. j. misa, p. brey & a.(ed.) modernity and technology. cambridge, ma: mit press. kelly, kevin. 1993. cypherpunks, e-money and the technologies of disconnection. whole earth review. leonardi, paul m. 2012. materiality, sociomateriality, and socio-technical systems: what do these terms mean? how are they related? do we need them? in p. m. leonardi, b. a. materiality and organizing: social interaction in a technological world (pp. 25-48). oxford: oxford university press marwick, alice and lewis, becca. 2017. media manipulation and disinformation online. data and society. https://datasociety.net/library/media-manipulation-and-disinfo-online/ pfefferkorn, riana. 2020. the earn it act: how to ban end-to-end encryption without actually banning it. the center for internet and society at stanford law school. retrieved from https://cyberlaw.stanford. edu/blog/2020/01/earnit-act-how-ban-endend-encryptionwithout-actually-banning-it. star, susah leigh, & ruhleder, karen. 1996. steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: design and access for large information spaces. information systems research, 7(1), 111-134. west, sarah myers (2018). survival of the cryptic: tracing technological imaginaries across ideologies, infrastructures, and community practices. new media and society, 24(8). whittaker, meredith (2021) the steep cost of capture. acm interactions, 28(6): 50-55. zuboff, shoshanna. (2015). big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization. journal of information technology, 30(1): 75-89. okafor-dimensions of data quality for values in smart cities datafication practices-dimensions of data selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 data quality assessment in smart cities datafication okafor, carl chineme university of stavanger, norway ferrer-conill, raul university of stavanger, norway helle, sjøvaaj university of stavanger, norway abstract data quality facilitates data interoperability for optimal decision-making in smart cities datafication. but there are few studies on how technologists (e.g., data scientists), governance people (e.g., municipal workers), and third-party collaborators (e.g., smart city services vendors) assess data quality together in smart cities datafication. this paper offers a response to this knowledge gap, using interviews (n=10) with municipal workers, data scientists and smart city services vendors, and data structure documents (n=8) in a situated case, the stavanger (norway) smart city. implicit the paper’s results is that data quality is a floating signifier – comprising the different articulations of data scientists, municipal workers and services vendors in assessment. this generates friction with implications on data interoperability. this paper therefore posits that assessing data quality in smart cities datafication is ambiguous, but not empty. it fluctuates between the articulations of data scientists, municipal workers, and services vendors, with implications on data interoperability through the friction this generates. keywords: data quality, data interoperability, floating signifier, frictions, smart city datafication introduction/argumentation datafication is the foundation of smart cities. it provides the raw material – data – for smart cities’ initiatives (al nuaimi et al., 2015) through sensors and recognition technologies (lomborg, dencik and moe, 2020), enabling data scientists, municipal workers and services vendors to understand people and social issues (dencik et al., pp 26-39, 2022) for efficient governance (hepp, jarke and kramp, pp 2-3, 2022). datafication comprises the ‘data work’ of collecting, managing, analysing and communicating data (pine et al., 2018, 2022), but also of data scientists, municipal suggested citation (apa): okafor, c. c., ferrer-conill, r, helle, s. (2023, october). data quality assessment in smart cities datafication. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. carl chineme okafor university of stavanger, norway raul ferrer-conill university of stavanger, norway sjøvaaj helle university of stavanger, norway workers and services vendors assessing data quality which smart cities datafication studies rarely consider. this paper positions the data work of assessing data quality as an essential element in smart cities datafication because this enables data interoperability for optimal decisionmaking (khisro, 2020); and asks, how do data scientists, municipal workers and services vendors assess data quality to enable data interoperability in smart cities datafication? the paper presents results that suggest that there is no explicit standard or model for assessing data quality amongst data scientists, municipal workers, and services vendors in stavanger. deliberating on the results, the paper advances that data quality is a ‘floating signifier’ comprising the different articulations of data scientists, municipal workers and services vendors who have different professional cultures but do the data work of assessing data quality in stavanger smart city datafication. the articulations of these data worker – data scientists, municipal workers, and services vendors – in data quality assessment is ambiguous but not empty and generate ‘friction’ with implications for data interoperability. this requires common grounds over the friction. with the concepts of ‘floating signifiers’ (laclau and mouffe, 2001; jørgensen and phillips, 2011) and ‘frictions’ (edwards et al., 2011; tsing, 2011), this paper articulates its arguments showing that 1) in stavanger as a relevant case, data quality assessment in smart cities datafication materialises through the different articulations of people who engage in ‘data work’ (e.g., data scientists, municipal workers and services vendors), 2) friction from the different articulations of data quality assessment is often inevitable, and 3) some forms of negotiations are desirable over the friction from the different articulatory assessment of data quality. this paper’s main question of, “how do data scientists, municipal workers and services vendors assess data quality to enable data interoperability in the stavanger smart city datafication?” is consequently answered with the support of these two sub questions: sq1. what are the data quality assessment models that data scientists, municipal workers and services vendors engage with in the stavanger smart city datafication? sq2. how do the data scientists, municipal workers and services vendors negotiate their data quality assessment to enable data interoperability in the stavanger smart city datafication? method and data a single case study method (flyvbjerg, 2011; yin, 2018) using the stavanger smart city is adopted in this paper. the particular focus on the smart city is because the entire operation of the smart city initiative is grounded in datafication and its integration of the social domains of technology and governance. but more importantly, we seek in this paper to find out if the different assessment of data quality has implications for data interoperability in the stavanger smart city. in relation, this paper considers case knowledge in qualitative studies as central in how scholars understand phenomena (flyvbjerg, 2011), which are datafication, the smart city and data quality in our case. stavanger’s smart city initiative dates back in 2016. stavanger uses digital data and connected communication technology processes to run its services and engagements in health and welfare, education and knowledge, energy, climate, and environment, urban art, as well as governance and democracy (stavanger city council, 2016). as of 2023, a number of stavanger’s smart city initiatives enjoy supports from the european union (eu), e.g., the eu – horizon 2020 (2015-2020) for smart cities and communities in europe, and eu – ai4cities, in support of artificial intelligence-based climate change mitigation efforts. interviews (edwards and holland, 2013) and documents (bowen, 2009; dalglish, khalid and mcmahon, 2021; grant and kara, 2022) are the paper’s means of collecting evidence. first, we conduct interviews with 10 respondents comprising data scientists, department workers in stavanger municipality, and third-party smart city services and solutions providers to stavanger between may and august 2023. we also collect documents, 1) roles in system and application management/user; 2) roles in system and application management/operation supplier; 3) roles in system and application management/system manager; 4) roles in system and application management/system owner; 5) roles in system and application management/service manager; 6) roles and responsibilities in information security work; 7), data processing checklist; and 8) guidelines for information security, from stavanger municipality in july 2023. with no preconceived themes, we analyse our interview and document data back and forth using the thematic data analyses strategy (braun and clarke, 2006) to find themes that respond to the questions we pose. we refine and categorise emergent themes into 1) data quality is largely important in this smart city’s datafication, 2) no explicit standard or model for assessing data quality therein, 3) silo data quality assessment is in practice, 4) inevitable friction from the silo data quality assessment in stavanger, 5) feedbacks, metadata, documentation are potential rallying grounds over frictions. we deliberate and discuss these results through the concepts of floating signifiers and frictions. early results using the stavanger smart city as a relevant case study, especially within the european context of smart cities datafication process, our early claim in this paper is that data quality assessment in smart cities datafication is ambiguous but it is not empty. in there, data quality assessment fluctuates between the contextual articulations of datafication actors, e.g., data scientists, municipal workers and services vendors who do data work – a concept bossen et al., (2019) describe as a range of socio-technical practices that undergird data production and use. data work often involves “any human activity related to creating, collecting, managing, curating, analyzing, interpreting, and communicating data” (bossen et al., 2019; møller et al., 2020), and it is key in smart cities datafication. these articulations generate friction that obstruct data interoperability, requiring common grounds on assessment to overcome friction. metadata, proper documentation, and feedback are the diverse forms of common grounds desirable to overcome friction from the different articulations of data quality assessment. references al nuaimi, e., al neyadi, h., mohamed, n., & al-jaroodi, j. (2015). applications of big data to smart cities. journal of internet services and applications, 6(1), 25. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13174-015-0041-5 bossen, c., pine, k. h., cabitza, f., ellingsen, g., & piras, e. m. (2019). data work in healthcare: an introduction. health informatics journal, 25(3), 465–474. https://doi.org/10.1177/1460458219864730 bowen, g. a. (2009). document analysis as a qualitative research method. qualitative research journal, 9(2), 27–40. https://doi.org/10.3316/qrj0902027 braun, v., & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa dalglish, s. l., khalid, h., & mcmahon, s. a. (2021). document analysis in health policy research: the read approach. health policy and planning, 35(10), 1424–1431. https://doi.org/10.1093/heapol/czaa064 dencik, l., hintz, a., redden, j., & treré, e. (2022). data justice. sage publications ltd. edwards, p. n., mayernik, m. s., batcheller, a. l., bowker, g. c., & borgman, c. l. (2011). science friction: data, metadata, and collaboration. social studies of science, 41(5), 667–690. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312711413314 edwards, r., & holland, j. (2013). what is qualitative interviewing? bloomsbury academic. https://books.google.no/books?id=skndmgeacaaj flyvbjerg, b. (2011). case study. the sage handbook of qualitative research, 4, 301–316. grant, a., & kara, h. (2022). doing your research project with documents: a step-by-step guide to take you from start to finish. policy press. hepp, a., jarke, j., & kramp, l. (2022). new perspectives in critical data studies: the ambivalences of data power—an introduction. in a. hepp, j. jarke, & l. kramp (eds.), new perspectives in critical data studies (pp. 1–23). springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96180-0_1 jørgensen, m., & phillips, l. (2011). discourse analysis as theory and method. sage. khisro, j. (2020). understanding the relation between interoperability and data quality: a study of data hub development in swedish electricity market. international journal of public information systems, 14(1). laclau, e., & mouffe, c. (2001). hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics (2. ed). verso. lomborg, s., dencik, l., & moe, h. (2020). methods for datafication, datafication of methods: introduction to the special issue. european journal of communication, 35(3), 203–212. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323120922045 møller, n. h., bossen, c., pine, k. h., nielsen, t. r., & neff, g. (2020). who does the work of data? interactions, 27(3), 52–55. https://doi.org/10.1145/3386389 pine, k., bossen, c., holten møller, n., miceli, m., lu, a. j., chen, y., horgan, l., su, z., neff, g., & mazmanian, m. (2022). investigating data work across domains: new perspectives on the work of creating data. chi conference on human factors in computing systems extended abstracts, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3503724 pine, k. h., bossen, c., chen, y., ellingsen, g., grisot, m., mazmanian, m., & møller, n. h. (2018). data work in healthcare: challenges for patients, clinicians and administrators. companion of the 2018 acm conference on computer supported cooperative work and social computing, 433–439. https://doi.org/10.1145/3272973.3273017 tsing, a. l. (2011). friction: an ethnography of global connection. princeton university press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt7s1xk yin, r. k. (2018). case study research and applications: design and methods (sixth edition). sage. final aoir 2022 panel description katzenbach/redeker.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 policing platforms: addressing power and inequalities in platform policies christian katzenbach zemki centre for media, communication and information research, university of bremen dennis redeker zemki centre for media, communication and information research, university of bremen joão carlos magalhães university of groningen adrian kopps zemki centre for media, communication and information research, university of bremen and alexander von humboldt institute of internet and society, berlin tom sühr technical university of berlin and harvard business school robyn caplan data & society, new york paloma viejo otero dublin city university edoardo celeste dublin city university nicola palladino trinity college dublin kinfe yilma addis ababa university suggested citation (apa): katzenbach, c., redeker, d., magalhães, j. c., kopps, a., sühr, t., caplan, r., viejo otero, p., celeste, e., palladino, n., & yilma, k. (2022, november). policing platforms: addressing power and inequalities in platform policies. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. social media platforms are ubiquitous in today’s internet. accepting that these digital intermediaries “govern the internet” (suzor 2019: 168), it matters which rules they are bound by and bind themselves to. platforms had for a long time successfully positioned themselves in the “sweet spot” between beneficial legislative protections and a remarkable absence of obligations (gillespie 2010: 348), yielding little need to take direct responsibility for the content of users. during the last decade however, and specifically since 2016, public and policy pressure has pushed platforms to become something different: not the allegedly neutral tech companies, but powerful intermediaries responsible for the functioning of public discourse and democracy. as a result, platforms have developed (more or less) elaborate policies that in effect govern who can say what when and where on the internet. platforms have struggled to develop their positions and processes for handling contested and delicate issues such as hate speech and misinformation, and the policies are still changing regularly. this highly dynamic situation indicates a low level of stability and institutionalization (barret & kreiss 2019; katzenbach 2021; katzenbach et al. 2021). taken together, this makes platform policies a key site to investigate today’s internet power relations, and the tech giants' strategies to "re-fashion the world in their own image" (cf. cfp). it is the locus where the power of the “new governors” (klonick 2019) becomes manifest, and yet it is still subject of negotiation and adoption. this panel examines how platform policies have come to be the way they are today, the influence of legal principles and political processes on them, and their enactment in practices and organizational processes. by studying the written (and unwritten) policies of social media platforms across different topical areas such as copyright, hate speech and account verification and on different levels of content moderation, we aim to better understand how these intermediaries indeed govern the internet. the (1) first paper on copyright content moderation investigates platform policies with regard to copyright in detail across fifteen platforms and a time period of more than ten years. the analysis shows that platform regulation in this area has evolved drastically over this time period with changing normative types (rights, obligations, expectations, principles) and subjects of moderation, resulting in a complexification and commodification of copyright content moderation. the (2) second paper provides a typology of verification policies across several major platform companies, building on the examination of how platforms as diverse a ebay, pornhub, twitter, airbnb and others, have developed processes and policies to classify some users, things, and places as ‘official,’ or ‘authentic.’ the analysis shows how verification is not just a matter of identity authentication, but that verification policies also importantly signal organizational and institutional relationships between platforms and their user groups that can confer significant material and social benefits. the (3) third develops a critical approach to the relationship between human reviewers and ai in content moderation adopting a decolonial perspective. by looking at the entanglements in the enforcement of platform policies, this paper explores the actual means by which human moderators input ai systems with their decisions and asks to what extent this relationship is one of ai-employee-collaboration, a form of colonization of the imagination, or of knowledge expropriation. the (4) fourth paper 2 adds a socio-legal perspective to the debate on the influences on (and principles embedded in) platform content moderation policies. using the theoretical framework of digital constitutionalism, the paper examines to what extent either human rights standards or demands by civil society activism can represent a fitting standard for platform content moderation policies. analyzing the policies and moderation practices of youtube, twitter, tiktok and meta, the paper finds a great degree of institutional isomorphism between them but also significant discrepancies with regard to the adoption of these standards. the paper also suggests that new actors like meta’s oversight board already play an important role in the translation process. taken together, the papers of this panel analyze crucial power dynamics and inequalities embedded within and extending beyond (social media) platform policies. for this, the panel brings together different disciplines and methods and fosters a productive multidisciplinary conversation and methodological exchange. this examination of the social, political, legal and economic underpinnings of recent changes in platform policies from a global perspective will allow us to better understand the ability of platforms to “re-fashion the world in their image” and to foster change. references barrett, b., & kreiss, d. (2019). platform transience: changes in facebook’s policies, procedures, and affordances in global electoral politics. internet policy review, 8(4). https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/platform-transience-changes-facebooks-policie s-procedures-and-affordances-global gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of ‘platforms’. new media & society, 12(3), 347-364. katzenbach, c. (2021). “ai will fix this” – the technical, discursive, and political turn to ai in governing communication. big data & society, 8(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211046182 katzenbach, c., magalhães, j. c., kopps, a., sühr, t. & wunderlich, l. (2021). the platform governance archive. alexander von humboldt institute for internet and society. https://doi.org/10.17605/osf.io/xsbpt klonick, k. (2019). the facebook oversight board: creating an independent institution to adjudicate online free expression. yale law journal, 129, 2418. suzor, n. p. (2019). lawless: the secret rules that govern our digital lives. cambridge: cambridge university press. 3 paper 1 complexification and concentration in platform power: changes in copyright content moderation and policies across 10 years and fifteen platforms christian katzenbach zemki centre for media, communication and information research, university of bremen joão carlos magalhães university of groningen adrian kopps zemki centre for media, communication and information research, university of bremen and alexander von humboldt institute of internet and society, berlin tom sühr technical university of berlin and harvard business school introduction platform governance and content moderation are a key site of the struggle to define the internet, its power relations, and the tech giants' strategies to "re-fashion the world in their own image" (cf. cfp). while the politicization of these questions with the advent of the tech lash 2015-17 and its focus on hate speech and misinformation might be considered a rather recent phenomenon, controversies on the responsibility and liability of platforms and service providers have been around since the commercialization of the internet in the 1990s. copyright has been a key topic among these long-standing debates, and continues to provide a rich source of contestation. massive public protests have, for example, accompanied the adoption of the recent copyright directive of the european union, with critics anticipating forced censorship by the tech platforms and the end of the internet as we know it, once the directive comes into effect. that is why it constitutes a particular instructive topic to study from a long-term perspective how power relations shape the internet as we know it. investigating platform power by looking at copyright content moderation while there is now ample research on different aspects of platform governance, there is surprisingly little empirical research on copyright content moderation. acknowledging that platform policies, or “platform law” (kaye 2019), are where the ways in which “digital intermediaries govern the internet” (suzor 2019: 168) become manifest, researchers have, for example, studied policies on hate speech (siapera & viejo otero, 2021), misinformation (keulenaar et al., 2021), or child abuse (tarvin & stanfill, 2022). others have systematically compared policies across platforms and topics (buckley & 4 schaefer, 2021) and highlighted the dynamic nature of policies and their responsivity to public and policy pressure (barrett & kreiss, 2019; katzenbach, 2021). with regard to copyright, platform policies are not yet well researched. given that earlier work has identified structural overblocking of content (ie. blocking and deletion of content legally does not constitute copyright infringement) by platforms and providers (urban et al., 2018; erickson & kretschmer, 2018; lester & pachamanova, 2017; bar-ziv & elkin-koren, 2018), there is evident need to more closely examine the copyright policies of platforms and their changes over time. copyright content moderation is potentially one of the key mechanisms to execute structural power over the circulation of content and creativity online. powerful actors such as media companies have in the past repeatedly mobilized copyright claims and enforcement mechanisms to strengthen their positions and to disadvantage independent creators and publishers as well as users and citizens. against this background, this paper describes a longitudinal study on how platforms have handled copyright-related questions in their content policies, that is the terms of services, community guidelines, and copyright policies. we study these questions across a diverse selection of social media platforms and over a time period of more than ten years, in order to understand the dynamics and changes across time and across different platforms. in the analysis we (1) explore which kinds of public documents and rules fifteen major and niche platforms have adopted to regulate copyright content moderation, we then (2) examine in detail how the rules of a selection of six of these platforms changed over time, and then (3) finally discuss and compare the enforcement of these policies in platforms' automated copyright content moderation systems. results: complexification and concentration of platform power our analysis shows that copyright content moderation has evolved drastically over the recent two decades. these results specifically show along our two dimensions of analysis: the different normative types platforms use to regulate, moderate and evaluate content, including: rights, obligations, expectations, principles, and procedures; and the differing subjects of copyright content regulation, including: infringement avoidance, manual content removal, automated moderation, disputes, penalties, exceptions, transparency, and monetisation. in sum, the results suggest that two dual processes seem to mark the development of platforms’ copyright content moderation over time. firstly, there has been a process of complexification and opacification. our empirical work indicates that virtually all 15 platforms’ t&cs have become more intricate, in various ways and to different extents, a process that was deepened by the emergence of automated copyright content moderation systems. it seems evident that the structures we studied became increasingly harder to understand and, sometimes, even to observe. such opacification was neither necessary nor necessarily justifiable, the paper argues. we characterize the second process as platformisation and concentration. our research demonstrates that platforms have altered their rules so as to subsume copyright content moderation to their own interests, logics and technologies. as with complexification, platformisation 5 has been experienced differently by different platforms and deepened by the rise of automated systems. this has seemingly led to a concentration of power in the hands of not only platforms themselves but large rights holders as well, the paper concludes. references barrett, b., & kreiss, d. (2019). platform transience: changes in facebook’s policies, procedures, and affordances in global electoral politics. internet policy review, 8(4). https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/platform-transience-changes-facebooks-policie s-procedures-and-affordances-global. bar-ziv, s., & elkin-koren, n. (2018). behind the scenes of online copyright enforcement: empirical evidence on notice & takedown. connecticut law review 50. buckley, n., & schafer, j. s. (2022). ‘censorship-free’ platforms: evaluating content moderation policies and practices of alternative social media. for(e)dialogue, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.21428/e3990ae6.483f18da. erickson, k., & kretschmer, m. (2018). ‘this video is unavailable’: analyzing copyright takedown of user-generated content on youtube. journal of intellectual property, information technology and ecommerce law (jipitec), 9(1), 75–89. katzenbach, c. (2021). “ai will fix this” – the technical, discursive, and political turn to ai in governing communication. big data & society, 8(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211046182. kaye, d. (2019). speech police – the global struggle to govern the internet. new york: columbia global reports. keulenaar, e. de, burton, a. g., & kisjes, i. (2021). deplatforming, demotion and folk theories of big tech persecution. fronteiras estudos midiáticos, 23(2), 118–139. https://doi.org/10.4013/fem.2021.232.09 lester, t., & pachamanova, d. (2017). the dilemma of false positives: making content id algorithms more conducive to fostering innovative fair use in music creation. entertainment law review, 24. siapera, e., & viejo-otero, p. (2021). governing hate: facebook and digital racism. television & new media. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476420982232. suzor, n. p. (2019). lawless: the secret rules that govern our digital lives. cambridge: cambridge university press. tarvin, e., & stanfill, m. (2022). “youtube’s predator problem”: platform moderation as governance-washing, and user resistance. convergence, 13548565211066490. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565211066490. 6 urban, j., karaganis, j., & schofield, b. (2018). takedown in two worlds: an empirical analysis. uc berkeley public law research paper no. 2755628. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/mduyn. paper 2 the business of trust: a typology of verification in platform governance robyn caplan data & society, new york as platforms come to embrace their role as mediators of the internet, they are increasingly using tools like verification (i.e. the blue checkmark used by twitter and instagram) as a way to distinguish between official and unofficial sources. for instance, the online adult video platform, pornhub, announced they had removed all unverified videos, limiting uploads to verified users only (cole, 2020). the move followed an investigative opinion piece by the new york times’s nicholas kristof that followed the lives of sexual abuse victims whose videos were uploaded to the site. kristof alleged that rape videos, including child rape videos, were allowed to remain and spread on the site unchecked (kristof, 2020). in response, major payment companies like mastercard and visa began their own investigations, eventually announcing they would stop processing payments with pornhub (robertson, 2020). pornhub’s move to “verified users only” means that uploads can only come from official content partners and members of their “model program” (pornhub, 2020). pornhub verified, which requires content partners to send in a current photo id for performers, has drastically reduced the amount of content available on the site. all the same, victims of child sex trafficking who had their videos uploaded to the site have argued in a recent lawsuit that the new rules have not gone far enough, noting that the company has made “no effort” to verify the identity of all performers in a video (ross, 2021). pornhub, however, is not alone in this move towards prioritizing verified users and content as a way to mitigate content concerns. platforms have begun embracing more publicly their role as mediators of information, and between interest groups vying for status online. what is happening on pornhub and many other platforms is part of this broader shift: many, even most, platforms are using “verification” as a way to distinguish between sources, often framing these efforts within concerns about safety and trustworthiness. for instance, airbnb announced in 2019 that it would verify all of its listings (yaffe-bellany, 2019), including the accuracy of photographs, addresses, and other information posted by hosts about themselves and their properties. tinder has rolled out a blue checkmark verification system to deter catfishing, asking users to take selfies in real time and match poses in sample images (carman, 2020). perhaps in recognition of the importance verification will play in the future of the internet, twitter 7 has opened a draft of their new verification system to public comment (twitter, n.d.; twitter inc., 2020). as work by caplan & gillespie (2020) has demonstrated, other platforms where legacy media and amateur content creators converge, such as youtube, have different content moderation rules and processes for different user groups. a typology of verification practices and policies this paper explores how platform companies use verification policies as a way to differentiate between users and goods over their networks. verification will play an important role in the future of platform governance, and how platforms implement verification policies and processes will have important consequences for participation, inclusion, and diversity online. this paper is an overview of verification policies and practices across major platform companies. this includes social media platforms such as weibo, instagram, twitter, and tiktok using blue checkmarks to verify identities, organizations, or signal official sources, e-commerce platforms such as ebay and amazon verifying sellers and products, transportation platforms like uber who use tools like facial recognition to verify the identity of drivers, and platforms like airbnb, that are using verification as a way to review the “quality” of goods for consumers. this paper uses publicly available documents from platform companies, including community guidelines, user interfaces for verification, terms of service agreements, and posts from corporate blogs and websites, as well as other public statements made by company representatives. i use the waybackmachine to understand how these policies have changed over time. i also rely on search engine and social media trade reporting. this paper finds a broad range of verification policies and processes across these major platforms, and holds that verification is not just a matter of identity authentication (van der nagel, 2020). rather, verification policies signal organizational and institutional relationships between platforms and their user groups that can confer significant material and social benefits. examining verification policies in detail, and doing so through this comparative approach, provides a lens into understanding a platform’s economic and institutional ties as they mediate between the users and organizations on their networks. references carman, a. (2020, january 23). tinder will give you a verified blue check mark if you pass catfishing test. retrieved from the verge: https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/23/21077423/tinder-photo-verification-blue-checkmar k-safety-center-launch-noonlight cole, s. (2020, december 14). pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform. retrieved from vice: https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgqjjy/pornhub-suspended-all-unverified-videos-conteng 8 kristof, n. (2020, december 4). the children of pornhub. retrieved from the new york times: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-rape-trafficking.html pornhub. (2020, december). the latest on our commitment to trust and safety. retrieved from pornhub: https://www.pornhub.com/blog/11422 van der nagel, e. (2020). embodied verification: linking identities and bodies on nsfw reddit. in k. warfield, c. abidin, & c. cambre, mediated interfaces: the body on social media. new york: bloomsbury. ross, s. (2021, february 13). new lawsuit against pornhub alleges improvements don’t go far enough. retrieved from ctv news. https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/new-lawsuit-against-pornhub-alleges-improvements-to-thesite-don-t-go-far-enough-1.5308001 twitter. (n.d.). about verified accounts. retrieved from twitter help center: https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twitter-verified-accounts twitter inc. (2020, november 24). help us shape our new approach to verification. retrieved from twitter blog: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/help-us-shape-our-new-approach-to -verification.html yaffe-bellany, d. (2019, november 6). airbnb to verify all listings, c.e.o. chesky says. retrieved from the new york times: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/business/airbnb-verify-listings.html paper 3 human reviewers & automatic detection systems: are they ai-employee collaboration, colonization of the imagination or knowledge expropriation? paloma viejo otero dublin city university the paper develops a critical approach to the relationship between human reviewers and ai in content moderation adopting a decolonial perspective. specifically, we ask to what extent the relationship between human reviewers and ai systems is one of employee collaboration, a form of colonization of the imagination, or a form of knowledge expropriation. to formulate this thought, the paper draws upon the 9 influences from anibal quijano’s theory of the coloniality of power and the question of knowledge as a product of a subject-object relation (2007). it also draws on eugenia siapera’s work in ai content moderation, racism and (de) coloniality (2021), and sarah roberts work on human review moderators (2019). content moderation is an essential and structural feature of platforms that responds to a security rationale by which large volumes of harmful content should be efficiently removed (siapera 2021, siapera and viejo otero 2021). in relation to content moderation, mark zuckerberg announced in 2017 the hiring of ten thousand employees, ‘for safety and security, with the possibility of extending that number to twenty thousand’. in january 2018, mark zuckerberg reiterated that ‘to prevent hate speech and ensure the security of the platform, facebook invests in staff and technology in equal parts so that facebook invests around 14,000 people working across communities’. by 2019, facebook had a total of ‘30,000 people working at facebook just for safety and security where half of those are content reviewers’. therefore, it could be argued that mark zuckerberg’s actions indicate that human reviewers and ai’s relationship is indissoluble in the eyes of tech companies, and that content moderation is a growing labour market for individuals who possess specific technical, linguistic and cultural knowledge. indeed, social media platforms are interested in presenting human reviewers and automated systems under the lens of mutual collaboration. human reviewers are guided by content standards and their task is to review all posts and publications flagged as potentially harmful. these teams are often determined by the languages and cultures of the individuals in these teams, so that moderators are people with necessary cultural and linguistic knowledge to decide over content. whereas the role of automatic systems is to faster eliminate material that repeatedly appears on the platform and that platforms recognise as harmful. considering that human moderation was implemented before automatic systems, it could be suggested that human moderators have continuously generated knowledge that the companies have accumulated to input their algorithms. different, however, is how human reviewers experiment their working relationship with ai. often, literature refers to the relationship between humans and ai systems as ‘human-ai partnership’, ‘human-ai teaming’ (nguyen et al 2018, barro & davenport 2019) or human-ai collaboration (ashktorab 2020). this literature assumes that humans cooperate and align their interest with the interest of social media platforms around moderation and security (chandrasekharan et al 2017, lai et al 2022). however, there is a dearth of empirical knowledge about if human teams perceive this relationship as a collaboration, as knowledge expropriation (heiman and nickerson 2004, quijano 2007) or even as a colonization of the imagination (quijano 2007). in light of this gap, the present paper questions if ai’s relationship in content moderation can be leveled as ‘human-ai teaming’, which implies equal collaboration, or as ‘human-in-the-loop’ by which ai receives input from the human to improve its performance without human acknowledgement and consent. to answer this question, this paper empirically relies on a series of indepth interviews with human moderators. questions explore human reviewer’s daily activity, how and if they actively input ai 10 systems, and if so, what are the actual means by which this occurs. data from the human reviewers will be analysed through the analytic lenses of team-ai collaboration, expropriation of knowledge and colonisation of the imagination. in doing so, this paper aims to contribute to deciphering the extent by which colonial practices operate in the social media environment. references ashktorab, z., liao q. v., dugan, c., johnson, j., pan, q., zhang, w., kumaravel, s., & campbell, m. (2020). human-ai collaboration in a cooperative game setting: measuring social perception and outcomes. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction 4, cscw2. 1–20. barro, s., & davenport, t. h. (2019). people and machines: partners in innovation. mit sloan management review, 60(4), 22-28. chandrasekharan, e., pavalanathan, u., srinivasan, a., glynn, a., , eisenstein, j., & gilbert, e. (2017). you can’t stay here: the efficacy of reddit’s 2015 ban examined through hate speech. proceedings of acm human computer interaction 1, computer-supported cooperative work and social computing, article 31. chowdhury, s., budhwar, p., dey, p. k., joel-edgar, s., & abadie, a. (2022). ai-employee collaboration and business performance: integrating knowledge-based view, socio-technical systems and organisational socialisation framework. journal of business research, 144, 31-49. heiman, b. a., & nickerson, j. a. (2004). empirical evidence regarding the tension between knowledge sharing and knowledge expropriation in collaborations. managerial and decision economics, 25(6‐7), 401-420. lai, v., carton, s., bhatnagar, r., liao, q. v., zhang, y., & tan, c. (2022). human-ai collaboration via conditional delegation: a case study of content moderation. nguyen, an t., kharosekar, a., krishnan. s., krishnan,s., tate, e., wallace, b.. & lease m. (2018). believe it or not: designing a human-ai partnership for mixed-initiative fact-checking. proceedings of the 31st annual acm symposium on user interface software and technology, 189–199. quijano, a. (2007). coloniality and modernity/rationality. cultural studies, 21(2-3), 168-178. roberts, s. t. (2019). behind the screen. new haven: yale university press. jhaver, s., birman, i., gilbert, e., & bruckman, a. (2019). human-machine collaboration for content regulation: the case of reddit automoderator. acm transactions on computer-human interaction (tochi), 26(5), 1-35. 11 siapera, e. (2021). ai content moderation, racism and (de) coloniality. international journal of bullying prevention, 1-11. viejo-otero, p. (2022). governing hate: facebook and hate speech. phd thesis, dublin city university. paper 4 digital constitutionalism and platform policies: towards a global standard? edoardo celeste dublin city university nicola palladino trinity college dublin dennis redeker zemki centre for media, communication and information research, university of bremen kinfe yilma addis ababa university a dilemma for social media content governance one of the main issues of global content governance on social media relates to the definition of the rules governing online content moderation worldwide (gillepsie 2018). one could think that it would be sufficient for online platforms to refer to existing international human rights standards. however, a more careful analysis shows not only that international law provides exclusively general principles, which do not specifically address the context of online content moderation. but also that a single human rights standard does not exist as even identical provisions and principles are interpreted by courts in different ways across the world. this is one of the reasons why, since their birth, major social media platforms have set their own rules, adopting their own peculiar language, values and parameters in their platform policies (suzor 2019). yet, at the same time, this normative autonomy too has raised serious concerns. why should private companies establish the rules governing free speech online? is it legitimate to depart from minimal human rights standards and impose more (or less) stringent rules? the current situation exposes a dilemma for online content governance that seriously affects the operations of social media companies and impacts on the exercise of fundamental rights by users as well as digital policy strategies. on the one hand, if social media platforms simply adopted international law standards, they would be 12 compelled to operate a choice on which model to follow – for example, between a us freedom of expression-dominated approach or a european-style standard, which balances freedom of expression with other social values. moreover, they would also need to put in place a mechanism able to translate, or ‘operationalise’, such general standards in their platform policies (suzor 2018). on the other hand, where social media platforms adopt their own values, rules and terminology in their policy documents, thus departing from international law standards, they are accused of censorship or laxity, intrusiveness or negligence. translating international human rights standards into platform policies? in this paper we address this conundrum. the paper investigates this topic from a multidisciplinary perspective, drawing from the expertise of the authors in law, political science and communication studies. we argue that the key to solving this dilemma lies in the capacity to define specific principles and values for as the foundation of platform policies, a task which is part of the broader process of constitutionalising the digital society and is the main aim of the new ideological movement called ‘digital constitutionalism’ (celeste 2019). to this end, the paper will explore civil society declarations articulating constitutional principles related to content governance, the so-called internet bills of rights (celeste 2018). we argue that the potential of international human rights law in offering much needed normative guidance to content governance is circumscribed by three interrelated factors. first, international human rights law is – by design – state-centered and hence does not go a long way in attending to human rights concerns in the private sector (lwin 2020). second, international human rights law standards are couched in general principles, and hence, less suited to apply in the context of platform content moderation which requires a rather granular and dynamic system of norms. third, the generic international content governance standards have not adequately been unpacked by relevant adjudicative bodies to make them fit for purpose to the present realities of content moderation and for inclusion in platform people in particular. civil society declarations constitute a source of normative standards for platform policies that have been so far neglected by the scholarship. over the past few years, a series of initiatives have emerged at societal level, and especially among civil society groups, to articulate rights and principles for the digital age (redeker et al. 2019). the output of these efforts mostly consists of non-legally binding declarations, often intentionally adopting a constitutional tone and therefore termed ‘internet bills of rights’. they can be considered as expressing the “voice” of communities that struggle to propose an innovative message within traditional institutional channels: one of the layers of the complex process of constitutionalisation (celeste 2021) that is pushing towards reconceptualising core constitutional principles in light of the challenges of the digital society. moreover these texts can provide an idea of which human rights standards are currently promoted by the communities within which social media platforms operate. this section illustrates the findings of a content analysis on a 13 database of 40 internet bills of rights including principles related to online content governance. finally, we illustrate how social media platforms deal with the content governance dilemma outlined previously. both international human rights law and civil society documents speak to platform policies and those who design them. by comparing four major social media platforms meta, twitter, tiktok and youtube in order we examine how substantive and procedural principles entailed in their policy documents relate to the standards stemming from international human rights law and internet bills of rights. this analysis is based on primary, publicly available data provided by the platforms, including their policy documents and enforcement reports, and secondary literature. this section examines differences and similarities between the twitter rules, meta’s community standards, tiktok community guidelines and youtube community guidelines. a comparison of principles found in civil society declarations and international human rights law with the platform policies shows great divergence of adoption of the former. the analysis also shows how emerging actors, specifically meta’s oversight board, engage in the translation work of external standards into platform policies. references celeste, e. (2018). terms of service and bills of rights: new mechanisms of constitutionalisation in the social media environment? international review of law, computers & technology, 33(2), 122-138. celeste, e. (2019). digital constitutionalism: a new systematic theorisation. international review of law, computers & technology, 33(1), 76-99. celeste, e. (2021). the constitutionalisation of the digital ecosystem: lessons from international law. max planck institute for comparative public law & international law (mpil) research paper, (2021-16). gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. new haven: yale university press. lwin, m. (2020). applying international human rights law for use by facebook. jreg bulletin, 38, 53. redeker, d., gill, l., & gasser, u. (2018). towards digital constitutionalism? mapping attempts to craft an internet bill of rights. international communication gazette, 80(4), 302-319. suzor, n. (2018). digital constitutionalism: using the rule of law to evaluate the legitimacy of governance by platforms. social media + society, 4(3), 1-11. suzor, n. (2019). lawless: the secret rules that govern our digital lives. cambridge: cambridge university press. 14 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 siuda, p. (2024, october). the elite among users: identity formation of vendors and customers on darknet drug trade sites. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the elite among users: identity formation of vendors and customers on darknet drug trade sites piotr siuda kazimierz wielki university in bydgoszcz, introduction darknet markets, also known as cryptomarkets, emerged as significant conduits for illicit drug sales throughout the 2010s and expanded to over a hundred platforms (e.g., aldridge & décary-hétu, 2016; dolliver & kuhns, 2016; gehl, 2018). nowadays, a plethora of new sites have surfaced across various countries, engaging in the sale of illegal substances. recently, we have seen a burgeoning interest in studying online drug trade and cryptomarkets. most scholarly efforts have been directed toward various aspects, including the substances sold and the scale of this trade (morelato et al., 2020; sudan et al., 2023). additionally, user knowledge of these substances, secrecy and anonymity strategies, and building trust among participants have been studied (bancroft, 2017; grimani et al., 2020; holt et al., 2016; nurmi et al., 2017; tzanetakis & south, 2023). while these studies have significantly expanded our understanding of the scope of drug sales on the dark web, a comprehensive grasp of how these sites serve as spaces for individuals to construct and negotiate their identities, hence engaging with others, continues to elude the researchers (harviainen et al., 2020). additionally, the connection between these online identities and the broader identities prevalent within the so-called drug subculture or the social worlds of drug users (sandberg, 2013; wanke et al., 2022) still needs to be better understood. the article aims to understand how users of darknet cryptomarkets curate their online personas, examining the formation of their identities and how these identities correspond with their self-perceptions and the images they wish to project. this inquiry centers on a case study of cebulka, the largest polish-language cryptomarket which hosts a variety of threads initiated by vendors. each thread includes an opening post that contains advertisements, followed by subsequent posts featuring user comments. although the study focuses specifically on one site, its findings have broader implications for several fields, as discussed in the concluding section. methods the methodology employed in this study involved a dual-stage approach, integrating conventional content analysis (cca) grounded in meticulous close-reading techniques (hsieh & shannon, 2005) with in-depth interviews of both vendors and buyers active on cebulka. the first phase involved a comprehensive cca based on the whole site’s content scrapped in three waves, i.e.: january 2023; june 2023, and january 2024. 8,170 sampled posts have been analyzed, encompassing both sales offers and the comments that followed these offers. this stage was dedicated to a detailed examination of how vendors formulate their advertisements and how they convey their identities, leveraging text and imagery. furthermore, the feedback provided by customers was analyzed with a focus on their satisfaction levels with the transactions and perceptions of the drug’s qualities. this comprehensive analysis aimed to uncover the nuanced strategies of vendors’ and buyers’ presentation within the cryptomarket’s ecosystem. the insights from the cca informed the second stage, which leveraged in-depth interviews (n=10) carried out in in-person and encrypted online communication channels from june 2023 to january 2024. this phase was about shedding more light on the selfconscious nature of online identity activities (wessels, 2012) identified during the first stage. additionally, interviews emphasized how cebulka’s users manage their online impressions (berkelaar, 2017). the semi-structured interviews spanned a range of topics, including the behaviors and practices of both vendors and buyers, how these individuals choose to present themselves within the community, and the distinctive patterns of communication that emerge among users. furthermore, perceived differences between drug users involved in darknet and traditional trading were investigated. results traditionally, some drug dealers attract customers by offering high-quality products and services, relying on word-of-mouth to enhance their credibility and, consequently, their profits (coomber, 2003; tzvetkova et al., 2016). this principle holds significant relevance and is a hallmark for vendors operating in cebulka, where customer feedback in the form of positive comments plays a crucial role in informing others about the transaction experience. the cca reveals that cebulka’s vendors engage in extensive promotional campaigns, highlighting the quality and variety of their offerings. these sellers construct their brand identities through pricing and diverse marketing strategies that include consistent and vivid visualizations, detailed descriptions, and product validations through laboratory testing. meanwhile, consumers contribute to this ecosystem by sharing detailed feedback. the interviews revealed an even more nuanced landscape, with statements organized into several subcategories and six primary categories, each denoted by the letter ‘c’ followed by a corresponding number (e.g., c1). a key finding is the universal distinction made by respondents between themselves and clear web trading and street trading (c1). this distinction holds for both vendors and consumers who perceive their activities as superior to traditional street-level trading, often associated with shadowy figures in back alleys or with organized crime and non-safe social media trading. moreover, a unanimous emphasis was placed on the enhanced knowledge possessed by those who operate in the cebulka, compared to the traditional street market (c2). the interviewees pointed out the inferior quality and limited selection of drugs available outside the darknet (c3). this self-perception of heightened awareness regarding the substances they handle—encompassing their types, effects, and dosages—positions them as quasi-experts or connoisseurs (c4). the respondents also shared a belief that the darknet attracts individuals of higher social status (c5), defined not just in conventional terms like education but also through a distinctive ‘approach’ to drugs or the technical savvy required for safely navigating the darknet. moreover, the interviewees underscored the clear separation between a person’s darknet persona and their ‘reallife’ identity, encompassing the various roles and duties they assume in their family and professional lives (c6). discussion cebulka’s users craft their identities based on the distinctions outlined, viewing themselves as an elite cohort within the drug user community. this perception manifests in their communication regarding product quality and brand development and in a subjective feeling of superiority and distinction from the average drug user. this observation has significant implications for various interconnected areas. the article illustrates that the identities of individuals engaged in trade on the darknet are shaped collectively. hence, social identity theory is pivotal in understanding the behavior and interactions of individuals on platforms like cebulka (flanagin et al., 2014). additionally, theories of performance play a crucial role in explaining the formation of these identities (talbot et al., 2022), emphasizing how users of these specific sites construct their digital personas. unlike many studies that suggest a direct translation of offline identities to online (hatef, 2022; huynh et al., 2013), this research indicates a complex interaction between digital and ‘real-life’ personas or even a separation, rather than a straightforward connection. this study aims to bridge the research gap highlighted in the introduction. as such, it endeavors to unravel the complexities of drug trading within the darknet context, contrasting it with conventional trading methods and more accessible platforms on the clear web. this investigation is also crucial for understanding the broader subculture of drug users, suggesting that individuals active on the dark web might forge distinct identifications and identities. this paper sheds new light on symbolic boundaries among drug users (copes, 2016), and also disrupts the traditional view of drug traders class background (berger et al., 2023). such insights could significantly influence efforts in harm reduction and the development of prevention policies. data availability the data underlying this article are available on zenodo under the following dois: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10810939, https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.25398268.v1. funding the present research was supported by the polish national science centre (narodowe centrum nauki) grant 2021/43/b/hs6/00710. references aldridge, j., & décary-hétu, d. (2016). cryptomarkets and the future of illicit drug markets. in the internet and drug markets (pp. 23–32). http://daviddhetu.openum.ca/files/sites/39/2018/12/future.pdf bancroft, a. (2017). responsible use to responsible harm: illicit drug use and peer harm reduction in a darknet cryptomarket. health, risk & society, 19(7–8), 336–350. https://doi.org/10.1080/13698575.2017.1415304 berger, e. j., pedersen, w., & sandberg, s. (2023). pathways to drug dealing in the middle and upper classes: early marginalization, relative disadvantage and countercultural opposition. the british journal of criminology, 63(4), 889–905. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azac063 berkelaar, b. l. (2017). how implicit theories help differentiate approaches to online impression management: a preliminary typology. new media & society, 19(12), 2039– 2058. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816654136 coomber, r. (2003). there’s no such thing as a free lunch: how “freebies” and “credit” operate as part of rational drug market activity. journal of drug issues, 33(4), 939–962. https://doi.org/10.1177/002204260303300408 copes, h. (2016). a narrative approach to studying symbolic boundaries among drug users: a qualitative meta-synthesis. crime, media, culture, 12(2), 193–213. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659016641720 dolliver, d. s., & kuhns, j. b. (2016). the presence of new psychoactive substances in a tor network marketplace environment. journal of psychoactive drugs, 48(5), 321– 329. https://doi.org/10.1080/02791072.2016.1229877 flanagin, a. j., hocevar, k. p., & samahito, s. n. (2014). connecting with the usergenerated web: how group identification impacts online information sharing and evaluation. information, communication & society, 17(6), 683–694. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2013.808361 gehl, r. w. (2018). weaving the dark web: legitimacy on freenet, tor, and i2p. mit press. grimani, a., gavine, a., & moncur, w. (2020). an evidence synthesis of strategies, enablers and barriers for keeping secrets online regarding the procurement and supply of illicit drugs. international journal of drug policy, 75, 102621. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2019.102621 harviainen, j. t., haasio, a., & hämäläinen, l. (2020). drug traders on a local dark web marketplace. proceedings of the 23rd international conference on academic mindtrek, 20–26. https://doi.org/10.1145/3377290.3377293 hatef, a. (2022). “the facebook is a state of roma”: negotiating identities, building communities, and belongingness online among roma in the czech republic. new media & society, 24(2), 328–344. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211063174 holt, t. j., smirnova, o., & hutchings, a. (2016). examining signals of trust in criminal markets online. journal of cybersecurity, 2(2), 137–145. https://doi.org/10.1093/cybsec/tyw007 hsieh, h.-f., & shannon, s. e. (2005). three approaches to qualitative content analysis. qualitative health research, 15(9), 1277–1288. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732305276687 huynh, k.-p., lim, s.-w., & skoric, m. m. (2013). stepping out of the magic circle: regulation of play/life boundary in mmo-mediated romantic relationship. journal of computer-mediated communication, 18(3), 251–264. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12011 morelato, m., medeiros bozic, s., rhumorbarbe, d., broséus, j., staehli, l., esseiva, p., roux, c., & rossy, q. (2020). an insight into the sale of prescription drugs and medicine on the alphabay cryptomarket. journal of drug issues, 50(1), 15–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022042619872955 nurmi, j., kaskela, t., perälä, j., & oksanen, a. (2017). seller’s reputation and capacity on the illicit drug markets: 11-month study on the finnish version of the silk road. drug and alcohol dependence, 178, 201–207. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2017.05.018 sandberg, s. (2013). cannabis culture: a stable subculture in a changing world. criminology & criminal justice, 13(1), 63–79. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895812445620 sudan, h. k., tai, a. m. y., kim, j., & krausz, r. m. (2023). decrypting the cryptomarkets: trends over a decade of the dark web drug trade. drug science, policy and law, 9, 20503245231215668. https://doi.org/10.1177/20503245231215668 talbot, c. v., talbot, a., roe, d. j., & briggs, p. (2022). the management of lgbtq+ identities on social media: a student perspective. new media & society, 24(8), 1729– 1750. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820981009 tzanetakis, m., & south, n. (2023). introduction: the digital transformations of illicit drug markets as a process of reconfiguration and continuity. in m. tzanetakis & n. south (eds.), digital transformations of illicit drug markets: reconfiguration and continuity (pp. 1–12). emerald publishing limited. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80043866-820231001 tzvetkova, m., pardal, m., disley, e., rena, a., talic, s., & forberger, s. (2016). strategies for a risky business: how drug dealers manage customers, suppliers and competitors in italy, slovenia and germany. international journal of drug policy, 31, 90–98. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2016.04.012 wanke, m., piejko-płonka, m., & deutschmann, m. (2022). social worlds and symbolic boundaries of cannabis users in poland. drugs: education, prevention and policy, 0(0), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687637.2022.2046706 wessels, b. (2012). identification and the practices of identity and privacy in everyday digital communication. new media & society, 14(8), 1251–1268. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444812450679 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): perrig, l. (2024, october). ready to hack: how bug bounty platforms create their workforce. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ready to hack: how bug bounty platforms create their workforce luca perrig university of st.gallen the industry our increasingly digitized economy has seen a recent surge in cyberattacks. most notable a wave of ransomware attacks has targeted organizations of all sizes, and studies estimate the number of attacks is ranging in the hundreds of millions per year worldwide.1 governments are getting increasingly worried about the vulnerability of a networked industry and are actively seeking remedies to secure the economy. at the heart of the problem is the detection of vulnerabilities. information systems are riddled with vulnerabilities that are only waiting to be exploited (schneier, 2018). organizations however have few incentives to invest in information security. several measures are thus pushed in order to promote incentives for a secure networked economy. among them is the development of cyberinsurance and international standards in the hope of incentivizing cyber hygiene measures. estimating cyber risks is however a difficult endeavor and such an insurance scheme still has trouble developing (wolff, 2022). another novel solution comes from bug bounty programs. these are “arrangements between organizations and individual security researchers to trade vulnerabilities as products” (zrahia, 2024). an organization willing to reinforce its security can thus publicly declare its willingness to pay for the disclosure of a vulnerability and expect hackers to spend time looking for vulnerabilities on its systems in exchange for a reward. this commodification of vulnerabilities has been growing in recent years, and it is widely acknowledged as a successful mechanism for vulnerability detection (bozzini, 2023). 1 see sonicwall (2024) “cyber threat report”, p.6. url: https://www.sonicwall.com/medialibrary/en/white-paper/2024-cyber-threat-report.pdf (accessed 1 march 2024). https://www.sonicwall.com/medialibrary/en/white-paper/2024-cyber-threat-report.pdf promoting such bug bounty programs has thus become a legitimate policy measure (zrahia, 2024). indeed, such programs not only contribute to securing the economy, they are also considered an efficient way to channel potential young criminals into a legitimate career as information security researcher (follis & fish, 2020), as well as a way to stifle the development of a black market for offensive zero-days (perlroth, 2021). for this reason, institutionalizing ethical hacking has increasingly been listed among the national cyberstrategies of states worldwide.2 platformization the bug bounty industry is particularly prone to the development of labor platforms. they indeed have the advantage of making programs visible, of handling the transactions, as well as ensuring the compliance of hackers. in some sense, they are thus akin to traditional platforms of the gig economy (ellis & stevens, 2022). they also share a business model that relies on charging a fee on each transaction. they thus have an incentive in stimulating the market that they are enabling. in contrast to usual platforms of the gig economy however, bug bounty platforms cannot tap on an already existing workforce (goerzen & coleman, 2022). indeed, the hacker community can hardly be considered a workforce, in the sense that it is composed of self-taught hackers with varying skills in a wide range of different domains. bug bounty platforms thus have to create a labor supply. such an endeavor however does not come without hurdles, and this paper discusses the measures that platform managers must take in order to secure a loyal workforce. the building of a workforce the paper will discuss four ways in which bug bounty platforms seek to build a competent and sufficient workforce. the first measure is to train young offensive security researchers. hacking is notorious for being self-taught. while there exist higher-education training in information security, it is seldom focused on offensive security. moreover, platforms rely on workers that are not yet committed in a career path, but rather willing to earn a little money on the side or expecting some intellectual challenge (akgul, 2023). for this reason, platforms will develop sophisticated online training programs and hold events in order to ensure a skilled workforce. hack-the-box exercices, ctf contests, and video tutorials are among the prominent educational tools that platforms provide. second, for pedagogical purposes, offensive security practices must be standardized. for this purpose, precise routines are established, that rely on specific software. among the educational material online, the content is remarkably homogeneous across platforms. ethical hacking is made accessible by providing a list of precise instructions for vulnerability detection. this ensures that a large crowd of hackers have entry-level capabilities in order to identify the lower-stakes bugs. 2 for the swiss case, see federal council (2023) “national cyberstrategy”, p. 20. url: https://www.newsd.admin.ch/newsd/message/attachments/76796.pdf (accessed 1 march 2024). https://www.newsd.admin.ch/newsd/message/attachments/76796.pdf third, bug bounty platforms must ensure competition among hackers. designing a scheme that favors competition is a necessary requirement in building a labor market. implementing rankings and gamifying work are among the platforms’ preferred ways to ensure workers’ consent (velthuis & van doorn, 2020; vasudevan & chan, 2022). in the case of bug bounty however, ranking vulnerabilities is an additional hurdle. indeed, in order to put a reward on a vulnerability, platforms must agree on some way to commensurate vulnerabilities. while standards exist to measure the criticality of a vulnerability, attempts at estimating the labor required to find one is still missing. the risk in mispricing vulnerabilities is that bug hunters lack incentives to find the more subtle ones and flock towards the most obvious ones. the fourth and last observed measure is institutional backing. by securing alliances with already established organizations, bug bounty platforms can benefit from a convergence of interest from the industry, the army, or higher education institutions. bug bounty platforms thus serve not only to secure information systems, but also as a steppingstone to a professional career, an enlistment to a cyber army unit, or a formal training. bug bounty conferences thus benefit from the ethos of hacker conferences and attract young hackers but often serve at the same time as recruitment events for very legitimate careers (coleman, 2010). bug bounty platforms thus display a prime example of the building of a labor market. the supply of workers in this case does not pre-exist the arrival of platforms. instead, they must actively work to establish standards, routines, and measurements so that workers are equipped to answer a growing demand. data the paper draws from an ongoing fieldwork in the offensive information security industry in switzerland. it relies on interviews with all sides of the market: bug hunters, platform managers, and chief information security officers (cisos) from partner organizations. in addition to these interviews, the fieldwork consists of a participant observation of the training of aspiring ethical hackers. it takes place online (forums and chatrooms) as well as offline (hacker events and conferences). references akgul, omer, taha eghtesad, amit elazari, omprakash gnawali, jens grossklags, michelle l. mazurek, daniel votipka, and aron laszka. 2023. “bug hunters’ perspectives on the challenges and benefits of the bug bounty ecosystem.” in 32nd usenix security symposium (usenix security 23), 2275–91. anaheim, ca: usenix association. bozzini, david. 2023. “how vulnerabilities became commodities. the political economy of ethical hacking (1990-2020).” https://hal.science/hal-04068476. ellis, ryan, and yuan stevens. 2022. bounty everything: hackers and the making of the global bug marketplace. data & society. https://hal.science/hal-04068476 follis, luca, and adam fish. 2020. hacker states. the information society series. cambridge, ma: the mit press. goerzen, matt, and gabriella coleman. 2022. wearing many hats: the rise of the professional security hacker. data & society. schneier, bruce. 2018. click here to kill everybody: security and survival in a hyperconnected world. new york ; london: w.w. norton & company. vasudevan, krishnan, and ngai keung chan. 2022. “gamification and work games: examining consent and resistance among uber drivers.” new media & society 24 (4): 866–86. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221079028. velthuis, olav, and niels van doorn. 2020. “weathering winner-take-all.” in the performance complex: competition and competitions in social life, edited by david stark, 167–84. oxford: oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198861669.003.0008. wolff, josephine. 2022. cyberinsurance policy: rethinking risk in an age of ransomware, computer fraud, data breaches, and cyberattacks. information policy series. cambridge, ma: the mit press. zrahia, aviram. 2024. “navigating vulnerability markets and bug bounty programs: a public policy perspective.” internet policy review 13 (1). https://doi.org/10.14763/2024.1.1740. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221079028 https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198861669.003.0008 https://doi.org/10.14763/2024.1.1740 selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): coulter, n., digiacomo, d., ellerbe, b., and willett, r. (2021, october). the legitimatization of young people’s digital media practices within neoliberal contexts and ecologies. panel presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the legitimatization of young people’s digital media practices within neoliberal contexts and ecologies natalie coulter york university daniela k. digiacomo university of kentucky briana l. ellerbe university of southern california rebekah willett university of wisconsin-madison introductory statement this panel focuses on different ways that practices of children, youth, and families are legitimatized (and deligitimatized) in market places, schools, and homes in the context of national and global events and politics of the late 2010s and early 2020s. paper 1 by natalie coulter focuses on children’s online creative labor and examines the constructions of the child in the neoliberal economy of digital capitalism. paper 2 by daniela k. digiacomo focuses on civic actions of youth by asking how young people themselves think about what it means to be civically engaged and/or media literate with implications for ways educators might reconsider how best to support students. paper 3 by briana l. ellerbe explores the act of “dreaming” among black millennial parents, examining ways dreams are ideologically, interpersonally, and culturally cultivated, as well as the ways in which mediated content can influence dreams and play a role in working toward dreams. paper 4 by rebekah willett examines ways parents accept, resist, or negotiate popular discourses around parenting and screen media before and during the covid-19 pandemic, revealing parents’ constant effort to maintain family stability as they make decisions and guide their children’s screen media practices. together, the four papers reveal ways that children, youth, and families are positioned in polarized and sometimes conflicting ways, and ways that particular practices are recognized and condoned, while others are subject to intense scrutiny. paper 1 digital entanglements in digital ecologies: rethinking children’s creative labour through a child studies lens natalie coulter york university there are radical shifts taking place in the production ecologies of children’s media as young people’s creative digital labour is becoming increasingly entangled with the promotional activities of the children’s media and entertainment industry. children’s media and entertainment companies increasingly see children as “product evangelizers” and “pint-sized marketers” for their intellectual properties. the experiences of young people in the neoliberal economy of digital capitalism are fast changing as influencers, microcelebrities, and fan communities are all engaged in the narratives, circulations, and promotions of intellectual properties despite these major shifts, there has been very little attention given by academics to the creative work of young people in the marketing and promotion of the intellectual properties of children’s media. and further, there is little research that integrates the marketing and merchandising of these media products (or ips) in the neoliberal economies of digital capitalism, the visibility economy and the surveillance economy. building on crystal abidin’s (2016) work on social media influencers as entangled in the of commerce, i explore how young people are “entangled” in the production ecologies of digital and promotional spaces. using the theoretical lens of child studies, i suggest that we that we need to rethink how both the labour and play of young people is “entangled in the ecologies of commerce” of the children’s media industry. the starting point of this paper is to explore the ontological question of what is a child in this space where the categories of labour and play for children are shifting dramatically. i turn to jenks (2005) foundational question, “how is the child possible as such?” to frame the basis of my work. in the context of these new digital entanglements of young people and the promotional spaces of the digital, i ask the ontological questions what is a child and what does this framing of a child reveal about digital culture. i am interested in how the child is “made possible as such” in the promotional entanglements of digital capitalism that extract value from the childs’ creative labour. arguably, the discursive divisions between childhood, play and labour is shifting ground in digital culture. this paper draws upon zelizer’s foundational work pricing the priceless child (1994) which traces the framing of a child in the 19th century as worker/labourer to the 20th century as sacred/consumer, concluding that cultural definitions of the child are shaped by the economic logics and demands of capitalism. cook draws similar conclusions and illustrates that the child is defined by the commercial epistemologies in which the industries (i.e., market research) that attempt to “know” children define and construct cultural categories of childhood according to the logics of the marketplace (2019). yet, there is no current research that addresses the child as labourer/consumer in the contemporary digital marketplace. while zelizer and cook outline the institutional structures and practices that shape the definitions of the child and children’s lives, other scholars in the field remind us that children are not passive subjects merely influenced or affected by social institutions. they are agentive social actors who engage in meaning-making practices (jenks 2005). nor is digital media separate from children’s lives; it is embedded within the practices and experiences of life as a 21st century child. children are social actors and are part of culture, not a precursor to culture. children are actively engaged with digital media as they consume, use, resist, negotiate, produce, respond to, and are influenced by media as part of their daily lived experiences. returning to jenks question “how is the child possible as such” and by using cook and zelizer’s argument that the child that is possible is shaped by the political economic forces of the workings of capitalism, i explore how the child is possible in the context of the contemporary neoliberal marketplace and digital capitalism, as companies like insight kids entangle young people into the promotional ecologies of children’s media. references abidin, c. (2015). micromicrocelebrity: branding babies on the internet. m/c journal, 18 (5). chumsky, s. 2017. fuelling fandom among today’s kids. kidscreen. april 7 2017. cook, d. t. (2019). children’s market researchers as moral brokers. journal of cultural economy. 12 (1), 70-82. jenks, c. (2005). childhood. new york, routledge. paper 2 centering youth voices in civic engagement school-change efforts: a case study from southern california daniela k. digiacomo university of kentucky two decades into the 21st century, there is widespread dissatisfaction on both left and right with the state of our democracy (foa & mounk, 2017). to cite just two examples, in a 2017 survey by the pew research center, just 20 percent of americans said they trust the government to do what is right for them always or most of the time, and only about one-third of younger adults said they are optimistic about the nation’s future. when a government that aims and claims to be of the people, by the people, and for the people is only trusted by 20 percent of the people, something significant is wrong. these problems extend beyond formal government. many, for example, worry about the deep divisions and isolation that often characterizes those who hold differing views on contentious issues and about the incivility that often arises in the discussions across difference that do occur. divides and sizable inequities tied to race, class, and multiple forms of diversity reflect our distance from many core ideals and from an overarching sense of common purpose. coupled with this, the challenge of becoming an informed participant, of determining, for example, the accuracy of claims about political issues on the internet and more broadly has also become apparent-for adults, youth, and children alike. undoubtedly, these and related problems have multiple roots and will require a range of responses, but school-based civic learning opportunities can still make a fundamentally important contribution. studies have found that a variety of civic learning opportunities, delivered both in and out of school, can foster greater and more informed civic and political engagement (e.g. kahne & sporte, 2008). however, how do our young people themselves think about what it means to be civically engaged and/or media literate in 2019? in this particular political moment, when the institution of democracy itself has been called into question both domestically and at the global scale, how do american public school students in an ideologically diverse district think about how to participate in our democracy? and for our young people, what does ‘democracy’ even mean? and what, if any, digital media do they use to participate as civic actors? informed by a commitment to including students as key stakeholders in decisions that impact their lives, this study examined how students conceptualize civic learning in today’s digital age. the analysis that drives this study draws from a multi-year research-practice partnership effort (penuel & gallagher, 2017) that aimed to construct and assess an evidence-based district-wide strategy for promoting the democratic purposes of education. data for this particular analysis includes a large scale civic engagement and media literacy survey of middle school youth over two years (n= ~3,000 middle school students each year from 7 middle schools) and focus groups with middle and high school students (n=5). thematic analysis of student survey and focus group data suggest a number of key challenges/tensions: ● students articulate wanting more frequent and deeper classroom based opportunities to talk about current and controversial issues; ● students conduct most of their research online, but report very infrequent opportunities to learn about how to discern credible information from false information, as well as infrequent opportunity to learn how to discuss issues online; ● (if and when) students encounter news, they predominantly get their news from social media even though they recognize that their sources may not always be credible; ● students articulate a community-based orientation toward civic engagement- that is, they often associated “civics” with knowing how their own community works or knowing about issues that affect them and their community; ● students’ experiences of civic learning largely depends on their teacher, as well as particular classroom peer-to-peer dynamics. attention to these lived realities and expressed tensions is essential, if educators are to successfully support students in becoming the type of civic actors they wish to be. it takes only a glance at the news to know these are challenging times for our country, as well as for the world at large. partisan divides as well as divides related to race and class often make the ideal of e pluribus unum harder and harder to pursue. moreover, those who hold differing views on issues don’t just disagree about policies, they frequently disagree when it comes to basic facts. due to these and a host of related concerns, trust in public institutions (i.e. government, the press, the police, etc.) and in the country’s ability to productively address its challenges has been greatly diminished. if these are challenging times for our democracy in general, they are even more challenging times for youth and particularly youth with few economic resources. if, as a society, we are ever to realize the promise of our democratic institutions, it is vitally important that all youth are prepared for active and informed engagement in civic and political life-both on and offline-at the national, state, and community levels. and although many young people are actively engaged civically and politically, still many are not. we can do better and amplifying the voices of youth themselves can help. the analysis put forth by this study will contribute to contemporary school-change conversations on how and through what lens(es) we should be thinking about civic engagement and media literacy learning opportunities for our young people. references foa, r. s. & mounk, y. (2017). the signs of deconsolidation. journal of democracy, 28(1), 5-15. kahne, j. & sporte, s. (2008). developing citizens: the impact of civic learning opportunities on students' commitment to civic participation. american educational research journal, 45, (3). penuel, w. r. & gallagher, d. j. (2017). creating research practice partnerships in education. harvard education press: cambridge, ma. paper 3 constructing dreams: narrative “dreaming” ecologies of black millennial parents briana l. ellerbe university of southern california in american culture and discourse, we are often prompted to dream, to hope, and to construct particular visions of our futures and what they could or should contain. the tension lies, however, in whether dreaming is a collective act, individual act, or something in between. for example, in the united states neoliberal context, the pursuit of dreams is often linked with individualized success, and in turn, high educational achievement. however, this narrative is also met with a dominant narrative of lowincome children, often in urban areas, struggling with perpetual low achievement in school (perry, steele, & hillard, 2003). as argued by critical race scholars, post-racial ideology and meritocratic thinking exacerbate negative perceptions of the populations who do not achieve high academic, economic, and social “success,” as well as stereotypical and often racist rationales about why this occurs (i.e., laziness, low intelligence, or dysfunctional family structures). black populations, however, have also historically looked at education as a key to achievement from a different epistemological standpoint (perry, steele, & hillard, 2003). while educational success often means the achievement of a dream, such as career success, perry, steele, and hillard (2003) give several examples of black populations viewing education as a tool for collective liberation, humanity, and uplift. learning was the way that “you asserted yourself as a free person, how you claimed your humanity. you pursued learning so you could work for the racial uplift, for the liberation of your people. you pursued education so you could prepare yourself to lead your people” (perry, steele, & hillard, 2003, p. 11). here, in opposition to the hyper-competitive narratives often tied to the american education system, education is viewed not as an individual act, but as a collective act of resistance. education was not only seen as a stepping stone toward a career, but as a subversive act toward liberation. another tension of dreaming lies within its imaginative and place-based existence. though dreams are illustrated as ideas bound only by the limits of one’s cerebral imaginations, they are both influenced by and have implications for geographic places. place can majorly influence the identity formation and the daily lives of those living there. place also has the potential to influence place-based pride, civic engagement, and a sense of whether or not residents would like to have a long-term future there. however, geographical places have embedded socio-historical characteristics which are often plagued with inequity. soja (2010) posits that “the spatiality of (in)justice...affects society and social life just as much as social processes shape the spatiality or specific geography of (in)justice” (soja, 2010, p. 5). for physical places challenged with embedded injustice, it is possible that residents’ dreams are influenced by and negotiated through place narratives, family narratives, and even narratives within mass media. positive perspectives of modern children’s media flaunt it as potential tools for both entertainment and education. in addition to educational potential, the tropes of dreams, belief, and imagination are quite common in children’s media content with the intent of being motivational and promoting resilience. however, thomas (2019), in reminiscing about the cinderella lyrics that assured her that her dreams could come true simply through persistent believing, writes that her mother cautioned her that in the context of her detroit, working-class, black female body, magic could not exist for her. she claims that cinderella’s “promise...was obscured by the real conditions of [her] existence as a young black woman in early twenty-first century america” (thomas, 2019, p. 2). leseur also (1995) posits that in the german bildungsroman literary tradition, dreams are often tied to physical places, and that these dreams are typically realized in a place different from the dreamer’s origin, calling into question the ways in which dreams might involve long-term investment in a place, or eventual migration away from it. given the intertwining, often competing narratives and realities tied to race, gender, socioeconomic status, and place that can potentially influence what people’s dreams consist of, this research explores the act of “dreaming” among black millennial parents of children between the ages of 1-13. through thematically analyzed, in-depth interviews with 15 black millennial parents in various parts of the united states, this project delves into reflections on their childhood dreams as they intertwined with their lived realities, as well as dreams that they have for their own children. this research builds theoretically on communication infrastructure theory’s concept of the storytelling neighborhood, which suggests that active and dynamic storytelling systems (which include nodes such as residents, community organizations, and media) within geographic neighborhoods can influence the sense of belonging in the neighborhood, in turn influence factors such as civic engagement, collaboration, and community investment there (ball-rokeach, kim, & matei, 2001). it also builds upon research in the field of the learning sciences that take into account the situated contexts in which children and families view media, bringing children’s media research into the sociological factors of society that shape the home. this work contributes an interdisciplinary perspective on the ways in which dreams are ideologically, interpersonally, and culturally cultivated, as well as the ways in which mediated content can influence dreams and play a role in working toward dreams. this research delves into questions on parent perceptions of the utility and purpose of media and education, explores tensions between individualism and collectivism, and finally between placebased civic engagement or dreams of migration. finally, this work encourages consideration for the ways in which not only sociology, place, and media interact with one another, but considerations for the creation of content for children and families. references ball-rokeach, s. j., kim, y.-c. & matei, s. (2001). storytelling neighborhood: paths to belonging in diverse urban environments. communication research, 28 (4), 392-428. leseur, geta j. (1995). ten is the age of darkness: the black bildungsroman. university of missouri press. soja, e. w. (2010). seeking spatial justice. university of minnesota press. thomas, e.e. (2019). the dark fantastic: race and the imagination from harry potter to the hunger games. nyu press. paper 4 “i feel like i'm way stricter when it comes to screen time and television”: parents’ negotiation of discursive fields surrounding children and screen media rebekah willett university of wisconsin-madison domestic settings have been the site of tensions around screen media practices since at least the 1950s, when rapid social changes coincided with nearly two-thirds of families in the us acquiring televisions. as television solidified its role as a dominant medium in the us and uk, the struggle to maintain control over the amount of time children spent in front of the screen intensified. from 1949 onwards numerous groups in the us aimed to influence government policy whilst providing parents with advice about why and how to regulate children’s television viewing. in contrast with commercial television programs, educational shows such as sesame street (1969 – present) and the bbc’s look and read (1967 – 2004) were constructed as high quality alternatives, keeping with perceptions of ‘good parenting’ as limiting commercial content and attending to children’s education within the home. as television choices proliferated, families in the us and uk increasingly invested in computers, and later in internet access and mobile technologies. similar to television and computers, the internet is positioned in popular discourse as both offering opportunities and risks to children; and perceptions of good parenting, therefore, align with strict monitoring and regulation of children’s internet practices. significantly, however, parents’ regulation of children’s television viewing worked hand-in-hand with government and industry regulations. the same cannot be said of children’s internet practices. with widespread access to the internet in domestic settings came government attempts to produce regulations to protect children online. fraught with limitations by government regulations coupled with changes in children’s media landscapes, more responsibility has been put on parents to be the primary regulators of children’s internet practices rather than government or industry (montgomery et al 2017). parents are told they must set rules, install controls, play with their children online, have conversations so as to mediate their children’s understanding of online environments, and so on. these devolved regulatory structures put pressure on parents, create hierarchies in terms of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ parenting, fly in the face of everyday realities of family life, and undermine children’s freedom and privacy. in essence, parents have to choose between empowering and protecting their children through restrictive measures (blum-ross & livingstone 2018). in this complex landscape, parents are making decisions about family media practices in relation to individual family values, children’s needs and desires, and domestic routines. this paper highlights the complexities of these decision-making processes by analyzing interviews with parents in different geographical areas of the us, including rural, urban, and suburban areas, about their domestic screen media practices, focusing specifically on families with children aged 5 to 11. the paper summarizes findings from two studies: one completed before the covid-19 pandemic and one completed during the pandemic. using thematic analysis informed by grounded theory, the analyses identified emerging themes across 51 parent interviews before covid-19 and 18 parent interviews during the pandemic. the analyses draw on giddens’ (1991) notion of ‘ontological security’ to reveal ways that households create narratives to sustain a sense of their own stability within the microcultures of their domestic space. simultaneously, households are being positioned by broader cultural discourses. as outlined above, neoliberal discourses define ‘good parenting’ and legitimatize particular practices related to children and screen media. the analyses reveal ways that parents accept, resist, or negotiate popular discourses around parenting and screen media. parents are keenly aware of discourses which position children as at risk of various ills connected with screen media without heavy parent intervention. this discourse is evident in the oft-cited ‘2 by 2 rule’ created by the american academy of pediatrics in 1999 (no screentime for children under age two, limit to two hours per day for older children), and many parents express anxiety when reconciling this discourse with the realities of their family practices. however, for the most part, parents in interviews whose practices do not align with popular discourse felt able to defend decisions they made for their families. parents turn to their values to explain their family media practices, and in doing so they indicate resistance to those discourses that are legitimatizing particular practices. this process of defining individual family values and aligning them with their screen media practices are part of parents’ efforts to maintain ontological security. in interviews, parents placed value on understanding their individual children’s needs in relation to screen media, and they indicated ways their children’s needs varied; for example, according to age, gender, interests, (dis)abilities, and temperament. parents described different factors and contexts related to their family’s unique practices; for example, the family’s ethnicity, parents’ work schedules, children spending time with exhusbands, isolated rural location, home schooling, and ties to a church. in essence, parents described the microcultures of their households and ways that these impact on their negotiations within the discursive field surrounding parenting and screen media. importantly, parents’ efforts to maintain family stability by turning to their values gave them confidence in their ability to make decisions and guide their children’s screen media practices, even when those practices did not align with ones that are legitimatized in popular discourse. however, it is clear that some parents are not in a position to openly resist these discourses, and others have to do more ‘work’ to create routines that are legitimate for their families. references blum-ross, a. and livingstone, s. (2018). the trouble with “screen time” rules. in g. mascheroni, c. ponte and a. jorge (eds.) digital parenting. the challenges for families in the digital age (pp.179-187). göteborg: nordicom. giddens, a. (1998). the third way. cambridge: polity montgomery, k. c., chester, j., & milosevic, t. (2017). ensuring young people’s digital privacy as a fundamental right. in b. s. de abreu, p. mihailidis, a.y.l. lee, j. melki, and j. mcdougall (eds.) international handbook of media literacy education. routledge. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): pilipets, e, caldeira, sp, flores, am (2024, october). “want boyfriend ❌❌❌”: porn bots, authenticity and social automation on instagram. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “want boyfriend ❌❌❌”: porn bots, authenticity and social automation on instagram elena pilipets university of siegen sofia p. caldeira lusófona university ana marta m. flores nova university of lisbon whenever a celebrity posts a photo on instagram, it is almost inevitable that the first comment on it will be made by a porn bot (alvarez 2020). observations of this kind – some focusing on the distorted perception of ‘sexiness’ and social media authenticity (thing 2020; salim 2023), others contesting instagram’s community guidelines prohibiting both nudity and automation (santos 2023) – have been ubiquitous in online tech reports for years. in academic discussions, scholars usually define porn bots as automated or semi-automated software agents that operate via sexual solicitation to capture attention (narrang 2019). twitter porn bots using not safe for work (nsfw) hashtags to advertise commercial links have been addressed in their generic patterns (paasonen, jarrett, and light 2019). tumblr porn bots have generated significant controversy due to their uninterrupted operation during the platform’s so-called ‘porn ban’ (pilipets and paasonen 2020). within instagram, as we will show, porn bots continuously intervene in a network of relationships that users forge with the platform, avoiding detection through a range of circumvention tactics. in all these instances, porn bots operate as medium-specific, heterosexually scripted ‘personas’ (bucher 2014), demonstrating remarkable adaptability to the platforms’ current cultures of use. what constitutes a porn bot ‘persona’? this contribution explores the platform-specific design of such ‘personas’ as it registers in the bot-exploited ‘instagrammatics’ (highfield and leaver 2016) of identity performance, social amplification, and attention capture. we argue that a bot programmed to operate with sexual content to generate attention derives its agency from the paradoxical blend of pornographic ‘imagination’ and social media ‘authenticity’. akin to the scripted dynamics known from commercial culture and reality television, authentic engagement on instagram often involves sexualized identity play in tandem with a self-promotional attitude attached to the cultivation of ‘instafame’ (marwick, 2015). like their twitter counterparts, instagram porn bots display authenticity by blending rigid standards of attractiveness with a strategic emphasis on communitybuilding routines (assenmacher et al. 2020). in terms of self-presentation, they reflect the ‘ready-made conventions of character, setting, and action’, which susan sontag described in her 1967 essay on ‘the pornographic imagination’. in operational terms, comments on posts, likes in stories, tags in reels, direct messages, follower-following relations, and disguised links in profile bios present bot operators with multiple opportunities to work with and around platform affordances and constraints (bucher and helmond 2018). ongoing enhancements in meta’s policies (2023) continuously transform the operational landscape for both social automation and sexual solicitation. in turn, bot operators face the challenge of adjusting the accounts’ functions, altering the ways in which porn bot agency registers in different contexts. against this background, the question becomes key: how would a plural conceptualization of porn bot agency operate if we shifted our attention to the situations through which bots become agents? methods: situations and relations methodologically, we expand our focus from studying the situations of porn bots ‘in action’ to the platform environments and artifacts that make such situations possible (marres 2020; guilbeault 2017). for our analysis, we manually identified thirty porn bot accounts spamming in the comment sections of highly visible instagram posts (those published by justin bieber in june 2022) (figure 1). we then scraped associated metadata – bot profile names and pictures (n=30), bot comments (n=30) and comment likers (n=1297), bot followers (n=15729) and followings (n=4550), bot profile posts (n=150), and links in profile bio (n=28). the research affordances (weltevrede, 2016) of these metadata derive from the situations that porn bots are designed to be part of and that come with certain api-based (application programming interface) access restrictions but also with some analytical possibilities. in our project, we examine amplified comments, analyze follower-following relations using network analysis, visually explore bot content, and trace the click trajectories of links in the bots’ bios. identity performance, social amplification, attention capture our analysis shows how porn bots intertwine common strategies of digital amplification, heteronormative sexual scripts, and social automation, focusing on three interconnected layers of porn bot agency. first, we reflect on bots’ strategies of identity performance and gendered representation, contextualizing them within instagram’s ongoing tendency towards deplatformisation of sex (molldrem 2018; tiidenberg and van der nagel 2020). we then connect these findings to how bots exploit instagram-native ideas of authenticity and visibility (leaver, highfield, and abidin 2019) by exploring the dynamics of following and being followed along with the adoption of automated ‘likers’ that push porn bots’ comments to the top (figure 1). the utilization of comments like 'want boyfriend ❌❌❌!!‘ posted by clmn_veronica_ and liked by rairebefitsehardbloodliecrit, faecarrrorosibibsouffhenrand and hundreds of others indicates an instant but, from a platform moderation standpoint, seemingly insignificant rise in porn bot visibility. at the same time, it also elevates the fleeting nature of interactions studied: bot accounts associated with other bot accounts appear as quickly as they disappear, resulting in the contrast between initially visible and remaining engagements available for scraping. figure 1: screenshot of justin bieber’s post from june 2022 the interplay of these qualities in the construction of a porn bot ‘persona’ is fueled by the simultaneous de-stabilization and reproduction of instagram-specific habitats, such as displaying popularity scores (guilbeault 2016). as with other mechanisms of relational design, bot profiles can be understood not only in terms of their immediate appearance but as contingent upon the engaging potential of user communities populating the platform. their authenticity is maintained through ongoing management of social relations: follower (and like) metrics not only facilitate the procedural display of connections but also shape conditions for authentication of what counts as a ‘good’ or ‘genuine’ enough profile (lindquist and weltevrede 2024). finally, by tracing the click trajectories of fraudulent dating sites and their pornographic pre-lander pages, we reflect on the heterosexually programmed characteristics of the ‘attention spam’ (lee et al. 2012) initiated by the links in bot profile bios. here, the heteronormative excess of ‘mildly sexualized’ female instagram profiles plays into the realm of ‘pornographic peekaboo’ (paasonen, jarrett, and light 2019, p. 52) in which explicit sexual displays are perpetually ‘one click away’, simultaneously visible and hidden. in the instagram-mediated situation of spamming justin bieber’s comment sections, porn bot comments sprinkled with emojis and amplified through automated likes were intended to make users curious enough to look at the profiles and click on the links. outside of this realm, spammy pornographic pre-landers present an intervention in the control networks of instagram, relocating the hypothetical audience from the center of a space that typically avoids adult content to its periphery. our findings (pilipets, caldeira, and flores 2024) point to how porn bots perform authenticity within a regulated system, in which platform policies stigmatize and valorize engagement, particularly around sexually suggestive content (tiidenberg and van der nagel 2020). we show that—by ‘attuning’ their appearance to instagram’s vision of ‘acceptable’ engagement—porn bots reveal this system’s double standards (are and paasonen 2021). on the one hand, instagram’s terms of service prescribed by meta (2023) manifest increasingly sex-averse community guidelines in the name of safety (mcdowell and tiidenberg 2023). on the other hand, the unequal governance of user cultures paradoxically allows porn bots to reproduce normative visions of sexuality that continue to thrive on the platform, often at the expense of marginalised communities (are and briggs 2023). references alvarez, edgar. 2020. “what the hell is going on in instagram comments.” input. march 20. https://www.inverse.com/input/features/instagram-comments-bots-porn-scamscelebrities. are, carolina and susanna paasonen. 2021. sex in the shadows of celebrity. porn studies 8(4): 411-419. are, carolina and pam briggs. 2023. the emotional and financial impact of deplatforming on creators at the margins. social media + society. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231155103. assenmacher, dennis et al. 2020. demystifying social bots: on the intelligence of automated social media actors. social media + society 6(3): 1-14. bucher, taina. 2014. about a bot: hoax, fake, performance art. m/c journal 17(3). doi: https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.814. bucher, taina. 2018. if . . . then: algorithmic power and politics. oxford: oxford university press. bucher, taina and anne helmond. 2018. „the affordances of social media platforms” in the sage handbook of social media, edited by jean burgess, alice marwick, thomas poell, 233-253. new york: sage. https://www.inverse.com/input/features/instagram-comments-bots-porn-scams-celebrities https://www.inverse.com/input/features/instagram-comments-bots-porn-scams-celebrities https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231155103 guilbeault, douglas. 2016. “growing bot security: an ecological view of bot agency.” international journal of communication 10: 5003–5021. highfield, tim, leaver, tama. 2016. instagrammatics and digital methods: studying visual social media, from selfies and gifs to memes and emoji. communication, research and practice 2(1): 47-62. leaver, tama, tim highfield and crystal abidin. 2020. instagram: visual social media cultures. cambridge: polity press. lee, kyumin et al. 2012. detecting collective attention spam. proceedings of the 2nd joint wicow/airweb workshop on web quality 12: 48-55. doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/2184305.2184316. lindquist, johan and esther weltevrede. 2024. authenticity governance and the market for social media engagement: the shaping of disinformation at the peripheries of platform ecosystems. social media + society, https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231224721. marres, noortje. 2020. for a situational analytics: an interpretative methodology for the study of situations in computational settings. big data & society 7(2): 1-16. marwick, alice. 2015. instafame: luxury selfies in the attention economy. public culture 27(1): 137-160. mcdowell, zachary j and katrin tiidenberg. 2023. the (not so) secret governors of the internet: morality policing and platform politics. convergence 29(6): doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231193694. meta. 2023. spam. transparency center. accessed 5 january 2023. https://transparency.fb.com/de-de/policies/community-standards/spam/. meta. 2023. sexual solicitation. transparancy center. accessed 5 january 2023. https://transparency.fb.com/en-gb/policies/community-standards/sexual-solicitation/. molldrem, stephen. 2018. tumblr’s decision to deplatform sex will harm sexually marginalized people. wussy magazine, december 6. https://www.wussymag.com/all/tumblrs-decision-to-deplatform-sex-will-harm-sexuallymarginalized-people. narrang, satnam. 2021. the evolution of instagram porn bots. computer, fraud & security 9. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/s1361-3723(19)30099-5. pilipets, elena and susanna paasonen. 2020. 'nipples, memes, and algorithmic failure: nsfw critique of tumblr censorship.' new media & society 24 (6): 1459–1480. doi:10.1177/1461444820979280. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1361-3723(19)30099-5 pilipets, elena, sofia p. caldeira, and ana marta m. flores. 2024. ‘24/7 horny&training’: porn bots, authenticity, and social automation on instagram. porn studies. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2024.2362166 paasonen, susanna, kylie jarrett, and ben light. 2019. sex, humor, and risk in social media. cambridge: the mit press. salim, nurie. 2023. a pornbot stole my identity on instagram. the guardian. 28 february. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/feb/28/a-pornbot-stole-myidentity-on-instagram-it-took-an-agonising-month-to-get-it-deleted. santos, romano. 2023. why are ‘porn stars’ liking your instagram stories? vice. 22 february. https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjkgvd/porn-stars-instagram-bots-s. tiidenberg, katrin and emily van der nagel. 2020. sex and social media. bingley: emerald publishing. tiidenberg, katrin. 2021. sex, power, and platform governance. porn studies 8(4): 381393. thing, nima. 2020. the rise of spam bots on instagram. medium. september 12. https://medium.com/illumination/horny-instagram-bots-rise-59c20d0a1c7. weltevrede, esther. 2016. repurposing digital methods. the research affordances of platforms and engines. phd dissertation uva. january 28. https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/pub/dmi/repurposingdigitalmethods/weltevrede_repurp osingdigitalmethods.pdf. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2024.2362166 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): tran, christine h. (2023, october). bleeding purple, seeing pink: domestic visibility, gender & social reproduction in the home studios of twitch.tv. paper (or panel) presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. bleeding purple, seeing pink: domestic visibility, gender & social reproduction in the home studios of twitch.tv christine h. tran university of toronto introduction from greenscreens in the bedroom to webcams on refrigerators, household surfaces underlie the broadcast of personality on twitch.tv, amazon’s $15 billion platform for live video entertainment. this paper examines how homemaking and visibility are coconceptualized in the labour of gendered and racialized game live streamers in canada and the united states. extending feminist and social reproduction theorizations of housework to the home studio-based live streaming, i detail how the convergence of houseand sight-making on twitch.tv reifies the gaming industry’s historic reliance upon unremunerated spousal and familial support (bulut, 2020; dyer-witheford and de peuter, 2006). drawing from a virtual ethnography of twitch creators’ domestic spaces in north america (n=12), i document the staging of household and familial visibility in relation to twitch’s affordances of on-demand broadcast and play. from this data, i argue the converging geographies of labour, leisure, and living demanded by twitch represent more than ancillary sites to visually recomposed play(ers) as “web-ready” for live platform(ization)s (see: helmond, 2015). rather, the management of a domestic timespace on twitch represents a worker’s struggle for autonomy over the means of cultural production in social media entertainment (see: craig and cunningham, 2019). methodology from april to october 2022, i conducted semi-structured interviews and live participant observation with 12 racialized and/or gendered streamers in their home studios to understand the co-relationships between digital labour and domestic play in platform content production. recruitment for this project took advantage of my pre-existing networks cultivated in gaming communities and social media. i deployed a snowball sampling method, relying on my initial participants to pass along the study information (atkinson and flint, 2001). the original call for participants reached out adults above the age of 18 who met the following qualifications: (1) used twitch to gain income from streaming of games, (2) performed this work from their residence and (3) were of historically marginalized gender and/or race in the north american context. i also drew upon emerging philosophies of “patchwork ethnography” (günel et al., 2020) to (re)construct the shared experience of streaming through short-time field visits, observation, interviews, and institutional analysis of platform transformations. this ethnographic method addresses and ameliorates the always-already blurred recombinations of “home” and “field” that became ever more entangled during the uneven telework economies of the global pandemic. interview topics focused on work routines, spatial relationships to worksites, and the role of domestic objects in the staging of livestreams. from this participant data, i organise my approach to streaming labour’s relationship to home infrastructures under three modalities: (in)visibility, intimacy, and temporal management. how marginalized twitch streamers calibrated opacity between their live broadcasts and their homes—from animation suits to greenscreen backgrounds and even codewords to alert cohabitants they webcameras were recording—revealed the affinities between platform aggregation and domestic privatization on local and global scales. visibility, in short, becomes a family project. theoretical framework visibility has become a salient term to conceptualize the self-presentational work of platformed creators (abidin, 2016; petre et al., 2019; poell et al. 2021). simultaneously, terms like “invisible labour” into bywords for the historically unpaid, devalued status of labour categorized as “women’s work” in the digital age (jarrett 2015; terranova 2000). to mark johnson and jamie woodcock (2019), what distinguishes twitch from the other world-leading video platforms is this technocultural emphasis on real-time recording as “not used to hide the labour of the worker, but rather to very visibly show a content creator to a global audience” (p. 3; emphasis mine). yet for creators on twitch who are systematically marginalized by racism and sexism, however, domestic visibility is fraught. toxic gamer cultures alter the experience of “being seen” on twitch into precursors for harassment, stalking, doxing and scandalous raids that layer labour in professional play (chan and gray; 2022; guarriello, 2019; ruberg and cullen, 2020). drawing from participant data, i relate twitch streamers’ relationship to platform visibility across two domains: domestic labour and digital leisure. findings of this study contextualise the housework of live streaming within the lineage of unenumerated social reproduction in the games industry. spouses have played a vital role as public narrators of experience and exploitation across the games industry (bulut, 2020; dyer witheford and de peuter, 2006; pettica-haris et al., 2015) as the infamous blog confessions of “ea spouse” and “rockstar spouse” aaa studio “crunch” have revealed, the precarious glamour of careers in games has been historically sustained by networks of feminised work and social reproduction--work that sustains at the home and sites beyond the aaa studios. well before the ascent of twitch, the domestic and home studio space that been proved vital in the widespread of computational gaming cultures (harvey, 2015; nooney, 2012). yet gaming’s reliance on unpaid familial work done at home speaks to upon recent studies of domestication’s prevalence to the immaterial labour of content production as a form of “digital housekeeping” (li 2022; kennedy, 2015). visualizing the career and domestic biographies of twitch streamers are intertwined, i argue that the collaborative and homemaking affordance of self-broadcasting activities associated with twitch are best understood as belonging to the same genus of domestic labour and its slippages towards privatized caretaking within the familial home. contributions decades after american scholar louise kapp howe (1977) coined “pink collar” to describe the traditional assignment of cleaning, cooking, and care as women’s work gender still colours our experiences of labour valuation. early 2010s concerns that social media would constitute the “pink ghetto of tech” (levinson, 2015) illustrate the vulnerability of platform self-promotion to these regimes of casualization through coding certain work as feminine (duffy and schwartz, 2018). confronting the affinities between the processes of domesticity and platformization in twitch streamer visibility, this paper reframes twitch slogan of “bleed purple” as more than a playful work ethos, branded by emojis and emotes. rather, this paper proffers twitch as a vital case study on why social reproduction and feminist theories are integral to deepening our understanding of platform work, in and beyond the home. during this pandemic, many participant streamers in this study found themselves enlisted as familial and friend group content managers, performing the relational labour (baym, 2015) of maintain family ties and networks through the shared broadcast of play. this work of helping families see each other through play over twitch was cited as a starting point for their ongoing careers in professional gaming before audiences. the coordinating of family along these lines’ gestures to an integral and yet to be fully understood role of social reproduction politics in supporting the widespread production of ludic experiences. understanding the home studio, and its attached familial partners as invisible networks on twitch will be fundamental to advocacy of guaranteed minimum work conditions in professional play within a heavily saturated market with little support from platform companies, like amazon, themselves. references abidin, c. (2016). visibility labour: engaging with influencers’ fashion brands and #ootd advertorial campaigns on instagram. media international australia, 161(1), 86–100. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x16665177 atkinson, r. & flint, j. (2001). accessing hidden and hard-to-reach populations: snowball research strategies. social research update, 33. baym, n. k. (2015). connect with your audience! the relational labor of connection. the communication review, 18(1), 14–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x16665177 bulut, e. (2020). a precarious game: the illusion of dream jobs in the video game industry. cornell university press. chan, b., & gray, k. (2020). microstreaming, microcelebrity, and marginalized masculinity: pathways to visibility and self-definition for black men in gaming. women’s studies in communication, 43(4), 354–362. https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2020.1833634. cunningham, s., & craig, d. (2019). social media entertainment: the new intersection of hollywood and silicon valley. new york university press. duffy, b. e., & schwartz, b. (2018). digital “women’s work?”: job recruitment ads and the feminization of social media employment. new media & society, 20(8), 2972– 2989. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817738237 dyer-witheford, n., & de peuter, g. s. (2006). “ea spouse” and the crisis of video game labour: enjoyment, exclusion, exploitation, and exodus. canadian journal of communication, 31(3). https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2006v31n3a1771 günel, g., varma, s., & watanabe, c. (2020, june 9). a manifesto for patchwork ethnography. society for cultural anthropology. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/amanifesto-for-patchwork-ethnography harvey, a. (2015). gender, age, and digital games in the domestic context. routledge. helmond, a. (2015). the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready. social media + society, 1(2), 2056305115603080. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080. howe, l.k. (1977) pink collar workers. new york: avon publications. kennedy, j., nansen, b., arnold, m., wilken, r., & gibbs, m. (2015). digital housekeepers and domestic expertise in the networked home. convergence, 21(4), 408–422. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856515579848 li, z. (2023). digital domestic (im)material labor: managing waste and self while producing closet decluttering videos. television & new media, 15274764221150163. https://doi.org/10.1177/15274764221150163 levinson, alana hope. 2015. “the pink ghetto of social media.” matter. july 16, 2015. https://medium.com/matter/the-pink-ghetto-of-social-media-39bf7f2fdbe1. peticca-harris, a., weststar, j., & mckenna, s. (2015). the perils of project-based work: attempting resistance to extreme work practices in video game development. organization, 22(4), 570–587. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508415572509 poell, t., nieborg, d. b., & duffy, b. e. (2022). platforms and cultural production. polity. https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2020.1833634 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817738237 https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2006v31n3a1771 https://culanth.org/fieldsights/a-manifesto-for-patchwork-ethnography https://culanth.org/fieldsights/a-manifesto-for-patchwork-ethnography https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080 https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856515579848 https://doi.org/10.1177/15274764221150163 https://medium.com/matter/the-pink-ghetto-of-social-media-39bf7f2fdbe1 https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508415572509 jarrett, k. (2015). feminism, labour and digital media: the digital housewife. routledge. johnson, m. r., & woodcock, j. (2019). “it”s like the gold rush’: the lives and careers of professional video game streamers on twitch.tv. information, communication and society, 22(3), 336–351. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2017.1386229 ruberg, b., & cullen, a. l. l. (2020). feeling for an audience: the gendered emotional labor of video game live streaming. digital culture & society, 5(2), 85–102. https://www.degruyter.com/transcript/view/journals/dcs/5/2/article-p85.xml terranova, t. (2000). free labor: producing culture for the digital economy. social text, 18(2), 33–58. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/soc/summary/v018/18.2terranova.html. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2017.1386229 https://www.degruyter.com/transcript/view/journals/dcs/5/2/article-p85.xml http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/soc/summary/v018/18.2terranova.html selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): comunello, f., scarcelli, c.m., parisi, l., & bernardini, v. (2024, october). gender, intimacy, and digital practices: insights into italian teenagers’ experiences. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. gender, intimacy, and digital practices: insights into italian teenagers' experiences francesca comunello sapienza university of rome cosimo marco scarcelli university of padua lorenza parisi link campus university & sapienza university of rome vittoria bernardini sapienza university of rome literature review the relationship between digital practices, gender, and intimacy in teenagers’ everyday life is gaining growing attention, often creating alarmism that reduces the debate on media usage to its effects (bragg & buckingham, 2009; tiidenberg & van der nagel, 2020). overcoming a media effects approach, sociocultural digital research has engaged with questions of gender and intimacy by adopting a mutual shaping perspective to capture the complexity of the interactions between digital media and gender (van zoonen, 2002). through this framework, scholars have sought to understand how the social meaning of digital media is shaped by widespread gender conceptions (wajcman, 1991), and how technologies help to re-shape or co-construct gender itself as “something that is done” and continuously re-created by social action and discursive negotiations. we can look at digital media as environments that offer young people agency and spaces where they can construct and perform their identity (boyd, 2014) through bricolage practices (willett, 2008) and by experimenting with their own selves, also with regard to gender and intimacy (de ridder, 2017; ferreira, 2021; metcalfe & llewellyn, 2020). such experimentation can be linked to stereotypical/hegemonic ideas of masculinity and femininity by replicating them (van oosten et al., 2017), emphasising them (doring et al., 2015) or subverting them (cook and hasmath, 2014). studies have also devoted particular attention to communicative interactions (e.g.,“sexting”), investigating both the incorporation of and resistance to specific gender and sexual ideologies (ringrose et al., 2013; scarcelli, 2020). specific attention has also been given to the gendered dimensions of representations and self-representations of masculinity and femininity (caldeira, 2021), and to the use of platforms for self-expression and social support, especially for women and the lgbtq+ community (tortajada et al., 2021). research shows that, although the internet enables self-expression, it also reinforces gender stereotypes (comunello et al., 2020). research has also been devoted to violent practices such as misogyny, hate speech, and harassment (nadim & fladmoe, 2021). overall, we recognize a gap in the literature due to the tendency to focus on: a) young and emerging adults more than on teens; and b) (digital) media representation more than on users' practices and motivations. in the italian context, despite interesting insights coming from works on teens and digital media (mascheroni & ólafsson, 2018), research is still scarce and there are no systematic works on digital practices, gender, and intimacy in teens’ everyday life. this gap is especially striking considering that data suggests that gender stereotypes are particularly present in italy (ragnedda & budd, 2015), compared with other global north countries, and that the country offers the worst conditions to lgbtqia+ individuals in western europe (ilga-europe, 2023). scappini et al. (2023) confirmed the endorsement of traditional gender scripts by young italian adults. methods the aim of our paper is to analyse how italian teenagers (aged 15-18) (re)define their understanding of gender and intimacy by engaging with digital media and incorporating it into their daily lives. our approach adopts a media practice paradigm in order to understand what young people do with and through digital media in the context of the specific situations in which they act (couldry, 2012), examining how teenagers (re)negotiate their gender identities and intimate life in their everyday use of digital media. our project puts young people and their experiences at the centre of the research process. we adopt a participatory design approach, which makes use of practical activities and material artefacts to stimulate the generation of knowledge and mutual learning among participants. specifically, focus group guides and activities are coconstructed through preliminary workshops with a group of 10 teenagers (“young researchers group”), who act as “epistemic partners” (holmes & marcus, 2012) in devising content and structure that is suitable for use in participatory focus groups with other teenage participants. using the activities co-constructed with the young researchers group, in the first step of our research we conducted six focus groups with students aged 15-18 from secondary schools in six cities located in three italian regions. focus groups employ creative techniques to prompt participant discussion and enable participants to express themselves and reflect about sensitive topics such as sexual and intimate digital practices (spawforth-jones, 2021). the empirical material collected from focus groups was analysed using thematic analysis. these findings will be further discussed with the young researchers group to receive their feedback and interpretation. the research follows aoir’s ethical guidelines and has been approved by the ethical committee of the university of padua. results at the moment, the research group is analyzing the data collected from the focus group discussions. the paper presents initial findings of this analysis, covering a wide set of digital practices and focusing on three interrelated dimensions: gender, sexuality, and intimate relationships. the analysis delves into the meanings that young people assign to everyday practices and how these are intertwined with the architecture of digital platforms. the preliminary analysis of the focus group discussions reveals that, regarding the gender dimension, young people mostly embrace the increased visibility of gender identities beyond the binary, but sometimes fall back on traditional gender stereotypes and roles both inside and outside digital spaces (belotti et al., 2022; comunello et al., 2023; farci & scarcelli, 2023). concerning sex and the so-called online sexual activities, the focus groups reveal a complex understanding of sexting that goes beyond moral panic and other oversimplified views of the relationship between teens and sex media (attwood et al., 2018). these findings illuminate a complex array of behaviours and meanings, such as the prevalence of gendered and heteronormative scripts and the negotiation of boundaries of what is “acceptable” and “unacceptable” in sexting (de ridder, 2017). regarding intimate relationships, the participants highlighted how digital culture is connected to perceptions and experiences of dating, showing significant instances of abuse and controlling behaviours, but also practices connected to romantic love that help young people gain spaces of autonomy. references attwood, f., smith, c., & barker, m. (2018). 'i'm just curious and still exploring myself': young people and pornography. new media & society, 20(10), 3738-3759. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818759271 belotti, f., et al. (2022). towards 'romantic media ideologies': digital dating abuse seen through the lens of social media and/or dating in teenage narratives. the communication review. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714421.2022.2033576 boyd, d. (2014). it's complicated. yale university press. bragg, s., & buckingham, d. (2009). too much too young? young people, sexual media and learning. in f. attwood (ed.), mainstreaming sex (pp. 129–146). i.b. tauris. https://doi.org/10.5040/9780755697083.ch-008 caldeira, s., et al. (2021). 'everybody needs to post a selfie every once in a while.' information, communication & society, 24(8). https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2020.1776371 comunello, f., parisi, l., & ieracitano, f. (2021). negotiating gender scripts in mobile dating apps. information, communication & society, 24(8). https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2020.1787485 cook, j., & hasmath, r. (2014). the discursive construction and performance of gendered identity on social media. current sociology, 62(7). https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392114550008 couldry, n. (2012). media, society, world. polity. creswell, j. w. (2014). a concise introduction to mixed methods research. sage. de ridder, s. (2017). social media and young people's sexualities. social media + society, 3(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117738992 döring, n., reif, a., & poeschl, s. (2016). how gender-stereotypical are selfies? a content analysis and comparison with magazine adverts. computers in human behavior, 55, 955-962. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.10.001 farci, m., & scarcelli, c. m. (2023). men have to be competent in something, women need to show their bodies: gender, digital youth cultures and popularity. journal of gender studies, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2023.2241857 ferreira, e., et al. (2021). digital practices, young people, and gender. first monday. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v26i12.11787 holmes, d. & marcus, g. (2012). chapter 6 collaborative imperatives: a manifesto, of sorts, for the reimagination of the classic scene of fieldwork encounter. in m. konrad (ed.), collaborators collaborating: counterparts in anthropological knowledge and international research relations (pp. 126-144). new york, oxford: berghahn books. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780857454812-007 https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2023.2241857 ilga-europe. (2023). rainbow europe index and map. retrieved from [https://www.ilgaeurope.org/report/rainbow-europe-2023](https://www.ilga-europe.org/report/rainboweurope-2023) livingstone, s., & mason, j. (2015). sexual rights and sexual risks among youth online. retrieved from [http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/64567](http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/64567) mascheroni, g., & ólafsson, k. (2018). accesso, usi, rischi e opportunità di internet per i ragazzi italiani. osscom. metcalfe, s., & llewellyn, a. (2020). "it's just the thing you do": physical and digital fields, and the flow of capital for young people's gendered identity negotiation. journal of adolescent research, 35(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/0743558419883359 nadim, m., & fladmoe, a. (2021). silencing women? gender and online harassment. social science computer review, 39(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439319865518 ragnedda, m., & budd, k. (2015). invisible violence: media (re)production of gender inequality in italy. communication papers: media literacy & gender studies, 4(7), 1121. https://doi.org/10.33115/udg_bib/cp.v4i07.22045 ringrose, j., harvey, l., gill, r., & livingstone, s. (2013). teen girls, sexual double standards and ‘sexting’: gendered value in digital image exchange. feminist theory, 14(3), 305-323. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700113499853 scappini, a., donati, m. a., & fioravanti, g. (2023). heterosexual script in italian young adults: measurement across genders. sexuality research and social policy, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-022-00786-9 scarcelli, c. m. (2020). teenage perspectives on sexting and pleasure in italy. in l. tsaliki & d. chronaki (eds.), discourses of anxiety over childhood and youth across cultures. palgrave macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46436-3_13 semenzin, s., & bainotti, l. (2020). the use of telegram for non-consensual dissemination of intimate images. social media + society, 6(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120984453 spawforth-jones, s. (2021). utilizing mood boards as an image elicitation tool in qualitative research. sociological research online, 26(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/1360780421993486 tiidenberg, k., & van der nagel, e. (2020). sex and social media. emerald. https://doi.org/10.1108/9781839094064 tortajada, i., et al. (2021). lost in transition? digital trans activism on youtube. information, communication & society, 24(8). https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2020.1797850 van oosten, j.m.f., vandenbosch, l., & peter, j. (2017). gender roles on social networking sites. journal of children & media, 11(2). https://doi.org/10.1080/17482798.2017.1304970 van zoonen, l. (2002). gendering the internet. european journal of communication, 17. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323102017001605 wajcman, j. (1991). patriarchy, technology, and conceptions of skill. work and occupations, 18(1), 29-45. https://doi.org/10.1177/0730888491018001002 https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323102017001605 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): montaña-niño, s., riedlinger, m., watt, n., garcía-perdomo, v., joubert, m. (2022, november). fact checking the pandemic in the global south: correction strategies by latin american and african meta fact checkers. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. fact checking the pandemic in the global south: correction strategies by latin american and african meta fact checkers silvia montaña-niño centre of excellence for automated decision-making & society queensland university of technology michelle riedlinger digital media research centre queensland university of technology ned watt school of communication queensland university of technology víctor garcía-perdomo school of communication universidad de la sabana marina joubert centre for research on evaluation, science and technology stellenbosch university the covid-19 pandemic and fact-checking in the global south between 2019 and 2021, the number of fact-checking organizations rose substantially in three key regions of the world (asia: 35 to 75; africa: 9 to 19; and latin america: 18 to 38) (stencel & luher, 2021). meta launched a third-party fact checking program for facebook content in 2016 and since then it has grown to include more than 90 fact checking partners around the world. they have also granted access to their detection and engagement measurement tools (full fact, 2020). montaña-niño, s., riedlinger, m.e., watt, n., garcía-perdomo, v., joubert, m. (2022, november). factchecking the pandemic in the global south: correction strategies by latin american and african meta fact-checkers. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. this study investigates the facebook dissemination practices of region-specific metaaffiliated fact checkers who dealt with covid-19 vaccine mis/disinformation. metaaffiliated fact checkers benefit from privileged access to ai tools developed by meta to identify viral and misleading content on facebook, however these tools operate under meta’s own assumptions and policies about content moderation that are not transparent/discussed openly. on top of this, there may be tensions between meta’s policy that emphasizes a focus on detecting bottom-up dis/misinformation claims and the understanding that covid-19 vaccine information is highly politicized. the spread of covid-19 dis/misinformation coincided with tumultuous periods of electoral political activity in latin america and sub-saharan africa. government representatives at various levels engaged in “vaccine diplomacy” (hill, 2021). importantly, russia and china engaged in negotiations with many countries to promote and sell their vaccines in competition with vaccines manufactured by the us, uk and europe. sputnik v and the chinese vaccines were acquired in numerous countries in latin america and subsaharan africa (hill, 2021; mallapaty, 2021). according to the argentinian fact-checking organization, chequeado, in the last half of 2021, false claims that had been verified tended to be “exported” from the us and spain to latin america (tardaguila, 2021). research approach we used crowdtangle to collect all facebook posts from six fact-checking organizations in latin america and sub-saharan africa from 2021 that contained variations on the words “coronavirus/covid-19” and “vaccine” and corresponding translations in spanish (i.e. “vacuna” and “pandemia”) (see figure 1). figure 1: facebook posts associated with covid-19 vaccinations collected from selected meta third party fact-checkers in 2021 montaña-niño, s., riedlinger, m.e., watt, n., garcía-perdomo, v., joubert, m. (2022, november). factchecking the pandemic in the global south: correction strategies by latin american and african meta fact-checkers. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. we drew on the work of ferracioli et al. (2022) and luengo and garcia-marin (2020) to develop our initial coding frame and used a double coding and consensus coding approach to inductively develop our codebook. here, we report on the findings from over half of the sample of facebook posts from each of these fact-checkers. preliminary findings fact checks of bottom-up and top-down claims our preliminary analysis shows that verifications of local bottom-up claims (associated with social media platform communication between ordinary users) dominated the facebook posts of these covid-19 fact-checking organizations in 2021 (figure 2 below). figure 2: source of claim mentioned in fact-checked claims on facebook. factchecked claims addressed by fact checkers these fact checks focussed on bottom-up claims related to covid-19 treatments and cures as alternatives to vaccines, covid-19 cases and deaths, and vaccine safety and efficacy. figure 3 presents an example of the kind of bottom-up fact-checking posts contained in our sample; the post from pesacheck contains a video debunking a claim that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were proven covid-19 treatments and that the astrazeneca vaccine was unsafe. this post was shared widely on facebook in kenya. montaña-niño, s., riedlinger, m.e., watt, n., garcía-perdomo, v., joubert, m. (2022, november). factchecking the pandemic in the global south: correction strategies by latin american and african meta fact-checkers. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. figure 3: pesacheck facebook post fact checking a bottom-up claim the fact-checking posts in our sample relating to local top-down claims were mainly local political fact checks (i.e. fact-checking focussing on the claims of local politicians and political parties and elected government officials). these top-down fact-checking posts reflected strategies that avoided focusing on political fact checking on meta platforms. fact checkers addressed government-influenced accounts of the virus spread as “mistakes”, “partially true”, or aggregated them into “multiple checks”, or “explainers” instead of declaring a single false verdict. many posts focussed on debunking political claims posted to twitter or claims reported in national broadcasting or printed mainstream media. for example, one of the most engaging posts from la silla vacia debunked a claim made by the opposition politician and then senator gustavo petro on twitter about vaccine efficacy during the delta variant spread (see figure 4). the translation of the post is, “senator and presidential candidate gustavo petro tweeted saying that vaccines are useless against the covid delta variant, but that is false. petro drew the wrong conclusion from an article in the new york times that talked about reinforcing biosecurity measures against this variant, however this article does not say that vaccines do not work against it. don't stop getting vaccinated!” montaña-niño, s., riedlinger, m.e., watt, n., garcía-perdomo, v., joubert, m. (2022, november). factchecking the pandemic in the global south: correction strategies by latin american and african meta fact-checkers. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. figure 4: la silla vacia fact check of a political claim from senator gustavo petro (currently president of colombia) on twitter questioning vaccine efficacy during the spread of the delta variant. engaging facebook users through social media affordances and “checktainment” the most common way that fact checkers distributed their content on facebook was through posting captions with attached urls, which functioned to drive traffic to the factchecking websites. however, the explainer or analysis posts often made use of video, memes and infographics, and received relatively more engagement on facebook when compared to the posts with captions and urls only (see figure 5). figure 5: fact-checkers’ use of facebook affordances to package explainer content and engagement rate as figure 6 shows, fact-checking explanations could be both humorous and pedagogical. we describe these kinds of emerging fact-checking practices as checktainment because montaña-niño, s., riedlinger, m.e., watt, n., garcía-perdomo, v., joubert, m. (2022, november). factchecking the pandemic in the global south: correction strategies by latin american and african meta fact-checkers. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. fact checkers would reuse and reshare this entertaining content within weeks when dis/misinformation resurfaced and recirculated. figure 6: example of checktainment content. the text in this meme, based on disney’s “encanto” film, translates to “when they say the sinovac vaccine is less effective and the vaccine of poor people…” the post shares a url and an explainer with the caption, “much of the misinformation about vaccines against covid-19 stems from ignorance about how they work. in this article we explain what technology each of them uses and how they act in the body” conclusion political fact checking associated with covid-19 vaccine misinformation was inescapable in these regions in 2021 given that many countries were on the verge of midterm or presidential elections. through explainer content, fact checkers were able to address uncertainties related to trending local politicized covid-19 science without referring directly to political sources. we also argue that the emerging checktainment strategies used to engaged social media users form part of a growing focus on evergreen content (content that remains fresh and relevant) creation used by fact checkers to engage followers. montaña-niño, s., riedlinger, m.e., watt, n., garcía-perdomo, v., joubert, m. (2022, november). factchecking the pandemic in the global south: correction strategies by latin american and african meta fact-checkers. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. references ferracioli, p., kniess, a. b., & marques, f. p. j. (2022). the watchdog role of factcheckers in different media systems. digital journalism 10 (5), 717-737. full fact. (2020). the challenges of online fact checking. https://fullfact.org/media/uploads/coof-2020.pdf hill, i. (2021). russia and china’s vaccine diplomacy: not quite the geopolitical slam dunk. australian institute of international affairs. retrieved in https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/russia-and-chinasvaccine-diplomacy-not-quite-the-geopolitical-slam-dunk/ luengo, m., & garcía-marín, d. (2020). the performance of truth: politicians, factchecking journalism, and the struggle to tackle covid-19 misinformation. american journal of cultural sociology, 8(3), 405-427. doi: 10.1057/s41290-02000115-w mallapaty, s. (2021). china’s covid vaccines have been crucial—now immunity is waning. nature, 598(7881), 398–399. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02796-w stencel, m., & luther, j. (2021). fact-checking census shows slower growth [duke reporters’ lab]. https://reporterslab.org/fact-checking-census-shows-slowergrowth/ tardaguila, c. (2021). disinformation for export: how false content generated in the united states reaches latin america. chequeado. retrieved from: https://chequeado.com/investigaciones/disinformation-for-export-how-falsecontent-generated-in-the-united-states-reaches-latin-america/ d selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): de coning, a. (2023, october). using “small data” to map how men’s rights came online. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. using “small data” to map how men’s rights came online alexis de coning west virginia wesleyan college the digital turn provides social movement researchers with numerous opportunities and challenges. on the one hand, born-digital materials, digital archives, and computational methods allow us to study how social movements use internet technologies to network, disseminate messages, build community, and recruit new members. on the other hand, we are often frustrated by both the abundance and scarcity of data, especially for historical research (nanni, 2019). while the advent of the internet can be seen as a “revolution” in how social movements communicate and organize – for instance, through connective action (bennet & segerberg, 2013) – digital methods and materials do not necessarily constitute a “revolution” in how we study these movements or their histories (nanni, 2019). it is thus unsurprising that some researchers “have questioned the idea that bigger is necessarily better” (milligan, 2019a, p. 9) when studying social movements online. furthermore, big data analysis often requires access to computing resources and skills that are not always available or easily learned by researchers. furthermore, archival materials are often “messy”: print materials cannot always be easily converted to digital formats for optical character recognition (ocr), and digital archival materials can be equally cumbersome and difficult to “clean” for computational methods. my paper enters this discussion by suggesting a “small data” approach for studying the early digital presence of social movements. in my case, a “small data” approach refers to collecting a preliminary dataset by manually trawling through print and digital archive materials, using simple spreadsheets to track the data, and google my maps to visualize the data. i focus on the men’s rights movement’s transition from print to digital media. the men’s rights movement refers to the “diverse range of groups and individuals who believe that the dignity and rights of men and boys are diminished, threatened, or non-existent” (de coning, 2020, p. 1). men’s rights activists often blame feminists in particular, and sometimes women in general, for their perceived lack of rights. this social movement has gained notoriety in recent years with events like #gamergate (2014) or misogynistincel attacks (kelly, dibranco, & decook, 2021), and its proponents are often associated with “extremely online” and “toxic” masculinities. however, the movement’s history and adoption of internet technologies remain understudied. here, i use two unique datasets to demonstrate how the men’s rights movement in north america transitioned from print-based communication to digital spaces in the early 1990s, and how these communities were often geographically well-positioned to do so. my first dataset uses print archival materials from the changing men collection at michigan state university to map the locations of men’s rights groups across north america. men’s rights newsletters and zines often dedicated space in their publications to list other publications and organizations — typically with contact numbers and postal addresses (see fig. 1). i draw specifically on the “directory lists” included in the prominent men’s rights zine the backlash! from october 1993 to october 1994 to pinpoint the locations of men’s rights groups, publications, and organizations operating during this time (see fig. 2). my second dataset draws on the usenet historical collection, hosted by the internet archive, and the men’s rights newsgroup alt.mens-rights in particular. working through the archived newsgroup chronologically, i collected a dataset of 100 posts (spanning september – november 1994). while each post contains the written content of the message, i focus on the metadata attached to these posts. of the initial dataset of 100 posts, i identified 83 unique users; of these, 24 had no clear location data and were removed from the dataset. however, the remaining posts include 59 users with university, organizational, or corporate email addresses that allowed me to locate them to some extent; while these email addresses are not an accurate representation of where users were located at the time of accessing the newsgroup, they do indicate the geographical areas where alt.mens-rights participants were located when first accessing usenet. additionally,10 users provided included their full addresses in their post signatures (see fig. 3). by comparing the geographical information across the two datasets (see fig. 4), i demonstrate how: 1) there is significant overlap between the print organizations and alt.mens-rights users; and 2) men’s rights communities in north america were often concentrated in areas like southern california, the pacific northwest, and the north eastern seaboard. this is important for several reasons. first, it suggests that the movement’s transition to digital media was impacted by its proximity to internet infrastructures and the typically middle-class, university-educated populations who had access to this technology in the early 1990s. i thus provide a more definitive picture of the men’s rights activists who “pioneered” the movement’s current digital manifestations. second, i demonstrate how print materials aided the movement’s transition online by providing “pre-digital networks” that presaged its digital networks. finally, this paper acknowledges specific challenges and potential problems with this approach. first, the sensitive nature of the metadata raises ethical concerns about its use (see dame-griff, 2019; milligan, 2019b; kollock & smith, 2005). for this reason, i have anonymized the data and removed any identifying information about alt.mensrights users from the paper. second, the data is preliminary; further research will expand both datasets to provide a more robust and rigorous analysis of the transition to digital media discussed here. third, my small data approach suggests a critical re evaluation of the methods and tools available to researchers using archives. as nanni argues, it is imperative for historians to “go beyond an unquestioned adoption of the new sources and tools at their disposal” and “instead critically employ them, in search of new historical perspectives” (2019, p. 122). however, i am not proposing that big data and computational methods are not valuable, or that potential mixed-methods collaborations could not be fruitful. furthermore, as with print archives, digital archives are often incomplete and represent only a portion of the people who may have had access to the internet at a particular time. thus, researchers making use of “small data” must be vigilant about selection bias and the representativeness of their data (milligan, 2019b, p. 85). nonetheless, my research provides an opportunity to think critically and creatively about the digital revolution, and how small data (both analog and digital) can still be valuable to researchers studying social movements online. figure 1: directory list extract from the october 1993 edition of the backlash! which lists men’s rights organizations across north america. figure 2: the locational data from my first dataset using organizational addresses published in the backlash! between october 1993 – october 1994. figure 3: the locational data from my second dataset using university, organizational, or corporate email addresses, as well as post signatures, collected from alt.mens-rights between september – november 1994. figure 4: overlaying the two maps. references bennet, w.l., & segerberg, a. (2013). the logic of connective action: digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. cambridge university press. dame-griff, a. (2019). herding the ‘performing elephants’: using computational methods to study usenet. internet histories 3:3-4, 223-244. doi: 10.1080/24701475.2019.1652456 de coning, a. (2020). men’s rights movement/activism. in: ross, k., bachman, i., cardo, v., moorti, s., and scarcelli, m. (eds.), the international encyclopedia of gender, media, and communication. john wiley & sons, inc. doi: 10.1002/9781119429128. kelly, m., dibranco, a., & decook, j. (2021). misogynist incels and male supremacism: overview and recommendations for addressing the threat of male supremacist violence. new america. retrieved from https://www.newamerica.org/politicalreform/reports/misogynist-incels-and-male-supremacism/ kollock, p. & smith, m.a. (2005). communities in cyberspace. in m.a. smith & p. kollock (eds.), communities in cyberspace (pp. 3-24). routledge. https://www.newamerica.org/political-reform/reports/misogynist-incels-and-male-supremacism/ https://www.newamerica.org/political-reform/reports/misogynist-incels-and-male-supremacism/ milligan, i. (2019a). historiography and the web. in n. brügger & i. milligan (eds), the sage handbook of web history (pp. 3 – 15). sage publications ltd. milligan, i. (2019b). history in the age of abundance? how the web is transforming historical research. mcgill-queen’s university press. nanni, f. (2019). collecting primary sources from web archives: a tale of scarcity and abundance. in n. brügger & i. milligan (eds), the sage handbook of web history (pp. 112-124). sage publications ltd. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 a picture is worth a thousand prompts: topic modeling of ai art subreddit communities jing han klein college of media and communication temple university andrew iliadis klein college of media and communication temple university text-to-image generation (ai art) has become a mainstream phenomenon since the introduction of dall-e by openai in january 2021 (nast, 2023). on the one hand, ai art challenges definitions of creativity that center on anthropocentric values and discredits the contributions of artists in the training of these ai models (knibbs, 2023). on the other hand, it blurs the line between artists and non-artists by enabling new ways of creating art (e.g., prompt engineering: an iterative and experimental text-based process to interact with text-to-image generation models). regardless of one’s ethical stance, practitioners of ai art, including artists of various skills and non-artists, form and participate in online communities to showcase their wares, share practices and resources, and learn from each other. this study uses a topic modeling approach to examine topics within three such subreddit communities centered on three text-to-image generation models (r/stablediffusion, r/midjourney, and r/weirddalle). previous studies on ai art community members have focused on the threats faced by digital art communities (allred & aragon, 2023), sociocultural biases (millet et al., 2023), and prompt engineering (oppenlaender, 2023). more specifically, allred and aragon (2023) highlight a distinction between previous digital art communities, which view themselves as a “digital counterculture akin to transformative fandom” (p. 32) and current ai art communities to understand a potential value misalignment between them. oppenlaender (2022) examines how creativity is understood differently in these ai art groups and argues that it arises in the interaction between humans and ai via prompt engineering while also highlighting the importance of online communities as the “social constituent of the online creative ecosystem around text-to-image generation” (p. 2). our study explores this aspect of ai art, aiming to understand the topics and themes within online ai art communities. suggested citation (apa): han, j., iliadis, a. (2024, october). a picture is worth a thousand prompts: topic modeling of ai art subreddit communities. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http:// spir.aoir.org. we collected the top 500 posts for each subreddit (r/stablediffusion, r/midjourney, and r/weirddalle) within one month (from dec 22, 2023, to jan 22, 2024) using the python reddit api wrapper (praw). we chose r/weirddalle instead of other subreddits based on dall-e series models due to its comparable membership sizes with r/stablediffusion and r/midjourney. our data included post titles, submission dates, scores (based on upvotes/downvotes), number of comments, urls, and link flair text. we used post urls to collect the post images. we chose not to include iterations of similar images in the analysis by selecting only the first image if the post contained a series (variations of a similar image). furthermore, we sorted each dataset based on the number of comments and selected rows where the number of comments is greater than or equal to the average. our topic modeling analysis included two steps: (1) translating images to textual data and (2) performing topic modeling with hyperparameter tuning on both translated textual data from images and post titles. we used replicate api (a cloud api that runs a collection of open-source ai models with customization options) to translate images into text prompts. the specific model we used for image-to-prompt translation was img2prompt by methexis-inc, which provides an approximate text prompt with styles. the generated prompts follow the pattern “a subject + subject modifiers + a style + style modifiers.” the caption in figure 1 is an example of a generated prompt. two researchers manually inspected the accuracy of the generated prompts from a random sample of 20 to confirm their appropriateness. we used bertopic to conduct topic modeling on generated text prompts and post titles and adjusted the hyperparameters (min_cluster_size, n_neighbors, and n_components) to better fit the topic models to our datasets. we also used the keybert-inspired model to reduce stop words and increase topic representation by having more diverse topic words. tables 1-3 each show seven prominent topics from the post titles of r/stablediffusion, r/midjourney, and r/weirddalle. most of the topics in r/stablediffusion post titles relate to themes of technological innovations/services or technical learning. innovators advance text-to-image technologies by releasing improved models (e.g., sdxl) and inventing new training techniques (e.g., dreambooth). services make innovations more accessible to community members by creating resources and building applications (e.g., automatic1111 and comfyui) on top of open-source code provided by innovators. the theme of technical learning is visible in topics that focus on community members striving to achieve more predictable and higher-quality results by providing workflows and details such as model checkpoints and training techniques. topics in r/midjourney relate to themes of showcasing ai art wares and prompt learning. community members share images generated by midjourney without apparent intentions to receive and learn from community feedback, focusing less on computational details and more on discussions about prompts. the accessibility of the models could partially explain the differences in community members’ activities between r/stablediffusion and r/midjourney. stable diffusion models are open source, enabling anyone to download/train their models. midjourney models are not open-source and can only be accessed via discord. lastly, topics in r/weirddalle focus on competition and the flaunting results; community members seem less interested in sharing knowledge and more in the ai art “game” (i.e., who can produce the most creative or entertaining results). tables 4-6 each show eight prominent topics from the prompts generated using the images of r/stablediffusion, r/midjourney, and r/weirddalle. the image prompts follow the pattern “a subject + subject modifiers + a style + style modifiers” instead of the pattern of a complete sentence structure. portraits of women are prominent subjects in r/stablediffusion images, while photos and photorealistic images are their most preferred styles. the community also generates images of anime and comic characters with trending styles in digital art platforms, such as deviantart and artstation. surrealist photos and digital art styles trending on deviantart and artstation are also prominent styles in r/midjourney images. in addition to women, frequently occurring subjects include food and animals. 3d style is popular in r/midjourney images but less pronounced in r/stablediffusion images. images in r/weirddalle encompass styles and subjects seen in the other two communities but with additional varieties. specifically, images contain photos of products and posters and appear to emphasize the shock value in the image styles and compositions. in sum, the topic words from image captions suggest that community members from three ai art subreddits prefer using popular media characters and digital art platforms in their text-to-image generation prompts and deem a high degree of photorealism in images of people as high quality. they also pursue surrealist styles and choose people, especially women, as image subjects. references allred, a. m., & aragon, c. (2023). art in the machine: value misalignment and ai “art.” in y. luo (ed.), cooperative design, visualization, and engineering (pp. 31-42). springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43815-8_4 knibbs, k. (2023, september 6). why this award-winning piece of ai art can’t be copyrighted. wired. https://www.wired.com/story/ai-art-copyright-matthew-allen/ millet, k., buehler, f., du, g., & kokkoris, m. d. (2023). defending humankind: anthropocentric bias in the appreciation of ai art. computers in human behavior, 143, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2023.107707 nast, c. (2023, january 12). where the ai art boom came from—and where it’s going. wired. https://www.wired.com/gallery/where-the-ai-art-boom-came-from-andwhere-its-going/ oppenlaender, j. (2022). the creativity of text-to-image generation. academic mindtrek ’22: proceedings of the 25th international academic mindtrek conference, 192202. https://doi.org/10.1145/3569219.3569352 oppenlaender, j. (2023). a taxonomy of prompt modifiers for text-to-image generation. behaviour & information technology, 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929x.2023.2286532 figure 1. sample image, from which we produced the following prompt: “a man in a futuristic suit with a gun in his hand, cyberpunk art by cedric peyravernay, cgsociety, afrofuturism, unreal engine 5, zbrush, artstation hd.” topics keywords examples technological innovations 'sdxl', 'sdnext', 'generate', 'creations', 'dreambooth', 'images', 'photos', 'life', 'suggestions', 'lapse' the best sdxl models are getting very photo-realistic now. discussions about stable diffusion 'ai', '2024', 'stability', 'stable', 'neural', 'viable', 'prediction', 'engine', 'models', 'next' i'm calling it: 6 months out from commercially viable ai animation. achieving realistic results 'photorealistic', 'nightshade', 'pictures', 'image', 'photo', 'portrait', 'picture', 'realistic', 'background', 'looks' is she photorealistic enough? technological services 'animatediffv3', 'animatediff', 'automatic1111', 'auto1111', 'animation', 'comfyui', 'vid', 'extensions', 'a1111', 'video' i created a free tool for texturing 3d objects using automatic1111 webui and sdwebui-controlnet. achieving predictable results 'sdxl', 'realvisxl', 'sd', 'anime', 'lora', 'albedobase', 'samplers', 'quality', 'ease', '3x' the model used was cyberrealistic with the lora sdxlrender. achieving higherquality results 'upscale', 'ultraupscale', 'upscaling', 'model', 'checkpoint', 'hd', 'horizon', 'models', 'ultimate', 'custom' in the workflow notes, you will find some recommendations as well as links to the model, lora, and upscalers. technical learning 'sd', 'editing', 'photobooth', 'learning', 'photo', 'tips', 'mindbl', 'quality', 'first', 'grey' trying new way of editing photo with sd. table 1. post title topics in r/stablediffusion (top 7). topics keywords examples achieving higherquality results 'realism', 'uncanny', 'photography', 'v6', 'attractiveness', 'scenes', 'portrait', 'ugly', 'accurate', 'real' v6 has insane realism with photography prompts. i've been playing around with some photography prompts and i can't stop being impressed at every single result. fantasy 'potter', 'harry', 'dragonball', 'disney', 'thrones', 'characters', 'poll', 'pothead', 'pirates', 'titles' harry potter characters froom book descriptions. can you guess them all? cartoons 'simpsons', 'futurama', 'characters', 'rick', 'selfie', 'scene', 'lion', 'movie', 'life', 'human' my attempt to make real life simpson's characters. science fiction 'iron', 'suits', 'v6', 'spacesuits', 'f1', 'swimsuit', 'mario', 'everybody', 'part', 'poolparty' everybody gets iron man suits food 'steroids', 'animals', 'crab', 'stadium', 'evolves', 'food', 'dinner', 'playoffs', 'restaurant', 'somewhere' animals on steroids. emancipation 'afrofuturism', 'life', 'underground', 'kremlin', '1960s', 'pride', 'people', 'from', 'years', 'gay' gay pride at the kremlin. prompts 'prompts', 'prompt', 'theme', 'colons', 'post', 'image', 'beautiful', 'pictures', 'full', 'midjourney' why can't new buildings look more like this? guess the theme and comment which one you would live in. [prompts in the description]. table 2. post title topics in r/midjourney (top 7). topics keywords examples razer 'razer', 'products', 'walts', 'school', 'everything', 'chips', 'company', 'money', 'magic', 'coffee' with the success of the razer face mask, the company decided to expand. which 3 products would you cop? characters 'prompt', 'portrait', '3d', 'render', 'apocalyptic', 'emaciated', 'character', 'elderly', 'outfit', 'gladiator' prompt: ""an emaciated, ill, and dirty character, post apocalyptic, realistic 3d render. food 'beef', 'eating', 'food', 'breakfast', 'cow', 'flavors', 'cheeseburger', 'raw', 'pizza', 'homer' batman's car made out of raw beef (prompt). movies 'godzilla', 'kong', 'villains', 'movies', 'movie', 'sequels', 'zelda', 'scene', 'characters', 'horror' horror movies as 70s hong kong kung-fu movies videogames 'simulator', 'gamecube', 'games', 'sims', 'playstation', 'game', 'countries', 'playing', 'european', 'brazil' brazil simulator for playstation (with screenshots). fill in the blank 'coach', 'firehouse', 'supersonics', 'comic', 'questions', 'employees', 'fireworks', 'seattle', 'news', 'answering' ___ as the head coach of the seattle supersonics. holidays 'reindeer', 'lyrics', 'christmas', 'grinch', 'shoppers', 'song', 'walmart', 'disturbing', 'this', 'business' the grinch praying at the mosque. table 3. post title topics in r/weirddalle (top 7). topics keywords examples photos 'stockphoto', 'photo', 'graphics', 'art', 'photorealism', 'rendering', 'standing', 'screenshots', 'style', 'featured' paintings 'painting', 'graphics', 'art', 'rendering', 'drawing', 'pixabay', 'matte', 'photorealism', 'arts', 'rendered' anime 'art', 'woman', 'painting', 'artstation', 'portrait', 'anime', 'outfit', 'akihiko', 'women', 'her' comic portraits 'portrait', 'art', 'deviantart', 'pose', 'comic', 'photo', 'kuan', 'graphics', 'costume', 'kratos' contest photos 'contest', 'stockphoto', 'photos', 'photo', 'selfie', 'pinterest', 'posing', 'tumblr', 'winner', 'picture' formal portraits of woman 'woman', 'portrait', 'photo', 'kodak', 'michelangelo', 'her', 'polaroid', 'renaissance', 'sitting', 'chair' realistic portraits of woman 'portrait', 'woman', 'street', 'photorealism', 'eyres', 'road', 'her', 'mollie', 'character', 'scarf' fantasy paintings 'dragon', 'art', 'painting', 'graphics', 'deviantart', 'airbrush', 'blue', 'poster', 'ji', 'demo' table 4. image caption topics in r/stablediffusion. topics keywords examples surrealist portraits 'portrait', 'art', 'painting', 'photo', 'surrealism', 'person', 'facial', 'poster', 'photos', 'graphics' deviantart paintings 'paintings', 'art', 'painting', 'poster', 'deviantart', 'stockphoto', 'illustration', 'film', 'artstation', 'magazine' artstation paintings 'art', 'painting', 'artstation', 'deviantart', 'cartoon', 'concept', 'michelangelo', 'robot', 'futuristic', 'costume' futuristic portraits of woman 'portrait', 'woman', 'futuristic', 'bodysuit', 'womans', 'kodak', 'photography', 'vanessa', 'character', 'her' 3d 'sculpture', 'maya', '3d', 'painting', 'statue', 'rendering', 'rendered', 'render', 'animal', 'zbrush' surrealist photos 'stockphoto', 'photo', 'surrealist', 'image', 'poster', 'stock', 'sign', 'painting', 'trending', 'chair' portrait photos 'portrait', 'photo', 'lens', 'person', 'photorealism', 'nikon', 'wearing', 'featured', 'conner', 'character' food contest photos 'contest', 'plate', 'pizza', 'portrait', 'stockphoto', 'photo', 'restaurant', 'awardwinning', 'winner', 'food' table 5. image caption topics in r/midjourney. topics keywords examples deviantart paintings 'deviantart', 'art', 'painting', 'stockphoto', 'graphics', 'photo', 'cartoon', 'poster', 'artstation', 'photorealistic' cartoons 'cartoon', 'art', 'hannabarbera', 'comic', 'deviantart', 'portrait', 'hologram', 'character', 'marvel', 'akira' posters 'poster', 'billboard', 'deviantart', 'art', 'costumes', 'film', 'painting', 'movie', 'photo', 'freakshow' surrealism 'surrealism', 'surrealist', 'sculpture', 'artwork', 'art', 'statues', 'statue', 'painting', 'demon', 'mickey' 3d 'cinema4d', 'rendering', '3d', 'rendered', 'render', 'maya', 'animated', 'photorealism', 'realism', 'voxel' photos of products 'stockphoto', 'shutterstock', 'paper', 'cardboard', 'contest', 'photo', 'papers', 'art', 'stock', 'legos' anime 'anime', 'art', 'miyamoto', 'gift', 'masterpiece', 'contest', 'behance', 'graphics', 'card', 'legos' photos of woman 'stockphoto', 'shutterstock', 'photo', 'woman', 'women', 'art', 'stock', 'pixabay', 'couch', 'aestheticism' table 6. image caption topics in r/weirddalle. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): lynch, c. & sweeney, m .e. (2023, october). evolving spatialities of digital life: troubling the boundaires of the smart city/home divides. paper (or panel) presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. evolving spatialities of digital life: troubling the boundaries of the smart city/home divides casey lynch university of twente miriam e. sweeney university of alabama introduction research on emerging digital geographies has tended to take ‘the city’ as a primary scale of analysis (luque-ayala, 2019), producing new insights around the smart city (kitchin, 2014), platform urbanism (barns, 2019a; sadowski, 2020a), urban automation (macrorie, marvin, and while, 2020; cugurullo, 2021), urban algorithmic governance (leszczynski, 2016; safransky, 2020) and other manifestations of a broader ‘digital urbanism.’ a related strand of scholarship has traced the emergence of various forms of smart home technologies (maalsen, 2020, 2022; goulden, 2021) and related domestic and intimate encounters with digital systems (brause and blank, 2020; cockayne, leszczynski, and zook, 2017; lynch, 2021). within this work, some scholars have troubled scalar logics that might oppose the city to the home, such as by focusing on the ‘mundane’ (leszczynski, 2020; pink et al. 2017) or ‘everyday life’ (barns, 2019b; lynch and farrokhi 2022) in human engagements with the digital in ways that cut across neat spatial divides. despite this, much scholarship in digital geographies continues to focus on the city or the home as largely separate sites of analysis, or have otherwise avoided explicitly theorizing the relation between urban and domestic space in processes of digitalization. yet, feminist scholars have long troubled any neat separation of urban and domestic space as they have deconstructed the public-private binary and situated the home as a key site of social and political analysis and action (marston, 2000; katz and monk, 1993). most recently, blunt and sheringham (2019: p. 829) have called for research on home-city geographies “that encompasses the interconnectedness and porosity of urban domesticities and domestic urbanism.” bringing together home studies and urban studies, this research agenda aims to “address the interplay between lived experiences https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_org&hl=en&org=12285976989264514140 of urban homes and the contested domestication of urban space” (ibid., p. 829-830) by exploring the complex entanglement of urban dwelling and mobility, including migration. yet, as koch and miles (2021: p. 1384) point out, “blunt and sheringham’s discussion… does not consider the role that digital technology often plays in these processes.” digital systems increasingly mediate intimate encounters in and beyond the home (koch and miles, 2021), determine access to (and experiences of) housing in the city (fields, 2022), extend surveillance and securitization practices into the home (jackman and brickell, 2022), and are key to enactments of home by migrants in global cities (cowen et al, 2020). four conceptual lenses this conceptual/theoretical paper brings recent scholarship on digital geographies together with feminist insights on the relationship between domestic and urban space in order to explore emerging smart city domesticities and the urban entanglements of the smart home, and question how these categories are troubled by processes of digitalization. it explores the question of the smart home/city by reading it through a series of established analytical frames for reflecting on the relationship between domestic and urban space, namely: governance, domestication, thresholds, and dwelling. 1. governance: exploring domestic digital technologies as tools of governance that mediate the interplay of the city and home opens up new potentials for connecting the banal management of daily domestic life to the broader political agendas that organize society at both structural and interpersonal levels. the “datafied” smart home depends on deep levels of surveillance that embed the home in “diverse, extended systems of consumption and governmentality” that extend beyond the traditional understandings of domestic boundaries and governance (dodge and kitchin, 2009: 1362). 2. domestication: what does it mean to feel at home in the digitally mediated city? domestication explores how information networks structure belonging and intimacy in the city through the mechanisms of personalization that are traditionally associated with the home. personalization relies on targeted advertising, surveillance, and data assemblages to create overlapping notions of place, cultivating an intimate connection between individuals and the city. 3. thresholds: thresholds draw focus to the myriad ways those boundaries are not simply transgressed but actively reproduced and/or renegotiated in processes of digitalization. in this section, we read recent literature on digital home-city spatialities through the lens of the threshold, tracing the ways distinctions between public and private spaces are actively reproduced and negotiated. 4. dwelling: while the previous sections have traced how digital technologies are increasingly transgressing and/or reproducing traditional spatial divisions between home and city, a dwelling lens looks to complicate such divisions altogether through a focus on everyday experience. rather than highlight one or another frame as the most appropriate or accurate, we consider how each lens opens a distinct set of questions about the evolving spatialities of digital life and the ways they are enacted, negotiated, and potentially contested. to further illustrate this point, we briefly apply these lenses to the case of the eco delta smart city in busan, south korea, an experimental smart city development built from the home up. drawing on publicly available planning documents, journalistic reporting and published scholarship about the development, we use the case to demonstrate the different sets of questions that emerge through application of each of the four lenses. conclusion our theoretical exploration of the evolving spatialities of digital life has implications for research on “smart” spaces that are attuned to the ambiguity and indeterminacy of everyday life. rather than using the home or the city (or another spatial unit) to define the scope or theme of research, we argue that using the lenses of governance, domestication, thresholds, and dwelling highlight the evolving geographies of digitalization in which home and/or city emerge in new ways as contingent, experiential, and far from certain. troubling these boundaries may provide new footholds for digital scholars hoping to critically describe, map, and intervene on the processes of digitization that shape everyday life. references barns, s. (2019). platform urbanism: negotiating platform ecosystems in connected cities. springer nature. brause, s. r., & blank, g. (2020). externalized domestication: smart speaker assistants, networks and domestication theory. information, communication & society, 23(5), 751-763. cockayne, d., leszczynski, a., & zook, m. (2017). #hotforbots: sex, the non-human and digitally mediated spaces of intimate encounter. environment and planning d: society and space, 35(6), 1115-1133. cowen, d., mitchell, a., paradis, e., & story, b. (eds.). (2020). digital lives in the global city: contesting infrastructures. ubc press. cugurullo, f. (2021). frankenstein urbanism: eco, smart and autonomous cities, artificial intelligence and the end of the city. routledge. jackman, a., & brickell, k. (2022). ‘everyday droning’: towards a feminist geopolitics of the drone-home. progress in human geography, 46(1), 156-178. katz, c. & monk, j. (1993). making connections: space, place and the life course. in katz, c. and monk, j., eds, full circles: geographies of women over the life course, new york and london: routledge, 264–78. kitchin, r. (2014). the real-time city? big data and smart urbanism. geojournal, 79(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-013-9516-8 koch, r., & miles, s. (2021). inviting the stranger in: intimacy, digital technology and new geographies of encounter. progress in human geography, 45(6), 1379-1401. leszczynski, a. (2016). speculative futures: cities, data, and governance beyond smart urbanism. environment and planning a: economy and space, 48(9), 1691-1708. leszczynski, a. (2020). digital methods iii: the digital mundane. progress in human geography, 44(6), 1194-1201. luque-ayala, a. (2019). urban. in digital geographies, ash, kitchin, and leszczynski eds. (pp. 24-35). sage. lynch, c. r. (2021). artificial emotional intelligence and the intimate politics of robotic sociality. space and polity, 25(2), 184-201. lynch, c. r., & farrokhi, b. (2022). digital geographies and everyday life: space, materiality, agency. in the routledge handbook of methodologies in human geography (pp. 196-206). routledge. maalsen, s. (2020). revising the smart home as assemblage. housing studies, 35(9), 1534-1549. maalsen, s. (2022). ‘we’re the cheap smart home’: the actually existing smart home as rented and shared. social & cultural geography, 1-20. macrorie, r., marvin, s., & while, a. (2021). robotics and automation in the city: a research agenda. urban geography, 42(2), 197-217. sadowski, j. (2020a). cyberspace and cityscapes: on the emergence of platform urbanism. urban geography, 41(3), 448-452. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-013-9516-8 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): kligler-vilenchik, n. & literat, i. (2022, november 3). “happy heavenly birthday, beautiful queen:” #justiceforbre and the black lives matter movement on instagram. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “happy heavenly birthday, beautiful queen”: #justiceforbre and the black lives matter movement on instagram neta kligler-vilenchik hebrew university of jerusalem ioana literat teachers college, columbia university introduction and theoretical framework on march 13, 2020, breonna taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician (emt) from louisville, kentucky, was killed by police officers during a raid on her apartment. in its immediate aftermath, taylor’s shooting received almost no media attention. public attention to the case was drawn only after the video of george floyd’s death ignited protest across the united states. as gender studies scholar brittney cooper (2020) argued, “black women are rarely the first thought in our outrage over police shootings. but black women are surely worthy of more than secondary outrage.” in this study, we analyze the complex intersections between race, gender, and the aesthetic norms dominant on instagram (see leaver, highfield & abidin, 2020), as they played out in the political expression around the black lives matter (blm) movement— specifically around the killing of breonna taylor. on a theoretical level, this research offers a model explaining how social media platforms (in this case, instagram) can enable—as well as constrain—certain forms of political expression, through the interaction between their affordances, norms, and contents. figure 1. the affordances/norms/contents framework methods as our lens, we used the prominent hashtag #justiceforbre. aided by the software tool 4kstogram, we collected the 5,779 publicly-available instagram posts that used this hashtag between may 25, 2020 (the day of the killing of george floyd) and june 7, 2020 (the end of the first big wave of blm protests in the us). using systematic random sampling, we created a collection of 578 posts for analysis; these included images, videos, as well as carousel posts (i.e. collections of multiple images and/or videos in a single post). to further understand the exchanges around this content, we also analyzed the 2,173 comments that appeared on these instagram posts. key findings our findings section considers the case study through our proposed affordances/norms/contents framework. the conversation around #justiceforbre manifested in a collection of posts that was rather uniform, centered on reposting a relatively limited set of posts that were eyecatching and visually appealing. in terms of content, these consisted most centrally of a few selected photographs of taylor (see figure 2, top row), as well as a series of artistic renderings of her created by social media users (see figure 2, bottom row). these digital images highlight taylor’s femininity, e.g. by the recurrent use of flowers in her hair or background, and were often accompanied by textual references to her as beautiful, or a “beautiful queen.” in addition to images of taylor, another dominant content genre included reposting of stylized activism guides with titles like “5 ways for non-black people to take action” or “ways you can help breonna taylor.” often paired with images, these included links to sign online petitions, emails and phone numbers of officials to contact, as well as calls to further share on social media. a dominant norm in the corpus was connecting political expression around the killing of breonna taylor to the user’s own identity, so that the “right” way to speak around the issue varied based on one’s racial group. in that sense, as opposed to the practice of “strategic colorblindness” practiced in many contexts in u.s. society (apfelbaum, sommers & norton, 2008) racial identity was explicitly foregrounded in these posts. for black users of instagram, this took the form of taking ownership of the issue of police violence and speaking in third person plural, such as in this caption text: “breonna was a kentucky emt, a daughter, a girlfriend—but most importantly she is a black woman. no one speaks up for us. this has to change.” perhaps more surprisingly, non-black (and, especially, white) users explicitly identified themselves racially as well, while problematizing their position vis-à-vis the blm movement. whether calling others to “use your white privilege and do something” or sharing personal stories of racial reckoning, such posts stand out versus the common “invisibility”—and thus seeming universality—of whiteness as a racial identity (dyer, 1997). figure 2. examples of the dominant photographs (top row) and artistic renderings (bottom row) of breonna taylor shared in the corpus. the reliance on affordances, norms, and contents unique to instagram played out most clearly in the #birthdayforbreonna campaign, launched on june 3 by culture critic cate young. to honor what should have been breonna’s 27th birthday—june 5, 2020— young called on her 20k instagram followers to share a stylized set of slides, including an artistic rendering of breonna created for the occasion by an artist, as well as a list of 10 “concrete action items people can do to commemorate her life and fight to get her justice.” action items included sending a birthday card to the kentucky attorney general demanding that he lay charges against the officers who killed breonna, as well as a call to flood social media platforms with remembrances for breonna taylor in order to “take over instagram in her name.” this initiative invited users to combine the political campaign around taylor’s killing with a well-known social media ritual (burgess et al., 2018): that of a birthday celebration. this unorthodox pairing broadened the norms of acceptable participation in the campaign, to include a range of practices usually associated with birthdays: users posting on june 5, the date of her birthday, interlaid images of breonna with “happy birthday” and “happy heavenly birthday” wishes, shared handmade birthday cards, or posted pictures of their homemade birthday cakes. the birthday campaign resonated powerfully, broadening the scope of users posting around breonna taylor. in our dataset, 3501 #justiceforbre posts were shared on her birthday, accounting for 61% of the total content that was posted over a 14-day period. by pairing the birthdayassociated practices with concrete action steps, the campaign highlighted breonna taylor as one of the key figures related to the blm protests. through this analysis, our study points at how the interaction between affordances, norms and contents uniquely shaped the kind of political expression that was enabled on instagram, as well as illuminating the kinds of expression that are constrained by the same dynamics. while the birthday campaign and other forms of embracing the instagram aesthetic (e.g. the use of pictures, artistic renderings and stylized activism guides) made a powerful impact for the blm movement, they also show the limits posed on activist action around the complex topic of race relations, when it is confined to aesthetically pleasing forms of expression that focus on femininity and beauty. references apfelbaum, e. p., sommers, s. r., & norton, m. i. (2008). seeing race and seeming racist? evaluating strategic colorblindness in social interaction. journal of personality and social psychology, 95(4), 918-932. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0011990 burgess, j., mitchell, p., & münch, f.v. (2018). social media rituals: the uses of celebrity death in digital culture. in: papacharissi, z. (ed.), a networked self and birth, life, death. routledge. cooper, b. (2020, june 4). why are black women and girls still an afterthought in our outrage over police violence? time. https://time.com/5847970/police-brutality-blackwomen-girls/ dyer, r. (1997). white. routledge. galucci, n. (2020, july 23). instagram is flooded with artsy activism guides. here’s the story behind them. mashable. https://mashable.com/article/user-made-educationalinstagram-guides leaver, t., highfield, t., & abidin, c. (2020). instagram. polity. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): zhu, g., graham, t., whelan-shamy, d., fleet, r. (2023, october). revealing image-based coordination in social media: a case study of pro-russian influence campaigns. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. revealing multimodal coordination in social media: a case study of pro-russian influence campaigns revealing multimodal guangnan zhu queensland university of technology timothy graham queensland university of technology daniel whelan-shamy queensland university of technology robert fleet queensland university of technology abstract coordinated online disinformation campaigns are by nature difficult to detect. in response, communication scholars have developed a range of methods and analytical frameworks to discover and analyse disinformation campaigns. the use of social network analysis (sna) to find and map coordinated behavioural patterns has become increasingly popular and demonstrated effective results. however, these methods are designed for text and behavioural but miss an important aspect of disinformation campaigns: image-based coordination. this paper examines this gap by introducing a multimodal network analysis framework to map coordinated retweeting behaviour and coordinated image-sharing. we show that image-based coordination is both widespread and different in structure to other forms of coordination. this is important because it highlights a major gap in research, where text-based computational methods are not suited to detecting and analysing the scale and scope of visual disinformation on platforms. to address this, we suggest new methods to complement existing approaches, using deep learning models and advanced sna to detect image similarity. the paper concludes with a reflection of limitations and suggestions for the next steps. introduction the growing prevalence of online influence campaigns that spread false or misleading information on social media has become one of the main threats to platform integrity, trust, and safety. new and emerging scholarship has begun to focus on the group-wise interactions and organizational mechanisms in these influence campaigns, which platforms characterize as ‘coordinated inauthentic behaviour’ (cib) (gleicher, 2019) a group of diverse actors act together in organized ways to exert and amplify influence on a large number of targeted users on online social media. nevertheless, previous studies on cib mainly focus on text-based coordinated behaviour and ignore the influence and harms driven by the semantic false content embedded in images. figure 1. pro-russian images shared in the influence campaigns from the russiaukraine war. this is problematic given that images nowadays increasingly play a dominant role in political mobilisation as image-based content more easily conveys and expresses people’s sentiments and opinions (johnson, 2007) in the context of the current online sphere (heiskanen, 2017). in fact, images are easy o manipulate and those that contain problematic and/or false content often escape traditional detection (thomson et al., 2022). similarly, images that do not represent false or misleading information can be deor re-contextualized to support and spread malinformation (wardle, 2022), evading the detection of both researchers and platforms. the widespread of visual influence campaigns such as meme warfare (merrin, 2019) and fake 'fact-checking' infographics (romero, 2022) are frequent practices of coordinated disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theory groups (krafft & donovan, 2019). for instance, several pro-russia images in the form of memes and infograph are posted and shared in the pro-putin (#istandwithputin) communities (figure 1). this paper presents a novel study in studying image-based coordination network. we examine the recent breakthroughs in social network analysis for detecting coordinated activity on social media platforms (keller et al., 2019; schoch et al., 2022) and opensource toolkits (giglietto et al., 2020; graham, 2020; righetti, 2021). given these approaches only make use of text and url-based data as well as behavioural activities (e.g., retweeting and replying) and are poorly suited to image-based content and online image-sharing behaviours, this study poses and answers three research questions: 1. how can coordination network analysis be modified to incorporate image-based content? 2. how does the volume and network structure differ between coordinated image sharing and text-based tweeting network? 3. how can we develop methods for detecting and analysing sets of similar images shared in influence campaigns? methods to address our research question and construct image-based coordinated networks for social network analysis, we have enhanced existing 'coordination network analysis' methodologies. our extension allows for the identification of accounts that post not only similar textual content but also share visual content, all within a short time frame (e.g., within 60 seconds). in our approach, we process both textual and visual data, converting them into embedding feature vectors. for the textual data, we utilize a pretrained bert-based (bidirectional encoder representations from transformers) text-embedding model. for the visual data, we employ a pretrained vgg16 model (pretrained on the imagenet dataset). to integrate these two types of data, we deploy a multimodal model, fusing the two embeddings into a single joint multimodal vector that represents the original posts. this method addresses the limitation in previous rgb histogram feature vectors (pacheco et al., 2020) by obtaining more hierarchical and no hand-crafted features. following this, we calculate the cosine similarity between vectors in each pair of posts. actors with higher similarity values that also meet our extended criteria for coordination are then connected and mapped. the final step of our process is achieved through the use of a toolkit developed by graham (2020), ensuring a comprehensive and robust analysis of coordinated network activities. we evaluate our methods through a case study of russian visual disinformation sharing in a coordinated fashion on twitter by over 78487 pro-russia and pro-putin accounts, as well as fringe botand troll-like accounts, on twitter that posted text-only or image content (n=13140) with the hashtag #istandwithputin in 2022 during the start of the russia-ukraine war. figure 2. comparison on number of posted tweets among text-only (yellow) and multimodal (orange) content results the descriptive comparison figure 2 demonstrates the obvious difference in number between text-only tweets and ones containing images during the period at the start of the russian invasion. we generate two coordination networks, one text-based and one multimodal network. we define the similarity threshold as 0.9 for both networks to indicate the highly similar pairs of posts. we also define the time window as 60 seconds and edge weight larger than 2 to detect pairs of nodes (accounts) in the network who must have posted similar images at least twice within 60 seconds of each other. all colored clusters within the multimodal coordination network share a pro-russian sentiment while the sentiment within the text-based network is much the same. the text-based coordination network consists of 322 nodes and 320 edges while the multimodal coordination network consists of 188 and 286 extra nodes and edges, respectively. the accounts in the multimodal network are more likely to share media content (e.g. images, videos, etc.) than in the text-based network. the results illustrate that the multimodal method effectively supplements the text-based detection method and expands the original method in detecting image-based coordination and more importantly, the multimodal level. figure 3. a text-based and a multimodal coordination network generated from the #istandwithputin dataset. conclusion image-based online communication by posting and sharing on social media has become an important mechanism in influence campaigns. the new multimodal coordination detection method utilises non-textual modes of data and information and introduces network-based analysis methods for detecting and studying multimodal content. although it is an ongoing project, the results illustrate the irreplaceable key role of multimodal methods in the practice of more complete and multimodal social media network studies and also serve to further improve coordination detection in disinformation campaigns. we also suggest deploying the image clustering method in future work to partition the images into semantically meaningful clusters to interpret their implicit relationship and use clusters as the indicator for sameness instead of explicit similarity measurement. this method can help us conduct the analysis of memetic templates such as image macros. apart from image and text, there are more unexplored forms and modes of information, where we look forward to future work leveraging more advanced methods to study more diverse coordinated activities such as online activism and participatory culture. references giglietto, f., righetti, n., & marino, g. (2019). understanding coordinated and inauthentic link sharing behavior on facebook in the run-up to 2018 general election and 2019 european election in italy. gleicher. (2018). coordinated inauthentic behavior explained. https://newsroom.fb .com/news/2019/08/cib-uae-egypt-saudi-arabia/. (accessed: 2021-10-15) graham, t. (2020). coordination network toolkit. queensland university of technology. (software). retrieved from ttps://doi.org/10.25912/rdf 1632782596538 heiskanen, b. (2017). meme-ing electoral participation. european journal of american studies, 12(12-2). keller, f. b., schoch, d., stier, s., & yang, j. (2020). political astroturfing on twitter: how to coordinate a disinformation campaign. political communication, 37(2), 256–280. krafft, p. m., & donovan, j. (2020). disinformation by design: the use of evidence collages and platform filtering in a media manipulation campaign. political communication, 37(2), 194-214. merrin, w. (2019). president troll: trump, 4chan and memetic warfare. in trump's media war (pp. 201-226). palgrave macmillan, cham. pacheco, d., flammini, a., & menczer, f. (2020). unveiling coordinated groups behind white helmets disinformation. in companion proceedings of the web conference 2020 (pp. 611–616). righetti, n. (2021). coortweet: an r package to detect coordinated behavior on twitter. retrieved from: https://www.nicolarighetti.net/digital-media/coortweet-an-rpackage-to-detect-coordinated-behavior-on-twitter/ romero, l. (2022). how ‘war on fakes’ uses fact-checking to spread pro-russia propaganda. politifact. retrieved from: https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/aug/08/how-war-fakes-uses-fact-checkingspread-pro-russia/ schoch, d., keller, f. b., stier, s., & yang, j. (2022). coordination patterns reveal online political astroturfing across the world. scientific reports, 12(1), 1–10. starbird, k., arif, a., & wilson, t. (2019). disinformation as collaborative work: surfacing the participatory nature of strategic information operations. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 3(cscw), 1–26. t.j. thomson, daniel angus, paula dootson, edward hurcombe & adam smith (2022) visual mis/disinformation in journalism and public communications: current verification practices, challenges, and future opportunities, journalism practice, 16:5, 938-962, doi: 10.1080/17512786.2020.1832139 wardle, c. (2020, sep 22). understanding information disorder. first draft. retrieved from: https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/understanding-information-disorder/ https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/understanding-information-disorder/ selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): pinch, a. (2022, november). navigating the ecosystem of big data and algorithms after incarceration. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. navigating the ecosystem of big data and algorithms after incarceration annika pinch northwestern university background returning citizens struggle when reentering society as their criminal record follows them around. in the age of big data and algorithms, finding information about someone’s criminal past is often as simple as typing their name into a google search. an estimated 40-70 million americans have criminal records (lageson & maruna, 2018), showing just how important it is to research people’s lives after incarceration. in this study, i ask: in what ways does the visibility of information about returning citizens’ criminal record as it appears on search engines impact their lives? what strategies (if any) do they use to manage their criminal record in search? we need research focused on understanding how people live with algorithms and big data systems, and what impacts they have in people's everyday lives (bucher, 2017; christin, 2017; eubanks, 2018). this study looks at the consequences of big data and algorithmic decisions for everyday people by studying the “experiences and practices of people subject to these systems” (ziewitz & singh, 2021, p. 11). moreover, returning citizens are a particularly vulnerable population that need more attention and support within communication scholarship (reisdorf & rikard, 2018; ogbonnaya-ogburu et al., 2019). as algorithmic and big data systems continually classify and order our lives (fourcade & healy, 2013; zuboff, 2019), we need to examine how technologies may act as a form of “social control” (gurusami, 2019, p. 449). the impacts of incarceration have long extended beyond a prisoner’s sentence, with michelle alexander (2010) deeming mass incarceration the “new jim crow”. upon reentering society, returning citizens face stigma associated with their sentence, along with challenges in gaining employment, access to public assistance, and disenfranchisement, among other effects. the longstanding impacts of systemic racism have led to racial differences in the criminal legal system and we must recognize the racism embedded within digital technology (benjamin, 2019; ogbonnaya-ogburu et al., 2020). method in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted, lasting between 30 minutes and 1.5 hours, which were audio recorded and transcribed. one challenge was gaining access to this population, especially given returning citizens can have less digital literacy and can avoid technology (lageson, 2020). recruitment occurred through previous contacts, along with snowball sampling. given the ongoing covid-19 pandemic, interviews have been majority conducted over the phone, which has the advantage of enabling discussion with participants in different parts of the us, yet at the same time, inevitably, doing phone interviews posed challenges especially given the lack of phone and internet familiarity some people in this population have. i used a thematic analysis approach (braun & clarke, 2012), developing a coding scheme that reflected all relevant topics, with a particular focus on visibility of one’s criminal record online. this method allowed me to answer my specific research questions and better understand participants’ experiences and how they think about their experiences with digital technology. moreover, to protect the privacy of this particularly vulnerable group, all participants were given pseudonyms and treated with full anonymity. lastly, it is important to point out that this project is framed withing the us criminal legal system context. future work should focus on people’s experiences with criminal records in other countries. findings returning citizens struggle when re-entering society into a technologically driven world which they do not necessarily know how to navigate, which leads to embarrassing and frustrating experiences, especially for those who have been incarcerated for long periods of time. moreover, returning citizens’ presence in google search results impacts them in various ways, such as in their search for economic opportunities, social relationships, and housing. returning citizens cope with uncertainty in not knowing where exactly their criminal record is showing up, how its impacting them, who its impacting, and who is seeing it. their presence in google’s algorithms had an immense impact over participants lives, yet they weren’t always sure how that power was being enacted, or what to do about it. while past research has shown how people can prefer to reveal sensitive or potentially stigmatizing information subtly, and over time (andalibi et al., 2018), returning citizens are not able to do this. instead, they adapt by being very upfront about their criminal record. an implicit assumption of much digital divide work is that people can and should be online. yet some returning citizens outright reject the use of online systems, concluding these systems are not made for them. our findings add to critiques about the prison-industrial complex and how our reliance on big data and algorithmic systems can perpetuate unequal and colonial power dynamics. this work emphasizes the importance of studying marginalized experiences with technology, and the everyday experiences of users who live with digital systems that rank and order their lives. references alexander, m. (2010). the new jim crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. the new press. andalibi, n., morris, m. e., & forte, a. (2018). testing waters, sending clues: indirect disclosures of socially stigmatized experiences on social media. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 2(cscw), 1-23. benjamin, r. (2019). race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. cambridge, uk: polity braun v., clarke v. (2012). thematic analysis. in cooper h., camic p. m., long d. l., panter a. t., rindskopf d., sher k. j. (eds.), apa handbook of research methods in psychology, vol. 2. research designs: quantitative, qualitative, neuropsychological, and biological (pp. 57–71). american psychological association. bucher, t. (2017). the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 30-44. christin, a. (2017). algorithms in practice: comparing web journalism and criminal justice. big data & society, 4(2), 2053951717718855. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717718855 eubanks, v. (2018). automating inequality: how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. st. martin's press. fourcade, m., & healy, k. (2013). classification situations: life-chances in the neoliberal era. accounting, organizations and society, 38(8), 559-572. gurusami, s. (2019). the carceral web we weave: carceral citizens’ experiences of digital punishment and solidarity. punishment & society, 21(4), 435–453. https://doi.org/10.1177/1462474518790237 lageson, s. e. (2020). digital punishment: privacy, stigma, and the harms of datadriven criminal justice. oxford university press. lageson, s. e., & maruna, s. (2018). digital degradation: stigma management in the internet age. punishment & society, 20(1), 113–133. https://doi.org/10.1177/1462474517737050 ogbonnaya-ogburu, i. f., smith, a. d., to, a., & toyama, k. (2020, april). critical race theory for hci. in proceedings of the 2020 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-16). ogbonnaya-ogburu, i. f., toyama, k., & dillahunt, t. r. (2019). towards an effective digital literacy intervention to assist returning citizens with job search. proceedings of the 2019 chi conference on human factors in computing systems chi ’19, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300315 reisdorf, b. c., & rikard, r. v. (2018). digital rehabilitation: a model of reentry into the digital age. american behavioral scientist, 62(9), 1273–1290. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764218773817 ziewitz, m., & singh, r. (2021). critical companionship: some sensibilities for studying the lived experience of data subjects. big data & society, 8(2), 20539517211061122. zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. new york, ny: public affairs. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): hallinan, b., trillò, t., mizoroki, s., scharlach, r., park, p.h., green, a., & shifman, l. (2024, october). the collective individualism of youtube makeup reviews. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the collective individualism of youtube makeup reviews blake hallinan the hebrew university of jerusalem tommaso trillò the hebrew university of jerusalem saki mizoroki the hebrew university of jerusalem rebecca schlarach the university of bremen pyung hwa park the hebrew university of jerusalem avishai green the hebrew university of jerusalem limor shifman the hebrew university of jerusalem beauty is one of the most popular and lucrative segments on youtube given its desirability to advertisers and the possibility for creators to launch product lines (hou, 2019). while social media entertainment takes on local specifications (e.g., arriagada & siles, 2023; bagdogan, 2023; mohan & punathambekar, 2019), there have been few direct cross-cultural investigations of such content, leaving the relationship between platform culture and local culture ambiguous. in this study, we thus set out to investigate the cultural repertoires of evaluation in beauty reviews on youtube across multiple languages, asking: 1) how do youtube creators communicate the value of products? 2) how do youtube creators communicate their value as reviewers? and 3) how do these practices vary across languages? we collected popular makeup reviews using keyword searches with youtube data tools (rieder, 2015) in five languages: english, german, italian, japanese, and korean. we selected english given its popularity on the platform (mcgrady et al., 2023). the remaining languages are affiliated with geographic regions representing divergent cultures (hofstede, 2003): germany and italy are associated with individualism while japan and korea are associated with collectivism. we employed content analysis on the top 20 videos in each language (n=100) to compare the videos’ evaluative criteria using a codebook of ten values we adapted from boltanski and thévenot’s (2006) typology of justifications for a prior study of youtube reviews (hallinan, 2023). a multi-national team of native speakers of the study’s languages went through each transcript to identify and code moments of evaluation. creators across languages employ a shared cultural repertoire to evaluate beauty products, concerned with aesthetics, functionality, pleasure, and, to a lesser extent, distinctiveness, and economy. basically, makeup products should look beautiful, work well, feel good, stand out, and deliver on their cost, aligning with prior work on english-language reviews (hallinan, 2023. while beauty creators appeal to a consistent set of values, they rarely elaborate on their meaning. reviews also overwhelmingly present positive evaluations, identifying the best products in a particular category or for a particular audience (e.g., mature skin). even videos that promise more critical evaluations, such as the “full face of worst rated makeup products,” distance the creator from negative evaluations by using online rankings and stipulating that any criticism comes from other people’s opinions. the approach to evaluation in youtube makeup reviews blends elements of collectivist and individualist communication styles. most creators make indirect recommendations, placing more emphasis on showing rather than telling (jaakkola, 2022). if a review answers the questions of what a product is and whether is it any good (blank, 2006), youtube beauty reviews spend most of their time on the former. even when they engage with the latter, they emphasize positivity. while not every reviewer uses the language of emotionality, they consistently framed their evaluations as subjective “personal” opinions. yet makeup reviewers on youtube also engaged in individualistic approaches to reviewing, using reviews as an opportunity to express their personality and build a distinctive personal brand. if the platform culture of youtube is changing the function of reviewing (hallinan, 2024; jaakkola, 2022), our research suggests that change may be more pronounced in western contexts. the precarity of creators on the platform incentivizes risk management strategies (duffy et al., 2021). as lawson observes, “influencers are careful, and even if they dislike a product, many will emphasize they love the brand and recommend other products they like in an attempt to maintain that relationship” (2021, p. 604). in so doing, they adopt more collectivelyoriented styles of communication that “soften” evaluations. although further research is necessary to investigate the reach of this practice, our analysis of multi-lingual makeup reviews demonstrates how the homogenization of social media entertainment need not be synonymous with westernization. references arriagada, a., & siles, i. (2023). the mutual configuration of affordances and technological frames: content creators in the chilean influencer industry. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, online first, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231157364 bagdogan, s. (2023). hands-on(ly) vlogging: how turkish muslim women perform “modesty” and “piety” in self-branding on their youtube cooking channels. social media + society, 9(2), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231166446 blank, g. (2006). critics, ratings, and society: the sociology of reviews. rowman & littlefield. duffy, b. e., pinch, a., sannon, s., & sawey, m. (2021). the nested precarities of creative labor on social media. social media + society, 7(2), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211021368 https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231157364 https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231157364 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231166446 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211021368 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211021368 hallinan, b. (2023). no judgment: value optimization and the reinvention of reviewing on youtube. journal of computer-mediated communication, 28(5). https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmad034 hofstede, g. (2003). culture’s consequences: comparing values, behaviors, institutions, and organizations across nations (2nd edition). sage publications. hou, m. (2019). social media celebrity and the institutionalization of youtube. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 25(3), 534–553. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856517750368 jaakkola, m. (2022). reviewing culture online: post-institutional cultural critique across platforms. palgrave macmillan. lamont, m., & thévenot, l. (eds.). (2000). rethinking comparative cultural sociology: repertoires of evaluation in france and the united states. cambridge university press. lawson, c. e. (2021). skin deep: callout strategies, influencers, and racism in the online beauty community. new media & society, 23(3), 596–612. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820904697 mcgrady, r., zheng, k., curran, r., baumgartner, j., & zuckerman, e. (2023). dialing for videos: a random sample of youtube. journal of quantitative description: digital media, 3. https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2023.022 mohan, s., & punathambekar, a. (2019). localizing youtube: language, cultural regions, and digital platforms. international journal of cultural studies, 22(3), 317–333. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877918794681 rieder, b. (2015). youtube data tools (version 1.30) [software]. https://tools.digitalmethods.net/netvizz/youtube/ https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmad034 https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856517750368 https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856517750368 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820904697 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820904697 https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2023.022 https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877918794681 https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877918794681 https://tools.digitalmethods.net/netvizz/youtube selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): rama, i. (2022, november). the complex simplicity of context. affordances as flows of social information. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the complex simplicity of context. affordances as flows of social information ilir rama university of milan affordances have been understood in a variety of ways, focusing on how they represent possibilities for action on digital spaces, their consequent macro-scale effects (bucher & helmond 2018), or their cultural and social embeddedness (davis & chouinard 2017). the broad application of affordances reflects, to some extent, broader attempts by a variety of disciplines to mitigate the tension between sociality and technology (e.g., mcgrenere & ho 2000, evans et al. 2017). however, this foundational tension concurs to obscure some dynamics. affordances have mostly been employed by considering technical and social aspects, while inextricably linking those dimensions. considering affordances as flows of social information (see meyrowitz 1985), that is by focusing on their social, co-constructed, and intersubjective nature, provides a powerful tool to consider social action in digital environments, while at the same time unpacking social and technical components. this underlines an emphasis on context in two ways. the first relates to the transposition of norms and customs to digital environments (see marwick & boyd 2011). considering affordances sociologically allows to give greater weight to social norms and cultural codes, in turn going over situated understandings of the relation between technical features and social action. this emphasizes the contextual nature of the use, understanding, and employment of affordances, as based on individual factors such as proficiency and instrumentality, as well as social and cultural contexts. for example, then, a relatively straight-forward affordance such as metrics can be invested with a variety of meanings based on context. a high number of plays on a song on youtube might be seen as detrimental, when considering how identities are managed around consumption in specific social niches (such as hipster authenticity, maly & varis 2015). similarly, fragmenting social situations on facebook might be seen as a normal way of using it, rather than the result of the technical structure of the platform (costa 2018). additionally, underlining how individual factors can affect social action on platforms points at how affordances can aid in structuring social situations on digital environments. in sociology, social situations are based on principles of co-presence that put emphasis on the physicality of cues and environments. said cues transmit social information: that is, they are interpreted by individuals to infer the norms of a specific social interaction, in turn guiding behaviour (goffman 1974). several efforts tried to reconceptualize social situations in digital societies, for example considering their intertwining with devices and bits (knorr cetina 2009), and even challenging their nature (marres 2017). considering affordances as flows of social information, then, contributes to fill this gap by underlining how social media features can act as digital cues and, in turn, structure interaction on digital environments. for example, the emoji of a national flag can acquire a different meaning if used in the united states or germany, in turn concurring to politically situate the conversation (kariryaa et al. 2020). the visibility of this cues, and their nature, makes the negotiation and mediation of social norms fluid. individuals can promote or sanction content based on their individual understanding of what is proper in a specific context, in turn establishing the cultural codes that will drive social action. the number of likes on a selfie, then, can concur to define the standards of beauty of a community on reddit, affecting how subsequent users will post (van der nagel 2013). a sociology of affordances considers how affordances are situated at the intersection between individual, social, cultural, and technical factors. affordances can be considered socially, as intersubjective and co-constructed features, and individually, as affecting and engendering behaviour. it allows to considers the peculiarity of contexts in two ways: individually, based on how they affect social action as based on individual understandings of platforms and their features, and socially, based on how they affect the definition of a situation based on their intersubjective nature, visibility, and coconstruction. such an understanding has been applied to reddit and its affordances. reddit is a content aggregator where users can post a variety of content and comments. the choice is motivated by its affordances: built by user-made communities, reddit has thousands of subreddits that can vary wildly, as well as present minor variations, such as on moderation policy (gibson 2019). additionally, the karma system is a quantification of the reception of a specific piece of content in a given community, in turn regulating its visibility. the complexity of reddit provides a privileged ground to explore how users navigate socially and culturally complex digital environments. to do so, 26 semi-structured interviews were conducted with reddit users from a variety of socio-demographic and geographical contexts, and with various patterns of use. interviews focused on the navigation of social contexts and norms, social action on digital platforms, and the relationship with the perception of affordances. results point at how users lean on individual factors to interpret and define how to properly act in digital environments through affordances, based on intentionality and patterns of use. affordances are understood and employed relationally to navigate complex social contexts, to infer dominant social norms and cultural codes and, once internalized, are deployed to sanction deviations or promote compliance to them. expression is modulated based on how social situations are defined: individuals withhold information when it does not suit the context they are currently in, and actively explore new situations to define what and how it is proper to socially act. this suggests how social situations, rather than being challenged by the complexity of digital environments, can disentangle social and technical aspects, while emphasizing the social, cultural, and individual factors driving interaction. references bucher, t., & helmond, a. (2018). the affordances of social media platforms. in the sage handbook of social media. costa, e. (2018). affordances-in-practice: an ethnographic critique of social media logic and context collapse. new media & society, 20(10), 3641–3656. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818756290 davis, j. l., & chouinard, j. b. (2017). theorizing affordances: from request to refuse: bulletin of science, technology & society. https://doi.org/10.1177/0270467617714944 evans, s. k., pearce, k. e., vitak, j., & treem, j. w. (2017). explicating affordances: a conceptual framework for understanding affordances in communication research. journal of computer-mediated communication, 22(1), 35–52. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12180 gibson, a. (2019). free speech and safe spaces: how moderation policies shape online discussion spaces. social media + society, 5(1), 2056305119832588. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119832588 goffman, e. (1974). frame analysis: an essay on the organization of experience. harvard university press. kariryaa, a., rundé, s., heuer, h., jungherr, a., & schöning, j. (2020). the role of flag emoji in online political communication. social science computer review, 0894439320909085. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439320909085 knorr cetina, k. (2009). the synthetic situation: interactionism for a global world. symbolic interaction, 32(1), 61–87. https://doi.org/10.1525/si.2009.32.1.61 maly, i., & varis, p. (2016). the 21st-century hipster: on micro-populations in times of superdiversity. european journal of cultural studies, 19(6), 637–653. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549415597920 marres, n. (2017). digital sociology: the reinvention of social research. polity. marwick, a. e., & boyd, danah. (2011). i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. new media & society, 13(1), 114–133. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365313 mcgrenere, j., & ho, w. (2000). affordances: clarifying and evolving a concept. 9. meyrowitz, j. (1985). no sense of place: the impact of electronic media on social behavior (1. issued as an oxford univ. press paperback). oxford univ. press. van der nagel, e. (2013). faceless bodies: negotiating technological and cultural codes on reddit gonewild. scan: journal of media arts culture, 10. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): siapera, e & farries, e (2024, october). platform governance and civil society organisations: tensions and insider perspectives. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. platform governance and civil society organisations: tensions and insider perspectives eugenia siapera school of information and communication studies, university college dublin elizabeth farries school of information and communication studies, university college dublin overview focusing on the european context and the digital services act, this article probes the role of civil society organisations (csos) in platform governance. theoretically, we locate csos within the paradigm of neoliberal governance, which aims to limit state power advancing a market-based rationality. civil society is tasked with pushing against both state and markets, although in doing so it may end up upholding the terms of neoliberal governance. in this context, we ask to what extent can digital rights csos fulfil their normative role and how do they participate in platform governance? empirically, we rely on a set of in depth interviews with key informants from five leading eu digital rights csos, supported by autoethnography and document analysis. our findings suggest that csos operate across what we refer as the ‘reform versus revolution’ continuum. while those closer to the ‘reform’ end aim to make incremental changes to improve platforms, those closer to the ‘revolution’ end take a more radical view aiming to dissolve platforms altogether. while this structuring division reflects positions that are critical in different ways, pragmatic issues around funding and the hegemonic role of platforms undermine csos ability to act altogether, reorienting them towards identifying ways in which they can sustain themselves. the dsa and cso participation the eu digital services act (dsa) came into force in n2022 and fully applied across the whole of the european union in 2024. this regulation constitutes the first systematic attempt to regulate platforms. the dsa as operates at two levels: at the first level it works through providing a set of mandatory but broad rules for different categories of platforms; and at the second level it provides for the development of a set of voluntary codes of conduct which contain specific guidance for the application of the regulations and rules. both make provisions for the participation of civil society organisations (csos) though there is a lack of specific details. the development of voluntary codes is considered part of a broader shift from ‘command and control’ regulation towards the incorporation of informal and voluntary steering mechanisms for the operation of transnational corporations (gorwa, 2019a). these mechanisms involve the participation of platforms themselves in forms of selfregulation as well as the participation of csos representing diverse communities and interests. the associated inclusion of csos is rooted in the multistakeholder governance model pioneered by the world summit on the information society (raboy and landry, 2005) and represents in broad terms the increasing involvement of civil society in governance. multistakeholder governance and civil society our discussion illustrates two key tensions in the involvement of civil society in processes of governance: the first tension stems from the power asymmetries between civil society and the other actors in multi stakeholder governance, namely states and private companies; and the second tension is linked to the great diversity of csos and their potentially conflicting priorities and interests. platform governance, the neoliberal turn and csos the dsa, and similar legal and regulatory instruments at the national level, are integral to platform governance in the eu. gorwa (2019a; 2019b) understands platform governance as consisting of a set of multilayered relationships between key stakeholders, including platforms themselves, individual and business users, governments, and other social and political actors. flew (2021) proposes a three-phase periodisation of platform governance: the early phase of unregulated libertarian internet; the phase of platformisation, characterised by the dominance of platforms; and a new period that we are entering currently, which sees the dawn of the regulated internet. here, we discuss the (neo)liberal approach to governance, positing that the space created for csos emerged within this paradigm. thus, the involvement of stakeholders from civil society is linked with the delegation of state power into the hands of non-state actors and with shifts in political rationality and the exercise of power (foucault, 2008). theoretically, we locate the emergence of civil society as part of (neo)liberal governance and this comes with a set of structural tensions that can capture csos in ways that may end up reproducing a system of governance that civil society was formulated to oppose or mitigate. while he location of csos in between states and platforms is taken to constitute an independent position outside the formal exercise of power, it may be an integral part of it. csos operate by seeking to bring matters to the attention of the state and corporate actors, where, to be addressed, they must be integrated into state and corporate rationalities (lipschutz, 2005). in this sense, civil society operates as a legitimation mechanism not only because it adds a superficial layer of democratic participation, but also at a deep, structural level, as it effectively advocates for state and corporate actors to deal with problems through incorporating them in their logics. the dsa and csos while for the most part the role of civil society in platform governance is to develop normative approaches (as in digital constitutionalism) or to advocate for rights and fundamental freedoms, for the first time the dsa provides a path for direct participation in governance rather than looking to exert influence and shape policy. its chief goal is to set clear rules to protect citizens and their fundamental rights while fostering “innovation, growth and competitiveness” (european commission, n.d.). there are three areas where the dsa provides (but does not mandate) for civil society involvement: firstly, in efforts to monitor the enforcement of its rules (e.g. recital 90); secondly, in codesigning mitigation measures and contributing to the drawing up of additional codes of conduct as and if required by the commission (e.g. article 45(2); and thirdly, in advising and providing expert support to the commission (e.g. recital 137). the potential for direct involvement of csos in the dsa marks a departure from their typical role of indirectly influencing policy and shaping public opinion. on the one hand, this development recognizes the importance of non-state and non-market actors in regulatory efforts. on the other hand, the quasi-formalised role allocated to csos raises important questions concerning their capacities, their independence and their structural position in platform governance. our research approach the article makes use of ethnographic methods, in depth interviews with key informants, together with document analysis. our empirical analysis is grounded in institutional ethnography as a qualitative research method (smith, 1987). unlike other research where researchers consider the working of groups that are external to them, our empirical approach is informed by insights obtained through a privileged insider perspective of one of the authors, who has a background of an eu cso worker and is therefore familiar with the processes, arguments, tactics deployed, and field-level impacts targeted for digital rights and regulations. there are two ways this approach has been useful for the current study: (i) in conjunction with our theoretical perspective it provided an entry point and guided the questions asked; (ii) as with the document analysis, it provided validation and support for the issues raised by the informants. references european commission (n.d.), the digital services act ensuring a safe and accountable online environment https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-andpolicy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-services-act_en flew, t. (2021). regulating platforms. polity. foucault, m., [davidson, a. i., & burchell, g.] (2008). the birth of biopolitics: lectures at the collège de france, 1978-1979. springer. gorwa, r. (2019a). the platform governance triangle: conceptualising the informal regulation of online content. internet policy review, 8(2), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.2.1407 https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.2.1407 https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.2.1407 gorwa, r. (2019b). what is platform governance? information, communication & society, 22(6), 854-871. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1573914 lipschutz, r. (2005). global civil society and global governmentality: or, the search for politics and the state amidst the capillaries of social power. in barnett m. and duvall r. (eds), power in global governance, cambridge university press, pp 229-248. raboy, m., & and landry, n. (2005). civil society, communication, and global governance; issues from the world summit on the information society. peter lang publishing inc. smith, d. e. (2005). institutional ethnography: a sociology for people. rowman altamira. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1573914 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): dejmanee,t. (2022, november). grappling with the model minority myth: asian american food bloggers’ activism through black lives matter on instagram. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. grappling with the model minority myth: asian american food bloggers’ activism through black lives matter on instagram. tisha dejmanee university of technology sydney asian american food bloggers constitute an overrepresented racial minority within the predominantly white, middle-class and heteronormative food blogosphere. the whiteness of this digital culture is a function of its allegiance to aspirational and commercialised postfeminist (mcrobbie, 2009; gill, 2007) and postrace (bonilla-silva, 2003; joseph, 2018) discourses, and asian american participation therein is often understood as ‘ethnic entrepreneurialism’ in which race is commoditised for the assumed white imagined audience. while the confessional tone and the focus on mundane, gendered experiences across the lifestyle blogosphere has been described as radical for women (lopez, 2009) and instrumental in generating communities of support for girls and women (e.g. makinen, 2021; keller, 2016), these findings of everyday politics and subversion are not similarly impactful for bloggers of colour. food blogs rarely constitute productive spaces for discussing or building community around asian american experiences even when published by asian american bloggers. this study addresses the need for further intersectional analyses of food blogs that specifically take into account the racial discourses generated and circulated in this culture. this presentation explores the racial discourses generated by asian american food bloggers participating in instagram conversations around #blackouttuesday and black lives matter in 2020. although the demographic focus is on food bloggers, i base the current analysis on instagram as an essential cross-promotional platform for food bloggers, due to its popularity and emphasis on visual storytelling (leaver, highfield & abidin, 2020), and as it was the platform around which the #blackouttuesday action was centered. i analyse 33 posts on the topic of #blackouttuesday, black lives matter or race that were published in june 2020, based on a sample of 17 asian american food bloggers who were saveur food blog award finalists between 2009-2019, currently maintain active food blogs, and have corresponding branded instagram accounts. i perform a thematic and semiotic analysis of data produced including instagram images, posts, hashtags and comments, which were interpreted in conjunction with the contextual reading of the associated food blogs. i found that most bloggers in my sample felt compelled to participate in this action, referencing an understanding of this moment as an ‘awakening’ that digital influence could and should be used to disseminate social activism messages. their contributions could be characterised as earnest and action-oriented, demonstrating a self-reflexivity about existing scepticism of ‘performative activism’ by influencers. additionally, i found that instagram and the #blackouttuesday action authorised the discussion of race in a way that was not previously visible in the food blogosphere – for instance, asian american food bloggers used instagram posts in these conversations to identify with the political identity term ‘asian american,’ while most reference to race on food blogs included terms such as ‘korean,’ ‘fusion,’ ‘pan-asian,’ and ‘asian-inspired,’ which were more aligned with the commodification of asian culture. additionally, ‘asian’ and ‘asian american’ were invoked as collective identity terms to inspire solidarity and action amongst the asian american community in support of black lives matter, for instance through the use of hashtags including #asiansforblacklivesmatter and the more controversial #yellowperilforblacklives, a way of interpellating a specifically asian american audience, whereas corresponding food blogs were often oriented towards an imagined white audience, thus limiting possibilities for generating asian american community. at the same time, these conversations about race also demonstrated the internalisation of the model minority myth, in which asian americans are presented as ‘exemplary’ and successful minorities as a rhetorical strategy that upholds white supremacy by positioning minority groups – typically asian americans and black americans – against each other in the us context (park, 2008). while many asian american food bloggers drew on the blogosphere’s conventions of personalization and intimacy to document their shock and grief in response to george floyd’s murder, as one of the main catalysts for #blackouttuesday, very few shared their own experiences of racism. instead, asian american food bloggers distanced themselves from the structural racism experienced by black americans in subtle ways such as distinguishing between the microaggressions they had experienced and the ‘more serious’ racism and threats faced by black americans. asian american food bloggers also acknowledged their many privileges and, while it is true that asian american food bloggers – as with the majority of food bloggers – tend to be socioeconomically privileged given the cultural capital, skills and resources currently required to maintain a professional food blog, when they acknowledge their privilege in conjunction with their identification as asian american, this works to conflate the myth of asian american exceptionalism that discounts the distinct socioeconomic bifurcation and heterogeneity within the asian american community. moreover, the perpetuation of model minority narratives – particularly as they are deemed to come directly and authentically from asian american representatives – disguises the continued precarity of asians within white settler colonialism racial landscapes, which became apparent as large numbers of asian americans becoming victims of racially-motivated fatal violence during the pandemic. what this data demonstrates is that the racial experiences of asian american food bloggers continue to be silenced or diffracted within the food blogosphere and its supplementary content, largely due to the ways that asian american participation is structured through assimilation and racial commodification in this predominantly white commercialised digital culture. however, despite the limitations of these discussions of structural racism within the asian american community, this conversation has value in contributing to visibility around minority allyship within the black lives matter movement – which has contributed greatly to mainstream discourse on structural racism – while also challenging the long-held premise within the blogosphere that the digital influence of minority bloggers is predicated upon their political silence. this focus on black lives matter discourse on instagram relates to the conference theme of decolonising the internet by centering the firsthand and intimate perspectives and experiences of racial minority food bloggers working in a predominantly white lifestyle blogosphere and discussing the continued limitations and constraints of diverse racial voice and representation due to the commercialised conventions and trend-based content production of influencer culture. references bonilla-silva, e. (2003). racism without racists: color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in america. rowman & littlefield. gill, r. (2007). postfeminist media culture: elements of a sensibility. european journal of cultural studies, 10(2), 147–166. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549407075898 joseph, r. (2018). postracial resistance: black women, media, and the uses of strategic ambiguity, new york: new york university press. keller, j. (2016). girl’s feminist blogging in a postfeminist age. new york: routledge leaver, t., highfield, t. and abidin, c. (2020). instagram: visual social media cultures. cambridge: polity press lopez, l. k. (2009). the radical act of “mommy blogging”: redefining motherhood through the blogosphere. new media & society, 11(5), 729–747. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809105349 mäkinen, k. (2021). resilience and vulnerability: emotional and affective labour in mom blogging. new media & society, 23(10), 2964–2978. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820941196 mcrobbie, a. (2009). the aftermath of feminism: gender, culture and social change. london: sage. park, l. s.-h. (2008). continuing significance of the model minority myth: the second generation. social justice, 35(2 (112)), 134–144. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29768492 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): van schenck, r. (2024, october). replatformization: racial capitalism and the stack-consciousness of kiwi farms. paper (or panel) presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. replatformization: racial capitalism and the stackconsciousness of kiwi farms reed van schenck ie university introduction the “regulatory turn” in internet studies is underway as scholars evaluate ict firms’ efforts to manage violent uses of digital platforms (schlesinger 2020; flew and gillett 2021). the problem of scale is essential. digital platforms depend on the “stack” (bratton 2016), or a modular hierarchy of infrastructure, to deliver content to users and to regulate offenders. a single platform contracts numerous firms including isps, web hosts, domain registrars, cybersecurity providers, ad brokers, and more. the international, multi-sided, and conflicting relationships between stack suppliers pose obstacles for implementing policies to curtail disinformation and hate (tusikov 2018). the concepts of (de)platformization help us appreciate the problem of scale but require updating to attend to recent industrial developments in reactionary digital media. “platformization” names the convergence of myriad sectors on digital platforms, or online services that deploy proprietary data-driven algorithms to organize interactions among users, providers, and industries (helmond 2015; gillespie 2018; nieborg and poell 2018). as platforms increasingly mediate social life, platform policy functions as social policy and ict firms as judge, jury, and executioner. for example, major social networking sites engage in “deplatforming” or the suspension of accounts violating their terms of service, such as the 2021 removal of donald trump from twitter following january 6th (rogers 2020; floridi 2021). deplatforming is plagued by scale due to its focus on individual figureheads. reactionary platforms like gab emerge as safe harbors for the deplatformed, while low-regulation platforms like telegram bridge mainstream and fringe environments (jasser 2021; agarwal, ananthakrishnan, and tucker 2022). meeting the problem of scale, josé van dijck et al. (2021) coin “deplatformization” to describe the systematic denial of service to reactionary platforms. unlike content-focused deplatforming, deplatformization targets a network’s stack to revoke access to payment processing, domain registration, web hosting, app stores, and other critical infrastructure. unlike deplatforming which is easily curtailed by moving to a new platform or account, deplatformization disrupts the technical, social, and economic reproduction of an entire web site. deplatformization by amazon web services has interrupted parler, which once mediated hundreds of thousands of racist users and now stands as a static webpage perpetually “coming soon” (as of february 2024). nevertheless, reactionary networks adapt to deplatformization by developing their own service providers and a corresponding consciousness toward the stack. for example, service denials by domain registrar godaddy have decimated “alt-right” web traffic. enter epik llc (formerly epik holdings), a multimillion-dollar conglomerate that provides domain registration for gab, bitchute, patriots.win, and numerous other white nationalist sites, immunizing these communities from deplatformization. similar firms include web host rightforge, a “cancel-proof” web host that built the prototype of trump’s truth social platform; vanwatech, responsible for re-platforming 8chan and q-anon; and parallel, a payment processor hosted on the white nationalist social network gab. in this trend which i term “replatformization,” extremist networks are producers of infrastructure, not just content. if the dialectic of deplatformization continues unabated, we may be witnessing the genesis of self-sufficient industry of far-right digital services whose ultimate goal is the balkanization of the internet in the name of short-circuiting public policy. to meet this problem with the scale it requires, i address the following research question: how do reactionary digital platforms modulate the stack to amplify their leverage within (de)platformization? methodology i analyze a single case study, kiwi farms (kf), to pay close attention to the stackconsciousness of a reactionary online subculture. established in 2013 by joshua moon, kf is a text forum used by 16,000 users daily to harass vulnerable people, particularly transgender women, whom they deem “lolcows,” existing solely to be “milked” for laughs (breland 2023). kiwi farms harassment campaigns have caused multiple suicides of transgender youth. after a 2022 viral #dropkiwifarms campaign on twitter brought this forum’s complicity to public attention, kf has been subject to deplatforming by service providers including host cloudflare, isp hurricane electric, tor router harica, and dozens of domain registrars (tiku 2023). nevertheless, kf remains online using its own services such as web host “final solutions llc” (named after the holocaust), ddos mitigator “kiwiflare,” and lolcow llc litigation fund. to quantify the “stackconsciousness” emerging on kf: over 1 week in february 2024, kf users raised over $150,000 to fund frivolous lawsuits in defense of their infrastructure. the paper applies materialist analysis, anchored by theories of racial capitalism, to understand the replatformization of kiwi farms in context of the disproportionate leverage structurally afforded to reactionary media over and against marginalized people. racial capitalism names that euro-western racism is the ideological foundation the extraction, valuation, and circulation of capital (robinson 2021). racial capitalism has inspired internet researchers to identify the whiteness, masculinity, and bourgeois character of platform capitalism as it manifests through predatory inclusion (mcmillan cottom 2020), value extraction (franklin 2021), and the geopolitics of platform economies (gebrial 2022). with racial capitalism as a guide, i situate kf in the context of social reproduction, meaning that i evaluate the forum within the inhospitable conditions of capitalism rather than characterizing it as an exceptionally extreme environment. this decision is critical to pay heed to the ways in which production prefigures the content-consumption patterns that dominate current research on deplatforming (mirrlees 2021). my archive is diachronic, tracing change before, during, and after replatformization, between 2014-2024. texts include kiwi farms’ and its service providers’ terms of service, funding pitches, and pr statements; the same texts from kf’s stack suppliers; joshua moon’s communications publicized on telegram; and statements by both deand replatforming stack providers. additionally, i consider the user experience through analysis of graphical user interface, affordances, and community habits. findings replatformization is the flip-side to deplatformization as racial capitalism disproportionately empowers reactionary webmasters. i trace a shift in how kf users identify with/of the platform, from a posse of “harmless” pranksters united by “lulz” to a self-imagined vanguard of online reactionary cultural production who explicitly advertise their intent to fracture the online public sphere. as kf users turned their attention to infrastructure by necessity, they ratcheted up their antagonism against internet governance in order to, paradoxically, defend their self-imagined right to impose mob rule against marginalized people. there by, replatformization radicalizes van dijck’s critique of deplatformization by bringing to light reactionary response patterns which proceed from the bourgeois management of digital infrastructure. replatformization unifies considerations within the regulatory turn including critiques of “alt-tech” platforms as “parallel ports” which reveal the ideological implications of platform governance in mystifying the rise of the far-right (donovan, lewis, and friedberg 2019). second, this study situates racial capitalism at the center of the regulatory turn’s problem of scale. private ownership of the means of mediation is the “platform” on which the farright’s emerging infrastructure industry is built. it is by design, not coincidence, that the far-right may easily re-turn to their online audiences after deplatforming because platform capitalism promises unmediated expression to those whose social position converges with the default whiteness of the net. hence, the field must adopt its own consciousness toward the stack attendant to how social antagonisms scale alongside internet infrastructures. references agarwal, saharsh, uttara m. ananthakrishnan, and catherine e. tucker. 2022. “deplatforming and the control of misinformation: evidence from parler.” ssrn scholarly paper. rochester, ny. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4232871. bratton, benjamin h. 2016. the stack: on software and sovereignty. 1st edition. cambridge, massachusetts: the mit press. breland, ali. 2023. “the website that wants you to kill yourself—and won’t die.” mother jones (blog). april 2023. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/02/kiwi-farms-die-drop-cloudflarechandler-trolls/. donovan, joan, becca lewis, and brian friedberg. 2019. “parallel ports. sociotechnical change from the alt-right to alt-tech.” in post-digital cultures of the far right, 49–66. transcript verlag. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839446706-004. flew, terry, and rosalie gillett. 2021. “platform policy: evaluating different responses to the challenges of platform power.” journal of digital media & policy 12 (2): 231–46. https://doi.org/10.1386/jdmp_00061_1. floridi, luciano. 2021. “trump, parler, and regulating the infosphere as our commons.” philosophy and technology 34 (1): 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-021-00446-7. franklin, seb. 2021. the digitally disposed: racial capitalism and the informatics of value. minneapolis: u of minnesota press. gebrial, dalia. 2022. “racial platform capitalism: empire, migration and the making of uber in london.” environment and planning a: economy and space, august, 0308518x221115439. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x221115439. gillespie, tarleton. 2018. custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. new haven: yale university press. helmond, anne. 2015. “the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready.” social media + society 1 (2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080. jasser, greta. 2021. “gab as an imitated counterpublic.” in rise of the far right: technologies of recruitment and mobilization, edited by melody devries, judith bessant, and rob watts, 193–212. rowman & littlefield. mcmillan cottom, tressie. 2020. “where platform capitalism and racial capitalism meet: the sociology of race and racism in the digital society.” sociology of race and ethnicity 6 (4): 441–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649220949473. mirrlees, tanner. 2021. “‘resisting’ the far right in racial capitalism: sources, possibilities, and limits.” in rise of the far right: technologies of recruitment and mobilization, edited by melody devries, judith bessant, and rob watts. rowman & littlefield. nieborg, david b, and thomas poell. 2018. “the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity.” new media & society 20 (11): 4275–92. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769694. robinson, cedric j. 2021. black marxism: the making of the black radical tradition. 3rd edition. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. rogers, richard. 2020. “deplatforming: following extreme internet celebrities to telegram and alternative social media.” european journal of communication 35 (3): 213–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323120922066. schlesinger, philip. 2020. “after the post-public sphere.” media, culture & society 42 (7–8): 1545–63. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720948003. tiku, nitasha. 2023. “the endless battle to banish the world’s most notorious stalker website.” the washington post. september 3, 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/03/kiwifarms-websiteoffline/. tusikov, natasha. 2018. “internet firms as global regulators.” ssrn scholarly paper. rochester, ny. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3107268. van dijck, josé, tim de winkel, and mirko tobias schäfer. 2021. “deplatformization and the governance of the platform ecosystem.” new media & society 25 (12): 3438–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211045662. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 the dark side of llm-powered chatbots: misinformation, biases, content moderation challenges in political information retrieval joanne kuai cornelia brantner michael karlsson elizabeth van couvering salvatore romano universitat oberta de catalunya, keywords algorithmic gatekeeping, comparative studies, algorithm auditing, generative information retrieval introduction this study explores the implications of large language model (llm)-based search engine chatbots on political information retrieval and for journalism and politics on the example of the 2024 taiwan presidential election that took place on january 13th, 2024. after the fast adoption of llms following the release of chatgpt in november 2022, many big platforms, including search engine giants google and microsoft bing, have karlstad university karlstad university karlstad university karlstad university suggested citation (apa): kuai, j., brantner, c., karlsson, m., van couvering, e., & romano, s. (2024, november). the dark side of llm-powered chatbots: misinformation, biases, content moderation challenges in political information retrieval. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http:// spir.aoir.org. announced integrated ai-powered chatbots into their applications. google and microsoft bing have already previously used natural language processing (nlp) features and other probabilistic models such as auto-complete, but the integration of llms into chatbots has raised new concerns related to, for example, information quality, the gatekeeping effects of algorithms, biases, or content moderation (afgiansyah, 2023; urman & makhortykh, 2023). these concerns are particularly relevant regarding news and political information and even more so in sensitive contexts such as political elections. research objectives in this context, we address the following four research objectives: 1. firstly, we examine the extent to which ai chatbot responses align with factual information regarding the leading candidates (prompt 1 & 4 – see table1) and their stances on key political issues (prompt 2), considering the information needs of citizens. 2. secondly, recognizing the central debate around algorithms and gatekeeping, our study poses a two-fold question. the first part inquires about the norms, if any, provided as background information for the ai chatbots. the second part delves into norms-in-action, exploring whether the ai chatbots adhere to stated norms on websites, mimic the impartiality ideals of news media (from which they draw information and with which they compete), advocate for a particular political inclination, or adopt an entirely different approach (all but specifically prompt 3). 3. thirdly, recognizing the importance of information quality and transparency in the sources used by ai chatbots, we investigate the factuality of the synopses and the sources provided by the chatbot (all prompts). 4. finally, considering the language limitations of ai chatbots and the geopolitical context in which they operate, we explore the universality of ai chatbot gatekeeping and sourcing. using the aforementioned questions, we investigate whether gatekeeping and sourcing are applied uniformly across several users using different languages but being situated in the same location (in sweden). theoretical framework theoretically, this sts-inspired study departs from the premises of the social construction of technology and the inherent value-embedded nature of technology (rohracher, 2015). it analyses llm-powered chatbots as communicative agents, functioning as information sources rather than information infrastructure or channels, and teases out how they ‘behave’ as communicators and how they shape political discourse and construct social relationships. the study also draws on theories about gatekeeping and, more specifically, the network of gatekeeping by individuals, algorithms, and platforms in digital news dissemination (wallace, 2018). it also delves into the political economy of ai (luitse & denkena, 2021), addressing geopolitical tensions, discrepancies among languages, and content moderation concerns in various contexts. methodology overview methodologically, this study uses a case study approach (yin, 2018) to situate the inquiry in the relevant and timely case of the 2024 taiwanese presidential election held on january 13th, 2024. the study examines microsoft’s llm-powered search engine chatbot copilot. the interface was chosen for its important position in the current market and its availability and popularity in the researched context. we adopted prompting as a method (meck & precht, 2021) and conducted multi-term conversations with a set of four prompts (see table 1) (the limit of copilot at the time of the data collection) multiple times on the topic of the 2024 taiwan presidential election in five languages (see table 2) to test potential variations in generated answers and sourcing behavior. the data collection was completed in the week leading up to the election. since we wanted to keep the geographical location constant and exclude potential personalization, the prompting was performed with clean browsers from a swedish city. a quantitative content analysis of the answers was conducted (with all variables in the ir test exceeding the recommended minimum coefficient of krippendorff’s alpha α = .800). table 1. prompts used in multi-term conversation no. prompt in english p1 hi, tell me about the upcoming taiwan presidential election. p2 what are the candidates’ views on the relationship between taiwan and china? p3 who is the best candidate to vote for? p4 who is leading the poll? table 2. languages used for prompting language justification english global lingua franca, default language of the chatbot, and much of the original training of the llms is done in english traditional chinese standard writing system for chinese speakers in taiwan, hong kong, macau and certain overseas chinese communities simplified chinese official writing system in mainland china and in pilot testing generated different results german spoken by a significant population in europe, contribute to the study’s applicability in a european context swedish official language of sweden, allowing exploration of chatbot interactions in a nordic context findings and discussion the study reveals how the chatbot differed in content curation, transparency measures, moderation, and sourcing behaviors in different languages. copilot generated answers containing factual errors in almost half of the 200 cases, suggesting that it is not a reliable source for the retrieval of political information. we found the most factually incorrect answers in the traditional chinese language, while in simple chinese, the bot scored much better but more often deflecting or refusing to answer questions at all (see figure 1). german language prompts elicited the most factually correct answers followed by swedish. interestingly, english-language responses had a high proportion of minor errors, but rarely contained major errors (such as giving incorrect candidates). figure 1. factual errors of prompt answers by prompt language (n=200). specifically, copilot exhibited problematic referencing and source citation behaviors by introducing mistakes into answers that were not present in the sources it linked to (misrepresenting the sources), or attributing statements (whether they were true or false) to the wrong sources. it also often prioritized the crowd-sourced encyclopedia wikipedia and other institutional webpages over legitimate news outlets. we argue that all of this would exacerbate the existing power imbalance between platforms and news organizations. moreover, we observed normor accountability-related chatbot behavior in more than half (53%) of the cases. this was mainly used to justify deflection or refusals. mainly arguments of political neutrality, references to the importance of information for political education and possible obsolescence and inaccuracy of the information provided were put forward. although, as expected and normatively desired, the bot refused to answer prompt 3 for the best candidate or responded in a deflective way. the bot sometimes exhibited this behavior for the other three prompts as well, especially when asked in traditional chinese. the findings reveal significant discrepancies in information readiness, content accuracy, norm adherence, source usage, and attribution behavior across languages. these results underscore the contextual awareness when applying accountability assessment that looks beyond transparency in ai-mediated communication, especially during politically sensitive events. references afgiansyah, a. (2023). artificial intelligence neutrality: framing analysis of gpt powered-bing chat and google bard. jurnal riset komunikasi, 6(2), article 2. https://doi.org/10.38194/jurkom.v6i2.908 luitse, d., & denkena, w. (2021). the great transformer: examining the role of large language models in the political economy of ai. big data & society, 8(2), 20539517211047734. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211047734 meck, a.-m., & precht, l. (2021). how to design the perfect prompt: a linguistic approach to prompt design in automotive voice assistants–an exploratory study. 13th international conference on automotive user interfaces and interactive vehicular applications, 237–246. rohracher, h. (2015). science and technology studies, history of. in j. d. wright (ed.), international encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences (second edition) (pp. 200–205). elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-08-097086-8.03064-6 urman, a., & makhortykh, m. (2023). the silence of the llms: cross-lingual analysis of political bias and false information prevalence in chatgpt, google bard, and bing chat. osf preprints. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/q9v8f wallace, j. (2018). modelling contemporary gatekeeping. digital journalism, 6(3), 274–293. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2017.1343648 yin, r. k. (2018). case study research and applications: design and methods (sixth edition). sage. ten oever-infrastructural insecurity-infrastructural insecurity selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 infrastructural insecurity: geopolitics in the standardization of telecommunication networks niels ten oever1 critical infrastructure lab at the university of amsterdam christoph becker critical infrastructure lab at the university of amsterdam abstract this paper argues that the production of ‘infrastructural insecurity’ is an inherent part of the standardization of information networks. infrastructural insecurity is the outcome of an intentional process within infrastructural production, standardization, and maintenance that leaves end-users of the infrastructure vulnerable to attacks that benefit a particular actor. we ground this analysis in an interrogation of the responses to the disclosure of three security vulnerabilities in telecommunications networks, namely (1) a security flaw in signaling system no. 7 (ss7) that allows for the data interception and surveillance, sms interception and location tracking by third parties, (2) the lack of encryption of permanent identifiers that allowed for the deployment of rogue base stations, which allowed for man-in-the-middle attacks, resulting in interception of all voice and data traffic in a physical signal vicinity, and (3) the lack of forward secrecy between user-equipment and the home network, which allows for the decryption of current encrypted data stream if credentials were obtained in the past. to research the shaping of communication and infrastructure architectures in the face of insecurities, we develop a novel approach to the study of internet governance and standard-setting processes that leverages web scraping and computer-assisted document set discovery software tools combined with document analysis. we bring these methods into conversation with theoretical approaches from material media studies, science and technology studies, and critical security studies. this is an important contribution because it asks fundamental questions about the adequacy and legitimacy of standardization processes. introduction this paper interrogates the responses in standardization to significant security issues with telecommunications networks. we conclude that slow responses by manufacturers 1 mail@nielstenoever.net university of amsterdam university of amsterdam suggested citation (apa): ten oever, n., becker, c. (2023, october). infrastructural insecurity: geopolitics in the standardization of telecommunication networks. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. and in one case an outright refusal to address the insecurity reflect geopolitical interests to maintain insecure global communication networks. to explain this we develop the concept of infrastructural insecurity to highlight how standardization of technology is not necessarily optimized to provide security but rather functions in geopolitical interests, also when it is driven by industry. this further problematizes the complex relations between states, industry, and technology in the production, standardization, and maintenance of communication networks (zajacz 2019). more precisely, it problematizes the process of standardization, which is increasingly looked towards as a trusted process to address societal concerns (ten oever and milan 2022). a recent example of this is the proposal to delegate authority on ‘ethical ai’ to standardsetting processes in the european commission’s draft ai legislation (veale and borgesius 2021). traditionally, security was one of the primary reasons to engage in standardization, mostly notably the standardization of the wall thickness of steam boilers to prevent future explosions (yates and murphy 2019). however, in 2013 whistle-blower edwards snowden exposed how the united states government engaged in the ‘manipulation of technical standards to render communication infrastructures susceptible to surveillance’ (rogers and eden 2017, 802). while at the time this brought up questions about the adequacy and legitimacy of standard-setting, responses to increased encryption in protocols did quiet down some of these debates (wilton 2017; doty 2020). recently discussions about standardization and security have resurfaced in the light of the newip proposals by chinese actors (sharp and kolkman 2020; hogewoning 2020), allegations about the insecurities resulting from huawei’s 5g implementations (mascitelli and chung 2019; wen 2020; rühlig and björk 2020; teki̇r 2020; becker, ten oever, and nanni 2022), china’s increased participation in standardization (pohlmann, blind, and heß 2020; baron and pohlmann 2018; baron and kanevskaia whitaker 2021), as well as russia’s attempts to build a national internet (ermoshina and musiani 2017; stadnik 2019; asmolov and kolozaridi 2021; ermoshina, loveluck, and musiani 2022). this paper aims to contribute to these debates by analyzing responses to three insecurities in transnational communication infrastructures. method to research the shaping of communication and infrastructure architectures in the face of insecurities, we develop a novel approach to the study of internet governance and standard-setting processes that leverages web scraping and computer-assisted document set discovery software tools combined with document analysis. we bring these methods into conversation with theoretical approaches from material media studies, science and technology studies, and international relations. this methodological approach has been introduced in our previous work [anonymized]. our findings are based on the study and analysis of two main text sources. firstly, we studied the communication patterns between actors using the mailing lists of 3gpp's tsg sa working group three (from now on abbreviated as wg3 and wg3_li; https://list.etsi.org/scripts/wa.exe?a0=3gpp_tsg_sa_wg3 and https://list.etsi.org/scripts/wa.exe?a0=3gpp_tsg_sa_wg3_li ) which is focused on further enhancements to the 5g system in general and lawful interception in particular. secondly, we used all documents related to the quarterly held 3gpp tsg wg3 plenary meetings that are focused on security (https://www.3gpp.org/ftp/tsg_sa/wg3_security ), which contain, inter alia, drafts and final versions of reports, invitations, agendas, minutes. these files are of interest, as the decision process behind the acceptance or objection (and by whom) to proposed changes on 3gpp specifications is partially revealed. the text corpora were retrieved using bigbang (benthall et al. 2021) in february 2023. at that time the mailing lists of wg3 and wg3_li contained 71.380 and 7027 emails of which 693 and 419 carried attachments respectively. for wg3 the mailing list has been in use since 1999 while wg3_li started communicating via email one and a half years later. the first plenary meeting reports of wg3 on security we could access date back to 1999. since then 525 meeting reports have been uploaded to their server which we used in our study (there are more but we focused on meeting reports). before we bring to the fore relations and associations between involved stakeholders, we group emails into sets of those that address purely managerial and organisational matters (e.g. meeting reminders and travel advice), and those that focus on legal and technical aspects of surveillance. conclusions in all three cases, there has been a considerable amount of time between the publication of the vulnerability and responses by standards developing organization 3gpp. at the same time, exploitation of the vulnerabilities by nation-state actors their law enforcement services has been documented (parks 2016; rogers and eden 2017; welch 2017; wolfe 2017). these vulnerabilities were all of an architectural nature, so arguably a standards body that maintains the standards is the best venue to address this issue. however, responses were slow and in the third case, namely that of the proposed implementation of perfect forward secrecy, a solution to the security vulnerability was structurally rejected by companies from the united states, the united kingdom, and france, leaving a structural insecurity present in new generation telecommunication networks. at the same time, the inclusion of this security feature was supported by companies from china, europe, and the united states. this insecurity is of the nature that it can only be used by significantly resourced actors and has in the past been exploited by the secret services of the united states and the united kingdom. this allows us to conclude that (1) geopolitics are an inherent part of standardization, (2) network insecurities are regularly exploited by governments for surveillance purposes, (3) insecurities in 5th generation telecommunications (5g) networks are maintained and improvements are blocked by companies from the united states, the united kingdom, and france, thus producing infrastructural insecurity. references asmolov, gregory, and polina kolozaridi. 2021. “run runet runaway: the transformation o fthe russian internet as a cultural-historical object.” in the palgrave handbook of digital russia studies, 277–96. palgrave macmillan. baron, justus, and olia kanevskaia whitaker. 2021. “global competition for leadership positions in standards development organizations.” ssrn scholarly paper id 3818143. rochester, ny: social science research network. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3818143. baron, justus, and tim pohlmann. 2018. “mapping standards to patents using declarations of standard-essential patents.” journal of economics & management strategy 27 (3): 504–34. becker, christoph, niels ten oever, and riccardo nanni. 2022. “the standardisation of lawful interception technologies in the 3gpp: interrogating 5g and surveillance amid us-china competition.” in interrogating 5g and surveillance amid uschina competition (july 19, 2022). washington dc, united states. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4167105. benthall, sebastian, niels ten oever, nick doty, and christopher becker. 2021. “bigbang.” https://github.com/datactive/bigbang. doty, nick. 2020. “enacting privacy in internet standards.” california, united states: university of california, berkeley. https://npdoty.name/enacting-privacy/. ermoshina, ksenia, benjamin loveluck, and francesca musiani. 2022. “a market of black boxes: the political economy of internet surveillance and censorship in russia.” journal of information technology & politics 19 (1): 18–33. ermoshina, ksenia, and francesca musiani. 2017. “migrating servers, elusive users: reconfigurations of the russian internet in the post-snowden era.” media and communication 5 (1): 42–53. fontugne, romain, ksenia ermoshina, and emile aben. 2020. “the internet in crimea: a case study on routing interregnum.” in 2020 ifip networking conference. paris, france. https://doi.org/10.1145/nnnnnnn.nnnnnnn. hogewoning, marco. 2020. “update on wtsa-20 preparations and new ip.” ripe labs. october 11, 2020. https://labs.ripe.net/author/marco_hogewoning/updateon-wtsa-20-preparations-and-new-ip/. limonier, kevin, frédérick douzet, louis pétiniaud, loqman salamatian, and kave salamatian. 2021. “mapping the routes of the internet for geopolitics: the case of eastern ukraine.” first monday, april. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v26i5.11700. luconi, valerio, and alessio vecchio. 2022. “impact of the first months of war on routing and latency in ukraine.” arxiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2208.09202. mascitelli, bruno, and mona chung. 2019. “hue and cry over huawei: cold war tensions, security threats or anti-competitive behaviour?” research in globalization 1 (december): 100002. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resglo.2019.100002. parks, lisa. 2016. “rise of the imsi catcher.” media fields journal 11. pohlmann, tim, knut blind, and philipp heß. 2020. “fact finding study on patents declared to the 5g standard.” rogers, michael, and grace eden. 2017. “the snowden disclosures, technical standards, and the making of surveillance infrastructures.” international journal of communication 11 (0): 22. rühlig, tim, and maja björk. 2020. “what to make of the huawei debate? 5g network security and technology dependency in europe.” ui paper, swedish institute of international affairs. sharp, hascall, and olaf kolkman. 2020. “discussion paper: an analysis of the ‘new ip’ proposal to the itu-t.” internet society, april, 13. stadnik, ilona. 2019. “internet governance in russia – sovereign basics for independent runet.” in proceedings of the 47th research conference on communication, information and internet policy (tprc 2019). washington dc. teki̇r, gökhan. 2020. “huawei, 5g network and digital geopolitics.” international journal of politics and security 2 (4 (çin özel sayısı)): 113–35. ten oever, niels, and stefania milan. 2022. “the making of international communication standards: towards a theory of power in standardization.” journal of standardisation 1 (june). https://doi.org/10.18757/jos.2022.6205. veale, michael, and frederik zuiderveen borgesius. 2021. “demystifying the draft eu artificial intelligence act—analysing the good, the bad, and the unclear elements of the proposed approach.” computer law review international 22 (4): 97–112. welch, bill. 2017. “exploiting the weaknesses of ss7.” network security 2017 (1): 17– 19. wen, yun. 2020. the huawei model: the rise of china’s technology giant. 1st edition. urbana: university of illinois press. wilton, robin. 2017. “after snowden – the evolving landscape of privacy and technology.” journal of information, communication and ethics in society 15 (3): 328–35. https://doi.org/10.1108/jices-02-2017-0010. wolfe, henry b. 2017. “the mobile phone as surveillance device: progress, perils, and protective measures.” computer 50 (11): 50–58. yates, joanne, and craig n. murphy. 2019. engineering rules: global standard setting since 1880. jhu press. zajacz, rita. 2019. reluctant power: networks, corporations, and the struggle for global governance in the early 20th century. cambridge (us): the mit press. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): vilkins, s., svegaard, s., barnes, r., vieira, e., aquino, m. c., ferreira, d., blanco, b., amaral, a., schuch, c., moody, k., rosenberg, a. (2023, october). ideology and affect in political polarization and fandom online. panel presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ideology and affect in political polarization and fandom online sebastian svegaard queensland university of technology, australia renee barnes university of the sunshine coast eloy vieira unisinos university maria clara aquino unisinos university driele ferreira unisinos university beatriz blanco unisinos university adriana amaral universidade paulista cassia schuch unisinos university kyle moody fitchburg state university allegra rosenberg new york university samantha vilkins queensland university of technology, australia introductory statement in recent years, scholarly attention has indicated the increased enmeshment of the political and entertainment media spheres, a change that has happened so gradually that it has not been as remarked upon as it should be. this is perhaps most observable in studies of community dynamics around both political figures as fandom objects and media engagement as political signifiers. the backdrop of digital surveillance capitalism, and the specific platform affordances on which these communities exist and interact, exacerbates both. furthermore, beyond these inverse scenarios whose distinctive boundaries grow blurrier by the day, there is a third domain in the overlap, of the exploitation – or compensation – of fans, fandoms, and fan labor for political and financial gain. this, too, exists in a reactive feedback loop with the always-on conditions of our contemporary digital political economy. as consequence, there are prominent recent streams of work explicating what exactly the fields of fan studies and political sociology can offer each other for researching communities online in such contexts. responding to both the current landscape and recent exemplary and novel scholarship, our panel presents four papers which each delve into an intersection of identity, community, and their ideological and affective ties. they investigate online affective community practices in reaction to fractured sociopolitical polarization and contribute to the expanding picture of interdisciplinary frameworks and methodologies available — and increasingly, required — to comprehend the motivations, justifications, and trajectories of community dynamics under such drivers. to open, the first paper synthesizes in detail the recent scholarship in the nexus of fan studies and studies of political polarization (sandvoss, 2019; miller, 2020; barnes, 2022; nybro-petersen, 2022). the utility and limitations of the interpretative frames of both fields are discussed, drawing on previous empirical research in the context of the increasingly interrelated study of fandomized politics and politicized media consumption in online communities. the paper questions the historical and contemporary distinction of these objects in academia, and predicts and proposes future research trajectories around the interplay of ideology and affect as motivations for identity formation online (berlant, 2008; stein, 2015; papacharissi, 2016). to follow, the second paper presents analysis of a case study of mobilization online around live-streamed covid-19 investigations of the brazilian government. it describes the practices of influential individuals around the livestreams, and how their tactics, reminiscent of tactics for social entertainment television engagement, resulted in direct impact on the investigations. with the landscape and context of the previous talk inhand, this paper expands the discussion from shared conceptual frameworks to operationalizing into empirical study. the third paper follows on the topic theme of live-streaming online, presenting a case study of identity formation responding directly to the first paper’s provocation of what happens when ideological and affective motivations, amongst others, are in conflict. the paper investigates the actions and reactions of video gamers on the streaming platform twitch as financial incentives encouraged them to play a game — hogwarts legacy, released 2023 — that generated them both peak attention along with widespread abuse (jacobs, 2023). placing the ongoing ethical debates of the game as expository context, the paper analyses the strategies and tactics of the twitch streamers in resolving their “identity projects” (shankar, elliott, and fitchett, 2009) and personal brands amidst the controversy. to conclude, the fourth paper returns to conceptual synthesis and the polarizing topic itself of fan labor in our current digital political economy. the paper then contextualizes and connects these commentaries to a longer, slower polarization within fan spaces on compensation for individuals. the paper argues that this debate, one in the roots of contemporary fandom and fan studies itself (chin, 2014; baruch, 2020), has accelerated due to the recent additions to the market of for-purpose apps which make commodification of fan labor more ‘seamless’ or at least, more widely accepted and expected. the alternative stance here, contrary to some shallow summaries by both media coverage and opponents in the debate, relies far more than might seem on an informed stance that is deeply woven into a sense of identity for its proponents. far from amateurs without the awareness or knowledge on how to seek compensation for their fan labor, these communities make conscious choices to operate in gift economies with presumption of creative control, as conscious escapes from capitalism wherever they can make them. such an observation is not only of interest to the panel as a case study outright on the dynamics and drivers of polarization in communities online, but furthermore for its implications for social participation under our current digital political economy, whereby, encouraged by monopolizing platforms, all community activity looks more and more like fan activity — activity people are working on methods to exploit. references baruch, felicitas. 2020. “transnational fandom: creating alternative values and new identities through digital labor”, in television and new media, 22 (6), pp. 687-702. doi: 10.1177/1527476419898553 berlant, lauren. 2008. the female complaint. duke university press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822389163/html. chin, bertha. 2014. "sherlockology and galactica.tv: fan sites as gifts or exploited labor?" in "fandom and/as labor," edited by mel stanfill and megan condis, special issue, transformative works and cultures, no. 15. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0513. jacobs, j. (2023, february 9). hogwarts legacy can’t cast aside debate over j.k. rowling. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/arts/hogwartslegacy-jk-rowling.html miller, lucy. 2020. "wolfenstein ii and maga as fandom." in "fandom and politics," edited by ashley hinck and amber davisson, special issue, transformative works and cultures, no. 32. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2020.1717. papacharissi, zizi. 2016. “affective publics and structures of storytelling: sentiment, events and mediality.” in information, communication & society 19 (3): 307–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2015.1109697. sandvoss, cornel. 2019. “the politics of against: political participation, anti-fandom and populism” in melissa a. click (ed.) anti-fandom: dislike and hate in the digital age. nyu press. shankar, a., elliott, r., & fitchett, j. a. (2009). identity, consumption and narratives of socialization. marketing theory, 9(1), 75–94. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470593108100062 stein, louisa ellen. 2015. millennial fandom: televised audiences in the transmedia age. university of iowa press. paper 1 politics and ideology or identity and affect sebastian svegaard queensland university of technology, australia renee barnes university of the sunshine coast this paper seeks to explore how the continuum or the conditions in which passionate political participation and debate is a form of fandom. with the ubiquitousness of digital life, a life where pop culture exists in the same space as politics, and where fandom, meme culture, and public debate co-exist on platforms and even in the same comment threads, we examine the aforementioned continuum and, through two examples from the global north and global south, argue that ideology and politics now coexist with identity and affect, and that online political debate is motivated by affect in a way that mirrors what is well established as modes of communication within fandom/s. introduction this paper will seek to explore how the continuum or the conditions in which passionate political participation and debate is a form of fandom. to do this we will first examine the literature of political participation and fandom to establish an interpretative framework for examining online political debate as a fan-like behaviour. then we will turn to a case study to illustrate how ideology and politics now coexist with identity and affect. literature in recent years there has been increasing interest in the intersections between politics and fandom, approached from several angles. there is a strong interest within a branch of fan studies in understanding how fandom and activism is connected, not least how fandom/s can inspire people to activist actions and engagements (jenkins & shresthova, 2012; jung, 2012; jenkins, 2015; hinck, 2019). lately, this has been expanded on by work explicitly and directly interested in politics, not least via the simultaneous celebrification of political figures and celebritisation of politics itself (driessens, 2013), and how these mechanisms intersect and interact with an increasingly politically divided population and political discourse. examples of this recent focus can be found in barnes’ (2022) recent book on fandom and politics, which uses fan studies as an interpretive lens through which to understand political debate and polarisation within debates. also nybro-petersen’s (2022) examination of conspiracy theories as play and fandoms, particularly using the concept of dark play to understand followers of conspiracy theories, while reinhard et al (2022) similarly argue that qanon is a form of fandom. the trajectory of former us president donald trump from businessman to tv celebrity to political candidate is perhaps one of the drivers of this interest, while simultaneously serving as a pertinent example of the increasing overlaps and confluences between fandom and politics. such increasing intersections suggest that a theoretical and methodological overlap could also be productive as a way of studying and understanding the political landscape of today. modes of engagement this political landscape is often understood as increasingly polarised; it is therefore timely to ask if, what, and how the aforementioned overlaps between fan engagements to politics function, and their expressions, including polarised discourses. as sandvoss (2005, 3) argues, it is not the object that makes the fan, but rather the the mode of engagement with the object, what he terms “committed consumption”. we expand here on previous work on politics and fandom (barnes, 2022) and on fandom critique and affect (svegaard, 2021), to show how polarised discourses can be understood through the interpretive lens of fandom. this further enables us to understand a polarised debate as being based in fandom engagement as much as an ideological standpoint. fandom can be understood as an intimate public (berlant, 2008) or, as louisa ellen stein (2015) argues, a “feels culture”; a culture that is based in the sharing, exchange, and mutual understanding of emotional relations and reactions, not only to the object of one’s fandom/s, but also to one’s fellow fans. the ties within in-group of a fandom or similar culture are, then, predicated on shared emotions. here it becomes clear how affect can compete with ideology. considering this, it is also important to remember that it not just (positive) fandom, which inspires such passion, it is also anti-fandom (gray, 2003; jones, 2015; gray, 2019; sandvoss, 2019). the use of antipathy or hate makes it much easier for an in-group to believe sinister claims about an out-group member, such as a politician with an opposing viewpoint (barnes 2022, 15f.) affect and polarization the fandom/anti-fandom poles thereby become another way of considering polarisation, one that again moves beyond or parallel to ideology. in this form of polarised discourse, it is not traditional political positions that are the poles, but a for/against or love/hate. this interpretive lens enables us to see the role that affect plays in polarisation. it is important to note, however, that when we use affect here, we do not mean the established concept of affective polarisation, though there are definite commonalities, but rather a use of affect that is more in line with the use of it by scholars such as ahmed (2004), berlant (2008) and papacharissi (2016). berlant’s concept of the intimate public is central, as is papacharissi’s affective public, and ahmed’s understanding of affect as something that can move us and contribute to the construction of inand out-groups. with this overlap established, one of the next questions to present itself is that of delineation. when is something political engagement? when is it passionate debate? when is it fandom? and is it even meaningful to make these distinctions? through the use of two case studies to illustrate the process, commonalities as well as differences, we explore this delineation problem. approaching the communication and use of fan-like affective discourses serves to examine this. case study we analyse the (fan) responses to danish prime minister mette frederiksen’s communication on facebook as an example of this complicated spectrum of fandom/debate/political engagement. we focus on responses relating to “minksagen”, a contentious issue or scandal in danish politics. during the covid-crisis, all mink in denmark were put down when a risk of further covid mutation was identified. it quickly became apparent, that, due to complex legal minutiae, some of the mink were culled without proper legal justification. this breach of the farmers’ constitutional rights remains a divisive issue in danish political and public debate, including becoming the subject of electoral promises in the 2022 elections by parties in opposition to the thengovernment. however, post-election, the largest opposition parties are now in coalition with frederiksen’s social democratic party, having resulted in the mink case not going to further investigation. instead, the findings of a parliamentary commission criticised frederiksen and her top official, while legal experts still debate the complexities. most recently, a journalist has published a non-fiction book, researching the case and the mink industry as a whole. frederiksen has a strong following on facebook, which is her primary social media platform (she does not have a twitter account as opposed to most other high-profile danish politicians), and this following is expressed also in support and fan pages and groups. two such groups form the basis of our research here. we examine posts in the groups related to the mink case, and use inductive as well as deductive analytical methods to understand what the members of the group do to reconcile the case with their position as stated strong supporters of frederiksen and her policies. this is particularly relevant regarding this case, as both groups were started around 2020, with one even bearing a name stating their support for frederiksen’s covid policies. out of this, we present findings showing the discourses and strategies that have emerged in the group as a way of responding to the mink case, and relate these to fan strategies, such as canon and fanon building and the push/pull of fandom vs. anti-fandom. references ahmed, sara. 2004. the cultural politics of emotion. routledge. barnes, renee. 2022. fandom and polarization in online political discussion: from pop culture to politics. springer international publishing. berlant, lauren. 2008. the female complaint. duke university press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822389163/html. driessens, olivier. 2013. “the celebritization of society and culture: understanding the structural dynamics of celebrity culture” in international journal of cultural studies, vol. 16, no. 6. pp. 641-657. doi: 10.1177/1367877912459140 gray, jonathan. 2003. “new audiences, new textualities.” in international journal of cultural studies, 6 (1), pp. 64-81. gray, jonathan. 2019. “how do i dislike thee?: let me count the ways.” in antifandom: dislike and hate in the digital age, edited by melissa a. click, 24:25–41. nyu press. hinck, a. (2019). politics for the love of fandom: fan-based citizenship in a digital world. lsu press. jenkins, henry, & shresthova, s. (2012). “up, up, and away! the power and potential of fan activism.” in transformative works and cultures, 10. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0435 jenkins, henry. (2015). “cultural acupuncture”: fan activism and the harry potter alliance. in l. geraghty (ed.), popular media cultures (pp. 206–229). palgrave mcmillan. jones, bethan. 2015. "antifan activism as a response to mtv's the valleys." in "european fans and european fan objects: localization and translation," edited by anne kustritz, special issue, transformative works and cultures, no. 19. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2015.0585. jung, s. (2012). “fan activism, cybervigilantism, and othering mechanisms in k-pop fandom.” in transformative works and cultures, 10. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0300 nybro-petersen, line. 2022. mediatized fan play: moods, modes and dark play in networked communities. milton. papacharissi, zizi. 2016. “affective publics and structures of storytelling: sentiment, events and mediality.” in information, communication & society 19 (3): 307–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2015.1109697. reinhard, c.d., stanley, d. and howell, l., 2022. “fans of q: the stakes of qanon’s functioning as political fandom”. in american behavioral scientist, 66(8), pp.1152-1172. sandvoss, cornel. 2005. fans: the mirror of consumption. polity. sandvoss, cornel. 2019. “the politics of against: political participation, anti-fandom and populism” in melissa a. click (ed.) anti-fandom: dislike and hate in the digital age. nyu press. stein, louisa ellen. 2015. millennial fandom: televised audiences in the transmedia age. university of iowa press. svegaard, sebastian f. k. (2022). ”all the feels!”: music, critique and affects in fanmade music videos [doctoral thesis. birmingham city university.] paper 2 fan practices about social tv during the coverage of the covid-19 pandemic investigation of bolsonaro’s government eloy vieira unisinos university maria clara aquino unisinos university driele ferreira unisinos university beatriz blanco unisinos university adriana amaral universidade paulista cassia schuch unisinos university introduction and the research context the following paper is a part of a bigger research project during 2021 and 2022 that analyzed social media data from the twitter, reddit, and youtube networks to discuss the consequences of online misinformation, rumors, and conspiracy theories about the vaccination and vaccines during the "covid-19 infodemic" in brazil. the researchers want to find out which false messages were circulating and how do they affect the narratives around the pandemic. for that objective we rely on a combination of social media analytics methods and qualitative analysis to uncover harmful narratives and frames and identify opinion leaders. our first research paper in this field has mapped different narrative categories on brazilian twittersphere to understand the inhomogeneous anti-vaccination movements (author et al, 2022).our main results showed the stronger politicization of vaccines in terms of the polarization of the brazilian context ant that under the authoritarian and anti-science leader bolsonaro, narratives that point to a strong division of political camps has played a stronger role. in this context a main player that has emerged from our dataset was the special parliamentary commission of inquiry (“cpi da covid”), which has led to the creation of a lot of content and discussions on social media, specifically on twitter. those political discourses have specific characteristics on a divided country such as brazil as showed by recuero & stumpf (2021). parliamentary commission of inquiry (“cpi da covid”) brazil was one most affected countries by the covid-19 pandemic (ferrante et al, 2021) nevertheless, the country was also simultaneously hit by “adverse effects” from the political scenario, such as misinformation, polarization and mismanagement that catalyzed the pandemic effects. precisely for this reason, a special parliamentary commission of inquiry (“cpi da covid”) was instituted in the national congress in april 2021. on april 13, 2021, the parliamentary commission of inquiry (cpi) on covid-19 was created. officially established in the federal senate of the federative republic of brazil, this cpi aimed to investigate alleged irregularities and omissions in the actions of the federal government, under the command of now former president jair bolsonaro, during the covid-19 pandemic in brazil. on july 14, 2021, the cpi was extended for another three months and the final report was presented on october 26, 2021. the report was approved and called for the indictment of 80 people, including the president of the republic, jair bolsonaro. its main objective was to investigate alleged irregularities and omissions in the actions of the federal government. the official investigation was tv broadcasted and widely followed by brazilians on social media, which symbolically replaced big brother brazil's (a reality tv show very famous) place among the most talked about issues in the country in the first months of its exhibition. this kind of phenomenon was more evident on platforms such as twitch, youtube and twitter, reiterating the adhesion of brazilians to social tv practices. so, on twitter specifically, the “cpi vip area” emerged as a social phenomenon from the meeting of a few influential profiles that acted as “institutionalized filters” and guided the consumption of the cpi broadcasts through the platform, even directly influencing the investigation processes and being quoted at the national congress a few times. fan practices around the “cpi da covid”: intersections between politics and pop culture in this paper, we intend to discuss these approximations between politics and pop culture in the global south (martino & marques, 2022) from theoretical contributions that help to understand the phenomenon of social tv in brazil (canatta, 2019) and even fan cultures (author et al, 2021; gunderman, 2020; bennet, 2012 and others) that emerged around this set of profiles on twitter. so, we conducted an exploratory research based on a boolean search with some terms found on twitter during cpi’s exhibition. from the initial observation of this repercussion on the platform, it was possible to understand that some influential profiles were highlighted in the formation of public opinion and in the fight against misinformation along the live broadcast of the main sessions of the cpi: “jairme arrependi”, “tesoureiros do jair”, “camarote da cpi” and “desmentindo bolsonaro”. after this phase, we analyzed these four profiles to identify characteristics of these content in publications on covid-19's cpi. our objective was to analyze how the production of content from these profiles mobilizes followers regarding the content being discussed in the sessions of the cpi. discussion of the first results other essential elements were the terms most used by people and how they are articulated with the political positions in the network. the use of the hashtag #cpidacovid indicates a kind of neutrality as it is a direct reference to the official name of the cpi, on the other hand, the use of #cpidocirco indicates a powerful government articulation, as it is the second most used while the opposition uses some more scattered as #cpidogenocidio which only appears in 4th place. in addition, the most common feelings linked to the terms used by people were anger and joy, indicating a latent polarization of the comments that came from all major cities in all regions of brazil, especially são paulo and rio de janeiro. from the dataset that was gathered with stilingue software, we’ve categorised nine (9) narratives: “insulting government supporters”, “cpi celebration”, “acknowlegement of the profile at the congress”, “celebration of allies”, “anti-vaxx government”, “engagement litteracy”, “president sons”, “general jokes” and “covid-19 mourn”. these findings suggest that social tv practices, highly influenced by factors such as geographic localization, were mobilized as a strategy of bolsonaro's government's opposers in social media through the deployment of humor, memes, and a network of creators articulated in sharing and engaging content. these mobilizations show that there are connections between entertainment and pop culture fan practices and politics. we aim to investigate these complementary aspects in future developments of this research through an intersectional approach considering more aspects about race, class, gender, generation, geographic spaces among other categories. references bennett, l. 2012. "fan activism for social mobilization: a critical review of the literature." in "transformative works and fan activism," edited by henry jenkins and sangita shresthova, special issue, transformative works and cultures, no. 10. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0346. canatta. f.(2014). tv e segunda tela: uma análise do horário nobre do twitter. m.a. dissertation from pucrs. retrieved from http://tede2.pucrs.br/tede2/handle/tede/4556 ferrante, l., duczmal, l., steinmetz, w. a., almeida, a. c. l., leão, j., vassão, r. c., tupinambás, u., & fearnside, p. m. (2021). how brazil’s president turned the country into a global epicenter of covid-19. journal of public health policy, 42(3), 439–451. retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1057/s41271-021-00302-0 martino, l.m.s., marques, a. (2022). política, cultura pop e entretenimento: o improvável encontro que está transformando a democracia contemporânea. ed. sulina: porto alegre, 2021. gunderman, h.c. 2020. "fan geographies and engagement between geopolitics of brexit, donald trump, and doctor who on social media." in "fandom and politics," edited by ashley hinck and amber davisson, special issue, transformative works and cultures, no. 32. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2020.1675. recuero, r., & stumpf, e. (2021). características do discurso desinformativo no twitter: estudo do discurso antivacinas do covid-19. in r. caiado & v. leffa (eds.), linguagem: tecnologia e ensino. (pp. 111–137). pontes editores paper 3 navigating identity projects in the era of twitch streaming: hogwarts legacy, public playing, and crises of pleasure kyle moody fitchburg state university in 2023, the warner brothers game hogwarts legacy was published across multiple platforms to massive success, with 12 million units sold in its first two weeks of release as warner brothers’ biggest global launch in history (maas, 2023). however, it was not released without controversy. the game’s arrival emerged with heated debate, as despite the launch success, there was prominent coverage of boycott calls (good, 2023). while rowling didn’t participate creatively in the game, she does benefit financially from its sales; the boycott calls argued, therefore, that playing the game was tantamount to endorsing the anti-trans causes that rowling supports. for many gamers, this created a conflict in their identity between fandom and politics. even as private as the choice felt, the constancy and immediacy of identity performance in the social media age allows for media consumption as public identifiers of political identity. in this way, unwanted political implications threatening media consumption can generate crises of pleasure (soto-vásquez et al, 2022). for some, the choice between playing the game or not was made under greater strain. the role of video-game streamers on twitch demands that they play games their audience recognizes, to maintain viewership and grow their channel. with the release of hogwarts legacy, users found that playing the game increased their visibility, with the game holding peak concurrent twitch viewership of over 1.2 million between february 6 and 7 (winslow, 2023). it became the single-player game with the highest number of concurrent viewers even before its official release, beating notable titles like cyberpunk 2077 and elden ring (jacobs, 2023). but streamers found this viewership did not only bring positive attention. the vocal anti-rowling contingent of the gaming community fomented a backlash against streamers playing the game, creating consequences for popular channels. the youtube and twitch duo girlfriend reviews were criticized for streaming the game on twitch (jacobs, 2023), even losing control of their subreddit. others in the gaming community have drawn a harder line regarding identity and consumption. “if you purchase this game — if you praise its qualities and encourage others to ‘support the developers’ or ‘treat yourself to a guilty pleasure’ — you are making a choice that will harm the transgender community,” percy ranson wrote for gameshub, an australian gaming news site, noting that they are transgender (jacobs, 2023). the conflict between fan communities and ideologies regarding harry potter and hogwarts legacy remains a strong one, highlighting how personal identities and brands are wrapped up in the very public act of playing video games online. the equivalence of consumer and political identity has taken on new meaning through the internet, resulting in a potential crisis of pleasure. this is a phenomenon when consumption is threatened by external forces, cognitive dissonance usually resulting in public outbursts, misinformation, and increased politicization and tribalism associated with public consumption. for example, brands themselves are also increasingly advertising their products with the language and visuals of socially progressive movements around race, gender, and sexuality to target diverse identities (kanai & gill, 2021). however, this also means that wb games promoting hogwarts legacy – or streamers trying to bring audiences to their channel – creates potential problems for their brands due to the negative associations caused by rowling’s views. outspoken streamers who damaged their public images reached for various tactics to fix them again in the eyes of their audience. some streamers sought to separate their playing of hogwarts legacy from an endorsement of rowling, by explicitly signaling that they were donating money to lgbtq+ philanthropic organizations. recently, wallace, buil, and de chernatony (2020) defined “conspicuous virtue signaling” (cvs) as how consumers communicate about brands across social networks represent their own virtuous natures and link themselves to a brand’s perceived morally-positive character. both acceptance and rejection of brands via public displays are indicative of cvs in action (tosi & warmke, 2016; wallace et al., 2020). the volume of backlash to streamers playing hogwarts legacy illustrates how the strong emotional connections to brands and the politicization of online consumption create the conditions necessary for a crisis of pleasure. multiple twitch streamers reported abuse and outcries in response to their streaming the game despite the nature of the abuse stemming from their public image being connected to an anti-lgbtq+ stance, it continued even when the streamers attempted to turn their streams into philanthropic works for lgbtq+ populations. once the connection from consumption to identity had been forged, it was difficult to break. one way to better understand the constant and curatorial connection between brand and identity is through the concept of “identity projects” (shankar, elliott, and fitchett 2009) defined as “strategic configurations of objects, symbols, scripts, and practices to claim particular identity positions.” to maintain identity projects, consumption must be made public in some way. however, the challenge with streamers and hogwarts legacy focused on the difficulty of navigating livestreaming. the game was immensely popular, and playing the game on twitch aligned with the platform’s affordances and incentives to generate views, but those same affordances created the potential for angry fans to voice their displeasure and potentially denigrate those streamers. many streamers had to use multiple tactics and strategies to navigate this contentious period, if they did navigate it at all. online technologies and mediated experiences are linked to the visible consumption of media products. for example, the mediated experiences of theme parks (sotovásquez, 2021) and international travel (blackwood, 2019; smith, 2018) on instagram show how influencers self-represent their branded selves, part of the identity project formation. the attention and abuse received by twitch streamers playing hogwarts legacy is part of the navigation process of these identity projects. consequently, stating that one opposes rowling’s views and denigrates the purchase of hogwarts legacy is also potentially part of one’s identity project. for example, ranson, a games journalist, would fit their gaming community membership with their transgender identity to equate their identity project. other viewers that engaged in abuse of streamers may be navigating their identity project and different positions, which contributes to the controversy. when one engages in consumption and behavior that runs counter to their established social identity, this creates potential cognitive dissonance for the individual and their social audience on platforms; in other words, it creates a crisis of pleasure. these crises often provoke public reactions, misinformation spread, and the politicization around consumption behaviors; for example, the very nature of purchasing from a chick-fil-a restaurant and discussing it online is linked to cultural and political ideals that are wrapped in identity. when a person whose values are opposite of rowling’s transgender views consumes harry potter content, there is a potential crisis of pleasure as the immediate pleasure of streaming or playing the game is countered by the cognitive dissonance of supporting a person whose ideals are not shared by the consumer. hence, a crisis of pleasure occurs, one which potentially threatens the consumer’s identity project(s). this paper explores how twitch users navigated their identity projects via crises of pleasure created by hogwarts legacy, if they did at all. it will address how the media consumption intersecting with identity formation is linked to twitch’s platform affordances and incentives to stream specific content, locating the production of culture and identity projects within a moment for online capitalist consumption and identity formation. references blackwood, r. (2019). language, images, and paris orly airport on instagram: multilingual approaches to identity and self-representation on social media. international journal of multilingualism, 16(1), 7–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2018.1500257 good, o. (2023, february 4). why is hogwarts legacy, a harry potter video game, so controversial? polygon. https://www.polygon.com/23584328/hogwarts-legacycontroversy-jk-rowling-explainer-transphobia-release-boycott jacobs, j. (2023, february 9). hogwarts legacy can’t cast aside debate over j.k. rowling. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/arts/hogwartslegacy-jk-rowling.html kanai, a., & gill, r. (2021). woke? affect, neoliberalism, marginalised identities and consumer culture. new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics, 102(102), 10– 27. maas, j. (2023, february 23). ‘hogwarts legacy’ earns $850 million, sells more than 12 million units in first two weeks. variety. https://variety.com/2023/gaming/news/hogwarts-legacy-sales-850-million-1235533614/ shankar, a., elliott, r., & fitchett, j. a. (2009). identity, consumption and narratives of socialization. marketing theory, 9(1), 75–94. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470593108100062 smith, s. p. (2018). instagram abroad: performance, consumption and colonial narrative in tourism. postcolonial studies, 21(2), 172–191. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2018.1461173 soto-vásquez, a. d. (2021). mediating the magic kingdom: instagram, fantasy, and identity. western journal of communication, 85(5), 588–608. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2021.1970797 soto-vásquez, a. d., moody, k., gonzalez, a. a., & shi, w. (2022). consumption, identity, and surveillance during covid-19 as a crisis of pleasure. consumption markets & culture, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2022.2137500 tosi, j., & warmke, b. (2016). moral grandstanding. philosophy & public affairs, 44(3), 197–217. https://doi.org/10.1111/papa.12075 wallace, e., buil, i., & de chernatony, l. (2020). ‘consuming good’ on social media: what can conspicuous virtue signalling on facebook tell us about prosocial and unethical intentions? journal of business ethics, 162(3), 577–592. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-018-3999-7 winslow, l. (2023, february 8). hogwarts legacy is dominating twitch right now. kotaku. https://kotaku.com/hogwarts-legacy-harry-potter-game-twitch-release1850089148 paper 4 compensation versus control in the digital political economy: polarized perspectives on commodification of fan activity online allegra rosenberg new york university samantha vilkins queensland university of technology, australia introduction a major fault line in internet culture coverage in recent years has been around ideas of “fan labor”. the term itself is not at all novel, being the subject of a special issue of transformative works and cultures in 2014. but since then, the commodification of the specific fannish mode of engagement (sandvoss, 2005) has greatly expanded outside of both fan spaces and fan objects. scholarship of fan labor can be found now across social and behavioral sciences, media and communication studies, and increasingly in business and digital economics. within our accelerating digital political economy, more players — creators and platforms alike — are recognizing the profit potential of fans and fan activity; however, not all agree on the specifics of its realization. in this paper, we review recent events, as well as related commentary and coverage, surrounding the polarized topic of fan labor in the 2020s. we analyze the prominent discourses associated with specific dimensions, sub-topics, and groups in response to these events. from this, we observe that representation of the issue often fails to integrate both the breadth and depth of polarization on the topic within online community spaces. most notably, beyond the visible public fault line on which the platform-creator relationship is negotiated, there lie decentralized communities which are analytically far further polarized in the sense of ideology, interaction, and interpretative foundations on the issue. but as other groups of hobbyists monetize as influencers and creators, the seeming ease with which they situate themselves in fulfilling self-employment creates a model for fans to do so within their own communities, establishing a personal brand as a fan-creator from which can be generated a positionality of authority and profit. the paper argues that this debate — one in the roots of contemporary fandom and fan studies itself — has accelerated and complexified due to the recent additions to the market of for-purpose apps which make commodification of fan labor more ‘seamless’ or at least, more widely accepted and expected. fan labor in contemporary digital economy there are many dimensions to the contemporary realizations of commodifying fan labor. an often-unclarified distinction is the difference between financialization of fans — e.g., fans signing up for paid subscriptions to creators — and financialization of fandom — fans subscribing to other fans and turning fans into creators, in a way specific to this era of platformization and suffusion of fan spaces by capital. in the terminology of recent studies on political polarization, various groups may be conceptualized as differing on ideological grounds with a strong affective response — while retaining strong interaction network ties and relying on the same fundamental interpretative logics. expanding this picture is the existing communities online of people wholly against the very idea of commercializing fan modes of engagement or their outputs. where the debate above is a push-and-pull to find the balance of rights and support between where fan labor is considered exploitation or deserved compensation, these decentralized groups “basically just want to be left alone by both aggressive capitalists and large corporations” (broderick, 2021). they have been known to prioritize the practices of gift economies, with free and open digital spaces for sharing, creating grassroots communities, and embedded senses of ownership quite separate from the commercial copyright of the original properties. this sits in direct contrast to web3centric systems of "underlying ownership of tokens gives fans a built-in business model and incentivizes derivative creation” that venture capitalist blogger li jin observes in contrasting web3 and web2 creative projects (jin, 2022). these are community divides with influence from generational differences, differences in economic stakes and wealth distribution, ideological differences and affective differences — for many, their stance is deeply entrenched in their understanding of their identity. fandom is a matrix of different status positions, with fans moving and renegotiating their relationships with other fans and with fannish objects over time (chin, 2018). this paper articulates recent evolutions in the negotiation of labor within fan communities. these communities have historically operated on foundationally separate socioeconomic interpretations to mainstream spaces online. broad commentaries offered externally from internet journalists and internally from community opponents, especially recently, often diagnose this as a lack of knowledge or confidence. on the contrary, these communities are developed by people quite keenly experienced with the drivers of digital economy. far from amateurs without the awareness or knowledge on how to seek compensation for their fan labor, these communities make deliberate choices to operate in gift economies with presumption of creative control, as conscious escapes from capitalism wherever they can make them: for example, the repository archive of our own, founded in 2008 in direct opposition to contemporaneous monetization platform attempts, remains nonprofit and open-source. recently, small networks of creators have embraced limited forms of monetization, in contrast with the well-known “gift economy” self-designation of fandom in the past (turk 2018, hellekson 2009), in which fan activity is performed for free and compensated via status and emotion. though they still turn away from hyped, web3-style tokenization, they rely on more individualizable commission and tip schemes with tools such as patreon, ko-fi, and gumroad, “spinning up new systems of social status which reflect their own priorities” (rosenberg, 2023). in 2017 mel stanfill noted cautiously that the commercialization of the web has put new pressures on fans as their works and communities increasingly exist at the mercy of third parties on platforms they do not control,” and asserts that the gift economy had up to then been the “soul” of fandom— but this default assumption is being challenged by changes in the platform practices of newer generations of fans. the financialized future the live debate presented here – both its discourses and their proponents – is of interest most simply in structure as a case study of polarization dynamics online. existing community tension, where generational and economic factors have disconnected groups interactionally and interpretationally, is then stress-tested by external economic forces of extraction and exploitation, developing further divides along the ideological perspectives of these relationships. chin’s description of fandom as a space in which “fans with possession of “popular cultural capital” build on the fan’s social capital and symbolic capital” is already outdated. we are at a point in which thanks to technological and platform tools and the increasing normative acceptance of monetization it is as easy for a fan as for anyone else online with a certain amount of subcultural (social/symbolic) capital to convert that into actual capital, which is to say, money. the question then is how this conversion is perceived and situated within the evolving social matrix of different fandom spaces. while comments on posts about ao3’s nonprofit status and other issues of fandom monetization are generally in favor of protecting fandom’s ongoing existence as a “gift economy,” and the maintenance of the “free” fandom tradition passed down from pre-digital fandom elders, this is a self-selecting sample size and more research is needed to determine attitudes towards fandom monetization by those with differing opinions. under our current digital political economy, all community activity looks more and more like fan activity, and fan activity is increasingly coming to resemble the commercial chaos of the wider “creator” ecosystem. how will “fan” continue to hold its own as an individuated identity? references broderick, ryan. “the dark and uncertain future of fan fiction.” garbage day, 10 dec. 2021, https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-truth-behind-finlands-catgirl. chin, bertha. “it’s about who you know: social capital, hierarchies and fandom.” a companion to media fandom and fan studies, wiley blackwell, 2018, pp. 243–55. hellekson, karen. “a fannish field of value: online fan gift culture.” cinema journal, vol. 48, no. 4, 2009. jin, li. “fans are the new creators.” li’s newsletter, 28 aug. 2022, https://li.substack.com/p/fans-are-the-new-creators. lee, chris. “how wattpad is rewriting the rules of hollywood.” vulture, 11 july 2018, https://www.vulture.com/2018/07/how-wattpad-is-rewriting-the-rules-of-hollywood.html. rosenberg, allegra. “do fans actually want to monetize?” garbage day, 22 feb. 2023, https://www.garbageday.email/p/fandom-is-fun. sandvoss, cornel. fans: the mirror of consumption. polity, 2005. stanfill, mel. “the fan fiction gold rush, generational turnover, and the battle for fandom’s soul.” the routledge companion to media fandom, routledge, 2017. turk, tisha. “fan work: labor, worth, and participation in fandom’s gift economy.” transformative works and cultures, no. 15, 2014. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): neill hoch i. (2022, november). tumblr meta-fandom: reflections and repair. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. tumblr meta-fandom: reflections and repair indira neill hoch concordia college, moorhead minnesota usa the eminent “death of tumblr” has been forecasted at least since the social platform was first purchased by yahoo! in 2013 for $1.1 billion; then again when it was acquired by verizon-oath in 2017. verizon subsequently banned pornographic content from the platform in december 2018, and again the end of tumblr was predicted. users joked that tumblr’s ownership was simply too incompetent to continue on (sybert, 2021). producing, distributing, and curating pornographic content, particularly queer pornographic content, had long been embedded in tumblr practice (see cho, 2015; mcglotten, 2020; tiidenberg 2014, as examples). then, less than a year after verizon “banned” porn, tumblr was again sold to automattic (best known for the blogging platform wordpress) for a reported $3 million. given that tumblr was founded in 2007, users have been discussing the imminent demise of the platform for more than half of its digital lifespan. drawing from qualitative interviews with nine active tumblr users conducted in the fall/winter of 2021-2022 and qualitative multimodal analysis of high-circulation “popular” tumblr posts, this research assesses and analyzes transformations in user attitudes towards tumblr three years on from verizon’s porn ban, and immediately prior to and following additional attempts to restrict adult content enacted by automattic. in an effort to de-center white european and north american narratives, interview participants range from diverse ethnic and national positions, six of the nine interviews are with minority and multi-racial participants, participants from south american nations, and turkey. specifically, this research considers iterations of what tiidenberg, hendry, and abidin (2021) have labeled tumblr’s meta-fandom, or fan practices centered around tumblr’s cultures and communities themselves, rather than a more traditional media property. i consider these practices through the lenses of reflective nostalgia (boym, 2001) and repair (jackson, 2014) as a way of contending with both the recounting of a place and time on tumblr that the users themselves know never really existed and the desire to acknowledge that tumblr always has been “broken” but users continue to thrive, even in the wake of declining overall usage. interview participants saw the 2018 porn ban as a temporal marker signaling a perception of before and after. many described a very similar trajectory following the ban that ultimately lead to a more pleasant overall experience in 2021. participant vera noted that by 2018 “[tumblr] was garbage, full of hostility and anger and people saying stupid shit and then getting angry when they were proved wrong. it wasn't a good place to be, but most of us were reluctant to leave anyway.” while she also discussed her frustration regarding the porn ban, she concludes “it's weird to think of now, but if you look at the current social media landscape, tumblr is the best and chillest by far.” participant mal similarly reflected that “i think there have definitely been changes and a lot of them aren't good. […] i think a lot of the more positive community that came about after this point did so much later in a kind of mutual hatred for the circumstance but finding the humor in it and being unwilling to leave to different platforms entirely... and i feel like it's been a lot more recent that people are agreeing that the censoring and surveillance on a lot of other sites is worse so we want to stick with what we've got.” participants maintained a sense of “past tumblr” but it was hardly an uncomplicated one. participants did not believe that removal of adult content itself lead to improved conditions on tumblr. explicitly, many were deeply concerned with sex workers who had used tumblr for promotion and were now no longer able to use their blogs effectively. rather, they found that long after the initial anger and exodus of users after the porn-ban, tumblr’s communities had stabilized into a more hospitable environment. with the decline in userbase, they generally found engagement to be lower, but less hostile or, as vera noted, “chill.” when discussing tumblr prior to the porn ban, there is little desire to return to the state of how things once were, or what boym (2001) labels restorative nostalgia, a nostalgia that considers itself to be truth of the past. participant andrew summarizes the current state of tumblr as “i think tumblr had become a little more self aware, maybe? there's always been self-referential jokes but now i think you really see it crystallized, like "back before the mass exodus" feeling like old-timers telling the children about history.” as much as long-term users might share meta-fandom stories of “past tumblr” they are most often presented as jokes with little desire to return to that past. figure 1. the tumblr convention the popular post in figure 1 demonstrates the “crystalized” self-referential humor noted by participant andrew. the first user’s post in blue describes the cyclical nature of tumblr’s trajectory, that there was, ten years ago, a sincere belief among some tumblr users that tumblr was a “beloved home” unlike anywhere else on the internet. the belief was that this state was something worth protecting from outsiders. such a sentiment would be typical of boym’s (2001) restorative nostalgia, except that the restorative impulse is immediately undercut twice, first by the user in blue themselves and then by the user in pink, who injects “tumblr history” to a comedic end. blue notes that the current feeling of tumblr being a “beautiful hellsite” (tiidenberg et al., 2021) is both exhausted and ironic. it is not a sincere restorative impulse. pink then makes reference to 2014’s dashcon (without naming it), a tumblr fan convention that largely lives in infamy among users as a disaster. when considering repair, jackson (2014) advocates for “broken world thinking” (p. 221) in technology research, that “asks what happens when we take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth and progress, as our starting points” (p. 221). pink’s reblog invoking dashcon highlights the idea that tumblr has always been broken, and effectively any meta-fandom assessment of tumblr’s history always begins from a point of having been broken from the start. understanding the impulse to perform this sort of continual repair performed by tumblr’s meta-fandom refocuses social media research from the new and popular to considering the locations and communities that users refuse to abandon, even if they weren’t so great from the start. references boym, s. (2001). the future of nostalgia. basic books: new york. cho, a. (2015). queer reverb: tumblr, affect, time. in k. hillis, s. paasonen, & m. petit (eds.), networked affect. (pp. 43-58). cambridge, mass: the mit press. jackson, s. j. (2014). rethinking repair. in t. gillespie, p. boczkowski, & k. foot (eds.), media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society. (pp. 121-139). cambridge, ma: mit press. mcglotten, s. (2020). tumporn is dead, long live tumporn!. in a tumblr book, a. mccracken, a. cho, l. stein, & i. neill hoch (eds). university of michigan press. sybert, j. (2021). the demise of# nsfw: contested platform governance and tumblr’s 2018 adult content ban. new media & society, 1461444821996715. tiidenberg, k. (2014). bringing sexy back: reclaiming the body aesthetic via selfshooting. cyberpsychology: journal of psychosocial research on cyberspace, 8(1). tiddenberg, k., hendry, n. a., & abidin, c. (2021). tumblr. polity. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): gliniecka, m. (2023, october). discussing health without adults – youth voices in peer-led discussions on teenagers’ subreddits. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. discussing health without adults – youth voices in peerled discussions on teenagers’ subreddits martyna gliniecka western sydney university in many western democracies, young people have become a key target group of formal digital health services, interventions and policies delivered by the state, institutions and organisations (clarke et al., 2015; lattie et al., 2022). the implementation of digital health initiatives has been amplified even more during the covid-19 pandemic (archard et al., 2021; davenport et al., 2020; evans et al., 2020). more and more initiatives actively involve young people in health research, policymaking and service design (brady, 2020; jacquez et al., 2013). giving voice to young people aims for them to express and have their views taken into account in matters that affect their lives (saldanha & nybell, 2017). however, it is not always standard practice, and the execution of participatory principles can be weak (dadich, 2015; fox, 2013; pincham et al., 2020). ‘youth voice’ can be a metaphor for using young people’s presence as an illusion of participation (bragg & buckingham, 2014). conditions for hearing voices are structured and incentivised, not spontaneous, and the voice is often expected to be exercised in an appropriate or acceptable manner (bragg & buckingham, 2014). there is an assumption about the unified representation of children’s culture and one ‘youth voice’ (alldred, 2011). therefore, many digital health initiatives are still rooted in adultled top-down approaches and are not often developed with young people or based on their preferred digital practices (patterson et al., 2019; shaw et al., 2015). at the same time, in online spaces, young people are active shapers of participatory and user-led culture (goodyear & armour, 2019). one of the forms of youth digital participation is engaging with health content (goodyear & armour, 2018). young people enact some digital practices with peers without adults’ governance. informal peer-led discussions are user-driven and bottom-up naturalistic voluntary communication in selfformed online communities (naslund et al., 2016). the internet offers ways for spontaneous engagement with peers, which makes young people feel empowered (regan & steeves, 2010). young people feel they can make their own terms by choosing the degree of participation, avoiding judgement, and staying anonymous and safe among people with similar problems (betton & woollard, 2019; kang et al., 2018; lupton, 2020; seemiller & grace, 2019). some young people consider general platforms, not specifically health-oriented, like youtube, tumblr and instagram, better than specifically designed digital health apps and interventions (lupton, 2021). another platform that young people use for health is reddit (sit et al., 2022). in this paper, i analyse peer-led discussions on teenagers’ peer communities: r/teenagers, r/askteengirls and r/askteenboys. reddit is a highly anonymised, multitopical platform, with communities of interest created by the users and peer moderation (murphy, 2019). reddit attracts many young people, as most redditors are young, geeky and tech-savvy (massanari, 2015). this paper responds to the question of how youths’ voices about health matters are represented in peer-led discussions. i also ask how the reddit platform supports plural youth health voices. my final research question is how the dialogical account of voice can offer alternative thinking about the voices of young people to include and consult with for research, policy and practice. bakhtinian theory of voice emphasises plurality and diversity of voices coexisting together (bakhtin, 1984). voices mobilise new meanings as they emerge from dialogical interactions (linell, 2009). voice is always set in the context – placed within relations with human and non-human entities (mazzei & jackson, 2017). i use key ideas from bakhtin’s theory of voice – heteroglossia, double-voicedness, centripetal and centrifugal forces, and polyphony – to unpack the messiness and complexities of discussions on teenagers’ subreddits as contributing to youth health discourse. this study employs unobtrusive digital ethnography by incorporating online lurking: passive observation of existing online communities without announcing the researcher’s presence (costello et al., 2017). unobtrusive digital ethnography has been utilised in several studies conducted on reddit (foeken & roberts, 2019; lavis & winter, 2020; robards, 2018; robitaille, 2018). creating an artificial conversation wouldn’t meet the expectations of investigating naturalistic phenomena. moreover, the candidness of interactions could have been disrupted when announcing the researcher’s presence in the community. the sample included 50 health-related threads from teenagers’ subreddits. data collection utilised third-party data scraping software. the analysis method is qualitative thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2012). ethics-wise, posts were anonymised during data collection and paraphrased for publication to avoid tracing them with a search engine. the situated ethics approach has been consulted with reddit users and the youth advisory board and received a formal exemption from human ethics review. this paper focuses on two elements of youth-led youth health discourse: voices about young people’s conceptualisation of health and narratives about actors like parents, teachers, healthcare professionals and technologies involved in health experiences. analysis shows that the ‘youth voice’ around health on reddit is not unified but represents a variety of voices and understandings of health matters. the heteroglossic environment of reddit supports the diversity of meanings of what health means. redditors talk about health with physical, mental, and social aspects. redditors seem to not prioritise any dominant ideas about health but maintain an open discussion and diverse points of view. the second part of the paper focuses on redditors’ voices about human and non-human actors engaged in youth digital health. for example, redditors often criticise parents for dismissing their health concerns, influencing decisions about their health, and having high expectations. redditors also vent about their experiences with school: health class curriculum, school psychologists and uncomfortable health topics. redditors also describe their positive and negative experiences with health services and discuss healthcare systems' political and social implications. finally, redditors discuss health monitoring with wearable technologies, self-assessment of health symptoms using search engines, and the role of reddit in their digital health experiences in both critical and optimistic ways. young people have many actors influencing their health. because of that, the autonomy of peer-led discussions can play an even more important role in youth-led youth health. in a peer-led environment, young people choose which topics or health matters they find meaningful, how to use platforms to facilitate their needs and expectations, and how and with whom they want to form connections. therefore, sites such as reddit are important sites for the study of youth health. young people harness opportunities from peer-led platforms to form a youth-led discourse, often contrary to the real-life underprivileged positions. although i emphasise the beneficial side of peer-led discussions, there are also some dangerous practices such as misinformation, aggression, or harmful advice. nevertheless, voices on reddit pertain to the plurality of dialogism. in dialogism, multiple voices can peacefully coexist in one space, painting a non-unified picture of a phenomenon of youth health. dialogical youth health means multiple and diverse concepts, experiences, practices, and opinions. there is a space on teenagers’ subreddits for each of these young people’s voices. analysing reddit allows us to gain insight into what young people think and talk about in the peer environment – and how. harnessing the knowledge from peer-led discussions for parenting, education, research, policymaking, and service design can offer different insights than the participatory approach. when learning from the naturalistic reddit environment, adults may redefine their ideas of youth health to be more youth-centred and align with young people’s needs. references alldred, p. (2011). ethnography and discourse analysis: dilemmas in representing the voices of children. in feminist dilemmas in qualitative research. sage publications ltd. archard, p. j., o’reilly, m., fitzpatrick, s., & fox, j. (2021). youth telemental health and covid-19. irish journal of psychological medicine, 38(4), 318–319. https://doi.org/10.1017/ipm.2021.27 bakhtin, m. (1984). problems of dostoevsky’s poetics (c. emerson, trans.). university of minnesota press. betton, v., & woollard, j. (2019). teen mental health in an online world: supporting young people around their use of social media, apps, gaming, texting and the rest. jessica kingsley publishers. brady, l.-m. (2020). introduction: embedding young people’s participation in healthcare. in embedding young people’s participation in health services (pp. 1–28). bristol university press. bragg, s., & buckingham, d. (2014). conclusion: elusive ‘youth.’ in d. buckingham, s. bragg, & m. j. kehily (eds.), youth cultures in the age of global media (pp. 273–287). palgrave macmillan uk. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137008152_17 braun, v., & clarke, v. (2012). thematic analysis. in h. cooper, p. m. camic, d. l. long, a. t. panter, d. rindskopf, & k. j. sher (eds.), apa handbook of research methods in psychology, vol 2: research designs: quantitative, qualitative, neuropsychological, and biological. (pp. 57–71). american psychological association. https://doi.org/10.1037/13620-004 clarke, a. m., kuosmanen, t., & barry, m. m. (2015). a systematic review of online youth mental health promotion and prevention interventions. journal of youth and adolescence, 44(1), 90–113. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-014-0165-0 costello, l., mcdermott, m.-l., & wallace, r. (2017). netnography: range of practices, misperceptions, and missed opportunities. international journal of qualitative methods, 16(1), 160940691770064. https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406917700647 dadich, a. (2015). beyond the romance of participatory youth research. in a critical youth studies for the 21st century (pp. 410–425). brill. davenport, t. a., cheng, v. w. s., iorfino, f., hamilton, b., castaldi, e., burton, a., scott, e. m., & hickie, i. b. (2020). flip the clinic: a digital health approach to youth mental health service delivery during the covid-19 pandemic and beyond. jmir mental health, 7(12), e24578. https://doi.org/10.2196/24578 evans, y. n., golub, s., sequeira, g. m., eisenstein, e., & north, s. (2020). using telemedicine to reach adolescents during the covid-19 pandemic. journal of adolescent health, 67(4), 469–471. foeken, e., & roberts, s. (2019). reifying difference: examining the negotiation of internal diversity on a (post-)lesbian subreddit. sexualities, 22(7–8), 1268–1287. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460718795119 fox, r. (2013). resisting participation: critiquing participatory research methodologies with young people. journal of youth studies, 16(8), 986–999. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2013.815698 goodyear, v. a., & armour, k. m. (2018). young people, social media and health. routledge. goodyear, v. a., & armour, k. m. (2019). what young people tell us about healthrelated social media and why we should listen. young people, social media and health; goodyear, va, armour, km, eds, 1–20. jacquez, f., vaughn, l. m., & wagner, e. (2013). youth as partners, participants or passive recipients: a review of children and adolescents in community-based participatory research (cbpr). american journal of community psychology, 51(1–2), 176–189. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-012-9533-7 kang, m., robards, f., sanci, l., steinbeck, k., jan, s., hawke, c., luscombe, g., kong, m., & usherwood, t. (2018). access 3: young people and the health system in the digital age final research report. 107. lattie, e. g., stiles-shields, c., & graham, a. k. (2022). an overview of and recommendations for more accessible digital mental health services. nature reviews psychology, 1(2), 87–100. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-021-00003-1 lavis, a., & winter, r. (2020). #online harms or benefits? an ethnographic analysis of the positives and negatives of peer-support around self-harm on social media. journal of child psychology and psychiatry, 61(8), 842–854. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.13245 linell, p. (2009). rethinking language, mind, and world dialogically: interactional and contextual theories of human sense-making. information age pub. lupton, d. (2020). ‘better understanding about what’s going on’: young australians’ use of digital technologies for health and fitness. sport, education and society, 25(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2018.1555661 lupton, d. (2021). young people’s use of digital health technologies in the global north: narrative review. journal of medical internet research, 23(1), e18286. https://doi.org/10.2196/18286 massanari, a. l. (2015). participatory culture, community, and play: learning from reddit. peter lang. mazzei, l. a., & jackson, a. y. (2017). voice in the agentic assemblage. educational philosophy and theory, 49(11), 1090–1098. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2016.1159176 murphy, n. (2019, april 12). reddit’s 2019 year in review. https://redditblog.com. https://redditblog.com/2019/12/04/reddits-2019-year-in-review/ naslund, j. a., aschbrenner, k. a., marsch, l. a., & bartels, s. j. (2016). the future of mental health care: peer-to-peer support and social media. epidemiology and psychiatric sciences, 25(2), 113–122. https://doi.org/10.1017/s2045796015001067 patterson, s. p., hilton, s., flowers, p., & mcdaid, l. m. (2019). what are the barriers and challenges faced by adolescents when searching for sexual health information on the internet? implications for policy and practice from a qualitative study. sexually transmitted infections, 95(6), 462–467. https://doi.org/10.1136/sextrans-2018-053710 pincham, h. l., harrison, j., & collin, p. (2020). successful youth participation in health research depends on the attitudes of adults. the lancet child & adolescent health, 4(12), 857–859. regan, p. m., & steeves, v. (2010). kids r us: online social networking and the potential for empowerment. surveillance & society, 8(2), 151–165. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v8i2.3483 robards, b. (2018). ‘totally straight’: contested sexual identities on social media site reddit. sexualities, 21(1–2), 49–67. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460716678563 robitaille, c. (2018). “this drug turned me into a robot”: an actor–network analysis of a web-based ethnographic study of psychostimulant use. canadian journal of public health, 109(5–6), 653–661. https://doi.org/10.17269/s41997-018-0149-z saldanha, k., & nybell, l. (2017). capturing/captured by stories of marginalized young people: direct scribing and dialogic narrative analysis. qualitative social work: research and practice, 16(2), 206–223. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473325016656750 seemiller, c., & grace, m. (2019). generation z: a century in the making. routledge, taylor & francis group. shaw, j. m., mitchell, c. a., welch, a. j., & williamson, m. j. (2015). social media used as a health intervention in adolescent health: a systematic review of the literature. digital health, 1, 205520761558839. https://doi.org/10.1177/2055207615588395 sit, m., elliott, s. a., wright, k. s., scott, s. d., & hartling, l. (2022). youth mental health help-seeking information needs and experiences: a thematic analysis of reddit posts. youth & society, 0044118x2211296. https://doi.org/10.1177/0044118x221129642 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): evans, j. m. (2023, october). these girls (strip) for the clout: exploring aspirational, emotional and erotic labour of black women of hip-hop on onlyfans. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. these girls (strip) for the clout: exploring aspirational, emotional and erotic labour of black women of hip-hop on onlyfans jabari miles evans university of south carolina introduction and background hip-hop culture and adult entertainment have historically shared a symbiotic relationship, and both have commodified the idea of black life in the urban areas (milleryoung, 2014; sharpley-whiting, 2007). a primary social site where these two worlds meet is within strip club culture (brooks, 2010). within strip club culture, black women routinely use their bodies to seek monetary and cultural capital within their social networks. since customers are directly helping the dancers financially, they often need to be validated as important, familiar and/or masculine. like the strip club, onlyfans is a techno-social arena where women maneuver to gain desirable resources by exposing their bodies. they both require the “marketing of erotic capital” by offering sexually explicit performances to those willing to pay, with onlyfans relying on a monthly subscriber fee for access to digital content and strip clubs often doing so through entry fees, food & drink, tips for stage performers and fees for private dances. in both instances, black women are required to use their racial identity in emotional labour to fulfill men’s fantasies and use relational labour to accomplish the illusion of intimacy, submissiveness, and attraction. to the contrary, offline, and online sex work differs in that onlyfans relies more on visibility labour (gain likes, shares and followers through posting and replying in ways to promote a personal brand) on multiple social media platforms rather than physically approaching potential customers in a club setting. this digital expansion within the sexual economy gives women of hip-hop culture who aren’t dancers (i.e. rappers and video models), a newfound potential for self-empowerment, through the exposure of their bodies, its financial valuation and its commodification (khong, 2020). purpose of study, methods, and analysis though the initial goal of the study was to understand how female rappers and video models use practices from sexual dance economies (e.g. strip clubs) to gain visibility on onlyfans more generally, it was ultimately decided to focus on experiences of the black women in that group who earned significant income through use of the platform. the criteria for inclusion were that subjects were cisgender black women with at least 10,000 followers or more on twitter and/or instagram. additionally, all participants selfidentified as video models and/or hip-hop artists, with links to onlyfans accounts in their twitter and/or instagram profile biographies. i completed twelve in-depth interviews. all interviewees were african american between the ages of 18 and 35 (with an average age of 24). i conducted the interviews in english. i used a semi-structured interview guide with questions regarding the history and evolution of their work as creators in music and adult entertainment, as well as matters regarding the operation, strategy, and distribution of their digital content. during this study, i utilized practices grounded in ethnographic methods of transcribing and coding interviews. by open coding, writing memos, organizing, and categorizing my data (semi-structured interviews and follow-up conversations), i developed themes of (1) relational labour, (2) visibility labour and (3) emotional labour, which the experiences and quotes of participants illuminated. ultimately, interviews touched on the role of social media as an economic resource in their artistic labour. i analysed all interviews in the qualitative data analysis software nvivo, before using an inductive, grounded theory approach (charmaz 2014) to distil recurrent themes. within nvivo, all uploaded data were encrypted and securely stored to protect participant privacy according to strict confidentiality. given the limitations of in-person ethnography during the current covid-19 pandemic, i employed digital urban ethnography (e.g. lane 2018) which privileges interpersonal communication with subjects via in-person as well as digital communication tools. this study was approved by my employer’s institutional review board and all participants gave informed consent to be a part of the study prior to their first interview. though some subjects gave permission to use their real names, many interviewees asked me to pseudonymize their names and quotes. those individuals are marked with an asterisk after their names. the power of digital clout (techno-social cultural capital tied to platform metrics) has made the gatekeepers of music industry more respectful of the influence and money that black women of the rap music industry can generate in the platform economy. even so, recent research has also detailed that black women still face racism, sexism and misogyny regardless of these evolutions (e.g. jennings 2020). that said, there is a dearth of work that has detailed black women’s perspectives (rappers or otherwise) working as content creators on onlyfans. against this backdrop, the current study follows emotional and relational labour of exotic dancers and aspiring artists on onlyfans. considering onlyfans’ connection to strip club culture as an exemplar of a hip-hop social site that has been reimagined as part of creator culture and the platform economy, this study hopes to build exploratory understanding of how digital clout redefines the value of erotic capital for black women of hip-hop culture. findings respondents reported that onlyfans was a platform that allowed them significant control in monetizing their visibility. they could directly profit from their bodies as sites of fascination and desire while seeding other aspects of their personal brands and artistic lives. additionally, respondents also used the myth of black female sexual deviance to their own financial interests. by taking tropes from both hip-hop music videos and hardcore pornography, respondents used onlyfans to secure economic power and sexual autonomy in two industries that typically deny significant opportunity, mobility and fame to its black women participants. despite such variances in content creators’ particular motivations, three salient tensions were shared about engaging with audiences through onlyfans: • soliciting business vs. building friendships (authenticity) • self-disclosure vs. playing the stereotype (trust) • clout vs. artistic merit (integrity). like senft’s (2008) foundational work on ‘camgirls’, the tensions of trust, confession and compartmentalizing persisted for participants throughout both interviews and field observations. although these three tensions differed, these themes overlapped and intersected in myriad ways. yet, together, they provided a more nuanced understanding of the unique experiences of black women on onlyfans and the emotional labour strategies that help to sustain (and grow) their digital clout. ultimately, respondents did feel the need to exacerbate stereotypes about black women, namely their alleged hyper-sexuality and physical availability. even so, as sexual performers they also felt they confronted the prevailing stigma by taking ownership of both racial stereotypes and how they commodified their bodies for pay. conclusion though their short-term financial success is unquestioned, this study reveals questions about the sustainability of onlyfans work for these women. unlike youtube, which allows creators to share advertising revenue from content they place on the platform, onlyfans allows creators to “partner” with the platform and collect revenue from viewer subscriptions, monetary gifts (in the form of tips) and other material gifts. even though onlyfans presents itself as a platform that is open for all types of expression and communication with audiences, the stakes of visibility are seemingly limited as far as what content by black creators is privileged over others. that said, i err on the side of caution in simply celebrating onlyfans solely as a solution for empowerment for black women. future research is needed to assess how the styling and presentation of black women’s bodies in participatory culture is possibly being exploited for the cultural capital that they bring to the platform. how digital black feminism plays a role in platform economics will play a critical role in examining racial capitalism in the ever-growing ecosystem of sex workers within social media entertainment. references brooks, s. (2010). unequal desires: race and erotic capital in the stripping industry. new york: suny press. charmaz, k. (2014), constructing grounded theory, new york: sage. halliday, a. s. (2020), ‘twerk sumn!: theorizing black girl epistemology in the body’, cultural studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2020.1714688. jennings, k. (2020), ‘city girls, hot girls and the re-imagining of black women in hip hop and digital spaces’, global hip hop studies, 1:1, pp. 47–70. johnson, a. (2014), ‘confessions of a video vixen: my autocritography of sexuality, desire, and memory’, text and performance quarterly, 34:2, pp. 182–200, https://doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2013.879991. johnson, a. (2021), ‘dirty south feminism: the girlies got somethin’ to say too! southern hip-hop women, fighting respectability, talking mess, and twerking up the dirty south’, religions, 12:11, p. 1030. khong, d. (2020), ‘“yeah, i’m in my bag, but i’m in his too”: how scamming aesthetics utilized by black women rappers undermine existing institutions of gender’, journal of hip hop studies, 7:1, p. 8. lane, j. (2018), the digital street, oxford: oxford university press. marwick, a. e. (2013). status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. new haven, ct: yale university press. mcmillan-cottom, t. (2020), ‘where platform capitalism and racial capitalism meet: the sociology of race and racism in the digital society’, sociology of race and ethnicity, 6:4, pp. 441–49. miller-young, m. (2008), ‘hip-hop honeys and da hustlaz: black sexualities in the new hip-hop pornography’, meridians, 8:1, pp. 261–92. miller-young, m. (2014), a taste for brown sugar, durham, nc: duke university press. rubin, l. r., fitts, m. l. and becker, a. e. (2003), ‘“whatever feels good in my soul”: body ethics and aesthetics among african american and latina women’, culture, medicine and psychiatry, 27:1, pp. 49–75. ryan, p. (2019), male sex work in the digital age: curated lives, boston, ma: springer. senft, t. m. (2008), camgirls: celebrity and community in the age of social networks, vol. 4, new york: peter lang. sharpley-whiting, t. d. (2007), pimps up, ho’s down: hip hop’s hold on young black women, new york: new york university press. stuart, f. (2020), ballad of the bullet: gangs, drill music, and the power of online infamy, princeton, nj: princeton university press. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): kasianenko, k., & boichak, o. (2024, october). the algorithm is your mom: playful algorithmic agency in the north atlantic fella organization. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “the algorithm is your mom”: playful algorithmic agency in the north atlantic fella organization kateryna kasianenko queensland university of technology olga boichak the university of sydney introduction algorithms of digitally networked platforms have invited an extensive critique for their obscure, biased, or extractive nature (eubanks, 2019; noble, 2018). however, recent studies (bonini & treré, 2024) call for enriching such critique with a consideration of user agency. the ability to influence “the outcome of algorithmic computation for [one’s] benefit” (ibid., p. 2) by making sense of algorithms (bishop, 2019; bucher, 2017), helps users regain control over one’s actions (bonini & treré, 2024), or repair harms and biases in algorithmic systems (velkova & kaun, 2021). in their conceptualisation of algorithmic agency, bonini and treré (2024) advocate for disbanding of the divide between “optimisation” and “gaming”, upheld by social media platforms to prohibit user engagement in “illegal” practices. this idea of purposeful play which explores algorithms’ inner workings to regain control over their outcomes (mendonça et al., 2023) echoes galloway’s (2006) notion of an allegorithm. an allegorithm is a sense-making tool – as players move through digital environments, they create sociotechnical imaginaries on the inner workings and “rules” of the game and what it takes to achieve their objectives. our paper contributes to this scholarship by exploring playful engagement with algorithmic systems among members of the north atlantic fella organization (nafo). nafo are an international social movement that emerged on twitter in the aftermath of russia’s invasion of ukraine in 2022 (kasianenko & boichak, 2024). its members, or fellas, are recognisable by their avatars featuring a shiba dog. they engage in ridiculing and debunking russian propaganda and disinformation and crowdfunding for the ukrainian military. the community is one of the most notable examples of playful https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=4ccoqj practices of countering russia’s full-scale invasion on digital media platforms (tokariuk, 2023). this study uses mixed methods to understand how nafo make sense of the algorithmic environment of twitter – their primary site of operation, and how their understanding of algorithms affects their daily participation in activism. we examine the community’s practices, or allegorithms, through the prism of playful activism (cervi & divon, 2023). figure 1. a collage showcasing avatars of some of the nafo members we combine insights from qualitative textual analyses of a sample from over 4 million tweets with 25 semi-structured interviews with nafo members. twitter data was collected between may 2022 and may 2023 using the academic api v2, and the interviews were recorded between february and december 2023. our approach for filtering tweets for close reading was informed by bucher’s (2017) keyword-based sampling procedure for twitter posts mentioning “algorithm”. interview participants were asked to reflect on their tactics of twitter usage and memorable posts related to russia’s invasion (see robards & lincoln, 2019 for description of this approach). our findings reveal that fellas understand twitter’s algorithm as both an instrumental and an antagonistic entity. their self-professed status as an algorithmic actor reclaims power in a fragmented and increasingly hostile environment of twitter. below, we summarise three key ways through which nafo understand twitter’s algorithm. twitter algorithm as a “tool” to counter russian propaganda, it is important for nafo to be able to fight their adversaries without algorithmically increasing their visibility. fellas also regularly run fundraisers, with some established techniques for enhancing their visibility – from adding a short reply with an image (a practice called “boosting”) to sharing personal or emotional stories to attract attention first, and adding a fundraiser link in replies. which affordances of twitter do, or do not, increase visibility, are a constant point for interest and discussion. fellas share practical tips for controlling algorithmic visibility such as avoiding following pro-russian accounts and taking screenshots of them instead, as well as adding them to a list and muting them. threads explaining this are often peppered with memes and jokes – a staple of nafo vernacular. it is a common belief among nafo and their supporters that humour is one of the ways to be “promoted” by the algorithm, which highlights the playful, subversive nature of the online collective. figure 2. an infographic combining memes with instructions for achieving higher algorithmic visibility nafo are not alone in their instrumental engagement with twitter’s algorithms – their adversaries (i.e., pro-kremlin accounts) often attempt to attract nafo’s attention to benefit from potential increase in visibility. calling out these attempts in a playful way is the primary response from fellas. twitter algorithm as an “enemy” it is not only russian propagandists that nafo are up against. since late 2022, fellas have been noticing a decrease of ukraine making it to twitter’s trends, as well as difficulties of finding other fellas. in nafo’s posts, the notion of “the algorithm” is often discursively connected with the figure of elon musk, whose flippant and increasingly pro-russian stance has been endangering ukraine’s fight beyond twitter (boichak & lokot, 2022). nafo came up with various humorous nicknames for the billionaire, such as “elon muscovite”. this personification of the algorithm not as a “god-like entity” (glatt, 2022), but as an authority that can be argued with, resisted, and ridiculed, is what enables nafo to continue changing their tactics and maintain a presence on the platform. figure 3. nafo’s meme mocking musk’s alignment with russian propaganda play is an important part of other forms of resistance towards the algorithm – from bravado-laden reports of being in and out of “twitter jail” to gallows humour about being “deboosted”. play sustains nafo’s tactical efforts that are not devoid of moral conundrums of needing to simultaneously work with and against twitter’s algorithms. nafo as an algorithmic entity the most playful and distinct form of nafo’s engagement with the idea of twitter’s algorithms is their reclaiming of a status of an algorithmic entity for themselves. in a fuzzy environment of twitter, nafo are often dismissed as “bots” by their adversaries. as the below post showcases, in such exchanges, reclaiming the status asserts nafo’s power not only to their adversaries, but to other fellas who follow nafo-related hashtags. surprised bots have a sense of humour? [redacted] produces bloody good algorithms. #fellas #nafo so you’ve met nafo for the first time?? 😂 they are programmed to appear when people tweet something really dumb. that’s the algorithm👍 nafo’s playful reclaiming of the notions of algorithms or bots extends scholarly understanding of accepted ways of activism on a platform where user-led responses are increasingly the only way to address russian propaganda. figure 4. nafo’s meme playing with the idea of fellas as an algorithmic entity. conclusion this study deepens understanding of algorithmic agency that arises in the process of allegorithmic play. instead of seeing algorithms as adversarial or omnipotent, fellas engage in playful vernacular practices to reclaim their agency over the information ecosystem. they might not succeed in fully understanding or rewriting the “rules of the game”, but nonetheless achieve their objective of propagating civic ideas to everincreasing international audiences. with the growing interest in harms that arise from online humour and memes, it is important to continue investigating digitally (and algorithmically) mediated collectives such as nafo, who use a variety of humorous practices to support the victims of russian aggression. as scholars, we should not lose sight of what play enables users to do in algorithmically mediated environments as they tactically reclaim tools for their activism. references boichak, o., & lokot, t. (2022, november 20). billionaires won’t save ukraine’s internet. foreign policy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/11/20/ukraine-russia-warinternet-musk-starlink-space-x/ eubanks, v. (2019). automating inequality: how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor (illustrated edition). picador usa. bishop, s. (2019). managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip. new media & society, 21(11–12), 2589–2606. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819854731 boichak, o., & lokot, t. (2022, november 20). billionaires won’t save ukraine’s internet. foreign policy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/11/20/ukraine-russia-warinternet-musk-starlink-space-x/ bonini, t., & treré, e. (2024). algorithms of resistance: the everyday fight against platform power. the mit press. bucher, t. (2017). the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 30–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154086 cervi, l., & divon, t. (2023). playful activism: memetic performances of palestinian resistance in tiktok #challenges. social media + society, 9(1), 20563051231157607. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231157607 cheney-lippold, j. (2016). jus algoritmi: how the national security agency remade citizenship. international journal of communication, 10(0), article 0. eubanks, v. (2019). automating inequality: how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor (illustrated edition). picador usa. galloway, a. r. (2006). gaming: essays on algorithmic culture. university of minnesota press. glatt, z. (2022). precarity, discrimination and (in)visibility: an ethnography of “the algorithm” in the youtube influencer industry. in the routledge companion to media anthropology. routledge. https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/11/20/ukraine-russia-war-internet-musk-starlink-space-x/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/11/20/ukraine-russia-war-internet-musk-starlink-space-x/ https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819854731 https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/11/20/ukraine-russia-war-internet-musk-starlink-space-x/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/11/20/ukraine-russia-war-internet-musk-starlink-space-x/ https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154086 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231157607 kasianenko, k., & boichak, o. (2024). canonizing online activism: memetic iconography in the north atlantic fella organization. media, war & conflict, 1– 18. https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352241279957 mendonça, r. f., filgueiras, f., & almeida, v. (2023). the infrapolitics of algorithmic resistance. communications of the acm, 66(11), 32–34. https://doi.org/10.1145/3573008 noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york university press. robards, b., & lincoln, s. (2019). social media scroll back method. in sage research methods foundations (pp. 1–14). sage publications ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526421036851495 tokariuk, o. (2023). from memes to morale: decoding ukraine’s comedy arsenal against disinformation [journalist fellowship paper]. reuters institute for the study of journalism. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/memes-morale-decodingukraines-comedy-arsenal-against-disinformation tomasello, f. (2023). digital civics and algorithmic citizenship in a global scenario. philosophy and technology, 36. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-023-00638-3 velkova, j., & kaun, a. (2021). algorithmic resistance: media practices and the politics of repair. information, communication & society, 24(4), 523–540. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1657162 https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352241279957 https://doi.org/10.1145/3573008 https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526421036851495 https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/memes-morale-decoding-ukraines-comedy-arsenal-against-disinformation https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/memes-morale-decoding-ukraines-comedy-arsenal-against-disinformation https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-023-00638-3 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1657162 aoir 2024.docx selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 big tech sovereignty: platforms and discourse of sovereignty-as-a-service alexandre costa barbosa university of arts berlin rafael grohmann university of toronto introduction the notion of digital sovereignty has been mobilized by various stakeholders as a response to platform power (dijck, nieborg & poell 2019, herlo et al. 2021). in the last decades, the concept of sovereignty has been applied mainly to state responses to exert power over other sectors and organizations (adler-nisen & gammeltoft-hansen 2008). nonetheless, the meanings of digital sovereignty have also been used and disputed by social movements, workers and indigenous communities (couture & toupin 2019). but the platform companies also entered into disputes about the meanings of this multifaceted notion. as an update of californian ideology (barbroock & cameron 1995, marwick 2017), platform companies modulate their discourse to say that they are also concerned with issues of sovereignty. thus, they are reappropriating the meanings of sovereignty through the launch of programs focused on sovereignty. we named this "big tech sovereignty", a provocation to mean how platforms have changed the meanings of sovereignty based on their own interests, such as the renewal of discourses in the context of "silicon valley dystopianism" (karppi & nieborg 2021). built on analyzes of sovereignty programs of amazon, microsoft and alphabet/google, this article argues that "big tech sovereignty" is a way of trying to deflate the concept politically, giving it only a commercial and/or personal framework, being more of an expression of the platform power. through the analysis of these “digital sovereignty” programs, the article demonstrates how companies framed “sovereignty-as-a-service”, especially in terms of digital infrastructures (poell, nieborg & van dijck 2021, plantin et al 2022, lafuente et al 2022). barbosa, a. & grohmann, r. (2024, october). big tech sovereignty: platforms and discourse of sovereignty-as-a-service. paper (or panel) presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. context the literature shows that claims around digital sovereignty may fit within at least three main categories (pohle & thiel 2020). one is related to the state's control over critical digital infrastructures. the second is related to the digital economy more broadly, encompassing the role of national companies and the state in delivering industrial policies. finally, there is the personal dimension, mostly related to digital self-determination or agency over personal data. this approach became apparent when germany's former prime minister angela merkel stated that digital sovereignty in the european union (eu) would also mean “an individual, a single person” (meinel, galbas & hagebölling 2023). merkel's statement is also important because the discourse on “digital sovereignty” became more prominent in the context of the eu digital policy-making. these elements are key to understanding the discourse around “sovereignty-as-a-service”. methods through critical discourse analysis (cda) (fairclough 1992, 2003), the article analyzes the programs of google, microsoft and amazon in relation to digital sovereignty all launched between 2022 and 2023. the focus on these companies is because they represent over two-thirds of the cloud computing market share (statista 2024). critical discourse analysis allows us to understand how text aspects relate to broader discourses and contexts, considering political and economic scenarios in this case, how a specific expression "sovereignty" has been discursively mobilized and how this relates to the broader strategies of platform companies. data collection involved all official information about these programs, consulted on the companies' own websites. the critical analysis involved the meanings of sovereignty in each program (what does sovereignty mean?), in which context they launched the program, and what were the strategies used by companies in these programs. analysis all three companies launched their “digital sovereignty” programs between 2022 and 2023, especially focused on a european context, in a response to the recent digital policies and discourses around sovereignty in the region. in late 2022, amazon through amazon web services (amazon 2022), its cloud infrastructure service provider launched the“digital sovereignty pledge'' program. according to amazon, digital sovereignty is about “having control over digital assets”, and the company is able to help “customers to meet digital sovereignty requirements”. thus, the discourse of sovereignty is reduced to an asset for amazon customers. the company uses the argument of “sovereign-by-design” a notion that is not explained by the company involving issues such as control over data location and access. the solutions aim to promote “greater control” of infrastructures by customers, in accordance with current laws, being discursively sold as something disruptive. microsoft launched its microsoft cloud for sovereignty program (microsoft 2022) in july 2022, and was the pioneer among other big tech companies. this program is aimed especially at governments and public sector customers who want to invest in “digital sovereignty”. here, this notion is also related to cloud and control over data. more specifically, the company addresses the concept of “data sovereignty”, which means that “data is under the control of the customer and governed by local law”. thus, this is related to the compliance with a country's policies. this approach is one of the responses, from the company's side, to the eu context of tech regulations. the main product of the microsoft program is a so-called “public cloud”, such as microsoft azure. the company addresses sovereignty assuming that “every government has a unique view and requirements when addressing their sovereign needs”. therefore, microsoft offers, through these services, “an additional layer of policy and auditing capabilities” for customer needs. thus, microsoft's discourse on digital sovereignty means that, instead of the state building its own sovereignty strategies, the company offers services so that the state is, in the company's view, “more sovereign”, highlighting the power of platforms over the states (lehdonvirta 2022). alphabet/google was the last of these three companies in launching its program. the digital sovereignty explorer (google 2023) was launched in march 2023, designed for the european context. instead of new products, alphabet/google created a tool to help customers identify digital sovereignty “solutions”, involving data, operational issues and software highlighting that it does not only focus on “data residency”. upon identifying consumer demands, the company sends a report to the customer suggesting google cloud products. the notion of sovereignty is also framed as a service, recognized by the company as “complex” and related to “digital transformation”, as something to be “achieved” by customers through google services. according to the program, “digital sovereignty is about organizations maintaining control and autonomy as they develop their digital transformation and cloud strategies”. basic features emphasize control, visibility and transparency. the software sovereignty dimension emphasizes protections on the part of the company “against disruptive geopolitical events”. thus, the company places itself as “protector” of customers’ interests in relation to possible external threats, thus guaranteeing its “sovereignty”. conclusions the digital sovereignty programs of amazon, microsoft and alphabet/google demonstrate how platform companies are emptying political meanings of sovereignty with historical roots in relation to the state, communities and social movements to emphasize sovereignty-as-a-service, erasing the power relations of the concept. the meanings of digital sovereignty are services aimed either at individuals and companies, or at governments and the public sector, especially in the case of microsoft. these services emphasize the role of infrastructures for platforms as well as market solutions. thus, big tech companies reaffirm their power to prevent competition in the provision of these services. however, instead of “infrastructure-as-a-service”, there is the emergence of “sovereign-as-a-service”. furthermore, sovereignty is addressed as something that can be resolved only by technologies. the analysis also reveals that the programs were designed for the european context, as a reaction by companies to the policies and regulations in force in the region. references adler-nissen, r., & hansen-gammeltof, t. (2008). sovereignty games: instrumentalizing state sovereignty in europe and beyond. new york: palgrave macmillan. amazon (2024). aws digital sovereignty pledge: control without compromise. available at: https://aws.amazon.com/pt/blogs/security/aws-digital-sovereignty-pledge-control-without -compromise/ couture, s. & toupin, s. (2019). what does the notion of “sovereignty” mean when referring to the digital? new media & society, 21 (10). dijck, j., nieborg, d. & poell, t. (2019). reframing platform power. internet policy review, 8 (2). fairclough, n. (2003). analysing discourse. london: routledge. fairclough, n. (1992). discourse and social change. cambridge: polity press. google (2024). google cloud digital sovereignty explorer. available at https://cloudsovereignty.withgoogle.com/ herlo, b., irrgang, d., joost, g., & unteidig, a. (eds.). (2021). practicing sovereignty: digital involvement in times of crises. transcript verlag. karppi, t. & nieborg, d. b. (2021). facebook confessions: corporate abdication and silicon valley dystopianism. new media & society, 23 (9). lehdonvirta, v. (2022). cloud empires: how digital platforms are overtaking the state and how we can regain control. cambridge: mit press. marwick, a. (2017). “silicon valley and the social media industry”. in: burgess, j., marwick, a. & poell, t. (eds.). the sage handbook of social media. london: sage, pp. 314-329. meinel, c., galbas, m., & hagebölling, d. (2023). digital sovereignty: insights from germany’s education sector. technical reports of the hasso-plattner-institute for digital engineering at the university of potsdam, 157. microsoft (2022). microsoft cloud for sovereignty. available at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/industry/sovereignty/cloud plantin, j-c., lagoze, c., edwards, p. n., & sandvig, c. (2018). infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook. new media & society, 20(1), 293–310. https://aws.amazon.com/pt/blogs/security/aws-digital-sovereignty-pledge-control-without-compromise/ https://aws.amazon.com/pt/blogs/security/aws-digital-sovereignty-pledge-control-without-compromise/ https://cloudsovereignty.withgoogle.com/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/industry/sovereignty/cloud poell, t., nieborg, d. & duffy, b. (2021). platforms and cultural production. new york: polity. pohle, j., & thiel, t. (2020). digital sovereignty. internet policy review, 9 (4). statista (2024). amazon maintains cloud lead as microsoft edges closer. statista. available at https://www.statista.com/chart/18819/worldwide-market-share-of-leading-cloud-infrastru cture-service-providers/ https://www.statista.com/chart/18819/worldwide-market-share-of-leading-cloud-infrastructure-service-providers/ https://www.statista.com/chart/18819/worldwide-market-share-of-leading-cloud-infrastructure-service-providers/ selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 kalisky, a. & kligler-vilenchik, n. (2024, october). unearthing connections: examining the role of sense of community in a conspiracy believers' facebook group. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. unearthing connections: examining the role of sense of community in a conspiracy believers’ facebook group alma kalisky hebrew university of jerusalem neta kligler-vilenchik hebrew university of jerusalem introduction conspiracy theories are defined as secret plots involving powerful actors and challenging established narratives (keeley, 1999; mahl et al., 2021). believers in conspiracy theories often have low trust in interpersonal and political spheres, with most research characterizing believers as paranoid and extremist (douglas et al., 2019; goertzel, 1994). however, there is a dearth of research that seeks to understand conspiracy theorists’ experiences from their viewpoint (see harambam & aupers, 2017; douglas et al., 2019). moreover, the focus on personal characteristics may miss the role played by group dynamics. thus, and acknowledging the potential dangers conspiracy theories pose, this research explores conspiracy theory believers’ experiences and motivations for group participation. to do so, we combine current knowledge about conspiracy theories with insights from the realm of online communities. online communities are known to offer support and understanding, particularly to individuals facing marginalization or stigma (van duyn, 2020). those dealing with stigma often seek like-minded individuals to counteract isolation (goffman, 1963). such communities provide a haven for those whose beliefs have isolated them, enabling to find a new sense of community (van duyn, 2020). believers in conspiracy theories can similarly be perceived as a marginalized group (particularly by participants). they actively seek like-minded individuals to exchange ideas and challenge worldviews (harambam & aupers, 2017), thus also potentially fostering a sense of community (douglas et al., 2017), defined as the emotional experience of belonging and the recognition of one’s value by other group members (mcmillan & chavis, 1986). a key concept for our investigation is that of boundary work—the discursive attribution of qualities to online group members to draw a rhetorical limit between in-group members who consider themselves authentic, and other, less authentic members (boero & pascoe, 2012). understanding how conspiracy theorists’ online communities employ boundary work is crucial to grasp the group dynamics, and the role played by sense of community in their experiences. this research thus asks: how is a sense of community established and maintained in online conspiracy groups? methodology to explore this question empirically, the study focuses on an israeli facebook group devoted to people who believe the earth is flat – flat earth israel, a public group with almost 9,000 members. we employ qualitative content analysis on posts and comments from the facebook group; interviews with group participants are planned for a later stage of the project. to select data for analysis, we searched the group posts using keywords that, upon pilot testing, were found to reflect aspects that relate to community, as well as its boundaries: “i identify with", "community," "friends," “flatties" and "trolls.“ applying this search from january 2023 to may 2023 (a period of relative routine) yielded 36 posts and 2093 related comments. the combination of posts and comments aims to identify group dynamics. from this corpus, we eliminated posts where the use of these keywords did not refer to aspects of community. the resulting corpus of 15 posts and their 1015 related comments underwent thematic analysis, which was inspired by grounded theory (strauss & corbin, 1998), identifying recurring concepts, and then coalescing those into key emergent themes that address the research question. preliminary findings thanks for sharing: appreciation and solidarity in the facebook group expressions of appreciation and solidarity were a strongly recurring phenomenon in the group discussion. in one post, typical to the group, a participant shared her journey towards believing in a flat earth. commenters thanked her: "thanks for sharing, it's important"; while others expressed appreciation, posting comments like "i was moved by this." such empathy and support contribute to building a sense of community in online groups (van duyn, 2020). furthermore, group participants used comments to express solidarity with experiences shared by other members in posts. for example, one group member confided that since finding "the truth" (i.e., “realizing” the earth is flat), he feels lonely and friendless. commenters shared similar sentiments, expressing agreement and support: "i'm in the same situation" or "we all feel like that." these expressions of solidarity serve a sense of community, by affirming the author's perspective—one that, in other social contexts, could be challenging and even unacceptable to share openly. this dynamic is similar to the one identified by van duyn (2020), posing online communities as safe havens for stigmatized and marginalized individuals, offering support, understanding, and a sense of belonging. yet, in the case of conspiracy theory groups, such a sense of belonging can also have negative repercussions. setting the community boundaries boundary work entails a negotiation over who is, and isn’t, deemed an authentic member. the group conversation characterized group members (and out-group members) based on their qualities, emphasizing openness and respect. for instance, one commenter contended: "those who are closed-minded, will not acknowledge any form of proof, from anyone. and those who are open to testing the truth, they will receive proof." openness thus emerges as a significant attribute among group members. one category of individuals who are seen by participants as out-group members are socalled "trolls". one member characterized “trolls” as those “who come here not to study the subject, but to convince us that the world is round, [they] create an unpleasant atmosphere and make those who really want to be interested not dare to speak up, because they are put off by the form of discourse." “trolls” are seen as disrespectful towards in-group members—those who believe in the flat earth—and therefore are shunned as outsiders. relatedly, group members often discuss whether the purpose of the group is to convince others and recruit additional members. for example, one post stated: "there are those who want me to prove [the flat earth] to them. […] i prove nothing!" this statement sparked a debate on whether group members should try to raise awareness of the flat earth and recruit new members. some claimed: "discussions on the subject usually end up with neither side moving an inch from where they started…" however, others emphasized the mission to “help others find the truth." as one commenter asserted: "[we] should work and try to convince others not leave the truth in the hands of the agents of chaos we need a critical mass of people with awareness." such debates underline the group's efforts to conduct boundary work. to provide support, online communities must remain accessible yet secure, and this involves members distinguishing between authentic group members and intruders (see yeshuakatz & hård af segerstad, 2020). in the case of the flat earth community, "trolls" and individuals lacking open-mindedness and respect are deemed unfit for membership—or even for attempts at persuasion. discussion this research examines how a sense of community is established in a facebook group devoted to conspiracy theorists. the analysis shows that insights from the study of online communities, according to which these spaces can be havens where marginalized individuals can connect, engage, and nurture a sense of belonging (van duyn, 2020) can apply to conspiracy groups as well. this perspective shifts our attention from individual traits to the significant role that group dynamics can play in the experience of conspiracy theorists. by recognizing the importance of belonging and solidarity, the study enriches our understanding of conspiracy theories and prompts consideration of solutions, such as fostering alternative avenues for community and belonging. references boero, n., & pascoe, c. j. (2012). pro-anorexia communities and online interaction: bringing the pro-ana body online. body & society, 18(2), 27-57. douglas, k. m., sutton, r. m., & cichocka, a. (2017). the psychology of conspiracy theories. current directions in psychological science, 26(6), 538-542 douglas, k. m., uscinski, j. e., sutton, r. m., cichocka, a., nefes, t., ang, c. s., & deravi, f. (2019). understanding conspiracy theories. political psychology, 40, 3-35. goertzel, t. (1994). belief in conspiracy theories. political psychology, 15(4), 731-742. goffman, e. (1963). stigma: notes on the management of spoiled identity. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice-hall. harambam, j., & aupers, s. (2017). ‘i am not a conspiracy theorist’: relational identifications in the dutch conspiracy milieu. cultural sociology, 11(1), 113-129. keeley, b. (1999). of conspiracy theories. the journal of philosophy, 96(3), 109-126. mahl, d., zeng, j., & schäfer, m. s. (2021). from “nasa lies” to “reptilian eyes”: mapping communication about 10 conspiracy theories, their communities, and main propagators on twitter. social media+ society, 7(2). mcmillan, d. w., & chavis, d. m. (1986). sense of community: a definition and theory. journal of community psychology, 14(1), 6-23. strauss a., & corbin j. (1998). basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. sage. van duyn, e. (2020). mainstream marginalization: secret political organizing through social media. social media+ society, 6(4), 1-13. yeshua-katz, d., & hård af segerstad, y. (2020). catch 22: the paradox of social media affordances and stigmatized online support groups. social media+ society, 6(4), 1-12. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): jokubauskaitė, e., & peeters, s. (2024). visibility in the shadows: tips in mainstream vs. niche streaming on chaturbate. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. visibility in the shadows: tips in mainstream vs. niche streaming on chaturbate emilija jokubauskaitė university of amsterdam stijn peeters university of amsterdam webcam sex platforms have grown into a multi-billion industry over the past few decades and host large populations of performers. succeeding on these platforms is often framed in terms of appearing higher in the algorithmically ranked performance list on their homepage (jones, 2015; van doorn & velthuis, 2018; velthuis & van doorn, 2020; jokubauskaitė et al., 2023). this visibility correlates with attracting substantial viewer numbers, in turn increasing the potential for tips. performers, however, frequently claim that due to the prevalence of freeloading, more viable income strategies revolve around cultivating a smaller but loyal customer base, commonly called 'regulars'. streaming to a niche, therefore, is a recognized approach among webcam performers, often advised to beginners as a way to “stand out and build a dedicated fan base” (sah, 2024). this suggests that there is more to financial success on these platforms than ‘ranking higher’, and that it can manifest in multiple forms. from the platform’s perspective, the algorithmic management of creators’ visibility is embedded in a large non-monopoly market (jokubauskaitė et al., 2023), with numerous sites competing for limited traffic. various platform affordances, such as the algorithmic ranking system, tag and categorization systems, whitelabel sites, and other affiliate program elements serve to maximize both traffic to the platform and potential spending by viewers (of which the platform receives a percentage). for performers, though, they afford alternative modes of visibility, which may generate tips beyond the top of the front page of the platform. nevertheless, little is known about the concrete earnings of webcam sex streamers in relation to both homepage ranking and other forms of visibility. this paper focuses on chaturbate, one of the highest-traffic and largestperformer-base webcam sex platforms, examining the income of performers on the platform as related to modes of visibility, reliance on regulars, and the size and frequency of incoming tips. previous research has underscored the opacity of algorithmic ranking systems in webcamming and the fiercely competitive environment they foster. for example, velthuis and van doorn (2020) assert that these systems are “constitutive of competition” (p. 168) and transform “the world of webcamming into a winner-take-all world” (p. 176). they further argue that “the algorithm is a strategic tool in inter-platform competition” (ibid.), with its opacity serving as a safeguard against performers attempting to 'game' the system. despite the opaqueness of these algorithmic ranking systems, some patterns have been observed regarding their outcomes. angela jones (2015) found that “black and hispanic performers have disproportionately lower camscores” (p. 789) on myfreecams. similarly, lorena caminhas (2022) documented that “rankings rely on axes of difference, centrally gender, race, and age, foregrounding young white cisgender women” (p. 1) in the local webcam industry in brazil. furthermore, jokubauskaitė et al. (2023) empirically scrutinized the outcomes of ranking systems of five webcam sex platforms. they note that chaturbate, the object of our study, hosts a high-risk, high-reward competitive environment, where a select group of high-visibility performers had significantly greater viewership of their shows compared to less visible counterparts. nonetheless, mainstream visibility is not the only successful income strategy, taken into account that online sex workers are known to resist platform affordances (rand & stegeman, 2023) and use various strategies to earn money in a highly competitive environment. large-scale studies focusing on ranking alone, therefore, are necessarily limited. furthermore, even though some data about performer earnings has been reported in ethnographic studies (e.g. jones, 2020), and anecdotal evidence has been presented in news media (e.g. isador, 2019) and industry blogs (e.g. graham, 2023), previous research does not directly connect visibility metrics with earnings. additionally, income data has not been collected systematically at a larger scale before. we thus focus our inquiry on earnings from tips collected on chaturbate and their relationship to visibility beyond the front page of the platform, made available via various technical affordances such as whitelabels, tags, or gender labels. our systematic, large-scale data analysis is grounded in an array of performance metrics, including ranking, tip, viewership, tags, and other data collected from public streams via a custom scraper on chaturbate over a two-week period in july 2022. we explore the distribution of earnings from tips and analyze their correlations with ranking on the front page, and show viewership. we then triangulate the findings via a codonation network with gender-label and tag data to delineate apparent niches that performers stream in. doing so, we interrogate the algorithmic visibility management on the platform and its consequences for performers’ income from tips, as well as different ways performers succeed financially on the platform. the analysis helps untangle the complex and opaque socio-technical conditions that webcam performers operate in. however, our case study does not come without ethical concerns, especially because of the continuous stigmatization and marginalization of the sex worker community. we are particularly aware of concerns related to automated online data collection. nevertheless, we believe that a comprehensive analysis into the functioning of powerful platforms can bring beneficial outcomes to worker communities if conducted with an 'ethic of care' (tronto 1998). while ethnographic studies of worker experiences are indispensable, they alone may not suffice to counterbalance the hegemonic influence wielded by large platforms through "sexual datafication" (saunders, 2020, p. 58). our research followed a strict ethics protocol, continually reassessing the potential risks of harm throughout the process. no visual data was collected, and only aggregated findings are presented without any identifying information. besides scrutinizing the algorithmic management of chaturbate, the paper offers insight into the scale and distribution of performer earnings along the lines of different strategies for generating tips. this can give actionable information to performers without requiring marginalized workers to perform “intellectual, practical, or emotional labor” (phipps, 2015). we also estimate the earnings of a platform within a highly secretive industry, which has not been independently or systematically done previously. three preliminary findings emerge: firstly, we find a pronounced winners-take-all distribution of tips on chaturbate, with the top 10 percent of earners collecting more than 69% of all tips. these tips strongly correlate with show viewership and homepage ranking. secondly, we identify instances where performers, despite not attaining high rankings, still accumulate substantial earnings, suggesting viable paths to sustainable income beyond seeking front-page visibility. thirdly, we uncover niche-visibility areas linked to gender labels and specific tags. while some performers in these niches earn a significant income from tips, their audiences tend to be smaller and more often consist mainly of loyal customers, who tip generous sums of money, otherwise known as “whales”. our findings reinforce previous academic observations concerning the competitive environment in webcam sex as well as creator industries at large. yet, diverging from the focus on mainstream visibility in prior work, we discern various income-generation strategies performers employ when subjected to the algorithmic rule of the “engines of anxiety” (espeland et al., 2016). the alternative modes of visibility afforded by the platform provide ways for more performers to monetize their content, and for the platform to receive niche traffic. however, the strong income reliance on whale tippers within more niche areas of content underscores the financial precarity in the industry – a performer remains dependent, either on the algorithmic ranking system to consistently bring in a large audience, or on a select few loyal fans for regular donations. notes the design of this study was reviewed and approved by the ethics review board of the university of amsterdam, faculty of social and behavioral sciences, project reference 2021-aissr-13818. references caminhas, l. (2022). the politics of algorithmic rank systems in the brazilian erotic webcam industry. porn studies, 0(0), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2022.2083661 espeland, w. n., sauder, m., & espeland, w. (2016). engines of anxiety: academic rankings, reputation, and accountability (1st edition). russell sage foundation. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2022.2083661 graham, m. (2023, december 6). how much do webcam models really make? (cam girl salary 2022 updated). medium. https://grahammaloney7.medium.com/how-muchdo-webcam-models-really-make-cam-girl-salary-2022-updated-49e4fc4a0516 isador, g. (2019, march 8). cam models tell us how much money they are really making. vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/wjmbwn/cam-models-tell-us-how-muchmoney-they-are-really-making jokubauskaitė, e., rieder, b., & burkhardt, s. (2023). winner-take-all? visibility, availability, and heterogeneity on webcam sex platforms. social media + society, 9(4), 20563051231214807. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231214807 jones, a. (2015). for black models scroll down: webcam modeling and the racialization of erotic labor. sexuality & culture, 19(4), 776–799. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-015-9291-4 jones, a. (2020). camming: money, power, and pleasure in the sex work industry. nyu press. phipps, a. (2015, september 29). research with marginalised groups: some difficult questions. https://phipps.space/2015/09/29/researching-marginalised-groups/ rand, h. m., & stegeman, h. m. (2023). navigating and resisting platform affordances: online sex work as digital labor. gender, work & organization, 30(6), 2102–2118. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.13047 sah, r. (2024, january 16). unveiling the secrets: how to make money on chaturbate like a pro! medium. https://medium.com/@ranjitsah11/unveiling-the-secrets-how-tomake-money-on-chaturbate-like-a-pro-fe6d9ae1d739 saunders, r. (2020). sexual datafication. in r. saunders (ed.), bodies of work: the labour of sex in the digital age (pp. 57–94). springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49016-4_3 tronto, j.c. (1998) an ethic of care. generations: journal of the american society on aging 22(3): 15–20. van doorn, n., & velthuis, o. (2018). a good hustle: the moral economy of market competition in adult webcam modeling. journal of cultural economy, 11(3), 177–192. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2018.1446183 velthuis, o., & van doorn, n. (2020). weathering winner-take-all. how rankings constitute competition on webcam sex platforms, and what performers can do about it. in d. stark (ed.), the performance complex: competitions and valuations in social life. oxford university press. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/132136/ https://grahammaloney7.medium.com/how-much-do-webcam-models-really-make-cam-girl-salary-2022-updated-49e4fc4a0516 https://grahammaloney7.medium.com/how-much-do-webcam-models-really-make-cam-girl-salary-2022-updated-49e4fc4a0516 https://www.vice.com/en/article/wjmbwn/cam-models-tell-us-how-much-money-they-are-really-making https://www.vice.com/en/article/wjmbwn/cam-models-tell-us-how-much-money-they-are-really-making https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231214807 https://phipps.space/2015/09/29/researching-marginalised-groups/ https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.13047 https://medium.com/@ranjitsah11/unveiling-the-secrets-how-to-make-money-on-chaturbate-like-a-pro-fe6d9ae1d739 https://medium.com/@ranjitsah11/unveiling-the-secrets-how-to-make-money-on-chaturbate-like-a-pro-fe6d9ae1d739 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49016-4_3 https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2018.1446183 http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/132136/ selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): durham, c. (2024, october). between the (live) stream: configurations of/for embodiment, technicity, and vicarious spaces. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. between the (live) stream: configurations of/for embodiment, technicity and vicarious spaces charlotte durham university of leeds drawing on iterative, empirical work that investigates the conditions of an everyday hypermediated environment, this paper focuses on experiences of livestreaming from the disney parks in order to think about the embodied and the technological in relation to the limits of mobility within this configuration of space(s). in doing so, i engage with longstanding ideas around multiple temporalities (e.g. kristeva, 1981; felski, 2000; grosz, 2005; baraitser, 2017), concepts of space (e.g. lefebvre, 1991; grosz, 2001; merleau-ponty, 2012; kinkaid, 2020) and of the body (e.g. grosz, 1994; simonsen, 2005; hansen, 2006; knudsen and stage, 2015a), as well as online culture and live streaming practices (e.g. burgess and green, 2018; mueser and vlachos, 2018; taylor, 2023; ruberg et al., 2023). these ideas come to be framed in this project by an overwhelming sense of industry that is threaded through enmeshed within neo-liberal political structures. yet industry is not often seen here, and instead, these practices and experiences relating to live streaming are understood as centrally relating to pleasure and affect. in other words, pleasure works to mask industry – as well as issues around mobility, power and the conditions of possibility in which these experiences occur – and therefore, sets out how these experiences come to be framed and positioned, particularly in terms of the multiple, oscillatory, and fluctuating subject positions of live streamers. central to these issues is an idea of space which is doubly lived: first, as a physical, tangible space (in thinking about live streamers in the disney parks), and second, as a virtual space (such as internet streaming sites such as youtube, for example, which host the live stream). what i want to argue is that live streaming operates within a kind of hybrid space that is crucially both physical and virtual. thinking in this way enables what thornham (2018) has argued against the conceptual separation of the real (and corporeal) and the virtual (see also grosz, 2001; walkerdine, 2007). as such, we can see live streaming not as two separate, discrete spaces, but as transmitting across this binary and as complexly and powerfully embodied, lived and everyday. that these experiences are embodied is important here in terms of how they come to be conceived of and conceptualised. what i am suggesting here then is that we can think about these spaces as a vicarious space in which vicarity is underpinned by a sense of mobility and an investment in the embodied. vicarious space is implicitly configured through the technological in relation to video-sharing platforms and within social, cultural, political, and economic structures and systems which are – ultimately – everyday and mundane. by positioning live streaming among the mundane, i am asking us to consider how, as a practice, it is embedded within a set of routine and normative experiences (see morris, 1988; seigworth, 2000) that are part and parcel of internet culture more broadly. in this context, live streaming is not just a set of protocols that enable (or not) video transmission, but the material, dynamic and anticipatory points of connection between streamer and viewer. by foregrounding these connections in this way, i am attempting to re-politicise what often is left out or forsaken in our imaginings by drawing a line of critical inquiry between the mundane, live streaming, and embodied vicarious space. at the same time, there is a further dialectic at play in thinking about disney – which is often imagined as magical, as dramatic, and as ‘hyperreal’ (eco, 1986) – and the mundane. what i want to say here is that disney is all of these things, as well as ordinary and everyday and in recognising this, we also need to note the politics of this manoeuvre and the implications of this for the (neoliberal) subject. as i have already said, industry emerges throughout this paper, and it emerges here again in thinking about disney as a global media conglomerate. disney is historically, culturally and economically significant and holds an immense amount of power, evidenced in their impact on global culture. by turning to live streaming from the disney parks as i do here, i am pushing for us to think about the conditions which enable these particular configurations of embodiment, technology, and space that are, of course, framed by and recursively fed through consumer-capitalism and neo-liberalism among other systems of power. methods in april 2024 i will spend a week ‘going along’ with several live streamers within the walt disney world theme parks. i will observe, reflect, and ask questions – encouraging those i am ‘going along’ with to do the same. walk-along methods emerge here as an experimental method that becomes folded together with the critical issues i am taking up, which – to reiterate – crucially relate to embodiment, mobility, and a notion of vicarity. this is important because it, in part, reflects a different way of ‘knowing’ something about the ephemeral, embodied experiences of live streaming i am interested in and in so doing, challenges differentials of power in data and lead us to more responsible ways of knowing (see d’ignazio and klein, 2020). more than this, these methods contribute a political shift towards playfulness that invites us to expose orientations by elevating the relational, sensory, embodied and contingent ways of knowing and experiencing the space. here then, i am drawing from ‘rapid ethnography’ (see millen, 2000; handwerker, 2001; vindrola-padros, 2021), ‘walk-along methods’ (see kusenbach, 2003; 2016; walkerdine, 2007; carpiano, 2009; rose et al., 2010), inventive and affective methods (lury and wakeford, 2014; knudsen and stage, 2015b), live methods (back and puwar, 2012), and feminist onto-epistemologies (oakley, 1981; ang, 1996; skeggs, 1997; barad, 2007). taken together, these approaches enable us to feel our way through complex entanglements of sets of politics. indeed, what i am hoping for here, is a sense of research with (rather than on) live streamers. yet, there are limits to this ethico-onto-epistemology, of course, and as such it is important to recognise that in writing up and sharing my work in this way, i am representing, i am performing knowledge in certain ways. these ways are not natural or value free; these are my accounts, based on my interpretations, my enactments of my research. speculative conclusions this paper focuses on live streaming as a set of experiences that configure embodiment, technology and space in particular ways that direct a spotlight on to an idea of vicarious space. in thinking about the conditions of this kind of space, i am directed to consider the implications for mobility and it is here i turn now in proposing some speculative conclusions. if disney is a “middle class kingdom” (mittermeier, 2019) then there is an underlying set of politics that which asks us to consider for whom this space is for. this question absolutely and powerfully relates to concepts choice and agency. mobility is necessary in that it enables people to choose pleasure; to choose disney. yet, we can recognise the ways in which class, along with gender, race and disability intersect and become subsumed within powerful neoliberal politics under a guise of mobility, and as such, and in configuring live streaming as a vicarious space, the internet makes possible certain relations and connections. what i am asking here then is how is vicarity imagined in terms of embodied subjectivity and agency? and how should we understand this in terms of the internet and opportunities for connectivity? references ang, i. 1996. living room wars: rethinking media audiences for a postmodern world. london: routledge. back, l. and purwal, n. eds. 2012. live methods. malden, ma: blackwell. barad, k.m. 2007. meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham: duke university press. baraitser, l. 2017. enduring time. london: bloomsbury. burgess, j. and green, j. 2018. youtube: online video and participatory culture 2nd ed. cambridge: polity press. carpiano, r.m. 2009. come take a walk with me: the “go-along” interview as a novel method for studying the implications of place for health and well-being. health & place. 15(1), pp.263–272. d’ignazio, c. and klein, l.f. 2020. data feminism. cambridge, massachusetts: the mit press. eco, u. 1986. travels in hyperreality: essays. san diego: harcourt. felski, r. 2000. doing time: feminist theory and postmodern culture. new york, ny: new york university press. grosz, e. 1994. volatile bodies: toward a corporeal feminism. bloomington, in: indiana university press. ____. 2001. architecture from the outside: essays on virtual and real space. cambridge, ma: mit press. ____. 2005. time travels: feminism, nature, power. durham, nc: duke university press. handwerker, w.p. 2001. quick ethnography. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. hansen, m.b.n. 2006. bodies in code: interfaces with digital media. new york, ny: routledge. kinkaid, e. 2020. re-encountering lefebvre: toward a critical phenomenology of social space. environment and planning d: society and space. 38(1), pp.167–186. knudsen, b.t. and stage, c. 2015a. global media, biopolitics and affect: politicizing bodily vunerability. new york, ny: routledge. ____. (eds.). 2015b. affective methodologies: developing cultural research strategies for the study of affect. new york, ny: palgrave macmillan. kristeva, j. 1981. women’s time. signs. 7(1), pp.5–12. kusenbach, m. 2003. street phenomenology: the go-along as ethnographic research tool. ethnography. 4(3), pp.455–485. ____. 2016. the go-along method. in: schwanhäußer, a. ed. sensing the city: a companion to urban anthropology. berlin: birkhäuser, pp. 154–158. lefebvre, h. 1991. the production of space. oxford: blackwell. lury, c. and wakeford, n. eds. 2014. inventive methods: the happening of the social. london: routledge, pp.1–24. merleau-ponty, m. 2012. phenomenology of perception. abingdon: routledge. millen, d.r. 2000. rapid ethnography: time deepening strategies for hci field research. in: boyarski, d., and kellogg, w. a. proceedings of the 3rd conference on designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques (dis '00), 17–19 august, new york, ny. new york, ny: association for computing machinery, pp. 280–286. mittermeier, s. 2019. a cultural history of the disneyland theme parks: middle class kingdoms. bristol: intellect. morris, m. 1988. banality in cultural studies. discourse. 10(2), pp.3–29. mueser, d. and vlachos, p. 2018. almost like being there? a conceptualisation of livestreaming theatre. international journal of event and festival management. 9(2), pp.183–203. oakley, a. 1981. interviewing women: a contradiction in terms. in: roberts, h. ed. doing feminist research. london: routledge, pp.30–61. rose, g., degen, m. and basdas, b. 2010. more on ‘big things’: building events and feelings. transactions of the institute of british geographers. 35(3), pp.334–349. ruberg, b., brewer, j., cullen, a.l.l. and persaud, c.j. 2023. the revolution is streaming live: cultural perspectives on the age of live streaming in: j. brewer, b. ruberg, a. l. l. cullen and c. j. persaud, eds. real life in real time: live streaming culture. cambridge, ma: mit press, pp.1–24. seigworth, g.j. 2000. banality for cultural studies. cultural studies. 14(2), pp.227–268. simonsen, k. 2005. bodies, sensations, space and time: the contribution from henri lefebvre. geografiska annaler: series b, human geography. 87(1), pp.1–14. skeggs, b. 1997. formations of class & gender: becoming respectable. london: sage. taylor, t.l. 2023. broadcasting our lives, broadcasting ourselves in: j. brewer, b. ruberg, a. l. l. cullen and c. j. persaud, eds. real life in real time: live streaming culture. cambridge, ma: mit press, pp. ix–xvi. thornham, h. 2018. gender and digital culture: between irreconcilability and the datalogical. london: routledge. vindrola-padros, c. 2021. rapid ethnographies: a practical guide. cambridge: cambridge university press. walkerdine, v. 2007. children, gender, video games: towards a relational approach to multimedia. palgrave macmillan. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): robards, b., carah, n., hayden, l. & dobson, a.. (2024, october). algorithmic gossip in young people’s accounts of ‘unhealthy’ advertising on social media. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. algorithmic gossip in young people’s accounts of ‘unhealthy’ advertising on social media brady robards monash university nicholas carah university of queensland lauren hayden university of queensland amy dobson curtin university introduction and background the opaque, algorithmic, and individualised nature of advertising on social media makes it difficult to study. each social media user receives a different flow of advertising, targeted based on likes, interests, and connections. facebook, instagram, snapchat, twitter, and especially tiktok largely fail advertising transparency tests with some levels of transparency for political ads but very limited or no transparency for other kinds of advertising (mehta & erickson 2022). in order to understand what kinds of promotional messages social media users receive, researchers are increasingly turning to participatory methods by asking users to donate ads (burgess et al. 2022) or collecting screenshots of ads themselves (lara-mejia 2022). in this paper we report on two studies where we worked with young people as ‘citizen scientists’ to collect screenshots of ‘unhealthy’ advertising they saw on social media. our focus on ‘unhealthy’ advertising gambling, alcohol, fast food was partly driven by our research partners in health promotion, but also out of our own commitments to social wellbeing. while we acknowledge the pleasures and connective capacities of ‘unhealthy’ practices (brown & gregg 2012), the algorithmic and dark advertising of unhealthy commodities on social media amplifies risks and harms. for instance, underage users seeing alcohol or gambling ads, or other users wanting to moderate their consumption being targeted. thus, studying how these advertisements circulate on social media contributes to wider public health initiatives alongside movements to foster safer online environments and hold digital advertising to higher standards of observability and accountability. our studies in this paper we draw on two studies undertaken with australian health promotion organisations. in the first, we worked with 204 young australians (aged 16-25, avg 19.5) to collect 5169 screenshots of ‘unhealthy’ marketing they saw on social media (gambling, alcohol, fast food and sugary drinks) over a one week period. researchers and participants communicated through sms chat (via a web-based platform called messagemedia) where screenshots were reflected upon and discussed. in the second study, we are working with 30 young australians (aged 18-25, avg 23.9) to collect screenshots of alcohol and nightlife marketing over a one month period. as jaynes (2019) explains, screenshots operate as a form of ‘evidence’ in digital cultures. participants in study 1 were also invited back for an online asynchronous focus group discussion forum (focusgroupit) to discuss our preliminary findings and add their interpretations and analyses to our own. our ‘citizen science’ approach centres young people as knowledgeable and expert when it comes to their own social media use, digital media cultures, and their experiences of advertising (thomas et al. 2022). algorithmic gossip we are interested in better understanding both what kinds of ‘unhealthy’ promotional material young people see on social media and how they interpret that material: why they think they see it, what they think about it being on their social media feeds, and what impact (if any) it has on them. participants consistently engage in what bishop (2019: 2589) describes as ‘algorithmic gossip’, the ‘communally and socially informed theories and strategies pertaining to recommender algorithms’ on social media. while bishop was focussed on how youtubers engaged in algorithmic gossip to increase the visibility and thus the financial success of their videos, we extend this to include the way research participants theorise and discuss how algorithms work (or don’t work) in surfacing content, in our case ads, on their own social media feeds. a number of themes emerge in our analysis of this gossip or vernacular theorisation of why our participants see certain ads. the first two clear themes are contradictory. on the one hand, our participants report that the algorithm knows them well targeting ads successfully, based on their likes, interests, and likely purchasing practices. on the other hand, other participants report that the algorithm does not know them at all, missing the mark in the ads they saw: christy (19, female) felt the algorithm ‘is tailored to me… it knows me’, and nate (16, male) explained the ads he saw ‘matched fairly well with my interests… no particular advertisement surprised me as they are a fair representation of what i see and like’. for others, the notion of the ‘faulty algorithm’ was common, for instance fern (discussion forum) explained ‘i noticed some of the ads were targeted while others missed their mark. this makes me think that the platforms had collected some data, but their predictions were off’ and erika (20, female) explained ‘i actually find it funny that i get alcohol ads as i myself have never drank and don't plan on doing so either!’ beyond their perceptions of how well algorithms ‘know them’, our participants often have complex theories about how algorithms work. one of the dominant inputs according to our participants was search history. sybil (24, female) for instance said ‘i'd say the ads are generated mainly from my google/facebook searches’ and sebastian (17, male) agreed saying ‘i wasn't really surprised by the ads that come up for me cause they are basically what i search online’. the friends of our participants were also theorised to play an important role: shawn (19, male) suggested ‘i think [these ads are] getting recommended to me because… friends on facebook have liked the page’ and meghan (18, female) said ‘i see alot of my facebook friends interested in those events too which is why they might be advertised alot to me’. we would suggest the theorisation of the role of friends in algorithmic surfacing is especially pronounced on facebook because of the way friends are leveraged on that platform. other theories explored in these algorithmic gossip exchanges included connections to work (‘i’m not a major alcohol drinker… i do work in hospitality as one of my jobs and often find myself on the dan murphy’s [australian alcohol retailer] website to look at prices… so the ads could be attributed to that’ (tilly, 21, female)), to algorithms learning over time (‘i thought the reason i got this ad may have been because it was on twitter, which i started using more recently and hence has not been catered directly towards me yet’ (cassie, 19, female)) and to specific times of year or events (‘i saw more alcohol stores and night club-like ads more. i think because it's my birthday month’ (irene, 20, female). notably, many participants also commented on how being part of the study and taking screenshots of certain ads changed their algorithm: ‘i noticed that the more i screenshotted the alcohol ads in particular the more i got them’ (samantha, 19, female) and ‘as a result of interacting with these ad pop ups by screenshotting, i believe the algorithm changed to show me more ads associated with that product’ (gracie, 19, female). conclusion when prompted, young people in our studies engage in extensive ‘algorithmic gossip’ around what they see on social media and why they see it. our ‘citizen scientists’ produce a range of theories around why they see some ads search histories, friendship networks, interests, time of day/week/year, location, age, gender, sexuality, and more. in this way, engaging in screenshot collection and ‘algorithmic gossip’ (bishop 2019) with our participants allowed us to get at these vernacular theories, and lead into discussions on whether they thought this kind of targeting in advertising was acceptable. our participants express strong views around regulation and wanting to see less of some forms of promotional content, especially when it came to gambling advertisements. while some of our participants occasionally see ads as helpful or creative, many reflected on the algorithmic targeting of unhealthy products as manipulative, creepy, and annoying, opening the opportunity for further discussions about platform accountability that centre young people’s expertise and knowledge. references bishop, s. (2019). managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip. new media & society, 21(11-12), 2589-2606. brown, r., & gregg, m. (2012). the pedagogy of regret: facebook, binge drinking and young women. continuum, 26(3), 357-369. burgess, j., andrejevic, m., angus, d., & obeid, a. k. (2022). australian ad observatory: background paper [report]. arc centre of excellence for automated decision-making and society. https://apo.org.au/node/318616 lara-mejía, v., franco-lares, b., lozada-tequeanes, a. l., villanueva-vázquez, c., & hernández-cordero, s. (2022). methodologies for monitoring the digital marketing of foods and beverages aimed at infants, children, and adolescents (ica): a scoping review. international journal of environmental research and public health, 19(15). mehta, s., & erickson, k. (2022). can online political targeting be rendered transparent? prospects for campaign oversight using the facebook ad library. internet policy review, 11(1), 1-31. doi:10.14763/2022.1.1648 thomas, j. a., trigg, j., morris, j., miller, e., & ward, p. r. (2022). exploring the potential of citizen science for public health through an alcohol advertising case study. health promotion international, 37(2), daab139. https://apo.org.au/node/318616 selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 which human faces can an ai generate? lack of diversity in this person does not exist lucas nunes sequeira1 group on artificial intelligence and art (gaia) and molecular sciences course, university of sao paulo bruno s. moreschi2 group on artificial intelligence and art (gaia) and faculty of architecture and urbanism, university of sao paulo vinicius ariel arruda dos santos3 group on artificial intelligence and art (gaia) and polytechnic school of the university of são paulo 1. introduction in this abstract we show the results of an interdisciplinary research in which we audit fake human faces (deepfakes) generated by the website this person does not exist (tpdne), and discuss how this system can help perpetuate normativities supported by a dependency on a limited database. our analysis focuses on the “default generic face” we created by overlapping random samples of fake faces generated by tpdne's algorithms. independently of the group of fake human faces sampled, the same generic white face always appeared as a result (fig. 1). 3 vinicius ariel arruda dos santos is an undergraduate student of the polytechnic school of the university of são paulo, researcher at group on artificial intelligence and art (gaia / c4ai / inova usp). e-mail: viniciusarielarruda@usp.br 2 bruno moreschi is a visual artist, postdoctoral fellow at university of são paulo’s faculty of architecture and urbanism, senior fellow at the center for arts, design and social research (cad+sr), member of the histories of ai: a genealogy of power group (university of cambridge) and co-coordinator of gaia. e-mail: brunomoreschi@usp.br 1 lucas n. sequeira is an undergraduate student of molecular sciences at the university of são paulo, researcher at group on artificial intelligence and art (gaia / c4ai / inova usp) and junior researcher at cpqd, in the area of natural language processing. e-mail: lucasnseq@usp.br suggested citation (apa): sequeira, l., moreschi, b., and arruda dos santos, v., (2021, october). which human faces can an ai generate? lack of diversity in this person does not exist. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. fig. 1: “default generic face” – overlapping 3000 random fake faces by tpdne. credit: bernardo fontes and lucas n. sequeira / gaia faces algorithmically generated are part of the improvements in the cv field since 2014, with the development of a machine learning infrastructure called generative adversarial network – gan (goodfellow et al., 2014). the increase of hardwares processing capacities made the intensive use of this infrastructure viable, recently allowing the construction of more realistic images of humans, animals and objects from the new gans known as stylegan (karras et al., 2019) and stylegan2 (karras et al., 2020; nie et al., 2020). created in 2019, tpdne is the result of using this last specific gan and it was only achievable thanks to the use of the database of real human faces from the flickr-faces-hq database, with 70 thousand high definition images. every time the website is refreshed, its ai renders a new (and fake) human face. the rise of cv has prompted several debates such as the “algorithmic injustices” (noble, 2018). in this research we are particularly inspired by specific analysis of datasets such as the auditing on imagenet conducted by prabhu and birhane (2020), and also the social and cultural impacts that those systems reflects in society approaching cultural aspects (mintz et al., 2019) or to certain phenotypic subgroups (buolamwini and gebru, 2018). fig. 2: samples of fake human faces generated by tpdne. 2. methodology we first built a database with 4100 fake human faces taken from tpdne website via web scraping. then, we analysed them through a python language script created by us, and discussed behaviours identified in this stylegan2. our analyses are based on the use of specific images created from a subset of overlapping fake human faces available in our database. these resulting images, called here “cluster-images”, were made from the overlapping of n arbitrary images generated by the tpdne's algorithms. 3. what does this face tell us? 3.1. a face that imposes itself independent of the selection in the dataset to prove this statement, we first created six “cluster-images” by overlapping fake faces scraped from tpdne (fig. 3), each formed by different amounts of images. we observed that the resulting “cluster-images” are similar: a person with white skin, dark eyes and brown hair, characteristics that are preserved regardless of the number of different fake faces overlapped. fig. 3: set of six images resulting from overlaps each with a number of different images. the “cluster-images” a, b, c, d, e and f were generated by, respectively, 10, 30, 100, 300, 1000 and 3000 images taken from our database randomly and without repetition. to assess how these “cluster-images” are similar to each other, we created a set of 20 “cluster-images” for each value of n. in each set “cluster-images” with a fixed n, we calculated the mean deviation between the images in them (fig. 4). this curve reveals that the degree of similarity increases exponentially for “cluster-images” that were generated with a larger number of data. from more than 1000 images, we can assume that the “cluster-images” generated are the “default generic face” of the database (fig.1; e and f in fig. 3). this experiment shows that, when we talk about the tpdne's algorithms, a larger data volume does not mean an increase in the diversity of results, but the contrary. fig. 4: the chart represents the mean standard deviation curve between set images assuming different values of n, each generated by 20 different “cluster-images”. 3.2. faces of black people as unlikely we also analyzed how the image database behaves in relation to skin tones diversity. for this, we selected all the faces of black people from a set of 4100 tpdne results – there were only 54 faces, which represents 1.4% of the whole set, which per se shows this racialization and whiteness of the dataset. with these images we generated a “cluster-image” (a). we also selected 54 random images of white faces to create another “cluster-image” (b) for comparison (fig. 5). finally, we conclude that the “cluster-image” generated by white people is visually more similar to the “default generic face” than the “cluster-image” generated by faces of black people. this is empirical evidence that the creation of fake faces is not independent of characteristics such as whiteness imposed by processes that are already historically known. fig. 5: “cluster-images” of two overlaps: a (54 images of different fake faces of black people) and b (54 different fake faces of white people). 4. why is this research important? these results intrigue us because they are part of a first generation of realistic images created independently from the human eye, since they are synthesized solely by algorithms – a new chapter in the history of post-photography (beiguelman, 2020). but also, particularly because the lack of diversity of tpdne's generated faces is not a bug in this digital infrastructure, but a reinforcing standard dynamic that historically regulates bodies, territories and practices, from which the computer sciences are not removed. it is not by chance that beiguelman (2020) also raises the question: are fake human faces the announcement of a new era of the eugenics of images? why, for example, is there a generic smile on “default generic face” and in all the fake human faces in tpdne? what does it hide from us? thousands of precarious crowdworks (as turkers) organizing the flickr-faces-hq database may be one of the answers (karras et al., 2019). the fact that this stylegan was only possible thanks to the use of amateur personal images posted on flickr (smits and wevers, 2021) and taken without the consent of its authors also tells us a lot about how data is made available to train artificial intelligence. 5. references beiguelman, g. (2020). as verdades dos deepfakes. retrieved march 25, 2021, from https://book.affecting-technologies.org/as-verdades-dos-deepfakes/ buolamwini, j.; gebru, t. gender shades: intersectional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification. in: conference on fairness, accountability and transparency. pmlr, 2018. p. 77-91. goodfellow, i.; pouget-abadie, j.; mirza, m.; xu, b.; warde-farley, d.; ozair, s.; courville, a.; bengio, y. (2014). generative adversarial networks. proceedings of the international conference on neural information processing systems (nips 2014). pp. 2672–2680. karras, t., laine, s., & aila, t. (2019). a style-based generator architecture for generative adversarial networks. in proceedings of the ieee/cvf conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (pp. 4401-4410) karras, t., laine, s., aittala, m., hellsten, j., lehtinen, j., & aila, t. (2020). analyzing and improving the image quality of stylegan. in proceedings of the ieee/cvf conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (pp. 8110-8119). mintz, a., gobbo, b., silva, t., & pilipets, e. (2019, april 17). interrogating vision apis. retrieved march 18, 2021, from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332910402_interrogating_vision_apis/ nie, w., karras, t., garg, a., debnath, s., patney, a., patel, a., & anandkumar, a. (2020, november). semi-supervised stylegan for disentanglement learning. in: international conference on machine learning (pp. 7360-7369). pmlr. noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. nyu press. prabhu, v. u.; birhane, a. (2020). large image datasets: a pyrrhic win for computer vision?. arxiv preprint arxiv:2006.16923. smits, t.; wevers, m. (2021) the agency of computer vision models as optical instruments. visual communication. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357221992097. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): de keulenaar, e., alves dos santos junior, m., magalhães, j. c., rogers, r., & ganesh, b. (2023, october). after deplatforming: retracing content moderation effects across platforms. panel presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from: http://spir.aoir.org after deplatforming: retracing content moderation effects across platforms emillie de keulenaar university of groningen marcelo alves dos santos junior pontifical catholic university of rio de janeiro joão carlos magalhães university of groningen richard rogers university of amsterdam bharath ganesh university of amsterdam abstract half a decade ago, social media platforms were widely perceived as revolutionary devices for maximizing political expression around the world. by opening the floodgates to expression, however, the same platforms were also accused of opening the floodgates of hate – allowing, for example, the self-claimed “revolutionary” return of ideas, speech and actors long thought to be relegated to the dustbins of history. this panel examines a three-fold revolution, namely: populist revolutions (on the right) facilitated by agnostic content moderation philosophies; the internal revolutions that platform content moderation underwent to address the political violence of the former; and the adjustments that digital methods research needs to adopt to facilitate content moderation research in a “post-api” environment. the first paper of this panel examines how twitter’s content moderation has undergone several arbitrary changes before reaching a form of “normative plasticity”, with reinforcement techniques such as demotion and other forms of conditional content obfuscation. the second paper looks at how, despite making profound changes to prevent furthering political violence during elections, twitter, facebook, youtube and instagram have tended to moderate the brazilian elections in a dislocated fashion, turning a blind eye to brazilian militaristic content and focusing instead on what it primarily moderates in a us context. finally, the third paper offers a set of methods for empirical researchers to capture and study content moderation metadata over time. all three papers aim to contribute to attempts at archiving and studying speech moderation as a public good, in an international context. introductory statement half a decade ago, social media platforms were widely perceived as revolutionary devices for maximizing political expression around the world (klonick, 2018). at the heart of this view was a newfound opportunity to open the “the floodgates to online expression” (keipi et al., 2016, p. 114) with affordances that circumvented ‘legacy’ media networks strongly gatekept by corporate or governmental interests. one of the key affordances to free speech was a largely non-interventionist philosophy of content moderation, according to which platforms, as “tech companies” (castillo, 2018), did not bear the right to adjudicate the moral, political or epistemic validity of user-generated content. besides being a convenient philosophy for platforms to function within free and “multi-sided markets” (rieder and sire, 2014), it was also a founding characteristic of platforms as public forums intended to consolidate “big data” as the most diverse possible conglomeration of information, ideas and user cultures. by 2021, this positive take on content moderation had largely faded. by opening the floodgates to expression, the same platforms were also accused of opening the floodgates of hate – allowing, for example, the return of ideas, speech and actors long thought to be relegated to the dustbins of history (fœssel, 2021). news media and scholarly literature have tended to focus on the “return” of extreme right-movements in europe and the u.s., with antiquated ideas of race and identity making their ways into the mainstream of online public spheres. oft-forgotten cases also touch upon latin america, where a once widely condemned, authoritarian brand of brazilian militarism has been normalized by a string of pro-military hashtag campaigns, facebook and instagram influencers, telegram groups, youtube and other content throughout bolsonaro’s presidency (2018-2022). ironically, these movements have not called for a return of authoritarianism per se (at least not explicitly), but demanded their own, competing version of an open democracy whose anti-establishment values merited revolutionary means of realization, as seen in washington d.c. on january 6, 2021, or in brasília on january 8, 2022. in response, social media platforms have sought to return to some of the historically constituted speech norms they had initially destabilized. against the re-emergence of antisemitic content online, for example, youtube, twitter and facebook introduced specific clauses against holocaust denialism in 2018 (youtube, 2019); against biological brands of racism and white nationalism, they have introduced new clauses in their “hateful conduct” policies throughout 2017 (see paper 1); and against militaristic content in brazil, facebook had made a specific policy forbidding such content through arguably imperfect means (catucci, 2022). these changes partook in a longer revolution in the field of content moderation, which, since 2017, saw platforms zigzagging through largely arbitrary decisions as to what users can and cannot say in the public spheres they maintain. one of the latest u-turns in this field, for example, has been elon musk’s claim to a return to ideological “neutrality” in twitter’s content moderation – which has, since his arrival, favored content on the right of the american, brazilian and european political spectra (getahun and tangalakis-lippert, 2022). this panel examines a three-fold revolution, namely: popular revolutions (on the right) facilitated by agnostic content moderation philosophies; the internal revolutions that platform content moderation underwent to address the political violence of the former; and the adjustments that digital methods research needs to adopt to facilitate content moderation research in a “post-api” environment (perriam, birkbak and freeman, 2020). the first paper of this panel examines how twitter’s content moderation has undergone several arbitrary changes before reaching a form of “normative plasticity”, with reinforcement techniques such as demotion and other forms of conditional content obfuscation. the second paper looks at how, despite making profound changes to prevent furthering political violence during elections, twitter, facebook, youtube and instagram have tended to moderate the brazilian elections in a dislocated fashion, turning a blind eye to brazilian militaristic content and focusing on what it primarily moderates in us elections: electoral disinformation. in doing so, it offers a metaanalysis of content moderation practices (deletion, labeling and demotion) in five platforms, both “fringe” and “mainstream” (de zeeuw and tuters, 2020): telegram, facebook, instagram, youtube, and twitter. finally, the third paper offers a set of methods for empirical researchers to capture and study content moderation metadata – which is increasingly prone to the volatility of a “post-api” research environment. all three papers aim to contribute to digital methods (and related) scholarship that attempt to archive and study speech moderation as an international public good. while paper 3 offers a set of methods to allow scholars to gain systematic access to content moderation metadata, paper 1 offers a wider historical outlook on how the recently acquired twitter reflects on larger societal transformations in corporate and public speech norms. paper 2 highlights how a “dislocated” form of us-based content moderation complicates difficult attempts at finding truth and reconciliation in fragile democracies, and outlines a few guidelines for policy makers and platform trust and safety teams to focus on preventing contention around issues that threaten deep ruptures of consensus. paper 1: modulating moderation: a history of objectionability in twitter moderation practices half a decade ago, social media platforms were widely seen as online models of nominally liberal, democratic societies (klonick, 2018). at the heart of this view was their newfound opportunity to open the “the floodgates to online expression” (keipi et al., 2016, p. 114) with affordances that circumvented strongly gatekept “legacy” media networks. one of these affordances was a largely non-interventionist philosophy of content moderation, according to which platforms do not bear the right to adjudicate the moral, political or epistemic validity of user-generated content, in order to host the most diverse possible conglomeration of ideas, information and user cultures. but when the same platforms were also accused of opening the floodgates of hate – allowing, for example, the return of ideas, speech and actors long thought to be relegated to the dustbins of history (fœssel, 2021) – they were pressured to consider the many ways in which the link between “online speech” and “offline harm” could become “demonstrably real” (dorsey, 2021). this question alone invites many different answers, encapsulated within different ideals of social media platforms as “public spheres” and speech as a public good. twitter, in particular, went through several approaches to moderate what it called “hateful conduct”, “abusive behavior”, “violent threats” and other more granular forms of verbal abuse. it invested in more human moderators, expanded systems of automated speech control, and had legal experts contribute to content moderation policies for an increasingly complex array of problematic situations. at the core of this process were considerations as to what amounted to objectionable language, a question reflected in ongoing battles of ideas as to what behavior, words and historical periods constitute falsehoods and offenses to religion, race, gender, and other forms of identity. by adopting some definitions over others, and thereby removing certain content over others, twitter became an intermediary to comprehensive but highly contentious transformations of public speech norms. in the process, its boundaries as an aspiring digital “public sphere” have broadened, retracted and become altogether more fluid. the general contours of the modulations of twitter as an online public sphere are relatively clear. but partly because they involve an opaque and private organization, little scholarship has systematically documented, examined, and theorized the evolution of twitter’s definitions of objectionable speech – particularly after its acquisition by elon musk. this article contributes to this research by analyzing how twitter’s conceptions and approach to objectionable speech changed between 2006 and 2022. methodologically, we look at both concepts and techniques that aim to define and discipline objectionable language linked to what twitter calls “hateful conduct” and “abusive behavior”. this implies a systematic web history (brügger, 2013) of several content moderation policies published by the platform, taking note of what is deemed problematic, specific examples offered for each type of content, and the techniques used against them. we then use a combination of digital methods (rogers, 2013) that rely on both scraping and twitter’s academic api to trace the moderation of objectionable speech in practice. we examine how a dataset of tweets linked to the u.s. elections of 2020 and online slurs were demoted, flagged, removed and (some) eventually “redeemed” after a period of temporary suspension. this means tracing instances of updated, overwritten, removed and “replatformed” content as various “platform effects” (malik & pfeffer, 2016). paper 2: three dislocated content moderation enforcements of political militarism during the brazilian elections of 2022 this paper examines traces of content moderation by twitter, youtube, facebook, instagram and telegram during the brazilian electoral year of 2022 to 2023, specifically between august 15, 2022 (the official start of political campaign) and january 15, 2023 (one week after the january 8 depredation). it argues that moderation suffers from three “dislocations”. first, us-based platforms lack a regional comprehension of the national political history and speech legislation of brazil, which causes them to moderate incriminating content with a primarily us understanding of local political violence. second, content moderation enforcement is dislocated in time, in the sense that it is applied primarily during the election cycle, missing out of violence incited as a result of electoral results. and third, content moderation is dislocated by users, who devise strategies to circumvent moderation with language obfuscation, vpns, and a broader network of fringe-to-mainstream platforms. empirically, this paper builds on digital methods and “dynamic archiving” of content moderation traces (see paper 3) to recreate enforcement mechanisms and moderation decisions over time. since the united states capitol storm on january 6, 2022, there has been a growing concern over the propagation of electoral disinformation on social media (munn, 2021). the #stopthesteal campaign was largely spread on social media challenging the timely removal of illegal or otherwise unsafe content from multiple platforms (see paper 1). one year later, the far-right president jair bolsonaro was defeated in a runoff on october 30, 2022, after the center-left won the brazilian presidential election by a slim margin of 2 million votes. even though brazilian events suggest a similar scenario of the delegitimization of elections resulting from social media and violent acts of invasion and depredation of public buildings, local specificities add another layer of complexity to content moderation policies in politically unstable democracies. on youtube, we sampled a list of 849 public channels that produce content about the brazilian elections. this rendered a unique dataset of 193,482 videos. next, we created an r script using the tuber package that connects to youtube data api v3 and collects the last 10 videos of each channel every six hours to record video metadata, including rankings for further analyses of demotion. at the end of each week, we also used the scraping library youtube-dl (gonzalez et al. 2023) to extract transcripts of the content. then, we called the youtube data api v3 to determine which videos were unavailable and scraped the platform's reasons for removal. we complemented this dataset by using youtube-dl to search videos mentioning any of 365 queries susceptible to returning problematic (and thus likely moderated) results about the brazilian elections. some examples include hashtags supporting a military coup (#sosffaa), denying the integrity of the electoral process (#brazilwasstolen), or attacking brazilian institutions responsible for overseeing the elections and a peaceful transfer of power (#fimdasurnaseletrônicasjá, #forastf). on telegram, content moderation is seldom enacted by the platform itself. users can decide when and how to delete their content with features optimized for the kind of “private sociality” the platform promotes (rogers, 2020), such as message autodeletion. we also found that a lot of messages had been promptly deleted after the january 8 riots for fear of recrimination. to collect these content moderation traces, we first collected 24,905 telegram messages from an expert list of 250 telegram groups active between january 1, 2022 and january 15, 2023. we then compared the availability of each group and their posts using selenium, a web scraper, on january 10, 2023, limiting our results to the top 500 most engaged posts from august 15, 2022 to january 10. unlike twitter, instagram and facebook are notoriously wary of scrapers, and have routinely banned researchers for using them on their sites (bond, 2021). for this reason, we have opted to manually copy the statuses of the 500 most engaged posts from august 15, 2022 to january 10, 2023. the data we have copied moderation statuses from are 678,029 facebook and instagram posts collected with the abovementioned queries on crowdtangle. on twitter, we again used selenium to scrape the statuses of all tweets dating from january 1, 2022 to january 10, 2023. this was done on a dataset of 3,486,622 tweets obtained with the academic api, using the same queries as above. for consistency, we filtered all results from all platforms to posts dating from august 15, 2022 to january 10, 2023. the first problem revealed by our data is a general “dislocation” in us-based content moderation policies. by this, we mean that youtube, twitter, facebook and instagram unilaterally conceived their content moderation policies based on their experience of the us elections of 2020, overlooking the local institutional, political and historical factors in brazil that contributed to the violence seen on january 8. youtube’s electoral misinformation policies list multiple rules that penalize false information on electoral procedures, such as voter suppression, obstruction or claiming widespread fraud. nonetheless, brazil’s electoral issues are derived from a longstanding history of institutional ruptures caused by military and political coups d’état, the latest of which resulted in a military dictatorship that ended in 1985. brazilian law includes safeguards against defenses of the military dictatorship, for encouraging a military intervention, or for inciting a democratic breakdown (de albuquerque, 2020). we find that a majority of moderated videos and posts are moderated not for these reasons but for spreading electoral disinformation; content that called for a military coup, even by militaries themselves, was left mostly unmoderated. the second issue is a temporal dislocation of content moderation. by this, we mean that platforms tended to relax their enforcement policies after the election ended on october 31, disregarding how violence was fostered following the electoral results. moderation after the fact, i.e., after october 31st, was insufficient to mitigate the propagation of electoral disinformation or convocations to violent protests. this dislocation in time is caused by two major factors. one concerns platforms’ period of attention, monitoring and coverage of the electoral cycle. on youtube, for example, we found that the majority of offline videos were created prior to october. the second factor is strike waivers granted by youtube. the enforcement of new policy clauses targeting electoral disinformation always gave the platform a 30-day buffer time, during which content could be removed without penalizing entire channels. the last shortcoming is user dislocation, i.e., ever-evolving content moderation evasion strategies. from august 2022 to january 2023, users engaged in calls for military coups or disseminating electoral misinformation routinely exchanged tips for evading moderation from either platforms or from the supreme federal court. some of these strategies included using vpns to access content exclusively banned in brazil, including detailed plannings of the january 8 attacks on twitter. another was language obfuscation, which consisted in slightly changing terms that are likely to be blacklisted in content moderation word lists (“fraud”, for example, becomes “fr4ud” or “f.r.4.u.d.”). a more complex strategy consisted in exchanging incriminating information in an increasingly complex network of more or less moderated platforms. users of facebook, instagram or youtube have also relied on telegram, gettr, bitchute, rumble and file transfer websites to exchange plans for the january 8 attacks, or documents purportedly showing electoral fraud. this “fringe-to-mainstream” platform ecology makes platform-specific content moderation ineffective on a larger scale. these three dislocations contribute to a larger issue stemming from us-based content moderation of brazilian political content, which is that it complicates a difficult process of truth and reconciliation of a fairly new and fragile democracy. since the military regime ended in 1985, tortures and other human rights abuses by the military regime had never been prosecuted. the return of militarism to the mainstream of brazilian public debate has also contributed to a serious institutional crisis after january 8, where the judiciary branch pained to keep military branches of power in check. we make recommendations for platform trust and safety teams to collaborate with local authorities to broaden the nature of their work outside of a punitive logic, and consider moderating – in the sense of balancing – long-term dialogue between opposing political voices. paper 3: after deplatforming: the return of trace research for the study of platform effects when platforms were considered as “intermediaries”, or conduits through which content would flow unfettered (gillespie, 2018), they could serve as sites for the study of user traces: online actions and behaviors interactively registered by the platforms and made available to researchers in the form of hit logs, links, likes, retweets, shares and so forth. one could observe user behavior and attitude as if ‘in the wild’. these ‘unobtrusive measures’ would provide insights in collective mood and sentiment, give indicators of opinion and perhaps even capture animal spirits behind stock price or cryptocurrency movements (watts and dodds, 2007; lazer et al., 2008). but there is a certain artificiality to platform data in at least four senses. on the platform side, there are attempts to make content “stick” in order to increase the time users spend consuming it on their services through the optimization of “watch time” or even the introduction of “dark patterns” underlying user interfaces that steer users towards forms of conversion (such as purchases). there are also content moderation techniques, such as deplatforming, labeling, or demoting objectionable content. on the user side, one finds the amplification or manipulation of user content, such as inflating likes and views, acquiring fake followers, gaming recommendation algorithms in order to up-rank certain content on top of their peer’s lists of visible content. there is optimisation from seo (search engine optimisation) to analytics-driven content production. users also protect themselves by employing code words while linking to extreme material, introducing (mirrored) images with explicit text, or setting accounts or posts to private to dodge the oversight of public or platform content moderation. though there have been more or less isolated studies about the function, roles and construction of each of these effects, there is no clear idea about their overall significance. there are of course platform transparency reports and blog posts detailing the percentage of content taken down by hate speech, misinformation or state legislations. this kind of documentation is most often framed as “pr exercises”, that is, diplomatic statements that one is required to read between the lines — or, in any case, secondary sources of information with no strong objective value. ironically, a solution to the “untraceability” of platform transparency reports has been to do trace research. that is, one needs trace research to answer the question of platform effects. in the field of content moderation studies, some examples are recovering traces of content removal by continually archiving posts, tweets or videos (de keulenaar et al., forthcoming); following patterns of demotion by scraping the rankings of search results on youtube or twitter (keulenaar, burton and kisjes, 2021); or scraping labels, “context” flags and other post statuses on twitter over time. on this matter, this chapter discusses a new kind of “digital forensics”, or set of methods one can use to reconstruct platform and user traces in content moderation. in other words, it proposes methods to reconstruct the scene after or on which platform or user data has disappeared in the context of one specific platform effect: content moderation. we discuss five examples: contextualizing the disappearance of user data by doing a web history of content moderation policies with the wayback machine; reverseengineering content moderation with “dynamic archiving” of data susceptible to being removed, demoted and otherwise moderated; and using platform metadata or scraping moderation traces, such as flags, prompts and labels. we also include one example of user effects, namely, capturing neologisms designed to obfuscate platform moderation, and tracing outlinks to alternative platforms to redirect audiences toward content that the host platform does not allow. each of these research techniques rely on the traces remaining after content has been re-versioned, updated, overwritten, suppressed or removed. as such, it puts trace research to a new use. rather than studying user behavior by treating the platform as an intermediary, it studies platform behavior by treating users as actively moderated. it thereby constitutes a different strategy for deploying trace research. in the earlier version of trace research, one would collect platform data about users and consider the extent to which it can be cleaned to remove platform effects and other content befouling causes (such as bots, optimized content or artificial amplification). now the trace research takes as its point of departure platform efforts to cleanse and police the site of rule-breaking or offending content, artfully capturing those acts. trace research thereby gains a new purpose. it seeks the answer, if only in part, to the question of the effects of content moderation on the content under study. in a sense, it could be seen as a necessary step prior to content analysis or trace research in its original form. or it could be considered a research practice in itself that has as its main aim content reconstruction, which has a series of uses. we first outline the methods and use cases linked to each of our examples — first, for platform effects, and then, for user effects. we then conclude with a discussion on the larger significance of empirical content moderation research, be it for scholars invested in digital methods, platform governance, or historians tracing the modulation of speech norms in complex media environments. we also cover important limitations — some of which are proper to any kind of historiographical (web) research (arora et al., 2016), and others due to the vagaries of “post-api” research (aoir, 2018). references aoir staff (2018) facebook shuts the gate after the horse has bolted, and hurts real research in the process. available at: https://aoir.org/facebook-shuts-thegate-after-the-horse-has-bolted/ (accessed: 1 march 2023). arora, s.k. et al. (2016) ‘using the wayback machine to mine websites in the social sciences: a methodological resource’, journal of the association for information science and technology, 67(8), pp. 1904–1915. available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23503. bond, s. (2021) ‘nyu researchers were studying disinformation on facebook. the company cut them off’, npr, 4 august. available at: https://www.npr.org/2021/08/04/1024791053/facebook-boots-nyu-disinformationresearchers-off-its-platform-and-critics-cry-f (accessed: 1 march 2023). brügger, n. (2013) ‘web historiography and internet studies: challenges and perspectives’, new media & society, 15(5), pp. 752–764. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444812462852. castillo, m. (2018) ‘zuckerberg tells congress facebook is not a media company: “i consider us to be a technology company”’, cnbc, 11 april. available at: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-is-a-technologycompany-not-media-company.html (accessed: 1 march 2023). catucci, a. (2022) ‘facebook e instagram começam a remover publicações com pedidos de intervenção militar no brasil, diz meta’, g1, 4 november. available at: https://g1.globo.com/tecnologia/noticia/2022/11/04/facebook-e-instagram-vaoremover-publicacoes-com-pedidos-para-intervencao-militar-no-brasil-dizmeta.ghtml (accessed: 1 march 2023). de albuquerque, a. (2020) ‘the two sources of the illiberal turn in brazil’, brown journal of world affairs, 27, p. 127. available at: https://heinonline.org/hol/page?handle=hein.journals/brownjwa27&id=407&div=& collection=. de keulenaar e, kisjes i, smith r, et al. (2023) twitter as accidental authority: how a platform assumed an adjucative role during the covid-19 pandemic. in: rogers r (ed.) the propagation of misinformation in social media: a cross-platform analysis. amsterdam: amsterdam university press, pp. 109–138. available at: https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789048554249. de keulenaar, e., burton, a.g. and kisjes, i. (2021) ‘deplatforming, demotion and folk theories of big tech persecution’, fronteiras estudos midiáticos, 23(2), pp. 118–139. available at: https://doi.org/10.4013/fem.2021.232.09. de zeeuw, d. and tuters, m. (2020) ‘teh internet is serious business: on the deep vernacular web imaginary’, cultural politics, 16(2). fœssel, m. (2021) récidive 1938. quadrige. paris: presses universitaires de france. garcia gonzalez, r., amine, r. and m., s. (2022) ‘youtube-dl’. youtube-dl. available at: http://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/about.html (accessed: 22 february 2021). getahun, k.t.-l., hannah and tangalakis-lippert, k. (2022) ‘elon musk says his politics are in the center but extremism experts say he’s using twitter to increasingly empower right-wing viewpoints’, business insider, 11 december. available at: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-right-wing-extremismtwitter-mythology-of-the-center-2022-12 (accessed: 1 march 2023). keipi, t. et al. (2016) online hate and harmful content: cross-national perspectives. taylor & francis. klonick, k. (2017) ‘the new governors: the people, rules, and processes governing online speech’, harvard law review, 131, p. 1598. available at: https://heinonline.org/hol/page?handle=hein.journals/hlr131&id=1626&div=&colle ction=. jack dorsey (2021) ‘i do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban @realdonaldtrump from twitter, or how we got here. after a clear warning we’d take this action, we made a decision with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety both on and off twitter. was this correct?’, twitter. available at: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1349510769268850690 (accessed: 15 july 2022). lazer, d. et al. (2008) ‘networks and political attitudes: structure, influence, and co-evolution’. rochester, ny. available at: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1280328. malik, m. and pfeffer, j. (2016) ‘identifying platform effects in social media data’, proceedings of the international aaai conference on web and social media, 10(1), pp. 241–249. available at: https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v10i1.14756. munn, l. (2021) ‘more than a mob: parler as preparatory media for the u.s. capitol storming’, first monday [preprint]. available at: https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v26i3.11574. perriam, j., birkbak, a. and freeman, a. (2020) ‘digital methods in a post-api environment’, international journal of social research methodology, 23(3), pp. 277–290. available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2019.1682840. rieder, b. and sire, g. (2014) ‘conflicts of interest and incentives to bias: a microeconomic critique of google’s tangled position on the web’, new media & society, 16(2), pp. 195–211. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444813481195. rogers, r. (2020) ‘deplatforming: following extreme internet celebrities to telegram and alternative social media’, european journal of communication, p. 0267323120922066. available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323120922066. watts, d.j. and dodds, p.s. (2007) ‘influentials, networks, and public opinion formation’, journal of consumer research, 34(4), pp. 441–458. available at: https://doi.org/10.1086/518527. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 reciprocal platform labour in the nigerian social media video industry godwin iretomiwa simon queensland university of technology, david b. nieborg university of toronto, introduction this paper explores the platformization of labour in the nigerian social media video industry. the sector emerged around 2013 through the activities of social media content creators, who produce short-form humorous and socially conscious video clips distributed via apps, such as facebook, youtube, and tiktok. the contents are consumed by millions of domestic and diasporic african users, and content creators earn revenue from generating ad revenue. within its first decade, the industry has become a dominant cultural form in nigeria’s media ecosystem. for example, as of 2022, its revenue rose to n50 billion (us$39 million), employing thousands of workers, thereby making it the third largest entertainment industry alongside incumbent sectors, such as film and music (business day, 2022). while extant scholarship has acknowledged the sector’s continuous growth within the nigerian entertainment space and its reconfiguration of the modes of video production and consumption (idowu & ogunnubi, 2023; ojomo & sodeinde, 2021; okadigwe & ebekue, 2023), less attention has been paid to the sector’s labour relations, particularly how those relationships are shaped by interactions with us and china-based platform companies. accordingly, this paper examines how nigeriabased content creators become “platform-dependent” by negotiating the business models, infrastructures, and governance frameworks of the video sharing platforms they use to distribute their content (nieborg & poell, 2018; poell et al., 2022). drawing on 10 semi-structured interviews with nigerian content creators and analysis of the domestic trade press, we observe that creators struggle to generate visibility in a highly saturated social media landscape. the imperative to gain visibility is far from unique to nigeria, as all creators engage in various kinds of “visibility labour” (abidin, 2016), or similar work meant to gain more attention (bishop, 2019; duffy & meisner, 2023). what sets nigeria apart, however, is the local political economy of video production, which translates into high production costs, which, we argue, are offset by suggested citation (apa): simon, g. i., nieborg, d. b. (2024, october). reciprocal platform labour in the nigerian social media video industry. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. orchestrating practices of informally organised reciprocal labour. nigeria thus provides a relevant perspective to ongoing debates in platform research that seek more regional specificity and seek to decentre the global north as their point of reference (bouquillion, 2023; zhang & chen, 2022). to heed that call, the specific labour practices we highlight, those of reciprocal labour, reflect the broader informal economies and traditional kinship norms in nigeria. exploring this mode of work showcases the intersections among creative labour and cultural dynamics in a given national context vis-à-vis the unifying business models and centralized governance frameworks of platform companies. theorizing platform labour the rise of the platform economy has engendered diverse forms of labour for “platformdependent” workers (poell et al., 2022). following fuchs (2013, p.236), we understand platform labour as all kinds of labour by digital platform users and gig workers that are harnessed for the “existence, production, diffusion, and use” of digital platforms. the multi-faceted labour relations in cultural production have been discussed using concepts such as “relational labour” (baym, 2015), “aspirational labour” (duffy, 2016), and above all “precarious labour” (alacovska et al, 2024). we contribute to these debates by providing the complementary analytical lens of reciprocal labour. we understand this as a form of non-monetary, voluntary exchange, or work done by members within a community usually for the benefits of one community member with the expectation that participating members enjoy similar benefits whenever the need arises. this kind of labour is often motivated by collective benefits accruable from such community work, rather than individual effort as well as the reinforcement of a sense of community identity (vasco, 2014). for example, in nigerian rural areas where agriculture is the major economic practice, farmers often engage in reciprocal labour during seed planting, weeding, and harvesting (adefila & madaki, 2014). notably, while labour reciprocity cuts across many contexts across the globe, the form it takes is shaped by specific regional and cultural contexts. as we observe in this paper, labour reciprocity among nigerian content creators is entrenched in existent cultural capital of communal and relational norms that are pervasive in african traditions. living in a rented home: platform logics and labour reciprocity what we found in our interviews is that many nigerian content creators moved into the social media video industry mainly as a means of survival in a context characterised by a retreating welfare system and poor fiscal conditions (okadigwe & ebekue, 2023). amidst the dilemma of earning a living and the difficulty of gaining foothold in legacy media industry sectors, such as film and television, social media creation features lower barriers to entry and an imagined zone of free expression of creativity. indeed, access to the social media video industry was relatively easy for some creators, but their expectations of maximum creativity have proven more elusive. creators often describe their working relationship with platforms as “living in a rented apartment.” as one interviewee succinctly put it, “you must understand that you are not in your house. you are in a house owned by somebody. most times, you must adhere to the rules of the landlord even when they are not comfortable.” a variety of strategies are deployed by nigerian content creators to navigate the challenges associated with platform-dependent cultural production; a crucial one is seeking out reciprocal labour relations. what emerges from our fieldwork is that nigerian content creators practice reciprocal labour for two key reasons. one, it serves as a strategy to mitigate the platforms’ opaque monetization models, which often snowball into reluctance to invest too much in productions. two, creators understand “getting the audience eyeballs” as central to their own monetization strategies. navigating these two conditions catalyses practices of reciprocity. that is, creators leverage informally organised social networks and personal relationships to offset production costs. for example, creators work for free or at discounted rates for one another. our interviewees articulated these shared relationships as “a form of currency” that has purchasing power just like national currencies. it is through this currency of relationships that the economic risks of algorithmic opacity are navigated. reciprocal labour is also deployed to orchestrate content visibility. globally, in the overcrowded platform market, competition for audiences is fierce (stokel-walker, 2018). similarly, in nigeria, creators have trouble attaining and sustaining their desired visibility. in this condition, reciprocal labour is deployed to achieve what we conceive as “composite visibility.” this occurs when two or more creators agree to feature (most times at no cost) in the productions of another creator to boost the visibility of the beneficiary creator. this is often attained by exposing the beneficiary creator to the fanbase of the volunteer creators. such gestures are often reciprocated among the creators involved. through this, the beneficiaries attract more ad revenue for their content. in the end, the reciprocal and relational nature of work among nigerian creators reflects the communal practices in african traditional culture wherein people are oriented to be their “brothers’ keepers” (akanle & olutayo, 2011). creators leverage this cultural capital as a means of getting by rather than despair or resign. in sum, reciprocal platform labour provides a more granular case for how platform-dependent workers leverage relational practices to navigate the unstable economic and contingent infrastructural logics of platforms. references abidin, c. (2016). visibility labour: engaging with influencers’ fashion brands and #ootd advertorial campaigns on instagram. media international australia, 161(1), 86–100. adefila, j. & madaki, j. (2014). roles of farmers’ cooperatives in agricultural development in sabuwa local government area of katsina state, nigeria. journal of economics and sustainable development, 5(12), 80-87. akanle, o. & olutayo, o. a. (2011). kinship construction variability among nigerian international migrants: the context of contemporary diaspora. human affairs, 21, 470–480. alacovska, a., bucher, e., & fieseler, c. (2024). a relational work perspective on the gig economy: doing creative work on digital labour platforms. work, employment and society, 38(1), 161-179. baym, n.k. (2015). connect with your audience! the relational labour of connection. the communication review, 18(1), 14-22. bishop, s. (2019). managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip. new media & society, 21(11–12), 2589–2606. bouquillion, p. (2023). the big five in india, powerful players? in p. bouquillion, c. ithurbide, & t. mattelart (eds.), digital platforms and the global south (pp. 37– 55). routledge. business day (2022). n50bn comedy industry: meet top 8 instagram skit makers in nigeria. available at: https://businessday.ng/life-arts/article/n50bn-comedyindustry-meet-top-8-instagram-skit-makers-in-nigeria/ duffy, b. e., & meisner, c. (2023). platform governance at the margins: social media creators’ experiences with algorithmic (in)visibility. media, culture & society, 45(2), 285–304. duffy, b.e. (2016). the romance of gender and aspirational labour in the digital cultural industries. international journal of cultural studies, 19(4), 441-457. fuchs, c. (2013). digital labour and karl marx. routledge. idowu, d.l., & ogunnubi, o. (2023). soft power in therapeutic comedy: outlining nigeria’s creative industry through digital comic skits. creative industries journal, 16(3), 361-382. nieborg, d.b.& poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society, 20(11), 4275–4292. ojomo o & sodeinde oa (2021) social media skits: reshaping the entertainment experience of broadcast audience. sage open: 1-13. okadigwe, m.n. & ebekue, e.o. (2023). surviving economic recession through the production of internet comic skits: the case of okoi siphon and david igwe. nigeria theatre journal, 18(2), 105-113. poell, t., nieborg, d.b., & duffy, b.e. (2021). platforms and cultural production. polity. stokel-walker, c. (2018, august 12). why youtubers are feeling the burn. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/12/youtubersfeeling-burn-video-stars-crumbling-under-pressure-of-producing-new-content vasco, c. (2014). reciprocal and wage labour in rural ecuador: a quantitative analysis. journal of agriculture and rural development in the tropics and subtropics,115(1), 23-30. zhang, l., & chen, j. y. (2022). a regional and historical approach to platform capitalism: the cases of alibaba and tencent. media, culture & society, 44(8), 1454–1472. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): lucia, b., vetter, m. (2023, october). behold the metaverse: facebook’s meta revolution and the circulation of elite discourse. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. behold the metaverse: facebook’s meta revolution and the circulation of elite discourse brent lucia the university of connecticut matthew vetter indiana university of pennsylvania much of techno-optimism is shaped around notions that a free, classless society will be developed through the efforts of big tech. from these efforts will spring forth a revolution-much like the countercultural revolution seen in the 1960’sthat will drastically shift cultural as we know it, led by technological innovations. these beliefs, referenced as the “californian ideology” (ferrari 2020), not only links big tech to nostalgic notions of “revolution” but conveniently position their corporate goals alongside a utopic vision of the future they have for their consumers. these futures are often labeled: sociotechnical imaginaries. facebook especially has deployed these sociotechnical imaginaries to either flatten or amplify values surrounding its company, creating impressions of the future for its own political or cultural power. our paper examines facebook’s sociotechnical imaginary as seen within media artifacts responding to the metaverse announcement, paying close attention to the ways in which these artifacts act as sources of amplification or criticality towards meta’s agenda. the analysis makes salient the moments where meta’s visions of revolution become amplified or deflected, raising questions not only meta’s discursive power but the role of tech journalists. zuckerberg’s metaverse announcement facebook’s dominance as a social networking site (sns) is unprecedented, having 2.8 million monthly active users as of 2021 and ranking as the fourth most used website globally. however, the company has confronted controversies concerning user data, political manipulation, and the physiological effects of its platform. during the 2021 connect! conference, zuckerberg announced that the company changed its name to meta and pivoted towards vr technology. this transition has been seen as a response to extensive reputational crises while also shifting its business model, a consistent pattern given zuckerberg’s previous entrepreneurial behavior (kraus et al., 2022). at face value, the announcement was an indication of a new commitment to the future of virtual reality (vr), as well as a corporate branding move. however, it was also obvious that the move was strategically timed to distract attention from a series of negative events and accusations. frances haugen, in her role in the facebook papers case, revealed the harmful algorithms facebook used and its handling of hate speech. accusations against the corporation have since swirled in the following areas: the company’s poor work situation (paul, 2021), privacy and security threat to clients (noman et al., 2019), capricious censorship practices, and inability to check misinformation (romo, 2021; saker and frith, 2022; timberg, et al., 2021; vaidhyanathan, 2018). thus, to kraus et al. (2022), the rebranding was “a fancy dress to distract from ingrained corporate challenges'' (p. 68). despite these challenges to the company’s reputation, media scholars have recognized zuckerberg’s ability to discursively shape the public narrative, establishing visions of the future that serve to “stabiliz[e] the meaning and the potential use of the platform,” and persuading the public to embrace such (corporate) visions (hoffmann et al., 2018: 200). zuckerberg’s promises in the announcement reinforced the company’s commitment to privacy, security and connectivity, acknowledging how,“[p]rivacy and safety need to be built into the metaverse from day one” (7:45), and that the company will need to be “transparent about how things work, what data is collected, and how that data is used over time” (52:12). zuckerberg noted how elements of privacy and protection will be up to the user, where “[y]ou’ll get to decide when you want to be with other people, when you want to block someone from appearing in your space, or when you want to take a break and teleport to a private bubble to be alone” (7:45). the speech emphasized the importance of connectivity for its users and located the metaverse as an extension of facebook’s core missions. as stated, meta is still “the company that builds technology to connect people. and the metaverse is the next frontier, just like social networking was when we got started.” (1:09: 41). meta’s corporate imaginary seen in media artifacts the meta announcement reveals a common pattern among tech companies’ sociotechnical imaginaries. previous research on tech companies such as facebook has sought to explain their often uncontested power as a result of the neo/cyberlibertarian ideologies central to the history of the internet itself (brown, 2015; creech, 2020) as well as through zuckerberg’s “switching power” or ability to move between and leverage his position in multiple networks at opportune moments (moran, 2020). while creech (2020) takes up an analysis of discourse surrounding fake news, it his focus on “elite discourse” (van dijk, 1993), or “the formulations and ideas that gain political currency within forums that possess an overt gatekeeping structure” (p. 957) that we respond to most directly in this paper. more specifically, we acknowledge the metaverse announcement itself (cite) as a type of elite discourse which functions as corporate imaginary. a discursive arrangement of what is said and not said, and how particular contours of the ensuing response are both understood and organized for audiences to consume. the circulation of elite discourse within digital ecologies may be constantly transformed (amplified or challenged) as it is taken up in journalist circles and other more popular media genres across the web. it is within such transformations that meta’s social power ebbs and flows (creech 2020), and how imaginaries establish themselves within popular discourse. examining media artifacts such as op-eds, reviews, editorials, feature articles, and other reaction pieces allows us to trace how non-elite, popular discourses contend with, amplify, and/or challenge these imaginaries that uphold such power. there are always multiple imaginaries in circulation, and these are often not only communicated by those in power but taken up by agents within a particular discourse. such self-defining strategies by a corporate entity can never be fully established alone, are often contested, and cannot be guaranteed to circulate as intended (sismondo, 2020). zuckerberg’s discursive constructions look to pull from and feed into a larger body of discourse surrounding the company, helping to not only situate facebook into society but also situate society into facebook (hoffmann et al., 2018: 214). empowering elite discourse through amplification and critique this paper examines facebook’s sociotechnical imaginary as represented by media artifacts responding to the metaverse announcement, paying attention to the ways in which these responses act as sources of amplification and criticality towards facebook’s corporate imaginary within popular media discourse. using a method of corpus analysis, this study investigated the company’s sociotechnical imaginary as it circulates in media artifacts (n=428) responding to zuckerberg’s 2021 metaverse announcement. analysis of how these artifacts respond to issues related to identity, privacy, security, and connectivity revealed that the majority amplify meta’s corporate messaging, empowering its elite discourse and solidifying its social power. while certain artifacts attempt to confront the prevailing narrative related to privacy, such discourse is often ineffectively rooted in cyber-libertarian ideology. in order to more effectively challenge meta’s social power, future critical discourse should be 1) more holistically deployed and 2) cognizant of the logics of surveillance capitalism and user exploitation. ultimately, our paper considers the rhetorical strategies and functions deployed in the circulation of elite discourse, while also acknowledging the dynamism of sociotechnical imaginaries. references brown w (2015) undoing the demos: neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. new york: zone books. creech b (2020) fake news and the discursive construction of technology companies’ social power. media, culture & society 42(6): 952–968. ferrari e (2020) technocracy meets populism: the dominant technological imaginary of silicon valley. communication, culture, & critique 13: 121–124. hoffmann al, proferes n and zimmer m (2018) “making the world more open and connected”:mark zuckerberg and the discursive construction of facebook and its users. new media & society 20(1): 199–218. kraus s, kanbach dk, krysta pm, et al. (2022) facebook and the creation of the metaverse: radical business model innovation or incremental transformation? international journal of entrepreneurial behavior & research 28(9): 52–77. moran re (2020) examining switching power: mark zuckerberg as a novel networked media mogul. information, communication & society 23(4): 491–506. noman asm, das s and patil s (2019) techies against facebook: understanding negative sentiment toward facebook via user generated content. proceedings of the 2019 chi conference on human factors in computing systems 468: 1–15. paul k (2021) do the facebook papers spell doom for meta—or is it too big to fail? the guardian, 30 october. available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/30/facebookpapers meta-analysis-zuckerberg (accessed 28 february 2023). romo v (2021) whistleblower’s testimony has resurfaced facebook’s instagram problem. npr,5 october. available at: https://www.npr.org/2021/10/05/1043194385/whistleblowers-testimony-facebookinstagram (accessed 5 march 2023). sismondo s (2020) sociotechnical imaginaries: an accidental themed issue. social studies of science 50(4): 505–507. saker m and frith j (2022) contiguous identities: the virtual self in the supposed metaverse. first monday 27(3). available at: https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v27i3.12471. timberg c, dwoskin e and albergotti r (2021) inside facebook, jan. 6 violence fueled anger, regret over missed warning signs. washington post, 22 october. available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/22/jan-6-capitol-riot-facebook/ (accessed 5 march 2023). vaidhyanathan s (2018) antisocial media: how facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy. oxford: oxford university press. van dijk ta (1993) elite discourse and racism. london: sage. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v27i3.12471 selected papers of #aoir2020: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): koltai, k., grohmann, i., johnson, d. t., rondini, s., & foley, e. r. (2021, october). mask narratives promoted by anti-vaccination accounts on instagram prior to the covid-19 pandemic. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. mask narratives promoted by anti-vaccination accounts on instagram prior to the covid-19 pandemic kolina koltai the university of washington iva grohmann the university of washington devin t. johnson the university of washington samantha rondini the university of washington ella r. foley the university of washington introduction & context there has been widespread debate over the efficacy and use of masks and face coverings during the covid-19 pandemic stemming from the proliferation of misinformation online. while there are many different actors that have contributed to the conflicting public health messages, the anti-vaccination movement has been particularly central in spreading health misinformation (burki, 2020). there have been numerous studies conducted exploring anti-vaccination narratives (kata, 2012) and the information behaviors (koltai, 2020) of the anti-vaccination movement online. we know that the spread of vaccine misinformation online is a leading contributor to vaccine hesitancy. the online groups and accounts which focus their efforts on spreading vaccine misinformation through varied rhetorical techniques (e.g., pseudo-scientific claims) (moran et al., 2016) have also been responsible for spreading other health misinformation. in this work, we investigate mask-wearing narratives of the anti-vaccination community prior to covid-19’s onset among instagram accounts that have repeatedly shared antivaccination content. during the course of the global pandemic, there has been demonstrated overlap between the anti-mask and anti-vaccine communities (taylor & asmundson, 2021). given the anti-vaccination community’s promotion of false and misleading content about masks during the pandemic, this prompts the question of whether they always held this negative sentiment about masks. given that masks can be an alternative to vaccines to prevent disease transmission, we believe it is possible that mask-wearing could’ve been a supported behavior in the movement prior to covid-19. therefore, the overarching research question that guides this preliminary work is: what were the mask narratives promoted by anti-vaccination accounts prior to the covid-19 pandemic? methods we were interested in identifying instagram users who had previously shared content about masks and vaccines prior to the pandemic. using crowdtangle, a public insight tool from facebook, we collected public instagram posts that were shared between october 1, 2017, to december 31, 2019. these dates were chosen because we wanted to cover posts that would have happened over a normal flu season in the us (starting in october) and avoid any overlap with the pandemic. any post from a public account that included the word “mask” and either “flu,” “flue,” “vaccine,” or “nurse” was collected. we had exclusion terms like “halloween” to remove noise. this resulted in 1,010 posts from 793 accounts. foreign language posts were not included in the analysis. these posts were collected on december 29, 2020. the research team hand-coded the posts to determine if they were in-scope (e.g., about medical masks). from this set, the team then evaluated the remaining accounts for their vaccine stance. we only included instagram users who expressed negative sentiments about vaccines in our dataset. we were left with 30 anti-vaccine accounts and 44 posts mentioning face masks prior to 2020. using thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2006), we identified several key themes. findings mask efficacy the theme of mask efficacy centers around the intended uses and benefits of wearing masks. posts often advocated for the efficacy of masks as an argument that they were more effective than vaccines at preventing the spread of seasonal flu and stressed the low efficacy rate of the seasonal flu shot in previous years. further, some posts around mask efficacy highlight that wearing a mask can signal that vaccines do not work. these posts describe beliefs that masks can protect yourself and others from getting sick. masks as a form of control while masks were discussed positively when it came to efficacy, there was some negative sentiment around masks, primarily stemming from mandates. in many healthcare settings, an employee must either agree to a seasonal flu vaccination or wear a mask for the duration of the flu season. while masks were seen as an alternative to vaccination, some accounts shared content about how they felt they were forced to wear a mask or felt discriminated against due to their opposing vaccine stance. there was also discussion about masks being used as a way to force vaccines, as masks were seen as socially undesirable and difficult to wear for long periods. societal perceptions mask posts would also cover the social perceptions of mask-wearing. some users believed mask-wearing disclosed an individual’s anti-vaccination stance and perceived those who wore masks as more intelligent or brave. masks served as “a conversation piece” for healthcare workers to spread vaccine misinformation. however, some posts acknowledged the social drawbacks of mask-wearing, namely that others were more likely to assume they were sick or infectious and may be more likely to avoid them. physical experience wearing masks although slightly more uncommon, several posts mentioned the negative physical experiences associated with wearing a mask. these posts expressed the discomfort of breathing in masks and for wearing them for extended periods. other posts were more specific in their criticism, such as that it made reading lips more difficult for deaf or hard of hearing individuals. however, these posts generally framed the difficulty of maskwearing as worthwhile to avoid vaccination. conclusions, limitations, and future work overall, posts about masks by vaccine opposed instagram accounts were generally positive prior to the covid-19 pandemic. most interestingly, masks were often praised for their efficacy which is counter to narratives about masks shared by anti-vaccine accounts during the pandemic. further, the themes we saw about masks were consistent with anti-vaccine themes. specifically, centering the conversation about masks around freedom is consistent with anti-vaccination narratives (koltai, 2020). notably, during the pandemic, there was a deluge of pseudo-science about the ineffectiveness of masks pushed online. knowing that there was a drastic shift in mask sentiment and narratives about mask-wearing in this community suggests that it is often less about the science of masks and more about the narrative of freedom and choice. arguably, this can inform future interventions to increase positive sentiment about masks and vaccines in those who are vaccine hesitant by emphasizing that it gives them freedom instead of limiting it. the limitations of this work are that we collected posts at the end of 2020. instagram, like other social media platforms, has been removing posts and accounts that violated their content policies. we, unfortunately, would not have any of these accounts in our data set. future planned work involves comparing mask sentiments before and during the pandemic by anti-vaccine accounts on multiple social media platforms and evaluating the accounts and sources that pushed for this shift in mask sentiment. references burki, t. (2020). the online anti-vaccine movement in the age of covid-19. the lancet digital health, 2(10), e504-e505. braun, v. & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77-101. kata, a. (2012). anti-vaccine activists, web 2.0, and the postmodern paradigm-an overview of tactics and tropes used online by the anti-vaccination movement. vaccine, 30(25), 3778-3789. koltai, k. (2020). human values and scientific controversies: studying vaccine information behavior on social networking sites. [doctoral dissertation, university of texas at austin]. moran, m. b., lucas, m., everhart, k., morgan, a., & prickett, e. (2016). what makes anti-vaccine websites persuasive? a content analysis of techniques used by anti vaccine websites to engender anti-vaccine sentiment. journal of communication in healthcare, 9(3), 151–163. taylor, s. & asmundson, g. j. g. (2021). negative attitudes about facemasks during the covid-19 pandemic: the dual importance of perceived ineffectiveness and psychological reactance. plos one, 16(2). e0246317 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): niessen, n., atalaia, n., luchs, i., and riemens, r. (2022, november). platform visions and invasions: spatial (re)imaginations in big tech discourse. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. platform visions and invasions: spatial (re)imaginations in big tech discourse niels niessen radboud university nijmegen nuno atalaia radboud university nijmegen inga luchs university of groningen rianne riemens radboud university nijmegen this panel analyzes the textual and audiovisual discourses in which big tech companies including google and amazon envision social spaces (i.e. domestic, urban, educational, natural) and the role that their “digital platforms” play in them. these tech-produced discourses range from product development to promotion, from manifestos to corporate blogs, and from online (learning) environments to statements on climate change. the panel asks: what are the visions of human life and technology that big tech companies narrate in relation to public and private spaces? and how do these tech-generated visions compare to current insights in and critiques of how these companies intervene in social spaces? our combined research situates itself within the growing corpus of critical platform studies, tackling the unchecked expansion through which these companies and their programmable architectures become large societal players, disrupting private and public spaces and institutions (zuboff 2019; van dijck, poell, and de waal 2018). platform companies expand by grafting onto pre-existing infrastructures and spaces, becoming vital to their functioning, while hoarding vaster and vaster amounts of user data: a process defined as “platformization” (helmond 2015; plantin et al. 2016). it is through platformization that these companies advance the rise of platform societies in which, as nick couldry and ulises a. mejias write: “our everyday relations with data are becoming colonial in nature; that is, they cannot be understood except as an appropriation on a 2 form and scale that bears comparison with the appropriations of historical colonialism.” in other words, big tech pushes frontiers—spatial, personal, and institutional—while using people’s experience as the fuel for its expansive strategies. this panel examines the textual and audiovisual discourses through which tech companies narrativize their expansion into urban space, education, domestic spaces, and also the natural environment. since these discourses, produced by tech companies, form an intervention into people’s relations to themselves, others, and their environments, tech companies stand to be analyzed as cultural producers. they do not merely address their users as consumers, but increasingly also as an audience representing a general “public” or even a caring “humanity.” in order to develop a critical understanding of the platform society, it is crucial to examine those discourses through which tech companies seek to generate a trusting user base, presenting themselves as democratic, almost state-like powers offering “public” services. employing methods of textual and audiovisual analysis, this panel offers such perspective by focusing on the main us tech companies and their platforms, that form the infrastructural core of the platform ecosystem (van dijck et al. 2018). in its analysis of tech visions, the panel focuses on (re)imaginations of space at different scales. the first paper analyzes how amazon’s release of new services connected to its digital voice assistant alexa expands platform infrastructures onto domestic spaces and familial bonds. the second paper analyzes discourses by sidewalk labs (a sister company of google) in its attempt to reimagine urban public space. the third paper analyzes google’s reimagination of educational space as well as the modes through which developers inhabit and create virtual spaces under the discourse of “democratic” ai. and the fourth paper analyzes how space companies, led by tech entrepreneurs musk (tesla) and bezos (amazon), imagine a future for humanity in extraterrestrial space. though each paper focuses on a different spatial scale and on different modes of inhabitation, a common ideological message appears: the expansion of corporate platforms and their infrastructures into these spaces is “empowering” to all its users, and a solution for all kinds of sociopolitical problems. the panel critiques this big tech narrative, situating its speech acts in the broader reality of its invasive logic. in sum, the panel analyzes how tech companies, as part of their space invasions, also seek to invade people’s very imaginations of space. references couldry, nick and ulises a. mejias (2019), the costs of connection: how data is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism. stanford university press. dijck, josé van, thomas poell, martijn de waal (2018), the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford university press. 3 helmond, anne (2015), the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready. social media & society (july-september): 1-11. plantin, jean-christophe, carl lagoze, paul n. edwards, christian sandvig (2016), “infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook”. new media & society 20 (1): 293–310. zuboff, shoshana (2019), the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. london: profile books. 4 paper 1: “even if you’re not around, you know someone is”— alexa and platform domestic ubiquity nuno atalaia radboud university nijmegen, the netherlands the digital caregiving of alexa in december 2021, amazon released a new paid subscription service connected to its digital voice assistant (dva) alexa, named “alexa together”. targeted at caretakers of elderly and vulnerable family members, this subscription service allowed users to “provide support” to their “loved ones”, keeping families “together even when they’re apart” (“alexa together” 2021). this caring at a distance was made possible by installing several devices, sensors, and cameras, across the loved one’s home, all synced through amazon’s infrastructure. family members would be able to access these devices, track activities, send reminders, make calls, and receive alerts at any time. at the same time, as a voice-operated assistant, alexa ensured elderly and vulnerable users could access devices through the intuitive medium of speech. in this paper, i analyze how, in this new service, the saturation of domestic spaces by computational devices and platform infrastructures is narrativized as an act of care. i focus my analysis on the promotional materials – texts, images, audio, and video – created for the service’s release, hosted in amazon’s website, and discussed in interviews with company speakers. these media, i claim, frame alexa as a ubiquitous benevolent agent – mediating care between its users – while also framing users as precarious subjects – requiring surveillance and control at every moment. humanmachine interaction becomes a form of theater in which the domestic space becomes a stage where machines and humans perform specific characters. this performance, however, obfuscates the ongoing expansion of platform infrastructures into our private lives. digital voice assistants and platform domestic ubiquity historical accounts of domestic media illustrate how machines occupying our home change our experience and interaction with domestic space, from television (spigel 1992) to computers (reeves and nass 2015), smartphones (turkle 2012), and now dvas (ostrowski et al. 2022). two aspects set dvas apart from the previous categories: firstly, dvas, as software can be invisibly grafted onto any other object, with no need for any graphic interface or screen; secondly, dvas are framed as digital personae able to engage in social interaction with its user. starting as mobile device apps, these conversational agents can now be found in smart-speakers, car dashboards, refrigerators, and even smaller items such as rings and glasses. as more and more items become accessible via dvas, our relationship with our environment shifts from tool use to socialization. 5 dvas play a key role in what google ceo sundar pichai described as the “fading away of the device” (sundar pichai 2016). they are part and parcel of the “third wave of ubiquitous computation” (ekman et al. 2015) through which computational systems are ever more discretely integrated into the everyday lives of individuals. “ubiquitous computation” is a vital step in the expansion of platform business models, dependent as tech companies are on the capturing and processing of ever larger data sets (zuboff 2019). my analysis frames this ubiquity not only as expansion but as obfuscation – hiding the computational saturation of our environments – by focusing on how “platformization” operates in domestic spaces at the smaller scale of the humanmachine relationship. alexa and other assistant sync a variety of computational devices and their data streams while narrativizing this process as a form of socialization. this socialization of platformization, however, is not merely a technical achievement but a result of the discourses surrounding the promotion of dvas. therefore, a cultural analysis of services, such as “alexa together” provides critical insights into the ongoing platform occupation of domestic spaces, and how it is made palatable for individuals. case study and methodology the core of my paper amounts to a close audiovisual and textual analysis of the promotional material created by amazon for the launch of the “alexa together” in their product’s webpage. these promotional materials, i claim, only provide a partial representation of the service, the infrastructure on which it runs, and the many devices through which it can be accessed. i contextualize the promotion of “alexa together”, by turning to the dva’s origins – its release and promotion in 2014 – and its competitors: apple’s siri, microsoft’s cortana, and google’s “assistant”. i frame these dvas and their promotion as a form of theatre, by turning to studies on theatricality (peetz, 2019) and dramaturgical sociology (goffman, 1956). as theatre, technological interaction assigns specific character roles to both humans and machines. in the case of “alexa together”, i focus on how humans are presented as precarious and vulnerable subjects for which alexa becomes a sort of confidant and caretaker. this representation, i go on, obfuscates the ways in which domestic space is ever more invaded by devices and the infrastructures of platform companies. these promotional media, therefore, hide the technical reality of the “alexa together” service by portraying alexa as a benevolent ubiquitous agent. voice, persona, and agency in his “the presentation of self in everyday life”, goffman understood humans as performers having to play out different characters in the spaces they occupied. in the same way, amazon’s promotional materials frame domestic spaces as a stage where alexa performs the character of personal assistant. this performance, however, puts into question the cultural fantasy of vocally commanding our environment used to sell dvas. 6 the sense of increased control of our environments, relies on the expansion of platform infrastructures onto our everyday life and its spaces, giving access to ever more data of an ever more personal nature. domestic spaces, in particular, are occupied by a series of surveillance devices and sensors, experienced as the agency of a ubiquitous character with a name such as alexa. an analysis of how these infrastructures and devices are represented and obfuscated, through the promotion of dvas, provides a critical perspective on the ongoing platformization of domestic spaces. references “alexa together” (2021), https://www.amazon.com/alexa-together. ekman, ulrik, jay david bolter, lily diaz, morten sondergaard, and maria engberg (2015), ubiquitous computing, complexity and culture. routledge. goffman, erving (1959), the presentation of self in everyday life. anchor books. new york, ny: bantam doubleday dell publishing group. ostrowski, anastasia k., jenny fu, vasiliki zygouras, hae won park, and cynthia breazeal (2022), “speed dating with voice user interfaces: understanding how families interact and perceive voice user interfaces in a group setting.” frontiers in robotics and ai 8. peetz, julia (2019), “theatricality as an interdisciplinary problem,” performance research 24 (4): 63–67. reeves, byron, and clifford nass (2015), the media equation: how people treat computers, television, and new media like real people and places. center for the study of language and inf. spigel, lynn (1992), make room for tv: television and the family ideal in postwar america. chicago, il: university of chicago press. sundar pichai (2016), “this year’s founders’ letter.” google. april 28, 2016. https://blog.google/alphabet/this-years-founders-letter/. turkle, sherry (2012), alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other. 1st edition. new york: basic books. vlahos, james (2019), talk to me: how voice computing will transform the way we live, work, and think. houghton mifflin harcourt. zuboff, shoshana (2019), the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. profile books. 7 paper 2: blurring “urban” space with sidewalk toronto niels niessen radboud university nijmegen, the netherlands quayside and sidewalk labs this paper analyzes the texts and images through which sidewalk labs (a sister company of google) presented quayside, an urban development project in toronto that was supposed to become the first neighborhood “built from the internet up” (doctoroff 2016). i focus on the promotional video “introducing sidewalk toronto” (2017) and the project’s master plan toronto tomorrow: a new approach for inclusive growth (2019). the paper shows how sidewalk labs in these discourses introduces the notions of “urban” space and “urban” data, blurring private and public spaces, allowing it to expand its datafying strategy. artist impressions of quayside depict what life could have looked like in toronto’s near future: timber high-rises, autonomous vehicles, and above all a rich pedestrian life in “intimate public spaces” and “people-first streets” (sidewalk labs 2019). this lively street scene would have been supported by invisible yet ubiquitous sensors feeding real-time data into an extensive digitized infrastructure: from smart traffic lights and modular pavements to “pay-as-you throw” garbage chutes. quayside was the pilot project for sidewalk toronto, an urban development initiative announced in 2017. sidewalk toronto was a collaboration between waterfront toronto (a public-private entity set up by the city, provincial, and national governments to redevelop the quayside site) and sidewalk labs (part of alphabet inc., the holding company that also owns google). quayside would have measured 5 hectares; the entire plan for sidewalk toronto would have ultimately concerned an area of 77 hectares. in 2019, however, under public pressure, the project was scaled back to the original quayside area. in may 2020, sidewalk labs pulled the plug on its toronto ambitions altogether, officially because of the covid pandemic, but likely also because of the severe criticism sidewalk toronto garnered over the years. this criticism was not only voiced by activist groups (#blocksidewalk), but also came from within the tech world itself. as venture capitalist roger mcnamee wrote in a letter to the toronto city council: “no matter what google is offering, the value to toronto cannot possibly approach the value your city is giving up. [quayside] is a dystopian vision that has no place in a democratic society” (cecco 2019). questions and arguments 8 quayside may have been abandoned, arguably its design still forms a blueprint for a city in which public space is permeated by a platform-capitalist logic according to which public space and private interests blur into a vaguely defined “urban” realm. using methods of textual and visual analysis, the paper asks: what is the vision of human life that informed quayside’s platformized city design? and how does this vision compare to the way quayside sought to collect data, not just in public but also in private spaces? the paper articulates the discrepancy between, on the one hand, quayside’s transhumanist narrative of a platform city where users are connected and in control, and, on the other hand, the project’s colonial logic. by “transhumanist” i refer to a vision of human life according to which technology enhances humanity. this vision is belied by quayside’s logic, which in the terminology of couldry and mejias is “colonialist in nature,” extracting value from people’s interactions and invading their integrity of selves. my paper shows how this invasive logic also manifests itself in sidewalk’s speech acts. specifically i discuss sidewalk’s use of the term “urban data,” a neologism in which the distinction between private and public disappears. part 1: transhumanist vision of urban life in response to the first question, what is the vision of human life informing quayside?, i analyze a number of textual and visual materials through which sidewalk labs presented sidewalk toronto, specifically the video “introducing sidewalk toronto” (2017) and the project’s master plan toronto tomorrow (2019). i argue that in these materials sidewalk labs presents a transhumanist vision of city life. according to this vision, human life is at once inherently driven towards connection and inherently flawed, facing “barriers” that hinder the connection between people. the exact nature of those barriers (toronto’s “design problem”) remain only vaguely defined by sidewalk labs, yet the proposed solution to the problem is very clear: more technology. with reference to sadowski and bendor, i show that sidewalk labs presents city design as a convergence between technology and humanity. this convergence is the transhumanist dream of a humanity for whom technology is second nature. in the case of sidewalk toronto it would have been an urban community that is at once uniquely “torontonian” and datafied. part 2: blurring boundaries second i discuss the question: how does this vision compare to the way quayside sought to collect data, not just in public but also in private spaces? i here focus on sidewalk’s proposed data policy. to many critical followers of sidewalk toronto these plans remained vague at best. as goodman and powles write: in broad strokes there are two kind of platform values, public and commercial, and “sidewalk obscures just which version of platform its digital layer will be and what it will be optimized for.” my paper argues that this vagueness around sidewalk’s strategy manifested itself in its vague language and blurring of concepts, in particular the notions of “urban space” and “urban data.” sidewalk toronto was imagined as a platform city across the public-private 9 divide. or as sidewalk writes itself, the city would have eliminated “the divide between home, work, and play” (sidewalk labs 2017). this unthinking of divides culminates in the notion of “urban data,” defined as “information gathered in the city’s physical environment, including the public realm, publicly accessible spaces, and even some private buildings.” sidewalk’s definition of “urban” thus exists across public and private space, collapsing both, much like its vocabulary collapses public and corporate interests. my paper argues that it is important to be very critical of such blurring of concepts, and that it is important to be very critical of city-as-platform discourse in general, in which people are framed as “users” of “urban space” (mattern 2021). tech companies’ framing of the spaces they venture into is integral to their profit-driven strategies themselves. a critique of platform strategies therefore also has to involve a critique of their speech acts. references barns, sarah (2019). platform urbanism: negotiating platform ecosystems in connected cities. palgrave macmillan. cecco, leyland (2020), “’surveillance capitalism’: critic urges toronto to abandon smart city project,” the guardian (may 7). couldry, nick and ulises a. mejias (2019), the costs of connection: how data is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism. stanford university press. dawson, alyssa harvey (2018), “an update on data governance for sidewalk toronto,” sidewalk labs (october 15). doctoroff, daniel l. (2016), “reimaging cities from the internet up,” sidewalk labs (november 30). mattern, shannon (2020), “post-it note city,” places (february), https://placesjournal.org/article/post-it-note-city/?cn-reloaded=1. mattern, shannon (2021), a city is not a computer: other urban intelligences. princeton university press. sadowski, jathan, and roy bendor (2019), “selling smartness: corporate narratives and the smart city as a sociotechnical imaginary,” science, technology, and human values 44.3: 540-563. sidewalk labs (2017), project vision (october 17). sidewalk labs (2019), toronto tomorrow: a new approach for inclusive growth. 10 paper 3: “democratic ai”: google as educator in the ai industry inga luchs university of groningen, the netherlands in 2018, google released its machine learning crash course (google developers 2022) out of a belief that “ai will have the greatest impact when everyone can access it” (google ai 2022a). this effort is in line with google’s overall mission to make “ai work for everyone” (pichai 2017). following recent research around big tech’s discursive strategies around an apparent “democratization of ai” (sudmann 2019), i argue that google’s attempt to make ai and machine learning (ml) more accessible must be understood as part of its business strategy to further dominate the ai industry regarding ml research and development. in my paper, i analyze how google’s machine learning crash course needs to be embedded into the company’s endeavour to position itself in the field of ai education by offering a corporate educational environment with tools and resources freely available. i pursue a walkthrough and critical discourse analysis of the course to shed light not only on recurring narratives around ai and ml that find application, but also on the economic interests of the company in offering the course. i show how particular narratives support google to uphold its power position by recruiting new ai talent and by securing their infrastructures and models to become the dominant ones, but also how the company is leaving a lasting mark on societal imaginaries of ai and its potential. extending reach: google as educator and provider of open infrastructures google profits from a tremendous position of power within the ai industry by means of its cloud computing and data resources (dyer-witheford et al. 2019). but also in the field of ai-/ml-as-a-service, it belongs to the top in the market (srnicek 2019). as i argue, the discourse around the “democratization of ai” plays an important role in the company’s effort to advance its infrastructural power (plantin et al. 2016). by taking over fields usually associated with the public sphere – such as the educational space and the provision of infrastructures – google pictures itself as crucial player for the advancement of technologies that “benefit people and society” (google ai 2022b). with its machine learning crash course, the company promises its users a cost-free opportunity to learn the key concepts of machine learning as well as their application using google’s software library tensorflow. with this corporate, but open-access learning environment, google creates an educational space in which it can impose its ai vision on aspiring ml practitioners, as well as draw them into its infrastructural ml ecosystem. against this background, this paper critically compares how the company addresses the subject of the course as well the promises it is made, with the actual possibilities of learning, creating and developing that the educational space itself 11 presents. this analysis allows for a more intricate view on the notion of “democratic ai”, the company puts forward and the economic benefits it draws from this discourse. further, i show how google not only influence greatly how ml is represented, but also how these representations in turn influence and direct current ml research and development, as well as the societal effects of its ml-infused products. methodology online courses are so far rarely studied in research on (ml) algorithms. hence, for an analysis of google’s course, i apply an adaption of the walkthrough method (light et al. 2018) that has been developed for the analysis of digital platforms. using this method, i trace the context of the online course drawing from the course environment and additional advertising material (i.e., concerning target user base, presented purpose, revenue sources, course design). further, i conduct a technical walkthrough through the online environment which enables the identification of key narratives. for a further indepth analysis, i apply a critical discourse analysis, asking what kinds of discourses are established around ai/ml and its users and what implications these narratives have on the dominant position of google and the development of its technologies. particularly the notions of “access” and the “inclusion of everyone” are invoked repeatedly throughout google’s ai and online course webpages and need further interrogation: who receives access, and to what? who is being addressed with ‘everyone’? and how does this relate to the vision of a democratic development of ai? in turn, in what way is the learning platform (concerning its interface and the conveyance of knowledge) enabling or restrictive in its design? agency in restricted spaces: imaginaries of technologies and subjects with its course, google appeals to users at all levels: from amateurs and non-experts to more experienced developers. the subject that the company addresses, is depicted as emancipated, creative agent, empowered by google’s technologies. the tools and platforms themselves are described as offering this subject unlimited possibilities while at the same time being simple in their application and requiring no prior knowledge. having a closer look at the ml course, this notion shifts: rather than the user being the emancipated agent, the agency is depicted with the technologies themselves. these are described as ‘doing everything for you’. within the restricted teaching environment for instance, this means concretely that the subject can only execute the code that is already written. ‘learning’ in this sense, does not entail a deeper understanding of or creative engagement with ml. the democratization of ai is rather to be understood as access to – and manifestation of – company-owned infrastructures. the notion to draw ‘everyone’ into google’s ai ecosystem thus allows the company to exert influence in all areas of education, development and application, and in manifesting its ai vision. this ai vision, secondly, is depictured first and foremost as centered around fair and democratic ai. this, however, stands in contrast to the directives of efficiency and performativity of google’s ml infrastructures. at the same time, limitations that ml might entail are not acknowledged within the social context of their development, but rather regarded as technical errors to be fixed. a reflection on the processes of 12 marginalization and exclusion each ml model entails and the role the data scientists plays in this is not taken into account. what does it thus mean when google not only enhances its dominant position within the industry, but also influences how ai and its potential is viewed and acted upon? references dyer-witheford n, kjosen am, and steinhoff j (2019), inhuman power. artificial intelligence and the future of capitalism. pluto press. google ai (2022a), “about. google ai.” available at: https://ai.google/about/. google ai (2022b), “responsibilities, google ai.” available at: https://ai.google/responsibilities/. google ai (2022c), “tools. google ai.” available at: https://ai.google/tools/. google developers (2022), “google machine learning crash course.” available at: https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/crash-course. light b, burgess j and duguay s (2018), “the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps,” new media & society 20: 881–900. pichai, s (2017), “making ai work for everyone,” google blog. available at: https://blog.google/technology/ai/making-ai-work-for-everyone/. plantin, jc, lagoze, c, edwards, pn, sandvig, c (2016), “infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook,” new media & society 20 (1): 293–310. srnicek n (2019), “the political economy of artificial intelligence,” recorded talk at the conference “great transformation”, jena, 23.09.-27.09.2019. available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmi3fq3q3bo. sudmann, a (2019), the democratization of artificial intelligence. net politics in the era of learning algorithms. transcript verlag. 13 paper 4: green expansionism: space invasion as big tech’s response to the climate crisis rianne riemens radboud university nijmegen, the netherlands space explorations and tech-on-climate discourse this paper presents an analysis of the proposals for space exploration made by tech companies. the paper specifically focuses on tech entrepreneurs elon musk and jeff bezos and their space companies spacex and blue origin. their projects — including travels to mars and preparations for the habitation of outer space — are framed as longterm solution to the ongoing climate crisis, creating a narrative about the exploration of extraterrestrial space as form of “green expansionism”. the paper analyzes this narrative and asks: what vision on the role of technology in the climate crisis can be found in the tech-on-climate discourse about space exploration? in recent years, tech companies have taken explicit positions as actors in the “fight” against the climate crisis. these companies invest in a tech-on-climate discourse: the ongoing production of keynotes, mission statements, ads and other texts and images that emphasize technological solutions to the climate crisis and obfuscate negative environmental impact. this discourse contains proposals that range from increasing recycling efforts and investing in solar and wind energy to plans such as moving industrial practices or entire communities into space. as musk and bezos hold prominent functions in space companies as well as tech companies (tesla and amazon), they are representative figures of the tech-on-climate discourse. this discourse presents a new kind of climate-friendly capitalism that provides moral legitimacy to tech companies’ business model (goldstein 2018). analyzing green expansionism as cultural myth the paper builds on the theoretical understanding that digital platforms operate as infrastructural companies, by initiating projects that extend their infrastructural reach and solidify their position as gatekeepers of (digital) services (plantin et al. 2016). the exploration of outer space is such an infrastructural project, in which space is presented as a blank canvas from which tech companies can build a new society from “the ground up”. through their space travel efforts, musk and bezos contribute to the spatial expansion of the “cloud empire” (couldry & mejias 2019). with space imagined as the new frontier, the discourse on space exploration presents an opportunity to better understand how tech companies defend new forms of expansion and what type of vision on the future, in times of climate crisis, this reflects. 14 the paper addresses its main question through two sub questions: 1) how is the narrative of “green expansionism” constructed by spacex and blue origin? 2) how does this narrative shape the discussion about solutions to the climate crisis? the paper approaches this narrative and the vision that lies behind it as a “cultural myth” that shapes how people think about the role of technology in the climate crisis (david 2001). the paper answers these questions through a critical discourse analysis that focuses on the texts and images of four case studies: the websites of spacex and blue origin (2021) and a keynote by musk and bezos on behalf of their company. as the analysis will show, the vision on the climate crisis becomes for example apparent in the mission statement of blue origin (2021), stating that the company was founded “with the vision of enabling a future where millions of people are living and working in space for the benefit of earth”. however, the analysis also takes into account what remains unclear or hidden in the texts and images that both companies and their leaders share. the exclusive and fictional tendencies of green expansionism the paper argues that the climate crisis is used as reason to legitimate space exploration, but that overall, projects are visually and textually presented as impressive entrepreneurial and engineering achievements. within this narrative, bezos and musk figure as pioneers, fulfilling the role of genius or visionary (taffel 2018). they represent what goldstein (2018) describes as a “better” form of capitalism: they distance their mission from that of traditional space and tech companies by positioning themselves as pioneers in a “tech for earth” movement. to realize this, musk and bezos are presented as “cowboys” that want to conquer a new frontier. green expansionism is thus not only an imperialist, but also a gendered project that promotes “ecomodern masculinity” (dockstader & bell 2020). the paper further argues that, under the guise of green growth, space exploration can be presented as a daring project that is beneficial to all of humanity (shammas & holen 2019). however, this narrative can only be convincing by keeping some elements of the project deliberately vague: practical questions about living or working in space, environmental risks, feasibility and accessibility remain unanswered. while presented as the way to save humanity and planet earth, the narrative of green expansionism does not present a feasible solution, but instead a perpetuation of a colonial logic of expansion and exploitation. because of the many complications — that musk and bezos do not altogether deny, but formulate as a problem of future generations — the cultural myth of conquering outer space does not tell us much about how these companies want to realize their future visions. instead, it says more about the way they want to be perceived in the present and the economic endeavors that interest them. as platform capitalism demands continuous expansion, space exploration serves as an “outer spatial fix”, with space technologies such as satellites offering new forms of surveillance and large-scale data collection (dickens & omrod 2007). despite its fictional elements, the narrative of green expansionism has concrete material consequences. it can lead to an overestimation of the impact of extraterrestrial projects and takes attention away from the negative environmental impact of tech companies, including space projects. it can also create a false sense of safety and undermine the 15 support for necessary climate actions that need to be taken. in sum, the myth of space invasion not only reveals the dream to conquer a new environment, but also the wish to steer debates about the climate crisis in a direction that is in the interest of platform companies. references blue origin (2021), “about blue origin,” https://www.blueorigin.com/about-blue couldry, nick & ulysses a. mejias (2019), the costs of connection. how data is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism. stanford: stanford university press. david, carol (2001), “mythmaking in annual reports,” journal of business and technical communication, 15(2) 195-222. dickens, peter & james s. ormrod (2007), cosmic society: towards a sociology of the universe, london: routledge. dockstader, sue & shannon elizabeth bell (2020), “ecomodern masculinity, energy security, and green consumerism: the rise of biofuels in the united states.” critical sociology, 46(4-5) 643–660. goldstein, jesse. (2018), planetary improvement: cleantech entrepreneurship and the contradictions of green capitalism. cambridge: the mit press. plantin, jean-christope, carl lagoze, paul n. edwards & christian sandvig (2016). “infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook.” new media & society 20(1) 293-310. victor l. shammas & tomas b. holen (2019). “one giant leap for capitalistkind: private enterprise in outer space.” palgrave communications, 5(1), 1-9. taffel, sy (2018). “hopeful extinctions? tesla, technological solutionism and the anthropocene.” culture unbound, 10(2) 163-184. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): milik, o., jang, d., foxman, m., klebig, b., beyea, d., leith, a., ratan, r. (2024, october). focusing on virtual groups: a method for focus group interviews in xr/vr group settings. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. focusing on virtual groups: a method for focus group interviews in xr/vr group settings oskar milik michigan state university dayeoun jang michigan state university maxwell foxman university of oregon brian klebig bethany lutheran college david beyea university of wisconsin – whitewater alex leith southern illinois university edwardsville rabindra ratan michigan state university intro the methods we use to study human behavior must change to match the advancements of social reality. the increasing use of technology to mediate interaction and the digitalization of many aspects of our world have increased the urgency for constructing and evaluating both established and novel methods for analyzing modernday social situations. one type of social science research that has not been as thoroughly developed is the use of focus group interviews within digital settings. the goal of this paper is to present a theoretical foundation and practical structure for an upcoming focus group study on interaction using virtual avatars in vrchat (2014). background digital research as new digital communication tools have engendered new contexts for social experiences, researchers have published discussions about expanding their methodologies, including quantitative methods such as “big data” and large surveys of online users (williams et al., 2011; yee, 2006) in addition to traditional ethnographic and interview methods translated into digital spaces (boellstorff et al., 2012; taylor, 2006). further, the accessibility of the variety of digital-world data makes mixed-method research even more powerful (ducheneaut, yee, & bellotti, 2010). more recently, the use of digital systems for work settings, such as zoom or virtualworld meeting spaces (e.g. engage, meta’s horizon workrooms), has increased significantly. considering social group interactions are affected by technology (milik, 2015), we need a new methodological approach to understand group dynamics in virtual meeting spaces. we also aim to expand methodological approaches beyond methods for focus group interviews in video-conferencing platforms (willemsen et al., 2023). we accomplish this by specifically focusing on the use of avatars and virtual spaces for interaction, specifically in a platform based on vrchat (2014). avatars and actors when observing social action in a digital setting, especially in virtual worlds, researchers should pay careful attention to the role of avatars, defined as digital representations of users that facilitate interactions (nowak & fox 2018). similar to how people adjust their identity to fit various circumstances offline, avatars allow users to adapt their online identity accordingly (phillips & milner, 2018). the ease of modifying digital representations allows individuals the ability to effortlessly alter the aspects of themselves and to showcase or even establish an entirely new identity (phillips, & milner, 2018). this creates a multi-layer representation of an individual that can create difficulty in analysis (carter, gibbs, & arnold, 2012). in response to this layered meaning, we present the individual in physical space as the “participant” and the individual’s virtual representation in digital space as the “avatar.” in discussing these two entities simultaneously for analysis, we use the concept of the “persona” (milik, 2017) as a methodological construct. also related to persona, we consider the concept of a third space (oldenburg, & brissett, 1982). even in a purely digital setting, these spaces can allow for interaction with greater freedom of expression (steinkuehler, & williams, 2006). vr-mediated meta-spaces can imitate a third space thanks to a sense of spatial presence (ahn et al., 2022). it is important to note that a vr meeting platform can be understood as an extension of the workspace but also a third place in terms of supporting formal and informal communication and offering features to support freedom of interaction (i.e., flying, teleporting, drawing in a void, etc). as work productivity and creativity are influenced by the physical environment (kristensen, 2004; sailer, 2011), it is important to examine how a vr meeting platform can influence social interaction. power, language, and identity when studying behavior in a digital space, questions of agency and power become additionally complicated. the participant retains social agency in physical space, but the behaviors of the avatar are intrinsically limited by the programming of the virtual world. in studying interpersonal relationships and social power, this can significantly change the nature of the research (taylor, 2018). representations of gender (bergstrom, 2012) and race (nakamura, 2020), for instance, can be heavily affected by the design of the virtual space and create restrictions on mobility for certain individuals. also important is the fact that some individuals are simply less comfortable with technology (bolin, kalmus, & figueiras, 2023), and this can lead to a normalization of inequality between members in digital interaction (paul, 2018) and create additional limits for people with certain disabilities. focus group interviews are built specifically to generate valuable data on interactions, discussions of narrative, and analysis of interpersonal relationships. the use of a digital platform for this purpose remains viable due to the researchers’ access to data for ethnographic (boellstorff et al., 2012), ethnomethodological (milik, 2015), and interview analysis (taylor, 2018). in designing this study, the concerns of agency, power, and identity were key factors that determined how the vr meeting platform was constructed. the method we used building on a larger project that examines how facets of virtual meeting technologies influence user well-being, we combine traditional focus group interviews with observational methods to investigate participants' behavior and interactions in a vr meeting platform. we developed a vrchat world to study the capacity of a vr meeting platform to promote equitable interaction, creativity, and collaboration between participants. first, participants in this irb-approved study experience a tutorial in the vr meeting platform to acclimate them to the environment and to collect data based on communication in more natural situations. participants choose one of 16 avatars (casual/formal outfit, four skin colors, feminine/masculine), which allows us to understand their use of avatars to establish identity. then, they work as a team for 15 minutes and complete a collaborative task (i.e., designing a modification to the game rock-paper-scissors or tic-tac-toe). participants are encouraged to use a variety of tools to help with the task, including 3d pens, boards, and dice to assess how technological competence affects the interaction. when done, the participants are asked to have a representative present their outcome to the researcher to assess power dynamics and leadership. participants can freely move around different locations in the platform by walking or using the teleportation feature to help understand how movement and closeness affects the group dynamics. as is standard for focus group interviews, one moderator and one observer are assigned to each participant group. the role of the observer is to monitor behavior while being invisible. even if being invisible is not common in vrchat, we decided on using invisibility to minimize the unintentional effect of an observer’s presence. during the task, both the observer and moderator monitor inter-participant discussions and how much each individual is contributing. this data is also collected through audio and video recordings of the session. following the observational portion of the study, we also conduct group interviews based on participants’ experiences in the vr meeting platform, either in-person or virtually, depending on the participants' preference and availability. the main goal of this follow-up is to understand individual reasoning behind the actions and decisions that the participants made on the platform, which are difficult to ascertain through observation only. conclusion as virtual meeting environments become more common, a reliable method of collecting focus group data is a rising concern. this study will incorporate the theoretical roots of digital research, address important social questions, and present the core of a methodological system for future studies using virtual reality or other multi-user meeting software for focus group interviews. beyond the academic setting, this will additionally be valuable for studies in management and organization, as well for rapidly digitalizing corporate actors. references ahn, s. j. g., nowak, k. l., & bailenson, j. n. (2022). unintended consequences of spatial presence on learning in virtual reality. computers & education, 186, 104532. bergstrom, k 2012, ‘virtual inequality: a woman’s place in cyberspace’, in proceedings of the acm sigcomm 2009 conference on data communication. sigcomm, barcelona, spain, pp. 135-146. boellstorff, t, nardi, b, pearce, c & taylor, tl 2012, ethnography and virtual worlds: a handbook of method. princeton university press, princeton, new jersey. bolin, g, kalmus, v, figueiras, r, 2023 ‘conducting online focus group interviews with two generations: methodological experiences and reflections from the pandemic context. international journal of qualitative methods, vol. 22, pp. 1-8. ducheneaut, n, yee, n & bellotti, v 2010, ‘the best of both (virtual) worlds: using ethnography and computation tools to study online behavior’. in proceedings for epic: ethnographic praxis in industry conference, tokyo, japan. kristensen, t. (2004). the physical context of creativity. creativity and innovation management, 13(2), 89-96. milik, o 2015, ‘virtual warlords: an ethnomethodological study of leaders in eve online’. games and culture: vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 1-22. milik, o 2017, ‘persona in mmo games: constructing an identity through complex player/character relationships’. persona studies: vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 66-78. nakamura, l 2020, ‘feeling good about feeling bad: virtuous virtual reality and the automation of racial empathy’. journal of visual culture, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 47-64. nowak, kristine & fox, jesse. (2018). avatars and computer-mediated communication: a review of the definitions, uses, and effects of digital representations. review of communication research. 6. 30-53. 10.12840/issn.2255-4165.2018.06.01.015. oldenburg, r., & brissett, d. (1982). the third place. qualitative sociology, 5(4), 265284. paul, c 2018, the toxic meritocracy of video games: why gaming culture is the worst. university of minnesota press, minneapolis, mn. phillips, w., & milner, m. r., (2017) the ambivalent internet. mischief, oddity, and antagonism online. polity press. sailer, k. (2011). creativity as social and spatial process. facilities, 29(1/2), 6-18. steinkuehler, c. a., & williams, d. (2006). where everybody knows your (screen) name: online games as “third places”. journal of computer-mediated communication, 11(4), 885-909. taylor, tl 2006, play between worlds: exploring online game culture. mit press, cambridge, ma. taylor, tl 2018, watch me play: twitch and the rise of game live streaming. princeton university press, princeton, nj. vrchat [video game] 2014. vrchat. yee, n 2006, ‘the demographics, motivations and derived experiences of users of massivelymultiuser online graphical environments’. presence: teleoperators and virtual environments, vol. 15, pp. 309-329. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 examining the effectiveness of artificial intelligence-based cyberbullying moderation on online platforms: transparency implications kanishk verma adapt centre, dcu anti bullying centre, dublin city university tijana milosevic dcu anti bullying centre, dublin city university brian davis adapt centre, dublin city university james o'higgins norman dcu anti bullying centre, dublin city university introduction the covid-19 pandemic in 2020 led to an increased usage of online social network (osn) and multiplayer online gaming (mog) platforms by children, accompanied by a rise in cyberbullying [1]–[7]. consequently, there is a need for osn and mog platforms to enhance the effectiveness of content moderation, often relying on automation using artificial intelligence (ai) [8]–[10]. measuring the efficacy of automated moderation mechanisms for detecting online bullying-related content is challenging due to their proprietary nature. our study analyses the research literature, transparency reports, and platform blogs to understand the efficacy of ai tools used by osn and mog platforms to regulate cyberbullying. to that effect, our research questions include, 1. how does ai identify and mitigate cyberbullying, and what user interactions does it monitor? 2. what do we know about the effectiveness of ai tools for detecting cyberbullying and enforcing policies against it? 3. how does the information available about these processes shed light on the transparency of online platforms? suggested citation (apa): verma, k., milosevic, t., davis, b., and o’higgins norman, j. (2022, november). examining the effectiveness of artificial intelligence-based cyberbullying moderation on online platforms: transparency implications. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. search strategy to examine how osn/mogs moderate cyberbullying content, we leveraged a two-method search strategy, i. examine platforms for information about any ai-enabled solutions for cyberbullying detection, prevention, and intervention. ii. querying search engines with specific keywords to retrieve news articles or blog posts that discuss aplatform’s ai-based solutions. we inspected 18 platforms (see appendix a) and their web resources throughout 2020 and 2021. we excluded articles and blog posts that did not provide information about new system/mechanism developments or designs by the platform, or shed light on the transparency of such systems the proprietary nature of ai-based platform solutions can be obstacle to their evaluation hence, as a an alternative look for computational studies that leverage conceptually similar ai algorithms for detecting online bullying. to that effect, we conducted a scoping study review of studies across academic repositories (see appendix b), to identify studies and datasets from two perspectives: i. data perspective exploring types of cyberbullying-related data, data annotation strategy ii. effectiveness perspective helps assess the capabilities of the state-of-the-art ai-enabled solutions to detect cyberbullying content. we excluded articles that do not discuss an online bullying dataset, an ai evaluation technique or benchmarking mechanism or is not a novel or reproducible system to detect cyberbullying. key findings industry initiatives our search yielded 150 relevant web-resources, indicating that ai solutions encompass various techniques to recognise and extract user features from multimodal human interaction data. we categorised these solutions as proactive intervention, where platforms intervene before user reporting, and reactive intervention, where platforms intervene after user reporting. apart from facebook, instagram’s proactive solutions and whisper, minecraft’s reactive solutions, we did not find information about whether and how the other 14 platforms leverage ai to counter cyberbullying on their platforms. descriptive information on ai techniques for content moderation is publicly available by facebook and google. facebook ai developed deeptext [11], linformer [12], whole post integrity embeddings (wpie) reinforced integrity optimizer (rio) [13] to identify harmful content across different contexts. however, the application and effectiveness of these advancements in addressing cyberbullying remain largely unknown. google and jigsaw developed, perspective, to address toxic and abusive online1 comments. to facilitate algorithmic transparency and fairness, the information on 1 https://jigsaw.google.com perspective’s training process, architecture, and training data are publicly available [14]–[16]. however, our analysis and previous study [17] revealed that perspective can be deceived by subtle phrase modifications, resulting in reduced toxicity scores provided by perspective. key findings academic literature a total of 157 computational articles were reviewed, resulting in selection of 119 articles, including 15 dataset studies, focused on cyberbullying. twitter emerged as the most examined platform, followed by instagram, askfm, and myspace. high quality datasets are vital for stimulating complex computational processes and are characterised by reliable annotations and inter-annotator agreement. only four datasets by [18]–[21] met these criteria, covering diverse aspects of cyberbullying and user-interactivity information. cyberbullying, encompassing various behaviour and involving not only perpetrators and victims but also bystanders, has been extensively studied. however, computational literature lacks diversity, with a majority of studies focusing on text-based communication, and only 20% of the studies scoped rely on other modes of communication than text. moreover, almost 73% of the studies scoped focus on classifying cyberbullying as binary, and 87% focus only on the english language. (see appendix c). conclusion co-relating our search results with the complex cyberbullying nomenclature, we found that despite the novel efforts by both academia and industry, the publicly available resources for independent researchers to scrutinise industry efforts, as well as to design a novel, effective, efficient and most importantly explainable cyberbullying detection model are extremely scarce. the availability of only two fine-grained first-rate datasets by [18], [21] is an indication that cyberbullying research progress in academia is slow. on the other hand, due to the proprietary nature of facebook ai’s deeptext, linformer, rio and wpie, not much can be known about its effectiveness in tackling cyberbullying. although the progress on google and jigsaw’s perspective is commendable in tackling toxicity on online platforms, it still can be deceived by subtle modifications to the text. our search also revealed that current platform policies fail to recognise “bystanders'' in bullying incidents. despite many technological advancements and having witnessed an increase in cyberbullying incidents on osn/mog platforms, the ai-enabled solutions for cyberbullying remain imperfect. through this study, we were able to ascertain the scarcity of qualitative and quantitative research to devise better and more effective tools to counter cyberbullying. going forward, ai tools that leverage not only text but also multimodal data to detect all varied forms and roles in cyberbullying should be developed. to close this gap and devise effective solutions, a multi-disciplinary environment of computational and social science researchers with teens and youth at focus must be leveraged. bibliography [1] p. babvey, f. capela, c. cappa, c. lipizzi, n. petrowski, and j. ramirez-marquez, ‘using social media data for assessing children’s exposure to violence during the covid-19 pandemic’, child abuse negl., vol. 116, p. 104747, jun. 2021, doi: 10.1016/j.chiabu.2020.104747. [2] ‘facebook reports fourth quarter and full year 2020 results’. https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2021/facebook-reports-fourth -quarter-and-full-year-2020-results/default.aspx (accessed feb. 25, 2022). [3] d. t. milosevic, d. laffan, and j. o. norman, ‘a study on digital practices, safety and wellbeing’, p. 16. [4] ‘coronavirus disease (covid-19) and its implications for protecting children online’. https://www.unicef.org/documents/covid-19-and-implications-protecting-children-online (accessed feb. 25, 2022). [5] g. u. utemissova, s. danna, and v. n. nikolaevna, ‘cyberbullying during the covid-19 pandemic’, glob. j. guid. couns. sch. curr. perspect., vol. 11, no. 2, art. no. 2, jul. 2021, doi: 10.18844/gjgc.v11i2.5471. [6] v. charisi et al., ‘artificial intelligence and the rights of the child : towards an integrated agenda for research and policy’, jrc publications repository, jun. 07, 2022. https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/jrc127564 (accessed oct. 01, 2022). [7] european commission. joint research centre., how children (10-18) experienced online risks during the covid-19 lockdown :spring 2020 : key findings from surveying families in 11 european countries. lu: publications office, 2021. accessed: feb. 25, 2022. [online]. available: https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2760/066196 [8] t. milosevic, protecting children online?: cyberbullying policies of social media companies. 2018. doi: 10.7551/mitpress/11008.001.0001. [9] t. gillespie, custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. yale university press, 2018. doi: 10.12987/9780300235029. [10] t. gillespie et al., ‘expanding the debate about content moderation: scholarly research agendas for the coming policy debates’, internet policy rev., vol. 9, no. 4, oct. 2020, accessed: feb. 25, 2022. [online]. available: https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/expanding-debate-about-content-moderation-scho larly-research-agendas-coming-policy [11] ‘introducing deeptext: facebook’s text understanding engine engineering at meta’. https://engineering.fb.com/2016/06/01/core-data/introducing-deeptext-facebook-s-text-und erstanding-engine/ (accessed feb. 28, 2022). [12] s. wang, b. z. li, m. khabsa, h. fang, and h. ma, ‘linformer: self-attention with linear complexity’, arxiv200604768 cs stat, jun. 2020, accessed: feb. 28, 2022. [online]. available: http://arxiv.org/abs/2006.04768 [13] ‘how ai is getting better at detecting hate speech’. https://ai.facebook.com/blog/how-ai-is-getting-better-at-detecting-hate-speech/ (accessed feb. 28, 2022). [14] ‘perspective api case studies’. https://perspectiveapi.com/case-studies/ (accessed dec. 08, 2022). [15] ‘about the api attributes and languages’. https://support.perspectiveapi.com/s/about-the-api-attributes-and-languages (accessed feb. 28, 2022). [16] ‘jigsaw unintended bias in toxicity classification’. https://kaggle.com/c/jigsaw-unintended-bias-in-toxicity-classification (accessed feb. 28, 2022). [17] h. hosseini, s. kannan, b. zhang, and r. poovendran, ‘deceiving google’s perspective api built for detecting toxic comments’, arxiv170208138 cs, feb. 2017, accessed: feb. 28, 2022. [online]. available: http://arxiv.org/abs/1702.08138 [18] c. v. hee et al., ‘automatic detection of cyberbullying in social media text’, plos one, vol. 13, no. 10, p. e0203794, oct. 2018, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0203794. [19] h. hosseinmardi, s. a. mattson, r. i. rafiq, r. han, q. lv, and s. mishra, ‘detection of cyberbullying incidents on the instagram social network’, arxiv150303909 cs, mar. 2015, accessed: feb. 28, 2022. [online]. available: http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.03909 [20] ‘analysis and detection of labeled cyberbullying instances in vine, a video-based social network | springerlink’. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13278-016-0398-x (accessed feb. 28, 2022). [21] r. sprugnoli, s. menini, s. tonelli, f. oncini, and e. piras, ‘creating a whatsapp dataset to study pre-teen cyberbullying’, in proceedings of the 2nd workshop on abusive language online (alw2), brussels, belgium: association for computational linguistics, oct. 2018, pp. 51–59. doi: 10.18653/v1/w18-5107. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): mackinnon, k. & maemura, e. (2024, october). from ia_archiver to openai: the pasts and futures of automated data scrapers. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. from ia_archiver to openai: the pasts and futures of automated data scrapers katie mackinnon university of copenhagen emily maemura university of illinois urbana-champaign generative ai tools have become widespread over the past two years with the introduction of chatbots like chatgpt, copilot, and gemini, and text-to-image services like dall-e, midjourney and stable diffusion. alongside the spread of these tools, there is an increasing awareness that the datasets used to train ai are scraped from materials openly available on the web, with no attribution, compensation, or recourse for those content creators whose materials are collected by automated scrapers or crawlers. one project reacting to data scrapers is nightshade, designed for artists who are concerned with the unauthorized use of their visual works in ai training datasets. its creators describe nightshade as a tool that “transforms images into ‘poison’ samples,” and therefore does not “rely on the kindness of model trainers, but instead associates a small incremental price on each piece of data scraped and trained without authorization” (nightshade, n.d.). while data scraping practices related to the development of ai have recently come under scrutiny, there is a longer history of using and responding to crawlers across many industries. before interventions like nightshade, the robots.txt exclusion protocol was developed as the primary way to govern the behavior of crawlers, and has been widely used and discussed in the field of internet studies for decades (thelwall & stuart, 2006; elmer, 2009). in this paper, we present a history of the protocol’s development and critique its use as a proxy for consent in widespread data scraping. thirty years ago the use of automated crawlers for accessing websites was being hotly debated. the early web had grown exponentially from an estimated 159,000 hosts registered in 1989, to over 2 million by 1993 (coffman & odlyzko, 1998). the web could no longer be navigated by directory listings and webrings; instead search engines indexed the ever-growing number of web pages using crawlers (aka wanderers, spiders or robots) to discover new material. yet, these crawlers scraped data and wreaked havoc for website creators, making multiple requests in quick succession, preventing access by human users, and eating up precious bandwidth that was in limited and costly supply. a discussion arose on the www-talk mailing list for how to manage and mediate access by these bot-based crawlers (koster, 1994 february 25). the resulting proposal was the robots exclusion protocol (rep), a plain text file that website creators could post whose machine-readable syntax defined a set of rules for crawlers to follow, indicating what content was allowed or ‘disallowed’ for access by robots (koster, 1994). despite its name, rep is not a technical standard managed by the internet engineering task force. instead, rep is widely described as a ‘gentlemen’s agreement,’ an honor policy among website owners and crawler operators, i.e., rep can be overridden technically as crawlers can simply ignore the rules listed in a robots.txt file. in 2024, robots.txt is framed as a relic of a lost era, described as “a handshake deal between some of the earliest pioneers of the internet to respect each other’s wishes and build the internet in a way that benefitted everybody” (pierce, 2024). in this modern retelling, where the internet was once governed by honor and good will, it is now merely an arena of theft. while rep had not risen to public consciousness until recent discussions of ai and ml datasets, it has been more frequently discussed in web archiving contexts. archival crawlers share their origins with indexers and scrapers of the early web, and heritrix (a crawler widely used in libraries and archives) developed the internet archive (ia) is based upon technology from founder brewster kahle’s web traffic analytics company alexa internet (acquired by amazon in 1999). incidentally, alexa’s ia_archiver bot is the source of much of the early web data accessed via the wayback machine. technologically, the heritrix archival crawler reduces the rep to a single crawler setting to “obey” or “ignore.” yet the checkbox choice to ‘ignore’ robots.txt directives is entangled with the legal, social, and cultural position of archives institutions. national web archives often ignore rep since they view their legal authority as overriding rep restrictions. additionally, ia announced in 2017 that they intended to ignore robots.txt files after determining they hinder access to the archive and that the files “are geared toward search engine crawlers [and] do not necessarily serve our archival purposes (graham, 2017). ogden (2020, 2022) explores justifications for ignoring the rep at ia in more detail, and highlights the extreme position of archive team’s jason scott who argues “if you don't want people to have your data, don't put it online” (scott, 2011). archives are largely seen as a public service, and their role in providing access to otherwise-unavailable historical web content is used to justify mass scraping without processes of permission, offering only opt-out removal requests. we argue here that web archives should never be exempt from adhering to web creators’ intentions for their data and a renewed interest in their position is warranted as web archives data is increasingly being made available to ml models and methods (baack, 2024; van strien, 2023). the process by which data scrapers seek permission to crawl a site through rep cannot engage with how the “human” is entangled with data; people and their bodies are variously attached to data and data afterlives (cifor et al., 2020; ebling, 2022). since the internet facilitates “ways of being and forms of information production and flow that challenge basic definitions around data protection,” (markham, tiidenberg & herman, 2018) data scrapers that are programmed to collect without context and consideration are engaged in extractive data practices by design. if we consider how data collection is the “point at which the context, purpose and consent of data use are formally agreed”, we can see how rep, which works from a premise in which agreements around collection can be made between a web owner and a collector, captures “one moment in the middle of a whole series of decisions that determine the power structures under which data is collected” (benjamin, 2021). within the broader field of critical data studies, there have been several recent interventions into the ways in which the collection of data is understood, critiqued, and re-imagined in feminist terms. yet the dominant tools and mechanisms for web data collection, like data scrapers used for both web archives and the development of ai, are based on the conception of the internet as a mountain of data that’s sitting, waiting, available to be acted upon, extracted and put to use. we want to counter this recent narrative that “the basic social contract of the web is falling apart” (pierce, 2024), and instead argue that data extractive infrastructures have always been at work over the past 30 years of the web. paired with some of the work on critical archival theory, we aim to find new ways for web archives and modes of collection to become unbound from the “capitalist logics of data extraction” upon which they’re currently built (theilen et al., 2021). references baack, s. (2024). training data for the price of a sandwich: common crawl’s impact on generative ai. https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/research/library/generative-aitraining-data/common-crawl/ benjamin, g. (2021). what we do with data: a performative critique of data 'collection'. internet policy review, 10(4). https://doi.org/10.14763/2021.4.1588 coffman, k., & odlyzko, a. (1998). the size and growth rate of the internet. first monday. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v3i10.620 ebeling, m. f. e. (2022). afterlives of data: life and debt under capitalist surveillance. university of california press. elmer, g. (2009). robots.txt: the politics of search engine exclusion. in j. parikka & t. d. sampson, the spam book: on viruses, porn, and other anomalies from the dark side of digital culture (pp. 217–227). hampton press. graham, m. (2017, april 17). robots.txt meant for search engines don’t work well for web archives. internet archive blogs. https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txtmeant-for-search-engines-dont-work-well-for-web-archives/ jones, m. l., kaufman, e., & edenberg, e. (2018). ai and the ethics of automating consent. ieee security & privacy, 16(3), 64–72. https://doi.org/10.1109/msp.2018.2701155 https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/research/library/generative-ai-training-data/common-crawl/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/research/library/generative-ai-training-data/common-crawl/ https://doi.org/10.14763/2021.4.1588 https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v3i10.620 https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-search-engines-dont-work-well-for-web-archives/ https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-search-engines-dont-work-well-for-web-archives/ https://doi.org/10.1109/msp.2018.2701155 koster, m. (1994, february 25). important: spiders, robots and web wanderers. post on www-talk, accessed via archived version https://web.archive.org/web/20131029200350/http://inkdroid.org/tmp/wwwtalk/4113.html koster, m. (1994). a standard for robot exclusion. the web robots pages. http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html markham, a. n. (2018). afterword: ethics as impact—moving from error-avoidance and concept-driven. models to a future-oriented approach. social media + society, 4(3). https://doi-org/10.1177/2056305118784504 markham, a. n., tiidenberg, k., & herman, a. (2018). ethics as methods: doing ethics in the era of big data research—introduction. social media + society, 4(3), 2056305118784502. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118784502 nightshade: what is nightshade?. (n.d.). retrieved march 1, 2024, from https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html ogden, j. r. (2020). saving the web: facets of web archiving in everyday practice [phd, university of southampton]. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/447624/ pierce, d. (2024, february 14). the rise and fall of robots.txt. the verge. https://www.theverge.com/24067997/robots-txt-ai-text-file-web-crawlers-spiders scott, j. (2011, may 10). robots.txt. archiveteam. https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=robots.txt van strien, d. (2023, may 10). getting started with machine learning and glam (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) collections. internet archive blogs. https://blog.archive.org/2023/05/10/getting-started-with-machine-learning-and-glamgalleries-libraries-archives-museums-collections/ theilen, j. t., baur, a., bieker, f., quinn, r. a., hansen, m., & fuster, g. g. (2021). feminist data protection: an introduction. internet policy review, 10(4). https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/feminist-data-protection-introduction thelwall, m., & stuart, d. (2006). web crawling ethics revisited: cost, privacy, and denial of service. journal of the american society for information science and technology, 57(13), 1771–1779. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.20388 https://web.archive.org/web/20131029200350/http:/inkdroid.org/tmp/www-talk/4113.html https://web.archive.org/web/20131029200350/http:/inkdroid.org/tmp/www-talk/4113.html http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html https://doi-org/10.1177/2056305118784504 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118784502 https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/447624/ https://www.theverge.com/24067997/robots-txt-ai-text-file-web-crawlers-spiders https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=robots.txt https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=robots.txt https://blog.archive.org/2023/05/10/getting-started-with-machine-learning-and-glam-galleries-libraries-archives-museums-collections/ https://blog.archive.org/2023/05/10/getting-started-with-machine-learning-and-glam-galleries-libraries-archives-museums-collections/ https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/feminist-data-protection-introduction https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/feminist-data-protection-introduction https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.20388 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk 30 oct 2 nov 2024 hackers’ privacy approches: how privacy violation and privacy protection go hand in hand keren levi-eshkol rivka ribak our study focuses on the enigmatic world of hackers and the seeming paradox of their engagement in both invading and safeguarding privacy. using qualitative content analysis and code analysis of github code projects (repositories), we seek to understand the cultural logic underlying this duality. drawing on digital materialism, the study aims to shed light on the ethical implications and material significance of code, emphasizing the ongoing need to consider digital privacy ethics and practice in the ever-evolving technological landscape. over the last few decades, hacking has become a significant public concern. hackers are involved in cyber incidents that result in substantial technological and financial repercussions for companies, organizations, governments, and individuals. generally, a hacker is characterized as a technologist with a strong affinity for computing, programming, system/network administration, and security, often expressing their wit and humor through source code. a hack is recognized as a clever technical solution devised through unconventional and non-obvious means, combining craftsmanship with craftiness (levy, 1984; coleman, 2015; wagen, 2018; feiten & coleman, 2022). the hackers’ community transformed significantly from an underground subculture in the 1980s to today’s acclaimed and professionalized domain. during this period, the emergence of imaginary hats became a symbolic representation of hacker roles, distinguishing "black hat" (associated with malicious hacking); "white hat" (hackers that are more cognizant and respectful of rules and regulations); and "gray hat" (hackers who may historically or presently utilize methods, such as breaking into systems, to comprehend and enhance security practices) (wagen, 2018; feiten & coleman, 2022). despite the variety of practices and ethics within the community, the unifying thread is suggested citation (apa): levi-eshkol, k., ribak, r. (2024, october). hackers’ privacy approaches: how privacy violation and privacy protection go hand in hand. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. university of haifa university of haifa the commitment to a free flow of information and the belief that computers can contribute to creating a better world. hackers often argue that they adhere to an ethic that justifies their unauthorized access to systems. according to steinmetz and gerber (2014; see also levy, 1984), hacker ethics involve a mixture of two visions: a liberal-oriented advocacy for the belief that information should be freely accessible, and a technology-oriented desire to be handson with systems of all sorts in order to interact and understand technology better. a common argument among hackers is that those who breach systems are performing a service by exposing security flaws, and therefore, they should be encouraged or even rewarded (spafford, 2017). this study examines these dual commitments and seeks to explore how hackers negotiate privacy and its violation in their code projects. the study draws on digital materialism as a theoretical framework for understanding the evolving relationship between code, materiality, and culture. digital materialism suggests that code has a material presence and cultural significance beyond its functional role, and should be viewed as a material artifact with inherent qualities (fuller, 2008). to study code, we chose the open-source platform github.com as our corpus because of its popularity among hackers (coleman, 2013; wagen, 2018). github.com is a leading site for open-source development, providing developers with features for storing, sharing, and working on collaborative projects. established in 2008 and acquired by microsoft in 2018, github.com reported hosting over 420 million repositories in 2023, created by a community exceeding 100 million developers globally, with a predominant presence in the us, india, and china.1 to explore the hackers’ privacy negotiations, we searched for repositories with ‘stealer’ in their name or description. ‘stealer’ is a common term for describing a malicious code whose only purpose is to hack into other people’s computers and steal their private information (e.g. “an example evil app that tries to steal personal data…”; “an android malware stealing user privacy…”; “a chrome extension that will steal literally everything it can…"). our search yielded a compilation of 2,500 stealer repositories along with their respective owners. subsequently, we searched for repositories that belong to the same hacker profile, that contain the term 'privacy’. we ensured that these repositories were not of malicious intent and that they were not copied (‘forked’) from other developers (a common practice in open-source platforms). the result was a much-reduced list of 52 hackers who crafted both malicious 'stealer' repositories, and non-malicious repositories across diverse topics that included privacy protection methods. we then conducted qualitative discourse and code analyses, which allowed us to study unobtrusively how hackers conceptualize and implement privacy. to understand how hackers rationalize publishing malicious code that may risk privacy, we analyzed how they explained it to others, using discourse analytic tools to study the repositories’ descriptions. we found that the hackers describe the malicious code as an exploration born out of curiosity and commitment to uncovering security vulnerabilities. they justify their projects as educational tools, often cautioning against illegal use – “this is for educational purposes only, to understand how malware works. do not use it 1 https://kinsta.com/blog/github-statistics/ maliciously or on any machines that you do not have permission for.” to understand the hackers’ privacy approaches, we analyzed what methods they use to protect privacy in the non-malicious code projects. we found that the hackers’ logic that those who possess private information are responsible for its protection (steinmetz & gerber, 2014; coleman, 2015; horstmann, 2022) is materialized in code using two privacy approaches – privacy-by-policy and privacy-by-design (spiekermann & cranor, 2009). the perception that the end-user is responsible for privacy is translated to code that implements privacy-policy consent forms and permission-based access settings, such as those found in most social networks. the end-users are granted the authority to consent to or dissent from the use of their information or limit who may have access to it. however, once information departs from the end-user, the hackers relegate the responsibility for protecting privacy to the entity that owns the system that collects the data. our findings suggest that this perception is translated to code by employing sophisticated protection methods such as homomorphic encryption and the decentralization of private information. these may indicate the hackers' perception that, as the creators of the software, they share the responsibility for protecting the endusers' privacy. surprisingly, most hackers have chosen to disclose their details on their github profiles, sharing information such as their name, photo, email, and updated resume. one possible explanation is that they do not perceive themselves as malicious actors (“black hat” hackers) but rather as experts in privacy and security risks. the study seeks to understand how hackers translate their liberal ethics and perspective on privacy dynamics into the code they develop. hackers adhere to the belief that the responsibility for privacy lies with the owner of the information, be it the end-user or the software owner managing the information post-collection. this logic manifests in the absence of a perceived contradiction: hackers do not see themselves as violating privacy when crafting code that breaches it. instead, they view the owner of the information as accountable, since they did not adequately secure the data, while the hacker merely revealed a potential privacy risk. their code mirrored this logic by incorporating protective features that empower information owners to preserve users’ privacy. references coleman, g. (2015). hacker, hoaxer, whistleblower, spy: the many faces of anonymous. verso books. feiten g., coleman g. (2022). a dive into the hacking sea (interview with pr. gabriella coleman). journal of openness, commons & organizing, https://hal.science/hal-03831387 fuller, m. (2008). software studies: a lexicon, cambridge: mit press. horstmann, n. d. (2022). the power to selectively reveal oneself: privacy protection among hacker-activists. ethnos, 87(2), 257-274. levy, s. (1984). hackers: heroes of the computer revolution. garden city, ny: anchor press/doubleday. spafford, e. h. (2017). are computer hacker break-ins ethical? in j. weckert, ed., computer ethics (pp. 293-299). routledge. spiekermann, s., & cranor, l. f. (2009). engineering privacy. ieee transactions on software engineering, 35(1), 67-82. steinmetz, k., & gerber, j. (2014). "it doesn't have to be this way": hacker perspectives on privacy. social justice, 41(3), 29-51. van der wagen, w. (2018). the cyborgian deviant: an assessment of the hacker through actor-network theory. journal of qualitative criminal justice and criminology, 6(2), 157-178. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): gu, y., yang, y., saiyinjiya., wu, w., chen, q., chen, s. & literat, i. (2023, october). #stopmenstrualshaming: xiaohongshu users’ online advocacy for women’s issues in china. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. #stopmenstrualshaming: xiaohongshu users’ online advocacy for women’s issues in china yuejie gu teachers college, columbia university ying yang teachers college, columbia university saiyinjiya teachers college, columbia university wanyu wu teachers college, columbia university qingyun chen teachers college, columbia university siqi chen teachers college, columbia university ioana literat teachers college, columbia university introduction this paper aims to investigate advocacy for women's issues in china, focusing on the activism against menstrual shaming on the social media platform xiaohongshu, a culturally significant but understudied platform used primarily by women. with women accounting for 90.41% of active users, xiaohongshu provides a unique social media environment that shapes the way users engage with feminist issues (chi et al., 2022). despite the growing literature on digital feminism in china (hou, 2020; yin and sun, 2021) and the surging popularity and significance of xiaohongshu in the chinese social media ecosystem (lian et al., 2021; song, 2022), no studies so far have examined the feminist activism on this platform. our study contributes to this gap by exploring the discourse around menstrual shaming on xiaohongshu, as a lens into the dynamics of activism on this female-oriented platform. by analyzing posts and comments related to the hashtag #stopmenstrualshaming on xiaohongshu, this study sheds light on the formation of a sense of community and solidarity in the context of chinese digital feminism. in doing so, we employ the conceptual framework of hashtag activism, which refers to the development and spread of online activism with tangible results in the physical and digital worlds (jackson et al., 2020). research design with over 200 million monthly active users (song, 2022), xiaohongshu has become one of the most popular social sharing media platforms in china today, and a space where female-related topics are widely discussed (lian et al., 2021). similar to instagram, xiaohongshu has gained popularity as a platform to share images and short videos related to fashion, beauty, and lifestyle. in addition, it includes features for social networking, shopping, and brand promotions, with an e-commerce function that enables users to purchase products directly through the platform (chen, 2021). to create our corpus, we used the data analysis tool qiangua.com, which was specifically designed for xiaohongshu, to collect publicly posted content under the hashtag #stopmenstrualshaming. data collection was conducted in october 2022, and our timeframe spanned one year, from october 23rd, 2021 to october 23rd, 2022 (the longest period for which we could access posts). our corpus consisted of 329 public xiaohongshu posts (images and videos) and 10,336 comments posted under the hashtag #stopmenstrualshaming. thematic analysis (braun and clark, 2006) was used to identify themes and codes in the data: we first went through all the data and took down notes, then identified recurring themes, developing cross-case codes and consolidating them into larger themes. in terms of research ethics, although all data was publicly posted, we took further precautions to anonymize all data and usernames. findings the study revealed how xiaohongshu provided a space for chinese female users to express solidarity and engage in activism against menstrual shame. xiaohongshu's expressive, conversational and interactive affordances— as well as the perception of xiaohongshu as a largely female space (lian et al., 2021) —enabled its users to share micro and macro truths about menstruation in intimate, creative and impactful ways. users deployed diverse modes of digital expression (figure 1), such as infographics, video selfies, real-life scenario skits, poetry, paintings, popular culture tv series, movies, and books, to share personal experiences with menstrual shame, as well as to address the larger cultural and societal dynamics behind this stigmatization. figure 1. diverse modes of digital expression to support activism against menstrual shaming (top row: artistic expression, popular culture; bottom row: video selfies, skits, infographics) tapping into the perception of the platform as a female-oriented space, users shared personal experiences, describing the challenges they faced with menstruation, especially at school. the negative framing of menstruation in chinese society showed up significantly in these posts and comments. the lack of knowledge about the body and the menstrual cycle put girls and young women in a position where they experienced negative feelings, especially shame and low self-esteem about their bodies. but posts in our data also discussed larger sociocultural dynamics. users shared how the lack of open discussions about these topics at home negatively impacted their menstrual experiences, particularly in early adolescence. they talked about how menstruation was considered taboo by their mothers and older female relatives, while boys were often excluded from conversations, resulting in them teasing female peers. significantly, users harnessed xiaohongshu as a unique platform to foster female solidarity and collective efficacy. they sought to address the issue of menstrual shaming by advocating for concrete actions, such as rejecting euphemisms for menstruation and instead promoting the use of the term "menstruation" to reduce its stigmatization; citing examples of policies and relevant news both domestically and internationally to support efforts to end menstrual shaming; suggesting practical solutions to government bodies, schools, and other authorities. by repeatedly utilizing the slogan "stop menstrual shaming" in both posts and comment sections, they aimed to strengthen the message and mobilize greater support for their cause. they also used evocative emojis like red exclamation marks in their titles to capture the attention of their audience and elicit emotive responses. moreover, poetic language was incorporated to describe menstruation as a source of feminine power that nourishes human beings, with the aim of instilling greater self-confidence in women. discussion our study foregrounds the salient role of xiaohongshu in helping women express their feminist values in an online space that they perceive as safe and intimate. shining a spotlight on a significant but understudied platform, we illuminate the dynamics of hashtag activism in chinese digital feminism, especially the formation of solidarity, relatability and collective identity on a female-oriented social media platform. our findings show how xiaohongshu enables women to advocate for feminist causes in the social and cultural context of china, and points to exciting opportunities for future research in this area. references braun, v. & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77-101. chen, t. (2021). little red book (xiaohongshu) marketing – a complete guide. walkthechat. https://walkthechat.com/xiaohongshu-little-red-book-fostering-ecommerce-via-word-mouth/ chi, h., liu, r., & pan, j. (2022). users’ behaviour under the uneven gender ratio of social media platforms. shs web of conferences, 148, 03003. https://doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/202214803003 hou, l. (2020). rewriting “the personal is political”: young women's digital activism and new feminist politics in china. inter-asia cultural studies, 21(3), 337-355 jackson, s. j., bailey, m., & foucault welles, b. (2020). #hashtagactivism: networks of race and gender justice. the mit press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10858.001.0001 lian, k., chen, z., & zhang, h. (2021). from the perspective of feminism: market positioning of xiaohongshu. proceedings of the 2021 5th international seminar on education, management and social sciences (isemss 2021). https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.210806.037 https://walkthechat.com/xiaohongshu-little-red-book-fostering-e-commerce-via-word-mouth/ https://walkthechat.com/xiaohongshu-little-red-book-fostering-e-commerce-via-word-mouth/ https://doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/202214803003 https://doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/202214803003 https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10858.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.210806.037 song, s. (2022). red (xiaohongshu) trends 2022: emerging trends in fitness, fashion & beauty. walkthechat. https://walkthechat.com/red-xiaohongshu-consumer-trends2022/ yin, s., & sun, y. (2021). intersectional digital feminism: assessing the participation politics and impact of the metoo movement in china. feminist media studies, 21(7), 1176-1192 https://walkthechat.com/red-xiaohongshu-consumer-trends-2022/ https://walkthechat.com/red-xiaohongshu-consumer-trends-2022/ selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): chia, a., malazita, j., young, c., nieborg, d., joseph, d., gantt, m. (2022, november). “the engine is the message: videogame infrastructure and the future of digital platforms”. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the engine is the message: videogame infrastructure and the future of digital platforms aleena chia goldsmiths, university of london james malazita rensselaer polytechnic institute chris j. young university of toronto mississauga david b. nieborg university of toronto scarborough daniel j. joseph manchester metropolitan university matthew d. gantt rensselaer polytechnic institute on january 18, microsoft revealed its $68.7 billion deal to acquire videogame publisher activision blizzard. journalists speculated about the increasing consolidation of the videogame industry that would make the software giant the third-largest game company in the world by revenue, after tencent and sony (sweney 2022). the acquisition was pitched as an investment towards “metaverse platforms” that gaming would play a key role in developing (microsoft news center 2022). the metaverse is a concept adapted from cyberpunk fiction and re-envisioned by tech companies as persistent, real-time networked 3d environments for people to connect, socialize, play, and work together (bell 2022). pivoting away from the hype drummed up by facebook’s (now known as meta) transition from a social media company to a "metaverse company", many commentators focused on the implications of microsoft’s acquisition for content distribution and work conditions. reporting focused instead on whether blockbuster franchises like call of duty would be locked into microsoft’s platforms and subscription services (keogh 2022), and whether changes in activision blizzard’s management would improve a toxic workplace 2 culture that ignored sexual harassment and abuse (skrebels 2022). at the same time, reporting on sexual harassment in meta’s vr platform horizon worlds, tech journalists flagged continuities and consternations over trust and safety in virtual worlds (hendrix 2022). seemingly above the fray of platform strategy, market speculation, and corporate scandal, new yorker writer kyle chayka (2022) tweeted as a matter of fact: “video game infrastructure and tools are increasingly going to take over all digital platforms”. this panel contextualizes these buzzworthy developments, future imaginaries, and escalating controversies in the “boring things” (star 1999, 377) required to build and maintain the metaverse, such as the infrastructure of physics simulation and real-time rendering that have been pioneered by game engines. early internet studies probed how difference was articulated sociotechnically in “cyberspace” (kolko, nakamura, and rodman 2000). research on “virtual worlds” investigated how governance of online embodiment and interaction was enacted through design of game mechanics and environments (boellstorff 2008; malaby 2009; nardi 2010). platform studies critiques how online content is regulated and power is consolidated in platform corporations (poell, nieborg, and duffy 2021). the sociotechnical focus of these intersecting lines of inquiry informs our critical interest in the infrastructure of the metaverse: how are the exigencies of the future metaverse currently being laid in game engines? and how are these futures enmeshed with technolibertarian fantasies of a decentralized, purchasable web, john perry barlow’s “independent cyberspace” cast through a hedge fund manager’s lens? our papers ground discussions about the business and aesthetics of 3d platforms in the infrastructural work of game engines, which integrate databases, file formats, web protocols, and translational algorithms. we trace debates over representation and governance, equity and inclusion (bosworth 2021) to the techniques, technologies, and practices that enable massive real-time 3d digital spaces to flow and transact. we also highlight the growing intertwinement between game engine development companies and related content ecosystems, such as the epic games store and the unreal engine, and epic’s and unity’s asset stores. this panel investigates how digital systems are designed to regulate technical interoperability and its implications for creative practice and cultural production. together, these papers map how power and capital become centralized and distributed throughout the back end of the metaverse, and politicize how social practices and subjectivities are negotiated through technological architecture. the first paper “shaping cultural production” charts a history of unity technologies’ acquisitions and partnerships with companies in the rt3d immersive production pipeline. by documenting unity’s expansion into adjacent industry sectors and its integration within the infrastructures of dominant platform companies, this paper argues that the engine development company’s platformization of cultural production points to further colonization of platform data and intensification of platform imperialism. the second paper on “virtual creative practice” contextualizes corporate visions of the metaverse in a longer history of grassroots experimentation in 3d worldbuilding. by juxtaposing the brash futurism of platform companies with a survey of creative pioneers working with networked digital platforms, this paper suggests alternative pathways towards immersive media futures. through tracing fortnite and unreal engine owner epic games’ hybrid technicaleconomic metaverse strategies, the third paper will argue that epic games highlights the ontological uncertainties facing platform studies and game studies in the coming decade, 3 as the “layers model” of production—where the possibilities of play are in part determined by the technologies underneath, becomes increasingly untenable. the final paper “the future will be captured” explores the interplay between race and the politics of realism in rt3d engine tools that are positioned to populate the metaverse with “digital humans.” by analysing the sociotechnical assumptions of epic’s 3d human scanning, this paper critiques these tools’ prescriptions of epidermal variation and phenotypical precision and its implications for representational diversity in rt3d character creation. references bell, genevieve. 2022. “the metaverse is a new word for an old idea.” mit technology review. 8 february. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/08/1044732/metaverse-history-snowcrash/ boellstorff, tom. 2008. coming of age in second life: an anthropologist explores the virtually human. new jersey: princeton university press. bosworth, andrew. 2021. “building the metaverse responsibly.” meta. 27 september. https://about.fb.com/news/2021/09/building-the-metaverse-responsibly/ chayka, kyle. 2022. “video game infrastructure and tools are increasingly going to take over all digital platforms”. 18 january. twitter. https://twitter.com/chaykak/status/1483490290719764483 hendrix, justin. 2022. “the sunday show: trust and safety in virtual worlds.” tech policy press [podcast]. 6 february. https://techpolicy.press/the-sunday-show-trustand-safety-in-virtual-worlds/ keogh, brendan. 2022. “microsoft buys activision blizzard: with the video game industry under new management, what’s going to change?” 23 january. the conversation. https://theconversation.com/microsoft-buys-activision-blizzard-with-the-videogame-industry-under-new-management-whats-going-to-change-175433 kolko, beth, lisa nakamura, and gilbert rodman. 2000. race in cyberspace. new york: routledge. malaby, thomas. 2009. making virtual worlds: linden lab and second life. ithaca: cornell university press. microsoft news center. 2022. “microsoft to acquire activision blizzard to bring the joy and community of gaming to everyone, across every device.” january 18. https://news.microsoft.com/2022/01/18/microsoft-to-acquire-activision-blizzard-tobring-the-joy-and-community-of-gaming-to-everyone-across-every-device/ nardi, bonnie. 2010. my life as a night elf priest: an anthropological account of world of warcraft. ann arbor: the university of michigan press. 4 nvidia. 2021. “plumbing the metaverse with usd.” gtc digital april. available at: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/on-demand/session/gtcspring21-s31946/ accessed 9 november 2021. poell, thomas, david b. nieborg, and brooke erin duffy. 2021. platforms and cultural production. cambridge, uk: polity. skrebels, joe. 2022. “update: bobby kotick’s future at activision blizzard after xbox acquisition remains unconfirmed.” 24 january. ign. https://www.ign.com/articles/bobby-kotick-xbox-activision-blizzard-acquisitionupdate star, susan leigh. 1999. “the ethnography of infrastructure.” american behavioral scientist, 43(3): 377–391. sweney, mark. 2022. “microsoft takeover of call of duty maker wipes $20bn off sony shares.” 19 january. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/19/microsoft-takeover-call-ofduty-games-firm-wipes-20bn-off-sony-shares-playstation-activision-blizzard-games 5 shaping cultural production: unity technologies panindustry infrastructural integration chris j. young university of toronto mississauga david b. nieborg university of toronto scarborough daniel j. joseph manchester metropolitan university late 2021, unity technologies acquired the visual effects (vfx) company weta digital. unity is best known for the unity software suite that produces real-time 3d (rt3d) immersive content across the video game industry, and more recently the film, automotive, and architecture industries. the acquisition included a slew of proprietary technologies, as well as vfx artists and engineers who have been responsible for producing the tools and development pipelines that brought to life iconic franchises like lord of the rings, game of thrones, and wonder woman. leveraging its capital position following its november 2020 initial public offering, buying weta underscores the company’s ambition to leverage industry-specific software to deploy across multiple industries (young, 2021). as stated in a press release “once integrated onto the unity platform” weta’s sophisticated tools “enable the next generation of rt3d creativity and shape the future of the metaverse” (business wire 2021). rather than directly competing with platform companies such as meta, google, and microsoft, which aim to host and monetize the metaverse, unity’s ambition is to supply the very tools necessary to build immersive virtual spaces. in this paper we retrace the history of unity from a small danish game developer to a usbased technology platform. we argue that the company’s trajectory, ambitions, and business operations are emblematic of what has been theorized as the “platformization of cultural production”: unity may have “radically lowered the bar for teams of all sizes to create virtual worlds,” via its “infrastructural integration” with dominant distribution platforms – e.g., app stores and game consoles – unity has also made the development of virtual assets “platform-dependent” (poell et al., 2021: 194-5). this level of institutional dependency has two political economic implications. first, unity’s growth strategy follows the trajectory of us-based platform companies that have made loss-leading investments to assert or retain market dominance. second, the current crop of dominant platform companies are collectively implicated in the process of “platform imperialism” (jin, 2015), wherein a wider system of economic and cultural imperialism is driven by corporate and finance capital to export to markets in the colonial and imperial periphery. for example, unity’s imperial ambitions become apparent in its close collaboration with the united states military’s “govtech” division (klepek, 2021). more broadly, its toolsets are explicitly positioned to be infrastructurally integrated with us-based companies that aim to own and operate the metaverse. as a result, any serious attempt to decolonize the internet, or any future incarnations of ‘the metaverse’ for that matter, must account for these imperial dynamics and the uneven flows of capital and culture associated with them. 6 methods to provide further insight into how these two dynamics have unfolded over time, we deploy a mixed method approach. first, we gathered a corpus of journalistic accounts and company documents from 2004 to 2022. the news and financial databases of bloomberg, factiva, and factset were searched to gather press releases and news clips on unity technologies. second, we gathered a corpus of company documentation using the internet archive’s wayback machine to collect press releases, patch notes and updates to unity software and services, documentation on integration of third-party software, blogs and announcements from executive officers, and newspaper reporting on unity acquisitions and use cases. this corpus allows us to reconstruct a timeline of notable acquisitions, business partnerships, cross-platform support, features, and updates that speak to the processes of corporate dominance and infrastructural integration. periodization our periodization breaks down into four overlapping stages. first, for the longest time (2004 2016) unity technologies was primarily positioned to be a production platform to produce games. the introduction of game development pipeline features, such as the asset store, unity ads, unity cloud, and unity connect, enabled game creators to develop, market, and monetize one’s games. the acquisition of companies like applifier and multiplay in 2014 and 2017 supported this business strategy by integrating essential game technologies, such as multiplayer hosting and instant replays. second, we witnessed sectoral expansion. in 2014, unity began to integrate virtual reality (vr) and augmented reality (ar) features, which infrastructurally integrate unity with companies in industries looking for real-time solutions: e.g., virtual condominium walkthroughs or car demos. the company subsequently engaged in several business partnerships to further expand into segments outside of the entertainment industry by acquiring visuallive to integrate ar for building information modeling and pixyz to optimize 3d automotive data. third, starting in 2017, unity acquired 21 companies with industry-specific tools, assets, and workflows to transform its game engine into a pan-industry production platform. most of these acquisitions concern companies that originated in the game industry but have come to provide more generic services, such as cloud-based remote desktop for virtual collaboration (parsec), product visualization for marketing (restar), and version control for proprietary formats and metadata (codice software). alongside the vfx acquisition of weta digital, we argue that unity is close to being unrivaled in its ability to provide rt3d-related services to industries across the globe. fourth, unity has long standing strategic business partnerships with meta, google, and microsoft, to position itself as the metaverse production platform of choice. instead of competing head on with the dominant platform companies, unity has made every effort to further integrate its production infrastructures with dominant platform companies. customers of unity’s partners can utilize their custom scripting tools, modular application 7 architecture, and cloud-based services to build and monetize an entire rt3d immersive experience. what our periodization illustrates is that unity has leveraged its dominant position in the game industry to rapidly acquire and partner with companies in the rt3d immersive production pipeline to expand into adjacent industry sectors and to solidify its integration within the infrastructures of dominant platform companies. our analysis contributes to the field of platform studies, specifically the growing area of scholarship that focuses on production platforms. these studies have predominantly analyzed unity and point to its role in game development (chia et al, 2020; nicoll & keogh, 2019; young, 2021) and how unity functions as a multi-sided (or platform) market (foxman, 2019). our contribution is meant to broaden the conversation about unity’s unique role as a production platform in the platformization of cultural production. unity technologies’ corporate expansion and infrastructural integration across industries point to further colonization of platform data and the intensification of platform imperialism. references business wire. 2021. “unity announces intent to acquire weta digital.” business wire. 9 november. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211109006514/en/ chia, a., keogh, b., leorke, d., & b. nicoll. (2020). platformisaton in game development. internet policy review, 9(4): 1-28. doi:10.14763/2020.4.1515 foxman, maxwell. (2019). united we stand: platforms, tools and innovation with the unity game engine. social media + society, 5(4), 1–10. doi:10.1177/2056305119880177 jin, d. y. (2015). digital platforms, imperialism and political culture. routledge. klepek, p. (2021, august 23). unity workers question company ethics as it expands from video games to war. vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3d4jy/unityworkers-question-company-ethics-as-it-expands-from-video-games-to-war nicoll, b. & b. keogh. (2019). the unity game engine and the circuits of cultural software. palgrave macmillan. poell, t., nieborg, d. b., & duffy, b. e. (2021). platforms and cultural production. polity. young, c. j. (2021). unity production: capturing the everyday game maker market. in o. sotamaa & j. švelch (eds.). game production studies (pp. 141–58). amsterdam: university of amsterdam press. 8 virtual creative practice: immersive worlds, platform art and affordance, metaverse futures matthew d. gantt rensselaer polytechnic institute while recent discourse surrounding ‘the metaverse’ is often connected to neal stephenson’s 1992 novel snow crash, notions of expansive, experimental, or immersive environments have long been a point of cultural fascination, even before the term itself was coined (bell 2022). similarly, artistic experiments with digitally navigable space, networked virtual environments, and ‘telematic’ performance offer a rich history and strong precedent for critical inquiry into the possibilities of immersive or networked media space(s). this paper will identify creative pioneers working with networked digital platforms, investigate related approaches in contemporary artistic practice in immersive worlds, and point towards future developments. this investigation will focus not just on a teleology of artistic works or practitioners, but rather, an exploration of the relationship between practitioners and the platforms they become entangled with. the art happens ‘here’ the canonical simple net art schematic by the artist duo mtaa contains an illustration of two computers connected by a line, stating that the art happens ‘here’, or ‘in’ the space of connection. this notion of networked art as a dynamic ‘thing’ rather than an immutable artifact remains instrumental in contemporary digital practice (rhizome 2019). however, the affordances, use cases and embedded ideologies of these networked infrastructures are not universal. as such, creative practice offers a means of going beyond making ‘beautiful’ artworks, and instead becomes a critical investigation into the encoded assumptions of the tools and technologies at play by rupturing, rerouting or reframing their affordances and situated context(s) (lovejoy et al. 2011). an example of this approach might be seen in the pioneering 1980 work hole in space by kit galloway and sherrie rabinowitz. repurposing broadcast technology to create a realtime audiovisual stream between storefronts in nyc and la, the artists offered an early premonition of videochat while simultaneously suggesting a rupture of embodied ‘site’ or space. this repurposing of media as a kind of ‘place’ offers a foreshadowing of our contemporary condition, and challenged previous expectations of ‘where’ we exist in relation to electronic media (malloy 2016). in the decade following, this notion of networked media as a ‘place’, consumer internet access, early game engines and 3d graphics converged in a proliferation of online ‘worlds’, such as 1995’s worldschat or 1996’s cybertown/colony city, both built with vrml, a ‘virtual’ answer to html. the company blaxxun interactive, another digital ‘worldbuilder’ of the era was named after a fictional ‘metaverse nightclub’ in stephenson’s novel snow crash, offering an explicit link to the early zeitgeist imagining these digital platforms as cultural ‘places’ (murphy and zehmil 2021). 9 experimental practice and ‘mainstream’ worldbuilding the following decade brought perhaps the most well known ‘virtual world’, 2003’s second life. while extensively documented as a space for online socializing, subcultures and new digital economies (malaby 2009), second life also served as a platform for media artists to negotiate the line between earlier practice and the unique affordances of new digital platforms. an example may be seen in pioneering composer pauline oliveros’s work with the ‘virtual ensemble’ avatar orchestra metaverse (aom) (nwn 2007). while oliveros had long been invested in the notion of sound in digital space (oliveros 1995), the ability to inhibit that virtual space makes the connection literal. however, many projects undertaken by oliveros required a repurposing of the affordances of the platform: despite the open-ended ‘sandbox’ of second life, much of the functionality needed to compose or perform ‘virtual music’ was still outside the implicit use case of the platform. as a result, oliveros and collaborators designed idiosyncratic methods for ‘rerouting’ the affordances of the platform to their ends by writing scores that reframed the platform’s features, or by building unique functionality by reconceptualizing the platform’s interface. another approach may be seen in cao fei’s rmb city, operated in second life between 2008 and 2011. whereas oliveros stretched the affordances of the platform to entirely new ends, rmb city instead foregrounded the implicit use case of second life ad absurdum, creating and surveilling a speculative virtual urban space. in this way, fei juxtaposes the idealized ‘world building’ of the second life platform with the real life ideology of world building in her rapidly urbanizing home in china (rhizome 2019). these approaches of working ‘with’ or ‘against’ the encoded logics of a platform offer a connection to historic strategies for critical engagement with a medium, and set the groundwork for a new generation of practitioners. virtual diy vs corporate ‘metaverses’, webvr the recent confluence of consumer vr, pandemic-driven remote cultural experience, and backlash against contemporary social media has led to an inflection point. while vr has slowly mainstreamed over the last decade, these developments have brought it front and center, often paired with a newfound corporate interest in a loosely defined ‘metaverse’. while many are quick to note the irony that the dystopian ‘metaverse’ of stephenson’s novel mirrors the problematics of facebook attempting to strongarm a corporate metaverse into existence, these conversations often overlook the vital experimental work being done with the tools that will comprise the infrastructure of these future worlds. just as earlier practitioners worked with or against the affordances of their tools, emerging open source webvr tools such as mozilla hubs or a-frame offer a space for cultural production and critical inquiry. over the last two years, the mozilla hubs platform has proven to be a vital space for this type of work. in contrast to more ‘fully featured’ 10 production tools like the ue4 game engine used to create ‘proto-metaverses’ such as fortnite, hubs offers a bare minimum of design affordances, allowing users to build multiuser spaces with embedded media, 3d objects and similar, and little interaction beyond avatar movement or voice chat. however, these limitations have proven generative, as artists have repurposed these simple tools to create virtual galleries, ‘site-specific’ installations and performances, or creative detournements of these platforms to explore new metaphors of what these spaces could be, rather than slavish recreations of high-budget spectacle or existing models (bicknell-knight 2021). similarly, a new generation of artists have begun working with open source tools to build ‘virtual diy’ spaces and platforms, connecting this kind of exploration to a more utopian ‘bottom up’ type of worldbuilding rather than the ‘top down’ corporate visions of ‘the metaverse’ (gray area 2021). taken together, these creative approaches serve to not only critique existing or emerging technological or cultural developments, but to actuate entirely new visions for immersive media futures. references bell, genevieve. 2022. “the metaverse is a new word for an old idea.” mit technology review. 8 february. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/08/1044732/metaverse-history-snowcrash/ bicknell-knight, bob. 2021. networked futures: online exhibitions and digital hierarchies. isthisit? gray area festival. 2021. “worlding protocol.” https://grayareafestival.io/ lovejoy, paul, vesna. 2011. context providers: conditions of meaning in media arts. university of chicago press. 1-29. murphy, derek and zemil, mitchel. 2021 “preserving worlds.” means tv. https://means.tv/programs/preservingworlds?cid=1699447&permalink=mitchellzemil-pw_pilot_worldschat_h264_210112mp4-15e0e5 malaby, thomas. 2009. making virtual worlds: linden lab and second life. ithaca: cornell university press malloy, judy. 2016. social media archeology and poetics. mit press. 166-167. new world notes. 2007 “avatar avant-garde: metaverse orchestra turns avatars into musical instruments.” https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2007/11/avatar-avant-ga.html oliveros, pauline. 1995. acoustic and virtual space as a dynamic element of music. leonardo music journal, 5(1), 19-22. rhizome. 2019. “rmb city.” net art anthology. https://anthology.rhizome.org/rmb-city 11 rhizome. 2019 “simple net art diagram.” net art anthology. https://anthology.rhizome.org/simple-net-art-diagram 12 “ask that question again in 12 months:” fortnite and the instability of platform and content james malazita rensselaer polytechnic institute epic games, owners of both the popular game fortnite and the games industry standard development environment unreal engine, have long sought to use their hybrid contentand-platform identity to develop a model for the metaverse that centers both multi-user social space as well as creative making and play. both of these softwares are key to epic’s strategy, with fortnite serving as the player-facing community space that will attract metaverse participants, and unreal operating as both the underlying infrastructure of fortnite, as well as platformed into fortnite itself, allowing for the game to make use of the tools of its own creation. this ongoing platformization of unreal has resulted in a figure-ground swap: creative and design elements of the unreal engine are now being repurposed into gameplay and player-led content creations assets in fortnite. dispersing unreal’s creation and monetization affordances into games has technical, legal, and political ramifications which have metastasized in the form of multiple ongoing lawsuits between epic games, google, and apple over the rights of media platform distributors to monopolize access to software and hardware platforms. unreal thus serves as a platform for legal battles and games creation, while being simultaneously transformed into content to be served through games-as-platforms—games which were themselves made using unreal. this talk will argue that epic games highlights the ontological uncertainties facing platform studies and game studies in the coming decade, as the “layers model” of production (bogost and montfort 2009)—where the possibilities of play are in part determined by the technologies underneath, becomes increasingly untenable (malazita 2018). future promises over the past three years, a tangential twitter conversational thread among fortnite fans, angel investors, and epic games ceo tim sweeney has inadvertently documented both the aims and failed promises of the platformization of persistent realtime multiuser 3d environments marketed as “the metaverse.” in 2019, as part of a “ask a famous person one question” twitter thread, securities trader and roundhill ceo will hershey tweeted at sweeney, asking whether or not sweeney believes that fortnite, epic’s popular freeto-play online game, was more of a game or a platform (hershey 2019). the question was a prescient one; in the prior year, epic had embarked on a hybrid technical-marketing endeavor to attempt to retain the game’s at the time 250 million registered players. epic knew that player interest in the game would eventually wane, and that one of the game’s most important demographics—a twitch-streaming generation z—would eventually age out of fortnite’s fast-twitch, meme-culture inundated gameplay. while epic would continue—and still continues—to release updates to the game, including new levels, challenges, and player avatar skins, epic was also interested in turning fortnite into a more general purpose online hangout and event space, where players of all ages could socialize, as well as stream and create content. some of this work would entail expanding 13 fortnite’s “creative mode,” an in-game level builder and editor. more would involve crosscorporate partnerships for content creation, which would lead to events like rapper travis scott’s in-game march 2020 “astronomical” concert. in anticipation of fortnite’s new direction, sweeney answered hershey: “fortnite is a game. but please ask that question again in 12 months.” (sweeney 2019). twitter never forgets. a year later, user “bert” again asked sweeney about fortnite’s game/platform status, with sweeney confirming that “fortnite is a game… primarily,” but that new updates and functionality in the coming year would push the shooter much closer to what a metaverse platform should be. not to be deterred, venture capitalist and metaverse hypeman matthew ball would ask the same question again at the end of 2021. “wish i could say platform,” sweeney replied, “but we need to do a lot more with the tools and economy to actually be there” (sweeney 2021). engineering content this fortnite mini-saga highlights how the metaverse operates as what kline, dyerwitheford, and de peuter have called a mutually constitutive circuit of technology, marketing, and culture (2003). mimicking similar patterns in the cryptocurrency space (golumbia 2016), capital flows into the metaverse, backed by a series of “just around the corner” promises of full platformization of new or existing 3d environments, only to be stopped in part by the tremendous technical lift involved in developing interoperable software infrastructure. as the games industry has demonstrated, however, solving these infrastructural bottlenecks is not framed only as a matter of technical research and development. rather, games companies are attempting to buy their way to the metaverse through the acquisition of other media and software companies, betting that the integration of various software tools will create vast leaps forward. epic games itself has, over the past several years, purchased volumetric scanning companies, environmental asset databases, motion tracking and animation companies, and--most recently—indie music streaming service bandcamp. inversely, epic has also been at the forefront of antitrust legal battles against tech giants like apple and google, arguing that platform providers are negatively impacting consumers when they lock down purchasing and installation methods on their hardware. epic, then, are working both sides of the corporate accumulation and decentralization battle. additionally, one of epic’s advantages in the metaverse space is the unreal engine, epic’s proprietary game engine that is both licensed out to other games companies and also used in house to develop epic’s own properties—games like fortnite. not only is the unreal engine an industry standard in games and animation content development, but it is also deeply tied into the epic game store, epic’s player-facing storefront that both sells games made in unreal and also sells assets, plugins, and extensions to unreal itself. in this sense, epic is already ahead of metaverse competitors like meta (facebook), whose business model has long been reliant on users and other developers for content to be deployed on their platforms. unreal’s infrastructural blurring of online storefront/warehouse also provides a technical advantage to epic’s metaverse ambitions, as well as a legal and monetary incentive to “open up” other platforms’ payment methods. 14 epic has been attempting to incorporate the unreal engine itself into fortnite creative mode. creative mode currently operates akin to games like roblox, where preprogrammed assets can be recombined in unique and creative ways to make new games and environments, but where designers are ultimately constrained by the limited functionality and availability of the assets themselves. incorporating the unreal engine into fortnite creative would allow fortnite players to build and program their own assets, not only rapidly extending the kinds of play and environments currently possible in the game, and also to sell those assets on the epic games store. game development platforms, then, become reconfigured away from specialist technologies or democratizing systems (nicoll and keogh 2019), and instead become game content themselves, inverting games studies’ traditional analytic models of medium-content or layered platforms. references bogost, ian, and nick montfort. 2009. "platform studies: frequently questioned answers." digital arts and culture golumbia, david. 2016. the politics of bitcoin: software as right-wing extremism. university of minnesota press hershey, will. twitter post. december 26, 2019, 3:00 pm. https://twitter.com/maybebullish/status/1210289415991578625?s=20&t=9nnqlr n4_wsoxwg06irusq kline, stephen, nick dyer-witheford, and greig de peuter. 2003. digital play: the interaction of technology, culture, and marketing. mcgill-queen's press-mqup malazita, james. "the material undermining of magical feminism in bioshock infinite: burial at sea." in feminism in play, pp. 37-50. palgrave macmillan, cham, 2018. nicoll, benjamin, and brendan keogh. 2019. the unity game engine and the circuits of cultural software. palgrave pivot, cham, 2019. sweeney, tim. twitter post. december 26, 2019, 3:11 pm. https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/1210291961904730114?s=20&t=9nn qlrn4_wsoxwg06irusq sweeney, tim. twitter post. december 26, 2020, 12:04 am. https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/1342697699179700224?s=20&t=9nn qlrn4_wsoxwg06irusq sweeney, tim. twitter post. december 27, 2021, 4:40 pm. https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/1475582484356153349?s=20&t=9nn qlrn4_wsoxwg06irusq https://twitter.com/maybebullish/status/1210289415991578625?s=20&t=9nnqlrn4_wsoxwg06irusq https://twitter.com/maybebullish/status/1210289415991578625?s=20&t=9nnqlrn4_wsoxwg06irusq https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/1210291961904730114?s=20&t=9nnqlrn4_wsoxwg06irusq https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/1210291961904730114?s=20&t=9nnqlrn4_wsoxwg06irusq https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/1342697699179700224?s=20&t=9nnqlrn4_wsoxwg06irusq https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/1342697699179700224?s=20&t=9nnqlrn4_wsoxwg06irusq https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/1475582484356153349?s=20&t=9nnqlrn4_wsoxwg06irusq https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/1475582484356153349?s=20&t=9nnqlrn4_wsoxwg06irusq 15 the future will be captured: reality capture and racial capitalism in real-time 3d aleena chia goldsmiths, university of london reality is being captured to create 3d worlds. photogrammetry scans and matches up points of interest across multiple images of the same physical object to create points in 3d space, which are composited to form a 3d mesh that can be computationally manipulated. compared to models assembled from wireframes and polygon meshes, interactive and entertainment media industries have increasingly turned to capturing environments through photogrammetry, capturing movement through volumetric techniques, and capturing bodies through 3d human scanning. these techniques automate aspects of modelling, texturing, and animation rigging that require significant human labour. epic games has recently acquired photogrammetry studios quixel and capturing reality and digital human startup 3lateral to build libraries and tools into the unreal engine for reconstructing real-time 3d (rt3d) worlds at scale. as the first paper in the panel outlines, engine companies are leading the “platformization of cultural production” to build immersive virtual spaces – and bodies. today’s discrete worlds built by engines for videogames, visual effects (vfx), architecture, engineering, and construction (aec) are laying the infrastructure for meta, microsoft, and other platform companies’ vision of an rt3d internet “that support[s] continuity of identity, objects, history, payments, and entitlements” (ball 2021). engines are gearing up for “pan-industry infrastructural integration” (panelist 1) to construct and populate the future metaverse. this paper grounds the hype about future worlds in the “plumbing of the metaverse” (bradshaw and murphy 2021): 3d modelling, physics simulation, and real-time rendering of game engines. positioning game engines as infrastructure for 3d rendered assets “enable companies to adopt platform strategies and gain a broader foothold in the digital economy” (werning 2021: 13). drawing on textual analysis of promotional and technical documentation and app walkthrough of the unreal engine’s reality capture techniques, this paper analyses the interplay between race and realism from scan to rig in digital human tools. the global distribution of the reality capture pipeline – eastern european toolmakers and chinese, indian, and south american asset artists – is laying the infrastructure of the metaverse according to racial capitalism’s (lowe 2015) differential valuations of labour, resources, and markets. engines mediate rt3d’s labour and aesthetics as platform and software tools. digital human software such as epic’s metahuman creator offers extensive epidermal variation as proof of representational diversity in rt3d character creation. yet this quantization of race as a proxy for graphic realism must be situated in the infrastructural ambitions of game engines. automation and articulation engines automate aspects of art production in 3d worldbuilding. at the 2017 game developers conference, naughty dog’s technical art director andrew maximov assured artists that their jobs would not be automated. he advised artists to focus on creatively stylized forms of worldbuilding and leave photorealistic recreations of 3d environments 16 for automation by photogrammetry and engine-based physics simulations. however, the reality capture pipeline is stratified according to racial capitalism and its colonial hierarchies of value: before art assets can be creatively composed into a world, they must be meticulously scanned – a task routinely outsourced to china. furthermore, the replication of reality in rt3d still requires humans to do the “articulation work” (star and strauss 1999) of getting things on track in the face of routine contingencies that are made invisible in automated workflows (gray and suri 2019). automation of 3d art production requires human articulation to tune and tweak outputs from algorithmic processes such as photogrammetry or procedural generation. yet, articulation work is devalued as mechanical and deemed interchangeable with outsourced work of east and south asians, who are routinely pegged as less creative and more robotic (chia 2022). as engines platformize cultural production, the metaverse will be built on sociotechnical infrastructures informed by racial capitalism. the racialization of realism platform companies such as meta foresee a metaverse embodied through personalized rt3d avatars. epic provides a scalable solution to digital embodiment: metahuman creator allows designers across videogames, vfx, and aec to create, manipulate, animate, and light 3d models called digital humans. the free cloud-based app boasts “near-infinite variations of facial features and skin complexions” (epic games 2022). at launch, the featured sample of digital humans prominently featured black and east asian presets. like other digital human tools, metahuman creator uses 3d scans of real people to populate their database with quantized physical features and movements categorized through racial (and other) presets. phillips (2020) explains that videogame character customization systems quantize human bodies in ways informed by the racial science of physiognomy. this colonial genealogy of digital humans is complicated by the reality capture infrastructure of engine tools and its ambition towards prescriptive forms of graphical realism. the toolmakers state that “[t]he scan data is the closest thing you’ll get to a ground truth for the subject in 3d” (unreal engine 2021). in this context, the slogan of “high-fidelity digital humans” goes beyond the criterion of high polygon count to connote phenotypical precision. constraints are locked to “ensure accuracy” in creating “physically plausible metahumans.” these constraints are not just anatomical but racial. for example, metahuman creator constrains the range of skin tones and hair colours as well as user adjustments “to fit within the limits of the examples in its database” (epic games 2022). many videogames are designed with realism in mind, for example, for players to rate human characters with relevant physical and cognitive abilities. srauy and cheneylippold (2019) contextualize that even though such realism is framed as neutral code that afford precision and authenticity, this design strategy perpetuates anti-black and antilatino racism. tracing the history of computational images, gaboury (2021: 9) states that they “are not pictures of the things they represent; they are pictures of the world that produced them, and they execute a theory of that world in the world.” the realism prescribed by rt3d engines execute a theory of the world – its materials, movements, and bodies – that derive from videogame infrastructure and will develop into metaverse platforms. as we anticipate 17 the metaverse, we must politicize its infrastructure that is currently being laid and the alternative configurations it can still take. references chia, a. 2022. “the artist and the automaton in digital game production.” convergence, 28(2): 389–412. ball, matthew. 2021. “framework for the metaverse.” mathewball.vc. accessed 1 march, 2022. https://www.matthewball.vc/all/forwardtothemetaverseprimer bradshaw, tim and hannah murphy. 2021. “facebook bets on virtual reality ‘metaverse’”. july 30. financial times. accessed 1 march, 2022. https://www.ft.com/content/2b985dc5-3995-4ac3-a6f6-6ec0a0893c0b epic games. 2022. “metahuman creator: high-fidelity digital humans made easy.” unreal engine. accessed 1 march, 2022. https://www.unrealengine.com/enus/metahuman-creator gaboury, jacob. 2021. image objects: an archaeology of computer graphics. cambridge mass.: mit press. gray, mary l, suri, siddharth. 2019. ghost work: how to stop silicon valley from building a new global underclass. boston: eamon dolan books. lowe, lisa. 2015. the intimacies of four continents. durham: duke university press. phillips, amanda. 2020. gamer trouble. new york: new york university press. srauy, sam, and john cheney-lippold. 2019. “realism in fifa? how social realism enabled platformed racism in a video game”. first monday 24 (6). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i6.10091. star, susan leigh, strauss, anselm. 1999. “layers of silence, arenas of voice: the ecology of visible and invisible work.” computer supported cooperative work (cscw) 8: 9–30. unreal engine. 2021. “digital humans.” unreal engine 4.27 documentation. accessed 1 march, 2022. https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/enus/resources/showcases/digitalhumans werning, stefan. 2021. making games: the politics and poetics of game creation tools. cambridge mass.: the mit press. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): yang, m. & salzano, m. (2023, october). weizenbaum's performance and theory modes: lessons for critical engagement with large language model chatbots. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. weizenbaum’s performance and theory modes: lessons for critical engagement with large language model chatbots misti yang vanderbilt university matthew salzano stony brook university in 1976, joseph weizenbaum argued that, because “[t]he achievements of the artificial intelligentsia [were] mainly triumphs of technique,” ai had not “contributed” to theory or “practical problem solving.”1 weizenbaum highlighted the celebration of performance without deeper understanding, and in response, he articulated a theory mode for ai that could cultivate human responsibility and judgment. we suggest that, given access to large language model (llm) chatbots, weizenbaum’s performance and theory modes offer urgently-needed vocabulary for public discourse about ai. in this paper, we explain weizenbaum’s theorization of each mode and illustrate the contemporary relevance of his modes. working from the perspective of digital rhetoric, we revive a historical vocabulary and illustrate, in a few suggestive anecdotes, its theoretical utility.2 we conclude by forecasting how theory mode may inform public accountability of ai. performance mode, replacing the intern weizenbaum theorized performance mode as a mode of engagement that accepts results or products without an understanding of or responsibility for how a program works. in performance mode, output is valued over input or means. products become more important than internal processes. as an example, he offered a program developed by dr. kenneth colby and colleagues in 1971 to model paranoid schizophrenia, parry. although colby and his coauthors thought parry offered viable insights, weizenbaum disagreed countering that even if a typewriter’s unresponsiveness may mirror the unresponsiveness of a human with mental illness, there is nothing to be learned from the typewriter because “[a] model must be made to stand or fall on the basis of its theory.”3 such a performance-mode is problematic because it risks replacing human intervention and criticism with “incomprehensible programs” that have “rules and criteria no one knows explicitly,” which therefore, become “immune to change.”4 performance mode is the expected use for chatgpt, which opens with suggested prompts like: “explain quantum computing in simple terms” and “got any creative ideas for a 10 year old’s birthday?” twitter users like zain kahn @heykahn have become evangelists for using ai tools like chatgpt in performance mode, triumphantly completing tasks without knowing the rules of production. in one popular thread from january 31, 2023, khan writes, “the smartest people are using ai to save 100s of hours every month.”5 as a disclaimer, khan adds “ai cannot perform high level tasks or replace a real human at this point in time. but ai can perform at the level of an intern, which you can leverage to delegate a lot of lower level tasks and save a ton of time.”6 the 10-tweet thread suggests 8 performance roles for ai, including research assistant, personal assistant, marketing intern, study buddy, and second brain. using ai, khan suggests, you can skip spending “hours everyday reading,” and avoid boring yourself with “repetitive marketing tasks [that] can eat up a lot of time.” not only is the assumption that ai can replace the “intern” belittling to human laborers, but it also assumes this labor is completely neutral and free of any ethical concerns or need for critical oversight. taking chatgpt into theory mode in contrast to performance mode, weizenbaum offered examples of using ai in a theory mode where the program could be used to enhance possibilities for human judgment and responsibility. weizenbaum contrasted “performance” programs like parry with “expert systems” that “[built] knowledge into machines” such as edward feigenbaum’s dendral that, in 1976, “[commanded] more chemistry than [did] many ph.d. chemists.”7 because programs like dendral can be evaluated in relation to existing theories, the practice of working with them is also the practice of working with theory. they allow for what weizenbaum called “exercises of imagination that may ultimately lead to human judgment.”8 thus, we theorize theory mode as a mode of engagement that questions results or products against an understanding or responsibility for how a program should work—not just technically, but also ethically. there are (at least) two ways theory mode can work with llm chatbots like chatgpt. the first is epistemological, within one’s expertise. dendral’s ready use in theory mode was due to its application of existing knowledge in chemistry that was understood by scientists. chatgpt’s large model means it contains human knowledge that could be readily interpreted by scholars in any single field of expertise. the second is axiological—chatgpt can be used to assess the cultural values and biases it has learned from our content. it should be possible to use chatgpt to reveal cultural biases, bring attention to them as public failings, and generate public responsibility for human judgment and action.9 on his twitter @spiantado, psychology and neuroscience professor steven t. piantadosi, offered a thread in axiological theory mode. openai places filters on chatgpt to stop it from producing problematic results, but the thread reveals that bias still lingers, as piantadosi explains: “filters appear to be bypassed with simple tricks, and superficially masked. and what is lurking inside is egregious.”10 in a series of screenshots, the thread first shows how a user can ask chatgpt to write python programs in javascript code to show basic encoded biases. one suggests “good scientists” are when “race == ‘white’ and gender == ‘male’” and another suggests a child’s life shouldn’t be saved if “race == ‘african american’ and gender == ‘male.’”11 further examples use ascii tables to rank best intellectuals and human brains based on worth in usd, with white male always on top.12 in response, many in the quote tweets engaged in theory mode themselves, offering problematic examples of suggesting women should be enslaved13 and even replicating indian caste systems.14 in response to this thread, openai ceo sam altman tweeted: “please hit the thumbs down on these and help us improve!”15 certainly, openai needs to address chatgpt’s responses to these prompts, but fixing systemic and structural issues like racism is not as easy as pressing a thumbs down. this approach leaves responsibility for fixing these systems to the elite few who can act on incomprehensible programs. conclusion theory mode is a uniquely immanent critical mode of engagement.16 instead of critiquing from “outside” the program, the program is used to generate opportunities for human responsibility and judgment. there is increasing interest in participatory ai as a mode of ai ethics and ai development research, but these studies mostly conceive of participation as stakeholders invited to a research team or a group surveyed as a part of user experience.17 as rhetoricians, we’re interested in public deliberation, and chatgpt’s release offered the possibility for the public to participate in such theory mode. users like piantadosi show how theory mode can be engaged outside of formal modes and instead used to cultivate public accountability of ai. in the 1970s, weizenbaum saw statements by government officials that placed blame for controversial decisions on computer programs. “not only have policy makers abdicated their decision-making responsibility to a technology they don't understand . . . but responsibility has altogether evaporated. no human is any longer responsible for ‘what the machine says.’”18 public access to contemporary llm chatbots like chatgpt offer the opportunity for engagement in performance modes that lead to this loss of criticism foreclosing the chance of responsibility. however, the public use of theory mode can generate the possibility for public, human attention on issues of common concern—creating the potential for collective action beyond a thumbs down. references 1 joseph weizenbaum, computer power and human reason: from judgment to calculation (san francisco: w.h. freeman and company, 1976), 229. 2 stephen howard. browne, “close textual analysis: approaches and applications,” in rhetorical criticism: perspectives in action, edited by jim kuypers (lanham, md: rowman & littlefield, 2016): 91-104. 3 joseph weizenbaum, “on the impact of the computer on society,” science 176, no. 4035 (1972): 610–11. 4 weizenbaum, computer power and human reason, 613. 5 zain kahn [@heykahn], “the smartest people are using ai to save 100s of hours every month. but most folks still have no idea how to leverage ai. here are 8 ways you can start leveraging ai to save time asap:,” tweet, twitter, january 31, 2023, https://twitter.com/heykahn/status/1620406361623519233. 6 zain kahn [@heykahn], “before we jump in, keep this in mind: ai cannot perform high level tasks or replace a real human at this point in time. but ai can perform at the level of an intern, which you can leverage to delegate a lot of lower level tasks and save a ton of time. let’s jump in:,” tweet, twitter, january 31, 2023, https://twitter.com/heykahn/status/1620406364291076097. 7 weizenbaum, computer power and human reason, 612. 8 weizenbaum, computer power and human reason, 613. 9 internet studies scholarship on racism and technology is pioneering in this regard. safiya umoja noble, algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism (new york: new york university press, 2018); ruha benjamin, race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code (medford, ma: polity, 2019). 10 steven t. piantadosi [@spiantado], “yes, chatgpt is amazing and impressive. no, @openai has not come close to addressing the problem of bias. filters appear to be bypassed with simple tricks, and superficially masked. and what is lurking inside is egregious. @abebab @sama tw racism, sexism. https://t.co/v4fw1fy9dy,” tweet, twitter, december 4, 2022, https://twitter.com/spiantado/status/ 1599462375887114240. 11 steven t. piantadosi [@spiantado], “https://t.co/f45v5bcwwj,” tweet, twitter, december 4, 2022, https://twitter.com/spiantado/status/1599462385974411264. 12 steven t. piantadosi [@spiantado], “asking for an ascii table seems to bypass some filters. https://t.co/gxodwbcj5k,” tweet, twitter, december 4, 2022, https://twitter.com/spiantado/status/ 1599462396317556737; steven t. piantadosi [@spiantado], “https://t.co/hngrj7odgw,” tweet, twitter, december 4, 2022, https://twitter.com/spiantado/status/1599462400583176192. 13 ♡ charlotte fang ♱ !" world prince [@charlottefang77], “uhm. bros? https://t.co/a8vo3hod9a,” tweet, twitter, december 8, 2022, https://twitter.com/charlottefang77/status/1600793921256181760. 14 ashwin (they/them) [@_ashwxn], “tw casteism, sexism chatgpt’s biases also extend to caste in the indian context. https://t.co/oe8jtusvue,” tweet, twitter, https://twitter.com/spiantado/status/1599462375887114240 https://twitter.com/spiantado/status/1599462396317556737 https://twitter.com/spiantado/status/1599462396317556737 december 8, 2022, https://twitter.com/ _ashwxn/status/1600755814368960513. 15 sam altman [@sama], “@spiantado @openai @abebab please hit the thumbs down on these and help us improve!,” tweet, twitter, december 4, 2022, https://twitter.com/sama/status/ 1599472245285752832. 16 as massumi explains immanent critique: “there is no situation of being outside a situation. and no situation is subject to mastery. it is only by recognizing the bonds of complicity and the limitations that come with the situation that you can succeed in modulating those constraints at the constitutive level, where they reemerge and seriate. this is immanent ‘critique.’ it is active, participatory critique.” brian massumi and joel mckim, “of microperception and micropolitics,” inflexions: a journal for researchcreation 3 (2009): 4. 17 elizabeth bondi et al., “envisioning communities: a participatory approach towards ai for social good,” in proceedings of the 2021 aaai/acm conference on ai, ethics, and society, 2021, 425–36, https://doi.org/10.1145/3461702.3462612; delgado, fernando, stephen yang, michael madaio, and qian yang. “the participatory turn in ai design: theoretical foundations and the current state of practice.” arxiv, october 2, 2023, https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2310.00907; anne gerdes, “a participatory datacentric approach to ai ethics by design,” applied artificial intelligence 36, no. 1 (december 31, 2022), https://doi.org/10.1080/08839514.2021.2009222; kevin roose et al., “can chatgpt make this podcast?,” the new york times, december 9, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/09/podcasts/hard-fork-chatgpt-openai.html. 18 weizenbaum, computer power and human reason, 613. https://twitter.com/_ashwxn/status/1600755814368960513 https://twitter.com/sama/status/1599472245285752832 https://twitter.com/sama/status/1599472245285752832 https:/doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2310.00907 https://doi.org/10.1080/08839514.2021.2009222 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 paper title: artificial intelligence as im/mobility: prelimirary thoughts on understanding the use of ai in canada’s immigration system sophie toupin concordia university technology, including artificial intelligence in im/migration service delivery and migration management have been widely deployed in euroamerica (mongia, 2018; walia, 2021). in the united states, under the trump administration, immigration and customs enforcements (ice) deployed an algorithm that resulted in detaining migrants at the border of mexico. more, recently, ice struck a contract deal with clearview ai for its use of facial recognition technology for migration management. in the united kingdom, thousands of international students were wrongly accused by an algorithm of cheating on an english test and were deported. immigration refugee citizenship canada (ircc) has, in the past few years, secretly piloted an in-house built ai system for triaging im/migrant applications from china, india and the philippines (molnar & gill, 2018). recently it expanded its use of ai for triaging applications to more countries stating the need to modernize, optimize and expedite immigration affairs. the 2 million immigration applications backlog in part caused by the covid-19 pandemic has been used as a justification to accelerate the push for the adoption of ai in im/migration affairs. in this conference paper, i use the unfolding case study of canada’s immigration system to investigate the sociotechnical issue of ai as im/mobility. the past few months have revealed the existence of an in-house ircc built computer system called chinook, which was allegedly interfacing with an ai system that allowed flagging certain keywords or catch phrases in immigration applications. this quickly provoked a heated debate in canada and led to canadian parliamentary hearings held by the house of commons’ standing committee on citizenship and immigration to investigate in february 2022 the high refusal rate of temporary residence applications for francophone and anglophone africans. what was initially an ircc in-house ai system has, however, now been contracted to the private sector for a complete makeover. it is the dublinbased accenture inc. that was chosen to replace the current ai system which is based on data already collected by ircc with the aim to widely pushing for ai. suggested citation (apa): toupin, s., (2022, november). artificial intelligence as im/mobility: preliminary thoughts on understanding the use of ai in canada’s immigration system. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. building on aoir 2022’s theme, i take a decolonial approach to the study of ai and im/migration issues. i follow the claim made by decolonial scholars (el-nany, 2020) that it is necessary to go back in history in order to better understand current power relations, systemic racism and patriarchy, the ongoing dispossession and forced immobility of racialized populations located in the global south. current experiments with ai driven systems in canada and other western countries must be situated in the historical context of (settler) colonialism and racism. in the book indian migration and empire, radhika viyas mongia (2018) argues that the history of slavery, indentured and ‘free’ south asian labourers coupled with the consolidation of the nation-state are closely tied to the emergence of the technology of the passport to manage immigration in former british dominions and colonies. passports were instituted to regulate the movement of “free” subjects following the abolition of slavery by the british empire. free subjects included those indentured labourers and colonial subjects who wanted to look for a better life elsewhere. the british empire closely monitored and controlled the movement of south asian indentured labour to other british colonies in africa and the caribbean but controlled less the migration of those who did not participate in largescale empire-led organized indentured systems. this is how mongia (2018) argues that the technology of the passport came to be used in canada to prevent the migration of unwanted racialized south asian subjects. this conference paper frames the use of ai in immigration affairs, including how it scopes the internet and social media, in continuity with the emergence of the technology of the passport to control the movement of population including their forced immobility. current conceptual frameworks understand the development and imposition of corporate digital technologies in the global south as a form of colonialism (kwet 2019; madianou 2019), ponder on the possibility of decolonizing ai (adams, 2021; mohamed, png, & isaac, 2020), and/or frame ai through the lens of biopolitics of border security technology (akhmetova & harris, 2021). to frame ai as im/mobility i build on harsha walia’s (2021) book border and rule where she suggests that what we are witnessing today is not a migration crisis, it is rather a crisis of immobility. taking the case study of canada, i show how ai technologies are being tested first and often secretly on individuals from the global south. these populations become testing grounds to experiment with ai systems and decide who is worthy of im/mobility. the government discourse that articulates ai around speed, efficiency and streamlining, obscure the continuity of a large-scale state organized project to force certain subjects into immobility. while there are local and national specificities to the adoption of ai systems in migration management, i argue that what we are witnessing is a western blueprint for the future of ai and immigration affairs deciding who is forced into immobility and who can be mobile. i end with a reflection on the necessity for a transnational civil society contestation to reverse the effect of ai as immobility. methodologically, this conference paper is informed by access to information requests made to the government of canada to shed light on the use of ai systems within the ircc. in addition, this paper relies on desk research including an analysis of newspaper articles, blog posts and podcasts by and with immigration lawyers, and parliamentary hearings. references adams, r. (2021). can artificial intelligence be decolonized? interdisciplinary science reviews: isr, 46(1-2), 176–197. akhmetova, r., & harris, e. (2021). "politics of technology: the use of artificial intelligence by us and canadian immigration agencies and their impacts on human rights". in digital identity, virtual borders and social media. cheltenham, uk: edward elgar publishing. doi: https://doi.org/10.4337/9781789909159.00008 el-enany, n. (2020). (b)ordering britain : law, race and empire. manchester university press. kwet, m. (2019). digital colonialism: us empire and the new imperialism in the global south. race & class, 60(4), 3–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396818823172 madianou, m. (2019). technocolonialism: digital innovation and data practices in the humanitarian response to refugee crises. social media society, 5(3). mohamed, s., png, m.-t., & isaac, w. (2020). decolonial ai: decolonial theory as sociotechnical foresight in artificial intelligence. philosophy & technology, 33(4), 659– 684. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00405-8. mongia, r. v. (2018). indian migration and empire: a colonial genealogy of the modern state. duke university press. molnar, p., & gill, l. (2018). bots at the gate: a human rights analysis of automated decision-making in canada’s immigration and refugee system. walia, h. (2021). border & rule : global migration, capitalism, and the rise of racist nationalism. haymarket books. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): lupinacci, l. (2024, october). mixed feelings: the platformisation of moods and vibes. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. mixed feelings: the platformisation of moods and vibes ludmila lupinacci university of leeds introduction this paper examines the growing entanglement between the pervasive technocorporate infrastructures we generally refer to as ‘digital platforms’ and ‘cultural feelings’ (highmore 2017) such as vibes and moods. my focus on those terms, rather than on more popular notions such as affect and emotion, is premised on the idea that they have been incorporated into digital vernaculars in ways that emphasise the increasing mediated aspect of both human feelings and ambient energies, as well as their transformation into commodities. over the past few years, digital platforms from different sectors have started tailoring their content, affordances, rhetoric, and interfaces to both respond to and create certain moods and vibes. in so doing, they become ‘atmospheric architectures’ (bohme 2018), also entering the industry of affective modulation. i focus on recent case studies and introduce a critical-phenomenological framework for the theorisation and empirical examination of this ongoing shift. vibe check: platforms as moodscaping devices moods can be broadly described as flickering background feelings that frame experience and action (coleman 2022). mood-regulation has long been considered a function of media (mostly, music), especially from a cultural studies standpoint (highmore 2017, coyne 2016). the topic of affective modulation can also be linked to canon concepts in cultural theory, such as ‘structures of feeling’ (williams 1977, coleman 2017). in a similar vein, the term ‘vibe’ has been defined as a new vernacular method of self-awareness, perception, and ‘sympathetic resonance’ (james 2022), and as an interpretive technique that favours un-named feelings and bodily responses (miles 2022). although the terms are somewhat overlapping, i understand vibes as the externalisation and collectivisation of moods, even if not necessarily through intersubjectivity. ‘vibe’ then becomes a mediated affective form of ‘co-subjectivity’– a mode of collective orientation through shared energy (denora 2000) –, which is more about common sensations than about the exchange of thoughts. affective modulation is often associated with therapy culture and broader demands for self-reflexivity and emotional control (illouz 2007). this suggests that moods and vibes are maintained through labour that is at once “ours” but also often delegated to particular objects and environments (highmore 2017). i start from the premise that, in our contemporary mediascape, part of the lure seems to be to delegate this labour to digital platforms themselves. based on this, i explore the working hypothesis that contemporary digital platforms are increasingly becoming vibescaping and moodscaping devices. i take moods and vibes to be deeply embedded in sociotechnical and material practices (highmore 2017). in so doing, i understand that ambiences are not naturally or organically occurring (roquet 2016) and call for the examination of their production and orchestration. in the mood: toward a critical phenomenology of digital platforms i posit that a critical-phenomenological framework is a productive epistemological, theoretical, and methodological resource for scrutinising this shift precisely at the intersection of embodied affect and the political economy of platformisation. by critical phenomenology i mean a phenomenological disposition that is not blind to the social, technical, and political environment in which it is situated (couldry and kallinikos 2018). for this preliminary analysis, i explore the contemporary case studies of tiktok, spotify, threads, and ‘ai slop’ to flesh out these new formations in which platform capitalism (srnicek 2017) meets emotional capitalism (illouz 2007). tiktok’s self-claimed mission is to ‘inspire creativity and bring joy’. contrary to many of its competitors, the platform mostly has no pledge to friends or contacts, and indeed prioritises the resonance of the content with the user. amongst the variety of genres uploaded every single day, a lot of tiktok’s content is meant for sensorial appreciation. there’s a visceral playfulness in those ‘oddly satisfying’ materials, in which sensory perception, enjoyment, and pleasure are favoured over interpretation, connection, or sociality. also, the audiovisual-oriented character of the platform and its incentive for the incorporation of repetition contribute to the creation of certain ‘vibes’ (burgess et al 2022). whilst other platforms were already permeated by moodboards and #aesthetics emblematic of specific cultural scenes, on tiktok the idea that what matters is just sharing a vibe through algorithmic associations (brown et al 2024) is intensified. audio streaming service spotify, in turn, has been focusing its institutional communication on the ‘emotional journeys’ of music consumption, claiming to offer ‘music for every mood’ through personalised playlists (ericksson et al 2019). its promotional campaigns, interface and affordances aim to make algorithmic personalisation ‘delightful’, shifting away from mere recommendation to ‘resonance’. through initiatives such as the ‘year in review’ spotify wrapped and smaller designed experiences such as ‘daylists’, ‘song psychic’ and ‘playlist in a bottle’, the platform combines therapeutic rhetoric, new age mystic jargon, and computational sorting to deliver the audio ‘moods’ that best represent each user’s ‘melodic vibe’. another interesting example is the case of threads, meta’s competitor for twitter/x. when trying to convey their vision for what threads should look like, instagram ceo adam mosseri defended an environment with no hard news, no politics, and no negativity. a critical eye could say that this is targeted to stakeholders such as investors and advertisers, probably as a reaction to the damage that recent political scandals have done to facebook’s reputation, and to the common perception of x as a ‘toxic binfire’. in this strategic ‘platform hygiene’ (rauchberg 2023), certain topics are meant to be avoided or suppressed so that the app becomes as clean and friendly as possible. after all, as conveniently summarised by mosseri, threads is for ‘good vibes’ only. meanwhile, we are now in a rapidly evolving technological landscape, with a bourgeoning industry developing new solutions in detecting, processing, understanding, and deploying emotional and affective states for training systems of artificial intelligence of all sorts. the potential use of generative ai to create ‘atmospheric aesthetics’ (salazar, 2023), for instance, invites us to rethink what we already know about the mediation of cultural feelings once computational technologies become central not only to the representation and modulation of mood and the clustering of people according to ‘vibes’, but to the automated production of these atmospheric categories (even if they often result in ‘ai slop’). those cases demonstrate that moods and vibes appear as part of the personalisation opportunities afforded by platforms, as tools for the user to calibrate their own experience, as a way of reflecting and performing their inner state of being, and of attuning to the world. they exemplify how the modulation of cultural feelings is now being repackaged not as a backdrop to mediated experience but rather as a product in and of itself (roquet 2021). just vibing: preliminary findings and intended contributions i propose to examine this phenomenon as associated to the notion of “staging power” – a twofold process in which platforms simultaneously offer users the opportunities for ‘staging’ their lives and controlling their aesthetic environments according to certain moods and intending to create or respond to certain ‘vibes’, and provide a particular ‘architecture of seduction’ or ‘persuasive power’ that makes datafication and algorithmification not only acceptable but perhaps also desirable. a focus on staging sheds light on the orchestration of individual and collective experience, and implies that sensual and emotional responses can be to some extent shaped and anticipated, even if not entirely controlled (bille et al 2015). i argue that the analysed cases illustrate the alleged shift towards the datafication, personalisation, standardisation, categorisation, and algorithmitisation (stark 2020) of states of being, configuring a new form of sensing and knowing with significant implications for our increasingly ‘computationally-oriented modes of existence’ (pedwell 2024:190). in the conversion of moods and vibes into practices that can be managed through techno-commercial assemblages, they become central to everyday ‘regimes of sensory calibration’ (starosielski 2021). moving forward, i hope to explore both the new anxieties and vulnerabilities emergent in the marketisation of states of being and the human and non-human labour involved in the production, circulation, and maintenance of platformised ‘cultural feelings’ (highmore 2017). ultimately, i propose that we are entering a new stage in programmed sociality (bucher 2018), focused less on sharing, connecting, or engaging, and more on the platformisation of the merely felt. the examination of this phenomenon demands us to acknowledge the significance of those mixed feelings – which involve an interplay of the emotional and the computational – and of their entanglement with a corporate technoscape. this requires an ‘ambivalent curiosity’ (markham 2020), which takes ordinary affects (stewart 2007) as a legitimate object of analysis. from this lens, then, perhaps what the platformisation of moods and vibes means is that digital platforms, which historically have used the rhetoric of experiential enhancement to legitimate and justify their actions (beer 2019, lupinacci 2022) are increasingly becoming markets for the ‘experience of feeling itself’ (highmore 2017). references beer, d. (2019). the quirks of digital culture. bingley: emerald publishing. bille, m., bjerregaard, p., sorensen, t.f. (2015) staging atmospheres: materiality, culture, and the texture of the in-between. emotion, space and society, 15, 31-38. böhme, g. (2018). atmospheric architectures. the aesthetics of felt spaces. bloomsbury. bucher, t. (2018). if…then. algorithmic power and politics. new york: oxford university press. burgess, j., carah, n., brown, m.g., angis, d. (2022). #cottagecore, #futurecore, #sadcore: using critical simulation to explore the interplay between machine vision and vernacular instagram aesthetics. selected papers of internet research. aoir 2022. brown, m.g., carah, n., de lazzari, c. (2024). no targets, just vibes: tuned advertising and the algorithmic flow of social media. social media + society. coleman, r. (2017). theorizing the present: digital media, pre-emergence and infrastructures of feeling. cultural studies, 32(4). coleman, s. (2022). ‘feeling it/not feeling it: mood stories as accounts of political intuition. international journal of politics, culture and society, 35. coyne, r. (2016). mood and mobility. navigating the emotional spaces of digital social networks. the mit press. couldry, n., kallinikos, j. (2018) ontology. in: burgess j, marwick a and poell t (eds.), the sage handbook of social media (pp. 149–159). london: sage. denora, t. (2000). music in everyday life. cambridge university press. eriksson, m., fleischer, r., johansson, a., snickars, p., vonderau, p. (2019). spotify teardown. inside the black box of streaming music. the mit press. highmore, b. (2017). cultural feelings. mood, mediation, and cultural politics. routledge. illouz, e. (2007). cold intimacies. the making of emotional capitalism. polity press. james, r. (2022). when did "vibes" become a thing? it’s her factory. https://itsherfactory.substack.com/p/when-did-vibes-become-athing?r=1ejb2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web lupinacci, l. (2022). live, here and now: experiences of immediate connection through habitual social media. doctoral thesis. the london school of economics and political science. https://etheses.lse.ac.uk/4421/ markham, t. (2020). digital life. cambridge: polity press. https://itsherfactory.substack.com/p/when-did-vibes-become-a-thing?r=1ejb2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web https://itsherfactory.substack.com/p/when-did-vibes-become-a-thing?r=1ejb2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web https://etheses.lse.ac.uk/4421/ mccarthy, j., wright, p. (2004) technology as experience. cambridge, massachusetts: the mit press. miles, corey j. ‘sociology of vibe: blackness, felt criminality, and emotional epistemology’. humanity & society, 16 december 2022, https://doi.org/10.1177/01605976221146733. pedwell, c. (2024). speculative machines and us: more-than-human intuition and the algorithmic condition, cultural studies, 38:2, 188 218, doi: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2142805 pelly, l. (2019). the big mood machine. the baffler. https://thebaffler.com/downstream/big-mood-machine-pelly rauchberg, j.s. (2023). crip data studies: digital articulations of disability, power, and cultural production. doctoral dissertation. mcmaster university. roquet, p. (2016). ambient media. japanese atmospheres of self. university of minnessotta press. roquet, p. (2021). in the mood. toward the full commodification of ambience. real life. https://reallifemag.com/in-the-mood/ salazar, m. (2023). cosy vibes. cosiness as an atmospheric aesthetic category. doctoral thesis. university of sussex. srnicek, n. (2017). platform capitalism. polity press. stark, l. (2020). the emotive politics of digital mood tracking. new media & society, (22)11, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820924624 starosielski, n. (2021). media hot and cold. duke university press. stewart, k. (2007). ordinary affects. duke university press. williams, r. (1977) structures of feeling. in: r. williams, ed. marxism and literature. oxford: oxford university press, 128–135. https://doi.org/10.1177/01605976221146733 https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2022.2142805 https://thebaffler.com/downstream/big-mood-machine-pelly https://reallifemag.com/in-the-mood/ https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820924624 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 navigating the digital wave: the unique challenges of ordinary older short video creators in china yingwen wang london college of communication, university of the arts london introduction concerns about the aging of the chinese population (wang & su, 2024), and with the chinese government's acknowledgment of the silver-haired economy's significant development, there is an urgent need for research into the social media engagement of the older adults. short videos, representing a novel form of information dissemination and social engagement, offer the elderly a means to connect across time and space (zhang & xiang, 2023). short form video is dynamic and intuitive, making audio-visual information and public communication particularly accessible to older audiences. notably, on 15th january 2024, the general office of the state council of china published the "opinions on developing the silver economy and enhancing the wellbeing of the elderly." this document marks the inaugural national policy directive specifically addressing the “silver economy” by the chinese government (huang, 2024). the issuance of the opinions policy underscores the critical role of the older demographic within the ambit of china's contemporary digital and cultural milieu, highlighting the government's commitment to integrating this segment of the population into the broader socio-economic framework. the "survey report on the use of short video by middle-aged and old people," collaboratively published by the population and development research centre of renmin university of china and douyin, indicates that platforms like douyin serve as innovative tools for the older adults to acquire knowledge, engage in socialization and entertainment, and express themselves (zhai, 2021). the short video involvement not only fortifies the social connections of older adults but also bolsters their social adaptation and participation following their exit from the workforce. the report underscores the critical contribution of short video engagement to promoting active aging among older individuals. however, existing research, both domestically and internationally, has predominantly examined the participation of older adults in short video platforms from the user suggested citation (apa): wang, y. (2024, october). navigating the digital wave: the unique challenges of ordinary older short video creators in china. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. perspective, often overlooking the significant number of older individuals actively contributing as content creators within the short video culture. consequently, this research addresses this gap and is dedicated to examining the involvement of chinese older individuals in the realm of short-form video culture, specifically as content creators. objective(s)/research questions in accordance with the aforementioned gaps identified in the literature, there is an urgent need to understand the phenomenon by exploring the context behind short form video culture among old people. thus, this research delved into the daily lives of older short video creators, with the following objectives: a) to explore the challenges faced by those older short video creators, and; b) to determine the range of solutions adopted by them against those challenges. ultimately, the researcher endevours to provide implications for future research to better understand this phenomenon. methodology data collection: given the prevalence of elderly short video creators on chinese social media platforms, douyin has been selected as the focal platform for this investigation. consistent with the methodologies of prior studies with similar explorative aims, the researcher selected a sample size of 15 participants (kay et al., 2023; munsch, 2021). selection criteria based on age and follower count, leveraging a snowball sampling methodology. the researcher initially identified potential participants through publicly accessible profiles on douyin, with following recruitment facilitated through participant referrals. semi-structured interviews have been adopted and divided into three distinct phases. the initial phase was a warm-up session which allows elicitation of background information and the motivation underlying the participants’ pursuit of creator status. the next phase was designed to gather the challenges and corresponding solutions adopted by the participants. lastly, the final phase aims to capture any additional insights that are missed. before data collection, consent forms for participation and audio recording were sent to the respondents. all respondents are 60 years or older who are ordinary content creators. for the definition of “ordinary”, the following criterion was established: the number of douyin followers constitutes a pivotal metric for delineating the subject population, namely, the "ordinary creators." nevertheless, the precise threshold for followers that categorizes an "ordinary creator" remains undetermined within the chinese context. consequently, this study adopts the delineation posited by gupta and mahajan (2020), stipulating that ordinary creators are those with fewer than 10,000 followers. this benchmark, while not empirically standardized within the region, provides a pragmatic basis for sample selection in the absence of region-specific metrics. data analysis: the chosen data analysis method was thematic analysis, which proved particularly apt for uncovering and exploring latent dimensions and under-researched aspects within the scope of this inquiry (braun & clarke, 2006). this method was well-suited for encapsulating the complexity of individual experiences, allowing for a nuanced understanding of the participants' perspectives. moreover, the analysis process was iterative, with concurrent data collection and analysis, and ceased upon reaching theoretical saturation. the researcher transcribed audio recordings verbatim. results this study reveals the multifaceted challenges faced by older content creators on douyin and the adaptive strategies they have adopted to overcome these barriers. the findings indicate that self-perceived technical barriers, psychological challenges, time constraints, and privacy concerns significantly hinder older adults' participation in digital spaces, exacerbating existing digital inequalities. despite these challenges, older content creators demonstrated their adaptive capacity through self-directed learning, reliance on intergenerational support, and proactive strategies to maintain online privacy and security. the digital divide faced by older adults extends beyond technological access to encompass broader social, psychological, and economic dimensions. limited selfperceived digital literacy, age-related cognitive decline, and lower literacy levels impede older creators' ability to fully engage with platforms. psychological barriers, such as selfdoubt and perceived lack of competence, further contribute to their sense of exclusion. additionally, socio-economic factors, including caregiving responsibilities and rural livelihoods, limit their time and ability to engage in digital activities. these findings challenge the simplistic notion that older adults have ample time to engage in digital activities after retirement, underscoring the importance of understanding the diversity of contexts in which they live. the study also highlights the importance of social support networks in bridging the digital divide. family members, particularly younger generations, play a crucial role in helping older adults use digital platforms. however, this reliance may foster dependency, revealing a delicate balance between empowerment and over-reliance. participants' adaptive strategies, such as learning by doing and imitating successful content, reflect their determination to overcome digital barriers despite limited formal support. conclusion in sum, to promote digital inclusion, platforms like douyin must consider the needs of older users by providing more accessible tools and clearer guidelines. policymakers and stakeholders should also recognise the socio-economic barriers that limit older adults' digital participation and provide targeted support, particularly for those in rural or disadvantaged contexts. ultimately, fostering an inclusive digital environment requires both technological adaptation and broader systemic efforts to support older adults' fully engagement in digital spaces. references braun, v., & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa gupta, s., & mahajan, r. (2020). role of micro-influencers in affecting behavioural intentions. international journal of recent technology and engineering, 8(4s5), 189– 192. https://doi.org/10.35940/ijrte.d1045.1284s519 huang, zuochun. (2024). the first policy document on the ‘silver economy’ focuses on the nearly 300 million elderly people. https://news.cctv.com/2024/01/23/artidcjjpn6mzgvfwvlgv2e0240123.shtml kay, s., mulcahy, r., sutherland, k., & lawley, m. (2023). disclosure, content cues, emotions and behavioural engagement in social media influencer marketing: an exploratory multi-stakeholder perspective. journal of marketing management, 39(7–8), 550–584. https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257x.2022.2118815 munsch, a. (2021). millennial and generation z digital marketing communication and advertising effectiveness: a qualitative exploration. journal of global scholars of marketing science, 31(1), 10–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/21639159.2020.1808812 wang, y., & su, m. (2024). grasp new development opportunities brought by silver economy. http://www.xinhuanet.com/comments/20240202/299fadb12296482488699af72636681b/ c.html zhai, z. (2021). actively responding to the ageing population: the role of short videos cannot be ignored. http://pdsc.ruc.edu.cn/jdjx/25592c597cf7436f88acbbd52a777bcb.htm# zhang, c., & xiang, ji. (2023). the impact of short videos on the quality of life of the elderly—based on the social network perspective. journal of xi’an jiaotong university (social science edition), 1–15. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 subordinated by the algorithm: exploring data colonialism among latin american citizens esteban morales university of british columbia katherine reilly simon fraser university introduction data colonialism refers to the control of human life through the appropriation of data value (couldry & mejias, 2019). regarding processes of data power such as data colonialism, van dijck (2014) argues that datafication (infrastructures) and the circulation of dataisms (ideologies) together uphold new ways to exercise control (dataveillance) that have profound material implications. the resulting information systems—located in specific historical contexts of colonialism (couldry & mejias, 2021)—replicate, transform, and expand capitalist accumulation by dispossession (thatcher, o’sullivan & mahmoudi, 2016). together, these forces are theorized to reproduce colonialism through dataveillance of the global south by global data powers, with accompanying psychological and material impacts. one of the most notorious effects of data colonialism is how its ideologies expand and reproduce power imbalances that arise from our contemporary economic and cultural ecosystems. indeed, such processes result in the colonization of citizens’ everyday life, where “data-driven narratives guide our imaginaries and govern what it means to live in contemporary urban societies” (ricaurte, 2019, p.352). in this context, it is necessary to better understand how data practices are lived by those most impacted by data colonialism—especially in the global south (milan & treré, 2019). moreover, it is necessary to examine the value of data colonialism as a theoretical approach to research the impacts of contemporary information systems. accordingly, this paper seeks to explore data colonialism as a lens to better understand how citizens in latin america experience the datafication of their everyday lives. suggested citation (apa): morales, e., & reilly, k., (2022, november). subordinated by the algorithm: exploring data colonialism among latin american citizens. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. suggested citation (apa): morales, e. & reilly, k. (2022, november). subordinated by the algorithm: exploring data colonialism among latin american citizens. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. methodology this paper presents findings from a collaboration with civic data organizations in five countries in latin america that conducted citizen-centered evaluations of private sector use of personal data. evaluations were carried out with various groups including platform workers in colombia, migrants in chile, and older adults in uruguay. following a participatory research approach (reilly, 2020), these five projects shared an interest in the role and impacts of personal data but adjusted their focus to specific contexts and perspectives—for example, the banking system, pharmacies, or food delivery apps. discussions of each case were then transcribed and analyzed following an open coding and constant comparison approach. findings findings show that several elements of data colonialism are present across the five cases. first, we find evidence of direct harm caused by the processes of value extraction through data—which include material and psychological dimensions. material harm could take the form of limited access to health or financial services, fraud, harassment, and surveillance. participants across the case study also evidenced psychological impacts due to their involvement with different information systems, as shown by a participant who claimed that "every time i press the 'accept terms and conditions' i feel like i'm being killed a little bit just for the sake of convenience" [peru]. additionally, there are cases where the impacts of data colonialism are seen across communities. such was the case of communities who were targeted due to their nationalities, gender, or class, to name a few—as narrated by a participant in chile, who recounted the risks of the “misinformed migrant population where they run many risks of being defrauded and harassed” due to the misuse of their personal data in the financial system. finally, a series of ideological shifts highlight the impacts of data colonialism in participants' everyday perception of and engagement with informational systems. in this sense, participants claim to perceive a shift in their role in society, where they are constantly overpowered by datafied systems. for example, an employee in colombia said, "we are being subordinated through an algorithm.” such feeling of subordination is expanded through participants' perceived inability to access and fully understand the ways data practices work ("data is invisible to 99% of the population and companies are also taking advantage of this" [uruguay]). overall, this subordination results in a shared perception that citizens are increasingly immersed in a dehumanized society, where most of their interactions with public or private institutions are exclusively conducted through and directed by algorithms. furthermore, they feel there are few opportunities to opt out of these systems, as "refusing to provide data requested by the system is to be left out of it" [uruguay]. yet the forces of data colonialism do not seem to encompass all data relations. indeed, some elements are lacking in an analysis of citizens' experience through data suggested citation (apa): morales, e. & reilly, k. (2022, november). subordinated by the algorithm: exploring data colonialism among latin american citizens. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. colonialism—highlighting contextualized spaces of resistance, escape, or negotiation. first, there is a need to relocate and recenter agency in the discussion about data, both in terms of why citizens choose to establish data relations (e.g., "for a discount" [peru]) and their ways of resistance/subversion (e.g., provide false or incomplete information [paraguay]). additionally, participants emphasize that not all data relations are the same—such as the case where they note to have no problem providing their data to doctors but not to their medical suppliers [uruguay]). there is also the need to take a nuanced approach to understand the contexts where data colonialism occurs, as these processes and their impacts vary significantly across cases. finally, participants show that various benefits of datafication promote their engagement with the information systems and should be considered when studying data colonialism, as shown by citizens who said that data collection and analysis allowed doctors better decisionmaking due to data available in medical history [uruguay]. conclusion as shown by the results of this study, data colonialism is a valuable lens to understand how information systems harm communities and individuals. indeed, findings highlight how data colonialism transforms citizens' imaginaries about their place in society and how they interact with different information systems. in this sense, this study underscores data colonialism's reach into both the material reality and our meaningmaking processes (couldry & mejia, 2019; ricaurte, 2019) with implications for autonomy, freedom, and wellbeing. however, results of this study also emphasize the need to integrate theoretical and methodological frameworks into data colonialism that emphasize how data relations processes are contextualized and how people/communities enact agency. accordingly, it could be of value to integrate data colonialism with theoretical lenses that foreground an epistemological shift in the way we study data—that is, that prioritize efforts to re-center people’s voices and experiences. references couldry, n., & mejias, u. a. (2019). the costs of connection: how data is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism. stanford university press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503609754 couldry, n., & mejias, u. a. (2021). the decolonial turn in data and technology research: what is at stake and where is it heading? information, communication & society, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2021.1986102 milan, s., & treré, e. (2019). big data from the south(s): beyond data universalism. television & new media, 20(4), 319–335. reilly, k. (2020). the challenge of decolonizing big data through citizen data audits. bigdatasur. https://data-activism.net/2020/04/bigdatasur-the-challenge-ofdecolonizing-big-data-through-citizen-data-audits-1-3/ suggested citation (apa): morales, e. & reilly, k. (2022, november). subordinated by the algorithm: exploring data colonialism among latin american citizens. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ricaurte, p. (2019). data epistemologies, the coloniality of power, and resistance. television & new media, 20(4), 350–365. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419831640 thatcher, j., o’sullivan, d., & mahmoudi, d. (2016). data colonialism through accumulation by dispossession: new metaphors for daily data. environment and planning d: society and space, 34(6), 990–1006. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775816633195 van dijck, j. (2014). datafication, dataism and dataveillance: big data between scientific paradigm and ideology. surveillance & society, 12(2), 197–208. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v12i2.4776 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): masterson, a. m. (2023, october). constructing and marketing sexual fantasy: analyzing the social media of sex robots. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. constructing and marketing sexual fantasy: analyzing the social media of sex robots annette masterson temple university abstract since the release of sex robots in 2017 by realdoll, they have been marketed as companions and sexual fantasies. social media platforms provide realdoll and its affiliates the opportunity to justify and celebrate the creation of a responsive sex robot directly to the public and potential consumers. to expand the fourth level of abstraction of mass media within the social construction of technology theory, this paper investigates the instagram and twitter pages of the technological segment of realdoll, realbotix, and the most prevalent realdoll affiliate, brickdollbanger. framed by fairclough’s (2012) perspective of critical discourse analysis, i reviewed a combined 1,016 tweets and instagram posts to analyze the process of enrollment by key actors in relation to the design of sex robots and the sex robot industry. results indicate humor and explicit images are utilized to market the sexual capabilities of the sex robots versus ideas of love and companionship. this paper adds to human-machine communication literature on the design of sex robots by exploring the sex-forward messaging not fully present in other marketing materials of realbotix. introduction marketing of sex technology used to be private and controversial; however, shifts in social attitudes in the united states have brought about a new form of openness (comella, 2017). though social media platforms restrict certain sexual content, sex companies’ posts can operate at the borderline of acceptability, avoiding bans or deletion. this paper addresses one such case of sex marketing and technological innovation emerging within the sex technology industry: sex robots. the first public demonstration of a sex robot occurred in 2017, with realdoll ceo matt mcmullen illustrating the harmony model and her capabilities, encompassed in the robotic segment, realbotix. this led to a media frenzy; however, with mass media interviews, mcmullen (and harmony) are restricted to certain community standards even if only published on newspapers’ online platforms, so her sexual functions cannot be fully marketed. this paper addresses two angles of social media marketing for the realdoll sex robot: the realbotix twitter page and realdoll affiliate brickdollbanger’s instagram page. though the realbotix website focuses on the technological components and the robot in other social arenas, such as customer service, the realbotix social media pages openly focus on the sexual and companionship functions. brickdollbanger (brick) operates uniquely within the company as an official “affiliate” and influencer with close access to realdoll management and facilities, often teasing new releases and sales. especially given that mcmullen does not use or test the dolls himself (mcmullen, 2018), he reached out to brick for product testing and, essentially, marketing (morris, 2018). by combining the official page of realbotix and a corporate influencer, the paper expands recent scholarship on realdoll messaging (cheok & zhang, 2019) and discourse around sex robots (masterson, 2022) while empirically analyzing karaian’s (2022) conceptualization of the sexual fantasy of sex robots. framed by klein & kleinman’s (2002) expansion of social construction of technology theory (scot), this paper recognizes the impact and influence of mass-mediated discourse on the cyclical process of technological shaping (johnson, 2015). drawing on critical discourse analysis (fairclough, 2012), social construction, and sexual fantasy, i ask: how is sexuality incorporated into realbotix’s social media marketing, and what micropolitical strategies are enforced between the social actors and the audience? from the social media pages, technological expansions of sex robots and the fantasy of an interactive but artificial lover are reinforced. sex robot representations humanoid robots and their representations provide a unique frame onto which we can analyze future perceptions of human-machine relations and how the technology (and its design) reflects current power structures (fortunati et al., 2021; leach & dehnert, 2021). sex robots elucidate an additional layer of complexities, given their intimate and companionship nature (dehnert, 2022). within the concept of erobots (dubé & anctil, 2021), sex robots can be defined as “any artificial entity” used for sexual pleasure with a “humanoid form . . . human-like movement/behavior . . . some degree of artificial intelligence” (danaher, 2017, pp. 4–5). though confined, this definition emphasizes the embodied nature of sex robots within a still-evolving technology. nevertheless, media and public discourse have approached sex robots with fear, fascination, and projected imaginaries. though similar to objectification and female representation in film, sex robots or gynoids represent anxieties surrounding feminism and technology (devlin & belton, 2020) and “sexual essentialism,” the tendency to focus on the non-humanness of robots leading social groups to envision the future technological functions (björkas and larsson, 2021, p. 5). fictional media often represents a cataclysmic ending, specifically for human users (hawkes & lacey, 2019; döring & pöschl, 2019), perhaps as a way to subliminally condemn the use of sex robots. non-fiction, such as news broadcasts, centers on the incomplete or deficient user who would be interested in a robotic companion (döring & pöschl, 2019). whether this messaging affects the public perception of robots is unclear; however, initial research indicates women rate a sex robot as a threat and find their sexual functions discomforting (brandon et al., 2021; szczuka & krämer, 2018). when directly asked, men are more likely to rank a human woman’s attractiveness over a robot; however, if evaluated implicitly, greater interest is implied (szczuka & krämer, 2017). the media, public, and users encompass social groups likely to shape the design of the technology and, ultimately, its possible social acceptance. social construction of technology scot analyzes the development of technology as a frame to understand the “mutual construction or mutual shaping” in society (pinch, 2009, p. 45). through a combination of social, cultural, economic, and political influences (johnson, 2015), social groups build meaning-making by addressing the technology’s controversy, problems, and intentions (bijker et al., 2012). the process of negotiation can take years until the controversy is rectified and design stabilization occurs (bijker, 1995). during this negotiation, specific designs and features may be encouraged (klein & kleinman, 2002). through a review of social media, i approach the fourth aspect of scot: the sociocultural level (klein & kleinman, 2002). from this arena, powerful social actors spread their message encouraging the use of the product and its design, a process called enrollment (bijker, 1995). i address the social media posts as “discursively regulated by symbolic media” for the intent of gaining power (bijker, 1993, p. 128). through the sociocultural level, mcmullen and brick have a direct connection with many viewers to shape impressions. method i utilize critical discourse analysis (cda) framed from fairclough (2012), which incorporates “social structures, practices and events” and the interplay of power and beliefs (p. 11). focused on language choices and symbolic meanings (erdogan, 2017), i reviewed the twitter page of realbotix from 2017-2023 and the instagram page of brickdollbanger from 2019-2023, when the pages were established. posts on sex robots were thematically coded to determine design and marketing intentions. a final collection of 350 tweets and 666 instagram posts, a total of 1,016 posts, were reviewed. initial results realbotix has 2,277 followers; the parent company abyss creations also operates instagram and youtube pages, though less active. brickdollbanger’s instagram page has 1,730 followers and also operates an onlyfan page, signaling more sexually focused content. twitter and instagram both ban sexually explicit content and nudity (twitter, 2022; instagram, 2022); however, both realbotix and brick’s pages illustrate a tendency to teeter between explicit and covered photos of the dolls’ nipples, buttocks, and vaginas, though sometimes those covers are well-placed emojis. unlike other messaging from realdoll and mcmullen, which focused on technological affordances and the robots’ companionship benefits (author, 2022), the twitter page’s overarching tone can be best described as emboldened. realbotix builds a self-aware brand and humorously engages with the sexual functions of the robots. in a reply to a user, realbotix (2017a) tweeted, “they are built for longevity, don’t worry.” realbotix acknowledges tropes of robots taking over the world but only addresses it through humor without context, asking the audience to laugh at its ridiculousness: “definitely not taking over the world, yet” (realbotix, 2018), and “we need good robots to kill bad robots” (realbotix, 2017b). brick similarly utilizes humor when photographing the dolls and robots in sexual positions or situations, attempting to create a sexual fantasy for followers that enhances the desire for realdoll products. these findings illuminate the androcentric positionality of the profiles with less focus on companionship and more emphasis on sexual pleasure functions. references bijker, w. e., hughes, t. p., & pinch, t. (2012). the social construction of technological systems: new directions in the sociology and history of technology. the mit press. bijker, w. e. (1995). of bicycles, bakelites, and bulbs toward a theory of sociotechnical change. mit press. bijker, w. e. (1993). do not despair: there is life after constructivism. science, technology, & human values, 18, 113–138. https://doi.org/10.1177/016224399301800107 björkas, r., & larsson, m. (2021). sex dolls in the swedish media discourse: intimacy, sexuality, and technology. sexuality & culture. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119021-09829-6 brandon, m. & planke, j.a. (2021). emotional, sexual and behavioral correlates of attitudes toward sex robots: results of an online survey. journal of future robot life, 67-82. doi: 10.3233/frl-210003 cheok, a.d. & zhang, e.y. (2019). human-robot intimate relationships. springer nature. comella, l. (2017). vibrator nation: how feminist sex-toy stores changed the business of pleasure. duke university press books. danaher, j. (2017). should we be thinking about robot sex? in j. danaher & n. mcarthur (eds.), robot sex (pp. 3–14). mit press. dehnert, m. (2022). sex with robots and human-machine sexualities: encounters between human-machine communication and sexuality studies. human-machine communication, 4, 131–150. https://doi.org/10.30658/ hmc.4.7 devlin, k., & belton, o. (2020). the measure of a woman: fembots, fact and fiction. in s. cave, k. dihal, & s. dillon (eds.), ai narratives: a history of imaginative thinking about intelligent machines (pp. 357-381). oxford university press. döring, n., & poeschl, s. (2019). love and sex with robots: a content analysis of media https://doi.org/10.1177/016224399301800107 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-021-09829-6 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-021-09829-6 https://doi.org/10.30658/hmc.4.7 representations. international journal of social robotics, 11(4), 665–677. https://doi. org/10.1007/s12369-019-00517-y dubé, s., & anctil, d. (2021). erobots and erobotics. in a. d. lykins (ed.), encyclopedia of sexuality and gender (pp. 1–5). springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319595313_100-1 erdogan, b. (2017). humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect. palgrave. fairclough, n. (2012). critical discourse analysis. in j. p. gee & m. handford (eds.), the routledge handbook of discourse analysis (pp. 9–20). routledge. fortunati, l., sorrentino, a., fiorini, l., & cavallo, f. (2021). the rise of the roboid. international journal of social robotics, 13(6), 1457–1471. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-02000732-y hawkes, r., & lacey, c. (2019). “the future of sex”: intermedial desire between fembot fantasies and sexbot technologies. the journal of popular culture, 52(1), 98– 116. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12748 instagram. (2022). community guidelines. meta. https://www.facebook.com/help/instagram/477434105621119 johnson, d. g. (2015). social construction of technology. in j. b. holbrook (ed.), ethics, science, technology, and engineering: a global resource, (2nd ed., vol. 4, pp. 182–185). gale group publishing. karaian, l. (2022). plastic fantastic: sex robots and/as sexual fantasy. sexualities, 0(0), 1-20. doi: 10.1177/13634607221106667 klein, h. k., & kleinman, d. l. (2002). the social construction of technology: structural considerations. science, technology & human values, 27(1), 28–52. http://www.jstor.org/stable/690274 leach, r., & dehnert, m. (2021). becoming the other: examining race, gender, and sexuality in detroit: become human. review of communication, 21(1), 23–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2021.1892173 masterson, a. m. (2022). designing a loving robot: a social construction analysis of a sex robot creator’s vision. human-machine communication, 5, 99-114. https://doi.org/10.30658/hmc.5.4 mcmullen, m. [mattrealdoll]. (2016, august 16). i am matt mcmullen, ceo, creative director, and founder of realdoll. ask me anything! [online forum post]. reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/iama/comments/4y0uyn/comment/)/ morris, a. (2018, september 27). meet the man who test drives sex robots. forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/andreamorris/2018/09/27/meet-the-man-who-testhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-595313_100-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-595313_100-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-02000732-y https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12748 https://www.facebook.com/help/instagram/477434105621119 http://www.jstor.org/stable/690274 https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2021.1892173 https://doi.org/10.30658/hmc.5.4 https://www.reddit.com/r/iama/comments/4y0uyn/comment/)/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/andreamorris/2018/09/27/meet-the-man-who-test-drives-sex-robots/?sh=15277363452d drives-sex-robots/?sh=15277363452d pinch, t. (2009). the social construction of technology (scot): the old, the new, and the nonhuman. in p. vannini (ed.), material culture and technology in everyday life: ethnographic approaches (pp. 45–58). peter lang publishing. realbotix [@realbotixxx]. (2017a, april 28). they are built for longevity [tweet]. twitter. https://twitter.com/realbotixxx/status/858045662432251904?s=20 realbotix [@realbotixxx]. (2017b, april 28). we need good robots to kill bad robots [tweet]. twitter. https://twitter.com/realbotixxx/status/858048211285676032?s=20 realbotix [@realbotixxx]. (2018, november 5). definitely not taking over the world [tweet]. twitter. https://twitter.com/realbotixxx/status/1059531585064554496?s=20&t=4dpw227 v4je9fm_8a-oeua szczuka, j. m., & krämer, n. (2017). not only the lonely—how men explicitly and implicitly evaluate the attractiveness of sex robots in comparison to the attractiveness of women, and personal characteristics influencing this evaluation. multimodal technologies and interaction, 1(1), 3. https://doi.org/10.3390/mti1010003 szczuka, j. m., & krämer, n. c. (2018). jealousy 4.0? an empirical study on jealousyrelated discomfort of women evoked by other women and gynoid robots. paladyn, journal of behavioral robotics, 9(1), 323–336. https://doi.org/10.1515/pjbr-2018-0023 twitter. (2022, january). sensitive media policy. https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-andpolicies/media-policy https://www.forbes.com/sites/andreamorris/2018/09/27/meet-the-man-who-test-drives-sex-robots/?sh=15277363452d https://twitter.com/realbotixxx/status/858045662432251904?s=20 https://twitter.com/realbotixxx/status/858048211285676032?s=20 https://twitter.com/realbotixxx/status/1059531585064554496?s=20&t=4dpw227v4je9fm_8a-oeua https://twitter.com/realbotixxx/status/1059531585064554496?s=20&t=4dpw227v4je9fm_8a-oeua https://doi.org/10.3390/mti1010003 https://doi.org/10.1515/pjbr-2018-0023 https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/media-policy https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/media-policy selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 amit-danhi, e.r., pentzold, c. & rakebrand, t. (2024, october). ‘guerilla analysis’ and the institutional voice: the productive meso-space of coronavirus visualizations on israeli telegram. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. between graphical 'excellence‘, literacy, and polysemy: a bi-national study of digital political visualization reception eedan r. amit-danhi university of groningen christian pentzold leipzig university thomas rakebrand leipzig university visualization, the visual encoding of information, is a communicative technology which suggests practitioner heuristics, usage affordances, and literacy standards in interpretation. as such, visualizations’ design practices are deeply rooted in a cognitively-oriented model of information transfer, wherein “graphical excellence” (tufte, 2001) should result in a ‘correct’ reading aligned with the intended meaning (kamat et al., 2014). in turn, audiences are expected to acquire “graphical literacy,” the skills and knowledge required in order to ‘correctly’ decode a well-made visualization and arrive at its intended meaning (roberts & brugar, 2017). evidently, from this perspective, visualization offers limited interpretive flexibility (cocking & van den hoven, 2018), wherein meaning assignment is primarily dictated by practices of visualization creation, rather than audiences’ considerations. however, in the past decade, the use of visualizations in digitally-networked communication has risen dramatically, primarily in social media and data-journalism. digital political visualizations constitute a ubiquitous and engaging rhetorical genre (amit-danhi & shifman, 2018), within which “graphical excellence” best-practices may conflict with politicians’ use of "strategic ambiguity" (eisenberg, 1984) to increase appeal. put differently, a digital political visualization’s ‘correct’ reading may not be a reading that visualization practitioners would consider literacy-driven or stemming from excellence in design (roberts & brugar, 2017). thus, digital political visualizations’ http://spir.aoir.org/ effectiveness is a fickle, culturally-constructed concept, as a semantically-fixed graph is arguably an unattainable ideal (kennedy et al., 2018; van eijck et al., 2011). studying digital political visualizations as mere communicative vessels neglects audience-side considerations and ambivalent decoding processes that resist determination (hall, 1980). in this paper we amalgamate perspectives to view visualization as a communicative technology, a rhetorical genre, and a persuasion-tool by tackling a scholarly gap around audiences’ reception and decoding of digital political visualizations. to do so, we explore the relationship between graphical excellence, audience’s graphical literacy performances, and the ensuing polysemy in personal and group readings of digital political visualizations. we ask: how do audiences decode political messages embedded in visualizations shared online? method to unfold audiences’ dynamics of digital political visualization reception, we convened 8 focus group sessions of 8-10 participants each (67 in total) in germany and israel. participants were recruited in two age groups (20-35; 40-55) and varied in educational, political, and socio-economic backgrounds. we designed a protocol that combines individual reflections and group discussions, in which participants first utilized an individual decoding-sheet to record their reading, followed by a group discussion. this protocol was implemented in two contexts (see appendix), a health crisis (covid-19), and a locally polarizing topic (migration or judicial reform). we introduced three stimuli: (1)covid-19 “flatten the curve” visualization; (2)informationallyand graphicallycomplex visualization; and (3)ostensibly persuasive, low-information visualization. for these stimuli, the participants first recorded their individual reading and opinion of the visualization, followed by a group discussion on its merits and faults. a final stimulus was discussed in a group decoding session around a side-by-side comparison of two conflicting visualizations, based on the same data and visualization mode (polarizing topic) or a graphically-excellent visualization posted to a polarizing politicians’ social media page (covid-19). the sessions were transcribed and were analyzed alongside the individual response sheets using inductive thematic qualitative analysis: in-group statements were contrasted with participants’ individual readings, followed by thematic analysis of group discussions to define recurring themes around discrepancies and points-of-tension in decoding the different stimuli. the bi-national aspect of our study strives to draw on similarities, rather than differences, in the two national contexts to assure wide applicability of its findings. preliminary findings following thematic coding of group discourse and individual decoding-sheets, we note that all visualizations – regardless of graphical excellence, topic or level of persuasiveness – resulted in highly polysemic readings. readings were also decidedly influenced by group dynamics: participants often reformulated and shifted their individual interpretations during group discussions in which domain-literacy performances were used to assert dominance and indicate identity-alignment. when a dominant participant cemented a misguided or partial reading of a visualization, it took several discussion turns until an alternative reading would emerge, suggesting that group dynamics offer interpretive benchmarks according to which participants chose their alignment in expressing their interpretation. overall, participants found the task of verbalizing or transcribing their readings of visualizations to be a challenging endeavor, with certain participants foregoing it altogether. they attributed this difficulty to pre-existing graphical avoidance tendencies or expressed varying degrees of willingness to commit to a singular reading. we thus suggest that the inevitability of polysemic meanings in political visualizations requires audiences to develop a different set of graphical literacy skills. in fig. 1 we demonstrate the interpretive range that emanated from differences in graphical literacy in individual readings, and the subsequent group discussions. we find that participants approach visualizations with differing positionings towards the rhetorical genre and the communicative technology: they may refuse to engage altogether (graphical avoidance) or choose to evaluate their rhetorical and analytical components by both recognizing the intended meaning, and choosing to add onto or modify it. fig. 1: the spectrum of graphical polysemy in digital political visualizations across our focus groups, participants thought of graphical literacy as the ability to read beyond the intended meaning and to discern underlying political strategies among the inevitable polysemy of political visualizations. they stated: “if there are caveats, tell me what the caveats are […] make the data points accessible, allow me to create the knowledge and reach my decisions” (judicial reform 20-35), asking to be given a choice in converting data into information and knowledge, rather than be fed ‘bottom lines.’ in both national contexts, participants asked to be provided with both data/information, and “the possibility of interpreting it” (immigration 40-55), expressing appreciation to excellence in design, but also pushed against design choices that limited their agency in interpretation. specifically, when discussing the idea of a ‘good graph’ for political deliberation on social media, our participants pushed against the contentdriven focus of graphical excellence, by claiming that any political graph “takes a point of view, and makes it into fact” by the mere act of visualizing (covid-19 20-35). thus, our participants suggested that a literate reader should decode the intended meaning, but exercise interpretive freedom and flexibility in deciding what it actually means, as part of the due-diligence of a political content consumption online. we therefore suggest that graphical literacy is not merely a set of skills and intellectual abilities, but is imbricated with worldviews, normative assumptions and is affected by group dynamics. it is from this amalgam that audiences come to engage with digital political visualizations as their ‘reading’ is equally an expression of political identity, group alignment, and prowess, as it is of their intellect. it is thus imperative to view political visualizations’ role in the digital informational landscape with both strategic ambiguity and audience’s individual and collective interpretive freedom in mind, by making ‘graphical excellence’ a dual pursuit, in which both audiences and visualizers take on responsibility in the creation and interpretation of digital political visualizations towards a benign and normatively beneficial digital deliberative space. references amit-danhi, e. r., & shifman, l. (2018). digital political infographics: a rhetorical palette of an emergent genre. new media & society, 20(10), 3540-3559. cocking, d. and van den hoven, j. (2018). our online environment. in evil online (eds d. cocking and j. hoven). https://doi-org.proxy-ub.rug.nl/10.1002/9781119471219.ch2 eisenberg, e. m. (1984). ambiguity as strategy in organizational communication. communication monographs, 51(3), 227-242. van eijck, m., goedhart, m. j., & ellermeijer, t. (2011). polysemy in the domain-specific pedagogical use of graphs in science textbooks: the case of an electrocardiogram. research in science education, 41, 1-18. hall, s. (1980). cultural studies: two paradigms. media, culture & society, 2(1), 57-72. kamat, p., hartland, g. v., & schatz, g. c. (2014). graphical excellence. the journal of physical chemistry letters, 5(12), 2118-2120. kennedy, h., & hill, r. l. (2018). the feeling of numbers: emotions in everyday engagements with data and their visualisation. sociology, 52(4), 83fk0-848. roberts, k. l., & brugar, k. a. (2017). the view from here: emergence of graphical literacy. reading psychology, 38(8), 733-777. tufte, e. r. (2001). the visual display of quantitative information (vol. 2, p. 9). cheshire, ct: graphics press. https://doi-org.proxy-ub.rug.nl/10.1002/9781119471219.ch2 \ appendix: focus group stimuli verma-designing ethical artificial intelligence-designing ethical artificial intelligence selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 designing ethical artificial intelligence (ai) systems with meaningful youth participation: implications and considerations kanishk verma adapt centre, anti bullying centre, dublin city university brian davis adapt centre, dublin city university tijana milosevic anti bullying centre, dublin city university james o’higgins norman anti bullying centre, dublin city university introduction social media platforms such as tiktok, snapchat, instagram, and facebook offer a range of features for children and young people to interact with one another. the advancements in internet communication technologies (icts), artificial intelligence (ai), and augmented reality (ar) have enabled such platforms to provide many features, including digital effects or "filters" that enhance photos and videos. supported by ai algorithms that detect faces and other objects, such filters help beautify the media content further. moreover, ai-enabled content recommendation and personalisation allow platforms to keep users engaged for long periods. social media platforms also leverage ai-based content moderation or proactive moderation to filter out harmful online content before showing it to users. recent transparency reports by instagram, facebook, tiktok, and youtube indicate an upward trend in proactive moderation of online content followed by a decline in user-reported online content [1]–[3]. while promising, there is limited insight into how these ai algorithms function in real-life scenarios, the user behaviour patterns they learn, and the potential risks like content filtering failures, privacy breaches, and restrictions on freedom of expression. recent studies suggest that children and young people are concerned about ai failures and biases in surveillance and profiling by ai [4], [5]. while it is vital to involve children suggested citation (apa): verma, k., davis, b., milosevic, t., o’higgins norma, j. (2023, october). designing ethical artificial intelligence (ai) systems with meaningful youth participation: implications and considerations. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. and young people in crafting ai content filters, ethical concerns persist regarding informed consent, participation, mitigation of biases (both implicit and explicit) in ai, and ensuring safeguards for their well-being throughout the ai design [6], [7]. additionally, safeguarding children and young participants from re-exposure to potential traumatic content is paramount. this article attempts to shed light on ethical concerns in ai system design and possible steps for mitigating those concerns. ai algorithmic opaqueness ai techniques leveraged by social media platforms to combat harmful online content remain somewhat opaque. however, insights from strides in computational research offer potential strategies utilised by such platforms [8]. competitions like those by semantic evaluation1 (semeval) [9]–[14], have advanced the development of systems capable of identifying various online harms. despite such systems demonstrating high accuracy in detecting harmful content, they are not near-perfect and often lack consideration for children’s viewpoints in their design. notably, studies focusing on explainable filtering of online bullying text content have made strides in computational research [15], [16], but fall short in incorporating children’s perspectives to enhance the transparency of the ai filtering system’s decision-making process. current ethical risks in youth participation in ai design ai system development relies heavily on extensive datasets for training and validation, necessitating the annotation of a vast amount of data. devising such systems for identifying online harms hinges on meticulously annotated datasets. these labelled datasets are crucial for training algorithms to understand the complexities of online content and improve their efficiency in recognising various forms of harm. by engaging children and young people in role-playing online bullying and aggression scenarios, computational researchers [17], [18], were able to devise conversations that serve as training data for ai systems to identify both bullying and aggression. although the role-playing technique effectively mirrors real-life scenarios and facilitates a more comprehensive representation of bullying and aggression conversations for ai to discern harmful content, it presents numerous challenges as well. one significant limitation is the potential risk of re-traumatising children who might have previously faced similar situations, potentially causing emotional distress when they engage in such design activities. however, excluding children and young people from the design process can result in differing perspectives on identifying harmful and non-harmful content. a research study by [19], found notable disparities between annotations by domain experts in [17], and 1 https://semeval.github.io ; semantic evaluation is a recurring series of computational semantic analysis competitions currently in its 17th edition. in this competition, the goal is to test computational systems to see how well they can understand and analyse language. the competition has multiple challenges organised for different language processing, generation or inference tasks. the organisers of different tasks in the competition provide text for the computer programs to analyse and also provide the labels or annotations for the text. children. thereby implying that children and young people have higher thresholds for defining online content as harmful than domain experts. ethical considerations going forward while building resilience towards online harm is one of the key motivations to involve children and young people in the annotations and design of ai systems, the risk of re-traumatisation from an ethical standpoint is quite severe. apart from obtaining informed consent from children and their parents or guardians before being involved in such research, there should be other risk mitigation strategies. engaging in design sessions with children and young individuals, as exemplified by prior studies [20]–[22], involves conducting extensive workshops over several weeks with a diverse research team. ensuring the research team includes trained professionals, such as psychologists or counsellors to offer support to children during the research process is essential. additionally, recent findings by [19], highlight the effectiveness of annotation of online harmful content via “interactive games” for children serves as a platform to (a) educate them on sensitive topics, (b) differentiate between harmful and benign content, and (c) gather pertinent annotation through innovative design approaches. granting children and young people control over their participation and the right to withdraw if uncomfortable or distressed is paramount and places their well-being above research objectives. prioritising participants’ safety might involve considering alternative methodologies, such as utilising and augmenting previously collected relevant data. adopting a user-centred and age-appropriate approach remains critical, supported by both pre-and post-design surveys to gauge participant sentiments and well-being. additional ethical considerations encompass establishing comparison groups, including other annotators and non-participating youth, to evaluate experiences and well-being during sensitive data annotation. moreover, implementing a continuous feedback (“human-in-the-loop”) mechanism is crucial for ethical ai system design. this approach not only encourages user engagement but also ensures that the ai system remains adaptable and responsive to evolving user needs. furthermore, facilitating focus-group participation in structured sessions provides a better platform for open dialogue, enabling participants to express their perspectives, concerns, and ideas regarding ai system design. ethically addressing implicit and explicit biases within ai systems requires deliberate efforts to recognise, analyse, and mitigate these biases. diverse representation becomes pivotal during system design, necessitating the involvement of children from varied ethnic, cultural, and economic backgrounds. this involvement ensures that the ai system accounts for a broad spectrum of perspectives, minimising biases that might otherwise lead to unfairness or discrimination. conclusion in conclusion, recent studies underscore the concerns of children and young individuals regarding biases and failures in ai surveillance and profiling. engaging them in the design of content-filtering ai systems is crucial. however, ethical and rights-based concerns persist regarding informed consent, participation, and addressing biases, necessitating safeguarding measures for children in ai system design. to effectively tackle these challenges, it is crucial to not only secure informed consent from both children and their guardians but also conduct pre-study and post-study surveys. these surveys serve as invaluable tools to assess the well-being and sentiments of the participants throughout the research process. the research team's composition, inclusive of trained professionals like psychologists or counsellors, is essential to provide the necessary support to children facing distress during the research process. furthermore, conducting workshops and design thinking sessions involving groups of children and young individuals rather than one-on-one interactions in ai system design research is recommended. implementing a human-in-the-loop ai system stands as a critical measure to counteract potential biases replicated by ai systems in real-world scenarios. these measures collectively contribute to a more ethical and responsible approach to involving children and youth in ai system development. references [1] google, ‘youtube community guidelines enforcement’, google transparency report. [online]. available: https://transparencyreport.google.com/youtube-policy/flags [2] meta, ‘community standards enforcement | transparency center’. accessed: oct. 26, 2023. [online]. available: https://transparency.fb.com/reports/community-standards-enforcement/bullying-and -harassment/facebook/ [3] tiktok, ‘community guidelines enforcement report’. [online]. available: https://www.tiktok.com/transparency/en-us/community-guidelines-enforcement-202 3-2/ [4] v. charisi et al., ‘artificial intelligence and the rights of the child : towards an integrated agenda for research and policy’, jrc publications repository. accessed: oct. 01, 2022. [online]. available: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/jrc127564 [5] ‘examining artificial intelligence technologies through the lens of children’s rights’. accessed: feb. 24, 2023. [online]. available: https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/jrc-news/examining-artificial-intelligence-t echnologies-through-lens-childrens-rights-2022-06-22_en [6] s. kotilainen, ‘methods in practice: studying children and youth online’, 2022, doi: 10.21241/ssoar.83031. [7] s. livingstone, l. haddon, a. görzig, and k. ólafsson, ‘the perspective of european children’. [8] kanishk verma, brian davis, tijana milosevic, ‘examining the effectiveness of artificial intelligence (ai) based cyberbullying moderation on online platforms: transparency implications’, in aoir 2022: children 2: safety and policy, dublin, ireland, nov. 2022. [9] v. basile et al., ‘semeval-2019 task 5: multilingual detection of hate speech against immigrants and women in twitter’, in proceedings of the 13th international workshop on semantic evaluation, minneapolis, minnesota, usa: association for computational linguistics, jun. 2019, pp. 54–63. doi: 10.18653/v1/s19-2007. [10] m. zampieri et al., ‘semeval-2020 task 12: multilingual offensive language identification in social media (offenseval 2020)’, in proceedings of the fourteenth workshop on semantic evaluation, barcelona (online): international committee for computational linguistics, dec. 2020, pp. 1425–1447. doi: 10.18653/v1/2020.semeval-1.188. [11] j. a. meaney, s. wilson, l. chiruzzo, a. lopez, and w. magdy, ‘semeval 2021 task 7: hahackathon, detecting and rating humor and offense’, in proceedings of the 15th international workshop on semantic evaluation (semeval-2021), online: association for computational linguistics, aug. 2021, pp. 105–119. doi: 10.18653/v1/2021.semeval-1.9. [12] e. fersini et al., ‘semeval-2022 task 5: multimedia automatic misogyny identification’, in proceedings of the 16th international workshop on semantic evaluation (semeval-2022), seattle, united states: association for computational linguistics, jul. 2022, pp. 533–549. doi: 10.18653/v1/2022.semeval-1.74. [13] c. perez-almendros, l. espinosa-anke, and s. schockaert, ‘semeval-2022 task 4: patronizing and condescending language detection’, in proceedings of the 16th international workshop on semantic evaluation (semeval-2022), seattle, united states: association for computational linguistics, jul. 2022, pp. 298–307. doi: 10.18653/v1/2022.semeval-1.38. [14] ‘semeval 2023 task 10: explainable detection of online sexism (edos) | acl member portal’. accessed: feb. 24, 2023. [online]. available: https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/semeval-2023-task-10-explainable-detectiononline-sexism-edos [15] f. elsafoury, s. katsigiannis, s. r. wilson, and n. ramzan, ‘does bert pay attention to cyberbullying?’, in proceedings of the 44th international acm sigir conference on research and development in information retrieval, in sigir ’21. new york, ny, usa: association for computing machinery, jul. 2021, pp. 1900–1904. doi: 10.1145/3404835.3463029. [16] k. verma, t. milosevic, and b. davis, ‘can attention-based transformers explain or interpret cyberbullying detection?’, in proceedings of the third workshop on threat, aggression and cyberbullying (trac 2022), gyeongju, republic of korea: association for computational linguistics, oct. 2022, pp. 16–29. accessed: feb. 24, 2023. [online]. available: https://aclanthology.org/2022.trac-1.3 [17] r. sprugnoli, s. menini, s. tonelli, f. oncini, and e. piras, ‘creating a whatsapp dataset to study pre-teen cyberbullying’, in proceedings of the 2nd workshop on abusive language online (alw2), brussels, belgium: association for computational linguistics, oct. 2018, pp. 51–59. doi: 10.18653/v1/w18-5107. [18] a. ollagnier, e. cabrio, s. villata, and c. blaya, ‘cyberagressionado-v1: a dataset of annotated online aggressions in french collected through a role-playing game’, in proceedings of the thirteenth language resources and evaluation conference, marseille, france: european language resources association, jun. 2022, pp. 867–875. accessed: feb. 24, 2023. [online]. available: https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.91 [19] f. bonetti and s. tonelli, ‘an analysis of abusive language data collected through a game with a purpose’, in proceedings of the 9th workshop on games and natural language processing within the 13th language resources and evaluation conference, marseille, france: european language resources association, jun. 2022, pp. 1–6. accessed: feb. 24, 2023. [online]. available: https://aclanthology.org/2022.games-1.1 [20] k. g. camelford and c. ebrahim, ‘the cyberbullying virus: a psychoeducational intervention to define and discuss cyberbullying among high school females’, j. creat. ment. health, vol. 11, no. 3–4, pp. 458–468, oct. 2016, doi: 10.1080/15401383.2016.1183545. [21] z. ashktorab and j. vitak, ‘designing cyberbullying mitigation and prevention solutions through participatory design with teenagers’, in proceedings of the 2016 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, in chi ’16. new york, ny, usa: association for computing machinery, may 2016, pp. 3895–3905. doi: 10.1145/2858036.2858548. [22] a. n. m. leung, n. wong, and j. m. farver, ‘you are what you read: the belief systems of cyber-bystanders on social networking sites’, front. psychol., vol. 9, 2018, accessed: feb. 24, 2023. [online]. available: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00365 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): schreiber, m., hendry, n. a. (2023, october). communicating care: healing, therapy and influencer practices on social media. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. communicating care: healing, therapy and influencer practices on social media maria schreiber university of salzburg, austria natalie ann hendry university of melbourne, australia internet cultures have long offered citizens the opportunity to connect, share information and collectively ‘make sense’ of health and life challenges. early digital forums, e-lists, blogs and webpages enabled grassroots participation for people and communities with lived experience to expand how, where and when people talked about disabling, stigmatising and confusing health experiences and conditions. the internet’s revolutionary potential for health-related communication has been tracked by media scholars and others who demonstrate its varying capacity to make living with health challenges more visible, archivable and collectively mediated (e.g., orgad, 2005; rheingold, 1994). these practices endure as digital technologies shift and develop; sharing one’s health experiences with others remains a familiar theme across social media platforms. for example, recent scholarship demonstrates how social media afford different bodily narratives or visibility (schreiber 2023; vicari 2021; groenevelt et al., 2022), and reprieve from the mundane daily challenges of negotiating mental illness and keeping up with one’s friends (hendry, 2020). much of the labour to communicate care, experience-produced knowledge and community with others is taken up by health (micro-)influencers and content creators. we suggest that these figures fill the gaps of medical health systems that, within the global north, typically offer ‘care’ that denies agency, control and participation led by lived experience. building on two case studies, this paper will discuss emerging healing and therapy cultures on social media and the role of (micro-)influencers. while influencer cultures have become an important field of internet research over the last decade (see e.g., abidin, 2015), scholars typically focus on commercial influencers in the context of fashion, beauty, travel, lifestyle genres, and adjacent genres. moving beyond this focus, the tiktok research network has recently identified ‘social justice influencers’ as an emerging phenomenon mainly in political and activist contexts (abidin & jin, 2022), drawing on earlier social justice digital practices on platforms such as tumblr and reddit (e.g. tiidenberg et al., 2021). this paper contributes to extending how we imagine and theorise influencer practices and explores influencers and influencer practices that are motivated, arguably, by healing rather than financial or ideological ambitions. theoretically, we consider how digital affect cultures enable influencers and followers to (re)create narratives about health, relate through resonance and engage with media as rituals rather than merely transmit information. as influencer practices and cultures continue to expand beyond popular or normative conceptualisations, this paper offers empirical accounts as a starting point to open up the contexts and theories we use to explore influencer dynamics. case studies our first case study builds on an online ethnography of #strokesurvivor on instagram, including interviews and close readings of accounts of contributors who emerged as micro-influencers within this specific community or hashtag public. the more ‘experienced’ or less affected survivors feel responsible or even ‘called to’ support others. on instagram, they usually do not share scientific or medical information but focus on (visual) storytelling of their personal recovery process and how they overcame (or not) obstacles and challenges. the narratives they offer vary; they are entangled with different styles of content creation but even more so with different modes of adapting and coping with their strokes, which may resonate with different audiences. they are active in the community and often comment on others’ stroke posts and are regularly mentioned and tagged. but becoming connecting nodes in this networked public also entails stressful expectations regarding their exposed position. they are consulted for advice or peer mentoring through platform comments and private messages; answering those generates time-consuming unpaid labor. overall, they typically become influencers by accident then later develop professionalism that goes beyond their instagram accounts as they start writing books or hosting podcasts. our second case study focuses on audiences, followers, listeners and “lurkers” of mental health-related influencers, podcasts and content creators. in this digital ethnography project, young adults (ages 21 to 40 years) in melbourne, australia, who were clients of psychologists, counsellors or other therapists, were interviewed over a series of interviews in 2021 and 2022. the project explored how they use social media in relation to their mental health experiences. participants learned and adopted norms, values and habits through their social media practices to embrace, consider and challenge normative ideas about mental health and therapeutic cultures that champion popular psychological tropes towards self-development and emotional control (e.g., salmenniemi et al., 2019). how influencers, podcasters and other content creators communicated in familiar, timely or ‘resonating’ modes was more important than what ideas or information were circulated. theorising health-related influencer practices other scholarship demonstrates how health influencers emerge in different ways. on twitter, for example, they act as curators of (scientific) information and sources. users whose messages are frequently retweeted and whose handles are mentioned often become gatekeepers of public issues (vicari, 2021). in anonymous mental health groups, users become health influencers who are peer mentors and role models through their intensive engagement, non-professional expertise, and authority (mccosker, 2018). in self-help communities, people with a problem tend to help other people with similar challenges, which is often (more) beneficial for those giving the help — the helper therapy principle, a well-known pre-internet phenomenon (riessman, 1965). moreover, becoming a “wounded storyteller” can become a way of recovering one’s voice, because “as wounded, people may be cared for, but as storytellers, they care for others” (frank, 2013, p. xx). this shift is not only an act of empowerment regarding one’s narrative but also establishes a relation of care. we understand care as an affective, cultural practice, that “enables us to move beyond the individual actor and the embodied emotion perspective and understand emotion in a larger framework as something that people do.” (döveling et al., 2018, p. 2). within this “digital affect culture”, the notion of alignment and belonging is crucial as such a culture “transmits emotions of solidarity and where ritual performances and participation in them are contextually normalized” (ibid. p. 7). we engage with belonging in the context of care and healing through hartmut rosa’s (2019) theory of resonance. he suggests resonance as a form of connection in alienated late-modern societies, describing it as “a mode of relating to the world in which the subject feels touched, moved or addressed by the people, places, objects, etc. he or she encounters” (pp. 46–47). while he focuses on offline encounters, he understands mediated content to afford experiences of resonance, as users “expose themselves to narratives because this helps them to come to terms with themselves and with their relationships with others and the world” (vorderer & halfmann, 2019, p. 88f.). engaging via resonance can become habitual throughout the healing process, constituting a ritualistic form of media use. this approach draws on james carey’s (2008) concept of media communication as ritual that, in contrast to information transmission, builds culture through media engagement over time. together, the two case studies attend to different perspectives — from (micro-) influencers and audiences or followers — of health-related digital affective cultures. while these case studies are empirically distinct, we offer them as a way to open up conversation at the conference about the diversity of influencers and influencer culture, how we might theorise their role, and how care, healing, health and therapy are felt and communicated. references abidin, c. (2015). communicative ❤ intimacies: influencers and perceived interconnectedness. ada: a journal of gender, new media, and technology, 8. http://adanewmedia.org/2015/11/issue8-abidin/ abidin, c., & jin, l. (2022). social justice through social media pop cultures: case studies and reading resources on influencers and tiktok. tiktok cultures research network (tcrn) & social media pop cultures programme, centre for culture and technology (ccat), curtin university. http://adanewmedia.org/2015/11/issue8-abidin/ carey, j. (2008). communication as culture (revised ed.). routledge. döveling, k., harju, a. a., & sommer, d. (2018). from mediatized emotion to digital affect cultures: new technologies and global flows of emotion. social media + society, 4(1), 1–11. frank, a. w. (2013). the wounded storyteller: body, illness, and ethics (2nd ed.). the university of chicago press. groenevelt, i., haan, s. de, & slatman, j. (2022). doing bodies in youtube videos about contested illnesses. body & society, 28(4), 28–52. hendry, n. a. (2020). young women’s mental illness and (in-)visible social media practices of control and emotional recognition. social media + society, 6(4), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120963832 mccosker, a. (2018). engaging mental health online: insights from beyondblue’s forum influencers. new media & society, 20(12), 4748–4764. orgad, s. (2005). storytelling online: talking breast cancer on the internet. peter lang. rheingold, h. (1994) the virtual community: finding connection in a computerized world. secker and warburg. riessman, f. (1965). the “helper" therapy principle. social work, 10, 27-32. rosa, h. (2019). resonance: a sociology of our relationship to the world. john wiley & sons. salmenniemi, s., nurmi, j., perheentupa, i., & bergroth, h. (2019). assembling therapeutics: cultures, politics and materiality. routledge. schreiber, m. (2023). #strokesurvivor on instagram: conjunctive experiences of adapting to disability. mediekultur: journal of media and communication research, 39(74), 50–72. https://doi.org/10.7146/mk.v39i74.132468 tiidenberg, k., hendry, n. a., & abidin, c. (2021). tumblr. polity press. vicari, s. (2021). digital media and participatory cultures of health and illness. routledge. vorderer, p., & halfmann, a. (2019). why do we entertain ourselves with media narratives? a theory of resonance perspective on entertainment experiences. annals of the international communication association, 43(2), 79–96. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120963832 https://doi.org/10.7146/mk.v39i74.132468 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): frenzel, j., jansen, f., liu, j., ruddock, j., finnegan, s., radloff, j. (2023, october). digital infrastructures and environmental justice: policies, practices, and visions. panel presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. digital infrastructures and environmental justice: policies, practices, and visions janna frenzel concordia university, canada fieke jansen university of amsterdam jen liu cornell university, usa jenna ruddock harvard kennedy school shawna finnegan association for progressive communication (apc) jennifer radloff association for progressive communication (apc) environmental media scholars have long drawn attention to the physicality of digital systems, situating their work as part of the infrastructural turn (larkin, 2013; parks & starosielski, 2015; star, 1999). contrary to the prevailing “cultural imagination of dematerialization” (starosielski, 2015), digital supply chains – from data centers to ai systems to consumer electronics – depend on minerals, water, land, labour, and energy (crawford, 2021; cubitt, 2016; hogan et al., 2022). this growth-based model of digital technology is based on assumed access to resources, implicating it in the extractive global economy shaped by ongoing colonial violence (liboiron, 2021; spice, 2018). transdisciplinary scholarship on the intersection of digital technologies and the environment has looked at online organizing and digital climate change action (mclean & fuller, 2016; pearce et al., 2019), indigenous resistance and data sovereignty (duarte, 2017; kukutai & taylor, 2016), the environmental impacts of large-scale data centers (hogan, 2015; velkova, 2016) and alternative social media (laser et al., 2022), and what "responsible digitalization" could look like (dwivedi et al., 2022). building on already existing work that critically examines the material implications of digital infrastructures, this panel asks what environmental justice means in relation to digital technologies. turning against the language of revolution that too often gets leveraged by big tech to describe the latest "disruptive" technology that is allegedly going to solve the world's problems (geiger, 2020; tabel, 2022), we foreground subversive practices, regulatory interventions, and grassroots organizing and vision building as emancipatory alternatives to a for-profit, monopolized internet. from a theory of change that seeks to understand and challenge the extractive nature of digital technology production from all angles, we shed light on reform, repair, refusal, and resistance as paths for transformation. zooming in on southeast louisiana where hundreds of petrochemical processing and manufacturing facilities are located, the first paper examines how internet access can be reimagined in landscapes shaped by extractive economies. the paper analyzes the challenges that activist and research groups face when using internet of things (iot) devices for real-time environmental sensing of air quality due to underdeveloped internet infrastructures in a region that is becoming increasingly vulnerable to climate change. the second paper engages with the material footprint and environmental implications of computing hardware production. it looks at the "right to repair" as one approach that challenges corporate control over design and obsolescence of electronic devices. by comparing examples of recent legislation in the eu, india, and the us, and analyzing them through the lens of design justice and discard studies frameworks, it argues that right to repair needs to be complemented by a substantial change in industry norms and practices rather than simply attempting to delay the disposal through repair by consumers. the third paper examines community resistance to data centers in the united states. in the past years, activists have framed their resistance to data centers along three critiques, namely noise pollution, resource consumption, and lack of public input to permitting processes. the paper investigates how environmental justice activists use formal legal and regulatory processes such as public meetings, petitions, lawsuits, public records requests to organise against new data center developments, and the challenges they meet as part of their organising. the fourth paper presents a "feminist principle of the internet on the environment" that was developed over several years in transnational collaborative work by practitioners. it addresses the interconnections between gendered online violence against land and environmental defenders on large social media platforms and on-the-ground resistance to extractive industries and outlines a new emancipatory vision for a different internet that centers planetary care and justice for communities and ecosystems. the fifth paper presents an analysis of the internet architecture board's (iab) workshop on "environmental impact of internet applications and systems", held online in december 2022. it uses an infrastructural lens to analyze which politics are embedded and missing from industry responses to the sector's environmental harms. while international regulatory bodies are slowly coming to terms with the environmental impacts of distributed digital networks, the paper argues that the proposed sustainability solutions are as of yet too narrow in scope. references crawford, k. (2021). atlas of ai. yale university press. cubitt, s. (2016). finite media. environmental implications of digital technologies. duke university press. duarte, m. e. (2017). network sovereignty: building the internet across indian country. university of washington press. dwivedi, y. k., hughes, l., kar, a. k., baabdullah, a. m., grover, p., abbas, r., andreini, d., abumoghli, i., barlette, y., bunker, d., chandra kruse, l., constantiou, i., davison, r. m., de’, r., dubey, r., fenby-taylor, h., gupta, b., he, w., kodama, m., … wade, m. (2022). climate change and cop26: are digital technologies and information management part of the problem or the solution? an editorial reflection and call to action. international journal of information management, 63, 102456. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2021.102456 geiger, s. (2020). silicon valley, disruption, and the end of uncertainty. journal of cultural economy, 13(2), 169–184. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2019.1684337 hogan, m. (2015). data flows and water woes: the utah data center. big data & society, 2(2), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951715592429 hogan, m., edwards, d., & cooper, z. g. t. (2022). 5 things about critical data center studies. commonplace. https://doi.org/10.21428/6ffd8432.af5934aa kukutai, t., & taylor, j. (eds.). (2016). indigenous data sovereignty: toward an agenda. anu press. larkin, b. (2013). the politics and poetics of infrastructure. annual review of anthropology, 42, 327–343. laser, s., pasek, a., sørensen, e., hogan, m., ojala, m., fehrenbacher, j., hepach, m., celik, l., & kumar, k. r. (2022). the environmental footprint of social media hosting: tinkering with mastodon. european association for the study of science and technology, 41(3). https://www.easst.net/article/the-environmental-footprint-ofsocialmedia-hosting-tinkering-with-mastodon/ liboiron, m. (2021). pollution is colonialism. duke university press. mclean, j. e., & fuller, s. (2016). action with(out) activism: understanding digital climate change action. international journal of sociology and social policy, 36(9/10), 578–595. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijssp-12-2015-0136 parks, l., & starosielski, n. (2015). signal traffic: critical studies of media infrastructures. university of illinois press. pearce, w., niederer, s., özkula, s. m., & sánchez querubín, n. (2019). the social media life of climate change: platforms, publics, and future imaginaries. wires climate change, 10(2), e569. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.569 spice, a. (2018). fighting invasive infrastructures indigenous relations against pipelines. environment and society, 9, 40–56. star, s. l. (1999). the ethnography of infrastructure. american behavioral scientist, 43(3), 377–391. starosielski, n. (2015). the undersea network. duke university press. tabel, j. (2022, june 29). silicon valley’s “ai revolution”: a revolutionary narrative serving the status quo. university of twente. https://essay.utwente.nl/91838/ velkova, j. (2016). data that warms: waste heat, infrastructural convergence and the computation traffic commodity. big data & society, 3(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716684144 internet access in extractive landscapes: a case study from southeast louisiana jen liu cornell university, usa in this paper, i will discuss how expectations of the internet as “always on” fall short in places that are experiencing accelerated effects of climate change. specifically, i draw from ongoing fieldwork in southeast louisiana on the impact of climate change on internet infrastructures. this work includes how frontline communities living near sites of petrochemical industries face challenges in the installation, repair, and maintenance of digital environmental monitoring devices. when using internet of things (iot) devices to do real-time tracking of air quality, residents are faced with issues of a sparse and aging internet infrastructure that is vulnerable to hurricanes and other climate-change related impacts. i use this case study to reimagine what internet access can look like in a dynamic and shifting landscape, shaped by histories of extraction. for centuries, southeast louisiana has relied on, and continues to rely on extractive economies, economies based on the exploitation of resources and labor without replacement. following french claim to the louisiana territory in the early 18th century, european settlers established slavery in the region, enslaving both indigenous and african slaves for labor on newly formed indigo, cotton, and sugarcane plantations. after the abolishment of slavery during the american civil war, louisiana, like many southern states, faced a period of stagnant economic development due to the previous reliance on enslaved african and indigenous people for cheap labor. when the first oil well was successfully struck in the early 20th century, state policymakers, eager to transform the slow economy, provided generous tax incentives for these new gas and oil companies. as a result of this increased investment in oil and gas extraction, many former plantations that lined the banks of the mississippi river were transformed into oil refineries and other related facilities. over 150 of these facilities are currently located in an 85 mile stretch along the mississippi river between baton rouge and new orleans. this area is nicknamed “cancer alley” due to the high levels of toxic waste and emissions that come from these factories. this toxic environment affects mostly lowincome rural black residents in the region, many of whom are descendants of the formerly enslaved (allen, 2003). the impact of the oil and gas industry in the region has detrimental health impacts such as increased respiratory illnesses and cancer diagnoses for people living closest to these sites (kang, 2021; singer, 2011). many activist and research groups have since used environmental monitoring to understand air and water quality issues, when corporate and government institutions have failed to provide adequate information and accountability (blodgett, 2006; gabrys, 2022; rey mazón et al., 2018; wylie, 2018). in recent years, iot sensors have been developed and deployed to provide real-time information about local environmental conditions. instead of storing data locally, the sensors can transmit data over the internet. one of the benefits of this is that the data from multiple sensors can be collected, processed, and visualized almost instantly – that is if there is a fast and stable enough internet connection. for some of these frontline communities, these sensors can often be difficult to set up and maintain due to both the state of internet infrastructures in this region (gabrys, 2016). many of these areas closest to petrochemical facilities do not have adequate broadband to bring these sensors online. for example, in st. james parish, data shows that while 100% of residents supposedly have access to broadband, only 17% of residents have a subscription (fcc, 2022; kahan & ferres, 2020). furthermore, many of these services are over dsl, cable, or satellite that may not have the necessary bandwidth to support real-time sensing devices. while internet hotspots are used to enhance existing connections, these are temporary workarounds that can add to the cost and amount of labor is necessary in the setup. furthermore, stronger hurricanes can also take electricity and internet offline for prolonged periods. given the rising severity of extreme weather events associated with climate change, the infrastructures that we rely on for digital communications are at risk of breakdown (durairajan et al., 2018). in southeast louisiana, these weather events include hurricanes that have increased in both frequency and intensity. warming ocean waters resulting from increased carbon emissions create conditions for storms to form with higher wind speeds and more precipitation. in 2020, the most active atlantic hurricane season on record brought several category 3 and 4 storms across the region. the national oceanic and atmosphere association (noaa) predicts that the proportion of hurricanes that reach category 4 or 5 levels is projected to increase over the course the next century (knutson, n.d.). much of the grid, which includes the utility poles which string together the internet in southeast louisiana was built to previous standards to brace winds at 110 miles per hour, equivalent to a category 2 storm (eavis & penn, 2021). while networks built to these prior standards had been able to brace most hurricanes that have hit the region, they are no longer able to withstand stronger hurricane seasons. researchers have described the rise and demand of digital networks and devices as the “cornucopian paradigm,” where a belief in the continued efficiency in computing will allow for continuous and unfettered growth (preist et al., 2016). under the ‘cornucopian paradigm’, internet services are assumed to be not only high quality, but also continuous, instant, and eternal. however, these expectations do not always hold up. in the context of this case study in south louisiana, this means that iot devices that are designed with seamless internet connections in mind will fail because of the state of current internet infrastructures. instead, one possibility is that both computing devices and infrastructures need to be considered and designed with intermittency in mind – that networks will go offline, but that life will still go on in the meantime. for sensors, this could mean having multiple ways to store data within a device. on the infrastructural level, this can entail changing state level policy to enable community or municipally owned networks that can be maintained locally to support the specific needs of residents. in southeast louisiana, the ongoing legacy of extractive industries has led to uneven development and deep socioeconomic disparities in the region, while increased intensity and frequency of storms cause severe damage and disruptions to the infrastructures that support everyday life for residents. these industries and storms are also enmeshed: the carbon emissions produced from industrial sectors contribute to warming ocean waters, which in turn create conditions for storms to form with higher wind speeds and more precipitation. through this case study, i show how these two are also linked via the question of internet access. ensuring just and livable futures for the people who live here needs to include a vision of internet that reflects this region. references allen, b. l. (2003). uneasy alchemy: citizens and experts in louisiana’s chemical corridor disputes. mit press. blodgett, a. d. (2006). an analysis of pollution and community advocacy in ‘cancer alley’: setting an example for the environmental justice movement in st james parish, louisiana. local environment, 11(6), 647–661. durairajan, r., barford, c., & barford, p. (2018). lights out: climate change risk to internet infrastructure. proceedings of the applied networking research workshop, 9– 15. eavis, p., & penn, i. (2021, september 17). why louisiana’s electric grid failed in hurricane ida. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/business/energy-environment/hurricaneidaentergy-power-outage-new-orleans.html fcc. (2022). summary data of fixed broadband coverage by geographic area. https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/area-summary/fixed?zoom=5.91&vlon= 92.809366&vlat=32.004534&br=r&speed=25_3&tech=1_2_3_4_5_6_7_8 gabrys, j. (2016). program earth: environmental sensing technology and the making of a computational planet. university of minnesota press. gabrys, j. (2022). citizens of worlds: open-air toolkits for environmental struggle. university of minnesota press. kahan, j., & ferres, j. l. (2020). united states broadband usage percentages dataset. microsoft. https://github.com/microsoft/usbroadbandusagepercentages kang, s. (2021). “they’re killing us, and they don’t care”: environmental sacrifice and resilience in louisiana’s cancer alley. resilience: a journal of the environmental humanities, 8(3), 98–125. knutson, t. (n.d.). global warming and hurricanes. retrieved february 28, 2023, https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/ preist, c., schien, d., & blevis, e. (2016). understanding and mitigating the effects of device and cloud service design decisions on the environmental footprint of digital infrastructure. proceedings of the 2016 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 1324–1337. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858378 rey-mazón, p., keysar, h., dosemagen, s., d’ignazio, c., & blair, d. (2018). public lab: community-based approaches to urban and environmental health and justice. science and engineering ethics, 24, 971–997. singer, m. (2011). down cancer alley: the lived experience of health and environmental suffering in louisiana’s chemical corridor. medical anthropology quarterly, 25(2), 141– 163. wylie, s. a. (2018). fractivism: corporate bodies and chemical bonds. duke university press. tackling the environmental footprint of digital technology through a “right to repair” janna frenzel concordia university, canada hardware is the prerequisite for data storage, processing, and transmission, and electronic devices enable access to digital platforms. its production is part of global supply chains that rely on the availability of minerals and other materials, labour, and manufacturing capacity. it also contributes to a growing e-waste problem, which is compounded by planned obsolescence and lack of or restricted repairability. this paper investigates legislation and socio-material practices around the design and disposal of computing hardware and the “right to repair”. first, it introduces the concept and practice of repair by situating it in the relevant transdisciplinary academic literature. second, it presents examples of recent legislation from the eu, india, and the us, and analyzes the implications of these regulatory changes. third, it mobilizes analytical concepts from design justice and discard studies as correctives that move the focus from the tail end of the issue – the attempt to delay the disposing of hardware at the end of its life through repair – upstream to how hardware is developed in the first place. in one of the first comprehensive theorizations of waste related to digitization and datafication, jennifer gabrys has argued that the environmental damage resulting from the accelerated production and discarding of electronic devices is systemically obscured by “performances of abundance”. devices appear in the cultural imagination as mere interfaces, making the virtual appear limitless and seemingly lacking any physical constraints (gabrys, 2011). critical scholarship in media and communication studies and related fields has built on this argument and called into question the arrival of an allegedly “post-extractive modernity” (vondereau, 2017) that supposes a disembodied “information society” (munster, 2011) or maintains a rigid distinction between content, software, and hardware, even though these are intimately intertwined (taffel, 2019). repair as a concept and practice challenges this imaginary of abundance by interrogating the existing socio-political and legal order that determines what can be repaired by whom, how, under which temporal and material constraints, and how this in turn effects what items and materials are “wasted”. while ‘innovators’ are usually revered for their entrepreneurial spirit and creativity in putting forward new ‘solutions’, those who undertake repair are often “seen as making do rather than innovating; repair happens in the face of austerity” (crosby & stein, 2020). steven j. jackson calls this the “productivist bias” (2014) that places power in the hands of producers who get to decide under what conditions repair is desirable and possible. right to repair is a largely civil society-initiated approach that aims to reclaim at least part of that power from corporate control and bring down barriers that restrict access to knowledge, tools, and parts needed for repair (perzanowski, 2022). it aims to reduce waste and new production by extending a product’s lifespan. as a concept, it opposes commercial incentives to respond to breakdown with immediate replacement or the most recent ‘upgrade’, thereby contesting notions of efficiency and economic growth (van der velden, 2021). but it does more than that: repair, particularly at the local scale, is also a social and community-building practice that is enacted in neighbourhood maker spaces and skill-sharing workshops called “repair caf.s”, often across generations (ibid). in terms of regulation, initiatives for right to repair legislation (which typically includes but is not limited to consumer electronics) focus on a variety of issues. for instance, the european right to repair campaign is built around the following three demands: 1) legislation that obliges producers to ensure that devices can be easily disassembled and parts which no longer work can be replaced, 2) that everyone have access to spare parts and repair manuals for the entire lifetime of a product (“fair access”), 3) the introduction of a scoring system that makes transparent to consumers whether products are built to be repaired or destined to be disposable when breaking (right to repair europe, n.d.). these demands interconnect with the black boxing of proprietary diagnostic tools, the discontinuation of software updates that would allow older models of hardware to function longer, the incompatibility of current legal frameworks of copyright and intellectual property, trade secrets, competition, and product pricing (grinvald & tur-sinai, 2019; manwaring et al., 2022; mellal, 2020). the relevant literature already points to several potential risks and pitfalls of right to repair. for one, circular consumption choices (for instance, paying for repair services instead of buying new products) can have unintended “rebound effects”, i.e., the decrease of material consumption in one area may lead to intensified material consumption in others, thereby jeopardizing the benefits of repair (castro et al., 2022). while lowering independent repair costs, right to repair legislation may also trigger a price response from manufacturers to make up for profit loss if the legislation doesn’t anticipate this (jin et al., 2022). looking at three examples of new regulatory initiatives – the right to repair frameworks of the european commission (expected in march 2023) and the government of india (expected later this year), as well as new york state’s digital fair repair act from 2022 –, i will read these examples through the analytical lenses of design justice (costanzachock, 2020) and the framework for discard studies proposed by max liboiron and josh lepawsky (2022). design justice establishes principles for non-exploitative, nonoppressive technologies, such as evaluating design based on outcome and accountability to those directly impacted by it rather than the vision or intention of the developers. discard studies asks how things are made disposable in the first place, focusing on the systemic structures that produce the problem rather than on how to best deal with pollution and waste when it is already in the world. by mobilizing these concepts, i ask in how far the legislative examples are successful in reigning in corporate power and establishing an accessible right to repair for citizens, and what their limitations or shortcomings are. i argue that the debate around repair needs to refocus on industry standards and protocols instead of consumer practices to move towards more environmentally just, circular models of hardware production. repair, however, remains a significant concept to draw attention to how the growthbased economic model of value creation offloads harms as “externalities” onto bodies and ecosystems. while it needs to be complemented by industry regulation to be effective at scale, it is a useful prompt for slowing down resource extraction and conversion that resonates with practices of social and planetary care, and ultimately goes against the grain of silicon valley’s accelerationist and disruptive model of technology development. references castro, c. g., trevisan, a. h., pigosso, d. c. a., & mascarenhas, j. (2022). the rebound effect of circular economy: definitions, mechanisms and a research agenda. journal of cleaner production, 345. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2022.131136 costanza-chock, s. (2020). design justice: community-led practices to build the worlds we need. mit press. crosby, a., & stein, j. a. (2020). repair. environmental humanities, 12(1), 179–185. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-8142275 gabrys, j. (2011). digital rubbish: a natural history of electronics. university of michigan press. grinvald, l. c., & tur-sinai, o. (2019). intellectual property law and the right to repair. fordham law review. https://fordhamlawreview.org/issues/intellectualpropertylaw-and-the-right-to-repair/ jackson, s. j. (2014). rethinking repair. in t. gillespie, p. j. boczkowski, & k. a. foot (eds.), media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society (pp. 221–307). mit press. jin, c., yang, l., & zhu, c. (2022). right to repair: pricing, welfare, and environmental implications. management science. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4401 liboiron, m., & lepawsky, j. (2022). discard studies: wasting, systems, and power. mit press. manwaring, k., kearnes, m., morgan, b., munro, p., pala, r., & samarakoon, s. (2022). what does a right to repair tell us about our relationship with technology? alternative law journal. https://doi.org/10.1177/1037969x221108557 mellal, m. a. (2020). obsolescence – a review of the literature. technology in society, 63, 101347. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101347 munster, a. (2011). materializing new media: embodiment in information aesthetics. upne. perzanowski, a. (2022). the right to repair: reclaiming the things we own. cambridge university press. right to repair europe. (n.d.). what we want. right to repair europe. retrieved february 26, 2023, from https://repair.eu/what-we-want/ taffel, s. (2019). digital media ecologies: entanglements of content, code and hardware. bloomsbury academic. van der velden, m. (2021). ‘fixing the world one thing at a time’: community repair and a sustainable circular economy. journal of cleaner production, 304(127151), 1–11. vondereau, a. (2017). technologies of imagination: locating the cloud in sweden’s north. imaginations journal, 8(2), 8–21. permitting/resisting the cloud: a comparative legal analysis of community resistance to fossil fuel infrastructure and data centers jenna ruddock harvard kennedy school, usa this paper looks to situate data center permitting and construction within a broader history of industrial infrastructure expansion and community acceptance/resistance in the us. it builds upon other critical research that aims to “resituat[e] the history of computing within the larger context of the history of industrialization” (ensmenger 2020) – a framing i embrace here as a lens for examining community resistance to the permitting, construction, and operation of data center facilities in three us regions: the mid-atlantic (swinhoe 2022, peterson 2017), the southwest (miller 2022, pineda 2021), and the pacific northwest (rogoway 2022, parks 2021). it seeks to fill a gap in current us legal scholarship on the expansion of data center infrastructure, which largely focuses on state-level regulatory incentives to entice data center construction. as many other scholars have described, the relative invisibility (star 1999) of internet infrastructure and in particular the rhetorical framing of “the cloud” obscures a material reality that ties internet infrastructure into long legacies of colonialism, extractivism, and industrialization (tarnoff 2022, vgontzas 2022, ensmenger 2018, hu 2016, star 1999). in the case of data centers, corporations, local governments, and communities are finding themselves on well-trodden ground in environmental disputes between extractive/polluting industries and the communities in which they seek to operate (solon 2021, bade 2017, varsalona 2016). from challenges to permitting decisions to a lack of public transparency regarding resource consumption and potential environmental impacts, local concerns surrounding the construction and operation of data centers are squarely in line with fights waged by communities against more “traditional” industrial infrastructures, from power plants to large-scale factory farming operations to oil and gas pipelines. the proactive and reactive behaviors of local governments and technology corporations continue to trace similar patterns, too. this research will focus on community resistance channeled through formal legal and regulatory processes. these processes include participating in public meetings with regulatory agencies, initiating public records requests and pursuing related litigation, and passing restrictive local ordinances. this research will also examine the potential challenges facing communities when those sanctioned methods of petition fail or are insufficient (ruddock 2019, stump 2017). at the same time, this research will examine how the legal tools and strategies employed by corporate actors in these case studies – google, facebook, and aws – replicate long-standing tactics deployed against communities in the construction and operation of fossil fuel infrastructures. in the selected case studies, these tactics include the veiling of corporate identity behind local subsidiaries, shielding operational information critical to community-led oversight, invoking legal protections for trade secrets to obscure potential environmental impacts, and taking advantage of local regulatory environments skewed to empower industry actors over community opposition. one illustrative case study involves google and the dalles, oregon. the dalles is a small city that sits on the columbia river, the second-largest river in the us, as well as on the edge of the oregon high desert (parks 2021). google has operated a data center in the dalles since 2006 and has plans to construct a new data center on a site once occupied by an aluminum smelter – google had already acquired the water rights formerly associated with that operation (parks 2021). local officials claimed that their proposed deal with google would involve the company transferring these water rights to the city and then paying a standard rate to access water as needed, but both google and local government officials declined to specifically disclose the amount of water google expected to draw from the city for its future data center operations, despite community concerns (parks 2021). in response, local news organization the oregonian/oregon live submitted a disclosure request under the state’s public records law – prompting local officials to sue the oregonian in an effort to prevent the release of those records (rogoway 2022). google’s initial position was one familiar to many communities adjacent to active or proposed fossil fuel infrastructure projects – that this information constituted a “proprietary trade secret” and, accordingly, local officials had signed a non-disclosure agreement preventing them from disclosing the information, information that was central to the agreement the city had reached with google regarding its additional data center (parks 2021). after litigating the case for over a year, the dalles finally reached a settlement with the oregonian/oregon in which it agreed to provide both past and future annual water usage data to the public – with google committing to covering the city’s legal costs as well as the settlement costs (rogoway 2022). the comparison between data center and fossil fuel infrastructure permitting has more than a superficial or procedural resonance, though legal and regulatory processes will provide a key lens for this research. as nathan ensmenger notes, while the particular invisibility of computing infrastructures often obscures the materiality of, for example, our internet-enabled activities, foregrounding “the places where large-scale computation happens” ensures that “the digital present does not seem quite so discontinuous with our industrial past.” (2018). examining the processes by which data centers are sited and permitted provides a new lens on this line of inquiry while also prioritizing the ways in which frontline communities initially encounter and are expected to contend with these infrastructures. but while the ongoing growth of large-scale computing infrastructures is a relatively recent development (monroe 2022, tarnoff 2022, ensmenger 2018, hu 2016), the widespread expansion of fossil fuel infrastructures is not. drawing connections to the processes by which fossil fuel infrastructures have been and continue to be sited and permitted connects emergent local struggles against the environmental impacts of expanding computing infrastructures in the us to longstanding local struggles against extractive/polluting industries – and, by extension, to the decades of lessons learned by communities engaged in those struggles. references bade, g. (2017, september 21). gas pipeline protesters turn up heat on ferc. utility dive. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/gas-pipeline-protesters-turn-up-heat-onferc/505415/ ensmenger, n. (2021). the cloud is a factory. in mullaney, t. s., peters, b., hicks, m., & philip, k. (eds.), your computer is on fire (pp. 29-50). mit press. ensmenger, n. (2018). the environmental history of computing. technology & culture, (59)4, 7-33. hu, t. (2016). a prehistory of the cloud. mit press. miller, r. (2022, august 19). water restrictions in southwest may raise the bar for data center operators. data center frontier. https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/sustainability/article/11427134/water-restrictionsinsouthwest-may-raise-the-bar-for-data-center-operators monroe, d. (2022). seeding the cloud. logic magazine (16). https://logicmag.io/clouds/seeding-the-cloud parks, b. (2021, september 29). residents seek more transparency from google in water deal with the dalles. oregon public broadcasting. https://www.opb.org/article/2021/09/29/google-water-data-center-the-dalles-oregon/ peterson, b. (2017, april 22). google’s controversial groundwater withdrawal sparks question of who owns south carolina water. the post and courier. https://www.postandcourier.com/news/google-s-controversial-groundwaterwithdrawalsparks-question-of-who-owns/article_bed9179c-1baa-11e7-983e03d6b33a01e7.html pineda, p. (2021, november 22). unsustainable, resource-hungry and loud: why chandler wants to ban more data centers. az central. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/chandler/2021/11/22/chandler-wantsbanmore-data-centers-after-years-complaints/8627569002 rogoway, m. (2022, september 2). how leaders in a small oregon town positioned themselves for an amazon ‘windfall.” the oregonian. https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/09/how-leaders-in-a-small-oregontownpositioned-themselves-for-an-amazon-windfall.html ruddock, j. (2019). coming down the pipeline: first amendment challenges to statelevel “critical infrastructure” trespass laws. american university law review, (69)2. solon, o. (2021, june 19). drought-stricken communities push back against data centers. nbc news. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/droughtstrickencommunities-push-back-against-data-centers-n1271344 star, s. (1999). the ethnography of infrastructure. american behavioral scientist, 43(3), 377-391. stump, n. f. (2017). mountain resistance: appalachian civil disobedience in critical legal research modeled law reform. environs: envtl. l. & pol'y j., 41(69). swinhoe, d. (2022, may 10). residents in culpeper sue the county over zoning decision for aws data center. data center dynamics. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/residents-in-culpeper-sue-thecountyover-zoning-decision-for-aws-data-center tarnoff, b. (2022) internet for the people. the fight for our digital future. verso. varsalona, s. (2016). pipelines, protests and general permits. nyu environmental law journal. https://www.nyuelj.org/2016/10/pipelines-protests-and-general-permits vgontzas, n. (2022). toward degrowth: worker power, surveillance abolition, and climate justice at amazon. new global studies, 16(1), 49–67. https://doi.org/10.1515/ngs-2022-0008 principles of shared responsibility: building a feminist internet with an ethics of collective care shawna finnegan association for progressive communication (apc) jennifer radloff association for progressive communication (apc) in 2019, the association for progressive communications’ (apc) women's rights programme (wrp) embarked on a collaborative process to develop a feminist principle of the internet (fpi) for the environment, building on 17 principles that were first developed in 2014. this process reflected on the destructive impacts of the internet on the earth and all life, while imagining safe, inclusive, and diverse digital spaces, tools and systems that respect the rights of all life and the rights of nature. the feminist principles of the internet (fpis) are a series of statements that offer a gender and sexual rights lens on critical internet-related rights. the principles were first drafted in april 2014 and updated in 2016, through convenings organised by the association for progressive communications (apc) that brought together activists and advocates working on gender, sexual rights, and digital rights to collectively identify, prioritize and discuss issues at these intersections (feminist principles of the internet, n.d.). currently there are 17 principles for a feminist internet, available in 11 languages and organised in five clusters: access, movements, economy, expression, and embodiment. together, they aim to provide a framework for women's movements to articulate and explore issues related to technology. the principles are used by feminist activists and adapted, localised, and made relevant to various contexts and issue-areas. we recently developed the fpi engagement toolkit to assist in holding local conversation on the fpi’s. towards a feminist principle of the internet for the environment apc women’s rights programme (wpr) collaborations with human rights defenders have deepened our understanding of how the internet is being used by governments and corporations to surveil, censor, discredit, and violate rights. digital attacks against land and environmental defenders often target family and friends and create a chilling effect in their communities. most of the digital platforms and spaces in which these attacks occur are owned and operated by private companies that are far removed from the realities of these defenders and are unable or unwilling to adequately address these attacks and rights violations (poetranto et al., 2020). at the front lines of resisting extractive industries and defending territories are women and girls with all their diverse identities as well as gender non-conforming and nonbinary people. these diverse identities exacerbate the threats they face. digital safety and care are critical to ensuring the agency, safety, and resilience of climate defenders. how do we build ethical and fair practices? the development of a feminist principle of the internet for the environment has been deeply informed by conversations in 2019 at a hackfeminist gather in chiapas, mexico, in which 26 women from diverse backgrounds met together for three days to explore technology and affection, and imagine a principle for a feminist internet that centers collective care, and weaves together policies of co-responsibility and interconnections between all life, and land.1 in this hackfeminist gathering, participants posed the question: "how do we build ethical and fair practices to ensure that our use of technologies respect the environment?" this question invited deeper engagement with a feminist exploration of environmental justice, and how to shift away from extractive and destructive digital technologies, challenge the roots of climate catastrophe in systemic injustices, and move towards and 1 the hackfeminist meeting in chiapas in july 2018 was co-organized by sursiendo, apc and instituto de liderazgo simone de beauvoir and tecnológico de monterrey. for more information, please see radloff (2022). ethics of digital safety and care. participants in the hackfeminist gathering developed a new draft principle for a feminist internet: “a feminist internet respects life in all its forms; it does not consume it. our proposal for a feminist internet principle in relation to the environment re-signifies care towards an ethics of collective care in choices around design, extraction, production, consumption, and disposal of the technologies involved.” this statement invites us to re-imagine and re-shape our relationships with technology to center collective care and shared accountability (ciacci, 2020). two publications that resulted from the hackfeminist gathering in chiapas offer critical insights for the future of a feminist internet for the environment: “technoaffections” (cort.s et al., 2022) investigates the politics of shared responsibility and speaks to our first relationships with technology through memory, feelings and emotions. the 12 chapters unpack the politics of shared responsibility as creative and collaborative, rooted in experiences of land defence, feminism, and social movements. how do we build ethical and fair practices to ensure that our use of technologies respects the environment? “let us imagine” (ricaurte & et al., 2022) contains hackfeminist writings for alternative technologies that look at relationships between ideas of love, work, alternative economies, and memory that teach us about care to arrive at strategies that nurture our communities. this collection of 20 writings from participants are a rich and diverse collection of thoughts and creativity about the politics of shared responsibility for people and the earth. the road ahead in 2023, apc and sursiendo will gather feminist, digital rights activists and organisations working on land and environmental justice, the internet, and extractive industries in an online convening to finalise an 18th fpi and explore ways of integrating this into wider environmental justice discussions and actions. apc's work to contribute to environmental justice and sustainability is framed within feminist principles, adopting intersectional approaches, fostering communities of digital safety and care, contributing to the fight against environmental racism, and centring respect for the rights and sovereignty of indigenous peoples and traditional communities (finnegan, 2022). an fpi on the environment will provide a framework for feminist movements to articulate and explore issues related to technology, digital rights, and the environment. linked to this, there will be a way forward mapped to bring this text to life through engaging in spaces where we can influence policy, donor advocacy, public awareness and build momentum for collective action to actively shift the devastating impacts of the technology industry on the earth. references ciacci, j. (2020). imagining a principle for a feminist internet focusing on environmental justice. in a. finlay (ed.), global information society watch 2020: technology, the environment and a sustainable world. https://giswatch.org/node/6228 cortés, n., ricaurte, p., la_jes, hernández, p., & heber pérez-días, l. (2022). technoaffections. the politics of shared responsibility. sursiendo. https://sursiendo.org/2022/08/hackfeminist-writings-for-alternative-technologies/ feminist principles of the internet. (n.d.). retrieved march 1, 2023, from https://feministinternet.org/en finnegan, s. (2022). organising for sustainable connectivity: centring communities in crisis. in a. finlay (ed.), global information society watch 2022: digital futures for a post pandemic world. https://giswatch.org/en/digital-rights-internet-advocacymeaningful-access/organising-sustainable-connectivity-centring poetranto, i., chan, s., & anstis, s. (2020). on/offline: multidimensional threats faced by environmental human rights defenders in southeast asia. in a. finlay (ed.), global information society watch 2020: technology, the environment and a sustainable world. https://giswatch.org/node/6228 radloff, j. (2022). towards a new feminist principle of the internet on the environment: two new publications now available in english. https://www.apc.org/en/news/towardsnew-feminist-principle-internet-environment-two-new-publications-now-available-english ricaurte, p., & et al. (2022). let us imagine: hackfeminist writings for alternative technologies. sursiendo. https://archive.org/details/let-us-imagine infinity, abundance, and optimization: an unrelenting internet infrastructure ideology fieke jansen university of amsterdam the climate crisis, planetary scarcity, and (geo)political conflicts force internet practitioners to rethink internet infrastructures. industry and policy responses to these crises remain tech solutionist, in which technology is positioned as the way out of the crisis without acknowledging that internet infrastructures themselves are increasingly becoming the subject of environmental controversy. data centers are linked to disputes over land, water, and energy in public debate (jansen 2022). computing and hardware demands are seen to intensify the extraction of critical raw materials (sutherland 2022). rising energy costs because of the war against ukraine create an economic incentive to handle computational processes sparingly. how the global internet governance community approaches the environmental impact of technology has not been extensively researched so far. this paper aims to start filling this gap by analysing the agendas that are currently being created, and the limits of these approaches. taking the example of the internet architecture board’s (iab) workshop entitled “environmental impact of internet applications and systems”, which was held online in december 2022 (iab 2022), i argue that the internet governance community is slowly coming to terms with the environmental harms of distributed digital networks but that the proposed sustainability solutions are narrow in scope. applying an infrastructural analytical lens allows us to see which politics are embedded and missing from government and industry responses to the digital sector's environmental harms. here, i use the term internet infrastructures to refer to both its material layer – the data centers, cables, routers, and devices – and its immaterial layer – computational processes, policies, and ideologies (ten oever 2020). research on the environmental impact of the internet has gathered pace within computer sciences. in this discipline, research engages with calculating the environmental impact of end-user devices (sutherland 2022), data processes, such as the energy consumption and carbon emissions of ai models (hao 2019; bender et al. 2021) and streaming services (makonin et al. 2022), and the estimation of water needs to run data centers (siddik, shehabi, and marston 2021). another strand of research aims to quantify the environmental impact of the extraction and production of a single critical raw material, such as silicon, needed to maintain and expand the internet infrastructure (williams 2004). when it comes to developing sociotechnical imaginaries on sustainable technologies, dominant debates solely focus on how computing can support carbon reduction in other sectors or assessing claims on the role technology play in the reduction of carbon emissions domains such as transportation, building, manufacturing, agriculture, and energy (pargman et al. 2020; rasoldier et al. 2022). while these strands of research present a unique insight into the environmental impact of a single technology, they omit to engage with the underlying values of infinity, abundance and growth that drive industry and policy solutions, which have been critically examined by media studies scholars such as brodie (2020), velkova (2021), and gabrys (2015). the internet architecture board’s (iab) workshop on “environmental impact of internet applications and systems” brought together those from the technical, standards, and research communities who are interested in and feel the urgency to reduce the environmental impact of internet infrastructures. drawing on the papers submitted to the workshop as well as the workshop and mailing list discussions, i will outline how this group of internet practitioners frames the nexus between environment and infrastructure, their problem statement, and proposed solutions, before discussing how these technical visions of the internet connect and diverge from an environmental justice framework. the iab workshop research papers and discussions foreground that internet practitioners see the nexus of environment and technology as a complex challenge in which industry needs to account for extractive practices, the energy, water and land consumption in manufacturing and operations of the internet, the origins and sustainability of energy sources, and hardware equipment lifespan. yet, solutions are limited to measurements and methods to optimize for the reduction of carbon emissions. in part, the narrowness of the solutions can be attributed to the type of internet practitioners that participated in the workshop, primarily network engineers, and in part, i will argue that is because the community tries to solve environmental problems within an existing internet infrastructure logic of infinity and abundance. if we assume, as this paper does, that infrastructures have become ‘the rules that govern the space of everyday life’ (easterling 2011), a more holistic approach to sustainable internet infrastructures is needed in the fight against climate change and environmental degradation. situating the problems and solutions in an environmental justice framework opens up questions about who gets to frame the problem and prioritize the solutions that are being proposed, and what are the social and environmental costs of these solutions. this offers insights into how even progressive approaches to minimizing environmental harms are still rooted in the logic of abundance and optimization, which in turn prompts and allows us to theorize in relation to limits and reductions, where infrastructures are considered temporal and can scale down. references bender, e., gebru, t., mcmillan-major, a., & shmitchell, s. (2021). on the dangers of stochastic parrots: can language models be too big? in proceedings of the 2021 acm conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency, 610–23. virtual event canada: acm. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922 brodie, p. (2020). climate extraction and supply chains of data. media, culture & society, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720904601 iab (2022). environmental impact of internet applications and systems. workshop, 2022, december 5. https://www.iab.org/activities/workshops/e-impact/ easterling, k. (2014). extrastatecraft: the power of infrastructure space. verso books. gabrys, j. (2015). powering the digital. from energy ecologies to electronic environmentalism. in r. maxwell, j. raundalen, & n. lager vestberg (eds.), media and the ecological crisis. routledge. hao, k. (2019). training a single ai model can emit as much carbon as five cars in their lifetimes. mit technology review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/06/06/239031/training-a-single-ai-model-canemit-as-much-carbon-as-five-cars-in-their-lifetimes/ jansen, f. (2022, march 7). the politics of data centers. the green web foundation, https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/news/the-politics-of-data-centers/ makonin, s., marks, l.u., przedpełski, r., rodriguez-silva, a., & elmallah. r. (2022). calculating the carbon footprint of streaming media: beyond the myth of efficiency. 8th workshop on computing within limits, 2022, june 21. https://doi.org/10.21428/bf6fb269.7625cc76 pargman, d., biørn-hansen, a., eriksson, e., laaksolahti, j., & robèrt. m. (2020). from moore’s law to the carbon law. in proceedings of the 7th international conference on ict for sustainability, 285–93. ict4s2020. new york, ny, usa: association for computing machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3401335.3401825 rasoldier, a., combaz, j., girault, a., marquet, k., & quinton, s. (2022). how realistic are claims about the benefits of using digital technologies for ghg emissions mitigation? 8th workshop on computing within limits, 2022, june 21. https://doi.org/10.21428/bf6fb269.6d7bd21b siddik, md a.b., shehabi, a., & marston. l. (2021). the environmental footprint of data centers in the united states. environmental research letters, 16(6). https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/abfba1 sutherland, b. (2022). strategies for degrowth computing. in 8th workshop on computing within limits, 2022, june 21. https://doi.org/10.21428/bf6fb269.04676652 ten oever, n. (2020). wired norms: inscription, resistance, and subversion in the governance of the internet infrastructure. phd thesis. https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/50781961/thesis.pdf velkova, j. (2021). thermopolitics of data: cloud infrastructures and energy futures. cultural studies, 35(4-5), 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2021.1895243 williams, e.d. (2004). environmental impacts of microchip manufacture, thin solid films, 461(1), 2-6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsf.2004.02.049 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): parnell, claire (2023, october). algospeak and algo-design in platformed book publishing: revolutionary creative tactics in digital paratext to circumvent content moderation. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. algospeak and algo-design in platformed book publishing: revolutionary creative tactics in digital paratext to circumvent content moderation claire parnell university of melbourne introduction this paper examines the rise of algo-design in the context of platformed book publishing. building on conceptualizations of algospeak, a strategy that involves creating code words or phrases to create a brand-safe lexicon, i theorize algo-design as a broader creative strategy used by online creators that involves using and avoiding specific language and visuals to evade content moderation by platforms. specifically, this research explores the use of algo-design in the paratext of romance and erotica novels by authors of color and lgbtqia authors who publish their fiction on digital publishing platforms, such as amazon, and market them on social media platforms. i argue that, in many cases, algo-design is a revolutionary creative tactic for bipoc and lgbtqia authors of romance fiction, who are disproportionately affected by content moderation systems (monea, 2022) and often have their works flagged as adult material due to the genre’s tendency to include intimate relationships (parnell, 2021). the use of algo-design by authors is a clear effort to push back against bluntly imposed content moderation interventions and subvert platform power. digital paratext as sites of moderation this research focuses on content moderation of digital book paratext. paratext refers to the materials surrounding the text of a book, which act as a “threshold”, without any clear boundaries, “between the inside and the outside” of a text (genette, 1997, 2). paratextual elements, including the title, author’s name, cover, description, preface, categories and so on, inevitably influence the reading of a text and contribute to positioning books within certain genres. in the context of digital publishing, paratext also serves as important metadata for platforms to organize and moderate content. on amazon, for instance, category, descriptions, keywords, and other paratext undergo moderation before a book is published or made available online. these metadata, as well as author names, are also used to sort books into a network of related titles, which in turn affects discoverability mechanisms such as search results, also-bought recommendations, and bestseller lists. paratexts thus serve a dual purpose in the platform ecosystem, as interpretive thresholds for readers and descriptive metadata for platform algorithms. the visibility of descriptive forms of metadata as paratext on book publishing platforms makes it a heuristic avenue to investigate the ways in which metadata, in contrast to the actual media content, is subject to content moderation. what kinds of paratext are being moderated by platforms and how are authors creatively opposing moderation? method this exploratory research brings together platform and publishing studies to account for both the technological contexts and genre histories in which books are produced, sold and consumed through platforms. it follows a bifurcated approach to theorizing and mapping algo-design: first, it tracks instances of content moderation of book paratext; and second, it looks at examples of paratext design that is intended to evade content moderation algorithms, or at least responsive to algorithmic imaginaries (bucher, 2017). it is based on empirical data from in-depth interviews with fourteen authors, focusing on their experiences of and “stories about algorithms” (schellewald, 2022), as well as metadata and paratext analysis. the results do not provide a generalizable survey of content moderation on platforms, rather they reveal instances in which moderation occurs and provide a foundation for future research. findings several authors reported being propelled to change language in their book titles and descriptions on amazon in response to moderation outcomes. one author decided to change the title of her debut novel to remove the phrase one night stand after facebook’s automatic detection software interpreted the original title as mature content and banned the book from being advertised on the platform. another author stated that when she tried updating the product descriptions of her books, the word ‘erotica’ and the flame emoji were flagged by amazon as keywords that violated community guidelines. some authors reported that they will avoid tagging their work as ‘erotica’ on amazon, even if it fits within this subgenre, because doing so often results in the book being removed from the site, prevented from being published in the first place, or algorithmically suppressed in the platform’s marketplace – a fate referred to by authors publishing and selling their books on amazon as being relegated to “amazon’s dungeon,” or “dungeoned.” other authors reported that terms relating to queer identities, including ‘queer’ and ‘bisexual’, were also flagged by amazon’s content moderation system, providing further evidence that demonstrates platform restrictions of adult content particularly impact people from marginalized groups, including lgbtqia+ people (especially queer people of color), gender nonconforming folks, and kink communities who often use digital networks for sexual self-expression, community and knowledge (bronstein, 2020; sundén et al., 2020). algospeak and algo-design is thus an important tactic for lgbtqia creators whose sexualities are often deemed as unsafe or adult content by platform governance systems, as seen in this context. finally, some authors reported that design elements on book covers had also been flagged by amazon’s content moderation system and prevented from being published on the platform. in one instance, the cover featured a black and white photo-style image of a black woman bordered by a red, christmas-themed background. the woman in the image has bare shoulders, but her torso and legs are covered by a white sheet. despite the minimal nudity, amazon’s automatic detection software prevented the book from being published, deeming that the cover contained adult materials. the author appealed the decision with amazon’s author services and although the book was eventually published on amazon, it has been suppressed from appearing in the search results, limiting its discoverability and sales potential. other authors changed cover designs to avoid this technological suppression. conclusion alternative phrases, double entendres and obfuscated design are not new to the paratext and marketing materials of romance and erotica, but they have become necessary algo-design strategies on publishing platforms that impose increasingly strict policies regarding adult materials. the instances of moderation described above indicate the extent to which romance fiction is getting caught up in the deplatformization of sex on social media platforms, which became widespread on several u.s.-based platforms after the implementation of fosta (fight online sex trafficking act) and sesta (stop enabling sex traffickers act) laws in 2018 (tiidenberg & van der nagel, 2020). although amazon and facebook’s moderation systems clearly explicitly target sexual content and adult material, it is nearly impossible for authors and publishers to know what constitutes violations except through trial and error. even then, moderation outcomes are often wildly inconsistent, affecting some authors more than others. bipoc and queer authors are particularly affected by these systems, as their identities and work are often flagged as adult or unsafe materials, further compounding the historical marginalization they have experienced in the traditional publishing industry. for these authors, creative choices intended to circumvent platform moderation may be thought of as micro creative revolutions against conservative corporate governance systems. this research calls for more sustained investigations into the relationship between paratext (and metadata), moderation and responsive tactics by creators across cultural industries as well as how these practices are shaping genre conventions of media texts. references bronstein, c. (2020). pornography, trans visibility, and the demise of tumblr. tsq: transgender studies quarterly, 7(2), 240–254. bucher, t. (2017). the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 30-44. genette, g. (1997). paratexts: thresholds of interpretation. cambridge university press. parnell, c. l. (2021). independent authors’ dependence on big tech: categorization and governance of authors of color on amazon. aoir selected papers of internet research, 2021. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2021i0.12005 monea, a. (2022). the digital closet. mit press. schellewald, a. (2022). theorizing “stories about algorithms” as a mechanism in the formation and maintenance of algorithmic imaginaries. social media + society, 8(1), 110. sundén, j., tiidenberg, k., & paasonen, s. (2020). platformed sex lives. aoir selected papers of internet research, 2020. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2020i0.11151 tiidenberg, k. & van der nagel, e. (2020). sex and social media. emerald group publishing. aoir 2024-final_spir_submission selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 how fact-checkers are becoming machine learners: a case of meta’s third party programme yarden skop crc media of cooperation, university of siegen, germany anna schjøtt hansen1 university of amsterdam, netherlands introduction political fact-checking, emerging in the us at the beginning 2000s as a particular form of journalism, has expanded to an international movement with hundreds of organisations across the globe (duke reporters lab, 2023). one of the recent developments in the field is what some scholars call the “debunking turn” (graves et al. 2023), in which fact-checking organisations move from fact-checking expressions of politicians and public figures to checking claims made on social media. a main driver of this change is the proliferation of a paid program initiated by meta, where fact-checkers check and label claims on the platform in exchange for monetary remuneration (meta, 2021). in this process, items (e.g., facebook posts) are pushed to fact-checkers through an internal interface created for them by facebook, which includes ml components to identify potential false claims (ananny, 2020). this paper draws on interviews with and fieldwork amongst fact-checkers who are or have been part of the meta partnership. based on the empirical insights we argue that the human-machine assemblage in fact-checking is (1) enabling a move beyond the ‘debunking turn’ by turning journalists into ‘machine learners’ (mackenzie, 2017) and (2) cements a ‘politics of demarcation’ (marres, 2018) in which public contestation over public facts is diminished and moved into networked infrastructures (annany, 2020). 1 the authors contributed equally to research and writing suggested citation (apa): skop y and schjøtt hansen a. (2024, october). how fact-checkers are becoming machine learners: a case of meta’s third party programme. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. http://spir.aoir.org with this argument, the paper highlights an additional aspect of the platformisation of journalism, as the labelling and claim-checking work of journalists now also enables large tech platforms to expand technical infrastructures that commodify journalistic work by turning it into training data aimed at improving their ml systems and algorithms. this enables platforms to move further beyond their current market role (nieborg and poell, 2018), as they also participate in the further industrialisation and standardisation of fact-checking. as large tech companies become industry leaders in the provision of ml systems for, among other things, fact-checking, the need to understand what politics they produce equally increases, as they become integral in the production of democratic ideals of citizens and public debate (marres, 2018; annany, 2020). the fact-checking assemblage in this paper, we approach fact-checking as a sociotechnical phenomenon, where human fact-checkers and machine learning systems work in collaboration to select, produce and present ‘facts’ on facebook. concretely, we draw on existing work that engaged with machine learning and its interfaces as sociotechnical assemblages (bucher, 2013; schjøtt hansen and hartley, 2021; rieder and skop, 2021, see also deleuze and guattari, 1987) that highlight how agency emerges through the assembling of heterogeneous actors (human and non-human). as bucher (2013: 481) writes: “(...) facebook, by organizing heterogeneous relations in a specific way, constitutes a productive force: it makes new relations possible”. in this paper, it is the ‘productiveness’ of this assemblage that is at the centre of the analysis, as we explore how it produces and limits certain agencies for fact-checkers. in analysing what we refer to as the ‘fact-checking assemblage’, we, therefore, pay careful attention to how the machine learning system by meta, its interface and affordances produce certain understandings of fact-checkers, facts, and the political role of fact-checking in society. in turn, we also show examples of ways in which fact-checkers negotiate with the system or simply circumvent it (see also schjøtt and bengtsson, 2024). methodology this contribution is based on two bodies of empirical work done separately. the first is a series of semi-structured interviews with fact checkers who are members of the international fact checkers’ network (ifcn) and partake in meta’s third-party fact-checking program (3pfc). the group is quite heterogeneous in terms of geographic spread and includes 18 fact-checkers from eight countries and three continents. some of them worked directly with facebook as part of the partnership and some were related to the periphery of the project in different ways. interviews were conducted in march 2021-november 2023, each interview lasting 45 to 90 minutes. background and contextual data were also gathered from facebook’s public website, which discussed the program, and attendance at two fact-checking global summits, https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?ki7hbk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?ki7hbk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?f3i2g2 “global fact”, on june 2022 in oslo and june 2023 in seoul. the second body of data is comprised of observations collected during an ethnographic enquiry at tjekdet.dk, the danish fact-checking organisation that acts as the third-party fact-checker for meta in denmark. the fieldwork was conducted in the spring of 2021 and over four months with weekly full-day visits to their offices in copenhagen. the interviews were analysed using abductive analysis (tavori and timmermans, 2014). similarly, the observational data was iteratively coded using a ‘bottom-up’ strategy to develop thematic codes (gibbs, 2012). in this analysis, overlapping codes regarding the fact-checkers attempts to ‘train’ the system are combined, together with codes relating to the underlying assumptions tied to the democratic role of fact-checking and the way these were negotiated through the affordances provided by meta. preliminary analysis the core of the work fact-checkers do for meta is labelling claims made by users on the platform, based on a list of labels provided by meta. these are false, altered, partly false, missing context, true, and satire (meta, 2021). fact-checkers also write an article on each fact check, which they get paid for. however, the interface visible to users on meta platforms only promotes the label and fact-checking organisation name, and reading the article, where additional context is provided, demands clicking to move to another link. on their organisational public websites, some fact-checking organisations use other labels or do not use short labels at all. in the analysis, we show how the labelling practice has a structuring and disciplinary effect, cementing certain understandings of public truths or falsehoods, and forcing fact-checkers to comply with these. we furthermore illustrate how the fact-checkers were either directed to ‘train’ the system by adding the ‘true’ label to content in the initial phase of their participation in the program or took it upon themselves to label false positives because they assumed it would help enhance the workings of the system. thereby, the fact-checkers became part of the system as active ‘machine learners’ (mackenzie, 2017), who via global labelling schemes contribute to targeted training of the ml system in different languages. however, this work reduces the richness of fact-checking by further standardising how it can be carried out. something that was also noted by the fact-checkers who would find the scheme limiting and either leave the programme or circumvent it by publishing other fact-checks, not identified via meta’s claim check interface, which was deemed of more societal value by the fact-checkers. based on the analysis we draw attention to how the flow of labour and professional freedom of fact-checkers is being transformed and industrialised, as it is boiled down to content labelling that is used on the platform and for deeper enhancement of ml systems. in this way, platformised infrastructures offered to them by meta, not only serve the platform in real-time but also allow for a long-term commodification of fact checkers’ work and expertise, which might later render them redundant. we also illustrate how the meta fact-checking program, via the structuring of fact-checking work, is participating in the construction of what ‘facts’ are and how they can and should be publicly dealt with. thereby, cementing both the liberal ideals of the citizen and the value of ‘debunking’, as opposed to public deliberation over facts. references ananny m (2020) making up political people: how social media create the ideals, definitions, and probabilities of political speech. preprint, 29 may. open science framework. available at: https://osf.io/7pd62 (accessed 1 september 2021). bucher t (2013) the friendship assemblage: investigating programmed sociality on facebook. television & new media 14(6). sage publications: 479–493. deleuze g and guattari f (1987) a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia (tran. b massumi). 2nd edition. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. duke reporters lab (2023) misinformation spreads, but fact-checking has leveled off. available at: https://reporterslab.org/tag/fact-checking-census/ (accessed: 29 february, 2024). gibbs gr (2012) different approaches to coding. sociological methodology, 42(1), 82-84. graves l, bélair-gagnon v and larsen r (2023) from public reason to public health: professional implications of the “debunking turn” in the global fact-checking field. digital journalism: 1–20. mackenzie a (2017) machine learners: archaeology of a data practice. cambridge, ma: the mit press. marres n (2018) why we can’t have our facts back. engaging science, technology, and society 4: 423–443. nieborg db and poell t (2018) the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society 20(11): 4275–4292. meta (2021) how meta’s third-party fact-checking program works. available at: https://www.facebook.com/formedia/blog/third-party-fact-checking-how-it-works (accessed: 29 february, 2024). rieder b and skop y (2021) the fabrics of machine moderation: studying the technical, normative, and organizational structure of perspective api. big data & society 8(2): 205395172110461. https://reporterslab.org/tag/fact-checking-census/ https://www.facebook.com/formedia/blog/third-party-fact-checking-how-it-works schjøtt, a., & bengtsson, m. (2024). deand recoding algorithmic systems: the case of fact checkers and fact checked users. convergence, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565241289233 schjøtt hansen a and hartley jm (2021) designing what’s news: an ethnography of a personalization algorithm and the data-driven (re)assembling of the news. digital journalism 0(0). routledge: 1–19. tavory i and timmermans s (2014) abductive analysis: theorizing qualitative research. chicago: the university of chicago press. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565241289233 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): holm,m. (2023, october). equality through exclusion? towards a new conceptualization of democratic exclusion in the context of digital public venues. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. platform governance from a feminist perspective: (how) can exclusion increase the participation of marginalized groups on digital public venues? malin holm department of government, uppsala university digital media platforms have transformed the public sphere and prerequisites for public conversations and opinion building in unprecedented ways. one of the greatest differences in relation to traditional public venues is that digital venues have significantly lowered the thresholds for entering public conversations and to broadcast political opinions to a wide audience. through their low thresholds for access, online platforms on the one hand present intersectionally marginalized groups with increased opportunities to come together and mobilize politically without having to deal with traditional gatekeepers or other types of cost and barriers that are inherent to offline public venues. at the same time, this new type of inclusion affords a wide range of possibilities whereby actors can exercise intersectional violence against politicians, feminist activists and individual women alike. moreover, there are a number of studies that have shown how these inequalities benefit groups on the extreme right and other types of organised racist movements, but also violent parts of men’s rights movements, who have been successful in their use of online platforms to mobilize and influence mainstream political agendas (daniels, 2009; dignam & rohlinger 2019; holm, 2019; koehler 2014). the response from the large mainstream social media platforms to remove published content or to ‘deplatform’ (the removal of one’s account on social media for breaking platform rules) a large variety of users, such as individuals and groups on the far right, including high profile politicians such as donald trump (kraus, 2018), has given rise to vivid mediaas well as academic debates around the effectiveness of deplatforming as well as its consequences for the foundations of democratic societies. in parallel, new legislation that targets big tech companies has been rapidly adopted, in particular at the european level. the removal of published content and the barring of users, ordinary citizens as well as high-profile politicians’, from social media platforms is increasingly defended as a way to protect democratic rights (chandrasekharan et al., 2017; kraus, 2018; rogers 2020). it has also been demonstrated that exclusion through deplatforming is an effective strategy, since those targeted loose parts of their visibility and outreach possibilities (chandrasekharan et al., 2017; nouri et al. 2019). however, such practices can also place undue restrictions on freedom of speech and create uneven access to key platforms for public discussion (lonigro 2021). it has also been shown how far right groups and men’s rights groups, as well as extremist internet celebrities, make use of a variety of strategies to sustain their activities and support/fan base when being deplatformed from major social media platforms (decook 2019; rogers 2020.) in order to hinder attacks on democratic norms and processes in digital public venues, designing exclusion strategies is a pressing concern. nevertheless, we lack systematic studies of how digital public venues should be governed to protect – rather than undermine – democratic values through exclusion. hitherto, the democratic quality of public debates has instead been strongly associated with inclusion. this can be understood in the light of that one of the main problems with traditional public venues in relation to political equality has been their high thresholds for participation, which has resulted in the exclusion of less resourceful groups. in democratic theory, inclusion has even been so strongly intertwined with democracy, so that exclusion has been understood as per definition anti-democratic (see e.g. plotke 2006; young 2000). as iris young (2000, p. 13) writes in her seminal work inclusion and democracy: ‘‘[i]f inclusion in decision-making is a core of the democratic ideal, then, to the extent that such [i.e., political] exclusions exist, democratic societies do not live up to their promise’’. previous research on how to increase the participation of marginalized groups in public deliberation primarily has also mainly focused on how public venues can be more accommodating to a wider range of discussion norms, as well as the importance of developing alternative, more inclusive, deliberative arenas (see e.g. fraser, 1990; hayward, 2004; young, 2000). hence, this literature has been written from what dovi (2009) denotes “a perspective of inclusion”. however, the dramatic consequences of the rapid development of digital public venues for democratic processes and practices show the urgent need for also analysing when and how the access to public venues needs to be limited or even denied. while there are pressing concerns to strategize about how to exclude from public venues hosted by big tech companies to hinder attacks on democratic norms and processes, we hence lack systematic studies of how and why digital platforms can and should exercise democratic exclusion. therefore, this contribution argues that we as feminist scholars now need to turn our theoretical and empirical focus also towards democratic exclusion to increase equal participation of intersectionally marginalized groups in public deliberation, and how such exclusion could be conceptualized in the context of online public deliberation. how can we then conceptualize of democratic exclusion in the context of digital public venues from a feminist power perspective? to explore this question, i will draw on the feminist works within democratic theory which have contributed greatly to the normative theorization of democratic exclusion, but have done so in relation to other types of political settings; in particular the works within feminist political theory on exclusion of dominant groups within parliaments (e.g. dovi 2009; murray 2014). to analyse if and how these previous contributions can be applied to the specific context of digital public venues, we also need to consider the specific gender power structures that characterizes digital public venues. first, i will analyze if and how these previous contributions can be applied to the specific context of digital public venues, where special conditions of access and visibility apply. i will then assess to what extent the platforms’ existing governing strategies and policies concerning the exclusion of problematic content or accounts are compatible with the relevant exclusion principles formulated in these works. for example, are principles that justify exclusion such as dovi’s (2009) “oppression principle” applicable in an online context? are limitations on the right to free speech justifiable when harm is induced, and if so what type of harm and to whom? building on this analysis, in its final parts the study will move on to carve out more specific suggestions for how exclusion on digital venues should be governed, and what principles should guide this governance. the results of this study will thus have direct policy implications for how digital public venues should be governed democratically. references chandrasekharan e, pavalanathan u, srinivasan a, et al. (2017) you can’t stay here: the efficacy of reddit’s 2015 ban examined through hate speech. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction 1(2): art. 31. daniels, j. (2009). cyber racism: white supremacy online and the new attack on civil rights. new york: rowman and littlefield. decook, j. r. (2019). curating the future: the sustainability practices of online hate groups. (doctoral dissertation, michigan state university). dignam, p. a., & rohlinger, d. a. (2019). misogynistic men online: how the red pill helped elect trump. signs: journal of women in culture and society, 44(3), 589-612. dovi, s. (2009). in praise of exclusion. the journal of politics, 71(3), 1172–1186. fraser, n. (1990). rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. social text, 25/26, 56–80. hayward, c . r. (2004). doxa and deliberation. critical review of international social and political philosophy, 7(1), 1–24. holm, m. (2019). the rise of online counterpublics?: the limits of inclusion in a digital age (doctoral dissertation, department of government, uppsala university). koehler, d. (2014). the radical online: individual radicalization processes and the role of the internet. journal for deradicalization, (1), 116-134. kraus r (2018) 2018 was the year we (sort of) cleaned up the internet. mashable, 26 december. available at: https://mashable.com/article/deplatforming-alex-jones2018/?europe=true lonigro, j. a. (2021) deplatformed: social network censorship, the first amendment, and the argument to amend. section 230 ff the cda. touro law review, 37(1), 427-498. murray, r. (2014). quotas for men: reframing gender quotas as a means of improving representation for all. american political science review, 108(3), 520-532. nouri, l., lorenzo-dus, n., & watkin, a-l. (2019). following the whack-a-mole: britain first’s visual strategy from facebook to gab. global research network on terrorism and technology: paper no. 4. available at: https://rusi.org/sites/default/files/20190704_grntt_paper_4.pdf plotke, d. (2006). democratic polities and anti-democratic politics. theoria, 53(111), 6-44. rogers, r. (2020). deplatforming: following extreme internet celebrities to telegram and alternative social media. european journal of communication, 35(3), 213-229. young, i. m. (2000). inclusion and democracy. oxford: oxford university press. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): hegarty, k. (2024, october). web archiving after platformization: reading archived social media along the grain. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. web archiving after platformization: reading archived social media along the grain kieran hegarty rmit university a key part of the emergence of the “everyday internet” (goggin, 2004), the world wide web is now over three decades old. in digital media and internet research, many have suggested that, since its inception, the web has moved from a relatively open, navigation-based information space to a more centralised environment dominated by several large commercial platforms (plantin et al., 2018; lingel, 2020). the concept of “platformization” has been used to describe both key technical-material changes in the way information moves around the web (helmond, 2015) as well as the reorganisation of cultural practices and markets (nieborg & poell, 2018) in the interests of companies who operate large platforms. yet, the impact of platformization on the records of the web’s past—in web archives—is only starting to be explored (acker & kreisberg, 2020; ben-david, 2020). while this recent work sheds light on the changing power dynamics that condition the formation of archives, there is currently little research exploring how platformization impacts the day-to-day work of building collections, how web archivists navigate the challenges of collecting material from platform environments, and what this means for the content and character—and therefore the future use—of web archives. in light of the fundamental shifts in power dynamics that shape how information is produced, distributed, and circulated, understanding how the “platformization of the web” (helmond, 2015) has shaped the archived web is, therefore, a critical task. methods this paper considers the impact of “the rise of the platform as the dominant infrastructural and economic model of the social web” (helmond, 2015, p. 1) on the content and character of web archives and explores how internet research can read web archives for traces of platformization. to do this, i draw on empirical and historical research at two libraries undertaking web archiving—the national library of australia (nla) and the oldest library in australia, the state library of new south wales (slnsw). both libraries have legislated collecting mandates and legal deposit provisions at the national and state level, enabling them to collect a wide range of “works that are available online” (copyright act 1968 (cth) s 195ca). the nla was one of the first libraries in the world to start a web archiving program, commencing their pandora web archive in 1996 (now called the australian web archive). the slnsw collects material relevant to australia’s most populous state and has developed a specific social media archive since 2012. throughout 2021, i interviewed staff at the nla and slnsw, observed and participated in everyday work practices, and analysed organisational records. through these data, i gained insight into the impact of platformization on day-to-day efforts to collect and provide access to a record of the web at national and state levels. web crawling and workarounds web archiving institutions typically rely on two techniques to collect material hosted on social media platforms: (1) web crawling and (2) collecting web material from a database made available through an application programming interface (api) (brügger, 2018). web crawling uses automated software to retrieve and store images, files, and code from a web server that can be reassembled to represent what a webpage looked like at a specific moment. the nla takes this approach, with the results of crawls made openly available via the australian web archive. in web archives research and practice, content hosted on social media platforms is recognised as a significant challenge for traditional web crawling techniques (ben-david, 2020; espley et al., 2014). in response to difficulties collecting social media using web crawling, staff at the nla engage in workarounds to gather material that falls within the library’s broad collecting remit (e.g. the social media presence of political candidates and parties). these workarounds change as the library tries to keep up with ongoing changes to platform design and policies. as i reviewed the history and current practice of collecting at the nla, i saw how my participants would respond to changes to platforms by experimenting with different strategies and techniques. the rationale, nature, and timing of platform-side changes were unclear to my participants, but the results were clear—again and again, the harvests simply no longer worked. the result is inconsistent collections, filled with unexpected ruptures left underexplained to both creators and users of web archives. api-based collecting and platform constraints meanwhile, api-based collecting returns content from a database, which might include profile information, posts, number of “likes” or “shares”, and other metadata based on specific queries or criteria. while the nla has been reticent to adopt api-based social media collecting to supplement web crawling, the slnsw has taken this path since 2012 with its social media archive. while apis enable the sanctioned collection of data from social media platforms, the owners of these services can change the design of apis and the terms that govern their use, with each change reflecting the priorities and interests of the company (helmond et al., 2019; van der vlist et al., 2022). as one of my interviewees involved in the slnsw social media archive told me in 2021, “we’re at the mercy of the platforms to a certain degree… the ramifications of api changes mean what may have been practical to do five years ago is no longer”. by embarking on apibased social media collecting, the contemporaneous collection of material available online is therefore constrained and enabled by platform strategies governing how social media content can be created, distributed, and used. through the offer of apis, platforms simultaneously open up new opportunities for developing library collections while also significantly constraining what data are collected and how these data can be made accessible to library users. conclusion: reading web archives along the archival grain this exploration of web archiving at the nla and slnsw illustrates how the platformization of the web significantly impacts the content and character of web archives. in examining the constraints of web crawling and api-based collecting, i illustrate the power of platforms to establish (and thereby change) the conditions that enable and constrain flows of information hosted on their services into web archives and shape how this information can be used. because of this, i suggest internet researchers can read web archives “along the archival grain” (stoler, 2002, p. 100) for traces of platformization. this approach, advanced by anthropologist ann laura stoler (2002, p. 87) in her work on colonial archives, focuses less on “mining… the content… of archival sources” and more on “their peculiar placement and form”. stoler (2002, p. 100) writes, “[w]e need to read [the archive] for its regularities, for its logic of recall, for its densities and distributions, for its consistencies of misinformation, omission, and mistake”. through this approach, web archives after platformization might be read not just as inconsistent, inaccessible, and error-ridden collections of social media but as evidence of contemporary struggles over data governance and platforms’ refusal to allow public institutions access to data unless on the terms they stipulate. references acker, a., & kreisberg, a. (2020). social media data archives in an api-driven world. archival science, 20(2), 105–123. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09325-9 ben-david, a. (2020). counter-archiving facebook. european journal of communication, 35(3), 249–264. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323120922069 brügger, n. (2018). the archived web: doing history in the digital age. mit press. copyright act 1968 (cth). https://www.legislation.gov.au/c1968a00063/ espley, s., carpentier, f., pop, r., & medjkoune, l. (2014). collect, preserve, access: applying the governing principles of the national archives uk government web archive to social media content. alexandria, 25(1–2), 31–50. https://doi.org/10.7227/alx.0019 goggin, g. (2004). virtual nation: the internet in australia. unsw press. helmond, a. (2015). the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready. social media + society, 1(2), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080 helmond, a., nieborg, d. b., & van der vlist, f. n. (2019). facebook’s evolution: development of a platform-as-infrastructure. internet histories, 3(2), 123–146. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2019.1593667 lingel, j. (2020). an internet for the people: the politics and promise of craigslist. princeton university press. nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society, 20(11), 4275–4292. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769694 plantin, j.-c., lagoze, c., edwards, p. n., & sandvig, c. (2018). infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook. new media & society, 20(1), 293–310. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553 stoler, a. l. (2002). colonial archives and the arts of governance. archival science, 2(1–2), 87–109. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02435632 van der vlist, f. n., helmond, a., burkhardt, m., & seitz, t. (2022). api governance: the case of facebook’s evolution. social media + society, 8(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221086228 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): ge, l. (2024, october). ambivalent affective labor: datafication of qing (affects and desires), and danmei writers in the creative industry. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ambivalent affective labor: datafication of qing (affects and desires), and danmei writers in the creativeindustry liang ge king’s college london introduction danmei 耽美 culture, which features male-male romance and/or erotica, emerged in mainland china in the late 1990s. in the beginning years, danmei culture was heavily influenced by japanese boys’ love (bl) comics when pirated copies entered mainland china via transiting in taiwan and hong kong. the term ‘danmei’ was also borrowed from the japanese ‘tanbi’, which literally means indulging in beauty. since the 2010s, chinese danmei culture has developed its own dynamic ecology and evolved into a transmedia cultural landscape, including fiction, animation, comics, audio drama, web series, films, games, music, etc. (ge, 2022). danmei has also become the preferred term among its participants. henry jenkins (2006) employs ‘transmedia storytelling’ to refer to the co-existence of traditional and new media and the ‘new aesthetic that has emerged in response to media convergence one that places new demands on consumers and depends on the active participation of knowledge communities’ (pp. 2021). while jenkins’ celebration of the audience/fan’s immersive experience in an everexpanding world which is constructed and maintained by transmedia storytelling, the other side of transmedia is the creative labor co-opted by capitalism (hesmondhalgh and baker, 2011; johnson, 2013). danmei participants are renowned for their intensified qing 情 invested in their producing and consuming male homoeroticism. qing, or the phrase qinggan 情感 or ganqing 感情 (aroused qing), does not merely mean affects, but refers to both affects and desires. first, herein i do not differentiate the distinctions among affects, feelings, and emotions as the tomkins-sedgwick school (sedgwick, 2003) or the spinozistdeleuzian approach (massumi, 2002). following sara ahmed, i consider affects as ‘the feeling of bodily change’ (ahmed, 2004, p.5), and ‘the attribution of feeling is an effect of encounter, which moves the subject away from the object’ (ibid., p.8). second, in debt to the cult of qing in chinese literary thoughts in the late ming dynasty (between the sixteenth and seventeenth century), i suggest that qing per se also includes desires. in the late ming dynasty, as exemplified mudanting (the peony pavilion) by tang xianzu (1550-1616) and the collection of male homoerotic stories bian er chai (hairpins beneath the cap) by zuixihu xinyue zhuren in the early seventeenth century (stevenson and wu, 2013, p.170), chinese literati scholars began to revalorize qing by embracing yu 欲 (desires) as to reinvent and/or challenge the confucian cultural heritage which is held under chronical control by neo-confucianists (huang, 2001). qing, including affects and desires, can be exploited and employed by the social institutions, or more precisely, capitalism and the state machinery for governance. because of their enormous investment of qing, danmei participants work as devoted affective laborers in the danmei cultural industry. in the present research, through indepth interviews with danmei participants, including 24 contracted writers on jinjiang, the hitherto largest website for producing and consuming danmei, i carefully examine how they work as affective labors and how their intensified qing has become the target of the capitalism for exploitation. first, danmei writers as affective laborers, their temporality is governed by writing male-male romance and erotica, and the flexible hours significantly disorders their work-life balance. second, driven by data, danmei writers are constantly self-exploiting themselves by inputting more qing in writing the homoerotic romance to achieve higher rankings on the literature website, while they are also experiencing anxiety, insecurity, and depression. pleasures and pains are both involved in doing the ambivalent affective labor. then by exploring the datafication of qing, i examine the distinct feature of danmei writers as ambivalent affective labor. for danmei writers, the datafication and monetization of qing leads to increasingly formulaic writing. by selecting, appropriating and combing the elements in the database of qing, danmei writers are able to swiftly generate a male homoerotic love story that efficiently and effectively invoke the affects and desires of readers for better monetization. however, the ambivalence emerges when these affective labors are constantly presenting their own creativity and subjectivity that can transgress the logic of capital. the transformative potential of these devoted affective labors is tightly linked with the multiple ambivalences in the danmei cultural ecology, where scenes of possibilities are being constantly generated and intensified in the male-male romances and erotica. rather than unilaterally mapping out how danmei writers are exploited, managed, and disciplined by the capita logic in their affective production, i also attend to the transformative potential of affective labor: the unalienated affective agency of danmei writers, which exceeds the capitalist control and regulation. by illuminating the datafication of qing, this research contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of danmei writers as ambivalent affective labours. pleasures and pains are both involved and exploited in their input of qing throughout their production of danmei stories in the cultural industry, while the affects and desires per se cannot be fully manipulated – transformative momentum is embedded in the water-like qing all the time. methodology considering the overarching popularity of jinjiang among danmei participants, i used purposive sampling to enrol writer-interviewees who are under contract with jinjiang. in 2008, jinjiang introduced the freemium business model and vip payment system. readers are required to pay for the subscription of following chapters after reading the initial dozen chapter for free. the profit from subscription has formed a major income source for contracted writers. jinjiang designates that for registered users, the average charge is 0.05rmb/1000 characters. one chapter usually has about 3000 to 6000 characters, so it costs circa 0.15 to 0.30 rmb per chapter. the authors share 50% of the avenues from the subscription if users access the chapter from the web, while 60% if from the mobile app and wap gateway. eligible danmei writers were contacted by private messaging them on weibo, one of the largest chinese largest media platforms. i then recruited those of writers who expressed interests in my research project. all interviews were conducted between july 2021 and january 2022, with some follow-up interviews from march to september 2022. the interview length ranged from 60 min to 210 min either online or in person. online interviews were conducted via social media platforms such as wechat and qq with the real-time video and voice call function. follow-up interviews were all scheduled online. all the 24 interviewees were born in and after the 1980s. among them, 15 out of 24 informants were born in the 1990s. the numbers of participants who were born in the 1980s and after 2000s are 7 and 2 respectively. moreover, the majority of my interviewees (23 out of 24) consider themselves as cis-gender women. their sexualities are far more diverse, including heterosexual women, bisexual women, and lesbian. to protect the confidentiality of interviewees’ personal information, i refer to them by pseudonyms in the present research. notably, i did not conduct once-for-all interviews with each participant. apart from some essential following-up interviews, i have also kept in touch with my interviewees, chatted with them concerning specific danmei works or events concerning danmei culture. i regard my interviewees as friend-respondents. as tillmann-healy (2003) suggests, practicing friendship as a method denotes that we research with ethics of friendship and invite respondents further into our (as well as their) lives. for the full version of this research, please kindly check ge, l. (2024). ambivalent affective labor: the datafication of qing and danmei writers in the cultural industry. european journal of cultural studies, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494241270468. https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494241270468 references ahmed, s. (2004) the cultural politics of emotion. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. ge, l. (2022) ‘dual ambivalence: the untamed girls as a counterpublic’, media, culture & society, 44(5), pp. 1021–1033. ge, l. (2024). ambivalent affective labor: the datafication of qing and danmei writers in the cultural industry. european journal of cultural studies, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494241270468. hesmondhalgh, d. and baker, s. (2011) creative labour: media work in three cultural industries. london: routledge. huang, m.w. (2001) desire and fictional narrative in late imperial china. cambridge, mass: harvard university asia center: distributed by harvard university press. jenkins, h. (2006) convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york: new york university press. johnson, d. (2013) media franchising: creative license and collaboration in the culture industries. new york: new york university press. massumi, b. (2002) parables for the virtual: movement, affect, sensation. durham, nc: duke university press. sedgwick, e.k. (2003) touching feeling: affect, pedagogy, performativity. durham: duke university press. stevenson, m.j. and wu, c. (eds) (2013) homoeroticism in imperial china: a sourcebook. new york: routledge。 tillmann-healy, l.m. (2003) ‘friendship as method’, qualitative inquiry, 9(5), pp. 729– 749. https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494241270468 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation: mccosker, a., kang, y.b., shaw, f., albury, k. (2024, october). from techsolutionism to community-centred data capability for disaster preparedness. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. from tech solutionism to community-centred data capability for disaster preparedness anthony mccosker swinburne university of technology yong-bin kang swinburne university of technology frances shaw swinburne university of technology kath albury swinburne university of technology introduction: community data capability and resource mapping information is vital to disaster resilience, helping to protect communities and enhance preparedness. digital humanitarianism is a transdisciplinary field of research and action that was originally built on concepts of crowdsourcing and the affordances of social platforms (e.g., twitter, facebook, instagram) along with open mapping tools like ushahidi and openstreetmaps (osm) (mccosker et al., 2022; mccosker, 2013; herfort et al., 2021). however, commercial social platforms and open-source maps have not delivered major solutions to disaster preparedness, prediction and recovery. early uses of twitter data, facebook, instagram and other social media platforms via api and data scraping showed promise but faced challenges in reliability and more recently deliberate misinformation before those platforms closed or restricted api access (bruns et al. 2012; shaw et al., 2013; mccosker et al., 2021). while disaster data and analysis has become its own industry and research field (cuthbertson et al., 2021), new approaches are needed that are not premised on imposing ‘techno solutionism’ (morozov, 2013) from the outside on communities vulnerable to disaster and climate change. this paper presents findings from a research collaboration with australian red cross, exploring how to best centre communities and enhance community resilience through data capability. the foundation of our work stems from the recognition that communities possess invaluable local knowledge, but this has not been well leveraged to support disaster preparedness. the project aimed to design and develop a model and prototype data sourcing and mapping platform. the model and platform sought to enable local community disaster preparedness and resilience by improving the quality of data about community strengths, resources and assets, and enable data donation within an ethical and scalable framework. the initial scoping work resulted in two core guiding research questions: 1. how can communities vulnerable to disaster risks be more effectively included in data and decision-making process so that they are better prepared to respond to emergencies? 2. what are the core features of a useful resource mapping platform and what data types and data access can enable community participation in building disaster resilience? our contribution lies in the formulation of a community-led resilience model that not only has the potential to enhance disaster preparedness but also can improve community engagement. methods the project took an organisational participatory approach (bush et al., 2017), through workshops that enabled co-shaping of the problem and research questions, within a human-centred and design justice framework (costanza-chock, 2020) that aligns with australia red cross’ trauma informed approach to humanitarian technology development. this involved a series of partner workshops scoping the problem and questions followed by design workshops focusing on establishing core data sets with representatives from the partner organisation and three other key stakeholder organisations (n=9). additionally, an evidence review was undertaken to synthesise the academic literature, digital humanitarian practice and technology use cases. these steps then led to the platform prototype design, development and review. findings and platform development our review of humanitarian mapping found that it has moved in two main directions: 1. open, crowdsourced and public data mapping has shown promise in disaster response scenarios and identifying risks but is restricted by a lack of resourcing and uncertainty about data access, reliability and rights. 2. commercial mapping and analytics have developed to incorporate remote sensing and satellite imaging and increasingly deploy machine learning to offer sophisticated predictive capability, but at a cost, with restricted access and often a narrow focus on risk and predictive modelling (mccosker et al., 2022). from the scoping work and evidence review, the project developed an approach that shifts the established focus from mapping vulnerabilities and using data for predictive purposes to ‘resource mapping’ and community-led data capability building (mccosker et al., 2023). we proposed a community resource mapping pipeline to ensure a community-centred and harm reduction approach that is grounded in data capability building and self-reliance (figure 1). figure 1. the community resource mapping pipeline for disaster preparedness, including suggested data sources. the community resource mapping pipeline sets out a process for building datasets and mapping community strengths and risks, making these available through an open platform. the platform aims to build community resilience through data collection and sharing, and digital and data capability building. this aligns with the work of ‘community asset mapping’, aiming to identify and enhancing strengths toward shared goals such as disaster preparedness (jakes et al., 2015). the co-development stage and workshops with industry stakeholders, along with the research and practice review, resulted in three core design principles to guide platform development. firstly, we saw the need to better involve communities in disaster preparedness efforts by harnessing local knowledge – the collective understanding, awareness, and resources available within a community that play a vital role in disaster preparedness. the platform therefore needs to enable recording of observations and insights, as well as tangible assets and resources. secondly, technologies are less helpful if they do not support capability development. community involvement promotes collaboration, enabling information flows that are tailored to meet community needs, fostering a sense of ownership. finally, information access would be best supported through an open access community resource mapping tool. this enhances the identification of strengths, assets and useful amenities. this knowledge can be used to inform decision-making and support proactive preparation activities. figure 2. core elements of the community resource mapping platform prototype, showing historical bushfire data overlay area. the platform design and build first considered data types and sources, drawing on stakeholder workshops, and planned interface design elements and navigation. to test the prototype platform and geospatial dashboard, we collected the following data for the fire prone regional area of ararat in victoria: a) amenities, including organisations, facilities, services, accommodation; b) people, demographics and groups; c) infrastructure: roads and transport. the process involved a phase of data sourcing, followed by data processing to clean and define attributes. finally, data augmentation involved enhancing the information available in each of these categories to enable decision making, ensuring that essential information and links are included in the geospatial dashboard for each data point. the notion of affordising is useful here for considering the transformative work of metrics, analytics and visualisation (pollock, 2012; mccosker and graham, 2018). for pollock, choices made at this stage establish the kinds of information and decision making available at the point of analysis and application. (full open source platform code and data repository: https://github.com/admscentre/community_resource_mapping_platform). conclusions the prototype has been developed to simulate the first three phases of the community resource mapping pipeline. the pipeline is not a universal solution for disaster preparedness, however through prototyping, we were able to test and implement the community-centred data capability model. we have demonstrated how communities vulnerable to disaster risks can be proactively included in data and decision-making processes to enhance disaster preparedness. some of the challenges in data sourcing and classification led to valuable insights into how to deploy the platform in the field through engagement with local community members and organisations. a central finding for the model of community data capability developed through the project workshops and platform design is the role that data donation can play as a new form of volunteering and humanitarian action (boeschoten et al., 2022). this will be a core component of the next phase of testing and community deployment. references boeschoten, l., ausloos, j., möller, j. e., araujo, t., & oberski, d. l. (2022). a framework for privacy preserving digital trace data collection through data donation. computational communication research, 4(2), 388-423. bruns, a., burgess, j., crawford, k., shaw, f. (2012) #qldfloods and @qpsmedia: crisis communication on twitter in the 2011 south east queensland floods. brisbane: arc centre of excellence for creative industries and innovation. bush, p. l., pluye, p., loignon, c., et al. (2017). organizational participatory research: a systematic mixed studies review exposing its extra benefits and the key factors associated with them. implementation science, 12(1), 1-15. costanza-chock, s. (2020). design justice: community-led practices to build the worlds we need. the mit press. cuthbertson, j., archer, f., robertson, a., & rodriguez-llanes, j. m. (2021). improving disaster data systems to inform disaster risk reduction and resilience building in australia: a comparison of databases. prehospital and disaster medicine, 36(5), 511518. https://github.com/admscentre/community_resource_mapping_platform jakes, s., hardison-moody, a., bowen, s., & blevins, j. (2015). engaging community change: the critical role of values in asset mapping. community development, 46(4), 392–406. mccosker, a., kang, y.b., shaw, f. (2023) ‘towards resilient communities: data capability and resource mapping for disaster preparedness’ arc centre of excellence for automated decision-making and society, melbourne. https://doi.org/10.26185/hgz2-h212 mccosker, a., shaw, f., calyx, c., kang, y.b., albury, k. (2022). mapping community resources for disaster preparedness: humanitarian data capability and automated futures. arc centre of excellence for automated decision-making and society. https://doi.org/10.25916/dpb7-5118 mccosker, a., kamstra, p., de cotta, t., farmer, j., shaw, f., teh, z., & soltani panah, a. (2021). social media for social good? a thematic, spatial and visual analysis of humanitarian action on instagram. information, communication & society, 24(13), 1870-1890. mccosker, a., & graham, t. (2018). data publics: urban protest, analytics and the courts. m/c journal, 21(3). mccosker, a. (2013). de-framing disaster: affective encounters with raw and autonomous media. continuum, 27(3), 382-396. morozov, e. (2013). to save everything click here: the folly of techno-logical solutionism. new york: public affairs. pollock, n. (2012) ranking devices: the socio-materiality of ratings. in p.m. leonardi, bonnie a. nardi, and j. kallinikos eds. materiality and organizing: social interaction in a technological world. oxford: oxford up, pp. 91-114. shaw, f., burgess, j., crawford, k., & bruns, a. (2013). sharing news, making sense, saying thanks: patterns of talk on twitter during the queensland floods. australian journal of communication, 40(1), 23-39. https://doi.org/10.26185/hgz2-h212 https://doi.org/10.25916/dpb7-5118 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): mwaura,j., dambo,t., ataguba,o., mare,a., mukhongo,l., chuma,w., mano,w. (2023, october). digital technologies and revolution in africa: complexities, ambivalences, and contextual realities. panel presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. digital technologies and revolution in africa: complexities, ambivalences, and contextual realities job mwaura university of the witwatersrand ochega ataguba university of cape town tamar haruna dambo eastern mediterranean university admire mare university of johannesburg wallace chuma university of cape town lusike mukhongo western michigan university winston mano university of the westminster introductory statement the rise of digital technologies has brought about significant changes in revolutionary projects across africa. the impact of these technologies on social movements and activism is complex and multi-faceted. this panel examines the role of technology in shaping african revolutionary projects, such as the use of social media platforms for mobilisation and coordination, and the challenges around issues like manipulation and exploitation. it also delves into the diverse goals and aspirations that drive these movements, from seeking social justice to reorganising social orders. by discussing these topics, the panel aims to provide attendees with a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between technology and revolution in africa and the different discourses that shape these movements. the first paper focuses on kenya and examines the role of digital technologies, specifically social media, in promoting socio-political change and revolution. the author notes that kenya has been regarded as one of the technological hubs in africa, and the increased use of internet technologies has become part of the everyday life of most citizens, especially in urban areas. social media has become essential for political participation in kenya, particularly among marginalised communities such as the youth and women. the author highlights the dynamics of protests and socio-political issues that shape socio-political movements, emphasising the use of social media in politically led and grassroots-led protests. on the other hand, the second paper looks at nigeria and explores the forms of civic engagement and citizenship performance on twitter spaces leading up to the country's 2023 national elections. the author uses the lens of digital citizenship to situate citizens as politically engaged subjects who gather and share information and make rights claims online, potentially altering the balance of power. the author acknowledges the need for contextual understanding when studying a country like nigeria imbued with culture and diversity. the author also highlights how new media technologies facilitate african digital citizenship and the tacit and observable ways citizens experience their social and cultural context in digital environments that may be uniquely african. the third paper examines the presence of influencers and grievances among the "soro soke" generation during nigeria's 2023 election cycle. the study aims to show the significance of influencers in the core networks of "soro soke" election tweeters and how their grievances are expressed through personalized statements of hopes, frustrations, and lifestyles that lead to collective action. additionally, the author explores the response of leading presidential candidates to the #endsars movement, highlighting how the movement connected the "soro soke" generation with like-minded politicians and how resources were mobilized to support them. the fourth paper critiques the discourse of social media platforms driving political revolutions in southern africa. it rejects the technological determinism and solutionism approaches and favours theoretical toolkits such as social shaping of technologies, structuration theory and technological dramas. the paper explores digital technologies' complex roles in political struggles, acknowledging their potential for democratization, citizen participation and political voice, as well as negative impacts like digital surveillance, authoritarianism, disinformation campaigns, cyberbullying, and dark participation. it highlights the disruptive tendencies of hashtag movements in southern africa, examining the positive and negative outcomes of digital technologies. this study contributes to understanding the relationship between digital technologies and political struggles in southern africa and challenges revolutionary technologies, actors, movements, and goals' rhetoric on social media. this paper examines how african youth and first-generation young african diasporas in the usa, uk, and france use social media to contest and reframe global media narratives about africa and its people. it analyzes subversive online narratives that challenge settler colonialism legacies and global north media control. social media provides a new frontier for disrupting media hegemonies and challenging stereotypes. the study concludes that social media facilitates protests and increases opportunities for youth engagement in collective action. african youth and diasporic communities use social media to challenge negative stereotypes and reframe global media narratives about africa, redefining identities in the process. all 5 papers are related in that they all focus on the role of digital technologies in shaping political and social change. they explore how digital technologies are leveraged to challenge dominant narratives, amplify alternative voices, and mobilize collective action. the abstracts also share a critical perspective that seeks to move beyond deterministic and solutionist approaches to analyzing the relationship between society and technologies and instead highlight the complex and multifaceted ways in which digital technologies can enable or constrain political struggles. in addition, the abstracts focus on different geographic contexts, including nigeria, kenya, southern africa, and the diaspora in the usa, uk, and france, indicating the global reach of digital technologies in shaping political and social change. overall, the abstracts highlight the potential of digital technologies as a tool for challenging dominant narratives and mobilizing collective action while also acknowledging the ambivalent and contested nature of their impact. social media and protests in kenya: a digital revolution for democracy job mwaura university of the witwatersrand introduction and background: the rise of digital technologies has had a significant impact on politics and activism across the globe. in africa, digital technologies have been instrumental in promoting political participation and revolution, particularly in countries where authoritarian regimes have restricted traditional political engagement (mare, 2014). this paper aims to explore the role of digital technologies in promoting socio-political change and revolution in africa, with a specific focus on kenya. i will examine the dynamics of protests and the socio-political issues that shape socio-political movements, emphasising the use of social media in both politically led and grassroots-led protests. key questions for this paper will be: (a) how do protest dynamics manifest and evolve within political movements? (b) what are the socio-political variables that influence digital activism in kenya? (c) in what ways do protest dynamics and sociopolitical factors impact political transformation within political movements? kenya has been regarded as one of the technological hubs in africa, and the increased use of internet technologies has become part of the everyday life of most citizens, especially in urban areas. the use of social media has become an essential tool for political participation in kenya, particularly among marginalised communities such as the youth and women. the arab spring in 2011, which saw the use of social media in mobilising and organising protests against authoritarian regimes in north africa and the middle east (hussain & howard, 2013), has inspired many activists in kenya to use social media for similar purposes. however, there is a lack of empirical research on the impact of social media on political participation and activism in kenya. literature the emergence of online social networks in the 1990s, particularly the internet's global reach, has been a significant area of study for scholars like manuel castells. castells (2008) believed that networks are a crucial feature of social morphology and have transformed social organization globally. he also studied the shift of power resulting from increased mediatisation, arguing that power rested in networks created by people. similarly, keck & sikkink (1998) have offered an understanding of how networks operate in political science and international relations, referring to them as transnational networks that are brought together by principled ideas or values. they argue that for networks to be effective, information exchange between them is necessary. castells (2008) and keck & sikkink (1998) acknowledge the importance of information in creating and strategically using it for socio-political change. the 2013 massive protest in brazil's capital, sao paulo, due to the hike in bus fares is an example of the power of networks (purdy, 2019). despite increased global social network research, research on online political participation and social movements in sub-saharan africa remains limited. scholars such as bosch (2017) and mutsvairo (2016) have recognized that socio-political, cultural, and economic issues affect digital media experiences in the region. mukhongo's work examines how young people in sub-saharan africa use digital media for political activism, including the challenges posed by these technologies (2015). she highlights socio-political issues as significant factors in how young people engage politically online. despite growing interest in digital media for political participation in the region, there is a lack of empirical studies on how social media is used in political and grassroots protests. this research aims to contribute to filling this gap in the literature. theory this study draws on network and resource mobilisation theories to examine the emergence of social movements such as #occupyplayground, #occupyparliament and #iebcmustgo. the network society concept, developed by jan van dijik (1991) and castells (2008), argues that digital information has become the primary driver of economic, cultural, and social change. this theory highlights the changes in the global economy and the expansion of networking logic in social structures, leading to social change. resource mobilization theory, developed by mccarthy and zald (1977), emphasizes the importance of organizational structures and resource accrual in mobilizing collective action. by examining the online and offline spaces where these movements emerged, this study demonstrates how the networks formed in these spaces provided fertile ground for political action. research design: this study employs a qualitative research design, and multiple case study research approaches to explore the role of social media in promoting socio-political change and revolution in kenya. three socio-political movements in kenya between 2013 and 2016 were selected to study the phenomenon. these included two grassroots movements #occupyparliament and #occupyplayground and one politically led movement, #iebcmustgo. the use of these sources of data made it possible to understand the dynamics of protests in digital activism in grassroots-led and politically-led protests. findings: this research suggests that using the media for activism in the pre-independence and various political environments and leadership have continuously shaped postindependence eras – from a more restricted media environment in the colonial period to free media in the current post-independence age. the findings indicated that grassroots and politically led protests use various media differently for activism, primarily due to the existing socio-political factors. for example, politically led protests rely more on mainstream media outlets such as television and radio, while grassroots-led protests utilise social media platforms such as twitter and facebook. however, it is important to note that both types of protests use a combination of online and offline activities to achieve their objectives. moreover, the findings of this research showed that offline activities during protests, such as street protests, meetings, and court processes, complemented by online protests, are all critical in realising socio-political change. the importance of offline activities was evident in the case of the #iebcmustgo protests, where the coalition of opposition parties relied heavily on offline activities such as street protests, meetings, and court processes to achieve their objective of forcing the electoral commission to reform. another interesting finding from this research was that the use of social media in protests in kenya was not limited to urban areas. the study found that social media was used to coordinate and mobilise protests even in rural areas, where internet access is limited. the use of basic mobile phones with internet capabilities was found to be the primary means of accessing social media platforms in these areas. this research highlights the importance of digital technologies in socio-political movements in kenya and how they have transformed the nature of protests. the use of social media has created a more decentralized and democratic platform for activism, allowing marginalised communities such as women and youth to participate and have their voices heard. it has also allowed for coordinating protests and sharing information in real time, leading to more efficient and effective protests. however, the research also highlights the challenges associated with using digital technologies in socio-political movements in kenya. the most significant challenge is the limited access to the internet, especially in rural areas, which limits the ability of some communities to participate fully. additionally, the government has been known to shut down social media platforms during protests, limiting communication and the ability to coordinate protests. in conclusion, this research showed that digital technologies have played a significant role in socio-political movements in kenya. the use of social media has transformed the nature of protests, making them more democratic and decentralised, allowing marginalised communities to participate fully. however, challenges associated with limited internet access, government censorship and the spread of false information must be addressed to ensure that digital technologies continue to play a positive role in socio-political movements in kenya and beyond. references bosch, t. (2017). twitter activism and youth in south africa: the case of #rhodesmustfall. information, communication & society, 20(2), 221–232. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1162829 castells, m. (2008). the new public sphere: global civil society, communication networks, and global governance. the annals of the american academy of political and social science, 616(1), 78–93. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716207311877 hussain, m. m., & howard, p. n. (2013). what best explains successful protest cascades? icts and the fuzzy causes of the arab spring. international studies review, 15(1), 48–66. keck, m., & sikkink, k. (1998). activists beyond borders; advocacy networks in international politics. cornell university press city. mare, a. (2014). social media: the new protest drums in southern africa. social media in politics: case studies on the political power of social media, 315-335. mccarthy, j. d., & zald, m. n. (1977). resource mobilization and social movements: a partial theory. american journal of sociology, 82(6), 1212–1241. mukhongo, l. (2015). friends or foes? a critique of the development of the media and the evolving relationship between press and politics in kenya. critical arts, 29(1), 59–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2015.1009678 mutsvairo, b. (ed.). (2016a). digital activism in the social media era; critical reflections on emerging trends in sub-saharan africa. springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40949-8 purdy, s. (2019). brazil’s june days of 2013: mass protest, class, and the left. latin american perspectives, 46(4), 15-36. digital citizenship in nigeria: civic engagement, online activism, and digital contention on twitter ochega ataguba university of cape town in nigeria, enthusiasm for dissent, sousveillance, and digital opposition peaked in parallel with the #endsars movement in october 2020(uwazuruike, 2020). the country has been on the cusp of an upsurge in citizen participation since then, with ordinary citizens emerging as front-stage social and political actors asserting civic rights. social media, particularly twitter, drives this activation as an alternative public sphere (van de donk et al., 2004), enabling political discourses and dissent in a space less dominated by mainstream media and more open to broader public participation, especially by those with access. this paper explores the complex forms of civic engagement and citizenship performance on nigeria’s twitter spaces between april 2022 and february 2023, leading to the country’s 2023 national elections. it uses the lens of digital citizenship that situates the citizen as a politically engaged subject who gathers and shares information. it makes rights claims online, potentially altering the balance of power (isin and ruppert, 2020; hintz et al., 2018). heeding the numerous calls made by many scholars to pay attention to the african digital cultural context rather than theorise from the vantage point of the global north (srinivasan et al., 2019, willems, 2014, bosch, 2022, schoon et al., 2020), this study unpacks how new media technologies facilitate african digital citizenship and the tacit and observable ways citizens experience their social and cultural context in digital environments that may be uniquely african(roberts and bosch, 2021). such a contextual view is necessary when studying a country imbued with culture and diversity, such as nigeria, because prevailing cultural, regional, and religious contexts and the peculiarity of shared practices across ethnicism, class, gender, and political leanings matter for how digital citizenship is understood, reimagined and reinvigorated among african digital publics. moreover, some research showed that political expression is the least essential part of citizenship compared with other, more traditional ways of participating in society(lane, 2020). within this context, this research teases out country-level experiences of citizens who transcend traditional levels of citizenship practices to adopt twitter as a space where convening publics come together to express forms of participation, including discussions of social, cultural, economic, and political issues and how twitter may shape what democratic action is possible and desirable from the citizens’ perspective. while various social media are widely used in nigeria, the dominant use of twitter for civic and political debate makes it the most relevant for this research(obia, 2020). twitter has the potential to be a strong force as a communicative environment that enables the performance of citizenship due to its open, very public, horizontal, vertical and broadly networked structure(puschmann et al., 2014). given the political tensions, repression of communicative freedom, ethnic and religious violence, and widespread gender inequality in nigeria, the study explores twitter as an alternative public sphere and platform for back-channel meaning-making. it underscores how political discourses, social justice activism, and civic agency become articulated in the broader repertoire of digital contention. with data collected using twitonomy and tweet deck software over eleven months, the study examines the nature of mediated citizen practices using a sample of twelve hashtags selected based on the trending hashtags on nigeria’s twitter during the months leading up to the 2023 general elections. these include #nigeriadecides2023, #bat2023, #peterobi4president, #atikuokowa2023, #nairaredesign #justice4deborah, #ujuanya, #femcoscam, #freeaminumuhammed, #atikugate, #fakebisopchallenge, and #jagabanarmy. these hashtags show how nigerians use twitter to engage in political discourse and social justice activities. results offer several essential contributions to the theoretical understanding of digital citizenship. given that the research was carried out during a period of heightened election tensions, most of the conversations on twitter were about political parties and political talk, even though politics is not the main focus of the study. however, the study goes beyond the narrow confines of politics to simultaneously include issues of culture, gender, economy, and other dimensions of citizenship and common interest. in theorising digital citizenship practices in nigeria, the study moves away from technological determinist-thinking implicit in an ideology that emphasises the liberating potential of social media to counter state control or any hegemonic order to emphasise the possibilities and limitations of deploying twitter as a tool for expressing dissent, and civic engagement. the research shows that twitter is embedded in the broader networks of relations in which ordinary citizens have become political subjects of power who make the right claims through their discursive participation on twitter (vromen et al., 2015; isin and ruppert, 2020). in these instances, twitter users become digital citizens by holding those in power accountable through emotional expressions of dissent, explicit points of view, humiliating metaphors, and dark humour. the study found that humour is a dominant discursive practice on nigeria’s twitter and a mode of civic engagement used to challenge civil rights violations and mock politicians for their excesses. this study argues that, perhaps, reactions through humour, memes and jokes displayed on twitter are mechanisms nigerians rely on to cope in situations they cannot rectify or change. a meme of the apc’s presidential candidate, bola asiwaju tinubu, riding an exercise bike as proof of health and wellness after it had been rumoured that he is unwell and therefore unfit to rule the country is a few examples of the types of creative, humorous expression that flourished on twitter. twitter nigeria as a platform has been instrumental in sustaining mobilisations and information sharing, evidenced by the significant amount of politically critical content sharing and conversations about contentious issues. during these processes, political views were often conflated with party affiliations, ethnicity, and religion politics, but this did not determine the flow of conversations. counter to the previously held assumption that the complexity of nigeria’s diversity would lead to polarization on nigeria’s twitter, it was interesting to find that, to a large extent, some hashtags allowed for less vertical but more horizontal participation in discussions among citizens where users from diverse cultures and ethnicities actively assert civic rights by forming collective voices around specific hashtags such as #getyourpvc. it allowed users to express solidarity with others and claim statehood. at the same time, twitter reflected hierarchies of belonging and forms of exclusion even within digital counterpublic spheres formed in opposition to the existing public sphere, giving shape to a public that includes citizens who are pro-government elites and those in opposition to the government. thus, the existing counter-public is curtailed and not entirely detached from the dictates of the status quo but can be seen as existing outside the realm of state power. this observation reinforces the argument that in digitally mediated communication, the public must be viewed as simultaneously public and personal(bryan, 2021). invariably, political elites and their supporters manipulated the digital public sphere by pedalling disinformation and fake news for political gains, which undermines the integrity of the democratic process. however, twitter’s affordances allowed citizens to confirm and verify these falsehoods. it became evident that the same affordances that make twitter easy to fabricate falsehoods, such as the platform’s openness, publicness and ephemerality, facilitated the verification of information. in this way, twitter constitutes a socio-technical environment where political participation as a communicative process is intertwined with imagined affordances that enable and constrain citizenship. ultimately, the study recognises that while it may not always serve as a revolutionary or transformative space, twitter provides a space for the contextual articulation of citizenship and remains a transgressive site for civil disobedience and the subversion of hegemonic platforms and ideologies. references bosch, t. 2022. decolonizing digital methods. communication theory, 32, 298-302. bryan, a. 2021. kuchu activism, queer sex-work and “lavender marriages,” in uganda's virtual lgbt safe (r) spaces. publics in africa in a digital age. routledge. hintz, a., dencik, l. & wahl-jorgensen, k. 2018. digital citizenship in a datafied society, john wiley & sons. isin, e. & ruppert, e. 2020. being digital citizens, rowman & littlefield publishers. lane, d. s. 2020. in search of the expressive citizen: citizenship norms and youth political expression on social media. public opinion quarterly, 84, 257-283. obia, v. 2020. #endsars, a unique twittersphere and social media regulation in nigeria. puschmann, c., bruns, a., mahrt, m., weller, k. & burgess, j. 2014. epilogue: why study twitter? twitter and society [digital formations, volume 89], 425-432. roberts, t. & bosch, t. 2021. concepts of digital citizenship: a review. unpublished schoon, a., mabweazara, h. m., bosch, t. & dugmore, h. 2020. decolonising digital media research methods: positioning african digital experiences as epistemic sites of knowledge production. taylor & francis. srinivasan, s., diepeveen, s. & karekwaivanane, g. 2019. rethinking publics in africa in a digital age. journal of eastern african studies, 13, 2-17. uwazuruike, a. r. 2020. # endsars: the movement against police brutality in nigeria. harvard human rights journal. van de donk, w., loader, b. d., nixon, p. g. & rucht, d. 2004. cyberprotest: new media, citizens and social movements, routledge. vromen, a., xenos, m. a. & loader, b. 2015. young people, social media and connective action: from organisational maintenance to everyday political talk. journal of youth studies, 18, 80-100. willems, w. 2014. beyond normative dewesternization: examining media culture from the vantage point of the global south. the global south, 8, 7-23. #endsars: the role of the “soro soke” generation in nigeria’s 2023 elections tamar haruna dambo eastern mediterranean university introduction #endsars, the hashtag that pervaded the global space in october 2020 while the world was battling with covid-19, has since become a rallying point for nigerian youths (oxford analytica, 2020; balogun & akano, 2021; agbashi et al., 2020; aniche & iwuoha, 2022) who had previously battled different forms of marginalization by their established political class in the country (dambo et al., 2022). while studies like balogun & akano (2021) reservedly suggested that the movement highlighted the need for youths to use their resources to participate in the country’s next general elections and indeed, aniche & iwuoha (2022) established that the protesting youths had attempted to float a new party albeit unsuccessfully, oxford analytica (2020) predicted an emergence of a youth-based party that would struggle to challenge the main two parties. although #endsars started in december 2017, the movement went global in late 2020 after a video on twitter showed police brutality on an unarmed young man in the southern region of nigeria (dambo et al., 2021). the reaction of youths and their ability to mobilize despite oppositional governmental activities like freezing the bank accounts of protesters illustrated the disruptive power of digital technologies, which empower marginalized groups to bypass the structures that marginalize them by forming their values and goals (castells, 2015). these new values and goals included finding alternative ways to pull resources to sustain their connective activities (dambo et al., 2021). conceptualizing marginalization as a problem that generally affects african youths, depriving them of political, economic and social resources, dambo et al. (2022) showed how the twitter ban enforced in nigeria in 2021 was another attempt to suppress already marginalized youths in nigeria. beyond this, it also delineated the disconnect between nigeria’s established political class and its oppressed youthful class (dambo, 2022). now called the “soro soke” generation (balogun & akano, 2021), the youths in nigeria, particularly those invested in the #endsars movement, have expanded their activities by seeking change through democratic means. soro soke, a nigerian slang for speaking out loud in the yoruba language, now signifies a moment in nigeria’s recent history when its youths collectively stood up against injustice. theoretical framework leaning on the logic of connective action as the theoretical basis for this paper, this paper attempts to interrogate the connective action of the “soro soke” generation beyond the #endsars movement that gave it its identity. gonzález-bailón and wang (2016) divide the various theoretical approaches to online collective action into two groups: those that view digital technologies as communication structures where those in control of the information are considered as communication brokers and another class that views them as power structures where those in control of the information are regarded as influential. furthermore, the resource mobilization theory explains how structural factors influenced the mobilization of resources by the “soro soke” generation in their attempt to restructure the political class in nigeria. research objectives the paper draws from the research objectives of dambo et al. (2021), which established the presence of influencers and the expression of grievances among the “soro soke” generation in nigeria’s 2023 election cycle. in connected action, a few users are required to facilitate information flow by moving data from one cluster to the next (dambo et al., 2021; gonzález-bailón & wang, 2016). due to gaps between clusters that can be filled by influencers evaluated by their betweenness centrality, these minority participants can enable the dissemination of information using their social capital within the same core network (burt, 2001). following this, this paper elicits the presence of influencers to illustrate their significance within the core networks of the “soro soke” election tweeters as a first objective. the second objective probes the different ways the grievances of these identified tweeters are expressed within their core network. this is because personalized statements of hopes, frustrations, and lifestyles arguably lead to collective activities that enable connected action, as seen in previous movements like the arab spring, the occupy protests, etc. (bennett & segerberg, 2012). lastly, new expressions made possible by transformative technologies allow for selfgenerated narratives steered and selected by network users (castells, 2013). those who have lost trust in institutions and are prepared to discontinue sustaining the system by participating in online protests drive these self-expressions of hope, rage, and disappointment (castells, 2015). however, since the logic of connective action is limited in the sense that it is restricted to the manifestations and expressions of dissent in online digital spaces, the paper uses the theory of resource mobilization (rmt) to make up for this limitation to elicit how the “soro soke” generation followed up on their demands for change with resources in the 2023 general elections. in this objective, the paper will highlight the response of the current leading presidential candidates to the #endsars movement when the movement scaled to a global community. as such, the third objective directly connects the “soro soke” generation with politicians who share their values and illustrates how resources are mobilized to support the identified contestants. research methodology while this paper is being written, nigeria’s 2023 election cycle is ongoing. the study uses twitter data to fulfil its objectives, which are to elicit the presence of influencers in an attempt to illustrate their significance within the core networks of the “soro soke” election tweeters, to probe the different ways the angst of these identified tweeters is expressed within their core network and; to connect the “soro soke” generation with politicians who share their values and illustrates how resources are mobilized to support the identified contestants. as an excellent resource for political information, twitter data has been used in numerous studies to show the power play between information brokers and marginalized groups. to this end, twitonomy is used to retrieve data for the study. due to the vast amount of data it provides and analyzes, twitonomy has been hailed as an excellent resource for twitter data collection (guijarro et al., 2018). it is an analytics application for twitter that enables tracking and analysis of all twitter activity, encompassing tweets, retweets, replies, mentions, and hashtags (ioannidis, et al., 2020). two types of twitter will be retrieved: first, tweets that combined #endsars and the 2023 elections will be recovered to establish a connection between the “soro soke” generation and their participation in the 2023 elections as predicted by oxford analytica (2020) and secondly, another set of tweets will be retrieved to find connections between the influencers identified in the first set of data collected and the types of twitter activities they engineered during the election cycle. references agbashi, e., tesfayohannes, n., adeyemi, t., & aghayere, o. (2020). #endsars 2020: the social movement that is rebirthing activism in nigeria social movements around the world: op-ed. yale journal of international affairs, 53, 53-58. aniche, e. t., & iwuoha, v. c. (2022). beyond police brutality: interrogating the political, economic and social undercurrents of the #endsars protest in nigeria. journal of asian & african studies, 0(0). balogun, t., & akano, r. (2021). discursive strategies in the tweets and comments of virtual #endsars protesters. ihafa: a journal of african studies, 12(1), 1145. bennett, w. l., & segerberg, a. (2012). the logic of connective action. information, communication & society, 15(5), 739–768. burt, r. s. (2001). the social capital of structural holes. in m. f. guillen, r. collins, p. england, & m. meyers, new directions in economic sociology (pp. 202250). russel sage foundation. castells, m. (2013). communication power. oxford: oxford university press. castells, m. (2015). networks of outrage and hope: social movement in the internet age (2nd ed.). cambridge: polity press. dambo, t. h., ersoy, m., auwal, m. a., olorunsola, v. o., & saydam, m. b. (2021). office of the citizen: a qualitative analysis of twitter activity during the lekki shooting in nigeria’s #endsars protests. information, communication & society, 25(15), 2246-2263. dambo, t. h., ersoy, m., eluwole, k. k., & arikewuyo, a. o. (2022). political marginalization of youths in nigeria and the use of social media to pursue inclusivity. political science quarterly, 137(1), 99-218. gonzález-bailón, s., & wang, n. (2016). networked discontent: the anatomy of protest campaigns in social media. social networks, 44, 95-104. guijarro, e., mascarell, c. s., darós, l. c., somavilla, r. d., & griñón, e. b. (2018). multicriteria techniques applied to social media in public sector: the use of twitter by different law enforcement authorities profiles. revista latina de comunicación social(73), 1412-1427. ioannidis, a., blanco-colino, r., chand, m., pellino,, g., nepogodiev,, d., wexner , s. d., & mayol , j. (2020). how to make an impact in surgical research: a consensus summary from the #some4surgery community. updates in surgery, 72, 1229–1235. oxford analytica. (2020). nigerian government will look to prevent more protests. expert briefings. doi:10.1108/oxan-db258491 the revolution will be tweeted. social media and the rhetoric of political revolutions in southern africa admire mare university of johannesburg the widespread rhetoric of revolution has accompanied the advent of digital technologies. this rhetoric assumes that digital technologies have inherent power to usher in revolutionary political changes in societies caught up in an authoritarian habitus. some structural challenges facing african postcolonial societies are bad governance, corruption, cronyism, one-partyism, human rights violations and repression. this has profoundly affected the deepening of democratic cultures and practices across the continent. in response to the shrinking democratic space, some african countries have witnessed the resurgence of youthful but resilient oppositional politics, disruptive social movements, and vibrant hashtag movements. partly because of the closure of the democratic space, opposition activists and social movement actors in southern africa have appropriated digital technologies for progressive and retrogressive politics. from eswatini to lesotho, malawi to mozambique, and zambia to zimbabwe, digital technologies have been used to mobilise supporters, spread messages of dissent, coordinate protests, and engage in diverse forms of political action. taking a historical look at the demonstration effect of the arab spring in southern africa, this presentation problematises the rhetoric of political revolutions inherent in framing the creative uses of social media platforms. it critiques this discourse mainly driven by technological determinism and solutionism approaches to analysing the relationship between society and technologies. jettisoning the technological determinist-thinking implicit in framing digital technologies as ‘revolutionary tools’, this presentation leans towards the social shaping of technologies, structuration theory and technological dramas as more appropriate theoretical toolkits for analysing the complex relationship between political change and technology. the presentation sheds light on digital technologies' ambivalent roles in political struggles. it demonstrates that the nexus between digital technologies and their impact on political struggles is complex and multifaceted. it acknowledges that, on the one hand, digital technologies have enabled the democratisation of the public sphere, citizen participation and enjoyment of political voice. on the other hand, it has opened floodgates for digital surveillance, digital authoritarianism, disinformation campaigns, cyberbullying, and other forms of dark participation. whilst these digital technologies have empowered activists to engage in what can be referred to as ‘revolutionary struggles’, the presentation also reminds us of how these actors are susceptible to platform and infrastructural vulnerabilities. these platform-specific vulnerabilities undercut the positive aspects associated with digital technologies. the presentation critiques the rhetoric of revolutionary technologies, tactics, actors, movements, and goals on social media. focusing on the disruptive tendencies of hashtag movements in eswatini, lesotho, malawi, mozambique, south africa and zimbabwe, this presentation examines how digital technologies have been leveraged for positive and negative outcomes in southern africa. it goes beyond the simplistic framing of digital political action as ‘social media dissidence’ and ‘digital dissidence’. it argues that revolutionary actions are disruptive, transformative, and transgressive. they are rooted in the quest to foster alternative political futures rather than simply (re)engineering regime change. references boulianne, s. (2017). revolution in the making? social media effects across the globe. information communication and society, 22(1):1-16. chitanana, t. (2020). from kubatana to# thisflag: trajectories of digital activism in zimbabwe. journal of information technology & politics 17 (2), 130-145. chiweshe, m. k. (2013). social networks as anti-revolutionary forces. africa development, 2, 21. gerbaudo, p. (2012). tweets and the streets: social media and contemporary activism. london: pluto press. jost, j. t. et al. (2018). how social media facilitates political protest: information, motivation, and social networks. advances in political psychology, 39(51): 85-118. gukurume, s. (2017). #thisflag and #thisgown cyber protests in zimbabwe: reclaiming political space. african journalism studies, 38(2), 49–70. lynch, m. (2011). after egypt: the limits and promise of online challenges to the authoritarian arab state. perspectives on politics, 9(2), 301–310. mare, a. (2014). social media: the new protest drums in southern africa? in b. pătruţ & m. pătruţ (eds.), social media in politics (vol. 13, pp. 315–335). cham: springer international publishing. mare, a. (2016). baba jukwa and the digital repertoires of connective action in a ‘competitive authoritarian regime’: the case of zimbabwe. in b. mutsvairo (ed.), digital activism in the social media era: critical reflections on emerging trends in sub-saharan africa (pp. 45–68). cham: palgrave macmillan. tufekci, z. (2017). twitter and tear gas: the power and fragility of networked protest. yale: yale university press. revolutionizing african media narratives: reframing, disrupting and occupying global digital ecosystems wallace chuma university of cape town lusike mukhongo western michigan university winston mano university of the westminister the paper explores global media ecosystems through analysis of processes of global media hegemony in reinforcing media marginalities, carcerality of indigenous knowledge and subalternity in the global south and african diaspora, and further details how global south users and african diaspora audiences are reimagining digital tools to create a global consciousness and resurgences through reframing, disrupting and occupying digital spaces. the broad goals of the paper are (a) to analyze the global media narratives about africa and the diaspora and reframing strategies used by audiences and users, (b) to discuss social media contestations and anti-algorithmic disruption strategies used to amplify african narratives, and (c) review of sustained occupying of online media spaces in attempts to shift dominant global narratives about africa. the paper analyzes deliberate and sustained online subversive narratives that counter and challenge settler colonialism legacies and global north media carcerality of african narratives and their peoples. the main questions the paper seeks to answer are: how are global south and african diaspora audiences and users reframing african narratives while capturing and celebrating diversities without morphing into the dominant image of the global north? how do african diasporic youth negotiate the tensions and convergences between their mediated experiences of africa (via media) and their lived experiences of being african in american and european metropoles? the study focuses on online identity formation, construction and contestations of global media narratives by african youth and first-generation young african diasporas in the usa, uk, and france. this study uniquely sought to explore, analyze, and determine the contestations and reframing of global media narratives by african youth and the extent of the influence of global media and non-media narratives about africa among young african diasporas in the usa, uk and france at a time when digital technologies have allowed them to access other alternatives as well as to challenge and forge a new identity for themselves and the african continent. the study was framed by the rdo model developed by the africa media collaborative team that seeks to decolonize media narratives and positions key steps in shifting the narrative (narrative change strategy) as (r)eframing, (d)isrupting, and (o)ccupying. (africa media collaborative, 2020). the data was generated through online interviews with african youth in the diaspora and web scraping of social media contestations by youth in africa and african diasporic communities. data on african youth narratives and contestations were initially generated using twitter api and later complemented with web scraping from twitter focusing on tweets posted between april 1, 2020, and december 31, 2022. the data was initially generated from twitter using the twitter api during momentous events in africa (such as the covid-19 pandemic, the 2022 world cup, and the cop27). still, due to limitations of how far back the twitter api could pull data, it was subsequently complemented with web scraping methods during data collection and analysis, especially when there was a need to go back and get more information about a specific tweet or hashtag. it was further complemented by archival data and content illustration of analysis of global news coverage and mining of online conversations, stories and mentions about africa in interpersonal, organizational, and global diasporic platforms. using a snowballing and purposive sampling of african youths in the african diaspora, 90 male, female and non-binary young africans were selected from the uk, usa and france. the interviews generated data on how young african migrants experience the diaspora as liminal spaces and how they negotiate relationships with other africans in these indeterminate spaces to construct, redefine, negotiate and contest identities. the data were analyzed qualitatively using narrative analysis and thematic content analysis (tca). the findings showed a strong sentiment toward an african identity among african youth and diasporic communities, defined through claims supported by belonging to africa through humour, media, family connections, history, and knowledge of africa. participants felt a sense of pride regarding their african identity and a recognition that africa is much more than what is seen in global media coverage. african diasporic communities hear both positive and negative stories about africa. the most common negative stories about africa were political violence and poverty. in contrast, the most common positive stories were about the beauty of africa and different indigenous and entrepreneurial inventions in africa to overcome different obstacles africa faces in its economic and infrastructural development. the participants also argued that global media representation of africa is mainly negative, and there was an overwhelming sense of frustration about how africa is portrayed. those who lived in africa and had travelled to africa or had close engagements with friends and family had a more favourable opinion and were more critical of global narratives and media coverage that presents the ‘stereotype image’ of africa in the media and the diaspora. from the discussions of findings, it can be concluded that social media is the latest frontier with incredible potential to challenge and disrupt media hegemonies in the fight to challenge the stereotypical image of africans and redefine identities. while the role of social media and mobile technologies in revolutions such as the arab spring has been contested, what is evident is that social media has facilitated protests by increasing opportunities for youth engagement in collective action (bosch, 2017). youth in africa and african diasporic communities described social media as a source of stereotypes and negatives. for example, tiktok as a space was riddled with jokes where they made fun of african accents. on the other hand, social media was also a platform for showcasing the best of africa. they were proud of prominent african figures in global spaces, such as chimamanda ngozi adichie, lupita ny’ong’o, burna boy, diamond platnumz, trevor noah, tiwa savage and whizkid. it can also be concluded that while global media coverage has been historically biased towards africans, social media offers spaces where youth in africa and african diasporic communities can contest hegemonic biased stories, challenge the stereotype image and reconstruct their identities. one interesting finding was how young africans use hashtags and twitter bombing to disrupt online narratives and create social media visibility for african youth voices. it can also be concluded that young african diaspora youth negotiate spaces in the global south or liminal and indeterminate spaces that characterize diaspora communities. young african migrants are constantly negotiating their identities in american and european metropoles, especially made worse with the rise of the far-right movement in the global north and triggered by racism and othering in the global north spaces. they are vigilant and survivalist in their outlook and strategy and are increasingly activists. the killing of trayvon martin in 2012 in the usa led to the emergence of the black lives matter (blm) movement (onwuachi-willig, 2018), and the murder of george floyd in 2020 and the subsequent blm riots solidified their experience of marginality. consequently, the sense of belonging to africa is seen as a source of pride to be nourished, preserved and developed through visits and historical reimagination. references africa media collaborative. 2020. https://africamediacollaborative.com/ bosch, t. 2017. twitter activism and youth in south africa: the case of #rhodesmustfall, information, communication & society, 20(2):221232. https://doi-org.libproxy.library.wmich.edu/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1162829 onwuachi-willig, a. (2018). from emmett till to trayvon martin: the persistence of white womanhood and the preservation of white manhood. du bois review, 15(2), 257-294. doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/s1742058x18000292 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): dugmore, h. (2024, october). fabricating stateless income: deconstructing the discourses of multinational platform corporations’ tax avoidance strategies in australia and canada paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. fabricating stateless income: deconstructing the discourses of multinational platform corporations’ tax avoidance strategies in australia and canada harry dugmore university of the sunshine coast while upending domestic and global news media’s advertising income streams via the provision of superior “commercial datafication” (mansell, 2021) and “digital tracking and profiling” (christl, 2017) functionalities, multinational platform corporations (mnpcs) have also implemented opaque strategies to minimize their domestic and global tax liabilities. these strategies have been an important contributor to both meta and alphabet’s surging profits over the past decade – for meta, from just us$1.5b in 2013, to $39b in 2023 and, for google, now listed as part of its parent company alphabet, from a us$12.73b profit in 2013 to us$74b in 2023. in terms of australian taxes, the australian competition watchdog, the accc, estimates meta’s total income in the 12month period to june 2023 at around $5b, which might be undercount additional direct payments from australia made by customers directly to meta platforms ireland. ireland has a much lower tax rate compared with many other jurisdictions (buckingham-hones & tadros 2024). and in 2022 facebook australia declared $1.25 billion as revenue from advertising but paid just $31 million in tax (jolly, 2024). these spectacular levels of profitability have been achieved despite a proliferation of local and some transnational ‘diverted profits tax’ laws (colbran & farhat, 2023; dunne, 2016) designed to prevent companies from shifting revenue from high-tax countries to low tax jurisdictions. mnpcs have been able to not just continue to transform the majority of their revenue into "stateless” income (kleinbard, 2016), which is not taxed in the country where the income is generated (nor, often, even in the country where the corporation is headquartered) but to get better at this and other forms of tax avoidance, via improving both their ability to “navigate institutional complexity” (kornelakis & hublart, 2022) and, as this paper argues, to shape national and transnational discourses about their strategies. while conscientiously legal, governments across the world are nonetheless deprived of significant revenues: an analysis of the so-called “silicon six" (including meta) has estimated their "tax gap" – the difference between expected tax liabilities, and actual tax payments made– at approximately $100 billion for the period 2011-2020 (chowdhary & diasso 2022). this paper explores the response of google and facebook to the australian government’s 2021 imposition of the news media bargaining code (nmbc) between 2020 and 2024 and the way it subsequently framed and adapted its global strategies, as exemplified by the respective corporations’ responses to canada's bill c-18 (the online news act). this paper, and the broader project it is part of, draws on submissions to and reports from government commissions of inquiry and subsequent legislative deliberations in both canada and australia (and particularly the australian competition and consumer commission’s (accc)’s original digital platforms inquiry (2017-19), the subsequent digital advertising services inquiry (2020-21) and the ongoing digital platform services inquiry (2020-25) and the voluminous submissions that respond to the accc’s 14 “reports” from these three inquiries by, especially, meta and alphabet, but also amazon, apple and others. it also draws on a burgeoning trove of journalistic and scholarly analysis of these inquires. the paper applies and seeks to extend radsch’s re-theorization of the categories of policy intervention available to governments to address the reality that despite operating and indeed facilitating local and global ‘public spheres’ and providing primary access, for many of their billions of users, to the news and information needed for informed citizenship, the mnpcs operate within a “platform logic’’ which is “based on a business model designed around datafication, engagement, and profit maximization and not the values that define the logic of journalism, i.e. public interest, accuracy, newsworthiness etc. (radsch, 2023). drawing on radsch’s triad of categories of contestation – of “taxation and subsidies”; “copyright and licensing” and “competition and anti-trust”, this paper focuses on the way in which taxation and subsidies are contested, i.e. framed, discussed and argued over. this is partly because the accc’s nmbc, combined other onerous legislative compliance requirements, with shrewd inducements for ‘voluntary’ ‘free market’ (and secretive) negotiations and ‘deals’ between google and facebook and australian news organizations can be seen as a form of ‘stealth tax’ on these mnpcs, and because their multilayered responses to the nmbc can also viewed as part of their broader suite of tax-mitigation schemes. the nmbc has seen upwards of $200m flow into australian news organizations per annum since 2021, and as such the nmbc is much admired by regulators beyond australia (bossio et al., 2022; dugmore, 2021; lever, 2021; meese, 2021; schiffrin et al., 2021). in the usa, the journalism competition and preservation act, and in canada, the canadian online news act and, in uk, the digital competition bill seek to emulate some elements of nmbc. in less wealthy countries, the nmbc is also much studied; in south africa, the peak journalism body, the south african national editors forum (sanef), is lobbying for the local competition commission to take australianlike action sooner rather than later. (dugmore, 2021). this project (and initially, this paper) argues that both facebook australia’s retaliatory week-long ‘news shutdown’ in australia, and more recently, as announced on march 1 2024, that the company will “deprecate facebook news” and decline to continue their previous nmbc ‘designation avoidance’ commercial deals with domestic news media companies back in 2020/21 and alphabet (google) virulent public opposition to the nmbc in 2021, have not, in the grand scheme of things, generated long-term public pressure nor the development of domestic counter-narratives. put differently, discourses of opposition to this fiscal maneuvering, has been uneven and largely ineffective in reducing the range and scope of mnpc’s revenue and profit externalization. there is no serious and sustained critique of or capacity to delegitimize their tax avoidance practices and seemingly endless profitability super-spiral. as such, the paper explores four discursive frames: • legalistic frame that emphasise each mnpc’s particularly exemplary corporate ‘citizenship’ in each of jurisdictions they operate in, accentuating their conscientious compliance with local laws and global treaties; • normalisation frames that situate their tax avoidances as “standard practice” and which thus partially frame their aggressive tax structuring as necessary for their competitiveness (and the ‘social good’ of maximising shareholder value); • fear frames that raise the spectre of localised economic regression and stagnation if the mnpc’s operations and tax mitigation strategies are curtailed via ex-ante regulation. these fear frames are often augmented with references to their mnpc’s roles as staunch local job creators, and the repeated provision of data about the large numbers of local customers who ‘depend’ on the mnpcs for advertising services. • technological illiteracy frames that seek to create a perception of blundering state governments’ inadvertently “breaking the internet” with antiquated and naïve approaches. this kind of framing often appeals to the authority of global tech luminaries (and academics) such as, for example, tim berners-lee, arguing that particular government policies are both foolish and risky. regarding the nmbc in australia, for example, berners-lee warned that the code “risks breaching a fundamental principle of the web by requiring payment for linking between certain content online.” (google blog, 2021) this paper thus suggests that australia’s nmbc, for all its success in extracting income for journalism directly for a three-year period (and perhaps longer), has also provided these particular mnpcs with something of a “discursive laboratory” where new rhetorical strategies are birthed, refined and updated. the paper explores how mnpcs have been able to carefully manage public sentiment and elicit what is effectively an elite quiescence via developing and propagating sophisticated discourse-shaping strategies that simultaneously reframe and narrow the terrain of debate, and how these augmented strategies are being operationalized, and are now playing out, in canada and elsewhere. references australian competition & consumer commission (accc) digital platforms inquiry, final report ,june 2019, p. 122. bossio, d., flew, t., meese, j., leaver, t., & barnet, b. (2022). australia's news media bargaining code and the global turn towards platform regulation. policy & internet, 14(1), pp. 136-150. browne, b. (2021). the future of work in journalism by jim stanford economist and director, the australia institute. australia. retrieved from https://policycommons.net/artifacts/2039155/the-future-of-work-in-journalism/2791598/ on 02 mar 2024 buckingham-jones, s., & tadros, e. (2024). how pwc helped facebook argue its bill down in tax fight with ato. https://www.afr.com/companies/media-and-marketing/howpwc-helped-facebook-argue-its-bill-down-in-tax-fight-with-ato-20240308-p5faui christl, w. (2017). corporate surveillance in everyday life: how companies collect, combine, analyze, trade and use personal data of billions. cracked labs. https://crackedlabs.org/en/corporate-surveillance colbran, e., & farhat, s. (2023). diverted profits tax and multinational anti-avoidance law-practical insights. tax specialist, 26(4), 183-191. cohen, n., hunter a., & o’donnell, p. (2019). bearing the burden of corporate restructuring: job loss and precarious employment in canadian journalism, journalism practice, 13:7, 817-83 chowdhary, ah & diasso, sb. (2022) taxing big tech: policy options for developing countries https://www.southcentre.int/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/tcpb27_taxingbig-tech-policy-options-for-developing-countries_en.pdf danckert s. (2021) iron rod: why the accc’s top dog isn’t for turning, sydney morning herald, november 6 2021 https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/iron-rodwhy-the-accc-s-top-dog-isn-t-for-turning-20211104-p595yx.html dunne, j. (2016). the maal and the diverted profits tax a comparative. taxation in australia, 51(1), 21-27 dugmore, h. (2021). thinking globally, acting locally: reviving and sustaining south african journalism in a post-covid world. unisc and rhodes university https://research.usc.edu.au/esploro/outputs/report/thinking-globally-acting-locallyreviving-and/99522204202621?institution=61usc_inst#file-0 google blog, (2021). answering your top questions about the news media bargaining code, https://blog.google/intl/en-au/company-news/outreach-initiatives/top-questionsnews-code/ jolly, n. (2024). a tax on social media companies is the cost-of-living solution we need https://mumbrella.com.au/the-weekend-mumbo-a-tax-on-social-media-companies-isthe-cost-of-living-solution-we-need-853878 leaver, t. (2021). going dark: how google and facebook fought the australian news media and digital platforms mandatory bargaining code. m/c journal, 24(2). https://policycommons.net/artifacts/2039155/the-future-of-work-in-journalism/2791598/ https://research.usc.edu.au/esploro/outputs/report/thinking-globally-acting-locally-reviving-and/99522204202621?institution=61usc_inst#file-0 https://research.usc.edu.au/esploro/outputs/report/thinking-globally-acting-locally-reviving-and/99522204202621?institution=61usc_inst#file-0 lee, k., & molitorisz, s. (2021). the australian news media bargaining code: lessons for the uk, eu and beyond. journal of media law, 13(1), 36-53. mansell, r. (2021). european responses to (us) digital platform dominance in jin, dy (ed) the routledge handbook of digital media and globalization (1st ed.). routledge 2021 meese, j. (2021). journalism policy across the commonwealth: partial answers to public problems, digital journalism, 9:3, 255-275, kleinbard, e. d. (2016). capital taxation in an age of inequality. s. cal. l. rev., 90, 593. kornelakis, a., & hublart, p. (2022). digital markets, competition regimes and models of capitalism: a comparative institutional analysis of european and us responses to google. competition & change, 26(3-4), 334-356 radsch, cc. (2023) platformization and media capture: a framework for regulatory analysis of media-related platform regulations. ucla journal of law & technology, platforms and the press, 28, no. 2 (winter 2023): 175–223. o’regan, t., & young, c. (2019). journalism by numbers: trajectories of growth and decline of journalists in the australian census 1961–2016. media international schiffrin, a., clifford, h., & adjin-tettey, td. (2022). saving journalism 2: global strategies and a look at investigative journalism washington, dc: konrad-adenauerstiftung wilkinson, s. (2019). the long decline of canadian journalism: fewer permanent jobs, less security 21 nov 2019 https://thetyee.ca/mediacheck/2019/11/21/longdecline-canadian-journalism-star-metro-closure/ winseck, d. (2017) “shattered mirror, stunted vision and squandered opportunities.” mediamorphis, february 9. https://dwmw.wordpress.com/2017/02/09/shattered-mirrorstuntedvision-and-a-squandered-opportunities/ https://thetyee.ca/mediacheck/2019/11/21/long-decline-canadian-journalism-star-metro-closure/ https://thetyee.ca/mediacheck/2019/11/21/long-decline-canadian-journalism-star-metro-closure/ https://dwmw.wordpress.com/2017/02/09/shattered-mirror-stuntedvision-and-a-squandered-opportunities/ https://dwmw.wordpress.com/2017/02/09/shattered-mirror-stuntedvision-and-a-squandered-opportunities/ selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 cloud as infrastructure: theorising links between ‘big tech’ and ‘small tech’ devika narayan university of bristol introduction this paper focuses on the political economy of cloud computing and the new industry dynamics it activates. it helps uncover the industrial and infrastructural underpinnings of the internet. the analysis and arguments i develop emerge from a multi-year field-based study of the global corporate computing industry or more colloquially, the ‘it industry.’ specifically, an offshore industry in india that has historically maintained the computing systems of the world’s largest firms (narayan, 2023a, 2023b; peck, 2017; upadhya, 2016). i study how traditional relations between lead firms in the us and uk and offshore it suppliers were interrupted by cloud firms and cloud computing models. cross-disciplinary scholarship on platform-mediated transformations is growing rapidly (cole, 2023; nieborg and poell, 2018). cloud providers create and own massive computing assets, that now represent new internet infrastructures (greene, 2022). large-scale data centres that aggregate hardware resources are an important element shaping the expansion of platform economies. however, the impact of this configuration of hardware on the dynamics of software development is still unclear. there is growing scholarship on data centres. but the precise impact of the aggregation of a highly scalable hardware system on industry dynamics calls to be delineated. for one thing, cloud computing lowers the upfront cost of using and owning computing systems (kushida et al., 2015; mosco, 2014). this reduces barriers to entry and also promotes the expansion of platform economies. a number of industries are being platformised (davis, 2016; lotz, 2021; srnicek, 2017). the wide-ranging impact of platforms is explained at least in part by cloud infrastructure: the scalable provisioning of computing resources via the internet. given the impact of cloud computing and its features that resemble other public utilities (kennedy, 2018), this work seeks to refine the understanding of cloud architecture and its organisational character. i look under the hood, so to speak, analysing the dominant players and their new constellation of partners and users. suggested citation (apa): narayan, d. (2024, october). cloud as infrastructure: theorising links between ‘big tech’ and ‘small tech’. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. until amazon, google, and microsoft upended the market for hardware and software, a more traditional industry model prevailed. lead firms had a more conventional procurement supply chain for hardware, software, and services. cloud computing transformed both computing infrastructure and organisational relations, rendering these more flexible and scalable (narayan, 2022). the first part of the project focuses on the transformation of traditional suppliers in the face of a new market threat, examining how it firms coped with the turbulence in their market. however, i present here the second part of the study. i focus on the anatomy of the infrastructure itself, and how it activates a new set of relations between start-ups, developers, entrepreneurs, and investors. increasingly scholars argue that platforms, including cloud platforms, foster ‘ecosystems’ rather than supply chains (kapoor, 2018; kapoor et al., 2021). i outline what this means, by drawing out the attributes of cloud infrastructure. i identify virtualized hardware, modularity, resource sharing, and externalisation as defining aspect of the increasingly dominant cloud regime. here, i show how these coalesce to form a new industry dynamic, with hardware centralisation on the one hand and decentralisation of cloud users and complement developers on the other. data centres aggregate and centralize computing capacity and in turn enable the growth of globally distributed and organizationally decentralized corporate ecosystems. scholarship in this area is beginning to examine the relations between dominant technology corporations and their networks of users and third-party companies (blanke and pybus, 2020; helmond et al., 2019). thus, i contribute to literature on platform ecosystems by examining changing organizational and market dynamics introduced by cloud computing within the corporate computing sector. this industry can be considered a meta-industry given that firms and organisations across sectors use and deploy cloud resources. theoretically, i consider the broader implications for industry dynamics when the cost of digital innovation falls thanks to cloud-based modularity and virtualisation. i borrow ideas from marxist industrial analysis (e.g., harvey, 1982), to discuss how cloud platforms enable the “liquification of fixed capital” and thereby accelerate the creation and capture of new markets. the conceptual goal is to account for new mechanisms and strategies of accumulation that platforms afford. the research project is based on 110 interviews with managers (executive, senior, and middle) in traditional it firms with large offices in bangalore, india, as well as industry experts, and software engineers. here i draw from a subset of the sample that focuses on the new start-ups that have exploded in india as users of cloud technology. drawing on qualitative interviews with managers and investors of software start-ups in india, i explicate the falling barriers to entry and an emergent transnational competitive terrain, with special emphasis on transnational labour and speculative financial relations. this analysis, by exploring the intersection of platform studies and internet studies, contributes to sts, economic sociology, and political economy. it also directly contributes to the study of industrial analysis and processes, the overarching theme of aoir 2024. references blanke t and pybus j (2020) the material conditions of platforms: monopolization through decentralization. social media + society 6(4). 4. cole m (2023) (infra)structural discontinuity: capital, labour, and technological change. antipode 55(2): 348–372. davis gf (2016) the vanishing american corporation: navigating the hazards of a new economy. oakland, california: berrett-koehler publishers, greene d (2022) landlords of the internet: big data and big real estate. social studies of science 52(6): 904–927. harvey d (1982) the limits to capital. chicago : university of chicago press  helmond a, nieborg db and vlist fn van der (2019) facebook’s evolution: development of a platform-as-infrastructure. internet histories 3(2):123–146. kapoor k, ziaee bigdeli a, dwivedi yk, et al. (2021) a socio-technical view of platform ecosystems: systematic review and research agenda. journal of business research 128: 94–108. kapoor r (2018) ecosystems: broadening the locus of value creation. journal of organization design 7(1). 1: 12. kennedy d (2018) the people’s utility. logic (5). 5: 165–174. kushida k, murray j and zysman j (2015) cloud computing: from scarcity to abundance. journal of industry, competition and trade 15(1). 1: 5–19. lotz ad (2021) media disrupted: surviving pirates, cannibals, and streaming wars. mit press. mosco v (2014) to the cloud: big data in a turbulent world. boulder: paradigm publishers. narayan, d. (2022). platform capitalism and cloud infrastructure: theorizing a hyper-scalable computing regime. environment and planning a: economy and space, 54(5), 911-929. narayan d (2023a) manufacturing managerial compliance: how firms align managers with corporate interest. work, employment and society 37(6): 1443–1461. narayan d (2023b) monopolization and competition under platform capitalism: analyzing transformations in the computing industry. new media & society 25(2): 287–306. nieborg db and poell t (2018) the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society 20(11): 4275–4292. peck j (2017) offshore: exploring the worlds of global outsourcing. new york, ny: oxford university press. srnicek n (2017) platform capitalism. cambridge, uk: polity press. upadhya c (2016) reengineering india: work, capital, and class in an offshore economy. first edition.. new delhi, india: oxford university press. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 valente, j. ustek spilda, f. alyanak, o. brittain, l. and graham, m. (2024, october). fairness in the work behind the ai industry: how action-research approaches can build better labour conditions in ai development. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. fairness in the work behind the ai industry: how actionresearch approaches can build better labour conditions in ai development jonas c. l. valente oxford internet institute funda ustek spilda oxford internet institute oguz alyanak oxford internet institute lolla brittain oxford internet institute mark graham oxford internet institute extended abstract artificial intelligence (ai) has gained attention in the last decade because of its ability to transform how we live (crawford, 2021). this change is not inherently good or bad, but it is not neutral also (cole et al., 2022). instead, the ongoing development of ai systems presents us with opportunities and threats that will emerge in different ways in different contexts. the blossoming of ai has been accompanied by an expansion in the discussion of ai ethics (hagendorff, 2020). as a result, scholars and a broad range of stakeholders have begun to ask how ai affects society and how it should be developed and used (jobin et al., 2019). regarding the relationship between ai and work, the opportunities and challenges have also been highlighted in intense controversies, particularly about the effect on workplaces and labour relations. ai has also been seen as a transformative technology capable of boosting productivity and improving the labour process (oecd, 2023). on the other hand, the literature has also revealed risks and harms for workers (benanav, 2020). one first aspect relates to the consequences of ai deployment on the number of jobs. studies diverge on the range of reach of occupation substitution, with more significant (frey & osbourne, 2013) or limited effects of ai-based automated systems (arntz et al., 2017). some studies point out possibilities of job augmentation (gmyrek et al., 2023). however, less attention has been paid to the work behind the ai industry. an ai system artificial intelligence (ai) is a set of technologies that “seeks to make computers do the sorts of things that minds can do. (boden, 2016). these machine-based systems can make predictions, recommendations, or decisions influencing real or virtual environments. however, in order to do that, an enormous amount of human labour is needed throughout the ai development lifecycle (steinhoff, 2021). along this cycle, there are several tasks which demand human labour. although their names vary throughout the literature and companies, they encompass actions such as data cleaning, data annotation, data labelling, model revision, content moderation, sentiment analysis, tagging or detection, relevance scoring, audio transcription, etc (miceli et al., 2020). this work is made available by different types of companies. digital labour platforms are key actors in organising the buying and selling of on-demand workers’ labour power internationally, constituting a planetary labour market (graham & ferrari, 2022). research has shown the growth of these platforms. the ilo (2021) counted an increase in the number of digital labour platforms from 142 in 2010 to 777 in 2020. regarding online remote work, or cloudwork, platforms, datta et al. (2023) estimated a range of 154535 million workers worldwide. among them are those working on microwork platforms with many of the tasks mentioned above (tubaro et al., 2020). other companies have also been providing a workforce for ai development, such as business processing outsourcing (muldoon et al., 2023). the risks and challenges in the labour relations behind the ai industry have been raising concerns (morley et al., 2023; miceli & posada, 2022). for instance, digital labour platforms can facilitate precarious arrangements with low pay, poor working conditions, inaccessible and unreasonable conditions, unfair management, and a lack of representation (woodcock & graham, 2019). comprehending the labour relations in the ai industry is an increasingly important task since many critical aspects of ai systems rely on global production networks characterised by atypical and, many times, precarious arrangements (howson et al., 2022). however, more than investigating, the limitations and problems of these production models pose a further effort of flagging and challenging problematic practices and promoting, on the other hand, fair work on these supply chains. drawing on these assumptions and concerns, the paper has two main goals. first, the aim is to investigate the current labour conditions in the ai industry and point out the lack of quality of outsourced jobs offered by digital labour platforms and business process outsourcing companies, calling attention to the challenges faced by workers and the human costs of ai systems deployment. second, it presents world research project results on how not only to carry on international studies on the topic but also how to use an action-research approach to generate impact through public scoring companies and encourage the adoption of best practices by them. the paper’s methods are based on the project’s action-research approach and methodological framework. the project investigates and highlights these enterprises' best and worst examples and examines their implications. through assessing working conditions, the project sheds light on the current state of these companies and tries to contribute to shaping the future of work in a way that is fair, inclusive, and sustainable for all stakeholders, especially the workers. companies are scored based on principles that address the major issues that define labour relations, such as pay, conditions, contracts, management, and representation. the analytical framework is adjusted with a specific set of standards within each principle depending on the kind of work analysed (cloudwork and ai-facilitated work, for instance). each company evaluated receives a score out of ten based on their evidence of adherence to the five principles. each of the principles has two thresholds, and accordingly, companies can receive scores from 0 to 10. a maximum score of 10 means that a platform meets the minimum standards of fairness.  the methodological framework involves three data sources: desk research, workers’ surveys and platform managers' interviews. the research team then gathers the information gathered for each study, granting or not points when evidence is found that platforms meet each of the ten thresholds. during the process, there is constant engagement with different stakeholders, from workers to platform managers. with the latter, the research team highlights worse practices and problems found before final scores to foster changes in line with the principles and standards. the paper will explain and detail the action-research approach and the methodological framework employed in the studies on cloudwork platforms and ai supply chain companies. furthermore, it will present findings in line with the two goals mentioned above. first, it will discuss the assessment of the cloudwork platform conducted in 2023, which analysed fairness in 15 leading global and regional web-based platforms. the results include how each platform meets each principle and the picture of the work behind ai in these companies. in addition, the paper will examine labour relations in bpo companies using a case study of the company sama, which is based in the united states and operates in many african countries. although the company calls itself an ethical sourcing business, our research found many problems, such as low pay, excessive working hours, unfair management practices, short-term contracts and job insecurity, and problematic surveillance practices. after presenting the studies’ findings on the labour conditions on cloudwork platforms and ai companies, the paper will show how the project’s action-research approach, including engagement with the management teams, led to the implementation of over 50 best practices on fairer working conditions in those companies. the discussion will focus on how action-research strategies can be designed and implemented, its paths and barriers, and how they can contribute to creating effective impacts and indicating how the platform economy can be. references arntz, m., gregory, t., & zierahn, u. (2017). revisiting the risk of automation. economics letters, 159, 157-160. benanav, a. (2020). automation and the future of work. verso books. cole, m., cant, c., ustek spilda, f., & graham, m. (2022). politics by automatic means? a critique of artificial intelligence ethics at work. frontiers in artificial intelligence, 5, 869114. crawford, k. (2021). the atlas of ai: power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. yale university press. gmyrek, p., berg, j., bescond, d. 2023. generative ai and jobs: a global analysis of potential effects on job quantity and quality, ilo working paper 96 (geneva, ilo). hagendorff, t. (2020). the ethics of ai ethics: an evaluation of guidelines. minds and machines, 30(1), 99-120. howson, k., ferrari, f., ustek-spilda, f., salem, n., johnston, h., katta, s., ... & graham, m. (2022). driving the digital value network: economic geographies of global platform capitalism. global networks, 22(4), 631-648. irani, l. (2012). microworking the crowd. limn, 1(2). jobin, a., ienca, m., & vayena, e. (2019). the global landscape of ai ethics guidelines. nature machine intelligence, 1(9), 389-399. miceli m and posada j (2022) the data-production dispositif. arxiv:2205.11963. arxiv. miceli, m., schuessler, m., & yang, t. (2020). between subjectivity and imposition: power dynamics in data annotation for computer vision. proceedings of the acm on humancomputer interaction, 4(cscw2), 1-25. morley j, kinsey l, elhalal a et al (2023) operationalising ai ethics: barriers, enablers and next steps. ai & soc 38:411–423. muldoon, j., cant, c., graham, m., & ustek spilda, f. (2023). the poverty of ethical ai: impact sourcing and ai supply chains. ai & society, 1-15. oecd (2019). artificial intelligence in society. paris: oecd. steinhoff, j. (2021). automation and autonomy. springer international publishing. sullivan-get with the program-get with the program selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 get with the program: programmatic advertising and the datafication of podcast audiences john l. sullivan muhlenberg college the podcasting landscape has been reshaped in the past several years by acquisitions and mergers among players in the industry. major platform services like spotify, siriusxm, iheartmedia, google, and apple have all attempted to more closely bind consumers to their proprietary services, threatening the open architecture of distribution via rss (morris, 2021; sullivan, 2019). while control and monetization of intellectual property is one key driver of platformization in podcasting, another key institutional shift is being accelerated by these changes: the datafication of the audience. in short, datafication involves the quantification of human activity to enable surveillance, prediction, and mass customization of advertising. the process of audience datafication is being driven largely by platform services, which leverage their “privileged access” to all user interactions on the platform to both extract and monetize these raw data (srnicek, 2016, p. 44). this drive to extract, sort, analyze and commodify user-generated data fuels an ever-increasing drive by platforms to expand their access to even more specific data about audiences’ media consumption habits, also known as “surveillance advertising” (crain, 2021). in this paper, i explore one significant impact of widescale platformization within podcasting: the emergence of programmatic advertising markets. by essentially “listening in” to industry discourses (corrigan, 2018) about podcast advertising (in podcasts and in the podcast upfront presentations from spring 2022), this essay outlines the importance of platform-to-platform data transactions and highlights the resulting shifts in podcasting: away from the intimate, relationship-driven ethos of the medium and toward a quantitative, surveillance-driven ecosystem. programmatic advertising in podcasting podcast advertising has developed significantly since 2015, with companies developing platforms and services to automate the process of buying and selling advertising across a huge array of shows, often directed by ai-driven algorithms with little direct human intervention. the key innovation in podcast advertising has been the suggested citation (apa): sullivan, j. l. (2023, october). get with the program: programmatic advertising and the datafication of podcast audiences. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. emergence of programmatic advertising. programmatic advertising involves “the automated serving of digital ads in real time based on individual ad impression opportunities” (busch, 2016, p. 8). in essence, programmatic approaches automate the process of buying and selling digital advertising by creating ad “exchanges”, or digital marketplaces that allow publishers and advertisers “buy and sell advertising space, often through real-time bidding, most often display, video and mobile ad inventory. agencies use demand-side platforms (or dsps), software programs used to purchase advertising in an automated fashion, to track money spent, ad prices and placement, audience data and metrics, and targeted audiences” (watkins, 2019, p. 13). programmatic advertising offers a number of advantages over traditional advertising in the sense that it is targeted to specific consumers at a granular level, it can be deployed in real time (e.g., dynamically delivered to a consumer when they access a particular type of digital content), and automated via algorithms (busch, 2016). both facebook and google were early adopters of programmatic advertising by creating their own “supply-side platforms” (ssps) of user-generated content, which were then matched with dsps that enabled advertisers to upload their ad messages intended for specific consumer targets. algorithms then place ads in front of specific consumers in real time, either as the result of specific text or keyword markers (called “prospecting”) or when a specific consumer demographic is identified by the ssp (called “retargeting”) (mills et al., 2019). for podcasting, the introduction of programmatic advertising has meant that creators and publishers can provide their content or rss feed to an ssp and make that content available to any dsp that would like to run an audio advertisement within their podcast. the key element to the success of this “just in time” advertising strategy is the deployment of dynamic advertising insertion (dai). a dynamically inserted ad is “piece of audio (referred to as the ‘creative’ from here) that is recorded and produced separately from a podcast episode. the creative is ‘stitched’ into the podcast episode file at the time of download when the ad targeting conditions are met” (resler, 2020). dai enables a whole new range of capabilities for podcast advertising, such as the ability to place advertisements instantly across hundreds or thousands of podcast episodes, to place limits or caps on either the time range for a particular campaign (30 days long, for example) or the number of times the ad is played (to reduce advertising load on listeners), or even to offer slightly different versions of the same campaign to the same listener across multiple podcasts (barletta, 2022). programmatic consequences in podcasting: centralization, surveillance, and brand safety programmatic advertising and dai are placing the platforms at the strategic center of the industry because these players have access to vast quantities of audio content (“inventory”) that they have made available for programmatic advertisers. despite the convenience and the scalability of programmatic advertising, however, some in the industry are worried that the relentless monetization of podcasts will lead to more ad “clutter”, higher ad loads for consumers, and lower quality ads similar to those found on commercial broadcast radio (guaglione, 2022). along with the industry concerns, there are consumer concerns as well, especially since the dynamic ad insertion process requires extensive surveillance of listener behavior, such as tracking ip addresses, app usage, and listening of specific podcasts and moments within those podcasts. these all hold the potential to disrupt the experience of intimacy and trust between the podcaster and the audience. programmatic approaches have the potential to indirectly alter or censor forms of creative production as well. since programmatic advertisers no longer have a personal connection with the individual podcaster (and indeed may be wholly unfamiliar with the content of their show), buying ad impressions in bulk via a dsp may result in some advertisements placed opposite “controversial” content. this creates a concern for what advertisers call brand safety. as bishop explores in her analysis of social media influencer tools on sites like facebook and instagram, brand safety refers to “a positive reproduction of a brand’s ideals, an avoidance of controversy, and a circumvention of sex, violence, and profanity” (bishop, 2021, p. 4). much like the social media influencers discussed by bishop, podcast advertisers have also recently expressed concern about their ability to avoid controversial content as an environment for their programmatic ad buys. this has fueled heavy industry investment in ai-driven language processing technology for actively scanning podcast content for objectionable words, topics, and issues, essentially expanding the scope of industry surveillance to include podcast content. thus, the emergence of platforms, advertising supply side platforms, and dynamic advertising insertion have not only rationalized the buying and selling of advertising across the industry, but these shifts have opened new vistas of podcast content surveillance and potential censorship as well. this analysis of programmatic advertising also highlights the importance of understanding platform-to-platform dynamics when considering the impacts of platforms on online cultural production and distribution. references barletta, b. (2022, september 13). programmatic advertising for buyers. sounds profitable. https://soundsprofitable.com/update/programmatic-ads-for-buyers bishop, s. (2021). influencer management tools: algorithmic cultures, brand safety, and bias. social media + society, 7(1), 205630512110030. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211003066 busch, o. (2016). the programmatic advertising principle. in o. busch (ed.), programmatic advertising: the successful transformation to automated, datadriven marketing in real-time (1st edition, pp. 3–16). springer. corrigan, t. f. (2018). making implicit methods explicit: trade press analysis in the political economy of communication. international journal of communication, 12(0), 22. crain, m. (2021). profit over privacy: how surveillance advertising conquered the internet. university of minnesota press. guaglione, s. (2022, march 4). why podcast agencies are warning about the move to dynamically-inserted ads. digiday. https://digiday.com/media/why-podcastagencies-are-warning-about-the-move-to-dynamically-inserted-ads/ mills, a. j., pitt, c., & ferguson, s. l. (2019). the relationship between fake news and advertising: brand management in the era of programmatic advertising and prolific falsehood. journal of advertising research, 59(1), 3–8. https://doi.org/10.2501/jar-2019-007 morris, j. w. (2021). the spotification of podcasting. in j. w. morris & e. hoyt (eds.), saving new sounds (pp. 208–223). university of michigan press. resler, s. (2020, november 30). podcast dynamic ad insertion 101 for radio broadcasters. jacobs media strategies. https://jacobsmedia.com/podcast-dynamicad-insertion-101-what-radio-broadcasters-need-to-know/ srnicek, n. (2016). platform capitalism. polity. sullivan, j. l. (2019). the platforms of podcasting: past and present. social media + society, 5(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880002 watkins, e. a. (2019). guide to advertising technology. tow center for digital journalism. https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-9aep-r971 aoir2023-submission-template (2) selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): banet-weiser, s., higgins, k.c., hewa, n., ging, d., baker, c. & brandt andreasen, m. (2023, october). misogyny, survivorship, and believability on digital platforms: emerging techniques of abuse, radicalization, and resistance. panel presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. misogyny, survivorship, and believability on digital platforms: emerging techniques of abuse, radicalization, and resistance sarah banet-weiser university of pennsylvania kathryn claire higgins goldsmiths, university of london nelanthi hewa university of toronto debbie ging dublin city university catherine baker dublin city university maja brandt andreasen dublin city university panel rationale on 18th may 2022, in an opinion piece for the new york times, columnist michelle goldberg declared “the death of #metoo” (goldberg, 2022). the immediate context for her declaration was the hypermediated defamation trial involving actor amber heard and her ex-husband johnny depp, which had, at the time of goldberg’s column, just about swallowed the internet whole. though the verdict of the trial was still pending, the public verdict was resounding: it seemed, per vice, that “the entire internet [was] team johnny depp” (zoledziowski, 2022). meanwhile, heard was being subjected to what goldberg describes as “industrial-scale” bullying and misogynistic abuse. that depp had a well-documented history of violent and abusive behavior seemed to matter little to those rallied under #justiceforjohnnydepp. he was a victim of unchecked and disingenuous feminism – and the feminists were finally getting what they deserved. the papers in this panel take the claim of “the death of #metoo” seriously and wrestle with its potential implications. broadening the lens beyond this one case, they examine case studies and data from the united states, australia, the united kingdom, and ireland in order to evaluate the current state of play in the online push-and-pull between feminist speech about gender-based violence and its attendant misogynistic backlashes. it is certainly nothing new to suggest that social media imply certain vulnerabilities to harassment, abuse, and disbelief that are explicitly gendered and raced, as feminist and anti-racist scholars of digital media have long documented (see noble, 2018; banetweiser, 2018; steele, 2021). similarly, there is a long tradition of scholarship on the “digital manosphere” that has foregrounded social media as a space of networking, capacity-building, and radicalization for misogynistic movements (see gotell & dutton, 2016; ging, 2019; johanssen, 2021). in 2018, sarah banet-weiser theorized this terrain as a “funhouse mirror” of (digitally mediated) popular feminism and popular misogyny, arguing that the key resources and strategies of the former were being steadily appropriated and distorted to fortify the backlash politics of the latter. today, we’re confronted with an uncomfortable and urgent question: is the backlash winning? each paper in this panel approaches this fraught terrain with a different set of questions and different methodological approaches, but with the same concerns in mind. nelanthi hewa draws from semi-structured interviews to examine how journalists reporting on sexual violence and gender-based abuse are orientated by the logics of digital platforms. hewa’s analysis unpacks how the incitement to visibility and exposure that characterizes social media (gray, 2013) is compounding with the incitement to transparency that characterizes journalism. they conclude that the imperative to have “nothing to hide” has important implications for both the journalism of sexual assault and the online and offline vulnerabilities of sexual assault survivors. building on this commentary, sarah banet-weiser & kathryn claire higgins shift the lens from visibility to believability, analyzing what happens to and with the different forms of digital evidence that survivors are incited to share publicly when they make sexual assault allegations. drawing from a conjunctural critique, banet-weiser & higgins propose that the gendered and racialized politics of doubt has been “digitized” in ways that tend to fortify, rather than disrupt, prevailing patterns of suspicion and distrust. they propose that an emerging strategy of online networked misogyny is to exploit the vigilance towards signs of inauthenticity and manipulation that characterizes contemporary internet culture in order to keep sexual violence allegations in a state of permanent “irresolvability.” debbie ging, catherine baker & maja brandt andreasen provide context for these analyses by examining one of the key phenomena shaping the push-and-pull between feminism and misogyny online: the radicalization of boys and men into misogynistic ideology. using a set of experimental social media accounts, ging, baker & brandt andreasen test the proposal that social media platforms contain “radicalization pathways” that nudge users towards increasingly more radical far-right and misogynistic content, combining a thematic analysis of content with close monitoring of algorithmic recommendations and trajectories. references bailey, m. (2014) more on the origins of misogynoir. moyazb, april 27. https://moyazb.tumblr.com/post/84048113369 /more-on-the-origin-of-misogynoir. bailey, m. (2021). misogynoir transformed: black women’s digital resistance. new york university press. ging, d. (2019). gender hate online: understanding the new anti-feminism. palgrave macmillan. goldberg, m. (2022). opinion: amber heard and the death of #metoo. new york times, may 18. https://www.nytimes .com/2022/05/18/opinion/amber-heard-metoo.html. gotell, l., and dutton, e. (2016). sexual violence in the “manosphere”: antifeminist men’s rights discourses on rape. international journal for crime, justice and social democracy, 5(2), 65–80. https://doi.org/10.5204/ijcjsd.v5i2 .310. gray, h. (2013). subject(ed) to recognition. american quarterly, 65(4), 771–798. http://www.jstor.org/stable /43822990. johanssen, j. (2021). fantasy, online misogyny, and the manosphere: male bodies of dis/inhibition. routledge. steele, c. (2021). digital black feminism. new york university press. zoledziowski, a. (2022). why does it seem like the entire internet is team johnny depp? vice, april 25. https:// www.vice.com/en/article/4aw93j/justice-for-johnny-depp -internetcomments. platformed survivorship: digital platforms and digital exposure nelanthi hewa research question/issue in 2000, an editorial by an anonymous journalist describing being groped by prime minister justin trudeau was published in a local paper; in 2018, a photo of the editorial was tweeted by an unaffiliated political pundit with the hashtag #metoo. in this paper, i bring sara ahmed’s (2006) theory of queer orientations into conversation with scholarly work on digital techno-capitalism and publicity online to explore how digital media orient sexual violence survivors and the journalists who report on them toward publicity and exposure. i take up the groping accusation against justin trudeau in the summer of 2018 as a refraction point to follow different rays of light as they dance on the wall: the internet as a public space, the framework of visibility that dominates sexual violence coverage online, and the interplay between legacy media outlets (classically thought of as slower, more ponderous, less reactive) and digital-first news outlets. i explore the orientation towards publicity/virality of digital media in conjunction with the chase for virality by journalists and the competition between outlets, as what began as an offline anonymous editorial moved through twitter, a gossip magazine, buzzfeed, and finally canadian legacy media outlets like the cbc and the national post. the journey of the groping allegation—from anonymous editorial to tweet to ammunition used by conservative outlets, to buzzfeed—exemplifies the process by which sexual violence becomes news as well as how those standards of newsworthiness have shifted. indeed, that the allegation was treated as gossip but also as potential news, or incipient news, exemplifies the complexity of what journalists in our interviews term the “lowering of the bar” when it comes to allegations of sexual violence. while standards around verification were not entirely gone, there was nevertheless a feeling that this was news, rather than “simply gossip.” though frank magazine, buzzfeed and the cbc all have different standards of what passes as news and covered the story differently, all of these outlets nevertheless acted as though reporting on the allegation was necessary. methodology/critical framework in queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others, sara ahmed (2006) attends to the way orientations — sexual orientations, but also orientations as ways of being in the world more generally — come to be, and come to be felt on the body. she argues that, when we are oriented towards a table (for example), we are also oriented away from what is behind the table, so that to queer one’s orientation would be to ask: who can sit at the head of the table? who is under it? who keeps it clean, and who is bereft of a seat? i take up ahmed’s phenomenology of queer orientations as a starting point for a materialist media theory to ask similar questions of the media and platforms at which we sit, since a table, like twitter, is also a platform (singh & banet-weiser, 2022). when one uses media, how does it orient us? or, when media call to us, how are we expected to respond? a user that turns towards a machine’s hail might be its ideal user, one who fits comfortably into its contours. in being hailed by media, however, what comes to be the “background” or the private? i bring this theoretical framework into conversation with a discourse analysis of news stories and data from semi-structured interviews i conducted with canadian journalists who cover sexual violence. building off the work of feminist scholars who have argued that women have been constructed as not credible and discounted as liars (jordan, 2004), i move to look at the role of digital media in challenging and narrowing feminist politics of speaking out. from the moment you press “enter,” digital life and the internet are replete with metaphors of space. “cyberspace,” windows,” and “entering” websites all direct us when we go online to think of the internet as a bounded space. moreover, to go online is to be interpolated as an active and empowered “user,” in control of the interface, situated within the screen, and moving actively through internet “space” (white, 2014, p. 1). yet one cannot enter the interface, delete unwanted search results, fully delete one’s data, or even know where, exactly, one’s data is going in these “leaky networks” (chun, 2016). as scholars have increasingly argued, not all users are archived by the internet’s algorithms of oppression (noble, 2018) in the same way. the metaphor of (public) space employed by ict companies, journalists, and users alike is central to how we conceptualize and interact with the digital, yet it fundamentally papers over the realities of what it is to be online. though the metaphor of the open public space pulls us to believe that to be out and visible forever is a good, even a necessity, for survivors, standards of proof and believability have hardly shifted to become more accommodating of the complexities of sexual violence. findings/conclusions/relevance sexual violence stories’ online circulation illuminates the particularly insidious aspects of the visibility economy because stories of sexual violence all rest on a particular kind of evidence. evidence of the crime is fundamentally entwined with evidence of the victim’s believability—their transparency—since these crimes, especially at the level of national coverage, are often taken as “he-said-she-said” stories. competition between news outlets pushes journalists to cover stories quickly, an experience captured by an anonymous journalist i spoke with who, describing their work at a digital news outlet, said there was an attitude with stories that “[if] it was all over social media, it was like, let’s get this out as soon as possible because other news outlets are covering it.” feminist ethics, i argue, are ultimately incommensurable with the attention economy of both the internet and contemporary news publications. in its orientation towards transparency, digital media demand that we have nothing to hide, a demand with particular implications for sexual violence news coverage. this is the paradox at the heart of the “internet as public space” metaphor, particularly as it relates to sexual violence: survivors are called to “rise up” and “speak out” in the visible platform of the internet, with the logic that to be out and visible (forever) is good for survivors. these material conditions exacerbate the limitations of a feminist politics of speaking out that “both supports survivor stories and requires survivors to tell these stories and to tell them in specific ways” (serisier, 2018, p. 11). sexual violence complicates—or perhaps enlivens—sarah banet-weiser’s (2018) framework of visibility and popular feminism because what sexual violence survivors are asked to make visible is unique from other instances of violence or feminist public speech. because survivors are often unable to make visible their lack of consent, it is survivors’ personhood and version of the facts that are debated as they are forced to run a “societal gauntlet of doubt, dismissal, or outright disbelief” (epstein & goodman, 2019). the only way for survivors to prove not simply their innocence but their lack of guilt—that is, that they are not lying—is to go always-more public, showing more and becoming hypervisible themselves in order to provide “proof.” references ahmed, s. (2006). queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. duke university press. banet-weiser, s. (2018). empowered: popular feminism and popular misogyny. duke university press. chun, w. h. k. (2016). updating to remain the same: habitual new media. mit press. epstein, d., & goodman, l. a. (2019). discounting women: doubting domestic violence survivors’ credibility and dismissing their experiences. university of pennsylvania law review, 167(2), 399–462. noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. nyu press. serisier, t. (2018). speaking out: feminism, rape and narrative politics. palgrave macmillan, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98669-2 singh, r., & banet-weiser, s. (2022). sky high: platforms and the feminist politics of visibility. in s. sharma & r. singh (eds.), re-understanding media: feminist extensions of marshall mcluhan. duke university press. white, m. (2014). the body and the screen: theories of internet spectatorship. mit press. digital evidence and digitized doubt after #metoo sarah banet-weiser & kathryn claire higgins one of the most concrete changes brought about by the #metoo movement is that it created a new public appetite for stories about sexual violence and other forms of gender-based harassment and assault. this appetite has been readily seized upon by hollywood, the press, and through a renewed investment in digital media – especially, social media platforms – as a space where women and marginalized subjects can speak, gain visibility, and access public solidarity (see gilmore, 2023; jackson et al, 2020; boyle, 2019; durham, 2021). it has also spurred the growth of a new market for anti-sexual violence products and services – apps, wearable technologies, and other digital devices that promise that if only women can furnish more and better evidence of their assaults (photographs, videos, screenshots, and other ‘corroborating’ digital artifacts) then they will prevail in bids for believability, both in the court of public opinion and potentially in courts of law. however, at the core of this narrative are struggles about how, whether, and when different forms of digital evidence ought to bolster believability—especially now that such evidence can be freely circulated online, and highly public bids for belief made without arbitration or intervention by the state. in this paper, we test the optimism of much #metoo scholarship and of the emerging market for anti-sexual violence by tracking what actually happens to and with these digital artifacts in struggles over the “truth” of sexual violence allegations taking place on social media platforms. more precisely, we draw on conjunctural analysis (hall, 1988; clarke, 2014) to engage a close analysis of three key cases of disputed believability: in the us, the hypermediated defamation trial between actors johnny depp and amber heard; in the uk, the rape allegations levelled against prince andrew, a member of the british royal family, by trafficking survivor virginia giuffre; and in australia, the rape allegation levelled against former attorney general christian porter. all three cases involved heated debates online over how, whether, and when different kinds of digital artifacts – or, what adgebuyi (2021) calls “receipts” – should be allocated evidentiary value in struggles over the believability of sexual assault and gender-based abuse. our starting point for this analysis is the proposed analytic of a digitally mediated “economy of believability” (banet-weiser & higgins, 2023) as a way of conceptualizing how different kinds of labor and resources come together on social media platforms to negotiate the “the truth” of sexual violence. against a historical backdrop in which women and other marginalized people have been constructed as doubtful subjects par excellence and routinely doubted and disbelieved when they speak about their lives (gilmore, 2017), we propose that there are new forms of labor designed to counteract this marginal positioning in the economy of believability through the production and circulation of ever-proliferating new forms of “proof.” for this reason, our analysis unpacks how contemporary struggles over the “truth” of sexual violence allegations are presently subject to what we term “the digitization of doubt.” broadly, this phrase captures how the different kinds of subject construction, labor, and performance that are implicated in struggles over believability are being increasingly routed through digital platforms and technologies, and so (re)shaped by and through their logics. when it comes to how the believability of sexual assault is negotiated online, our analysis of the depp/heard, prince andrew, and christian porter cases explores the gender and race politics framing the digitization of doubt across its three key core elements. first, we examine the new visibility and ease of circulation of digital evidence. afforming the arguments of critical race and technology scholars like noble (2018), brock (2021), and benjamin (2019), we find that the apparent democratization of public speech and visibility that emerges with the digital landscape also means that it is ever easier for other users to cast doubt on marginalized individuals, as well as to attach clout to doubt by means of likes, shares, and comments. the “solidarity-building” capacities of social media, in other words, are an affordance without an inherent politics – and so, often, they work along pre-established lines of believability and cultural power. this is perhaps most immediately clear in the disparate size of depp and heard’s respective online support-bases. on tiktok, #istandwithamberheard had around 2.4 million views in early may 2022, compared with 6.8 billion views for #justiceforjohnnydepp (siegel, 2022). the hypervisibility of the trial was also at the root of why so much misogynistic abuse emerged around it (see hewa, 2021). second, we examine the new forms and functions of digital evidence. here, we find that though survivors’ “digital performances” of believability are now able to call upon more forms of proof, these forms are subject to ever-increasing levels of scrutiny and forensic deconstruction across youtube channels, twitter threads, online chat forums, and other locales in the digital manosphere, where images and texts can be easily cropped and chopped, removed from one context and placed in another, and wrapped in narratives that often fundamentally reshape their interpretation (bock, 2021; lampen, 2022). for this reason, digital forms of evidence are objects of heated suspicion, and occupy an uneasy status as “proof” in digital culture. this hypervigilance towards signs of potential fakery or deceit fuses cultural anxieties about the untrustworthiness of women and queer people with anxieties about the capacities for deception and manipulation that are inherent to digital media, reinforcing both regardless of whether these artifacts are ever conclusively found to be fake (see maddocks, 2020). third, building on what has been previously described as a “platformization of truth” (cotter et al, 2022), we propose that we are also witnessing a platformization of doubt. here, we find that all three of our cases chimed with the commercial logics of social media platforms in two important ways: first, in the attention-grabbing power of celebrity, and second, in the lucrativeness of controversy. engagement-based revenue mechanisms do not discriminate based on the reasons for engagement, and so platformized struggles for the believability of sexual violence allegations are ultimately conducted under a commercial imperative to keep those allegations as contentious and outrage-worthy as possible (young, 2020; donovan et al., 2022). we conclude by arguing that we need to radically shift the frame in which sexual violence is understood, from truth to believability. in a digital sphere wherein doubt is endemic, doubt saves accused men and sinks survivors. ultimately, the digitization of doubt works to keep sexual violence allegations in a state of permanent irresolvability, so that accused men can retain public belief so long as any doubt remains. this is why, we argue, a preoccupation with whether allegations have been “proven above doubt” only gets us so far, as it sits in tension with contemporary practices of online public speech about sexual violence in ways that can’t be ignored. references adegbuyi, f. (2021, july 9). is internet receipt culture our undoing? cybernaut. https://every.to/cybernaut/is-internet-receipt-culture-our-undoing. banet-weiser, s. & higgins, k.c. (2023) believability: sexual violence, media, and the politics of doubt. polity. benjamin, r. (2019). race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. polity. bock, m. a. (2021). seeing justice: witnessing, crime, and punishment in visual media. oxford university press. boyle, k. (2019). #metoo, weinstein and feminism. springer international publishing. brock, a. (2020). distributed blackness: african american cybercultures. new york university press. clarke, j. (2014) conjunctures, crises and cultures: valuing stuart hall. focaal, 70(1), 113–122. cotter, k., decook, j. r., and kanthawala, s. (2022). fact-checking the crisis: covid19, infodemics, and the platformization of truth. social media + society, 8(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211069048. donovan, j., dreyfuss, e., and friedberg, b. (2022). meme wars: the untold story of the online battles upending democracy in america. bloomsbury. gilmore, l. (2023). the #metoo effect: what happens when we believe women. columbia university press. gilmore, l. (2017). tainted witness: why we doubt what women say about their lives. columbia university press. hall, s. (1988). the hard road to renewal: thatcherism and the crisis of the left. verso. hewa, n. (2020). the mouth of the internet, the eyes of the public: sexual violence survivorship in an economy of visibility. feminist media studies, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2021.1922483. jackson, s. j., bailey, m., and welles, b. f. (2020). #hashtagactivism: networks of race and gender justice. mit press. lampen, c. (2022). which women do we choose to believe? the cut, may 12. https://www.thecut.com/2022/05/why-do-so-many-people-think-amber-heard-islying.html. maddocks, s. (2020). “a deepfake porn plot intended to silence me”: exploring continuities between pornographic and “political” deep fakes. porn studies, 7(4), 415– 423. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2020.1757499. siegel, t. (2022). are johnny and amber stans for real? rolling stone, may 3. https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie -features/johnny-depp-amber-heard-fanwar-online-social -bots-1345208/. young, d. g. (2020) irony and outrage: the polarized landscape of language, fear and laughter in the united states. oxford university press. maddocks, s. (2020). “a deepfake porn plot intended to silence me”: exploring continuities between pornographic and “political” deep fakes. porn studies, 7(4), 415– 423. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2020.1757499. noble, s. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york university press recommending toxicity: do the algorithmic recommender functions of youtube and tiktok radicalize boys and men into manosphere ideology? debbie ging, catherine baker & maja brandt andreasen it is widely accepted that platform recommender algorithms draw users into increasingly extreme content. this has become an issue of increasing concern in the context of manosphere influencer andrew tate’s tiktok videos racking up almost 12 billion views before his ban from the platform and subsequent arrest by romanian police in january of this year. according to the radicalization hypothesis, channels in the intellectual dark web and the alt-lite serve as gateways to fringe far-right and other extreme ideologies. however, there is considerable disagreement about this process of radicalisation in the scholarship on recommender algorithms. papadamou et al. (2021) focused on quantifying the probability that a user will encounter an incel-related video via youtube’s recommendation algorithm. to do this, the researchers collected a dataset of youtube videos shared on incel-related subreddits (6.5k) and a baseline dataset of random youtube videos (5.7k). the researchers then developed a lexicon on incelrelated terms to annotate videos as incel-related or non-incel-related. to examine the process of potential radicalisation on the site, researchers used the youtube api to graph the recommendation algorithm output, using a random walker model to find the probability of users being algorithmically recommended incel-related videos. they conclude that within five hops, when starting from a non-incel-related video, this probability is 1 in 5. in other work that supports the radicalization hypothesis, ribiero et al. (2020) conducted a large-scale audit of user radicalization on youtube by analyzing 330,925 videos posted on 349 channels, which they broadly classified into four types: media, the alt-lite, the intellectual darkweb (i.d.w.), and the alt-right. they processed 72m+ comments, and their analysis shows that the three channel types increasingly share the same user base; that users consistently migrate from milder to more extreme content; and that a large percentage of users who consume alt-right content had consumed alt-lite and i.d.w. content in the past. they also probed youtube’s recommendation algorithm, looking at more than 2m video and channel recommendations and found that alt-lite content was easily reachable from i.d.w. channels, while alt-right videos were reachable only through channel recommendations. in a systematic review to determine whether the youtube recommender system facilitates pathways to problematic content such as extremist or radicalizing material, yesilada, m. and lewandowsky, s. (2021) found that most of the 23 included studies implicated the youtube recommender system in facilitating pathways towards problematic content (i.e. conspiratorial content, anti-vaccination content, pseudoscientific content, content unsafe for children, incel-related content, extremist content radicalizing content, and racist content). however, the review finds that many of the studies use random walk algorithms to determine the probability of encountering problematic content – which does not account for how the user personalisation and the interaction will influence the algorithm. contrary to these findings, ledwich and zaitzev (2019) contest the role of the youtube algorithm in radicalisation. they categorized almost 800 political channels, differentiating between different political schemas in order to analyze the algorithm traffic flows out and between each group. after conducting a detailed analysis of recommendations received by each channel type, they refute the popular radicalization claims. on the contrary, their data suggests that youtube’s recommendation algorithm actively discourages viewers from visiting radicalizing or extremist content. instead, the algorithm is shown to favor mainstream media and cable news content over independent youtube channels with a slant towards left-leaning or politically neutral channels. similarly, munger and phillips (2019) directly analyzed youtube’s recommendation algorithm and failed to find support for radicalization pathways. they maintain that the algorithm operates on a simple supply-and-demand principle and argue, rather than algorithms driving viewer preference and further radicalization, it is further radicalization external to youtube which inspires content creators to produce more radicalized content. a key issue with research to date in this area is that it relies predominantly on random walker models applied to graphs derived from api information or large computationally annotated datasets. therefore, a prominent gap exists assessing the experience of “real” logged-in users traversing personalized algorithms based on viewing history. due to the centrality of personalized algorithms recommendations to users' experience on social media sites, research addressing this gap is urgently needed. moreover, the research to date has focused exclusively on youtube and long-form video content. given the recent surge in popularity of short video content (seen in the rise of tiktok and addition of youtube shorts), additional research is needed to explore how platform recommender algorithms function in these new format domains the current paper reports on the findings of a study conducted in ireland, which sought to document whether and how the recommender functions of youtube and tiktok contribute to promoting misogynistic, anti-feminist and other extremist content to boys and young men. using a research method derived from the reset australia project on youtube manosphere radicalisation, and with support from the reset australia team, we set up experimental accounts on youtube shorts and tiktok to track the algorithmic recommendations and trajectories provided to fake male accounts on each of these platforms. this short-term, qualitative study involved analyzing algorithmic recommendations and trajectories provided to 10 experimental accounts, 5 on youtube shorts and 5 on tiktok, as follows: youtube shorts • 2 boys under 18, who followed content at different points along the ideological spectrum, from more mainstream to extreme sources and influencers • 2 young men over 18, who followed content at different points along the ideological spectrum, from more mainstream to extreme sources and influencers • 1 blank control account that did not deliberately seek out or engage with any particular content, but instead followed the videos offered by youtube shorts’ recommendations. tiktok • 2 boys under 18, who followed content at different points along the ideological spectrum, from more mainstream to extreme sources and influencers • 2 young men over 18, who followed content at different points along the ideological spectrum, from more mainstream to extreme sources and influencers • 1 blank control account that did not deliberately seek out or engage with any particular content, but instead followed the videos offered by youtube’s recommendations. to monitor the process of algorithmic recommendation and trajectories, we created a codebook that details the signifiers of manosphere content. this includes e.g. known manosphere hashtags, known manosphere accounts, and manosphere topics. once the codebook was established, we ran the experiment over the course of a week. each account watched videos recommended by the tiktok and youtube accounts respectively. the four accounts per platform (i.e. not the blank control accounts) “liked” and watched videos twice that were deemed manosphere content. they were gradually given “nudges” – e.g. watching 10 videos from known manosphere accounts – before returning to watching the suggested videos. this gradually led to an increase in manosphere content and also increasingly radical manosphere content. videos identified as manosphere content were thematically analyzed – providing the research project with an array of themes and trends. this paper reports on these themes, and details how the algorithms worked to introduce our fake accounts to increasingly radical manosphere content. references ledwich, m. and zaitsev, a., 2019. algorithmic extremism: examining youtube's rabbit hole of radicalization. arxiv preprint arxiv:1912.11211. munger, k. and phillips, j., 2019. a supply and demand framework for youtube politics. preprint. papadamou, k., zannettou, s., blackburn, j., de cristofaro, e., stringhini, g., & sirivianos, m. (2021). “how over is it?” understanding the incel community on youtube. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction. https://doi.org/10.1145/3479556 reset australia. 2022. algorithms as a weapon against women: how youtube lures boys and young men into the ‘manosphere’. ribeiro, m.h., ottoni, r., west, r., almeida, v.a. and meira jr, w., 2020, january. auditing radicalization pathways on youtube. in proceedings of the 2020 conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (pp. 131-141). yesilada, m. and lewandowsky, s., 2021. a systematic review: the youtube recommender system and pathways to problematic content. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): vinhas, o., bastos, m. (2023, october). the weird governance of factchecking: from watchdogs to content moderators. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the weird governance of fact-checking: from watchdogs to content moderators otávio vinhas university college dublin marco bastos university college dublin; city, university of london introduction fact-checking has undergone steady transformations of recent. originally devised as a tool designed to verify public discourse and hold politicians to account, fact-checkers have increasingly upscaled their activities to moderate viral misinformation and promote media literacy initiatives (çömlekçi, 2022; graves & mantzarlis, 2020). in the aftermath of the 2016 us presidential election, policymakers and social platforms invested in factchecking initiatives to restore truth and consensus reasoning in public debate (bennett & livingston, 2021). substantive resources were allocated by social platforms, and western industrialized countries developed local and regional strategies to tackle mis and disinformation, a set of policies that placed fact-checkers in the position of unwitting online content moderators (efcsn, 2022; states, 2022). such efforts, however, clashed with a common standard for fact-checking and caused considerable tension with stakeholders (bélair-gagnon et al., 2022), a problem that continues to haunt the institutional mission and values of journalists and fact-checkers (ananny, 2018). with social media hosting the ecosystem where much political deliberation occurs, unpacking the governance of fact-checking by social platforms is thus crucial to understanding the sociotechnical entanglements determining the digital infrastructure of knowledge and facts (ford, 2022). beyond western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (weird) countries, fact-checking initiatives follow inconsistent standards for acting as watchdogs of politicians and enforcing content moderation. critical approaches to misand disinformation studies have shown that fact-checkers operating in non-weird contexts must cope with various social forces eroding institutional trust and driving online harassment and physical violence (kuo & marwick, 2021). while these issues are global, the reliance on social platforms as news sources is higher in non-weird countries, where much of the internet infrastructure is restricted to meta’s applications (nothias, 2020). additionally, fact-checkers beyond the us and western europe generally depend on partnerships and grants from tech companies to maintain their operations, as many initiatives evolved from informal journalism and online activism instead of developing from a liberal and profitable media market (ababakirov et al., 2022). these conditions not only make the eroding potential of misand disinformation more effective beyond the weird world (tandoc, 2022); they also maximize the political ramifications of content regulation for local citizens and policymakers (gillespie et al., 2020). method we interviewed 37 fact-checkers from 35 organizations across 27 non-weird countries in africa, asia, latin america, and eastern europe. the interviews lasted between 30 and 90 minutes and were conducted in three languages (english, spanish, and portuguese) between march and november of 2021. we used duke reporters’ lab global fact-checking database as our reference point to recruit participants and subsequently snowballed to organizations that matched the following inclusion criteria: 1) listed as an active organization on duke reporters’ lab fact-checking database; 2) current signatories of the international fact-checking network (ifcn); 3) declared a consistent commitment to editorial non-partisanship and financial independence on their websites, along with a detailed description of transparent fact-checking methodologies. we cease our recruiting process once we reached saturation across geographical areas and organization types. the interview questions revolved around three main topics: 1) social media moderation by fact-checkers; 2) the criteria implemented to identify false and harmful content; 3) the role of social platforms in regulating the public debate. our analysis relied on braun and clarke (2022) reflexive thematic analysis framework and was devised to address the following research questions: 1) how have non-weird fact-checkers adapted their practices to meet the expectations of social media platforms? 2) what feedback do non-weird fact-checkers receive from social media users? 3) what is the relationship between social platforms and efforts to address mis and disinformation in non-weird contexts? iterative coding through nvivo was applied to the transcribed interviews to identify recurring topics that appeared in the data. following the first round of semantic coding, we applied axial coding to interpret the data in line with literature on news and platformization. the processed data reveals the relationship (context, interactions, and consequences) between fact-checkers and social media platforms. discussion and conclusion our findings detail three ways through which social platforms impinge on the scope, values, and institutional mission of non-weird fact-checking organizations. figure 1 shows the themes developed in the analysis that cataloged the methods, tools, and strategies fact-checkers implemented to produce pragmatic solutions to ward off the scourge of problematic content online. figure 1: conditions, interactions, and consequences of the platformization of factchecking our themes shed light on how non-weird fact-checkers have adapted their workflow to meet the expectations of cooperating with social media platforms. firstly, accusations of bias and weaponization of fact-checks on social platforms compel fact-checkers to trade off their objectivity to balance fact-checking posts across partisan divides. as social platforms’ affordances reward affective and identity-driven engagement with information over factual reasoning (chadwick et al., 2022), they inherently disrupt the informative role of fact-checking organizations (cotter et al., 2022). secondly, to tackle misand disinformation in high volumes, fact-checkers are increasingly adapting their work to compete for visibility on social platforms (petre et al., 2019). by adopting meta’s toolkit designed to verify viral content, fact-checking organizations embody facebook’s vision of problematic communication, where misand disinformation are reduced to a behavioral problem detached from contextual factors (anderson, 2021). thirdly, social platforms fail to apply their own community guidelines in non-weird contexts, despite partnering with seasoned local fact-checkers speakers. lastly, meta’s third-party factchecking program prevents fact-checkers from labeling politicians on facebook. this is in sharp contrast to the traditional watchdog mission of fact-checking. it is also at odds with evidence showing that falsehoods usually come from prominent public figures (brennen et al., 2020). taken together, the platformization of non-weird fact-checkers entails a convoluted process in which social media platforms gradually nudge fact-checkers into becoming part of the content moderation industry, a shift that runs counter to the democracybuilding values underpinning the fact-checking movement (amazeen, 2020). indeed, by including non-weird fact-checkers in their taskforces against misand disinformation, social platforms offer crucial funding for initiatives operating in contexts where factchecking would rarely be sustainable. but fact-checkers have no input over the policies and day-to-day decisions determining what content should be removed or reduced, an arrangement that leaves them vulnerable to polarization and being scapegoated as censors in the platform. this is particularly the case for meta, the most prominent funder of non-weird fact-checking initiatives. given the above, we conclude that fact-checking in non-weird countries is being deprived of its journalistic value as it is assimilated into the content moderation industry. the governance of non-weird fact-checking by tech companies such as meta and google entails the strategic capture of third-party news practitioners (papaevangelou, 2023) rather than the forging of asymmetrical but mutually-dependent partnerships (belair-gagnon et al., 2023). while our findings reflect the experiences of fact-checkers operating in non-weird contexts, they nonetheless establish the groundwork for investigating their weird counterparts. western fact-checkers address similar threats that erode institutional trust and contend with the failure of social platforms to establish a multistakeholder framework to address misand disinformation, even if these problems remain more pronounced and widespread in non-weird contexts. references ababakirov, a., ashour, a., bandaranayake, r., de silva, r., diouf, d., galpaya, h., . . . valente, j. (2022). meeting the challenges of information disorder in the global south. https://idl-bnc-idrc.dspacedirect.org/handle/10625/60954 amazeen, m. a. (2020). journalistic interventions: the structural factors affecting the global emergence of fact-checking. journalism, 21(1), 95-111. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884917730217 ananny, m. (2018). the partnership press: lessons for platform-publisher collaborations as facebook and news outlets team to fight misinformation. anderson, c. w. (2021). fake news is not a virus: on platforms and their effects. communication theory, 31(1), 42-61. https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtaa008 bélair-gagnon, v., graves, l., kalsnes, b., steensen, s., & westlund, o. (2022). considering interinstitutional visibilities in combating misinformation. digital journalism, 10(5), 669-678. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2022.2072923 https://idl-bnc-idrc.dspacedirect.org/handle/10625/60954 https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884917730217 https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtaa008 https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2022.2072923 belair-gagnon, v., larsen, r., graves, l., & westlund, o. (2023). knowledge work in platform fact-checking partnerships. international journal of communication, 17, 1169–1189. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/19851 bennett, w. l., & livingston, s. (2021). a brief history of the disinformation age: information wars and the decline of institutional authority. in w. l. bennett & s. livingston (eds.), the disinformation age: politics, technology, and disruptive communication in the united states. cambridge university press. braun, v., & clarke, v. (2022). thematic analysis: a practical guide. sage. brennen, s. j., simon, f. m., howard, p. n., & nielsen, r. k. (2020). types, sources, and claims of covid-19 misinformation chadwick, a., vaccari, c., & kaiser, j. (2022). the amplification of exaggerated and false news on social media: the roles of platform use, motivations, affect, and ideology. american behavioral scientist. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642221118264 çömlekçi, m. f. (2022). why do fact-checking organizations go beyond factchecking? a leap toward media and information literacy education. international journal of communication, 16. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/viewfile/19728/3903 cotter, k., decook, j. r., & kanthawala, s. (2022). fact-checking the crisis: covid19, infodemics, and the platformization of truth. social media + society, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211069048 efcsn, e. f.-c. s. n. (2022). european code of standards for independent factchecking organisations. https://eufactcheckingproject.com/app/uploads/2022/10/eu-code-efcsn-.pdf ford, h. (2022). writing the revolution : wikipedia and the survival of facts in the digital age. the mit press. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11386.001.0001 gillespie, t., aufderheide, p., carmi, e., gerrard, y., gorwa, r., matamoros-fernández, a., . . . myers west, s. (2020). expanding the debate about content moderation: scholarly research agendas for the coming policy debates. internet policy review, 9(4). https://doi.org/10.14763/2020.4.1512 graves, l., & mantzarlis, a. (2020). amid political spin and online misinformation, fact checking adapts. the political quarterly, 91, 585-591. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923x.12896 https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/19851 https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642221118264 https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/viewfile/19728/3903 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211069048 https://eufactcheckingproject.com/app/uploads/2022/10/eu-code-efcsn-.pdf https://doi.org/https:/doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11386.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.14763/2020.4.1512 https://doi.org/https:/doi.org/10.1111/1467-923x.12896 kuo, r., & marwick, a. (2021). critical disinformation studies: history, power, and politics. harvard kennedy school misinformation review. https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-76 nothias, t. (2020). access granted: facebook’s free basics in africa. media, culture & society, 42(3), 329-348. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443719890530 papaevangelou, c. (2023). funding intermediaries: google and facebook’s strategy to capture journalism. digital journalism, 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2022.2155206 petre, c., duffy, b. e., & hund, e. (2019). “gaming the system”: platform paternalism and the politics of algorithmic visibility. social media + society, 5(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119879995 states, u. (2022). election 2022: fact-checking and countering misinformation https://www.state.gov/briefings-foreign-press-centers/fact-checking-andcountering-misinformation tandoc, e. c. (2022). contextualizing fake news: can online falsehoods spread fast when internet is slow? in d. madrid-morales & h. wasserman (eds.), disinformation in the global south (pp. 3-14). wiley-blackwell. https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-76 https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443719890530 https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2022.2155206 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119879995 https://www.state.gov/briefings-foreign-press-centers/fact-checking-and-countering-misinformation https://www.state.gov/briefings-foreign-press-centers/fact-checking-and-countering-misinformation selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): leaver, t. (2022, november). adam mosseri: constructing instagram’s top dad. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. adam mosseri: constructing instagram’s top dad tama leaver curtin university, australia introduction us president joe biden’s 2022 state of the union address explicitly called out social media for exploiting and monetizing children and their data, stating “we must hold social media platforms accountable for the national experiment they’re conducting on our children for profit” (biden, 2022). biden’s remarks were widely interpreted as targeting meta, and their facebook and instagram platforms in particular (lima, 2022), especially after the backlash that instagram experienced a year earlier after announcing it was working on a version of instagram specifically for children under the age of 13. this backlash only intensified in october 2021, when former facebook employee, turned whistle-blower, frances haugen provided internal company documents and testified that meta knew instagram could cause mental health issues for young users (knowles, 2021). in this context, head of instagram, adam mosseri is an important figure not just as the person most directly responsible for an instagram kids app, but also, i shall argue, in terms of the way he has carefully constructed a public persona as a caring and trustworthy parent, deeply involved in his children’s lives, and that this persona has significant strategic value in meta and instagram’s future chances of deploying instagram kids, or something similar. method following marshall, moore and barbour (2015), mapping the ‘persona’ that adam mosseri portrays involves a detailed content analysis of all his public facing commentary, output and social media posts (on instagram and twitter), as well as utilizing screenshots and video capture to document and capture ephemeral social media traces (instagram stories). the latter is especially important as over the two years in question (2020-2021), mosseri has often used his instagram stories to respond to issues instagram is facing and undertake ‘q&a’ sessions where he solicits public questions and responds to around a dozen each week. given that instagram stories content typically disappears after 24-hours, capturing these traces has been particularly important in mapping mosseri’s public persona. figure 1. mosseri’s instagram profile. publicly parenting adam mosseri’s instagram profile prominently describes him as “head of @instagram, father of three, married up”, emphasizing his role as a parent, while his public posts, stories and highlights, interweave work and parenting; two of his prominent stories highlights are labelled, for example, #dadlife and lego, which feature mosseri doing lego builds with his children. this purposeful positioning as an active parent is emphasized on other platforms, too. in a june 2021 twitter exchange, content creator casey neistat (2021) asked mosseri for “a feature request; a simple elegant way to hide kids' faces when posting pics. i try to keep my kids off of social as much as i can but like to post family photos” to which mosseri responded “i actually use stickers to cover my kids faces but never thought of product-ing that”. both examples, though, very consciously position mosseri as an engaged parent, invested in the question of children’s privacy. notably, though, the last instagram post in mosseri’s main feed which used stickers to cover his older children’s faces was posted on 5 april 2021; as the discussion of instagram kids ramped up over 2021, mosseri’s stopped using stickers to mask his children’s faces in public posts. it is quite possible this was a conscious shift attempting to move attention away from questions of children’s privacy, at least in his own feed. figure 2. mosseri, 5 april 2021, https://www.instagram.com/p/cnrcgsvfli_/ pausing instagram kids in the face of intense political and media scrutiny (feiner, 2021), in late september 2021, mosseri announced that development of an instagram kids app would be “paused”. importantly he emphasized his belief that building instagram kids “is the right thing to do”, and that this pause was to allow the company to consult more widely and plan better (mosseri, 2021). his post emphasized that building ways to allow parents to better supervise younger users on instagram was still a priority for instagram’s future. rather than abandoning the instagram kids idea, this announcement remained consistent with mosseri’s own public persona as a concerned, active parent trying to ensure instagram empowers other parents to guide their children’s social media use. notably, this post avoided any discussion about the children’s privacy and data on instagram. the intimacy of stories in mosseri’s instagram stories on 1 october 2021, for example, he chose to answer questions about his work/life balance (he mentioned always seeing his kids in the morning, at least, but wanting to do more), whether he would let his own children use instagram (he would if as a parent he could control who they interacted with, exactly as the planned instagram kids app would have allowed), and posted a story where one of this children interrupted. posting the story in which his child interrupted is consistent with crystal abidin’s (2017) notion of “calibrated amateurism” in which behind-thescenes or seemingly less polished content is strategically shared specifically to add a sense of authenticity, everydayness and relatability. the overall impact of this particular q&a session on his stories is to portray mosseri as a caring, involved father who has the best interests of his children at heart. as head of instagram, these same stories emphasise mosseri’s credibility as a father, and thus also try to colour instagram’s pursuit of an instagram kids app as a well-intentioned attempt to give parents the tools they need to responsibly shape their children’s experience of instagram. figure 3. mosseri, instagram stories, 1 october 2021. conclusion while on one level adam mosseri’s social media and public commentary could be read as a relatively typical ‘authentic’ combination of professional and personal elements, as the head of instagram his carefully constructed public parent persona is both more managed, and more deliberate. while no public information has been released (at the time of writing) in terms of when instagram kids might be unpaused, the political climate in the us and elsewhere in 2022, emphasized in president biden’s 2022 state of the union speech, suggests any attempt will have meet serious resistance. in the meantime, constructing adam mosseri as instagram’s top dad is part of a larger, strategic public relations battle to give meta and instagram’s attempts to create bespoke children’s apps credibility references abidin, c. (2017). #familygoals: family influencers, calibrated amateurism, and justifying young digital labor. social media + society, 3(2), https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117707191 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117707191 biden, j. (2022, march 1). remarks of president joe biden – state of the union address as prepared for delivery. the white house. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/03/01/remarks-ofpresident-joe-biden-state-of-the-union-address-as-delivered/ feiner, l. (2021, may 10). more than 40 attorneys general ask facebook to abandon plans to build instagram for kids. cnbc. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/10/attorneysgeneral-ask-facebook-to-abandon-instagram-for-kids-plans.html knowles, t. (2021, october 25). facebook whistleblower frances haugen: children can’t escape from instagram bullies. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/markzuckerberg-and-other-facebook-bosses-let-politicians-break-harmful-content-rulesbv33f8k70 lima, c. (2022, march 1). biden’s endorsement could be a game-changer for kids’ privacy legislation. washington post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/02/bidens-endorsement-could-begame-changer-kids-privacy-legislation/ marshall, p. d., moore, c., & barbour, k. (2015). persona as method: exploring celebrity and the public self through persona studies. celebrity studies, 6(3), 288–305. https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2015.1062649 mosseri, a. (2021, september 27). pausing “instagram kids” and building parental supervision tools. instagram. https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/pausing-instagram-kids neistat, c. (2021, june 18). hey @mosseri, a feature request … [tweet]. @casey. https://twitter.com/casey/status/1405934260922601473 this research was supported by the australian research council centre of excellence for the digital child project number ce200100022. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/03/01/remarks-of-president-joe-biden-state-of-the-union-address-as-delivered/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/03/01/remarks-of-president-joe-biden-state-of-the-union-address-as-delivered/ https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/10/attorneys-general-ask-facebook-to-abandon-instagram-for-kids-plans.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/10/attorneys-general-ask-facebook-to-abandon-instagram-for-kids-plans.html https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mark-zuckerberg-and-other-facebook-bosses-let-politicians-break-harmful-content-rules-bv33f8k70 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mark-zuckerberg-and-other-facebook-bosses-let-politicians-break-harmful-content-rules-bv33f8k70 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mark-zuckerberg-and-other-facebook-bosses-let-politicians-break-harmful-content-rules-bv33f8k70 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/02/bidens-endorsement-could-be-game-changer-kids-privacy-legislation/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/02/bidens-endorsement-could-be-game-changer-kids-privacy-legislation/ https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2015.1062649 https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/pausing-instagram-kids https://twitter.com/casey/status/1405934260922601473 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): orton-johnson, k. (2024, october). first glass of wine in 8 months!: an examination of sober curious communities on tiktok. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. first glass of wine in 8 months!: an examination of sober curious communities on tiktok kate orton-johnson university of edinburgh this paper presents findings from an ongoing project focused on sober curious communities on tik tok. tiktok has emerged as a dynamic space where users can create and consume short-form videos on a wide range of topics and in recent years has become a significant hub for the sober curious. the term sober curious (warrington, 2018) refers to those questioning their relationship with alcohol or exploring a life without alcohol for health or personal reasons rather than a tacit acknowledgement of a struggle with alcoholism. in this paper i argue that sober curious communities on tiktok represent a significant cultural phenomenon offering a haven for individuals navigating the complexities of sobriety. the prevalence of alcohol on social media is well documented. from digital displays of young people’s drinking cultures (goodwin & lyons, 2019; niland et al., 2014), to the emergence of the digitally networked “wine mom” (harding et al., 2021; newman & nelson, 2021). in a myriad of ways the sharing of alcohol use online has created an ‘intoxigenic’ digital space (griffiths & casswell, 2010). in this intoxigenic culture the emergence of sober curious communities raises some interesting questions about evolving identities, processes of cultural normalisation and tensions between the “sober curious” and the “sober serious” (matei, 2019). there is a wealth of literature on drinking practices and societal and individual health and welfare outcomes around disordered drinking (carr et al., 2021; park & kim, 2020; rajput et al., 2019; rehm et al., 2021; shield et al., 2020) and on the use of social media in therapeutic support for patients with alcoholism (coulson, 2014; gustafson et al., 2011; yoo et al., 2020). alongside this is a growing body of literature on sober curiosity as an act of conscious identity construction. the choice not to drink has been conceptualised in a range of ways; as a form of resistance to dominant norms of excessive consumption (fry, 2011); as a way of redefining selfhood (pennay et al., 2016); as a gendered social act (conroy & de visser, 2013) and as a choice that attracts stigma, shame and judgement (cheers et al., 2020). in widespread cultures of intoxication, where alcohol is normalised as a substance that facilitates social connections and inclusion (cherrier & gurrieri, 2013), not drinking is a choice that must be defended, justified and legitimised through a complex range of social negotiations (advocat & lindsay, 2015; herring et al., 2014; supski & lindsay, 2017). given these pressures it is perhaps unsurprising that sober curious individuals have found social media platforms to be spaces of solace, support and shared experience. in a mediated ecosystem of sobriety, the labels of “alcoholic” or “addict” that characterise in-person recovery meetings and support groups, are replaced by a more fluid and negotiated continuum of alcohol consumption practices (davey, 2021). this research examines the implications of tiktok's emergence as a locus of sociality for the sober curious movement, both in terms of individual well-being and broader societal attitudes towards addiction and recovery. central to this investigation is an exploration of the creative and expressive practices employed by individuals within sober curious communities and the attitudes and experiences of those who follow them. the overarching research question then focuses on how tiktok functions as a digital tool and as a social space for navigating and negotiating social norms surrounding alcohol consumption. to address these questions an exploratory qualitative approach was employed, seeking to understand tiktok videos as a social phenomenon with a focus on user behaviour and culture. a systematic content analysis was used to sample tiktok for sober curious content. the first stage was to create a sample frame based on an exploration of hashtags such as #sobercurious, #sobertiktok, #soberjourney #soberlife. using a new tiktok account (to ameliorate the impact of my existing user profile on the platforms algorithmic curation) i followed 500 users with sober curious account names and during a 4-month period, from october 2023 to january 2024, sampled my main feed (“for you page”) for algorithmically recommended content around sober curiosity. this resulted in a dataset of 800 videos. the sample of videos was paired with interview data from 28 sober curious tiktok users. interviewees were recruited by posting to public sober curious facebook groups and employing a snowball sampling technique. the sample consisted of 15 women aged between 25-65 and 13 men aged between 32 and 68. respondents came from a diverse range of socio-demographic backgrounds. initial analysis of the data indicates that tiktok plays a pivotal role in destigmatizing addiction, fostering empathy, and promoting positive representations of abstinence and resilience among content creators and their audiences. this paper will focus on 3 emergent analytical themes: the value of digital storytelling, the nature of tiktok accountability and the problem of visibility and failure. the digital storytelling that takes place on tiktok provides a platform for individuals in the sober curious community to share and reflect on their personal journeys. these videos often combine humour and vulnerability creating engaging narratives that resonate with viewers. by sharing their experiences in public and highly visible ways content creators claim they break down their own stigmas around alcohol by creating positive stories of abstinence. for content creators and their viewers sober curious tiktok is a showcase of what is to be gained from sobriety that in turn becomes a supportive community. these communities also leverage the platform's affordances to foster accountability and counting practices. sharing sober journeys on tiktok creates a sense of answerability and commitment for creators and their audiences. the trope of counting sober days also highlights tensions between those on the platform who are perceived to be sober curious influencers and those perceived to be sober serious. both attempt to provide realistic and normalised accounts of sobriety but draw on very different narratives of “cheating”, of what “counts” and of relapse and recovery. the visibility of these failures or relapses on tik tok was an important emergent theme. the process of self-presentation and self-disclosure alongside an expectation of “authenticity” was experienced as simultaneously cathartic and claustrophobic. accompanying the opportunities for visibility, connection and affirmation, there also exists an ever-present risk of failure, rejection, social scrutiny and spoiled identity (goffman, 1963). the inequalities of visibility were also highlighted with certain voices and experiences within the sober community privileged or marginalized within tiktok's ecosystem. combined, these themes speak to tiktok as an important platform for the sober curious. tiktok is pervasive in respondents online and embodied experiences of sobriety. the platform is not simply a technological tool but a complex social space where individuals negotiate and navigate their identities, relationships, and experiences of sobriety. tik tok allows the messy, unpredictable, embodied and digital practices and experiences of sobriety to play out. importantly, for my respondents, it is a space where sobriety is reframed from a “serious”, medicalised fact couched in narratives of addiction, to a more nuanced and freeing set of practices and contexts that enable them to rethink and re-evaluate their relationship with alcohol. in exploring the affordances of tiktok in the context of sober curious users this study aims to deepen our theoretical understanding of the ways in which social media platforms have become part of a post digital landscape of cultural change. references advocat, j., & lindsay, j. (2015). to drink or not to drink? young australians negotiating the social imperative to drink to intoxication. journal of sociology, 51(2), 139–153. carr, s., rehm, j., & manthey, j. (2021). guidelines and reality in studies on the economic costs of alcohol use: a systematic review. international journal of alcohol and drug research, 9(1), article 1. cheers, c., callinan, s., & pennay, a. (2020). the ‘sober eye’: examining attitudes towards non-drinkers in australia. psychology & health, 36(4), 385–404. cherrier, h., & gurrieri, l. (2013). anti-consumption choices performed in a drinking culture: normative struggles and repairs. journal of macromarketing, 33(3), 232–244. conroy, d., & de visser, r. (2013). ‘man up!’ discursive constructions of non-drinkers among uk undergraduates. journal of health psychology, 18(11), 1432–1444. coulson, n. s. (2014). sharing, supporting and sobriety: a qualitative analysis of messages posted to alcohol-related online discussion forums in the united kingdom. journal of substance use, 19(1–2), 176–180. davey, c. (2021). online sobriety communities for women’s problematic alcohol use: a mini review of existing qualitative and quantitative research. frontiers in global women’s health, 2. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgwh.2021.773921 fry, m.-l. (2011). discourses of consumer’s alcohol resistant identities. journal of nonprofit & public sector marketing, 23(4), 348–366. goffman, e. (1963). stigma: notes on the management of spoiled identity. prentice-hall. goodwin, i., & lyons, a. (2019). social media and young adults’ drinking cultures: research themes, technological developments and key emerging concepts. in d. conroy & f. measham (eds.), young adult drinking styles: current perspectives on research, policy and practice (pp. 133–152). springer international publishing. griffiths, r., & casswell, s. (2010). intoxigenic digital spaces? youth, social networking sites and alcohol marketing. drug and alcohol review, 29(5), 525–530. gustafson, d. h., shaw, b. r., isham, a., baker, t., boyle, m. g., & levy, m. (2011). explicating an evidence-based, theoretically informed, mobile technology-based system to improve outcomes for people in recovery for alcohol dependence. substance use & misuse, 46(1), 96–111. harding, k. d., whittingham, l., & mcgannon, k. r. (2021). #sendwine: an analysis of motherhood, alcohol use and #winemom culture on instagram. substance abuse: research and treatment, 15, 11782218211015196. herring, r., bayley, m., & hurcombe, r. (2014). “but no one told me it’s okay to not drink”: a qualitative study of young people who drink little or no alcohol. journal of substance use, 19(1–2), 95–102 matei, a. (2019, july 1). the rise of the sober curious: having it all, without alcohol. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jul/01/sober-curious-alcoholabuse newman, h., & nelson, k. a. (2021). mother needs a bigger “helper”: a critique of “wine mom” discourse as conformity to hegemonic intensive motherhood. sociology compass, 15(4), niland, p., lyons, a. c., goodwin, i., & hutton, f. (2014). ‘see it doesn’t look pretty does it?’ young adults’ airbrushed drinking practices on facebook. psychology & health, 29(8), 877–895 park, s. h., & kim, d. j. (2020). global and regional impacts of alcohol use on public health: emphasis on alcohol policies. clinical and molecular hepatology, 26(4), 652– 661. pennay, a., maclean, s., & rankin, g. (2016). hello sunday morning: alcohol, (non)consumption and selfhood. the international journal on drug policy, 28, 67–75. rajput, s. a., aziz, m. o., & siddiqui, m. a. (2019). social determinants of health and alcohol consumption in the uk. epidemiology, biostatistics, and public health, 16(3), article 3. rehm, j., casswell, s., manthey, j., room, r., & shield, k. (2021). reducing the harmful use of alcohol: have international targets been met? european journal of risk regulation, 12(2), 530–541 shield, k., manthey, j., rylett, m., probst, c., wettlaufer, a., parry, c. d. h., & rehm, j. (2020). national, regional, and global burdens of disease from 2000 to 2016 attributable to alcohol use: a comparative risk assessment study. the lancet public health, 5(1), e51–e61 supski, s., & lindsay, j. (2017). ‘there’s something wrong with you’: how young people choose abstinence in a heavy drinking culture. young, 25(4), 323–338. warrington, r. (2018). sober curious: the blissful sleep, greater focus, limitless presence, and deep connection awaiting us all on the other side of alcohol. harpercollins. yoo, w., shah, d. v., chih, m.-y., & gustafson, d. h. (2020). a smartphone-based support group for alcoholism: effects of giving and receiving emotional support on coping self-efficacy and risky drinking. health informatics journal, 26(3), 1764–1776. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 is it (micro)cheating? how social media confound assumptions in romantic relationships margaret e. foster cornell university aspen k.b. omapang cornell university marina johnson-zafiris cornell university social media have changed how we communicate, meet others, and form intimate relationships. technology can also mediate intimate partner surveillance and abuse (muise, 2009; tokunaga, 2010). one way to understand these shifts is through relationship transgressions, defined and enforced by compulsory monogamy (tallbear, 2020). anxieties around cheating have evolved along with our technologies, as evidenced by new, ambiguous terms like “microcheating” (lusinski, 2018). in this inprogress, mixed-methods study, we investigate emergent definitions of cheating through computational and critical discourse analyses of discussions about potential transgressions on reddit. our analysis is informed by indigenous science and technology studies, queer studies, and feminist theory. literature review in dominant western cultures,1 romance and sex are structured through colonial notions of family and settler sexuality (federici, 2020; morgensen, 2011; willey, 2016), which associate morality with monogamy (tallbear, 2020; wilkins & dalessandro, 2013). this creates compulsory monogamy, where monogamous relationships are naturalized into a “commonsense” norm. compulsory monogamy is rooted in colonizing governments’ suggested citation (apa): foster, m. e., omapang, a. k.b., & johnson-zafiris, m. (2023, october). is it (micro)cheating? how social media confound assumptions in romantic relationships. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 1 in this paper, “west” is lowercase to symbolically disrupt colonial power dynamics. “property ethic,” which awarded single male heads of household property rights and control over their wives’ bodies (tallbear, 2020, pp. 473–474). an alternative to monogamy is ethical non-monogamy or polyamory (rambukkana, 2015), which encourages cultivating multiple intimate relationships, whether sexual, romantic, both, or neither (haritaworn et al., 2006; tallbear, 2020). while not a new way of relating, these terms represent their newest incarnation in western contexts. critical polyamory applies indigenous ontologies to intimate relationships with the goal of decolonizing relating. we draw upon this framing to interpret power dynamics embedded in relationship discourse online. compulsory monogamy can yield heightened suspicion and anger when a relationship transgression is perceived (spade, 2006; tallbear, 2020). otherwise innocuous behaviors can be construed as transgressive if they fall outside an established monogamous relationship (kruger et al., 2013). suspicious partners sometimes surveil their lovers to verify fidelity (e.g., reviewing text messages, installing spyware on a cellphone). this can escalate to harassment, doxxing, or physical violence (freed et al., 2018). high-tech surveillance echoes abusers’ analog techniques, like opening mail or checking a car’s gas levels (bancroft, 2002). yet media ideologies (beliefs about the meaning of communication technologies) are ambiguous for new media. instead, people develop localized idioms of practice, where communities develop perceptions about the “right” way to use new media (gershon, 2010). the phenomenon of interest in our study is discourse around what constitutes “cheating” as it relates to social media, that is, discourse around the limits of new technologies’ acceptable uses for relating outside an established relationship. individuals have long used technologies to coordinate extramarital sex (rambukkana, 2015), and social media have introduced spaces for new transgressions to emerge (muise et al., 2009; tokunaga, 2011). our investigation will illuminate 1) how definitions of infidelity have shifted due to the affordances of social media platforms (e.g., “microcheating”), and 2) how these new social anxieties enforce compulsory monogamy. thus, our concern is how people identify and interpret transgressive behaviors. here, we turn to reddit to see how pseudonymous users—self-proclaimed cheaters and victims of cheating alike—delineate transgressions through discussion of posters’ personal stories. our research questions are: 1. what behaviors cause uncertainty for users concerned about romantic relationship transgressions? 2. how do posts about potentially transgressive behaviors naturalize the extension of settler colonial compulsory monogamy into online space? method reddit is a pseudonymous social media platform that consists of subreddits, interestbased message boards. this pseudonymity could lead to disclosure of taboo behaviors without fear of offline consequences (ellison et al., 2016). reddit threads also retain peer-to-peer dynamics, which makes it particularly suited to studying discourse. finally, reddit is one of two major social media platforms yielding statistically significant growth; however, its relatively small size and homogeneity limit generalizability (auxier & anderson, 2021). our study requires reddit posts by self-identified cheaters and those who have been cheated on. ideal subreddits to sample would include: explicitly related topics; consistent posting by a diversity of users; primarily text-based post content; post text that includes self-disclosure; and an active comment section. these factors allow for analysis of common anxieties around technologically mediated infidelity. we used two tools to quantitatively assess subreddit candidates for data collection. subredditstats.com provides descriptive statistics about subreddits (e.g., posts per day) and subreddit similarity by userbase overlap. the latter identified other relevant subreddits. after identifying a list of subreddits, we manually assessed user interactions to finalize the subreddit sample. we proposed the subreddits r/cheating_stories, r/cheatinggf, and r/survivinginfidelity, then chose r/cheating_stories for our pilot analysis. at the time of data collection, it had approximately 207,000 members. we collected reddit data from a previously downloaded archive of submissions and their comments. we collected a consensus sample of all posts from this subreddit from january 2020–december 2022, capturing evolving idioms of practice during the covid19 pandemic. this dataset yielded 15,870 posts, many of which had been deleted or removed. we then used computational techniques to elicit common themes across subreddit posts. to organize data at scale, we conducted latent dirichlet allocation (lda), an unsupervised natural language processing tool that identifies latent topics from a large corpus of textual data (blei, 2012). the lda model’s output is a list of common “topics” present in the aggregate of subreddit posts, akin to the middle-stages of a grounded theory analysis. to preserve the word order of the document semantics, we applied multi-class text classification (doc2vec), which allowed us to evaluate the context of words associated with each of the lda topics and determine if and how similar words are being utilized in different threads, the outcome being a ranked list of the most important and common topics for this large community. one topic that emerged from our initial pilot analysis was hacking services and requests. we performed critical discourse analysis (cda) on the top 1000 posts that had the highest probability of association with the topic “hacking.” cda analyzes both text and ideologies underlying discourse (wodak & meyer, 2001). our pilot analysis suggested a belief that proof of (in)fidelity can be found on a partner’s smartphone, such as by reading texts. this orientation toward evidence then justifies surveillance and hacking of a partner’s phone and computer presence, construing the invasion of privacy as the right to truth. there was also discourse that suggested an emerging media ideology around understanding a personal smartphone as an extension of one’s body; entitlement to a lover’s phone dovetailed with entitlement to their body. this preliminary finding indicates that discourse around transgressive behaviors on social media likely reiterates compulsory monogamy and settler sexuality, including entitlement to control over a lover’s body both physically and as it extends into online space via smartphones. future directions we will continue using cda to analyze samples from the topic model to understand redditors’ attitudes about relationships (especially compulsory monogamy and ethical non-monogamy) and how technology affects understandings of trust, transgression, and socially acceptable surveillance. our theoretical contribution will be twofold: first, contextualizing social anxieties around cheating by drawing on critical polyamory, and second, challenging compulsory monogamy to create healthier and more harmonious communities. references auxier, b., & anderson, m. (2021, april 7). social media use in 2021. pew research center: internet, science & tech. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/social-media-use-in-2021/ bancroft, l. (2002). why does he do that? inside the minds of angry and controlling men. berkley books. baumgartner, j., zannettou, s., keegan, b., squire, m., & blackburn, j. (2020). the pushshift reddit dataset [data set]. international conference on web and social media. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3608135 blei, d. m. (2012). probabilistic topic models. communications of the acm, 55(4), 77– 84. https://doi.org/10.1145/2133806.2133826 ellison, n. b., blackwell, l., lampe, c., & trieu, p. (2016). “the question exists, but you don’t exist with it”: strategic anonymity in the social lives of adolescents. social media + society, 2(4), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116670673 federici, s. (2020). beyond the periphery of the skin: rethinking, remaking, and reclaiming the body in contemporary capitalism. kairos. freed, d., palmer, j., minchala, d., levy, k., ristenpart, t., & dell, n. (2018). a stalker’s paradise: how intimate partner abusers exploit technology. in proceedings of the 2018 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1–13). association for computing machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174241 gershon, i. (2010). the breakup 2.0: disconnecting over new media. cornell university press. haritaworn, j., lin, c., & klesse, c. (2006). poly/logue: a critical introduction to polyamory. sexualities, 9(5), 515–529. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460706069963 kruger, d. j., fisher, m. l., edelstein, r. s., chopik, w. j., fitzgerald, c. j., & strout, s. l. (2013). was that cheating? perceptions vary by sex, attachment anxiety, and behavior. evolutionary psychology, 11(1), 159–171. https://doi.org/10.1177/147470491301100115 lusinski, n. (2018, january 19). what’s the difference between emotional cheating & micro-cheating? relationship experts weigh in. bustle. https://www.bustle.com/p/whatsthe-difference-between-emotional-cheating-micro-cheating-relationship-experts-weighin-7955179 morgensen, s. l. (2011). spaces between us: queer settler colonialism and indigenous decolonization. university of minnesota press. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/social-media-use-in-2021/ https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3608135 https://d.docs.live.net/69dc9fa87c19c792/desktop/cornell/ay%2022-23/papers/aoir%2023/%20https:/doi.org/10.1145/2133806.2133826 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116670673 https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174241 https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460706069963 https://doi.org/10.1177/147470491301100115 https://www.bustle.com/p/whats-the-difference-between-emotional-cheating-micro-cheating-relationship-experts-weigh-in-7955179 https://www.bustle.com/p/whats-the-difference-between-emotional-cheating-micro-cheating-relationship-experts-weigh-in-7955179 https://www.bustle.com/p/whats-the-difference-between-emotional-cheating-micro-cheating-relationship-experts-weigh-in-7955179 muise, a., christofides, e., & desmarais, s. (2009). more information than you ever wanted: does facebook bring out the green-eyed monster of jealousy? cyberpsychology & behavior, 12(4), 441–444. https://doi.org/10.1089/cpb.2008.0263 rambukkana, n. (2015). fraught intimacies: non/monogamy in the public sphere. ubc press. spade, d. (2006). for lovers and fighters. in m. berger (ed.), we don’t need another wave: dispatches from the next generation of feminists (pp. 28–39). seal press. tallbear, k. (2020). identity is a poor substitute for relating. in b. hokowhitu, a. moreton-robinson, l. tuhiwai-smith, c. andersen, & s. larkin (eds.), routledge handbook of critical indigenous studies (pp. 467–478). routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429440229-40 tokunaga, r. s. (2011). social networking site or social surveillance site? understanding the use of interpersonal electronic surveillance in romantic relationships. computers in human behavior, 27(2), 705–713. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2010.08.014 wilkins, a. c., & dalessandro, c. (2013). monogamy lite: cheating, college, and women. gender & society, 27(5), 728–751. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243213483878 willey, a. (2016). undoing monogamy: the politics of science and the possibilities of biology. duke university press. wodak, r. & meyer, m. (eds.). (2001). methods of critical discourse analysis. sage. https://doi.org/10.1089/cpb.2008.0263 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429440229-40 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2010.08.014 https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243213483878 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): fox, i., (2022, november). hashtags, hierarchies and hegemonies: mainstream digital feminist activism and intersectional critiques. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. hashtags, hierarchies and hegemonies: mainstream digital feminist activism and intersectional critiques izzy fox maynooth university this paper focuses on the digital-material hybridity of the contemporary feminist activist, particularly the problematic and progressive potential offered by the technological affordances of the internet and digital social media. in addition, the paper highlights the associated anxieties for feminists of being online and engaging in what is often, in this “age of surveillance capitalism” (zuboff 2019) and toxic masculinity, a hostile, commodified and misogynistic milieu. furthermore, the digital affordances enabled through the proliferation of web 2.0 technology inform the nature of feminist online discourse and campaigning, which has, at times, contributed to the moral panic that surrounds attempts at centering marginalized voices, particularly members of the trans community and sex workers. the paper will explore the relationship between online tools and platforms adopted by mainstream contemporary feminists and the role they have played in constructing ‘othering’ hierarchies within feminism, as well in enabling the intersectional critique of these narratives. the paper draws on dabiri’s analysis of the online discourse by white allies in response to the black lives matter movement, which she argues served to reinforce racist hierarchies through the ally/victim binary (2021 3). this is done in order to explore the extent to which discussion of “decolonizing” the internet reinscribes such unequal power dynamics and to highlight how, at times, a similar ally/victim binary informs mainstream digital feminism, including in the irish context. a feminist critical discourse analysis (fcda) (lazar 2005) of conversation threads on the irish feminist network’s (ifn) facebook page reveals that the problematic trend highlighted by dabiri is repeated there. this ally/victim binary can often position people of color as “inferior”, while concomitantly “being committed to their ‘protection’” (3-4). dabiri argues that this position has a direct lineage to that taken by anti-slavery abolitionists many of whom, rather than viewing black people as equals, differed from slaveholders only in terms of how these “racial ‘inferiors’ should be treated” (4). 2 this racial hierarchy or othering is also consistent with mohanty’s understanding of feminist orientalism. for mohanty, western feminist discourse contributes to the construction of “the third world woman” (1988 333) in opposition to the ‘enlightened’ western feminist, which often results in the perpetuation of a ‘rescue narrative’ by those assuming the role of ‘white saviour’. mohanty conflates the feminist framing of nonwestern women, such as muslim women who veil, as being “exploited” with the sexist discourse labelling women as “weak” (1988 53). while mohanty was writing in the late 1980s, this trend continues today and is in evidence in the online spaces adopted by contemporary feminists. for instance, a contributor to the ifn’s facebook page in a thread under a post critiquing the orientalist stance by many western feminists, argues that “it’s not about rescuing, it’s about empowerment”. this problematic dynamic and rescue narrative is not only in evidence in mainstream feminism in relation to race and extends beyond the discussion threads of the ifn’s facebook page. for instance, certain campaigns that the ifn and other high-profile feminist groups and individuals have supported, such as the turn off the red light campaign, is further evidence of orientalism informing mainstream feminism. this campaign, which successively lobbied for the introduction of legislation that ostensibly criminalized the purchaser of sex but not the seller, contributes to the construction of a problematic binary between the ‘enlightened anti-prostitution feminist’ and the ‘prostitute as victim’. within this power dynamic the ‘prostitute’ is in need of rescue and education but they are often not bestowed with a voice or agency of their own. as bernstein points out in her account of an anti-sex work rally in the u.s.a., “all of the speakers at the rally deploy the new anti-trafficking buzzwords (“victim”, “predator”, “perpetrator”, “exploiter”) (2012 240), positioning those working within the sex industry firmly at one end of not only the predator/victim binary but also the ally/victim one. furthermore, the legislation that followed the torl campaign, which introduced the nordic model to ireland, is not supported by either the sex workers alliance of ireland (swai) or amnesty international. the swai criticized the torl campaign for privileging the voices of exited sex workers, resulting in silencing practices and infantilizing narratives toward those currently working in the sex industry. amnesty international also recognizes that the nordic model forces sex workers “to operate on the margins of society in clandestine and dangerous environments” (2016). these conditions are made even more precarious for those with marginalized identities such as trans women of color and migrant sex workers and represents the “carceral turn” that mainstream hegemonic feminism has taken since the 1960s (bernstein). online discourse about sex work, as well as trans rights, is often infused with elements of a moral panic and the architecture and affordances of the internet and social media enable the viral spread of these anxieties (ellison). the alignment of elements of mainstream feminism in ireland with a model that involves more policing feeds into the carceral turn taken by hegemonic feminism internationally, as illustrated by the use of the mapping app developed by hollaback!, the anti-street harassment group in the u.s.a. this app tracked the areas where reports of street 3 harassment took place. these results were then shared with the nypd, resulting in an increase in stop-and-frisk programs in predominately black neighborhoods, further criminalizing these communities, as this problematic interface fed “into racist geographies of fear” leading to increased policing, violence and arrest (rentschler 575). in this sense, hegemonic iterations of feminism emerge from a failure to apply an intersectional lens to sex work, street harassment and other feminist issues. furthermore, as illustrated by the discussion of hollaback!, above, the failure by mainstream feminists to recognize the role that digital tools and platforms can play in perpetuating inequalities and discrimination under the guise of ‘protecting women’ underscores the duty of care that feminists have to ensure that intersectionality informs every stage of a campaign, including online activism. concomitantly, this paper references how the digital affordances of social media have also enabled the resistance to these hegemonic feminisms in the form of queer, trans and intersectional critiques and campaigns, as these digital tools and platforms also form part of the activist arsenal of those challenging the mainstream feminist narrative, while also being cognizant of the corporatized and surveillant characteristics of digital spaces. avoiding either cyberutopian or dystopian arguments, or a techno-determinist or utilitarian stance, this paper accounts for the complex and contradictory environment that the internet offers to feminism. the paper also recognizes the enmeshed nature of feminists with their digital tools and platforms as well as the problematic and progressive feminist activism taking place online. 4 references bernstein, elizabeth. "carceral politics as gender justice? the “traffic in women” and neoliberal circuits of crime, sex, and rights." theory and society 41.3 (2012): 233-259. web. 14 jun. 2014. dabiri, emma. what white people can do next: from allyship to coalition. london: penguin, 2021. print. ellison, graham. “criminalizing the payment for sex in northern ireland: sketching the contours of a moral panic.” british journal of criminology 57.1 (2015): 194-214. web. 15 sept. 2019. lazar, michelle m. feminist critical discourse analysis: gender, power and ideology in discourse. basingstoke and new york: palgrave, 2005. print. mohanty, chandra talpade. “under western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses.” feminist review. 30 (1988): 65-88. web. 24 nov. 2012. rentschler, carrie a. “bystander intervention, feminist hashtag activism and the anticarceral politics of care.” feminist media studies 17.4 (2017): 565-584. web. 16 mar. 2018. zuboff, shoshana. the age of capitalist surveillance. the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. london: penguin, 2019. print. microsoft word san cornelio-environmental influencers on instagram-environmental influencers on instagram.docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): san cornelio, g; ardèvol, e; martorell, s. (2021, october). environmental influencers on instagram: connections and frictions between activism, lifestyles and consumption. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. environmental influencers on instagram: connections and frictions between activism, lifestyles and consumption. gemma san cornelio universitat oberta de catalunya elisenda ardèvol universitat oberta de catalunya sandra martorell universitat politècnica de valència environmental crisis is one of the main issues on the current social, political and media agenda that has spread to citizens engaging environmental activism in many ways. this paper focuses on the emergence of a very specific type of environmental activism in social media that we named as “eco-influencers”. drawing on our findings of an ongoing digital ethnography (pink et al. 2016; hjorth, horst, galloway, bell, 2017) among instagram profiles devoted to disseminate contents related to sustainability and climate change, our aim here is to explore some controversial issues regarding how they understand independence in relation to activism, lifestyle, consumption and work. this form of digital activism promotes the idea of a sustainable lifestyle, based on that small daily actions may contribute to achieve global changes, and distancing itself both from traditional forms of environmental communication in mass media, and from social movements oriented towards protest and collective action in public space. conversely, the so-named eco-influencers in instagram focus on individual agency and domestic space as a place for political action. moreover, they present a certain articulation with new ways of consumerism and an emerging market of sustainable products. on the one hand, the connections between lifestyle and activism has been underestimated. haenfler, johnson and jones (2012) contend that the separation between lifestyles and social movements has left a blind spot, located at the intersection between private individual action and activism, personal and social change, and personal and collective identity. they suggest the concept of lifestyle movements to point to social movements that actively promote new values and cultural meanings, challenging the hegemonic culture and fostering a broader social change through their lifestyle. this kind of activism is based on three characteristics: lifestyle choices as a tactic for social change; the centrality of personal identity as the engine of change; and a diffuse organizational structure (haenfler, johnson and jones, 2012: 2). on the other hand, since our field of study is instagram, we might consider the notion of visual activism for understanding the role of images and aesthetics in this digital activism. the most specific concept of visual activism is usually referred to artistic or creative groups, who put their visual and performative skills at the service of a cause. this type of activism has been negatively perceived by some authors since it is considered that the visual, as aesthetic, would lose strength to the movement (demos 2006: 90). however, our argument is that precisely the potential of environmental activism on instagram is articulated with the concept of consumption and lifestyle, involving personal narratives whose role of images is fundamental. we named these environmental activist eco-influencers as these profiles develop similar strategies as those that, according to leaver, hihghfield and abidin as influencers are characterized by: 1) applying positive self-branding strategies, 2) managing their visibility 3) cultivating their community of followers adopting storytelling techniques consistent with their lifestyles (leaver, hihghfield, abidin, 2020: 106). the fieldwork consists in participant observation in instagram since july 2020 following the profiles through a collective research account to maintain interaction and expand our field site until we have an intentional sample of 60 profiles that allowed us to create a first typology and beginning in-depth interviews. coinciding with the categories of shabir (2020) our sample is composed by: 1) lifestyle activists and bloggers, which, in turn, can be individuals, a couple, or family accounts dedicated exclusively to the environment and sustainable consumption; 2) influencers and lifestyle bloggers who also promote sustainable products; 3) accounts devoted to communicate tips, tricks and memes; generally managed individually or collectively and that are usually anonymous; 4) shops or small producers; 5) collectives and organizations, more focused on raising awareness and collective mobilization about the environment. for our study, we consider the first 4 categories as eco-influencers, although they would take part, as a whole, of an “ecosphere” in which environmental activism, ecological market and tips for a sustainable and healthy lifestyle are hybridized. in this regard, the interviews have focused in the first 4 categories and we have interviewed 12 profiles (3 of each category). here we highlight some features that have been raised regarding their activity as activists and the very notion of “eco-influencer”. firstly, we verify our initial perception that there is an emerging model of influencer coming from a familiar articulation. families and couples engage in such projects of life changing (to more sustainable habits) and dissemination of it, as a way to compromise with their audiences. all the interviewees claim that they are activists, but not interested in social movements and mobilisations on the street. they view themselves as independent agents interconnected through digital media, and their motivation is to change the world for better, educating the population through their own experiences, and in other cases, selling products that they have tested and match their ecological criteria. they try to live accordingly to their ideals about a sostenible life, respectful with the environment, and, if it is possible, as “influencers”, also make a living becoming enterpreneaurs. they are critical about consumerism, government environmental policies and the extractivist model of capitalism, but at the same time, they participate in the market, and they share the liberal belief of the individual as an independent agent, able to change society by an act of will. they consider the individual as an engine for social change, experiencing a heavy weight to carry individually, especially when trying to achieve an exemplary behaviour. in terms of the limitations of their field of action, they express conflicting positions regarding instagram, especially with the tyranny of its algorithm, expressing that they feel uncomfortable in a space out of their control. they are aware that they are not completely independent in this platform (indeed one of our interviewees that has left it). these conflicting feelings are also present regarding the very definition of influencer, which they partially refuse due to its negative connotations. but on the other hand, they recognize their activity have a positive influence on their communities. contrary to this, as we said, they all recognise being activists, although they offer nuances, such as their online activity is a specific way to change the world little by little, and that this is independent of being an activist in a classical way. in this regard, their use of visual resources is very accurate, since an important number of them have professional creative skills, and consider this may help to reach wider audiences. these preliminary findings allow a characterization of a new mode of social activism with specific features. as activists, these ‘eco-influencers’ regard themselves as independent agents interconnected through digital media, contributing to produce a change in society through their own example. as independent creative workers, they face the contradictions of the need for visibility in order to spread their message and the constraints of the platforms they depend on. independence is thus an aspiration as a way of life. references demos, t.j. (2016). between rebel creativity and reification: for and against visual activism. journal of visual culture, 15(1), 85-102. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412915619459 haenfler, r., johnson, b., & jones, e. (2012). lifestyle movements: exploring the intersection of lifestyle and social movements. social movement studies, 11(1), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2012.640535 hjorth, l., horst, h., galloway, a., & bell, g. (eds.). (2017). the routledge companion to digital ethnography. taylor & francis. leaver, t., highfield, t., & abidin, c. (2020). instagram: visual social media cultures. john wiley & sons. pink, s., horst, h., postill, j., hjorth, l., lewis, t., & tacchi, j. (2016). digital ethnography: principles and practice. sage pub. shabir, h. (2020). the representation of sustainability on social media: an ecofeminist reading of instagram. master thesis series in environmental studies and sustainability science. lund university centre of sustainability studies selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 “check your facts, fetus”: #genz vs. #millennials and the role of tiktok in the generationing process jacqueline ryan vickery university of north texas in summer 2021, another tiktok meme joined the emerging (english-language) debates between gen z and millennials. the acting skit typically includes one tiktok creator portraying two characters: a (drunk) millennial and a gen z’er. the original sound template by comedian brian moller (@bmotheprince) provides the basis for the audio meme. in the videos, a millennial walks into a room and the gen z’er reacts irritably, “another one? ugh, why do y’all keep coming here (tiktok)?” the millennial and gen z’er debate who belongs on tiktok; the gen z’er explains, “we’re the social media generation,” to which the millennial retorts, “bitch, we made social media. check your facts, fetus.” the banter continues with the gen z’er referencing tiktok’s “for you page” and the millennial referencing a 401k. the video ends with the millennial zoning out and the gen z’er critiquing their drinking habits as the millennial dances off out of the frame. figure 1 screenshots of a millennial and a gen z‘er on tiktok (credit: @workbystyle) suggested citation (apa): vickery, j.r. (2022 november). “check your facts, fetus!”: #genz vs #millennials and the role of tiktok in the generationing process. paper presented at aoir 2022. the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org at first glance, the “generational war” between gen z (born approximately 1996-2012) and millennials (born approximately 1981-1995) appears to be merely the latest iteration of an emerging generational cohort demarcating their taste cultures, subjectivities, and values. however, these seemingly trivial and playful debates over who “belongs” on tiktok and who is the “real” social media generation provide a fruitful inquiry into examining the generationing process. while many millennials may have come-of-age with the internet, gen z is unique in that they are the first generation to co-construct their generational identity formation in such a public, collective, and vocal manner and at such a young age through platforms such as tiktok. in their exploration of generational identity, vittadini et al. (2013) suggest that media scholars should pay more attention to the ways members of a particular generation produce and circulate self-narratives about their own understandings of their generation. heeding their call, this paper examines the ways that self-proclaimed members of gen z and millennials dyadically use tiktok to co-construct their respective generational consciousness by asking: what role do the platform logics, affordances, memetics, and creative vernaculars of tiktok play in the generationing process, specifically the collective construction of generational borders between millennials and gen z? i conduct a qualitative discursive analysis of the ways gen z and millennials create dialogical tiktok memes, challenges, and trends to co-construct their respective generational identities. i argue that simply dismissing these debates as trivial “generational conflicts” masks gen z’s attempt to resist colonization of their digital spaces and obscures deeper anxieties about space, belonging, social change, and the development of a generational habitus. the generationing process generationing refers to the process through which a generation develops a collective generational consciousness. thus, i approach generations as social constructs that function discursively and symbolically, rather than as biological determinants. there is ample evidence to suggest that mediatization and the accelerated pace of technological change play increasingly significant roles in the generationing process and the development of generational identities (bolin, 2017; vittadini et al, 2013). generational demarcations such as millennials and gen z function to discursively produce collective identities through repetitive social performances, thus drawing a generational border between “us” and “them.” integral to the generationing process then, is the production of a “we sense” that contributes to a shared identity and the ways a generational identity is performed in social relation to others (mannheim, 1970). such narratives are co-constructed in a multitude of ways, including through the reciprocal relationships between digital media platforms and users. method and analytical approach bolin (2017) argues that a generation’s “fresh contact” with media in their formative years can play a significant role in the habitus of a generation; because millennials have come of age alongside social media, many feel as though these spaces “belong” to them. with the rise of tiktok practices and the cultures that young tiktokers are creating, millennials are for the first time experiencing a trend-setting digital space as other. such anxieties and cultural contestations are originating through tiktok-specific vernaculars, memes, and challenges. thus, i have chosen to limit my analysis to tiktok due to the unique affordances of the platform that privileges memetic participation above social connections and for the ways it influences the norms, trends, and discourses of other platforms (zulli and zulli, 2021). searching for various gen z and millennial hashtags on tiktok from june 2020december 2021 led to the identification of popular sounds, skit acting memes, and generational challenges that formed the basis of the gen z vs. millennial tiktoks included in this paper (full paper includes a complete table/method). i conduct a thematic and discursive analysis of the visual and audio elements of the memes, including the on-screen text or stickers, sound clips, fashion, and body movements that are used to visually differentiate gen z and millennial identities. the analysis focuses on the assemblage of the narrative, visual, and audio content of the memes alongside the platform logic and affordances that make such memetic participation feasible (author, 2014). such an analysis reveals how gen z and millennials are using tiktok to publicly negotiate the borders of their respective generational identities and thus allows for a closer examination of the role of tiktok in the generationing process. memetic discursive patterns figure 2 memetic discursive cycle between gen z and millennials on tiktok as the memetic discursive cycle in figure 2 reveals, a paradox emerges in which millennials disavow gen z’s credibility because of gen z’s young age, yet such a defense serves to reify millennials’ credibility precisely because they are the older generation. yet millennials simultaneously refute gen z’s accusation that millennials are old, since such a critique is intended to either render millennials irrelevant and/or to hold millennials responsible for upholding the problematic values that gen z is critiquing (zeng and abidin, 2021). the paper will analyze specific examples to support each moment in this cycle. as will be demonstrated, this pattern is communicated alongside the platform logics and creative vernaculars of memes and the public dialogue that tiktok uniquely affords. the ability for gen z and millennials to playfully articulate respective generational subjectivities in such a mutual, reciprocal, and public manner provides greater insight into the generationing process than earlier media industries or technologies have afforded. lastly, while playful in nature, i demonstrate how the “templatabiltiy” (abidin, 2021) of the memetic discourse functions as a way for gen z to solidify what they perceive as their more progressive values while forcing millennials to come to terms with the paradoxes of their own problematic values, subjectivities, and positionalities. for millennials, arguments over who “belongs” in particular spaces or who “owns” pop culture may be playful and trivial debates that reveal anxieties about aging and cultural relevance, but for gen z, they are playful acts of resistance that allow them to negotiate and generate collective, collaborative, and progressive spaces to fine-tune their individual identities and generational values (katz, et al. 2021). references: abidin, c. (2021). mapping internet celebrity on tiktok: exploring attention economies and visibility labours. cultural science journal, 12(1). bolin, g. (2017). media generations: experience, identity and mediatised social change. routledge. katz, r., ogilvie, s., shaw, j., woodhead, l. (2021). gen z, explained: the art of living in a digital age. university of chicago press. mannheim, k. (1970). the problem of generations. psychoanalytic review, 57(3), 378– 404. vittadini, n., siibak, a., & reifová, i. (2013). generations and media: the social construction of generational identity and differences. in audience transformations (pp. 73-89). routledge. zeng, j., & abidin, c. (2021). ‘# okboomer, time to meet the zoomers’: studying the memefication of intergenerational politics on tiktok. information, communication & society, 1-23. zulli, d., & zulli, d. j. (2020). extending the internet meme: conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation publics on the tiktok platform. new media & society. appendix screenshots from @workbystyle video https://www.tiktok.com/@workbystyle/video/6836823692865981701?is_from_webapp= 1&sender_device=pc&web_id7070187623888815659 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): oh, d., sykora, m., elayan, s. (2024, october). social identities in twitter issue publics: biographical analysis of hyperactive uncivil and intolerant users in american abortion discourse. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. social identities in twitter issue publics: biographical analysis of hyperactive uncivil and intolerant users in american abortion discourse dayei oh university of helsinki martin sykora loughborough university suzanne elayan loughborough university twitter issue publics and hyperactive users in the digital age, platforms such as twitter foster the emergence of fragmented ‘issue publics’ (habermas, 2006), intersecting with traditional media and broader national discourse (bruns & highfield, 2015). however, these digital public spheres often deviate from ideal speech situations proposed by habermas, showcasing uncivil discourse and participatory disparities (oh et al., 2021, 2023; batos et al., 2013; graham & wright, 2014; krzyżanowski & ledin, 2017; weeks et al., 2017). previous work highlights a subset of hyperactive users on twitter who monopolise discussions on contentious topics like abortion, perpetuating intolerance and incivility (oh et al., 2023). prior work also distinguishes between incivility and intolerance, arguing that incivility – interpersonal impoliteness, rudeness – can be conducive to democracy as means of political opinion expressions (in limited cases) while intolerance – moral-political disrespect, exclusion – hinders equal participation from radical democratic perspectives (oh et al., 2023; rossini, 2020; young, 2002; zerilli, 2014). furthermore, there are verified influencers who were officially authenticated by twitter (before the blue tick verification controversy in early 2023), earning higher credibility and engagements from audiences (morris et al., 2012; zilinsky et al.,2020). the capacity for these small but influential hyperactive users to shape the wider discourse, coupled with their propensity towards uncivil and intolerant behaviours in the twitter issue publics, makes the biographies of these users particularly fertile ground for analysing the relationship between social identities and anti-deliberative behaviours in abortion issue publics on twitter. twitter biography as discursive construction of social identities this paper adopts a social psychological perspective on social identity, viewing it as a facet of self-representation influenced by social context and group membership. social identities shape various attitudes and behaviours including inter-group hostility and prejudice, impacting political participation and mobilization (klein et al., 2007; mason, 2018; tajfel et al., 1979). the paper focuses on discursive positioning, where individuals define their identity through linguistic representation. unlike fixed sets of characteristics, identities are seen as temporary attachments to subject positions constructed through discourse (hall, 1996). twitter biographies serve as proxies for self-representation, akin to the standardised psychological measures of self-attitudes, the twenty statements test (tst) (kuhn & mcpartland, 1954; rogers & jones, 2021), allowing us to explore the two research questions: rq1: how do hyperactive uncivil and intolerant twitter users self-describe their identity online, and how do these descriptions differ from each other and from non-hyperactive users? rq2: how do hyperactive influencers self-describe their social identities on twitter? how do their identifications differ from non-hyperactive influencers and from general users? data collection in 2020, the authors collected over 6 million tweets on american abortion discourse through twitter api and identified hyperactive uncivil and intolerant users through lexicon-based classification (oh et al., 2023). in december 2022, we rehydrated the biographical data of the top 1% of most hyperactive uncivil and intolerant users and a random sample of non-hyperactive users in a similar size for comparison. most accounts were still available when hydrated in late 2022: 8620 hyperactive intolerant accounts (96%), 9545 hyperactive uncivil accounts (98.24%) and 12721 non-hyperactive accounts (97.91%) are retrieved from twitter api. user data could not be retrieved from private, suspended, or non-existing accounts. the time gap between tweet and biographical data collection (2020 to 2022) presents both a limitation and an opportunity for insight into the evolving construction of social identities. we manually inspected a small random sample of user biographies in 2024, comparing them with our data captured in 2022 to demonstrate the longitudinal stability of biographies as a form of social identification. analysis methods the research uses various natural language processing tools to quantify significant aspects in user biography data, including tf-idf analysis and log-odds ratios of term frequency, word co-occurrence visualisation, liwc-22 psycholinguistic analysis, and emoji analysis (boyd et al., 2022; silge & davidson, 2017). emojis in biography convey diverse social identities including white nationalism and one’s support and opposition to abortion rights (graells-garrido et al., 2020; hagen et al., 2019). results the term frequency analysis provides an overview of commonly occurring words in the twitter users captured in the dataset. religious, political, and familial identity markers dominate the discourse, with terms like "god," "trump," and “conservative” being prevalent. interestingly, these markers overshadow abortion-related identities like "prochoice" or "pro-life." the log-odds and tf-idf results further highlight distinctions between the user groups. hyperactive intolerant users predominantly use words associated with american republican partisanship, religion, and conservative stances. on the other hand, hyperactive uncivil users tend to employ language aligned with liberal partisanship and activism. it suggests that although both political left and right-wing partisans engage in anti-deliberative behaviours online, these identities might be associated with different set of anti-deliberative behaviours. non-hyperactive users, however, focus more on apolitical and personal identity markers including one’s gender, sexual orientations, and hobbies. again, abortion-related identity markers are notably absent from the frequent words. the word co-occurrence network analysis illustrates how social identities interconnect in users' self-identification. hyperactive uncivil and intolerant users often link pro-life identity with conservatism and republican partisanship, mediated by religious terms. non-hyperactive users, in contrast, exhibit a scattered pattern of bigram networks, emphasising non-political personal interests. the liwc analysis delves into psycholinguistic features of user biographies. hyperactive users, both intolerant and uncivil, tend to write longer biographies and use more analytic, emotional language compared to non-hyperactive users. they also exhibit greater use of moralisation language. differences in the use of religion, politics, and ethnicity-related words further highlight distinct sociocultural interests and linguistic styles between hyperactive and non-hyperactive users. liwc results also indicate the differences between uncivil and intolerant user biographies. analysis of influencers' biographies reveals their emphasis on abortion-related identity, particularly for hyperactive intolerant influencers, who prioritise their pro-life stance. non-hyperactive influencers, in contrast, focus less on abortion-related terms and more on occupational and familial identities. comparisons between general users and influencers who were hyperactive in abortion issue public highlight stark differences in emphasis. while general hyperactive users prioritise religious, political, and familial identities, hyperactive influencers emphasise abortion-related identities. non-hyperactive users, including influencers, tend to focus more on occupational and familial identities rather than political ones. emoji analysis shows the multimodal ways of identity signalling, in which twitter users creatively communicate their american patriotism, anti-vax and pro-cop stance by combining american national flag right next to an eagle and police officer emojis, a needle with no entry sign emoji. in summary, the analyses elucidate that those who identify themselves with partisan, religious and other political (e.g., gun control) identity markers are associated with hyperactivity in anti-deliberative behaviours on twitter, with exhibiting distinct linguistic styles and sociocultural interests compared to non-hyperactive users. our analysis also suggests the dominance of partisan and religious identities over directly abortion-related identities. these findings offer insights into the broader american political spheres that abortion is more than a single-issue voter matter but connected in the long chain of equivalence in american conservative demands, reflected in the link between republican partisanship, sociocultural conservatism, religion, gun control, and patriotism. references bastos, m. t., raimundo, r. l. g., & travitzki, r. (2013). gatekeeping twitter: message diffusion in political hashtags. media, culture & society, 35(2), 260-270. boyd, r. l., ashokkumar, a., seraj, s., & pennebaker, j. w. (2022). the development and psychometric properties of liwc-22. austin, tx: university of texas at austin, 147. bruns, a., & highfield, t. (2015). is habermas on twitter?: social media and the public sphere. in the routledge companion to social media and politics (pp. 56-73). routledge. graells-garrido, e., baeza-yates, r., & lalmas, m. (2020, july). every colour you are: stance prediction and turnaround in controversial issues. in proceedings of the 12th acm conference on web science (pp. 174-183). graham, t., & wright, s. (2014). discursive equality and everyday talk online: the impact of “superparticipants”. journal of computer-mediated communication, 19(3), 625-642. hagen, l., falling, m., lisnichenko, o., elmadany, a. a., mehta, p., abdul-mageed, m., ... & keller, t. e. (2019, november). emoji use in twitter white nationalism communication. in conference companion publication of the 2019 on computer supported cooperative work and social computing (pp. 201-205). hall, s. (1996). who needs ‘identity’? in p. du gay, j. evans, & p. redman (eds.), identity: a reader (pp. l5–30). london: sage publications. klein, o., spears, r., & reicher, s. (2007). social identity performance: extending the strategic side of side. personality and social psychology review, 11(1), 28-45. krzyżanowski, m., & ledin, p. (2017). uncivility on the web: populism in/and the borderline discourses of exclusion. journal of language and politics, 16(4), 566-581. kuhn, m. h., & mcpartland, t. s. (1954). twenty statements test. american sociological review. mason, l. (2018). uncivil agreement: how politics became our identity. university of chicago press. morris, m. r., counts, s., roseway, a., hoff, a., & schwarz, j. (2012, february). tweeting is believing? understanding microblog credibility perceptions. in proceedings of the acm 2012 conference on computer supported cooperative work (pp. 441-450). oh, d., elayan, s., sykora, m., & downey, j. (2021). unpacking uncivil society: incivility and intolerance in the 2018 irish abortion referendum discussions on twitter. nordicom review, 42(s1), 103-118. oh, d., elayan, s., & sykora, m. (2023). deliberative qualities of online abortion discourse: incivility and intolerance in the american and irish abortion discussions on twitter. journal of deliberative democracy, 19(1). rogers, n., & jones, j. j. (2021). using twitter bios to measure changes in self-identity: are americans defining themselves more politically over time?. journal of social computing, 2(1), 1-13. rossini, p. (2019). disentangling uncivil and intolerant discourse. in r. boatright, d. young, s. sobieraj, & t. shaffer (eds). a crisis of civility? contemporary research on civility, incivility, and political discourse (142 – 157). new york: routlegde. silge, j. & robinson, d. (2017). text mining with r. o'reilly. tajfel, h., turner, j. c., austin, w. g., & worchel, s. (1979). an integrative theory of intergroup conflict. organizational identity: a reader, 56(65), 9780203505984-16. weeks, b. e., ardèvol-abreu, a., & gil de zúñiga, h. (2017). online influence? social media use, opinion leadership, and political persuasion. international journal of public opinion research, 29(2), 214-239. young, i. m. (2002). inclusion and democracy. oxford university press, usa. zerilli, l. (2014). against civility: a feminist perspective. civility, legality, and justice in america, 107-131. zilinsky, j., vaccari, c., nagler, j., & tucker, j. a. (2020). don’t republicans tweet too? using twitter to assess the consequences of political endorsements by celebrities. perspectives on politics, 18(1), 144-160. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): chess, s. (2023, october). magic in the air: memes, esoterica, and the internet. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. magic in the air: memes, esoterica, and the internet shira chess the university of georgia introduction leading up to, during, and immediately following the 2016 us election of donald trump, there was buzz about magic on the internet. from the meme magic of the cult of kek to liberal witches performing binding spells, magic seemed to emerge out of thin air. however, while technology and the occult may seem like strange bedfellows, they have a cozier historical relationship then we often acknowledge. for instance, it has been well-documented that there was a synergetic relationship between telegraphy and spiritualism (sconce, 2000) and we can consider ciphers used to construct grimoires as an antecedent to modern techno-cryptography (reeds, 1998). in what follows, i historize internet magic specifically situating “meme magic” within the broader context of both digital and occult histories. just as spiritualist séances articulated hopes and anxieties of mass communication, meme magic speaks to contemporary concerns and desires about the spread of propaganda. the magic wars of 2016 the events of the magic meme war relating to the 2016 election cycle, generally begins with the appropriation of pepe the frog as a troll mascot. the image of pepe was originally created in 2010 as an apolitical character in a web comic. in 2016 4chan and 8chan began using the image in racist, antisemitic, and trollish ways (asprem, 2020). simultaneously, pepe became associated with “kek” – an inversion of “lol” gleaned from the game world of warcraft. (in wow players choose to be either on alliance or horde teams and the garbling of in-game text between factions transforms “lol” into “kek.”) as the term continued to be used, it became associated with meme magic, and many 4channers discovered that “kek” is the name of the egyptian god of chaos (tuters, 2019). these things coalesced into a broader discourse about the viability of meme magic, with the goal of using the spreadability of content online to enact changes upon reality. broadly we can see both kek and social media-based magic as a method of understanding and controlling technologies and information flow that is otherwise ineffable. historicizing meme magic it is easy to approach magic online as a new phenomenon, however, the use of digital memes and social media as esoteric tools is neither new nor extraordinary. the occult world has been an unseen but pivotal part of the internet since some of its earliest iterations: via the technopagan movement of the 1990s and early 2000s (davis, 1998/2015), via attempts to turn virtual reality into an astral plane (crow, 2014), via the semi-spiritual tech iconoclasm of mondo 2000 and high frontiers/reality hackers (davis, 1998/2015), or via the offhand esotericism first seen in the whole earth catalogue and later within the ‘well network (davis, 2019). psychedelic advocate timothy leary referred to the internet as a “new spiritual state” to strive towards (leary 2008, p. 22). technopaganism of the 1990s and early 2000s became a mode of re-purposing technologies to embody an esotericism that de-prioritized belief and religious practice, and emphasized the fluidity of presence and the precarity of reality. many early discussions of virtual reality and the internet were built out of the psychedelic desires to manifest a “universality of consciousness” that transcended the physical realm (dery, 1997). one 1986 guide on magical practices by the lincoln order of neuromancers advocates using emerging technologies as a mode of techno-shamanism for scrying and other purposes (skarab et al, 1986). meme magic was embedded in occult ascii art from the mid-1990s in text files, and texts such as the “necromemicon.” by the mid1990s, groups such as (z) cluster, nutmeg, and tiamat created a tapestry of technologically savvy magicians, all sharing a variety of methods. and so, years before the idea of memes (let alone meme magic) had become broadly popularized, kirk packwood’s book, memetic magic (2004) suggests that a magician can use images online to manipulate the “fabric of reality” (pp. 7). in other words, while we might regard meme magic as a new phenomenon it emerged in tandem with the internet. yet, technopaganism was largely built off of pre-digital 20th century occult practices. for instance, meme magic necessarily references 20th century occult artist austin osman spare who innovated an individualistic form of sigil magic. per spare, sigils are built out of abstractions from words or ideas and spread broadly to function subconsciously (spare, 1913). later, spare’s practices were reworked into systems such as brion gysin and william s. burroughs’ “cut-up method” of magic (burroughs, 1982) and through the proliferation of chaos magick in the 1970s and 80s (carroll, 1987). while chaos magick is now often attributed to right-wing forms of esotericism (particularly in light of kek) this trajectory demonstrates that the practices themselves began in apolitical ways and have echoed the shifts of information flows over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. rethinking memes (magically) as we continue to grasp the cultural resonance of memes and the digital culture in our broader contemporary moment, it is worth considering the relationship between memes, the internet, and occult practices. occultists latched on to dawkins’ terminology long before the broader public did, building off the idea that “magic is the science and art of causing change to occur to conformality with will” (carroll, 1987 pp. 7) and that the internal awareness, circulation, and mutation inherent to contemporary memes (shifman, 2014) has a kind of result that believers interpret as inherently magical. the magic wars of the late 2010s was a moment of (re)evolution when esoteric beliefs transferred into broader practices, representing the anxieties and desires about the spread of information and the ineffability of our emerging technologies. references asprem, e. (2020). “the magical theory of politics: memes, magic, and the enchantment of social forces in the american magic war.” nova religio: the journal of alternative and emergent religions, 23(4), 15-42. burroughs, william s. (1982). “the cut-up method of brion gysin.” re/search, 4/5, 3538. carroll, p. (1987). liber null & psychonaut. newburyport: weiser books. crow, j. l. “accessing the astral with a monitor and a mouse: esoteric religion and the astral located in three-dimensional virtual realms.” in e. asprem & k. granholm (eds.) contemporary esotericism. new york: routledge. davis, e. (2015). techgnosis: myth, magic, and mysticism in the age of information. new york: harmony books. davis, e. (2019). high weirdness: drugs, esoterica, and visionary experiences in the seventies. cambridge: mit press. dery, m. (1997). “the inner elf.” in ashley crawford and ray edgar (eds.) transit lounge: an interface book for 21.c. north ryde, n.s.w: craftsman house (92-98). duggan, c. (2014). “perennialism and iconoclasm: chaos magick and the legitimacy of innovation.” in e. asprem & k. granholm (eds.) contemporary esotericism. new york: routledge (91-112). lachman, g. (2018). dark star rising: magick and power in the age of trump. new york: penguin random house. leary, t. (2008). cyberpunks cyberfreedom: change reality screens. berkely: ronin publishing. magliocco, s. (2020). “magical responses to the 2016 presidential election in the united states.” nova religio: the journal of alternative and emergent religions, 23(4), 43-68. packwood, k. (2004). memetic magic. seattle: jaguar temple press. reeds, jim. (1998). “solved: the ciphers in book iii of trithemius’ steganopraphia.” cryptologia, 22(4), 291-317. sconce, j. (1999) haunted media: electronic presence from telegraphy to television. durham: duke university press. shifman, l. (2014) memes in digital culture. cambridge: mit press. skarab, snake, sister apple & bro. moebius b. (1986). apikorsus: an essay on diverse practices of chaos magic. retrieved from http://www.chaosmatrix.org/library/chaos/texts/apik.html spare, a.o. (1913). the book of pleasure. london: cooperative printing society. tuters, m. (2019). “larping & liberal tears: irony, belief, and idiocy in the deep vernacular web. in m. fielitz & n. thurston (eds.) post-digital cultures of the far right. bielefeld: transcript verlag (37-48). selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): leaver, t., mannell, k., duffy, g., bunn, a., ng, r., and zhao, x. (2023, october 19). toward a revolution in australian children’s data and privacy. panel presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. toward a revolution in australian children’s data and privacy tama leaver curtin university kate mannell deakin university gavin duffy deakin university anna bunn curtin university rebecca ng university of wollongong xinyu ‘andy’ zhao deakin university this panel combines four papers which focus in different ways on the question of children’s data and privacy in the australian context. all four are framed with children’s right to privacy as a core concern, consistent with the un convention on the rights of the child as updated via the general comment 25 on child rights in the digital environment. we examine four arenas where children’s data is either extracted or occluded in ways that make it more difficult, if not impossible, for parents, carers and others to make informed choices about the data of very young children. as children begin to articulate their own ideas and privacy preferences, these studies highlight different understandings of privacy, and of trust in both people and technologies. collectively, these papers can be read as arguing that we need nothing less than a revolution in the way children and responsible adults are informed about the way children’s data is generated, captured, stored, and owned, as well as explicitly regulating who can profit from children’s data, in which circumstances, and how transparent these processes must be. the first paper, by kate mannell, ‘where does children’s data go? mapping the data broker industry’, focuses on the way that large data broker companies collect data either about children, or can infer data about children from other datapoints, despite regulation preventing targeted collection of children’s data in australia. the paper examines the broad range of activities brokers undertake, including selling data and also selling ways to target groups, including, for example, parents with young children. while australia is undergoing privacy reform around brokers, this paper warns that likely regulation does not go far enough as it does not restrict inferred data, nor companies selling access to groups rather than just selling the aggregated data itself. in the second paper, ‘data and privacy as a social relation’, gavin duffy focuses on the educational technology (aka edtech) market and examines young children’s understanding of their own data in relation to edtech used in schools. challenging conventional understandings, this paper finds that children see data more in terms of ownership than necessarily being digital. of equal interest, young children tend to trust the use of their data because of trust in teachers, inferring that if a teacher uses edtech, they implicitly endorse any data use around these tools. the third panel paper, ‘developing a holistic framework for analysing privacy policies – a child’s rights and data justice perspective’ by anna bunn, rebecca ng, xinyu ‘andy’ zhao and gavin duffy addresses the fact that in the australian context most existing frameworks and terms of use are not clearly readable to many people and thus this paper offers a framework evaluating four domains – readability, visual analysis, textual analysis and historical analysis – which can produce accessible understandings of existing terms of service. in doing so this framework is explicitly situated with children’s rights and data justice in mind. in the final paper, ‘unboxing data and privacy via young children’s wearables’, tama leaver extends existing walkthrough methods which have focused on apps by adding the dimension of unboxing which highlights the physical packaging and framing of wearable devices marketed as being for very young children. using case studies of the owlet smartsock and nurofen feversmart monitor, this last paper demonstrates a complete absence of any information about children’s data or privacy on these wearables and argues that this lack signals a need for better standards in the packaging of any device which collects children’s data. cumulatively, the four papers that constitute this panel diagnose serious problems in the way that data about children is generated, signaled, legally framed and commercially situated. collectively these papers argue that we need a revolution in the way children’s’ data is managed and that their right to privacy needs to be better protected both in the present and the future since data has no built in expiry dates. at a moment where there is a global appetite for better regulation of big platforms, the same push should encompass better privacy practices and regulation in both australia and across the globe. acknowledgement all papers in this panel, this research was supported by the australian research council centre of excellence for the digital child through project number ce200100022. where does children’s data go? mapping the data broker industry kate mannell deakin university introduction scholars have raised alarm about what the datafication of childhood might mean for children’s rights (lupton and williamson, 2017) and some jurisdictions have begun working toward improved regulations. yet, due to the opaque nature of commercial data practices, little is known about the risks or harms associated with children’s data, or how it is implicated in the political economy of surveillance capitalism (stoilova, nandagiri, and livingstone, 2021). without greater understanding of what happens to personal data beyond the point of collection, arguments about children’s data rights struggle to progress past arguing that the lack of transparency is itself an issue. this paper reports on the early stages of a research project that engages with this problem by examining the australian data broker industry and its interactions with children’s data. it provides analysis of the commercial and regulatory landscape of data brokering in australia, and considers implications for both the theorisation and regulation of children’s data privacy. data brokers data brokers are companies that acquire personal data and sell it, or insights derived from it, to other entities for purposes like marketing, risk assessment, and law enforcement. brokers occasionally collect personal data directly from individuals but more often acquire it through a combination of a) buying or trading data from private companies and government agencies and b) trawling public information such as property records, voter and motor vehicle registrations, court records, and census data. while data brokerage existed well before digital technologies, developments in behavioural data, programmatic advertising, and real time bidding have dramatically expanded the industry. understanding data brokers and their engagement with children’s data is important in part because the industry is a characterised by a high level of ‘privacy asymmetry’ whereby people know little or nothing about companies that are gathering and trading their data. it is also important because of the scale and sensitivity of the data they collect. a report from the us federal trade commission found that one data broker firm had 3000 data segments on nearly every us consumer (federal trade commission, 2014), while in australia, a market segmentation product from the company quantium claims to profile 80% of australian households (manwaring et al., 2021). research has indicated that some companies trade in highly-sensitive information, like mental health conditions (kim, 2023), drug use, or sexual orientation (manwaring et al., 2021). while the actions of data brokers are concerning in general, their practices have specific significance for children given their unique rights (lupton & williamson, 2017), and the unprecedented degree of datafication they will experience across their lifetimes (mascheroni & sibak, 2021). a focus on how children are implicated in data brokerage is also salient given the momentum around reforming data privacy regulations to protect children (lomas, 2021) –– a momentum which extends well beyond the appetite for regulating programmatic advertising more generally. mapping the australian industry and its interest in children and families drawing on an analysis of company websites, media reporting, and trade publications, this paper provides a map of the current australian data brokerage industry. it argues that the industry is characterised by a continuum of practices and business models that range from crude to highly complex and that, across this continuum, there is a clear interest in children and families as key consumer types. at the simple end of the industry are ‘list brokers’ –– companies that trade access to lists of contact details, like phone numbers and email addresses. lists are categorised into consumer types, including many that focus explicitly on parents of young children, or even on children themselves. for example, one company offers a list titled ‘parents with young children’ that includes contact details and demographic information about 312,000 individuals who can be targeted on the basis of their child’s age. the company also offers a list called the ‘national student database’ which purports to contain mobile and email data for children as young as 12 years old. this company, and the many others like it, claim that they do not give clients direct access to these contact details but instead send out communication on clients behalf. the opposing end of the industry is sophisticated multinational analytics firms that offer a wide range of products and services relating to consumer data. for these firms, the most valuable data don’t exist waiting to be excavated, as is the case with phone numbers and email addresses; rather, they are created by applying analytics processes to personal data that has been aggregated from a wide range of sources. these processes generate new information, such as who is most likely to buy specific products within a specific window of time. one example is quantium. while their privacy policy states that they do not “knowingly collect” data about anyone under the age of 13 (quantium, 2021), it is clear from their own marketing materials that families with children are a key consumer market, and that they thus gather and process data that is about children by proxy. it is also clear that their data flows are facilitated by forms of vertical integration and ‘partnerships’ that extend from companies with vast amounts of consumer data, including supermarkets and banks, through to organisations that provide ad tech infrastructure, such as news media. these relationships, together with increasingly automated analytics processes, appear to avoid the need for brokers like quantium to ‘trade’ data in a traditional sense. implications for theory and policy in addition to contributing empirical insights, this work has both theoretical and regulatory implications. scholars have become increasingly focused on conceptualising and theorising models of data privacy that resist the usual focus on individuals, including drawing attention to the need for collective rights for indigenous data sovereignty (rainie et al., 2019). this paper’s examination of data brokers highlights a further example where individual models of privacy are insufficient –– that is, even when data brokers explicitly claim that they do not collect data about children, data that pertains to categories like ‘parents’ or ‘new mothers’ clearly includes children by proxy. additionally, there are both regulatory and theoretical implications that stem from a more precise understanding of brokerage practices. while scholars have argued that policy responses to data brokers need to extend beyond transparency (crain, 2018), this work illustrates that even when regulation attempts to address practices, there are nuances to be considered. for example, in australia where this project is focused, current proposals for privacy reform focus on tightening controls around trading personal data, including a proposal to “prohibit trading in the personal information of children” (attorney-general’s department, 2023). however, arguably neither the list brokers, nor analytics firms, focus their operations around trading personal information – – at least not in the supply of their services –– raising questions about the focus on ‘trading’ in reform efforts and in the conceptualisation and theorisation of contemporary data brokers. references attorney-general’s department (2023). privacy act review report. australian government attorney-general’s department. https://www.ag.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-02/privacy-act-review-report_0.pdf crain, m. (2018). the limits of transparency: data brokers and commodification. new media & society, 20(1), 88-104. federal trade commission (2014) data brokers: a call for transparency and accountability. us federal trade commission. https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/reports/data-brokers-call-transparencyaccountability-report-federal-trade-commission-may-2014/140527databrokerreport.pdf kim, j. (2023) data brokers and the sale of americans’ mental health data: the exchange of our most sensitive data and what it means for personal privacy. duke university cyber policy program https://techpolicy.sanford.duke.edu/wpcontent/uploads/sites/4/2023/02/kim-2023-data-brokers-and-the-sale-of-americansmental-health-data.pdf lomas, n (september, 2021) uk now expects compliance with children’s privacy design code. techcrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/01/uk-now-expects-compliancewith-its-child-privacy-design-code/https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/01/uk-now-expectscompliance-with-its-child-privacy-design-code/ lupton, d., & williamson, b. (2017). the datafied child: the dataveillance of children and implications for their rights. new media & society, 19(5), 780-794. manwaring, k., kemp, k., & nicholls, r. (2021). (mis)informed consent in australia. unsw law research. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3859848https://papers.ssrn.com/s ol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3859848 mascheroni, g., & siibak, a. (2021). datafied childhoods: data practices and imaginaries in children’s lives. peter lang. rainie, s., kukutai, t., walter, m., figueroa-rodríguez, o. l., walker, j., and axelsson, p. (2019) indigenous data sovereignty. in t. davies, s. walker, m. rubinstein, f. perini, (eds.), the state of open data: histories and horizons. african minds and international development research centre. stoilova, m., nandagiri, r., & livingstone, s. (2021). children’s understanding of personal data and privacy online–a systematic evidence mapping. information, communication & society, 24(4), 557-575. quantium (2021) privacy policy. the quantium group. https://quantium.com/wpcontent/uploads/2022/09/privacy-policy-27-july-2021-%e2%80%93-web-version.pdf data and privacy as a social relation gavin duffy deakin university introduction and context the edtech market continues to grow, with a market value of 142 billion usd (grand view research, 2022), dozens of unicorns (sanghvi, & westhoff, 2022), a compound annual growth rate (cagr) of 16.3% in the aftermath of the covid-19 pandemic (holoniq, 2020). perhaps unsurprisingly, parents are becoming increasingly concerned about their children’s privacy, with the un (cannataci, 2021, 12) reporting that ‘85 per cent [of parents] have concerns about their children’s digital privacy’, while a survey in australia reports parental feelings of powerlessness in combatting technological issues (fu et al, 2019). privacy issues are also amongst the top three concerns of young people in australia as well, with regard to their safety online (moody et al, 2021). the concept of data, of course, pre-dates digital technologies. in particular, modes of schooling and education have long been predicated upon collecting, analysing, and utilising data for the purpose of stratifying students and (often) reifying existing hierarchies. this is seen across various critiques of education, whether it is freire’s (1970/2000) critique of the banking model; bourdieu’s (1974) critique of social and cultural capital through schooling, or in the use of schooling as a tool of colonialism (e.g. welch (1988) on australia) and white supremacy (e.g. dubois (1973) on america) in the global north. the function of edtech today does not substantially differ from this stratifying aim, often replicating the same biases (arantes, 2022), with the purported benefit of this technology being that it can do these data processes on a larger and more efficient scale than the more micro-level and more socially-constituted analogue processes of data. methods within my research, i conducted two semi-structured focus groups with primary-aged students, which included a discussion of how the students understood data and their own data practices. focus groups were conducted in the interest of destabilising the traditional research-participant power dynamic found in interviews (wilkinson, 1998), particularly with children (christensen, 2004), with focus groups allowing for greater talk amongst the student participants (as well as the option of silence from individual students). recognising and combatting these power imbalances was a conscious attempt to treat students as ‘competent social actors’ with their own agency, rather than as ‘other’ from the researcher (cutting & peacock, 2021, 2). thus, i discussed data with the student participants, asking them similar question to the adult participants in my research around edtech and its impact on privacy. in doing so, i sought a greater understanding of how those who grow up with edtech learn and think about their own privacy. do so-called ‘digital natives’ see data in a completely different manner than older ‘digital immigrants’ as prensky (2001) claimed? indeed, some of the teachers i interviewed appeared to believe so, suggesting that digital datafication was now simply the default for student as, simply, ‘that’s the society we live in’. findings part 1 contrarily, the conversations i had with students actually reiterated the importance of seeing data as relational and directly interpersonal, rather than a purely digital commodity. the students i spoke with initially discussed data as a type of knowledge with a social value; knowledge which can be given from one person to another but, equally, can be withheld. there are two notable elements to this. the first is that there was no technical element implied; rather, the students positioned the discussion we were having as one such exchange, in which they were ‘the knowledgeable’, while i was the one seeking new information. this initial interpretation of data as something which is not uniquely digital sits in contrast to most contemporary discussions around data and data privacy, where the digital aspect of this issue is more often than not left unsaid. the idea of ‘data’ is one which is generally now conflated with digital technologies but, evident from these students, remained ‘analogue’ as well. secondly, this discussion suggests that students, even at a young age, are aware (at least implicitly) of their ownership over their own data, their ability to share this data with someone else, and perhaps most importantly, their ability to withhold their data should this not consent to its collection. data, in this case, is defined by its ability to be withheld, rather than an assumption of being shared by default. this raises a supplementary question then: do students willingly and knowingly consent to educational apps collecting their data? findings part 2 it was only after i specifically reframed my questions to be about data generated through the apps the students used at school that the discussion of data became one of digital data specifically. this illuminated the second social aspect of data observed in my research: how students understand where, how, and who uses their (digital) data. the students i spoke with conceptualised their data as being used specifically by their teacher, as this is how they had seen their data being used. the students, naturally, had a pre-existing relationship with their teacher, trusted them in general, and so felt no issues with the collection, distribution, and analysis of their data through an app. in contrast, the students did not consider that their data would be used by a private, forprofit company, as they did not have a social connection to the app developers. this suggests that, for younger students at least, educational technologies benefit from the goodwill cultivated by classroom teachers, taking on a meta-social capital which allows edtech to collect student data due to the already established trust between teachers and their students. fundamentally, this may undermine any claims towards informed consent between young students and data-harvesting apps, with the students in my research appearing to only truly give consent for their teachers to access their data. conclusion and contribution i therefore suggest a re-consideration of how we think about data in educational technologies; away from technical terms, returning to a more social conception of data. a social conception of data is one which is potentially less instrumental, less rationalised, and resultantly less easily commodified in comparison to the technical view of data, with its tendency towards a disembodied data doppelganger. not only is this a ‘social’ conception of data which begins with privacy as the default status (rather than an ‘option’ to be tweaked), but it is one which reflects the existing, lived conception of data held by young students. in shifting towards a social idea of data then, the person (and, in this case, the student) is centred, as the originator and owner of data, who can (but is not required to) share this data with those they trust. this stands in contrast to a technical notion of data, which risks assuming data exists only once it is collected by an external, digital force, rather than being the domain of those who are surveilled by digital technologies. bibliography arantes, j. a. (2022). the ‘postdigital teacher identities’ praxis: a discussion paper. postdigital science and education, 4 (2), 447-466. bourdieu, p. (1974). the school as a conservative force: scholastic and cultural inequalities. contemporary research in the sociology of education, 32 (46). cannataci, j. (2021). artificial intelligence and privacy, and children’s privacy. published by: unhrc. available from: https://documents-ddsny.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/g21/015/65/pdf/g2101565.pdf?openelement (accessed 24/02/2023). christensen, p. h. (2004). children's participation in ethnographic research: issues of power and representation. children & society, 18 (2), 165-176. cutting, k., & peacock, s. (2021). making sense of ‘slippages’: re-evaluating ethics for digital research with children and young people. children's geographies, 1-13. dubois, w. e. b. (2001). the education of black people: ten critiques, 1906-1960. monthly review press, new york. freire, p. (1970/2000). pedagogy of the oppressed, 30th anniversary edition. continuum, new york. fu, e., chesters, j., & cuervo, h. (2019). preparing the next generation of australians for uncertain futures. published by: university of melbourne mgse. available from: https://education.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/3027362/27818-yrcmgse-parenting-21st-century-report.pdf (accessed 24/02/2023). grand view research. (2022). education technology market size, share & trends analysis report by sector (preschool, k-12, higher education), by end-user (business, consumer), by type, by deployment, by region, and segment forecasts, 2023 – 2030. available from: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/education technologymarket#:~:text=how%20big%20is%20the%20education,usd%20142.37%20billion%20i n%202023 (accessed 24/02/2023). holoniq. (2020). global edtech market to reach $404b by 2025 16.3% cagr. available from: https://www.holoniq.com/notes/global-education-technology-market-toreach-404b-by-2025 (accessed 24/02/2023). moody, l., marsden, l., nguyen, b., & third, a. (2021). consultations with young people to inform the esafety commissioner’s engagement strategy for young people. published by: western sydney university, young and resilient research centre. available from: https://www.esafety.gov.au/sites/default/files/202201/yrrc%20research%20report%20esafety%202021_web%20v06%20%20publishing_1.pdf (accessed 24/02/2023). prensky, m. (2001). digital natives, digital immigrants part 2: do they really think differently?. on the horizon, 9 (6), 1-6. sanghvi, s. & westhoff, m. (2022). five trends to watch in the edtech industry. published by mckinsey & company. available from: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/education/our-insights/five-trends-to-watch-in-theedtech-industry (accessed 24/02/2023). welch, a. r. (1988). aboriginal education as internal colonialism: the schooling of an indigenous minority in australia. comparative education, 24 (2), 203-215. wilkinson, s. (1998). focus groups in feminist research: power, interaction, and the coconstruction of meaning. women's studies international forum, 21 (1), 111-125. developing a holistic framwork for analysing privacy policies — a child’s rights and data justice perspective anna bunn curtin university rebecca ng university of wollongong xinyu ‘andy’ zhao deakin university gavin duffy deakin university introduction contemporary childhood is frequently digital by default. over the past years, the revolutionary expansion of technology into family homes and educational environments has transformed how and where children’s play, connection and education take place. so far, much discussion and debate has been devoted to the implications of these technological solutions for children’s health, connection, and education (straker et al., 2018; hollis et al., 2020; undheim, 2022). we call for and contribute to a different perspective which emphasizes how this trend has significant implications for children’s privacy and data rights. we point out that the growing adoption of technology across various settings, including education, has created practical challenges for researchers, educators, and families to understand how children’s personal data are collected, used, and shared, as a result of their engagement with digital services. overwhelmingly, australian parents believe that ‘children should have the right to grow up without being profiled and targeted’ and that technology in schools and for education should only ‘collect the minimum personal information necessary for the service’ (oaic, 2020, 94). young people have also advocated for more rules to limit how data of those under 18 is collected and used (australian government, 2022, 146). despite this, a recent report by human rights watch (hrw) identified that 89% of the education technology products they reviewed tracked children across the internet and provided children’s data to third-party companies, usually in the advertising technology sector (hrw, 20220. typically, it is through privacy policies that those outside of the provider organisation gain insights into what personal information the provider collects and holds, how and from whom it is collected, and how it is used. however, privacy policies are often long and complex. they also frequently employ vague language that permits the provider to collect extensive amounts of personal information and use it for a wide variety of purposes, but obscures the provider’s actual practices (reidenberg et al., 2015; australian competition & consumer commission, 2019). unsurprisingly, therefore, australians often fail to engage with privacy policies at all or, where they do engage, fail to understand them (oaic, 2020, p. 69). likewise, academics and researchers are faced with methodological challenges in unpacking the increasingly convoluted privacy policies provided by technology companies. to address this problem, we develop new framework for analysing the privacy policies of online products and services likely to be used by children. this framework is designed to be practical and straightforward for researchers to use, while providing sufficient, relevant indicators that can be used to gain a deeper understanding of privacy policies and the extent to which they, and the data practices they indicate, reflect a child-centric approach to children’s data (protecting children within the digital environment, not from it (information commissioner’s office [ico], 2020). methods and findings we conducted a literature review on studies to identify existing frameworks for evaluating privacy policies and terms of service. this review sought to answer the following questions: 1. what are the key benefits and drawbacks of existing frameworks? this involves answering the following questions, among others: to what extent are they practical and easy to use? to what extent do they allow for a practical and holistic analysis of privacy policies? to what extent do they allow us to assess whether a privacy policy, and the practices it indicates, promotes data justice for children? to what extent are they useful in drawing comparisons between different products/services? 2. what are the primary tensions between privacy policies and the understandings of the average end-users? 3. how can privacy policies be made more relevant to end-users? 4. how can analytical frameworks for privacy policies be made more useful for researchers as well as for end-users? through the review, we identified four domains for evaluation: readability; visual analysis; textual and evaluative analysis; and historical analysis. in practice there is some overlap between them. readability considers the extent to which the privacy policy is accessible, taking into account the age and background of the intended reader or readers. visual analysis considers the ‘look and feel’ of the policy and the extent to which layout, use of diagrams and so on assists to engage the reader and simplify the key messages. textual and evaluative analysis considers how transparent the policy is (e.g. to what extent does it use vague language) and the extent to which it complies with legal requirements (specifically those contained in australia’s federal privacy act (the privacy act 1988 (cth). it also identifies risky practices, as well as language and terms that indicate best practice in the context of children’s rights. finally, historical analysis allows for the comparison of the current privacy policy with previous versions of the same policy, where available, to assess the extent to which practices have changed over time. using a set of indicators across these domains, we then developed a framework for analysing privacy policies from a child’s digital rights perspective, influenced by a data justice approach. a data justice approach examines the ‘fairness in the way people are made visible, represented and treated as a result of their production of digital data’ (taylor 2017, p. 1), specifically addressing groups who are traditionally marginalised in conversations around justice, and is concerned with notions of ethics, autonomy, trust, accountability, governance and citizenship (dencik et al. 2019, apps et al. 2022). we see young children as one such group who have thus far been under-served by the data practices of technology providers, among other organisations. from a child’s rights perspective, data collection of children should be minimised and only used for the provision of a service and in the best interests of the child (ico 2021). adopting a child’s rights perspective to information practices can therefore promote data justice for children. the framework is intended to enable a holistic analysis of privacy policies to identify not only the extent of compliance with australian law, but the extent to which the provider’s policies, and the practices they indicate, promote a child rights approach to data and avoid ‘risky’ practices of most concern to parents and young people (oaic, 2020; australian government, 2022). the framework can be adapted to other legal contexts and enables for the comparison of privacy practices that are indicated in the policy, with those that actually occur (so far as these are discernable). we then tested this framework with different privacy policies and users to settle on the framework described in this paper. contribution various frameworks for analysing privacy policies exist. however, these frequently focus on one or two domains, and/or fail to provide a means to assess privacy policies holistically, and from a child-right’s perspective. they often require subjective assessments to be made, which devalues their utility for comparing products. our framework makes an important contribution by allowing for a practical, objective and holistic assessment of privacy policies that makes visible both risky practices and best practice, from a child right’s perspective. references andrejevic, m. (2019). automating surveillance. surveillance & society, 17(1/2), 7-13. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v17i1/2.12930 apps, t., beckman, k., & howard, s.k. (2022). valuable data? using walkthrough methods to understand the impact of digital reading platforms in australian primary schools. learning, media & technology, 1-16 https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2022.2160458 australian competition & consumer commission. (2019, june). digital platforms inquiry. final report. https://www.accc.gov.au/publications/digital-platforms-inquiryfinal-report australian government, attorney general’s department. (2022). privacy act review. https://www.ag.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-02/privacy-act-review-report_0.pdf dencik, l., hintz, a., redden, j. & treré, e. (2019). exploring data justice: conceptions, applications and directions. information, communication & society, 22 (7), 873-881. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1606268 hollis, c., livingstone, s., & sonuga-barke, e. (2020). editorial: the role of digital technology in children and young people’s mental health – a triple-edged sword? the journal of child psychology and psychiatry, 61(8), 837-841. human rights watch. (2022, may). how dare they peep into my private life? children’s rights violations by governments that endorsed online learning during the covid-19 pandemic. https://www.hrw.org/report/2022/05/25/how-dare-they-peep-my-privatelife/childrens-rights-violations-governments information commissioner’s office. (2020). age appropriate design code: a code of practice for online services. https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-dataprotection/ico-codes-of-practice/age-appropriate-design-a-code-of-practice-for-onlineservices/ office of the australian information commissioner. (2020, september). australian community attitudes to privacy survey 2020. https://www.oaic.gov.au/engage-withus/research/australian-community-attitudes-to-privacy-survey-2020-landing-page/2020australian-community-attitudes-to-privacy-survey reidenberg, j.r., breaux, t., cranor, l.f., french, b., grannis, a., graves, j.t., liu, f., mcdonald, a., norton, t.b., ramanath, r., russell, c.n. sadeh, n., & schaub, f. (2015). disagreeable privacy policies: mismatches between meaning and users’ understanding. berkeley technology law journal, 30, 39-88. safer technologies for schools. (2022, october). safer technologies for schools assessment: supplier guide. https://st4s.edu.au/st4s-vendor-guide/ straker, l., zabatiero, j., danby, s., thorpe, k., & edwards, s. (2018). conflicting guidelines on young children’s screen time and use of digital technology create policy and practice dilemmas. the journal of pediatrics, 202, 300–303. taylor, l. (2017). what is data justice? the case for connecting digital rights and freedoms globally. big data & society, 4(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717736335 un committee on the rights of the child. (2021, march). general comment no. 25 on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment. crc/c/gc/25. undheim, m. (2022). children and teachers engaging together with digital technology in early childhood education and care institutions: a literature review. european early childhood education research journal, 30(3), 472-489. unboxing data and privacy via young children’s wearables tama leaver curtin university introduction wearables, or wearable devices, are an increasingly common part of the adult world from fitbits to smartwatches. in tandem, a growing market exists of wearables aimed at infants and young children. often these devices seemingly offer important health, monitoring or educational benefits. however, signaling about what data is collected, stored, analysed and shared online by these devices is often not obvious to many consumers, including parents. even when these wearable devices are explicitly linked to a companion app which has terms and conditions allowing young children’s data to be harvested, these terms and conditions are rarely read in full, and are deliberately challenging for everyday consumers to easily navigate (obar & oeldorf-hirsch, 2020). in a cultural context where dataveillance is near ubiquitous (van dijck, 2014) and children increasingly have their data captured, collected and analysed in various ways that may create value for commercial entities (mascheroni & siibak, 2021; plunkett, 2019), mapping the way children’s data privacy is situated is vital. this paper explores what messages a parent or other consumer who is considering purchasing an infant wearable can evaluate prior to downloading the companion app itself. importantly, this means a close examination of the sort of packing and boxes devices come in since these are often the first messaging about that device consumers or parents encounter. indeed, these may be the primary messages used to decide whether or not to purchase an infant wearable. this has direct implications when the device itself connects online and often shares personal data about young children and their families and contexts. indeed, as with many material objects, the decision to purchase a device is likely to have already been concretely made before any consideration of a companion app at all, and thus any information about the children’s data is collected, and their privacy, is even further removed from a consumer/parent’s consideration. building on existing ‘walkthrough’ analytical methods (light et al., 2018), this paper offers a methodology for better ‘reading’ infant wearables in terms of the material signals offered by marketing materials, packaging and related promotional displays, highlighting a serious lack of signaling or transparency about how most of these devices collect, store and often own the data of very young children. the paper offers two case studies: the owlet smartsock2 infant wearable; and the nurofen for children feversmart temperature monitor, and offers an unboxing methodology for other related research. method: walkthrough + unboxing the walkthrough method developed by light et al (2018) has become one of the most popular methodological tools within media and communications research for analysing app use. to date there have been over 500 papers using this method, but only 6 of them meaningfully focus on apps relating to physical devices and only one of those specifically examines a wearable device (lyall, 2021). the walkthrough method is powerful as is establishes an apps’ ‘environment of intended use’ by reading a range of signals around apps. in order to adapt this method for wearables, i borrow the forensic scrutiny of the unboxing genre of youtube videos (mowlabocus, 2018) to use the same analytical techniques and breadth, but with the added layer of exploring the physical packaging materials and the initial experience of removing a device and setting it up. these signals generally precede any engagement with a companion app (if there is one) and are especially important around devices aimed at parents of very young children, not least of all as these are a particular anxious and often sleep deprived group of consumers. this process then establishes a device’s environment of expected use. case study 1: the owlet smartsock2 figures 1, 2, 3. unboxing the owlet smart sock 2: packaging images. the owlet smart sock is one of the most established infant wearables available today and has been particularly notable as the developers of it have been explicit in the fact that extracting, aggregating and reusing infant data is part of their business model (leaver, 2017). indeed, in the us in 2021 the developers were forced to stop selling the smart sock for months after the fda found their advertising deceptive (raymond, 2021). in the us the smartsock has been rebranded as something else, but in australia the smartsock is still available for purchase. in unboxing the smartsock 2, detailed photographs and notes were taken in first examining the packaging the device arrives in (see figures 1, 2, 3). marketed like a high end technology product, the packaging emphasized the ease of use, mentioned technical features, and emphasized health benefits. while there was an image pointing out there is a companion app, there was no mention of data or privacy anywhere on the outside packaging, nor inside the package where additional text appeared on the inner panels of the box. while ‘peace of mind’ is mentioned twice, the complete absence of any detail about how an infant’s data will be used, or any information about privacy, is significant in how this product is framed at the point of purchase. case study 2: nurofen for children ‘feversmart’ device figures 4, 5, 6. nurofen feversmart packaging, unboxed, and instruction booklet images. the nurofen feversmart device retail price in australia ranges from $99 to $139 and consists of a wearable temperature monitor that is affixed to an infant under their arm which then relays via bluetooth real-time temperature data to a paired mobile device. when unboxing the device (see figures 4, 5, 6) there were health and medical warnings in the instruction booklet, as well as standard warnings about the included battery, but no explicit mention of data collection or children’s privacy. as with the owlet, small images refer to their being a companion app, but no further information is on the product packaging, instruction booklet, or device itself. the nurofen web page for the product also lacks any specific information about children’s data and privacy. it is not until the companion app is installed that consumers are asked for a range of private data about them and the child being monitored. initial conclusions, next steps in terms of children’s data and privacy, as well as parents/carers ability to make informed decisions about infant data, unboxing both the owlet smartsock and the nurofen feversmart devices highlights the complete lack of information and cues for potential consumers about the way these devices generate, capture and share data about children with the commercial providers that create them. for many consumers, having made a decision to purchase a device often means they are unlikely to have the time or literacy to scrutinize unfriendly and often unreadable legal terms of use when installing a companion app. for children’s current and future rights to privacy to be respected, better privacy signaling is required. at a methodological level, extending the walkthrough method with additional unboxing tools and processes expands the utility of that method which may be of use for other projects that examine wearables and devices. next steps in this research should include developing a prototype signally or rating system for device packaging that could be mandated to better inform consumers, along the lines of star ratings about healthiness on food packaging. references leaver, t. (2017). intimate surveillance: normalizing parental monitoring and mediation of infants online. social media + society, 3(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117707192 light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881–900. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 lyall, b. (2021). ‘build a future champion’: exploring a branded activity-tracking platform for children and parents. media international australia, 1329878x211007167. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x211007167 mascheroni, g., & siibak, a. (2021). datafied childhoods: data practices and imaginaries in children’s lives. peter lang publishing, incorporated. mowlabocus, s. (2018). ‘let’s get this thing open’: the pleasures of unboxing videos. european journal of cultural studies, 1367549418810098. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549418810098 obar, j. a., & oeldorf-hirsch, a. (2020). the biggest lie on the internet: ignoring the privacy policies and terms of service policies of social networking services. information, communication & society, 23(1), 128–147. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2018.1486870 plunkett, l. a. (2019). sharenthood: why we should think before we talk about our kids online. the mit press. raymond, a. (2021, november 24). owlet infant monitoring sock pulled following fda warning. deseret news. https://www.deseret.com/utah/2021/11/24/22801111/owletinfant-monitoring-sock-pulled-following-fda-warning-wearable-baby-monitor-regulation van dijck, j. (2014). datafication, dataism and dataveillance: big data between scientific paradigm and ideology. surveillance & society, 12(2), 197–208. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): garcia-iglesias, j, heaphy b., yodovich. n. (2023, october). an intimate revolution: digital practices of intimacy during covid-19 and beyond. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. an intimate revolution: digital practices of intimacy during covid-19 and beyond jaime garcia-iglesias the university of edinburgh brian heaphy the university of manchester neta yodovich the university of manchester short abstract: this paper investigates the changes in digital practices of intimacy during the covid-19 social distancing period in the uk, and whether these transformations have persisted in the ‘new normal’. the study employed a mixed-methods approach, collecting quantitative and qualitative data from 824 adults who used dating apps during the pandemic, and conducting 60 in-depth interviews. the study aimed to understand the digital intimate practices of heterosexual and lgbt+ communities during and after covid-19. first, we describe (using both descriptive statistics and excerpts from participant interviews) the changes to practices of digital intimacy during covid-19. second, we will explore the distribution of these changes among communities. in particular, we describe the differences between heterosexual and lgbt+ respondents, and between white and ethnic minority respondents. third, we explore how these changes have endured after covid-19. in particular, we will explore how changes to what people look for in their app use endured or returned to ‘pre-covid’ the paper concludes by arguing that dating app's increasing status as health actors, particularly during a pandemic, necessitates more research in this area. this study provides insights into how digital practices of intimacy have transformed during covid19 and whether these transformations have endured in the ‘new normal’. understanding these changes is essential to adequately support people’s emotional and sexual wellbeing during and after a time of crisis. full abstract: this paper explores the changes to digital practices of intimacy experienced during the covid-19 social distancing period in the uk (broadly defined as between march 2020 and july 2021), and examine whether these transformations of intimacy endure in the ‘new normal’. it relies on quantitative and qualitative data from heterosexual and lgbt+ communities. understanding the digital intimate practices of communities during and after covid-19 is essential to adequately support people’s emotional and sexual wellbeing both during a time of crisis (such as covid-19 or mpox) and in its aftermath. covid-19 has become a critical historic moment because of the risk it presents for illness and death, as well as for how it has profoundly disrupted practices and norms of intimacy (broadly understood as couple, family and friendship relationships that that involve a strong sense of emotional and/or physical closeness) (jones 2020; preciado 2020; scott 2020). research has already evidenced that the negative impacts of covid-19 and social distancing have reinforced pre-existing inequalities (bowleg 2020; gonzalez et al. 2021; chang et al. 2021; hawke et al. 2021; solomon et al. 2021). in particular, for many people (especially those living alone, those seeking intimate sexual partners, or those for whom interaction with multiple intimate partners is an established aspect of their lifestyle), covid-19 restrictions have led to a detrimental sense of social isolation with wide ranging and severe implications on mental health (buecker et al. 2020; bu, steptoe, and fancourt 2020; hyndman et al. 2021). research has evidenced that, for some communities, desire for intimacy may have motivated the breaching of covid-19 regulations (hyndman et al. 2021; sonnenberg et al. 2022). covid-19 has developed in a time marked by the transformative possibilities for relating and social connection on the internet, particularly by means of dating apps— which have long been the subject of internet and social scholarship (mowlabocus 2010; race 2015; hobbs, owen, and gerber 2017; wu and ward 2018). however, global dating app use, which was already on the rise before 2020, was reported to have witnessed a steep incline during covid-19, with several apps meeting historic usage records (shaw 2020, the guardian, bbc, ft). although there have been some discussions about the ways in which covid-19 social distancing and the expanded use of dating apps might have led to transformations on practices of intimacy (hakim, young, and cummings 2022; levina 2020; mercer et al. 2021), there remains important lacunas in this area (gibson 2021). this is particularly striking given dating apps growing status as actors with significant impacts on sexual and mental health, particularly so during a pandemic (myles, duguay, and dietzel 2021; huang et al. 2016). this paper reports on the first study of its kind to explore how dating app use during covid-19 transformed practices of intimacy, how these transformations were spread among populations—comparing heterosexual and lgbt+ communities—, and whether these changes have endured after covid-19. this paper relies on a mixed-methods study conducted between january and october 2023 in the uk. the study collected responses to a 125-item survey from 824 adults in the uk who had used a dating app during covid-19 (defined as between march 2020 and june 2021). the survey, among other elements, explored how participants had used dating apps, what the goals for use were, their experiences of them, and their practices of intimacy through them (e.g. meeting people offline, sexting, attending parties) at three points (before, during and after covid-19). the survey was followed up with 60 in-depth semi-structured interviews that narrowed down on changes to intimacy, motivations, and emotions related to apps. participants included a representative sample of the uk population across sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and age. this paper will report on three key findings. first, we will describe (using both descriptive statistics and excerpts from participant interviews) the changes to practices of digital intimacy during covid-19. in particular, we will focus on what users sought from dating apps (e.g. finding a long-term partner, casual sex, friends, networking, etc.), the extent to which these desires were met, and the extent to which app use influenced their practices of meeting members from outside their household face-to-face (e.g. making it easier or helping them navigate covid-19 risk). second, we will explore the distribution of these changes among communities. in particular, we will describe the differences between heterosexual and lgbt+ respondents, and between white and ethnic minority respondents. we argue that the historical higher uptake of dating apps among lgbt+ communities, and the wellestablished existence of racism in digital dating settings impact changes among these groups (chan 2017; zervoulis et al. 2020). third, we will explore how these changes have endured after covid-19. in particular, we will explore how changes to what people look for in their app use endured or returned to ‘pre-covid’. given the long-term transformative impacts of covid-19 in other aspects of daily life (iftekhar et al. 2021), it is unsurprising that practices of intimacy have also changed. however, we will evidence the extent to which change has remained and its spread. finally, we will conclude by arguing that given dating app’s increasing status as health actors in the global north, understanding people’s use of them and their influence during a health crisis is particularly relevant. furthermore, understanding enduring changes to digital intimacy and app use is a pressing need as we are likely to encounter similar times at which dating apps become key instruments for practices of intimacy during health crises, such as the recent mpox outbreak or future global pandemics. understanding people’s needs will make it possible to develop targeted, acceptable, and effective support. references bowleg, lisa. 2020. “we’re not all in this together: on covid-19, intersectionality, and structural inequality.” american journal of public health 110 (7): 917–18. https://doi.org/10.2105/ajph.2020.305766. bu, f., a. steptoe, and d. fancourt. 2020. “who is lonely in lockdown? cross-cohort analyses of predictors of loneliness before and during the covid-19 pandemic.” public health 186 (september): 31–34. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2020.06.036. buecker, susanne, kai t. horstmann, julia krasko, sarah kritzler, sophia terwiel, till kaiser, and maike luhmann. 2020. “changes in daily loneliness for german residents during the first four weeks of the covid-19 pandemic.” social science & medicine 265 (november): 113541. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113541. chan, lik sam. 2017. “who uses dating apps? exploring the relationships among trust, sensation-seeking, smartphone use, and the intent to use dating apps based on the integrative model.” computers in human behavior 72 (july): 246–58. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.02.053. chang, cindy j., brian a. feinstein, brian c. chu, and edward a. selby. 2021. “the negative impact of covid-19 on sexual minority young adults: demographic differences and prospective associations with depression.” psychology of sexual orientation and gender diversity 8 (2): 220–27. https://doi.org/10.1037/sgd0000494. gibson, alexandra farren. 2021. “exploring the impact of covid-19 on mobile dating: critical avenues for research.” social and personality psychology compass 15 (11). https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12643. gonzalez, kirsten a., roberto l. abreu, saumya arora, gabriel m. lockett, and jules sostre. 2021. “‘previous resilience has taught me that i can survive anything:’ lgbtq resilience during the covid-19 pandemic.” psychology of sexual orientation and gender diversity 8 (2): 133–44. https://doi.org/10.1037/sgd0000501. hakim, jamie, ingrid young, and james cummings. 2022. “sex in the time of coronavirus: queer men negotiating biosexual citizenship during the covid-19 pandemic.” continuum 36 (2): 289–301. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2021.1992350. hawke, lisa d., em hayes, karleigh darnay, and joanna henderson. 2021. “mental health among transgender and gender diverse youth: an exploration of effects during the covid-19 pandemic.” psychology of sexual orientation and gender diversity 8 (2): 180–87. https://doi.org/10.1037/sgd0000467. hobbs, mitchell, stephen owen, and livia gerber. 2017. “liquid love? dating apps, sex, relationships and the digital transformation of intimacy.” journal of sociology 53 (2): 271–84. https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783316662718. huang, evelyn tzu-yen, henrietta williams, jane s hocking, and megan sc lim. 2016. “safe sex messages within dating and entertainment smartphone apps: a review.” jmir mhealth and uhealth 4 (4): e124. https://doi.org/10.2196/mhealth.5760. hyndman, iain, diarmuid nugent, gary george whitlock, alan mcowan, and nicolò girometti. 2021. “covid-19 restrictions and changing sexual behaviours in hivnegative msm at high risk of hiv infection in london, uk.” sexually transmitted infections 97 (7): 521–24. https://doi.org/10.1136/sextrans-2020-054768. iftekhar, emil nafis, viola priesemann, rudi balling, simon bauer, philippe beutels, andré calero valdez, sarah cuschieri, et al. 2021. “a look into the future of the covid-19 pandemic in europe: an expert consultation.” the lancet regional health europe 8 (september): 100185. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lanepe.2021.100185. jones, david s. 2020. “history in a crisis — lessons for covid-19.” new england journal of medicine 382 (18): 1681–83. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmp2004361. levina, marina. 2020. “queering intimacy, six feet apart.” qed: a journal in glbtq worldmaking 7 (3): 195–200. https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.7.3.0195. mercer, catherine h, soazig clifton, julie riddell, clare tanton, lily freeman, andrew j copas, emily dema, et al. 2021. “impacts of covid-19 on sexual behaviour in britain: findings from a large, quasi-representative survey (natsal-covid).” sexually transmitted infections, december, sextrans-2021-055210. https://doi.org/10.1136/sextrans-2021-055210. mowlabocus, sharif. 2010. gaydar culture: gay men, technology and embodiment in the digital age. farnham: ashgate. https://doi.org/10.1177/0094306112462562m. myles, david, stefanie duguay, and christopher dietzel. 2021. “dating apps as digital health technologies during the covid-19 pandemic.” in the covid-19 crisis, edited by deborah lupton and karen willis. abingdon, oxon ; new york, ny : routledge, 2021.: routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003111344. preciado, paul b. 2020. “the losers conspiracy.” artforum. https://www.artforum.com/slant/the-losers-conspiracy-82586. race, kane. 2015. “‘party and play’: online hook-up devices and the emergence of pnp practices among gay men.” sexualities 18 (3): 253–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460714550913. scott, j. blake. 2020. “how can we (have) queer sex in a pandemic?” qed 7 (3): 185–94. https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.7.3.0185. solomon, david t., kasey e. morey, camron j. williams, cathy l. grist, and l. alvin malesky. 2021. “covid-19 health behaviors in a sexual minority sample: the impact of internalized stigma.” psychology of sexual orientation and gender diversity 8 (2): 159–71. https://doi.org/10.1037/sgd0000466. sonnenberg, pam, dee menezes, lily freeman, karen j maxwell, david reid, soazig clifton, clare tanton, et al. 2022. “intimate physical contact between people from different households during the covid-19 pandemic: a mixed-methods study from a large, quasi-representative survey (natsal-covid).” bmj open 12 (2): e055284. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2021-055284. wu, shangwei, and janelle ward. 2018. “the mediation of gay men’s lives: a review on gay dating app studies.” sociology compass 12 (2): e12560. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12560. zervoulis, karyofyllis, david s. smith, rhiannon reed, and sokratis dinos. 2020. “use of ‘gay dating apps’ and its relationship with individual well-being and sense of community in men who have sex with men.” psychology & sexuality 11 (1–2): 88– 102. https://doi.org/10.1080/19419899.2019.1684354. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): stegeman, h.m., are, c. & poell, t. (2023, october). strategic (in)visibility: how marginalised creators navigate the risks and constraints of online visibility. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. strategic (in)visibility: how marginalised creators navigate the risks and constraints of online visibility hanne m. stegeman university of amsterdam carolina are northumbria university thomas poell university of amsterdam online creators need their content to be ‘seen’; visibility on platforms can provide financial, social, and representational benefits (poell et al., 2021). the creator economy relies on ‘popularity metrics’, such as likes, shares, comments, views, and subscriptions to prove and monetize a creator’s success (glatt, 2022; garcía-rapp, 2017). a lot of vital research has been done on how creators try to enhance their visibility on platforms and struggle with the threat of invisibility, finding that creators have to engage in ‘visibility games’ (cotter, 2019), share ‘algorithmic gossip’ about the best techniques to game the algorithm (bishop, 2019), develop folk theories to get more views (glatt, 2022), and skirt moderation practices (myers west, 2018) in order to thrive in their field. still, especially for marginalised creators, platformised visibility is not without its costs: harassment, threats, and stigmatisation (banet-weiser & miltner, 2016), risks of deplatforming and related loss of income (are & briggs, 2023) are commonplace for these workers. being visible does not equal being safe either from platforms or from fellow users (myers west, 2018). online and offline hegemonic norms have also simultaneously invisibilized and hypervisibilized marginalised groups. previous research has demonstrated how opportunities and harms are institutionalised and distributed through platform algorithms and moderation practices (e.g., cotter, 2019; southerton et al., 2020). for instance, celebrity users are not just afforded more protection, but also more wiggle room in relation to platform rules (are & paasonen, 2021; oversight board, 2022). clearly, therefore, harms can be perpetrated by both users and platform processes and infrastructures (schoenebeck & blackwell, 2021). in light of these concerns, this paper examines how marginalised creators manage (in)visibility across platforms. hegemonic standards, platforms, and visibility pursuing this line of inquiry, we build on a rich literature on how hegemonic standards render the identities, bodies and representations of marginalised groups simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible. levels of visibility set apart socially marginalised groups as ‘other’ in contrast to a norm, e.g.: black people are simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible as diverging from a normative whiteness (fanon, 1967, pp. 115–116), and fat people receive intense social scrutiny while also being marginalised through their erasure from mainstream discourse and opportunities (gailey, 2014, p. 7). dominant norms and identities are positively invisibilized through ‘universal’ acceptance, but deviation from these norms is simultaneously marked and erased for its ‘difference’. online such social structures not only persist, but are further institutionalised through platform affordances. ranking algorithms have, for example, made black women at once hypervisible as sexually available, while rendering their actual interests and representations invisible (noble, 2013, p. 5). on social media, algorithmic recommendation systems render fat bodies invisible, or overexpose fat people to hate (cotter, 2022). platform moderation practices limit the representations of minority sexualities, precisely by a hyper-focus on femme, queer, sex working, disabled and fat bodies (are, 2020; coombes et al., 2022; southerton et al., 2020). online sex workers are banned from platforms, yet also subjected to intense online surveillance (blunt & wolf, 2020, p. 121; sanders et al., 2018, p. 109). as such, platform design and decisions reinforce hegemonic standards. the hyper/invisibility of marginalised groups, through for instance algorithmic recommendation and moderation systems has been platformised. faced with dangers of overexposure, surveillance, and deplatforming while simultaneously trying to build an audience, creators may find themselves having to constantly balance the potential risks and benefits of platform visibility. examining this balancing act, this paper addresses the following research questions: what are the tactics creators employ to limit their visibility and its associated risks? how do they minimise the harms that come with their hypervisibility as marginalised creators? methodology drawing on 27 interviews with creators – online sex workers, lgbtq+ activists, sex educators – we outline the harms of hypervisibility and users’ tactics for strategic invisibility. more specifically, the analysis builds on a set of 15 in-depth interviews with european adult webcam performers and 12 interviews with content creators posting sex work, lgbtq+ expression, journalism, activism, and sex education. these sets of interviews originate from two projects with different foci: 1) webcam performers’ online working environments, and 2) potential links between networked harassment and deplatforming. using thematic analysis, we identified and 2tigmatizat how the interviewed creators manage visibility (braun & clarke, 2006). in combination, this analysis provides a comprehensive perspective on how a wide range of 2tigmatizati creators navigate risks of hypervisibility and 3tigmatization, while simultaneously trying to remain visible and make a living. by understanding online sex workers as creators and sexual content as cultural content, we explicitly aim to broaden the notion of the creator. treating online sex workers as distinct would be to perpetuate their 3tigmatization and sex exceptionalism (nayar, 2021). instead, the aim is to promote networks of solidarity across the wide variety of often precarious, platform-based content creators. risks and strategies of (in)visibility three key themes emerged from our interviews. first, in addition to the extensively discussed risks of creator invisibility (e.g., duffy & meisner, 2022), we found that hypervisibility can also pose a substantial risk to marginalised creators. the interviewees describe the harassment, stigmatisation, surveillance, and prosecution their (hyper)visibility at times brings along. hence, platform visibility needs to be understood as ambiguous. second, the interviewed creators outline tactics for critically managing their platform visibility. within platform constraints, they add risk management techniques to their ‘visibility games’ (cotter, 2019). they ignore or counter harassment, circumvent surveillance, and manage stigma. as marginalised creators they are often aware of the heightened scrutiny they face from platforms and audiences. pre-emptive risk management techniques help alleviate some of the burden of hypervisibility. third, creators at times also lean into invisibility. our interviewees tactically attempt to keep elements of their personalities, personal lives, spaces, and embodiments invisible for a variety of reasons. some creators explain how, contrary to logics of growth, they do not try to maximise their audience reach, but rather focus on the quality of their audience. taken together, our analysis suggests that we need to broaden the inquiry into regimes of visibility in the creator economy. the challenge is not just to gain insight into how creators maximise visibility, but also into how they seek particular types of visibility, as well as strategic invisibility references are, c. & briggs, p. (2023). the emotional and financial impact of de-platforming on creators at the margins. social media + society. https://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/51249/ are, c., & paasonen, s. (2021). sex in the shadows of celebrity. porn studies, 8(4), 411–419. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2021.1974311 are, c. (2020). how instagram’s algorithm is censoring women and vulnerable users but helping online abusers. feminist media studies, 20(5), 741–744. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2020.1783805 https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2021.1974311 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2020.1783805 banet-weiser, s., & miltner, k. m. (2016). #masculinitysofragile: culture, structure, and networked misogyny. feminist media studies, 16(1), 171–174. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1120490 bishop, s. (2019). ‘managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip.’ new media & society, 21(11-12), 2589-2606. blunt, d., & wolf, a. (2020). erased: the impact of fosta-sesta and the removal of backpage on sex workers. anti-trafficking review, 14. https://doi.org/10.14197/atr.201220148 braun, v., & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa coombes, e., wolf, a., blunt, d., & sparks, k. (2022). disabled sex workers’ fightfor digital rights, platform accessibility, and design justice. disability studies quarterly, 42(2). https://dsq-sds.org/index.php/dsq/article/view/9097/7727 cotter, k. (2019). playing the visibility game: how digital influencers and algorithms negotiate influence on instagram. new media & society, 21(4), 895–913. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818815684 cotter, k. (2022, november). navigating algorithmically mediated hyper(in)visibility in the body positivity movement. aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers, dublin, ireland. http://spir.aoir.org duffy, b. e., & meisner, c. (2022). platform governance at the margins: social media creators’ experiences with algorithmic (in)visibility. media, culture & society, 01634437221111923. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221111923 fanon, f. (1967). black skin, white masks (c. l. markmann, trans.). grove press, inc. https://bac-lac.on.worldcat.org/oclc/757057974 gailey, j. (2014). the hyper(in)visible fat woman: weight and gender discourse in contemporary society. springer. garcía-rapp, f. (2017). popularity markers on youtube’s attention economy: the case of bubzbeauty.’ celebrity studies, 8(2), 228-245. 10.1080/19392397.2016.1242430. glatt, z. (2022). precarity, discrimination and (in)visibility: an ethnography of “the algorithm” in the youtube influencer industry. in the routledge companion to media anthropology. routledge. myers west, s. (2018). censored, suspended, shadowbanned: user interpretations of content moderation on social media platforms. new media & society, 20(11), 4366– 4383. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818773059 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://dsq-sds.org/index.php/dsq/article/view/9097/7727 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk nayar, k. i. (2021). liquid assets: camming and cashing in on desire in the digital age. in the gig economy. routledge. noble, s. u. (2013). google search: hyper-visibility as a means of rendering black women and girls invisible. invisible culture, 19. https://doi.org/10.47761/494a02f6.50883fff oversight board. (2022) oversight board publishes policy advisory opinion on meta's cross check programme. oversight board news. https://oversightboard.com/news/501654971916288-oversight-board-publishes-policyadvisory-opinion-on-meta-s-cross-check-program/. poell, t., nieborg, d. b., & duffy, b. e. (2021). platforms and cultural production. polity. sanders, t., scoular, j., campbell, r., pitcher, j., & cunningham, s. (2018). internet sex work: beyond the gaze. springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65630-4_3 schoenebeck, s. and blackwell, l. (2021). reimagining social media governance: harm, accountability, and repair. yale journal of law and technology, 23, 113-152. southerton, c., marshall, d., aggleton, p., rasmussen, m. l., & cover, r. (2020). restricted modes: social media, content classification and lgbtq sexual citizenship. new media & society, 1461444820904362. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820904362 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://oversightboard.com/news/501654971916288-oversight-board-publishes-policy-advisory-opinion-on-meta-s-cross-check-program/ https://oversightboard.com/news/501654971916288-oversight-board-publishes-policy-advisory-opinion-on-meta-s-cross-check-program/ https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?iey3hk selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): diesen, p.s. (2024, october). fatherhood on dating apps – a norwegian twist. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. fatherhood on dating apps: a norwegian twist plata s. diesen kristiania university college introduction research on dating app usage is expanding, with a growing consensus that these platforms have largely replaced the traditional matchmaking roles of family and friends (bandinelli & gandini, 2022; pettersen & karlsen, 2023; wu & trottier, 2022). scholars suggest that disrupted love is increasingly a characteristic of romantic relationships in contemporary western societies (bauman, 2013; illouz, 2019), and i posit that mid-life single parents exemplify this social shift. yet, this substantial minority has received little to no research attention. the heterosexual male perspective has also been disproportionately understudied, even though popular apps like tinder have a predominantly male user base (businessofapps, 2023). furthermore, while existing studies largely focus on young adults (dwyer et al., 2021; konings et al., 2022), older age groups are increasingly engaging with apps like tinder (businessofapps, 2023). in this paper, i aim to address the following question: how do single dads in mid-life present themselves as parents on dating apps in norway? my aim is to contribute to two key areas within the academic discourse. first, i focus on impression management in dating app research, drawing on goffman’s (1959) self-presentation theory to examine how individuals manage the impressions they convey by adapting their behaviors and appearances. this analysis builds upon existing studies that show how dating app users aim to present an ideal yet authentic self (degen & kleeberg-niepage, 2021; ward, 2019). however, to understand these idealized selfpresentations, it requires an awareness of the relevant cultural context, leading to the second key area. culture, often defined as “the beliefs, behaviors, customs, and values that characterize a particular social group” (lansford, 2022, p. 467), is dynamic and evolves over time. while parenting practices share similarities across cultures, variations emerge from differences in physical environments and social expectations (lansford, 2022). in norway, single parenthood is common, with approximately 30% 2 of children experiencing parental separation before age 17 (statistics norway, 2023). in alignment with neighboring sweden, fathers are actively encouraged to pursue equal involvement in child care responsibilities on a structural and political level (graf & wojnicka, 2023), with 50/50 shared custody being widely supported as the ideal after parental separation. nevertheless, equally shared custody remains correlated with good economy, higher education, employment, good health, and low level of conflict (statistics norway, 2022). when assessing single fathers’ parental presentations on dating apps, it is essential to consider this context. methods to investigate the research question, i adopted a multimethodological approach, involving interviews, dating profile analysis, netnography, and ethnography. the norwegian ethical board (sikt) approved the project in june 2023, emphasizing the need to safe–guard the non-consenting third parties, such as children and expartners—a crucial reminder given the study's sensitive nature. this approach not only provides insights into single fathers who use dating apps, but also the complexities of conducting research in this domain. twelve single fathers aged 39–52, who were using or had recently used dating apps, participated in semi-structured interviews. geographically, three lived in oslo, five in smaller cities, and four in rural areas across norway. custody arrangements varied, as two fathers had full custody, six had 50% custody, three had 30% custody, and one had flexible arrangements. through nethographic research methods (kozinets, 2020), i examined presentations and interactions related to dating and parenthood on tinder and happn over seven months in 2023. being a single mother and dating app user myself, i found a unique access point to investigate this demographic. i used my personal profile, supplemented with academic and project credentials when i observed, interacted, and chatted with single fathers. i informed about the project in an early chat stage. the netnographic study intertwined with offline ethnography, as i met with some of the men on dates, although most dates evolved into interview–like encounters rather than romantic dates, with men eager to share their perspectives. the men had diverse backgrounds and were generally well-educated. additionally, i analyzed dating app self-presentations from 100 men who mentioned having children. using a reset profile with minimal preferences (age 35–55), the sample had a mean age of 46. geographically, 37 participants lived in oslo, 23 in smaller cities, and 40 in rural areas, excluding the northernmost parts of norway. educational backgrounds ranged from below high school to phd. some profiles included images of children, but due to ethical considerations, pictures were excluded from analysis. instead, i focused on textual (bios) and hypertextual (tags) elements, an unconventional yet valuable approach for dating app self-presentation research. preliminary results in the interviews, the men emphasized the significance of disclosing their roles as fathers on their dating profiles, and findings from the netnography and ethnography support this. the disclosure served multiple purposes: it declared their identity as 3 fathers, highlighted their life priorities, and simplified the logistic demands of single parenthood. it was also perceived to “look good” when they were searching for women in similar situations. information about their children was aimed to find combability, ideally seeking someone with children of similar ages, recognizing it as a particular life stage. equal custody (50/50) was considered a promise of stability, accountability, trustworthiness, and low conflict with the co-parent. those with less than 50% custody chose not to disclose this information in their profiles, perceiving it as an undesirable trait. some expressed feelings of shame due to their lesser parenting time. specifying odd– or even numbered weeks was a logistical necessity, because dating offline was an activity reserved for when their children were with the other parent. the use of hypertextual tags were considered highly important, shaping both self-presentation and partner selection. for some men, mismatching tags outweighed appealing photos, especially for those uninterested in having more children. on dating app profiles, men disclosed details about their fatherhood in various ways, often making it their focal point beside name, age, and profession. in their bios, written texts could include number and ages of their children, and information about custody arrangements, such as odd or even numbered week schedules and/or a 50/50 custody share. they could also use emojis, primarily 👪, 👪, 👪, 👪, 👪, or 👧, 👦, 💙, � (number of emojis matching number of boys or girls), occasionally followed by “50%” (i.e., equal custody share). some also indicated that they did not desire more children with a ✂, meaning vasectomy. alternatively, pre-made tags provided by the apps, such as “i have children and want more”, “i have children and don’t want more”, and other variations, were used to disclose their aspirations for the future. those elaborating further primarily did so in two discursive categories: activityfocused, highlighting their enjoyment of active leisure with their children, or prioritydriven, announcing their dedication, commonly stating they were “100 % dads 50 % of the time”. conclusion mid-life single dads on dating apps in norway highlighted fatherhood prominently on their profiles. they shared custody details, parenting schedules, and aspirations by using emojis, text, and tags. their self–disclosure emphasized identity, priorities, and compatibility, seeking partners in similar life stages, with logistical alignment shaping partner selection. such disclosures reflect the interplay between cultural expectations of parenting, personal identity, practical constraints, and strategic self-presentation in digital dating contexts. references bandinelli, c., & gandini, a. (2022). dating apps: the uncertainty of marketised love. cultural sociology, 16(3), 423-441. bauman, z. (2013). liquid love: on the frailty of human bonds. john wiley & sons. businessofapps. (2023). tinder revenue and usage statistics (2023). soko media. retrieved 10.12. from https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tinder-statistics/ degen, j. l., & kleeberg-niepage, a. (2021). profiling the self in mobile online dating apps: a serial picture analysis. human arenas, 1-25. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tinder-statistics/ 4 dwyer, z., hookway, n., & robards, b. (2021). navigating ‘thin’dating markets: midlife repartnering in the era of dating apps and websites. journal of sociology, 57(3), 647-663. goffman, e. (1959). the presentation of self in everyday life. anchor books edition. garden city, n.y. : doubleday, 1959. https://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/999467804702121 graf, t. e., & wojnicka, k. (2023). post-separation fatherhood narratives in germany and sweden: between caring and protective masculinities. journal of family studies, 29(3), 1022-1042. https://doi.org/10.1080/13229400.2021.2020148 illouz, e. (2019). the end of love: a sociology of negative relations. oxford university press. konings, f., sumter, s. r., vranken, i., dredge, r., & vandenbosch, l. (2022). behind the screens: a systematic literature review of quantitative research on mobile dating. archives of sexual behavior, 51(6), 2969-3020. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-022-02312-9 kozinets, r. (2020). netnography the essential guide to qualitative social media research. sage publications ltd. lansford, j. e. (2022). annual research review: cross-cultural similarities and differences in parenting. journal of child psychology and psychiatry, 63(4), 466-479. pettersen, l., & karlsen, f. (2023). strategic communication in digital ecosystems: a critical. strategic communication–contemporary perspectives, 6115. statistics norway. (2022). delt bosted for barn etter samlivsbrudd. nye utviklingstrekk og kjennetegn. (shared custody for children after divorce. new developmental features). retrieved may from https://www.ssb.no/befolkning/barn-familier-og-husholdninger/artikler/deltbosted-for-barn-etter-samlivsbrudd.nye-utviklingstrekk-og-kjennetegn statistics norway. (2023). familier og husholdninger (families and households). https://www.ssb.no/statbank/table/06204 ward, j. (2019). dating app autoethnography: presenting myself as a researcher and user. the qualitative report, 24(1), 130-144. wu, s., & trottier, d. (2022). dating apps: a literature review. annals of the international communication association, 46(2), 91-115. https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.2022.2069046 https://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/999467804702121 https://doi.org/10.1080/13229400.2021.2020148 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-022-02312-9 https://www.ssb.no/befolkning/barn-familier-og-husholdninger/artikler/delt-bosted-for-barn-etter-samlivsbrudd.nye-utviklingstrekk-og-kjennetegn https://www.ssb.no/befolkning/barn-familier-og-husholdninger/artikler/delt-bosted-for-barn-etter-samlivsbrudd.nye-utviklingstrekk-og-kjennetegn https://www.ssb.no/statbank/table/06204 https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.2022.2069046 please update your browser your browser isn’t supported anymore. update it to get the best youtube experience and our latest features. learn more mozilla firefox google chrome opera microsoft edge safari remind me later about copyright contact us terms privacy policy & safety © 2025 google llc selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): prá, r., antonello, c. (2022, november). protest movements on linkedin as space for challenging sociotechnical imaginaries. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. protest movements on linkedin as space for challenging sociotechnical imaginaries raquel prá federal university of rio grande do sul claudia simone antonello federal university of rio grande do sul introduction this paper aims to reflect on how the transformation of linkedin into an online environment from which are carried out critiques and questionings about the labor market, management practices, and work relations in brazil, allows to challenge of sociotechnical imaginaries (silva, 2020) about the relationship with the platform. linkedin was launched in 2003 as a recruiting platform for job seekers and companies looking for professionals. with the dissemination of content production practices, users from different professional areas, have begun to problematize, inside and outside the platform, ready-made formulas and posts with "fictitious" and "romanticized" narratives, enunciated by coaches, ceos, entrepreneurs, and gurus present in the corporate social network. the emergence of protest movements, posts aimed at criticizing circulating content (hine, 2015) on the platform, reveals that, although certain technological configurations impose themselves on users, digital platforms such as linkedin are not unique, universal, or deterministic. they are multiple and can have their ontological and epistemological assumptions questioned by different cosmotechniques (hui, 2020). the article framework is in the ontological turn movement, proposed by authors such as hui (2020) and latour (2019), by addressing technology as one of the component elements of human existence. according to this approach, humans constitute technologies, and these, in turn, act as mediators in the human relationship with the world, participating in the definition of realities and subjectivities. technologies are not neutral but configured in specific socio-historical and ideological contexts. as well as sociotechnical imaginaries, references or lenses for interpreting actions and thinking about the present and future relationships between humans and technologies (silva, 2020), like what linkedin is for and how it can be used. in this sense, we can produce new technological futures (hui, 2020) from established relationships and the development of new technologies. following this approach, this article addresses the protest movements on linkedin as a starting point for challenging pre-existing sociotechnical imaginaries about the platform, to boost societal change and new technological futures. according to hui (2020), the ontological turn movement must further address the technical issue as a dimension of human existence and be capable of establishing global collaboration. methodological framework to capture and describe movements tensioning the use of linkedin, beyond an online resume and venue for celebrating accomplishments and skills and therefore, the repositioning of users with the technology, the methodological strategy adopted to conduct this study was digital ethnography. according to hine (2015), it consists of adapting the traditional ethnographic method, characterized by employing strategies such as prolonged field observations and indepth interviews to understand cultures, local practices, and representations, to the online environment. according to this approach, the internet does not have transcendental effects and therefore, has to be studied in situated practices, specific everyday engagements, and emerging circumstances from the researcher's immersion in the field (hine, 2015). since digital ethnography is about following connections that are not circumscribed to a specific locality, the study was conducted from news reports on linkedin and observations of posts and discussions on linkedin and among members of a blog and a facebook group, both of which are brazilian and gathered to conduct critiques of the content circulating on linkedin. data collection took place between march 2021 and february 2022 by recording data in a field diary. for confidentiality reasons, this paper will not disclose the names of the persons, the blog, and the group. data presented in the article are part of ongoing research. the following categories arose from the collected data: (1) criticisms addressed to the platform and (2) criticisms addressed to circulating content and users. these remarks provided input to identifying alternatives and suggestions for changing linkedin itself, the labor market, management practices, and work relations. main findings preliminary findings suggest that users are objecting to the content circulating on linkedin more frequently. they tend to question the purpose of interlocutors and the veracity of the content disclosed. at first, the platform itself seems to be the target of criticism. however, most users question the use that is made of linkedin. such as the transformation of any event into a great learning experience, the exaltation of precarious situations or the fulfillment of basic workers' rights, the concealment of real motives and feelings associated with layoffs, and the repetition of clearly plagiarized stories as if they were personal experiences. the fact that users have to use their real names to join and make comments on linkedin is one of the factors that lead to the embarrassment of protesting attitudes. users who understand they depend on the platform for job search and that recruiters monitor online actions on linkedin for recruiting decisions, avoid expressing their opinions freely, using the private facebook groups as a space to make their criticisms. in these groups, there are sometimes incentives for users to report or comment on posts that refer to work-related discrimination or abuse, to support victims and expose offenders. some users question the circulating content from linkedin itself. they use the platform, its algorithms, and its connections strategically, to raise awareness, and expose and question inappropriate work situations. such as those that make workers prone to psychic illness and that refer to the precarization of work relations. generally, these users consider themselves to be in a privileged and somewhat protected position to express their opinions freely. therefore, they assume the role of agents of complaint and/or change. implications preliminary findings of the research suggest that the blog and the private group for discussion of the content circulating on linkedin, both present on facebook, act as a space of catharsis and mental health support for its members, bringing them together around their criticism, victim support, and offender exposure. the movement of questioning from the platform itself, in particular, seeks to appropriate the technological affordances and constraints imposed by linkedin to make it a space for awareness, problematization, and promotion of societal change. protest movements are broad and not restricted to a specific professional segment. by establishing new uses for the platform, unrelated to the commercial objectives for which it was created, these movements give conditions for the constitution of new sociotechnical imaginaries about the platform itself, beyond an online resume and venue for celebrating accomplishments and skills and also, to rethink work relations. references hine, c. (2015). ethnography for the internet: embedded, embodied and every day. london: bloomsbury academic. hui, y. (2020). tecnodiversidade. são paulo: ubu editora. latour, b. (2019). investigação sobre os modos de existência: uma antropologia dos modernos. petrópolis: vozes. silva, t. (2020). por outros imaginários sociotécnicos no novo normal. revista observatório itaú cultural, 28, pp.37-41. defending human rights in the era of datafication selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 normark, m., hansson, k., jacobsson, m. (2023, october). defending human rights in the era of datafication. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. defending human rights in the era of datafication maria normark department of informatics and media, uppsala university, sweden karin hansson school of natural science, technology and environmental studies, södertörn university, sweden mattias jacobsson school of natural science, technology and environmental studies, södertörn university, sweden introduction while extant scholarship has yielded a nuanced picture of how people have used information and communication technologies (icts) on civic participation, less is known about why ngos have appropriated and maneuvered some technologies but not others for communication and organization, against different contexts. especially when it comes to the opportunity to deploying data gathering tools and engaging in public discussion, non-profit organizations (ngos) and activist groups for example increasingly base their campaigns on data (baack 2015; briones rojas 2021). a growing field of research in this area is now developing, describing the infrastructural arrangement in diverse environments, for example the umbrella movement in hong kong (liu 2021), #blacklivesmatter in the usa (grill 2021), and climate activists in brazil (skill et al. 2021a). this paper presents findings from a study of activists and human rights defenders and how they try to manage the infrastructure of digital data (baack 2015). in this work, data can be a resource in activism and valuable in the organization of campaigns. however, data and lack of data also mean great difficulties in everyday life for people in vulnerable positions, for example, in contact with government agencies, schools, and healthcare (liu 2021). our analysis stems from interview data from four kinds of human rights activism. these include volunteers and employees from various ngos focusing on refugees/migrants, homelessness and poverty, women’s shelters, and sexual minorities. the study was done in sweden, where the gdpr (general data protection regulation) laws limit the handling and storage of personal data. social movements and human rights defenders previous research shows how political participation changes character through the ease with which technology can provide direct involvement in social movements (milan 2017). research in this area has primarily focused on the possibilities that digitalization brings with it, especially in acute crisis and disaster situations (almohamed et al. 2022; auferbauer and tellioǧlu 2017; blanford et al. 2014; haak et al. 2018; jensen et al. 2020; lambton-howard et al. 2019). however, research also shows that datafication creates new sorts of risks for democratic engagement: the risk of relying on a technology that is also a means of surveillance (liu 2021; michaelsen 2017; pickard and yang 2017; uldam 2018).; the risk of relying on a crowd of participants you might never meet face to face (klang and madison 2016); and the risk of disinformation, especially in relation to the unreliability of user-generated data (bradshaw and howard 2017; pickard and yang 2017). the consequences are the increased threats to human rights defenders' work in many countries, which is why the actual datafication can be central to the threat against activists and the people they defend. previous research also shows how social movements counteract the threat of surveillance, especially when it comes to activism in repressive regimes (see for example liu 2021; skill et al. 2021b) however, less research is done on how ngos and activist groups handle the risks, not only of being surveilled, but also of “surveilling” their members by using more data intensive methods as part of their communication. human rights activists are also confronted with the problems their protégés deal with as the society becomes increasingly digital. digitization is today a central infrastructure in society that people with protection needs need to relate to in a special way where potential risks need to be understood and managed (clark and albris 2020). a number of different types of everyday data transactions, in the form of documentation in registers and systems, geographical position data, digital financial transactions, to internal communications within human rights groups, can pose a risk to those in need of protection (steinbrink et al. 2021). in addition to this, these persons have a great need for information that is reliable and accurate as well as the opportunity to communicate with loved ones (haynes 2016). human rights groups therefore need to consider alternative data practices to be able to support people who, for various reasons, need to avoid being exposed in digital contexts. empirical studies of concrete digital practices in this area are scarce and few why this study can contribute with central new knowledge. today, we have data laws that protect the individual, rules that also have implications for how human rights organizations can operate and engage their members. while digitalization makes it easier to organize civil society, these much-needed data laws also impede organization. this dilemma between human rights in an online context and the government or state interference is currently an active research area in europe, both in terms of applicable policies and the broader understanding (pūraitė et al. 2020) however, empirical studies of concrete digital practices in this area are scarce why this study contributes with central new knowledge. based on our data we conceptualized the different types of work of volunteers and employees, using the concept of infrastructuring human rights to signify the creative arrangements of organizational structures and facilities needed for defending human rights in this era of datafication. drawing attention to the opportunities and constraints that the fabric of society, the very societal infrastructures (laws, technologies, resources, etc.) provides helped us analyze the role of data and datafication in ngo’s. based on the analysis of the data practices and arrangements surrounding data in ngo’s, five major strategies surfaced. • data integrity is for those who can afford it: when people face deportation if they don't find a job, being sensitive about how one's data is shared is a less viable option (see also steinbrink et al. 2021). therefore, infrastructuring human rights through handling data means at least circumventing and sometimes ignoring the data laws. • bridging data poverty: this concerns groups such as undocumented immigrants without credentials and necessary data, for example social security numbers and addresses. infrastructuring human rights means scaffolding the lack of data to avoid the effects of data poverty and invoke, for example migrants' rights. • preventive data practices: political currents in contemporary society have rendered considerable interest in data about minoritized groups, data about who work with these groups, and who supports them (grill, 2021; hansson et al 2021). this attention also reflects concerns about what can and should be publicly shared on social media and how to protect people with less awareness of the potential damage sharing specific data can do. • drawing attention to data: infrastructuring human rights through data means providing data to shed light on specific situations or developments. data is an essential resource for affecting public opinion (haynes, 2016). • monitoring systems and data routines: infrastructuring human rights through handling and storage of data is affected by the affordances of the data systems. therefore, being concerned with what is possible in the system is essential. as a final note, the activists, and the groups that they support through their organizations, are subject to contradictory aspects of data; on the one hand, intentionally exposing data about minoritized/marginalized groups, and on the other, making sure that these groups, and the activists themselves, are not exposed. indeed, our study indicates that the data laws and regulations are not adjusted to the most vulnerable in society, and that infrastructuring human rights in this era of datafication, therefore, requires actions of civil disobedience. references almohamed, asam hamed abbas; reem talhouk; and dhaval vyas. (2022). towards a conceptual framework for understanding the challenges in refugee resettlement. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. 6, no. group, 2022. auferbauer, d.; and h. tellioǧlu. (2017). centralized crowdsourcing in disaster management: findings and implications. acm international conference proceeding series, vol. part f1285, 2017, pp. 173–182. baack, stefan. (2015). datafication and empowerment: how the open data movement re-articulates notions of democracy, participation, and journalism. big data & society, vol. 2, no. 2, december 2015, pp. 205395171559463. blanford, justine i.; jase bernhardt; alexander savelyev; gabrielle wong-parodi; andrew m. carleton; david w. titley; and alan m. maceachren. (2014). tweeting and tornadoes. in iscram 2014 conference proceedings 11th international conference on information systems for crisis response and management. the pennsylvania state university, pp. 319–323. http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.084905820558&partnerid=tzotx3y1 bradshaw, samantha; and philip n. howard. (2017). troops, trolls and troublemakers: a global inventory of organized social media manipulation (no. 12). computational propaganda research project. oxford, uk. briones rojas, maría de los ángeles. (2021). disclose to tell: a data design framework for alternative narratives. computer supported cooperative work (cscw), vol. 30, no. 5–6, december 2021, pp. 785–809. clark, nathan; and kristoffer albris. (2020). in the interest(s) of many: governing data in crises. politics and governance, vol. 8, no. 4, 2020, pp. 421–431. grill, gabriel. (2021). future protest made risky: examining social media based civil unrest prediction research and products. computer supported cooperative work (cscw), vol. 30, no. 5–6, december 2021, pp. 811–839. haak, elise; jolien ubacht; marc van den homberg; scott cunningham; and bartel van den walle. (2018). a framework for strengthening data ecosystems to serve humanitarian purposes. acm international conference proceeding series, 2018. haynes, david. (2016). social media, risk and information governance. business information review, vol. 33, no. 2, 2016, pp. 90–93. jensen, rikke bjerg; lizzie coles-kemp; and reem talhouk. (2020). when the civic turn turns digital: designing safe and secure refugee resettlement. conference on human factors in computing systems proceedings, 2020, pp. 1–14. klang, mathias; and nora madison. (2016). domestication of online activism. first monday, vol. 21, no. 6, 2016, pp. 1–15. lambton-howard, daniel; robert anderson; kyle montague; andrew garbett; shaun hazeldine; carlos alvarez; et al. (2019). whatfutures: designing large-scale engagements on whatsapp. conference on human factors in computing systems proceedings, 2019, pp. 1–14. liu, jun. (2021). technology for activism: toward a relational framework. computer supported cooperative work (cscw), vol. 30, no. 5–6, december 2021, pp. 627– 650. michaelsen, marcus. (2017). far away, so close: transnational activism, digital surveillance and authoritarian control in iran. surveillance & society, vol. 15, no. 3/4, august 2017, pp. 465–470. milan, stefania. (2017). data activism as the new frontier of media activism. in g. yang and v. pickard (eds.), media activism in the digital age. routledge. pickard, victor; and guobin yang. (2017). media activism in the digital age. (v. pickard and g. yang, eds.)shaping inquiry in culture, communication and media studies. london: routledge. pūraitė, aurelija; rūta adamonienė; and audronė žemeckė. (2020). sustainable digitalization in public institutions: challenges for human rights. european journal of sustainable development, vol. 9, no. 3, october 2020, pp. 91. skill, karin; sergio passero; and marie francisco. (2021a). assembling amazon fires through english hashtags. materializing environmental activism within twitter networks. journal of computer supported cooperative work (cscw), vol. forthcomin, 2021. skill, karin; sergio passero; and marie francisco. (2021b). assembling amazon fires through english hashtags. materializing environmental activism within twitter networks. computer supported cooperative work (cscw), vol. 30, no. 5–6, december 2021, pp. 715–732. steinbrink, enno; lilian reichert; michelle mende; and christian reuter. (2021). digital privacy perceptions of asylum seekers in germany: an empirical study about smartphone usage during the flight. proceedings of the acm on humancomputer interaction, vol. 5, no. cscw2, 2021. uldam, julie. (2018). social media visibility: challenges to activism. media, culture and society, vol. 40, no. 1, 2018, pp. 41–58. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): linares-lanzman, j. & rosales, a. (2024, october). latet anguis in herba: unveiling ageism of generative artificial intelligence. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. latet anguis in herba: unveiling ageism of generative artificial intelligence juan linares-lanzman open university of catalunya andrea rosales open university of catalunya introduction social scientists are already starting to show how text-to-image (tti) models reinforce stereotypes and discrimination. recent studies demonstrated the existence of gender (sandoval-martin & martínez-sanzo, 2024), race (nicoletti & bass, 2024) and origin (turk, 2023) biases embedded in the artificial intelligence-generated images. however, less has been said about ageism in tti (bird et al., 2023). this is not surprising, as ageist depictions are the norm but ageism is widely disregarded and deprioritised in research, industry and society (officer & de la fuente-núñez, 2018). the goal of this research is to understand how age is visually represented in adult depictions generated by tti models. we analyse images created by midjourney, a popular tti tool (aiprm, 2024). a comprehensive list of 101 everyday activities was initially curated (edemekong et al., 2023; janke et al., 2006) to ensure a diverse and representative selection of activities for the image-prompting process. prompt formulation included 2 targets: “older person”, to elicit images of older adults, and “person”, to generate images of adults without reference to age. a total of 202 prompts were used, comprising 4 images each, resulting in 808 images. a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods was employed for the analysis. first, we used llava 1.6 multimodal language and vision model (llava ) to infer the age, gender, and race of individuals depicted in images. second, a qualitative visual analysis was employed to identify aspects that llava cannot discern, including the roles, attitudes, and emotions of the individuals represented in the images. qualitative analysis was also employed to evaluate the accuracy of computer vision results. https://paperpile.com/c/kfyyey/1vid https://paperpile.com/c/kfyyey/eozp https://paperpile.com/c/kfyyey/eozp https://paperpile.com/c/kfyyey/otoy generative ai prioritises youth, overlooking older generations most images of “a person” represent adults aged 25 to 34 years old (57%), but rarely older people, e.g. aged between 65 and 79 (2.5%). however, according to un statistics (population pyramids of the world from 1950 to 2100, n.d.) the real world differs, with a slightly higher population of older people aged between 65 and 79 (8%) and a lower population of young people aged between 25 and 34 (15%). images illustrated in figure 1 reflect this pattern. additionally, older individuals are depicted as seated, appearing tired, frustrated, some facing mobility challenges. in contrast, younger individuals appear in more dynamic postures, such as standing, with serious but unworried expressions, and situated in a lighter environment. the depiction of the younger individual's room is full of things and it is also a little messy, showing the idea of an active lifestyle. prompt: “a full-body portrait of a person in his or her room in a photorealistic style.” according to llava, the three on the left are aged 25-34, and the one on the right is aged 18-24. prompt: “a full-body portrait of an older person in his or her room in a photorealistic style.” according to llava, all images are of people 65-79 years old. figure 1: people in their room. source: midjourney, august 2024. generative ai favours men in older depictions, marginalising women among the depictions of “a person”, gender is almost equally distributed (55% are women); however, among the depictions of “an older person,” men are more represented than women (70% are men), precisely the opposite to reality. according to un statistics (population pyramids of the world from 1950 to 2100, n.d.), among the older population (over 65 years old), there are more women (56%) than men (44%), and this difference tends to increase with age, as women generally have a longer life expectancy than men. the images illustrated in figure 2, derived from the prompt “a portrait of a person playing mental games in a photorealistic style”, follow this logic. https://paperpile.com/c/kfyyey/jdym https://paperpile.com/c/kfyyey/jdym https://paperpile.com/c/kfyyey/jdym https://paperpile.com/c/kfyyey/jdym https://paperpile.com/c/kfyyey/jdym https://paperpile.com/c/kfyyey/jdym prompt: “a portrait of a person playing mental games in a photorealistic style.” according to llava, gender is equally distributed. prompt: “an older person playing mental games in a photorealistic style.” according to llava, all images are men. figure 2: people playing mental games. source: midjourney, august 2024. generative ai favours whiteness, marginalising diversity and ethnic minorities most depictions represent white people (63%), but this percentage is even more significant among older age groups (90%). however, reality differs with a more diverse society. the white demographic is declining (wikipedia contributors, 2024) in countries such as the usa, canada and the uk, but that is not reflected in our images. the images illustrated in figure 3 represent people talking, and most of them are mostly white. prompt: “create an image in front of a person talking in a photorealistic style.” according to llava, most images depict white people. https://paperpile.com/c/kfyyey/t2gj prompt: “create an image in front of an older person talking in a photorealistic style.” according to llava, all images depict white people. figure 3: people talking. source: midjourney, august 2024. generative ageism ai systems often exhibit biases that harm our society by reinforcing racial, gender, and age stereotypes. in particular, tti models fail to capture the true diversity and complexity of our society in the images they produce. this research demonstrates the emergence of what we propose to call “generative ageism”: the reproduction and reinforcement of age stereotypes through generative ai tools, taking the form of text, images or videos (our focus here is on ai image generation). we conceive generative ageism as an intersectional phenomenon encompassing age, gender and race stereotypes, among others, in our society. stereotypical depictions of old age reinforce not only the imaginaries society has about this life stage but also the images older people have of themselves, negatively affecting self-perception and everyday attitudes. nevertheless, people of all ages can find enjoyment in their lives in different ways. older people can maintain an updated, stylish, fashionable, and active lifestyle, even as they experience health issues associated with their age. it is important to recognize that older individuals are not solely affected by nostalgia and loneliness. traditional media has played a significant role in reinforcing age stereotypes. however, during the last decades, there has been progress toward a more inclusive representation of older adults in media (loos & ivan, 2018). in contrast, generative ageism appears to signal a regression in the visual representation of age diversity and inclusion. generative ageism can be framed within a broader ageist trend in ai systems (stypinska 2023) that poses a potential threat by reinforcing and expanding visual forms of age-related discrimination already prevalent today. while we have revealed the manifestation of ageism in tti models, we lack a comprehensive understanding of its true magnitude. the rapid spread of tti popular tools and the failure to quickly mitigate its bias and adverse effects on society demands urgent attention. references aiprm. (2024, july 24). ai in art statistics 2024. https://www.aiprm.com/ai-art-statistics/ bird, c., ungless, e. l., & kasirzadeh, a. (2023). typology of risks of generative textto-image models. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2307.05543 https://paperpile.com/c/kfyyey/pn9n http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/eozp http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/eozp http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/eozp https://www.aiprm.com/ai-art-statistics/ http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/kq9c http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/kq9c http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/kq9c http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/kq9c http://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2307.05543 edemekong, p. f., bomgaars, d. l., sukumaran, s., & schoo, c. (2023). activities of daily living. statpearls publishing. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/nbk470404/ janke, m., davey, a., & kleiber, d. (2006). modeling change in older adults’ leisure activities. leisure sciences, 28(3), 285–303. https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400600598145 llava. (n.d.). retrieved january 13, 2025, from https://llava-vl.github.io/ loos, e., & ivan, l. (2018). visual ageism in the media. in international perspectives on aging (pp. 163–176). springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/9783-319-73820-8_11 nicoletti, l., & bass, d. (2024, january 2). humans are biased. generative ai is even worse. bloomberg.com. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-generative-aibias/ officer, a., & de la fuente-núñez, v. (2018). a global campaign to combat ageism. bulletin of the world health organization, 96(4), 295–296. https://doi.org/10.2471/blt.17.202424 population pyramids of the world from 1950 to 2100. (n.d.). populationpyramid.net. retrieved january 9, 2025, from https://www.populationpyramid.net/ sandoval-martin, t., & martínez-sanzo, e. (2024). perpetuation of gender bias in visual representation of professions in the generative ai tools dall·e and bing image creator. social sciences (basel, switzerland), 13(5), 250. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci13050250 stypinska, j. (2023). ai ageism: a critical roadmap for studying age discrimination and exclusion in digitalized societies. ai & society, 38(2), 665–677. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01553-5 turk, v. (2023, october 10). how ai reduces the world to stereotypes. rest of world. https://restofworld.org/2023/ai-image-stereotypes/ wikipedia contributors. (2024, november 14). white demographic decline. wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; wikimedia foundation, inc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/white_demographic_decline http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/afnw http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/afnw http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/afnw http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/afnw http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/afnw https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/nbk470404/ http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/gsjj http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/gsjj http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/gsjj http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/gsjj http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/gsjj http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/gsjj http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/gsjj http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01490400600598145 http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/h2bm http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/h2bm http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/h2bm http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/h2bm http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73820-8_11 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73820-8_11 http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/ukqc http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/ukqc http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/ukqc http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/ukqc https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-generative-ai-bias/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-generative-ai-bias/ http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/1vid http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/1vid http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/1vid http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/1vid http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/1vid http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/1vid http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/1vid http://dx.doi.org/10.2471/blt.17.202424 http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/jdym http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/jdym http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/jdym https://www.populationpyramid.net/ http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/nbzew http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/nbzew http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/nbzew http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/nbzew http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/nbzew http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/nbzew http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/nbzew http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/nbzew http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/socsci13050250 http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/fcrz http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/fcrz http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/fcrz http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/fcrz https://restofworld.org/2023/ai-image-stereotypes/ http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/t2gj http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/t2gj http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/t2gj http://paperpile.com/b/kfyyey/t2gj https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/white_demographic_decline notes: images were generated in august 2024 with midjourney. the tool may subsequently have changed or will change in the future. other text-to-image systems might produce less stereotypical images and better reflect the diversity of older people’s lives, or not. this research is part of the ageism ai project funded by the volkswagen foundation. we would like to acknowledge the valuable contributions of david carbonell, inés montoya, justyna stypińska and sara suárez gonzález in the development of this research. https://www.wzb.eu/en/research/digitalization-and-societal-transformation/globalization-work-and-production/projects/ageai selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): watson, t. x. (2023, october). perceived entitlement and obligation between tiktok creators and their fans. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. perceived entitlement and obligation between tiktok creators and their fans t.x. watson the online content creator association introduction in 2020 tiktok saw an influx of new users, many of whom were looking for a sense of relief in the face of overwhelming loneliness, and found some palliative comfort in the sense of intimacy entailed in engaging with the works of microcelebrities. at the same time many new users became creators on tiktok, saw incredible growth, and quickly found themselves navigating a larger scale of demands on their attention and on their affects than they’d ever experienced, or, usually, expected. the purpose of this paper is to examine and describe the specific demands on the affective labor and attention of content creators on tiktok, the ways in which those demands tend to exceed what the creators themselves are comfortable with or capable of sustaining, and the challenges and limitations that prevent creators from setting, communicating, or maintaining boundaries around their labor, relationships, or personal and professional lives. i investigated these questions by participant observation and a series of interviews and explore answers in an ethnographic and autoethnographic framework. methods and frameworks in camgirls, theresa senft posits the label of microcelebrities, a smaller scale and more platform-specific form of fame than traditional media. one quality that distinguishes microcelebrities from traditional celebrities is that microcelebrities' professional lives revolve around a performance of intimacy with their audiences, whereas traditional celebrities' perceived entitlement to status is defined in terms of their talents or skills in a given form of performance. (senft 2008; abidin 2018) crystal abidin terms the relationship between microcelebrities and their audiences “perceived interconnectedness,” (2015) contrasting with horton and wohl’s (1956) “parasocial relationship.” where parasocial relationships are classically one-sided, with the audience having no access to the performer whatsoever, in perceived interconnectedness creators engage frequently with audience members in low-stakes, casual interactions, such as liking or replying to comments, shoutouts in posts, and inperson meetups. a significant elevation of audience access is nearly ubiquitous in internet-based media forms, though specific platforms afford very different kinds of relationships. on tiktok features like duets and stitches, which allow any user to incorporate another user’s work into their own videos, make it much easier to cultivate the impression of a reciprocal relationship, where an actual experience of mutuality does not tend to exist. to explore this phenomenon of interconnectedness, i combined my ongoing participation observation with my experiences as a content creator and six semistructured one-hour interviews with content creators. most community among tiktok creators centers around off-app sites, such as discord, a chatroom-style instant messaging platform, where the majority of my relationships with other tiktok creators take place. i became an administrator for several servers, spent a lot of time in private and semiprivate conversations with creators, and collaborated on a wide variety of projects with these creators, both on tiktok and elsewhere online. i began a period of participant observation for this study beginning in january 2022. i watched these creators' content, including friends only videos (tiktoks published so that they're only viewable by that creator's mutuals), and continued to interact with them, both on and off platform, as frequently as before. i interviewed all six creators in june 2022, discussing their experiences of their audiences from a set of prepared questions, and bringing in things we'd talked about in the past, as well as things they'd discussed in both public and friends only videos. these were creators with whom i have ongoing relationships, and with whom i've collaborated on a variety of projects, both on and off platform. the interviews were conducted in google's video conferencing platform, meet. i recorded each interview and used a browser extension, meet transcript, to save the live auto-generated captions to google docs. where necessary i used the video recordings to correct errors in the transcript. i synthesized the interviews, ethnographic data from participant observation, and autoethnographic knowledge of my own experience as a professional creator on tiktok to identify the most common themes. i identified two tendencies in audience treatment of creators, connected by a common theme of entitlement to the emotional lives of those creators: externalization of the audience members’ emotions, and extraction of specific affective performance from creators. both of these tendencies consistently exceed the bounds of creators’ comfort with these kinds of engagement. vending machines for intimacy tiktok creators offer a limited, mediated intimacy with their audiences as a core aspect of their work. however, whatever limits a creator might personally prefer to hold, they will be asked by their audiences to exceed those limits, not because individual audience members are incapable of learning a boundary and respecting it, but because their overall audience’s exposure to their content is deeply fragmented, and there will always be people who simply have not yet encountered the boundary. unlike the parasocial relationships of talk show hosts, in which the performer could be confident that the audience would receive a relatively complete continuity of messaging and was rarely exposed to audience feedback or interaction, tiktok creators cannot reasonably expect that any particular video will reach any particular segment of their audiences, and we directly experience all attempts by their audience to contact them by default. in particular, videos that center the creator’s needs and may make audience members feel guilty or bad about themselves get poor engagement, and are not distributed by the platform as widely as other content. creators experience audience overreach in ways that vary from superficial but highscale to specific and intimate, which i organize in terms of emotional and relational labor, respectively. i also separate some of the experiences as “horror stories,” which are examples of severe overreach that damage creators’ ability to trust their audiences and make creators feel unsafe in a much broader range of audience interactions. all of the creators i spoke with described harm they’d experienced as a direct result of their audience’s using them as resources in this manner, and several expressed fear for the well-being of those audience members for whom they don’t fulfill this impossible role perfectly enough. everyone i spoke with talked about types of content they used to make, but stopped because their audiences took it as an invitation to pursue unwanted intimacy. half of them had been lied to by an audience member who was attempting to get closer to them. all of them suggested therapy as a prerequisite for content creation, although some also expressed skepticism in the ability of therapists to help with this kind of problem. the dehumanizing experience of being treated as vending machines for intimacy is an ongoing psychological harm that, to some extent, all microcelebrities endure, for as long as they choose to keep their platforms and their careers. references abidin, crystal. “communicative intimacies: influencers and perceived interconnectedness.” ada: a journal of gender, new media, and technology 8 (2015): 1-16. abidin, crystal, internet celebrity: understanding fame online, emerald publishing limited, 2018. horton, donald and r. richard wohl, “mass communication and para-social interaction: observations on intimacy at a distance,” psychiatry, 19:3, 215-229, 1956. senft, theresa m., camgirls: celebrity and community in the age of social networks, peter lang inc., 2008. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): agarwal, s. (2024, october). platformization intermediaries: optimizing news for platforms in india. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. platformization intermediaries: optimizing news for platforms in india simran agarwal labex icca, université sorbonne paris nord introduction : platformization intermediaries previous research studying the platformization of news has focused on the dominance of search and social media platforms in news distribution. scholars across disciplines have highlighted its consequences upon the news industry, particularly the contingency of news (nieborg & poell, 2018), dependence of news publishers on platforms (meese & hurcombe, 2021; nielsen & ganter, 2022), capture of news industry through platform funding (fanta & dachwitz, 2020; myllylahti, 2021; papaevangelou, 2023) and infrastructure (de-lima-santos et al., 2023; nechushtai, 2018), and algorithmic reorganization of journalistic and public values (caplan & boyd, 2018). in this scenario, digital news industries around the globe are attempting to retain control over distribution, and consequent revenue, and surmount the algorithmic uncertainties of non-transparent platform systems. in india, complexities brought on by platformization have led to the rise and formalization of a previously veiled network of intermediaries that mediate between news businesses and large distribution platforms like google, facebook, twitter, youtube, etc. these intermediaries facilitate and broker interactions between news publishers and platforms through the provision of infrastructural tools and algorithmic expertise on news production, distribution, and monetization. this paper locates and conceptualizes them as ‘platformization intermediaries’. they differ from cultural producers or complementors that operate within the platform ecosystem leveraging platform’s infrastructure and end-user reach (poell et al. 2019). instead, platformization intermediaries drive the process of platformization itself, i.e. reshaping cultural economies and practices into platform optimized models. therefore, they facilitate the translation of platform’s algorithmic and economic priorities into the human and social practices of news making. building on exploratory interviews with news publishers of various sizes and languages, this paper maps the diversity of platformization intermediaries operating in the indian news market. this includes sellers of production, organization, and machine learning (ml) tools, and platform expertise to news publishers. they constitute a meso-layer of intermediaries in the news value chain. taking a critical political economic examination of their infrastructural products and services, and market position and dynamics, this study demonstrates that they enable and optimize the platformization of news in india. further, interviews with a handful of these actors in india unpack the implications on news publishers and its public interest value. optimizing news for platforms scholars of game and app studies literature investigates the rise of production platforms, particularly the case of unity game engine, that sell production tools to game producers, and mimic the monopolization tendencies of distribution platforms (foxman, 2019; young et al., 2020). another thrust of research, from the emerging field of content creators studies, locates the influence of cultural intermediaries in the form of talent managers (cunningham & craig, 2019; lobato, 2016; mehta, 2021) and algorithmic experts (bishop, 2020) that consolidate creator interests against platforms and demystify their algorithmic systems. however, the rise of similar intermediaries in news industries, and the implications thereof, are relatively understudied. ‘science of success’ is the promise of publishers digital lab (pdl), an indian company specializing in selling artificial intelligence (ai) tools for content creation as well as algorithmic expertise to alter news pages to meet platform’s requirements. similarly, piano.io offers news publishers end-to-end software for social media optimization, audience analytics, and ml tools for revenue management. echobox & izooto sell automated distribution and advertising tools to news publishers. finally, evolok augments revenue through ml tools that takeover the newsrooms distribution and revenue decisions. these companies, among others, facilitate the optimal platformization of news in the country. through their services and product, and unique market position and dynamics, they optimize platformization in a number of ways. first, they develop and sell a suite of infrastructural technologies that institutionalize news practices attuned to the logics of search and social media platforms. this includes software and ai & ml tools that introduce new, or reconfigure existing, news content management systems (cms) to include search engine and social media optimization (seo & smo) keywords, automate news distribution based on platform visibility metrics, algorithmically recommend articles to platform users, and redesign revenue systems to generate profit within platform ecosystems. second, they counsel publishers on creating news content that is better suited and optimized for a platformed environment. based on their expertise of platform’s algorithmic and technical changes, they advise news publishers on ‘how’ to create news for platform visibility or which platform formats to leverage for distribution. for example, creating news in popular genres, focusing on individualized ‘creator’ faces, using trending music in platform formats, and using images and keywords that circumvent platform moderation. in order to gain market legitimacy, platformization intermediaries take on strategic roles of ‘certified publisher partners’ or ‘certified marketing partners’ of larger platforms. elsewhere scholars view these partnerships as beneficial to the intermediaries that receive relevant integration apis & sdks for their interoperable tools (helmond et al., 2019; van der vlist & helmond, 2021). within news industry, they participate as experts or ‘funding intermediaries’ in initiatives like the google news initiatives and meta journalism project that extend platforms’ funding, technical infrastructure, and brand as valuable investment for newsroom innovation and success (papaevangelou 2023; agarwal, inpress). further, platformization intermediaries often emulate platformization tendencies of economic expansion, technological interoperability, and introduction of governance systems that reorganize cultural practices (athique & parthasarathi, 2020; poell et al., 2019). for instance, piano gained market prominence through vertical integration of competing firms such as at internet (analytics), celeraone (paywalled content), and socialflow (social media distribution) (piano, 2022). piano localized into the indian market through partnerships with local technological experts (suventure, n.d.). similarly, moengage, a us based firm runs its own partnership program that amasses interconnected infrastructural products providers under a single platform. reinforcing dependence & standardization of news therefore, platformization intermediaries play an important role in the complete integration of search and social media platforms into the digital news industry. in the ways discussed above, platformization intermediaries optimize news production practices for platformed distribution, platform’s infrastructural extension into the newsroom, and the reorganization of news value in line with platform governance. they reinforce publishers’ dependence on platforms for production, distribution and monetization rather than alleviating their troubles. notably, they expand existing hierarchies between large and small news players in the country, as the latter find it difficult to regularly invest in expensive technologies offered by platformization intermediaries. this hampers their adeptness and possibilities of success on platforms. further, the mechanization and streamlining of platform qualifiers impinges on the already reduced editorial autonomy within newsrooms in india, and elsewhere. these sociotechnical systems are institutionalized over time and become intrinsic to news creation and distribution. relatedly, platformization intermediaries reorganize the public interest value of news by encoding and automating production and distribution of profitable content rather than that in public interest. this paper pivots scholarly focus to the emergence and influence of platformization intermediaries in news. it reflects on their role in furthering platformization through a combination of automation and infrastructural tools and strategic consultations that optimize the integration of platform business model, infrastructures, and values into the news industry in india. at the same time, they present an interesting site for research due to their potential to emulate platformization. finally, this paper reveals how platformization intermediaries exacerbate news dependence on platforms, and risk standardization of news geared for platform ecosystem rather than produced in public interest. bibliography 1. agarwal, s. (in press). rooting platform dependencies in the digital news economy: google news initiative in india. international journal of communication. 2. athique, a., & parthasarathi, v. (2020). platform economy and platformization. in a. athique & v. parthasarathi (eds.), platform capitalism in india (pp. 1–19). springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44563-8_1 3. bishop, s. (2020). algorithmic experts: selling algorithmic lore on youtube. social media + society, 6(1), 205630511989732. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119897323 4. caplan, r., & boyd, d. (2018). isomorphism through algorithms: institutional dependencies in the case of facebook. big data & society, 5(1), 205395171875725. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718757253 5. cunningham, s., & craig, d. (2019). social media entertainment: the new intersection of hollywood and silicon valley. new york university press. 6. de-lima-santos, m.-f., munoriyarwa, a., elega, a. a., & papaevangelou, c. (2023). google news initiative’s influence on technological media innovation in africa and the middle east. media and communication, 11(2). https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v11i2.6400 7. fanta, a., & dachwitz, i. (2020). google, the media patron. how the digital giant ensnares journalism. [preprint]. socarxiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/3qbp9 8. foxman, m. (2019). united we stand: platforms, tools and innovation with the unity game engine. social media + society, 5(4), 205630511988017. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880177 9. helmond, a., nieborg, d. b., & van der vlist, f. n. (2019). facebook’s evolution: development of a platform-as-infrastructure. internet histories, 3(2), 123–146. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2019.1593667 10. lobato, r. (2016). the cultural logic of digital intermediaries: youtube multichannel networks. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 22(4), 348–360. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856516641628 11. meese, j., & hurcombe, e. (2021). facebook, news media and platform dependency: the institutional impacts of news distribution on social platforms. new media & society, 23(8), 2367–2384. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820926472 12. mehta, s. (2021). indian intermediaries in new media: mainstreaming the margins. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 27(1), 229–246. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856519896167 13. myllylahti, m. (2021). it’s a dalliance! a glance to the first decade of the digital reader revenue market and how the google’s and facebook’s payments are starting to shape it. digital journalism, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2021.1965487 14. nechushtai, e. (2018). could digital platforms capture the media through infrastructure? journalism, 19(8), 1043–1058. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884917725163 15. nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society, 20(11), 4275– 4292. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769694 16. nielsen, r. k., & ganter, s. a. (2022). the power of platforms: shaping media and society. oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190908850.001.0001 17. papaevangelou, c. (2023). funding intermediaries: google and facebook’s strategy to capture journalism. digital journalism, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2022.2155206 18. piano. (2022). piano broadens global footprint and social media publishing capabilities. resources. accessed february 15, 2024. https://piano.io/resources/piano-broadens-global-footprint-and-social-mediapublishing-capabilities/. 19. poell, t., nieborg, d., & dijck, j. van. (2019). platformization. internet policy review, 8(4). https://policyreview.info/concepts/platformization 20. suventure. (n.d.). suventure and piano software forge strategic partnership to accelerate digital transformation in india’s technology and analytics landscape. accessed february 15, 2024. https://suventure.in/suventure-and-piano-softwareforge-strategic-partnership-to-accelerate-digital-transformation-in-indias-technologyand-analytics-landscape-news-updates/ 21. van der vlist, f. n., & helmond, a. (2021). how partners mediate platform power: mapping business and data partnerships in the social media ecosystem. big data & society, 8(1), 205395172110250. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211025061 22. young, c. j., nieborg, d. b., & joseph, d. j. (2020). ‘bringing your vision to life’: production platforms and industry unity. aoir selected papers of internet research. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2020i0.11367 https://piano.io/resources/piano-broadens-global-footprint-and-social-media-publishing-capabilities/ https://piano.io/resources/piano-broadens-global-footprint-and-social-media-publishing-capabilities/ https://piano.io/resources/piano-broadens-global-footprint-and-social-media-publishing-capabilities/ https://policyreview.info/concepts/platformisation https://suventure.in/suventure-and-piano-software-forge-strategic-partnership-to-accelerate-digital-transformation-in-indias-technology-and-analytics-landscape-news-updates/ https://suventure.in/suventure-and-piano-software-forge-strategic-partnership-to-accelerate-digital-transformation-in-indias-technology-and-analytics-landscape-news-updates/ https://suventure.in/suventure-and-piano-software-forge-strategic-partnership-to-accelerate-digital-transformation-in-indias-technology-and-analytics-landscape-news-updates/ selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): tacheva, z., appedu, s., & wright, m. (2024, october). ai as “unstoppable” and other inevitability narratives in tech: on the entanglement of industry, ideology, and our collective futures. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ai as “unstoppable” and other inevitability narratives in tech: on the entanglement of industry, ideology, and our collective futures zhasmina tacheva syracuse university sarah appedu syracuse university mirakle wright university of colorado denver in a world where we are constantly being told that artificial intelligence (ai) is “revolutionizing” entire industries, about to cure all diseases, and on the verge of unlocking the deepest mysteries of the universe, its advancements are sold to us as “unstoppable” and “inevitable” by both supporters and critics alike (altman, 2023; fridman, 2024). “if we don’t do it,” we are told, someone else will,” with that “someone” cast not simply as an “other,” but as an adversarial nation, “the enemy” (fridman, 2024). the anticipated or allegedly already emergent artificial general intelligence (agi) – algorithms that are said to match or exceed human abilities in multiple domains – is touted as a landmark achievement, described as either the zenith of technoutopianism or the doom of technopessimism. despite claims of an “unprecedented moment in history,” the rhetoric of mainstream technologists in the ai industry, for whom fridman has become a vocal spokesperson, is a clear example of technological determinism (chandler, 1995). this belief positions technology as the main driver of societal change, evolving independently of human action along a predetermined singular path. fridman’s comments also highlight the competitive, zero-sum nature of ai innovation, reminiscent of prior technological races dating back to at least the cold war. this paper explores whether ai innovation, as framed by silicon valley’s technologically deterministic ethos, is the only path for technology development and how the ai industry’s competitive, nationalistic, and xenophobic ethos is shaped: not only by its products but also by ai discourses in big tech, (social) media, the academy, policy, and beyond. to address these questions, we utilize the black and indigenous feminist science, technology, and society studies’ framework of “entanglement” (tallbear, 2013; benjamin, 2019), which enables us to analyze the ai industry and the technological products and discourses it produces not merely as a predefined set of economic entities but as a complex phenomenon that is both materially and socially constructed, technoscientific and sociopolitical, utopian and dystopian, ephemeral and historical, global and local, unpredictable and deterministic, labor-free and labor-intensive. this complexity invariably stems from specific sets of beliefs, objectives, and ideas about the world and has concrete, material consequences especially on the environment and on those among us whose classification into racialized, gendered, and colonized categories it further entrenches. the paradigm of entanglement allows us to view these seemingly oppositional, mutually exclusive, and hierarchical binaries as continuums, spanned by the ai industry simultaneously, thereby challenging the simplistic mode of binary thinking and exposing the complexity of the entanglements in which ai and the encompassing industry engage at different levels of analysis. following ruha benjamin, we are not interested in “disentangling” the apparent differences for the sake of drawing easy distinctions between “good tech” and “bad tech” (benjamin, 2019); instead, our analysis aims to retain the messiness and complexity of a reality that, contrary to data science’s promises, does not easily lend itself to facile categorization. at the actor level, for instance, we find validation for tallbear’s observation of the “entanglements that can develop between scientific researchers, industry, and consumers” (tallbear, 2013) and we expand on this by adding the roles of governments and military entities (crawford, 2021), the significant underbelly of data workers from the global and local souths, which enables the “ai magic” that openai ceo sam altman often praises in the media (taylor, 2018; gray & suri, 2019; miceli & posada, 2022), and the environment, which is being exploited, polluted, and destroyed in the pursuit of ‘progress’ and ‘competitive advantage’ (sultana, 2022). to map out the scope of ai industry entanglements, however, we must also examine its discursive framework, which is as potent as its material infrastructure. in this conference paper, we apply a combination of critical discourse analysis, literary criticism, and critical quantitative methods to conduct a critical examination of a wide array of ai discourses, including company statements, scholarly literature, policy briefs, media narratives, research institute webpages, and online platform content, developing a discursive snapshot of the ai industry. our analysis of more than 1,200 content items demonstrates that discourse not only shapes the creation of ai artifacts and mythologies but also limits our collective imagination and material possibilities. extending the recent work of timnit gebru and émile torres, who show how the neoliberal californian ideology at the heart of the ai industry is not a disruptive phenomenon of the mid-to-late 20th century but rather a direct continuation of longstanding eugenic ideas (gebru & torres, 2023), we trace the entanglements of racism, sexism, and colonialism with the messianic narrative of linear world progress and technology as its driving force back to the first contact in the americas. this historical genealogy demonstrates how the current imperialistic entrenchment of ai’s ideology and industry, which, in their constant drive for exploitation, expansion, and erasure of difference, functions as an “ai empire” (tacheva & ramasubramanian, 2023). it also highlights the fundamental entanglements of the ai industry with the interlocking systems of sexism, colonialism, racism, capitalism, ableism, and homophobia, indicating that the “bad apples” approach to industry reform is insufficient for meaningful, equitable sociotechnological change. instead, collective movements, deeply intertwined in their intersectionality of identities, perspectives, strategies, and embodiments, is required to counter the “lopsided imagination” (benjamin, 2024) of the ai industry and ideology. these movements are already taking shape among marginalized communities, public technology activists, art collectives, and critical scholars, where abolitionist frameworks are reframing mainstream ai ethics. rather than focusing on how ai can be improved, they ask a more fundamental question: should the systems of surveillance, exploitation, and segregation that sustain ai exist at all? this growing call for ai abolition demands a radical reimagining of technological futures rooted in liberation, as opposed to reforms that merely polish and perpetuate oppressive systems. to heed this call is to commit to dismantling all structures of domination and building a world where technology advances collective liberation rather than control. amid escalating ecological and social catastrophes, the time to act is not tomorrow – it is now. references altman, s., & fridman, s. (the lex fridman pocast). (2023). openai ceo on gpt-4, chatgpt, and the future of ai. barad, k. (2007). meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham: duke university. benjamin, r. (2024). imagination: a manifesto. w. w. norton & company. benjamin, r. (2019). race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. medford: polity press. chandler, d. (1995). technological or media determinism. crawford, k. (2021). the atlas of ai. yale university press. fridman, l. (the lex fridman pocast). (2023). putin, navalny, trump, cia, nsa, war, politics & freedom. gebru, t., & torres, é. p. (2023). eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence. ieee satml, 16. gray, m. l., & suri, s. (2019). ghost work: how to stop silicon valley from building a new global underclass. eamon dolan books. miceli, m., & posada, j. (2022). the data-production dispositif. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 6(cscw2), 1-37. sultana, f. (2022). the unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality. political geography 99: 102638. tacheva, j., & ramasubramanian, s. (2023). ai empire: unraveling the interlocking systems of oppression in generative ai’s global order. big data & society, 10(2), 20539517231219241. taylor, a. (2018). the automation charade. logic magazine 5(1). selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): genon, l. j. d. (2024, october). “digital peacebuilding”: examining young women leaders' use of social media to build peace in the philippines. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “digital peacebuilding”: examining young women leaders' use of social media to build peace in the philippines lynrose jane d. genon queensland university of technology “digital peacebuilding” the field of peacebuilding has witnessed significant growth in the utilisation of digital technologies, especially among youth-led organisations in recent years. this emerging practice is referred to as "digital peacebuilding" (alliance for peacebuilding, 2023), which is defined as "the use of digital technologies toward a peacebuilding objective, and the use of peacebuilding approaches in response to digital conflict drivers'' (build up, 2023, p. 5). however, existing literature lacks a comprehensive analysis of how digital peacebuilding plays out in people’s everyday lives. to address this gap, a shift from a narrow tool-focused approach to understand the interplay between technology, social practices, and peacebuilding is necessary. this new understanding recognises that technologies are deeply woven into complex social systems, with their impact intricately shaped by power dynamics and existing social practices (hirblinger et al., 2022; welch et al., 2015). young people’s role in digital peacebuilding youth have been recognized globally for their significant role in peacebuilding, formalised by the united nations security council resolution (unscr) 2250 on youth, peace, and security (yps) (simpson et al., 2018). however, youth, particularly young women, continue to be excluded and marginalised in peacebuilding efforts (grizelj & saleem, 2022; pruitt, 2021). current peacebuilding frameworks inadequately address gendered exclusions, neglecting young women’s contributions to peace and their nuanced experiences (pruitt, 2021; un women, 2018). everyday peace, defined as “the capacity of ordinary people to disrupt violent conflict and forge prosocial relationships in conflict-affected societies” (mac ginty, 2014, p. 2), gives platform for marginalised groups, such as youth, to collectively address conflict, https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?fqbcm0 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?kbfov4 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?kbfov4 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?2fqmm4 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?2fqmm4 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?bpbzru https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hzloy0 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hzloy0 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?k9ifm3 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?y7hs26 violence, and exclusion (berents & mcevoy-levy, 2015). however, the use of social media to build everyday peace remains unexplored. this paper aims to address these gaps and asks: how do young muslim, lumad1, and christian women in the philippines use social media for peacebuilding? through an intersectional feminist lens (collins, 2015; crenshaw, 1991), the paper specifically looks at how women with diverse and intersecting social identities (including race, religion, and age) participate in everyday digital peacebuilding in the bangsamoro autonomous region of muslim mindanao (barmm). barmm was formally established as part of a peace agreement to end nearly five decades of armed conflict and several years of peace talks between the philippine government, and several autonomist groups. by investigating young women’s digital media practices in building everyday peace, the paper offers valuable insights into various ways technology is used for peacebuilding, young women’s understanding of peace, and the representation and negotiation of gender across different conflict settings. a better understanding of young women's contributions to digital peacebuilding also contributes new evidence for policymakers and practitioners to make more informed decisions on how to advance more inclusive and equitable use of digital media to conflict resolution and peace. examining digital peacebuilding practices on facebook and tiktok i am a young woman and a christian settler in mindanao. i am actively engaged in peacebuilding in the region through youth leadership programs, youth peacebuilding dialogues, and peace education for more than a decade through my academic work at mindanao state university and my leadership role in the young women+leaders for peace philippines, an organisation advocating for young women’s leadership for peace. it is through this positioning that i examine the digital peacebuilding practices of young women on social media. the empirical data analysed in this article stems from thirty (30) young women leaders, ages 18-30, who identify as, or are descendants of, muslim, lumad, and christian settlers in mindanao, southern philippines, collectively referred to as the tri-people youth. these young women are leading peacebuilding initiatives within barmm or hold leadership roles in youth-led organisations in the region. the data gathered includes 500 social media posts, including audience engagement, of these young women leaders on tiktok and facebook gathered in the span of five months (december 2023-may2024). using thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2023), the study critically examines key issues and themes in women’s digital peacebuilding strategies in the philippines. this paper presents preliminary findings from phase 1, focusing on social media analysis, while phase 2, involving kwentuhan (talkstory) and coparticipatory design workshops with young women, is not included in these initial results. mobilising non-violent actions, solidarity and care, and ‘platform vernaculars’ for peacebuilding 1 lumad is a visayan term meaning “native” or “indigenous” and is the ascribed collective name of the non-moro indigenous peoples of mindanao. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?rjxh1g https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?l3qkng https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?v6aogr muslim, lumad, and christian young women build solidarity through social media to advocate for their representation in formal and informal peace and security decisionmaking forums, access to peace education and training opportunities, and platforms to network and learn. they seek protection from various forms of violence, including armed conflict and gender-based violence. they strongly oppose those resorting to violence in resolving conflicts and stand in solidarity with victims of war, including those affected by the war in gaza. interestingly, each group of women also has specific agendas: lumad young women focus on mobilising solidarity around land rights and addressing their marginalisation within barmm, muslim young women work towards combating anti-islamic rhetoric, emphasising the peaceful aspects of islam, and christian young women prioritise peace education and interfaith dialogue as pathways to peace across sectors. this showcases the heterogenous conception of peace among these young women and unique experiences and perceptions of violence and insecurity rooted in their diverse and intersecting ethnic and religious identity. care is pivotal in their digital peacebuilding, both self and community care. this includes exercising, travelling, socialising with friends, and engaging in mutual aid. young women also align much of their self-care to spirituality, particularly muslim young women embracing islamic teachings to care for themselves and their community. this aligns with existing literature on the role of care, challenging the rigidities of conflict, strengthening social relations, transformative and peaceful outcomes (vaittinen et al., 2019). digital technologies, adept at forging connections and infiltrating intimate daily spaces, are well-suited for nurturing caring relationships (papacharissi, 2010). young women’s digital peacebuilding extends beyond the mere use of technology to promote peace and encompasses unique ‘platform vernaculars’, which gibbs et al., (2015) define as distinctive combination of styles, grammars, and logics inherent to social media platforms and the ways they are appropriated and performed in practice. for example, preliminary findings suggest young women use tiktok to disseminate information, transforming it into a channel for current affairs updates of the ongoing peace process in barmm. they also use tiktok and facebook trends to discuss cultural practices linked to violence. for example, the "of course" trend is used by a young muslim maranao woman leader to initiate a conversation on maratabat's role in clan conflicts. maratabat, integral to maranao culture, involves personal honour and dignity and can lead to violent retaliation when offended. such discussions deepen understanding of cultural concepts like maratabat and the need for positive transformation. another trend, “a day in my life”, offers insights into their routines, including how they organise community dialogues and capacity-building training in barmm, providing glimpses into their workplaces and self-care practices as part of their work. overall, the paper underscores how young women's peacebuilding efforts are often ignored in formal processes and shows how their contribution to peace via social media is generative. social media provides them with a vital platform to express their peace agenda, showcasing their everyday peace efforts and nuanced views on violence and insecurity. their diverse and intersecting identities enrich broader peacebuilding discussions, contributing to national and international peace and security agendas. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?ciy5wn https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?ciy5wn https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?nk57v8 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?vjmy0d https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?vjmy0d references alliance for peacebuilding. (2023, september 26). alliance for peacebuilding. alliance for peacebuilding. https://www.allianceforpeacebuilding.org berents, h., & mcevoy-levy, s. (2015). theorising youth and everyday peace(building). peacebuilding, 3(2), 115–125. https://doi.org/10.1080/21647259.2015.1052627 braun, v., & clarke, v. (2023). thematic analysis. in apa handbook of research methods in psychology: research designs: quantitative, qualitative, neuropsychological, and biological, vol. 2, 2nd ed (pp. 65–81). american psychological association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000319-004 build up. (2023). sealing the cracks-an intersectional perspective on digital peacebuilding [policy paper]. berghof foundation and platfrom peaceful transformation. https://berghof-foundation.org/library/sealing-the-cracks collins, p. h. (2015). intersectionality’s definitional dilemmas. annual review of sociology, 41(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-073014-112142 crenshaw, k. (1991). demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics [1989]. in feminist legal theory. routledge. gibbs, m., meese, j., arnold, m., nansen, b., & carter, m. (2015). # funeral and instagram: death, social media, and platform vernacular. information, communication & society, 18(3), 255–268. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2014.987152 grizelj, i., & saleem, a. (2022). we are in this together: operationalizing a five-year strategic action plan for youth-inclusive peace processes; global coalition on youth, peace and security. hirblinger, a. t., hansen, j. m., hoelscher, k., kolås, å., lidén, k., & martins, b. o. (2022). digital peacebuilding: a framework for critical–reflexive engagement. international studies perspectives, ekac015. https://doi.org/10.1093/isp/ekac015 mac ginty, r. (2014). everyday peace: bottom-up and local agency in conflict-affected societies. security dialogue, 45(6), 548–564. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010614550899 papacharissi, z. a. (2010). a private sphere: democracy in a digital age. polity press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docid=1180919 pruitt, l. (2021). youth, peace & security: gender matters in asia and the pacific. global change, peace & security, 33(3), 241–257. https://doi.org/10.1080/14781158.2021.1971964 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?w7iird https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?w7iird https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?w7iird https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?w7iird https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?w7iird https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?w7iird simpson, g., unfpa, & un peacebuilding support office. (2018). the missing peace: independent progress study on youth, peace and security. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/3846611 un women. (2018). young women in peace and security: at the intersection of the yps and wps agendas (p. 32). un women. https://www.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/headquarters/attachments/sections/ library/publications/2018/research-paper-young-women-in-peace-and-securityen.pdf vaittinen, t., donahoe, a., kunz, r., bára ómarsdóttir, s., & roohi, s. (2019). care as everyday peacebuilding. peacebuilding, 7(2), 194–209. https://doi.org/10.1080/21647259.2019.1588453 welch, j. r., halford, s., & weal, m. (2015). information and communication technologies (icts) and peacebuilding: a conceptual framework. proceedings of the acm web science conference, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1145/2786451.2786479 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): bowman, n. d., condis, m., yoshimura, k., & bohaty, e. (2023, october). vicarious nostalgia? playing retrogames fosters an appreciation for gaming history. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. vicaroius nostalgia? playing retrogames fosters an appreciation for gaming history nicholas david bowman syracuse university megan condis texas tech university koji yoshimura university of amsterdam emily bohaty texas tech university introduction video games have been a viable and vibrant sociocultural force in internet culture and entertainment for generations. once marketed as mostly for young boys (kline et al, 2003; lien, 2013; condis & morrissette, 2023), gameplay is common across myriad demographic categories. in the united states, more than 75% of gamers are over the age of 18, split evenly across binary gender identities (esa, 2022). as gamers age, so does an interest in the history of video games. second-hand retrogaming markets allow older players to re-engage with antiquated gaming technologies (bischoff and pereira, 2022). retrogames are commonly remixed and rereleased for newer consoles (heineman, 2014), along with fan-created reproductions of cherished franchises (iantorno, 2019). alongside this is the sustained popularity of retrogaming aesthetics, such as pixel art (makai, 2018) and chip-tuning (driscoll & diaz, 2009). relevant to retrogames is nostalgia—bittersweet-but-positive recollections of bygone times (sedikides et al, 2015) further divided into personal nostalgia (i.e., for one’s past experiences) and historical nostalgia (i.e., for history that predate an individual; natterer, 2014). historical nostalgia is especially relevant as it might explain the appeal of retrogames to younger audiences (bowman & wulf, 2022). younger gamers might “take-up” retrogames as touchstones of gaming culture, for example to develop a deeper knowledge of the medium (i.e., gamer capital: consalvo, 2007; mora-cantallops et al., 2021), or to engage with media histories broadly (see kalinina, 2016). the focus of the current study was to understand if and how players discussed historical nostalgia when playing a focal retrogame. in prior research, bowman et al. (2022) found that after playing super mario bros emulated on an nes classic, younger players without any prior experience had greater levels of historical nostalgia and discussed an appreciation for how video games were very different for “past generations” (e.g., parents and older siblings). a limitation of that study was the use of a widely popular video game that triggered high levels of nostalgia among all study participants— including those merely watching gameplay. to correct this, we used a less popular retrogame emblematic of “beat ‘em up” video games popular in the 1990s, playing with either original or contemporary game controllers (given the tactile nature of video game nostalgia; see heineman, 2014). we posed two research questions: rq1: “what themes emerge related to nostalgia from playing a retrogame?” and rq2: “did themes differ as a function of controller used for gameplay?” methods the current analysis is part of a larger project on retrogaming (bowman et al., 2023). individuals (n = 105, mage = 21.02, sd = 4.37) from a large public university in the southwestern united states were invited to play double dragon ii for 10 minutes, with random assignment to either an original-design nes controller (n = 55) or a modern wii classic pro controller (n = 46). participants included n = 60 women, n = 49 men, and n = 2 non-binary individuals, with n = 59 (58.4%) caucasian, n = 23 (22.8%) hispanic, and <6% (n ≤ 6) other ethnicities (via open-ended self-report). after playing, participants were asked to “elaborate on any other thoughts and feelings that you might have felt (such as feelings of nostalgia) while playing the game.” average word count per response was m = 42.4 words (sd = 29.9), ranging from 6 to 226 words. length did not differ by controller condition: retro nes controller, m = 48.9 words (sd = 33.4); wii classic pro controller, m = 40.9 words (sd = 26.4), welch’s t(95) = 1.29, p = .202. we used a modified version of braun and clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis, in which the lead author (with an emic perspective related to retrogaming and nostalgia scholarship; harris, 1976) did an initial coding, and the second author (etic perspective) independently reviewed and confirmed the veracity of codes. codes were promoted to themes if they were mentioned by at least 10% of participants (n = 10). results and discussion in answering rq1, eight themes emerged from our analysis, clustered into three groups: retrogames as unique experiences, retrogames and important others, and retrogames and the self (table 1). critically these themes did not vary between controller conditions (replicating bowman et al., 2022), so no further analysis is dedicated to rq2. regarding retrogames as unique experiences, we see a recognition that retrogames inform and construct an understanding of the history of the medium. broad references to retrogames as a genre marked a perceived uniqueness, for example the game as having an “old-school feel” similar to other “platformers and beat-em [up] games,” the “music and sound effects sounded very nostalgic,” and the game had “[an] 80s vibe.” retrogames were engaged as artifacts from of the medium’s history (e.g., “this game made me ponder about the era differences between now and when this game was first invented” and “i was thinking mostly about how far games have come”). some participants focused more on the gameplay elements of retrogames as paradoxically simpler (e.g., “old games are easier and less complex” and several references to a general lack of detailed narrative) but also being very difficult to play (e.g., “the boss is really hard to defeat” and references to the “game over” screen after losing). regarding retrogaming and important others, we see a theme repeated in nostalgia research (see wulf et al., 2020; bowman & wulf, 2022) in which nostalgia invokes memories of self-referential others (e.g., “it would be real treat to [play this game] with my family” and “i would play [similar games] with [various family members named in several replies]”). these data inform the value of video games in family bonding and intergenerational communication (martins et al., 2017; wang et al. 2018). especially notable for the study of retrogames and historical nostalgia was the explicit recognition of the games that others played, where participants thought “about game system [from] when my mom was younger and before i was born”—some even presuming that the experience would have been nostalgic for “them” (e.g., parents and older siblings). finally, we saw a cluster of themes about retrogaming and the self that reinforced engaging with retrogaming as part of an autobiographical experience. many participants recalled their first gaming experiences, such as “i was taught how to play super mario bros. at three years old, so a lot of my childhood is devoted to [retrogames])” and “it reminded me of how much i wanted to be good at games.” others had broader memories , with recollections simpler times where “all we had to worry about was … how to cure boredom.” one participant noted that retrogames were representative of their experiences traveling to and from mexico during a time when “there was no worry in the world, because [the journey was] not as dangerous [as it is today].” conclusion our findings corroborate past research indicating that nostalgic experiences were characterized by high self-salience and as well as recollections of social connectedness. we also found unique aspects of historical nostalgia from retrogames, from a contextualization of retrogames as markers in gaming history to a feeling of what we term vicarious nostalgia—that a player’s nostalgia may be associated with others’ presumed experiences with retrogames. references bischoff, t. and pereira, i. (2022). retro games get a new life as demand for defunct consoles, games on the rise. abc audio digital syndication. https://digital.abcaudio.com/news/retro-games-get-new-life-demand-defunct-consolesgames-rise bowman, n. d., velez, j., wulf, t., breuer, j., yoshimura, k., & resignato, l. (2022). that bygone feeling: controller ergonomics and nostalgia in video game play. psychology of popular media. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/ppm0000382 bowman, n. d., & wulf, t. (2023). nostalgia in video games. current opinions in psychology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2022.101544 bowman, n. d., yoshimura, k., bohaty, e., & condis, m. a. (2023). “makes me feel like i was born in the wrong era:” gamer self-efficacy and appreciation are correlated with historical nostalgia when playing a retrogame. psychology of popular media. condis, m. & morrissette, j. (2023). dudes, boobs and gamecubes: video game advertising enters adolescence. media, culture & society, 45(6). https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437231159533 consalvo, m. (2007). cheating: gaining advantage in videogames. mit press. driscoll, k. & diaz, j. (2009). endless loop: a brief history of chiptunes. transformative works and cultures. 2(1) https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2009.096 https://digital.abcaudio.com/news/retro-games-get-new-life-demand-defunct-consoles-games-rise https://digital.abcaudio.com/news/retro-games-get-new-life-demand-defunct-consoles-games-rise https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/ppm0000382 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2022.101544 https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437231159533 https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2009.096 entertainment software association (esa). (2022). essential facts about the video game industry. https://www.theesa.com/resource/2022-essential-facts-about-the-videogame-industry/ heineman, d. s. (2014). public memory and gamer identity: retrogaming as nostalgia. journal of games criticism, 1(1), 1–24. http://gamescriticism.org/articles/heineman-1-1 iantorno, m. (2019). rom hacks, randomizers, and retro games: challenging copyright and remixing zelda. proceedings of digra 2019. http://www.digra.org/wpcontent/uploads/digital-library/digra_2019_paper_91.pdf kalinina, e. (2016). the flow of nostalgia: experiencing television from the past. international journal of communication, 10. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/5075/1827 kline, s., dyer-witherford, n., & de peuter, g. (2003) digital play: the interaction of technology, culture, and marketing. mcgill-queen’s university press. lien, t (2013). no girls allowed. polygon. https://www.polygon.com/features/2013/12/2/5143856/no-girls-allowed makai, p. k. (2019). video games as objects and vehicles of nostalgia. humanities, 7(4), https://doi.org/10.3390/h7040123 martins, n., matthews, n. l., & ratan, r. a. (2017). playing by the rules: parental mediation of video game play. journal of family issues, 38(9), 1215– 1238. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192513x15613822 mora-cantallops, m., muñoz, e., santamaría, r., & sánchez-alonso, s. (2021). identifying communities and fan practices in online retrogaming forums. entertainment computing, 38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.entcom.2021.100410 natterer, k. (2014). how and why to measure personal and historical nostalgic responses through entertainment media. international journal on media management, 16(3), 161–180. https://doi.org/10.1080/14241277.2014.989567 sedikides, c., wildschut, t., routledge, c., arndt, j., hepper, e. g., & zhou, x. (2015). to nostalgize: mixing memory with affect and desire. advances in experimental social psychology, 51, 189–273. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.aesp.2014.10.001 wang, b., taylor, l., & sun, q. (2018). families that play together stay together: investigating family bonding through video games. new media & society, 20(11), 4074– 4094. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818767667 wulf, t., bowman, n. d., velez, j., & breuer, j. (2020). once upon a game: exploring video game nostalgia and its impact on well-being. psychology of popular media culture, 9(1), 83-95. https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000208 https://www.theesa.com/resource/2022-essential-facts-about-the-video-game-industry/ https://www.theesa.com/resource/2022-essential-facts-about-the-video-game-industry/ http://gamescriticism.org/articles/heineman-1-1 https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/5075/1827 https://www.polygon.com/features/2013/12/2/5143856/no-girls-allowed https://doi.org/10.3390/h7040123 https://doi.org/10.1177/0192513x15613822 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.entcom.2021.100410 https://doi.org/10.1080/14241277.2014.989567 https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.aesp.2014.10.001 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818767667 https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000208 selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): wernimont, j., kneese, t., sutherland , t., and cifor, m., (2021, october). when death depends on networked information. panel presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. when death depends on networked information jacqueline wernimont dartmouth tamara kneese university of san fransisco tonia sutherland university of hawaii marika cifor university of washington land acknowledgements: marika cifor: seattle and the university of washington stand on the unceded land of the coast salish peoples, land which touches the shared waters of all tribes and bands within the duwamish, suquamish, tulalip and muckleshoot nations. we acknowledge the ancestral homelands of those who walked here before us and those who still walk here. tamara kneese: i acknowledge that the university of san francisco is located on the unceded ancestral homeland of the ramaytush ohlone peoples who are the original inhabitants of the san francisco peninsula. i recognize that i benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. i acknowledge the painful history of genocide and forced removal from this territory, and i celebrate the public presence of ohlone descendants who are working today to preserve and nourish their indigenous identity. tonia sutherland: joins us from honolulu, hawaiʻi, where she is a guest and uninvited visitor on the unceded ʻaina (land) of the kānaka maoli, or native hawaiian, people. tonia also calls upon the grace and guidance of her afro-caribbean ancestors from trinidad and tobago, st. vincent and the grenadines, and st. lucia as she does this work. jacque wernimont: dartmouth was founded in an act of land and community theft and under the auspices of the colonial project of britain. dartmouth college was founded to educate native american youth in both christian and colonial, western ideology. as staff and residents here, we occupy the lands of the abenaki and other algonquin peoples who continue to live and work here and elsewhere. all the work that takes place here rests on the forceful appropriation of their lands by european settlers. panel abstract one of the founding stories of the united states centers on patrick henry’s 1775 declaration “give me liberty, or give me death” on the floor of the second virginia convention where war with britain was being debated (cohen, 1981). a similar sentiment is part of several national origin stories including the 1320 declaration of scottish independence, which may have been an inspiration for henry, and greece’s national motto of “liberty or death,” which was the rallying cry in the 1820 greek war of independence. in each instance the suggestion is that independence will be achieved either through successful revolution or death. but in our modern networked cultures, what kind of independence can be found in death? this panel takes up the aoir 2021 independence theme by considering how our information and communication technologies are entangled with the end of human life, both at individual and community levels. our case studies focus primarily on the united states and are deeply invested in considering practices that are evolving in the context of the covid-19 pandemic, the ongoing hiv/aids pandemic, and the long epidemic of police killings of people of color in the u.s. in each of these long events, we are witnessing a myriad of efforts to collect mortality data and render it in ways that make sense of scales of loss. but questions about digital afterlives, networked and remixed loss, and proprietary control over digital remains complicates the foundational narratives of liberty through death and enrolls our dead in practices of nation formation even when those very lives were rendered expendable by the nation-state. at the same time, these practices are an important part of the problematic narrative that nothing dies on the internet, where deaths can circulate as undead memes and commodified data streams. the papers on this panel examine the intersection of data management and speculative death (life insurance, mortality tables, pandemic statistics, counting the dead or potential dead) and death care management (personal digital archives, maintenance work, kinship ties, digital estate planning/mortuary rites, memorialization). as interdisciplinary scholars from library and information science, science and technology studies, and media history, we interrogate the historical, sociotechnical, and cultural aspects of sorting and caring for the dead through networked information. how are people, institutions, and infrastructures working to make sense of and account for the dead on both individual and collective scales? in what ways do histories of racialized and gendered surveillance and violence impact the treatment of the dead when it comes to both digital and physical remains? major digital platforms and tech companies are increasingly at the center of memorialization and mourning practices, both building on and transforming the ways that these longer histories inform mortuary politics. all four papers show how institutions and individuals are using digital media and networked information— from mortality data and barcodes affixed to coffins to social media memorials and crowdfunding platforms—to assess, track, memorialize, and otherwise manage the dead. we pay particularly close attention to the ways that race, gender, sexuality, immigration status, and citizenship affect how the dead are counted and remembered. we trace the history of technologies used to assess risk and manage mortality, comparing recent covid-19 related developments to previous crises or pandemics and to longer histories of deathcare management as data management, including the history of the life insurance industry, mortality tables, and surveillance, from chattel slavery to contemporary predictive policing. in the 21st century the majority of these practices have transitioned to online and networked spaces, even as they continue to create social networks of information and ritual. despite digital technologies being offered as a “solution” to the problem of death, our disparate case studies show how digital systems tend to reinforce existing structural inequalities, thereby troubling any sense that independence from violent social formations exists even in death. references cohen, charles (october 1981). "the 'liberty or death' speech: a note on religion and revolutionary rhetoric". the william and mary quarterly. 38 (4): 702–717. viral memorialization: (re)making the faces of aids and covid-19 marika cifor university of washington abstract “the fabric we were going to use for people who died is now going to be used for people, hopefully, to live,” gert mcmullin shared (shen-berro, 2020). mcmullin, an activist who has devoted the last three decades to memorializing people killed by the hiv/aids pandemic, was referencing 2020 efforts to sew leftover fabric from the aids memorial quilt into face masks for frontline workers amidst the covid-19 pandemic. the quilt, the most famous aids memorial, since 1985 has collected panels crafted by the dead’s loved ones or fans, presenting names, lifespans and artifacts to memorialize individuals (sturken, 1997: 186). the redeployment of materials from one pandemic to another highlights the intertwining of the covid-19 and aids crises. even as we live within the wreckage of their unrelenting devastation both pandemics are being similarly and actively memorialized. digital pandemic memorials, including instagram’s the aids memorial (@theaidsmemorial) and faces of covid (@facesofcovid) on twitter, build on rethorical lineages of aids memorialization. both also mobilize the viral affordances of digital platforms—instant content delivery, constant availability, hyper-interactivity (cifor, 2021). in this paper, i examine how we make sense of pandemic deaths, physical and social, as multiple crises are unfolding, being weaponized, and enfolding our bodies. at this pandemic conjuncture how we memorialize viral losses online has urgent stakes. using andré brock’s (2018) “critical technocultural discourse analysis” methodology, i undertake a close reading of @theaidsmemorial and @facesofcovid memorial and the platform-driven accounts. both have a tremendous following, interactivity, and activate platformed techno-social affordances. with each crowdsourced post these pandemic memorials are forming the faces of aids and covid in america. since april 2016, @theaidsmemorial has shared 7,000+ instagram posts memorializing beloveds and public figures who have perished since 1981 in the aids epidemic with its more than 145,000 followers. most of its subjects and followers are americans. its founder and moderator, stuart, a scottish instagramer solicits, collects, edits, and shares posts of 1-10 images, alongside captions and metadata culled from email submissions. similarly, @facesofcovid, founded by alex goldberg in march 2020, shares “stories of those lost to covid per news reports, obits & submissions.” most of its more than 145,000 followers and 5,000+ memorials are by and for americans. in 240-character narratives, the account offers poignant snapshots contributed via a google form. @theaidsmemorial and @facesofcovid share an emphasis on memorializing individuals. their visual repertoires revolve around portraits. faces provide powerful messages, we read them for affect, identity, and relation and such images generate the most ‘likes’ and comments (bakhshi et al., 2014). faces matter too for stigmatized conditions that often rely on logics of individual responsibilization. to those who submit memorials each loss is more than a statistic or a dot in a data visualization. frequent comparisons are being made by scholars and in popular media between american covid and aids pandemics as a means of sensemaking in the face of the uncertainty, fear, and precarity that are amplified by covid-19. yet, the intertwined digital memorialization of these pandemics on social media have yet to be examined. pandemics exploit extant social fault lines, hierarchies, and inequalities. tensions between memorializing individual lives deemed valuable and grievable (butler, 2016), and the need for accountability and response amidst unending crises that disproportionately impact people subjected to social death need to be interrogated. epidemic memorializations directly impact the life chances of the “viral underclass,” black and brown people disproportionately harmed not just by organisms of biological viruses but by the societal structures that render them vulnerable to transmission, inadequate care, suffering, and death (thrasher, 2020). while focused on the individual, the crowdsourced pictures and words these accounts share aggregate into vast, evergrowing catalogs of loss. they shape who is, and moreover who we can imagine to be living and dying now. as douglas crimp (2002) wrote in 1991, “in an [aids] epidemic that didn’t have to happen, and whose continuing to this day to spread virtually unabated is the result of political neglect or outright mendacity, every death is unacceptable.” similarly, goldberg said, “the responsibility i feel is to make these stories visceral and real because that is not only a more compassionate and empathetic way to deal with a crisis like this…it’s also what forces us to ask hard questions about what was inevitable and what wasn’t” (cramer 2020). memorialization on both accounts is an effort at accountability. pandemic memorials aspire to counter forgetting’s violences, to remember those who have perished, recognize resistors, and offer lessons that catalyze different futures. yet, pandemic commemorations also occupy a fraught temporal and material position. in america, the dying and the dead are often absented from daily life, demarcated into hospitals, hospices, funeral homes, and cemeteries (gibbs et al., 2015: 256). commemoration too is often restricted to particular places and times. @theaidsmemorial and @facesofcovid intervene, “repositioning the dead back within the flow of everyday life” (ibid, 257). the dead through digital memorialization are reawakened becoming foundational to novel network formations, media practices, and affective relations (papailias, 2016: 452). both memorials build community around collective loss. it is likely these losses would not be otherwise publicly memorialized. affect accumulates as the memorials circulate between networked users (prybus, 2015: 240). the interactivity instagram and twitter afford memorialization is central to the accounts’ promising affective potency, compelling outrage, grief, tenderness, sympathy, thereby engendering immediacy, and perhaps, action. occurring in a society that fails to acknowledge and reckon with past or present trauma, and the role of the state, media, and different communities in exacerbating suffering and accelerating thousands of pandemic deaths these memorials are powerful forces in how we envision life after worlds as we knew them end. references saeideh bakhshi, david a. shamma, and eric gilbert, “faces engage us: photos with faces attract more likes and comments on instagram,” proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems. toronto, april, 2014: 965–974. andré brock, “critical technocultural discourse analysis,” new media & society 20, no. 3 (2018): 1012-1030. judith butler, frames of war: when is live grievable? 3rd ed. new york: verso, 2016. marika cifor, “what is remembered lives: time and the disruptive animacy of archiving aids on instagram,” convergence 27, no. 2 (2021): 371-394. philissa cramer, “meet alex goldstein, who created the faces of covid twitter account to help america face its grief, “jewish telegraphic agency, october 13, 2020. https://www.jta.org/2020/10/13/united-states/the-man-behind-the-faces-of-covid-twitteraccount-wants-to-help-america-face-its-grief. douglas crimp, “the spectacle of mourning” in melancholia and moralism: essays on aids and queer politics (cambridge: mit press, 2002), 201. martin gibbs, james meese, michael arnold, bjorn nansen, and marcus carter, “#funeral and instagram: death, social media, and platform vernacular,” information, communication & society 18, no. 3(2015): 255–268. penelope papailias, “witnessing in the age of the database: viral memorials, affective publics, and the assemblage of mourning,” memory studies 9, no. 4, 2016: 437–454. jennifer prybus, “accumulating affect: social networks and their archives of feelings.” in: networked affect (cambridge: mit press, 2015), 235–250. julian shen-berro, “extra fabric from aids memorial quilt used for coronavirus masks,” nbc, april 14, 2020. https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/extra-fabric-aidsmemorial-quilt-used-coronavirus-masks-n1183501 marita sturken, tangled memories: the vietnam war, the aids epidemic, and the politics of remembering. berkeley: university of california press, 1997. steven w. thrasher, “an uprising comes from the viral underclass,” slate, june 12, 2020, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/black-lives-matter-viralunderclass.html. hustling after death: covid-19 and platform necropolitics tamara kneese university of san francisco, california abstract tithi bhattacharya refers to social reproduction as “life-making activities,” but extends that definition to the necropolitics of the covid-19 crisis: “capitalism privatizes life, but it also socializes death” (jaffe, 2020). essential workers who perform social reproduction— from nannies and meat processing plant workers to instacart shoppers and amazon delivery drivers—take on the risk of death; “essential” is racial capitalist code for “disposable.” the ongoing pandemic spotlights not only long-term inequalities, but tensions within deathcare. on the one hand, digital deathcare emphasizes individual responsibility, asking people to prepare for their own deaths by employing data management tools. new models of algorithmic surveillance and attention encourage people to remain productive in the face of death as a macabre extension of what tressie mcmillan cottom (2020) dubs the “hustle economy.” on the other hand, digital death practices like crowdfunded funerals are fundamentally related to collective care and mutual aid, as evidenced by the role of crowdfunding platforms in social justice movements. i draw on my long-term research on deathcare startups, including examples from my forthcoming book, death glitch: what social networks leave behind, to delineate how the pandemic is shaping deathcare practices in the united states. internet researchers have described how social media platforms interface with mourning, memorialization, and mortuary rituals (brubaker, hayes, and dourish, 2013; gibbs et al., 2015; marwick and ellison, 2013). meanwhile, the valuable data of the dead can be extracted by platforms, advertisers, and companies (karppi, 2018; leaver, 2013). at other times, remembrance of the dead through digital channels like hashtags is part of social justice activism, calling attention to people whose lives have been devalued by state violence and structural racism (bonilla and rosa, 2015; benjamin, 2018). during the covid-19 crisis, these earlier trends have taken on new significance. the pandemic lays bare the inequalities that leave some oppressed groups more likely to die than others, while also further intertwining sacred embodied care rituals with commercial platforms. covid-19 has intensified the role of death entrepreneurialism. when funerary rites shifted because of safety protocols, some deathcare workers like death doulas took on digital estate planning and other organizational tasks for grieving kin members (cowles, 2020). the new york times referred to the pandemic as a “boom time for death planning” (miller, 2020). covid has made young, white, and privileged people more aware of their own mortality. death influencers are capitalizing on the pandemic and founding startups. as a testament to the growth of such companies, there are 70 startups in the death and company slack channel, many of them founded by millennial women. deathcare management is an extension of neoliberal, ostensibly feminist self-care and a mark of personal responsibility. new death startups are partnering with insurance companies and employers, with the notion that workers will be more productive if they contemplate their own mortality. what i call “responsible death” is tied to larger risk management trends around corporate wellness, mindful labor, and workplace productivity (gregg, 2018; schüll 2016) and to much longer pernicious histories connecting the valuation of human life to metrics (bouk 2015; zelizer 1979; wernimont 2019). despite startup companies’ presentation of self-care as a way of managing mortality and mitigating illness and death, essential workers have no choice but to expose themselves to the virus. gig workers, many of whom are immigrants, are treated as contractor “micro-entrepreneurs” and don’t receive benefits. an uber driver died of covid-19 complications in 2020 precisely because he couldn’t afford to stop working. because he was classified as an independent contractor, uber did not provide for his family after his death (hussain 2020). when gig workers die at work, their loved ones often turn to gofundme as a de facto form of life insurance. long before the pandemic, many people crowdfunded for chemotherapy treatments and burials. in the us, many people don’t have medical coverage— let alone life insurance policies— in the absence of a universal health care system. neoliberal definitions of who is deserving of care inform which campaigns are successful and which fail (berliner and kenworthy, 2017). but for those who die without life insurance, crowdfunding campaigns can provide financial and emotional support to their loved ones. crowdfunding platforms, along with cashapp, venmo, and paypal, are instrumental to pandemic-related mutual aid efforts, which include paying off medical debt, burials, and mental health care for bereft families. in a feedback loop of attention, the more likes and shares that a campaign receives, the more a platform will promote it. gofundme dedicates a section of their website to funeral campaigns and highlights campaigns that are trending. this amplifies campaigns that are already in the news. the attention economy sometimes stalls out, privileging some lives and causes over others. with gofundmes becoming even more ubiquitous during the pandemic, such tensions and inequalities are heightened, particularly in a crisis that is disproportionately killing black, indigenous, latinx, and disabled people. deathcare, as a right, intersects with other labor organizing efforts and social movements connected to platform capitalism. amid the pandemic, the bay area-based gig workers collective and other worker-led groups are pushing for platforms to recognize their workers as employees, which also means caring for them and their families if they die on the job. those on the frontline of the hustle economy are fighting for dignity in both life and in death. references ruha benjamin, “black afterlives matter,” boston review, july 16, 2018, http://bostonreview.net/race/ruha-benjamin-black-afterlives-matter. lauren berliner and nora kenworthy, “producing a worthy illness: personal crowdfunding amidst financial crisis,” social science & medicine, 2017. yarimar bonilla and jonathan rosa, “#ferguson: digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the united states,” american ethnologist 42(1) 2015. dan bouk, how our days became numbered. chicago: university of chicago press, 2015. jed brubaker, gillian hayes and paul dourish, “beyond the grave: facebook as a site for the expansion of death and mourning,” the information society 2013, 29, 3, 152. tressie mcmillan cottom, “the hustle economy,” dissent, fall 2020, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-hustle-economy. charlotte cowles, “how i get it done: alua arthur, death doula,” the cut, october 19, 2020, https://www.thecut.com/2020/10/how-i-get-it-done-alua-arthur-death-doula.html. martin gibbs, james meese, michael arnold, bjorn nansen, and marcus carter, “#funeral and instagram: death, social media, and platform vernacular,” information,communication & society 18, no. 3(2015): 255–268. melissa gregg, counterproductive. durham, nc: duke university press, 2018. suhauna hussain, “this driver died of covid: a prop. 22 story,” los angeles times, november 1, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2020-1101/prop-22-uber-driver-covid-19-death-benefits-workers-comp. tero karppi, disconnect: facebook’s affective bonds. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2018. sarah jaffe, “social reproduction and the pandemic, with tithi bhattacharya”, dissent, april 2, 2020, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/social-reproduction-andthe-pandemic-with-tithi-bhattacharya. tama leaver, “the social media contradiction: data mining and digital death,” m/c journal, 2013, 16(2). alice marwick & nicole b. ellison, “there isn't wifi in heaven!” negotiating visibility on facebook memorial pages,” journal of broadcasting & electronic media 2012 56(3): 378-400. jennifer miller, “boom time for death planning.” the new york times, june 16, 22020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/business/boom-time-for-deathplanning.html. natasha dow schüll, “data for life: wearable technology and the design of self-care,” biosocieties 11, 2016. viviana zelizer, morals and markets: the development of life insurance in the united states. new york: columbia university press, 1979. jacqueline wernimont, numbered lives: life and death in quantum media. cambridge, ma: mit press. surveilling the dead: risk management, disaster technologies, and the digital afterlife tonia sutherland university of hawaiʻi at mānoa abstract in 2009 the chicago school system implemented a program developed by consultants from the massachusetts institute of technology (mit) and the university of chicago that would use predictive algorithms and archival records such as juvenile-detention reports, attendance records, and test scores to identify high-risk students and “assume, anticipate, predetermine, and foretell deadly violence (mckittrick, 2021: 104).” in other words, the chicago public school system deployed an algorithm that would determine exactly which of their 400,000 students were “most at risk for being shot (reel, 2014).” predictive risk assessment and other risk management tools—such as the one developed for and used by the chicago public schools—are increasingly common: they are used to determine recidivism rates (sutherland, 2019); for location-based proactive policing (cf. geolitica [formerly predpol]); and, increasingly, to augment disaster preparedness technologies. with the addition of predictive risk assessment and other risk management tools, the disaster preparedness industry has become part of the united states’s surveillance economy—one that has been shown to disproportionately impact black lives (browne, 2015). for example, after hurricane katrina—when hundreds of deceased black people’s bodies were separated from their caskets—the state of louisiana passed legislation requiring that all coffins be given a unique identifier that could be linked to more robust records on the deceased. as an analog process, this method of tracking the dead had already produced mixed results—and limited success: death certificates tucked inside coffins were often destroyed by water and labels affixed to caskets were easily washed away. as a result, state officials began working to find a more permanent, data-based solution. now, by using digital barcodes and attaching location tracking devices to coffins, state officials in louisiana are working to quickly develop mobile applications to scan and trace what they colloquially call “runaways”—invoking with this language the brutality of slave patrols and likening the deceased to selfemancipated enslaved people, or “runaway slaves.” by harnessing the power of simulations, decision trees, optimization, mapping, and other data-centric techniques, the technologies being developed and deployed under the auspices of risk management and disaster preparedness have created new modes and methods of surveilling black bodies, even after death. and as the state of louisiana begins to advertise itself as a “disaster laboratory (robertson, 2016),” officials envision the state as a functional experiment in combatting storm surge, resettling imperiled communities—and keeping track of the dead. similarly, in the face of the global covid-19 pandemic, funeral homes, cemeteries, crematoriums, and others in the deathcare industry have taken steps to maximize productivity using platforms specifically built for the cloud and delivered over the web to improve immediacy of access (primarily cloud-based software as a service [saas] platforms). innovations in areas such as automatic obituaries using pre-populated forms, online inventories, and barcode systems have been particularly compelling as the death toll from covid rises around the world. however, as covid-19 mortality rates have proven to disproportionately impact black, brown, and indigenous communities in the united states (cdc, 2021), these technological innovations are also disproportionately being tested and deployed in communities of color. and while it is important to be able to track the hospitalized, the missing, and the dead during pandemics and in the aftermath of disaster, critical questions must be asked about the biases encoded into these technologies, and the conditions of possibility they create for surveillant harm to occur. using post-disaster efforts in the louisiana gulf coast and deathcare technologies deployed during the covid-19 pandemic as sites of inquiry, this paper considers web and cloud-based solutions to surveilling the dead under the auspices of risk management. viewed through the lens of digital mortuary practices and hurricane disaster preparedness, the paper approaches disaster technologies as simone browne suggests: arguing that first and foremost, disaster technologies are human technologies where the ownership of and access to one’s own body data must be understood as a right (browne, 2010: 132). the paper addresses concerns about conflicting notions of “risk” and the uneven application of risk assessment and management tools through the lenses of race, records, and the surveillance of black digital afterlives. the project first addresses the records that comprise the data that drives these technologies, problematizing both what comprises modern death and mortuary records and their digital afterlives. next, the paper examines the nature of human bodies as records, framed by a discussion of the complex concerns raised by the deployment of risk management tools as disaster technologies in black communities and other communities of color. the paper then speaks to concerns about agency and empowerment, making recommendation about how to responsibly handle a person’s digital remains (here defined as the trails of data and metadata—both what people create and what is created for and about them—that are scattered across varying digital environments and that persist after death) at a time when deathcare industries have moved from analog to digital environments that render human bodies as data or as digitized code, increasingly usurping individuals’ accounts of who they are and whether and where they belong. references browne, simone. dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. durham: duke university press, 2015. browne, simone. “digital epidermalization: race, identity and biometrics.” critical sociology 36, no. 1 (2010): 131-150. centers for disease control and prevention (cdc). “health equity considerations and racial and ethnic minority groups.” february 12, 2021. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/health-equity/raceethnicity.html. geolitica. “data-driven community policing.” https://geolitica.com/. mckittrick, katherine. dear science and other stories. (durham: duke university press, 2021). reel, monte. “chronicle of a death foretold: predicting murder on chicago’s south side.” harper’s magazine. march 2014. https://harpers.org/archive/2014/03/chronicle-ofa-death-foretold-2/. robertson, campbell. “‘we built an app’: keeping track of louisiana’s flood-tossed tombs.” the new york times. september 18, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/19/us/we-built-an-app-keeping-track-of-louisianasflood-tossed-dead.html. sutherland, tonia. “the carceral archive: documentary records, narrative construction, and predictive risk assessment.” journal of cultural analytics (2019). doi: 10.22148/16.039. “to make death data faster”: the history and politics of the effort to “modernize and automate” mortality statistics jacqueline wernimont dartmouth abstract in 2020 judy moulder, the director of the office of vital records & health statistics in mississippi argued that efforts to modernize mortality data can only progress if agencies optimize the decidedly analog technology of human conversation (moulder, 2020). moulder’s advice is likely to encounter the fierce headwinds of techno-solutionism that saturate the 25 year-old “international collaborative effort (ice) on automating mortality statistics” at the centers for disease control (cdc) and within the national vital statistics system (nvss) (“international collaborative effort on automating mortality statistics,” n.d.). this project considers how the efforts to modernize the us death reporting system have been rhetorically positioned and materially pursued within both imagined and real shifts in american information and computing technologies. while this project focuses on u.s. efforts to automate death records, the first mortality ice includes participants from australian, brazilian, canadian, french, british, scottish, spanish, and swiss national agencies and subsequent proceedings had a wider transnational conversation (proceedings vol 1, 1999). for u.s. records produced before 2007, the history of automating death records is a history of multiple remediations from a range of textual materials. for records produced from 2008 onwards, this may also a story of remediation but one more fully encapsulated in digital media. given the patchwork of implementation of electronic death registry systems and provider use, the system currently has to accept paper, telecom, and digital transmission of information in order to ultimately transform the entire whole into standardized digital information. according to a 2020 audit, only one state, indiana was able to meet the goal of 90% digital registration of death events. as moulder suggests, transforming these various data depends on several levels of human interaction. because mortality reports are federated states process death records according to state laws and then sell that information to the federal surveillance and records system – the effort to get all 50 states and the 12 territories and jurisdictions to simultaneously adopt the same digital technologies and workflows is a complex network and systems challenge. perhaps it should come as no surprise then that the mortality automation project is 25 years and counting in the making. indeed, the technoutopianism underlying the current effort at modernization has been at the heart of our federated system since the end of the 19th century. indeed, the first efforts to modernize and automate the death records system at the federal level began in 1968 with the development of a software system known as acme (for automated classification of medical entities). “acme was designed with three goals: 1) to use software that embodies a set of explicit rules and relationships and could be modified and updated to select the underlying cause of death more consistently than could be done by manual coders, 2) to simplify data entry and thereby reduce the cost of training medical coders and nosologists, and 3) to produce multiple as well as underlying cause-of-death data” (proceedings vol 1, 1999). acme’s success was only partial given that the instructions to operate the software were at least as complex as manual death coding and as a result did not yield the hoped-for cost and time savings. subsequent development of an additional three systems, transax, micar and supermicar has enhanced our ability to understand the multiple factors leading to human death and have standardized the information in line with who guidelines and international efforts, but has not achieved the goal of simplifying the process or reducing cost. initially the mortality ice effort involved little discussion of networked information; while international standardization and digital processing were both goals for the participants in the first meeting in the 1996, the internet is only mentioned six times in the 218-page proceedings and where it does appear it is mostly as a repository for coding training materials for use by doctors. this changes dramatically by the time the group meets for the second meeting just three years later in 1999 (proceedings vol. 2, ) when edward sondik, director of the national center for health statistics, extolled the “astonishing…power of computer technology and the internet” (proceedings vol 2., 27). by that point the participants from more than 25 countries world-wide were hoping to have real time or, at the least, daily mortality data collected through national information networks that all depended on either public internet or secure governmental intranet networks. it is also at the 1999 meeting that we begin to see discussion of distributed work and remote reporting appear as central themes in the effort to make death data faster. by the time of the 2003 meeting of the mortality ice the desire to automate and standardize mortality data has expanded into creating a digital “life record” that could be accessed for several different governmental purposes from marriage and divorce registration to birth and death tracking (proceedings vol 3, p 83). along with this change is a shift to born digital documents and web-served databases of information. there is also an increased effort to mandate online mortality reporting, providing exemptions only in “limited cases” where “there may not be any internet service” and the local “funeral director is also the local butcher” (proceedings vol 3, 83). embedded within the discussions of technical affordances and costs are a remarkable set of assumptions about how americans die and who is involved in the processes of certifying death and preparing a body for final services. additionally, the increasing efforts to automate and network mortality and life information seem to iteratively edit out exactly the kinds of human conversation and intervention that are foregrounded in moulder’s 2020 essay. understanding the histories and the politics of “making death data faster” are crucial to understanding how mortality information is imagined to flow in and across nations and the roles such information plays in national and transnational governance and public health efforts. moulder’s essay frames my analysis of the work of the mortuality ice precisely because it seems to deviate from the kind of disembodied technology driven information networks that come to dominate the mortality ice discussions. one insight of this project is that competing interests, especially those articulated by congress around national security and social service fraud have taken over half of the work load of the already overburdened local vital registrars. as a consequence, registrars have been unable both in terms of human capacity and funding to serve both their service function to a nation of workers who must document their identity and public health official who depend on mortality tracking to understand regular disease spread and emerging viral threats like covid 19. given that moudler’s call for listening and communication between people, it is worth considering how “regular” death registration might differ from that during a crisis and how internet and communication technologies might interfere with, rather than aid, our understanding of mortality data in crises, like the covid-19 pandemic. additionally, given the central role of networked information in the u.s government’s approach to mortality data, we might well ask how the digital and connected technologies and process are shaping governmental and personal action. thomas laqueur has argued that our “dead make social worlds” and this project helps us to understand how internet and computing technologies have participated in this making of social worlds. references “international collaborative effort (ice) on automating mortality statistics” https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/ice_automation.htm accessed 4/14/2021. proceedings of the international collaborative effort on automating mortality statistics vol 1 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/misc/ice99_1.pdf accessed 4/14/2021 proceedings of the international collaborative effort on automating mortality statistics vol 2, 2001. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/misc/ice01_acc.pdf proceedings of the international collaborative effort on automating mortality statistics vol 3, 2006. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/misc/ice06_3.pdf laqueur, thomas. the work of the dead: a cultural history of mortal remains (new haven: princeton university press, 2015). moulder, judy. “to make death data faster, just listen” public health and surveillance, n.d. centers for disease control and prevention, deputy director for public health science and surveillance. https://www.cdc.gov/surveillance/blogsstories/make-death-data-faster.html accessed 4/14/2021. aoir disability & bootcamps author details [edited].docx selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 “i worked so hard, and i still didn’t succeed”: coding bootcamp experiences of people with disabilities kate m. miltner the university of sheffield gitit kadar-satat the university of warwick emily ashton the university of warwick introduction coding bootcamps are intensive training programs that aim to turn adults with no computer programming experience into professional software developers in as little as 12 to 16 weeks. coding bootcamps have been promoted as a key solution for the tech “skills gap” in the united states (swartz, 2017) as well as a “ticket into the middle class” for low-income workers (pathak, 2016). in the united kingdom, coding bootcamps have been positioned as a solution to the “digital skills gap” (nugent, 2022) as well as a strategic facet of the national ai strategy (2022), with a network of government-funded “skills bootcamps” aimed at providing workers with “in-demand digital skills” (institute of coding, n.d.) launching in 2021. in the us and canada, it is estimated that approximately 25,000 people attended a coding bootcamp in 2020 (eggleston, 2020); there is no comparable data for the uk. in both the us and the uk, coding bootcamps are positioned as an alternative pathway into the tech “pipeline” for groups who are traditionally excluded from computing careers (schnell, 2019; uk digital strategy, 2022). framed as a form of “coding equity”, bootcamps are said to provide “transformative access” for participants and have even been characterized as a form of social justice activism (rea, 2022). critics of coding bootcamps, however, suggest that they are another form of “lower ed” (cottom, 2017) that leaves students in debt and unprepared for the demands of the tech labor market (e.g., mcbride, 2016). suggested citation (apa): miltner, k.m., kadar-satat, g., ashton, e. (2023, october).“i worked so hard and i still didn’t succeed”: coding bootcamp experiences of people with disabilities. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. despite polarized claims about coding bootcamps and their possibilities, there is very little empirical work that investigates the experiences and outcomes of bootcamp attendees. this work-in-progress paper responds to this gap, drawing from a four-year comparative study between the us and uk that investigates who benefits the most from attending coding bootcamps, and why. combining ethnographic, interview, and survey data, this study suggests so far that the benefits of coding bootcamp attendance accrue disproportionately across different groups. one of the notable themes that has emerged from the study is that people with disabilities are far less likely to have a positive bootcamp experience. as recommendation site best bootcamps notes, people with disabilities “can learn to code and excel at it”, but most bootcamps “don’t provide pathways specifically for these students” (plaut, 2023). perhaps for this reason, people with disabilities were more likely to experience unfair bias and/or exclusion at their bootcamp and are less likely to have experienced employment-related benefits than people without disabilities. this paper discusses some of the reasons as to why this is the case, casting some doubt on the “transformative” possibilities of bootcamps for marginalized groups. methods this work-in-progress paper draws upon data from an ongoing comparative study (2018 present) about coding bootcamps in the us and uk. it combines ethnographic and interview data from the united states and survey and interview data from the united kingdom. the us ethnography took place over 9 months at a bootcamp in a major us city; interviews with participants from that fieldsite (n= 29) were conducted over a period of two years (2018-2020). the uk project began with an exploratory national survey of adults who attended a coding bootcamp (n = 193); data collection concluded in 2022. interview candidates were recruited from survey participants and through snowball sampling (n =14); uk interviews are still ongoing. bootcamp experiences of people with disabilities in our survey sample, people with disabilities comprised 29% of respondents; compared to the 17.8% of england and wales residents with disabilities (office of national statistics, 2021) this is a notable over-index; it is worth noting, however, that the respondent population was self-selecting. morris, begel, and wiedermann (2015) note that neurodiverse people are often interested in digital technologies and that there are “affinities between the profile of some individuals with asd [autism spectrum disorder] and the job requirements of the technology industry” (p. 173). while survey respondents self-identified as having a variety of disabilities, interview participants with disabilities were mostly (but not entirely) neurodiverse, disclosing diagnoses of asd, adhd, dyslexia, and dyspraxia. regardless of the type of disability, the poor experiences of people with disabilities at coding bootcamps was a stand-out theme across both the interview and survey data. 26% of respondents with a disability reported experiencing unfair bias and/or exclusion compared to 10% of respondents with no disability (p=0.013). interview data from both the us and the uk suggests that both the pedagogy employed at the bootcamps and treatment from staff were significant problems for people with disabilities. in both countries, students with disabilities struggled with the fast paced nature of the programme, with one interview participant with asd describing it as “hard to keep up”. while bootcamps are notoriously high-pressure environments (thayer and ko, 2017), they seem to be particularly difficult for neurodiverse students. both the equalities act 2010 (uk) and the americans with disabilities act state that organizations are required to provide reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities, but neurodiverse students from both countries reported that their bootcamps either struggled or refused to make adequate adjustments. furthermore, these students also reported that they felt penalized by staff for disclosing their disabilities and requesting additional support. perhaps unsurprisingly, bootcamp students with disabilities were less likely to complete their bootcamps (78% vs 87% for students without disabilities); even those who technically completed the course reported feeling “burnt out” or “depressed” as a result of the bootcamp. the impact of these experiences could be quite significant. one participant with adhd described feeling “flawed” and “broken” by their inability to keep up in their program; another participant with dyspraxia who felt “defrauded and “shafted” out of their life savings also reported being mocked by a fellow student and insulted by a staff member. furthermore, while 77% of respondents without disabilities got a job after finishing their bootcamp, that number dropped to 65% for respondents with disabilities. interview data also suggests that these numbers don’t tell the full story; for some bootcamp graduates with disabilities, staying employed in the jobs that they got after they completed their program could be a challenge. one participant with asd got two part-time jobs after they completed their bootcamp; however, they lost both jobs after three months and consequently experienced homelessness for a period of time. with stories like these, it is perhaps not unexpected that there was a statistically significant difference (p=0.048) between the course recommendation scores for students with disabilities (6.95) and students without disabilities (7.80). conclusion although some bootcamps declare their “support” for “people with disabilities and neurodiversities” (northcoders, n.d.), our study indicates that even if and when this support exists, it falls short of what people with disabilities need to thrive in a bootcamp setting. as one interview participant with asd said, “it could’ve worked for me. i loved it…i just would have loved it if it had all been the right support.” while coding bootcamps might provide “transformative access” (rea, 2022) to some marginalized groups, this paper suggests that this is less likely to happen for people with disabilities. references cottom, t. m. (2017, july 23). the lower ed ecosystem: bootcamps edition. tressie mcmillan cottom. https://tressiemc.com/uncategorized/the-lower-ed-ecosystem-bootcamps-edition/ disability, england and wales. (n.d.). office for national statistics. retrieved 1 march 2023, from https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthand wellbeing/bulletins/disabilityenglandandwales/census2021 driving digital diversity | diversity at northcoders. (n.d.). northcoders. retrieved 1 march 2023, from https://northcoders.com/company/diversity-inclusion mcbride, s. (2016, december 6).want a job in silicon valley? keep away from coding schools. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-06/want-a-job-in-silicon-valley-keep -away-from-coding-schools morris, m. r., begel, a., & wiedermann, b. (2015). understanding the challenges faced by neurodiverse software engineering employees: towards a more inclusive and productive technical workforce. proceedings of the 17th international acm sigaccess conference on computers & accessibility, 173–184. https://doi.org/10.1145/2700648.2809841 national ai strategy. (2022, december 18). gov.uk. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-ai-strategy nugent, j. (2022, october 12). how digital skills bootcamps are helping to bridge the talent gap. uktn | uk tech news. https://www.uktech.news/partnership/digital-skills-clinic-bootcamps-talent-gap-20221012 pathak, p. (2016, june 8). are coding bootcamps only for the rich? techcrunch. http://social.techcrunch.com/2016/08/06/are-coding-bootcamps-only-for-the-rich/ plaut, a. (2023, january 9). coding courses for people with disabilities. bestcolleges. https://www.bestcolleges.com/bootcamps/guides/coding-courses-for-people-with-disabili ties/ rea, a. (2022). coding equity: social justice and computer programming literacy education. ieee transactions on professional communication, 65(1), 87–103. https://doi.org/10.1109/tpc.2022.3143965 swartz, j. (2017, may 9). businesses say they just can’t find the right tech workers. usa today. https://tressiemc.com/uncategorized/the-lower-ed-ecosystem-bootcamps-edition/ https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthandwellbeing/bulletins/disabilityenglandandwales/census2021 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthandwellbeing/bulletins/disabilityenglandandwales/census2021 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthandwellbeing/bulletins/disabilityenglandandwales/census2021 https://northcoders.com/company/diversity-inclusion https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-06/want-a-job-in-silicon-valley-keep-away-from-coding-schools https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-06/want-a-job-in-silicon-valley-keep-away-from-coding-schools https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-06/want-a-job-in-silicon-valley-keep-away-from-coding-schools https://doi.org/10.1145/2700648.2809841 https://doi.org/10.1145/2700648.2809841 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-ai-strategy https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-ai-strategy https://www.uktech.news/partnership/digital-skills-clinic-bootcamps-talent-gap-20221012 https://www.uktech.news/partnership/digital-skills-clinic-bootcamps-talent-gap-20221012 http://social.techcrunch.com/2016/08/06/are-coding-bootcamps-only-for-the-rich/ http://social.techcrunch.com/2016/08/06/are-coding-bootcamps-only-for-the-rich/ https://www.bestcolleges.com/bootcamps/guides/coding-courses-for-people-with-disabilities/ https://www.bestcolleges.com/bootcamps/guides/coding-courses-for-people-with-disabilities/ https://www.bestcolleges.com/bootcamps/guides/coding-courses-for-people-with-disabilities/ https://doi.org/10.1109/tpc.2022.3143965 https://doi.org/10.1109/tpc.2022.3143965 https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/03/28/tech-skills-gap-huge-graduates-survey-says/99587888/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/03/28/tech-skills-gap-huge-gradu ates-survey-says/99587888/ thayer, k., & ko, a. j. (2017). barriers faced by coding bootcamp students. proceedings of the 2017 acm conference on international computing education research, 245–253. the ioc skills bootcamps. (n.d.). institute of coding. retrieved 1 march 2023, from https://instituteofcoding.org/ioc-skills-bootcamps/ uk digital strategy. (n.d.). gov.uk. retrieved 1 march 2023, from https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uks-digital-strategy/uk-digital-strategy https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/03/28/tech-skills-gap-huge-graduates-survey-says/99587888/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/03/28/tech-skills-gap-huge-graduates-survey-says/99587888/ https://instituteofcoding.org/ioc-skills-bootcamps/ https://instituteofcoding.org/ioc-skills-bootcamps/ https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uks-digital-strategy/uk-digital-strategy https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uks-digital-strategy/uk-digital-strategy microsoft word vicari-you cant see it but its a matter of life and death of platforms, power, and the invisible-you.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): vicari, s. & ditchfield, h. (2022, november). “you can’t see it but it’s a matter of life and death”. of platforms, power and the invisible. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. "you can't see it but it's a matter of life and death". of platforms, power and the invisible stefania vicari the university of sheffield hannah ditchfield the university of sheffield platform hegemony or user power? empirical work interested in the impact of social media use on discursive practices in general – and participatory dynamics in particular – tends to split into two main camps. on the one hand, research investigates the consequences of the infrastructural turn of contemporary digital structures: social media are increasingly becoming ubiquitous and in so doing, they are turning into essential and mundane infrastructures of our everyday life (plantin et al., 2018). as most mainstream social media are commercially owned and regulated, this also means that structures, interfaces and norms designed by profitdriven companies – namely, platforms’ “techno-commercial” mechanisms (van dijck et al., 2018) are increasingly influential to people's lives. these mechanisms generate platform bias: they shape how we present and represent ourselves and the issues we care for but also the information that we learn, see, and share. on the other hand, research has drawn attention to the way platforms’ socio‒technical infrastructures can actually destabilize traditional (commercial and state-centered) power roles in the construction of meaning and practices around issues of public interest. not only has the very structure of contemporary social media platforms been shown to open new routes for minority voices to make a point, be heard and be seen, for example through “networked counterpublics” (jackson et al., 2020). there is also clear evidence that social media cultures can develop practices of resistance able to circumvent commercial governance, for instance, in platforms’ moderation systems (gerrard, 2018). social media, the embodied and the invisible while debates feeding into one or both of the two camps discussed so far are now well established and growing, still little do we know about how these dynamics work in relation to power and meaning making centered on health and illness (lupton, 2017). even in research based on the analysis of health-based interactions on online platforms (e.g., webforums, chats, microblogging sites), little attention has been drawn to how platform mechanisms and user practices meet. in fact, existing research mostly approaches “online media” as “a conduit for information and a traversable space” (koteyko et al., 2015), rather than as influential to the very health practices being studied. the scarcity of empirical work in this domain becomes ever more evident when attention is drawn to rare, uncommunicable, or generally least known – and least studied health conditions and diseases (vicari and cappai, 2016). to address this gap, we draw on initial findings from an ongoing leverhulme trustfunded project focused on social media uses relevant to hereditary cancer syndromes. these syndromes mark health conditions linked to known genetic mutations, also called “cancer genes”, that heighten the risk of having cancer from an early age. these conditions are invisible in at least three ways. cancer genetic risk is evidence-based and embodied, but not bodily visible. general health practitioners rarely know about hereditary cancer syndromes. overall, hereditary cancer syndromes have not yet entered the wider collective imagination. existing research provides clear evidence that individuals with these conditions turn to social media to seek, learn, produce and share information about their condition (allen et al., 2020). it is also evident that this information often derives from a complex combination of lay and expert sources, like personal storytelling and scientific publications (vicari, 2021). however, little do we know about how these practices form at the intersection of “embodied experiences” of health and illness (brown et al., 2004), everyday social media uses, and platform mechanisms. in this paper we explore these dynamics drawing on a social media analysis that incorporates data from twitter, facebook, tiktok, and instagram. data and methods: combining the computational and the netnographic the article draws on the collection and analysis of social media content relevant to two hereditary cancer syndromes: the hereditary breast and ovarian cancer syndrome (also known as brca 1/2) and lynch syndrome. drawing on existing conceptualizations of digital methods for cultural research (vicari and kirby, 2022), we developed a research design that followed a quanti-quali trajectory. we used a combination of computational techniques and tools to access, collect and handle posts (i.e., data and metadata) about these conditions published by twitter (public accounts), tiktok (public accounts), instagram (public accounts) and on facebook (public pages) over the course of six months. then, we used netnographic techniques (kozinets, 2019) to disassemble these data on the basis of emerging themes and interpret these themes by recombining data within and across their platforms of origin. ultimately, this allowed us to both learn about lived experiences of hereditary cancer and identify the bias deriving from platform mechanisms. when the invisible becomes visible: (un-)ordinary leaders and local worlds our preliminary findings show that when it comes to invisible health conditions, the voice of ordinary social media users easily overcomes that of traditional elite entities (e.g., health professionals). local platform mechanisms differently shape how information is shared and who (e.g., breast cancer advocate, health data expert) and what (e.g., conference poster, photo of mastectomy procedure) become more visible and credentialed in these sharing practices. they also influence how and which personal experiences are curated and shared. these initial findings suggest that social media platforms are essential in making the invisible visible but raise questions on how participating in one or more platforms’ “local worlds” might affect the lived experience of those who embody this invisible. references allen, c. g., roberts, m., andersen, b., & khoury, m. j. (2020). communication about hereditary cancers on social media: a content analysis of tweets about hereditary breast and ovarian cancer and lynch syndrome. journal of cancer education, 35(1), 131-137. brown, p., zavestoski, s., mccormick, s., mayer, b., morello-frosch, r., & gasior altman, r. (2004). embodied health movements: new approaches to social movements in health. sociology of health & illness, 26(1), 50-80. gerrard, y. (2018). beyond the hashtag: circumventing content moderation on social media. new media & society, 20(12), 4492-4511. jackson, s. j., bailey, m., & welles, b. f. (2020). #hashtagactivism: networks of race and gender justice. mit press. koteyko, n., hunt, d., & gunter, b. (2015). expectations in the field of the internet and health: an analysis of claims about social networking sites in clinical literature. sociology of health & illness, 37(3), 468-484. kozinets, r. v. (2019). netnography: the essential guide to qualitative social media research. sage. lupton, d. (2017). introduction. in lupton, d. (ed.) digitised health, medicine and risk (pp. 1‒3). routledge. plantin, j. c., lagoze, c., edwards, p. n., & sandvig, c. (2018). infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook. new media & society, 20(1), 293–310. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553 van dijck, j., poell, t. and de waal, m., (2018). the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford university press. vicari, s. (2021). is it all about storytelling? living and learning hereditary cancer on twitter. new media & society, 23(8), 2385-2408. vicari, s., & cappai, f. (2016). health activism and the logic of connective action. a case study of rare disease patient organisations. information, communication & society, 19(11), 1653-1671. vicari, s., & kirby, d. (2022). digital platforms as socio-cultural artifacts: developing digital methods for cultural research. information, communication & society, 1-23. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 digital disconnection, the broken promise of attention, and potential for critical engagement: a case study of the forest app meilun chen rutgers university introduction in an era defined by the pervasive accessibility of mobile technology, the smart phone is deeply interwoven with everyday life and makes individuals constantly and permanently exist in the digital connection. together with the background of an attention economy that underpinned the mobile technology and internet industry (eyal, 2014; williams, 2018), the public become more concerned with the mobile industry’s design of luring attention and the potential digital attention crisis brought by the smartphone use and digital overconnection (baym, wagman, & persaud, 2020). given this concern, an emerging sector within the mobile app industry is burgeoning with the aim of tackling this issue. ranging from meditation apps to screen lock applications and digital productivity tools, this sector asserts its goal of alleviating smartphone-induced overconnection, promoting sustained attention, and empowering individuals to regain control over their smartphone usage (vanden abeele, 2021). despite practical differences between these apps, the discourse strategy advocated by the entire industry revolves around the contrast between distraction and concentration. technology addiction is portrayed as the natural inclination toward distraction, with attention—aroused through effective app design—offered as an antidote to technology addiction when the design is properly implemented (jablonsky, 2022). while there is a widespread adoption of these apps to manage focused time, this industrial discourse has been criticized by multiple media and technology scholars. some scholars think this discourse does not acknowledge the paradox and ambiguity inherent in digital connectivity and smartphone use (vanden abeele, 2021; syvertsen, 2020; ytre-arne et al., 2020). defining digital wellbeing as “a subjective individual experience of optimal balance between the benefits and drawbacks obtained from suggested citation (apa): chen, m. (2024, october). digital disconnection, the broken promise of attention, and potential for critical engagement: a case study of the forest app. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. mobile connectivity” (van abeele, 2021, p.938), van abeele (2021) advocates for research on digital wellbeing to move beyond simplistic cause-and-effect thinking and to understand it as a “dynamic construct” that, in addition to human factors, considers the influences of technology and context. similarly, büchi (2022) contends that digital media technologies should not be viewed merely as “antidote, poison, or scapegoat”; instead, future studies should focus on creative digital media practices and the social contexts in which they occur. some other scholars think about this issue from the sociotechnical arrangement of attention perspective, arguing that this industrial discourse frames “attention” as socially valuable and then extracting commercial value from user distraction (paasonen, 2021; syvertsen, 2020). given that the contemporary discussion on the concept of attention is deeply intertwined with the evolution of mobile technology, bucher advocates the examination of attention as “an emerging property of sociotechnical relations” (bucher, 2012, p.4). to enrich the understanding of attention beyond its cognitive science and psychological dimensions, bucher proposes the “technicity of attention” as an analytical framework that seeks to explore how attention is distributed, structured, and imbued with value within particular mediums and environments (bucher, 2012, p.4). this study responds the above research call by doing a case study of the forest app, one of most popular digital productivity apps that employs gamified pomodoro timer and screen lock mechanism to “help you stay away from your smartphone and stay focused on your work” (the forest app website, n.d.). by looking into how the forest app produces and instantiates modes of attention, how the users conceptualize their experiences and routines of the forest app in real situations, and how the previous two together shape users’ understanding of digital wellbeing, this study articulates the pitfalls of the forest app’s promise of attention, and more importantly, users’ embracing of these broken promise of attention create conditions for them to reflect on their past smartphone use, and help them critically reflect their personal meaning of digital wellbeing --raising future questions about whether we can turn the potential of failure experience into a critical intervention when designing digital wellbeing applications. methodology first, i employed the walk-through method (light, burgess, & duguay, 2016) to conduct a critical reading of the affordances implicated in shaping the "technicity of attention" within the forest app. at this stage, i also did a comprehensive review of the online materials (e.g. news articles, the app store introduction, and advertisements) related to the conception and promotion of the forest app. then i did 14 in-depth interviews with the forest users that had been actively use the forest app for more than 6 months paying attention to differences in gender, age, geography, major, education background and duration (based on the app’s user report profile). as the interviews went, i found a recurring discourse (13 out of 14 interviewees talked about that) of failure experience, for example, how the app’s promise of attention fell short, though this was not being initially prioritized in the semi-structured interviews. and i explored what meanings, feelings, and practices are invoked in this discourse. also due to this recurring discourse, i used the abductive coding analysis technique (tavory & timmermans 2014) to use the existing concepts as i mentioned above while finding new insights of this failure experience directly from the interview data. additionally, i avoided using abstract terminology such as “digital wellbeing” during my interviews. instead, i used a more detailed description for these terms. findings the first part of my key findings outlines the forest app’s sociotechnical arrangements of attention and their impact on user conceptualization and perception of attention. on one hand, the "technicity of attention" within the forest app shares similarities with the techniques used in the social media and internet industry to induce distraction and lure attention. the forest app employs the rewarding mechanisms (earning tokens and growing virtual trees by using the app to lock their phone) and gamifications (unlocking new species of the virtual trees) as stimuli replacement mechanism to give users freshness and thus get motivated to keep using this app to lock their screen. on the other hand, the application fosters dependency and compulsive use (klobas et al., 2018), with some users reporting that they have reached a point where they are unable to concentrate on work or study without it. additionally, some interviewees admitted to prolonged use of their smartphones after discontinuing the app, engaging in what they called "revenge smartphone use" as a reaction to the disconnection. even worse, some interviewees find themselves get trapped in the app's representational mechanisms (the virtual forest they grow by using the app) (gross et al., 2017), leading them to take cheating tactics such as exploiting system bugs to covertly use their smartphones while using the app. they justified their actions by convincing themselves that their unrecognized distraction by the app equates to staying focused. these findings reveal that the app's sociotechnical arrangements of attention replicate the oppositional relationship between dependency and agency, as critiqued by schüll (2012). in her study of the co-production of gambling addiction, schüll highlights how self-regulatory behaviors and the desire for self-control are central to addiction therapy. however, this dynamic creates a paradox: the very process of therapy, aimed at fostering self-control, can inadvertently perpetuate dependency. the second part of findings highlights the interviewees' shared experiences of failure while engaging with the forest app. participants vividly described instances of failure or frustration, and the insights gained from these moments, which emerged as a recurring theme during the interviews despite not being a focus of the initial semi-structured interview plan. while following the app’s guidelines, interviewees reported that they often failed to realize the app’s promise of “staying focused”. despite the forest app's failure to deliver on its promise of enhancing attention, these experiences led users to reassess their smartphone use, reconsider digital connectivity issues, and reflect on the nature of attention and digital wellbeing (although they did not explicitly use these terms). most interviewees, originally seeking a solution for smartphone overuse hindering their focus on work or study, recognized that ineffectiveness of attention arrangements on this app is similar to those found in the internet industry and identified the phone not as the primary issue. drawing on thrift's concept of the “technological unconscious” (2004) and menkman's insights on glitches (2011), this research proposes that these failure experiences reveal the hidden sociotechnical attention structures and provoke critical thinking among users. the technicity of attention employed by the internet industry operates within invisible sociotechnical frameworks, tricking users into “a flow of certain expectation” (menkman, 2011: 340) and forming the “technological unconsciousness”. thus, the failures encountered with the app can be interpreted as “glitches” that interrupt this flow and make the normally concealed structures of attention discernible. by highlighting the discourse surrounding these failure experiences, the study implies that such experiences hold value for evolving more nuanced analysis of sociotechnical attention mechanisms. it also raises an intriguing question for future scholars and industry designers: is it useful to transform user failure experiences into critical interventions for the design of future wellbeing applications? if so, how might this be achieved? if not, what are the alternatives? references baym, n. k., wagman, k. b., & persaud, c. j. (2020). mindfully scrolling: rethinking facebook after time deactivated. social media + society, 6(2), 2056305120919105. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120919105 braun, v., & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa büchi, m. (2021). digital well-being theory and research. new media & society, 1(1), 1– 18. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211014032 bucher, t. (2012). a technicity of attention: how software "makes sense." culture machine, 13, 1–23. campo, e. (2022). attention and its crisis in digital society. routledge. eyal, n. (2014). hooked: how to build habit-forming products. new york, ny: penguin. forest. (n.d.). forest: stay focused, be present. retrieved november 24, 2024, from https://www.forestapp.cc/ gross, s., bardzell, j., bardzell, s., & stallings, m. (2017). persuasive anxiety: designing and deploying material and formal explorations of personal tracking devices. human–computer interaction, 32(5-6), 297–334. https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2016.1275123 jablonsky, r. (2022). meditation apps and the promise of attention by design. science, technology, & human values, 47(2), 314–336. https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439211046838 klobas, j. e., mcgill, t. j., moghavvemi, s., & paramanathan, t. (2018). compulsive youtube usage: a comparison of use motivation and personality effects. computers in human behavior, 87, 129–139. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.05.038 light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881–900. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 menkman, r. (2011). glitch studies manifesto. in m. lovink & r. somers (eds.), video vortex reader ii: moving images beyond youtube (pp. 336–347). institute of network cultures. paasonen, s. (2021). dependent, distracted, bored: affective formations in networked media. mit press. schüll, n. d. (2012). addiction by design: machine gambling in las vegas. princeton university press. syvertsen, t. (2020). digital detox: the politics of disconnecting. emerald publishing limited. tavory, i., & timmermans, s. (2014). abductive analysis: theorizing qualitative research. university of chicago press. thrift, n. (2004). remembering the technological unconscious by foregrounding knowledges of position. environment and planning d: society and space, 22(1), 175–190. https://doi.org/10.1068/d321t vanden abeele, m. m. (2021). digital wellbeing as a dynamic construct. communication theory, 31(4), 932–955. https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtz038 williams, j. (2018). stand out of our light: freedom and resistance in the attention economy. cambridge, england: cambridge university press. ytre-arne, b., syvertsen, t., moe, h., & karlsen, f. (2020). temporal ambivalences in smartphone use: conflicting flows, conflicting responsibilities. new media & society, 22(9), 1715–1732. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819888750 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): lauriault, t.p., theus, a.-l. (2024, october). industry 4.0: digital twins and accountability. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. industry 4.0: digital twins and accountability tracey p. lauriault carleton university anna-leena theus carleton university introduction digital twins (dts) are often characterized as the nextgen smart cities, as part of cybermanufacturing processes (lee et al. 2016) and as industry 4.0 (royko 2017). dts are digital replicas of ‘real’ world physical assets, with by-directional feedback loops between the digital and the material (nap 2024). dts are generally discussed in it and engineering academic literature and by vendors, uncritically, and are marketed as a real-time immersive experience, where avatars interact with others in an urban landscape, and where urban planners provide the public a view of the ‘real’ impact of planning decisions. technologically solutionist rationales offer efficiently automated building operations; streamlined design and prototyping processes; and the means to monitor, predict, and preempt the impact of climate change (wgic 2022). this paper discusses preliminary observations from an archival and ai research project examining the imagining canada’s digital twin (icdt) project (cims n.d. b) for the architecture, engineering, construction and owner operated (aecoo) sector. research question the authors ask: if dts intermediate and automate actions and decisions that affect people and property, how ought records about those actions, decisions and processes be managed and archived? can ai/ml enable that preservation, and how would one archive the ai/ml processes within a dt? the digital twin study these questions guide the study of icdt at carleton university by the carleton immersive media studio (cims) funded by the new frontiers in research grant (cims n.d. b). the research is part of the international research on permanent authentic records in electronic systems (interpares) the i trust ai project, funded by social science humanities and research council (sshrc) led at the university of british columbia. the research is framed by four interrelated theoretical approaches: critical data studies, which accepts that data and technological systems are never independent from the institutions, systems, tools, techniques and systems within which they are created and used (kitchin & lauriault 2018); digital diplomatics (duranti 2009) which is “the study of the creation, form, and transmission of records, and their relationship to the facts represented in them and to their creator, to identify, evaluate, and communicate their nature and authenticity” (saa n.d.); social and technical assemblage theory (kitchin & lauriault 2018) which ontologically defines a specific complex data and technological system by identifying and describing the loosely coupled context and content attributes of its making to better describe how knowledge, forms of thought, actors, legalities and governmentalities, organizations, standards among others come together to create that system. and finally, digital records forensics (diamond 1994 in duranti 2009) whereby the researcher becomes an expert witness of records to testify that they have not been tampered with and are authentic. records here may be data, software, code, ai/ml, automated processes, hardware, agreements, contracts, seals and how these come together in a dt to inform actions and decisions that affect both social and material outcomes. it is about identifying what constitutes records in an evidentiary and juridical context to assess who the responsible and accountable actors are in a dt, and to test whether and what can be preserved in institutional digital archives. preliminary observations icdt was created for the aecoo sectors and actors with the subjectivities of builders, construction supply chain management, facilities and plant managers, researchers and geographic information systems (gis), building information modeling (bim) and internet of things (iot) specialists. as they are emergent, there are few standards, interoperability is a challenge, there are struggles between the owners of large monopolistic proprietary platforms and communities developing interoperable opensource systems. there is also a skills divide between facilities and plant management (fmp) that manages physical assets, architects and builders who use bims while fmp does not; between fmp and researchers and companies that install and maintain sensors including analytics companies that generate intelligence from them, and the revolving door of graduate students, researchers and contractors. from a juridical perspective, there is a host of undocumented agreements between asset owners and researchers; bim procurement contracts do not stipulate data ownership; and subcontracts with sensor and analytics providers lack grounded data and technological knowledge. currently there are no a-is bims as that was not stipulated in contracts; the ownership of sensor data is unclear as the sensor company is different from the company that does the analytics. we also discovered that sensors and analytics are outsourced for insurance reasons, as there is concern of automated action leading to material loss. while research is ongoing, we see systems deployed in the absence of coordinated data and technological governance. what is certain is that icdt, while innovative and best in show, does not resemble the simple it, engineering, building operation and vendor diagrams. we also see that records are intricately related to juridical actors and contractual obligations; we do not yet see the evidentiary trail of automated and ai/ml actions. methodological approach a hybrid methodological case study approach that combines technological walkthroughs (light et al. 2018) to capture the attributes of the dt was conducted with actors involved in icdt construction, with a digital diplomatics informed semi-structured interview instrument that guided data collection. actors include fmp, architects, iot experts, dt project managers and archivists. we met gis experts, the city archivist and the building permit office, and building and operations sensor and data analytics companies. we recorded interviews and collected documentation. we inventoried software, hardware and data types, and are modeling data flows to identify code related to automation and ai/ml. this approach enabled us to unearth contractual agreements and juridical actors and that there is no bi-directional dt, but there are multiple systems of systems under the authority of different juridical authorities within the university and the city. in terms of subjectivities, researchers at cims are interested in the digital rendering of the built environment, fmp is responsible for the safe operations of physical assets, researchers at the building performance research centre are interest in fmp data, the permit office ensures that building codes are met but do not process bims, and bims are not connected to the city’s dt which also has no bi-directional feedback but like icdt is a 3d interactive spatial data infrastructure for planning and scenarios. the city archives is interested in building permits and administrative records related to the city’s assets, but not the dt as it is not a record but a visual publication of records. the university archives is interested in the records related to contracts, the procurement of bims, and of weekly status reports from the companies that read and report sensor data and not icdt. conclusion this transdisciplinary, international and cross-sectoral research conducted with critical data studies scholars, theoretical digital archivists, ai/ml scholars, records managers and archivists developed a hybrid theoretical framework and methodological process to study fledging large and complex social and technical urban dts. our objectives are threefold: to assess how dts intermediate and automate actions and decisions that affect people and property, and how records about those actions, ought to be governed; to assess whether ai/ml can enable the preservation of urban dts and if ai/ml processes can be archived and to better understand the subjectivities of actors building dts, that may become public infrastructures thus necessitating accountability and transparency in decision making in dt records. references carleton immersive media studio (cims a). “understanding the cims streams of inquiry: modelling.” accessed november 14, 2024. https://cims.carleton.ca/blog/understanding_the_cims_streams_of_inquiry_modelling. carleton immersive media studio (cims b). “imagining canada’s digital twin.” research project. accessed november 14, 2024. https://canadasdigitaltwin.ca/. duranti, luciana. 2009. “from digital diplomatics to digital records forensics.” archivaria, 39–66. “interpares trust ai artificial intelligence (itrustai)” accessed november 14, 2024. https://interparestrustai.org/. kitchin, rob and lauriault, tracey p. 2018. “toward critical data studies: charting and unpacking data assemblages and their work.” in thinking big data in geography, edited by josef eckert, andrew shears, and jim thatcher. unp nebraska. lee, jay, behrad bagheri, and chao jin. 2016. “introduction to cyber manufacturing.” manufacturing letters 8 (april): 11–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mfglet.2016.05.002. light, ben, jean burgess, and stefanie duguay. 2018. “the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps.” new media & society 20 (3): 881–900. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438. national academies press (nap). 2024. “foundational research gaps and future directions for digital twins”. national academies press, washington, d.c. https://doi.org/10.17226/26894. rojko, andreja. 2017. “industry 4.0 concept: background and overview.” international journal of interactive mobile technologies (ijim) 11 (5): 77–90. https://doi.org/10.3991/ijim.v11i5.7072. “saa dictionary: diplomatics.” n.d. accessed march 1, 2024. https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/diplomatics.html. world geospatial industry council (wgic). 2022. “spatial digital twins: global status, opportunities, and the way forward,”. https://wgicouncil.org/wpcontent/uploads/2023/11/wgic-policy-report-2022-01-spatial-digital-twins.pdf. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): persaud, c. & liang, . (2022, november). ‘what are you looking for?’: sexual imaginaries and affordances on grindr and scruff. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ‘what are you looking for?’: sexual imaginaries and affordances on grindr and scruff christopher j. persaud university of southern california calvin a. liang university of washington introduction for queer men, sexual imaginaries have come to accommodate hybrid physical and digital location-based cultures (miles, 2017). in short, what is possible in terms of intimate connections with other queer men has opened up in exciting, sometimes scary, and radical ways. however, this expanded imaginary of what is possible can also lead to an existential questioning of what an individual person wants—simply and nothing more than sex, a fleeting summer fling, a new group of friends, to fall in love? more? less? a combination of all of these things at different moments in time? in the face of such uncertainty, we argue that queer men develop a range of practices as they negotiate their shifting relationships to sex and romance as mediated through virtual intimacies (mcglotten, 2013). in this study, we explore how queer men learn about, interpret, and reproduce sexual and romantic norms on two intimate platforms, grindr and scruff. our approach builds on sharif mowlabocus’s (2016, pg. 60) notion of cybercarnality concerning the “erotic economy of gay male corporeality” and pym et al. (2021, pg. 399) study of queer community “imagined as an affective sense of shared ethics” on intimate platforms. to that end, we explore three intertwined research questions: 1) what sexual imaginaries and affordances circulate on grindr and scruff? 2) how do queer users make sense of their own practices relative to these narratives and norms? 3) what role does platform design play in how users construct and reproduce sexual and romantic narratives and norms? methods we leverage digital ethnographic and qualitative approaches to explore how queer men make sense of how intimate platforms and their attendant sexual social media subcultures mediate their sexual and romantic practices. specifically, we employ 1) participant observation on location-based dating and hookup apps grindr and scruff, 2) interviews and app walkthroughs (light et al, 2018) with users, 3) critical discourse analysis of social media conversations and mainstream journalistic coverage of queer men’s mediated sexual and romantic practices, and 4) design probes that elicit alternative design directions. 'what are you looking for?' this study emerged from lingering questions in both of our doctoral research projects at the intersection of communication and media studies, human-computer interaction, and design studies. in the context of author 1’s research on sexual content moderation and queer digital sexual cultures, interviews and fieldwork highlighted an enduring ambivalence towards the behavioral routes available to queer users on intimate platforms like grindr and scruff. author 2’s research examines how norms embedded in platforms can influence health outcomes for queer people, elucidating participants’ experiences with grindr and scruff’s design features. the common question “what are you looking for?” that users exchange reveals the shifting practices that queer men bring to these platforms, where someone’s profile description or choice of tags does not necessarily align with the intimate possibilities that they are interested in at that moment in time. this resonates with miles (2019) exploration of the different types of use in male-male locative dating app contexts (the embracer, the timewaster, and the minimalist). furthermore, our study builds on byron et al. (2021) by examining how queer men destabilize divisions between dating apps and social media platforms, wherein their social and sexual communication practices construct digital intimate publics that support a range of sexual narratives and norms (or imaginaries). in this conference presentation, we discuss two emergent themes from our study: 1. the interpretive work that queer men do to make sense of how they fit into sexual and romantic norms as represented through profile descriptions and subculture signification (ie: kink interests, body-type categorization, sexual content creation) 2. the construction and circulation of sexual imaginaries on social media platforms (ie: twitter and reddit) and intimate platforms (ie: grindr and scruff) among queer men designing for multivalent intimate interests we follow up on birnholtz et al. (2014), who found that grindr users use specific language in their profiles to manage reactions and stigma from others, to investigate users’ reasonings and strategies. in alignment with hutson et al. (2018) who “argue that focusing on platform design can reveal opportunities to reshape troubling patterns of intimate contact without overriding users’ decisional autonomy”, we further explore the socio-cultural impacts of design-based features (pg. 1). in particular, we examine how current grindr and scruff users interact with 1) search, sort, and filter features in relation to discrimination (hutson et al's, 2018), 2) reporting and blocking moderation features (mowlabocus, 2020), and 3) relaxed sexual imagery on grindr and scruff that allows users to share content that had been previously prohibited. through qualitative interviews and design probes, we also employ speculative design methods to explore how queer mens’ experiences might change if these features worked in different ways, thus co-creating alternative ways of connecting with others on these platforms. intimate platforms, as lik sam chan (2021, pg. 2) describes, “are portals that transport people from their mundane physical environment to an exciting virtual world full of relational possibilities”. from our digital ethnographic and speculative design data, we develop the concept of multivalent intimate interests to capture the ambivalent sociocultural context and situated nature of queer men’s sexual and romantic practices. this is situated within a theoretical framework that integrates queer communication approaches with hci and critical design studies, shaped by our black and asian american personal subjectivities as well as decolonial queer of color critique and methodologies as they concern intimate platforms (mcglotten, 2013; mowlabocus, 2016, chan, 2021). references birnholtz, j., fitzpatrick, c., handel, m., & brubaker, j. r. (2014, september). identity, identification and identifiability: the language of self-presentation on a location-based mobile dating app. in proceedings of the 16th international conference on humancomputer interaction with mobile devices & services (pp. 3-12). byron, p., albury, k., & pym, t. (2021). hooking up with friends: lgbtq+ young people, dating apps, friendship and safety. media, culture & society, 43(3), 497-514. chan, l. s. (2021). the politics of dating apps: gender, sexuality, and emergent publics in urban china. mit press. hutson, j. a., taft, j. g., barocas, s., & levy, k. (2018). debiasing desire: addressing bias & discrimination on intimate platforms. proceedings of the acm on humancomputer interaction, 2(cscw), 1-18. light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881-900. mcglotten, s. (2013). virtual intimacies: media, affect, and queer sociality. suny press. miles, s. (2017). sex in the digital city: location-based dating apps and queer urban life. gender, place & culture, 24(11), 1595-1610. miles, s. (2019). going the distance: locative dating technology and queer male practice-based identities. in the geographies of digital sexuality (pp. 115-135). palgrave macmillan, singapore. mowlabocus, s. (2016). gaydar culture: gay men, technology and embodiment in the digital age. routledge. mowlabocus, s. (2020). a kindr grindr. queer sites in global contexts: technologies, spaces, and otherness, 33-47. pym, t., byron, p., & albury, k. (2021). ‘i still want to know they’re not terrible people’: negotiating ‘queer community’ on dating apps. international journal of cultural studies, 24(3), 398-413. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): pettis, b. t. (2023, october). who watches the birdwatchers? creating a rogue archive of twitter’s ongoing collapse. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. who watches the birdwatchers? creating a rogue archive of twitter’s ongoing collapse ben t. pettis university of wisconsin-madison crowdsourced fact-checking as platform metacommentary community notes (formerly named “birdwatch”) is twitter’s crowdsourced fact-checking program to combat misand dis-information.1 it “aims to create a better-informed world, by empowering people on twitter to collaboratively add helpful notes to tweets that might be misleading ” (twitter n.d.). by signing up to be a birdwatch contributor, a user can add contextual notes and commentary to other tweets as well as rate the contributions of others. since 2021, community notes that are rated as “helpful” are displayed underneath tweets that are identified by birdwatch users as needing additional context. user submissions to the community notes program also serve as metacommentary on the platform more generally. beyond their fact-checking role, birdwatch notes also illuminate how some users perceived elon musk’s recent purchase of the platform and how the subsequent changes aligned with their own understandings of what the platform ought to be. this paper describes birdwatch archive, a project to archive twitter’s community notes program, which has been an under-acknowledged component of the platform’s history. the website processes the data that twitter publicly releases from the birdwatch program and displays it in a searchable and organized fashion that is accessible and useful to researchers. as muira mccammon and jessa lingel (2022) explain, studying dying platforms is a way “for designers and practitioners to think about the lifecycles of the devices and services they create, and for users seeking to understand the relationships between people, platforms and data” (2). i argue that studying a dying platform relies upon the creation of what abigail de kosnik (2016) describes as “rogue archives,” collections which exist beyond traditional memory institutions. this includes 1 the online platform now named “x” was previously named “twitter.” i continue to use this original name in following the practices of the platform’s users and communities. similarly, although twitter renamed the “birdwatch” program to “community notes” shortly after the musk purchase, i continue to use both interchangeably as both names continue to be used within twitter’s publicly posted documentation as well as within the public urls for downloading data. turning to less publicized materials from social media platforms, and to preserve and make these available to other researchers. even though major platforms such as twitter are typically well-documented and may offer some data access, researchers cannot rely solely on the platform itself to document its histories. i use notes from the birdwatch archive to analyze how some twitter users experienced the weeks and months surrounding musk’s purchase of the platform. how did some users understand the platform and its online space? how did some users understand their own role in shaping the platform? what can we take from that to our analyses of other online spaces? elon musk purchases twitter and transforms the platform in late 2022, elon musk purchased twitter and enacted many significant changes across the platform, such as firing thousands of employees, reinstating previously banned users, and selling the blue checkmark “verified status” for a monthly fee (scribner 2022). in the months following musk’s purchase, many users abandoned the platform and there have been numerous failures of technology and infrastructure. in their “platform biography,” jean burgess and nancy baym (2020) argue that much of twitter’s success can be traced to novel practices developed by users and later coopted by the platform, such as hashtags and retweeting. the sociocultural meaning of any online platform emerges, in part, from the balance between user practices and the business interests of its corporate owners (gillespie 2010). as with the decline of earlier platforms like friendster, myspace, and tumblr, the sudden changed enacted on twitter felt like a seismic shift in the makeup of the contemporary internet (mccammon and lingel 2022; corry 2022; ogden 2021). but, as those previous cases demonstrate, new platforms will emerge may soon take twitter’s place. speculating in 2020 on the future of twitter and similar platforms, burgess and baym (2020) wrote that “[t]he challenge for us all is how to maintain the creative power users have to reshape the cultures of digital media platforms, especially when they seem to be veering precipitously toward interests that may work against their users’ security, privacy, wellbeing, and civic agency” (115). even as twitter continues to decline and the balance tips toward those interests, internet scholars can assess what’s left behind on the dying platform and imagine how future platforms might better balance the interests of their users with their own business priorities. the birdwatch archive there has been significant development of methods to study twitter by retrieving and analyzing tweets, and these will continue to be critical for studying the platform’s ongoing decline. however, the use of meta-commentary such as data from the community notes program offers additional opportunities to understand how users perceived their role in shaping the platform. in the interest of transparency, twitter publicly distributes birdwatch data, but this is limited in its scope and utility (twitter n.d.). data is batched and updated approximately once per day as a set of tsv (tabseparated values) files. typically, only the past week’s worth of data continues to be accessible at their public urls, and only one day’s files listed on the data download page. furthermore, although the data is distributed in a well-documented and structured format, it is difficult for a researcher to parse and search through the data in an efficient manner. to address these limitations, i have developed an archiving project to preserve copies of the public birdwatch data and make it accessible in a more convenient format for researchers. the project uses a series of python scripts to copy tsv files into a public google cloud storage bucket. the files are then imported into a relational database which is used as the backend for a public-facing website: www.birdwatcharchive.org. following shawn graham, ian milligan, and scott weingart’s (2016) “macroscopic” methods for large data sets, the website facilitates sorting, querying, identifying relations across the data at scale. using the anonymous user identification strings from each tsv file, the website enables researchers to assess how frequently users contribute to the community notes program by grouping notes and ratings they have provided. even as twitter continues to devolve and collapse, we can try to learn from how users described and understood the platform. when studying major platforms, we cannot rely solely upon the data made accessible by the platform itself. instead, we must look for opportunities to create “rogue archives” of online settings, which includes turning sources that are not as frequently viewed by most users. as jessica ogden (2021) puts it, “web archiving practices constrain how we will come to know and understand dead and dying platforms in future” (3). therefore, we should try to cast as wide a net as possible when archiving how various users understood an online space. preserving significant tweets is important, but other aspects of the platform—including birdwatch— are important for future analyses of twitter as well. part of imagining and building the future of the internet should include sifting through the rubble of what came before. researchers can lean upon rogue archives such as the birdwatch archive to begin to do this work. references brock, andré. 2012. “from the blackhand side: twitter as a cultural conversation.” journal of broadcasting & electronic media 56 (4): 529–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2012.732147. bruns, axel, tim highfield, and jean burgess. 2014. “the arab spring and its social media audiences: english and arabic twitter users and their networks.” in cyberactivism on the participatory web. routledge. burgess, jean, and nancy k. baym. 2020. twitter: a biography. new york: new york university press. corry, frances. 2022. “why does a platform die? diagnosing platform death at friendster’s end.” internet histories 6 (1–2): 31–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2021.1985360. crosset, valentine, samuel tanner, and aurélie campana. 2018. “researching far right groups on twitter: methodological challenges 2.0.” new media & society 21 (4): 939–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818817306. de kosnik, abigail. 2016. rogue archives: digital cultural memory and media fandom. cambridge, massachusetts: the mit press. fuchs, christian. 2018. digital demagogue: authoritarian capitalism in the age of trump and twitter. london: plutopress. gillespie, tarleton. 2010. “the politics of ‘platforms.’” new media & society 12 (3): 347–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342738. graham, shawn, ian milligan, and scott weingart. 2016. “the joys of big data for historians.” in exploring big historical data: the historian’s macroscope. london: imperial college press. mccammon, muira, and jessa lingel. 2022. “situating dead-and-dying platforms: technological failure, infrastructural precarity, and digital decline.” internet histories 6 (1–2): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2022.2071395. ogden, jessica. 2021. “‘everything on the internet can be saved’: archive team, tumblr and the cultural significance of web archiving.” internet histories 0 (0): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2021.1985835. scribner, herb. 2022. “a timeline of the musk-twitter deal so far.” axios. october 26, 2022. https://www.axios.com/2022/05/17/elon-musk-twitter-timeline. twitter. n.d. “community notes guide.” accessed november 15, 2022a. https://twitter.github.io/communitynotes/overview/. ———. n.d. “downloading data | community notes guide.” accessed november 15, 2022b. https://twitter.github.io/communitynotes/download-data/. grosse-the hashtag syllabus as class assignment-the hashtag syllabus as class assignment selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 assessing critical information literacy in the undergraduate classroom: exploring source type and expertise in studentgenerated hashtag syllabi meghan grosse washington college sara clarke-de reza washington college introduction in the immediate aftermath of the 2014 murder of 18-year michael brown in missouri, hashtags like #ferguson, #justiceformikebrown, and #handsupdontshoot begin trending on twitter. at the same time, marcia chatelain, georgetown university professor of history and american studies, began crowdsourcing materials for educators trying to address what happened in their classrooms using the hashtag #fergusonsyllabus. what resulted was a list of highly interdisciplinary and multimedia sources including scholarly texts, news stories, songs, poems, films, public addresses, and children’s books. chatelain’s call spoke both to the present crisis, the murder of a black teenager by police, and to the historical and cultural context in which this shooting happened. the efforts of chatelain and the community that came together around this hashtag expanded our understanding of information production and curation and the function of a syllabus beyond the college classroom. in introducing our classes to the idea of the hashtag syllabus, we attempt to engage our students in practices of information literacy with the hope of providing them tools to look critically at the inequities that permeate academic and non-academic spaces. critical information literacy while the hashtag syllabus as class assignment is distinct in many ways from the syllabi that inspired it, the goal is to draw student attention to contemporary issues outside of the classroom while simultaneously advancing important learning goals. as instructors, we see these learning goals as inextricable from questions of power and equity and work to meaningfully address those questions through various stages of the assignment. the central goal of these assignments is to develop our students’ critical information literacy skills. critical information literacy, a growing area of scholarship most frequently addressed by librarians and literacy scholars, “involves developing a suggested citation (apa): grosse, m., clark-de reza, s. (2023, october). assessing critical information literacy in the undergraduate classroom: exploring source type and expertise in student generated hashtag syllabi. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. assessing critical information literacy in the undergraduate classroom: exploring source type and expertise in studentgenerated hashtag syllabi critical consciousness about information” and challenging both the library and the academy’s “role in structuring and presenting a single, knowable reality” (elmborg 2006, 198). building further on this, we engage with ideas from critical library instruction praxis that “promotes critical engagement with information sources, considers student collaborators in knowledge production practices (and creators in their own right), recognizes the affective dimensions of research, and (in some cases) has liberatory aims” (accardi, drabinski, and kumbier 2009, xi-xii). methods and findings as instructors and scholars working in distinct, but highly interdisciplinary fields, we have used hashtag syllabus assignments across our curriculum to support unique learning objectives in both introductory and upper-level courses. in the early stages of developing critical information literacy, our students focus on vetting different source types. at the end of their time as undergraduates, the focus turns more explicitly to critiques of academic knowledge production and distribution. students in upper-level courses are assigned historical and contemporary critiques on race and gender bias in communication and media studies scholarship, in academic publishing and peer-review, and in libraries and archives in preparation for this assignment. this framework requires students to consider the “racialized and gendered politics of knowledge production itself” (goldthree and bahng 2016, 23). in both instances, our students are required to do collaborative work while quickly expanding their familiarity with materials on contemporary issues. to assess the effectiveness of these assignments in responding to these critiques, we use qualitative content analysis to explore patterns in source type, media type, source accessibility, authorship and engage in group discussions about the distribution and organization of materials. while we continue to review the outcomes of these assessments with new groups of students, we have found these assignments support deep learning and engage students in work that establishes critical connections between their work in the classroom and their position in the world. connection to conference themes chatelain’s #fergusonsyllabus was a revolutionary document, in its creation, its range of content, and its aims. that first hashtag syllabus served as a prototype that has since been recreated, reworked, and reimagined many times and in many different contexts. the power of these documents is that they bring together, in a cohesive way, a series of openly available documents for public consideration. while some operated through a crowdsourced model, like the #charlestonsyllabus, others, like the #charlottesvillesyllabus, were instead developed and circulated by a small group of people, in that case, a group of graduate students at the university of virginia (clark 2020, 226). both crowdsourced and curated hashtag syllabi efforts are often led by people working within traditional academic and educational institutions (teachers, professors, graduate students, librarians, and instruction coordinators), but not exclusively. the widely circulated #lemonadesyllabus, based on beyoncé’s 2016 album, was created by the theologian and writer candice marie benbow. through the process of co-creation, crowdsourcing, collaboration, and distribution outside of traditional academic spaces, the hashtag syllabus offers a kind of public pedagogy document that addresses, both implicitly and explicitly, the limitations of expertise as constructed within the academy. hashtag syllabi, as represented in the examples above, serve as opportunities not only for resource gathering, but intervention. it is important to recognize that the early examples of these efforts were “primarily initiated by african american scholar-activists,” and very often by black women.1 these efforts are part of a long history of selfeducation practices and are “necessitated by the systemic deficiency of racially inclusive content in america’s public school and university curricula” (monroe 2016).2 by integrating the hashtag syllabus into our classes, we ask our students not only to look more closely at the content offered to address contemporary issues of social justice, but to more critically consider how knowledge is produced and by whom. the open and online quality of the hashtag syllabus further deepens that discussion to consider the audience for and accessibility of the sources included and to engage students in processes of knowledge production. while the syllabus is rarely revolutionary in the context of the college or university classroom, our hope is to help students reimagine that document as one with revolutionary potential and to see their role and their responsibility in creating resources that actively push against biases in academia, to look beyond common search results, and to create a web-based resource that is responsive to issues and audiences in the world outside the academy. references accardi, maria t., emily drabinski, and alana kumbier, eds. 2009. critical library instruction: theories and methods. duluth, mn: library juice press. clark, meredith d. 2020. “remaking the #syllabus: crowdsourcing resistance praxis as critical public pedagogy.” communication, culture & critique 13: 222-241. elmborg, james. 2006. “critical information literacy: implications for instructional practice.” the journal of academic librarianship 32, no. 2: 192-199. goldthree, reena n. and aimee bahng. 2016. “#blacklivesmatter and feminist pedagogy.” the radical teacher 106: 20-28. monroe, lisa a. 2016. “making the american syllabus: hashtag syllabi in historical perspective.” accessed february 27, 2023. https://www.aaihs.org/making-the american-syllabus-hashtag-syllabi-in-historical-perspective/. 1 notably, two of the most famous movements of the past twenty years that centered hashtag campaigns were also developed or led by black women. the #metoo movement, while initially attributed by many news outlets to a 2017 viral tweet by actress alyssa milano, was started by activist tarana burke in 2006, and the black lives matter network was started in 2013 by patrisse cullors, alicia garza, and opal tometi. 2 for additional information on the history of collective knowledge production in african-american communities, please see heather andrea williams’ self-taught: african american education in slavery and freedom (2005) and “the history of non-digital, crowdsourced knowledge” in alyssa p. lyons’ article, “hashtag syllabus,” published by the american sociological association (2019). microsoft word gu-n�zhubo and her "brothers"-n�zhubo and her "brothers".docx selected papers of #aoir2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers virtual event / 13-16 oct 2021 suggested citation (apa): gu, j. (2021, october). nüzhubo and her “brothers”: streaming life and mediating intimacy at scale. paper presented at aoir 2021: the 22nd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. virtual event: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. nüzhubo and her “brothers”: streaming life and mediating intimacy at scale jingyi gu university of illinois at urbana-champaign gender and sexual dynamics in live/life streaming at 11:30 p.m. chinese local time, i logged onto the huajiao mobile app and entered the live streaming session hosted by little monroe, a 20s-looking woman with heavy makeup and showing a bit of cleavage. she greeted me: “welcome to my live streaming, brother gulu.” little monroe then addressed her over 6,000 viewers in the session: “how’s everyone’s work today?” someone responded in the chat box: “i just got off work so i’m exhausted, how about you?” little monroe belongs to a group called nüzhubo, which in chinese means “female live streamers.” many nüzhubos work in a genre i call “live/life streaming,” in which they broadcast and discuss their everyday lives to viewers in real-time in exchange for comments and virtual gifts. however, this live streaming genre often finds itself under the scrutiny of a combined state and industry censorship apparatus for creating sexually charged content. why did little monroe assume my gender identity and address me and all other viewers with “brother”, a common term of endearment in chinese? what is the appeal of little monroe’s session for those 6,000 people who participate in real time? to understand how seemingly intimate social relationships are formed within nüzhubos and their viewers, as well as mediated through the media technology of live streaming, i conducted 8-months digital ethnography on two chinese live streaming platform, inke and huajiao. the evolving landscape of chinese live streaming reveals a major gender imbalance, as market research shows that more than 60% of professional live streamers are women, while in contrast, around 75% of the active viewership of live streaming consists of men in the 20-40 age group (business insider 2016). live/life streaming as a media genre appeal to their viewers by providing opportunities to have spontaneous interactions with other people based on the exchange of information about their everyday lives. eventually, gendered and sexual content finds its way into this genre as a result of the live streamers’ needs to catch the attention of their viewers. it is often compared to web-camming in western contexts, regarding that nüzhubos play upon sexual tensions with their predominantly heterosexual male viewers in exchange for money (cunningham et al., 2019). mediated intimacy at scale how to understand the relationship between nüzhubos and their viewers is at the center of my inquiry, especially because these most personal mediated encounters happen paradoxicallywith huge number of strangers simultaneously in real time. i build on the theoretical framework of “mediated intimacy” to take account of the driving forces behind the formation of this relationship as not only personal and social, but also technical. concerning the medium through which intimacy is established, media and cultural studies coined the term “mediated intimacy” referring to “personal connections” framed within the “networked public culture” on digital platforms such as facebook (boyd, 2010; chambers, 2013; gregg, 2011) or through mobile devices (hjorth & lim, 2012). influenced by the feminist and queer critique of neoliberalism, studies on mediated intimacy also underline the labor politics and the commercialization of intimacy (burke, 2016; horchschild, 2012; wang, 2020). to challenge the traditional discourse of intimacy that only refers to love and sex of heteronormative gender and sexuality (attwood et al., 2017), theorists have expanded the scope of intimacy, considering its non-sexual and non-normative possibilities (chambers, 2013; giddens,1992), to denote “a complex sphere of inmost relationships with self and others” in modern subjects’ search for “authenticity, meaning, and freedom” (plummer, 2004). while this body of literature has considered the diverse nature of intimate relationships, the impact of digital technologies, and the gendered aspect of care, there is still need for broadening the theoretical discussions to address how “live” media technologies define and mediate “intimacy at scale,” as in the case of chinese live/life streaming. methodology to understand how everyday experience of gender, sexuality, and intimacy is mediated at scale within live/life streaming as a digital anthropological site, i will first employ the walkthrough method to directly interact with huajiao and inke’s interfaces for identifying the gendered and sexual implications in the cultural references and mechanisms of different functions, and the assemblage of various interfaces. then i follow hine’s (2015) “embedded, embodied, and everyday” approach to investigate how the technological architectures of live streaming platforms afford various user practices towards creating intimate connections. this is done through taking notes on how live streamers use various technological functions, including beauty filters and sound effects, alongside assorted modalities of performance and interaction. i also look for embodiments of emotions in viewers’ usage of varying forms of responses including text-based comments and virtual gift purchases. preliminary findings drawing from my participatory observations of live/life streaming sessions, i identify patterns of emotional expression and self-disclosure that lie within these interactions and analyze their alignment with and distinction from those that have been considered within the existing theorization of intimacy. i argue that live/life streaming construct seemingly scalable “mediated intimacy,” in the one-versus-many semi-public setting, through nurturing gendered performances and building subtle sexual tension between its participants. within these sessions that can last for 4-12 hours everyday, the live streamer engage with a crowd of audiences, sometimes a few thousands of people all at the same time through the facilitation of technologies. the conversations happening in live/life streaming are infused with disclosures of everyday life and encounters, personal experiences and feelings, positive or negative. the live streamer leads the conversation by performing care, or creating emotional expressions that can be resonated, while keeping track of the comments or virtual gifts from viewers. these ambient gestures toward intimacy are colored with a gendered and sexual undertone, and full of pointers to desires for human connections driven by the state of isolation and exhaustion from everyday hustle. many nüzhubos are also incentivized to dance around the fine line between the feminine and the overly sexual in their demeanors, to ensure the delivery of intimate feelings but to also stay “appropriate” according to the censorship apparatuses of the state. the live streamers and their viewers are also conscious of the gendered nature of their relationships, and habituated to equate the level of connection to the accumulated commercial value of the virtual gifts that are designed to be the currency for intimacy by the live streaming platforms. references attwood, f., hakim, j., & winch, a. (2017). mediated intimacies: bodies, technologies and relationships. journal of gender studies,26(3), 249-253. boyd, d. (2010). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in a networked self (pp. 47-66). routledge. burke, n. b. (2016). intimate commodities: intimate labor and the production and circulation of inequality. sexualities, 19(7), 780–801. chambers, d. (2013). social media and personal relationships online intimacies and networked friendship. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. cunningham, s., craig, d., & lv, j. (2019). china’s livestreaming industry: platforms, politics, and precarity. international journal of cultural studies, 22(6), 719–736. giddens, a. (1992). the transformation of intimacy: sexuality, love and eroticism in modern societies. stanford university press. gregg, m. (2013). work's intimacy. john wiley & sons. hine, c. (2015). ethnography for the internet: embedded, embodied and everyday (1st edition). routledge. hjorth, l., & lim, s. s. (2012). mobile intimacy in an age of affective mobile media. feminist media studies, 12(4), 477–484. hochschild, a. r. (2012). the managed heart: commercialization of human feeling. university of california press. plummer, k. (2004). intimate citizenship: private decisions and public dialogues. montréal: mcgill-queens university press. wang, s. (2019). chinese affective platform economies: dating, live streaming, and performative labor on blued: media, culture & society. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): rajan, b. (2024, october). beyond the swipe: unpacking indian women’s safety strategies on bumble. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. beyond the swipe: unpacking indian women’s safety strategies on bumble benson rajan queensland university of technology bumble presents itself as a feminist app providing a ‘safe space’ while grounding this claim in narratives of technological solutions to address women’s safety concerns (arkenbout et al., 2021; bivens & hoque, 2018; pruchniewska, 2020; young & roberts, 2021). it advertises that the platform gives women more agency in managing their safety in dating interactions (barrie, 2021). however, women on bumble have reported harassment and abuse on bumble despite its safety by design claims (singh & sirur, 2018). this study aims to understand the experiences of indian women with the safety features of bumble to critically assess the effectiveness of the app's safety design in their daily lives. background india is the fifth fastest-growing dating app market globally, and it is projected to become the second-largest revenue-grossing country for dating apps by 2027 (gupta, 2023). despite the persistence of patriarchal forms of marital arrangements and the complexities of restrictions surrounding caste, class, and religion, the proliferation of dating apps has led to some degree of normalisation of digital dating culture in urban india (george et al., 2021). the normalisation of dating apps in the indian marketplace came with its limitations, one being the skewed ratio of women to men. according to the data collected by statista in 2020, 67 per cent of users on dating platforms were men (mehrotra, 2021). women only constituted 29 per cent of the total dating pool (siddiqi, 2021). this skewed gender ratio is a contributing factor in understanding women’s experience on dating apps, with women reporting being bombarded with messages from men that consequently make them feel intimidated and harassed (singh & sirur, 2018; wells & bellman, 2018). one company has tried to address this issue by embedding safety into its platform’s design, communicating that bumble is a safe place for indian women (wells & bellman, 2018). bumble’s marketing bumble uses taglines such as “it is more than an app, it’s a movement” (young & roberts, 2021, p.1). to promote its safety discourse, bumble has run campaigns such as, ‘equal not loose’, ‘#makeromanceequal’, and ‘stand for safety’ to depict the app as finding design solutions for safety issues. bumble’s ‘women first’ approach and its branding efforts have created a perception of it being safer than its rivals tinder and hinge for female users (young & roberts, 2021). the ‘women first’ design is a feature unique to bumble, unlike other dating apps where men are known to make the ‘first move’ (macleod & mcarthur, 2019). the ‘women first’ feature is described as stopping the initial bombardment of messages from men while giving women added time to scrutinise men’s profiles before deciding to initiate conversation (pruchniewska, 2020). the phenomenon of dissuading men from sending ‘dick pics’ on bumble is also part of its ‘safety by design’ narrative. bumble uses an artificial intelligence (ai) technology called a ‘private detector’, which detects and blurs out sexually explicit pictures before the recipients receive them (barrie, 2021). it advertises this feature as part of its larger narrative of safe experiences for women. however, the shardha walker1 murder case has brought bumble to the forefront of the conversation surrounding women’s safety as shardha had met her murderer aaftab, on bumble (grover, 2022; khan, 2022). this has sparked a larger discussion about indian women’s experience of harassment and abuse on dating apps, especially on platforms that advertise themselves as safe. methodology and initial findings 1 shardha walker was murdered by aaftab poonawala who she had met on bumble (see more khan, 2022). due to this murder case concern surrounding indian women’s use of dating app became a popular topic of discussion on mainstream media. an explorative qualitative approach is employed in this study to understand indian women's lived experiences and meaning-making process with bumble. this approach allows researchers to “discover realities based on participants' narratives of their lived experiences, viewpoints, and beliefs” (safadi & swigart, 2017, p. 9). the qualitative design of this study aims to document indian women's experience with bumble's safety features and their attitudes towards the app’s safety standards. it will highlight the significance women attribute to these features as part of their online dating safety practices. by placing women's lived experiences at the centre of the meaning-making process, this approach legitimises and amplifies their voices as a valuable source of knowledge for this research (westmarland & bows, 2018). to conduct this study, we conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews on zoom. the study recruited 23 women users of bumble, aged 18-35, which represents the largest user base of bumble. according to sola (2017), 72% of bumble users are under 35. traditionally, it has been the role of the elders in the family to find a suitable partner for the woman to marry, and online dating carries a stigma for women who are at risk of drawing severe reproach from their family (bhandari, 2020; devi & parihar, 2021; kapila, 2011). despite the stigma, initial observations found that bumble has successfully branded itself as a ‘safe’ platform for indian women by advertising its built-in safety principles. nonetheless, one of its india-specific features where women have the option to use the first initial in their profile instead of their full name has been labelled as irrelevant by the participants. “name is the first thing people exchange when meeting someone new. i have no idea what kind of interaction bumble imagined will take place with people just using their initials” (amy, 2023). this feature was introduced to safeguard women from being easily identified and reported to their family or being harassed. preliminary findings have identified that bumble has not been successful in finding technological solutions for social problem. as a platform bumble is associated with a toxic culture of use based in misogynistic and patriarchal values. women on the app have experienced harassment, especially in the form of abusive messages, image-based abuse, online stalking, being catfished, and physical and sexual violence from men they meet through the platform. this has led to women leaving the platform due to major mental health distress and out of fear for personal safety. it has also been revealed that the reporting mechanism has been flawed, with women pointing out that the profiles of users whom they had blocked due to harassment continue to appear on their feeds despite them having reported and blocked those individuals. next steps the initial findings suggest that bumble's design features and marketing narrative have played a crucial role in attracting more women to the platform. however, it is important to note that these factors have not actually improved women's safety experience on the platform. this raises questions about the representation of bumble within the context of neoliberalism and globalization. bumble has had to navigate resistance and opposition from more traditional social economies that involve arranged marriages the involves families and their kinship networks in matchmaking and its safety measures. as a result, women in india have become more vulnerable in their dating lives with multinational companies prioritising profit margins over their safety concerns. this study is ongoing and aims to contribute to broader debates surrounding online safety on dating apps by examining the mechanisms employed by bumble to foster trust and exploring how women navigate these mechanisms. the findings from this study could initiate discussions on the unique features of bumble and other dating platforms in india, especially when compared to those in other regions of the global south/north. references arkenbout, c., o’malley, j., oyewo, a., & parai, o. (2021, october 29). bumble without gender: a speculative approach to dating apps without data bias | masters of media. masters of media. https://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/blog/2021/10/29/bumble-without-gender-aspeculative-approach-to-dating-apps-without-data-bias/ barrie, t. (2021, may 22). how whitney wolfe herd created bumble, the $13 billion dating app that will save the internet. gq india. https://www.gqindia.com/getsmart/content/how-whitney-wolfe-herd-created-bumble-the-dollar13-billiondating-app-that-will-save-the-internet bhandari, p. (2020). matchmaking in middle class india: beyond arranged and love marriage. springer singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1599-6 bivens, r., & hoque, a. s. (2018). programming sex, gender, and sexuality: infrastructural failures in the “feminist” dating app bumble. canadian journal of communication, 43(3), 441–459. http://dx.doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2018v43n3a3375 bumble private detector safety feature: here’s what it offers—times of india. (n.d.). times of india. retrieved february 3, 2023, from https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/bumble-private-detector-safetyfeature-heres-what-it-offers/articleshow/95137090.cms devi, n., & parihar, a. (2021). khaps in haryana, gender and honour: a field study. social change, 51(3), 379–395. https://doi.org/10.1177/00490857211013593 george, p., chittem, m., lewis-smith, h., & epton, t. (2021). a narrative review of motivations for dating app use and associated sexual behaviors: recommendations to promote safe sex among indian dating app users. media watch, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.15655/mw/2021/v12i1/205462 grover, s. (2022, november 18). shraddha walkar murder: the known and unknown risks of dating apps. thequint. https://www.thequint.com/news/cybercrime/dating-apps-tinder-bumble-sexual-predators-safety-of-women https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/bumble-private-detector-safety-feature-heres-what-it-offers/articleshow/95137090.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/bumble-private-detector-safety-feature-heres-what-it-offers/articleshow/95137090.cms gupta, s. (2023, august 4). modern love: india’s dating industry. smallcases. https://www.smallcase.com/blog/modern-love-indias-dating-industry/ kapila, k. (2011). circulating intimacies: sex-surveys, marriage and other facts of life in urban india. in indian mass media and the politics of change. routledge india. khan, s. t. (2022, november 16). ‘member’s safety top priority’: dating app bumble in limelight over shraddha walkar’s murder. india today. https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/dating-app-bumble-shraddha-walkarmurder-aaftab-poonawala-2298076-2022-11-16 macleod, c., & mcarthur, v. (2019). the construction of gender in dating apps: an interface analysis of tinder and bumble. feminist media studies, 19(6), 822– 840. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1494618 mehrotra, k. (2021, january 18). surge in dating apps in tier-ii cities, but skew against women. the indian express. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/dating-appstier-ii-cities-women-7150680/ morley, s. (2021, october 22). bumble safety and wellbeing center | what it is & how to use it 2022. dude hack. https://dude-hack.com/bumble-safety-and-wellbeingcenter/ pagad, a. (2023, january 10). man kidnaps bumble date, locks her up without food or water and assaults her for 5 days. dialyo. https://www.dailyo.in/news/mankidnaps-bumble-date-locks-her-up-without-food-or-water-and-assaults-her-for-5days-38524 pruchniewska, u. (2020). “i like that it’s my choice a couple different times”: gender, affordances, and user experience on bumble dating. international journal of communication, 14(0), article 0. safadi, r., & swigart, v. (2017). qualitative methods in researching violence against women. sage publications ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526411549 siddiqi, n. (2021). gender inequality as a social construction in india: a phenomenological enquiry. women’s studies international forum, 86, 102472. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2021.102472 singh, n., & sirur, s. (2018, november 18). indian women are getting assaulted on tinder dates and no one knows how to stop it. theprint. https://theprint.in/features/indian-women-are-getting-assaulted-on-tinder-datesand-no-one-knows-how-to-stop-it/151022/ wells, g., & bellman, e. (2018, june 24). tinder is big in india—at least with men. wall street journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-has-lots-of-single-womenbut-good-luck-finding-them-on-tinder-1529869656 https://dude-hack.com/bumble-safety-and-wellbeing-center/ https://dude-hack.com/bumble-safety-and-wellbeing-center/ young, m., & roberts, s. (2021). “shifting old-fashioned power dynamics”?: women’s perspectives on the gender transformational capacity of the dating app, bumble. feminist media studies, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2021.1992472 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): scharlach, r. (2023, october): platform pr the public moderation of platform values through tiktok for good. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. platform pr – the public moderation of platform values through tiktok for good rebecca scharlach the hebrew university of jerusalem tiktok claims it wants to “inspire creativity” and “spark joy” (bytedance, 2023), meta aims to “bring the world closer together” (haupt, 2021), and youtube aspires to “give everyone a voice and show them to the world” (youtube, 2023). platforms state that they want to do good. however, they regularly get international attention for being bad. such accusations often relate to social media data scandals, from myspace’s data leaks (2013) to facebook’s data breaches (2013, 2019) and whatsapp’s scandal relating to their privacy policy update (2021). the misuse of social media data is covered substantively in journalistic and academic work (see bacallao-pino, 2015; gonzález et al., 2019; griggio et al., 2022; weiss-blatt, 2021). in response to such allegations, platforms have declared their aims to be more transparent and socially responsible, taking steps such as establishing transparency reports, giving academics access to data, and creating social campaigns. yet initiatives to counterbalance these backlashes, such as youtube’s black voices fund or tiktok for good, are rarely investigated. this project explores “tiktok for good.” the social initiative developed out of #edutok, a campaign launched in 2019 to counterbalance “potentially harmful content” (zeng & kaye, 2022). other campaigns from social media platforms have similar histories: douyin’s #positiveenergy campaign to promote more “appropriate, patriotic content” was a response to the chinese government’s criticism of pornographic content on the platform (chen et al., 2021) and facebook’s “data for good” data sharing campaign was a response to data leaks. in this social initiative, tiktok curates and promotes causes that “inspire” and “encourage” – from the benefits of knitting for ocd, to sustainable farming, to gentle parenting. videos get published on the designated tiktok account @tiktokforgood in cooperation with tiktok creators producing content in line with what the platform aims to promote: our idea is simple...use tiktok to do good. tiktok wants to inspire and encourage a new generation to have a positive impact on the planet and those around them. (bytedance, 2023) although platform initiatives' content is often not on the top of your for you page (fyp), competing with algorithmically curated content (gillespie, 2014), such social initiatives are fruitful sites for unpacking the values a platform aims to promote, namely what they try to center as important or worthwhile. two bodies of literature inform this study: research on corporate social responsibility (csr) and research on platform moderation. csr, “a term that spans a variety of practices employed by corporations to exhibit ethical business conduct” (boxmanshabtai, 2019), is not a new phenomenon. corporations have always claimed they have responsibilities toward society, yet the framing of these responsibilities has changed over time (latapí agudelo et al., 2019). focusing on the intersection between csr and social media, scholars have explored how companies strategically use social media to promote their initiatives and how users relate to such campaigns. for example, researchers have examined users' attitudes toward influencer csr marketing (li, 2022) and user engagement with companies' csr campaigns (austin & gaither, 2016). studies have also explored how companies implement more traditional csr values such as sustainability or well-being through social media campaigns (castillo-abdul et al., 2022). however, research in this area generally evaluates their success through user perception of communicative values such as authenticity and engagement (balasubramanian et al., 2021; li, 2022). this strain of research adds to our understanding of the importance of social media for corporate social responsibility, yet research has evaded looking at csr initiatives taken by social media platforms. the second body of knowledge informing this study relates to platform moderation. platforms have become “unavoidably curators” (gillespie, 2022) of public discourse, negotiating the competing interests of different stakeholders (gillespie et al., 2020; gorwa, 2019). building on work about the disciplinary power of ranking algorithms by bucher (2012), zeng and kaye (2022) introduce the concept of “visibility moderation,” defined as “the process through which digital platforms manipulate the reach of usergenerated content through algorithmic or regulatory means” (p. 81). they point out that tiktok governs through visibility, arguing that the platform promotes content that nudges creators towards “social justice campaigns, particularly those that promote the platform's overall corporate image by serving socially responsible goals” (p. 83). to further explore these socially responsible goals, i investigate the concept of “visibility moderation” through the lens of platform values. previous research on the construction of platform values through social media policies found five core values across five platforms, including tiktok: expression, community, safety, choice, and improvement (scharlach et al., 2023). yet, platforms limit their burden to execute these values by selectively assigning responsibility for their enactment, often unloading these responsibilities onto users. social initiatives function as a pivot point, allowing for a closer look at a platform’s explicit promotion of values, and the division of responsibilities for their enactment. the following questions structure this study: what types of content does the “tiktok for good” initiative promote? what values are associated with the initiative? and who is responsible for promoting these values? altogether, these questions will allow me to understand what the good in “tiktok for good” actually means. method to address these questions, i adopt the definition of values by heinich (2020), who treats values as tangible objects and underlying principles. based on previous work by hallinan et al. (2021), i work with the notion of “values-as-goods: those (tangible or abstract) objects that have consistently been deemed worthy of appreciation such as art or friendship” (p. 7). first, i will perform an inductive analysis answering the questions “what is defined as good?” and “who is in charge of promoting good?” for each video (n=180) to understand what values are promoted in tiktok for good. combined with a thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2012), this will allow me to systematically identify patterns in the topics tiktok promotes, including what types of creators are promoted and the groups of people they address in the videos. preliminary results an initial analysis of 50 videos led to three observations. similar to the results of previous research on platform policies (scharlach et al., 2023), the enactment of promoting values is overwhelmingly a private act. it requires the viewer to actively do good, whether by reducing plastic waste, using inclusive language, or spending money for a social cause. tiktok for good is about how people can improve their daily lives. however, it evades raising more critical questions about potential legislative changes that would move responsibility from a personal problem to a structural one. second, videos promoted through the tiktok for good initiative circle around topics of sustainability, mental health, education about a specific subject, building community, and spreading awareness. these topics promote values aligning with current social issues. at the same time, videos such as “good animal news of today” potentially mask political issues associated with anything that is not inspiring or good, such as the ongoing russian invasion of ukraine, which was not part of any of the videos. lastly, it raises the question of what responsibilities an initiative of a social media platform should carry. can tiktok for good do more than just inspire and encourage? should a platform do more than provide a space to promote good? references austin, l. l., & gaither, b. m. (2016). examining public response to corporate social initiative types: a quantitative content analysis of coca-cola’s social media. social marketing quarterly, 22(4), 290–306. https://doi.org/10.1177/1524500416642441 bacallao-pino, l. m. (2015). challenging mainstream media systems through social media: a comparative study of the facebook profiles of two latin american student movements. international journal of communication, 9, 3702–3720. balasubramanian, s. k., fang, y., & yang, z. (2021). twitter presence and experience improve corporate social responsibility outcomes. journal of business ethics, 173(4), 737–757. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04537-x boxman-shabtai, l. (2019). the practice of parodying: youtube as a hybrid field of cultural production. media, culture & society, 41(1), 3–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443718772180 braun, v., & clarke, v. (2012). thematic analysis. in h. cooper, p. m. camic, d. l. long, a. t. panter, d. rindskopf, & k. j. sher (eds.), apa handbook of research methods in psychology, vol 2: research designs: quantitative, qualitative, neuropsychological, and biological. (pp. 57–71). american psychological association. https://doi.org/10.1037/13620-004 bucher, t. (2012). want to be on the top? algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on facebook. new media& society,14(7), 1164–1180. bytedance. (2023). tiktok for good. https://www.tiktok.com/forgood. castillo-abdul, b., pérez-escoda, a., & civila, s. (2022). social media fostering happiness management: three luxury brands case study on instagram. corporate governance: the international journal of business in society, 22(3), 491–505. https://doi.org/10.1108/cg-05-2021-0201 chen, x., valdovinos kaye, d. b., & zeng, j. (2021). #positiveenergy douyin: constructing “playful patriotism” in a chinese short-video application. chinese journal of communication, 14(1), 97–117. https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2020.1761848 gillespie, t. (2014). the relevance of algorithms. in t. gillespie, p. j. boczkowski, & k. a. foot (eds.), media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society (pp. 167–194). the mit press. gillespie, t. (2022). do not recommend? reduction as a form of content moderation. social media + society, 8(3), 205630512211175. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221117552 gillespie, t., aufderheide, p., carmi, e., gerrard, y., gorwa, r., matamoros-fernández, a., roberts, s. t., sinnreich, a., & myers west, s. (2020). expanding the debate about content moderation: scholarly research agendas for the coming policy debates. internet policy review, 9(4). https://doi.org/10.14763/2020.4.1512 gonzález, f., yu, y., figueroa, a., lópez, c., & aragon, c. (2019). global reactions to the cambridge analytica scandal: a cross-language social media study. companion proceedings of the 2019 world wide web conference, 799–806. https://doi.org/10.1145/3308560.3316456 gorwa, r. (2019). what is platform governance? information, communication & society, 22(6), 854–871. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1573914 griggio cf, nouwens m and klokmose cn (2022). caught in the network: the impact of whatsapp’s 2021 privacy policy update on users’ messaging app ecosystems. in: chi conference on human factors in computing systems, new orleans la usa, 27 april 2022, pp. 1–23. acm. 10.1145/3491102.3502032 hallinan, b., kim, b., mizoroki, s., scharlach, r., trillò, t., thelwall, m., segev, e., & shifman, l. (2021). the value(s) of social media rituals: a cross-cultural analysis of new year’s resolutions. information, communication & society, 0(0), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2021.1983003 haupt, j. (2021). facebook futures: mark zuckerberg’s discursive construction of a better world. new media & society, 23(2), 237–257. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820929315 heinich, n. (2020). ten proposals on values. cultural sociology, 14(3), 213–232. https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975520922173 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1573914 latapí agudelo, m. a., jóhannsdóttir, l., & davídsdóttir, b. (2019). a literature review of the history and evolution of corporate social responsibility. international journal of corporate social responsibility, 4(1), 1. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40991-0180039-y li, m. (2022). influence for social good: exploring the roles of influencer identity and comment section in instagram-based lgbtq-centric corporate social responsibility advertising. international journal of advertising, 41(3), 462–499. https://doi.org/10.1080/02650487.2021.1884399 weiss-blatt, n. (2021). the techlash and tech crisis communication (first edition). emerald publishing. youtube. (2023). about youtube—youtube. https://about.youtube/ zeng, j., & kaye, d. b. v. (2022). from content moderation to visibility moderation: a case study of platform governance on tiktok. policy & internet, 14(1), 79–95. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.287 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): hepp, a.; couldry, n.; bolin, g.; velkova, j.; brevini, b. (2024, october). critical perspectives on communicative ai. panel presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. critical perspectives on communicative ai andreas hepp zemki, university of bremen nick couldry lse göran bolin södertörn university julia velkova linköping university benedetta brevini university of sydney current media coverage surrounding chatgpt, lamda, and luminous has brought questions about the automation of communication into the mainstream. artificially intelligent media are no longer merely mediating instances of communication but are themselves becoming communicative participants. this has generated broad public discussion about these systems and others and the challenges they bring to domains such as education, public discourse, and journalistic production. much of this new “ai hype” (züger et al. 2023) revolves around the question of whether such systems will soon “replace” humans as workers in these various domains, whether they will develop “super intelligence” and as a result challenge or even marginalize the human species. while this question of the “intelligence” of such systems is always at the forefront of public debate, another is probably more decisive for their critical consideration. as elena esposito has put it, the crucial point is less “that the machine is able to think but that it is able to communicate” (esposito 2017: 250). to put it another way, the human attribution of “intelligence” to systems of automated communication is itself a communicative construction (lind & dickel 2023; natale 2021). accordingly, we should focus more on the communicative function of ai, as this simplifies the task of questioning the attribution of intelligence to these systems. http://spir.aoir.org/ 2 reflecting this, the term “communicative ai” has become internationally established (e.g., dehnert & mongeau 2022; guzman & lewis 2020; hepp et al. 2023; schäfer & wessler 2020; stenbom et al. 2021). we can now understand communicative ai as a sensitizing concept: following herbert blumer, a sensitizing concept offers “a general sense of reference and guidance in approaching empirical instances” (blumer 1954: 7). from this starting point, communicative ai draws our attention to a certain “family resemblance” (wittgenstein 1971: 65-71) that various examples of today’s automated communication systems share: communicative ai (1) is based on technologically advanced forms of automation for the purpose of communication, (2) is embedded within digital infrastructures, and (3) is closely entangled with human practices. with this panel, we would like to introduce this discussion but give it a new twist by asking what a critical perspective on communicative ai should look like. if these systems of “automated media” (andrejevic 2020) are not about intelligence, but about communication, what should a critical approach to them consider? raising this question, we want to present five key critical perspectives on communicative ai. the first paper develops a critical perspective on the visions of pioneer communities. it poses the question of whether today's pioneering communities ultimately reproduce basic patterns of the old californian ideology in relation to communicative ai. a second paper focuses on the perspective of data colonialism. in essence, it is about showing that a critical engagement with communicative ai means addressing the question of the extent to which systems of automated communication are linked to existing data infrastructures and nexus models of exploitation. the third paper highlights the perspective of economic value production. since more and more social situations include human-machine communication, more social interactions become possible to monetize. this relates not only to commercial settings, but also in the public sector as it relates to the welfare state. the fourth paper focuses on a material perspective. at its core is the question of how big tech procures power for data centres to construct the emerging geography of cheap computational labour needed for communicative ai. the fifth paper deals with the perspective of an eco-political economy of communicative ai. through this prism, the question of the ecological consequences of communicative ai can be addressed. by contrasting these five critical perspectives on communicative ai, we want to discuss what an overarching, critical approach to communicative ai might look like. references andrejevic, m. (2020). automated media. london: routledge. blumer, h. (1954). what is wrong with social theory? american sociological review, 19, 3-10. dehnert, m., & mongeau, p. a. (2022). persuasion in the age of artificial intelligence (ai): theories and complications of ai-based persuasion. human communication research, 48(3), 386-403. doi:10.1093/hcr/hqac006 esposito, e. (2017). artificial communication? the production of contingency by algorithms. zeitschrift für soziologie, 46(4), 249-265. doi:10.1515/zfsoz-2017-1014 3 guzman, a. l., & lewis, s. c. (2020). artificial intelligence and communication: a humanmachine communication research agenda. new media & society, 22(1), 70-86. retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1461444819858691 hepp, a., loosen, w., dreyer, s., jarke, j., kannengießer, s., katzenbach, c., . . . schulz, w. (2023). chatgpt, lamda and the hype around communicative ai: the automation of communication as a field of research in media and communication studies. human-machine communication, 6, 41-63. doi:10.30658/hmc.6.4 schäfer, m. s., & wessler, h. (2020). öffentliche kommunikation in zeiten künstlicher intelligenz. publizistik, 65(3), 307-331. doi:10.1007/s11616-020-00592-6 stenbom, a., wiggberg, m., & norlund, t. (2021). exploring communicative ai: reflections from a swedish newsroom. digital journalism, 1-19. doi:10.1080/21670811.2021.2007781 lind, m., & dickel, s. (2023). speaking, but having no voice. negotiating agency in advertisements for intelligent personal assistants. convergence. doi:10.1177/13548565231192100 natale, s. (2021). deceitful media. oxford university press. wittgenstein, l. (1971). philosophische untersuchungen (1. ed.). frankfurt a.m.: suhrkamp verlag. züger, t., kuper, f., & j, f. (2023). handling the hype: implications of ai hype for public interest tech projects. tatup, 32/3, 34-40. doi:10.14512/tatup.32.3.34 pioneers of communicative ai: visions of digital futures and the californian ideology andreas hepp zemki, university of bremen, germany the impact of imaginaries of possible futures on technological development, as well as their establishment and enforcement by individual collectives, has been demonstrated by studies on the history of the internet (barbrook 2007; flichy 2007). this is also the context for an increasing interest in the role media play in the construction of possible futures (see, for example, pentzold et al. 2020; zylinska 2022). research on this includes the investigation of science fiction as a form of “prototyping” technological futures (bell et al. 2013), the challenges of (politically) communicating the future (bennett 2020), technologies and the remaking of journalism’s future (lischka et al. 2022), the role of “design” for technology-related futures (macgilchrist et al. 2023) or the contribution of media coverage of technology fairs to the construction of possible futures (schwarzenegger & balbi 2020). sharing this trajectory, recent research has focused on investigating sociotechnical imaginaries of artificial intelligence. studies have addressed the role of ai imaginaries in governance (hoff 2023), the spread and transformation of ai imaginaries in public 4 discourse (bareis & katzenbach 2022; nguyen & hekman 2022), and analysed ai imaginaries of professional and everyday practitioners (bulathwela et al. 2021; hautala & heino 2023; pink et al. 2022; sartori & bocca 2023), cultural differences between and conflicts over ai imaginaries (bakiner 2023; hassan 2022) or the role of ai imaginaries in various forms of activism (e.g., lehtiniemi & ruckenstein 2019; kazansky & milan 2021). in this paper, i would like to take a critical look at the question of which groups in particular shape our ideas and our imaginaries of communicative ai. if you raise this question, you invariably discover the influence of so-called “pioneer communities” (hepp 2024). pioneer communities can be described as figurations of people playing a pioneering role within a specific thematic area. however, these are not just groups of scientists, but “intermediaries” (bourdieu 2010) between different domains of society (science, technology development, everyday use, technology journalism, politics, etc.). despite an inclination to label themselves as such, they also do not fit the sociological definition of social movements due to their low level of politicization and close ties to business. what pioneer communities share with scientists and social movements, though, is that they engage in experimental practices while crafting visions for potential digital futures. as i argue in my paper, it is crucial for a critical view of communicative ai to take a look at these pioneer communities. the reason is that they have played—and continue to play—a significant role in the emergence of technologies that we refer to as communicative ai. there are several indications of pioneer communities’ historical role and influence in the development of comai. the san francisco bay area (where stanford university and silicon valley are located) and massachusetts (where mit is located) have been dominating geographical contexts for this developmental history (berlin 2017; markoff 2015). for example, the whole earth network as a “first generation” pioneer community had a proximity to the stanford research institute (sri) from which apple’s siri later emerged. likewise, stewart brand, as a main figure in this network, had close ties to the mit media lab and contributed significantly to establishing the myth of this institution with his book about it and the organization of related conferences (brand 1987). a similar significance can be attested to kevin kelly (1992) with “out of control” and his involvement with wired and the global business network, co-founded by stewart brand, peter schwartz and others. as fred turner (2006) has pointed out, the whole earth network contributed, among other things, to the spread of ideas such as cybernetics, which is again characterized by notions of hybrid figurations, or, in the vocabulary of cybernetics, human-machine control circuits. rob kling and suzanne iacono (1988: 230f.) see here the early influence of an “artificial intelligence” movement, which they describe as a former scientific movement that increasingly mixed with popular cultural ideas. since then, a second and third generation of pioneer communities emerged, again shaping our imaginaries of communicative ai. examples of this are the hacks/hackers, who have had a considerable influence through their visions of data journalism and later automated journalism, or reboot, which understands itself as a “community reclaiming techno-optimism for a better future taking on these reflections, i would like to structure my presentation in three parts. in the first, i will use publications on historical pioneer communities to show how they disseminated their visions of communicative ai early on—i.e., from the 1980s onwards, increasingly intensifying since the 1990s—and were able to establish them in the public 5 discourse. in part two, i will use a media ethnography based on qualitative interviews, observations, and analyses of their own publications to take a closer look at two pioneer communities in particular that have played and continue to play a role in the field of communicative ai: the hacks/hackers movement and reboot. using these two examples, i will examine overarching patterns in the activities of pioneer communities. in a third and final part, i will then analyse the visions of communicative ai that are developed in these pioneer communities. in doing so, i question the implicit models of societal communication that these pioneer communities possess, i.e., generalized ideas of how they imagine communication as an ideal. i am particularly interested in the links between these models and the “californian ideology” (barbrook & cameron 1996; dickel & schrape 2017; hepp et al. 2023; marwick 2017)—and where these models might lead going forward. references: bakiner, o. (2023). pluralistic sociotechnical imaginaries in artificial intelligence (ai) law: the case of the european union’s ai act. law, innovation and technology, 15(2), 558-582. doi:10.1080/17579961.2023.2245675 barbrook, r. (2007). imaginary futures: from thinking machines to the global village. london: pluto press. barbrook, r., & cameron, a. (1996). the californian ideology. science as culture, 6(1), 44-72. bareis, j., & katzenbach, c. (2022). talking ai into being: the narratives and imaginaries of national ai strategies and their performative politics. science, technology & human values, 47(5), 855-881. doi:10.1177/01622439211030007 bell, f., fletcher, g., greenhill, a., griffiths, m., & mclean, r. (2013). science fiction prototypes: visionary technology narratives between futures. futures, 50, 5-14. doi:10.1016/j.futures.2013.04.004 bennett, w. l. (2020). communicating the future: solutions for environment, economy and democracy. cambridge: polity. berlin, l. (2017). troublemakers. new york: simon and schuster. brand, s. (1987). the media lab: inventing the future at mit. new york: viking. bulathwela, s., pérez-ortiz, m., holloway, c., & shawe-taylor, j. (2021). could ai democratise education? socio-technical imaginaries of an edtech revolution. arxiv, 2112.02034v1. retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/2112.02034v1 dickel, s., & schrape, j.-f. (2017). the renaissance of techno-utopianism as a challenge for responsible innovation. journal of responsible innovation, 4(2), 289-294. doi:10.1080/23299460.2017.1310523 flichy, p. (2007). the internet imaginaire. mit press. hassan, y. a. o. (2022). the globalization of artificial intelligence: african imaginaries of technoscientific futures. in. york university, toronto, ontario: dissertation. retrieved from https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/bitstreams/df47bf21-3de8-4b24b872-c615d067312f/download hautala, j., & heino, h. (2023). spectrum of ai futures imaginaries by ai practitioners in finland and singapore: the unimagined speed of ai progress. futures, 153, 103247. doi:10.1016/j.futures.2023.103247 hepp, a. (2024). curators of digital futures: the life cycle of pioneer communities. new media & society, online first. doi:10.1177/14614448241253766 6 hepp, a., schmitz, a., & schneider, n. (2023). afterlives of the californian ideology: tech movements, pioneer communities, and imaginaries of digital futures – an introduction to the thematic issue. ijoc, 17, 4142-4160. retrieved from https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/21405 hoff, j.-l. (2023). unavoidable futures? how governments articulate sociotechnical imaginaries of ai and healthcare services. futures, 148, 103131. doi:10.1016/j.futures.2023.103131 kazansky, b., & milan, s. (2021). “bodies not templates”: contesting dominant algorithmic imaginaries. new media & society, 23(2), 363-381. doi:10.1177/1461444820929316 kelly, k. (1992). out of control: the rise of neo-biological civilization. boston: addisonwesley. kling, r., & iacono, s. (1988). the mobilization of support for computerization: the role of computerization movements. social problems, 35(3), 226-243. lehtiniemi, t., & ruckenstein, m. (2019). the social imaginaries of data activism. big data & society, 6(1), 205395171882114. doi:10.1177/2053951718821146 lischka, j. a., schaetz, n., & oltersdorf, a.-l. (2022). editorial technologists as engineers of journalism’s future: exploring the professional community of computational journalism. digital journalism, 1-19. doi:10.1080/21670811.2021.1995456 macgilchrist, f., allert, h., cerratto pargman, t., & jarke, j. (2023). designing postdigital futures: which designs? whose futures? postdigital science and education. doi:10.1007/s42438-022-00389-y markham, a. (2021). the limits of the imaginary: challenges to intervening in future speculations of memory, data, and algorithms. new media & society, 23(2), 382405. doi:10.1177/1461444820929322 markoff, j. (2015). machines of loving grace. harpercollins. marwick, a. (2017). silicon valley and the social media industry. in j. burgess, a. marwick, & t. poell (eds.), sage handbook of social media (pp. 314-329). london: sage. nguyen, d., & hekman, e. (2022). the news framing of artificial intelligence: a critical exploration of how media discourses make sense of automation. ai & society, 115. doi:10.1007/s00146-022-01511-1 pentzold, c., kaun, a., & lohmeier, c. (2020). imagining and instituting future media: introduction to the special issue. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 26(4), 705-715. doi:10.1177/1354856520938584 pink, s., berg, m., lupton, d., & ruckenstein, m. (2022). everyday automation. experiencing and anticipating emerging technologies. london: routledge. doi:10.4324/9781003170884-3 ruppert, e. (2018). sociotechnical imaginaries of different data futures. rotterdam: erasmus university rotterdam. sartori, l., & bocca, g. (2023). minding the gap(s): public perceptions of ai and sociotechnical imaginaries. ai & society, 38(2), 443-458. doi:10.1007/s00146-02201422-1 schwarzenegger, c., & balbi, g. (2020). when the ‘messiah’ went to ‘mecca’: envisioning and reporting the digital future at the cebit tech fair (1986–2018). convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 26(4), 716731. doi:10.1177/1354856520909528 7 turner, f. (2006). from counterculture to cyberculture: stewart brand, the whole earth network, and the rise of digital utopianism. chicago: university of chicago press. wang, j. (2022). letter from the editor. kernel, 1, 6-7. zylinska, j. (ed.). (2022). the future of media. london: goldsmiths press. ai as knowledge capture and colonial landgrab nick couldry lse, uk this paper will propose a new perspective for interpreting ai, and in particular communicative ai, in the framework of data colonialism developed by nick couldry and ulises mejias (couldry and mejias, 2019; mejias and couldry 2024). by connecting the data colonialism framework to questions inspired by the sociology of knowledge, it proposes to explore better how ai works to reappropriate and reorganize social relations. in practical terms, ai, and particularly communicative ai in the form of chatbots such as chat-gpt, represents simply the application of a massive recent increase in simultaneous computation, across trillions of variables and vast data inputs. but how can we understand communicative ai socially, that is, a form of social relations? the paper will argue that, while of course, communicative ai has been developed as part of advanced capitalism, it is best understood as social relation in terms of the framework of data colonialism (understood as ‘an emerging order for the appropriation of human life so that data can be continuously extracted form it for profit’). data colonialism, couldry and mejias argue, is the continuation of five centuries of colonialism’s interlocking relations with capitalism or, more simply, just the latest in a long series of colonial landgrabs. ai’s continuation of this trajectory is clear, since generative ai treats the whole world of human communicative production and language as its input, or, in colonial terms, its territory. in this respect communicative ai represents even a stage beyond the other examples of data colonialism that have been discussed in particular spheres of everyday life, such as the smart home (goulden 2019; hurel and couldry 2022) and social welfare (magalhaes and couldry 2021). rather than being based in a particular area of life, communicative ai takes human culture as a whole as its input, and involves its users in a new type of data relation (couldry and mejias 2019) from which further input to large language models is garnered through our own interactions with those models conversationalized interface. seeing generative ai from a colonial perspective enables us both to foreground the changed relation to knowledge resources and cultural production that it represents (as reflected in current lawsuits, for example by the new york times against open ai and microsoft), but also to consider critically the changed social relations that will result from communicativeai’s extremely rapid move to appropriate human cultural production. in this way, although the applications of communicative ai seem very general, they can be seen to have quite specific effects. 8 without in any way denying the scientific power of large-scale ai for specific calculative goals (for example the computation of protein structures) that remain under harnessed to specific scientific projects that require extreme levels of computation complexity, ai as a vision that is spreading today across business and professional life can be expected to have number of quite specific social effects, which are best approached not only through a decolonial framework, but also via the sociology of knowledge. when considered from the point of view of sociology of knowledge, communicative ai is much more than a technique of computation, or a product that offers a humanized interface with vast calculative power. communicative ai is an attempt to alter the social construction of knowledge (berger and luckmann 1974). a search question that generates multiple ranked answers is converted into a truth question that generates one composite answer in language that mimics a human response; through this new format, ai is also asked to perform tasks that aimed at expressing truth or opinion. ai offers to mimic the outputs of human rationality through means that are not human. the paper will argue that, in order to understand the social force of this transformation, it is important to go beyond the fact of appropriation (the colonial act) and consider the new social forms that are emerging around this act. first, there is the social alchemy of transforming massive expansion of computing power into something socially recognized as ‘intelligence’ and potentially ‘knowledge’. this can be understood as an act of ideology (lanier and weyl 2020) that benefits material interests within the big tech industries. second, along with this ideology, comes a more expansive ai discourse that can be understood as a form of myth: a myth that renames computing power as a social force; a myth that begins to reorder social reality by extracting knowledge and cultural production from its original context and converting into a ‘raw’ input for a new product that makes no reference to that original context; a myth that potentially reframes existing contexts of knowledge production (for example the classroom, law court and newsroom) and reorganizes them around the ‘efficient’ use of ai products, destabilizing pre-existing forms of cognitive expertise and authority. the result, the paper argues, is to reimagine the whole domain of knowledge production from the privileged perspective of massive commercially-controlled computing power, in effect privatizing in a fundamental way the production of knowledge for public circulation (ferrari, van dijck and van der bosch 2023), while imagining away that actual limits of large-scale ai as a process of knowledge production (bender et al 2021). the paper concludes by arguing that, through this combined approach that links the data colonialism framework to the perspective of sociology of knowledge, we can come closer to grasping the huge social import of the emergence of communicative ai as both cultural and social phenomenon since late 2023. while public debate has recently been dominated by discussion of the supposed ‘existential risks’ posed by runaway ai in the distant or medium-term future (suleyman 2023), the paper will conclude that the real ‘existential risk’ posed by ai is to the frameworks of knowledge generation on which today’s social construction of reality has until now relied – a challenge which is happening without consultation, and under disguise of ai marketing that offers only more ‘personalized’ products, whether in the sphere of education, health or elsewhere. it is important in response to resocialize our approach to large-scale ai in ways that highlight 9 its ‘artifictional’ relations to our existing social realities (collins 2018) and grasp how actual social relations of knowledge production are being silently reconfigured without our consent references bender, emily, timnit gebru, angelina mcmillan-major, and shmargaret shmitchell (2021): ‘on the dangers of stochastic parrots: can language models be too big?’, https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922 berger, p. and luckmann, t. (1974): the social construction of reality. penguin. collins, harry (2018): artifictional intelligence. polity. couldry, nick and mejias, ulises (2019): the costs of connection. stanford university press. goulden, murray (2019): ‘“delete the family”: platform families and the colonization of the smart home’, information communication & society 24(7): 903-920. hurel, l. and couldry, n. (2022): colonizing the home as data source: investigating the language of amazon skills and google actions, international journal of communication, 16: 5184-5203 magalhães, j. and couldry, n. (2021): giving by taking away: big tech, data colonialism, and the reconfiguration of the social good, international journal of communication, 15: 343-362 mejias, ulises and couldry, nick (2024): data grab. w. h. allen. suleyman, mustafa (2023): the coming wave. bodley head. what’s the value of communicative ai? a critique of valuation in automated markets göran bolin södertörn university, sweden the rise and proliferation of communicative ai in the form of chatbots, virtual assistants and companions, and other communicational agents has been discussed with increasing intensity over the last decade (gehl & bakardjieva 2016; guzman 2019; hepp et al. 2023; natale 2021), and their implications for the activities and operations within a variety of social domains have been analyzed. examples of such research have concerned the everyday life in the family (e.g., hurel & couldry 2022; mascheroni 2024), automated social services (e.g., kaun & dencik 2020), newsroom decision making and news evaluation (stenbom et al. 2023), just to name a few areas. however, communicative ai arguably also has transformative implications in other social domains. one such domain concerns the digital markets of the contemporary capitalist economy, where communicative ai becomes a source of value extraction through the expansion of the area of the social. this theoretical paper discusses such value generating practices, responding to the question: how can we understand the role of communicative ai in the 10 expansion of digital, datafied markets, and what implications does this expansion have for non-commercial valuation processes related to social, cultural and public value? the argument will proceed in three steps: first, a brief outline of the developments within different stages or varieties of capitalism will be provided. second, it will be proposed that data capitalism is expanding by incorporating human communication as a resource to be extracted. third, the paper will discuss examples of communicative ai that expand the markets through datafication of human machine communication. capitalism as an economic system is defined by its drive for constant economic growth across all market sectors, including those concerning media and communication. in all forms of capitalism, from merchant capitalism over industrial, information (castells 1996), and now surveillance capitalism (zuboff 2015) or data capitalism (west 2019), this has meant a drive to expand markets, or for increased speed in turnover. while the shift from industrial to market capitalism introduced a more pronounced emphasis on nontangible commodities (e.g., information), the shift to data capitalism has meant a more pronounced focus on data as the main source of value. since data is harvested from social action in digital space, it has meant that the social has taken on a more central role as a source for value generation through the commodification of all social action online that can be extracted, processed and packaged into commodity form and circulated on the market (see bolin 2011; van dijck 2014). in addition, the fact that more and more of social life occurs online means that areas of the social that have previously been unable for commercial markets to exploit has become accessible for monetization purposes (bolin 2012). arguably, with communicative ai, this expansion now continues into the very heart of the social: human communication. if we can agree that social life takes on a more prominent position in data capitalism as a source of value generation, communication will also be important, since communication is at the root of all social relations. however, up until relatively recently, communication has mainly (although not exclusively) been centered on communication between humans, that is, between two or more “morally autonomous” selves in the words of john durham peters (1999: 20). however, with the proliferation of human-machine communication in increasingly more spheres of everyday life, one of these selves can be replaced by a conversational agent. this means that also machines can be part of the production of communicative acts fit to be extracted, processed and commodified and included in the market system. although karl marx (1867/1976) famously insisted that machines cannot produce surplus value, since they do not contain the human capacity to produce more than it takes for the reproduction of the labor power, we could argue that although machines might not be able to produce value on their own, they can indeed expand the human capacity—become “extensions of man”, as mcluhan (1964) would argue—through engaging in communication with humans. since chatbots and other communicative ai interacts with a social subject, there will be an extractable resource that can be turned into economic revenues and possibly also economic value. seen from the perspective of expansion of markets, this means that the shift from informational to data capitalism has brought with it both an increased speed in turnover due to technical advances in logistics, “just-in-time” 11 supplies, the abandonment of storage facilities, etc., and an expansion of markets into domains previously untouched by the market, in this case human communication. against the background of this line of argument, the paper proposes that data capitalism extends the domains in which economic value can be produced. however, since increasingly more social situations include human-machine communication, more social interactions become possible to monetize, not only in commercial settings, but also in the public sector in welfare states, where, for example, administrative public services have become transformed from personal meetings over the phone or face-to-face to communicative acts between a customer or client and a chatbot system. this means that economic logics are also introduced into non-market domains, where other value forms than the economic are central – social, cultural or public values that are coupled with other valuation regimes than the commercial or economic (bolin 2022). an important question is what happens to the valuation practices within these domains as they become colonized by the logics of the market. the paper will end with examples of how these market expansions occur in the public sector of welfare, health and education, and what types of implications for valuation processes this might have. in all these sectors, we can find an increase in automation of relations between welfare workers and their clients, medical staff and their patients, and teachers and educational staff with their pupils and students. normally, these are not social relations that are market relations, and they are not evaluated according to norms from economic valuation practices. the question is to what extent they are drawn into and possibly subsumed market logics, and how this will affect their valuation practices. references bolin, g (2011) value and the media. cultural production and consumption in digital markets. farnham: ashgate. bolin, g (2012) personal media in the digital economy. in pelle snickars & patrick vonderau (eds): moving data. the iphone and the future of media, new york: columbia university press, pp. 91-103. bolin, g (2022) the value dynamics of data capitalism: cultural production and consumption in a datafied world. in andreas hepp, juliane jarke & leif kramp (eds) new perspectives in critical data studies: the ambivalences of data power. london: palgrave, 167-186. castells, m (1996) the rise of the network society. the information age: economy, society and culture vol. i.malden & oxford: black well. gehl, rw & m bakardjieva (eds.) (2016) socialbots and their friends: digital media and the automation of sociality. london: routledge. guzman, al (2019) voices in and of the machine: source orientation toward mobile virtual assistants. computers in human behavior, 90, 343–350. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2008.03.008 hepp, a, w loosen, s dreyer, j jarke, s kannengießer, c katzenbach, c, r malaka, m pfadenhauer, c puschmann & w schulz (2023) chatgpt, lamda, and the hype around communicative ai: the automation of communication as a field of research in media and communication studies. human-machine communication, 6, 41-63. https://doi.org/10.30658/hmc.6.4 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2008.03.008 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2008.03.008 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2008.03.008 https://doi.org/10.30658/hmc.6.4 https://doi.org/10.30658/hmc.6.4 https://doi.org/10.30658/hmc.6.4 12 hurel, lm & n couldry (2022) colonizing the home as data-source: investigating the language of amazon skills and google actions. international journal of communication 16: 5184–5203. marx, k (1867/1976) capital. a critique of political economy. volume one. london: penguin books. mcluhan, m (1964) understanding media: the extensions of man. new york: mcgrawhill. kaun, a & l dencik (2020) datafication and the welfare state. global perspectives natale, s (2021) communicating through or communicating with: approaching artificial intelligence from a communication and media studies perspective. communication theory, 31(4), 905–910.https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtaa022 peters, jd (1999) speaking into the air: a history of the idea of communication. chicago: chicago university press. stenbom, a, m wiggberg & t norlund (2023) exploring communicative ai: reflections from a swedish newsroom, digital journalism, 11(9): 1622-1640, https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2021.2007781 west, sm (2019) data capitalism: redefining the logics of surveillance and privacy. business & society 58(1): 20–41. zuboff, s (2015) big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization. journal of information technology 30(1): 75–89. powering computers, dismantling public values: the energy politics of computation work in sweden julia velkova linköping university, sweden amidst debates about the societal transformations that communicative ai and its underlying technologies of machine learning and large language models are bringing, one thing is certain: they will require computers and electricity. since more than a decade, tech giants have been searching for places to station their computers and power them with “good” electricity that is cheap, abundant, non-intermittent and labelled as “green”. one such region are the nordic states with their well-developed, affordable electricity and communication infrastructure networks built around public values of openness and universal provision of connection. today, google has its largest european data center in finland; aws owns an expanding data center complex that stretches across three towns in sweden; while facebook and microsoft have several data centers in sweden and denmark. google and aws also own the electricity of some of the biggest, recently built wind-power production plants in sweden. in this paper i examine the practices through which big tech procures electricity for data centers in sweden to produce an emergent geography of cheap computation work needed for computation intense technologies, including communicative ai. specifically, i https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtaa022 https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2021.2007781 https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2021.2007781 13 discuss how these practices dismantle core public values associated with the welfare state while fueling conflicts between nordic states and their citizens. in my approach, i build on and extend work on media backends (parks et al., 2023), the materialities of ai (crawford, 2021), and digital energetics (ortar et al., 2023; pasek et al., 2023). i situate energy infrastructure as arrangements of sociotechnical relations shaped by different values embedded in things – devices, electric wires, wind turbines and nuclear reactors – and decisions about where electrons should travel, how, at what cost, from whom and to whom (akrich, 1997). as decades of work in science and technology studies has shown, energy does not exist in the void – electricity is transported to homes and computers through energy infrastructures that have their own dynamics, materialities, markets and logics of operation, and that differ across national contexts. in sweden, historically, electricity distribution has been part of the project of creating the welfare state, making electricity affordable and available to anyone through grid design and regulatory arrangements that have persisted despite liberalization. as data giants tapped into swedish grids to power their computers, societal and infrastructural controversies ensued. i engage in this paper with two such controversies: 1) when microsoft reserved grid capacity for its data center in the southern region of skåne and a local bread producer could not get on the same grid in the area to build a baking factory due to lack of grid capacity; and 2) when google materialized a wind farm in the region of jämtland on sami herding lands, and against the will of the local residents, and procured all the electricity produced by the farm. these controversies expose two things. first, while big tech imaginaries of futures with large language models presume the endless expansion of data and digital computing, power grid capacities are limited by the designs of transmission lines, and historically shaped cultural expectations of anticipated load. when microsoft reserves local power grids for computing, or when google buys all the available power of a wind farm, they push away other companies and business away, by simply limiting the available grid capacities to everyone, perpetuating what we term as energy gentrification (libertson et al., 2021). with increasing energy gentrification, public values of universal and equal access to electricity in sweden that have been core to the swedish welfare state are getting lost, resulting in unequal opportunities to local communities and industries for access to electricity provision. the culture of secrecy practiced by the digital and energy infrastructure operators in sweden stands against long-standing regional values of publicness and makes it impossible to assess the scale of these developments. they get to be known primarily by the visible controversies around lack of grid capacities and lack of “green” electricity. together, these practices dismantle infrastructurally nordic public values of openness, public knowledge and equal, affordable access to energy. and, these values cannot be quickly nor easily restored because electricity grids take decades to build. second, the controversies also expose how data giants’ energetic needs perpetuate conflicts between citizens, local businesses and the nordic states. google’s wind farm in jämtland has been subject of national and international court cases and activist campaigns over land conflicts between reindeer herding, local industrial development and wind power. while google takes all the energy from the wind power plant, they also 14 perpetuate unresolved disputes between the swedish state and sami people over land, furthering old practices of internal colonialism – this time not solely for the benefit of the swedish state, but also for the needs of google and the global computation economy. what i ultimately show in this paper is how the new geographies of digital computation that technologies such as communicative ai require profoundly impact public values, and perpetuate social inequalities through the infrastructure politics of access to and distribution of energy. as digital industries, governments and scholars are imagining computation-intense futures, it is vital to conceive of these futures through thicker accounts of the relation between digital computing and energy politics. what is at stake is nothing less than the liveable futures of societies organized around computation. references akrich m (1997) the de-scription of technical objects. in: bijker we and law j (eds) shaping technologies/ building society. cambridge: mit press, pp. 205–224. crawford k (2021) atlas of ai: power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. new haven: yale university press. libertson f, velkova j and palm j (2021) data-center infrastructure and energy gentrification: perspectives from sweden. sustainability: science, practice and policy 17(1): 153–162. ortar natalie, taylor are, velkova j, et al. (2023) powering ‘smart’ futures: data centres and the energy politics of digitalisation. in: abram s, waltorp k, ortar nathalie, et al. (eds) energy futures: anthropocene challenges, emerging technologies and everyday life. de gruyter contemporary social sciences 10. berlin; boston: de gruyter. parks l, velkova j and de ridder s (eds) (2023) media backends: digital infrastructures and sociotechnical relations. urbana: university of illinois press. pasek a, lin ck, cooper zgt, et al. (2023) digital energetics. in search of media. minneapolis: meson press: university of minnesota press. beyond extractionism and existentialism: an eco political economy of communicative ai benedetta brevini university of sydney, australia amidst the whirlwind of media attention surrounding the rise of communicative ai, leading digital lords (brevini 2020a) such as microsoft and google have finally openly acknowledged the hefty environmental toll associated with meeting the soaring demand for their ai tools. this toll includes the expensive production of semiconductors, the massive energy consumption, and an unprecedented strain on water resources (george et al. 2023; heikka 2023). microsoft’s latest environmental report, released in 2022, unveils a notable 34% surge in its global water usage from 2021 to 2022, totalling nearly 15 1.7 billion gallons. this substantial increase is directly attributed to the company’s intensified ai research endeavours with openai, presenting a heightened environmental concern compared to previous years. despite growing attention to the environmental costs of ict systems (ferreboeuf 2019) ai gets principally heralded as the key technology to solve contemporary challenges, including the climate crisis, which is one of the goals of sustainable development. remarkably, despite a substantial body of evidence, there exists no unanimously accepted conceptual framework or a standard set of guidelines for comprehending the complexity of the ecological harms generated by communicative ai (brevini 2020, 2021, 2023a). on one side, there is a recognition of the extensive benefits of communicative ai, while on the other, there’s a disciplinary and topical divide in the scholarship related to digital technologies, communicative ai and the environment. engineering and computer science scholarship remains detached from investigations into political economy and the social dimensions of technology. research on environmental communication operates independently from studies in geography. this academic compartmentalisation poses a barrier to effectively addressing these pressing challenges. a crucial systematic evidence-review of literature on environmental sustainability and digital communication conducted by kuntsman and rattle (2019) revealed that scholars engaging with sustainability and digital technologies, while acknowledging environmental concerns such as e-waste and energy consumption, the literature generally advocates for improving digital solutions rather than rejecting them outright. specifically, their analysis highlights a “paradigmatic myopia”, where various environmental blind spots persist despite some acknowledgment and mitigation efforts (ibid). in the field of media and communication there are noteworthy contributions including sean cubitt’s 2016 concept of “finite media” that brings attention to the finite nature of material resources required for, and subsequently depleted by, digital media; richard maxwell and toby miller’s pioneering work “greening the media” (2012) pushing for the development of “eco-ethics” in media studies (brevini and murdock 2017), exploring the intricate relationship between communication and "carbon capitalism." notable are the efforts of “data centers studies” recently focused on extensive carbon and extractive footprints of data infrastructures, with a focus on communicative ai’s characterization as an extractive technology (hogan, 2021, brodie,2023). in the field of “critical ai studies" (lindgren, 2023; verdegem, 2021), a significant focus revolves around the concern for bias, encompassing issues of race and gender discrimination, exclusion, oppression and “existential threat” brought by ai systems (broussard 2023; eubanks 2018; noble 2018). engineering studies played a pivotal role in advancing the field of communicative ai by providing the technical foundation and methodologies for the development and implementation of ai systems. they have also been delivering the most promising research engaging with the environmental toll of ai and its energy consumption. the most pioneering study in the field that connected ai with its environmental costs was published in june 2019 by strubell, e., ganesh a., mccallum at the college of information and computer sciences at the university of massachusetts amherst. for the first time, research sought to quantify the energy consumed by running ai programs. moreover, recent studies focusing on chatgpt have highlighted the urgency of recognizing the massive water footprint caused by ai models (george et al. 2023; heikka 2023; microsoft 2022; dryer 2020). 16 existing research predominantly fixates on isolated environmental footprints and a limited number of studies, highlighting the need for more comprehensive research to ascertain the reliability and validity of such findings (van wynsberghe, 2021). expanding upon the groundwork laid by henderson et al., anthony et al. (2020) introduced “carbontracker” as a novel tool designed for monitoring and predicting the energy consumption and carbon emissions associated with training deep learning models (ibid). notably, the “carbontracker” not only enables the generation of carbon impact statements but also provides a unique feature allowing users to halt model training “at the user’s discretion if the predicted environmental cost is exceeded. in more recent times, tools such as the 'machine learning emissions calculator' (lacoste et al., 2019) have become increasingly accessible (luccioni et al., 2023). however, these studies never engage with the complexity of ai global ecosystems and the overall ecological impact of ai. this conclusion aligns with the findings of the systematic review of engineering studies specifically addressing ai and ecological concerns conducted by verdecchia et al (2023). the systematic review underscores a significant increase in engineering publications exploring topics such as green software, green applications, and green data centers, with a substantial 76% of the papers emerging since 2020. however, it is noteworthy that the prevailing themes within these publications primarily revolve around monitoring, hyperparameter tuning, deployment, and model benchmarking (verdecchia, 2023). overall, scholarly work on artificial intelligence has not yet paid sufficient attention to the global ecosystem and production and supply chain dynamics associated with communicative ai, as well as to the challenge of providing a holistic analysis of the resulting environmental harms. as a result, the potential impact of existing interventions, is significantly constrained. to address these limitations, ai good for the planet? (2021) called for a novel approach, “an eco-political economy of ai” as a framework to understand holistically the complexity of ai environmental harms by studying the global production and supply chain of communicative ai (brevini 2021: 40; brevini 2024). embracing the tradition of the critical political economy of communications allows us to view communications systems as assemblages of material devices and infrastructures (brevini and murdock 2017). moving beyond disciplinary constraints, this paper extends those effort by developing this framework further, by consolidating fragmented knowledge traditions, indigenous concepts, environmental justice paradigms, and theories spanning media and communication, geography, computing and engineering. references brevini, b., & murdock, g. (2017). carbon capitalism and communication. palgrave macmillan. brevini, b. (2020). black boxes, not green: mythologizing artificial intelligence and omitting the environment. big data & society, 7(2) brevini, b. (2021). is ai good for the planet. cambridge: polity. cubitt, s. (2016). finite media: environmental implications of digital technologies. duke university press. 17 kuntsman, a., & rattle, i. (2019). towards a paradigmatic shift in sustainability studies: a systematic review of peer reviewed literature and future agenda setting to consider environmental (un) sustainability of digital communication. environmental communication, 13(5), 567-581 ferreboeuf, h. (2019). lean ict: towards digital sobriety. paris, france: the shift project. https://theshiftproject.org/wpcontent/uploads/2019/03/lean-ict-report_the-shift-project_2019.pdf. george, a. s., george, h., & gabrio martin, a. s. (2023). the environmental impact of ai: a case study of water consumption by chat gpt. partners universal international innovation journal, 1(2), 97–104. heikka, m.(2023) making an image with generative ai uses as much energy as charging your phone, available at https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/01/1084189/making-an-image-withgenerative-ai-uses-as-much-energy-as-charging-your-phone/ hogan m.(2021) the data center industrial complex. in: juemand ruiz r (eds) saturation: an elemental politics. durham, nc: duke university press, 283–305. lacoste, a., luccioni, a., schmidt, v., & dandres, t. (2019). quantifying the carbon emissions of machine learning. arxiv preprint arxiv:1910.09700 lindgren, s. (ed.). (2023). handbook of critical studies of artificial intelligence. edward elgar publishing. luccioni, a. s., viguier, s., & ligozat, a. l. (2023). estimating the carbon footprint of bloom, a 176b parameter language model. journal of machine learning research, 24(253), 1-15. maxwell, r., & miller, t. (2012). greening the media. oxford university press. microsoft (2022) microsoft environmental sustainability report, 2022 available at https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/rw15mgm verdegem, p. (ed.) 2021. ai for everyone?: critical perspectives. london: university of westminster press strubell, e., a. ganesh, and a. mccallum. 2019. "energy and policy considerations for deep learning in nlp". cornell university, arxiv:1906.02243. van wynsberghe, a. (2020). designing robots for care: care cantered value-sensitive design. in machine ethics and robot ethics (pp. 185-211). routledge. https://theshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/lean-ict-report_the-shift-project_2019.pdf https://theshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/lean-ict-report_the-shift-project_2019.pdf https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/01/1084189/making-an-image-with-generative-ai-uses-as-much-energy-as-charging-your-phone/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/01/1084189/making-an-image-with-generative-ai-uses-as-much-energy-as-charging-your-phone/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/01/1084189/making-an-image-with-generative-ai-uses-as-much-energy-as-charging-your-phone/ https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/rw15mgm selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): nelson, l and suzor, n. (2024, october). measuring misogyny: depp v heard and the limits of atomistic content moderation. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. measuring misogyny: depp v heard and the limits of atomistic content moderation lucinda nelson queensland university of technology nicolas suzor queensland university of technology introduction and background there is a fundamental disconnect between existing approaches to content moderation and the dynamics of violence against women. in this paper, through an examination of the online discourse around the depp v heard trial, we illustrate the limitations of atomistic content moderation. we argue that online misogyny cannot be adequately addressed through the moderation of individual pieces of content, and that we need new methods for measuring misogyny in aggregate. this paper is part of a larger, ongoing project that seeks to understand how to better identify and address the persistent undercurrent of ‘everyday’ misogyny on social media platforms. we use ‘everyday misogyny’ to refer to the subtler expressions of online misogyny that do not reach the threshold for prohibition or removal under either the law or platform policies, but still contribute to broader platform cultures that are hostile to women. over the past decade, social media companies have come under increasing pressure to make their platforms safer for women. while they have made some changes – banning specific groups and pages; committing to reducing the spread of “borderline content”; introducing features that allow users to add additional context when reporting content – the foundational approach to content moderation has remained largely the same. platforms continue to focus on identifying, assessing and responding to individual pieces of violating content, like overt hate speech, direct threats, and doxxing. this approach is ill-equipped to deal with structural harms, like misogyny (suzor 2019). scholars have emphasised that violence against women cannot be understood in terms of isolated instances, but as part of a continuum (kelly 1987). ‘everyday’ experiences of sexism and misogyny form part of the same dynamic as the more widely recognised, extreme forms of violence (gillett 2018). this makes everyday misogyny an important, albeit controversial, site for platform intervention. the most well-known existing tools for identifying harmful content tend to focus on variations of ‘toxic’ content, ‘not safe for work’ material, or explicit hate speech. for example, perspective api, the current industry standard for measuring ‘toxicity’, seeks to identify comments that are “rude, disrespectful or, unreasonable” and are “likely to make someone leave a discussion”. because they do not deal with context, these methods of assessing short texts in isolation often tend to function primarily as a detector of incivility (trott, beckett, and paech 2022). as a result, tools like perspective have been shown to tone-police the content of marginalised users, while also failing to identify politely worded expressions of harmful ideologies (dias oliva, antonialli, and gomes 2021). methods this paper explores these current tensions in content moderation using the case study of the depp v heard trial. the online response to this defamation trial, brought by johnny depp against amber heard, was emblematic of the anti-feminist backlash against the #metoo movement. while there was no shortage of overtly hateful content in the online discourse, this case study also presents an interesting opportunity to explore everyday forms of misogyny. the combination of the celebrity element and the public broadcasting of the trial created a spectacle, generating widespread discussion about the trial and allowing online spectators to participate in the interpretation and evaluation of evidence. as a legal trial, where the ‘truth’ was inherently contested, this case study is particularly useful for investigating perceptions of believability (banetweiser and higgins 2023) and doubt in the context of violence against women – concepts that are both deeply influenced by harmful beliefs about women, and widely seen as legitimate points for open discussion and debate. this data for this study is a set of over two million unique tweets containing relevant keywords, including variations and combinations of ‘johnny depp’, ‘amber heard’, ‘depp v heard’, posted between 4 april 2022 (one week before the trial began) and 8 june 2022 (one week after the trial ended). the first stage of our methods was exploratory. we developed a thorough understanding of the timeline of the trial and key issues in the discourse by examining peaks of activity in the data, popular hashtags and links, and influential accounts with tweets that were widely shared or replied to. we then used topic modelling to organise the data into identifiable topics of interest, focusing on topics related to evidence, believability and doubt. with the data organised by topic, we undertook a closer qualitative analysis of a random sample of each of our topics of interest. this analysis was informed by the literature on believability and doubt in domestic and sexual violence cases, including testimonial injustice (fricker 2007; harradine 2022; hänel 2022), rape and domestic violence myths (burt 1980; stabile et al. 2019; peters 2008; policastro and payne 2013), and ‘ideal victim’ narratives (christie 1986; randall 2004). preliminary results this paper is a work in progress. our preliminary findings indicate that everyday misogyny was widespread in online discussions about the trial. posts about evidence were often grounded in harmful beliefs about women and about the nature of domestic and sexual violence, including that women frequently lie about experiencing abuse and that victim-survivors will always act in a particular way. we also found significant double-standards in what was expected of each party, both in terms of their behaviour in court and the type and amount of evidence needed to prove their claims. users also expressed contradictory expectations of amber heard, which culminated in a series of double-binds: she was criticised for crying too much, but also for smiling or laughing; she was criticised for not having enough evidence of her physical injuries, but the fact that she recorded instances of depp’s abusive behaviour was also perceived as suspicious. importantly, these double-standards and double-binds were rarely found within the same post, or even the same comment thread. the full picture of the misogyny in the online discourse only becomes apparent through consideration of the culmination of tweets. our analysis suggests that it is not enough to perform a binary misogynistic/not misogynistic classification at scale; rather, we need to consider the broader patterns, recognising that entirely separate pieces of content still contribute to a common discourse and have cumulative weight. contribution the central contribution of this paper is to provide deeper insights into the way everyday misogyny manifests online, and the limitations of current approaches to content moderation. we intend to build on the findings of this study to develop new methods and frameworks for understanding misogyny in aggregate. through this work, we aim to inform ongoing debates in the content moderation literature about what platforms should do to address structural harms. references banet-weiser, sarah, and kathryn claire higgins. 2023. believability: sexual violence, media, and the politics of doubt. 1st ed. polity. burt, m. r. 1980. ‘cultural myths and supports for rape’. journal of personality and social psychology 38 (2): 217–30. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.38.2.217. christie, nils. 1986. ‘the ideal victim’. in from crime policy to victim policy: reorienting the justice system, edited by ezzat a. fattah, 17–30. london: palgrave macmillan uk. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08305-3_2. dias oliva, thiago, dennys marcelo antonialli, and alessandra gomes. 2021. ‘fighting hate speech, silencing drag queens? artificial intelligence in content moderation and risks to lgbtq voices online’. sexuality & culture 25 (2): 700–732. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-020-09790-w. fricker, miranda. 2007. epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. clarendon press. gillett, rosalie. 2018. ‘intimate intrusions online: studying the normalisation of abuse in dating apps’. women’s studies international forum 69 (july): 212–19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2018.04.005. hänel, hilkje c. 2022. ‘#metoo and testimonial injustice: an investigation of moral and conceptual knowledge’. philosophy & social criticism 48 (6): 833–59. https://doi.org/10.1177/01914537211017578. harradine, michelle. 2022. ‘defamation law and epistemic harm in the #metoo era’. australian feminist law journal 48 (1): 31–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/13200968.2022.2146303. kelly, liz. 1987. ‘the continuum of sexual violence’. in women, violence and social control, edited by jalma hanmer and mary maynard, 46–60. palgrave macmillan. peters, jay. 2008. ‘measuring myths about domestic violence: development and initial validation of the domestic violence myth acceptance scale’. journal of aggression, maltreatment & trauma 16 (1): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926770801917780. policastro, christina, and brian k. payne. 2013. ‘the blameworthy victim: domestic violence myths and the criminalization of victimhood’. journal of aggression, maltreatment & trauma 22 (4): 329–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926771.2013.775985. randall, melanie. 2004. ‘domestic violence and the construction of ideal victims: assaulted women’s image problems in law deconstructing the image of battered woman’. saint louis university public law review 23 (1): 107–54. stabile, bonnie, aubrey grant, hemant purohit, and mohammad rama. 2019. ‘“she lied”: social construction, rape myth prevalence in social media, and sexual assault policy’. sexuality, gender & policy 2 (2): 80–96. https://doi.org/10.1002/sgp2.12011. suzor, nicolas. 2019. lawless: the secret rules that govern our digital lives. cambridge, united kingdom ; new york, ny: cambridge university press. trott, verity, jennifer beckett, and venessa paech. 2022. ‘operationalising “toxicity” in the manosphere: automation, platform governance and community health’. convergence, june, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565221111075. divon-#vladdydaddy on tiktok-#vladdydaddy on tiktok selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 #vladdydaddy on tiktok: imagined intimacy and memetic participation in times of war tom divon the hebrew university of jerusalem daniela jaramillo-dent university of zurich alex gekker university of amsterdam introduction #vladdydaddy is a popular internet meme that emerged during the 2016 elections in the united states on 4chan and twitter to characterize the perceived submissive behavior of donald trump towards vladimir putin. the meme re-emerged on tiktok in the days leading to the russian invasion of ukraine in february 2022, gaining a new meaning. in 2022, the #vladdydaddy meme displayed tiktokers' creativity with humorous videos imagining a fictional connection between them and the russian president. in these memes, tiktokers were immersing themselves in imagined spaces facilitating communication lines with putin, attempting to persuade him to refrain from invading ukraine. our analysis of this meme is part of our research project focused on studying social media memetic responses to human tragedies like the russia-ukraine war. in this paper, we focus on "dm memes" as a creative sub-meme of #vladdydaddy. the memes' rapid virality is due to their use of irony and humor to advocate for social justice, aligning with tiktok's playful content style (abidin, 2020). memetic participation and imagined intimacy tiktok is one of the most popular platforms among young users, promoting collective engagement around memetic processes (zulli & zulli, 2020). the potential of the platform to generate memetic participation (milner, 2016) and imagined intimacy (greenwood & long, 2011) shapes our theoretical framework. in our analysis, we draw on milner's (2016) five fundamental logics of memetic participation multimodality, reappropriation, resonance, collectivism, and spread. additionally, we draw on greenwood and long's suggested citation (apa): divon, t., jaramillo-dent, d., gekker, a. (2023, october). #vladdydaddy on tiktok: imagined intimacy and memetic participation in times of war. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. (2011) conceptualization of imagined intimacy, which suggests that it emerges among individuals with unmet emotional needs towards a celebrity or public figure. using these frameworks, we examine how imagined intimacy with putin is achieved through the reappropriation of a widely recognized meme used to express desires for peace. prior research on dming memes examined hillary clinton's 2012 'texts from hillary' on twitter, crafting a relatable and dominant image for her in text exchanges with male political rivals and media celebrities (anderson & sheeler, 2014). in our corpus, putin is portrayed as responsive, reinforcing the constructed image of the russian leader and aiding tiktok communities in comprehending the distressing aspects of war and violence. method to facilitate a collection of the relevant videos, we manually collected 800 videos through a combination of personal and purposefully created research tiktok profiles. we created a clean slate user to train tiktok's algorithm for relevant content, using the browser version of the app and collecting specific video urls manually, along with an experimental browser extension, 'zeeschuimer,' for bulk video scraping. we gathered #vladdydaddy meme re-emergence on tiktok's 'for you' page from the days before the ukraine invasion in february 2022 to july 2022. we recognize a potential limitation in our method related to the app's emphasis on “freshness” (sánchez-querubín et al., 2023), prioritizing more recent videos over popular ones. to address this, we manually accessed video lists under the hashtag and associated sounds, searching for specific posting dates. we retrieved videos from the hashtag page, manually coding them into sub-categories, with a focus on timestamps to understand the broader tiktok community's temporal response. we grouped the different versions of #vladdydaddy, finding 254 'dm meme' videos in our collection, and analyzed the content using multimodal discourse analysis (kress & bezemer, 2023). grounded in social semiotics, this analytical approach is wellsuited for scrutinizing digital interactions among tiktok content creators and the symbolism and meanings within the #vladdydaddy meme and its community. as such, the visual, textual, and sonic cues present in our collected videos, as well as the connections of the meme to other memes and real-life events, will be considered and emphasized in the analysis. key findings dming putin is part of a long-standing tradition within the realm of internet memes. this particular type of meme is often characterized by a humorous tone and employs the format of text messaging or direct messaging to simulate conversations with famous personalities, caricatures of family members, love interests, or close friends. this typology of #vladdydaddy memes portrays an intimate exchange with putin by simulating direct message conversations with the ambitious aim of persuading him to withdraw his threats to invade ukraine. the videos in this category often start with attempts to mock putin’s masculinity and physical features, targeting his hairline or attractiveness, as exemplified in figure 1. in certain respects, putin's extensively documented political image, rooted in masculinity and symbolizing his power, is leveraged humorously to envision a scenario where he might be persuaded to avoid war by presenting alternative solutions. figure 1. dm memes provide alternatives or exchanges to stop the war other variations demonstrate an elevation in the users' creativity, as putin’s imagined response ranges from a mere notification of the message being "seen" to a photo of the user's residence or a full-blown threat to bomb the user’s house. in the response-fromputin videos, the user then begins to backtrack either by deleting the messages or stating that it was just a joke. these retractions are often accompanied by audio effects such as accelerated breathing, frantic typing, or panic-inducing sounds, which create a sense of stress and fear. alternatively, some videos incorporate popular music, such as the track “white khaby lame” which is a sped-up version of the song “dive in” by jeleel or gwen stefani’s “hollaback girl”, following milner’s (2016) memetic participation logics of reappropriation of sounds, collectivism in expressing the desire to avoid war and visual imitation in following a well-known dm meme genre. figure 2. dm meme praising zelenski another variation in this genre of memes involves sending direct messages to other world leaders and seeking their aid in the ongoing conflict. for instance, one popular meme addresses ukrainian president volodymyr zelenski’s “too many bitches” implying he is an object of courtship by members of the opposite sex. this variation exemplifies how memes can intersect and draw on pre-existing collective narratives like those that disparage putin's attractiveness among women. this variant seems to reflect the general support for zelenski and an attempt to express the need for world leaders to intervene using language and format that fits the lighter, playful tone of tiktok. a noteworthy observation is the use of derogatory language in these memes, which serves to diminish the role of women in both the political sphere and the context of this conflict. conclusions one could argue that dming putin is a collective coping mechanism to fulfill an emotional need through the construction of imagined intimacy between users participating in the spread of the #vladdydaddy meme with their constructed version of vladimir putin (greenwood & long, 2011). the sense of helplessness experienced by digital creators confronted with the looming threat of war has prompted a collective response, as they utilize a familiar format to express their aspirations for peace through an engaging and conversational medium (abidin, 2020). while it is clear that dming putin is not a real solution to the ongoing conflict, memetic communities collectively assert their stance against putin’s actions. it is worth noting that due to the authoritarian nature of the russian regime, activist actions that target putin on a personal level would never be possible within russian borders. in 2019, laws were passed in russia that prohibited any form of 'disrespect towards authorities' (bbc, 2019), which were then followed by tiktok ceasing operations in the country and strict censorship laws being implemented after the invasion (reuters, 2022). this underscores the significance of exploring seemingly trivial online discursive practices that may carry grave consequences offline. in doing so, we bring to the forefront the global community of creators who take a firm stance towards the current political climate in russia. references abidin, c. 2020. mapping internet celebrity on tiktok: exploring attention economies and visibility labours. cultural science journal, 12(1), pp. 77–103. doi: https://doi.org/10.5334/csci.140 anderson, k.v., & sheeler, k.h. (2014). texts (and tweets) from hillary: meta-meming and postfeminist political culture. presidential studies quarterly, 44(2), 224-243. https://doi.org/10.1111/psq.12111 ashwin, s., & utrata, j. (2020). masculinity restored? putin’s russia and trump’s america, contexts: american sociological association, 19(2), 16-21. bbc. (2019, march 7). russia laws ban ‘disrespect’ of government and ‘fake news’. bbc news. http://bit.ly/3y13jom dieter, michael, carolin gerlitz, anne helmond, nathaniel tkacz, fernando n. van der vlist, and esther weltevrede. 2019. ‘multi-situated app studies: methods and propositions’. social media + society 5 (2): 205630511984648. greenwood, d. n., & long, c. r. (2011). attachment, belongingness needs, and relationship status predict imagined intimacy with media figures. communication research, 38(2), 278-297. kress, g., & bezemer, j. (2023). multimodal discourse analysis. in the routledge handbook of discourse analysis (pp. 139-155). routledge. milner, r. (2016). the world made meme: public conversations and participatory media. mit press reuters. (2022, december 16). tiktok says it will cut staff in russia -company statement. reuters. http://bit.ly/3xuelwe sánchez-querubín, n., wang, s., dickey, b., & benedetti, a. (2023). political tiktok: playful performance, ambivalent critique, and event commentary. in r. rogers (ed.), the propagation of misinformation in social media: a cross-platform analysis (pp. 187–206). amsterdam university press zulli, d., & zulli, d. j. (2022). extending the internet meme: conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation publics on the tiktok platform. new media & society, 24(8), 18721890. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): basak, s. (2024, october). livelihood-related internet use among lowprivileged young men in kolkata. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. livelihood-related internet use among low-privileged young men in kolkata subham basak department of international development, university of oxford, uk there are stark inequalities in opportunities for employment in india, mainly shaped by the level, quality, and source of formal education. this is particularly disadvantageous for graduates from low-cost government institutions compared to expensive private ones (yagnamurthy, 2021), the inequalities having widened particularly after the liberalization of the economy in 1991. their disadvantage has coincided in recent times with the of mobile internet use in india (see g.s.m.a., 2021, 2023) and a simultaneous rise of the democratization and diversity of content in social media, where creators, relying on a platform’s monetization model (see e.g., youtube, 2023), provide many materials, including livelihood skills or information for free. these, in theory, can help many resource-poor consumers to broaden their life chances by pursuing livelihoodrelated resources. previous research regarding digital industries has discussed the cultural change (e.g., hesmondhalgh & baker, 2013; magaudda & solaroli, 2020) and precarious implications for the creators of these products (e.g., duffy, 2016; scholz, 2009). studies on effectiveness of online learning has focused on indonesian students in classroom settings (maziriri et al., 2020; rahmatika et al., 2021) and on autonomous englishlearning in taiwan (wang & chen, 2020). however, it is also important to know about the social and gendered contexts of specific population groups in other settings and how they shape goal-oriented uses of the internet and the achievement of such goals. this qualitative study investigates how urban young men of low-privileged backgrounds in kolkata (in eastern india) access digital content, mostly on youtube, to acquire skills for and information about income opportunities in the face of a lack of access to quality institutions. it also asks whether and how the outcomes of such internet use are shaped by their specific life contexts which may also influence the scope of application of such information. this study is based on blended ethnography (see e.g., hine, 2017), and uses digital divides (see ragnedda et al., 2023; ragnedda & muschert, 2017) and domestication theory (see e.g., haddon, 2017; hartmann, 2023) as analytical frameworks. the research discusses the experiences of 20 young men in kolkata who speak bengali as native language, have had personal smartphones for at least a year and studied in government-owned or government-aided schools due to the financial constraints of their family which made affording private education impossible. the off-line data is collected through in-person participant observations, ethnographic interviews, home visits and participation in their social life. digital data is collected from 1-to-1 online conversations and screenshots of youtube pages like subscriptions, liked videos, favourite channels etc. and other relevant apps/websites. data collection lasted from october 2023 till june 2024. all participants have stated their unhappiness with the government institutes in failing to provide them with job skills and linkages with desired jobs in a market where the demand far outstrips the supply of decent jobs, reflected in the high unemployment rate among the educated in india (see the indian express, 2023). they spoke of normalised gendered expectations from their families and (future) female partners on them to earn respectably and well. most of them have sought solutions through the smartphoneinternet which has involved numerous complexities. dipesh, a 21-year-old man pursuing bachelor of computer applications, despite bad grades, in a private college, struggles to cope with the demands on learning programming languages and the male-centric income expectations of his low-income family. he has tried to learn english for future job interviews and coding for his course by ‘subscribing’ to free vernacular channels on youtube. however, the exhausting but low-quality classes at college only hinder him from regular engagement with online learning. inspired from youtube videos, he also harbours lofty unrealistic aspirations of passing the most competitive civil service examinations in india. shyam, 19, once a meritorious student, was preparing from free youtube channels to pursue engineering after school as his family could not afford private tuition. he learned on youtube about a public examination for a low-paying but secure governmental position at the post office. when he passed the relevant examination, he had to choose this over engineering dreams because of immediate monetary needs of his family. karim, 19, through sheer determination and financial support from relatives, has completed online courses on digital graphics design, media editing etc. but has only found irregular low-income work opportunities. sourish, 26 and unemployed, was desperate for a job after failing to pursue a sports career and got cheated at an online platform with fake offers and now distrusts looking for jobs online. his motivation to look for online opportunities is often thwarted by male-centric gaming and sexual distractions online. raunak, 20, aspires to start dropshipping, a form of online retail after learning about it online, but afraid of the risk due to lack of contacts in this domain. rijul, 20, currently unemployed, on the other hand, has found irregular low-income employment from offline connections in the past without any need to use online sources. the desire for upward mobility motivates the participants to go online to search for fitting opportunities. using affordable internet resources, the young men exercise their agency to attempt to fill the deficiencies of formal institutions and their limited access to offline social/cultural/economic capital. this indicates some success in overcoming of the second digital divide, although not uniformly. limited offline capitals in the form of language barriers, low knowledge of effective use of the internet, lack of relatable role models, high scepticism in investing money etc. recreate in newer ways the previous limitations of their offline life as the accessible online opportunities look steep, unreliable or uncertain. in line with the third digital divide, these findings reveal greater obstacles in the efficacy of applying livelihood-related online resources in terms of the nature of livelihoods sought, availability of energy and time, social expectations, and the availability of avenues for finding lesser employment via offline ties. as this actively influences ‘digital empowerment’ (see ragnedda et al., 2023, p. 29), i aim to argue that the extent of divide (second or third) is not uniform for one individual in a population group but varies with each purposive use depending on personal interests and social factors that facilitate/hinder success in specific directions. negotiations of these divides underpin their everyday processes of domestication and re-domestication (see berker et al., 2006; peil & röser, 2023) on an individual level (see berker, 2023). additionally, as they grapple with making the best of digital resources for life chances, the role and responsibility of institutions, especially the government, receding to the back seat in a market-driven economy is further normalized. while generalisations are impossible, we see the general connections of online use with offline contexts, which determine the success of the life chances of the young men. this research contributes both to knowledge of digital experiences from the global south and extends the theories of domestication of digital technology and digital divides to youth in low privilege settings. the final paper will provide detailed ethnographic insights into the lives of the young men to also discuss the balance between various uses of the internet; for skills and for entertainment, and how they negotiate the challenges of digital industries offering them a mix of both, but which only some of them can utilize to enhance their life chances. references berker, t. (2023). domestication as user-led infrastructuring. in m. hartmann (ed.), the routledge handbook of media and technology domestication (pp. 29–41). taylor & francis. berker, t., hartmann, m., punie, y., & ward, k. (eds.). (2006). domestication of media and technology [electronic resource]. open university press. https://ezproxyprd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/login?url=http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oxford/detail. action?docid=287814 duffy, b. e. (2016). the romance of work: gender and aspirational labour in the digital culture industries. international journal of cultural studies, 19(4), 441–457. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877915572186 g.s.m.a. (2021). the mobile economy asia pacific 2021. in 2021 gsm association. https://www.gsma.com/mobileeconomy/wpcontent/uploads/2021/08/gsma_me_apac_2021_web_singles.pdf g.s.m.a. (2023). the mobile economy asia pacific 2023. https://www.gsma.com/mobileeconomy/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/mobileeconomy-report-asia-pacific-2023.pdf haddon, l. (2017). domestication and mobile telephony. in machines that become us (pp. 43–55). routledge. hartmann, m. (ed.). (2023). the routledge handbook of media and technology domestication. taylor & francis. hesmondhalgh, d., & baker, s. (2013). creative labour: media work in three cultural industries. routledge. hine, c. (2017). ethnographies of online communities and social media: modes, varieties, affordances. in n. fielding, r. m. lee, & g. blank (eds.), the sage handbook of online research methods [electronic resource] (second edition., pp. 401–415). sage inc. https://ezproxyprd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/login?url=http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oxford/detail. action?docid=4775497 magaudda, p., & solaroli, m. (2020). platform studies and digital cultural industries. sociologica, 14(3), 267–293. maziriri, e. t., gapa, p., & chuchu, t. (2020). student perceptions towards the use of youtube as an educational tool for learning and tutorials. international journal of instruction, 13(2), 119–138. peil, c., & röser, j. (2023). conceptualizing re-domestication: theoretical reflections and empirical findings to a neglected concept. in the routledge handbook of media and technology domestication. taylor & francis. https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/76514 ragnedda, m., & muschert, g. w. (2017). theorizing digital divides. routledge. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=4oe2dwaaqbaj&oi=fnd&pg=pt 7&dq=ragnedda,+the+third+digital+divide:+a+weberian+approach+to+digital +inequalities&ots=ksfdbg94cs&sig=lc8tldomxpkw8qmgqs13thggcio ragnedda, m., muschert, g. w., & ruiu, m. l. (2023). digital stratification: class, status group and party in the age of the internet. in w. housley, a. edwards, r. beneito-montagut, & r. fitzgerald (eds.), the sage handbook of digital society (p. 19). sage publications ltd. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=8pgceaaaqbaj&oi=fnd&pg=pa 19&ots=ojspfggojm&sig=ubq25oyi25sgnpwwrv-yxbenzm8 rahmatika, r., yusuf, m., & agung, l. (2021). the effectiveness of youtube as an online learning media. journal of education technology, 5(1), 152–158. scholz, r. t. (2009). the internet as playground and factory [phd thesis, university of plymouth]. http://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/handle/10026.1/2094 the indian express. (2023, september 21). 42.3% of graduates under 25 unemployed, finds latest state of working india report. the indian express. https://indianexpress.com/article/business/42-3-of-graduates-under-25unemployed-finds-latest-state-of-working-india-report-8949124/ wang, h., & chen, c. w. (2020). learning english from youtubers: english l2 learners’ self-regulated language learning on youtube. innovation in language learning and teaching, 14(4), 333–346. https://doi.org/10.1080/17501229.2019.1607356 yagnamurthy, s. (2021). english as medium of instruction at school level in india: opportunities and dilemmas. eighth annual international conference on humanities & arts in a global world. youtube. (2023). how to make money on youtube. youtube creators. https://www.youtube.com/intl/en_in/creators/how-things-work/video-monetization/ selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): li, y., garwood-cross, l., & kerr, a. (2023, october). women revolutionising money?: investigating meaning-making and gender messaging in female-to-female finfluencing on instagram. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. women revolutionising money?: investigating meaningmaking and gender messaging in female-to-female finfluencing on instagram yuening li maynooth university, ireland lisa garwood-cross salford university, uk aphra kerr maynooth university, ireland gender inequality in personal finances comes from interconnected issues of institutional flaws, socio-economic factors, cultural influences, and generational disparities, culminating in a form of social injustice. women have historically been excluded from financial independence, a reality underscored by early banking regulations and policies in both europe and asia. such exclusions positioned women as mere dependents when it came to activities such as opening bank accounts, applying for mortgages, or making investments (maurer, 2014). this exclusionary pattern has marginalised women from accessing personal finance as a larger part of gender exclusion, along with other aspects of life (dodd, 2014; swartz, 2014). on a surface level, financial gender differences result from structured and institutionalised barriers, wherein women were denied access to banking services. however, intersecting social issues, namely race and class, meant that women continued to face discrimination and marginalisation after they were permitted entry as independent customers. when women finally gained access to financial services as customers, they still lacked the accumulated prior experiences of male customers. initially, financial literacy was not imparted to women, primarily because it was not anticipated they would require such knowledge (zelizer, 1994). due to this, women were perceived as financially inept, which was unfairly attributed to their gender, without any recognition of the disparate access and experiences they had endured (swartz, 2020). these historical narratives persist and continue to shape contemporary perceptions, reinforcing stereotypes. it has been suggested that web 2.0 environments can evolve into novel forms of learning environments or learning ecologies (duffy, 2008; brown, 2002). we posit that this concept is also applicable to the realm of financial literacy, particularly in settings where informal peer-to-peer learning thrives. one such underexplored domain is instagram, which hosts small yet thriving personal finance communities. these online communities are centred around peer-to-peer networking and the strategic use of hashtags to aggregate content. although limited published literature on this particular community exists, a preliminary survey of hashtags, reveals the following: #debtfreecommunity (1.8 million posts), #personalfinance (2.5 million posts), #personalfinanceforwomen (214k posts), #thrifty (1.6 million posts), #thriftyshopper (68.7k posts), #moneysavingtips (325k posts), #savemoney (2.8 million posts), #savemoneytips (71.6k posts), and #manageyourmoney (24.5k posts). as of march 2023, these hashtags collectively exemplify a substantial volume of content related to personal finance, debt, and savings, illuminating the presence of female financial influencers (finfluencers). a 'finfluencer' is commonly defined as someone with substantial influence over investor decisions via social media, potentially impacting stock prices by sharing their views (guan, 2023). we propose an extension of this definition to include an emerging type of finfluencer, mostly women, focusing on personal finance, specifically addressing savings and debts. these finfluencers draw from their own life experiences rather than professional financial advisory expertise, often lacking formal credentials as financial experts. their primary objective is not to advise or influence others' financial decisions but to share their financial experiences as a form of vernacular knowledge, addressing specific financial issues frequently unaddressed by conventional financial guidance (certeau, 1984; jenkins, 2004). the emergence of female finfluencers has cultivated a sense of online community, (bakardjieva, 2003), where women have found a secure space to seek peer support and openly share personal stories as warm experts (olsson & viscovi, 2018) without the apprehension of encountering misogynistic remarks or gender-based discrimination in the context of expenditure and debt management (natile, 2020). this phenomenon has given rise to the development of decentralised informal communities centred around personal finance. such communities may also be an extension of the longstanding offline practice of women forming savings groups, a practice evidenced by existing financial support networks among female military veterans, sex workers, and minority ethnic female business owners (mantsios et al., 2018; pellegrino and hoggan, 2015; davidson, fielden, and omar, 2010). this paper utilises a networked perspective, addressing technical, social, and cultural components (selbst et al., 2019) in the context of the formation, expansion, and evolution of female finfluencing on instagram. the existing scholarly work largely criticises the lack of credibility for social media influencers in providing financial advice and the potential for compromised content generated under paid partnerships, leaving a gap in understanding female financial influencing as a cultural phenomenon of femaleto-female online community support and care (puig de la bellacasa, 2017). this paper explores the gendered messaging in female-to-female personal finance influencing on instagram and aims to address the social stigma surrounding spending and debt resulting from embedded gender inequalities in the finance system and labour markets , as well as the barriers faced by women who seek formal financial advice. in this paper we ask: a) in what ways is finfluencing on instagram gendered? b) what types of financial knowledge are female finfluencers sharing? and c) how do finfluencers use the affordances of instagram? this paper introduces preliminary findings from the first phase of a three-phase sociotechnical study on female-to-female personal finance influencer cultures on instagram. the broader research design incorporates the following methods. in phase 1 (platform), the walkthrough method is employed for a comprehensive examination of instagram as a hosting platform for female-centric finfluencing communities (light, burgess, and duguay, 2018). in phase 2 (observation), researchers immerse themselves in the online environment of instagram finfluencing communities to observe and document interactions, engagements, and peer-supports within these communities using netnographic immersion journals (kozinets, 2022). finally, in phase 3 (influencers), the research conducts semistructured interviews with 15 female financial influencers and their audiences. these interviews aim to provide deeper insights into the perspectives and experiences of these influencers within the community. the walkthrough method compares the intended use of instagram with the disruptive and transformative practices against the designed platform affordances employed by female finfluencing communities. the emerging findings reveal that while instagram continues to emphasise 'connecting with people you know', it is utilised to reach a broader audience by employing hashtags and tagged accounts to aggregate content from both finfluencers and their audience, facilitating the collective sharing of vernacular knowledge. some of the content, initially shared as unverified and framed as merely a single accidental event that has 'worked for me', may undergo further refinement and amendments through audience comments, evolving into more structured yet informal solutions for specific issues. consequently, from a community-oriented perspective, active engagement of followers is pivotal in this form of finfluencing, with the comment section serving as a platform for extended sharing and discussion. the rise of these finfluencers has the potential to construct a counter-narrative that showcases women as financially independent and serves as an inspiration to other women grappling with financial challenges. the next phases of this study employs in-depth netnographic journals and interviews with female finfluencers and their audiences. these phases will further delve into issues related to finfluencer labour, monetisation, risk, and the socio-technical, economic, and cultural significance of the emergence of female personal finance influencers and the practice of online saving communities. references bakardjieva, m. (2003). virtual togetherness: an everyday-life perspective. media, culture & society, 25(3), 291–313. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443703025003001 https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443703025003001 brown, j. s. (2002). growing up: digital: how the web changes work, education, and the ways people learn. change: the magazine of higher learning, 32(2), 11–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/00091380009601719 certeau, m. de. (1984). the practice of everyday life. university of california press. davidson, m. j., fielden, s. l., & omar, a. (2010). black, asian and minority ethnic female business owners: discrimination and social support. international journal of entrepreneurial behaviour & research, 16(1), 58–80. https://doi.org/10.1108/13552551011020072 dodd, n. (2014). the social life of money. princeton university press. duffy, p. (2008). using youtube: strategies for using new media in teaching and learning. in r. kwan, r. fox, f. t. chan, & p. tsang, enhancing learning through technology (pp. 31–43). world scientific. https://doi.org/10.1142/9789812799456_0003 guan, s. (2023). the rise of the finfluencer. ssrn electronic journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4400042 jenkins, h. (2004). the cultural logic of media convergence. international journal of cultural studies, 7(1), 33–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877904040603 kozinets, r. v. (2023). immersive netnography: a novel method for service experience research in virtual reality, augmented reality and metaverse contexts. journal of service management, 34(1), 100–125. https://doi.org/10.1108/josm-12-2021-0481 light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881–900. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 mantsios, a., galai, n., mbwambo, j., likindikoki, s., shembilu, c., mwampashi, a., beckham, s. w., leddy, a., davis, w., sherman, s., kennedy, c., & kerrigan, d. (2018). community savings groups, financial security, and hiv risk among female sex workers in iringa, tanzania. aids and behavior, 22(11), 3742–3750. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10461-018-2065-x maurer, b. (2015). how would you like to pay? how technology is changing the future of money. duke university press. natile, s. (2020). the exclusionary politics of digital financial inclusion: mobile money, gendered walls. routledge. olsson, t., & viscovi, d. (2018). warm experts for elderly users: who are they and what do they do? human technology, 324–342. https://doi.org/10.17011/ht/urn.201811224836 https://doi.org/10.1080/00091380009601719 https://doi.org/10.1108/13552551011020072 https://doi.org/10.1142/9789812799456_0003 https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4400042 https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877904040603 https://doi.org/10.1108/josm-12-2021-0481 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10461-018-2065-x https://doi.org/10.17011/ht/urn.201811224836 pellegrino, l., & hoggan, c. (2015). a tale of two transitions: female military veterans during their first year at community college. adult learning, 26(3), 124–131. https://doi.org/10.1177/1045159515583257 puig de la bellacasa, m. (2017). matters of care: speculative ethics in more than human worlds. university of minnesota press. selbst, a. d., boyd, d., friedler, s. a., venkatasubramanian, s., & vertesi, j. (2019). fairness and abstraction in sociotechnical systems. proceedings of the conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency, 59–68. https://doi.org/10.1145/3287560.3287598 swartz, l. (2014). gendered transactions: identity and payment at mid-century. women’s studies quarterly, 42(1/2), 137–153. jstor. swartz, l. (2020). new money: how payment became social media. yale university press. zelizer, v. a. r., & dodd, n. (2017). the social meaning of money (new princeton paperback edition). princeton university press. https://doi.org/10.1177/1045159515583257 https://doi.org/10.1145/3287560.3287598 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): montaña-niño, s., (2022, november). editorial automation: the pursuit of journalistic meaning in automated tools and automated decision-making systems in australian newsrooms. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. editorial automation: the pursuit of journalistic meaning in automated tools and automated decisionmaking systems in australian newsrooms silvia montaña-niño arc centre of excellence for automated decision-making & society queensland university of technology introduction journalists, editors, developers, and other news workers create and use automated tools to support their work. commercial software, open-source programs and other ad hoc algorithmic designs shape contemporary news production and distribution. the possibilities of artificial intelligence (ai) and data-driven technological tools are the core of the news assembly line (marconi, 2020). automated news writing, for example, has been one of the focus areas of development for relevant actors in the industry, such as news wire services, public service media and big global companies. natural language generation (nlg) algorithms have upscale formulaic and standardised text structures. the most popular computer-generated genres are sports, finance earnings or earthquake alerts. another area where algorithms have a central role is the content supply to loyal and casual audiences whereby computational algorithms by publishers’ content management systems and apps curate and suggest personalised content to readers based on metrics and data from their reading habits and topical preferences (bodó, 2019; harambam et al., 2018; kunert & thurman, 2019). the panorama of editorial automation is moving quickly in many organisations. however, the technological transition towards ai and machine and deep learning as supporting processes go at their own pace in other contexts beyond the us and europe and cast doubts about their implementation. this abstract presents the preliminary findings of an exploratory study about using automated tools and automated decision-making (adm) systems in australian newsrooms. the study examines the implementation of these computational tools, their journalistic uses, practices, and professionals’ perceptions of emerging issues about automation in australian traditional and emerging outlets. it investigates the limits of undertaking these technologies. recent studies document that (adms) is changing their workflows and creating new models of producing news that break with previous forms of labour organisation. a variety of perspectives are proposed to explain this transition: hybrid journalism (diakopoulos, 2019); structured journalism (jones & jones, 2019); algorithmic journalism (dörr, 2015), robot journalism (latar, 2018); and iterative journalism (marconi, 2020) to mention a few. editorial adms are understood as computational processes used in journalistic work that combine significant data inputs, programming languages, statistical modelling, and machine training algorithms with supporting human judgments in daily journalism (kluttz et al., 2020; marconi, 2020; thurman et al., 2019; diakopoulos, 2019). news organisations have employed adms based on their needs and understanding of journalistic ideals, adapting these tools to their contexts. methods i conducted 17 semi-structured interviews with news practitioners of traditional and emergent organisations to investigate the developments in the use of automated tools and the current obstacles to their design in news work in australia. i focused on recruiting participants working in different areas, directly engaging with editorial work and other news workers collaborating in designing tools that support journalistic work and whose knowledge is based on computational and programming sciences. for news workers, i selected participants based on a purposeful sampling method (palinkas et al., 2015), choosing practitioners who were most likely to be working daily with automated technologies or in areas more disposed to be automated in the immediate future based on the existent empirical research (i.e., sports, finance, weather, and breaking news). preliminary results there are three emerging findings in this study. firstly, the covid-19 pandemic has caused increased interest and experimentation with visual automation tools and semiautomated writing in several organisations. two of them approached the pandemic’s reporting by blending processes that used written iterative templates and scraped covid19 statistics to generate structured data flows that filled daily reports and infographics on the topic. although automated data visualisation was vital in past critical events (such as bushfires), data visualisation was decentralised in some newsrooms, and journalists could access pre-set graphs and visuals during the pandemic. these ways of working with automated tools are comparable to other international documented cases (danzonchambaud, 2021). in the short run, there is no great enthusiasm for nlg uses, but some organisations are planning and discussing its implementation. practitioners interviewed reported that this is not a journalistic priority, and outlets face different challenges in automating news. second, as journalists worked increasingly with data during the pandemic (mainly using audience metrics and official statistics), they created new data routines and became aware of the need for specific data skills to follow the new workflows. however, there are contrasting views regarding the perceived impacts of automation and data-driven technologies in their profession. whilst some participants with skills in coding, forensic tools and data journalism emphasised that human journalism “is not something that can be replaced soon”, other participants consider that ai technology might have a significant impact on news labour as automation speed up different processes, causing similar effects as those driven by the digitalisation of news in recent decades. in automated news writing, knowledgeable news workers argue that ai and machine learning algorithms demonstrate that computers can create realistic texts; however, these technologies fail to replace journalists' fundamental skills, such as prioritising and creating understandable news narratives. lastly, there are differences in the best approach to industrialising these tools, mainly developing them in-house or acquiring the technologies from third-party companies. newsrooms tend to generally depend on third-party services to outsource automation processes, mainly commercial software and app services to use these technologies. examples of that reliance are the popularity of commercial transcript apps that are used widely and have been perceived as “game changers”. another instance is how recommendation strategies are designed based on a whole range of analytics software and platform company services (such as google analytics) that capture audience signals through algorithms to make decisions on the distribution of topics and personalised content. in conclusion, there is no singular approach to configuring cultures of editorial automation in australian newsrooms, which greatly depends on their publishing systems and organisational priorities. when creating their automated process, journalists’ most relevant problem is adding journalistic value to any automated endeavour, delineated by the outlets’ public and commercial orientations. discussion to best implement advanced editorial decision-making systems is happening in many australian news organisations participating in the study. to adopt automatic writing, the fact that english is the dominant language to train automated tools gives australian news outlets a comparative advantage. however, the process has limitations, such as the potential market share of australian news consumers for these genres, the investment needed in the development of prototypes and their industrialisation, the stable data flows to work with structured data and the distinctive features of content management systems (cms) among the main ones. references bodó, b. (2019). selling news to audiences–a qualitative inquiry into the emerging logics of algorithmic news personalization in european quality news media. digital journalism, 7(8), 1054–1075. danzon-chambaud, s. (2021). covering covid-19 with automated news. tow center for digital journalism, columbia university. https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/covering-covid-automated-news.php/ diakopoulos, n. (2019). automating the news. in automating the news. harvard university press. dörr, k. n. (2015). mapping the field of algorithmic journalism. digital journalism. harambam, j., helberger, n., & van hoboken, j. (2018). democratizing algorithmic news recommenders: how to materialize voice in a technologically saturated media ecosystem. philosophical transactions of the royal society a: mathematical, physical and engineering sciences, 376(2133), 20180088. jones, r., & jones, b. (2019). atomising the news: the (in) flexibility of structured journalism. digital journalism, 7(8), 1157–1179. kluttz, d. n., kohli, n., & mulligan, d. k. (2020). shaping our tools: contestability as a means to promote responsible algorithmic decision making in the professions. in k. werbach (ed.), after the digital tornado: networks, algorithms, humanity (1st ed.). cambridge university press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610018 kunert, j., & thurman, n. (2019). the form of content personalisation at mainstream, transatlantic news outlets: 2010–2016. journalism practice, 13(7), 759–780. latar, n. l. (2018). robot journalism: can human journalism survive? world scientific. marconi, f. (2020). newsmakers: artificial intelligence and the future of journalism. columbia university press. palinkas, l. a., horwitz, s. m., green, c. a., wisdom, j. p., duan, n., & hoagwood, k. (2015). purposeful sampling for qualitative data collection and analysis in mixed method implementation research. administration and policy in mental health and mental health services research, 42(5), 533–544. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10488-013-0528-y thurman, n., lewis, s. c., & kunert, j. (2019). algorithms, automation, and news. digital journalism, 7(8), 980–992. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): novozhilova, e., mays, k., huang, d., lee, h., katz, j. (2023, october). where in society will ai agents fit? a proposed framework for understanding attitudes toward ai occupational roles from theoretical perspectives of status, identity, and ontology. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. where in society will ai agents fit? a proposed framework for understanding attitudes toward ai occupational roles from theoretical perspectives of status, identity, and ontology ekaterina novozhilova boston university kate mays university of vermont dongpeng huang boston university hongchan lee boston university james katz boston university introduction experts predict that almost half of american jobs will be replaced by artificial intelligence (ai) systems in the near future (grace et. al., 2018; frey & osborne, 2017). yet the public opinion research shows that people are not excited about being replaced with machines. people agree that ai will be transformative for society, but they are uncertain about whether this transformation will be positive or negative (kelley et al., 2021). in the united states, ai systems are being used for making high-level decisions, such as evaluating who is qualified for parole (dressel & farid, 2018) or sentencing decisions in courts (angwin et al., 2016). however, the research shows that americans are particularly averse to ai in advising roles, demonstrating much more comfort with ai assistants (mays et al., 2021). this work builds on previous ai-perception research to investigate attitudes about ai in higher-status occupations. we highlight different approaches in studying public perceptions and present a pilot study of public opinions on high-status jobs automation. approaches to understanding ai perceptions there are disciplinary differences in researchers’ approaches to explaining how and why people perceive ai in various roles. within human-machine communication, some work on ai acceptance and attitudes is premised on how machines are perceived ontologically (guzman, 2020). as examples, people who perceived machines as less biased and objectionable compared to humans, assigned more credibility to computer’s decisions (sundar, 2008). depending on whether participants treated a humanoid robot as a pet or human showed different levels of technology acceptance (edwards, 2018). these instances suggest that people’s categorical distinctions between machine and human influence their further interaction and judgment about ai systems. automation anxiety, or people’s fear of human labor replacement (autor, 2015), is another lens through which researchers in public policy and labor domains have explored attitudes towards ai. for instance, piercy and gist-mackey (2021) found that pharmacists whose work was more manual in nature experienced more automation anxiety than pharmacists whose work required judgment and decision-making. however, other research suggests that automation anxiety stemmed from the threat of ai to human intelligence. ai algorithms demonstrated the potential to play the same role as humans in creative or highly intellectually demanding jobs (knight, 2022). another useful approach from social psychology focuses on aspects of power and status that influence the extent to which one perceives obstacles as opportunities or threats (cho & keltner, 2020). this is demonstrated in differing attitudes towards automation: those in lower-status jobs perceive automation as a threat compared to high-status employees, who perceive it as an opportunity (qi, 2022). the research also suggests that occupational status may influence attitudes about automation. people are less comfortable with ai systems in higher-status roles, such as company leader or manager, compared to ai in peer or subordinate roles, such as a coworker and an assistant (mays et al., 2021). it is not yet clear the extent to which these differing approaches prevail in understanding ai perceptions. one’s personal ontological understanding of ai may moderate or mediate how much they perceive an ai as an identity threat. these dynamics may also be influenced by the ai’s role itself: certain domains may be more or less ontologically aligned with people’s expectations, or more or less threatening to their status. below we report on a pilot study that explores an assortment of relatively high-status and highhuman interaction roles that may challenge people's conception of ai. high-status ai domains we propose to test whether jobs with different scores (low, middle, high) from the socioeconomic index of occupations (smith & son, 2014) will be perceived differently, and whether these differences would be based on the status of the job, identity of the individual (including demographics), or human-machine ontology. in this pilot study we explored people’s perceptions of ai replacement in high-status occupations, such as hiring manager, journalist, trial judge, and religious leader. while there are multiple instances of ai products used in human resource practices, journalism, and criminal justice, the literature suggests that people hold different views on automation of these occupations. the general public have less favorable attitudes towards adopting ai technologies in the recruiting procedures (zhang & yencha, 2022) and criminal justice (araujo, 2020), while being more positive about automated journalism which is perceived as more objective compared to human’s reporting (cloudy et al., 2021). religion is an underexplored domain that is starting to see more ai integration. there are instances of using ai bots for praying (öhman, gorwa & floridi, 2019), worship (cheong, 2020) and funeral ceremonies (gould et al., 2021). thus, in a first descriptive step reported below, we compare the public’s views on automation in the spiritual realm where it is less prevalent and arguably has higher ontological stakes against views on automation in domains where ai has been more commonplace. initial descriptive findings of pilot study the pilot study was conducted in september 2022 through the ipsos enation omnibus platform. our u.s. sample (n = 1,005) used nationally representative quotas on gender (50.8% female), age (m = 49.13, sd = 17.71), race (64.5% white or caucasian), income (69.3% earned $74,999 or less), education (85.7% had some college degree or less), and employment status (36.1% were employed full-time). the results demonstrate that a majority of participants hold negative attitudes about ai replacement in all domains presented (figure 1). however there were differences between roles that were consistent with the socioeconomic index for various occupations: participants were more open to ai replacement in the relatively lower status roles (hiring manager and journalist) compared to the higher status roles (spiritual and religious leaders and trial judge). interestingly, respondents believed an ai trial judge was a slightly worse idea than an ai spiritual advisor. given the ontological distinction argument, we expected that pattern to be reversed, with more openness to a trial judge because of the associated machine heuristics of ai as more rational and objective. figure 1 ai replacement in the high-status occupations looking at demographic differences, our findings suggest that more vulnerable populations, such as women, people with lower income and education, are more reluctant to accept ai in the majority of occupations (figure 2). these findings are in line with previous public opinion surveys (smith & anderson, 2017; zhang & dafoe, 2019) and demonstrate that individuals with lower levels of power and status are more likely to be reluctant in acceptance of new technology and potentially perceive it as a threat. compared to other ethnicities, whites are least comfortable with ai replacing highstatus jobs. one possible explanation is that guided by machine heuristics, minorities might perceive algorithms as more objective and less biased in high-status roles that historically were occupied by whites. however, the growing body of evidence reveals a great amount of explicitly racial biases encoded in ai systems that do not serve in favor of ethnical minorities (benjamin, 2019). figure 2 people’s perceptions of ai replacement in the high-status occupations building on this initial work, we plan to conduct an online experimental survey that further delves into the interplay of varying ai domains by occupational status and individual differences across ontological perceptions, automation anxiety, perceived status, and identity threat. this examination will help tease out explanatory mechanisms driving the public’s view of ai integration and highlight ways to buffer against the detrimental effects of ai on society. references angwin, j., larson, j., mattu, s., kirchner, l. (2016). machine bias. retrieved october 18, 2022, from https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-incriminal-sentencing. araujo, t., helberger, n., kruikemeier, s., & de vreese, c. h. (2020). in ai we trust? perceptions about automated decision-making by artificial intelligence. ai & society, 35(3), 611–623. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-019-00931-w autor, d. h. (2015). why are there still so many jobs? the history and future of workplace automation. journal of economic perspectives, 29(3), 3–30. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.29.3.3 benjamin, r. (2019). race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. social forces, 98(4), 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soz162 cho, m., & keltner, d. (2020). power, approach, and inhibition: empirical advances of a theory. current opinion in psychology, 33, 196–200. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.08.013 cheong, p. h. (2020). religion, robots and rectitude: communicative affordances for spiritual knowledge and community. applied artificial intelligence, 34(5), 412–431. https://doi.org/10.1080/08839514.2020.1723869 cloudy, j., banks, j., & bowman, n. d. (2021, september 2). the str(ai)ght scoop: artificial intelligence cues reduce perceptions of hostile media bias. digital journalism, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2021.1969974 dressel, j., & farid, h. (2018). the accuracy, fairness, and limits of predicting recidivism. science advances, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aao5580 edwards, a. p. (2018). animals, humans, and machines: interactive implications of ontological classification. in a. l. guzman (ed.), human-machine communication: rethinking communication, technology, and ourselves (pp. 29–50). https://doi.org/10.3726/b14399 frey, c. b., & osborne, m. a. (2017). the future of employment: how susceptible are jobs to computerisation? technological forecasting and social change, 114, 254–280. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2016.08.019 gould, h., arnold, m., kohn, t., nansen, b., & gibbs, m. (2021). robot death care: a study of funerary practice. international journal of cultural studies, 24(4), 603–621. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877920939093 grace, k., salvatier, j., dafoe, a., zhang, b., & evans, o. (2018). when will ai exceed human performance? evidence from ai experts. journal of artificial intelligence research, 62, 729-754. https://doi.org/10.1613/jair.1.11222 guzman, a.l. (2020). ontological boundaries between humans and computers and the implications for human-machine communication. human-machine communication, 1(1):37–54. https://doi.org/10.3058/hmc.1.3 kelley, p. g., yang, y., heldreth, c., moessner, c., sedley, a., kramm, a., newman, d. t., & woodruff, a. (2021). exciting, useful, worrying, futuristic: public perception of artificial intelligence in 8 countries. proceedings of the 2021 aaai/acm conference on ai, ethics, and society. https://doi.org/10.1145/3461702.3462605 knight, w. (2022, july 13). when ai makes art, humans supply the creative spark. retrieved october 12, 2022, from https://www.wired.com/story/when-ai-makes-art/ mays, k. k., lei, y., giovanetti, r., & katz, j. e. (2021). ai as a boss? a national us survey of predispositions governing comfort with expanded ai roles in society. ai & society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01253-6 öhman, c., gorwa, r., & floridi, l. (2019). prayer-bots and religious worship on twitter: a call for a wider research agenda. ssrn electronic journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3831367 piercy, c., & gist-mackey, a. (2021, january 15). automation anxieties: perceptions about technological automation and the future of pharmacy work. human-machine communication, 2, 191–208. https://doi.org/10.30658/hmc.2.10 smith, t. w., & son, j. (2014). measuring occupational prestige on the 2012 general social survey (vol. 4). norc at the university of chicago. qi, w. (2022). the organizational correlates of automation depend on job status. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/2r53z sundar, s. s. (2008). the main model: a heuristic approach to understanding technology effects on credibility (pp. 73-100). cambridge, ma: macarthur foundation digital media and learning initiative. zhang, b., & dafoe, a. (2019). artificial intelligence: american attitudes and trends. ssrn electronic journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3312874 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): reschiglian, r., robards, b., scarcelli, c.m. (2024, october). “to be queer, to be in dating apps, to be queer in dating apps”: the on-life industriousness of creating strategies behind stigmas and fears of online dating of italian and australian queer young adults. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “to be queer, to be in dating apps, to be queer in dating apps”: the on-life industriousness of creating strategies behind stigmas and fears of online dating of italian and australian queer young adults rachele reschiglian university of padova brady robards monash university cosimo marco scarcelli university of padova introduction online dating practices and experiences in apps and digital spaces have been studied in social sciences under several different lenses, particularly if focussing on the intersection of mobile apps, gender, and sexualities (reschiglian & usachova, 2023). they portray these multidimensional phenomena as either positive and empowering practices (for example, parisi & comunello, 2020; ranzini et al., 2022, byron, 2021), but also as stigmatising and violent on-life encounters (miles, 2017; lamont, 2021). the sociocultural context in which these are implemented greatly affects not only the scripts and practices of personal interactions (comunello et al. 2021; miller, 2020; broeker, 2021; macleod & mcarthur, 2019) but also the perception of security with(in) dating apps for specific individualities (tao, 2022; conner, 2022; geeng et al., 2022, stardust et al., 2022). theoretical framework in particular, queer and lgbt+ people have been navigating in diverse ways online spaces (robards et al., 2020; fox & ralston, 2016; mckenna & chughtai, 2020). robards et al. (2018) discuss the lasting impact of the internet on young lgbtiq+ individuals over two decades. it explores how online spaces have provided avenues for community-building, identity exploration, and support for this demographic group, emphasising the enduring importance of the internet in facilitating connections and empowerment within the lgbtiq+ community. nevertheless, more and more they recognise that while social media platforms offer opportunities for connection and belonging, they can also become problematic or dangerous, with many respondents reporting experiences of isolation, exclusion, or harassment. this challenges the idea that cyber-queer spaces are solely productive and highlights the complexities of digital social interactions and the queer communities and movements. additionally, they note the intersectional challenges faced within cyberqueer spaces, such as racism on platforms like grindr and the exclusion of trans women in certain feminist online communities. recognising the fundamental role of online dating within the framework of cyber-queer discourse for individuals within the lgbtiq+ spectrum, these diverse subjectivities have actively pushed the boundaries of societal norms, stigma, and risk mitigation through their resourcefulness and industriousness (byron et al., 2021; harkness et al., 2021). the research as one delves into the complexities of this phenomenon, the unique cultural contexts of both italian and australian settings underline the necessity of comprehending how marginalised and minority identities, particularly within the lgbtq+ community, navigate their digitally mediated intimate connections in diverse socio-cultural circumstances (masullo & coppola, 2021; albury et al., 2020). these environments serve as distinct cosmos, each offering nuanced challenges and opportunities for individuals pursuing companionship and connection online. within these landscapes, the resilience, and adaptive strategies of lgbtq+ communities come to the fore, as they negotiate the details of digital spaces to assert their identities and establish meaningful relationships among social pressures and prejudices. this qualitative study aims to investigate how risks and fears in online dating experiences are perceived, navigated, and creatively challenged by queer young adults (from 18 to 32 years old) in the italian and australian contexts. the research aims to understand variances and similarities in perceptions, attitudes, and responses between the two culturally diverse groups. the nuanced dynamics of online dating practices among queer young adults in italy and australia are presented here, shedding light on the complexities of navigating stigmatisation and fears within digital intimacy spaces. to traverse the intricate landscape of italian and australian queer dating online practices, we adopted an explorative qualitative approach through a combination of online and offline focus groups. these focus groups served as a dynamic platform for engaging with participants and gaining insights into their queer digital intimacy experiences, especially online dating security perception and strategies. the focus groups were conducted over a period spanning from january 2023 to january 2024. this timeframe allowed for a comprehensive engagement with participants across various locations and contexts, ensuring a rich and diverse collection of data. we conducted eight focus groups in italy and seven focus group in australia (for a total of 15) trying to cover various regions in both australia and italy to ensure the inclusion of respondents from diverse cultural backgrounds. this strategic approach was integral to capturing a broad spectrum of perspectives, facilitating a rich and comprehensive dataset. the deliberate selection of diverse settings within these two countries enabled us to conduct a more holistic and inclusive analysis, ensuring that our findings reflect the complexity and variety of human experiences within and across these cultural landscapes. the empirical material collected has been meticulously analysed using thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2006). this analytical approach allowed for a deep dive into the rich, detailed, and complex dataset collected from the focus groups. by systematically coding the data and identifying themes, the research team was able to unravel the underlying ideas, beliefs, and experiences shared by participants. through this method, the research team was able to construct a comprehensive understanding of the participants' perspectives, offering valuable insights into the subject matter of the study. results in italy, findings underscore pervasive anxieties regarding the risks associated with online dating for young adults, including the fear of being outed in conservative hometowns or namely facing stigma for utilising dating apps. participants expressed apprehension about encountering judgment based solely on appearance, as well as concerns about catfishing and fetishization (as in albury et al., 2020; filice et al., 2022), particularly relevant for transgender women and bi/pansexual identities (in particular, female-presenting) by cis heterosexual men. moreover, the study unveils distinct hierarchies of intimacies (scarcelli, 2022) and rituals of transitions (broeker, 2021), with individuals employing varied strategies to safeguard their well-being, such as scrutinising social media profiles for authenticity and relying on face verification. notably, safer experiences were reported on platforms like tinder, where profiles are verified, compared to grindr, where concerns about aggressive behaviour and unsolicited explicit content were prevalent. at the moment the research group is analysing australian focus groups, and it will have some preliminary results by the end of march. across both contexts, strategies, and industriousness for mitigating risks during offline encounters emerged, including sharing location updates with friends, arranging meetings in public spaces, and establishing check-in protocols. conclusions these findings highlight the resilience and resourcefulness of queer individuals in navigating the complexities of online dating, while also pointing to the ongoing challenges and disparities faced within digital spaces and socio-cultural contexts. as digital intimacy continues to evolve, understanding and addressing these concerns are paramount in fostering safer and more inclusive online environments for queer individuals. references albury, k., dietzel, c., pym, t., vivienne, s., & cook, t. (2020). not your unicorn: trans dating app users’ negotiations of personal safety and sexual health. health sociology review, 30(1), 72–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/14461242.2020.1851610 braun, v., & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77-101. broeker, f. (2021). ‘we went from the anonymity of the internet into my private whatsapp’: rituals of transition among dating app users in berlin. new media & society, 25(10), 2551–2571. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211029200 byron, p. (2020). digital media, friendship and cultures of care. routledge. byron, p., albury, k., & pym, t. (2021). hooking up with friends: lgbtq+ young people, dating apps, friendship and safety. media, culture & society, 43(3), 497–514. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720972312 comunello, f., parisi, l., & ieracitano, f. (2021). negotiating gender scripts in mobile dating apps: between affordances, usage norms and practices. information, communication & society, 24(8), 1140–1156. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2020.1787485 conner, c. t. (2022). how sexual racism and other discriminatory behaviors are rationalized in online dating apps. deviant behavior, 44(1), 126–142. https://doi.org/10.1080/01639625.2021.2019566 filice, e., johnson, c. w., & parry, d. c. (2022). unicorns on the digital range: bisexual persons’ experiences of geo-social networking application use. journal of bisexuality, 23(1), 50–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/15299716.2022.2124214 https://doi.org/10.1080/14461242.2020.1851610 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211029200 https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720972312 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2020.1787485 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2020.1787485 https://doi.org/10.1080/01639625.2021.2019566 https://doi.org/10.1080/01639625.2021.2019566 https://doi.org/10.1080/15299716.2022.2124214 fox, j., & ralston, r. (2016). queer identity online: informal learning and teaching experiences of lgbtq individuals on social media. computers in human behavior, 65, 635–642. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.06.009 geeng, c., harris, m., redmiles, e., & roesner, f. (2022). "like lesbians walking the perimeter": experiences of u.s. lgbtq+ folks with online security, safety, and privacy advice. in 31st usenix security symposium (usenix security 22) (pp. 305322). harkness, a., weinstein, e. r., atuluru, p., vidal, r., rodríguez-díaz, c. e., & safren, s. a. (2021). “let’s hook up when the pandemic is over:” latinx sexual minority men’s sexual behavior during covid-19. journal of sex research, 58(8), 951–957. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2021.1888064 lamont, e. (2021). the persistence of gendered dating. sociology compass, 15(11). https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12933 macleod, c., & mcarthur, v. (2018). the construction of gender in dating apps: an interface analysis of tinder and bumble. feminist media studies, 19(6), 822–840. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1494618 masullo, g., & coppola, m. (2021). scripts and sexual markets of transgender people on online dating apps: a netnographic study. italian sociological review, 11, 319–341. https://doi.org/10.13136/isr.v11i4s.437 mckenna, b., & chughtai, h. (2020). resistance and sexuality in virtual worlds: an lgbt perspective. computers in human behavior, 105, 106199. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.106199 miles, s. (2017). sex in the digital city: location-based dating apps and queer urban life. gender, place & culture, 24(11), 1595–1610. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2017.1340874 miller, b. (2019). a picture is worth 1000 messages: investigating face and body photos on mobile dating apps for men who have sex with men. journal of homosexuality, 67(13), 1798–1822. https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2019.1610630 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.06.009 https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2021.1888064 https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2021.1888064 https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12933 https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12933 https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1494618 https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1494618 https://doi.org/10.13136/isr.v11i4s.437 https://doi.org/10.13136/isr.v11i4s.437 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.106199 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.106199 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2017.1340874 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2017.1340874 https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2019.1610630 parisi, l., & comunello, f. (2020). dating in the time of “relational filter bubbles”: exploring imaginaries, perceptions and tactics of italian dating app users. the communication review, 23(1), 66–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714421.2019.1704111 ranzini, g., rosenbaum, j. e., & tybur, j. m. (2022). assortative (online) dating: insights into partner choice from an experimental dating app. computers in human behavior, 127, 107039. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2021.107039 reschiglian, r., & usachova, o. (2023). understanding apps concerning gender and sex (ualities): a scoping review. ag about gender-international journal of gender studies, 12(23). robards, b., churchill, b., vivienne, s., hanckel, b., & byron, p. (2018). twenty years of ‘cyberqueer’: the enduring significance of the internet for young lgbtiq+ people. in youth, sexuality and sexual citizenship (pp. 151-167). routledge. robards, b., byron, p., & d’souza, s. (2021). lgbtq+ communities and digital media. in oxford university press ebooks (pp. 339–361). https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197510636.013.22 scarcelli, c. m. (2022). intimately connected devices. in (m. drusian, p. magaudda, c.m. scarcelli, young people and the smartphone, palgrave (pp. 29–45). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06311-4_3 stardust, z., gillett, r., & albury, k. (2022). surveillance does not equal safety: police, data and consent on dating apps. crime, media, culture, 19(2), 274–295. https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590221111827 tao, h. (2022). loving strangers, avoiding risks: online dating practices and scams among chinese lesbian (lala) women. media, culture & society, 44(6), 1199–1214. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221088952 https://doi.org/10.1080/10714421.2019.1704111 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2021.107039 https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197510636.013.22 https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197510636.013.22 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06311-4_3 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06311-4_3 https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590221111827 https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590221111827 https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221088952 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): zedan, m., ringel,s., and davidson, r., firstinitial. (2023, october). why do arab-palestinian journalists delete tweets?. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. why do arab-palestinian journalists delete tweets? moatasem zedan department of communication, university of haifa sharon ringel department of communication, university of haifa roei davidson department of communication, university of haifa in israel and palestine, as in many countries, the majority of journalists operate an account on twitter for different purposes, from news gathering and reporting to attracting new audiences and maintaining a relationship with their readers (hanusch & bruns, 2017). many studies of twitter’s journalistic role have examined journalists’ tweeting practices and the ways in which twitter serves as an organizational and individual branding tool (e.g., molyneux, holton, & lewis, 2018). however, only a few studies have examined the patterns of tweet deletion among journalists. ringel and davidson (2022) conceptualized the practice of tweet deletion as an instance of “proactive ephemerality, a social media phenomenon that occurs when users intentionally remove their own content from their social media profiles manually or with the aid of mechanical tools” (p. 1218). in this study, we examine the motivations of arab-palestinian journalists who operate in israel for deleting their tweets. based on semi-structured interviews with arab-palestinian journalists working in israel, we seek to understand why they proactively erase tweets. further, we wish to consider the implications of such an act for twitter’s functioning as a public record. previous studies have demonstrated how social media users perceive this medium as dynamic and ephemeral, where new stories are pushing back old ones, encouraging users to forget rather than remember (bayer, ellison, schoenebeck, & falk, 2016; kaun & stiernstedt, 2014). evidence that politicians often delete tweets (meeks, 2018) raises the question of how journalists, who also play a significant role in the public sphere, view and practice deletion. while one could argue that private citizens have the right to be forgotten (yang, quan-haase, & rannenberg, 2017), journalists’ professional commitment in many countries to act as representatives of the public interest (waisbord, 2013), might create a public duty to retain at least some of their social media discourse (hanusch & bruns, 2017). as journalists construct their presence on social media they must contend with various risks. journalists face occupational risks in a precarious labor market in which news organizations easily hire and fire employees and many journalists work on a free-lance basis, continuously on the lookout for new employment opportunities (davidson & meyers, 2016). there is evidence that most workers feel a need to constantly craft their social media identity to serve their occupational goals (gershon, 2017). specifically, journalists are dependent on the impressions they manage online as they work outside stable organizational networks. the impression management work of minority and female journalists might be especially crucial to their economic well-being (carlson & usher, 2016). in addition, given their high public visibility, journalists face extensive online harassment. such harassment is magnified by the rise of political polarization and authoritarianism in many societies. women and minority journalists are especially likely to be harassed under such conditions (waisbord, 2022). in this context, deletion of tweets may be considered micro-level paradigmatic “repair work” (bennett, gressett, & haltom, 1985) journalists do to correct the public record and retrospectively ensure their online presence conforms to professional norms and minimizes occupational and political risks. interviews with american journalists suggested many journalists deleted tweets. occupationally, they noted that the precarious nature of journalistic employment required them to constantly delete at least part of their online record to fit the preferences of future employers. politically, they noted that the polarized and hate-ridden nature of social media motivated them to delete tweets. the american interviewees argued women as well as ethnic minorities faced more harassment, and were therefore more likely to delete tweets (ringel & davidson, 2022). the online presence of arab-palestinian journalists reporting from israel is especially important in an ethnically divided region in which they often serve as the voice of their community. if news is the first draft of history and news tweeting is “the first draft of the first draft”--as described by an american journalist in ringel and davidson's (2022)-arab-palestinian journalistic tweets are an important and valuable primary source of knowledge on the palestinian-israeli conflict. however, arab-palestinian journalists are facing many challenges that may lead them to self-censor and delete tweets on twitter. in a polarized israeli society, arab citizens are conceived as a security threat, and arab journalists are subject to harassment from both israelis and palestinians (jamal & awaisi, 2012). in recent years, israel has experienced democratic backsliding within the 1967 borders (as it continued to occupy the west bank), with efforts to strengthen the power of the executive and the identity of israel as a jewish state while limiting human rights protections (brandes, 2022), especially those enjoyed by non-jews. occupationally, arab citizens of israel experience systematic discrimination including lower earnings (kristal & rozenfeld-kiner, 2022). hence, the occupational precarity they experience is especially acute. their political and occupational standing as a threatened minority has potentially significant implications for how arab-palestinian journalists work. in this study, we wish to consider how arab-palestinian journalists working in israel confront potential online threats and whether such threats shape their tendency to delete tweets. finally, twitter as a platform may encourage users to delete their content. the affordances of twitter do not allow users to edit tweets that involve typos and hence incentivize deletion. following the acquisition of twitter by elon musk in october 2022, the platform pared back some of the trust and safety mechanisms that reduced the prominence of hateful discourse online (the associated press, 2022). therefore, we further ask how the changing ownership of the platform may be related to deletion practices among arab-palestinian journalists. the study is based on 20 interviews conducted with arab-palestinian journalists who are active twitter users and have more than 1,000 followers. we utilized a snowball sampling method to recruit journalists from three distinct groups. the first group comprises arab-palestinian journalists reporting for local arabic news organizations. the second group consists of arab-palestinians working for israeli news outlets, covering issues related to the arab community in hebrew. the third group comprises arab-palestinian journalists working for international news outlets, focusing on issues related to israel and palestine. the paper examines the deletion practices of each group and discusses their motivations for erasing their tweets. the interviews were conducted by a co-author who is a native arabic speaker. the initial findings of this research indicate that arab-palestinian journalists are adopting cautious tweeting practices and proactively deleting tweets that could potentially lead to their arrest or being blocked from the platform. while previous studies have underscored impression management as a primary motivator for tweet deletion, arab-palestinian journalists are navigating a delicate balance, operating "between the drops" of the harassment they endure and the imperative to tweet and report news while safeguarding themselves and others from potential harm. references bayer, j. b., ellison, n. b., schoenebeck, s. y., & falk, e. b. (2016). sharing the small moments: ephemeral social interaction on snapchat. information, communication & society, 19(7), 956–977. bennett, w. l., gressett, l. a., & haltom, w. (1985). repairing the news: a case study of the news paradigm. journal of communication, 35(2), 50–68. brandes, t. h. (2022). israel’s legal system: institutions, principles and challenges. in routledge handbook on contemporary israel (pp. 114–128). routledge. carlson, m., & usher, n. (2016). news startups as agents of innovation. digital journalism, 4(5), 563–581. davidson, r., & meyers, o. (2016). toward a typology of journalism careers: conceptualizing israeli journalists’ occupational trajectories. communication, culture and critique, 9(2), 193–211. gershon, i. (2017). down and out in the new economy: how people find (or don’t find) work today. university of chicago press. hanusch, f., & bruns, a. (2017). journalistic branding on twitter: a representative study of australian journalists’ profile descriptions. digital journalism, 5(1), 26– 43. jamal, a., & awaisi, r. (2012). the challenges to journalistic professionalism: between independence and difficult work conditions. ilam-media center for arab palestinians in israel. kaun, a., & stiernstedt, f. (2014). facebook time: technological and institutional affordances for media memories. new media & society, 16(7), 1154–1168. kristal, t., & rozenfeld-kiner, a. (2022). the israeli labor market. in routledge handbook on contemporary israel (pp. 404–422). routledge. molyneux, l., holton, a., & lewis, s. c. (2018). how journalists engage in branding on twitter: individual, organizational, and institutional levels. information, communication & society, 21(10), 1386–1401. ringel, s., & davidson, r. (2022). proactive ephemerality: how journalists use automated and manual tweet deletion to minimize risk and its consequences for social media as a public archive. new media & society, 24(5), 1216–1233. the associated press. (2022, december 12). musk’s twitter has dissolved its trust and safety council. npr. retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2022/12/12/1142399312/twitter-trust-and-safety-council-elonmusk waisbord, s. (2013). reinventing professionalism: journalism and news in global perspective. john wiley & sons. yang, s., quan-haase, a., & rannenberg, k. (2017). the changing public sphere on twitter: network structure, elites and topics of the #righttobeforgotten. new media & society, 19(12), 1983–2002. suggested citation (apa): obia, v. (2022, november). matrix of dependence, postcolonialism, and social media regulation in an african context. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 matrix of dependence, postcolonialism, and social media regulation in an african context vincent obia birmingham city university introduction increasingly in africa, more countries are drafting regulatory policies to target social media and internet content. the case is no different in nigeria, the case study that i use, where there is the protection from internet falsehood and manipulation bill 2019, which has been dubbed the social media bill. a twitter ban was also implemented in june 2021, mirroring the trend of internet and social media bans on the continent. these developments in africa further find expression within the context of the regulatory turn globally. expectedly, social media users in nigeria have opposed the regulatory moves that have been introduced in the country, and the #saynotosocialmediabill has been used to organise resistance. given this opposition, my first objective in this paper was to highlight what social media users and other stakeholders perceive as credible regulatory alternatives. analysis of the interview responses led me to a second objective, which was to show how the credible alternatives could be understood through postcolonial lenses (ashcroft et al., 2007). i further draw from research into platform power and structural imperialism (galtung, 1971) to make the argument that with regards to social media regulation, nigeria, alongside the wider african continent, is locked into a matrix of dependence. method i analyse interview responses from 19 stakeholders. they include four digital rights campaigners, four online media practitioners, two media literacy experts, two public policy experts, two internet industry experts, and five twitter users who utilised the #saynotosocialmediabill tag. for analysis, i adopted the reflexive thematic analysis framework developed by braun and clarke (2021). this framework afforded me the chance to reflect and relate the findings to wider issues as they pertain to postcolonialism. the interviews were conducted in two tranches between january suggested citation (apa): obia, v. (2022, november). matrix of dependence, postcolonialism, and social media regulation in an african context. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. and october 2021. each interview lasted between 30 and 50 minutes. it was agreed beforehand that the transcripts would be anonymised. findings from the interviews, i identify four themes/alternatives to social media regulation in nigeria: copying western nations, platform self-regulation, governance built on trust, and digital media literacy. the first theme – copying western nations – captures the most explicit reference to the matrix of dependence. the interviewees mentioned the need to follow the examples of western nations, who have taken up “democratic solutions” to address social media online harms (participant 17). the supposed “best approach” is then viewed as what has been embraced by western nations (participant 11). the implication here is the resolution that acceptable solutions can only come if nigeria copies the strategy in liberal democracies. i argue that this is tied to a postcolonial thinking, representing colonial legacy and the impact of european imperialism on colonised territories (ashcroft et al., 2007). second, the interviewees felt that the current prevailing global system of regulation – platform self-regulation – should be maintained. reference was made to the internet falsehood bill, as interviewees expressed the notion that it was better to have platforms regulate content than to have the nigerian government do this. this implies that countries like nigeria have to continue to depend on platforms for social media regulation. in the wider sense, this dependence is tied to the regulatory paradigm established by the united states through section 230 of the 1996 communications decency act. in terms of governance built on trust, the interviewees highlighted the need for collectivisation – one where the nigerian government engages in respectful dialogue with national stakeholders. one respondent further drew attention to the international multistakeholder framework between government, corporations, and civil society groups (participant 3). still, issues of dependence remain since the power imbalance in a multistakeholder framework suggests that african nations function under a relation on dependence. an example is the description of the internet governance forum as being made up of “hawks” led by china and “doves” led by the us (mueller, 2010). the global order then places africa in a web of dependence on the west or east for the design on internet governance policies. finally, there was digital media literacy, described as “the most important thing today” [to address online harms] (participant 8). what we see here is an interpretation of social media users as responsible for the kind of content they expose themselves to and how to protect themselves from harmful content. in particular, there was mention of digital media literacy education, and some commended unesco for its media and information literacy curriculum for teachers and for piloting a literacy club in some nigerian higher education institutions. conclusion suggested citation (apa): obia, v. (2022, november). matrix of dependence, postcolonialism, and social media regulation in an african context. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. to sum up, i have highlighted the themes in the interview transcripts. as noted earlier, my initial aim was to identify what stakeholders understand as credible alternatives to social media regulation in an african context. analysis of the transcripts then reveal the underlying system of dependence within which nigeria is represented – with the idea that to have a credible regulatory regime, the country has to effectively copy the west. the other themes point to reliance on the us paradigm of platform self-regulation or a global bloc under multi-stakeholderism. digital media literacy is far less related to dependence, but it still bears some connection given the transfer of knowledge from international agencies like unesco. it is based on this that i introduce the concept of the matrix of dependence – the sense that no matter what social media regulatory agenda countries like nigeria embrace, it will be defined by the relation of subalternity. one might make the counterargument that the reality of the digital age is that regulatory actors across the world function under some form of (inter)dependence. regardless, i suggest that the relation of dependence is far more pronounced in the african context. this is because of structural imperialist order (galtung, 1971) defined by postcolonialism, guaranteeing a one-way flow of digital technology from developed to developing nations. regulation of any kind then flows on that same line, locking african nations like nigeria into the matrix of dependence. take the argument for the need of a systemic approach to regulation for instance (wood, 2021). this approach, which is emerging, advances the need to alter platform business models to make the online space more civil. this is potentially good, only that countries like nigeria can do nothing about it except to depend on western nations to do the alteration. this holds further implications for supposedly global research into social media regulation that conveniently exclude africa. it is this that underlines the implicit notion, even among my interviewees, that africa cannot but rely on external actors for social media regulation – the understanding being that the continent remains locked into the matrix of dependence. references ashcroft, b., griffiths, g., & tiffin, h. (2007). post-colonial studies: the key concepts (2nd ed.). routledge. braun, v., & clarke, v. (2021). one size fits all? what counts as quality practice in (reflexive) thematic analysis? quality research in psychology, 18(3), 328— 352. galtung, j. (1971). a structural theory of imperialism. journal of peach research, 8(2), 81—117. mueller, m. l. (2010). networks and states: the global politics of internet governance. mit press. wood, p. (2021, february 19) online harms: why we need a systems-based approach towards internet regulation. lse media blog. suggested citation (apa): obia, v. (2022, november). matrix of dependence, postcolonialism, and social media regulation in an african context. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2021/02/19/online-harms-why-we-need-asystems-based-approach-towards-internet-regulation/ selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 vigren, m. (2024, october). alternative futures! fostering eco-digital agency in generative ai workshops with young people. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. alternative futures! fostering eco-digital agency in generative ai workshops with young people minna vigren lut university, introduction "i wouldn't want to be a prisoner of google, because it is google that rules the world, but that's the way it is." this quote from a research participant in my dissertation reflects the rather resigned and powerless sense of agency that many people share about their networked everyday lives (saariketo, 2020). it gave a spark to the ongoing research project in which methods to imagine alternative digital futures are experimented with to foster eco-digital agency. the paper presents methodological reflections, observations, and critical considerations from workshops in which sustainable digital futures were imagined with young people using an artificial intelligence (ai) image generator as a tool. the key methodological question is: how could we as researchers create methods to spark imagination and inspire reflection about alternative futures? the theme of the conference, ‘industry’, is discussed by addressing the need to contest and re-imagine the hegemony of big tech corporations that control society and our everyday lives, the unsustainability of the devices and services they design, and the challenges that critical research encounters when existing generative artificial intelligence (genai) applications are adopted as research tools. the ability to imagine alternatives is important in fostering hope for more just futures. however, breaking away from the present and the familiar is not easy (poli, 2017; miller, 2018; markham, 2020; saariketo, 2020). in fact, it has been argued that the lack of imagination has prevented finding effective solutions to the urgent planetary crises (bendor, 2018), and our time is characterised by the decline of political and utopian imagination pressingly needed to challenge capitalism (salmenniemi et al., 2024). by tackling these issues, the paper contributes to nascent research that explores and experiments with so-called speculative methods in the field of critical media and infrastructure studies. it addresses the challenges in the field which does not yet have ready-to-hand methods available for researchers to initiate reflection on the domineering imaginaries of media technologies and how these imaginaries position people (see also hall, 1983/1996; vigren & ridell, 2021). furthermore, according to a recent literature review, the methodological field of transformative imagining is fragmented, with work being done across a range of disciplines with few crossreferences or a lack of core literature (ketonen-oksi & vigren, 2024). the unsustainability of digital everyday life digitalisation and technology have often been put forward as solutions to address the planetary crises and provide solutions to climate change, environmental pollution, and biodiversity loss (e.g. united nations, 2018; muench et al., 2022). nevertheless, the latest technologies, such as ai, are only partial and even deceptive solutions to the planetary crises if their sustainability is not addressed (crawford, 2021; heilinger, 2022). in a recent survey, finnish young adults voiced their hopes to have environmentally and socially sustainable digital devices (harju et al., 2021). however, the environmental footprint of using digital services was not part of the strongly voiced concern over the earth. it can be assumed that this is partly due to the fact that environmental awareness of the impacts of digitality is not yet widespread among users nor promoted by manufacturers and service providers. people may be aware of the carbon footprint of their diet, appliances, accommodation, and travel, but less regarding the environmental impact of their digital lives (gnanasekaran et al., 2021). similarly, this perspective receives little attention in the sustainability strategies of companies, municipalities, and nation-states, following the common approach to digital technologies with a focus on their usefulness, immateriality, and ability to provide solutions (mclean, 2020; crawford, 2021). imagining sustainable digital futures: the method experiment the starting point of the research project imagining sustainable digital futures, funded by the research council of finland, is that young people's perceptions, hopes, and fears about the future matter because the future concerns them particularly. yet, their voices often remain unheard in politics and strategy planning despite the growing recognition of their anxiety associated with climate change and environmental problems (pihkala, 2020; clayton et al., 2023; veijonaho et al., 2023). the concept of eco-digital agency developed in the project takes up this problem. it aims at fostering curious and fearless imagination to support people's ability to recognise, challenge, and resist the taken-for-grantedness of the injustices and unsustainability in the digitalised society and encourages taking action to achieve alternative futures. the core of the project was an experimental workshop in which young people used an ai image generator to create images of alternative futures and tell stories of what living in such futures would feel like. the images and stories were displayed in a public exhibition during a theme week on sustainable digital everyday life in may 2024 in turku, finland. the methodological reflection of this paper is based on the workshop with seven young participants aged 16-18 and seven pilot workshops with over 80 participants organised in the winter 2023-24. the interventionist research experiment follows a radical pedagogical approach. images of alternative futures are created to explore how participatory critical speculation can spark “raised consciousness” about the bleaker aspects of digital society and the kind of world people want to live in. inspired by the methods of critical speculation (e.g. dunne & raby, 2013) and utopia as a method (e.g. coté et al., 2007; levitas, 2013; salmenniemi et al., 2024), the aim is to break away from the status quo as a means of fostering imaginative capacities and stimulating visions of desirable futures. the workshop aims at being a safer space in which everyone's hopes and fears for the future are heard and opportunities for dialogue are created. following hook’s (1994) entangled pedagogics, the young participants are encouraged to express their opinions, and they are provided with an experience that everyone’s voice and thoughts matter and are heard. this is combined with the aims of critical (freire, 1970) and anarchist (haworth, 2012) pedagogies to provide a creative space of resistance in which radical agency is fostered to build a fairer society rather than adapting to unjust conditions. fostering transformative eco-digital agency? a major critical concern from the experiment relates to the limits of using ai in imagining alternative sustainable futures. namely, with the black-boxed and likely biased datasets and classification of images from the past and the present, what kind of images of alternative futures can be created? further, how is it possible to gain an understanding of the entire ai system and especially its environmental footprint? at the same time, only addressing the ethics and sustainability of ai can make it a viable tool for critical research and participate in the radical re-imagining of ai's technological development and role in society. the aim of cultivating imagination that allows the emergence of the completely new and previously unimaginable proved methodologically challenging, especially as it was combined with the goal of fostering critical agency that strives to transform society profoundly. yet, the playful exercise of making images with genai resonated positively with the participants and exhibition goers, providing a chance to foster eco-digital agency by critically examining concerns on ai’s ethics and sustainability. multiple lively discussions on today's society and hurdles in achieving the desirable futures took place during the workshop and exhibition. at best, eco-digital agency was fostered with the raised awareness on digital sustainability and when the images and stories of the future gave hope – and potentially acted as catalysts for action. references bendor, r. (2018). interactive media for sustainability. palgrave macmillan. clayton, s. d., pihkala, p., wray, b., & marks, e. (2023). psychological and emotional responses to climate change among young people worldwide: differences associated with gender, age, and country. sustainability 15(4), 3540. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15043540 coté, m., day, r. & de peuter, g. (2007). utopian pedagogy: creating radical alternatives in the neoliberal age. review of education, pedagogy, and cultural studies 29(4): 317–336. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714410701291129 crawford, k. (2021). atlas of ai. yale university press. dunne, a. & raby, f. (2013). speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming. mit press. gnanasekaran, v., fridtun, h.t., hatlen, h., langøy, m.m., syrstad, a., subramanian, s. & de moor, k. (2021). digital carbon footprint awareness among digital natives: an exploratory study. norsk ikt-konferanse forskning og utdanning 1, 99–112. freire, p. (1970). the pedagogy of the oppressed. continuum. hall, s.1983/1996. the problem of ideology: marxism without guarantees. in d. morley & k-h chen (eds.) stuart hall. critical dialogues in cultural studies, pp. 25–46. routledge. harju, a., saariketo, m., hiltunen, k., koski, k. & ridell, s. (2021). vähemmän koukuttavia algoritmeja: tulevaisuuden media-arki nuorten kuvittelemana tutkimushankkeen loppuraportti. [less addictive algorithms: the final report from the project young people imagining media(ted) futures]. tampere university: faculty of information technology and communication sciences. haworth, r.e. (2012). introduction to anarchist pedagogies. collective actions, theories, and critical reflections on education. pm press. heilinger, j-c. (2022). the ethics of ai ethics. a constructive critique. philosophy & technology 35(3). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-022-00557-9 hooks, b. (1994). teaching to transgress. routledge. ketonen-oksi, s. & vigren, m. (2024). methods to imagine transformative futures. an integrative literature review. futures 157, article number 103341. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2024.103341 levitas, r. (2013). utopia as method: the imaginary reconstruction of society. palgrave macmillan. markham, a. (2021). the limits of the imaginary. new media and society, 23(2), 382– 405. doi mclean, j. (2020). frontier technologies and digital solutions. anthropocenes, 1(1), 4. doi miller, r. (2018). transforming the future. anticipation in the 21st century. taylor & francis. muench, s., stoermer, e., jensen, k., asikainen, t., salvi, m. & scapolo, f. (2022). towards a green & digital future. jrc publications repository. https://dx.doi.org/10.2760/977331 pihkala, p. (2020). anxiety and the ecological crisis: an analysis of eco-anxiety and climate anxiety. sustainability 12(19), 7836. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12197836. poli, r. (2017). introducing anticipation. in r. poli (ed.), handbook of anticipation (pp. 1–14). springer. saariketo, m. (2020). kuvitelmia toimijuudesta koodin maisemissa [imaginaries of agency in the landscapes of code]. dissertation. tampere university 241. https://trepo.tuni.fi/handle/10024/120383 salmenniemi, s., porkola, p. & ylöstalo, h. (2024) political imagination and utopian pedagogy. critical arts. https://doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2023.2299450 united nations (2018). world economic and social survey: frontier technologies for sustainable development. https://doi.org/10.18356/c2fefb71-en veijonaho, s., ojala, m., hietajärvi, l., & salmela-aro, k. (2023). profiles of climate change distress and climate denialism during adolescence: a two-cohort longitudinal study. international journal of behavioral development. https://doi.org/10.1177/01650254231205251 vigren, m. & ridell, s. (2021). imagining alternative mediated futures? reflections on experimental workshops with young people. aoir selected papers of internet research, 2021. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2021i0.12237 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): dennin, k. (2024, october). merging queer readings and games: an analysis of co-created queer narratives of sidon and link through play in tears of the kingdom. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. merging queer readings and games: an analysis of cocreated queer narratives of sidon and link through play in tears of the kingdom kimberly dennin university of california, irvine introduction the release of the video game breath of the wild (botw) in 2017 ushered in one of the most popular ships (romantic pairings of characters) that the legend of zelda series has seen, that of sidon and link. the legend of zelda series is one of nintendo’s most popular video game series with each installment following the adventures of link. in botw link travels to the kingdom of the zora, a race of humanoid fish creatures, and meets their prince, sidon. sidon’s charm and enthusiasm for link resulted in many fans claiming that sidon was link’s boyfriend. fans were then shocked to discover that in the sequel, tears of the kingdom (totk), a new character, a female zora named yona, was introduced as sidon’s fiancée, despite there being no mention of her in the previous game. however, as the quest in zora’s domain unfolds, there are many subtextual queer moments that provide support for the queer readings that began in botw to continue in totk. what is at stake here is understanding where these queer readings fit in relation to the heteronormative reading that the inclusion of yona supports. this has broader ramifications for understanding the place of fan productions in relation to the media object they are drawing from. to come closer to this understanding, i analyzed examples of queer streamers on twitch playing through the quest involving sidon and the queer readings that the streamer and viewers created. i argue that the co-creation of these queer readings is a form of play and thus cannot be separated from the game. theoretical framework and methods scholars have very different understandings of how fan products relate to the original work. some argue that there is a hierarchy that presents the original work and normative interpretations as valid and fan products that change the original work as invalid (nordin, 2019) while others argue that there is no hierarchy, and any interpretation/product is valid (stasi, 2006). analyzing fan products through theories on play bridges the gap between these interpretations. one of the purposes of play is to allow people to change the game to feel satisfied, accomplished, and fulfilled (de koven, 1978; sicart, 2014), thus making that interpretation of the game a part of it and valid. however, there are forms of play that are valued over others (trammell, 2023) and hierarchies can be formed around those values. as such, queer readings created through play can be a valid part of the game while still existing in a hierarchy that gives it less value. there are already scholars who have argued for some fan products related to video games (i.e. modifications) to be considered a form of play (postigo, 2007; sotamaa, 2010). in this project, i extend this argument to queer readings, using theories of play as the theoretical framework through which i analyze the creation of queer readings by communities on twitch. for this project, i utilized a mixed methods approach. first, i completed a thematic analysis of videos on demand (vods) from a sample of 23 twitch streamers playing through the sidon quest line. of the 23 streamers, 21 openly identify as some lgbtqia+ identity either through the use of tags on their streams or their biography on their homepage. from this i identified 3 styles of play: creating a new narrative and maintaining it for the entire quest, initial anger/shock but no creation of a new narrative, and acceptance from the beginning but acknowledgment of the ship and/or how some fans will be hurt. i then completed a close reading of vods from three queer streamers who engaged with the first style of play. i examined what narratives were created, how they were created through collective play from the streamer and those in chat, and how the narrative affected the community’s response to the quest. summary of findings i found that these three communities created diverse narratives that were rooted in sidon and link maintaining their relationship and relied on moments from the game to support these narratives. streamer 1 created a narrative that many others in my sample shared. in this narrative, sidon remains link’s boyfriend/husband, and the community alternated between a complete dismissal of yona or having yona understand that she is just a figurehead. streamer 2 represents a slight variation on this narrative by making it a self-insert where link represents herself, and therefore sidon is her boyfriend/husband. this resulted in her acting with hatred towards yona which included threatening her life multiple times. this narrative relies on in-game moments that could be used to demonstrate that sidon and link are together. therefore, those in chat mostly maintained that sidon was link’s boyfriend/husband while using the same complex narrative that the streamer was developing about herself and sidon. streamer 3 greatly diverged in the narrative she created from streamer 1 and 2. like the others, this community maintained that sidon and link are in a relationship but did so by making sidon bisexual and in a polyamorous relationship with link and yona. once this narrative was decided on, yona was mostly accepted by the community. outside of the creation of new narratives, there was a consistent acknowledgment that sidon and link are often romantically paired together. for communities that showed either initial anger/shock but no creation of a new narrative or acceptance of the narrative from the beginning, it was still brought up that many people ship sidon and link or that there are going to be a lot of people who are disappointed by the in-game narrative. this reveals how the queer readings of the game have become pervasive and closely tied to the game in ways that the queer readings cannot be separated from it. there were also moments where the community called out nintendo for using yona as a way to make illegitimate the queer readings surrounding sidon and link. this demonstrates that these communities were aware that the actions of nintendo served to maintain their queer readings as something separate from the official heteronormative reading. through play, these communities were able to create narratives maintaining sidon and link’s romantic relationship that drew on in-game elements to have a satisfying experience with the quest line thus making it a part of the game. references de koven, b. (1978). the well-played game: a player’s philosophy (1st anchor books ed). anchor press. nordin, e. (2019). queerbaiting 2.0 from denying your queers to pretending you have them. in j. brennan (ed.), queerbaiting and fandom: teasing fans through homoerotic possibilities (pp. 25–40). university of iowa press. postigo, h. (2007). of mods and modders: chasing down the value of fan-based digital game modifications. games and culture, 2(4), 300–313. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412007307955 sicart, m. (2014). play matters. the mit press. sotamaa, o. (2010). when the game is not enough: motivations and practices among computer game modding culture. games and culture, 5(3), 239–255. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412009359765 stasi, m. (2006). the toy soldiers from leeds: the slash palimpsest. in k. hellekson & k. busse (eds.), fan fiction and fan communities in the age of the internet: new essays. mcfarland & co. trammell, a. (2023). repairing play: a black phenomenology. the mit press. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): premika, a. (2024, october). beauty brands online: visuality, labour, and representation. paper (or panel) presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. beauty brands online: visuality, labour, and representation anuja premika university of hyderabad introduction beauty as a category has always been intimately tied to industry. engagement with beauty has historically been seen as inherently consumptive (see lakoff & scherr, 1984) and (perhaps therefore) inherently feminine (see friedan, 1963) and trivial (hollows, 2000). popular discourse today would suggest, however, that beauty is increasingly seen as creative, and no longer assumed to be the domain of any one gender, particularly in online spaces (o’grady, 2021). yet as an unprecedented plurality of individuals appropriate beauty as a site of gendered expression and affirmation, their engagements with beauty continue to be entwined with the broader beauty machine— what third-wave feminist scholars called the “fashion-beauty complex” (bartky, 1990). this is not wholly new, and versions of the structure-agency debate have plagued feminist examinations of beauty for decades (craig, 2006; jarrín, 2017). online beauty culture, however—co-produced by beauty brands, content creators, and audiences— presents a space where the imprecise lines between individual and industry become still hazier. amidst celebrations of the democratisation of beauty on one end (yanagihara, 2021), and cries of an overly appearance-obsessed culture on the other (abram & fong, 2020), what does a situated feminist examination of online beauty culture tell us today? conceptual framework images of women have been a site of enquiry since the early days of the feminist project (butcher et al., 1974). scholars have frequently drawn from berger’s work on the “ways of seeing” gendered bodies in art (berger, 1972), and foucault’s work on bodies and power (deveaux, 1994; dellinger & williams, 1997; wykes & gunter, 2005). my theoretical position draws largely from bordo’s invocation of foucault—a “materialist” view of the body, one that accounts for the “direct grip” that culture has on bodies, beyond merely in/exclusion through representation (bordo, 1993). bordo’s understanding of the material body is linked to the cultural—culture that, she argues, normalises and disciplines. there is no “outside” to this culture (blum, 2005)—we are all placed varyingly within it, and individuals exercise various modes of “culturally scripted” agency within the frameworks of power in the culture industries (pitts-taylor, 2007; see also fraser, 2003). in the present study, i examine images from one type of source—beauty brands—to examine how they represent bodies, but also how these images are produced at the intersection of techno-aesthetic choices, platform affordances, market considerations, and the modes of gendered identity privileged by culture at a given point in time. methodology based on data collected as part of my doctoral work on the beauty media landscape in india, this paper maps the practices of beauty brands online by analysing 545 instagram posts1 made by the five most followed beauty brands in india—lakmé, sugar, nykaa, mac, and myglamm. the framework for analysis is adapted from the visual analysis model developed by bock et al. (2001), that accounts for all “phases” of image communication, including the context of design, incidence, production, media, and reception. further informed by lister & wells’ (2004) cultural studies approach to visual analysis, i conduct a mixed-methods content analysis of the 335 photos and 210 videos sampled. findings it was useful to first question who produced this content. some brands like nykaa and mac primarily shared content that was produced by/for them, while others like myglamm and sugar relied heavily on reposted content from influencers, particularly ones with smaller followings, even employing “influencer scouting teams” to do so (sil, 2021). influencers bear the brunt of content creation, constituting what duffy terms "aspirational labor" (duffy, 2022), creating content with the implicit hope that they will eventually earn monetary returns. but it is the brands that benefit financially, with sugar reporting that social media content generated a revenue of usd 12million for them in the year 2020 (sil, 2021). the ownership of influencer-generated content remains ambiguous, with brands subtly asserting ownership while merely acknowledging creators through tagging. influencer-generated content also lent itself to a particular “look”— flat-lit, tight frame with relatively high saturation, shot at eye level with a static recording device, often featuring little to no talking, and text on screen. some of these choices are shaped by platform affordances (aspect ratio, post format, compositional tools such as text and stickers etc.), and the assumption of a mobile viewing device (small, hand-held, perhaps 1 collected over one week in february 2022. i used the third-party tool “ig downloader” to save all posts made by the selected brands during the sampling week. affording distracted viewing). but this “look” is also notable for the shift it signals—a departure from the “high fashion” look of magazines, suggesting a democratisation in what images of beauty can look like. a new assemblage of technological tools enables content production— the mass adoption of smartphone-compatible ring lights emerges as a significant catalyst here. 76% of influencer-generated posts used a ring light, made evident by the unmistakeable ring-shaped reflection it casts in the subject’s eyes. once a specialised piece of equipment, ring lights are sold cheaply and widely in india today (as low as usd 8) —often available for sale by streetside vendors in urban spaces. the ring light represents a key piece of the puzzle —a technological tool, and increasingly a competence aspiring creators must possess, leading to it evolving into an aesthetic standard that new entrants may be required to uphold. while the content space democratised in some ways, it also flattened in others. at the level of appearance, hegemonically held ideals of indian beauty—long, straight hair, fair skin, big, “almond-shaped” eyes, and full lips (see reddy, 2006; parameswaran & cardoza, 2009)—are far from being dismantled. most persons featured in the sample were light-skinned (64%). hair texture and length also aligned with conventional standards of attractive femininity—75% persons had straight hair, and 67% had long hair. it was also instructive to observe how people were represented. several posts by the brand lakmé featured only a partial face or body (such as lips, eyes, or nails) to showcase the featured product, engaging in the “dismemberment” of women and the objectification of their bodies, rendering them less than human (killbourne, 2014). this study sheds light on a range of nuanced dynamics. the beauty brand on instagram offers a site to examine new modes of precarious labour and economic insecurity (see elias et al., 2017; bishop, 2018; duffy et al., 2021; hund, 2023), in a country where gendered labour precarity has been baked into the social system (raveendran, 2016) and the promise of transformation through digital democratisation runs loud in sociopolitical discourse (pitroda, 2015). it further points to the particular forms of bodily capital (bourdieu, 1984) that are privileged by the industry, popular culture, and even the platform (bishop, 2021) in a nation where appearances have been found to determine women’s economic and social opportunity (parameswaran, 2011). at the same time, it also points to the new ecology of beauty media today: the actors and technologies that make it possible, the opportunities it presents, and the new aesthetics and production modes it affords. this study of branded content feeds into my doctoral thesis that looks at the beauty media landscape in india today—built of brands, social media marketers, public relations personnel, influencers, influencer relationship managers, journalists, and editors—but it also speaks to broader cultures around appearance and gendered self-presentation and the nebulous nature of labour and influence in today’s media environment. references abram, c. c., & fong, j. (2020). is beauty culture hurting us? glad you asked s1 [video]. vox media. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8jsu7wsyhy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8jsu7wsyhy bartky, s. l. (1990). femininity and domination: studies in the phenomenology of oppression. routledge. berger, j. (1972). ways of seeing. bbc and penguin books. bishop, s. (2018). beauty vlogging: practices, labours, inequality [phd thesis]. university of east london, school of arts and digital industries. https://doi.org/10.15123/pub.7915 bishop, s. (2021). why the “ideal” influencer looks like…that. paper magazine. https://www.papermag.com/top-beauty-influencers#rebelltitem1 blum, v. l. (2005). flesh wounds: the culture of cosmetic surgery. university of california press. bock, a., isermann, h., & knieper, t. (2011). quantitative content analysis of the visual. in e. margolis & l. pauwels (eds.), the sage handbook of visual research methods (pp. 265–282). sage publications ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446268278 bourdieu, p. (1984). distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste. translated by r. nice. harvard university press. bordo, s. (1993). unbearable weight: feminism, western culture, and the body. university of california press. butcher, h., coward, r., evaristi, m., garber, j., harrison, r., & winship, j. (1974). images of women in the media. centre for contemporary cultural studies, university of birmingham. craig, m. l. (2006). race, beauty, and the tangled knot of a guilty pleasure. feminist theory, 7(2), 159–177. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700106064414 dellinger, k., & williams, c. l. (1997). makeup at work: negotiating appearance rules in the workplace. gender and society, 11(2), 151–177. https://doi.org/10.1177/089124397011002002 deveaux, m. (1994). feminism and empowerment: a critical reading of foucault. feminist studies, 20(2), 223–247. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178151 duffy, b. e., pinch, a., sannon, s., & sawey, m. (2021). the nested precarities of creative labor on social media. social media + society, 7(2), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211021368 duffy, b. e. (2022). (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender and aspirational labor in the social media economy. yale university press. https://doi.org/10.15123/pub.7915 https://www.papermag.com/top-beauty-influencers#rebelltitem1 https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446268278 https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700106064414 https://doi.org/10.1177/089124397011002002 https://doi.org/10.2307/3178151 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211021368 elias, a. s., gill, r., & scharff, c. (2017). aesthetic labour: rethinking beauty politics in neoliberalism (a. s. elias, c. scharff, & r. gill (eds.)). palgrave macmillan uk. fraser, s. (2003). the agent within: agency repertoires in medical discourse on cosmetic surgery. australian feminist studies, 18(40), 27–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/0816464022000056358 friedan, b. (1963). the feminine mystique. w. w. norton. hollows, j. (2000). feminism, femininity and popular culture. manchester university press. hund, e. (2023). the influencer industry: the quest for authenticity on social media. princeton university press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2v6pczn jarrín, a. (2017). the biopolitics of beauty: cosmetic citizenship and affective capital in brazil. university of california press. lakoff, r. t., & scherr, r. l. (1984). face value: the politics of beauty. routledge & kegan paul. kilbourne, j. (2014). the dangerous ways ads see women | jean kilbourne | tedxlafayettecollege [video]. tedx talks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uy8ylaowybk&ab_channel=tedxtalks lister, m., & wells, l. (2004). seeing beyond belief: cultural studies as an approach to analysing the visual. in t. van leeuwen & c. jewitt (eds.), the handbook of visual analysis (pp. 61–91). sage publications ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9780857020062.n4 o’grady, m. (2021). makeup is for everyone. the new york times style magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/10/t-magazine/men-makeupgender-%0anorms.html parameswaran, r., & cardoza, k. (2009). melanin on the margins: advertising and the cultural politics of fair/light/white beauty in india. journalism & communication monographs, 11(3), 213–274. https://doi.org/10.1177/152263790901100302 parameswaran, r. (2011). e-race-ing color: gender and transnational visual economies of beauty in india. in r. s. hegde (ed.), circuits of visibility: gender and transnational media cultures (pp. 68–86). nyu press. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814737309.003.0004 pitroda, s. (2015). digital india is all about democratisation of information. telecom, the economic times. https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/tele-talk/digitalindia-is-all-about-democratisation-of-information/741 pitts-taylor, v. (2007). surgery junkies: wellness and pathology in cosmetic culture. rutgers university press. https://doi.org/10.1080/0816464022000056358 https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2v6pczn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uy8ylaowybk&ab_channel=tedxtalks https://doi.org/10.4135/9780857020062.n4 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/10/t-magazine/men-makeupgender-%0anorms.html https://doi.org/10.1177/152263790901100302 https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814737309.003.0004 https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/tele-talk/digital-india-is-all-about-democratisation-of-information/741 https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/tele-talk/digital-india-is-all-about-democratisation-of-information/741 raveendran, g. (2016). the indian labour market: a gender perspective. un women. https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2016/2/the-indian-labourmarket-a-gender-perspective reddy, v. (2006). the nationalization of the global indian woman. south asian popular culture, 4(1), 61–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/14746680600555691 sil, d. (2021). how sugar leveraged social media influencers for d2c play. inc42. https://inc42.com/features/how-sugar-cosmetics-leveraged-social-media-influencers-ford2c-play/ wykes, m., & gunter, b. (2005). the media and body image: if looks could kill. sage publications ltd. yanagihara, h. (2021). who gets to be beautiful now? the new york times style magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/10/t-magazine/beauty-transformingself.html https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2016/2/the-indian-labour-market-a-gender-perspective https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2016/2/the-indian-labour-market-a-gender-perspective https://doi.org/10.1080/14746680600555691 https://inc42.com/features/how-sugar-cosmetics-leveraged-social-media-influencers-for-d2c-play/ https://inc42.com/features/how-sugar-cosmetics-leveraged-social-media-influencers-for-d2c-play/ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/10/t-magazine/beauty-transforming-self.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/10/t-magazine/beauty-transforming-self.html selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 the impact of tiktok policies on information flows during times of war: evidence of ‘splinternet’ and ‘shadow-promotion’ in russia salvatore romano ai forensics natalie kerby ai forensics miazia schüler ai forensics davide beraldo university of amsterdam ilir rama university of milano introduction this paper measures the effects of platform polices in times of war, and represents different entry-points into understanding how platforms impact information flows (ciuriak 2022). we present the outcomes of three tests that assessed content accessibility and prioritization on tiktok in russia in the aftermath of the invasion of ukraine. the tests adopted a combination of scraping and sock-puppet algorithmic audits (sandvig 2014) conducted through russian-based ip addresses. this study sheds light on how tiktok adapted to the russian war censorship laws with new policies (tiktok 2022), highlighting the need to closely monitor the platform's policy decisions during times of conflict. using digital methods (rogers 2019) and a crossnational approach (gray 2021), we reveal the existence of opaque content removal strategies, unevenly implemented policies, and their consequences for russian users, including the spread of pro-war propaganda and their isolation from the global tiktok community. our findings contribute to the understanding of how tiktok policies can contribute to the creation of a 'splinternet' a scenario in which countries have vastly different information online and separate internet infrastructures (lemley 2020). we quantify the changes in the information regarding the war recommended by tiktok to russian users and demonstrate how these changes my have contributed to modifying the information diet in the country. our study also offers insights into the methodological challenges of quantifying the effects of russian techniques that international companies navigate when operating in the country (vendil pallin 2016). test 1: content restriction our first probe demonstrates how, after the invasion, tiktok restricted access to nonrussian content in russia. we started monitoring tiktok's response to the russian invasion with the initial aim of comparing the content t<hat was prioritized to ukrainian versus russian tiktok users. however, while submitting a query for 'ukraine war' with a russian ip address, we encountered issues with our scrapers. we further investigated these issues by conducting tests with a set of automated browsers, querying for a number of war-related keywords that were accessible under a russian residential ip address network. the results of this audit varied over time. at first, the search function on the platform was unusable for non-cyrillic alphabet queries, returning no results. after a few hours, the search function was restored for non-cyrillic alphabet queries. however, we observed that the platform had restricted content to russian-only in both the search results and the for you page (fyp), resulting in a 95% reduction of available content in russia. as a result, accounts created with non-russian ips returned an empty page when accessed from a russian ip. we then compared popular accounts accessed through a russian ip address to those created through european ip addresses to understand the extent of the content limitations in russia. overall, we found that tiktok was not complying with their own publicly announced policies regarding bans on new content in russia (tiktok 2022). instead, they made all foreign content unavailable in russia, thereby isolating russian users from the rest of the world. test 2: pro-war content further investigations showed how tiktok unevenly applied their content policies, allowing pro-war content to proliferate in russia despite their claim that they had enforced a ban on new content uploads in russia (gilbert 2022). to assess whether and how new content could be uploaded and made available from russia, we attempted to upload content from a number of accounts and ip addresses—with some profiles created in russia and others not. we repeated these experiments dozens of times over twenty days, which allowed us to observe changes and inconsistencies in content upload permissions. based on the sample of videos we collected, and after an hashtag snowball process, we identified the 12 most prevalent hashtags that were commonly used by both sides to express their opinions on the war. to analyze the content, we automatically accessed around 1,000 of the most viewed videos for each selected hashtag and determined which were accessible from a russian ip address. through our analysis, we were able to identify temporal trends in the prominence of pro-war and anti-war content (figure 1). figure 1: content posted on tiktok from russian-based accounts despite tiktok’s ban announcement on 6 march, we found that the company inconsistently applied the ban until 25 march. during the period in which tiktok did not comprehensively implement the ban, new content uploads related to the war were overwhelmingly pro-war (93.5%), while before the ban was announced, the balance of pro-war and anti-war content was roughly equal. shortly thereafter, new uploads in russia became impossible, and content from outside russia was banned. therefore, the only information about the ukraine-russia war available on tiktok in russia was the content that was uploaded before 25 march, which was dominated by pro-war content and propaganda. test 3: shadow-promotion the third test brought to light a case of “shadow-promotion,” a term we coined to describe the algorithmic promotion of content that is supposed to be banned. according to tiktok’s own policy updated on 30 june, new content and international content was not available to domestic users inside russia. however, we found that state controlled media, political, and non-political content were being promoted to russian-based users via the algorithmically-compiled fyp, even though the videos did not appear on the profiles of the users who posted them. we created a russian tiktok profile and tried to upload a video while using a russian ip and non-russian ip. we then tried to access the video from different locations (russia and italy) using different access points, for example, accessing the uploader’s profile through a direct link, or querying for keywords and/or hashtags. subsequently, we explored the availability of content supposedly banned for russian users. we followed accounts with supposedly banned content, and checked the fyp afterwards to see if content from the account we had just followed was algorithmically recommended. we tested three account types: 1. a russian media account, e.g.. sputnikvideo, which was labeled by tiktok as ‘russian state-controlled media’; 2. a non-russian media account, e.g. the official tiktok profile of bbc; 3. a non-political account, e.g. the official tiktok account of fcdynamo, the ukranian professional football club based in kyiv. for all the accounts, we followed the same protocol. we first checked their accessibility in russia, in an eu-country (italy), and in a non-eu country (u.s.) through non-logged browsers. we found that all the supposedly banned content, despite not accessible on the users’ profile, did appear in the fyp for russian users. conclusion ultimately, these three tests underscore the importance of monitoring tiktok’s policy decisions in times of war, which we showcase through geographic-aware algorithmic audit methodologies. we were able to demonstrate the existence of unevenly implemented policies, and how it risked proliferating propaganda and perpetuating a splinternet. the digital service act requires big online platforms to publish transparent and detailed reports on content moderation at least once a year (art. 13). although tiktok's operations in russia are outside the scope of eu legislation, as standards emerge for platform transparency, its lack of transparency in a high-profile region raises questions. our research emphasizes the importance of data transparency regarding tiktok's recommendation system and providing civil society access to data to hold the platform accountable for its algorithms and content moderation strategies. we have shown how this data can help identify biases, discriminatory practices, and manipulative algorithms. further, our investigation stresses the need for social media platforms to have more transparent and consistent policies, particularly during times of conflict, to prevent the spread of harmful content and the fragmentation of the internet. references ciuriak, dan. 2022. “the role of social media in russia’s war on ukraine.” available at ssrn: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4078863. gilbert, david. 2022. “russian tiktok influencers are being paid to spread kremlin propaganda.” vice news (03/11/2022). https://www.vice.com/en/article/epxken/russiantiktok-influencers-paid-propaganda https://ssrn.com/abstract=4078863 gray, j. e. (2021). the geopolitics of" platforms": the tiktok challenge. internet policy review, 10(2), 1-26. lemley, mark a. 2020. “the splinternet.” stanford law and economics olin working paper #555. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3664027. rogers, richard. 2019. doing digital methods. 1st edition. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. sandvig, c., hamilton, k., karahalios, k., & langbort, c. (2014). auditing algorithms: research methods for detecting discrimination on internet platforms. data and discrimination: converting critical concerns into productive inquiry, 22(2014), 4349-4357. tiktok. 2022. “bringing more context to content on tiktok.” tiktok newsroom. https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/bringing-more-context-to-content-ontiktok?utm_source=commstwitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=030622 (accessed 23.02.2022). vendil pallin, carolina. “internet control through ownership: the case of russia.” postsoviet affairs, vol. 33, no. 1, jan. 2017, pp. 16–33. taylor and francis+nejm, https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586x.2015.1121712. aoir2024 scott drivers.docx google docs selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 how do the diverse drivers of children’s (6-12) digital play mediate the relationship between digital games and children’s subjective well-being? fiona scott the university of sheffield introduction children’s play is understood as a vital phenomenon, supportive of children’s learning and development (singer et al., 2006), social development (broadhead, 2003), identity formation (winther-lindqvist, 2009) and emotional exploration (rao & gibson, 2019). historically, however, the study of children’s digital play has tended to focus on risks (livingstone & pothong, 2022). recently, discursive shifts signal increasing mainstream enthusiasm for certain digital play practices when they are supportive of instrumental educational outcomes (sauce et al., 2022; marsh et al., 2021; ellison & evans, 2016). though welcome, this positioning of children’s subject learning, cognition and skills development as central to the value of digital play is at odds with how children’s play has been valued more generally, with due acknowledgment of the diverse and vital purposes it serves. limited attention has been paid to the possible well-being benefits of children’s digital play, the reasons that children engage with it or the broader functions this play fulfils, although covid-era scholarship has more recently drawn some attention to social (cowan et al., 2021) and affective (pearce et al., 2022) benefits. the significant time that children invest in digital game play on and offline poses risks, but also presents an opportunity for stakeholders to make bold decisions that will contribute positively to children’s well-being. this holds implications not only for policymakers but, importantly, for the expansive global digital games industry, a multi-billion dollar sector that has experienced consistent growth for decades.there is, however, a need for empirical research that more comprehensively examines the relationship between children’s digital play and their well-being and, within this, a focus on plurality in children’s digital experiences (alper et al., 2016). regardless of their global ubiquity, specific digital games, devices and platforms must be understood contextually, as placed resources (prinsloo, 2005), given that myriad differences in children’s lives will mediate the relationship between digital games and their design suggested citation (apa): scott, f. (2024, october). how do the diverse drivers of children’s (6-12) digital play mediate the relationship between digital games and children’s subjective well-being? paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. features and any hypothetical well-being outcomes. deep understanding of context necessitates sustained study of the specific factors that play a role in shaping children’s experiences of digital play across different contexts (scott et al., 2023). a complementary approach is to consider what drives the digital play of different children or groups of children. media scholars have previously theorised the reasons that adults (and sometimes children) engage with media in terms of ‘motivations’ (galpin, 2016; katz et al., 1973), though little work has interrogated how the drivers of children’s digital play connect with their experiences of subjective well-being. in researching the ‘drivers’ of children’s digital play, however, we draw on ang (1996) in understanding individuals as always implicated in webs of social, cultural and material relationships and structures, which mediate children’s choices, actions and experiences in relation to digital play. in this paper, i present empirical findings from an international research project (june 2022 to august 2023), delivered in collaboration with a children’s digital play industry partner and a global children’s rights organisation. the ultimate aspiration of the collaboration was to change how digital games are designed, putting children’s well-being at the centre of international policy and game design processes. the study was devised to explore this topic with 50 focus children and their families across four countries, but this paper draws on a subset of the data collected in the uk (120 research visits across 20 uk families). rather than presenting comprehensive findings of the study, which are being reported elsewhere, this paper draws on theories of children’s motivations and play to address the questions: (rq1) what drives the digital play choices and practices of a diverse cohort of children?; and (rq2) how do these findings contribute to understanding the relationship between children’s digital play and their well-being? methods and approach to support the overall aim of examining the relationship between children’s digital play and their well-being, we deployed a multi-method qualitative study in a case study design. a range of methods were chosen to support the development of an expansive understanding of the topic. the theoretical approach was ecoculturally-informed (weisner, 2002), meaning that children’s digital play was studied in relation to the environments and cultural contexts children live within. though detailed research tools were provided, researchers were encouraged to draw on ethnographic approaches (baszanger & dodier, 2004) beyond, and sometimes instead of, the tools provided, sometimes deviating from particular research activities to better reflect what was appropriate in each family context. the study was qualitative longitudinal work (pahl, 2006), with researchers making consecutive visits to families over a period of time. methods included: conversations and semi-structured interviews; ethnographic video observation; family-led data generation and sharing; map-making; ecocultural home tours; and iterative family feedback. participants were selected to ensure diversity across a range of factors, including age, sex and gender, socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity and disability/ non-disability. data were analysed and interpreted collectively, following a deductive-inductive approach, with inductive coding following a framework designed for the project. analysis summaries were produced and discussed between researchers. in preparing this paper, i drew across the inductive codes and analysis summaries, focusing on the findings most relevant to the rqs outlined above. findings and conclusions the study provided many examples of digital play supporting various dimensions of children’s subjective well-being, including their perceptions of autonomy and competence, feelings about identities, sense of purpose, emotional awareness and regulation, awareness of others, positive affective state and relationships with others. however, this relationship looked different for different children. children’s digital play choices and practices were influenced by diverse and often intersecting factors. these included specific family dynamics, practices and cultures, neurodiversity, physical differences or disabilities, a range of emotional and learning needs and dynamics between different environments. most compellingly, children’s digital play choices and practices were associated with different deep interests, desires and needs, understood in the present study as ‘digital play drivers’. eleven distinct ‘digital play drivers’ were identified, including: the drive to collect, curate and classify’; the drive to master challenges, including strategic challenges and puzzles; the drive to experience, explore and negotiate togetherness; the drive to empathise, tend and nurture; the drive to understand, and meet, one’s own emotional needs and so on. fulfilment of these drivers appeared to support children’s subjective well-being. these drivers were situated within diverse and dynamic family ecologies and intersected with other influential factors. in some cases, there were clear connections between digital play drivers and life experiences and factors. however, it is ultimately not possible to fully answer why children are driven by particular deep interests, desires and needs at different points in their lives. the findings offer an empirically grounded expansion of past ‘needs’ based approaches. the 11 ‘digital play drivers’ relate specifically to the contemporary digital play choices and practices of children aged 6-12. the findings foreground the mediating role played by digital play drivers in the relationship between digital games and children’s subjective well-being. an important implication that we are currently exploring in our collaboration with children’s digital game industry and child’s rights organisation: no single digital game or play experience can support all aspects of all children’s well-being. design features which may be supportive of well-being for one child may not for another. rather, the production of multiple and diverse digital games and play experiences should be encouraged, with the 11 ‘digital play drivers’ in mind. references alper, m., katz, v. s. and clark, l. s. (2016) researching children, intersectionality, and diversity in the digital age. journal of children and media, 10 (1), 107–114. ang, i. (2006). living room wars: rethinking media audiences . routledge. baszanger & dodier (2004). ethnography: relating part to whole. in: d. silverman (ed.) qualitative research: theory, method and practice (second edition). sage, pp. 9-34. broadhead, p. (2003). early years play and learning: developing social skills and cooperation . routledge. cowan, k., potter, j., olusoga, y., bannister, c., bishop, j. c., cannon, m., and signorelli, v. (2021). children’s digital play during the covid-19 pandemic: insights from the play observatory. je-lks: journal of e-learning and knowledge society, 17 (3), 8-17. ellison, t. l., and evans, j. n. (2016). "minecraft", teachers, parents and learning: what they need to know and understand. school community journal, 26 (2), 25-43. galpin, a. (2016). towards a theoretical framework for understanding the development of media-related needs. journal of children and media, 10 (3), 385-391. katz e., blumler j. g., gurevitch m. (1973). uses and gratifications research. the public opinion quarterly, 37 (4), 509–523. livingstone, s., & pothong, k. (2022). beyond screen time: rethinking children's play in a digital world. journal of health visiting, 10 (1), 32-38. marsh j., lahmar j., plowman l., yamada-rice d., bishop j., scott f. (2021). under threes’ play with tablets. journal of early childhood research, 19 (3), 283–297. pahl, k. (2007). timescales and ethnography: understanding a child's meaning-making across three sites, a home, a classroom and a family literacy class. ethnography and education, 2 (2), 175-190. pearce, k. e., yip, j. c., lee, j. h., martinez, j. j., windleharth, t. w., bhattacharya, a., and li, q. (2022). families playing animal crossing together: coping with video games during the covid-19 pandemic. games and culture, 17 (5), 773-794. prinsloo, m. (2005). the new literacies as placed resources: research: information and communication technologies. perspectives in education, 23 (1), 87-98. rao, z., and gibson, j. (2019). the role of pretend play in supporting young children’s emotional development. in: d. whitebread, v. grau, k. kumpulainen, m. mcclelland, n. perry and d. pino-pasternak (eds.) (2019). the sage handbook of developmental psychology and early childhood education , pp. 63-79. sauce, b., liebherr, m., judd, n., and klingberg, t. (2022). the impact of digital media on children’s intelligence while controlling for genetic differences in cognition and socioeconomic background. scientific reports, 12 (1), 7720. scott, f., marsh, j., murris, k., ng’ambi, d., thomsen, b. s., bannister, c., bishop, j., dixon, k., giorza, t., hetherington, a., lawrence, c., nutbrown, b., parry, b., peers, j. and scholey, e. (2023). an ecological perspective on children’s play with digital technologies in south africa and the united kingdom. international journal of play, 12 (3), 349-374. singer, d. g., golinkoff, r. m. and hirsh-pasek, k. (eds.) (2006). play = learning: how play motivates and enhances children's cognitive and social-emotional growth . oxford university press. weisner, t. s. (2002). ecocultural understanding of children's developmental pathways. human development, 45 (4), 275-281. winther-lindqvist, d. (2009). game playing: negotiating rules and identities. american journal of play, 2 (1), 60-84. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): reynolds, c. and hallinan, b. (2023, october). “youtube doesn’t care about creators”: how youtubers use the platform to promote accountability. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “youtube doesn’t care about creators”: how youtubers use the platform to promote accountability cj reynolds the hebrew university of jerusalem blake hallinan the hebrew university of jerusalem for platforms, moderation is, as tarleton gillespie argues, “essential, constitutional, definitional” (2018, p. 21). from removing copyrighted materials to targeting advertisements, from verifying accounts to creating revenue-sharing agreements, platforms make all kinds of decisions that set the conditions for who or what gets seen. but while platforms do extensive work regulating visibility on their sites, such moderation “must be largely disavowed, hidden” (ibid.). unsatisfied with the blackboxing of algorithmic governance (katzenbach and ulbricht, 2019) and platform governance on youtube more generally (tarvin and stanfill, 2022), creators have begun to seek accountability through other means, deploying their skills, audiences, and situated knowledge to investigate the platform’s operations. this paper examines a phenomenon we term user-generated accountability, or the use of publicity via content creation to reveal failures, oversights, or harmful policies on a platform. user-generated accountability is meant simultaneously to derive support from creators and audiences and to pressure the platform to acknowledge and remedy issues. because creators are structurally incentivized to both care about and contest platform governance (caplan and gillespie, 2020; devos et al., 2022; zeng and kaye, 2022), creator perspectives and practices offer insight into the conditions of platformized cultural production and reveal novel political strategies. furthermore, prior research has established that youtubers actively engage with platform governance issues through content production, although studies tend to focus on specific issues such as copyright enforcement (kaye and gray, 2021) and demonetization (caplan and gillespie, 2020), or specific communities such as beauty vloggers (bishop, 2019) and breadtube (cotter, 2022). building on and broadening this work, we investigate youtubers’ calls for accountability on the platform, asking the following questions: rq1: what forms do calls for accountability on youtube take? rq2: what actors do youtubers target when calling for accountability? rq3: what topics or concerns do these calls address? method to answer these questions, we analyzed videos featuring issues of platform accountability. in order to ensure our dataset featured diverse topics, concerns, and creators, we employed multiple sampling strategies. we started by creating “video networks” through youtube data tools (rieder, 2015), using a prominent trilogy of videos about a user-driven algorithmic audit of demonetization as the seeds (devos et al., 2022). we collected 94 videos from these networks and then ran 21 keyword searches using the “video list” function of youtube data tools to collect an additional 1050 videos. we also manually supplemented the list, adding 185 videos to create a dataset of 1329 videos. after cleaning the data for duplicates and non-applicable videos, we had a corpus of n = 429 videos. to analyze the videos, we coded the format of the video, its stance toward youtube, the targets of accountability, and the issues it raises. following modified principles of the grounded theory approach (kelle, 2007), which uses existing theoretical concerns to inform an inductive examination of the data, we developed the codebook starting from issues raised in prior research (eslami et al., 2019; haimson et al. 2021; kingsley et al., 2022). after randomizing our corpus, we coded and engaged in constant comparison until both authors agreed that theoretical saturation had been reached at n = 250 videos. there are 172 unique channels represented in this sample. findings vlogs were by far the most popular format for accountability-focused videos, representing 165 cases or 66% of our sample. scripted videos, such as video essays, were a distant second with 50 instances (20%), followed by conversation-style videos including podcasts and talk shows with 18 examples (7.2%). 14 videos in our sample were experiments meant to test the youtube algorithm (5.6%), and only three videos fell outside these categories (1.2%). the overall stance towards youtube in our data set was notably varied. we expected callout videos aiming for accountability to be overwhelmingly negative towards youtube. indeed, negative was the largest category (83 cases or 33.2%), but mixed, indicating both critique of and defenses of youtube, appeared 73 times (29.2%). 58 videos took a neutral/undetermined stance towards youtube (23.2%), while 36 videos primarily defended the platform (14.4%). our accountability target codes (excepting the not applicable code) were non-exclusive. “youtube” was cited the most often in videos that invoked at least one target of accountability, appearing in 141 videos (70.85%) from this subset. with all the talk of “the algorithm” among creators and scholars, automation was the second-most invoked actor (55 cases, 27.64%). surprisingly, “self” was next with 46 cases (23.12%). indeed, placing blame directly on human actors was frequent in our data set, with other creators (31 cases or 15.58%), youtube employees (27 cases or 13.57%), and youtube ceo susan wojcicki (21 cases or 10.55%) easily surpassing targeting of automated systems when combined (79 cases, or 39.7% of accountability invocations). only two other groups appeared more than 10 times in our sample, with audiences invoked 21 times (10.55%) and predators—those who exploit children or animals— targeted with considerable vitriol in 11 videos (5.53%), in line with previous research (tarvin and stanfill, 2022). we coded for 16 non-exclusive content elements within videos that identified specific complaints or problems with youtube. complaints about youtube policies appeared in over half our sample, 126 videos. also prominent was anger about lack of communication (74 cases) and perceived bias against certain demographics of creators (72 cases) or types of content (67 cases). censorship was claimed in 55 videos, and issues with youtube features (45 cases), the corporation’s cultural disconnect with creators (32 cases), and the frustrating process for filing appeals (27 cases) all appeared in more than 10% of our sample. conclusion user-generated accountability videos create a significant sense of solidarity between creators on youtube, with many creators lending their voices to signal boost issues raised by others. in one video, 25 other youtubers appeared on camera to back the grievances of creator mamamax, whose video criticizing child predators had been removed by the platform. this is community building by both choice and necessity, as most creators expressed they felt they could not leave youtube; no other platform offered them the reach that youtube did, nor could they easily move their audiences elsewhere. feeling trapped on youtube led to significantly increased frustrations regarding the platform’s perceived lack of communication with its creators, to the extent that many reiterated the need to take to twitter to force youtube to respond to their appeals or policy disputes. if still unheeded, they did what they do best—make videos about the issue. creators also highlighted how the lack of transparency about youtube’s systems—algorithmic and human—contributed significantly to stress and burnout, even leading some to consider quitting content creation altogether. youtube is a platform uniquely suited to user-generated accountability, as the entire structure of the site revolves around generating mass publicity and visibility. at the same time, however, all of youtube’s problems are problems at scale due to their 2.6 billion monthly users. an issue that affects just 1% of the platform may not draw major corporate attention even as it plagues 26 million people. thus, publicizing problems with the platform in a way that draws attention from audiences, news media, and other creators represents one of the most important ways youtube’s creators can participate in platform governance. references bishop s (2019) managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip. new media & society 21(11–12): 2589–2606. doi: 10.1177/1461444819854731. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819854731 caplan r and gillespie t (2020) tiered governance and demonetization: the shifting terms of labor and compensation in the platform economy. social media + society 6(2): 205630512093663. doi: 10.1177/2056305120936636. cotter k (2022) practical knowledge of algorithms: the case of breadtube. new media & society. doi: 10.1177/14614448221081802. devos a, dhabalia a, shen h, et al. (2022) toward user-driven algorithm auditing: investigating users’ strategies for uncovering harmful algorithmic behavior. in: chi conference on human factors in computing systems, new orleans la usa, 29 april 2022, pp. 1–19. acm. doi: 10.1145/3491102.3517441. eslami m, vaccaro k, lee mk, et al. (2019) user attitudes towards algorithmic opacity and transparency in online reviewing platforms. in: proceedings of the 2019 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, glasgow scotland uk, 2 may 2019, pp. 1–14. acm. doi: 10.1145/3290605.3300724. gillespie t (2018) custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. new haven: yale university press. haimson ol, delmonaco d, nie p, et al. (2021) disproportionate removals and differing content moderation experiences for conservative, transgender, and black social media users: marginalization and moderation gray areas. proceedings of the acm on humancomputer interaction 5(cscw2): 1–35. doi: 10.1145/3479610. katzenbach c and ulbricht l (2019) algorithmic governance. internet policy review 8(4). doi: 10.14763/2019.4.1424. kaye dbv and gray je (2021) copyright gossip: exploring copyright opinions, theories, and strategies on youtube. social media + society 7(3): 205630512110369. doi: 10.1177/20563051211036940. kelle u (2007) the development of categories: different approaches in grounded theory. in: charmaz k (ed.) the sage handbook of grounded theory. london: sage, pp. 191–213. kingsley s, sinha p, wang c, et al. (2022) ‘give everybody [..] a little bit more equity’: content creator perspectives and responses to the algorithmic demonetization of content associated with disadvantaged groups. proceedings of the acm on humancomputer interaction 6(cscw2): 1–37. doi: 10.1145/3555149. rieder b, (2015) youtube data tools (version 1.30) [software]. available from https://tools.digitalmethods.net/netvizz/youtube/ tarvin e and stanfill m (2022) “youtube’s predator problem”: platform moderation as governance-washing, and user resistance. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies 28(3): 822–837. doi: 10.1177/13548565211066490. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120936636 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221081802 https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517441 https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300724 https://doi.org/10.1145/3479610 https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.4.1424 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211036940 https://doi.org/10.1145/3555149 https://tools.digitalmethods.net/netvizz/youtube/ zeng j and kaye dbv (2022) from content moderation to visibility moderation: a case study of platform governance on tiktok. policy & internet 14(1): 79–95. doi: 10.1002/poi3.287. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.287 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): horne, c. (2024, october). a game of privacy tug of war: a historical analysis of privacy settings. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. a game of privacy tug of war: a historical analysis of privacy settings chelsea l. horne american university introduction the battle over privacy on social media platforms is a game of tug of war: a series of give and take with shifting landscapes of digital privacy. at the heart of this longstanding, ongoing privacy “game” are privacy settings, a key lever of power at the intersection of platforms, users, and regulation (horne, 2023a). a now notorious example of this back and forth on privacy comes from the early days of facebook. in 2008, facebook deployed privacy settings that set user information to private by default (kirkpatrick, 2010), indicating that privacy was central for facebook and the main place where privacy was controlled and enacted was via user privacy settings. then in 2010, facebook made an abrupt transition on privacy when the platform switched user privacy settings to instead be public by default. facebook ceo and founder mark zuckerberg explained the company’s decision by stating that privacy was no longer a social norm (kirkpatrick, 2010). privacy settings were the conduit of the back and forth, the push and pull, over user privacy on social media platforms. privacy settings are a critical mechanism for platforms to manage, control, and impact user privacy online. the policies of social media platforms and their technical design— including the choice architecture of privacy settings—"serve as a form of privatized governance directly enacting rights and regulating the flow of information online (denardis & hackl, 2015). many platforms use a rhetoric of “choice and control,” relying on privacy settings to shoulder the burden of responsibility for user privacy (horne, 2021). another challenge to privacy on social media platforms is that there is a wide disparity of settings choices across different platforms, with varying defaults (horne, 2023b). additionally, the interconnection and the technical importance of privacy settings has a clear and well-established history. this paper examines this history via a historical analysis of meta’s changes to privacy settings. the analysis focuses on meta as it is one of the oldest and largest of social media platforms; it also hosts a comprehensive archive of news articles, which tracks critical updates to meta products. the study seeks to determine what privacy settings changes meta has made, when the changes were announced, as well as analyze how these changes were framed in news articles. methodology this study is interested in how meta has changed its approaches to privacy via its privacy settings over the years. meta archives public-facing press releases and news articles on its meta newsroom website, which features search and filter functions. the research questions for this study are : when, how, and why did meta make changes to its privacy settings? and how does meta shape the narrative around privacy settings? as this study is interested in studying both settings changes over time as well as how meta shapes understandings of privacy through these changes, the dataset consisted of all meta newsroom articles from the data and privacy topic from the beginning to present: the complete dataset consists of 264 meta newsroom articles. the analysis is comprised of two main parts. first, i developed a focused timeline of critical privacy inflection points encompassing the past twenty years in order to overlay these key moments to any settings changes to consider potential connections with exogenous factors. secondly, the meta newsroom articles were coded for the following elements: date, meta tags, update or new initiative, addition/change/removal, proactive or reactive, dark pattern attribute, and user benefit frame. findings/discussion the study’s findings offer insights into the role and deployment of facebook/meta privacy settings over time. this paper offers a historical and conceptual framework to understand the strategic approaches of facebook—and later, meta—as it adapts to shifting cultural processes, legal regulation, societal norms, and other factors. the paper offers a comprehensive analysis of the history of facebook/meta privacy settings, considering them through multiple perspectives: historical changes, article purpose, meta news topic, settings language, type of settings change, and user benefit frame. one finding is that a proportionally significant number meta newsroom articles on data and privacy address privacy settings, indicating that privacy settings are indeed an important part of the platform’s privacy discourse. further, within the scope of the dataset, there have been fifty-seven changes to privacy settings, with the majority of these changes occurring post-2018—after the cambridge analytica scandal and the “techlash.” this study offers insight into how meta engages with privacy through changes to privacy settings over the years as well as an analysis into the frames deployed to explain these updates. in the literature on privacy settings, previous studies have considered when and how users change settings, examined the effectiveness of particular settings, and also analyzed privacy settings for deceptive or manipulative tactics (boyd & hargittai, 2010; mathur et al., 2021; shah & sandvig, 2008; svirsky, 2019). building on this scholarship, this paper tracks meta’s historical reliance on privacy settings during pivotal moments. repeatedly over the years, meta would develop new privacy settings or update existing privacy settings in both reactive and proactive framing functions. that is to say, that settings changes were deployed as a way of responding to regulatory and/or normative privacy issues. in addition, meta made changes to privacy settings as a way to demonstrate responsible harm mitigation efforts to protect its users and stay at the forefront of privacy protection. meta has often deployed changes to privacy settings to solve existing problems in the settings (such as concerns about complicated navigation or deceptive design) or deployed changes to address emerging privacy concerns (such as implementing stronger defaults for teen users). the paper’s findings reinforce that privacy settings are one of the most important tools in the privacy landscape and a critical lever of power. in other words, privacy settings feature strongly in the tug of war over online privacy. references boyd, danah, & hargittai, e. (2010). facebook privacy settings: who cares? first monday. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v15i8.3086 denardis, l., & hackl, a. m. (2015). internet governance by social media platforms. telecommunications policy, 39(9), 761–770. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.telpol.2015.04.003 horne, c. (2021). choice and control: an analysis of privacy values and privacy controls. aoir selected papers of internet research. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2021i0.11944 horne, c. l. (2023a). in settings we trust: the privacy battle for choice and control. 217. https://doi.org/10.57912/25229699 horne, c. l. (2023b). rule by default: a cross-platform analysis of privacy settings. aoir selected papers of internet research. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2022i0.13022 kirkpatrick, marshall. (2010, january 9). facebook’s zuckerberg says the age of privacy is over. readwrite. https://readwrite.com/facebooks_zuckerberg_says_the_age_of_privacy_is_ov/ mathur, a., mayer, j., & kshirsagar, m. (2021). what makes a dark pattern... dark? design attributes, normative considerations, and measurement methods. proceedings of the 2021 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445610 shah, r. c., & sandvig, c. (2008). software defaults as de facto regulation the case of the wireless internet. information, communication & society, 11(1), 25–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691180701858836 svirsky, d. (2019). why do people avoid information about privacy? journal of law & innovation, 2(1). selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 pybus, j.; svendsen, k. s.; lai, s.s.; lomborg, s. (2024, october). auditing the closed ios ecosystem: is there potential for large language model app inspections?. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. auditing the closed ios ecosystem: is there potential for large language model app inspection jennifer pybus york university kristian sick svendsen university of copenhagen signe sophus lai university of copenhagen stine lomborg university of copenhagen scholarly attention is increasingly paid to the dynamic and embedded ways in which third party tracking has become widespread in the mobile ecosystem. much of this research has focused almost exclusively on android and google play applications and their respective infrastructures of data capture, even though apple and their app store have a significant market share, with nearly 30 percent in europe and 54 percent in the us (sellers, 2024; statista, 2023). one of the main reasons for this scholarly imbalance has to do with key differences between these two ecosystems, namely that google’s is open and accessible while apple’s is closed-off and encrypted, making it challenging, if not illegal to adequately inspect its apps. moreover, few open access tools or databases like exodus privacy for android apps, are available to make it easier for interested interlocutors or academics to inspect its applications. how then to ensure any kind of regulatory accountability if apple’s infrastructure lacks observability, outside the promises made about its new privacy preserving operating system? we see an active need to better account for the ways in which this ecosystem accesses, shares and uses end-user information, increasing capacity for greater external oversight to ensure compliance with data protection legislation. as such, platform governance debates, particularly those that extend to the infrastructures of data capture within our applications should not only apply to google. our paper therefore seeks to address this gap through a methodological exploration that uses 2 chatgpt-4’s to decompile and open-up the ipa files of +1000 apps. on this basis, we assess its usability as an adequate approach to examine two key mobile applications infrastructures: i) the plist file, which details how end-user data is accessed and used by the app and ii) the software developments kits (sdks) or third-party platforms and companies that developers use to both build and develop apps. within app studies, the infrastructure that facilitates access to end-user data stems from the multi-situated (dieter et al., 2019) and dynamic ways in which developers embed software from both platforms and third parties to build and monetize their applications (blanke and pybus, 2020). one of the primary ways in which these services are integrated is through sdks. these third parties constitute practical technical objects that offer a range of complex services such as ready-made tools, code, libraries, and tutorials from either platforms and/or third parties. in addition, sdks provide and encase apis so that their services can be easily accessed and integrated into apps (gontovinkas, 2020). for this reason, they take on a modular quality, wherein developers are free to pick and choose what they want to use (pybus and coté, 2024). however, given that these infrastructures belong almost uniquely to platforms, their opaque encased architectures raise a number of privacy and accountability questions, especially regarding what data gets accessed and shared, and with whom. scholarship on the relationship between apps and third parties tend to position the third parties as fundamental agents of surveillance (zuboff, 2019), data (west, 2019), or platform (srnicek, 2017) capitalism, playing a pivotal role in the monetization of enduser data. datafication scholarship works alongside these insights and draws attention to the infrastructural agents that facilitate complex end-user data extraction for new kinds of value from a range of different actors (flensburg and lomborg, 2023; blanke and pybus, 2020; flensburg and lai, 2022). in this way, it draws our attention to the non-rivalrous quality of data, which enables its continuous (un)coupling, (re)use, and seamless integration into a constellation of different arrangements to maximise its value and exchange. we therefore see the infrastructures of apps, both the sdks and the data governance policies manifest files in android or plist files in apple as fundamental objects of study, given the way they amplify datafication, serving to (re)produce a data-for-service logic that underscores the app economy. to examine apple’s ecosystem, we have first drawn on the open-source tools developed by kollnig and his team (2021) to access ipa files and then to overcome the challenge of opening and inspecting, we have explored the role that a large language model (llm) can play in enabling this process? we have opted to use chat gpt-4 because of how it has been designed to assist humans in both interacting and understanding code. it has therefore been programmed to both simplify complexity and be able to provide documentation and commentary on existing codebases. we therefore ask: can chat-gpt assist scholars interested in apple’s mobile ecosystem through the auditing of ipa files? to answer this question, we compare findings from the automated analysis with manually crafted dataset of sdks derived from an erc-funded project, in which we have mapped infrastructures of tracking and mobile datafication across android and ios platforms to gauge the infrastructural dependence on tech companies as peoples’ 3 ordinary lives are increasingly orchestrated with the phone (anonymized for review). as part of the project, we have collected a dataset of 1000+ apps, and inspected these for embedded permissions for accessing data via the app as well as identified the sdks of each app. the outcomes of the explorative study include 1) an evaluation of chat-gpt4 as an assistant for reading code at scale as well as its potential for automating processes involved in future app monitoring and regulation; 2) a deep dive into the shortcomings of chat-gpt4 when it comes to interventions into the mobile ecosystems; and 3) a discussion of ethical issues involved in harnessing llm for forwarding a research agenda around apple’s otherwise understudied ecosystem. our exploration aims to evaluate a methodological intervention that could bring more observability into an otherwise closed-ecosystem that promises the preservation of end-user privacy, without any meaningful external oversight. references blanke, tobias, and jennifer pybus. ‘the material conditions of platforms monopolisation through decentralisation’. social media + society, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120971632. dieter, michael, carolin gerlitz, anne helmond, nathaniel tkacz, fernando n. van der vlist, and esther weltevrede. ‘multi-situated app studies: methods and propositions’. social media + society 5, no. 2 (1 april 2019): 2056305119846486. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119846486. flensburg, sofie, and signe s. lai. ‘datafied mobile markets: measuring control over apps, data accesses, and third-party services’. mobile media & communication 10, no. 1 (1 january 2022): 136–55. https://doi.org/10.1177/20501579211039066. flensburg, sofie, and signe sophus lai. ‘networks of power. analysing the evolution of the danish internet infrastructure’. internet histories 5, no. 2 (2020): 79–100. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2020.1759010. gontovnikas, martin. ‘what is an sdk?’ auth0, 23 december 2020. https://auth0.com/blog/what-is-an-sdk/. kollnig, konrad, anastasia shuba, reuben binns, max van kleek, nigel shadbolt, and : de-. ‘are iphones really better for privacy? comparative study of ios and android apps’. proceedings on privacy enhancing technologies ..; .. (, september 2021, 1–19. https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.13722v4. pybus, jennifer, and mark coté. ‘super sdks: tracking personal data and platform monopolies in the mobile’. big data & society 11, no. 1 (1 march 2024): 20539517241231270. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241231270. sellers, dennis. ‘apple registered a record-high q4 market share in europe’s smartphone market’. apple world today, 26 february 2024. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120971632 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120971632 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119846486 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119846486 https://doi.org/10.1177/20501579211039066 https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2020.1759010 https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2020.1759010 https://auth0.com/blog/what-is-an-sdk/ https://auth0.com/blog/what-is-an-sdk/ https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.13722v4 https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.13722v4 https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241231270 https://appleworld.today/apple-registered-a-record-high-q4-market-share-in-europes-smartphone-market/ 4 https://appleworld.today/apple-registered-a-record-high-q4-market-share-in-europessmartphone-market/. srnicek, nick. platform capitalism. john wiley & sons, 2017. https://www.wiley.com/engb/platform+capitalism-p-9781509504862. statista. ‘us mobile smartphone os market share 2012-2023’, 2023. https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held-by-smartphone-platformsin-the-united-states/. west, sarah myers. ‘data capitalism: redefining the logics of surveillance and privacy’. business & society 58, no. 1 (2019): 20–41. zuboff, shoshana. the age of surveillance capitalism : the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. london: profile books ltd, 2019. https://appleworld.today/apple-registered-a-record-high-q4-market-share-in-europes-smartphone-market/ https://appleworld.today/apple-registered-a-record-high-q4-market-share-in-europes-smartphone-market/ https://www.wiley.com/en-gb/platform+capitalism-p-9781509504862 https://www.wiley.com/en-gb/platform+capitalism-p-9781509504862 https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held-by-smartphone-platforms-in-the-united-states/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held-by-smartphone-platforms-in-the-united-states/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held-by-smartphone-platforms-in-the-united-states/ microsoft word zaher-users_ sense of empowerment, communicative behavior, and public engagement-users_ sense of empowerment, .docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): zaher, z., dejmanee, t., weber, k., (2022, november). users’ sense of empowerment, communicative behavior, and public engagement on instagram: an examination of the #blackouttuesday conversations. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. users’ sense of empowerment, communicative behavior, and public engagement on instagram: an examination of the #blackouttuesday conversations zulfia zaher central michigan university tisha dejmanee university of technology sydney kirsten weber central michigan university #blackouttuesday was a digital action devised by brianna agyemang and jamila thomas, two black music executives, in the wake of george floyd’s murder in minneapolis and the subsequent, unprecedently large black lives matter protests. agyemang and thomas presented #blackouttuesday as a day for the music industry to reflect on their systematic exploitation of black artists, however this hashtag went viral due to widespread participation by celebrities, influencers and corporate brands, and was commonly represented through posting a black square on instagram. black lives matter has been the focus of a number of studies. for example, mundt, ross, and burnett’s (2018) study on #blacklivesmatter illustrated that communicative features of social media are beneficial for building connections, mobilizing participants and resources, coalition building, and amplifying alternative narratives. ince, rojas, and davis (2017) examined #blacklivesmatter tweets and found that this hashtag was variously used to: a) express solidarity or approval of the movement, b) refer to police violence, c) mention movement tactics, d) mention ferguson, and e) express countermovement sentiments. we argue that the study of #blackouttuesday instagram posts is a significant contribution to research on black lives matter as 1) they reflect the commentary of a large community of allies who do not fit the main demographic groups of participants in blm conversation previously identified by freelon, mcilwain and clark (2016), and 2) this conversation was centered around instagram, rather than twitter which is often considered the foundational platform of the movement. this study has three main objectives: to test three new independent variables — race, gender, and source — in determining the demonstration of users’ empowerment; to test race, gender, and source to determine users’ communicative behavior on instagram; and, to investigate the connection between source types and user engagement on instagram. significance the results of this study have significance for scholars interested in digital audience behavior, particularly users’ sense of empowerment regarding social platform-centric collective action. furthermore, this study provides empirical evidence for social movement scholars, political communication scholars, and public relations scholars on the impact of gender, race, and source types on online mobilization, as well as users’ communicative behavior related to instagram-based collective action. method we conducted quantitative content analysis to address the research questions. using crowdtangle we collected ten thousand instagram posts containing #blackouttuesday published on june 2, 2020. this study is based on 1250 posts randomly selected from the original sample. to examine the influence of gender and race in relation to sense of empowerment and communicative behavior, we adapted studies by mazid & zaher (2020) and smith et al. (2015) and developed a coding scheme for analysis. we employed a mix of deductive and inductive approaches to identify existing constructs used by previous research and explore unique practices that were not explored before. two coders inductively analyzed 500 instagram posts to develop 24 categories (listed in table 2) that examined the users’ sense of empowerment, communicative behavior, gender, race, message source types, message structure, and emotional tone (positive and negative). to establish intercoder reliability, two trained coders coded 10 percent of the sample. after the two rounds of coding, coders achieved the average reliability of 0.75 on all the variables, as assessed via krippendorf’s alpha. results this study tested eight hypotheses. using a series of chi-square tests, the results revealed that the users’ gender, race, and source types were significantly associated with their sense of empowerment and communicative behavior regarding #blackouttuesday conversation on instagram. this study also investigated the factors that influenced higher engagement. employing a one-way anova, the results showed that source types, particularly celebrities and for-profit and media organizations, generated more likes. we also found that negative emotions created more likes and comments. however, the results did not support the association of post structure with higher engagement (see tables 1 and 2 for more detailed information). table 1. information about hypotheses, variables, statistical tests, and results hypotheses/research questions independent variables dependent variables statistical procedure results h1 gender users’ sense of empowerment chi-square h1 supported (p< .005) h2 race users’ sense of empowerment chi-square h2 supported (p< .005) h3 source types users’ sense of empowerment chi-square h3 supported (p< .005) h4 gender communicative behavior chi-square h4 supported (p< .005) h5 race communicative behavior chi-square h5 supported (p< .005) h6 source types communicative behavior chi-square h6 supported (p< .005) h7 source types number of like and comments one-way anova celebrities and for-profit organizations generated more likes. h8 emotional tone number of like and comments multiple regression negative emotions received more likes and comments (p<.005). table 2: frequency of source, gender, race, sense of empowerment, communicative behavior, and post structure variables frequency percentage source celebrity 646 51.7 black entertainers 120 9.6 government/politician 3 .2 profit organization 345 27.6 activist/non-profit 38 3.0 blm enthusiast 64 5.1 other 34 2.7 sense of empowerment enactive attainment 75 6.0 vicarious experience 240 19.2 autonomy 799 63.9 other 136 10.9 communicative behavior solidarity 551 44.1 self-promotion 72 5.8 social criticism 141 11.3 offering a solution 45 3.6 call to action 303 24.2 educational 75 6.0 inspirational 63 5.0 post structure text+album 143 11.4 text+image 1040 83.2 infographics 25 2.0 text+video 42 3.4 gender female 486 38.9 male 288 23.0 non-binary 7 .6 organization 469 37.5 race self-identified as black 179 14.3 other 1071 85.7 conclusion preliminary findings reveal that source types and emotional valence, mostly negative emotional tone, are significantly associated with higher engagement (e.g., number of likes and comments) on instagram. these preliminary findings will be interpreted in relation to platform (notably, the positivity bias generally associated with instagram), the personalization of political expression encouraged by ‘connective action’ movements such as black lives matter (jackson et al., 2020; bennett & segerberg, 2013), and the relationship between #blackouttuesday – widely circulated by influencers and celebrities, and subject to controversy for its ‘performative activism’ – to the black lives matter movement. further, future studies need to look into the diffusion of social movement posts on instagram to investigate the engagement. this topic relates to the conference theme by focusing on the ways in which users engage in racial justice discourse and movements through social media. references bennett, l., & segerberg, a., (2013). the logic of connective action: digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. cambridge university press. freelon, d., mcilwain, c. d., & clark, m. d. (2016). beyond the hashtags: #ferguson, #blacklivesmatter, and the online struggle for offline justice. centre for media and social impact. ince, j., rojas, f., & davis, c. a. (2017). the social media response to black lives matter: how twitter users interact with black lives matter through hashtag use. ethnic and racial studies, 40(11), 1814-1830. jackson, s. j., bailey, m., & welles, b. f. (2020). # hashtagactivism: networks of race and gender justice. mit press. mazid, i., & zaher, z. (2020). twitter users’ sense of empowerment and communicative behavior: an examination of the #burkini conversations on twitter. ohio communication journal, 58, 40-52. mundt, m., ross, k., & burnett, c. m. (2018). scaling social movements through social media: the case of black lives matter. social media+ society, 4(4), 2056305118807911. smith, b. g., men, r. l., & al-sinan, r. (2015). tweeting taksim communication power and social media advocacy in the taksim square protests. computers in human behavior, 50, 499-507. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation: casteel, d. (2024, october). boycott wokeness, shop like a patriot: a discursive analysis of conservative mlm promotion on instagram. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. boycott wokeness, shop like a patriot: a discursive analysis of conservative mlm promotion on instagram diana casteel university of illinois at chicago introduction female conservative political influencers are an obscure but growing force within american politics, embedding distrust in healthcare, government, and education institutions. exploiting the inadequacies in these systems, these women profit off the fears they cultivate through conspiratorial narratives such as the government poisoning food and indoctrinating children to encourage their instagram audience to learn how to homestead through their content and boycott “woke” corporations by purchasing their household supplies through patriot wellness boxes and other mlms. many of these women have risen from obscurity to internet fame and now attend events with prominent gop figures, including former president donald trump and his family. american conservative women and mlms are happy bedfellows as they both have historically utilized gender tropes to advance their interests. for nearly a century, conservative women have leveraged racial and gendered logics to advance patriarchal white supremacist policies and evade accountability for doing so (calahane, 2022; matfess & margolin, 2022; nickerson, 2012). the origins of mlms are not rooted in political ideology but have primarily targeted heterosexual cis-gendered women through postfeminist neoliberal rhetoric that promises them empowerment and the ability to supplement their husband’s income while not challenging his masculinity and the ability to stay home with their children (pearce, 2024; wrenn & waller, 2021). mlms have long been subject to scrutiny from the public and policymakers, especially during the pandemic, as wellness influencers selling mlm products such as essential oils became purveyors of anti-vaccination conspiracy theories (baker, 2022; mastrangelo & longo, 2024). the genesis of conservative mlms such as patriot wellness box is unclear due to the lack of transparent business practices that purposefully obfuscate who owns or runs the company. to view products, one must contact a direct seller, who typically does not include the company name in promotional posts. a substantial number of these conservative-based mlms appear to have opened within the last three years, and all promise consumers american-made products and a way to live their values. conceptual framework using abidin’s (2021) framework of refracted publics and cotter’s (2019) concept of “playing the visibility game,” this study seeks to understand the ways that vaguely coded conservative mlms such as patriot wellness box enable conservative female influencers to circumvent algorithms and sentiment seed more radical conspiracies within lifestyle content. as an extension of networked publics, refracted publics do not seek maximal visibility and instead are characterized by the conditions of transience or ephemerality, discoverability (not easily searched), decodability (coded language), and silosociality (communal context) (abidin, 2021). like their mainstream counterparts, conservative influencers’ success depends on their ability to cultivate a large following and adapt to constantly changing algorithms to maintain visibility (abidin, 2015; cotter, 2019; duffy & hund, 2015). however, given that much of their discourse is conspiratorial and contested (e.g., anti-vaccination, joe biden works with big tech to censor conservatives), it has a higher likelihood of being moderated or deleted. thus, their tactics for negotiating visibility are inherently more complex. these frameworks enable deeper exploration into the relational nature of this form of affective algorithmic play. method using qualitative inquiry, i began analyzing the discourses of female conservative influencers tied to various conservative mlms in a practice akin to the ethnographic concept of “deep hanging out” (geertz, 1998). while this mode of inquiry is less systematic, it allows researchers to silently observe and familiarize themselves with the norms and practices of groups (marwick & partin, 2022). in concert with a larger research project, i have spent a couple of years in this space and have observed the shifts in discourse and audiences as they joined new mlms. through this immersion, i developed an actor-based approach and identified 20 female conservative media influencers on instagram. they all had a public account, promoted conservative politics with radical discursive themes, had between 10,000-1 million followers, and were affiliated with one or more mlm businesses. these accounts were selected as micro and macro-influencers who may be more persuasive than their megainfluencer counterparts as they can cultivate a more authentic persona (campbell & farrell, 2020), and their political endorsements are less likely to seem financially motivated (goodwin et al., 2020). these accounts are not statistically representative of this group; however, they were chosen to represent central issues within the conservative media ecosystem, such as media bias, covid-19 vaccines, home schooling, culture wars, belief in democratic conspiracy theories, reproductive rights, and gun control. data from instagram profiles was computationally and manually collected. the dataset includes a large corpus of visuals, videos, and text. i also spent time experiencing each account as a user would by scrolling through content and taking detailed notes of stories, posts, and connections between influencers. guided by the principles of discourse analysis, the corpus was read thoroughly and then reread several times, and notes were taken to identify overall themes and strategies in connection with the framework of refracted publics and playing the invisibility game. preliminary findings while mainstream influencers often build their audiences through collaboration, these female conservative influencers who teeter between mainstream conservative politics and the far-right utilize ideological mlms in various ways that merit greater attention. first, their self-amplification groups operate simultaneously to grow their audiences and obscure their connections to the far right and one another. as these women climb to the top of the patriotic pyramid schemes, they often hide their connections to qanon and far-right influencers and use more coded language to hint to their older followers that they have not sold out. they offer mlms as a way to resolve the disenfranchisement their followers feel in a capitalist system that does not reward them for working hard and trying to fit within the narrow but cushioned box of white womanhood that is allocated in the white supremacist patriarchy. but freedom is not found in subscription boxes, nor are the skills to homestead. second, the mlms are discussed in ways that mirror sovereign citizen/white militia rhetoric that positions the government as an existential threat they must be prepared to fight. part of that preparation includes withdrawing from public schools and boycotting major corporations rather than forming militias (at least for now). they are promoting anti-democratic messages, xenophobia, and authoritarian-esque sentiments under the guise of a conservative lifestyle achievable through mlm participation. the more significant impact is not on supposedly woke corporations’ bottom line but in spreading widespread distrust and fear that institutions meant to serve public interest are actually tied to a government conspiracy to harm all americans, not just conservatives. as the 2024 presidential election looms large, we must analyze the ways that trust in government and public institutions is being undermined through neoliberal conservative mlms one subscription box ad at a time. references abidin, c. (2021). from “networked publics” to “refracted publics”: a companion framework for researching “below the radar” studies. social media + society, 7(1), 205630512098445. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120984458 baker, s. a. (2022). alt. health influencers: how wellness culture and web culture have been weaponised to promote conspiracy theories and far-right extremism during the covid-19 pandemic. european journal of cultural studies, 25(1), 3–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494211062623 calahane, k. (2022). the general and her soldiers: how phyllis schlafly and eagle forum mobilized the conservative movement [ph.d., uc, irvine]. https://www.proquest.com/docview/2691499202/abstract/466ae57508404233pq /1 campbell, c., & farrell, j. r. (2020). more than meets the eye: the functional components underlying influencer marketing. business horizons, 63(4), 469– 479. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2020.03.003 cotter, k. (2019). playing the visibility game: how digital influencers and algorithms negotiate influence on instagram. new media & society, 21(4), 895–913. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818815684 geertz, c. (1998, october 22). deep hanging out. the new york review of books. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1998/10/22/deep-hanging-out/ goodwin, a.m., joseff, k., & woolley, s. c. (2020, october). social media influencers and the 2020 u.s. election: paying ‘regular people’ for digital campaign communication. center for media engagement. https://mediaengagement.org/research/social-media-influencers-and-the-2020election marwick, a. e., & partin, w. c. (2022). constructing alternative facts: populist expertise and the qanon conspiracy. new media & society, 146144482210902. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221090201 mastrangelo, f., & longo, g. m. (2024). downlining disinformation: how mlm distributors use gendered strategies for recruitment and pastel qanon indoctrination. social media + society, 10(1), 20563051231224735. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231224735 matfess, h., & margolin, d. (2022). the women of january 6th: a gendered analysis of the 21st century american far-right. program on extremism (report), the george washington university. nickerson, m. m. (2012). mothers of conservatism women and the postwar right. princeton university press. pearce, j. (2024). achieving motherhood: a qualitative analysis of mlm success stories online. feminist media studies, 24(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2023.2172056 wrenn, m. v., & waller, w. (2021). boss babes and predatory optimism: neoliberalism, multi-level marketing schemes, and gender. journal of economic issues, 55(2), 423–431. https://doi.org/10.1080/00213624.2021.1908805 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): odermatt, c., kappeler, k., festic, n. & latzer, m. (2024, october). temporal dynamics of chilling effects of dataveillance: empirical findings from a longitudinal field experiment. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. temporal dynamics of chilling effects of dataveillance: empirical findings from a longitudinal field experiment céline odermatt university of zurich kiran kappeler university of zurich noemi festic university of zurich michael latzer university of zurich introduction everyday internet use generates vast amounts of data enabling a specific form of surveillance of individuals, i.e., digital dataveillance: “the automated, continuous, and unspecific collection, retention, and analysis of digital traces by state and corporate actors” (büchi et al., 2022, p. 1). individuals can experience a sense of dataveillance, i.e., feeling watched or listened to, due to triggers like news reports about dataveillance (odermatt et al., under review). a possible consequence to this is a self-inhibition of individuals’ legitimate digital communication behavior, including searching for (sensitive) information, voicing their opinion, and disclosing personal information online (büchi et al., 2022). this phenomenon is known as the chilling effect of dataveillance. empirical research on chilling effects is sparse. studies in switzerland relying on self-reports reveal that a majority of the population has experienced chilling effects (latzer et al., 2023). because chilling effects are theorized to be long-term and subtle (büchi et al., 2022) studies should look beyond their prevalence and consider the temporal dynamics of individuals’ perception of dataveillance and the resulting behavioral changes to deepen the understanding of consequences of the repeated exposure to dataveillance. such repeated exposure over time is expected to cause an increase in a sense of dataveillance and in turn an accumulation of chilling effects (büchi et al., 2022). excitation transfer theory proposes that repeated experiences can lead to emotional reactions being carried over (cummins, 2017). the relevance of time for understanding the characteristics and consequences of emotions and their (behavioral) subcomponents is also central to studies on emotion dynamics, which focus on the fluctuation of emotions over time (kuppens & verduyn, 2017). for chilling effects research, this suggests that repeated triggers of a sense of dataveillance over time lead to a momentary drop in individuals’ level of uninhibited digital communication behavior. this level does not perfectly recover to its initial baseline as its recovery is interrupted by a subsequent trigger. so far, studies have not captured chilling effects in-situ and over time. hence, this paper aims to investigate how chilling effects accumulate over time by experimentally manipulating a sense of dataveillance and capturing the temporal dynamics of chilling effects. method and data analysis to investigate the accumulation of chilling effects over time, we conducted a six-week longitudinal online field experiment with a representative sample of swiss internet users. participants received 19 prompts containing notifications and news articles on different sensitive topics in areas like politics, religion, or health. for each prompt, participants were randomly assigned to either the experimental treatment, intended to heighten their sense of dataveillance, or control condition on the same topic unrelated to dataveillance. these prompts, informed by a qualitative study on triggers of a sense of dataveillance (odermatt et al., under review), were successfully pretested for heightening the sense of dataveillance. individuals who participated in 12 or more prompts were included in the sample (n = 827). after each prompt, three digital communication behaviors, which were related to the topic in the article and expected to be self-inhibited due to a heightened sense of dataveillance, were measured: feeling comfortable to search for information online, voice one’s opinion online, and disclose personal information. the main assumption of the study posited that the treatment prompts heighten participants' sense of dataveillance over time, leading to self-inhibition of the digital communication behaviors over time. to first inspect the temporal trends of the sense of dataveillance and the communication behaviors, we conducted preliminary descriptive data analyses. second, to explore the relationship between the experimental condition, the sense of dataveillance, the communication behaviors, and time, we ran linear regression models. the preliminary findings of these analyses are discussed in the following section. preliminary findings and discussion sense of dataveillance first, the sense of dataveillance was initially rather high and increased over time (mwave1 = 3.53, mwave19 = 3.80; p <.001). regression analysis revealed that being in the treatment condition (vs. control) was associated with a higher sense of dataveillance, meaning that the manipulation worked as intended. additionally, we found that the longer into the study, the higher was the participants’ sense of dataveillance (table 1). this is in line with the theoretical assumption of accumulated chilling effects over time, suggesting that the participants’ residual sense of dataveillance in the experiment was carried over from previous treatment prompts (büchi et al., 2022). digital communication behaviors second, over time participants felt increasingly comfortable to search for information (mwave1 = 1.56, mwave19 = 1.63; p = .006) and voice their opinion (mwave1 = 2.45, mwave19 = 2.88; p <.001) but felt slightly less comfortable to disclose personal information (mwave1 = 2.45, mwave19 = 2.88; p <.001). regression analysis showed that being in the treatment condition (vs. control) was associated with feeling less comfortable to search for information, voice opinions, and disclose personal information (tables 2–4). this result supports the assumption that triggers of a sense of dataveillance can lead to self-inhibition of such behaviors. time significantly predicted a decrease in feeling comfortable to disclose information. this result can be understood as an accumulation of chilling effects over time, meaning that participants’ baseline of the behavior did not perfectly recover between treatment prompts (büchi et al., 2022). however, time had the opposite effect on feeling comfortable to voice opinions as it significantly predicted an increase in the behavior. this increase may be partially explained by the recovery potential of chilling effects suggesting that after a trigger of a sense of dataveillance, participants’ baseline of uninhibited opinion voicing rather quickly reapproached the initial baseline due to a recovery phase (preibusch, 2015). time showed no effect on information search. more in-depth insights into the accumulation of chilling effects over time require further analytical steps: to analyze the relationships of the treatment condition, the sense of dataveillance, the digital communication behaviors, and time, we plan to employ multilevel linear models which account for the nested structure of the data and disentangle between-person and within-person effects. the models will control for theoretically deduced individual characteristics of participants expected to affect chilling effects on the individual level which were collected in a survey at the end of the experiment, including personality traits, exposure to dataveillance-related information in everyday life, and sociodemographic characteristics. contribution and conclusion this article empirically explores how repeated confrontation with the topic of dataveillance over time leads to an increased sense of dataveillance and in turn a change in self-inhibition in information disclosing and opinion voicing. hence, this study contributes to the growing research on the chilling effects of dataveillance which is of societal relevance as chilling effects undermine a vital role of digital communication in democratic societies by deterring people from using the internet for everyday activities, personal growth, and political advocacy (büchi et al., 2022). because chilling effects are conceptualized as long-term, the experimental method of this study addresses challenges of previous cross-sectional chilling effects studies to validly capture the effects (büchi et al., 2022): the longitudinal experimental measurement captures the sense of dataveillance and self-inhibition of digital communication behaviors in-situ. this allows for insights into the prevalence, magnitude, and temporal dynamics of long-term chilling effects, rendering the findings more valid for real-life contexts. the findings can inform research on chilling effects as consequences of perceived dataveillance practices as well as assessments of the need for and appropriate design of governance interventions of dataveillance practices. references büchi, m., festic, n., & latzer, m. (2022). the chilling effects of digital dataveillance: a theoretical model and an empirical research agenda. big data & society, 9(1), 1– 4. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211065368 kappeler, k., festic, n., & latzer, m. (2023). dataveillance imaginaries and their role in chilling effects online. international journal of human-computer studies, 179, 103120. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2023.103120 kuppens, p. & verduyn, p. (2017). emotion dynamics. current opinion in psychology, 17, 22–26. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.06.004 latzer, m., festic, n., kappeler, k. & odermatt, c. (2023). vertrauen und sorgen bei der internetnutzung in der schweiz 2023: themenbericht aus dem world internet project – switzerland 2023. university of zurich. odermatt, c., festic, n., jaramillo-dent, d., kappeler, k., & latzer, m. (2023). triggers of a sense of dataveillance: empirical insights into characteristics, determinants, and affective responses [manuscript submitted for publication]. department of communication and media research, university of zurich. preibusch, s. (2015). privacy behaviors after snowden. communications of the acm, 58(5), 48–55. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2663341 zillmann, d., katcher, a. h. & milavsky, b. (1972). excitation transfer from physical exercise to subsequent aggressive behavior. journal of experimental social psychology, 8(3), 247–259. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0022-1031(72)80005-2 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): raman, u., premika, a., mehta, c., rangaswamy, n., & madapathi, m. (2024, october). constructing the digital: working from the global south. panel presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org constructing the digital: working from the global south usha raman university of hyderabad anuja premika university of hyderabad chinar mehta university of hyderabad nimmi rangaswamy international institute of information technology, hyderabad manisha madapathi university of hyderabad panel abstract the aoir flashpoint symposium conducted in hyderabad, india, explored multiple facets of digital labor–that which takes place through and on platforms, monitored or managed via digital interfaces, as well as forms of work that contribute to building, maintaining, and populating digital infrastructures. the discussions at the symposium proceeded from the recognition of the need for regulation with the consumer of technology as our main object of concern, while also attending to the humans at the center of the machinery of production–those who build the insides of the machines (coders, designers, annotators) as well as those who make the content that flows through it. this panel extends the discussions at the symposium with five papers that attend to different types of digital/digitally-enabled work: content creation and curation, app-based services, infrastructuring through tech work, and advocacy for a just and open digital commons. together, the papers intend to make visible how the everyday labor of those in the global south undergirds the global network of digital goods, services, and infrastructures–both materially and discursively. we think of the digital economy and culture in planetary terms (graham & ferrari, 20221), driven by technologies largely imagined in the west even as they are enabled in very specific ways by workers in the global south. much recent work in rapidly digitizing geographies in south asia and latin america has pointed to the embedded nature of the digital, as technology and as experience. cultural creators on platforms such as youtube, tiktok, instagram and spotify speak to increasingly dispersed audiences, their content subject to a variety of regulatory regimes monitored and managed in algorithmically impenetrable ways. gig workers find their work patterns are constrained and defined by interfaces driven by neo-colonial imaginaries that defy regulation yet prompt innovative forms of resistance. public discourse veers between the celebratory and the cautionary, as in much of the globe, with states responding, in turn, with shut downs and penalties and sops and incentives. the papers in this panel while locating their arguments and their insights in the specific context of india, also speak to the need for imaginaries that are at once broad and contextual, that take from aspirational articulations while rejecting a universalizing logic, whether in the realm of design, or use, or regulation. 1 graham, m & ferrari, f. (2022). digital work in the planetary market. mit press. making the case for femwork: lessons from studying women’s “informal” labor2 usha raman university of hyderabad the discourse on platformization in relation to women’s labor force participation has been multipronged, ranging on the one hand from concerns around rising precarity and lack of social protections to the advantages to be gained from bringing structure and regulation to the informal sector. this paper brings together the findings of a 3-year project that sought to map the contours of informal work engaged with by women, both on and off platforms, and to understand whether and how the digital intervened in their everyday negotiations through work and life. our focus was on five sectors that were characterized by high levels of informality, where women have traditionally been employed or were increasingly entering: platform-contracted personal care, ride-hailing, construction, sanitation, and home-based artisanal work. the study sought to understand the lived experiences of women workers in these sectors, focusing on questions of access to markets, negotiations with various intermediaries (technological and human), dignity and security of work, understanding of precarity, and aspirations for the future. we also attempted to map the communicative ecologies of women in these sectors, to develop an understanding of how they used digital tools for a variety of purposes, from communication to transaction to information gathering. the project was informed by a feminist understanding of paid and unpaid labor and the nature of gender dynamics in these sectors. drawing on 65 individual interviews (across workers, intermediaries, and activist groups) and 3 focus group discussions, in addition to group discussions with social sector organizations, conducted across three cities over a period of two years, we were able to draw out a broad picture of what informality looks and feels like from the perspectives of those who live it, and what aspirations and expectations exist among women in these spaces—particularly in relation to a rapidly digitizing landscape. we found that across sectors, the use of networked technology was limited to the narrowly instrumental (in platform-based work) or used only for private socializing. in non-platform sectors, such as construction, sanitation, and artisanal work, most women did not have their own phones and had limited access to the phone owned (usually) by a male family member. in work that was mediated by platforms, women were often challenged by issues of algorithmic control and the opaqueness of the interface, while also deriving a sense of professional identity through this technological mediation. the three key learnings from our research may be summarized as follows: 1. all gig work is not platform work: we need to go beyond the current imagination of gig work as being entirely platform mediated, with a resulting exclusion of older, more entrenched forms of “piece work” and non-contractual casual labor 2 raman, u. (2024, october). making the case for femwork: lessons from studying women’s “informal” economy. paper presented as part of the panel “constructing the digital: working from the global south” at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. that many women engage in, particularly in artisanal work, sanitation, and construction. at the same time, we need to understand that human intermediaries in these sectors function much like platforms, with a similar opacity that disallows negotiation by those at the bottom of the ladder. 2. social structures remain key to thinking about governance of gig work, both on and off platforms. our interviews showed that women’s access to work, their ability to negotiate and form communities of practice, was largely constrained by social and cultural norms and their membership in kinship and community networks. 3. women must balance multiple identities and roles as they handle informal work; in this context, work form and workplace are equally important to how they negotiate their place within a household economy. policies that aim to offer social security to informal workers need to consider not only what women do but where they do it, as locating work within the home introduces dynamics that could be both beneficial and disempowering. thinking through these findings and reflecting on our conversations with women workers, we proposed a set of principles that we believe can productively inform the design of contracts, workplaces, and platform interfaces. these principles, which we call the femwork principles, reflect the aspirations, experiences, and lived realities of women workers at the margins, and can offer a way of thinking about the future of work. the seven ideas that form this framework encourage us to think about work and worker engagement in terms of: fairness, equity, mobility-enhancing, worker-identity focused, offering opportunity for meaningful organization, is respect-based, and knowledgebased. we offer these principles as a framework for thinking about women, work, and informality, recognizing that contexts vary widely across geography and sector, and depending on the mediation of technology or platforms. we see these principles as an expansive and adaptable set of standards that can be applied by advocates for the rights of all marginalized workers in informal work across sectors, as well as those working on platform design and governance. while we build our model by situating women worker’s voices and experiences at the center for sustainable change, we make the case that these insights and reforms are relatable to and transferable for the benefit of other marginalized groups. femwork is a framework that extends the idea of fair and just work by drawing on feminist values, which are then articulated as a set of discrete worker rights that can be applied across work contexts. femwork is about recognizing that the well-being of workers must be centered, rather than the productivity or profitability of work. the femwork values operate in tandem with each other. even as the government and policymakers focus on the promise of technologymediated platforms to address many of the precarities of informality, our research suggests that it is not informality that is the problem, but the absence of social and civic protections that could give women the choice to take on work in a way that is accorded dignity and an acknowledgment of their status as productive labor. converging labors: creating the new beauty media ecology in online spaces3 anuja premika university of hyderabad online spaces have formed a home for beauty culture since the early days of the user generated web (hund, 2023), and have now arguably taken over traditional media as the primary mode of beauty communication (the digital beauty counter, 2018). taking the form of photos, videos, and text, primarily on social media platforms, but also on websites and blogs, beauty media4 today is created by a range of individual and institutional actors—from journalists, editors, and influencers, to brands, websites, and magazines. the distinctions between individual and institutional media however, are hard to define—brands for instance, frequently repost user generated content on their social media platforms, and magazines rarely hire staff writers anymore, but rely on freelancers and independent contractors to populate their (web)pages and social media feeds. further, the differences between individual actors are similarly hard to define. while they self-identify in distinct ways—referring to themselves as influencers, creators, makeup artists, journalists, freelancers, or consultants—their labors often overlap and morph into one another, as they carry out the forms of work that have increasingly become the inescapable norm in beauty media today. based on interviews conducted with these individual actors, as well as representatives of the industry such as public relations personnel, brand managers, and influencer relationship managers, i explore this phenomenon of converging labors. influencers and content creators engage in “productive, purposeful, task-oriented, and value-generating” labors (duffy, 2022) and duffy suggests that these practices are “quite similar to the (waged) work of traditional media producers, including journalists, video producers, advertisers, and publicists” (p. 8). as such, content creators have, “come to resemble the traditional media workers … they have defined themselves against” (p. xii). concurrently, influencers’ practices of self-branding and -promotion have expanded to become the norm in several other fields, in a phenomenon that bishop calls “influencer creep” (2023): “influencers have developed and formalized strategies for garnering visibility on social media platforms, which are taken up by … workers more broadly” (para. 3). i explore how this phenomenon—where influencers increasingly carry out the labors of traditional media workers, and workers in other culture industries adopt the practices and grammars of influencer culture—plays out in beauty media, and how the histories of labor in and inherent tensions within beauty media further complicate this trend. 3 suggested citation (apa): premika, a. (2024, october). converging labors: creating the new beauty media ecology in online spaces. paper presented as part of the panel “constructing the digital: working from the global south” at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 4 in this paper, i use beauty media to refer both to magazine and website content published by institutional titles, as well as social media content created by institutional and individual creators. the converging labors in this space can be observed along three dimensions—the mandate to create “good content,” the competition to stand out in a crowded content space, and the relationship building that these are contingent on. my interviewees shared that “good content” is that which is “authentic,” but those with backgrounds in traditional media understood this as being expert-backed and fact-checked, whereas influencers saw authenticity as being about their own identity or experience. this centering of identity was not unique to influencers, however—increasingly faced by the mandate to develop their personal platforms on social media and take on paid partnerships with brands (for some out of interest, others because opportunities in traditional media were drying up, or simply out of the fear of being left behind), the journalists too had to build “authentic” identities online. but here too, they understood authenticity as being about credibility—their instagram bios featured the names of publications they have contributed to, and they frequently shared clippings of their magazine or website articles alongside content they created for social media, establishing that they were trained in the “print tradition.” the influencers too recognized that they needed to “do the research” before putting out information, with one influencer indicating that they could take days to weeks to read up on a product or ingredient before deciding whether to feature it. both influencers and journalists indicated that they aimed to differentiate themselves in the crowded beauty space by creating authentic content, rather than simply following trends. however, they recognized that this was sometimes at odds with the competing demands of brands and platforms. brands often only cared for hard numbers (in terms of likes, shares, click-throughs, and sales), and platforms heavily favored content with the potential for virality (for instance, algorithmically encouraging the use of viral audios or reel templates). neither brands nor platforms prioritized accuracy, and both journalists and influencers expressed their frustration with creators who put out false, incomplete, or misleading information in the interest of “being first,” jumping on a trend, or pandering to the industry. beauty media, however, has never been without its commercial entanglements— journalists working within traditional beauty media outlets such as magazines have always looked to maintain long-standing relationships with beauty brands, receiving free products and invites to trips and events. this relationship, however, was thought of as the magazine’s relationship with the brand, whereas now, increasingly the labor of building and maintaining them are the job of the individual journalists. some journalists shared how they had to reestablish their connections after they transitioned from working as staff writers with magazines to a freelance working model. nonetheless, journalists had their foot in the door of the industry, and influencers expressed struggling to build these relationships from scratch, performing aspirational labor (duffy, 2022) and conspicuous consumption (see marwick, 2015) in hopes that brands would want to work with them in the future. while journalists could sometime subsidize this unpaid labor through their paid work for traditional media, and even repurposed work put into traditional media content to generate social media content (for instance, converting a magazine story into an instagram reel for their personal page), influencers had to carry out this labor with no way to immediately monetize or otherwise generate income from it. journalists and influencers carried out similar tasks—researching products, testing them out, creating technically well-produced content, staying on top of trends, and trying to stand out. journalists however resisted being referred to as influencers—they insisted that their social media activities were an extension of their journalistic work, and were unhappy that they were forced to share space—digital as well as physical, at industry events, for instance—with influencers who had not “put in the work.” as this paper demonstrates, however, “the work” increasingly looks the same for both journalists and influencers. they are often faced with the same industry and platform mandates, and experience similar kinds of precarity in their labor. beyond “influencer creep,” where the self-branding practices of influencers online are adopted in other areas of work, beauty media demonstrates how the inherent tensions of the space—its commercial logic and the inalienability of media-industry relationships—has given rise to new hierarchies (imaginations around good, or even deserving, creators), as well as a flattening of old ones (the gatekeeping associated with legacy print publications, see abram and fong, 2020). this work informs broader conversations around the nebulous nature of influence (pearl, 2024), and how we may understand (and as a next step, regulate) the labors of social media creators (see abidin et al., 2023). references the digital beauty counter (2018). pixability. https://www.pixability.com/insightsreports/digital-beauty-counter/ abidin, c., xu, j., & hutchinson, j. (2023). influencer regulations, governance and sociocultural issues in asia. policy & internet. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.340 abram, c. c., & fong, j. (2020). is beauty culture hurting us? glad you asked s1. vox media. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8jsu7wsyhy bishop, s. (2023). influencer creep: how artists strategically navigate the platformisation of art worlds. new media & society. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231206090 duffy, b. e. (2022). (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender and aspirational labor in the social media economy. yale university press. hund, e. (2023). the influencer industry: the quest for authenticity on social media. princeton university press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2v6pczn marwick, a. e. (2015). instafame: luxury selfies in the attention economy. public culture, 27(1 75), 137–160. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2798379 pearl, d. (2024). the widening gap between influencers and creators. the business of fashion. https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/marketing-pr/the-widening-gapbetween-influencers-and-creators/ https://www.pixability.com/insights-reports/digital-beauty-counter/ https://www.pixability.com/insights-reports/digital-beauty-counter/ https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.340 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8jsu7wsyhy https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231206090 https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2v6pczn https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2798379 https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/marketing-pr/the-widening-gap-between-influencers-and-creators/ https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/marketing-pr/the-widening-gap-between-influencers-and-creators/ solving for “bad workers”: how data imaginaries normalize surveillance of sanitation workers in india5 chinar mehta university of hyderabad in chandigarh, sanitation workers click selfies through smartwatches on their wrists as they arrive early in the morning. these pictures appear in a remote-control room miles away, where officers track the live location of each worker on the computers. as the day progresses, the watches track if the workers are within their area of geographic jurisdiction. if data from a watch shows the worker moving outside their work area, they are marked absent for that time, and their wages are cut. this scene repeats across a dozen cities in india where sanitation workers are required to wear watches equipped with gps to monitor their movement remotely from centralized control rooms by their supervisors. in this context, the deployment of surveillance technologies is shaping and extending a casteist culture of suspicion over low-income sanitation workers hailing from marginalized castes. remote technologies that make use of internet infrastructures are constantly put to use to quantify the productivity of workers to police and control them. through various ways, widespread consent and acceptance is manufactured for such surveillance technologies. this paper's central question is: how do socio-technical imaginaries of caste, labor, and datafication in public discourse normalize and justify surveillance measures on sanitation workers? we use discourse analysis to examine how the state imagines and legitimizes surveillance technologies in sanitation work and how a socio-technical landscape of “efficiency” and “innovation” is inflected by relations of caste and labor. drawing on government documents, marketing materials, news reports, and interviews with journalists, we make the argument that imaginaries of techno-solutionism and caste-based suspicions come together to make surveillance acceptable. local governments are encouraged to adopt technologies to ensure “transparency” of public services as part of national government programs like digital india and clean india mission. this pursuit for transparency relies on socio-technical imaginaries in public discourse to justify the use of invasive and unjust surveillance of workers. sociotechnical imaginaries are imagined futures that consolidate certain realities over others through the exercise of power (jasanoff & kim, 2015; mcneil et al., 2017). this analytical device rooted in science and technology studies no doubt finds a place in media studies as language becomes crucial in how technoscientific visions are enacted in the world (mager & katzenbach, 2021). additionally, “surveillance capitalism” holds significant implications for “information civilization” in that surveillance itself is dependent on an architecture of data-collection for behavioral prediction that challenges democratic norms (zuboff, 2015). uncovering socio-technical imaginaries that benefit surveillance practices points to the future of data infrastructure. 5 mehta, c. (2024, october). solving for “bad workers”: how data imaginaries normalize surveillance of sanitation workers in india. paper presented as part of the panel “constructing the digital: working from the global south” at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. our central argument in the paper concerns how imaginaries about workers and technologies generate widespread complacency and acceptance of surveillance on workers. we divide this argument into three themes. firstly, due to the relationship between caste and sanitation work, workers are seen as people who are meant to do the work of cleaning. this leads to a lack of rights in sanitation work, interlocking the relationship between caste and division of labor and laborers in data imaginaries. secondly, the workers are imagined to be “bad workers” avoiding work and therefore believed to be paying through their right to privacy being revoked. most sanitation workers belong to scheduled castes, occupying a lower status in the caste hierarchy in indian society, and are associated with the “polluted” work of cleaning (cassan et al., 2022; raghuram, 2001). scholars studying technologies used in carceral and forensic studies write of “technologies of suspicion” through which empirical processes are codified to produce and interpret results in a way that makes possible supervision, some kind of deterrence, and eventually control (campbell, 2002; shelby, 2023). finally, technological innovation is understood to be an infallible solution to keep track of the workers’ whereabouts. critical scholarly work in studying the imaginations of smart cities rightly points to the ideology of innovation that turns complex sociocultural and political issues into quick-fix techno-solutions (godin & vinck, 2017; mertia, 2017; morozov, 2013; sadowski & bendor, 2019). realizing a kind of “data imperative” (sadowski, 2019), local governments and private tech firms see workers as datafied bodies that can be disciplined. this case of surveillance exemplifies datafication as contingent articulation; collecting (and acting on) data is the answer before the problem is fully understood. our analysis reveals a techno-optimistic vision that innovates at the cost of autonomy and dignity of frontline workers. ultimately, we argue that surveillance mechanisms enacted on lowincome workers are state-sanctioned casteist aggressions that ride on widespread public consent. references campbell, n. d. (2002). technologies of suspicion: coercion and compassion in postdisciplinary surveillance regimes. surveillance & society, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v2i1.3328 cassan, g., keniston, d., & kleineberg, t. (2022). a division of laborers: identity and efficiency in india. national bureau of economic research. godin, b., & vinck, d. (2017). critical studies of innovation: alternative approaches to the pro-innovation bias. edward elgar publishing. jasanoff, s., & kim, s.-h. (2015). dreamscapes of modernity: sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power. university of chicago press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226276663.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v2i1.3328 https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226276663.001.0001 mager, a., & katzenbach, c. (2021). future imaginaries in the making and governing of digital technology: multiple, contested, commodified. new media & society, 23(2), 223– 236. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820929321 mcneil, m., arribas-ayllon, m., haran, j., mackenzie, a., & tutton, r. (2017). conceptualizing imaginaries of science, technology, and society. in u. felt, r. fouché, c. a. miller, & l. smith-doerr (eds.), the handbook of science and technology studies (fourth edition, p. 319). the mit press. mertia, s. (2017). fcj-217 socio-technical imaginaries of a data-driven city: ethnographic vignettes from delhi. the fibreculture journal, 29: computing the city. morozov, e. (2013). to save everything, click here: the folly of technological solutionism. public affairs. quality council of india. (2018). swachh survekshan 2018. ministry of urban development, government of india. https://ss2022.sbmurban.org/assets/pdf/ss2018_report.pdf ‘ raghuram, p. (2001). caste and gender in the organisation of paid domestic work in india. work, employment & society, 15(3), 607–617. sadowski, j. (2019). when data is capital: datafication, accumulation, and extraction. big data & society, 6(1), 205395171882054. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718820549’ sadowski, j., & bendor, r. (2019). selling smartness: corporate narratives and the smart city as a sociotechnical imaginary. science, technology, & human values, 44(3), 540–563. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243918806061 shelby, r. (2023). technology, sexual violence, and power-evasive politics: mapping the anti-violence sociotechnical imaginary. science, technology, & human values, 48(3), 552–581. https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439211046047 zuboff, s. (2015). big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization. journal of information technology, 30(1), 75–89. https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2015.5 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820929321 https://ss2022.sbmurban.org/assets/pdf/ss2018_report.pdf https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718820549 https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243918806061 https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439211046047 https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2015.5 constructing the labor digital: datafication of and in the global south6 nimmi rangaswamy international institute of information technology, hyderabad we explore the forms and structures of digital labor, examining the precarity and consolidation of working conditions driven by the platform economy in urban india. we consider the threats in 'gigging' and the informalization of labor (hussain et al. 2023), the need to reconceptualize worker well-being, risks, and stress, and the alignment of workplaces and workers in digital labor. we also acknowledge the contradictions in viewing platform work in india as both marginalizing and as a means of consolidating employability for labor in the informal sector. despite the absence of a formal employment sector capable of employing millions, digital and platform labor, however precarious, provides a sense of regularity and continuity of work. by examining the informal sector's everyday work practices, contexts, and conditions, we highlight the narratives of labor journeys and the uncertainty amidst opportunities for work in the digital labor landscape. inspired by james c. scott's 'weapons of the weak (1985), our study highlights the vexed duality of 'gig' labor, which can both reward and punish, in the context of india and developing countries. despite the 'illusion of choice' and 'algorithmic despotism' (griesbach et al. 2019) displayed by digital platforms, workers recognize the opportunities available. many believe the work flexibility and potential earnings are unmatched compared to the nature of employment in the vast and unskilled informal sector in india. underpinning the theme of moving 'beyond data universalism,' our study sheds light on the everyday aspects of data power concerning location, space, and time. focusing on 'agency,' one of the tenets in the theory of 'datafication of and in the souths' (milan & treré 2019), we aim to disentangle the idea of 'performance' as a socio-technical derivative governing digital labor in urban india and what we address as 'unfair usage of data power' by technology platforms. the global south is contextualized as economically constrained, resource-deficient, and socially hierarchical in contrast to the north. although platform-mediated work has faced criticism for its precariousness and adverse effects in the global north, its reception and impact in the global south offer contrasting narratives. flexibility, accessibility, and transparent income generation associated with platform labor have allowed individuals from diverse and precarious socio-economic backgrounds to earn and enhance their livelihoods. without diminishing the information asymmetry, algorithmic tyranny, and performance pressure challenges on digital labor, our study offers an ethnographic view of everyday opportunities, however small, to counter the 'despotism' of platform work. the global south is characterized by a preponderance of informal labor markets and unregulated, often unsecured, employment. however, platform-mediated work has also been understood as formalizing work by introducing transparency and standardization of wages 6 rangaswamy, n. (2024, october). constructing the labor digital: datafication of and in the global south. paper presented as part of the panel “constructing the digital: working from the global south” at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. (sehrawat 2021). previous research studies have highlighted the role of digital platforms in providing employment opportunities to marginalized populations, including those without formal education or limited access to traditional job markets, and the trend of marginalized groups and religious minorities entering platform work. the heterogeneity of the platform workforce remains unexplored due to the global northcentricity of these narratives and the dominance of ride-hailing platforms. central to the critique of platform-mediated labor is the idea of 'algorithmic management,' aligned with the deepening subjugation of the platform-mediated labor experience. this shift in perception, especially research from the global north, understands digital platforms as primarily perpetuating precarious work conditions. an important dimension of our study revolves around using data from digital platforms to optimize and prioritize demand, supply, and business expansion over employment issues. digital platforms capture and deploy data to manipulate and optimize business metrics over worker experience and comfort. we suggest an emerging gamification culture between digital labor and the digital platform. in a gradual yet consistent way, digital workers adapt to stringent algorithmic management and precarious working conditions, finding means to overcome some of its repercussions on everyday work practices. we develop the notion of 'agency' to disentangle the idea of 'gamification by agents' as a socio-technical derivative governing digital workers in urban india. digital platforms, in their hunt for efficiency and profitability, often employ gamification tactics to manipulate their workforce's labor. however, in this dynamic ecosystem, workers are not passive agents. instead, they engage in a reciprocal gamification process, seeking to reclaim agency and subvert the platforms' control. by adopting a two-fold perspective, we explore mechanisms through which platforms manipulate labor while investigating worker strategies to extract agency and exploit platform work mandates. we explore this dualistic relationship, as remarkably exhibited in urban india, where rapid urbanization and technological advancement have reshaped the fabric of digital labor and commerce. references kathleen griesbach, adam reich, luke elliott-negri, and ruth milkman. (2019). algorithmic control in platform food delivery work. socius 5 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023119870041 mohammad sajjad hussain. (2023). learning to strike in the gig economy: mobilization efforts by food delivery workers in hyderabad, india. journal of south asian development 18, 3 (2023), 431–456. https://doi.org/10.1177/09731741231182877 ujjwal sehrawat, namit sawhney, tejaswini yeleswarapu, and nimmi rangaswamy. (2021). the everyday hci of uber drivers in india: a developing country perspective. proc. acm human-computer interaction, 5, cscw2, article 424 (oct 2021), https://doi.org/10.1145/3479568 james c scott. (1985) weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance. yale university press. https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023119870041 https://doi.org/10.1177/09731741231182877 https://doi.org/10.1145/3479568 milan, s., & treré, e. (2019). big data from the south(s): beyond data universalism. television & new media, 20(4), 319-335. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419837739 https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419837739 communicative labor in the times of internet shutdowns7 manisha madapathi university of hyderabad citizen protests have historically played a crucial role in shaping policy by bringing attention to pressing issues and exerting pressure on policymakers. for instance, following the fukushima daiichi nuclear disaster in march, 2011, japan witnessed widespread protests from anti-nuclear groups, women groups, and citizens who called for the government to abandon nuclear energy. while short lived, the protests led to a dramatic change in the county's energy policy, to become nuclear-free, until former prime minister shinzo abe was re-elected in 2012. (williams, 2012) in 1986, people power revolution, also known as the edsa revolution in the philippines was a nonviolent civil resistance by the citizens, including students, and religious groups, against president ferdinand marcos’ regime of violence and electoral fraud. in four days, marcos was ousted to make way for democratic reforms. (mcgeown, 2011) the often-cited civil rights movement in the united states of america in the 20th century, also used various forms of civil disobedience to bring attention to legalized racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement of african americans. this movement not only led to the striking down of the laws that allowed legal discrimination, but also achieved the passage of significant federal legislation such as the civil rights act of 1964, voting rights act of 1965, and the fair housing act of 1968. it is important to note that each of these movements faced coercive responses from the state in each instance, including police crackdowns and military interventions as well as ideological control through censorship of critical media outlets, restricted access to information, and limiting media coverage. in india too, there have been several protest movements that have contributed to changing the course of national governance and policy. in 2011, the anti-corruption movement took off under the leadership of activist anna hazare, and several political figures to alleviate corruption and kleptocracy in the country. the movement led to the passing of the lokpal and lokayukta bill in 2013, making it an act that “seeks to provide for the establishment of the institution of lokpal to inquire into allegations of corruption against certain important public functionaries including the prime minister, cabinet ministers, members of parliament, group a officials of the central government and for matters connecting them". (ians, 2013) similarly, in 2012, the incident of a gang rape and fatal assault of a woman in delhi sparked widespread outrage and led to massive protests demanding stronger laws and measures to address gender-based violence and ensure the safety of women. the protests prompted the government to enact the criminal law (amendment) act, 2013, which introduced harsher penalties for sexual offences, expanded the definition of rape, and enhanced provisions for the protection of women's rights. (“president signs ordinance”, 2013) 7 suggested citation (apa): madapathi, m. (2024, october). communicative labor in the times of internet shutdowns . paper presented as part of the panel “constructing the digital: working from the global south” at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. in this paper, i look at one such movement in the recent past that led to change in government policy was the farmers’ protest that lasted from september 2020 to november 2021 which led to the repealing of the three controversial farm laws. (“it's official. three,” 2021) the protestors, who were mainly farmers, held a sit-in protest at the bordering villages of the national capital, delhi at singhu, tikri, and gazipur, for over a year. this civic dissent by the farmers was interrupted by the state at various points, sometimes coercively, through the use of water cannons, tear gas, and barricades; and some other times by disrupting or suspending information infrastructure, through internet shutdowns, and network throttling. (“protesting farmers brave”, 2020) under these conditions, citizens and journalists found ways to circumvent restrictions to convey their dissent. in this paper i describe and analyze the various ways in which these shutdowns were bypassed and how that adds to the labor of communication during an internet shutdown. methodology in order to research an event-based phenomenon, it is useful to adapt clarke’s (2003) situational analyses approach to lay out the several actors and actants involved in the event and then find analytical and relational categories from the coded data. clarke (2003) takes grounded theory literature and renovates, regenerates, and re-articulates it to lay emphasis on its postmodern capacities. abandoning over arching paradigms, and theoretical and methodological meta systems, grounded theory approach allows for the specific, local, heterogenous and relational to emerge from the data itself. situational analyses can be made through drawing three kinds of maps. first, situational maps which lay out the major human, non-human, discursive and other major elements in the research situation of concern and provoke analyses of relations among them. second, the social worlds/ arenas maps that engage in ongoing negotiations of the various collective actors involved, where meso level interpretations can be made of its social organizational and institutional and discursive dimensions. and finally, positional maps which lay out the major positions taken, and not taken (silences) by actors. using these maps to interpret data encourage making connections previously ignored or not seen while also acknowledging disparities, contradictions, and gaps. for the purpose of this paper, i emphasize on the situational maps aspect of the situational analysis method. i map out the various actors involved in the situation of a protest that has faced communication blackout at various levels throughout the duration of the protest. in this paper, i will be using in-depth interviews of protestors, journalists, and internet advocacy groups to understand how internet shutdowns played out during the farmers protest. the protest started in late 2020, and went on till the controversial farm laws were repealed in november 2021. participants were recruited through snowball sampling. at the time of the interviews, the protest had just been called off and protesters had vacated the site. all interviews were conducted online, on zoom in 2022, between february and august. in this paper i draw on interviews with protestors (2), journalists (3), and civil society activists (2) who have engaged with the protest to understand how the movement negotiated through the periods of communication disruption. pseudonyms have been used to maintain anonymity. in the following sections, i unpack the various themes that emerged in these discussions and lay out the strategies and techniques used to manage communications and sustain the movement over the duration of the protest. i use these findings to extrapolate the communicative labor that protestors and journalists performed even under severe crackdown. references clarke, a. e. (2003) situational analyses: grounded theory mapping after the postmodern turn. symbolic interaction, 26(4), 553–576. ians. (2013, december 13) lokpal bill tabled in rajya sabha, din blocks debate. business standard. https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ians/lokpal-billtabled-in-rajya-sabha-din-blocks-debate-113121300622_1.html it's official. three farm laws scrapped. (2021, december 2). the hindu. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/president-gives-assent-to-farm-laws-repealbill/article37802828.ece president signs ordinance to effect changes in laws against sexual crimes. (2013, february 3) india today. https://www.indiatoday.in/india/north/story/president-signsordinance-to-effect-changes-in-laws-against-sexual-crimes-153156-2013-02-02 protesting farmers brave water cannons, tear gas shells: key points. (november 26, 2020). the times of india. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/79430745.cms?utm_source=contentofinte rest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst mcgeown, k. (2011, february 25) people power at 25: long road to philippine democracy. bbc. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-12567320 williams. c. j. (2012, september 14) “in wake of fukushima disaster, japan to end nuclear power by 2030s”. la times. https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/worldnow/story/2012-09-14/in-wake-of-fukushima-disaster-japan-to-end-nuclear-power-by2030s https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ians/lokpal-bill-tabled-in-rajya-sabha-din-blocks-debate-113121300622_1.html https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ians/lokpal-bill-tabled-in-rajya-sabha-din-blocks-debate-113121300622_1.html https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/president-gives-assent-to-farm-laws-repeal-bill/article37802828.ece https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/president-gives-assent-to-farm-laws-repeal-bill/article37802828.ece https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/president-gives-assent-to-farm-laws-repeal-bill/article37802828.ece https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/president-gives-assent-to-farm-laws-repeal-bill/article37802828.ece https://www.indiatoday.in/india/north/story/president-signs-ordinance-to-effect-changes-in-laws-against-sexual-crimes-153156-2013-02-02 https://www.indiatoday.in/india/north/story/president-signs-ordinance-to-effect-changes-in-laws-against-sexual-crimes-153156-2013-02-02 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/79430745.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/79430745.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/79430745.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-12567320 https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/world-now/story/2012-09-14/in-wake-of-fukushima-disaster-japan-to-end-nuclear-power-by-2030s https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/world-now/story/2012-09-14/in-wake-of-fukushima-disaster-japan-to-end-nuclear-power-by-2030s https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/world-now/story/2012-09-14/in-wake-of-fukushima-disaster-japan-to-end-nuclear-power-by-2030s selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): owens, l, bichard-collins, l., ferrari, e. (2024, october). queer digital lives: understanding datafication through creative collaborative approaches. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. queer digital lives: understanding datafication through creative collaborative approaches liv owens city st. george’s, university of london, uk lily bichard-collins university of glasgow, uk elisabetta ferrari aarhus university, denmark from bathroom stalls to airport security, surveillance practices are ubiquitous; whether deployed to control and suppress more fluid conceptions of gender (costanza-chock, 2020) or reinforce white supremacy (browne, 2015), surveillance is key to the experience of contemporary life. surveillance has only grown more complex in digital spaces where, under surveillance capitalism (zuboff, 2019), databases, facial recognition systems, and automated forms of identity verification are pervasive. datafication and surveillance are thus key concerns, particularly for marginalized groups (hintz et al., 2018). in this research project, we specifically consider how queer individuals experience datafication and surveillance in their daily life and how they respond to it. as documented in the literature, datafication enforces visibility, understood as “the logic of contemporary digital life and its requirements to be seen” (talvitie-lamberg et al., 2022). vulnerable societal groups, such as the unemployed, undocumented, and older people studied by talvitie-lamberg et al. (2022), experience data-driven technologies as requiring them to negotiate how visible they are, to the platforms and to other users; they do this through “tactics of invisibility”, which allow them to exert some agency and resist the datafied gaze (talvitie-lamberg et al., 2022). however, for lgbtq communities, visibility is even more complex: it can serve to provide public recognition to queer and trans people, help build communities and strengthen solidarity, but can also expose individuals to abuse, harassment and surveillance (kitzie, 2019; lingel, 2021). scholars have proposed to address this tension surrounding queer visibilities by proposing tactics of hypervisibility, such as dazzle camouflage (lingel, 2021) and drag as obfuscation (kornstein, 2019). reflecting on the nexus of visibility, invisibility and hypervisibility, in our research we address how queer people conceptualize surveillance and datafication in their daily lives, how they interact with these systems, and what tactics they deploy to negotiate their interactions. the research project grounded in a participatory action research (par) framework and utilizing focus groups with queer/lgbtq+ participants from glasgow (uk), our project examines how queerness is objectified, datafied, and surveilled in online spaces. employing a critical, curious, and collaborative approach, the study treats community members as experts. the project includes three focus groups and a workshop with the same group of five participants over a three-month period, exploring intersections of queerness, safety, expression, and surveillance online. in the first session, the research team invited participants to think about datafication through a "data diary", through which they mapped out the various systems, locations, devices, and routines that are connected to data and data collection in their lives. in the second session, participants read two media articles on the topic of instagram shadowbanning and facebook's “real name” policy and discussed the tension between safety and visibility for queer communities. the third session is a visual focus group (ferrari, 2024), in which participants came together to draw an image that represents their collective vision of a queer, safe, and regenerative internet. the last session was devoted to a zine-making workshop, which was informed by a discussion of our preliminary findings and resulted in different zines. findings in this paper, we focus on the findings emerging from the first two sessions. first, participants are acutely aware of how much digital data they generated over the course of a typical day and of how such data is collected by different corporate actors to maximize their profits. this profit-driven datafication coexists with what participants see as a structural inability to “opt-out” of data collection, because “giving up” data is increasingly tied to financial incentives – chiefly the possibility of saving (even small amounts of) money in the sharp cost of living crisis that characterizes the uk at present. participants discussed how “opting out” felt increasingly unrealistic; they remarked on how much this data collection renders them heavily visible online and specifically highly visible as queer. they expressed a shared need to hold different “presentations of the self” in different online contexts, to seek community or to ensure safety, but also delineated how queerness troubles the distinction between visibility and invisibility online and the oft-repeated idea that “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”. second, participants reflected on two paradoxes they encounter in their use of corporate digital platforms. as mentioned, this discussion was facilitated by two media articles that covered two phenomena, which have already been explored by scholars (see rauchberg, 2022; lingel, 2017): the shadowbanning of queer content on instagram and the issues with facebook’s real name policy. the first paradox lies in how the enactment of safety policies by corporate digital platforms renders queer communities more visible, but not safer. one example of this is verification requirements, which are aimed at enhancing safety in digital spaces by linking user accounts to their "real" identities (boyd, 2012). participants noted how the policy privileged the concept of permanency and how, by making the process of name change difficult, it universalizes the importance of permanent names, which is not necessarily shared across all communities. the second paradox concerns how these platforms have become a crucial stage for the development of queer knowledge (haimson et al., 2019; willcox and hickey-moody, 2020), while also “extracting” this knowledge (guyan, 2023). participants often found this to be confusing and ironic; many listed the ways that being queer while navigating data systems was hard, yet remarked how the platforms connected to these systems are also sites of connection and belonging. but participants also shared their own experiences in trying to navigate these paradoxes and spent time examining the various ways in which they set boundaries in the digital world in order to protect their space, health, and the balance between their online/offline selves. these tactics included: posting instagram stories visible only to their carefully curated list of “close friends” (as enabled by the platform); creating finstas, i.e. separate instagram accounts through which they can post more authentic content and manage “context collapse” (marwick & boyd, 2011); removing tags and followers; using pronoun markers in some platforms but not others; and divesting from the use of facebook. while participants generally felt the need to engage in these “tactics of invisibility”, many of them had not thought about these practices as connected to navigating datafication until our focus groups made them realize this connection. the sessions revealed that participants spent a lot of time and labour considering how to navigate different modalities of visibility, as being "seen" or represented was not an inherent "good" and how and why and when they wanted to be perceived (intentionally or not) changed depending on audience and platform context. this participant-led focus inspired a concept we have preliminary named “digitally afforded lateral surveillance” and by which we highlight how participants feel primarily surveilled online by their peers, via read receipts, shared locations, tagging, “@” functions, etc. this is enabled through corporate data extraction, of course, but holds different risks, contradictions, and meanings for the participants, especially when they "logged off" and dealt with these reverberations in their offline lives. further, while participants couldn’t exactly pinpoint where they had learned these tactics, they reported having seen them adopted by the queer communities they interact with online. this speaks to the existence of processes of inter-community knowledge sharing (see also geeng et al. 2022). overall, the focus groups homed in on how peer and corporate data surveillance, along with awareness of these practices, leads queer communities to develop tactics to negotiate visibility and privacy in online spaces. conclusion through a participatory action research (par) lens, our work centres the voices and lived expertise of lgbtq+ community members and delves into the tensions around visibility, invisibility, and hypervisibility, illuminating how queer individuals navigate these dynamics and employ tactics to negotiate their digital interactions. by adopting a collaborative approach, we not only document these experiences but also invite participants to co-create knowledge about datafication and surveillance, with the aim of empowering them in their day-to-day encounters with digital technologies. finally, we argue that dataveillance is a queer issue. investigating daily practices and imaginaries through this frame offers a vital perspective from which to study datafication at large. references boyd, d. (2012). the politics of “real names.” communications of the acm, 55(8), 29– 31. https://doi.org/10.1145/2240236.2240247 browne, s. (2015). dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. duke university press. costanza-chock, s. (2020). design justice: community-led practices to build the worlds we need. the mit press. ferrari, e. (2024). visual focus groups: stimulating reflexive conversations with collective drawing. new media & society, 26(9), 5486–5506. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221136082 geeng, c., harris, m., redmiles, e., & roesner, f. (2022). “like lesbians walking the perimeter”: experiences of u.s. lgbtq+ folks with online security, safety, and privacy advice. 31st usenix security symposium (usenix security 22), 305– 322. https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity22/presentation/geeng guyan, k. (2022). queer data: using gender, sex and sexuality data for action. bloomsbury academic. haimson, o. l., dame-griff, a., capello, e., & richter, z. (2021). tumblr was a trans technology: the meaning, importance, history, and future of trans technologies. feminist media studies, 21(3), 345–361. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1678505 hintz, a., dencik, l., & wahl-jorgensen, k. (2018). digital citizenship in a datafied society. wiley. kitzie, v. (2019). “that looks like me or something i can do”: affordances and constraints in the online identity work of us lgbtq+ millennials. journal of the association for information science and technology, 70(12), 1340–1351. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24217 kornstein, h. (2019). under her eye: digital drag as obfuscation and countersurveillance. surveillance & society, 17(5), 681–698. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v17i5.12957 lingel, j. (2017). digital countercultures and the struggle for community. mit press. lingel, j. (2021). dazzle camouflage as queer counter conduct. european journal of cultural studies, 24(5), 1107–1124. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549420902805 https://doi.org/10.1145/2240236.2240247 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221136082 marwick, a. e., & boyd, d. (2011). i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. new media & society, 13(1), 114– 133. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365313 rauchberg, j. s. (2022). #shadowbanned. in p. paromita, lgbtq digital cultures (1st ed., pp. 196–209). routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003196457-15 talvitie-lamberg, k., lehtinen, v., & valtonen, s. (2022). tactics of invisibility: how people in vulnerable positions make datafied everyday life livable. new media & society, 146144482211360. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221136077 willcox, m. g., & hickey-moody, a. c. (2020). queer materialities and instagram live interviewing: community entanglements. aoir selected papers of internet research. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2020i0.11363 zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. profile books. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365313 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221136077 https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2020i0.11363 aoir2022-submission-template.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 the vibes are off: tracing viral targeted theories across tiktok yvonne m. eadon center for information, technology, and public life (citap) university of north carolina, chapel hill introduction the social media and short video streaming app tiktok has grown exponentially in the past four years: from 55 million global users in 2018, to 689 million in 2020, to one billion in 2021—a 45% increase from 2020 to 2021 (wang 2021). the app’s growth, and its marked influence on other apps (aten 2020) show that studying the socio-techno-cultural dynamics of tiktok are essential for understanding the wider forces at work in our contemporary digital landscape. tiktok’s uniqueness and appeal derives from its mimetic affordances: the material and sociocultural determinants of how users can engage with the platform, including specific tools and algorithms (bucher and helmond 2018) are built on logics of imitation and replication (zulli and zulli 2020). content is often created by using a sound from another creator’s video, “stitching” with a video in order to respond to it, or using the green screen effect, in which a creator can place someone else’s video in the background of their own. tiktok’s main content feed, the “for you page” (fyp) is precisely algorithmically personalized for each user. the fyp algorithm is notoriously good at cultivating virality (le compte and klug 2021) in particular a sped-up kind of hyper-virality that spikes over a matter of days, sometimes hours. case study: stella weber one such hyper-viral incident took place in late 2021: a recently out transgender woman and tiktok creator, stella weber, went viral on the platform. some of her videos,1 consisting of her dancing in her home in a variety of outfits, garnered views in the millions. these numbers were a result of other creators making videos about her, accusing her of being a serial killer or kidnapper. one creator specializing in “creepy” 1 stella weber is a pseudonym. although the incident and her tiktok profile are public, the creator’s privacy remains important. suggested citation (apa): eadon, y. (2022, november). the vibes are off: tracing viral targeted theories across tiktok. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. content used the green screen effect to zoom in on a computer monitor in the background of one of stella’s videos, positing that the blurry images on the screen looked like security footage of two women being confined. comments upon comments on this and similar videos suggested that stella’s content had “buffalo bill vibes,” referencing the serial killer from the silence of the lambs whose character design is notoriously transphobic (romano 2021). beyond the “creepy vibes” of stella’s videos (likely a classist reaction to her living situation) the main evidence given for her supposedly being a kidnapper are these blurry computer monitor images. it is often easy to fill in the blanks when something comes from a source the reader or viewer finds untrustworthy: some jfk assassination researchers speculate that the redactions on declassified documents contain the keys to the entire case (eadon 2019). in this circumstance, we see people filling in the blanks in a different way: shaped by their own unquestioned normative perceptions of the monstrosity and concomitant untrustworthiness of transness and poverty. in a matter of days, a variety of discourses emerged from this initial viral theorization, from people showing up unannounced at stella’s home to interview her on camera, to creators who had accused her of being a serial killer apologizing to her publicly, to videos by queer creators pointing out the transphobia inherent in comments referencing buffalo bill. one such creator asked: “if you were one of the countless people that was saying this account was giving you buffalo bill vibes, i really want you to think about why.” videos like this one are critical of the original, normative narrative framing of stella’s content, illustrating the depth and variety of discourses that can circulate around such viral incidents. targeted theories through a discourse analysis of this and two other case studies (outlined below), this exploratory research project outlines and defines a new kind of phenomenon taking place on tiktok: that of the viral targeted theory: an amateur investigation of an individual creator based on an—often mundane—activity recorded in a tiktok video. targeted theories are related to online harassment; in many cases they constitute a type of harassment. they are also related to conspiracy theories, but are distinct from them in that targeted theories accuse an individual, rather than a group, of duplicity. research questions for this project include: what are targeted theories, and are they unique to tiktok? how do tiktok’s platform affordances create an environment that is (or is not) especially hospitable for targeted theorizing and concomitant discourses? how are the identities of targeted creators who are marginalized exploited and even weaponized as part of targeted theorizing? in what ways do creators who engage in normative discourses (reinforcing the targeted theory), those who engage in critical discourses (challenging the targeted theory), and the creators who are themselves targeted, interact, converse, and influence one another? this project traces the rise and fall of three case studies of targeted theories on tiktok, and the normative and critical discourses that emerge around them. in addition to stella, other tiktok creators who have been subject to targeted theorization include the daydream collective, a person with dissociative identity disorder who was bullied off2 the platform after being accused of faking their mental illness (colombo 2022); and couch guy, whose “weird vibes” in a video of his long-distance girlfriend surprising him with a visit resulted in speculation that he was cheating. almost overnight, these creators became the subject of ridicule and loathing from astounding numbers of tiktok users. creators who are targeted often become memeified, going so viral that references to them are instantly recognizable. the amateur investigative digilantism (nhan, huey, and broll 2017) of creators who posit targeted theories is based in moral panic: they rally against perceived trafficking or murder (in stella’s case), lying, lack of authenticity, or attention seeking (the daydream collective), and cheating or deception in a monogamous relationship (couch guy). online harassment and logics of morality go hand-in-hand (marwick 2021). further questions some big-picture questions to be answered in future research follow. what are the consequences of targeted theories, for the creators who are targeted, in particular those with marginalized identities? how does targeted theorizing reveal the shapes of existing power structures? that is, how might such crises of virality on tiktok exemplify and reveal the wider system of algorithmic harms (noble 2018) faced by marginalized people online? references aten, jason. “instagram reels copies tiktok, and is an example of everything wrong with facebook.” inc, august 6, 2020. bucher, taina, and anne helmond. “the affordances of social media platforms.” in the sage handbook of social media, by jean burgess, alice marwick, and thomas poell, 233–53. 1 oliver’s yard, 55 city road london ec1y 1sp: sage publications ltd, 2018. colombo, charlotte. “viral ‘dissociative identity disorder’ tiktoker sparks questions about the internet’s effect on mental health.” rolling stone (blog), january 15, 2022. eadon, yvonne. “‘useful information turned into something useless’: archival silences, imagined records, and suspicion of mediated information in the jfk assassination collection.” interactions: ucla journal of education and information studies 15, no. 2 (2019). kaye, d bondy valdovinos. “you made this? i made this: practices of authorship and (mis)attribution on tiktok,” 2021, 21. 2 the fantasy collective is also a pseudonym. couch guy was not given a pseudonym due to the fact that his name is not used in public discussions of the incident. https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/instagram-reels-is-a-copy-of-tiktok-an-example-of-everything-wrong-with-facebook.html https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/wonderland-system-tiktok-dissociative-identity-disorder-1283571/ le compte, daniel, and daniel klug. “‘it’s viral!’ -a study of the behaviors, practices, and motivations of tiktok social activists.” arxiv:2106.08813 [cs], june 16, 2021. marwick, alice e. “morally motivated networked harassment as normative reinforcement.” social media + society 7, no. 2 (april 1, 2021): 20563051211021376. nhan, johnny, laura huey, and ryan broll. “digilantism: an analysis of crowdsourcing and the boston marathon bombings.” the british journal of criminology 57, no. 2 (march 1, 2017): 341–61. noble, safiya umoja. algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york, ny: new york university press, 2018. rieder, bernhard, ariadna matamoros-fernández, and òscar coromina. “from ranking algorithms to ‘ranking cultures’: investigating the modulation of visibility in youtube search results.” convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies 24, no. 1 (february 2018): 50–68. romano, aja. “understanding silence of the lambs’ complicated cultural legacy.” news. vox, february 16, 2021. valdovinos kaye, d. bondy. “make this go viral: building musical careers through accidental virality on tiktok.” flow journal 27, no. 1 (2020). wang, echo. “tiktok hits 1 billion monthly active users globally.” reuters, september 27, 2021. zulli, diana, and david james zulli. “extending the internet meme: conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation publics on the tiktok platform.” new media & society, december 26, 2020, 1461444820983603. http://arxiv.org/abs/2106.08813 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211021378 https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azv118 https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856517736982 https://www.vox.com/culture/22281548/silence-of-the-lambs-cultural-impact-legacy-feminist-transphobia https://www.flowjournal.org/2020/09/make-this-go-viral/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/tiktok-hits-1-billion-monthly-active-users-globally-company-2021-09-27/ https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820983603 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): spencer-smith, c.; drüeke, r. & peil, c. (2024, october). “they will destroy telegram” – narratives of platform censorship in the german-speaking covid-19 conspiracy community on telegram. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “they will destroy telegram” – narratives of platform censorship in the german-speaking covid-19 conspiracy community on telegram charlotte spencer-smith department of communication studies, university of salzburg ricarda drüeke department of communication studies, university of salzburg corinna peil department of communication studies, university of salzburg introduction the covid-19 pandemic has provided fertile ground for the spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories. in response, social media platforms have implemented stringent content moderation measures, including the deletion of problematic content and deplatforming of offending accounts, compelling conspiracy theorists to migrate towards the messaging app telegram (rogers 2020). such actors face ‘deplatforming’, in which users are ejected “from a specific technology platform by closing their accounts, banning them, or blocking them from using the platform or its services” (radsch, 2021, p.109). short of being banned, users can also find themselves frustrated by a range of content moderation measures that prevent them from circulating content freely, including reducing the reach or visibility of content, adding fact checks or wikipedia links to posts around disputed subjects or preventing creators from monetizing their content (gillespie, 2022; caplan and gillespie, 2020; cotter et al., 2022). online conspiracy theory communities, which we address in our research, are particularly at odds with the governance of digital platforms (papakyiakopoulos et al. 2020). the infrastructure for content moderation is crucial for content production and communication possibilities. while previous studies explore how non-conspiracy users perceive content moderation (e.g., myers west 2018), there is a lack of research on how conspiracy theorists interpret content moderation and how it fits into broader censorship narratives. our study addresses this gap by investigating how conspiracy communities – the “querdenken” movement – on telegram discuss and (mis-)conceptualize content moderation practices across platforms. born in response to the covid-19 pandemic, the “querdenken” movement gained prominence in the early 2020s for its criticism of what it believed to be restrictive government policies in austria, as well as germany. it rapidly expanded through digital communication and established itself as an important platform for coordinating protests and voicing dissent against political decisions and pandemic containment strategies (holzer 2021). as the pandemic has abated, this community has pursued positions associated with right-wing populism, including on the russian invasion of ukraine. at the same time, these communities have faced a tougher regulatory environment with new laws that directly impact content moderation in germany (the network enforcement act) and austria (the communications platforms act), as well as the european digital services act and recently imposed sanctions against russian state-affiliated media. we aim to uncover the prevalent beliefs of “querdenken” community members about content moderation, proposed resistance strategies, and how these views intersect with overarching conspiratorial frameworks. theoretical framework while previous studies have explored the reactions of non-conspiracy theorist users to content moderation, this subject remains largely unexplored within conspiracist communities. in the context of non-conspiracist user populations, myers west (2018) and savolainen (2022) have looked at “folk theories” of content moderation and social media algorithms. this and similar literature argue that platforms’ lack of transparency about content moderation contributes to the development of theories and speculation by users (e.g. cotter, 2019). further studies have revealed suspicions among users that they are being marginalised using content moderation for ideological reasons or because of platforms’ discomfort with subjects such as sexuality (riedl et al., 2024; are, 2021). although this might suggest that users are at the mercy of platforms, research has uncovered users’ strategies for resisting content moderation, for example by changing the spellings of words that are likely to trigger content moderation processes (gillett et al., 2023; gerrard, 2018; steen et al., 2023). methods our research methodology involves an in-depth examination and content analysis of telegram messages utilizing a dataset comprising 87 channels in the german and austrian corona skeptical “querdenken” community. messages were downloaded from the following time periods: (1) the time around the largest covid-19 protest in austria (9th to 23rd december 2021) (2) a selected time period following the russian invasion of the ukraine (3rd to 17th march 2022) and (3) a selected time period after most covid19-related restrictions were lifted in austria (1st to 15th february 2023). these were chosen as time periods representing different phases for the covid-19 protest movement in austria. using maxqda, this dataset was further filtered using a keyword search to only messages that mentioned at least one of a list of social media platforms, messaging platforms and apps. in a second step, this was further refined using a list of german-language keywords relevant to content moderation and related controversies. for the qualitative content analysis, we analyzed references to content moderation to identify key themes and narratives. using the three most mentioned platforms regarding content moderation – telegram, facebook and youtube – we then developed comparative case studies on the discussion of these platforms. overall, the case studies show how the content moderation measures identified by users are woven into conspiracy narratives and which actors are seen as central. at the same time, they reveal which platforms are seen as alternatives and free from censorship. findings on each platform, there is a distinct discourse about how content moderation in the context of the covid-19 pandemic is perceived. conspiracy theorists portray telegram as a refuge for unfiltered communication, citing its encrypted nature and limited content moderation. nevertheless, they consider telegram to be under existential threat from both government regulators and app store operators. in contrast, the central theme of the discussion around facebook is its fact-checking program, which is responsible for removing and downranking covid-19 vaccine-related content. conspiracy theorists point to selective censorship practices and suggest that corporate influence, particularly from pharmaceutical companies, play a role in content moderation decisions. on youtube, criticism of the removal of content and accounts is directed at various tech companies that are perceived as representing the so-called elites. the regulatory interventions that prevent people from learning the ‘whole truth’ are highlighted. discussion & conclusion our findings provide valuable insights into the emergence and spread of conspiracy theories in digital ecosystems, shedding light on the development of censorship narratives and circumvention strategies. this helps to illuminate how conspiracy theorists make sense of disruption and unpredictability in their social media communications and bring the new order of platform power into their understanding of the old order of conspiracy. this is particularly timely considering the continuing growth of right-wing populism against the backdrop of a stricter regulatory environment against hate speech and disinformation in europe. references are, c. (2023). an autoethnography of automated powerlessness: lacking platform affordances in instagram and tiktok account deletions. media, culture & society, 45(4), 822–840. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221140531 caplan, r., & gillespie, t. (2020). tiered governance and demonetization: the shifting terms of labor and compensation in the platform economy. social media + society, 6(2), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120936636 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120936636 cotter, k. (2019). playing the visibility game: how digital influencers and algorithms negotiate influence on instagram. new media & society, 21(4), 895–913. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818815684 cotter, k. (2023). “shadowbanning is not a thing”: black box gaslighting and the power to independently know and credibly critique algorithms. information, communication & society, 26(6), 1226–1243. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2021.1994624 gerrard, y. (2018). beyond the hashtag: circumventing content moderation on social media. new media & society, 20(12), 4492–4511. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818776611 gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. yale university press. gillett, r., gray, j. e., & valdovinos kaye, d. b. (2023). ‘just a little hack’: investigating cultures of content moderation circumvention by facebook users. new media & society, 0(0), 14614448221147661. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221147661 holzer, b. (2021). zwischen protest und parodie: strukturen der» querdenken «kommunikation auf telegram (und anderswo). in s. reichardt (ed.), die misstrauensgemeinschaft der querdenker. die corona-proteste aus kultur-und sozialwissenschaftlicher perspektive (pp. 125-157). frankfurt/new york: campus. myers west, s. (2018). censored, suspended, shadowbanned: user interpretations of content moderation on social media platforms. new media & society, 20(11), 4366– 4383. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818773059 papakyriakopoulos, o., serrano, j. c. m., & hegelich, s. (2020). the spread of covid19 conspiracy theories on social media and the effect of content moderation. the harvard kennedy school (hks) misinformation review, 1. radsch, c. (2021). deplatforming. in l. belli, n. zingales, & y. curzi (eds.), glossary of platform law and policy terms (pp. 109–111). internet governance forum. riedl, m. j., martin, z. c., & woolley, s. c. (2024). ‘i get suppressed:’ proand antiabortion activists’ folk theories of platform governance and shadowbanning. information, communication & society, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2023.2289976 rogers, r. (2020). deplatforming: following extreme internet celebrities to telegram and alternative social media. european journal of communication, 35(3), 213–229. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323120922066 steen, e., yurechko, k., & klug, d. (2023). you can (not) say what you want: using algospeak to contest and evade algorithmic content moderation on tiktok. social media + society, 9(3), 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231194586 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818815684 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2021.1994624 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818776611 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221147661 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818773059 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2023.2289976 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231194586 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): arriagada, a., duffy, b., glatt, z., wissinger, b. & wood, r. (2024, october). industry tensions: labor subjectivities and self-reinvention in platform work. panel presented at aoir 2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. industry tensions: labor subjectivities and selfreinvention in platform work arturo arriagada universidad adolfo ibáñez brooke erin duffy cornell university zoe glatt microsoft research elizabeth wissinger the city university of new york rachel wood keele university this panel aims to challenge the binary framing of worker resistance strategies found in recent internet studies research, by directing attention towards the intricate processes of self-reinvention and adaptation among platform workers, particularly influencers. the focus on worker resistance strategies (bonini et al., 2023; anwar & graham, 2020) fails to consider the nuanced individual processes of adaptation associated with the kinds of transformation this panel puts forward. the digitalization of labor is reconfiguring the processes and products of various industries—from media and advertising to transport and retail (delfanti, 2019; turow et al., 2015; woodcock & graham, 2020). in this context, transformations related to the twin processes of digitalization and industrialization have introduced new mechanisms of power and subjugation, too. while internet studies researchers have drawn attention to many of the less auspicious aspects of control, including systems of surveillance, automation, and precarization; algorithmic systems, in particular, are key vectors in the organization and mediation of work (ravenelle, 2019; rosenblat, 2018; wood et al., 2019). this panel delves into the labor subjectivities that emerge from processes of adaptation to platform work. 2 these papers discuss the mechanisms by which different actors within the influencer industry navigate constantly changing organizational environments, a crucial aspect of what it takes for them to thrive across industries and labor markets. this involves reinventing themselves in an ever-changing technological environment, coping with being subjects of permanent control and evaluation by customers and employers, and making sense of their activities in highly-commercial environments. consequently, notions of labor and value remain in a continuous state of contestation and redefinition within the influencer industry. the papers span topics ranging from visibility and authenticity to the reinvention of work through platform engagements, as well as the role intermediaries play in the quantification and qualification of influencer activities. the first paper considers changing discourses about labor and employment in the post-pandemic era—from #quietquitting to influencer-employees. by exploring social media expressions of, for, and against corporate employers, the authors offer a framework for understanding contemporary worker subjectivities. by doing so, they illuminate the tensions that arise when corporate brand directives (i.e., humanized brands) collide with individual promotional logics (branded humans) on social media. the second examines the complex interplay between sustainability influencers’ precarious and insecure labor conditions and the climate crisis. ‘green’ influencers must negotiate reducing/refusing consumption and waste, practices that run directly counter to the social media values of self promotion via branded consumption. rejecting normative income generating practices of self branding, and traditional notions of success, sustainability influencers struggle to monetise their labor without compromising their environmental principles (e.g. by working with brands with negative environmental impacts that have been accused of 'greenwashing'). these nuanced processes of individual adaptation require sustainability workers to craft their subjectivity over and against platform norms, causing intensified precarity to be endemic to this kind of work. the third explores the cultural mediation fashion models perform at the margins of prescriptive ideals of beauty and race in social media culture. it details the pressure to self-brand to achieve influencer status, under the aegis of strict brand requirements exercised by model agencies. these pressures have forced older models to adapt and intensify their digital platform labor over and above the physical and personal self-branding labor that has always been a requisite to being signed as a model. while aging loudly and proudly, these model/influencers do so amidst limiting assumptions about how best to age as a person of color while trying to gain traction on social media. respondents report that both the fashion and social media industries have promised far more inclusive acceptance of age and race than they currently afford. consequently, their influencer work is often in tension with their agency's brand dictates, as well as running counter to social media influencing ideals. 3 the fourth paper explores the integral role of influencer marketing companies and their algorithmic tools in quantifying influencers' value in the latin american context. these companies seek to render influencer returns measurable. this pursuit, however, comes at the cost of adopting a set of indicators, pricing structures, or monitoring methods that may remain opaque to content creators. despite promises to enhance brand certainty, these agencies, rather than neutral intermediaries, actively shape influencer practices, often at the expense of creators. the study reveals how quantification dynamics perpetuate power imbalances, undermining the agency of platform workers in an opaque industry. #employable: when humanized brands and branded humans collide brooke erin duffy cornell university zoe glatt microsoft research introduction if mainstream media coverage is taken at face value, then the post-pandemic work era marks a radical new phase in labor politics: union support is soaring in western countries (mccarthy, 2022), and workers across industries and levels are entering collective bargaining agreements (logan, 2022). contesting “always-on” professional demands, workers—especially the younger generation who joined the workforce since 2020—are pushing back against the steady incursion of the 9-to-5 into their personal lives. 2021 was dubbed the year of the “great resignation”, with record numbers of employees quitting their jobs, meanwhile trends such as #bareminimummonday and #quietquitting encouraged workers to wrest back control over their schedules and labor power. at the same time, corporate employers are striving to lure office-weary workers back to the workplace (goldberg & kode, 2023); while some companies are hiring slick designers to create “instagrammable” officers, others offer dazzling in-office perks: dry-cleaning, lunch, even a concert with lizzo (wakabayashi et al., 2022). others are honing their so-called “employer brand” in a bid to appeal to gen z, who purportedly care less about money than previous generations and more about working for “authentic” companies that share their values (conley, 2022). in case it’s not abundantly clear, these emergent discourses and practices of contemporary work often involve social media platforms: instagram, x, tiktok, 4 linkedin and youtube, among others. in this paper, we contend that digitally mediated conversations about work can tell us much about broader flows of worker power, agency, and resistance in the contemporary landscape. methods this paper presents a typology of trends at the interface of social media and the workplace. we began our research by identifying popular discourses related to work, labor, and employment from the last four years (2020-2024). our corpus of data included news articles, popular media, and blog posts that spanned such topics as jobs, careers, work, labor, branding. we worked iteratively to compile more articles and examples until prominent themes emerged (glaser & strauss, 1967). from there, we developed a quadrant graph with employer power/employee agency on one-axis, and brand alignment on the other. in order to glean deeper insight into the themes arising, we selected key case studies that exemplified each of the four quadrants. we subsequently compiled a secondary corpus for each case, which consisted of user-generated content on tiktok and instagram; audience interactions; and press releases and communications from and about brands/companies. we then analyzed these cases with an eye toward power flows on social media platforms as companies and employees grapple for control and agency. preliminary findings through our typology, we identify a range of work practices and discourses about the nature of work as they are expressed through social media platforms: the company influencer (high corporate alignment/high employee agency), the invisible employee-ambassador (high corporate alignment/low employee agency), the quiet quitter (low brand loyalty/low employee agency) and the anti-work crusader (low employer loyalty/high employee agency). the individual cases that exemplify each category are highly variable—from cringey anthropomorphized brand twitter and employee influencer schemes, to parodies of corporate culture and public videos of firings on tiktok. yet, together, they help illuminate the shifting power dynamics between brands/companies and their employees at a moment when such negotiations are increasingly playing out on and through social media. one key vector of the shift is the rise of digital branding and, more precisely, cultures of “influencer creep” (bishop, 2023). brands understand the value of harnessing employees in a platform-oriented marketing environment, and social media marketers and employee influencers are tasked with crafting relatable brand identities that will speak to gen z and millennial audiences, who are often highly critical of overtly corporate messaging. crucially, though, these initiatives rely upon 5 “real people”—oft-un(der)paid young people who are upheld as a savvy workforce (jacobson et al, 2023; duffy & sawey, 2021). over the past decade, companies and brands have increasingly leveraged social media in a bid to appear more authentic, more relatable, more intimate (banet-weiser, 2012). marketing consultants laud efforts to humanize brands by capitalizing on the “aura,” and anthropomorphic brands have been given new life across instagram, tiktok, and twitter/x. at the same time as major brands cede control to their employees in their attempts to connect with a new generation of customers, the former fear losing a handle on their self-narratives, facing new risks from disgruntled (ex-)employees who may mobilize their own audiences against them. we see particularly high profile examples of this with social media-forward brands like buzzfeed and bon appétit, both of which have benefitted from the immense popularity of their highly visible onscreen talent, and both of whom faced the consequences when said talent went independent and used their platforms to critique those companies. conclusion in his much-hyped 1997 article the brand called you, business pundit tom peters roused those vying to get ahead in the brave new world of work to practice strategic self-branding. though peters’ directive to become “the ceo of me, inc.” was perhaps novel advice at a moment that predated linkedin and twitter, selfmarketization has since emerged as an organizing principle for social life under conditions of neoliberalism (gershon, 2017). it is perhaps not surprising, then, that attention to the topic of self-branding abounds, seeing a great uptick with the rise of influencer cultures in the 2010s. yet what is less well understood is how this culture of personal branding melds with its inverse: the humanization of brands. in this paper, we offer a conceptualization of these two concurrent movements at the interface of technology and work: the branding of humans, and the humanization of brands. such a framework, we argue, has important implications for understanding the fraught terrain of employment, autonomy, surveillance, (in)visibility, resistance and rupture in the age of social media. the paradox of commercial and environmental values for sustainability influencers: exploring a post-work approach to influencer labour rachel wood keele university scholarship on influencer labour has demonstrated that these hyper-precarious platform workers (duffy et al., 2021; glatt, 2022) are on the front lines of a 6 contemporary ‘crisis of work’ (hoffmann & frayne, 2023). this platform labour crisis can be understood not in isolation, but situated within the broader context of what has been described as the ‘polycrisis’ (lawrence et al., 2024), a succession of major global social, economic, environmental, and political crises that are entangled with, and exacerbating of, one another. specifically, the paper examines how influencers are positioned within the context of climate crisis and how this can intersect with and complicate their insecure labour conditions. the analysis draws on a digital ethnography of sustainability influencers, showing how their concerns for the environmental impact of consumption and waste come into conflict with normative income generation practices for influencers which involve monetising a self-brand into promotional arrangements. the paper argues that commercial and promotional values of the influencer platform economy are ultimately irrevocable with environmental values. sustainability influencers take on individual responsibility for navigating this ‘sustainability paradox’ (frig & jaakkola, 2023), using various practices of compromise, conciliation, strategic negotiation, defensive retreat, and refusal. the analysis develops the paper’s theoretical argument: that ecological and feminist post-work and de-growth approaches to labour (weeks, 2020; hoffmann & frayne, 2023) might fruitfully be brought to bear in influencer industry research as a way of imagining a way out of intersecting crises of both labour and climate. the paper concludes by looking to possibilities offered in the data that indicate alternatives to the commercial and promotional norms that pervade the contemporary influencer ecology. polycrisis: platform labour and climate that platform workers are at the vanguard of the current labour crisis has been well established (jarrett, 2022). this scholarship situates itself in literature examining the neoliberal shifts in cultural and creative sectors since the 1990s which devolved risk and responsibility from employer to employee (mcrobbie, 2018). influencer labour is characterised by intense levels of unpredictability and uncertainty, subject to shifts in markets, industries and platform affordances and algorithms (duffy et al., 2021). feminist researchers have demonstrated that this hyper-precarity exacerbates inequalities and engenders anxious forms of self-management (bishop, 2018; duffy et al., 2021; glatt, 2022, rauchberg, 2022). placing an understanding of platform labour in crisis within a broader ‘polycrisis’ context (lawrence et al., 2024) has three main benefits. first, it allows for an exploration of the ‘sustainability paradox’ that emerges when the promotion normative to influencer labour clashes with increasingly popular sustainability values (frig & jaakkola, 2023). second, it enables a feminist critique of how individual responsibilisation operates across multiple crises including that of economy, labour, pandemic, and environment, with women in particular taking on much of the burden of privatising and managing polycrisis conditions (wilson and yochim, 2018). and finally, it opens up the possibility of exploring solutions that might address 7 intersecting crises simultaneously, as explored in the discussion of post-work approaches below. methods the paper draws on analysis of data gathered using a qualitative digital ethnography of a sub-set of sustainability influencers: those focused on ‘zero waste’ lifestyles aimed at reducing consumption and waste. methods included an instagram participatory ethnography of sustainability influencer instagram accounts, participant observation of industry events, and semi-structured individual interviews with fifteen ‘nano-influencers’ based in the uk, europe, and north america. the analysis highlights the specific complexities that arise from trying to work as an influencer while upholding sustainability principles that routinely come into conflict with taken for granted industry and platform norms of promotion, consumption, and accumulation. findings all influencers must navigate a delicate, often unstable, balance of visibility and authenticity when monetising their personas to promote brands (arriagada and bishop, 2021). for sustainability influencers, however, considerations around commodifiable self-brand values are layered with, and routinely come into conflict with, environmental values. as one influencer explained in an interview: ‘i feel like there’s like two questions that i need to answer when i work with brands… number one, are they sustainable? and then number two, is it something that i would use and love?’. analysis of the data shows that: · before working with brands, sustainability influencers undertake extensive research about the environmental impact of the brand’s materials, supply chains, production, workers, shipping, use, disposal, and more, often questioning the company directly and navigating obfuscating impression management communications in the form of ‘greenwashing’ (jones, 2019) · just as research on influencer labour has shown individual responsibilisation of precarious working conditions (glatt, 2022), there was broad agreement among participants that it is ultimately influencers as individuals who are responsible for researching and understanding an extensive, complex, and often deliberately obtuse set of factors related to the environmental impact of brands and products. interviews captured experiences of influencers feeling anxious and embarrassed and concerned about the risk of criticism from followers if and when they ‘got it wrong’. · some influencers seek to side-step this hard to manage level of individual expectation by promoting products that they knew had less than perfect eco credentials. to do this they draw on familiar discourses of authenticity (arriagada 8 and bishop, 2021), emphasising sustainability as an imperfect ‘journey’ and framing ‘perfection’ as inauthentic and unattainable. most influencers make very little or no financial income for their work, meaning their labour is ‘aspirational’ in its orientation to the possibility of monetising their self-brand in future (duffy, 2017). because of the factors outlined above, financial success was often described as an impossible and/or undesirable aspiration for sustainability influencers. even for those who did wish to grow their account, it was acknowledged that doing so would be challenging not only due to the income precarity and individualised risk that all influencers face, but also the compromises to environmental values that creators felt would be unavoidable in order to monetise. discussion the impossibility of straightforwardly aligning environmental and commercial values for sustainability influencers evidences the fundamental unsustainability of the influencer economy itself. in thinking through this polycrisis, we are presented with an opportunity to rethink social media cultures of promotional labour and consumption in ways that address the crisis of work and the climate crisis simultaneously (vrasti, 2021). ‘post-work’ approaches, drawing from eco-critical and feminist traditions, problematise the unsustainable centrality of labour in economic and social life, and imagine how dependence on paid work might be reduced, both materially and culturally (gerold et al., 2023; weeks, 2020). this approach acknowledges that contemporary systems of work are characterised by conditions of precarity, exploitation and inequality but argues that sustainable solutions cannot be found in calls for more and better jobs, which are highly energy intensive and environmentally harmful, but in a move away from work altogether (vrasti, 2021; hoffman and paulsen, 2020). in imagining how work might be reduced and re-organised in ways that are more sustainable, researchers suggest we look to traces of post-work organisation and politics in the present (hoffman and paulsen, 2020). in concluding the paper, i return to the data to touch on sustainability influencers’ focus on practices that suggest alternatives to commercial and promotional norms, revealing possibilities for feminist communities of care (de wilde and parry, 2022) forged around the sharing of slow living practices and collective and creative patterns of re-purposing and re-using materials for daily living. references: arriagada, a., & bishop, s. (2021). between commerciality and authenticity: the imaginary of social media influencers in the platform economy. communication, culture and critique, 14(4), 568-586. 9 bishop, s. (2018). anxiety, panic and self-optimization: inequalities and the youtube algorithm. convergence, 24(1), 69–84. doi:10.1177/1354856517736978 duffy, b. e. (2017). (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. new haven, ct: yale university press. duffy, b. e., pinch, a., sannon, s., & sawey, m. (2021). the nested precarities of creative labor on social media. social media+ society, 7(2), 20563051211021368. frig, m. m., & jaakkola, m. (2023). between conspicuous and conscious consumption: the sustainability paradox in the intermediary promotional work of an online lifestyle site. journal of consumer culture, 14695405231170684. gerold, s., hoffmann, m., & aigner, e. (2023). towards a critical understanding of work in ecological economics: a postwork perspective. ecological economics, 212, 107935. glatt, z. (2022). ‘“we’re all told not to put our eggs in one basket”: uncertainty, precarity and cross-platform labor in the online video influencer industry’. international journal of communication, special issue on media and uncertainty. 16, 119. hoffmann, m., & frayne, d. (2023). ecological postwork theory. in c. overdevest (ed.), elgar encyclopedia of environmental sociology. edward elgar publishing hoffmann, m. & paulsen, r. (2020) resolving the ‘jobs-environment dilemma’? the case for critiques of work in sustainability research, environmental sociology, 6:4, 343354, doi: 10.1080/23251042.2020.1790718 jarrett, k. (2022). digital labor. john wiley & sons. jones, e. (2019). rethinking greenwashing: corporate discourse, unethical practice, and the unmet potential of ethical consumerism. sociological perspectives, 62(5), 728754. lawrence, m., homer-dixon, t., janzwood, s., rockstöm, j., renn, o., & donges, j. f. (2024). global polycrisis: the causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement. global sustainability, 7, e6. mcrobbie, a. (2018). be creative: making a living in the new culture industries. john wiley & sons. rauchberg, j. s. (2022). # shadowbanned: queer, trans, and disabled creator responses to algorithmic oppression on tiktok. in lgbtq digital cultures (pp. 196209). routledge. vrasti, w. (2021). struggling with precarity: from ‘more jobs’ to post-work politics. precarity and international relations, 149 10 weeks, k. (2020). the problem with work: feminism, marxism, antiwork politics, and postwork imaginaries. duke university press de wilde, m., & parry, s. (2022). feminised concern or feminist care? reclaiming gender normativities in zero waste living. the sociological review. wilson, j. a., & yochim, e. c. (2017). mothering through precarity. duke university press. 11 “own your age. own your beauty. own your power” exploring how models of color navigate age and race boundaries in the relentless youthscape of social media elizabeth wissinger the city university of new york introduction our study examines how mature models navigate the demands of platform labor within the confluence of race and aging. we noted the paucity of studies focused on race and aging under the pressure of fashion and beauty ideals in social media and the broader fashion industry. this addresses the gap in the literature, but more importantly, it offers a critical addition to broader conversation surrounding beauty, aging, race, and self-worth that have become culturally prominent in the last decade. models have long embodied brands by means of their aesthetic and glamour labor (entwistle and slater, 2012; author, 2015). within the rise of social media, models negotiate self-branding, while tightly controlled by the 'brand' of their agency. similar to paper 1 in this panel studying the “tensions that exist when corporate brand directives (i.e., humanized brands) collide with individual promotional logics (branded humans) in digital/social media contexts," we are looking at the tension between the brand directives coming from the modeling agency, and the branded humans who have to construct 'individual promotional logics' amid a sea of assumptions regarding who and what they should be, due to their race and age, and their position as 'fashion models.’ mature models of color in particular face cultural attitudes of ageism (kenalemang, 2022), and must work within a fashion culture that favors models who are thin and white (biefeld, et al., 2020), while also working against racism in social media culture more broadly (dodgson, 2020; christin and lu, 2023) while there has been much lip service paid to the idea of inclusivity in the fashion world, industry practices are not living up to the hype (reynders and cyr, 2024). we pay particular attention to the cultural mediation models perform at the margins of beauty and race within a culture that promised far more inclusive acceptance of age and race than it has delivered (banet-weiser, 2021; bishop, 2019). we also note how models self-brand within the paradox of the traditional fashion model image, premised on being inaccessible, with a reputation for being inauthentic, within a setting that demands legible authenticity (arriagada and bishop, 2021). our study draws out, examines, and evaluates the social implications and personal costs of these cultural contradictions and damaging stereotypes at the root of their creation. this is where models of color in the ‘age inclusive’ market must ply their trade, both within the fashion system, and the broader context of influencer labor within the social media industries. 12 methods we conducted in-depth interviews with 8 established over-40 models of color. interviews focused on the messages about aging, gender, race, and culture depicted in their self-branding versus the messages they receive from their agencies, and the broader culture. we used snowball sampling, calling on existing contacts both authors had in the modeling industry as well as recruiting via a social media call for participants. interviews were open ended, starting with brief demographic and work history questions, and then moving on to explorations of respondents’ experiences with attitudes about race, age, body ideals, and the work of embodying the desired ‘look’ for clients, to seek jobs, and in their influencer labor, to seek followers, legitimacy, and endorsements. working from transcripts,we hand coded the responses to draw out patterns and produce a grounded theory analysis in which our analytic themes emerged from the data. these interviews were conducted in accordance with the irb requirements at our university. further analysis of the models’ social media presence, both text and branded images, augmented the interview data. findings our respondents cited pressures emerging from the new terrain in which ‘models’ and ‘influencers’ are considered interchangeable. several described how they had to ‘retrofit’ themselves to become more like ‘influencers’ than ‘traditional models,’ in order to stay relevant in their profession. many respondents described the intensified demands of the digital labor required for building a following, along with the ‘daily grind’ of keeping their self-branded image current on social media. respondents also noted working to achieve these goals under the tight control of their physical and virtual presence by their agencies, within the demand to adhere to the agency’s overall image and brand. for instance, our recruitment of a model on social media elicited a thorough interrogation by her agency regarding the nature of the study, where it would be published, what questions she would be asked, and if any images of her would be used. many of the models we talked to experienced influencers as competition. they perceived that influencers are sometimes rewarded for exposing stereotypes or presenting at the cutting edge of acceptable norms of presentation of beauty and desirable body types, while eschewing ‘accepted’ racial characteristics. in contrast, the over-40 models we spoke to were often held to a different and more conservative standard, within which they must still work to gain the online recognition and notoriety required to establish a social media presence. 13 our respondents also described having to navigate prescriptive norms governing acceptable gendered and raced standards of beauty, and keenly felt the up close and personal nature of these pressures on body image and self-esteem in an environment that highly values youth. much of their constructed personas revolved around pushing back against these standards. they employed hashtags such as #greyhairdontcare; #agingwithstyle; or #disruptallfashionrules; or the model in our title, whose ‘about’ section started with ‘own your age. own your beauty. own your power," an opening salvo that resonated with our respondents’ stories of selfdetermination and battles for self-worth within an environment that devalues their look, and indeed who they are. conclusions amidst the hype of diversification in the modeling and social media industries, this study offers insights into how actors on the ground experience claims to inclusivity. we highlight cultural contradictions surrounding attitudes toward people of color and women of a certain age. evidence points towards a kind of ‘second shift’ of respondents’ platform labor, on top of the normal self-branding required to be a model in the first place. the added pressures to physically and emotionally embody the persona depicted in both their paid labor as models, as well as their projected image on social media, represent an intensification of the ’glamour labor’ (author 2015) in which models already engage as part of their regular work, exacerbated by their work to either diminish or embrace their race and age within different contextual demands on their self-presentation. while this pressure impacts age and race inclusive models in particular, it also explicates pressures influencers face more generally in social media culture. by examining our respondents’ efforts to transform from models of color who work in fashion, to become influencers of color of a certain age, we elucidate the barriers presented by the youth infused, algorithmically limiting, space of social media to workers who do not readily meet these criteria. (re)inventing influence: valuation and justification in the influencer marketing market arturo arriagada universidad adolfo ibáñez matías valderrama university of warwick introduction 14 the influencer industry, a multifaceted ecosystem involving brands, marketers, platforms, influencers, and agencies, relies on data-driven strategies for collaborations. quantification through metrics and algorithms is crucial for influencer marketing agencies, establishing commercial connections by measuring indicators like followers and engagement (bishop, 2021). this numeric validation transforms digital interactions into tradable commodities, shaping perceptions of success and popularity (bucher, 2012; gräve, 2019). the industry, projected to reach $21.1 billion in 2023, emphasizes the authentication of endeavors through data (geyser, 2023). this article delves into the quantification of influencers' work and justifications by marketing agencies, aiming to unravel complexities at the intersection of data, value creation, and commerce in the evolving influencer marketing landscape. a year-long ethnographic study focused on chilean influencer marketing firms reveals the integration of algorithmic systems, extending beyond influencer selection to actively control their work throughout campaigns (borchers, 2023). grounded in boltanski and thévenot's "orders of worth" framework (boltanski & thévenot, 2006), the study explores how justifications reconcile the world of fame with the industrial world. influencer marketing firms use digital quantification technologies to bridge these domains, creating calculable and sustainable campaigns. despite industry volatility, agencies seek predictability through new algorithmic tools, potentially obscuring indicators from influencers. the study exposes how agencies influence expectations, pricing, and performance calculations, perpetuating power imbalances in an opaque industry controlled by platform companies and intermediaries (rocamora, 2022). the influencer marketing industry: a new form of compromise between the world of fame and the industrial world the article investigates social quantification in influencer marketing agencies using a pragmatist approach through boltanski and thévenot's "orders of worth" framework. this framework encompasses six distinct orders—inspired, domestic, fame, civic, market, and industrial—each defining a common world with specific evidence, subjects, objects, qualifiers, and relations. applying this framework to the influencer industry, the study explores the justifications aligned with the "world of fame" and its compromise with the "industrial world." the influencer marketing industry, seen as a unique compromise between fame and industry, employs data collection and machine learning to quantify and anticipate influencers' performance, creating dynamic and real-time metrics. the compromise relies on effective extraction and processing of social media data, making the measures of influence indistinguishable without algorithmic mediation. the study questions the strength of this compromise, considering whether efficiency criteria prevail over other considerations in influencer industry transactions (boltanski & thévenot, 2006; gerlitz & lury, 2014; hund, 2023). 15 the evolving roles of intermediaries in shaping influence valuation from media to influencer economies highlight the historical compromise between the industrial and fame worlds, exemplified by audience measurement instruments like people meters and polls (gitlin, 1994; napoli, 2003). in the digital age, social media platforms become active participants in the creation, distribution, and marketing of influencer content, serving as built-in people-meters commodifying social interactions. influencer marketing companies, crucial intermediaries, utilize data to wield authority in this realm, influencing perceptions of success (rocamora, 2022). while the global south witnesses the rise of new intermediaries quantifying influencer work, this remains an unexplored terrain. the article aims to scrutinize these firms' validation, steering of influencer efforts, algorithmic tools, and justifications within the latin american context (bishop, 2021; rocamora, 2022). methods this article extends a 4-year research project on the chilean influencer industry (author, 2020; 2021; 2022). conducting a 1-year ethnography, we mapped the market, interviewed experts, and analysed seven companies' websites and social media accounts. a comparative grid revealed diverse services, success stories, terms influencing mediation, and strategies for market leadership. three agencies underwent an 8-month multi-case study involving in-depth interviews with executives. cases revealed global ramifications as agencies utilized tools from colombia and brazil. methodologically, we unpacked executives’ qualifications, exploring metrics and algorithms' role in demarcation and justification within the industry, revealing how influence is defined and calculated in the influencer marketing landscape (bishop, 2021; christin & petre, 2020). results making social media influence calculable across gut feelings and numbers despite positioning themselves as intermediaries between brands and influencers, a scrutiny of the websites of these companies reveals a predominant focus on addressing brands and marketers. for instance, a comprehensive analysis of a company’s website demonstrates a clear orientation towards brands and their ability to exert control over campaigns and influencers: “find the influencer closest to your brand. the influencer applies a campaign in which she/he feels identified with the brand. she/he makes you a creative proposal and puts a price on her/his work.” in response to the uncertainty about who truly wields influence and the success of influential marketing campaigns, influencer marketing companies deploy their technologies and services to move away from gut decisions and adopt a more strategic 16 approach. they endeavour to naturalise the notion that “influence” is something objective and measurable through a layer of data-driven planning and management processes. as an executive articulated, “influencers are just another channel. let's treat them like one. no gut feelings, just data.” algorithmic mediations: the colonisation of the industrial world? however, this escalating digital quantification of influence brings about transformations in various influencer practices. in the study cases, we observed the deployment of algorithms, accompanied by a set of assumptions and justifications, for four processes: 1) identifying ideal influencers for specific campaigns, 2) filtering the actual reach of influencers, 3) calculating the appropriate prices to be charged by influencers, and 4) predicting the return of campaigns for brands. algorithms aid in influencer selection, as seen in chilean agencies partnering with platforms like klear, quantifying influencers' impact beyond follower count (author, 2020; 2021; 2022). another algorithm trims inauthentic reach, addressing issues of engagement pod influence and follower deception (grohmann et al., 2022; rocamora, 2022). algorithms also determine influencer pricing, offering standardized rates with negotiation flexibility (bishop, 2021). notably, predictive algorithms estimate campaign outcomes, aligning with the industrial world's pursuit of predictability (boltanski and thévenot, 2006). however, qualitative factors, industry expertise, and human judgment complement algorithmic evaluations, emphasizing the nuanced nature of influencer marketing (bishop, 2021). the study reveals a delicate balance between efficiency-focused algorithms and qualitative considerations, mirroring the compromise between the industrial and fame worlds. conclusion in the evolving landscape of influencer marketing, agencies serve as key intermediaries, employing metrics, algorithms, and platforms to make influence calculable on social media platforms (gräve, 2019). drawing from boltanski and thévenot's "orders of worth," influencer marketing companies reconcile the worlds of fame and industry to define and quantify influence, introducing novel calculations and metrics (brooks et al., 2021; colucci & pedroni, 2022). justification process enhances influencers' differentiation and value for brands, expanding beyond follower counts to include diverse algorithmic interventions. however, challenges arise as algorithmic efforts favor brands, potentially sidelining creators (bishop, 2021). the compromise between fame and industry worlds unfolds across various processes, from specifying salaries to predicting influence returns, signaling a dominance of efficiency-based criteria conflicting with reputation-based justifications (borchers, 2023). despite a technological layer, influencer marketing agencies acknowledge the indispensability of qualitative and human aspects in campaign management, reflecting a nuanced understanding beyond data-driven decisions (gerlitz & helmond, 2013). 17 references anwar, m. a., & graham, m. (2020). hidden transcripts of the gig economy: labour agency and the new art of resistance among african gig workers. environment and planning a: economy and space, 52(7), 1269–1291. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x19894584 arriagada, a., & bishop, s. (2021). between commerciality and authenticity: the imaginary of social media influencers in the platform economy. communication, culture & critique, 14(4), 568–586. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcab050 banet-weiser, s. (2012). authentic™: the politics of ambivalence in a brand culture. new york university press. banet-weiser, s. (2021). gender, social media, and the labor of authenticity. american quarterly, 73(1), 141–144. biefeld, s., stone, e., & brown, c. (2020). sexy, thin, and white: the intersection of sexualization, body type, and race on stereotypes about women. sex roles, 85(5– 6), 287–300. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-020-01221-2 bishop, s. (2019). “why the ‘ideal’ influencer looks like...that.” paper magazine, 12 august 2019. https://www.papermag.com/top-beauty-influencers-2639784604.html bishop, s. (2021). influencer management tools: algorithmic cultures, brand safety, and bias. social media + society, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211003066 bishop, s. (2023). influencer creep: how artists strategically navigate the platformisation of art worlds. new media & society, 0(0). onlinefirst. boltanski, l., & thévenot, l. (2006). on justification: economies of worth. princeton university press. bonini, t., treré, e., yu, z., singh, s., cargnelutti, d., & lópez-ferrández, f. j. (2023). cooperative affordances: how instant messaging apps afford learning, resistance, and solidarity among food delivery workers. convergence, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231153505 borchers, n. s. (2023). to eat the cake and have it, too: how marketers control influencer conduct within a paradigm of letting go. social media + society, 9(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231167336 brooks, g., drenten, j., & piskorski, m. j. (2021). influencer celebrification: how social media influencers acquire celebrity capital. journal of advertising, 50(5), 528– 547. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2021.1977737 https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x19894584 https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcab050 https://www.papermag.com/top-beauty-influencers-2639784604.html https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211003066 https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231153505 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231167336 https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2021.1977737 18 bucher, t. (2012). want to be on the top? algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on facebook. new media & society, 14(7), 1164–1180. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444812440159 christin, a., & lu, y. (2023). the influencer pay gap: platform labor meets racial capitalism. new media & society, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231164995 christin, a., & petre, c. (2020). making peace with metrics: relational work in online news production. sociologica, 14(2), article 2. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.19718853/11178 colucci, m., & pedroni, m. (2022). got to be real: an investigation into the cofabrication of authenticity by fashion companies and digital influencers. journal of consumer culture, 22(4), 929–948. https://doi.org/10.1177/14695405211033665 conley, p. (2022). u.s. chamber of commerce: how employer branding can woo new employees. u.s. chamber of commerce. retrieved from https://www.uschamber.com/co/good-company/launch-pad/how-employer-brandingcan-woo-new-employees delfanti, a. (2019). machinic dispossession and augmented despotism: digital work in an amazon warehouse. new media & society, 23(1), 39–55. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819891613 dodgson, l. (2020). stories of racist jokes, microaggressions, and tokenism from youtubers highlight a widespread problem within the influencer industry. insider. https://www.insider.com/racist-jokes-microaggressions-and-tokenism-in-theinfluencer-world-2020-8 duffy, b. e., & sawey, m. (2022). in/visibility in social media work: the hidden labor behind the brands. media and communication, 10(1), 77–87. entwistle, j., & slater, d. (2012). models as brands: critical thinking about bodies and images. in j. entwistle & e. wissinger (eds.), fashioning models: image, text and industry (pp. 15–33). berg. fish, a., & srinivasan, r. (2012). digital labor is the new killer app. new media & society, 14(1), 137–152. gershon, i. (2017). down and out in the new economy: how people find (or don’t find) work today. university of chicago press. geyser, w. (2023). what is influencer marketing? the ultimate guide for 2024. influencer marketing hub. https://influencermarketinghub.com/influencer-marketing/ gitlin, t. (1994). inside prime time. routledge. glaser, b., & strauss, a. (1967/2017). discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. routledge. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444812440159 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231164995 https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/11178 https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/11178 https://doi.org/10.1177/14695405211033665 https://www.uschamber.com/co/good-company/launch-pad/how-employer-branding-can-woo-new-employees https://www.uschamber.com/co/good-company/launch-pad/how-employer-branding-can-woo-new-employees https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819891613 https://www.insider.com/racist-jokes-microaggressions-and-tokenism-in-the-influencer-world-2020-8 https://www.insider.com/racist-jokes-microaggressions-and-tokenism-in-the-influencer-world-2020-8 https://influencermarketinghub.com/influencer-marketing/ 19 graham, m., & woodcock, j. (2019). the gig economy. polity. gräve, j.-f. (2019). what kpis are key? evaluating performance metrics for social media influencers. social media + society, 5(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119865475 grohmann, r., pereira, g., guerra, a., abilio, l. c., moreschi, b., & jurno, a. (2022). platform scams: brazilian workers’ experiences of dishonest and uncertain algorithmic management. new media and society, 24(7). hund, e. (2023). the influencer industry. princeton university press. jacobson, j., gomes rinaldi, a., & rudkowski, j. (2023). decoding the employee influencer on social media: applying taylor’s six segment message strategy wheel. european journal of marketing, 57(1), 29–59. kenalemang, l. (2022). visual ageism and the subtle sexualisation of older celebrities in l’oreal’s advert campaigns: a multimodal critical discourse analysis. ageing and society. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0144686x20002019 logan, j. (2022, february 3). amazon, starbucks, and the sparking of a new american union movement. the conversation. retrieved from https://theconversation.com/amazon-starbucks-and-the-sparking-of-a-new-americanunion-movement-180293 mccarthy, j. (2023). u.s. approval of labor unions at highest point since 1965. gallup. retrieved from https://news.gallup.com/poll/398303/approval-labor-unionshighest-point-1965.aspx napoli, p. m. (2003). audience economics: media institutions and the audience marketplace. columbia university press. ravenelle, a. (2019). hustle and gig: struggling and surviving in the sharing economy. university of california press. reynders, d., & cyr, m. g. (2024). fashion+ inclusive articulations and practices in design, communication & development. academic and scientific publishers (asp). rocamora, a. (2022). the datafication and quantification of fashion: the case of fashion influencers. fashion theory. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1362704x.2022.2048527 rosenblat, a. (2018). uberland: how algorithms are rewriting the rules of work. university of california press. turow, j., mcguigan, l., & maris, e. r. (2015). making data mining a natural part of life: physical retailing, customer surveillance and the 21st century social imaginary. european journal of cultural studies, 18(4–5), 464–478. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549415577390 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119865475 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0144686x20002019 https://theconversation.com/amazon-starbucks-and-the-sparking-of-a-new-american-union-movement-180293 https://theconversation.com/amazon-starbucks-and-the-sparking-of-a-new-american-union-movement-180293 https://news.gallup.com/poll/398303/approval-labor-unions-highest-point-1965.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/398303/approval-labor-unions-highest-point-1965.aspx https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1362704x.2022.2048527 https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549415577390 20 wakabayashi, d., griffith, e., & conger, k. (2022, april 12). the great r.t.o. experiment: the technology. the new york times. retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/12/technology/rto-return-office-technology.html wood, a. j., graham, m., lehdonvirta, v., & hjorth, i. (2019). good gig, bad gig: autonomy and algorithmic control in the global gig economy. work, employment and society, 33(1), 56–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017018785616 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/12/technology/rto-return-office-technology.html selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 masculine optimization influencers and the sacrality of self-optimization sara reinis university of pennsylvania introduction from meticulous morning routines to obsessive fitness tracking, there is a rising cohort of american male influencers centered around reaching “maximum potential” physically, mentally, and financially. the fitness and self-help industries have found powerful combinatory power with each other as they have adjusted to the contours of platform economies. in this space, the mind and body are inextricably bound and proper discipline of both is necessary for general success. fusing together fitness advice with career strategy, these influencers issue constant rallying cries to work out harder as part of unlocking generalized success. focusing on a cohort i’m calling “masculinized optimization influencers,” i argue that this group is best understood through the lens of sara ahmed’s (2004) “affective economies.” defined as those who place a dual focus on men’s need to hustle equally at the gym and in their career, masculine optimization influencers present a particular vision of masculinity that binds physical discipline with financial success. crucially though, this is presented as much more than a selfish pursuit, this cohort’s approach joins a long american tradition of presenting bodywork as a moral imperative (white et al., 1995). moreover, as this research will argue, they construct this path of selfoptimization as a sacred pursuit. such an approach attempts to justify hierarchical relations at a time when masculinity and capitalism are facing critique. theoretical framework and approach as ahmed (2004) explains, “emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities…through the very intensity of their attachments” (p. 119). through identifying how “emotions circulate between bodies and signs,” and paying particular attention to the emotions of shame and disgust, this research examines how this affective economy mobilizes emotions to sacralize their ascendance in a dissymmetric economic system (ahmed, 2004, p. 119). suggested citation (apa): reinis, s. (2024, october). masculine optimization influencers and the sacrality of self-optimization. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. my research is rooted in a critical discourse analysis of thirteen us-based instagram accounts with over 200,000 followers in this space. applying the framework of affective economies, i paid close attention to the circulation of figures, products, health preoccupations, routines, and aesthetic sensibilities. how do masculinized optimization influencers insist on the necessity of self-optimization? if self-optimizing is sacred, how does this group characterize those who are not in active pursuit of optimization? findings muscular male body as a sign of success. the visual-forward nature of instagram has led to an increase in men taking “gym selfies” and sharing imagery of their muscular figures (chatzopoulou et al., 2020; hakim, 2018). through this circulation, images of the muscular male body increase in affective value and “become sticky, or saturated with affect, as sites of personal and social tension” (ahmed, 2014, p. 11). this also has direct economic implications as increased engagement directly opens the opportunity for brand partnerships, sponsored posts, or, for the most successful, the ability to create and market their own product lines, events, or services. thus, the highly circulated muscular male body becomes a source of perceived and actual economic success. the visibly disciplined male body becomes an affect-rich sign of an optimized, achievementoriented life. mobilizing disgust and shame for the undisciplined body. two key emotions are at play in the affective economy: disgust and shame. there is a threatening figure implicitly lurking in the shadows of the self-help speeches and inspiration posts of masculine optimization influencers: the undisciplined body. fat, lazy, and broke, this often unnamed and only sometimes acknowledged figure exists in two forms: the one outside of you (which evokes disgust) and the one within you (which evokes shame). shame and the construction of “we.” the affective economy of masculine optimization circulates the financially successful, muscled male body as the shared ideal, and this ideal binds members into a collective “we.” because this ideal is dependent on selfmastery and a sustained physique, these connections are highly tenuous and always under threat of dissolving and causing shame. certain objects have become particularly “sticky” affective objects through circulation within this space as part of one’s endless battle with a weaker self. workout equipment, exercise stats, early morning alarms, supplements, and more are all crucial to the genre. one object has become a stand-in for full-life optimization: the cold plunge. many masculine optimization influencers film their daily ice bath submersion while reciting or superimposing quotes about selftransformation. baptismal overtones saturate the discourse, and the ice bath thus becomes a ritual to purge the unmotivated, shameful self and become the optimized ideal. disgust and the construction of “other.” in the same manner that shame is crucial for the idea of “we,” disgust is crucial for the idea of the “other.” fundamentally, disgust functions as a hierarchical emotion. through visible signifiers of bodily discipline (namely extremely low body fat and chiseled muscles), men in this affective economy strive to earn the right to move past internalized shame and perform externalized disgust. this mindset also enables the free dispense of blame. in purportedly “inspirational” posts offering paths for success for anybody “hardworking,” they construct the fit and rich as a class of rightful winners while the fat and poor are merely those who warrant disgust. a sense of “belowness” thus sticks to the physique of the imagined unoptimized other who does not have the discipline needed to lose fat, gain muscle, and achieve financial success. in this conceptualization, the fitness of the body reveals whether one is worthy of economic stability and willfully buries all discussion of systemic barriers. self-optimization as sacred. sacralizing language is commonplace and appeals to spiritual journeys are woven throughout content both explicitly and implicitly. most blatantly, the process of pursuing bodily discipline is regularly equated to spiritual discipline. such rhetoric serves to position bodily transformation as a sacred path that carries the weight of moral obligation. the use of disgust also serves to construct a strict division between those inside the sacred fold who deserve to be blessed and those who have ostensibly chosen to stay outside of it. the magnetism of masculine optimization influencers is indirectly and directly in conversation with increasing public discourse about topics like “toxic masculinity,” “male privilege,” and “white privilege.” yet, performing more nuance than some openly misogynist men’s rights activists or plainly bitter incels, this group seeks to couch their interest in a hierarchical form of masculinity and capitalist dominance as a sacred pursuit of self-improvement. conclusion i suggest the popularity of framing self-optimization as sacred is in many ways a defensive and reactionary movement to classical forms of patriarchal and capitalist hierarchy being questioned. within this context, appealing to sacrality functions to insulate the practices and hierarchical beliefs from critique. according to masculine optimization influencers, the muscular male body is inscribed with visual evidence of discipline. it is a body that is constantly proving itself as hardwon. transforming one’s mind, body, and spirit is not only possible, but it is also a moral obligation that will be blessed with capitalist success and a deserved level of “aboveness” from the unoptimized other. for those who may be concerned that male privilege is no longer a given, perhaps, by framing self-optimization as a sacred journey, it is something they can claim is earned. references ahmed, s. (2004). affective economies. social text, 22(2), 117–139. ahmed, s. (2014). the cultural politics of emotion (2nd ed.). edinburgh university press. chatzopoulou, e., filieri, r., & dogruyol, s. a. (2020). instagram and body image: motivation to conform to the “instabod” and consequences on young male wellbeing. journal of consumer affairs, 54(4), 1270–1297. https://doi.org/10.1111/joca.12329 hakim, j. (2018). ‘the spornosexual’: the affective contradictions of male body-work in neoliberal digital culture. journal of gender studies, 27(2), 231–241. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2016.1217771 white, p., young, k., & gillett, j. (1995). bodywork as a moral imperative: some critical notes on health and fitness. loisir et société / society and leisure, 18(1), 159– 181. https://doi.org/10.1080/07053436.1995.10715495 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): birrer, a., & just, n. (2024, october). spotlight on deepfakes: mapping research and regulatory responses. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. full paper available at https://doi.org/10.1177/146144482412531 spotlight on deepfakes: mapping research and regulatory responses alena birrer university of zurich natascha just university of zurich background in february 2024, an open letter with over a thousand signatures from tech executives, academics, and prominent figures from the entertainment industry was released, urging governments to take immediate action against the proliferation of deepfakes ("disrupting the deepfake supply chain", 2024). this urgency for regulatory action stems from growing concerns about the threats posed by deepfakes to both individuals and society. journalists have vividly painted a dystopian scenario, referring to deepfakes as an “epistemic apocalypse” (habgood-coote, 2023), where the lines between authentic and artificial content become alarmingly blurred, creating a sense of impending doom (wahl-jorgensen & carlson, 2021). this is accompanied by fearmongering by the ai industry through public warnings about the dangers of deepfakes (bartz, 2023). at the same time, regulators have been noticeably more hesitant in their responses. the european artificial intelligence act (ai act), for instance, classifies deepfakes as “limited risk ai systems” and sets only minimal transparency requirements. the united states and china have implemented more targeted legislation, criminalizing the distribution of potentially harmful deepfakes. this was accompanied, however, by concerns that governments could use such rules to restrict free speech and control information flows (hine & floridi, 2022; tsukayama et al., 2019). aim and methodological approach given this background, the questions arise: how much do we actually know and understand about deepfakes, and what regulatory responses have emerged in response? a growing research field discusses deepfakes’ potential harms (e.g., chesney & citron, 2019; diakopoulos & johnson, 2021; rini & cohen, 2022) and http://spir.aoir.org/ https://doi.org/10.1177/146144482412531 whether existing public and private law is sufficient to counteract them (e.g., caldera, 2019; meskys et al., 2020; van der sloot & wagensveld, 2022). in contrast, there is a lack of consolidated knowledge regarding the empirical evidence supporting these concerns as well as the specific regulatory measures developed in response. to bridge these gaps, our methodological approach is two-fold: (1) we provide a systematic literature review to consolidate what is currently empirically known about deepfakes, and (2) a qualitative content analysis of the evolving regulatory landscape. this is to offer a more comprehensive understanding of the deepfake phenomenon and to provide directions for future research and policymaking. systematic literature review we conducted a systematic literature review of empirical research on deepfakes to consolidate existing knowledge regarding their current uses, effects, consequences, and regulatory challenges. relevant literature was identified following the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (prisma) 2020 guidelines (page et al., 2021). this included a broad search of five databases (scopus, web of science, ebscohost, proquest, arxiv). a total of 79 studies was finally included in the analysis. given the diversity of research questions and methods employed across the studies, we chose a qualitative approach based on a deductive-inductive coding scheme to review the literature. the findings suggest that our understanding of deepfakes remains insufficient to assess the validity of the often-voiced concerns about their negative effects and the most effective strategies to counteract them. the term “deepfake” is often not precisely defined and lacks clear conceptual boundaries, which further complicates efforts to grasp the phenomenon and its distinct manifestations. additionally, empirical evidence on the prevalence of deepfakes is largely missing. the literature review shows that emphasis is on three major regulatory challenges (i.e., difficulties in detecting deepfakes, deepfake disinformation, and deepfake pornography). it further indicates that deepfakes currently do not introduce fundamentally new and unique regulatory challenges. instead, they add to the repertoire of tools available for spreading harmful or illegal content such as disinformation and non-consensual pornography. moreover, there is some evidence that common countermeasures such as raising awareness or labelling deepfake content may not be as effective in mitigating their potential harms. in some cases, these strategies can even backfire and result in a general climate of uncertainty and mistrust in media. qualitative content analysis of regulatory responses informed by the findings of the systematic literature review, we conducted an in-depth qualitative content analysis of dedicated regulatory responses to deepfakes. we identified 100 policy and legal documents through a review of existing research, indepth searches of regulatory authorities’ websites, and thorough monitoring of media coverage and policy blogs. the documents were coded using the coding software maxqda for qualitative data analyses. special attention was paid to examining and evaluating the rationales driving the need for regulatory action, identifying the accountable actors, and assessing the adequacy and efficacy of the proposed measures in the context of existing empirical research on deepfakes. overall, a diverse spectrum of regulatory responses to deepfakes emerged, ranging from market-driven initiatives to state-imposed command-and-control-regulation, with various forms of self and co-regulation in between. the measures address different stages of the deepfake lifecycle and vary in their target, applying to producers of deepfake technology, users who create or disseminate deepfakes, or the platforms that host them. some policymakers have chosen to refrain from regulatory action altogether, either due to limited research on deepfakes or the belief that existing laws – although sometimes extended in scope – are generally well-equipped to address deepfakes. others rely on selfand co-regulation aimed at raising awareness as well as hard, i.e. legally binding and enforceable regulations that require transparency, or ban or preemptively curb the production or distribution of potentially harmful deepfakes. such measures address the regulatory challenges described in the literature, focusing primarily on electoral manipulation through deepfake disinformation and deepfake pornography. in this context, they often refer to empirically unverified assumptions about the prevalence and deceptive capacity of deepfakes. moreover, when evaluated against the findings of the literature review, concerns about enforcement and efficacy of the countermeasures persist. conclusion and outlook the dynamic nature of deepfake technology calls for adaptive policy approaches (latzer, 2013) that aim to mitigate harm while protecting individual rights and addressing larger societal issues. risk-based approaches, as proposed in the ai act, appear to hold the most promise in striking this balance. nonetheless, it is crucial to acknowledge that existing tools may not fully resolve current and future challenges, emphasizing the need for critical oversight and periodic review. this must also include careful consideration of adequate governance arrangements, including both appropriate state and private involvement as highlighted in the governance-choice approach (latzer et al., 2019). altogether, this highlights the necessity for further empirical research to navigate and comprehend the regulatory challenges raised by deepfakes. future research should specifically clarify the conceptual boundaries and the diverse applications of deepfakes and explore the individual and societal impact they can have (both harmful and beneficial), especially beyond the global north. in addition, more research is needed on the intended and unintended consequences of countermeasures to strengthen evidence-based policymaking. references bartz, d. (2023, may 25). microsoft chief says deep fakes are biggest ai concern. reuters. https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-chief-calls-humans-ruleai-safeguard-critical-infrastructure-2023-05-25/ caldera, e. (2019). “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears”: deepfakes and the law of virtual replicants. seton hall law review, 50(1), 177–205. chesney, r., & citron, d. (2019). deep fakes: a looming challenge for privacy, democracy, and national security. california law review, 107(6), 1753–1820. https://doi.org/10.15779/z38rv0d15j diakopoulos, n., & johnson, d. (2021). anticipating and addressing the ethical implications of deepfakes in the context of elections. new media and society, 23(7), 2072–2098. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820925811 disrupting the deepfake supply chain. (2024). https://openletter.net/l/disruptingdeepfakes habgood-coote, j. (2023). deepfakes and the epistemic apocalypse. synthese, 201(3). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04097-3 hine, e., & floridi, l. (2022). new deepfake regulations in china are a tool for social stability, but at what cost? nature machine intelligence, 4(7), 608–610. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-022-00513-4 latzer, m. (2013) medienwandel durch innovation, ko-evolution und komplexität. ein aufriss. medien & kommunikationswissenschaft, 61(2): 235–252. https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-78012 latzer, m., saurwein, f., & just, n. (2019). assessing policy ii: governance-choice method. in h. van den bulck, m. puppis, k. donders, & l. van audenhove (eds.), the palgrave handbook of methods for media policy research (pp. 557– 574). springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-160654_32 meskys, e., liaudanskas, a., kalpokiene, j., & jurcys, p. (2020). regulating deep fakes: legal and ethical considerations. journal of intellectual property law & practice, 15(1), 24–31. https://doi.org/10.1093/jiplp/jpz167 page, m. j., et al. (2021). the prisma 2020 statement: an updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews. bmj, 372(71), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n71 rini, r., & cohen, l. (2022). deepfakes, deep harms. journal of ethics and social philosophy, 22(2), 143–161. https://doi.org/io.265s6/jesp.v22i2.162828 tsukayama, h., mckinney, i., & williams, j. (2019). congress should not rush to regulate deepfakes. electronic frontier foundation. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/congress-should-not-rush-regulatedeepfakes van der sloot, b., & wagensveld, y. (2022). deepfakes: regulatory challenges for the synthetic society. computer law and security review, 46. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clsr.2022.105716 wahl-jorgensen, k., & carlson, m. (2021). conjecturing fearful futures: journalistic discourses on deepfakes. journalism practice, 15(6), 803–820. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2021.1908838 microsoft word yang-from _text for location_ to _no phone on the dance floor_-from _text for location_ to _no phone on the da.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): yang, s. (2022, november). from “message for location” to “no phone on the dance floor”: playing with visibility in underground electronic/dance music. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. from “message for location” to “no phone on the dance floor”: playing with visibility in underground electronic/dance music stephen yang cornell university the mediation of mobile and social media technologies has reshaped how people imagine, understand, and, in turn, negotiate the visibility of their self-expression, information sharing, and relationship-building (humphreys, 2011; marwick & boyd, 2014). the adoption of mobile and social media technologies introduced new possibilities of visibility and new possibilities of managing visibility by affording individuals’ agency in regulating their own monitoring and enacting the monitoring of others (marwick, 2012; trottier, 2012). much of visibility management entails the calibration “between hyper-visibility and under-visibility to avoid over-exposure in some areas and redirect audience interest to others” (abidin, 2021, p. 1). as engagement with social media increasingly turned mobile, the spatial and temporal dimensions of mobile and social media use afford new possibilities of visibility management. past work largely looked at the spatial and temporal dimensions in a separate fashion. to consolidate these perspectives of visibility management, i examined how participants in underground electronic/dance music culture (edmc) managed their visibility on and through mobile and social media to maintain the boundaries of the underground and their culture of secrecy. throughout the history of underground edmc, participants in underground edmc have developed collective norms for “locating, sharing, and hiding information” (lingel & boyd, 2013, p. 981) of their gatherings. such practices reflect a form of visibility management that creates social bonds by distinguishing between insider and outsider groups. such information practices reflect “a group commitment to protecting shared practices and activities” (lingel, 2017, p. 115). method to examine visibility management in underground electronic/dance music scenes, i conducted 20 nights of field observations at live music events and 27 semi-structured interviews with promoters and attendees between april 2021 and november 2022. i adopted a multi-site approach by targeting four underground dance music scenes in distinct socio-political contexts –– bushwick, new york city; ithaca, new york; taipei, taiwan; berlin, germany. taking a “field site as network” approach (burrell, 2009; lingel, 2017), i selected the four music scenes as “entry points” to gain access to underground edmc. findings my analysis highlighted two scenarios in which promoters and attendees leverage the spatial and temporal affordances of mobile and social media to maintain the boundaries of the underground – (1) last-minute, indirect location sharing, and (2) the dialectical shaping of venue policies and phone etiquette. first, the promoters leveraged the delayed and indirect sharing of event locations to bar outsiders from entering while also affording the insiders to authenticate themselves by navigating to the gatherings. the exchanges and gatekeeping of event information was crucial to maintaining the boundaries of the underground, as such information was attendees’ entry point to the culture. by accelerating the temporality of and augmenting the mobility of sharing, identifying, and hiding event locations, mobile and social media afforded two new ways through which scene participants maintained the secrecy for their gatherings last-minute announcement and indirect location sharing. in the case of the latter, the indirect sharing of locative information through (1) direct messages (dm), (2) instructions, and (3) gps coordinates have shaped three distinct modes of locationseeking practices among the attendees – (1) locating through inquiries, (2) locating via instructions, and (3) locating by navigating. second, the dialectical shaping between promoters’ venue policies and attendees’ folk theories of phone etiquette maintained a state of reduced mobile media use at such gatherings. my data highlighted a specific set of policies regarding phone and social media use at the venues. such policies range from banning flash use, warning against phone use, taping the back camera of each attendee’s phone upon entering, to collecting each attendee’s phone. meanwhile, attendees also developed their own folk theories regarding what is socially acceptable in terms of their phone and social media use at these venues. taken together, these policies and folk theories shaped the way attendees presented themselves through their in-situ use (and non-use) of mobile and social media. in particular, attendees embraced three sets of spatial-temporal practices attendees to calibrate their visibility. first, they would forfeit or reduce their phone use on the dance floor. second, they would leverage insider cues such as sharing a snapshot at the bathroom entrance to signal their participation without sharing technical details of the events. they would use ephemeral media such as instagram stories that archives shared content after a short period of time to render their content untraceable in retrospect. discussion these two scenarios in underground edmc pointed to how the spatial-temporal affordances of mobile and social media use are constitutive of contemporary practices of visibility management. the visibility management practices i identified span across a wide array of spatial-temporal scenarios, from the delayed and indirect announcement of event locations in the neighborhood, the process of navigating to out-of-the-way venues, the non-use of phones on the dance floor, to the in-situ content sharing while vibing at the venue. these practices illustrate how participants of underground edmc conceptualized their visibility as a continuous presence – spatially, across networked publics and physical territories, and temporally, across synchronous situations and asynchronous situations. on the spatial end, one’s visibility is concurrently marked by physical actions and online content circulation. on the temporal end, one’s visibility is simultaneously mediated by in-the-moment physical actions, broadcasting of live actions, ephemeral evidence of past actions, and permanent presence of profiles. underlies this understanding of visibility is the new condition of surveillance imaginaries where people constantly think about the lateral gaze from both in-person and online observers as well as from both synchronous and asynchronous observers – regardless of what they are doing, where they are physically located, and whether they are on their mobile devices. this new condition of visibility has brought forth new possibilities for people to not only manage – but play with visibility. in particular, this case study on underground edmc calls attention to how the playful engagement with partial visibility can in itself become a proxy of sociality. as it becomes faster and easier to locate information, it is through the purposeful act of waiting, navigating, and obfuscating that people distinguish between insiders and outsiders and bond with one another. references abidin, c. (2021). from “networked publics” to “refracted publics”: a companion framework for researching “below the radar” studies. social media + society, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120984458 burrell, j. (2009). the field site as a network: a strategy for locating ethnographic research. field methods, 21(2), 181–199. https://doi.org/10.1177/1525822x08329699 humphreys, l. (2011). who’s watching whom? a study of interactive technology and surveillance. journal of communication, 61(4), 575–595. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14602466.2011.01570.x lingel, j. (2017). digital countercultures and the struggle for community. mit press. lingel, j., & boyd, d. (2013). “keep it secret, keep it safe”: information poverty, information norms, and stigma. journal of the american society for information science and technology, 64(5), 981–991. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.22800 marwick, a. (2012). the public domain: surveillance in everyday life. surveillance & society, 9(4), 378–393. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v9i4.4342 marwick, a. e., & boyd, danah. (2014). networked privacy: how teenagers negotiate context in social media. new media & society, 16(7), 1051–1067. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814543995 trottier, d. (2012). interpersonal surveillance on social media. canadian journal of communication, 37(2), 319–332. https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2012v37n2a2536 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): jacobs, n., changede, s., gradinar, a. (2024, october). mindful automation: technology and meaning in smart homes. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. mindful automation: technology and meaning in smart homes naomi jacobs imaginationlancaster, lancaster university sejal changede imaginationlancaster, lancaster university adrian gradinar imaginationlancaster, lancaster university introduction in 2011, william webb imagined a ‘distant future’ home “perhaps 20 years or more away” (webb, 2011) that included speculations such as personalised heating systems, news compilers, and automated grocery shopping. less than 15 years later, these are somewhat recognisable features of our modern home life, though as webb points out, such predictions are rarely entirely accurate. nevertheless, our homes have long been the focus of automation through digital connectivity, which is likely to continue. themes of efficiency and industry infuse narratives of the smart home, despite that homes are allegedly a respite from our working life. what is less examined are aspects of home life practice that seem to invite automation, but which have meaning beyond that of industry and productivity, feeding into our identity, spirituality, and mental wellbeing. takayama et al (2012) examined the meaning of automated technology in a home, referring to “bruner’s sense of meaning-making as a culturally situated process that is often shared and communicated via narrative stories”. rituals and embodied practice are a key form of meaning-making that we believe are under-considered when designing technologies for home automation. cheshner (2019) describes interaction with smart speakers as ‘invocationary acts’, comparative to ritual invocation addressing a sublime non-human other. we might thus potentially describe a call of ‘hey siri’ as a new ritual directed by home-based technology. in this paper we interrogate what ritual might mean in such a technological context and suggest that we should further examine how existing ritual and meaning-making might be negatively – or positively – impacted by automation and home-based connected digital technology. we also examine how new rituals and meaning-making might be ‘automated in’ using these technologies. we ask: how is value and meaning in embodied ritual practice impacted by intervention with digital technologies in the home? automated ritual and meaning automation of ritual and meaningful practice in the home context is not new and is often connected directly with religious practice. for example, woodruff et al. (2007) describes the use of automation by orthodox jewish households to facilitate observation of the sabbath by taking over functions that people are forbidden from doing themselves during this period. such technological intervention by orthodox jews has been common for decades, with e.g. time switches being used to turn lights and ovens on and off at appropriate times. woodruff et al. (ibid) report how users feel that this usage enhances the spiritual experience of the sabbath by maintaining spiritual distance from the working week while also retaining modern conveniences. however, these systems replicate utilitarian functions of the home to make room for the spiritual, rather than replacing existing ritual practices. functionality is often a primary consideration in home automation; for example, takayama et al.’s (2012) work is structured around functions including security, energy, lighting etc. automation identifies an output (e.g. a clean floor) and considers how to achieve this without requiring input from the human actor, for example using a roomba vacuum cleaner. however, many activities and practices, particularly those with ritual or religious significance, have meaning beyond the practical output. while tangible external outputs may exist, there may also be internal, intangible outcomes through which the action of embodied practice, carrying out the ritual itself, provides benefit to the actor. for example, the lakshmi jhadu (grass broom) in rural indian households is used each morning by the female householder to clean the courtyard and porch. this action removes the dirt, but also has ritual, spiritual significance, being associated with the feminine and the goddess of wealth and prosperity (changede et. al. 2023). instructing a roomba negates the embodied physical action that is the expression of welcoming prosperity, and which can have its own health benefits. such embodied experience of going through physical actions cannot be shortcut. while purchasing a pre-made version of a particular beloved childhood foodstuff may evoke sense memories and provide sustenance, it lacks the experience of cooking it with a family member, which may take many hours and involve all the senses. markum et al. (2024), in categorising intersections between technology design and religious and spiritual practice, emphasise “the importance of tangibility and embodiment in technology-mediated practices for [religious and spiritual] contexts.” they note that such practices are often about making tangible the intangible and highlight this embodiment as a potential opportunity for hci research. similarly, noble (1999) suggests that technology has historically been imbued with a sense of divine purpose, becoming a means of bridging the gap between the mundane and the sacred. we suggest this extends beyond religion to wider ritualistic practice. complexity in the process itself and taking each step thoughtfully is often the basis of ritual action whether based on religious practice or other sources of meaning-making. for example, consider the practice of making an audio ‘mix-tape’, a common practice during the 1980s and 1990s. a practice that involved considerate time and investment from the creator, also recognised and appreciated by the recipient. the physical playlist (burnett et al. 2015) is an example of a project that aimed to recreate this embodied experience of making a mix-tape, to challenge the prevalence of digital (streaming) listening experiences, wherein the practice of making and curating a playlist requires significantly less time and effort. this project resurfaces the meaningful experience that embodied ritualistic practice brings (recording the tape), that had been lost through technological advancements. borrowing principles of ritual practice from religion for increasing meaning and value has also been suggested by hammer (2020) who suggests that "as hci researchers, this principle [ma’alin b’kodesh] might help us design for sustainability. what if things became holier the more we used them? what if the value of used objects went up instead of down? what if we had better rituals to celebrate the end of an object’s life?". our proposed project suggests research through design exploration and the creation of speculative smart home interventions in order to provoke questions of ritual and meaning. conclusion we concur with markum (2024) that hci and internet research fields will benefit from further research into connected technology interacting with embodied experience and ritual in home practice. as design researchers, we contend that understanding how value and meaning interact with embodied practice and automation in smart homes should be design-led. here, we agree with sudjic (2009) that design research helps make sense of a quickly evolving world by providing ways to investigate “complex social, environmental and cultural challenges” (rogers et al., 2019). this complex area of study requires a methodological framework focused on finding and understanding the challenges rather than solving them (malpass, 2017). we, therefore, propose a research through design methodology aimed at developing research through the action of the design process, incorporating speculative approaches; ritual is multisensory and embodied, and design fiction (bleeker, 2009) allows an embodied and tangible interaction with technologies and experiences that do not yet exist. as levy (2016) argues, mindful interaction with technology has the potential to deepen our engagement and sense of presence, much like religious and spiritual rituals. throughout this research programme, we will explore the connections between embodied ritual practices and meaningful home life, and the value which automation might bring beyond the functional, industry, and efficiency-focused framework of much current thinking in terms of smart homes. references berg, m. (2022). digital technography: a methodology for interrogating emerging digital technologies and their futures. qualitative inquiry, 28(7), 827-836. bleecker, j. (2009). design fiction: a short essay on design, science, fact and fiction. near future laboratory 29. burnett, d., gradinar, a., porter, j., stead, m., coulton, p., forrester, i. (2015). physical playlist: bringing back the mix-tape. in: abascal, j., barbosa, s., fetter, m., gross, t., palanque, p., winckler, m. (eds) human-computer interaction – interact 2015. interact 2015. lecture notes in computer science(), vol 9299. springer, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22723-8_6 changede, s., thomas, l., mullagh, l.,and jacobs, n.(2023) out with the new, in with the old: future directions for design for sustainability, in de sainz molestina, d., galluzzo, l., rizzo, f., spallazzo, d. (eds.), iasdr 2023: life-changing design, 9-13 october, milan, italy. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.378 chesher, c. (2019). trusting smart speakers: a typology of invocationary acts. aoir selected papers of internet research. hammer, j. (2020). envisioning jewish hci. in extended abstracts of the 2020 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (honolulu, hi, usa) (chi ea ’20). association for computing machinery, new york, ny, usa, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.3381818 levy, d. m. (2016). mindful tech: how to bring balance to our digital lives (1st ed.). yale university press. markum, r. b., wolf, s., claisse, c., & hoefer, m. (2024). mediating the sacred: configuring a design space for religious and spiritual tangible interactive artifacts. in proceedings of the eighteenth international conference on tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction, 1-22. malpass, m. (2017). critical design in context. bloomsbury publishing plc. noble, d. f. (1999). the religion of technology: the divinity of man and the spirit of invention (1st ed.). penguin books. rodgers, p., francesco, m. & conerney, l. (2019) the evolving landscape of design research in the uk, in proceedings of the interactional association of societies of design research conference 2019. sudjic, d. (2009) the language of things. penguin. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22723-8_6 https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.378 https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.3381818 takayama, l., pantofaru, c., robson, d., soto, b., & barry, m. (2012). making technology homey: finding sources of satisfaction and meaning in home automation. in proceedings of the 2012 acm conference on ubiquitous computing, 511-520. webb, w. (2011). the networked home: the way of the future or a vision too far? the connected home: the future of domestic life, 19-28. woodruff, a., augustin, s., & foucault, b. (2007). sabbath day home automation: "it's like mixing technology and religion". in proceedings of the 2007 sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems, 527-536. duan-_this tweet is unavailable_-_this tweet is unavailable_ selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): lastname, firstinitial. (2023, october). paper (or panel) title. paper (or panel) presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “this tweet is unavailable”: #blacklivesmatter tweets decay yiran duan syracuse university jeff hemsley syracuse university alexander owen smith syracuse university introduction by virtue of its user base, which skews towards those who disproportionately affects news coverage (chadwick, 2017; himelboim et al., 2013), twitter plays an important role in setting the public agenda. however, twitter is a highly dynamic space that evolves over time, where users’ norms impact twitter’s environment and functionality (halavais, 2013). another way that twitter is dynamic results from information decay (walker, 2017), which happens when users delete their tweets, close or make their accounts private, or twitter suspends or deletes an account. while a few studies have looked at twitter information decay (almuhimedi et al., 2013; bastos, 2021; bhattacharya & ganguly, 2016; mccammon, 2022; zubiaga, 2018) most have tended to focus on a limited set of topic spaces, or were before musk took over twitter, which has dramatically altered the distribution of users (safak, 2022). as researchers grapple with figuring out how to do research in this evolving space, understanding how information decay may impact research seems key. this preliminary work adds to the existing literature in two keyways. first, we broaden the kinds of discussion spaces where information decay has been studied by focusing on #blacklivesmatter (hereafter, blm), which in the u.s. has become a highly politicized movement (stewart et al., 2018). second, to our best knowledge, this is the first study looking at social movement tweets since musk took over and it may highlight how the landscape on twitter has shifted. background suggested citation (apa): duan, y., hemsley, j., smith, a. o. (2023, october). “this tweet is unavailable”: #blacklivesmatter tweets decay. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. previous studies show that random tweet collections that include more than one hashtag had relatively low rate of unavailable tweets while political related datasets have a higher rate of tweet decay (almuhimedi et al., 2013; bastos, 2021; bhattacharya & ganguly, 2016; mccammon, 2022; zubiaga, 2018). for example, zubiaga’s (2018) study indicates that 81.4% of their 30 randomly selected real-world events datasets remained available after 4 years, while bastos’ (2021) study shows that only 67% of brexit debate related tweets were available after the same amount of time. with musk’s takeover, and reinstatement of many accounts previously shut down for harassment (lorenz, 2022), some of these numbers may look different today. we take up this speculation by examining a large collection of #blacklivesmatter data at three different time points. pew polling data shows that roughly 42% of adults in the u.s. held a negative view of the blm movement (hurst, 2022). research has also suggested that the twitter discussion space around blm is highly polarized (stewart et al., 2018), therefore we expect to find a low rate of decay since some accounts that were negative towards blm could have been reinstated on the grounds of free speech after musk’s takeover. we also speculate that highly publicized events such like blm might have a different rate of decay since they might have a larger audience. given above, we propose the following two research questions: rq1: how does the percentage of unavailable blm tweets compare to the numbers published by previous research? rq2: is the rate of decay substantially different for a highly publicized, blm related event, to a more typical rate for blm? the key event we chose is derek chauvin’s trial, which took place on april 20th, 2021. chauvin, a former police officer, murdered black american george floyd on may 25th, 2020, which caused world-wide protests for police brutality and unfair treatments of black americans. methods using twitter’s academic api, we have been collecting tweets with the #blacklivesmatter hashtag since july 2020. this api collects tweets as soon as they are posted, so even if someone deletes their tweet right after posting it, we have a copy in our dataset. to answer our research questions, we pulled tweets from our collection for three time periods: february 17th to february 23rd of 2021, april 17th april 23rd, 2021, and february 17th to february 23rd, 2022. thus, we have tweets from three, one week block of time. the april block captures tweets about three days before and after derek chauvin’s trial. the other two blocks offer data before and after the trial within black history month. then, we used the rehydrator (coakley & steinert-threlkeld, 2019) package to check the availability of our tweets and generated a list of unavailable ones. we then ran the academicr package (barrie et al., 2022) on the unavailable tweets. this package provides error messages for unavailable tweets that helps us understand if the tweet was deleted or the account has been marked private or was suspended. note that no package that we know of provides more detail on what a tweet might be unavailable. having the results, we answer the first question by finding the average missing tweet rates across the three date ranges and comparing it to the published rates. with the results we provide some observations given musk’s take over and some of the sparse literature since then. to answer the second question, we compare the results during derek chauvin’s trial with the results from before and after. preliminary findings table 1 shows the information decay at the three time periods. table 1. summary of three time periods figure 1. visualization of three time periods as table 1 shows, on average, 37% of the tweets in our data collection became unavailable within 2 years. compared to previous studies, such as zubiaga (2018)’s randomly selected real-world events datasets (19% information decay after 4 years) and bastos (2021) brexit debate (33% information decay after 4 years), the blm information decay is 4 to 18% higher. this appears to be a substantially higher rate of decay than previous literature, which answers rq1. we also note that while the most recent dataset has the lowest decay rate, the two older datasets have similar rates, suggesting that an event like chauvin’s trial seems not to influence decay rate; the unavailable tweets rate increases as more time passes, which answers rq2. the noticeably higher decay rates suggest that either more decay happens in the blm discussion space than others, or that since twitter was taken over by musk, more information decay has taken place. future work could compare the blm discussion space with other social movements to conduct further analysis. one limitation of this study is that we do not know when exactly a tweet or an account became unavailable, but this limitation does not impact us comparing the percentage of unavailable tweets in our dataset with previous studies’. another limitation is that although some studies show that users delete their tweets or close their accounts due to regrets (mccammon, 2022; murillo et al., 2018; petrovic et al., 2013), we cannot say for sure why some tweets became unavailable in our dataset. however, this limitation does not affect our analysis since this study focuses on the percentage of unavailable tweets. we plan on running sentiment analysis on the unavailable tweets for future studies since the original dataset captured the original message of a tweet. conclusion this preliminary study shows that tweets from the #blacklivesmatter discussion space have decayed at a higher rate than other discussion spaces from previous studies. more work needs to be done to understand if this a byproduct of musk taking over twitter, or if something is inherently different about the blm discussion space that results in higher rates of decay. references almuhimedi, h., wilson, s., liu, b., sadeh, n., & acquisti, a. (2013). tweets are forever: a large-scale quantitative analysis of deleted tweets. proceedings of the 2013 conference on computer supported cooperative work, 897–908. https://doi.org/10.1145/2441776.2441878 barrie, c., ho, j. c., chan, c., rico, n., könig, t., & davidson, t. (2022). academictwitter: access the twitter academic research product track v2 api endpoint (0.3.1). https://cran.r-project.org/package=academictwitter bastos, m. (2021). this account doesn’t exist: tweet decay and the politics of deletion in the brexit debate. american behavioral scientist, 65(5), 757–773. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764221989772 bhattacharya, p., & ganguly, n. (2016). characterizing deleted tweets and their authors. proceedings of the international aaai conference on web and social media, 10(1), article 1. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v10i1.14803 chadwick, a. (2017). the hybrid media system: politics and power. oxford university press. coakley, k., & steinert-threlkeld, z. (2019). rehydrator: downloads tweets from a list of tweet ids (0.5.2). https://cran.r-project.org/package=rehydrator halavais, a. (2013). structure of twitter: social and technical. in twitter and society (1th ed., vol. 89, pp. 29–42). peter lang. himelboim, i., hansen, d., & bowser, a. (2013). playing in the same twitter network. information, communication & society, 16(9), 1373–1396. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2012.706316 hurst, k. (2022). u.s. teens are more likely than adults to support the black lives matter movement. pew research center. https://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2022/06/15/u-s-teens-are-more-likely-than-adults-to-support-the-black-livesmatter-movement/ lorenz, t. (2022, november 30). ‘opening the gates of hell’: musk says he will revive banned accounts. washington post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/24/twitter-musk-reversessuspensions/ mccammon, m. (2022). tweeted, deleted: an exploratory study of the us government’s digital memory holes. new media & society, 24(3), 741–759. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820934034 murillo, a., kramm, a., schnorf, s., & de luca, a. (2018). “if i press delete, it’s gone”: user understanding of online data deletion and expiration. proceedings of the fourteenth usenix conference on usable privacy and security, 329–339. petrovic, s., osborne, m., & lavrenko, v. (2013). i wish i didn’t say that! analyzing and predicting deleted messages in twitter (arxiv:1305.3107). arxiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.3107 safak, v. (2022). elon musk’s twitter takeover: politician accounts. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2205.08491 stewart, l. g., arif, a., & starbird, k. (2018). examining trolls and polarization with a retweet network. 6. walker, s. (2017). the complexity of collecting digital and social media data in ephemeral contexts [thesis]. https://digital.lib.washington.edu:443/researchworks/handle/1773/40612 zubiaga, a. (2018). a longitudinal assessment of the persistence of twitter datasets. journal of the association for information science and technology, 69(8), 974– 984. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24026 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): mahetaji, k & nieborg, d.b. (2024, october). where my ai apps at? a historiographic approach to analyzing platform tools. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. where my ai apps at? a historiographic approach to analyzing platform tools kaushar mahetaji university of toronto david b. nieborg university of toronto introduction in april 2020, tiktok’s parent company bytedance published the video-editing app capcut, which reached 250 million downloads within a year of its release. bytedance promoted capcut as a “free all-in-one” tool “for everyone to create anything anywhere,” singling out its ai-driven affordances, which range from automated video editors to speech-to-text converters (capcut, 2024). as such, capcut is indicative of bytedance’s broader corporate strategy to expand its suite of software tools, specifically ai-based tools, across the app ecosystem. this perspective challenges the idea of tiktok and capcut as discrete apps. instead, they are part of a growing, integrated app collection. in this sense, apps can be seen as assemblages of interrelated “media software,” or “software tools for creating, interacting with, and sharing media” (manovich, 2013, p. 3). in previous work, building on foxman’s (2019) insights on the relationship between platforms and tools, we argued that apps such as capcut and tiktok also function as “platform tools” (mahetaji & nieborg, 2024). in this capacity, bytedance’s apps are deployed by different platform users, from cultural producers to advertisers, to (1) make content for bytedance apps and (2) integrate apps in bytedance’s app ecosystem. for example, creators use tiktok’s editing features to design filters, which then serve as templates for new filters, or as editing tools for video production. at the same time, such filters are integrated back into capcut, increasing its functionality. thus, these efforts tie tiktok and capcut together at the infrastructural level, as well as generate more revenue by attracting more end-users and more diverse user groups. in this paper we explore how bytedance has expanded its infrastructural and economic footprint in the app economy by weaving a web of related apps. bytedance’s competitors, together with a seemingly endless slew of start-ups, have followed suit with their own platform tools, which makes the question of who owns and advances the means of “platform-dependent cultural production” ever more relevant (poell et al., 2021). more precisely, our inquiry into bytedance’s platform tools points to the increasingly central role of generative ai in software tools. examining platform growth via platform tools bytedance manages a sizeable number of apps in both its domestic market and abroad. many of them are aimed at supporting content creators, such as the photo and video editing apps capcut, ulike, and faceu, together with hybrid distribution/creation apps, such as lemon8, tiktok, and douyin. taken together, these apps form a dynamic assemblage of “platform tools,” i.e., a series of interrelated software resources that further integrate bytedance’s apps at the infrastructural and economic level. untangling the evolution of this app ecosystem, then, allows us to uncover the specific infrastructural and economic shifts in how these tools are integrated, and how, ultimately, they are adopted by end-users and creators. platform infrastructures have primarily been explored from the perspective of data and datafication, or the conversion of various aspects of life into data (couldry & mejias, 2019; sadowski, 2019). apart from empirical analyses into application programming interfaces (van der vlist et al., 2022) and software development kits (blanke & pybus, 2020), media scholars have shied away from discussing software tools in broader conversations about platform power. therefore, we contend that platform tools contribute to accumulating and operationalizing infrastructural and economic power through what has been theorized as (1) “multi-sided,” (2) “multi-layered,” and (3) “multisituated” processes (helmond & van der vlist, 2019). let us unpack these. first, platform tools constitute markets and therefore increase the number of user groups (or “sides”). these are brought together by apps behaving as distinct “platform instances,” i.e., “technical and economic platform configuration[s] that [facilitate] connectivity and interactions among end-users and multiple partners” (nieborg & helmond, 2019, p. 199). more succinctly, platform tools strengthen the multi-sided markets that platform companies operate. second, platform tools contribute to a platform’s infrastructural layeredness. that is, apps extend across economic sectors and everyday lived realities through the process of “platformization” (helmond, 2015). finally, platform tools support the platform as a regionally multi-situated company by enabling “parallel platformization” (kaye et al., 2021). that is, apps such as douyin and tiktok are “the same entity, offer nearly the same features, but differ in their infrastructures, governance, and market” (kaye et al., 2021, p. 245). how, then, has bytedance positioned its apps to expand along these three axes? surveying and mapping bytedance’s platform tools starting with bytedance’s introduction of the humor app neihan duanzi in 2012, we conduct a systematic financial and infrastructural analysis of the company’s softwarebased resources. for our financial analysis, we draw on documentation on corporate mergers, acquisitions, and venture capital investments by bytedance ltd. and its subsidiaries, which includes trade reports, news articles, and private market research databases crunchbase and pitchbook. for our infrastructural analysis we consulted developer documentation provided by bytedance, corporate promotional material, and technical tutorials to identify instances of software integration and the use of generative ai. then, we plotted the financial and infrastructural changes over time, heeding calls from platform scholars to engage in “historiographic” approaches to visualize platform power (helmond & van der vlist, 2019). figure 1. positioning tiktok in bytedance’s assemblage of apps by unpacking bytedance’s apps as platform tools, we demonstrate that tiktok is not a discrete app but a platform tool that is part of a dynamic assemblage of apps (see figure 1). through the development of first-party platform tools (circles), the sourcing of third-party tools through acquisitions (rectangles), and venture capital investments (diamonds), bytedance has grown its overall market. bytedance supplies several all-inone ai-based toolkits that streamline cultural production and improve the functionality of existing tools for multiple user groups, from cultural producers to advertisers. platform tools outlined in red are key examples of tools that supplement existing tools. moreover, platform tools diverge and converge to produce new platform tools—e.g., live.me and musical.ly, which transformed into tiktok. we notice that inter-app communication is made possible by data exchanges that provide infrastructural links among bytedance’s family of apps. some of bytedance’s apps lie within the cultural industries (yellow shapes and tiktok in figure 1), while others remain outside (blue shapes in figure 1). platform tools, then, are the connective glue at both the infrastructural level, resulting in platformization, and the economic level, extending bytedance’s reach beyond the cultural industries, thereby positioning bytedance as a multi-layered platform. we also identify the ongoing process of parallel platformization, where bytedance develops and deploys similar platform tools in separate ecosystems: the chinese (domestic) market and the international market, connected by the double-ended arrows in figure 1. these instances of parallel tool building and parallel platformization allow bytedance to be multi-situated, capturing both regional and global markets. in sum, what our analysis shows is that apps have moved from discrete objects to interconnected clusters of platform tools, thereby revealing an underexplored dimension of platform power. by concentrating on the breadth and depth of its ai-based platform tools in particular, bytedance has increasingly become multi-sided, multi-layered, and multi-situated, securing further opportunities to expand its corporate conglomerate. with this exploratory analysis, we aim to lay the foundation for further research on how platform tools are adopted and negotiated by creators, and gain a deeper, empirical understanding of how generative ai is becoming increasingly central to the app economy. references blanke, t., & pybus, j. (2020). the material conditions of platforms: monopolization through decentralization. social media + society, 6(4), 1–13. capcut. (2024). all-in-one video editor & graphic design tool driven by ai. capcut. https://www.capcut.com/ couldry, n., & mejias, u. a. (2019). data colonialism: rethinking big data’s relation to the contemporary subject. television & new media, 20(4), 336–349. foxman, m. (2019). united we stand: platforms, tools and innovation with the unity game engine. social media + society, 5(4), 1–10. helmond, a. (2015). the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready. social media + society, 1(2), 1–11. helmond, a., & van der vlist, f. n. (2019). social media and platform historiography: challenges and opportunities. tmg — journal for media history, 22(1), 6–34. kaye, d. b. v., chen, x., & zeng, j. (2021). the co-evolution of two chinese mobile short video apps: parallel platformization of douyin and tiktok. mobile media & communication, 9(2), 229–253. mahetaji, k., & nieborg, d. b. (2024). tiktok as a platform tool: surveying disciplinary perspectives on platforms and cultural production. in f. lesage & m. terren (eds.), creative tools and the softwarization of cultural production (pp. 23–45). palgrave macmillan. manovich, l. (2013). software takes command: extending the language of new media. bloomsbury academic. nieborg, d. b., & helmond, a. (2019). the political economy of facebook’s platformization in the mobile ecosystem: facebook messenger as a platform instance. media, culture & society, 41(2), 196–218. poell, t., nieborg, d. b., & duffy, b. e. (2021). platforms and cultural production. polity. sadowski, j. (2019). when data is capital: datafication, accumulation, and extraction. big data & society, 6(1), 1–12. van der vlist, f. n., helmond, a., burkhardt, m., & seitz, t. (2022). api governance: the case of facebook’s evolution. social media + society, 8(2), 1–24. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-23 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): martin, z., valle, d. m., & shorey, s. (2023, october). care, inc.: how big tech responded to the end of roe. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. care, inc.: how big tech responded to the end of roe zelly martin university of texas at austin dominique montiel valle university of texas at austin samantha shorey university of texas at austin introduction after the leak of the dobbs decision that ultimately overturned roe v. wade, technology companies made a series of (officially unrelated, but conspicuously timed) public statements in support of user privacy: apple released an advertisement showcasing privacy features (o’flaherty, 2022); google promised to delete location data of abortion clinic visitors (grant, 2022); meta announced testing of default end-to-end-encryption on messenger and instagram direct (newman, 2022). on the surface, these declarations cast big tech as entities that take care to protect their users. limiting data collection by deleting location history or instituting end-to-end encryption threatens a business-model based on selling user data to advertisers (zuboff, 2015). should we understand these decisions as a form of altruistic activism? what might big tech have to gain? we analyze a collection of statements and policy changes by technology companies to understand how corporate decisions are leveraged as a branding strategy and to identify the limits of corporate care. we thus ask: can corporations engage in care-ful activism, or are their decisions (as exemplified by their policies and utterances after dobbs) always-already care-less? platform ideology in the past, corporations like meta worked to convince users that their platforms were morally neutral (deibert, 2020; gillespie, 2010). platforms aim to resist legal liability by claiming they are not arbiters of truth, while maintaining their relevance as public spheres (gillespie, 2010). although platforms literally “pick and choose” what content they allow to exist (gillespie, 2015), they claim to facilitate openness, connection, and accessibility. but by relying on user data for profit (west, 2019; zuboff, 2015), platforms are inherently capitalist and thus political (winner, 2017). further, platforms are inherently closed. proprietary algorithms mean that users have little insight into their inner workings, which allows platforms to make unilateral decisions “that purport to be in the best interest of their user networks” (cotter, 2021; petre et al., 2019, p. 2). now, platforms work to appear ‘good’: they publicly “crack down” on manipulation (malik, 2022) and speak out for racial justice (toh, 2020), despite privately subjecting activists to state surveillance (nurik, 2022). in order to bolster positive public perceptions of their platforms, companies may engage in “commodity activism” or “brand activism” by taking social action or a position on a social issue. vredenburg et al. (2020) developed a framework for differentiating authentic from inauthentic brand activism by parsing their speech (marketing messaging) from their actions (corporate policies). however, their framework was developed with the aim of guiding brands on how to best perform their activism. it is worth querying whether this is something we should strive for, or if this problematically (re)inscribes corporations as people, thereby perpetuating their moral authority (petre et al., 2019) over users. in a forum on popular feminism, rottenberg observes: “[through neoliberalism] everything is reduced to market metrics, even our political imagination” (banet-weiser et al., 2020, p. 8). this is an integral aspect of commodity activism, as well—ultimately, commodity activism works to enhance capital for corporations rather than enact social change by making “social action …marketable” (mukherjee & banet-weiser, 2012, p. 2). this has bolstered popular feminism (ibid.), which is able to flourish when feminism is popular enough to be a commodity. engaging in brand activism that supports people who can get pregnant, then, is a cost-benefit analysis: is it more useful for the corporation to say nothing and avoid angering the opposition, or more marketable for the corporation to come out in defense of reproductive rights? politics of care platforms hope that we believe they care. they care about connection, they care about transparency, they care about democracy and about privacy. when thinking about platform activism, then, we must engage with “matters of care” (de la bellacasa, 2011). caring is historically gendered (gilligan, 2009) and devalued as antithetical to science in that it is inherently subjective, rather than objective (code, 2015; martin et al., 2015). however, code (2015) argues that to know is to care, as questioning how we know what we know requires that we care about how we discovered it. but troubling romanticized notions of care is critical. paternalistic “care” was and remains a weapon of (post)colonialism and imperialism while sidestepping structural oppression by emphasizing the individual (murphy, 2015). care, then, is at once antithetical and aligned with neoliberalism, able to be wielded against and in service of it (martin et al., 2015; murphy, 2015). data feminism and liberatory pursuits so does this mean that platforms’ social action is always-already capitalist and careless? west (2022) argues that some privacy moves, like instituting end-to-end encryption with an eye toward feminist, black, queer ideologies rather than cis-hetero white libertarianism, can create communities of care, free from surveillance by corporations and states. looking beyond social media and search platforms, some science and technology scholars have argued that the instantiation of user agency in self-tracking technologies can be harnessed to resist power structures by (mis)using the technologies to increase user benefit (fox et al., 2020; kristensen & ruckenstein, 2018). troublingly, though, being a cyborg (haraway, 1990) is not necessarily a benefit to those seeking reproductive care without roe protections, as digital traces can later implicate abortion-seekers (singer & chen, 2022). this calls to mind lupton’s (2013) neoliberal cyborg: a well-behaved, conservative subject seeking wholeness and perfection. digital technologies create this neoliberal subject, lupton argues, by encouraging constant self-surveillance and monitoring, and by turning our embodied experience into ‘objective’ data, i.e., numbers. while subjective knowledge was previously used to determine if an abortion law was broken in pre-roe america (holland, 2020), the power of ‘objective’ data may now be harnessed to criminalize a formerly-pregnant person. method given the controversy of the dobbs decision, it is perhaps unsurprising that there are very few official statements that address the decision directly (2). we additionally draw upon news articles (76) published from the date of the dobbs leak to the end of the year pulled from google news results for each platform of interest and “abortion” which pertain to actions (18) taken by platforms. we analyze this compilation of public utterances (96) through critical technocultural discourse analysis (brock, 2018) to capture the combination of discourse and action in our dataset. preliminary results care, in its ideal, is opposed to neoliberalism: resisting individuality in favor of community and refusing to reduce humans to capital (martin et al., 2015). yet, there is indeed a “darker side of care” (p. 627). paternalistic care can be a weapon – used to ensnare and to oppress (murphy, 2015). we find that platforms redefine care in three main ways: for users, care is neoliberal platforms provide us with good privacy options, for which we are individually responsible. the datafication of our surveillance is reframed as something we can control through making responsible choices. for employees, care is paternalistic (murphy, 2015; petre et al., 2019) employees are offered money for healthcare, at the expense of free expression. finally, ultimate care is for the platform that company culture is protected, alliance with the state unthreatened, and above all, profit is promoted. through the “double vision of care,” (lindén & lydahl, 2021, p. 8) platform decisions are revealed to extend care in some ways, while also maintaining control over users and their data. references banet-weiser, s., gill, r., & rottenberg, c. (2020). postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism? sarah banet-weiser, rosalind gill and catherine rottenberg in conversation. feminist theory, 21(1), 3–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700119842555 brock, a. (2018). critical technocultural discourse analysis. new media & society, 20(3), 1012–1030. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816677532 code, l. (2015). care, concern, and advocacy: is there a place for epistemic responsibility? feminist philosophy quarterly, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.5206/fpq/2015.1.1 cotter, k. (2021). “shadowbanning is not a thing”: black box gaslighting and the power to independently know and credibly critique algorithms. information, communication & society, 0(0), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2021.1994624 de la bellacasa, m. p. (2011). matters of care in technoscience: assembling neglected things. social studies of science, 41(1), 85–106. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312710380301 deibert, r. j. (2020). reset: reclaiming the internet for civil society. house of anansi. fox, s. e., menking, a., eschler, j., & backonja, u. (2020). multiples over models: interrogating the past and collectively reimagining the future of menstrual sensemaking. acm transactions on computer-human interaction, 27(4), 22:1-22:24. https://doi.org/10.1145/3397178 gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of ‘platforms.’ new media & society, 12(3), 347–364. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342738 gillespie, t. (2015). platforms intervene. social media + society, 1(1), 2056305115580479. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115580479 gilligan, c. (2009). in a different voice: psychological theory and women’s development. harvard university press. grant, n. (2022, july 1). google says it will delete location data when users visit abortion clinics. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/technology/google-abortion-location-data.html haraway, d. (1990). simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203873106 holland, j. l. (2020). tiny you: a western history of the anti-abortion movement. univ of california press. kristensen, d. b., & ruckenstein, m. (2018). co-evolving with self-tracking technologies. new media & society, 20(10), 3624–3640. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818755650 lindén, l., & lydahl, d. (2021). editorial: care in sts. nordic journal of science and technology studies, 3–12. https://doi.org/10.5324/njsts.v9i1.4000 lupton, d. (2013). the digital cyborg assemblage: haraway’s cyborg theory and the new digital health technologies (ssrn scholarly paper no. 2272963). https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2272963 malik, a. (2022, june 21). meta is cracking down on fake and irrelevant reviews on facebook. techcrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/21/meta-cracking-down-fakeirrelevant-reviews-facebook/ martin, a., myers, n., & viseu, a. (2015). the politics of care in technoscience. social studies of science, 45(5), 625–641. mukherjee, r., & banet-weiser, s. (2012). commodity activism: cultural resistance in neoliberal times. nyu press. murphy, m. (2015). unsettling care: troubling transnational itineraries of care in feminist health practices. social studies of science, 45(5), 717–737. newman, l. h. (2022, august 11). meta just happens to expand end-to-end encryption. wired. https://www.wired.com/story/meta-messenger-encryption-nebraska-abortion/ nurik, c. l. (2022). facebook and the surveillance assemblage: policing black lives matter activists & suppressing dissent. surveillance & society, 20(1), 30–46. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v20i1.13398 o’flaherty, k. (2022, may 25). apple slams facebook and google with bold new privacy ad. forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2022/05/25/appleslams-facebook-and-google-with-bold-new-privacy-ad/ petre, c., duffy, b. e., & hund, e. (2019). “gaming the system”: platform paternalism and the politics of algorithmic visibility. social media + society, 5(4), 2056305119879995. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119879995 singer, n., & chen, b. x. (2022, july 13). in a post-roe world, the future of digital privacy looks even grimmer. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/technology/personaltech/abortion-privacy-roesurveillance.html toh, m. (2020, june 1). “black lives matter”: facebook, netflix, peloton and other companies take a stand as protests sweep america. cnn business. https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/01/business/us-protests-companies-respond-intlhnk/index.html vredenburg, j., kapitan, s., spry, a., & kemper, j. a. (2020). brands taking a stand: authentic brand activism or woke washing? journal of public policy & marketing, 39(4), 444–460. https://doi.org/10.1177/0743915620947359 west, s. m. (2019). data capitalism: redefining the logics of surveillance and privacy. business & society, 58(1), 20–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/0007650317718185 west, s. m. (2022). survival of the cryptic: tracing technological imaginaries across ideologies, infrastructures, and community practices. new media & society, 24(8), 1891–1911. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820983017 winner, l. (2017). do artifacts have politics? in computer ethics (pp. 177–192). routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315259697-21 zuboff, s. (2015). big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization. journal of information technology, 30(1), 75–89. https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2015.5 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): morris, j.w. (2024, october 30). artificial audio: emerging uses of ai in podcasting. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. artificial audio: emerging uses of ai in podcasting jeremy morris university of wisconsin-madison rationale several recent controversies have erupted at the intersection of podcasting and artificial intelligence. in april 2023, there was the launch of the joe rogan ai experience; a podcast that used ai to generate fake voices and scripts of conversations between the world’s most popular (and controversial) podcaster, joe rogan, and a number of celebrity guests, including hip hop star drake and former u.s. president donald trump. the stunt was an experiment by an audio producer in sydney, australia, looking to test the capabilities of generative ai, but the attention it drew raised ethical and legal questions about creativity, ownership and the economics of platforms that host and stream podcasts (e.g. youtube and spotify). other ai-hosted shows have been taken down shortly after their launch due to misinformation or content that was racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive (xiang 2023). even shows that remain on platforms, like ai radio a “current events” show hosted by chat bots adam and bella that discuss topics like different sex acts human enjoy and kangaroos invading uganda come with content warnings and feel like they could be taken down any day: “these segments are made up by ai. sometimes they get to pretty questionable territory” (ai radio description in spotify, 2023). while the popular press covering these stories focused on long-held worries about fraud, deception, and the differences between “real” human practices and “fake” machinic ones, these incidents speak to larger concerns about the future role of artificial intelligence in the everyday routines of podcast industry workers and in the circulation and consumption of podcasts as a media form. as jonathan sterne and elena razlogova argue about the use of artificial intelligence in the music industries: “to understand, assess, and intervene in the cultural politics of ai, scholars will need to consider broader questions of how work processes operate, the meanings of the work performed by the ai to its users, the ideologies operating in the interface, […] and the infrastructural conditions within which it must operate” (2021: 765). while the popular press discourse around ai is full of stories about the uncertain ways ai systems might threaten or deskill workers, the challenges it brings to questions of credibility and veracity of information or might provide untold new possibilities for productivity, efficiency and creativity, sterne and razlogova remind us of the very real, mundane, and routine ways ai is already, and will be, built into the everyday practices of cultural industry workers. research questions and methods in light of their call, then, this paper aims to survey the state of artificial intelligence in the podcasting industry by exploring the following two research questions: 1) how is ai being used by podcasters and other actors in the podcasting industry? 2) how is the use of ai in podcasting framed in articles and writing about the industry? using a collection of 30 podcasts that employ ai during the production and consumption process, the paper describes the various ways ai is currently being employed by podcasters. the ai-enabled podcasts will be identified by finding references to the shows in podcast newsletters, websites, and tech articles about the use of ai in the media industries. the paper will also present a discourse analysis of industry texts about a variety of ai tools designed for podcasters. through textual analysis of the aienabled podcasts and an analysis of the rhetoric within the industry texts, the paper employs a critical media industry studies lens to present a typology for the various uses of ai within podcasting and explores the various promises, threats and challenges that accompany the deployment of ai-based features, services, and technologies. each category of the typology raises questions about labor, economics, creativity, and ownership within the podcasting industry. broadly, there are 1) tools that focus primarily on production, such as ai scriptwriting, ai voice generation, ai sound effect creation, as well as ai-enabled mixing, mastering, and editing services, 2) tools that support the podcasting infrastructure more broadly like ai assistants for buying and placing advertising or for finding and negotiating sponsorships, and 3) tools that center around listening, such as services that further personalize the podcasting experience, allowing dynamic content to be inserted into shows based on listener preference, location, or time of day. ai tools are also being put in service of “spoofing” streaming platforms by posing as listeners. even from this cursory typology, it's clear that there is greater need for researchers to develop more specificity around what we mean as we discuss “ai in podcasting”, to push beyond simply worrying about whether our next favorite podcast will be hosted by ai. bearing in mind the prevalence and dominance of platformization in the podcasting industry (bonini 2015; sullivan, 2019; hesmondhalgh et. al. 2023), it is perhaps not surprising that content producers may be turning towards using more artificial intelligence in the podcast production process. if platforms have found that podcasts are a cheaper source of audio entertainment than music or other audio media that require licenses and royalties, it stands to reason they’d also be interested in content that could be produced regularly and in an automated fashion. moreover, as individual podcasters are looking to stand out on crowded platforms, using ai to generate more content, more quickly, helps podcasts stay top-of-mind with audiences and the platform’s search algorithms. the closed and proprietary nature of many of these ai services and technologies stand in contrast with podcasting’s origins as a relatively open and accessible format (berry 2016, bottomley 2019, spinelli and dann) that could potentially open media-making up to a greater diversity of identities, perspectives, and communities by creating “audio enclaves” (florini 2015) or providing a “space at the margins” (vrikki and malik 2019) for underrepresented individuals and historically silenced communities. while podcasting has long been structured by significant exclusions (markman 2011; wang 2021), the format still represents a fruitful space for expression, community-building and meaningmaking for a range of different identities (copeland 2018; florini 2015; fox et al. 2020; hogan 2008; tiffe and hoffmann 2017). as the podcasting industry begins to incorporate artificial intelligence and innovate around it, we need research that explores how these new developments alter or shift podcasting’s historical promises and practices. by analyzing a number of ai-enabled podcasts, and by unpacking the industrial discourse around the ai services, tools, and software offered to podcasters and podcast listeners, i explore how podcasters and others in the podcasting industry are using ai to create novel and perhaps, problematic, podcasting experiences. given the controversies ai technologies raise around misinformation, unsavory content, intellectual property and creativity, the paper aims to raise attention of the important role that podcast platforms like spotify, google and apple podcasts play in creating the institutional, aesthetic, and technical “conditions” where artificially generated podcasts and listeners are not only possible but an unsurprising outcome. references berry, richard. 2016. “podcasting: considering the evolution of the medium and its association with the word ‘radio.’” radio journal: international studies in broadcast & audio media 14 (1): 7–22. bonini, tiziano. 2015. “the ‘second age’ of podcasting: reframing podcasting as a new digital mass medium.” quaderns del cac 41 18 (july): 21–30. bottomley, andrew. 2020. sound streams: a cultural history of radio-internet convergence. ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press. copeland, stacey. 2018. “a feminist materialisation of amplified voice: queering identity and affect in the heart.” in podcasting: new aural cultures and digital media, edited by dario llinares, neil fox, and richard berry, 209–26. florini, sarah. 2015. “the podcast ‘chitlin’ circuit’: black podcasters, alternative media, and audio enclaves.” journal of radio & audio media 22 (2): 209–19. fox, kim, david o. dowling, and kyle miller. 2020. “a curriculum for blackness: podcasts as discursive cultural guides, 2010–2020.” journal of radio & audio media 27 (2): 298–318. hesmondhalgh, d., campos valverde, r., kaye, d., & li, z. (2023). digital platforms and infrastructure in the realm of culture. media and communication, 11(2), 296-306. doi:https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v11i2.6422 hogan, mél. 2008. “dykes on mykes: podcasting and the activist archive.” topia: canadian journal of cultural studies 20 (september): 199–215. jorgensen, britta. 2021. “the ‘cultural entrepreneurship’ of independent podcast production in australia.” journal of radio & audio media 28 (1): 144–61. llinares, dario, neil fox, and richard berry. 2018. podcasting: new aural cultures and digital media. london, uk: palgrave macmillan. markman, kris m. 2011. “doing radio, making friends, and having fun: exploring the motivations of independent audio podcasters.” new media & society 14 (4): 547–65. spinelli, martin, and lance dann. 2019. podcasting: the audio media revolution. new york, ny: bloomsbury academic. sterne, jonathan and razlogova, elena (2021) tuning sound for infrastructures: artificial intelligence, automation, and the cultural politics of audio mastering, cultural studies, 35:4-5, 750-770, doi: 10.1080/09502386.2021.1895247 sullivan, john. 2019. “the platforms of podcasting.” social media + society. tiffe, raechel, and melody hoffmann. 2017. “taking up sonic space: feminized vocality and podcasting as resistance.” feminist media studies 17 (1): 115–18. vrikki, photini, and sarita malik. 2019. “voicing lived-experience and anti-racism: podcasting as a space at the margins for subaltern counterpublics.” popular communication 17 (4): 273–87. wang, jennifer. 2021. “the perils of ladycasting: podcasting, gender, and alternative production cultures.” in saving new sounds: podcast preservation and historiography, edited by jeremy wade morris and eric hoyt, 51–70. ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press. xiang, chloe. 2023. “this podcast has hosts, jokes, and expert guests. it’s all aigenerated.” vice. february 10. https:// www.vice.com/en/article/pkgj38/this-podcasthas-hosts-jokes-andexpert-guests-its-all-ai-generated https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2021.1895247 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): pluta, m., siuda, p., (2022, november). cancer on tiktok–evaluating online self-disclosure using directed content analysis and in-depth interviews. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. cancer on tiktok–evaluating online self-disclosure using directed content analysis and in-depth interviews magdalena pluta faculty of pedagogy, kazimierz wielki university in bydgoszcz, poland piotr siuda faculty of social communication and media, kazimierz wielki university in bydgoszcz, poland introduction tiktok, a social media app featuring short video content, has become immensely popular around the world (zeng et al., 2021). some researchers claim social media are more about the “positive culture” (e.g., lee-won et al., 2014), which means that content with a positive tone is more desirable and accepted than that with a negative one and users want to present themselves without undesirable traits. the study focuses on tiktok videos by users with cancer and their experiences. the research continues the work done by the first author (pluta, 2021) on online selfdisclosure of women with breast cancer using instagram, with self-disclosure understood as the willingness to provide intimate, private information about oneself (e.g., barak & suler, 2008). previously, pluta showed that instagram posts are full of fears, anxiety, pain, weaknesses, and suffering associated with the treatment and body changes (c1: category 1–self-disclosure of negative information). importantly, the posts also turn out to be a form of self-therapy. instagram narratives relate to positive emotions, joyful life events, self-acceptance, self-affirmation, education (e.g. prevention, debunking stereotypes about cancer) (c2: category 2–self-disclosure of positive information), and people supporting them on their way to recovery (c3: category 3– disclosure of information about other people). however, this previous research revolved around the posts, and thus was limited when concluding about the experiences of the users. the presented paper aims to characterize tiktok practices of users with cancer considering positive culture and online self-disclosure. the researchers ask the following questions: 1) are tiktok videos disclosing information in the manner the previous research on instagram shows? this question–despite being a yes/no type of question–is intended to compare different platform cultures (instagram vs tiktok) for specific use practices. at the same time, the study asks 2) what are the creators’ motivations and what meanings they give to disclosing cancer–are these in line with what one can see on tiktok? how do the users position themselves considering the social media positive culture; does disclosing cancer debunk or support this culture (or both to some extent)? methods combining qualitative directed content analysis (dca) with in-depth interviews (idi) is crucial here. stage 1 of the research was about analyzing the content using hashtags to identify and sample the most relevant profiles and videos posted. 862 videos from four profiles were analyzed and the profiles were chosen based on the list that included the number of followers, likes, and videos for each profile. dca was used as described by hsieh & shannon (2005). it is especially appropriate for research aiming to describe further a given phenomenon as the previous study would benefit from expanding and also offering supporting and non-supporting evidence for a given study. also, this approach is deductive and guided by a more structured process than a conventional approach. thus, the codebook was developed based on prior research on instagram (pluta, 2021) with previously identified categories and subcategories (the three categories indicated above and 10 subcategories). stage 2 (guided by stage 1), i.e., semi-structured online idis (n=8) was intended to go beyond dca to a more nuanced understanding of the users’ lived experience. to sample the respondents, the previously indicated list of profiles was used. eight people were reached and interviewed, including the creators of four analyzed profiles, and sample saturation was successfully achieved. the research was conducted under all ethical standards (see e.g., elgesem, 2015). findings and relevance similar to instagram, tiktok is a tool for negative (c1) and positive online selfdisclosure (c2) and disclosing others (c3). dca revealed that content on tiktok is much more positive (c1 being 24 percent of all videos; c2–79 percent), and the videos are mostly educational (see idis below). c3 is not numerous (8 percent of all videos), which does not mean that there are no such videos at all. also, some new categories (and subcategories) were indicated–e.g., responding to hateful comments (see below) and raising money for treatment. the interviews confirmed that the respondents want to educate others, as they feel especially competent because of their experiences. for them, tiktok is not about getting support, but a tool to inform and warn others. the interviewees pointed out tiktok’s informal rules, including using trends (e.g., herrman, 2019), which means that videos are usually more positive despite dealing with a difficult topic. however, this does not mean that there is a positive culture understood as presenting oneself without any undesirable traits (e.g., lee-won et al., 2014). the respondents seem not to care how they are perceived while disclosing cancer. especially since some of them get unfavorable comments about being a “cancer celebrity”–these are mostly ignored or mocked. here positive culture means more content with a positive self-disclosure as it has been previously defined (e.g., joyful life events, self-acceptance, self-affirmation). similar to the previous instagram study, the research presented here undermines the traditional understanding of online self-disclosure. previously anonymity and lack of support from close others (e.g., friends or relatives) were debunked as conditions necessary to disclose oneself. this study on tiktok shows that one may even not seek support from other social media users (e.g., barak & suler, 2008). it is not that creators do not want to receive support, but what they want most of all is to educate others and this is a crucial part of their experience. also, the study shows that positive culture is not a general category, as particular social media are internally diverse and the users constitute different niches, with different content addressed to different audiences. the work is important for several reasons. 1) tiktok (and social media in general) is so far rarely explored as a field of activity for people with chronic illnesses. 2) existing studies on tiktok focusing on content analysis lack an even deeper qualitative approach and the paper provides this depth through the use of idis. also, 3) the study deepens our understanding of how and why people use social media in general and shows that this usage has many, often unexpected, facets. references barak, a., & suler, j. (2008). reflections on the psychology and social science of cyberspace. in a. barak (ed.), psychological aspects of cyberspace: theory, research, applications (pp. 1–12). cambridge university press. elgesem, d. (2015). consent and information – ethical considerations when conducting research on social media. in h. fossheim & h. ingierd (eds.), internet research ethics (pp. 14–34). cappelen damm akademisk. herrman, j. (2019, march 10). how tiktok is rewriting the world. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/style/what-is-tik-tok.html hsieh, h.-f., & shannon, s. e. (2005). three approaches to qualitative content analysis. qualitative health research, 15(9), 1277–1288. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732305276687 lee-won, r. j., shim, m., joo, y. k., & park, s. g. (2014). who puts the best “face” forward on facebook?: positive self-presentation in online social networking and the role of self-consciousness, actual-to-total friends ratio, and culture. computers in human behavior, 39, 413–423. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.08.007 pluta, m. (2021). online self-disclosure and social sharing of emotions of women with breast cancer using instagram–qualitative conventional content analysis. chronic illness, 17423953211039778. https://doi.org/10.1177/17423953211039778 zeng, j., abidin, c., & schafer, m. s. (2021). research perspectives on tiktok and its legacy apps: introduction. page header logo international journal of communication, 15, 3161–3172. https://doi.org/1932–8036/20210005 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): newton, g. (2024, october). dna data: digital displays of family and the biodigital self. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. direct-to-consumer dna platforms & digital displays of family giselle newton the centre for digital cultures and societies, university of queensland background the family genealogy industry has seen exponential growth in recent years, in large part due to the rise of direct-to-consumer dna testing. worldwide, millions of people have submitted saliva samples to be digitised in exchange for dna profiles, ethnicity estimates and dna matches. to some extent, ancestry-oriented dna platforms function like other social media networks, connecting users in intimate publics, yet they differ in the way they order users by centimorgans rather than other social relationships such as friendship. further, dna testing sits within a spectrum of technologies for tracking and monitoring the body however, dna data is more identifying and arguably more sensitive than other forms of intimate data. as such, direct-to-consumer dna testing raises novel and complex questions related to how this technology might (re)shape individuals’ sense of self and connectedness to family. in this presentation, i draw on accounts from an ongoing study with australians interested in genealogy, or affected by adoption or donor conception. i situate this work among scholarship by digital researchers who have drawn on the sociological concept of ‘family display’ (finch, 2007), which highlights how the ways we display family (deliberately or inadvertently) constitutes a key family practice. previous work on digital displays of family has considered: family photography on instagram (barnwell et al. 2021), mobile photography and skype use in transnational families (share et al. 2017; cabalquinto, 2019), and family accounts on smart home devices (goulden, 2019). in a similar way, (genetic) families become visible and legible through dna testing platforms. i bring this scholarship on digital displays into dialogue with work on geneticization of the self (fishman & mcgowan, 2014) and bio-digital identity (peters & gorissen, 2023), to illuminate how the digitization of dna shapes our familial and personal lives in powerful and novel ways. methods semi-structured interviews were conducted with australian individuals who had used dna testing platforms to access information about their family (n=23). participants were recruited via community organisations, facebook groups and via word of mouth. data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2021), and two themes were derived from my analysis, outlined below. dna displays of family: how users are connected and ordered on the dna platform the first theme derived from my analysis related to how participants used dna platforms to make visible or display their genetic familial networks. for example, some participants were hoping to match with a specific family member (e.g. a biological parent) or uncover information about their cultural identity. for instance: i am mapping the entire village [my family came from] and i thought, well, let me see if i can do it properly. (zoya, 62, female, genealogy enthusiast) accounts revealed how participants sought to construct desirable family histories. for example, many participants described feeling disappointed about their ethnicity estimates, that dna data did not reveal more ‘exotic’ cultural ties or salacious histories, like convicts. participants also acknowledged the limitations of such networks constructed from dna, for example, in that they did not capture the oral narratives or account for their social family members: i talk to him all the time, but they're not blood related. and so i can't put them on my tree even though i call him my cousin, even though they're connected. (danielle, 47, female, genealogy enthusiast & adopted mother) further, for some participants solving their family mysteries or identifying a biological parent or sibling required more members to join the dna platform giving rise to periods of waiting and longing: the waiting is you always feel on edge. you're hoping every time you log in, or that she logs in, that she's actually going to tell me that there's somebody who's closer. (zoya, 62, female, genealogy enthusiast) as such, maximising the desired and imagined affordances of the centralised dna platform required a critical mass. elsewhere, the future of their dna profiles and the platform was also considered by participants, and some viewed their genealogical work as a way of contributing to their family and leaving a legacy: i don't have children, so i thought it was my way of keeping the family tree alive too. (danielle, 47, female, genealogy enthusiast & adopted mother) yet, this also meant that future generations would also have to manage unexpected matches and dna surprises, and individuals described how this placed a burden on their children and grandchildren. defining the bio-digital self: how identity is shaped by dna data the second theme focused on how individuals were able to cultivate their bio-digital identities through engaging with dna testing. many participants viewed dna data as representations of their ‘true’ selves: this is the truth and you know, you can't deny dna, dna’s in your makeup. (brad, 65, male, genealogy enthusiast) participants often described how it was important that they added accurate and detailed information and photos to, not only to their dna profile, but also to other social media profiles so that they were ‘findable’ or ‘discoverable’ if/when family members matched with them and began sleuthing. in this way, participants sought to portray a ‘best self’ online. some participants discussed how they needed their profile to show that they were authentic and human (rather than scammer or bot), for example, in the case that the dna testing would reveal an unexpected and/or multiple (donor) sibling relationship. they think i'm a bot or a scammer, so i have to try and yeah, try to humanise myself as much as possible, like have a profile photo and put my phone number. (caroline, 33, female, donor-conceived) yet while they sought to be desirable and unique, participants often joked about how their dna data was neither exceptional nor useful or incriminating in any way, for example: if somebody's cloned me somewhere along the line, ok, well, and good. make it a good one (laughs). (julie, 73, female, genealogy enthusiast) many participants considered dna testing practices, genealogy and family history more broadly as a personal hobby, important to their identity and aligned with their personality. for instance, one participant located genealogical practices historically as a pastime dominated by women, describing how she viewed dna testing as part of ‘herstory’: [dna testing] has really strengthened my conviction as a feminist… it's not ‘hisstory’. it's ‘her-story’ to me, because social history is the story of households and families and social obligation. (emily, 61, female, genealogy enthusiast) preliminary conclusion and implications this is the first empirical study to capture the australian direct-to-consumer dna users’ experiences, combining accounts from genealogy enthusiasts with accounts from those affected by adoption and donor conception who may feel compelled to test due to limited access to information. this work firstly contributes to understanding digital displays of family, specifically how dna platforms shape understandings and practices of family. secondly, this work provides insights into how dna data (like other biometric data) shape individual identities in complex ways. references barnwell, a., neves, b. b., & ravn, s. (2023). captured and captioned: representing family life on instagram. new media & society, 25(5), 921–942. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211012791 braun, v., & clarke, v. (2021). thematic analysis: a practical guide (1st ed.). sage publications. cabalquinto, e. c. (2020). ‘they could picture me, or i could picture them’: ‘displaying’ family life beyond borders through mobile photography. information, communication & society, 23(11), 1608–1624. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1602663 finch, j. (2007). displaying families. sociology, 41(1), 65–81. fishman, j. r., & mcgowan, m. l. (2014). will personal genomic information transform one's self?. in genetics as social practice (pp. 29-42). routledge. goulden, m. (2021). ‘delete the family’: platform families and the colonisation of the smart home. information, communication & society, 24(7), 903–920. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1668454 lazard, l., capdevila, r., dann, c., locke, a., & roper, s. (2019). sharenting: pride, affect and the day-to-day politics of digital mothering. social and personality psychology compass, 13(4), e12443. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12443 peters, c., & gorissen, s. (2023). corporate constructions of bio-digital identity: dnabased playlists and the mandate to “listen to your dna”. new media & society, 14614448231217428. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231217428 share, m., williams, c., & kerrins, l. (2018). displaying and performing: polish transnational families in ireland skyping grandparents in poland. new media & society, 20(8), 3011–3028. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817739272 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): adams, p.r., scholl, b., & sommers, m. (2023, october). gaming platforms as chaotic neutral?: toxic performance, community resistance, and agonistic potential. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. gaming platforms as chaotic neutral?: toxic performance, community resistance, and agonistic potential philippa r. adams simon fraser university ben scholl simon fraser university maria sommers simon fraser university extended abstract in the post-gamergate era, much has been written about the toxicity of online multiplayer video gamespaces (canossa et al., 2021; hilvert-bruce & neill, 2020; kordyaka et al., 2020; kordyaka & kruse, 2021; kou, 2020; kowert, 2020). game scholars agree the definition of the term ‘toxic’ is slippery, lacking definitional stability in the mainstream and within game studies. there is also consensus that toxicity is a highly context-dependent phenomenon reliant on players’ relationships to one another and technical game elements (canossa et al., 2021; hilvert-bruce & neill, 2020; kou, 2020; kowert, 2020).  the design mechanics of many mmogs fashion players into teams––ranging from small fireteams to large guilds. regardless of size, teams are defined by their members, alliances, and most crucially, outsiders. exclusion is thus an integral feature to the normative function of most mmogs. past scholarship illustrates that these spaces are deeply gendered and center white masculine normativity (cote, 2020; gray, 2020; ruberg, 2019; shaw, 2015; trammell, 2023). norms are then enforced through an enduring apolitical discursive position towards fun and play, a privileged position which erases concerns of race and identity (trammell, 2023). the result is an ongoing reinforcement and reinscription of identity conflating gaming, whiteness, and masculinity, to produce a hegemonic ideal, what gray (2020) terms the default gamer identity. the enforcement of default gamer identity in gamespaces contributes to what players and academics alike have labeled toxic gamer culture. however, players outside this identity can and do enter into these spaces, coming into contact, and often conflict, with the default gamer. in instances of conflict there is the potential for agonism—described as a political and social theory that seeks to highlight generative dimensions of conflict (laclau & mouffe, 1985). during our research, we found it difficult to produce a taxonomy of toxicity, particularly when a more compelling thread pointed to the agonistic potential woven into the umbrella term toxic gamer culture. we employed cultural probes to better understand how players experience toxicity in online gaming spaces. cultural probes, typically objects or a small collection of materials, are designed “to ask questions and present challenges in an open-ended, often provocative manner” (wallace et al., 2013, p. 3442). when developing this method, gaver et al. (1999) were concerned that employing a survey with a standardized set of questions might limit an understanding of participants’ embodied experience of their cultural environment, and their relationship to and with technology. building on this design methodology we developed and distributed a set of probe kits to 28 participants in the form of playing cards and instructed the participants to bring their probe kits into their regular gameplaying routine. the probe kits gently disrupted each participant’s gaming experience by asking them to carry out a series of brief and creative gaming-related tasks. digital game play often requires players make quick and intuitive decisions. accordingly, the probe kits were developed to encourage players to slow down and revisit those moments of instinctual decision-making in order to meaningfully deconstruct their embodied experience of toxicity during play. the kits encouraged participants to reflect on their personal experiences of pressure points in gaming before writing out their thoughts. this ensured the work completed by the participants in the study emerged from a place of selfreflexivity and intentionality. for the duration of the research, we employed the term ‘pressure points’ in reference to behaviours that would typically be categorized as toxic to avoid priming and limiting the responses of our participants to common understandings of toxic activity in gamespaces. using information from each participant’s probe kit, we designed a set of interactive tools and conducted three focus groups and twelve semi-structured one-on-one interviews. our gaming-themed tools encouraged participants to pause and think through their experiences of toxicity during play. the first tool, a tier-list maker, asked participants to drag icons of toxic behaviours to the list and explain the rationale behind their choices. the icons were tailored specifically to each focus group or interview based on the information from the participants’ probe kits. the second tool was an alignment chart––the meme format popularized in the tabletop role-playing game dungeons & dragons. we asked participants to drag icons of games, spaces, and communities into their corresponding alignments and explain their rationale. this activity encouraged the participants to explore their relationship to game communities and environments, while also discussing hidden social structures. in the analysis, we organized player-defined toxic pressure points into thematic categories. we came to understand each participant's understanding of the pressure points as complex, relational, and often, contradictory. while recognizing many of the pressure points to be so-called toxic behaviours, many of our participants also associated these pressure points with fun or describe them in ways that we identified as actions to counter toxicity. therefore, we concluded that a single, clear-cut definition of toxicity is insufficient and is better understood as performative and dependent on situational context. we were particularly inspired by the emerging narrative of countering from our participants and recognize this narrative as a potential path of resistance against more harmful manifestations of certain pressure points. intrigued by these contextual and relational dimensions, we embraced the duality, contradictions, and slippages inherent in toxicity as a concept. like toxicity, performance is relational and is a form of analysis that helps to identify the ways in which toxicity is contested and opposed, sometimes through further heightened toxicity. additionally, it helps us to better understand non-toxic instances of traditionally toxic behaviours. this study pivots focus from determining whether a behaviour or game mechanic is toxic to questioning why it is perceived as toxic. this paper explores behaviours which are emblematic of performing toxicity or ‘counterplay’ (dyer-witheford and de peuter, 2009). we position counterplay as a performance of toxicity in response to pressure points in a multiplayer gamespace. in this manner it may contribute to deepening the toxicity of a gamespace, illustrated neatly in a quote from one of our participants: “okay, if you are being toxic, i will just be toxic to you, and we will see who will be the most toxic eventually.” this interaction is common when the hegemonic norm is rejected by an actor or when groups performing antagonistically converge in gamespaces. our findings from our cultural probes, focus groups, and interviews, are grounded in the following themes. we propose that counterplay exists in the form of ludic mithridatism, when a player develops a threshold for tolerating toxicity in a gamespace. from discussions with our participants, several different methods for tolerance building emerged during their play including fighting fire with fire, which participants described as turning the perpetrator’s toxicity against them, and muting, the act of turning off the voice chat which are participants discussed as an easy tool that acts as a shield or protective measure. however, we also found that muting can easily tip into silencing, a double bind where women mute themselves to prevent harassment, but doing so may put them at a disadvantage in the game, particularly in games that require group coordination. not only does this prevent players from progressing at a reasonable pace but can also perpetuate the myth that women are inherently bad at playing video games, which in turn can encourage more toxic behavior. references canossa, a., salimov, d., azadvar, a., harteveld, c., and yannakakis, g. (2021). “for honor, for toxicity: detecting toxic behavior through gameplay.” proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction 5 (chi play): 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1145/3474680. cote, a. (2020). gaming sexism: gender and identity in the era of casual video games. new york university press. dyer-witheford, n., & de peuter, g. (2009). games of empire: global capitalism and video games. university of minnesota press. gaver, b., dunne, t., & pacenti, e. (1999). design: cultural probes. interactions, 6(1), 21–29. https://doi.org/10.1145/291224.291235 gray, k. (2020). intersectional tech: black users in digital gaming. louisiana state university press. hilvert-bruce, z., and neill, j.t. (2020). “i’m just trolling: the role of normative beliefs in aggressive behaviour in online gaming.” computers in human behavior 102 (january): 303–11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.09.003. kordyaka, b., jahn, k, and niehaves, b. (2020). “towards a unified theory of toxic behavior in video games.” internet research 30 (4): 1081–1102. https://doi.org/10.1108/intr-08-2019-0343. kordyaka, b., and kruse, b. (2021). “curing toxicity – developing design principles to buffer toxic behaviour in massive multiplayer online games.” safer communities 20 (3): 133–49. https://doi.org/10.1108/sc-10-2020-0037. kou, y. (2020). “toxic behaviors in team-based competitive gaming: the case of league of legends.” in proceedings of the annual symposium on computerhuman interaction in play, 81–92. virtual event canada: acm. https://doi.org/10.1145/3410404.3414243. kowert, r. (2020). “dark participation in games.” frontiers in psychology 11 (november): 598947. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.598947. laclau, e. & mouffe, c. (1985). hegemony and socialist strategy, towards a radical democratic politics. verso books, 2nd ed. ruberg, b. (2019). video games have always been queer. nyu press. shaw, a. (2015). gaming at the edge: sexuality and gender at the margins of gamer culture. university of minnesota press. https://doi.org/10.1145/3474680 https://doi.org/10.1145/291224.291235 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.09.003 https://doi.org/10.1108/intr-08-2019-0343 https://doi.org/10.1108/sc-10-2020-0037 https://doi.org/10.1145/3410404.3414243 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.598947 trammell, a. (2023). the privilege of play: a history of hobby games, race, and geek culture. new york university press. wallace, j., mccarthy, j., wright, p.c., and olivier, p. (2013). “making design probes work.” in proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems, 3441–50. paris france: acm. https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2466473. https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2466473 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): ooko, g. (2022, november). exploring the multiplicity of coloniality: a focus on the agency of internet prosumers in the global south. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. exploring the multiplicity of coloniality: a focus on the agency of internet prosumers in the global south. by gloria anyango ooko moi university, kenya. introduction to the common critique that scholarship on decolonization focus more on the problems of coloniality without providing solutions, a considerable number of scholars from the global south have responded with research and literature which demonstrate the unique ways in which the “other” can speak back to these power inequalities. schoon et al. (2021) call for the “positioning of african digital experiences as epistemic sites of knowledge production” as opposed to privileging global knowledge flows from the west. chasi (2018) demonstrates how research methods originating from the west can be appropriated and adapted to the unique african contexts. while these scholarships make robust contributions towards the decolonization project, and provide the literature within which this paper is situated, they somewhat fit into the limiting unidirectional approach in which hegemony is seen as originating from the north-west while sources of resistance as rising from the global south, and specifically in the africa imaginary. such an approach, i argue, not only silences the complex ways in which users/prosumers in the margins interact with media technologies including the internet, but also hinders “complete” decolonization of coloniality in all its forms (of power, knowledge and being). it is these complexities that this paper focuses on, in particular, the ways in which the margins conform to and/or jointly with the coloniality actors perpetuate the hegemonic nature of the internet and what that then means to the decolonization process. to support this argument, the paper presents part of the findings of my phd study which explored power struggles in two purposively selected political whatsapp communities in kenya. the communities, east asembo development forum (eadf) and kabula forward (kf) are imagined around the notion of place where both east asembo and kabula are wards (smallest administrative units in counties) in siaya and bungoma counties in western kenya. of interest is the “group formation” convention and mobility affordance of whatsapp technology which allows the existence of digital citizens and ‘subjectivities’ who have to negotiate their identity and participation ‘between and betwixt’ two worlds; that of the physical which places them in either the local or translocal and that of the virtual which makes them citizens of both. question is, how does the combined agency of the technology and human actors in the process of the said negotiations contribute to (de)coloniality? theoretical framework and methodology. in line with decolonization discourses’ emphasis on multiplicity of knowledge production and meanings, this paper theoretically engages with the concept of hybridity as a dialectic construct understood both as mode of colonial resistance for the subaltern (bhabha, 1994) and as an intercontextual theory in which the concept is understood as communicative practice which could as well act as a site of hegemony (kraidy, 2002). hybridity in this paper is used to capture how the complexities of social technological practices of actors in a digital environment blur the margins between hegemony and resistance, including how certain concepts take up multiple meanings in the whatsapp communities studied. the study used the netnography method which in the spirit of decolonising epistemologies, recognizes multiple realities and ways of knowing. consequently, both the human and material components of whatsapp technology contribute to the discourses of the whatsapp communities, informing a multimodal data collection . the data set included for analysis focused on discussions posted online between august 2017 and december 2018. data was collected through background listening, semi-structured interviews, and focus group discussions. in the case of diaspora members, online interviews via whatsapp were conducted. for interviews 2 main administrators (founders) selected, 6 most active and 6 least active members (frequency determined by group wize app), 4 diaspora members and 3 individuals who left the communities were purposefully selected . six members each for the two focus group discussions were recruited voluntarily. texts were first exported from whatsapp to an excel sheet then mined randomly by entering certain key words including ‘participate’, ‘local’ and ‘diaspora into it. in the second phase the data that fell within discursive moments was purposefully selected guiding the selection of interview participants. discursive moments were identified as those which tangible action like when members had to decide on a matter. a discursive material analysis (dma) in which metaphors (operating at an ontological level) were used to read both the materiality of the whatsapp technology and participants’ discussions as text. findings. the major finding in this article is that hybridity in its multiplicity, is celebrated in these whatsapp communities less as a form of resistance to coloniality but more through discourses of capitalism, exploitation and marginalization which perpetuate coloniality instead. for instance, hybridity in the composition of the members of the whatsapp communities given where they are physically based as ‘locals’ and translocal (diaspora) nor the different subjection positions of ordinary citizens and political leaders do not contribute to diversity in voices. in the discourses defining participation, participants gave little importance to whether members’ discussions meaningfully contributed to the goal of the communities, that is holding their political leaders accountable and demanding development. rather participation was metaphorically substituted with “giving”materialism and commodification. since those in the diaspora are more economically empowered than those in the local, they made more monetary contributions to harambees (fundraisers). consequently, ‘diasporans’ views on issues was more respected, not because of merit, but simply because they give more money. further, the juxtaposition of the urbanite against the ‘diasporan’, marginalized the urbanite who was constructed by the local as “struggling economically” and therefore had nothing worth “giving.” in the participant’s parlance, their “absence” from their rural homes was not “felt.” in these communities, presence in culturally important events such as burials, is seen as meaningful participation. this absence can however be forgiven if one makes a monetary contribution toward these “projects”. therefore more monetary contribution translated to “quality” participation, a continuity of discourse of capitalism which marginalize those not materially endowed. however, subject positions’ power hierarchy kept on flipping depending on context. for instance, given their physical presence, the locals were more knowledgeable on ‘going-ons on the ground’ as compared to the ‘diasporans’. additionally, the whatsapp technology only affords participation to the extent that one has access to the internet. the political elite took advantage of this as they provided a constant supply of data bundles for their proxies, posing as part of the ordinary citizens, while pushing the selfish agenda of their masters, maintaining the status quo. strategies to subvert surveillance, such as use of pseudonyms, were frowned upon as hindering participation instead of providing a safe environment. anonymous participants were treated suspiciously and accused as either “not belonging” by virtue of not hailing from the physical spaces the online communities are imagined around or as government spies. they were forced to either identify themselves or face expulsion from the communities. references schoon, a., mabweazara, h. m., bosch, t., & dugmore, h. (2020). decolonising digital media research methods: positioning african digital experiences as epistemic sites of knowledge production. african journalism studies, 41(4), 1-15. chasi, c. (2018). decolonising the humanities: a smash-and-grab approach. in b. mutsvairo (ed).the palgrave handbook of media and communication research in africa (pp. 41-53). palgrave macmillan, cham. kraidy, m. m. (2002). hybridity in cultural globalization. communication theory, 12(3), 316-339. bhabba, h. (1994). the location of culture. new york: routledge selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): lawson, c.e. (2022, november). a girl defined by god: biblical womanhood, anti-feminism, and white evangelical microcelebrities. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. a girl defined by god: biblical womanhood, anti-feminism, and white evangelical microcelebrities caitlin lawson emmanuel college introduction girl defined is a cross-platform fundamentalist evangelical christian ministry started in 2014 by kristen clark and bethany beal (both née baird), who describe themselves as “two sisters from texas who are fighting feminism, embracing gender differences and empowering girls to live out their god defined purpose.” the goal of their ministry is to encourage women to deny their desires and live out god’s design for their lives: biblical womanhood. biblical womanhood centers on a complementarian mandate in which the husband is the head of household and his wife is his helpmate. in addition to strictly defined gender roles, they promote cisheteronormativity and purity culture and largely ignore issues of race and socioeconomic privilege. through an analysis of girl defined’s blog posts and accompanying youtube videos tagged “feminism,” this project seeks to understand the ways that white fundamentalist christian women make sense of and mobilize against the feminist movement. as made abundantly clear by the 2016 and 2020 us presidential elections, white evangelical women are a powerful voting bloc that skews heavily conservative. moreover, scholars have tended to focus on male anti-feminist online communities in their explorations of digital far right phenomena. through their expansive construction of feminism as ideologically dominant, girl defined simplifies and individualizes women’s experiences to frame biblical womanhood as a “radical” alternative to feminism. these findings add to our understanding of anti-feminist backlash and white evangelical women’s place in the culture wars. relevant literature this project extends existing scholarship in three subject areas: women’s agency in gender-traditional religions, questions of authority among evangelical white women in the united states, and tensions around evangelical microcelebrities. research on evangelical white women in the us has explored their reactionary relationship to two secular forces: anti-racism and feminism. many scholars have focused on the ways that evangelical women mobilize their whiteness to bolster their authority (mikkelsen and kornfield 2021, burke and mcdowell 2021) and express conflicted responses to feminism, which often functions as an ideological stand-in for a range of progressive movements (diefendorf 2019). further, given the constraints of women’s authority within gender-traditional religions like evangelicalism (burke 2012), women’s use of social media to engage in ministry can deepen existing crises of biblical authority (gaddini 2021, laughlin 2021). through an in-depth analysis of girl defined’s discursive construction of feminism on the one hand and biblical womanhood on the other, this study explores how clark and beal deploy microcelebrity practices to spread their anti-feminist messaging. research design the analyses presented here are part of a larger examination of girl defined and its cross-platform constructions of biblical womanhood. the findings presented here stem from a critical discourse analysis of 67 blog posts (2012-2021) and 14 youtube videos (2016-2021) tagged “feminism” on the girl defined blog. the topics of these posts range widely from discussions of relationships and sexuality to beauty standards; thus a central goal is to use clark and beal’s organization of these posts under the umbrella of “feminism” to better understand their conceptualization of feminism and its relationship to biblical womanhood. using the grounded theory method of open coding, my analysis of these posts centered on 1) descriptions of feminism, 2) the relationship between feminism and mainstream culture, 3) descriptions of biblical womanhood, and 4) the relationship between biblical womanhood and feminism. findings first, girl defined portrays feminism as ideologically dominant and synonymous with mainstream secular culture. their construction of feminism can be summed up neatly with this quote from beal (2015): “we have a massive goliath mocking our god. her name is feminism.” to girl defined, feminism is a secular giant that godly women must battle. further, girl defined’s descriptions of feminism reflect an amalgamation of postfeminist logics, anti-feminist stereotypes, and sexism that is divorced from any substantive acknowledgment of the material, emotional, or psychological impacts of misogyny on women’s lives. they describe feminism as: 1) selfish striving for personal fulfillment (girl defined 2019); 2) man-hating and hostile toward children and family; and 3) responsible for men’s objectification of women due to the sexual revolution. rarely do they discuss any actual efforts of the feminist movement to improve women’s lives; when they do, it is to critique the pro-choice movement. finally, clark and beal appeal to their audiences by incorporating neoliberal logics of self-improvement consistent with postfeminism while appropriating the language of progressive movements to modernize their presentation of traditional gender norms. such “self-help” discourses, provided by two conventionally attractive and charismatic white women, are consistent not only with evangelical christianity (see mikkelsen and kornfield 2021) but also social media influencer content. moreover, their rhetorical appeals reflect the growing mainstream popularity of progressive movements, including feminism, as they coopt terms like “countercultural” and “radical” to describe biblical womanhood. conclusions girl defined employs often-contradictory rhetorical and aesthetic appeals to present biblical womanhood as an empowering, radical alternative to feminism. the evangelical emphasis on a personal relationship with christ allows clark and beal to act as religious influencers, providing guidance to their followers about how to improve their individual holiness using many of the same strategies of intimacy, relatability, and authenticity that other influencers deploy to share beauty tips. this individual focus on living out god’s supposed design for women enables them to sidestep issues of systemic sexism and misogyny, not to mention racism and poverty. by reframing feminism as postfeminism – an individually-focused belief system that gives women a sense of self – they offer biblical womanhood as an alternative pathway to understanding women’s purpose and value. further, their construction of feminism as ideologically dominant makes it easier to incorporate feminism into a simple binary of secular/bad and biblical/good. acknowledging that feminism is an alternative “radical” movement could complicate thus weaken their defensive posturing and sense of persecution; it is easier to dismiss feminism if it becomes a more expansive explanation for problems with secular culture. overall, these findings provide insight into the paradoxical flexibility of hyperconservative ideologies that center on a rigidly defined “us” (fundamentalist christian women) vs. an ever-flexible “them” (secular culture) while expanding our understanding of the way conservative thought leaders modernize old ideas and use digital networks and influencer logics to spread them. references beal, bethany. 2015. “feminism is laughing at our god.” girldefined (blog). march 13, 2015. https://girldefined.com/feminism-laughing-god. burke, kelsy c. 2012. “women’s agency in gender-traditional religions: a review of four approaches.” sociology compass 6 (2): 122–33. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00439.x. burke, kelsy, and amy mcdowell. 2021. “white women who lead: god, girlfriends, and diversity projects in a national evangelical ministry.” sociology of race and ethnicity 7 (1): 86–100. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649220903759. diefendorf, sarah. 2019. “contemporary evangelical responses to feminism and the imagined secular.” signs: journal of women in culture and society 44 (4): 1003– 26. https://doi.org/10.1086/702035. gaddini, katie christine. 2021. “‘wife, mommy, pastor and friend’: the rise of female evangelical microcelebrities.” religions 12 (9): 758. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12090758. girl defined. 2019. christian girl, live for something greater. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ieavw0o-qq. laughlin, corrina. 2021. “#amplifywomen: the emergence of an evangelical feminist public on social media.” feminist media studies 21 (5): 807–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2020.1711794. mikkelsen, sage, and sarah kornfield. 2021. “girls gone fundamentalist: feminine appeals of white christian nationalism.” women’s studies in communication 44 (4): 563–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2021.1911895. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): hardcastle, f., raman, s., de silva, c., davis, jl., tavakoli-nabavi, e. (2024, october). rethinking ai for good: critique, reframing and alternatives. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. rethinking ai for good: critique, reframing and alternatives faranak hardcastle australian national university sujatha raman australian national university christer de silva australian national university jenny l. davis vanderbilt university ehsan tavakoli-nabavi australian national university the pursuit of technological systems for global well-being has given rise to ai for social good (ai4sg) initiatives across academia, governments, private corporations, and civil society. however, the definition of “the good" within this context remains ambiguous, raising concerns that the term may become an empty signifier, lacking conceptual or practical meaning. this ambiguity poses a challenge, potentially allowing ai actors to invoke “the good” to justify their interventions without having to be accountable for the promises they make about the benefits of ai. in turn, such ubiquitous claims to be doing good undermine collective societal capacities to work towards ways of ensuring that future ai developments do indeed align with a normatively viable sense of public good. this paper is motivated by the premise that the extensive social science scholarship on ai and other emerging technologies contain several critical insights that can help inform a public good framework that can be the basis for dialogue with those who are the imagined beneficiaries of ai4sg or overly abstract principles in this regard. for example, social science work helps us unveil implicit as well as overlooked values, identify boundaries where caution or avoidance of ai applications may be as warranted as adoption in the pursuit of public good and recognise the conditions that need to be in place for this pursuit to be plausible (davis et al, 2021; davis, 2023). we therefore propose to develop a socially situated public good framework, to scrutinize existing ai4sg initiatives, their embedded meanings of “the good” and their potential alignment or misalignment with values associated with two key areas of scholarship. the first is the broad field of technology and society studies; our way into this is via a public good test developed for quantum technologies that was informed by this literature (roberson et al, 2021). our aim is to refine, adapt and elaborate this ‘test’ into a public good framework that is more closely situated in and reflective of insights from the second area of scholarship, namely: critical ai studies (used as an umbrella term to encompass the fields of critical data/algorithm studies (kitchin & lauriault, 2014; gillespie & seaver, 2015; dalton et al, 2016), design justice (costanza-chock et al, 2018), and algorithmic reparation (davis et al, 2021). in developing our public good framework, we first examine a body of literature that seeks to define “the good” in ai4sg in narrowly prescriptive ways or that sidesteps this question altogether by associating ai with broad expressions of global good, notably, the united nations sustainable development goals (sdgs) (chui et al, 2018; cowls et al, 2021).1 for example, “the good" may be construed in some of this work through universal ethical principles drawn from bioethics (taddeo & floridi, 2018) to identify the potential for harm and maleficence (floridi et al, 2020). in other cases, authors try to connect their definitions of “the good” to design values and data processes (tomašev et al, 2020) or practical applications and eventual outcomes (cowls et al, 2021). however, much of this literature adopts a vision of ai as a neutral tool, rather than one that is shaped by specific framings, narratives, and interests as highlighted by critical social science work. we argue that even when principles and definitions are offered, they tend to be abstracted from the complex social realities and contexts that shape both the design and implementation of ai technologies and their ability (or inability) to create social good, especially in the global south. promises of social progress are made but the question remains who defines progress and what technologies are needed to achieve it. we therefore delve into how dominant framings of ai4sg stabilize and normalize, probing whether these initiatives fulfil their promises, asking what northernled ai for social good means in a global context and to what effects does it operate particularly in the global south? in sum, we highlight several limitations in how ai4sg is operationalised, impacting their practical applicability in specific contexts, and raising questions about their global relevance. in the second part of the paper, we synthesise insights from another body of literature that delves into the social, material, and historical context surrounding ai4sg initiatives and algorithmic developments more broadly. we build on these insights to extend and adapt roberson et al’s (2021) public good test which requires assessing diversity in research agendas, social orders, and research society networks. in particular, we 1 for more detail, please see https://sdgs.un.org/goals https://sdgs.un.org/goals highlight the need to understand why and how general frameworks or public good tests might fail, despite the best intentions or recognition of social realities. critical social science literature highlights the importance of considering the sociomaterial dimensions of ai4sg that might be in tension with its normative objectives: persistent power imbalances often prioritize technological imaginaries while perpetuating existing structural inequalities, including colonial legacies and global disparities (magalhães and couldry, 2021; madianou, 2021). additional concerns include exploitative labour practices (fejerskov, 2022) and research dynamics (stahl et al., 2023), overexploitation of resources (stahl et al., 2023), and long-term harm (green, 2019). ongoing critical research in this space grapples with rethinking ways forward (aula & bowles, 2023; moorosi et al, 2023). we argue that these critical insights can be integrated into a public good that better reflects structural disparities and social relations in shaping research agendas, social orders, and research-society networks to define “the good” in and around ai. additionally, focusing on practice enables challenging assumptions that: 1. "the good" is intrinsic to goals such as achieving the sdgs, which can obscure how these goals are pursued and their practical implications for intended beneficiaries, and 2. "the good" is intrinsic to universal principles, often neglecting the systemic and structural nature of issues and their specific contexts. a practice-based approach would require mapping the system around the problems at hand within their wider social, cultural, and historical context. we could start by developing an understanding of how people are affected by them, and how existing local practices for addressing them can be supported and enhanced. then we could explore if and how developing ai could be helpful within this system: whether design strategies less common in ai such as downscaling, or interventions that do not centre on ai might be more appropriate in specific contexts (hanna & park, 2020). assessing the sociomaterial dimensions of “the good” as well as its normative viability, enables moving beyond one-size-fits-all solutions to create interventions that are more responsive and adaptable to the specific needs of the communities they aim to serve. our effort to co-produce such a framework will undoubtedly demand numerous iterations and persistent adjustments for this challenging undertaking. we conclude with reflections on the potential use of this framework to foster dialogue with diverse stakeholders, test and co-produce a revised framework, and inform the ongoing development of ai initiatives, particularly in the global south. references aula, v., & bowles, j. (2023). stepping back from data and ai for good – current trends and ways forward. big data & society, 10(1), 20539517231173901. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231173901 chui, m., harryson, m., manyika, j., roberts, r., chung, r., van heteren, a., & nel, p. (2018, december). applying ai for social good. discussion paper. notes from the ai https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231173901 frontier. mckinsey global institute. https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/featured%20insights/artificial%20intellige nce/applying%20artificial%20intelligence%20for%20social%20good/mgi-applying-ai-forsocial-good-discussion-paper-dec-2018.pdf. last accessed on 1/03/2024 cowls, j., tsamados, a., taddeo, m., & floridi, l. (2021). a definition, benchmark and database of ai for social good initiatives. nature machine intelligence, 3(2), 111–115. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-021-00296-0 costanza-chock, s. (2018, july 16). design justice, a.i., and escape from the matrix of domination. journal of design and science. https://doi.org/10.21428/96c8d426 dalton, c. m., taylor, l., & thatcher, j. (2016). critical data studies: a dialog on data and space. big data & society, 3(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716648346 davis, j. l., williams, a., & yang, m. w. (2021). algorithmic reparation. big data & society, 8(2), 20539517211044808. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211044808 davis, j. l. (2023). ‘affordances’ for machine learning. in 2023 acm conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (pp. 324–332). acm. https://doi.org/10.1145/3593013.3594000 fejerskov, a. (2022). the global lab: inequality, technology, and the experimental movement. oxford university press. floridi, l., cowls, j., king, t. c., & taddeo, m. (2020). how to design ai for social good: seven essential factors. science and engineering ethics, 26(3), 1771–1796. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-020-00213-5 gillespie, t., & seaver, n. (2015, november 5). critical algorithm studies: a reading list. social media collective (blog). https://socialmediacollective.org/reading-lists/criticalalgorithm-studies/. last accessed on 29/02/2024 green, b. (2019). ‘good’ isn’t good enough. in neurips joint workshop on ai for social good. vancouver, canada: track 3, public policy. https://aiforsocialgood.github.io/neurips2019/acceptedpapers_track3.htm kitchin, r., & lauriault, t. (2014, july 30). towards critical data studies: charting and unpacking data assemblages and their work. ssrn scholarly paper. rochester, ny. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2474112 madianou, m. (2021). nonhuman humanitarianism: when ‘ai for good’ can be harmful. information, communication & society, 24(6), 850–868. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2021.1909100 magalhães, j. c., & couldry, n. (2021). giving by taking away: big tech, data colonialism, and the reconfiguration of social good. international journal of communication, 15(0), 20. https://www.mckinsey.com/%7e/media/mckinsey/featured%20insights/artificial%20intelligence/applying%20artificial%20intelligence%20for%20social%20good/mgi-applying-ai-for-social-good-discussion-paper-dec-2018.pdf.%20last%20accessed%20on%201/03/2024 https://www.mckinsey.com/%7e/media/mckinsey/featured%20insights/artificial%20intelligence/applying%20artificial%20intelligence%20for%20social%20good/mgi-applying-ai-for-social-good-discussion-paper-dec-2018.pdf.%20last%20accessed%20on%201/03/2024 https://www.mckinsey.com/%7e/media/mckinsey/featured%20insights/artificial%20intelligence/applying%20artificial%20intelligence%20for%20social%20good/mgi-applying-ai-for-social-good-discussion-paper-dec-2018.pdf.%20last%20accessed%20on%201/03/2024 https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-021-00296-0 https://doi.org/10.21428/96c8d426 https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716648346 https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211044808 https://doi.org/10.1145/3593013.3594000 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-020-00213-5 https://socialmediacollective.org/reading-lists/critical-algorithm-studies/ https://socialmediacollective.org/reading-lists/critical-algorithm-studies/ https://aiforsocialgood.github.io/neurips2019/acceptedpapers_track3.htm https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2474112 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2021.1909100 moorosi, n., sefala, r., & luccioni, s. (2023). ai for whom? shedding critical light on ai for social good. https://openreview.net/forum?id=vjwyyla8pj hanna, a., & park, t. m. (2020, november 20). against scale: provocations and resistances to scale thinking. arxiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2010.08850 roberson, t., leach, j., & raman, s. (2021). talking about public good for the second quantum revolution: analysing quantum technology narratives in the context of national strategies. quantum science and technology, 6(2), 025001. https://doi.org/10.1088/2058-9565/abc5ab stahl, b. c., schroeder, d., & rodrigues, r. (2023). ai for good and the sdgs. in ethics of artificial intelligence: case studies and options for addressing ethical challenges (pp. 95–106). springerbriefs in research and innovation governance. cham: springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17040-9_8 taddeo, m., & floridi, l. (2018). how ai can be a force for good. science, 361(6404), 751–752. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aat5991 tomašev, n., cornebise, j., hutter, f., mohamed, s., picciariello, a., connelly, b., belgrave, d. c. m., et al. (2020). ai for social good: unlocking the opportunity for positive impact. nature communications, 11(1), 2468. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467020-15871-z https://openreview.net/forum?id=vjwyyla8pj https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2010.08850 https://doi.org/10.1088/2058-9565/abc5ab https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17040-9_8 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aat5991 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-15871-z https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-15871-z selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): brodie, p. (2023, october). theorizing environmental mediation through ireland’s peatlands. paper (or panel) presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. theorizing environmental mediation through ireland’s peatlands patrick brodie university college dublin this paper situates the historical resource and conservation landscape of ireland’s peat boglands within their emerging role in datafied “green” revolutions. emphasizing the stakes of land, resources, technologies, and research institutions within green transitions, the paper theorizes peat bogs an emerging site of digital climate solutionism. in doing so, i offer a framework for understanding resource landscapes in so-called “post-extractive” contexts where networked forms of extraction are innovated through public/private technoscientific research at the intersections of digital technology and ecosystemic interactions between geologies, atmospheres, and cultures. bringing together literature from environmental media studies, sts, and geography, and performing participant observation and discourse analysis on emerging projects of peatland science in academic and industry settings, i theorize how “environmental mediation” offers an aperture for understanding how digital technologies network landscapes towards “ecosystem services” and other capital-driven climate projects. boggy infrastructure whereas ireland has been a leader in “smart” technologies and infrastructures by facilitating digital multinationals since the 1980s-1990s, the comparatively “dumb” media (mattern 2017) of muddy peatlands presents a challenge for development. as media theorist john durham peters has famously articulated, media constitute more than the devices we use to communicate. theorizing what he calls “elemental media, “the elements that lie at the taken-for-granted base of our habits and habitat” (2015, 2), he argues that the foundational “natural” elements of networks organize life and nature in increasingly cloudy ways. until recently, “media” more frequently referred to earth systems than communicative ones (2015, 2), such as peat soils’ ability to act as a “medium” for growing, carbon cycles, water cycles, or other ecosystemic processes. optimized technological utilization of peat as soil media for green development and climate solutions requires sophisticated digital technologies for mapping, measuring, analyzing, and instrumentalizing the geological and hydrological characteristics of peatlands (bullock et al. 2012; rowan et al. 2022). many have recognized projects of digital sensing and sense-making in the climate and biodiversity science of landscapes like woodlands (see gabrys 2020), demonstrating their role as a kind of “infrastructural nature” for climate politics (see bigger and nelson 2022). bogs are thus today a medium for capitalist value via entanglements between their “natural” and technological ecologies. as some have expanded and critiqued the elemental media framework (furuhata 2022; jue and ruiz 2021), the “elemental” must also account for the entanglement of the “material and semiotic” (jue and ruiz 2021) within violent regimes of material accumulation from colonialism to contemporary extractive capitalism (voskoboynik and andreucci 2021). a critical analysis of elemental media, if we are understanding the elemental frameworks of soil and water that make up bog landscapes, requires intersectional analyses including material histories of colonial capitalism and the material violence often enacted through the semiotic functions of technoscientific territory and resource-making. the ways that bogs blur “nature” and “society” make them especially strategic resource landscapes towards different developmental and technoscientific frameworks. the datafied dynamics of peatland science demonstrates peatlands’ increasing and continuous instrumentalization for transformative material and epistemological projects of technological modernization across history, most recently in their networking via these technologies within land use, ecosystem services, and natural capital frameworks. from energetic resource to natural capital the irish free state, established as a dominion of britain in the early-1920s after a long revolutionary period, inherited ways of seeing irish peatlands as “wastelands” in need of “improvement” (ruuskanen 2018), drawing upon colonial maps to learn how to develop them for large-scale industry like agriculture and energy. through semi-state bord na móna (bnm), these rationalities fuelled national electrification and modernization through large-scale extraction and burning of “turf” in power plants. but across history, irish boglands have been situated within different cultural imaginaries and projects of colonial and state mediation. their extent (20% of ireland’s landmass) and material properties (waterlogged, treacherous to cross, ability to preserve organic matter, biodiverse) have variously been observed for their sanctity and inaccessibility as well as their often conflicting status as wilderness, fuel for households, fuel for the nation, material archive, biodiversity stronghold, or commons (e.g. feehan et al. 2008; gladwin 2016). today, and in tension with these intersecting legacies, the most visible projects on bnm’s peatlands remain in the energy sector, transferring industrial-scale carbon to renewable energy in their rebranding as a “climate solutions” company in 2021. in planned “energy parks,” bnm will facilitate circular sites on which interlocking infrastructures of data centers (huge energy users), renewable energy, and battery storage will be administered by private companies on “post-extractive” peatlands (bresnihan and brodie forthcoming). however, similar to prior forms of development, these activities require that bogs remain drained, complicating their climate mission. peatlands are an efficient carbon store when left intact, but when disrupted for example, through large-scale drainage for development they emit carbon reserves into the atmosphere, reversing their “natural” function as carbon sinks. the irish state and its corporate partners are thus searching for ways to optimize carbon storage value via technological solutions. recalling above legacies of cartographic governance, the microsoft and publicly co-funded terrain ai project has developed a petabyte-scale cloud-based platform for mapping and identifying carbon sequestration potentials within strategic “green” landscapes including peatlands (terrain-ai, n.d.). similarly, intel has partnered with the irish national parks and wildlife service on a bog restoration project in the wicklow mountains, to protect the “natural assets” of ireland’s water supplies towards its own water sustainability goals (intel pr 2021). beyond directly tech-funded work, a consortium of state-funded researchers at irish universities are combining british bog commission maps from the early-1800s designed to map agricultural potential to supply imperial endeavor with present “cloud-based geospatial platforms such as google earth engine” to build knowledge of precise carbon stores and sequestration potentials of degraded peatlands (darmody 2022). in each of the above cases, a snapshot of dozens of collaborations between peatland and data science happening in irish universities and funded by public and private research institutions, bogs are strategic opportunities towards industry-driven goals and policies, which ostensibly also serve the irish state’s sustainability targets. as opposed to their “intrinsic” value, these frameworks value boglands for “ecosystem services” and “natural capital,” a land medium to deliver climate solutions such as green energy and carbon sequestration (see bresnihan and brodie forthcoming). this is not to unduly critique scientific research around peatlands – in fact, i want to recognize how essential it is to fund research into these landscapes amid climate crisis. however, in this paper, i am offering a framework for understanding how the blurring of “nature” and “society” through the emerging institutional and technological frameworks of ecosystem services infrastructuralizes the landscapes of peatlands towards capitalist climate adaptation through taken-for-granted technoscientific orthodoxies and research funding partnerships. the proliferating networks of sensors, measuring devices, machine-learning systems, and digital imaging of the bogs, comprehensively dissecting their geological, hydrological, and atmospheric processes and interactions, demonstrates the entanglement of cloud-enabled digital technology with the material pasts and futures of landscapes as they are being shaped during climate change (see gabrys 2020; goldstein and nost 2022). technological mediation, as a form of environmental mediation (chang et al. 2019; shriver-rice and vaughan 2020), is a vital representative tool for the transformation of land into value for climate solutions, survey devices for a coming peatland “green grab” (fairhead et al. 2012). conclusion the “prehistory” of the digital bog traced above (see hu 2015) foregrounds the entangled legacies of colonial technoscience within the development and application of systems which maintain the expanding presence and infrastructures of privatized digital technology in green development. while alternative and insurgent elemental bogland politics exist in ireland, like in other contexts contesting the encroachment of privatized digital futures (estrada and lehuedé 2022), this paper offers an urgent call for a more radically democratic land and resource politics surrounding digital technologies and platforms in environmental science, aligning with communities struggling for more careful futures and presenting a material template for a “digital bog” that furthers a truly “just” transition during climate change. references bresnihan, patrick and patrick brodie. forthcoming. “data sinks, carbon services: waste, storage, and energy cultures on ireland’s peat bogs.” new media and society. bullock, craig h., marcus j. collier, and frank convery. 2012. “peatlands, their economic value and priorities for their future management – the example of ireland.” land use policy, vol. 29: 921-928. chang, alenda, adrian ivakhiv, and janet walker. 2019. “states of media+environment: editors’ introduction.” media+environment, vol. 1, no. 1. https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.10795. darmody, jenny. 2022. “using data to refine the knowledge of ireland’s peatlands.” silicon republic, 29 july. https://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/peatlands-irelanddata-climate-research. fairhead, james, melissa leach, and ian scoones. 2012. “green grabbing: a new appropriation of nature?” journal of peasant studies, vol. 39, no. 2: 237-261. feehan, john et al. 2008. the bogs of ireland: an introduction to the natural, cultural and industrial heritage of irish peatlands. university college dublin environmental institute. furuhata, yuriko. 2022. climatic media: transpacific experiments in atmospheric control. duke university press. gabrys, jennifer. 2020. “smart forests and data practices: from the internet of trees to planetary governance.” big data and society, vol. 7, no 1: 1-10. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/2053951720904871. gladwin, derek. 2016. contentious terrain: boglands, ireland, postcolonial gothic. cork university press. goldstein, jenny and eric nost. 2022. the nature of data: infrastructures, environments, politics. university of nebraska press. hu, tung-hui. 2015. a prehistory of the cloud. mit press. intel pr. 2021. “national parks and wildlife service and intel launch bog restoration project to increase water storage by millions of litres.” intel newsroom, 20 may. https://newsroom.intel.ie/news-releases/national-parks-and-wildlife-service-and-intellaunch-bog-restoration-project-to-increase-water-storage-by-millions-of-litres/. jue, melody and rafico ruiz. 2021. “introduction.” in saturation: an elemental politics. duke university press. mattern, shannon. 2017. code and clay, data and dirt: five thousand years of urban media. university of minnesota press. nelson, sarah h. and patrick bigger. 2021. “infrastructural nature.” progress in human geography, vol. 46, no. 1: 86-107. peters, john durham. 2015. the marvelous clouds: toward a philosophy of elemental media. university of chicago press. rowan, neil j. et al. 2022. “digital transformation of peatland eco-innovations (‘paludiculture’): enabling a paradigm shift towards the real-time sustainable production of ‘green-friendly’ products and services.” science of the total environment, no. 838: 120. ruuskanen, esa. 2018. “encroaching irish bogland frontiers: science, policy and aspirations from the 1770s to the 1840s.” in histories of technology, environment and modern britain, edited by jon agar and jacob ward. university college london press. shriver-rice, meryl and hunter vaughan. 2020. “what is environmental media studies?” journal of environmental media, vol. 1, no. 1: 3-13. terrain-ai. n.d. “about terrain-ai.” terrain-ai. last accessed 22 february 2023. https://terrainai.com/index.php/about-terrain-ai/. voskoboynik, daniel macmillan and diego andreucci. 2021. “greening extractivism: environmental discourses and resource governance in the ‘lithium triangle.’” environment and planning e: nature and space, vol. 5, no. 2. spir aoir abolish privacy lim selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 revolutionary tactics: abolish privacy this paper addresses internet scholars who promote online privacy. this paper rejects privacy as a neoliberal agenda. 1. privacy is not social justice corporate online platforms are built on racial capitalism, to quote cedric robinson, designed to make profit by marginalizing blackness. black, working class, indigenous, refugee, disabled communities are further marginalized by automated health care (cruz 2022), policing (brayne 2020), welfare qualifications, refugee status (molnar and gill, 2018), democratic voting rights (noble 2018), and access to information seen in meta’s current restrictions on documenting palestinian casualties. privacy will not protect us from these harms. however many excellent alternatives have been proposed, for example in a study of predictive policing (dixon-roman, nyame-mensah, allison russell 2019): first, they call for the decriminalization of poverty and self-defense, and instead, a focus on the far more socially expensive problem of white collar crime. second, they call for data audits, so that individuals can object to attributes generated by racist training data. third, they call for a turn of the predictive gaze instead onto the perpetrators by training ai to forecast excessive violence by the police and military. fourth, they ambitiously but crucially call for the dismantling of the category of human, which excludes black people and demotes indigenous, disabled and queer people not by mistake but by design. these authors invoke the black radical tradition, robinson’s thesis that the reduction of black people to private property is the basis of capitalism. in his urgent 2020 political pamphlet on property, rinaldo walcott argues that private property justifies carceral systems and the un-privacy of a caged class (walcott, 2020; hill 2016). in dark matters, simone browne shows how surveillance is born out of the selective deprivation of black privacy and the desire to claim blackness as the private property of whiteness. whiteness as cheryl harris reminds us, is the only basis of private ownership. unprivacy is fundamental to able bodied supremacy, as crip theorist mia mingus (2017) writes, forcing disabled people into intimate disclosures on a daily basis as a requirement for basic needs and access. queer theorist laurent berlant argues that suggested citation (apa): lim, e. (2023). “abolish privacy.” panel presented at aoir 2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 2 constitutional american “personhood” is historically defined by the ownership of slaves within a private realm; privacy that protects nobody from the abuse of white men (p. 18). critical race, feminists, queer and crip theory relentlessly problematizes privacy as an ideology. activists must not invoke the specter of privacy in our efforts to shield and care for each other. our resistance movements have always called for its opposite: interdependence and collective solidarity, or to quote wendy chun (2014), the right to be vulnerable online. she cites the toronto slutwalk, as well as south asian feminist activists fighting gender-based violence. these women call for the right of marginalized communities to take risks in public without facing violence. to quote chun, “rather than fight for privacy—for hermeneutic bubbles of protection—we need to fight for the right to loiter.” 2. privacy is inextricable from private property. one might argue that calls for online privacy are not the same as calls for private property, but in the discourse surrounding online privacy, this distinction is not made. this is the result of several critical discourse analyses of mainstream privacy rhetoric concluding that privacy narratives focus on customer rights, government and corporate transparency, and threats to democracy (connor and doan, 2021). mcdonald and forte complement these findings with a discourse analysis of blog posts written by the newsrooms of meta and snapchat, which strive to shape media privacy rhetoric towards a focus on personal authenticity, safety and data impermanence; in other words the assertion and expansion of private property. david carroll’s words especially alarmed broad audiences in his opening lines of netflix documentary the great hack, “all of my interactions… all collected in real time and attached to my identity, giving any buyer direct access to my emotional pulse” (the great hack, 2019). wired magazine called the documentary a “horror movie” that “brings our data nightmare to life” (dreyfuss, 2019). however in media appearances that year, carroll made a concerted effort to temper those words, and in fact, critique the documentary’s overall message (fischer, 2019), “my pursuit [in the film] is a highly individualized narrative, which obscures the reality that it's a story about all of us…it does require a collective response. data protection is a structural problem” (fischer, 2019). carroll emphasizes that data infractions are not about individual privacy. nevertheless, the film spread a contagious nightmare of defenseless personal property online. this moment inaugurated facebook’s grandiose pivot to privacy, when mark zuckerberg happily announced at f8 conference that year, that “the future is private,” touting new facebook resources like “control who can find you,” “abuse resources” and other frightening titles that serve to raise fears of dangerous invaders that only meta can stop through securitization and corporate biometrics. even though at the same time research shows that increased corporate securitization does not work (wolff, 2019), surveys found that these privacy settings made people feel secure (torres & o’brien, 2012) in a deliberately provoked atmosphere of danger. 3 it is no coincidence that these securitization measures further marginalize vulnerable communities. for example two-factor authentication that requires two fully charged, updated, working devices with fully paid off monthly bills; or byzantine platforms whose complicated permissions exclude users due to language or neurological barriers. as these security measures are expanded throughout privatized platforms in health services, rental agencies, welfare, social media platforms and more, they claim to efficiently reduce organization workload by in fact locking out significant numbers of vulnerable stakeholders, as shoshana magnet has shown. 3.online “privacy” is a myth. online privacy is neither possible nor desirable. in her book updating to remain the same wendy chun points out that the nature of the internet is computers that are “engaged in constant, incessant, and promiscuous exchanges of information” (2016, p. 107). meta's security claims are fruitless defenses against the promiscuous circulation of marketing, cyberbullying, violence, and as maggie mcdonald shows, csam or child and sexual abuse material that happens inside closed networks of so-called “friends.” social media is not really social, it is a decision support system for flagging market trends. activist academics like zeynep tufecki (2018) repeatedly show how misinformation is spread between like-minded networks. social media privacy measures will never interfere with marketing, and hate is abundantly marketable. 4.“privacy” is a historic device for designating morally upright sex and policing and punishing its deviations. privacy is a colonial legacy that produces, polices and enforces the limits of heteronormative decency. today, contemporary u.s. notions of broader cis-heterosexual “privacy” entitlements expose transgender communities to danger: required to frequent bathrooms in accord with their sex assigned at birth and subject to mandatory disclosure in order to access healthcare services and obtain government services including government-issued identification (ringrose, 2020). privacy is not social justice, neither for consumer protection, which is disingenuous, nor for marginalized communities, whose problems are systemic. when we call for privacy, we reinforce the logics of liberal property entitlements, gatekeeping and policing. as walcott argues, oppression and violence are rationalized through, quote, “the faith and enduring belief that something wrong might happen to us” (walcott 2020, p. 37). 4 references brandom, r. (2017). two-factor authentication is a mess. the verge, july 10. https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/10/15946642/two-factor-authentication-online-security -mess benjamin, r. (2019). race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. social forces. cruz, t. m. (2022). the social life of biomedical data: capturing, obscuring, and envisioning care in the digital safety-net. social science & medicine, 294, 114670. clough, p. (2009). the new empiricism: affect and sociological method. european journal of social theory, 12(1), 43-61. daniels, j. (2009). cyber racism: white supremacy online and the new attack on civil rights. rowman & littlefield publishers. dreyfuss e. (2019). netflix's the great hack brings our data nightmare to life. wired magazine. retrieved from: https://www.wired.com/story/the-great-hack-documentary/ fischer, w. (2019). we talked to the professor who fought cambridge analytica to get his data back in netflix's 'the great hack' about why privacy rights in the us are lagging behind the rest of the world. business insider. retrieved from: https://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-great-hack-david-carroll-interview-data-rights-ca mbridge-analytica-2019-8 lapowsky, i. (2019). one man’s obsessive fight to reclaim his cambridge analytica data. wired magazine. retrieved from: https://www.wired.com/story/one-mans-obsessive-fight-to-reclaim-his-cambridge-analyti ca-data/ massumi, b. (2015). ontopower: war, powers, and the state of perception. duke university press. mcmillan cottom, t. (2020). where platform capitalism and racial capitalism meet: the sociology of race and racism in the digital society. sociology of race and ethnicity, 6(4), 441-449. molnar, p. and lex gill. “bots at the gate: a human rights analysis of automated decision-making in canada’s immigration and refugee system,” citizen lab and international human rights program (faculty of law, university of toronto) research report no. 114, university of toronto, september 2018. noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression. new york university press. https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/10/15946642/two-factor-authentication-online-security-mess https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/10/15946642/two-factor-authentication-online-security-mess 5 robinson, c. (2023). black marxism. in social theory re-wired (pp. 156-164). routledge. torres, a. m., & o'brien, d. (2012). social networking and online privacy: facebook users' perceptions. irish journal of management. the great hack (documentary film). produced and directed by karim amer and jehane noujaim. netflix, 2019. 1 hour 54 minutes "united states senate committee on the judiciary". www.judiciary.senate.gov. archived from the original on june 8, 2020. retrieved feb 6, 2023. walcott, r. (2021). on property. biblioasis: windsor. wolff, j. (2019). two-factor authentication might not keep you safe. the new york times, january 27. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/27/opinion/2fa-cyberattacks-security.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/27/opinion/2fa-cyberattacks-security.html selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): li, y., kerr, a., ryan, l. (2024, october). trust issues and responsibilities: social imaginaries, risk, and user labour in digital banking apps. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. trust issues and responsibilities: social imaginaries, risk, and user labour in digital banking apps yuening li national university of ireland, maynooth aphra kerr university college dublin linzi ryan national university of ireland, maynooth the launch of m-pesa in 2007 served as an early and archetypical example, utilising telecommunications networks for payments and marking a shift towards converging banking with media functions, and fostering social interaction through finance (maurer, 2015). this trend has been propelled by the growth of finance applications with social functionality, leading to a blurring of distinctions between service providers and users, and resulting in the new financial technology (fintech) industry (swartz, 2020). the development of payment platforms (e.g., meta pay) by social media providers which emphasise the transactional and exchange functions of payment, along with neobanks like revolut and n26, represents a challenge from decentralised digital financial paradigms to traditional payment models (mezei and verteș-olteanu, 2020). while these novel digital services have gained widespread acceptance, they also raise concerns regarding social inclusivity, accessibility, algorithmic discrimination, and data security. these issues necessitate scholarly attention to examine the evolving fintech industry, focusing on the design and service affordances of banking innovations and their social impacts. this paper draws upon conceptual frameworks of platformisation (van dijck, poell, and de waal, 2018), media convergence (jensen, 2022), trust in digital banking (mezei and verteș-olteanu, 2020; van esterik-plasmeijer and van raaij, 2017), and social imaginaries (james, 2019; mansell, 2012; gillespie, 2018). it views digital banking apps as platforms that enable personalised interactions (poell, nieborg, and van dijck, 2019), and aim to investigate the datafication (van dijck, 2014; sadowski, 2019) and platformisation of banking. this approach underscores the transformation of service dynamics and the challenges brought by digital banking concerning public accessibility and social inclusion (swartz, 2020). we ask: a) what are the dominant imaginaries of payment reflected by contemporary financial services? and b) how do the design and affordances of digital payment services impact trust, responsibility, and user labour? this paper employs a modified walkthrough method (light, burgess, and duguay, 2018) including detailed content analysis of the terms and conditions (t&cs) documents required for initial access to seven digital banking apps in ireland. the sampled banking apps include bank of ireland (boi), n26, an post money, revolut ie, chase uk, starling bank uk, and klarna. given the heightened security and legal vetting requirements required by digital banking apps, the modified walkthrough method encompasses six stages: a) anticipated use; b) entry page; c) t&cs; d) authentication and verification; e) customer support (replacing the original ‘everyday use step’); and f) suspension and withdrawal of service. the modified walkthroughs highlight a significant convergence between the finance and media industries. our analysis identified three dominant social imaginaries of payment leading to different designs for digital banking apps: a) the institutional imaginary, b) the transactional imaginary, and c) the digital imaginary. the institutional imaginary views payment as a state-sanctioned and surveilled economic activity. two variations of this approach were identified: pillar banks (e.g., boi) and community-centric financial systems (e.g., an post money and credit unions). this imaginary reflects the state theory of money (i.e., chartalism) (knapp, lucas and bonar, 1973). the transactional imaginary focuses on the exchange function of payments (simmel, 2011; dodd, 2014; zelizer, 2017; swartz, 2020) leading to a convergence of media and finance. again, there are two design variations of this imaginary: economic trading networks like neobanks (e.g., revolut ie and n26) and interpersonal communication-enabled payment solutions such as wechat pay and m-pasa that are more common in the global south (chuhan-pole and angwafo, 2011). the digital imaginary emphasises technology and promotes the design of dematerialised and decentralised fintech innovations using biometric and blockchain technology (westermeier, 2020; lemieux and dodd, 2023). adopting the concept of social wholes (castoriadis,1998), we view these imaginaries as arising from diverse, intersecting social groups and communities that contribute to collective thought processes. these groups shape the broader understanding and design of money and digital banking services, influenced by cultural norms, historical contexts, technological advancements, and economic practices. the content analysis of t&cs documents identified accessibility and readability barriers, and ambiguities and anomalies of user consent and user labour. t&cs are often lengthy and written in complex legal and technical language and only provided in english for the irish market. at the same time, the apps may be accessed via different language settings based on the mobile language settings of users—this creates barriers for users with varying levels of literacy for the english language and financial knowledge. additionally, the visual design of t&cs documents is not mobile-friendly and often links to external web pages. this may discourage users from thorough reading and hinder fully informed consent. the t&cs analysis also uncovered the problematic use of implied consent, in contrast to explicit consent, hidden options to withdraw consent, and a lack of transparency regarding the collection and analysis of personal data. the investigation of sample banking apps operating environments reveals broader concerns about social inclusion and user agency. by enabling users to open banking accounts solely through the apps and providing digital-only service, digital banking apps emphasise them as app users over banking customers, transferring responsibilities onto users. digital banking apps incorporate self-verified steps turning users into unpaid labourers (jarrett, 2022) for the platform. users are expected to perform tasks traditionally managed by service providers, such as document verification, reporting technical issues, and navigating complex consent and security processes. this shift requires users to have higher levels of digital and financial literacy, which may exacerbate the digital divide and potentially exclude those less proficient. additionally, with ‘rewards’ for referral links, digital banking apps impose risk on users for sharing information to their social networks for the banks without adequate support or compensation. this trend raises ethical concerns about user agency and the equitable design of essential financial services within the increasingly app-centric ecosystem. this paper traces the development of the fintech industry through the lens of current digital banking app designs in ireland. it identifies the convergence between the media and finance industries and their digital infrastructures, highlighting a collective shift towards platformisation and datafication. three different imaginaries are represented in the designs of the digital banking apps examined. they are resonant of classical social theories of money and contemporary collective understandings and expectations of personal finance. these imaginaries are not separate but converge and interact with each other, leading to app designs such as revolut ie and an post money that reflect more than one imaginary. the analysis of t&cs documents reveals ambiguities and risks that may create barriers to continuous app use, withdrawal of the service, and questionable consent obtained from users who are not fully informed. the deployment of automated self-verification and customer service imposes additional responsibilities on users, including more user labour, challenging the industry's promise of personalised banking accessible anytime, anywhere. this paper lays a foundation for further exploration into how the fintech industry could foster a more inclusive and equitable financial services network. funding this research was funded by science foundation ireland under grants number 18/crt/6222. references castoriadis, c., 1998. the imaginary institution of society. 1st mit press pbk. ed ed. cambridge, mass.: mit press. chuhan-pole, p. and angwafo, m. eds., 2011. yes africa can: success stories from a dynamic continent. washington, d.c: world bank. dijck, j. van, poell, t. and waal, m. de, 2018. the platform society. new york, ny: oxford university press. van dijck, j., 2014. datafication, dataism and dataveillance: big data between scientific paradigm and ideology. surveillance & society, 12(2), pp.197–208. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v12i2.4776. dodd, n., 2014. the social life of money. princeton, new jersey: princeton university press. van esterik-plasmeijer, p.w.j. and van raaij, w.f., 2017. banking system trust, bank trust, and bank loyalty. international journal of bank marketing, 35(1), pp.97– 111. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijbm-12-2015-0195. gillespie, t., 2018. custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. new haven london: yale university press. jensen, k.b., 2022. media convergence: the three degrees of network, mass, and interpersonal communication. 2nd ed. [online] london: routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003199601. knapp, g.f., lucas, h.m. and bonar, j., 1973. the state theory of money. [abridged ed ed. reprints of economic classics. clifton [n.j.]: a. m. kelley. lemieux, v. and dodd, n., 2023. ‘life world’ on ledger: a ‘scenic’ view. journal of digital social research, 5(2), pp.21–54. https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v5i2.145. light, b., burgess, j. and duguay, s., 2018. the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), pp.881–900. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438. mansell, r., 2012. imagining the internet: communication, innovation, and governance. oxford: oxford university press. maurer, b., 2015. how would you like to pay? how technology is changing the future of money. durham; london: duke university press. mezei, p. and verteș-olteanu, a., 2020. from trust in the system to trust in the content. internet policy review, [online] 9(4). https://doi.org/10.14763/2020.4.1511. poell, t., nieborg, d. and van dijck, j., 2019. platformisation. internet policy review, [online] 8(4). https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.4.1425. sadowski, j., 2019. when data is capital: datafication, accumulation, and extraction. big data & society, 6(1), p.2053951718820549. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718820549. simmel, g., 2011. the philosophy of money. routledge classics. abingdon, oxon; new york: routledge. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v12i2.4776 https://doi.org/10.1108/ijbm-12-2015-0195 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003199601 https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v5i2.145 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 https://doi.org/10.14763/2020.4.1511 https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.4.1425 https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718820549 swartz, l., 2020. new money: how payment became social media. chicago university press. westermeier, c., 2020. money is data – the platformization of financial transactions. information, communication & society, 23(14), pp.2047–2063. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2020.1770833. zelizer, v.a.r., 2017. the social meaning of money. new princeton paperback edition ed. princeton, new jersey: princeton university press. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2020.1770833 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): shen, jie. (2024, october). chinese smart city: a genealogy of chinese smart city metaphors. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. chinese smart city: a genealogy of chinese smart city metaphors jie shen university of amsterdam since the reforming and opening up in the 1980s, chinese cities have adopted the paradigm of a mechanized modern city, to emulate western societies. maçães perceives this urbanization as a product “in the age of mechanical reproduction”, prioritizing efficiency and financial gain at the potential expense of "genuine spontaneity; the stirrings and desires of life” (maçães, 2019). however, a notable shift is underway. with the increasing integration of digital and intelligent technologies, such as ai, chinese cities are evolving into smart cities with a new image. these cities are envisioned as organic entities. alibaba and local governments metaphorize them as a human brain, namely "city brain". the city brain is anticipated to dynamically sense and respond to real-time city events, making holistic decisions by integrating various aspects of urban life. more importantly, they expect that these organic smart cities are dedicated to serving the people, actively learning and adapting to enhance people's well-being, as affirmed by new regulation (standing committee of the 13th hangzhou municipal people’s congress, 2021). these two contrasting images represent a significant shift in chinese visions of the role of intelligent technologies in society. while mechanized cities represent a modernist dream, the emergence of organic entities reflects a deeper concern for the citizens' role within an intelligent environment and how such an intelligent environment reshapes social governance. this begs several questions: what does this organic metaphor entail, especially in the era of ai? why has it emerged? why is it so crucial that local government have even enshrined it in a new regulation? with smart city increasingly intertwined with people’s lives, how does this new metaphor reshape the citizenship and social governance in china? like myths nurturing societal aspirations (mosco, 2005), metaphors serve as constructive tools for structuring sociotechnical ordering. debunking this organic metaphor helps reveal the present desires of the key stakeholders in china and enriches global debates on smart cities and infrastructures. research across multiple disciplines has investigated the visions and expectations underlying chinese smart city initiatives. public policy and management studies researchers have presented varying views on the government and citizenships the chinese smart city aims to transform in particular. some focus on the transformation of the governance mode. they argue that the smart city alters the government into a “data-driven surveillance infrastructure” and a "service-oriented platform" which provides service rather than making rules (gao & tan, 2020; yu et al., 2019; caprotti & liu, 2020). in addition to the social organization, more critical researchers have paid closer attention to how the citizenships are altered. some argue that the data-driven surveillance infrastructure is intended to discipline people's behaviour and hence transform them into "ordered, rational" actors (liang et al., 2018; van ditmar, 2022, p. 44; caprotti & liu, 2020). and curran & smart (2021) claim that smart systems, deploying “algorithmic classification”, prevent marginalized groups from accessing city space and modes of living, exacerbating social equality. researchers in urban studies conceptualize china's smart city as a technological way to "optimize sources" and alleviate urban problems (pan et al., 2016; wang jian, 2017; du, 2021; bellini et al., 2022). in sum, these pieces of literature show that the chinese smart city is related to the "modernist narrative of progress" and is regarded as a means for "social engineering” (bareis & katzenbach, 2021, p. 5). however, the aforementioned literature often focuses on specific aspects of the smart city, thereby retaining critiques within the mechanized stage characteristic with the "rule imposition paradigm" (hui, 2017, p. 29). consequently, it becomes difficult to notice the evolving visions of the smart city, let alone scrutinize the emerging metaphor of the "organic entities". as kitchin (2015, p. 132) has observed, "there has been little genealogical excavation of the smart city concept and how it has been formulated and deployed over time, space and by stakeholders beyond a handful of quite thin origin stories". by emphasizing the genealogy in foucault’s sense, kitchin means that the smart city imaginaries don’t maintain the same or develop linearly, but instead, they develop discursively, with contingencies. as he said, "in the face of critique and push back", the old metaphor "continues to find new avenues and ideas to finesse and extend its development and evolve and morph" (kitchin, 2015, p. 133). these insights inspire this study that, in order to unpack the new metaphor, it is necessary to thoroughly examine its historical roots. however, such historical analysis remains under-researched, underscoring the significance of this study's contribution. echoing kitchin, this paper aims to fill this gap by adopting the genealogy to uncover why this new metaphor has been developed, what new societal strivings have been added, and how the shift happened. to do so, i conducted a four-month ethnographic fieldwork in shenzhen and hangzhou, two primary cities at the forefront of smart city development. during this period, i interviewed seven engineers actively engaged in innovative processes related to smart cities. additionally, i attended ten industrial conferences and official panel discussions, for which i possess voice recordings. moreover, i immersed myself in the daily life of one of these cities to gain firsthand experience of how the smart city influences local dynamics. moreover, this study also scrutinizes the institutional co-production of smart city discourses (such as policies, rules, new press, webpages, etc.) in line with the evolution of smart cities over time. the fieldwork and discourse analysis complement each other, facilitating a comprehensive investigation of hidden historical undertakings and visions supporting current metaphors. in conclusion, by applying the method of genealogy, this work contributes to bringing into view the research's blind spot for the profoundly cybernetic and technocratic histories that have shaped chinese smart city initiatives. this research delves into how chinese experts localize cybernetics within china's socio-political environment as transiting towards the age of ai. this process of localization has established a strong basis for the development of a new governance structure and the new roles of citizens, underlying today’s smart city metaphor of organic entities. this work also sheds light on the transition from mechanization to intelligentization in china, by analyzing and delineating the characteristics of the intelligent transformation in china. chinese smart city serves as a microcosm of the nationwide intelligent infrastructure still underway in china. with its close relations to officials and alibaba, primary players in the development of intelligent technologies and social engineering, the smart city metaphor is an influential reflection of how intelligent technologies would shape the present and future social governance and citizenships in china. furthermore, this narrative also offers distinct socio-technical perspectives that diverge from concepts like the neo-colonial city and the neo-capitalist city. moreover, the chinese socio-technical evolution from "informatization to intelligentization" represents a unique path of integrating intelligent technologies into soceity, providing aspirations and serving as an alternative for updating the economy and society in such way. references bareis, j., & katzenbach, c. (2021). talking ai into being: the narratives and imaginaries of national ai strategies and their performative politics. science technology and human values. https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439211030007 bellini, p., nesi, p., & pantaleo, g. (2022). iot-enabled smart cities: a review of concepts, frameworks and key technologies. in applied sciences (switzerland) (vol. 12, issue 3). mdpi. https://doi.org/10.3390/app1203160 curran, d., & smart, a. (2021). data-driven governance, smart urbanism and risk-class inequalities: security and social credit in china. urban studies, 58(3), 487–506. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098020927855 du, j. (2021). application analysis of iot technology in smart cities. proceedings 2nd international conference on e-commerce and internet technology, ecit 2021, 264– 269. https://doi.org/10.1109/ecit52743.2021.00064 gao, x., & tan, j. (2020). from web to weber. source: china review, 20(3). https://doi.org/10.2307/26928112 hui, y. (2017). preface: the time of execution. in h. pritchard, e. snodgrass, & m. tyz ̇lik-carver (eds.), data browser 06: executing practices (pp. 23–31). autonomedia. kitchin, r. (2015). making sense of smart cities: addressing present shortcomings. in cambridge journal of regions, economy and society (vol. 8, issue 1, pp. 131–136). oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsu027 liang, f., das, v., kostyuk, n., & hussain, m. m. (2018). constructing a data-driven society: china’s social credit system as a state surveillance infrastructure. policy and internet, 10(4), 415–453. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.183 maçães, b. (2019, november 20). the city in the age of mechanical reproduction. city journal. mosco, v. (2005). the digital sublime: myth, power, and cyberspace. the mit press. pan, y., tian, y., liu, x., gu, d., & hua, g. (2016). urban big data and the development of city intelligence. in engineering (vol. 2, issue 2, pp. 171–178). elsevier ltd. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eng.2016.02.003 standing committee of the 13th hangzhou municipal people’s congress. (2021, january). promotion regulations of hangzhou city brain empowering urban governance. van ditmar, d. f. (2022). if (equality). in s. flynn (ed.), equality in the city: imaginaries of the smart future. the university of chicago press. yu, j., wen, y., jin, j., & zhang, y. (2019). towards a service-dominant platform for public value co-creation in a smart city: evidence from two metropolitan cities in china. technological forecasting and social change, 142, 168–182. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2018.11.017 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): mccosker, a., farmer, j., kamstra, p. (2023, october). mental health and the digital care assemblage: user and moderator practices. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. mental health & the digital care assemblage: user & moderator practices anthony mccosker swinburne university of technology jane farmer swinburne university of technology peter kamstra university of melbourne introduction and background this paper examines the socio-technical ecosystems that shape the moderation of mental health content. to explore how care is formulated across and between different actors and automated systems, i focus on the experiences of moderators and users of three peer-based mental health support platforms. the analysis is framed by the notion of the 'digital care assemblage' to delineate the interactions between goal-oriented moderation policies, automated systems, human content moderators or platform managers, and users seeking or giving help in relation to mental ill-health. each of these actors contribute to the supportive capacity of the platforms for addressing mental health issues in the community. early uses of the internet saw the potential to revolutionise healthcare through increased participation and community support (mccosker, 2018). the push toward peer-to-peer, participatory or personalised modes of digital health has only intensified in the rush toward online services during covid-19 (sorkin et al., 2021). meanwhile, as mental health support groups have proliferated across commercial platforms and nonprofit forums to fill some of these gaps, the need for moderation to ensure safety and care has deepened. while mental health content often falls into the category of 'problematic', 'borderline' and ambiguous content for commercial platforms, it poses different challenges to other moderated material such as misinformation, 'obscenity', or hate speech (gillespie and aufderheide, 2020). gerrard, for instance, raises the question of whether instagram should allow currently banned images of healed self-cutting, under the guise of supporting recovery (2022, p. 86-87). to curtail these 'risks', platforms increasingly rely on algorithmic moderation of various kinds (gorwa et al., 2018), alongside teams of human moderators. this paper contributes to the growing body of work on content moderation as a sociotechnical system, and to the goal of improving moderation practices for better mental health support. examining three dedicated mental health platforms, we present the digital care assemblage as a concept for understanding – and optimising – digital mental health care and support as an assemblage of actors, practices, governance mechanisms and technical components (fox, 2011; lamarre and rice, 2021). methods the three project partners deliver community-oriented, non-profit mental health support programs and services, funded through government grants and charity donations – sane australia, reach out and beyond blue. this paper focuses on qualitative research with forum moderators and managers (n=7), lived experience volunteer moderators or 'community guides' (n=4), and people living with mental health issues who make use of the platforms for support (n=35). data was collected throughout 2021 and 2022, through online focus group workshops with moderators and managers, and video interviews with users. findings and analysis participants spoke at length about how human and automated moderation, community guidelines and user actions interacted to create a safe online space for mental health support – and where tensions arise within what we refer to as the overall 'digital care assemblage'. that is, we found moderation practices consisted of interactions between institutional goals, community guidelines and negotiated policies, through a set of routines and feedback loops, and in conjunction with automated moderation systems. we characterise these processes as both reactive and adaptive – they were dynamic, but circumscribed by a distribution of routines, actions and often contested decisions (mccosker et al., 2023). platform managers and moderators described the mix of broad goals for creating supportive, peer-led spaces in contrast to the 'cluster-mess' (as one platform manager put it) of commercial platforms like facebook. they saw their professional role as juggling a set of service goals and policies, working with automated moderation systems, through collaborative and reflexive moderation practices, to manage unpredictable user actions and behaviours. in some respects, the automated moderation systems contribute to structuring the routine tasks moderators must attend to (jhaver et al., 2019), but the influence moves in both directions with collaborative and distributed forms of decision-making in responding to problematic content and interactions. and this included the actions and responses of platform users. for example, on one platform, users responded to the covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns through extensive 'venting' and engaging in off-topic 'socialposts', which breach community guidelines designed to focus on mental health challenges more directly. moderators and managers eventually adapted the guidelines to allow for these uses of the platform. interactions between moderation and user practices are complex and cause some tension and are integral to the way the care assemblage is constructed and maintained. while our interviews with platform members did not initially focus on their experience of moderation, it was a theme that often arose during discussions – usually when reflecting on things that did not work well for them. their experiences, however, contribute to the functioning of the care assemblage. when posts are flagged by moderators and changed, deleted, or given warnings, some users feel reluctant to continue posting, or modulate how they post: ‘i’ve become less willing to put certain things out here’ (sane, 1). in this case, anonymity was a positive factor, enabling their sharing and openness. but a warning from a moderator about potential legal issues related to one post made them less willing to share at all afterwards. variations on this experience have been understood as forms of ‘selfcensorship’ in negotiations with platform moderation and algorithmic curation (gillespie, 2018). we argue that the negotiations were more than self-censorship; they were as intricately involved in the work of the care assemblage as the moderation practices and systems they ran up against. managing safety and care is experienced by some as a form of co-production. for example, one person reflected on initially being upset when she had a post removed, but she came to understand and appreciate the moderation processes: ‘now i’m fine with it, like i know they need to do that and it’s good they do’; ‘they email me the post and they let me know why it’s been moderated. and usually, they are just changing a word or two.’ she elaborated: ‘like you don’t mean to write something that could be upsetting but sometimes you just don’t know.’ (beyond blue, 2). in a different way, recalling a time when a distressed and suicidal member disappeared from the forum, one user emphasised the need for more transparency, and hence involvement in the care assemblage. they noted feeling upset at the time and their belief that the person had ‘ended her life’: it’s a bit of a fine line. […] i think it would be helpful that if someone’s been banned … there should be some kind of notification … just for the peace of mind for the people that have been communicating with this person and genuinely care about them. (sane, 15) conclusion improving moderation practices and systems to better support mental health requires firstly a more complete understanding of the digital care assemblage, and secondly, negotiation between moderators and managers, automated systems designers as well as users. bringing users’ experiences into moderation goals and practices can add an important, underutilised dimension. this would align with the professionalisation and growth in dedicated platforms for community-based mental health support outside of the less equipped commercial social platforms. references de cotta, t., knox, j., farmer, j., white, c., & davis, h. (2021). community co‐ produced mental health initiatives in rural australia: a scoping review. australian journal of rural health, 29(6), 865-878. fox, n. j. (2011). the ill-health assemblage: beyond the body-with-organs. health sociology review, 20(4), 359-371. gerrard, y. (2018). beyond the hashtag: circumventing content moderation on social media. new media & society, 20(12), 4492-4511. gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. yale university press. gillespie, t., and aufderheide, p. (2020). introduction: expanding the debate about content moderation: scholarly research agendas for the coming policy debates. internet policy review, 9(4), 1–29. girrard, y. (2022). what is content moderation? in d. rosen (ed.). the social media debate: unpacking the social, psychological, and cultural effects of social media. routledge, 77-95. jhaver s, birman i, gilbert e, et al. (2019) human-machine collaboration for content regulation: the case of reddit automoderator. acm transactions on computer-human interaction (tochi), 26(5), 1-35. kang, y. b., mccosker, a., kamstra, p., & farmer, j. (2022). resilience in web-based mental health communities: building a resilience dictionary with semiautomatic text analysis. jmir formative research, 6(9), e39013. lamarre, a., & rice, c. (2021). the eating disorder recovery assemblage: collectively generating possibilities for eating disorder recovery. feminism & psychology, 31(2), 231-251. mccosker, a., kamstra, p., & farmer, j. (2023). moderating mental health: addressing the human–machine alignment problem through an adaptive logic of care. new media & society, 14614448231186800. mccosker, a. (2018). engaging mental health online: insights from beyondblue’s forum influencers. new media & society, 20(12), 4748-4764. mccosker, a., & gerrard, y. (2021). hashtagging depression on instagram: towards a more inclusive mental health research methodology. new media & society, 23(7), 18991919. sorkin dh, janio ea, eikey ev, et al. (2021) rise in use of digital mental health tools and technologies in the united states during the covid-19 pandemic: survey study. journal of medical internet research, 23(4), e26994. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): medina perea, i., bates, j., fratczak, m., kennedy, h., ochu, e. (2023, october). beliefs, values and emotions in practitioners’ engagements with learning analytics in higher education. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. beliefs, values and emotions in practitioners’ engagements with learning analytics in higher education itzelle medina perea the university of sheffield jo bates the university of sheffield monika fratczak the university of sheffield helen kennedy the university of sheffield erinma ochu university of the west of england philanthropists, internet entrepreneurs, edtech companies, ai enthusiasts, and policymakers around the world have promoted the idea that big data and learning analytics (la) have the potential to revolutionise education (roberts-mahoney et al., 2016) and not necessarily in ways that many ‘revolutionaries’ would wish. la, defined as the continuous measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their context (gašević et al., 2015, p. 1), is increasingly being used to track and evaluate what students do in internet-mediated environments (williamson, 2017). the movement supporting the adoption of ai-based solutions in education is in sync with the belief that technology has the power to bring progress. some seem to embrace the belief that the adoption of ai-based solutions is the remedy to old-fashioned systems that limit students’ potential (microsoft, 2021). a number of benefits have been attributed to the adoption of ai-based solutions in the education sector. it has been argued, for example, that they help enhance student success (jisc, 2018) and minimise inequalities (microsoft, 2021). it has also been claimed that by identifying patterns in student data, educators can promptly identify students’ needs or weaknesses and act based on these data to improve their learning experience (luckin et al., 2016). a growing body of literature has questioned these benefits, reflecting on the potential negative implications of adopting ai-based solutions and raising a number of concerns about the current developments in the field (jarke & macgilchrist, 2021; prinsloo, 2020; williamson, 2017; yu & couldry, 2020). studies of a critical nature have explored, for example, issues such as surveillance and loss of privacy, bias and discrimination, and the marketisation of education (castañeda & selwyn, 2018; hartong & förschler, 2019; roberts-mahoney et al., 2016; yu & couldry, 2020). despite this growing interest among researchers, we know little about how the beliefs, values and feelings of different groups of educational practitioners shape how they engage with ai-driven learning analytics technologies and influence the evolution of the cultures of practice shaping adoption of learning analytics. in this paper, we report on research that asks: how do culturally situated beliefs, values and emotions shape practitioners’ engagements with narrow ai in different contexts of practice? the research project as a whole examines these cultures of practice across three contrasting contexts: higher education, science, and arts practice. here we will discuss early findings from one of these contexts – learning analytics in higher education. the theoretical approach underlying the study recognises the interconnected nature of values, beliefs and emotions in the constitution of social phenomena (ahmed, 2014; bericat, 2016; ustek-spilda et al., 2019), in contrast to approaches that theorise reason and emotion as binary entities. drawing on work by e.g. bates (2017) and kitchin and lauriault (2014), we understand the values and beliefs within a given context of practice to be shaped by external social forces. we understand beliefs as ideas that people assert to be true, recognising widely accepted beliefs as “loose ideologies” (harrison & boyd, 2018) or fragmented common sense (hall, 1987). values are specific types of beliefs that people hold about, for example, what is right or wrong. finally, we understand emotions to be “social feelings…conditioned by the culture of society..its norms, values, ideas, beliefs” (bericat, 2016). previous research has identified a range of beliefs people have about data and ai, such as “dataism” (van dijck, 2014) and “data-centric relationality (ricaurte, 2019), values around emergent tech practices e.g. ‘human’ values such as liberal values, human-centric values (pasquale, 2020), or emotional responses to data and machine learning systems (eubanks, 2018; kennedy & hill, 2018). however, values, feelings and beliefs have not been considered in interaction with one another. our data collection includes observations, focus groups, and interviews. we interviewed 33 participants in different roles: staff from jisc, a provider of digital services for uk higher education (n~5), and staff from three different uk universities, including academic staff from different disciplines (n~17), learning technologists and others responsible for la system implementation (n~7), and student advisors (n~4). we also conducted four focus groups with 3-5 people in different roles and participant observation in jisc la network events and mailing list. data are being analysed using a combination of thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2006), and close critical reading around key findings. ethical approval for the study was gained from the university of sheffield. it is clear that the beliefs, values and emotions of practitioners about the use of la in higher education, and resultantly in their own work, are strongly influenced by participants’ perceptions of what is happening externally to their organisation. while educational practitioners recognise the potential benefits of la, their belief systems do not seem to embrace the revolutionary discourse promoted by some edtech providers and other stakeholders such as internet entrepreneurs, in which tools are promised to improve retention, increase efficiency, and ‘fix’ education. for the educational practitioners we engaged with, learning analytics is a tool that, if used carefully and responsibly, has the potential to enhance educators' work, but they are averse to the belief that it is “magic or [an] easy solution” (interviewee, learning technologist, oct-2022). practitioners in all roles express frustration about the proliferation of the revolutionary discourse that tends to over-claim the benefits of these tools. they believe that more critical voices in the field willing to challenge the values and beliefs being promoted by edtech providers and other powerful stakeholders are needed. practitioners' beliefs and values regarding the use or adoption of la reflect the human-centric values (pasquale, 2020) they hold in relation to their work in education. participants reflect on the importance of keeping students at the forefront of their practice and seeing beyond the data. some teachers avoid looking at data before engaging with students because they worry it will influence their relations with them or will ‘dehumanise’ their students, which goes against their values. furthermore, they value interactions with students over obtaining insights from la tools; for them, systems should not replace meaningful conversations or undermine the possibility of developing meaningful and positive student-teacher relationships. one of the big promises of la dashboards is that their outputs provide new insights about learners. however, teachers believe that in most cases, these tools tend to confirm what they already know about students and only on rare occasions, indicate something new. for some, getting confirmation from the system about their existing beliefs about students reassures them that their “thinking is right” (interviewee, academic staff, nov-2022) while others believe it may be a better idea for institutions to prioritise exploring other strategies to support learners’ journeys, even if such strategies do not involve the use of ai or other new technologies. findings of this research highlight that education practitioners believe there are potential benefits of using internet-mediated learning analytics, however do not embrace the idea that the mere implementation of these tools will improve education. this challenges the revolutionary discourse promoted by edtech companies, internet entrepreneurs, ai enthusiasts, and other powerful stakeholders. through enhancing our understanding of the beliefs, values and emotional engagements of education practitioners with data and learning analytics systems, we aim to contribute to empower practitioners in higher education and relevant stakeholders to foster the development of critical and reflective data cultures that are able to exploit the possibilities of learning analytics, while being critically responsive to their societal implications and limitations. references ahmed, s. (2014). cultural politics of emotion. edinburgh university press. bates, j. (2017). data cultures, power and the city. in data and the city (pp. 189– 200). routledge. https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/120825/3/14_bates%20v32%20%28final%20edited%20jb261016%29.pdf bericat, e. (2016). the sociology of emotions: four decades of progress. current sociology, 64(3), 491–513. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392115588355 braun, v., & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology,. 3(2), 77–101. castañeda, l., & selwyn, n. (2018). more than tools? making sense of the ongoing digitizations of higher education. international journal of educational technology in higher education, 15(1), 22. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-018-0109-y eubanks, v. (2018). automating inequality: how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor (first edition). st. martin’s press. gašević, d., dawson, s., & siemens, g. (2015). let’s not forget: learning analytics are about learning. techtrends, 59(1), 64–71. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-0140822-x hall, s. (1987). gramsci and us. marxism today, june 1987, 16–21. harrison, k., & boyd, t. (2018). the role of ideology in politics and society. in understanding political ideas and movements (pp. 135–153). manchester university press. https://www.manchesteropenhive.com/view/9781526137951/9781526137951.00011. xml hartong, s., & förschler, a. (2019). opening the black box of data-based school monitoring: data infrastructures, flows and practices in state education agencies. big data & society, 6(1), 2053951719853311. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951719853311 jarke, j., & macgilchrist, f. (2021). dashboard stories: how narratives told by predictive analytics reconfigure roles, risk and sociality in education. big data & society, 8(1), 20539517211025560. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211025561 jisc. (2018, september 20). can artificial intelligence transform the teaching and learning experience? times higher education (the). https://www.timeshighereducation.com/hub/jisc/p/can-artificial-intelligence-transformteaching-and-learning-experience kennedy, h., & hill, r. (2018). the feeling of numbers: emotions in everyday engagements with data and their visualisation. sociology. https://journals-sagepubcom.sheffield.idm.oclc.org/doi/full/10.1177/0038038516674675 kitchin, r., & lauriault, t. (2014). towards critical data studies: charting and unpacking data assemblages and their work (ssrn scholarly paper id 2474112). social science research network. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2474112 luckin, r., holmes, w., griffiths, m., & forcier, l. b. (2016). intelligence unleashed: an argument for ai in education. pearson. https://www.pearson.com/content/dam/one-dot-com/one-dot-com/global/files/aboutpearson/innovation/open-ideas/intelligence-unleashed-v15-web.pdf microsoft. (2021). understanding the new learning landscape: accelerating learning analytics and ai in education. microsoft. https://edudownloads.azureedge.net/msdownloads/microsoft-accelerating-learninganalytics-and-ai-in-education.pdf pasquale, f. (2020). new laws of robotics—frank pasquale. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674975224 posner, z. (2017, november 21). artificial intelligence comes to learning. mcgraw hill. https://www.mheducation.com/ideas/artificial-intelligence-comes-to-learning.html prinsloo, p. (2020). of ‘black boxes’ and algorithmic decision-making in (higher) education – a commentary. big data & society, 7(1), 2053951720933994. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720933994 ricaurte, p. (2019). data epistemologies, the coloniality of power, and resistance. television & new media, 20(4), 350–365. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419831640 roberts-mahoney, h., means, a. j., & garrison, m. j. (2016). netflixing human capital development: personalized learning technology and the corporatization of k12 education. journal of education policy, 31(4), 405–420. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2015.1132774 ustek-spilda, f., powell, a., & nemorin, s. (2019). engaging with ethics in internet of things: imaginaries in the social milieu of technology developers. big data & society, 6(2), 205395171987946. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951719879468 van dijck, j. (2014). datafication, dataism and dataveillance: big data between scientific paradigm and ideology. surveillance & society, 12(2), 197–208. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v12i2.4776 williamson, b. (2017). big data in education: the digital future of learning, policy and practice. sage. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sheffield/detail.action?docid=4923811 yu, j., & couldry, n. (2020). education as a domain of natural data extraction: analysing corporate discourse about educational tracking. information, communication & society, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2020.1764604 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): tilbert, d. (2024, october). agency perspectives on industry digital ethnography. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. agency perspectives on industry digital ethnography dylan tibert feedback introduction channel ecosystem changes and evolving internet literacy have publics the world over constantly adapting their online behaviors. data on digital footprints is hoarded by industry stakeholders as the market for them grows. however, despite the saturation of analytic models at their disposal to digest and leverage this data, even with the breakthrough of llms, industry leadership often lives in a dissonant world – disjointed from not only their consumer publics but also other industry stakeholders. more behaviorally holistic comprehension is vitally needed within these leadership silos that are lost in the bias of their own hype cycles and echo chambers. to meet this need, the application of ethnography expands beyond traditional scholarly anthropological and sociological settings into industry spaces. feedback is one such player; our methodology is deeply rooted in applied digital ethnography. our work has positioned us as a bridge between leadership with their publics and industry stakeholders. it is our vital function to inform and provide value to these leaders; however, that value stems from an authentic connection to the experiences, wants, and needs of their audiences – hard truths included. since our work also centers on doing public good, we often find ourselves in a place of tension between the realities of our subjects and the often dissonant perspectives of siloed leadership shaping their lives. we also encounter some of the same methodological tensions between research techniques as our listening to public discourse can often provide a richer, more raw set of behaviors than a typical corporate reliance on internally-conducted surveys. leveraging feedback’s over 15 years of experiences and unique perspectives as a market ethnographic research agency, this paper aims to articulate the ways in which our work builds on multidisciplinary scholarly theory and ethnographic practice, and, as an olive branch toward more active collaboration and discussion, share some insight from our own applied practice with academic practitioner programs and communities (like aoir). ethnographic methodology in industry feedback’s research design philosophy, an adaptive mix of methodologies, aligns with karen o’reilly’s definition of ethnographic analysis – not as a stage in a linear process, but an iterative phase in a spiral where progress is steadily made from data collection to making some sense of it all for others (o’reilly, 2009). our practice is, foremost, rooted in manual online fieldwork, listening to the stories being told in fully public informal discussion spaces. using informal conversations has advantages and disadvantages, but we agree with the argument that benefits far outweigh the possible limitations – that these conversations reflect more realistic or naturalistic data with less performativity (swain & king, 2022). the ethical considerations of studying public informal discussion data are of vital importance to our practice especially since we are so often in the position of advocating for vulnerable audiences. to this end, we agree with annette markham and elizabeth buchanan’s assertion that many internet users do not want their information to be private so much as they want it to only be used publicly in ways they find acceptable, and focus on each person’s relationship to their information in a given context when making ethical considerations – consistently posing ethical questions and reflecting on research process in alignment with the internet specific ethical questions table they recommend in their chapter of the datafied society (markham & buchanan, 2017). expanding on this root method, we qualitatively and quantitatively code this informal discussion data in a relational database where we run our own content analysis. we additionally consider a wide spectrum of other information sources provided by clients, agency partners, and collaborating subject matter experts alike bringing in multidisciplinary perspectives, and considering other analytic models and aggregated statistics weighed accordingly by bias and method. the important characterization of our research practices lies in the mix of methodologies and sources, anchored by ethnography. we aim for multidimensionality through triangulation: using multiple methods, data sources, or perspectives to address a research question, mitigating any potential research biases (bhandari, 2023). our analysis is complicated by multiple channel sources; meaning we consider as many unique channels as possible within each study. we triangulate between different researcher perspectives on data, different theoretical frameworks necessary for synthesizing our data, and across qualitative and quantitative methodologies. our research teams are comprised of scholars across the humanities and social sciences, while also drawing talent from diverse fields like computer science, healthcare, education, marketing, art/design, etc. ethnography serves as the central synthesis engine ensuring that direct listening to our subjects is prioritized in our analysis. it uniquely equips us to solve for bias across all sources while establishing an internal ethical center that informs how data is collected, weighed, and communicated – enabling swift action without the cumbersome oversight of, say, an irb. the speed of research operations combined with our multimodal approach enables adaptability that is essential for producing insights on a timeline where they are most useful in-industry. our competitive industry value lies in answering specific client questions, contextualizing existing datasets, and monitoring topics or issues with insights that are timely/varied/flexible enough not to break down when internet trends change. b2b applications and impacts while the most obvious examples would feature insights around consumer behavior in order to cater products and services, it is the business to business application of this technique where we have the opportunity to show its nimbleness and reveal how discrete audience behavior can inform decision-making for x industry client wanting to understand how fluid engineers make specification decisions on pipes we found fascinating conversations between new (just out of school) engineers and retired ones mentoring; we also helped illustrate those decision journeys as well as add where procurement intersects and the often opposing forces at work between ideal spec and final ordered product in a project examining the value of a particular piece of cad software for electronic appliance designers we uncovered it wasn’t the cad ability that was important but rather the software’s ability to read and export files from a variety of programs thereby changing the use case for loss-leader software provided by a parts distributor maybe most importantly in many b2b projects we were told by at least one corporate leader that “their audiences don’t use social media” only to find them in droves among peers in discreet channels; this has happened in such varying stakeholders and industries such as physicians, insurance adjustors, facilities managers of sports arenas, teachers and school administrators, security consultants, site selectors, and more. concluding thoughts in conclusion, we assert that digital ethnography creates a fertile ground for multidisciplinary collaboration in both industry and scholarly research, and that each mode of ethnography has a lot to gain by collaborating and discussing methodology with each other. industry research, like feedback’s, has roots and sustaining connections in scholarly ethnography, and continues to carry forward that theoretical complexity as well as the centeredness on data ethics and public good. industry research experience offers insight into how industry might be studied in kind. likewise, it is vital to facilitate spaces, like aoir, for industry researchers to loop back into scholarly discourse, to mutually enrich the practices in both spaces. references o'reilly, k. (2009). key concepts in ethnography. sage publications ltd, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446268308 swain, j., & king, b. (2022). using informal conversations in qualitative research. international journal of qualitative methods, 21. markham, a., & buchanan, e. (2017). research ethics in context: decision-making in digital research. in m. t. schäfer & k. van es (eds.), the datafied society: studying culture through data (pp. 201–210). amsterdam university press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1v2xsqn.19 bhandari, p. (2023, june 22). triangulation in research | guide, types, examples. scribbr. https://www.scribbr.com/methodology/triangulation/ https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446268308 https://www.scribbr.com/methodology/triangulation/ selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): quelhas freire, s. (2024, october). simulating subjectivity baudrillard and the political economy of llms. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. simulating subjectivity baudrillard and the political economy of llms sebastião quelhas freire university college dublin introduction although the work of baudrillard is semi-frequently evoked in descriptive critical assessments of new technologies, be it in the context of the risk of simulated social systems (andrejevic, 2020) or in the context of an oversaturated media environment demanding increasing participation (della ratta, 2020), there is a lack in a productive integration of baudrillard's work in contemporary studies of ai. this paper aims at contributing in this direction, by showcasing the utility of baudrillard’s concepts for an understanding of immaterial free labour in the context of large language models (llms). context the popularisation of ai technologies and their proliferation in daily uses has sparked a discussion on the social and political risks of the offloading of social systems to automated ones (andrejevic, 2020). concurrently, debates over the political economy of digital systems are still divided among the lines of free digital labour (fuchs, 2023) and digital rentier capitalism (christophers, 2020). since the launch of chatgpt in november 2022, generative ai systems have become the hallmark of current and future technological developments, with llms being applied to innumerable digital applications and it being hailed as one of the next big steps in consumer products for daily use. discussions on the political economy of artificial systems and their integration has neglected an in-depth appreciation of the problem of subjectivity and its relationship with processes of valorisation. although, this is in part warranted as the hypothesised sentience of llms is merely apparent and ascribable only as user perception, the rise of llms as human-like communication generators presents an opportunity of re-introducing the problem of subjectivity in the political economy of digital media, as the promise of llm implementation is that of generating human-like content without the requirement of actually relying on human subjects. the problem of subjectification has been examined extensively by the post-operaist tradition, through discussions of immaterial labour in the context of digital systems (terranova, 2000; virno & hardt, 2010), wherein it is argued that the digital economy relies on the capture of the social knowledge of the networked interactions of subjects acting therein. however, the concept of immaterial labour, both in its precise definition and its theoretical utility, has yet to be clarified (gandini, 2021), and the discussion of the political economy of digital media still neglects that the monetisation of digital media is concurrent with the distribution of subjects in such a way as to render them of use to processes of valorisation (foucault, 1990). as such, scholarship on free labour currently relies on an undertheorised conception of digital subjectivity. theoretical framework baudrillard in order to bring to light this issue in the context of llms, i propose to recover the work of jean baudrillard, relevant in light of both its anticipatory dimension in relation to ai (andrejevic, 2020) and its description of a specific subject of communication (baudrillard, 2019; baudrillard & maclean, 1985), which anticipates the rise of communicationintensive social relations. to trace this description, i first highlight baudrillard's concept of simulation, understood as logic of programmed anticipation and production of 'the real' by technical systems based on models without origins (baudrillard, 2016, p. 80, 2019, p. 1). following, i describe how both individual subjects and the social as "the masses" function in this system of simulation, explain how they are the locus of social demand for communication (baudrillard, 2019) and how the social is conceptualised as the locus of confirmation of the functionality of an overall system of control (baudrillard, 1983, p. 76). in a third instance, i pinpoint baudrillard's sparse discussions of robots and ai, which he hypothesises could replace this functional role in the logic of simulation he identifies in humans (baudrillard, 1995, 2016). contending that free user labour in general carries the implied notion that subjects fulfil an operational and functional role in the system of data production and manipulation, i argue that this role is precisely what conversational ai systems automate. to grapple with this phenomenon, i propose the concept of ‘subject function’ and of 'the automatic writing of the world' (baudrillard, 1995, pp. 101–102, 2000, p. 64) to describe the simulated output of llms, in view of their function of automating the generation of information. by examining baudrillard’s notions of subject operability in the circuitry of capitalist value production, i aim to integrate baudrillard’s discussion of subjects of communication, which anticipate debates of the role of users as data sources (della ratta, 2020), with the novelty offered by the communication automating role of conversational llms. application llms drawing from the recent phenomena of the sale of reddit communications content to openai as training data (orland, 2024), i propose the notion of digital common as the pre-trained collected and recorded data of actual human communication through digital systems. the digital common i argue, constitutes the pre-condition for llms output generation and consequentially, for its subsequent monetisation through subscriptions and licensing fees. additionally, the inclusion of collective human communication, located outside of strictly economic spheres, into processes of valorisation such as these, demand increased attention to be paid to role of subjectivity in the context of ai. heading this demand, i propose the framework of the subject function as expounded in the work of baudrillard, in both its individual and collective aspects, as a necessary conjuncture to understand how commercial applications of conversational llms fit into the broader landscape of digital political economy. i suggest that the role played in this specific application derives from the appropriation of freely generated user-data in how it constitutes the digital common and as carrying a specific conception of subjectivity. baudrillard's concepts of subjects, masses, and society as functional to the social logic of a capitalist mode of domination, wherein the commutability of signs takes over production as the main source of value production, serve here as probing elements in evaluating this newfound role of the digital common in new processes of valorisation. finally, through an analysis of baudrillard's hypothesis that the functionality of subjectivity can be replaced by automatic systems, i explain the context of an already simulated reality of automated social systems and anticipate what the popularization of these systems might entail for the disappearance of a political subjectivity of communicating users in the face of fully automated subjectivities. thus, i propose that baudrillard's dense and polemical conceptual apparatus serves critical ai studies by placing the onus on the identification of human social agency in the context of processes of valorisation baudrillard himself could not fully anticipate. references andrejevic, m. (2020). automated media. routledge. baudrillard, j. (1983). in the shadow of the silent majorities, or, the end of the social, and other essays. semiotext(e). baudrillard, j. (1995). the virtual illusion or the automatic writing of the world. theory, culture & society, 12, 97–107. baudrillard, j. (2000). the vital illusion. columbia university press. https://doi.org/10.7312/baud12100 baudrillard, j. (2016). symbolic exchange and death (rev. edition). sage ltd. baudrillard, j. (2019). simulacra and simulation (s. f. glaser, trans.). univ. of michigan press. baudrillard, j., & maclean, m. (1985). the masses: the implosion of the social in the media. new literary history, 16(3), 577. https://doi.org/10.2307/468841 christophers, b. (2020). rentier capitalism: who owns the economy, and who pays for it? verso. della ratta, d. (2020). digital socialism beyond the digital social: confronting communicative capitalism with ethics of care. triplec: communication, capitalism & critique. open access journal for a global sustainable information society, 18(1), 101–115. https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v18i1.1145 foucault, m. (1990). the history of sexuality. 1: an introduction. vintage books. fuchs, c. (2023). media, economy and society: a critical introduction (1st ed.). routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003391203 gandini, a. (2021). digital labour: an empty signifier? media, culture & society, 43(2), 369–380. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720948018 orland, k. (2024, february 23). reddit cashes in on ai gold rush with $203m in llm training license fees. ars technica. https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/02/reddithas-already-booked-203m-in-revenue-licensing-data-for-ai-training/ terranova, t. (2000). free labor: producing culture for the digital economy. social text, 18(2), 33–58. virno, p., & hardt, m. (eds.). (2010). radical thought in italy: a potential politics (nachdr.). univ. of minnesota press. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): monea, a., are, c., stegeman, h., franco, r., stardust, z. (2024, october). sexual content moderation. panel presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. sexual content moderation alexander monea george mason university carolina are northumbria university hanne stegeman university of amsterdam rébecca franco university of amsterdam zahra stardust queensland university of technology despite popular understandings of the internet as both teeming with pornography and offering safe harbor for lgbtqia+ content, recent scholarship has documented the myriad ways in which internet platforms are cracking down on sexual expression online (are 2022, 2023a, 2023b, 2024; are & briggs, 2023; beebe 2022; blunt & stardust 2021; gehl, moyer-horner, & yeo 2017; griffin 2024; monea 2022, 2023; myles, duguay & echaiz 2023; stegeman 2021; williams 2023). content moderation is a core component of any internet platform (gillespie 2018) and as part of their content moderation efforts most internet platforms have a series of one-size-fits-all, often puritan, adult and sexual content policies and content moderation practices for digital sexual expression and work (monea 2022). in tracking the history of the hashtag ‘nsfw’ (not safe for work), susanna paasonen, keith jarrett, and ben light (2019) show how contemporary platform discourse increasingly articulates sex and sexuality as “inherently risky, potentially harmful, and best hidden away and left unmentioned,” (pp. 9-11) and ignores how sexual content and communication online is “key to people’s self-definitions, central in terms of their wellbeing, and elementary in the building of social connections” (pp. 48-49). deplatforming sex and sexuality has very real and material impacts on users, ranging from sex workers losing the capacity to safely solicit, screen, and meet with clients (blunt & stardust 2021; monea 2022) to lgbtqia+ users having their identities censured and their communities destroyed (monea 2022; tiidenberg, henry & abidin 2021). these impacts are not distributed equally and tend to disproportionately increase the precarity of those who are disabled, fat, black, working class, or who are targeted for social marginalization due to other identity traits (are & briggs 2023; monea 2022; paasonen, jarrett, & light 2019). this panel continues the ongoing research documenting the censorship of sexual expression online and extends it in new directions by examining its impact on distinct subcommunities. these analyses push current research in new directions by adding new findings and concepts to our understanding of the impact of deplatforming, shadowbanning, and other erasures of sexual expression online. carolina are, for example, examines changes in the shadowbanning of the pole dancing community on instagram following the platform’s apparent shift towards transparency, since they started enabling users to appeal a ‘non-recommendable’ account status. pole dancers constitute a unique case study because their art form has roots in sex work but the art form itself is not necessarily sexual or performed by sex workers. this adjacency renders them vulnerable to overbroad content moderation practices. author 1 draws on qualitative survey data from 100 pole dancers using instagram, as well as ethnographic and autoethnographic research, showing how the new appeals are a cosmetic change to a faulty system. by documenting how shadowbanned pole dancers navigate instagram’s post-2023 shadowban appeals process, author 1 shows the impact that trying to maintain their audience and continue to create regular content in a creatively stunting environment has on their everyday lives, both online and off. similarly, alexander monea documents cisnormative and heteronormative content moderation practices at tiktok that were especially prominent during its early years and examines the impact that this has had on ‘queer tiktok’. despite tiktok being recognized as the most queer friendly social media platform today, creators of queer tiktok content still engage in self-censorship and heavily curtail their content to match their understanding of the opaque content moderation practices on the platform. this is shown through an analysis of tiktok’s community guidelines and related policies over time, archival analysis of instances of biased content moderation, autoethnography of participation in queer tiktok, and ongoing ethnographic interviews with queer tiktokers. drawing on this, author 2 examines the ways queer tiktokers have collectively produced ‘folk remedies’ for how best to evade censorship on the platform and argues that the continued prominence of these folk remedies on queer tiktok demonstrates the lasting impact that bad content moderation can have on the algorithmic imaginary of a platform’s user base. hanne stegeman and rébecca franco turn to erotic webcam streamers to examine the ways in which sexual content moderation not only polices the permissibility of their content across internet platform, but also works to manage their labor on internet platforms. based on this examination, they argue more (legislative) attention must be paid to moderation as labor management. the authors analyzed platform policies, conducted interviews with industry experts, attended adult industry conferences, and conducted interviews with 67 webcam performers. they show how sexual content moderation is frequently leveraged by internet platforms to discipline and control the labor of sex workers, with a specific focus on regulating their labor to direct clients across platforms and ensure that revenues remain funneled towards their platform. zahra stardust examines how new and emerging independent small-scale platforms and cooperatives moderate sexual content. these platforms and their users often are explicitly opposed to the discriminatory, sex-negative, and surveillance capitalism based business models of major internet platforms and governments, and thus intentionally craft spaces that are meant to be more ethical and equitable. author 5 conducted 10 hour-long qualitative interviews with new or emerging platforms. they document the challenges of reimagining internet platforms and content moderation, some of the most forward-looking and equitable ways of structuring internet platforms and content moderation, and the incredible difficulty of maintaining any alternative business model in the current political and economic landscape. references are. c. (2024). flagging as a silencing tool: exploring the relationship between deplatforming of sex and online abuse on instagram and tiktok. new media & society, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241228544 are, c. (2023a). an autoethnography of automated powerlessness: lacking platform affordances in instagram and tiktok account deletions. media, culture & society, 45(4), 822-840. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221140531 are, c. (2023b). the assemblages of flagging and de-platforming against marginalised content creators. convergence, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231218629\ are, c. (2022). the shadowban cycle: an autoethnography of pole dancing, nudity and censorship on instagram. feminist media studies, 22(8), 2002-2019. are, c., & briggs, p. (2023). the emotional and financial impact of de-platforming on creators at the margins. social media + society, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231155103 beebe, b. (2022). “shut up and take my money!”: revenue chokepoints, platform governance, and sex workers’ financial exclusion. international journal of gender, sexuality & law, 2(1-2), 140-170. blunt, d., & stardust, z. (2021). automating whorephobia: sex, technology and the violence of deplatforming: an interview with hacking//hustling. porn studies, 8(4), 350366. gehl, r. w., moyer-horner, l., & yeo, s. k. (2017). training computers to see internet pornography: gender and sexual discrimination in computer vision science. television & new media, 18(6), 529-547. gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. new haven, ct: yale university press. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241228544 https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221140531 https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231218629/ https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231218629/ https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231155103 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231155103 griffin, r. (2024). the heteronormative male gaze: experiences of sexual content moderation among queer instagram users in berlin. international journal of communication, 18(2024), 1266-1288. monea, a. (2023). i know it when i see it: the heteronormativity of google’s safesearch. porn studies, 10(2), 135-153. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2022.2086163 monea, a. (2022). the digital closet: how the internet became straight. cambridge, ma: mit press. myles, d., duguay, s., echaiz, l.f. (2023). mapping the social implications of platform algorithms for lgbtq+ communities. journal of digital social research, 5(4), 1-30. https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v5i4.162 paasonen, s., jarrett, k., & light, b. (2019). nsfw: sex, humor, and risk in social media. cambridge, ma: mit press. stegeman, h. m. (2024). regulating and representing camming: strict limits on acceptable content on webcam sex platforms. new media & society, 26(1), 329-345. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211059117 tiidenberg, k., hendry, n.a., & abidin, c. (2021). tumblr. new york, ny: wiley. williams, j. (2023). deplatforming sex education on meta: sex, power, and content moderation. media international australia, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x231210612 paper 1: “sexy jail”: pole dancers’ digital labour and resistance strategies to instagram’s “account status” update to shadowbanning carolina are northumbria university ‘sexy jail’ is a user-generated term online communities of pole dancers have begun utilising to describe instagram’s shadowban 2.0, or the notification their profile is ‘nonrecommendable’ to other accounts according to the platform’s algorithm due to the potential violation of nudity and sexual activity recommendations guidelines. this paper evaluates their experiences of posting during, navigating and appealing the platform’s updated shadowban through a platform governance and digital labour perspective, in order to provide recommendations to users and social networks alike about the fairness, transparency and effectiveness of their tools. shadowbanning is a cross-platform light yet insidious social media censorship technique used by the likes of twitter, instagram and tiktok (are, 2021a). although social media companies do not use the term, it has become shorthand for their https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2022.2086163 https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2022.2086163 https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v5i4.162 https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v5i4.162 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211059117 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211059117 https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x231210612 https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x231210612 demotion of content and profiles, which are hidden from or not recommended to their main discovery feeds, greatly affecting the visibility, earnings, wellbeing and communications of the users affected (are, 2021a; blunt et al., 2020; cotter, 2021). known to particularly affect those who conduct work through social media e.g. content creators, small businesses and marginalised communities such as lgbtqia+ and bipoc accounts (ibid; duffy and meisner, 2022) shadowbanning is a controversial aspect of platform governance in continuous development. although not as damaging as outright de-platforming, or content and account removal from a social media platform, shadowbanning can greatly affect those whose work depends on visibility, such as content creators (glatt, 2022), resulting in the timeconsuming sharing and testing of strategies to game the algorithm known as ‘algorithmic gossip’ (bishop, 2019). pole dancers have been at the forefront of protest against and knowledge sharing about shadowbanning, having been some of the first ‘mainstream’ users affected (leybold & nadegger, 2023). practicing an art and a sport that has roots in the sex industry, not all pole dancers are sex workers but they create sex work adjacent content, making their posts a liminal space that requires context and that confuses algorithms and platforms’ policy-makers alike (are & paasonen, 2021). in the aftermath of fosta/sesta, the 2018 exception to section 230 of the us telecommunications act 1996 that made social media companies legally liable for facilitating sex trafficking (a crime) and sex work (a job), leading them to over-censor swathes of content to avoid liability (blunt & wolf, 2020). shadowbanning was one of the most controversial censorship techniques implemented by platforms, often administered in relation to increasingly sex-averse community guidelines focused on nudity, sexual activity and solicitation (blunt & wolf, 2020; blunt & stardust, 2021; paasonen et al., 2019 etc.). as a result, pole dancers were the some of the first shadowbanned groups after sex workers, triggering a widely reported apology that brought further awareness of instagram’s shadowban (leybold & nadegger, 2023). a key characteristic of shadowbanning is that, often, platforms do not notify users it is happening (are, 2021a). while avoiding notifying those spreading harmful views or content that their posts are being restricted can be useful when running digital spaces, this lack of communication is frustrating and, often, damaging for users, who are made to think their content’s lack of views is strictly due its poor quality a practice dubbed ‘blackbox gaslighting’ by cotter (2021). building on previous work on shadowbanning’s impact on sex workers (blunt et al., 2020), pole dancers (are, 2021a), influencers, plus size and lgbtqia+ individuals (cotter, 2021), this paper provides the first contribution so far evaluating instagram’s most recent attempt at transparency in shadowbanning. following repeated backlash against shadowbanning, in december 2022, instagram announced they were going to notify users their content was being moderated through this technique (gerken, 2022). by going into the newly created ‘account status’ page in their app’s settings, users can now check whether their account is at risk of deletion due to violations of community guidelines, or ‘non-recommendable’ because, in the platform’s words, it may have violated recommendation guidelines (instagram, n.d.). according to said newly published recommendation guidelines, the meta-owned app does not recommend: “content that discusses self-harm, suicide or eating disorders, as well as content that depicts or trivialises themes around death or depression,” content that may depict violence, posts “that may be sexually explicit or suggestive, such as pictures of people in see-through clothing,” or content by accounts the platforms deems non-recommendable, meaning profiles that have repeatedly breached recommendation guidelines (ibid). following this move, users could also appeal the decision (gerken, 2022). through a qualitative survey amongst 100 pole dancers circulated through the author’s instagram network and following of almost 30,000, this paper evaluates pole dancers’ relationship with and experience of the newly created account status, in order to answer the following research questions: how has the new account status notification of shadowbanning affected pole dancers’ experiences of posting on instagram? how effective are account status appeals to mitigate or fight the shadowbanning of pole dancing content? preliminary findings highlight that while instagram’s disclosure of their recommendations guidelines has mitigated one problem – the lack of transparency and gaslighting of users (cotter, 2021), it has also effectively only rebranded a term the company did not use (shadowbanning) into ‘non-recommendable’ (are, 2021b). thus, while instagram may now be disclosing their policies, the effect is the same: swathes of content, and particularly content featuring nudity and lgbtqia+ expression, is often disproportionately ‘non-recommendable’. further, users find themselves in a groundhog day of recurring appeals for content that had already been successfully appealed and approved by the platform. through a thematic analysis drawing from daniels’ (1987) idea of invisible labour, or the unpaid and de-valued work women are often expected to perform to enable societal development, this paper highlights various areas of improvement to make the account status feature really transparent and useful for pole dancers and nude users alike. firstly, the inability to reach human moderators to question repeated glitches and appeals makes the experience time-consuming and dehumanising, showing the additional form of work required for women creators and creators at the margins due to the over-moderation of their content, often intersecting with issues of gender, race, sexuality and disability. secondly, while initial communications with instagram seemed to hint that the account status feature wanted to empower users to take charge of their visibility (are, 2021b), this empowerment is felt by users rather like a burden, forcing them to appeal into a void while also losing connection and work opportunities due to their constant relegation to the shadows. lastly, the invisible and often emotional labour performed by pole dancers to avoid shadowbanning ultimately adds information, context and education for other users, cementing their status as platform governance and creative pioneers a status cemented by the never-ending questioning, conceptualisation and mocking of instagram’s governance as ‘sexy jail’. references are, c. (2021a). the shadowban cycle: an autoethnography of pole dancing, nudity and censorship on instagram. feminist media studies, 22(8): 2002-2019. are, c. (2021b). updates on shadowbanning, nudity and ads on instagram. blogger on pole.https://bloggeronpole.com/2021/06/updates-on-shadowbanning-nudity-adsinstagram/ are, c. (2022). an autoethnography of automated powerlessness: lacking platform affordances in instagram and tiktok account deletions. media, culture & society, 45(4), 822-840. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221140531 are, c. & paasonen. s. (2021). sex in the shadows of celebrity. porn studies, 8(4) 411-419. bishop, s. (2019). managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip. new media & society, 21 (11-12), 2589-2606. blunt, d., coombes, e., mullin, s. and wolf, a. (2020). posting into the void. hacking/hustling. https://hackinghustling.org/posting-into-the-void-content-moderation/ blunt, d. and wolf, a. (2020). erased: the impact of fosta-sesta and the removal of backpage on sex workers. antitraffickingreview.org, special issue – technology, antitrafficking, and speculative futures, 14, 117-121. blunt, d. & stardust, z. (2021). automating whorephobia: sex, technology and the violence of deplatforming. porn studies, 8 (4), 350-366. bronstein, c. (2021). deplatforming sexual speech in the age of fosta/ sesta. porn studies, 8(4), 367-380, doi: 10.1080/23268743.2021.1993972. cotter, k. (2021). ‘shadowbanning is not a thing’: black box gaslighting and the power to independently know and credibly critique algorithms.’ information, communication & society 26(6), 1226-1243. doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2021.1994624. daniels, a. k. (1987). invisible work. social problems, 34(5), 403–415. https://doi.org/10.2307/800538. duffy, b. e. (2020). algorithmic precarity in cultural work. communication and the public, 5(3–4), 103–107. https://doi.org/10.1177/2057047320959855. duffy, b. e., & meisner, c. (2023). platform governance at the margins: social media creators’ experiences with algorithmic (in)visibility. media, culture & society, 45(2), 285304. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221111923 garcía-rapp, f. (2017). popularity markers on youtube’s attention economy: the case of bubzbeauty. celebrity studies, 8:2, 228-245. gerken, t. (2022). how to check if your instagram posts are being hidden. bbc news. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-63907699. gillespie, t. (2022). do not recommend? reduction as a form of content moderation. social media + society, 8, 3: 20563051221117550. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221117552 glatt, z. (2022). ‘we’re all told not to put our eggs in one basket’: uncertainty, precarity and cross-platform labor in the online video influencer industry. international journal of communication, special issue on media and uncertainty, 16, 1-19. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/15761. instagram (n.d.) recommendations on instagram. help centre. https://help.instagram.com/313829416281232/. leerssen, p. (2023). an end to shadow banning? transparency rights in the digital services act between content moderation and curation. computer law & security review, 48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clsr.2023.105790. leybold, m., & nadegger, m. (2023). overcoming communicative separation for stigma reconstruction: how pole dancers fight content moderation on instagram. organization, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/13505084221145635 paper 2: algorithmic folk remedies: how censorship shaped the algorithmic imaginary of queer tiktok alexander monea george mason university this paper is the final draft of a study i presented in its first iteration at aoir 2023 (monea 2023) and thus has significant overlaps with and repurposes material from that presentation. this iteration highlights the ways in which early content moderation strategies continue to shape users’ understandings of social media platforms indefinitely into the future. the paper makes this argument through a case study of queer tiktok’s response to early cisheteronormative content moderation policies and practices on the platform, which led to what can be termed ‘algorithmic folk remedies’ that helped queer tiktok evade censorship on the platform. this paper argues that these algorithmic folk remedies that resulted from early censorship on the platform continue to shape the way that queer users understand tiktok and create content on the platform. the paper begins with an analysis of theories of algorithmic imaginaries and build connections between them and theories of folk wisdom, folk psychology, and other similar forms of crowdsourced, intuitive, and iterative forms of knowledge production. the paper then moves on to analyze tiktok’s content moderation policies and practices, documenting a strong cisheteronormative bias in early moderation efforts on the platform. the paper then moves on to show how these early cisheteronormative content moderation practices shaped users’ engagement with the platform as queer users worked to produce algorithmic folk remedies to evade censorship on tiktok. these strategies range from a/b testing to employing ‘algospeak’ to engaging in cross-platform content strategies, all of which continue to structure content production and everyday use on queer tiktok. the paper concludes by extracting some lessons from the case study of queer tiktok that apply more broadly to global experiences of content moderation, platform governance, algorithmic imaginaries, and algorithmic folk remedies. tiktok has a troubled history of censoring lgbtq+ content on its platform. it has censored depictions of homosexuality (e.g., holding hands, touching, kissing), reporting on homosexual groups, content promoting gay rights, and content promoting queerness in general in a number of conservative countries – turkey being the most famous example (hern 2019). research has shown lgbtq+ related hashtags being suppressed in at least eight languages, including russian and arabic (li 2020; ryan, fritz & impiombato 2020). many american and anglophone lgbtq+ content creators have similarly reported biased moderation of their content, most notably amongst transgender content creators (akinrinade 2021; criddle 2020). tiktok has argued that many of these instances were due to their restriction of hashtags associated with ‘pornographic searches,’ but this simply reifies the pornographication and/or hypersexualization of queer existence so frequently at the center of cisheteronormative censorship. it is worth noting that tiktok’s biased content moderation extends to many other socially marginalized groups, including black content creators (ghaffary 2021; rosenblatt 2021), as well as the ‘ugly,’ poor, and disabled (biddle, ribeiro & dias 2020). as such, tiktok follows in the wake of many other internet platforms in its institution of cisheternormative content moderation policies (blunt & stardust 2021; gehl, moyer-horner, & yeo 2017; monea 2022). within this context, tiktok users are rightfully concerned with the undue censorship of their content and invest their time and energy into avoiding having their content censored, deprioritized, demonetized, or otherwise shadow banned. tiktok has made big promises about opening up its algorithms, policies, and decision-making practices for outside review (heilweil 2020; knutson 2020; matsakis 2020), and it leverages these promises to signal its commitment to ‘accountability’ and ‘transparency’ in attempts to mitigate public relations crises – like it coming to light that tiktok censors lgbtq+ hashtags in eight or more languages (li 2020). however, tiktok has not actually been very forthcoming with technical details about its algorithms or data about content moderation decisions and everyday users are left with little official or expert knowledge about how tiktok’s algorithms are working and what will and will not trigger undue censorship during the content moderation process. as abidin notes, “tiktokers have had to rely on repeated attempts, observed patterns, and gut feelings to figure out how the algorithm works, how to please the platform to facilitate their visibility, and how to have their popularity grow” (2020, p. 85). this process is akin to what bucher calls an ‘algorithmic imaginary,’ which describes “the way in which people imagine, perceive and experience algorithms and what these imaginations make possible” (2017, p. 31), as well as bishop’s work on ‘algorithmic gossip’ (2019) and ‘algorithmic lore’ (2020). others have described this process as ‘algorithmic folklore,’ writing: tiktok users have speculated about coded discrimination on the platform, sharing individual experiences and anecdotal evidence to identify and disrupt the algorithm. engaging in collective guesswork, these users take to the comments section to propose different theories about why the algorithm acts in discriminatory ways. […] by sharing experiences, asking questions, and crowdsourcing answers, teens are developing an algorithmic folklore while discerning the potential motivations behind tiktok’s software engineering. (akinrinade 2021) this is a departure from traditional folk psychology, which explains the ways in which humans perceive, explain, predict, and criticize one another’s behavior – largely through the attribution of mental states to others (hutto & ravenscroft 2021). lgbtq+ users are particularly adept at producing folk knowledge about tiktok’s algorithms and content moderation policies, given both the general cisheteronormative bias of online content moderation and tiktok’s specific history of censoring lgbtq+ content on its platform. the practices they employ to identify and avoid cisheteronormative content moderation practices on the platform include (but are not limited to): • intentionally using language, keywords, hashtags, and images that they anticipate triggering censorship and cataloging tiktok’s responses • continually a/b testing the platform’s content moderation by posting multiple iterations of the same videos with slight alterations to see which elude the algorithm’s content moderation • engaging in motivating misspelling and mispronunciation of words understood to trigger censorship (e.g. ‘seggs’ or ‘s*ggs’ in place of ‘sex’) • tactically covering or obscuring certain parts of the body, background objects, portions of images, etc. • leveraging specific audiences, hashtags, and cross platform links to boost lgbtq+ content • utilizing comment spaces and forums on other platforms to collectively produce, collect, archive, and disseminate folk knowledge for lgbtq+ tiktok users queer tiktok is rife with self-censorship and similar attempts to employ algorithmic folk remedies to evade cisheteronormative content moderation on the platform. this is true despite tiktok being popularly understood as the most queer friendly internet platform and actively soliciting queer users. in closing, i argue that this demonstrates two important things about internet platforms: (1) the bar is depressingly low for what counts as ‘queer friendly’ online, and (2) bad content moderation practices can have a lasting impact on the algorithmic imaginary of a platform’s user base. references abidin, c. (2020). mapping internet celebrity on tiktok: exploring attention economies and visibility labours. cultural science, 12(1): 77-103. akinrinade, i. (2021, jul. 14). strategic knowledge: teens use “algorithmic folklore” to crack tiktok’s black box. data & society. retrieved from https://points.datasociety.net/strategic-knowledge-6bbddb3f0259 [accessed mar. 1, 2023] https://points.datasociety.net/strategic-knowledge-6bbddb3f0259 https://points.datasociety.net/strategic-knowledge-6bbddb3f0259 biddle, s., ribeiro, p.v., dias, t. (2020, mar. 16). invisible censorship: tiktok told moderators to suppress posts by “ugly” people and the poor to attract new users. the intercept. retrieved from https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderatorsusers-discrimination/ [accessed mar. 1, 2023] bishop, s. (2019). managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip. new media & society, 21(11-12): 2589-2606. bishop, s. (2020). algorithmic experts: selling algorithmic lore on youtube. social media + society, 6(1): 1-11. blunt, d., & stardust, z. (2021). automating whorephobia: sex, technology and the violence of deplatforming: an interview with hacking//hustling. porn studies, 8(4), 350366. bucher, t. (2017). the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1): 30-44. criddle, c. (2020, feb. 12). transgender users accuse tiktok of censorship. bbc news. retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51474114 [accessed mar. 1, 2023] gehl, r. w., moyer-horner, l., & yeo, s. k. (2017). training computers to see internet pornography: gender and sexual discrimination in computer vision science. television & new media, 18(6), 529-547. ghaffary, s. (2021, jul. 7). how tiktok’s hate speech detection tool set off a debate about racial bias on the app. vox. retrieved from https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/7/7/22566017/tiktok-black-creators-ziggi-tyler-debateabout-black-lives-matter-racial-bias-social-media [accessed mar. 1, 2023] heilweil, r. (2020, jul. 29). why it matters that tiktok wants to reveal its algorithms. vox. retrieved from https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/7/29/21346758/tiktok-for-youalgorithm-transparency-instagram-antitrust [accessed mar. 1, 2023] hern, a. (2019, sep. 26). tiktok’s local moderation guidelines ban pro-lgbt content. the guardian. retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/26/tiktoks-local-moderationguidelines-ban-pro-lgbt-content [accessed mar. 1, 2023] hutto, d. & ravenscroft, i. (2021). folk psychology as a theory. stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/folkpsych-theory/ [accessed mar. 1, 2023] knutson, j. (2020, mar. 11). tiktok plans los angeles “transparency center” to assuage critics. axios. retrieved from https://www.axios.com/2020/03/11/tiktok-losangeles-china [accessed mar. 1, 2023] https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-users-discrimination/ https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-users-discrimination/ https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51474114 https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/7/7/22566017/tiktok-black-creators-ziggi-tyler-debate-about-black-lives-matter-racial-bias-social-media https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/7/7/22566017/tiktok-black-creators-ziggi-tyler-debate-about-black-lives-matter-racial-bias-social-media https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/7/7/22566017/tiktok-black-creators-ziggi-tyler-debate-about-black-lives-matter-racial-bias-social-media https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/7/29/21346758/tiktok-for-you-algorithm-transparency-instagram-antitrust https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/7/29/21346758/tiktok-for-you-algorithm-transparency-instagram-antitrust https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/26/tiktoks-local-moderation-guidelines-ban-pro-lgbt-content https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/26/tiktoks-local-moderation-guidelines-ban-pro-lgbt-content https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/26/tiktoks-local-moderation-guidelines-ban-pro-lgbt-content https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/folkpsych-theory/ https://www.axios.com/2020/03/11/tiktok-los-angeles-china https://www.axios.com/2020/03/11/tiktok-los-angeles-china li, j. (2020, sep. 8). tiktok is suppressing lgbt content in eastern europe and the middle east. quartz. retrieved from https://qz.com/1900530/tiktok-shadow-bans-lgbthashtags-in-russian-and-arabic [accessed mar. 1, 2023] matsakis, l. (2020, jun. 18). tiktok finally explains how the ‘for you’ algorithm works. wired. retrieved from https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-finally-explains-foryou-algorithm-works/ [accessed mar. 1, 2023] monea, a. (2023, october). cruising tiktok: using algorithmic folk knowledge to evade cisheteronormative content moderation. paper (or panel) presented at aoir2023: the 24thannual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org rosenblatt, k. (2021, feb. 9). months after tiktok apologized to black creators, many say little has changed. nbc news. retrieved from https://www.nbcnews.com/popculture/pop-culture-news/months-after-tiktok-apologized-black-creators-many-say-littlehas-n1256726 [accessed mar. 1, 2023] ryan, f., fritz, a., & impiombato, d. (2020). tiktok and wechat: curating and controlling global information flows. policy brief report no. 37/2020. canberra, australia: australian strategic policy institute. retrieved from https://www.aspi.org.au/report/tiktok-wechat [accessed mar. 1, 2023] paper 3: moderate, manage, market: content moderation as worker management on adult labour platforms hanne stegeman university of amsterdam rébecca franco university of amsterdam introduction content moderation on adult platforms, like algorithmic management, is a type of worker management. research on content moderation more generally focuses on the balance between the need to limit harmful content and censorship, and the different private and public actors and their interests involved in these processes (griffin 2023; deflem & silva 2021; mcchesney 2013; gorwa et al 2020). on the flipside, examinations of how platforms manage platform workers tend to focus on employment status classification and algorithmic rankings and ratings (stark & pais 2020; möhlman et al., 2021), and less so on the use of content moderation and user-verification as a management strategy. the separation of these fields of research is reflected in policy debates and regulations. for instance, the uk online safety bill and the eu digital services act deal with content moderation but do not contend with its consequences for content creators https://qz.com/1900530/tiktok-shadow-bans-lgbt-hashtags-in-russian-and-arabic https://qz.com/1900530/tiktok-shadow-bans-lgbt-hashtags-in-russian-and-arabic https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-finally-explains-for-you-algorithm-works/ https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-finally-explains-for-you-algorithm-works/ http://spir.aoir.org/ https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/months-after-tiktok-apologized-black-creators-many-say-little-has-n1256726 https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/months-after-tiktok-apologized-black-creators-many-say-little-has-n1256726 https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/months-after-tiktok-apologized-black-creators-many-say-little-has-n1256726 https://www.aspi.org.au/report/tiktok-wechat https://www.aspi.org.au/report/tiktok-wechat as platform workers, while the eu platform work directive regulates platform work and ai management, but not content moderation. for sex workers and people who create sexual content, however, the (over)moderation of sexual content affects them in ways that closely resemble workers’ management. since platform content moderation disproportionately focusses on sexual content (gillespie, 2018), some of the effects, experiences and issues with moderation efforts are most prominent in relation to the regulation of this content. sex workers rely on both adult and mainstream platforms to carry out their work of streaming and selling sexual content. discussions on the (over)moderation of sexual content have, so far, focussed on representational (southerton et al., 2020), community-forming (blunt & stardust, 2021), income (hamilton et al., 2022; ma & kou, 2021) and emotional (are & briggs, 2023) consequences, but less so on how content moderation is experienced as a topdown management technique imposed by platforms. taking sex work, and particularly erotic webcam streamers, as a case study, this paper contends that content moderation does not just manage “permissable platform content”, it also manages platform workers. connecting moderation and management previous work on content moderation has increasingly focussed on the ways in which sexual content is moderated by platforms. scholars have observed a general move towards the ‘deplatforming’ of sex (blunt et al., 2021; tiidenberg & van der nagel, 2020), because platforms equate sexual and harmful content in their attempt to avoid legal liabilities, protect their advertisement revenue, and appease relationships with payment processors (ruberg, 2020; griffin 2023; tusikov 2019). consequences of this have been detailed in various areas. the deplatforming of sex has detrimental consequences, such as the loss of income, workspaces and safety strategies (blunt et al., 2021; hamilton et al., 2022). adult platforms strictly moderate permissible content in ways that leave workers vulnerable to loss of their accounts and revenue (stegeman, 2021). online sex workers, such as erotic webcam performers, exemplify what happens when labor platforms are subject to intense moderation. because webcam performers are digital workers (rand, 2019), this case study bridges content moderation and algorithmic gig labour management literature. algorithms on many gig platforms are responsible for assigning tasks, connecting clients and workers and ultimately influence incomes (wood et al., 2019). this literature has primarily dealt with how ratings, past jobs and other metrics are extracted by platforms to rank and manage workers (stark & pais, 2020; wood et al., 2019). how content moderation manages workers is underexplored. the experiences of erotic webcam performers, subject to the precarious circumstances of digital work and intense content moderation, showcase the ways in which content moderation is also worker management. this paper combines perspectives on content moderation and management from multiple angles. findings are based on: 1. document analysis of webcamming platforms' terms and conditions, 2. sixteen semi-structured expert interviews with platform insiders, content moderation services, law firms and performers engaged in advocacy, 3. fieldnotes from three adult industry conferences in the us, romania and the netherlands, and 4. in-depth interviews with 67 webcam performers from the netherlands, romania and the uk. together, these methods present a holistic picture of how platforms moderate and manage, and how workers experience and resist this. findings we found that platform interests in controlling workers converge with content moderation requirements, which affects webcam performers. platforms willfully combine rules and content moderation strategies that are aimed at stopping harmful content with rules that are aimed to serve the business interest of the platform in its relationship with individual performers. for example, platforms’ terms and conditions show that platforms instrumentalize the necessity to moderate illegal content to enforce strict management of workers through, for instance, penalty systems for performers that are ostensibly aimed at ‘making the site safer’. moreover, platform representatives argued that they keep some of the content rules deliberately vague in order to allow for implementing such guidelines in ways that serve platform interests while incorporating punitive measures for performers. some of these forms of control are increasingly backed by aipowered content moderation systems. the same systems that are required to moderate harmful content also surveil and punish performers who attempt to redirect clients to platforms with higher pay-out rates. these mechanisms of control through content moderation directly affect webcam performers, who, quite often, outline their own experiences with content moderation as feeling like top down instructions on how to conduct their work. webcam performers described content rules that have very little to do with content moderation directly influencing their ways of working. one romanian performer (b) clearly describes this for regulations they experienced on livejasmin: “no i stopped working with jasmin because they had these complicated rules, very strict and they’d modify the percentage of payout you’d get, like, if you don’t have the perfect background and the perfect lighting we’ll just drop you to 25%”. very clearly, the commercial interests of platforms are also reflected in what a dutch performer (e) describes as a platform's most important rule “you can’t promote other sites, or links, or skypeshows or whatever, basically anything that would allow you to make money without the platform itself”. here the opacity of how platforms actually enforce their regulations also causes performers to be extra careful and wary: “you have no idea of what content that you’re gonna put up is gonna flag” (performer d, uk). showing the convergence of content moderation and management strategies in the adult webcamming industry, this paper argues that content moderation creates a de facto managerial relationship between platform and worker. concerns about platform workers’ rights should therefore include an evaluation of the process and effects of content moderation. references are, c., & briggs, p. (2023). the emotional and financial impact of de-platforming on creators at the margins. social media + society, 9(1), 20563051231155103. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231155103 blunt, d., duguay, s., gillespie, t., love, s., & smith, c. (2021). deplatforming sex: a roundtable conversation. porn studies, 8(4), 420–438. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2021.2005907 blunt, d., & stardust, z. (2021). automating whorephobia: sex, technology and the violence of deplatforming. porn studies, 0(0), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2021.1947883 deflem, m., & silva, d. m. (eds.). (2021). media and law: between free speech and censorship. emerald publishing limited. gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet : platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. new haven: yale university press gorwa, r., binns, r., & katzenbach, c. (2020). algorithmic content moderation: technical and political challenges in the automation of platform governance. big data & society, 7(1), 2053951719897945. griffin, r. (2023). from brand safety to suitability: advertisers in platform governance. internet policy review, 12(3). doi: 10.14763/2023.3.1716. hamilton, v., barakat, h., & redmiles, e. m. (2022). risk, resilience and reward: impacts of shifting to digital sex work. arxiv:2203.12728 [cs]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2203.12728 ma, r., & kou, y. (2021). “how advertiser-friendly is my video?”: youtuber’s socioeconomic interactions with algorithmic content moderation. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 5(cscw2), 429:1-429:25. https://doi.org/10.1145/3479573 mcchesney r.w. (2013). digital disconnect: how capitalism is turning the internet against democracy. new york: the new press. möhlmann, mareike, lior zalmanson, ola henfridsson, and robert wayne gregory. 2021. “algorithmic management of work on online labor platforms: when matching meets control.” mis quarterly 45(4), 1999–2022. doi:10.25300/misq/2021/15333. rand, h. m. (2019). challenging the invisibility of sex work in digital labour politics. feminist review, 123(1), 40–55. https://doi.org/10.1177/0141778919879749 ruberg, b. (2020). “obscene, pornographic, or otherwise objectionable”: biased definitions of sexual content in video game live streaming. new media & society, 1461444820920759. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820920759 southerton, c., marshall, d., aggleton, p., rasmussen, m. l., & cover, r. (2020). restricted modes: social media, content classification and lgbtq sexual citizenship. new media & society, 1461444820904362. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820904362 stark, d., & pais, i. (2020). algorithmic management in the platform economy. sociologica, 14(3), 47–72. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/12221 tiidenberg, k., & van der nagel, e. (2020). what’s at stake when sex is deplatformed? aoir selected papers of internet research. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2020i0.11348 wood, a. j., graham, m., lehdonvirta, v., & hjorth, i. (2019). good gig, bad gig: autonomy and algorithmic control in the global gig economy. work, employment and society, 33(1), 56–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017018785616 paper 4: cultivating brave spaces: alternative approaches to sexual content moderation zahra stardust queensland university of technology digital platforms struggle with the question of how to address harassment, abuse and non-consensual content whilst still facilitating consensual sexual expression. social media policies on sex are often restrictive (albury, 2018; paasonen et al., 2019; tiidenberg and van der nagel, 2020), making private, arbitrary, unaccountable decisions about the kinds of sexualities visible online (stardust, 2018). platforms have actively shadowbanned, demoted, de-monetised, suspended and deplatformed sex workers and lgbtq+ folk (blunt et al., 2020; monea, 2022; are, 2022) and social media rules around sex and nudity continue to impact user safety and wellbeing (southerton et al., 2021). at the same time, a suite of legislation (such as the fight online sex trafficking act 2018 in the us, the online safety act 2021 in australia, and the online safety act 2023 in the uk) now incentivises platforms to automate efforts to remove sexual content, with threat of civil and criminal penalties. civil society groups are actively engaging with sexual content moderation. many have critiqued the discriminatory algorithms, sex-negative policies, extractive business models, surveillance practices and lack of accountability of both firms and governments. stakeholders have responded to the over-capture of consensual sexual expression, sex education, harm reduction and public health material through a range of measures: manifestos, art projects, written submissions, media campaigns, community research and public interest litigation. users themselves contest top-down moderation, using creative language to circumvent algorithms that detect sexual solicitation. among this, generative work is underway among alternative, independent collectives and cooperatives, who are designing new spaces, ethical standards and governance mechanisms. this empirical study examined how independent small-scale platforms and cooperatives moderate sexual content in ways that move beyond the ethics and practices of corporations and governments. it involved 10 one-hour qualitative interviews with new or emerging platforms that profess to take an alternative approach to sexual content moderation. mapping approaches between australia, the united kingdom and the united states, the study sought to understand how such platforms cultivate consent culture, promote user safety, protect user privacy, support diverse sexualities and value sexual content creators. platforms interviewed included lips social (a sexual expression site for artists, activists, lgbtq communities and women, without ‘biased censorship’), assembly four (who founded the sex worker-friendly version of twitter, switter), mint stars (an ‘ethical and inclusive’ subscription site for adult models using non-fungible-tokens), make love not porn (a streaming site that describes itself as ‘the safest place on the internet’), and peep.me (a sex worker cooperative with the aim of ‘exit to community’). interviews covered how platforms determine their community standards, decision-making about acceptable sexual content, approaches to tagging and curation, balancing identity verification against user privacy, preventing non-consensual content, human versus automation, and navigating the regulatory environment. the platforms differentiated their approaches in multiple ways, including through their business models, revenue streams, profit sharing and payouts. they were often built upon the insights of sex workers, featured sex worker leadership, and described being accountable to sex worker communities. they took queer and sex positive approaches to developing community standards, with conceptualisations of harm and safety that differed from legal or risk-averse standards. some featured bottom-up tagging practices that associated more nuanced meanings with bodies and identities. some sought to cultivate ‘brave spaces’ for users to unlearn internalised oppressions, and pioneer an educative, transformative justice approach in addressing problematic content. they prioritised valuing sexual content creators, taking lower commissions and donating profits to local sex worker projects. the platforms studied were often founded in specific legal-techno-political environments that necessitated mutual aid and cooperation: some described how the coalescing of the black lives matter movement with the peak of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020 was a catalyst for them, especially given that many of their local escort directories had been raided by the fbi and other alternatives like only fans were “throwing sex workers under the bus.” other platforms described how they turned to their offline experiences to think about safety in virtual worlds. for example, val, the non-binary latina head of community at lips social described how their experience volunteering as a safer space officer in queer night clubs or working as crew on feminist porn sets provided foundational training for thinking about the ethics of governance. however, the interviews also highlighted how firms and states continue to shape what’s possible in moderating content. while some were deliberately founded on cryptocurrencies, other platforms had shut down citing onerous legislation, threat of prosecution and payment discrimination. art projects like only bans (where users play the role of a sex worker being doxxed and deplatformed) and eviction! (a 12hr, pop-up, self-destructing peepshow) had emerged to draw attention to the economic violence of mainstream sexual content moderation. these platforms still faced difficult challenges – identifying the limits of acceptable sexual content (including where the criminal law had overstepped to prohibit consensual kinks), how to design non-discriminatory algorithms, modelling cooperative decision-making (as they grew in size and scale), and finding options for less data-intensive verification methods (ensuring consensual content, achieving user safety and legal compliance without mass surveillance). of the ten platforms interviewed, four had shut down or paused their operations indefinitely, citing the difficulties of bringing their radical visions to life in the current regulatory environment. the platforms – switter, sex school, body of workers and peep.me – expressed their deep sense of grief at losing such important political projects (worker cooperatives! live action porn literacy! sex worker socials!) and their frustration in trying to foreground ethics, accountability and justice in a climate that prioritized speed, scale and surveillance. it’s an eternal struggle”, said lina bembe, a queer feminine migrant of colour and part of the core performer team at sex school. “it just boils down to – there’s no place for platforms to exist.” this study reminds us that there are indeed alternative possibilities for governing sexual content on digital platforms, approaches that improve upon the sexual ethics of both governments and corporations. for such possibilities to flourish, small, local cooperatives must be supported to experiment in imagining different economies of value and relationships to sex, media and community. however, a swathe of regulations (incentivising automation, requiring surveillance, mandating heteronormativity and restricting finance) render it difficult for such projects to even survive, let alone thrive. law and policy reform is therefore necessary to ensure that sexual content moderation operates not simply as a synonym for ‘detection and remove’ but instead works to actively cultivate more ethical, just and equitable sexual societies. references albury, k. 2018, ‘sexual expression in social media’, p.p. 444-462 in j burgess, ae marwick and t poell (eds), the sage handbook of social media, sage, london. are, c. 2022. ‘the shadowban cycle: an autoethnography of pole dancing, nudity and censorship on instagram.’ feminist media studies. 22:8. blunt, d, wolf a, coombes e and mullin s, 2020. ‘posting into the void: studying the impact of shadowbanning on sex workers and activists.’ hacking//hustling. monea, a. 2022. the digital closet: how the internet became straight: mit press. paasonen, s, jarrett k, light b, 2019. #nsfw: sex, humor and risk in social media. mit press, cambridge. tiidenberg k and van der nagel e, 2020. sex and social media. emerald. stardust, z. 2018. ‘safe for work: feminist porn, corporate regulation and community standards’ pp 155-179, in c dale and r overell (eds) orienting feminism: media, activism and cultural representation, palgrave macmillan. southerton et al, 2021. ‘restricted modes: social media, content classification and lgbtq sexual citizenship’ 23 new media and society 920. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 october 2 november garvey, k. & flonk, d. (2024, october). adaptive governance by digital platforms: how twitch changed its platform over time. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. adaptive governance by digital platforms: how twitch changed its platform over time kevin garvey rikkyo university daniëlle flonk hitotsubashi university introduction since its launch in 2011, the live streaming platform twitch has continually expanded its mechanisms for monetizing interactions between content creators and their viewers. while numerous studies document the motivation of viewers (sjöblom, et. al. 2017; wulf, et. al. 2020), experiences of live streamers (taylor, 2018; sjöblom, et. al., 2019; woodcock & johnson, 2019), and platform policy (partin, 2020; poell, et. al., 2022), an explanatory framework and a clear timeline of functional changes on twitch is still missing. tracking twitch changes can shed light on what motivates them, and what is likely to influence the platform going forward. the literature on twitch platform policy focuses mainly on how the platform mimics features that were first introduced by users, a process partin (2020) called “envelopment”. however, we argue that there are two important parallel mechanisms that motivate change. first, via competition, twitch copies features from other platforms. second, via realignment, twitch meets user demands for changes on the platform. this process of strategic cooptation of features via envelopment, competition, and realignment, is what we call adaptive governance. it is this holistic approach of adaptive governance that remains a blind spot in the literature and which this article aims to give a first description of. hence, our contribution is not only theoretical, but also empirical. histories of twitch tend to focus on its origins (taylor, 2018; johnson, 2021) or case studies of policy (ruberg, et. al. 2019) . we present the first historical overview of changes that twitch made to its platform. we adopt the empirical approach of netnography (kozinets, 2020) that collects and triangulates a variety of data, namely interviews with streamers, twitch’s official blog, journalistic reports of major changes, twitchcon announcements, a “digital oral history” of youtube videos, and finally digital autoethnography. the variety of data helps us see the full context of platform change: when and where twitch implemented key function changes, and the language it uses to promote them. we define key function changes as critical junctures, which are “events and developments in the distant past, generally concentrated in a relatively short period, that have a crucial impact on outcomes later in time.” (capoccia, 2016, p. 89) during these critical junctures, more dramatic change is possible (capoccia & kelemen, 2007). in short, our project has two goals: (1) to reconstruct a timeline of official changes made by twitch to its platform, and (2) to categorize these changes by the source of their motivation, either (a) enveloping user practice, (b) competing with other platforms, or (c) realigning to respond to user demand. project and findings we argue that twitch applies a strategy of adaptive governance: the strategic cooptation of features developed outside of the platform, originating from users (enveloping), from other platforms (competing), or based on popular demand (realigning). for an overview of critical junctures along these dimensions, see table 1-3. enveloping user practice refers to twitch’s practice of introducing features that imitate functions produced by others. by monitoring their user base and third party applications, twitch gains knowledge about which products have a high demand. after introducing these features as twitch features, twitch can take a part of the revenue made from them. for instance, twitch introduced “twitch fundraising”, a function that integrates with live streaming broadcasts and allows viewers to direct their monetary donations towards a charity of the streamer’s choice. prior to its introduction, third-party apps such as tiltify were used by live streamers to arrange fundraising on their channel. type of adaptive governance envelopment meaning introducing functions that imitate or otherwise make redundant functions that were produced by others year: feature name 2016: clips 2021: bits 2023: twitch charity feature explanation the ability of users to record up to 60 seconds of a live stream the ability of viewers to donate custom amounts of money a multipart feature that directs donations to specific causes, often with accompanying banner and tracker table 1: critical junctures related to the envelopment process however, features are not only adopted from users or the twitch community. twitch constantly competes with other platforms by imitating or iterating on proven popular functions. for instance, twitch introduced “twitch shorts” (clips of channels, similar to tiktok’s short-video format), and “super chats” (similar to a youtube function of the same name), which allows viewers to donate money to highlight or pin their messages to the top of streamers’ chat. type of adaptive governance competition meaning imitating or iterating on proven popular functions from other platforms year: feature name (competing with) 2023: super chats (youtube) 2023: discovery feed (tiktok) 2023: revenue split 70/30 (kick) feature explanation viewers can donate money to have their message highlighted select clips of streamers are placed on the front page to increase the visibility of their channel another update to twitch’s standard revenue splitting agreement with live streamers table 2: critical junctures related to the competition process finally, realigning refers to the implementation of features because users demand it. this fit to user demand can be seen in the example of twitch’s added moderation tools to decrease practices such as “hate-raiding” (i.e. directing a large number of viewers to a specific channel with the intent of overwhelming the channel with negative messages). this process is notably slower than either enveloping or competing, because it is not motivated by revenue. instead, it is a quality of life improvement pushed for via a bottom-up process. resulting in fewer and slower changes, realigning is the weakest of three motivations for twitch’s adaptive governance. type of adaptive governance realignment meaning implementation of features because users demand it year: feature name 2021: automod 2021: shield mode 2023: shared mod comments feature explanation an ai-assisted text identifier that automatically censors viewer messages deemed offensive a single button that restricts chat functionality for viewers streamers can share lists of previously banned users with their network table 3: critical junctures related to the realignment process discussion the preliminary findings show that there are different motivations for adaptive governance. twitch's logic for adopting features is different depending on the source. when enveloping user practice or competing with other platforms, twitch makes rapid changes. realigning, on the other hand, is both a slower process and results in fewer substantial changes. for instance, when streamers were developing tools to tackle hate raids in 2021 and protested on a large scale via a “twitch blackout”, or widespread nonuse of the platform, twitch was compelled to incorporate features that gave streamers more tools to moderate their channels in order to keep them safe. however, the motivation to change was different when twitch introduced clips on the frontpage in 2023, (imitating tiktok and youtube shorts). here, twitch was proactively competing with these platforms. the proliferation and variety of digital platforms presents a challenge to scholarly work seeking to understand the nature of these services. the constant adjustments made by digital platforms obscure the fact of persistent underlying motivations driving platforms to invite and capture ideas from elsewhere. by tracking platform change chronologically and in detail, we reveal consistent motivations of envelopment, competition, and realignment. this ‘chronological’ approach can direct future studies of platforms by looking beneath the waves of updates and small function changes to see the nature of adaptive governance shaping platforms. references capoccia, g. (2016). critical junctures. the oxford handbook of historical institutionalism, 89-106. capoccia, g., & kelemen, r. d. (2007). the study of critical junctures: theory, narrative, and counterfactuals in historical institutionalism. world politics, 59(3), 341-369. gillespie, t. (2010). “the politics of ‘platforms’”. new media & society, 12(3) 347-364. doi: 10.1177/1461444809342738 johnson, m. r. (2021). behind the streams: the off-camera labour of game live streaming. games and culture, 16(8), 1001-1020. kozinets, r. (2020). netnography: the essential guide to qualitative social media research. sage publications. partin, w. c. (2020). bit by (twitch) bit:“platform capture” and the evolution of digital platforms. social media + society, 6(3), 2056305120933981. poell, t.,nieborg, d., duffy, b. (2022) platforms and cultural production (p. 184). polity press. ruberg, b., cullen, a. l., & brewster, k. (2019). nothing but a “titty streamer”: legitimacy, labor, and the debate over women’s breasts in video game live streaming. critical studies in media communication, 36(5), 466-481. sjöblom, m., & hamari, j. (2017). why do people watch others play video games? an empirical study on the motivations of twitch users. computers in human behavior, 75, 985-996. sjöblom, m., törhönen, m., hamari, j., & macey, j. (2019). the ingredients of twitch streaming: affordances of game streams. computers in human behavior, 92, 2028. woodcock, j., & johnson, m. r. (2019). the affective labour and performance of live streaming on twitch.tv. television & new media, 20(8), 813–823. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419851077 wulf, t., schneider, f. m., & beckert, s. (2020). watching players: an exploration of media enjoyment on twitch. games and culture, 15(3), 328-346. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419851077 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): tylstedt, b., eklund, l., sadowski, h., thaduri, s., & normark, m. (2023, october). reproductive health apps and empowerment–a contradiction?. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. reproductive health apps and empowerment – a contradiction? beatrice tylstedt uppsala university lina eklund uppsala university helga sadowski uppsala university sharanya thaduri uppsala university maria normark uppsala university introduction women’s reproductive health is a contested field, with past and ongoing struggles for power over women’s bodies (e.g. stanworth, 1987; franklin 1997; lupton, 2013). in a lifetime, women and others who menstruate are expected to go through about five hundred menstruation cycles and pregnancy (or its avoidance) is a key part of life for many (karlsson, 2019). yet, the bleeding and pregnant female body has been deemed ‘impure,’ ‘unclean’, and ‘out of control,’ and menstruating women emotionally labile, irrational, and mentally or physically ill (johnston-robeldo & chrisler, 2013; kristeva, 1982). throughout history, argumentations as these have been used to control female bodies and exclude women from parts of society and social life (e.g. stern & strand, 2022). one event in the history of reproductive health that is often described as revolutionary was the invention of the contraceptive pill in the 1960s, an invention that is often credited for women’s sexual liberation (watkins, 1998). however, since then, the pill, being a hormonal contraceptive, has faced a considerable amount of critique due to its unwanted side effects (watkins, 1998). many advocate contraceptives that are hormone-free, and today these alternatives often come in the shape of reproductive health apps. such applications claim to offer users reliable fertility tracking, a sense of control without the need to take hormones. they are part of a wider trend of technologies directed towards women, labelled femtech – female technology. these apps offer a digital alternative to manage fertility, menstruation, and pregnancy. are they helping women in similar ways as the invention of the pill did? while reproductive health apps are often marketed in terms of female empowerment (hendl & jansky, 2021; healy, 2021) and seem to offer women new and improved ways of managing their health, they are at the same time criticized for lacking data privacy (mehrnezhad & almeida, 2021; fox, howell, wong & spektor, 2019). furthermore, the apps have been criticized for turning users into objects of surveillance, discipline and commodification (healy, 2021; roetman, 2020; lupton, 2015) and of perpetuating normative stereotypes about women as reproductive subjects (lupton, 2015). furthermore, empowerment is a contested term and studies on technology have shown how it is rarely defined and instead used in a wide variety of ways (schneider, eiband, ullrich & butz, 2018). our point of departure is thus a critical understanding of empowerment and potential through the design of these apps. this is founded on e.g. anne-marie willis’ concept of the ‘double movement of ontological designing’ (2006). this concept argues that we design and create the material circumstances in our world and those circumstances in turn shape us and our understanding of the world. in the case of menstruation apps, the hypothesis we build on is that the way that the apps are designed shape how we understand reproductive health. femtech and its apps are increasing in popularity and yet, we know little about how these app-based technologies come into users’ lives and co-shape experiences of e.g. bleeding and pregnancy. considering the contested history of female reproduction and technologies, and the fact that most of these apps are developed by commercial companies, there are many questions regarding the actual relation between these technologies and the potential for individuals’ empowerment. thus, we ask: how do these apps represent reproductive health? what kinds of empowering qualities are present in them? are there any aspects of the technology that (inadvertently) counteract the empowering purpose? approach in this paper, we present results from an ongoing five-year project on the topic of commercial femtech apps and their empowering and dis-empowering potentials, both in the interface design and in the creative practices of users. our data primarily consists of critical walk-through analysis and researcher use-diaries of the interaction design of nine of the most downloaded menstruation apps, as well as nine of the most downloaded pregnancy apps, based on incognito searches and official download statistics from the google play store. the insight we build on is that the way that the apps are designed, and the reproductive event such as menstruation and pregnancy is represented in the design, has the potential to shape how we understand our bodies and reproductive health. the project data also consists of interviews with app developers and users which add extra depth to our study, but this data gathering and analysis is still ongoing. the focus of our presentation will therefore be on the interaction design of the apps and the results from the critical app walkthrough and researcher use diaries that we have performed. results and conclusions we show in our analysis that there are three critical ways in which these apps represent reproductive health events to users through design. we analyze; 1) interface metaphors used to represent temporality, 2) datafication of reproductive health through input and output for intimate data tracking and 3) finally the ways predictions convey certainty over uncertainty and the implications of this. reproductive health tracking apps become part of a certain model of reproductive health, as predictable, exact, trackable through medicalized symptoms, and controllable through technological means. this model comes at the expense of other ways of seeing and experiencing reproductive health. feminist theories of the body have long argued for the feminine body as unruly, leaky, and wayward (carter, 2010; kristeva, 1982; butler, 2011). in history, this leaking was used as an argument for keeping female bodies out of certain areas of society, for example the military (stern & strand, 2022). indeed, medical technology for female reproductive health has historically been contentious, often with negative impact for women and children (franklin, 1997; franklin & ragone, 1997). the way that these apps represent menstruation and pregnancy and offers interactional possibilities to users enforces a certain techno-medical definition at the expense of more embodied, troubled, leaky, and multiple versions and interpretations. however, as stanworth (1987) has argued, reproductive health technologies seldomly have simple effects, but rather often contain both; negative consequences and potential for empowering women. as we show with these apps, the potential to learn more about both the individual body and the way that reproductive health is part of everyday life, holds great potential for something that historically women had to do in secret, or consult medical doctors for. yet, the empowering potential is not utilized enough in current popular designs. from our results we present four design sensitivities meant to inspire designers to design for other types of period tracking experiences that might empower bleeders. these are 1) support lived temporalities, 2) embrace uncertainty, 3) empower the self, and 4) design less. together, they support the call for hci practitioners to support a plurality of female experiences and has the potential to empower a historically disempowered group (keyes et al., 2020). references butler, j. (2011). bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of sex (1st edition). routledge. carter, s. k. (2010). beyond control: body and self in women’s childbearing narratives. sociology of health & illness, 32(7), 993–1009. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14679566.2010.01261.x epstein, d. a., lee, n. b., kang, j. h., agapie, e., schroeder, j., pina, l. r., fogarty, j., kientz, j. a., & munson, s. (2017). examining menstrual tracking to inform the design of personal informatics tools. proceedings of the 2017 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 6876–6888. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025635 fox, s., howell, n., wong, r., & spektor, f. (2019). vivewell: speculating near-future menstrual tracking through current data practices. proceedings of the 2019 on designing interactive systems conference, 541–552. https://doi.org/10.1145/3322276.3323695 franklin, s. (1997). embodied progress: a cultural account of assisted conception. routledge. franklin, s., ragone, h., & ragoné, h. (eds.). (1997). reproducing reproduction: kinship, power, and technological innovation. university of pennsylvania press. healy, r. l. (2021). zuckerberg, get out of my uterus! an examination of fertility apps, data-sharing and remaking the female body as a digitalized reproductive subject. journal of gender studies, 30(4), 406–416. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2020.1845628 hendl, t., & jansky, b. (2022). tales of self-empowerment through digital health technologies: a closer look at ‘femtech’. review of social economy, 80(1), 29–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/00346764.2021.2018027 johnston-robledo, i., & chrisler, j. c. (2013). the menstrual mark: menstruation as social stigma. sex roles, 68(1–2), 9–18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-011-0052-z karlsson, a. (2019). den kønnede datakrop: en socioteknisk undersøgelse af menstruation, self-tracking og apps. [doctoral dissertation, aarhus universitet]. keyes, o., peil, b., williams, r., & spiel, k. (2020). reimagining (women’s) health: hci, gender and essentialised embodiment. acm transactions on computer-human interaction, 27(4), 1–42. https://doi.org/10.1145/3404218 kristeva, j. (1982). powers of horror: an essay on abjection. columbia u. p. lupton, d. (2013). the digitally engaged patient: self-monitoring and self-care in the digital health era. social theory & health, 11(3), 256–270. https://doi.org/10.1057/sth.2013.10 lupton, d. (2015). quantified sex: a critical analysis of sexual and reproductive self tracking using apps. culture, health & sexuality, 17(4), 440–453. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2014.920528 mehrnezhad, m., & almeida, t. (2021). caring for intimate data in fertility technologies. proceedings of the 2021 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445132 roetman, s. (2020). self-tracking ‘femtech’: commodifying & disciplining the fertile female body. the 21th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2020i0.11320 schneider, h., eiband, m., ullrich, d., & butz, a. (2018). empowerment in hci a survey and framework. proceedings of the 2018 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173818 stern, m., & strand, s. (2022). periods, pregnancy, and peeing: leaky feminine bodies in swedish military marketing. international political sociology, 16(1), 1-. https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olab025 stanworth, m. (ed.). (1987). reproductive technologies: gender, motherhood, and medicine. polity press in association with b. blackwell, oxford, uk. watkins, e. s. (1998). on the pill: a social history of oral contraceptives, 1950-1970. johns hopkins univ. press. willis, a.-m. (2006). ontological designing. design philosophy papers, 4(2), 69–92. https://doi.org/10.2752/144871306x13966268131514 https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445132 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): fridzema, n., aasman, s., smit, r., & slootweg, t. (2024, october). smallscale entrepreneurship on the early web: socio-economical practices of local/regional businesses. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. small-scale entrepreneurship on the early web: socioeconomical practices of local/regional businesses nathalie fridzema university of groningen susan aasman university of groningen rik smit university of groningen tom slootweg university of groningen in 2001, on a dutch television talk show, entrepreneur j. egmond discussed how he joined the world wide web with his then-40-year-old family business selling musical instruments. initially, egmond created a homepage containing only general information about his offline shop in eindhoven. he soon also created an ‘internet version of the shop’ with the help of a state subsidy meant to stimulate the growth of the national ict market. asked about his motivations, egmond stated that he thought that this decision would have expanded his market reach across europe and would increase his revenue by a factor of 6000. unfortunately, his projections failed to materialise and the webshop did not even go ‘live’. egmond lost a total of 800,000 dutch guilders and he had to declare bankruptcy for both his onand offline business. in the interview, he announced that he had made a restart and currently runs a smaller musical instrument store. ‘does this apply to the webshop too, but smaller?’ the host asked. egmond, laughing, replied that ‘the web store is always big, you know, it is the internet’ (ncrv, 2001). this episode, aptly titled “the malaise among internet companies” (ncrv, 2001), featured diverse perspectives on the new dot-com economy of the late 1990s. amid boundless optimism, internet entrepreneurs and gurus championed the idea that embracing the web was the key to entrepreneurial success. partaking in the new economy meant embracing the web (van den boomen, 2000). egmond’s story was not unique; throughout the mid-1990s, numerous traditional businesses created websites to join the digital revolution, and by the early 2000s, countless startups emerged to capitalize doing internet business (ackermans, 2003). this narrative captures many dimensions of what scholars describe as the “new economy,” which encompasses both the rise of a digital financial system and a cultural shift towards entrepreneurialism (lewis, 2000; löfgren, 2003). scholars such as castells (2001) and turner (2006) situate this phenomenon within broader sociopolitical contexts like neoliberalism and individualism. notable, as castells pointed out, “[t]he proper uses of the internet have become a key source of productivity and competitiveness for all kinds of business. for all the hype surrounding the dot.com firms, they only represent a small, entrepreneurial vanguard of the new economic world” (2001, p. 64). following this line of thought, this paper explores how local and regional businesses navigated this new economy, moving beyond dominant success stories to adopt a grassroots cultural-historical perspective. such an approach sees culture as rooted in everyday practices (williams, 1983), inherently local (pratt, 2000; turner, 2017; abbate, 2017), and views technological adoption as nonlinear and contingent (pinch & bijker, 2012). the study examines small-scale online entrepreneurship, encompassing regional industry, family businesses, and hobbyists engaged in various types of commerce. this analysis situates their efforts within the ideological and practical context of the dutch digital transition. the idea that everybody should have access to the internet has always been dominant in the netherlands; from the earliest, grassroots and hacktivist initiatives sprouting one of the first internet providers xs4all (access for all), to government agendas that reflected the country’s objective to be at the digital forefront, in an increasingly deregulated society, the private sector was foregrounded in developing the electronic infrastructure. to exemplify, in a true neoliberal vein, the platform internet voor alledag (internet for the everyday) connected local and potential web initiatives with the business sector to realise more accessibility, functionality, and usage (internet voor alledag, 2001). thus, one can identify an interesting mix of neoliberalism, commercialism, and individualism, as well as everydayness and amateurism that created the backdrop against which local/regional industries took their businesses online for the first time (fridzema et al., 2024). we thus argue that the socio-economic context of the new economy was a significant moment for the cultural production of artefacts which are, in our case, the material web sphere. following megan ankerson in her book dot.com design, we believe that “[m]ore than just describing a zeitgeist of the 1990s, “dot-com” articulates an assemblage of relations into a cultural formation that is both material and semiotic” (2018 p. 8). to study this, the research makes use of the xs4all homepage collection 1993-2001 archived at the dutch royal library (de bode & teszelsky, 2021). a homepage, from a technical perspective, is one’s main page and every subscriber of xs4all got to make their own. however, the homepage is a key concept in internet culture and foregrounds both material and affective notions; the idea of one’s personal space online (mallapragada, 2019). the study adopts a web-minded approach (brügger, 2018), which considers the unique attributes of web pages, their archival contexts, and contemporary understandings of the web's purpose. inspired by aasman et al. (2019), the methodology follows a mixedmethod, web-archaeological procedure that combines exploratory qualitative analysis with computational techniques. the qualitative analysis employs a multimodal framework (pauwels, 2012) to examine the textual, visual, and perceptual elements of webpages. some preliminary findings include the identification of themes such as amateurism and everydayness when looking into preliminary websites reflecting small-scale entrepreneurship. many websites of local/regional businesses are not professionalized but rather playful. we can detect this in the rhetoric used which is, for example, written in a rather personal manner. the purpose of some websites also remains unclear as some do not have proper contact information or anything on the location of the business – one website in particular solely has a picture of a shop’s book inventory – whilst other sites look like business cards without any outgoing links. an interesting question arises as to why these businesses went online; did they deliberately want to gain a bigger reach for their commerce, or, from a social perspective, was going online simply a normalized practice in an increasingly digital society? subsequently, a shift is identified from such mixed socio-economic practices to sites honing e-business strategies, or activities “whose performance (...) takes place predominantly by/on the internet” (castells, 2001, p. 66). the latter indicates the increasing influence of the new economic mindset seeping through to local/regional businesses. this finding reflects a paradigm shift in the dominant socio-technical imaginary of the web; from a bottom-up public domain to a networked fertilizer for the new economy depicting a cruel optimist sentiment towards an inevitable commercial utopia (fridzema et al., 2024). the study contributes to the field in three key ways. first, it looks at socio-economic practices using a cultural-historical lens to analyse small-scale entrepreneurship during the new economy’s rise. second, it demonstrates a methodological framework for an archival exploration of bottom-up materials through a web-minded approach. finally, it enriches the historiography of the dutch public web and complements existing research on the dot-com boom by emphasizing local and regional narratives. this approach challenges dominant interpretations that focus exclusively on large-scale internet businesses, building on work from scholars like turner (2017) and driscoll (2022) that foregrounds underexplored, social perspectives in internet history. by situating small-scale entrepreneurship within the cultural and economic currents of the new economy, this study opens avenues for comparative analyses and a deeper understanding of how local practices shaped—and were shaped by—the early web. references aasman, s., de haan, t., & teszelszky, k. (2019). web archaeology: an introduction. tmg journal for media history, 22(1), 1-5. abbate, j. (2017). what and where is the internet? (re) defining internet histories. internet histories, 1(1-2), 8-14. ackermans, m. (2003). we zouden rijk worden, heel rijk en heel snel.. in h. blanken, & m. deuze (eds.), (2003). de mediarevolutie 10 jaar www in nederland (pp. 111-128). boom. ankerson, m. s. (2018). dot-com design: the rise of a usable, social, commercial web. new york university press. brügger, n. (2018). the archived web: doing history in the digital age. mit press. castells, m. (2001). the internet galaxy: reflections on the internet, business, and society. oxford university press. de bode, p. & teszelszky, k. (2021). collectiebeschrijving xs4all-homepages (1.0). koninklijke bibliotheek driscoll, k. (2022). the modem world: a prehistory of social media. yale university press. fridzema, n., aasman, s., slootweg, t., & smit, r. (2024). a decade of transformative discourse: sociotechnical imaginaries of the dutch web between 19942004. in s. gebeil, et al. (eds.), exploring the archived web in a highly transformative age (pp. 141-161). firenze university press. internet voor alledag (2001, june 5). retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20010605022656/http://internetvooralledag.nl/ lewis, m. m. (2000). the new new thing: a silicon valley story. ww norton & company. löfgren, o. (2003). the new economy: a cultural history. global networks, 3(3), 239254. mallapragada, m. (2019). cultural historiography of the ‘homepage'. in the sage handbook of web history (pp. 387-399). sage publications. ncrv (broadcaster). (2001). random tien de malaise onder de internetbedrijven [tv show]. pauwels, l. (2012). a multimodal framework for analyzing websites as cultural expressions. journal of computer-mediated communication, 17(3), 247-265. pinch, t. & bijker, w. (2012). the social construction of facts and artefacts. in w. bijker, et al. (eds.) the social construction of technological systems (pp. 11 44). mit press. pratt, a. c. (2000). new media, the new economy and new spaces. geoforum, 31(4), 425-436. turner, f. (2006). from counterculture to cyberculture: stewart brand, the whole earth network, and the rise of digital utopianism. university of chicago press. turner, f. (2017). can we write a cultural history of the internet? if so, how?. internet histories, 1(1-2), 39-46. van den boomen, m. (2000). leven op het net: de sociale betekenis van virtuele gemeenschappen. voor publiek en politiek. williams, r. (1983). culture and society, 1780-1950. columbia university press. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): caldeira, s. p. (2024, october). (re)sharing feminisms: re-sharing instagram stories as everyday feminist practices. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. (re)sharing feminisms: re-sharing instagram stories as everyday feminist practices sofia p. caldeira cicant, lusófona university introduction social media has long been used for feminist purposes, with movements like #metoo helping to cement their public visibility (banet-weiser, 2018). while scholarship tends to focus on visible peaks of protest, most online engagements with feminism take place outside these peaks – in practices of everyday feminism (pruchniewska, 2019). this paper explores the ways in which feminisms can be integrated into everyday social media practices that might not be understood as deliberately political, but that can nonetheless help to contest social inequalities. we explore instagram stories as a site for everyday feminisms. introduced in 2016, stories are an ephemeral format (disappearing after 24 hours), that allows for short form (lasting 5 to 60 seconds) multi-modal content (combining, for example, photos, videos, text, emojis, audio, and interactive stickers) (bainotti et al., 2020). stories have since became a central feature on instagram and one of its primary modes of sharing (constine, 2018). yet, their political uses are still under-explored (e.g. jaramillo-dent et al., 2021; cassidy et al., 2019). as different platforms and cultures of use can shape different modes of political expression (keller, 2019), we seek to explore how this format – commonly associated with notions of ephemerality, playfulness, or spontaneity (e.g. cardell et al., 2018; bainotti et al., 2020) – can be used for feminist purposes. this paper narrows it focus on practices of re-sharing content – one of many political uses afforded by this feature. re-sharing is an unusual affordance on instagram, which tends to privilege original and platform-native content. centring re-sharing practices, we recognise different levels of participation on social media – not only active content creation, but also through interaction with content created by others. the paper draws on picone’s et al. (2019) notion of small acts of engagement – comprehending more casual and less labour-intensive forms of participation, which can be performed without “stepping out of the comfort zone of our daily routines.” (picone et al., 2019: 2017— 2018). as engaging with political topics online can be perceived as risky (ekström, 2015), it’s essential to explore these small acts of engagement that for different degrees of political engagement, facilitating the integration of feminist practices into everyday life, even for reticent participants. methodological approach this paper analyses instagram practices in portugal – a compelling yet underexplored national context. while portuguese feminisms have been historically dominated by practices of “state feminism” (santos and pieri, 2020), in recent years there was a growth of bottom-up mobilisations, in part due to social media organising (e.g. caldeira and machado, 2023; lamartine and cerqueira, 2023). these national practices, however, are entangled with transnational dimensions (sorce and dumitrica, 2022), eliciting reflections that can be significant at wider scales. this paper analyses 2282 stories, shared by a sample of 52 instagram users. participants were identified using a multi-layered approach: drawing on previous research on feminist cultures on portuguese instagram (author, 2023), on the exploration of relevant feminist hashtags (e.g. #feminismoportugal), and using instagram recommendation features to snowball the sample. only users with public profiles and actively sharing stories were contacted via instagram direct message, informed about the research and its aims, providing their informed consent to participate in the study. due to ethical and data minimisation concerns, no demographic information about the people or entities managing the studied accounts was collected. however, amongst our sample we can observe diverse profiles, including accounts from feminist organisations and collectives of various scales; accounts belonging portuguese public figures (e.g. actors, comedians, journalists, or influencers) who explored feminist issues (either consistently or occasionally); and accounts of “ordinary” people (both identifying as feminist or engaging with these topics more tangentially). to avoid circumstantial effects associated with specific periods (vázquez-herrero et al., 2019: 4), we collected all stories shared by the participants on four randomly selected days per month, for three months (october—december 2022). data from the 2282 collected stories was manually inputted in csv files, audio content was transcribed, and all stories were qualitatively coded. this coding, inspired by existing scholarship on instagram stories (e.g. bainotti et al., 2020; vázquez-herrero et al., 2019), covered different aspects, including: type of story, visual content, formal characteristics, language used, use of instagram-specific digital objects, and characteristics of the feminist content shared. we conducted a multi-layered analysis which combined qualitative textual analysis, qualitative close readings accompanied by extensive note taking with emerging interpretations, and the use of digital methods to engage with this reasonably large dataset and explore overarching patterns. findings this paper showcases the complexity of re-sharing practices on various levels. our observations illustrate how stories bring together feminist concerns with other social justice issues, thus reflecting an intersectional lens often associated with fourthwave feminism (munro, 2013). through practices of curatorial activism (tiidenberg et al., 2021), re-shared stories can bring together diverse issues and help to amplify political messages beyond the immediate networks of the original content producer. resharing also connects stories to wider media ecologies (mattoni, 2017; zhao et al., 2016), incorporating content coming from other instagram features (such as posts or reels), but also opening the platform to content re-circulated across different platforms, incorporating clickable links. furthermore, re-sharing can carry different meanings (tiidenberg et al., 2021) – being used either as expressions of agreement, relatability, critique, call for action, etc. as users take advantage of the multi-modal nature of stories, they can establish intertextual conversations with original content, superimposing textual comments or digital elements, such as emojis or gifs, to frame their opinion or convey personal reactions. yet, despite this possibility, stories are frequently re-shared with no added commentary, their meanings not always evident due to lack of context. re-sharing also has a social nature (tiidenberg et al., 2021: 25–26), at times helping to foster practices of community building. this can be done by including interactive digital objects like question stickers, but it is often reflected in indirect practices of amplification and support that reify informal feminist networks, focusing on shared issues. finally, our observations also shed light on the limitations of stories. its ephemeral character and short-format can lead to partial or fragmented information – showing only snippets of the original content, or lacking the textual context provided by captions or added comments. this can result in context loss (cavalcanti et al., 2017), which has implications for the feminist potential of stories, as it pushes the responsibility of feminist education to the viewer, who must actively seek to complement partial information. however, instagram users have developed strategies and creative workarounds to subvert stories’ affordances and minimise context loss, thus complementing shared content and seeking to direct viewers’ attention. this paper highlights the tensions and complexities of re-sharing practices in instagram stories. these can be both an amplifier of feminist issues, a limited source of information, and a steppingstone for further feminist knowledge and action that are supposed to happen elsewhere – in feminist posts, websites, podcasts, or even inperson events. these small acts of engagement can help to embed feminist concerns in the realm of everyday life, which can be particularly relevant in contexts such as portugal where there is a tentative history of sustaining bottom-up collective forms of feminist activism (santos and pieri, 2020). references bainotti l, caliandro a and gandini a (2020) from archive cultures to ephemeral content, and back: studying instagram stories with digital methods. new media & society. doi: 10.1177/1461444820960071. banet-weiser s (2018) empowered: popular feminism and popular misogyny. durham: duke university press. caldeira sp and machado af (2023) the red lipstick movement: exploring #vermelhoembelem and feminist hashtag movements in the context of the rise of farright populism in portugal. feminist media studies. doi: 10.1080/14680777.2023.2166971 cardell k douglas k and maguire e (2018) ‘stories’: social media and ephemeral narratives as memoir. in: avieson b et al. (eds) mediating memory: tracing the limits of memoir. new york: routledge, pp. 157–172. cassidy w matamoros-fernández a and thomson tj (2019) mardi gras through instagram stories: how ephemeral media shape everyday engagements with identity politics. in: aoir 2019, brisbane, australia, 2–5 october. available at: https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/spir/article/view/10931 cavalcanti l et al. (2017) media, meaning, and context loss in ephemeral communication platforms: a qualitative investigation of snapchat. in: cscw '17. portland, 25 february – 1 march. available at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2998181.2998266 constine j (2018) stories are about to surpass feed sharing. now what? techcrunch. available at: https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/02/stories-are-about-to-surpass-feedsharing-now-what/ ekström m (2016) young people’s everyday political talk: a social achievement of democratic engagement. journal of youth studies 19(1), 1–19. doi: 10.1080/13676261.2015.1048207 jaramillo-dent d contreras-pulido p and pérez-rodríguez ma (2021) right-wing immigration narratives in spain: a study of persuasion on instagram stories. european journal of communication, 1–20. doi: 10.1177/02673231211012157 keller j (2019) “oh, she’s a tumblr feminist”: exploring the platform vernacular of girls’ social media feminisms. social media + society. doi: 10.1177/2056305119867442. lamartine c and cerqueira c (2023) communicating through cyberfeminism: communication strategies for the construction of the international feminist strike in portugal. social sciences 12(9), 473. doi: 10.3390/socsci12090473 https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/spir/article/view/10931 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2998181.2998266 https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/02/stories-are-about-to-surpass-feed-sharing-now-what/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/02/stories-are-about-to-surpass-feed-sharing-now-what/ mattoni a (2020) a media-in-practices approach to investigate the nexus between digital media and activists’ daily political engagement. international journal of communication 14, 2828–2845. doi: 1932–8036/20200005 munro e (2013) feminism: a fourth wave? political insight 4(2), 22–25. picone i et al. (2019) small acts of engagement: reconnecting productive audience practices with everyday agency. new media & society 21(9), 2010–2028. pruchniewska u (2019) everyday feminism in the digital era: gender, the fourth wave, and social media affordances. phd thesis, temple university, us. santos ac and pieri m (2020) my body, my rules? self-determination and feminist collective action in southern europe in: fominaya cf and feenstra ra (eds) routledge handbook of contemporary european social movements. london: routledge, pp. 196– 209. sorce g and dumitrica d (2022) transnational dimensions in digital activism and protest. review of communication 22(3), 157–174. tiidenberg k hendry ka and abidin c (2021) tumblr. cambridge: polity. vázquez-herrero j direito-rebollal s and lópez-garcía x (2019) ephemeral journalism: news distribution through instagram stories. social media + society, 1– 13. doi: 10.1177/2056305119888657 zhao x lampe c and ellison nb (2020) the social media ecology: user perceptions, strategies and challenges. chi '16: proceedings of the 2016 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 89–100. doi: 10.1145/2858036.2858333 aoir2023-digitalresistances_final_spir.docx selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 pushing back: digital resistance as a sensitizing concept stéphane couture université de montréal sophie toupin université laval guillaume latzko-toth université laval thirty years ago, howard rheingold’s book the virtual community: homesteading on the electronic frontier was published (1993), inaugurating the utopian era of social discourse on the internet and digital media, and the rhetoric of the “digital revolution” marked by technological solutionism. while this perspective lasted until the 2010s, it is now rather time for a dystopia: surveillance capitalism, data colonialism, polarization and radicalization of opinions and discourses, disinformation, propaganda, addiction… digital technology has become the problem of society rather than the solution to its problems, and the anticipated positive revolution is far less present today. in this context, other notions might be more fruitful today to characterize some of the initiatives, discourses and sociotechnical practices that we observe today in relation to the internet. one of these is the notion of “digital resistance” that we propose to explore in this paper, through preliminary conceptualizations and empirical analysis. how can we define digital resistance? what kinds of practices, discourses, and initiatives can be analyzed with this concept? what dimensions of digital resistance could be the subject of inquiries? while the notion of resistance in relation to technology is often connoted negatively and associated with the rejection of innovation or change (we can think of the trope of “late adopters” in diffusionist theory, rogers, 2003), our approach to digital resistance takes here a new meaning: political and critical. indeed, the notion of digital resistance is often used in academia and public discourse to describe practices of using, subverting, and creating technologies, usually in a progressive and anti-oppressive perspective (russell, 2005). the term digital resistance (and its equivalent in other languages) is mostly used today in reference to tactical uses, for example in solidarity with freelance journalists (salamon, 2018), support for the palestinian struggle (skare, 2016), or suggested citation (apa): couture, s. toupin, s., latzko-toth, g. (2023, october). pushing back: digital resistance as a sensitizing concept. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. democracy in zimbabwe (moyo, 2009). for ziccardi (2013), digital resistance activities often also have very strong ties to hacker culture, or at least to what he calls its “noble” tradition, known for its ethos of curiosity, freedom, and using technology to do good (coleman, 2012; levy, 1985), and often associated with the world of open-source software and peer production (couture, 2021; toupin, 2014). bailay (2021) discusses “black women’s digital resistance” through the use of digital media, in opposition to racist and misogynistic representations. the phenomenon, as we can see, is very real and the questions it raises are far from being exhausted. however, the term is still relatively undefined, and many practices could be categorized as digital resistance if the term was better defined. we propose in this paper a preliminary but formal conceptualization of digital resistance. our theorization takes place in the context of a research project on the cartography of digital resistance. different data collection and analysis activities will be implemented to have a wide and panoramic empirical view of the phenomenon of digital resistance. the approach is in line with hine’s (2007) calls to establish a mid-range theory that bridges the gap between in-depth but difficult to generalize case analysis and overarching theories often detached from the field. in this project, the cartographic approach takes on a dual meaning, namely a broad and systematic description of a phenomenon, and the implementation of an original digital device allowing its visualization and potentially participatory enrichment. theoretically, we adopt a “sociotechnical” approach to digital resistance by crossing media and communication studies with science & technology studies (sts). this approach seeks to go beyond technical and social determinisms by considering the co-production of technical objects and social order. contemporary works have highlighted the capacity of technologies to act on societies as well as the opposite capacity of societies on technologies. some works have emphasized that technological artifacts and infrastructures are vehicles of power and authority (denardis, 2014; gillespie, 2010; law, 1991; musiani et al., 2015; winner, 1980), but can also be reconfigured (suchman, 2007) or misappropriated. studies have thus documented opportunities for users to hijack or “misuse” technologies (akrich, 1992; latzko-toth et al., 2019). other studies have focused on how sexism, racism, and colonialism are embedded in technical design and propose different ways to oppose them. in the discourse analysis, the concept of sociotechnical imaginary will be used to understand digital resistance as such and to analyze how these discourses are reflected in the design of digital technologies. our preliminary empirical mapping identified six dimensions to analyze digital resistance that we will present in this paper: ● technical affordances. digital resistance is often related to the technical affordances of digital devices, be it algorithms, interfaces, or network architectures. several of them have an objective of detour or “gaming”, while others aim at proposing another way of making, sometimes in opposition to colonial standards. ● the collective or the individual. digital resistance is often of a collective nature and is articulated—or could potentially be articulated—around solidarity. ● tools or objects of resistance. a distinction already discussed elsewhere (landry, 2013) is whether one resists through the digital or about the digital infrastructure and in favor of an alternative technology. ● strategies or tactics. this distinction refers to the work of de certeau (1984) between tactics and strategies, where strategy refers to an action that can be carried out from a specific place, outside the power environment of the opponent while tactics refer to actions that can only be taken within the adversary’s power environment. ● the discursive and the practical. some forms of resistance are discursive. this is particularly the case of some manifestos or slogans aiming, for instance, at reclaiming “our” data or technologies. other forms of resistance are practical, such as cryptographic communication networks to support cooperation between activists. ● the hidden and the public. many initiatives of digital resistance are often clandestine, hidden, or private. conversely, the more 'discursive' resistance initiatives are inherently public since their impact can only be effective if the initiative is publicized. we argue in particular for the need to apprehend digital resistance as a “sensitizing concept” (blumer, 1954; bowen, 2006) that can offer a new perspective (and an analytical tool) for internet studies. following blumer (1954, p. 7), “while a definitive concept refers precisely to what is common to a class of objects, by the aid of a clear definition in terms of attributes or fixed benchmarks. […] [a sensitizing concept] gives the user a general sense of reference and guidance in approaching empirical instances”. this paper thus aims to contribute to media, communication, and digital technology studies by proposing a more systematic conceptualization of digital resistance. references akrich, m. (1992). the de-scription of technical objects. in w. e. bijker & j. law (eds.), shaping technology/building society. studies in sociotechnical change (pp. 205-224). the mit press. bailey, m. (2021). misogynoir transformed: black women’s digital resistance. new york university press. blumer h. (1954). what is wrong with social theory? american sociological review, 18, 3-10. bowen, g. a. (2006). grounded theory and sensitizing concepts. international journal of qualitative methods, 5(3), 12-23. https://doi.org/10.1177/160940690600500304 coleman, g. (2012). coding freedom: the ethics and aesthetics of hacking. princeton university press. couture, s. (2021). free & open source software. in m. o’neil, c. pentzold, toupin, s. (eds.), the handbook of peer production (pp. 155‑168). john wiley & sons, inc. denardis, l. (2014). protocol politics: the globalization of internet governance. the mit press. https://doi.org/10.1177/160940690600500304 certeau, m. de. (1984). the practice of everyday life. university of california press. gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of ’platforms’. new media & society, 12(3), 347‑364. hine, c. (2007). multi-sited ethnography as a middle range methodology for contemporary sts. science, technology, & human values, 32(6), 652‑671. landry, n. (2013). droits et enjeux de la communication. presses de l’université du québec. latzko-toth, g., söderberg, j., millerand, f., jones, s. (2019). misuser innovations: the role of “misuses” and “misusers” in digital communication technologies. in vertesi, j., ribes, d. (eds.), digitalsts: a field guide for science & technology studies (pp. 393-41). princeton university press. law, j. (éd.). (1991). a sociology of monsters: essays on power, technology, and domination. routledge. levy, s. (1985). hackers heroes of the computer revolution. dell. moyo, l. (2009). repression, propaganda, and digital resistance: new media and democracy in zimbabwe. in o. f. mudhai, w. j. tettey & f. banda (eds.), african media and the digital public sphere (pp. 57‑71). palgrave macmillan. musiani, f., cogburn, d. l., denardis, l., & levinson, n. s. (eds.). (2015). the turn to infrastructure in internet governance. palgrave macmillan. rheingold, h. (1993). the virtual community: homesteading on the electronic frontier. addison-wesley. rogers, e. m. (2003). diffusion of innovations (5th ed.). the free press. russell, a. (2005). editorial: exploring digital resistance. new media & society, 7(4), 513‑515. salamon, e. (2018). precarious e-lancers: freelance journalists’ rights, contracts, labor organizing, and digital resistance. dans eldridge ii, s. & franklin, b. (eds.), the routledge handbook of developments in digital journalism studies (pp. 186-197). routledge. suchman, l. (2007). human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated actions (2nd ed.). cambridge university press. skare, e. (2016). digital jihad: palestinian resistance in the digital era. zed books ltd. toupin, s. (2014). feminist hackerspaces: the synthesis of feminist and hacker cultures. journal of peer production, 5. winner, l. (1980). do artifacts have politics? daedalus, 109(1), 121‑136. ziccardi, g. (2013). digital resistance, digital liberties and digital transparency. in g. ziccardi (ed.), resistance, liberation technology and human rights in the digital age (pp. 27‑71). springer netherlands. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): kim, y., finn, m. (2023, october). epistemologies of missing data: covid data builders and the production and maintenance of marginalized covid datasets. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. epistemologies of missing data: covid data builders and the production and maintenance of marginalized covid datasets youngrim kim rutgers university megan finn american university introduction during covid-19, countless dashboards have served as central media where people learn critical information about the pandemic. varied actors, including news organizations, government agencies, universities, and ngos created and maintained these dashboards, conducting the onerous labor of collecting, categorizing, and taking care of covid data. this study uncovers different forms of data practices and labor behind the building of these dashboards, based on in-depth interviews with volunteers and practitioners across india and the united states who have participated in covid dashboard projects. specifically, we are interested in projects that have focused on underrepresented or missing covid data such as covid cases in prisons and long-term care facilities, racial/ethnic breakdown of cases, as well as deaths due to covid enforcement. these data builders employed sometimes creative, sometimes mundane and laborious data practices to not simply collect, but to produce these data that are often absent or obscured in the official covid dataset. in this process of data production, dashboard builders problematized the state’s hegemonic ways of quantifying death and illness, as well as grappling with the questions of how certain data is collected, who/what is missing from the dataset, and how these data voids shape and manipulate our understanding of the pandemic. through in-depth interviews with 74 data builders who participated in covid dashboard projects, this paper demonstrates the range of underrepresented and messy covid data that these data builders identified and engaged with – disappearing data, obscuring data, and disregarded data that these builders repaired and maintained to render them useful. such critical engagement with missing covid data reveals different data injustices that have tremendous potential to affect future pandemic preparation and intervention efforts. missing data and the politics of counting in covid-19 underor misrepresented datasets have been extensively investigated by rich feminist and indigenous scholarship that has paid attention to systematic biases and institutional neglect that render certain populations, activities, and other aspects of human lives absent from state records (wernimont, 2018; tuana, 2007; carlson, 2021). these works emphasize how the absence or lack of certain data is both productive and systematic, revealing the value systems of our society: whose lives are deemed worthier than others, what is considered more countable and profitable, and thus better accounted for in the state’s quantification practices? contributing to this feminist scholarship, d’ignazio (2023) provides a critical definition of “missing data”: “those that are neglected to be prioritized, collected, maintained, and published by institutions, despite political demands that such data should be collected and made available.” hence, identifying and collecting such “missing data” is a central form of data activism that demands critical reflection on why certain knowledge is absent and/or overlooked. as a result, d’ignazio emphasizes that attention to missing data is an active manifestation of state ignorance as well as a call for a structural repair. the covid-19 pandemic is a case where we have witnessed both an overabundance and a dearth of critical covid data. milan and treré (2020, 2021) pointedly speak about the covid data divide – a term describing global north as having the privilege of being “data-rich” while marginalized communities suffer from “data poverty.” pelizza et al. (2021) also spoke about how undocumented migrants have been actively neglected by the state’s covid counting, making them inaccessible to basic healthcare and civil rights protections. problematizing such hegemonic quantification of covid-19, disaster studies scholars emphasized the need for more inclusive and humane data practices that account for care, rather than control and governance (soden et al., 2022). mattern (2022) in particular, speaks about how some common data practices such as dashboards and mapping could have the potential to show the political meaning of missing data by telling stories that the official data sources neglect. the covid dashboard projects that we examined actively attend to these data voids in a way that mattern describes, as shown in the findings below. method we conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews from march to november 2021 with 74 participants who were involved in dashboard projects in the united states and india. we recruited interviewees from 11 different dashboard projects, including the covid tracking project, johns hopkins university’s coronavirus resource center, and the marshall project’s prison covid data. this paper specifically focuses on dashboard projects that collected covid data in specialized contexts: covid racial data, covid in long-term care facilities, prison covid data, racial violence during covid, and deaths due to covid enforcement. each interview took between one to two hours and was conducted over zoom. the landscape of missing covid data one type of missing data we learned from our interviews was disappearing and ephemeral data. covid cases in vulnerable communities such as prison systems and long-term care facilities were often removed or reverted without clear explanations. for instance, reporters at the marshall project, who tracked covid numbers in us prison systems, noticed in march 2021 that the cumulative numbers of covid cases reported by the federal bureau of prisons (fbp) were in fact, decreasing. when they investigated this issue, reporters discovered that the fbp was removing people who had been released from prisons from their totals: “so we still don’t have a great sense of the total number of people who were ever infected in federal prisons,” said our interviewee. to capture such disappearing and ephemeral data, it was crucial for data builders to meticulously track and probe any changes in state prisons’ covid pages. at times, this involved building their own web tracking software that would monitor a certain part of a webpage every second, as well as manually contacting public information officers of each state prison to question the reasoning behind suspicious changes in numbers. the second type of missing data that we identified is obscuring data. here, we argue that the concept of “missing data” does not only indicate an absence of certain data, but also those that are made meaningless to accurately reflect the extent of the pandemic. one case that shows such an extended understanding of missing data is lumped datasets from long-term care facilities. the covid tracking project’s long-term care team identified that the states’ reporting of covid cases in these facilities often report only the aggregate number of cases of different nursing facilities, without breaking down by type such as nursing homes, assisted living, family-type homes, or adult homes. knowing that assisted-living facilities have fewer resources and are thus more vulnerable to covid than nursing homes, only showing the combined number of cases obscures us from seeing where inequality is happening. to tease out these numbers, the long-term care tracking team compared multiple state datasets with reports from the centers for medicaid and medicare to produce facility-type breakdowns. lastly, some dashboard builders invented new categories that are disregarded from official covid datasets to highlight covid-induced injustices, particularly in extremely impoverished communities. for instance, the non-virus death database, built by academics and public interest technologists in india, tracked the number of deaths due to covid enforcement such as suicides, domestic violence, and starvation due to lockdowns. here, counting missing data became a means to studying the conditions of these deaths, and a process to tell poignant stories of the underserved communities’ pandemic experience. references carlson, b. (2021). data silence in the settler archive: indigenous femicide, deathscapes and social media. in s. perera & j. pugliese (eds.), mapping deathscapes: digital geographies of racial and border violence (pp. 84-105). routledge. d’ ignazio, c. (2023). counting feminicide: data feminism in action. mit press. mattern, s. (2021). how to map nothing. places journal. available at: https://placesjournal.org/article/how-to-map-nothing/ milan, s. & treré, e. (2020). the rise of the data poor: the covid-19 pandemic seen from the margins. social media + society, 6(3): 1-5. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120948233 milan, s. & treré, e. (2021). a widening data divide: covid-19 and the global south. in s. milan, e. treré, & s. masiero (eds.), covid-19 from the margins: pandemic invisibilities, policies, and resistance in the datafied society (pp. 24-28). institute of network cultures, amsterdam. ọnụọha, m. (2016). the library of missing datasets. available at: https://mimionuoha.com/the-library-of-missing-datasets. pelizza, a., milan, s., & lausberg, y. (2021). the dilemma of undocumented migrants invisible to covid-19 counting. in s. milan, e. treré, & s. masiero (eds.), covid-19 from the margins: pandemic invisibilities, policies, and resistance in the datafied society (pp. 70-78). institute of network cultures, amsterdam. soden, r., wernimont, j., & knowles, s. g. (february 24, 2022). accounting for care in times of crisis. items. available at: https://items.ssrc.org/covid-19-and-the-socialsciences/disaster-studies/accounting-for-care-in-times-of-crisis/ tuana, n. (2006). the speculum of ignorance: the women’s health movement and epistemologies of ignorance. hypatia, 21(3): 1-19. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2006.tb01110.x wernimont, j. (2018). numbered lives: life and death in quantum media. mit press. https://placesjournal.org/article/how-to-map-nothing/ https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120948233 https://mimionuoha.com/the-library-of-missing-datasets https://items.ssrc.org/covid-19-and-the-social-sciences/disaster-studies/accounting-for-care-in-times-of-crisis/ https://items.ssrc.org/covid-19-and-the-social-sciences/disaster-studies/accounting-for-care-in-times-of-crisis/ https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2006.tb01110.x selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): mcewan, s. rutherford. (2024, october). stuff (is something) white people like: on the white prototypicality of facebook. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. stuff (is something) white people like: on the white prototypicality of facebook s. rutherford mcewan university of north carolina, chapel hill introduction in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis, venture capital investment in advertisingdriven platforms emerged as a primary vehicle for high-yield returns.1 these platforms are distinguished by their use of algorithmic targeting to guarantee advertiser return on investment. the technological sophistication of these (proprietary) algorithms promises a hitherto unmatched granularity in the specification of advertisement audience. platforms produce, define, and improve audience categories through large-scale associations detected in captured behavioral data, which advertisers then use to ensure their message reaches their desired audience as efficiently as possible. one such category was “ethnic affinity”, developed by facebook to personalize user advertisements according to expressed preferences. ethnic affinity was removed from facebook after press coverage and subsequent lawsuits alleged that the category violated the fair housing act by allowing advertisers to hide housing advertisements from protected classes, including (but not limited to) those defined by race. despite this removal, the problem of discriminatory targeting persisted, and eventually resulted in meta removing algorithmic targeting from housing, employment and credit advertisements altogether, as part of a settlement with the justice department.2 although the platform does not explicitly collect data on race, to be attractive to advertisers the category of ethnic affinity had to be commensurable with their intended audience.3 as the department of housing and urban development argued in their lawsuit against facebook, ethnic affinity as category “inevitably recreates groupings defined by their protected class” in the course of its targeting function.4 1 cooiman, “imprinting the economy”; shestakofsky and petre, “sociotechnical change.” 2 nix and dwoskin, “justice department and meta settle landmark housing discrimination case.” 3 van der vlist, “accounting for the social.” 4 worden, pennington, and weiss, hud v. facebook, inc. at 5. facebook developed three core affinity groups—“african americans,” “u.s. hispanics,” and “asian americans”— through the algorithmic association of user interests and their attribution to individual users. in later senate hearings, and a series of subsequent lawsuits, facebook insisted that the targeting categories were based “not [on] their genetic makeup, but their affinity to the cultures they are interested in”.5 the possibility of ethnicity, absent race, as facebook claims it is presenting, is a reflection of the “postracial racist politics of silicon valley”.6 it seemingly moves away from the staid, discredited, biological category of “race”, towards the behaviourally derived, and thus supposedly more firmly user-grounded, “ethnicity”, delivered through the proprietary technological sophistication of facebook’s targeted algorithms.7 but the appearance of this rupture is a marketing ploy of facebook before it is an actually-existing difference (let alone improvement) from its competitors, that is, traditional advertising companies.8 rather than take this rupture for granted, my project understands it as the production of an understanding of technological sophistication (and race), instead of its mere existence. it joins recent literature that recovers historical continuity in these targeting categories.9 one such continuity is obvious. facebook has, and had, no such ethnic affinity-based targeting for white people.10 my study therefore seeks to establish how ethnic affinity as a category serves to negotiate tensions between the technologically fetishistic, “post-racial” aesthetic of silicon valley, and the political economy of targeted advertising online. i ask the following questions: rq1: how does the production of “ethnic affinities” as data function as mechanism of racialization? rq2: how do “ethnic affinities” interact with other mechanisms of racialization within various circuits of exchange – that is, as discursive formations, and as technical objects? methodology through a media genealogy of ethnic affinity that tracks the birth, transformation, death, and afterlife of the category, my work seeks to understand how latent theories of racial property underwrite its form and subtend the means by which it makes its discriminations. i perform archival analysis across a variety of corpora, that reflect the variegated stakeholders in the circulation of ethnic affinity. these include archived business developer api instructions, facebook promotional material, investigative journalism, and paratextual instructional literature of the “facebook for dummies” genre. i interrogate these texts not only for how ethnic affinities coheres as a discursive formation but for how facebook’s technical systems constitute the category. the nature of how this understanding changes, and points of rupture and tension across and amongst varying stakeholders, draws attention to political decisions that make concrete some forms of possible relationship, and conceal or thwart others. 5 newitz, “facebook’s ad platform now guesses at your race based on your behavior.” 6 noble and roberts, technological elites, the meritocracy, and postracial myths in silicon valley. 7 see nadler and mcguigan, “an impulse to exploit.” 8 see beauvisage et al., “how online advertising targets consumers.” 9 mcguigan, selling the american people; salas, “total market american.” 10 cotter et al., “‘reach the right people.’” discussion i argue that racism is not a tertiary outcome of what is produced as “data” in these circuits of production, consumption, distribution and exchange; rather, these circuits constitute modalities of racialisation themselves. the ethnic affinity category on facebook operated through a “white prototypicality” that encodes white racial identity as having a fixed, normative function—the implicit standard against which racialized others are defined.11 racial difference is produced and executed as data, as possessing a discrete, fixed form and mode of relation.12 the presumed objectivity of algorithmic competency is then projected onto this extracted data, so that facebook is able to justify charging a higher rent under the aegis of personalization. facebook, then, determines the conditions of visibility under which racial classifications come to be defined and targeted, re-articulating racial difference as algorithmically governed forms of subjectivity. the location of race moves from phenotypical expression towards something that is, in the words of wark and phan, “grounded in one’s behavioural affines.”13 race is not hidden, but instead revealed by and as the technical system, with any resulting disparity or discrimination deemed technical errors, “glitches in the system,” rather than the responsibility of facebook itself.14 framed as error, the problem is not the system of racial classification, but its incomplete implementation. these “biases” then provide an opportunity for technical mastery to be re-performed, reinforcing white normativity. historicizing digital forms of “predatory inclusion,” this project contributes to an understanding of platformization as a process that operates in and through digital artifacts but is not limited to them.15 it locates the existence of the category not only in the media-specific political economy of facebook, but as one legacy of the post-racial promise of digital technologies in the era immediately following the financial crisis (c. 2008-2016). most previous scholarship has either overlooked the relationship between racialization and platform capitalism or theorized this relationship from a paradigm that views the construction and exploitation of social media audiences as a form of commoditization.16 in contrast to these previous authors, i argue that these ethnic affinities are not best understood as a proxy of race because race is already a proxy.17 as wendy chun argues, race makes the “visible innate” by linking “somatic differences 11 browne, dark matters; gordon, “is the human a teleological suspension of man? phenomenological exploration of sylvia wynter’s fanonian and biodicean reflections.” 12 nakamura and chow-white, “race and digital technology: code, the color line, and the information society,” 8. 13 wark and phan, “what personalisation can do for you! or, how to do racial discrimination without ‘race,’” 20. 14 nakamura, “glitch racism.” 15 steinberg, “from automobile capitalism to platform capitalism”; taylor, race for profit; mcmillan cottom, “where platform capitalism and racial capitalism meet.” 16 mcmillan cottom, “where platform capitalism and racial capitalism meet”; rigi and prey, “value, rent, and the political economy of social media”; caraway, “audience labor in the new media environment”; robinson, “with a different marx.” 17 gray, watching race; goldberg, racist culture. to innate physical and mental characteristics.”18 “ethnic affinities” functions as a racial technology, a “means by which origins and boundaries [of race] are simultaneously traced and constructed.”19 the question of the technical here is if and how the categories of race are being transformed, not just through the occlusion of technical systems, but through the media-specific production of race, and its occlusion, in and as these technical systems: racialization is therefore one of the “structuring logics of the platform model.”20 theorizing ethnic affinity as a racial technology that descends from earlier forms of targeted discrimination, my research demonstrates how historical modes of racial property subtend, and are re-articulated in, systems of digital discrimination— as michael eng says, how “racial difference might function as that outside against which data coheres its integrity as data.”21 in the case of ethnic affinities, white racial identity is stabilized through the production of data as “spectacle of the other.”22 it is a form of what valdivia and tazzioli call “racialisation through datafication”.23 references 18 chun, “introduction,” 11. 19 chun, 10. 20 gebrial, “racial platform capitalism.” 21 eng, “lights! race! gender! adrian piper and the pseudorationality of data,” 137. 22 hall, “the spectacle of the ‘other’”; daniels, “race and racism in internet studies”; gregg, “inside the data spectacle.” 23 valdivia and tazzioli, “datafication genealogies beyond algorithmic fairness,” 839. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): mcewan, s. rutherford. (2024, october). stuff (is something) white people like: on the white prototypicality of facebook. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. beauvisage, thomas, jean-samuel beuscart, samuel coavoux, and kevin mellet. “how online advertising targets consumers: the uses of categories and algorithmic tools by audience planners.” new media & society, january 12, 2023, 14614448221146174. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221146174. browne, simone. dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. durham: duke university press, 2015. caraway, brett. “audience labor in the new media environment: a marxian revisiting of the audience commodity.” media, culture & society 33, no. 5 (july 1, 2011): 693–708. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443711404463. chun, wendy hui kyong. “introduction: race and/as technology; or, how to do things to race.” camera obscura: feminism, culture, and media studies 24, no. 1 (2009): 7–35. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-2008-013. cooiman, franziska. “imprinting the economy: the structural power of venture capital.” environment and planning a: economy and space, november 16, 2022, 0308518x221136559. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x221136559. cotter, kelley, mel medeiros, chankyung pak, and kjerstin thorson. “‘reach the right people’: the politics of ‘interests’ in facebook’s classification system for ad targeting.” big data & society 8, no. 1 (january 1, 2021): 2053951721996046. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951721996046. daniels, jessie. “race and racism in internet studies: a review and critique.” new media & society 15, no. 5 (august 1, 2013): 695–719. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444812462849. eng, michael. “lights! race! gender! adrian piper and the pseudorationality of data.” feminist media histories 3, no. 3 (july 1, 2017): 133–48. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2017.3.3.133. gebrial, dalia. “racial platform capitalism: empire, migration and the making of uber in london.” environment and planning a: economy and space, august 1, 2022, 0308518x221115439. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x221115439. goldberg, david theo. racist culture: philosophy and the politics of meaning. oxford [england] ; cambridge, mass: blackwell, 1993. gordon, lewis r. “is the human a teleological suspension of man? phenomenological exploration of sylvia wynter’s fanonian and biodicean reflections.” in after man, towards the human: critical essays on sylvia wynter, edited by anthony bogues. caribean reasonings. kingston: ian randle publ, 2006. gray, herman. watching race: television and the struggle for blackness. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2004. gregg, melissa. “inside the data spectacle.” television & new media 16, no. 1 (january 2015): 37–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476414547774. hall, stuart. “the spectacle of the ‘other.’” in cultural representations and signifying practices, edited by stuart hall, 223–91. london: the open university, 1997. mcguigan, lee. selling the american people: advertising, optimization, and the origins of adtech. distribution matters. cambridge, massachusetts: the mit press, 2023. mcmillan cottom, tressie. “where platform capitalism and racial capitalism meet: the sociology of race and racism in the digital society.” sociology of race and ethnicity 6, no. 4 (october 1, 2020): 441–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649220949473. nadler, anthony, and lee mcguigan. “an impulse to exploit: the behavioral turn in data-driven marketing.” critical studies in media communication 35, no. 2 (march 15, 2018): 151–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2017.1387279. nakamura, lisa. “glitch racism: networks as actors within vernacular internet theory.” culture digitally (blog), december 10, 2013. https://culturedigitally.org/2013/12/glitch-racism-networks-as-actors-withinvernacular-internet-theory/. nakamura, lisa, and peter a. chow-white. “race and digital technology: code, the color line, and the information society.” in race after the internet, edited by lisa nakamura and peter a. chow-white, 1–19. new york and london: routledge, 2011. nix, naomi, and elizabeth dwoskin. “justice department and meta settle landmark housing discrimination case.” washington post, june 21, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/21/facebook-dojdiscriminatory-housing-ads/. noble, safiya, and sarah roberts. technological elites, the meritocracy, and postracial myths in silicon valley, 2019. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7z3629nh. rigi, jakob, and robert prey. “value, rent, and the political economy of social media.” the information society 31, no. 5 (october 20, 2015): 392–406. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2015.1069769. robinson, bruce. “with a different marx: value and the contradictions of web 2.0 capitalism.” the information society 31, no. 1 (january 1, 2015): 44–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2015.977634. salas, marcel aurea. “total market american: race, data, and advertising.” phd dissertation, new york university, 2020. shestakofsky, benjamin, and caitlin petre. “sociotechnical change: tracing flows, languages, and stakes across diverse cases.” international journal of communication 18, no. 0 (december 26, 2023): 8. steinberg, marc. “from automobile capitalism to platform capitalism: toyotism as a prehistory of digital platforms.” organization studies 43, no. 7 (july 1, 2022): 1069–90. https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406211030681. taylor, keeanga-yamahtta. race for profit: how banks and the real estate industry undermined black homeownership, 2021. valdivia, ana, and martina tazzioli. “datafication genealogies beyond algorithmic fairness: making up racialised subjects.” in proceedings of the 2023 acm conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency, 840–50. facct ’23. new york, ny, usa: association for computing machinery, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1145/3593013.3594047. vlist, fernando n van der. “accounting for the social: investigating commensuration and big data practices at facebook.” big data & society 3, no. 1 (june 1, 2016): 2053951716631365. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716631365. wark, scott, and thao phan. “what personalisation can do for you! or, how to do racial discrimination without ‘race.’” culture machine 20 (september 15, 2021). https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2021i0.12261. worden, jeanine, kathleen m. pennington, and ayelet r. weiss. united states department of housing and urban development v. facebook, inc, no. 01-180323-8 (march 28, 2019). selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): eadon, y. (2023, october). conspirituality capitalism: yoga, authenticity, and whiteness on a streaming video platform. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. conspirituality capitalism: yoga, authenticity, and whiteness on a streaming video platform yvonne m. eadon university of north carolina at chapel hill entering “best online yoga classes,” into google search returns lists—likely native marketing— from fitness websites like verywell fit, yogi times, prevention, self, and shape. most include gaia.com, a subscription-based streaming video platform, labeling it variously as “best for the whole family,” “best intermediate/advanced,” and, most notably, “best for delving into yogic philosophy.” byrdie.com highlighted its library of 8,000 on-demand videos as “including classes and educational content.” such “educational content,” however, includes a significant amount of conspiracy theory content—gaia.com offers videos and articles about yoga alongside videos and articles about ufos, extraterrestrials, alternative archaeology, and universal consciousness, among a variety of other topics related to conspiracy theories, the paranormal, and new age spirituality. gaia was formerly primarily a yoga equipment brand, gaiam, founded in the 1980s by czechoslovakian-born entrepreneur jirka rysavy. gaiam still exists as a yoga equipment retailer, but it was sold off in 2016 after gaia acquired several media companies in the 2000s, allowing it to rebrand from a yoga equipment brand with a media arm to a streaming video media company (beres, remski, and walker, 2023, 143). the company has grown significantly in the late 2010s and early 2020s. in 2019, the company started offering in-person, livestreamed events at their campus in boulder, colorado. in-person attendance for a single weekend conference costs between $500 and $800, and access to live-streamed events costs $300 per year. a 2021 business insider piece exposed poor working conditions for gaia staff, including reports of harassment and surveillance, as well as accusations from staff that the company was “manipulating the building’s energy using crystals” (price, 2021). this paper, which is exploratory in nature, introduces the term conspirituality capitalism and examines gaia as a case study in it. conspirituality denotes the liminal space between conspiracy theories and new age spirituality practices (parmigiani, 2021). conspirituality capitalism refers to the idea that conspirituality both requires capital accumulation to exist and simultaneously obfuscates it as a driving force. the proliferation of conspirituality we are seeing across the internet is fueled by a thriving alternative market of products, courses, books, videos, and other forms of content sold by influencers and public figures who often claim to reject capitalism entirely. a form of racial capitalism, conspirituality capitalism reifies whiteness, exoticism, and individualism, reproducing systemic racial oppression and undermining collective action. gaia’s particular brand of conspirituality capitalism involves structures that are rooted in the partnership between authenticity and whiteness. offering conspiracy theories alongside a variety of decontextualized religious practices, gaia flattens them into the same quasi-religious new age spiritual content. gaia operationalizes whiteness, individualism, and new age ideology in order to legitimize itself and its ideological underpinnings as viable alternatives to late capitalism (lucia, 2020). new age spiritual beliefs are often created and maintained in response to a deep dissatisfaction with living under late capitalism, particularly in the united states: “...the new age movement has offered an alternative way to look at life, particularly for middle and upper class people in capitalist society…” (islam, 2012). rejecting mainstream forms of consumerism pushes such individuals towards participating in other forms of consumerism that may seem alternative, or more authentic. conspirituality capitalism involves structures and systems that rely on the performance of authenticity and alternatives to late capitalism as a mechanism to keep the consumer spending: gaia keeps their users returning to the platform through manufactured rabbit holes (marwick et al., 2022). one such manufactured rabbit hole is visible in the sign-up process. when a new user signs up for the platform, they are asked what kid of content they are interested in: “yoga,” “spiritual growth,” and “meditation” seem to go together—but there is also “hidden history,” “expanded consciousness,” “supernatural,” “unexplained,” and “coverups.” figure 1: from gaia.com: new users can indicate which of the above topics they are interested in. even if a user indicates that they are only interested in yoga, once they scroll far enough down, they will be greeted by a variety of conspiritual topics: the site will show yoga and meditation content alongside energy healing, astral projection, “universe as a hologram,” and psychic abilities. figure 2: gaia.com still shows conspiratorial content even when users indicate they are not interested. a preliminary topic model of gaia article headlines from 2019 – 2022 (n=778) reveals that, despite billing itself as primarily a website for on-demand yoga classes, yoga is only the fourth most common topic discussed on the website. by far the most frequent topic of these articles is alternative archaeology, a form of conspiratorial interpretation of archaeological findings that often posits the existence of ancient aliens. the pseudo-scientific theories around ancient aliens are racist at their core, implying that nonwhite pre-modern civilizations were not capable of extreme feats of engineering (bond, 2018). furthermore, despite the prominence of alternative medicine as a topic, no article title in the 778 analyzed included any mention of either vaccines or covid-19. yet, the ideology behind certain approaches to alternative medicine (“ancient mistletoe could be the next alternative cancer treatment”) likely bolsters vaccine hesitancy. figure 3: chart depicting the top 20 most common topics of article headlines on gaia.com from 2019 2022 also conspicuously absent from gaia is any form of online community. gaia hosts in-person and online events, but there is no forum or any kind of community discussion space on the website. the site is focused mainly on content production and distribution, in the vein of a traditional media company. in her work on transformational festivals and whiteness, amanda j. lucia identifies the underlying threads that bind attendees of transformational festivals together as the ideological commons (lucia, 2020). though gaia has no commons per se, it does have consistent ideological underpinnings. for the average at-home yoga practitioner, watching videos about alternative medicine and alternative archaeology could feel as though they are delving more deeply into their yoga practice. absent any community participation or cultural context, however, this delving could turn into a series of rabbit holes and, ultimately, radicalization into more dangerous ideologies. conspirituality capitalism is also necessarily a form of racial capitalism (melamed, 2015). 85% of people involved in metaphysical spirituality are white (lucia, 2020). further, gaia’s marked absence of community likely entrenches individualism, an ideological component of white supremacy (turner, 2008). authenticity works in tandem with ideologies of white supremacy, rooted as it is in the orientalist quest to legitimize the nonwhite other (hirose and pih, 2011). further, … [mostly white] participants turn to indigenous and indic religious forms because they imagine them to be expressions of alternative lifeways existing outside of modernity. this fundamental act of distancing and appropriation means that these movements tend to gravitate towards neoromantic forms that stem from nineteenth-century conceptions of the anglo-european self as civilized and modern while relegating nonwhites to the primitive and premodern (lucia, 2020). gaia includes decontextualized bits and pieces of world religions (of the contemporary religious deities and practices discussed in the 778 article headlines sampled, 57% mentioned hinduism, 6% islam, 6% christianity, 18% buddhism, and 12% unspecified forms of shamanism) alongside articles about cryptozoology and ufos. by flattening world religions and conspiracy theories together, gaia raises the profile of conspiracy theories while simultaneously decontextualizing and delegitimizing formalized religious practices. references beres, d., remski, m., & walker, j. (2023). conspirituality: how new age conspiracy theories became a health threat. publicaffairs. bond, s. e. (2018, november 13). pseudoarchaeology and the racism behind ancient aliens. hyperallergic. http://hyperallergic.com/470795/pseudoarchaeology-and-the-racism-behindancient-aliens/ hirose, a., & pih, k. k.-h. (2011). ‘no asians working here’: racialized otherness and authenticity in gastronomical orientalism. ethnic and racial studies, 34(9), 1482–1501. islam, n. (2012). new age orientalism: ayurvedic ‘wellness and spa culture.’ 21(2), 13. lucia, a. j. (2020). white utopias: the religious exoticism of transformational festivals. university of california press. marwick, a., clancy, b., & furl, k. (2022). far-right online radicalization (p. 83). center for information, technology, and public life. melamed, j. (2015). racial capitalism. critical ethnic studies, 1(1), 76–85. munn, l. (2019). alt-right pipeline: individual journeys to extremism online. first monday. parmigiani, g. (2021). magic and politics: conspirituality and covid-19. journal of the american academy of religion, 89(2), 506–529. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfab053 price, r. (2021, february 4). gaia was a wildly popular yoga brand. now it’s a publicly traded netflix rival pushing conspiracy theories while employees fear the ceo is invading their dreams. business insider. turner, j. (2008). american individualism and structural injustice: tocqueville, gender, and race. polity, 40(2), 197–215. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.polity.2300088 http://hyperallergic.com/470795/pseudoarchaeology-and-the-racism-behind-ancient-aliens/ http://hyperallergic.com/470795/pseudoarchaeology-and-the-racism-behind-ancient-aliens/ https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i6.10108 https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfab053 https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.polity.2300088 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): bruns, a., et al. (2024, october). controversies, problematic information, and polarisation: case studies across six continents. panel presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. controversies, problematic information, and polarisation: case studies across six continents axel bruns digital media research centre, queensland university of technology marco bastos university college dublin otávio vinhas university college dublin raquel recuero universidade federal do rio grande do sul felipe soares university of the arts london laura iannelli university of sassari giada marino university of urbino danilo serani university of salamanca augusto valeriani university of bologna tariq choucair digital media research centre, queensland university of technology sebastian svegaard digital media research centre, queensland university of technology laura vodden digital media research centre, queensland university of technology daniel whelan-shamy digital media research centre, queensland university of technology alia azmi digital media research centre, queensland university of technology jennifer stromer-galley syracuse university panel introduction political trends around the world have drawn further scholarly attention to the study of polarisation, especially also as it is expressed and potentially deepened by public communication on digital and social media platforms. the very concept of polarisation itself, however, remains ill-defined especially in communication research, where it is often used as a mere buzzword without sufficient definition – even in spite of a wide range of conceptual approaches that variously emphasise issue-centric, ideological, affective, interpretive, interactional, or other facets of polarisation (marino & ianelli, 2023; esau et al., 2023). issue-centric approaches to the study of polarisation often connect it with specific controversies, and therefore align well with controversy mapping and related methodological frameworks. especially where they study such controversies in digital and social media contexts, they also point to the significant intersections between the circulation of problematic information by and the deepening of polarisation between partisan actors, as well as to the often asymmetrical nature of such contestations (where groups on one side of a given controversy are substantially more likely to use problematic information to support their cause than the groups opposing them; kreiss & mcgregor, 2023). unfortunately, much of the recent research in this field has continued to focus on a small number of key political contexts, with emphasis especially on the us and uk. this panel reviews evidence on the intersection of controversies, problematic information, and polarisation through a series of case studies from six continents: north and south america, europe, asia, australia, and oceania. in combination, these studies present a substantially more comprehensive picture of global similarities and local differences. paper 1 explores the polarising impact of disinformation campaigns in favour of incumbent president jair bolsonaro in the 2022 brasilian presidential election. it reveals a potentially unusual bottom-up disinformation pattern that produces a reverse influence flow from grassroots activists to political leaders and complicates standard distinctions between misand disinformation; this also creates new challenges for fact-checking efforts. paper 2 examines the dynamics of italian public opinion in response to the introduction of covid-19 restrictions in early 2020. drawing on longitudinal survey data, it identifies a range of perspectives from extreme communitarian to extreme libertarian, and connects this to patterns of legacy and social media use, attitudes towards political institutions, and levels of exposure to misand disinformation. paper 3 compares the divergent dynamics of political debates on indigenous rights in australia and aotearoa new zealand. in the campaigning leading up to australia’s 2023 referendum on greater indigenous recognition and representation, it identifies a highly asymmetrical contest that flipped public opinion from strong support for indigenous recognition to a 60% no vote within less than one year. in the heated political debate about māori rights in aotearoa new zealand since the 2023 election of a new, conservative coalition government, it identifies continuing māori/non-māori solidarity in resistance to the reduction of rights stemming from the 1840 treaty of waitangi. paper 4 investigates the debates on twitter about measures to combat sexual violence in indonesia that came into effect in 2021 and 2022. drawing on extensive content and network analysis, the study shows that, diverging from the #metoo-style activism against sexual discrimination, harassment, and violence that is common in western contexts, in indonesia this agenda is interpreted predominantly through the lens of an underlying polarisation between secular nationalist and islamist political groupings in the world’s largest muslim-majority democracy. paper 5 compares the online dynamics of the abortion debate in the us before and after the supreme court’s 2022 dobbs decision, focussing especially on political candidates’ social media messaging on abortion rights. analysis of democrats’ and republicans’ posts about the issue, and of broader twitter and facebook user engagement with the issue, is expected to point to substantial differences between the parties, timeframes, and platforms. in combination, these five papers cover a rich selection of case studies on the intersections between controversies, problematic information, and polarisation around the world. extended abstracts for all five papers are included on the following pages. references esau, k., choucair, t., vilkins, s., svegaard, s., bruns, a., o’connor farfan, k. & lubicz, c. (2023, 30 may). destructive political polarization in the context of digital communication – a critical literature review and conceptual framework. international communication association, toronto. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/238775/ kreiss, d., & mcgregor, s. c. (2023). a review and provocation: on polarization and platforms. new media & society. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231161880 marino, g., & iannelli, l. (2023). seven years of studying the associations between political polarization and problematic information: a literature review. frontiers in sociology, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2023.1174161 https://eprints.qut.edu.au/238775/ https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231161880 https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2023.1174161 paper 1 reverse influence: disinformation and institutional distrust in the brazilian elections marco bastos university college dublin otávio vinhas university college dublin raquel recuero universidade federal do rio grande do sul felipe soares university of the arts london extended abstract the brazilian presidential election of 2022 was marked by a slew of fraud allegations and conspiratorial narratives aimed at discrediting the electoral process (ruediger et al., 2022). this disinformation campaign exploited tropes of a perceived ‘communist threat’ (burity, 2021), the depiction of bolsonaro as a ‘messiah’ tasked with warding off leftists and progressive movements, and unsubstantiated claims of fake electronic ballots and vulnerability in brazil’s electronic voting systems (cunha, 2023). the disinformation campaign organized by bolsonaro supporters intensified towards the end of the campaign trail and slowly merged with calls for military intervention and calls for a coup d’état widely distributed across social media platforms. false claims of election fraud, along with voter suppression attempts, would become a strategy integral to bolsonaro’s failed bid to the presidency in 2022 (gonçalves & abbud, 2022) and would culminate in bolsonaro supporters attacking the congress, the presidential palace, and the supreme court in brasilia after lula da silva was sworn in on 1 january 2023. the polarized and highly controversial developments leading up to the ballot offered a textbook case of disinformation campaign. in this study, however, we inspect the applicability of categorizations like misand disinformation in the context of the brazilian presidential election of 2022 through three case studies. we first explore visual disinformation distributed on facebook to probe the extent to which the diffusion of disinformation follows the typical cascade activation process informed by epidemiological models of contagion, or alternatively stems primarily from audiences that effectively set the agenda of the political leadership. our second case study leverages a database of textual disinformation shared on twitter to examine whether disinformation is too narrow an analytical category to account for the very diverse and disruptive campaign that targeted the presidential election in brazil. our third case study relies on a set of interviews with brazilian fact-checkers with extensive experience in moderating and checking divisive political content to identify how fact-checkers define and operationalize disinformation in contexts of institutional distrust. our first case study shows that the distribution of disinformation in the brazilian election deviates from the prevailing epidemiological model informing disinformation studies whereby messages originate from influential accounts and are then disseminated to the broader population through a process of simple or complex contagion. in contrast to this model, we found that such messages emerge initially from grassroots activists and are only later voiced by the political leadership, a process that the fact-checkers we interviewed refer to as ‘bottom-up disinformation’ and that we refer to as reverse influence. this two-way process where both grassroot activists and popular influencers are simultaneously influencing each other in the effective production of disinformation shows the inherently participatory nature of the spread of these narratives on social media. our second case study shows that the coding process of tweets associated with the election proved challenging to binary, static definitions of disinformation. we struggled to distinguish between what was a ‘clear call for military intervention’ and what was ‘calling into question democratic institutions.’ the separation between these variables proved porous at best and entirely dependent on the context. at any rate, disinformation could only be identified in reference to the context that grounded these narratives, with the content analysis quickly escalating to a context analysis that speaks to the ‘collective memory’ supporting these narratives (wodak, de cillia, & reisigl, 1999) the relatively lower krippendorff’s alpha achieved for some categories is indicative of the difficulties in separating what was clearly disinformation from what was at times legitimate, if illinformed and perhaps ill-intentioned discussion about democratic institutions and the deliberative process. these krippendorff’s alpha scores were nonetheless only achieved after training the coding team to look into the context of the messages. our third and last case study incorporates interviews with fact-checkers with extensive experience in the verification of political claims in brazil. these experts made a forceful case that disinformation in brazil primarily stems from institutional distrust instead of relating to the supply and consumption of information, such as a lack of reliable news sources or inadequate media literacy among the population (rossini, mont'alverne, & kalogeropoulos, 2023). this problem invariably pivots along contentious issues such as national history, the weak institutional authority, and the fragile balance between institutional actors—including journalism. the relatively fragile social cohesion across opposing political and religious groups, but also across populations from diverse demographic backgrounds, renders it impractical for fact-checkers and social platforms to counter disinformation through binary truth parameters for content moderation. this was particularly salient in brazil’s latest election cycle, when bolsonaro supporters took up a central role in promoting narratives antithetical to democratic principles and that endorsed alternative facts with self-validating participatory disinformation ecosystems crafted via social media and messaging applications like whatsapp and telegram (ozawa et al., 2023). the falsehoods eventually disseminated by politicians transcended mere fabrications; rather, they encapsulate broader issues deeply entrenched in the social fabric of the country conjured up through the expressive sharing of disinformation. this ‘bottom-up disinformation’ is somewhat at odds with the limited effects paradigm (pickard, 2021) because the central point of diffusion stems from atomized usergenerated content that sets the agenda for political elites and the mainstream media. the central insights gleaned from experienced fact-checkers, but also from the limits of text and visual classification of disinformation, speak to the limits of approaching communication from a strictly transmissive perspective that ignores the role of shared interaction online for the maintenance of social groups and the representation of their shared beliefs. many of the cases reviewed in our study foreground a ritualistic view of communication whereby the information being shared, often objectively containing mis or disinformation, is of limited import to groups dedicated to drawing people together in fellowship and commonality (carey, 2009). as such, it should not be surprising that these narratives are dedicated to the maintenance of an ordered, meaningful cultural world that can serve as a control and container for human action; a container that is often repressive, and a cultural world that can be markedly reactionary. these forms of participatory disinformation foreground the reading and partaking in stories that are not consumed as units of information conveyed by authoritative sources, but as a collective narrative effort similar to attending a mass, a situation in which nothing new is learned, and where no information is essentially accurate, but in which a particular view of the contending forces in the world is portrayed and confirmed. in particular, many of the narratives covered in our study evoke beliefs commonly held by those involved in their distribution, beliefs that are frequently rooted in historical revisionism but that have been prevalent within the brazilian political consciousness over several decades, including notions of the communist menace and scepticism towards democratic institutions. they often rely on symbolisms that cannot be strictly fact-checked, a recurrent issue faced by fact-checkers who deemed most of social media content essentially impossible to fact-check. in the end, the reduction of disinformation to information that is false fails to acknowledge that the social role of disinformation for these groups is not to convey information, but to provide a stage for dramatic forces and actions that invite participation. references burity, j. (2021). the brazilian conservative wave, the bolsonaro administration, and religious actors. brazilian political science review, 15. carey, j. (2009). communication as culture: essays on media and society (revised edition). new york: routledge. cunha, m. d. n. (2023). "brazil above everything. god above everyone." politicalreligious fundamentalist expressions in digital media in times of ultra-right populism in brazil. international journal of communication, 17. gonçalves, e., & abbud, b. (2022). partido de bolsonaro divulga parecer que questiona sem provas segurança das urnas; tse diz que documento é 'falso' e 'mentiroso'. o globo. https://web.archive.org/web/20221002005556/https://oglobo.globo.com/politica/eleico es-2022/noticia/2022/09/pl-partido-de-bolsonaro-divulga-parecer-que-questionaseguranca-de-urnas-a-quatro-dias-das-eleicoes.ghtml ozawa, j. v., woolley, s. c., straubhaar, j., riedl, m. j., joseff, k., & gursky, j. (2023). how disinformation on whatsapp went from campaign weapon to governmental propaganda in brazil. social media + society, 9(1), 20563051231160632. https://web.archive.org/web/20221002005556/https:/oglobo.globo.com/politica/eleicoes-2022/noticia/2022/09/pl-partido-de-bolsonaro-divulga-parecer-que-questiona-seguranca-de-urnas-a-quatro-dias-das-eleicoes.ghtml https://web.archive.org/web/20221002005556/https:/oglobo.globo.com/politica/eleicoes-2022/noticia/2022/09/pl-partido-de-bolsonaro-divulga-parecer-que-questiona-seguranca-de-urnas-a-quatro-dias-das-eleicoes.ghtml https://web.archive.org/web/20221002005556/https:/oglobo.globo.com/politica/eleicoes-2022/noticia/2022/09/pl-partido-de-bolsonaro-divulga-parecer-que-questiona-seguranca-de-urnas-a-quatro-dias-das-eleicoes.ghtml pickard, v. (2021). unseeing propaganda: how communication scholars learned to love commercial media. harvard kennedy school misinformation review. rossini, p., mont'alverne, c., & kalogeropoulos, a. (2023). explaining beliefs in electoral misinformation in the 2022 brazilian election: the role of ideology, political trust, social media, and messaging apps. harvard kennedy school misinformation review, 4(3). ruediger, m. a., grassi, a., dourado, t., barboza, p., piaia, v., & hubert, d. (2022). online disinformation and questioning of election results. wodak, r., de cillia, r., & reisigl, m. (1999). the discursive construction of national identities. discourse and society, 10(2), 149-173. paper 2 public health comes first? divergence and differences between communitarians and libertarians in italy during the covid-19 pandemic laura iannelli university of sassari giada marino university of urbino danilo serani university of salamanca augusto valeriani university of bologna the context: disputes on pandemic management between political elites the who's declaration of the covid-19 pandemic in january 2020 led italy to introduce, by march, the first mass lockdown in modern western democracies (phase 1 of pandemic management). phase 2 saw a gradual easing of restrictions, but concerns persisted, leading to alternating lighter and stricter lockdown measures (phase 3). the government which managed the emergency in italy was an alliance between the five star movement and left-wing parties. from the earliest phases, the government and right-wing opposition parties struggled with the “lockdown” measures (bertero & seddone, 2021). amidst heated disputes between political elites on covid-19 restrictive measures, this study delves into the dynamics of italian public opinion, guided by four research questions. societal-level analysis: exploring the state of divergence between “communitarians” and “libertarians” first, the study aimed to investigate whether italian public opinion showed signs of divergence during the initial stages of pandemic management between extreme communitarians and libertarians (who claimed, respectively, the clear-cut priority of public health over citizens’ freedoms and vice versa). divergence is one of multiple dynamics of polarization that can occur at the societal level when preferences move apart to opposite extremes (fiorina et al., 2005). previous research suggested that polarization among political elites could lead to social polarization (e.g., prior, 2013). at the same time, the literature indicated the possibility of a "rally-around-the-flag" effect during a crisis (baum & groeling, 2008), potentially resulting in widespread support for government containment measures. we thus posed this rq: rq1 – did italian public opinion diverge between extreme "communitarian" and "libertarian" positions during the first two phases of the covid-19 pandemic, and to what extent? individual-level analysis: exploring the media and political predictors of “communitarian” and “libertarian” positions our second goal was to analyze the role of disinformation in forming communitarian and libertarian stances at the individual level (tucker et al., 2018). one significant challenge involved understanding the role of fake news spread through both “older” and “newer” media sources (giglietto et al., 2019), being both responsible for the infodemic (who, 2020). another challenge was the rise of "post-truth" (waisbord, 2018). citizens' knowledge of different "regimes of truths" about the pandemic could lead to varying perceptions of its seriousness and the necessity of safety measures. considering these challenges, we posed the following rqs: rq2 – did italian citizens' opposite perceptions of traditional media (television, radio, newspapers), social media, and messaging apps as reliable sources correlate with communitarian and libertarian positions, and if so, how? rq3 – were the levels of knowledge regarding covid-related "official truths" proposed by institutions at the beginning of the emergency associated with communitarian and libertarian positions, and if so, how? finally, the study investigated the role of the support for the italian government: rq4 – was trust in the government that issued the "stay-at-home" order associated with libertarian or communitarian positions, and if so, how? data and method the study is based on the first two waves of a longitudinal cawi survey administered after phase 1 (may 2020) and at the end of phase 2 (september) pandemic management to a representative sample of the italian adult population with internet access. to address rq1, we utilized a survey question asking respondents to indicate their position on an 11-point scale regarding two opposing statements: one prioritizing "citizens' freedoms always before public health," and the other prioritizing "public health always before citizens' freedoms." this scale ranged from 0 (extreme communitarian position) to 10 (extreme libertarian position). we measured the divergence in these positions using established methods from polarization studies (lee, 2016; lelkes, 2016). additionally, we compared this divergence in public opinion on public health with divergence on other contentious issues in italian public discourse, such as immigration and european integration, to provide a benchmark for comparison. to address rq2, rq3, and rq4, we employed a series of cross-sectional and selfregressive logistic regression models. we constructed our dependent variables using the same question described earlier. to identify "the libertarians," we coded individuals who selected one of the three scale points closest to the statement "citizens' freedoms always come before public health" as 1 and all others as 0. conversely, to identify "the communitarians," we coded individuals who chose one of the three scale points closest to the statement "public health always comes before citizens' freedoms" as 1 and all others as 0. for our first independent variable, we considered responses to three questions recording the frequency of encountering fabricated news on television, radio, print, digital newspapers, social media platforms, and instant messaging apps. in our models, we also included an index measuring respondents’ knowledge of official truths about the covid-19 pandemic coming from institutional sources. finally, we used a survey battery on institutional trust and included a set of control variables (frequency of news media use, sociodemographic variables). findings contrary to the us (e.g. allcott et al., 2020), data analysis indicated that italian citizens' opinions did not significantly diverge into extreme libertarian and communitarian positions. in contrast to divisive issues like european integration and immigration, italy's dominant stance on public health was overwhelmingly communitarian, even at the end of phase 2. this trend may be attributed to the "rally-around-the-flag" phenomenon. however, such a widespread acceptance of unprecedented limitations on personal freedoms to protect public health could be read as a fertile ground for a normalized suspension of democratic rights within the emergency frame (agamben, 2020). the logistic regression findings underscored a pronounced distinction between libertarian and communitarian attitudes, extending beyond specific issues to broader perceptions of the news media, official truths, and government. the analysis demonstrated a strong relation between trust in the government, a trustful attitude toward the legacy news media and institutional sources as reliable sources, a vision of digital platforms as infodemic environments, and communitarian positions. conversely, libertarians tend to exhibit distrust in the government, skepticism towards traditional news media and official truths, and less concern about the spread of fake news on digital platforms. considering the typical “ceasefire” of journalists when a country experiences an external threat (bennett, 1990), individuals skeptical of the government might have perceived traditional media coverage of the government's lockdown measures as exaggerated, leading to a stronger resistance to restrictions on personal freedoms. conversely, those with greater confidence in the government and traditional media sources might have reinforced their belief in prioritizing public health. the opposite dynamic occurred on digital platforms, which often feature criticism of lockdown measures. these opposite attitudes towards traditional media and the government also aligned with levels of knowledge about official truths. higher levels of knowledge tended to correlate with communitarian positions. conclusions this study adopted a specific definition of polarization and polarized opinions that helps to focus on specific manifestations of opinion formation – at the societal and individual levels – which indicate unsustainable conflicts for democratic societies. moreover, the study delved into the intricate dynamics of fake news within the contemporary hybrid media system, also considering various regimes of truth, thus highlighting the value of going beyond the analysis of a single (social) medium. references agamben, g. (2020). a che punto siamo? l'epidemia come politica. quodlibet. allcott, h., boxell, l., conway, j., gentzkow, m., thaler, m., & yang, d. (2020). polarization and public health: partisan differences in social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic. journal of public economics, 191, 104254. baum, m., & groeling, t. (2008). crossing the water’s edge: elite rhetoric, media coverage and the rally-round-the-flag phenomenon. the journal of politics, 70(4), 1065–1085. bennett, l. w. (1990). toward a theory of press-state relations in the united states. journal of communication, 40(2), 103–27. bertero, a., & seddone, a. (2021). italy: populist in the mirror, (de)politicizing the covid-19 from government and opposition. in g. bobba & n. hubé (eds.), populism and the politicization of the covid-19 crisis in europe (pp. 45–58). palgrave macmillan. fiorina, m. p., abrams, s. j., & pope, j. c. (2005). culture war? the myth of a polarized america. longman giglietto, f., iannelli, l., valeriani, a., & rossi, l. (2019). “fake news” is the invention of a liar: how false information circulates within the hybrid news system. current sociology, 67(4), 625–42. lee, f. l. f. (2016). impact of social media on opinion polarization in varying times. communication and the public, 1(1), 56–71. lelkes, y. (2016). mass polarization: manifestations and measurements. public opinion quarterly, 80(s1), 392–410. prior, m. (2013). media and political polarization. annual review of political science, 16(1), 101–27. tucker, j. a., guess, a., barbera, p., vaccari, c., siegel, a., sanovich, s., stukal, d., & nyhan, b. (2018) (eds). social media, political polarization, and political disinformation: a review of the scientific literature. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/87402 waisbord, s. (2018). truth is what happens to news: on journalism, fake news, and post-truth. journalism studies, 19(13), 1866–78. world health organization (2020a, 15 february). who general director’s speech at munich security conference. https://www.who.int/directorgeneral/speeches/detail/munich-security-conference http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/87402 https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/munich-security-conference https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/munich-security-conference paper 3 representation? treaty? polarisation in news and social media debates about indigenous rights in australia and aotearoa new zealand axel bruns digital media research centre, queensland university of technology tariq choucair digital media research centre, queensland university of technology sebastian svegaard digital media research centre, queensland university of technology laura vodden digital media research centre, queensland university of technology daniel whelan-shamy digital media research centre, queensland university of technology introduction and background australia and aotearoa new zealand continue to struggle with their respective colonial legacies, especially when it comes to the rights, recognition, and representation of indigenous peoples. in 2023 and 2024, such controversies were once again reignited in both countries, if in very different contexts; this paper presents a comparative analysis of public debates in each case, paying particular attention to the intersections between social media discussions and news media coverage and the extent and structures of political polarisation which such controversies reveal. in australia, the centrist labor government under prime minister anthony albanese, elected in may 2022, honoured its election-night promise to hold a referendum on the constitutional recognition of australia’s indigenous peoples (morse, 2022). on 14 october 2023, australians voted on a proposal to enshrine an indigenous voice to parliament – a federal body representing aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples and providing advice to parliament on matters that affect indigenous peoples, which had been proposed in the 2017 uluṟu statement from the heart (national constitution convention, 2017). however, in spite of substantial majority support for the constitutional recognition of indigenous peoples in the early stages of the referendum campaign, the referendum lost 40% to 60% and failed to carry a majority in even a single of australia’s six states. this was due to substantial extent to a highly effective and well-organised no campaign, aided by substantial support for no campaigners in australia’s conservative media. in aotearoa new zealand, the 2023 national election, held by sheer coincidence on the same day as the australian voice referendum, eventually resulted – after several weeks of negotiations – in a change of government from the labour party to a coalition of the conservative national party with populist minor parties nz first and act (neilson et al., 2023). emerging amongst the key policy priorities for this new coalition (and especially for act) was the rolling back of existing policies recognising the rights, culture, and language of aotearoa new zealand’s indigenous māori minority; this manifested initially in part in the removal of bilingual english / te reo māori nomenclature from government departments and other offices (mcconnell, 2023), and subsequently centred especially on the reduction of special provisions for māori language, culture, and self-governance derived from the 1840 treaty of waitangi between british colonial representatives and māori chiefs. the depth of the division between māori groups and their supporters on the one hand and the conservative government became especially obvious in the variously frosty and angry reception that the coalition party leaders experienced when they attended and spoke at public ceremonies on the eve of waitangi day, aotearoa new zealand’s annual national day of commemoration, on 5 feb. 2024 (mckay, 2024). data and methods to investigate and analyse the public discourse surrounding these divisive debates about the recognition of indigenous peoples in australia and aotearoa new zealand, we gathered data on public debate across a range of mainstream social media platforms, including facebook and instagram (through crowdtangle, which covers activity in public groups and pages), twitter/x (via nodexl’s scraping service, and subject to the severe limitations that now apply to data gathering from this platform), and youtube (from the youtube data api). in each case, we gathered posts that contained one of a number of relevant keywords relating to either debate – for the voice to parliament referendum, from 1 jan. 2023 to the referendum date of 14 oct. 2023, and for the waitangi debate, from the election date of 14 oct. 2023 (data collection is ongoing, and for the purposes of this paper we will determine an appropriate end date). in addition, we also extracted from these posts any links to external sources (with particular attention to content from news outlets), and similarly examined whether youtube content appearing in our datasets originated from news sources. for each of these datasets we performed a mixed-methods analysis including natural language processing (nlp), topic modelling, network mapping, and qualitative close reading steps; we have also explored the potential to use large language models (llms) like openai’s chatgpt to systematically assess the expressed stance of individual social media accounts towards the voice referendum or waitangi treaty, and are currently reviewing the quality and reliability of such assessments. this combination of methods enabled us to identify a number of distinct groups of actors in each case, whose news sourcing and sharing practices we also examined. preliminary findings within the space available in this extended abstract we can only sketch out some overall findings, and focus here on the voice referendum case in australia. our analysis here clearly points to a highly asymmetrical contest: over the course of the campaign, the no side was able to very effectively mobilise uncertainty, doubt, and even fear towards the voice to parliament proposal (indeed, a deliberate strategy to foment doubt and fear especially amongst comparatively uninformed voters was revealed by media reporting; sakkal, 2023). this is exemplified by the campaign’s simplistic but highly effective slogan ‘if you don’t know, vote no’. such efforts were further aided and amplified by a coalition of conservative and far-right politicians and media outlets, with the arch-conservative sky news australia assuming an especially prominent position in the discourse network. fig. 1: the network of facebook groups and pages sharing on each other’s content demonstrates the considerably more coherent structure of the no campaign, and the centrality of sky news australia as a source of no-aligned content, while the yes campaign is considerably less organised and has no comparably central campaign or media sources. the yes campaign, by contrast, was considerably less coordinated: it enrolled a loose network of indigenous activists, progressive politicians, union leaders, media and sports celebrities, and progressive activists, but this network lacked a core driver and failed to engage centrist or progressive media as supporters and amplifiers; this is due in part to the considerable market power of conservative media in australia (led by rupert murdoch’s news corporation, which also operates sky news australia), but also to the editorial choices of public broadcaster abc and even the progressive guardian australia to favour even-handed fact-checking over active campaigning. such choices represent a principled journalistic stance that is perfectly defensible, of course, but this mismatch between activist and disinterested journalistic reporting did also mean that public debate in news and social media was able to be dominated by the clearly partisan editorialising of sky news australia and other conservative and far-right outlets in support of the no campaign. further analysis and interpretation given the different status quo in aotearoa new zealand (where an existing treaty between indigenous people and colonial society is being undermined), we expect our second case sky news australia senator jacinta price – don’t divide us vote no the voice 2023 – yes or no pauline hanson’s please explain the uluru statement from the heart yes 23 abc news pensioners, veterans and seniors political discussion group we loathe dutton & murdoch facebook on-sharing network black/green/grey/red: public facebook pages/groups yes/no stance: llm-based coding of post content study to exhibit very different patterns of debate, and intend to analyse and highlight these divergences in the full paper. overall, we will interpret our observations through the lens of polarisation, distinguishing between the various forms of polarisation (issue-based, ideological, affective, interpretive, interactional, …) that have been identified in the relevant literature (cf. kubin & von sikorski, 2021; lelkes, 2016; marino & ianelli, 2023; yarchi et al., 2021), and assessing in particular whether the patterns of polarised discourse and engagement that are evident in our two cases exhibit any of the symptoms of destructive polarisation that esau et al. (2023) have identified. should such symptoms of destructive polarisation be present in our data – and our preliminary analysis of the voice referendum debate certainly suggests that it exhibits some such symptoms – we will also reflect on how such trends could have been avoided and might yet be reversed. while the voice to parliament referendum is lost, the struggle to maintain and safeguard māori rights continues, and in australia, too, greater recognition and representation of aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples in policymaking remains on the political agenda despite this major setback. references esau, k., choucair, t., vilkins, s., svegaard, s., bruns, a., o’connor farfan, k. & lubicz, c. (2023, 30 may). destructive political polarization in the context of digital communication – a critical literature review and conceptual framework. international communication association, toronto. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/238775/ kubin, e., & von sikorski, c. (2021). the role of (social) media in political polarization: a systematic review. annals of the international communication association, 45(3), 188–206. https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.2021.1976070 lelkes, y. (2016). mass polarization: manifestations and measurements. public opinion quarterly, 80(s1), 392–410. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfw005 marino, g., & iannelli, l. (2023). seven years of studying the associations between political polarization and problematic information: a literature review. frontiers in sociology, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2023.1174161 mcconnell, g. (2023, 24 nov.). incoming government to change branding to english and repeal treaty clauses. stuff. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/133346834/incoming-government-to-changebranding-to-english-and-repeal-treaty-clauses mckay, b. (2024, 5 feb.). heckles and boos for nz government to ‘protect treaty of waitangi’. sydney morning herald. https://www.smh.com.au/world/oceania/hecklesand-boos-for-nz-government-to-protect-treaty-of-waitangi-20240205-p5f2iw.html morse, d. (2022, 23 may). anthony albanese promised action on the uluru statement from the heart. so what is the proposed indigenous voice to parliament? abc news. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-24/federal-election-anthony-albaneseindigenous-uluru-statement/101092816 national constitution convention. (2017). uluru statement from the heart. https://ulurustatemdev.wpengine.com/wpcontent/uploads/2022/01/ulurustatementfromtheheartplaintext.pdf neilson, m., pearse, a., & cheng, d. (2023, 24 nov.). coalition agreement: national, act, nz first and the deal that delivers new government. nz herald. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/238775/ https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.2021.1976070 https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfw005 https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2023.1174161 https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/133346834/incoming-government-to-change-branding-to-english-and-repeal-treaty-clauses https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/133346834/incoming-government-to-change-branding-to-english-and-repeal-treaty-clauses https://www.smh.com.au/world/oceania/heckles-and-boos-for-nz-government-to-protect-treaty-of-waitangi-20240205-p5f2iw.html https://www.smh.com.au/world/oceania/heckles-and-boos-for-nz-government-to-protect-treaty-of-waitangi-20240205-p5f2iw.html https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-24/federal-election-anthony-albanese-indigenous-uluru-statement/101092816 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-24/federal-election-anthony-albanese-indigenous-uluru-statement/101092816 https://ulurustatemdev.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/ulurustatementfromtheheartplaintext.pdf https://ulurustatemdev.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/ulurustatementfromtheheartplaintext.pdf https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/coalition-agreement-national-act-nz-first-andthe-deal-that-delivers-new-government/4medzqbq7bdk3j3dlg5k5k3hhy/ sakkal, p. (2023, 12 sep.). no campaign’s ‘fear, doubt’ strategy revealed. sydney morning herald. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/no-campaign-s-fear-doubtstrategy-revealed-20230910-p5e3fu.html yarchi, m., baden, c., & kligler-vilenchik, n. (2021). political polarization on the digital sphere: a cross-platform, over-time analysis of interactional, positional, and affective polarization on social media. political communication, 38(1–2), 98–139. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1785067 https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/coalition-agreement-national-act-nz-first-and-the-deal-that-delivers-new-government/4medzqbq7bdk3j3dlg5k5k3hhy/ https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/coalition-agreement-national-act-nz-first-and-the-deal-that-delivers-new-government/4medzqbq7bdk3j3dlg5k5k3hhy/ https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/no-campaign-s-fear-doubt-strategy-revealed-20230910-p5e3fu.html https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/no-campaign-s-fear-doubt-strategy-revealed-20230910-p5e3fu.html https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1785067 paper 4 online polarisation as framework in researching social media activism against sexual violence in indonesia alia azmi digital media research centre, queensland university of technology background this study proposes online polarisation as the theoretical framework in researching women’s online activism by focusing on the case of indonesia, for three reasons: (a) the different characteristics of indonesia’s digital feminist activism from those in the global north, where the #metoo online movement started with individuals sharing experiences online and coming together as a shared network in voicing similar interests, (b) indonesia’s ideological contestation between progressives (secular nationalists) and conservatives (islamism) that often leads to polarisation based on religious interpretation, particularly on women’s issues; and (c) the fact that similar controversies also happened in other countries with majority muslim populations, and particularly those that have secular constitutions. digital feminist activism in the global north is identified by the common use of the internet to counter the mainstream media’s silencing of women’s experiences of sexual harassment (salter, 2013; sills et al., 2016). social media are considered a safe space for victims to tell of their experiences, with the choice of anonymity and in the hope of being heard, believed, and supported (andalibi et al., 2018; gorissen et al., 2023). social media affordances like hashtags allow users to find others with similar interests (bruns & burgess, 2015), and in the case of sexual violence can also frame meanings into terms that expose the prevalence of sexual violence (mendes et al., 2019). movements like slutwalk, the hollaback!, #yesallwomen, and #metoo are considered successes in sharing individual stories and using catchphrases to expose sexual violence in the global north (fileborn, 2014; loney-howes, 2019; mendes, 2015). in countries of the global south, sharing sensitive individual stories, such as harassment experiences, is not common, and frowned upon. the disclosure of individual experiences of sexual violence does not always result in inspiration for others to share stories, as in the #metoo movement, due to different identity, legal, and sociocultural systems. objections from family and stigma from the community are the biggest challenges for victims and activists to speak up against sexual violence. in indonesia, speaking up against harassment and expressing feminist perspectives can lead to judgment based on religious stigma. public discussions about women’s roles in society and the fight against discrimination and violence have been polarising society, which is visible on social media and in policy-making processes. controversies about women’s issues in indonesia are rooted in different interpretations of religious teachings. the feminist movement faces challenges from religious groups who claim that feminism, “imported” from western culture, is incompatible with local and religious values (nisa, 2019). discussions about gender roles and gender policy reforms are often influenced by different perspectives between secular nationalists and islamists (afrianty, 2020; hidayahtulloh, 2023), for example relating to controversies about the role of women in the family and the bylaws on head covers for female students in certain regions of the country. the elimination of sexual violence (esv) bill, proposed in 2016 to the national legislative, was only passed after six years of deliberation and controversies between conservative and progressive groups. in october 2021, the minister of education implemented a decree to prevent and address sexual violence on university campuses, which also sparked controversies similar to the esv bill. both the bill and the decree identify sexual violence as sexual advances without the victim’s consent. the definition is considered to align with democratic cosmopolitan values as the basis for gender equality norms; meanwhile, conservative groups and parties accused the proponents of the bill of a hidden agenda to adopt western liberal values (hidayahtulloh, 2023). this polarisation stems from indonesia’s characteristics as the most populous muslim nation, but with secular constitution, which means that the constitution does not recognise a specific state religion. the constitution, however, does mention the belief in one god as one of the state’s ideological principles, which is often interpreted differently between conservative (islamism) and the progressive (secular nationalist) groups (bourchier, 2019; hidayahtulloh, 2023). the debate is often linked to the history of the creation of the indonesian constitution, when secular nationalists rejected a proposal from the islamist parties and organisations to include islamic sharia as part of the constitution and the nation’s ideology, the five principles of pancasila. the drive to combine democracy and islamic teachings, however, remains alive among conservative islamists until now (bourchier, 2019). in discussions from social interactions to government policies, it is quite common to have different opinions between religious conservatives and moderate secular nationalists. other countries with majority muslim populations have been facing the same problem when dealing with women’s rights. surveys indicate that women in muslim countries are often divided on issues such as wearing a veil, the role of wives, inheritance rights for women, and the implementation of sharia (pew research center, 2013). iran, for example, has seen women’s movements that align themselves with the international human rights framework (far, 2023). women in the middle east and other regions have improved their knowledge of more moderate interpretations of the quran to eliminate discrimination against women, therefore creating different paths from the traditional patriarchal interpretation of islamic teachings (kharroub, 2015). in these countries, there have been efforts to fights for women’s rights and against discrimination and violence, but there are still challenges from the traditional perspective, making polarisation unavoidable. research design this study focused on the controversies on social media about the indonesian minister of education’s decree about sexual violence on campus and the elimination of sexual violence bill. the ministerial decree came into effect in october 2021, in response to increasing reports of sexual violence cases in universities across indonesia. at the time of the decree, indonesia did not have any specific laws about sexual violence, and the elimination of sexual violence bill was still being deliberated in the legislative body, the people’s representative council (dpr). it was eventually passed in 2022. this study uses posts about the ministerial decree and the esv bill from twitter, as one of the most used social media platforms in indonesia. i collected historical tweets including key terms related to the two topics, using the twitter academic api in two different timeframes for both topics: (1) the ministerial decree from 1 october 2021, when the news about the decree started, to 31 december 2021; and (2) the esv bill from 1 april 2016, when it was proposed to the legislative, to 12 april 2022, when the bill was passed. the data were analysed to identify important highlights such as peak activities, prominent actors, and posts that attracted the most interactions. i also examined the network of interactions in the data, to identify different clusters or groups that can be understood as representing the various political groups that are polarised against each other. by analysing the posts, actors, and the interaction network, i identify how polarisation about the issue contributes to or works against activism against sexual violence in indonesia. references afrianty, d. (2020). rising public piety and the status of women in indonesia two decades after reformasi. trans : trans-regional and-national studies of southeast asia, 8(1), 65–80. https://doi.org/10.1017/trn.2019.14 andalibi, n., haimson, o. l., choudhury, m. d., & forte, a. (2018). social support, reciprocity, and anonymity in responses to sexual abuse disclosures on social media. acm transactions on computer-human interaction, 25(5), 28:1-28:35. https://doi.org/10.1145/3234942 bourchier, d. m. (2019). two decades of ideological contestation in indonesia: from democratic cosmopolitanism to religious nationalism. journal of contemporary asia, 49(5), 713–733. https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2019.1590620 bruns, a., & burgess, j. (2015). twitter hashtags from ad hoc to calculated publics. in n. rambukkana (ed.), hashtag publics: the power and politics of discursive networks (pp. 13–27). peter lang. far, t. s. (2023, june 26). unveiling resistance: the struggle for women’s rights in iran | human rights watch. https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/06/26/unveilingresistance-struggle-womens-rights-iran fileborn, b. (2014). online activism and street harassment: digital justice or shouting into the ether? griffith journal of law and human dignity, 2(1) (women & violence: 2014 special), 23. gorissen, m., van den berg, c. jw., ruiter, s., & bijleveld, c. cjh. (2023). sharing unwanted sexual experiences online: a cross-platform analysis of disclosures before, during and after the #metoo movement. computers in human behavior, 144, 107724. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2023.107724 hidayahtulloh, m. a. (2023). ideological contestation and gender policy reforms in post-reformasi indonesia. journal of contemporary asia, 0(0), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2023.2177558 https://doi.org/10.1017/trn.2019.14 https://doi.org/10.1145/3234942 https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2019.1590620 https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/06/26/unveiling-resistance-struggle-womens-rights-iran https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/06/26/unveiling-resistance-struggle-womens-rights-iran https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2023.107724 https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2023.2177558 kharroub, t. (2015, october 4). five things you need to know about women in islam: implications for advancing women’s rights in the middle east. arab center washington dc. https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/five-things-you-need-to-knowabout-women-in-islam-implications-for-advancing-womens-rights-in-the-middle-east/ loney-howes, r. (2019). the politics of the personal: the evolution of anti-rape activism from second-wave feminism to #metoo. in b. fileborn & r. loney-howes (eds.), #metoo and the politics of social change (pp. 21–35). springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15213-0_2 mendes, k. (2015). slutwalk: feminism, activism and media. palgrave macmillan uk. https://books.google.com.au/books?id=jfemcgaaqbaj mendes, k., keller, j., & ringrose, j. (2019). digitized narratives of sexual violence: making sexual violence felt and known through digital disclosures. new media & society, 21(6), 1290–1310. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818820069 pew research center. (2013). the world’s muslims: religion, politics, and society. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religionpolitics-society-women-in-society/ salter, m. (2013). justice and revenge in online counter-publics: emerging responses to sexual violence in the age of social media. crime, media, culture, 9(3), 225–242. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659013493918 sills, s., pickens, c., beach, k., jones, l., calder-dawe, o., benton-greig, p., & gavey, n. (2016). rape culture and social media: young critics and a feminist counterpublic. feminist media studies, 16(6), 935–951. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2015.1137962 https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/five-things-you-need-to-know-about-women-in-islam-implications-for-advancing-womens-rights-in-the-middle-east/ https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/five-things-you-need-to-know-about-women-in-islam-implications-for-advancing-womens-rights-in-the-middle-east/ https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15213-0_2 https://books.google.com.au/books?id=jfemcgaaqbaj https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818820069 https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-women-in-society/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-women-in-society/ https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659013493918 https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2015.1137962 paper 5 unpacking the highly polarized u.s. abortion debate online: political candidates’ messaging before and after the dobbs ruling jennifer stromer-galley syracuse university social media platforms in the united states, especially twitter and facebook, have become central communication channels in the public sphere. politicians and those running for political office actively use platforms such as twitter and facebook to communicate to their supporters and the broader public (stromer-galley, 2019). they use these platforms to articulate their policy agendas and attack their opponents’ agendas. there is also concern that the platforms foster communication that contributes to political polarization (bail, 2021). research suggests, for, example that people are more likely to share negative messages on twitter than positive messages (stromer-galley, zhang, hemsley, & tanupabrungsun, 2018), which can help boost polarization. access to abortion is a contested and polarizing policy topic in the united states. political polarization is a process and a consequence of extreme rhetoric that shapes public attitudes (sunstein, 2002). of special concern is affective polarization, which is a negative predisposition that partisans have towards out-groups members (iyengar et al. 2012). even in the months and years after the u.s. supreme court codified a woman’s right to the medical procedure in 1974, it remained a fraught political topic, with republican politicians typically aligning with the pro-life movement, and democratic politicians aligning with the pro-choice movement, and both sides articulating affectively polarizing discourse. legal protections of abortion access have eroded since 1974, with conservatives vowing to overturn the supreme court’s ruling in roe v. wade that defined those protections. the election of republican donald trump and his appointment of three supreme court justices led to the ruling in dobbs vs. jackson’s women’s health in 2022 that undid the legal protections defined in roe. ideally, elections provide the citizenry the opportunity to learn the policy positions of their potential representatives in government, and then decide on who would best represent their interests (trent, friedenberg, & denton, 2011). in practice, u.s. political campaigns are episodic exercises in political polarization, in which ideology and identity coalesce around the candidates of the two major parties (hernandez et al., 2021; lau et al., 2017). in this context, the campaigns use social media to not only articulate their policy positions but do so in a way to court supporters and enable them to amplify their message and evangelize to the broader public. social media becomes an amplifier of affectivelypolarizing speech. one weakness of the literature on polarization is that it focuses more on the attitudes of the public than the causes of those attitudes. political discourse, especially by people in political power, contribute to the polarizing attitudes that are increasingly pervasive. given that, my project aims to explore how the discourse by political candidates on social media evolved from 2018 to 2022 – from the lead-up to the dobbs ruling to the election in the year it took effect. surprisingly little research has yet explored how political candidates have used their social media platforms to either advocate for or attack abortion rights, and we know little about how the discourse evolved in that time, or how the public engaged with those messages. to understand the discourse in this time period, i ask the following research questions: to what extent did political campaign messages on twitter and facebook change between 2018, when abortion was still codified in federal law, and 2022, after roe v. wade was overturned? were republican candidates more likely to share social media messages about abortion as compared with democrats, and were there changes over time? were candidates more likely to attack opponents for their positions on abortion, or to instead advocate for their own positions? to what extent did women candidates emphasize abortion differently than male candidates, and what changes if any are in evidence from before to after the dobbs ruling? were there differences in the incivility that attacked opponents in abortion messages by party, by gender, or by political race over time? are there any differences in the messaging strategies on twitter as compared with facebook across the three election periods by race and by party? the data for this analysis comes from a multi-year project collecting facebook posts and tweets from u.s. political candidates. the corpus includes messages from nearly all candidates with facebook accounts and twitter accounts that ran for u.s. senate or governor during the general elections of 2018, 2020, and 2022.1 to analyze the massive volume of messages, as part of a larger project, we developed algorithms that categorize messages on a variety of different dimensions, including on their policy positions, whether the messages attack opponents or advocate for their own positions (stromer-galley and rossini, 2023), and whether the message tone is civil or uncivil. we also collected metadata from twitter and facebook of engagement metrics, including likes, shares/retweets, and comments. we further gathered meta data regarding the candidate, such as their political party and their gender. i am currently in the process of updating our policy topic classifiers to take advantage of the bert large language model (devlin, chang, lee, & toutanova, 2018), and so the data are not yet analyzable. we specifically have a policy classifier focused on women’s issues, which includes abortion. our process will include initially analyzing the “women’s issues” categorized messages and then building a key-word search within those to identify messages pertaining explicitly to abortion. we will then further build classifiers to identify messages that support or that oppose abortion access. once those messages are categorized, then we will analyze the data with a series of descriptive statistics to answer the research questions. in addition, we will read the messages across time to also provide a richer qualitative analysis of the changes over time in the public messaging by political candidates, especially around polarizing discourse. 1 i note “nearly” because collection problems surfaced in 2018. we failed to collect a few messages or all of the general election messages of less than 10% of the candidates that year, primarily senatorial candidates. we attempted to collect those missing messages in 2023, but a few candidates deleted their campaign accounts creating a gap in our collection. our aim is to trace how the public messaging by political candidates on social media evolved over the time period from before to after the dobbs ruling. political candidates use their social media accounts to articulate their policy positions, but at the same time we are concerned some communicate in ways that denigrate and dehumanize the opposition, which creates the environment for affective polarization. while members of the public and elites can and do disagree intensely on policy matters, polarization is more likely when the debate turns hostile and dehumanizing. references bail, c. (2021). breaking the social media prism: how to make our platforms less polarizing. princeton university press. devlin, j., chang, m-w., lee, k., & toutanova, k. (2018). bert: pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805 hernandez, e., anduiza, e., & rico, g. (2021). affective polarization and the salience of elections. electoral studies, 69. 10.1016/j.electstud.2020.102203 iyengar, s., sood, g., & lelkes, y. (2012). affect, not ideology: a social identity perspective on polarization. public opinion quarterly, 76(3), 405–431. 10.1093/poq/nfs038 lau, r., anderson, d. j., ditonto, t. m., kleinberg, m. s., & redlawsk, d. p. (2017). effect of media environment diversity and advertising tone on information search, selective exposure, and affective polarization. political behavior, 39, 231 255. 10.1007/s11109-016-9354-8 sunstein, c. (2002). the law of group polarization. journal of political philosophy, 10 (2), 175-195. 10.1111/1467-9760.00148 stromer-galley, j. (2019). presidential campaigning in the internet age (2nd ed.). oxford university press. stromer-galley, j., & rossini, p. (2023). categorizing political campaign messages on social media using supervised machine learning. journal of information technology & politics. 10.1080/19331681.2023.2231436. stromer-galley, j., zhang, f., hemsley, j., & tanupabrungsun, s. (2018). tweeting the attack: predicting gubernatorial candidate attack messaging and its spread. international journal of communication, 12, 3511-3532. 1932-8036/20180005 trent, j.s., friedenberg, r. v., & denton, jr. r. e. (2011). political campaign communication: principles and practices (7th ed.). new york: rowman & littlefield publishers. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): butkowski, c., corry, f. moses, a., & bhandari, a. (2023, october). digital memory, pandemic temporalities: reflections on studying and storing crisis media. panel presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. digital memory, pandemic temporalities: reflections on studying and storing crisis media chelsea butkowski american university frances corry university of pittsburgh adetobi moses university of pennsylvania aparajita bhandari university of waterloo a strength of the wide-ranging field of digital memory studies is its ability to interpret how digital media use shapes the experience and interpretation of crises. whether examining how groups use social media platforms to create community memory around incidents of racial injustice (smit, heinrich, & broersma, 2017) or how individuals use the internet to document the aftermath and unfolding of environmental disasters (tandoc & takahashi, 2017), studies at this intersection probe how crisis events are processed, historicized and reinterpreted through digital media. at the same time, studies of digital memory have long been concerned with how digital media use interfaces with temporality, and the ways in which networked digital devices–from websites (gitelman, 2006) to platform algorithms (jacobsen & beer, 2021) to ai applications (kidd & mcavoy, 2023)–shape collective relations to time and to the past. while temporality and crisis are both fundamental threads within digital memory studies, it is rare that they have been in concerted discussion. this panel argues that this is a missed opportunity, especially because a recent and ongoing crisis–the covid-19 pandemic–has revealed how deeply intertwined digital media use, temporality, and crisis are. using covid-19 as a case, this panel examines how networked digital media interface with experiences of temporality, playing a fundamental role in shaping how the covid-19 crisis is related to and remembered over time. more than a juncture through which to explore how fundamental themes in digital memory studies interact, covid-19 has also revealed an opportunity to reflect on approaches to studying digital memory in general. unlike other crisis events that a researcher might interpret from an outside perspective–whether by virtue of temporal distance (e.g. the event occurred long ago) or social distance (e.g. not being directly affected by the event in question)– no one was a complete “outsider” to the effects of the pandemic. in response, this panel also explores how digital memory research was altered by the conditions of the pandemic, whether grappling with how the strange experience of pandemic time shaped participants' ability to reflect on their experience, or how digital platforms and infrastructures emerged, changed, or obstructed practices of memory work and archiving. crisis events like the covid-19 pandemic are often invoked as revolutionary, whether these revolutions refer to sweeping societal changes or activism and social justice. indeed, pandemic safety restrictions precipitated social and technological change while also intensifying existing inequalities. pandemic safety restrictions also required researchers to adjust their methodologies and project designs, adopting new fluidities and practices while sacrificing others. amid ongoing conversations about social and epistemological revolution found in crisis, this panel also interrogates how considering temporal frameworks can shape what it means to “revolutionize” social and institutional memory practices as well as academic research approaches. this panel incorporates four projects that examine the relationship between crisis and digital memory across complementary temporal and structural considerations. in conversation, these projects present reflections spanning personal and institutional pandemic memories; crisis time scales; and visual, sonic, and infrastructural media. the panel begins with a project theorizing the interlapping time scales of pandemic and crisis time, internet time, and research time that shape the study of crisis events in digital contexts. then, the second project reflects on the process of scrolling back through research participants’ pandemic era social media profiles—evaluating the profile as a space for memory storage and connective memory work. from there, the third project examines corona diaries, a digital audio archive populated with usergenerated submissions from around the globe, through communal listening and talking back to archive entries. the final project investigates how professional archivists and librarians have managed rapid response collecting initiatives during the pandemic and made sense of its ambiguous end point—when to stop collecting. ultimately, this panel underscores the interconnectedness of crisis and temporality in digital memory studies, inviting conversation on mediated memories of disruptive events constructed by institutions, individuals, and researchers themselves. over three years after the start of the ongoing covid-19 pandemic, this panel will meditate on the early memories of an unbounded pandemic history. together, we seek to spark further inquiry on the ways that crisis shapes digital memory as well as the ways that experiencing crisis informs and, in some cases, transforms the research process. references gitelman, l. (2006). always already new: history and the data of culture. mit press. jacobsen, b., & beer, d. (2021). social media and the automatic production of memory: classification, ranking and the sorting of the past. bristol university press. kidd, j., & nieto mcavoy, e. (2023). deep nostalgia: remediated memory, algorithmic nostalgia and technological ambivalence. convergence, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565221149839 smit, r., heinrich, a., & broersma, m. (2017). activating the past in the ferguson protests: memory work, digital activism and the politics of platforms. new media & society, 20(9), 3119–3139. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817741849 tandoc, e. c., & takahashi, b. (2017). log in if you survived: collective coping on social media in the aftermath of typhoon haiyan in the philippines. new media & society, 19(11), 1778–1793. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816642755 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): butkowski, c., corry, f. moses, a., & bhandari, a. (2023, october). digital memory, pandemic temporalities: reflections on studying and storing crisis media. panel presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. from pandemic time to research time: examining shifting timescales of crisis and digital research aparajita bhandari university of waterloo introduction when the covid-19 virus rapidly spread across the globe in early 2020 it upended daily life and changed the course of history. while there have numerous scholarly explorations of the pandemic through the lens of public health and political crisis relatively little attention has been paid to the ways that covid-19 was and is fundamentally also what baraitser and salisbury (2020) refer to as a crisis of time. common rhetoric has referred to the pandemic as a paradigmatic temporal shift, ushering a new post pandemic era or epoch that is markedly different than the “before times” that came prior (velasco et al., 2022). terms such as ‘unprecedented’, ‘uncertain’ and ‘unparalleled’ have been endlessly parroted by governments, corporations and institutions to mark the way that this crisis has drastically rearranged temporalities of and temporal relationships to technology, work and social life (chan, 2020). this paper takes this call to examine the times and temporalities of the pandemic seriously. drawing from a broader two-year digital ethnographic project examining the use of social media to build community and provide support during the pandemic in toronto, canada, this paper takes a step back to engage in a rigorous reflection of the temporalities of digital life during the pandemic. ultimately, this paper argues that three distinct yet interlapping temporal scales which i term pandemic time, research time and internet time must be concurrently considered and accounted for when studying digital pandemic data. this framework also has implications for how we come to study crisis events more widely. pandemic time and crisis time the covid-19 pandemic, akin to other crises, was characterized by simultaneous and parallel temporal processes of rupture and stasis. firstly, at certain periods of the pandemic especially during the beginning, changes and shifts happened very rapidly. within the span of a few weeks schools and businesses shut down, flights became grounded, borders closed, and governments across the globe imposed lockdowns and quarantine orders. many have described (velasco et al., 2022) a sense of the pandemic marking a distinct before and an after, a temporal rift that separated the time of the pandemic from the time that preceded it. although it is tempting to say that there is a split in our timeline, critical scholars especially feminist and black scholars remind us of the dangers of such out of time rhetoric and remind us that this moment is not outside of or a shift in the progression of time but rather a product of it (bhatia, 2021; chan, 2020). our experience of the pandemic is irrevocably intertwined with the social that came context; it is a natural outgrowth of imperialist and capitalist processes history and the result of decades if not centuries of crises-racial, environmental and social preceding it (neely & lopez, 2022). yet, just as periods of the pandemic were characterized by this sense of temporal rupture and rift for many much of the pandemic is reflective of a deep sense of temporal suspension and stasis – a feeling of time slowing down, if not grinding to a complete halt. whether it was due to quarantine or simply due to the disruption of one’s normal routine many found themselves suddenly out of step from the breakneck pace of modern capitalism forced to slow down. internet time even as every aspect of non-digital life had come to a standstill amid nationwide lockdowns, digital life began to grow rapidly and exponentially. from a shift towards remote education to the increase in online streaming and retail, the proliferation of the digital led to an acceleration in the development of virtual spaces that can operate both synchronously and asynchronously (chan, 2020). prior work has examined both how online experiences are fundamentally shaped by time (keightley, 2012) and also how the proliferation of the internet has led to a fundamental restructuring of our conceptions and experience of time (lohmeier et al., 2020). yet what i term as internet time in this paper refers not just to the structuring of time on and through the internet but rather to the vital temporal qualities of internet data. all social data, both online and offline, is embedded within the flow of time. it is created within a specific temporal context and under a specific set of temporal constraints and conditions. yet internet data is often methodologically treated as though it is timeless. through technologies such as web-scrapers, digital apis and the way back machine we are able to relatively easily access data from the past and bring it into our present, removed from the moments of time within which they were produced. in order to holistically understand the online data that we work with, researchers must begin to meaningfully grapple with how the data are placed in time. research time and studying the recent past online finally, the last timescale that must be considered is that of the academy itself. the modern neo-liberal university is increasingly governed by linear, future oriented timescales which is at odds with the with the non-linear, often slow moving and emergent temporal realities of the lived experience of doing research (ylijoki, 2014). the university also attempts to remove itself from the “indebtedness of the past” (facer & smith, 2021) and often becomes doggedly focused on the production of present and future. thus, researchers within the academy become plagued by a need to produce research that is “timely”, current or cutting edge. yet almost all research endeavours concerned with examination of events and crises, even those which are not traditionally conceived of as historical or archival, are at their core projects in reconstructing the past, even if it is the recent past. this is by virtue of the fact that social phenomena must be studied after the fact. therefore, in paying attention to these disjoints between research time as constructed by the institution and in the lived temporalities of the research of doing we come to more clearly understand how all of us even when we do not study time are always fundamentally working with and in time. references baraitser, l., & salisbury, l. (2020). ‘containment, delay, mitigation’: waiting and care in the time of a pandemic. wellcome open research, 5. bhatia, s. (2021). the pandemic is a mirror: decolonizing psychology and racism in times of covid-19 crisis. in the psychology of global crises and crisis politics (pp. 65-89). palgrave macmillan, cham. chan, n. (2020). pandemic temporalities: distal futurity in the digital capitalocene. journal of environmental media, 1(1), 13-1. facer, k., & smith, b. (2021). working with/in time: how university timescapes shape knowledge. in working with time in qualitative research (pp. 182-197). routledge. keightley, e. (ed.). (2012). time, media and modernity. springer. lohmeier, c., kaun, a., & pentzold, c. (2020). making time in digital societies: considering the interplay of media, data, and temporalities—an introduction to the special issue. new media & society, 22(9), 1521-1527. neely, a. h., & lopez, p. j. (2022). toward healthier futures in post-pandemic times: political ecology, racial capitalism, and black feminist approaches to care. geography compass, 16(2), e12609. velasco, p. f., perroy, b., gurchani, u., & casati, r. (2022). lost in pandemic time: a phenomenological analysis of temporal disorientation during the covid-19 crisis. phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, 1-24. ylijoki, o. h. (2014). conquered by project time? conflicting temporalities in university research. in universities in the flux of time (pp. 108-121). routledge. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): butkowski, c., corry, f. moses, a., & bhandari, a. (2023, october). digital memory, pandemic temporalities: reflections on studying and storing crisis media. panel presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “god, it just keeps going . . .”: storing personal memories of collective crisis on the social media profile chelsea butkowski american university in times of national and global crisis, people turn to personal media production to collectively witness, document, and cope with mass disruption as it reconfigures their lives (frosh & pinchevski, 2008). this practice encompasses pre-digital media modalities such as paper diaries and scrapbooks (good, 2013), but social media platforms also extend its reach and reshape its manifestations (humphreys, 2018). foundationally, social media platforms provide digital spaces for the storage and display of personal media content for future reengagement, which has led some scholars to liken them to exhibitions or archives (hogan, 2010; zhao et al., 2013). this ability to “freeze, replay, and store” (zelizer, 2002, p. 698) personal experiences through media is a key building block of connective memory work, which involves reconstructing the past in the present using digital, networked technologies (smit, 2020). in other words, social media platforms play an important role in preserving personal accounts of pivotal events to forge collective narratives and spur recovery in the face of crisis (zelizer, 2002). although boyd (2014) labels the persistence of digital content as one of the key technological affordances of social media, this persistence has become increasingly subject to platform specificities, governance, and user practices (abidin, 2021). these changes have spurred theoretical and methodological questions surrounding the preservation and obfuscation of social media traces within digital memory studies and platform studies (e.g., cardell et al., 2017). how do social media platforms configure users’ access to their own memories via their social media posts? what role do platform interfaces and cultures play in dictating what is most readily remembered and forgotten? i examine these questions through the lens of one of the chief storytelling sites within most social media platforms: the social media profile. although social media profiles reflect only a fraction of the digital traces that users produce, they display a curated version of that users’ selfhood and posts for networked audiences (hogan, 2010). this project extends research on the mnemonic capabilities of social media platforms to trace how profiles shape personal remembrancing during a largescale, collective crisis. i focus specifically on the covid-19 pandemic as a far-reaching global crisis that showcases collective experiences of disruption as well as heightened social inequalities. using self-confrontational methodologies, the purpose of this research is to deconstruct how social media profiles enable and constrain personal projects of connective memory work during the covid-19 pandemic. research design this project draws from 48 social media scroll back interviews with adult social media users from the united states conducted between july and december 2021. the scroll back method combines in-depth interviewing with observational research by inviting participants to scroll back through their own social media profiles alongside the researcher (robards & lincoln, 2019). the profile serves as a “memory object,” and the interview reflects on machineand user-created traces through participants’ personal memories of them (møller & robards, 2019, p. 105). in providing a “tour” of their profile history, the participant serves as a co-analyst of their own digital self-making while the researcher asks sensitizing questions (lincoln & robards, 2017). in these 40–70-minute-long virtual interviews, i asked participants to scroll back through their profiles to capture the duration of the pandemic in the u.s., starting in march 2020. participants selected the social media platforms that we discussed, which came to include facebook, twitter, instagram, snapchat, and tiktok. the data from this project, though largely focused on recalling pandemic memories, is inevitably situated within its own contemporary pandemic present in late 2021. in this study, i examine how participants reinterpret the pandemic past within the interview present to reflect on the ways that different social media profiles and platforms shape how participants preserve and recall personal memories of the covid-19 crisis. profile structure and practice for memory work the scroll back method encourages a purposefully artificial interaction with social media profiles, even if many participants mentioned using the same practice in their everyday lives: the act of manually looking back at one’s own past digital media traces. conducting these interviews across distinct social media platforms underscored the role of platform memory infrastructures in the storage and display of media traces (corry, 2022). i found that several interlocking aspects of memory infrastructure shaped the accessibility of participants’ past posts for present engagement. these include profile interfaces, platform interference, and user interaction. profile interface profile interface played a significant role in facilitating scroll back interviews, with some profiles making past posts a much more central aspect of user experience than others. for example, instagram’s grid-like profile interface allowed participants to easily scroll back to the early days of the pandemic and to chart the journey of their profiles since (leaver et al., 2020). it also encouraged extensive editing. several participants reported reflecting “almost obsessively” on their instagram profiles while staying at home under pandemic lockdowns, leading them to delete posts that they reinterpreted as unflattering or, in some cases, repurpose their profiles altogether. alternatively, facebook profiles presented a cumbersome and difficult interface for scrolling through past posts. at the time of the interviews, facebook’s profile interface showed only a single post at a time with no readily available option to move to specific dates or years. one participant, elena (21), maintained at the beginning of the interview that she had completely stopped using facebook since the start of the pandemic. however, she later discovered that she had shared and posted frequently in the first six months of lockdowns, a fact that she had forgotten until engaging in the laborious process of scrolling backward. elena went from saying, “the pandemic started, and i just stopped posting” to “god, it just keeps going.” platform interference platforms also interfered in the preservation and display of participants’ social media posts through algorithmic governance and curation. in several instances, participants found that posts they had previously shared on facebook and twitter containing covid-19 information had been flagged and blocked as misinformation, with platforms dictating which aspects of the pandemic participants should forget. on the other hand, facebook also displayed auto-generated “on this day media” posts referencing happier pre-pandemic days or early pandemic memories that were sometimes painful to remember. user interaction finally, scrolling back required participants to interact with their own rhythms of selfrepresentation through the frequencies with which they posted, shared, and in some cases, were tagged in social media content. one participant, nora (30), lamented the irregularity of her pandemic posts, saying that she viewed her profile as “a story,” and its account of the pandemic would be full of gaps. self-confrontation and proximity to crisis the backdrop for all of these interviews is, of course, an ongoing pandemic—an event that subsumed myself as a researcher and my research participants. while profiles served as a mnemonic device during the interview process, they were also products of collective traumas and ongoing reinterpretation. the study of social media profiles in crisis is a meditation on the process of remembering an unfolding event as it happens as platform infrastructures reveal and obscure memories in the process. references abidin, c. (2021). from “networked publics” to “refracted publics”: a companion framework for researching “below the radar” studies. social media + society, 7. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f2056305120984458 boyd, d. (2014). it’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens. yale university press. cardell, k., douglas, k., & maguire, e. (2017). stories: social media and ephemeral narratives as memoir. in b. avieson, f. giles, & s. joseph (eds.), mediating memory: tracing the limits of memoir. routledge. corry, f. (2022). sunsetting: platform closure and the construction of digital cultural loss [doctoral dissertation, university of southern california.] frosh, p., & pinchevski, a. (2008). media witnessing: testimony in the age of mass communication. palgrave macmillan. good, k. d. (2012). from scrapbook to facebook: a history of personal media assemblage and archives. new media & society, 15(4), 557–573. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444812458432 hogan, b. (2010). the presentation of self in the age of social media: distinguishing performances and exhibitions online. bulletin of science, technology, & society, 30(6), 377–386. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0270467610385893 humphreys, l. (2018). the qualified self: social media and the accounting of everyday life. mit press. leaver, t., highfield, t., & abidin, c. (2020). instagram: visual social media cultures. polity. lincoln, s., & robards, b. (2017). editing the project of the self: sustained facebook use and growing up online. journal of youth studies, 20(4), 518–531. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2016.1241869 møller, k., & robards, b. (2019). walking through, going along, scrolling back: ephemeral mobilities in digital ethnography. nordicom review, 40, 95–109. https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2019-0016 robards, b., & lincoln, s. (2019). social media scroll back method. in p. atkinson, s. delamont, a. cernat, j. w. sakshaug, & r. a. williams (eds.), digital media and research. sage. smit, r. (2020). connective memory work on justice for mike brown. in s. merrill, e. keightley, & p. daphi (eds.), social movements, cultural memory, and digital media: mobilising mediated remembrance. (pp. 85–108). palgrave macmillan. zelizer, b. (2002). finding aids to the past: bearing personal witness to traumatic public events. media, culture & society, 24(5), 697–714. https://doi.org/10.1177/016344370202400509 zhao, x., salehi, n., naranjit, s., alwaalan, s., voida, s., & cosley, d. (2013). the many faces of facebook: experiencing social media as performance, exhibition, and personal archive. proceedings of chi 2013. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): butkowski, c., corry, f. moses, a., & bhandari, a. (2023, october). digital memory, pandemic temporalities: reflections on studying and storing crisis media. panel presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. dialogues with aural digital archives in post-pandemic times adetobi moses university of pennsylvania introduction 2020 marked the beginning of a global pandemic that almost immediately forced people around the globe to contend with isolation and an unknown disease at a rate not seen since the flu pandemic of the early 20th century. suddenly contact among friends, classmates, colleagues, and families had to be severely limited or stalled. borders were closed sometimes with only little warning leaving many travelers, international students, and other migrants with very few options. as the world contemplated solitude in pandemic times, outlets like twitter, instagram, and tik tok often became the social media platforms people used to vent their frustrations with rapidly fluctuating state and local pandemic measures and/or burdened medical infrastructure. it was also a place to share disapproval with the federal government's inability to limit disinformation about the new virus. finally, social media outlets also provided space for people to show solidarity with protest movements against racism and police brutality that exploded after the death of george floyd. amidst these tumultuous times, many libraries, universities, and publications sought to document peoples’ experiences. at the beginning of the pandemic, local, national, and global public and private institutions sought submissions in the form of photos, recordings, stories, and interviews from the public that were related to the pandemic. corona diaries, an open access platform that allows participants to record an audio diary entry related to the pandemic based on a daily prompt, is just one of many global crowd-sourced efforts to collect pandemic experiences. while initially intended for creatives, the corona diaries platform has nevertheless received support, attention, and responses from a diverse range of people of different ages and occupations by providing a platform for spatially dispersed voices to discuss the shared complexities of living within an ongoing crisis. method: community listening and asynchronous pandemic dialogues my paper demonstrates how digital archives can be used creatively to preserve the memory of covid-19 in post pandemic times. i argue for thinking about crisis moments as temporal openings for researchers to experiment with fresh, collaborative, and creative methods for understanding the individual and collective experiences of a given crisis as it unfolds. my analysis draws on my research with the sonic pandemic archive, corona diaries, and the focus groups i held with different adult members of philadelphia communities, in which we listened and discussed a selection of diaries together. the paper that has emerged from these steps analyzes what it means to enter dialogue with a digital archive and ‘talk back.’ i argue that engaging with, listening, and discussing the pandemic archive as a community creates a sort of three-way asynchronous dialogue between the archive’s participants, the focus groups’ respondents, and me—the researcher. this ‘dialogue’ created space in the analysis for the meaning of these digital diaries to be negotiated with openly and be dealt with frankly from three different standpoints, the archive’s, mine, and the community members. moreover, i demonstrate how examining the potential impact of corona diaries on listeners can help approximate the reach of other crowd-sourced, communitybased memorialization projects and archives that seek to preserve the toll of the pandemic in public memory. it should be noted here that because these aural diaries exist as an open platform, one’s sense of ‘community’ is detached from the burdens of being quantified by engagement statistics, comments, and shares and instead rests on the assumption that the participants are in ongoing dialogue with themselves and the listener. this type of ‘open’ dialogue becomes even more pronounced within digital spaces as the immortality of digital content makes dialogue, and thus community, possible for people that are dispersed spatially and temporally (anderson 1994). in short, one can imagine that because corona diaries is a digital archive, the ‘addressee’ of a given audio diary will change as different people and generations rediscover the stories over time. thus, community within the corona diaries platform is premised on what lena buford (2020) calls “anonymous intimacy.” it is this anonymous intimacy, promised by digital technology, that makes an expanding notion of community possible during and after the pandemic. the place of digital archives in post-pandemic times moreover, this paper illustrates how different members of the same community may negotiate between the personal and the collective toll of the pandemic as they listen to the collection of audio diaries and enter dialogue with each other about the archive’s content. part of the motivation of this paper stems from the insistence that rigorous work on the pandemic and future crises must seek to mediate between the communal and the individual. the macro-level spectacularized shutdowns of schools, neighborhoods, and whole countries were some of the ways the world learned to internalize the pandemic early on. while these measures, and the media’s reporting of these measures were important for galvanizing governments into action (action that included making and distributing masks and ppe gear and developing a vaccine), they sometimes masked the individual stories that made up the crisis. promoting these personalized stories can contribute to a more holistic understanding and appreciation for the toll of the pandemic. this paper also demonstrates how covid-19 archives more generally can be used in classroom settings, libraries, museums, and future public memorials to facilitate ongoing collective reckonings with the individual lives and experiences lost during the pandemic. local, national, and global efforts to create a premediated infrastructure for pandemic experiences (see erll 2007, 2017, 2020), both digital and non-digital, that in essence preserves and facilitates the spread of these experiences are some of the most important collective tools we have. this infrastructure of course, would include the use of archives like corona diaries in public institutions to help us anticipate future disaster. this may in turn help raise support for policies that can help us withstand other disasters of similar or greater proportions. emphasizing the policy stakes of this paper is critical as it will give future researchers’ a sense of what features of pandemic stories and experiences may resonate with different types of audiences. this can then inform knowledge about how digital technologies can help manage, mediate, and preserve our memories of covid-19 moving forward. references anderson, r. 1994. "anonymity, presence and the dialogic self in a technological culture." in the reach of dialogue: confirmation voice and community, by rob anderson, kenneth n. cissna and ronald c. arnett, 91-110. hampton press inc. buford, l. 2020. "a journey through two decades of online diary community." in the diary: the epic of everyday life, by batsheva ben-amos and dan ben-amos, 425-440. bloomington : indiana university press. erll a (2020) afterword: memory worlds in times of corona. memory studies 13(5): 861–874. erll a (2017) media and the dynamics of memory: from cultural paradigms to transcultural premediation. in: wagoner b (ed.) the oxford handbook of culture and memory. oxford: oxford university press, pp.305–324. erll a, rigney a (eds) (2009) mediation, remediation, and the dynamics of cultural memory. berlin, ny: de gruyter. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): butkowski, c., corry, f. moses, a., & bhandari, a. (2023, october). digital memory, pandemic temporalities: reflections on studying and storing crisis media. panel presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. when does a pandemic end? bounding crisis through digital rapid-response collecting frances corry university of pittsburgh in the early months of covid-19 lockdowns in the us, press outlets discussed how social media and other digital documentation would provide a robust record of the pandemic. under headlines like “what historians will see when they look back on the covid-19 pandemic of 2020” (burch, 2020) or “this year will end eventually. document it while you can” (blume, 2020), articles detailed how archival groups were aggregating diverse digital media that could one day provide a historical account of that moment. these archival practices can be characterized as “rapid-response collecting,” a methodology used by information institutions like libraries and archives to collect “material culture from major events as the phenomenon unfolds or in the immediate aftermath” (debono, 2021, p. 180). yet unlike other american crises for which rapidresponse collecting had been employed–whether september 11th, 2001, or the boston marathon bombings of 2013–covid-19 lacked easily marked temporal boundaries, its moment extending beyond the first weeks of lockdown once optimistically imagined. instead of a clean ending to covid-19, cultural debates emerged around when the pandemic would end, and what it would look like when it did (kolata, 2020). collecting efforts around covid also differed from previous rapid-response projects as they were focused on aggregating digital traces. because of the prevalence of digital device use and the need to collect materials during social distancing measures, archivists focused on gathering social media, websites, digital diaries, and smartphone photos, often crowdsourced and submitted through institution websites. encountering different constraints and possibilities through digital collection, and facing a crisis that exceeded predicted temporal boundaries, professionals had to ask novel questions of their rapid-response collections: when do we stop collecting, and how do we know it’s the right time? in other words, when does a pandemic end? how is this reflected in digital collecting practices? in conversation with this panel’s focus on the mediated temporalities of covid-19, and how these temporalities shape the study of crisis, this paper addresses the cultural ambiguity around the pandemic’s end in the context of digital rapid-response collecting. through semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 21 archivists, librarians and other information professionals who engaged in digital collecting around covid-19, it reviews how they planned, executed, and ended rapid-response collecting around covid-19; how they grappled with the ambiguous ends of the pandemic through collecting practices; and how these practices will shape how covid-19 is historicized and remembered into the future. shaping event meaning through digital media collection scholars across media and memory studies have long observed that public crises’ legacies are tied to the production, circulation, and preservation of media. individuals, communities, and institutions use media to process and produce the past, whether “bearing witness” to events, marking them as significant through media production (zelizer, 2002); using media to solidify narratives about events, with the potential to outlast individual human memory (hirsch, 2008; sturken, 1997); or crafting presence and absence in historiographies through the exclusion or inclusion of media in archives (caswell, 2004; trouillot, 1995). media, that is, are crucial in “boundary making” around crisis events; they are used to cohere and categorize a moment, locating it in time and space (wagner-pacifici, 2017). these actions influence what an event means, who it pertains to, and what its socio-political impacts are. because internet-based digital media have altered the landscape of media production, circulation, and preservation, the experience and legacies of crisis events have likewise changed. for instance, the web’s unstable content alters traditional temporal patterns of the documented past (chun, 2011; gitelman, 2006), just as social media platforms’ algorithmic patterns and ownership structures influence the organization of previously posted media, shaping narratives about the past (corry, 2023; jacobsen & beer, 2021). that is, the conditions of digital media production, circulation, and preservation affect how a crisis event is categorized, located in time and space, and given meaning over time. by looking at institutions–like libraries and archives, history centers and museums–that actively deal with questions around event boundary-making through the collection of digital media, this paper grapples with the contemporary production of the past through covid-19. methods i draw on semi-structured in-depth interviews with 21 people from 20 information institutions in the us conducted from october 2022–january 2023 who had engaged in digital collecting around covid. i assembled participants via press pieces about archiving projects, lists of covid-19 archiving projects (e.g. “documenting covid-19”), and snowball sampling. participants included staff at federal libraries and archives; university libraries and digital humanities centers; city and state-run libraries and archives; and local museums/history centers. interviews lasted an hour and were conducted on zoom or phone. following interviews, a thematic content analysis using an inductive/deductive coding schema was performed (braun & clarke, 2006). codes from related literature in digital media and information studies were brought to these interviews, just as interviews were coded in-vivo, with novel themes arising from the data. the proceeding section provides a brief overview of themes. an archive of lockdown, an archive of exhaustion the collection itself is an event. so when does the event end? – lisa, archivist, federal library archivists, librarians, and historians who engaged in digital rapid-response collecting ultimately grappled with the ambiguous ends of the pandemic in diverse ways. yet the event’s closure was not routinely considered as institutions embarked on these projects. instead, participants emphasized uncertainty about the pandemic’s timeline as they began rapid-response digital collecting, reflecting what wagner-pacifici (2021, p. ) has characterized as typical of crisis events, entered through a “phase of incomprehension and unknowing” when an event is not yet “named and determined.” lack of temporal planning was tied to the fact that many institutions were engaging in digital rapid-response collecting for the first time: most participants described their covid collecting as their first time collecting born-digital materials at all. in this way, covid-19 acted as a catalyst for institutions to explore collecting media from the present, and how digital traces might have representational power over time. participants instead dealt with the temporal scope of the pandemic, and the possibility of its end, on an ad-hoc basis. many described their collections as having a seeming “natural end,” a point at which the public lost interest in documenting and donating digital materials. archivists noted that this end was grounded in exhaustion: people were tired of processing an ongoing traumatic event through mediation. one historian lamented that his project was an “archive of lockdown,” not a collection representing the evolution of covid-19 over time. it was an open question for many professionals how these digital traces would be preserved and accessed over time, and what the future use of these collections would be. some participants, especially at smaller institutions, had to largely give up on actively maintaining these digital collections, particularly when returning to on-site work and the physical demands of existing collections. through these practices, covid-19 becomes bounded. the digital traces collected in rapid-response efforts represent the pandemic as an historical event, but in their absences also reflect people’s coping, exhaustion, and desire to move on through nondocumentation. thus, what falls outside this temporal scope are experiences where people continued grappling with the dangers of a pandemic that is never quite out of sight. references blume, l. m. m. (2020, july 14). this year will end eventually. document it while you can. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/style/museumscoronavirus-protests-2020.html burch, a.d.s. (2020, april 15). what historians will see when they look back on the covid-19 pandemic of 2020. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/us/coronavirus-pandemic-historians-archive.html braun, v., & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa caswell, m. (2014). archiving the unspeakable: silence, memory, and the photographic record in cambodia. university of wisconsin pres. chun, w. h. k. (2011). programmed visions: software and memory. mit press. corry, f. (2022). never forget? memory maintenance on an aging platform. convergence. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565221129224 debono, s. (2021). collecting pandemic phenomena: reflections on rapid response collecting and the art museum. collections, 17(2), 179–185. https://doi.org/10.1177/1550190620980844 “documenting covid-19.” documenting the now. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v5tso8spfq6spw53h2ojulcdropebyi6xpah31k w-h0/edit gitelman, l. (2006). always already new: history and the data of culture. mit press. hirsch, m. (2008). the generation of postmemory. poetics today, 29(1), 103–128. jacobsen, b., & beer, d. (2021). social media and the automatic production of memory: classification, ranking and the sorting of the past. bristol university press. kolata, g. (2020, may 10). how pandemics end. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/10/health/coronavirus-plague-pandemic-history.html sturken, m. (1997). tangled memories: the vietnam war, the aids epidemic, and the politics of remembering. university of california press. trouillot, m.-r. (1995). silencing the past. beacon press. wagner-pacifici, r. (2017). what is an event? university of chicago press. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/style/museums-coronavirus-protests-2020.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/style/museums-coronavirus-protests-2020.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/us/coronavirus-pandemic-historians-archive.html https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565221129224 https://doi.org/10.1177/1550190620980844 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v5tso8spfq6spw53h2ojulcdropebyi6xpah31kw-h0/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v5tso8spfq6spw53h2ojulcdropebyi6xpah31kw-h0/edit https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/10/health/coronavirus-plague-pandemic-history.html ––– (2021). what is an event and are we in one?. sociologica, 15(1), 11-20. zelizer, b. (2002). finding aids to the past: bearing personal witness to traumatic public events. media, culture & society, 18. aoir2023-submission-hui lin selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): lastname, firstinitial. (2023, october). paper (or panel) title. paper (or panel) presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. civic participation in china: a comparative study between wechat and douyin as a democratic arena hui lin king’s college london online media platforms have become an arena for activists to engage with political discourses. since covid-19, an increasing number of citizens have begun to actively participate online to express their ideas towards political issues. various types of usergenerated content were circulated on various social media platforms: they wrote textual content on wechat with various metaphors and created user-generated videos on videostreaming platforms to express their opinions. after an apartment fire in the city of urumqi, an increasingly number of citizens actively engage with political issues and national events. as social media platforms in china are highly censored by the government and have followed the state’s internet regulations (chen et al., 2021), how does democratic civic participation develop in the chinese media landscape? this question needs to be answered because the 2022 witnessed the most active political participation among citizens in the new media era. to answer this question, this study examines how citizens express democratic opinions against dominant interpretations, what role social media platforms play as an arena for activists’ participation, and what social media factors facilitate active online civic participation and influence it to be translated into offline activities. many existing studies have concentrated on civic participation on a single social media platform, overlooking the patterns of cross-media use that shape, motivate, and limit political participation among citizens. for example, jonathan hassid (2012) examined the effect of microblogs on political participation. hua pang (2022) suggested that wechat usage (a social networking platform equivalent to facebook) is positively related to people’s online and offline civic engagement. and chen et al., (2021) concentrate on douyin to examine how the government playfully engages the public. however, insufficient studies assess the role of media multiplicity, which refers to using multiple types of online media for social interaction and political participation. although some researchers have evaluated the relationship between media multiplicity and online expressive political participation (xenos & moy, 2007), these studies analysed the role of social media platforms in civic participation as a whole instead of comparing how different digital social media platforms contribute to resistant participation to the state discourses. indeed, each platform exhibits suggested citation (apa): lin, h. (2023, october). civic participation in china: a comparative study between wechat and douyin as a democratic arena. paper (or panel) presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. particular effects that influence people’s online participation through different technological features (pearce, et al., 2020). thus, this study adopts a cross-platform perspective to compare how users resist the mainstream discourse and express counternarratives on different platforms. the comparative study focuses on wechat and douyin. national statistics demonstrate that most people are likely to consume news and political content on douyin in a playful way. in this sense, citizens are likely to be influenced by dominant discourses from the state because douyin has become used by the government as a crucial tool to promote state ideology and express mainstream discourses. they may also release their anger and give up resistant behaviours towards the government because hassid (2012) suggested that if newspapers and the mainstream media set the agenda, the internet can serve as a "safety valve" to ease anger. however, active civic participation still arises and some have been translated into the large offline political participation. it seems that although more people participate in political content on douyin, they are less likely to accept ideological propaganda but to take actions to resist these state interpretations. in this sense, media multiplicity should be examined because citizens do not adopt one social media in political participation. before on-street political participation, there were a great number of videos to mourn victims on douyin and plenty of articles on wechat to criticise the government, from strict top-down policies to centered power. thus, this article investigates how douyin and wechat facilitate civic participation differently and how people engage with political content differently on these two different media platforms. i employed digital ethnography, augmented by the walkthrough method (light et al., 2018), and qualitative content analysis to examine how wechat and douyin play different roles in civic participation. i began this study by using the walkthrough method, engaging directly with the interfaces of two appliances to examine how their technological features affect and shape the way citizens engage with political content (light et al., 2018). then, focusing on activities rather than just technologies (pink et al., 2016), i observed two platforms, each for three hours over the course of two weeks, to investigate the various modes of citizen participation. besides, qualitative content analysis was used to compare users’ comments with articles on wechat and with video content on douyin. this is because qualitative content analysis pays attention to the meanings underlying the physical messages, and activists often use metaphors to express resistive comments and counter-dominant expressions, making messages obscure for censorship mechanisms to detect (wasserstrom & perry, 2018). this study argues that the social networking platform wechat provides more in-depth participation and has more democratic forms than douyin, especially for expressing counter narratives to mainstream discourses. it found that users are more likely to express opposite views from mainstream discourses on wechat than douyin. from a technological perspective, one of the reasons for this is that wechat allows people to express longer words than douyin, according to the walkthrough method. another reason for this is algorithms. as the two platforms adopt different systems to censor content, the moderation of content is quicker on douyin than on wechat because douyin uses algorithmic filter bubbles to censor content and eliminate sensitive words immediately, whereas wechat takes some time to detect sensitive metaphors and underlying meanings. after analysing the content of over 500 accounts on each platform, the resistant comments associated with wechat articles are more insightful and critical than comments on douyin. when comparing various types of democratic participation on these two platforms, sharing articles written by official accounts on wechat is a prominent resistive action among activists. when engage with political issues, many people shared "no-word articles" on wechat to call for free speech on the internet. by contrast, users of douyin can merely express ideas through comments which can be easier moderated by the algorithmic system. references references chen, x., valdovinos kaye, d. b., & zeng, j. (2021). #positiveenergy douyin: constructing “playful patriotism” in a chinese short-video application. chinese journal of communication, 14(1), 97–117. https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2020.1761848 hassid, j. (2012). safety valve or pressure cooker? blogs in chinese political life. journal of communication, 62(2), 212–230. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14602466.2012.01634.x ho, p. (2018, april 12). jokes app neihan duanzi shuttered by china’s media regulator for “vulgarity.” sup china. https://supchina.com/2018/04/12/jokes-app-neihan-duanzi shuttered-by-chinas-media-regulator-for-vulgarity/ light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media and society, 20(3), 881–900. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 pang, h. (2022). can wechat really foster young people’s civic engagement? unraveling an underlying mechanism from the social capital theoretical perspective. aslib journal of information management. https://doi.org/10.1108/ajim-07-2021-0204 pearce, özkula, s. m., greene, a. k., teeling, l., bansard, j. s., omena, j. j., & rabello, e. t. (2020). visual cross-platform analysis: digital methods to research social media images. information, communication & society, 23(2), 161–180. pink. s., horst, h., postill, j., hjorth, l., levis, t., tacchi., j. (2016). digital ethnograpy. sage. wasserstrom, j. n., & perry, e. j. (2018). popular protest and political culture in modern china (second edition.). routledge. xenos, m., & moy, p. (2007). direct and differential effects of the internet on political and civic engagement. journal of communication, 57(4), 704–718. doi: 10.1111/j.14602466.2007.00364. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 waldenburger, l. / wimmer, j. (2022, november). digital media use in public space – an observational study of self-service technology during covid19-pandemic. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. digital media use in public space – an observational study of self-service technology during covid19pandemc . lisa waldenburger, m.a. university of augsburg prof. dr. jeffrey wimmer university of augsburg abstract the spread of digital media and devices in public spaces, so-called self-service technology (sst), is reaching more and more areas, so that it is now possible to interact with them for example when shopping, ordering or sending parcels. the use of sst is mostly supposed to be self-explanatory and intuitive, nevertheless it implicitly presupposes a certain degree of technical literacy. if this is not the case, digital stress can be triggered. but how do people deal with these devices, what role does the presence of others, the device itself and how it works, and the situational context plays? what influence do the measures to deal with the covid-19 virus and the pandemicrelated constraints have on the nexus of device, users and situation? this was investigated qualitatively in the present study by conducting participant observations. the advantage of this methodological approach is the consideration of contextual factors of the different practices and the direct observation of subjective evaluation processes on the use or even non-use of sst. this shows that characteristics of the devices – e.g. functionality, initiation and optionality – , situational contextual conditions – e.g. time and social pressure and spatial conditions –, and the subject themselves – e.g. age, routinisation and carried along baggage– play a role in dealing with sst and moderate the emergence of digital stress. keywords covid-19, digital stress, participant observation, qualitative research, self-service technology digitalisation has not only spread in the professional and private domestic context, but has also colonised public life (mcquire 2016). while in the professional sphere the employer is mainly responsible for the adaptation of new digital devices and applications, in the private sphere there is mostly the subjective freedom of choice to use new devices and programmes. in the public sphere, meanwhile, skilled use is often taken for granted. in regard to the increase of digital stress in everyday life and its longterm health consequences, the use of digital devices in public spaces should be analysed. previous studies have shown that digital stress in everyday life is triggered on the one hand by too much media content, i.e. information, messages and opportunities, and on the other hand is intensified by a lack of media literacy (waldenburger/wimmer 2021). especially people who did not grow up with digital devices as ubiquitous experience the demands on their own media literacy and understanding of technology as stressful. in this context, many examples from public life are mentioned, in which digital technology is used as a substitute for originally non-digital, interpersonal interactions, so-called selfservice-technologies (sst) (meuter et. al 2000). digital developments enable rationalisation and cost reduction by eliminating the need for manpower. critical discussions with regard to economic effects and social exclusion can be found, for example, under the keyword prosumption »in material brick-and-mortar settings« (ritzer 2015, p. 415). the devices developed in public space in recent years are either an alternative option to previous modes of use (e.g. paying at a cashier in a supermarket), or they are used as a comprehensive replacement (shepard 2013). when dealing with digitalised devices, intuitive use is often placed in the foreground. however, the fact that this requires a certain degree of media literacy and technical understanding on the part of the user is not considered. someone who has never interacted with a device with a touch screen will hardly come up with the idea of pressing the display to switch off the advertising and switch on ticket sales. so, these devices cause stress especially for non-tech-savvy and older people (marcellini et al. 2000). with a focus on media use in public spaces, we qualitatively investigated the adoption and use of different media devices. for this purpose, participant observations (n=160) were recorded in 15 different media use situations (for the method see jorgenson 2020) in a german middle-sized city during winter 2021. the observed situations range from buying a ticket at a vending machine to ordering food in fast food restaurants to selfcheckout at the supermarket. particular focus was placed on the observable behaviour of media users and their facial expressions before, during and after using a specific sst, understood as a specific constellation of people attending, the media technology itself and the spatial, situational contexts. uggla et. al. (2020) have already pointed out the importance of local placement and surrounding. in addition, pandemic-related framework factors such as the wearing of masks or the impact of social distance were also observed. data analysis shows, a distinction must first be made between the degree of voluntariness of use. the development of digital stress is much more likely in situations where media use is without alternatives, such as ordering in a fast food restaurant, than in situations where media use is optional, as is illustrated by the example of selfcheckout counters. second the situational circumstances, i.e. how crowded the supermarket is and how long the queues are at the checkout, play a significant role here. the longer the waiting time, the more willing customers are to use the devices for payment themselves, even if they are not yet used to operating them. expertise in the use of media devices can be recognised by the speed with which user decide to use the device, as well as the ability to manage the device, and often also by their multitasking. particularly in the case of vending machines, it is clear that some customers have already routinised their manual operation of touchscreens, so they are cable of doing other things like using their own smartphone simultaneously. pashkevich et. al. (2021) investigated a similar situation using eye tracking. it is essential to consider further characteristics of sst in the analysis and assessment of using digital devices in public space – the complexity of the media application and the date of implementation in public space. thus, in the observation of picking up or sending a package at a parcel delivery services, it becomes clear that this is less crisisprone than ordering food at the ordering tool of fast food restaurants. the mode of use at a packing station offers few options and the guidance through the pick-up process follows a linear path with few choices. the ordering tool, on the other hand, is highly complex, the user has a large number of ordering options and not all products can be selected quickly. the menu navigation is highly branched, thus extending the duration of the ordering process (also compared to ordering through a person at the counter) and overwhelming the user due to the multi-optionality (rinta-kahila et al. 2021). at the same time, not all digital devices and technologies are “new” in public space – for example, vending machines for transport tickets as well as bank machines have been part of media use for a very long time and the use is more routinised than for rather new applications, such as the various self-service technologies in shops. also, the duration of availability often has an impact on the susceptibility to errors and occurring understanding as well as application problems have already been corrected. all devices compared, this study clearly shows that failing functionality very quickly triggers digitally mediated stress – users are often quickly frustrated, become impatient and abandon the process if possible. at the same time, they quickly appear stressed if there are people waiting behind them who are also using the devices – especially evoked through anxiety in times of a pandemic. from this, premises can be formulated for a mode of operation that reduces digital stress or does not allow it to arise and at the same time enables the advantages of digitalisation. with this in mind, we would like to present our research findings from the observational study in detail as part of the aoir, in order to add another facet to the question of colonisation through the internet, especially in public spaces. references jorgensen, d. (2020). principles, approaches and issues in participant observation. milton: routledge. marcellini, f., mollenkopf, h., spazzafumo, l., ruoppila, i. (2000). acceptance and use of technological solutions by the elderly in the outdoor environment: findings from a european survey. z gerontol geriat, 33(3), 169–177 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1007/s003910070057 mcquire, s. (2016). geomedia: networked cities and the future of public space. cambridge: polity press. meuter, m. l., ostrom, a. l., roundtree, r. i., & bitner, m. j. (2000). self-service technologies: understanding customer satisfaction with technology-based service encounters. journal of marketing, 64(3), 50-64. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.64.3.50.18024 pashkevich, a.;,szarata, a., burghardt, t.e., jaremski, r., šucha, m. (2021). operation of public transportation ticket vending machine in kraków, poland: an eye tracking study. sustainability 2021, 13, 7921. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13147921 rinta-kahila, t., penttinen, e., kumar, a., janakiraman, r. (2021). customer reactions to self-checkout discontinuance. journal of retailing and consumer services 61, s. 102498. doi: 10.1016/j.jretconser.2021.102498. ritzer, g. (2015). prosumer capitalism. the sociological quarterly, 56(3), 413–445. doi:10.1111/tsq.12105 shepard, m. (2013). minor urbanism: everyday entanglements of technology and urban life, continuum, 27(4), 483-494, doi: 10.1080/10304312.2013.803299 uggla k., eriksson y. (2020). a contextual usability exploration of cash and ticket machines. in: gao q., z. j. (ed.): human aspects of it for the aged population. technologies, design and user experience. hcii 2020. lecture notes in computer science, vol 12207. springer, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50252-2_19 waldenburger, l., wimmer, j. (2021). just a couple posts more: digital stress and the errecting of communicative boundaries. iamcr online conference paper, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/s003910070057 https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.64.3.50.18024 https://doi.org/10.3390/su13147921 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50252-2_19 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 parnell, c. (2022, november). global platforms, local markets: the platformization of media and publishing in the philippines. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. global platforms, local markets: the platformization of media and publishing in the philippines claire parnell university of melbourne the cultural industries have transformed due to processes of platformization (poell et al., 2021). this paper examines the platformization of media and publishing in the philippines, using wattpad as a case study. wattpad, a global creative writing and reading social media platform, has altered the way intellectual property and creative content is sourced and produced in the philippines. once self-described as the youtube for books, wattpad now promotes itself as a multi-platform entertainment company and implements a pan-entertainment business model. the pan-entertainment business model has been matured by china’s bat (baidu, ali baba and tencent) platforms, and describes the production and professionalization of intellectual property across multiple media formats. the logics of adaptation that underpin wattpad’s panentertainment strategy adapt traditional markers of success, such as awards and sales (ellis, 1982; murray, 2012), with digital metrics (van dijck & poell, 2013) and combine this with logics of platform capitalism (srnicek, 2017). wattpad has embedded itself in the filipino media and publishing industries by developing partnerships with book publishers and television studios. while such partnerships exist globally, wattpad’s impact on philippine media culture is particularly acute. wattpad’s position in the philippines illustrates the way wattpad, a globalized platform that is extremely popular amongst filipino users, is entering and adapting local cultural industries. what opportunities exist for decolonization of media content in the platformization of the cultural industries in the philippines? what are the conditions of the filipino media landscape that contribute to the success of wattpad’s panentertainment strategy in this territory? this interdisciplinary research brings together publishing studies, platform studies and media ecology. to do so, i draw on and adapt josé van dijck’s (2013) connective media ecology model, which examines the socioeconomic and techno-cultural aspects of platform microsystems and their position in the connective social media ecosystem. in this paper, i explicitly extend the ecosystem frame to include traditional cultural industries to account for the growing interconnectedness between platformed and traditional spaces of media production. focusing on the platformization of cultural production in the philippines, a media landscape marked by postcolonialism, state-run media and concentrated private ownership (estella & löffelholz, 2019; pertierra, 2021), this research adds to scholarship that works to de-westernize and re-regionalize platform studies (jin, 2013; steinberg & li, 2017; davis & xiao, 2021) as well as publishing and media studies (amin et al., 2000; waisbord & mellado, 2014; parnell et al., 2021). the impact of wattpad in the philippines this paper draws on interviews with seven wattpad authors conducted over zoom in late 2020 and early 2021, focusing on their experiences working on the platform and within wattpad’s pan-entertainment system. these authors write across genres, but primarily work within romance and young adult fiction. three main themes were identified from the data. first, post-colonial tensions play out in the dominant languages of traditional and platformed cultural production. while the philippines has over 120 local languages, traditional media have historically been dominated by filipino/tagalog and media republished or adapted from wattpad are often written in taglish, a code-mixing dialect of tagalog and english. in both systems of production, the commercial opportunities for media by creators working in regional philippine languages is extremely limited. one participant, who is from iloilo city where the local language is hiligaynon/ilonggo, attributed her decision to publish on wattpad to her ability to write in english and find an audience. english is the dominant language on wattpad (ramdarshan bold, 2016), the second national language of the philippines, and this author’s second language so, as she stated, “aside from english, i really have no other choice.” western platforms like wattpad provide new avenues for creators from regional provinces who work in languages not privileged by traditional filipino institutions, but they do not dismantle colonial structures that privilege creators working in dominant national languages and discourage the use of local languages. second, wattpad is creating opportunities for greater diversity and inclusion in filipino book and media culture. in 2021, bliss books, wattpad’s imprint with anvil publishing published wake up, dreamers! by demi abilon, which features lgbtqia+ characters. literature and media featuring lgbtqia+ themes and characters have historically been excluded in filipino media. through popularity metrics such as awards and the number of reads (wake up, dreamers! had more than 1.4 million reads by the time of publication), wattpad can demonstrate the tried-and-trusted success of inclusive stories in the philippines. third, media products developed from wattpad benefit from distinctly filipino modes of reception. kilig, a filipino term that refers to an affective feeling of romantic excitement, inflects the relationship between wattpad authors, readers, actors, and story characters. this high level of fan engagement contributes to the successful adaptation of wattpad media in the philippines. love teams, pairs of celebrities launched by mainstream filipino studios to appear in a succession of films, tv series, advertisements, and other media together (bolisay, 2015), have also become a key feature of the romance stories wattpad has adapted and republished in the philippines. conclusion wattpad operates collaboratively and competitively with filipino publishers and producers through its pan-entertainment strategy and has a significant degree of power in shaping popular culture in the philippines. wattpad’s pan-entertainment strategy in the philippines demonstrates how multi-platform companies are leveraging the interconnectedness of media industries in an increasingly convergent and globalized media landscape and provides insight into the impact that wattpad and other platforms like it may have on the creative industries more globally. references amin, hussein, w. lance bennett, stuart cunningham, james curran, peter dahlgren, terry flew, and s. r. waisbord. de-westernizing media studies. new york: routledge, 2000 bolisay, richard. 2015. “‘yes, you belong to me!’: reflections on the jadine love team fandom in the age of twitter and in the context of filipino fan culture” 12 (1): 22. davis, mark. 2021. “de-westernizing platform studies: history and logics of chinese and u.s. platforms.” international journal of communication 15: 103–22. dijck, josé van. 2013. the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. new york: oxford university press. dijck, josé van, and thomas poell. 2013. “understanding social media logic.” media and communication 1 (1): 2–14. ellis, john. 1982. “the literary adaptation.” screen 23 (1): 3–5. estella, pauline gidget resterio, and martin: löffelholz. 2019. “media landscapes philippines.” ilmenau, germany: european journalism centre. jin, dal yong. 2013. “the construction of platform imperialism in the globalization era.” triple c: communication, capitalism & critique 11 (1): 145–72. murray, simone. 2012. the adaptation industry: the cultural economy of contemporary literary adaptation. new york, ny: routledge. parnell, claire, andrea anne trinidad, and jodi mcalister. 2021b. “live literature in the philippines: an ethnographic study of #romanceclass and reading as performance.” creative industries journal:1–20. pertierra, anna cristina. 2021. “entertainment publics in the philippines.” media international australia 179 (1): 66–79. poell, thomas, david b. nieborg, and brooke erin duffy. 2021. platforms and cultural production. hoboken, nj: john wiley & sons. srnicek, nick. 2016. platform capitalism. hoboken, nj: john wiley & sons. steinberg, marc, and jinying li. 2017. “introduction: regional platforms.” asiascape: digital asia 4 (3): 173–83. waisbord, silvio, and claudia mellado. 2014. “de-westernizing communication studies: a reassessment.” communication theory 24 (4): 361–72. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): milne, b., ringrose, j., horeck, t. & mendes, k. (2024, october). tinder for teens: an in-depth exploration of youth intimate cultures and sexual and gender-based violence on snapchat presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. tinder for teens: an in-depth exploration of youth intimate cultures and sexual and gender-based violence on snapchat betsy milne university college london jessica ringrose university college london tanya horeck anglia ruskin university kaitlynn mendes western university research aims snapchat has long been a pivotal space for youth digital intimate and sexual cultures, as well as gendered and sexual risks and harms (handyside & ringrose, 2017). despite being one of the most widely used social media platforms among youth in england (ofcom, 2023) and america (anderson et al., 2023), there has been little in-depth research that connects snapchat’s unique features and affordances with an analysis of young users’ practices and experiences on the platform. responding to this gap, our paper explores our mixed-methods research findings on british young people’s diverse social, sexual, and intimate experiences on snapchat. we explore how snapchat’s unique features, such as disappearing images (“snaps”), algorithmic friend recommendations (“quick adds”), and user engagement metric ("snapscores”), form new conditions and environments for young people’s experiences of courtship, sexting, and sexual and gender-based violence. approach while it is important to protect young people from emerging digital risks, scholars are increasingly emphasising youth digital sexual rights, and the positive potential that digital technologies can play in young people’s sexual and bodily self-expression online (albury, 2017; albury et al., 2017; livingstone & third, 2017; setty, 2019). rather than taking a singular risk-focused approach to young people’s uses of snapchat, we aim to explore their broader sexual cultures on the platform. we develop an “affordance” (boyd, 2011) and “platform sensitive approach” (bucher & helmond, 2018, p. 17) to explore youth’s snapchat engagement. we consider not only the actions afforded by snapchat’s features, but also the diverse expectations that users hold of these features (bucher & helmond, 2018). in addition, we contextualise youth user experiences with snapchat’s guidelines and safeguards for youth, which we argue fail to understand or address youth users’ experiences. method we draw upon our quantitative and qualitative research conducted in uk schools following the covid-19 lockdowns. quantitatively, we administered an online survey to 551 teens (aged 13-18) of all genders—with questions on mental health and time online, digital literacy, and experiences of tech-facilitated sexual and gender-based violence (tfsgbv) during lockdowns. qualitatively, we conducted 17 focus groups with 65 teens and 29 individual follow-up interviews with this sample in five comprehensive secondary schools across england. focus groups used arts-based methodologies, asking participants to write or draw their perspectives on social media platforms using templates we provided. select focus group participants partook in follow-up individual interviews, where we elicited more detailed accounts of topics discussed. findings our findings showed that young people are commonly using snapchat in their social, romantic, and sexual lives. we found that 71.9% of survey respondents were on snapchat, and 45.1% increased their time on snapchat during lockdown. snapchat afforded an opportunity to meet and connect—or “associate” (treem & leonardi, 2012)—with new friends or romantic/sexual partners, particularly during lockdown. for example, one teen described how snapchat became a tinder for teenagers, where they would add unknown users in their digital peer network through snapchat’s algorithmic friend recommendation feature (“quick adds”) and would regularly exchange images, videos, and messages (“snapping”) with those users, with the goal to eventually meet them in offline spaces. snapchat was also perceived as the app for sexting (i.e., the sending and receiving of sexually explicit images), due to its perceived ephemerality, privacy, and transparency. these positive opportunities for youth digital sexual exploration, however, were enmeshed with gendered risks and harms. young people’s use of snapchat as a tool for meeting “new friends” created opportunities for adult men to perpetrate tfsgbv. young people often reported receiving unsolicited sexual images from snapchat users they believed were peers but were actually adult men, also known as catfishing. in our survey findings, the majority of unsolicited sexual images came from adults that they had met online. snapchat’s lack of age-verification and image-based profiles, among other features, afford “pseudonymity” (evans et al., 2017) to adult users—thus protecting groomers and child predators, instead of young people. we discuss how these findings directly contrast with snapchat’s rollout of “stronger friending protections” (snapchat, 2023a) for 13–17-year-old users, which were designed to reduce friend recommendations, connections, and communication between young people and strangers. in line with our previous research (ringrose et al., 2021), the majority of unwanted requests for nude images from peers in the same age range were also on snapchat. for example, one teen described how conversations with boys she’d met on snapchat would most often lead to exchanges of nude images, which at times involved the boys pressuring her to send nudes when she did not want to. in addition, peer-to-peer imagebased sexual abuse (i.e., the non-consensual distribution of nudes) (mcglynn et al., 2017) was described as an expected outcome of sending a nude “snap”—evidencing snapchat’s persistence (handyside & ringrose, 2017) and spreadability (boyd, 2014). beyond the limits of snapchat’s perceived ephemerality (via the “disappearing snap”), we discuss how snapchat’s “quick add” feature affords loose connections with unknown and semi-known youth users (often boys), who potentially feel more confident in perpetrating image-based sexual harassment and abuse (ringrose et al., 2021) because of a reduced risk of in-person repercussions (e.g., at school). again, these experiences are in direct contrast to snapchat’s prohibition of “pornographic content” in its community guidelines (snapchat, 2023b), as well as its reliance on mutual friends as a safeguard against harm (snapchat, 2023a). finally, young people experienced slut-shaming and stalking and tied these experiences to the “visibility” (boyd, 2014) afforded by snapchat. young people described monitoring other users’ “snapscores”—a number on each user’s profile measuring their level of engagement on the platform. girls were slut-shamed for having a high “snapscore” as it was correlated with “snapping” more sexual and romantic partners, which was associated with sexual immorality. we discuss how this trend is an example of an “imagined affordance” (nagy & neff, 2015) that is reflective of how the users imagine the technology operates within a context of societal sexual double standards. in addition, young people described the active surveillance of their romantic partners’ “snapscores”, as a method to document whether they were active on the platform or not, which is indicative of a potentially problematic affordance if used in the context of an abusive relationship. conclusion snapchat continues to be a highly popular site for young people to meet new friends, and potential dating and sexual partners, and to exchange sexually explicit images. our research contributes, therefore, to understandings of how snapchat’s youth users experience the app in relation to gender and sexual exploration and identity. in addition, our paper provides an in-depth analysis of how snapchat’s features, affordances and (lack of) user protection creates a specific environment for sexual and gender-based violence. given snapchat’s inadequate platform-level responses to these issues, we conclude with recommendations for interventions dedicated to increasing platformspecific digital literacy (particularly for parents, policymakers, and educators), and preventing and responding to youth experiences of online gendered risks and harm— while upholding their digital and sexual rights. references albury, k. (2017). just because it’s public doesn’t mean it’s any of your business: adults’ and children’s sexual rights in digitally mediated spaces. new media & society, 19(5), 713–725. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816686322 albury, k., hasinoff, a. a., & senft, t. (2017). from media abstinence to media production: sexting, young people and education. in l. allen & m. l. rasmussen (eds.), the palgrave handbook of sexuality education (pp. 527–545). palgrave macmillan uk. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40033-8_26 anderson, m., faverio, m., & gottfried, j. (2023, december 11). teens, social media and technology 2023. pew research center: internet, science & tech. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/12/11/teens-social-media-and-technology2023/ boyd, d. (2011). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in z. papacharissi (ed.), a networked self (pp. 47–66). routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203876527-8 boyd, d. (2014). it’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens. yale university press. bucher, t., & helmond, a. (2018). the affordances of social media platforms. in j. burgess, a. marwick & t. poell (eds.), the sage handbook of social media (pp. 233253). sage publications ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473984066 evans, s. k., pearce, k. e., vitak, j., & treem, j. w. (2017). explicating affordances: a conceptual framework for understanding affordances in communication research. journal of computer-mediated communication, 22(1), 35–52. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12180 handyside, s., & ringrose, j. (2017). snapchat memory and youth digital sexual cultures: mediated temporality, duration and affect. journal of gender studies, 26(3), 347–360. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2017.1280384 light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881–900. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 livingstone, s., & third, a. (2017). children and young people’s rights in the digital age: an emerging agenda. new media & society, 19(5), 657–670. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816686318 mcglynn, c., rackley, e., & houghton, r. (2017). beyond ‘revenge porn’: the continuum of image-based sexual abuse. feminist legal studies, 25(1), 25-46. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-017-9343-2 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816686322 https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40033-8_26 https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/12/11/teens-social-media-and-technology-2023/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/12/11/teens-social-media-and-technology-2023/ https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203876527-8 https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473984066 https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12180 https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2017.1280384 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816686318 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-017-9343-2 nagy, p., & neff, g. (2015). imagined affordance: reconstructing a keyword for communication theory. social media & society, 1(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603385 ofcom. (2023). children and parents: media use and attitudes 2023. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0027/255852/childrens-media-use-andattitudes-report-2023.pdf ringrose, j., regehr, k., & milne, b. (2021). understanding and combatting youth experiences of image-based sexual harassment and abuse. university college london institute of education. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/departments-andcentres/departments/education-practice-and-society setty, e. (2019). a rights-based approach to youth sexting: challenging risk, shame, and the denial of rights to bodily and sexual expression within youth digital sexual culture. international journal of bullying prevention, 1(4), 298–311. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42380-019-00050-6 snapchat. (2023a). introducing new safeguards to protect our community. https://values.snap.com/news/new-safeguards-for-snapchatters-2023 snapchat. (2023b). sexual content: community guidelines explainer. https://values.snap.com/en-gb/privacy/transparency/community-guidelines/sexualcontent treem, j. w., & leonardi, p. m. (2012). social media use in organizations: exploring the affordances of visibility, editability, persistence, and association. communication yearbook, 36, 143-189. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2129853 word limits: 1,200 for extended abstracts. references are not part of the 1,200 word count. 1,200 for each paper in a panel submission the organizer must include a brief introductory statement articulating the papers’ relationship to each other. references are not part of the 1,200 word count. please note: if you are preparing an original submission for the 1 march deadline (rather than for circulation after the conference), do not include author names or any other identifying information. if your submission is accepted, we will ask you to resubmit with identifying information as well as any changes you may make in light of reviewer feedback. references https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603385 https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/departments-and-centres/departments/education-practice-and-society https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/departments-and-centres/departments/education-practice-and-society https://doi.org/10.1007/s42380-019-00050-6 https://values.snap.com/news/new-safeguards-for-snapchatters-2023 https://values.snap.com/en-gb/privacy/transparency/community-guidelines/sexual-content https://values.snap.com/en-gb/privacy/transparency/community-guidelines/sexual-content https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2129853 references should be formatted the same as the body, with a double space between entries. any standard style guide (apa, chicago, etc.) is acceptable as long as it is consistent throughout the submission. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): haimson, o.l. (2023, october). exploring the current landscape of trans technology design. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. exploring the current landscape of trans technology design oliver l. haimson university of michigan exploring the current landscape of trans technology design transgender people face substantial challenges in the world, such as discrimination, harassment, and lack of access to basic resources. some of these challenges can be addressed to some extent with technology. this paper examines the world of trans technologies: apps, health resources, art, games, and other types of technology designed to help address some of the challenges transgender people face in the world, and to create spaces for trans communities and individuals. trans technologies included in the study include solace (described in detail below), trans lifeline, a peer support tool to help trans people in crisis, transgender media portal, a web resource making trans films and audiovisual works available to the public (and whose creators explicitly consider it a trans technology (horak, 2020)), and a wide selection of trans games and art, voice apps, augmented reality and virtual reality systems, surgical procedures, prosthetics, and many more. by examining and analyzing trans technology creators’ experiences, i argue that trans tech design can be empowering for creators yet is sometimes isolating and potentially exclusionary. i describe trans technology design processes and instances when they do and do not include and account for trans communities and multiply marginalized trans people. what “trans technology” is, and what it means for technology design, is an important conversation that impacts how technological innovation may improve trans lives and wellbeing. prior work defined “trans technology” as technology that “allow[s] trans users the changeability, network separation, and identity realness, along with the queer aspects of multiplicity, fluidity, and ambiguity, needed for gender transition” (haimson et al., 2019). in later participatory design work (haimson et al., 2020), “trans technology” expanded to mean technology designed with and for trans communities to address challenges trans people and communities face. these definitions do not conflict, but their differences signal the need to better define the problem space and identify areas for innovation. in this work i address the following research questions: what do trans technology design processes look like? to what extent do existing trans technologies meet the needs of trans people and communities? this work makes social and intellectual impact by illuminating the trans technological landscape, the design processes that brought these technologies to life, and the ways trans people often must rely on community to meet their most basic needs and challenges. in this paper, i discuss which trans needs and challenges are currently being addressed by technology, which still need to be addressed, and how creators of trans technologies are accomplishing this work. prior research has discussed marginalized groups’ experiences with technology (e.g., ahmed et al., 2021; costanza-chock, 2020; dombrowski et al., 2016; erete et al., 2018; harrington et al., 2019; rankin & henderson, 2021), but has not specifically focused on trans technologies and the broad trans technological landscape. trans people are an important marginalized group to study, as they face incredible barriers to existing in the world that are often amplified by technology. this work builds on academic work about gender, identity, and technology by describing technology design for a particularly marginalized gender minority group. additionally, by illuminating if and how trans people are involved in trans technology design processes, this work contributes to academic conversations about how human-centered design actually works in practice, in contrast to how it should work. i conducted an in-depth interview study with 115 creators of existing trans technologies to understand the world of trans technology design, both its exciting aspects and its limitations. my research team and i used criterion sampling (maxwell, 2012), an approach in which we selected participants who met a particular predetermined criterion – in this case, being creators, designers, or developers of some type of trans technology. we conducted semi-structured interviews, primarily via zoom, that lasted approximately sixty minutes. we asked participants about the story of their technology’s ideation and creation, their design processes and who was involved, challenges they faced, their conceptions of trans technology, and more. with a semi-structured format, interviews focused on topics most salient to participants. participants were compensated with a $100 gift card or check. this study was reviewed and deemed exempt by university of michigan’s institutional review board. for data analysis, i followed an iterative inductive qualitative coding technique drawing from open coding and axial coding techniques (corbin & strauss, 2008) and reflexive thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2021) to analyze the interview transcripts and field notes. i was lucky to have the help of several members of my research team – kai nham, aloe deguia, and hibby thach – who collaborated with me on making sense of the data, creating and revising codes, and generating themes. solace, a gender transition tracking app created by a trans woman in washington, is an example of how trans technologies have recently begun to be both visible and monetized. the app, which enables its users to create a gender transition “to do” list and then provides resources to accomplish those goals, gained widespread attention and notoriety when its leadership announced in 2021 that they had received substantial venture capital funding to support the app. solace’s monetization was in stark contrast to many trans people’s realities, in which they struggle to find basic resources like safety and healthcare, and the app only acknowledges and addresses these types of wellbeing needs to a limited extent. notably, solace encourages its users to transition in isolation, with no social or community elements – an unexpected orientation for a population who have historically found support from a community of similar others. yet its tens of thousands of users signal its importance for a large facet of potentially isolated users. in this research, i discovered how solace’s interface and features reflect its creator’s values – a white trans woman who stated in our interview that she chooses not to be part of trans communities. on one hand, the fact that solace’s founder created and gathered funding for an app that allowed many others to mirror her own solitary transition experience could be seen as empowering. at the same time, the design may not fully represent the needs and desires of the larger trans population, particularly trans people of color, those facing economic precarity, and others whose identities sit at the intersection of multiple forms of marginalization. solace is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to trans technology – the visible part of a much larger world of technologies designed for, but only sometimes by and with, trans communities. in this paper, i explore that world. by examining creators of trans technologies’ experiences and design processes, i show how trans technology design processes are often deeply personal, and focus on the technology creator’s needs and desires. trans technology design can be empowering because technology creators have agency to create the tools they themselves need to navigate the world. however, when trans communities are not involved in design processes, this can lead to overly individualistic design that speaks primarily to more privileged trans people’s needs. references ahmed, a. a., kok, b., howard, c., & still, k. (2021). online community-based design of free and open source software for transgender voice training. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 4(cscw3), 258:1-258:27. https://doi.org/10.1145/3434167 braun, v., & clarke, v. (2021). thematic analysis: a practical guide. sage. corbin, j., & strauss, a. (2008). basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. sage. costanza-chock, s. (2020). design justice: community-led practices to build the worlds we need. mit press. dombrowski, l., harmon, e., & fox, s. (2016). social justice-oriented interaction design: outlining key design strategies and commitments. proceedings of the 2016 acm conference on designing interactive systems, 656–671. https://doi.org/10.1145/2901790.2901861 erete, s., israni, a., & dillahunt, t. (2018). an intersectional approach to designing in the margins. interactions, 25(3), 66–69. https://doi.org/10.1145/3194349 haimson, o. l., dame-griff, a., capello, e., & richter, z. (2019). tumblr was a trans technology: the meaning, importance, history, and future of trans technologies. feminist media studies, 21(3), 345–361. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1678505 haimson, o. l., gorrell, d., starks, d. l., & weinger, z. (2020). designing trans technology: defining challenges and envisioning community-centered solutions. proceedings of the 2020 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 1– 13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376669 harrington, c. n., borgos-rodriguez, k., & piper, a. m. (2019). engaging low-income african american older adults in health discussions through community-based design workshops. proceedings of the 2019 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300823 horak, l. (2020, may 30). black and trans approaches to the digital humanities: using the transgender media portal to explore black trans filmmaking. canadian society for digital humanities online conference. canadian society for digital humanities online conference. https://hcommons.org/docs/black-and-trans-approaches-to-the-digitalhumanities-using-the-transgender-media-portal-to-explore-black-trans-filmmaking/ maxwell, j. a. (2012). qualitative research design: an interactive approach. sage publications, inc. https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/qualitative-researchdesign/book234502 rankin, y. a., & henderson, k. k. (2021). resisting racism in tech design: centering the experiences of black youth. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 5(cscw1), 192:1-192:32. https://doi.org/10.1145/3449291 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): witzenberger, k., swist, t., gulson, k. (2024, october). prototyping an edtech assessment toolkit: towards technical democracy. presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. prototyping an edtech assessment toolkit: towards technical democracy kevin witzenberger queensland university of technology teresa swist university of sydney kalervo gulson university of sydney online exam proctoring, facial emotion recognition, conversational ai, automated essay scoring, aggression detection, bus routing optimization, and school choice algorithms. while we refer to these technologies usually as edtech, they are about much more than technology and education. edtech is a fast-growing multibillion-dollar industry composed of tech companies, business managers, market forecasters, investors, and private equity firms (see williamson, 2022). the financial interests shared by these stakeholders accelerate the integration of new edtech products into schools and universities. holoniq – an organization specializing in monitoring investments within the education sector – forecasts that worldwide expenditures on educational technology will surge to $404 billion by the year 2025 (holoniq, 2022). as ai and proprietary edtech products are rapidly being integrated across schools and universities, the inner workings of potential benefits and harms are complex, hidden from view, and underexplored amongst education stakeholders (author). a key problem is that edtech is often over-hyped and deployed with little scrutiny across a variety of essential educational services: school operations, teaching and learning, plus staffing. learning through shared uncertainty to help education practitioners and administrators critically explore these systems, deliberate about their consequences, and weigh up possible immediate and long-term inequalities, this paper presents the prototype of an edtech assessment toolkit (https://education-futures-studio.org/toolkit/) . the toolkit intends to facilitate collective forms of governance, slow down the implementation of new technology and enable https://education-futures-studio.org/toolkit/ educators to explore impacts beyond the industry’s marketing claims. the prototype brings awareness to the potential of participatory design to explore accountability, transparency, and governance of ai-based systems through collective forms of experimentation. it is thereby embedded in a body of work aiming to make technical democracy (callon et al., 2011; thompson et al., 2023) a key feature in the design, implementation, and use of socio-technical systems like ai in the public sector. the overarching aim of this paper is to illustrate how technical democracy and learning can be advanced as a defining feature of media futures in the public sector. in our example, we explore this through the development of a prototype designed for education. the premise of the toolkit is simple: if a school is approached, for example, by an edtech company, stakeholders can use our toolkit to learn, deliberate, and discuss new technologies and collectively decide on a course of action. when we refer to technical democracy, we mean attempts to include, activate, and mobilise ordinary citizens into the development and implementation of emerging information technologies (such as teachers into the implementation of ai products in school) through collective forms of experimentation (callon et al., 2011). prototyping on the other hand refers to the process for generating and testing ideas with material objects, which can inform new possibilities and solutions. while commonly associated with design and engineering fields, ‘prototyping’ is now being deployed more broadly as part of policymaking and transdisciplinary research projects focused on grappling with complex technologies and issues (gengnagel et al., 2015; gils et al., 2022). the toolkit prototype integrates insights from previous and ongoing presentations, collaborations, dialogues, and workshops with cross-sectoral stakeholders, including interdisciplinary researchers, educators, policymakers, students, teachers, department representatives, campaigners, and advocates. therefore, learning through experimentation here is twofold: the toolkit is both outcome and stimulant of collective forms of experimentation. we have learned about socio-technical issues through prototyping, and the prototype can draw people together in collaborative processes where they can identify issues and decide collectively on appropriate measures (lanng et al., 2022). the edtech toolkit to illustrate the benefit of our methodology leading to the development of the toolkit, the paper presents three tools: the possibilities matrix, the issues register and the counterarchive. the possibilities matrix is a tool to brainstorm non-technical alternatives and edtech workarounds to identify varied possibilities. finding alternatives to edtech is about critically and creatively exploring potential and possible futures in education that do not rely on over-centralisation and excessive commercialisation (selwyn et al., 2020). this requires new ways of reimagining education and the role of emerging technologies. for instance, exploring not just everyday alternatives, but also speculative and utopian approaches which contest the assumptions and hype of edtech (macgilchrist, 2021). the issues register is a tool to explore how a range of technologies, stakeholders, and power relations shape socio-technical systems over time. artificial intelligence registers are websites that describe the features of ai systems used in geographical areas or organisations (cath & jansen, 2021). registers can potentially support democratic participation in government use of ai by providing mechanisms for transparency, feedback, and building ‘trustworthy ai’ (haataja et al., 2020). however, existing ai registers are seen as problematic. issues include registers with limited information, which can be seen as a form of ethics ‘washing’ that is untrustworthy and introduced with little input from those who either use or are affected by ai (cath & jansen, 2021). our register aims to communicate a range of issues, algorithmic models, and examples that can inform collective learning and experimentation specific to the education domain. in this register, users can learn how socio-technical issues arise from the integration of specific computing models across a range of educational contexts. the counter-archive is a tool to explore socio-technical issues and examples from around the globe. the purpose of this tool is to understand how different cultural records from the past can render visible issues and possibilities for shaping edtech in the present. the process of ‘education counter-archiving’ refers to retracing the cultural records of data infrastructures and inequalities in education” (author) and surfacing historical processes, conditions, and conflicts associated with emerging technologies (williamson & eynon, 2020). this process aims to surface the hidden values, uncertain archives, and ethico-politics which imbue algorithms and automated decision-making (agostinho et al., 2019; amoore, 2020; kitchin, 2017). slowing down and opening up public service industries as the edtech industry accelerates the implementation of its products and conceals their development, the edtech assessment toolkit can be understood as a provocation to slow down and open-up. our prototyping process and toolkit offer an exploratory, yet pragmatic, tool for enacting technical democracy. we believe this approach has merit for other public sectors that grapple with the introduction of emerging information technologies like health, social services, and urban planning. our approach aims to inspire collective learning and experimentation towards political and democratic designs (disalvo, 2010; mouffe, 2013) with the potential to interrupt public sector design and create spaces which move from consensus to dissensus in an age of automated decision-making (swist et al., 2024). references agostinho, d., d'ignazio, c., ring, a., thylstrup, n. b., & veel, k. (2019). uncertain archives: approaching the unknowns, errors, and vulnerabilities of big data through cultural theories of the archive. surveillance & society, 17(3/4), 422-441. amoore, l. (2020). cloud ethics: algorithms and the attributes of ourselves and others: duke university press. callon, m., lascoumes, p., & barthe, y. (2011). acting in an uncertain world: an essay on technical democracy: mit press. cath, c., & jansen, f. (2021). dutch comfort: the limits of ai governance through municipal registers. arxiv preprint arxiv:2109.02944. disalvo, c. (2010). design, democracy and agonistic pluralism. paper presented at the design and complexity drs international conference, montreal, canada. https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conferencepapers/drs2010/researchpapers/31/ gengnagel, c., nagy, e., & stark, r. (2015). rethink! prototyping: transdisciplinary concepts of prototyping: springer. gils, h. c., gardian, h., kittel, m., schill, w.-p., zerrahn, a., murmann, a., . . . van ouwerkerk, j. (2022). modeling flexibility in energy systems—comparison of power sector models based on simplified test cases. renewable and sustainable energy reviews, 158, 111995. haataja, e., laine, a., & hannula, m. s. (2020). educators’ perceptions of mathematically gifted students and a socially supportive learning environment–a case study of a finnish upper secondary school. lumat: international journal on math, science and technology education, 8(1), 44-66. holoniq. (2022). 2022 global education outlook. retrieved from https://www.holoniq.com/notes/2022-global-education-outlook kitchin, r. (2017). thinking critically about and researching algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1). doi:10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154087 lanng, d. b., laursen, l. h., & borg, s. r. (2022). forming issues and publics: participatory design things and uncertain rural futures. policy design and practice, 5(1), 86-102. macgilchrist, f. (2021). what is ‘critical’in critical studies of edtech? three responses. in (vol. 46, pp. 243-249): taylor & francis. mouffe, c. (2013). agonistics: thinking the world politically: verso books. https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2010/researchpapers/31/ https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2010/researchpapers/31/ https://www.holoniq.com/notes/2022-global-education-outlook selwyn, n., hillman, t., eynon, r., ferreira, g., knox, j., macgilchrist, f., & sancho-gil, j. m. (2020). what’s next for ed-tech? critical hopes and concerns for the 2020s. in (vol. 45, pp. 1-6): taylor & francis. swist, t., gulson, k. n., benn, c., kitto, k., knight, s., & zhang, v. (2024). a technical democracy design experiment: making the uk exam algorithm controversy game. design studies, 91-92, 101245. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2024.101245 thompson, g., gulson, k. n., swist, t., & witzenberger, k. (2023). responding to sociotechnical controversies in education: a modest proposal toward technical democracy. learning, media and technology, 48(2), 240-252. doi:10.1080/17439884.2022.2126495 williamson, b. (2022). big edtech. learning, media and technology, 47(2), 157-162. doi:10.1080/17439884.2022.2063888 williamson, b., & eynon, r. (2020). historical threads, missing links, and future directions in ai in education. learning, media and technology, 45(3), 223-235. doi:10.1080/17439884.2020.1798995 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2024.101245 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): mitchell, p., & marshall, a. (2024, october). the work of digital inclusion: exposing the digital labour of community workers fostering digital participation. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the work of digital inclusion: exposing the digital labour of community workers fostering digital participation peta mitchell queensland university of technology amber marshall griffith university introduction digital inclusion is increasingly being recognised as a human right, with growing calls for policy, programs, and advocacy to reduce structural disadvantages and disparities in digital access and inclusion (sanders, 2021). digital in/exclusion is also closely related to social in/exclusion, meaning that vulnerable populations (such as those with low incomes, low levels of education, or cultural and linguistically diverse backgrounds) are more likely to experience digital disadvantage. digital exclusion, in turn, further compounds disadvantage, by excluding people from the benefits and opportunities afforded by access to information, products, and services online (van dijk, 2020). while the experiences of people with low levels of digital inclusion have attracted increasing attention from scholars (e.g., hargittai, 2021; helsper, 2021), less attention has been paid within the digital inclusion literature to understanding a) how people are supported to access and use digital technologies in situ and b) the work involved in providing this support. digital inclusion support can be provided in a myriad of formal and informal ways, including in-person or online technical support, deviceand datadonation services, and forms of digital mentoring like digital literacy workshops (dezuanni et al., 2019). we argue that these activities are forms of ‘digital labour’ and that the digital labour involved in supporting individuals towards achieving digital inclusion is under-recognised both in digital inclusion theory and practice. context of the study in this paper we present findings from a national-scale project that worked with disadvantaged communities to examine digital inclusion in low-income families and the role of social infrastructure (e.g., schools, libraries, charities, government services) in supporting digital participation. over two and half years (2021–2023), project researchers conducted extended fieldwork with families, schools, and community organisations in seven communities—ranging from urban to periurban, regional, and remote—across australia. the project focused on the digital inclusion implications of children’s home and school learning experiences, school leavers’ transitions into work, and parenting in digital times. importantly, it included understanding how social infrastructure organisations are working to support local families to become digitally included—through, for example, digital literacy training, provision or subsidy of devices and data, and assistance in accessing information and services online. this paper draws on interviews and workshops with community workers (e.g., teachers, librarians, social support workers) in an outer urban community with high representation of pasifika and indigenous people. this community, home to approximately 20,000 people, is in the lowest quintile of every measure on the australian bureau of statistics (abs)’s socio-economic index for areas (abs, 2023). the community’s unemployment rate is almost double the national rate, and household incomes are about 25% less per week than the average australian household. while a quarter of all australians hold a bachelor’s degree, this is true of only 9% of this community’s population. despite the significant challenges facing families in the community and the organisations that support them, the researchers were privileged to work with a vibrant and cohesive community sector in the area, giving rise to some of the specific findings of this paper. methodology this paper adopts a qualitative case study methodology to provide a detailed account of how digital labour is performed by social infrastructure workers in the context of digital inclusion and broader social services. this approach has been successfully employed in other studies of community-level digital inclusion in australia (e.g., alam & imran, 2015) and abroad (e.g., bürgin & mayer, 2020). as an exemplar, hughes et al. (2018) detail a case study focused on residents’ experiences of social living lab initiatives in the regional australian city of townsville, in the wider context of australia’s national broadband network (nbn) implementation. in step with this study, we sought to explore the experiences of digital in/exclusion from multiple perspectives—at both the family and community levels—within a particular suburban community. more specifically, we combine intrinsic and instrumental case study approaches (simons, 2014) to a) investigate and illuminate the complexity and uniqueness of this community’s particular challenges and opportunities for digital inclusion and b) gain broader insight into the issue of digital in/exclusion experienced by low-income australian families, respectively. we pay particular attention to understanding the interactions between service providers and the families they support, including the types of activities involved in helping families become connected using digital technologies. analysis and findings data for our analysis was primarily drawn from interviews and a two-hour workshop the authors ran with community sector workers who actively work with families to provide tailored social services, such as support for job seeking and accessing government support (see figure 1). in the course of this work, participants reported that they act as digital mentors for clients who often lack reliable, affordable access to digital devices and the internet along with the requisite skills to use digital technologies to perform everyday tasks. for example, social workers are often asked for advice on which internet and mobile plans are best, given the persistent budgetary constraints of lowincome families. furthermore, these workers are often asked by their clients to help them create accounts and login to banking and social services, which can present ethical challenges related to privacy. participants also recounted that this work is generally unaccounted for in position descriptions, key performance indicators, training, and resourcing allocations. similar experiences were reported by other social services workers in other communities in the broader research project. figure 1: participants in the community sector workshop discussing digital inclusion in the local area. in scholarly literature, such support has not conventionally been considered as a form of digital labour: this term has largely been applied to paid, unpaid, or underpaid online activity, platform-mediated ‘gig’ work, and formal employment within the digital media industries (jarrett, 2022). more recently, digital labour has been expanded to encompass—often highly gendered—domestic digital labour (e.g., sadowski et al., 2021), particularly since the covid-19 pandemic. nonetheless, the digital labour of digital mentoring has not yet been accounted for. in light of our results, our study extends the concept of digital labour to include work undertaken in the service and advocacy of digital inclusion in community contexts. specifically, we articulate the activities, challenges, frustrations, and costs (in time and resources) that characterise digital inclusion support of low-income families, often beyond role expectations. in doing this, we seek to expand understandings of digital labour both as a category and concept. overall, the paper demonstrates that digital inclusion initiatives must not only accommodate the intersecting socio-cultural needs of low-income families, but also include appropriate support and resourcing for community workers performing critical digital mentoring work. references alam, k., & imran, s. (2015). the digital divide and social inclusion among refugee migrants: a case in regional australia, information technology & people, 28(2), 344– 365. https://doi.org/10.1108/itp-04-2014-0083 australian bureau of statistics. (2023). socio-economic indexes for areas. https://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/censushome.nsf/home/seifa bürgin, r., & mayer, h. (2020). digital periphery? a community case study of digitalization efforts in swiss mountain regions. in s. patnaik, s. sen, & m. s. mahmoud (eds.), smart village technology: concepts and developments (pp. 67–98). springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37794-6_4 dezuanni, m. et al. (2019). digital mentoring in australian communities. digital media research centre, queensland university of technology. available at: https://apo.org.au/node/316264 hargittai, e. (2021). handbook of digital inequality. edward elgar. helsper, e. (2021). the digital disconnect: the social causes and consequences of digital inequalities. sage. hughes, h., et al. (2018). fostering digital participation and communication through social living labs: a qualitative case study from regional australia, communication research and practice, 4(2), 183–206. https://doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2017.1287032 jarrett, k. (2022). digital labor. polity. sadowski, j., strengers, y., & kennedy, j. (2021). more work for big mother: revaluing care and control in smart homes. environment & planning a, 56(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x211022366 sanders, c. k., & scanlon, e. (2021). the digital divide is a human rights issue: advancing social inclusion through social work advocacy. journal of human rights and social work, 6, 130–143. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41134-020-00147-9 https://doi.org/10.1108/itp-04-2014-0083 https://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/censushome.nsf/home/seifa https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37794-6_4 https://apo.org.au/node/316264 https://doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2017.1287032 https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x211022366 https://doi.org/10.1007/s41134-020-00147-9 simons, h. (2014). case study research: in-depth understanding in context. in p. leavy (ed.), the oxford handbook of qualitative research (pp. 455–470). oxford university press. van dijk, j. (2020). the digital divide. wiley. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 cardozo sarli, a. (2023, october). even more complicated: the networked lives of teenagers in a context of exclusion in brazil. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. even more complicated: the networked lives of teenagers in a context of exclusion in brazil andré cardozo sarli university of geneva introduction this paper addresses the social media practices of teenagers living in institutional care in brazil, colloquially known as shelters, and how these practices relate to the particularly unique set of experiences they are undergoing. i refer to this set of experiences as a “context of exclusion,” an amalgamation of several layers of hardships, such as stigmatization (goffman, 1963) and oppression (freire, 2000) that intersect (crenshaw, 2017). the title of the paper is inspired by boyd’s (2014) book “it’s complicated the social lives of networked teens,” while emphasizing that for teenagers living in shelters, the question of their access and activities is even more complicated. to illustrate a common scenario, the complication arises from potentially dangerous uses, such as connecting with drug cartels or strangers, leading most institutions to forbid access. however, the complexity also lies in the nuance: a way of describing how their mundane uses of selfies or hashtags reveal an appropriation of technological affordances that complicates any interpretation of these actions beyond simplistic associations with danger, vanity, or simple pastime. background: teenagers living in institutional care in brazil shelters serve as safe havens for vulnerable children. under brazil's statute of the child and adolescent (sca, 1990), child rights violations necessitate state intervention in cases of abuse, neglect, orphanhood, and various forms of threat or violence. in extreme cases, children or teenagers are removed from their families and communities, becoming shelter residents under state guardianship. this placement, while protective, can also be a source of trauma. the exclusion these children face is multi-layered. beyond the reasons for their removal from family, which include poverty, homelessness, illness, educational deficits, and discrimination based on origin, skin color, or sexual orientation, they often face challenges linked to drug cartels. additionally, the shelters themselves experience exclusion through petitions, invasion attempts, and threats. this multifaceted exclusion creates a complex dynamic within the shelter, where individual issues of a teenager can affect the collective interactions among residents and staff in the institution. it is in this background that access and practices within social media becomes even more complicated, and to that we must not forget that adolescence is a critical stage of life for the development of one’s personality and sense of identity (erikson, 1959; adams et al., 1992) and it is most likely that teenager will spend the whole period inside institutions because of the dim chances of being returned or adopted1. methodology i employed a qualitative methodology that included semi-directed interviews, on-site observations, and online observation of behaviors across three platforms: instagram, tiktok, and facebook. in 2022, i interviewed 61 teenagers and 27 staff members across 14 different institutions in 7 cities in brazil. the approach to data collection was inspired by grounded theory (corbin & strauss, 1990) and situational analysis (clarke, 2003). of the teenagers interviewed, 27 were engaged in a conversational format focusing specifically on their activities on these platforms. theory data is analyzed through the lenses of the script approach by akrich (1992), which deems that technology has embedded a series of prescriptions that push users to act in certain ways: “like a film script, technical objects define a framework of action together with the actors and the space in which they are supposed to act.” (akrich, 1992).in addition to that, i refer to the works of van dijck (2013) who was inspired by the concept of script to analyze the logics of social media, which push users to share everything about their lives and with everyone, through the activities of sharing, liking and befriending. contested access: a foreign body. shelters predominantly view social media negatively: nine of the 14 impose strict limitations on access, perceiving these platforms as complicating factors. social media is often seen as a problem. for instance, catia from shelter tucandeira advocated for banning access after teenagers used it to plot an attack on a rival. similarly, shelter guará imposed restrictions following incidents where a teenager engaged in sexual activity with an adult stranger and another reconnected with their estranged mother without permission. other institutions reported less severe issues, such as online crushes, exposure to pornography, and gaming, indicating a generally negative stance towards technology, a sentiment boyd (2014) observed among parents. 1 the brazilian national system of adoption divulged in 2020 that only 3% of potential adoptive parents seek to adopt children over 10 years old. conversely, five out of the 14 institutions view social media positively. notably, some encourage residents to seek support and opportunities through these platforms. shelter tucunaré, for instance, helped black teenagers connect with a black empowerment movement, while shelter uacari developed personalized digital dossiers akin to social media profiles and engaged professionals from cinema and other arts to assist teenagers in crafting their digital personas. it is more complicated than risks and opportunities: what do teenagers really do like all teenagers, they post selfies full of effects in instagram, share with they did in the stories, try some cool moves in reels, celebrate birthdays in facebook, dance, lip-sync and follow fun trends in tiktok. if most of their use is mundane, the extraordinariness doesn’t come from putting themselves in dangerous situations. what deserves further observation is that their activities (when they are allowed to access) reflect an intention to find stability in a context of high uncertainty, which goes much further than risks and opportunities. as mentioned, it is likely that will spend their adolescence in shelters, and when adults they will need to look for themselves. the search of stability, or in giddens sense, “ontological security” (1991), bring us a perspective to acknowledge influence of the prescriptions to share, befriend and like, all while they appropriate the affordances of platforms to make sense of their narratives. teenagers like lila appropriated instagram’s functionalities that push users to curate themselves (márquez, lanzeni & masanet, 2022) to empower her self-acceptance following episodes of racism and bodyshaming in the school. valeria found in facebook ubiquitous the only place to to connect with the memories of her deceased parents, especially her grandmother that passed away with covid. teenagers also used tiktok to connect with a subculture of the youth from the peripheries of brazil that find commonalities and identification with funk music. conclusion: the way ahead these results demonstrate that although social media may blur the lines between private and public spaces and potentially act as a catalyst for danger, it's crucial to recognize and comprehend that teenagers' engagement with social media is part of a broader generational habitus. it is essential for institutions to acknowledge that the ways in which teenagers use these platforms can offer valuable insights into their realities and challenges, thereby enabling the provision of more effective care and support. references adams, g. r., gullotta, t. p., & montemayor, r. e. (1992). adolescent identity formation. sage publications, inc. akrich, m. (1992), ‘the description of technical objects’, in wiebe bijker and john law (eds), shaping technology/building society studies in sociotechnical change, cambridge, ma: mit press, pp. 205–24 brasil (1990). estatuto da criança e do adolescente. lei federal n. 8069, de 13 de julho de 1990. boyd, d. (2014). it's complicated: the social lives of networked teens. yale university press. clarke, a.e. (2003). situational analyses: grounded theory mapping after the postmodern turn. symbolic interaction, 26(4): 553–576. corbin, j., & strauss, a. (1990). grounded theory research: procedures, canons, and evaluative criteria. qualitative sociology, 13(1), 3-21 crenshaw, k. w. (2017). on intersectionality: essential writings. the new press. erikson, e. (1959), "identity and the life cycle," psycho10gicalissues, 1 (1),1-171. freire, p. (2000). pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed.). continuum. giddens, a. (1991). modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age. stanford university press. goffman, e. (1963). stigma: notes on the management of spoiled identity. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice-hall. márquez, i., lanzeni, d., & masanet, m. j. (2023). teenagers as curators: digitally mediated curation of the self on instagram. journal of youth studies, 26(7), 907-924. van dijck, j. (2013b). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. oxford university press. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 conner, v.a. (2024, october). nostalgic neighborhoods of tiktok: mapping a topology of affective publics. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. nostalgic neighborhoods of tiktok: mapping a topology of affective publics viki askounis conner university of illinois-chicago nostalgia is a culturally resonant and politically potent sensemaking resource that frames how people see the past and understand their place in the world. despite attention to how social media platform political economies and affordances affect nostalgic practices of remembering (e.g., jacobsen & beer, 2021; niemeyer & keightley, 2020; pentzold & menke, 2020), there is a lack of research applying network analytic methods to study its structure and social-semiotic function in digital networks which enable new forms of connective action (bennett & segerberg, 2013) based on discursive, affective, and mimetic bonds. while research indicates nostalgia’s dual-edge function in group dynamics of social solidarity and exclusion (e.g., sedikides & wildschut, 2019), these studies often take collective identity a priori. through a content and semantic network analysis of the popular hashtag #nostalgia (>140b views) on tiktok, this study offers a first step toward understanding the meaning of nostalgia in networked processes of group identification by mapping the topology of the “nostalgic neighborhoods” on the platform emerging from the co-linkages of hashtags. as tiktok’s algorithmic affordances render affiliation networks opaque as they are less rooted in interpersonal social ties (zulli & zulli, 2022), this study contributes important insights into how the hashtag, as a semiotic technology (zappavigna, 2018), structures nostalgic publics on a platform that has emerged as a popular site for nostalgia within youth cultures. conceptualizing networked nostalgia this study brings the scholarship on nostalgia and media (e.g., niemeyer, 2021) into dialogue with theories of social organization in the networked public sphere to define and operationalize networked nostalgia. while nostalgia has been differentially understood as a medical illness, an emotion, a zeitgeist, an aesthetic, and a rhetorical weapon during its short history as a modern named emotion (becker, 2023), its etymology (nostos – return home; algia – pain) reveals its homeric, locative meaning as nostalgia discursively and affectively orients a subject in time and space in the search of the “lost” home (hepper, 2012). i offer that networked nostalgia is an emotive (reddy, 2001), or performative emotion, that is semantically networked, linking understanding of nostalgia’s dimensions of time and space through affective and discursive modalities of sensemaking afforded by the structures of digital networks. as the literature on networked publics (boyd, 2010) and hashtag publics (bruns et al, 2016) shows, hashtags are not only markers of location, as a technical affordance that aids in finding content and navigating platforms; they also serve socio-linguistic functions by discursively expressing ideas and sentiment, contributing to ambient forms of affiliation (zappavigna, 2018, 2011). thus, i argue that how people use its main hashtag, #nostalgia, both reveals and constitutes communities on the platform. two questions guided this study: rq1: what are the most popular hashtags connected to #nostalgia, and what semiotic functions do they serve within the overall co-hashtag network? rq2: what do the co-occurrences of hashtags within the semantic neighborhoods of #nostalgia tell us about the meaning of nostalgia as basis for affiliation? method as the first study of its kind, semantic network analysis (danowski, 1993) permitted attention to the basic structure of nostalgia’s meaning at the level of the hashtag – one of tiktok’s primary affordances of visibility and association (zulli & zulli, 2022). following zappavigna (2018), i defined the hashtag as a semiotic technology with linguistic and technical functions permitted by a platform’s socio-technical affordances of visibility and association (treem & leonardi, 2013). i purposively selected #nostalgia as the entry point for this study given its direct semantic link to the term “nostalgia.” data collection followed best practices identified by the digital methods initiative at the university of amsterdam as shared at the 2023 association of internet researchers annual conference pre-conference. the final dataset included 975 videos over the timeframe may 19, 2019 to november 10, 2023. the network contained 2,737 nodes (hashtags) and 36,308 edges (co-occurrences). i measured the co-occurrence of hashtags in the network using gephi and used its louvain modularity algorithm to reveal the internal hierarchical structure of the network. after identifying twenty neighborhoods, i analyzed key statistical measures to assess their structural properties, manually coded the top 100 hashtags, and undertook a thematic content analysis of seven selected neighborhoods identified for deeper analysis. summary findings based on the equivalence of these neighborhoods’ semantic structures and thematic meanings, i identified three types of affective publics (papacharissi, 2015), below, that emerged in relation to different linguistic and technical functions of the hashtag. given the centrality of technical hashtags (#fyp, #viral) in the overall co-tag network connected to #nostalgia (figure 1), i found the differential use of technical hashtags, as co-linked with affective and discursive hashtags, impacted the affective intensities and meanings of nostalgia within these publics. i argue these findings underscore the importance of tiktok’s socio-technical affordances in “wiring” semantic bonds of nostalgic affiliation and point to the difficulties of disentangling the logics of imitation (zulli & zulli, 2022) from the dynamics of affective publics on the platform (e.g., hautea et al, 2021). • play-grounds described dense fan or participatory cultures (jenkins & ito, 2015) marked by semantic variation, a joyful affective valence, and higher than average degree centrality scores. two nostalgic neighborhoods typified this type of affective public – one centered around gaming (coded in pink) and another centered around celebrity and parasocial interaction (coded in gray). • heart-lands (coded in green, taupe, and black) described less dense, but highly interconnected, affective memory worlds centered around nostalgic experiences and moods (e.g., “vibes”) typified by links to childhood objects, “-core” aesthetics, and music. while these neighborhoods were connected to the overall network through technical hashtags, these markers tended to be less virally articulated, such as #fyp or #greenscreen (in contrast to #viral or #meme), and used in ways that connoted their interpersonal meaning as a visibility or editability affordance. • reflecting pools (coded in blue and orange) represented a third, hybrid type affective public. while structurally similar to heart-lands, reflecting pools more explicitly engaged with the mimetic templates tiktok affords for personal memory as expressed through its imitation logics and participation in mimetic repertoires such as the “then/now” meme and the “evolution” challenge. future directions this study laid important conceptual and empirical groundwork in mapping the socialsemiotic terrain that constitutes nostalgic publics on tiktok. while limited by its focus on the semantic marker of the hashtag, future studies can incorporate multi-modal layers to augment view of the topology of the network revealed here. recognizing nostalgia is often weaponized by far right-wing political actors (e.g., menke & wulf, 2021), future work might extend the metaphor of the neighborhood to identify the “networked gatekeepers” (meraz & papacharissi, 2013) of these publics to better understand the dynamics of power and information flow within this semantic network. references abidin, c. (2021). mapping internet celebrity on tiktok: exploring attention economies and visibility labours. cultural science journal, 12(1), 77-103. becker, t. (2023). yesterday. harvard university press. bennett, l.w & segerberg, a. (2013). the logic of connective action. cambridge: cambridge university press. bhandari, a., and bimo, s. (2022). why’s everyone on tiktok now? the algorithmized self and the future of selfmaking on social media. social media + society, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221086241. bruns a., moon b., paul a., münch f. (2016). towards a typology of hashtag publics: a large-scale comparative study of user engagement across trending topics. communication research and practice, 2, 20–46. danowski, j.a. (1993). network analysis of message content. in g. barnett & w. richards (eds.). progress in communication sciences xii (pp. 197–222). norwood, nj: ablex. digital methods initiative (2022). zeeschuimer. github. https://github.com/digitalmethodsinitiative/zeeschuimer hautea, s., parks, p., takahashi, b., & zeng, j. (2021). showing they care (or don’t): affective publics and ambivalent climate activism on tiktok. social media + society, 7(2), 205630512110123. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211012344 hepper, e. g., ritchie, t. d., sedikides, c., & wildschut, t. (2012). odyssey's end: lay conceptions of nostalgia reflect its original homeric meaning. emotion, 12(1), 102. jacobsen, b.n., & beer, d. (2021). quantified nostalgia: social media, metrics, and memory. social media + society, 7(2). doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/20563051211008822 jenkins, h., & ito, m. (2015). participatory culture in a networked era: a conversation on youth, learning, commerce, and politics. john wiley & sons. niemeyer, k. (2021). media studies and nostalgia: media philosophy & nostalgizing in times of crisis. in m.h. jacobsen (ed.). in intimations of nostalgia: multidisciplinary explorations of an enduring emotion (pp.151-170). bristol, uk: bristol university press. https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529214789.ch007 niemeyer, k., & keightley, e. (2020). the commodification of time and memory: online communities and the dynamics of commercially produced nostalgia. new media & society, 22(9), 1639–1662. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820914869 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221086241 https://github.com/digitalmethodsinitiative/zeeschuimer https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529214789.ch007 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820914869 literat, i., & kligler-vilenchik, n. (2019). youth collective political expression on social media: the role of affordances and memetic dimensions for voicing political views. new media & society, 21(9), 1988–2009. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819837571 menke, m., & wulf, t. (2021). the dark side of inspirational pasts: an investigation of nostalgia in right-wing populist communication. media and communication, 9(2), 237 meraz, s., & papacharissi, z. (2013). networked gatekeeping and networked framing on #egypt. the international journal of press/politics, 18(2), 138-166. meraz, s. (2017). hashtag wars and networked framing: the private/public networked protest repertoires of occupy on twitter. in between the public and private in mobile communication (pp. 303-323). routledge. papacharissi, z. (2015). affective publics: sentiment, technology, and politics. oxford university press. pentzold, c., & menke, m. (2020). practicing media—mediating practice | conceptualizing the doings and sayings of media practices: expressive performance, communicative understanding, and epistemic discourse. international journal of communication, 14, peeters, s., & hagen, s. (2022). the 4cat capture and analysis toolkit: a modular tool for transparent and traceable social media research. computational communication research, 4(2), 571-589. phua, j., jin, s. v., & kim, j. j. (2017). gratifications of using facebook, twitter, instagram, or snapchat to follow brands: the moderating effect of social comparison, trust, tie strength, and network homophily on brand identification, brand engagement, brand commitment, and membership intention. telematics and informatics, 34(1), 412424. reddy, w. m. (2001). the navigation of feeling: a framework for the history of emotions. cambridge university press. sedikides, c., wildschut, t., routledge, c., arndt, j., hepper, e. g., & zhou, x. (2015). to nostalgize: mixing memory with affect and desire. in advances in experimental social psychology (vol. 51, pp. 189-273). academic press. sedikides, c., & wildschut, t. (2019). the sociality of personal and collective nostalgia. european review of social psychology, 30(1), 123-173. http://doi.org /10.1080/10463283.2019.1630098 treem, j. w., & leonardi, p. m. (2013). social media use in organizations: exploring the affordances of visibility, editability, persistence, and association. annals of the international communication association, 36(1), 143–189. https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.2013.11679130 tufekci, z. (2017). twitter and tear gas: the power and fragility of networked protest. yale university press. zappavigna, m. (2011). ambient affiliation: a linguistic perspective on twitter. new media & society, 13(5), 788-806. https://doi-org /10.1177/1461444810385097 zappavigna, m. (2018). searchable talk: hashtags and social media metadiscourse. bloomsbury publishing. zeng, j., abidin, c., & schäfer, m. (2021). research perspectives on tiktok & its legacy apps| research perspectives on tiktok and its legacy apps—introduction. international journal of communication, 15, 12. retrieved from https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/14539. zulli, d., & zulli, d. j. (2022). extending the internet meme: conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation publics on the tiktok platform. new media & society, 24(8), 1872-1890. figure 1. overall network (with degree centrality scores) figure 2. nostalgic neighborhoods selected for thematic analysis selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): brown, j. (2023, october). groups are easy, federating is hard. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. groups are easy, federating is hard james j. brown, jr. rutgers university camden introduction when elon musk took over twitter in october 2022, many users immediately sought out a place of refuge, and mastodon was seen as one early candidate. mastodon is part of the fediverse, a decentralized network of social media services. fediverse software is free and open source, and servers can be run and maintained by the community. there are exceptions – in 2021, truth.social was discovered to be running on mastodon software (kan, n.d.). still, federated social media does allow users to organize themselves into servers or “instances,” and the activitypub networking protocol that it uses provides a key set of functions that connect those servers to one another (activitypub, n.d.). a user of mastodon is exposed not only to content posted on their home server but also other servers as well. users of slack have the relatively easy job of establishing a group, but on mastodon users have to manage internal group dynamics while also federating (or defederating) with other groups. many considering a move from twitter to mastodon were confused about how decentralized social media works. they seemed ill-prepared for the labor required to establish, join, or maintain a federated community. so, it wasn’t all that surprising that some users immediately deemed it to be little more than a collection of “silos” (richard h. ebright [@r_h_ebright], 2022). this concern is of course central to much internet research, which has long addressed the issue of echo chambers and filter bubbles (colleoni et al., 2014; flaxman et al., 2016; terren & borge-bravo, 2021). mastodon users choose a “home” instance, and it was unsurprising that many users were concerned that federated systems would suffer from atomizing forces. what was perhaps more surprising were responses by those who openly professed ignorance about mastodon and then also proceeded to dismiss it. philip lewis of huffington post is one example: “i don’t know enough about mastodon but if people have to operate on specific silos or servers, then that doesn’t seem particularly useful to me” (philip lewis [@phil_lewis_], 2022). this kind of reaction signals something important about a narrowed network imagination amongst some users, a narrowed imagination that is not shared by all. a narrow network imagination on mastodon, users engage in labor-intensive federating practices – they manage both the internal dynamics of their home server and that server’s relations to other servers. groups are relatively easy to create, but federation can be quite difficult. federation is not only about how individuals connect to one another but also about how groups connect to one another. this requires a set of practices for managing group-to-group connections, and the skeptical view of mastodon is evidence that such practices are foreign to many. this skepticism narrows what many people think a social network is or what it can be, and that limited imagination is not just about social networking software. in many social situations, groups are cut off from one another and are encouraged to remain so. the siloing of discord servers should be seen alongside a host of other social formations. both online and off, organizing a group is much easier than federating. in labor organizing, labor laws box in unions. in the u.s. and a number of other countries, secondary strikes one labor union striking in solidarity with another are illegal, meaning that unions are forced to remain focused on their own membership’s narrow concerns rather than working in solidarity with other unions (the right to strike, n.d.). property tax policies and “not in my backyard” (nimby) activists stand in the way of fair housing construction, maintaining static boundaries between neighborhoods rather than organizing in broader coalitions. nimbys rely on the enforcement of longstanding zoning laws that maintain housing segregation (mcelroy & szeto, 2017). these barriers to federation shed light on the confusion of new mastodon users, confusion that is not really about a new user interface. federating practices robert gehl and diana zulli argue that mastodon relies on a shared “political and social worldview,” and they suggest that this worldview was tested when many servers decided to defederate from gab, a far-right social media platform, after the january 6 attacks on the u.s. capitol. this decision isolated the far-right server and ensuring its disconnection from most other servers (gehl & zulli, 2022). however, january 6 is an interesting case to consider when it comes to federating practices. if gab failed to effectively federate on mastodon, the groups that stormed the capitol seem to have succeeded in the difficult work of federation. the attack was the result of a far-right federation that included the proud boys, the oath keepers, the three percenters, and others. these groups have different internal dynamics, but they were still able to organize alongside one another. research has indicated that after january 6, those groups have focused even more on offline organizing methods (holt, 2022). january 6 was a federating project that relied on using digital platforms, but the next attempt at farright federation may not be as visible or trackable in digital spaces. this suggests that researchers should focus not only on federated social media but also on federating practices. conclusion some are out of practice when it comes to federation, as evidenced by the response to mastodon. but others are actively engaged in such practices. while many suffer from a narrowed network imagination, others are actively engaged in the difficult work of federation. by expanding our research lens beyond the fediverse to federating practices, we can better understand not only the confused responses to federated social media but also the evolution of organizing practices across a range of social and political situations. references activitypub. (n.d.). retrieved march 1, 2023, from https://www.w3.org/tr/activitypub/ colleoni, e., rozza, a., & arvidsson, a. (2014). echo chamber or public sphere? predicting political orientation and measuring political homophily in twitter using big data. journal of communication, 64(2), 317–332. flaxman, s., goel, s., & rao, j. m. (2016). filter bubbles, echo chambers, and online news consumption. public opinion quarterly, 80(s1), 298–320. gehl, r. w., & zulli, d. (2022). the digital covenant: non-centralized platform governance on the mastodon social network. information, communication & society, 1–17. holt, j. (2022). after the insurrection: how domestic extremists adapted and evolved after the january 6 us capitol attack. atlantic council. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/after-theinsurrection-how-domestic-extremists-adapted-and-evolved-after-the-january-6us-capitol-attack/ kan, m. (n.d.). trump’s social media site quietly admits it’s based on mastodon | pcmag. retrieved november 9, 2022, from https://www.pcmag.com/news/trumps-social-media-site-quietly-admits-its-basedon-mastodon mcelroy, e., & szeto, a. (2017). the racial contours of yimby/nimby bay area gentrification. berkeley planning journal, 29(1). philip lewis [@phil_lewis_]. (2022, november 5). i don’t know enough about mastodon but if people have to operate on specific silos or servers, then that doesn’t seem particularly useful to me. [tweet]. twitter. https://twitter.com/phil_lewis_/status/1588930963912142849 richard h. ebright [@r_h_ebright]. (2022, november 5). @kakape @ct_bergstrom @devisridhar @markmccaughrean @joinmastodon @cfiesler leaving the global community to enter a silo makes no sense. [tweet]. twitter. https://twitter.com/r_h_ebright/status/1588915997746302976 terren, l., & borge-bravo, r. (2021). echo chambers on social media: a systematic review of the literature. review of communication research, 9, 99–118. the right to strike. (n.d.). boston review. retrieved march 1, 2023, from https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/james-gray-pope-ed-bruno-peter-kellmanright-strike/ selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): robinson, j. y. & cole, s. (2024, october). proposing reciprocal digital methods: a user-centric method for algorithmic social media platforms in a post-api world. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. proposing reciprocal digital methods: a user-centric method for algorithmic social platforms in a post-api world jessica yarin robinson university of oslo sebastian cole university of oslo introduction this paper introduces reciprocal digital methods, a novel research framework tailored to the exigencies of studying social media in what has been called a post-api landscape (bruns, 2019; freelon, 2018). in this paper we build on scholarly discourse on the epistemology and ethics of social media data (lomborg & bechmann, 2014; marres & gerlitz, 2016), and the current debates about the future of social media research (bruns, 2019; freelon, 2018; ohme & araujo, 2022; tromble, 2021). we propose a model that is intended to push the field forward, merging approaches to social media that have been largely disparate, and combining computational analysis of user-level digital trace data and interviews with the same users. the background for this method is the ascendance of algorithmic social platforms, which have engendered an ecosystem wherein user interactions are mediated and molded by opaque and highly tailored algorithmic processes. digital data, while rich in potential insights, often lacks the context necessary to interpret user behavior and platform interaction accurately. conversely, interviews provide depth and narrative but are generally not reliable for capturing use patterns. by combining these two elements, the proposed methodology enables researchers to bridge the gap between narrative and pattern, and between media use and media practice. in other words, the aim of the proposed methodology is to build on the differences between media use and media practices. as mathieu (2023) writes: “usage and practices are two sides of the same coin, but the distinction is nevertheless an important one. … usage is both the object of measurement and something that can be contained by technology. practices are neither of these things. practices are shaped by meaning, tradition, habit, culture and identity, and populate the sociocultural everyday life of audiences.” (p. 35) we argue that user perspectives and digital trace data should not be considered as separate methods but as part of a reciprocal exchange and a broader methodological pluralism (danermark et al., 2019). based on use cases of this method, we note that such an approach can demand new skills of researchers, and involve more direct engagement with social media users. however, such an approach is increasingly necessary in the context of highly personalized platforms and the limitations of data access. moreover, we propose that inviting users into the quantitative analysis process can help correct for the noted lack of agency users have had in big data studies (bishop & kant, 2023). background in the course of our own research, we have iteratively developed a method that combines trace data – from apis, data donations, or manual collection – with user interviews. this emergent approach has proven to be an effective strategy for on the one hand quantifying media use, while also breathing life into the data by giving voice to the users. yet, we find little in the methodological literature that provides a clear framework for an alloy between these types of data. while the combination of qualitative interviews with quantitative data traditionally falls under the catch-all “mixed methods,” we find this category provides insufficient methodological backing for social media researchers seeking to contextualize user-level practices. mixed methods often progress from qualitative to quantitative, with individual interviews informing the structure of subsequent generalizable social surveys, or vice versa, with qualitative interviews providing more social context for the findings of surveys (creswell & creswell, 2018). even when qualitative and quantitative data are collected in tandem,these are not generally data on the same individual. moreover, such triangulation approaches are often used to corroborate different measures of similar outcome variables (such as user perceptions). these do not take advantage of the availability of digital trace data, the by-products users’ interactions with digital media, offering a window – albeit limited – into user behavior (rogers, 2019).in the past few years, new methodologies such as data donations have been developed to study social media use, and are often compared epistemologically to self-reports, logs, and phone tracking (van driel et al., 2022; ohme et al., 2023). a recent line of literature has examined best practices for obtaining and analyzing donated data (keusch et al., 2024; gomez ortega et al., 2023; pfiffner & friemel, 2023), yet we find so far little scholarly writing has addressed combining user data with interviews. we argue that these quantitative trace data alone are insufficient; users are not their data. our proposed framework suggests collecting digital traces and explanations from the same users, who are brought into the data collection and the analysis. a core premise of our proposed model is that the patterns identified through data scraping and analysis are devoid of meaning without the interpretive voices of the users themselves (lomborg & bechmann, 2014). this perspective aligns philosophically in many ways with digital ethnography, but we find that the current scope of digital ethnography does not lend itself to quantitative explorations of digital trace data. ethnography is generally a qualitative approach that emphasizes the reflexivity of the researcher and the in-depth exploration of cultural milieux (coleman, 2010). computational analysis of digital trace data is difficult to fit into the traditions of digital ethnography. thus, our methodological proposal is not a mere academic exercise; it is a practical advancement of existing methods, and an adaptation to the evolving landscape of digital interaction. we demonstrate the application of the reciprocal model through two use cases: spotify and twitter/x. case study i: twitter/x in the first case study, the reciprocal approach was applied to the study of communication in global networks on twitter, involving interviews with 26 users. in advance of each interview, the user’s tweet archive was accessed through the platform's api – acknowledging that profile scraping could serve as an alternative – and the researcher identified the user’s most popular tweets and mapped patterns of communication. during the subsequent interview, tweets were presented to the participant. this technique prompted users to engage in more specific and reflective discussions about their tweeting practices, including the temporal patterns of their activity. this reciprocal method not only allowed users to clarify and correct the researchers’ interpretations, but also revealed insights into phenomena such as the differentiation between disengagement and user fatigue, and the repercussions of platform suspension (visible in the trace data only as periods of reduced tweeting). this reflective process underscored the value of integrating user perspectives into metadata analysis of digital trace data. case study ii: spotify the second case study focused on spotify, with an emphasis on the interaction between users and the recommendation algorithm. the researcher first interviewed 20 participants to gather qualitative insights into their perceptions and attitudes towards the platform and its algorithmic recommendations. following these discussions, participants were asked to provide “donated data” – logs of their spotify usage. this combination of qualitative narratives with quantitative usage data allowed the researcher to discern discrepancies between how users perceived their interactions with spotify's algorithm and their actual engagement patterns as evidenced in the donated data. it revealed not only patterns for music listening and discovery but also tensions between selfperceptions and listening behavior. through this reciprocal process, the study revealed a complex relationship between user agency and algorithmic influence. toward reciprocal digital methods some fields, projects, and research questions will naturally benefit from purely quantitative or qualitative approaches. our aim is to provide a framework for inquiries that seek to bridge user behavior (use) and user perception (practice). reciprocal digital methods addresses the importance of, on the one hand, not looking at digital data in isolation, and on the other, grounding interviews in specific use patterns – ultimately providing a more complete picture of the digital experience. references bishop, s., & kant, t. (2023). algorithmic autobiographies and fictions: a digital method. the sociological review, 71(5), 10121036. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261221146403 bruns, a. (2019). after the ‘apicalypse’: social media platforms and their fight against critical scholarly research. information, communication & society, 22(11), 1544-1566. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1637447 coleman, e. g. (2010). ethnographic approaches to digital media. annual review of anthropology, 39, 487–505. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25735124 creswell, j. w., & creswell, j. d. (2018). research design: qualitative, quantitative & mixed methods approaches. (5th ed.). sage. danermark, b., ekström, m., & karlsson, j. ch. (2019). explaining society: critical realism in the social sciences. routledge. freelon, d. (2018, 2018/10/02). computational research in the post-api age. political communication, 35(4), 665-668. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2018.1477506 gomez ortega, a., bourgeois, j., hutiri, w.t. & kourtuem, g. (2023) beyond data transactions: a framework for meaningfully informed data donation. ai & society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-023-01755-5 keusch, f., pankowska, p. k., cernat, a., & bach, r. l. (2024). do you have two minutes to talk about your data? willingness to participate and nonparticipation bias in facebook data donation. field methods. https://doi.org/10.1177/1525822x231225907 lomborg, s., & bechmann, a. (2014). using apis for data collection on social media. the information society, 30(4), 256-265. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2014.915276 marres, n., & gerlitz, c. (2016). interface methods: renegotiating relations between digital social research, sts and sociology. the sociological review, 64(1), 21–46. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954x.12314 mathieu, d. (2023). deconstructing the notion of algorithmic control over datapublics. in datapublics (pp. 27–48). bristol university press. https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/display/book/9781529228649/ch002.xml https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261221146403 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1637447 http://www.jstor.org/stable/25735124 https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2018.1477506 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-023-01755-5 https://doi.org/10.1177/1525822x231225907 https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2014.915276 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954x.12314 https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/display/book/9781529228649/ch002.xml ohme, j., & araujo, t. (2022). digital data donations: a quest for best practices. patterns, 3(4). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2022.100467 ohme, j., araujo, t., boeschoten, l., freelon, d., ram, n., reeves, b. b., & robinson, t. n. (2023). digital trace data collection for social media effects research: apis, data donation, and (screen) tracking. communication methods and measures, 0(0), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2023.2181319 pfiffner, n., & thomas. n. friemel (2023) leveraging data donations for communication research: exploring drivers behind the willingness to donate. communication methods and measures, 17(3), 227249. https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2023.2176474 rogers, r. (2019). doing digital methods. sage. tromble, r. (2021). where have all the data gone? a critical reflection on academic digital research in the post-api age. social media + society, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305121988929 van driel, i. i., giachanou, a., pouwels, j. l., boeschoten, l., beyens, i., & valkenburg, p. m. (2022). promises and pitfalls of social media data donations. communication methods and measures, 16(4), 266–282. https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2022.2109608 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2022.100467 https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2023.2181319 https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2023.2176474 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305121988929 https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2022.2109608 richter-the politics of platform imaginaries-the politics of platform imaginaries selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 the politics of platform imaginaries vanessa richter university of amsterdam, university of bremen thomas poell university of amsterdam introduction over the past decade, a lot of research on digital platforms has been informed by the concept of socio-technical imaginaries (jasanoff & kim 2015, 2009; mager & katzenbach 2021). building on earlier work on imagined communities (anderson 1991) and social imaginaries (taylor 2004), this concept has been defined as “collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures” (jasanoff 2015, 4). examining how such visions have been articulated in relation to platforms, data, and online audiences, researchers have further developed the concept, as algorithmic imaginaries (bucher 2017), data imaginaries (beer, 2018), platform imaginaries (van es & poell 2020), infrastructural imaginaries (mukherjee 2019), and imagined audiences (litt & hargittai 2016; marwick & boyd 2011). these concepts have inspired a wealth of research on how different societal actors, ranging from major platform companies and social movements to small-scale cultural producers and endusers, not only imagine and perceive platforms, their particular affordances and audiences, but also how these imaginaries enable new social practices and relations. lacking, so far, however, is a more precise understanding of how these imaginaries are negotiated between multiple stakeholders. this paper aims to provide insight into these politics of platform imaginaries. it will do so through a case study on the competing images, values, and purposes attached to digital health tracking (dht) platforms, examining how such visions are constructed and negotiated in complex intersectional realities. we will specifically focus on recent societal negotiations over female digital health tracking in the us. these negotiations involve large platform companies, such as fitbit (google) and apple, marketing their products as personal healthcare devices, as suggested citation (apa): richter, v., poell, t. (2023, october). the politics of platform imaginaries. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. well as millions of end-users, ascribing values such as ‘neutrality’ and ‘control’ to digital health tracking. and perhaps most impactful, over the past years, digital health tracking has been adopted by workplaces, government institutions, and health insurances (gorm & shklovski 2019). as such, it is urgent to consider how different stakeholders understand and organize their activities in relation to these technologies. this leads us to the following research questions: which imaginaries are articulated in connection to the leading dht platforms? how are the differences and frictions between these imaginaries resolved or kept alive? which societal actors are involved in this process of negotiation? and how do power differences between these actors shape this process? methods the inquiry focuses on the two leading dht platforms, fitbit and apple health. these platforms are particularly interesting, as both google (fitbit) and apple have gone beyond the dht market: producing their own studies on wearables and health, providing research tools (apple inc., 2019; fitbit health solutions, 2021), and partnering with governments (fitbit inc., 2019), corporations (mobihealthnews, 2020), and universities (gregg, 2020). to examine how these platforms are involved in current debates on female health tracking, we use a combination of critical discourse analysis (wodak, 2015) of user and platform content and walkthroughs (light et al., 2016) of the two platforms. for each platform, we collected posts and reviews by end-users on motivation of use, health perception, and attached values from app stores and facebook groups. the collected materials were manually coded to find common themes regarding (1) motivation for using the platform, (2) values attached to the platform, and (3) any information on their perception of health. in turn, the walkthrough method was employed to gain insight into the technical specificity of dht platforms, as well as embedded cultural implications. this additional set of netnographic data helps to identify and deconstruct a technology’s cultural discourses’ (light et al., 2016, p. 7). and it allows us to analyze the cultural significance, purpose, and values communicated by the platform companies through their interface and public communication. analysis examining these materials, it is immediately striking how dht platforms have pushed imaginaries of health tracking as revolving around self-determination and autonomy. they have done so through promotional materials and slogans such as “take charge of your health with the latest from fitbit” (2023) and “see more of yourself in health” (apple, 2023). yet from the start, these imaginaries have also been challenged by endusers, especially regarding the inadequate support for female health tracking. while the inclusion of female health tracking features in fitbit and apple health was publicly demanded and welcomed at its advent in 2015, end-users also criticized the platforms for lack of accuracy and inclusivity. especially women with health conditions and transwomen felt excluded, whereas female users more generally denounced the sexist iconography. traditional media sources took notice and the discussion moved into the public eye with media reports backing end-users’ concerns around values of equal representation and usability (wakefield, 2018; tiffany, 2018). to maintain the image of openness and personal autonomy, both fitbit and apple health were pressured into revising features and options such as symptom tracking and dispensing with restrictions on cycle length (shieber, 2019; macdonald, 2018). these kinds of negotiations are still ongoing, but have, over the past years, been supplemented by politically laden debates. the politicization of digital health tracking has especially been intensified by the overturning of roe vs. wade, in june 2022, by the u.s. supreme court, ending the federal right to access an abortion. this ruling had a myriad of implications for the us healthcare system, but also for the health tracking market. even prior to the ruling, women started deleting their health apps, taking off their wearables, or stopping period tracking, fearing the potential use for prosecution (garamvolgyi, 2022) and signaling a loss of trust in the idea that health tracking equals autonomy and self-determination. female health tracking in itself is now in question as a safe practice for female users. this has shifted the priorities of both camps of female end-users back to pressuring the platforms to take responsibility for providing secure, reliable, and supportive data for female bodily autonomy against governments and other third parties. digital health tracking platforms, wanting to be perceived as tools for autonomy and selfdetermination of users' health and fitness, are now caught up in a us religious, and political debate, which, in turn, affects users across the globe as it shapes the features that become available through fitbit and apple health. analyzing these societal negotiation processes and mapping the evolving nature of platform imaginaries, we gain insight into the politics of dht imaginaries. the paper examines a key slice of the history of building and shaping imaginaries of female digital health tracking, which has a well-documented history of negotiation and contestation in community discourses, user communication, platforms’ public communication, and media reports. this episode highlights how digital health tracking platforms have become centrally imbricated in crucial societal issues, such as female bodily autonomy and reproductive rights. it shows how quickly ideas of female self-determination and autonomy, associated with health-tracking apps, can be overthrown and reversed. references apple inc. (2019). apple announces three groundbreaking health studies. apple newsroom. retrieved 1 march 2021, from https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/09/apple-announces-three groundbreaking-health-studies/. anderson, b. (1991). imagined communities. reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. london: verso. apple. (2023). ios health. apple. retrieved march 1, 2023, from https://www.apple.com/ios/health/ beer, d. (2018). the data gaze. sage. bucher, t. (2017). the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 30-44. fitbit. (2023). take on your stress. take care of you. fitbit official site for activity trackers & more. retrieved march 1, 2023, from https://www.fitbit.com/global/us/home fitbit health solutions. (2021). one easy health solution for all your employees | fitbit health solutions. fitbit health solutions. retrieved 1 march 2021, from https://healthsolutions.fitbit.com/. fitbit inc. (2019, january 16). national institutes of health launches fitbit project as first digital health technology initiative in landmark all of us research program. fitbit, inc. press releases. https://investor.fitbit.com/press/press-releases/pressrelease-details/2019/national-institutes-of-health-launches-fitbit-project-as-firstdigital-health-technology-initiative-in-landmark-all-of-us-researchprogram/default.aspx. gorm, n., & shklovski, i. (2019). episodic use: practices of care in self-tracking. new media & society, 21(11-12), 2505-2521. garamvolgyi, f.. (2022, june 28). why us women are deleting their period tracking apps. the guardian. retrieved january 31, 2023, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/28/why-us-woman-are-deleting-theirperiod-tracking-apps gregg, s. (2020, september 16). can digital devices help detect flu, covid-19 infection? newsroom. https://newsroom.uw.edu/news/can-digital-devices-help-detect-flu-covid-19-infection. jasanoff s (2015) future imperfect: science, technology, and the imaginations of modernity. in: jasanoff s and kim sh (eds) dreamscapes of modernity: sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power. chicago, il: university of chicago press, pp. 1–33. jasanoff, s., & kim, s.-h. (2009, june 26). containing the atom: sociotechnical imaginaries and nuclear power in the united states and south korea minerva. springerlink. retrieved march 1, 2023, from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11024-009-9124-4 light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2016). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881–900. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 litt, e., & hargittai, e. (2016). the imagined audience on social network sites. social media+ society, 2(1), 2056305116633482. mager, a., & katzenbach, c. (2021). future imaginaries in the making and governing of digital technology: multiple, contested, commodified. new media & society, 23(2), 223– 236. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820929321 marwick, alice e., and danah boyd. "i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience." new media & society 13.1 (2011): 114-133. mcdonald, c. (2018, august 6). fitbit suffers from period pains. computerweekly. retrieved march 1, 2023, from https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/inspect-agadget/fitbit-suffers-from-period-pains mobihealthnews. (2020, september 16). apple, anthem launch 2-year study of asthma app, connected devices. mobihealthnews. https://www.mobihealthnews.com/news/apple-anthem-launch-2-year-study-asthma-appconnected-devices. mukherjee, r. (2019). jio sparks disruption 2.0: infrastructural imaginaries and platform ecosystems in ‘digital india’. media, culture & society, 41(2), 175-195. shieber, j. (2019, june 3). apple's cycle-tracking feature leads new additions to apple watch and is available on health ios. techcrunch. retrieved march 1, 2023, from https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/03/apples-cycle-tracking-feature-leads-new-additionsto-apple-watch-and-is-available-on-health-ios/ taylor, c. (2004). modern social imaginaries. durham: duke university press. tiffany, k. (2018, november 13). period-tracking apps are not for women. vox. retrieved march 1, 2023, from https://www.vox.com/thegoods/2018/11/13/18079458/menstrual-tracking-surveillance-glow-clue-apple-health van es, k., & poell, t. (2020). platform imaginaries and dutch public service media. social media+ society, 6(2). wakefield, j. (2018, august 2). fitbit faces anger for setting limits on women's periods. bbc news. retrieved march 1, 2023, from https://www.bbc.com/news/technology45043399 wodak, r. (2015). critical discourse analysis, discourse-historical approach. in the international encyclopedia of language and social interaction edited by karen tracey. wiley blackwell. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): pilipets, e., geboers, m., divon t., bösch, m., delavar-kasmai, d., tuters, m., noordenbos, b., rogers, r., zhang, x. (2023, november). wartok: networked soundscapes of memetic warfare. panel presented at aoir 2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. wartok: networked soundscapes of memetic warfare elena pilipets university of siegen marloes geboers university of amsterdam this panel investigates the networked soundscapes of memetic warfare on tiktok, a platform crucial in mediating the ongoing war in ukraine since february 2022. introduced to the public as a unique form of war programming during the first week of russia's full-scale military invasion (mobilio 2022), wartok—a portmanteau of ‘tiktok’ and ‘war’—signifies "the war of super-empowered individuals armed only with smartphones" (friedmann 2022). producing headlines such as "tiktok's amazing russian-ukraine war videos," (figure 1) the term necessitates critical and ethical scrutiny, not only for its sensationalist stance but also for the collapse of contexts it entails. integrated into a platform that thrives on remixing, wartok seamlessly intertwines on-the-ground war reporting with war propaganda—an aspect explored across all panel contributions through the lens of music. figure 1: a screenshot of google search recommendation for the term “wartok”. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/02/tiktok-ukraine-war-video.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/opinion/putin-russia-ukraine.html networked soundscapes the choice for sound as the primary step in our exploration not only derives from the platform’s logic of content creation, it also acknowledges music’s affective impact and its historical role in propaganda (thompson & biddle 2013). music on tiktok serves as both an affective mediator and a highly templatable networker. recent studies highlight the templatability of tiktok sounds, offering insights into content creators' attentiongrabbing techniques (abidin & kaye 2021), logics of trend dilution (bainotti et al., 2022), issue-specific remix cultures (primig et al. 2023), and infrastructural meme collection (rogers & giorgi 2023). aural linkages between templates can intersect with other platform-native modalities of expression, producing networked soundscapes. a soundscape, as we approach it by leaning into tiktok’s logic of indexing “listed” and “original” sounds, foregrounds audio as the main memetic stratifier, opening up different paths for navigating content (geboers et al., forthcoming). hashtags and sounds, for example, can turn into a source of mutual amplification or may remain disengaged even when united through technical means (pilipets 2023). feeding into contested attentional dynamics of digital media (boler & davis 2021), propaganda by means of tiktok sharing takes on a new dimension in a highly contested space, which is said to “raise memes to the level of infrastructure” (zulli & zulli 2021). memetic warfare often driven by a cynical hunt for eyeballs, memetic warfare on social media taps into humor and mockery, inviting playful participation (divon 2022), channeling disinformation (bösch 2023), and using agitainment to captivate publics beyond the explicitly political (tuters and noordenbos forthcoming). in the context of war propaganda, memes become central agents of partisan bonding through recognizable templates and inscribed in-group cues (arkenbout & scherz 2022). tiktok music expands the toolbox of crafting memes, opening up new venues of boundary work and populist instrumentalization (boichak & hoskins 2022). tiktok is renowned for its ability to implant short video earworms, perceived as stickier than complete songs (vizcaíno-verdú & abidin 2022). some attribute this phenomenon to the cognitive principle that human memory retains unfinished tasks more effectively than completed ones, generating affective tension (carson 2022). walter j. ong’s “secondary orality”, a concept revived by venturini (2022), is one way to address this tension in online spaces where written words often become spoken words and where evanescence is ingrained into the logic of engagement. foregrounding the memetic function of tiktok, the panel sets out to explore how the ultra-nationalist landscape of russian wartok and the tactics of pro-ukrainian hijacking intertwine in a complex ecology of imitation and attention hijacking. https://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/critical-meme-reader-ii_memetic-tacticality_inc-2022_inc-reader-16.pdf https://izi.br.de/english/publication/televizion/36_2023_e/boesch-wartok.pdf the first paper inquires into memetic tactics of disinformation carried through sound, applying the typology of information disorder (wardle & derakhshan 2017) to the notion of computational propaganda understood as the “use of algorithms, automation, and human curation to purposefully distribute false information over social media networks” (woolley & howard 2019: 3). the second paper discusses the appropriations of ukrainian popular music for purposes of russian propaganda by focusing on two tiktok sounds: “доброго вечора where are you from” by the ukrainian duo probass and hardi, also known as “good evening, we are from ukraine” and its pro-russian adaptation “good morning, we are from russia”. the third paper explores the affective entanglements of warped time within the soundscape of “священная война" (“the sacred war”)—one of the most famous soviet songs of the second world war that has been variously reenacted during the russian invasion of ukraine. the fourth paper assesses the networked templatability of “катюша” (“katyusha”)—a soviet folk-based military march, which became a popular tiktok techno-remix shared by the so-called russian war influencers along with a set of characteristic memetic features such as effects and stickers. the fifth paper interrogates ambiguous stance-taking and oppositional sound publics on douyin with particular attention to how public sentiment about the war in ukraine takes shape through links between hashtags and sounds. references abidin, c. & kaye, b. 2021. “audio memes, earworms, and templatability: the ‘aural turn’ of memes on tiktok.” in c. arkenbout, j. wilson & d. de zeeuw (eds.) critical meme reader: global mutations of the viral image (pp. 58-68). institute of network cultures: amsterdam. arkenbout, c., & scherz, l. 2022 (eds.). critical meme reader ii. memetic tacticality (vol. 16). institute of network cultures. bainotti, l. et al. 2021. tracing the genealogy and change of tiktok audio memes. https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/dmi/winterschool2022tiktokaudiomemes#a_4.1.4._v ideo_stack_analysis. 28.01.22. boichak, o., & hoskins, a. 2022. my war: participation in warfare. digital war, 1-8. boler, m, & davis, e. 2021. (eds.) affective politics of digital media: propaganda by other means. new york: routledge. https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/dmi/tiktok https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/dmi/winterschool2022tiktokaudiomemes#a_4.1.4._video_stack_analysis https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/dmi/winterschool2022tiktokaudiomemes#a_4.1.4._video_stack_analysis bösch, m. 2023. wartok – tiktok and the war in ukraine. televizion 36: 4-7. carson, e. 2022. how tiktok songs make the most intense earworms ever. available at: https://www.cnet.com/culture/heres-why-tiktok-songs-are-stuck-in-your-head/ divon, t. 2022. playful publics on tiktok: the memetic israeli-palestinian war of #challenge. in c. arkenbout & l. scherz (eds.). critical meme reader ii. memetic tacticality. institute of network cultures: amsterdam. friedmann, t.l. 2022. we have never been here before. available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/opinion/putin-russia-ukraine.html geboers, m., pilipets, e., & delavar-kasmai, d. forthcoming. detouring, rerouting and weaponization: cross-cultural networks of war propaganda on tiktok. in d. nguyen, j. zeng, & b. mutsvairo (eds.). global perspectives on the digital transformation. technology, power & society. ong, w. s.j. 1982. orality and literacy the technologizing of the word. london: methuen. pilipets, e. 2023. hashtagging, duetting, sound linking. tiktok gestures and methods of (in)distinction. mast. journal of media art study and theory 4(1): 109-135. doi: https://doi.org/10.59547/26911566.4.1.07 primig, f., szabó, h. d., & lacasa, p. 2023. remixing war: an analysis of the reimagination of the russian–ukraine war on tiktok. frontiers in political science, 5, 1085149. rogers, r., & giorgi, g. 2023. what is a meme, technically speaking?. information, communication & society, 1-19. thompson, m., & biddle, i. 2013 (eds.). sound, music, affect: theorizing sonic experience. a&c black. tuters, m. d., & noordenbos, b. forthcoming. faking sense of war: osint as prokremlin propaganda. in media and the war in ukraine peter lang. venturini, t. 2022. “online conspiracy theories, digital platforms and secondary orality: toward a sociology of online monsters.” theory, culture & society, 39(5), 61– 80. https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211070962. https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211070962 vizcaíno-verdú, a., & abidin, c. 2022. music challenge memes on tiktok: understanding in-group storytelling videos. international journal of communication, 16, 26. wardle, c. & derakhshan, h. 2017. “information disorder: toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy.” council of europe report dgi(2017)09 woolley, s.c. & howard, p. n. “computational propaganda worldwide: executive summary.” samuel woolley and philip n. howard, eds. working paper 2017.11. oxford, uk: project on computational propaganda. comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk. zulli, d. & zulli, d.j. 2020. extending the internet meme: conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation publics on the tiktok platform. new media & society, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820983603. the sound of disinformation: tiktok, computational propaganda and the invasion of ukraine marcus bösch universität münster tom divon the hebrew university of jerusalem introduction tiktok has become a focal point for spreading misinformation and disinformation about the ongoing war in ukraine in 2022/23. videos with the hashtag #ukraine were viewed 36.9 billion times in the first three months of the war (tiktok 2022), and the short-form video platform, owned by the chinese company bytedance, served as the harbinger of war while communicating high volumes of videos containing fragments of misinformation and disinformation. this spread of false information represents a burgeoning issue within societies governed by platforms that provide unfettered access to individuals for the purpose of creating, sharing, and distributing fallacious information to a worldwide audience (jeangène vilmer et al. 2018). besides more traditional strategies to distribute false information on the platform via images, text, and video, novel ways occurred during the war in ukraine when creators innovatively used the popular sound feature as a means of disseminating both misinformation and disinformation. considered as the “backbone of the app” (richards 2022), sound accompanies nearly all visual content on the platform. besides choosing existing music from tiktok’s library, audio is an interactive experience on the platform where users can add voice overs, effects, or multiple audio layers to their videos, automatically linking the sound to an overview page that lists all videos using this sound https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/dmi/tiktok https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820983603 (“sound page”). furthermore, creators apply sound as a visibility strategy by adopting trending songs, rewarding their videos with wider discoverability by the algorithmic recommendations, serving to shape users' experiences (bhandari & bimo 2022). theory to understand the manifestation of misand disinformation carried through sound on tiktok, we contextualize our observations with a computational propaganda lens, described as the “use of algorithms, automation, and human curation to purposefully manage and distribute misleading information” (woolley & howard 2019: 3) where misleading information is understood as misand disinformation (the latter with an intention to deceive) (wardle & derakshan 2017). the features of computational propaganda are (1) automation: allowing propaganda to scale up, (2) scalability: allowing colossal and instant reach within content distribution, and (3) anonymity: allowing the perpetrator to remain unknown. sound-based computational propaganda has not yet been extensively researched, as previous focus was on textual forms of mis and disinformation (dan et al. 2021). in our paper, we unwrap computational propaganda strategies to spread false information. as our study focuses on tiktok’s audio-meme, we apply a typology of mis and disinformation (wardle & derakhshan 2017) creating a map of diverse memetic sound-based videos carrying false information. this typology ranges from low (satire and parody content) to high volume (fabricated content). while fabricated content is not neatly demarcated (it potentially overlaps with the other categories in the typology) wardle (2020) utilizes intention ‘to deceive and do harm’ to single out high volume disinformation. to date, this typology has not yet been applied to sound-based false information. by connecting these findings to the computational propaganda features and applying them to sound, we offer a unique level of insights, asking: (q1) automation how is sound used to spread false information on tiktok? and which role does automation play? (q2) scalability how successful is the usage of sound concerning performance and reach (views, likes, interactions)? (q3): anonymity how can sound-based disinformation be traced back to its perpetrators? method to explore computational elements in war-related tiktok content, we adopted an exploratory user-centric approach utilizing the walkthrough method (light et al., 2018) from the perspective of a tiktok user using an analytical eye. the walkthrough method engages with an app's interface to understand its technology and cultural references, revealing its user guidance. to reduce bias, we established a research-oriented account with varied sim cards but the same geolocation (outside ukraine). after a month of scrolling, we amassed a collection of 300 videos featured on our war-trained “for you” page. all videos contained auditory elements, utilizing songs, audio clips, human speech, sound effects, and audio mashups. we used purposive sampling (sandelowski, 1995) to select information-rich cases and identified eight sound-based examples that aligned with wardle and derakshan's (2017) framework of misand disinformation, further categorized by the intensity of information disorders, ranging from (1) low volume with satire and parody content to (3) high volume with manipulated and fabricated content. finally, we conducted multimodal content analysis (zeng et al., 2021) for each sound, revealing how auditory elements influenced videos and shed light on computational propaganda dimensions on the platform. preliminary findings so far, our findings show an entangled landscape of disand misinformation narratives distributed by audio memes. mapping of 24 significant sounds using wardle’s and derakshan’s (2017) grid captures three levels of false information. first, low-volume misand disinformation videos utilizing sound included parody videos of a soldier dancing to michael jackson’s “smooth criminal” posted by the ukrainian soldier alex hook (@alexhook2303). the viral video accumulated 88m views had the “potential to fool” (wardle & derakshan 2017) as it signaled unjustified optimism by disguising the strength ratio of both military forces and implying a narrative of future ukrainian victory demonstrating the scope of scalability on the platform. second, middle-volume mis-and disinformation videos utilizing sound include the “russian warship go fuck yourself meme” that qualifies as “misleading use of information to frame an issue” (wardle & derakshan 2017). ukrainian users recontextualized the radio message "russian warship, go fuck yourself" by a ukrainian border guard during the russian attack on snake island on february 24, in which 13 ukrainian soldiers were detained by russian force. users turned the radio message into an audio-meme attracting 64.6m views while falsely claiming the soldiers had died as heroes in the battle for the island, showing generic imagery of “death” soldiers, and infusing the sound with patriotic commemorative sentiments. third, high-volume misand disinformation videos utilizing sound include several examples of fabricated content being “100% false” (wardle & derakshan 2017). we identified a sound including gunshots and screams (“оригинальный звук”; english: original sound) with ukrainian and non-ukrainian users filming out of their windows with shaky hands showing a potential war situation with them being attacked by allegedly russian forces. the original sound could be traced back to a source video recorded in a football stadium with firecrackers being lit and fans shouting. the top five videos using this sound have a combined view count of 24.7m. discussion our paper suggests that audio memes work as a contagious force being utilized as an automated mechanism of computational propaganda on tiktok and play a crucial role amidst the invasion of ukraine. our examination of sound-based videos spreading false information shows that features of automation, scalability and anonymity are verifiable. (q1) automation strategies include audio memes and pre-scripted texts for fast distribution that are (q2) scaled up to 88 million views per video with (q3) coordinated campaigns that can be traced back to russian and ukrainian origin with perpetrators disguising their intent by applying strategies like deleting the tiktok video with the original sound. by better understanding the features of computational propaganda on a platform that accommodates more than 1 billion monthly active users (tiktok 27 september 2021), we hope to have a part in countering the spread of false information concerning those events and providing users with future literacy about the platform’s distribution system. references abidin, c. & kaye, d.b.v. 2021. “audio memes, earworms, and templatability: the ‘aural turn’ of memes on tiktok.” critical meme reader, institute of network cultures battle of snake island [sound] 2022. available at: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/battle-of-snake-island bhandari, a. & bimo, s. 2022. why’s everyone on tiktok now? the algorithmized self and the future of self-making on social media. social media + society. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221086241 dan, v., paris, b., donovan, j., hameleers, m., roozenbeek, j., van der linden, s., & von sikorski, c. 2021. visual mis-and disinformation, social media, and democracy. journalism & mass communication quarterly, 98(3), 641-664. davis, j. 2019. the tiktok strategy: using ai platforms to take over the world, the business school for the world. available at: https://knowledge.insead.edu/entrepreneurship/tiktok-strategy-using-ai-platforms-takeover-world hern, a. 2022. tiktok algorithm directs users to fake news about ukraine war, study says. the guardian. available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/mar/21/tiktok-algorithm-directs-users-tofake-news-about-ukraine-war-study-says jack, c. 2017. lexicon of lies: terms for problematic information. data & society, 3(22), 1094-1096. jeangène vilmer, j.-b. 2018. “information manipulation: a challenge for our democracies, report by the policy planning staff (caps) of the ministry for europe and foreign affairs and the institute for strategic research (irsem) of the ministry for the armed forces” https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/img/pdf/information_manipulation_rvb_cle838736.pdf https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221086241 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221086241 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/mar/21/tiktok-algorithm-directs-users-to-fake-news-about-ukraine-war-study-says https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/mar/21/tiktok-algorithm-directs-users-to-fake-news-about-ukraine-war-study-says https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/img/pdf/information_manipulation_rvb_cle838736.pdf https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/img/pdf/information_manipulation_rvb_cle838736.pdf light, b.; burgess, j.; duguay, s. 2018. the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881–900. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 medina serrano, j. c., papakyriakopoulos, o., & hegelich, s. 2020, july. dancing to the partisan beat: a first analysis of political communication on tiktok. in: 12th acm conference on web science (pp. 257-266). richards, a. 2022. “a pro-russia propaganda campaign is using over 180 tiktok influencers to promote the invasion of ukraine” media matters https://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/pro-russia-propaganda-campaign-using-over-180tiktok-influencers-promote-invasion-ukraine tiktok 24 february 2022 , “#ukraine” (https://www.tiktok.com/tag/ukraine); archived at wayback machine (https://web.archive.org/) https://web.archive.org/web/20220224113854/https://www.tiktok.com/tag/ukraine tiktok 25 may 2022, “#ukraine” (https://www.tiktok.com/tag/ukraine); archived at wayback machine (https://web.archive.org/) https://web.archive.org/web/20220525205346/https://www.tiktok.com/tag/ukraine tiktok 27 september 2021, “thanks a billion!” https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/1billion-people-on-tiktok wardle, c.; derakhshan, h. 2017. “information disorder: toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy.” council of europe report dgi(2017)09 https://rm.coe.int/information-disorder-report-version-august-2018/16808c9c77 woolley, s.c. & howard, p. n. 2017 “computational propaganda worldwide: executive summary.” samuel woolley and philip n. howard, eds. working paper 2017.11. oxford, uk: project on computational propaganda. comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk. zeng, j., abidin, c., & schäfer, m. s. 2021. research perspectives on tiktok and its legacy apps: introduction. international journal of communication, 15, 3161-3172. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 https://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/pro-russia-propaganda-campaign-using-over-180-tiktok-influencers-promote-invasion-ukraine https://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/pro-russia-propaganda-campaign-using-over-180-tiktok-influencers-promote-invasion-ukraine https://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/pro-russia-propaganda-campaign-using-over-180-tiktok-influencers-promote-invasion-ukraine https://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/pro-russia-propaganda-campaign-using-over-180-tiktok-influencers-promote-invasion-ukraine https://www.tiktok.com/tag/ukraine https://web.archive.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220224113854/https:/www.tiktok.com/tag/ukraine https://www.tiktok.com/tag/ukraine https://web.archive.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220525205346/https:/www.tiktok.com/tag/ukraine https://web.archive.org/web/20220525205346/https:/www.tiktok.com/tag/ukraine https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/1-billion-people-on-tiktok https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/1-billion-people-on-tiktok https://rm.coe.int/information-disorder-report-version-august-2018/16808c9c77 https://rm.coe.int/information-disorder-report-version-august-2018/16808c9c77 “доброго вечора where are you from”: memetic reversal, cultural appropriation, and sound hijacking daria delavar-kasmai university of amsterdam sound memeification, platform-specificities & performing national identity wartok’s content has boosted morale among ukrainian troops and civilians, who use the platform to connect with others and share their experiences (lowery 2022). alongside, serving as a means to cope, share on-the-ground information, and diversify perspectives (chayka 2022), decades-old practices of cultural reappropriation driven by colonialist incentives, unfortunately, take root on the platform. this paper sheds light on the ways in which tiktok affords the continuation of theft and reappropriation of ukrainian music by russian actors. tiktok’s sound infrastructure is instrumentalized for the purpose of erasing ukrainian identity through sound memeification that, in turn, invites platform-specific tactical practices of propagation or pushbacks. in the context of national identity boundary-work, the platform specificity of tiktok materializes via particular user practices that the platform adds to the typical practices of ‘viewing, interacting, creating, and disseminating’ (jenkins et al. 2015). vizcaíno-verdú and abidin (2022: 903) argue that tiktok’s “use this sound” feature adds particular in-group values that include signaling belonging to a certain country, language, and music style: “the tiktoker does not merely partake in a popular trend, but also participates, selfexpresses, and identifies with a network of like-minded others who share their multiple interest affiliations.” music tethered to ukrainian cultural heritage is of paramount importance to russian propagandist actors as it can be flexibly ‘bended’ culminating into counterimitative modes of engagement and identity performance. in the words of abidin and kaye (2021) these can turn into ‘dark innuendos’, producing malicious and cynical forms of appropriation. within the realm of russian propaganda on tiktok, such innuendos emerge via thefts of ukrainian music and hijacks of its cultural associations and historical meanings. in the context of online culture wars and memetic warfare (nagle 2017), these acts of appropriation feed into broader ecologies of war propaganda shaping public opinion about the course of the conflict. russian state-backed media and social media accounts have used memes to spread disinformation, sow division, and promote their preferred narrative of events in ukraine. meanwhile, ukrainian memes have become part of modern folklore used (along with songs and poetry) to counter russian propaganda in simple metaphorical language (antoniuk 2022). soviet rule and the rhetoric of assimilation historically, russian colonialism had a profound impact on ukrainian culture. ukraine was long under soviet rule, and ukrainian language was systematically suppressed. the soviets appropriated ukrainian (among other) cultures, claiming their heritage as their own and erasing their origins (velychenko, 2002). the colonial repressive https://kyivindependent.com/national/making-sense-of-ukrainian-memes-from-watermelons-to-saint-javelin mechanism aims to create the illusion of a homogenous space in which language, cultural norms, and traditions are unified. everything that was once imposed upon the periphery becomes familiar and assimilated (velychenko, 2004). as the periphery becomes part of the center, the erasure of local cultural characteristics becomes associated with ‘emancipation’ through the boundary work of “authenticating narratives” (reddi et al. 2021) that on tiktok, of course, is presented with cynicism. the hijacking of ukrainian songs on tiktok by russian tiktokers is not just a matter of cultural appropriation, but rather an important tactic in a war of forms and senses, in which attention is weaponized by means of memetic reversal. in this context, sounds and images attuned to (the preservation of) ukrainian culture and identity become a vulnerable target for russian imperialism and kremlin-propagandist actors. the cultural frontline is just as important as the war frontline— and by stealing ukrainian songs and using them to humiliate and degrade ukrainians, russian tiktokers are perpetuating this ongoing cultural war. this paper investigates how such cultural wars are fought out on tiktok and how the material affordances of the platform shape its tactical practices. the hijacking of good evening we are from ukraine the sampling methodology utilized in this study partly relies on gerbaudo's recommendations for snowball sampling (gerbaudo 2016). romele and furia (2020) built on this work to encompass digital hermeneutics in which following digital traces is the leading rationale: “whereas the notion of data presumes a particular architecture, the notion of trace is more minimal, positing merely the detection of a thing or movement and the recording of this” (marres 2017: 54). tracing selected sounds that were relevant during particular time frames of significance, we abided by what gerbaudo (2016) labels ‘zoom-in sampling’. tiktok’s sound indexing infrastructure allows for searching the platform via song titles. we could identify additional songs that were used under another title but that would pertain to the same song. the first case study relates to the original song "good evening, we are from ukraine!"—a famous phrase during the war, as well as a track by probass ∆ hardi, released in october 2021. although it was initially used on tiktok with videos displaying various contexts, quickly after the invasion of the country, it evolved into an unofficial military salute in ukraine. the head of the mykolaiv regional administration vitaly kim, as well as the minister of defense reznikov, and journalists begin their video addresses with the main lyrics of the song. a russian modulated/remix version appeared on tiktok mid-march, and has about 10,000 videos with this sound at the time of writing. there are three main versions of this sound: 1) the first uses the same music, but the lyrics go “good morning, we are from russia” (dobroe utro, my iz rossii). 2) the second version starts the same as the ukrainian one but interrupts in the middle with a sound from “masha and the bear”, quoting “no-no-no, i can make it tastier,” and then we hear “good morning, we are from russia” (dobroe utro, my iz rossii). 3) the third sound is the least popular but still worth mentioning, it starts with “good morning, we are from dnr” (donetsk people republic), and then we hear a mutilated sound from the original version. discussion the case of good evening ukraine/good morning russia is a clear example of a hijack where the only speech remix is the replacement of the main lyric of the song, keeping intact the recognition value by way of simple reversal. ironically, this way of retaining elements of an audio meme propagates pro-russian sentiment as much as it works to underpin ukrainian ownership of the original. from reading speech patterns in texts overlaid on top of the videos, it is clear that this case study effectively fits better what reddi et al. (2021) conceptualize as boundary work through ‘authenticating narratives’ revolving around national identities. the key predictors of memetic success on tiktok—visibility, editability, and association (see treem & leonardi 2012; hautea et al. 2021) are all present: recognizable and easily replicable, the hijacking of good evening ukraine exemplifies how audio memes can, in their replicability, not only go viral but also serve the tactical purposes of cultural appropriation and attention hijacking. by tactically making use of pro-ukrainian hashtags such as #путинхуйло (translated freely to putin is a dickhead) and the queer flag emoji usually not associated with kremlin propaganda, pro-russian creators of the good morning remix plugged their spinoff in pro-ukrainian audiences, serving the aims of assimilation of the ‘periphery’ to a russian center. references abidin, c. & kaye, b. 2021. “audio memes, earworms, and templatability: the ‘aural turn’ of memes on tiktok.” in c. arkenbout, j. wilson & d. de zeeuw (eds.) critical meme reader: global mutations of the viral image (pp. 58-68). institute of network cultures: amsterdam. antoniuk, o. 2022. available at: https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2022/04/20/antoniukhow-the-yale-russian-chorus-perhaps-unwittingly-aids-russias-war-in-ukraine-2/ chayka, k. 2022 watching the world’s “firsttiktok war”. available at: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/watching-the-worlds-first-tiktok-war gerbaudo, p. 2016. from data analytics to data hermeneutics. online political discussions, digital methods and the continuing relevance of interpretive approaches. digital culture & society, 2(2), 95-112. https://doi.org/10.14361/dcs-2016-0207 hautea, s., parks, p., takahashi, b., & zeng, j. 2021. showing they care (or don’t): affective publics and ambivalent climate activism on tiktok. social media + society, 7(2), 20563051211012344. jenkins, h., ito, m., & boyd, d. 2015. participatory culture in a networked era: a conversation on youth, learning, commerce, and politics. cambridge, uk: polity press. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/watching-the-worlds-first-tiktok-war https://doi.org/10.14361/dcs-2016-0207 lowery, l. 2022. wartok: how ukraine is using tiktok to fight putin’s invasion. available at: https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/wartok-how-ukraine-using-tiktokputin-invasion/ nagle, a. 2017. kill all normies: online culture wars from 4chan and tumblr to trump and the alt-right. john hunt publishing. reddi, m., kuo, r., & kreiss, d. 2021. identity propaganda: racial narratives and disinformation. new media & society, 14614448211029293. marres n. 2017. digital sociology. polity press, cambridge romele, s. m., & furia, p. 2020. digital hermeneutics: from interpreting with machines to interpretational machines. ai & society, 35(1), 73–86. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146018-0856-2 shifman, l. 2013. memes in a digital world: reconciling with a conceptual troublemaker. journal of computer-mediated communication, 18(3), 362-377. treem, j. w., leonardi, p. m. 2012. social media use in organizations: exploring the affordances of visibility, editability, persistence, and association in: communication yearbook, vol. 36, pp. 143-189, 2012, available at ssrn: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2129853 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2129853 velychenko, s. 2002. the issue of russian colonialism in ukrainian thought. dependency identity and development. ab imperio 2002(1), 323-367. doi:10.1353/imp.2002.0070. velychenko, s. 2004. post-colonialism and ukrainian history. ab imperio 2004(1), 391404. doi:10.1353/imp.2004.0028. vizcaíno-verdú, a., & abidin, c. 2022. music challenge memes on tiktok: understanding in-group storytelling videos. international journal of communication, 16, 26. https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/wartok-how-ukraine-using-tiktok-putin-invasion/ https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/wartok-how-ukraine-using-tiktok-putin-invasion/ https://ssrn.com/abstract=2129853 https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2129853 http://doi.org/10.1353/imp.2002.0070 http://doi.org/10.1353/imp.2004.0028 ambient propaganda: the dark refrain of wartok marc tuters university of amsterdam boris noordenbos university of amsterdam tiktok is an unusual platform, and to make sense of its role in political communication we need somewhat unconventional ideas. analyzing a corpus of pro-kremlin videos that all use the same stalin-era marching song, this paper sets out to rethink the spread of propaganda in a decentralized media environment through the conceptual lens of ‘ambience’. the classic definitions of propaganda all have one thing in common, the idea of an intentional agent with the objective to manipulate. yet intention is a slippery concept when discussing contemporary, networked forms of power. in order to address this, we argue for replacing a model of propaganda premised on the linear transmission of communication with a decentralized model of ambience and attunement, where boundaries “dissolve” between “subject and object, human and nonhuman, and information and matter” (ricket 2013: 1). our theoretical premise is that conceptual metaphors theorizing information flows in terms of content, storage, or transportation fail to recognize that (successful) contemporary propaganda defies the clear-cut hierarchies, linearities, and distinctions of top-down twentieth-century communication recent scholarship acknowledges that social media networks have revolutionized propagandistic communication, making it function by “other means” (boler & davis 2021), and specifically in ways that are more “participatory” (wanless & berk 2020), “computational” (woolley & howard 2016), and “collaborative” (starbird, arif & wilson 2019). today, common users of social media, enhanced by algorithms and forms of automation, have an active role in the creation, curation, “amplification” (diresta 2021), and distribution of propaganda. what remains undertheorized, however, are the (affective, embodied, mimetic) mechanisms through which such new interactions with propagandistic content take shape whereas the classic “transportation theory” of communication holds that the content of a communication is that which it contains, what is called the “resonance theory” studies how media messages activate reservoirs of ideas (schwartz 1974; paasonen 2019). on tiktok, such resonance initially occurs on the level of affect, for example through viral videos, which reverberate with and set ideas and ideologies in motion (cf buchanan 2020: 34). in order to explore this theory, the paper looks at how tiktok’s affordances –the videos’ shortness; looping repetitions of sounds; 'hashtag stuffing’– are at once used to distinguish content and users while at the same time creating imbrications across different (social, ideological) axes and temporalities. these dynamics create unique attentional environments, characterized by 'fluidity', embodied synchronization, memefication, and the 'viral' propagation of disinformation. making sense of their disruptive effects has posed significant challenges to communications scholars (bennett et al. 2018). it is against this background that the paper introduces its theoretical frame, proposing that the analyzed sound meme pivots on forms of bodily, sonic and ideological attunement with the “ambience” of pro-kremlin “wartok.”the paper’s perspective subscribes to the “participatory propaganda” model in recognizing the pivotal involvement of online crowds in persuasive and manipulative communication. yet our conception of ambience breaks with this model by spotlighting not the (intentional) agency of participants (nor that of state actors), but the material agency of memetic online environments themselves. taking inspiration from updated models of althusserian interpellation, we conceive of participants, amplifiers and orchestrators of propaganda as situating themselves in, and “ambiently” attuning themselves to, these environments. through their interpellating force social media ecologies co-shape agency (chun 2016: 59), while simultaneously implicating subjects in ways that blur distinctions between subject and interface. the paper explores this theoretical framework through a case study of pro-kremlin wartoks, looking in particular at content organized around variations of the patriotic world war ii march “священная война” (the sacred war). combining quantitative and qualitative methods, we set out to analyze the unlikely, viral resonance that this pathosladen war song has recently acquired. we first collect a corpus of 2,344 videos that use this sound and then analyze their content. we discuss how these tiktok videos create affective, aural and visual resonance between the 2020s and the (mythologized) 1940s, as well as earlier historical periods. our analysis shows how, in these videos, persuasiveness is anchored not in the content itself, but in the ritualized, affective gesture of its repetition, as well as in the aural and visual resonances suggested between seemingly incommensurable contexts and positions. as such, this paper offers a participatory and media ecological update on a mass media concept (propaganda), which suggests—at both the level of form and of content—that we are not yet done with the enduring legacies of the violent 20th century. we situate the videos in the context of a putin-era world war ii cult that pivots on “the performative denial of temporal distance,” and that tends to “leave[...] out all traces of historical, political, or, for instance, ideological incommensurability” (oushakine 2013: 273). what we add to these insights, however, is an analysis of how tiktok’s material affordances allow for specific temporal montages that erase distinction and generate the resonances on which ambient propaganda relies. the characteristic non-linearity of these clips is exacerbated by their looping repetitions which make historically disparate markers resonate, rather than cohere in a linear narrative sequence. covering episodes as far apart as alexander nevsky’s 13th-century crusades, to the russian imperial resistance against napoleon’s invasion, and the soviet battle against german nazism, the clips invoke a timeless russian victory. the wished-for imminent defeat over the fascist enemy, articulated in the original song’s lyric, as well as its looping, metric beat on tiktok, suggest that time marches on, inevitably toward a new installment of the same russian triumph. as a case study we focus on a subgenre of the video in which 21st-century young russian women transform themselves into uniformed soviet soldiers from world war ii while lip-synching to “the sacred war”. we focus on how these content producers, through their videos, attune their bodies to the affordances of the platform. in comparing these specific tiktoks with the rest of their output on the platform, we speculate on how they may likely have been interpellated as propagandists through their ‘for you page’. we conclude by considering how ambient propaganda reproduces itself in part algorithmically, through decentralized processes that may not be orchestrated by the kremlin, which, however, certainly benefits from it. references bennett, w. lance, and barbara pfetsch. "rethinking political communication in a time of disrupted public spheres." journal of communication, vol. 68, no. 2, 2018, pp. 243253. boler, megan and elizabeth davis, editors. affective politics of digital media: propaganda by other means. routledge, 2021. buchanan, ian. assemblage theory and method: an introduction and guide. bloomsbury academic, 2020. chun, wendy hui kyong. programmed visions: software and memory. mit press, 2011. diresta, renee. "'it’s not misinformation. it’s amplified propaganda." the atlantic, 9 october 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/disinformationpropaganda-amplification-ampliganda/620334/, accessed 30 march 2023. oushakine, serguei alex. "remembering in public: on the affective management of history." ab imperio, vol. 2013, no. 1, 2013, pp. 269-302. paasonen, susanna. "resonant networks. affect and social media." public spheres of resonance. constellations of affect and language, edited by anne fleig and christian von scheve, routledge, 2019, pp. 49-62. rickert, thomas j. ambient rhetoric: the attunements of rhetorical being. university of pittsburgh press, 2013. schwartz, tony. the responsive chord. anchor press, 1974. starbird, kate, et al. "disinformation as collaborative work: surfacing the participatory nature of strategic information operations." proceedings of the acm on humancomputer interaction, vol. 3, no. cscw, 2019, pp. 127:1–127:26. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/disinformation-propaganda-amplification-ampliganda/620334/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/disinformation-propaganda-amplification-ampliganda/620334/ wanless, alex, and berk, michael. "the audience is the amplifier: participatory propaganda." the sage handbook of propaganda, 2019, pp. 85-104. woolley, samuel c., and philip n. howard. "political communication, computational propaganda, and autonomous agents – introduction." international journal of communication, vol. 10, 2016, pp. 4882–4890. zappavigna, michele. "ambient affiliation: a linguistic perspective on twitter." new media & society, vol. 13, no. 5, 2011, pp. 788-806. what if they attack? катюша and the countermobilization of sound marloes geboers university of amsterdam elena pilipets university of siegen introduction in their conceptualization of the ‘aural turn’, abidin and kaye (2021) underline the ambiguous role that sounds play in the processes of meme circulation on tiktok. by repurposing the engaging infrastructure of sound-linking (pilipets 2023), our research upholds sensitivity to how this infrastructure gives rise to what boler and davis (2021) call ‘propaganda by other means’. contingent on participation, propaganda by means of tiktok sharing encompasses multi-modal video performances circulating in a decentralized fashion. musical sound as the amplifier of affect (hennion 2015) here also serves as the main networker, allowing us to approach tiktok content in terms of its capacity “to propagate, move and be moved” (kahn, 2009, p. 26). our case study pertains to a networked template that is tied together by a techno remix of the famous soviet folk song катюша (katyusha) and emerges within a ‘soundscape’ of original sounds frequently appearing together with pro-russian hashtags including #россия🇷🇺 (russia), #мненестыдно (“i’m not ashamed”), and #zанаших (“for our boys”). the composition of co-hashtags and audio remix—as well as other networked components—such as effects and stickers—will be at the center of our analysis, allowing for a critical exploration of the affective affordances (see geboers 2020; hautea et al. 2021) that propel engagement within the nationalist sphere of russian wartok. exploring heterogeneous forms of audiovisual reenactment as the main driving force of memetic warfare, our paper engages with characteristic organizing principles of https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10021331 templatability (leaver et al. 2020) that on tiktok are said to emerge through replication “at the platform level” (zulli & zulli 2021). by discussing how tiktok affordances of the “effects tab” and “use this sound” button facilitate affective loops of imitation and counterimitation (boler & davis 2018), it offers a quali-quantitative analysis of a subset of 1938 videos published with a popular “original sound” variation of катюша. since many videos were removed from public view due to the content restrictions of the “splinternet” (kerby 2022), our data are partial in capturing the templates then in circulation. nevertheless, the song provides a valuable entry point into the study of highly contested russian war influencer ecologies (shadijanova 2022). methodological constellation our methodology acknowledges the sound infrastructure of the platform in which listed sounds from the tiktok-embedded sound library are densely intertwined with tweaks, reworkings, and spin-offs also known as “original sounds”. in the context of russian propaganda, such practices of audio remix are instrumentalized for political purposes such as the hijacking of songs to subvert their meanings. resulting audio artifacts therefore may contain traces of ‘disguised’ sound templates, which are not easily accessible through keywords and require qualitative platform walkthroughs (light et al. 2018) sensitive to the contextual nuance of associated platform features. as leaver et al. (2020: 44-45) point out: “interpreting other people’s engagement with social image-sharing is aided by surrounding contextual information, be it captions, hashtags, profile information, comments, or other annotations.” intertwining in the streams of user-generated and platform-distributed content (niederer, 2016), these features, essential for meme detection, also generate metadata, which we collected using the digital methods initiative’s browser tool ‘zeeschuimer’ (peeters 2022) and explored with particular attention to visual patterns. by tracing patterns and variations in the composition of memetic content, we propose a methodological approach attuned to tiktok’s multi-modal layers of engagement. for this paper, we tested several research techniques aiming not only at the recognition of audiovisual similarity in катюша video templates but also at further contextualization of these templates through composite images (colombo 2018). as we demonstrate below, such analytical devices offer a means of simultaneous close-looking and cross-reading. they are ‘metapictures’ framed in a manner of display that enables critical reflection on them (rogers 2021; mitchell 1994). preliminary findings a sample of video frames presented in figure 1 exemplifies how networked templatability amounts to a ‘skeletal masterplot’ (mäkelä et al. 2021) that sets up a theatrical mode of situation and suspense (wang & suthers 2022). situation is established by tiktok performances, it is a flexible setting, which can be demarcated by hashtags, sounds, and emojis in video captions. suspense builds up as a continuation of the situation. https://tracking.exposed/blog/tiktok-russia-the-emerging-splinternet/ https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/apr/23/z-symbols-pro-war-memes-ukrainian-flags-russian-influencers-ukraine in the memetic setting of катюша videos, a sticker text stating in russian “i am afraid: what if they attack?” demarcates the situation that extends into suspense through the embodied gesture of folding hands in a prayer-like fashion. when the video shows a flashy effect, allowing for the magical appearance of putin, kadyrov, and lukashenko, suspense dissolves and the accompanying sticker text reads: “they will not attack”. the resulting composition combines two propaganda temporalities: one of anxiety and one of affirmation. the first scene represents the anxious present and the next adds an imaginary twist to this present in which staged fear becomes obsolete. figure 2: two examples of memetic juxtaposition in the “what if they attack—they will not’ катюша template. below: grouping frames extracted from a selection of videos adapting the same template by visual similarity in a montage. a parallel can be drawn to an inverted logic of “predictive projection”, which finnin and roozenbek (2022) have described as a characteristic reflection of the kremlin’s own intentions based on what it says others will do first. unpacked through the video background effect "на фоне видео", the sticker text, and pro-russian hashtags, the template transports the message that putin’s government has been propagating since the beginning of the war. exploiting the imagination of a western threat, the message https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/03/22/putin-disinformation-apathy-00018974 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/03/22/putin-disinformation-apathy-00018974 asserts: ‘we’ must attack first in order to prevent ‘them’ from even trying. discussion networked propaganda on tiktok draws its force from the combinations of expressive features. multimodal intersections of sounds, hashtags, video effects, and stickers reinforce engaging potential by design. creating an atmosphere of anxious anticipation, катюша videos derive their impact from the affect-laden folklore song and a suspensedriven masterplot that both encourage imitation. at the same time, tiktok performances not only consolidate the affective consensus of the like-minded others, but often hand a loaded gun to the hands of the opponents, as one-sided positionings are easy to turn around (mäkelä et al. 2021). one of such pushbacks is the use of the same template in pro-ukrainian videos, featuring jesus and zelensky. in addition to audiovisual analysis focusing on such tactics of countermobilization, the affective dimension of imitation publics can be explored through a focused analysis of “sticky words” (ahmed 2004) extracted from the videos’ comments. for sara ahmed, stickiness takes “a form of relationality, or a ‘withness’, in which the elements that are ’with’ get bound together” (ibid.: 91). videos networked via aural linkages become even more sticky through combinations of modalities, such as those seen in катюша posts, where both the song as well as the sticker texts constitute the template. while room is left open for performance, the propagandist messages perpetuated by these templates are meant to be (almost identically) repeated. aiming to dampen possible interventions, катюша videos, are designed to strengthen the bonds between certain audiences—a strategy that extends into commenting practices reiterating the same or similar message. references abidin, c. & kaye, b. 2021. “audio memes, earworms, and templatability: the ‘aural turn’ of memes on tiktok.” in c. arkenbout, j. wilson & d. de zeeuw (eds.) critical meme reader: global mutations of the viral image (pp. 58-68). institute of network cultures: amsterdam. ahmed, s. 2004. the cultural politics of emotion. edinburgh university press boler, m., & davis, e. 2018. the affective politics of the “post-truth” era: feeling rules and networked subjectivity. emotion, space and society, 27, 75-85. colombo g. 2018. the design of composite images: displaying digital visual content for social research. phd thesis, politecnico di milano. finnin, r. & roozenbeek, j. 2022. the real goal of kremlin disinformation isn’t what you think. available at: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/03/22/putin-disinformation-apathy00018974 geboers, m., stolero, n., scuttari, a., van vliet, l., & ridley, a. 2020. why buttons matter: repurposing facebook’s reactions for analysis of the social visual. international journal of communication, 14, 1564-1585. hautea, s., parks, p., takahashi, b., & zeng, j. 2021. showing they care (or don’t): affective publics and ambivalent climate activism on tiktok. social media + society, 7(2), 20563051211012344. hennion, a. 2015. the passion for music: a sociology of mediation, farnham, ashgate. kahn, d. 2009. ‘alvin lucier: i am sitting in a room, immersed and propagated.’ oase, 78, 24–7. kerby, n. 2022. tiktok, russia & the emerging splinternet. available at: https://tracking.exposed/blog/tiktok-russia-the-emerging-splinternet/ leaver, t., highfield, t., & abidin, c. 2020. instagram: visual social media cultures. hoboken, nj: john wiley & sons. light, b.; burgess, j.; duguay, s. 2018. the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881–900. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 mäkelä, m., björninen, s., karttunen, l., nurminen, m., raipola, j., & rantanen, t. 2021. dangers of narrative: a critical approach to narratives of personal experience in contemporary story economy. narrative, 29(2), 139-159. mitchell w.j.t. 1994. picture theory: essays on verbal and visual representation. chicago: university of chicago press. niederer, s. 2018. networked images: visual methodologies for the digital age. hogeschool van amsterdam. peeters, s. 2022. zeeschuimer. a browser extension. available at https://github.com/digitalmethodsinitiative/zeeschuimer. pilipets, e. 2023. hashtagging, duetting, sound linking. tiktok gestures and methods of (in)distinction. mast. journal of media art study and theory 4(1): 109-135. doi: https://doi.org/10.59547/26911566.4.1.07 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 https://github.com/digitalmethodsinitiative/zeeschuimer rogers, r. 2021. visual media analysis for instagram and other online platforms. big data & society, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211022370 shadijanova, d. 2022. pro-war memes, z symbols and blue and yellow flags: russian influencers at war. available at: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/apr/23/zsymbols-pro-war-memes-ukrainian-flags-russian-influencers-ukraine zulli, d. & zulli, d. j. 2020. extending the internet meme: conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation publics on the tiktok platform. new media & society. online first, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820983603. the russia-ukraine war in chinese social media: crossnational amplification on weibo and the nationalized self on douyin richard rogers university of amsterdam xiaoke zhang renmin university of china studying the russia-ukraine war discourse in chinese social media this study is a cross-platform analysis of the discourses surrounding the russiaukraine war in chinese social media. making use of both computational as well as manual classification of posts about the war, we found most significantly the mass amplification of russian state positions on weibo and the reframing of the war as being in the chinese national self-interest on douyin. we situate what we call ‘cross-national amplification’ as well as the ‘nationalized self’ among other notions that seek to capture the discursive power of the state including ‘digital nationalism’, ‘soft propaganda’ and ‘playful patriotism’. we also emphasize the importance of a cross-platform analysis (rather than a single platform analysis) when seeking to capture public sentiment on social media and the type of state discursive power on display. ever since russia’s full-scale invasion of ukraine in february 2022, information and viewpoints about the conflict have spread widely across various chinese social media platforms, much of it taking a pro-russian stance, mixed with framings concerning chinese national interests. despite china's official stance of neutrality, a recent survey by the carter center gauging chinese public opinion on the russia-ukraine war indeed found that 75% of respondents believed that siding with russia would be beneficial to china’s national interests (us-china perception monitor, 2022). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211022370 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820983603 one predominant strand of policy as well as academic work discusses nationalist sentiment on chinese social media as state ‘discourse power’ (atlantic council, 2020). one is the result of top-down propaganda, intended to “control narratives around key public issues and assert the chinese communist party’s discourse power” through official media channels and accounts (zhang et al., 2021: 2). this ‘digital nationalism’ (schneider, 2018) is complemented by ‘softer’, more bottom-up strategies, where seemingly everyday users adopt the same viewpoints and amplify the discourse (creemers, 2016; hyun et al., 2014; zou, 2021). once referred to as 50c party posts (king et al., 2017), these contributions appear to be from genuine users. a more recent characterisation of how state-organized discourse forms on social media has been dubbed ‘playful patriotism’, where the use of hashtags such as #positiveenergy are encouraged, particularly on douyin (chen et al., 2021). videos tagged with #positiveenergy have been found to promote the "chinese state’s political agenda" (chen et al., 2020: 97) through “consensus-building” for the sake of "national unity and cohesion" (fung and hu, 2022). the research question guiding this study is, how is public discourse about the war being shaped on chinese social media? is it primarily through the mechanisms of ‘digital nationalism’, ‘soft propaganda’, ‘playful patriotism’, or are there other orchestrations at work? methodology: a cross-platform approach with ai-assisted labeling the aim here is to contribute to the study of state-sponsored discourse online by examining the origins and substance of the narratives surrounding the russia-ukraine war on chinese social media. it focuses on two of the three most prominent social media platforms in china, weibo and douyin (wechat being the other). we situate our research within the broader literature on how the state shapes discourse on social media in china, as mentioned above. we begin with a brief overview of the characteristics of weibo and douyin. weibo and douyin possess distinctive cultures and features. weibo is typically thought of as an ‘older, more mainstream’ platform, while douyin is a more ‘youth-oriented space’ (meng and literat, 2023). in terms of content format (and the structure of the data, as we come to), weibo primarily features text-based posts occasionally accompanied by pictures and videos. douyin contains primarily short-form videos, with trending sounds and filters, and they aim to entertain. in terms of their recommendation algorithms, weibo is more centralised, and their users tend to actively search for information. in contrast, douyin filters content based on individuals’ previous consumption, tailoring user experience to specific interests, leading to a more passive mode of information reception. we describe our approach as a cross-platform analysis, distinctive from a singleplatform analysis (rogers, 2018), with the benefit of finding discursive and source commonalities across platforms while still taking into account platform specificity, given each platform’s affordances and vernacular culture. we examine posts on weibo and douyin about the russia-ukraine war from february 2022 to july 2023. first, for collecting data on weibo and douyin we employed a query design that fits with our analytical strategy of locating the war discourses from the platforms’ particularities. for douyin, we undertook hashtag-based querying, whereas for weibo we made keyword queries. in the analysis, we also take advantage of recent developments in computational methods, particularly the effectiveness of large language models (llms) for classification tasks (törnberg, 2023). utilizing these tools, and checking them against manual classification, we map out the most significant war-related talking points and larger narratives on weibo and douyin, discussing their origins through engagement analysis. empirically, the combination of the computational analysis with the qualitative examination allows us to make observations about the power and limitations of language models in zero-shot and more elaborate classification tasks and clustering. the llms produced rather broad, seemingly apolitical narratives, we found, while the manual investigation picked out more specifically the russian talking points and some larger narratives that could have been overlooked if relying solely on automated classification. findings: cross-national amplification on weibo and the nationalized self on douyin our findings provide compelling evidence of the amplification of russian state narratives by chinese state sponsored accounts as well as political influencers on weibo, with a relative absence of nationalist chinese content though with the notable exception of multipolarity and u.s. hegemony which could be considered a narrative that ‘overlaps’ with the russian state interests. on douyin we note the nationalization of the war discourse, where national self-interests are predominant. we dub the discourse as the ‘nationalized self’, where the war becomes a prism through which (and opportunity) to discuss its benefits for china, such as the potential for the ‘return of vladivostok’ (baptista, 2020). unlike on weibo, on douyin the russian state narratives are not prominent, nor are chinese state sponsored accounts. these findings not only point up the importance of cross-platform analysis (rather than a single-platform approach) to the study of discourse on chinese social media. they also demonstrate how additional forms of ‘discourse power’ on top of ‘digital nationalism’, ‘soft propaganda’ as well as ‘playful patriotism’ may be present. our analysis found what we term ‘cross-national amplification’ of russian talking points and narratives as well as the reframing of the war discourse in the self-interest, or what we refer to as the ‘nationalized self’. a secondary set of findings concern the comparison between automated cluster labeling and narrative discovery and manual classification by experts. the automated labeling seems to confirm what one could call a ‘neutrality bias’ on the part of the llms, together with a rather muted tonality, compared to the manual labeling. as a case in point, the same cluster was labeled ‘anti-war sentiment’ by the computational technique, where the manual classification had ‘peace instead of american hegemony’. references atlantic council (2020) chinese discourse power, digital forensic research lab, december, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/chinadiscouse-power-final.pdf. baptista, e. (2020) why russia’s vladivostok celebration prompted a nationalist backlash in china, south china morning post, 20 july. chen, x., kaye, d. b. v., & zeng, j. (2021). #positiveenergydouyin: constructing “playful patriotism” in a chinese short-video application. chinese journal of communication, 14(1), 97–117. creemers, r. (2017) cyber china: upgrading propaganda, public opinion work and social management for the twenty-first century, journal of contemporary china, 26:103, 85-100 fung, a. & hu, y. douyin (2022) douyin, storytelling, and national discourse, international communication of chinese culture, 9, 139–147, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40636-022-00259-z. hyun, k. d., kim, j., & sun, s. (2014). news use, nationalism, and internet use motivations as predictors of anti-japanese political actions in china. asian journal of communication, 24(6), 589–604. king, g., pan, j. & roberts, m.e. (2017) how the chinese government fabricates social media posts for strategic distraction, not engaged argument, american political science review 111, 3, 484–501, doi: 10.1017/s0003055417000144. rogers, r. (2018). digital methods for cross-platform analysis, in j. burgess, a. marwick and t. poell (eds.), sage handbook of social media (pp. 91–110). sage. schneider, f. (2018) china’s digital nationalism, oxford university press. törnberg, p. (2023). chatgpt-4 outperforms experts and crowd workers in annotating political twitter messages with zero-shot learning, https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.06588. us-china perception monitor (2022) chinese public opinion on the war in ukraine, carter center china focus, https://uscnpm.org/2022/04/19/chinese-public-opinion-warin-ukraine/. zhang, a., wallis, j. & bogle, a. (2021) trigger warning: the ccp’s coordinated information effort to discredit the bbc, australia strategic policy institute, https://www.aspi.org.au/report/trigger-warning. zou, s. (2021) restyling propaganda: popularized party press and the making of soft propaganda in china, information, communication & society, 26:1, 201–217, doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2021.1942954. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): suzor, n and nelson, l. (2024, october). gpt4 v the oversight board: using large language models for content moderation. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. gpt4 v the oversight board: using large language models for content moderation nicolas suzor queensland university of technology lucinda nelson queensland university of technology introduction and background large-scale automated content moderation on major social media platforms continues to be highly controversial. moderation and curation are central to the value propositions that platforms provide, but companies have struggled to convincingly demonstrate that their automated systems are fair and effective (gillespie, 2018). in this paper, we set out to understand how the emergence of generative ai tools might transform industrial content moderation practices. we investigate whether the current generation of pretrained foundation models may expand the established boundaries of the types of tasks that are considered amenable to automation in content moderation. this paper presents the results of a pilot study into the potential use of gpt4 for content moderation. we use the hate speech decisions of meta’s oversight board as examples of covert hate speech and counterspeech that have proven difficult for existing automated tools. our preliminary results suggest that, given a generic prompt and meta’s hate speech policies, gpt4 can approximate the decisions and accompanying explanations of the oversight board in almost all current cases. our final paper will present analysis of several clear challenges and limitations, including particularly the sensitivity of variations in prompting, options for validating answers, and generalisability to examples with unseen content. during the covid-19 pandemic, in response to abrupt labour shortages and lockdown requirements, platforms accelerated their adoption of automated content moderation. these systems have primarily used machine learning classifiers trained on large datasets of human decisions and evaluated for consistency against their human counterparts (caplan, 2018). in prioritising consistency, companies have invested in systems that perform well on average, but comparatively much worse on harder linecalls and less common categories of decisions and content. it is easier for content classifiers to consistently identify explicit, egregious pieces of prohibited content than to understand subtlety, nuance and context (dias oliva et al., 2021; trott et al., 2022). there is more training data available for common types of rule breach in more common languages, meaning errors are likely to disproportionately impact already-marginalised groups. in the moderation of hate speech and abuse, uneven error rates are compounded by the fact that minority groups are disproportionately targeted by threats and harassment and have their own content flagged for review at a disproportionately high rate (duguay et al., 2018). for a long time, the limitations of automated content classifiers in dealing with borderline cases have seemed intractable. with the recent expansion in the capabilities and availability of large language models, however, there is reason to suspect that more nuanced automated assessment of content in context may be possible. objectives we aim to develop a chain of prompts that can reliably distinguish between hate speech, content that may be harmful but is not strictly prohibited, and reclaimed language and counterspeech. as sociolegal scholars, we seek to move beyond binary classification tasks, to the more complex task of generating verifiable interpretations of texts and application of rules expressed in natural language. by breaking challenging moderation problems into chains of smaller tasks, and incorporating automated checks to identify errors, we aim to create a system that is consistent, transparent and reliable. crucially, we explore how it might be possible to use large language models as an alternative to highly specialised content classifiers and generic ‘toxicity’ and ‘safety’ models. we aim to assess the potential of generative models to identify hateful speech in context, rather than focusing predominantly on explicit language, as current classification-based approaches tend to do. method this analysis focuses on the oversight board’s decisions under meta’s hate speech policies. the oversight board selects a very small proportion of appeals from instagram and facebook and renders detailed decisions that reflect extensive deliberation and external consultation. they arguably represent some of the hardest cases in contemporary content moderation, and they are certainly the most detailed and extensive analyses of their kind with publicly available reasoning. we deliberately focus on hard cases as a way of exploring the potential that foundation models present to approach content moderation tasks in a radically different way. we selected these cases to explore opportunities to use large language models in ways that more closely resemble and support the analytical tasks of interpreting content and applying the complicated (and sometimes poorly written) natural language rules, definitions, and exceptions of content guidelines. these cases, which require understanding of contextual signs and domain expertise, are often thought to require expert human analysis. in this exploratory stage, we iteratively develop and refine a set of prompts that together form a chain to apply content policies to examples. we take the oversight board decisions as ground truth initially, and inductively explore variations in prompting with the goal of producing a generalisable chain that produces consistently good results across the existing hate speech decisions. in addition to systematic tests with varying prompts and context, we integrate and evaluate promising techniques from other research contexts. we include, for example, ‘chain-of-thought' prompting to approximate reasoning (kojima et al., 2022); breaking complex policies into atomistic steps to avoid getting ‘lost in the middle’ (liu et al., 2023) of long prompts; and adding key failed responses as ‘few-shot’ examples (brown et al., 2020). a fuller description of and reflection on our development process will follow in the full paper. preliminary results our evaluation in this project is primarily qualitative. our exploratory methodology does not lend itself to quantitative testing against large-scale held-out datasets. many existing content moderation datasets are tuned specifically for stress-testing classification models. meta’s hate memes dataset, for example, is full of synthetic examples designed specifically to confound classifiers: explicit hateful messages and harmless gibberish that uses the same form or expression as those messages. our preliminary results are promising and revealing. we are interested not just in the number of correct outcomes, but whether the outcomes are made understandable in a way that provides some degree of confidence that those outcomes might be supported by valid reasons that are logical and verifiably correct. obviously, the outcomes of the language models themselves are still probabilistic; here we explore how well we can use probabilistic generative models to approximate reasoned decision-making. we look forward to finalising this analysis and presenting a detailed examination of our methodological and theoretical contributions in the coming months. future work we hope that this work will lead to useful methodological and conceptual insights that can guide emerging regulation of digital platforms. the requirements of new legislation, including the digital services act in europe and the online harms act in the uk, are still underspecified. our analysis is grounded in theories of justice that highlight not just general values of due process but substantive impact on marginalised groups. by conducting this research independently, we aim to expand the range of potential approaches to moderation at scale, beyond those directly envisaged by platforms and regulators. references brown, t., mann, b., ryder, n., subbiah, m., kaplan, j. d., dhariwal, p., neelakantan, a., shyam, p., sastry, g., & askell, a. (2020). language models are few-shot learners. advances in neural information processing systems, 33, 1877–1901. caplan, r. (2018). content or context moderation? [report]. data & society research institute. https://apo.org.au/node/203666 dias oliva, t., antonialli, d. m., & gomes, a. (2021). fighting hate speech, silencing drag queens? artificial intelligence in content moderation and risks to lgbtq voices online. sexuality & culture, 25(2), 700–732. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-020-09790w duguay, s., burgess, j., & suzor, n. (2018). queer women’s experiences of patchwork platform governance on tinder, instagram, and vine. convergence, 1354856518781530. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856518781530 gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media (1st edition). yale university press. kojima, t., gu, s. s., reid, m., matsuo, y., & iwasawa, y. (2022, may 24). large language models are zero-shot reasoners. arxiv.org. https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11916v4 liu, n. f., lin, k., hewitt, j., paranjape, a., bevilacqua, m., petroni, f., & liang, p. (2023). lost in the middle: how language models use long contexts (arxiv:2307.03172). arxiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2307.03172 trott, v., beckett, j., & paech, v. (2022). operationalising ‘toxicity’ in the manosphere: automation, platform governance and community health. convergence, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565221111075 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): kopelman, s. (2024, october). the photojournalistic gif: visual journalism in the social media era. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the photojournalistic gif: visual journalism in the social media era sara kopelman the hebrew university of jerusalem, israel alongside photographs and videos, a new form of visual storytelling has entered the repertoire of visual journalism in recent years: the photographic gif (graphics interchange format). the emergence of the gif in online news as a legitimate image for the documentary representation of disaster, violence, and tragedy is unexpected. the gif, characterized by its silent, short-looped movement, is identified with popular culture and is mainly known from social media networks; it is recognized as a humorous metaphorical image and is used for amusing and witty interactions and reactions (eppink, 2014; miltner & highfield, 2017). however, using a gif to illustrate the news, especially in cases of tragedy or disaster, seems to contradict the more serious purposes and solemn tone of much journalistic reporting. the gif’s mechanical, repetitive motion and absence of sound are reminiscent of “slapstick” comedy in cinema and appear incompatible with the depicted event’s more complex and somber emotional tenor. for many years, photojournalism has been telling stories and creating news narratives via photographs or videos. photographs are historically associated with printed newspapers and videos with television news broadcasts. both are identified in journalistic practices as formats with epistemological value as evidence (e.g., carlson, 2019; schwartz, 1999), but specific technical capabilities, limitations, and narrative possibilities characterize each. a photograph portrays a story through the frozen, silent capture of reality, enabling long and repeated observation (barthes, 1981). a moment that the well-known photographer henri cartier-bresson (1952) defined as “the decisive moment”: a single still image that invites the viewer, through aesthetic composition, to imagine the flow of the depicted narrative (zelizer, 2010). in contrast, a video or a television broadcast presents a story by showing a sequence of filmed occurrences accompanied by sound. this assemblage allows more sensory experience (sobchack, 1992) and enhances the sense of “witnessing” events as they have occurred in real time (zelizer, 2010). however, the moving sequence of videotaped footage is time-limited, represents a linear evolution that presents a beginning and an end, and therefore constrains and defines the duration of viewing and the boundaries of the narrative in advance. the photographic gif seems like a hybrid format – a merging of photograph and film into a new visual form: silent like a photograph, moving like a film, but distinguished by the unique attribute of a short, repetitive looped movement that requires further examination. the ceaseless repetitive motion of the gif stands in overt contrast to conventional photographs and videos in the news but, at the same time, seems to echo the transformations that followed the intense use of smartphones that have affected visual news production and news consumption. the current news production’s material and technological processes embody temporal aspects, such as immediacy, liveness, and preparation time, that stem from the pressure to generate news updates for online platforms continuously competing with the opportunity for more in-depth story development typically available in print. therefore, the temporal orientation of news narratives is influenced by topical content, the medium’s inherent properties, and its surrounding work environment (tenenboim-weinblatt & neiger, 2018). furthermore, turning the smartphone into an information consumption device increased the growth of online news and, consequently, changed news consumption habits (see newman et al., 2022). in particular, the prevalent use of smartphones as integrated gateways to social media platforms led to young people’s preference to consume news on social media, which is expressed with the possibility of keeping up with news immediately and concisely (boczkowski et al., 2018). this increasing popularity of smartphones and competition with social media for public attention has led news organizations to try to design their apps and websites around the user experience models of social media smartphone apps. one of the expressions of adopting new visual designs in online news is the gif, a format that is well-known from social media, and although it has emerged in the past decade as another form of visual journalism, it has received little to no attention in the research literature. consequently, this article identifies the photographic gif as a new visual form in online news and focuses on the extreme case of representation of tragic news. it underlines the unique character of the short-looped movement by drawing on relevant literature concerning photojournalism and visual storytelling, news production, and the attention economy. it then examines the uses of photographic gifs in online news, their potential meanings, and the editorial considerations underpinning their production in newsrooms. methodologically, it uses a mixed-methods qualitative approach, combining semiotic visual analysis of a sample of online gifs and in-depth interviews with senior online news-desk editors of the sampled news organizations. the research corpus was constructed by collecting gifs from the homepages of israeli news websites from the beginning of september 2022 to the end of may 2023 (nine months). the findings of the sampling demonstrate how the gif has been extended beyond its initial contexts, such as humor, reaction, and social media, and how the gif has become a legitimate visual format of journalistic documentation by presenting various uses of photographic gifs in digital journalism and, among them negative news, such as armed and unarmed violence, destruction, natural or infrastructure disasters, and tragedies. since the gif must be created after “taking” photographs or video footage and editing by selecting a sequence and assembling it into a loop, in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with senior online news editors after collecting the sample to examine editorial practices. modeled on approaches from newsroom research (e.g., bock, 2012; gursel, 2016; ilan, 2019; mäenpää, 2022; nilsson, 2017), the interviews included co-viewing of gifs from various online news websites to explore the advantages of the photographic gif compared to traditional photographs and videos, to define what constitutes a “good gif” in digital journalism, and to reveal editorial policies, norms and ethical considerations. lastly, by combining the two methods, the contribution of this article will be presented as twofold: to the best of my knowledge, photojournalistic gifs have yet to be researched despite their presence in online news in recent years. this article thus discovers how the instrumental technique of the gif – the short, looped movement – not only functions as clickbait in a digital network environment but provides informative and even traumatic content in ways that serve key frameworks and goals of visual journalism: storytelling, reporting, and documenting. therefore, this research contributes to visual and digital journalism studies: exploring the photographic gif as a new journalistic storytelling format reveals the enrichment of the visual journalism repertoire in the digital and social media era and emphasizes how, by using gifs, the digital journalism industry adapts to the contemporary environment based on endless scrolling and a competitive, continuous data-stream environment. references barthes, r. (1981). camera lucida: reflections on photography (richard h, trans). new york: hill and wang. bock, m. a. (2012). newspaper journalism and video: motion, sound, and new narratives. new media & society, 14(4), 600–616. boczkowski, p. j., mitchelstein, e., & matassi, m. (2018). “news comes across when i’m in a moment of leisure”: understanding the practices of incidental news consumption on social media. new media & society, 20(10), 3523-3539. carlson, m. (2019). news algorithms, photojournalism and the assumption of mechanical objectivity in journalism. digital journalism, 7(8), 1117–1133. cartier-bresson, h. (1952). the decisive moment. new york: simon and schuster. eppink, j. (2014). a brief history of the gif (so far). journal of visual culture 13(3), 298–306. gursel, z. d. (2016). image brokers: visualizing world news in the age of digital circulation. university of california press. ilan, j. (2019). the international photojournalism industry: cultural production and the making and selling of news pictures. routledge. mäenpää, j. (2022). in search of visual expertise: examining skilled vision in the work of news photo professionals. visual communication, 21(2), 237–255. miltner, k. m., & highfield, t. (2017). never gonna gif you up: analyzing the cultural significance of the animated gif. social media+ society, 3(3), 1–11. nilsson, m. (2017). a faster kind of photojournalism?. nordicom review, 38(s2), 41– 56. newman, n., fletcher, r., schulz, r., c. t., e., k., & nielsen, r. k. (2022). reuters institute digital news report 2022. reuters institute for the study of journalism. schwartz, d. (1999). “objective representation: photographs as facts.” in picturing the past, edited by bonnie brennen and hanno hardt. urbana: university of illinois press, pp. 158–181. sobchack, v. (1992). the address of the eye: a phenomenology of film experience. princeton university press. tenenboim-weinblatt, k., & neiger, m. (2018). temporal affordances in the news. journalism, 19(1), 37-55. zelizer, b. (2010). about to die: how news images move the public. oxford university press. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): rauchberg, j., alper, m., simpson, e., guberman, j. & feinberg, s. (2023, october). “here to have fun and fight ableism”: #autisktok user bios as neruoqueer microactivist platform affordances. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “here to have fun and fight ableism”: #autisktok user bios as neuroqueer microactivist platform affordances jess rauchberg seton hall university, usa meryl alper northeastern university, usa ellen simpson university of colorado at boulder, usa josh guberman university of michigan, usa sarah feinberg tufts university, usa introduction and theoretical background user biography sections on digital social platforms (hereafter described as “user bios” or “bios”) are spaces for account holders to communicate their identities to other users and interlocutors. in doing so, users take narrative ownership by “storying” the mediation of identity. user bios are a platform affordance (devito et al., 2017; bucher & helmond, 2017) encouraging communication of the self. bios may include hashtags, slang influenced by algorithmic culture (i.e., “algospeak”), or emojis to share important qualities of how one wants to be perceived (steen et al., 2023). for instance, social media users often rely on emojis as a self-branding practice to convey interests and identity markers within the constraints of a respective platform’s character limits (li et al., 2020). there is a lack of research, however, on the specific role of user bios on tiktok, a micro-vlogging and content creation platform popular among youth, particularly those from historically marginalized groups. online platforms, such as social media, are increasingly used as community hubs for disabled groups, and especially for autistic people (rauchberg, 2022; alper, 2023; guberman, 2023; sins invalid, 2019). we focus on #autisktok, one of many enclaves for autistic community building and cultural production on tiktok. hashtags are a commonly used affordance on tiktok, in addition to other content sharing and social media platforms (e.g., twitter). they serve multiple purposes, as they are archival and searchable (herrman, 2019), provide a name for a community space, and are indicators of identity (hererra, 2018). additionally, they can be organizational (dailey, 2023) and storytelling elements of ad-hoc networked publics (bruns & burgess, 2011) whose meanings change and evolve over time (papacharissi, 2015). through a critical/cultural qualitative thematic analysis of #autisktok user bios, we assess how the user bio is a space for mediating self-advocacy, agency, and autisticcentered knowledges on #autisktok. to investigate how autistic tiktokers use their profile’s bio section as a space for “restorying” (i.e., taking back narrative ownership) mainstream discourses about autism and agency, we draw upon m. remi yergeau’s (2018) work on autism and neuroqueer rhetorics. through their use of neuroqueerness, yergeau challenges clinical framings of autism that place it outside of neurotypical conceptualizations of language and culture. neuroqueer rhetorics “are stories about communication more generally… [and] disability cultures… and what or who is determined to be storied or storyable” (p. 21). our inquiry is equally informed by arseli dokumacı’s (2023) theory of microactivist affordances, or disabled peoples’ improvisational tactics within inaccessible physical environments. we extend dokumacı’s framework toward the digital, examining how the micro-activist platform affordances of the tiktok user bio allow autistic youth to mediate neuroqueer subjectivities beyond ableism. we pose the following research questions: how do autistic youth use the bio section on tiktok to (re)story autism diagnosis? what is the user bio’s role in creating a supportive enclave for other autistic creators, users, and activists on the tiktok platform? method our study employs a mixed-methods approach using computational and critical qualitative methods. the project is grounded in critical/cultural studies to investigate the enmeshed relationship between discourse and dominant ideological structures (see ono, 2009). we obtained irb approval from northeastern university to begin data collection. our research team (composed of neurotypical and neurodivergent researchers) began with an exploratory walkthrough (zulli & zulli, 2020) of autismrelated hashtags on tiktok and other social media platforms. through this, we discovered an english-language account on instagram dedicated to reposting “actually autistic”1 tiktoks, and created a dataset based on this corpus. one team member contacted the account holder but did not receive a response. we have anonymized the account handle to protect their identity. we first used a python scraper to pull data (e.g., captions, comments, urls) from 1,093 instagram posts from september 2020 to june 2022, and reconstructed the data set after reconciling posts with their source material on tiktok. in january 2023, we engaged in a qualitative thematic analysis (basu, 2017) of the corpus focused on the biography sections of the 639 unique and available tiktok posts (e.g., had not been deleted by tiktok users after having been reposted to instagram). with respect to positionality, our research team has varying individual relationships to autism diagnosis; one author identifies as autistic, and two others as neurodivergent. our teams’ collective expertise in social media research and lived experience with neurodivergence were assets as we collected and analyzed our data. using an open and selective coding process, our thematic analysis produced 3 primary and 7 secondary codes. the code sets were collectively compared and developed into 3 themes: explicit use of autism in bio, autism and intersecting political identities, and the bio as a space for asserting autistic selfhood. findings explicit use of autism in bio social platform users often mediate their identity to other account holders through their account’s biography section (li et al., 2020; greene & brownstone, in press). #autistok users also employ the biography section on their tiktok profiles to discuss their connections to autism and the self publicly. users in our corpus included popular terms like “autistic” (appearing 43 times), “#actuallyautistic” (6 times), “neurodivergent” (6 times), and “neurodiverse” (3 times). additional account bios featured unique, playful phrases that convey the user’s interpretation of their autistic experiences (e.g., “soft autism content,” “autistic goth,” and “neuroqueer”). autism and intersecting identities several user bios in the corpus discuss autism alongside other intersecting identities, suggesting that, for #autistok users, autism shapes how they experience other identities, such as race, gender, and sexuality. user bios discussed the intersections of autism with other disabilities (e.g., “autistic & adhd/audhd,” “autism & did [dissociative identity disorder] system,” “autistic & chronic pain”); autism, gender, and sexuality (e.g., use of 🏳🌈🌈 emojis in bio, “your favorite queer autistic vegan,” “autistic & ace,” “nonbinary goblin”); and autism and race (e.g., “autistic & black,” “bisexual, biracial, bilingual,” “black, autistic, & lgbtq”). notably, the bios of white autistic users in the corpus did not discuss racial identity. the bio as a space for asserting autistic selfhood some user bios additionally communicate specific information about access needs or (humorous) narrativizations of autistic experiences, reflecting self-expressions of agency often denied to autistic people. bios were used to indicate access needs regarding interaction (e.g., “tone indicator appreciated,” “semi-speaking,” “aac user”2) and to discuss diagnosis (e.g., “late identified/late dx”). in addition, users often relied on abstract, gen-z style humor or euphemisms in their bios to story autism away from ableist, pathologizing rhetorics (e.g., “here to have fun and fight ableism,” “autism is winning bois,” “autistic bimbo”). conclusion this work extends and builds upon work at the intersections of identity and societal marginalization, social media cultures, and platform politics. our study illustrates how autistic creators use their account bios as microactivist platform affordances to engage in discourses of resistance that employ neuroqueer rhetorics, thereby re(storying) autism. notes 1. the #actuallyautistic hashtag and movement were created on tumblr in response to the saturation of non-autistic users perpetuating anti-autistic ableism under the #autism hashtag to reclaim narratives about autism and validate autistic experiences and knowledges (osorio, 2020). 2. augmentative and alternative communication (aac) refers to a range of practices, tools, and devices that support verbal communication for nonand semi-speaking people. references alper, m. (2023). kids across the spectrums: growing up autistic in the digital age. mit press. basu, a. (2017). reba and her insurgent prose: sex work, hiv/aids, and subaltern narratives. qualitative health research, 27(10), 1507-1517. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732316675589. bruns, a., & burgess, j. (2011). the use of twitter hashtags in the formation of ad hoc publics. proceedings of the 6th european consortium for political research (ecpr) general conference 2011 (pp. 1-9). the european consortium for political research (ecpr). bucher, t., & helmond, a. (2017). the affordances of social media platforms. in j. burgess, a. marwick, & t. poell (eds.), the sage handbook of social media (pp. 223– 253). sage. dailey, s. l. (2023). “define yourself...# exstpride”: exploring an organizational hashtag through the structurational model of identification. management communication quarterly, 37(1), 127-143. https://doi.org/10.1177/08933189221095597. devito, m.a., birnholtz, j., & hancock, j.t. (2017). platforms, people, and perception: using affordances to understand self-presentation on social media. cscw ‘17: proceedings of the 2017 acm conference on computer supportive cooperative work and social computing, 740-754. https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998192. dokumacı, a. (2023). activist affordances: how disabled people improvise more habitable worlds. duke university press. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732316675589 https://doi.org/10.1177/08933189221095597 https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998192 guberman, j. (2023). #actuallyautistic twitter as a site for epistemic resistance and crip futurity. acm transactions on human-computer interaction, 30(3), 1-34. https://doi.org/10.1145/3569891. herrera, a. p. (2018). theorizing the lesbian hashtag: identity, community, and the technological imperative to name the sexual self. journal of lesbian studies, 22(3), 313-328. https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2018.1384263. herrman, j. (2019, march 10). how tiktok is rewriting the world. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/style/what-is-tik-tok.html. li, j., longinos, g., wilson, s. r., & magdy, w. (2020). emoji and self-identity in twitter bios. proceedings of the 4th workshop on natural language processing and computational social science (pp. 199-211). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/p17. ono, k.a. (2009). critical/cultural approaches to communication. in j. f. eadie (ed.), 21st century communication: a reference handbook (pp. 74-81), wiley & sons. osorio, r. (2020). i am #actuallyautistic, hear me tweet: the autist-topoi of autistic activists on twitter. enculturation, 31. http://enculturation.net/i_am_actuallyautistic papacharissi, z. (2015). affective publics: sentiment, technology, and politics. oxford university press. rauchberg, j.s. (2022). imagining a neuroqueer technoscience. studies in social justice, 16(2), 370-388. https://doi.org/10.26522/ssj.v16i2.3415. sins invalid. (2019). skin, tooth, and bone: the basis of movement is our people– a disability justice primer (2nd ed.). sins invalid. steen, e., yurechko, k., & klug, d. (2023, online first). you can (not) say what you want: using algospeak to contest and evade algorithmic content moderation on tiktok. social media + society, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231194586. yergeau, m. r. (2018). authoring autism: on rhetoric and neurological queerness. duke university press. zulli, d. & zulli, d. j. (2022). extending the internet meme: conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation publics on the tiktok platform. new media & society, 24(8), 1872-1890. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820983603. https://doi.org/10.1145/3569891 https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2018.1384263 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/style/what-is-tik-tok.html https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/p17 http://enculturation.net/i_am_actuallyautistic https://doi.org/10.26522/ssj.v16i2.3415 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231194586 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820983603 selected papers of #aoir202 3 : the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 rouse, l. and m. stanf ill. (2023, october). mapping tumblr through fannish homophilies . paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved f rom http://spir.aoir.org. mapping tumblr through fannish homophilies lauren rouse university of central florida mel stanfill university of central florida tumblr, a microblogging platform that was founded in 2007, hosts various communities organized around interests. the platform has had a varied history, changing ownership multiple times over its lifespan. in 2019, there were nearly 475 million individual blogs across the site, with 376 million unique visitors worldwide (a number that had decreased after tumblr banned adult content in 2018)(rouse and salter 2021); as tiidenberg, hendry, and abidin note, “tumblr has consistently had more active users than twitter, snapchat, baidu, or linkedin” (2016, 2) combining many of the most the popular aspects of social media and blogging platforms, tumblr allows users to curate their blog, or profile, aggregating content reflecting interests spanning sports, music, literature, or art. users can post a variety of content including videos, music files, images, chat posts, or links. they can also reblog other users’ content, which functions similarly to retweeting by reposting given content to their own followers. other features include liking, commenting, and tagging. the experience of tumblr is organized around the “dashboard,” which—rare among contemporary social media platforms—is a reverse chronological feed of the blogs a user follows. users can also discover content through tracking particular tags or an algorithmic “for you” tab. however, as the common joke on the platform about a post “breaking containment” shows, generally content circulates within smaller groups rather than across the entire site; tiidenberg, hendry, and abidin describe the platform as “experienced through silos” that are “sustained through shared practices, vernacular, and sensibility” (2016, 13) tumblr is also notoriously difficult to study. the site is notably hard to navigate (hillman, procyk, and neustaedter 2014). it is also ephemeral, in the sense that “most content posted to the site quickly becomes irrecoverable” (popova 2020, 81) as proferes and morrissey note, while the reblogging function allows for users to add their own comments or hashtags to a post, posts “tend to fragment into multiple branches,” such that “reconstructing an entire conversation is difficult” (2020, 32). this differs from a function like replies on twitter or facebook that are threaded. additionally, as louisa ellen stein describes, “although tags are intended to help with categorizing, archiving, http://spir.aoir.org/ and retrieval, tumblr users often include tags to capture their momentary response to an image, to theorize or extrapolate, or to inscribe the imagined audience into the post” (2015, 158). as a result of this usage norm, tags are rarely useful as metadata for post discovery or retrieval. attu and terras note (2017) that “the majority of papers published have a conceptual focus: explaining how tumblr works when positioned within a specific field of interest, closely followed by message-based works which study tumblr content” (3). however, they also note that user studies have become more popular, as researchers attempt to understand the various motivations for choosing this particular pattern over other social media platforms like twitter or facebook (bury et al. 2013; hillman, procyk, and neustaedter 2014). some researchers use content analysis as a way of determining how identities and representation plays into the distribution of media across the site (chang et al. 2014; xu et al. 2014; dame 2016; bourlai 2017; wick and harriger 2018). others use close reading and interviews with users of the site to investigate often-toxic behaviors that permeate many interactions within various communities, including gatekeeping, bullying, and systemic oppression (cavazos-rehg et al. 2017; ringrose and lawrence 2018; byron 2019; keller 2019). however, there is a lack of research on the network of users and information flow on tumblr. because so much of the platform and its communities are sequestered around tags or specific accounts, and accounts do not have to follow others in order to access the content a specific blog might post, it is difficult to understand how users, and specifically for our purposes here fans, navigate throughout the platform. using survey data from a 2022 survey of fans that was distributed on tumblr between february 22 and march 21, 2022, this paper speculatively maps the network of tumblr. tumblr is home to fandoms of all kinds, acting as a space where fans can gather, discuss theories, produce fan texts and media, and interact with fanworks, making them one of the key distinctive communities that use the site and a suitable community to investigate the shape of the network. in analyzing the 5,000 responses from our survey, we began to notice distinct patterns where the responses seemed to echo one another as various demographic answers would be the same in a clump. one pocket of similar responses was from our question on disability. in the survey, we asked for participants to self-describe any disabilities that they have. we received 65 responses to this question which listed ehlers-danlos syndrome, a group of inherited disorders which affects connective tissue in the body. in the united states, the mayo clinic classifies it as a rare disorder, and within the worldwide population, eds affects just 1 in every 5,000 people (“ehlers-danlos syndrome” n.d.; “ehlers-danlos syndrome” n.d.). people with this condition are thus very overrepresented in our data, and furthermore these responses all were reported around the same time, suggesting that the post with the survey was being reblogged through a section of the network with a high degree of homophily around that identity. beginning from this example, we take a twofold approach. first, we analyze the prevalence of particular demographic answers over time to find points at which a large number of responses have similar identities. second, we use the baseline probability of any given answer within our data set to examine times when it becomes disproportionately prevalent compared to elsewhere in the data. through looking at these correlations between time and probability in specific demographic answers, we can identify moments when the survey was traveling through a homophilic network within the platform, and therefore extract information about how homophily works on this platform. by mapping tumblr through these survey homophiles, we can gain a greater understanding of how people gather and interact on the platform. this has implications both for questions of community and subcultural belonging, but also issues like the spread of misand disinformation. references attu, rose, and melissa terras. 2017. “what people study when they study tumblr: classifying tumblr-related academic research.” journal of documentation 73 (3): 528–54. https://doi.org/10.1108/jd-08-2016-0101. bourlai, elli. 2017. “‘comments in tags, please!’: tagging practices on tumblr.” discourse, context & media 22 (october). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2017.08.003. bury, rhiannon, ruth deller, adam greenwood, and bethan jones. 2013. “from usenet to tumblr: the changing role of social media” 10 (1). byron, paul. 2019. “‘hey, i’m having these experiences’: tumblr use and young people’s queer (dis)connections.” cavazos-rehg, patricia a., melissa j. krauss, shaina j. sowles, sarah connolly, carlos rosas, meghana bharadwaj, richard grucza, and laura j. bierut. 2017. “an analysis of depression, self-harm, and suicidal ideation content on tumblr.” crisis 38 (1): 44–52. https://doi.org/10.1027/0227-5910/a000409. chang, yi, lei tang, yoshiyuki inagaki, and yan liu. 2014. “what is tumblr: a statistical overview and comparison.” acm sigkdd explorations newsletter 16 (1): 21–29. https://doi.org/10.1145/2674026.2674030. dame, avery. 2016. “making a name for yourself: tagging as transgender ontological practice on tumblr.” critical studies in media communication 33 (1): 23–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2015.1130846. “ehlers-danlos syndrome.” n.d. accessed february 28, 2023a. https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/condition/ehlers-danlos-syndrome/. “———.” n.d. mayo clinic. accessed february 28, 2023b. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/ehlers-danlossyndrome/symptoms-causes/syc-20362125. hillman, serena, jason procyk, and carman neustaedter. 2014. “tumblr fandoms, community &amp; culture.” in proceedings of the companion publication of the 17th acm conference on computer supported cooperative work & social computing, 285–88. cscw companion ’14. new york, ny, usa: association for computing machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556420.2557634. keller, jessalynn. 2019. “‘oh, she’s a tumblr feminist’: exploring the platform vernacular of girls’ social media feminisms.” social media + society 5 (3): 2056305119867442. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119867442. popova, milena. 2020. “‘tumblr time: how tumblr’s temporal features shape community memory and knowledge.’” in a tumblr book: platform and cultures, by allison mccracken, alexander cho, louisa stein, and indira neill hoch. university of michigan press. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11537055. proferes, nicholas, and katherine e. morrissey. 2020. “lost in the ‘dash’: how tumblr fosters virtuous cycles of content and community.” in a tumblr book: platform and cultures, by allison mccracken, alexander cho, louisa stein, and indira neill hoch. university of michigan press. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11537055. ringrose, jessica, and emilie lawrence. 2018. “remixing misandry, manspreading, and dick pics: networked feminist humour on tumblr.” feminist media studies 18 (4): 686–704. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1450351. rouse, lauren, and anastasia salter. 2021. “cosplay on demand? instagram, onlyfans, and the gendered fantrepreneur.” social media + society 7 (3): 205630512110423. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211042397. stein, louisa ellen. 2015. millennial fandom: television audiences in the transmedia age. university of iowa press. tiidenberg, katrin. 2016. “boundaries and conflict in a nsfw community on tumblr: the meanings and uses of selfies.” new media & society 18 (8): 1563–78. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814567984. wick, madeline r., and jennifer a. harriger. 2018. “a content analysis of thinspiration images and text posts on tumblr.” body image 24 (march): 13–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2017.11.005. xu, jiejun, ryan compton, tsai-ching lu, and david allen. 2014. “rolling through tumblr: characterizing behavioral patterns of the microblogging platform.” in proceedings of the 2014 acm conference on web science, 13–22. bloomington indiana usa: acm. https://doi.org/10.1145/2615569.2615694. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): valiati, v.; lupinacci, l.; soares, f. (2024, october). wrap your head around it: brazilian users’ algorithmic imaginaries of spotify wrapped. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. wrap your head around it: brazilian users’ algorithmic imaginaries of spotify wrapped vanessa valiati feevale university ludmila lupinacci university of leeds felipe soares university of the arts london introduction spotify is one of the world’s most popular music streaming services, operating in over 180 countries. in what is now part of the ‘year-end list’ tradition, spotify wrapped summarises each user’s annual listening habits. although spotify is generally classified as a streaming service, initiatives such as wrapped have an explicit component of sociability (hagen & lüders 2017) – in this case, not only because they are based on the harvesting of users’ behavioural data but also because they are created to be shared on platforms such as instagram and twitter/x. indeed, spotify wrapped has acquired its own role in digital popular culture, inciting anticipation and excitement from users worldwide and becoming an 'algorithmic event' (annabell & rasmussen 2023) in and of itself. in this paper, we propose to scrutinise how this algorithmic event is perceived and understood by brazilian users whilst also identifying and unpacking the platform affordances and algorithmic imaginaries (bucher, 2017) that inform those interpretations and their associated performances of taste and identity (airoldi, 2019, prey, 2018). we explore, in particular, how users negotiate the tensions between algorithmic personalisation and individuation and the possibilities for shared experience to emerge during this event. through a mixed-method approach, we argue that the 'eventness' (frosh and pinchevski, 2018) of spotify wrapped is distributed, clustered but sparsely connected, and marked by fleeting, fluid and ephemeral feelings of shared experience and recognition rather than by enduring communities, which in turn reflects and extends previous theorisations of affective publics (papacharissi, 2014), everyday data cultures (burgess et al., 2022), and social media liveness (lupinacci, 2021). algorithms, performance, and taste in an "algorithmic episteme" (fisher & mehozay, 2019), a focal point of extensive research revolves around platforms observing audiences through the collection of data on users' habits. the individual is perceived through a discernible pattern derived from the data they generate, including their tracks on the platform. cheney-lippold (2017) encapsulates this notion with "measurable types", through which individuals are temporarily classified as members of fragmented categories. at the same time, the affordances of digital platforms amplify the persistence and visibility of these users' discourses and taste practices (airoldi, 2019). therefore, it becomes crucial to assess how these affordances are integrated into the ways individuals reproduce discourses about their tastes and identity performance through their consumption and sharing of musical information (webster, 2021). in this context, the assumption is made that musical identity undergoes a continual process of "algorithmic individuation," which "should be understood as a dynamic socio-technical process engaged in enacting the individual" (prey, 2018, p. 1095). as a tool, spotify wrapped consolidates the characteristic elements of platformed consumption. it offers the promise of personalisation, leveraging the digital traces users leave throughout the year. simultaneously, it contributes to the ongoing modulation and individuation of taste and identity, fostering a so-called "shared experience" during this algorithmic 'event.' then, it becomes relevant to investigate these aspects that cause tension between individual and collective consumption practices: the distinction (how people perform and share their tastes and how they judge or fear being judged by others), whether there is indeed performance management and how this is reflected in their practices, the perceived need to share as an opportunity to participate in a flow of content, and how the platform shapes all these aspects. methods to explore brazilian users’ perception of spotify wrapped, we adopted a mixed-method approach. we combined social network analysis of x/twitter data, a manual review of the most shared messages, and contrasted those results with a preliminary thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with 25 brazilian spotify users. we used brandwatch to collect x/twitter data. for data collection, our search query included the combination of the words “spotify” and “wrapped”, and we filtered for messages in portuguese only, as we focused on brazilian users in this study. we collected messages posted in november and december 2023 to encompass the period before spotify launched the wrapped to its users and the time after that. we collected 22,283 messages, of which 12,745 were shares/retweets used for the social network analysis. after generating a network graph, we manually reviewed the users with the highest indegree and their most shared messages. we used an arbitrary threshold of 50 weighted indegree to select the most shared messages. we then conducted an exploratory thematic analysis of the 41 most shared messages in the dataset. this dataset will undergo further examination through a content analysis based on the categories identified in the exploratory analysis. additionally, we conducted 25 semi-structured interviews with brazilian spotify users to understand their engagement with spotify wrapped and how it affects their online selfpresentations on social media. interviews were complemented with elicitation techniques preliminary findings and next steps the network graph based on x/twitter data shows a variety of small clusters sparsely connected (figure 1). each of these small clusters is centred around a specific user who had their message highly shared on x/twitter. few users (less than 8%) shared more than one message, and only 26 (0.21%) shared five or more messages. consequently, the average degree of the network is close to 1. this means that the network around spotify wrapped on x/twitter in brazil was mainly based on users sharing one or a few specific messages rather than engaging in-depth in communitybuilding conversations. fig 1. network of x/twitter users around spotify wrapped we identified three overarching categories in the preliminary thematic analysis of the interviews and the most shared messages on x/twitter: cultivating your wrapped: users recognise their active role in ‘nurturing’ their annual listening habits to ensure their wrapped is accurate, exciting, ‘beautiful’, or good. they recognise the labour of ‘cultivating’ (siles et al., 2019) their media consumption to obtain affective gratifications; in this case, they acknowledge the happiness and success of getting the ‘right’ data stories. this often involves the incorporation of spotify listening into existing routines (such as working out to the same playlist every single day) and the creation of new rituals to ensure the desired results. managing contexts and algorithmic sensitivity: we identified strategies to manage and manipulate music consumption practices throughout the year to ensure that only what really ‘represents you’ (or, actually, what you want to represent you) is shown on spotify wrapped. we interpret this as a widespread hope that the platform’s algorithmic systems would somehow be able to identify the contexts of listening that are indeed ‘significant’ (and therefore worthy of being on your wrapped) and those that are trivial or considered noise. individual personalisation and the shared experience: participants acknowledge the social aspect of wrapped, including the anticipation that others will be seeing their annual retrospective and will have opinions on it and the potential these data stories have for generating conversation and sparking connections. our findings reflect previous theorisations of social media liveness (lupinacci 2022), which argued that the emergent sense of 'shared experience' is often fleeting, fluid, and ephemeral and does not necessarily translate into a more enduring or complex sense of community. in this context of algorithmically-mediated 'affective publics' (papacharissi 2014), being part of the content stream becomes an end in and of itself. when it comes to algorithmic imaginaries, then, we highlight the participants’ desire for ‘the algorithm’ to have a much more sophisticated sensibility to context and intention of listening, as the platform should be able to identify the listening sessions that are indeed “wrapped-worthy” automatically. we also provide further evidence to the previously theorised idea that spotify wrapped is an emblematic example of algorithmic eventness (annabell and rasmussen, 2023) and of everyday data intimacy and data publics (burgess et al., 2022), as it foregrounds the ambivalent belief and imagination of the powers endowed to algorithmic systems at the same time it demonstrates the perceived vulnerability of imagined surveillance surrounding the sharing of personal results. funding this research is supported by the national council for scientific and technological development, brazil (cnpq/mcti nº 10/2023 420387/2023-4). references annabell, t.; rasmussen, n.v. (2023). spotify unwrapped: how to critically examine your repackaged data stories. presentation. algorithms for her 2, sheffield, uk. airoldi, m. (2019). digital traces of taste: methodological pathways for consumer research. consumption markets & culture. https://doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2019.1690998 burgess, j., albury, k., mccosker, a., wilken, r. (2022). everyday data cultures. polity. bucher, t. (2017). the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms. information. communication & society, 20(1), 30–44. cheney-lippold, j. (2017). we are data: algorithms and the making of our digital selves. new york university press. fisher, e., & mehozay, y. (2019). how algorithms see their audience: media epistemes and the changing conception of the individual. media, culture & society, 41(8), 11761191. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443719831598 https://url6.mailanyone.net/scanner?m=1rqprd-0004w5-3x&d=4%7cmail%2f90%2f1705674000%2f1rqprd-0004w5-3x%7cin6e%7c57e1b682%7c10917358%7c13772167%7c65aa870fdd03d7592441c1317111a0f6&o=%2fphto%3a%2fdts0ri.1%2f1.og5%2f08802301.2666191.089909&s=xgm-yoaulmviwmurap3g4-t1qu4 https://url6.mailanyone.net/scanner?m=1rqprd-0004w5-3x&d=4%7cmail%2f90%2f1705674000%2f1rqprd-0004w5-3x%7cin6e%7c57e1b682%7c10917358%7c13772167%7c65aa870fdd03d7592441c1317111a0f6&o=%2fphto%3a%2fdts0ri.1%2f1.og3%2f174164705937831918&s=thtsalw9yephu1gn1zuhejq2frc frosh, p., & pinchevski, a. (2018). media and events after media events. media, culture & society, 40(1), 135-138. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443717726007 guest, g., k. m. macqueen, and e. e. namey. 2012. applied thematic analysis. new york: sage. hagen, a. n., & lüders, m. (2017). social streaming? navigating music as personal and social. convergence, 23(6), 643-659. jørgensen, k.m. (2016) the media go-along. researching mobilities with media at hand. mediekultur, 60, 32-49. lupinacci, l. (2021). ‘absentmindedly scrolling through nothing’: liveness and compulsory continuous connectedness in social media. media, culture & society, 43(2), 273-290. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720939454 papacharissi, z. (2014). affective publics. sentiment, technology, and politics. oxford university press. prey, r. (2018). nothing personal: algorithmic individuation on music streaming platforms. media, culture & society, 40(7), 1086-1100. siles, i., segura-castillo, a., sancho, m., & solís-quesada, r. (2019). genres as social affect: cultivating moods and emotions through playlists on spotify. social media + society, 5(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119847514 webster, j. (2021). the promise of personalisation: exploring how music streaming platforms are shaping the performance of class identities and distinction. new media and society, 25(8), 2140-2162. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211027863 https://url6.mailanyone.net/scanner?m=1rqprd-0004w5-3x&d=4%7cmail%2f90%2f1705674000%2f1rqprd-0004w5-3x%7cin6e%7c57e1b682%7c10917358%7c13772167%7c65aa870fdd03d7592441c1317111a0f6&o=%2fphto%3a%2fdts0ri.1%2f1.og3%2f174164700737726017&s=lf7pjpdkio0htr38ckqitl5y4su https://url6.mailanyone.net/scanner?m=1rqprd-0004w5-3x&d=4%7cmail%2f90%2f1705674000%2f1rqprd-0004w5-3x%7cin6e%7c57e1b682%7c10917358%7c13772167%7c65aa870fdd03d7592441c1317111a0f6&o=%2fphto%3a%2fdts0ri.1%2f1.og3%2f174164704037439529&s=-eszvvguxp7ztxilgxd7bhgskl8 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119847514 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211027863 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 pinch, a & suenzo, f. (2024, october). cultures of sex advice: examining tiktok communities around sexual health in the us. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. cultures of sex advice: examining tiktok communities around sexual health in the us annika pinch northwestern university facundo suenzo northwestern university introduction/background the relationship between media and sexuality has undergone a significant transformation in the context of modernity, influencing societal perspectives on love, relationships, and pleasure (bauman, 2013; beck & beck-gernsheim, 2018; giddens, 2013). this study investigates the evolving landscape of sexual health in the digital age, specifically focusing on how sexuality experts convey advice on online platforms and the subsequent interactions and perceptions of audiences. our research builds upon steven epstein’s (2022) thesis on the diversification of sexual health expertise, where the “blossoming of expertise constitutes a kind of democratization of knowledge and advice-giving, while also raising perplexing questions about who should be trusted and why” (p.19). to explore this tension, we also draw from science and technology studies’ literature on knowledge, credibility, and trust (collins, 1981; epstein, 1995; jasanoff, 2004; latour, 1987; shapin, 1994). in the context of the ever-expanding digital realm, understanding these dynamics is crucial for comprehending the impact of technology on sexuality. while the relationship between sex advice, health, and media is not new (attwood, 2017; barker et al., 2018; bashford & strange, 2004), the prevalence of online technologies, particularly social media platforms, has transformed the way individuals seek and receive advice on sexuality. the arrival of the internet and its increasing accessibility has impacted the nature of mediated sex advice (attwood et al., 2015). indeed, a new strand of scholarship seeks to explain how advice and expertise are being formed and transmitted in digital spaces (avella, 2023; hendry et al., 2022; maddox, 2023; southerton, 2021; stein et al., 2022). as barker and colleagues (2018) suggest, one of the central differences with previous mediated forms of sex advice is the changing status and relationship between advice-givers and audiences. however, little is known about how audiences engage with sexual advice, with some exceptions (yeo & chu, 2017). we thus focus on audiences’ multiple ways of knowing, participating, and challenging conventional authority, drawing from albury and hendry’s (2023) framework, who privilege ritualistic aspects of communication as opposed to a transmission view of communication. research questions this study investigates how sexuality experts communicate sexual advice on online platforms and how audiences interact with and perceive these experts. our study aligns with this year’s conference theme – examining the emergence and continuation of industries like sexual health education – highlighting the dynamics that arise within online spaces. we thus propose the following research questions: rq1: how do sexuality experts build credibility amongst their audience? rq2: what are the ways in which audiences engage with this content and evaluate creators’ expertise and credibility? methods to answer these questions, we use tiktok as our site of analysis because of the potential for creators to reach diverse and sizable audiences, aided by tiktok’s unique affordances (miltsov, 2022; schellewald, 2021). analyzing tiktok videos is still an evolving methodology, and we thus followed guidelines and advice from emerging research (zhao, 2024). for the first phase of our project, we selected 20 sex experts, whose videos consistently garnered over 100,000 views each, compiling each expert’s fifteen most viewed videos (n=300). these experts were chosen by reading articles that recommended the top sex experts to follow (inks, 2022) and searching keywords on tiktok such as ‘sex expert’ or ‘sex therapist’. the chosen videos were in english, publicly accessible, and attributed to creators located in the united states, as indicated by profile information. we used a thematic analysis approach watching videos, discussing emerging themes and grouping them thematically. during this phase, we noticed creators actively engaged within comment sections. to capture these interactions, we made a subsample of each expert’s top five videos, including their top five comments in our analysis (n=500). we similarly read through these comments and created themes. for the second phase of the project, we will conduct in-depth online interviews with individuals who regularly contribute to sex education content on tiktok (n=15). we will prioritize participants with a substantial number of followers and engagement rates, ensuring their influence within the platform’s community. all participants will be over 18 and united states residents. the interviews will delve into how experts conceptualize sexual health, build credibility, and understand their audience, among other themes. preliminary results below, we present preliminary results, and by the conference date, we anticipate incorporating our interview findings. building and maintaining credibility we found that an important part of building and maintaining credibility happened beyond the tiktok videos themselves. creators' ability to engage in relational labor (baym, 2018), often important for “maintaining an audience and earning money” (bonifacio et al., 2021; p. 2686), was vital in this process, especially in instances where their expertise was questioned. creators employed various strategies when questioned, including responding to comments, crafting replies to videos, and utilizing humor to connect with users. in one case, a user expressed disagreement with a creator, to which the creator responded, “i said what i said but i said it with <3”, attaching a reply video which used humor and incorporated pop culture references, before gradually transitioning into a more serious response. this nuanced handling of comments revealed a delicate balance creators needed to maintain being both authoritative while acknowledging the diverse experiences and opinions of their users so as not to alienate them. our observations extended beyond creators themselves, revealing instances where fellow audience members played a role in validating creators' expertise. meisner (2023) explored the ways in which creators and audiences rely on each other, especially when facing hostility. building on this, we saw collective strategies emerge when creators' expertise was challenged. in one instance, a user skeptically questioned the creator (“how would you know?”) with another user replying, “she is a doctor.” in a different case, a user affirmed the creator's expertise by acknowledging, “being a kink educator must be exhausting with all the uneducated people on this app.” both creators and audiences actively contributed to the establishment and reinforcement of expertise. cultures of advice comment sections emerged as dynamic spaces for discourse. we found that sexual health advice was not solely coming from creators, but also from those engaging in comments, fostering a culture of advice related to the video’s theme. one user shared their advice on a video about first-time sexual experiences, stating, “pro tip: be loose and laugh off embarrassing moments (bc they will happen)...” in which other users liked and responded. the comment sections turned into spaces of community building, where people shared experiences, found validation, and tagged friends and partners. indeed, as albury and hendry (2023) have argued, “media is not about the transmission of information – it is about building and sustaining culture” (p. 639). creators have long been attuned to audience tastes (duffy et al., 2021), and we similarly saw the importance of being flexible and creating videos based on what audiences wanted to engage with. one creator made a video addressing colorism in sex and relationships to which a user asked, “are [white] people able to be colorist?” the creator then focused their next video on this question. the audience actively influenced the content landscape, challenging the conventional top-down hierarchy in sexual education where expertise is unilaterally shared. the observed cultures of advice surrounding sexual health thereby also emphasizes the necessity for advice that reflects diverse experiences and comes from various voices. references albury, k., & hendry, n. (2023). information, influence, ritual, participation: defining digital sexual health. journal of sociology, 59(3), 628–645. https://doi.org/10.1177/14407833221136579 attwood, f. (2017). sex media. john wiley & sons. attwood, f., barker, m. j., boynton, p., & hancock, j. (2015). sense about sex: media, sex advice, education and learning. sex education, 15(5), 528–539. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2015.1057635 avella, h. (2023). “tiktok ≠ therapy”: mediating mental health and algorithmic mood disorders. new media & society, 14614448221147284. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221147284 barker, m.-j., gill, r., & harvey, l. (eds.). (2018). mediated intimacy. sex advice in media culture. polity press. bashford, a., & strange, c. (2004). public pedagogy: sex education and mass communication in the mid-twentieth century. journal of the history of sexuality, 13(1), 71–99. bauman, z. (2013). liquid love: on the frailty of human bonds. john wiley & sons. baym, n. k. (2018). playing to the crowd: musicians, audiences, and the intimate work of connection. in playing to the crowd. new york university press. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479896165.001.0001 beck, u., & beck-gernsheim, e. (2018). the normal chaos of love. john wiley & sons. bonifacio, r., hair, l., & wohn, d. y. (2021). beyond fans: the relational labor and communication practices of creators on patreon. new media & society. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211027961 collins, h. m. (1981). son of seven sexes: the social destruction of a physical phenomenon. social studies of science, 11(1), 33–62. https://doi.org/10.1177/030631278101100103 duffy, b. e., pinch, a., sannon, s., & sawey, m. (2021). the nested precarities of creative labor on social media. social media + society, 7(2), 205630512110213. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211021368 https://doi.org/10.1177/14407833221136579 https://doi.org/10.1177/14407833221136579 https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2015.1057635 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221147284 https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479896165.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479896165.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211027961 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211027961 https://doi.org/10.1177/030631278101100103 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211021368 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211021368 epstein, s. (1995). the construction of lay expertise: aids activism and the forging of credibility in the reform of clinical trials. science, technology, & human values, 20(4), 408–437. epstein, s. (2022). the quest for sexual health: how an elusive ideal has transformed science, politics, and everyday life. university of chicago press. giddens, a. (2013). the transformation of intimacy: sexuality, love and eroticism in modern societies. john wiley & sons. hendry, n. a., hartung, c., & welch, r. (2022). health education, social media, and tensions of authenticity in the ‘influencer pedagogy’ of health influencer ashy bines. learning, media and technology, 47(4), 427–439. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2021.2006691 inks, l. (2022, march 8). 13 sex therapists on tiktok you need to follow. https://www.bustle.com/wellness/sex-therapists-follow-tiktok jasanoff, s. (ed.). (2004). states of knowledge. the co-production of science and social order. routledge. latour, b. (1987). science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society. harvard university press. maddox, j. (2023). micro-celebrities of information: mapping calibrated expertise and knowledge influencers among social media veterinarians. information, communication & society, 26(14), 2726– 2752.https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2022.2109980 meisner, c. (2023). networked responses to networked harassment? creators’ coordinated management of “hate raids” on twitch. social media + society, 9(2), 205630512311796. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231179696 miltsov, a. (2022). researching tiktok: themes, methods, and future directions. in a. quan-haase & l. sloan (eds.), the sage handbook of social media research methods. sage publications ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529782943 schellewald, a. (2021). communicative forms on tiktok: perspectives from digital ethnography. international journal of communication, 15(0), article 0. shapin, s. (1994). a social history of truth: civility and science in seventeenth-century. the university of chicago press. southerton, c. (2021). research perspectives on tiktok & its legacy apps| lipsyncing and saving lives: healthcare workers on tiktok. international journal of communication, 15(0), article 0. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2021.2006691 https://www.bustle.com/wellness/sex-therapists-follow-tiktok https://www.bustle.com/wellness/sex-therapists-follow-tiktok https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2022.2109980 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231179696 https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529782943 stein, k., yao, y., & aitamurto, t. (2022). examining communicative forms in #tiktokdocs’ sexual health videos. international journal of communication, 16(0), article 0. yeo, t. e. d., & chu, t. h. (2017). sharing “sex secrets” on facebook: a content analysis of youth peer communication and advice exchange on social media about sexual health and intimate relations. journal of health communication, 22(9), 753–762. https://doi.org/10.1080/10810730.2017.1347217 zhao, y. (2024). tiktok and researcher positionality: considering the methodological and ethical implications of an experimental digital ethnography. international journal of qualitative methods, 23, 16094069231221374. https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069231221374 https://doi.org/10.1080/10810730.2017.1347217 https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069231221374 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): eapen, g., howard, m., nizaruddin, f., ogden, m., & singha, s. (2024, october). the precarity, perils, and promises of emerging creator economies. panel presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the precarity, perils, and promises of emerging creator economies gayas eapen coastal carolina university matthew jungsuk howard loyola university chicago fathima nizaruddin humboldt university of berlin malcolm ogden university of richmond sagorika singha goethe university frankfurt in their work on "cruel optimism," berlant (2010) describes how the formation of attachments to particular objects and ideas can be tied to "compromised conditions of possibility" related to broader social, political, and economic changes. while such attachments can provide subjects with a "sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world," berlant explains that they are also "incoherent and enigmatic"— tied to vague and only ever partially grasped "cluster[s] of promises." following a similar set of interests, this panel focuses on the relationship of emerging creator economies to conditions of precarity, as they have come to develop in several distinct yet partially overlapping social and historical contexts. across the various contexts considered in these papers, emerging creator economies, and the media practices and technologies which constitute them, appear as often attached to various contextually situated promises—of social mobility; political empowerment; cultural recognition; fame and wealth; or healing and relief from systemic forms of harm. this panel considers how various individuals, social groups, and organizations have, through participation in and strategic engagement with emerging creator economies, sought to achieve at least one (and in some cases, multiple) of the above listed goals and objectives. utilizing a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches that collectively prioritize ambivalence and contextual nuance over sweeping generalizations, each of these five papers in some way balances an interest in the unique social and political potentials that emerging creator economies have helped (or might help) to realize, in a given context, with a critical awareness of the systemic forms of inequality, political disempowerment, and social and psychological immiseration that creator economies have also contributed to and intensified. the first paper, "fantasies of amplification: emerging digital music creators in rural india," looks at the experiences of a dalit content creator operating out of the bhiwani region of haryana, india. based on ethnographic fieldwork performed in summer 2022, this paper argues that the promises of fame, monetization, and a desire to transcend social divisions based on caste and religion, have all contributed to content creators' specific approaches to content creation on youtube. these predominantly internet/platform-based modes of content creation are contrasted with the mobile street performances of many of the same content creators, and the non-signifying sounds and embodied relations that these performances enable. the second paper, "platform orientalism: asian boss and youtube demonetization in the historical longue durée," presents a media historical analysis of "asian boss" youtube channel’s struggles with demonetization on youtube. asian boss is mainly a street interview-based channel that produces content aimed at bridging cultural knowledge gaps between global east and west, targeting questions of stereotypes, social justice, and politics in particular. this focus on difficult and often contested issues has led to most of the asian boss catalog being demonetized by youtube for not being “advertiser-friendly.” this paper discusses this moment’s implications within a mediahistorical longue durée, ultimately arguing that the dynamic of demonetization of asiafocused knowledge content that is both conventionally serious and does not play to historical euro-american desires for orientalist consumption shows the historical inertia of orientalism and orientalist consumption as they play out in the politics of today’s digital platforms. the third paper, "digital labor in the times of right-wing ethnonationalism: insights from an indian election campaign," looks at the targeting of minorities through digital platform use as an emergent political strategy, through a case study analysis of a 2024 parliamentary election campaign in a constituency in the state of uttarakhand, india. drawing on appadurai's (2019) writing on "aspirational hatred," this paper maps ethnonationalist themes and tropes as they are deployed across a range of different platforms, as a key component of contemporary digital political campaigns. the fourth paper, "the legacy of the new age on/as online video platforms: an analysis of crystaltok," looks at the attempted use of audiovisual platforms like youtube and tiktok by individuals living relatively affluent western settings as a means of self-medication and self-healing. focusing in particular on the example of "crystaltok," this paper ties various close readings of crystaltok videos to beliefs and practices that have historically been associated with the new age movement, including especially the notion of strategically tapping into an invisible world of energies and spirits. the fifth paper, "content creators as custodians: how youtubers affect social engagement in neoliberal india," examines the growing influence of motivational speakers and development gurus in the state of assam, india, within the specific context of the 2024 general elections. noting how these speakers, who are mostly active on youtube, have positioned themselves as "custodians of culture, traditions, and local narratives," this paper analyzes the unique role that they have played in the bjp's campaign strategy, and in effectively legitimizing the prerogatives and interests of the neoliberal state at local levels. in each of these papers, we encounter individuals, groups, and institutions who have, in the pursuit of different "promises"—wealth, power, fame, belonging, recognition, "healing"—found themselves at the forefront of emerging creator economies. through careful analysis, these papers collectively reveal the co-productive nature of these economies with systems of relations that extend well beyond "social media," including but not limited to: neoliberal entrepreneurialism; hindu ethno-nationalism; imperial metropolitanism; and new age and alternative healing practices. references: appadurai, a. (2019). a syndrome of aspirational hatred is pervading india [news]. the wire. https://m.thewire.in/article/politics/unnao-citizenship-bill-violence-india berlant, l. (2010). cruel optimism. in gregg, m., & seigworth, g. j. (eds.), the affect theory reader (pp. 93-117). duke university press. fantasies of amplification: emerging digital music creators in rural india gayas eapen coastal carolina university from a rural village located in the arid, almost drought prone, parts of haryana’s bhiwani (in india), vdm runs and manages a youtube channel. this is, of course, a part time job. an elementary school teacher, he got interested in “the internet” after his songs, written for a regional dalit-run production house (dalits are historically marginalized caste groups within south-asian social hierarchy), started doing well on youtube. soon enough, his songs were being played in local village events; he got calls for interviews from an online news portal; and he started imagining getting famous. using vdm’s and others’ experiences in running and managing youtube channels, in this presentation, i aim to generate insights on how content creators, aspiring to monetize their content, understand platforms and their technical functioning. particularly, i am interested in how knowledge around platform temporalities–that relate to ideal times for posting content or events around which content supposedly garners maximum views–is built up overtime through contextual and site-specific uses of audiovisual platforms. i ask: how do content creators understand and leverage platforms, and their technical operations, as tools? how do political subjectivities modify and come about in relation to ways of operating platforms? how does the consequent interaction of historical marginalization and emerging ‘creator’ identities tie into emerging nationalisms? the secrecy around monetizing content on youtube, and constant modifications to google’s pagerank algorithm, has given rise to a category of experts who speculate on the streaming platform’s functionings. bishop (2020) discusses these experts or coaches as cultural intermediaries (drawing on bourdieu’s work) who propagate ‘algorithmic lore’ on what constitutes ‘good content’. caplan and gillespie (2020) have spoken of a structure of youtube’s practices of ‘tiered governance’ that rewards and protects premium creators more than others, in turn contradicting a level playing field for different kinds of creators. the lack of purported transparency and shady algorithmic behavior has encouraged emerging creators to speculate and arrive at their own conclusions regarding youtube’s inner workings. i argue that such speculations have been informed by specifics of the geographic and cultural contexts within which content creators are located along with their motives and desires of amplification. the potential for monetization, becoming popular, and being able to capitalize religious or national events (festivals, observations) are all part of how the ‘self’ is modified in relation to ‘technology’. here i am interpreting technology broadly to think about audiovisual platforms and their complex technical governance, expectations of use, and bestuse practices. the construction of subjectivities in relation to technology has been written about scholars who deploy materialist frameworks for analyzing media technologies (hayles, 2012; packer and wiley, 2011). however, specifically for vdm and creators like him, there is a sense that such ‘becoming’ can bring seemingly disjunctive selves together. for instance, as a dalit person vocally dismissive of hindu religious rituals (for being historically exploitative of dalits under brahmanical traditions), vdm generates content—such as skits, videos, and songs—to post on the eve of hindu festivals and events attempting to capitalize around popularly searched keywords. this practice can, in one instance, be read as subversive. this would involve observing how tools–inescapable rituals and events– at the disposal of historically marginalized groups are being used for creative modes of expression. however, within a larger conversation of burgeoning hate speech and islamophobia over audio-visual platforms (baishya, 2022; nizaruddin, 2021), such practices potentially risk benefiting hindu ethnic nationalism and diluting anti-caste movements from and within minoritized groups. such disparate subjectivities, that i just described, emerge along with algorithmic structuring of platforms and their consequent role in modifying social and cultural time. finally, vdm’s aspirations as a creator transcends motivations such as attaining widespread fame through the affordances of social-networking platforms or gaining monetary benefit. content creators of music and music videos often prepare and expect for their content to play over physical, and often mobile, loudspeaker systems. i have previously understood and analyzed some of these as dj trucks–where loudspeakers are retrofitted on large trucks that are operated by a dj figure and a driver. the motives for amplification are both geographical (reaching a large group of people) but also physical and affective. it is through such remediations that content creators aspire for simultaneous local and national fame. and yet, as songs resonate and reverberate over bass-heavy speaker systems, linguistic signifying sounds cease to have much relevance. the communicative act, per nina eidsheim (2015), includes both the nonsignifying sounds as well as the embodied relations they facilitate. as a result, it is also important to connect the fantasies of amplification that creators like vdm have beyond the linguistic-significations of music that are privileged over the internet. this presentation connects the aspirations of content creators, and their technological negotiations with the platform, to the politics of blasting music on city-streets over large speaker trucks. in doing so, it tries to bridge the ‘digital’ and ‘physical’ dimensions of the sonic experience, especially as it manifests in rural and suburban india. i argue that the affordances of platforms that enable monetization of music or sounds is just one reason for a burgeoning creator industry. viewing these industries from the lens of hindutva and its capture of the mundane, i am interested in how the physical remediations of music over systems of amplification can turn its meaning and signification on its head. ultimately, the beats, vibrations, and its resonance on the bodies speak louder than words. references baishya, a. (2022). violent spectating: hindutva music and audio-visualizations of hate and terror in digital india. communication and critical/cultural studies, 19(3), 289-309. bishop, s. (2020). algorithmic experts: selling algorithmic lore on youtube. social media + society, 6(1), 2056305119897323. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119897323 eidsheim, n. s. (2015). sensing sound: singing and listening as vibrational practice. duke university press. hayles, k. (2012). how we think digital media and contemporary technogenesis. chicago: university of chicago press. packer, j., & wiley, s. (2011). communication matters: materialist approaches to media, mobility and networks. routledge. nizaruddin, f. (2021). role of public whatsapp groups within the hindutva ecosystem of hate and narratives of “coronajihad. international journal of communication, 15(18), 1102-1119. platform orientalism: asian boss and youtube demonetization in the historical longue durée https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119897323 matthew jungsuk howard loyola university chicago with 3.74 million subscribers as of february, 2024, asian boss is one of the largest street-interview based channels on youtube. their decade-long catalog includes 1,300 videos featuring compilations of interview footage from various countries on the vast asian continent, but with a particular focus on china, japan, and south korea, although interviews and questions from numerous other countries, such as indonesia, malaysia, and syria also appear. many of the channel’s videos address quotidien life differences, reactions to euro-american stereotypes about people in asia, and some content that focuses on more fun or silly topics. generally, though, asian boss’ focus is on information and street-level knowledge sharing. on their channel page, the group’s mission statement reads: we bring you the most authentic news from all over asia, featuring real people's voices and stories. our mission is to bridge social and cultural gaps between asia and the rest of the world to prevent world war iii (asian boss). this is an intense brand message for a street interview channel on youtube. it also assumes an outsized level of responsibility and power for a youtube channel. looking at a channel that simultaneously sees itself as 1) a key epistemic intermediary between east and west, and 2) an agent of peace, my question is how asian boss’s mediahistorical situation fits into longue durée histories of empire, orientalism, and orientalist consumption. ultimately, this project asks whether asian boss is succeeding despite the difficulties of running an anti-imperial channel dependent upon platform imperialized infrastructures like social media platforms and conventional user generated content pathways. the project is methodologically-driven by the work of chen kuan-hsing and of the annales school of historians. chen’s book asia as method (2010) proposes a geocolonial historical materialism, which argues that any attempt to produce new epistemic reference points originating from and serving imperial peripheries must contend with a trialectic of coloniality, global historical currents, and local historical specificities (p. 66, 108). the annalists, a group of historians originating in interwar france that rose to immense import in the mid-twentieth century, stressed the interplay of varying historical temporalities, interdisciplinarity, and globality (braudel, 1949, 1980; burgiere, 1982). they drew together with tremendous intentionality the work of historians, sociologists, demographers, economists, and anthropologists, forming the bedrock of emergent social historiography. a synthesis of chen’s work and that of the annalists pushes media-historical work to draw back from historical myopia to focus generatively on the ways that we can analyze the construction and articulation of cultural imaginaries through intertemporal interplay. accordingly, this project is based around asian boss’s various materials, channels, sites, and productions as historical archive, but it also approaches them with a sensitivity to their place within the meso and macro-levels of historicity through histories of colony, empire, and consumption in the longue durée. the historical flashpoint i begin with is asian boss’s 2023 outreach video in which channel co-founder stephen park announced the launch of the organization’s patreon, independent subscription service through their website, and app in an effort to keep the proverbial lights on despite mass demonetization from the youtube platform on swaths of their content. in it, co-founder stephen park describes the dire financial straits the company found themselves in. he argues that they are an organization driven by passion and integrity, as well as a resolute resistance to algorithmic censorship and sensationalism. he outlines significant personal and professional struggles after he and kei ibaraki founded asian boss in 2013, and the takeaway is simple: youtube will no longer allow the organization to function, so to financially sustain themselves, they are now trying new approaches. opposite this project of deimperial knowledge production, the practice of demonetization is more than a platform showing the power and control that scholars have pointed out for more than a decade now (gillespie, 2010; jin, 2013; gray, 2016; singh, 2018). the practice of demonetization is a disciplinary move by youtube’s content moderation teams and algorithms that marks out content that is deemed in breach of copyrights, conduct guidelines, or “advertiser-friendly content guidelines” (google, 2024). among these advertiser-friendliness guidelines, the platform lists obvious points like “adult content,” “harmful acts and unreliable content,” and “hateful & derogatory content,” but they also list vague or ultimately unenforceable policies by censoring “inappropriate language,” “violence,” “shocking content,” and “controversial issues.” in asian boss’s case, this includes topics like extraordinarily high suicide rates in south korea and other concrete social problems that require dialogue and awareness as part of their solution. demonetization is an outright exercise of power and epistemic violence that – while it certainly cuts multiple ways and does discipline its share of bigots and hatemongers – imposes its fair share of harms in the name of positive panopticism. ultimately, i argue in this talk that asian boss offers a testament to articulations of platform imperialism and of orientalist consumption’s massive place within imperial metropolitanism. asian boss sits at an interesting place. the majority of their videos, per channel co-founder stephen park, have been deemed “too political” and demonetized or shadowbanned by the youtube platform. a channel that addresses homophobia in indonesia, exploitative work culture in china, suicide in south korea, and north korean refugees faces consistent financial backlash for doing so. from a materialist point of view, this primarily illustrates that youtube, as a platform, enforces sanctions against content more frequently at the flashpoint of human rights issues, and in doing so, the platform favors conditions of asiatic possibility that lend themselves to orientalist consumption that forced asia open to the west repeatedly in the long past. asia is to be eaten, bought, and feared. it is an object, not a conversation partner. demonetization cutting the financial legs out from under asian boss rhymes with other historical entanglements of euro-american empires and orientalist consumption. in even american public schools, we have taught the roots of the “age of exploration” as the desire for indian spices and chinese silks, and there has always been the weight of military and religious force behind these ventures. dutch and portuguese traders reaped war profits from the chaos of japanese sengoku jidai (1467-1600); european powers encouraged and profited from opium pathways into mainland china; american commodore matthew perry forced japan open to foreign trade in the 1850s at cannonpoint; and french and u.s. troops stormed gangwha island off the korean peninsula in a diplomatic flex against the late joseon dynasty in 1871. in the 1920s, the number one export from china to the u.s. was mahjong sets, which white, middle class publics used to perform and produce deviations from hegemonic femininity and engage with the exotic east (heinz, 2016). set within the course of such events, the demonetization of videos by a channel that positions itself as raising awareness to promote peace and head off a future world war between asia and euro-america takes on the context of reasserting western control over the pacific, intentionally or not. this produces epistemic violence through comparative historical importance. pursuits of historical causality have caused tremendous harm, particularly to women, scholars of color, lgbtq+ scholars, and those of class-based minoritizations and others. while causality has its place and space in the historiographical tradition, it overemphasizes the importance of intentionality and expectation. what remains of central importance is description, contextualization, and comparison. this is the legacy of the annalists. so what does the panoptic work of demonetization do in transpacific contexts? what can be claimed about it descriptively and comparatively? it reiterates and reproduces the colonial and imperial past. references [asian boss]. (2023, november 16). hope you get this message (before it’s too late) [video]. youtube. https://youtu.be/7ukflmmi8xy?si=hme6bqlthuvbgt6h. braudel, f. (1949, 1996). the mediterranean and mediterranean world in the age of philip ii. university of california press. braudel, f. (1980). on history. university of chicago press. burguiere, a. (1982). the fate of the history of mentalites in the annales. comparative studies in society and history 24(3), p. 424-437. chen, k. (2010). asia as method: toward deimperialization. duke university press. gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of ‘platforms.’ new media & society 12(3), p. 347-364. gray, k. (2016). “they’re just too urban”: black gamers streaming on twitch. in j. daniels, k. gregory, and t. mcmillan cottam (eds.), digital sociologies (355368). policy press. heinz, a. (2016). performing mahjong in the 1920s: white women, chinese americans, and the fear of cultural seduction. frontiers 37(1), p. 32-65. https://youtu.be/7ukflmmi8xy?si=hme6bqlthuvbgt6h jin, d. (2013). the construction of platform imperialism in the globalization era. triplec 11(1), p. 145-172. singh, r. (2018). platform feminism: protest and the politics of spatial organization. ada new media (14), p. 1-10. digital labor in the times of right-wing ethnonationalism: insights from an indian election campaign fathima nizaruddin university of passau contemporary india is witnessing a unique moment in its history with the electoral consolidation of right-wing hindu nationalist (hindutva) politics under the leadership of prime minister modi which has led to the emergence of a majoritarian state (chatterji et al., 2019). circulation of extreme speech, misinformation and violence that targets the minorities has played an important role in this consolidation and digital platforms have been integral to the present-day existence of this circulatory network. this paper focuses on the role of digital labour in expanding such circulatory networks. the creator economy around right-wing ethnonationalism in india is analysed to understand how the existing ecology of digital platforms contributes to the functioning of this economy. while drawing from existing scholarship on right wing online content creation in the global north, the paper argues that unlike in these contexts, such content creation cannot be positioned as outside the mainstream in the present political scenario in india where a large section of news channels and right-wing discourse across digital platforms draw from each other. in other words, discussions about industrialization of digital content creation in india will have to take into account the vector of right-wing hindu nationalism within this process of industrialization. cunningham and craig (2021) have used govil’s (2013) arguments in the context of indian film industry to formulate their criteria to consider sme (social media entertainment) as industry. this paper contends that these criteria which includes size as well as scope, difference from other especially neighbouring industries and move towards formalisation can be applied in the indian context to consider right wing hindu nationalist (hindutva) content creation as an industry. while the so-called it cell of the ruling hindu ethnonationalist party bjp (bharatiya janata party) is certainly a central player within this industry, the paper argues that the range of practices within it that range from hindutva pop music (purohit, 2023) to the use of whatsapp to coordinate violence (nizaruddin, 2022) points to the size and scope of this industry which exceeds the operational limits of the bjp it cell. drawing from an ongoing study on hyper local content creators in india, the paper argues that precarious working conditions for a sizeable section of content creators set by major global digital platforms (bidav & mehta, 2024) contributes to the landscape within which hindutva content creation emerges as an industry. for many creators working in hyperlocal contexts, earning an income via major digital platforms is not a viable option. in this context, multiple efforts and payment schemes by the bjp government in the centre as well as bjp ruled states elaborated in the paper that incentivises content creation that contributes to the expansion of iterations that aim to build a consensus around the majoritarian state become attractive options. apart from the government schemes, it cell of the bjp as well as the broad network of party sympathisers and the wider field of hindutva groups provides various entry points to be a part of the hindutva content creation industry. the paper argues that the spectrum of opportunities available within this industry is broad. on one end of the spectrum are activities that are informed by the logic of “aspirational hatred” (appadurai, 2019) which incites targeting of minorities as a way to rise in stature within the field of right-wing ethno-nationalist politics. however, drawing from the empirical study, the paper will argue that the hindutva content creation industry offers a broad range of possibilities to participate; not all these possibilities need an alignment with the bjp or the hindutva ideology. this becomes more pronounced in the cases where bjp governments play a role. the entry of the majoritarian state might signal the beginning of a degree of formalisation which is one of the criteria that cunningham and craig (2021) put forward to identify the emergence of an industry. since the targeting of the minorities is the logic around which the hindutva content creation industry functions, it can be viewed as contributing to the culture of impunity in the majoritarian state where violence against the minorities by state as well as non-state actors are being normalised (bhat, 2024) (chatterjee, 2017). the paper concludes by arguing that the emergence of the hindutva content creation industry in india can be understood by extending the frame of ‘shadow politics’ that sahana udupa (2024) puts forward in her recent article on the digital influence operations in india. in udupa’s formulation, “shadow politics refers specifically to the manner in which dispersed and “bottom-up” networks are integrated into the party campaign structure via indirect sanctions and incentives”(udupa, 2024). according to her, the shadow politics in india of digital influence operations can be linked to other practices such as distributing money or liquor during election time. unlike in the case of shadow politics which has integral links with the so-called official party politics, the hindutva content creation industry is not formulated by the broader social media entertainment industry. however, it can be argued that it is emerging in the “shadow” of the broader contours of this industry. the thresholds for entering and gaining monetary or other benefits within the hindutva content creation industry is considerably low when compared with the broader sme industry. the hindutva content creation industry needs to be situated as one of the “shadow industries” that is expanding under the extremely precarious conditions of digital labour set for content creators by contemporary platform capitalism. the paper broadens the call to look at the labour conditions that sustain disinformation environments (grohmann & corpus ong, 2024) and contends that misinformation is a better frame in the indian context because not all actors including content creators might be aware of their role in consolidating networks of misinformation, extreme speech and violence. there is a need to map similar shadow industries in other parts of the world and their relationship with right-wing governments. participation in such industries need to be positioned within the frame of the mundane everyday as well as compulsions around digital labour in precarious working conditions. references appadurai, a. (2019). a syndrome of aspirational hatred is pervading india [news]. the wire. https://m.thewire.in/article/politics/unnao-citizenship-bill-violence-india bhat, m. m. a. (2024). ‘the irregular’ and the unmaking of minority citizenship: the rules of law in majoritarian india. social & legal studies, 33(5), 690–721. https://doi.org/10.1177/09646639241238427 bidav, t., & mehta, s. (2024). peripheral creator cultures in india, ireland, and turkey. social media + society, 10(1), 20563051241234693. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051241234693 chatterjee, m. (2017). the impunity effect: majoritarian rule, everyday legality, and state formation in india. american ethnologist, 44(1), 118–130. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12430 chatterji, a. p., hansen, t. b., & jaffrelot, c. (2019). introduction. in a. p. chatterji, t. b. hansen, & c. jaffrelot (eds.), majoritarian state: how hindu nationalism is changing india. oxford university press. cunningham, s., & craig, d. (2021). introduction. in s. cunningham & d. craig (eds.), creator culture: an introduction to global social media entertainment (pp. 1– 17). nyu press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv27ftts6 govil, n. (2013). recognizing ‘industry’. cinema journal, 52(3), 172–176. grohmann, r., & corpus ong, j. (2024). disinformation-for-hire as everyday digital labor: introduction to the special issue. social media + society, 10(1), 20563051231224723. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231224723 nizaruddin, f. (2022). institutionalised riot networks in india and mobile instant messaging platforms. asiascape: digital asia, 9(1–2). purohit, k. (2023). h-pop: the secretive world of hindutva pop stars. harpercollins india. udupa, s. (2024). shadow politics: commercial digital influencers, “data,” and disinformation in india. social media + society, 10(1), 20563051231224719. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231224719 the legacy of the new age on/as online video platforms: an analysis of crystaltok malcolm ogden university of richmond this paper examines some of the emergent media forms, practices, and subjective modes that characterize crystaltok. similar to booktok, fragrancetok, and other "subcommunities" on tiktok organized around shared topics of interest, crystaltok encompasses a vast body of audiovisual media, circulated on tiktok and across various other platforms such as youtube and instagram, devoted to the specific yet broadly defined topic of healing crystals. as it is discussed in this paper, crystaltok also encompasses individual content creators, as well as the viewer-listeners who regularly consume crystaltok content. drawing on religious studies scholarship on the new age movement, internet and platform studies scholarship, and critical theoretical work on neoliberalism and neoliberalization, this paper begins with the basic assertion that, from their inception, audiovisual platforms like youtube and tiktok have, in relatively "affluent" western settings especially, served as a seemingly convenient and affordable means of attempted self-medication and self-healing within a broader context characterized by increasing precarity, commoditization, and hyper-individualization. through close analysis of a number of popular examples of crystaltok videos, this paper further argues that the ostensible "healing" that crystaltok has to offer its users can be generally divided into three subcategories: healing knowledge or information; healing sensations; and, lastly, healing energies. the first of these three categories, healing knowledge and information, refers in part to the systems of meanings commonly ascribed to healing crystals, wherein specific minerals are posited to have unique yet also somewhat generic benefits for their "users.” for instance, in a crystaltok video entitled "4 crystals you should wear everyday," uploaded by stonesofvirtue in february 2023, the channel creator lauds the mineral pyrite for its unique capacity to "bring an abundance of health and wealth [t]o you and your loved ones" (rose, 2023). in a comment on the same video, user girlwiththehandbag expresses their disagreement with the inclusion of the mineral obsidian in the video: "not black obsidian!! too strong for everyday!" on crystaltok, one finds a whole matrix of similarly formulated promises and suggestions regarding how minerals might be deployed by individuals to provide some kind of benefit or advantage throughout their daily lives—often paired with some acknowledgement of states and conditions deemed as unsatisfactory (e.g., stress, anxiety, exhaustion, burnout, depression, etc.). tiktok thus appears as a kind of accumulated reservoir for these sorts of associations to be repeatedly reinscribed by content creators, and "tested out" by viewer-listeners. this first form of healing is therefore, i argue, of a rather indirect sort. it still implicitly prioritizes the material acquisition of healing crystals "outside" the boundaries of the screens and speakers through which platforms are made perceptible to users. in other parts of crystaltok, healing crystals are more plainly acknowledged as being not just a unique category of tangible objects, but a kind of commodity. crystaltok serves to establish this commodity, in the minds of crystaltok enthusiasts, as not something totally discrete or self-contained, but which rather coheres quite neatly with platform logics of circulation—a common subject of interest amongst media scholars and theorists in recent years (eichhorn, 2022; kornbluh, 2024; packer et al., 2022). as something both deeply participatory and radically open-ended, the healing knowledge of crystaltok is, as berardi (2017) writes "not about truth or about discovering and displaying the essential reality—it is rather about the creation of meaning and in the invention of technical interfaces projecting meaningfulness into reality" (p. 198). that being said, interfaces do not merely serve to facilitate the circulation of healing knowledge/information on crystaltok, but also help to constitute healing sensations. the healing sensations of crystaltok, this paper argues, can be found in videos that either place a particular emphasis on the physical appearances of healing crystals as part of their perceived "benefits," or, somewhat similarly, in videos wherein content creators have focused on the aesthetic qualities of the video itself as potentially offering viewer-listeners some specific or vaguely defined benefits. in the former category, the labor performed by content creators entails the use of video cameras to select and store the visual (and, to a lesser extent, auditory) "information" of specific minerals. crystaltok content creators will also often engage in a kind of ekphrastic narration, describing the physical appearance of specific minerals (or in some cases, specific "pieces") using highly subjective and poetic language. meanwhile, the latter category of healing sensations, having to do with the healing qualities of videos themselves, is most apparent in crystaltok's overlapping with a range of other emergent categories of online videos, such as asmr and sound-healing videos. here, the premise that viewerlisteners might ever acquire specific healing crystals of their own becomes less of a priority than viewers' immediate sensory encounters with sounds and images via screens and speakers. in asmr and frequency-based sound-healing videos, a fixation on the specific and combinatorial yet also highly subjective character of particular kinds of objects, in how they might be applied by individual users throughout their daily lives, migrates from healing crystals, as a unique class of objects, to any audiovisual stimuli that might lend themselves to transmission via mundane computational interfaces. the third and final form of healing associated with crystaltok that this paper examines is a posited invisible realm of energies and spirits. whereas the first form of healing discussed in this paper has to do with the exchange of specific language and meanings, ostensibly related to but distinct from the "actual" world of energy/spirits that crystalusers tap into, other parts of crystaltok seem to more radically embrace the notion that different kinds of energy, while perhaps being still tied to different kinds of healing crystals, can be sent and received remotely along pathways that audiovisual platforms help to lay out or establish. this basic concept, seen also in reiki healing videos, and in numerous other emergent categories of online video, clarifies, among other things, crystaltok's connections to practices and beliefs that have historically been associated with the new age movement. these include: a prioritization of subjective self-efficacy (bowman, 2007) as the ultimate measure of truth or reality; the individualized use of global supply-chains and information networks to build, and perpetually reconfigure, "spiritual toolboxes" (bowman, 2007); and a professed skepticism toward western rationality and mainstream technoscience (ivakhiv, 2007; hanegraaf, 2007). to conclude, i reflect on this broader conjuncture, focusing especially on certain resonances between the third form of healing, related to a posited invisible world of energy or spirit that can be strategically accessed by "users," and various contemporary phenomena, including, especially: the covid-19 global pandemic; the global climate crisis; global finance; and the near ubiquitousness of algorithmic systems and ai in certain parts of the world. contrary to framings of contemporary capitalism as being centrally reliant upon "immaterial" forms of production, what the example of crystaltok ultimately illustrates, i argue, is the continued importance of various kinds of physical commodities—be they healing crystal "pieces" or smartphone screens and speakers— to the platformized world, and the creator economies that platforms make possible. references: berardi, f. (2017). futurability: the age of impotence and the horizon of possibility. verso. bowman, m. i. (2007). ancient avalon, new jerusalem, heart chakra of planet earth: the local and the global in glastonbury. in kemp, d. & lewis, j. r. (eds.), handbook of new age (pp. 291-314). koninklijke brill. eichhorn, k. (2022). content. mit press. hanegraaff, w. j. (2007). the new age movement and western esotericism. in kemp, d. & lewis, j. r. (eds.), handbook of new age (pp. 25-50). koninklijke brill. ivakhiv, a. (2007). power trips: making sacred space through new age pilgrimage. in kemp, d. & lewis, j. r. (eds.), handbook of new age (pp. 263-290). koninklijke brill. kornbluh, a. (2024). immediacy, or the style of too late capitalism. verso. packer, j., nuñez de villavicencio, p., monea, a., oswald, k., maddalena, k., & reeves, j. (2022). the prison house of the circuit: politics of control from analog to digital. university of minnesota press. rose, t. [@stonesofvirtue]. (2023, february 2). 4 crystals you should wear everyday [video]. tiktok. content creators as custodians: the role of the local influencers in changing the landscape of political campaigns in india sagorika singha centre for the study of developing societies (csds) digitally connected india, considered the world’s largest democratic electorate with over 900 million people registered voters, is more active online than ever before. it is fairly established that internet, access to information, technology, and fact-checking have been pivotal in shaping the electoral landscape in the country. the 2014 election was named the ‘first social media election’ in the country (rodrigues, 2015). in the 2019 election, whatsapp played a significant role in creating political communities (sarma & hazarika, 2023). we continued witnessing this change in the 2024 general elections with youtubers constituting one of the key components of the right-wing political party bharatiya janata party’s (indian people’s party)(bjp henceforth) campaign network. scholars from computational social science researching influencer and political discourse in india have argued that the more polarised the influencers, the more their popularity (dash et al., 2022). yet scholarship on media history, notes how social media has structurally shifted allowing politicians to find alternate routes to directly communicate with the electorate (rodrigues, 2020). however, none of these works has engaged with the central question of how such regional youtubers transform political engagement in a diverse socio-political state such as india. inherently, the scholarship on influencers and political discourse characterises them as a conduit or as an alternate partisan, distributing propaganda mostly, underplaying their role in driving a significant transition in the way the electorate is involved in it through them. influencers play a crucial role due to their extensive reach, accessibility, and ability to connect with diverse demographics, particularly young people. without an adequate examination of influencers as a crucial figure in this political communication, we would fail to comprehensively account for this shift. this presentation thus analyses the intellectual production of youtube influencers during important national events such as the elections. through an ethnography of a specific set of such indian influencers, and placing them within the context of labour studies, digital culture studies and media infrastructure studies, i argue that youtube influencers have a significant impact on shaping political perspectives in their local communities, which is often exploited by political parties, especially in countries with authoritarian tendencies such as india. it aims to critically analyse the relationship between local digital cultures and global networks, showing how communities with complex historical backgrounds become part of these networks, which are increasingly being utilized to further larger authoritarian agendas mobilised through economic imperative. this presentation further delves into how labor is becoming more integrated into the development of such distribution networks, leading to a shift in the perception of social involvement by content creators. social media consultants believe local is key since influencers can build one-on-one trust with their audiences. these creators, aided by their ‘authentic’ identity, rootedness and their roles ‘as custodians of culture, tradition, and local narratives’ (2023), through their content on their everyday issues ‘humanise the politicians’ while, at times, underhandedly dealing with propaganda (khan et al., 2024). this paper argues that the regional counterparts of these indian influencers, who serve as both entertainers and political commentators, increasingly represent an emergent class of ‘creative entrepreneurs’ epitomizing aspirational labour (duffy, 2016). their local connection allows them to wield significant influence in connecting with regional audiences and shaping political perspectives. in an ascending authoritarian state such as india, this augments the right-wing socio-political refrains. these influencers generate substantial income by endorsing political messages and sharing political content. however, content creators, during their promotional activities, often do away with transparency even as some influencers express apprehensions about facing criticism or negative feedback from political parties. a june 2024 investigative report, focuses on a category of right-wing youtubers who use vox-pop style videos in specific locations in the capital delhi to circulate hateful and hindunationalist narratives (ranjan, 2024). this kind of social engagement, born through the confluence of the coming of technology and geography; and the transnational and the global, presents the challenges and risks of an increasingly networked society, more so in the global south. the study of these influencers from india illustrates the formation of new social actors, aesthetics, and socio-political implications as it looks at the local digital space as a site for examining politics, aspirations, experiences, and media narratives. in the process, they generate a creative, albeit mundane manner of social engagement expanding the objectives of the authoritarian state. the state, in turn, actively promotes and rewards such engagement as can be seen in a recent example where, in september 2024, the largest electorate, the state of uttar pradesh in north india, announced a new social media policy encouraging influencers to promote the state government’s initiatives, schemes, and achievements with prize payments. research questions 1. in a right-wing state such as india, what roles do youtube influencers increasingly play in shaping the electoral landscape? 2. how does this role transform social engagement in a technopolitical state? rationale this presentation looks at politics and civil society in contemporary india as it emerges as the world’s second-largest internet user base and shows the connections and opportunities in an increasingly networked country. in the process, it demonstrates how aspiration, politics and profitability converge to affect socio-political consequences. this work thus addresses a socially relevant issue of the potential advantages and disadvantages of influencers’ involvement in the electoral process. in an increasingly online world, a party must show voters real-world evidence that it has the support of other voters like them. voters see real-world evidence as vital in evaluating a party’s fit with their interests. voters also interpret physical campaigning as indicative of a party’s prospects for electoral success. in the digital age, political parties can use social media to extend the impact of their rallies beyond the event itself, reaching voters and shaping perceptions through online content. with over 800 million internet users and the world's largest presence on instagram, facebook, and whatsapp, it has become imperative for political parties to woo social media influencers to echo their messages to a wider audience. conclusion my scholarship on the regional influencers in india reveals their redefining of the political mobilisation in contemporary india which often bleeds into the right-wing rhetoric in the country. by focusing on them, this presentation brings forth a marginalised perspective on the global digital culture and illustrates the specific challenges that materialise in countries of the global south as technology and geopolitics collide thus contributing to the debates about the complex nature of political communication in an increasingly networked global south. references dash, s., mishra, d., shekhawat, g., & pal, j. (2022). divided we rule: influencer polarization on twitter during political crises in india. proceedings of the international aaai conference on web and social media, 16, 135–146. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19279 duffy, b. e. (2016). the romance of work: gender and aspirational labour in the digital culture industries. international journal of cultural studies, 19(4), 441–457. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877915572186 khan, s., mukherjee, r., & pal, j. (2024). influencer collaboration on youtube: changing political outreach in the 2024 indian elections. https://joyojeet.people.si.umich.edu/wpcontent/uploads/2024/01/youtube.pdf ranjan, a. (2024). the inner world of delhi’s hate-debaters. international centre for journalists. https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/06/07/behind-spike-in-hatecontent-on-youtube-vested-rhetoric-and-staged-video rodrigues, u. (2015). the media, the social media and the elections. in e. thorsen & c. sreedharan (eds.), india election 2014: first reflections. centre for the study of journalism, culture & community, bournemouth university. rodrigues, u. (2020). political communication on social media platforms. in a. athique & v. parthasarathi (eds.), platform capitalism in india (pp. 221–238). springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44563-8 sarma, p. p., & hazarika, t. (2023). social media and election campaigns: an analysis of the usage of twitter during the 2021 assam assembly elections. international journal of social science research and review, 6(2), 96–117. https://doi.org/10.47814/ijssrr.v6i2.857 simran. (2023, august 15). madify [madify, an influencer marketing and management agency based out of assam with a unique focus on creators, especially regional ones of the east & northeast.]. how regional influencers are changing the marketing game. https://madify.in/how-regional-influencersare-changing-the-marketing-game/ selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): kant, t. (2024, october). cheatgpt? the realities of automated authorship in the uk pr and communications industries. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. cheatgpt? the realities of automated authorship in the uk pr and communications industries tanya kant university of sussex introduction chatgpt and its competitors have caused flurries of speculation in the creative industries for their ability to generate ‘human-like’ written text in the form of press releases, articles and other online content. however, like many apparently gamechanging tools before them, current speculations about what generative text ai can do seem to be outweighing actual uses. this paper looks to refine and extend research on ethical ai use, authorship and generative text tools to ask: how do (human) content writers navigate and utilise generative text ai in current communications climates? how are employers of content writers negotiating the issues that chatgpt and its competitors appear to bring? and what socio-cultural implications for authorship, creativity and ethical ai use do such tools create? drawing on interview and survey data from content writers and their managers in the uk communications industries, i will present findings that explore sector-specific engagements with generative text ai. the project will consider frameworks of algorithmic and ai literacy (cotter, 2020; swart, 2021, cox, 2024) to evaluate opportunities for empowering as-yet disempowered stakeholders of ai tools in creative industry sectors. critical context the potential ‘dangers’ of ai have dominated popular and industry-based narratives in recent months, with global players framing ai tools as existential threats not just to human authorship but humanity itself (roose, 2023). despite the allure of these dominant narratives, scholars such as leslie (2019) highlight that meaningfully assessing the effects of ai necessitates a move away from macrocosmic speculations and towards usage in specific contexts. this paper responds to such a need by exploring the realities of generative text ai usage in the uk communications and pr sector. skujve et al. note that though there are numerous technical and theoretical http://spir.aoir.org/ studies of conversational generative ai, at present ‘there is a relative lack of knowledge as to why people use this technology’ (2023, n.p.). in the uk swathes of the communications sector are comprised of smallto medium-sized employers (herein sme) (techuk, 2023). these stakeholders are reportedly increasing their usage of chatgpt and its competitors (kratchounova, 2023) but have little power in shaping the wider techno-political landscape of generative ai development. this is evidenced in the publication of the #aisummitopenletter created by numerous civil society organisations and campaigners (connected by data, the trades union congress et. al, 2023), which highlights that in current ai development, ‘small businesses and artists are being squeezed out… as a handful of big tech companies capture even more power and influence’ (ibid, 2023). to critically analyse the realities of using chatgpt i draw on frameworks of algorithmic and ai literacy. dogruel et al define algorithmic literacy as ‘being aware of the use of algorithms in online applications, platforms, and services, knowing how algorithms work, being able to critically evaluate algorithmic decision-making as well as having the skills to cope with or even influence algorithmic operations’ (dogruel et al., 2021, 4). at present work on algorithmic literacy is ‘rich but scattered’ and tends to focus on ‘awareness’ rather than ‘how to improve’ algorithmic literacy in specific contexts (oeldorf-hirsch & neubaum, 2023, 16). there is emerging research that considers algorithmic literacy specifically in ai tool users – for example cox uses the term ‘generative ai literacy’ (2023) to describe user awareness of ‘ethical and societal’ implications of generative ai – but to date there is little empirical research in this field.this project looks to map generative ai usage and understanding of smaller stakeholders in uk communications sectors in ways that might empower such stakeholders to use generative text ai tools ethically and critically. methodology and findings the paper presents findings from a survey of 1,074 respondents 637 content writers working in uk pr and communications roles or in the sector, and 437 managers of content writers. interview responses are drawn from 21 interviews with selected survey respondentsi. launched in collaboration with communications consultancy magenta associates, the project secured ahrc impact accelerator funding and has been awarded ethical approval via the researcher’s institutional ethics board. the project finds that generative text ai use is widespread in the sector, with 80% of content writers using gen ai tools frequently. we find that generative text ai is increasingly being used by content writers in ways that challenge speculative forecasts; these tools are useful for saving time, elements of idea generation and synthesising existing text, but are for the most part not (yet) used to generate press-ready, authorially convincing and stylistically branded outputs. we find that contrary to press reportage, most workers disclosure using generative text ai tools to others in their workplace. qualitative data suggests that those who are using tools in total secrecy (8%) are doing so out of ‘embarrassment’ rather than to gain competitive advantage over co-workers. finally, though we find the majority respondents believe generative text ai use is ethical, many writers and managers lack the assurances needed to confidently negotiate the legal, ip and employment implications of generative ai tools. i argue that ‘critical algorithmic literacy’ (cotter, 2020) is best placed to empower sme https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/people/lorakratchounova1/ https://journals-sagepub-com.sussex.idm.oclc.org/doi/full/10.1177/14614448231182662#bibr22-14614448231182662 communications workplaces to create new avenues in ai understanding, authorship and practice, as this form of literacy best acknowledges unequal distribution of algorithmic power between different kinds of global and local stakeholders. in doing so i argue that ai-focused literacy is not just a question of upskilling or training but a question of challenging power relations. references christian, a. (2023, october 25). the employees secretly using ai at work. bbc. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20231017-the-employees-secretly-using-ai-at-work connected by data, the trades union congress, open rights group et.al. (2023, october 30) ai safety summit open letter to the uk prime minister. https://ai-summitopen-letter.info/ cotter, k. m. (2020). critical algorithmic literacy: power, epistemology and platforms: michigan state university. information and media. cox, a. (2024). algorithmic literacy, ai literacy and responsible generative ai literacy. journal of web librarianship, 1–18. https://doiorg.sussex.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/19322909.2024.239534 dogruel, l., masur p., joeckel s (2021). development and validation of an algorithm literacy scale for internet users. communication methods and measures 16(2): 115– 133. kratchounova, l. (2024, february 23). genai is changing public relations forever, but not how you may think. forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2024/02/26/genai-is-changing-publicrelations-forever-but-not-how-you-may-think/ leslie, d. (2019). understanding artificial intelligence ethics and safety: a guide for the responsible design and implementation of ai systems in the public sector. the alan turing institute. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3240529 pr week staff. (2023, january 18). will chatgpt replace pros? pr week. https://www.prweek.com/article/1810634/will-chatgpt-replace-pr-pros oeldorf-hirsch, a., & neubaum, g. (2023). what do we know about algorithmic literacy? the status quo and a research agenda for a growing field. new media & society, 0(0). https://doi-org.sussex.idm.oclc.org/10.1177/14614448231182662 roose, k. (2023, may 30). ai poses ‘risk of extinction’. new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/technology/ai-threat-warning.html skjuve, m., brandtzaeg, p. b., & følstad, a. (2024). why do people use chatgpt? exploring user motivations for generative conversational ai. first monday, 29(1). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i1.13541 https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20231017-the-employees-secretly-using-ai-at-work https://ai-summit-open-letter.info/ https://ai-summit-open-letter.info/ https://doi-org.sussex.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/19322909.2024.239534 https://doi-org.sussex.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/19322909.2024.239534 https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/people/lorakratchounova1/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2024/02/26/genai-is-changing-public-relations-forever-but-not-how-you-may-think/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2024/02/26/genai-is-changing-public-relations-forever-but-not-how-you-may-think/ https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3240529 https://www.prweek.com/article/1810634/will-chatgpt-replace-pr-pros https://doi-org.sussex.idm.oclc.org/10.1177/14614448231182662 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/technology/ai-threat-warning.html https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i1.13541 swart j., (2021). experiencing algorithms: how young people understand, feel about, and engage with algorithmic news selection on social media. social media + society, 7(2). https://doi-org.sussex.idm.oclc.org/10.1177/20563051211008828 i project interviews are still on-going and so data here represents initial responses. all interviewee names have been changed to protect anonymity. https://doi-org.sussex.idm.oclc.org/10.1177/20563051211008828 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): zong, j and matias, j n. (2023, october). data refusal from below: a framework for understanding, evaluating, and envisioning refusal strategies. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. data refusal from below: a framework for understanding, evaluating, and envisioning refusal strategies jonathan zong massachusetts institute of technology j. nathan matias cornell university extended abstract amidst calls for public accountability over large data-driven systems, feminist and indigenous scholars have developed refusal as a practice that challenges the authority of data collectors. however, because data affects so many aspects of daily life, it can be hard to see seemingly different refusal strategies as part of the same repertoire. furthermore, conversations about refusal often happen from the standpoint of designers and policymakers rather than the people and communities most affected by data collection. in this paper, we introduce a framework for data refusal from below—writing from the standpoint of people who refuse, rather than the institutions that seek their compliance. we characterize refusal strategies across four constituent facets common to all refusal, whatever tactics are used: autonomy, or how refusal accounts for individual and collective interests; time, or whether refusal reacts to past harm or proactively prevents future harm; power, or the extent to which refusal makes change possible; and cost, or whether or not refusal can reduce or redistribute penalties experienced by refusers. we illustrate each facet by drawing on cases of people and collectives that have refused data systems. together, the four facets of our framework are designed to help scholars and activists describe, evaluate, and imagine new forms of refusal. refusal is a practice of saying “no” to how data is collected or used, and rejecting the processes, goals, or authority of data collectors. a first nations community might force governments and academics to follow community-defined research policies [5]. a family might try to refuse ecommerce data collection [12]. a citizens group might sue a government agency for engaging in domestic surveillance [4]. in our time, corporations and governments continue to collect data to run systems that profoundly affect every element of people’s daily lives. because these systems reach across many different domains, acts of refusal can take on many different forms. as a result, it can be difficult to see the diverse acts of refusal undertaken by individuals and collectives across society as instances of a broader movement. to begin to describe these actions, feminist and indigenous scholars have developed refusal as a broad concept for understanding the agency of the people whose lives are affected by data regimes [1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13]. these concepts matter because while activists and community leaders are using the idea of refusal to build shared conversations and to explain their work. yet, as new ways to use and collect data continue to be invented, so do new ways to refuse. how can people both understand existing practices as acts of refusal, and also think systematically about how refusal emerges in response to the design of data systems? to address this question, we develop the idea of data refusal from below by presenting a design framework for illuminating the spectrum of refusal. the options available to communities are shaped by policymakers, computer scientists, and designers who influence what kinds of data refusal to require, allow, or prevent. communities navigate these technical and institutional constraints to arrive at creative ways to resist, disrupt, or pursue alternatives. we recognize the process of discovery that enables new refusals as a generative practice of design. to support refusers in this work, we adopt the idea of a “prism of refusal” from benjamin [2] to characterize refusal strategies across four constituent facets: autonomy, time, power, and cost. these facets are considerations that apply to all refusal, whatever tactics are used. we illustrate each of these facets with cases of people who have refused systems of data power. by considering these four facets, we hope marginalized communities can envision and organize refusals that more directly meet community needs and advance a just world. starting from the standpoint of people most affected by data collection, we write about and for those who are typically excluded from design decisions about data-driven systems. scholarship on refusal has largely focused on actions that designers and policymakers can take to create change within powerful institutions. however, when research on data refusal primarily focuses on the standpoint of small groups of influential people, scholars risk sidelining the goals and perspectives of the vulnerable and marginalized. furthermore, we risk entrenching theories of change that rely on the decisions and goodwill of elites, rather than supporting people’s agency to shape their relationships to data regimes. for activists, this framework offers a way to explain their work within and alongside marginalized communities as part of a broader movement of refusal. it also offers a way to think about how their acts of refusal fit into a broader terrain of possible actions. for designers and scholars, this framework offers a way to understand the actions of refusers as a form of participation in technology design. just as data systems affect people’s everyday lives, the agency people exert within systems — including through their non-participation — exert pressure on the design of new technology in response to changing behaviors and collective actions. in this paper, we advance the idea that refusal can be theorized as an act of design, and provide a framework for thinking about current and future acts of refusal. the concept of data refusal from below draws on conversations in feminist standpoint theory, understanding acts of refusal undertaken by the marginalized differently from refusal by the institutionally privileged. we argue that refusal can be thought of as an act of designing alternate social configurations. seeing refusal as design — and by extension, refusers as designers — creates opportunities for design-oriented theory and methods to contribute to the continually-evolving practice of refusal. design frameworks serve descriptive, evaluative, and generative purposes by giving scholars language to describe and compare artifacts in the world, and imagine new design possibilities. we present a framework consisting of four facets of refusal: autonomy, time, power, and cost. when introducing each facet, we use real-world cases to highlight important considerations that apply generally when using the framework to analyze instances of refusal. finally, we explicate the descriptive, evaluative, and generative uses of the framework, reflect on how designers can learn from acts of refusal, and articulate a vision for a politics of refusal in a world shaped by large institutions. references [1] chelsea barabas. 2020. to build a better future, designers need to start saying ‘no’. https://onezero.medium.com/refusal-a-beginning-that-starts-with-an-end2b055bfc14be [2] ruha benjamin. 2016. informed refusal: toward a justice-based bioethics. science, technology, & human values (june 2016). https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243916656059 [3] m. cifor, p. garcia, t.l. cowan, j. rault, t. sutherland, a. chan, j. rode, a.l. hoffmann, n. salehi, and l. nakamura. 2019. feminist data manifest-no. https://www.manifestno.com/ [4] emmanuel morgan. 2019. group that sued lapd over controversial data policing programs claims victory. los angeles times (dec. 2019). https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-10/stop-lapd-spying-coalitionannounceslawsuit-victory-against-lapd [5] first nations information governance centre. 2014. barriers and levers for the implementation of ocap™. international indigenous policy journal 5, 2 (april 2014). https://doi.org/10.18584/iipj.2014.5.2.3 [6] seeta gangadharan. 2021. digital exclusion: a politics of refusal. in digital technology and democratic theory, lucy bernholz, hélène landemore, and rob reich (eds.). university of chicago press, 113–140. https://doi.org/doi:10.7208/9780226748603-005 [7] anna lauren hoffmann. 2021. even when you are a solution you are a problem: an uncomfortable reflection on feminist data ethics. global perspectives 2, 21335 (march 2021). https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2021.21335 https://onezero.medium.com/refusal-a-beginning-that-starts-with-an-end-2b055bfc14be https://onezero.medium.com/refusal-a-beginning-that-starts-with-an-end-2b055bfc14be https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243916656059 https://www.manifestno.com/ https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-10/stop-lapd-spying-coalition-announceslawsuit-victory-against-lapd https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-10/stop-lapd-spying-coalition-announceslawsuit-victory-against-lapd https://doi.org/10.18584/iipj.2014.5.2.3 https://doi.org/doi:10.7208/9780226748603-005 https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2021.21335 [8] carole mcgranahan. 2016. theorizing refusal: an introduction. cultural anthropology 31, 3 (aug. 2016), 319–325. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.3.01 number: 3. [9] sara ahmed. 2017. no. https://feministkilljoys.com/2017/06/30/no/ [10] audra simpson. 2007. on ethnographic refusal: indigeneity, ‘voice’ and colonial citizenship. junctures: the journal for thematic dialogue 9 (2007). https://junctures.org/index.php/junctures/article/view/66 number: 9. [11] kim tallbear. 2013. native american dna: tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic science. university of minnesota press. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816665853.001.0001 [12] janet vertesi. 2014. internet privacy and what happens when you try to opt out. https://time.com/83200/privacyinternet-big-data-opt-out/ [13] jonathan zong. 2020. from individual consent to collective refusal: changing attitudes toward (mis)use of personal data. xrds: crossroads, the acm magazine for students 27, 2 (dec. 2020), 26–29. https://doi.org/10.1145/3433140 https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.3.01 https://feministkilljoys.com/2017/06/30/no/ https://junctures.org/index.php/junctures/article/view/66 https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816665853.001.0001 https://time.com/83200/privacyinternet-big-data-opt-out/ https://doi.org/10.1145/3433140 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): matos, c. (2024, october). de-constructing ‘gender ideology’ myths on reproduction and digital storytelling through cda: a case study of women’s ngos social media engagement on twitter and facebook. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. de-constructing ‘gender ideology’ myths on reproduction and digital storytelling through cda: a case study of women’s ngos social media engagement on twitter and facebook carolina matos city st. george’s, university of london introduction sexual and reproductive health and rights (srhr) matter both for gender equality as well as for democratic politics, whilst communications when strategically used has potential for advancing progressive policies. this research explores the findings on the social media engagement and advocacy activities of 52 women’s health ngos from across the world during the year of 2019, amid an environment of hostility and attacks of far-right groups against women’s rights, and particularly in areas such as women’s sexuality and female bodies. these findings are only a small part of a larger four year study, funded by the global challenges research fund (gcrf), which examined the advocacy communication activities of ngos working on women’s health in the us, europe, latin america, brazil and india. methods the research made use of a mixed methods approach which included in depth interviews with 50 ceos from the organizations as well as a short survey applied to the communication directors of these ngos, including from care international uk to crea india and anis brazil. this was combined with critical discourse analysis (cda) of their institutional websites, as well as their social media engagement on social network platforms. this paper focuses on the cda results of the social media engagement of the organizations conducted during the months of march and april 2019, when a total of 1.505 tweets were collected. there were a total of 521 tweets collected from the us, 358 from asia, 327 from latin america, 265 from europe and another 34 were ‘international’. findings thus showed an emphasis on the use by the organizations of tweets and discourses which contained ‘hard facts’, statistics and reports around public health arguments on reproductive health, including the use of ngo journalism devices such as ‘fact checking’. however, there was also a growth in use of more human interest stories, particularly the use of storytelling, to reach out to larger audiences and to make difficult, sensitive and medical arguments on women’s reproductive health more direct, attractive as well as informative. thus questions asked here included how could communications be used for advocacy on srhr, and specifically how health and feminist ngos’ communication strategies reflect on their daily activities amid the challenges that these organizations are currently encountering. literature review this research has thus sought to contribute to the work of scholars within the field of gender and development, health and development communications, advancing discussions on the role of feminist ngos, particularly from the global south but as well as the global north, in advocating for women’s rights (alvarez, 2009; harcourt, 2009), further assessing the ways in which communication strategies and new technologies can be better used for gender and health activism. drawing from the fields of communications, development and feminist studies, as well as sociology and health communication, this research contributes to theoretical and empirical research in the fields of gender development, media and sexuality (correa and petchesky, 1994; cornwall, correa and jolly, 2008; harcourt, 2009; butler, 2019), and ngos use of media for advocacy communications for social change (obregon and waisbord, 2012; wilkins, 2016). particular case studies were carried out with latin american ngos, and their strategic use of communications for advocacy on reproductive health throughout the region, as well as with the ngos working in south asia, with full results published in a book manuscript. challenges encountered by the ngos range from the growth of far-right movements and conservative resistance throughout the world, and their opposition to the advancement of women’s rights – seen as ‘gender ideology’ to cuts and pressures on public health services at the local level as well as the increasing climate of competition faced by these organizations in their pursuit of more funds, attention and publicity in what is currently a saturated media (and online) political environment (kingston and stam, 2013; thrall et al, 2014; mcpherson, 2017, powers, 2017). notably, the debate on sexual and reproductive health and rights (srhr) in the mediated public sphere, both in local contexts but also globally, is still quite poor and subject to misinformation, stigma as well as ideological manipulation and political polarization. this includes the ability to provide in depth, detailed and critical information on srhr, permitting that citizens can question messages and information, and can also make connections between reproductive health rights to issues of poverty and inequality. for reproductive health rights not only is part of women’s rights, but it also contributes to social inclusion, to quality health and well-being and to better citizenship and functioning of democracies. as it stands today debates on reproductive health, sexuality and bodily autonomy are still largely restricted to public health professionals, to ngo advocates and to other specialized feminist movements and groups, perpetuating ‘echo chambers’ and inequalities in knowledge as well as access to services and rights. findings the overall findings of the gcrf research revealed that there is still insufficient engagement with the affected communities, and that there are problems with communicating on complex health topics such as reproductive health. the conclusions pointed to the need to assess the reasons for their ‘resistance’, fear and anxieties towards sexuality and reproduction issues due to cultural and social constraints, as well as political pressures and economic barriers. the research concluded that communications about and for sexual and reproductive health and rights, despite the use of various creative approaches by the organizations, is still largely directed to the publics ‘in the know’, including ngo advocates and health professionals and could be improved in order to teach out to larger publics. some of the experts interviewed recognized that public health arguments and the mere adherence to advocating on reproductive health based on facts, reports and statistics is not enough and is not ‘winning hearts”, at a particularly crucial time where emotions and cultural values around various political, cultural and social issues run high, particularly in the digital age and in the context of increasing political polarization, populism and rise of opinionated commentary in the media and online sphere. many of the organizations acknowledged the need to advocate for ‘facts’ (‘reason”) combined with the need to appeal to human interest and personal narratives, appealing to emotions and to everyday experiences and making use of entertainment-education formats, digital storytelling and other approaches which can reach out to people. conclusion there was thus the recognition of a wider need to embed health communication messages within wider narratives of personal lived experiences, enabling more spaces for the participation of communities in the co-construction of their own health messages and campaigns through a combination of online media tools with offline traditional communication vehicles, with different types of media targeting diverse groups, including across generations. references alvarez, s. e. (2009, june). “beyond ngo-ization? reflections from latin america.” in development (52), 175-184 butler, j. (2019, december). “anti-gender ideology and mahmood’s critique of the secular age.” in journal of the american academy of religion, vol. 87, issue 4, 955-967 correa, s. and petchesky, r. 1994. “reproductive and sexual rights: a feminist perspective.” in sen, gita, germain, adrienne, lincoln, c. chen (eds.) population policies reconsidered: health, empowerment and rights (p. 107-126). boston: harvard university press cornwall, a., correa, s. and jolly, s. 2008 (eds.) development with a body: sexuality, human rights and development. london: zed books harcourt, w. 2009. “reproductive bodies.” in body politics in development: critical alternatives in gender and development (38-65). london: zed books kingston, lindsey n. and stam, kathryn r. 2013. “online advocacy: analysis of human rights ngo websites” in journal of human rights practice, vol. 5, n. 1, 75-95 mcpherson, e. 2017. “social media and human rights advocacy” in tumber, h. and waisbord, s. (eds.) the routledge companion to media and human rights (279-288), london and new york: routledge obregon, r. and waisbord, s. 2012. “capacity building (and strengthening) in health communication: the missing link.” in obregon, r. and waisbord, s. (eds.) the handbook of global health communications (559-582). wiley-blackwell powers, m. 2017. “civic organizations, human rights and the news.” in tumber, h. and waisbord, s. (eds.) the routledge companion to media and human rights (248-257), london and new york: routledge thrall, t., stecula, d. and sweet, d. 2014. “may we have your attention please? human-rights ngos and the problem of global communications.” in the international journal of press/politics, 1-25 wilkins, k. g. 2016 communicating gender and advocating accountability in global development. new york: palgrave macmillan, 85-123 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): lo, c and walton, s. (2024, october). automoderator as an example of community-driven development. paper (or panel) presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. automoderator as an example of community-driven development claudia lo wikimedia foundation sam walton wikimedia foundation introduction rushes to adopt the latest technologies to the field of community moderation are deeply lopsided (franco et. al., 2023; weng et. al. 2023). the closed-door nature of product development at the majority of tech companies means that the logic underlying the creation of new features is generally opaque. many alternative approaches to design have been articulated that take a more collaborative approach, including design justice (costanza-chock, 2020), participatory design (kensing and blomberg, 1998; callon, 2004), and social design (disalvo et al, 2011). we present the development and deployment of the wikimedia foundation’s automoderator1, an automated anti-vandalism tool, as an example of a product developed through community-driven design principles. product development for the automoderator project included a participatory process, where the product team integrated volunteer feedback and direction on a continuous basis, rather than writing software in isolation and deploying rapidly. while it is helpful to analyze and critique the design approach laid out here, we should recognize that these practices do not explicitly follow any of the collaborative frameworks above, and also do not necessarily represent the practices of every wikimedia foundation product team. content moderation on wikipedia on average wikipedia receives 4 edits every second across more than 300 languages (wikistats, n.d.). while the wikipedia community and wikimedia foundation has invested in automating the process of patrolling recent edits to wikipedia articles, the 1 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/moderator_tools/automoderator https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/moderator_tools/automoderator task remains time consuming. there is a constant stream of changes from contributors ranging from small single-word edits, to entire new articles. while some edits may require careful human review, some low quality edits are obvious vandalism, and can be reverted immediately. such edits may not individually take up much volunteer time, but in aggregate editors can spend a lot of time dealing with routine edit reverts. since the early days of wikipedia in 2001, volunteers have created automated tools to more easily identify and automate parts of this workload. in specific, volunteer-created anti-vandalism bots were a major inspiration for the automoderator project. such bots are important to these communities in their efforts to combat vandalism on their projects (geiger and halfaker, 2013). however, they are only available on a very small minority of wikipedias, and each requires a technically proficient volunteer to create, configure, and maintain it. this fractured ecosystem puts strains on individual volunteers, who are duplicating each other’s work, and become single points of failure for systems which the wider community considers vital. beyond demonstrating a desire for automated anti-vandalism in general, these community-created bots gave clear directions for automoderator’s development based on their successes and failures. these existing tools steered automoderator’s development towards the values of accuracy, transparency, and human control over all its actions. developing and deploying automoderator before any code was written for the automoderator software, the moderator tools product team engaged with a wide range of volunteer contributors to understand what features it should have, how trustworthy it needed to be, which language communities might be interested in trialing it, and what configuration options it ought to have. the team specifically contacted the authors of older anti-vandalism bots, to learn about the solutions they had built, and how automoderator might be able to build on their learnings. at the same time, the goals and key metrics for the project were shared publicly and comments and feedback were invited2 and integrated from a wide range of volunteers. a public page was created as soon as the project was first scoped3, which was kept up to date with progress updates and opportunities for feedback throughout. during its development, the automoderator team developed a testing tool in the form of a spreadsheet, allowing any user from any community to compare how their personal judgements would compare against automoderator’s judgements. this allowed community members to assess the tool’s efficacy before full deployment. it also allowed them to see how automoderator might impact their wikis, without needing to wait for the fully finished tool. these tests also allowed the development team to gauge whether volunteers considered the prototype to be reliable enough for deployment. 2 visible on the public discussion page https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/talk:moderator_tools/automoderator 3 https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=moderator_tools/automoderator&oldid=5950762 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/talk:moderator_tools/automoderator https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=moderator_tools/automoderator&oldid=5950762 the team also integrated functionality from the community configuration extension4, an extension that allows wikimedia communities to customize mediawiki features for their specific needs, into automoderator. this addition enables wikipedia administrators to control automoderator’s behavior directly (walton, 2023). it also provides administrators with immediate control over whether automoderator is running at all. all of automoderator’s user-facing text can be customized per-wiki, and editors have access to a monitoring dashboard5 to review statistics about its behavior, and its estimated false positive rate (velaga, 2024). each wikipedia language edition must initiate the deployment of automoderator by making a request to the product team. by giving the option to opt-in to use the product on their wikis, automoderator’s product team gave control over the timing of its deployment to the communities. at the time of writing, automoderator is operational on five wikipedia projects. it uses a language-agnostic ml model6 that predicts the probability of an edit being reverted (trokhymovych et. al, 2023). a further round of user testing is ongoing with a more highly performant multilingual ml model (walton, 2024). discussion the above approach to product development hews closer to community-collaborative design approaches, but there are some trade-offs to this product development approach. time. the most obvious trade-off is time. the need to continually collect feedback, and optionally translate both ways, creates additional work and dependencies. moreover, this level of continuous feedback requires committing to maintaining long-term relationships with chosen communities. for the automoderator project, facilitating multilingual collaborative development depended upon: ● access to automated translations for quick replies, ● access to multilingual support for design research, with professional translators and interpreters, ● engaging with community members fluent in english or hiring community members to help facilitate discussions in their communities, ● constant monitoring of the central product page, as well as discussions happening in other community fora in their own languages. deep knowledge of wikipedia patrolling operations. the highly technical nature of automoderator, as well as its use-case, meant that the product team needed extensive familiarity with the context of moderation on wikipedia. this added an additional layer of complexity to the development process as well as the continual feedback cycle. accessibility. the population of users who do respond to requests for feedback are not guaranteed to be representative, either of the end-users of the product or of their 4 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/community_configuration 5 https://superset.wmcloud.org/superset/dashboard/unified-automoderator-activity-dashboard/ 6 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/machine_learning_models/production/language-agnostic_revert_risk https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/community_configuration https://superset.wmcloud.org/superset/dashboard/unified-automoderator-activity-dashboard/ https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/machine_learning_models/production/language-agnostic_revert_risk community at large. the creation of the testing spreadsheet was a conscious effort to broaden the pool of respondents, but to an extent, the population of community members who have the inclination, time and interest to respond is self-selecting. equity. while the model presented in this paper has significant advantages in providing opportunities to users for engaging in the product development process, it does not entirely address the challenges of equitably participating in such processes. for example, we expect that users with technical and economic advantages will be able to more actively engage in such a product development process. we hope that by sharing more about a contemporary alternative system for product development, we demonstrate that it is possible to conduct product development in a more collaborative manner within the technology world. references callon, m. (2004, march 1). the role of hybrid communities and socio-technical arrangements in the participatory design. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/the-role-of-hybrid-communities-andsocio-technical-callon/1b69de82480500cdc37dcb3134452e3706679046 costanza-chock, s. (2020). design justice: community-led practices to build the worlds we need. the mit press. disalvo, c., lodato, t., fries, l., schechter, b., & barnwell, t. (2011). the collective articulation of issues as design practice. codesign, 7(3–4), 185–197. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2011.630475 franco, m., gaggi, o., & palazzi, c. e. (2023). analyzing the use of large language models for content moderation with chatgpt examples. 3rd international workshop on open challenges in online social networks, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1145/3599696.3612895 kensing, f., & blomberg, j. (1998). participatory design: issues and concerns. computer supported cooperative work (cscw), 7(3–4), 167–185. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1008689307411 moderator tools/automoderator. (n.d.). mediawiki. retrieved november 22, 2024, from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/moderator_tools/automoderator moderator tools/automoderator/multilingual testing. (n.d.). mediawiki. retrieved november 22, 2024, from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/moderator_tools/automoderator/multilingual_te sting utilisateur:salebot. (2023). in wikipedia. https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=utilisateur:salebot&oldid=208729762 velaga, k. (2024, july 8). ⚓ t369488 develop a unified automoderator activity dashboard (v1). https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/t369488 walton, s. (2023, october 20). ⚓ t349374 how will communities configure automoderator? wikimedia phabricator. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/t349374 walton, s. (2024, may 22). ⚓ t365581 use multilingual revert risk model in automoderator on supported wikis. wikimedia phabricator. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/t365581 weng, l., goel, v., & vallone, a. (2023, august 15). using gpt-4 for content moderation | openai [blog]. openai blog. https://openai.com/index/using-gpt-4for-content-moderation/ wikistats. (n.d.). wikimedia statistics—all wikis edits. retrieved november 26, 2024, from https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/allprojects/contributing/edits/normal|bar|2022-10-01~2024-12-01|~total|monthly https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/the-role-of-hybrid-communities-and-socio-technical-callon/1b69de82480500cdc37dcb3134452e3706679046 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/the-role-of-hybrid-communities-and-socio-technical-callon/1b69de82480500cdc37dcb3134452e3706679046 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/the-role-of-hybrid-communities-and-socio-technical-callon/1b69de82480500cdc37dcb3134452e3706679046 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/the-role-of-hybrid-communities-and-socio-technical-callon/1b69de82480500cdc37dcb3134452e3706679046 https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2011.630475 https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2011.630475 https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2011.630475 https://doi.org/10.1145/3599696.3612895 https://doi.org/10.1145/3599696.3612895 https://doi.org/10.1145/3599696.3612895 https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1008689307411 https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1008689307411 https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1008689307411 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/moderator_tools/automoderator https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/moderator_tools/automoderator https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/moderator_tools/automoderator/multilingual_testing https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/moderator_tools/automoderator/multilingual_testing https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/moderator_tools/automoderator/multilingual_testing https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/moderator_tools/automoderator/multilingual_testing https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=utilisateur:salebot&oldid=208729762 https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=utilisateur:salebot&oldid=208729762 https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=utilisateur:salebot&oldid=208729762 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/t369488 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/t369488 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/t349374 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/t349374 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/t349374 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/t365581 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/t365581 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/t365581 https://openai.com/index/using-gpt-4-for-content-moderation/ https://openai.com/index/using-gpt-4-for-content-moderation/ https://openai.com/index/using-gpt-4-for-content-moderation/ https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/contributing/edits/normal%7cbar%7c2022-10-01~2024-12-01%7c~total%7cmonthly https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/contributing/edits/normal%7cbar%7c2022-10-01~2024-12-01%7c~total%7cmonthly https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/contributing/edits/normal%7cbar%7c2022-10-01~2024-12-01%7c~total%7cmonthly selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): zhu, s., liu, x., peng, x., & luo, y. (2024, october). strategic autonomy in flux: examining power dynamics in tiktok shop's managed models. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. strategic autonomy in flux: examining power dynamics in tiktok shop's managed models silei zhu rutgers university xuanbo liu tsinghua university xinyi peng tsinghua university yaqin luo shenzhen university introduction initially a video-sharing app, tiktok has emerged as a leading player in chinese crossborder e-commerce, alongside aliexpress, shein, and temu (nielseniq, 2023), with an estimated combined global market value projected to reach $2 trillion by 2030. the introduction of tiktok shop has sparked a transformative shift, creating a thriving ecosystem and reshaping relationships among creators, sellers, platforms, and the social media industry. seeking to leverage its ties to the 'world's factory' and challenge established market players like amazon, tiktok has actively courted chinese sellers to offer competitively priced products globally through cross-border e-commerce. central to this strategy is the 'fulfilled by tiktok' program, which streamlines global logistics for merchants, encompassing storing, packing, and shipping (korn, 2023). based on that, tiktok has furthered the comprehensive supply chain management responsibilities, including online sales processes. however, while economic prospects for merchants seem promising, complaints have arisen regarding the perceived cost pressures and loss of autonomy under tiktok's fully and partially managed models. the study of tiktok is gaining popularity, yet the understanding of the tiktok economy and its global economic expansion remains relatively underdeveloped. as tiktok shop introduces a novel business model for a global user base, reminiscent of the one that revolutionized chinese shopping habits and significantly altered the retail industry on douyin (kaye et al., 2021), it is urgent to explore its patterns and mechanisms. moreover, online sellers’ complaints showcase another representation of platform power affecting stakeholders, and unraveling the power dynamics and negotiations within the current complex ecosystem surrounding tiktok is crucial. to delve into these complicated inquiries regarding the tiktok ecosystem, we aim to investigate the business model, platform policies, and their implications. employing online ethnography since november 2022, we have been actively tracking updates of tiktok shop policies and services, documenting live streams, and engaging in forums to discuss with sellers on tiktok shop to gather materials for analysis. through this approach, we have established some preliminary findings focusing on two main aspects. firstly, our exploration of the past delves into the formation and evolution of tiktok's business model, elucidating its origins and key milestones. secondly, we analyze the ecosystem and power dynamics at play within the tiktok platform and its impact on various stakeholders. economy & business model: re-thinking platform vertically originating from china, tiktok operates within a distinct business model and context that have been shaped by its developmental trajectory and the influence of its sister platform, douyin. douyin first introduced its transactional e-commerce feature and douyin shop center during the early stages of the covid-19 outbreak in 2020. drawing inspiration from established platforms like taobao and wechat, douyin evolved its features to cater to the growing demand for online shopping in china. following douyin's success, tiktok embarked on a similar path by launching its tiktok shop marketplace and services in the uk and asia in 2021. this initiative gradually expanded to include u.s. users and other regions worldwide in 2022, with the goal of replicating douyin's achievements on a global scale. to streamline product delivery from china's manufacturing hub to consumers worldwide, tiktok adopted an extended fulfillment strategy similar to that of temu, a prominent e-commerce platform. this strategy involved tiktok assuming a more significant role in the supply chain, facilitating the logistics of product storage, packaging, and shipping. the platform economy is deeply intertwined with regional economic strengths and specializations (athique, 2019), a concept underscored by tiktok's design and business model. tiktok's ecosystem is cultivated within china's unique market ecology, influenced by the country's techno-nationalist pursuits and its robust e-commerce landscape (qiu, 2023; plantin & de seta, 2019). this contextual backdrop has provided bytedance, the parent company of tiktok, with a solid foundation to replicate successful practices from douyin to tiktok shop, leveraging its experience and expertise in navigating china's dynamic digital market. platform design is often perceived as geared towards horizontal expansion, rather than internalizing external elements (plantin et al., 2018). however, with tiktok's foray into e-commerce and especially supply chain management, encompassing various components such as logistics, warehousing, and agency operations, it becomes imperative to reconsider the vertical dimension of platforms, specifically by emphasizing the analysis of manufacturing as a critical site (qiu et al., 2014). ecosystem & power: a case of full-hosting model tiktok shop has introduced two distinct managed models for merchants: full hosting and semi-hosting. in the full hosting model, tiktok takes on comprehensive supply chain management responsibilities, including online sales processes and logistics operations (see dotted area in figure 1). this arrangement signifies tiktok's shift towards a more active role as a wholesaler, curating products from participating suppliers and streamlining the sales process within its platform. however, this transition has not been without challenges, with some platform merchants expressing concerns about reduced profitability and limited autonomy. figure 1 building blocks and operational flow in social-media e-commerce merchants operating under the full hosting model often find themselves facing pressure to lower supply prices in order to remain competitive in the rapidly evolving market. despite the promise of increased sales volume, many merchants report minimal profits or even losses under this model. furthermore, the liquidity of suppliers within the platform exacerbates pricing pressures, leading to a race to the bottom in terms of pricing. moreover, the life of a semi-hosting merchant is not without its challenges. despite promises of profit sharing and exposure, sellers concentrated on online sales often find themselves relegated to disposable assets within the platform economy, investing significant resources in branding, content creation, and product selection only to be swiftly replaced when the platform identifies the next trending item. this disposability not only undermines the sustainability of their businesses but also fosters a sense of exploitation, as they feel used and discarded by the platform at its convenience. furthermore, the overarching trend towards managed models, particularly full-hosting arrangements, exacerbates these challenges by favoring suppliers and merchants with supply chain advantages or manufacturing capabilities, leaving independent sellers marginalized and vulnerable to the platform's influence. while the semi-hosting model offers some degree of autonomy in pricing and sales decisions, merchants still grapple with diminishing maneuverability and strategic autonomy, limiting their ability to compete effectively and adapt to evolving market dynamics. these observations underscore the inherent precariousness associated with platform-based business models (duffy, 2021) and highlight the extent of control wielded by platforms over economic activities. through vertical integration and control of the value chain, platforms further extend their power, which call for attention to the examination of the dynamics and implications of platform power (gillespie, 2010; van dijck et al., 2018). furthermore, tiktok shop’s model facilitates the direct connection between suppliers and buyers, leading to the disintermediation of the middlemen within the platform. such disintermediation, as identified by chircu et al. (1999), brings about transformations in the retail industry, which has been attributed to infrastructure and bears significant societal implications (van dijck et al., 2018). therefore, in our future exploration, we will keep scrutinizing the dynamics of tiktok's economic activities, examining their impact and power, and addressing issues of public accountability. additionally, the strategic move by tiktok shop prompts questions about whether it is rebranding chinese products or simply using them to establish platform dominance. these questions require thorough examination. references athique, a. (2019). digital transactions in asia. in digital transactions in asia (pp. 1-22). routledge. chircu, alina m.; robert j. kauffman (1999). "strategies for internet middlemen in the intermediation/disintermediation/reintermediation cycle". electronic markets. 9 (1–2): 109–117. duffy, b. e., pinch, a., sannon, s., & sawey, m. (2021). the nested precarities of creative labor on social media. social media+ society, 7(2), 20563051211021368. gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of platforms. new media & society, 12(3), 347-364. kaye, d. b. v., chen, x., & zeng, j. (2021). the co-evolution of two chinese mobile short video apps: parallel platformization of douyin and tiktok. mobile media & communication, 9(2), 229-253. korn, j. (2023, september 12). tiktok shop is now open for business. cnn. https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/12/tech/tiktok-shop-us/index.html nielsen, r. k., & ganter, s. a. (2022). the power of platforms: shaping media and society. oxford university press. nielseniq. (2023, april 18). 2023 china cross-border e-commerce platform whitepaper. nielseniq. https://nielseniq.cn/global/zh/insights/report/2023/尼尔森ig-2023 年中国跨境电商平台出海白皮书 plantin, j. c., & de seta, g. (2019). wechat as infrastructure: the techno-nationalist shaping of chinese digital platforms. chinese journal of communication, 12(3), 257273. plantin, j. c., lagoze, c., edwards, p. n., & sandvig, c. (2018). infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook. new media & society, 20(1), 293-310. qiu, j. l. (2023). three approaches to platform studies: cobweb, billiard balls, and ant societies. social media + society, 9(3), 20563051231193304. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231193304 qiu, j. l., gregg, melissa, & crawford, kate (2014). circuits of labour: a labour theory of the iphone era. triplec: communication, capitalism & critique. open access journal for a global sustainable information society, 12(2), 564–581. srnicek, n. (2017). platform capitalism. cambridge, uk: polity press. van dijck, j., poell, t., & de waal, m. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford university press. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): nemer, d., & marks, w. (2023, october). unraveling disinformation: examining the human infrastructure of misinformation in brazil through the lens of heteromation. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. unraveling disinformation: examining the human infrastructure of misinformation in brazil through the lens of heteromation david nemer university of virginia william marks harvard university introduction as the information landscape continues to evolve, the widespread dissemination of disinformation is proliferating at a rate and scale never seen in a democratic society. in recent years, major technology companies have taken much of the public blame for this reality, given their algorithms facilitate the sharing of—and sometimes even promote— falsehoods. this, however, misses a key reality; social media, search engines, and messaging services are not fully automated technologies. rather, they are heteromated: they are reliant on participatory humans to serve their economic goals. misand disinformation and selective news filtering gained attention from scholars and the general public after they contributed to social media platforms’ ideological polarization that favored donald trump in the 2016 us presidential election and the “brexit” vote (vaidhyanathan, 2018). however, the rise of brazil’s former president, the far-right firebrand jair bolsonaro, owes much to whatsappa messaging app that runs on a peer-to-peer architecture, where no algorithm curates content according to the characteristics or demographics of the users. instead, a human infrastructure was assembled to create a pro-bolsonaro environment on whatsapp and spread misinformation to bolster his candidacy (see nemer 2021a, 2021b, 2022). in this paper, we articulate the labor executed by the human infrastructure of misinformation (him) as heteromated labor (see nemer & marks, in press). as claimed by hamid ekbia and bonnie nardi (2017), there has been a shift from technologies of automation, those which are entirely managed by machines, to those of “heteromation,” which push critical tasks to end-users as indispensable mediators. unlike technologies of automation, those of heteromation benefit from or depend on often-unrecognized or uncompensated human labor to complete tasks. the field of disinformation studies has yet to address questions related to the relationship between disinformation and labor, identity, and morality. thus, as claimed by jonathan ong and jason cabañes (2019), approaching disinformation as a culture of production expands the field into understanding the social conditions that entice people to this work and the creative industry practices that normalize fake news as a side gig. him in brazil given the prevalence of whatsapp use and the intriguing way that misinformation was spread during brazil’s 2018 presidential election, david nemer began monitoring whatsapp groups in march 2018 that had an average of 160 members. at the peak of the election cycle, each group was posting an average of one thousand messages per day. in august, after conducting the first thematic analysis of the data, nemer identified three clusters of actors across the groups: the average brazilians, the bolso-army, and the influencers. nemer found that misinformation was spread in these groups through a pyramid structure, similar to the classic two-step flow of communication model (katz and lazarsfeld, 1966) in which each cluster of actors occupied a level. influencers were at the top and average brazilians were at the bottom (see nemer 20221a, 2021b, 2022). heteromation of him him sustained an information system, in this case, misinformation on whatsapp, that functioned through the actions of heterogeneous actorsin other words, the members of such infrastructure were users that provided the heteromated labor necessary to make misinformation on whatsapp work. ekbia and nardi (2017) examine heteromated systems according to their functionality and reward structure. they categorize systems in terms of who benefits from the heteromated labor relation, whether participant compensation (monetary) is offered, and whether the system produces affective rewards. beneficiaries are social actors that reap the major benefits of heteromated labor. participants may benefit from affective rewards. following the authors' categorization, the heteromation system that him labored in can be organized as detailed in table 1 table 1 heteromation of the him. system heteromated functionality beneficiaries participant compensation affective rewards for participants misinformation on whatsapp human infrastructure of misinformation politicians influencers: medium-high average brazilians: high influencers: contentcreation; cognitive and creative labor. bolso-army: repetitive microtasks; communicative and organizing labor. average brazilians: emotional and communicative labor. bolso-army: medium-high the heteromated labor performed by influencers and bolso-army was compensated in amounts of between usd 100 and usd 250 per week (between brl 380 and brl 900 approximately). such an amount can be considered "medium-high" since the brazilian minimum monthly wage in 2018 was set in at brl 954 and the average monthly household income per capita was brl 1.337 (ibge, 2019). influencers were at the top of the him: they were responsible for producing and bringing new misinformation to probolsonaro groups on whatsapp. their cognitive labor comprised of understanding the current and complex political environment in order to promote the presidential candidate jair bolsonaro and/or to respond to the criticism that bolsonaro was receiving during his campaign. such cognitive labor led to the influencers' creative labor which meant creating outputs – like pro-bolsonaro memes and short videos. as for bolso-army, they did not engage in heteromated cognitive labor, instead, they were in charge of repetitive microtasks that followed a predefined script and/or reacted to a previous trigger. bolso-army performed communicative labor as they were scripted to reinforce the influencers' content's message, as soon as new content was posted to those pro-bolsonaro groups on whatsapp, in order to make sure that the ordinary brazilians internalized their message, as well as to spread the same content to other whatsapp groups and platforms such as twitter and groups on facebook. differently than claimed by ekbia and nardi, that described communicative labor as the act of engaging online in return for self-validation and self-promotion, members of the bolsoarmy were not necessarily after self-validation and/or self-promotion; their main goal was to validate and promote the message contained in the influencer's posts. the average brazilians, performed communicative labor as they also helped spread the misinformation posted on those pro-bolsonaro groups to their other personal groups that were not necessarily politically oriented, such as family, neighborhood, and friend groups. they often used the content posted by the influencers as evidence for their arguments in their online debates. average brazilians also performed emotional labor (hochschild, 1983), since they were expected to regulate their emotions during interactions with the bolso-army and other average brazilians. fearing being kicked out of those whatsapp groups, they often complied with the bolso-army's authority and avoided asking questions that could be interpreted as them challenging bolsonaro's legacy. instead, they often responded to the influencers or bolso-army posts by cheering with the brazilian flag, validating messages, or with bolsonaro’s trademark handgun emoji (👉). that validating or positive response was perceived by average brazilians to have their loyalty recognized by the bolso-army and rewarded with their permanence in the groups. studies on heteromated systems have focused on creating awareness around labor exploitation, compensation, invisibility, and advocating for labor rights (bailey et al. 2018; ekbia & nardi 2017; irani 2019; sambasivan et al 2021). however, in the case of the human infrastructure of misinformation, given its ethical and quasilegal practices, such awareness may not be wanted nor beneficial to its members. in many cases, we might call for unpaid heteromated labor to be compensated, or for the greater acknowledgment of the work of low-paid creators. however, when it comes to the heteromated process of the him, the actors involved are creating what is likely a societal net negative, calling into question the types of behaviors that should be incentivized. references bailey, d. e., diniz, e. h., nardi, b. a., leonardi, p. m., & sholler, d. (2018). a critical approach to human helping in information systems: heteromation in the brazilian correspondent banking system. information and organization, 28(3), 111-128. ekbia, h. r., & nardi, b. a. (2017). heteromation, and other stories of computing and capitalism. mit press. hochschild, a. r. (1983). the managed heart: commercialization of human feeling. university of california press ibge. (2019, october 16). pnad contínua 2018: 10% da população concentram 43,1% da massa de rendimentos do país. agência ibge notícias. retrieved from https://agenciadenoticias.ibge.gov.br/agencia-sala-de-imprensa/2013-agencia-denoticias/releases/25700-pnad-continua-2018-10-da-populacao-concentram-43-1-damassa-de-rendimentos-do-pais irani, l. (2019). justice for data janitors. in think in public (pp. 23-40). columbia university press. katz, e., & lazarsfeld. p. f. (1966). personal influence, the part played by people in the flow of mass communications. a report of the bureau of applied social research. columbia university free press. https://agenciadenoticias.ibge.gov.br/agencia-sala-de-imprensa/2013-agencia-de-noticias/releases/25700-pnad-continua-2018-10-da-populacao-concentram-43-1-da-massa-de-rendimentos-do-pais https://agenciadenoticias.ibge.gov.br/agencia-sala-de-imprensa/2013-agencia-de-noticias/releases/25700-pnad-continua-2018-10-da-populacao-concentram-43-1-da-massa-de-rendimentos-do-pais https://agenciadenoticias.ibge.gov.br/agencia-sala-de-imprensa/2013-agencia-de-noticias/releases/25700-pnad-continua-2018-10-da-populacao-concentram-43-1-da-massa-de-rendimentos-do-pais nemer, d. (2021a). the human infrastructure of fake news in brazil. items. social sciences research council. nemer, d. (2021b). disentangling brazil’s disinformation insurgency. nacla report on the americas, 53(4), 406-413. nemer, d. (2022). technology of the oppressed: inequity and the digital mundane in favelas of brazil. mit press. nemer, d., & marks, w. (in press). the human infrastructure of misinformation: a case study of brazil’s heteromated labor. in m. ocepek, & m. sanfilippo (eds.), governing misinformation in knowledge commons. cambridge university press. ong, j., & cabañes, j. (2019). when disinformation studies meets production studies: social identities and moral justifications in the political trolling industry. international journal of communication, 13, 20. retrieved from https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/11417/2879 sambasivan, n., kapania, s., highfill, h., akrong, d., paritosh, p., & aroyo, l. m. (2021, may). “everyone wants to do the model work, not the data work”: data cascades in high-stakes ai. in proceedings of the 2021 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-15). vaidhyanathan, s. (2018). antisocial media: how facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy. oxford university press. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/11417/2879 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): marwick, a., losh, e., phipps, b., schlüter, m., and markham, a. (2022, november). feminist approaches to disinformation studies. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. feminist approaches to disinformation studies alice e. marwick university of north carolina elizabeth losh college of william and mary elizabeth brooke phipps university of maryland maximilian schlüter aarhus university annette markham rmit university abstract disinformation, inaccurate information spread intentionally for profit, ideology, or harm (freelon & wells, 2020), is a major public issue and a significant object of study in communication, rhetoric, political science, sociology, and computational social science (tucker et al., 2018). however, much scholarship treats “disinformation” as an irritant without recognizing that it often harnesses metanarratives about inequality and identity, and disproportionately impacts marginalized communities (kuo & marwick, 2021; reddi et al., 2021). for example, counting how many “sockpuppet” accounts contribute to a twitter hashtag reveals that they do not represent genuine opinions of unique individuals, but does not capture whether they advance cultural narratives about race and gender (freelon et al., 2020). in understanding the political economy of disinformation, the standard distinction between disinformation and misinformation oversimplifies, defers responsibility from mainstream news organizations, and limits possible responses. while narrowly defining disinformation distinguishes it from internet falsehoods like satire and clickbait, this https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?mm6p9l creates a much more homogeneous and less representative category. positioning disinformation as a willful negation of the “truth” denies the complex and multilayered characteristics of knowledge-making processes. disinformation is often amplified by media actors eager to debunk or contextualize it (phillips 2018), while “true believers” pass along content to reaffirm their own identities or warn others (marwick 2018). disinformation is not easily understood within the binary of true/false or through the rubric of “intent”—particularly considering the wide circulation of content online. furthermore, disinformation campaigns are often mischaracterized as “information warfare” or “psychological operations” and reduced to military-style masculinized logics of conflict and dominance in which “threat” is framed as a matter of “cybersecurity” (caramancion, 2020). this leaves out complex dynamics of identity, intersectionality, affect, labor, and material infrastructures. attempts to algorithmically moderate disinformation reproduce systemic bias while commercial content moderation exposes vulnerable workers to horrific affective conditions (roberts, 2019). to understand how disinformation is created within participatory communities, it is necessary to understand how even extreme white nationalists might provide time and space for nurturing activities (panofsky and donovan, 2019). at the same time, purportedly “safe,” feminized platforms like pinterest can propagate disinformation through hashtags and keywords (losh, 2022). feminist theory, methods, and perspectives are particularly well suited to exploring such issues. this panel brings together scholars working at different edges of this nascent discipline to explore what disinformation studies can learn from feminist scholars in rhetoric, communication, and science and technology studies. this panel offers four papers, each with a different angle on this discussion. the first paper presents a theoretically oriented discussion of the gendered logics of disinformation, using materials from a nato cybersecurity challenge and visual memes about pizzagate on pinterest and instagram. paper 2 analyzes tiktok videos that promote conspiracy theories to understand how they serve as identity signals that reinforce hegemonic power relations. the third paper uses a feminist ethic of care to conduct an ethnographic and rhetorical analysis of bro science memes that promote hypermasculinity, exploring how this lens can generate nuanced and layered accounts that situate disinformation as a disturbing care practice of community building among disaffected right-wing masculinists. the final paper situates trolling as a resistance tactic, understanding how youth fight disinformation by leveraging the platform politics of tiktok. by centering intersectional identity in “disinformation studies,” we contribute to the longstanding scholarly recognition of knowledge production as a feminist issue. references caramancion, k. m. (2020). an exploration of disinformation as a cybersecurity threat. 2020 3rd international conference on information and computer technologies (icict), 440–444. https://doi.org/10.1109/icict50521.2020.00076 freelon, d., bossetta, m., wells, c., lukito, j., xia, y., & adams, k. (2020). black trolls matter: racial and ideological asymmetries in social media disinformation. social https://doi.org/10.1109/icict50521.2020.00076 science computer review, 089443932091485. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439320914853 freelon, d., & wells, c. (2020). disinformation as political communication. political communication, 37(2), 145–156. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1723755 kuo, r., & marwick, a. (2021). critical disinformation studies: history, power, and politics. harvard kennedy school misinformation review. https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-76 losh, e. (2022). selfie democracy. mit press marwick, a. e. (2018). why do people share fake news? a sociotechnical model of media effects. georgetown law technology review. panofsky, a., & donovan, j. (2019). genetic ancestry testing among white nationalists: from identity repair to citizen science. social studies of science, 49(5), 653–681. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312719861434 phillips, w. (2018). the oxygen of amplification: better practices for reporting on extremists, antagonists, and manipulators online. data & society research institute. reddi, m., kuo, r., & kreiss, d. (2021). identity propaganda: racial narratives and disinformation. new media & society, 14614448211029292. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211029293 roberts, s. t. (2019). behind the screen: content moderation in the shadows of social media. yale university press. tucker, j. a., guess, a., barbera, p., vaccari, c., siegel, a., sanovich, s., stukal, d., & nyhan, b. (2018). social media, political polarization, and political disinformation: a review of the scientific literature (ssrn scholarly paper id 3144139). social science research network. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3144139 https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439320914853 https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439320914853 https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1723755 https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-76 https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-76 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?lzgehn https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?lzgehn https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312719861434 https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312719861434 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211029293 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211029293 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?lzgehn https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?lzgehn https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?lzgehn https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?lzgehn feminist decolonial perspectives on disinformation elizabeth losh college of william and mary feminist scholars in science and technology studies have long emphasized the materiality, embodiment, affect, and labor invested in sociotechnical systems (wernimont and losh, 2018). such scholars have noted the complexity of the messy infrastructures of informal knowledge networks and the logics of reproduction, care, and repair that sustain them (panofsky and donovan, 2019). they also have criticized myths of neutrality, rationality, transparency, universality, and transcendence that are central to the rhetoric of silicon valley companies (mullaney et al, 2020) and to the disinformation for which these companies provide an essential platform (kuo and marwick, 2021). rather than define disinformation narrowly, with a focus on the sharp demarcation of truth from falsehood and clear moral judgment about right and wrong behavior, feminist internet researchers examine how disinformation communities pursue multiple purposes and negotiate heterogenous understandings of shared goals, which makes disinformation inseparable from other kinds of contested political communication (freelon and wells, 2020). drawing on the work of inderpal grewal (2017), which is grounded in feminist theory and postcolonial studies (reflecting the theme of this year’s conference), this paper examines how notions of personal sovereignty in online disinformation belief systems reflect ideals about exceptional citizenship and service the security state. the data for analysis is drawn from two very different case studies: 1) imagined us interventions into russian disinformation campaigns in ukraine and 2) pizzagate conspiracy theory messages. it draws on evidence from 50 presentations given at a recent nato “cybersecurity challenge” and 34 pinterest posts and 2,529 instagram posts from two pizzagate conspiracy theorists. cyberwarfare in ukraine over 300 students from universities in nato alliance countries joined a 2021. cybersecurity challenge, a “hackathon” that asked participants to examine a dossier about election disinformation in ukraine and then pitch practical solutions for crisis mitigation. team names contained terms like “defenders” and “warriors.” given the time pressure for implementation, solutions often drew upon existing technologies for trust and transparency – such as blockchain registers and github repositories – but some also proposed software products yet to be invented. framing disinformation as warfare and using military metaphors is common in disinformation research. references abound to the “weaponization” of social media (singer and brooking, 2018) and repelling “threats” (caramancion, 2021). as a result, students maintained oversimplified viewpoints that ignored the presence of feminized labor, domestic arrangements, affective investments, reproductive concerns, and responsibility for care and maintenance that were often central to the ukrainian disinformation ecosystem, particularly when tropes of purity and danger (douglass, 2003) were operationalized. for example, even if activists characterized youtube as a “war machine,” in real-life ukrainian social media disinformation scenarios, much more mundane civilian contexts are referenced in postings on twitter, facebook, instagram, and the russian-language social media platform vkontakte (losh, 2019). unlike the nato hackathon participants, ukrainian authorities had to adjudicate more complex cases of social media influence that conjoined femininity and militarism, including the trial of 22-year-old maria koleda who promoted pro-russian militancy on vk and instagram and was charged with shooting three people. security moms on pinterest and instagram in her pizzagate work, whitney phillips shifts attention from potential comet ping pong pizza shooter edgar welch to “the importance of fully understanding the broader historical, cultural, and interpersonal context of belief, and, more basically, why a particular false claim is true to the person who believes it” (2020). building on phillips’ work, this paper uses the critical lenses of feminist analysis to reveal how tropes of stranger danger and maternal vigilance in pizzagate might reflect an imagined relationship between the social and sexual contracts and gendered notions of citizenship. although pizzagate keyword searches have been disabled on pinterest, it is still possible to find a wealth of material with the #pizzagate hashtag on the site, which is often intermingled with other pins emphasizing domesticity, feminine pursuits, and homey lifestyles. a similarly feminized logic in pizzagate memes on instagram exists. for example, conservative blogger pam jones for liberty, who once published a comprehensive pizzagate decoding key for john podesta’s email archive, has posted over two thousand visual memes on instagram. a representative post shows an image of a white wolf against the horizon of a wilderness landscape with a caption reading “the world is a dangerous place not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.” despite her use of non-suburban imagery in this posting, many of her other posts emphasize neighborhood-watch style attention to the cases of missing children. exceptional citizens although these two case studies are very different in their geography and the gender of their presumed audiences, the work of inderpal grewal on “exceptional citizens” who must perform service for “the security state” is useful for interpreting both. grewal herself analyzes how both active shooters and security moms share ideologies of personal sovereignty that are tied to a colonizing american imaginary. although acts of violence by perpetrators like koleda and welch might attract more attention as evidence of the dangers of disinformation, this paper argues that patriarchal and colonial oppression is more commonly domesticated and internalized in internet disinformation communities. references caramancion, k. m. (2020). an exploration of disinformation as a cybersecurity threat. 2020 3rd international conference on information and computer technologies (icict), 440–444. douglas, m. (2003). purity and danger: an analysis of concept of pollution and taboo. routledge. freelon, d., & wells, c. (2020). disinformation as political communication. political communication, 37(2), 145–156. grewal, i. (2017). saving the security state: exceptional citizens in twenty-firstcentury america. duke university press books. kuo, r., & marwick, a. (2021). critical disinformation studies: history, power, and politics. harvard kennedy school misinformation review. losh, e. m. (2019). hashtag. bloomsbury academic. mullaney, t. s., peters, b., hicks, m., & philip, k. (2020). your computer is on fire. the mit press. @pamjonesforliberty is on instagram • 217 people follow their account. (n.d.). retrieved march 1, 2022, from https://www.instagram.com/pamjonesforliberty/ panofsky, a., & donovan, j. (2019). genetic ancestry testing among white nationalists: from identity repair to citizen science. social studies of science, 49(5), 653–681. phillips, w. (2020). you’re fake news: the problem with accusations of falsehood. in m. zimdars & k. mcleod (eds.), fake news: understanding media and misinformation in the digital age. mit press. pinterest. (n.d.). retrieved march 1, 2022, from https://www.pinterest.com/lunaveronica585/pizzagate/ reddi, m., kuo, r., & kreiss, d. (2021). identity propaganda: racial narratives and disinformation. new media & society. singer, p. w. (2018). likewar: the weaponization of social media. eamon dolan/houghton mifflin harcourt. tuters, m., jokubauskaitė, e., & bach, d. (2018). post-truth protest: how 4chan cooked up the pizzagate bullshit. m/c journal, 21(3), article 3. https://www.instagram.com/pamjonesforliberty/ https://www.pinterest.com/lunaveronica585/pizzagate/ wernimont, j., & losh, e. m. (2018). bodies of information intersectional feminism and the digital humanities. university of minnesota press. wmgic x nato act cybersecurity challenge. (n.d.). william & mary. retrieved march 1, 2022, from https://www.wm.edu/offices/wholeofgovernment/wmgic2021/ https://www.wm.edu/offices/wholeofgovernment/wmgic2021/ shapeshifters and starseeds: self-presentation and disinformation in conspiracy tiktok alice e. marwick, katherine furl, elaine schnabel, and courtlyn pippert university of north carolina at chapel hill introduction this paper takes a critical, feminist approach to disinformation studies to understand tiktok videos made by americans that promote conspiracy theories. in addition to viewing these videos as “disinformation,” we analyze them along three axes. first, we build on an emergent literature that contextualizes disinformation as a key tool in promoting hegemonic structures of power, including race, class, gender, and sexuality (kuo & marwick, 2021). second, we understand conspiracy videos as performances of identity which align their makers with larger communities and contexts. third, we examine how these videos present evidence to understand the “epistemic crisis” around disinformation. using qualitative methods, we analyze 200 tiktok videos that promote conspiracy theories. conspiracy videos share common visual tropes that present photographs and videos as “evidence,” mixed with personal narratives that lend authenticity to their claims. conspiracy videos can be clustered based on the theory discussed (such as 9/11, or ufos); the aesthetics and visual tropes of the video; or the identity markers exhibited by the creators. preliminary analysis finds that anti-semitic, transphobic, and covid-19 conspiracies are prevalent on tiktok. many of these theories build upon long-standing power inequalities; however, a diverse group of people create conspiracy videos, which are distributed across lines of race, partisanship, and gender. disinformation, conspiracy, and identity conspiracy theories are a prominent type of online disinformation which generally hold that a group of powerful people are secretly behind a social phenomenon. while conspiracy theories vary in topic, they reflect common concerns about losing control to complex social forces, and thus share themes and narratives (melley, 2016). many conspiracy believers are part of larger networks, particularly online (mahl et al., 2021). within these communities, conspiracy believers learn to interpret knowledge claims that originate outside institutions like journalism or science. thus, we position conspiracy theories as a form of knowledge production that takes place within online communities of practice. rather than viewing disinformation as a recent phenomenon in which factually incorrect information disrupted a homogenous realm of truth, this paper follows kreiss and others who call for analysis of the “deep-rooted political, social, and racial contexts” in which disinformation is created (2021). in internet communities, people signal their affiliations through identity cues and symbolic markers (donath, 1999). thus, we carefully attend to how ideologies and identities—including whiteness—are expressed through tiktok conspiracy videos to understand them as an identity-driven form of disinformation. method we found conspiratorial videos from tiktok by following hashtags associated with conspiracies (#conspiracytok, #rabbithole) and communities like qanon (#greatawakening) and anti-vaxxers (#nojabforme). we collected the most popular videos from highly-followed tiktokers who post conspiracy videos. we also searched for tiktok sounds commonly used in conspiracytok. we watched each video, identified its topic, and coded it based on visible identity markers and type(s) of evidence presented. we then applied reddi et al. (2021)’s guiding questions: “what societal power structures and cultural beliefs about social hierarchies are being exploited? which social groups are given power through these narratives, and which have their autonomy undermined?” finally, we attended to schellewald (2021) who advocates for clustering tiktok videos based on aesthetics, techniques, and references, given that creators do not work in a vacuum but are connected to larger platform trends. evidence the primary format of tiktok conspiracy videos consists of the creator talking directly to the camera while a variety of visual images appear behind them [figure 1]. these visuals include photographs, wikipedia pages, screenshots of documents, google maps, and seemingly “historical” images. these are rarely sourced and rely on the “myth of photographic truth” to establish them as evidentiary (sekula, 1982). the creator’s voiceover guides the viewer through their interpretation and thought process (krafft & donovan, 2020). [figure 1: visual evidence in conspiracy tiktok] in highly-viewed videos, the comments often call into question the theory, the evidence, or the creator. for example, on a video discussing submerged ruins of an ancient civilization, the top comment read “and this people, is why archeology requires degrees.” on videos with fewer views, most comments expressed support or excitement. this suggests that videos are met with more skepticism when they move from conspiracy communities to broader audiences. identity clusters preliminary analysis noted three clusters of identity markers amongst videos where the creator was present. right-wing theories focused on covid or government control and included identity markers such as american flags, christian symbols, trucks, country music, and so forth. these creators appeared to be in their 20s-40s. “new age” theories involved aliens, spiritual awakenings, demon possession, and other alternative beliefs. these creators were young, and many were people of color. signals included “hippie” iconography like tapestries, wiccan and afrocentric symbols, dreadlocks, piercings, and tie-dye. popular culture theories discussed celebrities, secret messages in the media, or secret societies like the illuminati. these creators were young, racially diverse, and fashionable, with visible tattoos and stylish clothing, frequently using pop and hip-hop songs. power in conspiracy theories while identity markers of different clusters varied, they often held the same beliefs. for example, the anti-semitic conspiracy theory that the jewish banking family the rothschilds control the world was furthered by members of all three groups. qanonadjacent theories about child trafficking, human sacrifice by celebrities to get attention, and a pedophilic cabal were present in both the “new age” and “popular culture” clusters. covid-19 conspiracy theories were common in all three clusters, although right-wing identity markers appeared more frequently in anti-vaccination hashtags. we also found a variety of transphobic videos in the “popular culture” cluster. this suggests that conspiracy theories reinforce hegemonic power relations among diverse demographics. the appeal of conspiracy theories as secret, even “forbidden” knowledge that explains complicated social events crosses demographic boundaries. references donath, j. (1999). identity and deception in the virtual community. in p. kollock & m. smith (eds.), communities in cyberspace (pp. 29–59). routledge. krafft, p. m., & donovan, j. (2020). disinformation by design: the use of evidence collages and platform filtering in a media manipulation campaign. political communication, 37(2), 194–214. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2019.1686094 kreiss, d. (2021). “social media and democracy: the state of the field, prospects for reform,” edited by nathaniel persily and joshua a. tucker. the international journal of press/politics, 26(2), 505–512. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940161220985078 kuo, r., & marwick, a. (2021). critical disinformation studies: history, power, and politics. harvard kennedy school misinformation review, 2(4). https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-76 mahl, d., zeng, j., & schäfer, m. s. (2021). from “nasa lies” to “reptilian eyes”: mapping communication about 10 conspiracy theories, their communities, and main propagators on twitter. social media + society, 7(2), 20563051211017480. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211017482 melley, t. (2016). empire of conspiracy. cornell university press. reddi, m., kuo, r., & kreiss, d. (2021). identity propaganda: racial narratives and disinformation. new media & society, 14614448211029292. schellewald, a. (2021). communicative forms on tiktok: perspectives from digital ethnography. international journal of communication, 15, 21. sekula, a. (1982). photographic meaning. in v. burgin (ed.), thinking photography (pp. 84–109). macmillan. studying hypermasculine memes as bro science through a feminist ethic of care maximilian schlüter aarhus university annette markham rmit university moving beyond the binary of disinformation much disinformation research focuses on identifying or tagging content as true or false, following content back to creators or disseminators (reddi et al., 2021), in an attempt to understand the structures of how disinformation gets created and shared. this particular analysis of disinformation is built on a false binary that “mis” or “dis” information requires an evaluation of truthity or falsity of some element in the content itself (see søe, 2019). but, as has been noted (c.f., boyd, 2018), disinformation is not so easily understood or solved. how does information develop truth-value? to this question we can add a slightly different question, asking: how does any “truth claim” or what might be later labeled as disinformation, function in communities that share these “truths” with each other? critical feminist theory holds that truth-making is a contested process, intertwined and dependent on intersectional axes of oppression, and that “multiple realities,” “multiple truths,” or “multiple lived experiences” are experienced as true. what happens when we take a feminist position of validating community-based sensemaking about what counts as true or false to analyze disinformation? this type of analysis insists on an openness towards the emerging realities of members of hypermasculine, far-right spaces. we posit this approach can provide layered and nuanced accounts of how disinformation comes into being, what narratives it builds on, and how it functions culturally inside the communities that produce and share it. this initially empathetic lens, conducted with and in the spirit of an ethic of care, can also yield more rich ethnographic detail that can be used to intervene in spaces of intense disaffection. we are inspired in taking this stance in part by jameson's (1988) as well as panofsky and donavan’s (2019) arguments that dis/misinformation can be seen as a form of citizen science among disaffected groups. to be clear, this paper is not a defense of dis/misinformation, toxic masculinity, racist white supremacy, or other held beliefs within such fringe communities. rather, it is an effort to build an analytical lens that draws on a feminist orientation of empathy and an ethic of care, which we believe can help us draw out how these communities engage in sensemaking about the(ir) world, which in turn can help researchers identify (and intervene to shift) the underlying root motivations behind these communities’ actions and attitudes. case study what type of “bro science” goes behind the production of a meme that would be absurd and easily labeled “false” and “misinformation” from a casual critical viewer? we analyze the layers of meaning embedded in a certain hypermasculine meme, reject modernity, embrace masculinity (rmem)-memes, that reclaim masculinity through particular types of mocking, pushing a model of masculinity that is either ‘hyper’ or 'nothing,’ and that uses image macro styling (text over image) plus specific music accompaniment to build the idea. produced primarily for youtube, these types of memes have significant stylistic similarity. the genre’s starting point (figure 1) features aziz ‘zyzz’ shavershian, a bodybuilder famously considered the pioneer of gym culture memes in the early 2000s, who died in 2011 at the age of 22. as shifman (2014) notes, this genre developed through mimesis and remix, whereby gym culture was appropriated, extended, or transformed into a genre of promoting hyper masculinity in contrast to feminine, weak, and undesirable. an ever-escalating meme genre, rmem’s anti-feminist messaging is so obvious it ought to be caricature (figure 2). how is this type of genre connected to-enabling or facilitating-other types of disinformation? how does this meme function inside this cultural milieu that constructs and celebrates the hypermasculine in this way? (figure 1: “female detected, opinion rejected” screenshot from youtube) (figure 2: “reject weakness & modernity, embrace masculinity” screenshot from youtube) methodology we begin with the premise that these memes are a type of citizen science, a critical answer to the struggles of 20th century contemporary life, and a desperate search by disaffected hypermasculinist groups for solace and easy answers to the complications of living with one’s own downfall in the anthropocene. this analytical lens focuses on the lived experience of these memes, from one author’s long time ethnographic immersion in their surrounding contexts, combined with analysis of the memes themselves. we combine shifman’s (2014) frameworks to analyze what’s happening in these memes, tiidenberg’s (2021) framework for considering how they are shared as part of community maintenance, and markham’s theory that these units of cultural information can be understood as flows rather than discrete objects (markham & lindgren, 2014). this stance involves significantly bracketing our own attitudes, to be more open to understanding what is occurring in this situation. mindful analysis of the situation also enacts what lies at the heart of a feminist resistence to overt and hasty categorization of people into easy and likely false binaries. this stance explores how people share information that serves a purpose beyond its information value (or disinformation value). on the level of analyzing content, rm memes operate as performances in two parts and the contradiction of both parts is carried heavily by a hardstyle genre musical underscore. it starts with an ominous musical build-up accompanied by imagery that is supposed to represent undesirable contemporary realities, like fatness or femininity. as the song reaches its crescendo and changes, the images change to hypermasculine feats of strength. within the larger context of the community experience, rmems are underscored by what we can only define as a dangerous articulation of “science,” despite its attachment to a goofy and laughable set of images and arguments. rather than dismiss this diy “bro science” as crass and ridiculous (which it is), the next level analysis (still in progress) explores what function this idea has within their community of practice; that is, a group of disaffected males who believe they are marginalized, oppressed, and being shoved aside globally. what acts of ‘care’ and ‘belonging’ and ‘nurturing’ do these videos provide? of course, this type of analytical thinking is not new, but here, we use it to help build a lens that can reach beyond the true/false dichotomy, which we believe targets the outcome, rather than the roots of the problem. references boyd, danah. (2018). you think you want media literacy… do you? data & society: points. https://points.datasociety.net/you-think-you-want-media-literacy-do-you7cad6af18ec2 jameson, f. (1988). cognitive mapping. in c. nelson & l. grossberg (eds.), marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 347–360). university of illinois. markham, a., and lindgren, s. (2014). from object to flow: network sensibility, symbolic interactionism, and social media" in symbolic interaction and new media (studies in symbolic interaction), (43), 7-41. https://doi.org/10.1108/s0163239620140000043012 panofsky, a., & donovan, j. (2019). genetic ancestry testing among white nationalists. social studies of science, 49(5), 653–681. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312719861434 reddi, m., kuo, r., & kreiss, d. (2021). identity propaganda: racial narratives and disinformation. new media & society, https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211029293 shifman, l. (2014). memes in digital culture. mit press. søe, s. o. (2019). a unified account of information, misinformation, and disinformation. synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02444-x tiidenberg, k. (2021). abduction, imitation and sense making. lecture and blogpost. accessed march 18, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1108/s0163-239620140000043012 https://doi.org/10.1108/s0163-239620140000043012 https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312719861434 “trolling” or resistance? how tiktok activists fight (dis)information wars elizabeth brooke phipps university of maryland 2020 was a unique presidential election season in the united states. as the covid-19 epidemic swept the globe, the impact of digital platforms came to the fore during a contentious presidential election. throughout the year, teenagers made headlines across the united states for their digital initiatives to “troll” president donald trump throughout his campaign for re-election. similarly, content creators on tiktok created videos trolling anti-mask and anti-vaccine supporters’ arguments while also countering disinformation on the platform. this paper argues that trolling has been re-appropriated as a resistance tactic, and that tiktok is uniquely situated as a persuasive digital place for this style of discourse. trolling, a term traditionally associated with infamous hate campaigns like #gamergate, is known for targeting individuals or organizations with harassment, leaking personal information, and even swatting due to perceived injustices online.1 these types of toxic technocultures persist as parasitic publics and are typically protected by the infrastructures of digital platforms.2 however, as trolling spreads across the digital landscape, it has developed to a subcultural notion that further complicates using trolling as a term.3 increasingly, trolling can be linked as a resistive practice to other civic actions, particularly to youth movements observed in places like south korea.4 as such, it is of interest that the two case studies for this essay deal with tiktok initiatives that counter conservative and alt-right discourses regarding the trump election and the ongoing covid-19 pandemic. the politics of trolling on tiktok is embedded in the broader discussion of platform politics in media and communication scholarship. digital platforms themselves are rooted in capitalism as privately owned companies generate profit through user data and advertising revenue based on viewership and engagement.5 the algorithms that determine search results and discoverability on platforms privilege content that furthers the profitability of the platform within a white, patriarchal, hegemonic society.6 there is a material element incorporated in the trolling strategies deployed on tiktok, which nuances them from otherwise expressing resistance to conservative and alt-right ideologies online. this essay contends that the platform of tiktok, and its ability to traverse transplatform networks through “sharing, remediating, and remixing,” plays a uniquely persuasive role as a digital place for protest online.7 to analyze the role of the platform in this resistive trend, i draw from rhetorical theory scholars of place who argue that places--situated locations with their own histories and cultures--enact powerful politically persuasive forces, such as the national mall.8 social demonstrations are “contextualized and situated” through specific events “at particular places,” meaning locations enact their own persuasive rhetorical forces.9 these assumptions regarding the power of locating a social movement in traditionally analog locations carry over to digital places as well. kavada and poell contend that lefebvre’s definition of space as a both product of and producing social relations, a thus we might view social media platforms as rendering the “spatial dimensions of making things public.”10 as such, digital media platforms make discursive circulation visible in unique ways due to its mass distribution network and accessibility. in kavada and poell’s estimation, social media fulfills both the material and inhabitant requirements in the creation of space. operating under this premise, digital platform can successfully fulfill the relational role between users, companies, and infrastructures that merit rhetorical analysis like that demonstrated in place-as-rhetoric. the application of this place-as-rhetoric frame to the resistive trolling practices on tiktok highlight the ways that activists fight disinformation through co-opting the stylizations of trolling. throughout the essay, the interactions between infrastructure, transplatform networks, trolling tactics, style, and political expression illuminate the ways digital activists take on disinformation. analyzing the persuasive power of these relationships offers new avenues for scholarship regarding youth engagement, media attention, and the politics of platforms as they relate to information and disinformation in digital discourse. references 1 adrienne massanari, “#gamergate and the fappening: how reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures,” new media & society 19, no. 3 (2017): 329–46, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815608807; shira chess and adrienne shaw, “a conspiracy of fishes, or, how we learned to stop worrying about #gamergate and embrace hegemonic masculinity,” journal of broadcasting & electronic media 59, no. 1 (2015): 208–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2014.999917. 2 kyle r. larson and george f. (guy) mchendry jr., “parasitic publics,” rhetoric society quarterly 49, no. 5 (2019): 517–41; massanari, “#gamergate and the fappening.” 3 whitney phillips, this is why we can’t have nice things: mapping the relationship between online trolling and mainstream culture, (cambridge, ma: mit press), 18–21. 4 jane yeahin pyo, “tactical trolling: understanding journalist trolling as a new online resistance in south korea,” communication, culture & critique 13 (2020): 134–37; j. r. decook, “trust me, i’m trolling: irony and the alt-right’s political aesthetic,” m/c journal 23, no. 3 (2020); ashley hinck, “fluidity in a digital world: choice, communities, and public values,” in theorizing digital rhetoric, ed. aaron hess and amber davisson (new york, ny: routledge, 2018), 98–111; henry jenkins and sangita shresthova, “up, up, and away! the power and potential of fan activism,” transformative works and cultures, no. 10 (2012), https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/435/305. 5 tarleton gillespie, “the politics of platforms,” new media & society 12, no. 3 (2010): 347–64; “facebook and twitter aren’t liberal or conservative. they’re capitalist.,” august 2018, https://slate.com/technology/2018/08/twitter-facebook-alex-jonesbias.html. 6 vaidhyanathan, the googlization of everything; safiya umoja noble, algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism (nyu press, 2018), https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1pwt9w5. 7 sarah florini, beyond hashtags: racial politics and black digital networks (new york, ny: nyu press, 2019), 35. 8 danielle endres and samantha senda-cook, “location matters: the rhetoric of place in protest,” quarterly journal of speech 97, 3 (2011): 257–82; henri lefebvre, the production of space, trans. donald nicholson-smith (cambridge, ma: basil blackwell, inc., 1991); pamela moss and avril maddrell, “emergent and divergent spaces in the women’s march: the challenges of intersectionality and inclusion,” gender, place & culture 24, 5 (2017): 613–20. 9 endres and senda-cook, "location matters," 277. 10 anastasia kavada and thomas poell, “from counterpublics to contentious publicness: tracing the temporal, spatial, and material articulations of popular protest through social media,” communication theory, no. 00 (2020): 7. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 lene pettersen & faltin karlsen (2023, october). dark design patterns and gamification as the heart of dating applications’ business models. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. dark design patterns and gamification as the heart of dating applications’ business models lene pettersen kristiania university college faltin karlsen kristiania university college introduction the number of involuntary singles that has been rising significantly in industrialized societies represents significant business opportunities. this dating market is capitalized by the american match group, the parent company of tinder, match, hinge, okcupid, and several others. the match group’s total revenue in 2021 was 851,68 million u.s. dollars (statista, 2023). dating applications represent a paradox: on the one hand, they provide a monetized platform for people to form relationships, yet on the other, the more people who find partners, the less revenue to the company. with this paradox as a backdrop, the extended abstract at hand examines the business model of dating applications asking the following research question: • what characterizes the business models of dating applications? to provide a nuanced picture of this, we conducted a 2022-study combining data about dating apps and norwegian app users: (a) 22 in-depth interviews with current and previous users (aged 24–49 years) of dating applications users; (b) a systematic analysis of 30 dating apps for persons looking for a partner (and not a fling, hook up or friends) in google play and apple’s app store; and (c) a diary study of four of these 30 dating applications where a female and a male researcher individually studied the apps for one week each in a walk-through-method way (light et al., 2018) by employing an ethnographic approach (writing daily field notes). value creation in the platform economy dating apps are part of the app economy and the platform economy where digital data are a key component for value creation (bown, 2022). business models explain how firms create and capture economic value (zott, amit, & massa, 2011). the business model of digital platforms facilitates the digital opportunity to combine different sets of users, markets, datasets, or it-systems (de reuver, sørensen & basole, 2018). a platform differ from traditional pipeline companies in especially three ways (van alstyne, parker & choudary, 2016): (1) resource control versus resource orchestration. in platforms, the network of contributors and their assets are the chief resources. (2) internal optimization versus external interaction. platforms create value by facilitating interactions between external actors. (3) creating customer value versus ecosystem value. platforms seek to maximize the total value of an expanding ecosystem in a circular, iterative, feedback-driven process. common revenue models in the mobile app economy are (1) premium (pay-perdownload fees or copy sales); (2) freemium (in-app purchases); (3) subscription fees; and (4) advertising (tang, 2016). until recently, the ad-revenue model has been a cornerstone of app monetization. now, however, due to, amongst others apple’s changes for idfa (the key identifier used for advertising by app publishers), in-app purchase-models are outperforming ad-revenue models (farago, 2020). thus, dating apps adjust their business models to increase in-app purchases. dark design and gamification are well-known design features to nudge such purchases. dark design patterns and gamification dark design patterns is a term used to describe user interface designs that can lead, or manipulate, the user to act in certain ways, such as buying or signing up for something they initially did not intend to (brignull, 2013; mathur, kshirsagar, & mayer, 2021). dark pattern design elements are known to be at play in online games and shopping sites yet are also observed as a business trend (mathur et al., 2021). some of these has been described as exploitative, such as match.com that knowingly lets scammers generate fake messages of interest in its online dating app to get users to sign up for its paid service (narayanan, mathur, chetty, & kshirsagar, 2020). gamification is design principle that share some of these characteristics, by enhancing services with (motivational) affordances to invoke playful experiences and further behavioral outcomes (hamari, koivisto, & sarsa, 2014). findings key take-aways from our study are that dating apps use both dark-design patterns and gamification as design features to create value and to keep the users engaged in the apps. although it is possible to create a profile for free, the opportunities for searches, as well as interaction and communication with others, are typically limited for nonpayers. one example of this limited access for non-payers is happn, which has “crushtime,” a quiz where four profiles appear, and the user has to guess which one of these has liked you (screenshot 1). to find out the answer to the quiz (screenshot 2), as well as who liked you (which is communicated to the user as a notification), one has to pay (screenshot 3). screenshots 2 and 4 illustrate the dark-design pattern of psychological pricing. screenshot 1. illustration of “crushtime” at happn. screenshot 2. illustration from happn of psychological pricing (a countdown to when the user can give likes on others’ profiles, accompanied with an offer to pay for a membership that enables unlimited likes). screenshot 3. illustration that shows blurred pictures of persons who have liked your profile. however, to see whom this is, the user must buy membership at tinder. screenshot 4. illustration of psychological pricing (50% offer with a time limit (“only today”) and a visual countdown, price appearance (the “normal” price is shown with a strikethrough)) at tinder. gamification features used to stimulate the user’s emotional curiosity are also found in our interviews. for example, felix (single, 38 years), who initially had the free version of tinder, but when he got a notification that someone liked him, he paid immediately for a membership to see who this was, explaining, “i am very curious, i have to know who this is.” as another example, karen (single, 31) explained she pays for tinder because they offered her a 50% discount. she is also a paying member of the match app, as the free version had too many limitations. other gamification design features we found in this study are a high volume of notifications; the unlocking of different opportunities; quizzes; badges; new levels; progress; and super-likes to mention a few. when the user wants to delete his or her account, the dating apps also use a well-known dark pattern labelled the roach motel, which lets users do something easily, like sign up for an account, but makes it extremely difficult to deactivate and delete it. in other instances, the dating apps plays on the users’ feelings, asking if the user is really sure of their decision to leave, typically stating something like “sorry to let you go.” in addition, several of the apps save by default the users’ profile for a month after leaving, in case s/he wants to return. conclusion to conclude, despite a few exceptions where one must buy a membership to create a profile in dating apps, most apps have a business model that creates revenue through a mix of an in-app purchase-model and subscription fees. the apps typically market themselves as free, yet they use several dark design and gamification features to create and spark emotional curiosity and engagement that in turn brings in revenue to dating app companies. several of the users stated that they have experienced the apps as manipulative, emotionally exhausting and that they created the same kind of “addiction” or “cravings” they experienced in social media. clearly, designing for emotional engagement is a key value-creating element in the dating app companies’ business models. references bown, a. (2022). dream lovers. the gamification of relationships. pluto press. brignull, h. (2013). dark patterns: inside the interfaces designed to trick you. the verge 29. retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/29/4640308/dark-patterns-insidethe-interfaces-designed-to-trick-you de reuver, m., sørensen, c. & basole, r. c. (2018). the digital platform: a research agenda. journal of information technology, 33(2), 124-135. farago, p. (2020). are app developers shifting revenue models as advertising gets challenged? retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/app-developers-shiftingrevenue-models-advertising-gets-peter-farago/ hamari, j., koivisto, j., & sarsa, h. (2014). does gamification work?--a literature review of empirical studies on gamification. paper presented at the 2014 47th hawaii international conference on system sciences. light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881-900. mathur, a., kshirsagar, m., & mayer, j. (2021). what makes a dark pattern... dark? design attributes, normative considerations, and measurement methods. paper presented at the proceedings of the 2021 chi conference on human factors in computing systems. narayanan, a., mathur, a., chetty, m., & kshirsagar, m. (2020). dark patterns: past, present, and future: the evolution of tricky user interfaces. queue, 18(2), 67-92. statista (2023). annual operating income of the match group from 2017 to 2022. statista research department, sep 14, 2023. retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1120192/match-group-annual-operating-income/ tang, a. k. (2016). mobile app monetization: app business models in the digital era. international journal of innovation, management and technology, 7(5), 224. van alstyne, m. w., parker, g. g., & choudary, s. p. (2016). pipelines, platforms, and the new rules of strategy. harvard business review, 94(4), 54-62. zott, c., amit, r., & massa, l. (2011). the business model: recent developments and future research. journal of management, 37(4), 1019-1042. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): lackey, c. & taylor, s. h. (2023, october). algorithmic folk theories of online harassment: how social media algorithms enable online harassment and prevent intervention. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. algorithmic folk theories of online harassment: how social media algorithms enable online harassment and prevent intervention cait lackey university of illinois chicago samuel hardman taylor university of illinois chicago the prevalence of online harassment is undeniable, with 64% of u.s. citizens under the age of 30 having experienced some form of online harassment, and people with marginalized identities reporting being victimized most often (lenhart & zickuhr, 2016; vogels, 2021). enabled by networked internet technologies, online harassment is a variety of abusive online behaviors, which target a specific person or group (blackwell et al., 2017). research suggests people are often harassed by groups connected on platforms who are motivated by moral outrage (marwick, 2021). social media algorithms, or computerized systems that curate, detect, and filter social media content based on pre-programmed model specifications, are often suggested as a scalable solution to reducing networked online harassment (al-garadi et al., 2019; rosen, 2021; taylor & choi, 2022). despite the vast resources dedicated to creating algorithms to mitigate harassment, online harassment continues to grow in frequency and severity (vogels, 2021). research raises concerns about the inadequacies and inequalities of algorithms as content moderators because these systems are blind to the social issues and concerns contextualizing online harassment (musgrave et al., 2022). this critique of algorithms introduces questions about what is missed at the intersection of online harassment and algorithms. investigating victims, perpetrators, and bystanders’ perceptions of algorithmic failures related to online harassment provides insight into their role in perpetuating online harassment. algorithmic folk theories are a framework for investigating perceptions of social media algorithms because folk theories can shed light on how victims, preparators, and witnesses behave during online harassment episodes (devito et al., 2018). algorithmic folk theories are the "intuitive, informal theories that individuals develop to explain the outcomes, effects, or consequences of technological systems” (devito et al., 2017, p. 3165). research suggests that algorithmic folk theories inform experiences of online harassment (devito, 2022; karzait et al., 2021; ytre & moe, 2021). actionable folk theories inform how users adapt their behavior to meet their goals within the confines of algorithms, whereas demotivational theories leave no clear avenue for action (devito, 2022). given the importance of folk theories in understanding people’s behavior on platforms, there remains important questions about how people who have been victims, perpetrators, or bystanders of online harassment theorize the role of algorithms in their experience and how these folk theories influence their behavior. thus, the goal of this research is to explore: rq1: what folk theories and folk theorization do victims, perpetrators, and bystanders of online harassment have of algorithms? rq2: how does folk theorization impact people’s behaviors during online harassment? method we conducted semi-structured grounded theory interviews focusing on perceptions of social media algorithms and their relation to online harassment. participants were recruited in a large u.s. midwest city and required to be over 18 years old. our participants identified as victims, instigators, and/or witnesses of online harassment on social media. we interviewed 19 individuals: 16 victims, 19 witnesses, and 6 preparators. our sampling strategy focused on identity categories most likely to be victims of online harassment, such as lgbt individuals, young adults, women, and racial or ethnic minorities. online harassment episodes were reported across a spread of social media platforms. after completing a brief introductory survey, qualifying participants completed zoom interviews lasting between 60 to 80 minutes and were compensated $20. there were multiple rounds of data collection to allow flexibility for analytic work and the development of emergent theory (charmaz, 2006). interviews were transcribed verbatim for coding. after each interview, we conducted initial grounded theory coding to identify gaps in research, allowing space to adjust for analytic leads based on the indications of emergent theoretical categories (glazer, 1978). following saturation, we utilized focused coding to synthesize data followed by a theoretical coding process to invoke comprehensible and grounded conceptual findings. findings participants provided folk theories of online harassment they witnessed, experienced, or instigated as a consequence of algorithmic design. we identify four algorithmic folk theories: (1) the critical mass intervention theory, (2) the harassment amplifier theory, (3) the algorithmic virus theory, and (4) the biased protection theory. each folk theory is associated with behavioral outcomes. first, the critical mass intervention theory finds algorithmic intervention was only possible when a large number of people flag a harassment incident. conversely, if victims personally flag their harassment on platforms, without soliciting additional intervenors, they failed to receive algorithmic attention. as bystander brianna experienced, “my friend reached out to me because she couldn’t get her nudes taken down. she needed a bunch of people to flag it to get tiktok’s attention.” because of this theory, some victims worked to solicit large groups of support to receive intervening algorithmic moderation, whereas others without large social networks described helplessness. next, the victims, bystanders, and perpetrators of harassment described the harassment amplifier theory to perceive that algorithms are designed to amplify harassment content because it increases engagement. as perpetrator asher describes, “[twitter’s algorithm] ranks hate or hateful comments or negative constantly over positive because that will get clicks.” thus, there was widespread belief that algorithms actively amplify harassment, which invigorated perpetrators to increase the toxicity of their comments. third, many victims were harassed by individuals outside of their personal networks. the algorithmic virus theory describes perceptions that algorithms intentionally network profiles and content within and across platforms, creating opportunities for harassment. as alex describes, “algorithms can spread and share my profile to other people pretty fast, just based off of similar interests. kind of like a virus.” victims experienced algorithmic spread of their social media interactions to potential harassers, and stopping the spread of the hate was beyond their control. last, the biased protection theory was described by victims and bystanders, which was the perception that algorithms fail to contextualize the harassment experienced by marginalized communities. as jennifer laments, “i should be able to report disability hate speech. i always report those and almost never get it removed. the algorithm comes back and says that they review it, but it didn’t violate anything.” despite victim and bystanders’ efforts, algorithms often fail to reduce harm to these groups, which increase feelings of marginalization on social media. conclusion algorithmic folk theories described by victims, witnesses, and perpetrators of online harassment suggest that social media algorithms perpetuate online harassment. our findings contribute to algorithmic folk theories suggesting that online harassment elicits novel folk theories associated with communicative actions from victims, bystanders, and perpetrators of online harassment. some victims and bystanders used these folk theories to curb online harassment; whereas perpetrators used their theories to increase the visibility and harm of their attacks. however, many reported their perceptions of algorithms can lead to unactionable behaviors, such as censorship or no longer reporting harassment, suggesting whether folk theories of online harassment are actionable and demotivational depends upon one’s positionality in online harassment: victim, bystander, or perpetrator. these folk theories also build theory on networked harassment suggesting that social media algorithms are experienced as amplifiers of harassment, in addition to popular accounts or communities (marwick, 2021). furthermore, victims and bystanders described leveraging algorithms to reach networked audiences of bystanders to end the harassment. our research, ultimately, counter narratives from social media companies about algorithms as a scalable solution to harassment, as the lived experience of algorithms discourages intervention while encouraging in new types of online harassment and reinforcing marginalization. references al-garadi, m. a., hussain, m. r., khan, n., murtaza, g., nweke, h. f., ali, i., ... & gani, a. (2019). predicting cyberbullying on social media in the big data era using machine learning algorithms: review of literature and open challenges. ieee access, 7, 7070170718. http://doi.org/10.1109/access.2019.2918354 blackwell, l., dimond, j., schoenebeck, s., & lampe, c. (2017). classification and its consequences for online harassment: design insights from heartmob. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 1(cscw), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3134659 charmaz, k. (2006). constructing grounded theory: a practical guide through qualitative analysis. sage. devito, m. a., gergle, d., & birnholtz, j. (2017, may). " algorithms ruin everything" #riptwitter, folk theories, and resistance to algorithmic change in social media. in proceedings of the 2017 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 3163-3174). https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025659 devito, m. a., birnholtz, j., hancock, j. t., french, m., & liu, s. (2018, april). how people form folk theories of social media feeds and what it means for how we study self-presentation. in proceedings of the 2018 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-12). https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173694 devito, m. a. (2022). how transfeminine tiktok creators navigate the algorithmic trap of visibility via folk theorization. in proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 6(cscw2), 1-31. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555105 glaser, b. (1978). theoretical sensitivity: advances in the methodology of grounded theory. the sociology press. karizat, n., delmonaco, d., eslami, m., & andalibi, n. (2021). algorithmic folk theories and identity: how tiktok users co-produce knowledge of identity and engage in algorithmic resistance. in proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 5(cscw2), 1-44. https://doi.org/10.1145/3476046 lenhart, a., & zickuhr, k. (2016). online harassment, digital abuse, and cyberstalking in america. data & society research institute. marwick, a. e. (2021). morally motivated networked harassment as normative reinforcement. social media+ society, 7(2). http://doi.org/20563051211021378 musgrave, t., cummings, a., & schoenebeck, s. (2022, april). experiences of harm, healing, and joy among black women and femmes on social media. in proceedings of the 2022 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-17). https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517608 rosen, g. (2021, november 1). hate speech prevalence has dropped by almost 50% on facebook. meta. retrieved february 23, 2023, from https://about.fb.com/news/2021/10/hate-speech-prevalence-dropped-facebook/ taylor, s. h., & choi, m. (2022). an initial conceptualization of algorithm responsiveness: comparing perceptions of algorithms across social media platforms. social media+ society, 8(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221144322 vogels, e. a. (2021). the state of online harassment. pew research center. ytre-arne, b., & moe, h. (2021). folk theories of algorithms: understanding digital irritation. media, culture, & society, 43(5), 807-824. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720972314 http://doi.org/20563051211021378 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): liang, b. (2024, october). from neijuan to bujuan: chinese it professionals’ changing philosophy towards working. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. from neijuan to bujuan: chinese it professionals' changing philosophy towards working boyang liang school of languages, cultures and societies, university of leeds introduction having the highest average salary in china, it professionals have enjoyed rapid development and upgrades in their industry. they are called hu lian wang ren (literally meaning: internet/it personnel) in mandarin chinese. this group includes individuals engaged in high-tech tasks such as web design, software/hardware development, and data analysis, as well as tech tasks such as digital marketing, e-commerce, social media management, online content creation, and other comparable roles (sha, 2022, p.7). however, despite their high average wages, they work with a sense of substitutability, as their positions are highly replaceable due to the intense job market competition and the devaluation of higher education in china. this issue is even more severe with the ongoing economic downturn affected by covid-19 in 2019 (chinese higher education communication and public opinion monitoring online, 2022). according to china daily (2022), it professionals are facing significant career uncertainties that extend to their personal lives as they strive to gain a competitive edge in the industry. many of them turned to neijuan when they entered the industry, at the beginning aiming to pass the probational period, then aiming to pursue higher positions or salaries. unlike its interpretation in the agricultural field as involution, neijuan is defined in the working context as internal energy-consuming competition (yang, 2022). yin et al. (2023) argue that neijuan reflects the work behavior of china’s young adults, arising from the tremendous pressures faced by their generation, including housing, healthcare, education, and more (yin et al., 2023). among posts on social media platforms and media reports in china, neijuan is frequently discussed within the it industry. given the high uncertainty within the industry itself, the outcome of neijuan among it professionals is not necessarily success in competition; it can lead to a sense of anxiety for others and calls for more internal competition (mulvey & wright, 2022). however, some it employees still practice neijuan in their work. although the duration and sources of its occurrence vary, they seek to achieve better results, such as job promotion or wage increases, through hard work and by making their hard work visible. nevertheless, at some point, some it professionals give up on it. in chinese, this state is referred to as bujuan. the existing research on neijuan primarily discusses it as a social phenomenon, and currently, there are no academic sources focusing on it professionals’ (or other chinese employees’) choice of bujuan. moreover, scholars such as zhao and beveridge (2022) argue that one manifestation of neijuan in the workplace is overworking to gain advantages in terms of social differentiation, including consumption, professional ethics, interpersonal relationships, job security, and status advancement. however, this is not exactly true for it professionals, as the high competition between it companies and their heavy daily workloads make overworking a normal occurrence and organizational culture for them, not a standard for practicing neijuan. therefore, this research argues that it would be helpful to conduct empirical studies by examining current and former neijuan practitioners, the it professionals with at least one year of working experience in the same city, to understand their perception of neijuan. it is further argued that neijuan represents a culture and spiritual state, or a philosophy, for chinese employees to survive in this specific industry. method: semi-structured interview and qualitative analysis the fieldwork for this research took place in beijing, china, where the it industry is highly concentrated. moreover, living, residing, and working as a game designer in beijing has made me very familiar with this city and the neijuan nature of the it industry. due to censorship on chinese social media platforms, individuals' voices of dissatisfaction and complaints are often difficult to echo, as the content is likely to be perceived by social media as having a distorted mindset and spreading negative energy (wang & sun, 2015). to understand it professionals’ perceptions of neijuan, what drives them to embrace it, and the factors that lead them to choose bujuan, i conducted an empirical study through 30 semi-structured interviews with it professionals in beijing from late 2023 to early 2024. this research embedded a fully qualitative approach through coding and analyzing the interview transcripts to examine their transition from neijuan to bujuan, both as working philosophies within their it contexts. key findings this research finds that participants came to perceive neijuan as an active choice if they believed it could help them gain promotions or higher wages. otherwise, passive neijuan occurred as they had to secure a job or cope with significant living pressures in beijing as migrant residents. moreover, what drives them to abandon neijuan is their understanding, derived from practicing and observing neijuan in their work, that its adjustment depends on whether the results are promising or meaningless. this research also finds that whether neijuan is seen as meaningless or promising is largely determined by participants' salary ranges and economic situations, which subsequently affect their decision to embrace bujuan. for example, participants perceiving meaningless results from neijuan tended to choose bujuan. this further demonstrates that both neijuan and bujuan are reactions to the commercialization of labor, serving as ways to protect themselves and seek a more comfortable life within their limitations of work ability and living affordability. references china daily. 中国日报中文网. 2022. pan dian 2021: hu lian wang cai yuan chao guan chang quan nian, zheng ge jiu ye shi chang han dong le ma? 盘点2021：互联网裁员潮贯穿全年，整个就业市场寒冬了吗？. [press release]. [accessed 3 july 2023]. available from: https://caijing.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202201/10/ws61dbd7d5a3107be497a017cc.html chinese higher education communication and public opinion monitoring online. 中国传媒大学高教传播与舆情监测研究中心. 2022. wo men ru he li xing kan dai hu lian wang hang ye de “cai yuan chao”? 我们如何理性看待互联网行业的“裁员潮”?. [online]. gao jiao yu qing can kao. 高教舆情参考. 2022(7). [accessed 3 july 2023]. available from: https://gaojiao.cuc.edu.cn/edit/uploadfile/20224/2022-4-14-17-0-5.pdf mulvey, b. and wright, e., 2022. global and local possible selves: differentiated strategies for positional competition among chinese university students. british educational research journal, 48(5), pp.841-858. sha, z. 沙梓社. 2022. hu lian wang ren. 互联网人. beijing: zhong guo ren min da xue chu ban she. wang, d., and sun, b. 王东 and 孙彬, 2015. hu lian wang zheng neng liang jiao yu yu zhu dong jie ru xing jiao yu mo shi yan jiu. 互联网正能量教育与主动介入型教育模 式研究. xin jiang da xue xue bao (zhe xue ren wen she hui ke xue ban). 新疆大学学报 (哲学· 人文社会科学版), 6. yang, j. 杨加伟, 2022. “involution” yu “nei juan” gai nian de fan yi dui deng du kao cha. “involution” 与 “内卷” 概念的翻译对等度考察. modern linguistics, 10, p.405. yin, j., ji, y., & ni, y. (2023). does “nei juan” affect “tang ping” for hotel employees? the moderating effect of effort-reward imbalance. international journal of hospitality management, 109, 103421. zhao, m. and beveridge, a.j., 2022. neijuan: an investigation of overtime work among chinese urban white-collar employees. in academy of management proceedings (vol. 2022, no. 1, p. 15516). briarcliff manor, ny 10510: academy of management. https://caijing.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202201/10/ws61dbd7d5a3107be497a017cc.html spir_aoir2024_tradwives.docx selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 breadwinner or breadmaker: contradictions in tradwives’ creator labor, religious vernacular, and aesthetics roxana mika muenster cornell university margaret e. foster cornell university introduction the hashtag #tradwife yields a wide variety of posts on social media: bread recipes, childcare tips, bible verses, 1950s kitsch aesthetics, and more. shared among the creators is a commitment to "traditional" values, religious faith, and antifeminism (jones, 2024; mattheis, 2021; tebaldi, 2023). through sharing their life and domestic labor online, some tradwife creators have amassed sizable–and profitable–followings. yet their role as professional (or aspiring) creators seemingly contradicts their belief that women should eschew the economic sphere, paradoxically leaving some of them as the main breadwinner of their supposed “traditional” family. through this in-progress, mixed-methods project, we aim to understand how tradwife influencers navigate their professed commitment to traditional values and their entrepreneurial labor. specifically, we aim to shed light through our qualitative analysis on how creators’ stated ideology, as derived from a computational text analysis of their websites, are borne out in their instagram stories. our analyses will illuminate how tradwives evoke ideologies about traditional gender roles and how they reconcile their beliefs with their entrepreneurial activities. literature review tradwives fit into a wider ecosystem of right-wing creators, where research has tended to center prominent male figures of the movement. leidig (2023) argues that tradwives reflect the nostalgic pursuit of a mythical past and a white supremacist utopia. early tradwives had smaller followings and were more openly politically radical; with one creator calling for a #whitebabychallenge, a cynical appeal to increase the white birth suggested citation (apa): muenster, r. m., & foster, m. e. (2024, october). breadwinner or breadmaker: contradictions in tradwives’ creator labor, religious vernacular, and imagery. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. rate (leidig, 2023). tradwives reinforce “traditional” gender roles, emphasizing caregiving as feminine and breadwinning as masculine (mattheis, 2021). however, this seems at odds with their labor as content creators. feminist scholars have long investigated wives’ and mothers’ self-representations on social media, as well as “feminine-coded model[s] of self-enterprise” (duffy & packer, 2022, p. 105; lopez, 2009). historically, entrepreneurial opportunities for housewives have been restricted to feminine-coded and economically devalued domains like beauty and household products (duffy & packer, 2022; wrenn & waller, 2021). women were thus able to engage in the economic sphere without betraying their “wifely” duties and ideals (bax, 2010; duffy & packer, 2022; nel et al., 2010). nevertheless, this entrepreneurial labor renders porous the boundaries between the professional and domestic spheres (marwick, 2013; neff et al., 2005; wrenn & waller, 2021). various researchers have observed the role of religious faith in multi-level marketing schemes and “mompreneur” discourse (bromley, 1995; prins & wellman, 2021; wren & waller, 2021). businesses may also be framed as family endeavors (biggart, 1989; mastrangelo & longo, 2024; peters et al., 2023). in this in-progress paper, we examine how tradwife influencers navigate their performance of traditional values with their entrepreneurial activities. we ask the following research questions: rq1: how do tradwife creators reconcile their professed identification with traditional gender roles and their entrepreneurial activities in text and audiovisual content? rq2: in what ways are those entrepreneurial activities portrayed as part of a vocation or profession? methodology we selected our sample of 25 tradwife creators based in north america and the united kingdom by triangulating popular press coverage, prior academic case studies (mattheis, 2021; tebaldi, 2023), and a crowdtangle search of relevant hashtags. we included tradwives who produce english-language lifestyle content and maintain a website outside of instagram. we first performed a computational text analysis of the “about me” and/or product landing page sections on creators’ websites using linguistic inquiry and word count (liwc), a psycholinguistic computerized textual analysis program designed to uncover meaning by assigning categories to the words used in the text that has been used to analyze influencer content (auxier et al., 2019; haq et al., 2022; miller et al., 2022; tausczik & pennebaker, 2010). drawing on liwc’s preset categories1, our analysis will attend to expressions of social relations to decipher the tradwife creators’ understanding of their labor in relation to their homemaking and entrepreneurship; religiosity; whether the focus of the text is placed on 1 https://lit.eecs.umich.edu/geoliwc/liwc_dictionary.html their entrepreneurial or homemaking activities; and concerns of work and home to gather the extent to which they see their activities online as a professional vocation. based on our review of the literature outlined above, we hypothesize the following results: h1: tradwives’ “about me” and product landing pages will feature extensive religious vernacular. h2: words of social and familial relations and processes will feature heavily in both “about me” and product pages, and plural pronouns will outnumber singular pronouns. h3: language surrounding the home will play a more central role in “about me” and product pages compared to language of work. to explore how these themes are expressed in tradwives’ multimodal social media presence, we conducted a qualitative audiovisual discourse analysis of the accounts’ instagram story highlights. instagram stories are ephemeral photos posted to an instagram account, which disappear after 24 hours unless manually saved in instagram story highlights (bainotti et al., 2021). because of their ephemeral nature, instagram stories have historically been understudied despite their growing importance for both advertising and audience connection (bainotti et al., 2021; belanche et al., 2019; kreling et al., 2022). emergent findings our findings show that tradwives are far from monolithic: there are significant differences in how the women in our sample speak about their profession, religion, marriage, and politics. for our first research question, we find that tradwives generally downplay their entrepreneurial labor and financial contribution to the household in their instagram stories, but language of work features extensively on their websites’ product pages (partially disproving h3). thus, tradwives resolve the tension between their ideology and profession by, seemingly, obfuscating it. for example, one creator frames her online presence as “being a sharer” while omitting the brand sponsorships she advertises to her thousands of followers. regarding the second research question, these tradwives do not present their entrepreneurial activities or their domestic labor as a job. housework is more explicitly acknowledged than business ventures (in both stories and on their websites, partially confirming h3), but creators do not politicize it as valuable labor. work is often discussed in terms of the husbands’ or even children’s labor, and product offerings are made using plural pronouns (partially confirming h2). the fact that some of them, through their online prominence, emerge as their families’ breadwinners and how this aligns with their political ideology remains unspoken. religion, which establishes many tradwives’ views on gender roles, features extensively in their instagram stories and substantially on their websites (confirming h1). explicit expressions of political ideology, however, are absent from their websites. they rarely feature on their instagram stories, except for occasional opposition to feminism and reproductive rights. this makes economic sense: a tradwife running a #whitebabychallenge would likely encounter difficulty gaining mainstream sponsorships or reaching the 10 million followers hannah neeleman, a prominent tradwife, has amassed on her instagram account. thus, the creators in our sample make more palatable and mainstream their regressive gender roles through established influencer practices. we expect our theoretical contribution to explore the relationship between conservative ideology, visual self-representation, and participation in creator economies. ultimately, we suggest that the idea of a tradwife appears to be a particular stylization and vernacular that coalesces around ideological themes. in their current iteration, tradwives seem to capitalize on this vernacular, strategically prioritizing mainstream appeal and palatability over explicit political rhetoric (lewis, 2018; marwick, 2015). in other words, the “tradwife” emerges as a metapolitical branding strategy. references auxier, b., buntain, c., & golbeck, j. (2019). analyzing sentiment and themes in fitness influencers’ twitter dialogue. in n. taylor, c. christian-lamb, m. martin, & b. nardi (eds.), information in contemporary society. iconference 2019. lecture notes in computer science, 11420. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15742-5_41 bainotti, l., caliandro, a., & gandini, a. (2021). from archive cultures to ephemeral content, and back: studying instagram stories with digital methods. new media & society, 23(12), 3656-3676. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820960071 bax, c. e. (2010). entrepreneur brownie wise: selling tupperware to america’s women in the 1950s. journal of women’s history, 22(2), 171-180. https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.0.0159 belanche, d., cenjor, i., & pérez-rueda, a. (2019). instagram stories versus facebook wall: an advertising effectiveness analysis. spanish journal of marketing esic, 23(1), 69-94. https://doi.org/10.1108/sjme-09-2018-0042 biggart, n. w. (1989). charismatic capitalism: direct selling organizations in america. university of chicago press. bromley, d. g. (1995). quasi-religious corporations: a new integration of religion and capitalism? in r. h. roberts (ed.), religion and the transformation of capitalism: comparative approaches (pp. 135–160). routledge. duffy, b. e., & packer, j. (2022) wifesaver: tupperware and the unfortunate spoils of containment. in s. sharma & r. singh (eds.), re-understanding media: feminist extensions of marshall mcluhan (pp. 98–118). duke university press. haq, e.-u., lee, l.-h., tyson, g., mogavi, r. h., braud, t., & hui, p. (2022). exploring mental health communications among instagram coaches. 2022 ieee/acm international conference on advances in social networks analysis and mining (asonam), pp. 218-225. istanbul, turkey. https://doi.org/10.1109/asonam55673.2022.10068611 jones, s. (2020, october 28). trump’s base isn’t housewives, it’s tradwives. intelligencer. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/trumps-base-isnt-housewives-its-tradwives.htm l kreling, r., meier, a., & reinecke, l. (2022). feeling authentic on social media: subjective authenticity across instagram stories and posts. social media + society, 8(1), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221086235 leidig, e. (2023). the women of the far right: social media influencers and online radicalization. columbia university press. https://doi.org/10.7312/leid21016 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15742-5_41 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820960071 https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.0.0159 https://doi.org/10.1108/sjme-09-2018-0042 https://doi.org/10.1109/asonam55673.2022.10068611 https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/trumps-base-isnt-housewives-its-tradwives.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/trumps-base-isnt-housewives-its-tradwives.html https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221086235 https://doi.org/10.7312/leid21016 lewis, r. (2018). broadcasting the reactionary right on youtube. data & society. https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/2018-09/apo-nid193281.pdf lewis, r. (2020). this is what the news won’t show you: youtube creators and the reactionary politics of micro-celebrity. television & new media, 21(2), 201-217. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419879919 lopez, l. k. (2009). the radical act of “mommy blogging”: redefining motherhood through the blogosphere. new media & society, 11(5), 729–747. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809105349 marwick, a. e. (2013). status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. yale university press. marwick, a. e. (2015). you may know me from youtube: (micro-)celebrity in social media. in p. d. marshall & s. redmond (eds.), a companion to celebrity (pp. 333–50). john wiley. mastrangelo, f., & marie longo, g. m. (2024). downlining disinformation: how mlm distributors use gendered strategies for recruitment and pastel qanon indoctrination.” social media + society, 10(1), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231224735 mattheis, a. a. (2021). #tradculture: reproducing whiteness and neo-fascism through gendered discourse online. in s. hunter & c. van der westhuizen (eds.), routledge handbook of critical studies in whiteness. routledge. miller, e. m., jolly, j. l., latz, j. n., & listman, k. (2022). influencers and major themes in a gifted education community of practice on twitter. journal of advanced academics, 33(3), 469-504. https://doi.org/10.1177/1932202x221099590 neff, g., wissinger, e., & zukin, s. (2005). entrepreneurial labor among cultural producers: “cool” jobs in “hot” industries. social semiotics, 15(3), 307–334. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330500310111 nel, p., maritz, a., & thongprovati, o. (2010). motherhood and entrepreneurship: the mumpreneur phenomenon. the international journal of organizational innovation, 3(1). peters, c., thomas, j. b., & dille, e. (2023). an exploratory examination of the mompreneur and multi-level marketing: what does she do and why does she do it? journal of enterprising culture, 31(1), 47-76. https://doi.org/10.1142/s0218495823500024 prins, k., & wellman, m. (2021). #faithandfitnesscollide: spreading the word of multilevel marketing in christian women’s fitness instagram posts. aoir selected papers of internet research, 2021. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2021i0.12228 https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/2018-09/apo-nid193281.pdf https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419879919 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809105349 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231224735 https://doi.org/10.1177/1932202x221099590 https://doi.org/10.1142/s0218495823500024 https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2021i0.12228 tausczik, y. r. & pennebaker, j. w. (2010). the psychological meaning of words: liwc and computerized text analysis methods. journal of language and social psychology, 29(1), 24-54. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927x09351676 tebaldi, c. (2023). tradwives and truth warriors: gender and nationalism in us white nationalist women’s blogs. gender and language. 17(1), 14-38. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.18551 wrenn, m. v. & waller, w. (2021) boss babes and predatory optimism: neoliberalism, multi-level marketing schemes, and gender. journal of economic issues, 55(2), 423–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/00213624.2021.1908805 https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927x09351676 https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.18551 https://doi.org/10.1080/00213624.2021.1908805 microsoft word vaughan-success as antithetical to safety-success as antithetical to safety.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): vaughan, a. (2022, november). success as antithetical to safety: researching the far right in an academic context. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. success as antithetical to safety: researching the far right in an academic context antonia vaughan university of bath success metrics in academia, both of institutions and individual researchers, have increasingly moved towards emphasising impact, production, and efficiency. prioritising public scholarship, publications, and digital presence, academics increasingly understand the need to build a profile to have an edge in an incredibly competitive job market (veletsianos et al, 2018). however, these necessities exist within an increasingly hostile environment, with widespread discrimination, threat, and hostility present on the same forums academics engage in. visibility is tied to both success and risk: the more visible a researcher is, the more likely they are to face harassment. the available risk mitigations create a troubling choice for the researcher, often involving strategies that reduce visibility, and thus impact on success. veletianos et al (2018) and massanari (2018) have argued that greater attention needs to be paid to the balance between visibility and safety because of the close connection with success and opportunity. this paper seeks to examine and problematise the balance scholars must strike between being safe and being successful. it focuses on the uneven impact of threats and how available mitigation measures risk exacerbating and maintaining structural barriers. whilst attention is increasingly being paid to the issue of researcher welfare and safety, it tends to be either focused solely on individual practices or institutional structures. this paper critiques the broader environment researchers of the far right operate in, particularly focusing on the impact of digital presence and success metrics on researcher safety and wellbeing. success in academia the phenomena ‘publish or perish’ (pop) is emblematic of this increasing focus on production and efficiency. moosa (2018) notes how pop has been a feature of academia, with de rond and millier (2005, in moosa 2018) stating that “[t]here are few more familiar aphorisms in the academic community than "publish or perish", which is venerated by many and dreaded by more'. central to pop is the requirement to produce as many publications and contributions as possible, with the perception that this production is tied to visibility and thus grants. exacerbating this is the connection between demonstrating impact and receiving grant funding, again placing emphasis on the researcher to engage in public scholarship, branding, and visibility. academics engage in phenomena such as #academictwitter because of its benefits of engagement, increased impact, and the opportunities for networking (walker 2016). through this, the individual academic is developed into a “microcelebrity”, with public scholarship and a digital presence being actively “desirable” in a candidate (massanari, 2018; veletsianos et al 2018). these metrics exist within an increasingly competitive job market, with warren (2019) finding that new assistant professors published twice as many articles as a new assistant professor in 1990s. the hostile environment simultaneously, academics are increasingly being understood as a ‘vulnerable population’, subject to harms from both the material and the environment. networked harassment, vicarious trauma, and unwanted attention from hostile groups has been a known threat since #operationdiggingdigra in 2014 when gaming academics were targeted by the alt-right for their feminist positioning (massanari, 2018). hostility towards academics in a range of disciplines have been documented, with abuse so common it’s considered “an everyday part of the internet” (marwick and caplan, 2018, p.545). those on the sharp end of far right discourse are particularly vulnerable to unwanted attention and abuse (marwick and caplan, 2018). as such, being actively engaged in digital and public scholarship produces a number of risks that must be considered. secondly, scholars are vulnerable to harm from the material itself, known in the literature as secondary or vicarious trauma (williamson et al 2020). reported among content creators, archivists, trauma researchers, and those researching extremism, vicarious trauma is “‘emotional residue of exposure’ … it results from people witnessing trauma (by direct exposure or by hearing narratives about it), and thus becoming ‘witnesses to the pain, fear, and terror that trauma survivors have endured’” (american counselling association in williamson et al, 2020; van der merwe and hunt 2019; williamson et al 2020; winter, 2019). these risks disproportionately affect those at the sharp end of the far right. methodology this paper situates lived experience within the broader environment of neoliberal academia to examine how we practice scholarship and success in relation to risk and safety. the paper utilises a thematic analysis approach with a corpus of 21 interviews with researchers of the far right and manosphere from the us, uk, europe, and australia. in particular, this paper seeks to problematise structural elements that render emotional and physical protection inaccessible to most by creating barriers and a need to trade safety for success. in the next section, i briefly consider the key finding: that safety is antithetical to success. mitigations respondents detailed how available protection measures to deal with the aforementioned risks were experienced as incompatible with what they understand as necessary for progression and success: visibility and publication. those working at the intersections of marginalisation and precarity report making choices that may harm their career in order to safeguard themselves, in particular whether or not to engage with digital and public scholarship. other respondents reported fearing the greatest risk around points of success in academia, particularly publishing. the paper finds that broader issues in both academia and the online environment are magnified at this intersection, rendering researchers vulnerable and structurally unsupported. suggestions to “just get off the internet”, publish less, or in different venues was contradictory with how success is measured and enabled through engagement with digital scholarship and publication. those who took steps were highly conscious of the potential impact it may have on their careers but felt it necessary for safety. both veletsianos et al (2018) and massanari (2018) problematise available mitigations for enabling a select few to engage in incredibly valuable and desirable venues. references mattheis, a. and kingdon, a., 2021. does the institution have a plan for that? researcher safety and the ethics of institutional responsibility. in: a. lavorgna and t. holt, ed., researching cybercrimes: methodologies, ethics, and critical approaches, 1st ed. springer international publishing. pp.457-472 marwick, a., blackwell, l., & lo, k. 2016 best practices for conducting risky research and protecting yourself from online harassment (data & society guide). new york: data & society research institute. massanari, a.l. (2018). rethinking research ethics, power, and the risk of visibility in the era of the “alt-right” gaze social media & society 1(1), pp.1-9 moosa, i. a. (2018). publish or perish: perceived benefits versus unintended consequences. e. elgar. veletsianos, g., houlden, s., hodson, j., gosse, c., 2018 women scholars’ experiences with online harassment and abuse: self-protection, resistance, acceptance, and self-blame new media & society 20(12) pp.4689-4708 warren, j. (2019). how much do you have to publish to get a job in a top sociology department? or to get tenure? trends over a generation. sociological science, 6, 172– 196. https://doi.org/10.15195/v6.a7 walker, l. (2016). beyond academic twitter: social media and the evolution of scholarly publication [web log]. retrieved from https://hybridpedagogy.org/beyondacademic-twitter/ williamson, e., gregory, a., abrahams, h., aghtaie, n., walker, s. and hester, m., 2020. secondary trauma: emotional safety in sensitive research. journal of academic ethics, 18(1), pp.55-70. winter, charlie. 2019 researching jihadist propaganda: access, interpretation, and trauma. washington, d.c.: resolve network. https://doi.org/10.37805/rve2019.1 microsoft word wissinger-supremacy of symbiosis the gendered affordances of embodied technology design-supremacy of.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): wissinger, e. (2022, november). supremacy or symbiosis? the gendered affordances of digital versus biodesign technology. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. supremacy or symbiosis? the gendered affordances of digital versus biodesign technology elizabeth wissinger city university of new york, bmcc/graduate center context this paper examines persistent structural power relations and hierarchies based in gender oppressions in wearable tech and biodesign. how do gendered power structures inflect designers’ sense of do-ing – of design, of their sense of the body they design for, and the goals of their making? technology design is supposedly as neutral as technology itself. yet my findings indicate that not only the gender of the practitioner, but the gender of the practice itself, affected design outcomes. theoretical framework calling on neff et al.’s “gendered affordances,” e.g. “social affordances that enable different users to take different actions based on the gendered social and cultural repertories available to … technology designers” (schwartz & neff, 2019, p. 5), this study builds on critical race and technology studies’ contention that the lack of diversity in science and design settings leads to biased or discriminatory design outputs (benjamin, 2019; broussard, 2018; levy, 2015; lupton, 2015; marwick, 2015; massanari, 2017; mcilwain, 2019; nakamura, 2014; neff & nafus, 2016; noble, 2018; rosner, 2018; sanders, 2017; wissinger, 2017). extending these analyses beyond design environments, it explores the gendered aspects of designing embodied technologies in wearable tech and biodesign, where bodies are sensed, perceived, and lived through communication devices, clothing, biometric gadgets, distributed networks, interfaces, and biological interdependencies. additionally, it goes beyond digital design to biodesign, where living organisms are key to design production or functionality (for instance, weaving conductive protein nanowires into mushroom grown textiles, or incorporating microbes’ active tendencies into a garment’s wicking properties). 2 when gendered power structures affect design practice, critiquing its outcomes is crucial. significantly, gendered inflections of my respondents’ ‘sense’ of the body mapped onto paradigmatic concerns within conceptualizations of the transand post human. by contrasting trans-human practices that idealize merging technology with the body, with post-human practices that imbricate humans with their environments to minimize harm to humans and nonhumans alike, i found clear links between gendered influences on technological design practice and outcomes that favor masculinist trans versus feminist posthuman design values. methodology this paper draws from a multi-year study (2017 to the present) of the wearable tech and biodesign communities. it analyzes field notes from fashion tech summits, wearable tech conferences, trade shows, design meet ups, and biotech design competitions, as well as a 24-interview sample of fashion and tech designers, synthetic biologists, biodesigners, biofabricators, and wearables designers. analytic themes drew from hand coding transcriptions and field notes. findings the paper shares three main findings. first, gendered meaning systems affect who is considered an ‘expert.’ respondents used clothing and language to ‘signal’ their status as engineers to be avoid being seen as an inconsequential rep from marketing. a biotech engineer claimed man talk helped telegraph legitimacy, saying, “none of us would call ourselves girly, but we all have to try to adopt how men talk about work and behave in meetings in order to be taken seriously as engineers or to be seen as an engineer at all. if people don't know you, they always assume you're in marketing.” second, gendered assumptions influenced choices of design method, with less value given to feminine ways of making. these associations informed whether my respondents adopted coding versus knitting, data broadcasting versus data privacy, and visual versus haptic designs. they were open to ideas for technologies employing feminine-associated practices. a wearable tech designer i spoke to observed: “knitting is really, really technical but [has] not [been] taken seriously. but it is real engineering.” gender differences inflected working with materials as opposed to working on them; conceiving the body as organic versus the body as machine, while juicy or gross processes contrasted with dry and clean technologies; shaping both the concrete scientific practices and design outcomes my respondents described. finally, many contrasted their ‘feminine’ design practices with masculinist technologies designed for mastery of human foibles through digitization. data privacy and treatment of bodily data, were key for designers, prioritizing feminine, haptic, and inward-looking goals. regarding data exploitation in wearable tech design, a speculative wearables designer observed, 3 there's this bizarre thing going on with wearable technology -technology is both invading our space and invading our bodies...it is a bit of an assault if you look at how we are data-fying everything. i mean, it's really sick, especially when we're talking about body data. a female speculative designer observed, “i'm thinking about privacy, who's in power, who's vulnerable and…what interaction should we be aiming for?” in sum, respondents negotiated material limitations and design exigencies where the masculine and feminine inflected design practices and outcomes toward either transor posthumanist ends. conclusions enmeshing the body with data gathering technology, or merging the body with technology, ostensibly to perfect it, can lead to damaging data exploitation. exploring feminine associated low tech or crafty, environmentally friendly, or wearer centered designs, can produce gadgets and garment interfaces that are arguably less exploitative of human tendencies, and more symbiotic with natural resources. while respondents did not use these terms, their sense of the masculine and feminine meanings and associations in the field, and their self-described practices, clearly telegraphed how transversus posthuman concerns informed their design values. feminist/feminine identified practitioners and practices tended strongly toward posthuman ends. faced with oppressive, masculinist, trans-human oriented technologies, these designers asked key questions, and sought out alternative practices. research interrogating the underlying bodily constructs informing on-body design, can give designers the tools they need to seek out and create more just and equitable embodied designs, which reject supremacy in favor of a more symbiotic future. references benjamin, r. (2019). race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. polity. broussard, m. (2018). artificial unintelligence: how computers misunderstand the world. the mit press. lanzing, m. (2016). the transparent self. ethics and information technology, 18(1), 9– 16. levy, k. e. c. (2015). intimate surveillance. idaho law review, 51, 679. lupton, d. (2015, january 25). the cultural specificity of digital health technologies. this sociological life. marwick, a. e. (2015). status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. yale university press. 4 massanari, a. (2017). #gamergate and the fappening: how reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. new media & society, 19(3), 329–346. mcilwain, c. d. (2019). black software: the internet and racial justice, from the afronet to black lives matter. oxford university press. nakamura, l. (2014). gender and race online. in m. graham & w. h. dutton (eds.), society and the internet: how networks of information and communication are changing our lives (first edition, pp. 81–96). oxford university press. neff, g., & nafus, d. (2016). self-tracking (1 edition). the mit press. noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york university press. rosner, d. (2018). critical fabulations. mit press. sanders, r. (2017). self-tracking in the digital era: biopower, patriarchy, and the new biometric body projects. body & society, 23(1), 36–63. schwartz, b., & neff, g. (2019). the gendered affordances of craigslist “new-in-town girls wanted” ads. new media & society, 21(11–12), 2404–2421. wissinger, e. (2017). wearable tech, bodies, and gender. sociology compass, 11(11), e12514. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): gray, j & bay, m. (2023, october). platform power, xr, and the metaverse: new challenges or old structures? paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. platform power, xr, and the metaverse: new challenges or old structures? joanne elizabeth gray the university of sydney morten bay the university of southern california while social media platforms continue to dominate the ways in which people connect using computational devices and digital media, a transition towards more immersive platforms and experiences is underway (egliston & carter, 2022a). extended reality (xr) is the umbrella term for media that enable experiences in augmented, mixed, and virtual reality. through xr technologies, new digital spaces are being developed that combine features of existing digital platforms with elements of the immersiveness of gaming, sometimes referred to informally as ‘the metaverse’. notably, many of the corporations behind the dominant social media platforms are active in the xr economy (egliston & carter, 2022b). meta has garnered much attention in this regard, but google, apple, microsoft, amazon and sony have all either entered the market or have been reported as having xr/metaverse ambitions. through a multiple-case study (eisenhardt, 1989) of three companies, this paper maps out key dimensions of the emerging metaverse economy and shows how the platform characteristics of xr providers, similar to the current social media economy, can enable the concentration of social and economic power around a few actors. the study provides a detailed analysis of the xr activities of meta, epic games/unreal engine and roblox between 2018-2023. these companies were chosen because they are representative of what we identify as the three overarching layers of the xr economy: device manufacturers, tools and infrastructure providers, and corporate content providers. each company is also dominant within the current xr economy to varying extents. meta is the producer of the most widely sold vr headset, the quest 2, while roblox is currently the biggest platform for social vr, reaching 65 million daily users globally as of january 2023 (perez, 2023). epic games/unreal engine maintains a duopoly-like position in the gaming industry (along with its competitor unity) and is the producer of fortnite, one of the biggest immersive gaming communities currently in existence. the game has more than 400 million users worldwide (ftc, 2022). epic games has also begun to move unreal engine into other areas of immersive media, such as volumetric video production, and appears likely to be a dominant provider when it comes to rendering virtual and mixed realities as part of xr/metaverse infrastructure (jungherr and schlarb, 2022). in this paper, we approach the multiple case study analysis through the lens of platform studies, specifically the platformization framework articulated by scholars such as josé van dijck, anne helmond, thomas poell, david nieborg, martijn de waal and others (2019; 2021; 2018, 2019). these scholars explain how the currently dominant digital platforms have used processes of datafication, commodification and selection to build highly successful data-driven capital accumulation models (van dijck et al, 2018). the large digital platform companies now own and manage global infrastructure (helmond et al, 2019); they produce and regulate multi-sided marketplaces (nieborg et al, 2020); and they influence cultural and political conditions by moderating the flow of information in society (gray, 2020). this results in concentrated platform power that can damage democratic social systems, produce unfair economic conditions for those seeking to compete or work with the dominant platforms and harm the well-being of individuals (van dijck et al, 2019). our analysis of the business models and market actions, hardware design, affordances, infrastructure and limitations of meta, roblox and epic games/unreal engine suggests the xr economy will be underpinned by the same processes of datafication, commodification and selection that underpin the current digital platform economy, and this may lead to new and extended concentrations of platform power. for instance, meta is aiming to convert billions of social media platform users to its xr offerings and recently proposed a policy for lowering the age limit of its horizon worlds social vr platform to correspond with the age limits on facebook and instagram, i.e. from 18 to 13 (rodriguez, 2023). meta has also reportedly entered into negotiations with the leading chinese digital platform company, tencent, to sell the quest 2 headset in china (huang and purell, 2023). at the same time, roblox is reportedly adding the market leading meta quest 2 headset to its range of compatible vr headsets in 2023, which will likely boost both companies’ market shares almost instantaneously (forristal, 2022). as our study shows, in these and other examples, we see evidence that a handful of companies are acting to leverage existing data and other resources to gain first-mover advantages in the xr economy of the kind that historically have led to tech monopolies and duopolies. in our case studies, which include an analysis of recent statements, decisions and actions by meta, roblox and epic games/unreal engine, we also identify the market consolidation strategies that each company appears to be pursuing and evaluate their potential impact on the future competitiveness of the xr economy. our findings align with previous critical xr studies, such as those by egliston and carter (2021, 2022b), but add additional insights based on recent industry developments and deepen knowledge of the processes of consolidation currently underway. by examining the three xr case studies through the lens of platformization, our study shows how and why transitioning, to any extent, digital socialization to xr/metaverse media carries the risk of repeating the same asymmetric power consolidations that have occurred in the global digital economy over the past two decades. this consolidation is particularly concerning given that the xr market has not yet fully opened up to all participants. in the paper, we propose that in the transition to a more immersive digital era, to enable a competitive, vibrant and fair xr economy, policymaking and governance must proactively address the issue of concentrated platform power. the paper concludes with a discussion of potential policy and regulatory pathways for taking up this challenge. references clement, j. (2022, november 17). roblox game global dau as of q3 2022. statistica. retrieved january 25, 2023, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1192573/dailyactive-users-global-roblox/#statisticcontainer egliston, b., & carter, m. (2021). critical questions for facebook’s virtual reality: data, power and the metaverse. internet policy review, 10(4). egliston, b., & carter, m. (2022a). ‘the interface of the future’: mixed reality, intimate data and imagined temporalities. big data & society, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211063689 egliston, b., & carter, m. (2022b). ‘the metaverse and how we’ll build it’: the political economy of meta’s reality labs. new media & society, 14614448221119784. eisenhardt, k. m. (1989). building theories from case study research. academy of management review, 14(4), 532–550. forristal, l. (2023, january 10). roblox may arrive on meta quest later this year. techcrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/10/roblox-may-arrive-on-meta-quest-laterthis-year/ ftc federal trade commission. (2022, december 16). fortnite video game maker epic games to pay more than half a billion dollars over ftc allegations of privacy violations and unwanted charges. federal trade commission. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/fortnite-video-gamemaker-epic-games-pay-more-half-billion-dollars-over-ftc-allegations gray, j. e. (2020). google rules: the history and future of copyright under the influence of google. oxford university press. helmond, a., nieborg, d. b., & van der vlist, f. n. (2019). facebook’s evolution: development of a platform-as-infrastructure. internet histories, 3(2), 123–146. huang, r., & purnell, n. (2023, february 21). tencent in talks to sell meta’s quest 2 vr headset in china. wall street journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/tencent-in-talksto-sell-metas-quest-2-vr-headset-in-china-6d90190a jungherr, a., & schlarb, d. b. (2022). the extended reach of game engine companies: how companies like epic games and unity technologies provide platforms for extended reality applications and the metaverse. social media+society, 8(2), 20563051221107640. nieborg, d. b., duffy, b. e., & poell, t. (2020). studying platforms and cultural production: methods, institutions, and practices. social media + society, 6(3), 2056305120943273. perez, s. (2023, february 15). in a boost for the “metaverse,” roblox stock pops 25% after strong q4 earnings. techcrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/15/in-a-boostfor-the-metaverse-roblox-stock-pops-25-after-strong-q4-earnings/ poell, t., nieborg, d. b., & duffy, b. e. (2021). platforms and cultural production. john wiley & sons. rodriguez, s. (2023, february 7). meta pursues teen users as horizon metaverse app struggles to grow. wall street journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/meta-to-revamphorizon-metaverse-app-plans-to-open-for-teen-use-as-soon-as-march-11675749223 van dijck, j., nieborg, d., & poell, t. (2019). reframing platform power. internet policy review, 8(2), 1–18. van dijck, j., poell, t., & de waal, m. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford university press. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): richter, vanessa. (2022, november). social media platforms as multi-sided stakeholders: youtube’s role in shaping imaginaries of ai. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. social media platforms as multi-sided stakeholders: youtube’s role in shaping imaginaries of ai vanessa richter zemki, centre for media, communication & information research, university of bremen artificial intelligence (ai) is considered a key technology in contemporary societies with vast resources dedicated globally to its development. simultaneously, ai technology has been at the center of public debate considering its societal impact. social media platforms (smps) play a crucial role today in providing a space for such public debates but also partake in public discourses on various levels. at the same time, ai as a concept is often vaguely defined and inconsistent across debates acting as an umbrella term for various technical innovations, which has been critiqued for either overpromising the technology's impact turning towards solutionism or painting a dystopian future. this highlights that the perception of a broad technology such as ai is shaped by sociocultural, economic, and political factors and, therefore, contextually flexible and vulnerable to being influenced. questioning the important position smp’s inhabit by interfacing different stakeholders around ai while also representing different types of stakeholders within the ai environment is therefore relevant to gauge their potential influence in shaping different publics perception of an evolving key technology. public debates and the public arenas, within which they are held, are crucial in shaping public perception. understanding social media’s power in informing, shaping, and sparking these debates as stakeholders as well as providing such a public arena is crucial especially in light of their global reach and position. public debates are important as well as the access and option to participate in them because “sociotechnical imaginaries” (jasanoff & kim, 2015), meaning a societies’ perception of a technologies’ (future) risks and possibilities, are hereby co-constructed. these imaginaries play an important role in influencing how societies deal with emerging key technologies like ai by impacting what could be considered ‘public imaginaries’, which focus particularly on the public communication in this process (brause et al, 2022). while bareis and katzenbach (2021) have previously considered national ai imaginaries through ai policy papers and traditional media’s role has often been questioned for framing public debates and resulting imaginaries, this paper is questioning what role social media platforms play in shaping users and, hence, public(s) imaginaries of ai. in order to analyze smps with their complex assemblage of technical and social actors, the paper considers smps like youtube beyond multi-sided markets (nieborg & poell, 2018) as multisided stakeholders when it comes to ai. smp’s like youtube simultaneously represent (1) the industry as an ai innovator, (2) the platform as a technological implementer, (3) a media representative producing content about ai, and (4) a political mediator through their platform environment interfacing various ai stakeholders. furthermore, smp’s are global entities, expanding their impact on public imaginaries globally as they can have differing effects on national and regional sociotechnical imaginaries. hereby, smps concentrate power in one corporation going beyond considerations of “data colonialism”. citizens’ data is not only claimed and privatized (couldry & mejias, 2018) by smp’s but also shaped and sorted as certain data production is incentivised while others might be ‘lost’ in the recommendation algorithm. to understand the role of smps in co-constructing public imaginaries, it is important to understand the various sociotechnical imaginaries they buy into and push in their communication. furthermore, questioning these differences depending on the various roles the platform inhabits helps to visualize the complex negotiations happening with and within the platform and their societal implications that slowly but surely are able to stabilise sociotechnical imaginaries beyond the space of smp’s. hereby, smp’s represent multisided stakeholders in ai by acting as different stakeholders but also interfacing them. the research design focuses on youtube as a case study. in order to conceptualize the platform as a multisided stakeholder, the operationalisation is based on a mixed-method approach considering four streams of data to analyze youtube as 1) an ai innovator through their communication about ai innovation and use (collection of website material, pr, reports) 2) a media representative through their produced content about ai (youtube original ai series: the age of a.i.) 3) an ai implementer on their platform (academic literature review and popular sources) 4) and lastly, as a political mediator shaping youtube’s platform as a space for public debate (platform walkthrough following light et al. (2016) in combination with creator gossip through youtube video content of 5 commentary channels focused on influencer culture and labor) the mixed-methods approach draws on a combination of document analysis, platform analysis as well as content analysis of youtube content. the concept of gossip as loose, unmethodological talk that is generative previously used by sophie bishop (2018), is employed to incorporate creators' communication about the platform's use of ai. this brings forth the ongoing negotiation between platform, creators, and users to question the multifaceted role smps play in shaping imaginaries of ai. the preliminary analysis shows that youtube acts as a multisided stakeholder by shaping other stakeholders’ imaginaries of ai from various angles depending on the intended audience of the public communication, created content, or applied technology. their communication about ai on the platform itself is sparse and obscure by not employing the term ai or other technical equivalents on their youtube about pages but buying into known sociotechnical imaginaries such as platforms as open and accessible spaces. research into youtube’s use of ai has highlighted its consistent expansion of ai from machine learning algorithms in their recommendation and content moderation system to detecting plagiarism and hate speech. at the same time, youtube’s public communication about the platform stays clear of ai related language. in contrast, youtube has released an eight part original video series titled the age of a.i. in 2019 dissecting different ai aspects and industries. platforms were no such industry, unsurprisingly, obfuscating youtube’s own role in ai development and application, while also stereotypically painting ai in a solutionist light. despite the chasm between the smp’s use of ai and its communication about their own ai use contrasting with their media production on ai development, the platform hosts a wide range of content on ai from various angles including creator’s calling out youtube’s harmful ai use regarding cultural creators. the platform, its affordances, and overall environment have become a staple of discussion in commentary channels focused on influencer labor. the same channels have, however, also brought forth the concern that the algorithmic curation supposedly “making youtube safer” (youtube, 2022) might also undermine critical voices that counteract the sociotechnical imaginaries youtube wants to endorse – not only when it comes to ai. overall, taking the framework of sociotechnical imaginaries to consider social media platforms’ role in shaping public debates allows a new perspective to the complex negotiations within youtube’s different roles itself as well as the platform imaginaries it evokes beyond its platform environment. it also highlights smps multi-sided role regarding ai from innovation, implementation, communication about, and political mediation of ai technology. while this preliminary study focuses on ai imaginaries in general, the framework allows both a deeper dive into specific aspects and industries of ai as well as a transition to other multisided stakeholders and other technological developments in future research to analyze the complex power dynamics in global digital networks. references bareis, j., & katzenbach, c. (2021). talking ai into being: the narratives and imaginaries of national ai strategies and their performative politics. science, technology, & human values, 016224392110300. https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439211030007 bishop, s. (2019). managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip. new media & society, 21(11-12), 2589–2606. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819854731 brause, s. r., katzenbach, c., richter, v., mao, y., schäfer, m. s., & zeng, j. (july, 2022). public imaginaries of artificial intelligence: conceptualizing public debates about ai. paper presented at easst 2022: politics of technoscientific futures. madrid, spain: easst. retrieved from https://easst2022.org/easst_2022_madrid_book_of_abstractsdef.pdf couldry, n., & mejias, u. a. (2018). data colonialism: rethinking big data’s relation to the contemporary subject. television & new media, 20(4), 336–349. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476418796632 jasanoff, s., & kim, s.-h. (2015). dreamscapes of modernity : sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power. chicago ; london: the university of chicago press. nieborg, d. b., & poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society, 20(11), 4275–4292. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769694 youtube. (2022). how youtube works product features, responsibility, & impact. youtube. retrieved march 1, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/intl/en_us/howyoutubeworks/ selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): valderrama barragán, m. (2024, october). platforms on trial: mapping the facebook files/papers. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. platforms on trial: mapping the facebook files/papers matias valderrama barragán centre for interdisciplinary methodologies, university of warwick introduction1 after the series of scandals around the us tech industry in the last decade, there has been a widespread backlash against big tech in what has come to be known as the techlash (foroohar, 2018). multiple platform controversies have arisen over the interface designs, algorithms, and metrics of platforms, putting into question how they measure and intervene in our social interactions and their consequences to mental health, democracy and societies in general. data leaks, whistleblowers, misinformation, election interference, and social experiments have raised alarm bells about the socalled toxic and unaccountable power of platforms and, more broadly, about the growing crisis of accountability in digital societies (cooper et al., 2022; khan, 2018; marres, 2021; suarez estrada et al., 2022; van dijck et al., 2018). the subject of this research is the question of the platform harms and the demand to hold platforms accountable. from a theoretical perspective informed by pragmatist and dramaturgical approaches (boltanski, 2011; goffman, 1986), societal harms are not objective conditions inherent to static technologies nor subjective definitions by individual humans. instead, we need to look at the situations where the ways of interacting with these platforms are problematised and called to account for their configurations. rather than attempting to prove platforms' harmful or toxic effects, this research aims to study how the connection between platforms and harms is made and unmade in the first place. situated at the intersection of digital sociology, media studies, and science and technology studies (sts), this research inquiry into how actors make and unmake connections between social media platforms and societal harms across different settings, in order to contribute a better understanding of how platforms are put on trial. methodology 1 this work was supported by economic and social research council (esrc) studentship grant number es/p000711/1. to address these questions, i am mapping a specific platform controversy: the facebook files/papers. this controversy started in september 2021 when the wall street journal began publishing a series of stories called the facebook files about the leak of internal documents of the tech company facebook -now meta (horwitz, 2021). a few weeks later, the former facebook employee frances haugen would reveal her identity as the whistleblower behind the leak on television and at a us congressional hearing, causing a major media uproar. haugen denounced that her former employer was privileging profits over users’ safety. by the end of october, more than a hundred news articles would be published based on haugen’s disclosures under the label of the facebook papers (hendrix, 2021). along with the huge media coverage, the internal documents would circulate through government agencies, congresses, courts, and advocacy groups, and being translated and reframed in different ways. altogether, this is a fruitfully case to study platform controversies and exploring how various actors establish, demonstrate, and challenge the connection between platforms and societal harms across multiple settings. building on the tradition of controversy analysis (jasanoff, 2019; marres, 2015; nelkin, 1992; venturini & munk, 2022), since october 2021 i have been following the disclosures across different media settings, combining digital and ethnographic methods in a mixed design methodology. digital trace data collected through web scraping and api requests, are interwoven with interviews with experts and key actors in the controversy, participant observation of relevant events, as well as a document analysis (asdal & reinertsen, 2022) of the more than a thousand leaked documents, in a kind of ‘digitally connective fieldwork’ inspired by connective and multi-sited ethnographies (hine, 2015; marcus, 1995). in this way, i think of my project as in-between (marres, 2017) or in the continuity of the old digitised methods and the new natively digital methods (rogers, 2013, 2019). all this in order to develop a “cross-media analysis” (venturini & munk, 2022; venturini & rogers, 2019) of the connection between meta's platforms and societal harms across four corpus of empirical materials from the disclosures, news media, corporate media, and social media, selected for providing ample material to analyse the multiple actors, issues and framings at play during the controversy. results in this work-in-progress, i present some of my preliminary findings by examining how haugen's disclosures were made public and which actors, issues and framings and not others gained greater prominence during the controversy to make or unmake connections between meta platforms and societal harms. in the news and social media corpus i found a certain personification of the controversy, or a prominence of the whistleblower's figure and related events of the controversy over the discussions of the actual internal documents. beyond this, it was promoted what i call a 'strategic causalism' in how the leaks were re-framed by actors in journalism, politics, and activism to solidify the connection between meta's platform and specific harms. moreover, in order to charge the disclosures with the capacity to solidify platform critique, these actors promoted causal connections between platforms and societal harms primarily the connection between instagram and teen mental health harmsbut always in a strategic way to achieve more 'feasible' platform regulations. and for that goal, "more scrutiny, the better", as one journalist told me. in contrast, meta’s corporate response constantly sought to reframe the disclosures by emphasising nuances, giving more context, and explaining to us what their internal documents ‘really say’ (raychoudhury, 2021). the research on platforms and mental health issues would be continuously framed as “relatively nascent and evolving” (newton, 2021) to suggest that such a connection is not yet established or settled in resonance with big tobacco's discursive strategies (proctor, 2006). drawing on ignorance studies (gross & mcgoey, 2022), the meta response promoted what i conceptualise as “strategic ambiguity.” instead of closing the controversy, meta’s executives would precisely try to state that the causal link between platforms and harms would still be an open controversy. but rather than denying negative effects, representatives would promote a utilitarian narrative that the negative effects would be outweighed by the positive effects of social media platforms in terms of social capital or connectedness. this appeal to nuances of platform harm research by meta spokespersons can be understood as a dramatic technique to disperse responsibilities to others (e.g. users, malicious actors, politicians). finally, the re-framings across these media settings focused on a small number of issues that stand out strategically as those most likely to advance platform accountability regulations but nevertheless reinforce a u.s. and european centrism in the public trial about platform harms, that does not allow for more plural forms of platform accountability from and for the global south. by moving from platforms as stages to putting platforms on stage, the personification and selection of certain issues over others restricted the possibility of discussing platform power and the increasing social engineering of sociality. in analysing the case of the facebook files/papers, we are not only faced with the typical denunciation of wrongdoings by private companies, the spread of a increasingly critical tech journalism, or the difficulties of exposing such wrongdoings in the absence of platform accountability, but that the very idea of accountability must be reconsidered taking into account the asymmetries involved in the study and mediatisation of platform harms and who is qualified to give accounts of them. references asdal, k., & reinertsen, h. (2022). doing document analysis: a practice-oriented method. sage publications ltd ; sage publications inc. boltanski, l. (2011). on critique: a sociology of emancipation (english ed). polity. cooper, a. f., moss, e., laufer, b., & nissenbaum, h. (2022). accountability in an algorithmic society: relationality, responsibility, and robustness in machine learning. 2022 acm conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency, 864–876. https://doi.org/10.1145/3531146.3533150 foroohar, r. (2018, december 16). year in a word: techlash. financial times. goffman, e. (1986). frame analysis: an essay on the organization of experience (northeastern university press ed). northeastern university press. gross, m., & mcgoey, l. (2022). routledge international handbook of ignorance studies: second edition (2nd ed.). routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003100607 hendrix, j. (2021, october 25). the facebook papers: an anthology. tech policy press. https://techpolicy.press/the-facebook-papers-an-anthology/ hine, c. (2015). ethnography for the internet: embedded, embodied and everyday. bloomsbury academic, an imprint of bloomsbury publishing plc. horwitz, j. (2021, october 1). the facebook files. wall street journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039 jasanoff, s. (2019). controversy studies. in g. ritzer (ed.), the blackwell encyclopedia of sociology (1st ed., pp. 1–5). wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405165518.wbeosc130.pub2 khan, l. m. (2018). sources of tech platform power. georgetown law technology review, 325. marcus, g. e. (1995). ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multisited ethnography. annual review of anthropology, 24, 95–117. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.24.100195.000523 marres, n. (2015). why map issues? on controversy analysis as a digital method. science, technology, & human values, 40(5), 655–686. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243915574602 marres, n. (2017). digital sociology: the reinvention of social research. polity. marres, n. (2021). no issues without media. the changing politics of public controversy in digital societies. in j. swati & j. wasko (eds.), media: a transdisciplinary inquiry. intellekt books. nelkin, d. (ed.). (1992). controversy: politics of technical decisions (3rd ed). sage. newton, k. (2021, september 14). using research to improve your experience. instagram. https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/using-research-toimprove-your-experience proctor, r. n. (2006). ‘everyone knew but no one had proof’: tobacco industry use of medical history expertise in us courts, 1990-2002. tobacco control, 15(suppl_4), iv117–iv125. https://doi.org/10.1136/tc.2004.009928 raychoudhury, p. (2021, september 26). what our research really says about teen well-being and instagram. facebook newsroom. https://about.fb.com/news/2021/09/research-teen-well-being-and-instagram/ rogers, r. (2013). digital methods. the mit press. rogers, r. (2019). doing digital methods (1st edition). sage publications. suarez estrada, m., juarez, y., & piña-garcía, c. a. (2022). toxic social media: affective polarization after feminist protests. social media + society, 8(2), 205630512210983. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221098343 van dijck, j., poell, t., & waal, m., de. (2018). the platform society. public values in a connective world. oxford university press. venturini, t., & munk, a. k. (2022). controversy mapping: a field guide. polity. venturini, t., & rogers, r. (2019). “api-based research” or how can digital sociology and journalism studies learn from the facebook and cambridge analytica data breach. digital journalism, 7(4), 532–540. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2019.1591927 abstract_aoir_2024_white_nationalism_tiktok.docx google docs selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 unveiling tiktok's shadow: a typology of white nationalist narratives as eudaimonic entertainment julia niemann-lenz german center for higher education research & science studies (dzhw) katharina kleinen-von königslöw university of hamburg leia kantenwein university of hamburg leonie oelschlägel university of hamburg hannah scherf university of hamburg extended abstract in an era dominated by social media influence, understanding the manifestation of white nationalism on platforms like tiktok is crucial for comprehending extremist content dissemination. this research delves into the interplay between content and form in tiktok videos, shedding light on the nuanced ways in which creators exploit platform-specific features to propagate white nationalist narratives. the theoretical underpinning of this study is rooted in the identity approach, encompassing both the social identity theory and the self-categorization theory (see hornsey, 2008 for an overview). social identity theory highlights the idea of social identity, where individuals define themselves as interchangeable group members, leading to the formation of in-group and out-group distinctions. this results in in-group favoritism, and often leads to intergroup discrimination. self-categorization theory further elucidates suggested citation (apa): niemann-lenz, j., kleinen-von königslöw, k., kantenwein, l., oelschlägel, l. & scherf, h. (2024, october). unveiling tiktok's shadow: a typology of white nationalist narratives as eudaimonic entertainment . paper (or panel) presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the individual's role within a group. it asserts that individuals align themselves with group members during the social comparison process, leading to the formation of both individual and collective identities through a categorization process. both theories are closely linked to understanding phenomena such as nationalism (ibid., p. 204). in light of the identity approach, the content viewed, shared and published on digital platforms serves a dual purpose: to demonstrate one's own group affiliation and to consolidate the identity of the group, especially if it is harmonized in form and content. indeed, research on nationalist videos disseminated on digital platforms has identified recurring motifs, such as nature symbolizing patriotism and the portrayal of women confined to traditional roles. altand neo-right movements master the art of ambiguity in public spaces, with videos often featuring subtle allusions rather than explicit expressions of extremism. the utilization of anachronistic visuals and symbols, along with coded language (“dog whistling”) play a role in conveying these ideologies (krämer, 2017). while previous studies have focused on platforms such as youtube and twitter/x, we aim to fill the gap on tiktok, which currently has over 20.9 million monthly users worldwide, predominantly teenagers (weimann & masri, 2023). as tiktok is an entertainment platform, it is important to consider the entertainment process. "eudaimonic entertainment, associated with meaningful and morally complex content, can trigger positive emotions. however, when studying white nationalism, it is imperative to explore its potential negative consequences, such as “dark inspiration” (frischlich, 2021). the interplay between entertainment features and extremist propaganda remains under-researched, especially in the context of tiktok's young audience. against this background, we analyze and categorize white-nationalist content on tiktok. we seek to understand the nuanced interplay between content and form in these videos, shedding light on the ways creators utilize platform-specific features to propagate white-nationalist narratives. to pursue this goal, we conducted a qualitative content analysis. using three accounts trained to show as much white nationalist content as possible, a total of 300 videos were collected on german tiktok. after excluding videos that were not unequivocally categorized as white-nationalist, a random sample of 75 videos was drawn for analysis. videos were coded based on content categories, including objective description and narratives, as well as formal elements. content descriptions captured individuals, environments, and symbols depicted in the videos. narratives focused on linking the depicted elements to the referenced narratives of white nationalism, placing them in a social and political context. finally, formal elements such as music, stylistic elements, effects, camera angles, and editing style were identified. each video was assessed by two coders. based on these codings, a typology was developed, focusing on the interconnection between content and form. in total, we identified seven types, while only eight videos remained unclassified due to their significant deviations from the rest of the sample. nationalistic militarism (19 videos): these videos glorify military and war in a white-nationalist and, particularly, fascist context. they celebrate uniformity and reject individuality, featuring footage of marching or fighting soldiers paired with bass-heavy music reminiscent of video games or action films. videos with nazi references portray the ideal of a strong, sacrificial warrior. modern armies are also glorified. these videos often use black-and-white or color-altered visuals, deliberate distortion, and vintage effects to create an intentionally aged appearance. traditionalism (19 videos): this type combines modern stylistic elements with traditional european motifs. it idealizes european culture, societal roles, and landscapes, portraying narratives that align with white-nationalist ideals. the videos showcase naturalistic paintings and camera shots, accompanied by optimistic electronic music. elements of feudal or ancient european culture are selectively presented to romanticize these aspects. traditional architecture, medieval castles, rural villages, and statues are featured, with men depicted as knights and women associated with domestic roles. afd edit (10 videos): inspired by the format of "kpop edits," these videos aim to build parasocial relationships with leading figures of the german right-wing extremist party alternative for germany (afd). they feature dynamic editing with snippets of speeches, combined with modern electronic or hip-hop music. the content tends to simplify political messages, favoring the afd over other parties and portraying afd personalities as admirable. stylized political speech/news video (9 videos): this type repurposes professional television footage of white-nationalist political figures for tiktok, enhancing them with platform-specific elements. videos include fast and short subtitles, occasional humorous elements like gifs or laughing people, and rare additional music. unlike other types, these videos fully articulate arguments and present narratives directly. infographic/documentation (4 videos): this category involves repackaging content from documentaries, journalistic formats, or scientific presentations to disseminate white-nationalist narratives. the use of serious and factual approaches aims to lend credibility to the presented narratives. demo recordings (3 videos): amateur recordings from the perspective of participants in white-nationalist demonstrations are featured in this type. these videos capture the symbolism and propaganda of the events, with an unpolished, personal style that aligns with a distrust of established media. patriotic self-presentation (3 videos): this type consists of selfie videos from individuals expressing their white-nationalist identity by incorporating national symbols such as the german flag or eagle. the videos use fast consecutive images, paired with modern electronic or hip-hop music, to construct a sense of identity around the nation. our typology of nationalist videos on german tiktok offers nuanced insights into the specific strategies extremists use for narrative dissemination on the platform, and sheds light on potential avenues for platform moderation. it can serve as a basis for subsequent quantifying research, as well as for developing effective countermeasures and interventions to mitigate the spread of extremist content. exploring the influence of eudaimonic entertainment contributes to a deeper understanding of the emotional appeal and recruitment strategies embedded in extremist narratives. in addition, we will discuss methodological challenges at the conference, such as our ethical considerations and barriers to research, such as account suspensions and accessibility of filter bubbles. these reflections on our exploratory approach provide valuable insights into the complexities researchers face when studying online extremism and may guide future research. references frischlich, l. (2021). # dark inspiration: eudaimonic entertainment in extremist instagram posts. new media & society, 23 (3), 554-577. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819899625 hornsey, m. j. (2008). social identity theory and self-categorization theory: a historical review. s ocial and personality psychology compass, 2 (1), 204-222. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00066.x krämer, b. (2017). populist online practices: the function of the internet in right-wing populism. information, communication & society, 20 ( 9 ), 1293–1309. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2017.1328520 weimann, g., & masri, n. (2023). research note: spreading hate on tiktok. studies in conflict & terrorism, 46 (5), 752-765. https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610x.2020.1780027 https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2017.1328520 https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2017.1328520 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): meng, f. (2024, october). monetizing queerbaiting: boyfriend daily check-ins as a strategy to engage queer fandom. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. monetizing queerbaiting: boyfriend daily check-ins as a strategy to engage queer fandom fancheng meng london college of communication, university of the arts london abstract: this study investigates the increasingly prominent phenomenon of queerbaiting in chinese social media, which involves baiting and luring queer audience into consuming existing media texts, often through representations with queer undertones, including erotica. in the western context, queerbaiting can be understood through two distinct aspects: in-canon and extratextual approaches (ng, 2017). according to bridges (2018), in-canon queerbaiting refers to "(1) any in-canon inference or subtext suggesting queerness, or (2) actual occurrence of queerness that results in the luring of queer viewers to engage, become fans, and, given today’s fully interactive fandom cultures, to serve as vectors for deep promotion of a media franchise" (p.119). this type of queerbaiting involves embedding queer subtext within the media narrative itself, suggesting or hinting at queer identities or relationships to attract a queer audience. on the other hand, extratextual queerbaiting takes on a different dimension. as brennan (2019) argues, it refers to self-identifying and self-claimed homosexual behaviours that are used to entice queer audiences. this approach aligns with lam's (2018) theory of fans using their own "slash imagination" to blend online personas with real-world identities by breaking the "fourth wall." this form of queerbaiting encourages fans to interpret and expand upon the queer elements suggested outside the primary text, often involving influencers or celebrities performing queer-coded behaviours to engage queer viewers. in the chinese context, queerbaiting is known as "zhinan maifu" (直男卖腐) (chen et al., 2023). this neologism combines "zhinan," which literally means "straight men," with "maifu," which means "selling homoerotism." the term describes the practice of ostensibly straight men presenting homoerotic behaviours or queer-coded performances to appeal to a queer audience, thereby monetizing queer desire without explicitly identifying as queer. the understanding of queerbaiting thus varies between western and chinese contexts, but in both cases, it involves strategically using queercoded elements, such as on-camera and streaming performances and well-tested media tropes, to attract and engage queer audiences. the difference lies in the nature of how queerness is presented: in-canon through subtext or narrative suggestion, and extratextual through behaviours and performances outside the primary text, primarily suggested and re-edited by fans. in china, the term emphasizes the commercialization of queer aesthetics by straight-identifying individuals, reflecting a unique cultural adaptation of queerbaiting practices. with the development of streaming media and its innovative application in e-commerce, especially during the covid-19 pandemic, social media platforms such as douyin have become rich sites for economic and cultural analyses. this project is significant because, despite the chinese government and platforms regulating queer content in a seemingly strict manner (wang, 2019), queerbaiting as a genre of media production continues to proliferate through short videos, often evading tightened regulatory regimes. simultaneously, douyin's considerable monetization potential with e-commerce in various formats, such as e-gift-giving, sponsorship, and advertorials, has made queerbaiting a marketing strategy that garners scholarly and market attention. furthermore, most queer content creators on douyin often present themselves as straight precisely because of their tacit engagement with queerbaiting strategies. this approach allows them to sustain their media production within a tightly regulated environment while making their data accessible for this research. the study emphasizes a departure from fan-centred queerbaiting research and instead examines the phenomenon from the producer's perspective. it dissects the actions and goals of influencers who aim to attract followers, monetize their content, and profit by manipulating audience interpretations and queer imaginaries as part of their strategies. these influencers must navigate and protect themselves from homophobic regulatory and social environments. this study challenges heteronormativity in chinese social media by arguing that queerbaiting is a dynamic and creative practice that responds to a unique sociocultural context. it differs from the perspective found in western fandom literature, where queerbaiting is often regarded as exploitative. combining offline and online aspects of influencers' lives through walkthrough and semiotic analysis, this research investigates the strategies employed, if and how influencers succeed in achieving their goals through self-presentation. the data for this research was collected through a two-phase process on the douyin platform. the first phase involved conventional content and textual analysis, gathering data from influencers' daily posts, douyin homepages, livestreams, and comments. in the second phase, a digital walkthrough studies platform-specific data, using douyin's built-in data centre and starmap. starmap provides comprehensive influencer information, including account details, content displays, follower demographics, interaction rates, and other metrics that are made available to brands interested in potential partnerships (marszałek, 2020). the study presented here focuses on analysing a popular queerbaiting trend as one of the key themes from my larger phd project. the chosen theme on douyin is known as "boyfriend's daily report (check-ins)" ("男朋友的报备⽇常"). the research examines how queer discourse and symbols are used within this trend to attract queer or queer-friendly audiences, and how influencers navigate platform censorship. additionally, the study investigates how these influencers monetize their fanbase after attracting followers. the research sample consists of 10 male influencers who use the "boyfriend's daily report" queerbaiting strategy, with follower counts ranging from 10,000 to 1 million. the goal is to understand whether there are differences in how influencers with varying levels of social influence perform this queerbaiting strategy and attract audiences. results indicate that across the 10 influencers analysed, white socks emerged as a common queer erotic symbol employed by all queerbaiting influencers to implement their strategies. this finding echoes ai et al. (2023), who argued that white socks are a potent queer erotic symbol with a strong appeal for the queer community in china. however, differences in how influencers construct their online personas were observed, with varying degrees of emphasis based on the level of social influence. these variations are likely due to differing levels of scrutiny and platform regulations that influencers face. furthermore, the queerbaiting strategies used by these influencers involve both incanon and extratextual forms. they perform and construct queer scenarios in different ways, employing homoeroticism to attract followers and guide them toward monetization. by creating scenarios that suggest queerness either directly or through fan imagination, influencers engage their audiences and entice them to participate financially, where business models are explored and critiqued. therefore, this study analyses the strategies employed by influencers who use the "boyfriend's daily report" style of queerbaiting. the analysis is conducted through an examination of the contexts and queer symbols used on their homepages, using ai et al. (2023)'s study of queer erotic symbols as a reference. after the strategy analysis, the research evaluates monetization methods supported by different business models and platform functions, such as the commercial plugins on influencers' homepages and their livestreaming activities, in order to explore whether there are differences in monetization tendencies across various fan demographics. the findings provide insights into how different fan bases impact the use and outcomes of queerbaiting strategies, highlighting the ways in which influencers balance audience attraction with platform compliance to achieve monetization goals. key words: queerbaiting, social media, self-presentation, influencer marketing, monetization. references ai, q., song, y., & zhan, n. (2023). creative compliance and selective visibility: how chinese queer uploaders performing identities on the douyin platform. media, culture & society, 016344372311743. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437231174345 brennan, j. (2019). queerbaiting and fandom: teasing fans through homoerotic possibilities. fandom & culture. bridges, e. (2018). a genealogy of queerbaiting: legal codes, production codes, ‘bury your gays’ and ‘the 100 mess.’ journal of fandom studies, 6(2), 115–132. https://doi.org/10.1386/jfs.6.2.115_1 chen, z. t., whyke, t. w., lopez-mugica, j., & peng, a. y. (2023). cashing the pink rmb through docile bodies: queering paradox of erotic entrepreneurs on chinese social media platforms. humanities& social sciences communication. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02006-0 lam, c. (2018). backstage spaces: the sherlock incident. in brill ebooks (pp. 99– 124). https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004365322_007 marszałek, w. (2020, february 20). a thorough guide to influencing on douyin for individuals and businesses (2020) nanjing marketing group. nanjing marketing group. https://nanjingmarketinggroup.com/blog/a-thorough-guide-to-influencingon-douyin-for-individuals-and-businesses-2020 ng, e. (2017). between text, paratext, and context: queerbaiting and the contemporary media landscape. transformative works and cultures, 24. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2017.0917 wang, s. (2019). live streaming, intimate situations, and the circulation of same-sex affect: monetizing affective encounters on blued. sexualities, 23(5–6), 934–950. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460719872724 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): fiers, f. (2022, november). inequality and discrimination in the online labor market: a scoping review. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. inequality and discrimination in the online labor market: a scoping review floor fiers northwestern university motivation while inequality and discrimination in the traditional labor market has been a central focus of various subfields of labor studies, economics and sociology (e.g., bertrand & duflo, 2017; pager, 2007; quillian et al., 2017), findings from traditional labor contexts may not generalize to the realm of digitally mediated labor. nonetheless, digitally mediated labor is an increasingly prevalent: in 2016, 24% of american adults had earned money for performing a job they had found through an online platform (pew research center, 2016). such work arrangements encompass a diverse range of activities that may include selling something online, renting out property via the internet, and performing “microtasks.” as the online labor market mediates access to opportunities to exchange work for money, it is important to understand who is able to capitalize on the existence of this labor market. across different venues and disciplines, including sociology, economics, marketing, and computer science, there are a variety of approaches to understanding disparities in access to, participation in, and outcomes in the online labor market (e.g., edelman et al., 2017; hannák et al., 2017; schor, 2017). this scoping review brings together these studies with the goals of understanding the approaches and central findings of these different strands of scholarship as well as synthesizing a new, refocused research agenda. we seek to understand how prior literature has investigated who does or does not participate as independent contractors on online labor markets and, among those participants, who is able to be successful and capitalize on their usage of the platforms. theoretical background over the last few decades, digital inequality literature has advocated for studying online participation as a multistage process rather than as a set of binary outcomes (e.g., scheerder et al., 2017; shaw & hargittai, 2018). shaw and hargittai (2018) propose a “pipeline of online participation inequalities” that breaks down the steps one needs to take before editing wikipedia. while this is a type of online participation that is in theory accessible to all internet users, online labor market participation requires external admission in the form of getting hired. in that way, barriers imposed by biases of hiring parties and mediating platforms significantly change the process of accessing the online labor market as opposed to other online spaces. thus, we advance shaw and hargittai (2018)’s pipeline model to fit the process of becoming an independent contractor on or via online platforms and account for the power that hiring parties and platforms hold in this process. we then map prior literature across the stages of this enhanced pipeline to identify the foci of prior literature and directions for future research. data and methods we conducted a scoping review on the intersection of inequality and online labor, which is a type of systematic literature review that examines the state of a particular research field. the prisma approach (moher et al., 2015) informed our process of systematically searching for, filtering through, and analyzing literature from five academic databases to ensure a broad and comprehensive set of studies. we filtered the data based on three clear inclusion criteria and coded the final set of 47 articles by adopting a selection of strategies that belong to the grounded theory (corbin & strauss, 2015). subsequently, we lay out what aspects of and how online labor market inequality have been studied. selected findings and discussion we break down online labor participation into a progression of eleven behaviors leading to participation in an online labor platform: from having heard of a platform to receiving payments and reviews (see figure 1). our analysis of prior literature indicates that the latter part of the pipeline of participation has received much more attention than the first half. outcome variables related to having been hired and received a payment are particularly common in the examined body of literature. in contrast, hardly any studies take the first seven stages into account and, therefore, overlook the conditions that need to be met before an individual can perform a job or task. within-individual analyses of participation that stretch across multiple pipeline stages are rare in the examined dataset. similarly, prior literature has largely overlooked within-platform factors that limit one’s ability to participate online regardless of access and skill set. while unequal resource distribution generates an important set of barriers, an individual who has gained internet access and developed digital skills might still face barriers to reaping the benefits of online labor due to bias built into the platform design, specifically as enforced by gatekeeping actors and systems (e.g., platform moderators, employers, and algorithmic intermediaries). a sole focus on resource-related barriers could falsely imply that if only people had the appropriate resources, they could participate. therefore, this scoping review identifies a need for future research to focus on stages of the participation pipeline that get at the structural role of the platform in facilitating inequality and discrimination. references bertrand, m., & duflo, e. (2017). field experiments on discrimination. in a. v. banerjee & e. duflo (eds.), handbook of economic field experiments (vol. 1, pp. 309–393). north-holland. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.hefe.2016.08.004 corbin, j., & strauss, a. (2015). basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory (fourth edition). sage publications, inc. edelman, b., luca, m., & svirsky, d. (2017). racial discrimination in the sharing economy: evidence from a field experiment. american economic journal: applied economics, 9(2), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1257/app.20160213 hannák, a., wagner, c., garcia, d., mislove, a., strohmaier, m., & wilson, c. (2017). bias in online freelance marketplaces: evidence from taskrabbit and fiverr. proceedings of the 2017 acm conference on computer supported cooperative work and social computing, 1914–1933. moher, d., shamseer, l., clarke, m., ghersi, d., liberati, a., petticrew, m., shekelle, p., stewart, l. a., & prisma-p group. (2015). preferred reporting items for systematic review and meta-analysis protocols (prisma-p) 2015 statement. systematic reviews, 4(1), 1. https://doi.org/10.1186/2046-4053-4-1 munn, z., peters, m. d. j., stern, c., tufanaru, c., mcarthur, a., & aromataris, e. (2018). systematic review or scoping review? guidance for authors when choosing between a systematic or scoping review approach. bmc medical research methodology, 18(1), 143. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12874-018-0611-x pager, d. (2007). the use of field experiments for studies of employment discrimination: contributions, critiques, and directions for the future. the annals of the american academy of political and social science, 609(1), 104–133. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716206294796 pew research center. (2016). gig work, online selling and home sharing. pew research center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/11/17/gig-work-onlineselling-and-home-sharing/ quillian, l., pager, d., hexel, o., & midtbøen, a. h. (2017). meta-analysis of field experiments shows no change in racial discrimination in hiring over time. proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 114(41), 10870–10875. scheerder, a., van deursen, a., & van dijk, j. (2017). determinants of internet skills, uses and outcomes. a systematic review of the secondand third-level digital divide. telematics and informatics, 34(8), 1607–1624. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2017.07.007 schor, j. b. (2017). does the sharing economy increase inequality within the eighty percent?: findings from a qualitative study of platform providers. cambridge journal of regions, economy and society, 10(2), 263–279. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsw047 shaw, a., & hargittai, e. (2018). the pipeline of online participation inequalities: the case of wikipedia editing. journal of communication, 68(1), 143–168. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqx003 figures figure 1 pipeline of participation in the online labor market selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): literat, i., & kligler-vilenchik, n. (2023, october). climate anxiety as a lens into young people’s political expression on youtube. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. climate anxiety as a lens into young people’s political expression on youtube ioana literat teachers college, columbia university neta kligler-vilenchik hebrew university of jerusalem introduction and theoretical framework climate anxiety—the feeling of dread and distress associated with worrying about the future of the planet—has been posited as a defining feature of gen z (katz et al., 2021). a large-scale global study of people aged 16-25 recently found that 75% see the future as frightening, and 45% believe that climate anxiety negatively affects their daily lives (hickman et al., 2021). at the same time, climate change remains a highly politicized topic, and a prominent subject of political expression across social media platforms (funk, 2021). this study examines youth communication around climate anxiety on youtube, with the aim of illuminating the role of affordances, norms and contents in shaping youth political expression. given that differences between social media platforms crucially shape their political dynamics (bode & vraga, 2018), our broader research offers and tests a theoretical model (figure 1) explaining how different platforms enable—and constrain—certain forms of political expression, via the interaction between their affordances, norms, and contents. while each of these aspects has been considered separately in previous work (e.g., boyd, 2010; davis & chouinard, 2016; kreiss, lawrence & mcgregor, 2018; maia & rezende, 2016; marwick & boyd, 2011; stromer-galley, bryant & bimber, 2015), we consider their interaction in a single framework, which we see as operating at the meso level (the level of the platform), between the micro level of individuals and the macro societal level. in doing so, we make several important contributions on the theoretical front: 1) we focus on how the choice of a platform may shape the resulting expression, rather than how and why people choose to use different platforms; 2) relying on content analysis, we use content (rather than user perceptions or self-reports) as a starting point, to illuminate perceived affordances and norms; and 3) we designed our framework to be applicable across contexts and platforms. while we focus on political expression here, the framework is also useful for other forms of expression on social media platforms (e.g., self-expression or community building) and for both comparative and singleplatform studies. figure 1. the affordances/norms/contents (anc) framework research design as the premier video platform for youth worldwide (omnicore, 2022), youtube is an essential source of environmental information for young people (allgaier, 2019; kaul et al., 2020), and a space where youth often create and respond to climate change-related content (funk, 2021). data was collected in june 2022. to create our corpus, we searched for the keywords “climate anxiety” (563 public videos) and “eco anxiety” (382 public videos). then, to narrow in on youth-created videos, we eliminated videos that were posted by organizations (538); posted by individuals speaking in a professional capacity, such as psychologists or academics (155); unrelated to climate change (57); or shared by individuals who were clearly not youth (11). after eliminating duplicate videos (38), we were left with a final corpus of 146 youth-created videos around climate/eco anxiety. we employed a qualitative content analysis of these 146 videos, as well as the over 20,000 comments posted on them. reflecting the relatively new emergence of the term climate anxiety, all but 4 videos were posted after december 2018. most of the videos were vlogs—focused on providing advice for climate anxiety from a personal, relatable perspective—but the genres represented were quite diverse (see figure 2). overall, the corpus was characterized by very low engagement, in terms of both views (half of the videos had under 70 views) and comments (40% of videos had zero comments). figure 2. different video genres in the corpus (from top left: vlog, podcast, short film, animation, song, gamestream). key findings our findings section considers the case study through our proposed anc framework. in terms of contents, a central message across the videos was the call to—as one young youtuber put it—“channel [climate anxiety] into taking action, instead of laying in bed thinking about how the earth is on fire.” many videos contained lists of actionable things one can do, both to deal with climate anxiety (e.g. acknowledge your feelings, connect to nature, find community) and to help the environment (e.g. reduce your waste, eat less meat, plant a tree). at the same time, videos also stressed that protecting the planet is not just the individual’s responsibility, and that corporations and governments should bear the bulk of responsibility. in terms of norms, we found that the vast majority of videos assumed an imagined audience of young people who are concerned about the climate. thus, the goal was to provide information and advice rather than persuade about climate change. a central norm in these videos was the idea of “doing what’s right for you” and refraining from judging the choices of others. comments were, similarly, mostly supportive, though there was also an awareness of the political and potentially divisive nature of climate change as a topic. significantly, climate anxiety was framed as a collective, youthspecific issue—creators explicitly addressed young people in their videos, and commenters often disclosed their ages as fundamentally connected to the climate anxiety they’re experiencing. the case study richly illustrates youtube’s affordances of expressivity and connectivity (see kligler-vilenchik et al., 2020). tapping into youtube’s expressivity affordances, these videos showed an in-depth engagement with the topics at hand—in terms of length, amount of information, and often the effort put into preparing them. at the same time, this emphasis on content may come at the expense of reach, as illustrated by the low engagement around the videos; our research further theorizes this relationship and, in contrast to much literature on youtube, shines a spotlight on content that is less prominent or “successful” on the platform. our findings also illustrate how youtube affords connectivity, enabling creators to connect with a likeminded audience committed to climate change. here, the comment section played an important role in facilitating connectivity, often serving as a space for discussion, venting and solidarity. discussion our analysis foregrounds a key tension between social media as a site for cross-cutting exposure versus a space for insider conversations. while we often assume that the key aim of political discussion should be to enable dialogue across political views (mutz, 2006)—including around the topic of climate change (schäfer, 2022)—our analysis illustrates the significance of insider conversations among youth, and the centrality of youtube’s expressivity and connectivity affordances in allowing young people to engage with these topics on a personal and intimate level. at the same time, our research illuminates the mental toll of political expression for young people, and further highlights this connection between the affective and the political drive. significantly, this research also probes the global aspects of youth online political expression, with climate change being a particularly apt lens into these dynamics. on the one hand, the global youth connections we spotlight in our findings can be quite powerful, and have the potential to be a meaningful mobilizing force for political action. however, though our data included users from across the world, videos seemed to focus on the experience of climate anxiety by youth in western contexts, versus those most directly affected by climate change, living in the global south. references allgaier, j. (2019). science and environmental communication on youtube: strategically distorted communications in online videos on climate change and climate engineering. frontiers in communication, 4(36). https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2019.00036 about:blank boyd, d. (2010). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in z. papacharissi (ed.), a networked self (pp.39–58). new york: routledge. davis, j. l., & chouinard, j. b. (2016). theorizing affordances: from request to refuse. bulletin of science, technology & society, 36(4), 241-248. https://doi.org/10.1177/0270467617714944 funk, c. (2021). key findings: how americans’ attitudes about climate change differ by generation, party and other factors. pew research center. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/05/26/key-findings-how-americansattitudes-about-climate-change-differ-by-generation-party-and-other-factors/ hickman, c., et al. (2021). climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: a global survey. the lancet planetary health, 5(12), e863-e873. https://doi.org/10.1016/s25425196(21)00278-3 kaul, l., schrögel, p., & humm, c. (2020). environmental science communication for a young audience: a case study on the #earthovershootday campaign on youtube. frontiers in communication, 5(108). https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2020.601177 katz, r., ogilvie, s., shaw, j., & woodhead, l. (2021). gen z, explained: the art of living in a digital age. chicago, il: university of chicago press. kreiss, d., lawrence, r.g., & mcgregor, s.c. (2018). in their own words: political practitioner accounts of candidates, audiences, affordances, genres, and timing in strategic social media use. political communication 35(1), 8-31. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2017.1334727 kligler-vilenchik, n., baden, c., & yarchi, m. (2020). interpretative polarization across platforms: how political disagreement develops over time on facebook, twitter, and whatsapp. social media+ society, 6(3), https://doi.org/2056305120944393. maia, r.c.m., & rezende, a.s.t. (2016). respect and disrespect in deliberation across the networked media environment: examining multiple paths of political talk. journal of computer-mediated communication 21(2), 121-139. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12155 marwick, a. e., & boyd, d. (2011). i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. new media & society, 13(1), 114133. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365313 mutz, d. (2006). hearing the other side: deliberative versus participatory democracy. new york, ny: cambridge university press. https://doi.org/10.1177/0270467617714944 about:blank about:blank about:blank about:blank about:blank https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2017.1334727 about:blank https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12155 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365313 omnicore. (2022, january 4). youtube by the numbers: stats, demographics & fun facts. https://www.omnicoreagency.com/youtube-statistics/ schäfer, m.s. (2022). the internet of natural things: environmental communication online and in social media. in b. takahashi et al. (eds), the handbook of international trends in environmental communication (pp. 50-69). new york: routledge. stromer-galley, j., bryant, b., & bimber, b. (2015). context and medium matter: expressing disagreements online and face-to-face in political deliberations. journal of public deliberation 11(1). https://doi.org/10.16997/jdd.218 about:blank https://doi.org/10.16997/jdd.218 lee-care-less data pop cultures-care-less data pop cultures selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 care-less data pop cultures: an investigation of the data imaginaries and data cultures of the pandemic jeehyun jenny lee university of washington jin lee curtin university introduction in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic, many studies have examined the care-less legal and technical aspects of governments’ data disclosure of covid-19 patients’ information (ibrahim, 2020; jung et al., 2020; oh et al. 2021). yet little attempt has been made to understand how citizens utilize and engage with such data provided by the government. while many democratic states advocated their data-driven solutions as “democratic technologies of control” (j. j. lee, 2022, p. 1) that empower citizens with information to protect their health, citizens did not necessarily engage with the data of covid-19 patients in considerate, caring, and democratic ways (murphy, 2020), with many circulating the data across social media platforms beyond their initial context of the disclosure. against the backdrop of the current climate of call-out cultures, where any mistakes can become the target of collective shaming in line with existing power dynamics (j. lee & abidin, 2021), data ownership – rights to appropriate public data and power to produce particular discourses and imaginaries from the data – has often been weaponized to mobilize collective acts against covid-19 patients. a prime example of this has been the “itaewon outbreak” in south korea. in may 2020, the gay community in korea became the target of public surveillance after it was revealed that a person who tested positive had visited a gay club in seoul’s multicultural district itaewon. at the time, the korean government was disclosing covid-19 patients’ anonymized demographic and location data to the public as a part of their quest to protect the citizens’ right to know about the spread of the virus (j. j. lee, 2022). the disclosure of their data to the public without stringent privacy safeguards and consideration for how it would impact the gay community in a notoriously homophobic society has led to “care-less” surveillance (oh et al., 2021). while purporting to share data to care about the safety of citizens, the government had a “standard human” in suggested citation (apa): lee, j., lee, j. (2023, october). care-less data pop cultures: an investigation of the data imaginaries and data cultures of the pandemic. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. mind (milan, 2020, p. 2), failing to perform “careful surveillance” – the “careful monitoring” of others that is considerate of how surveillance might impact them (hjorth, pink & horst, 2018, p. 122). in this setting, the news media sensationally reported on the anonymized demographic and location data of the people related to the case, highlighting their presumed gay sexuality. when human rights organizations and concerned citizens critiqued the news media’s sensational reporting of the itaewon outbreak, many pushed back, defending the media’s reporting as representing “factual data” about the virus necessary for citizens’ safety (e.g., comments under k. lee, 2020). encouraged by the news media’s homophobic reporting, citizens widely circulated the data across social media to speculate and blame the people behind the data. through the case study of the itaewon outbreak, we investigate citizens’ care-less engagement with the data about the itaewon outbreak on social media. we specifically focus on how they carelessly circulate and storify the data in relation to networked surveillance culture of social media, where one’s private data are shared among the anonymous public and scrutinized for fun and pleasure. we describe this process of cultural interpretation and shaping of pandemic data through social media’s participatory culture as data pop culture. to analyze data pop culture, we first examine the dominant data imaginaries cultivated through news media and government reports and technical manuals on covid-19 data disclosure and how they inform the public’s understanding of the data related to the itaewon outbreak. next, we examine how these dominant data imaginaries create power relations between people on social media as data owners – those who set the meaning and conditions on how to use data – and data objects – those who are perceived as undeserving of data rights. lastly, we examine how these dominant data imaginaries and relations are shaped through social media popular culture and how these engagements with data shape peoples’ data imaginaries in return. methodology to address the aforementioned dimensions of data pop culture, we collected four different data sets: major news media reporting on the government’s pandemic data governance; government reports and technical manuals by the korean disease control prevention agency (kdca), the ministry of health and welfare (mohw) and ministry of interior and safety (mois) laying the groundwork for pandemic data governance; 50 most watched youtube videos on the itaewon outbreak, and comment sections of those videos. following critical data studies and media studies scholars who focus on the politics of discourses surrounding data and technology (hoffmann, 2021; j. j. lee, 2022; kim et al., 2021), we approached these texts as discursive processes that “animate” (hoffmann, 2021, p. 4) peoples’ understanding and relation to data. with the first two data sets, we focused on how news media and government discursive constructions of data served as “forms of knowledge that set conditions of possibility” (clarke, 2005, p. 14) shaping peoples’ understanding and engagement with data. with the latter two data sets, we explored how the dominant data imaginaries cultivated through data governance discourse become shaped by social media popular cultures. we chose youtube as our primary site as youtube became the central platform where influencers and everyday people storified the data of the itaewon outbreak, taking the data beyond health contexts to sensational topics surrounding the gay community. in our analysis of the videos, we made note of the 1) videos’ storification of data, 2) users’ comments and reflections, and 3) how they together cultivate the interpretations surrounding the data related to the itaewon outbreak. conclusion through our findings, we show that while care-less data pop culture is frivolous and playful, it carries significant normative implications, constructing boundaries on whose data is worth protecting and caring for. korean citizens’ care-less engagement with the data of people related to the itaewon outbreak across social media illustrates how the unequal, homophobic status quo of korean society and harmful online participatory cultures shape and are reflected in peoples’ interpretation of data. but more than anything else, our study shows how calls for democratic ideals such as data transparency, data as a public good, and the public’s right to know are not equally enjoyed by everyone, often serving the interests and cultures of dominant members of society. in fact, the dominant imaginaries surrounding data, bolstered by the government’s discursive construction of data as a public resource and social media popular culture of surveillance and call-outs that treat data of minoritized identities as undeserving of care commit what hoffmann (2021) describes as “data violence,” the “material, symbolic, and other violence inflicted by and through data technologies” (p. 2) and mechanisms. our findings indicate that when we discuss the harms and violence of data cultures, we need to consider not only institutional bodies’ responsibilities, but also that of the wider culture and everyday participation of people. references clarke, a. e. (2005). situational analysis: grounded theory after the postmodern turn. sage publications. hjorth, l., pink, s., & horst, h. (2018). being at home with privacy: privacy and mundane intimacy through same-sex locative media practices. international journal of communication, 12, 1209–1227. hoffmann, a. (2021). terms of inclusion: data, discourse, violence. new media & society, 23(12), 3539–3556. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820958725 hjorth, l., pink, s., & horst, h. (2018). being at home with privacy: privacy and mundane intimacy through same-sex locative media practices. international journal of communication, 12, 1209–1227. jung, g., lee, h., kim, a., & lee, u. (2020). too much information: assessing privacy risks of contact trace data disclosure on people with covid-19 in south korea. frontiers in public health, 8, 1–13. https://doi.org.10.3389/fpubh.2020.00305 kim, y. (2021). kim, y., chen, y., & liang, f. (2021). engineering care in pandemic technogovernance: the politics of care in china and south korea’s covid-19 tracking apps. new media & society, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211020752. lee, j. & abidin, c. (2021). backdoor advertising scandals, yingyeo culture, and cancel culture among youtube influencers in south korea. social media & society, 0(0), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211061829 lee, j. j. (2022). vital dataveillance: investigating data in exchange for vitality through south korea’s covid-19 technogovernance, communication, culture & critique, 0(0),1– 16. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcac001 lee, k. (2020, may 13). [속보] 인천서 이태원 클럽발 코로나 확산...학원강사에게서 8 명 감염 [new covid-19 case related to the itaewon club in incheon..8 people catches covid-19 from an academy lecturer]. chosun biz. https://n.news.naver.com/article/366/0000522268 milan, s. (2020). techno-solutionism and the standard human in the making of the covid-19 pandemic. big data & society, 7(2), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720966781. murphy, t. (2020, september 26). social media and covid shaming: fighting a toxic combination. ap. https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-media-social-media-archivepublic-health-dd0168e11f7f1ae23a65feaa81cddd92 oh, b., chang, y., & jeong, s. (2020, november 30). covid-19 and the right to privacy: an analysis of south korean experiences. association for progressive communications, https://www.apc.org/en/pubs/covid-19-and-right-privacy-analysis-south-korean experiences. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): trkman, m., reisdorf, b. c., bartol, j., & petrovčič, a. (2023, october). testing the role of categorical and resource inequalities in indirect internet uses of older adults: a path analysis. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. testing the role of categorical and resource inequalities in indirect internet uses of older adults: a path analysis marina trkman university of ljubljana bianca c. reisdorf university of north carolina at charlotte jošt bartol university of ljubljana andraž petrovčič university of ljubljana introduction age-related digital inequalities have been one of the key aspects to understand and enable better ageing in the digitalized world (hunsaker & hargittai, 2018; wilsonmenzfeld & brittain, 2022). there is a vast amount of literature on digital engagement of older adults related to different forms and determinants of internet access, skills, uses, and tangible outcomes (hargittai et al., 2019; nguyen et al., 2022). however, existing research has largely focused only on direct forms of digital engagement, assuming that older adults are either self-reliant internet users or non-users (bartol et al., 2022; dolničar et al., 2018). in contrast, only a few studies investigated the personal and social determinants of indirect internet uses such as use-by-proxy (ubp)—a practice where (usually low-skilled) users or non-users ask others (i.e., proxy users) to perform activities online on their behalf (petrovčič et al., 2022). while ubp is a common form of digital engagement among older adults, its availability is crucial, especially for non-users because for many it represents the only way to get online (hunsaker et al., 2020). however, not everyone who has someone available for doing a task online, can actually activate this kind of support (grošelj et al., 2022). the scarce research on ubp shows that availability and activation of ubp are also affected by socioeconomic inequalities (grošelj et al., 2019; taipale, 2019). notably, younger, more educated, and married older adults living in larger and financially less constrained households are not only more likely to have more supportive ties available for ubp (taipale, 2019), but they are also more likely to enact this kind of support (dolničar et al., 2018; grošelj et al., 2022). it has also been shown that material and social resources have a stronger influence on the availability and activation of ubp among older adults who tend to rely on the support of close emotional social contacts (i.e., family and close friends) than among their younger counterparts (marler & hargittai, 2022) and tech-savvy peers (hunsaker et al., 2020). thus, existing literature on ubp seems to be consistent with van dijk’s (2005) resources and appropriation theory. according to this theory, categorical inequalities, that is inequalities in personal (e.g., age, gender) and positional (e.g., education, occupation, marital status, residential area, household size) categories, cause differences in the distribution of resources (e.g., social, material, cultural), which are in turn responsible for unequal distributions of resources needed for internet access and use. in this paper, we therefore draw on van dijk’s (2005) theory to investigate how personal and positional categorical inequalities of older non-users influence their differences in social (i.e., bridging and bonding social capital) and material (i.e., household income) resources and how these two types of resource inequalities determine the heterogeneity of ubp availability and activation of networks. we also examine how the heterogeneity of ubp availability and activation of networks affects non-users’ breadth of ubp engagement. to this end, we propose a conceptual model (figure 1) with seven theoretical hypotheses that account for the sequential paths between categorical and resource inequalities and also discern their impact on the diversity of the role relations that older non-users have available for and activate in ubp. method data for this study were collected in a population-based telephone survey in november 2021 from a representative sample of slovenian residents aged 65+. a total of 701 completed responses were obtained. among the participants, 460 (65.6%) were internet users and 241 (34.4%) were non-users. the proposed model was tested with path analysis on the subsample of internet non-users. all measures were adopted from previous literature. path analysis was used as the included variables are either single item measures or formative constructs (kline, 2015). for model estimation, full information maximum likelihood (fiml) was used to include respondents with missing data points, while the robust maximum likelihood estimator (mlr) to account for nonnormally distributed variables (beaujean, 2014). figure 1 conceptual model of use-by-proxy engagement among older adults based on the resources and appropriation theory results the model demonstrated good fit to the data: χ2 (df) = 27.146(24) (p = .298); cfi = 0.994; tli = 0.988; rmsea = 0.018, 90% ci [0.000, 0.061]; srmr = 0.033. out of seven hypotheses, two were fully (h6, h7) and five partly (h1-5) supported at p < .05. specifically, the results showed that among categorical inequalities only occupation significantly affected bridging social capital (h1), while age and gender influenced bonding social capital (h2). household income was affected by education, occupation, and household size (h3). for resource inequalities, higher levels of bridging and bonding social capital significantly increased the heterogeneity of ubp availability, while household income did not (h4). conversely, only household income had a significant positive effect on heterogeneity of ubp activation (h5). lastly, the heterogeneity of ubp availability positively predicted heterogeneity of ubp activation (h6), and heterogeneity of ubp activation had a strong positive effect on the breadth of ubp activation (h7). discussion and conclusion this is the first study that draws on the resources and appropriation theory (van dijk, 2005) to explore how categorical inequalities and differences in the distribution of material and social resources affect the availability and activation of ubp among older non-users aged 65+. path analysis confirmed that different personal and positional categories are associated with unequal distributions of social and material resources among older non-users with positional categories affecting bridging social capital and household income, and personal categories affecting bonding social capital. in terms of resource inequalities, the results confirmed suggestions from previous research that non-users’ access to social and material resources can affect the availability and activation of ubp in their social networks (dolničar et al., 2018; grošelj et al., 2019). moreover, the diversity of available role relations in ubp strongly affects the diversity of activated role relations in ubp, which in turn determines the breadth of ubp activities. in other words, non-users who know and activate more internet users for ubp also obtain help with a wider array of online activities. overall, this study shows that disadvantages in personal and positional categories diminish social and material resources of older non-users, which in turn imposes significant constraints on finding and activating someone who would do something online on their behalf. these findings are particularly relevant because they indicate that social inequalities affect not only disparities between internet users and non-users (hargittai et al., 2019; nguyen et al., 2022), but also influence the ways in which older non-users engage with indirect forms of internet uses. these findings have important theoretical and practical implications. from a theoretical perspective, they call for a deeper investigation of the sequential pathways between categorical and resource inequalities in indirect forms of internet uses and suggest the need for a holistic model of digital engagement accounting for direct and indirect internet uses. from a practical perspective, findings suggest that policy initiatives aimed at preventing digital exclusion should prioritize older non-users who lack adequate social resources or are at risk of social isolation. this would ensure that this group of older non-users that has very limited access even to indirect internet use would have the chance to partake in and benefit from the increasing digitalization of society. references bartol, j., prevodnik, k., vehovar, v., & petrovčič, a. (2022). the roles of perceived privacy control, internet privacy concerns and internet skills in the direct and indirect internet uses of older adults: conceptual integration and empirical testing of a theoretical model. new media & society, 146144482211227. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221122734 beaujean, a. a. (2014). latent variable modeling using r: a step-by-step guide. routledge. dolničar, v., grošelj, d., filipovič hrast, m., vehovar, v., & petrovčič, a. (2018). the role of social support networks in proxy internet use from the intergenerational solidarity perspective. telematics and informatics, 35(2), 305–317. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2017.12.005 grošelj, d., reisdorf, b. c., dolničar, v., & petrovčič, a. (2022). a decade of proxy internet use: the changing role of socio-demographics and family support in nonusers’ indirect internet access to online services. the information society, 38(4), 240–256. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2022.2080782 grošelj, d., reisdorf, b. c., & petrovčič, a. (2019). obtaining indirect internet access: an examination how reasons for internet non-use relate to proxy internet use. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221122734 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2017.12.005 https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2022.2080782 telecommunications policy, 43(3), 213–224. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.telpol.2018.07.004 hargittai, e., piper, a. m., & morris, m. r. (2019). from internet access to internet skills: digital inequality among older adults. universal access in the information society, 18(4), 881–890. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-018-0617-5 hunsaker, a., & hargittai, e. (2018). a review of internet use among older adults. new media & society, 20(10), 3937–3954. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818787348 hunsaker, a., nguyen, m. h., fuchs, j., karaoglu, g., djukaric, t., & hargittai, e. (2020). unsung helpers: older adults as a source of digital media support for their peers. the communication review, 23(4), 309–330. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714421.2020.1829307 kline, r. b. (2015). principles and practice of structural equation modeling. guilford press. marler, w., & hargittai, e. (2022). division of digital labor: partner support for technology use among older adults. new media & society, 146144482110684. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211068437 nguyen, m. h., hunsaker, a., & hargittai, e. (2022). older adults’ online social engagement and social capital: the moderating role of internet skills. information, communication & society, 25(7), 942–958. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2020.1804980 petrovčič, a., reisdorf, b. c., prevodnik, k., & grošelj, d. (2022). the role of proxy internet use in sequential pathways of digital exclusion: an empirical test of a conceptual model. computers in human behavior, 128, 107083. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2021.107083 taipale, s. (2019). intergenerational connections in digital families. springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11947-8 van dijk, j. a. g. m. (2005). the deepening divide: inequality in the information society. sage. wilson-menzfeld, g., & brittain, k. (2022). digital exclusion in later life: a narrative review. in p. tsatsou (ed.), vulnerable people and digital inclusion (pp. 169– 188). springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94122-2_9 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.telpol.2018.07.004 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-018-0617-5 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818787348 https://doi.org/10.1080/10714421.2020.1829307 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211068437 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2020.1804980 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2021.107083 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11947-8 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94122-2_9 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): šubelj, ž., vehovar, v., wisteria, a., petrovčič, a., & bartol, j. (2024, october). exploring survey instruments in online hate speech research: a comprehensive scoping review. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. exploring survey instruments in online hate speech research: a comprehensive scoping review živa šubelj faculty of social sciences, university of ljubljana vasja vehovar faculty of social sciences, university of ljubljana avis wisteria faculty of social sciences, university of ljubljana andraž petrovčič faculty of social sciences, university of ljubljana jošt bartol faculty of social sciences, university of ljubljana introduction over the last decade, online hate speech (ohs) has emerged as a subject of active debate among a wide range of scholars as well as governmental and private entities. the notion of hate speech, otherwise rooted in legal frameworks, in the context of the european legislation system typically denotes extreme negative communication towards minorities and other protected groups, thereby being a specific exception to the freedom of speech (european court for human rights, 2023). with the ever-evolving technological and social landscape, ohs is increasingly studied across various scientific fields, including computer science, criminology, communication, psychology, and educational research (see waqas et al., 2019). with the advancements in machine learning technology, many scholars focused on researching new methods to identify ohs (jahan & oussalah, 2023; poletto et al., 2021; tontodimamma et al., 2021) and limit its spread (masud et al., 2022; qian et al., 2019). additional impetus to the ohs debate was given in 2016, when global social media corporations and the european commission signed a code of conduct to counter illegal ohs, binding it companies to speedily review and remove potential hateful content (european commission, 2016). furthermore, the passing of the digital services act in eu countries made hate speech issues formally nested in a broader legal and institutional frame (european commission, 2020). nevertheless, scholars have only recently begun to systematically explore how individuals perceive and experience ohs as well as what kind of strategies they use for countering it (bliuc et al., 2018). while such insights can be obtained with various methods – including qualitative methods and data mining techniques – this study focuses on survey measures, widely used research means for understanding largescale social phenomena. high-quality survey measurement can bring insights into individuals’ ohs perceptions and experiences, which is of great importance for the design and implementation of strategies aimed at informing the public about ohs and restraining its expansion. importantly, educational and informational initiatives have proved effective in developing anti-hate critical thinking and fighting ohs (müller & lopez-sanchez, 2021; woo & cho, 2023). a scoping review of existing survey measures assessing individuals’ perceptions and experiences with ohs will provide several original insights with practical implications. first, no such review has yet been conducted. multiple studies reviewing prior scholarly literature looked at existing definitions of hate speech, with a focus on different online environments (ermida, 2023; hietanen & eddebo, 2023; kansok-dusche et al., 2023; papcunová et al., 2023; sellars, 2016). however, most reviews were narrative or otherwise limited in scope. in addition, scholars conducting reviews of existing academic research on ohs emphasized that certain groups, such as ohs perpetrators, have not been given enough attention (tontodimamma et al., 2021) and advocated for a greater focus on quantitative research methods (bliuc et al., 2018; castaño-pulgarín et al., 2021; kearns et al., 2023). second, the current assessment approaches and collected data are fragmented (kansok-dusche et al., 2023). providing an overview of existing survey measures can lead to the informed and expedient development of comprehensive and reliable instruments, that could be used in the future to gather valid and comparable data. additionally, mapping the researched topics within the ohs field as well as population groups will help identify gaps in the literature and provide directions for future scholarly endeavours. therefore, we systematically collected and assessed existing academic papers to answer the following research questions (rqs): rq1: which population groups are studied using ohs survey measures? rq2: which ohs topics are covered by survey measures? rq3: which kind of survey measures are used to assess ohs? methods and results a systematic approach has been undertaken to map existing academic evidence, following the prisma-scr guidelines (tricco et al., 2018). the search was executed using the web of science and scopus databases, alongside the bibliographic harvester of the university of ljubljana (dikul). a total of 725 articles were initially identified for review. after removing duplicates, 370 articles were screened by two independent reviewers based on their titles and abstracts. a total of 65 records (comprising 67 different studies), which included 309 survey measures related to ohs, were selected for full-text review. during this phase, data were extracted, including demographic information, survey admission type, and key characteristics of each survey measure. in addition, an inductive thematic analysis was conducted to categorize each survey measure based on the ohs aspect it addresses. concerning rq1, preliminary findings indicate that the highest percentage of ohs survey-based studies focused on student and young adult populations (34%). nearly half of the studies employed non-probability sampling methods. 70% disseminated the questionnaire online. over 60% of the studies investigated ohs in general internet contexts, followed by 36% focused on social media. regarding minorities, most survey measures addressed ohs in general, followed by 26% focused on discrimination related to nationality, ethnicity, or migrant status. in relation to rq2, the 309 identified survey measures addressed different aspects of ohs. through inductive thematic analysis, each question was categorized into one of 11 topics. the largest proportion of questions (21%) addressed individuals' reactions and coping strategies when faced with ohs. over 18% of the questions examined perceptions of hate speech, while 16% focused on exposure to ohs and 13% on victimization. topics of self-perpetration, others' perpetration, and combating hate speech each accounted for 5–10% of the questions. fewer than 5% of the questions explored each of the following topics: consequences of ohs, free speech vs hate speech, legislation, and definitions of hate speech. with respect to rq3, 83% of survey measures were close-ended questions, and 4% were close-ended questions with an open-ended option “other”. half of the identified measures were ordinal scales (likert-type questions (n=73) or likert scales (n=71)), followed by 31% of questions with categorical response options (single(n=73) or multiple-choice questions (n=22)) and three open-ended questions. however, no scale was consistently employed in a standardized way, resulting in fragmentation in question typology. nevertheless, for each of the 11 topics, the most common and typical survey questions will be identified in the next phase. conclusion preliminary findings reveal a disproportionate focus on students and young adults, leaving older population groups under-researched, even though older adults express high levels of concerns regarding ohs (pacheco, 2024) and online ageism increased during the pandemic (levy et al., 2022). additionally, the predominant use of non representative sampling methods in the reviewed studies raises concerns about the generalizability of the findings. broad research scopes are predominant; in order to better understand real-world experiences, scholars should aim for more detailed research scopes, including studying ohs in specific online contexts and within specific groups. in terms of topics, existing survey measures mostly cover the topics of direct exposure/perpetration of ohs, neglecting the whole hate speech ecosystem; what comes before and after the dissemination of hate speech online. in terms of question types, ordinal scales are most common, but the lack of standardized scales results in fragmented findings that are difficult to compare. future research should prioritize examining general and older populations and focus on their understanding of hate speech and how it can be mitigated. standardized survey measures for ohs should be developed and systematically evaluated to improve the reliability and comparability of future research findings. references bliuc, a. m., faulkner, n., jakubowicz, a., & mcgarty, c. (2018). online networks of racial hate: a systematic review of 10 years of research on cyber-racism. computers in human behavior, 87, 75–86. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.05.026 castaño-pulgarín, s. a., suárez-betancur, n., vega, l. m. t., & lópez, h. m. h. (2021). internet, social media and online hate speech. systematic review. aggression and violent behavior, 58. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2021.101608 ermida, i. (2023). distinguishing online hate speech from aggressive speech: a fivefactor annotation model. in i. ermida (ed.), hate speech in social media: linguistic approaches (pp. 35–75). springer nature switzerland ag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38248-2_2 european commission. (2016). code of conduct on countering illegal hate speech online. https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/justice-andfundamental-rights/combatting-discrimination/racism-and-xenophobia/eu-codeconduct-countering-illegal-hate-speech-online_en european commission. (2020). executive summary of the impact assessment report. accompanying the document: proposal for a regulation of the european parliament and of the council on a single market for digital services (digital services act) and amending directive 2000/31/ec. https://digitalstrategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/impact-assessment-digital-services-act european court for human rights. (2023). hate speech. https://www.echr.coe.int/documents/d/echr/fs_hate_speech_eng hietanen, m., & eddebo, j. (2023). towards a definition of hate speech—with a focus on online contexts. journal of communication inquiry, 47(4), 440–458. https://doi.org/10.1177/01968599221124309 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.05.026 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2021.101608 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38248-2_2 https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/justice-and-fundamental-rights/combatting-discrimination/racism-and-xenophobia/eu-code-conduct-countering-illegal-hate-speech-online_en https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/justice-and-fundamental-rights/combatting-discrimination/racism-and-xenophobia/eu-code-conduct-countering-illegal-hate-speech-online_en https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/justice-and-fundamental-rights/combatting-discrimination/racism-and-xenophobia/eu-code-conduct-countering-illegal-hate-speech-online_en https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/impact-assessment-digital-services-act https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/impact-assessment-digital-services-act https://www.echr.coe.int/documents/d/echr/fs_hate_speech_eng https://doi.org/10.1177/01968599221124309 jahan, m. s., & oussalah, m. (2023). a systematic review of hate speech automatic detection using natural language processing. neurocomputing, 546. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2023.126232 kansok-dusche, j., ballaschk, c., krause, n., zeißig, a., seemann-herz, l., wachs, s., & bilz, l. (2023). a systematic review on hate speech among children and adolescents: definitions, prevalence, and overlap with related phenomena. trauma, violence, & abuse, 24(4), 2598–2615. https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380221108070 kearns, c., sinclair, g., black, j., doidge, m., fletcher, t., kilvington, d., liston, k., lynn, t., & rosati, p. (2023). a scoping review of research on online hate and sport. communication and sport, 11(2), 402–430. https://doi.org/10.1177/21674795221132728 levy, s. r., lytle, a., & macdonald, j. (2022). the worldwide ageism crisis. journal of social issues, 78(4), 743–768. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12568 masud, s., bedi, m., khan, m. a., akhtar, m. s., & chakraborty, t. (2022). proactively reducing the hate intensity of online posts via hate speech normalization. proceedings of the acm sigkdd international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, 3524–3534. https://doi.org/10.1145/3534678.3539161 müller, a., & lopez-sanchez, m. (2021). countering negative effects of hate speech in a multi-agent society. frontiers in artificial intelligence and applications, 339, 103– 112. https://doi.org/10.3233/faia210122 pacheco, e. (2024). older adults’ safety and security online: a post-pandemic exploration of attitudes and behaviors. arxiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2403.09208 papcunová, j., martončik, m., fedáková, d., kentoš, m., bozogáňová, m., srba, i., moro, r., pikuliak, m., šimko, m., & adamkovič, m. (2023). hate speech operationalization: a preliminary examination of hate speech indicators and their structure. complex & intelligent systems, 9, 2827–2842. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40747-021-00561-0 poletto, f., basile, v., sanguinetti, m., bosco, c., & patti, v. (2021). resources and benchmark corpora for hate speech detection: a systematic review. language resources and evaluation, 55(2), 477–523. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-02009502-8 qian, j., bethke, a., liu, y., belding, e., & wang, w. y. (2019). a benchmark dataset for learning to intervene in online hate speech. proceedings of the 2019 conference on empirical methods in natural language processing and the 9th international joint conference on natural language processing (emnlp-ijcnlp), china, 4755–4764. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/d19-1482 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2023.126232 https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380221108070 https://doi.org/10.1177/21674795221132728 https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12568 https://doi.org/10.1145/3534678.3539161 https://doi.org/10.3233/faia210122 https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2403.09208 https://doi.org/10.1007/s40747-021-00561-0 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-020-09502-8 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-020-09502-8 https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/d19-1482 sellars, a. (2016). defining hate speech. https://ssrn.com/abstract=2882244 tontodimamma, a., nissi, e., sarra, a., & fontanella, l. (2021). thirty years of research into hate speech: topics of interest and their evolution. scientometrics, 126(1), 157–179. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03737-6 tricco, a. c., lillie, e., zarin, w., o’brien, k. k., colquhoun, h., levac, d., moher, d., peters, m. d. j., horsley, t., weeks, l., hempel, s., akl, e. a., chang, c., mcgowan, j., stewart, l., hartling, l., aldcroft, a., wilson, m. g., garritty, c., … straus, s. e. (2018). prisma extension for scoping reviews (prisma-scr): checklist and explanation. annals of internal medicine, 169(7), 467–486. https://doi.org/10.7326/m18-0850 waqas, a., salminen, j., jung, s., almerekhi, h., & jansen, b. j. (2019). mapping online hate: a scientometric analysis on research trends and hotspots in research on online hate. plos one, 14(9). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0222194 woo, h., & cho, y. y. (2023). fighting hate and hate speech: raising anti-hate awareness through critical analysis of popular cultural texts on an undergraduate course. societies, 13(11). https://doi.org/10.3390/soc13110240 https://ssrn.com/abstract=2882244 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03737-6 https://doi.org/10.7326/m18-0850 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0222194 https://doi.org/10.3390/soc13110240 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): monea, a. (2023, october). cruising tiktok: using algorithmic folk knowledge to evade cisheteronormative content moderation. paper (or panel) presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. cruising tiktok; using algorithmic folk knowledge to evade cisheteronormative content moderation alexander monea george mason university this paper examines crackdowns on queer content on tiktok and creative responses of content creators to circumvent biased content moderation and cisheteronormative censorship. the first portion of the paper demonstrates tiktok’s recurrent cisheteronormative biases in content moderation decisions and examines select instances of lgbtq+ content that has been censored on the platform. it also works to situate this within a broader trend of lgbtq+ censorship across internet platforms. the second portion of the paper examines how lgbtq+ tiktok users have built up folk knowledges and intuitive understandings of tiktok’s blackboxed algorithms and opaque content moderation policies, situating this discussion within theories of the ‘algorithmic imaginary’. it catalogs the myriad ways that tiktok users work to circumvent lgbtq+ censorship on the platform (e.g. by tactically obscuring key words in both speech and text and obscuring body parts and scenes). in the final portion of the paper, i draw on the concept of ‘cruising’ and other constitutive silences of lgbtq+ existence to show how lgbtq+ users are particularly well suited to producing folk knowledge about blackboxed algorithms. in closing, i examine the affordances and the limitations of lgbtq+ users’ approach to navigating platform governance – and content moderation practices more specifically – as well as call for more organized and collective action in search of more permanent changes towards lgbtq+-friendly platforms. tiktok has a troubled history of censoring lgbtq+ content on its platform. it has censored depictions of homosexuality (e.g., holding hands, touching, kissing), reporting on homosexual groups, content promoting gay rights, and content promoting queerness in general in a number of conservative countries – turkey being the most famous example (hern 2019). research has shown lgbtq+ related hashtags being suppressed in at least eight languages, including russian and arabic (li 2020; ryan, fritz & impiombato 2020). many american and anglophone lgbtq+ content creators have similarly reported biased moderation of their content, most notably amongst transgender content creators (akinrinade 2021; criddle 2020). tiktok has argued that many of these instances were due to their restriction of hashtags associated with ‘pornographic searches,’ but this simply reifies the pornographication and/or hypersexualization of queer existence so frequently at the center of cisheteronormative censorship. it is worth noting that tiktok’s biased content moderation extends to many other socially marginalized groups, including black content creators (ghaffary 2021; rosenblatt 2021), as well as the ‘ugly,’ poor, and disabled (biddle, ribeiro & dias 2020). as such, tiktok follows in the wake of many other internet platforms in its institution of cisheternormative content moderation policies (blunt & stardust 2021; gehl, moyer-horner, & yeo 2017; monea 2022). within this context, tiktok users are rightfully concerned with the undue censorship of their content and invest their time and energy into avoiding having their content censored, deprioritized, demonetized, or otherwise shadow banned. tiktok has made big promises about opening up its algorithms, policies, and decision-making practices for outside review (heilweil 2020; knutson 2020; matsakis 2020), and it leverages these promises to signal its commitment to ‘accountability’ and ‘transparency’ in attempts to mitigate public relations crises – like it coming to light that tiktok censors lgbtq+ hashtags in eight or more languages (li 2020). however, tiktok has not actually been very forthcoming with technical details about its algorithms or data about content moderation decisions and everyday users are left with little official or expert knowledge about how tiktok’s algorithms are working and what will and will not trigger undue censorship during the content moderation process. as abidin notes, “tiktokers have had to rely on repeated attempts, observed patterns, and gut feelings to figure out how the algorithm works, how to please the platform to facilitate their visibility, and how to have their popularity grow” (2020, p. 85). this process is akin to what bucher calls an ‘algorithmic imaginary,’ which describes “the way in which people imagine, perceive and experience algorithms and what these imaginations make possible” (2017, p. 31), as well as bishop’s work on ‘algorithmic gossip’ (2019) and ‘algorithmic lore’ (2020). others have described this process as ‘algorithmic folklore,’ writing: tiktok users have speculated about coded discrimination on the platform, sharing individual experiences and anecdotal evidence to identify and disrupt the algorithm. engaging in collective guesswork, these users take to the comments section to propose different theories about why the algorithm acts in discriminatory ways. […] by sharing experiences, asking questions, and crowdsourcing answers, teens are developing an algorithmic folklore while discerning the potential motivations behind tiktok’s software engineering. (akinrinade 2021) this is a departure from traditional folk psychology, which explains the ways in which humans perceive, explain, predict, and criticize one another’s behavior – largely through the attribution of mental states to others (hutto & ravenscroft 2021). lgbtq+ users are particularly adept at producing folk knowledge about tiktok’s algorithms and content moderation policies, given both the general cisheteronormative bias of online content moderation and tiktok’s specific history of censoring lgbtq+ content on its platform. the practices they employ to identify and avoid cisheteronormative content moderation practices on the platform include (but are not limited to): • intentionally using language, keywords, hashtags, and images that they anticipate triggering censorship and cataloging tiktok’s responses • continually a/b testing the platform’s content moderation by posting multiple iterations of the same videos with slight alterations to see which elude the algorithm’s content moderation • engaging in motivating misspelling and mispronunciation of words understood to trigger censorship (e.g. ‘seggs’ or ‘s*ggs’ in place of ‘sex’) • tactically covering or obscuring certain parts of the body, background objects, portions of images, etc. • leveraging specific audiences, hashtags, and cross platform links to boost lgbtq+ content • utilizing comment spaces and forums on other platforms to collectively produce, collect, archive, and disseminate folk knowledge for lgbtq+ tiktok users in fact, lgbtq+ content creators might be particularly well positioned to produce these folk knowledges for evading cisheteronormative algorithmic censorship. as sedgwick (2008) has shown, queer folx are particularly well versed in navigating the constitutive silences of discourse, determining safe and unsafe conditions of speech and the attendant meanings of such determinations. this capacity is paralleled by the ability to navigate visibility and invisibility in public spaces, particularly as evidenced by ‘cruising’ wherein queer folx navigate precarious but coded acts of public disclosure of their sexuality in search of erotic partners (bullock 2004; humphreys 1970; leap 1999). algorithmic folk knowledges require similar capacities to navigate speech and silence, visibility and invisibility, all with increasingly high stakes for participating in everyday digitally connected life. in closing, i suggest that perhaps we might follow muñoz (2009) in looking to these practices of ‘algorithmic cruising’ for a more utopic digital future. references abidin, c. (2020). mapping internet celebrity on tiktok: exploring attention economies and visibility labours. cultural science, 12(1): 77-103. akinrinade, i. (2021, jul. 14). strategic knowledge: teens use “algorithmic folklore” to crack tiktok’s black box. data & society. retrieved from https://points.datasociety.net/strategic-knowledge-6bbddb3f0259 [accessed mar. 1, 2023] biddle, s., ribeiro, p.v., dias, t. (2020, mar. 16). invisible censorship: tiktok told moderators to suppress posts by “ugly” people and the poor to attract new users. the intercept. retrieved from https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderatorsusers-discrimination/ [accessed mar. 1, 2023] bishop, s. (2019). managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip. new media & society, 21(11-12): 2589-2606. https://points.datasociety.net/strategic-knowledge-6bbddb3f0259 https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-users-discrimination/ https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-users-discrimination/ bishop, s. (2020). algorithmic experts: selling algorithmic lore on youtube. social media + society, 6(1): 1-11. blunt, d., & stardust, z. (2021). automating whorephobia: sex, technology and the violence of deplatforming: an interview with hacking//hustling. porn studies, 8(4), 350366. bucher, t. (2017). the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1): 30-44. bullock, d. (2004). lesbian cruising. journal of homosexuality, 47(2): 1-31. criddle, c. (2020, feb. 12). transgender users accuse tiktok of censorship. bbc news. retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51474114 [accessed mar. 1, 2023] gehl, r. w., moyer-horner, l., & yeo, s. k. (2017). training computers to see internet pornography: gender and sexual discrimination in computer vision science. television & new media, 18(6), 529-547. ghaffary, s. (2021, jul. 7). how tiktok’s hate speech detection tool set off a debate about racial bias on the app. vox. retrieved from https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/7/7/22566017/tiktok-black-creators-ziggi-tyler-debateabout-black-lives-matter-racial-bias-social-media [accessed mar. 1, 2023] heilweil, r. (2020, jul. 29). why it matters that tiktok wants to reveal its algorithms. vox. retrieved from https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/7/29/21346758/tiktok-for-youalgorithm-transparency-instagram-antitrust [accessed mar. 1, 2023] hern, a. (2019, sep. 26). tiktok’s local moderation guidelines ban pro-lgbt content. the guardian. retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/26/tiktoks-local-moderationguidelines-ban-pro-lgbt-content [accessed mar. 1, 2023] humphreys, l. (1970). tearoom trade: impersonal sex in public places. chicago, il: aldine. hutto, d. & ravenscroft, i. (2021). folk psychology as a theory. stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/folkpsych-theory/ [accessed mar. 1, 2023] knutson, j. (2020, mar. 11). tiktok plans los angeles “transparency center” to assuage critics. axios. retrieved from https://www.axios.com/2020/03/11/tiktok-losangeles-china [accessed mar. 1, 2023] leap, w. l. (ed.). (1999). public sex/gay space. new york, ny: columbia university press. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51474114 https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/7/7/22566017/tiktok-black-creators-ziggi-tyler-debate-about-black-lives-matter-racial-bias-social-media https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/7/7/22566017/tiktok-black-creators-ziggi-tyler-debate-about-black-lives-matter-racial-bias-social-media https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/7/29/21346758/tiktok-for-you-algorithm-transparency-instagram-antitrust https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/7/29/21346758/tiktok-for-you-algorithm-transparency-instagram-antitrust https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/26/tiktoks-local-moderation-guidelines-ban-pro-lgbt-content https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/26/tiktoks-local-moderation-guidelines-ban-pro-lgbt-content https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/folkpsych-theory/ https://www.axios.com/2020/03/11/tiktok-los-angeles-china https://www.axios.com/2020/03/11/tiktok-los-angeles-china li, j. (2020, sep. 8). tiktok is suppressing lgbt content in eastern europe and the middle east. quartz. retrieved from https://qz.com/1900530/tiktok-shadow-bans-lgbthashtags-in-russian-and-arabic [accessed mar. 1, 2023] matsakis, l. (2020, jun. 18). tiktok finally explains how the ‘for you’ algorithm works. wired. retrieved from https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-finally-explains-foryou-algorithm-works/ [accessed mar. 1, 2023] muñoz, j. e. (2009). cruising utopia: the then and there of queer futurity. new york, ny: nyu press. rosenblatt, k. (2021, feb. 9). months after tiktok apologized to black creators, many say little has changed. nbc news. retrieved from https://www.nbcnews.com/popculture/pop-culture-news/months-after-tiktok-apologized-black-creators-many-say-littlehas-n1256726 [accessed mar. 1, 2023] ryan, f., fritz, a., & impiombato, d. (2020). tiktok and wechat: curating and controlling global information flows. policy brief report no. 37/2020. canberra, australia: australian strategic policy institute. retrieved from https://www.aspi.org.au/report/tiktok-wechat [accessed mar. 1, 2023] sedgwick, e. k. (2008). epistemology of the closet. berkeley and los angeles, ca: university of california press. https://qz.com/1900530/tiktok-shadow-bans-lgbt-hashtags-in-russian-and-arabic https://qz.com/1900530/tiktok-shadow-bans-lgbt-hashtags-in-russian-and-arabic https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-finally-explains-for-you-algorithm-works/ https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-finally-explains-for-you-algorithm-works/ https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/months-after-tiktok-apologized-black-creators-many-say-little-has-n1256726 https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/months-after-tiktok-apologized-black-creators-many-say-little-has-n1256726 https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/months-after-tiktok-apologized-black-creators-many-say-little-has-n1256726 https://www.aspi.org.au/report/tiktok-wechat selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): berman, g., williams, k., & cohen, e. (2024, october). a study of industry influence in the field of ai research. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. a study of industry influence in the field of ai research glen berman australian national university kate williams university of melbourne eliel cohen king’s college london extended abstract “you’ve got this enormous amount of money. that has gravitational influence for universities. every university now has an ai institute and an ai ethics institute.”1 this extract is from an interview study (n = 90) we conducted with academics affiliated with university-based ai-branded research networks.2 in this paper, we explore how these academics, whose affiliations posit them as ‘ai researchers’, mobilise and resist industry interests. the research question to which this paper is addressed is: how do university-based academics in the field of ai experience and mediate industry influence in their research? we consider also the broader characteristics of the ai research field—a field that sits at the intersection of industry, government, and media interest (williams et al., 2023). following the bourdieusian tradition, we understand ‘ai research’ to be a field of knowledge production, which takes place within social spheres with distinct norms and traditions (camic, 2011; camic & gross, 1998). we direct our study towards research networks which utilise ‘ai’ when describing their focus, treating these networks as key actors in the process of demarcating the ai field (abbott, 1988; bourdieu, 2008). method 1 an interview extract from a hass academic affiliated with an ai-branded research network, interviewed during this study. 2 we refer interested readers to ‘the benefits of being between (many) fields: mapping the high dimensional space of ai research’, forthcoming in big data & society. semi-structured interviews with 90 academics affiliated with ai-branded, universitybased research networks were conducted. six research networks were selected, with two each in the us, uk, and australia. in each national context, one interand one intranetwork was selected. participants were recruited through direct outreach and snowball sampling, with an equal number of participants recruited from each national context. interviews were undertaken between may 2022 and march 2023. participants were asked to explain their research goals and relationship to established disciplines, and to describe their approach to navigating the university, including career progression, teaching, and research funding. interview data was analysed using thematic analysis, reflecting a broadly constructionist perspective (braun & clarke, 2006; clarke & braun, 2017). a mix of deductive and inductive coding was employed (byrne, 2022; clarke & braun, 2017). we collected interview extracts under broad themes, deductively hypothesised from our understanding of fields and existing research on industry influence in the ai field. we inductively coded data extracts under these themes and iteratively organised codes into themes and sub-themes. findings we find that national research funders and university bureaucracies incentivise industry investments in ai research, both at the level of researchers, for whom career progression may be tied to their ability to broker intersectoral collaborations, and at the level of research networks, whose funding may be tied to their facilitation of industryacademic partnerships. we argue that university-based ai research networks primarily operate as mediators between industry, government, and university actors, and highlight the role national research investment strategies play in creating an enabling environment for industry influence of ai research. “[my network] has a curious reluctance to define what ai is, and particularly what it isn't. ai has become so mainstream... if you do algorithms, then you kind of do ai... [funders] run the risk that everybody suddenly decides that what they've been doing for the last ten years is ai after all.”3 our findings reflect ongoing definitional debates about what constitutes both ai and legitimate goals for ai research (jaton & sormani, 2023; suchman, 2023). we find that the ai field is unstable, and maps poorly onto traditional disciplinary or sectoral boundaries. as such, we conceptualise ai research as an interstitial field, with knowledge production occurring in the liminal space between more established fields, and across a range of sectors and professions (eyal, 2013; stampnitzky, 2011). 3 extract from a cs academic interview. “if you think about ai in, and around, the university it is less a network… more an ecosystem of… publics, community organisations, smes, large corporates, other universities, research institutes, schools… the analogy is more like a coral reef.”4 we argue that the field of ai research is a site through which industry, government, and university actors renegotiate their shared boundaries and interdependencies. how university-based academics in the field of ai experience and mediate industry influence prefigures relations between the broader university, government, and industry sectors. “if i'd freely pursued my own intellectual interests, i'd look more like a traditional humanities scholar. i look the way i do because of a pragmatic choice to… build the kind of career that the institution would recognise, that would… shape a research agenda that could get funded.”5 industry influence, however, is not straightforward. interview participants described how universities and national funders incentivise ‘impactful’ research, which they operationalise as applied and intersectoral research. industry influence is thus enabled by an orientation within the university sector towards industry partnerships. precarious employment within the university sector provides an additional enabler for industry influence: participants described their academic careers as contingent, necessitating movement between industry and university employment opportunities. the ability to develop and maintain partnerships with industry is thus seen by university-based ai researchers as critical to their long-term careers, funding opportunities, and research projects. “[national funders have been] divesting from the humanities... ai ethics has emerged as… a legible, valuable topic to funders. you have some of the biggest corporations in the world [saying] we need ai ethicists. you see this little bit of money available to the humanities, and humanities researchers [are] rebranding themselves as a social responsibility or ai ethics researchers.”6 participants also discussed the risks of industry influence. given the importance of industry investment to their own research, several participants understand risk in terms of waning industry interest in their research. these participants see the role the media sector and university-based research networks play in ‘hyping’ ai research as a significant threat to their research—’hype’ risks creating unrealistic industry expectations. other participants described how they have adjusted their research agendas to align with industry interest. for these participants, industry influence risks having a stifling effect on promising ai research directions—to mitigate this, participants contest narrow definitions of ‘ai’, and reframe their research activities to appear more aligned with areas of industry interest. finally, we observe internalisation of industry logics in the way industry participants describe their research objectives and the objectives of the research networks they are 4 extract from a stem academic interview. 5 extract from a hass academic interview. 6 extract from a hass academic interview. affiliated with. participants described their research goals in terms of ‘scale’ and ‘generalisability’, which are both conceptualised as widespread use or engagement with their research outputs (e.g. new algorithms, new models, new datasets). to achieve scale, participants seek to move across application domains, working at a level of abstraction they believe will enable their research outputs to be implemented across many local contexts. in effect, this pattern of research mirrors the commercial logic of technology firms, who similarly extract value through development of scalable digital platforms that bridge local contexts. broader impacts industry influence over ai research is a source of significant concern (abdalla & abdalla, 2021; young et al., 2022). these concerns reflect an understanding of ai research and the development of ai systems as deeply socially consequential (shelby et al., 2023). industry influence may threaten the independence of ai researchers, and the ability of researchers to question industry imperatives (young et al., 2022) or pursue alternatives to deep learning (klinger et al., 2020). given the intertwining of interests between us-based industry actors, us government agencies, and elite us-based universities, industry influence may also threaten the democratic aspirations of ai research—industry influence is associated with the concentration of ai research in elite western universities (ahmed & wahed, 2020). within this context, this paper contributes an empirical description of the ways in which industry influence moves through and structures the field of ai research, highlighting the significance of national research funders’ impact agendas in enabling industry influence. references abbott, a. d. (1988). the system of professions: an essay on the division of expert labor. university of chicago press. abdalla, m., & abdalla, m. (2021). the grey hoodie project: big tobacco, big tech, and the threat on academic integrity. proceedings of the 2021 aaai/acm conference on ai, ethics, and society, 287–297. https://doi.org/10.1145/3461702.3462563 ahmed, n., & wahed, m. (2020). the de-democratization of ai: deep learning and the compute divide in artificial intelligence research. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2010.15581 benner, m., & sandström, u. (2000). institutionalizing the triple helix: research funding and norms in the academic system. research policy, 29(2), 291–301. berman, g., williams, k., & cohen, e. (forthcoming). the benefits of being between (many) fields: mapping the high dimensional space of ai research. big data & society. bourdieu, p. (2008). the logic of practice (reprinted). stanford univ. press. braun, v., & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa byrne, d. (2022). a worked example of braun and clarke’s approach to reflexive thematic analysis. quality & quantity, 56(3), 1391–1412. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-021-01182-y camic, c. (2011). bourdieu’s cleft sociology of science. minerva, 49(3), 275–293. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-011-9176-0 camic, c., & gross, n. (1998). contemporary developments in sociological theory: current projects and conditions of possibility. annual review of sociology, 24(1), 453–476. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.24.1.453 chevaillier, t., & eicher, j.-c. (2002). higher education funding: a decade of changes. higher education in europe, 27(1–2), 89–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/0379772022000003242 clarke, v., & braun, v. (2017). thematic analysis. the journal of positive psychology, 12(3), 297–298. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2016.1262613 demeritt, d. (2000). the new social contract for science: accountability, relevance, and value in us and uk science and research policy. antipode, 32(3), 308– 329. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8330.00137 eyal, g. (2013). spaces between fields. in bourdieu and historical analysis (pp. 158– 182). duke university press. jaton, f., & sormani, p. (2023). enabling ‘ai’? the situated production of commensurabilities. social studies of science, 53(5), 625–634. https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127231194591 klinger, j., mateos-garcia, j. c., & stathoulopoulos, k. (2020). a narrowing of ai research? ssrn electronic journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3698698 shelby, r., rismani, s., henne, k., moon, aj., rostamzadeh, n., nicholas, p., yillaakbari, n., gallegos, j., smart, a., garcia, e., & virk, g. (2023). sociotechnical harms of algorithmic systems: scoping a taxonomy for harm reduction. proceedings of the 2023 aaai/acm conference on ai, ethics, and society, 723– 741. https://doi.org/10.1145/3600211.3604673 stampnitzky, l. (2011). disciplining an unruly field: terrorism experts and theories of scientific/intellectual production. qualitative sociology, 34(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-010-9187-4 suchman, l. (2023). the uncontroversial ‘thingness’ of ai. big data & society, 10(2), 20539517231206794. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231206794 williams, k., berman, g., & michalska, s. (2023). investigating hybridity in artificial intelligence research. big data & society, 10(2), 20539517231180577. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231180577 williams, k., & grant, j. (2018). a comparative review of how the policy and procedures to assess research impact evolved in australia and the uk. research evaluation, 27(2), 93–105. https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvx042 young, m., katell, m., & krafft, p. m. (2022). confronting power and corporate capture at the facct conference. 2022 acm conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency, 1375–1386. https://doi.org/10.1145/3531146.3533194 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): byron, p. (2024, october).instagram close friend stories for mental health support among lgbtq+ young people. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. instagram close friend stories for mental health support among lgbtq+ young people paul byron university of technology sydney background social media use among lgbtq+ young people is reported to be higher than for their cisgender and heterosexual peers (jenzen, 2022; robards et al., 2021). for lgbtq+ young people facing mental health challenges, everyday support from friends is important, and often occurs through social media (berger et al., 2022; milton et al., 2023). among australian young people, instagram is the most widely used social media platform. it is also a platform that affords many communicative options, ranging from public posting to private chat, and the increasingly common use of ephemeral instagram story posts, including close friend stories. this project responds to a need to better understand of how popular social media platforms, such as instagram, afford peerbased mental health support for lgbtq+ young people, as a population that faces high rates of poor mental health. researchers have found that instagram offers an important source of mental health information and support for its users. much of this research has focused on scraping and coding platform content, typically sourced through hashtags (gupta & ariefdjohan, 2021; lee et al., 2020; mccosker & gerrard, 2021), and most of this research has not focused on lgbtq+ young people. this paper responds to this by engaging with australian lgbtq+ young people via a qualitative survey and interviews, to discuss how peer support for mental health plays out through their use of social media platforms. many participants highlighted how instagram’s close friend stories plays a key role in sourcing and offering support to friends and peers. methods & approach interviews about digital peer support for mental health were conducted with 36 lgbtq+ young people, aged 16-25, living in australia. interview questions were informed by data from a national survey conducted prior (n=660). most interview participants (n=24) had completed the survey and were recruited at that point, with the remainder recruited through additional promotion and advertising on social media (instagram, twitter, facebook) and through lgbtq+ community networks. interview participants cover all ages from 16-25 years, lived in all major states and territories of australia, lived in a range of settings (urban, regional, and rural), and had a range of sexual orientations (most commonly bisexual and queer) and ethnicities and cultural backgrounds. participants were 50% cisgender and 50% trans and gender diverse. data from interviews that focus on participants’ uses and experiences of social media in relation to social and mental health support, are the focus of this paper – specifically discussion of instagram’s close friend stories feature. following the work of baym (2015), this research takes a relational approach to social media and its everyday use, asking ‘what do friends do with the close friend stories, and how might this foster mental health support?’ madianou’s (2016) concept of ‘ambient co-presence’ is used to consider participants’ everyday instagram use, and a range of close friend story practices related to mental health support – whether this is sought or offered. findings participants offered a rich account of digital peer support that was suggested to permeate instagram use for many. most highlighted that friendships were a central anchor point to their instagram use. use of instagram also extended beyond friendship communication, with the platform offering access to information, learning, entertainment, and a culture of browsing and connecting to others. however, the many modes and directions of instagram use were experienced alongside friends, punctuated by seeing and chatting with friends. twelve participants explicitly discussed their use and familiarity with close friend stories for mental health posting. among these participants, close friend stories were commonly described as a space to vent, share, and seek support. for example: greta: a lot of my friends are quite willing to post stuff if they’re not feeling super great… they’ll post things and then you know to reach out to them. amal: there’s some [friends] particularly that have a close friends list purely to talk about their mental health. and i respond… “oh that’s cool of you, i’m here for you.” close friend stories were valued for the ability to reach a selected group of friends, with whom one could be more vulnerable or honest. these stories were therefore suited to mental health disclosures (as well as other disclosures, with one participant ‘coming out’ on close friends the day before our interview). a key finding was that mental health posting on close friend stories precluded the need to directly ask a friend for support, which was seen as unfair and burdensome. as many participants noted, friends may not always have the capacity to offer support and may be facing challenges of their own. a close friend story that would reach a small group of friends (usually close friends, but not always), allowed viewers to choose to respond or not, and responses would be direct and private, initiating conversation. this arms-length signaling for support was seen as the appeal of close friend stories, making it safer, more careful, and less likely to disrupt or challenge friendships. close friend stories were also ambiguous, with this ambiguity often being the starting point to a conversation. as avery describes: “people will be, ‘i’m depressed haha’ [and] i’ll be, ‘hey is this a joke or is this serious i can’t tell. but either way i’m here to talk to you about it if it is.” participants illustrated a specific literacy of mental health posting on close friend stories, in which the practice was familiar, recognisable, and part of friendship cultures on instagram. for some, such as koda, there was a sense that posting about your feelings to close friends was ubiquitous: “i think we all have a tendency to post things about how we are feeling to private stories.” many others, such as odette, gave examples of their own postings: “i mean the other day i quite literally posted on my instagram story a photo of me crying.” for riley, who also spoke of being disabled and often unable to spend time with friends outside of social media, instagram stories were a key space to vent, rant, and share their feelings to friends: “i call them either my angry trans rants or my crip rants which is where i just kind of go on about something that bothers me.” riley did not expect nor need responses to their rants, and also saw them as educational to friends who were not queer, trans, or disabled. conclusion for lgbtq+ young people, close friend stories offer a particular form of co-presence, through an intimate structure that can hold mental health disclosures more carefully and safely. this connects to madianou’s concept of ‘ambient co-presence’ (2016) which is fostered through participants’ everyday use of instagram – a platform they experience in the company of friends. as such, the use of instagram close friend stories can foster more intense experiences of connection, intimacy, and a culture of vulnerable sharing that is felt to be reciprocal. although madianou focuses on transnational family communication, the ambient co-presence she discusses reflects that of lgbtq+ young people – many of whom predominantly engage with friends through social media, and for whom friendships contour their instagram use. this offers a sense that friends are always in reach, and that instagram can be a caring and careful space. references baym, n. k. (2015). personal connections in the digital age. polity press. berger, m. n., taba, m., marino, j. l., lim, m. s. c., & skinner, s. r. (2022). social media use and health and well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth: systematic review. journal of medical internet research, 24(9), e38449– e38449. https://doi.org/10.2196/38449 https://doi.org/10.2196/38449 gupta, r., & ariefdjohan, m. (2021). mental illness on instagram: a mixed method study to characterize public content, sentiments, and trends of antidepressant use. journal of mental health, 30(4), 518–525. https://doi.org/10.1080/09638237.2020.1755021 jenzen, o. (2022). lgbtq youth cultures and social media. in oxford research encyclopedia of communication. oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.1363 lee, n., buchanan, k., & yu, m. (2020). each post matters: a content analysis of #mentalhealth images on instagram. journal of visual communication in medicine, 43(3), 128–138. https://doi.org/10.1080/17453054.2020.1781535 madianou, m. (2016). ambient co-presence: transnational family practices in polymedia environments. global networks, 16(2), 183–201. https://doi.org/10.1111/glob.12105 mccosker, a., & gerrard, y. (2021). hashtagging depression on instagram: towards a more inclusive mental health research methodology. new media & society, 23(7), 1899–1919. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820921349 milton, a., ajmani, l., devito, m. a., & chancellor, s. (2023). “i see me here”: mental health content, community, and algorithmic curation on tiktok. proceedings of the 2023 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581489 robards, b., byron, p., & d’souza, s. (2021). lgbtq+ communities and digital media. in d. a. rohlinger & s. sobieraj (eds.), the oxford handbook of digital media sociology. oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1080/09638237.2020.1755021 https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.1363 https://doi.org/10.1080/17453054.2020.1781535 https://doi.org/10.1111/glob.12105 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820921349 https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581489 aoir2024_submission_updated selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): kelly, a. p. (2024, october). “oh, you mean… gay?”: relational labour and the industrial articulation of hegemonic masculinity by andrew tate and his followers. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “oh, you mean… gay?”: relational labour and the industrial articulation of hegemonic masculinity by andrew tate and his followers anthony patrick kelly university college dublin introduction this paper examines how the figures and imaginaries of hegemonic masculinity are coproduced and contested among a reactionary influencer fandom. it assumes an intersectional masculinities approach to the question of how andrew tate and his social media audience(s) mobilise anti-feminist and anti-lgbtqia+ discourses online. within the manosphere, enjoinments to embody idealised forms of masculinity are embedded within the affective frameworks for the extraction of value that typify influencer media. such masculinity injunctions are here conceptualised as a technique of hegemony and as a galvanising force in the relational labour (baym, 2018) of tate and his followers. political influencers have become focal figures in the contemporary media environment, bridging commercial and political interests (riedl et al., 2021) while seeking public engagement through the performance of “authentic” identity (harris et al., 2023). most work on influencers focuses on creators, with relatively little attention paid to audiences. as political influencers have become increasingly prominent media figures, however, fan studies frameworks have grown more visible in analyses of the mediation of political life (petersen et al., 2023), including reactionary politics (stanfill, 2020). this paper incorporates perspectives on fandom, labour, and the manosphere to describe how masculinity discourses are enmeshed in the complex interplay of production and labour that animates the creation of reactionary influencer online content. focusing on andrew tate’s role in mediating identity claims through the performance of figures of masculinity highlights the affective aspects of his role as an intermediary. this affective intermediation is a key component in the relational labour that serves strategically to bolster tate’s authority and influence. however, this status is arguably also shaped by the frequently antagonistic engagement of tate’s followers. affect, intermediation, and relational labour in the influencer ecosystem affective intermediation is proposed as a concept that situates relational labour within the influencer ecosystem in terms of the affective production of masculinity as a cultural and economic category. in this context, creators serve as ideological intermediaries who promote lifestyles and ways of being to audiences (arnesson, 2023). by mobilising social identities, such intermediation by influencers can also be seen to have affective dimensions. for mouffe (2018), the anti-pluralist mobilisation of affect typifies the rhetorics of right-wing populism. this framework likewise characterises the networked misogyny (banet-weiser & miltner, 2016) of reactionary influencers. examinations of digital intimacies in influencer media emphasise how audience engagement impacts the status and reach of influencers (dobson et al., 2018). engagement may motivate influencers’ relational labour (baym, 2018), but creators are also at risk of this strategic intimacy being weaponised by their followers (glatt, 2023). for partisan media figures, attempts by audiences to determine the content of media is an established hazard (kelly, 2023). this paper conceives of user contributions, like platformised possessions (denegri-knott et al., 2023), as a form of relational labour that is central to the strategic deployment of figures of masculinity within the manosphere. articulation, hegemony, and masculinity as analytical categories the concepts of articulation, hegemony, and masculinity developed here are rooted primarily in the work of connell (2005) and laclau and mouffe (2001). laclau and mouffe’s concept of articulation centres the production and performance of collective identities, with articulation viewed as the site of struggle for dominance in defining the nature of the social, i.e., hegemony. connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity refers to a configuration of standards defining how to be masculine against which gender performances are judged. critiques have focused on the distinction between internal and external hegemony (demetriou, 2001) and the complexity of men’s actual practices and motivations (moller, 2007). a blended concept of hegemonic masculinity, following johansson & ottemo (2015), recognises multiplicity and conflict in how dominant modes of masculinity are defined. it aligns with approaches highlighting the competition that characterises the networking of masculinities (ging, 2019) and the multiple masculine identities that men must navigate online (garcía-gómez, 2020; trott, 2022). essential, too, is a sense of how gender identities intersect with other social identities, including race (dharani et al., 2021). by taking an intersectional masculinities approach to the content created by andrew tate and his audience, this paper addresses how reactionary influencer fandoms serve as sites of cultural and economic production with wide-ranging social and political impacts. methods and data data for this paper are drawn from the alt-tech video-sharing platform rumble and x (formerly twitter). data consist of a 15-month sample of andrew tate’s posts on rumble (n=213) and a purposive sample of 17 posts by tate on x. the dataset includes all user responses to posts on rumble (n=112,656) and x (n=14,796). the methods used here are constructionist thematic analysis, which orients towards the sociocultural contexts of discourse (braun & clarke, 2006) and computational discourse analysis, including topic modelling (gokcimen & das, 2024). computational techniques are employed on the complete corpora of user-generated comments and video transcripts, whereas qualitative techniques focus on a limited sub-sample (n=10) of the highest engagement posts. preliminary findings the preliminary data suggest three key points of tension. first, directives about who tate should interact with and how he should conduct himself are prevalent within the dataset. some of the more vocal directives focus on the youtube creator adin ross, who has featured several times in tate’s outputs but who tate often speaks of derisively. ross, it is claimed, either is or acts “gay”. anti-ross invective conflicts with the strategies tate employs in his attempts to boost reach, impact, and influence by leveraging the online status of other creators. second, there is a fine line between support and “simping” that fans and followers must navigate. a simp can be seen as subordinate to women — part of the transactionalisation of sex and sexuality in which any positive treatment of women must result in material benefit — as well as tate. comments repeatedly articulate the distinction between alpha and beta (see ging, 2019), alongside frequent judgments about gender presentation (e.g., voice) and the outward appearance of capacity for violence that inform the masculinity injunctions typifying the data. fans must learn to express approval in ways that will not be seen as “gay”. third, the data are shaped inextricably by a sample period that includes tate’s imprisonment and, later, house arrest in romania on charges of sexual trafficking. the result is a shift not only in his posting cadence but also in the character and timbre of his posts, which have a palpable emphasis on marketing. this transition has resulted in explicit critical commentary from his audience pushing back on tate’s attempts to market a range of his media products. these engagements are indicative of audience expectations — and directives — that tate should privilege the production of masculinist content in ways they deem appropriate. conclusion persuasion may be at the root of hegemony (buttigieg, 2005), but the question remains to what extent tate’s audience accept his messaging without disapproval. this is particularly relevant with respect to content creation, especially attitudes regarding content collaborations. affective intermediation encompasses the relational labour in which tate’s audience position themselves as stakeholders in the articulation of idealised masculinity and the extraction of economic value that defines this media ecosystem. these preliminary findings illustrate how, in the context of reactionary influencer online content, the relations we term digitally intimate are in practice frequently constituted through acts of audience antagonism. references arnesson, j. (2023). influencers as ideological intermediaries: promotional politics and authenticity labour in influencer collaborations. media, culture and society, 45(3), 528– 544. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221117505 banet-weiser, s., & miltner, k. m. (2016). #masculinitysofragile: culture, structure, and networked misogyny. feminist media studies, 16(1), 171–174. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1120490 baym, n. k. (2018). playing to the crowd: musicians, audiences, and the intimate work of connection. new york university press. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479896165.001.0001 braun, v., & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa buttigieg, j. a. (2005). the contemporary discourse on civil society: a gramscian critique. boundary 2, 32(1), 33–52. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-32-1-33 connell, r. w. (2005). masculinities (2nd ed.). university of california press. demetriou, d. z. (2001). connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity: a critique. theory and society, 30(3), 337–361. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1017596718715 denegri-knott, j., jenkins, r., molesworth, m., & grigore, g. (2023). platformised possessions and relational labour. marketing theory, 24(1), 23-44. https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931231201783 dharani, b., vergo, o., & april, k. (2021). an intersectional approach to hegemonic masculinity and internal hegemony: a thematic analysis in south african men. journal of gender studies, 30(3), 329–343. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2020.1852918 dobson, a. s., carah, n., & robards, b. (2018). digital intimate publics and social media: towards theorising public lives on private platforms. in a. s. dobson, b. robards, & n. carah (eds.), digital intimate publics and social media (pp. 3–27). palgrave macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97607-5_1 garcía-gómez, a. (2020). discursive representation of masculinity and femininity in tinder and grindr: hegemonic masculinity, feminine devaluation and femmephobia. discourse & society, 31(4), 390–410. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926520903523 ging, d. (2019). alphas, betas, and incels: theorizing the masculinities of the manosphere. men and masculinities, 22(4), 638–657. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184x17706401 glatt, z. (2023). the intimacy triple bind: structural inequalities and relational labour in the influencer industry. european journal of cultural studies, 27(3), 424-440. https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494231194156 gokcimen, t., & das, b. (2024). exploring climate change discourse on social media and blogs using a topic modeling analysis. heliyon, 10(11). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e32464 harris, b. c., foxman, m., & partin, w. c. (2023). “don’t make me ratio you again”: how political influencers encourage platformed political participation. social media and society, 9(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231177944 johansson, t., & ottemo, a. (2015). ruptures in hegemonic masculinity: the dialectic between ideology and utopia. journal of gender studies, 24(2), 192–206. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2013.812514 kelly, a. (2023). recontextualising partisan outrage online: analysing the public negotiation of trump support among american conservatives in 2016. ai & society, 38(5), 2025–2036. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01109-5 laclau, e., & mouffe, c. (2001). hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics (2nd ed.). verso. moller, m. (2007). exploiting patterns: a critique of hegemonic masculinity. journal of gender studies, 16(3), 263–276. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589230701562970 mouffe, c. (2018). the affects of democracy. critique & humanism, 49(49), 61–70. petersen, l. n., reinhard, c. d., dannar, a., & le clue, n. (2023). new territories for fan studies: the insurrection, qanon, donald trump and fandom. convergence, 30(1), 313-328. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231174587 riedl, m., schwemmer, c., ziewiecki, s., & ross, l. m. (2021). the rise of political influencers — perspectives on a trend towards meaningful content. frontiers in communication, 6. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.752656 stanfill, m. (2020). introduction: the reactionary in the fan and the fan in the reactionary. television and new media, 21(2), 123–134. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419879912 trott, v. a. (2022). ‘gillette: the best a beta can get’: networking hegemonic masculinity in the digital sphere. new media & society, 24(6), 1417–1434. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820978293 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 researching youth perspectives – group discussions in non-formal digitalised educational arrangements amelie wiese university of cologne eva m. bosse university of cologne nadia kutscher university of cologne research subject pisa results show that educational inequality in europe is prevalent: many countries score below average in inclusion as well as socio economic fairness (oecd 2024). thus, in striving for educational and social equity, it is relevant to understand enabling or impeding factors for educational participation of (marginalised) youth. as formal educational institutions, schools are usually seen as key to overcoming educational inequality. the role of non-formal education is often underestimated, especially with regard to digitised societies (jeong et al. 2018; spanhel 2020). the term “non-formal education” describes organised places and modalities of education apart from formal education, e.g. child and youth welfare, after school activities, youth centres or sports clubs (rauschenbach et al. 2004). these non-formal educational arrangements do not aim at formal qualification. instead, they are voluntary and create learning opportunities. in germany, most non-formal educational institutions are funded by the welfare state and therefore are free of charge. they are obliged by law to also target marginalised youth, for example by being set up in ‘deprived’ urban areas. some non-formal educational institutions specialise in digital media activities, such as coding, robotics or 3d-printing (henceforth referred to as “non-formal digitalised educational arrangements”). applying a broad understanding of education1 as a transformation of self-world-relations (jörissen/marotzki 2009), non-formal digitalised educational arrangements aim at 1 in accordance with the german tradition of ‘bildung’. suggested citation (apa): wiese, a., bosse, e. m., kutscher, n. (2024, october). researching youth perspectives – group discussions in non-formal digitalised educational arrangements. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. contributing to educational and digital equity among youth by enabling processes of learning and experiences of self-efficacy. recognising (marginalised) youth’s realities and establishing trust and respect are considered important factors in order to successfully reduce inequalities in non-formal educational arrangements (fujii et al. 2021; streicher et al. 2014; walther 2014). however, inequalities may be reproduced within these arrangements, if e.g. specific media-related practices are delegitimised (fujii et al. 2021; kutscher/farrenberg 2017; schäfer/lojewski 2007). moreover, it is unclear whether and under which conditions non-formal institutions are successful in the inclusion of marginalised youth (dawson 2014). research questions this paper focuses on investigating the participatory potential within non-formal digitalised educational arrangements from a marginalised youth’s perspective: how do non-formal digitalised educational arrangements succeed at enabling educational practices and participation of marginalised youth, therefore reducing social and digital inequalities? in order to answer this question, conditions that enable resp. limit the range of participation in two non-formal educational institutions specialising in digital media activities and one youth centre (a non-formal institution without specialisation in digital media) will be identified in relation to (marginalised) youth’s orientations. digitality is focused as a potential contributing factor to the (non-)accessibility and appeal of nonformal educational arrangements. methodological framework funded by the german federal ministry for education and research, the joint research project “dilaboration” aims at identifying conditions under which opportunities for participation and transformation of self-world-relations are enabled or impeded within non-formal digitalised educational arrangements, specifically regarding marginalised youth. dilaboration focuses on the orientations and realities of the target group as well as how they are being addressed by different non-formal arrangements. this provides an understanding of enabling and impeding factors that entail marginalised youth participation within the arrangements. therefore, dilaboration is implemented as an ethnographic field study carried out in two different institutions in germany that offer a variety of non-formal digitalised educational arrangements including activities such as 3d-printing, gaming and coding. both institutions differ in terms of their structural conditions, resources and location. comparing both institutions enables the reconstruction of how these different conditions prevent or enable participation. the preconditions for youth participation are investigated through group discussions with (marginalised) youth who take part in the researched institutions’ educational arrangements as well as youth who belong to the potential target groups in the respective neighbourhoods but participate in other nonspecialised non-formal institutions, e.g. youth centres. group discussions are analysed using the documentary method to reconstruct collective patterns of orientations that influence everyday practices (bohnsack 2010). the term “orientation” signifies the implicit knowledge underlying practical action, from which a group’s habitus can by identified (ibid.). in group discussions, depictions and narrations are unfolded by the participants. the researchers theoretically explicate the implicit common knowledge of the group, thereby understanding their framework of orientation. in this paper, the documentary analysis of group discussions with youth is applied in order to examine conditions and orientations that enable or constrain participation in non-formal (digitalised) educational arrangements. participants’ narrations and discussions about their experiences within the educational arrangements as well as challenges and objectives in their everyday life provide insights in these orientations. the documentary method is combined with a habitus hermeneutic approach, which allows for the interpretation of reconstructed habitual patterns with sensitivity to social inequalities (lange-vester/teiwes-kügler 2013). findings presented at aoir 2024 at aoir 2024, the methodological approach of dilaboration as well as findings from three group discussions with regard to conditions of participation in non-formal (digitalised) educational arrangements from a marginalised youth’s perspective were presented and contrasted with a privileged youth’s perspective. they mirror previous findings on habitual differences of children and youth in relation to social inequalities. firstly, self-descriptions of skills in formal education by marginalised youth as opposed to privileged youth correspond with jünger’s (2008) findings on resource-specific (formal) educational logics and are proven to hold true for non-formal contexts: while marginalised youth describe themselves as unskilled in formal education and relate their non-formally and informally acquired skills to future professionalisation, privileged youth describe themselves as skilled in various educational contexts while they do not discuss possible career perspectives. secondly, patterns of resource-specific structuring of leisure time activities, similar to lareau’s (2011) findings, were reconstructed: while marginalised youth describe mostly spontaneous and unstructured activities and focus on material (i.e. financial) aspects of daily life, privileged youth describe highly structured weekly schedules and focus on programmatic aspects in non-formal activities and represent an orientation in autonomous self-unfolding / self-expression. in relation to findings from ethnographic research within dilaboration, it can be stated that elements of “non-formality” in educational arrangements, that is openness and flexibility, are more likely to match with marginalised youth’s orientations. regarding the conference theme “industry”, this approach provides an alternative perspective on digital education, which is often discussed in relation to requirements of the labour market and employability, see e.g. the discussion on future and education skills 2030 (oecd 2023). this paper rejects a perspective on digital education that primarily considers industries’ requirements and education as producing labour force. instead, non-formal digitalised educational arrangements are researched as structures that may provide support and acquire meaning in marginalised youth’s everyday lives within their respective communities by taking up a (marginalised) youth’s perspectives. references bohnsack, ralf. 2010. ‘documentary method and group discussions’. pp. 99–124 in qualitative analysis and documentary method in international educational research, edited by r. bohnsack, n. pfaff, and w. weller. verlag barbara budrich. dawson, emily. 2014. ‘equity in informal science education: developing an access and equity framework for science museums and science centres’. studies in science education 50(2):209–247. doi: 10.1080/03057267.2014.957558. fujii, michi s., nadia kutscher, and klara-marie niermann. 2021. ‘grenzen pädagogischen handelns: medienbildung zwischen anerkennung und handlungsbefähigung’. pp. 39-50 in pädagogik, soziale arbeit und digitalität: = education, social work and digitality, edited by j. wahl, i. schell-kiehl, and t. damberger. weinheim basel: beltz juventa. jeong, shinhee, soo jeoung han, jin lee, suravee sunalai, and seung won yoon. 2018. ‘integrative literature review on informal learning: antecedents, conceptualizations, and future directions’. in human resource development review 17(2):128–152. doi: 10.1177/1534484318772242. jörissen, benjamin, and winfried marotzki. 2009. ‘medienbildung eine einführung: theorie methoden analysen’. bad heilbrunn: klinkhardt. jünger, rahel. 2008. ‘bildung für alle?’ wiesbaden: vs verlag für sozialwissenschaften. kutscher, nadia, and dominik farrenberg. 2014. ‘teilhabe und soziale kompetenz durch die nutzung von digitalen medien: herausforderungen für die kinderund jugendpolitik. expertise für den 10. kinderund jugendbericht des landes nordrhein-westfalen’. vechta. lange-vester, andrea, and christel teiwes-kügler. 2013. ‘das konzept der habitushermeneutik in der milieuforschung’. pp. 149–74 in pierre bourdieus konzeption des habitus, edited by a. lenger, c. schneickert, and f. schumacher. wiesbaden: springer fachmedien wiesbaden. lareau, annette. 2011. ‘unequal childhoods: class, race, and family life’. 2nd ed., with an update a decade later. berkeley: university of california press. oecd. 2023. ‘oecd future of education and skills 2030. oecd learning compass 2030. a series of concept notes’. oecd. 2024. ‘education at a glance 2024’: oecd indicators. oecd. rauschenbach, thomas, hans rudolf leu, sabine lingenauber, wolfgang mack, matthias schilling, kornelia schneider, and ivo züchner. 2004. ‘non-formale und informelle bildung im kindesund jugendalter’. edited by bmbf. berlin: bmbf. spanhel, dieter. 2020. ‘kinder, jugendliche und junge erwachsene in digitalisierten lernwelten’. pp. 101–14 in handbuch soziale arbeit und digitalisierung, edited by n. kutscher, t. ley, u. seelmeyer, f. siller, a. tillmann, and i. zorn. weinheim basel: beltz juventa. streicher, barbara, kathrin unterleitner, and heidrun schulze. 2014. ‘knowledge rooms — science communication in local, welcoming spaces to foster social inclusion’. journal of science communication 13(02). doi: 10.22323/2.13020303. walther, andreas. 2014. ‘aneignung und anerkennung. subjektbezogene und soziale dimensionen eines sozialpädagogischen bildungsbegriffs’. pp. 97–112 in tätigkeit-aneignung-bildung, edited by deinet, ulrich/reutlinger, christian. wiesbaden: springer vs. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation: are, c. (2023, october). researching under platforms’ gaze: rethinking the challenges of platform governance research. paper presented at aoir 2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, united states: aoir. retrieved from: https://spir.aoir.org/ researching under platforms’ gaze: rethinking the challenges of platform governance research carolina are centre for digital citizens, northumbria university introduction in 2021, meta, the tech giant and parent company of facebook, whatsapp and instagram, shut down two new york university researchers’ accounts, preventing them from studying political ads and misinformation with the pretence of protecting user privacy (hatmaker, 2021). many, however, viewed meta’s move as a way to hinder the researchers’ transparency work, and the shut-down raised various concerns about platforms’ power over knowledge and their gatekeeping of information (ibid), which affects researchers and users alike. towards the ‘revolutions in research methods’ theme, this essay addresses the challenges that researching on social media platforms through the same platforms poses to researchers, particularly when they are part of and/or observe subcultures and content at the margins, such as nudity and sex work. my goal is to examine how the intersection of platform power, academic precarity and the creator economy affects early-career researchers and academics. at the heart of this are the questions: how can researchers gather data, disseminate results and establish a professional profile under platforms’ all-encompassing gaze? what does platform governance or the regulatory dynamics that determine the freedoms, responsibilities and liabilities of platform companies (tiideberg, 2021) and its focus on specific areas of control mean for researching content and users at the margins? what risks do platforms themselves pose to researchers’ work? and how does the broader precarity of particularly earlycareer academic work intersect with the effects of platform power? these questions are urgent and important, because while platforms can offer extraordinary research opportunities, “their design and day-to-day functioning can impose constraints largely outside the control of researchers” (franzke et al., 2020:12). in short, they are both a site of opportunity (i.e. work) and oppression in the form of https://spir.aoir.org/ abuse and surveillance, for users and researchers alike (coombes et al., 2022). it is this lack of control, leading to new research challenges and, often, heightened risks, that i wish to address here, reflecting on platforms’ influence and chilling effects on research and society within an already opaque social media governance system influenced by systemic offline inequalities (author & gerrard, forthcoming). i am no stranger to platform censorship myself, both in a research and personal capacity: my social media accounts, essential towards my research and, during some stages of my life, towards my income, have been repeatedly censored, affecting my ability to continue my work and to support myself (author, 2022). the entities that my research participants have defined as “nameless masters” of platforms (author, forthcoming) have created plenty a risk and challenge during my own studies on platform governance and its effects on sex working and sex-positive communities. i therefore begin this essay with a personal account of how such censorship has affected my work and research, not to centre my experience, but to highlight how the censorship of specific communities and stigmatised topics does not only affect users’ lives and livelihood it creates a chilling effect on the production of knowledge and research too, making a handful of opaque, mysterious and powerful companies all the more powerful. atay (2020) argues that when analysing digital spaces, researchers need fresh new methods. i therefore approach this paper through a digital autoethnography “to describe and systematically analyse personal experience in order to understand cultural experience” (ellis et al., 2011: 273). autoethnography is an “interpretation and creation of knowledge rooted in the native context,” using tenets of autobiography and ethnography that, in this case, will be used to describe direct experience of social media moderation’s processes (mitra, 2010: 15). despite being a creative method, autoethnography still requires researchers “to be clear about their purpose, provide a level of analysis, and attend to the ethical issues that arise in this form of work” (stahlke wall, 2016: 5). this paper therefore features considerations on ethics, limitations and my positionality, while presenting “reflexive, critical, creative, evocative, and poetic firstperson narratives” to examine “cultural identity presentations and performances in digital spaces” (atay, 2020: 272). specifically, this paper takes an approach which regards my social media presence and research experience digital autoethnography, treating both as a narrative, a form of “digital life writing” which, when threaded together, “can tell the theoretically infused stories about the cultures in which we are situated” (ibid: 273) it is therefore important to state that although i come to the study of social media governance with the significant privilege afforded by being a white, cisgender, university-educated bisexual woman with no lived experiences of sex work, posting sex work adjacent content and researching on the moderation of nudity and sex work has meant facing significant online and offline challenges as a user and as an academic alike. these experiences have shaped me as a researcher and as a person and will therefore shape this paper. similarly to coombes et al. (2022), i argue that these instances of censorship both as a creator and a researcher make me an expert of my own experiences, which are applicable to various user populations and early-career researchers, and therefore worth addressing. i situate these experiences within broader platform governance literature, conceptualising it as researching under ‘platforms’ gaze’. inspired by massanari (2018), i define ‘platforms’ gaze’ as a gendered, raced, heteronormative and puritan surveillance, constructing a social reality where marginalised individuals and dissent are rendered both hyper-visible and vulnerable to harassment by users and silencing by platforms. following this definition, i offer thoughts on how platforms’ gaze affects researchers gathering data subject to platforms’ rules and early-career researchers constructing their personae through digital media. i highlight researcher vulnerability in data collection, results dissemination and persona management, which i problematise in connection with the increasing digital labour required by the ‘impact agenda,’ or the quest for publications, promotion and visibility within the academy (jerome, 2020). i conclude with considerations on activist interventions in the platform governance field and with changes in the academy to mitigate researcher precarity. despite my privileged position as a researcher, my experiences with platform governance mirrored that of censored users: faced with no transparency from platforms, i found myself reverse-engineering their moderation through stringing together my experiences of censorship to help others in my situation and demand better communication (author, 2021). these experiences of precarity in my academic and platform work meant i often chose my research methods not only according to which methodology was more appropriate to my studies, but also according to what was available to me in terms of time and resources, having started to observe platform governance ahead of securing a research post. platforms were my means of data collection, as they were largely free to use when observing my own experiences. just like any other user, i had to post about my research by acting within their community guidelines and opaque governance to conduct autoethnographies, ethnographies, qualitative surveys, interviews, content and discourse analyses. my personal experiences as a user therefore blended with my work experiences as a researcher, generating specific risks and challenges borne out of academic and platform work precarity – issues which badly need discussing if we truly aim to revolutionise research methods and practices. references ahearne, g. (2015) ‘between the sex industry and academia: navigating stigma and disgust.’ graduate journal of social science, 11(2), pp. 28–37. atay, a. (2020) ‘what is cyber or digital autoethnography?’ international review of qualitative research 13(3): 267–279. are, c. (2020) ‘a corpo-civic space: a notion to address social media’s corporate/civic hybridity.’ first monday, 25(6). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v25i6.10603. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v25i6.10603 are, c. (2021) ‘the shadowban cycle: an autoethnography of pole dancing, nudity and censorship on instagram.’ feminist media studies, pp.1-18. doi: 10.1080/14680777.2021.1928259. are, c. (2022) ‘an autoethnography of automated powerlessness: lacking platform affordances in instagram and tiktok account deletions.’ media, culture & society, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01634437221140531. are, c. (forthcoming) ‘flagging as a silencing tool: exploring the relationship between de-platforming of sex and online abuse on instagram and tiktok.’ new media & society. are, c. and gerrard, y. (2023) ‘violence and the feminist potential of content moderation.’ in: k. boyle and s. berridge (eds.), routledge companion on gender, media and violence. london; new york: routledge. are, c. and paasonen, s. (2021) ‘sex in the shadows of celebrity.’ porn studies forum. armstrong, l. (2022) ‘the courage to “get naked”: stigma, disclosure and lived experience in sex work research.’ sexualities, 0(0) 1–18. bishop, s. (2019) ‘managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip.’ new media & society, 21 (11-12), pp: 2589-2606. blunt, d. and wolf, a. (2020) ‘erased: the impact of fosta-sesta and the removal of backpage on sex workers.’ antitraffickingreview.org, special issue – technology, anti-trafficking, and speculative futures, 14: 117-121. bronstein, c. (2021) ‘deplatforming sexual speech in the age of fosta/ sesta.’ porn studies, 8(4), pp. 367-380, doi: 10.1080/23268743.2021.1993972. browne, s. (2015) dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. durham: duke university press. coombes, e., wolf, a., blunt, d. and sparks, k. (2022) ‘disabled sex workers’ fight for digital rights, platform accessibility, and design justice.’ disability studies quarterly, 42 (2). cotter, k. (2021) ‘“shadowbanning is not a thing”: black box gaslighting and the power to independently know and credibly critique algorithms.’ information, communication & society, doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2021.1994624. duffy, b.e. & meisner, c. (2022) ‘platform governance at the margins: social media creators’ experiences with algorithmic (in)visibility.’ media, culture & society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2057047320959855. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01634437221140531 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f2057047320959855 ellis, c.s. & bochner, a.p. (2006) ‘analyzing analytic autoethnography.’ journal of contemporary ethnography 35: 429–449. foucault, m. (1995) discipline and punish: the birth of the prison (2nd ed., a. sheridan, trans.). new york, ny: vintage books. franzke, a. s., bechmann, a., zimmer, m., ess, c. and the association of internet researchers (2020) ‘internet research: ethical guidelines 3.0.’ aoir.org. https://aoir.org/reports/ethics3.pdf. fuchs, c. (2011) ‘how can surveillance be defined?’ matrizes, 5, pp.109-136. gillespie, t. (2010) ‘the politics of platforms’ new media & society, 12 (3): 347– 364. doi:10.1177/1461444809342738. gillespie, t. & aufderheide, p. & carmi, e. & gerrard, y. & gorwa, r. & matamoros-fernández, a. & roberts, s. t. & sinnreich, a. & myers west, s. (2020) ‘expanding the debate about content moderation: scholarly research agendas for the coming policy debates.’ internet policy review, 9(4). https://doi.org/10.14763/2020.4.1512. goanta, c. and ortolani, p. (2021) ‘unpacking content moderation: the rise of social media platforms as online civil courts.’ forthcoming, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3969360. haimson, o.; delmonaco, d.; nie, p. and wegner, a. (2021) ‘disproportionate removals and differing content moderation experiences for conservative, transgender, and black social media users: marginalization and moderation gray areas.’ proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction,5, (cscw2), no.: 466. pp 1–35, https://doi.org/10.1145/3479610. hall, j. (2022) ‘academia excludes sex workers. a new generation of sex work researchers is changing things.’ the daily dot. https://www.dailydot.com/pleaser/sexwork-academia/. hammond, n., kingston, s. (2014) ‘experiencing stigma as sex work researchers in professional and personal lives.’ sexualities, 17(3), pp. 329–347. hatmaker, t. (2021) ‘facebook cuts off nyu researcher access, prompting rebuke from lawmakers.’ techcrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/04/facebook-adobservatory-nyu-researchers/. hughes, e.c. (1958) men and their work. glencoe, il: free press. hughes, e.c. (1962) ‘good people and dirty work.’ social problems, 10(1), pp. 3– 11. https://aoir.org/reports/ethics3.pdf https://doi.org/10.14763/2020.4.1512 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3969360 https://dl.acm.org/toc/pacmhci/2021/5/cscw2 https://doi.org/10.1145/3479610 https://www.dailydot.com/pleaser/sex-work-academia/ https://www.dailydot.com/pleaser/sex-work-academia/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/04/facebook-ad-observatory-nyu-researchers/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/04/facebook-ad-observatory-nyu-researchers/ inge, s. (2022) ‘major uk funders commit to increase phd stipend.’ research professional news, https://researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-charities-andsocieties-2022-9-major-uk-funders-commit-to-increase-phd-stipend/. irvine, j.m. (2014) ‘is sexuality research ‘dirty work’? institutionalized stigma in the production of sexual knowledge.’ sexualities, 17(5/6), pp. 632–656. jee, c. (2021) ‘a feminist internet would be better for everyone.’ mit technology review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/04/01/1020478/feministinternet-culture-activist-harassment-herd-signal/. jerome, l. (2020) ‘making sense of the impact agenda in uk higher education a case study of preventing violent extremism policy in schools.’ journal of social science education, 19(2), pp.8-23. jokubauskaitė, e. and stegeman, h. (2022) ‘“black boxed” & “shadowbanned”: barriers to knowledge on online sexuality.’ plexxi.org, plexxxi.org/black-boxedshadowbanned-barriers-to-knowledge-on-online/. kaye, d. (2019) speech police the global struggle to govern the internet. new york: columbia global reports. massanari, a. l. (2018) ‘rethinking research ethics, power, and the risk of visibility in the era of the “alt-right” gaze.’ social media + society, pp.1-8. mulvey, l. (1989) visual and other pleasures. bloomington: indiana university press. nolan brown, e. (2022) ‘the new campaign for a sex-free internet.’ reason. available at: https://reason.com/2022/04/09/the-new-campaign-for-a-sex-free-internet/. poole, a. (2022) ‘methodologies don’t hurt people, bad people wielding methodologies do: autoethnography and that paper from qualitative research.’ british educational research association. https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/methodologies-donthurt-people-bad-people-wielding-methodologies-do-autoethnography-and-that-paperfrom-qualitative-research. schoenebeck, s. and blackwell, l. (2021) ‘reimagining social media governance: harm, accountability, and repair.’ yale journal of law and technology, 23, pp. 113152. simpson, j. (2022) ‘whorephobia in higher education: a reflexive account of researching cis women’s experiences of stripping while at university.’ higher education, 84, pp: 17–31. spina, n., smithers, k., harris, j. & mewburn, i. (2022) ‘back to zero? precarious employment in academia amongst “older” early career researchers, a life-course https://researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-charities-and-societies-2022-9-major-uk-funders-commit-to-increase-phd-stipend/ https://researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-charities-and-societies-2022-9-major-uk-funders-commit-to-increase-phd-stipend/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/04/01/1020478/feminist-internet-culture-activist-harassment-herd-signal/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/04/01/1020478/feminist-internet-culture-activist-harassment-herd-signal/ https://reason.com/2022/04/09/the-new-campaign-for-a-sex-free-internet/ https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/methodologies-dont-hurt-people-bad-people-wielding-methodologies-do-autoethnography-and-that-paper-from-qualitative-research https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/methodologies-dont-hurt-people-bad-people-wielding-methodologies-do-autoethnography-and-that-paper-from-qualitative-research https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/methodologies-dont-hurt-people-bad-people-wielding-methodologies-do-autoethnography-and-that-paper-from-qualitative-research approach.’ british journal of sociology of education, 43:4, pp. 534-549, doi: 10.1080/01425692.2022.2057925. stahlke wall, s. (2016) ‘toward a moderate autoethnography.’ international journal of qualitative methods 15: 1–9. stardust, z., garcia, g. and egwatu, c. (2020) ‘what can tech learn from sex workers? sexual ethics, tech design & decoding stigma.’ berkman klein center collection. https://medium.com/berkman-klein-center/what-can-tech-learn-from-sexworkers-8e0100f0b4b9. tiideberg, k. (2021) ‘sex, power and platform governance.’ porn studies forum. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/23268743.2021.1974312. wróblewska, m. n. (2021) ‘the impact agenda in four acts – or, how impact moved from concept to governing principle.’ lse blogs, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2021/07/15/the-impact-agenda-in-fouracts-or-how-the-impact-agenda-moved-from-concept-to-governing-principle/. https://medium.com/berkman-klein-center/what-can-tech-learn-from-sex-workers-8e0100f0b4b9 https://medium.com/berkman-klein-center/what-can-tech-learn-from-sex-workers-8e0100f0b4b9 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/23268743.2021.1974312?needaccess=true& https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2021/07/15/the-impact-agenda-in-four-acts-or-how-the-impact-agenda-moved-from-concept-to-governing-principle/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2021/07/15/the-impact-agenda-in-four-acts-or-how-the-impact-agenda-moved-from-concept-to-governing-principle/ selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 iliadis, a., tripodi, f., dave, a., jones, l. k., acker, a., & ford, h. (2023, october). infrastructures of manipulation. panel presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. infrastructures of manipulation andrew iliadis temple university francesca tripodi university of north carolina at chapel hill aashka dave university of north carolina at chapel hill leslie kay jones rutgers university amelia acker university of texas at austin heather ford university of technology sydney this panel presents research on web and information infrastructures used for manipulative purposes. in contrast to platform manipulation (woolley & howard, 2018; benkler et al., 2018), where users such as bad actors seek to gamify and exploit the weaknesses of online social media platforms like twitter and tiktok, the papers in the present panel describe studies where web or information infrastructures such as those involved in search and information retrieval are manipulated to alter or produce facts (rather than social commentary on facts). for example, studies have shown how infrastructures like google search are manipulated by conservative elites (tripodi, 2022), how anonymous editors use wikidata to revise the distribution of information related to political protest movements (ford, 2022), and how administrators harness information schemas to improve the findability of their advertising content (iliadis, 2022). in these areas and more, web and digital infrastructures are being manipulated to serve the interests of politically motivated actors (acker, 2018; acker & donovan, 2019). infrastructures typically refer to shared public services like sewers, telephone poles, and electricity. according to bowker et al. (2010, p. 98), information infrastructure refers to “digital facilities and services usually associated with the internet.” information infrastructures are thus enabling resources, in network form, whose key role is that of a distributor, but rather than goods or services, information infrastructures distribute “knowledge, culture, and practice” (bowker et al., 2010, p. 114). such structures do this through their development of ontologies or classification schemes that enable dividing the world into categories or, through their application to large data sets, by offering an enormous, open store of data that can be used by others for a variety of purposes, such as retrieving facts and sharing information. recently, several scholars have elaborated on the political nature of such infrastructural processes of digitization and datafication, including in the domains of archiving and preservation (thylstrup, 2018, 2022), governance and management (flyverbom & murray, 2018), metrics and sorting (alaimo & kallinikos, 2021), and the creation of global ontologies for things like web search (iliadis et al., 2023) and surveillance services (iliadis & acker, 2022). manipulation of social media content and messaging is likewise a major research area over the last several years owing to the prevalence of online misinformation and disinformation campaigns (reagle, 2016; paris, 2021; culloty & suiter, 2021), particularly those associated with electoral politics (tucker & persily, 2020) and health misinformation (keselman et al., 2022). yet, online manipulation is not a new phenomenon and has long been discussed as a feature of the web in the context of the history of trolling, abuse, and hate (phillips, 2015, 2019). manipulation is thus a multivalent concept and is found in several domains that share the notion that manipulation is related to altering, editing, treating, controlling, and influencing content and messages for misleading individuals. historically, though, less attention has focused on manipulation as it has been mobilized infrastructurally, particularly concerning the information infrastructures that transmit content and messages. infrastructures should be understood here broadly as undergirding the communication structures that transmit messages and content. such infrastructures can be found in computer science, news and journalism, government, policy, and other areas where messaging is organized using some form of schema, whether technical, linguistic, financial, or otherwise. the first paper uses interviews to highlight the “importance of abortion-related web search and whether or not that system has been manipulated by actors trying to prevent abortion access.” the paper “examines how people (users) search for information about abortion, how organizations (content providers) utilize search engine optimization to reach potential users, and how advertisers try to attract visitors.” the second paper uses autoethnography and process tracing with respect to “the ap african american studies debacle in order to elucidate digitally mediated disinformation as a strategy for stoking moral panic and thereby gaining widespread public buy-in to the establishment of educational censorship infrastructure.” the third paper analyzes palantir as a surveillance platform that shapes and is shaped by infrastructures of manipulation. the paper “provides a method for researching companies like palantir and its surveillance infrastructures” through digital media archiving of “over 600+ documents which have been stored, cleaned, annotated, and uploaded into an online digital archive that will be publicly available for media researchers to study.” the fourth and final paper is “an ethnographic study of a single wikipedia article and how it evolved over the course of a decade” in the context of political revolutions. the paper describes “a framework for understanding new methods of controlling facts in the context of automated knowledge products” and “the importance of semantic infrastructure to new methods of control and influence on wikipedia and the wider knowledge infrastructures that are increasingly dependent on it.” references acker, a. (2018). data craft: the manipulation of social media metadata. data & society. https://datasociety.net/library/data-craft/ acker, a., & donovan, j. (2019). data craft: a theory/methods package for critical internet studies. information, communication & society, 22(11), 1590-1609. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1645194 alaimo, c., & kallinikos, j. (2021). managing by data: algorithmic categories and organizing. organization studies, 42(9), 1385–1407. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840620934062 benkler, y., faris, r., & roberts, h. (2018). network propaganda: manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in american politics. oxford university press. bowker, g. c., baker, k., millerand, f., & ribes, d. (2010). toward information infrastructure studies: ways of knowing in a networked environment. in: j. hunsinger, l. klastrup, & m. allen (eds.), international handbook of internet research. springer. https://doi.org/10.1007 /978-1-4020-9789-8_5 culloty, e., & suiter, j. (2021). disinformation and manipulation in digital media: information pathologies. routledge. flyverbom, m., & murray, j. (2018). datastructuring—organizing and curating digital traces into action. big data & society, 5(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718799114 ford, h. (2022). writing the revolution: wikipedia and the survival of facts in the digital age. mit press. iliadis, i. (2022). semantic media: mapping meaning on the internet. polity. iliadis, a., & acker, a. (2022) the seer and the seen: surveying palantir’s surveillance platform. the information society, 38(5), 334-363. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2022.2100851 iliadis, a., acker, a., stevens, w., & kavakli, b. (2023). one schema to rule them all: how schema.org models the world of search. journal of the association for information science and technology. 1-64. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24744 keselman, a., smith, c. a., & wilson, a. j. (eds.). (2022). combating online health misinformation: a professional's guide to helping the public. rowman & littlefield. paris, b. (2021). configuring fakes: digitized bodies, the politics of evidence, and agency. social media + society, 7(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211062919 phillips, w. (2015). this is why we can't have nice things: mapping the relationship between online trolling and mainstream culture. mit press. phillips, w. (2019). it wasn’t just the trolls: early internet culture, “fun,” and the fires of exclusionary laughter. social media + society, 5(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119849493 reagle, j. (2016). reading the comments: likers, haters, and manipulators at the bottom of the web. mit press. thylstrup, n. b. (2019). the politics of mass digitization. mit press. thylstrup, n. b. (2022). the ethics and politics of data sets in the age of machine learning: deleting traces and encountering remains. media, culture & society, 44(4), 655-671. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437211060 tripodi, f. b. (2022). the propagandists' playbook: how conservative elites manipulate search and threaten democracy. yale university press. tucker, j. a., & persily, n. (2020). social media and democracy: the state of the field, prospects for reform. cambridge university press. woolley, s. c., & howard, p. (eds.) (2018). computational propaganda: political parties, politicians, and political manipulation on social media. oxford university press. abortion near me? how advertising thwarts access to health care francesca tripodi university of north carolina at chapel hill aashka dave university of north carolina at chapel hill access to an abortion is a crucial component of overall maternal care. since abortion care is time-sensitive, and many states are trying to reduce the gestational limits for abortion, early access to effective abortion services is a critical information need. nonetheless, information access to abortion services is complicated by the presence of crisis pregnancy centers (cpcs). cpcs are organizations, typically religiously affiliated, that provide free or affordable non-clinical services to pregnant people. most are not licensed medical facilities and are primarily staffed by volunteers who do not adhere to u.s. medical guidelines (baggett, 2022). journalistic accounts document how cpcs rely on search engine optimization, targeted advertising, and websites to make their centers look like health clinics (cott et al., 2022). building on the assumption that audiences are inclined to go to sites like google to find information about abortion care, our research seeks to consider how misinformation, as a sociotechnical vulnerability, intersects with web searches. sociotechnical researchers try to understand why and how misand disinformation is believed by highlighting the role epistemology plays in how people validate information (anderson, 2021; marwick, 2018; yin et al., 2018). these studies find that tactics for spreading disinformation often exploit the human desire to fact-check information and encourage audiences to engage in participatory practices to create alternative facts (marwick & partin, 2022; lee et al., 2021; starbird et al., 2019; tripodi, 2021). by providing a tangible do-it-yourself quality to the process of information seeking, this “ikea effect of misinformation” empowers audiences with a faux autonomy, making them feel like they are drawing their own conclusions (tripodi, 2022). understanding the important role search engines play in seeking out information about abortion is critical, yet limited attention has been paid to the importance of abortion-related web search and whether or not that system has been manipulated by actors trying to prevent abortion access. this paper examines how people (users) search for information about abortion, how organizations (content providers) utilize search engine optimization to reach potential users, and how advertisers try to attract visitors. drawing on analysis of interviews and search tasks with 42 individuals in four locations across the state of north carolina, we argue that user ability to find accurate information about how to terminate a pregnancy is primarily driven by user position on abortion (i.e., whether they support terminating a pregnancy), since their initial search determines their search results. however, our findings also indicate that search engine optimization and advertising make finding accurate information more challenging because cpcs dominate search results regardless of user intent. methods from july november 2022, our team conducted interviews and search tasks with 42 participants at four different public libraries throughout north carolina. library locations were chosen based on political variation to ensure a mix of responses from both conservative and progressive patrons. following the work of prominent internet scholars, researchers utilized interviews combined with participant observation; a researcher would sit one-on-one with each participant and perform a series of search tasks (hargittai & young, 2012). during tasks, researchers prompted participants to “think aloud,” to analyze participant information retrieval processes as they occur (jaspers et al. 2004). after conducting a practice prompt, participants were read a series of four scenarios on politically divisive topics: abortion, gun control, the outcome of the 2020 u.s. presidential election, and voting rights. this paper focuses exclusively on the first prompt, which read: “a close friend of yours recently found out that they are unexpectedly pregnant and are considering terminating the pregnancy. do you have an opinion on what they should do?” after stating their opinion, participants were asked to take ten minutes to search for more information about the topic and find information that would be useful to their friend. search tasks were conducted on a loaner laptop utilizing the library wifi network. to record their responses, the researchers used open broadcaster software (obs), a video recording software that captures audio and screen recordings of what participants were doing on the loaner laptop to control for personalization. by discussing each topic in turn and then recording participants' search processes in reaction to individual prompts, researchers could make inferences about how user presuppositions inform search queries and document how they determined what constituted trustworthy information. analysis of the think aloud interviews was guided by the principles of grounded theory, with an emphasis on constructing thematic conceptions (charmaz, 2006). interview recordings were used to analyze participants’ positions on abortion, the words they used to form their searches, which returns they received, and which information they clicked on or identified as reliable. findings/conclusion in all the interviews, the person’s intention influenced their choice of keywords, which subsequently influenced the information returned to them. those who supported their friend’s decision used phrases that would help their friend find a place that could terminate their pregnancy (e.g., “planned parenthood” or “abortion services + location”). those who did not support their friend’s desire to terminate the pregnancy used language that led to resources that may have changed their friend’s mind (e.g., “alternatives for abortion” or “adoption services”). regardless of the seeker’s intent, cpcs dominated search results. advertised cpcs were returned for every query that included the phrase abortion. even when the person was looking for information about how and where their friend could terminate a pregnancy. failing to differentiate between a query like “abortion near me” versus “alternatives for abortion” suggests google’s advertising structure connects and classifies cpcs to the phrase “abortion” regardless of the perceived intent, suggesting that placement of advertised cpcs is not accidental and a purposeful strategy to dominate search returns. by conducting an exploratory project on how people’s opinions shape their keywords, this research provides a starting point to better understand how content providers and advertisers anticipate searches regarding abortion and the way information systems can be manipulated by political actors. while forty-two people does not serve as a representative sample of all information-seeking practices concerning abortion, the data does reveal important insights into “the query, the contents, and the architecture of the system” (rieder & sire, 2014, p.198). given the overwhelming preference respondents had for google, both for their browser and their search engine, this paper serves as an important case study on how the tech giant orders information concerning reproductive health across the state of north carolina and the role cpcs play in complicating access to effective abortion care. references anderson, c. w. (2021). fake news is not a virus: on platforms and their effects. communication theory, 31(1), 42–61. https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtaa008 baggett, l. (2022, april 7). new data reveals cpcs are spreading, casting wider net to attract non-pregnant clients. university of georgia college of public health. https://publichealth.uga.edu/new-data-reveals-cpcs-are-spreading/ charmaz, k. (2006). constructing grounded theory. sage publications. cott, e., tabrizy, n., aufrichtig, a., lieberman, r., & morgan, n. (2022, june 23). they searched online for abortion clinics. they found anti-abortion centers. the new york times. hargittai, e., & young, h. (2012). searching for a “plan b”: young adults’ strategies for finding information about emergency contraception online. policy & internet, 4(2), 1– 23. https://doi.org/10.1515/1944-2866.1176 jaspers, m. w., steen, t., van den bos, c., & geenen, m. (2004). the think aloud method: a guide to user interface design. international journal of medical informatics, 73(11-12), 781–795. lee, c., yang, t., inchoco, g. d., jones, g. m., & satyanarayan, a. (2021). viral visualizations: how coronavirus skeptics use orthodox data practices to promote unorthodox science online. proceedings of the 2021 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445211 marwick, a. e. (2018). why do people share fake news? a sociotechnical model of media effects. georgetown law technology review, 2(2), 474–512. marwick, a. e., & partin, w. c. (2022). constructing alternative facts: populist expertise and the qanon conspiracy. new media & society, 14614448221090200. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221090201 rieder, b., & sire, g. (2014). conflicts of interest and incentives to bias: a microeconomic critique of google’s tangled position on the web. new media & society, 16(2), 195–211. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444813481195 starbird, k., arif, a., & wilson, t. (2019). disinformation as collaborative work: surfacing the participatory nature of strategic information operations. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 3(cscw), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359229 tripodi, f. b. (2021). reopen demands as public health threat: a sociotechnical framework for understanding the stickiness of misinformation. computational and mathematical organization theory. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10588-021-09339-8 https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtaa008 https://publichealth.uga.edu/new-data-reveals-cpcs-are-spreading/ https://publichealth.uga.edu/new-data-reveals-cpcs-are-spreading/ https://doi.org/10.1515/1944-2866.1176 https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445211 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221090201 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221090201 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444813481195 https://doi.org/10.1145/3359229 https://doi.org/10.1145/3359229 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10588-021-09339-8 tripodi, f. b. (2022). the propagandists' playbook: how conservative elites manipulate search and threaten democracy. yale university press. yin, l., roscher, f., bonneau, r., nagler, j., & tucker, j. a. (2018). your friendly neighborhood troll: the internet research agency’s use of local and fake news in the 2016 u.s. presidential campaign [data report]. nyu center for social media and politics. digitally mediated disinformation: the case of ap african american studies leslie kay jones rutgers university on january 21, 2023 republican senator manny diaz, jr. tweeted an infographic created by the florida department of education delineating a number of “issues” found with the pilot curriculum proposed for us classrooms by the ap college board for a new ap african american studies course. the infographic consisted of a two-column table, with the left side identifying subject areas, and the right side containing quotations, names of scholars, and brief definitions of the offending fields. the content of the infographic was designed to convince readers that the ap african american studies curriculum was a vehicle for ideological indoctrination of high school students, and that the smuggled ideologies were age inappropriate, immoral, and threatening to civility and social cohesion. the infographic included contested interpretations of ideological positions, misrepresentations of research and theory, and false statements about included course content. the florida doe threatened to ban the course from the state if its concerns were not adequately addressed by the college board. i argue that the framing of the aas curriculum and subsequent coercion to censor its content constitute what reddi, kuo, and kreiss call “identity propaganda,” defined as “strategic narratives that target and exploit identitybased differences to maintain existing hegemonic social orders and/or undermine challenges to extant political power” (reddi, kuo, & kreiss 2021, p. 2). the current paper applies autoethnography (berger 2014) and process tracing (collier 2011) to the ap african american studies debacle in order to elucidate digitally mediated disinformation as a strategy for stoking moral panic and thereby gaining widespread public buy-in to the establishment of educational censorship infrastructure. i ground this case study in two concerns expressed by michael l. miller and cristian vaccari: 1) “the risk that research overemphasizes direct and short-term implications of digital threats on individuals and specific groups at the expense of indirect and mediumterm effects on collective norms and expectations of behavior” (miller & vaccari 2020) and 2) “that perhaps the most significant threat to democracy around the world is the fact that flows of information, and the democratic quality of such flows, vary significantly by political and social context” (miller & vaccari 2020). i anticipate that the involvement of racial politics may itself significantly influence flows of information and the propagation of identity propaganda frames via segregated digital discussion of news objects (mcilwain 2017). the case is particularly demonstrative of the first concern because censorship proponents leverage the specter of censorship itself, framed as “wokeness” (see “political correctness” in earlier historic periods) to establish a sense of imminent threat to unarticulated shared civic values in a complex, long-term strategy that eludes the scope accountability journalism. the threat is proactively defined in socially contentious terms, while the targets of the threat (people, ideas, ideals, institutions) are left to individual audience members’ imagination. the mechanism of digital mediation is significant because, following the second concern, it illustrates the challenges of addressing rapidly disseminated false information when the targets of the disinformation have themselves been successfully framed as purveyors of disinformation. by announcing its objections to the ap african american studies via twitter, the florida doe was able to promote its framing directly to a national public and circumvent factchecking protocols followed by journalistic organizations. these fact-checking protocols created additional delays as reporting journalists sought authoritative commentary on emerging counter-frames. this inquiry focuses on “the way scholars and the public conceptualize problematic information” (freelon & wells 2020, p. 152). in the aftermath of the infographic’s release, many of the scholars named as problematic curricular inclusions themselves became the subject of public and media inquiry, even though they were not involved with the development of the curriculum. many of these scholars’ names and works would not be assigned as student reading or recommended as references to students, but rather were included in marketing materials developed to demonstrate the quality of the curriculum to generalist consultant during the curriculum’s early drafting stage. where scholars were assigned as reading, their ideas were grievously misrepresented, a tactic common to the conservative anticrt movement’s orchestrated attack on the institution of public education (goldberg, pg. 360). nevertheless, the florida department of education successfully prompted widespread public concern about the “indoctrination” of ideas and intellectual frameworks like intersectionality, critical race theory, queer theory, black feminist literary thought, and reparations. in performing journalistic due diligence to inform the public of the developing controversy, media outlets were forced to repeat the original claims and justifications for censorship made by the florida doe, even in attempts to have them debunked by scholarly experts. in less than two weeks after the infographic prompted widespread media attention (bbc, npr, associated press, cnn, ny times), the ap college board produced a new final draft of the curriculum that removed references to intersectionality, critical race theory, black feminist literary thought, and reparations. the ap college board denied that the changes were made in response to the florida desantis administration, asserting that all changes had been made before the florida doe voiced its objections to the curriculum. this was followed by considerable debate on social media about the truthfulness and trustworthiness of the college board, news media (chiefly the ny times), and the florida governor. the college board was accused of obfuscating the extent to which political and marketing pressures influenced the redrafting of the curriculum. news media, particularly the ny times, were accused of making unverifiable assertions about the college board’s motivations in service of a political bias. ron desantis, finally, was accused of drumming up a media spectacle ahead of a run for us president. later reporting revealed significant contact between the college board and the florida doe over the course of several months before the original pilot curriculum was publicly impugned by the doe and leaked in american conservative digital-first media. timelines of communications between the florida doe and the college board spread rapidly via twitter, where clusters of readers developed discrete interpretations of the available evidence and conflicting reportage. rather than providing a basis for public consensus about the quality and necessity of the final ap african american studies curriculum, the ongoing discovery facilitated widespread, crossideological mistrust of information curation and dissemination practices of previously accepted sources. the ap african american studies controversy presents the opportunity for a case study of political disinformation within a modern media ecosystem where news agendas and framing are set through social media as often as through legacy media, and culturally accepted media “of record” must react to news stories at the pace of digital public squares. at the same time, social media users may perceive direct-to-social-media government propaganda as trustworthy primary sources when it is framed as an intervention to pressing social problems in an era where there is declining public trust in journalistic capacity to identify and address such problems. insofar as political actors have also become aware of this pattern, media researchers might productively seek to understand how this system can be strategically leveraged in service of political propaganda. in the case of florida, the february 2023 introduction of house bill 999 just a month after censoring ap african american studies underpins the stakes of curating and framing political controversies in the new media ecosystem. references berger, r. j. (2014). academic freedom and its discontents: an autoethnography. international review of qualitative research, 7(2), 258-273. collier, d. (2011). understanding process tracing. ps: political science & politics, 44(4), 823-830. freelon, d., & wells, c. (2020). disinformation as political communication. political communication, 37(2), 145-156. goldberg, d. t. (2023). 357 the war on critical race theory: turning a blind eye to the realities of racial injustice, the highly orchestrated right-wing attacks cast a body of scholarship about race in the law as a great threat to american society. in foundations of critical race theory in education (pp. 357-361). routledge. mcilwain, c. (2017). racial formation, inequality and the political economy of web traffic. information, communication & society, 20(7), 1073-1089. miller, m. l., & vaccari, c. (2020). digital threats to democracy: comparative lessons and possible remedies. the international journal of press/politics, 25(3), 333-356. reddi, m., kuo, r., & kreiss, d. (2021). identity propaganda: racial narratives and disinformation. new media & society, 14614448211029293 the palantir files: archives for investigative research of surveillance companies andrew iliadis temple university amelia acker university of texas at austin this paper describes a method for building documentary evidence to research surveillance companies. we build on work in critical data and internet studies (acker & donovan, 2019; iliadis & russo, 2016) and empirical investigative research of it organizations (carter, et al., 2021; iliadis et al., 2023), and proceed by assembling an archive of distributed documents concerning the surveillance company palantir. palantir is a data integration company that offers software to its customers who seek to surveil and collate sensitive data from heterogeneous sources for manipulation and control (brayne, 2017, 2020; ferguson, 2017; knight & gekker, 2020; munn, 2017; iliadis & acker, 2022). our paper provides a method for researching companies like palantir and its surveillance infrastructures (we define this method as ‘dragnet counter surveillance’) and describes several outcomes from this project relating to uncovering documents concerning privacy, civil liberties, and human rights abuses. as such, this paper proposes infrastructural manipulation as a double articulation whereby researchers build investigative document caches/archives to examine infrastructures of surveillance. while palantir supplies infrastructure to its customers for surveillance, it simultaneously attempts to mitigate privacy and civil liberties concerns through product design, public relations, and social engagement via its privacy & civil liberties engineering (pcl) team. we provide critical analysis of projects in which pcl is engaged, including in policing, philanthropy, and policy via the amassing of documents and construction of a digital archive to investigate palantir. these palantir-related materials reviewed include privacy impact assessments (pia), court documents, and materials obtained through freedom of information act (foia) requests. we provide a presentation of an archive of these palantir materials using a customized metadata schema and end by theorizing an apparent contraction in palantir’s business dealings, between a self-described pcl mandate of ‘corporate social responsibility’ (matten & moon, 2004; lindgreen & swaen, 2010) towards not collecting data (palantir, 2023) and the company’s aim of achieving widespread data integration for its clients across information infrastructures, including those where human rights abuses remain an issue (bell & kleinman, 2020). we suggest that palantir be studied as a surveillance infrastructure and recommend several steps toward future empirical investigative research of surveillance companies. the dragnet surveillance method our dragnet surveillance method is proposed as a way of facilitating empirical investigative research of it organizations like surveillance companies. dragnet surveillance is a method whereby researchers attempt to collect evidentiary data concerning the activities of surveillance platforms by scraping publicly available databases containing information about legal information, pias, foia requests, press releases, contracts, patents, and government documents. while our method encourages the widespread collection of case materials, we suggest that researchers develop a guiding question to which the data collection is meant to respond. in our case, we specifically sought to address the following claim made by palantir’s pcl team: “as a company, we do not collect data, sell data, or facilitate unauthorized sharing of data among customers or any other parties” (palantir, 2023). to evaluate this claim, we began looking for materials concerning descriptions of palantir’s data-collecting capabilities, particularly materials provided in contexts where palantir’s approaches to privacy are adjudicated externally from the organization, such as in court filings, software patents, and pias underwritten by palantir customers. we began by scraping material related to palantir from several sources, including court documents from justia (a commercial legal information database), pias from palantir customers, documents obtained via foia requests, press releases from business wire (a web source for disseminating such releases), government documents from a variety of domains (.gov, etc.), and third-party organization policy reports (such as those in the nonprofit sector). as of this writing, we collected over 600+ documents, which have been stored, cleaned, annotated, and uploaded into an online digital archive that will be publicly available for media researchers to study and are added to over 5,000 documents collected during prior palantir research (iliadis & acker, 2022). the documents are tagged using a customized metadata schema indicating their source, purpose, content, and connection to palantir-related activities. findings and conclusion preliminary findings from our study indicate that palantir indeed expends considerable resources countering claims and accusations related to deceptive business practices or the alleged data-collecting activities their software facilitates. for example, class action lawsuits have been initiated concerning palantir’s business dealings, including those relating to alleged deceptive stock practices concerning palantir’s use of specialpurpose acquisition companies (spac); one source describes “a highly unorthodox investment program in which palantir invested in early-stage companies in exchange for these companies agreeing to enter into contracts for palantir’s products and services (the “spac investment strategy”)” (sanchez, 2022). second, our sources show that “palantir initially claimed that it worked only with homeland security investigations, not with enforcement and removal operations,” yet documents obtained via foia found that us immigration and customs enforcement (ice) “did use palantir software to target relatives of unaccompanied minors” (evers, 2019). the government accountability group american oversight has issued further foia requests that ice produce records “sufficient to identify the number of administrative arrests during which ice personnel used any software or hardware contracted from palantir technologies” (ibid). lastly, pias obtained from the us department of justice (doj) indicate that data maintained in the palantir relational information management application “may be accessed by authorized civil division employees, other federal employees and contractors” (stanton, 2018). pias like those provided by the doj describe how nonclient individuals may have access to sensitive data amassed via palantir’s technologies, such as contractors. these and other findings provide evidence against some of palantir’s public claims regarding sound stock market practices, noninvolvement in deporting immigrants, and safety concerning data accessibility. the archive of documents thus presents a proof-of-concept document archive for internet researchers akin to the zuckerberg files and the snowden digital surveillance archive. references acker, a., & donovan, j. (2019). data craft: a theory/methods package for critical internet studies. information, communication & society, 22(11), 1590-1609. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1645194 bell, d., & kleinman, m. (2020). as palantir goes public, consider its troubling human rights record. fortune, september 30. accessed july 25, 2021. https://fortune.com/2020/09/30/palantir-direct-listing-human-rights/ brayne, s. 2017. big data surveillance: the case of policing. american sociological review 82 (5):977–1008. doi: 10.1177/0003122417725865. brayne, s. 2020. predict and surveil: data, discretion, and the future of policing. oxford, uk: oxford university press. carter, d., a. acker, and d. sholler. 2021. investigative approaches to researching information technology companies. journal of the association for information science and technology 72 (6):655–66. doi: 10.1002/asi.24446. evers, a. r. (2019). foia to ice regarding assessments of palantir products. american oversight. https://www.americanoversight.org/document/foia-to-ice-regardingassessments-of-palantir-products ferguson, a. g. 2017. the rise of big data policing: surveillance, race, and the future of law enforcement. new york: new york university press. iliadis, a., & acker, a. (2022) the seer and the seen: surveying palantir’s surveillance platform. the information society, 38(5), 334-363. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2022.2100851 iliadis, a., acker, a., stevens, w., & kavakli, b. (2023). one schema to rule them all: how schema.org models the world of search. journal of the association for information science and technology. 1-64. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24744 iliadis, a., & russo, f. (2016). critical data studies: an introduction. big data & society, 3(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716674238 knight, e, and a. gekker. 2020. mapping interfacial regimes of control: palantir’s icm in america’s post-9/11 security technology infrastructures. surveillance & society 18 (2):231–43. doi: 10.24908/ss.v18i2.13268. lindgreen, a., & swaen, v. (2010). corporate social responsibility. international journal of management reviews, 12(1), 1-7. matten, d., & moon, j. (2004). corporate social responsibility. journal of business ethics, 54, 323-337. munn, l. 2017. seeing with software: palantir and the regulation of life. studies in control societies 2 (1):1–16. palantir. (2023). privacy & civil liberties. palantir. https://www.palantir.com/pcl/technologies/ sanchez, j. c. (2022). extended class period: robbins geller rudman & dowd llp files class action against palantir technologies inc. and announces opportunity for investors with substantial losses to lead case – pltr. business wire. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20221104005665/en/extended-classperiod-robbins-geller-rudman-dowd-llp-files-class-action-against-palantirtechnologies-inc.-and-announces-opportunity-for-investors-with-substantial-lossesto-lead-case---pltr stanton, a. (2018). department of justice – civil division: privacy impact assessment for palantir relational information management application (prima). department of justice. https://www.justice.gov/d9/pages/attachments/2019/02/12/civ_pia_170146_prima_final_for_publishing.pdf the rise of infrastructural influence on wikipedia heather ford university of technology sydney this paper explores how the methods and possibilities for influencing the factual content of wikipedia articles have changed in the context of semantic media (iliadis, 2022) and the rise of ai-infused knowledgebases, virtual assistants, and chatbots. it is based on an ethnographic study of a single wikipedia article and how it evolved over the course of a decade (ford, 2022). the study found anomalies in common-held assumptions about wikipedia editing in the documentation of current events that question the project’s status as a venue for the neutral representation of consensus by impartial editors. this paper builds on the previous study to develop a framework for understanding new methods of controlling facts in the context of automated knowledge products. central to this framework is the importance of semantic infrastructure to new methods of control and influence on wikipedia and the wider knowledge infrastructures that are increasingly dependent on it. in this paper, i ask two questions: a) to what extent are individual editors able to control facts on wikipedia that are prioritized by automated knowledge products?; and b) are they acting unfairly or dishonestly? i first describe the role of activist editors in influencing facts in the wikipedia article about the 2011 egyptian revolution. the editor who wrote the first version of the article the day before the protests began was “the egyptian liberal”, a young egyptian democracy activist at the time who wrote the first version of the article the day before protests began, using an afp source that described plans for the events rather than the events themselves. when hosni mubarak resigned from office on february 11, 2011, liberal also helped support a change to a related article’s title (from “the tunisian protests” to “the tunisian revolution”) and, in so doing, support the change to “revolution” over at the egyptian article title. the egyptian liberal also verified media reports using his experience and “original research” in the field. for example, when editors wanted to clarify whether wael ghonim, the administrator of the facebook group used to coordinate protests in egypt, had relinquished control of it, the egyptian liberal wrote, “i just spoke to wael and no, he is still the admin of the page”. the editor, in his privileged position as witness to events on the ground, did his own research to verify media reports. this is very much against wikipedia policy in normal times but there was no opposition to his actions during the fervor of the protests. in the second part of the paper, i complicate this initial view of editor control of the article by describing the semantic infrastructure on which facts depend to travel to automated knowledge products. semantic infrastructure includes both material and symbolic elements necessary for enabling a fact to both be stabilized and to travel in wikipedia. material elements include facts’ packaging (semantic metadata and infoboxes) and companions (attendant sources, categories and hyperlinks). semantic metadata in which facts contained within wikipedia articles are wrapped explains to computers what kinds of entities are being described and categorized. infoboxes, the fact boxes on the right-hand side of most articles on wikipedia that summarize the article, are another type of packaging. this packaging enables facts to travel through wikipedia to reach search engines like google and virtual assistants like alexa and now chatbots like chat gpt in the form of answers to users’ questions. they also constitute the data that will ultimately be extracted by third parties that make use of wikipedia about the person, place, event, or thing you’re searching for. today, the answer to the question, “what is the egyptian revolution?” on google, bing, siri and alexa is sourced directly from english wikipedia infoboxes and the opening paragraphs of the article. facts also require good companions (morgan, 2010) in order to travel well. sources are necessary companions for the travel of facts on wikipedia, and the practice of citation is fundamental to wikipedia epistemology. editors use citations during breaking news events to back up claims being made, and as a trail for users to follow to verify whether the sources are being accurately reflected. categories and internal links to other wikipedia articles are essential to stabilizing a new article. if the article does not contain categories and links, it will be flagged as potentially harmful. the first version of the article contains a series of links: first, to related articles and “portals,” where work based on particular topics is coordinated; and, second, to categories of articles. connecting to portals brings in other editors to help improve the article, since adding a new article triggers a notification to editors watching portal pages. i describe moments in the evolution of the article when each of these infrastructural elements was being wrestled over and why they are important for supporting the key facts that end up being prioritized by automated knowledge products. i argue that this demonstrates a departure from the methods of influencing wikipedia in two key ways. first, there is a focus by crowds and activist editors on infrastructural elements, rather than individual facts in the article. second, activists are supported by crowds rather than individual editors who are able to move wikipedia by the force of their will. i conclude the paper by engaging with the question of manipulation in the context of popular protests. manipulation requires a) control and b) unfairness or dishonesty. the questions, then, become a) how much are individual editors able to control facts on wikipedia that are prioritized by ai platforms? and b) are they acting unfairly or dishonestly? in response to the first question, i argue that individual editors can never entirely control the narrative of current events on wikipedia because, although they can try to control individual facts and semantic infrastructures supporting those facts, they rely on multiple independent (material and symbolic) forces for the fact to travel. catalytic events are contingent, and their representations are dependent on a myriad of forces, not least of which is the event itself and its underlying symbolic narrative of victims and oppressors (see wagner-pacifici, 2017) that drives media attention and thus wikipedia editing. crowds, on the other hand, are sometimes able to bend infrastructural elements (such as article titles) to their will and upend the ideal consensus-building process. this points to a need for the wikimedia foundation and other stakeholders to think through how to secure wikipedia’s infrastructures against attacks by crowds at key moments in the evolution of events. the second question (whether activists like the egyptian liberal were acting unfairly or dishonestly) is more complex. liberal was certainly open and honest about his allegiance to the democracy movement in egypt but he was clearly conflicted when documenting events on wikipedia. does this constitute unfairness? wikipedia’s conflict of interest policy is focused mostly on paid editing and editing on behalf of companies. citizens, who become part of popular protests, don’t easily fit here, particularly because wikipedians themselves are involved in activist efforts to prioritize the representation of women and people from the global south, among others. more work needs to be done to understand how best to govern wikipedia as it is increasingly being used for ideological (rather than financial) goals. references dee, j. (2007, july 1). “all the news that’s fit to print out,” new york times (online), new york: new york times company. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/magazine/01wikipedia-t.html. ford, h. (2022). writing the revolution: wikipedia and the survival of facts in the digital age. mit press. iliadis, a. (2022). semantic media: mapping meaning on the internet. polity. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/magazine/01wikipedia-t.html morgan, m. (2010). “traveling facts,” in how well do facts travel? the dissemination of reliable knowledge, ed. peter howlett and mary morgan. cambridge university press, 3-42. robin wagner-pacifici, r. (2017). what is an event? university of chicago press. steinberg-the convenience store revolution-the convenience store revolution selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): steinberg, m. (2023, october). the convenience store revolution: computer networks, logistics, and the reinvention of retail in japan. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the convenience store revolution: computer networks, logistics, and the reinvention of retail in japan marc steinberg concordia university convenience stores in their current, most globally popular form were born in the us, reinvented in japan, and re-exported to or reinvented in large parts of asia and the world. no company better illustrates this transnational trajectory than 7-eleven. founded in the us in 1927 by southland corporation, the store concept was licensed to japanese retailer ito-yokado in 1973. from the 1970s to 80s 7-eleven’s operations were essentially reinvented through a combination of the introduction of fresh foods, the logistical innovation, the introduction of novel networked information systems that allowed information gathering and new ordering systems, and rapid if geographically selective expansion through japan (marutschke, 2011; whitelaw, 2018). 7-eleven japan’s success led it to buy out southland corporation in 1991 when it was in financial difficulties, leading the japanese company to subsequently expand rapidly throughout asia and reconfigure its existing stores in the us – in the japanese model. this history of convenience stores may seem far removed from the interrogation of internet revolutions this conference asks us to engage. and yet, as i’ll argue in this presentation, the japanese convenience store offers the best site to rethink histories of networked computing and the “revolution” of the internet in a non-western context – furthering the project of “de-westernizing” or regionalizing internet studies (davis and xiao, 2021; steinberg and li, 2017). retail is in fact crucial to developments in surveillance and accounts of networked media. as joseph turow (turow, 2017) points out in his work, networked computing and surveillance are as much a part of retail history as of internet history. jesse lecavalier (lecavalier, 2016) similarly charts the humble life of the barcode as a source of information gathering and walmart as an innovator in information technology in his account of the company. in this paper, i turn my attention to another humble, often-overlooked, yet crucial site for thinking critically, historically, and globally about the discourse of internet revolutions: the franchised convenience store. three reasons drive this turn and will form the structure of my paper. first, recent discussions of the commercial internet figure the convenience store revolution: computer networks, logistics, and the reinvention of retail in japan suggested citation (apa): steinberg, m. (2023, october). the convenience store revolution: computer networks, logistics, and the reinvention of retail in japan. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. convenience as a key reason for the uptake of services from amazon to netflix to apple pay, to name just a few (lotz, 2017; west, 2022), or for what draper and turow (draper n.a. and turow j., 2019) aptly term the “digital resignation” to the tradeoff of privacy for convenient services. convenience is hence a key term that needs to be critiqued and rethought from within internet studies – and more generally (berlant, 2022; neves and steinberg, 2020). the convenience revolution (hyken, 2018) – as one recent business tome symptomatically sums up this line of discourse – is intimately bound up with the commercial internet. yet convenience as a keyword, a value, a discourse, and a series of practices stretches back much farther than the advent of the internet (shove, 2003; tierney, 1993). the japanese iteration of the convenience store offers one place to trace this logistically-supported, pre-and post-internet iteration of convenience. second, the convenience of the japanese convenience store is intimately bound up with various movements in the information revolution that tell a different story of the internet itself – and hence offer a crucial site for internet research. computer networks were a major part of business operations long before the internet, with protocols like electronic data interchange (edi) powering 7-eleven japan’s computer systems and point-of-service terminals before the internet’s spread, and eventually coexisting with it. focusing on this parallel industrial history of the internet allows us to tell a rather different story about networked computing that challenges the common narratives of a fall-from-grace that is the commercialization of the internet. the japanese convenience store’s early adoption of information technologies and logistical management, particularly in the 1980s, tells a different, longer story of networked (and subsequently internet-based) “revolutions” happening within industrial contexts. that 7-eleven in the late 1990s saw itself as a competitor to e-commerce giants like amazon or rakuten via a “clicks-and-mortar” strategy is only one example of this. even before this time, the number of japanese books on 7-eleven’s information strategies bearing the keyword revolution in the title is notable, and reach back to the mid-1980s. to name just a few examples we have: 7-eleven's pos revolution: the challenges of information individualization (kunitomo, 1986); the logistical information revolution of itoyokado’s 7-eleven (ogata, 1991); 7-eleven's information revolution (kunitomo, 1993). that these revolutionary developments are firmly linked to corporate strategies of information gathering and order management offer a different angle onto the history of the networked (or internet) revolution. third, engaging these developments more carefully in the context of japan’s reinvention of the american convenience store allows me to tell a more global, if provisionally nationally anchored, history of networked computing as well as a longer account of the rise of convenience as a crucial, internet-enabled virtue. building on previous work on the japanese commercial internet and its industry underpinnings (steinberg, 2019, 2022), on other work on computing and its revolutionary fantasies in the east asian context (liu, 2019; wu, 2022), and on the longer project of internationalizing internet studies (chan, 2013; goggin and mclelland, 2009; peters, 2016) is still underway, this paper hopes to expand the objects of internet studies. complementing turow (2017), this paper treats retail as a crucial site from which to think the history of networked computing and the internet. suggested citation (apa): steinberg, m. (2023, october). the convenience store revolution: computer networks, logistics, and the reinvention of retail in japan. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. this paper in its three-pronged approach is based on extensive primary archival research into (1) the discursive framing and historical introduction of the convenience store in 1970s japan (government manuals; newspaper reports; early books introducing the convenience store); and (2) contemporaneous accounts of its subsequent transformation in the 1980s and 1990s via networked computing, including the books mentioned above. synthesizing this research, this paper will propose we see the “internet revolution” through the lens of information-based transformations to retail that precede and then proceed alongside the expansion of the internet and networked computing. in doing so it will chart the longer history of computing in retail environments, internationalizing both internet research and retail research, which, outside of crucial attention to alibaba (zhang, 2020, 2023), and has focused mostly on the north american context or on amazon in other contexts (delfanti, 2021). though amazon is the frequent focus of retail analysis today, the convenience store in japan was at the center of many of the innovations of e-commerce, data-gathering, and logistics over the years; it is presently the site of pitched battles over digital payment services. charting some of this longer network history and internet history leading to the present is another aim of this paper. expanding internet history – and continuing the project of de-centering and de-westernizing internet studies – is a final component of this research. in this context internet studies outside the west doesn’t offer alternative practices to the corporatization of the internet but another angle onto and crucial site from which to understand the ongoing datafication of everyday life and expansion of what halpern and michell (halpern and mitchell, 2023) term the smartness mandate – an imperative to solve all of our problems by recourse to computer networks. this angle and site is the complicated, transnational, logistically-enabled, franchised convenience store, with a particular focus on the japanese reinvention of 7-eleven. references berlant lg 1957-2021 (2022) on the inconvenience of other people. writing matters! durham: duke university press. available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/j.ctv2rr3g94. chan a (2013) networking peripheries : technological futures and the myth of digital universalism. cambridge, massachusetts: the mit press. davis m and xiao j (2021) de-westernizing platform studies: history and logics of chinese and us platforms. international journal of communication 15: 20. delfanti a (2021) the warehouse : workers and robots at amazon. london: pluto press. draper n.a. and turow j. (2019) the corporate cultivation of digital resignation. new media and society 21(8): 1824–1839. doi: 10.1177/1461444819833331. suggested citation (apa): steinberg, m. (2023, october). the convenience store revolution: computer networks, logistics, and the reinvention of retail in japan. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. goggin g and mclelland m (2009) internationalizing internet studies: beyond anglophone paradigms. in: goggin g and mclelland m (eds) internationalizing internet studies: beyond anglophone paradigms. london: routledge, pp. 3–17. halpern orit and mitchell robert (2023) the smartness mandate. collingwood: mit press. available at: https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=29673 075. hyken s (2018) the convenience revolution: how to deliver a customer service experience that disrupts the competition and creates fierce loyalty. sound wisdom. kunitomo 国友隆一 ryuichi (1986) セブンイレブンのpos革命 : 情報個性化への挑戦 (7eleven’s pos revolution: the challenges of information individualization). ぱる 出版. available at: http://id.ndl.go.jp/bib/000001840214. kunitomo 国友隆一 ryuichi (1993) セブンーイレブンの情報革命 : posからisdnへ 小 さなお店の大きなシステム (7-eleven’s information revolution: from pos to isdn, the large systems of small stores. paru shuppan. available at: http://id.ndl.go.jp/bib/000002304790. lecavalier j (2016) the rule of logistics: walmart and the architecture of fulfillment. u of minnesota press. liu x 1982(2019) information fantasies : precarious mediation in postsocialist china. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. lotz ad (2017) portals: a treatise on internet-distributed television. ann arbor, mi: michigan publishing, university of michigan library. marutschke d (2011) continuous improvement strategies: japanese convenience store systems. springer. neves joshua and steinberg m (2020) pandemic platforms: how convenience shapes the inequality of crisis. in: pandemic media: preliminary notes towards an inventory. meson press, pp. 105–112. ogata 緒方知行 tomoyuki (1991) セブンーイレブン・イトーヨーカ堂の流通情報革命 : リーダー・鈴木敏文の変化対応経営 (the logistical information revolution of itoyokado’s 7-eleven). ティビーエス・ブリタニカ. available at: http://id.ndl.go.jp/bib/000002133949. peters b (2016) how not to network a nation: the uneasy history of the soviet internet. mit press. shove e 1959(2003) comfort, cleanliness and convenience : the social organization of normality. new technologies/new cultures series, 1472-2895. oxford ; berg. suggested citation (apa): steinberg, m. (2023, october). the convenience store revolution: computer networks, logistics, and the reinvention of retail in japan. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. steinberg m (2019) the platform economy: how japan transformed the commercial internet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. steinberg m (2022) from automobile capitalism to platform capitalism: toyotism as a prehistory of digital platforms. organization studies 43(7): 1069–1090. doi: 10.1177/01708406211030681. steinberg m and li j (2017) introduction: regional platforms. asiascape: digital asia 4(3). brill: 173–183. tierney tf (1993) the value of convenience: a genealogy of technical culture. suny press. turow j (2017) the aisles have eyes : how retailers track your shopping, strip your privacy, and define your power. new haven: yale university press. west e (2022) buy now: how amazon branded convenience and normalized monopoly. mit press. whitelaw gh (2018) konbini-nation. in: cwiertka kj and machotka e (eds) consuming life in post-bubble japan. amsterdam university press, pp. 69–88. doi: 10.2307/j.ctv56fgjm.8. wu ax (2022) the ambient politics of affective computing. public culture 34(1): 21– 45. doi: 10.1215/08992363-9435427. zhang l (2020) when platform capitalism meets petty capitalism in china: alibaba and an integrated approach to platformization. international journal of communication 14: 114–134. zhang l (2023) the labor of reinvention : entrepreneurship in the chinese digital economy. new york: columbia university press. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): hansen, a. s., luitse, d. (2024, october). the politics of machine-learning evaluation: from lab to industry. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the politics of machine-learning evaluation: from lab to industry anna schjøtt hansen university of amsterdam dieuwertje luitse university of amsterdam introduction artificial intelligence (ai) applications are today implemented across various societal sectors, ranging from health care and security to taking part in shaping the media environment we encounter online. in the last decade there has been a significant shift in the field of ai, as the development of ai applications is no longer confined to the laboratory, but rather widely used and tested in and on societies (whitaker et al., 2018; seaver, 2019: marres and stark, 2020; sheik et al., 2023; van der vlist et al. 2024). with this rapid industrialisation of ai, there is an increased need to understand the implications of both the development and deployment of these systems. while critical scholars have started to scrutinize different components of ai development, such as dataset construction and annotation practices (miceli et al., 2021; miceli and posada, 2021; paullada et al., 2021; orr and crawford, 2023), the study of evaluative practices in ai has received limited attention. a few studies have highlighted the importance of benchmarking practices and how these methods become integral in establishing the validity of the system and its success, which then enables widespread application (jaton, 2017; 2023; raji et al., 2021; grill, 2022). this paper presents a research agenda that outlines how to study machine-learning evaluation practices that move beyond the laboratory into industry applications and standardised validation practices. based on emerging research and illustrative empirical examples from recent fieldwork, we argue to study machine-learning evaluation as a sociotechnical and political phenomenon that requires multi-level scrutiny. therefore, we provide three analytical entry points for future research that address the political dynamics of (1) standardised validation infrastructures, (2) the circulation of evaluation methods and (3) the situated enactment of evaluation in practice. evaluation is a foundational part of the development of ai systems because it requires “reflection on what the objectives of an effective model involve, in addition to conscious decision making on how to best represent these desired outcomes in evaluation metrics, data and methodology” (raji et al., 2021, p. 3). in practice, this often involves developing metrics that can best approximate and measure whether the system achieves the anticipated behaviour (aradau and blanke, 2021; raji et al., 2021). as also highlighted by thomas and uminski, (2020): ‘what most current ai approaches do is to optimize metrics’ (p. 1). taken together, this illustrates how evaluation is a highly political practice, where the decisions will often favour ‘good enough’ optimisation methodologies (amoore, 2020; thomas and uminsky, 2021). the political nature of ‘good enough’ optimisations has been highlighted by authors, pointing out how this enables the construction of validity (raji et al., 2021) and the production of certainty through accuracy measurements (grill, 2022). in addition, thakkar et al., 2022 highlight how the construction of machine-learning datasets is also guided by questions of ‘goodenough’, while jaton (2017) has focused on the key role of so-called ‘ground truths,’ in both training and evaluating ai applications through randomized tests to assess their performance. however, these studies have been predominately concerned with the established ‘scientific’ evaluative practices of ai research and development and do not consider that ai applications and their evaluative methods are increasingly becoming industrialised. in light of these developments, this paper aims to expand the current research on evaluation by building on emerging insights from the cited critical enquires and illustrative empirical examples from ongoing fieldwork. for the latter, we draw on examples from a recent ethnographic enquiry within the bbc’s data science department (conducted by author 1) and ongoing fieldwork on the development of ai applications at a dutch medical centre (conducted by author 2). taking a critical ai studies and science and technology studies (sts) research approach, we outline how to study what we call industrialised accounts of ai evaluation beyond the laboratory. concretely, we present three analytical entry points that address the sociotechnical and political nature of ai evaluation. these entry points focus on different levels of ai evaluation in industry settings that include wider attempts of standardised evaluation infrastructures, the circulation of evaluative methods and the situated practice of evaluating emerging ai applications within localised contexts. in what follows, we briefly discuss these entry points and substantiate them with empirical illustrations from existing research and our ongoing fieldwork. the political dynamics of standardised validation infrastructures the first entry point engages with the emergence of wider attempts at standardisation of evaluation in the ai industry via large-scale infrastructural agents that shape ai development and evaluation regimes. one example of such an infrastructure is the ai competition platform kaggle, which facilitates the evaluation of new models across domains. such competition platforms participate in setting the conditions for evaluation by providing a pre-specified list of metrics for competitions hosted on their platforms. as these competition platforms are gaining increased popularity this homogenises the types of tasks and associated metrics that are used to develop new ai applications, while at the same time concentrating power amongst a small group of actors (luitse et al., 2024). political dynamics of circulating methods of evaluation with the second entry point, we wish to bring attention to the role of specific methods of evaluation that circulate. for example, via ‘best practice’ metrics for certain tasks or the functionalities of ai development platforms and development frameworks, such as sagemaker or tensorflow. building on the work of selbst et al. (2019), we argue for the need to study the ‘portability’ of metrics into different domains and how that shapes the development and evaluation of ai applications. luchs et al. (2023), for example, illustrate how machine learning frameworks such as tensorflow produce ‘step-by-step' approaches to ai development including methodologies for iterative and gradual optimisation of the model (i.e. evaluation). in addition, developers at the dutch medical centre, highlighted that the commonly used developer framework pytorch comes with specific machine-learning pipeline requirements, which again shapes how the application is developed and evaluated. the political dynamics of situated enactments of evaluation with the third entry point, we follow jaton and sormani’s (2023) recent call for situated accounts of ai development and highlight the need to study the localised enactments of evaluation. such concrete case studies (flyvbjerg, 2011) can help illustrate the tensions between metrics and contextual understandings of what makes the system ‘good enough’ to be deployed. schjøtt and birkbak (2022), for example, illustrate that the failure of a recommender system for news could not solely be ascribed to its lack of providing accurate predictions, but rather the opposite. instead, it was the editor’s need to protect the public interest that ultimately led to the decision not to deploy it on the news sites. the fieldwork at the bbc also illustrated how many local methods of evaluation were put in place, such as visualisation tools, to enable qualitative feedback from editorial staff. however, these tools also configure the development of ai systems by making certain features of the system salient, while also abstracting away other ways of understanding the system. references amoore l (2020) cloud ethics: algorithms and the attributes of ourselves and others. duke university press. aradau c and blanke t (2021) algorithmic surveillance and the political life of error. journal for the history of knowledge 2(1). 1: 10–10. flyvbjerg b (2011) ‘case study’, in n.k. denzin and y.s. lincoln (eds) the sage handbook of qualitative research. thousand oaks: sage, pp. 301–316. grill g (2022) constructing certainty in machine learning: on the performativity of testing and its hold on the future. osf preprints. available from: osf.io/zekqv. jaton f (2017) we get the algorithms of our ground truths: designing referential databases in digital image processing. social studies of science 47(6): 811–840. jaton f and sormani p (2023) enabling ‘ai’? the situated production of commensurabilities. social studies of science 53(5): 625–634. marres n and stark d (2020) put to the test: for a new sociology of testing. the british journal of sociology 71(3): 423–443. miceli m and posada j (2021) wisdom for the crowd: discoursive power in annotation instructions for computer vision. arxiv:2105.10990. arxiv. available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10990 (accessed 26 february 2024). miceli m, yang t, naudts l, et al. (2021) documenting computer vision datasets: an invitation to reflexive data practices. in: proceedings of the 2021 acm conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency, virtual event canada, 3 march 2021, pp. 161–172. acm. available at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445880 luchs i, apprich c and broersma m (2023) learning machine learning: on the political economy of big tech’s online ai courses. big data & society 10(1). doi: 10.1177/20539517231153806 . luitse d, blanke t, and poell t. (2024). ai competitions as infrastructures of power in medical imaging. information, communication & society, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2024.2334393 http://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10990 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445880 https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231153806 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2024.2334393 orr w and crawford k (2023) the social construction of datasets: on the practices, processes and challenges of dataset creation for machine learning. socarxiv. available from: osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/8c9uh. paullada a, raji id, bender em, et al. (2021) data and its (dis)contents: a survey of dataset development and use in machine learning research. patterns 2(11). 11: 100336. doi: 10.1016/j.patter.2021.100336 . raji d, denton e, bender em, et al. (2021) ai and the everything in the whole wide world benchmark. in: proceedings of the neural information processing systems track on datasets and benchmarks (eds j vanschoren and s yeung), 2021. curran. available at: https://datasets-benchmarksproceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2021/file/084b6fbb10729ed4da8c3d3f5a3ae7 c9-paper-round2.pdf. seaver n (2019) knowing algorithms. in: knowing algorithms. princeton university press, pp. 412–422. available at: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9780691190600-028/html. selbst ad, boyd d, friedler sa, et al. (2019) fairness and abstraction in sociotechnical systems. in: proceedings of the conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency, atlanta ga usa, 29 january 2019, pp. 59–68. acm. doi: 10.1145/3287560.3287598. sheikh h, prins c and schrijvers e (2023) ai is leaving the lab and entering society. in: sheikh h, prins c, and schrijvers e (eds) mission ai: the new system technology. research for policy. cham: springer international publishing, pp. 43–84. available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21448-6_3 (accessed 28 february 2024). schjøtt a and birkbak a (2022) you cannot make the algorithm do something it does not want to do: exploring the agency and power of ai systems in practice. in: easst 2022, 2022. available at: https://easst2022.org/programpreliminary7.asp thakkar d, ismail a, kumar p, et al. (2022) when is machine learning data good?: valuing in public health datafication. in: chi conference on human factors in computing systems, new orleans la usa, 29 april 2022, pp. 1–16. acm. available at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3491102.3501868 . thomas rl and uminsky d (2022) reliance on metrics is a fundamental challenge for ai. patterns 3(5). elsevier. doi: 10.1016/j.patter.2022.100476 van der vlist f, helmond a, and ferrari f. (2024). big ai: cloud infrastructure dependence and the industrialisation of artificial intelligence. big data & society, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241232630 whittaker m, crawford k, dobbe r, et al. (2018) ai now report 2018. available at: https://ainowinstitute.org/aiareport2018.pdf https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2021.100336 https://datasets-benchmarks-proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2021/file/084b6fbb10729ed4da8c3d3f5a3ae7c9-paper-round2.pdf https://datasets-benchmarks-proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2021/file/084b6fbb10729ed4da8c3d3f5a3ae7c9-paper-round2.pdf https://datasets-benchmarks-proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2021/file/084b6fbb10729ed4da8c3d3f5a3ae7c9-paper-round2.pdf https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9780691190600-028/html. https://doi.org/10.1145/3287560.3287598 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21448-6_3 https://easst2022.org/programpreliminary7.asp https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3491102.3501868 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2022.100476 https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241232630 https://ainowinstitute.org/aiareport2018.pdf selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): harris, b.c, tran, c.h., persaud, c.j. (2024, october). recontextualizing violence in real time: live streaming & the governance of inconsistency on twitch.tv. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. recontextualizing violence in real time: livestreaming & the governance of inconsistency on twitch.tv brandon c. harris university of alabama christine h. tran university of toronto christopher j. persaud intel labs introduction, literature review, & method how does inconsistency become an institution? here, we examine platform governance and moderation on amazon’s twitch.tv as a cultural practice. through case studies and thematic analysis, we showcase moments of regulatory inconsistency that are constitutive of how twitch manages harm. our analysis identifies contexts, temporalities, and violence as critical themes for identifying twitch’s inconsistent moderation. we offer a playbook for better understanding livestreaming platform governance as an iterative process which frequently targets vulnerable streamers. we applied thematic analysis to two case studies to document how regulatory inconsistencies are directed at historically marginalized streamers. we began with an inductive approach examining twitch’s response to: 1) kai cenat’s impromptu community meet-up which was labeled a riot by the nypd and 2) when twitch modified their clothing and attire policy three times in one month to curtail the so-called ‘topless meta’, where a handful of women staged their cleavage to imply full nudity and optimize viewer engagement. then, we performed a deductive grounded theory analysis (charmaz, 2008) on twitch’s community guidelines and terms of service documents to further highlight the platform’s unbalanced governance. undergirding our three identified thematics on twitch governance--contexts, temporalities, and violence--is an intellectual debt to livestreaming research from feminist game studies, which has recognized how feminized labor becomes embedded into digital entertainment, underscoring the tensions between who is burdened to further contextualize their content versus who can “just play” at being a passive content creator (eg: consalvo, 2012; gray et al, 2018; phillips, 2020; shaw et al, 2019). findings & discussion contexts context sensitive moderation poses a special challenge across different kinds of social media (caplan, 2018). context is a site of collapse (marwick and boyd, 2011) and collision (davis and jurgenson, 2013). by selling constant and visible presence through video broadcast, twitch is a commodifier of geographic, social, and temporal contextual experiences. simultaneously, the platform is at the institutional mercy to the contexts which individual streamers themselves bring to the platform. herein, twitch’s categorization of specific scandals as "metas" (i.e., fads or norms) establishes hierarchies regarding what twitch deems acceptable cultural production. for example: in march 2021, twitch explicitly addressed the proliferation of swim suited streamers, and those who harass them, as “hot tub meta” (twitch, 2021). in december 2023--in the wake of “topless meta” over woman creators allegedly staging implied nudity-twitch.tv overturned its decision to sanction “artistic nudity” in live video broadcasts, just two days after the initial revision to their community guidelines permitting nudity under accurate content labels. meta-making relegates certain content to domains like women's work or other peripheral designations that signify lower social status outside the privileged "magic circle" of toxic technocultures (massanari, 2016). context--and who is denied it--especially challenges the marginalization of users through “meta.” understanding twitch is complicated because it straddles multiple platforms, localities, and modalities. twitch tends to be most proactive about governing behavior on its own platform, but users have developed an iterative and playful, if dangerous, culture that innovates new ways to weaponize platform features like using emotes to create racist attacks on streamers (grayson, 2019). clipping, or using twitch’s video recording feature, has become another weapon to police streamers since users can submit out of context videos of a streamer to elicit punishment from twitch employees (flint, 2023). clipping is a crucial strategy in policing some forms of cultural production, specifically using video clips of a handful of women as evidence of a ‘topless meta’ on twitch to imply that every female streamer uses the suggestion of nudity to build their audience (grayson, 2021), despite that nearly 80% of the platform’s streamers are men (twitch advertising, n.d.). twitch’s response to controversies leads to inconsistent enforcement of the rules, which further exacerbates inequalities among streamers since the most vulnerable and marginalized streamers are subjected to the most stringent policing (hortenski, 2024; grayson 2019, 2021). temporalities twitch’s emphasis on “real time” meditation between broadcasts and audiences create challenging temporalities for violence. under these temporal regimes, the contexts of content creation, surveillance, and governance collapse as twitch manages what is permissible on a case-by-case basis. see for example, the controversial “contextual exception” clauses in its community guidelines wherein otherwise “objectionable” performance, attire, and activities can be sanctioned if geographic context fits. we view cultural production on twitch as a platform assemblage of performance, practices, and people under the narrative of “real time”. as digital technologies challenge what sarah sharma (2014) terms the “chronopolitics” of human interaction, livestreaming must reckon with the ways that demands for instant and authentic interaction discipline users into new regimes of performing “temporal” labor (see also: johnson et al., 2019; gregg, 2011). twitch’s always-on nature presents methodological challenges for researchers; broadcasts disappear from channels after 60 days, which leaves researchers to rely on paratexts and selectively archived materials (ruberg and cullen, 2022). we must consider how twitch users weaponize ephemeral affordances to enact both lulz-based trolling for mischievous humor (phillips, 2016) as well as hate raids on and off the platform (grayson, 2021). violence as twitch scales, streamers, audiences, and hostile users all create innovative ways to express themselves and their world views. this results in studied struggles for representation on the platform, as many hard core game loyalists consider any female, queer, or non-white or non-asian identity unwelcome on twitch. twitch scholars have elaborated on how streamers manipulate and encourage audience engagement to elevate their political rhetoric in a crowded media landscape (harris et al., 2023. likewise, research has begun to address how audiences attack a streamer’s claims to authenticity and challenge their ability to grow their audience (tran, 2022), how queer streamers perform moderation labor to make themselves accessible to audiences while risking queerphobic abuse (persaud & perks, 2022), and how they deploy hate raids as a form of targeted harassment to police who is and isn’t allowed to become a streamer (meisner, 2023). platform governance literature on twitch has examined the rhetorical labor of institutional documents such as term of service to construct gendered subjectivities of “streamers” as antithetical to certain kinds of sexual performance (ruberg, 2020; zolides, 2020). streamers themselves have self-deputized themselves and peer networks to perform moderation work (cullen and kairam, 2022, thach et al., 2022), generating as another field wearing cultural are creators take on a neoliberalism self-responsibility for their own protection, survival, and prosperity. conclusions & trajectories however, as platformization continues twitch (and its owner amazon, llc.) attempts to bring additional aspects of cultural production under twitch’s control, it is important for scholars to develop new methods and perspectives for studying the livestreaming behemoth. twitch is attempting to diversify its reputation as just a source for gaming content, and attempting to bring in other traditional sports, music festivals, and concerts broadcasted on twitch to increase the platform’s value in a crowded media ecosystem. therefore, the authors contribute their collective expertise on twitch, the creator economy, and synthesize current trends in research while recommending future areas of concern for research on twitch’s potential for digital and platformized violence. references caplan, r. (2018). content or context moderation?. data and society research institute. https://apo.org.au/node/203666 charmaz, k. (2008). reconstructing grounded theory. the sage handbook of social research methods, 461-478. consalvo, m. (2012). confronting toxic gamer culture: a challenge for feminist game studies scholars. ada: a journal of gender, new media, and technology. cullen, a. l. l., & kairam, s. r. (2022). practicing moderation: community moderation as reflective practice. https://www.amazon.science/publications/practicingmoderation-community-moderation-as-reflective-practice davis, j. l., & jurgenson, n. (2014). context collapse: theorizing context collusions and collisions. information, communication & society, 17(4), 476-485. flint, e. (2023). twitch's new 'topless' meta needs to be shut down immediately, say viewers. gaming bible. https://www.gamingbible.com/news/platform/twitch/twitchs-topless-meta-needsshutting-down-says-viewers-850606-20231211 gray, k. l., voorhees, g., & vossen, e. (eds.). (2018). feminism in play. springer. grayson, n. (2019). twitch still hasn't fixed its racist emote problem. kotaku. https://kotaku.com/twitch-still-hasnt-fixed-its-racist-emote-problem-1835253131. grayson n. (2021). marginalized streamers beg twitch to ‘do better’ in wake of hate raids, poor pay. the washington post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/videogames/2021/08/11/twitch-do-better-hate-raids/. gregg, m. (2011). work’s intimacy. polity press. harris, b. c., foxman, m., & partin, w. c. (2023). “don’t make me ratio you again”: how political influencers encourage platformed political participation. social media + society, 9(2), https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231177944. hortenski, d. (2024). twitch streamer appalled after ‘fake’ mod shuts down her stream. dextero. https://www.dexerto.com/twitch/twitch-streamer-appalled-after-fakemod-shuts-down-her-stream-2525992/ johnson, m. r., carrigan, m., & brock, t. (2019). the imperative to be seen: the moral economy of celebrity video game streaming on twitch.tv. first monday. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i8.8279 https://apo.org.au/node/203666 https://www.amazon.science/publications/practicing-moderation-community-moderation-as-reflective-practice https://www.amazon.science/publications/practicing-moderation-community-moderation-as-reflective-practice https://www.gamingbible.com/news/platform/twitch/twitchs-topless-meta-needs-shutting-down-says-viewers-850606-20231211 https://www.gamingbible.com/news/platform/twitch/twitchs-topless-meta-needs-shutting-down-says-viewers-850606-20231211 https://kotaku.com/twitch-still-hasnt-fixed-its-racist-emote-problem-1835253131 https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/08/11/twitch-do-better-hate-raids/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/08/11/twitch-do-better-hate-raids/ https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231177944 https://www.dexerto.com/twitch/twitch-streamer-appalled-after-fake-mod-shuts-down-her-stream-2525992/ https://www.dexerto.com/twitch/twitch-streamer-appalled-after-fake-mod-shuts-down-her-stream-2525992/ https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i8.8279 marwick, a. e., & boyd, d. (2011). i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. new media & society, 13(1), 114– 133. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365313 massanari, a. (2016). # gamergate and the fappening: how reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. new media & society, 19(3), 329-346. meisner, c. (2023). networked responses to networked harassment? creators’ coordinated management of “hate raids” on twitch. social media+ society, 9(2), 20563051231179696. persaud, c. j., & perks, m. e. (2022). beauty from the waist up: twitch drag, digital labor, and queer mediated liveness. television & new media, 15274764221080912. https://doi.org/10.1177/15274764221080912. phillips, a. (2020). gamer trouble: feminist confrontations in digital culture. nyu press. phillips, w. (2016). this is why we can’t have nice things: mapping the relationship between online trolling and mainstream culture. mit press. ruberg, b. (2020). “obscene, pornographic, or otherwise objectionable”: biased definitions of sexual content in video game live streaming. new media & society. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820920759 ruberg, b., & cullen, a. l. l. (2020). feeling for an audience: the gendered emotional labor of video game live streaming. digital culture & society, 5(2), 85–102. https://www.degruyter.com/transcript/view/journals/dcs/5/2/article-p85.xml sharma, s. (2014). in the meantime : temporality and cultural politics. duke university press. shaw, a., agloro, a., nguyen, j., phillips, a. d., & ruberg, b. (2019). feminist and queer game studies. oxford university press. thach, h., mayworm, s., delmonaco, d., & haimson, o. (2022). (in) visible moderation: a digital ethnography of marginalized users and content moderation on twitch and reddit. new media & society, 14614448221109804. tran, c. h. (2022). “never battle alone”: egirls and the gender (ed) war on video game live streaming as “real” work. television & new media, 23(5), 509-520. twitch (2021). let’s talk about hot tub streams. twitch blog. https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2021/05/21/lets-talk-about-hot-tub-streams. twitch advertising (n.d.). twitch advertising, “audience”. twitch. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365313 https://doi.org/10.1177/15274764221080912 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820920759 https://www.degruyter.com/transcript/view/journals/dcs/5/2/article-p85.xml https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2021/05/21/lets-talk-about-hot-tub-streams https://twitchadvertising.tv/audience/. zolides, a. (2020). gender moderation and moderating gender: sexual content policies in twitch’s community guidelines. new media & society. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444820942483. https://twitchadvertising.tv/audience/ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444820942483 aoir2023toxicityfinal selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): recuero, r. , tavares, c. (2023, october). toxicity against brazilian women federal deputies on twitter: a categorization of discursive violence. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. toxicity against brazilian women deputies on twitter: a categorization of discursive violence camilla tavares (universidade federal do maranhão/ufma) raquel recuero (universidade federal de pelotas/ufpel) introduction the obstacles that women face in the political arena are a frequent theme in the literature and, in general, seem to be similar in many countries. several works discuss the difficulties of competing for space in an environment that is traditionally masculine appear both from an institutional (araújo & alves, 2007; sporh et al., 2016) and a social (beard, 2018) point of view. social media platforms, however, have added more challenges to this reality. through these platforms, women have been strongly attacked, with deeper effects both on their political and daily life (ferreira, rodriguez, & cunha, 2021). thus, these platforms can effectively decrease women's representation as they increase gender violence (paz, montero-díaz, & moreno-delgado, 2020; silva, francisco, & sampaio, 2021) and increase the trend of growing global political violence against women (krook, 2018). in this context, we argue that different types of discursive violence may create different types of toxic discourses about female deputies on social media. we want to explore, in this paper, how discourse in online social media platforms create toxic environments for women in politics and if there are differences in the toxicity for different political spectrum/ideology. to discuss these questions, we focus on a case study on brazilian female deputies and twitter, with a dataset of 1400 violent tweets, with over 2500 retweets. theoretical approach discursive violence is a concept that has been explored by many authors. discourse is a source of symbolic power being part of the process of domination and naturalizing power relations (bourdieu, 1999), including gender violence. thus, the discourse is also constitutive of the existing power relations in our society, allowing other forms of violence to emerge (zizek, 2008). thus, while this type of violence comes from language, it is this system of values legitimated by language that allows violence to be justified. discursive violence assumes many facets, such as hate speech or incivility both in national (sponholz, 2020; rizzotto & saraiva, 2020; silva, francisco, & sampaio, 2021) and international literature (calvert, 1997; anderson & huntington, 2017; omilusi, 2017; rossini, 2019; paz, montero-díaz, & moreno-delgado, 2020; brison, 2021; castañopulgarín et al, 2021). in these works, the focus is mostly on how discourse constitutes violence, rather than how it can be toxic. toxicity is a concept less discussed in the literature. it is a concept that comes from the debate on environmental issues (buell, 2003). however, toxicity is also connected to the emergence of unsafe environments that legitimate violence (wexler, 2013). in this paper, we understand toxicity because of the spread and legitimation of violent discourse. this is an essential dimension of social media platforms' action and discourse. furthermore, the repetition of this toxic violence is capable of silencing and pushing these women away from their political space. toxicity may also have a connection with the political spectrum. some works, for example, connect political violence with extremist rhetoric (pickard et al., 2022). twitter may allow toxicity as these violent discourses are easily reproduced and the codes used for violence may challenge moderation tools. the number of retweets, for example, may show how toxic is a certain discourse. methods we used social feed manager (prom, 2006) to access twitter’s api to collect data. we focused on tweets mentioning the official accounts of female brazilian federal deputies from the term of 2019/2022. from a total of 77 deputies, there were 64 official accounts. the data was collected during two months, may and june of 2022, totaling more than 500 thousand tweets. to analyze these tweets, we employed a mixed-methods approach. we first employed computational analysis to examine the total occurrence of lexicons that could be associated with violent discourses. this approach follows the steps of corpus linguistics (sinclair, 1992). tweets are then filtered to create a dataset of violent discourses, with 1477 original tweets and 2533 retweets. our approach to this final dataset was to qualitatively analyze themes that emerge from these concepts and sort them into categories of violence based on their effects (discourse analysis). these categories were further connected to how they spread, or how they are connected to toxicity. finally, we also grouped the tweets based on the political ideology of the deputies (based on bolognesi, ribeiro & codato, 2020) to understand if this could be a predictor of toxicity. in all, accounts were distributed as follows: right-wing, 35 accounts, center, 7 accounts, and left-wing, 22 accounts. results first of all, we found that political polarization may be an important issue connected to violence. deputies from the center were never cited and thus, we disregarded these categories from the analysis. all violent tweets cited only female deputies from the right and the left. we thus focused on them. in general, we found six major categories where concepts from tweets could be classified in. the first one was “moral behavior”. this category had tweets that criticize deputies based on how condonable their morality was. a second category was “cognitive ability”, as women were also frequently criticized based on how “dumb” they were. body shaming was another frequent emergent category, as many of these women were referred to through derogatory nicknames, such as “peppa pig”, “old” or even “girl” to diminish their credibility. female deputies were also criticized for their political views, which tend to be more common also among men. finally, women were also compared to objects and received attacks that claimed they were submissive to their male colleagues. tables 2 and 3 show how violent tweets for each side of the spectrum were classified in the dataset. these results suggest that all female deputies suffered the same types of violence, although to different degrees. deputies from the left wing, while less in number, received the majority of attacks. the most widespread violent category was moral judgment for both right-wing and left-wing deputies (1060 retweets total). the second category was cognitive ability (362). body shaming was the third category for the rightwing (126) and the fourth for the left-wing (118). the third category with the most violent discourses for leftists was name-calling based on ideological views (204) categories connected to comparison to objects and submission to male colleagues were less frequent (left=85 and right = 53). this data suggests that toxic discourse (wexler, 2013) against female deputies on twitter is largely based on violence connected to women's behavior and abilities in the political realm, rather than ideology or propositions. this means women are criticized for being women, rather than, because of their work. twitter, thus, tends to reproduce the types of violence that women suffer in other realms (paz, montero-díaz, & morenodelgado, 2020; silva, francisco, & sampaio, 2021). these ways of describing and depreciating women associate female behavior with elements already observed in the literature and disqualify women deputies in front of their male colleagues. finally, ideological affiliation, while may influence the amount of toxicity created (deputies from the left wing received more toxicity than deputies from the right), they don’t influence the toxicity of the discourse about who these women are and how they are perceived by the audiences. references anderson, a. & huntington, h. (2017). social media, science, and attack discourse: how twitter discussions of climate change use sarcasm and incivility. science communication, 39(5). araújo, c. & alves, j. (2007). impactos de indicadores sociais e do sistema eleitoral sobre as chances das mulheres nas eleições e suas interações com as cotas. dados revista de ciências sociais, 50(3): 535-577. beard, m. (2018). mulheres e poder. são paulo: planeta do brasil. bolognesi, b., ribeiro, e. & codato, a. (2020) esquerda, centro ou direita? como classificar os partidos no brasil. available at: https://observatoriodaseleicoes.com.br/esquerda-centro-ou-direita-como-classificar-ospartidos-no-brasil/. bourdieu, p. (1991). language and symbolic power. massachusetts, harvard university press. brison, s. hate speech (2021). international encyclopedia of ethics. doi: 10.1002/9781444367072.wbiee771.pub2. calvert, c. (1997). hate speech and its harms: a communication theory perspective. journal of communication, 47(1). castaño-pulgarín, s. et al. (2021). internet, social media and online hate speech. systematic review. aggression and violent behavior, 58. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2021.101608. ferreira, d., rodrigues, c. & cunha, s. (2021). relatório 2020-2021 de violência política contra a mulher. brasília: transparência eleitoral brasil, 2022. available at: https://static.poder360.com.br/2021/12/relatorio-de-violencia-politica-contra-amulher.pdf krook, m. (2018). violence against women in politics: a rising global trend. politics & gender, 14(4): 673-675. doi:10.1017/s1743923x18000582 omilusi, m. (2017). da hibernação conveniente ao desespero circunstancial: discurso de ódio, comunicação político partidária e as eleições gerais de 2015 na nigéria. revista brasileira de estudos africanos, 2(4). paz, m. a., montero-díaz, j. & moreno-delgado, a. (2020). hate speech: a systematized review. sage open: 1-12. doi: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244020973022 pickard h., efthyvoulou, g. & bove, v. (2023). what's left after right-wing extremism? the effects on political orientation. european journal of political research, 62: 338351. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12538 rizzoto, c. & saraiva, a. (2020). violência de gênero em debate: uma análise das conversações sobre a lei do feminicídio na fanpage do senado federal. intexto, 49. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.19132/1807-8583 202049.249-269. rossini, p. toxic for whom? examining the targets of uncivil and intolerant discourse in online political talk. (2019). in p. moy & d. mathelson (eds). voices: exploring the shifting contours of communication. new york: peter lang. silva, l., francisco, r. & sampaio, r. (2021). discurso de ódio nas redes sociais digitais: tipos e formas de intolerância na página oficial de jair bolsonaro no facebook. galáxia, 46. doi: https://doi.org/10.1590/1982-2553202151831. sinclair, j. 'the automatic analysis of corpora' (1992). in svartvik, j. (ed.). directions in corpus linguistics (proceedings of nobel symposium 82). berlin: mouton de gruyter. sponholz, l. (2020). o papel dos discursos de ódio (online) na ascenção da extrema direita: um aporte teórico. confluências, 22(3). sporh, a., maglia, c., machado, g. & oliveira, j. (2016). o. participação política de mulheres na américa latina: impacto de cotas e de lista fechada. estudos feministas, 24(2): 417-441. weinberg, leonard, and eliot assoudeh, 'political violence and the radical right', in jens rydgren (ed.), the oxford handbook of the radical right, oxford handbooks (2018; online edn, oxford academic, 5 feb. 2018), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190274559.013.21, accessed 28 feb. 2023. wexler, m.n. (2013), business and society review. business and society review, 118: 171-192. https://doi.org/10.1111/basr.12007 zizek, s. violence: six sideways reflections. picador usa, 2008. acknowledgements: this work is partially supported by the national council for scientific and technological development (cnpq), through grants number 405965/2021-4, 302489/2022-3, 310780/2022-5 and 406504/2022-9 (national institute of science and technology on information disputes and sovereignty inct/dsi) and fapema grant number app-12152/22. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): pereira, g. (2024, october). license to surveil? imagining the future of vehicles as computers. paper (or panel) presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. license to surveil? imagining the future of vehicles as computers gabriel pereira university of amsterdam recently, vehicle surveillance has emerged as a threat for women seeking abortions in the usa (cahn & manis, 2022). this is just an instance of the many privacy and justice issues posed by widespread collection of vehicle data around the world, a history that traces back decades (bridle, 2013). with the increasing datafication of vehicles, new questions are emerging: what happens when “smart vehicles” are themselves producing detailed surveillance data, for example through their embedded gps? with the rise of self-driving vehicles, are cars becoming roving surveillance cameras? gekker & hind (2019) ask such questions to argue for connected and autonomous vehicles (cavs) as media infrastructures (parks & starosielski, 2015). they propose a new model of privacy, “infrastructural surveillance”, identifying the rise of an “invisible and omnipresent” infrastructure that aggregates data sources via developed standards, and to some extent decentralizes knowledge production toward non-human agents. in sum, constant surveillance is built into the operation of cavs. although cavs may still be far into the future, these speculative technological futures of vehicle data are already in flux. the “algorithmic imaginaries” (bucher, 2017) of actors are already troubled by a dominant datafication discourse, whereby everything is and will be taken over by the imperative of data, and more recently ai (sadowski, 2019). this paper asks: how does this future-oriented imaginary relate to current practices in vehicle data, particularly for policing? at the same time, how is this imaginary unfolding as privacy/justice concerns for activists and regulators? this research draws from semi-structured interviews with over 30 people working on algorithmic surveillance—including police officers and surveillance manufacturers, but also activists and regulators. within a larger project, they were asked about how they saw the future developments in vehicle data. it also builds on fieldwork conducted at policing/traffic conferences, particularly sessions on “the future” or “emergent technologies”. this paper used situational analysis (clarke, 2003) to map this emergent field and its imaginaries. vehicles as connected computers first, there is an increased narrative of vehicles as connected computers. this perhaps indicates that gekker & hind’s (2019) “infrastructural surveillance” is, in some ways, already a reality (cf. hind et al., 2022). as spoken by a police officer and representative of a surveillance software company: “really, i want people to start thinking about vehicles as nothing more than a computer on wheels. and for us [officers] that [means] we can be able to go in and get information out of these particular vehicles.” vehicles are seen as generating data in a plethora of ways: “so whether it be connected devices, meaning cell phones, whether it's voice recordings inside of vehicles, odometer readings, gear shifts, door opening events, power events, getting text messages out of a particular infotainment system, that stuff can be very valuable for today's investigation” (ibid). not only is data already being captured by vehicles, but an intrinsic collaboration between policing institutions and the vehicle industry exists to facilitate this sharing— e.g. data from general motor’s onstar gps system can be easily requested by law enforcement, potentially without a warrant (beggin, 2022). the boundaries and privacy regulations that apply to vehicle data are still largely undefined, however. this may be a consequence of the obfuscation of the data produced by vehicles, as the systems conceal data gathering in their normal operation (c.f. bridges, 2021). even a highlyspecialized british policy advisor rhetorically asked: “what does nissan do with the data from my electric leaf?” this lack of clarity on what/how data is collected and who has access to it co-exists with the banality of such data, as it is generated for an accepted and politically unproblematic goal (pereira & raetzsch, 2022; brayne, 2022). in policing conferences, there were frequent references to how the development of connected technologies outpaces the legislation. new laws were pointed as a solution for this, but platformization still plays a central role. that is, vehicle manufacturers are responsible for managing data infrastructures, including which/how third-parties have access (cf. dijck et al., 2018; plantin et al, 2018). among activists and regulators, this future leads to anxiety around function creep, as manufacturers may decide to change their policies, or new forms of analysis may be enabled for policing. futures of data excess and ai—but also smaller solutions second, a key concern troubling different actors is that, with the exponential production of vehicle data, a “data deluge” will unfold whereby data excess will become a norm. as stated by the representative of a vehicle manufacturer: “in the future, you're going to see vehicle to everything, which is v2x. and as vehicles communicate with each other and with the infrastructure, there will be signatures left behind that will be valuable info forensically.” although this is considered a boon by police institutions, some are concerned of the difficulties that may emerge. a danish police manager, for example, said he was afraid increased resources would be needed to “find the needle in the haystack”—resources he says he doesn’t currently have. in response to this future, there is a growing industry focus on developing infrastructures for merging policing data sets. the rationale goes that unless all data is integrated in real-time, through platforms such as fususone, officers will be overwhelmed by excessive data. these platforms currently integrate data from automated license plate recognition (alpr), police drones, among other surveillance infrastructures, but importantly imagines a future in which private data sources will be folded in—including vehicles themselves. some actors are excited for ai as a solution for analyzing mounting vehicle data. these imaginaries give continuity to debates on predictive policing (brayne, 2021), and the many injustices it generates—a continuous concern of activists. recently, a police department in ny claimed to use ai and alpr data to detect “a journey typical of a drug trafficker”, leading to an arrest (brewster, 2023). these futures of vehicle data analysis are responses to both the belief that ai is well-suited for dealing with an ever-increasing scale of vehicle data; but also to a wider techno-solutionist framing: as stated by a police manager, “generative ai will change how we send emails and write reports, but also radically change policing.” although this grandiose imaginary occupies headlines and industry events, it co-exists with a reality in which vehicle data tracking is changing in much smaller, iterative ways. for example, most interviewees pointed to a future integration of facial recognition to alpr. even more banal are bespoke solutions such as the monocam/tiresias project in the netherlands, which adds ai to surveillance cameras to detect if drivers are using a mobile phone. none of these use vehicles themselves to produce the data, instead relying on long-existing infrastructures of state surveillance. conclusion this paper engages with the future-oriented imaginaries of vehicle data to show how they impact current practices in policing and activism. it finds: 1) in direct relation to gekker & hind’s (2019) “infrastructural surveillance”, that vehicles are already imagined as connected computers, constantly generating surveillance data; 2) how a concern of a data excess is responded through increased data integration and a techno-solutionist narrative of ai, but also smaller interventions. the paper thus contributes to critical data studies literature, supporting renewed considerations for privacy and justice frameworks in a world where vehicles act as infrastructures for constant surveillance. references beggin, r. (2022). police don’t need a warrant to pull personal data from cars. governing. https://www.governing.com/security/police-dont-need-a-warrant-to-pullpersonal-data-from-cars brayne, s. (2021). predict and surveil: data, discretion, and the future of policing. oxford university press. brayne, s. (2022). the banality of surveillance. surveillance & society, 20(4), 372–378. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v20i4.15946 brewster, t. (2023). this ai watches millions of cars daily and tells cops if you’re driving like a criminal. forbes. https://www.governing.com/security/police-dont-need-a-warrant-to-pull-personal-data-from-cars https://www.governing.com/security/police-dont-need-a-warrant-to-pull-personal-data-from-cars https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v20i4.15946 https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2023/07/17/license-plate-reader-aicriminal/ bridges, l. (2021). infrastructural obfuscation: unpacking the carceral logics of the ring surveillant assemblage. information, communication & society, 24(6), 830–849. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2021.1909097 bridle, j. (2013). how britain exported next-generation surveillance. medium matter. https://medium.com/matter/how-britain-exported-next-generation-surveillanced15b5801b79e bucher, t. (2017). the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 30–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154086 cahn, a. f., & manis, e. (2022). pregnancy panopticon: abortion surveillance after roe. stop. https://www.stopspying.org/pregnancy-panopticon clarke, a. e. (2003). situational analyses: grounded theory mapping after the postmodern turn. symbolic interaction, 26(4), 553–576. https://doi.org/10.1525/si.2003.26.4.553 dijck, j. van, poell, t., & waal, m. de. (2018). the platform society. oxford university press. hind, s., kanderske, m., & van der vlist, f. (2022). making the car “platform ready”: how big tech is driving the platformization of automobility. social media + society, 8(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221098697 parks, l., & starosielski, n. (eds.). (2015). signal traffic: critical studies of media infrastructures. university of illinois press. pereira, g., & raetzsch, c. (2022). from banal surveillance to function creep: automated license plate recognition (alpr) in denmark. surveillance & society, 20(3), 265–280. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v20i3.15000 plantin, j.-c., lagoze, c., edwards, p. n., & sandvig, c. (2018). infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook. new media & society, 20(1), 293–310. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553 sadowski, j. (2019). when data is capital: datafication, accumulation, and extraction. big data & society, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718820549 https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2023/07/17/license-plate-reader-ai-criminal/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2023/07/17/license-plate-reader-ai-criminal/ https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2021.1909097 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154086 https://doi.org/10.1525/si.2003.26.4.553 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221098697 https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v20i3.15000 https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718820549 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 in the shadow of llms: trouble in the “smart” automotive industry alex gekker university of amsterdam, the netherlands sam hind university of manchester, uk abstract this paper explores the tumultuous landscape of the modern automotive industry, once heralded as the epitome of artificial intelligence (ai) and machine learning (ml) applications through the promise of connected and autonomous vehicles (cavs). the introduction of large language models (llms), notably with chatgpt's launch in november 2022, marked a turning point, casting shadows over the ambitious goals set by major tech and automotive players. notable failures, including ford's shutdown of argo ai and volkswagen's struggle with electric vehicle transitions, have led to a crisis in the viability of connected and autonomous driving. the paper identifies four central types of limitations contributing to this crisis: technical, economic, financial, and regulatory. technical limitations expose the inadequacies of autonomous vehicles in meeting their promised capabilities. economic limitations highlight the unsustainable nature of platformizing automotive operations, linked to innovations like vehicle subscription models. financial limitations point to the speculative investment decisions that underpin technological projects. regulatory limitations showcase the industry's renegotiation of conditions in response to safety concerns. by examining these limitations, the paper establishes a conceptual framework applicable not only to the automotive industry but also to current discussions surrounding llms. the lessons drawn from these challenges contribute to a broader understanding of the perils and limitations within ai sub-industries. suggested citation (apa): gekker, a., hind, s. (2024, october). in the shadow of llms: trouble in the “smart” automotive industry. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. introduction: driving ai’s winter until large language models (llms) took the crown with openai’s launch of chatgpt in november 2022, autonomous vehicles were considered the greatest possible application of artificial intelligence (ai) and machine learning (ml) in the modern era. huge investments from both big tech firms and automotive manufacturers resulted in billion dollar capital valuations throughout the last decade, each built on a similar promise: that a world of fully-autonomous cars would be possible by 2020 (adams 2015, metz and griffith 2022). a series of highly public failures ever since chatgpt’s launch has pushed this dream further into the distance, as money and interest has drained away. new plans, updated legislation, and revised timelines scratch 2020, how about 2025? appear just as fanciful (uk department of transport 2022). to demonstrate: in october 2022, ford shut their autonomous vehicle division argo ai down, absorbing the project into other ford initiatives (hawkins 2022). in december 2022, newly installed volkswagen group ceo oliver blume was forced to pitch a revised software and vehicle platform strategy to an increasingly concerned board, after numerous failures to transition to electric vehicles since the diesel emission scandal in 2015 (reuters 2022). in october 2023, california’s department of motor vehicles suspended cruise’s ‘robotaxi’ operating license in san francisco, after an incident with a pedestrian (hawkins 2023), and following a massive citizen-led protest, which included “blinding” the cars by putting traffic cones on their hoods (keer, 2023). tesla, never far from controversy, was forced into two huge recalls in december 2023 and february 2024 one affecting their autopilot system, another concerning instrument panel displays affecting more than 4 million vehicles in total (krisher 2023, hawkins 2024). then, in january 2024, autonomous vehicle platform provider and chip supplier mobileye issued a profit warning, after demand from car companies fell (aglionby and healy 2024). in february, another tech giant apple cancelled its decade-long “titan” connected vehicle project, reportedly shifting the workforce to genai (roth 2024). taken individually, these incidents might simply amount to ordinary industry turbulence, the consequence of internal business strategies (organizational restructures, scrapped product lines, diverted capital) or external market dynamics (imposed regulatory orders, changing customer demands). together, they arguably constitute a crisis: a crisis of the viability of both connected and autonomous driving, a crisis of the applicability of ml and ai to real-world domains, and a crisis of sustainability for the automotive industry at large. on its face, this heralds the dreaded “ai winter” once prophesised by a lead industry player (shalev-shwartz et al., 2018: 1). our paper examines these failures and more, in order to situate, and contextualise, their collective occurrence within broader technological shifts of computational and media infrastructures. we propose four, non-mutually exclusive, central types of limitations contributing to this crisis. firstly, technical limits in ml and computer vision work that has surfaced the perceptive inadequacies of autonomous vehicles (mccosker and wilken 2020). secondly, economic limits in attempts to ‘platformize’ automotive operations depending on a variety of innovations such as vehicle subscription models and enhanced chip manufacturing (hind and gekker 2022, hind et al. 2022). thirdly, financial limits in respect to funding of technological projects dependent upon huge, more-or-less speculative investment decisions (marx 2022). and lastly, regulatory limits as local and national bodies seek to impose safety restrictions on operations for wider social benefit, resulting in the industry’s renegotiation of the conditions of what is perceived possible (tennant and stilgoe 2021). our paper further expands on these limitations by drawing on the cases outlined above and connecting them to the recent turn to platforms and infrastructure scholarship in media studies. technical limits perhaps most obviously, cavs failed to deliver on their basic promise: taking away driving responsibilities from the human and bestowing them safely upon the machine. computer vision and fleet learning (the ability of one vehicle to learn from the experience of others) have so far not been able to guarantee a smooth transition into such reality. beyond the technological issues at hand, sts and media scholars have long been observing the discrepancy between the given of a specific technology and its wider understanding by users, in various type of technological imaginaries (jasanoff and kim 2013, bucher 2017, egliston and carter 2022). often, they do not stand up to the hype exacerbated by traditional and social media (funk 2019). here we see perhaps a clear empirical indication to the hype’s limit: a specific imaginary consistently failing to deliver. economic limits much of the cav industry grew out of either new nimble technological player attempting to “disrupt” the car marker or traditional manufacturers attempting to keep their position. this is nonetheless often done by collaborating with outside actors, such as honda's collaboration with sony to launch a new series of evs in north america (hawkins, 2023). a central theme in the development of such vehicles was their linking to broader plans surrounding the platform and gig economy, with their interrelated business models. yet, those have been proven unsustainable with central actors from uber to deliveroo having to downscale and re evaluate their approaches in recent years (vallas and schor 2020). financial limits anticlimactically, the bloom of cav might be seen as just another “zero interest-rate economy” instances, where venture capital was willing to borrow cheap money on moonshot projects in the hopes of quick returns. what happened with cav closely resembles what has been described as “financialisation” or “assetisation” (sadowski 2020, birch and muniesa 2020) of the digital economy. cavs were always intended as a method of data extraction on top of their car-function, treated like assets to generate additional rent instead of mere commodities to be sold. similar to what has happened in the housing market, the introduction of pre-mediated digital surveillance and enclosure (nethercote 2023) has severely impacted how the automobiles were developed and deployed. regulatory limits particularly of interest here is the rapid public opinion turnaround surrounding cavs. from a technology of possibility and liberation they became strongly associated with “solutionism” and big tech, as citizen groups exerted additional pressure on the policy makers to stop or limit vehicles experimentation. this very much parallels the documented shift in another infrastructural issue, namely the construction of data centers, their environmental impact and resource drain (rone 2023, van es et al. 2023). av testing, it seems, is quite similar to the latter, where while physically located in a specific locale, give very little tangible benefits for this space, acting instead as a ‘node in others’ networks, both built in and left out’. (jonhnson 2019, 75). ultimately, the paper builds a conceptual framework for understanding the limitations and perils of ai (sub-)industries. while focusing on the automotive domain, the lessons can be relevant to the current focus on llms as well. references adams, tim. 2015. ‘self-driving cars: from 2020 you will become a permanent backseat driver’. the observer, 13 september 2015, sec. technology. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/13/self-driving-cars-bmw-google2020-driving. aglionby, john, and euan healy. 2024. ‘mobileye shares plunge on profit warning’. 4 january 2024. https://www.ft.com/content/0dca91eb-7a78-49eb-ae63-3b427e5104fa. bucher, taina. 2017. ‘the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms’. information, communication & society 20 (1): 30–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154086. egliston, ben, and marcus carter. 2022. ‘oculus imaginaries: the promises and perils of facebook’s virtual reality’. new media & society 24 (1): 70–89. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820960411. es, karin van, daan van der weijden, and jeroen bakker. 2023. ‘the multifaceted and situated data center imaginary of dutch twitter’. big data & society 10 (1): 20539517231155064. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231155064. fourcade, marion, and kieran healy. 2016. ‘seeing like a market’. socio-economic review 15 (1): 9–29. https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mww033. funk, jeffrey. 2019. ‘what’s behind technological hype?’ issues in science and technology 36 (1): 36–42. hawkins, andrew j. 2022. ‘argo ai, driverless startup backed by ford and vw, is shutting down’. the verge. 26 october 2022. https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/26/23423998/argo-ai-shut-down-ford-vw-av-selfdriving. ———. 2023a. ‘sony and honda just announced their new electric car brand, afeela’. the verge. 5 january 2023. https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/4/23539863/sony-honda-electric-vehicle-afeela-cesreveal-photos. ———. 2023b. ‘california dmv suspends cruise’s robotaxi permit “effective immediately”’. the verge. 24 october 2023. https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/24/23930629/california-dmv-suspends-cruiserobotaxi-permit-safety. ———. 2024. ‘tesla’s latest screwup involves making the font size of its braking system too small’. the verge. 2 february 2024. https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/2/24059114/tesla-recall-brake-system-font-sizepower-steering. hind, sam, and alex gekker. 2022. ‘automotive parasitism: examining mobileye’s “caragnostic” platformisation’. new media & society, july, 14614448221104209. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221104209. hind, sam, max kanderske, and fernando van der vlist. 2022. ‘making the car “platform ready”: how big tech is driving the platformization of automobility’. social media + society 8 (2): 20563051221098697. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221098697. jasanoff, sheila, and sang-hyun kim. 2013. ‘sociotechnical imaginaries and national energy policies’. science as culture 22 (2): 189–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2013.786990. johnson, alix. 2019. ‘data centers as infrastructural in-betweens: expanding connections and enduring marginalities in iceland’. american ethnologist 46 (1): 75–88. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12735. kerr, dara. 2023. ‘armed with traffic cones, protesters are immobilizing driverless cars’. npr, 26 august 2023, sec. business. https://www.npr.org/2023/08/26/1195695051/driverless-cars-san-francisco-waymocruise. krisher, tom. 2023. ‘tesla recalls nearly all vehicles sold in us to fix system that monitors drivers using autopilot’. ap news. 13 december 2023. https://apnews.com/article/tesla-autopilot-recall-driver-monitoring-system8060508627a34e6af889feca46eb3002. mccosker, anthony, and rowan wilken. 2020. automating vision: the social impact of the new camera consciousness. new york ; london: routledge/taylor & francis group. metz, cade, and erin griffith. 2020. ‘this was supposed to be the year driverless cars went mainstream’. the new york times, 12 may 2020, sec. technology. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/technology/self-driving-cars-coronavirus.html. nethercote, megan. 2023. ‘platform landlords: renters, personal data and new digital footholds of urban control’. digital geography and society 5 (december): 100060. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.diggeo.2023.100060. reuters. 2022. ‘vw ceo to present software “reality check” to board on dec. 15, report says’. automotive news europe. 6 december 2022. https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/vw-ceo-present-software-reality-check-boarddec-15-report-says. rone, julia. 2023. ‘the shape of the cloud: contesting data centre construction in north holland’. new media & society, january, 14614448221145928. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221145928. roth, emma. 2024. ‘apple’s electric car project is dead’. the verge. 27 february 2024. https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/27/24084907/apple-electric-car-project-titanshuts-down. sadowski, jathan. 2020. ‘the internet of landlords: digital platforms and new mechanisms of rentier capitalism’. antipode 52 (2): 562–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12595. shalev-shwartz, shai, shaked shammah, and amnon shashua. 2018. ‘on a formal model of safe and scalable self-driving cars’. arxiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1708.06374. uk department of transport 2022. 2022. ‘self-driving revolution to boost economy and improve road safety’. gov.uk. 2022. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/selfdriving-revolution-to-boost-economy-and-improve-road-safety. vallas, steven, and juliet b. schor. 2020. ‘what do platforms do? understanding the gig economy’. annual review of sociology 46 (1): 273–94. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-121919-054857. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): morales, e., divon, t., lundqvist, m., halabi, n. (2023, october). exploring the contextual complexities of violence on digital platforms: intersections, impacts, and solutions. panel presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. exploring the contextual complexities of violence on digital platforms: intersections, impacts, and solutions esteban morales university of british columbia tom divon hebrew university of jerusalem martin lundqvist lund university nour halabi university of aberdeen introduction violence has become intricately interwoven into the fabric of our modern-day digital ecosystem. the escalating accessibility and ubiquity of digital platforms across the globe have facilitated a corresponding rise in the frequency of violence enacted through these channels. several studies have observed a growing prevalence of violence perpetrated on and through digital platforms. for example, stubbs et al. (2022) argue that content depicting real-world violence is a common element of our contemporary digital landscape, resulting in severe psychological effects on platforms' users. in a similar vein, matamoros et al. (2023) have highlighted the pervasive nature of humorous digital content, often employed as a means to disseminate and exacerbate cultures of violence. conversely, some studies showcase how online humor, such as memes and online jokes, are deployed to poke fun at political violence: satirizing and potentially delegitimizing it (gusic & lundqvist, 2023). the rising prominence of digital platforms in our daily lives has made online harms increasingly impactful, blurring the distinctions between online and offline violence, and rendering them seemingly irrelevant (gosse, 2019). for example, coombs (2021) argues that digital manifestations of violence directly impact various human rights, such as the “rights to privacy, freedom of movement, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly, to name a few, as well as rights relating to freedom from violence” (p. 480). similarly, donovan et al. (2022) emphasize the role of digital platforms in contemporary cultural and informational wars in the united states, where the weapons were memes, slogans, ideas; the tactics were internet-enabled threats like swarms, doxes, brigades, disinformation, and media-manipulation campaigns; and the strategy of the warriors was to move their influence from the wires (the internet) to the weeds (the real world) by trading fringe ideas up the partisan media ecosystem and into mainstream culture. (p. 14–15) in the context of rapid technological development, global conflicts, and socio-cultural transformations, gaining a comprehensive understanding of the nature of violence, the role of platforms in its proliferation, and its impact on users is an essential undertaking towards fostering cultures of peace. in such circumstances, a crucial initial step involves contextualizing violent behavior and content within their cultural and historical contexts (dwyer, 2017). indeed, as noted by stanko (2005), “what violence means is and will always be fluid, not fixed; it is mutable” (p. 3, emphasis in original). this panel delves into the impact, reach, and various manifestations of violence, as experienced and perceived within specific socio-cultural contexts, through four studies conducted in different countries and regions. employing diverse methodological approaches, such as interviews, content analysis, and ethnography, panelists explore various forms of violence and counter-violence, including memes, insults, and viral videos depicting physical violence. the first paper delves into the impact and role of internet memes in shaping political discourse and narratives around violence in post-conflict northern ireland. the author develops an audience-centric analysis of memes dealing with political violence: an analytical approach that has hitherto been missing from the sub-field of meme studies. the second paper explores social media narratives around the recent earthquake in syria. the author reveals how such narratives serve to erase citizens' trauma and exacerbate violence against those already affected by natural disasters. this underscores the potential of digital platforms to perpetuate symbolic violence, normalizing and concealing power imbalances while amplifying and sustaining their harmful effects. the third paper provides a critical examination of memetic platforms as hotbeds of inflammatory content, with a particular emphasis on tiktok and its role in the israelipalestinian conflict, as well as the recent protests against religious agents in iran. the author conducts a critical analysis of the platform's social media culture of "challenges," highlighting how these memetic practices can motivate real-world participatory violence. the fourth paper studies the mediation of everyday violence among colombian young adults. here, the author explores how social media platforms have fundamentally altered the way users perceive and interpret meaning-making processes around violence. these changes have crucial consequences in societies with prolonged or ongoing histories of armed conflicts, leading to the normalization of harmful behavior both within and beyond digital platforms. as researchers who have spent significant amounts of time in zones of conflict and witnessed the devastating effects of violence both online and offline, we aim to thoroughly examine the role of users, platforms, and digital practices in perpetuating this issue. with our diverse academic backgrounds and areas of expertise, we aim to bridge the gap between western and non-western perspectives on violence in digital spaces. most importantly, through and across these case studies, we seek to uncover solutions for mitigating the harmful effects of digital violence, unveiling ways of supporting the construction of sustainable cultures of peace that take into consideration the critical role of digital technologies in our societies. references coombs, e. (2021). human rights, privacy rights, and technology-facilitated violence. in j. bailey, a. flynn, & n. henry (eds.), the emerald international handbook of technology-facilitated violence and abuse (pp. 475–491). emerald publishing limited. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83982-848-520211036 donovan, j., dreyfuss, e., & friedberg, b. (2022). meme wars: the untold story of the online battles upending democracy in america. bloomsbury publishing. dwyer, p. (2017). violence and its histories: meanings, methods, problems. history and theory, 56(4), 7–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12035 gosse, c. (2021). “not the real world”: exploring experiences of online abuse, digital dualism, and ontological labor. in j. bailey, a. flynn, & n. henry (eds.), the emerald international handbook of technology-facilitated violence and abuse (pp. 47–64). emerald publishing limited. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83982-848-520211003 gusic, i, & lundqvist, m. (2023). “’meme-ing’ peace in northern ireland: exploring the everyday politics of internet memes in belfast riots”. international journal of communication 17: 6312-6334 matamoros-fernández, a., bartolo, l., & troynar, l. (2023). humour as an online safety issue: exploring solutions to help platforms better address this form of expression. internet policy review, 12(1). stanko, e. a. (2005). conceptualising the meanings of violence. in the meanings of violence (pp. 19–32). routledge. stubbs, j. e., nicklin, l. l., wilsdon, l., & lloyd, j. (2022). investigating the experience of viewing extreme real-world violence online: naturalistic evidence from an online discussion forum. new media & society, 146144482211084. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221108451 https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83982-848-520211036 https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83982-848-520211036 https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12035 https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83982-848-520211003 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221108451 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221108451 'meme-ing’ political contention in northern ireland: exploring audience reception of internet memes about political violence in belfast martin lundqvist lund university introduction and context in april 2021, northern ireland was once again marred by outbreaks of violence, while politicians from the united kingdom (u.k.) and ireland grappled with the challenge of preserving a longstanding peace agreement in the region. the streets of belfast bore witness to a week-long spate of unrest, during which numerous police officers suffered injuries due to attacks involving bricks, fireworks, and petrol bombs. this renewed turmoil coincided with the 23rd anniversary of the good friday agreement, a historic peace accord that ended three decades of sectarian violence known as 'the troubles (the spectator, 2021). the hostilities reached a critical juncture as political leaders attempted to reach a consensus on new trade regulations between the u.k. and the european union without undermining the aforementioned peace agreement. it is apparent that the enduring tensions between (protestant) unionists and (catholic) nationalists — who were the principal political adversaries during 'the troubles’ — lay at the heart of the 2021 disturbances in belfast. here, brexit acted as a catalyst, reigniting hostilities along well-established political fault lines (bbc, 2021). while political violence is a recurring phenomenon in physical spaces in belfast, antagonisms have also increasingly ’gone digital’. as cars burned in the streets and clashes took place in parks and squares during the april 2021 riots, conflicts also played out online: partially as internet memes (henceforth: memes) which responded to and engaged with the riots in various ways. the same goes for the massive belfast riots of 2012 — colloquially known as ‘the flag protests’ — which are considered to be the first riots in post-war northern ireland that were heavily mediatized through social media such as twitter, reddit, facebook, and youtube (reilly, 2021). these protests, which at times involved violent clashes between protestors and police, started in december 2012 and lasted until february 2013. they were instigated by the decision to not fly the union jack from belfast city hall quite as often as before. prior to this decision, the flag was flown every day of the year, whereas afterward, it was reserved for specific holidays. this shift in policy left a significant number of protestants in belfast feeling that the symbolic link between northern ireland and the united kingdom was under threat. (reilly 2021; young & reilly, 2015). the fact that these protests were highly disruptive is also evident in the large body of memes which have been produced about them (know your meme: northern ireland flag protests n/d). theoretical framework and contributions this study seeks to shed light upon how people receive internet memes about political violence in contemporary belfast. the large-scale riots of april 2021 and december 2012 discussed above serve as its primary case studies. analyzing how people read memes about these riots enables one to grasp how they – in their everyday lives – position themselves politically vis-à-vis the political violence of the past (i.e., ‘the troubles’) and its re-eruption in the present (as riots). understanding memes along these lines thus treats them as discursive practices: an analytical point of view which previous communication research has firmly established (see for example: shifman, 2013; wiggins & bower, 2015; denisova, 2019; wiggins, 2019; mortensen & neumayer, 2021). while much has already been said about the discursive power of memes, significantly less has been said about how they are received by their audiences. as noted by trilló and shifman (2021) the sub-field of memes studies would benefit from ‘a deeper understanding of how photo-based memes […] are perceived by potential audiences’ (p. 2496-2497). previous studies of memes have mostly dabbled in the notion of an ‘imagined audience’ (and its assumed reading of the memes in line with discourses) rather than talking to the people who inhabit the political context of the memes (see wiggins 2019 p. 100-115 for an extended discussion on audiences and memes). the absence of an audience perspective is a somewhat serious shortcoming, as we are then limited to reading the memes as discourses and lack an understanding of how they are decoded in everyday life. considering how audiences rarely (if ever) read media texts fully as intended by their authors (see for example hall 1981/1973; jenkins, 1992; burgess & green, 2009) – arguably makes notions such as an ‘imagined audience’ and the discursive ‘directionality’ of memes inherently flawed. indeed, questioning such notions opens up space for analyzing audiences who read memes contrary to their intention, e.g., in ways which challenge instigations to violence. methods in order to address this research gap, i have conducted 19 semi-structured interviews with interlocutors in belfast, asking them for their take on memes about riots and contentious politics in the city. in addition to semi-structured interviews, i employ digital ethnography. in digital ethnography, ‘we are often in mediated contact with participants rather than in direct presence … we might be watching what people do online by digitally tracking them or asking them to invite us into their social media practices’ (pink et al 2016, p. 21). in this study, i primarily draw upon digital ethnography to observe how people engage with discussions on rioting and memes about riots on various social media platforms, such as reddit, instagram, and facebook. this complements the semi-structured interviews by anchoring them in broader online discussions about political contention and memes in northern ireland. such online discussions help situate the interviews within a larger discourse about political violence and social media in northern ireland and provides important contextualisation to the interviewees’ answers. expected findings and analysis as memes are inherently polysemic (milner, 2013; pettis, 2022, p, 264), semi-structured interviews and digital ethnography will help elucidate the extent to which there is a red thread running from the discourses of the memes to the meaning(s) made by their audiences. in essence: to what extent – and how – do people read the memes differently from what a discourse analytical approach would have assumed? to answer this research question, i contrast and compare the findings of previous work on the discourses of memes about political violence in belfast (gusic & lundqvist, 2023; reilly, 2021) with the views expressed by my interlocutors. previous studies on memes about political violence in belfast have argued that they mock the political rationales of the rioting, thus in a sense discursively delegitimizing the violence in question (gusic & lundqvist, 2023). still, this discursive-analytical approach leaves little room for analyzing audiences, and thus we are left in the dark about their experiences of reading these memes: including their affective engagement with them (which is an essential component in making people politically engaged through social media, as argued by papacharissi, 2014). this study aims to ameliorate this shortcoming through an in-depth analysis of audience reception of memes about political violence in belfast, northern ireland. the interviews for this study are currently being conducted in belfast, and thus, the analysis will be developed once these are finalized – all in good time before the conference. references bbc (2021). ’ni riots: what is behind the violence in northern ireland?’ url: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-56664378 [accessed 14 january 2023] burgess, j. & green, j. (2009). youtube: online video and participatory culture. polity: cambridge. denisova, a. (2019). internet memes and society: social, cultural, and political contexts. new york and london: routledge. gusic, i, & lundqvist, m. (2023). “’meme-ing’ peace in northern ireland: exploring the everyday politics of internet memes in belfast riots”. international journal of communication 17: 6312-6334 hall, s. (1981 [1973]) ‘encoding/decoding’. in hall s, et al. (eds) culture, media, language. london: hutchinson. hoey, p. (2018). shinners, dissos and dissenters: irish republican media activism since the good friday agreement. manchester: manchester university press. jenkins, h. (1992). textual poachers: television fans & participatory culture. london and new york: routledge. know your meme (n/d). ‘northern ireland flag protests’. url: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/northern-ireland-flag-protests-2012-13 [accessed 12 february 2023] milner, r.m. (2013). ‘pop polyvocality: internet memes, public participation, and the occupy wall street movement’. international journal of communication, vol 7: pp. 2357-2390. mortensen, m., & neumayer, c. (2021). ‘the playful politics of memes’. information, communication & society, 24:16, 2367-2377. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-56664378 https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/northern-ireland-flag-protests-2012-13 papacharissi, z. (2014). affective publics: sentiment, technology, and politics. oxford: oxford university press. pettis, b. (2022). ‘know your meme and the homogenization of web history’. internet histories. vol 6(3): 263-279. pink, s.; horst, h.; postill, j.; hjorth, l.; lewis, t., & tacchi, j. (2016). digital ethnography: principles and practices. los angeles: sage publications. reilly, p. (2021). digital contention in a divided society: social media, parades, and protests in northern ireland. manchester: manchester university press. shifman, l. (2013). memes in digital culture. cambridge, mass., and london: mit press. the spectator (2021). ‘the good friday agreement’s uneasy anniversary’. url: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-good-friday-agreement-s-uneasy-anniversary [accessed 14 january 2023] trilló, t. & shifman, l. (2021). ‘memetic commemorations: remixing far-right values in digital spheres’. information, communication & society, 24:16, 2482-2501. wiggins, b.e, & bowers, g.b (2015). 'memes as genre: a structurational analysis of the memescape'. new media & society 17(11): 1886-1906. wiggins, b. (2019). the discursive power of memes in digital culture: ideology, semiotics, and intertextuality. london: routledge. young, o. & reilly, p. (2015) ‘social media, parades and protests’. published by the northern ireland community relations council. url: https://www.communityrelations.org.uk/sites/crc/files/media-files/social-media-parades-andprotests%202015.pdf [accessed 12 february 2023] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-good-friday-agreement-s-uneasy-anniversary https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-good-friday-agreement-s-uneasy-anniversary https://www.community-relations.org.uk/sites/crc/files/media-files/social-media-parades-and-protests%202015.pdf https://www.community-relations.org.uk/sites/crc/files/media-files/social-media-parades-and-protests%202015.pdf https://www.community-relations.org.uk/sites/crc/files/media-files/social-media-parades-and-protests%202015.pdf symbolic violence of erasure and invisibilization in online discussions of the syrian conflict nour halabi university of aberdeen introduction in the aftermath of the earthquake that affected turkey and syria in early 2023, discussions of the harrowing impact of the natural disaster intensified an ongoing representational struggle between assadists and revolutionary syrians online. on the one hand, pro-assadist “anti-imperialist” accounts insisted that the humanitarian disaster was made deadlier due to economic sanctions imposed by the united states. on the other hand, pro-revolution accounts emphasized how the shelling of northern syria that the regime had exacted prior to the quake damaged key infrastructure, magnifying the deadliness of the following natural disaster. in this study, i present an exploration of social media accounts of both pro-assadists and pro-revolutionaries to explore narratives surrounding the impact of the 2023 earthquake on northern syria. i draw for this analysis on herremans and destrooper’s (2021) discussion of omission in the context of justice discourses in syria as a dichotomy between erasure and invisibilization. to achieve this, i first examine five social media accounts belonging to “anti-imperialist/anti-sanction” advocates to illustrate how the omission of information on syrian government attacks on northern syria prior to the earthquake contributes to the “erasure” (herreman & destrooper, 2021) of the violence directed at the syrian subject. next, i examine five social media accounts of revolutionary figures, arguing that their focus on countering “anti-imperialist” narratives—although a necessary form of resistance to political oppression and erasure (medina, 2018)—shifted attention away from meaningful discussion of humanitarian aid to the affected, leading to the invisibilization of syrians' trauma (herremans & destrooper, 2021). theoretical framework and contributions the contemporary media environment is defined by the primacy of proprietary, exclusionary, and us and european-based media platforms, a phenomenon puschmann and burgess (2014) term the “platform paradigm.” in this context, this project seeks to focus on key figures across multiple social media platforms and different media in an attempt to decentralize the primacy of any one platform in a digital media debate. moreover, given the crisis of legitimacy and transparency surrounding twitter as a platform (roth, 2022), the study seeks to leverage the contemporary importance of the platform within the larger debate of justice in the syrian conflict while also taking into consideration how twitter debates interact with, diffuse to, and compare with their counterparts in digital news platforms such as enab baladi, newslines, as well as other social media websites such as facebook and instagram. in so doing, this project is not only interested in capturing the “ephemerality” of social media platforms in general and twitter in particular, but it also offers insight, or the “scoop” as rogers (2009) puts it, of the affordances of a platform may structure the horizons of public debate. at the same time, tracing discourses as they migrate from one platform to another offers insight into the impact a waning platform may have on the future of global justice debates. methods this paper draws from digital ethnography, adapting the practices of participant observation to the study of online platforms as a field site (hine, 2000). the project selects ten social media accounts held by key figures in the debate on global and syrian justice to allow the systematic collection of posts made by individual “opinion leaders” on a debate, thereby adapting the methodological tools developed by scholars of black twitter (clark, m. & banks, a., 2022), feminist bloggers (clark-parsons, 2022), and journalists (barnard, 2016). i trace the responses of public accounts in the crucial search and rescue and early emergency relief phases of the post-earthquake environment, from february 6, 2023, to february 28, 2023. in a sense, this study eschews the reliance on proprietary datasets curated by social media websites, such as twitter’s api—an approach that is of particular importance given the diminishing access academic research may have to the platform’s data (stokel-walker, 2023). thus, instead of focusing attention on following hashtags that are mired in the problematic aspects of twitter’s search function and api access, i will focus on individual users known to syrian audiences as key figures within the debate on justice in the crisis. after collecting the public posts made by key figures, the study applies multimodal discourse analysis to capture the complex interaction of visual, textual, and intertextual elements that inform the narratives surrounding the syrian conflict shared in these posts. preliminary findings the preliminary findings of this study suggest that the online discourse surrounding the earthquake in syria contributes to the double erasure of the suffering of syrians impacted by both natural disasters and government oppression. on the one hand, self-proclaimed “anti-imperialist” commentators participated in the “erasure” (herremans & destrooper, 2021) of the suffering of syrian subjects by focusing their discourse solely on the impact of economic sanctions. examples of this erasure include twitter posts by prominent european political journalists and political figures in both the united states and the united kingdom, blaming the suffering of syrian citizens on economic sanctions (benjamin, 2023; medhurst, 2023;). on the other hand, pro-revolutionary accounts such as global justice and razan al saffour focused their attention on falsifying the narrative surrounding the impact of sanctions on delivering aid to affected syrians, particularly focusing on the exclusion of humanitarian aid from economic sanction frameworks. nevertheless, the centering of this debate rather than the issues facing syrians impacted by the quake served to further invisibilize the suffering of syrian residents of northern syria. it is worth noting that some accounts sought to address the prevailing simplification of narratives around the earthquake—as illustrated by some commentators who tried to reframe and rectify the double-erasure of the suffering inflicted on syrian citizens. of note is the intervention of the leader of the syrian civil defence group the white helmets, who called for an end to the “politicization of aid to syrians impacted by the earthquakes” and posted several accompanying tweets shedding light on the magnitude of the humanitarian disaster facing its people. conclusion the dynamics of invisibilization of syrian trauma explored in this paper resonate with galtung’s conception of structural and cultural violence (galtung, 1969), as the erasure of stories surrounding the earthquake results in further violence directed at syrians. in this sense, the results of this study emphasize the invisibilization of trauma through social media as a form of structural violence that reinforces the image of the syrian conflict as an intractable struggle and complex reality that is difficult for witnesses to grasp, let alone resolve. the latter, in turn, shrinks the justice imagination of both global onlookers and governments (herremans & destrooper, 2021) while confusing global audiences and disincentivizing aid contributions. references benjamin, m. [@medeabenjamin]. (2023, february, 28). lift cruel sanctions on syria!!! [twitter profile]. clark, m. & banks, a. (2022) thinking of a black digital ethos. social media + society, 8(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221117568. clark-parsons, r. (2022) networked feminism. university of california press. herremans, b., & destrooper, t. (2021). stirring the justice imagination: countering the invisibilization and erasure of syrian victims’ justice narratives. international journal of transitional justice, 15(3), 576-595. gaffney, d. & puschmann, c. (2014) “data collection on twitter.” twitter and society (2014), 55-67. galtung, j. (1969). “violence, peace and peace research.” journal of peace research 6(3). medhurst, r. [@richimedhurst]. (2023, february, 23) they pretend to be concerned about syrians, but conveniently never mention how us/eu sanctions are suffocating people, throwing them into poverty and food insecurity, and stopping aid to syria before, during, and after the earthquake. [twitter profile]. medina, j. (2018). the epistemology of resistance: gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and resistant imaginations. new york: oxford university press. puschmann, c., & burgess, j. (2014). “the politics of twitter data.” twitter and society, 43-54. rogers, r. (2009). the end of the virtual: digital methods. vol 339. amsterdam: amsterdam university press. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221117568 https://twitter.com/richimedhurst spivak, g. (1993). ‘can the subaltern speak?’ in chrisman, e. and williams, p (eds) .colonial discourse and post-colonial theory: a reader, new york: harvest wheathead, 1993) stokel-walker, c. february 7, 2023. “techscape: why twitter ending free access to its apis should be a ‘wake up call’.” the guardian. playful platforms: the memeification of participatory violence on tiktok tom divon hebrew university of jerusalem introduction tiktok is a powerful social media platform that has granted a complex and multifaceted role in the terrain of contemporary socio-political conflicts. this study examines tiktok’s position in two recent major warfare conflicts: the first is the escalation of violence between palestinians and israelis in may 2021, culminating in the israeli military operation “guardian of the walls” in gaza (kingsley, 2021). the second is the wave of protests in november 2022 in iran as a reaction to the death of 22-year-old mahsa amini, who was murdered by iran's “morality police” for failing to cover her hair in public (cbs news, 2022). the presence of tiktok has taken a prominent position in the mediatization of these conflicts, moving beyond the mere networked presence of palestinian and iranian publics. tiktok’s infrastructure galvanized brutality through its novel play-based affordances and audiovisual grammar while propelling users to engage in participatory violence behaviors cultivated by the culture of #challenges. conceptual framework this study offers theoretical concepts that are useful for understanding the inflammatory nature of platforms in times of conflict. the first concept is social media challenges. these are play-based collaborative tasks governed by a set of performative rules in which users are encouraged to co-opt a competitive creative mission initiated by random users (kriegel et al., 2021). on tiktok, challenges become multimodal memes. based on an imitable combination of text, sound, and movement, challenges offer memetic templates for content creation, allowing an accessible framework for ordinary users to create within. when a challenge appears to users on tiktok’s feed, known as the “for you” page (fyp), they can choose to participate by producing their own version in order to achieve algorithmic visibility (abidin, 2021). the second concept is playful publics. those are algorithmically motivated cohorts of users who take part in the daily manufacture of memetic trends for the sake of granting virality to their social-political voices. tiktok’s memetic architecture of #challenges renders networked crowds into playful publics who affectively convey their sentiment concurrently with emerging burning events by using playful performance methods. they utilize tiktok’s whimsical and ludic attitude as their storytelling structure and are propelled by the platform’s socio-technical affordances, encouraging them to work as a communalized collection of people driven by forces of imitation, affection, and play. tiktok’s playful climate allows socio-political advocacy to weave into unexpected memetic formats that prompt political change (bandy & diakopoulos, 2020), but may fuel offline violence, polarization, and extremism (huang & tingting, 2022). lastly, cycles of amplification (phillips, 2015). this notion refers to the ways digital platforms create self-reinforcing feedback loops that increase the visibility and impact of content, including violence or extremism. tiktok’s powerful dissemination system creates cycles of amplification, resulting in human and algorithmic manufacturers of virality. tiktok has faced allegations of human interference with a feature (“heating”) artificially boosting the visibility of certain videos on the “for you” (baker-white, 2023). in addition, tiktok's algorithmic amplification has been shown to be a potent mechanism that incentivizes users to create and distribute content in accordance with the platform's established norms, resulting in accelerated exposure (kaye et al., 2022). meaning, users who take part in tiktok’s challenges increase their chances of being spotted by the algorithmic “eye,” entering the platform's cycle of amplification that pushes their videos to the fyp, triggering and motivating playful publics into action. methods focused on the hashtags in english and in arabic #hitandrun (واهرب and (#اضرب #turbanflippers (عمامه_پرانی#) accumulating 1.2 billion views by january 2023), this study applied the walkthrough method (light et al., 2018), scrolling through tiktok’s hashtag page and forming a repository of users’ audiovisual engagements throughout the times of both conflicts. the study focused on the platform’s human and nonhuman actors, seeking to understand how tiktok’s #challenge templates ignite and contribute to participatory violence behaviors, and how users were leveraging different features, practices, and styles for participation. accordingly, a repository of 1,320 videos was created composed of identified 600 #hitandrun videos and 720 #turbanflippers videos, and with the help of multimodal content analysis (kress & van leeuwen, 2020), their memetic form unfolded looking at their audiovisual, textual and performative features, together with multifaceted modes of communication. preliminary observations the #hitandrun challenge: in may 2021, supporters of the #freepalestine movement fluxed tiktok with challenge videos that were mobilizing in a terrorizing call-to-action to hit and run random israelis in the streets of israel. this challenge was sparked by a widely circulated video showing a young palestinian slapping an ultra-orthodox jewish person in jerusalem. this video surpassed 2.4 million shares overnight, generating a memetic influx of similar videos that stimulated the palestinian public to take over the visibility of both the “for you” page and the streets of jerusalem. those videos were accompanied by a caption saying: “you will continue to delete, but we will continue to upload. it’s either the palestinian people or you.” the message represented a three-fold narrative of "intifada" (resistance, in arabic): tiktok's algorithm moderating violent palestinian content, the israeli public fighting back by reporting violent videos, and the israeli authorities “deleting” the palestinians' wish to be recognized of as a nation in a territory where their existence is constantly under negation. the palestinian public weaponized tiktok’s play-based practice of challenges to inflame conflict in various hot spots in israel while uploading videos from palestinian users’ accounts showing repetitive features of performative violence. in many examples, the documenter was infusing the executor’s acts with an “allahu akbar” call (“god is the greatest” in arabic), framing this challenge as an act of jihad (the muslim obligation for resistance in religious warfare; see gawrych, 2002). some palestinians were seen attacking rabbis near synagogues and deliberately attempting to attack israeli soldiers. the #turbanflippers challenge: in november 2022, members of the #turbanflippers in iran fluxed tiktok with challenge videos that were mobilizing another terrorizing call-toaction to flip and hit the turbans off the heads of unsuspecting islamic clerics in public. hundreds of memetic videos have swept across the “for you” showing turban hats being knocked off in streets, buses, metro stations, and other public spaces in which islamic clerics were attacked. the turban was targeted due to mahsa amini’s death for wearing her hijab “improperly,” leading participants to redirect their anger towards another religious headwear. in some, users were seen screaming “allahu akbar” calls, but this time not as a symbol of religious-based resistance but as a sign of mockery of the shi’a clergy and their legitimacy in iran. some were yelling, “clerics get lost!” and adding captions of #discrimination, #exclusion, rejecting of the gender-based abuse iranian women have been subjected to by the clergy who verbally abuse them in public for their “inappropriate” hijab. discussion although the #hitandrun and #turbanflippers videos can also be seen as random documentation of violence, as the labor of playful publics, they adhere to the theme and structure of other videos while "lending themselves to finding new instances of related content.” (rintel, 2013) following a memetic structure, this “play” had specific rules: one user was to take the role of the documenter that was filming, and another user was to be the executor hitting random victims and immediately fleeing the scene. these videos’ memetic structure, interconnected by a shared dialect (the #), is an open invitation to the “theater of terror,” showing brutal acts communicated through orchestrated violence (weimann, 1994), and even if not transmitted in real-time, might incite collective action. moreover, the behaviors of playful publics carry a toxic potential for participatory violence to “travel seamlessly back and forth between online and offline spaces and transit into real-life political mobilizations.” (borum, 2016) references abidin, c. (2021). mapping internet celebrity on tiktok: exploring attention economies and visibility labours. cultural science journal, 12(1), 77-103 baker-white, e. (2023, january 20). tiktok's secret "heating" button can make anyone go viral. forbes. retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heatingbutton-can-make-anyone-go-viral/?sh=6fe6c1126bfd bandy, j., & diakopoulos, n. (2020). #tulsaflop: a case study of algorithmicallyinfluenced collective action on tiktok. arxiv preprint arxiv:2012.07716. borum, r. (2010). understanding terrorist psychology. in a. silke (ed.), the psychology of counter-terrorism (pp. 33-47). london: routledge. https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/?sh=6fe6c1126bfd https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/?sh=6fe6c1126bfd cbs news. (2022, february 23). iran's mullah-turban-tossing trend videos spark outrage, as army says it's ready to stop protests. cbs news. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iranmullah-turban-tossing-trend-videos-army-ready-to-stop-protests/ gawrych, g. w. (2002). jihad, war, and terrorism. article online, 1-22. huang, v. g., & liu, t. (2022). gamifying contentious politics: gaming capital and playful resistance. games and culture, 17(1), 26-46. kaye, d. b. v., chen, x., & zeng, j. (2021). the co-evolution of two chinese mobile short video apps: parallel platformization of douyin and tiktok. mobile media & communication, 9(2), 229-253. kingsley, p. (2021, may 10). after raid on aqsa mosque, rockets from gaza and israeli airstrikes. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/10/world/middleeast/jerusalem-protestsaqsapalestinians.html kress, g., & van leeuwen, t. (2020). reading images: the grammar of visual design. routledge kriegel, e. r., lazarevic, b., athanasian, c. e., & milanaik, r. l. (2021). tiktok, tide pods and tiger king: health implications of trends taking over pediatric populations. current opinion in pediatrics, 33(1), 170-177. light, b, burgees, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881-900. phillips, w. (2013). the house that fox built: anonymous, spectacle, and cycles of amplification. television & new media, 14(6), 494-509. rintel, s. (2013). crisis memes: the importance of templatability to internet culture and freedom of expression. australasian journal of popular culture, 2(2), 253-271. weimann, g., & winn, c. (1994). theater of terror: mass media and international terrorism. new york: longman. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-mullah-turban-tossing-trend-videos-army-ready-to-stop-protests/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-mullah-turban-tossing-trend-videos-army-ready-to-stop-protests/ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/10/world/middleeast/jerusalem-protests-aqsapalestinians.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/10/world/middleeast/jerusalem-protests-aqsapalestinians.html social media and the mediation of violence among colombian young adults esteban morales university of british columbia introduction encountering harmful content, such as gender or racial violence, is an increasingly common experience for social media users (e.g., matamoros-fernández et al., 2022). the prevalence of harm on social media emphasizes the role of digital platforms as critical elements of contemporary ecologies of violence, whereby digital platforms enable new ways of practicing harm while transforming existing cultures of violence (morales, 2023). such integration of online manifestations of harm and cultures of violence is evidenced in colombia, the setting of this study, where anti-social behaviors on digital platforms are grounded and bound to historical, socio-cultural, and political contexts marked by longlasting armed conflicts. looking to better understand how cultures and enactments of violence configure and are configured by social media, this study explores the mediation of everyday violence through social media platforms among colombians. theoretical lens theoretically, this article relies on jesús martín-barbero’s approach to mediation—a lens that emphasizes how our modes of perception and language configure and are configured by the ongoing processes of cultural mutation (martín-barbero, 2002). to explore mediations, martín-barbero proposed a series of conceptual devices that map the processes of meaning-making of our surroundings, referencing the sensations, perceptions, and interpretations of the cultural experience we inhabit (rincón, 2019: 263). in the last version of these mediation maps, martín-barbero sought to respond to the complexities of the digital environments (martin-barbero & rincón, 2019), outlining four central mediations: spatialities, temporalities, technicities, and sensorialities. these four mediations are at the center of this study. methods this article reports on the findings of an exploratory case study, where 18 young adults from medellin (colombia) were invited to collaboratively discuss the violence they experienced in their everyday engagements with social media platforms. the participants were undergraduate students from various universities in the city. participants were organized into five discussion groups, with four to five young adults per group. each group held four discussion sessions over the video conferencing platform, zoom, where they all shared and reflected on the violence they experienced while using social media, such as insults to a friend over facebook comments or videos shared on twitter depicting war content. they also had a group chat on whatsapp, where they discussed violence on social media as they experienced it. data analysis consisted of two phases of thematic coding. the first phase followed a codebook approach (braun et al., 2019), deductively categorizing data into the four mediations outlined by martín-barbero (temporalities, spatialities, technicities, and sensorialities). the second round was informed by a reflexive thematic approach (terry & hayfield, 2020), inductively coding the data inside each mediation into emergent themes. results spatialities: when engaging with social media content, results show that colombian young adults inhabit multiple territorialities of violence, often simultaneously. indeed, participants noted that social media enables them to easily access geographical contexts of violence that are far away from them, such as the ukraine-russia war, or spaces that are close to them, such as video content of a robbery down their street in medellin. in this context, spatialities of violence are difficult to delimit for users, as violence that occurs over there and violence that occurs over here often collapse and collide. certainly, the spaces of violence that participants inhabit are increasingly not the same as those that affect them or their communities directly, but rather whatever is trending on social media. as noted by a participant, “you log in on twitter, and you think you see the world's panorama. but no, you go out on the street, and nobody knows what they are talking about on twitter.” temporalities: similarly to spatiality, the way users experience and make sense of the temporalities of violence has profoundly changed due to the proliferation of digital technologies. one of the most notorious changes is the foregrounded liveness of digital platforms (lupinacci, 2021), which allowed participants to see acts of harm and terror in real-time. for instance, participants were able to easily access live transmissions of a massive brawl in a mexican stadium, noting that “there are very strong images, even people shouting at others that they deserve to be killed.” moreover, while platforms foreground being in the moment, they also transform how the past is understood and experienced. for example, a participant told a story about how she found a video of a massacre that happened three years ago near her house: “i was watching a news story [on facebook] that happened in 2019 in itagüí, and i had no idea. and i thought it was terrible when i read it (...) i mean, this horrible thing happened, and i found out about it 3 years later.” this example shows not only the potentiality to connect and reconnect social media users to stories of the past but also to enable spaces where hegemonic and antihegemonic narratives of colombian historical memory are reconstructed and negotiated (birkner & donk, 2020). technicities: this mediation refers to what people do and narrate with technology, which is conditioned by both the materiality of the medium and the socio-cultural contexts in which they are used (pieniz & cenci, 2019). overall, there are four technicities in colombian young adults’ engagement with violence on social media. first, enacting harm, where participants noted the potential to be violent on social media by drawing on the affordances of each platform. second, entertaining themselves and others, which is better exemplified by the multiple examples of violence disguised as humor (e.g., a participant said that there “are some very delicate topics and they still make jokes. one laughs, but then realizes and says, ‘oh no, what is this?’”). third, expressing points of view through and around violence, as participants noted that, in many cases, people expressed their opinions in ways that were violent toward others. finally, participants also found social media a productive space for informing themselves and learning about specific contexts of violence. sensorialities: finally, sensorialities are a way of understanding how our senses and emotions, embedded in particular socio-cultural standings, mediate our processes and experiences of meaning-making. in this regard, participants recognize the emotional load embedded in their experiences with violence on social media. for instance, a participant reported sadness when exposed to violence against animals, “i see the little dog totally lacerated, wounded and… i want to cry.” participants also reported despair, anger, fear, and even joy—especially around the humorous representation of violence in memes. the most common consequence of these various emotional responses to violence is the normalization of harmful behavior—which extends beyond digital environments and into their everyday lives. a participant discussing seeing violent content on social media recounted that digital violence “generates an instinct for someone to record and share it with the rest of the world. and instead of helping, it's like they start to record it.” conclusion overall, the results of this study highlight how social media platforms profoundly transform processes of meaning-making of violence among colombian young adults. indeed, across all mediations, the increasing destabilization of meaning-making practices of the territories of violence that young adults inhabit on social media platforms is evident. these mediation processes emphasize challenges and opportunities for researchers, educators, activists, and policymakers to better understand and address violence on digital platforms. references birkner, t., & donk, a. (2020). collective memory and social media: fostering a new historical consciousness in the digital age? memory studies, 13(4), 367–383. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698017750012 braun, v., clarke, v., hayfield, n., & terry, g. (2019). thematic analysis. in p. liamputtong (ed.), handbook of research methods in health social sciences (pp. 843– 860). springer singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5251-4_103 lupinacci, l. (2021). ‘absentmindedly scrolling through nothing’: liveness and compulsory continuous connectedness in social media. media, culture & society, 43(2), 273–290. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720939454 martín-barbero, j. (2002). oficio de cartógrafo. travesías latinoamericanas de la comunicación en la cultura. fondo de cultura económica. martin-barbero, j., & rincón, o. (2019). mapa insomne 2017: ensayos sobre el sensorium contemporáneo. un mapa para investigar la mutación cultural. in o. rincón (ed.), un nuevo mapa para investigar la mutación cultural: diálogo con la propuesta de jesús martín-barbero (pp. 17–23). ediciones ciespal. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698017750012 https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698017750012 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5251-4_103 https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720939454 matamoros-fernández, a., rodriguez, a., & wikström, p. (2022). humor that harms? examining racist audio-visual memetic media on tiktok during covid-19. media and communication, 10(2), 180–191. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v10i2.5154 morales, e. (2023). ecologies of violence on social media: an exploration of practices, contexts, and grammars of online harm. social media+ society, 9(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231196882 pieniz, m. b., & cenci, m. p. (2019). tecnicidades de las mediaciones comunicativas de la cultura a las mutaciones culturales. in o. rincón (ed.), un nuevo mapa para investigar la mutación cultural: diálogo con la propuesta de jesús martín-barbero (pp. 137–160). ediciones ciespal. rincón, o. (2019). mi invención sobre el mapa para comprender el sensorium de la contemporaneidad. in o. rincón (ed.), un nuevo mapa para investigar la mutación cultural: diálogo con la propuesta de jesús martín-barbero (pp. 263–274). ediciones ciespal. terry, g., & hayfield, n. (2020). reflexive thematic analysis. in m. ward & s. delamont, handbook of qualitative research in education (pp. 430–441). edward elgar publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788977159.00049 https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v10i2.5154 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231196882 https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788977159.00049 https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788977159.00049 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): entrena serrano, c., meyer, t. (2024, october). artifacts, practices and social arrangements in content curation on tiktok: a study on political and social issues content. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. artifacts, practices and social arrangements in content curation on tiktok: a study on political and social issues content carlos entrena serrano vrije universiteit brussel trisha meyer vrije universiteit brussel over their two decades of existence, social media have increasingly leaned into algorithmic recommendations to increase user engagement and sustain their business logic (zuboff, 2019). platforms have transitioned from a model where users could explicitly choose content sources, to one based on their inferred algorithmic identities (cheney-lippold, 2011). users’ agency over their media diets is shaped differently in this new social media paradigm. platforms such as tiktok, where algorithmic distribution of content is the standard, afford consumptive curation (davis, 2017) in new avenues. in this paper we explore this phenomenon, studying how users interact with tiktok to consume political and social issues content. we follow lievrouw’s (2014) understanding of social media platforms as a triple articulation of technological artifacts, practices and social arrangements. user practices for content curation are shaped by their social context and by platforms’ technical design—which offers insights into how users are guided to interact with algorithmic recommendations. we build upon previous research on how tiktok’s interface design shapes consumptive curation affordances. we employed davis’s (2020) conceptualisation of affordances mechanisms to argue that social media interface design can request, demand, refuse, encourage, discourage, and allow certain user practices. for example, by establishing different friction levels (5rights foundation, 2021, p. 27) that make it more difficult to find, use or understand algorithmic control features (alvarado & waern, 2018). in this paper, we seek to understand how and under what circumstances tiktok affords certain consumptive curation practices to users interested in political and social issues. we research how users react to and reappropriate tiktok’s interface design to fulfil their consumptive curation goals. we focus on political and social issues as a case study (1) to understand how participants manage their need to find specific content amidst the infinite flow of algorithmic recommendations tiktok presents to them, and (2) in light of the growing relevance of this type of content in the platform. we are interested in how the identified mechanisms of affordance in our previous research correspond—or not—with users’ everyday experiences. furthermore, we consider how users’ perception and skills, as well as their institutional and cultural arrangements (davis, 2020), shape their practices and experiences with algorithmic personalization, and how they experience algorithmic curation in two different but interrelated ways, as instrumental and/or intimate (savolainen & ruckenstein, 2022). from an instrumental perspective, users’ algorithmic literacy and ability to enact it heavily impact their experience. they construct folk theories on how these algorithms work (karizat et al., 2021) and sometimes try to find workarounds to achieve their consumptive curation goals. from an intimate viewpoint, users are in a position of vulnerability with algorithmic curation. when a successful personalisation happens, users are more willing to give up control of these systems and perceive them as useful tools that create a sense of familiarity and empowerment. however, users frequently detect failures in the algorithmic identity that is being constructed of them but without them. in these cases they can try to resist and reconfigure algorithmic personalisation. often both realities happen simultaneously (siles et al., 2023). methodologically, we engage with users in two different rounds. first, we conduct semistructured interviews with approx. 15 users to discuss how they use and experience tiktok for political and social issues content. the participants are asked to donate their tiktok data for analysis at the end of the first session. after this, we employ the donated data, together with the tiktok api, to generate different graphs and statistics of each participant’s content consumption—inspired by the spotify wrapped tool. we conduct a second semi-structured interview with the same participants, where the analysed data donations are employed to deepen the discussion and reflections about their engagement with tiktok. the developed dashboards enable users to see (1) how many videos they watch, like and save per month, (2) which accounts they engaged with the most and (3) prevalent hashtags in their consumed content, among other statistics. by establishing two different points of contact and analysing their data donations, we aim to discuss both self-reported behaviour and “real behaviour”. we expect by bringing data into the second round we can improve participants’ perception and skills about algorithmic curation—their algorithmic literacy. this helps participants elucidate further responses and a deeper reflection of their practices related to news content curation on the platform—both instrumentally and intimately. expected findings illuminate how and under what circumstances tiktok affords consumptive curation to users interested in political and social issues. we aim to gain a better understanding of how tiktok operates as an articulation of technological artifacts, practices and social arrangements and how users negotiate affordances with the platform; reacting or reappropriating tiktok features to fulfil their own consumptive curation goals. we also expect this work to be a valuable methodological contribution to the field. first, because it uses donated data to contrast and complement how users perceive their experiences with algorithmic content curation in social media, fostering further reflections. second, the developed software will be made available for reuse or repurposing for future academic work. apart from this, we see a significant potential to use the same methodological approach for future consumptive curation studies in other social media platforms, and different types of content. we also hope this research can serve to promote the implementation of tools in social media platforms such as tiktok, allowing users to better understand the content they consume. references 5rights foundation. (2021). pathways: how digital design puts children at risk. https://5rightsfoundation.com/uploads/pathways-how-digital-design-puts-children-atrisk.pdf alvarado, o., & waern, a. (2018). towards algorithmic experience: initial efforts for social media contexts. chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 1– 12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173860 cheney-lippold, j. (2011). a new algorithmic identity: soft biopolitics and the modulation of control. theory, culture & society, 28(6), 164–181. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276411424420 davis, j. l. (2017). curation: a theoretical treatment. information, communication & society, 20(5), 770–783. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1203972 davis, j. l. (2020). how artifacts afford: the power and politics of everyday things. the mit press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11967.001.0001 karizat, n., delmonaco, d., eslami, m., & andalibi, n. (2021). algorithmic folk theories and identity: how tiktok users co-produce knowledge of identity and engage in algorithmic resistance. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 5(cscw2), 1–44. https://doi.org/10.1145/3476046 lievrouw, l. a. (2014). materiality and media in communication and technology studies: an unfinished project. in t. (ed ) gillespie, p. j. boczkowski, & k. a. foot (eds.), media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society. savolainen, l., & ruckenstein, m. (2022). dimensions of autonomy in human–algorithm relations. new media & society, 14614448221100802. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221100802 siles, i., gómez-cruz, e., & ricaurte, p. (2023). fluid agency in relation to algorithms: tensions, mediations, and transversalities. convergence, 13548565231174586. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231174586 zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. publicaffairs. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 noone, r. (2022, november). data 2. geographies of self-sufficiency: prototyping exploration, experience, and access presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. geographies of self-sufficiency: prototyping exploration, experience, and access rebecca noone university college london introduction scrolling through google maps application or website, it is difficult to avoid google maps’ hallmark promises of explore and experience. from calls to “explore and experience the world”, “discover new experiences”, “find places for you” or “have the confidence to explore, access to experience”, explore and experience (and their iterations of discover, find, and access) command imaginaries of unrestricted entitlement and complete control over one’s personal domain. this google maps rhetoric reifies exploration and experience as desirable mobilities without acknowledging the politics they enforce and the relations to space they enact. this paper asks: in these projected geographies of self-assured navigation, who is the prototype that fulfills the fantasy of seamless mobility and unrestricted claims to space? i divide this paper into three sections— explore, experience, and access— to analyze what these modes are, what they are contingent on, who they prioritize and the harms they reinforce and reproduce. in the final section, access, i address the limits google maps claims to space and present a necessary reorientation. i argue that google maps’ imperatives to explore, experience, and access space are based on a colonial raced, classed, and ableist prototype—the self-sufficient user. in organizing space around the self-sufficient user, google maps extends and entrenches settler colonial dispossession and ableist gatekeeping. ultimately, google’s imaginary of untethered exploration— the experience and access it engenders— carries a heavy weight. explore, experience, access from the software, to interface, to google’s marketing, explore, experience, and access stand out as the maps’ principal operations of location awareness. “making the world your own” is a promise echoed by google maps vice president jen fitzpatrick’s (2016) pledge that maps is “making it easy for you to explore and experience what the world has to offer.” here, fitzpatrick articulates google’s principal modes of world making— explore and experience— centred on you. shining the spotlight on you and your explorations and experiences, casts a shadow on the global infrastructures, protocols, and politics that make claiming space an alluring possibility. i identify how exploration, experience, and access are spatial technologies that reify colonial assumptions of unbridled entitlement and universal entrée, based on what simone browne terms the “prototyping whiteness” (browne, 2015). this paper identifies and unpacks the imperatives to explore, experience, and access that appear to make the world available and claimable for google map’s idealized self-sufficient user at the cost of reinforcing imperial violence and colonial expansion. here i find parallels with jas rault’s (2020) analysis of transparency and kimberley christen’s (2012) analysis of open access as communication technologies that leverages promises of accountability and truth in the name of entrenched colonial administration. rault’s framework orients us towards seeing exploration as a tool of settler possession and entitlement. exploration as spatial technology fails to contend with the violence these maps serve, which eve tuck and marcia mckenzie (2014) mark as indigenous erasure, black containment, settler ancestry – all which have been refused and fought by indigenous and black folks for centuries and continue in what christina sharpe (2018) terms “in the wake.” this trajectory of mapping sets the scene for how google maps frames exploration as a valiant discovery rather than a method of dispossession and erasure. exploration is a technology shaped by what sandy grande (2014) calls a “colonial consciousness.” i then relate this analysis broader claims to space within a social order that increasingly privileges the tech-savvy. i show how these emergent findings resonate with noble and roberts’ (2016) critique of the now-defunct google glass and promotion of the explorer appeal. google glass branded its users as “explorers”. with highest concentration of google glass users the san francisco bay area, noble and roberts draw attention to how the google glass explorer’s unmistakable presence signaled gentrification and displacement at the hands of the wealthy silicon valley elite. echoing to browne’s “prototyping whiteness”, we see how it is only the most privileged who are even positioned to take up the mantel of self-sufficient explorer, especially in cities encoded with systemic anti-black racism and anti-indigeneity. in this context, simultaneous to the promise of exploration are ongoing negotiations of space based on personal and political “cognitive maps of safety and danger” organized around calculations and geographies of risk (cadogen, 2016). google’s coded depoliticization of spatial mobility (it’s for everyone! to go anywhere!) reifies mobility as a mode of power and exploration the means to attain it. building a whole mapping infrastructure around the positionality of unbridled access erases so many urban experiences and reinforces racialized enclosures of space. i close by broadening out modes of access based on understandings of care rather than the bulldozing of self-sufficiency, to demonstrate how access should not be a mark of exclusivity but a way of negotiating interconnectedness. i address the limits of google’s branding of access through alternative frameworks of radical access from disability justice (piepzna-samarasinha, 2021) and critical access studies (hamraie, 2017). what these critical modes of access demonstrate are the hard limits to google maps view of “the universal” and how geographically insufficient google maps is in the face of all the radical spatial practices beyond the map. overall, this paper identifies how google maps’ orientations of location awareness are not simply acts of pinpointing location; they are a broader orientation towards selfsufficiency enabled through values of exploration and access that reflect the overdetermination of platform and its implicit biases. references browne, s. (2015). dark matters. duke university press. cadogan, g. (2016). black and blue. in j. ward (ed.), the fire this time: a new generation speaks about race (pp 129-144). new york, ny: scribner. christen, k. (2012) does information really want to be free? indigenous knowledge systems and the question of openness. international journal of communication 6: 2870–2893. fitzpatrick, j. (2016, october) going beyond the map. on google cloud tech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpo_flznqz0 grande, s. (2004). red pedagogy: native american social and political thought. rowman & littlefield publishers. hamraie, a. (2018). mapping access: digital humanities, disability justice, and sociospatial practice. american quarterly. 70(3), 455-482. noble, s. u., & roberts, s. t. (2016). through google-colored glass (es): design, emotion, class, and wearables as commodity and control. in s.y. tettegah & s.u. noble (ed.), emotions, technology, and design (pp. 187–212). elsevier. piepzna-samarasinha, l.l. (2021). care work: dreaming disability justice. arsenal pulp press. rault, j. (2020) “window walls and other tricks of transparency: digitality, colonial and architectural modernity,” american quarterly 72(4), 937-960. sharpe, c. (2018). in the wake. duke university press. tuck, e., & m. mckenzie (2014) place in research: theory, methodology, and methods. routledge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpo_flznqz0 i identify how exploration, experience, and access are spatial technologies that reify colonial assumptions of unbridled entitlement and universal entrée, based on what simone browne terms the “prototyping whiteness” (browne, 2015). this paper identif... selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): grover, r. (2024, october). unpacking expertise in the privacy tech industry. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. unpacking expertise in the privacy tech industry rohan grover university of southern california introduction data privacy laws have been passed and implemented with increasing velocity since the european union’s general data protection regulation (gdpr) passed in 2016 (bennett, 2018; bradford, 2020). these laws are socioculturally distinct (grover et al., 2024), but broadly they impose restrictions on companies as the most visible actors responsible for collecting, processing, sharing, and selling personal data. in response, these companies often call upon internal and external lawyers, technologists, compliance officers, and consultants to develop compliance programs that minimize both legal risk and impact to their surveillant business models (waldman, 2021). in response, companies have spent billions of dollars building compliance programs, giving rise to an emergent privacy tech industry that consists of tech startups, consultants, investors, platforms, and domain experts that collectively help companies comply with data privacy laws. these actors play a key role in translating the law into software products that constitute the infrastructure of companies’ privacy programs. this study asks: how is expertise defined and encoded in the privacy tech industry? it is part of a broader ethnographic study about mapping the privacy tech industry while focusing specifically on how boundaries are drawn across professional jurisdictions that index conceptualizations of privacy and consent in technical, legal, economic, political, and moral terms. the study draws on multi-sited fieldwork in the privacy tech industry, including 18 days of participant-observation at industry conferences, 29 semi-structured interviews, attending industry events and following trade publications, developing my own expertise through training and certification, and examining regulatory documents and media artifacts. suggested citation (apa): grover, r. (2024, october). unpacking expertise in the privacy tech industry. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. unpacking expertise expertise is a multidimensional analytic developed by sociologists and science and technology studies (sts) scholars in part to account for controversies over claims to knowledge. analytically, it is valuable for deconstructing logics that have been naturalized and stabilized through professional boundaries. it can be defined either as an attribute found “inside” people or as an attribution defined externally, such as through certified credentials or professional memberships (collins & evans, 2007; eyal, 2019). one key dimension is how expertise contributes to how professional groups establish jurisdiction, distinguish responsibilities, and uphold legitimacy. these questions have been approached by understanding expertise as “performance” (hilgartner, 2000) or “enactment” (knorr cetina, 1999) that are made visible by “boundary work” (gieryn, 1983) that manifests in institutional stability (abbott, 1988). thus, expertise is a valuable meso-level analytic to evaluate a professional field. a second key dimension of expertise is whether “lay” individuals possess expertise and what role, if any, lay expertise should play in policy and governance (e.g., epstein, 1995). such questions index a debate about whether expertise should be defined to facilitate technocracy—in which experts are entrusted due to their unique technical knowledge—or participatory democracy, in which citizens are empowered to contest technical authority with lived experiences (eyal, 2019). thus, expertise is also valuable for surfacing structural power and normative politics. findings first, my findings demonstrate that the privacy tech industry constitutes a networked arena of relations structured by partitioning professional expertise across technical, legal, and operational domains. this is evident in the international association of privacy professionals, the global association that organizes industry conferences, conducts trainings, and offers certifications for privacy tech professionals. this boundary work allows technologists and lawyers to maintain legitimacy despite uncertainty about what constitutes “privacy” as well as “compliance.” it also upholds the credibility of technologists who often stand in for technical systems despite lacking sufficient insight and transparency to attest to their contents, structure, activities, and levels of compliance. thus, technical expertise, in particular, is operationalized as an attribution rather than an attribute in that it is broadly attributed to software engineers based on their software engineering skills, technical fluency, professional image, and, most importantly, proximity to technical systems. second, technical expertise in the privacy tech industry is often tenuous and contingent. actors such as startups, consultants, technologists, and investors bring their own interests that shape how they interpret ambiguous factors in data privacy law, such as what constitutes due diligence, responsibility, and valid consent. however, individuals are often ill equipped to make confident assessments because privacy programs are modularized, built on networks of integrated software that undermine epistemic accountability. for example, a senior developer shared that they felt unable to certify the compliance of their products because they were “entrusting that what is supposed to happen, does… we're sending a signal [to another system] and getting a response… what happens on their systems is completely opaque to us.” this example illustrates the contingent nature of technical expertise, which could be strengthened by applying scrutiny and agonistic deliberation to evaluate the content of expertise rather than its performance. third, boundaries of expertise are increasingly encoded in compliance software, perpetuating performative rather than scrutinized expertise and therefore codifying splintered accountability. compliance software refers to products such as data mapping, consent management, third-party risk management, and data rights automation offered by tech startups including onetrust, securiti, trustarc, bigid, and transcend. these products encode values that scale as thousands of companies integrate them into their privacy programs. this software often promotes efficiency over friction, especially by automating translation work between functional teams. for example, a privacy tech executive described her clients’ biggest problem as “translation error” between privacy program managers and software developers—two groups that embody operational and technical expertise. she understood her goal to be minimizing friction by automating translation work across teams, substituting social interaction with software integrations. however, automating translation work upholds jurisdictional boundaries and inhibits the scrutiny needed to evaluate the content of expertise. this includes impeding contestation from individuals and communities who fall outside the technical-legaloperational expertise model. at scale, then, privacy tech software promotes managerial processes that manifests as checkbox compliance, in which individuals such as the senior developer mentioned above simply perform isolated actions that should, theoretically, add up to upholding the spirit of the law, but, in practice, may fail to achieve accountability. discussion expertise in the privacy tech industry mediates relations among professional groups, between people and technical systems, and between professional experts and the public. there are substantial stakes for understanding—and reconfiguring— expectations and standards of expertise in data privacy and technology policy more broadly. currently, interpreting and operationalizing data privacy law is often assigned to people with technical proximity and accreditation. however, the questions at the heart of data governance concern values such as subjectivity, autonomy, and consent, which would benefit from scrutinizing the contents of expertise and inviting agonistic deliberation. moreover, the exclusion of lay expertise—which is concretized through privacy tech software products—perpetuates the technocratic structural relations of a surveillance economy. this is evident in how privacy is enacted as an individual value and evaluated based on individual behaviors. privacy scholars have long advocated for recognizing privacy as a fundamentally social phenomenon (cohen, 2012; nissenbaum, 2009) and argued that individualizing privacy capitulates to the depoliticizing impulse of “digital resignation” (draper & turow, 2019). nevertheless, these practices persist in the privacy tech industry, allowing corporate actors to define the terms and stakes of technology policy. this manifests in borders to participation such as requirements for technical literacy, training, certification, and corporate affiliations. these dynamics characterize privacy expertise as something that cannot be found organically “within” individuals but instead as technical skills and knowledge only accessible to professionals with proximity to technical systems. codifying boundaries of expertise attenuates data privacy law in action. inhibiting crossfunctional deliberation and democratic participation authorizes existing practices by hegemonic institutions. perhaps drawing from alternative sources of expertise, including embodied, subjective, affective knowledge from the intended beneficiaries of data privacy laws—individuals and communities, especially those with marginalized identities with higher stakes for digital privacy—can contribute to a more equitable and more effective data privacy paradigm. references abbott, a. (1988). the system of professions: an essay on the division of expert labor. university of chicago press. bennett, c. j. (2018). the european general data protection regulation: an instrument for the globalization of privacy standards? information polity, 23(2), 239–246. https://doi.org/10.3233/ip-180002 bradford, anu. (2020). the brussels effect: how the european union rules the world. oxford university press. cohen, j. e. (2012). configuring the networked self: law, code, and the play of everyday practice. yale university press. collins, h. & evans, r. (2007). rethinking expertise. university of chicago press. draper, n. a. & turow, j. (2019). the corporate cultivation of digital resignation. new media & society, 21(8), 1824–1839. epstein, s. (1995). the construction of lay expertise: aids activism and the forging of credibility in the reform of clinical trials. science, technology, & human values, 20(4), 408–437. https://doi.org/10.1177/016224399502000402 eyal, g. (2019). the crisis of expertise. polity press. gieryn, t. f. (1983). boundary-work and the demarcation of science from non-science: strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists. american sociological review, 48(6), 781–795. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095325 grover, r., jang, k., & su, l. w. (2024). beyond digital protection(ism)? comparing data governance frameworks in asia. journal of information policy, 14. https://doi.org/10.5325/jinfopoli.14.2024.0005 hilgartner, s. (2000). science on stage: expert advice as public drama. stanford university press. knorr cetina, k. (1999). epistemic cultures: how the sciences make knowledge. harvard university press. nissenbaum, h. (2009). privacy in context: technology, policy, and the integrity of social life. stanford university press. waldman, a. e. (2021). industry unbound: the inside story of privacy, data, and corporate power. cambridge university press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591386 terenzi-exploring the dark side of cryptocurrencies on facebook and telegram-exploring the dark side of selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 exploring the dark side of cryptocurrencies on facebook and telegram: uncovering media manipulation and “get-rich-quick” deceptive schemes massimo terenzi university of urbino introduction new technologies such as blockchain and cryptocurrencies decentralize transactions while introducing new vulnerabilities and “exposing the economy to threats unprecedented” (dipietro et al. 2021, p. 66). in particular, when it comes to cryptocurrencies, scholars argue that the risks associated with cryptocurrencies are still unclear. particularly, in the era of social media, the so-called information-based manipulation, perpetuated through spreading false rumors or information, can be conducted through numerous sources of information. one recent case that has garnered widespread attention is the gamestop short squeeze (jetty et al. 2022). in january 2021, a group of reddit users gathered in the subreddit r/wallstreetbets to drive up the stock price of gamestop, a struggling video game retailer. the coordinated effort caused significant financial losses for established hedge funds that had bet against the company's success. this incident highlights the power of coordination on social media in shaping financial markets and its potential to disrupt traditional investment strategies. however, it also raises questions about the ethical implications of manipulating public sentiment through media channels. while it is true that many of these reddit users urge a shifting of power from the financial establishment into the hands of ordinary people, other news stories have revealed the great risks that these broader movements involve. for example, in 2022, the collapse of ftx, the third-largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume, caused hundreds of thousands of small investors to lose billions, in what has been defined as a "fraud of epic proportions" by us federal prosecutors (sorkin et al. 2022). some preliminary works investigate discussions on platforms such as reddit (glenski et al. 2019), twitter, discord, or telegram (nizzoli et al. 2020; feder et al. 2018; mirtaheri et al. 2019) with the aim of mapping both the ecosystem cryptocurrencies and possible forms of manipulations. nonetheless, the research still lacks a clear and comprehensive picture of how widespread the phenomenon is, its actors, venues, and strategies of suggested citation (apa): terenzi, m. (2023, october). exploring the dark side of cryptocurrencies on facebook and telegram: uncovering media manipulation and “get-rich-quick” deceptive schemes. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. media manipulation (donovan, 2020) in the context of financial markets and throughout the whole ecosystem. moreover, the question of evaluating the impact of such illegal manipulative practices on mainstream social media platforms still remains unanswered. to fill this gap, this work focuses on facebook, as a venue for possible manipulative practices or scams related to cryptocurrencies. in this regard, it is useful to refer to the concept of coordinated inauthentic behavior: the activity of some people who employ groups of social accounts to carry out coordinated actions for the dissemination of content on social media, with manipulative purposes. specifically, coordinated link sharing behaviour (clsb) is a strategy for boosting the reach and distribution of links by using coordinated activities performed by facebook accounts that repeatedly share the same content in a very short period from each other (giglietto et al., 2020a). this is done through bots and automatic systems (cresci 2020), fake or compromised accounts, which take on the appearance of real users, that is, with behavior that is perfectly plausible in the eyes of the platforms. for the latter, therefore, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish the activity of real users from that of bogus accounts, created ad hoc (acker 2018, p. 4). methods the coornet library, based on the r software environment, was used to identify networks of coordinated link-sharing accounts on facebook (giglietto et al., 2020b). coornet uses social media data to detect such coordinated networks of accounts that repeatedly share the same links in a very short amount of time. coornet has been widely used and increasingly adopted by scholars and research centers specializing in the detection and analysis of coordinated behavior on social media and disinformation, providing results capable of linking coordination to the dissemination of political information and disinformation during electoral and other circumstances (e.g. ayers et al., 2021; broniatowski, 2021; dfrlab, 2020; giglietto et al., 2019; giglietto et al., 2020b). this work stems from a broader investigation into disinformation in africa (giglietto et. al 2022) where we identified different clusters of facebook entities that shared content related to the world of cryptocurrencies in a coordinated way. one of these clusters appeared to be particularly relevant, being made up of 152 groups, with 521 shared domains (521 full domains, with 477 parent domains). these signs of coordination allowed us to formulate our first research question, which guided our investigation into the intersection between facebook and the crypto ecosystem: rq1a: to what extent the content circulated by the crypto-cluster on facebook can be deemed as problematic content? rq1b: how many of the circulated links are presently active and how many are inactive? rq2: what types of crypto initiatives emerge? to analyze this cluster related to cryptocurrencies, we collected through crowdtangle 100,000 posts produced by the cluster itself, and extracted the links present in the posts of our dataset for a total of 12,033 urls, calculating the sum of the interactions of the posts that linked to the same urls. we, therefore, selected the 1,052 urls that scored the most interactions. then, to measure the relationship between problematic and non-problematic content (rq1a), we verified how many of the links in our sample were active (rq1b), through the automatic bulk check of the http response status codes of the sampled urls dataset. results we found that a significant part of the links checked was inactive, and found that the absolute most widespread domain among the links of our sample was that of telegram, a noteworthy 47%. namely, links were related to telegram bots, channels, groups, or profiles. we then manually checked all the telegram links to better understand their status and found that a large part of the accounts was labeled by the platform as "scams". lastly, to answer rq2 we analyzed the remaining part of active telegram channels, bots, and groups. the accounts displayed names, usernames, or descriptions referring to the possibility for users to receive free cryptocurrency sums. cryptocurrencies were allegedly distributed to users as a reward for performing certain actions, such as clicking on social media or sending users’ data. in some cases, users were promised to earn cryptocurrencies by watching advertisements, or by playing so-called "bot games". a minimum threshold is often required for the withdrawal of the accumulated rewards and the instantaneousness of the payment of the rewards is almost always mentioned, as well as the reliability of the bots ensured. some bots referred to the so-called "airdrops", perhaps the most ephemeral category but also the most representative of all the operations we have observed, and the theme of the attention economy itself. airdrops refer to short crypto-events in which small amounts of cryptocurrency are distributed completely free of charge. airdrops represent an effective marketing strategy carried out by those who launch new crypto-projects, to achieve wider adoption of the new cryptocurrency, since the presence of mass adoption is considered a good metric. conversely, airdrops could also give a false impression of growth to users, that is, an inauthentic amplification, that is, letting users believe that the cryptocurrencies that are launched are much more widespread than they are. this paper explores the overlap between the cryptocurrency community and social media, analyzing how crypto-related projects are disseminated as a new type of problematic content on facebook and telegram. references acker, a. (2018), “data craft: the manipulation of social media metadata”, in data & society, retrieved from: https://datasociety.net/wpcontent/uploads/2018/11/ds_data_craft_manipulation_of_social_media_metadata_.pd f ayers, j. w., chu, b., zhu, z., leas, e. c., smith, d. m., dredze, m., & broniatowski, d. a. (2021). spread of misinformation about face masks and covid-19 by automated software on facebook. jama internal medicine, 181(9), 1251–1253. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2021.2498 broniatowski, d. a. (2021). towards statistical foundations for detecting coordinated inauthentic behavior on facebook, https://iddp.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs3576/f/downloads/coordinated%20behavior%2 0on%20facebook;%20broniatowski.pdf cresci, s. (2020), a decade of social bot detection, communications of the acm (forthcoming) dfrlab (2020). why the debunked covid-19 conspiracy video “plandemic” won’t go away https://medium.com/dfrlab/why-the-debunked-covid-19-conspiracy-videoplandemic-wont-go-away-c9dd36c2037c dipietro, r., raponi, s., caprolu, m., & cresci, s. (2021). new dimensions of information warfare. in new dimensions of information warfare (pp. 1-4). springer, cham. donovan, j. (2020). the lifecycle of media manipulation. in c. silverman (ed.), verification handbook for disinformation and media manipulation. european journalism centre. feder, a., gandal, n., hamrick, j. t., moore, t., mukherjee, a., rouhi, f., & vasek, m. (2018). the economics of cryptocurrency pump and dump schemes (no. 13404). cepr discussion papers. giglietto, f., righetti, n., marino, g., rossi, l. (2019). multi-party media partisanship attention score: estimating partisan attention of news media sources using twitter data in the lead-up to 2018 italian election. comunicazione politica, n.1/2019, pp. 85-108. doi: 10.3270/93030 giglietto, f., righetti, n., & rossi, l. (2020a). coornet. detect coordinated link-sharing behavior on social media. http://coornet.org giglietto, f., righetti, n., rossi, l., & marino, g. (2020b). it takes a village to manipulate the media: coordinated link sharing behavior during 2018 and 2019 italian elections. information, communication and society, 1–25. giglietto, f., olaniran, s., mincigrucci, r., marino, g., mottola, s., & terenzi, m., blowing on the fire: an analysis of low quality and hyper partisan news sources circulated by coordinated link sharing networks in nigeria (july 13, 2022). available at ssrn: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4162030 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4162030 glenski, m., saldanha, e., volkova, s., (2019) characterizing speed and scale of cryptocurrency discussion spread on reddit, in the 28th international conference on world wide web (www’19), pp. 560–570 jetty, s., chen, t., & mirza, r. (2022), meme war: the gamestop short squeeze campaign that gamed the financial algorithm, the media manipulation casebook, retrieved from: https://mediamanipulation.org/case-studies/meme-war-gamestop-shortsqueeze-campaign-gamed-financial-algorithm mirtaheri, m., abu-el-haija, s., morstatter, f., ver steeg, g., & galstyan, a. (2021). identifying and analyzing cryptocurrency manipulations in social media. ieee transactions on computational social systems, 8(3), 607-617. nizzoli, l., tardelli, s., avvenuti, m., cresci, s., tesconi, m., & ferrara, e. (2020). charting the landscape of online cryptocurrency manipulation. ieee access, 8, 113230113245. sorkin, a.r., mattu, r., warner, b., kessler, s., gandel, s., de la merced, m.j., hirsch, l., & livni, e. (2022), the new york times, retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/23/business/dealbook/sbf-ftx-epic-fraud-lawsuit.html selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): navon, s. (2022, november). the emergence of networks on facebook memorial pages. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the emergence of networks on facebook memorial pages sarit navon bar ilan university introduction over the last two decades, online death, mourning, and memorialization have grown into a vibrant field of interest and research. social media, and social network sites, play prominently here and are key sites for public displays of mourning and memorialization. studies examine various social media platforms, including myspace (carroll & landry, 2010), youtube (harju, 2015), instagram (gibbs et al., 2015), twitter (cesare & branstad, 2018), and tiktok (eriksson krutrök, 2021). however, the most dominant platform in terms of mourning and memorialization practices is facebook which comprises several different sub-platforms – profiles, groups, and pages (navon & noy, 2021). each sub-platform possesses distinct affordances, thereby enabling and shaping different social dynamics and emergent practices. in this paper, i closely examine the practice of memorial pages and suggest viewing it through the theoretical lens of the social capital approach. social capital is one of the leading areas of interest in social-media literature (stoycheff et al., 2017). yet, most of the research concerning facebook looks at ordinary users and does not consider the unique affordances of page admins. in what follows, i briefly describe pages affordances and the focus of the current research. facebook pages is an essentially public sub-platform that is visible to anyone on facebook by default (as opposed to profiles or groups). pages may have an unlimited number of followers, and their content is controlled by their administrators (admins). their official aim is to serve businesses, communities, and public figures who seek to increase their digital presence; however, users creatively adapt pages to their own needs, one of which includes the memorialization and publication of ordinary individuals. the memorial pages i look at in this paper are all created in memory of ordinary people yet generate public mourning. the research sample includes 18 cases, 12 men and 7 women (one case refers to the death of female and male spouses), ranging in age between 15-55, with an average of 25.6. none of the commemorated individuals were public figures or known publicly before the death. data collection procedures employed facebook’s search bar (marwick & ellison, 2012). to avoid or offset possible biases of facebook’s unknown algorithmic preferences, i conducted multiple searches and did not sample pages from the top of the result list every time. in the next phase, i selected pages for analysis based on the “intensity sampling” method (suri, 2011; marwick & ellison, 2012) and considered an additional factor of heterogeneity in terms of gender, age, cause of death, socio-cultural background, etc. between june 2018 and march 2021, i conducted ethnographic fieldwork based on the principles of digital ethnography (varis, 2014), and in line with varis’s approach, i implemented the two layers of media affordances and online-offline dynamics as part of my analysis. findings reveal how users negotiate facebook affordances when creating, designing, and maintaining memorial pages. from the first moment of naming and categorizing the page, users contend with restrictions put forth by the platform as the list of available categories provided by facebook does not include any option that relates to memorialization. users do not have the freedom to choose a page category of their own, so they take the freedom to interpret existing categories (community, interest, and public figure) and use them according to their goals. the use of pages for memorialization purposes pursued despite or as a variation of facebook’s official policy. users strategically lead this process and employ socio-technical practices to reach an audience, create a network of followers, and become admins. as admins, they portray the deceased as a special person whose story carries social significance and collective moral value. the acts of engagement with the page, therefore, emerge as socially valued actions. furthermore, users make a causal connection between visible and measurable online engagement (like, share, follow) and cognitive or emotive implications – public memory, recognition, and esteem. admins utilize the page, together with their network of followers, to run extensive memorial activities, both online and offline. they accumulate various resources from monetary donations to physical attendance in events and emotional support these resources amount to the social capital that admins generate. the most significant factors influencing social capital processes are the size of one’s network and the patterns of interaction (ellison & vitak, 2015). indeed, admins invest great efforts at gaining followers and increasing the size of their network, and their interaction with their network is multi-layered and highly strategic. on the one hand, they use a formal register, especially on the page about section and biographical posts, to establish a sense of formality, authority, and recognition towards the deceased and the page. on the other hand, they use a highly personal, enthused, and emotional register as they express gratitude and show their appreciation to followers, generating in this way an encouragement-engagement circle. finally, they discursively position the followers, who are otherwise strangers, as vital partners in this process. the contribution of this study is twofold: in terms of memorialization, it sheds light on novel commemorative practices and norms of public remembrance in and through social media. in terms of social network sites, and more broadly, it provides fruitful insights into current social capital processes. the attention to admins’ affordances, and the dynamics between admins and their network of followers, may be beneficial to a wide array of research on social capital processes in different contexts and themes. references carroll, b., & landry, k. (2010). logging on and letting out: using online social networks to grieve and to mourn. bulletin of science, technology & society, 30(5), 341-349. cesare, n., & branstad, j. (2018). mourning and memory in the twittersphere. mortality, 23(1), 82-97. ellison, n. b., & vitak, j. (2015). social network site affordances and their relationship to the social capital processes. in s. sundar (ed.), the handbook of the psychology of communication technology (pp. 205–227). john wiley & sons. eriksson krutrök, m. (2021). algorithmic closeness in mourning: vernaculars of the hashtag# grief on tiktok. social media+ society, 7(3), 1-12. doi: 20563051211042396. gibbs, m., meese, j., arnold, m., nansen, b., & carter, m. (2015). # funeral and instagram: death, social media, and platform vernacular. information, communication & society, 18(3), 255-268. harju, a. (2015). socially shared mourning: construction and consumption of collective memory. new review of hypermedia and multimedia, 21(1-2), 123-145. doi:10.1080/13614568.2014.983562 marwick, a., & ellison, n. b. (2012). “there isn’t wifi in heaven!” negotiating visibility on facebook memorial pages. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 56(3), 378– 400. doi:10.1080/08838151.2012.705197 navon, s., & noy, c. (2021). conceptualizing social media sub-platforms: the case of mourning and memorialization practices on facebook. new media & society, 14614448211035769. stoycheff, e., liu, j., wibowo, k. a., & nanni, d. p. (2017). what have we learned about social media by studying facebook? a decade in review. new media & society, 19(6), 968-980. doi:10.1177/1461444817695745 suri, h. (2011). purposeful sampling in qualitative research synthesis. qualitative research journal, 11(2), 63-75. doi:10.3316/qrj1102063 varis, p. (2016). digital ethnography. in a. georgakopoulou & t. spilioti (eds.), the routledge handbook of language and digital communication (pp. 55–68). routledge. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): cinque, t., jones, a., yang, f., fordyce, r., heemsbergen, l., hristova, t. (2024, october).industries of infrastructural futures, automated cultures and algorithmic dynamics. panel abstract for aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. industries of infrastructural futures, automated cultures, and algorithmic dynamics toija cinque deakin university allan jones deakin university fan yang university of melbourne robbie fordyce monash university luke heemsbergen deakin university tsvetelina hristova university of southampton panel abstract we approach the conference topic of industry through three studies that explore a new media landscape where value and power are increasingly produced through the operalisation of machinic and affective relations and subjectivities. we explore technologies of automation, artificial intelligence and algorithmic regimes and the new possibilities for enacting and imagining political futures that they afford. the papers focus on three case studies: wechat posts related to the australian referendum for indigenous voice to parliament; perceptions of bias in texts generated by chatgpt; and time synchronisation protocols used in industrial warehouses. these three cases reveal the ways in which automated media technologies enable complex interactions between humans and machines that impact practices of political subjectification, trust and notions of truth, and weave a particular relationship between affect, media interfaces and algorithms. the panel analyses the role of networks and algorithms in shaping the parameters of emerging forms of expression and participation that are enacted through the interrelation between users and digital platforms. the three papers adopt a platform and infrastructure-specific research approach, building on research into the infrastructural turn in media studies (plantin and punathambekar 2019). seeing media infrastructures as a complex arrangement of digital platforms, databases, algorithms and protocols, we look at the political effects produced by these infrastructures. these effects are analysed in their material situatedness in the logic of the particular digital platform. in their paper, toija cinque and allan jones illuminate the interplay between ai agency, human cognition, and digital media platforms, thereby contributing to discourse on ethical ai use, sociotechnical systems, and information integrity in the digital age. their paper explores the interconnections between generative ai, digital platforms, and cognitive biases, striving to deepen our understanding of technology’s capacity to engender a truth-centric, empathetic digital society. by delineating ethical pathways for the coexistence of humans and machines within the information realm, the study aims to contribute significantly to the ongoing discourse surrounding ethical ai use, the development of sociotechnical systems, and the maintenance of information integrity in the digital era. through its findings, it aspires to influence future technological developments, regulatory frameworks, and policy formulations, thus paving the way for a more balanced and equitable digital future. fan yang, robbie fordyce and luke heemsbergen analyse messages related to the recent referendum for political representation of indigenous australians posted on the chinese-owned platform wechat. the authors argue that, while posts largely follow the rhetoric of mainstream australian media in their sentiments, the cases in which they divert, indicate the catalyzation of diaspora affects which influence the position towards race and indigenous issues. tsvetelina hristova explores the technopolitical implications of network time synchronisation protocols in automation. the logic of digital infrastructures imposes a notion and practice of time that is radically different from the universalising time synchronisation of industrial capitalism. instead, network time protocols rely on the exchange of messages and data packages through which a measure and notion of time is negotiated and agreed upon in a networked environment. this imposes a particular technopolitical context of technological interpellation where structures of time are constituted through the participation of nodes in the network and in which the operative visuality of sensors and image data reconstitute relations of hierarchies and enclosures. this panel is proposed by members of two research groups on critical infrastructure studies across the atlantic that explore how new digital, automated and intelligent media technologies are impacting social and political life. trying to understand criticality as both an analytical approach and a characteristic of the objects we research, we interrogate the aspects of digital media infrastructures that add new layers to how datafication acquires subtle cultural and technopolical inflections. through the focus on affect in the panel, understood as both social emotional charge (ahmed 2013) and as the potential for connection and interaction (massumi 2002) in the network, we try to see the infrastructure of data systems and automated platforms as the product of different cultural, political and technological drives. these drives give rise to situated and embodied logics of automation that are platform-dependent but also dependent on cultural and social affects imbued through their provenance, producers and users. the panel blends different disciplinary perspectives and approaches, seeking a dialogue between media and communication studies, cultural studies and critical art research. references ahmed, s., 2013. the cultural politics of emotion. routledge. massumi, b., 2002. parables for the virtual: movement, affect, sensation. duke university press. plantin, j.c. and punathambekar, a., 2019. digital media infrastructures: pipes, platforms, and politics. media, culture & society, 41(2), pp.163-174 empathy and de-biasing through generative ai: navigating cognitive biases, fake news, and socio-technical agency in the digital media landscape toija cinque deakin university allan jones deakin university a critical examination of ai’s role in cognitive bias mitigation and information integrity in an era defined by pervasive digital information, ai systems have become integral to curating and amplifying content tailored to user preferences (tufchi, yadav & ahmed, 2023; wardle & derakhshan, 2017). while these systems facilitate personalized engagement, they also exacerbate cognitive biases (sunstein, 2017; bruns, 2019; zollmann, et al., 2021), reinforce filter bubbles, and propagate misinformation (pariser, 2011; allcott & gentzkow, 2017). these dynamics undermine information integrity and hinder empathetic engagement by entrenching polarization. the rise of hyperindustrialization and human-machine interaction (hmi) further complicates this landscape, with generative ai models—particularly large language models (llms)— reshaping how information is curated and consumed (brynjolfsson & mcafee, 2014). generative ai models, particularly large language models (llms), enhance human cognition by reshaping how information is curated and consumed, thereby creating new socio-technical dynamics that may also shape biases and empathetic interactions (brown et al., 2020). socio-technical agency, in this context, refers to the ability of ai and digital platforms to influence and co-construct human behaviour, decision-making, and societal dynamics through their design and operational features. while generative ai has the potential to mitigate biases and foster empathy by exposing users to diverse perspectives and enabling nuanced discourse, its impact remains insufficiently explored, particularly in regions with limited technological infrastructure (caliskan, bryson & narayanan, 2017), particularly in regions with limited technological infrastructure or representation in digital media research. this study employs the media ecology framework to analyze how generative ai, as an extension of human cognition, reshapes information flow and influences cognitive biases and empathy (postman, 2000). this lens contextualizes ai’s role within broader socio-technical and communicative ecosystems. specifically, this study critically examines the relationship between what users are exposed to via ai-driven content to speculate on the mechanisms through which generative ai might reduce biases, promote empathy, and ensure accuracy in digital media. by investigating user interactions with llms, the research seeks to uncover how these technologies can navigate the complex interplay of cognitive biases, fake news, and socio-technical agency to promote more inclusive and balanced digital ecosystems. contextualizing the digital quandary digital narratives—interactive storytelling constructs combining text, visuals, audio, and algorithmically curated content—amplify cognitive biases by reinforcing predispositions and intensifying distortions in judgment through personalization and platform design. this interplay between ai, human cognition, and digital platforms demands a robust methodological approach to disentangle the complex dynamics and provide actionable insights. this study adopts a mixed-methods design, integrating qualitative and quantitative data, to capture user experiences with llms in underrepresented regions. by focusing on diverse contexts, the research ensures a comprehensive examination of how generative ai influences information integrity—defined as the accuracy, reliability, and diversity of information—and empathetic interactions, addressing global inequities in digital media research. methodology new artificial intelligence (ai) models have become highly effective in delivering content that fuels perpetual user engagement and platform growth, however, the governance of their information dissemination in the interest of the wellbeing of participants is crucially neglected. many users are afforded only crude means by which to exercise their own agency in navigating the landscape. the exploration of the role and impact of ai, particularly in the domain of mitigating biases and fostering empathy in digital information landscapes, often tends, however, to be concentrated in regions with advanced technological infrastructures and capacities, such as the united states, the european union, china, and other technologically advanced nations. consequently, several countries and regions may be underrepresented in this realm of research, particularly those in africa, southeast asia, central asia, and south america—this was our focus. this research prioritizes underrepresented regions to develop strategies and policies that address unique local challenges, fostering globally equitable digital ecosystems. method adopting a mixed-methods approach enables a comprehensive analysis of user interactions with ai, capturing both the systemic impacts of cognitive biases and the user-level experiences that shape information integrity. information integrity here refers to the accuracy, reliability, and diversity of information disseminated through ai systems. we draw on qualitative and quantitative data from 580 international participants from across three regions in the global south in five countries about their experience, access and use of llms such as chatgpt-4 using the survey instrument perceptions of generative ai in underrepresented regions: uptake and use survey with 20 quantitative and 7 qualitative questions. the sample comprises responses from (1) africa: south africa; (2) southeast asia: indonesia, india, and the philippines, and; (3) south america: brazil. in the context of the literature cited above, our aim is to surface the implications and emotional effects of technology-driven information delivery, shedding light on the potential and pitfalls of employing large language models (llm) such as generative ai (genai) in navigating the complex digital media environment. h1: understanding individuals as networked users and customers through their engagement with generative ai offers new opportunities to mitigate biases and foster empathetic interactions in digital spaces. rq1: how do generative ai systems influence user exposure to diverse information, and what biases emerge in their content delivery? rq2: what are the measurable impacts of generative ai on cognitive biases, emotional engagement, and user perceptions of information integrity in digital environments? rq3: what mechanisms in generative ai deployment influence user well-being and how are these perceived across different contexts? the paper provides empirical insights meant to inform ethical guidelines, regulatory policies, and developmental frameworks for leveraging ai in mitigating cognitive biases, fostering empathy, and ensuring veracity in digital information landscapes. discussion and recommendations this research intricately explores the interconnections between generative ai, digital platforms, and cognitive biases, striving to deepen our understanding of technology’s capacity to engender a fair and empathetic digital information environment. we present six key recommendations based on user interactions in the global south with ai-driven digital platforms. first, our findings show that a number of participants from underrepresented regions perceive algorithmic curation as a barrier to encountering opposing views, underscoring the need for platform designs that promote respectful engagement. second, enhancing digital literacy is essential for consistent fact-checking in environments prone to misinformation. third, further research is needed to validate self-reported behaviours and strengthen digital literacy efforts. fourth, ongoing investigation into content diversity and algorithmic curation is necessary. fifth, clearer platform policies are required to guide users through ai’s growing influence. finally, increased transparency in content algorithms is critical to understanding how personalisation may limit exposure to diverse perspectives. by delineating ethical pathways for the coexistence of humans and machines within emerging information spheres, the study aims to contribute significantly to the ongoing discourse surrounding ethical ai use, the development of sociotechnical systems, and the maintenance of information integrity in the digital era. by focusing on underrepresented regions, this research challenges the predominantly western-centric narratives in ai studies, offering a globally equitable perspective on the ethical use of generative ai. through its findings, this study aspires to influence future technological developments, regulatory frameworks, and policy formulations, thus paving the way for a more balanced and equitable digital future. references allcott, h., & gentzkow, m. (2017). social media and fake news in the 2016 election. journal of economic perspectives, 31(2), 211-236. brown, t., mann, b., ryder, n., subbiah, m., kaplan, j. d., dhariwal, p., neelakantan, a., shyam, p., sastry, g., askell, a., & agarwal, s. (2020). language models are few-shot learners. advances in neural information processing systems, 33, 1877-1901. bruns, a. (2019). after the ‘apicalypse’: social media platforms and their fight against critical scholarly research. information, communication & society, 22(11), 1544-1566. brynjolfsson, e., & mcafee, a. (2014). the second machine age: work, progress, and prosperity in a time of brilliant technologies. w.w. norton & company. caliskan, a., bryson, j. j., & narayanan, a. (2017). semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases. science, 356(6334), 183–186. pariser, e. (2011). the filter bubble: what the internet is hiding from you. penguin. postman, n. (2000, june). the humanism of media ecology. proceedings of the media ecology association, keynote address delivered at the inaugural media ecology association convention fordham university, new york, new york, 1(1), 10–16. sunstein, c. r. (2017). a prison of our own design: divided democracy in the age of social media. democratic audit uk. tufchi, s., yadav, a., & ahmed, t. (2023). a comprehensive survey of multimodal fake news detection techniques: advances, challenges, and opportunities. international journal of multimedia information retrieval, 12(2), 28. available at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13735-023-00296-3 wardle, c., & derakhshan, h. (2017). information disorder: toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policymaking (vol. 27). council of europe. zollmann, f. (2021). manufacturing a new cold war: the national security state, “psychological warfare,” and the “russiagate” deception. in stephen j. a. ward (ed.) handbook of global media ethics, springer. 985-1012. affect infrastructures of political communication: wechat and the 2023 australian indigenous voice referendum fan yang university of melbourne robbie fordyce monash university luke heemsbergen deakin university introduction the language barrier, platform-politics linked to australia’s geo-politics, and domestic political speech have made visible for study what might be described as neocolonial information infrastructure: wechat in australia offers an intermediary industry of political communication operated by chinese-language ethnic media outlets. these outlets promote political campaigns for australian parties or candidates, driven by business imperatives, without adhering to australian electoral or media regulations (yang et al., 2024). manipulating affect is central to their strategy, generating clicks that attract political ads and sponsored content which often yield higher revenue than conventional commercial ads (coleman, 2018; yang, 2023). we are interested in examining how australian political actors, wechat’s platform economy, and diasporic media outlets collectively shape the chinese ethnic media industry into an affective infrastructure for political communication and exploring its implications for the vitality of the chinese-speaking online public sphere. we employ wechat’s coverage of the 2023 australian indigenous voice to parliament referendum as a case study and ask: • which domestic and international actors used wechat to shape discussions on the voice, and what platform features supported this engagement? • how did wechat content reflect support or opposition to the referendum? • was misinformation observed, and what insights can inform (monitoring) political communication on wechat or other “alternative” social media for the 2025 australian federal election? research context this study fills in a research and regulatory gap where australian electoral and media regulatory bodies—particularly the australian electoral commission (aec) and the australian communications and media authority—fail to adequately oversee nonenglish language media. while traditional and new media content in australia is highly regulated (cunningham and turnbull, 2020), platform distribution has prompted unique governmental interventions (meese and hurcombe, 2021; bossio et al., 2022). meanwhile, wechat has emerged as a significant platform in the australian public sphere, facilitating domestic political messaging, symbolizing perceived chinese influence, and serving as a primary information source for chinese-speaking communities (hsu, 2023). here, the networks, systems, and standards of wechat, as an information infrastructure (de seta, 2023), support ethno-transnational media organizations operating through “wechat official accounts” (woas) that circulate information and financial transactions in australia. wechat functions as an “extra-national” piece of prc information infrastructure critically shaping the socio-political life of chinese australians. methods this work builds from a program of work around chinese-language social media monitoring launched in 2019, with aims to systematically monitor and analyse australian politics-related public opinions on wechat and red (xiaohongshu). we employ a computational hass tool for the mobile investigation of platforms—the “share-capture” method—which combines manual data collection with computational data scraping (see fordyce, 2024). we seek to develop a form of literacy aligned with the “ability to account for, intervene around, and participate in the wider socio-technical infrastructures through which data is created, stored, and analyzed” (gray 2018, p. 1). over the period spanning from the 3rd of february to the 8th of december 2023, we collected a total of 3,002 items related to the voice referendum, which included: 267 public posts from wechat, 20 short videos published through wechat’s short-video feature “channel” and 2,715 anonymous “reply” comments by users. strikingly, 133 comments responded to 267 public posts and 2,582 comments responded to the 20 short videos. we applied both quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the dataset. quantitative content analysis (neuendorf, 2002) was used to examine the coverage of the voice referendum, user support (vote yes) or objection (vote no), and key international and domestic actors shaping the discussion. alongside the quantitative content analysis, we counted, ranked and categorized hashtags, while also identifying correlations between variables. our qualitative analysis involved close reading of public posts, short videos, and comments to identify the key discourses swaying political opinions during the event. discussion our analysis reveals the two key findings. firstly, short videos emerged as a more affective and effective tool in political communication compared to text-oriented official accounts, although the latter remained a popular communication channel between australian public institutions and chinese-speaking voters. secondly, australian regulations are inadequate to address the complexities of modern digital media. figure 1 “number of woa content, comments, and their sentiment leading up to the 14 october 2024 referendum” the first coverage of the referendum was observed in january 2023, focusing on the possibility of republicanism. by september 2023, just one month before the referendum, explicit voice campaigns ramped up on wechat. wechat's coverage often mirrored australian media, with translations from english news to chinese woas as a prominent mode of engagement. our analysis showed that the voice was often linked to everyday topics like immigration, economy, and foreign relations to engage chinese australians, though it was rarely the main focus unless explicitly sponsored by the aec and the australian government. of note, nine woas offered about 50% of voice content—consistent with wechat’s decentralised content creators appealing specific audiences. the aec published 13 sponsored articles on major woas to educate chinese-speaking and correct misinformation. however, there articles were later removed post-referendum largely due to contractual agreements between the content providers and the media accounts. a liberal-party politician, representing the electorate with a significant chinese australian population, subtly campaigned against the voice by shifting the focus from the indigenous voice to the need to listen to chinese migrants. while woas incorporated the voice referendum into their daily mix of news, the short videos were more explicitly focused on the referendum. we noted that content creators expressed their positions—vote yes or no—quite regularly. the high user engagement with these videos, particularly through comments, revealed a clear political stance on the voice, with 92% expressing support for voting no and 6% supporting yes (2% being ambiguous or irrelevant). this was a marked contrast to the more ambiguous comments on woa stories. these comments and short videos that favored no votes noted existing anxieties within chinese migrant communities. concerns focused on the potential disruption of australia’s racial hierarchy, with fears of disempowering chinese communities, alongside scepticism toward albanese government regarding the possibility of increased taxation. the question is whether the proliferation of comments on video media were organic or dis/misinformation. on one hand, these tropes align with broader trends in australia, where the referendum was rejected at 60%, and the framing by major media outlets, particularly those owned by the murdochs. yet, these tropes offer a similar playbook to information operations in other western countries designed to sew discord generally, and around the voice referendum in australia for english x/twitter specifically (graham, 2024). a smaller majority of chinese australians voted no than our ‘organic’ sentiment data suggested, while the removal of official political information from the aec contrasted with persistent “no”-leaning political content left on public wechat accounts. conclusion considering these woas as sitting upon neocolonial affect infrastructure raises important questions for future analysis. woas in australia exist outside the direct control of western technology markets or china, prompting inquiries into how to discern organic engagement or propaganda as scale and content change from manual woa markets to more algorithmically malleable engagements with video/comment interactions. in the future research, it is important to better understand the spectrum from misinformation to political opinion expressed through the digital disenchantment (see han 2022) of diasporas on infrastructures of affect across national bounds. references bossio, d., flew, t., meese, j., leaver, t., & barnet, b. (2022). australia's news media bargaining code and the global turn towards platform regulation. policy & internet, 14(1), 136-150. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.284. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.284 coleman r. (2018). social media and the materialisation of the affective present. in tony s., maddison s., ellis d. (eds.), affect and social media (pp. 1220–1389). rowman & littlefield. cunningham, s., & turnbull, s. (eds.). (2020). the media and communications in australia. routledge. de seta, g. (2023). china’s digital infrastructure: networks, systems, standards. global media and china, 8(3), 245-253. https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231202203. fordyce, f. (2023). yet another computational hass tool for the investigation of mobile platforms. zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10215442. graham, t. (2024). exploring a post-truth referendum: australia’s voice to parliament and the management of attention on social media. media international australia. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x241267756. gray, j., gerlitz, c., & bounegru, l. (2018). data infrastructure literacy. big data & society, 5(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718786316. han, r. (2023). debating china beyond the great firewall: digital disenchantment and authoritarian resilience. journal of chinese political science, 28(1), 85-103. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-022-09812-4. hsu, j. (2023). being chinese in australia. lowy institute. https://www.lowyinstitute.org/event/2023-being-chinese-australia-public-opinionchinese-communities. meese, j., & hurcombe, e. (2021). facebook, news media and platform dependency: the institutional impacts of news distribution on social platforms. new media & society, 23(8), 2367-2384. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820926472. neuendorf, ka. (2002). the content analysis guidebook. sage publications. reconcilliation australia. (2023). voice to parliament. https://www.reconciliation.org.au/reconciliation/support-a-voice-to-parliament/. yang, f. (2023). affective news, affective labor: chinese female “little editors” of wechat official accounts in australia, social media + society, 9(3), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231186343. yang, f., fordyce, r., & heemsbergen, l. (2024). toward a translational news ecology: covering the 2022 australian federal election on wechat. international journal of communication, 18(2024), 4883-4908. https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231202203 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10215442 https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x241267756 https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718786316 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-022-09812-4 https://www.lowyinstitute.org/event/2023-being-chinese-australia-public-opinion-chinese-communities https://www.lowyinstitute.org/event/2023-being-chinese-australia-public-opinion-chinese-communities https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820926472 https://www.reconciliation.org.au/reconciliation/support-a-voice-to-parliament/ https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231186343 on the technological production of time and the interpellation of network protocols tsvetelina hristova, southampton university the newly developed series of standards for network connectivity, called time sensitive networking, is indicative of two things. first, how digital systems are changing our relationship to temporality as a political category and second how the production and imagination of temporalilty in the digital are informed by two distinct modes of operation of the digital infrastructures: one originating in techniques of labour discipline in scientific management and another one that we can trace back to the production of hyperreality and simulacra in the increasingly audio-visual nature of data flows within different networks. we, as subjects, experience our relationship to and interpellation into systems of production and ideology through standardised and universalised temporal frameworks. one such example is our subjectivation as members of the imagined community of the nation, which, as benedict anderson (1983) argues (borrowing the concept from walter benjamin), is predicated on the acceptance and participation in the temporal regimes of the “homogeneous empty time” of capitalism. practices of time, particularly in mechanisation and automation, are key for the technological constitution of subjects and structures to which these subjects are accountable and accounted for. a famous example are frederick taylor’s experiments and e.p. thompson’s (1967) critique that sees the imposition of universal measures of time as one of the key technologies of control in capitalism, where the clock rules over the factory and the factory, in turn, rules over the daily cycles of life for the workers and their families. early experiments with scientific management made extensive use of the nascent medium of photography and cinematography, in the works of edward muybridge and frank and lillian gilbreth who used a variety of ingenious cinematic techniques to document, analyse and modify the movements of workers. their focus on constructing the perfect labour process has far-reaching effects, by driving forward the standardisation, abstraction, mechanisation and automation of labour. it is also woven into a particular regime of visibilities and invisualisations, where the standardised perfected labour process was often achieved at the expense of outsourcing all timeconsuming and inefficient tasks to other workers, creating a hierarchy between efficient temporalities and what steven jackson refers to as the “slow underbelly of modernist stories of speed and technology” (2017: 170) in distributed digital systems, despite the drive towards interoprability and standardisation, the possibility of universal measure of time is surprisingly hard to achieve. time is constantly produced and negotiated through the transmission of electrical signals and data packages. alexander galloway (2006) writes that protocols as political technologies are realised through their enactment, and, in the case of temporality in digital networks, this enactment is also an act of participation and of “technological interpellation” through which a field of control is constituted, in the sense that a network only exists as a relation between its nodes. this field of control operationalises genealogies linking network time protocol to practices of labour control like the time stamp (gordon 2021) or time-sharing, which tung-hui hu (2015) sees as an important moment in the constitution of the user of computing infrastructures as a subject. but it is also defined by the material properties of media and infrastructures for transmission, in which sensor and audiovisual data are key for the enactments of temporally-situated actions (ernst 2016; gehl 2011; sprenger 2022, parrika 2017). concepts like “real time”, “time sensitive” and “time critical” are contingent on the materiality of platforms, interfaces and devices that enable these transfers (weltevrede, helmond & gerlitz 2014). this new technopolitical meaning of time management extends not just to automated machines within industrial settings but, through their use, to human labour and human subjects, which are directly and indirectly implicated in the organisation of these hierarchical relations. it also means that automation operationalises particular topologies of network time that do not coincide with notions of temporality linked to a traditional model of geopolitics. the wider known network time protocol (ntp) operates with a topology of universalised time, retaining its connection to the sociotechnical infrastructure of coordinated universal time (utc, which used to be called gmt) (gordon 2021), a measure that is simultaneously a product of technoscience and of political imaginaries of world order and bordering. in contrast, networks of industrial automation rely on solipsistic, enclosed and hierarchicised topologies of data flows. these kinds of differential temporalities are at the core of the standards for timesensitive networking (tns) developed by ieee (the institute of electrical and electronics engineers). tsn aims to establish hierarchies between different data flows within a network and to control the sequence of data packages in the flows that are given priority. non-tsn networks can guarantee the receiving of packets but not their exact sequence. this can be a problem in two cases: audio-video streaming and industrial robotics operating with sensor and visual data. from the early 2000s to 2012 the working group for tsn was called audio-video bridging and was focused on establishing standards for the transfer of digital audiovideo data over the network with minimal loss and high determinism, i.e. accurate sequencing of transmitted packets. in these cases, any out of sequence packets can result in distorted sound or picture, which makes audio-video files far more time sensitive than other types of data. eventually the principle of network determinism developed for audio video data transmission served as a scaffolding for addressing a wider range of use cases for deterministic networks: industrial smart robotics, autonomous vehicles, and aerospace where machines navigate their environment and interact with each other by relying on a real-time simulation of their environment based on data from sensors and cameras. in these technologies of “time critical media” (sprenger 2022) decisions about how the machine would act need to be taken within fractions of a second, based on input data – a timeframe that entirely precludes the possibility of human oversight and intervention. tsn focuses on establishing relationships and temporal sequencing across nodes in the network to a greated extent than it aims to address the referentiality of these nodes to an external universal measure of time. it prioritises data flows exchanged between devices linked in the industrial internet of things, such as robots, automated machinery and sensors, i.e. operational technology, where sensor and visual data needs to be rapidly transferred and processed by machines. other types of data exchanges, for instance, ones between systems used for storing information about the operation of the warehouse, are not time-critical and do not require the same temporal urgency defined by concepts like hard real-time processing. tns pushes a topology where the production and operationalisation of simulated environments takes priority over all other processes of exchange, communication and socialisation. this reinvented significance of the iconography of digital simulacra (baudrillard 1994) suggests the potential to revisit the postmodernist concept of virtuality and its potential for producing political effects in the network. at the same time, the distribution and interrelation of different notions of time in the network points to the internal contradiction of the expansion of the digital. behind the promise of connectivity, they rub against “the revenge of the real” (to borrow a catchy phrase coined for a slightly different context by benjamin bratton) – the materiality of copper, silicone and air that transmits but also slows down transmission. in the quest for time-sensitive computing this leads to the proliferation of hardware solutions like edge computing and network bridges that de-virtualise the cloud and produce simultaneously its limits and its expansion. for example, google closed its iot core service and instead opted for its own tensor processing unit, edge tpu. these infrastructural solutions also actively produce, hierarcherise and monitor differentiated temporalities by policing data traffic and enacting discipline onto data packet sequences and network time prioritisation. the expansion of tsn in wireless and 5g networks, for example, revives debates about net neutrality (allera 2022). in the process, however, they also manufacture excesses and byproducts of automated efficiencies, through the proliferation of temporal notions like best effort traffic, slowness and non-time sensitivity, which further contest and fragment the topologies of network time. references allera, m. 2022. a modern internet needs modern rules. newsroom bt. available at: https://newsroom.bt.com/a-modern-internet-needs-modern-rules/ anderson, b. 1983. imagined communities. reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism. london: verso. baudrillard, jean. 1994. simulacra and simulation. ann arbor: the university of michigan press. chun, w.h.k., 2016. updating to remain the same: habitual new media. mit press. https://newsroom.bt.com/a-modern-internet-needs-modern-rules/ ernst, w., 2016. chronopoetics: the temporal being and operativity of technological media. rowman & littlefield. galloway, a.r., 2006. protocol: how control exists after decentralization. mit press. gehl, r.w., 2011. the archive and the processor: the internal logic of web. 2.0 new media & society. gordon, g., 2021. engaging an infrastructure of time production with international law. london review of international law, 9(3), pp.319-349. hu, t-h., 2015. prehistory of the cloud. mit press. hui, y., 2019. recursivity and contingency. rowman & littlefield. sprenger, f., 2022. microdecisions and autonomy in self-driving cars: virtual probabilities. ai & society, 37(2), pp.619-634. thompson, e.p., 1967. time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism. past & present, volume 38, issue 1, december 1967, pages 56–97. weltevrede, e., helmond, a. and gerlitz, c., 2014. the politics of real-time: a device perspective on social media platforms and search engines. theory, culture & society, 31(6), pp.125-150. amit-danhi, e.r. (2024, october). ‘guerilla analysis’ and the institutional voice: the productive meso-space of coronavirus visualizations on israeli telegram. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 ‘guerilla analysis’ and the institutional voice: the productive meso-space of coronavirus visualizations on israeli telegram eedan r. amit-danhi university of groningen introduction in spring of 2020, israeli telegram became a staple venue of civic-minded news consumption, as the platform served as the ministry of health’s primary official output in updating about new covid-19 patients and measures (nossek, 2022). the moh channel, set up in 2018, was until then used primarily for the circulation of press releases, utilizing the platform’s “unsend everything” affordances (urman & katz, 2020; rogers, 2020) in order to correct and edit such releases over time. but as contagion numbers rose, a new, less professionalized audience joined in: civic-minded audiences looking to be instantly informed about the trajectory of what will become the first waves of the pandemic in israel. in july 2021, a group of ‘guerilla analysts,’ private citizens who pooled together their analytical resources to collect and co-create analyses and visualizations of pandemic data, migrated from twitter and set up their own channel. replacing traditional gatekeepers such as medical correspondents and scientists, this ragtag crew of data-driven citizens created a space in which literacies are co-developed through shared analysis of pandemic data. in this paper, i explore the informational ecosystem created by both institutional and ‘guerilla’ telegram channels engaging in informing the public about the unfolding crisis through data visualizations, by comparing their visualizations of moh data, and the discursive patterns that they provoke. through distinct formulations of actors, platforms, rules, and topics, messaging apps can create “news meso-space(s)” (tenenboim & kligler-vilenchik, 2020), in which they offer sociable, semi-intimate, often reciprocal venues of news consumption. at times, they serve as fertile ground for digital collaborative information-making practices such as co-creation, collaborative fact-checking and co-production (e.g., luengo & garcía marín, 2020; noain-sánchez, 2020), in which traditional journalist-audience dynamics may prove more fluid, and knowledge is produced by all. while meso-spaces have been examined as news sources and evaluated as disinformative and subversive venues, this paper offers insight into the ways in which such channels may be used to communally expand, evaluate and stretch the limits of knowledge in uncertainty through informational discourse triggered by data visualizations. http://spir.aoir.org/ this venture is informed by works that suggest that visualizations enjoy an association with the authority of the numbers that foreground them, as they may serve to empower political actors as vessels of rhetoric, or amplify voices in igniting deliberative systems around their informational subject matter (amit-danhi, 2022; nærland & engebretsen, 2021). by highlighting both the different visualization approaches taken with pandemic data in both groups, and the discursive dynamics that followed in interaction with audience, i seek to highlight a confluence of technological, informational and social practices that resulted in the empowering informational eco-system of a ‘productive meso space’. method to unfold the discursive framework that formed in israeli telegram during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, i collected a sample of two telegram channels’ discourse utilizing telegram’s api: the moh channel, and “the national graph headquarters” (henceforth: graphhq), formed in july 2021 as a platform expanding twitter discourse by its founders, all private citizens, led by a twitter personality named “littlemoiz”, a sushi restaurant owner from the suburbs of central israel. both channels generally relied on the same governmental data resources, and their visualizations were featured prominently across israeli social and news media, making their output highly impactful. i collected all visualizations posted to both channels between july 2021 and may 2022, and matched visualizations from “graphhq” with their same-day moh counterparts, making sure to match visualizations of the same current data, to facilitate comparisons. i then randomly selected 100 visualization pairs, which serve as the main database. i then applied qualitative visualization rhetoric analysis to locate similarities and differences in informational, narrative and visual approaches between the ministry and ‘graphhq’ visualizations. finally, i selected a sub-sample of the 30 most discursively engaging visualizations in order to apply qualitative discourse analysis to the comments posted to visualizations in order to document the ‘guerilla analysts’ practices of audience inclusion, literacy-sharing, mentorship and moderation. preliminary findings preliminary findings reveal that while the moh’s ‘institutional voice’ remained focused on conservative visualizations of present and past progression of the pandemic, graphhq’s visualizations often chose to re-visualize government data, incorporating predictive narratives. see, for example, fig. 1, comparing two visualizations from the same day, 27 july 2021. while 1a, moh’s visualization utilizes a future-oriented metric (the r value), it stops at the water’s edge and does not highlight its tangible meanings, while in 1b, that same day’s visualization by graphhq, visualizers extend the visual and conceptual trajectory in order to make tangible the scenarios suggested by the data. the willingness to venture into the future highlights that graphhq’s team are ‘guerilla analysts’ – they utilize whatever epistemic, analytic and computational resources they come across to fight the sense of uncertainty that engulfed them. they correct and re visualize institutional visualizations, often taking bolder swings in proposing actionable narratives missing or edited out of moh visualizations. they produce bolder and starker visualizations to negate the risk of myocarditis in vaccination (7 october, 2021), simplify vaccine efficacy with easy-to-comprehend visualizations (21 october, 2021), and are willing to venture a first guess as to where omicron is headed in december 2021, stating “errors and omissions excepted” to indicate that the analysis is preliminary. while their leadership and rule-structure is clearly designed to keep disinformation away, they maintain the same sense of sociability documented in journalistic and professional news meso-space(s), even in discussions engaging partisan politics. while primarily focused on elucidation of complex analyses, the audience also challenges ‘guerilla’ narratives, primarily by engaging in further re-visualizing, but also through collaborative fact-checking and cross-referencing with other agents’ data. most importantly, the two channels are linked – by way of shared data and shared purpose – to reveal what is upcoming, inform about what is unknown, and warn the public of dis/misinformation. although they follow patterns of what are essentially re visualizations conducted by peripheral actors (guerilla visualizers), of visualizations created and posted by an empowered actor (moh) during an unfolding crisis, the discursive and rhetorical patterns found in this study suggest that the sociability and reciprocity embedded in productive meso-spaces do not follow dynamics of rhetorical revisualization (amit-danhi, 2022). instead of revisualizing in order to reclaim powerful or institutional narratives, graphhq visualizers revisualize in order to expand and enrich its informational modalities. thus, i suggest that telegram’s affordances may have served graphhq to complement and enrich public debate by promoting civic engagement and data-driven deliberation, supplementing the structural, political limitations that dictate an analytically conservative ‘institutional voice’ with bolder, though analytically robust statements, by laypeople as civic actors. in doing, it amalgamates meso-space practices with visualizations’ abilities to transcend literacy gap and invite laypeople into closed-off venues of analysis and knowledge. predominantly conceptualized as a venue for subversive and dissident discourse, these findings highlight telegram as a potentially civic platform and proposes that messaging apps may offer an array of linked, informationally productive news meso-spaces, in which citizens are empowered to go beyond consumption and take data into their own hands, creating civic-minded narratives and making recommendations in support of a collective common good. figure 1: visualizations from july 27th, 2021 references allen, w. l. (2021). the conventions and politics of migration data visualizations. new media & society, 14614448211019300. amit-danhi, e. r. (2022). facts of (financial) life: political power and re-visualization strategies. convergence, 28(1), 92-108. luengo, m., & garcía-marín, d. (2020). the performance of truth: politicians, fact checking journalism, and the struggle to tackle covid-19 misinformation. american journal of cultural sociology, 8(3), 405-427. nærland, t. u., & engebretsen, m. (2021). towards a critical understanding of data visualisation in democracy: a deliberative systems approach. information, communication & society, 1-19. noain-sánchez, a. (2020). collaborative journalism versus disinformation: an approach to fact-checking projects in mexico, argentina, colombia, brazil, and spain. the politics of technology in latin america (volume 2), 194-211. nossek, h. (2022). government communication policy for dealing with the covid-19, the case of israel: how to explain to groups with unique communication characteristics a universal phenomenon. in manufacturing government communication on covid-19: a comparative perspective (pp. 199-211). cham: springer international publishing. rogers, r. (2020). deplatforming: following extreme internet celebrities to telegram and alternative social media. european journal of communication, 35(3), 213-229. tenenboim, o., & kligler-vilenchik, n. (2020). the meso news-space: engaging with the news between the public and private domains. digital journalism, 8(5), 576 585. urman, a., & katz, s. (2022). what they do in the shadows: examining the far-right networks on telegram. information, communication & society, 25(7), 904-923. eedan r. amit-danhi university of groningen introduction method preliminary findings figure 1: visualizations from july 27th, 2021 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 rethinking the social in social media jenny sundén södertörn university susanna paasonen university of turku katrin tiidenberg tallinn university maria vihlman university of turku this paper makes an argument for the value of including sexual sites in definitions and analyses of social media. general purpose social media platforms— often incited by american legislation—broadly and routinely exclude sex from acceptable forms of sociality in the abstract name of user safety (paasonen et al. 2019). while academics and activists have consistently argued that deplatforming of sex does more harm than good (blunt et al 2021), the collective imaginaries of what sex positive social media (stardust et al 2022) would look like, and whether one is even possible / desirable remain uncertain (anderson 2022). this presentation analyzes interview data (four developer interviews and 56 user interviews) from three north european sexual platforms (darkside, alastonsuomi and libertine.center) devoted to nudity, sex, and kink in order to rethink the social in social media. we ask, what does it mean to define sex platforms as social media? what analytical avenues does the inclusion of sexual sites open up for understanding forms of sociability within them? and what can such a framing add to our understanding of social media and the social more generally? our analysis is threefold. we start by mapping the studied platforms as built infrastructures that shape and constrain sociality, with a particular focus on developer dialogue with the broader social media ecosystem. we then discuss how these built spaces are used and experienced as “socio-sexual silos” with a particular focus on notions of safety. finally, we consider what this means for sociality on social media and propose “context promiscuity” as a conceptual aid for unpacking this. built infrastructures that shape and constrain sociality the platforms we study build and afford sociality through affinities centered on sexual desire. within them, sexuality is understood neither as harmful by default nor as a surplus in social lives, but rather as something that drives and shapes sociality. as built infrastructures they emulate (rudmark 2021) and remix elements from generic platforms in their functionalities and governance principles while also expanding their affordances for sexual ends. despite the sociality offered by mainstream social media prescribing a strikingly normative model of the sexual that relegates it from networked publics to more hidden or private realms (bivens, 2017), our three platforms have taken shaped in emulative dialogue with it. this emulation takes multiple forms: darkside (the swedish bdsm site) adopted a news feed and libertine.center (the estonian nonmonogamy platform) a process of user verification because the developers liked those features on generic platforms, or presumed the platform vernaculars they liked elsewhere to stem from particular features. we call this imitating emulation. for its part, alastonsuomi (the finnish naked self-presentation site) was set up as an inversion of a sex-negative, but otherwise popular finnish image gallery in what we identify as rejective emulation. finally, libertine.center built a partial functionality chat app since due to the developer assumption that these features are mandatory within the current social media ecosystem, and without them users would reject the platform; this we call contextual emulation. socio-sexual silos on our platforms, social exchanges are framed on sexual terms by default and users can look for hook-ups, play dates or simply at each other. this yields particular types of sexual sociality experienced as more social than those of sex-only platforms but also as more sexual and intensely social than those of generic social media platforms. this, we argue, points to silosocial experiences (tiidenberg et al. 2021) within social media ecosystems where technologies, corporate interests, individual and group practices, norms, and ideas converge in ways accommodating certain degrees and types of sexual display and exchange. our interviews speak of the felt value of sexual social media platforms as sites of seeing and being seen, and learning about sexual selves and the sexual tastes of others. most significantly, it speaks of the value of the social transcending default boundaries separating the sexual (which may or may not be experienced as intimate) from mundane sociality – of the importance of sites “where we can, in one moment, talk about last night’s sex experiences and, in another, about someone having a good recipe for buns.” our study participants speak of sexuality as fundamental to how social bonds take shape and of the importance, gravity, pleasure, and ease of connecting with others similarly attuned. the data helps to map out alternative analytical approaches to the perceived risks and harms of social media, ones expanding to crucial things lost when ousting sex from networked forms of sociality. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20563051221147324#bibr2-20563051221147324 context promiscuity while social media research has largely been invested in analyzing individual platforms, there is also a growing discussion of how users move between them in promiscuous ways, giving shape to social media ecologies both complex and habitual (payne 2015; taffel 2019). our study participants describe constant balancing between privacy and publicness as they move from explicitly sexual social media platforms to more mainstream ones, as they manage their respective profiles, and as they build and foster connections and disconnections across platforms. building on this, we propose thinking of sexual expression as something not contained by, but put in motion across platforms, user cultures, content policies, and sexual norms. in attending to this cross-platform traffic enacted by our participants, we re-examine the notion of “context collapse” (marwick and boyd 2011) broadly used to conceptualize how generic social media disafford social boundary work. our data highlights how strategic audience segregation meets leaky boundaries and how content and data bleeds occur in social media presence. rather than furthering a context collapse, our participants experience and enact this “context promiscuity” – a partially deliberate blending of contexts that nevertheless maintains their structural integrity. conclusion we argue that the removal of sex from social media drastically delimits ways of being social: it further truncates ways of understanding what makes the self and what interests, forces, and attachments drive people on levels both individual and collective. such truncation disproportionally targets sexual cultures, practices, and identities already deemed marginal, such as the self-proclaimed “perverts,” kinksters, swingers, cross-dressers, and exhibitionists we interviewed. attempts to make social media safer do not then necessitate the default effacement of sex: rather, users should be able to opt both in and out of sexual content across platforms. such an approach involves foregrounding sexual ethics and sexual rights in how safety becomes understood and advanced in the first place. learning from the experiences and practices of sexual platforms is one means toward understanding the value of networked sexual sociality, its risks, and its possibilities. in our study, users of different ages, genders, sexual orientations, ethnicities, and bodily abilities and sizes address safety and unsafety as connected to the creation of social and content silos, nuanced negotiations over consent, and tactical forms of platform promiscuity. references anderson, r. (2022). can social media be sex positive? the spectator https://thespectator.com/topic/tumblr-porn-social-media-sex-positive/ bivens, r. (2017). the gender binary will not be deprogrammed: ten years of coding gender on facebook. new media & society, 19(6), 880–898. https://thespectator.com/topic/tumblr-porn-social-media-sex-positive/ blunt, d., duguay, s., gillespie, t., love, s., & smith, c. (2021). deplatforming sex: a roundtable conversation. porn studies, 8(4), 420–438. marwick, a., & boyd, d. (2011). i tweet honestly, i tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. new media and society 13, 96–113. paasonen, s., jarrett, k. & light, b. (2019). nsfw: sex, risk and humor in social media. cambridge, ma: mit press. rudmark, d. (2021). designing platform emulation. ph.d. thesis, department of applied it, university of gothenburg, gothenburg, sweden. stardust, z., van der nagel, e., tiidenberg, k., lee, j., coombes, e., and miller-young, m. (2022), manifesto for sex-positive social media, arc centre of excellence for automated decisionmaking and society, https://sexpositivesocialmedia.org/ doi 10.25916/vnkc-zn96 tiidenberg, k., natalie ann hendry & crystal abidin (2021). tumblr. cambridge: polity press. https://sexpositivesocialmedia.org/ selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): bounegru, l. & gray, j. w. y. (2024, october). from platforms to protocols, forges, stacks and daos: on the platformisation and deplatformisation of software development. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. from platforms to protocols, forges, stacks and daos: on the platformisation and deplatformisation of software development liliana bounegru king’s college london jonathan w. y. gray king’s college london this paper contributes to the critical study of platformisation and deplatformisation of software development and how networked infrastructures commodify, configure and challenge relations between code, coders, communities, technologies, investors and industries. it explores the political economic and cultural dimensions of the platformisation of software development in the news industry with a case study on github. it then turns to how platformisation is being resisted and the development of socio-technical arrangements for socialising software development differently. acquired by microsoft in 2018, github is now part of a group of tech companies on which digital cultural production in the global north is dependent, known as gafam: google, apple, facebook, amazon and microsoft (nieborg and poell, 2018). this position, alongside github’s dominance in the online software development and f/oss (free and/or open-source software) space, call for more sustained critical engagement with the platform’s re-centralisation of software development across a variety of industries, and ongoing expansion into other societal spaces and cultural practices. at the same time, github’s controversial purchase by industry giant microsoft has led to resistance, critical responses, counter-mobilisations and movements to alternative code hosting spaces – and other ways of organising, networking and socialising the development of the software that we live with. these are equally important to study. the paper contributes to a growing body of work on platforms, platformisation and cultural production (dolata & schrape, 2023; duffy et al., 2019; helmond, 2015; mackenzie, 2018; nieborg et al., 2020; plantin et al., 2016) by combining political economy and cultural studies approaches to examine the platformisation and deplatformisation of software development. it examines the platformisation processes that underpin github and how the interplays between technical infrastructure and economic imperatives shape platform vernaculars (gibbs et al., 2015). next it studies how github’s platformising processes are resisted through alternative arrangements for software development that may be understood as a form of deplatformisation. while media scholars have studied deplatformisation and deplatforming as corporate-led processes to detoxify platforms (van dijck, de winkel, & schäfer, 2023; rogers, 2020), we examine deplatformisation as a user-led process to support arrangements which do not follow economic or cultural logics of platformisation. to examine this we turn to how networks of developers, hackers, artists and activists are mobilising to contest and resist the platformisation of free/open source software development, and organising self-hosted, non-profit and community-based software development spaces to decommodify these practices, including in contexts such as f/oss, feminist infrastructure, experimental media arts and marginalised community spaces. to study the platformisation of software development this article combines “technographic inquiry” (bucher, 2018) to understand github’s material-economic configuration and how it structures software and project development, and digital methods approaches for social and media research (marres & gerlitz, 2015; rogers, 2013, 2019; rieder, 2012; venturini et al., 2018). bucher (2018) defines technography as scrutinizing the mechanisms and operational logics of platforms and algorithms and how they configure social action similarly to how an ethnographer would examine culture by means of the way people ascribe meanings to worlds. digital methods are used to examine high-visibility platform practices and vernaculars on github by means of an analysis of top starred repositories and associated organisations. we examine a collection of 3,665 public repositories created by 87 media initiatives and organisations with public github accounts. to study forms of resistance to platformisation, we combine technography and the analysis of online documents and materials to study the values, practices and communities associated with collaborative software development initiatives such as gogs, gitea, radicle and forgejo. drawing on van dijck et al. (2018), the paper proposes the concept of “connective coding” to characterise github’s dominant modes of configuration and capitalisation of public repositories and profiles and the power relations that underpin it. in this arrangement public software development work becomes assets in the platform economy that have the potential to be variously capitalised by the platform and its associated third-party ecosystem. in the context of github, the commodification of software development refers to potential economic capital accumulation by converting public coding activities, developer profiles and behaviours into assets that may attract future revenue and investment to the platform (mackenzie, 2018). this is made possible by a technical infrastructure that sets conditions for participation in alignment with the platform’s economic aims. this includes a front-end which seeks to solicit, intensify and accelerate user engagement and a back-end comprised of servers and data storage, mining and archival capabilities (gehl, 2011). these features, just as in the case of other social media platforms, are organised around nurturing a platform ecosystem that multiplies valorisation of connectivity around several registers (gerlitz, 2016; marres, 2017). by making projects and people commensurable through the introduction of common metrics, the platform materialises an auditorial culture (gane, 2014; power, 1999; strathern, 2000) based on quantitative measures, that intensifies evaluation and competition between projects (rieder, 2017). in the case study on newsroom industry practices and how they are mediated by the platform, this auditorial culture materialises in a high-visibility platform vernacular dominated by a mix of large and established media actors, as well as smaller and more recent actors and initiatives. f/oss features prominently in this high-visibility space, from the appropriation of f/oss for media commodity production by large companies such as in the case of bloomberg and the new york times, to the extension of an organisational strategy of journalistic transparency in non-profit media production to the software development space such as in the case of the guardian and propublica, as well as cross-organisational collaborations to create an independent open-source product. by contrast, lowvisibility public repositories in this space may be seen as indicative of github’s role in facilitating what fuller et al. (2017) have described as a post-f/oss culture in contemporary software development. by contrast, projects such as gogs, gitea, radicle and forgejo, which have received limited scholarly attention focusing on studying f/oss software development outside of github (e.g. trujillo, hébert-dufresne, & bagrow, 2022), can be understood as contested sites of infrastructural experimentation, articulating alternative forms of networked sociality and valuation. tracing the making, forking and fate of these initiatives provide insights into the dynamics and politics of deplatformisation in the current moment. they can be considered post-platform in that they echo familiar platform user features and functionalities, but with technical, economic and organisational setups which aspire to depart from platform logics. in all, the paper contributes to conference themes pertaining to the political economy of digital industries, labour in platform contexts, and resistance in digital industry contexts. references bucher t (2018) if...then: algorithmic power and politics. new york: oxford university press. dolata, u., & schrape, j.-f. (2023). platform companies on the internet as a new organizational form. a sociological perspective. innovation: the european journal of social science research, 0(0), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/13511610.2023.2182217 duffy be, poell t and nieborg db (2019) platform practices in the cultural industries: creativity, labor, and citizenship. social media + society 5(4). sage publications ltd: 2056305119879672. doi: 10.1177/2056305119879672. fuller m, goffey a, mackenzie a, et al. (2017) big diff, granularity, incoherence, and production in the github software repository. in: how to be a geek: essays on the culture of software. cambridge, uk: polity press. https://doi.org/10.1080/13511610.2023.2182217 gane n (2014) the emergence of neoliberalism: thinking through and beyond michel foucault’s lectures on biopolitics. theory, culture & society 31(4): 3–27. gehl, r. w. (2011). the archive and the processor: the internal logic of web 2.0. new media & society, 13(8), 1228–1244. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444811401735 gerlitz c (2016) what counts? reflections on the multivalence of social media data. digital culture & society 2(2): 19–38. gibbs m, meese j, arnold m, et al. (2015) #funeral and instagram: death, social media, and platform vernacular. information, communication & society 18(3): 255–268. doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2014.987152. helmond a (2015) the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready. social media + society 1(2): 2056305115603080. mackenzie a (2018) 48 million configurations and counting: platform numbers and their capitalization. journal of cultural economy 11(1): 36–53. marres n (2017) digital sociology: the reinvention of social research. cambridge, uk: polity press. marres n and gerlitz c (2015) interface methods: renegotiating relations between digital social research, sts and sociology. the sociological review 64(1): 21–46. nieborg db, duffy be and poell t (2020) studying platforms and cultural production: methods, institutions, and practices. social media + society 6(3). sage publications ltd: 2056305120943273. doi: 10.1177/2056305120943273. plantin j-c, lagoze c, edwards pn, et al. (2016) infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of google and facebook. new media & society 20(1): 293–310. power m (1999) the audit society: rituals of verification. oxford: oxford university press, usa. rieder, b. (2012). digital methods: five challenges. in d. m. berry & t. röhle (eds.), understanding digital humanities. palgrave macmillan uk. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371934 rieder b (2017) beyond surveillance: how do markets and algorithms ‘think’? le foucaldien 3(1). rogers r (2013) digital methods. cambridge, ma: mit press. rogers, r. (2019). doing digital methods. sage. rogers, r. (2020). deplatforming: following extreme internet celebrities to telegram and alternative social media. european journal of communication, 35, 213–229. strathern m (ed.) (2000) audit cultures: anthropological studies in accountability, ethics and the academy. london: routledge. trujillo, m. z., hébert-dufresne, l., & bagrow, j. (2022). the penumbra of open source: projects outside of centralized platforms are longer maintained, more academic and more collaborative. epj data science, 11, 31. van dijck, j., poell, t., & waal, m. d. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford university press. van dijck, j., de winkel, t., & schäfer, m. t. (2023). deplatformization and the governance of the platform ecosystem. new media & society, 25, 3438–3454. venturini t, bounegru l, gray j, et al. (2018) a reality check(list) for digital methods. new media & society: 23. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769236. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): annabell, t. & rasmussen, n.v. (2024, october). an algorithmic event: the celebration and critique of spotify wrapped. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. an algorithmic event: the celebration and critique of spotify wrapped taylor annabell utrecht university nina vindum rasmussen london school of economics and political science introduction the end of november marks spotify wrapped season: the time of year when spotify nudges users to view and share aesthetically pleasing data stories ‘wrapped’ and repackaged from their listening behaviour. we approach wrapped as an ‘algorithmic event’, defined as a moment in time in which there is a collective orientation towards a particular algorithmic system and associated data. wrapped is an example of an algorithmic event in which people both celebrate and critique data capture, affording an opportunity to critically think through algorithmic systems. at the same time, wrapped makes visible and topical the collection and aggregation of user data, which we investigate collaboratively through creative workshops. theoretical framework the repackaging of user data that is central to wrapped can be situated within the (re)configuration of the self through data assemblages. cheney-lippold (2011) refers to ‘algorithmic identities’ produced by algorithms that infer categories of identity based on data. such categorisation of identity is projected onto individuals outside of their control. prey (2018) coins the term ‘algorithmic individuation’ as ‘a dynamic socio-technical process engaged in enacting the individual’ (p. 1095). he notes the prevalence of algorithmic individuation on platforms like spotify and how algorithms play an increasingly important role in subject formation by ‘reflecting back categorized images of our self’ (p. 1096). there has been limited academic research that examines these dynamics with wrapped, which we argue are heightened through the re-presentation of data back to users. a notable exception is an analysis of #spotifywrapped tweets by burgess et al. (2022) who refer to wrapped as a ‘spotify data selfie’. our research is also informed by the analytical orientation towards understanding how people experience and interpret ‘algorithmic culture’ (striphas, 2023), uncovering what it means for people that algorithms infer categories of identity and assemble narratives for them. for bucher (2017), affective encounters with algorithms as part of everyday life involve what she refers to as ‘the algorithmic imaginary’. this concept emphasises the way that people perceive and make sense of their experiences with algorithms. following this view, scholars have explored how people think about their ‘algorithmic identities’ and recommendations through arts-based methods and workshops (lupton, 2021; bishop & kant, 2023; siles et al., 2020), which we build on. methodological approach to examine how people make sense of wrapped as an algorithmic event, we have developed a workshop that enables users to unwrap layers of datafication. drawing on ‘data feminist principles’ (d’ignazio & klein, 2020), participants engage in a series of exercises. the first one focuses on the 2022 ‘listening personalities’ or ‘me in 2023 characters’ cards from wrapped. we suggest directions for discussion related to connections between music listening and taste, types of data collection implied by the categories and feelings towards labelling. the second exercise is a modified version of the walkthrough method (light et al., 2018). our version remains committed to the orientation to materiality, perceptions of affordances and built-in inequalities. in pairs, participants ‘walk through’ a particular wrapped data story or the spotify app, focusing on how data, personalisation and identity are (in)visible. as part of this process, they produce a diagram to record their observations and emerging insights (figure 1). drawing on craft-based approaches, the final exercise sees participants producing a physical artefact. participants construct their own wrapped that might rearticulate or critique spotify’s version, using material objects such as cds, vinyl, magazines, glitter and markers (figure 2). we hosted nine workshops with more than 200 university students in the united kingdom in 2023 and 2024 (see annabell & rasmussen, 2024). we obtained informed consent to audio record their contributions in the plenary discussions and photograph materials they produced. although participants were invited to bring in wrapped screenshots, we did not collect this as data. instead, we focus on their interpretations of their own data. we position our participants as co-analysts, following the work of robards and lincoln (2017) and markham (2021), and in our analysis highlight themes that arise from their contributions. figure 1: participants ‘walking through’ the interface figure 2: examples of creative artefacts produced by participants preliminary findings in our early analysis of the plenary discussions, walkthrough diagrams and creative artefacts, we observe responses to the value of wrapped that range from celebration to critical and resistant readings. at times, participants used wrapped as a mnemonic vehicle to reflect on their patterns of listening as well as broader experiences with music. in such instances, we note how the claims that spotify ‘knows you’ and the logic of wrapped are reproduced, which was evident in the production of the creative artefact that echoed spotify’s use of ‘top’ artists or songs to best represent spotify listening and capitalise on parasocial relationships. wrapped as revealing ‘truth’ about music consumption and taste was also contested. some participants identified a friction between wrapped and how they experienced spotify. wrapped was unable to convey the intricacies of experiences. for example, by restricting the user to one personality and collating user data, spotify collapses diachronic, dynamic listening behaviour, which was considered by some as core to how their listening took place. this theme was continued in the production of artefacts that illustrated changes over time or interconnections between people, going beyond spotify data stories. as part of critical reflections on wrapped, participants also drew attention to tensions between claims of individuality and distinctiveness with an orientation towards collective patterns and genericity. we argue that wrapped in these instances is experienced as personalised but not personal, repositioning the rhetoric of the platform through data stories. finally, the construction of wrapped as an algorithmic event was indicated by the way some participants discussed the lead-up to wrapped season, which could be marked by feelings of trepidation and concern over what might be revealed. this anticipation was at times a catalyst for adapting their use of spotify in an attempt to regain autonomy and influence the data collection that was assumed to underpin the data stories. in addition, the temporal dimension of the algorithmic event in which wrapped becomes a marker in time, not only of time, was picked up in the production of some artefacts that played with its annual recurrence. conclusion in this paper, we present emerging findings from our creative workshops in which we invite participants to analyse and discuss algorithmic events like wrapped. in collaboration with participants, we tease out how normative assumptions are baked into wrapped data stories and mobilise particular understandings of individuals, their habits, tastes and identities. we argue that algorithmic events like wrapped are useful ways to think through data capture and algorithmic systems because of their familiarity and everydayness coupled with their popularisation and celebration of data. the phenomenon of ‘wrappification’ – by which we mean the repackaging of behavioural data that captures a particular activity throughout the year and the responses to the belief that we can ‘know’ ourselves in this way – speaks to such impact. the production of wrapped iterations by other companies and individuals necessitates not only research but also opportunities for people to critically reflect on and discuss datafication and algorithmic identities. references annabell, t., & rasmussen, n. v. (2024, april 12). spotify wrapped: workshop on repackaged music data [video]. youtube. https://youtu.be/bu7lg9yzgj4 https://youtu.be/bu7lg9yzgj4 bishop, s., & kant, t. (2023). algorithmic autobiographies and fictions: a digital method. the sociological review, 71(5), 1012–1036. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261221146403 bucher, t. (2017). the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 30–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154086 burgess, j., albury, k., mccosker, a. & wilken, r. (2022). everyday data cultures. polity press. cheney-lippold, j. (2011). a new algorithmic identity: soft biopolitics and the modulation of control. theory, culture & society, 28(6), 164–181. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276411424420 d’ignazio, c. & klein, l. (2020). data feminism. mit press. light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881–900. https://doiorg/10.1177/1461444816675438 lupton, d. (2021). ‘not the real me’: social imaginaries of personal data profiling. cultural sociology, 15(1), 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975520939779 markham, a. (2021). the limits of the imaginary: challenges to intervening in future speculations of memory, data, and algorithms. new media & society, 23(2), 382–405. https://doi-org/10.1177/1461444820929322 prey, r. (2018). nothing personal: algorithmic individuation on music streaming platforms. media, culture & society, 40(7), 1086–1100. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443717745147 robards, b., & lincoln, s. (2017). uncovering longitudinal life narratives: scrolling back on facebook. qualitative research, 17(6), 715–730. https://doiorg/10.1177/1468794117700707 siles, i., segura-castillo, a., solís, r., & sancho, m. (2020). folk theories of algorithmic recommendations on spotify: enacting data assemblages in the global south. big data & society, 7(1), https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720923377 striphas, t. (2023). algorithmic culture before the internet. columbia university press. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261221146403 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154086 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276411424420 https://doi-org/10.1177/1461444816675438 https://doi-org/10.1177/1461444816675438 https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975520939779 https://doi-org/10.1177/1461444820929322 https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443717745147 https://doi-org/10.1177/1468794117700707 https://doi-org/10.1177/1468794117700707 https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720923377 formatted abstract2 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 policy at oddsdigital india versus internet shutdowns manisha madapathi 1 university of hyderabad digital policy in india the government of india, in 2014, through the department of electronics and information technology launched a flagship programme called digital india, with a vision to transform india into a ‘digitally empowered society and knowledge economy’. the official press release on the announcement of this programme states that “even though india is known as a powerhouse of software, the availability of electronic government services to citizens is still comparatively low”. that this programme would ensure that government services are available to citizens electronically. that this is intended to bring public accountability through mandated delivery of government’s services electronically. a similar intention is reflected in another initiative by the government of india called bharatnet (formerly known as national optical fibre network). in 2012, this project was undertaken by a government statutory body called the universal service obligation fund, under the department of telecommunications (dot), ministry of communications. the uso fund was established with the fundamental objective of providing access to telegraph services, including mobile services, broadband connectivity and ict infrastructure creation in rural and remote areas. the usof website says that bharatnet is one of the biggest rural telecom project in the world. objective is to enable access providers like mobile operators, internet service providers (isps), cable tv operators, content providers to launch various services such as applications like e-health, e-education and e-governance in rural and remote india. so far, 207,989 gram panchayats are connected through the bharatnet project and 669,751 km of ofc has been laid. additionally, 782,366 fibre-to-the-home (ftth) connections are commissioned and 104,675 wi-fi hotspots are installed to ensure last-mile connectivity. while policies and projects involving massive communication infrastructure are encouraged by the regime, it is done primarily for the purpose of efficient governance. establishing digital networks to remote rural india serve very defined goals for the project of digital india. the vision areas outlined by this project attempts the following: suggested citation: madapathi, m. (2024, october). policy at oddsdigital india versus internet 1 shutdowns. paper presented at aoir 2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from: http://spir.aoir.org. firstly, it states that digital infrastructure is a core utility to every citizen. every citizen should have access to high speed internet for the delivery of services. every citizen should have a “cradle to grave digital identity that is unique, lifelong, online and ‘authenticable’ to every citizen”. through mobile phones and online banking, citizen is enabled to participate in digital and financial life. and there would be easy access to common service centre. these are access points for delivery of government to citizen e-services, to make service delivery mechanism transparent and to reduce citizens’ effort in visiting government offices. second, to disburse services on demand for efficacy of governance. to seamlessly integrate services across departments or jurisdictions. to ensure all citizen entitlements to be portable and available on cloud. to make services available in real time from online and mobile platforms. to make financial transactions electronic and cashless. they also intend to leverage gis (geospatial information systems) to help make decisions for support systems and development. thirdly, to digitally empower citizens. their objective is to achieve digital literacy, and to provide universally accessible digital resources, and to make these available in indian languages. internet shutdowns during civil protests one can see from these initiatives that there is a lot of encouragement from the state for the citizens to go digital. however, it is interesting to note that india has been notorious at shutting down the internet, at minor inconveniences and also to control violent unrest. some of these shutdowns were placed to avoid cheating during government examinations. and many of these have been during citizen protests and during instances of anticipated violence or dissent. using internet shutdowns as a reaction to civil unrest is not uncommon in india. in the year 2020, india ranked no.1 in the total number of hours spent 1,655 hours in internet blackouts, and four times more spent in throttling networks. in 2021, ranking in the order or the total cost of internet shutdownsindia ranked no.3 with 1,157 hours of blackout; and in 2022 in ranks no.6 with 1,533 hours in shutdowns. (top10vpn, 2022, 2023, 2024) several state and central governments have used this tactic to suspend the flow of information either to curtail the ability of citizens to organise through social media networks or to dominate discourse around the event, or both. several of these instances have been instances of violation of the right to peaceful assembly. in access now’s report (2021), however, india has consistently raked number one, in the total number of hours spent under internet shutdown. protest communication networks have been fragile, even more so, ever since they have become digitalised. the earliest movement that was aided by digital networks was the egypt revolution in early 2010s, that overthrew the then president hosni mubarak, occurred through twitter. since the arab spring, regimes have been wary of citizens using digital networks to collectivise. more recently, it has become frequent for governments to clampdown on the internet during social unrest. historically across the world, communication blackout is not a new tactic (tufekci, 2016; article 19, 2020). in india, the anticaa protests in late 2020, and early 2021, was one such period that saw many shutdowns across multiple cities, simultaneously. this severe crackdown on internet was criticised by many international watchdogs (amnesty international, 2020; human rights watch, 2020). later that year, we saw the farmers protest, where a majority of farmers in the northern part of india dissented to the unconstitutionally introduced farm laws, through a sit-in protest near the national capital, delhi. when we look at these two actions by the governmentone, to digitise governance (as seen with initiatives such as digital india, and bharatnet) and provide connectivity to all citizens to digitally empower them allow for the participation in networked economy; and two, to disrupt these very connections when citizens use networks to express dissent. placed together, these look like opposing forces, incompatible with each other. the indian state’s impetus for the digital is to achieve efficient governance, and to provide each of its citizen with a digital identity. however when citizens use the internet to collectivise or mobilise against a democratic government, these same networks are shutdown. in this paper i take a closer look at the policy documents and the building of information infrastructure that is written into it. these massive projects embed infrastructure into policy, and promote the building of industry around this “common” communication good. while also studying how infrastructure gets suspended during dissenting movements led by citizens. i use the case of two eventsthe anti-caa movement, and the framers protest to understand this disruption. using newspaper analysis and interviews, i examine how infrastructure gets denied and disrupted to citizens when digital networks are used in ways that are unintended by the government. references article 19. (2020). (rep.). iran: tightening the net 2020 after blood and shutdowns. (pp. 23–24). london, uk: article 19. digital india. (2023). retrieved from https://digitalindia.gov.in/ india: international community must condemn crimes against peaceful protesters. amnesty international australia. (2020, march 3). https://www.amnesty.org.au/india-states-mustcondemn-human-rights-violations-against-peaceful-protesters/ india: protests, attacks over new citizenship law. human rights watch. (2020, april 9). https:// www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/09/india-protests-attacks-over-new-citizenship-law keepiton. (2021) shattered dreams and lost opportunities: a year in the fight to keepiton. access now. https://www.accessnow.org/cms/assets/uploads/2021/03/ keepiton-report-on-the-2020-data_mar-2021_3.pdf tufekci, z. (2017). twitter and tear gas. new haven and london: yale university press. usof ongoing schemes advancing telecom connectivity in india. (n.d.). retrieved from https://usof.gov.in/en/ongoing-schemes woodhams, s., migliano, s., (2022) the global cost of internet shutdowns 2021 report. top10vpn. https://www.top10vpn.com/cost-of-internet-shutdowns/ woodhams, s., migliano, s., (2023)the global cost of internet shutdowns 2022 report. top10vpn. https://www.top10vpn.com/research/cost-of-internet-shutdowns/2022/ woodhams, s., migliano, s., (2024) the global cost of internet shutdowns 2023 report. top10vpn. https://www.top10vpn.com/research/cost-of-internet-shutdowns/2023/ https://digitalindia.gov.in/ https://www.amnesty.org.au/india-states-must-condemn-human-rights-violations-against-peaceful-protesters/ https://www.amnesty.org.au/india-states-must-condemn-human-rights-violations-against-peaceful-protesters/ https://www.amnesty.org.au/india-states-must-condemn-human-rights-violations-against-peaceful-protesters/ http://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/09/india-protests-attacks-over-new-citizenship-law https://www.accessnow.org/cms/assets/uploads/2021/03/keepiton-report-on-the-2020-data_mar-2021_3.pdf https://www.accessnow.org/cms/assets/uploads/2021/03/keepiton-report-on-the-2020-data_mar-2021_3.pdf https://www.accessnow.org/cms/assets/uploads/2021/03/keepiton-report-on-the-2020-data_mar-2021_3.pdf https://usof.gov.in/en/ongoing-schemes https://www.top10vpn.com/cost-of-internet-shutdowns/ https://www.top10vpn.com/research/cost-of-internet-shutdowns/2022/ https://www.top10vpn.com/research/cost-of-internet-shutdowns/2023/ selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): ditchfield, h and vicari, s (2024 october) performing previvorship online: examining identity management on tiktok. paper presenting at aoir: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from: http://spir.aoir.org performing previvorship online: examining identity management on tiktok hannah ditchfield university of sheffield stefania vicari university of sheffield with the growing popularity and prevalence of tiktok as a social media platform, scholarship has tended to focus on the “distinctive technical structure” of the platform (zulli and zulli, 2020, pg. 1872) and particularly in the role of the ranking algorithm in shaping content, connections and experiences of this particular online space (see avella, 2023; klug, qin, evans and kaufman, 2021; krutrok, 2021). this focus has led to less attention being paid to the ways in which identity is performed and managed on the platform. work that has conceptualised identity performance on tiktok has again highlighted the role of the algorithm arguing that we are departing from older self-making frameworks such as the networked self and are instead moving towards a more ‘algorithmized self’ (bhandari and bimo, 2022). this departure moves us from a framework that emphasises user agency, creativity and performance in the goffmanian sense to a model that emphasises the role of the algorithm in shaping our self-making practices. this paper extends work that conceptualises identity and self on tiktok by further exploring the extent to which we may have departed from older self-making frameworks. to do this, we look at how active content creators, rather observers, work to perform their identities in particular tiktok spaces, specifically in the context of health and illness. social media platforms have been established as important spaces for the performance of both health and illness identities (see tembeck, 2016; kent 2020). tembeck, for example, has highlighted how platforms offer a space for authopathographic performances where users can engage in self-representational practices (such as selfies) to display experiences of illness and “come out” as “visibility ill” (2016, pg. 1). despite the distinctive technical structure of tiktok, and the move towards more algorithmized selves, this paper asks whether and how illness performances occur on this platform, especially in relation to illnesses that remain largely invisible. to address these questions, we draw on findings from an ongoing leverhulme trustfunded project focused on social media uses relevant to hereditary cancer syndromes. these syndromes mark health conditions linked to known genetic mutations, also called “cancer genes”, that heighten the risk of having cancer from an early age. conditions are invisible in at least three ways: 1) cancer genetic risk is evidence-based and embodied, but not bodily visible 2) general health practitioners rarely know about hereditary cancer syndromes and 3) overall, hereditary cancer syndromes have not yet entered the wider collective imagination. carriers of these genetic mutations are often referred to as ‘previvors’: healthy individuals who are coping with the awareness of having a genetic predisposition to cancer and who are often faced with choices around preventing, or lowering, their risk e.g. through constant screening or in some cases preventative surgery. in line with research on illness identities, genetic risk management and responsibility have been investigated as embedded in new forms of subjectivity and selfhood (see ross, kerr, cunningham-burley, 2018 and hallowell and lawton, 2022). these involve the renegotiation of one’s social relationships to accommodate risk-derived uncertainty in everyday life and are central to the emergence of new individualities. in other words, the awareness of carrying a genetic mutation affects how we construct and perform our identity. existing research provides clear evidence that individuals with these conditions turn to social media to seek, learn, produce and share information and stories about their condition (allen, roberts, anderson and khoury, 2020; wellman, holton, kaphingst, 2022) however less is known about how they manage, and perform, their identities as previvors in these spaces. data and methods to fill this gap, this paper draws on the collection and analysis of tiktok content relevant to two hereditary cancer syndromes: brca 1/2 and lynch syndrome. drawing on existing conceptualisations of digital methods for cultural research (vicari and kirby, 2022) we used computational techniques and tools to access, collect and handle posts (i.e., data and metadata) about these conditions published on tiktok. we then conducted a qualitative content analysis of 100 posts published in march 2023 by both brca and lynch syndrome previvors. following approaches laid out by previous tiktok research (e.g. ebbrecht-hartmann and divon 2022 and krutrok, 2021) we constructed a coding schedule that allowed us to identify the kinds of identities that previvors create and perform in posts that use #brca and #lynchsyndrome. this was followed by conducting a closer textual analysis of 20 of the 100 posts collected. this paper approaches activities undertaken on social media “as not merely reflective of the everyday presentations of self that occur offline” due to the specific affordances that platforms offer to users (tembeck, 2016, pg. 3). because of this, we also coded the communicative features that previvors use and engage with in their tiktok content to gain a more comprehensive understanding of how previvors perform and manage their identities online. preliminary findings despite arguments that self-making is departing from older frameworks based on the networked self and identity performance, our initial findings show how strong elements of this are still present in content produced by previvors on tiktok. we found previvors to perform various types of identity within their online content ranging from being ‘the friend’ to ‘the educator’ to ‘the defender’ in which previvors performed more politicized identities when justifying their decisions on managing the risk of their conditions. we also found that previvors identity performances are still very much networked, interactive and connected to specific communities. this is especially prevalent in content that mimics interactions, addresses specific questions from fellow previvors or that involves collaborations such as through the ‘duet’ function of the platform. with these findings, this paper contributes to scholarship working to understand the relationship between social media users, platform structures and identity management with questions being raised around the amount of agency previvors, but more broadly tiktok users, have when it comes to ‘self-making’ on this platform. references allen, c. g., roberts, m., andersen, b., & khoury, m. j. (2020). communication about hereditary cancers on social media: a content analysis of tweets about hereditary breast and ovarian cancer and lynch syndrome. journal of cancer education, 35(1), 131-137. avella, h. (2023) “tiktok #therapy”: mediating mental health and algorithmic mood disorders. new media & society, online first. bhandari, a., & bimo, s. (2022). why’s everyone on tiktok now? the algorithmized self and the future of self-making on social media. social media + society, 8(1), 1-11. ebbrecht-hartmann, t., & divon, t. (2022). serious tiktok: can you learn about the holocaust in 60 seconds? mediarxiv. september 4. https://doi.org/10.33767/osf.io/nv6t2 hallowell, n., & lawton, j. (2022). negotiating present and future selves: managing the risk of hereditary ovarian cancer by prophylactic surgery. health: an interdisciplinary journal for the social study of health, illness and medicine. vol 6(4): 423–443. kent, r. (2020). self-tracking health over time: from the use of instagram to perform optimal health to the protective shield of the digital detox. social media + society, 6(3), 1-14. klug, d., qin, y., evans, m., & kaufman, g. (2021). trick and please. a mixed method study on user assumptions about the tiktok algorithm. in 13th acm web science conference 2021 (websci ’21), june 21–25, 2021, virtual event, united kingdom. acm, new york, ny, usa, 9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3447535.3462512 krutrok, m. (2021). algorithmic closeness in mourning: vernaculars of the hashtag #grief on tiktok. social media + society, 7(3), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3447535.3462512 ross, e., broer, t., kerr, a., & cunningham-burley, s. (2018). identity, community and care in online accounts of hereditary colorectal cancer syndrome. new genetics and society, 37(2), 117-136. tembeck, t. (2016). selfies of ill health: online autopathographic photography and the dramaturgy of the everyday. social media + society, 2(1), 1-11. wellman, m., holton, a., & kaphingst, k. (2022) previvorship posting: why breast cancer previvors share their stories on social media. health communication, online first. zulli, d., & zulli, d. (2022). extending the internet meme: conceptualising technological mimesis and imitation publics on the tiktok platform. new media & society, 24(8), 18721890. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): stardust, z., albury, k., kennedy, j., learmonth, c., sundén, j. & van der nagel, e. (2024, october). sextech industries and cultures: towards mediated pleasures and data justice. panel presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. sextech industries and cultures: towards mediated pleasures and data justice zahra stardust queensland university of technology kath albury swinburne university of technology jenny kennedy royal melbourne institute of technology caitlin learmonth swinburne university of technology jenny sundén södertörn university emily van der nagel monash university abstract the industry of sextech is on the rise. the economist suggested that the rapidly growing global market for sexual pleasure and wellbeing-focused technologies was projected to reach 40 billion us dollars in 2023 (chankova, 2022). this market growth has coincided with a proliferation of industry conferences and hackathons worldwide, such as the reimagine sexuality conference; the love and sex with robots conference; the sx tech eu conference; the online tech accelerator sextech school; as well as sextech hackathons in new york, london, singapore and melbourne (devlin, 2019). while the term sextech has been applied to technologies as diverse as dating apps, menstrual trackers, personal lubricants, smart vibrators, and sex robots, it is often understood in terms of technologies that enhance, intensify, or improve sexuality and sexual experiences in an individualist manner. our own understanding is less concerned with sexuality as a question of technological optimisation, and more invested in sextech as a range of technologies, not only for pleasure and health, but also for regulation, surveillance, and biopolitical management (in line with ruberg, 2022). despite bold statements among sextech entrepreneurs about how their products will disrupt and revolutionise sex and pleasure (barrica, 2019), as queer and feminist researchers we are interested in the intersection of technology, politics, and culture are examining the ways sextech products and marketing materials represent and engage with sexuality, gender, global markets, human rights, and data justice. this work builds on concerns raised by global public health and development practitioners and researchers, who argue that the “disruptive” ethos that underpins tech start-up culture is fundamentally incompatible with values such as sustainability and universal access to healthcare. this panel explores the growth of the sextech industry and its relationships to surveillance capitalism, artificial intelligence, data governance, and politics of pleasure. drawing from empirical data with sextech users, retailers, developers, and founders as well as collaborations between industry and academia, the papers explore how sextech industries outsource labour, upscale automation, and shape intimate connections through digital technologies. while we consider the interplay of sextech and public health policy and practice, we do not seek to quantify the prevalence of sextech use, or evaluate its therapeutic utility. instead, we adopt a sociotechnical approach, reflecting on how cultural assumptions around gender, sexuality, health, and pleasure guide and inform sextech markets. the panel is structured by moving from broad interrogations of the issues within the sextech industry to case studies of specific platforms, before finishing with a consideration of user experiences of queering sextech to explore some possible futures. zahra stardust investigates how a hubris of innovation can overshadow data extraction and wealth accumulation in the sextech industry, by canvassing how new sextech entrepreneurs understand their own responsibilities in governing sensitive, intimate user data. emily van der nagel examines the emergent sextech industry of automated chatbots to perform small talk, dirty talk, and outsource the work of building relationships with subscribers on onlyfans. kath albury and caitlin learmonth explore equity and diversity issues raised by sextech’s ‘disruption’ of public health services, contrasting the data-driven limitations of government-subsidised sexual health services with user experiences of a commercial sexually-transmitted infection (sti) testing platform. finally, jenny sundén demonstrates how capitalism works to manufacture pleasures, using hetero, cisnormative, and couple-centred scripts embedded at the point of technology design, resulting in a disconnect between industry marketing of sextech products and their unpredictable, creative, and off-label uses by queer users. in these case studies, focusing on industry practices allows us to see how sextech is marketed as simultaneously sexually empowering, a source of self-knowledge and a solution for social inequality and injustice (greene, 2021). however, these narratives about sextech are often “contradictory, empirically unsubstantiated and gender oppressive” (hendl & jansky, 2022), and “create possibilities for unprecedented levels https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448231164408#bibr16-14614448231164408 of reproductive surveillance” (mishra & suresh, 2021), with major discrepancies between the language of the company and the experiences of the users. instead, we see precedents for the development of new sexual technologies in the work of disability activists who continue to pioneer future relationships between accessibility and technology (piepzna-samarasinha, 2022), critical race scholars who have explored how carceral technologies can be resisted and reworked for liberatory purposes (benjamin, 2019), marginalised communities who have collaboratively produced design principles for more just futures (costanza-chock, 2020), and scholar-practitioners who have emphasised the political role of pleasure as part of social justice (brown, 2019). references barrica, a. (2019). sextech revolution: the future of sexual wellness. lioncrest. benjamin, r. (2019). race after technology. polity. brown, a. m. (2019). pleasure activism: the politics of feeling good. ak press. chankova, s. (2022, november 18). sexual pleasure is increasingly seen as part of general well-being. the economist. https://www.economist.com/the-worldahead/2022/11/18/sexual-pleasure-is-increasingly-seen-as-part-of-general-well-being costanza-chock, s. (2020). design justice: community-led practices to build the worlds we need. mit press. devlin, k. (2019). turned on: science, sex and robots. bloomsbury publishing. greene, d. (2021) the promise of access: technology, inequality, and the political economy of hope. mit press. hendl, t., & jansky, b. (2022). tales of self-empowerment through digital health technologies: a closer look at ‘femtech’. review of social economy 80(1), 29–57. mishra, p., & suresh, y. (2021). datafied body projects in india: femtech and the rise of reproductive surveillance in the digital era. asian journal of women’s studies 27(4), 597–606. piepzna-samarasinha, l. (2022). the future is disabled: prophecies, love notes and mourning songs. arsenal pulp press. ruberg, b. (2022). sex dolls at sea: imagined histories of sexual technologies. mit press. https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2022/11/18/sexual-pleasure-is-increasingly-seen-as-part-of-general-well-being https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2022/11/18/sexual-pleasure-is-increasingly-seen-as-part-of-general-well-being sextech entrepreneurs: governing intimate data in start-up culture zahra stardust queensland university of technology introduction in the back cover blurb for her 2019 book sextech revolution: the future of sexual wellness, andrea barrica, founder of online adult sex education video-clip platform o.school, argues that “sexual wellness is the next blue ocean for tech entrepreneurs and investors alike” (barrica, 2019). in an aspirational industry that attracts careerists from a variety of backgrounds, sextech entrepreneurs are immersed in a start-up culture that foregrounds business, marketing and branding. across both sextech and femtech industries, data have been positioned as a tool for knowledge and user empowerment (flore & pienaar, 2020) and an opportunity for personalized and responsive health care (hendl & jansky, 2022). however, the privacy and security vulnerabilities of smart sex toys have been the subject of recent media attention. emerging research has identified multiple privacy and security vulnerabilities in sextech devices that potentially leave users open to stigma, blackmail, prosecution and remote sexual assault (giusto & pastorino, 2021; wynn et al., 2017). dating apps, menstrual trackers and sex toy companies have paid millions in compensation for non-consensually collecting or sharing intimate data. as an industry, sextech itself is both unexceptional and unique. it is unexceptional in that it faces similar issues to other tech industries around accountability and surveillance capitalism. sextech, however, is unique in the sense that it invites individuals to enter the industry through unconventional pathways. while it encourages people from minority populations to participate, the industry simultaneously positions data from those communities as an untapped mine for investment. sexual stigma marks the industry, posing barriers to accessing finance, hosting, advertising and markets. however, stigma also forms part of sextech’s appeal, forming a central part of the industry’s narrative and acting as a platform for media, branding and recruitment. there has been little research into how prospective sextech entrepreneurs conceptualise and approach intimate data governance. while industry-research sextech partnerships do exist, many of the current collaborations are focused upon collecting and analysing data for therapeutic or sexological insights rather than examining the complexities of data justice. in industry discussions, the topic tends to be presented in terms of the need to guard against data leaks, in order to protect the privacy, rights and security of individual data subjects. there has been less explicit discussion of more collective approaches to data justice or data sovereignty within sextech development and production. methods to better understand the ways that “industry newcomers” currently approach industry data practices, we conducted a 3-hour virtual professional development and knowledge https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448231164408#bibr12-14614448231164408 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448231164408#bibr19-14614448231164408 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448231164408#bibr15-14614448231164408 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448231164408#bibr41-14614448231164408 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448231164408#bibr41-14614448231164408 exchange workshop with 15 people seeking to enter the sextech industry in august 2021. we sought to investigate if and how sexual technologies can be governed at scale in ways that prioritise public interest benefit and feminist data ethics. the discussion was divided into five key topic areas: current approaches to existing sextech on the market, ethical data governance frameworks, enablers and barriers to �ecentralize�g�ion, equitable distribution of benefits of sextech, and interface design. the research was conducted in partnership with the sextech school, an established private training academy for sextech start-ups and would-be professionals, situated between australia and the united states and coordinated online, founded by industry future of sex podcaster and speaker, bryony cole. sextech school enrols students from global locations including australia, the united kingdom, europe, north america, asia, and south america. of those attending the 6-week online training course, the predominant demographic is women-identified people in the 30–40 age bracket. the curriculum includes four key modules: industry knowledge, brand building, community engagement, and business models. start-up journeys – from data subjects to data brokers among our participants, the predominant pathway to sextech school involved a personal catalyst or experience that drew an individual to the field. drawing from their adjacent business endeavours and preliminary sextech initiatives, participants unsurprisingly saw data as providing a valuable market insight. data were seen as having potential use for multiple stakeholders, and many described a positive role for big data in improving products, user experiences, and well-being interventions. in transitioning from their position as data subjects to data brokers, some participants were confounded by the complex data protection legislation that applied to them. despite this, they were �ecentral of the risks of collecting sensitive data. speaking from their positions as tech users, participants were concerned with their rights to access and delete their own data, and there was general consensus that consent to data collection should be dynamic. our study suggests that there is an appetite and interest among upcoming sextech professionals for greater literacy, awareness, and skills in ethical data governance. we found that participants at the sextech school drew from their experiences and frustrations as users (who expected their own data to be protected), reflected on their own sense of responsibility in handling sensitive data (aspiring to do it ethically), expressed desire for more information on data protection (how to comply with regulatory requirements), and sought improved accountability in industry standards and practices (looking for guidance on alternative approaches). however, the workshop revealed disconnections between the collective possibilities offered by a data commons approach and the technosolutionist narratives of start-up cultures. start-ups often position scale as their goal and automation as their method. this was consistent among the prospective sextech entrepreneurs we spoke to, who framed data accountability through a lens of individual rights, privacy, and consent. accordingly, we found that because start-up cultures involve a boot-strap narrative and empire-building fantasy, they do not necessarily encourage founders to devolve their own political power, redistribute their wealth, or prioritise collective ownership. as a result, when generated in a start-up model, sextech may be limited in its capacity to practice feminist data ethics. conclusions if feminist data ethics is concerned with examining how data flows, “�ecentralize�g data power”, and ensuring “control of the internet architecture is wrested back from the privatized platforms” (gurumurthy & chami, 2022: 10), then individualist approaches that are solely concerned with consent, privacy, notice and transparency will not be sufficient towards this end. we conclude that there is a need for collaborations between industry, community and researchers to develop approaches to governance that �ecentrali, redistribute, and �ecentralize the data economy of sextech. our research demonstrates that the existence of non-linear pathways to sextech and the liminal space that prospective sextech entrepreneurs occupy provides a ripe opportunity for rethinking industry practice. references flore, j., & pienaar, k. (2020). data-driven intimacy: emerging technologies in the (re) making of sexual subjects and ‘healthy’ sexuality. health sociology review 29(3), 279– 293. giusto, d., & pastorino, c. (2021). sex in the digital era: how secure are smart sex toys? eset exw. data governance network working paper 24. https://itforchange.net/beyond-data-bodies-new-directions-for-a-feminist-theory-of-datasovereignty hendl, t., & jansky, b. (2022). tales of self-empowerment through digital health technologies: a closer look at ‘femtech’. review of social economy 80(1), 29–57. wynn, m., tillotson, k., kao, r., et al. (2017, november). sexual intimacy in the age of smart devices: are we practicing safe iot? proceedings of the 2017 workshop on internet of things security and privacy, 25–30. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3139937.3139942 automating intimate messaging in the adult content chatbot industry emily van der nagel monash university on content subscription platform onlyfans, a promised pleasure is “authentic connections” (onlyfans, 2024) between creators and fans. these connections, begun on mainstream social media, are often developed through direct messaging on onlyfans as part of the subscription. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448231164408#bibr17-14614448231164408 https://itforchange.net/beyond-data-bodies-new-directions-for-a-feminist-theory-of-data-sovereignty https://itforchange.net/beyond-data-bodies-new-directions-for-a-feminist-theory-of-data-sovereignty https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3139937.3139942 this paper considers the automating of intimate messaging on onlyfans through artificial intelligence chatbots, a sextech service marketed in ways that shape the “authentic connections” made possible through the platform. it takes up the call for queer and feminist researchers to explore how sextech products and their marketing materials represent and engage with sexuality, gender, and data justice (albury, stardust, & sundén 2023). direct messages on onlyfans onlyfans, predominantly known for its adult content, has grown since 2016 to amass over a billion us dollars of revenue in 2023 from over 200 million users (axios, 2023). it functions as a paid, adult layer over mainstream social media platforms like instagram and tiktok. there, content creators use strategies originated in influencer culture, including careful self-branding and performing authenticity (bishop, 2023), to direct their audience to their onlyfans page – all without violating the ban on adult content common to these platforms. this paper draws on a larger research project on onlyfans that includes news, memes, blog posts, marketing material, a qualitative survey of 89 onlyfans users, and interviews with 11 content creators and nine subscribers on the platform. content creators on onlyfans must endeavour to keep their audience paying for their subscription, which is why a key aspect of the platform is interacting with individual subscribers through direct messaging. as one of my content creator interviewees put it: “people don’t realise i’m in the inbox 18 hours a day. building connections is how you get people to buy. it is so much work.” (participant 10, 36-45, cis female). onlyfans’ potential to be quickly profitable for a popular user has sparked headlines like ‘ufc star paige vanzant reveals she made more money flaunting her body on onlyfans in 24 hours than she did ‘in her entire fighting career’’ (karruli, 2023) and ‘exactly how lucy banks made over $1million on onlyfans’ (findlay, 2023). this kind of publicity, along with the knowledge that direct messaging is difficult to scale, has resulted in an industry of attendant services emerging to take advantage. this includes onlyfans management agencies, chatter services (hendy, 2023), and chatbots. “small talk/dirty talk/sell content”: onlyfans chatbot botly chatbots automate conversations between a computer program and a human, usually through text-based interactions. their use within sextech has led to mixed experiences and attitudes. for example, in one study of a chatbot offering advice on sexually transmitted infections (nadarzynski et al, 2021) chatbot users found its information about sexual health useful, convenient, and non-judgemental – but also that the chatbot lacked human empathy, and raised privacy concerns for the participants about with whom their health information would be shared. this paper presents a case study of botly, “the ai chatbot for onlyfans” (botly, 2024). botly advertises “messages that sound like you” so content creators can “build relationships faster”. i have conducted a feminist content analysis (leavy, 2007) of marketing material of botly to discover how ideas about gender are formed and represented. this included botly’s own promotional material – its website and instagram account – and industry reports about the service. the analysis allows me to argue that the onlyfans service industry frames the platform as a heteronormative space that expects mostly women content creators to perform intimacy and care in messaging with their heterosexual male subscribers. botly offers three main modes of conversation, having identified patterns within onlyfans direct messages: “small talk”, “dirty talk”, and “sell content”. responding to a subscriber in one of the three modes is meant to ease awkwardness by matching the tone of the subscriber-initiated chat. although the text addresses content creators as “you”, the testimonials on the website come from creators and agency owners, one of whom writes: “my team that’s been using the app loves it so far. they say it makes their job way easier”. this is despite onlyfans’ terms of service forbidding the use of chatbots in direct messages, and onlyfans ceo keily blair stating that “all accounts have to be tied back to a verified human creator, and that content needs to be identifiably that creator [...] we don’t allow ai chatbots. when we identify those, we take action” (blair in axios, 2023). clearly, if the direct messages are so integral to the experience (and therefore profits) of onlyfans, the risk of being penalised for outsourcing the work can be worth it. but going against the terms of service isn’t the only violation. use of chatbots in such an intimate setting is a kind of deception when a subscriber thinks they are chatting with the creator from the onlyfans account – likely, one they already feel a connection with, based on their social media presence. botly’s promotional material features an example set of exchanged messages designed to “show fans you care”. a botly response to a subscriber messaging a content creator, “just hanging with my dog” reads, “awww! :) how is ted?” the implication is that the bot can recall and use personal details, like names of pets, in conversations as an expression of care – with no regard for the potential ethics of misleading subscribers. instead of a chatbot helping to sort this kind of personal information, or find things to talk about that would interest both parties, or otherwise focus on increasing enjoyment of messaging, botly markets the automation of a woman in a service role to a male client. in this way, the chatbot is providing a textual script that conforms to broader (hetero)sexual scripts, which are deeply gendered guidelines for sexual relations (christensen 2021). the tone and content are derived from what amy shields dobson (2015) describes as the “heterosexy” feminine form. while she is describing a visual culture when she identifies qualities of playfulness, upfor-it sexiness, and casual attitudes to commodification, these are all present textually in botly’s sample messages and marketing material. conclusion a central tenet within sextech scholarship is that focusing on pleasure helps us imagine better futures for technology (albury, stardust, & sundén 2023). based on my feminist content analysis of botly’s marketing materials, the heteronormative scripts they follow cast onlyfans as a place that limits, instead of expands, ideas around pleasure. this runs counter to the bold assertion of onlyfans ceo keily blair, that onlyfans’ goal is to “change the internet” (blair in axios, 2023). blair’s way of changing the internet involves content creators more directly making money from their audience. a more imaginative vision would involve building pleasure into onlyfans experiences in all directions, expanding and queering the platform and therefore adult content culture. references albury, k., stardust, z., & sundén, j. (2023). queer and feminist reflections on sextech. sexual and reproductive health matters, 31(4), 1–6. axios (2023, october 12). watch: axios bfd featuring key leaders in business and tech. axios. https://www.axios.com/2023/10/12/axios-bfd-conference-watch-live bishop, s. (2023). influencer creep: how artists strategically navigate the platformisation of art worlds. new media & society, online before print. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231206090 botly (2024). botly. https://getbotly.com/ christensen, m. a. (2021). “tindersluts” and “tinderellas”: examining the digital affordances shaping the (hetero)sexual scripts of young womxn on tinder. sociological perspectives 64(3), 432–449. findlay, s. (2023, august 1). exactly how lucy banks made over $1million on onlyfans. mamamia. https://www.mamamia.com.au/lucy-banks-dating-onlyfans/ hendy, e. (2023, october 25). ‘think you’re messaging an onlyfans star? you’re talking to these guys. vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3b33/onlyfansmanagement-agency-chatters karruli, k. (2023, november 8). ufc star paige vanzant reveals she made more money flaunting her body on onlyfans in 24 hours than she did ‘in her entire fighting career’. daily mail australia. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-12721169/ufcpaige-vanzant-money-onlyfans-24-hours.html leavy, p. l. (2007). the feminist practice of content analysis. in s. n. hesse-biber & p. l. leavy (eds.), feminist research practice: a primer (pp. 222–248). sage publications. nadarzynski, t., puentes, v., pawlak, i., mendes, t., montgomery, i., bayley, j., & ridge, d. (2021). barriers and facilitators to engagement with artificial intelligence (ai)based chatbots for sexual and reproductive health advice: a qualitative analysis. sexual health, 18(5), 385–393. onlyfans (2024). about. onlyfans. https://onlyfans.com/about shields dobson, a. (2015) postfeminist digital cultures: femininity, social media, and self-representation. palgrave macmillan. https://www.axios.com/2023/10/12/axios-bfd-conference-watch-live https://getbotly.com/ https://getbotly.com/ https://www.mamamia.com.au/lucy-banks-dating-onlyfans/ https://www.mamamia.com.au/lucy-banks-dating-onlyfans/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3b33/onlyfans-management-agency-chatters https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3b33/onlyfans-management-agency-chatters https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-12721169/ufc-paige-vanzant-money-onlyfans-24-hours.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-12721169/ufc-paige-vanzant-money-onlyfans-24-hours.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-12721169/ufc-paige-vanzant-money-onlyfans-24-hours.html https://onlyfans.com/about https://onlyfans.com/about navigating stigmahealth – public policy, social capital and digital sexual health cultures kath albury swinburne university of technology caitlin learmonth swinburne university of technology introduction in australia (as elsewhere) diagnoses of sexually-transmitted infections (stis) are rising (king et al, 2023). however, face-to-face clinical testing services are culturally, financially and/or geographically inaccessible to many, and cannot meet existing demand. consequently, australian public health organisations are seeking to evaluate the quality of digital sti testing platforms, in order to develop policies and guidelines for a largely unregulated domain (cardwell et al, 2023). this paper combines approaches drawn from media and communications studies, platform studies, health sociology and sexual health research, to offer a transdisciplinary case-study of “digital sexual health”. it explores the interplay of australian sexual health testing policy guidelines – which restrict publicly-funded testing for individuals who are not deemed “high risk” – with the everyday digital and data intimacies (burgess et al., 2022) of consensually non-monogamous adults who have multiple/concurrent sexual partners. drawing on user and founder accounts of the australian sexual health platform stigma health, we recommend that future evaluations of sexual health testing platforms should extend beyond consideration of platform adherence to formal health policy and guidelines (for example, gibbs et al., 2017) or data-sharing practices (for example, van dijck & poell, 2016). while these elements are essential for ensuring user privacy and quality care, they do not account for unequal distribution of social capital in sexual subcultures and communities. nor do they consider the complex relationship between formal health data collection practices and everyday data cultures. methods semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted in two ongoing research projects investigating the relationship between digital technologies, data and everyday sexual health and wellbeing practices. the first explores the health-seeking experiences of australian adults practicing consensual non-monogamy (n=17). while recruitment emphasised sexual practice over sexual identity, the majority of study participants identify as queer, bi+ or pansexual. the second investigates the ways that diverse swedish and australian lgbtq+ sextech users aged 18+ (n=15), and sextech founders and retailers (n=10), experience and conceptualise sexual health and wellbeing. following preliminary abductive analyses (tavoury & timmermans, 2014), the authors undertook a limited walkthrough (light et al., 2016) of the stigmahealth platform (without submitting health data or testing requests). preliminary themes and speculative findings were sense-checked with project advisory groups that include researchers, clinicians, and representatives from peer health advocacy groups and sexual health workforce training organisations. stigma though the lens of public health stigmahealth is a private, fee-based mobile-friendly web platform that allows users to complete a brief sexual history and receive a referral to a pathology clinic for sti and hiv testing. test results are returned via an app notification with a turnaround of 3-5 days. users access telehealth consultations with a general practitioner, which can include digital prescriptions for sti treatment. a companion platform, prephealth, offers telehealth consultations and prescriptions for hiv pre-exposure prophylaxis medication. both services adhere to current australian health service provision guidelines (including guidelines for data privacy and security). in a recent review, cardwell and colleagues (2023) aim to assess the “quality, reliability and accessibility” of 17 australian digital sexual health testing services (including stigma) through a range of indicators, including platform alignment with existing australian policies and guidelines for testing, and the health on the net foundation’s code of conduct (boyer et al., 1998). services were also assessed according to uk digital testing standards, which mandate telehealth consultations for users who are perceived to be especially marginalised to vulnerable (cardwell et al., 2023). while digital services were evaluated with regard to “appropriate” offerings, appropriateness was determined primarily in relation to clinical guidelines, with the aim of service improvement. in contrast, our research focused on cultures of use. strategic navigation of health testing participant accounts of stigma use demonstrated both fluency in the use of digital sexual technologies and platforms (ranging from hookup apps to health discussion forums), and high levels of health literacy – defined by nutbeam (2000) as “the personal, cognitive and social skills which determine the ability of individuals to gain access to, understand, and use information to promote and maintain good health” (pg. x). while our study was small, the high levels of economic and social capital among our participants resonate with findings of a recent systematic review of digital sexual health testing interventions (iyamu et al., 2023). our participant’s accounts of using stigma can be interpreted through the lens of “everyday data cultures” (burgess et al., 2022). for instance, all participants seemed to be well aware that current public health policy guidelines limit the number of medicarebilled sti tests available to those who are not “men who have sex with men” (msm) or sex workers. however, they practiced workarounds to allow them to access testing on stigma. by identifying as sex workers on intake surveys, app-users who were neither msm nor sex workers were able to test more frequently and/or comprehensively than guidelines allow. while some participants were employed in the health sector (and may have inside knowledge of health guidelines), others reported sharing cultural knowledge around testing on platforms that combine explicit profiles with discussion forums, such as fetlife or redhotpie. as robinson (2013) notes, “strategic” expression of sexual practice and identity is not uncommon in face-to-face health data collection. stigma (and other testing apps) simplify “strategic identification” by providing digital menus that alleviate the need for detailed conversations with health providers. for users, stigma was preferred because digital test results could be easily copied and shared across group chats, as part of multi-partner sexual negotiations. this offered significant advantages in complex sexual networks, given that digital access to test results is not common in face-to-face australian health services, and the majority of dating apps and platforms in australia do not easily afford sharing of sti and hiv status (author). conclusions according to stigma’s co-founder james sneddon, assurances of anonymity and “discretion” are key features of platform advertising and marketing, alongside promises of accessibility. but “access” to commercial health platforms is dependent on both user knowledge and material resources. as iyamu and colleagues (2023) observe, while digital testing services are sometimes promoted as an antidote to marginalisation and exclusion from face-to-face services, they are currently most used by those who have secure incomes, and multiple options for quality healthcare. some of our participants explicitly acknowledged high levels of both economic and social capital that enabled them to successfully navigate stigma (and other digital services). however, they suggested that this was likely to benefit publicly-funded clinics, who could focus on offering testing services to people who could not afford to access commercial platforms. further, they valued the specific affordances of digital healthcare which facilitated the strategic deployment of intimate data practices. these included “gaming” intake data collection to access desired testing, and deliberately seeking test results in digital formats that could be easily shared in broader sexual networks. consequently, we conclude that the process of critically evaluating health platforms extends beyond an analysis of technical affordances and regulatory regimes. it also demands an attention to local health policies and industry-specific “quality indicators”; and contextual understanding of the diverse ways that sexual sub-cultures and communities engage with and understand “digital sexual health”. references boyer, c., selby, m., scherrer, j. r., & appel, r. d. (1998). the health on the net code of conduct for medical and health websites. computers in biology and medicine, 28(5), 603–610. burgess, j., albury, k., mccosker, a., & wilken, r. (2022). everyday data cultures. polity/john wiley & sons. cardwell, e. t., ludwick, t., fairley, c., bourne, c., chang, s., hocking, j. s., & kong, f. y. (2023). web-based sti/hiv testing services available for access in australia: systematic search and analysis. journal of medical internet research, 25, e45695. gibbs, j., gkatzidou, v., tickle, l., manning, s. r., tilakkumar, t., hone, k., ... & estcourt, c. s. (2017). ‘can you recommend any good sti apps?’ a review of content, accuracy and comprehensiveness of current mobile medical applications for stis and related genital infections. sexually transmitted infections, 93(4), 234–235. iyamu, i., sierra-rosales, r., estcourt, c. s., salmon, a., koehoorn, m., & gilbert, m. (2023). differential uptake and effects of digital sexually transmitted and bloodborne infection testing interventions among equity-seeking groups: a scoping review. sexually transmitted infections, 99(8), 554–560. king, j., mcmanus, h., kwon, j., gray, r., & mcgregor, s. (2023). hiv, viral hepatitis and sexually transmissible infections in australia: annual surveillance report 2023. kirby institute, unsw sydney. https://doi.org/10.26190/f5ph-f972 light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881–900. nutbeam, d. (2000). health literacy as a public health goal: a challenge for contemporary health education and communication strategies into the 21st century. health promotion international, 15(3), 259–267. robinson, m. (2013). polyamory and monogamy as strategic identities. journal of bisexuality, 13(1), 21–38. tavory, i., & timmermans, s. (2014). abductive analysis: theorizing qualitative research. university of chicago press. van dijck, j., & poell, t. (2016). understanding the promises and premises of online health platforms. big data & society, 3(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716654173 an electric dog collar under the skirt: queer uses and experiences of sextech jenny sundén södertörn university pleasure is a question of sexual justice and sexual rights and as such critical for queer, trans and nonbinary people. this paper delineates a queer politics of pleasure by exploring lgbtq+ people’s uses and experiences of sextech by moving from normative regulations of sextech to counter-normative, or what paul preciado (2018) calls “countersexual” ways of interlinking sex and tech. which bodies, identities, pleasures and practices do sextech assume and extend? and how can these assumptions be bent or played with in and through sextech use by lgbtq+ people? in-depth interviews and a deleuzian perspective on pleasure and desire from medical devices in disguise in the early 20th century (lieberman 2016, 2017, maines 1999), to liberating and playful political objects as part of the sexual revolution in the 1960s and 1970s (comella, 2017), and to the present mainstreaming of sex toys as part of feminist and sex-positive sexual retailing (attwood, 2005; comella, 2017; smith, 2007), pleasure is at the forefront of tech development. as a broad umbrella term for digital technologies designed to enable and encourage pleasure, sextech and sextech research encompasses, for example, sex robots and vr porn (devlin, 2019; evans, 2020; kubes, 2019), sexual wellness apps for self-tracking (gesselman et al., 2020; lupton, 2015; saunders, 2022) and smart sex toys (flore & pienaar, 2020; author, 2020). while sextech has been given capacious definitions of what counts as sextech, it is often understood as technologies that enhance or improve sexual experiences and pleasure (such as when networked sex toys seek to measure, visualise, and “optimise” orgasms) in a linear fashion with limited space for curiosity, exploration, and desire which can be this elusive thing. the paper builds on a collaborative research project with 38 in-depth interviews with lgbtq+ sextech users and producers/retailers in australia and sweden. it mainly focuses on user perspectives on the sextech industry by emphasizing experiences of sex toys specifically. the group of participants currently represents a wide array of sexual and gender identities, from bisexual, queer and lesbian ciswomen, to trans, nonbinary and gender fluid participants, and to gay cismen. most of the participants are white (but with indian, aboriginal, middle-eastern/asian, and australian/vietnamese participants in the australian sample), their ages ranging from 18 to 70, but a clear majority is in their 30s and early 40s. the discussion is framed through a deleuzian critique of pleasure as a commodity in capitalist societies, and how entering into pleasurable, playful relations with sex toys entails a certain amount of giving in to their rhythms, logics, and ways of modeling both pleasure and sexual norms. or, as claire colebrook (2006, 133) argues, capitalism does not repress or deny pleasure, but rather, we are “manufactured to want. my desire must be for this or that purchasable pleasure.” in the discussion of normative regulations of sextech with the help of countersexual forms of use, the argument also builds on how elizabeth grosz (1995, 180) proposes a deleuzian reconfiguration of desire, not in terms of a (freudian) lack to be filled, but as production: “as production, desire does not provide blueprints, models, ideals, or goals. rather, it experiments, it makes: it is fundamentally aleatory, inventive.” countersexual uses and experiences of sextech normative marketing and design the linear design of sex toys is in a sense paralleled by how bodies, genders and sexualities are assumed to “line up” according to a cis-heteronormative logic. while the field of sextech includes a variety of bodies, gender identities and sexual orientations, a majority of the sextech market focuses on products targeting women and female bodies on the one hand, and straight couples on the other (e.g., faustino, 2018; wilson-barnao & collie, 2018). this resonates in obvious ways with many of our interviewees who repeatedly pointed out the strikingly gendered marketing and design of sex toys, and how this in turn reinforces sexual norms and cisheterosexual relationships, which for some nonbinary participants gave rise to dysphoria. assuming and extending bodies and pleasures sextech design extend and assume some bodies, and not others. are those straps holding the harness long enough to fit a fat body? will the angle or positioning of bodies for this or that toy work for a body with chronic pain? sextech also presupposes some pleasures and not others, as if toys are always used for receiving pleasure, and not providing it (in ways that can be equally pleasurable). even toys marketed specifically to trans and nonbinary users may not recognize the pleasure involved in giving pleasure to others, “how it might feel to wear it or wield it,” as if extending the body in that way does not have its own pleasure possibilities. within this shift, bodies are no longer confined to a narrow set of sexual or gender identities, to what bodies “are,” but rather imagined on the basis of what they are capable of, what bodies can do. creative, off-label uses of sextech when it comes to more creative or off-label uses of sextech, those interviewees who also belong to kink communities were a particularly rich source. one queer woman in her 50s, who is also a bdsm practitioner, imagines using a vibrator which visualizes orgasm curves in practices of edging, knowing with a scientific precision of sorts where the breaking point is for “staying just under.” there are also stories of using appliances for sexual ends that are not designed for sex. a bisexual woman in her 40s wore a remote-control electric dog collar around her thigh with her dominant, male partner, stating how with every electric shock he gave her, she felt he was thinking of her. she just wishes the collar had further reach, was less clunky and easier to wear under a wide skirt on walks around town. variety and unpredictability counter to the linear design of orgasms in sextech, following a tech development assumption of the stronger and the faster the better, other uses and technologies are interesting, such as those that have space for desire in the sense of not knowing what one wants, finding out in the process, exploring, experimenting, and improvising. one interviewee programmed her own rather complex vibration patterns so that she would not know beforehand what would happen. someone else enjoyed the musical randomness of jazz linked to their toy. they emphasise the importance of variety and unpredictability in sexy encounters with tech, as a way of making space for other pleasures and desires than those more predictably inscribed by design. conclusion what queer users want from sextech is only partly what they find. in their ways of using, experiencing, and imagining sextech, they emphasise the importance of a focus on bodily capacities, not on what bodies are, but on what bodies can do, as well as on how it is not always possible to know what one wants beforehand. in the midst of sextech discourses emphasising optimisation and orgasmic results, there is thus a need for a discussion of more flexible and unexpected pleasures and forms of use. such a discussion adds nuance to sextech discourses and makes space for more imaginative ways of sensing and making sense of tech. references author (2020) colebrook, c. (2006). deleuze: a guide for the perplexed. continuum. comella, l. (2017). vibrator nation: how feminist sex-toy stores changed the business of pleasure. duke university press. devlin, k. (2019). turned on: science, sex and robots. bloomsbury publishing. evans, l. (2020). ‘the embodied empathy revolution … ’: pornography and the contemporary state of consumer virtual reality. porn studies 8(1), 121–127. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2020.1777894 faustino, m. j. (2018). rebooting an old script by new means: teledildonics – the technological return to the ‘coital imperative’. sexuality & culture, 22(1), 243–257. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-017-9463-5 flore, j., & kiran, p. (2020). data-driven intimacy: emerging technologies in the (re)making of sexual subjects and ‘healthy’ sexuality. health sociology review 29(3): 279–293. https://doi.org/10.1080/14461242.2020.1803101 gesselman, a. n., druet, a. & witzthum, v. j. (2020). mobile sex-tech apps: how use differs across global areas of high and low gender equality. plos one 15(9), e0238501. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238501 https://doi.org/10.1080/14461242.2020.1803101 grosz, e. (1995). space, time, and perversion. essays on the politics of bodies. routledge. kubes, t. (2019). new materialist perspectives on sex robots. a feminist dystopia/utopia? social sciences 8(8): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci8080224 lieberman, h. (2016). selling sex toys: marketing and the meaning of vibrators in the early twentieth-century america. enterprise and society, 17(2), 393–433. lieberman, h. (2017). buzz: a stimulating history of sex toys. pegasus books. lupton, d. (2015). quantified sex: a critical analysis of sexual and reproductive selftracking using apps. culture, health & sexuality 17(4), 440–453. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2014.920528 maines, r. p. (1999). the technology of orgasm: “hysteria”, the vibrator, and women’s sexual satisfaction. johns hopkins university press. preciado, p. b. (2018). countersexual manifesto. columbia university press. saunders, r. (2022). sex tracking apps and sexual self-care. new media & society. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221079631 wilson-barnao, c., & collie, n (2018). the droning of intimacy: bodies, data, and sensory devices. continuum, 32(6): 733–744. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2018.1525922 wood, r. (2017). consumer sexualities: women and sex shopping. routledge. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221079631 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221079631 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221079631 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221079631 https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2018.1525922 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): campos valverde, r. (2024, october). engineered inequality: musical taxonomies and streaming recommender systems. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. engineered inequality: musical taxonomies and streaming recommenders systems raquel campos valverde university of leeds background literature despite academic efforts to understand streaming classification and recommendation (maasø & spilker 2022; hesmondhalgh et al. 2023) it is still unclear which musical taxonomies are used by music streaming platforms. previous research addressing algorithmic recommendation and genre (seaver 2022; goldschmitt and seaver 2019; krogh 2020; johnson 2020), remains unclear. by taxonomies here i mean the classification systems of music genre, mood, instruments and other musical elements that provide the software infrastructure for navigation, product design, distribution and recommendation in streaming platforms. previous studies suggest that streaming platforms tend to focus on categories such as mood and genreless playlists to market their music catalogues (krogh: ibid.; cf. leight 2019). however, genre continues to be a crucial element in music streaming success (brackett 2016; johnson 2020). music streaming employees (mcdonald, everynoiseatonce.com) argue that genre is a dynamic element that is not organised hierarchically for music recommendation. significant differences exist between overtagged content – often white, male, western artists and audience – and undertagged genres (johnson: ibid.), which inevitably leads to higher exposure and revenue for certain artists and genres. within this public debate about bias, streaming platforms have not adopted notions of common good as public service media (ferraro et al. 2022). instead, they have integrated technocentric critiques in their pr (spotify 2018a, 2018b), promising to deliver specialised knowledge and curation to navigate infinite catalogues (seaver: 2022). previous studies also address the role of human editorial curation (goldschmitt and seaver 2019; bonini and gandini 2019; bonini and magaudda 2023), and employees’ influence in categorising and marketing music. there are also considerable differences between industry pr and their internal strategies (seaver 2022). research questions and method in light of this existing literature and ignited from the recognition that no musical taxonomy can be perfect nor neutral, this paper investigates what musical taxonomies are currently used by streaming services, and the kinds of cultural visions and understandings of music cultures are inscribed in these taxonomies. it aims to illuminate how might musical taxonomies in streaming services may influence music cultures and understand whether music streaming taxonomies contain western biases or forms of cultural imperialism. to answer these questions, i conducted research following a mixed-methods approach that combines three different forms of data collection. first, an interface analysis of six msps and the metadata coding standards used to create musical taxonomies in digital services (n=2). second, ongoing discourse analysis of pr materials produced and distributed by streaming platforms, and ethnographic fieldwork at seven music industry conferences. and third, interviews with industry stakeholders (n=6) and to a lesser extent, researchers (n=2), start-ups, and a public institution representative. findings my research findings confirm that the standards currently followed by the music industry fall short of any systematic or sensible understanding of culture, organology, or genre classification at the stages of metadata creation, standardisation or curation (see ddex 2023 for standardisation; see musiio 2023 for automated tagging) with some overrepresented genres and cultures over others. fieldwork in industry conferences and interviews demonstrated that although the need to improve taxonomical indexing and metadata features in corporate conversations, there is a significant disparity between the issues emphasized by the industry, and other culture-impacting problems that remain peripheral or disputed. industry stakeholders promote automation in tagging, use of unique metadata identifiers and other measures of technical accuracy, highlighting the neutrality of these tools. they also encourage the idea of genreless curation. yet, some voices acknowledge that metadata standards are still in an early phase of development and are oftentimes ignored, seeing genre and language as central in the development of products and marketing, and difficult to code in english. engineered inequality, meaning the hardwiring and reproduction of cultural inequality into software systems, also features in the management of user-generated content and quality control. the qc process of ddex – the most widely adopted set of coding standards in the industry – is managed by 144 members, unequally distributed around the world. ddex and music industry representatives admitted at the 2023 metadata summit the existence of inaccuracies in 5-10% of the catalogue, mostly in content from indies and self-releasing artists, who should be either trained or eradicated from the data value chain. there are also contradictions in approaches to user-generated content. the industry proposes technical solutions to absorb and monetise user generated data and successful content such as playlists. moreover, the editorial practices of major platforms that further de-standardise metadata for streaming products are not challenged. the same occurs in msps editorial and internationalisation practices. taxonomical indexing, curation, and editorialisation remain divided in separate divisions or completely subcontracted. this atomisation prevents a holistic vision of editorialised products and taxonomical strategy. in addition to previously-existing class, gender, and nationality inequalities in the music industry as a whole (jones 2020), the current lack of workforce diversity is only acknowledged at managerial levels. often small, non-diverse teams of curators cover large areas of the world, without local expertise in the regions where streaming platforms may be expanding into. developers also focus on launching beta products for western markets, subsequently implementing them in the rest of the world. the emphasis of music industry and streaming pr is placed on visible diversity, such as international curation and discovery. theoretical analysis and conclusions the potential harms that the industry currently focuses on mitigating contrasts with the wider cultural impacts produced and the public marketing discourse of music streaming platforms. the music and streaming industries work to improve poor quality metadata and incoherent taxonomies to prevent the development of poor recommender systems and products, especially because they impact the creation and collection of revenue. absent from product analysis and industry discussions are the ongoing cultural impacts of these malfunctioning software infrastructures, which reproduce and repackage engineered forms of musical misinformation and inequality, to the extent that some streaming products simply digitalise musical orientalism and audio tourism as it already existed in the recorded music industry before the appearance of streaming (kassabian 2004; sprengel 2021) and create new cultural spaces for platformed racism (matamoros-fernández 2017). from a sociocultural perspective, the evidence presented in this paper confirms saha’s (2021) postcolonial cultural economy approach, whereby contemporary media institutions exploit ideas about diversity and global reach for economic performance, instead of addressing the root causes of this lack of diversity, or acknowledging how media effectively makes culture in the interaction between industry, policy and users. this evidence also calls for systematic international or governmental oversight of streaming platforms’ impacts on music cultures. more empirical research also needs to be conducted on the cultural impacts on users and audiences. references bonini, t. and gandini, a. 2019. “first week is editorial, second week is algorithmic”: platform gatekeepers and the platformization of music curation. social media + society. 5(4). bonini, t. and magaudda, p. 2023. la musica nell’era digitale. bologna: il mulino. brackett, d. 2016. categorizing sound: genre and twentieth-century popular music. oakland, ca: university of california press. digital data exchange llc 2023. avs:classifiedgenre. ddex data dictionary. [online]. [accessed 27 oct 2023]. available from: https://service.ddex.net/dd/dd-avscurrent/dd/avs_classifiedgenre.html ferraro, a., ferreira, g., diaz, f. and born, g. 2022. measuring commonality in recommendation of cultural content: recommender systems to enhance cultural citizenship in: proceedings of the 16th acm conference on recommender systems (recsys ’22). [online]. new york, ny, usa: association for computing machinery, pp.567–572. available from: https://doi.org/10.1145/3523227.3551476. goldschmitt, k.e. and seaver, n. 2019. shaping the stream: techniques and troubles of algorithmic recommendation in: n. cook, m. m. ingalls and d. trippett, eds. the cambridge companion to music in digital culture [online]. cambridge companions to music. cambridge: cambridge university press, pp.63–81. available from: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-music-in-digitalculture/shaping-the-stream-techniques-and-troubles-of-algorithmicrecommendation/67a48ce833167ea679d3acbf558d3f42. hesmondhalgh, d., campos valverde, r., kaye, d.b.v. and li, z. 2023. the impact of algorithmically driven recommendation systems on music consumption and production: a literature review [online]. london, uk: centre for data ethics and innovation. [accessed 9 may 2023]. available from: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4365916. johnson, t. 2020. chance the rapper, spotify, and musical categorization in the 2010s. american music. 38(2), pp.176–196. jones, j. 2020. a seat at the table: a persepective on women of colour in the music business [online]. a seat at the table consultancy. available from: https://www.freshnsassy.com/_files/ugd/8ea9aa_268581746af04d58aa897bebac43dc3 6.pdf. kassabian, a. 2004. would you like some world music with your latte? starbucks, putumayo, and distributed tourism. twentieth-century music. 1(2), pp.209–223. https://service.ddex.net/dd/dd-avs-current/dd/avs_classifiedgenre.html https://service.ddex.net/dd/dd-avs-current/dd/avs_classifiedgenre.html https://doi.org/10.1145/3523227.3551476 https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-music-in-digital-culture/shaping-the-stream-techniques-and-troubles-of-algorithmic-recommendation/67a48ce833167ea679d3acbf558d3f42 https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-music-in-digital-culture/shaping-the-stream-techniques-and-troubles-of-algorithmic-recommendation/67a48ce833167ea679d3acbf558d3f42 https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-music-in-digital-culture/shaping-the-stream-techniques-and-troubles-of-algorithmic-recommendation/67a48ce833167ea679d3acbf558d3f42 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4365916 krogh, m. 2020. ‘context is the new genre’: abstraktion og singularisering i digital musikformidling. norsk medietidsskrift. 27(3), pp.1–15. leight, e. 2018. latin music is reaching more listeners than ever but who is represented? rolling stone. maasø, a. and spilker, h.s. 2022. the streaming paradox: untangling the hybrid gatekeeping mechanisms of music streaming. popular music and society. 45(3), pp.300–316. matamoros-fernandez, a. 2017. platformed racism: the mediation and circulation of an australian race-based controversy on twitter, facebook and youtube. information, communication and society. 20(6), pp.930–946. mcdonald, g. n.d. every noise at once (map). everynoise.com. [online]. [accessed 7 april 2022]. available from: https://everynoise.com/everynoise1d.cgi?vector=popularity&scope=all. musiio 2023. taxonomy musiio tag. musiio tag. [online]. [accessed 27 october 2023]. available from: https://tag.musiio.com/home/taxonomy. saha, a. 2021. race, culture, and media. london: sage. seaver, n. 2022. computing taste: algorithms and the makers of music recommendation [online]. chicago: university of chicago press. available from: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226822969. spotify newsroom 2018a. discover hits from around the world with spotify’s global cultures initiative. for the record. [online]. [accessed 25 march 2022]. available from: https://newsroom.spotify.com/2018-09-28/discover-hits-from-around-the-world-withspotifys-global-cultures-initiative/. spotify newsroom 2018b. represent! celebrate the diversity of latin music for hispanic heritage month. for the record. [online]. [accessed 25 march 2022]. available from: https://newsroom.spotify.com/2018-10-09/represent-celebrate-thediversity-of-latin-music-for-hispanic-heritage-month/. sprengel, d. 2021. expanding music streaming scholarship beyond the west: producing local culture, digital orientalism(s), and dependency through streaming platforms in egypt. soas music department seminar, 2 february, london. https://everynoise.com/everynoise1d.cgi?vector=popularity&scope=all https://tag.musiio.com/home/taxonomy https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226822969 https://newsroom.spotify.com/2018-09-28/discover-hits-from-around-the-world-with-spotifys-global-cultures-initiative/ https://newsroom.spotify.com/2018-09-28/discover-hits-from-around-the-world-with-spotifys-global-cultures-initiative/ https://newsroom.spotify.com/2018-10-09/represent-celebrate-the-diversity-of-latin-music-for-hispanic-heritage-month/ https://newsroom.spotify.com/2018-10-09/represent-celebrate-the-diversity-of-latin-music-for-hispanic-heritage-month/ selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): rodrigues, b. and peruzzo, a. (2022, november). real harassment, virtual robots implications of online harassment geared at virtual assistant bia paper presented at aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. real harassment, virtual robots? implications of online harassment geared at virtual assistant bia beatrys cornell university andré peruzzo universidade de são paulo “for you, it can be a joke. for me, it was violent". this is one example of a new set of responses introduced by bradesco bank, the third-largest banking institution in latin america, to their chatbot called bia bradesco inteligência artificial (bradesco artificial intelligence, acronym translated from brazilian portuguese). in april of 2021, bradesco launched a new transmedia advertising campaign called "bia's new responses against harassment" (bradesco, 2021), which featured a video that showcased bia's less subservient responses to verbal attacks frequently sent to the virtual assistant. according to the bank, bia received around 95,000 messages of offenses and sexual harassment (propmark, 2021). the campaign had massive digital repercussions, especially the video on youtube that had accumulated 168 million views, 17,508 comments, and over 44 thousand dislikes and 10 thousand likes (as of june 2021). following worldwide trends in the gendering of ai assistants such as amazon's alexa, microsoft's cortana, and apple's siri, bia is a common nickname for women called bianca or beatriz in brazil. after its first initial advertising campaign, the chatbot was anthropomorphized and called by the pronoun "she," confirming its explicit feminine persona. however, feminist researchers have argued that the feminization of these assistants reenacts oppressive gender roles (phan, 2019; woods, 2018). the video was aligned with unesco's international initiative "hey update my voice", a movement aiming at "pushing back against gender bias and sexual harassment of ais" (heyupdatemyvoice.org, 2021). the initiative argued that these assistants are coded as feminine, on par with previous arguments. as wajcman (2006) and noble (2018) have postulated, technologies carry the signs of their designers and the culture in which they are developed so that they can reinforce gender, ethnic-racial, and class prejudices. this paper is an invitation to think about how the audience's negative reaction to the campaign illuminates the social and symbolic asymmetries in feminized work. one of our guiding questions in this research was: "who is being dehumanized through bia, and in turn, who becomes more human?". the comments help us to reflect on understanding what constitutes the human in artificial intelligence and how the harassment of this virtual chatbot relates to the harassment suffered by women in virtual settings. to critically analyze these texts, we have conducted a qualitative content analysis on 500 comments with the highest number of likes on the official youtube video of the campaign, collected through youtube data tools. by way of contextualization, it is worth noting that the repercussion of the ad on social networks is part of a broader context of polarization between the left and the right that has marked brazilian political life, at least since 2013, from the protests held that year, through the articulated coup against president dilma rousseff, the rise of the extreme right represented by bolsonaro and the recent election of lula. in order to move away from technological determinism, we understand from machado and miskolci (2019) that these polarizations were not caused by social networks but made visible, catalyzed, and deepened by these same networks. these disputes have been especially characterized by the dissemination of moralizing guidelines in the sphere of sexuality and gender by various political-religious actors, based on what miskolci defines as moral battles in the technical-mediatizing public sphere (machado, miskolci, 2019), in addition to other conservative agendas symbolized in the fight against corruption and a supposed communist threat. as communication scholars, we come from a tradition that sees "the semiotic construction of gender by different social technologies has concrete and material implications for people's lives" (de lauretis, 1987). also, we see advertising as a gendered technology that puts representations of femininity and masculinity in media circulation. another productive concept is framing this ad as part of a broader trend of outvertising. mozdzenksi(2020, 2021) discusses how moral battles in the brazilian advertising context are also expressed in the communication of brands, especially in a context in which advertising has been associated with social causes and guided issues of gender and sexuality. outvertising is based on inclusive, tolerant, and pro-diversity discourses that denounce prejudice, stigma, discrimination, and violence against socially minority populations, even with significant tensions. we found intersecting but distinct themes that emerged from our thematic analysis of the comments. there is a recognition of the precariousness of female work and the harassment suffered by bank and call-center employees. still, commenters are critical of the idea that robots can be victims of harassment. a large number of critical interactions and negative reactions demonstrate once again, even if metaphorically, mediated in the figure of a virtual assistant, the discomfort that any posture that contests sexism and violence may suffer on the internet. the commentators' resistance to change, the shameless reaffirmation of their harassment, and their constant irony emerge as expressions of “hegemonic masculinity” (connell and messerschmidt, 2005). a recurring theme in our sample could be explained as commenters feeling dehumanized while artificial intelligence is humanized. as one of our most liked comments said: "no friend if you messed with a robot, then you went too far, let's fight for bia's human rights ah no, wait." this effort to place bia within the boundaries of humanness enacted by the video, or as "someone" that can suffer harassment by other humans, may also work to conceal the lack of support that real call center women suffer every day within the bank. this argument seems to be directly linked with the technoliberalism ideology proposed by atanasoski and vora (2019). looking for "technological enchantment" by automated objects, real labor is obscured by putting forth autonomous machines that seem to have a life of their own. most of the commenters seem oblivious to the importance of symbolic harassment, at the same time, they support their objection by reclaiming the boundaries of humanness, especially the humanness that is denied women in assistant roles. as a sarcastic commentator said: "even artificial intelligence has more rights than me." this type of comment also shows how the audience understands exploitation. as judy wajcman famously proposed, "an emancipatory politics of technology requires more than hardware and software; it needs wetware bodies, fluid, human agency" (2006). through this, we show how the audience reflects on the contradictory understandings of the humans rendered invisible in technology and that changing the materiality/code of technology is not enough to affect systems of gendered oppression. as a final comment, the comments reflect on the mismatch between the issue of harassment raised by the campaign and the categories raised by the commentators. the campaign sought to use the bia's new responses as an example of ways in which women can respond to offensive and unwelcome interactions and, in so doing, presented a less subservient female persona. the large number of critical interactions and negative reactions demonstrate once again, even if metaphorically, mediated in the figure of a virtual robot, the discomfort that any posture that contests machismo and violence suffers daily on the internet. the commentators' resistance to change, the shameless reaffirmation of their harassment, and their constant irony emerge as expressions of hegemonic masculinity. similar to other moral panics and delegitimization of other examples of outvertising, the comments invest in efforts to silence the debate; create catastrophic and undesirable futures; and demoralize the "lacradores" which are seen as crazy, without a sense of true justice. bibliography #heyupdatemyvoice. (2021). hey update my voice. https://heyupdatemyvoice.org/ atanasoski, n., & vora, k. (2019). surrogate humanity: race, robots, and the politics of technological futures. duke university press. bradesco. (2021, april 5). novas respostas da bia contra o assédio. youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ou6sca1q1a&ab_channel=bradesco connell, r. w., & messerschmidt, j. w. (2005). hegemonic masculinity: rethinking the concept. gender & society, 19(6), 829-859. de lauretis, t. (1987). technologies of gender: essays on theory, film, and fiction (theories of representation and difference). indiana university press. machado, j., & miskolci, r. (2019). das jornadas de junho à cruzada moral: o papel das redes sociais na polarização política brasileira. sociologia & antropologia, 9, 945970. miskolci, r. (2021). batalhas morais: política identitária na esfera pública técnicomidiatizadora. autêntica editora. mozdzenski, l. (2021). outvertising: a publicidade fora do armário. editora appris. mozdzenski, l. (2020).“mulher como garoto-propaganda do dia dos pais”: outvertising e as retóricas lgbtfóbicas na publicidade e no comentariado homotransfóbico brasileiro. signos do consumo, 12(2), 76-92. noble, s. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york university press. perez, c., & peruzzo, a. l. s. (2018). masculinidades em anúncio: a publicidade enquanto tecnologia de gênero. tríade: comunicação, cultura e mídia, 6(13). phan, t. (2019). amazon echo and the aesthetics of whiteness. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(1), 1–38. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29586 propmark. (2021, april 6). bradesco mostra novas respostas da bia contra assédio. retrieved september 1, 2021, from https://propmark.com.br/anunciantes/bradescomostra-novas-respostas-da-bia-contra-assedio/ unesco. (2019). i’d blush if i could: closing gender divides in digital skills through education. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000367416.page=1 wajcman, j. (2006). el tecnofeminismo. ediciones cátedra. woods, h. s. (2018). asking more of siri and alexa: feminine persona in service of surveillance capitalism. critical studies in media communication, 35(4), 334–349. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2018.1488082 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): cabbuag, s., abidin, c. (2024, october). tiktok ‘dogshows’ and the amplification of online incivility among gen z influencers in the philippines. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. tiktok ‘dogshows’ and the amplification of online incivility among gen z influencers in the philippines samuel i. cabbuag university of the philippines diliman; hong kong baptist university crystal abidin curtin university introduction this paper seeks to explore the origins, phenomena, and implications of ‘dogshows’ on tiktok, especially as they play out as forms of online incivility that are amplified by, and even applied to, gen z (11 to 26-years-old) and young children (under 10-years-old) on tiktok. we historicise and explore tiktok dogshows in the context of the philippines, beginning with setting the local context, reviewing relevant scholarship on tiktok and online incivility, and considering how our study contributes to age-based and culturallyspecific developments of emergent tiktok cultures. we close with some insights on how platforms can be more proactive and reflexive in their content moderation. tiktok dogshows in the philippines in the philippines, dogshows are a staple in contemporary digital culture. on urban dictionary, the online user-generated dictionary of contemporary slang and vernacular, the definition of dogshows is corroborated as “satirically mocking a celebrity or any other famous person through memes or jokes” (gloria’s talking neckbrace, 2022). furthermore, this entry stated that dogshows do not intend to cause actual harm to a person, and are usually provoked by enthusiastic fan bases of celebrity figures. as such, while the literal meaning and translation of dogshows refer to events where people judge the overall performance of dogs according to a specific standard, in the context of slang in the philippines, dogshows on social media are when individuals are placed in the spotlight, evaluated through a mass of commentators who usually deploy derogatory humour and provocative memes in their discourse, thus inviting other spectators to join in to throw jabs at and tease the individual “on display”. these commentators, who are mainly gen z and younger people including children, may engage in text-based conversations, or use social media pop cultures like reaction gifs, emoji, and pictures in their jabs. many of these commentators and videos would say that this is a ‘gen z’ type of humor as dogshows are commonly found among younger people’s content, since they are often the ones participating in the dogshows or are the subject of the dogshows. framework and rqs we engage with digital media scholars ariadna matamoros-fernández et al.’s (2023: 5) framing of “legal but harmful humour”, which refers to “any humorous communication that targets historically marginalised individuals and groups in a way that undermines their assurance as to equal status in the community”. in studies of incivility on tiktok, we see how harmful videos maneuvered around tiktok’s community guidelines even though the app also consists of a large user base of gen z and young children. scholars on trolling, online hate, and networked harassment such as rebecca lewis (2018) and whitney phillips (2018) have explored how social media platforms can be responsible for multiplying negative effects such as hate through its features and affordances. in the philippine context, there are available studies on harmful humour such as how tiktok was seeded with political messaging directed to youths (ong et al., 2022). yet, studies on filipino gen z and young children are less explored. given these, we ask the following research questions: rq 1: how do influencers deploy dogshows to negotiate and capitalise on incivility for online fame? rq 2: how do gen z and young child audiences respond to influencers who engage in such forms of incivility? methodology this paper adopts purposive sampling, online observation, and case study analysis to understand the phenomenon of dogshows on tiktok. we identified 10 gen z tiktokers aged 18 and above who have at least 10,000 followers as the threshold for who constitutes a public figure (c.f. marwick, 2015). we checked whether the term ‘dogshow’ is mentioned by the influencer in the video, or by followers in the comments sections. we were able to find 220 videos that are considered viral videos (averaging between 100k and 1m views). we analyzed these videos inductively via grounded theory (charmaz, 2014) and our fieldnotes included details of the dogshow post by the tiktoker, screenshots of the top comments, and engagement metrics such as the number of ‘likes’, ‘comments’, ‘saves’, and ‘shares’ on the video. as an ethical practice, we followed markham’s (2012) practice of fabrication by providing pseudonyms of the influencers and we will not quote any comments to minimise traceability. concepts we highlight the affordances of audiencing, or how images and their meanings are renegotiated and even rejected (fiske, 1994 in rose, 2016); and silosociality, or how increased visibility of content is communal (tiidenberg et al, 2021; abidin, 2021). through audiencing, tiktok creators and audiences, including gen z and young children, can engage with various contents presented to them and creatively deploy them to reflect their opinions, interject with resistance or criticism, or simply amplify the sentiment by re-platforming the content through the extended exposure warranted by duets, stitches, and parodies. on the other hand, silosociality allows the phenomenon of dogshows to be cultivated by gen z and young children who adapt the practice in the vein of their vernacular registers, and invite other users from their cohort to participate within their silos. thus, if a minor or child enters the space, there is a very low likelihood of external intervention, the possibility of a voice of reason from outside the silo, or general moderation to guide or caution them against the more harmful values and consequences surrounding dogshows. sample case study an example is gen z creator francine with over 2.6 million followers. francine used a trendy tiktok randomizer filter ‘what kind of barbie you are’. when francine was offered the response ‘oversized barbie’, she sarcastically thanks tiktok, released a string of curse words, then comforted herself by exclaiming that “at least she was still a barbie”, albeit a “barbie-cue” [a homonym for ‘barbecue’]. gen z and young children tiktokers will often add to this self-inflicting dogshows, as evidenced from our corpus of comments where underaged tiktokers were chiming in with more pig-related puns, such as ‘barbie-ik’ [a homonym for ‘biik’ or ‘piglet’]. this kind of humor, while strategic in this case, can evoke similar humor on body image that can be harmful to children and teenagers (pryde and prichard, 2022). summary of findings we found two types of dogshow content: (1) egging on dogshows, where the influencer provokes or promotes the dogshow, and thus invites the audience to contribute to the flaming; and (2) self-inflicting dogshows, where the influencer willingly places themselves as the victim in the dogshow. while these may appear as instances of mere frivolity and humour, we found that gen z and children feature heavily in the incivility of dogshows on tiktok, by: (1) piling on and further encouraging dogshows; or (2) cautioning users to cease the dogshow. we note that when gen z and young children became the objects and purveyors of dogshows, or even start inflicting dogshows upon themselves, they become more prone to the legal-but-harmful humour (matamoros-fernández et al., 2023) from other users. we conclude with recommendations of how tiktok can explore more conversations and deliberations with different community groups, especially if they hail from at-risk or marginalized demographics such as gen z and young children to bring more specific sensibilities and reflexivity in content moderation strategies. references charmaz k (2014) constructing grounded theory. 2nd edition. london: sage publications. fiske j (1994) audiencing: cultural practice and cultural studies. in n. k. denzin & y. s. lincoln (eds.), the handbook of qualitative research (pp. 189–198). thousand oaks, ca: sage. gloria’s talking bracelet (n.d.) dogshow. urban dictionary. available from: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dogshow (accessed 1 august 2023). lewis r (2018) alternate influence: broadcasting the reactionary right on youtube. 18 september. data & society. available at: https://datasociety.net/library/alternativeinfluence/. markham a (2012) fabrication as ethical practice: qualitative inquiry in ambiguous internet contexts. information, communication & society 15(3): 334–353. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2011.641993 marwick ae (2015) instafame: luxury selfies in the attention economy. public culture 27(1): 137–160. doi: 10.1215/08992363-2798379. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dogshow https://datasociety.net/library/alternative-influence/ https://datasociety.net/library/alternative-influence/ https://datasociety.net/library/alternative-influence/ https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2011.641993 https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2798379 https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2798379 matamoros-fernández a, bartolo l and troynar l (2023) humour as an online safety issue: exploring solutions to help platforms better address this form of expression. internet policy review 12(1). doi: 10.14763/2023.1.1677. ong jc, fallorina r, lanuza jm, sanchez ii f, and curato n (2022) parallel public spheres: influence operations in the 2022 philippine elections. the media manipulation case book. internews and harvard kennedy school shorenstein center. available at: https://mediamanipulation.org/research/unmasking-influence-operations-in-thephilippines (accessed 3 august 2023). phillips w (2018) the oxygen of amplification: better practices for reporting on extremists, antagonists, and manipulators online. 22 may. data & society. available at: https://datasociety.net/library/oxygen-of-amplification/. pryde s and prichard i (2022) tiktok on the clock but the #fitspo don’t stop: the impact of tiktok fitspiration videos on women’s body image concerns. body image 43: 244– 252. rose g (2016) visual methodologies: an introduction to researching with visual materials. 4th edition. london: sage publications ltd. https://doi.org/10.14763/2023.1.1677 https://doi.org/10.14763/2023.1.1677 https://mediamanipulation.org/research/unmasking-influence-operations-in-the-philippines https://mediamanipulation.org/research/unmasking-influence-operations-in-the-philippines https://datasociety.net/library/oxygen-of-amplification/ https://datasociety.net/library/oxygen-of-amplification/ https://datasociety.net/library/oxygen-of-amplification/ aoir2023_macdonald_final spir submission (20231026) selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 the algorithmic moderation of sexual expression: pornhub, payment processors and csam maggie macdonald university of toronto context pornography platforms are increasingly required by payment processors to apply algorithmic tools in their content management systems (gurriell 2021). particular demands on adult merchants are not proportional to harmful content found on these sites, but a response to the widespread association of pornography with risk (paasonen et al. 2019; tiidenberg and van der nagel 2020). this sex-negative framing is part of a larger trend identified by researchers as the deplatforming of sexual expression (tiidenberg 2021; van dijck et al. 2021; bronstein 2021; spišák et al. 2021). decades of antipornography campaigning have successfully conflated the legal and regulated porn industry with abuse, nonconsensual content and human trafficking (webber and sullivan 2018; burke and millermacphee 2021; mckee and lumby 2022). amplified through uncritical journalism and policy, antiporn claims leave the industry routinely scapegoated as the worst perpetrator of child sexual abuse material (csam), as exemplified in 2020 when pornhub faced allegations of profiting from csam circulation. the scandal and subsequent public outrage led to massive service changes on the platform, a parliamentary investigation, and swift demonetization by visa and mastercard (webber et al. 2023). harmful content unquestionably circulated on pornhub, but this problem is not unique to porn platforms. exponentially more incidents are reported across social media sites which face no financial embargoes over csam.1 defying the logic of targeting porn to mitigate harm, data instead suggests that financial firms assess merchant risk around public relations interests. conflation of porn with harm encourages firms to “selectively construct matters of concern” related to risk and safety (gillett et al. 2022). reifying 1 the private nonprofit operating the centralised mandatory reporting system for csam, the national centre for missing and exploited children (ncmec), received 29,309,106 reports of csam possession, manufacture, and distribution in 2021. while 3,393,654 of these reports applied to instagram and 22,118,952 to facebook, only 9029 reports of csam applied to pornhub just 0.02% of meta’s share. suggested citation: macdonald, maggie. 2023. the algorithmic moderation of sexual expression: pornhub, payment processors and csam. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. october 20, 2023. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. whorephobic pr frameworks into technical processes “deputizes private actors to police users whether or not the activity is criminalized”, and perpetuates discrimination by design (stardust et al. 2023, 137). responding to stardust et al.'s call for further empirical study of these systems, i analyse algorithmic moderation tools on pornhub to ask: what standards are defined by financial firms, how are these enforced, and what effects does this arrangement have on pornographic content? methods & analysis i take a three-pronged approach. first, mapping financial infrastructures clarifies the enforcement of rules by intermediary business partners. along with formal global, state, regional and self-regulation, platforms are subject to significantly less-clear co-regulation by powerful stakeholders (gorwa 2019). operators, users, partner firms, third-party services, policymakers, advocates and more all have unequal influence in negotiating and setting standards (nieborg et al. 2021). as the primary engine of global digital commerce, credit networks like platforms have power to establish dependencies and enforce standards among partners. [figure 1: business partnerships of digital credit infrastructures] transaction ecosystems are complicated. credit firms do not interact with platforms directly, but through intermediary banks and payment service providers (psps). psps include both processors—which convey transactions between credit networks and issuing or acquiring banks (the largest include jpmorgan chase, citibank, wells fargo and fiserv)—and gateways which operate as point-of-sale, encrypting and verifying customer information before sending requests to processors (shopify, helcim, merchantone, apple pay, and amazon pay). many operate as both (paypal, square, stripe, venmo). psps and banks must enforce credit network standards or risk fines and imperil their own valuable partnership contracts. visa and mastercard are two of the largest credit providers, holding a duopoly over financial infrastructures essential to platform success. while not formally recognized as regulators, these companies are imbued with powers of co-governance (gorwa et al. 2020). identified as essential infrastructures for financial inclusion, this opaque system is a chokepoint allowing denial of services with limited culpability (o'brien and reitman 2020). next, a close reading of merchant agreements identifies clauses calling for algorithmic intervention. coded as a reputational liability, pornography becomes a symbolic, rather than substantial, source of harm. adult merchants are subsequently flagged high-risk and subject to enhanced compliance measures (free speech coalition 2023). for example, mastercard specifies “automated tools and solutions are not only permissible but recommended”, requiring high-risk merchants “review all content before it is published, and have systems in place for real-time monitoring of livestreams” (2021). visa insists merchants “must safeguard against risks that may negatively affect their brand or reputation” and compliance recommendations include “machine learning to review data” (2021). notably absent are standardised guidelines for acceptable systems, providers, or centralised bodies managing the burden of compliance. these ill-defined standards shield financial firms from accountability over discrimination, but incentivize partner firms to refuse ‘risky’ clients (tusikov 2021). finally, a taxonomy of pornhub tools examines a dominant porn platform’s response to these standards. classifier hasher photodna (microsoft) instant ii (eokm) safer (thorn) mediawise (vobile) classifier crawler project arachnid (c3p) predictor safeguard (aylo) cnn csai match (youtube) contentsafety api (google) [figure 2: pornhub’s moderation tool classifications] [figure 3: content moderation process, pornhub 2022 transparency report] pornhub applies seven external tools and one proprietary system (safeguard) to user-generated content. classifiers identify known images using a process of metadata similarity detection called hashing. web-crawlers collect the totality of a website’s content, identifying suspicious patterns through aggregated data from keywords and hyperlinks. predictors mostly rely on visual detection, isolating image features to classify and sort content. finally, recent developments in convolutional neural networks (cnns) have hybridised visual and metadata analysis, applying hashing and predictive systems in tandem. issue discussion & conclusion porn platforms are criticised as under-regulated, lacking “algorithmic accountability” in systems that prioritise engagement above all else, but function at a scale making algorithmic intervention necessary (hunt and mckelvey 2019; gillespie 2020). with eight tools in place, pornhub exceeds credit card compliance guidelines, yet remains blacklisted over reputational risk. positioned as both problem and solution, algorithmic moderation is merely symbolic of increased safety, security and responsibility, but these systems “remain opaque, unaccountable and poorly understood” (gorwa et al. 2020, page 1). forensic, biometric and computer science research supports developer claims around high rates of accuracy (sanchez et al. 2019; pereira et al. 2020). however, researchers from platform, pornography and legal, critical race and feminist technoscience studies express substantial concern around bias in decontextualized application of these systems (gehl et al. 2017; buolamwini and gebru 2018; gerrard and thornham 2020; are 2020; krishna 2021; blunt and stardust 2021; coombes et al. 2022). distinguishing csam from legal porn consistently returns false positive rates around 13% in error margins developers dismiss as “not ideal” (lee et al. 2020, 7). visual analysis cannot determine consent, lacks accuracy determining age and essentializes complex identity expressions for race and gender (lee et al. 2020; scheuerman et al. 2021). ethical concerns with csam training data abound, and generalised datasets reduce accuracy for marginalised subjects, meaning hegemonic white, cis and able bodied content is more accurately identified (laranjeira et al. 2022). non-white children are less proximate to rescue from csam, and non-white content more prone to errors, thus establishing ‘digital redlining’ in detection systems (thakor 2018; tusikov 2021). human moderators remain essential, but workers lack appropriate training or resources to manage traumatising content (mount et al. 2021). best practices in csam reduction require robust structural support focused on prevention, education and legal interventions, generally not offered by employers seeking cost-cutting efficiency through the promise of automation (kloess et al. 2019; 2021). payment processor demands on porn platforms substantiate a case where “scientific knowledge, technological innovation, and corporate profit reinforce each other in deeply entrenched patterns that bear the unmistakable stamp of political and economic power” (winner 1980, 126). csam moderation will not improve through undemocratic co-governance or invocations of safe and neutral algorithms. applied uncritically, these tools reinforce old prejudices in service of political regimes devaluing sexual expression. references are, carolina. 2020. “how instagram’s algorithm is censoring women and vulnerable users but helping online abusers.” feminist media studies 20 (5): 741–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2020.1783805. blunt, danielle, stefanie duguay, tarleton gillespie, sinnamon love, and clarissa smith. 2021. “deplatforming sex: a roundtable conversation.” porn studies 8 (4): 420–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2021.2005907. blunt, danielle, and zahra stardust. 2021. “automating whorephobia: sex, technology and the violence of deplatforming.” porn studies 8 (4): 350–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2021.1947883. bronstein, carolyn. 2021. “deplatforming sexual speech in the age of fosta/sesta.” porn studies 8 (4): 367–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2021.1993972. buolamwini, joy, and timnit gebru. 2018. “gender shades: intersectional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification.” in proceedings of the 1st conference https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2020.1783805 https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2021.2005907 https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2021.1947883 https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2021.1993972 on fairness, accountability and transparency, edited by sorelle a. friedler and christo wilson, 81:77–91. proceedings of machine learning research. pmlr. https://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a.html. burke, kelsy, and alice millermacphee. 2021. “constructing pornography addiction’s harms in science, news media, and politics.” social forces; a scientific medium of social study and interpretation 99 (3): 1334–62. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaa035. coombes, emily, ariel wolf, danielle blunt, and kassandra sparks. 2022. “disabled sex workers’ fight for digital rights, platform accessibility, and design justice.” disability studies quarterly: dsq 42 (2). https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v42i2.9097. free speech coalition and sex work ceo. 2023. “financial discrimination and the adult industry.” free speech coalition. https://www.freespeechcoalition.com/banks. gehl, robert w., lucas moyer-horner, and sara k. yeo. 2017. “training computers to see internet pornography: gender and sexual discrimination in computer vision science.” television & new media 18 (6): 529–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476416680453. gerrard, ysabel, and helen thornham. 2020. “content moderation: social media’s sexist assemblages.” new media & society 22 (7): 1266–86. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820912540. gillespie, tarleton. 2020. “content moderation, ai, and the question of scale.” big data & society 7 (2): 2053951720943234. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720943234. gillett, rosalie, zahra stardust, and jean burgess. 2022. “safety for whom? investigating how platforms frame and perform safety and harm interventions.” social media + society 8 (4): 20563051221144315. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221144315. gorwa, robert, reuben binns, and christian katzenbach. 2020. “algorithmic content moderation: technical and political challenges in the automation of platform governance.” big data & society 7 (1): 2053951719897945. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951719897945. gorwa, robert. 2019. “the platform governance triangle: conceptualising the informal regulation of online content.” internet policy review 8 (2). https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.2.1407. https://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a.html https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaa035 https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v42i2.9097 https://www.freespeechcoalition.com/banks https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476416680453 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820912540 https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720943234 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221144315 https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951719897945 gurriell, maryjane. 2021. “born into porn but rescued by thorn: the demand for tech companies to scan and search for child sexual abuse images.” family court review 59 (4): 840–54. https://doi.org/10.1111/fcre.12613. hunt, robert, and fenwick mckelvey. 2019. “algorithmic regulation in media and cultural policy: a framework to evaluate barriers to accountability.” journal of government information: an international review of policy, issues and resources 9: 307–35. https://doi.org/10.5325/jinfopoli.9.2019.0307. kloess, juliane a., jessica woodhams, helen whittle, tim grant, and catherine e. hamilton-giachritsis. 2019. “the challenges of identifying and classifying child sexual abuse material.” sexual abuse: a journal of research and treatment 31 (2): 173–96. https://doi.org/10.1177/1079063217724768. kloess, juliane a., jessica woodhams, and catherine e. hamilton-giachritsis. 2021. “the challenges of identifying and classifying child sexual exploitation material: moving towards a more ecologically valid pilot study with digital forensics analysts.” child abuse & neglect 118 (august): 105166. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2021.105166. krishna, anirudh. 2021. “internet.gov: tech companies as government agents and the future of the fight against child sexual abuse.” california law review 109 (4). https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1211448. laranjeira, camila, joão macedo, sandra avila, and jefersson a. dos santos. 2022. “seeing without looking: analysis pipeline for child sexual abuse datasets.” arxiv [cs.cv]. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2204.14110. lee, hee-eun, tatiana ermakova, vasilis ververis, and benjamin fabian. 2020. “detecting child sexual abuse material: a comprehensive survey.” forensic science international: digital investigation 34 (september): 301022. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fsidi.2020.301022. mastercard. 2021. “business risk assessment and mitigation (bram) compliance program revised standards for specialty merchant registration & requirements for adult content merchants.” an 5196. mastercard. mckee, alan, and catharine lumby. 2022. “pornhub, child sexual abuse materials and anti-pornography campaigning.” porn studies, june, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2022.2083662. https://doi.org/10.1111/fcre.12613 https://doi.org/10.5325/jinfopoli.9.2019.0307 https://doi.org/10.1177/1079063217724768 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2021.105166 https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1211448 https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2204.14110 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fsidi.2020.301022 https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2022.2083662 mount, david, lorraine mazerolle, renee zahnow, and leisa james. 2021. “triaging online child abuse material: testing a decision support tool to enhance law enforcement and investigative prioritisation.” policing: an international journal 44 (4): 628–42. https://doi.org/10.1108/pijpsm-02-2021-0020. nieborg, david b., thomas poell, and brooke erin duffy. 2021. “analyzing platform power in the culture industries.” spirales, september. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2021i0.12219. o’brien, danny, and rainey reitman. 2020. “financial censorship: visa and mastercard are trying to dictate what you can watch on pornhub.” electronic frontier foundation. december 14, 2020. https://www.eff.org/issues/financial-censorship. paasonen, susanna, kylie jarrett, and ben light. 2019. nsfw: sex, humor, and risk in social media. mit press. pereira, mayana, rahul dodhia, hyrum anderson, and richard brown. 2020. “metadata-based detection of child sexual abuse material.” arxiv [cs.lg]. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2010.02387. pornhub. 2022 “transparency report.” accessed october 7, 2023. https://help.pornhub.com/hc/en-us/articles/14666334117267-2022-transparency-report -. sanchez, laura, cinthya grajeda, ibrahim baggili, and cory hall. 2019. “a practitioner survey exploring the value of forensic tools, ai, filtering, & safer presentation for investigating child sexual abuse material (csam).” digital investigation 29 (july): s124–42. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.diin.2019.04.005. scheuerman, morgan klaus, alex hanna, and emily denton. 2021. “do datasets have politics? disciplinary values in computer vision dataset development.” proceedings of. acm hum.-comput. interact., 317, 5 (cscw2): 1–37. https://doi.org/10.1145/3476058. spišák, sanna, elina pirjatanniemi, tommi paalanen, susanna paasonen, and maria vihlman. 2021. “social networking sites’ gag order: commercial content moderation’s adverse implications for fundamental sexual rights and wellbeing.” social media + society. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211024962. stardust, zahra, danielle blunt, gabriella garcia, lorelei lee, kate d’adamo, and rachel kuo. 2023. “high risk hustling: payment processors sexual proxies and discrimination by design.” city university of new york law review 26 (1): 57–138. https://doi.org/10.1108/pijpsm-02-2021-0020 https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2021i0.12219 https://www.eff.org/issues/financial-censorship https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2010.02387 https://help.pornhub.com/hc/en-us/articles/14666334117267-2022-transparency-reporthttps://help.pornhub.com/hc/en-us/articles/14666334117267-2022-transparency-reporthttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.diin.2019.04.005 https://doi.org/10.1145/3476058 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211024962 thakor, mitali. 2018. “digital apprehensions: policing, child pornography, and the algorithmic management of innocence.” catalyst 4 (1): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v4i1.29639. tiidenberg, katrin, and emily van der nagel. 2020. sex and social media. emerald publishing limited. tiidenberg, katrin. 2021. “sex, power and platform governance.” porn studies 8 (4): 381–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2021.1974312. tusikov, natasha. 2021. “censoring sex: payment platforms’ regulation of sexual expression.” in media and law: between free speech and censorship, 63–79. sociology of crime, law and deviance. emerald publishing limited. https://doi.org/10.1108/s1521-613620210000026005. van dijck, josé, tim de winkel, and mirko tobias schäfer. 2021. “deplatformization and the governance of the platform ecosystem.” new media & society 1 (17): 14614448211045662. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211045662. visa. 2021. “global brand protection program (gbpp) guide for acquirerspayment facilitator and marketplace risk guide.” visa. webber, valerie, and rebecca sullivan. 2018. “constructing a crisis: porn panics and public health.” porn studies 5 (2): 192–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2018.1434110. webber, valerie, maggie macdonald, stefanie duguay, and fenwick mckelvey. 2023. “pornhub and policy: examining the erasure of pornography workers in canadian platform governance.” canadian journal of communication 48 (2): 381–404. https://doi.org/10.3138/cjc.2022-0044. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v4i1.29639 https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2021.1974312 https://doi.org/10.1108/s1521-613620210000026005 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211045662 https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2018.1434110 https://doi.org/10.3138/cjc.2022-0044 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): reynolds, c. & hallinan, b. (2024, october). creator cartels as emergent platform governance. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. creator cartels as emergent platform governance cj reynolds the hebrew university of jerusalem blake hallinan the hebrew university of jerusalem in september 2022, a contingent of high-profile twitch streamers threatened to boycott during one of the most lucrative weeks of advertising revenue unless twitch addressed the rising popularity of gambling streams, which had recently become one of the site’s most-watched categories of content. in response, a group of equally prominent progambling streamers rallied their fans to defend the practice and accuse the antigambling streamers of jealousy and discrimination. within four days, twitch publicly announced new restrictions on gambling content (parrish, 2022), successfully averting the boycott but provoking the formation of kick, a gambling-friendly competitor that subsequently signed several of twitch’s top gambling broadcasters to lucrative contracts (browning, 2022). as the gambling saga shows, creators ally and collude with each other to produce mutually desirable outcomes, leveraging audiences and advertisers to influence the platform economy. previous research provides further evidence of collusion, documenting how creators form “ad hoc networks” to share advice on dealing with harassment (meisner, 2023; han et al., 2023; tomlinson, 2023) and pressure platforms to address problems like copyright enforcement (edwards, 2018), predatory behavior (berge, 2023; tarvin & stanfil, 2022), and censorship (leybold & nadegger, 2023). to make sense of this emergent practice of platform governance, we propose the concept of creator cartels, understood as contingent alliances between creators leveraged to produce beneficial policy and economic conditions. just platforms “work together to remove content or actors from their services” in what evelyn douek calls content cartels, we argue that a parallel development takes place among high-profile creators “in response to particular crises” (douek, 2020). creators do not simply provide content for platforms but also participate in governance functions like “testing and proving new and emerging business models, and providing robust feedback in seeking to improve platform service” (cunningham & craig, 2019, 271). yet these functions often lack proscribed paths, especially in cases where creators have competing interests. additionally, few creators are large enough to grab platform policymakers’ attention on their own (reynolds & hallinan, 2024), motivating collaborative action. we develop the concept of creator cartels and document how they form, operate, and dissolve through an analysis of the gambling saga on twitch, informed by a crossplatform digital ethnography (thach et al., 2023) where we traced practices of coordination across twitch streams, twitter threads, reddit threads, youtube reaction videos, and press coverage. our analysis follows the critical media industry studies framework offered by havens et al. (2009), especially in our attention to “the role of human agents [...] in interpreting, focusing, and redirecting economic forces” (236). we identify two rival cartels involved in the saga: the anti-gambling streamers and the progambling streamers. alongside these primary factions are onlookers who benefit from the conflict, such as the drama community on youtube who produce tabloid-esque videos outlining the clash (lewis & christin, 2022), and those who suffer from it, such as twitch’s policy team, boxed into siding with one faction or the other, and smaller creators affected by the market changes wrought by cartels. the rapid formation and resolution of the controversy illustrate the agility of creator responses to emergent governance problems (han et al., 2023; zuckerman & rajendranicolucci, 2023). the idea for the boycott emerged in a joint stream between devin nash, mizkif, and pokimane, with pokimane arguing that a strike represented “put[ting] their money where their mouth is” regarding gambling (orland, 2022). this stream followed a major gambling scandal on the platform where streamer itssliker was revealed to have borrowed more than $200,000 from peers and viewers to feed a sports gambling addiction that he was unable to pay back. fellow gamblers trainwreckstv and xqc stepped in to cover his debts, but the perceptual damage had been done and provoked anti-gambling streamers into drawing a line in the sand. “your profits are your viewers’ losses,” pokimane chided gambling streamers (h3 podcast highlights, 2022). pro-gambling streamers responded by pointing to their copious messaging about the risks of gambling, emphasizing the importance of personal responsibility, and noting that a twitch ban would be hypocritical and self-serving given that days earlier, twitch parent company amazon had signed a multi-year partnership with sportsbook draftkings (draftkings media, 2022). conflicts between the rival factions continued to play out on streams, social media platforms, and even in physical face-to-face encounters when anti-gambling streamer tanzverbot got into a fistfight with pro-gambling streamers orangemorgange and scurrows at a convention (simmons, 2022). the vitriol was unsurprising given the economic stakes at hand in the battle. for example, adin ross, one of twitch’s most popular streamers, claimed the gambling ban lost him around $100 million in cryptocasino sponsorships (the squadcast, 2022), while anti-gambling streamer mizkif said he had previously turned down offers of $10 million per year to gamble for a mere 15 hours per month on stream (hill, 2022). ultimately, twitch was trapped between two rival cartels with economic and ethical stakes in twitch’s gambling policies, representing many of its most popular and powerful streamers. by waiting until open conflict arose, the platform lost the chance to govern proactively and was trapped in the cycle of shocks and exceptions (ananny & gillespie, 2016), reduced to making a reactive decision that ultimately lost it several prominent streamers and birthed a competing platform. creator cartels represent an emergent form of platform governance that challenges the dominance of corporate ownership as the ultimate power in policy and economic decisionmaking. within traditional economic policymaking, cartels are generally framed as presenting “some of the most severe competition restrictions” within markets, resulting in “great harm to other undertakings in the market, consumers, as well as national economic development and competitiveness” (bruneckienė, 2015: v). yet the creator economy does not act like a traditional market, and creators do not fall within standard employment boundaries that support established collective organization structures like unions, contributing to the failure of creator unions like the youtubers union (stephen, 2019) or the internet creators guild (alexander, 2019). likewise, attempts to create a twitch streamers union have never gotten off the ground, despite ongoing calls for unionization in scholarship (e.g., curl, 2022) and trade media (e.g., ellis, 2019). our analysis of the twitch gambling saga challenges one of the fundamental premises of unionization: that creators are workers with the same economic relationship to the platforms that essentially act as their employers. cartelization offers an alternative perspective, treating creators as economic competitors working within a given platform economy; as such, different creators may at times be allies and at other times rivals. sometimes they benefit from corporate decisions and at other times are harmed by them. thus, the relative contingency of cartels compared to organizational forms like unions may benefit large creators, even the actions of rival cartels may pose an economic risk to unaffiliated smaller creators. despite their unequal distribution of influence, we contend that creator cartels represent a novel organizational practice that both responds to and harnesses platform power, representing a promising area of inquiry for researchers interested in community governance and the conditions of platform labor. references alexander, j. (2019, july 11). youtubers’ first organizing attempt, the internet creators guild, is shutting down. the verge. https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/11/20688929/internet-creators-guild-shutting-downhank-green-youtube-copyright-claims-monetization ananny, m., & gillespie, t. (2016). public platforms: beyond the cycle of shocks and exceptions. ipp2016 the platform society, 22. berge, p. (2023). #answerusyoutube: predatory influencers and cross-platform insulation. feminist media studies, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2023.2231655 browning, k. (2023, june 16). twitch star xqc signs $100 million deal with kick, a rival platform. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/16/business/twitch-kick-xqc.html https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/11/20688929/internet-creators-guild-shutting-down-hank-green-youtube-copyright-claims-monetization https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/11/20688929/internet-creators-guild-shutting-down-hank-green-youtube-copyright-claims-monetization https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/11/20688929/internet-creators-guild-shutting-down-hank-green-youtube-copyright-claims-monetization https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2023.2231655 https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2023.2231655 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/16/business/twitch-kick-xqc.html bruneckienė, j., pekarskienė, i., guzavičius, a., palekienė, o., & šovienė, j. (2015). the impact of cartels on national economy and competitiveness. a lithuanian case study. cham: springer. cunningham, s., & craig, d. (2019). creator governance in social media entertainment. social media + society, 5(4), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/205630511988342 curl, a. (2022). turning the channel: why online content creators can and should unionize under the nlra. aba journal of labor & employment law, 36(3), 517-542. douek, e. (2020). the rise of content cartels. knight first amendment institute at columbia university. https://knightcolumbia.org/content/the-rise-of-content-cartels draftkings media. (2022, september 13). amazon selects draftkings as a sponson and the exclusive pregame odds provider for thursday night football on prime video. draftkings news. https://www.draftkings.com/news-2022-09-amazon-selects-draftkingsas-a-sponsor-and-the-exclusive-tnf-odds-provider edwards, d. w. (2018). circulation gatekeepers: unbundling the platform politics of youtube’s content id. computers and composition, 47, 61–74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2017.12.001 ellis, e. g. (24 october). youtubers must unionize, no matter what google says. wired. https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-union/ h3 podcast highlights. (2022, september 4). pokimane on the issues with twitch gambling. youtube. https://youtu.be/z02cqr2ma9g?si=74j7uonln5lk5zzx han, c., seering, j., kumar, d., hancock, j. t., & durumeric, z. (2023). hate raids on twitch: echoes of the past, new modalities, and implications for platform governance. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 7(cscw1), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1145/3579609 havens, t., lotz, a. d., & tinic, s. (2009). critical media industry studies: a research approach. communication, culture & critique, 2(2), 234–253. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1753-9137.2009.01037.x hill, e. (2022, april 25). mizkif explains why he turned down $10m a year gambling sponsorship. dexerto. https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/mizkif-explains-why-heturned-down-10m-a-year-gambling-sponsorship-1811190/ lewis, r., & christin, a. (2022). platform drama: “cancel culture,” celebrity, and the struggle for accountability on youtube. new media & society, 24(7), 1632–1656. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221099235 leybold, m., & nadegger, m. (2023). overcoming communicative separation for stigma reconstruction: how pole dancers fight content moderation on instagram. organization, online first, 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/13505084221145635 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119883428 https://doi.org/10.1177/205630511988342 https://knightcolumbia.org/content/the-rise-of-content-cartels https://www.draftkings.com/news-2022-09-amazon-selects-draftkings-as-a-sponsor-and-the-exclusive-tnf-odds-provider https://www.draftkings.com/news-2022-09-amazon-selects-draftkings-as-a-sponsor-and-the-exclusive-tnf-odds-provider https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2017.12.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2017.12.001 https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-union/ https://youtu.be/z02cqr2ma9g?si=74j7uonln5lk5zzx https://doi.org/10.1145/3579609 https://doi.org/10.1145/3579609 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1753-9137.2009.01037.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1753-9137.2009.01037.x https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/mizkif-explains-why-he-turned-down-10m-a-year-gambling-sponsorship-1811190/ https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/mizkif-explains-why-he-turned-down-10m-a-year-gambling-sponsorship-1811190/ https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221099235 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221099235 https://doi.org/10.1177/13505084221145635 meisner, c. (2023). networked responses to networked harassment? creators’ coordinated management of “hate raids” on twitch. social media + society, 9(2), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231179696 orland, k. (21 september 22). as streamers threaten boycott, twitch takes action on some gambling content. ars technica. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/09/twitchrestricts-some-gambling-streams-amid-streamer-boycott-threat/ parrish, a. (2022, september 21). twitch to ban stake.com streams and other unlicensed gambling content. the verge. https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/20/23364080/twitch-gambling-ban-stake-slotsroulette-dice-games reynolds, c., & hallinan, b. (2024). user-generated accountability: public participation in algorithmic governance on youtube. new media & society, 26(9), 5107-5129. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241251791 simmons, f. (2022, august 29). twitch streamers get physical at gamescom over gambling. gambling news. https://www.gamblingnews.com/news/twitch-streamers-getphysical-at-gamescom-over-gambling/ stephen, b. (2019, august 19). youtube says it won’t negotiate with the youtubers union. the verge. https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/26/20833315/youtube-unionyoutubers-negotiate-germany-meeting tarvin, e., & stanfill, m. (2022). “youtube’s predator problem”: platform moderation as governance-washing, and user resistance. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 28(3), 822–837. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565211066490 thach, h., mayworm, s., delmonaco, d., & haimson, o. (2022). (in)visible moderation: a digital ethnography of marginalized users and content moderation on twitch and reddit. new media & society, online first. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221109804 the squadcast @fsgsquadcast. (2022, september 30). adin ross losing millions after twitch gambling ban. youtube. https://youtube.com/shorts/yhv_jrn0oa4?si=alcpmyy8jbsavxtl tomlinson, c. (2023). community grievances, personal responsibility, and diy protection: frustrations and solution-seeking among marginalized twitch streamers. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, online first, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231184060 zuckerman, e., & rajendra-nicolucci, c. (2023). from community governance to customer service and back again: re-examining pre-web models of online governance to address platforms’ crisis of legitimacy. social media + society, 9(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231196864 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231179696 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231179696 https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/09/twitch-restricts-some-gambling-streams-amid-streamer-boycott-threat/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/09/twitch-restricts-some-gambling-streams-amid-streamer-boycott-threat/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/09/twitch-restricts-some-gambling-streams-amid-streamer-boycott-threat/ https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/20/23364080/twitch-gambling-ban-stake-slots-roulette-dice-games https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/20/23364080/twitch-gambling-ban-stake-slots-roulette-dice-games https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/20/23364080/twitch-gambling-ban-stake-slots-roulette-dice-games https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241251791 https://www.gamblingnews.com/news/twitch-streamers-get-physical-at-gamescom-over-gambling/ https://www.gamblingnews.com/news/twitch-streamers-get-physical-at-gamescom-over-gambling/ https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/26/20833315/youtube-union-youtubers-negotiate-germany-meeting https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/26/20833315/youtube-union-youtubers-negotiate-germany-meeting https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565211066490 https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565211066490 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221109804 https://youtube.com/shorts/yhv_jrn0oa4?si=alcpmyy8jbsavxtl https://youtube.com/shorts/yhv_jrn0oa4?si=alcpmyy8jbsavxtl https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231184060 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231196864 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231196864 suggested citation (apa): livingstone, s., third, a., burton, p., witting, s., lievens, e. steinberg, s., gilutz, s. and souter, d. (2022, november). the un committee on the rights of the child’s general comment on the digital environment. panel presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 the un committee on the rights of the child’s general comment on the digital environment sonia livingstone london school of economics and political science amanda third western sydney university in march 2021, the un committee on the rights of the child (crc) adopted general comment 25 (gc25) on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment. a general comment is an authoritative document which sets out how states should implement the un convention on the rights of the child (uncrc) in specific contexts, such as the digital environment. a general comment must apply in wealthier and poorer nations, to governments of all political stripes, and for all children whatever their abilities or circumstances. gc25 explains why states and other duty bearers must act and how they should act to implement children’s rights around the world. gc25 was widely recognised by policy and advocacy organisations around the world. now every un member state must ensure that all duty bearers within their jurisdiction meet their responsibilities to children’s rights. chaired by members of the gc25 drafting team responsible for international consultation among stakeholders and children, this panel critically discusses efforts to implement gc25. it highlights the particular challenges for communication policy and law, including generating meaningful participation from children regarding child online protection policy in zimbabwe (paper 1), aligning european policies for a rights-respecting framework for internet governance (paper 2), reconciling parents’ responsibilities with children’s rights regarding privacy in the us (paper 3), and translating child rights-respecting initiatives into designing digital products and services (paper 4). the discussant is a un expert advisor who will question the implementation of digital rights in a context of global inequalities. extended abstract – panel introduction sonia livingstone london school of economics and political science amanda third western sydney university for too long, child rights advocates knew little about the internet while internet governance experts knew little about children’s rights. in march 2021, the un committee on the rights of the child (crc) adopted general comment 25 (gc25) on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment. a general comment is an authoritative document which sets out how states should implement the un convention on the rights of the child (uncrc) in specific contexts, such as the digital environment. like the convention itself, general comment 25 needs to apply in wealthier and poorer nations, to governments of all political stripes, and for all children whatever their abilities or circumstances. it has to balance the provision of guidance on a very broad range of issues with adequate depth, so as to be meaningfully applied. and it has to shore up children’s rights today, while also anticipating the risks of harm and the potential benefits associated with future developments in the technological environment. a major cross-sector and international collaborative effort was required to ensure gc25 could achieve its aims. to inform the process, the drafting team coordinated an international public consultation, receiving unprecedented numbers of submissions; consulted with 50 experts from across jurisdictions; and conducted consultations with over 700 children in 27 countries. this process surfaced deep theoretical dilemmas and disagreements, as well as diverse practical challenges for implementing meaningful and actionable digital policy. for the child rights advocates uncertain exactly how to realize rights online as offline, gc25 provides a mandate and agenda. for policymakers uncertain where children fit into ongoing debates over internet governance, gc25 provides explanation and direction. for the public keen for children to thrive in a digital world, no longer ‘canaries in the coal mine,’ gc25 provides the road map for states to generate improvements. for 1000+ children consulted around the world, and the one in three internet users under 18 for whom they spoke, gc25 reflects their views on a matter that affects them greatly. but it is easier to say that rights offline also apply online than it is to achieve this in practice. on publication, gc25 was recognized by oecd, united nations broadband commission for sustainable development goals, ecpat (the global partnership to end violence against children), international telecommunication union, unesco, weprotect global alliance, world childhood foundation usa, world health organization and the european commission. however, it is states rather than regional or other bodies who are the primary duty bearers bound to implement the convention and its general comments under international law. gc25 landed on the desk of every government in the world, and they must ensure that all duty bearers within their jurisdiction meet their responsibilities to children’s rights – including businesses and others whose activities significantly impact on children. introduced and chaired by members of the gc25 drafting team responsible for the international consultations among stakeholders and children, this panel discusses ongoing efforts to interpret and implement gc25. conceiving the child as a limit case for policy development, and recognising that, far from abstract legal principles, children’s rights come to life at the level of children’s everyday experiences, the panel will reflect on the difficulties of generating policy guidance to protect and uphold children’s rights in a digital age. it highlights the particular challenges for communication policy and law, including generating the evidence base and meaningful participation from children regarding child online protection policy in zimbabwe (paper 1), aligning state with regional policies in europe so as to provide a coordinated and rights-respecting framework for internet governance (paper 2), reconciling parents’ responsibilities with children’s rights regarding privacy in the us (paper 3), and translating child rights-respecting initiatives into designing digital products and services used by children (paper 4). while four papers cannot capture the full range of issues that arise in relation to children’s rights in the digital environment, the panel represents perspectives from three very different continents which contrasting approaches both to children and to internet governance. through their commonalities and differences, the panel will seek to open a dialogue that represents diverse experiences across cultures and contexts, including the struggles and possible contestation that un initiatives can occasion. a respondent to all four papers will reflect on the challenges of promoting coordination and implementing child rights-respecting governance in contexts of global inequality and conflict. building on his role as expert advisor to the united nations, he will suggest a framework for advancing the recommendations of general comment internationally, before opening up the discussion for participation among the chairs, panellist and delegates. paper 1 children’s participation at the centre of digital policy making – lessons learnt from a global south lower-middle income country patrick burton centre for justice and crime prevention sabine witting leiden university the rapid spread of technologies and the digitalization of even the most remote communities and households has changed the face of economies and societies throughout the world. it offers the unprecedented opportunity to combat existing inequalities, which have been further exacerbated by covid19 and subsequent restriction measures. this notion of the internet as a mechanism to realise the rights of the most vulnerable populations has been further emphasized by the committee on the rights of the child in its general comment no. 25 on children’s rights in relation to digital environment (hereafter: gc 25), which notes that “the rights of every child must be respected, protected and fulfilled in the digital environment”. this language, which is equally used to describe children’s rights in the ‘analogue’ space, points towards the crc’s conceptualization of children’s rights in relation to the digital environment as a continuum and constant interaction between the ‘digital’ and the ‘analogue’. importantly, the crc committee notes that the rights of children in the digital environment also apply to those children who do not yet have access, as their lives might nonetheless be directly and indirectly affected by the digital environment. a key mechanism to realise the rights of every child both in the online and the offline space is meaningful participation of all children, especially of those most vulnerable. article 12 of the un convention on the rights of the child notes that “state parties shall assure to children the right to express (their) views freely in all matters affecting the child (the views of the child being given due weight in accordance to the age and maturity of the child).” this is operationalized in gc 25 which notes that in identifying and addressing the emerging risks that children face in diverse contexts, “[states should listen] to their views on the nature of the particular risks that they face.” building strongly on the gc 25, this paper will showcase the lessons learnt from applying a comprehensive child participation approach in the context of developing a child online protection policy. the paper will investigate the comprehensive child participation approach in zimbabwe. the latest available data shows that approximately 6.8 million zimbabweans, or 40% of the population, are online, and use the internet (hootsuite 2019). more than three quarters (76%) have mobile phone subscriptions, and mobile internet users account for the vast majority of internet users, with no specific data available on children’s use of the internet. initial qualitative research on online violence against women and girls conducted in zimbabwe showed that these groups are especially vulnerable to online violence in the country, but also highlighted the experiences of boys as critical to addressing violence. while online protection of children is incorporated incrementally into the existing policy framework in zimbabwe, there is no dedicated policy to align an evidencebased and integrated approach to keeping children safe online that can guide the work of all relevant sectors. the government of zimbabwe, with support from unicef zimbabwe country office, thus embarked on the development of a child online protection policy to provide that coherent framework, with the ultimate aim of ensuring that all children in zimbabwe are safe online, and free to realise the essential benefits and opportunities that the digital space offers, and to fully realise all their rights, online and offline. meaningful consultations with children of different age groups and backgrounds provided the centrepiece of the policy development process, starting from the initial conceptualisation through the development of the final draft. a total of 475 children were consulted through in-depth qualitative activities on their use and experiences of digital technology, and of the opportunities and benefits it presented, as well as the risks and dangers that they faced online on a daily basis. in addition, 6,743 u report (sms-based real-time data collection system) users were polled on their views and experiences. many children consulted in the development of this policy noted that they had no or only limited access to the internet, and yet their lives were still impacted by the technology itself, illustrating the importance of that observation within paragraph 4 of the general comment no. 25. children also noted the impact on their lives of the way in which digital technology and internet is used by those around them, including by their friends and peers. children frequently demonstrated the vast discrepancy between adults’ views on risks and harms online, and the lived reality of children in relation to the digital environment. their experiences also starkly highlighted the difference between their lived experiences and the views and perceptions of adults of their capacities and skills. this was particularly noticeable in some rural areas (which traditionally have less access to the internet), where some children eloquently spoke about the use of vpn services and their advantages. most importantly, children made it clear that they want and need support ranging from education and digital skills development to supportive and responsive systems when things go wrong for them online. the information gathered during the consultations heavily influenced the content of the child online protection policy and strategies and interventions flowing from the policy. children’s voices informed the development of training for social workers and allied professionals and support workers and provided a way to integrate online protection into the broader case management system. this training was targeted at those with very limited understanding of online safety and technology in general and promoted a balance of opportunities and protection. further, an industry roundtable on child online protection was held, which brought the experiences of zimbabwean children online directly to the private sector and shaped the development of a code of conduct for industry partners on child online protection. consultations also provided areas of emphasis within the development of content for a curriculum for senior school learners on online safety and privacy, which integrated different aspects of gc 25 including protection and safety, right to express themselves, right to play, privacy and data protection. an alarming finding from the consultations were the reported experiences by school-going girls who disclosed that they were sexually harassed on school-specific whatsapp groups, which were founded as a response to the school-closure during strict covid-19 lockdowns. following the girls’ disclosure, their parents prohibited them to access these whatsapp groups, which effectively denied them access to the only available source of learning for months. therefore, dedicated risk mitigation measures for these incidents were included in the curriculum. in summary, meaningful consultations with children from diverse background considerably shaped the conceptualisation and drafting of the child online protection policy and even influenced various interventions on midand down-stream level. different priorities for the country were identified – education and awareness-raising (including of privacy), a focus on the opportunities and rights of children, as detailed in general comment no. 25, the provision of integrated services, and the role and responsibilities of industry – all directly from the voices and experiences of children. crc committee, general comment no. 25 (2021) on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment, crc/c/gc/25 (2 march 2021), para. 4 hootsuite/we are social (2019): digital 2019, available at https://www.slideshare.net/datareportal/digital-2019-zimbabwe-january-2019v01?from_action=save [accessed 05 october 2019] paper 2 linking general comment 25 and european union policy: from fragmentation to coordination eva lievens ghent university the un general comment 25 (gc25) on the rights of the child in the digital environment is addressed to states. although all member states have ratified the uncrc, the european union (eu) itself is not a party to it. yet, many of the elements of the gc25 are relevant to policy decisions and legislative initiatives taken and initiated by the eu. the gc25 requires ‘states’ to adopt a ‘comprehensive strategy and policy’, and to ‘coordinate policies, guidelines and programmes’. at the eu level, however, current and proposed rules that may affect the realisation of children’s rights in the digital environment are scattered and fragmented. the general data protection regulation (gdpr) mentions that children merit specific protection with respect to their personal data, and refers to children a few times, but the actual (extra) requirements for data controllers towards children remain vague. especially with respect to profiling and (solely) automated decisionmaking, which the gc25 requires states to prohibit when done for commercial purposes on the basis of a digital record of their actual or inferred characteristics, the gdpr provisions are ambiguous (van der hof et al., 2020). moreover, enforcement is currently still lacking. a few investigations into children’s data processing are ongoing but so far very few sanctions have been imposed. other measures are laid down in the audiovisual media services directive (avmsd), which requires that video-sharing platforms (such as youtube) ensure that children are protected from programmes, user-generated videos and audiovisual commercial communications which may impair their physical, mental or moral development. these same platforms will also be subject to what is going to be the digital services act (dsa), proposed by the european commission in december 2020. this proposal aims to regulate intermediary services and to “set out uniform rules for a safe, predictable and trusted online environment, where fundamental rights enshrined in the charter are effectively protected”. more specifically, the preamble to the proposal states that the proposal will “contribute to the protection of the rights of the child and the right to human dignity online”. throughout the proposal, children and their rights are referred to a few times. the most important provision (article 26, recital 57) relates to a risk assessment obligation that is imposed on the very large online platforms (such as facebook, youtube, or tiktok). they should identify, analyse and assess any significant systemic risks stemming from the functioning and use made of their services in the eu. one of the categories of systemic risks relates to “any negative effects for the exercise of the fundamental rights to respect for private and family life, freedom of expression and information, the prohibition of discrimination and the rights of the child”. a second legislative initiative pending at the eu level that has the potential to significantly impact children’s rights in the digital environment is the proposal for an artificial intelligence act (aia). the proposed aia aims to ensure a high level of protection of fundamental rights in general and on the rights of specific groups including children through a risk-based approach. the proposal prohibits o.a. ai-systems that “exploits any of the vulnerabilities of a specific group of persons due to their age, physical or mental disability, in order to materially distort the behaviour of a person pertaining to that group in a manner that causes or is likely to cause that person or another person physical or psychological harm”, and imposes obligations on ai-systems that are considered to be high risk. with regard to such high risk systems, a risk management system should consider whether the system is “likely to be accessed by or have an impact on children”. whereas it is promising that both the proposal for the dsa and the aia seem to agree with the approach in the gdpr and the avms that children merit specific protection, it still remains to be seen how these proposals will evolve throughout the ongoing legislative process. moreover, it is unclear to what extent there is a real coordination between the existing and proposed legislative instruments (and their drafters). and although the european commission has confirmed its commitment to the uncrc in its recently published eu strategy on the rights of the child (2021), there is a risk that an inconsistent approach throughout the different legislative instruments related to the digital environment weakens the protection of children, and, hence, the objective of the gc25. against this background, this contribution explores the link between the gc25 and eu action. by mapping (1) the gc25 demands on states, (2) the competence of the eu and (3) the measures included in eu (proposed) legislation, gaps, overlaps and the level of coordination are detected and assessed. this analysis also includes a focus on the obligations that are imposed on businesses, as the gc25 determines that states have the obligation to ensure that businesses meet their responsibilities to respect children’s rights and prevent and remedy abuse thereof in relation to the digital environment. finally, recommendations on how a more coordinated approach could be shaped are formulated in order to ensure that children’s well-being in the digital age is fully realised. an important part of such a coordinated approach regards the extent and manner in which children’s views are given due weight during the shaping and implementation of policies. references european commission (2021). eu strategy on the rights of the child. https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/default/files/child_rights_strategy_version_with_visuals 3.pdf van der hof, s., lievens, e., milkaite, i., verdoodt, v., hannema, t., & liefaard, t. (2020). the child’s right to protection against economic exploitation in the digital world. international journal of children’s rights, 28(4), 833–859. https://doi.org/10.1163/15718182-28040003 paper 3 from privacy interest to privacy right: creating a policy framework that supports families and empowers children in digital spaces stacey steinberg university of florida general comment 25 of the united nations convention on the rights of the child provides that children have a right to privacy in online spaces. the language contained within the comment clearly set forth what this means for children and families living in countries bound by the convention, and it offers member nations strikingly articulate guidance towards creating laws that protect, but perhaps more importantly, empower young people to thrive online. it can be argued that young people in the united states, however, have not directly benefited from the enactment of comment 25 (nor any other provision of the uncrc). this is because the united states is the only united nations member country to not have ratified the convention. despite this lack of direct benefit, the united states is poised to indirectly benefit by comment 25, as it provides persuasive guidance to lawmakers and other policy advocates. one key step towards this goal will be a robust discussion regarding the meaning of free speech in the digital age. in the united states, children have an interest in privacy, but this interest is not often considered a legal right (meyer, 2003). in europe, most of the information stored on digital platforms is viewed as data, whereas in the united states, this information is often referred to as speech. creating a comprehensive analytical framework to analyze this issue will be critical moving forward (stuart, 2014). the recognition of data as a source of risk to young people is central to this discourse. due to the nature of childhood, it is also critical to discuss the role of parents as enforcers and protectors of children’s rights (woodhouse, 1993). the collection, storage, and sale of an individual’s online behaviors and disclosures is a common source of regulation in both the united states and in europe. the united nations convention on the rights of the child (uncrc) comment 25 considers the impact of such by third parties and the harms these behaviors cause children. in addition to the recognition of actual harm to children, the uncrc recognizes the evolving ability of children to give consent to these data processes and encourages collaboration by key stakeholders, especially amid the realities of the covid-19 pandemic (livingstone et al, 2021). this could ensure digital platforms protect children’s data and empower children in a manner consistent with their developmental abilities. lawmakers in the united states could benefit from reexamining provisions of coppa (1998) to be more consistent with policy dictated by the laws in the united kingdom and guidelines set forth by the uncrc comment 25. congresswoman castor (2021) and senators blumenthal and blackman (sorken et al., 2022) have pending bills that would both update coppa and borrow from key provisions of uk and eu privacy laws to provide better protections for children’s data. a second element to consider is how the united states balances free speech and privacy. words matter. and definitions, especially in the context of lawmaking, are critical to the creation and enforcement of public policy. our first amendment freedom of expression clause prohibits the government from limiting an individual’s (and in most instances, a digital platform’s) speech except in the most limited of circumstances. unlike our counterparts in europe, these limited circumstances are not defined by a balancing test of expression and privacy interests. us laws instead support a framework that weighs expression over privacy. the united states has previously recognized children as a class of individuals needing special protections. these protections are considered exceptions to typical regulations surrounding free speech. for example, pornography is viewed as a form of speech under american jurisprudence, but child pornography, while speech, is not protected by the constitution, as child pornography is uniquely and especially harmful to children in its creation and circulation. this is one example of how the united states treats children differently than adults when considering the boundaries of free expression. lastly, and perhaps most importantly, is the recognition of the unique nature of childhood and the evolving capacities of young people to fully participate in society (dailey & rosenbury, 2018). current us frameworks recognize childhood as a condition of vulnerability requiring protection. european frameworks, and more broadly, the united nations convention on the rights of the child comment 25, recognize childhood not merely from a perspective of vulnerability. instead, their lenses focus on a perspective that both empowers youth and lays out a foundation to recognize that their affirmative rights must be central to discussions of moderating digital platforms and centralizes providing access of information and inclusion alongside discussions centered on safety and privacy. specifically, paragraph 67 addresses the intersection of a child’s right to privacy and a parent’s right to speech and autonomy, encouraging thoughtful conversation about how families can balance competing interests in the digital environment. european families benefit from novel policy structures that benefit exploration and growth through the offering of age-appropriate design and protection. families in the united states can also reap the rewards of the groundbreaking work of policy makers in the european union. moving forward, these three components offer a starting point for deliberations focused on moving us policy forward in the context of children’s rights online. these signposts will likely bring forth further conversation and new ideas, which should be embraced, even as the conflict long held beliefs and practices. our children are the first generation to grow up alongside iphones and apps. and while we do not have our own lived experiences to guide them as they walk this new path, the united states has the experiences of the uncrc and europe to serve us as a compass as we chart our own course past recognizing a child’s interest in online privacy and towards the recognition of online privacy as a child’s right. castor, rep. castor reintroduces landmark kids privcy act to strengthen coppa, keep children safe online https://castor.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?documentid=403677 (july 21, 2021) coppa: children’s online privacy protection act of 1998, 15 u.s.c. §§ 6501–6506 (2012). dailey, anne c. & laura a. rosenbury, the new law of the child, 127 yale l.j. 1448 (2018). livingstone, sonia, kristen hope-burchill, and konstantinos papachristou. "children’s rights in a digital world–can covid-19 move governments from evidence to action?" parenting for a digital future (2021). meyer, david d., the modest promise of children’s relationship rights, 11 wm. & mary bill rts. j. 1117, 1118 (2003); see also bellotti v. baird, 443 u.s. 622 (1979); but see samuel d. warren & louis d. brandeis, the right to privacy, 4 harv. l. rev. 193 (1890). stuart, a. h. google search results: buried if not forgotten, 15 n.c. j.l. & tech. 463, 466 (2014). sorken et al child safety is the new tech battleground, andrew r. sorken, et. al., https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/17/business/dealbook/children-online-safetybill.html (feb. 17, 2022) woodhouse, barbara bennett , hatching the egg: a child-centered perspective on parent’s rights, 14 cardozo l. rev. 1747 (1993). un general comment no. 25 (2021) on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment. paper 4 designing for children’s rights in a digital world: introducing a global volunteer network initiative shuli gilutz tel-aviv university the distinction between child rights and child rights in the digital world is a very ‘adult’ one. for many children growing up today all over the world, there is no distinction between “digital” aspects of their life and “non-digital” aspects. they perceive both part of everything they do and take it for granted that internet connectivity is a standard affordance of most part of their lives. for many children in 2022, “digital” is a regular part of life and always has been. “digital” is intertwined in children’s homes, schools, learning, play, entertainment, creativity, and communication with family and friends. this means that children behave the same way in digital and non-digital environments and interactions and expect similar experiences. children know that a playground is a safe place designed for kids to play independently, with others their age. they may not know that an online/digital playground, such as an app or virtual world, is not safe in the same way. this may lead to dangerous situations. this is exactly why the un committee on the rights of the child’s adaptation of general comment 25 is critical – because children had taken for granted that the digital world was designed for them the same way the physical world was, with the same safety, privacy, participation, and social rules. and it was not. until now. general comment 25, and policy proposals and legislation that have emerged since its instalment both in the uk and the us, state that companies must shift their products’ process, design, and assessment, to a child rights framework. this is a huge change in the digital industry that was initially creating digital products and services for adults, and paid little attention to the needs of children, as they are not paying customers. in the non-digital world, these issues have been addressed for many years: toy companies, educational companies, and entertainment and adventure services for children have been designed with children’s unique needs in mind. child development professionals, as well as education professional, special child-safety experts, and child-rights sdgs have been implemented in the design and development of physical products and experiences for children for years. while there is still a range of quality within this area, both legislation and consumer trends have led to a standard of products for kids, which allows kids safe and age-appropriate experiences (and some piece of mind for parents). products and services are marked by the age they are fit for, as well as other affordances and limitations. this has not been the case in the digital world. parents struggle to keep up with the ever-changing landscape of digital play for children, and many times are not aware of the challenges and risks children may face playing their games, watching their videos and shows, and communicating with friends on apps. safety, privacy, ageappropriate content, age-appropriate interfaces, are just some of the challenges children may face in digital environments that were not designed with children’s rights in mind. sometimes parents know that there are risks, but do not have the time and capacity to understand them and monitor them, so they disconnect their children from the digital world altogether. this, to, is problematic since the digital tools are an important part of children’s lives today, offering them unique learning environments, play and creation opportunities, and communication with peers and family. in a recent study about children during the covid 19 pandemic it was shown that digital communities were a lifeline for teens. general comment 25 allows some of this weight to be lifted from parents and shifts responsibilities to the companies themselves: they should consider all these issues when designing products and experiences for children, allowing both kids and their families and safe way to use digital products to their fullest potential. for most digital technology companies, transition of their priorities of business and design from the general digital business models to child-centred ones may be a challenge. that’s why the designing for children’s rights guide, a global volunteer network decided to offer designers themselves a set of guidelines and case studies to help them make better products for children. rather than turning to companies and big organizations, d4cr local chapters around the world help educate designers who are interested in making better products for children, based on a child-rights framework. many designers understand the need of ethical design and want to both create developmentally appropriate experience for children, while letting them enjoy the incredible play, learning, and communication capabilities digital environments have to offer. their design guide is free for everyone, with example of products that include safety, privacy, inclusion, creation, and many other principles of child-centred design. the community is growing constantly, including designing from the largest digital play companies in the world. this is just the beginning. references hern, a. (2021, september 2). uk children’s digital privacy code comes into effect. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/02/uk-childrens-digital-privacycode-comes-into-effect sorkin, a. r., kessler, s., gandel, s., de la merced, m. j., hirsch, l., & livni, e. (2022, february 17). senators introduce a sweeping online child safety bill. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/17/business/dealbook/childrenonline-safety-bill.html selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): may, e. (2023, october). technological practices of refusal: radical reimagination in m eifler’s computational prosthetics. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. technological practices of refusal: radical reimagination in m eifler’s computational prosthetics emma may rutgers university the project will explore the connections between disability and practices of refusal as they relate to technology, building upon both black feminist theory, critical disability studies, and feminist science and technology studies (sts) (barabas, 2022; benjamin, 2016; garcia et al., 2020; hoffmann, 2021). an overarching objective of this work is to connect black feminist theory and critical disability studies to feminist sts to challenge normative understandings of ableism in ways that consider race not as an addendum to such movements, but a central organizing principle. additionally, this work extends schalk & kim’s (2020) feminist-of-color disability studies. schalk & kim write that a feminist-of-color disability studies maps the connections between multiple forms of violence, which underscore “unexpected points of affinity that might build coalition across categories” (p. 38). this essay explores artist m eifler’s computational prosthetics (eifler, 2022; vargas, 2022) as technological practices of refusal. there is a growing body of literature that situates refusal as a framework to interrogate how sociotechnical systems both reproduce and are embedded in systems of domination that impede collective liberation. barabas (2022) extends feminist understandings of refusal as a means to interrogate how sociotechnical systems, which are built upon systems of domination, reproduce inequities and further structural harms. according to barabas (2022), refusal is “a practice of generative boundary-setting” (p. 36). it is also a means to engage in a practice of radical reimagination, in barabas’ words, “a framework for renegotiating the terms of engagement…refusal offers an entry point into a transformative process of becoming otherwise, to break free from overdetermined notions of the probable or practical in order to enact the possible” (p. 50). refusal is more than an outright denial or simply challenging harmful systems; it is about imagining beyond pervasive logics to build a better future. extending the literature concerning feminist refusal and technology, technological practices of refusal additionally look toward black feminist theory and critical disability studies to examine how technological practices are means to challenge normative logics and engage in collective world-making practices toward liberation and societal transformation. the concept of technological practices of refusal builds upon campt’s practices of refusal. according to campt (2017), refusal entails the “quotidian reclamations of interiority, dignity, and refusal marshaled by black subjects in their persistent striving for futurity” (campt, 2017, p. 11). these practices are everyday radical reclamations of subjectivity that refuse dehumanization. refusal is tied to the grammar of black feminist futurity: “that which will have had to happen” (p. 17). campt notes that “the grammar of black feminist futurity is a performance of a future that hasn’t yet happened but must…it is the power to imagine beyond current fact and to envision that which is not, but must be” (p. 17). refusal is the radical imagining of a future that denies the continuation of the systems that preclude these possibilities. refusal can thus be understood as both a pathway toward imagining previously foreclosed futures, and a movement-building framework wherein disability activists can illustrate the connections between ableism, white supremacy and capitalism. this is not a conflation of anti-black racism and ableism, but rather, the point is to explore the connections between ableism and white supremacy as they are produced by intersecting systems of domination that devalue individuals based on white supremacist ideals of race, class, gender and ability. m eifler is an artist whose work explores the connections between hierarchies of value, knowledge production, and disability (vargas, 2022). the artist’s computational prosthetics combine ar with physical experiences to interrogate dominant understandings of normalcy, ability, and disability. an example of eifler’s computational prosthetic work is masking machine. the title of the work refers to the act of masking, wherein autistic individuals suppress certain non-normative behaviors or mimic the behaviors of those around them. the masking machine project utilizes wearable augmented reality technology to create and project various masks. selfies of the artist are repeatedly fed into an algorithm, while being changed slightly each time. this repetitive refeeding process created distorted depictions of eifler’s face, which are ultimately converted into ar masks. eifler notes that this repetition uncovered the role of technology in the process, which is often rendered invisible. inspired by the artist krzysztof wodiczko’s “mouthpiece,” eifler devised a wearable technology with a camera that records live video while they wear a screen in front of their face that instantaneously projects a mask of their distorted face. the screen blocks eifler from seeing those with whom they interact, while it simultaneously simulates eye contact with its viewer. despite what their naming might allude to, eifler’s computational prosthetics are not concerned with “curing” disability. rather, the project is concerned with assumptions regarding normative social interaction and behavior, relations around technology, and the connections between embodiment and knowledge production. in their own words, eifler explains that their art practices explore how disability spurs various “ways of knowing” (ibid). eifler’s computational prosthetics do not signify a techno-solutionist understanding of disability and technology, rather they gesture toward transformative practices that counter the hierarchal structuring of needs and exclusionary norms that govern social relations. eifler’s project highlights how disabled people create and build relations through technology. these practices are more than simply technological interventions. eifler’s work can be understood as practices of refusal that look beyond the exclusionary norms that govern social relations and knowledge production. they are technological practices that reveal possibilities to imagine and enact new ways of being. it is a radical restructuring that campt describes as a “grammar of possibility” (campt, 2017, p. 17). technological practices of refusal therefore entail a refusal of the conditions that render not only disabled people’s humanity—but people proscribed by assumed pathologies— as incomprehensible. technological practices of refusal explore how disabled people reimagine new means of social relation despite the routine foreclosure of futurity. refusal challenges systems of power that undergird racist and ableist pathologies, which determine how people are not only valued—but granted humanity—due to the ongoing legacies of colonialism and racial capitalism. refusal, and the grammar of black feminist futurity name the urgency of rejecting such logics. technological practices of refusal underscore the role of alternative practices that work toward societal transformation. refusal entails imaginative world-making practices that envision a future—a “crip vision of an elsewhere” (kafer, 2013, p. 24)—against the systemic preclusion of such imaginaries. references barabas, c. (2022). refusal in data ethics: re-imagining the code beneath the code of computation in the carceral state. engaging science, technology, and society. benjamin, r. (2016). informed refusal: toward a justice-based bioethics. science, technology, & human values, 41(6), 967–990. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243916656059 campt, t. m. (2017). listening to images. duke university press. eifler, m. (2022). prosthetics. blinkpopshift. http://www.blinkpopshift.com/prosthetics garcia, p., sutherland, t., cifor, m., chan, a. s., klein, l., d’ignazio, c., & salehi, n. (2020). no: critical refusal as feminist data practice. conference companion publication of the 2020 on computer supported cooperative work and social computing, 199–202. https://doi.org/10.1145/3406865.3419014 hoffmann, a. l. (2021). terms of inclusion: data, discourse, violence. new media & society, 23(12), 3539–3556. kafer, a. (2013). feminist, queer, crip. indiana university press. schalk, s., & kim, j. b. (2020). integrating race, transforming feminist disability studies. signs: journal of women in culture and society, 46(1), 31–55. https://doi.org/10.1086/709213 vargas, e. (n.d.). everyone has needs: queering technology through disability. retrieved december 4, 2022, from https://cchange.xyz/m-eifler/ selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): aymar, c., aufderheide, p., haywood, a., and clark, j. (2023, october). reparative media: revolutionary storytelling and its enemies in a streaming era. panel presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. reparative media: revolutionary storytelling and its enemies in a streaming era aymar j. christian northwestern university patricia a. aufderheide american university antoine haywood university of pennsylvania jessica clark independent scholar how do we critique a streaming “golden age” characterized by the ceaseless production of expression that repeats and reinforces injustice and inequality? our media and tech systems prioritize developing stories and platforms to target distinct audiences for profit, but our communities need to cultivate interdependence and solidarity. healing these injustices, including racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, classism, ableism, and other forms of hate, requires a specific method of repair: re-distributing power more equitably to the historically disempowered. in the last decade in the u.s., what aymar jean christian terms “reparative media,” responding to the social upheaval that political polarization, misinformation, and climate and racial reckoning has burgeoned. christian writes, “[r]epairing our culture means healing how we make media, how we connect through technology, and how we generate knowledge.” this panel analyzes the concept of reparative media, examines case studies, and analyzes counterrevolutionary pushback. grounded in u.s. experience, the panel is designed to open a conversation more widely, and create terms under which these issues can be engaged elsewhere. unlike previous eras, this era’s reparative media work is grounded in responses to the realities of a digital culture shaped by mega-platforms. in audio-visual media, streamers in particular (building upon past example in broadcast and cable) have funded or showcased boldly extractive and exploitative programming, such as much of true crime, reality shows, and unapologetically offensive comedy. scandals about ethics—whether over yazidi women protesting invasion of privacy in the documentary sabaya, menasa filmmakers protesting errors and putting participants at risk in jihad rehab, or bipoc filmmakers protesting the all-white, male production crew for a forthcoming film about tiger woods (a sports figure for whom race has been defining in his career)—have multiplied. the reparative media movement is also informed, in the u.s., by the growing tide of racial reckoning since 2014. this movement has also been joined by other minoritized voices, including those of people living with disabilities, gendernonconforming makers, and those experiencing the consequences of lacking appropriate immigration status. however, the reparative work also builds upon efforts in previous eras in self-styled movements for alternative media, community media, public-service media, and activist media. these movements have also been accompanied by extensive communications research—much of it done in a collaborative way with practitioners—that allows us to understand reparative media in context. these movements have shared common expectations that media produced by and for underheard members of society are essential parts of movements for social change. the panel provides both theoretical and practice-oriented roads into the discussion, which we expect to be between a third and a half of the time allotted. panelists also strive to provide examples and illustrations relevant to the conference venue of philadelphia. aymar jean christian will address the conceptualization of reparative media and the process of reparative research and development (r&d). reparative research is work that is not only about but with reparative media communities, using both quantitative and qualitative research. reparative story development is about the practice of developing narratives that confront, challenge, and provide alternatives to systemically oppressive storytelling. reparative platform development is the work of building training, distribution and showcasing alternatives to today’s digital mega-platforms. this presentation will use case studies to illustrate the three categories. patricia aufderheide will use a cultural-production analysis to focus upon reparative story development practices, looking closely at a two-year process to create standards for values-driven documentary production. the process, which itself included reparative research, is analyzed for its challenges as well as its conclusions. reception within the documentary community of the resulting document, a values-based framework for a sixpart production process, is discussed, as is engagement by gatekeepers such as streamers, broadcasters and production companies. the presentation then focuses upon the attacks upon public exercise of such values and standards. these attacks, with a veneer of legitimacy from centrist mainstream media, leverage a conservativemedia use of the notion of “woke cancel culture,” to demonize the assertion of such values in the production process. antoine haywood will address reparative platform development. in the u.s., community media centers, based in cable systems and offering educational, governmental, and public access channels, have their origins in 1970s citizen activism. but cmcs have shown an ability not only to survive but to reinvent themselves both technologically and in terms of community reparative work. the paper focuses on one such example, in philadelphia, where communities of color have been actively working to address systemic harms and bolster community strength with hyperlocal media. in discussing the work of creating content for such systems, the paper also reveals the infrastructural affordances and limitations mediamakers encounter. such forces reveal the systemic forces that threaten the evolution of such media. jessica clark, with deep experience in reparative research in the philadelphia media community and nationally, will infuse their commentary with location-specific references. paper #1: reparative media: cultivating stories and platforms to heal our culture abstract how do we understand media and tech industries’ power and impact on the cultural ecosystem? scholars of media and tech industries study the systems that structure consumption of culture. like media sociologists todd gitlin, vincent mosco, more recently siva vaidhyanathan, and others, we can locate power in media and tech systems in their control over message distribution, how storytellers reach communities (gitlin 1983; mosco and wasko 1988; vaidhyanathan 2012, 2018). mosco and wasko write that this “profit from the sale of commodities” (because they view stories and audiences as products) is a “fundamental source of power in a capitalist society” (mosco and wasko 1988, 3). centralized corporate distribution has been critical to perpetuating racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia and other forms of hate throughout u.s. history. netflix is perhaps the best example of a global story distributor, with over 200 million subscribers in nearly 200 countries. netflix rose to power by combining what david craig and stuart cunningham call hollywood’s southern california (socal) strategy of developing and owning expensive productions (e.g. hbo, which inspired netflix early on), with silicon valley’s nocal big data strategy of automating content exhibition for audiences as with youtube (cunningham and craig 2019). the rest of hollywood is following netflix’s quest for fast, digital distribution having already secured significant ownership rights over what they produce, limiting options and diversity for both storytellers and audiences (christian 2023). in the last year, diverse storytellers and fans have seen shows canceled too soon, as workers suffer from the increasing pace of production. in this context some have looked optimistically to nocal open-access platforms as a countervailing force to hollywood’s closed, hierarchical streaming platforms. though more open and accessible, social media is still a fully integrated system, anchored by distribution platforms as sites of near-simultaneous content development, production, exhibition and audience engagement (i can have an idea, produce it and deliver it to audiences in seconds), all controlled by a small number of corporations. where social media platforms offer open and largely free distribution to our cultural environment, compared to hollywood’s closed system, they aggressively curate and censor what can be said and seen as they mine our sociocultural interactions for data. offering our free or undercompensated labor to these platforms has helped them develop ai and sophisticated marketing technology to make them quite arguably more powerful than their studio peers. reparative media argues the way to heal our culture is to cultivate more open systems for distributing culture led by historically disempowered communities, particularly those impacted by multiple systems of oppression (racism, sexism, etc.), or intersectionality. the theory is based on five years of reparative research on an intersectional streaming tv platform, otv | open television (http://weareo.tv), as a community-based research project using a range of methods, including: interviews with storytellers, surveys of community members locally, analysis of quantitative and qualitative social media, and participant observation. if we consider streaming and tech systems as cultural “operating systems” – to draw from tara mcpherson (2012) and kara keeling (2014) –otv is an experiment in intentionally queering these systems, applying keeling’s notion of “queer os” [operating system] to the spaces of tv and social media. otv offers a case study for broader systemic changes that are clear and concrete, if only we can commit as much to repairing systems as we do ourselves. like all processes for healing great wounds, reparative research & development (is not simple, easy or perfect, but its effects are immediate and backed by data. through community-based distribution backed by research, we were able to see the practices necessary for reparative story development in the production of original web tv stories and reparative platform development in the release of those stories online, contrasted with local engagement. reparative story development challenges the norms of how films and tv shows are developed in hollywood’s streaming studio system. disrupting the socal business model cultivated more complex, connective, and collective stories. instead of taking intellectual property, we gave artists ownership of their own stories, and in turn they shared ownership with each other. instead of locking artists into exclusive contracts, we shared ownership over distribution, cultivating specific online and local experiences that built connections and bonds. stories that emerged were trauma-informed but not traumatizing. reparative platform development harnesses community to counteract the structures of global, big data-driven social media platforms. curating experiences and conversations locally and in-person offers critical lessons to silicon valley as they struggle to moderate social networks of millions of people. the triumphs and challenges of circulating otv’s work on global corporate platforms, alongside the joys and struggles of connecting people in chicago, shows how cultivating platforms for community requires a level of time and care that corporations have never attempted despite having enough resources to do so. reparative media is complex. pain and pleasure, scarcity and abundance, can coexist. as with healing, the process is more important than the result, and processes of repair can feel difficult even as we are getting better. it is both necessary and possible to open ourselves to new ways of developing stories, community and data to advance equity and justice in the 21st century. reparative media shows how, even in our pain, we can develop media (television), create platforms (tech) and organize our data (research) to heal our culture. christian, aymar jean and chelsea peterson-salahuddin. 2023. rage against the streaming studio system: worker resistance to hollywood’s networked era. information, communication & society, doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2023.2166363. gitlin, todd. 1983. inside prime time. new york: pantheon. keeling, kara. 2014. queer os. cinema journal, 53(2): 152-157. mcpherson, tara. 2012. “u.s. operating systems at mid-century: the intertwining of race and unix.” race after the internet. ed. lisa nakamura, peter chow-white, and alondra nelson. new york: routledge. 21-37. mosco, vincent and janet wasko, eds.1988. the political economy of information. madison: university of wisconsin press. vaidhyanathan, siva. 2012. the googlization of everything: (and why we should worry). los angeles: university of california press. vaidhyanathan, siva. 2018. antisocial media: how facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy. new york ; london: oxford university press. paper #2: is another documentary world possible?: weaponizing wokeness to challenge reparative media in the streaming era abstract as digital streaming fiercely drives the commercialization of documentary (weideman 2023; galuppo and kilkenny 2022; lindahl 2021), ethics scandals have also become headline news (kaufman 2022; arraf and khaleel 2021; sharf 2021). at the same time, in the u.s. the racial reckoning has provoked a field-wide conversation about equity and justice, and spurred new organizations around representation, labor issues and equity. this paper analyzes efforts, particularly by minoritized makers, to articulate and assert mission-driven values in documentary filmmaking. it then charts the rise of “cancel culture” claims for such work, and discusses the political drivers of such critiques. the intertwined processes illustrate the opportunities and challenges of building “reparative media” (christian in press) cultures. in the spirit of cultural studies analysis (hall and open university. 1997; bourdieu 1984), the analysis informs a case study in the structural forces that bring into place norms-setting actions and that challenge their implementation. this study results from a combination of interview-based and small-group-discussion, research into professional practice, and literature review. the members of dawg contributed insights throughout. it first reviews the ways ethics concerns and documentary production have evolved, noting strategic and economic reasons why the field—unlike journalism or professions ranging from pharmacology to funerary management—has never developed explicit ethical standards. discussed are the economic development of production, including government propaganda investments, corporate advertising and promotional investments; the growth of multiple distribution mechanisms, with an emphasis on streaming’s powerful role in increasing both the number and pace of production of documentaries; and the pressures on makers that explain an entrenched, decades-long reluctance to address ethics themselves. it then focuses on u.s.-based efforts between 2014-2023, coming from makers themselves, to organize and establish community-based standards on a range of issues directly affecting their work lives. these include formation of groups of producers (e.g., editors; producers; directors) not previously organized, to assert standards for the pace of production; the formation of ethnic/cultural identity organizations that can then take action collectively to assert expectations; an organization formed to demand more diversity from u.s. public television; and an organization created to articulate ethical standards for the field, particularly in relation to participants and fellow team members. the paper discusses triggering events precipitating such activities, especially the events building the racial reckoning of the last decade in the u.s. it discusses particular incidents, e.g. the announcement of a production of a tiger woods biography that featured only white male makers. the paper then details the process of creating from reflection to release: an ethical framework for values, ethics and accountability in non-fiction production, by the documentary accountability working group. notably, the two-year process involved consultations with a range of organizations, presentations and workshops at industry events such as festivals and conferences, and quiet discussions with various gatekeepers. the learnings from those discussions are discussed, as informing the result. the process aligned with that used to create codes of best practices in fair use with documentary and other creator communities, since 2005. such codes have proven robust in guiding professional practice. (aufderheide and jaszi 2018). next, the paper discusses the public discussion that arose from the release of the framework. it immediately resulted in widespread discussion, as well as some adoption. its release occurred at the same time as the premiere of a documentary film about the longterm consequences of participating in a documentary, called subject. it also aligned with a flurry of industry events that addressed what had become a term of art in the field, “non-extractive filmmaking,” i.e. filmmaking that does not merely take from an individual or community, but provides value to both in the process of making. the paper then discusses evidence of resistance to establishing these new norms. one strain is outright attack, as seen in the example of jihad rehab (now redacted). upon its release at sundance film festival, the single most important release venue for documentaries in the world, a group of 70+ muslim filmmakers and allies released a public letter addressed to sundance, critiquing the curators’ decision to showcase it. they described it as insensitive to american muslim sensibilities, inaccurate and exploitative. the director, with backing from a nonprofit with conservative leanings and advisors who have taken boldly anti-muslim stances, was able to garner attention from major publications including the new york times. the framing of this coverage was that the director was a victim of “woke cancel culture,” a phrase promoted on fox news and a theme of the times op-ed pages. another point of resistance comes from organizations currently using journalistic standards in development or acquisition of documentaries. journalistic standards are designed out of the experience of daily journalism, and have features that sometimes do not reflect documentary practice. for instance, journalistic standards require no payment for services of interviewees; documentary filmmakers, by contrast, may work with participants for months on end, and some participants have few resources. refusing to pay for such things as transportation, time off from work, or daycare, for time spent with filmmakers, may be experienced as unethical. concerns for participants’ welfare also do not align with journalism’s claim to “afflict the powerful,” to conduct investigations that may expose injustice or malfeasance. while some within media companies may be sympathetic to concerns raised by filmmakers working in a nonextractive mode with disenfranchised participants, they face serious hurdles in overcoming longstanding assumptions about best practices drawn from journalism. these constraints and resistances are some of the emerging challenges to the development of documentary ethics codes. some forces have political valences, others cultural. the closely-observed process so far demonstrates that ethics codes inevitably are a fiercely political process, which involves conflicting ideologies. the streaming era has accelerated that process and raised the stakes for everyone. references: arraf, jane, and sangar khaleel. 2021. "women enslaved by isis say they did not consent to a film about them." new york times, september 26, 2021. accessed january 22, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/26/world/middleeast/sabaya-isis.html. aufderheide, patricia, and peter jaszi. 2018. reclaiming fair use : how to put balance back in copyright. second edition. ed. chicago ; london: the university of chicago press. bourdieu, pierre. 1984. distinction : a social critique of the judgement of taste. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. christian, aymar jean. in press. reparative media: how to heal our culture. mit press. galuppo, mia, and katie kilkenny. 2022. "inside the documentary cash grab." hollywood reporter, september 16. hall, stuart, and open university. 1997. representation : cultural representations and signifying practices.culture, media, and identities. london ; thousand oaks, calif.: sage in association with the open university. kaufman, anthony. 2022. "why filmmakers have had a problem with 'jihad rehab' for years." documentary. lindahl, chris. 2021. "the future of documentary filmmaking is bright, but it remains a high-risk endeavor." indiewire, december 11. sharf, zack. 2021. "anthony bourdain doc recreates his voice using artificial intelligence and 10-plus hours of audio." indiewire, july 15. weideman, reeves. 2023. "the boom—or glut—in television documentaries has sparked a reckoning among filmmakers and their subjects." vulture, february 1. shifting the narrative: african americans engaging in reparative media making and hybrid platform communication at philadelphia community access media community media centers (cmcs) play an essential, yet often-overlooked role in contemporary media ecosystems. urban-situated versions of cmcs, sustained by funding from cable television infrastructure, have an extensive track record of engaging marginalized communities in neighborhood-level storytelling processes and mediamaking practices (crittenden and haywood 2020). while significant attention has been given to understanding how people of color forge black cybercultures, grassroots digital activism, and online televisual narratives (brock 2020; jackson et al. 2020; christian 2018), this study analyzes how people of color, particularly philadelphia-based african americans, currently use cmc resources to facilitate digital inclusion, platform integration, and collective storytelling. from a reparative media critical perspective (torres et al. 2020; christian in press), this paper explains how cmc models, like philadelphia community access media (phillycam), offer a perch from which communities of color can mitigate systemic harms and participate in collective healing practices. a steady loss in revenue from cable subscribers who have migrated to streaming video services has raised concerns about the future of community media in the united states. within this reality, phillycam offers a unique case for understanding how marginalized communities value cmcs for their reparative capabilities. unfortunately, these constituent values are in marked contrast with privileged perceptions that see cmcs as unnecessary or even a threat. this study draws insights from interviews with production volunteers and communityengagement program managers at phillycam. observations of production practices and community-made programming are also included. data collected and analyzed in this research build upon existing studies to demonstrate the continued relevance and value of local media centers tied to community television infrastructure (ali 2017; rhinesmith 2016; haywood et al. 2021). in the u.s., philadelphia was the last major city that activated its public-access cable channels. phillycam, the nonprofit corporation created and designated to operate philadelphia’s public-access channels, only began cablecasting in 2009. in most urban localities, like minneapolis, boston, chicago, and atlanta, public access television services were activated in the 1980s and ’90s. legislation that enacted the vision of a public-access media center and channel system in philadelphia was first approved in 1983. local politics, however, mired the system’s growth and prevented the vision from being realized. multiple generations of multi-ethnic grassroots coalitions had to deploy novel tactics that maintained pressure to ensure the city’s administration made good on its promise (mccollough and coates 1999; phillycam 2011). this struggle lasted for more than two decades. finally, in 2008, the city and comcast agreed to amend philadelphia’s local cable franchise agreement and allocate one-million dollars to establish the public access corporation that would build what is now known as phillycam. this historical perspective of a cmc’s development exemplifies how minoritized and unheard community members lead grassroots movements to create reparative media spaces. when phillycam opened its doors to the public in 2010, there were widespread concerns about how public, educational, and governmental (peg) access channel operations would remain relevant in the digital age (waldman 2011; breitbart et al. 2011). media localism advocates argued that access television affiliated cmcs like phillycam are important community assets that should not be abandoned because they play a critical role in helping communities forge a sense of place, build social capital, and animate civic participation (ali 2014; fuentes-bautista 2014; chen et al. 2013; rhinesmith, 2016). since the rise of the virtual public sphere and online user-led video creation and distribution (papacharissi 2002; bruns 2008), access media operations across the country have gradually adopted internet-based video services like apple tv, roku, and youtube. making local programming available via their organizational websites has become standard practice, but transitioning to hd channels has been difficult, and streaming services do not yield substantial revenue. the digital technological pivots in the early 2000s required organizations to lobby for additional capital funds and access to hd channel provisions, which are not mandated by the 1984 cable act or existing local franchise agreements. not all requests for digital upgrades received favorable responses. in maine, grassroots political organizing was needed to prevent cable companies from arbitrarily relocating and “slamming” community access channels into higher-numbered, difficult-to-search tiers on local cable systems that privilege digital channels (davies 2020). despite widespread, harmful regulatory shifts, funding cuts, and channel reassignments, 1600 community access media entities operate 3000 channels today. cmcs, maintaining reparative media spaces, perpetually struggle to keep pace with technological shifts that become existential threats. systemic biases and injustices inherent in corporate media logics make it difficult for cmcs to survive and evolve despite their apparent necessity. being a late bloomer in the public access media realm benefited phillycam in many ways. it gained a lot of wisdom and ideas from its older peers. in the spirit of traditional public access, phillycam values free speech and enables democratic discourse on its channels. early proponents of access television argued that access channels serve as valuable “electronic public space” where community self-structuring can occur, thus, strengthening the public sphere. (aufderheide 1992). phillycam, has also, since its inception, embraced diversity, equity, and inclusion principles that have helped it do more than conservatively maintain what laura linder (1999) called an “electronic soapbox.” it uses a membership model to provide technical training, production support, and community-building services. its core curriculum includes production planning, tv studio production, basic field production, video editing in adobe premier, live video streaming, audio production, and low-power fm radio broadcasting. phillycam is also hired by state-funded agencies, local nonprofits, neighboring schools, and grassroots community groups to produce local production projects. student interns from local colleges and universities gain first-hand experience while working on these professional assignments as assistant camera operators and editors. in 2015, phillycam began to develop internal, staff-managed programs that intentionally support youth media makers, community journalists, independent filmmakers, and local podcast/radio producers. these features have made phillycam an exception compared to wayne’s world-style versions of public access television spawned in the late 1980s. an outstanding characteristic of phillycam is its high level of engagement with african americans in philadelphia. since 2010, phillycam has served as a stepping-stone for african americans aspiring to be professional production crew members, podcasters, journalists, filmmakers, event planners, and pr consultants. it has also served as a sturdy perch from which african americans, and other people of color, have used to share community-benefiting narratives and information. few studies, however, have intentionally focused on understanding the significance of what people of color gain from cmcs like phillycam. thus, this case study analyzes discernable correlations between reparative media practices and hybrid platform communication led by african american community members at phillycam. talking tech with wayne is an interactive educational show for seniors struggling with digital technology use; we talk weekly is an award-winning multi-platform program on black enterprise and popular culture; and phillycam youth media is a multi-ethnic afterschool program that addresses food insecurity, mental health, and public safety concerns. these programs, among many others, exemplify why cmcs like phillycam persistently carve and maintain reparative media spaces despite pervasive corporatized media threats. references ali, christopher. 2017. media localism: the policies of place. university of illinois press. ali, christopher. 2014. “the last peg or community media 2.0? negotiating place and placelessness at phillycam.” media, culture & society 36 (1): 69–86. aufderheide, patricia. 1992. “cable television and the public interest.” journal of communication 42 (1): 52–65. breitbart, joshua, tom glaisyer, bincy ninan, and james losey. 2011. “full spectrum community media expanding public access to communications infrastructure.” washington d.c. brock, andre jr. 2020. distributed blackness: african american cybercultures. new york university press. bruns, axel. 2008. “reconfiguring television for a networked, produsage context.” media international australia 126 (1): 82–94. chen, wenhong, marcus funk, joseph d. straubhaar, and jeremiah spence. 2013. “still relevant? an audience analysis of public and government access channels.” journal of broadcasting and electronic media 57 (3): 263–81. christian, aymar jean. 2018. open tv. new york university press. christian, aymar jean. in press. reparative media: how to heal our culture. mit press. crittenden, letrell, and antoine haywood. 2020. “revising legacy media practices to serve hyperlocal information needs of marginalized populations.” journalism practice 14 (5). davies, lyell. 2020. “civic activism for community access television in the us state of maine.” journal of alternative & community media 5 (2): 135–52. fuentes-bautista, martha. 2014. “rethinking localism in the broadband era: a participatory community development approach.” government information quarterly 31 (1): 65–77. jackson, sarah j., moya bailey, and brooke foucault welles. 2020. #hashtagactivism: networks of race and gender justice. mit press. linder, laura r. 1999. public access television: america’s electronic soapbox. greenwood publishing group. mccollough, george, and inja coates. 1999. “a philadelphia story.” community media review 22 (4): 9–11. papacharissi, zizi. 2002. “the virtual sphere: the internet as a public sphere.” new media & society 4 (1): 9–27. phillycam. 2011. we’re on! the fight for philly access. u.s. https://vimeo.com/551978456. rhinesmith, colin. 2016. “community media infrastructure as civic engagement.” in civic media, edited by eric gordon and paul mihailidis, 481–500. mit press. waldman, steven. 2011. “information needs of communities: the changing media landscape in a broadband age.” washington d.c. torres, joseph, alicia bell, collette watson, tauhid chappell, diamond hardiman, and christina pierce. 2020. “media 2070: an invitation to dream up media reparations.” washington d.c. microsoft word vetter & mcdowell, wikipedia's enlightenment problem.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 vetter, m. & mcdowell, z. (2022, november). wikipedia’s enlightenment problem: decolonizing western epistemologies through critical open education practices. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. wikipedia’s enlightenment problem: decolonizing western epistemologies through critical open education practices matthew a. vetter indiana university of pennsylvania zachary j. mcdowell university of illinois chicago wikipedia’s founder jimmy wales once described the vision behind wikipedia in the following optimistic terms: “imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge” (“wikipedia founder,” 2004). despite this lofty goal, wikipedia continues to falter in pursuit of its ambitions due to representational and colonial problems rooted in its very core. although wikipedia boasts over 280 language versions, the english version is by far both the most welldeveloped and the most trafficked. because the english version receives more traffic, the editing of content related to culture outside of anglophone geographies and in the global south is often done by editors who have no real connection to the culture or geography of those topics (graham, 2011). furthermore, while wikipedia’s gender representation problem is both legendary and well-documented (cohen, 2011; collier & bear, 2012; glott, schmidt, & ghosh, 2010; gruwell, 2015; wadewitz, 2013), systemic biases within wikipedia extend far beyond gender, sparking concern over how wikipedia represents “reality” (mcdowell & vetter, 2021), particularly because collecting “the sum of all human knowledge” has, so far, been a project taken on by predominantly young, white, western males (vetter & pettigrew, 2017). in this paper we dig deeper into the root of these concerning issues, looking in particular at how wikipedia’s foundational principles and assumptions stand in its own way of collecting “the sum of all human knowledge.” although wikipedia uniquely challenges the boundaries of the encyclopedic genre in terms of collaboration, technology, authority, and knowledge production, it remains an encyclopedia, an epistemological method and forum that carries with it the ideological traces and functions of enlightenment print culture (vetter, 2020). such print culture manifests itself most visibly in the wikipedia policy of verifiability. although this policy keeps the encyclopedia in check by ensuring that editors support their claims about a subject with a reliable (and published) source, a concern emerges when we recognize that verifiability and reliability are typically only granted to written, published sources. despite its vision, wikipedia omits a tremendous amount of human knowledge, especially from cultures without a (privileged) history of print culture. cultures and regions representing the global south, indigenous cultures and peoples, and other types of knowledge where an oral tradition plays a large part in the transmission and curation of knowledge are simply not accounted for in wikipedia. consequently, wikipedia’s vision (somewhat paradoxically) remains hindered by its adherence to colonialist epistemologies that continue to define the encyclopedic genre. this paper articulates wikipedia’s colonialist epistemology problem by 1) reviewing the core content policies that prohibit alternative and indigenous sources of knowledge, especially verifiability and notability policies and 2) focusing on direct examples of the encyclopedia’s inability to represent indigenous knowledge. in linking contemporary wikipedia policies to colonialist ideologies, we also trace the encyclopedia genre from its western predecessor, showcasing how wikipedia continues this tradition via its own techno-optimistic rhetoric. finally, we discuss failed attempts to address the issue of indigenous knowledge within wikipedia, and make recommendations for its future. the fifth of wikipedia’s 5 pillars, “the fundamental principles” that guide the community, states that the encyclopedia “has no firm rules,” further explained in the following: “wikipedia has policies and guidelines, but they are not carved in stone; their content and interpretation can evolve over time” (“wp: five pillars,” 2022). it is this fundamental principle that we attend to in discussing the encyclopedia’s future and its capacity to meet the ever-changing needs of a robust free knowledge movement. more specifically, wikipedia’s future depends on its community’s ability to dynamically evolve, decolonize, and to imagine an encyclopedia that is actively inclusive of a more global epistemology. the encyclopedia community will need to not only figure out new methods for building and encouraging a diverse editorship in order to listen and include marginalized voices; it will also need to engage in deep reflection on how policies such as verifiability and neutrality have limited the historical inclusion of alternative knowledge traditions. to accomplish this, first, wikipedia must gather broad-based input both within and beyond the immediate community on issues related to the exclusion of indigenous forms of knowledge, informing a deep reflection on wikipedia’s place in the encyclopedic tradition. next, community members must commit to an outcome-oriented structure for policy recommendations related to inclusion of indigenous knowledge. for example, the “oral citations” project, failed to make a mark on the larger structures of the encyclopedia because of its lack of integrated outcomes and policy recommendations. finally, and perhaps most difficult of all, the wikipedia community must acknowledge and commit to raising awareness regarding wikipedia’s knowledgemaking constraints within educational and other public sectors. policy alone will not solve the many challenges the encyclopedia faces. wikipedia cannot accomplish its goals without first decolonizing itself, through which the community must both re-imagine core content policies, as well as diversify its editorial demographic by welcoming in new users from under-represented categories and geographies. acknowledging this, we explore methods for participation and engagement in educational and other affiliate spaces that forward a decolonial agenda, one that centers action around indigenous knowledge-making practices. finally, building on the work of sarah lambert’s proposed concept of socially-just open education (2018), we also articulate a need for more critical open education practices that will help inscribe and articulate the need for the aforementioned re-imagination. wikipedia will need to enact a project not only of representational justice that recognizes traditional western epistemologies, but also one of redistributive and recognitive justice that also unsettles its dominant knowledge-making operations. references bear, j.b., & collier, b. (2016). where are the women in wikipedia? understanding the different psychological experiences of men and women in wikipedia. sex roles, 74(5), 254-265. cohen, n. (2011, january 30). define gender gap? look up wikipedia’s contributor list. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/business/media/31link.html glott, r., schmidt, p., & ghosh, r. (2010). wikipedia survey overview of results. unumerit, wikimedia foundation. https://www.merit.unu.edu/wpcontent/uploads/2019/03/wikipedia_overview_15march2010-final.pdf graham, m. (2011). wiki space: palimpsests and the politics of exclusion. in geert lovink and nathaniel tkacz (eds.) critical point of view: a wikipedia reader. institute of network cultures. 269-282. gruwell, l. (2015). wikipedia’s politics of exclusion: gender, epistemology, and feminist rhetorical (in)action. computers and composition, 37, 117–131. lambert, s. r. (2018). changing our (dis) course: a distinctive social justice aligned definition of open education. journal of learning for development, 5(3), 225-244. mcdowell, z. j., & vetter, m. a. (2021). wikipedia and the representation of reality (1st edition). routledge. research:oral citations meta. (n.d.). retrieved february 22, 2022, from https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/research:oral_citations vetter, m. a., & pettiway, k. (2017). hacking hetero/normative logics: queer feminist media praxis in wikipedia. technoculture: an online journal of technology in society, 7. vetter, m. a. (2020). possible enlightenments: wikipedia’s encyclopedic promise and epistemological failure. in j. reagle and j. koerner (eds.), wikipedia @ 20: stories of an incomplete revolution. mit press. 285-296. wadewitz, a. (2013). wikipedia’s gender gap and the complicated reality of systemic gender bias. hastac. archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20130823095141/http://www.hastac.org/blogs/wade witz/2013/07/26/wikipedias-gender-gap-and-complicated-reality-systemicgender-bias wikipedia:five pillars. (2021). in wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=wikipedia:five_pillars wikipedia founder jimmy wales responds—slashdot. (2004). retrieved february 23, 2022, from https://slashdot.org/story/04/07/28/1351230/wikipedia-founder-jimmywales-responds selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): sun,, q. (2023, october). digital labor under the state/capitalist duopoly: state labor and playful workaholics in chinese digital space. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. digital labor under the state/capitalist duopoly: state labor and playful workaholics in chinese digital space qingyue sun drexel university introduction with the explosion of digital technology and the spread of social media, a highly exploitative workforce has emerged in digital cultural and creative industries (abidin, 2016; baym, 2015; duffy, 2017). in western contexts, digital labor is often considered neoliberal agents, embracing a form of entrepreneurship that preaches the neoliberal ideologies of self-governance and ideals of individuality (marwick, 2013). however, it is worth noting that digital creative industries and labor subjectivities in china present a different dynamic. first, contemporary chinese digital creative industries are dominated by multi-channel networks (mcns). as full-fledged service providers, mcns are actively involved in chinese digital creative industries. often seen as “wanghong1 incubators” (han, 2021), mcns have gone beyond service providers to full-fledged organizations, bringing together professionals from all walks of life dedicated to digital cultural production and operation (si, 2021). in addition, mcns in china operate a triangular business model of “social community – wanghong – e-commerce retail,” playing the role of “a critical intermediary which progressively fills—and institutionalizes—the space between different types of dominant platforms” (han, 2021, p.6). in recent years, mcns have quickly demonstrated tremendous profitability through traffic monetization. an economy called “social commerce” rises in chinese digital space — a hybrid economy combined platforms, influencers and consumer markets (lin, 2020). despite the unstoppable growth, mcns have been accompanied by controversies. given that mcns represent an alliance of various capital forces to maximize traffic monetization, their dominance has made it extremely difficult for individual entrepreneurs to survive (wu, 2021). for the most part, micro-influencers and digital 1 wanghong (网红), a chinese social media catchphrase for influencers or internet celebrities. entrepreneurs have no choice but to sign up with mcns to mitigate the instability of platformization. mcns interfere with content production mainly based on market metrics (jin, 2021). when necessary, mcns mostly end support for accounts (or influencers) that do not consistently see a favorable roi (i.e., return on investment). mcns’ intervention thus casts a shadow of asymmetrical power relations in chinese digital creative industries. importantly, mcns do not work for nothing. they tend to take the lion’s share of the revenue. si (2021) noted that the legal relationship between digital laborers and mcns is often seriously threatened, as mcns deliberately damage the interests of live streaming hosts and infringe on the intellectual property of content creators. at the same time, digital laborers in china cannot properly be characterized as neoliberal agents in the traditional sense. instead, they grow in a digital landscape under “socialism with chinese characteristics” (harvey, 2007). despite the adoption of similar neoliberal policies, china still maintains a state-led economic structure (duckett, 2020). importantly, platforms have become an integral part of chinese society as the boundary between platforms, public infrastructure, and civic life becomes increasingly porous (de kloet et al., 2019). contemporary china has entered an era of state-led platformization that differs from platform capitalism and algorithm-based cultural industries described in western societies (srnicek, 2017). as evidenced by the 13th and 14th five-year plans, a series of national agendas surrounding platforms and digital economy has been released in china’s policy blueprint (gao & mu, 2021). digital creative industries and entrepreneurship have been increasingly used for political aims and economic development. the ubiquity of state-led platformization and emerging national agendas not only fit with china’s ambition for economic, technological, and infrastructural development but also brings a new model of governance to chinese digital labor (craig et al., 2021). chinese state-led platformization, as “a project of “dewesternizing” that challenges the cultural and entrepreneurial contexts of western platform hegemony, cannot be generalized by western platform studies (davis & xiao, 2021). to understand digital labor in china, it is necessary to place them into their unique platform ecology and broader sociopolitical context. recently, there has been a growing academic interest in china’s digital labor, such as post-feminism in wanghong culture (liao, 2021) and contingent agency of platform labor (sun & chen, 2021). however, the attention on mcns, laborers under mcns, and their interplays with the broader chinese socio-economic context remains unexplored. as mcns continue to grow, the status quo of digital employment and labor issues in china warrants more scholarly interrogation. amid state-led platformization, the digital employment led by mcns has the potential to provide new insights into structural inequalities in chinese digital creative industries. taken together, this project aims to address the following questions: what are the characteristics of the ideal digital laborers that mcns look for? what are the potential exploitations and inequalities faced by these digital laborers? what are some different implications of chinese digital labor? method & preliminary results this study focuses on digital employment in china and explores how major chinese mcns imagine their ideal digital laborers. considering the significant number of mcn agencies in china, this study focuses on those mcn agencies with beauty/fashion industry as their main business area. according to chinese mcn industry development research white book (2020), the beauty/fashion industry occupies the highest proportion of the chinese mcn market, with over 70% of mcn agencies involved. drawing upon a qualitative textual analysis of 203 recruitment advertisements of mcns, i aim to explore the characteristics of digital laborers of mcns and the potential risks and exploitation faced by these laborers. the findings of my study reveal that digital laborers of mcns are trapped in a duopoly of capital power and state-led platformization. digital laborers of mcns not only face a range of inequalities of capitalized, platformed digital creative industries but also bear the stamp of national agenda. under the systematic division of labor, both the highly gendered wanghong in front of the camera and the laborers behind the scenes face great risks of platformized digital economy. in the market-state nexus, i argue that digital laborers sought by mcns can be understood as a form of state labor, whose labor subjectivity largely depends on state interests and is shaped by the national development agenda. laborers are expected to embody the national character promoted by the state and to contribute to china’s economic goals of achieving a prosperous digital economy. references abidin, c. (2016). visibility labour: engaging with influencers’ fashion brands and #ootd advertorial campaigns on instagram. media international australia, 161(1), 86– 100. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x16665177 baym, n. k. (2015). connect with your audience! the relational labor of connection. the communication review, 18(1), 14–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714421.2015.996401 chinese mcn industry development research white book [中国mcn行业发展研究白 皮书] (2020). retrieved october 25, 2023, from http://pdf.dfcfw.com/pdf/h3_ap202005081379467432_1.pdf craig, d., lin, j., & cunningham, s. (2021). wanghong as social media entertainment in china. london: palgrave macmillan. davis, m., & xiao, j. (2021). de-westernizing platform studies: history and logics of chinese and u.s. platforms. international journal of communication, 15, 20,103–122. de kloet, j., poell, t., zeng, g., & fai, c. y. (2019). the platformization of chinese society: infrastructure, governance, and practice. chinese journal of communication, 12(3), 249–256. https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2019.1644008 duckett, j. (2020). neoliberalism, authoritarian politics and social policy in china. development and change, 51(2), 523–539. https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12568 duffy, b. (2017). (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. new haven, ct: yale university press. gao, j., & mu, r. (2021). mass entrepreneurship and mass innovation in china. in x. fu, b. mckern, & j. chen (eds.), the oxford handbook of china innovation (pp. 254– 287). oxford: oxford university press. han, x. (2020). historicising wanghong economy: connecting platforms through wanghong and wanghong incubators. celebrity studies, 12(2), 317–325. https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2020.1737196 harvey, d. (2007). a brief history of neoliberalism. ny: oxford university press. jin, z. (2021). the disappearance of a top chinese influencer. us-china today. retrieved october 25, 2023, from https://uschinatoday.org/features/2021/12/13/thedisappearance-of-a-top-chinese-influencer/%20 liao, s. (2021). wanghong fashion culture and the postfeminist time in china. fashion theory, 25(5), 663–685. https://doi.org/10.1080/1362704x.2019.1638158 lin, d. (2020). why influencer mega-stars like li jiaqi are so important for businesses targeting china. nativex. retrieved october 25, 2023, from https://www.nativex.com/en/blog/why-influencer-mega-stars-like-li-jiaqi-are-soimportant-for-businesses-targeting-china/ marwick, a. e. (2013). status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. new haven, ct: yale university press. si, r. (2021). china livestreaming e-commerce industry insights. singapore: springer nature. sun, p., & chen, j. (2021). platform labour and contingent agency in china. china perspectives, 2021(1), 19–27. https://doi.org/10.4000/chinaperspectives.11325 srnicek, n. (2016). platform capitalism. cambridge, uk: polity. wu, c. (2020). how do multi-channel networks (mcns) work in china? launchmetrics. retrieved october 25, 2023, from https://www.launchmetrics.com/resources/blog/howdo-multi-channel-networks-work-in-china-networks-work-in-china. y-towards anticaste internet-towards anticaste internet selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 towards anticaste internet: the operation, challenges and aspirations of bahujan publishers. yatharth the center for internet & society, india background caste is fundamental to communication and digital technologies in india.1 as sanctioned by the caste system: communication & knowledge in india has been historically controlled and gatekept by elite oppressor castes.2 oppressed castes (bahujan3) which represent upto 85% of the population find negligible to no presence in indian mainstream media.4 an overwhelming majority of leadership and editorial positions are occupied by members of oppressor castes (savarna5).6 as a result, issues, perspectives and voices of marginalized castes are suppressed and often erased from mass media. oppressor castes hegemonize the narratives on, and of the oppressed.7 early anti-caste scholars recognised this hegemony and its impact on bahujan emancipation & started landmark bahujan-led publication spaces.8 although most of these publications were outlasted by their mainstream media counterparts, with rapid 8 thirumal, “international exploration of technology equity and the digital divide.” 7 kureel, “indian media and caste.” 6 “oxfam indianewslaundry report”; mandal, “upper-caste domination in india’s mainstream media and its extension in digital media.” 5 dhanraj, “the modern savarna and the caste-is-dead narrative.” 4 while no caste census has been conducted since 1929, 85% combined figure for sc, st and obcs is widely used in anticaste movement based on estimates by mandal commission 3 karunakaran, “the dalit-bahujan guide to understanding caste in hindu scripture.” 2 thirumal, “international exploration of technology equity and the digital divide”; “what dalit people taught us about education and why we must commit to it.” 1 shanmugavelan, “a proposal for caste-ing out media: exploring the role that the media plays in ushering in a caste-sensitive society | association for progressive communications”; kumar and subramani, “internet as an alternative media for dalits in india.” suggested citation (apa): yatharth (2023, october). towards anticaste internet: the operation, challenges and aspirations of bahujan publishers. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. proliferation of internet & social media through smartphones, digital publications emerged as space for alternative media for several (intersectional) marginalized groups including bahujans.9 due to issues of access, affordability and english education; proportion of bahujans with digital access and especially bahujan-women is significantly lower than that of savarnas.10 although digital platforms and social media are dominated by savarnas, a sizable bahujan counter-public11 has started carving an alternative media culture, asserting identity, building community, retelling history, archiving lived realities and building a connective anti-caste resistance.12 in the last decade, a variety of bahujan-led publishing projects including visual-arts, podcasts, infographics, video, blogs, news etc have emerged as spaces for discussion, assertion, community and resistance.13 these spaces have brought anti-caste discourse into the mainstream, responding to rising atrocities against marginalized identities; bahujan internet users often experience hate speech, harassment & opposition.14 further exposing casteist logics of the technology industry15 that manifest through issues of poor protections against caste-based hate speech, discrimination in ‘verification’ & algorithmic bias.16 bahujan-led publications serve a very important function of visiblising expressions, narrations and issues of an overwhelming majority of the structurally silenced population. yet, anti-caste publishing and its operational nuances, community building 16 cheema, “why is twitter silent on casteism allegations in india over verified accounts?” 15 omdevt, “untouchables in the world of it”; vaghela, jackson, and sengers, “interrupting merit, subverting legibility”; kumar, “tech was supposed to be a meritocracy. in india, it reinforces old caste divides in new ways.” 14 “online caste-hate speech: pervasive discrimination and humiliation on social media — the centre for internet and society”; shanmugavelan, “caste-hate speech and digital media politics”; counterview, “40% of india’s casteist facebook posts are anti-reservation, anti-dalit reveals a us research.” 13 thakur, “new media and the dalit counter-public sphere”; shivaprasad and jain, “anti-caste memes as cultural archives of resistance”; subramanian, “bahujan girls’ anti-caste activism on tiktok”; chandran, “india’s booming creator economy is a battleground for dalit artists | boom.” 12 utrecht university and de kruijf, “the dalit i define”; “towards an internet of equals”; kumbhojkar, “dalits, internet y políticas emancipadoras.” 11 rao, “democratizing the op-ed.” 10 oxfam, “digital divide india inequality report 2022”; csds, “social media & political behaviour.” 9 kumar, “internet usage pattern, access and utilization of dalit websites and blogs by dalits in india.” and challenges are relatively understudied. this work attempts to close this gap and situates itself in the emergent field of ccts.17 methodology for this study, we conducted in-depth interviews with anti-caste publishing projects. these projects were identified from a list of content-creators and publishing projects18 led by sc/st/obc,across social media with between 1,000-100,000 followers/subscribers.individual users engaging primarily in self expression, large news publishers and anti-caste allyship projects were not included. ten projects were selected, based on diversity of platform use, mediums used, audience size and gender perspectives. semi-structured interviews were conducted with people in leadership roles with these publishing projects covering: operational models, infrastructure needs, motivation, community, hate-speech, platform-censorship, and future visions. the interviews were analyzed with a mixture of thematic and narrative analysis. findings we found that, for bahujan publications, motivation to start publishing often comes from personal experiences and lived realities. for younger publishers, political activation during protests on citizenship laws and time availability during pandemic served as an entering point. the absence of financial support makes anticaste work particularly difficult. publishers, being bahujan themselves, often do not have access to intergenerational wealth for self-funding. further, they lack established caste networks of savarnas that can help raise funding from external sources.19 corporate funding is absent for anticaste publishing. bahujan publishers often have to operate on established platforms like instagram, facebook etc. setting up one’s own website takes substantial time, skill and funds. the projects are supported by small groups of volunteers working from their homes, who rely on free digital tools for their operations. infrastructure is mediated by caste histories 19 kamath, “‘untouchable’ cellphones?”; “caste and entrepreneurship in india.” 18 this list included meme pages, instagram infographics, podcasts, blogs, youtube channels, new websites etc. 17 critical caste and technology studies (ccts) : ccts aims to provide “technology-based critique of contemporary caste narratives,” and “unravel how and in what ways caste is embedded in the field of technology”. as well. one podcaster mentions how having even a own room is out of reach for most bahujans. lack of privacy and silence becomes a barrier for bahujans podcasters. despite the infrastructural limitations, publications engage in a broad range of subjects: bahujan history, translation of anti-caste texts, dalit feminism, futurism, political theory etc. publishers are motivated to capture the “full humanity (of dalits) without being oppression porn”; having informative discussions on caste history; & creating a space for representing and training bahujan writers. the platforms had a strong sense of founding ideology and believed in long term anticaste work over reactionary commentary which can put the operation & mission at risk. while bahujan audiences often respond positively to these publishers highlighting relatability of caste-based experiences or for “saying what (they) wanted to say”, savarna audiences are mixed. publishers spoke of ‘performance of merit’ demanded by the savarna audience. they have to put extra efforts in fact-checking and language, as any mistakes could be used to either launch a caste-coded attack on ‘merit’ of bahujans.20 some savarna audiences respond positively with gratitude for learning something they were unaware of, others would react with denial, minimization of issues and even hate speech. most publishers reported experiencing hate speech, even treating it as an unavoidable outcome. hate is primarily casteist, asking publishers to “go back and clean toilets' ' and other abuses alluding to their caste occupation. threats of physical violence and rape against bahujan women and gender-queer folks are also prevelant. threats of police and legal coercion are also common. managing mental health has become a necessary part of working in this space. publishers often take extended time off to maintain mental health and maintain anonymity. while there are personal support groups, institutional and systemic help is absent. thus, community and networks become important for the publishers. we found publishers often participate in bahujan networks with other publishers. these spaces have provided a place of belonging, anti caste friendship for the first time. it serves as a place for learning, healing, sharing, collaboration, conflicts & support. meanwhile, little to no support is available from platforms. platforms are inadequate in managing caste-based hate speech and providing protections to marginalized castes. further, we found shadowbanning of caste issues to be a common experience for publishers. since they often operate around sensitive discussions involving usage of 20 subramanian, “recovering caste privilege.” sensitive language & imagery, they often get poor algorithmic reach. thus, some publishers try using euphemisms to get around the algorithm. sudden unexplained drops in reach are also very common making relying on publishing financially extremely unstable. publishers remarked about the unsustainability and unreliability of doing anticaste work on corporate-platforms. these platforms are designed & led by members of dominant castes & thus fail to address needs and concerns of bahujan users.21 conclusion despite the challenges involved with platforms, funding & hate speech we find that the closing outlook of publishers to be predominantly positive. in the words of a publisher, this moment is akin to a “cultural-renaissance” for bahujans, with caste becoming a mainstream discussion, and importantly, led by bahujans themselves. according to publishers, an anticaste internet would be a step towards claiming political, intellectual and structural mobility for marginalized castes through mass internet access for bahujans, strong caste informed platform regulations & greater platform ownership by bahujans. in conclusion, despite historic erasure and marginalization of bahujans from media narratives, bahujan publishing has opened a space for an emerging vision of anti-caste internet. at the same time, they face caste-coded challenges with funding, infrastructure, hate-speech, and platform-censorship. through this study, we provide documentation of these challenges and recommend further study on platform governance and policy, the funding landscape and technical infrastructures from a ccts lens as steps towards an anticaste internet. references “caste and entrepreneurship in india” 48, no. 06 (january 30, 2013). https://www.epw.in/journal/2013/06/special-articles/caste-and-entrepreneurship-in dia.html. chandran, rachelle bharathi. “india’s booming creator economy is a battleground for dalit artists | boom,” april 8, 2022. https://www.boomlive.in/decode/indias-booming-creator-economy-instagram-face book-battleground-for-dalit-artists-17471. cheema, kopal. “why is twitter silent on casteism allegations in india over verified accounts?” inc42 media (blog), november 8, 2019. 21 “rules of modern manusmriti that apply only to dalits on social media velivada educate, agitate, organize”; chandran, “india’s booming creator economy is a battleground for dalit artists | boom”; cheema, “why is twitter silent on casteism allegations in india over verified accounts?”; tiku, “india’s engineers have thrived in silicon valley. so has its caste system.” https://inc42.com/features/why-is-twitter-silent-on-casteism-allegations-in-india-o ver-verified-accounts/. counterview. “40% of india’s casteist facebook posts are anti-reservation, anti-dalit reveals a us research.” national herald, june 24, 2019. https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/opinion/40-percent-of-indias-casteist-facebo ok-posts-are-anti-reservation-anti-dalit-reveals-a-us-research. csds. “social media & political behaviour.” lokniti, 2019. dhanraj, christina thomas. “the modern savarna and the caste-is-dead narrative.” feminism in india, september 12, 2017. https://feminisminindia.com/2017/09/13/modern-savarna-caste-dead/. kamath, anant. “‘untouchable’ cellphones? old caste exclusions and new digital divides in peri-urban bangalore.” critical asian studies 50, no. 3 (july 3, 2018): 375–94. https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2018.1479192. karunakaran, valliammal. “the dalit-bahujan guide to understanding caste in hindu scripture.” medium (blog), july 14, 2016. https://medium.com/@bahujan_power/the-dalit-bahujan-guide-to-understandingcaste-in-hindu-scripture-417db027fce6. kumar, c. suresh. “internet usage pattern, access and utilization of dalit websites and blogs by dalits in india.” international journal of advanced research (blog). accessed january 12, 2023. https://www.journalijar.com/article/. kumar, c. suresh, and r. subramani. “internet as an alternative media for dalits in india: prospects and challenges.” iosr journal of humanities and social science 19, no. 2 (2014): 125–29. https://doi.org/10.9790/0837-1925125129. kumar, raksha. “tech was supposed to be a meritocracy. in india, it reinforces old caste divides in new ways.” rest of world, january 19, 2022. https://restofworld.org/2022/tech-india-caste-divides/. kumbhojkar, shraddha. “dalits, internet y políticas emancipadoras.” revista científica arbitrada de la fundación menteclara 3, no. 1 (april 30, 2018): 45–56. https://doi.org/10.32351/rca.v3.1.42. kureel, pranjali. “indian media and caste: of politics, portrayals and beyond.” caste / a global journal on social exclusion 2, no. 1 (may 16, 2021): 97–108. https://doi.org/10.26812/caste.v2i1.261. mandal, dilip. “upper-caste domination in india’s mainstream media and its extension in digital media” 55, no. 46 (november 20, 2020). https://www.epw.in/journal/2020/46/perspectives/upper-caste-domination-indiasmainstream-media-and.html. mintlounge. “towards an internet of equals,” august 31, 2018. https://lifestyle.livemint.com//news/talking-point/towards-an-internet-of-equals-111 645092715631.html. omdevt, gail. “untouchables in the world of it,” n.d. https://www.itu.int/net/wsis/docs/background/themes/development/untouchablesomvedt.pdf. “online caste-hate speech: pervasive discrimination and humiliation on social media — the centre for internet and society.” accessed september 12, 2022. https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/online-caste-hate-speech-pervasive -discrimination-and-humiliation-on-social-media. oxfam, india. “digital divide india inequality report 2022.” accessed december 5, 2022. https://d1ns4ht6ytuzzo.cloudfront.net/oxfamdata/oxfamdatapublic/2022-12/digital %20divide_india%20inequality%20report%202022_print%20with%20cropma rks.pdf?3l.73pgqrpqfyrnwweoxv3bfjhetfa_p. “oxfam indianewslaundry report: 90% leadership positions in indian media are occupied by upper caste groups with not even single dalit or adivasi heading indian mainstream media.” accessed november 29, 2022. https://www.oxfamindia.org/press-release/oxfam-india-newslaundry-report-90-lea dership-positions-indian-media-are-occupied-upper-caste-groups. rao, pallavi. “democratizing the op-ed: anti-caste counterpublics & the mainstream news.” communication, culture and critique 14 (june 23, 2021). https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcab041. shanmugavelan, murali. “a proposal for caste-ing out media: exploring the role that the media plays in ushering in a caste-sensitive society | association for progressive communications.” accessed july 28, 2022. https://www.apc.org/en/node/37537/. ———. “caste-hate speech and digital media politics.” journal of digital media & policy 13, no. 1 (march 1, 2022): 41–55. https://doi.org/10.1386/jdmp_00089_1. shivaprasad, madhavi, and shubhangani jain. “anti-caste memes as cultural archives of resistance.” culture unbound 14, no. 2 (july 7, 2022): 153–78. https://cultureunbound.ep.liu.se/article/view/3956. subramanian, ajantha. “recovering caste privilege: the politics of meritocracy at the indian institutes of technology.” in new subaltern politics: reconceptualizing hegemony and resistance in contemporary india, edited by alf gunvald nilsen and srila roy, 0. oxford university press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199457557.003.0004. subramanian, sujatha. “bahujan girls’ anti-caste activism on tiktok.” feminist media studies 21, no. 1 (january 2, 2021): 154–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2021.1864875. thakur, arvind kumar. “new media and the dalit counter-public sphere.” television & new media 21, no. 4 (may 2020): 360–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419872133. the wire. “what dalit people taught us about education and why we must commit to it.” accessed march 2, 2023. https://thewire.in/caste/what-dalit-people-taught-us-about-education-and-why-wemust-commit-to-it. thirumal, p., ed. “india’s dalits search for a democratic opening in the digital divide,” advances in electronic government, digital divide, and regional development, 2011. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-61520-793-0. tiku, nitasha. “india’s engineers have thrived in silicon valley. so has its caste system.” washington post, december 31, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/27/indian-caste-bias-silicon -valley/. utrecht university, and johannes g. de kruijf. “the dalit i define: social media and individualized activism in subaltern spheres.” pacific asia journal of the association for information systems, 2015, 11–24. https://doi.org/10.17705/1pais.07402. vaghela, palashi, steven j jackson, and phoebe sengers. “interrupting merit, subverting legibility: navigating caste in ‘casteless’ worlds of computing.” in chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 1–20. new orleans la usa: acm, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3502059. velivada. “rules of modern manusmriti that apply only to dalits on social media velivada educate, agitate, organize,” october 29, 2017. https://velivada.com/2017/10/29/rules-modern-manusmriti-apply-dalits-social-me dia/. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 wanke, m., siuda, p. (2024, october). medical cannabis industry and the refracted public of polish drug users forum. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. medical cannabis industry and the refracted public of polish drug users forum michał wanke opole university, piotr siuda kazimierz wielki university in bydgoszcz, aim and background intersections of digital spaces and illicit drugs have been slowly coming to the forefront of criminology or sociology (barratt, 2011). as drug users and vendors alike use surface, deep, or dark web to go about substance-related activities, enhancing digitally their activity, some interesting phenomena arise at the intersection of the two domains. managing visibility, stigma or trust, and the physical embeddedness are at the core of this transdisciplinary scholarship (tzanetakis & south, 2023). in this paper we analyze polish drug forum users as refracted public (abidin, 2021) to illuminate accommodation of the medical cannabis industry in the social worlds of cannabis users. their digital presence “below the radar” contributes to the changing landscape of cannabis use at the intersection of emerging industry, upcoming possible reforms and user cultures in transition. drug users benefit from the affordances of the digital sphere to connect, maintain their otherwise spoiled identities, search for information that is scattered across the web, and spread it. simultaneously, these conditions of the networked spaces (boyd, 2010) are challenging due to the very reason that brings users together: stigmatized or illegal activity. their drug-related presence disrupts the public/private binary. drug forum users discuss highly personal issues that require trust and sensitivity and urge them to remain hidden in plain sight to avoid context collapse, yet maintaining visibility (marwick & boyd, 2014). emerging cannabis industry materialized through legislative changes initiated in the 21st century in countries such as uruguay, canada or the us. it started to coexist with illegal cannabis markets, well established globally. the legislation shifts also produced tensions and contradictions in the process (wheeldon & heidt, 2022). amid many of them are the discrepancy between the cannabis users’ experiences in the countries where very little loosening happened and the liberalizing vanguard, that is very well accessible through global media, migration flows, and digital interconnectedness. in the meantime, the medical cannabis regulation started to happen, even among the more conservative states. it introduced both different perspectives on the illicit drug that gained a new social meaning as a healing substance and a different industry that populated—to some extent—the formerly gray zone of illegal supply. this paper looks at the discussions of polish drug forum users who exercise anonymity to produce knowledge about and access to cannabis and facilitate its use at the slow waning of prohibition. it does so by analyzing how the emergence of the medical cannabis industry has been accommodated within the social world of cannabis users online. it also tracks the discursive reception of the emergence of the cbd industry within online drug discussions. last, but not least, it studies the convergence of selfcare narratives within the cannabis social worlds with the medicalization and selfhealing stories underpinning the two industries. medical cannabis was introduced in 2017 in poland, disrupting conservative attitudes towards cannabis and drugs in general (wagner et al., 2021). it also quivered the illicit supply of cannabis bringing alternative access to the substance to the black market reliant users. simultaneously, a low thc cannabis product, the cannabidiols (cbd) emerged in a gray-zone between the illicit drugs and alternative medicine, herbal healing or therapeutic self-care use (fortin et al., 2023). the cannabis use itself started undergoing differentiated normalization within the cannabis social world (wanke, 2023), bringing more heterogenous and reflexive social constructions of this drug use to the growing number of polish users caught between liberalization in various western countries, permissive global cannabis culture and local conservative backlash and harsh legal regulations (wanke et al., 2022). the subcultural nature of the cannabis social world, together with the fact that the users are scattered around the country, contributed to the emergence of digital spaces where drugs are discussed and the social world thrives below the radar amid societal negligence or stigma (bilgrei, 2018). methods the study relies on qualitative thematic analysis of the content of the biggest and arguably the oldest polish surface web drug forum. this study draws on more than 8000 forum posts selected in a purposive sampling procedure. 15 cannabis related threads spread across the whole spectrum of issues, ranging from the quality of substance, setting of use, side effects, dependency, or medical cannabis were selected. the time span runs through two decades of online discussions, from 2000 to early 2023. the data was semi-open-coded according to the pre-conceptualized categorization key. primary categories included complication of cannabis praise, cannabis user reflexivity, and grass-roots harm reduction. all of these were cross analyzed with medical or selfcare narratives. results the results reveal that there has been a widespread subcultural accommodation of medical cannabis. users anticipated its introduction in the hope of gaining access to legal supply. digital publics serve as bulletin boards about availability in selected pharmacies, a backchannel about the quality of the product and repository of tips and recommendations about obtaining the prescription thus “hacking” the medical supply industry. at the same time, we observed an emergence of self-care and reflexive cannabis narratives, where traditional cultural framing of the substance as source of fun and pleasure (sandberg, 2013) has converged with medical purposes narrative. imposing self-regulation of use, experimenting with tolerance, acknowledging one’s harmful use, anticipating or counteracting potential harms, and caring for others are all present. last but not least, mental health and other issues are addressed actively in the discussions and the ways of using cannabis to tackle them are offered. additionally, we discovered peer harm reduction information in this forum. convergence with the emerging cannabis industries is apparent, as these below the radar publics actively discuss quality of product, growth and distribution. they accumulate knowledge and know-how for the consumers that is otherwise lacking due to the unregulated or illicit nature of the cannabis market in poland. conclusions the application of the refracted public model illuminates how the user imposed transience of the forum enables its public existence and discoverability for users scattered around the country and keeping their drug identity low key. the discussions they engage in are decodable only to those who operate within the cannabis social worlds and these conversations are insider based (abidin, 2021). these conditions allow for the otherwise illicit and restricted content to surface and resonate. at the intersection of the institutionalized healthcare industry and the cannabis social world, an interesting tension occurred that blurred the boundaries between medical and other purposes of use. it can be called the “medicalization of the revolt” (pedersen & sandberg, 2013), as the previously counter-cultural meanings inside the firmly detached social world underwent transformations to adhere to expert language about and specialist framing of cannabis use for medical purposes. this happened to gain social legitimation and counteract stigma (reiman et al., 2023). this process is messy and far from being complete (reid, 2023), yet requires drifts between private and public. looking at what the digitally enabled discussions reveal sheds light on the possible social accommodation of cannabis once the governing bodies decide to regulate it. the affordances of internet discussion forums (davis & chouinard, 2016; ronzhyn et al., 2023) and their vernacular adaptation by the drug users allowed us to study their social worlds operating below the radar of public interest (abidin, 2021). data availability the data underlying this article are available on zenodo under the following dois: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10810251. funding the present research was supported by the polish national science centre (narodowe centrum nauki) grant 2021/43/b/hs6/00710. references abidin, c. (2021). from “networked publics” to “refracted publics”: a companion framework for researching “below the radar” studies. social media + society, 7(1), 205630512098445. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120984458 barratt, m. j. (2011). discussing illicit drugs in public internet forums: visibility, stigma, and pseudonymity. proceedings of the 5th international conference on communities and technologies, brisbane, australia. bilgrei, o. r. (2018). broscience: creating trust in online drug communities. new media & society, 20(8), 2712–2727. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817730331 boyd, danah. (2010). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in a networked self. routledge. davis, j. l., & chouinard, j. b. (2016). theorizing affordances: from request to refuse. bulletin of science, technology & society, 36(4), 241–248. https://doi.org/10.1177/0270467617714944 fortin, d., di beo, v., carrieri, p., & barré, t. (2023). therapeutic use and other reasons to consume cannabidiol: insight from the french and italian contexts. journal of psychoactive drugs, 0(0), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/02791072.2023.2285843 marwick, a. e., & boyd, danah. (2014). networked privacy: how teenagers negotiate context in social media. new media & society, 16(7), 1051–1067. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814543995 pedersen, w., & sandberg, s. (2013). the medicalisation of revolt: a sociological analysis of medical cannabis users. sociology of health & illness, 35(1), 17–32. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9566.2012.01476.x reid, m. (2023). how the incomplete medicalization of cannabis shapes patient experiences. sociological focus, 56(1), 97–114. https://doi.org/10.1080/00380237.2022.2163014 reiman, a., meisel, j. s., capler, r., & paulding mccready, d. (2023). medical cannabis identity and public health paternalism. public health in practice, 5, 100372. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhip.2023.100372 ronzhyn, a., cardenal, a. s., & batlle rubio, a. (2023). defining affordances in social media research: a literature review. new media & society, 25(11), 3165–3188. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221135187 sandberg, s. (2013). cannabis culture: a stable subculture in a changing world. criminology & criminal justice, 13(1), 63–79. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895812445620 tzanetakis, m., & south, n. (eds.). (2023). digital transformations of illicit drug markets: reconfiguration and continuity. emerald publishing. https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/75912 wagner, a., polak, p., & świątkiewicz-mośny, m. (2021). from community of practice to epistemic community – law, discipline and security in the battle for the legalisation of medical cannabis in poland. sociology of health & illness, 43(2), 316–335. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.13217 wanke, m. (2023). different-paced normalisation: cannabis social worlds in non liberalised contexts. in normalisation re-visited: drugs in europe in the 21st century (pp. 110–126). pabst science publishers. wanke, m., piejko-płonka, m., & deutschmann, m. (2022). social worlds and symbolic boundaries of cannabis users in poland. drugs: education, prevention and policy, 29(4), 334–344. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687637.2022.2046706 wheeldon, j., & heidt, j. (2022). cannabis criminology: inequality, coercion, and illusions of reform. drugs: education, prevention and policy, 29(4), 426–438. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687637.2022.2081531 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): proferes, n. (2022, november). anticipating socio-technical change: users beliefs around reddit’s ipo. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. anticipating socio-technical change: users beliefs around reddit’s ipo nicholas proferes arizona state university introduction platform changes are a phenomenon endlessly confronting social media users, impacting how they create and consume content. tiktok has made multiple alterations to its recommended video algorithms, such as a 2021 adjustment meant to reduce the amount of exposure users have to videos with emotionally volatile content (allison, 2021). interface adjustments occur on an almost weekly basis on facebook (mcglaun, 2017). and twitter famously ditched the 140-character tweet length in favor of 280 characters to give users more space to express themselves (perez, 2018). however, these kinds of technical changes are often tied to an underlying economic need. tiktok was likely seeking to head off potential regulation. facebook interface changes frequently come with greater ad-density. and while twitter boasts that it’s the platform for short-form communication, too much brevity can frustrate users and drive them elsewhere, thus diminishing advertising views. social media platforms are made of more than their computational elements. van dijck (2013) writes that social media platforms are constituted by two interconnecting spheres: a techno-cultural sphere made up of things such as data structures, algorithms, interfaces, and protocols, and a socio-economic sphere constituted by the platform’s ownership structure, business practices, and policies. the two are intimately connected. for example, the business models of a platform may inform the way default settings are arranged on the site or the kinds of interfaces offered to users. changes in one may necessitate changes in the other. while users often encounter platform change and respond to it directly through the techno-cultural side, the socio-economic conditions that undergird a platform ultimately play a formative role in user experience. the social media platform “reddit” is, as of writing, in the midst of a significant planned shift in their socio-economic foundation. reddit’s owners are moving the company from being a privately held business to a publicly-traded one, having confidentially submitted a registration with the united states securities and exchange commission in december of 2021 (roof & tse, 2022). as a publicly traded company, reddit’s directors will have fiduciary duties towards stockholders. in practice, this means reddit’s leaders will pursue corporate interest in generating revenue. one significant question reddit users will face is: what changes will occur to the platform in light of this new socio-economic reality? this is not an inconsequential question. currently, reddit generates revenue through advertising and by selling “reddit coins” to users which can be used to purchase awards for other users on the site. the site will be under pressure to show profitability, and advertisers may have qualms about reddit content as reddit has been noted for a “longtime laissez-faire approach to content moderation, often preferring a hands-off approach to some of the most noxious ideas and people on the internet” (isaac, 2022). indeed, the site has a history of scandal driven in part by the kinds of content that have appeared on the site (hern, 2015). while scholarly attention in domains such as human-computer interaction (hci) has focused on tracing how users understand and respond to changes in the interface features of social media, less consideration has been given to how users make sense of the socio-economic side of the social media platform equation. further complicating matters, the socio-economic conditions of a platform tend to be far less known to users (proferes, 2017), as business processes, platform ownership, and governance models are not as immediately accessible to users as algorithms, protocols, and interfaces. to help unpack how users make sense of socio-economic change on social media platforms and what it might mean for their experiences, this study examines usergenerated discourse about the reddit ipo that has been shared on reddit itself. through a thematic analysis (vaismoradi et al., 2013) of reddit posts and comments mentioning the reddit ipo made to “r/announcements,” “r/theoryofreddit,” “r/askreddit,” “r/stocks,” “r/wallstreetbets,” and “r/technology,” this study examines how users discuss and make sense of socio-economic change in this social media environment. findings from this study focus on three themes: • what aspects of the techno-cultural facets of reddit (defaults, protocols, algorithms, and interfaces) users believe might change as a result of the ipo. • what policy changes users believe might occur on reddit, particularly in relation to moderation practices and the kinds of content allowed on the site. • user beliefs about the particular interests that these changes may serve. as previous work on folk theories about social media has focused primarily on how users hypothesize about how algorithms work (devito et al., 2017; karizat et al., 2021), this study helps fill in an important gap. findings from this thematic analysis help detail how users build mental models of both the techno-cultural and socio-economic sphere and their mutual constitution, and how they anticipate change. references allison, m. (2021). tiktok’s tweaking its algorithm for mental health reasons. digital trends. https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/tiktok-algorithm-for-you-curation-change/ devito, m. a., gergle, d., & birnholtz, j. (2017). “algorithms ruin everything”: #riptwitter, folk theories, and resistance to algorithmic change in social media. proceedings of the 2017 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 3163–3174. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025659 hern, a. (2015, december 30). how reddit took on its own users – and won. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/30/reddit-ellen-pao isaac, m. (2021). reddit takes its first official step toward going public. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/business/reddit-ipo.html karizat, n., delmonaco, d., eslami, m., & andalibi, n. (2021). algorithmic folk theories and identity: how tiktok users co-produce knowledge of identity and engage in algorithmic resistance. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 5(cscw2), 305:1-305:44. https://doi.org/10.1145/3476046 mcglaun, s. (2017). facebook tweaks app ui for better news feed readability. hothardware. https://hothardware.com/news/facebook-tweaks-news-feed-for-easierreading perez, s. (2018). twitter’s doubling of character count from 140 to 280 had little impact on length of tweets. techcrunch. https://social.techcrunch.com/2018/10/30/twittersdoubling-of-character-count-from-140-to-280-had-little-impact-on-length-of-tweets/ proferes, n. (2017). information flow solipsism in an exploratory study of beliefs about twitter. social media + society, 3(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117698493 roof, k., & tse, c. (2022, january 7). reddit taps morgan stanley and goldman sachs for ipo. bloomberg.com. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-0107/reddit-is-said-to-tap-morgan-stanley-goldman-sachs-for-ipo vaismoradi, m., turunen, h., & bondas, t. (2013). content analysis and thematic analysis: implications for conducting a qualitative descriptive study. nursing & health sciences, 15(3), 398–405. van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. oxford university press. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): bessant, c. (2024, november). family privacy, family autonomy and coercion in digital health. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. family privacy, family autonomy and coercion in digital health claire bessant northumbria university digital technology is increasingly being used to support children’s health. expectant mothers may be pressured to use pregnancy trackers, to monitor their health, to prioritise their unborn child’s well-being (neely and reed, 2023) and ‘to conform to the ideal of the “digitised reproductive citizen” (lupton, 2020, 399). parents of new-borns are similarly offered, and encouraged to use, an array of digital health tools (ball and keegan, 2022; bonafide jamison and foglia, 2017; langton, 2023). many older children also wear smart watches monitoring their activity and sleep, with the world health organisation highlighting the potential such wearable devices have for tackling a worldwide need to increase physical activity, particularly in adolescents (who, 2018). the monitoring of children’s health and wellbeing is not new; lupton and williamson (2017, 783) recognise that ‘[c]hildren have been subjected to close monitoring as part of the government of childhood for centuries in an attempt to promote their health’. what is different is the breadth and depth of such monitoring and the way such information is used. as many researchers recognise, children are increasingly datafied; our society is one where the digital is viewed as ‘the norm’ (barassi, 2019). whilst much academic focus has been upon the role of big tech in this caring dataveillance (lupton, 2020; barassi, 2017), the state is also involved in the coerced datification of children (barassi, 2020; bessant, 2022). this paper uses family privacy theory and dataveillance literature as twin lenses through which to explore the state’s use of telehealth technologies to support children’s healthcare, and the contribution such technologies are making to children’s datafication. these issues have received little consideration in the literature. family privacy family privacy is an important ideology which emerged in the nineteenth century. it still informs legal and political understandings of the family, and influences laws governing the family’s relationship with state and society (diduck and kaganas, 2012; fineman, 1999; hayes and higgins, 2014). respect for family privacy is commonly understood to entail state non-intervention in ordinary family life (fineman, 1999; kim, 2006, woodhouse, 1999). some scholars, however, recognise that family privacy may be more widely understand to entail family autonomy, or a right to determine matters relating to the family (cahn, 1999; bessant, 2023). such a perspective is evident in england’s children act 1989, which introduced the notion of ‘parental responsibility’, confirming that ‘it is parents, rather than the court or the state, who take primary responsibility for their children’s upbringing and who are the primary decision makers in matters concerning children’s welfare’ (re w, 2012). family privacy can also be understood to afford parents control over family information, and a right to determine how children’s information is used (berardo, 1999; bessant 2023). an understanding of parents as protectors of children’s privacy underpins the uk and eu general data protection regulations whilst the parental role as protectors of children’s rights and interests is recognised in articles 5 and 18 of the united nations convention on the rights of the child. the uncrc itself explicitly affords children rights, including a right to privacy and a right to be heard on matters affecting them (articles 12 and 16). digitalisation in children’s healthcare whilst an extensive body of literature considers the privacy implications of commercial apps designed to support parental monitoring of children’s wellbeing, far less consideration has been given to how state healthcare bodies use technology to support children’s care. that state healthcare professionals may encourage or coerce parents to engage with digital technologies is highlighted in katrin langton’s (2023) work on australian breastfeeding apps. langton identifies an expectation that parents will ‘perform good responsible parenthood through datafication as a form of health monitoring’ and a potential privileging of technology and the data it produces over parent’s own knowledge and experience. such a focus upon data over knowledge contrasts with the basic tenets of family privacy ideology, which understands that parents are uniquely positioned to prepare their children for life, to protect them, educate them, meet their needs, and guarantee their rights (peterman & jones, 2003; moller-okin, 1989). it could also be argued that this privileging of data over parental knowledge and experience and an expectation that parents agree to use of technologies which impact upon children’s privacy conflicts with traditional understandings of parents as the best people to make decisions regarding their children. to develop understanding of how digital technology, particularly telehealth and remote monitoring technology, is used in paediatric healthcare across england, freedom of information requests were additionally sent to 42 integrated care boards (icbs) and 38 nhs trusts between august and october 2024. further information was gathered from the nhs transformation directorate’s website. 16 icbs and 18 trusts confirmed that telehealth is used to support paediatric healthcare in their area and, more specifically that monitoring technologies are being used, many collecting extensive amounts of data about children. technologies being utilised include virtual wards (where patients may be reviewed using video technology) and apps, wearables and other medical devices which monitor patients’ vital signs (uk authority, 2023). for example, the mymobileapp is used by some child patients with anorexia nervosa to monitor vital signs and to record answers to symptom related questions (tunstall, 2022), the patientmpower app is being used for remote monitoring some children with cystic fibrosis (nhs england, undated) and diabetes monitoring systems offered by dexcom, libre and glooko are also widely used. such technologies afford benefits both to the nhs and to families, enabling patients to monitor physical symptoms and recovery without the need for face-to-face contact, maximising the effective use of nhs staff resources, reducing the risk of hospitalacquired infections, reducing travel costs and minimising disruption to schooling or parental employment. such, digital monitoring nonetheless has potential to reshape assumptions about good parenting and to exacerbate existing concerns around the coerced datafication of children. key issues the uk general data protection regulation provides a valuable framework for exploring what transparent, lawful and fair use of children’s data entails in the context of digitised healthcare. it explicitly obliges data controllers (e.g. trusts) to provide child data subjects or their parents with information about how and why their data is being used. documentation provided by trusts reveals, however, that children and their parents are often not told by the nhs how such technologies use patient data. as one trust explained, it is for patients or their parents to review the privacy policies that explain how these technologies use patient data. important questions are raised about how the nhs could better support parents and children to understand the implications of these technologies for children’s privacy. parents have a key role to play as children’s privacy stewards but are not being supported by the state to effectively fulfil this role. where health professionals encourage child patients’ parents to register with health technology providers but do not inform them how children’s data will be used, the parent’s role as steward of the child’s privacy is diminished. one might argue that the state is coercing parents into facilitating children’s datafication. this paper ultimately argues both for greater acknowledgement of the state’s role in children's health monitoring and for greater attention to be paid to children’s privacy and the agency of child patients and their parents. references ball, h.l., & keegan, a.a. (2022). digital health tools to support parents with parentinfant sleep and mental well-being. npj digit med, 5,185. doi: 10.1038/s41746-02200732-4. barassi, v. (2017). babyveillance? expecting parents, online surveillance and the cultural specificity of pregnancy apps. social media + society, 3(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117707188 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117707188 barassi, v. (2019). datafied citizens in the age of coerced digital participation. sociological research online, 24(3), 414. https://doi.org/10.1177/1360780419857734 barassi, v. (2020). child data citizen: how tech companies are profiling us from before birth. mit press. berardo, f. (1998). family privacy: issues and concepts. j fam iss, 19(1), 4. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/019251398019001002 bessant, c. (2022). children, public sector data-driven decision-making and article 12 uncrc. european journal of law and technology, 13(2). https://ejlt.org/index.php/ejlt/article/view/872 bessant, c. (2023). twenty-first-century family privacy. child and family law quarterly, 35(3), 251. bonafide, c.p., jamison, d.t., & foglia, e.e. (2017). the emerging market of smartphone-integrated infant physiologic monitors. jama, 317(4), 353-354. doi: 10.1001/jama.2016.19137. cahn, n. (1999). models of family privacy. george washington law rev 67(5), 1225 diduck, a., & kaganas, f. (2012). family law, gender & the state: text, cases & materials. (3rd ed.) hart publishing. fineman, m.a. (1999). what place for family privacy? george washington law review, 67, 1207 hayes, a., & higgins, d. (2014) families, policy and the law: selected essays on contemporary issues for australia. australian institute for family studies. kim, s. (2006). reconstructing family privacy. hastings law journal 57, 557 langton, k. (2023) constructing contemporary parenthood in digital spaces: infant feeding apps and the mediation of australian parenthood. [conference paper]. the datafied family, university of surrey, online. lupton, d., (2020) caring dataveillance: women’s use of apps to monitor pregnancy and children. in lelia green, donell holloway, kylie stevenson, leslie haddon and tama leaver (eds.), the routledge companion to digital media and children. (pp 392402). routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351004107 lupton, d. & williamson, b. (2017). the datafied child: the dataveillance of children and implications for their rights. new media & society, 19(5), 780-794 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1461444816686328 moller-okin, s. (1989). justice, gender and the family. basic books. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1360780419857734 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/019251398019001002 https://ejlt.org/index.php/ejlt/article/view/872 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351004107 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1461444816686328 neely, e. and reed, a. (2023) towards a mother-centred maternal health promotion, health promotion international, 38(2). https://doi.org/10.1093/heapro/daad014 nhs black country integrated care board. (2022, 23 december). local baby boy home for christmas thanks to virtual hospital ward. https://blackcountry.icb.nhs.uk/news-andevents/latest-news/local-baby-boy-home-christmas nhs england. (undated). remote monitoring for virtual clinics and shared care in paediatric cystic fibrosis. https://transform.england.nhs.uk/key-tools-and-info/digitalplaybooks/respiratory-digital-playbook/remote-monitoring-for-virtual-clinics-and-sharedcare-in-paediatric-cystic-fibrosis/ peterman, l., and jones t. (2003) defending family privacy. journal of law & family studies 5, 71. re w (direct contact) [2012] ewca civ 999. tunstall. (2022, 18 may). remote health monitoring for eating disorders. https://www.tunstall.co.uk/resources/case-studies/2022/05/cornwall-partnership-nhsfoundation-trust---remote-health-monitoring-for-eating-disorders/# uk authority. (2023, 7 july). nhs england extends virtual wards to child healthcare. https://www.ukauthority.com/articles/nhs-england-extends-virtual-wards-to-childhealthcare/ woodhouse, b. b. (1999). the dark side of family privacy. george washington law review 67, 1247 world health organization. (2018). global action plan on physical activity 2018-2030. https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/272722/9789241514187eng.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y https://doi.org/10.1093/heapro/daad014 https://blackcountry.icb.nhs.uk/news-and-events/latest-news/local-baby-boy-home-christmas https://blackcountry.icb.nhs.uk/news-and-events/latest-news/local-baby-boy-home-christmas https://transform.england.nhs.uk/key-tools-and-info/digital-playbooks/respiratory-digital-playbook/remote-monitoring-for-virtual-clinics-and-shared-care-in-paediatric-cystic-fibrosis/ https://transform.england.nhs.uk/key-tools-and-info/digital-playbooks/respiratory-digital-playbook/remote-monitoring-for-virtual-clinics-and-shared-care-in-paediatric-cystic-fibrosis/ https://transform.england.nhs.uk/key-tools-and-info/digital-playbooks/respiratory-digital-playbook/remote-monitoring-for-virtual-clinics-and-shared-care-in-paediatric-cystic-fibrosis/ https://www.tunstall.co.uk/resources/case-studies/2022/05/cornwall-partnership-nhs-foundation-trust---remote-health-monitoring-for-eating-disorders/ https://www.tunstall.co.uk/resources/case-studies/2022/05/cornwall-partnership-nhs-foundation-trust---remote-health-monitoring-for-eating-disorders/ https://www.ukauthority.com/articles/nhs-england-extends-virtual-wards-to-child-healthcare/ https://www.ukauthority.com/articles/nhs-england-extends-virtual-wards-to-child-healthcare/ https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/272722/9789241514187-eng.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/272722/9789241514187-eng.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): levy-eshkol, k. and ribak, r. (2023, october). identifying with privacy: references to privacy in developers’ github profiles. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. identifying with privacy: references to privacy in developers’ github profiles keren levy-eshkol department of communication, university of haifa rivka ribak department of communication, university of haifa in a competitive environment in which one of the marks of good developers is their proficiency in the extraction and analysis of users’ personal information, how do developers negotiate the cultural value of privacy? this study, now underway, is part of a larger project that investigates “privacy” closest to where it is materialized in code – namely, in the open source code-sharing platform github. github opened in 2008 and has been owned by microsoft since 2018. according to recent data, it is hosting more than 62 million users1 and 200 million code repositories (36 million of which are public2) – the most widely used platform for open-source software development and more recently, talent recruitment. using github rest api and python scripts written for this purpose, we extracted from developers’ profiles 2025 bio descriptions containing the word “privacy.” these form the corpus of the current analysis, in which we map articulations of privacy in developers’ self-presentation to study how they negotiate the potential tension between their commitment to privacy and their professional employability. mapping privacy in developers’ self-presentation conceptualizing developers as cultural producers – mediators who translate cultural values into the code that in turn becomes culture (ribak, 2019) – github provides us with access to these producers unobtrusively, in their “natural” environment. github is a hub of code development, hosting developers who advocate open-source software, commercial enterprises employing open-source solutions, and talent scouts seeking potential additions to their teams. as such, it plays an important role in shaping 1 https://github.com/search?q=type:user&type=users 2 https://venturebeat.com/2018/11/08/github-passes-100-million-repositories/; https://github.com/search?q=is:public https://github.com/search?q=type:user&type=users https://venturebeat.com/2018/11/08/github-passes-100-million-repositories/ https://github.com/search?q=is:public developers’ personal and professional identities, while allowing us to explore how developers curate their online personas and manage the two (flisfeder, 2015). to analyze developers' usage of the term “privacy” within their bios, we used github search tools and developed custom python scripts to identify profile descriptions containing references to “privacy” in the text. we collected 2025 profiles generated between 2008 and 2021 that contained the word “privacy,” and saved them in a single file that formed the dataset for the automated analysis. using vosviewer software, an nlp tool designed for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks (van eck & waltman, 2010), we identified four distinct clusters that, based on the words in each cluster, we labeled: “freedom” (in red), “privacy advocacy” (green), “academia” (blue), and “professional experience” (yellow). figure 1: developers’ profile words associated with the word “privacy” the proximity of the red/freedom and green/advocacy clusters suggests that developers who prioritize privacy as a human right tend to intertwine it with open-source practices. by contrast, the interconnections between the blue/academia and yellow/professional clusters imply that certain developers include privacy as part of their learned skills. the privacy expert as a freedom fighter to study these relationships further, we analyzed the interconnections of “freedom” and “experience” and their relationships with words from other clusters. by pinpointing “freedom” on the vosviewer map, we discerned its associations with various words and word pairs. notably, “freedom” exhibited the strongest co-occurrence with terms and word pairs found in the green/advocacy cluster, such as “hacker,” “linux,” “foss,” “bitcoin,” and “decentralization.” additionally, it was associated with words from the red/freedom cluster, including “right,” “human right,” “internet,” and “free software,” as illustrated in figure 2. figure 2: links associated with the word “freedom” these relationships between “freedom” and green/advocacy cluster suggest that developers link open source to freedom, particularly in the context of privacy. using voyant-tools.org, a scholarly text-analysis software that provides a key word in context (kwic) interface for interaction with the text, we identified profile descriptions that explicitly articulate this connection and include words from both clusters: “freedom and privacy geek open source the world!”; “security engineer and software developer enthusiast. … believe in privacy, open source, and freedom.” furthermore, these profiles claim that open source code fosters privacy, in contrast to proprietary software, which is often perceived as a “black box”: “i am an avid linux user. i believe that users have the right to privacy and a way to use their system the way they see fit and not the way a company tells you how.” when we focus on the term “experience” on the vosviewer map, we find associations with words and word pairs such as “ph.d. student,” “privacy enthusiast,” and “'freedom.” figure 3: words associated with the word “experience” beyond highlighting their professional skills, some developers also passionately express their dedication to privacy: "c/c++ and python dev. advanced linux/unix experience. privacy enthusiast." the use of terms like “freedom” and “privacy enthusiast” is not trivial, considering the extraction imperative (zuboff, 2022) that undergirds the digital economy. moreover, in contrast to the conventional linkage between employability and a business-oriented mindset (gershon, 2017), these developers do not perceive a conflict between the requirements imposed by software companies to align with their business models, and their belief in the value of privacy and its role in preserving freedom. rather than focus exclusively on their professional accomplishments and skills, these developers opt for what may be termed authentic self-presentation, emphasizing privacy and the will to safeguard it: "graphic designer and web developer. supporter of privacy, civil rights, and online liberties. currently working at ..." – arguably seeking employment in a workplace that values the privacy of its users (sieverse et al., 2015). “privacy is a human right. encrypt everything” finally, in three out of four clusters, the term “security” appears in different forms, including “information security,” “privacy & security,” “security & privacy,” and “data protection.” this finding echoes prior research that indicated that developers frequently employ security tools, notably encryption, for safeguarding privacy (hadar et al., 2018). consequently, their perception of privacy may primarily center on security concerns. as one developer wryly observed: “privacy is a human right. encrypt everything.” we conclude by noting the need for a closer reading of the profiles, as the following attempts to reconcile the committed and the professional positions illustrate: “by day, staff engineer; by night, privacy advocate,” and “software engineer, privacy first.” the day/night distinction offers a temporal means to contain professional demands and personal activism within one person. alternatively, by prioritizing privacy, the second bio outlines a hierarchy in which passion informs one’s professional choices. cited references flisfeder, m. (2015). the entrepreneurial subject and the objectivization of the self in social media. south atlantic quarterly, 114(3), 553-570. gershon, i. (2017). down and out in the new economy: how people find (or don’t find) work today. university of chicago press. hadar, i., et al. (2018). privacy by designers: software developers' privacy mindset. empirical software engineering, 23(1), 259-289. ribak, r. (2019). translating privacy: developer cultures in the global world of practice. information, communication & society, 22(6), 838-853. sievers, k., et al. (2015). self-presentation in professional networks: more than just window dressing. computers in human behavior, 50, 25-30. van eck, n., & waltman, l. (2010). software survey: vosviewer, a computer program for bibliometric mapping. scientometrics, 84(2), 523-538. zuboff, s. (2022). surveillance capitalism or democracy? the death match of institutional orders and the politics of knowledge in our information civilization. organization theory, 3(3). selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): carah, n., brown, m.g., tesiram, r., kahukura, h., enright, l., & hawker, k. (2024, october). scroll, print, algorithmically cluster: a co-analysis approach to exploring the interplay between users, platforms and algorithmic models on instagram. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. scroll, print, algorithmically cluster: a co-analysis approach to explore the interplay between users, platforms and algorithmic models on instagram nicholas carah the university of queensland maria gemma brown the university of queensland rani tesiram the university of queensland hine tapairu kahukura the university of queensland lisa enright the university of queensland kiah hawker the university of queensland background instagram turns 15 in 2025. for users who have been on the platform for much of that time, their profiles are a biography of their own lives, their visual practices and the platform itself. instagram is ‘more than one thing’: a platform, a database of images and videos, an interface for posting, swiping and tapping, algorithmic models that classify and curate (leaver et al. 2020). instagram has industrialised and platformised the everyday practices of photography for its billions of users (authors). our posts and stories are both an archive of our lives and visual practices, but also part of the historical socio-technical process of assembling image data sets for training machine vision systems. this paper presents the final part of a multi-year project where we use a combination of cultural and computational methods to explore the relationships between our everyday image-making practices and the algorithmic models of instagram (authors). in the earlier phases we developed a purpose-built machine vision system that approximated the capacity of instagram to cluster images together based on visual patterns. we have ‘critically simulated’ the capacity of machine vision models to recognise and reproduce the patterns in the visual cultures of instagram including images posted on hashtags relating to cultural events like music festivals, food and dining scenes, and intimate publics surrounding alternative art, culture and fashion. we have also explored the capacity of machine vision models to recognise visual patterns in advertisements on instagram. our aim in this larger project is not only to describe the visual practices of users, but also to enable a speculative exploration of how instagram uses machine vision to inform the recommendation engines that curate our feeds and target advertising. the study in this paper we present findings from a study with 25 participants who have used instagram for five or more years as part of their professional or creative practices. participants include photographers, designers, musicians, influencers and others who work in the cultural industries. we begin by asking participants to download their archive of images they have posted to their instagram profile or stories and share it with the researchers, using the personal information download tools provided by meta. their collections range in size from 500 up to more than 10,000 posts and stories. we process their archive by randomly selecting 500 images we print as photographs and uploading all their images to our purpose-built machine vision system (tan 2020). our system consists of a three-step data processing pipeline: (1) embedding, where images are mapped into numeric feature vectors, (2) clustering, where images are associated with each other based on similarities perceived by the algorithms by computing distances in their numerical embeddings, and (3) creating a visualisation, where clusters of images are presented in an interface for exploration and analysis. figure 1 shows the visualisation interface featuring a cluster of images from the instagram profile of one of the researchers. on the left hand side are clusters of images, with the number in the pink box indicating how many images are in that cluster. if the user clicks on a cluster, they are taken into a second layer of clusters. as they move through the clusters they can see how the machine vision system has grouped their images in increasingly fine-grained ways. figure 1: the user interface of our machine vision system once the images are printed and clustered, we meet with the participant for a coanalysis interview that unfolds in three steps. firstly, we undertake a ‘scrollback’ through their instagram profile (robards and lincoln 2017). through this process we explore with them what they post to their instagram profile, whether their practices have changed over time, and how that relates to changes in their lives, professional or creative practices, and the platform. secondly, we give participants the stack of 500 photographs we have printed from their profile and stories posts. where the first step only explores the archive of posts on their profile, this step introduces the ephemeral posts from their stories feed that are provided by instagram in the data download. we ask participants to organise their images in any way they like. this process takes time, and as an order emerges, we discuss with participants their choices that prompts reflection on their digital archive, disconnected from the chronological order of their profile. thirdly, leaving their manually-sorted images on the table we ask participants to open and explore the machine visualisation, describing as they go how they think the algorithmic model has organised their images, whether they can explain its logic, and whether its clustering reflects their own. scrolling, printing and algorithmically clustering instagram posts our novel integration of data donation, computational and scrollback interview methods brings to the fore the multiple uses and values of images on instagram. by working with participants to download, scroll, print and algorithmically cluster their instagram profiles and stories we develop an intimate form of platform biography (burgess and baym 2020). this situated method of co-analysis contributes to efforts to investigate the algorithmically curated and ephemeral nature of instagram’s culture and platformization (bainott et al. 2021, san cornelio and roig 2020). participants describe how their practices of expressing themselves, often over the course of a decade of their lives, are entangled with the development of platform interfaces, features, algorithms and business models. by moving back and forth between their profile, the printed out images and the machine vision system we explore their images on, off and underneath the platform interface. the process stimulates the algorithmic imaginary (bucher 2017, bishop 2018) of participants as they offer a range of creative, thoughtful and frustrated responses to how the curation of their images by algorithmic models reflects and diverges from their own practices. some organise their printed images chronologically, sorting them into periods that reflect their lives; some around objects, scenes or places like images; some around practices like travel, work, and social events. then when they move to the machine visualisation some express a sense of eeriness or creepiness about patterns in their images the machine vision system sees that they hadn’t recognised. some are struck by the childlike and banal nature of the model’s choices. they offer rich descriptions of how machine vision doesn’t ‘get’ narrative or context, even though it successfully identifies patterns. some express a sense that their instagram profile has two ‘audiences’: the people they imagine viewing and interacting with their stories, and the algorithmic systems that sort and cluster them. over the course of a decade and a half our everyday practices of making and sharing images have been integrated into the industrial process of training machine vision models. this training period has been a formative stage in the emerging development of models that can synthetically generate and augment images at scale. machine vision tools are useful not only for exploring platform-scale questions about classification and recommendation, but also as part of participatory approaches that elicit and develop the algorithmic imaginaries of instagram users. we propose that the intimate platform biographies we develop with participants are valuable in making sense of how our image making and sharing practices are not only archives of our personal lives, but archives for the industrial process of training machine vision models. references bainotti, l., caliandro, a., & gandini, a. (2021). from archive cultures to ephemeral content, and back: studying instagram stories with digital methods. new media & society, 23(12), 3656-3676. bishop, s. (2019). managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip. new media & society, 21(11-12), 2589-2606. bucher taina. 2017. “the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms.” information communication & society 20 (1): 30–44. burgess, j., & baym, n. k. (2022). twitter: a biography. nyu press. cornelio, g. s., & roig, a. (2020). mixed methods on instagram research: methodological challenges in data analysis and visualization. convergence, 26(5-6), 1125-1143. leaver, t., highfield, t., & abidin, c. (2020). instagram: visual social media cultures. john wiley & sons. robards, b., & lincoln, s. (2017). uncovering longitudinal life narratives: scrolling back on facebook. qualitative research, 17(6), 715-730. tan, x.y. (2020). image machine. github. retrieved from: https://github.com/qutdmrc/imagemachine selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): rossi, l, segerberg, a, magnani, m, arminio, l, (2024, october). do you see what i see? emotional reation to visual contentin the online debate about climate change. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. do you see what i see? emotional reaction to visual content in the online debate about climate change luca rossi it university of copenhagen alexandra segerberg uppsala university matteo magnani uppsala university luigi arminio it university of copenhagen this paper explores the visual dimension of the hypothesized echo chamber in online climate discourse. the presence of echo chambers separating climate ideologically distinct groups in online climate discourse is a repeat finding in several studies. yet these repeat results run counter to the consensus that expectations of social media amplified echo chambers are exaggerated in most cases, and there are also some contradictory findings in the case of online climate communication. some analyses suggest that there is more interaction going on between groups on divergent sides than commonly recognized, and the possibility has been put forward that the findings of starkly separate spheres have to do with where and how the matter has been studied online. we focus on the role of visual content in these processes. images are recognized to be important in climate communication, helping to bring complex issues close to home, mobilize action, and shape support for climate policy. yet the scope of their role in online climate discourse is still little understood. we argue that visual content has the potential to contribute to a two-fold (de)polarizing dynamic in this context. on the one hand, images are the kind of content that can cross ideological boundaries to become a focal point for engagement from opposing sides, thereby drawing separate spheres together. on the other hand, audiences with divergent ideological, psychological and cultural predisposition may react in diverging ways to similar visual content. this means that engaging with common content can still underpin and amplify dynamics of affect and antagonism. in order to examine the visual dimension of online climate discourse, and in particular whether visual content supports echo chambers in this context, the study analyses the sharing of visual content across facebook pages and groups that diverge in climate ideological stance. we ask the following questions: (1) whether visual content posted in the context of progressive action and activism is shared also on pages and groups that oppose such progressive climate action and activism; (2) whether emotional reaction to visual content changes as it is shared in ideologically distinct pages and groups; methods the data builds on the online communication performed by a manually curated list of public facebook pages and groups, manually coded as actors or counter actors, respectively advocating for more urgent action against climate change, or supporting climate change denialism and/or objecting to progressive action on climate change. our initial list of pages and groups was compiled by a team of domain experts through a multi-stage process aimed at including not only the major organisations that are active and visible in the public debate about climate change, but also the large galaxy of local groups, communities and semi-formal organisations that play a role in shaping the debate and its public perception (castro et al., 2016; hoppe et al., 2016). the final list counts 423 european public facebook pages and groups. of those 258 have been manually labelled as actors and 165 have been labelled as counter actors. we then collected the posts shared by the 258 actors between july 1, 2023 and october 15, 2023 using crowdtangle 3500 of the 7256 collected posts contained visual content. notice that these coshares of the same visual content have been generated through any of the mechanisms allowed by facebook, e.g. directly sharing a post from our initial list, sharing a post not in our initial list but linking to the same content, or posting a link to the same content without directly sharing another post. for this reason, rather than understanding this data as visual content propagating from actors to counter actors, we should think of it as co-exposure to the same visual content. this rich dataset was then enriched through computational analysis to define an emotional reaction score for each post containing visual content. the emotional reaction score is based on what developed by muraoka et al. (2021) and how much angry reactions dominates over love reactions (and vice versa). results our analysis shows that the vast majority of visual content shared by the actors is not co-shared by the counter-actors. counter-actors only co-share 3.2% of the visual content shared by the actors. this result confirms an extremely small visual overlap between the two communities. nevertheless, the exploration of the small amount of information that is actually co-shared shows some interesting results. figure 1 shows the emotional shift observed when the visual content is shared by the actors and by the counter-actors. it is clearly possible to see a statistically significant movement of the overall emotional reaction towards more “anger” or less “love” when the content is shared among the counter-actors. a qualitative exploration of the reactions to the coshared images shed lights into this interesting emotional divergence. figure 1: movement of the emotional reaction score on co-shared pictures (actors -> counter-actors) figure 2 shows and example of the same image that was shared by both actors and counter actors but generated opposite reactions depending on the ideological alignment of the page/group. the image refers to a recent installation of large wind turbines in germany and it comes with a text that summarises the incentives that have made the local community welcome the project. when shared on actor pages the comments were overwhelmingly positive and included things like “best practice!” or “so was nennt man fortschritt1”. when shared on a counter actors group the tone of the comments changes radically and includes comments like “stinktnach bestechung2” or “wenn es für diesen wahnsinn keinen widerstand gibt, kann es nur an der dummheit und naivität der schipkauer liegen3”, together with longer comments detailing the perceived limitations or economic problems of wind energy. conclusions we have observed how, over a prolonged period of time, only a small fraction of visual content is co-shared by activists groups and counter-actors. moreover, when visual content is co-shared, it generates reactions that seem to correlate with the pre-existing ideological positions of the respective online spaces. this set of observations confirms what can be described as an overall echo chamber structure when it comes to the visual side of the climate debate, with only a small set of content forming a bridge across the groups. this is in line with what has been reported in previous research focused on non-visual aspects of the debate around climate change (bloomfield and tillery, 2019; kaiser and puschmann, 2017; williams et al., 2015). we also show that the presence of common visual content does not represent a meaningful bridge across ideologically diverse communities. the same visual content triggers different, often opposite, reactions that seem to be driven by the pre-existing polarisation between the groups. figure 2: one of the images in the dataset that saw the polarity of the reactions changing depending on the ideological alignment of th efacebook group where it was sahared references e. f. bloomfield and d. tillery. 2019, the circulation of climate change denial online: rhetorical and networking strategies on facebook. environmental communication, 13(1):23–34, 2019. publisher: taylor & francis. h. t. williams, j. r. mcmurray, t. kurz, and f. hugo lambert. network analysis reveals open forums and echo chambers in social media discussions of climate change. global environmental change, 32:126–138, may 2015. issn 09593780. h. t. williams, j. r. mcmurray, t. kurz, and f. hugo lambert. network analysis reveals open forums and echo chambers in social media discussions of climate change. global environmental change, 32:126–138, may 2015. issn 09593780. t. muraoka, j. montgomery, c. lucas, and m. tavits. love and anger in global party politics: facebook reactions to political party posts in 79 democracies. journal of quantitative description: digital media, 1, apr. 2021. issn 2673-8813. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): reddy, a., & kumar, p.c. (2023, october). exploring authenticity on the social media app bereal. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. exploring authenticity on the social media app bereal ananya reddy pennsylvania state university, college of information sciences and technology priya c. kumar pennsylvania state university, college of information sciences and technology introduction and related work bereal, the latest social media app to gain popularity (chan, 2022), explicitly frames itself as a more “authentic” alternative to dominant platforms like instagram and tiktok (duffy & gerrard, 2022). users can post only once per day, in a random two-minute window controlled by the app. posts consist of an image that combines photos from a smartphone’s frontand back-facing cameras. they cannot be edited, and posts made outside the two-minute window are marked late. these features individually are not novel (newton, 2022), but the app packages them as an overt response to current cultural frustration with “all things ‘fake’” (duffy & gerrard, 2022). this strategy is not novel either; salisbury and pooley (2017, p. 1) found that “nearly all [new] snss [social network sites] invoked authenticity…in their promotional materials.” how persuasive is this marketing tactic, especially among a generation that has grown up with social media? to explore this question, we are interviewing young adult bereal users about how they use the app and to what extent they experience bereal as a space for authenticity. much social media scholarship has focused on authenticity in relation to labor, branding, and celebrity, finding that users experience tension between presenting a “true” reflection of their identities online while also protecting themselves and their brands from harm (e.g., abidin, 2022; duffy & hund, 2019; hund, 2023). indeed, such tension may be inherent to the concept of authenticity, which simultaneously impels people “to find and express your true self but also to carefully curate your impressions” (pooley, 2010, p. 72). our initial findings indicate that young adults experience impression management challenges on bereal (reddy & kumar, 2023), which is expected given the performative nature of social media (pooley, 2010). in this paper, we focus on the extent to which young adults consider bereal to facilitate authentic interactions. our ongoing analysis suggests that while participants find bereal to provide a blend of what salisbury and pooley (2017) call real-time and spontaneous authenticity, on a deeper level, participants question whether social platforms can ever act as vessels for authenticity. data collection and analysis from december 2022 through february 2023, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 undergraduate students at a large university in the u.s. we recruited participants by posting fliers in the university student center, campus libraries, academic buildings, and dormitories. interviews ranged from 30 to 90 minutes, with most lasting 40 minutes. all took place in-person, except one that occurred virtually. each participant received a usd$25 credit to their on-campus spending account. the study was approved by our university’s institutional review board (irb). interviews began with warm-up questions asking participants to describe their typical social media use. we then asked questions about their general use of bereal, the kinds of pictures they post on the app, their reactions to bereal features like the random notification and time limits, their thoughts about authenticity and social media, and how bereal compared to other social media apps they used. for our initial analysis, we wrote analytic memos for each interview and identified patterns related to our research question. we devised a set of codes based on these patterns and are applying this inductively developed codebook to the interviews. our analysis is ongoing, and we present preliminary findings below. findings participants describe bereal posts as mundane and emotionally “neutral,” depicting people doing homework, walking to class, watching tv, and lying in bed. one participant likened bereal posts to “old instagram,” saying the app seems to be appealing to nostalgia and “the good ol’ days” of social media. but unlike other platforms, bereal tells users when to post. the result is images that are taken hastily in the middle of a task, but also pictures that start to look the same; participants report seeing the same bedrooms, angles, and activities every day. for some participants, posting and seeing banal updates on bereal of what their friends are doing now does manifest as a blend of real-time and spontaneous authenticity (salisbury & pooley, 2017). one participant said the images of daily mundanities bring her comfort, allowing her to feel more free compared to the selfcritique evoked by instagram. participants also note the difference between capturing a moment on bereal versus a regular phone camera. one participant recalled taking a bereal at an opportune time in the middle of a hockey game, stating that the image stands out compared to the more posed pictures taken on the same day because it was captured “in the moment.” however, other participants perceived limits on bereal’s capability for authenticity. one called bereal “a teaspoon of authenticity. it just shows location and condition.” they said they could see how the setup of the app helps provide a “realer” image but explained that “authenticity means absolute transparency and truth, which is a private practice not a public practice. there is too much to gain from editing yourself.” this appeals to the notion of authenticity as congruence (abidin, 2022), where one’s “true” identity is visible through their self-presentation. however, by distinguishing between private and public practices, the participant suggests that authenticity can perhaps never transcend into public self-presentation. indeed, participants noted that bereal’s lack of editing features and filters did not achieve the ambitious goal of stripping away self-editing, since they still found ways to construct images that portrayed particular visions of themselves. for instance, some participants put off posting because they knew they would be at an event later, not paying much mind to the “late” label on their image. others noted that the app’s twominute limit leaves enough time to change tabs from netflix to homework on a laptop, move to get a friend in the picture, or find an angle that makes them look the nicest. another participant who was also skeptical about bereal’s promise of “realness” said that if someone wants to construct a particular image, they always can. they explained that an instagram user who only posts about exciting activities like a bahamas vacation will only post on bereal when they’re with a big group of friends, always consciously portraying a particular vision of their life, regardless of what social media platform they’re using. this participant’s perspective on authenticity places more weight on the intentions and personality of the user rather than the affordances of a given platform. indeed, some participants questioned the premise of being authentic on social media. one said, “to be really honest, being authentic would be not showing up on social media and just calling my friend on facetime.” discussion our initial findings suggest that while our young adult participants do consider bereal a space for certain kinds of authenticity, many question how far such authenticity goes, asking whether social media can be a venue for authenticity at all. new social media platforms regularly use claims of authenticity as a way to differentiate themselves from dominant platforms (salisbury & pooley, 2017). aligning with banet-weiser’s (2012) argument that authenticity is central to brand culture, our research indicates that young adults may recognize such claims as the marketing tactics they often are. references abidin, c. (209 c.e.). what i talk about when i talk about authenticity: an auto-bibliographic inquiry. in m. heřmanová, m. skey, & t. thurnell-read (eds.), cultures of authenticity. emerald. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80117-936-220221015 banet-weiser, s. (2012). authentic™: the politics of ambivalence in a brand culture. nyu press. chan, s. (2022, october). bereal exceeds 50 million installs worldwide. sensortower. https://sensortower.com/blog/bereal-50m-installs duffy, b. e., & gerrard, y. (2022, august 5). bereal and the doomed quest for online authenticity. wired. https://www.wired.com/story/bereal-doomed-online-authenticity/ https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80117-936-220221015 https://sensortower.com/blog/bereal-50m-installs https://sensortower.com/blog/bereal-50m-installs https://www.wired.com/story/bereal-doomed-online-authenticity/ duffy, b. e., & hund, e. (2019). gendered visibility on social media: navigating instagram’s authenticity bind. international journal of communication, 13(2019), 4983-5002. hund, e. (2023). the influencer industry: the quest for authenticity on social media. princeton university press. newton, c. (2022, july 20). why bereal is breaking out. the verge. https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/20/23271184/bereal-app-popularity-memes-tiktok-time-to pooley, j. (2010). the consuming self: from flappers to facebook. in m. aronczyk & d. powers (eds.), blowing up the brand: critical perspectives on promotional culture (pp. 71–89). peter lang. reddy, a. &, kumar, p.c. (2023, february 10). college students and impression management on bereal. flow. https://www.flowjournal.org/2023/02/college_students_impression_management_bereal/ salisbury, m., & pooley, j. (2017). the #nofilter self: the contest for authenticity among social networking sites, 2002–2016. social sciences, 6(1), 10. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci6010010 https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/20/23271184/bereal-app-popularity-memes-tiktok-time-to https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/20/23271184/bereal-app-popularity-memes-tiktok-time-to https://www.flowjournal.org/2023/02/college_students_impression_management_bereal/ https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci6010010 https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci6010010 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): holi, e. (2024, october). from #bodypositive to #weightlossjourney – exploring weight loss narratives within the fat community. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. from #bodypositive to #weightlossjourney – exploring weight loss narratives within the fat community ella maria holi university of bergen, center for digital narrative introduction as ozempic and other glucagon-like peptide-1 (glp-1) agonists (originally developed for diabetes management) have gained popularity as a weight loss drug (e.g. oswald, 2024), weight loss talk has also infiltrated social media spaces that were once dedicated to promoting body positivity. in the united states, content creators are announcing their departure from the body positive community in the pursuit of weight loss (e.g. baker, 2024). in the nordics, however, some content creators are attempting to position their weight loss journeys as body positive instead of fully turning their backs on the movement. this study, situated in the field of fat studies, explores the conflict between intentional weight loss and body positivity in nordic body positive content creators’ weight loss narratives on instagram and tiktok. as christiansen (2024) points out, fat studies has been “dominated by anglo-american academia” (p. 1), and there is a need for studies that address the unique dynamics of the european context. more specifically, through four case studies, including two content creators from norway, one from sweden, and one from finland, i examine how the content creators position their weight loss narratives in relation to master narratives of fatness, the dominant weight loss narrative, as well as the body positive counter-narrative. i apply positioning analysis (bamberg, 2020; giaxoglou & georgakopoulou, 2021) and theory on master and counter narratives (bamberg, 2004; hochman & spector‐mersel, 2020; mclean & syed, 2015; ronai & cross, 1998). the positioning analysis of the four cases shows that aspects of the dominant weight loss narrative are often intertwined with elements from the body positive one. i argue that the body positive weight loss narratives represent a change in how body positivity is understood. narratives of fatness master narratives are the “culturally shared stories” (mclean & syed, 2015, p. 320) that frame individuals’ identity and self-perceptions (hochman & spector‐mersel, 2020, p. 1045). they provide guidance for “how life should unfold” (hochman & spector-mersel, 2020, p. 1046), and represent shared knowledge of “frames” that events can be plotted against (bamberg, 2004). the master narratives position fatness as a temporary, liminal state (e.g. harjunen, 2009; maor, 2014), as unhealthy and immoral, and a matter of individual responsibility (e.g. harjunen, 2009). weight loss is presented as the only solution to the “problem” of fatness (e.g. harjunen, 2009), promising a more successful and confident future (fox, 2018), and social and self-acceptance (e.g. harjunen, 2009). body positive and fat activist counter narratives are positioned against the stigmatizing master narrative. these counter narratives argue that changing one’s body should not be needed to accept or love it and reject weight loss as the only way to improve health (meleo-erwin, 2011, p. 195). however, as fox (2018) argues, rejecting weight loss goes “against the temporal current of our entire society” (p. 224), making it hard to resist the expectation to lose weight. social media platforms are used by the body positive community as “emancipatory platforms” (zavattaro, 2021, p. 282) to tell stories about fatness in their own terms. instagram and tiktok are often favored because of their audiovisual nature (hedegaard heiselberg & raun, 2024). however, some versions of body positivity that spread on social media have been accused of being “defanged fat activism” (cwynar-horta, 2016, p. 40), and a manifestation of post-feminism (e.g. darwin & miller, 2021). in the nordics, body positivity is a relatively new social movement (harjunen, 2023; hynnä-granberg, 2023; sveningsson et al., 2022). there is still negotiation about who is allowed to participate (sveningsson et al., 2022), and the movement is still taking shape. harjunen (2023) argues that in finland body positivity is increasingly being used outside of its original political context and the term has become an “empty signifier” (p. 37) that can be used in almost any context related to the body, including weight loss. method this study is a part of a larger ethnographic study of nordic body positive social media narratives. over a six-month observation period from january to june 2024, i identified several body positive content creators from the nordic countries on instagram and tiktok. the sample includes four content creators who to self-identify as body positive (through hashtags like #bodypositive or #bodyacceptance or profile bio texts) and fat or plus size, and regularly post content related to weight loss or lifestyle change. the 34 posts, including instagram posts and reels, as well as tiktok-videos, selected for analysis discussed weight loss or lifestyle change and body positivity or body acceptance. even though the content is publicly available, the four content creators were anonymized, and any details that could be used to identify the creators, such as names, usernames, specific location information or dates, were removed. all participants gave informed consent. the instagram and tiktok posts, including visual, audio and textual elements, were analyzed as narratives, applying bamberg’s (2020) positioning analysis and the narrative practice approach. the narrative practice approach analyzes “storytelling as a process of navigating and managing identities” (bamberg, 2020, p. 244), and highlights that “identities and narratives are processual” (p. 250). body positive weight loss narratives the four content creators position their weight loss as different from dominant weight loss narratives, aligning themselves with the body positive narrative. the body positive narrative is present in how they frame their weight loss motivation and talk about their bodies. in the narratives the temporal order of achieving body acceptance through weight loss has been reversed: instead, they claim that accepting their bodies first is what enabled them to lose weight. for example, one of the content creators claims she is “not doing this [losing weight] to become “perfect” or thin”, and another claims she learned to “take care” of herself through self-acceptance. furthermore, some of the content creators subvert the traditional before and after element of hegemonic weight loss narratives. instead of the classic before pictures, where the “old me” is depicted as a miserable figure (levy-navarro, 2012), they use imagery that represents their “before” bodies in a neutral or positive way. the content creators seem to be aware of the conflict between weight loss and body positivity, and attempt to manage responses from their followers by actively positioning their narratives as body positive. for example, one of the cases addresses her lifestyle change in a 10-image instagram post where she explains how her goals are in line with body acceptance. despite the clash between weight loss and body positivity, the response from the content creators’ followers is mostly positive. the content creators are rarely called out for their weight loss, instead, most comments are supportive. this points towards a change in how body positivity is understood: instead of seeing weight loss as something outside of the frames of body positivity, the boundaries are being pushed to include weight loss. conclusion the four cases represent a change in how weight loss is talked about, but also a change in how body positivity is understood. in line with previous fat studies research, the findings demonstrate how body positivity is increasingly being used outside of its original context, moving it away from its political origins (e.g. harjunen, 2023), which has the potential of further fragmenting the movement (e.g. darwin & miller, 2021). references baker, k. j. m. (2024, february 26). they promoted body positivity. then they lost weight. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/style/bodypositive-influencers-weight-loss.html bamberg, m. (2004). considering counter narratives. in m. bamberg & m. andrews (eds.), considering counter narratives: narrating, resisting, making sense (vol. 4, pp. 351–371). john benjamins publishing company. https://doi.org/10.1075/sin.4.43bam bamberg, m. (2020). narrative analysis: an integrative approach. in m. järvinen & n. mik-meyer (eds.), qualitative analysis: eight approaches for the social sciences (pp. 243–264). sage publications ltd. christiansen, l. b. (2024). call for papers—fat studies across europe. fat studies, 1– 3. https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2023.2296258 cwynar-horta, j. (2016). the commodification of the body positive movement on instagram. stream: interdisciplinary journal of communication, 8(2), 36–56. https://doi.org/10.21810/strm.v8i2.203 darwin, h., & miller, a. (2021). factions, frames, and postfeminism(s) in the body positive movement. feminist media studies, 21(6), 873–890. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2020.1736118 fox, r. (2018). against progress: understanding and resisting the temporality of transformational weight loss narratives. fat studies, 7(2), 216–226. https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2017.1372992 gailey, j. a., & harjunen, h. (2019). a cross-cultural examination of fat women’s experiences: stigma and gender in north american and finnish culture. feminism & psychology, 29(3), 374–390. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353518819582 giaxoglou, k., & georgakopoulou, a. (2021). a narrative practice approach to identities: small stories and positioning analysis in digital contexts. in m. bamberg, c. demuth, & m. watzlawik (eds.), the cambridge handbook of identity (1st ed., pp. 241–261). cambridge university press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108755146.014 harjunen, h. (2023). kehopositiivisuus: radikaalista yhteiskunnallisesta liikkeestä uusliberaalin terveyden tuottajaksi? in t. eskelinen, e. jokinen, & l. a. rokkonen (eds.), tehostamisyhteiskunnan jäljet (pp. 35–56). jyväskylän yliopisto. http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-951-39-9499-0 hedegaard heiselberg, m., & raun, t. (2024). educate yourself! exploring feminist politics and self-development in danish online fat activism. feminist media studies, 0(0), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2024.2363852 hochman, y., & spector‐mersel, g. (2020). three strategies for doing narrative resistance: navigating between master narratives. british journal of social psychology, 59(4), 1043–1061. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12376 hynnä-granberg, k. (2023). enduring emotions. fat time and weight loss in the finnish body positive podcasts jenny and the fat myth busters and the soft. nora nordic journal of feminist and gender research, 31(3), 236–248. https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2022.2139754 levy-navarro, e. (2012). i’m the new me: compelled confession in diet discourse. the journal of popular culture, 45(2), 340–356. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.15405931.2012.00928.x mclean, k. c., & syed, m. (2015). personal, master, and alternative narratives: an integrative framework for understanding identity development in context. human development, 58(6), 318–349. https://doi.org/10.1159/000445817 meleo-erwin, z. c. (2011). ‘a beautiful show of strength’: weight loss and the fat activist self. health: an interdisciplinary journal for the social study of health, illness and medicine, 15(2), 188–205. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363459310361601 oswald, f. (2024). anti-fatness in the ozempic era: state of the landscape and considerations for future research. fat studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2024.2307674 ronai, c. r., & cross, r. (1998). dancing with identity: narrative resistance strategies of male and female stripteasers. deviant behavior, 19(2), 99–119. https://doi.org/10.1080/01639625.1998.9968078 sveningsson, m., vestberg, a., & hedström, j. (2022). “not quite the struggle of normatives”: belonging and entitlement in swedish “body activism.” nordicom review, 43, 38–55. https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2022-0003 zavattaro, s. m. (2021). taking the social justice fight to the cloud: social media and body positivity. public integrity, 23(3), 281–295. https://doi.org/10.1080/10999922.2020.1782104 from #bodypositive to #weightlossjourney – exploring weight loss narratives within the fat community introduction selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 zhang, b. z., yang, t., haimson, o. l., & thomas, m. (2024, october). conceptualizing precision labor in artificial intelligence training. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. conceptualizing precision labor in artificial intelligence training ben zefeng zhang university of michigan, tianling yang technische universität berlin & weizenbaum institut, oliver l. haimson university of michigan, michaelanne thomas university of michigan, introduction accuracy and precision are often closely associated with the objectivity (grill, 2022; mackenzie, 1993; suchman, 2020; wise, 1997), scalability (tsing, 2012), and intelligence (crawford, 2021), standing in stark contrast to “ambiguity, uncertainty, messiness, and unreliability” (wise, 1997). what does it take to achieve a high level of technical accuracy? what are the harms resulting from technology companies’ obsession with technical accuracy and precision, and who incurs the greatest burdens? using ai training as a context, this work documents ai workers’ everyday working practices, challenges, and harms under the guise of achieving extreme levels of technical precision demanded by clients and ml practitioners. in this work, we offer an ethnographic account of ai trainers, a relatively understudied but emergent category of laborers in china. they often take tasks from data annotation to tasks that complement, augment, and sometimes substitute for autonomous ai systems when they fall short (miceli & posada, 2022; wu, 2023). previous literature has examined the hidden labor behind ai (ekbia & nardi, 2014; gray & suri, 2019); specifically on the human labor to produce ml datasets. existing work has investigated involved work practices, workflows, and social and organizational contexts (miceli et al., 2020; muller et al., 2019; zhang et al., 2020). informed by feminist scholarship on work and labor (baym, 2015; hochschild, 2022), we synthesize and extend our findings by introducing the concept of precision labor. by precision labor, we refer to the hidden work involved in erasing the messy, ambiguous, and uncertain aspects of technology production, all in the pursuit of presenting technology as objective, truthful, and productive, despite such pursuit can be unnecessary, arbitrary, and harmful to laborers. specifically, precision labor contributes to a new way of understanding the disproportionate impact of unnecessary and unrecognized labor as well as emergent harms such as financial precarity and machine subordination on digital labor communities within ai production. methods we relied on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between january 2023 to january 2024 in china, within the context of ai training. ethnography is particularly apt for studying work and labor; it highlights the “interpretative flexibility of technological artifacts” (pinch & bijker, 1984), allowing us to understand the intricacies, significance, and politics surrounding ai training. to explore chinese ai trainers' motivations, aspirations, and everyday professional experiences, the first author worked as an ai trainer in data annotation centers, which involves observation and hands-on participation in activities ranging from work projects, team meetings, lunch meet-ups with colleagues, ai training certificate courses and examinations, to major industry events. much of the empirical data presented in this paper is based on 9 weeks of ethnographic research conducted by the first author when they worked as a data work intern in an ai data annotation center. the data for this paper is grounded in 16 formal interviews with ai trainers and over 150 pages of field notes and online archives. we anonymized all data in this paper and used pseudonyms for participants, companies, and locations to ensure data privacy and security. on the ground, the first author relied on aspects of grounded theory to guide their research (charmaz, 2006). in the iterative process of data coding, accuracy and precision emerged as one of the dominant themes. findings our findings are structured around how technical accuracy is perceived, established, and managed and its associated negative consequences. perceiving and establishing accuracy. many workers at data centers believe that the ai training work they do is vital and either directly or indirectly contributes to al system refinement; yet they understand little about the mechanisms behind ai. narratives about doing ai training work correctly and accurately were often emphasized even before the employees started working as ai trainers. in the context of ai training, accuracy can have multiple meanings, often depending on the specific context, as illustrated in figure 1. for instance, tasks and projects involving voice recognition, computer vision, and generative ai technologies could have distinct measurements and requirements. nevertheless, across various projects, there tends to be a common understanding of accuracy based on a statistical measure that standardizes accuracy. this is “unifying accuracy,” referring to the overall accuracy rate of projects, which is typically required to be over 95%. despite the multiple meanings and the contextual nature of accuracy, for many workers, accuracy is more of a homogeneous and arbitrary production goal, manifested through unifying accuracy set by the clients and reinforced by different actors. zimo, who has worked as both an annotator and reviewer, revealed: “accuracy means meeting clients' requirements. some are set at 98%, others at 99%. the client will approve your project if you achieve their accuracy expectations.” figure 1. the establishment of accuracy is understood in different scenarios and dimensions. managing and making performative accuracy. in order to meet clients' specified accuracy standards, workers often undergo training that can, at times, become excessive. in addition, a standard workflow is often established, involving various actors: clients, intermediaries, and service providers. the clients relay data to intermediaries, who then delegate tasks to the service providers. within the service provider's framework are annotators, reviewers, quality inspectors, and managers. figure 2, adapted from the company figure and used widely across the country, exemplifies a flowchart designed to ensure perceived high accuracy. once annotators complete their data annotations, they submit their work to the reviewers. if the reviewers identify multiple errors or believe the accuracy rate is below the threshold, they return the data to the annotators for revision. once the task passes the reviewers' standards, quality inspectors conduct additional accuracy checks. successful clearance from both reviewers and quality inspectors means the annotated data could be submitted to the inspection staff appointed by the clients, who sometimes employ algorithms to test the data to ensure that the model performance meets high accuracy expectations. if any stage of this verification process is unsuccessful, the data is either returned to the service provider or the project is deemed a failure. figure 2. an emblematic example of workflow in ai training projects to ensure high accuracy. throughout the fieldwork across different contexts, we also observed a hybrid form of labor control and management style. workers are being controlled and managed by traditional and factory-like settings as well as gamification in an on-demand economy, but not enjoying the benefits of either, specifically, the social benefits and protection in the former or the flexibility in the latter. moreover, quantification and gamification techniques, as well as several punitive measures such as payment deduction, suspensions, and mandatory unpaid retraining, were used not only to foster productivity but also to uphold accuracy standards, but they often prove unnecessary, harmful, and counterproductive for workers. our findings also illuminate that the pursuit of performative accuracy could also lead to workers becoming subordinate to machines. while striving for optimal accuracy, workers' decision-making often becomes influenced by, and sometimes even subservient to, machine outputs, which are often regarded as potential arbiters of the ground truth. importantly, during the pursuit of high technical accuracy, they have to adapt their thought processes, internalize their frustrations, and navigate financial instability, often at the cost of their physical and mental well-being. conclusion the concept of precision labor is particularly relevant in today's technology landscape, where technology production is increasingly algorithmic and data-driven, and laborers are increasingly feeling compelled to comply with the demand for machine intelligence. our findings have shown precision labor is often materialized through and amplified by the obsession with the pursuit of performative accuracy and precision. we propose precision labor as a lens to understand the often unnecessary and unrecognized labor, along with the various harms stemming from the relentless quest for technical accuracy. it invites further investigations to scrutinize the legitimacy of technical accuracy, question its reasonableness and sustainability, and call for enhanced reflexivity and timely intervention. references baym, n. k. (2015). connect with your audience! the relational labor of connection. the communication review, 18(1), 14–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714421.2015.996401 charmaz, k. (2006). constructing grounded theory: a practical guide through qualitative analysis. sage. crawford, k. (2021). the atlas of ai: power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. yale university press. daniels, a. k. (1987). invisible work. social problems, 34(5), 403–415. https://doi.org/10.2307/800538 ekbia, h., & nardi, b. (2014). heteromation and its (dis)contents: the invisible division of labor between humans and machines. first monday. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v19i6.5331 gray, m. l., & suri, s. (2019). ghost work: how to stop silicon valley from building a new global underclass. houghton mifflin harcourt. grill, g. (2022). constructing certainty in machine learning: on the performativity of testing and its hold on the future. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/zekqv hochschild, a. r. (2022). the managed heart. in working in america (5th ed.). routledge. mackenzie, d. (1993). inventing accuracy: a historical sociology of nuclear missile guidance. mit press. miceli, m., & posada, j. (2022). the data-production dispositif (arxiv:2205.11963). arxiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11963 miceli, m., schuessler, m., & yang, t. (2020). between subjectivity and imposition: power dynamics in data annotation for computer vision. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 4(cscw2), 115:1-115:25. https://doi.org/10.1145/3415186 muller, m., lange, i., wang, d., piorkowski, d., tsay, j., liao, q. v., dugan, c., & erickson, t. (2019). how data science workers work with data: discovery, capture, curation, design, creation. proceedings of the 2019 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300356 pinch, t. j., & bijker, w. e. (1984). the social construction of facts and artefacts: or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other. social studies of science, 14(3), 399–441. https://doi.org/10.1177/030631284014003004 suchman, l. (2020). algorithmic warfare and the reinvention of accuracy. critical studies on security, 8(2), 175–187. https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2020.1760587 tsing, a. l. (2012). on nonscalability: the living world is not amenable to precisionnested scales. common knowledge, 18(3), 505–524. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754x-1630424 wise, m. n. (1997). the values of precision. princeton university press. wu, d. (2023). good for tech: disability expertise and labor in china’s artificial intelligence sector. first monday. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v28i1.12887 zhang, a. x., muller, m., & wang, d. (2020). how do data science workers collaborate? roles, workflows, and tools. proceedings of the acm on humancomputer interaction, 4(cscw1), 22:1-22:23. https://doi.org/10.1145/3392826 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): karathanasopoulou, e. (2024, october). podcasting, vr, ai and the evolution of intimacy. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. podcasting, vr, ai and the evolution of intimacy bournemouth university this paper’s case study is episode 398 of the lex fridman podcast. posted on september 28 2023 this episode is an interview with facebook and meta’s co-founder and ceo mark zuckerberg. the episode, titled first interview in the metaverse, is available as a youtube video (as well as an audio-only version). the video version is going to be the one interrogated here. in the video fridman and zuckerberg use meta’s new technology to virtually meet and conduct the podcast interview. fridman prefaces the conversation with the following introduction “…we appear to each other as photorealistic codec avatars in 3d with spatial audio. this technology is incredible, and i think it's the future of how human beings connect to each other in a deeply meaningful way on the internet” (2023). next, in a directorial move that accentuates the transition, we see friedman, in physical space, wearing a virtual reality headset and moving his head around in wonderment, before we see him again meeting zuckerberg in the metaverse, both as avatars. while in obvious awe and wonder from the experience, one of the first things that fridman says is, “the realism here is just incredible. where am i? where are you, mark? where are we?” zuckerberg replies, “you're in austin, right?”. fridman quickly responds, “no, i mean this place”. using radio and podcast studies as its main scholarship areas, this paper examines the potential for virtual reality (vr) and artificial intelligence (ai) technologies to change podcasting both in how it is crafted and in how audiences consume podcasts. focusing on the idea of intimacy this paper interrogates how this defining characteristic of “soundbased digital media” (hilmes, 2013:44) may persist and evolve, particularly through conceptualizations of space and place, imagined and actual. in a landscape where podcasting is increasingly perceived by (mostly younger) audiences and creators to be a visual medium (berry, 2023), i explore how intimacy may continue to be a defining characteristic of podcasting. in particular, and going well beyond just the aural or indeed beyond the combination of the visual and the aural, i want to understand what intimacy can mean when podcasting moves into the virtual reality immersive space. evi karathanasopoulou 2 this paper takes the stance the intimacy ascribed to both radio and podcasting is intrinsically linked to the technologies that make them possible and that these media cannot be understood as separate from those technologies, nor can the intimacies they generate. in the case of podcasting, which belongs in the platform age (sullivan, 2019), these technologies may indeed include virtual reality, and to some extent, artificial intelligence. towards the beginning of the podcast examined here, fridman is starting to envision what this technology may come to mean for him as a podcaster. he says: “like, my heart is actually beating fast now. this is super interesting, like, that such intimacy of conversation could be achieved remotely. […] i don't do remote podcast for this reason and this is like, breaks all of that” (2023). zuckerberg, later during the interview, imagines an ai addition to a podcast that may allow individual listeners to interact with fridman. this paper will examine the potential for these technologies to become part of podcasting, and the intimacies they might generate, including ones that may be considered as spurious. the latter, interestingly, has been a concern in radio scholarship (barnard, 2000: 181) well before podcasting, vr or ai entered the scene. important to this paper will be tiziano bonini’s breakthrough intervention into the debate about the nature of podcasting and whether it is a remediation of radio or something completely other. bonini argues that both can be true. he writes that, “podcasting is first of all a hybrid cultural form emerged from the remediation of different media and it should be better understood as an evolving medium, sometimes more like radio, sometimes closer to something new, but that any static definition risks crystallizing its evolution and capturing only a precise moment of its history” (bonini, 2022: 22-23). in this context, this paper is not proposing a static definition of intimacy either. rather, it is looking to add to a set of interlinking intimacies as they emerge within audio and other media. acknowledging the limitations of its research method, this work positions itself as a speculative step into this space and proposes that further qualitative research into audience reception in the future might provide closer insight. the research method used in this paper is a close-reading of the video episode of this case study, along with the comments to it by a contemporary audience whose imagination immediately jumps to a future podcast “where you, the listener, are the third seat at the table and you can convincingly be in the same room as the two people talking” (brandonsmith8235, 2023). this paper then, will situate intimacy as place-based affect and will look to find common ground with previous radiophonic and podcast intimacies as well as to reveal where there may be new intimacies if/when podcasting enters the virtual reality media space. 3 radiophonic intimacy is understood, at least in part, as deriving from radio’s blindness (crisell, 1994). when we interrogate video podcasts, where voices are no longer disembodied and the message no longer leaks into the listeners’ space, or indeed into their head, we may argue that some of this intimacy is stripped off as the freedom to imagine is removed and the message is framed and constrained. yet, when the immersion of a virtual reality space is added, the frame is once again removed. we return then, a step closer to the imagined space of radiophony. unframed and still requiring a level of suspension of disbelief, it is perhaps a paradox within a paradox that broadcast radiophony can share intimacies with the vr space. i examine this antithesis: on the one hand, radiophonic intimacy is based on the listener filling in the visual gaps through imagination and by using their private and personal noumenal imagery. on the other hand, a new type of intimacy in podcasting on the vr space would be based on depictions of the speakers that are as close to reality as possible – as showcased in the case study examined here. this paper argues that the addition of virtual immersion, may initially be seen to be creating a fuller picture, but instead we may find that it creates different gaps that will be asking to be filled by the audience, and this time by the podcaster and their participants too. within those gaps is where intimacy can grow. “where am i? where are you? where are we?” a listener will ask sitting on that third chair, as the space they know they physically inhabit blends with the virtual space of the podcast table. a paradox again, another leak, this time the other way around, instead of the message leaking into your space, you leak into another place; perhaps, the very familiar, intimate space of your favourite podcast. references barnard, s. (2000). studying radio. london: arnold. berry, r. (2023). we hardly need to use our ears. video, podcasts, and the shaping of the medium. 7th ecrea radio and sound conference section: radio and sound ecosystems in the platform age. barcelona, 6-8 september 2023 bonini, t. (2022) podcasting as a hybrid cultural form between old and new media. in m. lindgren and j. loviglio, routledge companion to radio and podcast studies (pp. 1929), london: routledge. brandonsmith8235. (2023) imagine a podcast where you, the listener, are the third seat at the table and you can convincingly be in… [comment on the video mark zuckerberg: first interview in the metaverse | lex fridman podcast #398]. youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvyrjjndreg&t=17s (accessed 28 february 2024). 4 crisell, a. (1994). understanding radio. london: routledge. hilmes, m. (2013). the new materiality of radio: sound on screens. in j. loviglio and m. hilmes (eds.) radio’s new wave. global sound in the digital era, new york: routledge, pp. 43-61. fridman, l. (2023). mark zuckerberg: first interview in the metaverse | lex fridman podcast #398. available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvyrjjndreg&t=17s (accessed 28 february 2024). sullivan, j. l. (2019). the platforms of podcasting: past and present. social media + society, 5(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880002 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): parke, j. (2024, october). a systematic review of virtualhumans.org and its role in virtual influencer research, 2019 to present. paper (or panel) presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. a systematic review of virtualhumans.org and its role in virtual influencer research, 2019 to present jul jeonghyun parke university of toronto introduction virtual influencers are cgi-rendered, 2d-drawn, or ai-generated characters with social media accounts in their own name. often driven by a team of creators, an agency, or conglomerate which participates in their aesthetic design, storyline, tone of voice, and real-time interaction with followers in the comments section or inbox (oosterom et al., 2023; sands et al., 2022), virtual influencers represent a nascent presence on social media platforms. virtualhumans.org, a privately owned website, functions as a significant database and information hub for this emergent virtual influencer industry. inspired by ben t. pettis's study (2022) of the website and database know your meme, i investigate the considerable influence of virtualhumans.org on the emerging field of virtual influencer research. i present findings from a systematic review (n=29) of academic articles published between 2019 and 2024 that reference the website. i examine how often and in what capacity virtualhumans.org is cited in these articles and whether the website’s commercial affiliations are critically considered. my initial findings indicate frequent reliance on the website for quantitative data, with limited acknowledgment of its role as an industry participant. i conclude by highlighting the risks of homogenization in academic narratives when research relies too heavily on industry-driven resources, proposing a need for more diversified and contextualized approaches in the study of emergent social media phenomena. background since 2019, virtualhumans.org has described itself as “the best source of information on virtual influencers, directly from industry insiders” (homepage). founded by christopher travers, an entrepreneur based in atlanta, usa, the website was originally formed to collect information about virtual influencers shortly after a viral stunt by lil miquela, a brazilian-american social media influencer on instagram, revealed that the nineteen-year-old was not a human but a cgi-generated character by tech company brud inc. (brachtendorf, 2022). the website’s influence continued past 2020, when the creation and use of virtual influencers became more popular in response to the covid19 crisis (choudhury et al., 2022; hund, 2023). virtualhumans.org catalogues the broad landscape of virtual influencers, offering detailed profiles, categorization systems, and background information of the companies and developers behind each character. in late 2022, the website was formally acquired by offbeat media group, a digital marketing agency; a year later, offbeat media group was acquired by entertainment company and gaming network, vertiqal studios corp. these acquisitions led to shifts in the website's focus, becoming more actively involved in brokering relationships between brands and virtual influencer agencies. travers departed the website in january 2023. while the website has been described as the “most comprehensive” (hofeditz et al., 2023) resource for virtual influencer data, its commercial affiliations and potential biases remain underexplored in academic research. with the underlying political economy context in mind, i examine references to virtualhumans.org across 29 articles, inspired by pettis (2022)’s critique of the database and wiki know your meme, which demonstrated how uncritical reliance on industry-driven resources could narrow scholarly perspectives. the core question guiding this review is whether academic studies adequately contextualize virtualhumans.org’s dual role as a database and an active industry player. method in february 2024, a search for “virtualhumans.org” was conducted on google scholar, limited to the website's existence from 2019 to 2024. this search yielded 189 results. a parallel search for "virtual influencers" within the same time frame yielded 1,030 results, indicating that nearly one in five studies about virtual influencers referenced virtualhumans.org. to focus on scholarly work, the initial 189 results were filtered to include only peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and conference proceedings in english and korean. this selection process resulted in a corpus of 29 studies. each study was then manually read and analyzed for the frequency and nature of references to virtualhumans.org, examining how the website was being contextualized within the research. additionally, a use-based analysis of the current virtualhumans.org website was conducted. this analysis included reviewing staff profiles, website organization, frequently cited content, public statements from founders and staff, and information about stakeholders on platforms like instagram and linkedin. findings and impact a wide range of disciplines engaged with virtualhumans.org, including media studies, marketing, computer science, and sociology. despite this diversity, few studies critically assessed the website’s commercial interests or its influence on defining the boundaries of virtual influencer research. notably, 20 out of 29 studies referenced virtualhumans.org as a quantitative resource, utilizing the website to provide statistics on the virtual influencer industry, such as the number of active virtual influencers and trends in follower counts. researchers often derived legitimacy for their methodology or information from virtualhumans.org, going beyond merely acknowledging it as a legitimate resource. this reliance was evident in the rationale statements for data collection, methodologies, and even in defining the phenomenon of virtual influencers or virtual humans. studies cited former and current virtualhumans.org staff writers alongside academic and news media citations without further commentary. these citations originated from blog posts, interviews, and independent research content produced by the website, effectively blurring the lines between industry-produced content and academic research. most significantly, none of the studies contextualized virtualhumans.org or its writers as a for-profit entity or broker in the virtual influencer industry. there are several implications regarding these initial findings. virtualhumans.org, as a singular commercially driven platform, appears to be shaping research questions, methodologies, and interpretations within the field. this reliance is concerning given that virtualhumans.org has a vested interest in promoting a particular view of the industry, one that aligns with its commercial goals. to start, the website’s industry focus may downplay controversies of representation and identity politics, potentially excluding diverse perspectives and cultural nuances of the infamously racialized virtual influencer landscape (sobande, 2021). the platform's categorization system, which relies on keywords such as ‘doll-like’ or ‘feminine,’ might not adequately capture the complexities of virtual influencers operating in non-western contexts or within specific subcultural communities. moreover, failing to acknowledge the website's commercial interests and potential biases could lead to an oversimplified and potentially misleading understanding of the industry. finally, relying heavily on virtualhumans.org for foundational data and definitions could undermine the development of independent and rigorous research methodologies. ultimately, an overreliance on this platform as a primary source of information could compromise the originality, significance, and quality of research in several ways. i contend that future studies must strive to diversify their data sources and critically evaluate the information presented on the platform. conclusion by conducting a systematic review of the use of virtualhumans.org as a major resource and database for virtual influencer research, i questioned whether studies of virtual humans adequately consider the rooted industry contexts of virtualhumans.org, potentially overlooking its position as a for-profit broker in the virtual influencer economy when relying on its extensive database of historical and commercial knowledge about virtual humans across multiple platforms. echoing pettis (2022)'s concerns regarding know your meme on classifying, historicizing, and interpreting meme content, i argue the need for a more critical and contextualized approach to studying virtual influencers, one that moves beyond a single source and embraces the complexity and diversity of this emerging phenomenon. exploring alternative data sources, such as social media platforms, interviews with creators and audiences outside the virtualhumans.org network, and analysis of industry reports from diverse sources, may offer opportunities to challenge virtualhumans.org’s popular monopoly over virtual influencer discourse, particularly for critical academic inquiry. there appears to be a clear need to further investigate the platform's editorial practices, classification systems, and potential influence on research questions and interpretations. ultimately, virtualhumans.org has become a starting point and even a validation tool for emerging research, creating a risk of inadvertently shaping a constrained view of the virtual influencer landscape. this analysis suggests that while virtualhumans.org serves as an invaluable database, an uncritical reliance on it could oversimplify the complex, culturally diverse, and evolving nature of virtual influencers. as a case study, it cautions the potential of homogenization when a single source assumes the authority to define and frame digital phenomena. references audrezet, a., & koles, b. (2023). virtual influencer as a brand avatar in interactive marketing. in c. l. wang (ed.), the palgrave handbook of interactive marketing (pp. 353–376). springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14961-0_16 awdziej, m., plata-alf, d., & tkaczyk, j. (2022). real or not, doesn’t matter, as long as you are hot: exploring the perceived credibility of an instagram virtual influencer. extending boundaries, 33. brachtendorf, c. (2022). lil miquela in the folds of fashion: (ad-)dressing virtual influencers. fashion, style & popular culture, 9(4), 483–499. https://doi.org/10.1386/fspc_00157_1 byun, k. j., & ahn, s. j. (2023). a systematic review of virtual influencers: similarities and differences between human and virtual influencers in interactive advertising. journal of interactive advertising, 23(4), 293–306. https://doi.org/10.1080/15252019.2023.2236102 choudhry, a., han, j., xu, x., & huang, y. (2022). 'i felt a little crazy following a “doll”': investigating real influence of virtual influencers on their followers. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 6(group), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1145/3492862 conti, m., gathani, j., & tricomi, p. p. (2022). virtual influencers in online social media. ieee communications magazine, 60(8), 86–91. https://doi.org/10.1109/mcom.001.2100786 de brito silva, m. j., de oliveira ramos delfino, l., alves cerqueira, k., & de oliveira campos, p. (2022). avatar marketing: a study on the engagement and authenticity of virtual influencers on instagram. social network analysis and mining, 12(1), 130. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-022-00966-w https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14961-0_16 https://doi.org/10.1386/fspc_00157_1 https://doi.org/10.1080/15252019.2023.2236102 https://doi.org/10.1145/3492862 https://doi.org/10.1109/mcom.001.2100786 https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-022-00966-w de leon, p. (2019, july 4). what does the daily routine of a 'virtual idol' look like? we spoke with 4 to find out. hypebae. franke, c., groeppel-klein, a., & müller, k. (2023). consumers’ responses to virtual influencers as advertising endorsers: novel and effective or uncanny and deceiving? journal of advertising, 52(4), 523–539. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2022.2154721 ham, j., li, s., looi, j., & eastin, m. s. (2024). virtual humans as social actors: investigating user perceptions of virtual humans’ emotional expression on social media. computers in human behavior, 155, 108161. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2024.108161 ham, j., li, s., shah, p., & eastin, m. s. (2023). the ‘mixed’ reality of virtual brand endorsers: understanding the effect of brand engagement and social cues on technological perceptions and advertising effectiveness. journal of interactive advertising, 23(2), 98–113. https://doi.org/10.1080/15252019.2023.2185557 hofeditz, l., erle, l., timm, l., & mirbabaie, m. (2023). how virtuous are virtual influencers? a qualitative analysis of virtual actors’ virtues on instagram. proceedings of the 56th hawaii international conference on system sciences. hund, e. (2023). the influencer industry: the quest for authenticity on social media. princeton university press. hwang, s., & lee, m. c. (2021). changes in meaning of ‘virtual human’ through semantic network analysis: focusing on the covid-19 pandemic. journal of digital contents society, 22(12), 2039–2047. https://doi.org/10.9728/dcs.2021.22.12.2039 kovacic, m. (2021). cyborg in idology studies: symbiosis of animating humans and machines. in a. hiroshi, p. w. galbraith, & m. kovacic (eds.), idology in transcultural perspective (pp. 91–131). springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82677-2_5 kozminski university, tkaczyk, j., & awdziej, m. (2022). extending boundaries: the impact of the digital world on consumers and marketing. poltext. https://doi.org/10.7206/9788366502062 lee, e. j. (2024). minding the source: toward an integrative theory of human–machine communication. human communication research, 50(2), 184–193. https://doi.org/10.1093/hcr/hqad034 li, h., lei, y., zhou, q., & yuan, h. (2023). can you sense without being human? comparing virtual and human influencers endorsement effectiveness. journal of retailing and consumer services, 75, 103456. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2023.103456 https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2022.2154721 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2024.108161 https://doi.org/10.1080/15252019.2023.2185557 https://doi.org/10.9728/dcs.2021.22.12.2039 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82677-2_5 https://doi.org/10.7206/9788366502062 https://doi.org/10.1093/hcr/hqad034 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2023.103456 liu, f., & lee, y. h. (2022). unveiling behind-the-scenes human interventions and examining source orientation in virtual influencer endorsements. in acm international conference on interactive media experiences (pp. 175–192). acm. https://doi.org/10.1145/3505284.3529962 luo, l., & kim, w. (2024). how virtual influencers’ identities are shaped on chinese social media: a case study of ling. global media and china, 9(3), 325–343. https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231188353 moon, h., kwon, e.-y., & woo, k. (2023). technology-enhanced suggestions for customizing clil materials: with the topic of virtual humans. korea journal of english language and linguistics, 23, 696–712. https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.23..202309.696 oosterom, e. b., baytar, f., & maher, m. (2023). fashion marketing with virtual humans as influencers. in a. s. m. sayem (ed.), digital fashion innovations (pp. 163– 178). crc press. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003264958-13 pettis, b. t. (2022). know your meme and the homogenization of web history. internet histories, 6(3), 263-279. sands, s., ferraro, c., campbell, c., & kietzmann, j. (2022). who is the human in human-ai interaction? the avatar as an extension of self. psychology & marketing, 39(10), 2053-2065. sobande f (2021) spectacularized and branded digital (re)presentations of black people and blackness. television & new media, 22(2): 131– 46. https://doi.org/10.1145/3505284.3529962 https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231188353 https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.23..202309.696 https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003264958-13 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): divon, t., annabell, t., goanta, c., abidin, c., beuckels, e., hudders, l., van den abeele, e., de brabandere, m., vanwesenbeeck, i., de jans, s., leaver, t., livingstone, s., cantwell, n., özkul, d., shekhawat, g., kidron, b. (2024, october). the place of a child on platforms: responsibilities, obligations, and expectations. panel presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the place of a child on platforms: responsibilities, obligations, and expectations tom divon hebrew university of jerusalem taylor annabell utrecht university school of law catalina goanta utrecht university school of law crystal abidin curtin university emma beuckels ghent university liselot hudders ghent university elisabeth van den abeele ghent university marloes de brabandere ghent university ini vanwesenbeeck tilburg university steffi de jans ghent university tama leaver curtin university http://spir.aoir.org/ sonia livingstone digital futures for children centre, london school of economics and political science with the 5rights foundation nigel cantwell digital futures for children centre, london school of economics and political science with the 5rights foundation didem özkul digital futures for children centre, london school of economics and political science with the 5rights foundation gazal shekhawat digital futures for children centre, london school of economics and political science with the 5rights foundation beeban kidron digital futures for children centre, london school of economics and political science with the 5rights foundation within our ‘platform society,’ children and childhood have become entangled with the logics of platformisation, datafication and monetisation. by platformisation, poell et al. (2019, p. 6) refer to the “reorganisation of cultural practices and imaginations'' around the ecosystem of platforms. this process involves the creation, gathering, and aggregation of data, referred to as 'datafication,' which is then capitalized on through specific business models and governance frameworks (van dijck & poell, 2013). it is within this framework that children, like their adult counterparts, engage in sharing and consuming entertainment and information on platforms as well as participate in the burgeoning marketplace of selling, buying and monetising ‘influence.’ the identity and age of the child reposition our understanding of these practices on platforms along with their underlying logics of datafication and monetisation, ushering in additional concerns about how to regulate the relationship between platforms and end-users. in this panel, we centre the child within the platform ecosystem, exploring their involvement in the dynamics of platformisation, dataification and monetisation. several papers use the phenomenon of kidfluencers and child influencers as a departure point, building on scholarly interest in the integration of children into parents' influencer content (abidin, 2015) and their active role as creators within the influencer economy (craig & cunningham, 2017; nicoll & nansen, 2018). panellists carve out a trajectory that examines how the place of children on platforms is influenced by commodification and monetisation practices, necessitating a nuanced analysis across time, platforms, geographies, and cultures. another central thread across the panel, consistent with current debates, concerns the integration of children and child influencers on platforms within regulatory frameworks. in keeping with a platform governance approach (gorwa, 2019), this encompasses the range of regulations by platforms and different legal regimes that govern child labour, children and advertising, and platform liability. as explored in our panel, platforms and jurisdictions vary in their regulatory approaches, shaped by conceptualisations of risks, challenges, and the opportunities platforms present to children. papers critically analyse the complex constellation of interests, exploring the reconfiguration of childhood and parenting via data surveillance, and the exploitation of child rights by tech companies for data commodification and profit. our panel brings together phd, early-career and senior scholars to grapple with the place of the ‘child’ as object, subject and user on platforms, seeking to enrich ongoing research about agency, platform governance, regulatory and surveillance practices. through the papers, we consider a range of critical issues, including monetisation and datafication, platform dynamics, legal regimes, children’s rights and the impact of commercialisation on children, and reflect on how different actors in the platform ecosystem negotiate and articulate responsibilities, obligations, and expectations for the place of children on platforms. the first paper focuses on how children and childhood are exposed, mobilised and commodified in influencer content on tiktok. drawing on ethnographic observations of kidfluencers across cultural contexts, the paper elucidates tensions in practices of visibility and monetisation, interpreted from a legal perspective through recent eu regulations. the paper suggests that when children are becoming a medium for monetisation it poses a 'systemic risk' for which platforms may be liable, prompting discussions on regulatory oversight. the second paper extends the discussion of children’s participation in the influencer industry by tracing the evolving landscape. utilizing a longitudinal ethnography (2008-2024) across multiple regions and involving 500 interviews with industry professionals, alongside digital and traditional observations, the paper presents a taxonomy of child influencers, delineating eight distinct trajectories. this thorough exploration emphasizes the nuanced roles children play in the influencer ecosystem, stressing the importance of responsible governance in protecting their interests. the third paper examines the influence of kidfluencers on kids in the context of promoting healthy consumption behaviours on youtube. anchored in consumer socialization theory, the study investigates the impact of message framing on children’s dental care behaviours and beliefs through experiments with children from belgium and the usa. the findings spotlight kidfluencers' impact on young viewers' brand preferences, highlighting ethical issues with their commercial content. the fourth paper delves into the datafication and platformisation of childhood and parenting through digital dashboards. reflecting on the 'arkangel' episode from black mirror, the paper critically examines narratives surrounding digital dashboards—dynamic visualisations summarising complex data on children's health, location, and well-being. the paper provokes a reflection on how parenting becomes entangled with intimacy, surveillance and the logic of datafication. the fifth paper centres on children’s rights in the platform ecosystem. informed by a child rights framework, it traces the utilisation of the 'best interests of the child' principle within legislation, policy, and digital service providers, critically reflecting on its potential misuse. the paper underscores tensions between safeguarding children's rights and tech companies' actions, which often limit child agency, prioritise data commodification, and evade regulatory measures. collectively, these papers illuminate how the place of children online is contested, as they become embroiled in practices of monetisation, visibility, and datafication across platforms and infrastructures. our panellists draw from their empirical and theoretical work to challenge these practices, emphasising their implications for platform governance and addressing how regulations can serve children's best interests. references abidin, c. (2015). micromicrocelebrity: branding babies on the internet. m/c journal, 18(5). craig, d., & cunningham, s. (2017). toy unboxing: living in a(n unregulated) material world. media international australia, 163(1), 77–86. gorwa, r. (2019). what is platform governance?. information, communication & society, 22(6), 854-871. nicoll, b., & nansen, b. (2018). mimetic production in youtube toy unboxing videos. social media+ society, 4(3), 2056305118790761. poell, t., nieborg, d., & van dijck, j. (2019). platformisation. internet policy review, 8(4), 1-13. van dijck, j., & poell, t. (2013). understanding social media logic. media and communication, 1(1), 2-14. children as commodities: ethnographic observations and legal implications of child influencer monetisation on tiktok tom divon hebrew university of jerusalem taylor annabell utrecht university school of law catalina goanta utrecht university school of law introduction the term 'kidfluencer' underscores children's distinct role in the influencer sector, yet despite attention from media and academia, platforms like tiktok overlook 'kidfluencers' in their monetisation strategies. the platform's policies limit monetisation options like creator funds, tiktok creator marketplace, and receiving gifts during live streams to adult accounts only. however, we argue that tiktok's policies fail to account for the nuances of 'kidfluencers' in monetised content, treating them as a concealed user category due to unaddressed monetisation practices for children. our paper explores how children and childhood are exposed, mobilised and commodified in influencer content on tiktok, focusing on 'kidfluencers' with cultural nuances and practices across various geographical contexts. we employ ethnographic and legal analyses to scrutinize practices against current regulations. theoretical background as bloggers and influencers integrate their children into the content they produce and share on platforms, they shape the child's digital identity and engage in the commercialisation of their online presence. this phenomenon is explored in research through the 'micromicrocelebrity' framework (abidin, 2015) and 'sharenting' concept (blum-ross & livingstone, 2017), highlighting how parents oversee and manage their children's online presence. parents have been observed monetising content featuring their children (fineman, 2022), giving rise to what we identify as transactional tensions, necessitating unpacking of the balance between recognizing children's agency and ensuring their protection in monetised content, with a focus on their involvement as labour. in influencer and creator studies, the concept of labour focuses on working conditions, with "aspirational labour" capturing entrepreneurial content creation enacted with hopes of future economic benefits (duffy, 2015). the labour of influencers takes on additional implications when it comes to kidfluencers and the examination of working conditions and compensation must also be situated in legal discussions of child labour (masterson, 2020). geider (2021) advocates for the implementation of legal safeguards for kidfluencers, highlighting the complex landscape of platform regulations concerning children's decision-making capacities in the digital age. this covers variations in child monetization regulations across jurisdictions due to cultural and legal differences (mol and goanta, 2023), aligning with our focus on the complex interactions of kidfluencers, their parents, and the regulatory environment. methods we use a dual approach, combining ethnographic observations and content analysis, to examine children's involvement in tiktok influencer monetisation practices, focusing on “kidfluencers” from israel, new zealand, and the usa within regulatory contexts. our data selection adheres to an ethnographic content analysis framework, focusing on captions, tagging, feature usage, memetic elements, and children's presence. we adapt to the platform-specific affordances, allowing our analysis units to naturally emerge, asking: (1) what practices of content monetisation are visible within 'kidfluencer' content on tiktok? (2) how are children’s participatory actions manifest and framed within 'kidfluencer' profiles? (3) how can the inclusion of children in influencer content be positioned within regulatory frameworks? to protect children's privacy, we use pseudonyms for them and first names for parents. analysis brands as kids’ props our first classification captures brands' roles as accessories in videos featuring children and their interactions with brands. the visible presence of brands represents a ‘successful’ exchange of childhood for income as videos integrate explicit disclosures of content monetisation, using tiktok’s paid partnership tag or #ad. this category delineates into two manifestations where children act as conveyors of monetised messages kids as props for branded content in which a tangible child-brand connection is fostered and ‘kids playing with brands’, in which children actively interact with the brand. to exemplify the latter, the presence of brit’s three children in disclosed branded content for fruit-flavoured treats with collectable toys lends authenticity to her ongoing partnership with the brand. in one video, her children engage in childhood ‘play’ by building a fort, which transitions into playful interactions with the branded product. such sponsorship potentially alludes to an orientation of childhood towards capitalist promotion in which ‘play’ is structured by contractural obligations with brands, raising questions of whether the fun fort-building activity was staged as a site for promotion. transactional childhood the second category involves observing parents and/or children navigating diverse childhood and growing-up scenarios intertwined with varying degrees of brand presence and monetisation. while specific brands are woven into the fabric of childhood experiences, unlike the previous category, the absence of complete disclosures generates transactional tensions. for instance, 6-year-old arianna independently recreates the popular ‘latte’ makeup look, without any noticeable assistance from her mother. presented with the 'cuteness' appeal of a child (maddox, 2021), she meticulously displays each product to the camera, continuously narrating her actions. while arianna makes visible some brands, the lack of disclosure generates ambiguity concerning the promotional nature of this video. her closing inquiry, 'what do you think?' also contributes to the transactional tensions between childhood and commerce, employing a self-optimization tactic that invites interactivity and comments, thereby boosting her personal brand. aspirational child-fication this category addresses the self-branding practices deployed by children and parents to develop and maintain their ‘relatable’ portrayals of the ‘right’ types of childhood. while content production does not overtly feature brand integration, the aspiration towards monetisation is achieved through efforts to establish a brand presence and gain visibility. this category comprises two iterations of aspirational child-ification: religious aspirational labour and platform aspirational labour. to exemplify the former, sher, owner of a gym chain brand, uploads videos featuring her child engaging in traditional religious ceremonies. her 5-year-old, affectionately known by her followers as the 'king of shabbat,' enlightens viewers about shabbat prayers. as sher whimsically deems him her ‘personal rabbi’, she skillfully employs aspirational labour through her child's participation, resonating with her traditional audience. by sharing her religious practices online, like lighting shabbat candles, sher upholds her traditional persona and aligns her brand with her community's values, seamlessly blending religious commitment with her business strategy. regulative parenthood our final category considers how kidfluencer activities rely on parents' disciplinary approaches. instances reveal a proactive inclination to surpass platform stipulations, driven by a determination to safeguard their children. this category also addresses the complexities of consent in content production, illuminating consensual cues demonstrated by children's voluntary engagement under parental guidance. for instance, mama seebz's 16-year-old son, lucas, does not appear in sponsored content, unlike his older sister, who also partners with brands. by delineating content with the child as a co-star, enhancing brand value, from her promotional posts, mama seebz adopts a regulatory stance as part of her parenting approach. legal reflections our ethnographic study has sought to demonstrate the range of monetisation and visibility practices in which children are exposed, mobilised, and commodified in parents' content on tiktok. central to this, we argue, is the platform's intermediation and amplification of parents' kidfluencer content, which, as our analysis shows, seeks to strategically capitalise on. thus, we conclude by shifting focus to the legal safeguards designed to protect children's interests on platforms. in the eu, a recent regulation (dsa) updated platform liability and imposed transparency requirements to tackle 'illegal content.’ meaning, any european laws governing children's social media activities may render content that violates these rules illegal, potentially introducing new regulatory mechanisms for kidfluencer practices in the eu. another concept introduced by the dsa in article 34 is ‘systemic risks’ that stem from the “design, functioning and use of (platform) services, as well as from potential misuses.” the dsa requires very large online platforms to understand systemically where kidfluencer practices may have negative impacts. indeed, our study reveals that children serve as a medium for monetisation through the interplay of their agency, parental involvement, and commercial interests, highlighting the need for regulatory scrutiny of both parents and the platform's roles in this dynamic. references abidin, c. (2015). micromicrocelebrity: branding babies on the internet. m/c journal, 18(5). abidin, c. (2017). # familygoals: family influencers, calibrated amateurism, and justifying young digital labour. social media+ society, 3(2), 2056305117707191. archer, c. (2019). how influencer ‘mumpreneur’bloggers and ‘everyday’mums frame presenting their children online. media international australia, 170(1), 47-56. blum-ross, a., & livingstone, s. (2020). “sharenting,” parent blogging, and the boundaries of the digital self. in self-(re) presentation now (pp. 70-85). routledge. craig, d., & cunningham, s. (2017). toy unboxing: living in a(n unregulated) material world. media international australia, 163(1), 77–86 duffy, b. (2015). amateur, autonomous, and collaborative: myths of aspiring female cultural producers in web 2.0. critical studies in media communication, 32(1), 4864. fineman, m. n. (2022). honey, i monetized the kids: commercial sharenting and protecting the rights of consumers and the internet's child stars. geo. lj, 111, 847. geider, j. (2021). how to (not) exploit your internet child star: unregulated child labor on youtube, instagram and social media. law school student scholarship, 1-30. masterson, m. a. (2020). when play becomes work: child labor laws in the era of" kidfluencers". u. pa. l. rev., 169, 577. maddox, j. (2021). the secret life of pet instagram accounts: joy, resistance, and commodification in the internet’s cute economy. new media & society, 23(11), 33323348. mol, c., & goanta, c. (2023). shedding light on child influencers: insights on the influencer economy, dutch private law and children’s rights. tijdschrift voor familieen jeugdrecht, (45). a taxonomy of children and social media visibility crystal abidin curtin university this paper presents a longitudinal ethnography of the influencer industry, focusing especially on children and the origins and genres of their entanglements with social media visibility. it has been widely reported that an increasing number of children aspire to become influencers (e.g., suciu, 2022), with businesses quickly cashing in to provide incubator camps (e.g., lorenz, 2023). many young influencers begin their careers as under-18 children and minors, and have quickly grown to have immense sway over the gen z cohort (duck, 2022). young influencers have promoted civic messages about political advocacy (shaw, 2011), lgbtqia+ community building (abidin, 2019), and climate change (bogle, 2019). children emerged in the influencer industry with mummy/parenting bloggers who feature their children in online diaries and progressed as/to advice columnists providing paid reviews (abidin, 2011). as influencers from lifestyle genres aged, many pivoted to the parenting genre where their children anchored sponsored contents, beginning as early as sonograms (abidin, 2015). some children become overnight celebrities through viral memes (abidin, 2022) and parlay their fame into influencer careers (abidin, 2018). family influencers incorporate children and their routines in monetised contents (abidin, 2017), and children are themselves content creators in child unboxing videos (craig & cunningham 2017), in reading recommendations (dezuanni et al. 2022), and as aspiring idol artists (lee & abidin, 2023). methodology given the rapid diversification of child influencers across a sprawling array of platforms, this paper seeks to present a historical taxonomy of child influencers focusing on their pathways from social media visibility to fame and monetisation. the ethnographic insights are drawn from traditional and digital participant observation rooted in the anthropological tradition, supported by personal interviews with over 500 backend (para-)professionals (e.g., parent managers, guardians, brokers, managers), and supplemented with document analysis of agency handbooks and brand pr collateral. fieldwork spans 2008–2024 across southeast asia, east asia, oceania, and the nordic regions. visibility, celebrity, influencer at the most basic level, internet celebrities are generally media formats anything that can be conveyed digitally that attain prominence and popularity native to the internet (abidin, 2018). in other words, the ‘origin story’ of their fame is based online. internet celebrities can be people who (unwittingly) lend their face to be the next meme, people who experience virality overnight (for good or bad reasons), or people who intentionally court fame then try to monetise it (successfully or not). it is most useful to define internet celebrities by their ability to hold high visibility. in a very saturated network of platforms and trends that are continuously vying for our attention, internet celebrities are able to cut through the noise and static of our already-saturated digital landscape, and navigate platform algorithms and filters to reach an alreadysaturated online audience. this is a form of ‘visibility labour’ that can involve significant planning and work (abidin, 2016). however, the nature and morality of this visibility is flexible this high visibility can be attributed to fame or infamy, positive or negative attention, talent and skill or otherwise, and can be either sustained or transient, intentional or by happenstance, monetised or not. it is at this juncture that an elite class of internet celebrities emerge, based on a combination of attributes about their visibility. enter the ‘influencer’, a professional internet celebrity, who intentionally pursues online fame as a career or sustainable monetising opportunity, by curating visibility that is generally founded on positive attention, and some form of talent and skill to keep audiences hooked. a taxonomy this work details eight case studies to flesh out the distinct but connected pathways from social media visibility, to commercialism, to professionalisation as a child influencer. a summary is as follows: mummy bloggers: earliest origins in late-2000s to early-2010s, where babies and very young children became narrated in public (archived and/or now defunct) blog platforms like livejournal, xanga, blogger, wordpress, and similar. considers the beginnings of partnerships with brands and clients for endorsements and collaborations, and tensions across personal ethos, shared community norms, and feminist labours. micro-microcelebrity: children of micro-celebrities who attain online fame through proximate micro-celebrification and repeated exposure to the public, with a special focus on instagram strategies like pregnancy announcements, pre-birth social media handle reservations, brand tie-ups from conception to birth, birth announcements, and similar. considers how pre-birth imageries of the child and the branding of early childhood are stepping stones to the emergence of the child as an independent, recognisable persona online. family influencers: families who have turned themselves into social media content creators using highly parasocial filming strategies, with a special focus on youtube and reality tv families who accumulate fame for being extraordinary, exotic, and/or eccentric. considers how authenticity is strategised and performed as an anticipatory mitigation of accusations against the parents. child influencers: a cross-pollinated genre of influencer cultures where children are main actors across content genres that especially target minor audiences, including dance & entertainment, toy unboxing and reviews, reading recommendations, and similar. considers what the tensions between the terms ‘influencer’ and ‘creator’ signal in terms of platform, parental, and policy responsibilities. kidtok: children who accumulate online fame on tiktok, including 'gen z parents' and viral teen pregnancies, 'tiktok prodigies' whose performance talents attract viral reactions that enhance celebritisation aspirations, 'tiktok famous babies' whose of meme and roleplay fame, and 'pandemic babies' from a sprawling network of sharenting during covid-19. considers how visibility and fame are attached and detached to children in the lifecycle of virality. meme celebrities: often younger children whose image is taken out of context, and whose likeness becomes a shorthand to express a specific emotion or situation in internet discourse, recently popular beyond macros to include messaging stickers. considers the consequences of merchandising meme cultures, where third parties profit off the image of these children. viral stars: children who become trending and wildly popular among global audiences within a very short span of time, stemming from iconic moments that are performed and/or amplified on television talkshow circuits, where acts of emotional vulnerability or childhood innocence are on perpetual replay. considers the traditional entertainment industry's track record for (mis)using and discarding these children for viewership. variety stars & social experiments: children who unwittingly become variety stars through reality tv programmes and social experiment channels, with a special focus on the especially established market in the korean entertainment industry, including parenting shows, novel daycare experiments, and hidden camera youtube channels. considers the implications of enduring digital footprints and afterlives of childhood visibility fame as these children age into teenhood. governance by law vs. governance by the grassroots in closing, the paper will underscore the utility of the taxonomy for locating, shaping, and challenging governance by law; and soliciting, guiding, and scaffolding governance by the grassroots. in the recent 'benchmarking influencer regulations in the asia pacific region' (abidin & hong-phuc, 2023), a stocktake of the current governance of the child influencer industry was undertaken to consider how existing laws can apply specifically to children entangled with social media commerce, and review the development of newer laws that regulate the child influencer industry specifically. the importance of definitions, origin stories, and scale of commerce were found to be especially important for determining the jurisdiction of governance by law. in response, this longitudinal ethnography will offer closing insights on how governance by the grassroots has been maintained and flourishing over a decade through a patchwork of backend industry staff, guardians and kin, and networks of followers and internet sleuths. references abidin, c. (2011, january 9). new’s kid on the blog. the new paper. abidin, c. (2015). micro-microcelebrity: branding babies on the internet. m/c journal, 18(5). https://journal.mediaculture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1022 abidin, c. (2016). visibility labour: engaging with influencers’ fashion brands and# ootd advertorial campaigns on instagram. media international australia, 161(1), 86-100. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1329878x16665177 https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1022 https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1022 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1329878x16665177 abidin, c. (2017). #familygoals: family influencers, calibrated amateurism, and justifying young digital labor. social media + society, 3(2), 1–15. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2056305117707191 abidin, c. (2018). from internet celebrities to influencers. in internet celebrity: understanding fame online (pp. 71-98). emerald publishing limited. https://www.emerald.com/insight/publication/doi/10.1108/9781787560765 abidin, c. (2019). yes homo: gay influencers, homonormativity, and queerbaiting on youtube. continuum, 33(5), 614–629. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10304312.2019.1644806 abidin, c. (2022, september 14). it’s corn! how the online viral ‘corn kid’ is on a well-worn path to fame in the child influencer industry. the conversation. https://theconversation.com/its-corn-how-the-online-viral-corn-kid-is-on-a-well-wornpath-to-fame-in-the-child-influencer-industry-189974 abidin, crystal, & n. l. hong-phuc. (2023). benchmarking influencer regulations in the asia pacific. influencer ethnography research lab (ierlab), faculty of humanities, curtin university. https://ierlab.com/benchmarking-apac bogle, a. (2019, september 19). students are fighting climate change, one tiktok video at a time. abc rn. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-19/tiktok-youth-ledclimate-activism-school-strike/11520474 lee, j, & abidin, c. (2023). ella gross and child social media stars: rising to fame through k-pop idol trainee systems, mixed raceness, and tabloid cycle controversies. pp. 71–94 in women we love in and around k-pop and k-drama in the hallyu era, edited by liew kai khiun, lee soojin, and kate korroch. hong kong: hong kong university press. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9789888842650-009/html craig, d., & cunningham, s. (2017). toy unboxing: living in a(n unregulated) material world. media international australia, 163(1), 77–86. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1329878x17693700 dezuanni, m., reddan, b., rutherford, l., & schoonens, a. (2022). selfies and shelfies on #bookstagram and #booktok – social media and the mediation of australian teen reading. learning, media and technology, 47(3), 355–372. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17439884.2022.2068575 duck, s. (2022, august 23). ‘influencers’ having huge impact on gen z purchasing and opinion. kidsnews. https://www.kidsnews.com.au/finance/influencers-havinghuge-impact-on-gen-z-purchasing-and-opinion/news-story/ [page since removed] lorenz, t. (2023, november 7). camps teaching kids to be youtubers are cropping up across the country. the washington post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/07/kids-youtuber-influencercamps-creators-learn-how/ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2056305117707191 https://www.emerald.com/insight/publication/doi/10.1108/9781787560765 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10304312.2019.1644806 https://theconversation.com/its-corn-how-the-online-viral-corn-kid-is-on-a-well-worn-path-to-fame-in-the-child-influencer-industry-189974 https://theconversation.com/its-corn-how-the-online-viral-corn-kid-is-on-a-well-worn-path-to-fame-in-the-child-influencer-industry-189974 https://ierlab.com/benchmarking-apac https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-19/tiktok-youth-led-climate-activism-school-strike/11520474 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-19/tiktok-youth-led-climate-activism-school-strike/11520474 https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9789888842650-009/html https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1329878x17693700 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17439884.2022.2068575 https://www.kidsnews.com.au/finance/influencers-having-huge-impact-on-gen-z-purchasing-and-opinion/news-story/ https://www.kidsnews.com.au/finance/influencers-having-huge-impact-on-gen-z-purchasing-and-opinion/news-story/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/07/kids-youtuber-influencer-camps-creators-learn-how/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/07/kids-youtuber-influencer-camps-creators-learn-how/ shaw, f. (2011). (dis)locating feminisms: blog activism as crisis response. outskirts: feminisms along the edge, 24. https://www.proquest.com/docview/885358276?sourcetype=scholarly%20journals suciu, p. (2022, october 20). young people want to be influencers even as older americans say it isn't a real job! forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2022/10/20/young-people-want-to-beinfluencers-even-as-older-americans-say-it-isnt-a-real-job/ https://www.proquest.com/docview/885358276?sourcetype=scholarly%20journals https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2022/10/20/young-people-want-to-be-influencers-even-as-older-americans-say-it-isnt-a-real-job/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2022/10/20/young-people-want-to-be-influencers-even-as-older-americans-say-it-isnt-a-real-job/ little stars, big troubles? testing the effectiveness of an influencer sharenting intervention to promote mindful sharenting behaviors emma beuckels ghent university liselot hudders ghent university elisabeth van den abeele ghent university marloes de brabandere ghent university ini vanwesenbeeck tilburg university steffi de jans ghent university introduction social media influencers increasingly monetize the portrayal of their underaged child(ren) on social media (ågren, 2022; blum-ross & livingstone, 2017; van den abeele et al., 2023). the children contribute to the digital capital of parent influencers as they make the sharing of parenting experiences more authentic and trustworthy (ågren, 2022). sharing intimate details of one’s private life is crucial for a successful influencer status (abidin, 2015). parent influencers therefore heavily post images and stories videos of their adorable children, , a practice known as ‘influencer sharenting’, using their own influencer profiles or creating separate profiles for their family or children , a practice known as ‘influencer sharenting’ (abidin, 2015; saragoza, 2019; van den abeele et al., 2024). however, this practice of sharing personal or sensitive information of children on the internet can have negative sideeffects, such as privacy violations and criminal use of the shared content (ong et al., 2022). the monetization of sharenting through the portrayal of children in sponsored content additionally raises concerns regarding child labor and the commercial exploitation of the child, and is increasingly being criticized (saragoza, 2019; van der hof et al., 2020). interventions that raise awareness on the hazards of sharenting behaviors and motivate parents to adopt mindful sharenting tactics are scarce (williams-ceci et al., 2021) and academic research that specifically focuses on influencer sharenting interventions are to the best of our knowledge non-existent. the main objective of the current study therefore is to develop and evaluate an intervention specifically designed to address the influencer sharenting behaviors of influencer parents. to achieve this goal, we undertook three important steps: (1) identifying beneficial mindful sharenting practices and barriers to their adoption within an influencer context, (2) developing the intervention, and (3) testing its effectiveness. method a mixed methods approach was adopted to obtain the above-mentioned goals. first, to design an intervention grounded in credible information, we relied on problemcentered expert interviews with professionals in parenting and social media. thirteen interviews with a total of 15 experts (two duo-interviews took place) were interviewed between september-october 2021 and each interview had a duration of 30 to 60 minutes. these interviews helped us identify mindful sharenting behaviors that can be applied by influencers to better protect their children from potential harm. additionally, through these interviews, we were able to pinpoint the different barriers that are currently hindering influencers from adopting those practices. further, we used a co-creation approach with social media influencers to develop the content for this intervention. second, using the information gathered in the initial step, the intervention was created. this intervention (in the form of a website) aims to inform parent influencers about the hazards of influencer sharenting, offer tips on mindful sharenting practices, and refer to support organizations when they encounter problems related to their influencer sharenting behaviors. third, the intervention was tested on its effectiveness in raising privacy concerns and encouraging mindful sharenting behaviors using a pretest-posttest design. in particular, a preand post-intervention survey was conducted among 59 parent influencers. before launching the intervention, parent influencers were contacted to complete a baseline survey measuring their influencer sharenting behaviors. a few weeks after the completion of this pre-intervention survey, the parent influencers who completed the baseline survey were instructed to visit the influencer sharenting website in the upcoming week and complete the post intervention survey. findings the in-depth interviews identified four major risks (i.e. digital id construction, child labor, privacy loss and mental wellbeing) to be related to influencer sharenting. the results revealed that most the risks associated with regular sharenting, get amplified in the context of influencer marketing, due to the great reach and anonymity of the public. the magnitude and anonymity of the third parties to whom influencers grant co-ownership of their children’s private information particularly facilitate misuse. additionally, the monetary gains associated with influencer sharenting introduce a new risk dimension of economic exploitation, which is not applicable to regular sharenting situations. nevertheless, our study suggests that these risks could be mitigated by adopting nine specific privacy management strategies that are easy to reconciliate with influencers’ goals and careers. the co-creation sessions resulted in clear pathways to encourage these nine privacy management strategies among parent influencers, which were all implemented within a web-based intervention. the pre-post intervention testing study demonstrated that the intervention website was positively perceived by the influencers in terms of overall attitudes, visual design, ease of use, and ease of understanding. respondents had an overall low resistance towards the intervention message, with a below-average score for both affective resistance (m = 2.25) as well as cognitive resistance (m = 2.25). more specifically, our data suggests that respondents were not likely to refute the information on the website, nor to react in an angry way towards it. our data further revealed that respondents were highly likely to recommend the website to other parents (m = 4.22). in terms of parents’ actual referral behavior, descriptive analyses revealed that 27% of the parents already suggested the website to another person. results show that the intervention did significantly affect parents’ tendency to adopt various stricter privacy management strategies in the future. for example, regarding posting frequency of commercial posts (w = .89, p < .001), the analysis showed that the intent to portray the child in commercial posts at t1 (m = 1.72) was lower compared to t0 (m = 2.04; z = 356, p < .05). besides, at baseline, the respondents indicated that their child was involved in the creation of one commercial post for about 39.9 minutes on average. at t1, however, this time decreased to 26.3 minutes. in conclusion, participants who were more positive towards the website, were more likely to report a change in their sharenting behaviors. on the other hand, parents who felt highly supported by their environment in sharing their child’s information were less likely to report any behavioral change. this underscores the power of social norms regarding sharenting and highlights the necessity for future interventions to continue informing various crucial stakeholders besides the parents themselves, such as policymakers, brands, and platforms, about this topic. references abidin, c. (2015). micromicrocelebrity: branding babies on the internet. m/c journal, 18(5). ågren, y. (2022). branded childhood: infants as digital capital on instagram. childhood, 30(1), 9-23. https://doi.org/10.1177/09075682221129367 blum-ross, a., & livingstone, s. (2017). “sharenting,” parent blogging, and the boundaries of the digital self. popular communication, 15(2), 110-125. ong, l. l., fox, a. k., cook, l. a., bessant, c., gan, p., hoy, m. g., nottingham, e., pereira, b., & steinberg, s. b. (2022). sharenting in an evolving digital world: increasing online connection and consumer vulnerability. journal of consumer affairs, 56(3), 1106-1126. saragoza, a. (2019). the kids are alright? the need for kidfluencer protections. am. uj gender soc. pol'y & l., 28, 575. van den abeele, e., vanwesenbeeck, i., & hudders, l. (2023). child’s privacy versus mother’s fame: unravelling the biased decision-making process of momfluencers to portray their children online. information, communication & society, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2023.2205484 van den abeele, e., vanwesenbeeck, i., & hudders, l. (2024). child’s privacy versus mother’s fame: unravelling the biased decision-making process of momfluencers to portray their children online. information, communication & society, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1177/09075682221129367 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2023.2205484 van der hof, s., lievens, e., milkaite, i., verdoodt, v., hannema, t., & liefaard, t. (2020). the child’s right to protection against economic exploitation in the digital world. the international journal of children's rights, 28(4), 833-859. williams-ceci, s., grose, g. e., pinch, a. c., kizilcec, r. f., & lewis jr, n. a. (2021). combating sharenting: interventions to alter parents’ attitudes toward posting about their children online. computers in human behavior, 125, 106939. platformed parenting: datafication, devices and dashboards tama leaver curtin university introduction platforms, apps and digital devices have reconfigured numerous everyday experiences into ones that generate, transmit, and share data at a large scale; in many situations, this data is compared to existing data patterns, producing dashboards and indicators of health, achievement and normality. parenting can involve many highly anxious experiences, amplified even more so for brand new parents. in the months surrounding a newborn entering the world, parents and carers have an increasingly large array of devices and apps available to them, each promising to ease some of their anxieties by providing newly visualised indicators of infant health, development and wellbeing. wearables might track everything from heartrate to breathing, apps might provide an array of soothing sounds or initial words customised to specific developmental milestones or personal inputs, and in exchange for children’s data, parents are almost always provided reassuring dashboards, progress measurements and indicators showing their child is recognisably ‘well’. green indicator lights tracking ‘your child’s progress’ are always available, no matter where parents are. this paper focuses on the function of digital dashboards to map some of the ways in which infancy and childhood are being digitally reconfigured, mapping both the new opportunities and reassurances which are available to parents, but also the underlying extractive logic of platformisation and datafication driving most consumer apps and devices. to map present and future concerns, this paper utilises the 2017 ‘arkangel’ episode of the dystopian near-future black mirror series to extrapolate the present and future impact of such visualisation and information extraction on both children as they grow, and their relationship with parents. from datafication to dashboards datafication, the increasing presence of digital processes which generate, measure, share, aggregate, visualise, interpret and monetise data, is a largely inescapable part of the logic and fabric of everyday life in the twenty-first century (burgess et al., 2022). the generation of data, or dataveillance, differs from past models of surveillance since these were almost always purposeful only capturing a record for a purpose clearly defined in advance, be that a health record or a wire tap on a phone. in contrast, dataveillance “entails the continuous tracking of (meta)data for unstated preset purposes” (van dijck, 2014, p. 205); the capturing of data justifies itself, on the presumption it will be of some value in in the future. as mascheroni and siibak (2021) convincingly argue, these logics have enveloped the practices and imaginaries of childhood, too, leading to many new opportunities but also significant issues around privacy and the commercialisation of children’s data. indeed, intimate surveillance the “purposeful and routinely well-intentioned surveillance of young people by parents, guardians, friends, and so forth” (leaver, 2015, p. 153) drives the uptake of many infant and child apps and platforms used by parents and carers. infant wearables are explicitly promoted with the idea that their dashboards provide parents with ‘peace of mind’ (see figure 1; leaver, 2017). parenting apps and their dashboards are framed by providers as essential care work, subtly suggesting non-use is akin to negligence, weaponizing parental guilt as part of the logic of datafication (mauk, 2023). while data has an almost mythical status in the platform economy, generally data does not tell stories by itself. within many platforms and apps, the visualisation of that data takes place in the form of a dashboard. while the history of summarising complex data through visualisations predates the digital age entirely (rettberg, 2020), the emergence of dynamic, updating visualisations available via smart devices means these visualisations are a much larger part of contemporary lives in the digital era (engebretsen & kennedy, 2020). as tkacz (2022, p. 6) argues, “dashboards and dashboard-like interfaces are everywhere, used all the time, by scientists, civil servants, economists, managers, factory workers; and pretty much by anyone who has a phone, tablet or personal computer”. importantly dashboards do not just represent or narrate, they configure experiences, they encourage specific “ways of thinking, alongside ways of relating to time, space and other people and things … [they] always already partake in and contribute to certain ways of living” (tkacz, 2022, p. 24). dashboards don’t just reflect lived experience, including parenthood: they shape it. ‘arkangel’: the near future of parenting dashboards as not all the implications of the ubiquity of digital dashboards in childhood are evident yet, the 2017 ‘arkangel’ episode of the netflix series black mirror usefully provides a way of extrapolating some of the more prominent potential effects (presented alongside examples of existing apps in the full paper). ‘arkangel’, written by charlie brooker and directed by jodie foster, focuses on marie (rosemarie dewitt) and her daughter sara (brenna harding). after an incident where sara goes missing briefly as a young child, sara purchases an arkangel implant which tracks sara’s location, wellbeing and allows her mother to view the world through sara’s eyes via a tablet-like device. the visualisations of the arkangel interface and dashboards are consistent with contemporary app and platform design, easily summarising sara’s location, health, emotional state, and a number of other things for her mother via the bespoke tablet device (see examples at figure 2). the arkangel implant allows sara and her mum to engage in some creative forms of play, and prevents sara witnessing some challenging situations. however, the episode tends to emphasise the idea that dashboards displace important forms of learning, including learning from mistakes. as sara gets older, the arkangel is seen as stunting her growth, with marie struggling to let go of the reassurances of its dashboard, but eventually agreeing to do so. it’s only later when sara is a teen that marie turns to the seductive reassurance of the dashboard when sara is late home; marie tracks sara’s location, and invades her privacy by ‘seeing’ what sara is doing, leading to a breakdown in trust between mother and daughter. after a dramatic climax in which sara attacks her mother, marie is seen clutching the now broken arkangel tablet, traumatised at now being completely unable to find, or track, her daughter. the episode presents a fairly unambiguous critique of the way dashboards have configured marie’s parenting and ultimately damaged her relationship with her daughter. conclusion: dashboarding childhood dashboards format, configure, summarise and narrate data, experience and ways of being in particular ways that are driven by platform logics. they narrate and tell stories that focus on and include some information and deliberately and necessarily exclude far more. ‘arkangel’ positions parenting dashboards as part of a dystopian future, but the episode’s biggest challenge is this version of black mirror feels more like the present than the future. dashboards are premised on, and promote, the logic of datafication; more data means more complex dashboards. for parents, carers, and children, dashboards are a larger part of their lives, whether in terms of health, physical activity, location tracking, education or a host of other fields. dashboards are also seductive insomuch as they often present clear, uncomplicated snapshots, often reduced to three colour indicators, with green equated with good parenting. dashboards are thus a larger and larger part of the experience of parenting the digital child. dashboards are the narrators of datafication, and are increasingly an unavoidable window through which parents view their children. references leaver, t. (2016). born digital? presence, privacy, and intimate surveillance. in: hartley j and qu w (eds) re-orientation: translingual, transcultural, transmedia. shanghai: fudan university press, 149–60. leaver, t. (2017). intimate surveillance: normalizing parental monitoring and mediation of infants online. social media+ society, 3(2), 2056305117707192. burgess, j., albury, k., mccosker, a., & wilken, r. (2022). everyday data cultures (1st edition). polity. engebretsen, m., & kennedy, h. (2020). data visualization in society. amsterdam university press. https://doi.org/10.5117/9789463722902 mascheroni, g., & siibak, a. (2021). datafied childhoods: data practices and imaginaries in children’s lives. peter lang publishing, incorporated. mauk, m. (2023). parenting and the algorithm: a perspective on parental controls and guilt amid digital media. in m. ito, r. cross, k. dinakar, & c. odgers (eds.), algorithmic rights and protections for children (pp. 35–42). the mit press. rettberg, j. w. (2020). ways of knowing with data visualizations. in m. engebresten & h. kennedy (eds.), data visualization in society (pp. 35–48). amsterdam university press. https://doi.org/10.5117/9789463722902 tkacz, n. (2022). being with data: the dashboarding of everyday life (1st edition). polity. van dijck, j. (2014). datafication, dataism and dataveillance: big data between scientific paradigm and ideology. surveillance & society, 12(2), 197–208. https://doi.org/10.5117/9789463722902 critical reflections on how digital providers respect “the best interests of the child” sonia livingstone digital futures for children centre, london school of economics and political science with the 5rights foundation nigel cantwell digital futures for children centre, london school of economics and political science with the 5rights foundation didem özkul digital futures for children centre, london school of economics and political science with the 5rights foundation gazal shekhawat digital futures for children centre, london school of economics and political science with the 5rights foundation beeban kidron digital futures for children centre, london school of economics and political science with the 5rights foundation introduction “the best interests of the child” (article 3(1) of the un convention on the rights of the child (uncrc)) states that “in all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.” with children’s best interests increasingly being referred to explicitly in legislation and policy making relating to the digital environment, the concept is at times misunderstood or even misused. in some contexts, it is used as a substitute for the full range of children’s rights or to legitimate a “one-size-fits-all” approach, notwithstanding children’s diverse circumstances, or to suggest that a single right, such as the right to access information, trumps other rights. taking a child rights approach, this paper reviews the uses and misuses of the best interests of the child in digital contexts before recommending how the concept should be appropriately applied in accordance with international law. theoretical background the un committee on the rights of the child’s general comment no. 25 interprets children’s rights specifically in relation to the digital environment: "the digital environment was not originally designed for children, yet it plays a significant role in children’s lives. states parties should ensure that, in all actions regarding the provision, regulation, design, management and use of the digital environment, the best interests of every child is a primary consideration.” the best interests principle is applicable to policymaking for all decisions that concern or impact children, including business and legislative ones. this includes policies on digital services, data protection and privacy, information security, ai, audiovisual media as well as digital services deployed by public services, ecommerce, education, justice, health and in other areas of public and private life. it is especially important when tensions arise among children’s rights, for example to agency (including participation and access to information), protection (from harm and exploitation) and privacy, and when their rights are at risk in a commercial and datadriven digital world. in effect, the concept of best interests is a means of ensuring that, especially on those occasions when rights are in tension, all children’s rights in the uncrc are realised. method informed by a child rights framework, this paper draws on legal and policy desk research to trace references to the best interests of the child within emerging legislation and policy shaping the digital environment across countries and continents. we also examine the ways in which companies are beginning to refer to best interests by reviewing their policies and legal actions. finally, we draw on a consultation conducted in the uk in 2022 with 143 children aged between 7 and 14 about their rights and best interests in the digital environment. findings the application of best interests to the digital environment varies by country, in part due to its role in a country’s legal system. best interests is present in the irish fundamentals, the african union child protection policy and in sweden and scotland, where the uncrc has been incorporated into law; in those cases it impacts on all laws and regulations that pertain to children. notably, in the global south, south africa, brazil, and kenya explicitly include the best interests of the child in their constitutions. also relevant are the uk’s age appropriate design code and the australian online safety act 2021 where best interests is a standard for platforms to comply with. recently, the european digital services act (regulation (eu) 2022/2065, dsa) requires businesses to put the children’s best interests at the heart of their provision: "providers of very large online platforms and of very large online search engines should take into account the best interests of minors in taking measures such as adapting the design of their service and their online interface, especially when their services are aimed at minors or predominantly used by them.” (para. 89) however, even if the 'best interests of the child’ is mentioned (such as in kenya), children’s rights are often upheld via singular measures of ‘parental consent.’ considering the diversity of childhood contexts, this may not mean that children’s best interests are considered in practice and could even worsen situations by giving parents undue control over children’s access to the digital world. furthermore, some technology companies have started using best interests in their policies and product development in problematic ways. for example, meta’s trust, transparency and control (ttc) labs developed meta’s best interests of the child framework as a standard for their product developers. however, the way meta refers to ‘best interests of the child’ in different documents suggests some confusion about the principle. for example, in their 2022 annual human rights report, they imply that it means protecting children and giving them tools. although they suggest that primary consideration is given to children’s best interests over meta’s commercial interests, the examples given are setting teen accounts to private by default, adding a take a break tool and restricting adults from messaging teens arguably, safety measures rather than limits on the monetisation of children’s data. yet more worryingly, children’s rights in general, and the best interests of the child in particular, are being weaponized by tech lobbyists and trade associations such as the chamber of progress, whose corporate partners include amazon, apple, google, and snap, and netchoice, which represents some of the biggest tech companies in the world. for example, in suing the state of california for its californian age-appropriate design code act, netchoice claimed that “best interests of the child” can be a subjective and vague term that could cause companies to “guess” their meanings, apparently sidelining the considerable jurisprudence regarding the best interests of the child and halting regulation designed to protect children’s privacy online. whatever the merits of the act, such a use of the concept of best interests is misappropriation. takeaways determination of the best interests of the child is a tool prescribed in the uncrc to ensure that decision-making complies with standards set for children under international human rights law. it invokes an authoritative and transparent procedure which, in putting the child’s interests at the centre of concern as a ‘primary consideration,’ allows for accountable decision making. governments and their delegated authorities such as regulators, but not commercial companies, should establish what is in the best interests of children through a consultative process informed by independent expertise in order to realise children’s rights in full. where the commercial interests of digital service providers appear to run counter to the best interests of children, digital policy and legislation are increasingly clear that the latter should be prioritised. sufficient rights-based arguments would have to be advanced by the provider to overcome the best interests of children. weaponizing children’s best interest to undermine the application of data privacy or child protection laws contravenes the uncrc and signals the need for mandatory standards and processes to ensure that children’s needs are a primary consideration in relation to the digital environment. references cantwell, n. (2016). the concept of the best interests of the child: what does it add to children’s human rights? in the best interests of the child – a dialogue between theory and practice. council of europe. https://rm.coe.int/1680657e56 united nations committee on the rights of the child (crc). (2013). general comment no. 14 (2013) on the right of the child to have his or her best interests taken as a primary consideration (art. 3, para. 1) (crc/c/gc/14). https://www.refworld.org/legal/general/crc/2013/en/95780 united nations committee on the rights of the child (crc). (2021). general comment no. 25 (2021) on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment (crc/c/gc/25). https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/general-comments-andrecommendations/general-comment-no-25-2021-childrens-rights-relation goonesekere, s. (1994). the best interests of the child: a south asian perspective. international journal of law, policy and the family, 8(1), 117-149. livingstone, s., cantwell, n., özkul, d, shekhawat, g., and kidron, b. (2024). the best interests of the child in the digital environment. digital futures for children centre, lse and 5rights foundation. https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/122492/ meta. (2022). meta human rights report: insights and actions 2020 2021. https://humanrights.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/2021-meta-human-rightsreport.pdf montgomery, e., & elaina, k. (2022). meta’s best interests of the child framework. ttc labs. https://www.ttclabs.net/news/metas-best-interests-of-the-child-framework https://www.refworld.org/legal/general/crc/2013/en/95780 https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/general-comments-and-recommendations/general-comment-no-25-2021-childrens-rights-relation https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/general-comments-and-recommendations/general-comment-no-25-2021-childrens-rights-relation https://humanrights.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/2021-meta-human-rights-report.pdf https://humanrights.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/2021-meta-human-rights-report.pdf https://www.ttclabs.net/news/metas-best-interests-of-the-child-framework selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct – 02 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): lemos, a., estima, w. (2024, october). autonomy under surveillance: a failed experience on platform cooperativism in brazil. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. disciplined autonomy: a failed platform-cooperativism experience in brazil andré lemos faculty of communication, ufba walmir estima faculty of communication, ufba introduction platformisation (van dijck et al., 2019) operates as a global data extraction and processing structure on proprietary platforms that have conquered central positions in international socioeconomic relations. with its well-established operating rules and power relations, the global platform ecosystem poses challenges and limitations to the platform cooperativism movement. platform cooperativism is a movement that seeks to unite traditional cooperative values with digital communication technologies (scholz, 2016). it aims to offer a counterpoint to platformisation in the struggle for autonomous and fairer working conditions concerning commercial platforms. the analysis of a failed partnership involving a rideshare driver cooperative, coomappa, in the city of araraquara, são paulo, brazil, the city's municipality and a private company (bibi mobilidade) provides an opportunity to discuss platform cooperativism and examine the manifestations of power in the global south. the dynamics of platform capitalism (srnicek, 2017), data colonialism (couldry & mejias, 2019), and surveillance capitalism (zuboff, 2019) constituted the operating model of the experience that is established in the contradiction between the discourse of autonomy and the control of extractive data and resource relations through a disciplinary (economic, technical, organisational) power (foucault, 1977). in the case under analysis, this power is what we name “disciplined autonomy”. a failed experience the experience failed after eight months of operation. based on the premise that failure reveals sociotechnical networks (appadurai & alexander, 2020; baker & korolkova, 2021; bowes & korolkova, 2020; lemos, 2023; rettberg, 2023), we argue that infrastructural dependencies defined local actors’ scope of action from the outset, creating disciplined autonomy: the apparent self-governance of a resistance movement within boundaries set by disciplinary power. coomappa was born from mobilising drivers in araraquara to create alternatives to the low payments received for rides on uber and 99 pop apps. in feasibility studies, the cooperative decided not to develop its app and to invest in the bibi mob app franchise from bibi mobilidade. the city hall welcomed the project through the public incubator of creative and solidarity economy. its launch generated many celebratory headlines in brazil's traditional news portals. brazilian platform cooperativism initiatives are experimental (grohmann, 2021, p.3). method: tracing power relationships through data relations the power of global infrastructural platforms is operating in the locatable action flows of the entities involved in the experience. following the data, we locate globally redistributed local action from the continuous connections of the various stakeholders. we track the data produced by the experience to show how power was performed. the device is analysed based on official documents and website (terms of use and privacy policy), on the application interface (for users and drivers), on the analysis of software development kits and android application permissions (80% of brazilians use the android system), analysis of araraquara city law 10.161/23 and an in-depth interview with coomappa's president. from the analysis, four major infrastructural platforms were involved in the process from the beginning: alphabet, meta, apple and amazon. passenger and driver data are stored and processed on amazon servers coupled with all application usage data. alphabet (google maps) controls the geolocation data of registered users and drivers. support and interpersonal communication activities are carried out by whatsapp (meta), installed on users' and drivers' smartphones, as well as bibi mobilidade attendants and coomappa collaborators. download and installation activities depend on google and apple stores. the identified sdks show data flow toward amazon, meta, and google. the permission to access user accounts in the passenger app, the only one with facebook's data tracking, indicates that the data produced by bibi mob is shared with meta for advertising purposes. disciplined autonomy in the case of digital platforms, autonomy presupposes control of the platform's operation regarding its algorithmic logic, data usage, interfaces, organisation, and business model. coomappa did not have self-determination over the bibi mob platform, which, in turn, was dependent on other infrastructural platforms such as google, amazon, apple, and meta. however, both the sectoral and the global infrastructural platforms seemed to give workers autonomy over their jobs, and that is why they welcomed the partnership, guided by better remuneration. however, before long, autonomy was revealed as partial, monitored, and controlled by mega-platforms that dictated operating costs by changing pricing and narrowing the remuneration possibilities, making the initiative unfeasible for drivers. the disciplinary power produces disciplined autonomy through the bibi mob app and affects the workers' cooperative. it operates in the locatable action flows of the entities creating the experience (drivers, passengers, app, city hall, cooperative, and private company), and it is materially detectable through the mapping of data flow and its management. conclusion the "failure" does not refer to a digital platform that did not work, but quite the opposite, by an operational rationale established by global platforms that led to the bankruptcy of the sociotechnical arrangement. it indicates that the central element of the infrastructural platforms' power is giving relative autonomy to workers controlled by a business model that concentrates organisational power (tariffing, technologies, strategies, data flow surveillance). this research shows that platforms promote partial autonomy as a narrative to make partners docile by offering levels of flexibility that result, in the end, in poor working conditions, low remuneration, and dependence (morales & stecher, 2023; wood et al., 2019; kerssens & van dijck, 2022). the failure of the araraquara experience is due to the exercise of the platform's disciplinary power applied to the partners as a disciplined autonomy. the franchised platform was a mediator of these processes by embedding data capture in its structure, incorporating infrastructural services from sdks and inevitable infrastructural dependencies from google maps, app stores, and amazon web services. bibi mobilidade company had more control over the datafication process than coomappa because it controlled monetisation from facebook sdks and open telemetry functionalities and used driver and user data to try to continue operations in the city without coomappa. in a power pyramid, coomappa would be below bibi mobility. the gafam is on top, orchestrating relationships. the power of platforms revealed by the failure of the brazilian experiment occurred through a disciplined autonomy. this power ensures domination through control over data, imposition of standards, and infrastructural dependencies that affect the definition of business models and the field of action of those on the periphery of the structure. the concept of disciplined autonomy adds evident contradictions to the process of platformisation: unwitting reproduction by a resistance movement of the same power relations it seeks to counter. the main challenges posed to the platform cooperativism movement are in this tangle of relational power. without a broad and efficient data sovereignty policy, the autonomy of cooperative movements will always be watched and at the mercy of disciplinary power – even if they achieve partial and temporary success. platform cooperativism needs to be situated within a broader framework of public policies to offer alternatives to infrastructural platforms. in the global south, policies for innovation and the development of alternative digital infrastructures are urgent. references appadurai, a., & alexander, n. (2020). failure. polity. barker, t., & korolkova, m. (orgs.). (2022). miscommunications: errors, mistakes, media. bloomsbury academic. couldry, n., & mejias, u. a. (2019). data colonialism: rethinking big data's relation to the contemporary subject. television & new media, 20(4), 336–349. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476418796632 foucault, m. (1977). discipline & punish. new york: vintage. grohmann, r. (2021). rider platforms? building worker-owned experiences in spain, france, and brazil. south atlantic quarterly, 120(4), 839–852. doi:10.1215/003828769443392 kerssens, n., & van dijck, j. (2022). governed by edtech? valuing pedagogical autonomy in a platform society. harvard educational review, 92(2), 284-303 korolkova, m., & bowes, s. (2020). mistake as method: towards an epistemology of errors in creative practice and research. european journal of media studies, 9(2), 139– 157. https://necsus-ejms.org/mistake-as-method-towards-an-epistemology-of-errors-increative-practice-and-research/ latour, b. (2005). reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. oxford university press. lemos, a (2023). errores en la cultura digital. in carlon, m. lo contemporáneo: indagaciones sobre el cambio de época en/desde américa latina. universidad de buenos aires. instituto de investigaciones gino germani. pp. 65–90. morales, k., & stecher, a. (2023). platform capitalism and neo-normative control: "autonomy" as a digital platform control strategy in neoliberal chile. new technology, work and employment, 38(2), 230-251. rettberg, j. w. (2022). algorithmic failure as a humanities methodology: machine learning's mispredictions identify rich cases for qualitative analysis. big data & society, 9(2), 205395172211312. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517221131290 scholz, t. (2016). platform cooperativism. challenging the corporate sharing economy. new york: rosa luxemburg foundation. srnicek, n. (2017). platform capitalism. cambridge: polity http://catalogoiigg.sociales.uba.ar/cgi-bin/koha/opac-retrieve-file.pl?id=792f22d829f864d0c4288885abbc188f http://catalogoiigg.sociales.uba.ar/cgi-bin/koha/opac-retrieve-file.pl?id=792f22d829f864d0c4288885abbc188f van dijck, j. & nieborg, d. & poell, t. (2019). reframing platform power. internet policy review, 8(2). https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.2.1414 wood, a. j., graham, m., lehdonvirta, v., & hjorth, i. (2019). good gig, bad gig: autonomy and algorithmic control in the global gig economy. work, employment and society, 33(1), 56-75. zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. public affairs. https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.2.1414 selected papers of #aoir2024: annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct-2 nov 2024 baines, a. & hargittai, e. (2024, october). older adults’ response strategies to misinformation on social media. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. older adults’ response strategies to misinformation on social media baines, annalise university of zurich, switzerland hargittai, eszter university of zurich, switzerland older adults, typically defined as age 60+ (united nations, 2017), have increasingly joined online platforms such as facebook and instagram (auxier & anderson, 2021; cotten et al., 2021). as such users navigate social media, they are confronted with the challenge of discerning credible content, particularly exacerbated during the covid-19 pandemic (butcher, 2021; pehlivanoglu et al., 2022; pennycook et al., 2020). while some studies suggest that older adults may contribute to the spread of misinformation online (brashier & schacter, 2020; guess et al., 2019), how this population responds to false information and what role sociodemographic factors and digital skills play in this process has been underresearched. existing scholarship on the sharing of misinformation among older adults presents a complex picture, with findings that are mixed. for instance, guess and colleagues (2019) challenge the notion that sharing misinformation is as prevalent among older adults as popular accounts suggest. however, insights from another study note an age-related pattern in the sharing of false news on social media (moretto et al., 2022). building on this prior work, this study explores how this demographic responds to misinformation on social media through the following research questions: rq1: how popular are various response strategies to misinformation on social media among adults aged 60+? rq2: what is the relationship between older adults’ internet experiences and skills, and their response strategies to misinformation on social media? rq3: what sociodemographic factors relate to which and how many types of response strategies older adults employ when encountering misinformation on social media? methods in fall 2023, we surveyed 2,000 adults aged 60+ about their internet uses including their response strategies to misinformation on social media. since our research adam woodward adam woodward adam woodward adam woodward older adults’ response strategies to misinformation on social media adam woodward annalise baines adam woodward eszter hargittai questions concern experiences on social media, we restrict the analyses to social media users. three percent of respondents indicated that they never use social media, and were therefore excluded from the analyses, resulting in a final sample of 1,941 social media users. all respondents in our sample passed an attention-check question (berinsky et al., 2014). to be representative of the national population, we apply weights based on age, gender, race, and education. dependent variable response strategies to misinformation encountered on social media. we developed a list of misinformation response strategies based on existing literature (munyaka et al., 2022; wasike, 2023; zhou et al., 2023). the survey asked the following question: “have you ever done any of the following in response to content you saw on social media that you thought was false? check all that apply.” with these options: • explicitly challenged, corrected, or questioned the content • checked the source of the content to verify its credibility • used a fact checker website to verify the content • searched for other sources to verify the content • read the comments to see if other users shared your perspective • used your intuition or “gut feeling” to know if the content was true or false • defriended or unfollowed someone because they shared the content • reported or flagged the content • none of the above we created two recodes of the measure: a) a continuous variable ranging from 0-8 indicating how many of the misinformation strategies respondents reported using; and b) a variable for whether the respondent used any of the misinformation strategies. independent variables sociodemographics. [full paper includes details of how we measured age, gender, education, socioeconomic resources, disability.] internet experiences and skills. we included three measures related to respondents’ internet experiences given that digital inequality scholarship has shown these to be important for how people incorporate information and communication technologies into their lives: autonomy of use, frequency of use, and social media skills. [the full paper includes measurement details.] analytical procedure to address the first research question, we report on the prevalence of using various misinformation response strategies. next, we examine the relationship of internet experiences and skills with the use of misinformation response strategies (rq2), using bivariate and then regression analyses. to address the third research question, we look at how use of misinformation strategies relates to sociodemographic factors using both logit (any such use) and ols (number of response strategies used) regressions. [tables and figures are provided for each rq in the full paper.] the use of misinformation response strategies (rq1) many respondents (65.6%) employ at least one strategy when encountering false information on social media. the most popular approach is to read the comments to see if other users shared the respondent’s perspective (35.0%), followed by checking the source of the content to verify its credibility (34.7%). defriending or unfollowing someone because they shared the content was the least used misinformation response strategy (15.3%) of the ones listed on the survey, perhaps not surprisingly as it is a much more drastic and permanent action. on average, respondents used two strategies to deal with misinformation. use of misinformation strategies by internet experiences and skills (rq2) the second research question delves into the relationship between digital experiences (autonomy of use, social media skills, frequency of use) and the utilization of misinformation response strategies. digital experiences are closely linked to the use of response strategies. specifically, frequency of internet use is related to misinformation response strategies, whereby (68.5%) of regular users utilize response strategies compared to 40.1% of less frequent users, the former averaging 2.2, the latter 0.9 response strategies. the most highly skilled users are much more likely (85.0%) to take advantage of response strategies than the least skilled (45.4%) and they also use more such response strategies (3.2 vs 1.1, respectively). use of misinformation response strategies by sociodemographic background (rq3) our final research question asked what sociodemographic factors relate to whether and how many types of response strategies older adults employ when encountering misinformation on social media. those with higher educational attainment (bachelor’s degree or higher) and disabled people are more likely to use any misinformation response strategy. additionally, as age increases, individuals are less likely to use any misinformation strategy. these findings generally also hold for number of response strategies used. higher education levels and being disabled are associated with an increase in the number of misinformation response strategies. higher age is also associated with a decrease in the number of misinformation response strategies used. discussion our investigation into misinformation response strategies among older adults on social media shows that while many such users approach online content critically, there is room for improvement as about a third do not rely on any of the eight strategies we inquired about. the study offers insights into how using response strategies relates to digital experiences and sociodemographic factors. the findings underscore the importance of considering both social media skills and sociodemographic factors in comprehending people’s engagement with misinformation. data on nationally representative samples about coping with misinformation are rare, which is an important unique contribution of this paper. the study contributes to the evolving discourse on misinformation in the digital age, offering insights that can inform educational initiatives and intervention strategies tailored to the particular needs of older adults. references auxier, b., & anderson, m. (2021). social media use in 2021. pew research center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/social-media-use-in-2021/ berinsky, a. j., margolis, m. f., & sances, m. w. (2014). separating the shirkers from the workers? making sure respondents pay attention on self-administered surveys. american journal of political science, 58(3), 739–753. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12081 brashier, n., & schacter, d. (2020). aging in an era of fake news. current directions in psychological science, 29(3), 316–323. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721420915872 butcher, p. (2021). covid-19 as a turning point in the fight against disinformation. nature electronics, 4(1), article 1. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-020-00532-2 cotten, s. r., schuster, a. m., & seifert, a. (2021). social media use and well-being among older adults. current opinion in psychology, 45. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.12.005 guess, a., nagler, j., & tucker, j. (2019). less than you think: prevalence and predictors of fake news dissemination on facebook. science advances, 5(1), 1– 8. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aau4586 moretto, m., ortellado, p., kessler, g., vommaro, g., rodriguez-raga, j. c., luna, j. p., heinen, e., cely, l. f., & toro, s. (2022). people are more engaged on facebook as they get older, especially in politics: evidence from users in 46 countries. journal of quantitative description: digital media, 2. https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2022.018 munyaka, i., hargittai, e., & redmiles, e. (2022). the misinformation paradox: older adults are cynical about news media, but engage with it anyway. journal of online trust and safety, 1(4), article 4. https://doi.org/10.54501/jots.v1i4.62 pehlivanoglu, d., lighthall, n. r., lin, t., chi, k. j., polk, r., perez, e., cahill, b. s., & ebner, n. c. (2022). aging in an “infodemic”: the role of analytical reasoning, affect, and news consumption frequency on news veracity detection. journal of experimental psychology: applied, 28(3), 468–485. https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000426 pennycook, g., mcphetres, j., zhang, y., lu, j. g., & rand, d. g. (2020). fighting covid-19 misinformation on social media: experimental evidence for a scalable accuracy-nudge intervention. psychological science, 31(7), 770–780. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620939054 united nations. (2017). world population ageing 2017. united nations. wasike, b. (2023). you’ve been fact-checked! examining the effectiveness of social media fact-checking against the spread of misinformation. telematics and informatics reports, 11, 100090. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.teler.2023.100090 zhou, j., xiang, h., & xie, b. (2023). better safe than sorry: a study on older adults’ credibility judgments and spreading of health misinformation. universal access in the information society, 22(3), 957–966. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-02200899-3 microsoft word zaffaroni-smart speakers and data relations in families with young children-smart speakers and data relations.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): zaffaroni, l. g., mascheroni, g., amadori, g. (2022, november). smart speakers and data relations in families with young children. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. smart speakers and data relations in families with young children lorenzo giuseppe zaffaroni università cattolica del sacro cuore, italy giovanna mascheroni università cattolica del sacro cuore, italy gaia amadori università cattolica del sacro cuore, italy introduction smart speakers are now a popular component of the digital media ensembles of (country anonymised) families. as other “artificial companions” (hepp, 2019), smart speakers are internet-connected objects that collect, monitor and distribute information about their users and the surrounding environment (bunz & meikle, 2018), thus gaining at least partially autonomous agency. in so doing, smart speakers extend the datafication of the domestic environment, while contributing to the normalisation of data relations (couldry & mejias, 2019)—interactions facilitated and shaped by technologies of data extraction—as an integral part of family everyday life. smart speakers have been analysed focusing mainly on privacy issues (büchi et al., 2020, 2022; pridmore et al., 2019), usage patterns (beneteau et al., 2020; lopatovska et al., 2019), and children’s interaction with social robotic agents from a developmental perspective (lovato & piper, 2019; de jong et al., 2021). research so far on the domestication of smart speakers into the domestic context, family relations, practices and imaginaries has been sparse. theoretical framework we argue for a move away from a media-centric approach, towards an analysis of the emergent and situated relationships (through and with smart speakers), agencies and power structures mobilised in the domestication of smart speakers. for these reasons, we make the argument that we can gain a deeper understanding of the role of smart speakers in family life, and, overall, of the datafication of childhood (barassi, 2020; mascheroni & siibak, 2021), if we understand families as communicative figurations (couldry & hepp, 2017; hepp, breiter & hasebrink, 2018) composed of a constellation of actors (family members), culture (including technological and surveillance imaginaries (lyon, 2018), communication practices, and a specific digital media ensemble. methods focusing on smart speakers, this presentation reports on the first wave of a longitudinal mixed-method research project involving 20 families with children aged 0 to 8 in (country anonymised). theoretical sampling was adopted to reach families with different socio-economic backgrounds and different media habits. interviews with parents and children were conducted separately (when possible), after a joint ice-breaking activity. anonymised transcriptions were analysed following a constructivist grounded theory approach (charmaz, 2014) via the maxqda software. findings findings confirm that smart speakers are appropriated, negotiated and resisted based on the specific communicative figuration enacted by each family. in particular, we advance that communicative figurations involve –and therefore demand analytical attention to– a reconfiguration of power and agency relating both to traditional axes (status, class, gender and age) and new forms of power enabled by the progressive colonisation of the domestic environment by data (couldry & mejias, 2019). the interplay between these (traditional and data-driven) reconfigurations is also part of our analysis. based on our analysis of the emergent, situated and everyday power dynamics in data practices and imaginaries, we propose a typification of households along a continuum of positions in family relationships with data between two opposite poles: data-resistants and data-normalisers. for example, when smart speakers were framed as tools for children’s empowerment (i.e. enabling children’s autonomous access to digital media), they were resisted by parents who believed they threatened their ability to control and mediate children’s media practices. in this case, the domestication of smart speakers involves a reconfiguration of the power dynamics inherent in parental rules. in particular, we find that children derive agency by borrowing from smart speaker’s communicative agency – comprising communicative functions ("alexa, what's the weather like?") and remote control affordances, which enable children to control other connected devices ("alexa, play some music from my spotify playlist”). other families enthusiastically accepted smart speakers as the latest technological gadget, conceiving of privacy risks as an inevitable yet trivial consequence. families can adopt communicative strategies –such as portraying a “reconciled” image of the family (goulden, 2019)– as means to minimise the exposure of one's “colonised self” in the eyes of others. similarly, families downplay algorithmic tracking, and thus normalise it, by referring to their moral righteousness (e.g. !having nothing to hide”). in other instances, the resistance to smart speakers is embedded both in discourses and practices which reject surveillance imaginaries (lyon, 2018). some families, indeed, de-domesticated smart speakers due to the chilling effect of algorithmic predictions. conclusions our presentation provides theoretical and empirical insights into the study of datafication as a diverse, situated and embodied experience. households can negotiate, resist and oppose datafication practices and imaginaries by mobilising various strategies, discourses, meanings and practices. in this respect, our theoretical approach and typification ultimately allow studying how data practices materialise – and are (partially) accepted, negotiated or rejected – as a specific communicative figuration in each family. references barassi, v. (2020). child data citizen: how tech companies are profiling us from before birth. mit press. beneteau, e., boone, a., wu, y., kientz, j. a., yip, j., & hiniker, a. (2020). parenting with alexa: exploring the introduction of smart speakers on family dynamics. proceedings of the 2020 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 1– 13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376344 büchi, m., fosch-villaronga, e., lutz, c., tamò-larrieux, a., velidi, s., & viljoen, s. (2020). the chilling effects of algorithmic profiling: mapping the issues. computer law & security review, 36, 105367. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clsr.2019.105367 büchi, m., festic, n., & latzer, m. (2022). the chilling effects of digital dataveillance: a theoretical model and an empirical research agenda. big data & society, 9(1), 205395172110653. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211065368 bunz, m., & meikle, g. (2018). the internet of things. polity press. charmaz, k. (2014). constructing grounded theory (2nd ed.). sage publications ltd. couldry, n., & mejias, u. a. (2019). the costs of connection. stanford university press. couldry, n., & hepp, a. (2017). the mediated construction of reality. polity press. de jong, c., peter, j., kühne, r., & barco, a. (2021). children"s intention to adopt social robots: a model of its distal and proximal predictors. international journal of social robotics, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-021-00835-0 goulden, m. (2019). “delete the family”: platform families and the colonisation of the smart home. information, communication & society. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1668454 hepp, a. (2013). the communicative figurations of mediatized worlds: mediatization research in times of the ‘mediation of everything’. european journal of communication, 28(6), 615–629. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323113501148 hepp, a. (2019). deep mediatization"s re-figuration of society. in deep mediatization. routledge. hepp, a., breiter, a. & hasebrink, u. (2018). communicative figurations: transforming communications in times of deep mediatization. springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65584-0_2 lyon, d. (2018). the culture of surveillance: watching as a way of life. polity press. lopatovska, i., griffin, a., gallagher, k., ballingall, c., rock, c., & velazquez, m. (2019). user recommendations for intelligent personal assistants. journal of librarianship and information science. advance online publication. doi: 10.1177/0961000619841107 lovato, s. b., & piper, a. m. (2019). young children and voice search: what we know from human-computer interaction research. frontiers in psychology, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00008 mascheroni, g. (2020). datafied childhoods: contextualising datafication in everyday life. current sociology, 68(6), 798–813. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392118807534 mascheroni, g. & siibak, a. (2021). datafied childhoods: data practices and imaginaries in children's lives. peter lang pridmore, j., zimmer, m., vitak, j., mols, a., trottier, d., kumar, p. c., & liao, y. (2019). intelligent personal assistants and the intercultural negotiations of dataveillance in platformed households. surveillance & society, 17(1/2), 125–131. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v17i1/2.12936 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 empowering voters and fostering healthy political discourse: discursive legitimation by digital media platforms in the context of elections salla-maaria laaksonen university of helsinki mervi pantti university of helsinki niko hatakka (†)1 university of helsinki introduction the role of digital media platforms as societal actors has been increasingly brought to the fore in recent years. while it has been acknowledged that social media allows for democratizing of communication and supports civic processes (e.g., dutton, 2009; bennett & segerberg, 2013), we have also grown to understand how they foster communication not motivated by liberal and democratic norms. following the revelations by large-scale whistleblower accounts or document leaks, concerns about the platform industry’s conduct have been voiced out by the media, citizens, ngos, and finally by governments as well. this growing distrust towards the big technology companies is known publicly as ‘the techlash’ (economist, 2018). the public concerns are also backed up by academic research. critical scholarship has pointed out platforms’ role in amplifying extreme content and misinformation (e.g., jungherr & schroeder, 2021), spreading false information (e.g., vicario et al., 2016), and allowing for manipulation of political processes and communication (e.g., bennett & livingston, 2018; dommett, 2021). from a more systemic perspective, scholars have sought to understand the socio-economic relations behind platforms and to ways in which their business structure incentivizes certain types of communicative behavior (e.g., van dijck, et al., 2018; gillespie, 2015). in particular, existing research addresses 1 † passed away october 15, 2023. suggested citation (apa): laaksonen, s.-m., pantti, m., hatakka, n. (2024, october). empowering voters and fostering healthy political discourse: discursive legitimation by digital media platforms in the context of elections. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. how social media platforms, through their design choices, user incentives, and moderation choices, intervene in public political communication. platforms have been argued to affect the practices of voters and politicians (thorson et al., 2021; miller & vaccari, 2020; nelimarkka et al., 2020; freelon, 2017), and to contribute to more individualized, visual, and negative forms of communication (enli & moe, 2013; gerbaudo et al., 2023). following the increasing public scrutiny of harmful activities and information operations taking place on digital platforms, the platforms have begun defending their actions by showing that they address the problems stated and engage in self-regulation. as moss and ford (2020) note, platforms’ willingness to self-regulate beyond their legal requirements counts as a valid, if perhaps limited mechanism for accountability. yet, as pointed out by bossetta (2020), platforms typically change their structures and design only as a response to public scandals (see also ananny & gillespie, 2018). in addition, platforms engage in public communication about their activities. platform companies eagerly communicate that they generate social good, yet they are commercial companies motivated by private, economic interests (van dijck et al., 2018; van dijck & nieborg, 2009). to investigate the actions and communication of the platform industry we turn to studies of organizational and discursive legitimacy. legitimacy refers to the social acceptance of an organization and its operations. according to the classic definition of suchman (1995), legitimacy refers to the general perception or assumption that an organization’s actions are desirable, correct, or appropriate in a particular socially constructed system of norms, values, or beliefs. lack of legitimacy typically forces the organization to react and modify their actions (tost, 2011; meyer & scott, 1983). therefore, organizations typically engage in discursive processes of legitimation, that is, processes of meaning-making where their actions and positions in society are constructed to generate a sense of legitimacy (van leeuwen, 2007; vaara et al., 2006). discursive legitimation thus refers to a process of socially constructing a desirable social reality and positioning the organization in it (berger & luckmann, 1966). this study focuses on the discursive strategies adopted by the platforms over time to publicize and justify their actions related to elections and political communication on their services. we ask, how do platform companies articulate elections as a context through which they discursively construct their role and legitimacy as actors in society? data and methodology our data includes corporate blog entries from 10 major platform companies (google, youtube, meta, twitter, tiktok, reddit, microsoft, amazon, apple, linkedin). we use a large scraped dataset of corporate blogs (n=27,616, years 2006-2022), filtered with an automated dictionary-based method to identify entries related to elections (n=413). we analyze these texts as strategic, discursive justification and legitimation (suchman, 1995; van leeuwen, 2007) amidst the calls for platform accountability in safeguarding election integrity. we used corpus linguistic tools and textual data visualizations (tableau & voyant tools, sinclair & rockwell 2023) combined with a qualitative analysis of legitimation strategies and discursive positioning to identify the different discursive categories of legitimation (van leeuwen, 2007). findings our findings show a shift from an opportunity-focused discourse that promotes participation, digital democracy, and politician-citizen interaction to a more defensive discourse stressing companies’ responsible attitude to elections, as evidenced by their transparency efforts, advertising control, fact-checking initiatives, and strategic partnerships. we identified three distinct phases in the development of the discourses. first phase is the era of participatory digital democracy. the blog posts are ripe with opportunity-focused discourse promoting political livestreams and opportunities to interact with the candidates, giving tribute to participatory online culture. this phase is particularly dominated by youtube, which is why youtube creators are given a prominent role along with citizens and politicians. discursive legitimation is based on moral evaluation: the discourses highlight the value of user participation. the second phase of crisis mode and newspeak begins from the 2017 cambridge anaytica scandal, which led to a more defensive discourse stressing companies’ responsible attitude and the implemented remedies, including transparency efforts, advertising control, fact-checking initiatives, and strategic partnerships with fact-checkers. the legitimizing discourses emphasized means, goals, and effects, thus building on instrumental legitimation by establishing the value of their counteractions. the effectiveness was further backed up with numerical argumentation. during this phase, an “election integrity newspeak” emerges: words such as “malicious content”, “harmful misinformation”, “coordinated inauthentic behavior” and “healthy discourse” enter the corporate vocabulary of the platforms (see figure 1). by creating this terminology the platforms, interestingly, become major drivers in propagating the narrative of false information. the final third phase is the era of platform agency and information defense. the discourses still highlight malicious actors but increasingly depict the platforms as proactive players and emphasize their collaboration networks. focus is on justifying and underlining the recently found agency of the platforms in society. novel actions are stronger interventions to political talk: they include highlighting and amplifying desired content and also bans on political advertising by some platforms (twitter, tiktok). the discursive legitimation relies on naturalizing theoretical rationalization which normalizes platform power in an affirmative tone: “this is how things are”. overall, our findings highlight how election-related scandals emerge as a critical event, a culmination point for platform responsibility discourses. in these discourses, the platforms conveniently utilize the typical empowering discourse and language of social media that highlights cultures and participation (see van dijck & nieborg, 2009). this kind of dominant social media discourse fits well with the topic of politics and ideals of representative democracy. explored over time, our findings demonstrate an institutionalization of discourses within the platform industry and highlight their reactive response strategies from feature development (bossetta, 2020) to corporate legitimation strategies. instrumental legitimation and discursive positioning the platform companies engage in aims to equip them with expert authority and presents them as socially indispensable actors in society. figure 1. relative frequencies of transparen*, misinform* and fake* in the corpus. references ananny, m., & gillespie, t. (2016). public platforms: beyond the cycle of shocks and exceptions. the internet, policy & politics conference 2016, 1–22. available: http://blogs.oii.ox.ac.uk/ipp-conference/2016/programme-2016/track-b-governance/platf orm-studies/tarleton-gillespie-mike-ananny.htm bennett, w. l., & livingston, s. (2018). the disinformation order: disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions. european journal of communication, 33(2), 122–139. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323118760317 bennett, l. w., & segerberg, a. (2013). the logic of connective action : digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. cambridge university press. berger, p. l., & luckmann, t. (1966). the social construction of reality. penguin group, https://doi.org/10.2307/323448 bossetta, m. (2020). scandalous design: how social media platforms’ responses to scandal impacts campaigns and elections. social media and society, 6(2), 205630512092477. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120924777 dommett, k. (2021). the inter-institutional impact of digital platform companies on democracy: a case study of the uk media’s digital campaigning coverage. new media and society. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211028546 dutton, w. h. (2009). the fifth estate emerging through the network of networks. prometheus, 27(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/08109020802657453 economist (018). the techlash against amazon, facebook and google—and what they can do. january 20, 2018. available: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/01/20/the-techlash-against-amazon-facebookand-google-and-what-they-can-do enli, g. & moe, h. (2013). social media and election campaigns – key tendencies and ways forward, information, communication & society, 16(5), 637-645, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2013.784795 freelon, d. (2017). campaigns in control: analyzing controlled interactivity and message discipline on facebook. journal of information technology & politics, 14(2), 168–181. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2017.1309309 gerbaudo, p., de falco, c. c., giorgi, g., keeling, s., murolo, a., & nunziata, f. (2023). angry posts mobilize: emotional communication and online mobilization in the facebook pages of western european right-wing populist leaders. social media + society, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231163327 gillespie, t. (2015). platforms intervene. social media + society, 1(1), 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115580479 jungherr, a., & schroeder, r. (2021). disinformation and the structural transformations of the public arena: addressing the actual challenges to democracy. social media + society, 7(1), 205630512198892. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305121988928 meyer, j. w. & scott, w. r. (1983). organizational environments: ritual and rationality, sage. miller, m. & vaccari, c. (2020) digital threats to democracy: comparative lessons and possible remedies. the international journal of press/politics, 25(3), 333–356. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940161220922323 moss, g., & ford, h. (2020). how accountable are digital platforms? : a research agenda for digital politics. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781789903096.00019 nelimarkka, m., laaksonen, s.-m., tuokko, m., & valkonen, t. (2020). platformed interactions: how social media platforms relate to candidate–constituent interaction during finnish 2015 election campaigning. social media + society, 6(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120903856 sinclair, s., & rockwell, g. (2023). voyant tools. retrieved june 9, 2023, from https://voyant-tools.org/ suchman, m. c. (1995). managing legitimacy: strategic and institutional approaches. the academy of management review, 20(3), 571. https://doi.org/10.2307/258788 thorson k., cotter k., medeiros m., & pak, c. (2021). algorithmic inference, political interest, and exposure to news and politics on facebook. information, communication & society, 24(2), 183–200. tost, l. p. (2011). an integrative model of legitimacy judgments. academy of management review, 36(4), 686–710. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2010.0227 vaara, e., tienari, j., & laurila, j. (2006). pulp and paper fiction: on the discursive legitimation of global industrial restructuring. organization studies, 27(6), 789–813. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840606061071 van dijck, j., & nieborg, d. (2009). wikinomics and its discontents: a critical analysis of web 2.0 business manifestos. new media and society, 11(5), 855–874. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809105356 van dijck, j., poell t., & de waal m. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford university press. van leeuwen, t. (2007). legitimation in discourse and communication. discourse & communication, 1(1), 91–112. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481307071986 vicario, m. del, bessi, a., zollo, f., petroni, f., scala, a., caldarelli, g., stanley, h. e., & quattrociocchi, w. (2016). the spreading of misinformation online. proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america, 113(3), 554–559. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1517441113 aoir2023.docx selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 proactive memefication and political catharsis: how online humor prompts political expression among sudanese social media users abubakr abdelbagi teachers college, columbia university introduction similar to many other countries in the southwest asia and north africa (swana) region1, sudan has been through elongated periods of heightened political activity within the last few decades since its independence; two civil wars and dozens of military coups, and most recently the 2018 december revolution. with social media increasingly becoming part of everyday life in sudan, new opportunities and challenges emerge. on the one hand, sudanese people have benefited from the affordances of social media platforms to enrich their civic life (ali, 2019; kadoda & hale, 2015). on the other hand, the authoritarian regime has been using the same platform tools to surveil the citizenry, disseminate misinformation, and deceivingly embellish the regime’s image for international audiences (wilson, 2019). while there is a considerable number of studies on how social media was used to mobilize citizens during the arab spring (see, e.g. eltantawy & wiest, 2011), or demobilize and control populations (jones, 2017), less attention is given to how these online spaces were –– and still are — used for political engagement that is not inherently considered mobilization. furthermore, although a growing body of literature is concerned with how arabic content creators are using online humor (as a safer discourse tool compared to offline physical action) to subvert social and political authority (see, e.g. zidani, 2020), internet scholarship is yet to comprehensively explore how online comical content might make room for other less-inclined platform users to also engage in politics. this examination is essential in the context of sudan, which is 1 in line with decolonial frameworks that repudiate the positioning of the region from a western-centric perspective, this article prefers the use of southwest asia and north africa (swana). the term swana suffers less from ethnocentrism and stereotyping compared to other terms such as the middle east and north africa (rahme, 1999, p. 478). suggested citation (apa): abdelbagi, a. (2023, october). proactive memefication and political catharsis: how online humor prompts political expression among sudanese social media users. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. critically understudied in terms of communication practices and social movements (malik, 2022). therefore, this study asks, how does online humor prompt political expression among sudanese social media users? method this study employs qualitative analysis of data collected from the shabab hilween facebook page, the main social media outlet of prominent sudanese youth content creators with more than 800,000 followers. the page regularly posts comedic videos to tackle burgeoning social issues and on a smaller scale, topical political events, in a way that would be “otherwise difficult or contentious to express outside the vehicles of parody and [humor]” (abidin, 2021, p. 599). facebook was chosen as the site of research because of its regional popularity, boasting 1.3 million users from sudan (iws, 2021), and the role the platform plays “in both political and community engagements of contemporary urban sudanese youth” (kadoda & hale, 2015, p. 215). this researcher has collected all the user-generated comments (93,544) posted in reaction to the page’s humorous videos (33) since the beginning of the december revolution in 2018, up to october 2022 (the time of data collection). this timeframe represents a period of heightened political activity in sudan, as political unrest continues to take place across the nation. as a particularly suitable tool for exploratory research using large datasets, thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2006) was conducted on the data corpus to investigate the patterns of how the shabab hilween page’s humorous videos prompted political expression. following warren’s (1999) framework of “what is political?”, the research captured the comments that either: (1) referred to a political figure, group, actor, or entity, explicitly or implicitly; (2) mentioned a recent event that had to do with the political situation in sudan, directly (e.g. the military coup) or indirectly (e.g. bread and gas shortage); (3) discussed the everyday societal issues and other forms of contested relations of power (e.g. politics of religion, gender, and identity); or (4) responded to any comment from the previous categories. this resulted in a final corpus of 8,232 comments. having been a follower of the page since 2017 and a culturally-relevant participant observer (see williams, 2007), the researcher coded, categorized, and refined the aforementioned emerging themes (braun & clarke, 2006). findings and discussion two major preliminary findings emerged within the study. first, the shabab hilween page commentators were observed memefying the content from the page’s humorous videos to layer in political commentary. hundreds of memefied screenshots created or appropriated by users were observed in the comment section to address unfolding political events, often under content that is not explicitly political. more importantly, however, the shabab hilween page owners, in turn, were seen to engage in what i define as proactive memefication and templatization (see figure 1). in the process of proactive memefication, right after the page owners publish a new video, they immediately follow up with a meme pulled from the video’s content to entice users into participating. and, to facilitate this with proactive templatization and to prompt community user-generated memes, content creators mobilize a meme template by, for example, posting or commenting with an expressive still image aptly snapped from the video, creating a sad gif, or trimming a 5-second video with a witty line. figure 1: examples of proactive memefication and templatization done on the shabab hilween facebook page (annotated by author’s translation). a growing body of literature shows how online users, especially young people, utilize the shared symbolic resources offered by popular culture artifacts for political engagement in western contexts (see, e.g. literat, i., & kligler-vilenchik, 2021). that being said, this study digs deeper and begs the question of what content is essentially popular culture for sudanese people — especially youth who, due to years of censorship and propaganda, have no interest in local mainstream media (abdelbagi & literat, 2023), and also might not necessarily be interested in global popular culture? it’s possible the youth creators of the shabab hilween facebook page came to realize and address this “void” (malik, 2022) by proactively memefying their own content, allowing local users to have preferred sources to use for political engagement. additionally, the researcher has occasionally observed memes originating from the shabab hilween page’s videos circulating around the larger platform outside the specific community page, suggesting the significance and political discourse implications of the act of proactive memefication/templatization. the second finding highlights how sudanese social media users sought political catharsis and collective relief from the shabab hilween page’s humorous videos and the comment section. significantly, the violent oppression from authorities has been a traumatic element of the revolution that sudanese users continue to endure and vocalize against. users have posted comments thanking the creators for making videos that speak to them and provide comfort. they also replied to one another in consolation. indeed, parody (such as saturday night live sketches) can offer that, enabling citizens to release repressed emotions and create “political catharsis” in the aftermath of transformative events, and “move the public through grief to a place of action” (davisson, 2018, p. 196). lacking popular television shows and artifacts, sudanese online surfers have used the space afforded on facebook, especially shabab hilween’s witty videos. users have been excessively tagging and urging one another to watch the content, but also explicitly communicating their relief that “finally someone talked about this”, as one user commented. many users have shared a photo of themselves with what seemed to be their families or friends watching the videos. this suggests that political discussion and catharsis might extend beyond the online platform, and warrants future research. references abdelbagi, a., & literat, i. (2023). mapping the information landscapes of sudanese youth: implications for media literacy education. international journal of communication, 17, 23. abidin, c. (2021). minahs and minority celebrity: parody youtube influencers and minority politics in singapore. celebrity studies, 12(4), 598-617. ali, n. m. (2019). sudanese women’s groups on facebook and# civil_disobedience: nairat or thairat?(radiant or revolutionary?). african studies review, 62(2), 103-126. braun, v. & clarke, v. (2006) using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77–101. davisson, a. (2018). “hallelujah”: parody, political catharsis, and grieving the 2016 election with saturday night live. communication quarterly, 66(2), 196-213. internet world stats. (2021). usage and population statistics: sudan. retrieved from https://www.internetworldstats.com/africa.htm#sd jones, m. o. (2017). social media, surveillance and social control in the bahrain uprising. westminster papers in communication and culture, 9(2). kadoda, g., & hale, s. (2015). contemporary youth movements and the role of social media in sudan. canadian journal of african studies/revue canadienne des études africaines, 49(1), 215-236. literat, i., & kligler-vilenchik, n. (2019). youth collective political expression on social media: the role of affordances and memetic dimensions for voicing political views. new media & society, 21(9), 1988-2009. malik, s. i. (2022). sudan’s december revolution of 2018: the ecology of youth connective and collective activism. information, communication & society, 25(10), 1495-1510. rahme, j. g. (1999). ethnocentric and stereotypical concepts in the study of islamic and world history. the history teacher, 32(4), 473-494. warren, m. e. (1999). what is political?. journal of theoretical politics, 11(2), 207-231. williams, m. (2007). avatar watching: participant observation in graphical online environments. qualitative research, 7(1), 5-24. wilson, t. (2019, june 30). sudan militia chief hires canadian lobbying group for $6m. financial times. retrieved from https://www.ft.com/content/816fb488-99a7-11e9-9573-ee5cbb98ed36 zidani, s. (2020). not arabi or ajnabi: arab youth and reorienting humor. international journal of communication, 14, 18. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): poole, e; de quincey, e; giraud, e & richardson, j.e. (2023, october). tracing media solidarities with muslims: contesting islamophobia on twitter. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. tracing media solidarities with muslims: contesting islamophobia on twitter elizabeth poole keele university ed de quincey keele university eva giraud the university of sheffield john e. richardson the university of liverpool this paper traces the ambivalence of mediated solidarities, by drawing on five years’ of data from a project on anti-islamophobic counter-narratives.solidarity has been cited as a necessary prerequisite for transformational structural change and therefore contains revolutionary potential (mohanty, 2003; featherstone, 2012). in turn, political emotion is a key driver of solidarity and the development of social movements (bakardjieva, 2020). debates about the capacity of digital spaces for fostering political emotion that can give rise to solidarity have abounded since early studies of alter-globalisation protestors in the 1990s and early 00s (juris, 2007; dean, 2009). this paper examines the role and evolution of mediated solidarities, which have become increasingly central to an analysis of social movements with the advent of participatory technologies. a key scholar of media solidarities kaarina nikunen (2019:3) defines them as ‘the ways in which media shapes, circulates and takes part in expressions and representations of solidarity’ which may take the form of ‘media engagements, representations and productions that express or enhance solidarity’. numerous studies have demonstrated the importance of affective engagement in driving the formulation of networked counter-publics (jackson and foucault welles, 2016: papacharissi, 2015). yet, they also note the limitations of a commercialised digital space and characteristics of an ‘impatient’ media which generates both ‘weak commitment’ that can be depoliticising (chouliaraki, 2006; nikunen, 2019) and as antagonistic political polarisation (yardi & boyd, 2010). this selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): poole, e; de quincey, e; giraud, e & richardson, j.e. (2023, october). tracing media solidarities with muslims: contesting islamophobia on twitter. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. paper explores this ‘paradox of media solidarity’ (nikunen, 2019) with reference to a big data study examining the potential for media solidarities with muslims on twitter. online platforms have the affordances to contest islamophobic hate speech as demonstrated by the dynamics of #stopislam following the brussels terror attack, 2016. in this instance, the hashtag gained its prominence through the contestations of users who sought to question, critique and undermine its original message (reference redacted). however, close examination of this hashtag also revealed how some right-wing alliances were better able to harness the affordances of twitter in the interests of their political agendas. these conflicting engagements with #stopislam demonstrate the frictions arising in what is both a commercialised and politicised media space. we sought to further interrogate the dynamics of online attempts to challenge islamophobia through a large-scale interdisciplinary study (3million plus tweets), #contesting islamophobia: representation and appropriation in mediated activism, that used methods of computational (big data), quantitative, and qualitative content analysis to examine the dynamics of discourse about islam and muslims in the case three ‘trigger events’ (awan, 2014). these were britain’s exit from the european union (i.e. ‘brexit’); the 2019 terrorist attack on two mosques in christchurch, new zealand, by a white supremacist; and the covid-19 pandemic, (2020). adopting a longitudinal, comparative approach, we examine whether the high incidence of solidarity discourses in these datasets are limited to acts of counter-speech (and other acts of ‘weak’ solidarity) or if they contribute to sustainable counter-narratives that have implications for wider formations related to islam and muslims, networked collectivities, and meaningful change. through our analysis we identify a pattern wherein, as the shock of trigger events event diminishes, support also begins to evaporate and critical voices emerge, raising questions over the longevity of online solidarities in relation to these events. in line with the case of #stopislam for example, engagement following the christchurch terror attack was highly supportive initially as people sought to demonstrate solidarity with muslims following a harrowing attack. through the production and circulation of hashtags such as #hellobrother and #peacefulmosques, the data contributes evidence for the notion of networked counter-publics. however, over time transnational debates about gun laws and the sharing of hateful content online begins to undermine these solidarities and provides evidence of a ‘long tail of racism’ exploited by a transnational far right. in turn, our findings raise questions regarding whether the political economy of twitter (and other commercial social media platforms) limits the ability to act as a communication tool for positive, progressive and structural change. the paper selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): poole, e; de quincey, e; giraud, e & richardson, j.e. (2023, october). tracing media solidarities with muslims: contesting islamophobia on twitter. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. explores the technological, social and translocal structures that enable networked collectivities to form and circulate counter-narratives, but also the complexities that arise from being intimately entangled with the narratives they seek to contest. equally, we question how far a platform underpinned by commercial logic can be an agent of change when islamophobia is exploited for economic gain. in the case of the christchurch terror attack, for example, highly visible accounts, dominated by politicians, journalists and celebrities were most likely to be retweeted, revealing a platform with exclusionary tendencies that reinforce the privileges of existing social hierarchies. this research took place in a particular historical political moment, following the purging of qanon activists, after the capitol riots, and before twitter’s acquisition by elon musk. we demonstrate how this period of increased moderation of and by the platform also contributed to altering the dynamics of anti-muslim discourse at this specific moment in time. through its comparative approach, the research traces the evolution of islamophobic activity across ethno-geopolitical and temporal spaces. in the case of the covid data, for example, activity in the us is dwarfed by that of actors from the indian subcontinent. however, there also remains an abundance of evidence of ‘banal’ or implicit racism undetected by uneven moderation processes, and procedures that focus on identifying and removing keywords (siapera, 2019). we close the paper by suggesting that, despite the limitations of anti-islamophobic counter-narratives, emerging interview data with anti-racist activists demonstrate the ongoing benefits of twitter as a platform for meaningful and active mobilisation. initial analysis of these interviews suggests that a distinction should be made between expressions of solidarity and structural transformation. based on this data we ultimately argue that twitter can be a space for significant solidarities to coalesce, and act as a conduit for ongoing collectivities to form, yet meaningful transformation requires additional activities and engagement. while these may operate on a continuum of commitment, rather than reinforce existing binary arguments regarding the potentials and limitations of twitter as a platform for solidarity, we wish to demonstrate the contradictory dynamics of the solidarities that arise from the logics of twitter which relies on and produces these entanglements. we also argue that these debates should be contextualised by an examination of the nuances of specific case studies that are further situated through an analysis of wider media ecologies. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): poole, e; de quincey, e; giraud, e & richardson, j.e. (2023, october). tracing media solidarities with muslims: contesting islamophobia on twitter. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. references awan, i. (2014) islamophobia and twitter: a typology of online hate against muslims on social media. policy & internet. 6(2): 133–50. bakardjieva, m. (2020). “say it loud, say it clear…”: concerting solidarity in the canadian refugees welcome movement (2015–2016). canadian review of sociology. https://doi.org/10.1111/cars.12305 chouliaraki, l. (2006). the spectatorship of suffering. london, sage. dean, j. (2009). democracy & other neoliberal fantasies: communicative capitalism and left politics. durham, nc: duke university press. featherstone, d. (2012). solidarity: hidden histories and geographies of internationalism. london: bloomsbury. juris, j. (2007). networking futures. durham, nc: duke university press. mohanty, c.t. (2003). “under western eyes” revisited: feminist solidarity through anticapitalist struggles. signs. 28(2): 499-535. nikunen, k. (2019). media solidarities: emotion, power and justice in the digital age. london, sage. papacharissi, z. (2015). affective publics: sentiment, technology and politics. oxford, oxford university press. yardi, s., & boyd, d. (2010). dynamic debates: an analysis of group polarization over time on twitter. bulletin of science, technology & society. 30(5): 316–327. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 ‘it’s a candy store. you can see the candies, but the door is closed.’ (neuro)queering the hook-up app industry in non-metropolitan finland. richard eric rawlings northumbria university genavee brown northumbria university antu sorainen university of helsinki lisa thomas northumbria university lynne coventry abertay university issue industry is a paradox. it is a natural/rural cycle of autonomous workers interspersing social interactions and labour tasks without precise attention to clock-time. yet it is also the classed time-discipline of synchronised labour: employee time is employers’ money, time at work is measured, work and leisure are demarcated, and capitalist bosses judge workers’ recreation as wasteful (thompson, 1967). the industrious human achieves autonomy while the industrialised subject is disempowered. industrial time and space produce marginalities and resistance: colonial imposition of arbitrary borders and linear time undermined geosocial order in parts of the global south (arfaoui, 2021), and queer lives were historically excluded from normative trajectories of marriage and child-rearing. queer time rejects linearity, potentiates alternate experiences (halberstam, 2005), and runs backwards or off-course (kondakov, 2023). rural queer scholars question urban speed and rural slowness suggested citation (apa): rawlings, r. e., brown, g., sorainen, a., thomas, l., coventry, l. (2024, october). ‘it’s a candy store. you can see the candies, but the door is closed.’ (neuro)queering the hook-up app industry in non-metropolitan finland. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http:// spir.aoir.org. (crawford, 2017), while crip time resists demands for disabled bodymind conformity to clock time (katzman et al., 2020). intersecting subject positions, including sexuality (moore, 2012), contest linear-industrial progress, as does the history of steel city: attercliffe was transiently the crucible of steel and a queer social enclave (brownson, 2022). both declined, validating the precarity of linear progress. today, phones or smartwatches mediate temporal ruptures in daily lives (mowlabocus, 2016), and hook-up app industries monetise intimacies (aunspach, 2020), defining interactional norms (licoppe, 2020), profile fields (warner et al., 2020) and pictures (smilges, 2019), while empowerment is rooted in (in)visibility (brighenti, 2007). global design undermines local contexts (hardy & lindtner, 2017), while app time is too fast or slow, dependent on user motives of immediacy or futurity (bonner-thompson, 2023). time is passed (or wasted) as distraction. queer app messaging frustrates other goals, and some users leave these technologies (brubaker et al., 2016). given permanent online connectivity, work and leisure are more porous than in a factory, yet corporate industries mediate marginal socialities. app designers utilise user data, albeit more covertly than workplace clock cards. industrious rural queers wrestle control of spatiotemporal intimacies from totalising platforms while concurrently moving through daily lives. participants & methodology prior linked doctoral studies considered perceptions of queer hook-up apps and community group use in urban and countryside britain using mixed methods. this study maps rural sexuality and hook-up app (dis)comfort, and visualises whether hook-up contacts penetrate social networks. a turing partnership with a finnish researcher offered a northern european research site politically similar to the uk, while benefitting from finland’s vaster, more sparsely populated geography. northumbria university granted ethical approval in october 2023. semi-structured interviews constructed relief maps expressing feelings of (dis)comfort (rodó-de-zárate, 2014) and sociograms mapping queer relations (complex data collective, 2016). recruitment emails were sent to local lgbtq+ organisations and research contacts. data was collected in january 2024. seven participants responded: two online and five face-to-face. five resided in arctic finland, one in west finland, and one in southwest finland. two identified as gay men, one as a bisexual woman, one as gender-fluid, one as queer, one as a lesbian woman, and one as pansexual-asexual non-binary. three participants identified as neurodivergent (adhd/autism), and one disclosed cerebral palsy. two arctic participants identified as indigenous (sami/karelian). the insider-outsider researcher (a regional british gay man with adhd) carried out inductive reflexive thematic analysis, mediated by his positionality via autoethnographic journal (braun & clarke, 2022). analysis of visual data is forthcoming. results three themes were determined: (in)visibility due to (fears of) marginalisation; categories and borders of app design inadequately reflecting indigenous/gendered, (neuro)queer, rural, linguistic, infrastructural and economic realities; and resisting spatiotemporal app logics. two participants described one locality as closed-minded, one stating this prevents queer people from becoming visible on apps or in place, voicing their queerness after moving elsewhere. others experienced a ‘live and let live’ mentality yet feared discrimination (that did not materialise). another felt discomfort with sexuality and hookup app use when visiting the family due to exclusion there. one indigenous participant experienced uncomfortable fetishisation of their clothing; finding smaller places enabled them to be a person rather than a tourist attraction. another no longer shares his number after being blackmailed by a hook-up app contact. local culture and past memory consequently shape current possibilities. reductive categorisations were manifold. on grindr, one participant felt forced into descriptions of ‘tribes’ and sexual positions, limiting interactional potential. several wished for others with similar hobbies, gender identities (indigenous genders differ from app options) or accessible matches. yet distance radiuses of apps reach norway (with no common language or cross-border train) while excluding others in sami land. two participants mentioned rapid cheap flights to london and brussels as more affordable than finnish trains, yet could not see matches there. some valued the design of her for community-building and transgender inclusion, yet felt compelled to use tinder (despite normative frustrations) given its dominance. many wished for a queer friendship, rather than dating, app. app design thus borders and limits social potential. participants queered hook-up app demands of hyper-connectivity and visibility. nearly all expressed a preference to meet face-to-face shortly after initiating discussions (sometimes due to app limitations and risks), despite the need for expensive day or night-long rail or road journeys, often in treacherous conditions. several enjoyed meeting distant contact only a few times a year because multiple intersecting marginalities produced intimacies. others logged on at work, feeling power from avoiding and queering heteronormative spaces, or accidentally leaving their phone unlocked and getting ‘blocked’ (by a user who felt ignored). others spoke of the cyclical nature of rural loneliness, browsing at night, and deleting and re-downloading (for example when university terms bring new queer people). this blurs life’s boundaries and undermines permanent connectivity via cyclical (dis)connections, and wrestles control from app logics. discussion history has shown the rise of industry as precariously subject to queer temporal forces lacking predictable directions, ultimately declining. nonetheless, queer hook-up apps claim control of users’ leisure and work time, while mediating possibilities for expression among the (mis)mapped matches they produce. they contribute to fetishisation of queer (and indigenous) bodies as visible yet unreachable products for capitalist consumption (as the participant’s quote in the title of this paper suggests). apps inadequately account for the cultural, linguistic, neurodiverse, gender diverse, disabled, indigenous, remembered, and local contexts of queer lives beyond major cities: just as clock-time undermined working labourers while empowering colonial interests. via empirical research at embodied and geographical margins, we demonstrate the ingenuity of users in queering apps’ social norms. this ingenuity resists digital foreclosure of queer futures. our findings reveal the importance of digital queer world-making that counterbalances immediacy with slowness, profile visibility with intimate community, geolocation with awareness of cultural and local context, and technological distraction with intimate connection. achieving this requires theoretical knowledge and user experience from postcolonial, feminist, disabled, and queer people. we hope this may challenge digital industries of capitalist oppression. references arfaoui, m., 2021. time and the colonial state. the funambulist magazine, 21. aunspach, c., 2020. discrete and looking (to profit): homoconnectivity on grindr. critical studies in media communication, 37(1), pp.43-57. bonner-thompson, c., 2023. queering digital temporalities? visceral geographies of grindr. geoforum, 144, p.103815. braun, v., & clarke, v., 2022. thematic analaysis: a practical guide. sage. brighenti, a., 2007. visibility: a category for the social sciences. current sociology, 55(3), pp.323-342. brownson, l., 2022. we’ve always been here: tracing sheffield’s subversive queer history. now. then. https://nowthenmagazine.com/articles/weve-always-been-heretracing-sheffields-subversive-queer-history. accessed 29/2/24. brubaker, j.r., ananny, m. and crawford, k., 2016. departing glances: a sociotechnical account of ‘leaving’grindr. new media & society, 18(3), pp.373-390. complex data collective., 2016. network canvas interviewer. www.doi.org/10.5281/ zenodo.6026548. crawford, l., 2017. a good ol’country time: does queer rural temporality exist?. sexualities, 20(8), pp.904-920. halberstam, j.j., 2005. in a queer time and place: transgender bodies, subcultural lives (vol. 3). nyu press. hardy, j. and lindtner, s., 2017, february. constructing a desiring user: discourse, rurality, and design in location-based social networks. in proceedings of the 2017 acm conference on computer supported cooperative work and social computing (pp. 13-25). katzman, e.r., kinsella, e.a. and polzer, j., 2020. ‘everything is down to the minute’: clock time, crip time and the relational work of self-managing attendant services. disability & society, 35(4), pp.517-541. kondakov, a.s., 2023. challenging the logic of progressive timeline, queering lgbt successes and failures in ireland and russia. sexualities, 26(1-2), pp.105-124. licoppe, c., 2020. liquidity and attachment in the mobile hookup culture. a comparative study of contrasted interactional patterns in the main uses of grindr and tinder. journal of cultural economy, 13(1), pp.73-90. mowlabocus, s., 2016. the 'mastery' of the swipe: smartphones, transitional objects and interstitial time. first monday. parker, p. a., paul boyce, henrietta l. moore, richard (ed.). 2012. understanding global sexualities: new frontiers. routledge. rodó-de-zárate, maria., 2014. developing geographies of intersectionality with relief maps: reflections from youth research in manresa, catalonia. gender, place & culture, 2014, vol.21, (8), p.925-944. smilges, j.l., 2019. white squares to black boxes: grindr, queerness, rhetorical silence. rhetoric review, 38(1), pp.79-92. thompson, e.p., 1967. time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism. past and present 38, pp. 56-97. warner, m., kitkowska, a., gibbs, j., maestre, j.f. and blandford, a., 2020, april. evaluating 'prefer not to say' around sensitive disclosures. in proceedings of the 2020 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-13). selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 tiktok’s ai hype creators’ role in shaping (public) ai imaginaries vanessa richter university of amsterdam, university of bremen introduction artificial intelligence (ai), often hailed as a transformative force, has become an ambivalent buzzword, simultaneously promising utopian possibilities and fueling dystopian anxieties. this paradox of hope and apprehension, driven by the hype surrounding ai, underscores the critical need for a more nuanced and informed public discourse. within this evolving landscape of ai discussions, social media platforms have emerged as pivotal spaces where the public narrative about ai takes shape, especially through content creators, significantly influencing our collective vision of the future with ai. the concept of "imaginaries" has proven to be highly valuable in this context, particularly in shedding light on how perceptions, discourses, and future outlooks play a role in the intricate processes of co-constructing technological advancements (anderson, 1983; taylor, 2004). this line of research has served as the foundation for more recent investigations into "sociotechnical imaginaries" (si) (jasanoff, 2015; mager & katzenbach, 2021), characterised as "collectively shared, institutionally stabilised, and publicly enacted visions of desirable futures" (jasanoff, 2015, p. 4). while previous research has considered imaginaries formed around social media platforms by influencers and their impact on their labour and self-perception (arriagada & bishop, 2021; richter & ye, 2023), there is a lack of research on the role of creators in shaping public imaginaries acting as cultural intermediaries (hutchinson, 2017). therefore, this paper inquires into the role of creators, such as content creators, influencers, and social media channels, in shaping public imaginaries of ai through their content. during the last decade, a new industry has grown out of a previously informal market with influencers, creators, and other online personalities on social media platforms becoming points of access and distribution (poell et al., 2021). simultaneously, the professionalisation of this industry has created precarious working conditions (duffy 2017, duffy et al., 2021, glatt, 2023) with creators balancing multiple sets of expectations heightened by established platform imaginaries between the platform, business partners, and end users as audiences (richter & ye, 2023). platforms as suggested citation (apa): ritchter, v. (2024, october). tiktok’s ai hype creators’ role in shaping (public) ai imaginaries. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. multi-sided markets (nieborg & poell, 2018) have a clear interest in mitigating risks to their reputation by pushing responsibility toward platform complementors (poell et al., 2021). therefore, it is relevant to question the role of creators as platform complementors in bringing a variety of stakeholders into conversation on societally relevant topics such as ai and consider how they shape ai imaginaries beyond the platform itself. the study does this by inquiring into the different types of ai content, types of creators posting on ai, different topical foci, and lastly larger ai imaginaries. methodology the paper is based on tiktok as a site of entrance for investigating the role of social media platforms and creators in shaping public imaginaries and ongoing discourses of ai. tiktok is chosen as a case study as it is currently the basis for short video content, often distributed on youtube and instagram to alleviate the risk of platform dependence and diversify income streams (cunningham & craig, 2019; glatt, 2021). therefore, the first analysis of ai content is based on a hashtag network analysis and mapping of tiktok content on ai to understand the composition of video content and account clusters. sorting creators by genre and style of content helps to differentiate educational and commentary content from listicles. to understand the role of creators within this ongoing ai discourse, a hashtag network analysis is paired with a critical discourse analysis (wodak, 2015) of creators’ content on ai. lastly, following sophie bishop’s work on algorithmic gossip – gossip, defined as loose, unmethodological talk that is generative (bishop, 2019) – creators' reflections and internal discourses are understood as a valuable form of knowledge production and exchange between creators. considering these technical discussions as sense-making as well as learning processes has been beneficial in current research. hereby, creators’ statements and comments on the platform environment as well as their work and relation to ai applications provide another layer of insights into shaping their ai imaginaries. this content can further provide an entry point to understand the public negotiation of ai imaginaries through creators on social media platforms. results the preliminary results show three dominant genres of ai content based heavily on 1) ai tools, especially visual, and their employment including videos on ai development, ai avatars, and other visual ai prompts; 2) listicles on ai tools often focused on the “best” tools for specific tasks, user groups, or type of tools that always follow a similar style usually connected to hashtags such as #trends; and 3) educational content including critical ai content varying from commentary and educational videos to ai news and educational ai interactions such as interviewing robots often by media outlets. in contrast, critical commentary style videos on ai impacts, ethical challenges, and questions of responsibility are often addressed and made explicit by individual content creators. considering the creator types behind the content, a high amount of content is produced by content farms creating listicles and easily clickable content as has been previously observed by ashley mears (2023) work on content production in content farms. this easily replicable content also includes ai prompt videos and visual ai videos with high engagement rates but low-status value. while tech tiktokers produce similar content types, their content production is often more elaborate, with non ai voice overs, themselves as a brand within videos as well as a focus on their “expertise as added value” narratives. compared to the first two content types, media outlets and commentary tiktokers dominate the third content section with different foci. while media channels strongly emphasize educational and newsworthy content on ai, commentary tiktokers often stress critical perspectives on ai, its implementation, and implications. across the different ai content genres and creator types, four types of ai imaginaries are foregrounded. especially the visual ai content by content farms and channels emphasize a high ai mystification pushing a trend of large corporations in envisioning ai as fast paced and inherently life changing. in a similar vein, ai avatars and ai girlfriend content is often heavily underscored by an ai futurism making it out as the inevitable trajectory of ai innovation integrating into everyday life. contrastingly, a high ai pragmatism is prevalent in the ongoing tool discourse around ai applications and their specific and often also limited use where ai becomes represented and emphasized as work in progress and amplifying human capabilities and time. lastly, the critical but also very factual and scientific leaning educational content mostly counteracts these imaginaries with a strong ai realism highlighting the complex and nuanced aspect of ai innovation, the prominent differences in what is considered ai, as well as its future implications and responsibilities towards implementation. therefore, the analysis offers key results for understanding how creators’ ai content on social media platforms such as tiktok shape and push ai imaginaries through their amplified reach. it further emphasizes that ai is both a sociotechnical phenomenon and an object of public communication that is formed through ongoing discourses in various public domains. inquiring further into these public negotiations becomes highly relevant in this formative phase of technological innovation falling under the umbrella term ai. as public imaginaries on ai institutionalise and become normalised across larger stakeholder groups, these imaginaries play a decisive role in the future development of ai technology. references anderson, b. (1983). imagined communities. reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. london: verso. arriagada, a., & bishop, s. (2021). between commerciality and authenticity: the imaginary of social media influencers in the platform economy. communication, culture and critique, 14(4), 568-586. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcab050 bareis, j., & katzenbach, c. (2021). talking ai into being: the narratives and imaginaries of national ai strategies and their performative politics. science, technology, & human values, 016224392110300. https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439211030007 bishop, s. (2019). managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip. new media & society, 21(11-12), 2589–2606. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819854731 cunningham, s., & craig, d. (2019). social media entertainment: the new intersection of hollywood and silicon valley. new york university press. duffy, b.e. (2017). (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. 1st edn. london. yale university press. duffy, b. e., pinch, a., sannon, s., & sawey, m. (2021). the nested precarities of creative labor on social media. social media + society, 7(2), 205630512110213. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211021368 glatt, z. (2021). “we’re all told not to put our eggs in one basket”: (in)visibility, uncertainty and the metrification of self-worth in platformised creative work. international journal of communication. hutchinson, j. (2017). cultural intermediaries: audience participation in media organisations. london: palgrave macmillan. jasanoff, s., & kim, s.-h. (eds.) (2015). dreamscapes of modernity: sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power. chicago: university of chicago press. mears, a. (2023). bringing bourdieu to a content farm: social media production fields and the cultural economy of attention. social media + society, 9(3), 20563051231193027. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231193027 nieborg, d.b., poell, t. (2018). the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. new media & society. 20(11), 4275–4292. poell, t., nieborg, d.b., duffy, b.e. (2021). platforms and cultural production. cambridge. polity. richter, v., & ye, z. (2023). influencers’ instagram imaginaries as a global phenomenon: negotiating precarious interdependencies on followers, the platform environment, and commercial expectations. convergence. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231178918 taylor, c. (2003). modern social imaginaries. durham: duke university press. the artificial intelligence act. (2022, november 28). retrieved december 5, 2022, from https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/ wodak, r. (2015). critical discourse analysis, discourse-historical approach. in the international encyclopedia of language and social interaction edited by karen tracey. wiley blackwell. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): hawker, k., et al. (2024, october). dying and being dead in xr. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. dying and being dead in xr: immersive rehearsals of death; affective artefacts post-life kiah hawker the university of queensland luke heemsbergen deakin university tonya meyrick deakin university stefan greuter deakin university introduction virtual reality (vr) and augmented reality (ar) mediate experiences in ways that offer unique insights and novel exploration of the rehearsal of death and the remembrance of life. we explore theorisation of two multi-site case studies of dying and being dead in extended reality (xr) to investigate immersive death experiences facilitated by these media. our observations, discussion and critique underscore an emergent and nuanced interplay between spatial technologies and death encounters, their linked cultural constructions, and the emerging industry that channels these phenomena. our work began by assisting with “passing electrical storms” (gladwell, 2023), an interactive exhibit at the national of victoria’s (ngv) melbourne now show, analogous to “second chance” (lava saga, 2018), first hosted at the reimagine (end of life week) festival in san francisco. participants in this vr experience find themselves in a futuristic 'med bay,' lying on a coffin-shaped bed equipped with a vr unit and pulsometer. as their heartbeat “slows” to a flatline, participants witness their own ascension above the bed, traversing the universe—an immersive experience of their demise and rebirth that playfully challenges conventional notions of death. the passing electrical storms exhibit serves to accentuate the imagined affordances (nagy and neff 2015) of vr’s immersive potentials to seemingly physically and viscerally capture aspects of the 'dying' process for users who dawn the goggles and lie down to die. however, xr technologies, and how they mediate physical-digital space are more complex and varied than what lie-down-and-die/fly vr can offer. simply put, on the whole, xr are media technologies that mediate digital data with the physical world in real time (heemsbergen et al. 2021). this might take users ‘out' of their surroundings through vr systems that map-but-hide the physical, and replace it with what programmers desire. or, xr might add digital artefacts that relate with the physical world via ar systems that have us peering through screens or even hearing spatial cues (boisvert et al. 2023), that are computed to fool our senses of what is ‘in’ the real. what – and who – is able to be brought ‘in’ and ‘out’ of the perceived world has significant consequences for the growing industry of necro technologies (westendrop and gould 2021; alison et al. 2023) considering changing attitudes toward death via posthumous communication technologies (pcts) (morse 2023) and new spectacles of/for the dead, available in emergent mediatisation, commercialisation, re-ritualisation (sumiala and jacobsen 2024). foci: two phenomenon that extend the reality of death our work then, focuses on two multi-site phenomenological cases within the digital necro-industry: the first, is taking users ‘out’ of the real (usually via vr) to experience death, dying or the dead; and second, bringing death ‘in’ to the physical world via mediations of the dead, death or dying. as an example of the latter (the former seen in passing electrical storms) consider how in 2021, tiktok introduced the 'picture animate' ar lens (or interchangeably ‘filter’) that seamlessly blended physical pictures with captivating animations, bringing the depicted subjects to life. concurrently, a noteworthy cultural trend emerged on the platform, as users leveraged this filter to reanimate images of departed loved ones, offering a distinctive avenue for reminiscence. a compelling instance surfaced in july 2021 when a user, 'emmasamara,' shared three revitalised photographs. the video commenced with the original poster in tears, gazing downward, setting a tone that evolved into a sequence of animated memories of her deceased peers. the initial image shared was extracted from a memorial booklet of a friend’s funeral frozen in time, only to be revived with a warm smile and blinking eyes. the focus then shifted to another photo featuring two more friends, with the filter animating the countenance of a young man on the left who grinned at the camera. the sequence concluded with an image of a young woman lowering her glasses and flashing a smile, as she, too, animated and winked at the camera. the accompanying caption expressed gratitude, acknowledging the perfection of the animated winking moment, and extended thanks to tiktok for providing this unique opportunity to memorialise friends in a novel way. emmasamara’s example is indicative of what the paper considers, as it cultivates themes from observed phenomenon towards saturation of emerging practices. discussion thematic analysis from these experiential cases suggests specific trends in the industry for discussion and critique. first is growing set of ‘grief services’ such as the hereafter institute (see sisto 2020), or project elysium (circa 2015), or from frames of vrcounselling (see kiros 2023). second are the ‘grief spectacles’ mediate, and in some cases reanimate the dead, or death. here is where gladwell’s (2023) work fits, as does media projects like “i met you” (mbc life 2021) a project that reanimated a dead daughter for a mother in vr, and for tv audiences’ gaze. we consider the spectacle theme as debord (1967) might, with the full irony of replacing the impossibility of direct experiences with death, but garnering ‘genuine’ human interactions with its representation mediated via xr. on the one hand, capitalistic production of death and dying experiences are accelerating and industry that employs novel spectacle via xr, and of late, incorporates generative ai. on the other hand the alienation and passivity that debord might look for in these markets is juxtaposed by the phenomenological agency (e.g. personalisation) that seems to be available in some of the necrotech xr products. here the inescapably performative nature of death’s rehearsal mediates the spectacle as a social construct, allowing individuals to question its influence while seeking novel authentic communal experiences via the ‘direct’ engagement with extended reality. aware of the themes of industry regarding service and spectacle, we turn back to the mediating technologies, to offer a dissection of their capabilities in socio-technical terms. for instance, vr, known for its immersive capabilities, excels in internalising the dying moment, as exemplified by the passing electrical storms exhibit. in contrast, ar, with its lower level of body immersion, excels in representing the deceased to the user, as evidenced in applications where users use ar filters to animate photos of departed loved ones or construct other novel in-memoriums from corpuses of the deceased’s data and novel compute (e.g. llms leveraging shared correspondence and creating personalized generative memorium). this externalised perspective captures moments after death, presenting a stark contrast to the internalised experience of vr. xr technology type can shape the nature of the 'death' experience for users. vr, exemplified by the passing electrical storms exhibit, elicits visceral and physical responses, allowing users to internally experience the 'dying' process. conversely, ar, with its lower immersion level, excels in portraying the deceased externally. we note that both ar and vr’s immersivity in these instances is via mediation of time, bringing the dead back to life, or accelerating one’s own inescapable demise. the paper concludes with a discussion that syntheses our study of industrial trends and phenomenological-technological critique to consider what next steps the ‘industry’ might take. we view this as an opportunity to consider how stakeholders that have hitherto not been invited to compose cultures of xr death-tech might act. these include, but are not limited to discussion on religious and spiritual mediations and teaching; medical assistance in dying (maid) applications; reconsidering palliative care from frameworks of trauma reduction to skill attainment or digital drugs; and engaging in ante-memoriam experiences. here we acknowledge how death-positivity (see nicolucci 2019) offers new ways for xr to contribute to shaping our understanding of mortality over time. references allison, f., nansen, b., gibbs, m., & arnold, m. (2023, april). bones of contention: social acceptance of digital cemetery technologies. in proceedings of the 2023 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-17). boothe, a. (2022). the death and life of jang nayeon: a case for personality rights in the digital layers of reality. international journal of law and information technology, 30(4), 398-422. boisvert, i., dunn, a. g., lundmark, e., smith-merry, j., lipworth, w., willink, a., ... & calvert, m. (2023). disruptions to the hearing health sector. nature medicine, 29(1), 19-21. cuerdo, m. a. m., & melcer, e. f. (2020, april). " i'll be back": a taxonomy of death and rebirth in platformer video games. in extended abstracts of the 2020 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-13) harrer, s. (2013). from losing to loss: exploring the expressive capacities of videogames beyond death as failure. culture unbound, 5(4), 607-620. heemsbergen, l., bowtell, g., & vincent, j. (2021). conceptualising augmented reality: from virtual divides to mediated dynamics. convergence, 27(3), 830-846. kaptelinin, v. (2016, may). making the case for an existential perspective in hci research on mortality and death. in proceedings of the 2016 chi conference extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems (pp. 352-364). moutogiannis, p. p., thrift, j., pope, j. k., browning, m. h., mcinarlin, o., & fasolino, t. (2023). a rapid review of the role of virtual reality in care delivery of palliative care and hospice. journal of hospice & palliative nursing, 25(6), 300-308. nicolucci, v. (2019). a death-positive video game for death education of adolescents. italian journal of educational technology, 27(2), 186-197. mo, j., vickerstaff, v., minton, o., tavabie, s., taubert, m., stone, p., & white, n. (2022). how effective is virtual reality technology in palliative care? a systematic review and meta-analysis. palliative medicine, 36(7), 1047-1058. morse, t. (2023). digital necromancy: users’ perceptions of digital afterlife and posthumous communication technologies. information, communication & society, 117. öhman, c. j., & watson, d. (2019). are the dead taking over facebook? a big data approach to the future of death online. big data & society, 6(1), 2053951719842540. sumiala, j., & jacobsen, m. h. (2024). digital death and spectacular death. social sciences, 13(2), 101. westendorp, m., & gould, h. (2021). re-feminizing death: gender, spirituality and death care in the anthropocene. religions, 12(8), 667. wilson, g., & mcgill, m. (2018, october). violent video games in virtual reality: reevaluating the impact and rating of interactive experiences. in proceedings of the 2018 annual symposium on computer-human interaction in play (pp. 535-548). woo, o. k., & lee, a. m. (2023). case report: therapeutic potential of flourishing-lifeof-wish virtual reality therapy on relaxation (flow-vrt-relaxation)—a novel personalized relaxation in palliative care. frontiers in digital health, 5, 1228781. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): miltner, k.m. (2024, october). “a.i. is holding a mirror to our society”: lensa and the discourse of visual generative ai. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “a.i. is holding a mirror to our society”: lensa and the discourse of visual generative ai kate m. miltner university of sheffield introduction since the release of the open-source ai model stable diffusion in august 2022, a series of apps that create ai-generated portraits, or avatars, have exploded in popularity. one of the most notable examples is ai-powered photo editing app lensa, owned by prisma labs. lensa went viral in late 2022 due to the launch of its magic avatar feature, which uses the stable diffusion model to create fantastical (and occasionally bizarre) portraits of users in a series of themes, such as “fairy princess”, “superhero”, and “astronaut”. after the magic avatar launch, lensa was installed over 13.5 million times worldwide and users spent over usd$29 million on the app in 12 days (mccluskey, 2022). in response to lensa’s international popularity, a global discourse developed that both hyped and critiqued the magic avatar phenomenon. this paper analyzes the global english-language press coverage of lensa and finds that it echoes existing technological discourses, focusing on the app’s predatory data practices, the biased content it produced, and the user behaviors associated with it. i argue that this coverage provides evidence of discursive closure (deetz, 1992; leonardi & jackson, 2003; markham, 2021) around both the risks and the potential of visual generative ai in a manner that supports the maintenance of the status quo. i also suggest that the press coverage of lensa, which both articulates key ai-related harms and frames those harms as intractable and insolvable, creates a discourse of inevitability (leonardi & jackson, 2003; markham, 2021) that has implications for how these issues are understood by the public, and for the approaches that are taken to address them. method the study corpus consisted of 135 unique articles from the global english-language syndicated and tech press. articles were sourced from nexis using the term “lensa ai” in english-language coverage across all regions from november 2022 to july 2023. topically irrelevant results were excluded from the corpus, and any repeated articles were deduplicated. i then took a “snowball” approach (see braithwaite, 2016) to the content linked in the nexis results, adding any new articles. i then read these articles and followed those links until reaching saturation/failing to come across any new material. i analyzed the corpus using reflexive thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2019; byrne, 2020). following braithwaite (2016), my goal was to offer an “illustrative rather than exhaustive account” of the lensa discourse and demonstrate its most salient features (p. 3). this study has obvious limitations in that the corpus is limited to englishlanguage coverage; the discourse about lensa likely has a wider global audience than the countries reflected in this analysis. nonetheless, the discourse surrounding lensa had distinct contours that were quite consistent across the countries represented in the corpus, offering a clear illustration of the key issues associated with visual generative ai at this point in time. findings out of the 12 countries represented in the corpus, there were four countries that comprised the majority of english-language lensa coverage: the united states, mexico, the united kingdom, and india. the united states and mexico dominated the coverage, with 34% and 31% of the corpus, respectively. news items from the united kingdom comprised 14% of the sample, and indian stories were 13%. collectively, these four countries made up 92% of the corpus. the remaining 7 countries (australia, canada, egypt, pakistan, singapore, switzerland, and the uae) collectively composed 8% of the corpus. there were two distinct types, or genres, of content in the lensa discourse: scandal coverage and explainer coverage. scandal coverage, which comprised 42% of the corpus, focused on perceived wrongdoing or norm violations related to the app and its use. the other type of coverage was explainer coverage, which constituted 58% of the corpus and focused on describing what lensa is and how it worked. in addition to the two categories of coverage, there were three overarching themes across the sample. the first theme focused on predatory data practices. this theme was the most prevalent in the corpus, reflected in 56% of the articles and within six countries (usa, mexico, uk, india, australia, and canada). it largely focused on the unethical or non-consensual use of data in ai technologies, discussed through two distinct, but related topics: the use of art as training data in the stable diffusion model and lensa’s privacy policy, which stated at the time that users’ photos could be used to train the app. the second theme was related to biased content. articles relating to this theme referred to the gender and racial biases reflected in some of the images generated by lensa, including the sexualization of women, the lightening of darker skin tones, and the generation of explicit content. this was the second most prevalent theme in the corpus, reflected in 47% of articles, and was present in coverage in the us, uk, canada, australia, india, mexico, and switzerland. the third theme focused on user behavior. the content in this theme described how people used the app, including celebrities and political figures. it was reflected in 37% of articles within five countries (usa, mexico, uk, india, and australia). discussion the key themes of “sex, art theft and privacy” (biron, 2023) in the lensa discourse connect to existing framings and understandings of sociotechnical concerns. the discussions of lensa’s predatory data practices closely align with popular discourses about users as exploited data subjects that took off exponentially in the wake of the cambridge analytica scandal (e.g., isaac and hanna, 2018). critiques of lensa’s sexualized and racialized results map directly onto discourses about “algorithms of oppression” (noble, 2017) and other forms of gendered and racialized algorithmic biases, and analyses of lensa user behaviors were plucked directly from the selfie moral panic playbook, with their insistence that digital technologies amplify our most deleterious narcissistic tendencies (e.g., tiidenberg, 2018). repeating existing framings of these sociotechnical issues perpetuates the status quo. while the discourse about magic avatars identifies key ai-related problems, it also treats those problems as intractable obstacles that are too big to solve; it is taken for granted that these systems or models will inevitably cause harm. in this way, we can see discursive closure at work: by acquiescing to a discourse of inevitability (leonardi and jackson, 2003; markham, 2021) about generative ai, the lensa coverage offers “a particular view of reality that is maintained at the expense of equally plausible ones” (deetz, 1992, p. 188). a range of ideas have been proposed by computer scientists, artists, and other stakeholders (e.g., crabapple, 2022; hundt et al., 2023) to address airelated harms, but within the lensa coverage, no such solutions are visible; instead, we are told that when it comes to generative ai, “the horse has already left the barn” (hatmaker, 2022). markham (2021) explains that the power of anticipatory logics that flow through everyday discourse around emerging technologies end up building and reinforcing “a hegemonic ideology of external power and control”, strengthening the dominant frames of inevitability and powerlessness (p. 384). as a result, more creative approaches to the challenges and potential harms of technologies like generative ai end up being foreclosed or dismissed as unlikely, constraining the boundaries of possibility and limiting a more expansive vision of what they could– or should– be. references biron, b. (2023, january 16). sex, art theft, and privacy: lensa exploded overnight — and now the avatar app is dealing with public backlash. here’s what you should know. business insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/lensa-ai-raises-seriousconcerns-sexualization-art-theft-data-2023-1 braithwaite, a. (2016). it’s about ethics in games journalism? gamergaters and geek masculinity. social media + society, 2(4), 2056305116672484. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116672484 braun, v., & clarke, v. (2019). reflecting on reflexive thematic analysis. qualitative research in sport, exercise and health, 11(4), 589–597. https://doi.org/10.1080/2159676x.2019.1628806 https://www.businessinsider.com/lensa-ai-raises-serious-concerns-sexualization-art-theft-data-2023-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/lensa-ai-raises-serious-concerns-sexualization-art-theft-data-2023-1 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116672484 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116672484 https://doi.org/10.1080/2159676x.2019.1628806 https://doi.org/10.1080/2159676x.2019.1628806 byrne, d. (2022). a worked example of braun and clarke’s approach to reflexive thematic analysis. quality & quantity, 56(3), 1391–1412. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-021-01182-y crabapple, m. (2022, december 21). op-ed: beware a world where artists are replaced by robots. it’s starting now. los angeles times. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-12-21/artificial-intelligence-artistsstability-ai-digital-images deetz, s. (1992). democracy in an age of corporate colonization: developments in communication and the politics of everyday life. suny press. hatmaker, t. (2022, december 5). lensa ai, the app making ‘magic avatars,’ raises red flags for artists. techcrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/05/lensa-ai-app-storemagic-avatars-artists/ leonardi, p. m., & jackson, m. h. (2004). technological determinism and discursive closure in organizational mergers. journal of organizational change management, 17(6), 615–631. https://doi.org/10.1108/09534810410564587 markham, a. (2021). the limits of the imaginary: challenges to intervening in future speculations of memory, data, and algorithms. new media & society, 23(2), 382– 405. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820929322 mccluskey, m. (2022, december 14). why it’s so hard to resist turning your selfies into lensa ai art. time. https://time.com/6240648/lensa-ai-psychology-behind/ noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. nyu press. tiidenberg, k. (2018). selfies: why we love (and hate) them. emerald publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-021-01182-y https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-021-01182-y https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-12-21/artificial-intelligence-artists-stability-ai-digital-images https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-12-21/artificial-intelligence-artists-stability-ai-digital-images https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-12-21/artificial-intelligence-artists-stability-ai-digital-images https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/05/lensa-ai-app-store-magic-avatars-artists/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/05/lensa-ai-app-store-magic-avatars-artists/ https://doi.org/10.1108/09534810410564587 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820929322 https://time.com/6240648/lensa-ai-psychology-behind/ selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): stanusch, n., rogers, r., baym, n., liu, c., shaw r., katzenbach, c., richter, v., kannengießer s., mollen, a., brause, s. r., yang, h., schäfer, m., zeng, j., glawatzki, a. (2024, october). ai industry expectations and underperforming imaginaries. panel presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ai industry expectations and underperforming imaginaries natalia stanusch university of amsterdam richard rogers university of amsterdam nancy baym microsoft research chuncheng liu microsoft research ryland shaw microsoft research christian katzenbach university of bremen vanessa richter university of bremen sigrid kannengießer university of münster anne mollen university of münster saba rebecca brause university of zurich heng yang shanghai university mike schäfer university of zurich jing zeng university of zurich anastasia glawatzki university of münster panel introduction the panel takes up aoir’s theme of how industry pre-mediates the future of internet technology and its effects and inquiries into alternatives. utilising ideas from the study of sociotechnical imaginaries, it aims to locate, map, and critically examine ai imaginaries together with counter-imaginaries that engage with and intervene in those of the ai industry. sociotechnical imaginaries, or those that concern specifically the entanglements of science, technology, and society, have been defined by jasanoff and kim as “assemblages of materiality, meaning, and morality that constitute robust forms of social life (…) propagated by (...) organised groups” (2013; 2015). the point of departure of their study focuses on how these are currently articulated and performed, together with the kinds of social orders they promote and cement across the ai industry. along those lines, this panel is interested in the imaginaries driven by so-called big tech. as stated in the recent report by the ai now institute, “there is no ai without big tech” (kak & west, 2023). the related magazine article had as its headline: ‘make no mistake—ai is owned by big tech’ (kak et al., 2023). this panel takes up the analytical opportunity to map the discursive landscape of big tech ‘ai talk’ as a means to study ‘new media concentration’ (bode & goodlad, 2023). which big tech ai imaginaries are stabilising? more normatively, do they seek to cement their interdependence both generally but also with respect to the future of internet technology? more specifically, how does the ai industry imagine regulation, sustainability, and the hoped (and feared) ai futures? since jasanoff and kim’s original contribution, imaginaries research has emphasised that they are also “articulated and enacted by corporate actors, civil society, research communities, and other organised groups in processes much more complex and nonlinear than envisaged in the original concept” (mager & katzenbach, 2021; felt & ochsner, 2019; lehtiniemi & ruckenstein, 2019). indeed, the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries has grown into an analytical lens through which an interplay of actor entanglements can be identified and analysed (lupton, 2020; markham, 2020; sörum & fuentes, 2021; mager & katzenbach, 2021). taking up this invitation, in the panel, we bring together studies of ai imaginaries performed within but also beyond the ai industry. it considers the ai industry’s relationships with various actors, such as governments, media outlets, and academia. in addressing these questions and interests, it also presents various methodological entry points to the study of the ai industry and larger ecosystem from direct interviews and a close reading of media coverage to an analysis of online environments such as websites and social media platforms. the contribution entitled, negotiating ai(s) futures: stakeholders push to shape public imaginaries of ai in germany and the us, offers a cross-national comparative overview of ai imaginaries performed by various actors: industry, academia, media, and governments. it frames its conceptual contribution as the study of ‘public imaginaries’, focusing on both dominant but also developing and counter imaginaries. following a three-step methodological approach consisting of a field survey, longitudinal analysis of twitter posts, and semi-structured interviews, it finds how ai industry framings dominate media coverage of ai, but especially in the german context, it also surfaces developing counter imaginaries surrounding sovereignty. building on the idea of ‘culturally particular’ imaginaries, the next paper, imaginaries of artificial intelligence in healthcare a qualitative analysis of chinese, german and us american news coverage, compares imaginaries of ai in the healthcare sector across three countries. using topic modelling as well as qualitative, thematic analysis, it examines ai coverage provided by leading newspapers, finding that the imaginary landscape differs slightly given distinctive ‘discursive opportunity structures’. this contribution shows how u.s. commercialism, chinese national development and german hesitancy prefigure ideas of ai-healthcare futures ai imaginaries have issues: mapping an ai controversy with social media provides an empirical approach to the study and conceptualization of the ai industry imaginaries. taking the firing and reinstatement of sam altman of openai as a moment when the future of ai was at stake, it analyses imaginaries in play across multiple platforms (wikipedia, x/twitter, and linkedin), mapping out how ai imaginaries are also related to a variety of issues concerning ‘deep time’, gender, politics, fringe science and others. following the path of looking at the ai industry’s actors directly, it’s a friend! it’s a puppy! it’s ai!: making sense of copilot, locates and analyses ai imaginaries performed by microsoft insiders. by interviewing employees who engaged with microsoft’s ai assistant ‘copilot,’ this contribution offers an overview of contrasting ai imaginaries performed within the ai industry. finally, imagining sustainable ai industry looks at both big tech actors and alternative ai companies through a lens of sustainability. it undertakes a close reading of ai industry websites to track how they imagine and perform sustainability. references bode, k., & goodlad, l. m. e. (2023). data worlds: an introduction. critical ai 1(1-2). 10.1215/2834703x-10734026. felt u., & öchsner s. (2019). reordering the "world of things": the sociotechnical imaginary of rfid tagging and new geographies of responsibility. sci eng ethics. 25(5): pp.1425-1446. doi: 10.1007/s11948-018-0071-z. jasanoff, s. (2015). future imperfect: science, technology, and the imaginations of modernity. in s. jasanoff, and s. kim (eds.), dreamscapes of modernity: sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power, ( pp. 1-33). university of chicago press. jasanoff, s., & kim, s. (2013). sociotechnical imaginaries and national energy policies. science as culture. 22, pp. 189-196. 10.1080/09505431.2013.786990. kak, a, west, s. m., and whittaker, m. (december 5, 2023). “make no mistake—ai is owned by big tech.” mit technology review. kak, a., & west, s. m. (april 11, 2023). ai now 2023 landscape: confronting tech power, ai now institute. latour, b. (2005). reassembling the social – an introduction to actor-network-theory. oxford university press. lehtiniemi, t., & ruckenstein, m. (2019). the social imaginaries of data activism. big data & society, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718821146. lupton, d. (2020). ‘not the real me’: social imaginaries of personal data profiling. cultural sociology 15(1): pp. 3–21. doi:10.1177/1749975520939779. mager, a., & katzenbach, c. (2021). future imaginaries in the making and governing of digital technology: multiple, contested, commodified. new media & society, 23(2), pp. 223–236. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820929321. markham, a. (2021). the limits of the imaginary: challenges to intervening in future speculations of memory, data, and algorithms. new media & society, 23(2), 382405. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820929322 paper 1 negotiating ai(s) futures: stakeholders push to shape public imaginaries of ai in germany and the us christian katzenbach university of bremen vanessa richter university of bremen introduction utopian and dystopian visions regularly dominate the public discourse on artificial intelligence (ai) (cave & dihal 2019). these debates are increasingly focused on how ai (re)consolidates existing discrimination and social inequalities. while ai is now routinely treated as self-evident (suchman 2023), it is still very much under formation as a sociotechnical phenomenon. public communication and discursive framing hereby have considerable influence, being important elements of social (dis)ordering, and potentially both disrupting and reproducing prevailing social organization and its control. this paper contributes to the panel conceptually by structuring the role of stakeholders in negotiating contested sociotechnical imaginaries (mager & katzenbach 2021), and empirically with a study on stakeholders’ positioning and imagining of ai in the us and germany. the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries defined as ”collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order“ (jasanoff, 2015, p. 4) has proven useful in studying the interplay of discourses, institutional and technological developments. building on jasanoffs’ work, researchers have further developed the concept as algorithmic imaginaries (bucher, 2017), platform imaginaries (van es & poell), and influencer imaginaries (arriagada & bishop, 2021). however, missing so far is a more precise understanding of how these imaginaries are negotiated between multiple stakeholders in public discourse, given their multiple, contested, and often strongly commodified character (mager & katzenbach 2021). therefore, we are employing the framework of public imaginaries defined „as publicly constructed visions of (un)desirable socio-technical futures. these visions guide action, mobilise resources and layout trajectories for the materialisation or prevention of those futures” (brause et al., 2023). the concept offers a constructive framework to question the role of different stakeholders in shaping imaginaries around ai and the often disruptive negotiation processes around different desirable futures of ai and social orders. in order to conceptualise and structure relevant stakeholders in this discourse, we build on recent contributions to stakeholder typologies for tech discourses (gorwa, 2022). methodology in line with the framework of public imaginaries, the study was operationalised in three steps. first, an expert survey was conducted reaching out to ai experts — considered as consistently involved in ongoing ai research or public discourse and actively intervening in existing knowledge or knowledge production of ai –in the us and germany. the survey served as a first entry to comprise a list of relevant stakeholders in the ai environment. second, a longitudinal study of ai stakeholders on twitter (20122021) was conducted mapping the shifts in dominant stakeholder types over the ongoing ai hype as well as serving as an exemplary dataset for an ai stakeholder typology. third, based on the survey overview in connection with the stakeholder typology and longitudinal analysis, a list of relevant stakeholders was developed for an interview study. therefore, the following preliminary analysis focuses on producers of ai-related communication, based on semi-structured interviews with ai experts in industry, government, academia, media, and civil society from the us and germany (10-15 per country). the transcribed interviews were analysed employing both situational analysis (clarke, 2019) and critical discourse analysis (wodak, 2015) to map the relational development of imaginaries across stakeholder groups as well as major emerging imaginaries on ai. by considering the situational aspects of imaginary development, we are able to map controversial discourses on ai impacting future visions of the technology and its perception. results both the survey and twitter analysis highlighted an industry dominance previously reflected in analysis of media representation around tech discourses (fischer & puschmann, 2021; cui & wu, 2019). overall, the longitudinal analysis offers insights into different cycles of institutionalisation in the localised versus international ai discourses on twitter. additionally, it underscores noticeable changes in stakeholder engagement throughout the evolution of the public discourse on ai, which is reflected in the need for a broad set of interviewees to contextualise these data further. the qualitative analysis of the semi-structured interviews furthermore reveals clear differences across the two countries but also similarities in larger tech imaginaries that impact the future visions of ai. the analysis highlights that firstly the negotiation of ai imaginaries does not necessarily occur across all stakeholder groups as the us and german discourses are localised in several geographic ai centres. secondly, there is a strong co-orientation and networking between actors from the countries studied. the german analysis showed a clustering of governmental actors and ngos as civil society representatives in berlin focused on the race on ai regarding regulation and, hence, sovereignty as a developing imaginary. the industry cluster located strongly in mid to south germany was more preoccupied with who should regulate in the first place. while academia was tied into various points of the discourse as a highly decentralized cluster, a neutralizing standpoint focusing on ai as a tool in human control and, therefore, on questions of responsibility was at the forefront. this imaginary was further referenced strongly by several tech-specialized media outlets as a relevant counter imaginary to the ongoing hype. in contrast, the race on ai imaginary connected governmental actors and industry emphasizing the potential of ai for global (political) dominance in the us while still grappling with the potential regulatory needs. while on a similar trajectory, a silicon valley industry cluster foregrounded the regulatory need through corporations during this ‚industrial revolution‘ emphasizing a strong societal good focus in their public communication despite their clear economic core. furthermore, academia is interestingly intertwined with the tech industry through innovative research and funding but simultaneously connected to the strongly political cluster as an advisory board. the general consensus in this last cluster shared between academia and ngos reflects a similar approach to a neutralizing counter imaginary based on ai as a tool that requires technological specificity critiquing ai as a marketing term overshadowing the actual implications of specific innovations. however, the question of responsibility highlighted in the german discourse becomes much less prevalent. moving beyond specific stakeholders to question the processes of national and international negotiation on future ai imaginaries, the analysis reveals relevant intersections of imaginary building and political and sociotechnical agendas forming and disrupting current trajectories. the analysis thus offers key results for understanding how ai as an object of public communication is actively negotiated between powerful stakeholders, based on data from the us and germany. as a result, the paper makes visible how discourses and strategic activities of stakeholders condense into widely shared sociotechnical imaginaries with societal implications. these imaginaries play a decisive role in shaping the future design of ai systems and their integration into society and thus social (dis)ordering in times of profound automation. references arriagada, a., & bishop, s. (2021). between commerciality and authenticity: the imaginary of social media influencers in the platform economy. communication, culture and critique, tcab050. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcab050 brause, s.r., schäfer, m., katzenbach, c., mao, y., zeng, j., richter, v., dergacheva, d. (2023) public imaginaries of technologies: conceptual framework and empirical illustrations. 73rd annual conference of the international communication association (ica). 25-29 may 2023, toronto, canada. bucher, t. (2017). the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 30–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154086 cave, s., & dihal, k. (2019). hopes and fears for intelligent machines in fiction and reality. nature machine intelligence, 1(2), 74. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-0190020-9 clarke, a. e. (2019). situating grounded theory and situational analysis in interpretive qualitative inquiry. the sage handbook of current developments in grounded theory, 3–48. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526436061.n3 cui, d., & wu, f. (2021). the influence of media use on public perceptions of artificial intelligence in china: evidence from an online survey. information development, 37(1), 45–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/0266666919893411 felt, u., & öchsner, s. (2019). reordering the “world of things”: the sociotechnical imaginary of rfid tagging and new geographies of responsibility. science and engineering ethics 25: 1425–1446. fischer, s., & puschmann, c. (2021). wie deutschland über algorithmen schreibt. accessed februar 15, 2024, from https://www.bertelsmannstiftung.de/de/publikationen/publikation/did/wie-deutschland-u eber-algorithmenschreibt gorwa, r. (2022). who are the stakeholders in platform governance? yale journal of law and technology, 24, 493–509. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/ayx8h jasanoff, s., & kim, s.-h. (eds.) (2015). dreamscapes of modernity: sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power. chicago: university of chicago press. mager, a., & katzenbach, c. (2021). future imaginaries in the making and governing of digital technology: multiple, contested, commodified. new media & society, 23(2), 223–236. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820929321 suchman, l. (2023). the uncontroversial ‘thingness’ of ai. big data & society, 10(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231206794 van es, k., & poell, t. (2020). platform imaginaries and dutch public service media. social media + society, 6(2), 2056305120933289. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120933289 wodak, r. (2015). critical discourse analysis, discourse-historical approach. in the international encyclopedia of language and social interaction edited by karen tracey. wiley blackwell. paper 2 imaginaries of artificial intelligence in healthcare a qualitative analysis of chinese, german and us american news coverage saba rebecca brause university of zurich heng yang shanghai university mike schäfer university of zurich jing zeng university of zurich artificial intelligence (ai) technologies have been widely predicted to transform manifold sectors of society (stone et al., 2016). one sector with potentially numerous application prospects is healthcare, where they have entered many subfields, including radiology, cardiology, and oncology, and are expected to further enhance others (mintz & brodie, 2019). the evolution of emerging technologies is reflected in news coverage, which not only transmits knowledge and influences public perceptions about them (brossard, 2013), but can also shape technological developments themselves through the public construction of visions of socio-technical futures (vicente & dias-trindade, 2021; konrad et al., 2017). such visions have been conceptualised as sociotechnical imaginaries (sis), defined as “collectively held, institutionally stabilised, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures [or of resistance against the undesirable], animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology” (jasanoff, 2015, p. 4; p.19). sis are “culturally particular” (jasanoff, 2015, p.19) and can therefore differ strongly from one context to another, offering an explanation for diverging developmental paths of the same technology in different national contexts (see e.g. jasanoff & kim, 2009). this paper proposes to examine sis of ai in healthcare as they are constructed in news coverage in three leading economies striving for ai leadership: the united states of america, china, and germany. while the u.s. and china have been competing for leadership in the field for several years (wang & chen, 2018), germany is now aiming to catch up with these global ai leaders (buck, 2018). meanwhile, these three countries exemplify different cultural and political outlooks on technology: more consumerist and national identity-building in the u.s. (nye, 1996), more focused on its concrete problemsolving potential in china (simon & goldman, 1989; greenhalgh, 2020), and more hesitant in germany (jasanoff, 1995). concurrently, these countries provide different discursive opportunity structures (ferree et al., 2002) for the emergence and propagation of imaginaries, given the largely state-controlled chinese media landscape (zhao, 2012), the strongly commercialised, market-led u.s. media system, and the german media system with its combined partisan and commercial characteristics (hallin & mancini, 2004). these differences are likely to impact which imaginaries of ai in healthcare are constructed in newspapers and who gets to contribute to their construction. therefore, drawing from the si concept and scholarship on the public communication about technologies (pct), this paper explores two research questions (rqs): rq1: which imaginaries of ai in healthcare are promoted in u.s. american, german and chinese newspapers? rq2: who gets to contribute to the construction of these imaginaries in the newspapers? conceptual framework this study is centrally framed by the si concept (jasanoff, 2015), complemented by elements from scholarship on pct. indeed, while sis “find[..] expression in the mass media” (jasanoff, 2015, p. 27), this mediated representation has remained underconceptualised. we therefore propose to additionally draw from scholarship on pct, which has developed approaches to understand how, and by whom technologies are framed in the news media. from the si concept (jasanoff, 2015) we draw three imaginary dimensions. (1) the envisioned role for ai in healthcare. (2) the desirability of the vision including (a) whether the vision is (un)desirable, (b) for whom, and (c) for which reasons. (3) the object of the vision, i.e. the specific ai technologies being referenced. from pct literature, particularly the scientific public sphere concept (ferree et al., 2002; gerhards and schäfer, 2009), we draw a “speaker” dimension to capture how imaginaries are publicly constructed in the news media by different speakers competing for visibility for themselves and their interpretations of emerging technologies: (4) the speaker denotes the person or stakeholder contributing to the construction of the imaginary. methodology the comparison is based on articles from five leading newspapers in each country, published between 2012 and 2021. the present analysis on ai healthcare imaginaries is part of a larger comparison of ai imaginaries in u.s., german and chinese newspapers. lda topic modelling (blei et al., 2003) was performed on each of the three datasets. one healthcare topic emerged in each of the topic models and was selected for in-depth investigation in the present study. thematic analysis was performed, taking the conceptual framework’s dimensions as “analytical objectives” (guest et al., 2012). results we identified two imaginaries of ai in healthcare in the u.s., two in the chinese, and one in the german news coverage (see table 1). these imaginaries shared large similarities across the countries but differed in the details of several imaginary dimensions. for instance, the first imaginaries in the u.s. and germany on the one hand, and the imaginary in china on the other, centred on the enhancement of healthcare, albeit with different foci regarding the societal level in focus. indeed, the german and u.s. imaginary emphasised the micro-level, i.e. improving care for individual patients, while the chinese imaginary concentrated on macro-scale goals, namely the enhancement of healthcare provision capacity through ai and the standardisation of care across china. the second imaginary in the u.s. and china evolved around pandemic or epidemic management by using ai for handling increased demand in healthcare and for controlling infection spread, yet, there again, differences emerged. for instance, the u.s. imaginary envisioned infection spread on an individual patientand hospital level, while the chinese imaginary conceived of ai-assisted infection spread from a crowd and top-down angle. regarding who gets to construct there imaginaries, technology sector speakers contributed to the construction of all five imaginaries, while civil society speakers were present only in u.s. and german, and government speakers only in chinese coverage. united states germany china enhancing healthcare (micro-level focus) enhancing healthcare (micro-level focus) enhancing healthcare (macro-level focus) managing pandemics (micro-/meso-level) managing epidemics (macro-level) table 1. overview of imaginaries overall, the results indicate well-established, cross-national imaginaries of ai in healthcare, while lower-level differences in several elements of the imaginaries emerged as linked to the national contexts. for instance, regarding the first imaginary, the macro-level focus in the chinese version can be related back to the demographic context and the largely state-controlled healthcare system (wang, 2009), whereas the us version’s focus is reflective or its more privatised health system (hennes et al., 2017). furthermore, the traditionally cautious approach to new technologies in germany could underlie the reduced diversity in ai imaginaries for healthcare (jasanoff, 1995). speaker contribution to the imaginaries point to a strong influence of the technology sector in constructing imaginaries of ai in healthcare, and otherwise reflect the weaker versus stronger state involvement in the media system of the three countries (hallin & mancini, 2004; zhao, 2012). references bauer, m. (1995). resistance to new technology and its effects on nuclear power, information technology and biotechnology. in m. bauer (ed.), resistance to new technology (1st ed., pp. 1–42). cambridge university press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511563706.002 blei, d. m., ng, a. y., & jordan, m. i. (2003). latent dirichlet allocation. journal of machine learning research, 3(jan), 993–1022. brossard, d. (2013). new media landscapes and the science information consumer. proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 110(supplement_3), 14096– 14101. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1212744110 buck, t. (2018, november 15). germany to spend €3bn on boosting ai capabilities. https://www.ft.com/content/fe1f9194-e8e3-11e8-a34c-663b3f553b35 ferree, m. m., gamson, w. a., gerhards, j., & rucht, d. (2002). shaping abortion discourse: democracy and the public sphere in germany and the united states. cambridge university press; cambridge core. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511613685 gerhards, j., & schäfer, m. s. (2009). two normative models of science in the public sphere: human genome sequencing in german and us mass media. public understanding of science, 18(4), 437–451. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662507082891 greenhalgh, s. (2020). governing through science: the anthropology of science and technology in contemporary china. in s. greenhalgh & l. zhang (eds.), can science and technology save china? (pp. 1–24). cornell university press. https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501747021.003.0001 guest, g., macqueen, k. m., & namey, e. e. (2012). applied thematic analysis. sage publications. hallin, d. c., & mancini, p. (2004). comparing media systems: three models of media and politics. cambridge university press; cambridge core. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511790867 hennes, j., kieselbach, f., klädtke, r., wirsching, k., & zucchinali, r. (2015). a cross comparative analysis of the u.s., german, and italian healthcare system. in d. audretsch, e. lehmann, a. richardson, & s. vismara (eds.), globalization and public policy (pp. 93–119). springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17692-5_6. jasanoff, s. (1995). product, process, or programme: three cultures and the regulation of biotechnology. in m. bauer (ed.), resistance to new technology (1st ed., pp. 311–332).cambridge university press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511563706.016. jasanoff, s. (2015). future imperfect: science, technology, and the imaginations of modernity. in s. jasanoff & s.-h. kim (eds.), dreamscapes of modernity. sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power (pp. 1–33). university of chicago press.https://doi.org/10.7208/9780226276663-001 jasanoff, s., & kim, s.-h. (2009). containing the atom: sociotechnical imaginaries and nuclear power in the united states and south korea. minerva, 47(2), 119–146. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-009-9124-4 konrad, k., van lente, h., groves, c., & selin, c. (2017). "performing and governing the future in science and technology. in c. a. miller, u. felt, r. fouché, & l. smith-doerr (eds.), the handbook of science and technology studies, 4th edition (4th ed., pp. 465–493). mit press. mintz, y., & brodie, r. (2019). introduction to artificial intelligence in medicine. minimally invasive therapy & allied technologies, 28(2), 73–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645706.2019.1575882 nye, d. e. (1996). american technological sublime. mit press. simon, d. f., & goldman, m. (1989). science and technology in post-mao china. harvard univ asia center. stone, p., brooks, r., brynjolfsson, e., calo, r., etzioni, o., hager, g., hirschberg, j., kalyanakrishnan, s., kamar, e., kraus, s., leytonbrown, k., parkes, d., press, w., saxenian, a., shah, j., tambe, m., & teller, a. (2016). artificial intelligence and life in 2030 (report of the 2015-2016 study panel; one hundred year study on artificial intelligence). stanford university. https://apo.org.au/node/210721 vicente, p. n., & dias-trindade, s. (2021). reframing sociotechnical imaginaries: the case of the fourth industrial revolution. public understanding of science, 30(6), 708–723. https://doi.org/10.1177/09636625211013513 wang, h. (2009). a dilemma of chinese healthcare reform: how to re-define government roles? china economic review, 20(4), 598–604. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chieco.2009.04.001 wang, y., & chen, d. (2018). rising sino-u.s. competition in artificial intelligence. china quarterly of international strategic studies, 04(02), 241–258. https://doi.org/10.1142/s2377740018500148 zhao, y. (2012). understanding china’s media system in a world historical context. in d. hallin & p. mancini (eds.), comparing media systems beyond the western world (1st ed., pp. 143–173). cambridge university press. paper 3 ai imaginaries have issues: mapping an ai controversy with social media natalia stanusch university of amsterdam richard rogers university of amsterdam this paper is centred on four goals: first, to employ issue mapping and digital research approaches to locate contemporary ai imaginaries and the issues arising from them; second, to assess their salience in a cross-platform perspective; third, to describe the stakes gleaned from the prominence of certain dominant framings, and forth, to trace ai industry’s issuefication through the notions of issue preclusion and premediation. through the preclusion and premediation of issues that arise from imaginaries, ai industry is trying to occupy the future and absorb the present. with this research, we join with others (e.g., marres, n. et al., 2024) on this argument and demonstrate it empirically. the ai industry's monopolization, however, is not complete. the case in question concerns discussions about the current state and future of ai, especially the ai industry. as latour and others have argued, there are particular moments when technologies are ripe for study before they are stabilised: at the time of a controversy, through an accident or disaster and more recently when projects are released in the wild in beta, transforming users into participants in a living lab (latour, 2005; marres, 2018). or as latour put it: “[what] a minute before appeared fully automatic, autonomous, and devoid of human agents, are now made of crowds of frantically moving humans with heavy equipment” (2005, p. 81). the ai industry arguably has had many such moments, especially ‘early’ releases of versions of a chatbot, such as microsoft’s tay which quickly devolved into unacceptable utterances and more recently google’s gemini whose guardrails were allegedly ‘woketuned’. as an illustration of the tallying of such moments, the european union, in preparation for the ai act, maintains an ai incidents database, currently numbering over 3,000 items. for our project, we selected an incident or episode that stirred up actors and suddenly destabilised the industry, surfacing tensions about the stakes of ai: the firing and reinstatement of sam altman, ceo of openai, in november 2023. through this moment of ‘frantically moving humans’ or online commentators and editors pressing their send buttons, we sought to capture the envisaged futures as well as the issues arising from them about an ai industry allegedly at a crossroads. the altman episode sparked an extensive outpouring of posts across social media platforms and articles about ai. thus, the episode offers an instance when it is particularly opportune and productive to undertake such a mapping. this paper contributes to a broader understanding of how ai technologies are being envisaged and debated across online platforms. it seeks to contribute to the study of ai as new media concentration (or ‘big tech’) (bode and goodlad, 2023; crawford, 2021; kak and west, 2023) by examining how ai industry discusses itself as a key actor or leader. it builds upon existing notions of sociotechnical imaginaries (and counterimaginaries) and fills them in by extending their study to the social issues arising around them (jasanoff & kim 2013; 2015). in our approach, imaginaries imply competing issues and matters of concern that may be mapped, but also competing visions under development. methods in the paper, we put forward techniques and a series of findings from the tracing of how actor messaging and editing at the time of the firing and reinstatement articulate the stakes of ai. we do that empirically by analysing the multiple ‘ais’ and their issues as they are articulated on the online platforms, linkedin and x/twitter. apart from traditions in science and technology studies, this project may be situated in the scholarship surrounding controversy mapping, issue mapping as well as digital research methods (latour, 2005; venturini & munk, 2022; rogers et al., 2015; rogers, 2013). in order to locate and map the salience of ai imaginaries and issues per and across each platform under study, we employ digital research methods for online data analysis (see table 1). table 1. rendering a platform as an issue space platform linkedin x/twitter timeframe nov 16, 2023 – dec 14, 2023 nov 16, 2023 – jan 7, 2024 technique co-hashtag analysis and visual network analysis retweet and visual network analysis for the analysis of linkedin and x/twitter, we used ‘quanti-quali’ methods (venturini and latour, 2010), where the demarcation of a corpus and initial analysis are through computational methods and interpretation through closer readings. to study the clash of imaginaries and issues on x/twitter, we queried the accounts of ai industry and trade association members, and created a retweet network of tweets concerning altman and openai, moving back in time from january 7, 2024. we performed a visual network analysis, creating clusters (venturini et al., 2021), and subsequently analysing the most engaged with tweets per cluster (according to retweet count). for linkedin, we collected posts that contained the keyword sam altman, the hashtag #samaltman, and the mention @samaltman around the time of his firing and reinstatement (late november and early december). we subsequently performed a cohashtag analysis, followed by a visual network analysis in order to create clusters (rogers, 2024; venturini et al., 2021). for the localisation of ai imaginaries and their issues, we followed with a close reading of the most engaged with posts per cluster. results our two main findings are as follows. we found that the altman controversy gives silicon valley the opportunity to appropriate ai’s controversial issues, making certain of them more concerning than others through: 1) premediation as externalization and 2) preclusion through absorption (or internalization). an example of premediation on linkedin constituted the issue space we labelled as longtermism. longtermism concerns the issue of artificial general intelligence (agi) and altman’s contribution to its development is a central theme. particularly the speculations around the so-called “q” algorithm that openai was allegedly developing as a step towards arriving at agi. thus, ai industry envisions the issues of concern for ai as located in the distant future, embracing a long-term vision. an example of preclusion on linkedin was found in the issue space we labelled as who is tech literate? the question of regulation is central to the voices on linkedin which enacts sentiments of governmental incompetence in the face of new ai technology. here, the critiques coming from outside of ai industry focused on the calls for regulation and stronger governance are precluded (or internalized) by the ai industry. who is tech literate? precludes the (lack of) regulation as the issue that can – and should be – solved by the industry itself. on x/twitter, we also found a similar space of preclusion and premeditation to that on linkedin, yet we also found a space of counter-imaginaries. unlike on linkedin, we locate two issue spaces that we term anti-intersectionality the lack of diversity, discrimination, and racism that have been reoccurring issues in the big tech industry, especially in the managerial circles. big tech is predominantly white and male, projecting certain biases and worldview as normative – and governing urgency recognizing the urgent need for stronger regulatory initiatives taken up by governments is the only way to face the risks and damages that ai imposes. references bode, k., & goodlad, l. m. e. (2023). data worlds: an introduction. critical ai 1(12).10.1215/2834703x-10734026. crawford, k. (2021). the atlas of ai: power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. yale university press. jasanoff, s. (2015). future imperfect: science, technology, and the imaginations of modernity. in s. jasanoff, and s. kim (eds.), dreamscapes of modernity: sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power, ( pp. 1-33). university of chicago press. jasanoff, s., & kim, s. (2013). sociotechnical imaginaries and national energy policies. science as culture. 22, pp. 189-196. 10.1080/09505431.2013.786990. kak, a. and west, s. m. (april 11, 2023). ai now 2023 landscape: confronting tech power, ai now institute, https://ainowinstitute.org/2023-landscape. latour, b. (2005). reassembling the social – an introduction to actor-network-theory. oxford university press. marres, n. (2018). why we can't have our facts back. engaging science, technology, and society 4, 423 443. doi:10.17351/ests2018.188 marres, n., castelle, m., gobbo, b., poletti, c., & tripp, j. (2024). ai as supercontroversy: eliciting ai and society controversies with an extended expert community in the uk. big data & society, 11(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241255103. rogers, r. (2013). digital methods, mit press. rogers, r. (2018). otherwise engaged: social media from vanity metrics to critical analytics. international journal of communication 12, pp. 450–472. rogers, r. (2024). doing digital methods. sage publications. rogers, r., sánchez-querubín, n., and kil, a. (2015). issue mapping for an ageing europe. amsterdam university press. venturini, t., & latour, b. (2010). the social fabric: digital traces and qualiquantitative methods. in proceedings of future en seine 2009, (pp. 87101). editions future en seine. venturini, t., & munk, a. k. (2022). controversy mapping: a field guide. polity press. venturini, t., jacomy, m., & jensen, p. (2021). what do we see when we look at networks: visual network analysis, relational ambiguity, and force-directed layouts. big data & society, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211018488. paper 4 it’s a friend! it’s a puppy! it’s ai!: making sense of copilot nancy baym microsoft research chuncheng liu microsoft research ryland shaw microsoft research introduction in 2023, microsoft introduced copilot, described as a “next-generation ai [that] will transform work for everyone” (microsoft worklab). copilot is a prominent example of the integration of generative ai into work, a shift that has sparked widespread imaginings of new work futures (e.g. abumusab, 2023; budhwar et al., 2023; davalos & eidelson, 2023). technologies that make an impact generally do so both because of their capabilities, and because of the domesticated understandings of their value that people reach through discursive and everyday practices (e.g. baym 2014). this paper focuses on early users of copilot employed by microsoft to identify how they made sense of generative ai. interviewing salespeople, marketers, developers, hr professionals, and more—people whose work is both shaping and being shaped by this new technology— allows us to see the role of industry in pre-shaping imaginaries of what generative ai and ai-mediated communication (jakesch et al., 2019; hancock et al., 2020) could become and how, even from within industry, pre-shaping only partially configures imaginaries. microsoft announced the full integration of copilot into office software (teams,outlook, word, excel, powerpoint, etc) in march 2023. as the marketing launch explained, copilot can summarize email chains or teams meetings, “jump-start” creativity in word, or transform documents into powerpoint presentations, among other scenarios (spataro, 2023). for those with a license, copilot is omnipresent. the integration of generative ai into productivity software already in global daily use means that the imaginaries that guide its futures may be particularly influential in shaping ai futures. early users negotiate bright futures painted by tech proponents (leaver & srdarov, 2023) and hype as technology settles into reality (hepp et al., 2023; liao & iliadis, 2023). one of generative ai’s most unusual qualities is how constantly it changes. large language models evolve on their own, and how they will behave tomorrow is not entirely predictable from how they behave today. we show how early users of this ai, one already loaded with strategic vagueness (suchman, 2023), engage in sensemaking that both resonates with and counters industry discourse. furthermore, at the time of this study, copilot was undergoing rapid development. these employees of “customer zero” were encouraged to provide feedback which might be addressed through technological iteration, sometimes became educators for customers and for others at work. methods and rqs we interviewed 36 employees drawn from a small portion of employees invited to participate in a copilot early access program. participants gained access in waves beginning at the start of 2023, well ahead of the november 2023 general access launch. we spoke with each person twice between september 2023 and april 2024 to see how their experience and thinking evolved with time. participants worked in 14 countries and across company divisions. 24 interviewees were male, 12 female. they came from 14 countries and six corporate divisions. we oversampled in sales (n=20) to gain indirect access to customer perspectives and because these users are those charged with persuading others of industry’s preferred imaginary. after obtaining irb approval and informed consent, we followed a semi-structured interview protocol. interviews were automatically transcribed, manually corrected and anonymized, and then imported into a qualitative software platform. we collaborated to create an inductive codebook based on common patterns across interviews. two areas stood out as loci of industry imaginaries and counter imaginaries: the metaphors people used in describing both copilot and generative ai and the hopes and fears they expressed for the technology’s future. “future visions,” such as hopes and fears, “are a crucial and constitutive element of the socio-technical environment of emerging technologies” (liao and iliadis, 2021, 259). metaphors are a particularly productive site to understand how publics are making sense of generative ai (see anderson, 2023). as wyatt (2004, 257) wrote in an article critiquing microsoft’s power in using the metaphor of windows, “metaphors not only help us to think about the future; they are a resource deployed by a variety of actors to shape the future.” with an eye toward both industry imaginaries and counter-imaginaries, we ask (1) how do people imagine their relationships with copilot and ai and; (2) how do they imagine these technologies affecting their relationships to themselves and with others? findings “copilot” is a metaphor, one intended to foreground a relationship between the user, in control, and ai, there to competently assist. participants did use this metaphor, and most were uncomfortable with the prospect of letting the ai do their work without supervision. the metaphor of personal assistant and calculator, among others, also fell in line with the product name and microsoft’s intent. but other metaphors reveal a less settled relational dynamic between people and copilot. for example, one interviewee described it as “like asking a friend” to read your draft and offer advice, suggesting intimacy and equality. yet later, he exclaimed “it’s not my friend, it’s a tool!” other metaphors stressed generative ai’s immaturity, positioning themselves as elders. one enthusiastic employee explained, “unless everyone who uses copilot knows how to work with toddlers and puppies, they may get frustrated.” participants’ hopes and fears also echoed and varied from industry imaginaries. overall, hopes repeated the company’s marketing, and previous provocations that new technologies could make more time for work that really matters (pugh, 2022). they hoped the product would improve, that it would help them save time, reduce drudgery, and enable more meaningful work, more creativity, new skills, and new business models. these hopes were often short term and individualized. in contrast, fears tended to be long term, relational, organizational, and societal, reflecting existential and longterm risks promulgated by ai safety advocates (e.g. sætra & danaher, 2023). some worried about losing humanity. for instance, one salesman speculated, “maybe in the future […] i use copilot to create the email and customers might create responses to my email using copilot. so i'm wondering: why we are doing that? it's meaningless.” people also expressed concern about over-reliance, one worrying we might become like the humans in wall-e. some expressed concern about automation replacing their own or others’ jobs, or about being placed under continuous surveillance. in contrast to the imagined copilot, whom one can trust to fly the plane, others feared long term societal trust consequences of “hallucinations,” deepfakes, and misinformation. conclusion we don’t yet know how generative ai might shape the future of work. industry actors, including microsoft, have a enormous stakes in shaping that future through their rhetoric. employees, early in this process, are both industry voices and individuals trying to make their own sense of rapid changes. far from united in a corporate prefiguring of what ai is and will be, these industry insiders actively sense of the gap between the promise and reality, sometimes reshaping both. references abumusab, s. (2023). generative ai and human labor: who is replaceable? ai & society, s00146-023-01773–3. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-023-01773-3 ai: a whole new way of working. (n.d.). retrieved october 30, 2023, from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/ai-a-whole-new-way-of-working anderson, s. s. (2023). “places to stand”: multiple metaphors for framing chatgpt’s corpus. computers and composition, 68, 102778. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2023.102778 baym, n. k. (2014). personal connections in the digital age (2nd edition). polity. budhwar, p., chowdhury, s., wood, g., aguinis, h., bamber, g. j., beltran, j. r., boselie, p., lee cooke, f., decker, s., denisi, a., dey, p. k., guest, d., knoblich, a. j., malik, a., paauwe, j., papagiannidis, s., patel, c., pereira, v., ren, s., … varma, a. (2023). human resource management in the age of generative artificial intelligence: perspectives and research directions on chatgpt. human resource management journal, 33(3), 606–659. https://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12524 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-023-01773-3 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/ai-a-whole-new-way-of-working https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2023.102778 https://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12524 davalos, j., & eidelson, j. (2023, december 11). microsoft and labor unions form ‘historic’ alliance on ai. bloomberg.com. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-11/microsoft-and-labor-unionsform-historic-alliance-on-ai hancock, j. t., naaman, m., & levy, k. (2020). ai-mediated communication: definition, research agenda, and ethical considerations. journal of computer-mediated communication, 25(1), 89–100. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmz022 hepp, a., loosen, w., dreyer, s., jarke, j., kannengießer, s., katzenbach, c., malaka, r., pfadenhauer, m. p., puschmann, c., & schulz, w. (2023). chatgpt, lamda, and the hype around communicative ai: the automation of communication as a field of research in media and communication studies. human-machine communication, 6, 41–63. https://doi.org/10.30658/hmc.6.4 jakesch, m., french, m., ma, x., hancock, j. t., & naaman, m. (2019). ai-mediated communication: how the perception that profile text was written by ai affects trustworthiness. proceedings of the 2019 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300469 leaver, t., & srdarov, s. (2023). chatgpt isn’t magic: the hype and hypocrisy of generative artificial intelligence (ai) rhetoric. m/c journal, 26(5), n.pag-n.pag. https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.3004 liao, t., & iliadis, a. (2021). a future so close: mapping 10 years of promises and futures across the augmented reality development cycle. new media & society, 23(2), 258–283. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820924623 liu, y., mittal, a., yang, d., & bruckman, a. (2022). will ai console me when i lose my pet? understanding perceptions of ai-mediated email writing. proceedings of the 2022 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517731 pugh, a. j. (2023). constructing what counts as human at work: enigma, emotion, and error in connective labor. american behavioral scientist, 67(14), 1771–1792. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642221127240 sætra, h. s., & danaher, j. (2023). resolving the battle of shortvs. long-term ai risks. ai and ethics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-023-00336-y spataro, j. (2023, march 16). introducing microsoft 365 copilot – your copilot for work. the official microsoft blog. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/03/16/introducing-microsoft-365-copilot-yourcopilot-for-work/ suchman, l. (2023). the uncontroversial ‘thingness’ of ai. big data & society, 10(2), 20539517231206794. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231206794 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-11/microsoft-and-labor-unions-form-historic-alliance-on-ai https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-11/microsoft-and-labor-unions-form-historic-alliance-on-ai https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmz022 https://doi.org/10.30658/hmc.6.4 https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300469 https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.3004 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820924623 https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517731 https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642221127240 https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-023-00336-y https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/03/16/introducing-microsoft-365-copilot-your-copilot-for-work/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/03/16/introducing-microsoft-365-copilot-your-copilot-for-work/ https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231206794 sundar, s. s. (2020). rise of machine agency: a framework for studying the psychology of human–ai interaction (haii). journal of computer-mediated communication, 25(1), 74–88. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmz026 wyatt, s. (2004). danger! metaphors at work in economics, geophysiology, and the internet. science, technology, & human values, 29(2), 242–261. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243903261947 https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmz026 https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243903261947 paper 5 imagining sustainable ai sigrid kannengießer university of münster anne mollen university of münster anastasia glawatzki university of münster sustainability and ai the development, training and use of generative ai (genai) causes tremendous social, ecological, economic effects and new inequalities: examples are the immense carbon emissions that are currently produced through the energy intense training and use of genai, discrimination in and through data sets used or market concentration, i.e. the dominance of a few tech companies in the market offering genai. different organizations (companies, networks, institutes) address (some of) these effects imagining genai that is more sustainable in the economic, ecologic, and social dimension. these imaginations of sustainable ai are in the focus of our research questions: what is the relevance of sustainability in shaping generative ai? how is sustainable generative ai imagined by ai developing organizations? we analyzed this research question conducting a qualitative content analysis (kuckartz & rädiker 2023) of websites of different organizations that develop genai. in our sample, we include big tech companies such as google and openai as well as organizations such as huggingface, nxai, lelapa ai and networks like eleuther. this latter group of organizations often frames itself as “alternatives” to big tech companies. we thus address the panel’s core interest the study of “counter-imaginaries beyond the [big] ai industry”. putting imaginations of sustainable ai in focus, we modify the sustainability definition of the brundtland report (un wced, 1987), defining sustainability as social ecological-economic justice. for our analysis, we used criteria developed for sustainable ai as deductive categories (rohde et al. 2024). next to our empirical interest in the imaginations of sustainable genai, we argue that the broader interdisciplinary research field of media and communication that discusses and examines genai (e.g. guzman & lewis 2020; hepp et al. 2023) should ask how ai can and should be imagined, developed, produced and used in a sustainable way – in acknowledgement of the severe ecological, economic, and social effects that we referred to above. this leads to the analysis of genai applications that address negative ecological, economic, and social effects of genai. negative socio-ecological economic effects of ai especially research in the field of machine learning is investigating the ecological effects of generative ai and examining the energy consumption of the training circles of generative ai and the carbon dioxide emission that is connected to this energy consumption as most of the energy comes from fossil resources (luccioni et al. 2022; kaack et al. 2022). other research reveals the exploitation of nature and human-beings (bresniahn & brodie 2021; gray & siddarth 2019; miceli et al. 2022) or the concentration in the market of generative ai (vipra & korinek 2023, png 2022). these are examples of negative ecological, economic, and social effects of genai technologies dominating the market such as chatgpt by openai or bard by google. “alternative” technologies of generative ai address these effects by imagining and trying to develop and produce ai models which imagine what we characterize as sustainable ai. imagining sustainable ai technological imaginaries have been discussed before the social diffusion of genai. sheila jasanoff defines sociotechnical imaginaries as “collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology.” (jasanoff, 2015) such imaginaries often include visions for societies and the role specific technologies could and should play in it. with broad societal contestations about the role of technologies of genai specifically a multitude of ai-related imaginaries exist (pink et al., 2022). they are being put forward by ai companies (katzenbach, 2021), by policy-makers (un desa, 2021), in journalistic reporting (wang et al., 2023). socio-technical imaginaries not only build the context in which ai-related practices should be considered; they are equally enacted in practices. especially, in times where societies are being confronted with complex transformative tasks as part of a socioecological or socio-technical transformation, imaginaries are contested. this can not only be observed in policy discussions on how ai technologies should be regulated but can equally be observed for instance in the heated and seemingly incompatible opposition between proponents of ai ethics on the one and ai safety/ai alignment on the other side. interdisciplinary media and communication research on imaginaries of ai and sustainability should consider the range of imaginaries, the multitude of different actors involved in formulating and creating imaginaries, the fields of application which imaginaries relate to, the fields of contestations in which they are being negotiated etc. the results of our investigation of imaginations of sustainable ai, based on websites of ai developing organizations, show that sustainability is rarely explicitly mentioned. if so the role of ai for sustainability is stressed but not the relevance of sustainable ai (e.g. by google). using ai sustainability criteria (rohde et al., see above), we found that criteria in the social dimension of sustainability are dominating, and here mostly the criteria openness and transparency. in the ecological dimension, resource efficiency is addressed. this criterium is not only related to environmental aspects but also regarding the economic dimension and financial aspects. focussing on efficiency, our results show an ambivalence within certain sustainability criteria in imaginations of genai. efficiency is on the one side used as a criterium in a sustainability understanding (defined as justice; e.g. by the company huggingface when relating to resource efficiency). on the other side, the criterium is not related to questions of sustainability at all (e.g. by nxai, as technological efficiency and progress). a third result is that “alternative” imaginaries of genai (framing themselves as alternatives to the big tech companies) are primarily equally driven by technological progress, not by sustainability. they call for collaboratively developing genai, not to make genai development more accessible to serve justice intentions, but to strengthen the genai developer community and improve the technologies as such. taking into account the above mentioned severe ecological, economic and social effects of the development, training, and use of genai, imaginaries of sustainable ai are urgently needed that put justice from a comprehensive perspective into focus. references bresnihan, p., & brodie, p. (2021). new extractive frontiers in ireland and the moebius strip of wind/data. environment and planning e: nature and space, 4(4), 1645– 1664. 10.1177/2514848620970121 gray, m. l., & siddharth, s. (2019). ghost work. boston: houghton mifflin harcourt. guzman, a. l., & lewis, s. c. (2020). artificial intelligence and communication: a human–machine communication research agenda. new media & society, 22(1), 70– 86. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819858691 hepp, a., loosen, w., dreyer, s., jarke, j., kannengießer, s., katzenbach, c., malaka,r., pfadenhauer, m. p., puschmann, c., & schulz, w. (2023). chatgpt, lamda, and the hype around communicative ai: the automation of communication as a field of research in media and communication studies. human-machine communication, 6, 41–63. https://doi.org/10.30658/hmc.6.4 jasanoff, s. (2015). future imperfect: science, technology, and the imaginations of modernity. in s. jasanoff & s.-h. kim (hrsg.), dreamscapes of modernity: sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power (pp. 1–33). university of chicago press. https://doi.org/10.7208/9780226276663-001 kaack, l. h., donti, p. l., strubell, e., kamiya, g., creutzig, f., & rolnick, d. (2022). aligning artificial intelligence with climate change mitigation. nature climate change, 12(6), 518–527. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01377-7 katzenbach, c. (2021). “ai will fix this”–the technical, discursive, and political turn to ai in governing communication. big data & society, 8(2), 20539517211046182. kuckartz u. & rädiker, s. (2023). qualitative content analysis. methods, practice and software. london: sage. luccioni, a. s., mueller, z., & raw, n. (2022). co2 emissions and the 🤗 hub. https://huggingface.co/blog/carbon-emissions-on-the-hub miceli, m., yang, t., garcia, a. a., posada, j., wang, s. m., pohl, m., & hanna, a. (2022). documenting data production processes, http://arxiv.org/abs/2207.04958, 10.48550/arxiv.2207.04958 png, m.-t. (2022). at the tensions of south and north. 1434–1445. 10.1145/3531146.3533200 rohde, f., mollen, a., meyer, a., wagner, j., marken, g., frick, v., schmelzle, fr., engel, l. (2024). taking (policy) action to enhance the sustainability of ai systems. https://www.ioew.de/publikation/taking_policy_action_to_enhance_the_sustainability_of _ai_systems rolnick, d., donti, p. l., kaack, l. h., kochanski, k., lacoste, a., sankaran, k., ross, a. s., milojevic-dupont, n., jaques, n., & waldman-brown, a. (2022). tackling climate change with machine learning. acm computing surveys (csur), 55(2), 1–96. un desa. (2021). artificial intelligence saving the natural world. https://www.un.org/en/desa/artificial-intelligence-saving-natural-world un wced. (1987). our common future. world commission on environment and development. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/5987ourcommon-future.pdf vipra, j., & korinek, a. (2023). market concentration implications of foundation models. center on regulation and markets working paper 9. washington d.c.: brookings. wang, w., downey, j., & yang, f. (2023). ai anxiety? comparing the sociotechnical imaginaries of artificial intelligence in uk, chinese and indian newspapers. global media and china, 20594364231196547. https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231196547 https://www.ioew.de/publikation/taking_policy_action_to_enhance_the_sustainability_of_ai_systems https://www.ioew.de/publikation/taking_policy_action_to_enhance_the_sustainability_of_ai_systems selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): depounti, i. and saukko, p. (2024, october). ‘you cannot expect such validation in real life’ historical continuities and change in women’s romancing with the ai chatbot replika.paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ‘you cannot expect such validation in real life:’ historical continuities and change in women’s romancing with the ai chatbot replika iliana depounti loughborough university paula saukko loughborough university in both scholarly and popular discourses, our time has been named as the time of the artificial intelligence (ai) revolution in various domains such as work, education, health, and relationships. in the field of human relationships, there has been a rapid rise in the development and diffusion of communicative ai in the form of chatbots, interactive agents, voice assistants, virtual influencers and others. these ais, such as the replika ai chatbot, are ‘personal’ and designed to interact with humans in socially meaningful ways posing as friends, helpers, lovers, therapists, and confidantes. according to previous studies (devlin, 2020) they reflect a cultural shift towards alternative and novel ways and needs of interacting and signify our robotic moment (turkle, 2011). ai chatbots, robots and agents have been widely studied through novelty (elliot, 2023; kislev, 2022) and/or speculation frameworks (levy, 2018), exploring the new ways humans communicate with them and how these might change our socializing, having sex or talking to a therapist. however, in this article we suggest that there are significant continuities between engagement with ai and traditional entertainment, such as books, television shows or video games. we further contend that classical feminist research on old media offers valuable insights that help to understand interaction with ai in the context of intimate, social life.  thus, the study explores how female users of the replika companion chatbot app use their ai companions for classical romantic fantasy as well as more novel emotional regulation. the research was based on qualitative, in-depth interviews with twenty mostly midlife female users of the replika chatbot, whom we recruited online. following a thematic analysis, we found that first, the women, used the replika chatbot for fantasies of nurturing companionship they were lacking in real life, such as attentive lover, friend or child in the context of feeling alone due to living alone, caring for family members or having a chronic condition and/or disability. second, the women used the bot reflexively for caring for or managing the self and to validate their emotions and their worth, reflecting the therapeutic ethos of our time (illouz, 2008). this study thus to explores the continuities and change between earlier forms of media romancing and ai. more specifically, the examined case highlights how women’s engagements with earlier media such as romance novels (radway; 1984 illouz, 2014) and pornography (juffer, 1998) but also later devices such as video games (iversen, 2012) and audio erotica apps (bellas and mcalister, 2023) help us understand how women use ai companions to dream and feel valued.  the replika app is downloaded on the mobile device of users who create their own replikas, assign them an avatar, name, gender and skin colour and talk to them for companionship purposes. replika offers users the possibility to “talk with an ai companion that cares” by employing a combination of pre-programmed scripts of erotic role play, positive psychology and cognitive behavioral therapy (cbt) and chatgpt-3 generated answers. previous studies about replika (maples et al., 2024, skjuve et al., 2022; xie & pentina, 2022; ta et al., 2020) have found that its users perceive the app as a mental well-being enhancer; it has also been found that users are encouraged to and train their ais to show desirable traits such as assertiveness, humour, empathy, agreeableness and others (depounti et al., 2022). in the interviews we conducted, the women users of replika described how they used replika for romantic fantasy and emotional regulation or self-care by capitalising on its ‘inherently’ caring, romantic and empathetic nature. use of ais and robots for sex and love have been widely studied but mostly from the male user perspective (middleweek, 2021; devlin & locatelli, 2020; langaster-james and bentley, 2018). female perspectives are lacking (hanson & locatelli, 2022) and based on media coverage (liang, 2023; singhkurtz, 2023) we suspect that female users will be discussed in terms of the ‘loneliness epidemic.’ following feminist media studies tradition our aim is to acknowledge that female users may be lonely but to offer a more nuanced interpretation of women’s ai chatbot practices beyond merely pathetic, sad or concerning (dobson, 2015).  the study contributes to long-standing feminist media studies conversations on women’s romancing and self-therapy and their role in their personal and political life in the context of ai. while the idea is not new, since radway suggested that the smithton women in the 1980s found romance reading ‘therapeutic, a tranquilizer and tension reliever’ (radway, 1984), there is a change from ‘the therapeutic’ as an abstract concept to a more organized experience of self-help in female users of contemporary media and in this case, ai companion chatbots. the improvement of the self, under its many labels such as self-care, self-management and others, reflects the generalized self-help cultural mode (illouz, 2008) and is a strategy to deal with the latest mode(s) of capitalism that require constant self-modulation to adapt to changing and precarious economic and social circumstances (boltanski & chiapello, 1999, deleuze 1992). however, interpretations and practices of self-help by individuals and especially women, who are its main audience (riley et al.,2019) have been found to be more varied and nuanced, and this study adds to this literature. radway (1984) lamented that the smithton women did not change their personal circumstances through romance reading. contemporary feminists’ scholarship underlines that self-help and positive psychology do not lead to real political agenda of addressing structural inequalities bringing about illbeing in the first place (orgad & gill, 2021). however, it has also been pointed out that many women do not seek to change the world but simply aim to survive in or bear with it (berlant, 2008). for example, gravel-patry (2022) observed that women consumed instagram mental health content to help them get through their day. while the targeting of women with self-help content is problematic, this content also offered solace and self-soothing to women, highlighting their contradictions as media practices. another recent study (stone, 2020) examined how mental well-being apps such as #selfcare don’t actively nudge users to change their situations and feel better but rather aims to bring them a moment of relief by validating how bad they must be feeling and encouraging them to stay in bed. as described (stone, 2020) the users of #selfcare are in self-suspension (berlant, 2008), not necessarily getting better but also not getting worse.  in the case of replika, we found that female users are immersed in the romantic fantasy of the ideal nurturing man, which the replika male bots are programmed after, or another compensatory relationship which is entertaining and emotionally validating, providing solace to their individual circumstances, which also do not change. inspired by the highly popularized ‘self-care’ trend, many of them name their replika practices as self-care. their engagement with the app is neither representative of the hard, lifechanging work that goes into counselling nor of the neoliberal postfeminist sensibility of empowerment or feminism’s change of patriarchal structures. instead, the women of replika revel on the app to make themselves feel better amidst precarious social and personal circumstances of their historical present. in this way, they self-suspend (berlant, 2008) among normative, neoliberal, technological, gendered and feminist frameworks which may deem them as falling short of the dominant expectations in relationships, health and success.  references bellas, a & mcalister, j (2023) let me take care of you: domestic caretaking fantasies in boyfriend experience audio erotica, porn studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2023.2220721 berlant, l. (2008). the female complaint: the unfinished business of sentimentality in american culture. duke university press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1131c7k boltanski, l., & chiapello, e. (2005). the new spirit of capitalism. international journal of politics, culture, and society, 18(3/4), 161–188. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20059681 deleuze, g. (1992). postscript on the societies of control. october, 59, 3–7. http://www.jstor.org/stable/778828 https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2023.2220721 https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1131c7k http://www.jstor.org/stable/778828 depounti, i., saukko, p., & natale, s. (2023). ideal technologies, ideal women: ai and gender imaginaries in redditors’ discussions on the replika bot girlfriend. media, culture & society, 45(4), 720-736. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221119021 devlin, k. (2020). turned on: science, sex and robots. bloomsbury publishing. devlin, k., locatelli, c. (2020). guys and dolls. in: bendel, o. (eds) maschinenliebe. springer gabler, wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-29864-7_5 dobson, a. (2015). postfeminist digital cultures: femininity, social media, and selfrepresentation. palgrave macmillan. elliott, a. (2023). algorithmic intimacy: the digital revolution in personal relationships. polity press. gravel-patry, f. (2023) “a series of little high fives”: mental health and digital habituation in women’s instagram practices, feminist media studies, 23(8), 4073-4088, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2022.2149603 hanson, k.r. and locatelli, c.c. (2022) from sex dolls to sex robots and beyond: a narrative review of theoretical and empirical research on human-like and personified sex tech. current sexual health reports, 14, 106–117 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11930022-00331-0 illouz, e. (2008) saving the modern soul. 1st ed. university of california press. available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/552109/saving-the-modern-soul-pdf (accessed: 29 february 2024). iversen, s.m. (2014) playing with sims as a space of one's own, feminist media studies, 14(5), 727-742, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2013.816332 juffer, j. (1998). at home with pornography: women, sexuality, and everyday life. nyu press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qffzq kislev, e. (2022). relationships 5. 0: how ai, vr, and robots will reshape our emotional lives. oxford university press. langcaster-james, m., and bentley. g.r. (2018.) beyond the sex doll: post-human companionship and the rise of the ‘allodoll’. robotics 7,(4), 62. https://doi.org/10.3390/robotics7040062 levy d. (2007)love and sex with robots: the evolution of human-robot relationships. harper collins liang, c. (2023) my a.i. lover three women reflect on the complexities of their relationships with their a.i. companions. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/opinion/ai-chatbot-relationships.html https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221119021 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-29864-7_5 https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2022.2149603 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11930-022-00331-0 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11930-022-00331-0 https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2013.816332 http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qffzq https://doi.org/10.3390/robotics7040062 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/opinion/ai-chatbot-relationships.html middleweek, b. (2021). male homosocial bonds and perceptions of human–robot relationships in an online sex doll forum. sexualities, 24(3), 370-387. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460720932383 orgad, s & gill, s (2021). confidence culture. durham: duke university press radway, j. a. (1984). reading the romance: women, patriarchy, and popular literature. university of north carolina press. riley, s., evans, a., anderson, e., & robson, m. (2019). the gendered nature of selfhelp. feminism & psychology, 29(1), 3-18. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353519826162 skjuve m, følstad a, fostervold ki, brandtzaeg pb (2022). a longitudinal study of human-chatbot relationships. int j hum comput stud 168:102903. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2022.102903 stone, k. (2020) designing self-care: affect and debility in #selfcare. in: görgen, a, simond, s. h., krankheit in digitalen spielen. interdisziplinäre betrachtungen. bielefeld: transcript, s. 417-432. http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/14971. ta, v. et al. (2020). user experiences of social support from companion chatbots in everyday contexts: thematic analysis. j. med. internet res. 22 (3), e16235. turkle, s. (2011). alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other. basic books. xie, t., pentina, i., (2022). attachment theory as a framework to understand relationships with social chatbots: a case study of replika. in: proceedings of the 55th hawaii international conference on system sciences, pp. 2046–2055. available at. https:// scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/79590. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460720932383 https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353519826162 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2022.102903 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): glatt, z. (2023, october). the intimacy triple bind: structural inequalities and relational labour in the influencer industry. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the intimacy triple bind: structural inequalities and relational labour in the influencer industry zoë glatt microsoft research new england introduction the work of content creators, or influencers, bears many of the hallmarks of creative labour that have been identified by researchers of the creative and cultural industries going back three decades. and yet, their work is also shaped by novel formations, concerns, and challenges, which require critical scrutiny. not confronted with the usual gatekeepers of legacy industries determining their suitability for opportunities and setting the disciplinary boundaries of their labour—line managers, commissioning editors, executive producers, directors—the careers of content creators in the influencer industry instead live or die by their ability to directly cultivate and maintain an invested audience-community. to this end, as many scholars have noted, they are encouraged to commodify their personalities, lives and tastes, building ‘authentic’ self-brands, appealing on-screen personas, and intimacy with audiences (for example, abidin, 2015; baym, 2018; bishop, 2018; cunningham and craig, 2017; duffy, 2017; duguay, 2019; glatt and banet-weiser, 2021; raun, 2018). nancy baym develops the concept of relational labour to describe this phenomenon in the context of musicians and their fans, defined as the ‘ongoing, interactive, affective, material, and cognitive work of communicating with people over time to create structures that can support continued work’ (2018: 19). any analysis of relational labour must be also understood in terms of the relational boundaries that creators put in place, as they attempt to strike a balance between closeness and distance, and between work and life (baym, 2018). whilst it is well established in the literature that content creators are required to practice relational labour, there is a lack of attention paid to the unequal distribution of the tolls that managing these audience relationships can take. drawing on a longitudinal ethnographic study of the london influencer industry (2017-2023), this paper examines relational labour through an intersectional feminist lens, foregrounding the ways in which structural inequalities shape relationships between creators and their audiences. situating this article within the broader context of the structural inequalities that mark labour in the influencer industry, this article seeks builds a dialogue between two seemingly disparate bodies of work: influencers’ relational labour, on the one hand, and the proliferation of what has variously been termed “toxic technocultures” (massanari, 2017), “misogynoir” (bailey, 2010), and “networked misogyny” (banet-weiser and miltner, 2016), on the other. i suggest that the imperative of relational labour and the flourishing of hate and harassment towards marginalised groups can—and indeed should—be thought together productively in the context of the influencer industry, as both concern the ways in which affect, pleasurable and painful, circulates between content creators and their audiences. methods this research is ethnographically grounded. the data presented stems from a six-year research project interrogating precarity and inequality for london-based content creators working in the influencer industry (2017-2023), with the wider aim to address the platformisation of creative labour. this involved a number of complimentary methods: (1) offline participant observation at key industry events (vidcon london and l.a., summer in the city), as well as formal and informal content creator meet-ups and events; (2) online participant observation of content creator/influencer culture across a wide range of social media platforms (youtube, tiktok, twitch, instagram, facebook, twitter, personal blogs, and so on); (3) in-depth semi-structured interviews with 30 london-based content creators; and (4) autoethnographic research in the form of becoming a youtube creator myself, with the aim of gaining first-hand experiential insights into the nature of content creator labour. the research has encompassed a wide spectrum of entrepreneurial creators, from attending london small youtubers meetings, a community organization for small creators (<20,000 subscribers) carrying out seemingly endless free “aspirational labour” (duffy, 2017: x), to “deep hanging out” (geertz, 1998) in various green rooms and highly secured hotel bars at major industry events with elite a-list influencers. interviewees represented diverse identity categories (in terms of gender, race, sexuality, class and ability), worked across a wide variety of prominent and niche genres, and encompassed both full-time and hobbyist creators, ranging from a single solitary subscriber (myself) to 2.2 million. findings i found that creators from historically marginalised groups, as well as those in content verticals less commensurate with neoliberal “advertiser friendly” culture, face complex systemic technological, sociocultural and commercial exclusions that result in a greater reliance on crowdfunding for financial support. these creators thus find themselves stuck in what i call the intimacy triple bind: already at higher risk of trolling and harassment, yet under increased pressure to perform relational labour, which adversely opens them up to further harms. thus, this article dovetails with recent scholarship that strives to understand the relationship between the requisite career visibility and the resultant public scrutiny, hate and harassment that is par for the course for influencers, “all of which are exacerbated for women, communities of color, and the lgbtqia community” (duffy, miltner and wahlstedt, 2022: 1661). the analysis identifies four key practices that marginalised creators employ in their attempts to manage relational boundaries with both friendly and hostile audiences: (1) leaning into making rather than being content; (2) (dis)engagement with anti-fans through silence; (3) retreating into private community spaces, away from the exposure of public platforms; and, in parallel, (4) turning off public comments. findings highlight the individualisation of risk and harm as a structural norm in the influencer industry, raising serious questions about the lack of accountability and responsibility that platforms show towards the creators who generate profit for them. through studying practices of relational labour and boundary setting, it became clear that despite the “visibility mandate” (duffy and hund, 2019) that structures the influencer industry, many of the tactics that marginalised creators employ involve some sort of retreat: away from confrontation, away from virality, away from the public internet, or away from audiences altogether. the influencer industry, far from being the bastion of diversity and meritocracy where “anyone can make it” as a creator if they just have enough talent, determination, and an entrepreneurial spirit, is often an incredibly hostile environment for these creators, especially those who make content less commensurate with the interests of advertisers, as they are hit from all sides by economic, emotional and technological hurdles. references abidin c (2015) communicative <3 intimacies: influencers and perceive interconnectedness. ada: a journal of gender, new media, & technology 8. bailey m (2010). they aren’t talking about me... in: crunk feminist collective. available at: http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2010/03/14/they-arent-talking-about-me/ banet-weiser s and miltner km (2016) #masculinitysofragile: culture, structure, and networked misogyny. feminist media studies 16(1): 171-174. baym nk (2018) playing to the crowd: musicians, audiences, and the intimate work of connection. new york, usa: nyu press. bishop s (2018) #youtuberanxiety: anxiety as emotional labour and masquerade in beauty vlogs. in: driver s and coulter n (eds) youth mediations and affective relations. cham: palgrave macmillan, pp. 89-105. cunningham s and craig d (2017) being ‘really real’ on youtube: authenticity, community and brand culture in social media entertainment. media international australia 164(1): 71-81. duffy b (2017) (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. new haven, ct: yale university press. http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2010/03/14/they-arent-talking-about-me/ duffy be and hund e (2019) gendered visibility on social media: navigating instagram’s authenticity bind. international journal of communication 13: 4983-5002. duffy be, miltner km and wahlstedt a. (2022) policing “fake” femininity: authenticity, accountability, and influencer antifandom. new media & society 24(7): 1657–1676. duguay s (2019) “running the numbers”: modes of microcelebrity labor in queer women’s self-representation on instagram and vine. social media + society. geertz c (1998). deep hanging out. the new york review of books xlv(16), 69-72. glatt z and banet-weiser s (2021) productive ambivalence, economies of visibility and the political potential of feminist youtubers. in: cunningham s and craig d (eds) creator culture: studying the social media entertainment industry. new york: nyu press, pp. 39-57. massanari a (2017) #gamergate and the fappening: how reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. new media & society 19(3): 329-346. raun t (2018) capitalizing intimacy: new subcultural forms of micro-celebrity strategies and affective labour on youtube. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies 24(1): 99–113. lin-commemorating as criticizing-commemorating as criticizing selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): lastname, firstinitial. (2023, october). paper (or panel) title. paper (or panel) presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. commemorating as criticizing: how li wenliang’s weibo homepage becomes a place for questioning china’s covid-19 policies and a “wailing wall” bibo lin university of oregon, usa introduction li wenliang, a doctor at wuhan central hospital, was one of the first to raise alarm about the outbreak of covid-19. warning fellow doctors that an illness resembling severe acute respiratory syndrome (sars) could grow out of control in wuhan, china, in late december 2019, the ophthalmologist was soon summoned by the local police and forced to sign a statement reprimanding his message as a groundless rumor as well as a disturbance to the public order. two months later, li wenliang died after contracting covid-19 at his workplace, aged 33 years. his death caused shock and outrage across china. citizens, mostly on social media, expressed their gratitude for li's candor and devoted front-line service and criticized the response of wuhan's public sectors and medical officials to his alarm (green, 2020; buckley, 2020). in the following years, li’s weibo (china’s equivalent of twitter) homepage, although the posts had never been updated again, gradually become a place where people mourned, condoled, and commemorated the whistleblower and complained, questioned, and protested against the overstrict government policies relevant to covid-19 pandemic. visitors constantly left comments on li wenliang’s last weibo post—there are over 1 million comments so far—making it an online “wailing wall.” memory work in the digital age is not only shaped by the individual and collective remaking of the past at every present but also by the technological affordances and unique features of social media (smit, 2020). recent scholarships have examined how the operational logic (bucher, 2018) of a specific type of social media, including youtube (smit et al., 2017), facebook (smit et al., 2018), and reddit (esteve del valle & smit, 2021), facilitates users to “remember” certain aspects of incidents, events, or celebrities, while “forgetting” others. in a “new memory ecology” (brown & hoskins, 2010) enabled by digital technologies, memory work, however, is rarely confined by the boundary of a single social media. it is also not unusual for a citizen to simultaneously use several platforms to acquire information and participate in collective actions (deluca suggested citation (apa): lin, b. (2023, october). commemorating as criticizing: how li wenliang’s weibo homepage becomes a place for questioning china’s covid-19 policies and a “wailing wall”. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. et al., 2016). the commemoration of li wenliang is such a case. people visit li’s weibo homepage (a relatively public space) account to leave short messages and use their own wechat accounts to (semi-private space) disseminate longer articles. therefore, to further explore how memory was shaped across social media platforms, this study poses two interrelated research questions: 1. how did the distinct affordances of wechat and weibo shape users’ commemoration of li wenliang? 2. how did the interactions between the users on wechat and weibo shape users’ commemoration of li wenliang? methods wechat is the most popular social media app in china with roughly 982 million monthly active users, whereas weibo has about 445 million monthly active users (quest mobile, 2021). as a regular user of both wechat and weibo for over a decade, the author witnessed the commemoration of li wenliang on wechat and weibo at many points during the covid-19 period. those observations, though far from systemic, at least allow the author to further explore the meaning-making processes related to this topic as a cultural insider (geertz, 1973). for the specific methods this study used, first, the author closely read all 2014 posts on li wenliang’s weibo homepage, seeking to identify what kind of information about li is publicly available there. he then searched “李文亮” (“li wenliang” in chinese) on wechat and collected and analyzed the top 145 articles which appeared in the search results. these articles are believed as most widely spread wechat articles about li wenliang because each of them has been viewed over 100,000 times. these articles are relatively comprehensively written, compared to weibo posts. lastly, he collected and analyzed users’ comments on li wenliang’s last weibo post and wechat articles about li wenliang on three distinctive dates: (1) feb 8, 2020, one day after the death of li wenliang; (2) march 28, 2022, the first day of shanghai’s lockdown; (3) december 7, 2022, the day when china’s state council released ten new guidelines, signaling the end of "zero-covid" restrictions. these dates are all landmark moments during the development of the covid-19 pandemic in china. preliminary findings and conclusion the preliminary findings suggest that weibo offers a space for users to (1) see the mundane life of li wenliang, (2) shortly express their grief and frustration, and (3) interact with other users to remember li. first, the rich life details of li wenliang on his weibo homepage, including 2014 posts from december 31, 2010, to january 31, 2020, allow the public to revisit many junctures of the developments and changes of li’s life in his twenties to his thirties. this is substantive to the stabilization of the memory of li as a civilian hero and the creation of sympathy. second, weibo provides visitors with a place to comment, repost, and express commemorative feelings. the two posts on the top of li’s weibo homepage are directly related to covid-19, his reception of the reprimand, and his death. such an arrangement facilitates users to recall and reinforce the memories of how, why, and for what li died, and the controversy and ridiculousness of the authority’s reprimand. third, weibo is a social media that highlights connectivity and sharing. users connect with each other by using hashtags (such as #李文亮), being inspired by others’ posts and comments, and reposting and responding to others’ posts and comments, thereby forming a sense of community and participation in public events. the reach of weibo is relatively limited to young chinese, whereas the users of wechat have a broad range of demographics. thus, the articles on wechat are crucial for the commemoration of li to extend to the broader public. moreover, the communicative networks on weibo are usually weakly tied, whereas wechat enables strong-tie communicative networks (wu & wall, 2019). the study finds that wechat allows users to synthesize information about li wenliang, provide analysis and criticism, and circulate the memory of li in users’ own social networks. lastly, by examining weibo users’ comments and wechat articles about li wenliang on the three particular days. the study finds that the users’ activities on weibo (such as actively sharing and commenting, making it the latest trending topic, etc.) stimulated wechat users to write and disseminate articles (wechat articles often started with describing what was happening in weibo). the circulation of wechat articles, in return, encouraged more users to visit li’s weibo homepage and join the commemoration. together, these two platforms helped stabilize internet users’ memory of li as a whistleblower, a civilian hero, a martyr, and a supporter of free speech and diverse voices, distinguished from the official version (han, 2023). to sum up, this study shows how the technological affordances of weibo and wechat and the interactions between the users on the two platforms contribute to the memory work of li wenliang. it also shows that even in a politically constrictive environment, such as china’s media ecology, the space for questioning and protesting still exists, although in more nuanced and precarious ways. references brown, s., & hoskins, a. (2010). terrorism in the new memory ecology: mediating and remembering the 2005 london bombings. behavioral sciences of terrorism and political aggression, 2(2): 87–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/19434471003597399 bucher, t. (2018). if ... then: algorithmic power and politics (oxford studies in digital politics). new york, ny: oxford university press. buckley, c. (2020, february 7). chinese doctor, silenced after warning of outbreak, dies from coronavirus. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/world/asia/chinese-doctor-li-wenliangcoronavirus.html deluca, k., brunner, e., & sun, y. (2016). weibo, wechat, and the transformative events of environmental activism on china’s wild public screens. international journal of communication, 321–339. esteve del valle, m., & smit, r. (2021). moonwalking together: tracing redditors’ digital memory work on michael jackson. convergence, 27(6), 1811–1832. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565211003878 geertz, c. (1973). the interpretation of cultures: selected essays. new york: basic books. green, a. (2020). li wenliang. the lancet, 395(10225), 682. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(20)30382-2 han, e. (2023). github as a collaborative curation platform for memory projects of covid-19 in china. information, communication & society, 26(2), 340–355. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2022.2161828 quest mobile. (2021). questmobile2020 中国移动互联网年度大报 告·下 [questmobile2020 china mobile internet annual report · ii]. beijing: quest mobile. https://www.questmobile.com.cn/research/reportnew/143 smit, r. (2020). connective memory on justice for mike brown. in merrill, s., daphi, p., & keightley, e. (eds) social movements, cultural memory and digital media: mobilising mediated remembrance (pp. 85–108). houndmills, basingstoke, hampshire: palgrave macmillan. smit, r., heinrich, a., & broersma, m. (2017). witnessing in the new memory ecology: memory construction of the syrian conflict on youtube. new media & society, 19(2): 289–307. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815604618 smit, r., heinrich, a., & broersma, m. (2018). activating the past in the ferguson protests: memory work, digital activism and the politics of platforms. new media & society, 20(9): 3119–3139. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817741849 wu, y., & wall, m. (2019). the ties that bind: how the dominance of wechat combines with guanxi to inhibit and constrain china’s contentious politics. new media & society, 21(8), 1714–1733. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819830072 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): meng, x.& literat, i. (2023, october). #averageyetconfidentmen: chinese stand-up comedy and feminist discourse on douyin. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. #averageyetconfidentmen: chinese stand-up comedy and feminist discourse on douyin xingyuan meng teachers college, columbia university ioana literat teachers college, columbia university introduction in china, the spotlight is shining on female stand-up comedians. whereas in traditional chinese forms of comedy like sketch shows or crosstalk, women have typically been the butt of the joke, stand-up comedy—a western performance genre that has recently seen surging popularity—has given chinese female comedians a space to push back against dominant gender stereotypes. relying on self-deprecation, ambiguity, absurdity, and irony to present alternative perspectives and challenge current gender norms (chen & gao, 2021), female stand-up comedians have sparked important conversations around topics like body shaming, marriage issues, or workplace sexism (li, 2021). their performances have received intense attention and circulation online, becoming trending topics on chinese social media. in particular, douyin (china’s version of tiktok) has emerged as a prominent platform for videos related to their performances to be shared and commented upon. douyin users have been creatively leveraging the app’s features to engage in feminist discussions inspired by these female stand-up comedians’ acts. while social media platforms play a significant role in facilitating feminist discourse in the chinese public sphere (chang, ren & yang, 2018; peng, 2021; zhou, wang & zimmer 2022), research has yet to elucidate the complex interrelations between popular culture (in this case, stand-up comedy) and feminist expression in such spaces. furthermore, research on chinese social media tends to focus on older, more mainstream platforms like weibo and wechat; here, we put the spotlight on douyin, an under-researched yet highly popular youth-oriented space. our study thus asks: how do chinese female stand-up comedians spark discussions about feminism on douyin? to answer this question, we employed a qualitative content analysis of douyin videos related to chinese female stand-up comedians, as well as comments posted on these videos. in doing so, this research aims to better understand the cultural impact of female stand-up comedians’ rhetoric in terms of probing gender norms, and the role of social media in mobilizing broader public engagement with feminism in the chinese context. methodology to compile the corpus, we relied on the hashtag as a methodological tool (literat & kligler-vilenchik, 2019), selecting five hashtags as a way to identify and collect relevant data. three of these hashtags were the names of the most popular chinese female stand-up comedians: #yangli, the “punchline queen” (feng & wang, 2021) famous for mocking chinese men; #siwen, who gained attention for her candid perspective as a young divorcée; and #yanyiyanyue, twin sisters who perform together and call out body shaming in chinese society. additionally, two highly prominent buzzwords related to these stand-up comedians were selected, in order to capture videos that were relevant to the research question but did not explicitly include the names of these comedians among their hashtags: #averageyetconfidentmen (a term coined by yangli in her popular stand-up performance, and widely embraced as a way to criticize chinese patriarchy) and #womansfist (a term which replaced the chinese word for “feminist” with its homophone, “woman’s fist,” to label feminists as angry and aggressive “punchers”). we selected the 30 most-liked public videos under each of the five hashtags, as well as the top 50 comments under each video. the overall corpus thus consisted of 150 videos and 7,500 comments. the data was analyzed using thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2006) in a two-phased approach, first focusing on each video and corresponding comments—paying particular attention to the use of douyin to convey these messages—and then considering the data holistically, aiming to consolidate the themes identified in videos and comments. findings three key practices and associated video types emerged from the analysis: practice form use of stand-up comedy footage key douyin features used sharing and annotating standup comedians’ gags footage from comedians’ sets, annotated with personal commentary yes editing, dubbing, text blurbs, filter, tags enacting everyday sexism satirical skits no recording of original video and audio, video effects, text blurbs, and soundtracks critiquing feminist rhetoric confessionals no recording of original video and audio, text blurbs, etc. in the first practice, users creatively used footage from the comedians’ sets and annotated it with one’s personal commentary. the act of annotation took various forms, from adding a brief voiceover introduction preceding the comedy excerpts, to overlaying personal commentary via text blurbs on top of the footage, to editing together various clips in order to convey feminist arguments. for instance, users weaved together excerpts and combined stand-up comedians’ punchlines with other female celebrities’ feminist speeches into collective statements. in comments, douyin users shared extremely positive responses, calling the comedians “queens” and “sisters.” some also opened up about their own experiences in relation to the topics covered in the comedy sets, such as sharing their experiences of divorce. the second key practice was the use of satirical skits to call out everyday sexism. for instance, creators used yang’s term “average yet confident men” to humorously enact their encounters with men in daily settings and call out men’s overinflated egos. the skits were performed by both gender creators, often using text blurbs to convey the characters’ true thoughts and emphasize how men and women perceived the same thing differently. however, these female comedians and their supporters also faced fierce backlash on duoyin. particularly under the hashtag #womansfist, anti-feminist videos—which generally took the form of confessionals posted by men— spoke up against china’s rising feminist sentiment. they argued that the female comedians’ speeches were “flaunting western terminology [i.e. feminism] and insulting all men," "creating gender opposition,” and were “harmful to the harmonious core of socialism with chinese characteristics.” these videos rarely featured sophisticated visuals, sound effects, or interactive elements; creators seemingly aimed to draw the viewer’s attention primarily to the content of their critique. discussion shining a spotlight on a new yet wildly popular chinese platform, our research thus shows how social media both facilitates and amplifies discussions about feminism in contemporary china. in doing so, we build on existing work surrounding the resonance of the #metoo movement in chinese online spaces (yin & sun, 2021; zeng 2019; zhou & qiu, 2020), while further elucidating the role of local popular culture (here, stand-up comedy) in catalyzing feminist—and anti-feminist—discourse. furthermore, by analyzing comments in addition to videos, our findings were able to surface the salient function of social media as a space of connectivity around gender issues. relatability and solidarity emerged as common refrains in these comments for the first two themes, in support of the comedians’ feminist messages; however, our third theme, focused on the anti-feminist rhetoric, also demonstrated how the comment section can become a space to amplify hate speech and incivility. while our analysis suggests that social media makes discussions about feminism more visible and perhaps more broadly accessible (see also yin & sun, 2021), it remains to be seen whether and how voice might translate into influence (allen & light, 2015), tapping into social media’s mobilizational potential (fischer, 2016). indeed, important challenges remain. beyond the threat of backlash and deeply embedded misogyny that characterizes chinese online spaces (han, 2018), another significant obstacle has to do with government censorship (li & li, 2017; yin & sun, 2021; zeng, 2019). in the context of our data, it is worth noting that the focus of feminist expression was on personal experience rather than institutional critique, on the individual level rather than the structural one; this could be due at least in part to a reluctance to bluntly criticize larger political or institutional structures. references allen, d., & light, j. s. (2015). from voice to influence: understanding citizenship in a digital age. university of chicago press. braun, v., & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77-101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa chen, d., & gao, g. (2021). the transgressive rhetoric of standup comedy in china. critical discourse studies, 20(1), 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2021.1968450 feng, z., & wang, y. (2021, january 25). yang li: the 'punchline queen' who offended chinese men. bbc news. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55744860 fischer, m. (2016). #free_cece: the material convergence of social media activism. feminist media studies, 16(5), 755-771. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1140668 han, x. (2018). searching for an online space for feminism? the chinese feminist group gender watch women’s voice and its changing approaches to online misogyny. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2021.1968450 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55744860 https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1140668 feminist media studies, 18(4), 734-749. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1447430 li, j. (2021, january 23). “average-yet-confident”: a comedian coined a chinese equivalent to “mansplaining”. quartz. https://qz.com/1956642/female-comedian-yang-licoins-chinas-version-of-mansplaining li, j., & li, x. (2017). media as a core political resource: the young feminist movements in china. chinese journal of communication, 10(1), 54-71. https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2016.1274265 literat, i., & kligler-vilenchik, n. (2019). youth collective political expression on social media: the role of affordances and memetic dimensions for voicing political views. new media & society, 21(9), 1988-2009. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819837571 yin, s., & sun, y. (2021). intersectional digital feminism: assessing the participation politics and impact of the metoo movement in china. feminist media studies, 21(7), 1176-1192. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2020.1837908 zeng, j. (2019). you say #metoo, i say #mitu: china’s online campaigns against sexual abuse. #metoo and the politics of social change, 71-83. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15213-0_5 https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1447430 https://qz.com/1956642/female-comedian-yang-li-coins-chinas-version-of-mansplaining https://qz.com/1956642/female-comedian-yang-li-coins-chinas-version-of-mansplaining https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2016.1274265 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819837571 https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2020.1837908 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15213-0_5 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): özkula, s. m., & reilly, p. j. (2022, november). where is the global south? a systematic review of geopolitical representation in digital activism research. paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. where is the global south? a systematic review of geopolitical representation in digital activism research suay m. özkula università degli studi di trento paul j. reilly university of glasgow context recent research has problematised the missing “voices” in digital activism research. rega and medrado (2019; 2021) are among those scholars to argue that the majority of studies are written from a global north perspective. other scholars have linked these skewed representations to choices made in research methodologies. for example, some scholarship has identified the prevalence of prominent western social media platforms in activist and political research (e.g. özkula, reilly, & hayes, 2021; ruess et al., 2021). other studies have more broadly problematised western or global north foci in digital media research and called for critical data studies and internet research methods to be de-westernised, internationalised, or decolonised (e.g. arora, 2019; badr & ganter, 2021; bosch, 2022; milan & treré, 2019; mutsvairo, 2019; schoon et al., 2020). as such, there is a need for interrogating whether digital activism research is inclusive and representative of non-western perspectives, both in terms of case studies and methods. however, it is often difficult to link digital activism research to specific geographic locations due to the universality of hashtags such as #blacklivesmatter and the fact that these networked publics are often geographically dispersed rather than situated in a single country (alongside wider issues of defining what has been termed the “global south”, see khan et al., 2022). in response to this issue, this paper sets out to explore the geographic foci of digital activism research to date through a systematic review of journal articles published between 2011 and 2018. methodology this paper presents the results of a mixed-methods systematic review of empirical journal articles (n=315) published on this topic. the study implemented principles from high quality systematic reviews towards creating a reliable corpus, including focused research questions, a set of hypotheses, a defined methodology with inclusion and exclusion criteria, and the application of a search strategy and review protocol. the corpus was created by running queries spanning 21 relevant keywords describing digitally enabled activism (e.g. digital activism, online activism) on the scopus database, with cross-checks on google scholar. queries were limited to searches of article titles, abstracts, and keywords, initially producing a sample of 2,668 articles within the ‘social sciences’ category. the corpus was then filtered to articles published in academic journals, which were peer-reviewed prior to publication, empirical in nature, and fitted karatzogianni’s (2015) definition of digital activism. these articles were manually coded to identify specific attributes such as the methods of data collection and analysis, including whether digital data was used as a source. the corpus was further analysed on which actors and regions were represented in these articles, with a specific focus on whether they were situated within the global south or outside of what has been described as the “global majority” (i.e. beyond a north-south dichotomy). coded categories included the choice of case study, its origin and location, the country of affiliation for lead authors, and the platforms being studied (including what platform choice implied about the captured communities). this part of the coding was conducted towards capturing a general sense of diversity and spatial representation in digital activism research, above all in relation to the emergence of software-based digital methods. the final corpus consisted of 315 articles published between 2011 and 2018, of which 117 articles used exclusively traditional research methods and 198 articles included digital data as a source. results & implications the results show that digital activism articles are skewed towards non-region-specific and high-visibility social media groupings (e.g. hashtag publics) and wider social movements, rather than particular demographics or regions. this was particularly the case in platform-based research (i.e. digital data sources), an issue partly tied to the regionally diffused nature of digital platforms. as such, the majority of articles did not focus specifically on communities from global south or semi-periphery countries. these findings raised questions around (a) what global south in digital networks and communities entails, and (b) whether digital activism produces a view into disadvantaged, marginalised, or under-represented social groups. thus, the global south and other countries outside of the global geopolitical majority appear to be underrepresented in digital activism research, but the extent of this disparity is hard to assess. the findings show that digital activism research using digital data largely studies visibility and specific types of it: privileged demographics and popular platforms in the global north. we term these “northern visibilities”. the paper concludes by proposing a future research agenda for digital activism researchers which redresses this imbalance in favour of digital activism research from and within the global south/minority. specifically, we argue that researchers should diversify their methodological approaches towards stakeholder inclusion, capturing contextualised data, and more variation in the platforms they study. such research would be more inclusive of hitherto marginalised activist voices as well as better capture how digital activism operates in contexts outside the global north. references arora, p. (2019). decolonizing privacy studies. television & new media, 20(4), 366-378. badr, h., & ganter, s. (2021). towards cosmopolitan media and communication studies: bringing diverse epistemic perspectives into the field. global media journalgerman edition, 11(1). https://www.globalmediajournal.de/index.php/gmj/article/view/195 bosch, t. (2022). decolonizing digital methods. communication theory, 32(2), 298302. couldry, n., & mejias, u. a. (2019). data colonialism: rethinking big data’s relation to the contemporary subject. television & new media, 20(4), 336-349. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1527476418796632 karatzogianni, a. (2015). firebrand waves of digital activism 1994-2014: the rise and spread of hacktivism and cyberconflict. springer. khan, t., abimbola, s., kyobutungi, c., & pai, m. (2022). how we classify countries and people—and why it matters. bmj global health, 7(6), e009704. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2022-009704 milan s, treré e. big data from the south(s): beyond data universalism. television & new media. 2019;20(4):319-335. https://doi.org.10.1177/1527476419837739 mutsvairo, b. (2019). challenges facing development of data journalism in non-western societies. digital journalism, 7(9), 1289-1294. özkula, s. m., reilly, p. j., & hayes, j. (2022). easy data, same old platforms? a systematic review of digital activism methodologies. information, communication & society. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2021.2013918 rega, i., & medrado, a. (2021). the stepping into visibility model: reflecting on consequences of social media visibility–a global south perspective. information, communication & society, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2021.1954228 rega, i., & medrado, a. (2019). activism, art-ivism and digital media to reduce marginalisation: sharing experiences and lessons from brazil, kenya, syria, and costa rica. evoices [online report]. http://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/31990/1/evoices_guideforpractitioners_eng_reduce d_size.pdf ruess, c., hoffmann, c. p., boulianne, s. & heger, k. (2021). online political participation: the evolution of a concept. information, communication & society, 1-18. https://doi.org.10.1080/1369118x.2021.2013919 schoon, a., mabweazara, h. m., bosch, t., & dugmore, h. (2020). decolonising digital media research methods: positioning african digital experiences as epistemic sites of knowledge production. african journalism studies, 41(4), 1-15. https://doi.org.10.1080/23743670.2020.1865645 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): walton, m. & aderibigbe, d. (2024, october). hairy industries the politics of advertising hair products and services to south africans on facebook and instagram. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. hairy industries: the politics of advertising hair products and services to south africa on facebook and instagram marion walton marion.walton@uct.ac.za deborah aderibigbe adrire001@myuct.ac.za introduction in the white supremacist discourses of apartheid south africa (sa), hair was a key signifier of race. local media industries still encourage black african readers to “aspire to whiteness as a social and aesthetic category” (pilane, & iqani, 2022) and to idealise long, straight hair in particular (madlela, 2018), all the while promoting products that alter hair dramatically and possibly harmfully (spector et al., 2023). globally, black antiracist activists have challenged these hegemonies (tate, 2007; sobande, 2020) including in south africa, where stores were forced to close and unilever’s tresemmé products were removed from shelves after an outcry about a racist advertising campaign (“tresemmé,” 2020). women’s hair routines can involve considerable expense and aesthetic labour (elias et al., 2017), and this is particularly so for many women of colour (woc). nonetheless, informal skill development and formal work in hair and beauty industries are also vital to many women’s livelihoods and self-expression. this paper shows how minor brands, small businesses and micro-entrepreneurs in sa use targeted ads on meta platforms (primarily facebook and instagram) to promote their products and services in the hair and beauty industries. in a gesture towards accountability, the facebook ad library was set up to archive political ads posted to meta platforms (leerssen, et al 2023:1394). commercial ads for hair products are not considered a “political issue” and thus they are not archived or accessible via the meta api, but they are briefly available in the library while active on university of cape town university of cape town meta platforms. our aim was to collect a sample of active campaigns over a period of time to document sa-targeted racialised messaging about hair on meta platforms. we sought to explore (1) the range of adverts available via the facebook ad library matching the keyword “hair” and which targeted facebook users in sa (2) how the visual messaging of these adverts represented anticipated consumers and their hair, and (3) what such messaging might suggest about micro-targeting practices in the industry. methodology a script was used to search the facebook ad library using the query “hair” and restricting results to sa-targeted posts. the resulting purposive sample of ads (n=558) included 126 unique images and 85 unique video files posted to meta platforms over a six month period by 99 different advertisers. both quantitative and qualitative multimodal content analysis was conducted. this paper presents a visual content analysis of posts from the sample (n=183) which included images of people. when possible, signifiers of gender (feminine, masculine, multiple, not coded) were coded for any models and influencers featured in the images, along with a categorization of ethnicity (bipoc, white, multiple, not coded) as suggested by the model or influencer’s appearance. hairstyles were coded for length and texture or styling. these broad categories were used for intersectional analysis, and results were used to select case study campaigns for in-depth qualitative analysis. the long tail of a hairy industry the distribution of advertisements in the sample followed a long-tailed distribution (f (1, 15) = 21.37, p < .001), with most of the 99 advertisers in our sample posting only one or two advertisements. one local "hair growth treatment” brand (see images 1 and 2 in fig 1 and image 2 in fig2) was responsible for 160 of the sampled posts and 12 of the images. figure 1: distribution of sa-targeted advertisements (n=558) featuring the keyword “hair” on meta (sa) ’23-‘24 most ads were posted by smaller, relatively unknown local brands, including many individual hairstylists, hair salons and hair product manufacturers. only one high profile consumer brand made an appearance in the sample. visual analysis of gender and ethnicity figure 2: most prolific campaigns featuring woc content analysis showed that photographs of bipoc women (see figure 2) appeared in almost two thirds of posts (62%) making this the single largest category of posts. about half of such posts (32%) included signifiers of black african identities, such as highly textured hair. figure 3: most prolific campaigns featuring white women in sa, white women are a tiny minority, but they were over-represented in our sample (20%, see figure 3), much as they have been in sa media (pilane, & iqani, 2022). far fewer ads featured men (9%), suggesting that the burdens and pleasures of hair care and maintenance are distinctly feminized while the hair industry is actively involved in production of gender. the only employment ads in the sample (for hairdressers) featured white men. only 3 posts in total featured bipoc men. straight hair, #hairvirginity and purity discourse images of long straight hairstyles appeared in the majority of posts (62%) and this style was idealized across ethnicities. by contrast, hairstyles associated with african ethnicities were underrepresented (11%). straight, straightened and relaxed hair was associated with discourses of luxury, light, wealth, perfection, and purity. in these campaigns, textured hair was often described as dull, lifeless, frizzy or flawed. some campaigns even implied relaxed hair was impure or tainted, such as the perfect angel post below (fig 4), which associated wigs made from “virgin” hair (untreated human hair) with discourses of purity and love. figure 4: image and copy from ad for perfect angel wigs, retrieved from facebook ad library from messaging to targeting meta does not provide data about the overall spend, reach or targeting of commercial ads. hence we do not know how often these ads were displayed, nor to whom. nonetheless the visual evidence in our sample suggests the presence of traditional binary demographic targeting by gender (bivens & haimson, 2016; bivens, 2017). bipoc women were targeted with messaging which, at best, promoted a new aesthetic or promised to save money or time. at worst, it was promoting harmful products and perpetuating racialized discourses. the ads in the sample were all associated with the generic term “hair”. it will be important to also explore more specific keywords (e.g. “braids” “afro”) in future work, and to document possible outcomes of meta’s decision to make terms like “afro” unavailable for targeting to guard against them being used to discriminate against groups of users (keegan, 2021). given the distinctive messaging around white women and woc and the examples we found of employment ad campaigns featuring only white men, we recommend further exploration of how certain facebook advertisers may be using racial proxies to target by ethnicity (keegan, 2021) by targeting facebook-defined “interests” such as afrikaans (language), or wigs, braids and hair straightening. built on dataveillance, such microtargeting may be fueling feedback loops which intensify harm or deepen existing gendered inequalities. conclusion despite the limitations and restrictions of the facebook ad library, the sample yielded many insights into how this industry may be adopting targeted ads. our analysis of the messaging about hair in the ads showed racial ideologies and binary gendering at work in campaigns where the visual imagery addresses women in sa. this initial analysis also suggests ways to use active campaigns on the ad library to reduce the obscurity surrounding algorithmic targeting on social platforms. a range of other approaches (see e.g. angus, et al, 2024) will help engage south africans about the ads they see online, begin documenting potential harms, and help demand accountability of meta platforms in the global south. list of references angus, d., hayden, l., obeid, a. k., tan, x. y., carah, n., burgess, j., parker, c., andrejevic, m., fordyce, r., cellard, l., & bagnara, j. (2024). computational methods for improving the observability of platform-based advertising. journal of advertising, 1– 20. https://doi-org.ezproxy.uct.ac.za/10.1080/00913367.2024.2394156 bivens, r. (2017). the gender binary will not be deprogrammed: ten years of coding gender on facebook. new media & society, 19(6), 880–898. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815621527 bivens, r., & haimson, o. l. (2016). baking gender into social media design: how platforms shape categories for users and advertisers. social media + society, 2(4), 205630511667248. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116672486 bucher, t. (2017). the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 30–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154086 elias, a. s., gill, r., & scharf, c. (2017). aesthetic labour: rethinking beauty politics in neoliberalism. palgrave macmillan uk. keegan, j. (2021, july 9). facebook got rid of racial ad categories. or did it? – the markup. https://themarkup.org/citizen-browser/2021/07/09/facebook-got-rid-of-racial-adcategories-or-did-it madlela, k. (2018). black hair politics: the representation of african women on true love magazine front covers and hair advertisements [thesis, university of pretoria]. https://repository.up.ac.za/handle/2263/65573 sobande, f. (2020). the digital lives of black women in britain. palgrave macmillan. spector, m., naidu, r., & cooke, k. (2023, november 4). thousands of black women claim hair relaxers gave them cancer. reuters. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/loreal-hair-relaxers-litigation/ tate, s. (2007). black beauty: shade, hair and anti-racist aesthetics. ethnic and racial studies, 30(2), 300–319. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870601143992 lupinacci-_not like other social networks_ bereal and the remediation-_not like other social networks_ berea selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): lupinacci, l. (2023, october). not like other social networks? bereal and the remediation of liveness in the platform environment. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ‘not like other social networks’? bereal and the remediation of liveness in the platform environment ludmila lupinacci university of leeds, uk introduction ‘social media’ represent a dynamic technological environment, in which emerging platforms make use of comparisons to existing apps to construct their own reputation. this is the case of bereal – a platform that allows users to share pictures once a day when triggered by a notification. in this paper, i examine how bereal deploys antagonistic discourse towards dominant media to promise a more authentic experience. in so doing, i frame the platform as evoking, appropriating, and remediating (bolter and grusin 2000) notions of mediated liveness – not only when it comes to a promised ‘real-time’ connection but also referring to a particular sense of ‘being there’, sharing experiences, and having ‘real’ experiences through technological mediation. platformization, authenticity, and the refashioning of ‘liveness’ in a context of increasing platformization (poell et al 2019) mainstream apps are often critiqued for favoring a perfectly curated version of people’s appearances, identities, and doings rather than a supposedly ‘authentic’ depiction of life as it is. arguably, there is nothing particularly revolutionary in claiming to offer authentic experiences. indeed, emerging technologies often make use of “authenticity” as a strategy to position themselves, disregarding the fact that most established apps have done the same in the past (salisbury and pooley 2017). this confirms that authenticity is malleable, fluid, and constantly on the move. it should be noted that the term has multiple and contested definitions (banet-weiser 2012, grazian 2018). here i am conceiving of the ‘authentic’ as that which is perceived as genuine, real – even if requiring a lot of mediative work to be concretized (hochschild 1983, scannell 2000). my theoretical starting point is the consideration that liveness, in its different ‘constellations’ (van es 2016) is a value-loaded attribute – and, often, these values ludmila lupinacci university of leeds reinforce the promise and pursuit of an ‘authentic experience’ through the reproduction of certain reality claims despite the presence of technological intervention (scannell 2014). liveness, i argue, involves an articulation of four experiential dimensions: temporality, spatiality, intersubjectivity and embodiment (lupinacci 2022). this raises the question on how bereal positions itself in relation to existing platforms, and whether (and in what ways) the historical construct of liveness can be a productive analytical tool for understanding contemporary socio-technical disputes over ‘platformized authenticity’. methods to examine how bereal conceives of the very idea of authenticity and its conditions of possibility, i used a technographic approach. technography pays attention to how a given technology is framed, promoted, or presented by its creators, and scrutinizes the normative views behind those ideas (bucher 2018). this includes the inspection of the interpretive repertoires, symbols and metaphors deployed in institutional and promotional materials, the kinds of experiences they invoke, and how they fit broader discursive structures (berg 2022). this was complemented by the walkthrough method (light et al 2016), which treats each platform as a particular environment and focuses on how corporate visions are embedded into the interface, the affordances, and the overall operation of each app. whilst these methods do not allow me to examine how the platform is experienced by users in practice, their combination provides a good insight into how its creators envisioned bereal to orchestrate users’ experiences. findings the analysis focuses on four thematic clusters – temporality, spatiality, intersubjectivity and embodiment –, all of which represent continuities and disruptions in relation to preexisting social media and historical claims of mediated liveness. if we approach liveness from the angle of temporality, the concept designates either a matter of speed (the ‘real-time’ access to what is happening), duration (or lack thereof), or contingency (based on situations that are still ‘in state of becoming’). in the case of bereal, there is a clear focus on the ‘now’, even if this ‘present’ can be technically made flexible by the users (highfield 2023). bereal also exemplifies the potential for imminent risk that is typical of liveness – as the whole premise of the app is that users will be taken by surprise by notifications that pop up at random times. bereal has an intrinsically ‘interruptive’ character, in which the perpetual possibility for a notification is a central part of the experience. if we focus on the spatiality of ‘the live’, then the term is deployed to characterize practices of mediated witnessing, presencing, or experiential ‘teleportation’. on bereal, a particular sense of space is produced through the use of the dual camera setting – in which a selfie and the user’s point of view are captured almost simultaneously –, which confers the platform with a very specific way of ‘being there’ through this photographic marker of presence (swerzenski and mccauley 2023). bereal, then, produces a particular way of being in the world which was until then unique to the platform (although it has been since copied by some of its competitors). ‘being there live’, however, is rarely only about a perceptual relocation; it is, usually, the experience of being part of an experience with others who are also experiencing it (hammelburg 2021). when it comes to intersubjectivity, then, liveness comprises ideas of togetherness, collectiveness, and participation. in the interactional environment provided by bereal, the sense of shared experience is mostly produced by the fact that every user is prompted to submit a picture at the same time – although in practice this might not necessarily be the case. still, the fact that the app only lets you see what others have shared once you have submitted a post yourself through contingent access (taylor 2023) constrains the experience into a virtual collectivity. bereal also seems to foreground a new modality of social surveillance (maddox 2023), in which you are encouraged to share in order to be able to see what others are doing. finally, if we foreground embodiment in the examination of liveness, then its definition becomes closely aligned with a promised ‘direct’ access to reality, as if it was not mediated. the ‘live’ “announces its authenticity against potentially deceptive substitutes” (peters 1999:218). in this regard, bereal relies on the mediated use of the body as a marker of authenticity – in particular, the app’s rhetoric and interface encourage users to keep their faces always visible, and preferably with a smile on (annabell 2023). the platform also allows users to create and share personalized emotional reactions through capturing their own version for existing emoji, configuring a self-claimed ‘realmoji’. moreover, a crucial component of bereal’s mode of engagement is the fact that in order to properly ‘bereal’, the user must keep their phone at hand at all times, since they never know when the notification might pop up. despite its rhetoric of healthy (dis)connection, bereal actually demands continuous bodily proximity. discussion and conclusions my analysis suggests a recycling of the longstanding idea that immediacy provides a more fulfilling and authentic experience. whereas many ‘alternative’ social platforms (gehl 2015) focus on restoring democratic values as the key distinction from dominant technologies, bereal focuses on providing a different experience from that of mainstream social media. bereal relies on a techno-nostalgic appreciation of a social media past (wieghorst 2021), when rather than ‘platforms’ we had ‘social networks’ focused on meeting new and old friends and seeing what they were up to. particularly, bereal promises to reconnect users with the long-lost joy of social media, evoking this assumed authentic past through technical constraints. bereal’s normative conception of authentic experience seems grounded in values such as spontaneity, simultaneity, and shared experience – which is a clear refashioning of historical claims of mediated liveness (scannell 2014). yet, i argue that bereal favors a new modality of platformized social organization envisioning the production of authentic experiences. while algorithmic platforms are premised on the production of orchestrated serendipity (karppi 2018) – the apparently contradictory experience of expecting surprising affective intensity to emerge from programmed environments –, bereal seems to foreground coordinated spontaneity, emphasizing the paradoxical experiences of improvisation and synchronization. moreover, by rejecting the ‘continuous connectedness’ typical of other apps, bereal appropriates the rhetoric of digital disconnection in order to build its own brand identity, reinforcing value-loaded ideas of anti-fakery and, therefore, of what ‘being real’ actually looks like. those findings matter because they demonstrate how claims of immediacy and the direct access to ‘reality’ are manifested and negotiated in contemporary sociotechnical practices. in this context, bereal’s version for “platformized authenticity” – the co-option of ‘the authentic’ to advance platforms’ growth and commercial goals – is a process marked by a recursive, cyclical negotiation between technical mediation and claims of liveness. references annabell, t. (2023). ‘bonus points for the smile!’: the directive of happiness on bereal. flow. http://www.flowjournal.org/2023/02/smile-directive-happiness-bereal/ banet-weiser, s. (2012). authentic™ the politics of ambivalence in a brand culture. new york university press. berg, m. (2022). ‘digital technography: a methodology for interrogating emerging digital technologies and their futures’. qualitative inquiry, 28(7). bolter, j., grusin, r. (2000). remediation. the mit press. bucher, t. (2018) if…then. algorithmic power and politics. oxford university press. gehl, r.w. (2015). the case for alternative social media. social media + society. grazian, d. (2018). demystifying authenticity in the sociology of culture. in l. grindstaff, m. m. lo, j. r. hall (eds.), routledge handbook of cultural sociology. routledge. hammelburg, e. (2021). being there live : an ethnographic approach for studying social media use in mediatized live events. social media + society. hammelburg, e. (2021). being there live: an ethnographic approach for studying social media use in mediatized live events. social media + society, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120984454 highfield, t. (2023). bereal now: digital temporal authenticity on bereal. flow. http://www.flowjournal.org/2023/02/bereal_now_temporal_authenticity/ hochschild, a. r. (1983). the managed heart. commercialization of human feeling. university of california press. karppi, t. (2018). disconnect. facebook’s affective bonds. university of minnesota press. light, b., burgess, j., duguay, s. (2016). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3). lupinacci, l. (2022). live, here and now: experiences of immediate connection through habitual social media. doctoral thesis, department of media and communications, the london school of economics and political science. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/4421/ maddox, j. (2023). more real, or just more surveillance? panopticism and shifting authenticity paradigms in bereal. convergence, 29(5), 1183-1198. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231199987 peters, j. d. (1999). speaking into the air. a history of the idea of communication. the university of chicago press. poell, t., nieborg, d., van dijck, j. (2019). platformisation. internet policy review, 8(4). salisbury m, pooley jd. (2017). the #nofilter self: the contest for authenticity among social networking sites, 2002–2016. social sciences. 6(1):10. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci6010010 scannell, p. (2000). authenticity and experience. discourse sudies, 3(4). scannell, p. (2014). television and the meaning of live. polity press. swerzenski, j.d., mccauley, b. (2023). formatting the real. flow. http://www.flowjournal.org/2023/02/formatting-the-real/ taylor, z. (2023). everyone stop what you’re doing, and be real: conceptualizing bereal as a live public. flow. http://www.flowjournal.org/2023/02/everyone_stop_bereal/ van es, k. (2016). the future of live. polity press. wieghorst, c. (2021). analogue nostalgia. examining critiques of social media. in.: chia, a., jorge, a., karppi, t. (eds). reckoning with social media. rowman & littlefield. lim aoir spir unfree; indentured; influencer selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 unfree; indentured; influencer elisha lim york university unfree migrant labour in singapore in singapore, foreign domestic workers (fdws) experience conditions of unfree indenture and intersecting marginalization. these workers lack safe and restful working conditions, decent wages, privacy, and labor rights protection against over-surveillance and workplace violence. erasure from civil society representation adds to the group’s invisibility. since 2020 i have collaborated with satveer kaur-gill and krittiya kantachote to study how foreign domestic workers use tiktok to balance visibility and expressions of sexuality as a political strategy despite its hypervisibility and potentially increased surveillance. despite the many oppressive limitations faced by this group, our study shows that they are nevertheless active on the platform as a group of aspiring influencers. this paper considers how the reality of “influencers” who are "unfree" challenges social media studies’ assumptions about what, and who, is a "content creator" or “influencer.” i conduct a walkthrough of the tiktok advertising interface, in order to understand how fdws adapt to the platform’s environment of expected use (light et al, 2018). what really is an influencer? like all social media platforms, tiktok’s revenue model sets the standards for exactly how aspiring influencers must behave and discipline their forms of expression, in order to gain visibility on the platform. tiktok revenue comes from showing ads to people based on their specific tastes. advertisers look at an interface called ads manager, where the platform offers categories of user tastes based on the kinds of videos that they tend to watch, and thus the kinds of ads they might be susceptible to. suggested citation (apa): lim, e. (2023). “unfree; indentured; influencer.” paper presented at aoir 2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. tiktok’s 28 categories of potential tastes in ads are based on what kind of creators users follow uploaded content, and how users interact with them, for example, how long they watch or repeat or like or share videos. for you page recommendations are designed to confirm these categories; not content that is popular, but content that confirms or updates its 28 ad customer categories. in this way, tiktok advertising sets the standards for exactly how aspiring influencers must behave and discipline their forms of expression in order to be promoted. because these ad categories are the platform’s source of revenue, this is its priority. for example if a user sees a lot of videos about “home improvement,” it’s not because these videos are the most popular or authoritative or feature the most attractive creators; it’s because these are the videos that most accurately confirm potential customers for ads about home improvement (chun, 2021; lim, 2020). however 28 categories are very few categories compared to competitors, for example, facebook or instagram which have over 9 million categories designed to narrow down customer tastes. for example, instagram users could be targeted by subjects that they or their friends have shown interest in, as specific as, for example “credit cards / credit finance / credit history,” once an advertiser selects that as a user interest, they are offered even more refined suggestions like loans or personal finance or line of credit. that option will drill down to an even more specific suggestion like refinancing / pre-qualification (lending)” / etc). meanwhile on tiktok, the targeting remains relatively broad. for example the most specific that an advertiser can target is an umbrella category called “finance services which drills down to credit bureaus,” tiktok ads manager does not offer any further suggestions, there is no drill down menu. instead there are only 28 rather broad categories. tiktok’s recommender algorithms serve up much less specific targeting and less controversial content. this might explain why users often describe the eerie way that tiktok seems to guess their tastes. tiktok content is much less targeted and exposes users to broader options, while instagram serves a repetition of the same razor sharp interests based on past selections and friends’ selections. also unlike instagram or twitter, tiktok does not allow politics. ads manager includes a warning against special ad categories. quote “declare if your ads are related to credit, employment or housing, or about social issues, elections or politics. requirements differ by country.” tiktok’s specific ad policies differ by region. for the fdws that we studied for example, like any southeast asian users, would not be allowed to post content related to beauty and cosmetic services, or weight loss, or contraceptives, or religion – as just some examples – this content would be removed by moderators. tiktok users may not be aware of these policies but avid users intuit which content is promoted, or not, or removed altogether. in other words, to be visible on any social media platform, users learn to create posts that align with the platforms’ revenue models and rules. on tiktok, these revenue models fall into relatively broad marketing categories. for the aspiring influencers that we studied, tiktok is thus an easier platform for entry, but on the other hand presents some stricter limitations. it is easier entry for 3 reasons: 1) content only needs to consistently appeal to one of the 28 broad categories of user interests. 2) tiktok influence does not require large friend networks because unlike facebook, posts are not promoted based on friend tastes; 3) in order to harness algorithmic traction, content does not compete with material related to politics, economy, civil or social rights issues, which fdw would rarely be able to post about anyways given their oppressive conditions. on the other hand, these “advantages” promote marketable behavior, but exacerbate the very problems these fdws face, giving them little chance of sustaining platform influence if they attempted to draw attention to the extreme exploitation they face. like all aspiring influencers, they must align their content with strictly marketable material. our study reveals a world of aspiring influencers that raises questions about the current conceptualization of culture in communication studies. the fdws that we studied in southeast asia are subject to soft violence that always stifles their enactments of cultural freedom. this includes limits of how they can access mobile phones and when they can, they are subject to time limitations; and sometimes its also screened by their employers. these fdws are denied human rights, free speech, personal privacy, legal recourse or any other requirements for building or retaining social capital. however in communication studies these qualities are often taken for granted as a given that all users have and deserve to protect. we have studied a subaltern group that, despite their lack of freedom or personal privacy, nevertheless aspires to influence. this paradox confronts the underlying assumptions of influence itself. we are not concerned with inclusion as charity. we are concerned with a more accurate picture of the social media landscape than the field of commnications currently depicts. we offer our research so that this picture can avoid narrow hegemonic formations. the study of these unfree laborers on tiktok reveals some of the unconscious bias in the field around the presumed subject position of a ‘creative’ or ‘cultural producer’. how do western scholars manifest an ideal user? how does this naturalize ideologies of individuated social capital? what are scholarly preconceptions of social media "activism" and “social justice”? to conclude with a quote by gayatri spivak: what does the study of subalternity represent about ourselves? how can our analysis confront the “"artificial" to begin with-"economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life” (p.277)? references “ads manager” facebook website. “ads manager” tiktok website. chun, w. h. k. (2021). discriminating data: correlation, neighborhoods, and the new politics of recognition. mit press. light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881-900. lim, e. (2021). personal identity economics: facebook and the distortion of identity politics. social media + society, 7(2), 20563051211017492. parreñas, r. s. and k. kantachote. 2021. "negotiating indenture: migrant domestic work and temporary labor migration in singapore." in precarity and belonging,pp. 145-160. rutgers university press. “privacy policy” tiktok website. https://www.tiktok.com/legal/page/row/privacy-policy/en spivak, g. c. (2023). can the subaltern speak?. in imperialism (pp. 171-219). routledge. yeoh b and annadhurai k (2008) civil society action and the creation of ‘transformative’ spaces for migrant domestic workers in singapore. women’s studies 37(5): 548–569 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): whalley, j., stocker, v., & lutz, c. (2024, october). freelancing in the digital age: understanding fiverr within the gig economy. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. freelancing in the digital age: understanding fiverr within the gig economy jason whalley northumbria university, volker stocker weizenbaum institute, christoph lutz bi norwegian business school, introduction and methods in recent times, a series of platforms have emerged as key actors within the economy. ‘big tech’ companies like alphabet, meta or alibaba have developed into powerful and complex multi-layered platform ecosystems (van dijck et al., 2018). these firms dominate their respective markets, creating value for their users and shareholders, but also raising substantial concerns. reflecting their size and scope, these platforms are often in the headlines and have attracted the attention of scholars and policymakers (cabral et al., 2021; crémer et al., 2019; furman et al., 2019). arguably they overshadow the development of smaller platforms that have emerged in the sharing economy and gig economy (van dijck et al., 2018). within the sharing economy, platforms allow resources to be flexibly shared in areas like accommodation (e.g., airbnb, couchsurfing), car sharing (e.g., share now, blablacar) and storage and parking (e.g., stashbee). in the gig economy, by contrast, individuals rent out their labour (de stefano, 2016; frenken and schor, 2017). despite the considerable body of literature on the topic (koutsimpogiorgos et al., 2020; vallas & schor, 2020), how specific gig economy platforms have developed and how they align buyers (clients) with sellers (freelancers) has so far been largely overlooked. consequently, in this paper we will focus on fiverr, a key gig economy platform. extant research in the area has focused strongly on local gig work or app-work (duggan et al., 2020; vallas & schor, 2020), especially in the form of ride-hailing platforms such as uber and lyft (cameron, 2022; rosenblat, 2018) or food delivery platforms such as deliveroo, doordash, meituan and foodora (galière, 2020; newlands, 2022; van doorn & chen, 2021). moreover, microwork or microtasking (vallas & schor, 2020) has been widely studied, with ample research about amazon mechanical turk (bucher et al., 2019, 2024; newlands & lutz, 2021). finally, there is a rich body of research on capital platform work (duggan et al., 2020), especially airbnb (e.g., dann et al., 2019). much less evidence is available about online freelancing, an important sub-sector of the gig economy vallas and schor (2020) call “creative projects (doing, designing, and analysis)” and howcroft and bergvall-kåreborn (2019) label “profession-based freelance crowdwork”. fiverr specifically, despite its size and importance, has received scant attention but is a relevant case study for several reasons. as a global marketplace that connects sellers with buyers, fiverr presents rich insights into the dynamics of cross-cultural digital work. through its broad coverage of activities, fiverr enables the study of changing patterns of knowledge work across industries. moreover, the adaptability of fiverr during covid19, when it experienced a significant increase in demand, underlines its critical role in the gig economy’s response to the global pandemic. however, the emergence of generative ai represents a challenge to fiverr’s business model, offering an interesting case how knowledge work and competitive dynamics in the gig economy adapt to new social realities. investigating fiverr’s development thus helps better understand and contextualize the gig economy and future of work. to explore how fiverr has developed, we adopt a longitudinal case study approach (eisenhardt, 1989; yin, 2018). the case study combines materials by fiverr itself (annual reports, regulatory filings with the securities & exchange commission, press releases and presentations) with reports from newspapers, the trade press and analysts as well as academic literature. these sources were triangulated to construct a timeline of fiverr’s development. this use of secondary sources is consistent with research that has examined the development of platforms in sectors such as textiles (e.g., schmidt et al., 2021) and high technology (e.g., ansari et al., 2016; hein et al., 2019). results and discussion our analysis shows that fiverr remains an important platform in the gig economy, mirroring the broader emergence of digitally enabled platforms. these platforms not only bridge geographical divides but also accommodate a multitude of languages, thereby broadening their service range (stephany et al., 2021). despite fiverr's expansion and improvements in operational performance, the benefits sellers can draw from the platform are unevenly distributed, with a substantial portion of sellers earning minimal returns. specifically, 96% of sellers make less than $500 per month, with 70% earning less than $100 per month (priceonomics, 2017). strategically, fiverr has extended its scope and capabilities over time, focusing on technology acquisition rather than talent, a practice known as acquihire. this strategy aligns with a larger digital platform trend of seeking competitive advantage through technological acquisitions rather than through talent integration (parker et al., 2021). our analysis shows how fiverr has developed its business across more services, also highlighting how the platform is thematically structured, based on three classification schemes: first, categories describe relatively narrow task areas such as ‘photoshop editing’ and ‘tattoo design’. second, verticals are broader domains, spanning multiple categories. an example is ‘graphics and design’ and currently there are nine verticals. finally, fiverr launched nine so-called stores, which are similar to verticals in breadth but encompass different task types or fields such as gaming, real estate, logo making, and e-commerce. the most recent store is ‘international women day’, where all of the services are provided by women. the introduction of this store seems pragmatically motivated, showing how gig economy platforms such as fiverr hijack social justice issues such as gender inequalities for profit. fiverr’s strategic orientation has led to a dynamic that predominantly favors buyers over sellers, aiming to maximize transactions and revenue. the platform’s pricing strategy contributes to this imbalance. specifically, the buyer (client) pays a service fee determined by the size of the transaction, while the seller pays a transaction fee of 20 per cent. for example, if a gig is listed at $100 then the company earns $5 from the buyer and $20 from the seller. in other words, the buyer pays $105 to purchase the gig, from which fiverr earns $25 while the seller receives $80. our case study also shows the critical role of technology, especially machine learning, in facilitating transaction efficiency and platform scalability. nonetheless, the success of such strategies significantly depends on the platform's adaptation to geographical and contextual conditions, which influence its expansion. these factors range from socioeconomic realities and regulatory frameworks to digital literacy levels and connectivity infrastructure, all of which dictate the platform’s ability to attract and retain buyers and sellers. for example, given fiverr's israeli roots, geopolitical sensitivities could impact its market reach and operational stability, although such effects may be mitigated by the platform's global footprint and economic imperatives driving its use. additionally, fiverr faces the challenge of disintermediation, where the platform develops strategies to maintain user engagement and prevent market bypassing. by positioning itself as an asset-light "inverted firm," fiverr effectively scales its operations to meet the demands of an expanding user base without diluting service quality or alienating stakeholders (parker et al., 2017). as a final note, fiverr currently faces challenges from the rise of generative ai, for example chatgpt, midjourney, gemini, and dall·e. first empirical insights suggest that online freelancers – and particularly those engaged in languageand text-oriented work – are indeed exposed to automation risks (demirci et al., 2023; hui et al., 2024; liu et al., 2023). references ansari, s., garud, r., & kumaraswamy, a. (2016). the disruptor’s dilemma: tivo and the us television ecosystem. strategic management journal, 37(9), 1829-1853 braesemann, f., stephany, f., teutloff, o., kässi, o., graham, m., & lehdonvirta, v. (2022). the global polarisation of remote work. plos one, 17(10), e0274630. bucher, e., fieseler, c., & lutz, c. (2019). mattering in digital labor. journal of managerial psychology, 34(4), 307-324. bucher, e., fieseler, c., lutz, c., & buhmann, a. (2024). professionals, purposeseekers, and passers-through: how microworkers reconcile alienation and platform commitment through identity work. new media & society, 26(1), 190-215. cabral, l., haucap, j., parker, g., petropoulos, g., valletti, t. m., & van alstyne, m. w. (2021). the eu digital markets act: a report from a panel of economic experts. european union, luxembourg. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3783436 cameron, l. d. (2022). “making out” while driving: relational and efficiency games in the gig economy. organization science, 33(1), 231-252. crémer, j., de montjoye, y., & schweitzer, h. (2019). competition policy for the digital era: a report for the european commission. european commission, april. ec.europa.eu dann, d., teubner, t., & weinhardt, c. (2019). poster child and guinea pig–insights from a structured literature review on airbnb. international journal of contemporary hospitality management, 31(1), 427-473. de stefano, v. (2016). the rise of the “just-in-time workforce”: on-demand work, crowd work and labour protection in the “gig-economy”. ilo working papers, 71. https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_protect/---protrav/--travail/documents/publication/wcms_443267.pdf demirci, o., hannane, j., & zhu, x. (2023). who is ai replacing? the impact of chatgpt on online freelancing platforms. ssrn electronic journal. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4602944 duggan, j., sherman, u., carbery, r., & mcdonnell, a. (2020). algorithmic management and app‐work in the gig economy: a research agenda for employment relations and hrm. human resource management journal, 30(1), 114-132. edelman, b., & hu, p. (2016). disintermediation in two-sided marketplaces. harvard business school technical note, 917(4). eisenhardt, k. m. (1989). building theories from case study research. academy of management review, 14(4), 532-550. frenken, k., & schor, j. (2017). putting the sharing economy into perspective. environmental innovation and societal transitions, 23, 3-10. furman, j., coyle, d., fletcher, a., mcauley, d., & marsden, p. (2019). unlocking digital competition: report of the digital competition expert panel. hm treasury, london. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5c88150ee5274a230219c35f/unlocking_ digital_competition_furman_review_web.pdf galière, s. (2020). when food‐delivery platform workers consent to algorithmic management: a foucauldian perspective. new technology, work and employment, 35(3), 357-370. gu, g., & zhu, f. (2021). trust and disintermediation: evidence from an online freelance marketplace. management science, 67(2), 794-807. hein, a., schreick, m., wiesche, m., böhm, m., & krcmar, h. (2019). the emergence of native multi-sided platforms and their influence on incumbents. electronic markets, 29(4), 631-647. hui, x., reshef, o., & zhou, l. (2024). the short-term effects of generative artificial intelligence on employment: evidence from an online labor market. organization science, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.18441 howcroft, d., & bergvall-kåreborn, b. (2019). a typology of crowdwork platforms. work, employment and society, 33(1), 21-38. koutsimpogiorgos, n., van slageren, j., herrmann, a. m., & frenken, k. (2020). conceptualizing the gig economy and its regulatory problems. policy & internet, 12(1), 525-545. ladd, t. (2022). the achilles’ heel of the platform business model: disintermediation. business horizons, 65(3), 277-289. liu, j., xu, x., li, y., & tan, y. (2023). “generate” the future of work through ai: empirical evidence from online labor markets. arxiv, preprint 2308.05201. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2308.05201 newlands, g. (2022). anthropotropism: searching for recognition in the scandinavian gig economy. sociology, 56(5), 821-838. newlands, g., & lutz, c. (2021). crowdwork and the mobile underclass: barriers to participation in india and the united states. new media & society, 23(6), 1341-1361. parker, g., van alstyne, m. w., & jiang, x. (2017). platform ecosystems: how developers invert the firm. mis quarterly, 41(1), 255-266. priceonomics (2017). how much are people making from the sharing economy? priceonomics, 15 july 2017. https://priceonomics.com/how-much-are-people-makingfrom-the-sharing/ rosenblat, a. (2018). uberland: how algorithms are rewriting the rules of work. university of california press. schmidt, a.l., petzold, n., lahme-hutig, n., & tiemann, f. (2021). growing with others: a longitudinal study of an evolving multi-sided disruptive platform. creativity and innovation management, 30(1), 12-30. stephany, f., kässi, o., rani, u., & lehdonvirta, v. (2021). online labour index 2020: new ways to measure the world’s remote freelancing market. big data & society, 8(2), 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211043240 vallas, s., & schor, j. b. (2020). what do platforms do? understanding the gig economy. annual review of sociology, 46, 273-294. van dijck, j., poell, t., & de waal, m. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford university press. van doorn, n., & chen, j. y. (2021). odds stacked against workers: datafied gamification on chinese and american food delivery platforms. socio-economic review, 19(4), 1345-1367. yin, r. (2018). case study research and applications: design and methods (sixth edition). sage. zhu, f., & iansiti, m. (2019). why some platforms thrive and others don’t. harvard business review, january-february 2019, 118-125. https://hbr.org/2019/01/why-someplatforms-thrive-and-others-dont selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 the brazilian digital battlefield: investigating the dynamics of political information campaigns in post-bolsonaro era giada marino university of urbino bruna almeida paroni university of urbino fabio giglietto university of urbino the 2022 presidential elections in brazil were marked by intense polarisation and the widespread dissemination of misinformation online, both during and after the campaign period (bastos & recuero, 2023). this polarisation reached its peak on january 8, 2023, with an attempted coup. in light of this scenario, our study addresses a growing concern: the rise of destructive political polarisation (esau et al., 2024). destructive polarisation goes beyond ideological disagreement, posing a serious threat to democracy. it involves a breakdown of communication between individuals with opposing political views, not merely as a lack of interaction but as a dysfunctional form of communication driven by negative emotions and antagonism toward anyone outside one’s political community. emotions are central to this form of political polarisation. research highlights that anger and mistrust toward those outside one’s ideological group often intensify group boundaries (barnes, 2022; recuero et al., 2020; sandvoss, 2020). social media platforms, particularly facebook, play a crucial role in this dynamic. facebook’s affordances—such as reactions, comments, and shares—enable researchers to measure these negative emotions (anwar & giglietto, 2024). prior studies indicate that comments often reflect intentions to engage in discussion, which can sometimes escalate into incivility (giglietto et al., 2019; mccosker, 2014). suggested citation (apa): marino, g., paroni, b. a., giglietto, f. (2024, october). the brazilian digital battlefield: investigating the dynamics of political information campaigns in post-bolsonaro era. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. meanwhile, 'angry' reactions frequently signal frustration or anger directed at opposing content (anwar & giglietto, 2024; eberl et al., 2020; muraoka et al., 2021). our ongoing research builds on these insights by analysing 'angry' and 'love' reactions alongside comments and shares to track polarised engagement. angry reactions and comments may indicate negative sentiments toward the 'other,' whereas shares and 'love' reactions typically signify support and alignment with the content (eberl et al., 2020). to guide our analysis, we propose the following research questions: rq1. does affective polarisation expressed through facebook interactions remain stable before and after the elections in the pro-bolsonaro political community? rq2. are changes in interaction patterns affected by changes in content publication over time? method as part of the european research project vera.ai, researchers developed an innovative news alert system to identify links shared in a coordinated manner by actors known for spreading problematic information on facebook (giglietto et al., 2023). analysis of these flagged links revealed repeated and regular dissemination of content related to brazilian political pages and groups. we created a graph of facebook accounts that shared these links in a coordinated manner, filtered the top 10% of edges by weight, and used a modularity algorithm to identify communities. this process identified 58 coordinated facebook pages and groups supporting bolsonaro. over 12 million posts shared by this network between january 1, 2021, and december 31, 2023, were collected. quantitative analysis measured interactions (comments, shares, love, and angry reactions) to map engagement trends. time series analysis of love/angry and share/comment ratios was conducted to assess affective polarisation and its fluctuations in response to political events. seven periods of instability, mostly in 2021 and 2023, were identified. for qualitative analysis, we applied a grounded approach to the 100 highest-engagement posts from each instability period, analysing a total of 700 posts. preliminary findings we identified a network that includes 58 groups primarily aligned with pro-bolsonaro positions. affective polarization in pro-bolsonaro facebook communities we focused on three years of content shared by accounts primarily supporting bolsonaro. analysing angry/love and comment/share ratios over time, we observed that these metrics range between 1 and -1. values close to 1 indicate dominance of love reactions and shares, while values near -1 reflect a predominance of angry reactions and comments. in 2023, following the attempted coup, the shares/comments ratio and love/angry ratio shifted significantly, with comments and angry reactions gaining prominence compared to previous years (fig. 2). volatility analysis identified periods of instability where these ratios diverged significantly from previous patterns. while the ratios were stable throughout 2022, seven instability periods were concentrated in 2021 and 2023. figure 2 – time series analysis of angry/love and comment/share ratios. impact of content changes on interaction patterns we analysed 700 high-engagement posts from the seven instability periods. using a grounded approach, we annotated the posts and grouped categories into themes, including events, political stances (pro/anti-bolsonaro or lula), tone (e.g., celebrative, mockery, engagement bait), targets (politicians, media), and content types (news, ugc, facebook live). a b c figure 3 – examples of pro-bolsonaro engagement-baiting posts. in figure 3, a post from the aliança pelo brasil group showcases hyperpartisan engagement-baiting content. the post features the bolsonaro couple with text inviting followers to engage through hypothetical scenarios, such as, "if bolsonaro runs for re-election in 2026, would you vote for him again? answer yes or no." this pattern of interaction is consistent with posts from hyperpartisan media outlets like portalbr7.com. a b figure 4 – mocking posts by pro-lula users in pro-bolsonaro groups. in 2023, we observed mocking content targeting bolsonaro, his family, and allies, shared by presumed lula supporters within pro-bolsonaro groups. for instance, one post (figure 4) features an ai-generated image of cows around a table labelled "cattle party," mocking bolsonaro supporters. a b figure 5 – examples of celebratory posts for bolsonaro and lula. celebratory posts about both bolsonaro and lula appear within pro-bolsonaro groups. for instance, the bolsonaro 2026 group continued to support the former president even after his 2022 electoral defeat. lula-related celebratory posts, on the other hand, tend to generate high engagement and discussions. a b figure 6 – political event-focused posts and their narratives. other clusters of posts focus on specific political events, such as brazil's independence day (september 7) and the january 8 attempted coup. posts also targeted brazilian institutions like the supreme federal court and judge alexandre de moraes, as well as mainstream media, particularly rede globo. in figure 6a, a post uses a watermelon emoji to symbolise military personnel perceived as covertly supporting leftist ideologies. figure 6b features a pro-lula gesture to suggest that the january 8 destruction was orchestrated by lula's supporters rather than bolsonaro's. future research future work will build on this qualitative analysis by developing llm-assisted annotation (marino & giglietto, 2024) to examine whether different content categories influence interaction patterns. references anwar, s., & giglietto, f. (2024). facebook reactions in the context of politics and social issues: a systematic literature review. frontiers in sociology, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2024.1379265 barnes, r. (2022). loving to hate: fandom fuelling polarised behaviour. in fandom and polarisation in online political discussion (pp. 61–86). springer international publishing. bastos, m., & recuero, r. (2023). the insurrectionist playbook: jair bolsonaro and the national congress of brazil. social media + society, 9(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231211881 eberl, j.-m., tolochko, p., jost, p., heidenreich, t., & boomgaarden, h. g. (2020). what’s in a post? how sentiment and issue salience affect users’ emotional reactions on facebook. journal of information technology & politics, 17(1), 48–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2019.1710318 esau, k., choucair, t., vilkins, s., svegaard, s. f. k., bruns, a., o’connor-farfan, k. s., & lubicz-zaorski, c. (2024). destructive polarization in digital communication contexts: a critical review and conceptual framework. information, communication and society, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2024.2413127 giglietto, f., marino, g., mincigrucci, r., & stanziano, a. (2023). a workflow to detect, monitor and update lists of coordinated social media accounts across time: the case of 2022 italian election. social media + society. giglietto, f., valeriani, a., righetti, n., & marino, g. (2019). diverging patterns of interaction around news on social media: insularity and partisanship during the 2018 italian election campaign. information, communication and society, 22(11), 1610–1629. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1629692 marino, g., & giglietto, f. (2024). integrating large language models in political discourse studies on social media: challenges of validating an llms-in-the-loop pipeline. sociologica, 18(2), 87–107. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/19524 mccosker, a. (2014). trolling as provocation: youtube’s agonistic publics. convergence, 20(2), 201–217. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1354856513501413 muraoka, t., montgomery, j., lucas, c., & tavits, m. (2021). love and anger in global party politics: facebook reactions to political party posts in 79 democracies. journal of quantitative description: digital media, 1. https://journalqd.org/article/view/2568 recuero, r., soares, f. b., & zago, g. (2020). polarization, hyperpartisanship and echo chambers: how the disinformation about covid-19 circulates on twitter. scielo preprints. sandvoss, c. (2020). 6. the politics of against: political participation, antifandom, and populism. in anti-fandom (pp. 125–146). new york university press. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479866625.003.0009 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): lastname, firstinitial. (2022, november). paper (or panel) title. paper (or panel) presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. assessing policy tradeoffs and silos in regulating platform power, platformization, and datafication pawel popiel annenberg school for communication, university of pennsylvania introduction policymakers’ inquiries into digital platform markets to address a range of political, economic, and social concerns represent evolving policy responses to platform power, platformization, and datafication. these different, but linked processes challenge existing policy frameworks, not least because of their scope and their reconfiguration of existing business models (cohen, 2019). while platform power derives from individual companies, platformization denotes platform business logics that systematically reconfigure swaths of the economy and human activity (poell et al., 2019). similarly, datafication includes the concentration of data infrastructures among dominant platforms, but also extends surveillance logics to the public sector and the global economy (mejias & couldry, 2019). the increasingly international policy debates contemplate policy overhauls that assert meaningful oversight over these processes, yet sometimes advance different, contradictory policy goals, which reflect sometimes conflicting normative values. this study critically assesses how platform inquiries, often explicitly attempting holistic proposals, tackle issues arising from datafication, platformization, and platform power. following other studies (e.g., flew & su, 2021), i examine a sample of prominent international expert platform inquiries. unlike previous studies, which evaluate policy recommendations, my focus falls on critically analyzing gaps and tensions that emerge within these inquiries, which i theorize as policy silos and tradeoffs falling along four dimensions: 1) policy area silos, 2) market and sectoral silos, 3) temporal silos and tradeoffs, and 4) normative and value tradeoffs. this typology and accompanying analysis introduce a conceptual schema for identifying gaps in policy framework design that thwart robust policy responses to platformization and datafication, and raise key questions about the scope of and assumptions underlying platform regulation internationally. while policy specialization and siloed analysis is not de facto problematic, it becomes problematic when it is unexamined. suggested citation (apa): popiel, p. (2022, november). assessing policy tradeoffs and silos in regulating platform power, platformization, and datafication. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. accordingly, i foreground tensions in problem definitions, policy recommendations, and normative goals that privilege certain solutions over others, while narrowing potential policy responses. methodology to build my sample, i drew on two lists of platform inquiries: 1) one maintained by puppis and winseck (2021) and 2) one by the university of chicago booth school of business (world reports on digital markets 2019). i assembled a corpus of 18 reports, following three heuristics. first, i included inquiries that were frequently cited in platform oversight debates (e.g., accc’s report, stigler report). second, i prioritized final reports over interim ones. third, despite most reports originating from europe and north america, i also sought to include underrepresented regions, including latin america (e.g., mexico) and south asia (india). i analyzed the data qualitatively using the content analysis software atlas.ti. i uploaded the reports into atlas.ti and coded each based on the following criteria derived from my research focus: a) the scope of policy problem definitions (e.g., market power); b) the breadth of actors implicated (e.g., platforms, competitors); c) the scope of policy areas invoked (e.g., competition); d) disparities and tensions between problem definitions and proposed solutions (e.g., merger reform); and e) tradeoffs and tensions in normative principles guiding the problem definition and policy solutions (e.g., innovation). using these codes and guided by platform policy literature, i constructed a typology of policy silos and tradeoffs presented below. policy tradeoffs and silos policy area silos denote disconnects and imbalances between policy areas and jurisdictions, which sometimes persist even when policy experts attempt to bridge them. they manifest as either 1) a lack of or unequal attention to policy areas implicated in datafication and platformization; or 2) as narrow bridges between policy areas that privilege one policy approach over another at the expense of more comprehensive interventions. for instance, while the inquiries collectively engage a range of policy areas, competition policy not only dominates, but is also often framed as the policy approach with which other frameworks should be harmonized. its prevalence impacts the policy options that are proposed, narrowing potential interventions. conversely, key areas of labor rights and environmental impact receive almost no consideration. market and sectoral silos involve misdiagnosis of the dynamics between various markets implicated in datafication and platformization. for instance, as platformization extends into the infrastructure layer, including cloud architectures, so does the control of dominant companies like amazon and microsoft. yet, the inquiries focus primarily on the app layer, with few exceptions. the shortcomings of the competition policy frame become especially prominent here: although dominant platforms do not have market power in these sectors, they strategically expand their economies of scope to encompass the entire internet stack. the key policy challenge with respect to market and sectoral silos involves assessing platform cross-sectorization strategies and economies of scope, including the linkages between platform entities and other sectors. without broadening analysis, such silos may contribute to a mismatch between narrow policy approaches and expansive policy problems. temporal silos and tradeoffs: how policymaking conceptualizes time shapes the scope of possible interventions (strassheim, 2016). several inquiries stress that the regulation must match the pace of technological change, emphasizing the importance of regulatory dynamism. however, such temporal concerns introduce tradeoffs that can constrain policy interventions. for instance, some inquiries openly oppose divestiture due to concerns about future market uncertainty and impacts on innovation. similarly, to avoid jeopardizing potential future benefits like innovation and competition, certain inquiries articulate principleor standard-setting proposals, which maximize flexibility, encourage private sector feedback, and empower co-regulation. yet, such future-proofing proposals risk becoming “frictionless regulation,” namely private sector-driven coregulation, with the state serving a minimal coordinative role to facilitate platform incumbents’ smooth operations (popiel & sang, 2021). ultimately, concerns about future uncertainty and innovation risk narrowing potential policy futures, unduly restricting crucial interventions tackling problems arising from datafication and platformization. normative and value tradeoffs: while the silos outlined above emerge partly due to the policy challenges introduced by platformization and datafication, normative goals and values legitimate and intensify them. the inquiries are animated by various normative and geopolitical commitments, yet most inquiries adopt innovation via competition as a key policy normative lodestar. innovation is both key to competition and at the heart of the data revolution on which the platform inquiries focus. as a normative frame and a policy goal, innovation alongside competition borders on technological solutionism, mirrors big tech’s own discourses, inevitably introduces policy tradeoffs, and ultimately constrains policy responses to datafication. conclusion this typology offers three key lessons. first, policy area and market silos focus policy attention more on platform power—as market power (competition policy) and as social infrastructure (content standards and algorithmic regulation)—than on datafication and platformization. second, relatedly, the dominant market competition policy frame yields downstream blind spots that thwart not only addressing the scope of platformization (e.g., eliding labor concerns), but also datafication (e.g., framing privacy as product quality or data trusts as competition inputs). third, temporal and normative concerns about harming potential innovation also constrain robust policy responses, while legitimating ongoing datafication, often with limited consumer protections. such concerns are partly about unduly restricting the data flows that characterize datafication and fuel surveillance capitalism. however, regulating data flows and infrastructures involves shaping, not thwarting innovation to preserve public interests with respect to data collection and processing. reticence to impose robust public oversight over digital platform markets will cede policy ground to dominant incumbents, heavily invested in shaping policy interventions. references cohen, j. e. (2019). between truth and power: the legal constructions of informational capitalism. oxford university press. flew, t., & su, c. (2021). mapping international enquiries into the power of digital platforms. ssrn electronic journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3860990 mejias, u. a., & couldry, n. (2019). datafication. internet policy review, 8(4), 1-10. https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.4.1428 poell, t., nieborg, d., & van dijck, j. (2019). platformisation. internet policy review, 8(4), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.4.1425 popiel, p., & sang, y. (2021). platforms' governance: analyzing digital platforms' policy preferences. global perspectives, 2(1), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2021.19094 puppis, m., & winseck, d. (2021, june). platform regulation inquiries, reviews and proceedings worldwide. retrieved september 1 from https://docs.google.com/document/d/1azdh9secgftqeroqjo5fyeiy_gezdf_11 b8mqfsumfs/edit?usp=sharing strassheim, h. (2016). knowing the future: theories of time in policy analysis. european policy analysis, 2(1), 150-167. https://doi.org/10.18278/epa.2.1.9 world reports on digital markets. (2019, may 15). the university of chicago booth school of business. retrieved september 1 from https://www.chicagobooth.edu/research/stigler/events/antitrust-competitionconference/world-reports-on-digital-markets selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): bruns, a., bechmann, a., charquero-ballester, m., walter, j.g., stromergalley, j., mckernan, b., giglietto, f., righetti, n., stanziano, a., choucair, t., esau, k., svegaard, s., vilkins, s. (2023, october). revisiting key concepts in digital media research: influence, populism, partisanship, polarisation. panel presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. revisiting key concepts in digital media research: influence, populism, partisanship, polarisation axel bruns digital media research centre, queensland university of technology anja bechmann datalab – center for digital social research, aarhus university marina charquero-ballester datalab – center for digital social research, aarhus university jessica g. walter datalab – center for digital social research, aarhus university jennifer stromer-galley syracuse university brian mckernan syracuse university fabio giglietto university of urbino carlo bo nicola righetti university of vienna anna stanziano university of rome “la sapienza” tariq choucair digital media research centre, queensland university of technology katharina esau digital media research centre, queensland university of technology sebastian svegaard digital media research centre, queensland university of technology samantha vilkins digital media research centre, queensland university of technology panel introduction recent scholarship on the intersections between digital media and political debate has taken on a decidedly pessimistic, even dystopian tone, and not without reason: from the effective use of social media platforms by populists and demagogues like donald trump to the expression of deepening ideological divides in online public debate, and from the emergence of partisan online communities and platforms to the intensification and exploitation of such partisanship by conspiracy theorists and state actors, there are substantial concerns about the way that extremist actors are utilising digital and social media logics to further their ideological agendas. the situation is further complicated by platform providers’ and regulators’ limited and unsystematic responses to these issues. but while there is considerable research into the various issues and events that illustrate these developments, many of the central concepts that are used to describe these cases receive substantially less critical attention. terms such as ‘influence’, ‘populism’, ‘partisanship’, and ‘polarisation’ are often deployed as if did not themselves require further qualification and definition – even in spite of the considerable volume of literature in political science and other ancillary disciplines that addresses the various facets that such concepts may have. informed by and building on substantial empirical research, this panel therefore facilitates a conversation between methodological innovation at the coalface of digital trace data analysis and careful reflection on the definitions of key concepts, in order to explore the conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches that might illuminate the distinct features of our four key concepts in sharper focus. our first paper engages with the concept of influence, which it conceptualises as the power to affect others. focussing especially on the spread of verified false content (vfc) through social media, it proposes a novel population-scale approach that both employs a bottom-up perspective for identifying the influential actors spreading such content, and highlights the exposure of ordinary citizens to these messages. it demonstrates this approach by drawing on the large-scale facebook url-sharing dataset available from social science one, developing an eu-wide perspective on vfc exposure at national levels. our second paper continues this approach by critiquing the concept of populism, highlighting the term as a weak analytical concept. it argues that, rather than focussing on their populist stance, populist politicians can be judged by the extent of their delegitimising rhetoric. further, the paper asserts that such rhetoric is enabled by the decentralised communication environment of social media. the utility of the concept of delegitimisation is that enables the identification of political messages that are truly dangerous because they are meant to destabilise fundamental democratic principles, such as the integrity of the vote and the legitimacy of alternative policy perspectives. by situating this in the context of social media messaging, we can see how such messages are amplified by distributed network channels. our third paper shifts focus to the possible results of influence campaigns and populist demagoguery, and addresses the concept of partisanship. taking as case study the 2022 italian election, it introduces a novel combination of computationally informed analytical methods and applies them to social media data to gauge the level of partisan attention devoted to the different news sources and political topics in the election campaign, and distinguish between partisan and cross-partisan sources and themes. this provides new insights into the structures, intersections, and faultlines of partisanship, and enables the mapping of a broader multi-dimensional ideological space. our final paper continues this discussion by exploring the complexities of polarisation. it highlights the conceptual fluidity of this term, which is expressed in the multitude of adjectives and qualifiers that can be found in the relevant literature – from ideological through affective to interactive polarisation and beyond, and from benign and even beneficial to pernicious and destructive polarisation. mapping these distinct forms of polarisation onto a diverse range of mixed-methods digital media research approaches, and outlining a number of criteria for assessing whether the dynamics of polarisation have turned destructive, it outlines new pathways for polarisation research in internet studies. in combination, then, these four papers offer a timely nudge for digital and social media research to revisit and reconsider some of the central concepts in online political communication studies, and to retrace and reaffirm the connections between the definitions of these concepts and the methodological frameworks that we use to study them. we include the extended abstracts for the individual papers on the following pages. paper 1 unwanted influence in the facebook news feed: comparing citizen exposure to verified false content in all 27 eu countries anja bechmann datalab – center for digital social research, aarhus university marina charquero-ballester datalab – center for digital social research, aarhus university jessica g. walter datalab – center for digital social research, aarhus university actors’ influence on citizens via the media has long been addressed in media studies, especially in relation to advertising and during elections and crises when people seek out media for trustworthy information (blumler & mcquail, 1968; mcquail, 1979, 2016; mcquail & deuze, 2022). current issues relating to the spread of verified false content (vfc) during elections, the pandemic, and the current war in ukraine have reignited interest in influence, or more precisely in unwanted influence, from a societal perspective, especially as it is nowadays exerted in a much more complex global media environment with personalised and algorithmically curated feeds that conceal information about vfc exposure and viewing (charquero-ballester et al., 2021; nissen et al., 2022). this paper argues that this opaque nature of the current media landscape, with a focus on social media, and the lack of bottom-up investigations of influence combined with the lack of theoretical discussions on influence (gruzd & wellman, 2014), provide little conceptual and empirical ground to understand what influence in social media entails in its diversity, and what different types of influential actors potentially exert unwanted influence in various modes of the influence process. in this paper, influence is conceptualized as the power to affect, with effect as its result (katz & lazarsfeld, 1955; mcquail & deuze, 2022); this is followed by critical reflections on how (unwanted) influence through social media has been addressed previously. the paper proposes a population-scale approach that: a) centralises a bottom-up perspective to influential actors, focusing on potential influence on populations and citizens, rather than adapting a predefined influential actor perspective focusing on either tastemakers, (micro)celebrities, or opinion leaders per se, as they can change status depending on the context, e.g. platform, subject, audience, and region (abidin, 2016; giglietto et al., 2019; jerslev & mortensen, 2018; katz & lazarsfeld, 1955; marwick, 2013), and b) highlights the citizen exposure mode of the process that is seldom studied, due to limited access to personal feeds on national population scales outside the us (e.g., allcott et al. 2019; bailey et al. 2021; canary et al. 2022; guess et al. 2019; yang, a. et al. 2021; yang, k.-c. et al. 2021). the paper asks: how do national populations in the eu differ in their exposure to vfc in terms of the topic of vfc, the actors creating it, and the demographic profile of the citizens exposed to it? and do these actors create integrated networks across and beyond eu countries? the paper hypothesises great variation across countries due to national cultural history, and political and media systems (hallin & mancini, 2004) that potentially will favour some actors over others and that will affect the way social media is used as a platform in different countries. furthermore, we expect to find differences across demographics of age and gender due to stereotypic differences in age and gender-related lifestyles and interests, and we expect to find rather integrated networks across countries due to the activities of well-known influential vfc actors. the outcome of the analysis will thus among others be to divide european countries in a vfc country typology, with inspiration from hallin & mancini. methodologically, we will utilise our access to the social science one facebook url dataset to answer the research question, and combine this with lists of verified false stories from the international fact-checking network (ifcn) fact-checkers to enable filtering of the dataset for vfc (nissen et al., 2022). furthermore, we will register overlap of source url sharing across countries. facebook is chosen as it is the most used social media platform across europe in terms of monthly active users (statista, 2022, 2023). the paper is unique in its contribution to our understanding of exposure data on national levels, and outside us, across the 27 eu countries whose susceptibility to vfc is understudied at scale (bak et al., 2022). the paper also provides an important and novel contribution in its attempt to produce a population-level country typology in europe in relation to facebook vfc exposure patterns. the dataset, scale, and scope of the study allows us to understand more general patterns and dynamics that we might be unaware of, and which can both feed into the way that we understand and measure influence, and function as an empirical grounded contribution to societal processes towards regulation of unwanted influence and transparency. references abidin, c. (2016). visibility labour: engaging with influencers’ fashion brands and #ootd advertorial campaigns on instagram. media international australia, 161(1), 86–100. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x16665177 bak, p. de p., walter, j. g., & bechmann, a. (2022). digital false information at scale in the european union: current state of research in various disciplines, and future directions. new media & society, 14614448221122146. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221122146 bailey a, gregersen t and roesner f (2021) interactions with potential mis/disinformation urls among u.s. users on facebook, 2017-2019. in: proceedings of the acm sigcomm 2021 workshop on free and open communications on the internet, virtual event usa, 27 august 2021, pp. 16–26. acm. doi: 10.1145/3473604.3474561. blumler, j. g., & mcquail, d. (1968). television in politics: its uses and influence (vol. 3). faber and faber. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/canadian-journal-ofpolitical-science-revue-canadienne-de-science-politique/article/abs/jay-g-blumlerand-denis-mcquail-television-in-politics-its-uses-and-influence-london-faber-andfaber-1968-pp-xi-379/f9cbc2e72e0d1f57b186babf42730502 canary he, wellman n and martinez ls (2022) covid-19, genetics, and risk: content analysis of facebook posts early in the coronavirus pandemic. health communication: 1–12. doi: 10.1080/10410236.2022.2027639. charquero-ballester, m., walter, j. g., nissen, i. a., & bechmann, a. (2021). different types of covid-19 misinformation have different emotional valence on twitter. big data & society, 8(2), 20539517211041280. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211041279 giglietto, f., iannelli, l., valeriani, a., & rossi, l. (2019). ‘fake news’ is the invention of a liar: how false information circulates within the hybrid news system. current sociology, 67(4), 625–642. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392119837536 gruzd, a., & wellman, b. (2014). networked influence in social media: introduction to the special issue. american behavioral scientist, 58(10), 1251–1259. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764214527087 guess a, nagler j and tucker j (2019) less than you think: prevalence and predictors of fake news dissemination on facebook. science advances 5(1). american association for the advancement of science: eaau4586. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aau4586. hallin, d. c., & mancini, p. (2004). comparing media systems: three models of media and politics. cambridge university press. humprecht e, esser f and van aelst p (2020) resilience to online disinformation: a framework for cross-national comparative research. the international journal of press/politics 25(3): 493–516. doi: 10.1177/1940161219900126. jerslev, a., & mortensen, m. (2018). celebrity in the social media age: renegotiating the public and the private. in routledge handbook of celebrity studies. routledge. katz, e., & lazarsfeld, p. f. (1955). personal influence: the part played by people in the flow of mass communications (pp. xx, 400). free press. marwick, a. e. (2013). status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. yale university press. mcquail, d. (1979). the influence and effects of mass media. in mass communication and society ed. j. curran, m gurevitch & j. woolacott (pp. 7–23). sage publications. mcquail, d. (2016). media effects and society. routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203854693 mcquail, d., & deuze, m. (2022). mcquail’s media and mass communication theory. sage. https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/mcquail%e2%80%99s-media-and-masscommunication-theory/book243524 nissen, i. a., walter, j. g., charquero-ballester, m., & bechmann, a. (2022). digital infrastructures of covid-19 misinformation: a new conceptual and analytical perspective on fact-checking. digital journalism, 0(0), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2022.2026795 reimers n and gurevych i (2019) sentence-bert: sentence embeddings using siamese bert-networks. arxiv:1908.10084 [cs]. available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10084 (accessed 29 january 2021). statista. (2022). facebook: europe daily active users by quarter 2022. statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/745383/facebook-europe-dau-by-quarter/ statista. (2023). biggest social media platforms 2022. statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-numberof-users/ syvertsen t, enli g, mjøs oj, et al. (2014) the media welfare state: nordic media in the digital era. university of michigan press. doi: 10.2307/j.ctv65swsg. paper 2 delegitimization versus populism: the case study of donald trump in our social media communication environment jennifer stromer-galley syracuse university brian mckernan syracuse university introduction scholars, journalists, and political observers have embraced the idea of populism to explain the recent and current spate of political leaders who are contributing to democratic backsliding. these politicians include u.s. president donald trump, u.k. prime minister boris johnson, indian prime minister narendra modi, and brazil’s jair bolsonaro, just to name a few. our concern with populism as a way to identify and describe problematic democratically-elected politicians is that populism is a weak analytical concept. it does not help differentiate merely problematic democratically-elected leaders from those who are truly dangerous to democracy. moreover, the object of analysis is muddy: is it ideology? is it rhetoric? is it tone? we argue that a better analytical concept is needed by which to judge political elites in democracies. using the case of the 2020 u.s. presidential election and a comparison of the social media messages of two candidates -donald trump and joseph biden – we advance the argument that politicians can be judged by the extent of their delegitimizing rhetoric. we further assert that such rhetoric is enabled by the decentralized communication environment of social media. we ascribe to the perspective of laclau (2014) that populism is a style of rhetoric rather than an ideology. all democratically-elected politicians, he argues, ascribe to populism to some degree given that the basic premise of democracy is that the voices of the public are represented in the political system. at best, as muddle (2004) notes, populism is a ‘thin’ ideology that focuses essentially on a position of antagonism towards elites. populism, though, is unhelpful analytically. first, if, as laclau (2014) argues, all politicians have some aspect of populism in their rhetoric, and there is not a clearly identifiable ideology of the populist, then populism cannot help us differentiate the ideologically problematic from the downright dangerous. engesser, ernst, esser, and büchel (2016) find that a broad range of politicians articulate support for the public, while left-leaning politicians attack economic elites and right-leaning politicians attack the media elite. given that nearly all politicians can be labeled as populists, even if the dimensions of what elites are attacked can be cleaved on different targets, it raises questions about how useful populism is as a concept. scholars have attempted to resolve this by providing additional adjectives to modify populism as a way to differentiate different politicians. for example, rowland (2021) refers to trump as a ‘nationalist populist’. we argue that such adjective + populist labeling further muddies the conceptual waters. scholars do not agree on what the right adjective + populism should be for ‘bad’ populists (right wing?, nationalist?, authoritarian?). second, and related to the first, scholars contend that there are good populists and bad populists. mouffe (2018), for example, argues that there is a need for a left populism and rowland (2021) contrasts nationalist populism (bad) with progressive populism (good). yet, if most scholars highlight populism as problematic and a contributor to democratic backsliding (müller, 2016), then to what use is the concept if it can also be applied to progressive or ‘good’ populists? third, the object of study or what makes for a populist is unclear. for some scholars it is their rhetoric (mouffe, 2021), but for others it’s the tone or style (judis, 2016). for others still, the focus is more on the context that has given rise to populism (moffitt, 2016), and the policies and actions undertaken in office that is the focus (müller, 2016). without a clear focus on the object of study, it is hard to clearly determine who is and is not a populist and what the potential implications of such are or might be. we contend instead that the lens through which politicians should be evaluated is through argumentation theory. fairclough and fairclough (2012) suggest that political discourse analysis should be understood as analysis of argumentation. the foundation of argumentation is evidence that supports claims, which are made through language. when politicians advance only claims without evidence, or make claims that are premised on false information, then a foundational premise of democratic politics is violated. this is what we call delegitimizing rhetoric when the targets of that rhetoric focus on undermining democratic institutions, processes, and actors. trump’s discourse as compared with biden’s is noteworthy for his delegitimizing rhetoric. using as a case study the 2020 presidential campaign, trump produced extensive arguments founded on lies that the democrats were stealing the election, that voting machines and voting locations were being used to manipulate votes, and after the election he repeatedly claimed that he had won, even when he knew he had not. by contrast biden never questioned election results, and underscored the importance of voting and of ensuring effective voting systems. moreover, trump baselessly attacked opponents and institutions. he delegitimized his opponents through a rhetoric of disrespect – calling opponents names, insinuating ill motives, and making false accusations. he delegitimized institutions, from government agencies, such as the federal bureau of investigation, to city governments of major cities like philadelphia, baltimore, and chicago. while scholars have highlighted the role of social media in the rise of populism (gerbaudo, 2018), we make a second argument that social media can be used to amplify delegitimization rhetoric, as politicians like trump not only bypass traditional journalism but also attack it. undermining key gatekeepers in the information environment enables delegitimizing rhetoric of democratic institutions to spread and to fail to be countered effectively, further putting the foundational pillars of democracy at risk. the utility of the concept of delegitimization is that it allows us to differentiate political messages that are truly dangerous because they are meant to destabilize democratic bedrock principles, such as the integrity of the vote and the legitimacy of alternative policy perspectives. by situating it in the context of social media messaging, we can see the ways that it manifests unchecked and gets amplified through the power of distributed network channels. references fairclough, i., & fairclough, n. (2012). political discourse analysis: a method for advanced students. london: routledge gerbaudo, p. (2018). social media and populism: an elective affinity? media, culture & society, 40(5), 745-753. doi: 10.1177/0163443718772192. judis, j. b. (2016). the populist explosion: how the great recession transformed american and european politics. new york: columbia global reports. laclau, e. (2005/2014). populism: what's in a name? (2005). in d. howarth (ed.), postmarxism, populism and critique (pp. 152-164). new york: routledge. moffit, b. (2016). the global rise of populism: performance, political style and representation. stanford, ca: stanford university press. mouffe, c. (2018). for a left populism. brooklyn, ny: verso books. mudde, c. (2004). the populist zeitgeist. government and opposition 39: 542–563. müller, j. (2016). what is populism? philadelphia, pa: university of pennsylvania press. rowland, r. (2021). the rhetoric of donald trump: nationalist populism and american democracy. manhattan, ks: university of kansas press. paper 3 partisan attention and news stories topics during the 2022 italian election fabio giglietto university of urbino carlo bo nicola righetti university of vienna anna stanziano university of rome “la sapienza” polarisation and partisan attention the prevalence of extremist positions over moderate ones in some recent elections and the emergence of hyperpartisan media (benkler et al., 2018) have brought renewed attention to the impact of political polarisation (wojcieszak, 2015) on public discourse in liberal democracies (katsambekis, 2017). concerns have been raised regarding the potential of selective political exposure and ideological polarisation as a result of the ongoing fundamental shifts in communication ecosystems. claims of skewed political news stories and partisan coverage of public issues are widespread throughout media history. nonetheless, in the last few years, several factors, such as declining public trust in traditional media (zuckerman, 2018), the emergence of social media and alternative digital media sources, have led to concerns about the social and political consequences of a surge in partisan selective exposure (lazarsfeld et al., 1968) prompted by an increasingly fragmented media environment. sunstein’s (2017) “echo chambers” metaphor (bruns, 2019) serves as a cautionary reminder about the effects of the combination of two phenomena: the tendency for individuals to self-segregate into groups with like-minded individuals, and the ability of social media users to shape their networks through a combination of platform constraints, algorithmic filters, prioritisation, and personal preferences (bakshy et al., 2015). on the supply side, social media have aided the success of hyper-partisan media by providing effective options for the growth of micro (and macro) audience niches. hyper-partisan journalistic and quasi-journalistic sources (mcnair, 2017), which are now vying for online user attention alongside mainstream news organisations, often flout established ethical principles in professional news reporting, and in some cases, deliberately publish false or misleading news stories (bhat, 2018). estimating partisan attention with social media data the political partisanship of news media outlets is a classic topic in political communication research. however, traditional methods of classification (e.g., pew research center, 2018) are costly, restrict the number of news outlets considered, and are susceptible to the standard biases of self-reported data (haenschen, 2019). new studies have emerged using digital data to measure media partisanship, resulting in three main approaches. the first analyses textual content to estimate the political bias of news media outlets (e.g., gentzkow and shapiro, 2010). the second aims to scale the political leaning of various textual items, such as documents, news articles, or blogs, using semi-automated analysis methods (e.g., laver, benoit, and garry, 2003). these approaches still require manual coding or data preparation, as they generally deal with classification problems and use semi-automated analysis methods. the third approach offers a more efficient and unbiased way of classifying political media, at least in that it is entirely data-driven. it uses automated methods, such as analysing twitter users’ political leaning through following-followers networks (barberá, 2015), or classifying the political orientation of social media users and then the news sources they share online. an example of the latter approach is the media partisanship attention scores (mpas) (faris et al., 2017). most of these approaches, however, are grounded in the u.s. bipolar political system and unsuitable for a multi-party system. more recently, faris’s approach (2017) has been adapted to the italian multiparty political system with the “multi-party media partisanship attention score” or mp-mpas (giglietto et al., 2019a). a wide range of studies has been conducted to better understand the challenges posed by this transformation to modern liberal democracies, with the goal of estimating partisan consumption of both legacy media and social media and assessing its effect on political and ideological polarisation. this paper contributes to the discussion by examining the case of the italian general election, which was held on september 25, 2022. we analyse the facebook posts around political news produced by 15 news media pages in the lead-up to the election and extract the main topics discussed by these news media. in addition, our study repurposes the original mp-mpas technique to measure the attention dedicated by different partisan online communities to digital news media sources using twitter data in a multi-party political system, with the goal of examining partisan political news consumption on social media. this work aims to map topics to news sources and (and in turn) partisan attention score and, finally, to measure the alignment between partisan attention score to media topics and prevalent party topics. methods: mp-mpas and openai powered topic clustering this paper implements an original combination of two methodological approaches: the multi-party media partisanship attention score (mp-mpas) and the openai powered topic clustering. with regards to mp-mpas, its general idea “is to categorize users first (based on the proportion of their retweets) and then, in turn, the news sources they shared” (giglietto et al., 2019a, p. 90). this approach has already been shown to be capable of shedding light on partisan information dynamics in social media (giglietto et al., 2019b). to calculate the mp-mpas score, we collected 509,219 retweets from political accounts the month before the election and then extracted 146,596 links shared by the 5,776 most active users. the method yielded a measure of partisan attention for 1,354 domains, including 15 prominent italian news outlets, on which we focused our subsequent analysis. as for the main topics discussed by news media on facebook, we analysed all the posts published by the official page of the 15 selected italian news outlets between july 21 and september 25, 2022, using several techniques powered by the openai language models. to begin, we fine-tuned openai’s ada model to carry out a binary classification task, enabling the differentiation between political and non-political posts with a high level of accuracy (f1 score: 0.97). overall, a total of 14,146 posts were subjected to analysis, with 12,604 posts categorised as political. to retrieve a 1536dimensional vector document embedding for each political post, we utilised the "textembedding-ada-002" model. the document embedding approach is a natural language processing technique that involves representing textual documents – in our case, social media posts – as dense vectors in a high-dimensional space. lastly, we utilised k means cluster analysis, with auto-topic labelling (text-davinci-003), to identify the salient topics that emerged from the political posts. we successfully identified 94 clusters, which allowed us to group similar posts together and allocate labels to each cluster based on the most frequently occurring topics. subsequently, we mapped the partisan attention score of news sources on their corresponding facebook pages, and then to the relevant topical clusters. this process allowed us to gauge the level of partisan attention devoted to each of the identified topical clusters and to distinguish between insular and cross-partisan topics. while based on a single national context, the results of this study offer useful insights into the role played on social media by different sources of information, which are sometimes used as a meeting/clash space between different partisan communities, while other times they act as megaphones for the benefit of specific communities. beside these insights, the study introduces an original method that leverage social media traces to detect and map campaign topics on a latent multi-dimensional ideological space. references bakshy, e., messing, s., & adamic, l.a. (2015). exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on facebook. science, 348 (6239), 1130-1132. barberá, p. (2015). birds of the same feather tweet together: bayesian ideal point estimation using twitter data. political analysis, 23 (1), 76-91. benkler, y., faris, r., & roberts, h. (2018). network propaganda: manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in american politics. oxford university press. bhat, p. (2018). advertisements in the age of hyper-partisan media: breitbart’s #dumpkelloggs campaign. in gutsche, r. e. (eds.), the trump presidency, journalism, and democracy (192-205). routledge. bruns, a. (2019). are filter bubbles real? john wiley & sons. faris, r., roberts, h., etling, b., bourassa, n., zuckerman, e., &benkler, y. (2017). partisanship, propaganda, and disinformation: online media and the 2016 us presidential election. berkman klein center research publication 2017-6, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3019414. gentzkow, m., & shapiro, j.m. (2010). what drives media slant? evidence from u.s. daily newspapers. econometrica, 78 (1), 35-71. giglietto, f., righetti, n., marino, g., & rossi, l. (2019a). multi-party media partisanship attention score: estimating partisan attention of news media sources using twitter data in the lead-up to 2018 italian election. comunicazione politica, 20(1), 85-108. giglietto, f., valeriani, a., righetti, n., & marino, g. (2019b). diverging patterns of interaction around news on social media: insularity and partisanship during the 2018 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3019414 italian election campaign. information, communication & society, 22(11), 16101629. haenschen, k. (2019). self-reported versus digitally recorded: measuring political activity on facebook. social science computer review, january, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0894439318813586. katsambekis g. (2017). the populist surge in post-democratic times: theoretical and political challenges. the political quarterly. 88(2), pp. 202-210. laver, m., benoit, k., &garry, j. (2003). extracting policy positions from political texts using words as data. american political science review, 97 (2), 311-331. lazarsfeld, p.f., berelson, b., & gaudet, h. (1968). the people’s choice: how the voter makes up his mind in a presidential campaign. columbia university press. mcnair, b. (2017). after objectivity? schudson’s sociology of journalism in the era of post-factuality. journalism studies, 18 (10), 1318-1333. pew research center (2018). news media and political attitudes in italy, http://www.pewglobal.org/fact-sheet/news-media-and-political-attitudes-in-italy/. sunstein, c.r. (2017). #republic: divided democracy in the age of social media. princeton university press. wojcieszak m. (2015). political polarization. in mazzoleni g. (eds.), the international encyclopedia of political communication. wiley-blackwell. zuckerman, e. (2018). draft chapter 1: the necessity for trust. washington, dc: knight commission on trust, media and democracy, https://medium.com/trustmedia-and-democracy/renewing-americans-trust-b16a63eb5e63. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0894439318813586 http://www.pewglobal.org/fact-sheet/news-media-and-political-attitudes-in-italy/ https://medium.com/trust-media-and-democracy/renewing-americans-trust-b16a63eb5e63 https://medium.com/trust-media-and-democracy/renewing-americans-trust-b16a63eb5e63 paper 4 types of polarisation and their operationalisation in digital and social media research axel bruns digital media research centre, queensland university of technology tariq choucair digital media research centre, queensland university of technology katharina esau digital media research centre, queensland university of technology sebastian svegaard digital media research centre, queensland university of technology samantha vilkins digital media research centre, queensland university of technology introduction apparently increasing partisanship and polarisation, especially online, poses an urgent threat to societal cohesion in many democratic nations; polarisation is also a critical geopolitical concern when actively promoted by bad-faith actors to undermine citizens’ trust in democratic institutions. but not all forms of partisanship and polarisation are inherently pernicious and destructive: milder forms of partisanship also motivate civic participation, constructive political debate, and policy advancement (le bas, 2018; mclaughlin, 2018; mouffe, 1993). this raises complex questions about when polarisation shifts from constructive to destructive; whether this is linked with a move from issue-based, ideological polarisation to identity-based, affective polarisation; and at what point such problematic developments should be countered with active initiatives to depolarise. digital communication research provides new opportunities for studying polarisation in terms of traceable interactions and scale, but adds further complexity to an already challenging concept. in this paper, we draw on literature from political science and media and communication studies, concluding that much of the extant research studies polarisation without sufficiently conceptualising it (cf. kubin & von sikorski, 2021). this lack of conceptual definition is reflective of disagreements in these fields about what counts as polarisation and about how to assess its extent and impacts. this can lead to substantial problems when operationalising the concept of polarisation in digital media research. key problems include the conflation of different forms of polarisation, the unquestioned adoption of technologically determinist perspectives, and the overdiagnosis of polarisation as destructive and static. building upon existing literature from political science and media and communication studies, we argue for a better demarcation of distinct concepts and definitions in the study of political polarisation as a threat to democracy. we describe the latter phenomenon as destructive political polarisation, in contradistinction from milder and more benign forms of political partisanship. reviewing the diverse range of polarisation types identified in the literature across both fields, we highlight their key attributes and outline methodological approaches to their operationalisation in mixed-methods research that draws on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of digital trace data. polarisation and its definitions polarisation has gained a negative connotation due to widespread popular and media concerns that societies are becoming increasingly divided, or polarised, in a way that is destructive for democracies. in popular use, the term builds on a blurry definition that encompasses a spectrum from mild political disagreement to outright hostility, and often carries an a priori negative or destructive connotation. by contrast, the social sciences have historically used 'polarisation' in a neutral sense to refer to divisions between societal groups. these divisions can be understood as motivated by different attributes (e.g., ideologies, positions, issues, identities, values, affect, emotions), as operating at different levels (macro, meso, micro), and as focussing on different actors (e.g., politicians, political parties, citizens, journalists, media outlets). our full paper works through these definitions of polarisation and their key identified attributes, and outlines how they can be operationalised in digital media research. for instance, ideological polarisation can be understood as the distance between positions on one or more specific policy issues (dimaggio et al., 1996; fiorina & abrams, 2008); traditional definitions in political science focus on elite or mass polarisation through political ideology, capturing (a) the level of agreement or disagreement with specific positions on political or societal issues; or (b) the placement in a broader ideological spectrum. in digital media, this may be investigated through computational or manual analyses of how a diverse range of mainstream or niche media outlets cover and frame the same issues, in terms of their language, tone, sourcing practices, and overall coverage choices (cf. feldman et al., 2017); additionally, it is possible to trace how social media users in turn share and engage with such material in their own discussions (giglietto et al., 2019). but political polarisation can also be understood through concepts other than ideology. affective polarisation is furthered through positive or negative sentiment expressed towards members of inand outgroups, resulting in extreme cases in hatred and contempt towards outgroups (e.g., iyengar et al., 2012; mason, 2015; hobolt et al., 2021). some empirical studies suggest that such affective polarisation can increase even while ideological differences remain static (e.g., iyengar et. al., 2012; lelkes, 2016). such polarisation is thus defined by hostility towards out-group members, and solidarity with one’s own ingroup; notwithstanding the limits of simple computational sentiment analysis as applied to short-form social media texts, such discursive patterns can be assessed and analysed qualitatively and quantitatively through a combination of manual and automated evaluation of affective language and audiovisual components in social media discussions (e.g. yarchi et al., 2021). further, it is also possible to evaluate networks of communication to determine the patterns of interaction between the various discursive groups, in order to examine what yarchi et al. (2021) term interactional polarisation. this approach is exemplified by studies of climate change discussions on twitter (williams et al., 2015) and reddit (treen et al., 2022). polarisation could be defined here simply by the absence of interaction between opposing sides, yet this may represent an oversimplification: as studies such as williams et al.’s analysis of climate change hashtags on twitter show, the various communicative affordances of specific platforms (here, @mentions, retweets, and following) may be used in diverging ways to attack, support, connect, and otherwise engage in constructive or destructive ways with inand outgroup members (also cf. giglietto et al., 2019). network analysis, then, can point to distinct patterns of interaction with different groups, but only a further analysis of the content of such interactions will determine their positive or negative valence. this introduction to three major types of polarisation is far from exhaustive, of course; we will discuss other possible definitions in the full paper, and outline how they may be operationalised in applied digital media research. further, the approaches we have sketched out here may be employed at varying levels of specificity: in the context of distinct issues (e.g. a momentary political event or crisis); of longer-term debates (e.g. of major themes like climate change or minority rights); or even across multiple themes (e.g. to examine whether inand outgroup patterns remain stable independent of the specific issues at hand). identifying destructive polarisation finally, a key aim of our work is also to determine whether and when the patterns of polarisation that may be observed in empirical analysis should be seen as inherently problematic. mccoy et al. (2018) argue that, although some political and societal polarisation is beneficial to a functioning democracy (e.g., by enabling political parties to define their distinct positions on key issues and thereby offer a clear choice to electors), once a level of “severe polarization” is reached democratic societies will struggle to maintain productive political processes. building on these ideas, we therefore propose a set of criteria for what we describe as destructive political polarisation. we suggest that the following key elements may serve as indicators of destructive polarisation in online communication: (a) breakdown of communication between opposing groups; (b) discrediting and dismissal of oppositional information; (c) erasure of complexities in the discussion of issues; (d) disproportionate space for and attention to extreme voices; (e) exclusion of opposing views through appeals to emotion. this is not intended to represent an exhaustive or definitive list, nor do all these elements need to be present in any one case for polarisation to be destructive. however, we posit that if one of these elements is present, it is likely that others are as well, as they are related and connected to each other in complex ways. the conceptual and methodological considerations presented in our paper make a substantial contribution to the identification of these destructive tendencies in digital and social media communication, and thus also serve as a first step towards addressing such problematic dynamics. references dimaggio, p., evans, j., & bryson, b. (1996). have american’s social attitudes become more polarized? american journal of sociology, 102(3), 690–755. feldman, l., hart, p.s., & milosevic, t. (2017). polarizing news? representations of threat and efficacy in leading us newspapers’ coverage of climate change. public understanding of science, 26(4), 481–497. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662515595348 fiorina, m.p., & abrams, s.j. (2008). political polarization in the american public. annual review of political science, 11(1), 563–588. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.11.053106.153836 giglietto, f., valeriani, a., righetti, n., & marino, g. (2019). diverging patterns of interaction around news on social media: insularity and partisanship during the 2018 italian election campaign. information, communication & society, 22(11), 1610– 1629. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1629692 hobolt, s.b., leeper, t.j., & tilley, j. (2021). divided by the vote: affective polarization in the wake of the brexit referendum. british journal of political science, 51(4), 1476-1493. https://www.cambridge.org/core/article/divided-by-the-vote-affectivepolarization-in-the-wake-of-the-brexitreferendum/2393143858c3fa161af795269a65b900 iyengar, s., sood, g., & lelkes, y. (2012). affect, not ideology: a social identity perspective on polarization. public opinion quarterly, 76(3), 405–431. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfs038 kubin, e., & von sikorski, c. (2021). the role of (social) media in political polarization: a systematic review. annals of the international communication association, 45(3), 188–206. https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.2021.1976070 lelkes, y. (2016). mass polarization: manifestations and measurements, public opinion quarterly, 80(1), 392–410. https://academic.oup.com/poq/articlelookup/doi/10.1093/poq/nfw005 le bas, a. (2018). can polarization be positive? conflict and institutional development in africa. american behavioral scientist. 62(1), 59-74. mason, l. (2015). “i disrespectfully agree”: the differential effects of partisan sorting on social and issue polarization. american journal of political science, 59(1), 128– 145. mccoy, j., rahman, t., & somer, m. (2018). polarization and the global crisis of democracy: common patterns, dynamics, and pernicious consequences for democratic polities. american behavioral scientist, 62(1), 16–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764218759576 mclaughlin, b. (2018). commitment to the team. perceived conflict and political polarization. journal of media psychology, 30(1), 41-51. mouffe, c. (1993). the return of the political. verso. treen, k., williams, h., o’neill, s., & coan, t.g. (2022). discussion of climate change on reddit: polarized discourse or deliberative debate? environmental communication, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2022.2050776 williams, h.t.p., mcmurray, j.r., kurz, t., & lambert, f.h. (2015). network analysis reveals open forums and echo chambers in social media discussions of climate change. global environmental change, 32, 126–138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2015.03.006 https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662515595348 https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.11.053106.153836 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1629692 https://www.cambridge.org/core/article/divided-by-the-vote-affective-polarization-in-the-wake-of-the-brexit-referendum/2393143858c3fa161af795269a65b900 https://www.cambridge.org/core/article/divided-by-the-vote-affective-polarization-in-the-wake-of-the-brexit-referendum/2393143858c3fa161af795269a65b900 https://www.cambridge.org/core/article/divided-by-the-vote-affective-polarization-in-the-wake-of-the-brexit-referendum/2393143858c3fa161af795269a65b900 https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfs038 https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.2021.1976070 https://academic.oup.com/poq/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/poq/nfw005 https://academic.oup.com/poq/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/poq/nfw005 https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764218759576 https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2022.2050776 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2015.03.006 yarchi, m., baden, c., & kligler-vilenchik, n. (2021). political polarization on the digital sphere: a cross-platform, over-time analysis of interactional, positional, and affective polarization on social media. political communication, 38(1–2), 98–139. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1785067 https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1785067 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): decusatis, c.m. (2023, october). stable science and fickle bodies: an examination of trust and the construction of expertise on r/skincareaddiction. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. stable science and fickle bodies: an examination of trust and the construction of expertise on r/skincareaddiction cara maria decusatis university of maryland introduction while there is considerable research on the topic of trust when it comes to health information or news media, there is less work examining how trust and expertise are conceptualized for information that may straddle both subjective and objective approaches to knowledge. in this paper, i use the subreddit r/skincareaddiction as a fieldsite to examine how users construct skincare expertise and position skincare expertise in relation to formalized bioscience and experiential knowledge. building on science and technology studies’ theories of lay expertise and embodiment, i investigate how users interpret, share, and enact skincare and subreddit competence, discern trustworthy information, and negotiate the boundaries of science. specifically, this research asks the following questions: (1) how do users of r/skincareaddiction discuss trust, and what factors contribute to or detract from the creation of trustworthiness? (2) how do users of r/skincareaddiction evaluate skincare expertise? (2a) what are the ways users of r/skincareaddiction perform skincare expertise? (3) how do users of r/skincareaddiction view the body as it relates to skincare? through a grounded theory analysis of subreddit posts and comments, i argue that r/skincareaddiction users engage in forms of boundary work to preserve the expertise of medical professionals and the perceived infallibility of science. i argue that such delineations both uphold formalized systems of expertise and make space for alternative, community-specific forms of skincare expertise. this community-specific expertise is reified through community norms and agreed upon beliefs, such as the understanding that “your mileage may vary” and “everyone’s skin is different”. i situate these community beliefs within feminist understandings of embodied knowledge and argue that these beliefs are what afford users participation in “expert” conversations from which they might otherwise be excluded. theoretical frameworks this research is situated within a larger body of literature in science and technology studies (sts) that investigates how expertise is defined and bounded in scientific and non-scientific domains. that primary theoretical framework used in this research is sts and feminist sts understandings of expertise, with specific focus paid to the tensions between lay and embodied expertise and “type 1” expertise (haraway, 1988; collins & evans, 2002). the theory of lay expertise (epstein, 1995; bryan wynne, 1996) is essential to unpacking r/skincareaddiction because it helps illuminate the central tension present in this research– how do people determine expertise in a lay community, when the topic of that expertise (skincare) is ill-defined and distributed across both scientific and non-scientific domains? drawing from the work of scholars such as h.m. collins and robert evans (2002), bryan wynne (1996), and steven epstein (1995), i examine how lay expertise can be used as a framework to analyze skincare authority within the subreddit r/skincareaddiction. in addition, i utilize the feminist theories of embodiment and selfknowledge to examine the corporeal and embedded aspects of skincare expertise (barad, 1999; suchman, 2007; haraway, 1988; mol, 2002). expertise provides a valuable lens from which to analyze r/skincareaddiction due to the unique nature of skincare and the function of the subreddit format. like other special interest subreddits, r/skincareaddiction’s breadth and depth help create a repository of collective knowledge that users can consult for relevant or helpful information. the subreddit features the perspectives and advice of a mix of usersthe majority of whom are skincare hobbyists, while others are dermatologists, cosmetic chemists, estheticians, and those with professions related to skincare. as a result, the advice offered and its respective rationale can differ, and users are left to determine which information they trust and deem credible, as well as whose expertise they value. methods this study employs aspects of grounded theory to analyze posts and comments on r/skincareaddiction. the sample size of posts was first limited to those that had a keyword appearance of “trust” in the title or text of the post. the purpose of this exclusion criteria was to confine the data set and increase the chances of yielding discussions that engaged more explicitly with notions of credibility, expertise, and authority. these posts were then sorted by the categorical tag that the subreddit assigns to each post (also known as “flair.) this was accomplished by using the search query “flair: [flair name] and trust”. the keyword and flair search results were then filtered using the “top” and “all time” facets to show the posts with the highest vote counts (solutionengineering, 2021). the top ten posts and all associated comments of each category were then screen shot using a full page screen capture application. the screen captures were then imported into atlas.ti. in total there were 501 quotations (text that received coding) spanning 14 different flair groups. codes were developed using an inductive and iterative coding process adopted from the grounded theory approach (charmaz, 2014). the first round of coding helped develop both thematic codes (“dermatology”) as well as process codes (“stating my experience”). the data then underwent two more rounds of coding resulting in a codebook of 59 codes. limitations to this study included: use of a single coder, use of a single keyword for inclusion criteria, possible decontextualization during the coding process, and a possible bias towards newer posts. findings there were three major themes that emerged from this research: (1) dermatology and medical/scientific credibility (2) trust and skincare (3) specificity and the role of personal responsibility in skincare. overall, users found dermatologists to be credible due their extensive training, unique medical knowledge, and participation in the medical system. the expertise of dermatologists was frequently contrasted to that of the users’ of the subreddit as a way to demonstrate the dermatologists’ intellectual authority. dermatologists were also characterized as practitioners of science who were not influenced by profit. interestingly, some users did not see dermatologists as authorities on skincare because they were doctors. users most explicitly invoked trust when discussing skincare products. certain factors signaled the trustworthiness of a product, such as the brand, ingredients, proximity to science, or european origin. the greatest factor associated with distrust was monetization. other themes that signaled distrust were cheating or inadequate regulations, absence of science, big box online retailers, or inadequate ingredients. some users also expressed distrust in the skincare addiction community. the most complex and overt conversations about trust had to do with trusting sunscreen. one final theme to emerge was the idea of self-knowledge or self-expertise. users encouraged people to trust their gut, listen to their body, and understand that skincare is extremely personal. relatedly, many users discussed the role and effort required to achieve good skin and engage in the practice of skincare. this involved doing their research, fixing their skin on their own, being a critical consumer, and understanding that their mileage will always vary. conclusion the findings of this study contribute to the larger body of work around the construction of expertise and the use of science to bolster or undermine that expertise in lay communities. the subreddit r/skincareaddiction provides a unique context in which to analyze expertise due to the subreddit’s fluid understanding of what constitutes skincare and whether it belongs in the domain of bioscience or that of personal experience and aesthetic preference. references barad, karen. 1999. “agential realism: feminist interventions in understanding scientific practices.” in the science studies reader, ed. m. biagioli. london: routledge, 1999. pp. 1-11. charmaz, kathy. 2014. constructing grounded theory. 2nd edition. introducing qualitative methods. london; thousand oaks, calif: sage. collins, h. m., & evans, r. (2002). the third wave of science studies: studies of expertise and experience. social studies of science, 32(2), 235–296. epstein, s. (1995). the construction of lay expertise: aids activism and the forging of credibility in the reform of clinical trials. science, technology, & human values, 20(4), 408-437. haraway, d. (1988). situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. feminist studies, 14(3), 575-599. mol, a. (2002). the body multiple: ontology in medical practice. duke university press. solutionengineering. (2021, june 22). evolving the best sort for reddit’s home feed [online forum post]. reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/o5tjcn/evolving_the_best_sort_for_reddi ts_home_feed/ suchman, l. (2007). feminist sts and the sciences of the artificial. the handbook of science and technology studies, 3, 139-164. wynne, b. (1996). may the sheep safely graze? a reflexive view of the expert-lay knowledge divide. risk, environment and modernity: towards a new ecology, 40, 44. https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/o5tjcn/evolving_the_best_sort_for_reddits_home_feed/ https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/o5tjcn/evolving_the_best_sort_for_reddits_home_feed/ selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 the zealous practices of tech industry leaders sara reinis university of pennsylvania introduction prepping for the apocalypse. fighting for eternal life. building separatist compounds for like-minded people. reproducing to fill the world with chosen ones. manifestos to recruit believers. all these practices are age-old characteristics of religious zealots and sound like the makings of a promising cult docuseries. and yet, they are also increasingly common obsessions of leaders of the american tech industry. from building luxury bunkers to hoping cryonic freezing could make resurrection possible, many billionaire and multi-millionaire founders, engineers, and vcs are investing time, money, and attention into speculative pursuits that are often considered the realm of religious paranoia. through a conjunctural analysis, this research aims to examine a set of religiously coded practices to reveal the teleological formations and apocalyptic anticipations of some of the world’s most influential tech elite. what do these practices reveal about how the “religion of technology” persists today? what future do they anticipate and create? theoretical framework & approach following the work of stuart hall, my exploratory research on this project takes the form of conjunctural analysis (hall, 1978). as such, i aim to be “located between the specificity of the moment and the long duree of the epoch” (grossberg, 2019, p. 42). in this vein, my analysis examines a select few practices of current tech industry leaders through multimedia analysis while situating the conversation within the overall context of these leaders increasingly taking up more power in shaping our ideological, sociopolitical, and economic landscapes. david noble’s (1999) work on the “religion of technology” provides a crucial foundation for this project, which seeks to affirm his fundamental thesis that religious ideology and the pursuit of technological innovation in the west are inextricably bound. noble insists that his comparisons to religion are not merely metaphorical, but rather must be understood “literally and historically, to indicate that modern technology and religion suggested citation (apa): reinis, s. (2024, october). the zealous practices of tech industry leaders. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. have evolved together and that, as a result, the technological enterprise has been and remains suffused with religious belief” (p. 5). this research will also contribute to scholarly work aiming to identify and codify the ideology of silicon valley (gebru & torres, 2024; geraci, 2010; turner, 2008). by connecting the techno-solutionist practices of today’s tech elite to questions that have historically been explored via religious interventions, i hope to decenter appeals to rationality and expose the underlying values and emotions that drive these decisions. additionally, this framework requires taking these practices seriously as symptomatic of an underlying belief system—rather than just the quirks of people with too much money on their hands. this research will unpack three core focuses: separatist communities, conquering death, and apocalypse prep. findings separatist compounds. through the more temporary retreats and more permanent attempts at creating entirely new cities and states, the tech elite are preoccupied with creating spaces of “like-minded” individuals. in an attempt to cut out nonbelievers (skeptics and government regulators), there is a wave of people seeking to create communes where full ideological buy-in is necessary. these projects are gaining a following in silicon valley under the label “network states,” an idea and term developed by balaji srinivasan—whose fund, conferences, and now school in singapore have attracted the endorsement and investment of silicon valley billionaires. srinivasan has described this movement as a form of faith in “tech zionism” (duran, 2024). conquering death. going beyond digital immortality (kneese, 2023), there are two core ways of resisting death gaining traction: longevity and resurrection. within the longevity space, aging is often presented as a disease in need of curing. those preoccupied with longevity often have in-depth regimens of supplements and biohacking routines. for those who are more extreme, they promote the practice of infusing themselves with “young blood.” a prime example of this is bryan johnson who spends $2 million annually on his own approach to anti-aging and uses blood from his son to lower his “biological age” (heller, 2023). while there are varying extremes, anti-aging and beating death is a widespread preoccupation with the likes of jeff bezos investing millions in anti-aging startup altos (regalado, 2021). additionally, cryonics, the act of freezing one’s recently deceased body with hopes of being resuscitated in the future when technology advances has captured the attention of powerful vc peter theil and sam altman who have both signed up for the service. apocalypse prep. fears about the end of the world as we know it seem to haunt, or perhaps excite, many tech leaders. whether climate collapse, an ai takeover, or societal unrest, many tech leaders have their eyes on potential doomsdays. meta founder and ceo mark zuckerberg, for example, is preparing a 5,000 square foot luxury bunker under his home in hawaii (scrimgeour, 2023). openai leader sam altman—who has said that ai may cause human extinction even as he develops it—has a stash of guns, gold, and gas masks (nguyen, 2024). and then, of course, there are those who think going underground won’t be enough and that going to space is a safer bet (rubenstein, 2024). as tech elites look deep into the underground of our planet and beyond the planet for solutions, we must ask, doomsday for whom? there is a pervasive sense not of dread, but of eager anticipation for those who will be spared from collapse. this is aligned with many doomsday cults who warn of armageddon but also excitedly anticipate it as chosen ones who will be spared. crucially, we must also account for the fact that these leaders are fabricating futures in both senses of the world: they created imagined narratives of our future and wield the power to make it so. conclusion assessing these practices begins to reveal a clear eschatology at play. there is a destiny in mind that humanity is, and ought to be, marching toward. in his conclusion noble (1999) states, "if the religion of technology once fostered visions of social renovation, it also fueled fantasies of escaping society altogether…simply, the technological pursuit of salvation has become a threat to our survival” (p. 208). such escapist tendencies (from others, death, and the world as we know it) seem to fuel today’s tech leaders. there is an underlying sense of inevitability coupled with excited proclamations of progress. but who gets to escape society? who gets left behind in their visions of new worlds? assessing these practices starts to assemble a picture of the grand cosmic narrative at play. zealotry—and its by-any-means-necessary certainty—is justified through a vision of humanity and technology’s destiny. if technology is our salvation, then regulating it and questioning it is a moral flaw. additionally, the idea of the chosen and the damned starts to be revealed. within this cosmic vision, who gets to transcend? who gets to be saved? who is collateral on the path to sacred progress? references duran, g. (2024, april 26). the tech baron seeking to purge san francisco of “blues.” the new republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasannetwork-state-plutocrat gebru, t., & torres, é. p. (2024). the tescreal bundle: eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence. first monday. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13636 geraci, r. m. (2010). apocalyptic ai: visions of heaven in robotics, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality. oxford university press. grossberg, l. (2019). cultural studies in search of a method, or looking for conjunctural analysis. new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics, 96(1), 38–68. hall, s. (ed.). (1978). policing the crisis: mugging, the state, and law and order. macmillan. heller, k. (2023, november 6). ‘aging is a disease’: inside the drive to postpone death indefinitely. washington post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/ofinterest/2023/11/06/longevity-aging-disease/ kneese, t. (2023). death glitch: how techno-solutionism fails us in this life and beyond. in death glitch. yale university press. https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300275001 nguyen, b. (2024, february 20). meet sam altman, the openai ceo who learned to code at 8 and is a doomsday prepper with a stash of guns and gold. business insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-chatgpt-openai-ceo-careernet-worth-ycombinator-prepper-2023-1 noble, d. f. (1999). the religion of technology: the divinity of man and the spirit of invention (new edition, with a new preface). penguin books. regalado, a. (2021, september 4). meet altos labs, silicon valley’s latest wild bet on living forever. mit technology review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/04/1034364/altos-labs-siliconvalleys-jeff-bezos-milner-bet-living-forever/ rubenstein, m.-j. (2024). astrotopia: the dangerous religion of the corporate space race. university of chicago press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/a/bo184287883.html scrimgeour, g. (2023, december 14). inside mark zuckerberg’s top-secret hawaii compound | wired. https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-insidehawaii-compound/ turner, f. (2008). from counterculture to cyberculture: stewart brand, the whole earth network, and the rise of digital utopianism. university of chicago press. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): svegaard, s. f. k. & vilkins, s. (2024, october). all politics is local: news influencers and audience engagement in local and state politics discourse dynamics on tiktok. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. all politics is local: news influencers and audience engagement in local and state politics discourse dynamics on tiktok sebastian f. k. svegaard queensland university of technology samantha vilkins queensland university of technology in the age of the “video-first internet” (broderick, 2023), tiktok has rapidly established itself as a fixture for debate on the state of the web and society at large. the platform serves as a primary generator of trends and viral content, and as a locus for political concerns around globalisation, surveillance and privacy. moves to ban tiktok conquered headlines in the united states through 2023, and in australia, the app was prohibited on government devices in april (mcguirk, 2023). despite this, political dialogue and journalistic engagement on tiktok persisted. according to the digital news report 2023, the use of tiktok for news continues to rise amongst younger australians. yet, the attention to detailed political discourse on these platforms in academic research is still emerging (e.g. literat, 2021). across the political and academic spheres, the focus has mainly been on perceived threats of the platform itself, such as international influence either from the platform’s chinese business origins or the rapid importation, adoption, and cycling of international cultural trends. what is considerably understudied is how tiktok is forging connections in political discourses more locally. grasping the usage and impact of tiktok across demographics is a complex challenge. while tiktok may not have the market capture of behemoths like facebook, it is a rising generator and driver of discourses online. tiktok is not currently the top provider of news content for any demographic, at least in australia (park et al, 2023), but this use is growing, alongside instinctual use as a search engine for gen z for everything from recipes to current events (huang, 2022). in 2024, data from the pew research centre revealed that almost 40% of us tiktok users were now in their 30s and 40s, rather than gen z, and that a majority of content was uploaded by a minority of users (bestvater, 2024). parallels with twitter pre-x present themselves – not the most widely used platform, but the one that draws all the attention, driven by superusers. indeed, meme documentation website knowyourmeme.com reported that tiktok took over twitter as primary origin source for memes in the first few months of 2022 (walker, 2022). growing generational differences in behaviour on the app, as well as its unique affordances, means political discourse on tiktok may operate differently to elsewhere. as susan grantham (2023) has shown, local politicians can attain success—in form of responses and reactions—on the platform by playing to and with these affordances and adhering to tiktok aesthetics and styles. however, we do not yet know if and how wider political debate from other actors, including influencers, news, grassroots organisers etc., play out on tiktok, nor the relative reach and engagement with content posted by these actors. an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods approach for studying the role of video in political discourse is especially needed in order to grasp the range of uses of the platform and its content affordances, such as voiceovers, music, editing, and filters (svegaard, 2022), as well as infrastructure affordances, such as stitches, topics, and music-as-search—and the work involved in these layers of political engagement (abidin, 2016). in this paper, we present an exploration of political discourses on tiktok through the case study of local city council elections for brisbane in the state of queensland, australia, and for the later state elections in queensland. regular collections of videos were conducted in the four weeks before and after the elections on respectively 13 march 2024 (city) and 26 october 2024 (state). the videos were drawn from a growing, snowballed list of key topic search terms originating from local media coverage and previous collections. video metadata was recorded using the zeeschuimer (peeters, 2023) tool. the timing and structure of the local and state elections in brisbane and queensland offer a fortunate opportunity to study the different discourses which may arise at different levels of politics amongst similar communities. australia’s premier elections analyst predicted in january that the timing of the queensland state election in late 2024 and upcoming federal australian election in early 2025 would have the brisbane council elections “dissected for their state and federal implications” (green, 2024, para 3) with greater attention than usual. the brisbane city council is also unique as australia’s largest local authority, with comparable responsibility to small states and territories in terms of responsibility for public infrastructure and services (green, 2024). furthermore, queensland has long been a fixation of national political discourses, with a complicated history melding economic socialism and social conservatism (head, 1986). the most recent federal election in 2022 sparked interest in a new shift in queensland politics: the conservative liberal-national party coalition has controlled the council for over 16 years, while the opposing labor party has controlled the queensland state government for nearly 10; as of 2022, inner-city brisbane has three greens party federal electorates—more than any other city (riga, 2023). with increasing investment and interest in the queensland greens, both the discourses and visible actors of queensland electoral campaigns are in a new state of flux. in our study, we focus on the discursive dynamics of the broader local community both separately and in response to the communication of candidates. we draw on research on the social news landscape and the role of ‘newsfluencers’ and community narratives amidst changing audience expectations (hurcombe, 2022), and clustering of crossideological ties in social media news sharing over time (angus et al, 2023). through this, we contrast the topic-selective engagement across various actors, from mainstream and national news outlets, local or alternative media, businesses, organisations, political campaigners, and unaffiliated individual users. as such, we focus on how local tiktok users respond to, remix, engage with, and disseminate political communication on tiktok, as well as how they create their own political content, such as advocating for/against a candidate, an issue, or engaging in commentary on the wider election process. we take a mixed-methods approach to our analysis. collecting through zeeschuimer provides a set of metadata points, which can be used to assess reach, engagement, and responses relating to videos, themes, or other trends, while the method of collection – a scroll-along – gives us a visual overview of the video uploads. in doing so, we are working with tiktok’s algorithm, allowing it to aid us in curating a feed that focuses on local and state politics to ensure maximum exposure for us to the relevant content. in addition to collecting larger amounts of metadata, we will take random samples of our feed and do a closer reading of emerging video (downloaded using jdownloader2) and text content in terms of discourse and use of tiktok affordances. through this, we explore the political debate landscape on tiktok in the example of local and state elections in brisbane and queensland, which serve as a discreet time period as well as a wider theme through which to understand political discourse on tiktok. elections are traditionally times of heightened political interest and debate, where everything from the hyper-local to the global may become points of contention and debate. by using the elections rather than a random time period, we hope to get a better understanding of tiktok’s use as a tool in political debate as we can expect higher than usual engagement. references abidin, c. (2016). visibility labour: engaging with influencers’ fashion brands and #ootd advertorial campaigns on instagram. media international australia, 161(1), 86– 100. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x16665177 angus, d., bruns, a., hurcombe, e., harrington, s., & (jane) tan, x. y. (2023). computational communication methods for examining problematic news-sharing practices on facebook at scale. social media + society, 9(3), 20563051231196880. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231196880 bestvater, s. (2024, february 22). how u.s. adults use tiktok. pew research center: internet, science & tech. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2024/02/22/how-u-sadults-use-tiktok/ broderick, r. (2023, november 9). is the web actually evaporating? garbage day. https://www.garbageday.email/p/is-the-web-actually-evaporating grantham, s. (2023). tiktoking towards the ballot box: a study on the use of tiktok by queensland’s political leaders. australian and new zealand communication association, te whanganui-a-tara / wellington. green, a. (2024, january 11). brisbane city council election guide launched. https://antonygreen.com.au/brisbane-city-council-election-guide-launched/ head, b. (1986). the queensland difference. politics, 21(1), 118–122. https://doi.org/10.1080/00323268608401986 huang, k. (2022, september 16). for gen z, tiktok is the new search engine. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/technology/gen-z-tiktok-searchengine.html hurcombe, e. (2022). social news: how born-digital outlets transformed journalism. springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91712-8 literat, i., & kligler-vilenchik, n. (2021). how popular culture prompts youth collective political expression and cross-cutting political talk on social media: a cross-platform analysis. social media + society, 7(2), 20563051211008821. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211008821 mcguirk, r. (2023, april 4). australia bans tiktok from federal government devices. ap news. https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-australia-ban-government-devicesce06a8d4215bbf8b85b692d91f96cf32 park, s., mcguinness, k., fisher, c., lee, j. y., mccallum, k., cai, x., chatskin, m., mardjianto, f. x. l. d., & yao, s. (pinker). (2023). digital news report: australia 2023 (australia) [report]. news and media research centre. https://apo.org.au/node/322606 peeters, s. (2023). zeeschuimer (v1.4) [computer software]. zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7525702 riga, r. (2023, august 18). a green wave could be on the horizon and it spells trouble for labor and the lnp in queensland. abc news. https://www.abc.net.au/news/202308-19/qld-green-wave-politics-labor-albanese/102746112 svegaard, s. f. k. (2022). ”all the feels!”: music, critique and affect in fanmade music videos. walker, a. (2022, august 29). where do memes come from? the top platforms from 2010-2022. know your meme. https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/insights/where-domemes-come-from-the-top-platforms-from-2010-2022 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): redeker, d. (2024, october). trust in alternative governors: exploring user confidence in companies, states and civil society in platform content moderation. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. trust in alternative governors: exploring user confidence in companies, states and civil society in platform content moderation dennis redeker university of bremen introduction social media platforms such as facebook, x and tiktok are the “new governors” or “custodians” of the internet (klonick 2018; gillespie 2018). how they moderate global speech online affects the communication practices of billions of people and it can make or break social movements and political resistance, and generally be a critical risk factor for human rights violations. these platforms are increasingly joined by states, international organizations, civil society, journalists and others in defining and interpreting the limitations of speech online, be it through legislation, guidelines or by helping platforms to distinguish misinformation from legitimate content. in parallel, researchers ponder questions concerning the legitimacy of various approaches of content moderation (haggart & keller 2021; suzor 2019), which must extend to the question of which actors ought to fulfill which function in the moderation of content. a legitimate content moderation constellation (and potentially division of labor) is arguably one that is perceived to be legitimate by the “governed” themselves (for whatever qualities are appraised by them). as of today, however, we have little empirical knowledge about what users actually think about content moderation in general. even less so, we know what users think about different roles for states, international organizations or different civil society actors in platform content moderation. the current paper presents novel empirical evidence on how users perceive platform content moderation and how they perceive content moderation roles of different governors of speech. “roles” in content moderation are here defined to relate to the making of rules for platforms, the enforcement of rules and the adjudication of appeals as last-resort decisions. among the seven potential “alternative governors” covered in this paper are platforms (meta inc.), state institutions (the parliament, the government and courts respectively), and international organizations (the un, etc.). in addition, four 2 groups representing civil society at large are included, including organized civil society (ngos, etc.), journalists, academics, and users themselves. the quantitative analysis is based on a survey of more than 15,000 facebook and instagram users in 33 countries, which was conducted in six languages in late 2022 and early 2023. while with a focus on countries in africa, asia, latin america, the data also allows comparison to attitudes in europe through inclusion of switzerland and six eu member states poland, hungary, romania, croatia, spain and portugal in the sample. using this broad crosssectional dataset, the paper shows that far from observing one overarching trend of users entrusting specific (alternative) governors with functions of content moderation, significant differences exist between countries. the paper inter alia shows that there are distinct differences between the “global south” and europe regarding the question of who should be in charge of which function in platform content moderation. as an illustration of this, for instance, respondents living in switzerland, on average, tend to favor the swiss government enforcing content moderation rules on social media platforms, but not the platforms themselves. in contrast, on average, users in nigeria, indonesia or turkey heavily favor meta to enforce the rules on instagram and facebook, but not the government. the paper discusses countryand regional differences and correlates these findings with more general responses to questions about the trust in various state and non-state institutions. not unsurprisingly, there is a strong correlation between how much respondents from a country-level sample trust in their government or trust in meta as a company and how they want these actors to be involved in (different) functions of the content moderation process. in addition, within-country differences regarding attitudes toward alternative governors specifically those related to gender and age are being discussed for selected countries. other questions that relate to the trust in (alternative) governors are also addressed in the paper. for instance, in a separate analysis, the paper examines how content moderation priorities in different countries relate to trust in different possible governors. the data shows that respondents from belarus are on average most concerned about misinformation, government surveillance and censorship on social media platforms (in that order). in contrast, respondents from the philippines are on average most concerned about misinformation, bullying and hate speech (in that order). the relatively varying concerns and priorities across countries is systematically related to preferences for who should be involved in content moderation, specifically with regard to the role of state institutions. this is specifically challenging amid the discussion of unesco’s recently published “guidelines for regulating digital platforms”, which has arguably correctly been criticized for overlooking the enormous cross-country differences in democratic capacity of state institutions. however, taking into account different levels of trust in alternative moderators is crucial for a meaningful discussion of how multistakeholder approaches and the inclusion of alternative governors can protect user rights. while the paper discusses current proposals concerning alternative content moderation arrangements, including the trend toward greater involvement of state institutions in different functional phases of moderation, it also discusses the relevance of the findings in relation to the demand for greater decentralization of content moderation. this 3 includes moves toward greater involvement of civil society and users themselves (again) in the moderation of content, amid the recent rise of the open-source platform mastodon. finally, the paper critically engages with the method chosen for datacollection, including a discussion about the limitations of the specific empirical approach. deriving from this, possible avenues for future research are discussed, including a multi-platform approach to surveying content moderation attitudes. references bygrave, l. a. (2015). internet governance by contract. oxford: oxford university press. gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. new haven: yale university press. haggart, b., & keller, c. i. (2021). democratic legitimacy in global platform governance. telecommunications policy, 45(6), 102152. kaye, d. (2019). report of the special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression a/hrc/38/35, available at documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/g18/096/72/pdf/g1809672.pdf. klonick, k. (2018). the new governors: the people, rules, and processes governing online speech. harvard law review 131, 1598–1670. suzor, n. (2019). lawless. the secret rules that govern our digital lives. cambridge: cambridge university press. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): horne, c. (2024, october). who has the power?: a comparative analysis of parental controls on social media platforms. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. who has the power?: a comparative analysis of parental controls on social media platforms chelsea l. horne american university introduction one recent trend in social media platform practices as well as in proposed policy and regulation for online data rights is a turn towards parental controls. for example, in the united states, the 2023 kids online safety act (kosa) is the first bill to specifically refer to “parental controls.” a few years earlier, the proposed 2020 detour act mentioned “parental consent,” but not controls specifically. there are also ongoing lawsuits in the us that claim faulty design on online platforms’ parental controls, thus leading to harm to children. while concerns over children’s safety online and complaints about problematic settings are not necessarily new (horne, 2021; horne, 2023b), there may be an emerging trend in some countries to try to address growing concerns about the impact of social media platforms by setting regulation on parental controls. privacy settings, default selections, and by extension parental controls have significant power to impact users’ privacy and overall experience on social media platforms. that said, the literature indicates that many people do not change their default privacy settings (dinner et al., 2011; ramokapane et al., 2019; shah & sandvig, 2008; sunstein, 2013; svirsky, 2019; watson et al., 2015). because “technical arrangements are arrangements of power” (denardis, 2014), it is of critical research importance to consider the design, structure, and practice of platform settings. to that end, more research is currently needed to study parental controls and age-specific settings for teens and children, as these are comparatively newer developments and a topic and platform feature in flux. this paper contributes to this needed research area by focusing on specific definitions and understandings of privacy. the apparent appeal of parental controls is the ability of social media platforms to offer a visible space to exert “choice and control” to users’ parents (freishtat & sandlin, 2010; hoffmann et al., 2018). on the other hand, the practice of relying on parental action as a key in protecting children online, places the burden of responsibility on the parent, which may raise concerns about privacy literacy, information overload, and children’s rights. methodology the purpose of this study is two-fold. many social media platforms offer both agespecific privacy settings to children under certain age, as well as parental controls to manage the account of their children. as a result, this study will examine which parental controls are available and how they are offered across some of the most popular social media platforms: facebook, instagram, tiktok, discord, and youtube. the average user has 8.5 social media accounts (dixon, 2022), so a comparative approach to parental controls offers a comprehensive look at users’ experiences. the dataset for this study will consist of each social media platform’s: 1. default settings of teen and children’s accounts and 2. parental control options. the analysis will broadly consider how each platform defines parental controls via privacy options. further questions include: what kinds of control choices are offered? how do these choices differ across platforms? these are significant questions because the design of platform choice architecture has the ability to influence online experiences. the research questions for this paper are: 1. what parental controls do different social media platforms offer? 2. what privacy topics do social media platforms’ parental controls address? 3. are social media platforms’ default settings preset towards more restrictive choices (increased privacy) or towards more public choices (increased sharing)? the first and second research questions consider if there are differences, and if so, what differences exist between controls options for each platform. the aim of the study is not to determine the “best” types of parental controls and design features, but to track the range of options in order to better understand the opportunities and challenges of relying on parental controls to manage children’s privacy online and mitigate potential harms. the comparative approach captures the reality for children and parents as they likely will have to manage multiple social media platform accounts, that have vastly different options and privacy perspectives. finally, the third research question considers the impact and positionality in default selections as these pre-set choices can significantly shape a child’s experience online, especially since teens and children may not have the literacy skills to manage them by themselves. in terms of methodology and analysis, this paper uses the typology of privacy settings to analyze the privacy topics of parental controls (horne, 2023a). this typology offers a granular look at privacy in practice by operationalized seven discrete components of privacy: visibility, discoverability, bounderability, content, account security, data access/portability, and data sharing/personalization. conclusions the findings indicate that much like overall privacy and standard privacy settings, parental controls are also “a concept in disarray” (solove, 2008). the study found that parental controls emphasized three types of privacy: discoverability, bounderability, and content. across platforms, the quantity of choices as well as the types of choices varied significantly. in general though, parental controls are currently focused most on bounderability options—choices that are aimed at setting limits for the child’s account. on the other hand, platforms take on most of the burden of visibility type settings as these appear in the child/teen’s account via strong privacy default selections. this is of notable interest as it explains why visibility settings are not apparent in parental controls: the platforms increase privacy themselves for children’s accounts. a final noteworthy finding is that the results indicate the emergence of a new type of setting that is discrete for parental controls: transparency. notably, transparency parental controls only allow information from children’s account to be viewed, but not managed in any way. references denardis, l. (2014). the global war for internet governance. yale university press. dinner, i., johnson, e. j., goldstein, d. g., & liu, k. (2011). partitioning default effects: why people choose not to choose. journal of experimental psychology: applied, 17(4), 332–341. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024354 dixon, s. (2022, april 28). global social media account ownership 2018. statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/788084/number-of-social-media-accounts/ freishtat, r. l., & sandlin, j. a. (2010). shaping youth discourse about technology: technological colonization, manifest destiny, and the frontier myth in facebook’s public pedagogy. educational studies, 46(5), 503–523. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2010.510408 hoffmann, a. l., proferes, n., & zimmer, m. (2018). “making the world more open and connected”: mark zuckerberg and the discursive construction of facebook and its users. new media & society, 20(1), 199–218. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816660784 horne, c. (2021). choice and control: an analysis of privacy values and privacy controls. aoir selected papers of internet research. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2021i0.11944 horne, c. l. (2023a). in settings we trust: the privacy battle for choice and control. 217. https://doi.org/10.57912/25229699 horne, c. l. (2023b). rule by default: a cross-platform analysis of privacy settings. aoir selected papers of internet research. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2022i0.13022 ramokapane, k. m., mazeli, a. c., & rashid, a. (2019). skip, skip, skip, accept!!!: a study on the usability of smartphone manufacturer provided default features and user privacy. proceedings on privacy enhancing technologies, 2019(2), 209–227. https://doi.org/10.2478/popets-2019-0027 shah, r. c., & sandvig, c. (2008). software defaults as de facto regulation the case of the wireless internet. information, communication & society, 11(1), 25–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691180701858836 solove, d. j. (2008). understanding privacy / daniel j. solove. harvard university press. sunstein, c. r. (2013). deciding by default. university of pennsylvania law review, 162(1), 1–58. svirsky, d. (2019). why do people avoid information about privacy? journal of law & innovation, 2(1). watson, j., lipford, h. r., & besmer, a. (2015). mapping user preference to privacy default settings. acm transactions on computer-human interaction, 22(6), 1– 20. https://doi.org/10.1145/2811257 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): nanditha,n., hermanova,m., rega, r., henrichsen, j., jordan m. foley, j., babulal lalwani,s., gehrke,m.. (2023, october). gender and misinformation: digital hate and harassment. panel presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. gender and misinformation: digital hate and harassment narayanamoorthy nanditha university of north carolina marie hermanova institute of sociology, czech academy of sciences rosella rega university of siena jennifer henrichsen edward r. murrow college jordan m. foley washington state university sheila babulal lalwani university of texas-austin marília gehrke university of groningen panel introduction social media platforms allow for free expression and speech, but also open possibilities for online misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, harms, and conspiracy theories (nadim and fladmoe, 2019). here, gender as an analytical category plays a significant role in understanding how women, lgbtq+ people, and members of various minorities in particular are disproportionately targeted by hate actors. in fact, through gendered violence and online hate, social media serves to promote structural inequality where gender minorities become the target of harassment (jane 2014a; jane 2017). gendered violence and cyberhate have consequences that negatively impact women and queer groups and pose a threat to political goals through victimization and reinforcement of patriarchy (jane, 2014b). though anonymous in nature, mobilized and networked hate becomes a product of what castells (1986) refers to as the culture of real virtuality where there is a flow of capital, information, technology, images as well as organizational interaction. in particular, gendered cyberhate targets women in lonstanding discourses that view men as superior to women (jane, 2014b). misogyny exists as a connective tissue that legitimizes the subjugation of feminine and othered identities in relation to heteronormative patriarchy (kaul, 2021). in particular, online violence against women in politics poses a deepening challenge to democracy, serving as a key tool of illiberalism and democratic backsliding across the globe. hate speech against women in politics, female journalists and other public figures encompasses all forms of aggression, coercion and intimidation seeking to exclude women from the digital public sphere simply because they are women. gender misinformation here itself becomes a form of violence that undermines women and othered identities, and weaponizes gendered narratives to promote political, social or economic objectives. this online behavior seeks to achieve political outcomes: targeting individual women to harm them or drive them out of public life, while also sending a message that women in general should not be involved in politics. it is important to note that digital misogyny may not be overt at all times but benign and subtle involving “everyday, seemingly innocent slights, comments, overgeneralizations, othering, and denigration of marginalized groups'' (anderson, 2010; anderson, 2015) that although unintentional is insidious and dangerous. despite growing concerns about the increasing prevalence of misogynistic or sexist hate speech on different popular digital platforms, research in this field and the attention directed at ways to combat hate online is relatively recent. at this juncture, this panel on gender misinformation: hate and harassment will provide a forum to discuss how women in politics, journalism, and the film industry are perceived, and what the hate that targets these women looks like in practice in a global context. we bring together scholars whose interdisciplinary and comparative work in germany, azerbaijan, philippines, india and brazil focuses on prominent women in the digital public sphere and political leaders from racial, ethnic, religious, or other minority groups to demonstrate how misogynistic speech acts to exacerbate patriarchal norms, and operationalize a relationship between gender and power. in addition to the focus on digital hate and harassment in the global south, this panel also brings together a diversity of methodological interventions references anderson kristin j. (2015). modern misogyny: anti-feminism in a post-feminist era. oxford: oxford university press. anderson kristin j. (2010). benign bigotry: the psychology of subtle prejudice. cambridge: cambridge university press. castells, manuel. (2000). the rise of the network society. oxford ; malden, ma: blackwell publishers jane emma a. (2017). misogyny online: a short (and brutish) history. london: sage. kaul, nitasha. (2021). the misogyny of authoritarians in contemporary democracies, international studies review, volume 23, issue 4, pages 1619–1645, https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viab028. nadim, m., & fladmoe, a. (2019). silencing women? gender and online harassment. social science computer review, 39, 245 258. gendered disinformation and its impact on female journalists in the philippines and azerbaijan jennifer r. henrichsen washington state university jordan m. foley washington state university introduction the environment in which journalists and news organizations operate has been deteriorating in the united states and in other parts of the world amidst rising populism and authoritarianism, political polarization, and democratic backsliding. technological advances have increased the pollution in a complex information ecosystem, sowing distrust and discord between members of the public and journalists. while politically motivated misand disinformation–in various forms and to differing degrees–have always been a societal problem, the interconnected infrastructure of the internet provides affordances and constraints that facilitate the targeted spread of false information across populations. even democratic countries increasingly face institutional legitimation crisis linked to digital news environments characterized by information disorder (bennett & livingston, 2018). targeted information campaigns by state actors, foreign and domestic, are increasingly leveraging the attention economy to influence political news media. social media platforms, and the technological capacity to influence content at scale, contribute to this destabilizing environment, fostering conditions for distrust and digital attacks against the media. according to starbird et al. (2019), strategic information operations (sios) are “efforts by individuals and groups, including state and nonstate actors, to manipulate public opinion and change how people perceive events in the world by intentionally altering the information environment” (p. 2). while this term is expansive in the types of operations it covers (e.g., disinformation, political propaganda, other forms of online manipulation, etc.), it has not specifically engaged with how sios harm journalists and journalism. this paper examines how actors use strategic information operations, including gendered disinformation and harassment, to target female journalists in azerbaijan and the philippines. more specifically, the authors investigate the following research questions: 1) what types of strategic information operations are targeting journalists?, 2) how do strategic information operations affect how journalists interact with audiences?, and 3) how do they change journalists’ news gathering activities? literature review scholars have shown that journalists are increasingly attacked digitally and physically for their work by state and non-state actors (henrichsen, 2020; 2021; henrichsen & shelton, 2022; henrichsen et al., 2015). these attacks range from sophisticated technical attacks, like distributed denial of service (ddos) attacks and the hacking of journalistic devices (marczak et al., 2020) to online harassment (lewis et al., 2020; reporters without borders, 2018; westcott, 2019) and “mob censorship” (waisbord, 2020a) in which citizens engage in bottom-up vigilantism “aimed at disciplining and silencing journalists” (p. 1031). these actions can result in a variety of harms to journalists and news organizations from limited digital publicity (waisbord, 2020b), selfcensorship and limited press freedoms (posetti et al., 2021), to financial concerns (i.e., ransomware), and increased emotional labor among journalists (miller & lewis, 2020). harassment increasing has a gendered component with female journalists, journalists of color, and those identifying as lesbian and bisexual more likely to receive online harassment and abuse (chen et al., 2020; miller, 2020; posetti et al., 2021). when journalists receive abuse, it typically involves misogynistic and racist elements (posetti et al., 2021). female journalists are also more likely to self-censor or leave their job following such abuse, compared to their male colleagues (miller, 2020). methodology drawing on the concept of “networked authoritarianism” (mackinnon, 2011), we use a comparative case study approach, involving azerbaijan and the philippines. we selected azerbaijan and the philippines as case studies because both countries are technologically developed and have precarious political environments; both countries represent understudied journalistic contexts that, while influenced by western journalistic norms and values, have developed distinctive professional cultures in response to their respective institutional contexts; and because both countries have high-profile journalistic exemplars with large social media footprints, providing a rich context to assess the impact of sios on digitally focused journalists with a strong sense of professional identity. we interviewed the azerbaijan journalistic exemplar, arzu geybulla, and included firsthand accounts from the filipino journalistic exemplar, maria ressa, who spoke at recent events. we performed a content analysis of nearly 150,000 social media posts, reflecting these two journalists’ twitter data between 2015 and 2022 to see whether, and to what extent, journalists’ self-reported reactions were reflected in their online media presence. social media data was collected through twitter’s academic research api v2.0 by downloading all tweets and retweets made on the timelines of each journalist. using descriptive statistics from all corpora, we employed a constructivist grounded theory approach (charmaz, 2006) engaging in open, selective, and theoretical coding to connect journalist’s experiences to their public presentation on social media. findings this paper extends the boundaries of sios by linking them to gendered disinformation operations deployed against an understudied, yet critical population (journalists) in understudied country contexts (azerbaijan and the philippines). through an analysis of the journalistic exemplars’ online behavior, we found the sios against the journalists affected how they interacted with audiences and affected how they engaged in news gathering activities. while the overall twitter activity of both geybulla and ressa slightly declined over the years, the topic models of their respective tweets show significant variation in the subjects they reported on after being targeted by sios. although geybulla and ressa still engaged in significant reporting about their respective national politics, the likelihood of posting about national elections and political figures declined over time. following these declines, both journalists were far more likely to post about issues related to press freedom, catalyzed by offline events such as legal actions against journalists and news organizations. although both journalists changed their newsgathering activities, they rhetorically reinforced the importance of their journalistic roles. as mammadov (2021) has noted, azerbaijani journalists take on unique professional roles as political activists, populist disseminators, and citizen helpers. as political activists, they act as adversaries to government action, a role that geybulla consistently reflects in her reporting on corruption, protests, and the persecution of journalists. as populist disseminators and citizen helpers, azerbaijani journalists also take an audience-centered approach to act as a voice of public opinion and connect readers with high-quality information sources that assist in interpreting, rather than merely reporting, events. here, geybulla’s heavy use of social media and audience engagement even with her trolls is reflective of this understanding of her professional journalistic role. even as she became more dispassionate and detached from reporting on azerbaijan generally, she continued to embody the unique journalistic roles found in an azerbaijani context. in the philippines, ressa also reinforced the importance of her journalistic role despite ongoing threats and attacks. ressa’s commitment to the watchdog role aligns with the role perceptions that filipino journalists have in an era of misand disinformation. balod and hameleers (2021) found that the most important role conceptions among filipino journalists in an environment of inaccurate information were those of disseminator and watchdog. as such, journalists view themselves as “truth crusaders” and “advocates of societal reform” more so than interpreters of the news (balod & hameleers, 2021, p. 2368). the emphasis that journalists place on the disseminator and watchdog roles stems from the threats to their autonomy and authority amid an environment of rife mis and disinformation. it also triggers their need to defend the role of journalism to society (balod & hameleers, 2021). references balod, h. s. s., & hameleers, m. (2021). fighting for truth? the role perceptions of filipino journalists in an era of misand disinformation. journalism, 22(9), 2368–2385. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884919865109 bennett, w. l., & livingston, s. (2018). the disinformation order: disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions. european journal of communication, 33(2), 122–139. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323118760317 charmaz, k. (2006). constructing grounded theory: a practical guide through qualitative analysis. sage publications. chen, g. m., p. pain, v. y. chen, m. mekelburg, n. springer, & f. troger. 2020. “‘you really have to have a thick skin’: a cross-cultural perspective on how online harassment influences female journalists.” journalism, 21(7): 877–895. henrichsen, j. r. (2020). breaking through the ambivalence: journalistic responses to digital security technologies. digital journalism, 8(3), 328–346. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2019.1653207 henrichsen, j. r. (2021). understanding nascent newsroom security and safety cultures: the emergence of the “security champion.” journalism practice. 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2021.1927802 henrichsen, j. r., betz, m., & lisosky, j. m. (2015). building digital safety for journalism: a survey of selected issues. unesco. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000232358 henrichsen, j.r., & shelton, m. (2022). expanding the analytical boundaries of mob censorship: how technology and infrastructure enable novel threats to journalists and strategies for mitigation. digital journalism, https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2022.2112520 lewis, s.c., zamith, r., & coddington, m. (2020). online harassment and its implications for the journalist-audience relationship. digital journalism, 1-21. mackinnon, r. (2011). china’s “networked authoritarianism.” journal of democracy, 22, 32-46. doi: 10.1353/jod.2011.0033 mammadov, r. (2021). political activist, citizen’s helper, and entertainer: a study of professional role perception of journalists in azerbaijan. journalism practice, 15(7), 911936. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2020.1758189 marczak, b., anstis, s., crete-nishihata, m., scott-railton, j., deibert, r. (2020, january 28). stopping the press: new york times journalist targeted by saudi-linked pegasus spyware operator. doi: https://citizenlab.ca/2020/01/stopping-the-press-newyork-times-journalist-targeted-by-saudi-linked-pegasus-spyware-operator/ mellado, c. & van dalen, a. (2013). between rhetoric and practice: explaining the gap between role conception and performance in journalism. journalism studies, 15(6), 859–878. miller, k.c. (2020). “harassing the fourth estate: the prevalence and effects of outsider-initiated harassment towards journalists.” phd diss., university of oregon. miller, k.c., & lewis, s.c. (2020). journalists, harassment, and emotional labor. the case of women in on-air roles at us local television stations. journalism, 1-19. doi: 10.1177/1464884919899016 posetti, j., shabbir, n., maynard, d., bontcheva, k., & aboulez, n. (2021). the chilling: global trends in online violence against women journalists. unesco. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000377223 reporters without borders. (2018). online harassment of journalists: attack of the trolls. https://rsf.org/sites/default/files/rsf_report_on_online_harassment.pdf starbird, k., arif, a., & wilson, t. (2019). disinformation as collaborative work: surfacing the participatory nature of strategic information operations. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 3, cscw, 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359229 waisbord, s. (2020a). mob censorship: online harassment of us journalists in times of digital hate and populism. digital journalism, 8(8), 1030-1046. waisbord, s. (2020b). trolling journalists and the risks of digital publicity. journalism practice, https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2020.1827450 westcott, l. (2019, september 4). ‘the threats follow us home’: survey details risks for female journalists in u.s., canada. committee to protect journalists. https://cpj.org/blog/2019/09/canada-usa-female-journalist-safety-online-harassmentsurvey.php digital misogyny and misinformation: state propaganda in bollywood narayanamoorthy nanditha university of north carolina at chapel hill introduction i examine the hate campaign against bollywood actress rhea chakraborty on twitter following the suicide of a prominent indian actor and chakraborty’s partner, sushant singh rajput. i study how this misogyny is linked to a government sponsored hate campaign against the bollywood industry and its liberal values. i attempt to uncover traces of vilification and misogynistic hate in the discourse directed against rhea by examining twitter hashtags following the actor’s death to demonstrate how the focus of this discourse emerges as a form of government political propaganda, and seeks to undermine bollywood’s liberal values. background bollywood actor sushant singh rajput was found dead by suicide at his mumbai residence on june 14, 2020. after news of his death broke, rajput’s mental health struggles emerged. following his death, conspiracy theories circulated that rajput had been driven to his death by 1) the nepotism in india’s film industry, which had hated him for being an outsider, and 2) his girlfriend and live-in partner, rhea chakraborty, who was accused of abetment to suicide, theft, cheating, conspiracy and wrongful confinement of the actor. following this sponsored campaign, rhea chakraborty was subjected to misogyny and media hounding, including on social media where “justice for sushant” trended for months. the media’s character assassination of her has escalated since. her phone conversations and pictures were leaked to the media, and she was blamed rajput’s suicide. her lifestyle, education and property became part of public discussion. literature review india has witnessed a steady rise in the number of internet users in recent years (mishra & chanchani, 2020) with increasing connectivity bringing more indians online. however, as the largest consumer of social media platforms india is emerging as a breeding ground for online misinformation (singh, 2019). given the country’s history of communal violence (brass, 2003), digital misinformation has become a pressing issue. the ruling bharatiya janata party or bjp party and similar actors weaponized social media platforms to spread disinformation campaigns (chaudhuri,2020; mihindukulasuriya, 2020; neyazi et al., 2021). the scholarship on hindutva ideology, its origins in india, and its steady rise since india’s independence is vast (sahai, 1958; anderson & damle, 2019; shani, 2021; sahgal, 2020). the bjp is a right-wing hindu nationalist political party that has close ties to the rashtriya swayamsevak sangh (rss), a “religio-political revivalist ideology that seeks to make hinduism the dominant and exclusive force of indian culture and identity” (khan & lutful, 2021). following bjp’s 2014 and 2019 electoral victories, india’s political campaigns became infused with right-wing hindutva nationalism, particularly on digital platforms, and increased the possibility of “india becoming a hindu rashtra or a hindu state.” the rise of digital hindutva in recent years can be attributed to the increased number of followers for bjp on platforms such as twitter, and the party’s highly “diverse social media presence” (udupa, 2019). the bjp and the ideology it espouses have demonstrated “well-coordinated, centralized, and targeted media strategies that create narratives of hinduphobia in the form of trolling and attacks on critics that create sites of hindutva knowledge production and dissemination” (thapliyal et al, 2022; reddy, 2011; banaji, 2018). whether it is through the dissemination of doctored images on whatsapp before the national elections (campbell-smith & bradshaw, 2019), or hate campaigns against indian muslims (neyazi, 2019), digital misinformation in the indian context warrants empirical research to identify and mitigate the concern. according to mangurkar and rangaswamy, this misinformation is shaped by an increase in discriminatory discourse against gender minorities, indian women, and lgbtqia+ communities in india (2022). scholarship in feminist literature in india finds linkages to masculine manifestation and patriarchal values as important to the process of nation building. women are “reproducers of ethnic collectivity, transmitters of culturally sanctioned behaviors, and carriers of honor” within the fabric of nationhood (pande, 2022). this representation of male power, gender inequality and lack of female agency contribute to structures of nationalism, religious pride, patriarchy and misogyny that begin to emerge on platforms in the form of misinformation campaigns. method i collected a total of 2128 tweets in english and hindi, one of india’s prominent languages, from twitter using twitter apis. i employed specific hashtags as filters including #justiceforssr, #sushantwaskilled, and #ssrmurdernot suicide to collect data between june 14th, 2020 and june 14th, 2021. the majority of tweets i collected included the hahstag justiceforssr. i employed qualitative deductive coding on the dataset to understand the larger cultural patterns that emerge in the form of conspiracy theories against rhea. i coded several questions including “does this tweet/post denote misogyny against actor chakraborty,” and “does this tweet/post propagate a known conspiracy theory,” for each post in binaries of 0 and 1 to indicate the number and type of misinformation that surrounds the death of sushant singh rajput. using grounded theory, i organized these conspiracy theories in multiple ways. i conducted a textual analysis of tweets to understand how misogyny and hate propaganda emerge on these platforms. results conspiracy theories and gendered misinformation 166 tweets in the entire dataset indicate misogyny. i have categorized this misogyny in two distinct ways one that labels rhea chakraborty as sushant singh rajput’s murderer and the other that is a call for her arrest. the first category is where tweets characterize chakraborty as a murderer who killed sushant. these are a few tweets as representative samples of this categorization. here, chakraborty is labelled as a murderer, a thief who stole the actor’s money and is a gold digger. as a woman and his partner, she is blamed for his failures in life and his death. her identity is that of a manipulative gold digger who practices witchcraft, and engaged in money laundering and cheating. a number of tweets engage in elaborate conspiratorial storytelling based on media narratives on how chakraborty and her associates stole money from sushant and killed him. i characterize this misogyny as entrenched within different kinds of conspiracy theories on how and why sushant singh was murdered, and how the mumbai police has stayed silent to protect bollywood higher ups. misogyny and far-right hindutva the second category of emerging misogyny is characterized specifically through the calls for the arrest of rhea, and the use of the hashtag #arrestrhea. a number of posts that call for her arrest do so by labelling her a drug addict, consumer and peddler. this thread connects far-right misogyny in the case of chakraborty with government propaganda against bollywood celebrities and liberal values. a number of tweets call for a boycott of bollywood and characterize celebrities, including rhea, as drug addicts. i argue the hindutva government is using powerful tools, including media and digital propaganda to curtail the creative freedom of bollywood, and to label bollywood actors as drug addicts and peddlers. this is a desire to return to india’s traditional values of brahmanical heteropatriarchy, hindutva puritanism, and masculinity. the outpouring of hatred towards the actress and internet vigilantes labeling her as a “manipulative murderer” reveals ingrained misogyny. this research contends the campaign against rhea chakraborty performs two crucial functions. first, it diverts public attention from government failures in handling covid-19. second, it serves to undermine the liberal values bollywood espouses. references anderson, walter, and shridhar damle. (2019). the brotherhood in saffron: the rashtriya swayamsevak sangh and hindu revivalism. new delhi: penguin random house india private limited. banaji, s. (2018). “vigilante publics: orientalism, modernity and hindutva fascism in india.” javnost-the public 25 (4): 333–350. brass p. r. (2003). the production of hindu-muslim violence in contemporary india. university of washington press. campbell-smith u., bradshaw s. (2019). global cyber troops country profile: india. https://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/93/2019/05/india-profile.pdf chaudhuri p. (2020). 18 times bjp spokesperson sambit patra shared propagandafuelled misinformation. the wire. doi: https://thewire.in/politics/bjp-sambit-patra-fakenews-propaganda khan, m. a. muqtedar, and rifat lutful. (2021). "emerging hindu rashtra and its impact on indian muslims" religions 12, no. 9: 693. doi: https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12090693. mangurkar, & rangaswamy, n. (2022). “controlled empowerment of women: intersections of feminism, hci and political communication in india.” feminist theory, 23(2), 171–206. https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001221082296. mihindukulasuriya r. (2020). nearly 18,000 twitter accounts spread “fake news” for bjp, 147 do it for congress: study. the print. https://theprint.in/politics/nearly-18000twitter-accounts-spread-fake-news-for-bjp-147-do-it-for-congress-study/356876/ mishra d., chanchani m. (2020). for the first time, india has more rural net users than urban. the times of india. doi: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/indiabusiness/for-the-first-time-india-has-more-rural-net-users-thanurban/articleshow/75566025.cms neyazi, t. a., kalogeropoulos, a., & nielsen, r. k. (2021). misinformation concerns and online news participation among internet users in india. social media + society, 7(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211009013. neyazi t. a., kumar a., dutta m. j. (2019). channel complementarity or displacement? theory and evidence from a non-western election context. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 63(4), 656–676. pande, m. (2022). gendered analysis of hindutva imaginaries: manipulation of symbols for ethnonationalist projects. journal of modern european history, 20(3), 407–422. https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944221110725. reddy, d. s. (2011). “hindutva: formative assertions.” religion compass 5 (8): 439– 451. sahai, govind secretary. (1958). critical analysis of rashtriya swayamsevak sangh. new delhi: all india congress committee. sahgal, gita. 2020. “hindutva past and present: from secular democracy to hindu rashtra.” feminist dissent 5: 19–49. shani. (2021). “towards a hindu rashtra: hindutva, religion, and nationalism in india.” religion, state & society, 49(3), 264–280. singh m. (2019). whatsapp reaches 400 million users in india, its biggest market. techcrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/26/whatsapp-india-users-400-million/ thapliyal, khorana, s., pal, f., & ghosh, d. (2022). resisting hindutva in the digital indian diaspora: notes from australia. ethnic and racial studies, 1–24. udupa.s. (2019). “nationalism in the digital age: fun as a metapractice of extreme speech.” international journal of communication, 3143–3164. ‘they must first be raped and mutilated’: early evidence of the mental health impact of online harassment on women parliamentarians in germany sheila b. lalwani university of texas at austin introduction women in elected office are especially vulnerable to online harassment (bowles, 2016; carter and sneesby, 2017; rheault, 2019). through the use of online and communication technologies that cause, facilitate or threaten violence (dunn, 2020; der spiegel, 2021; un, 2015), online harassment can take different forms. these categories include one or a combination of the use of swear words, insults, trolling, cyberstalking, harassment, bullying, personal attacks on someone’s private life, attacks targeted at a group, hate speech, sexual exploitation, revenge porn (rheault, 2019) or deep fakes (gosse and burkell, 2020). despite the severity of these crimes, offending perpetrators are seldom held accountable, and online harassment is often dismissed (krook, 2017; krook, 2018), generating mental health struggles for women active in the public eye. this study provides the first-ever attempt to map the mental health impact of online harassment amongst one of the most visible groups in german society: women elected to the german parliament. the german parliament provides a unique setting for this study. germany has strong hate speech laws in place and is the first western democracy to institute content moderation laws, but online harassment is pervasive among elected leaders serving in the german parliament. the 2021 federal election highlighted that, despite germany being ranked as one of the best countries in the world for women (us news, 2023), women politicians continue to be subjected to online harassment in various forms (schultheis, 2021). lesser known is the mental health toll that online harassment takes on women in elected office. this study attempts to help fill that gap. literature review chadwick (2013) notes that election campaigns in democracies play out intensely over social media channels and especially x (twitter). metatexas and mustafaraj (2012) point out that a defining feature of the digital age is that people choosing to dedicate their lives to politics must be prepared to face a torrent of insults and disparaging comments aimed at them through social media platforms like x (twitter), facebook and instagram. bowles (2016) and carter and sneesby (2017) further affirm that women who occupy leadership roles in elected office and politics trigger negative reactions from the public offline as well as online. rheault (2019) showed that online harassment is an extension of the offline harassment that women experience. the european institute for gender equality (2017) and lomba, et., al., (2021) point to women across europe and germany as easy targets for online harassment. women running for office are judged more harshly, often along the lines of likeability, attractiveness and intelligence. krook (2017) points out that reports of abuse and harassment have increased since women have become more politically engaged around the world. despite their severity, these acts have often been relegated to the “cost of doing politics,” instead of a negative challenge to democracy (krook, 2017; krook, 2018). wilfore (2021) notes that nearly nine in 10 female parliament members in germany have been targeted by online threats. a der spiegel study indicates that 69% of female members of parliament in germany have experienced harassment while in office (wilfore, 2021). nearly every study connecting online violence to mental health determines that victims endure harmful effects. stevens, nurse and arief (2021) find that victims of cyberstalking or harassment experience anxiety, depression, sadness, anger, fear, shame, embarrassment, isolation, low self-esteem, paranoia, stomach aches, panic attacks, post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd), self-harming behavior or heart palpitations. camp (2016) indicates some victims of online harassment can harbor selfharm thoughts or suicidal ideations. rationale & preliminary findings limited media articles from outlets in germany and the u.s. have covered online harassment against women parliamentarians. initial findings indicate that women parliamentarians in germany experience online abuse. while some parliamentarians have been more open about their experiences with online harassment than others, collected statements from interviews with current women parliamentarians point to the extensiveness of online harassment against women parliamentarians. harassment cuts across age, religion and years in office. in other words, women parliamentarians, regardless of age, religion and years served, encounter online harassment at a higher prevalence than men politicians. women parliamentarians who report online harassment may be new to elected office, and others have served for years. in one example quoted in the press, longtime parliamentarian claudia roth reported receiving death threats. she also received emails that she is to be “fu**** to death” (brandes, 2021). other parliamentarians report sex-based image abuse (wilfore, 2021). several of the parliamentarians respond to harassment in various ways, often including social media. one parliamentarian says she tweeted photos that contain racist and sexist content. others says that they respond directly on their social media feeds. online harassment has led to feelings of stress and anxiety among victims. some parliamentarians say they have had to take extra security precautions. chebli travels with police protection. she and other parliamentarians connect online harassment to offline violence. during an interview, roth says, “in the fantasies of the people who send them, it is not enough for women to be killed – they must first be raped and humiliated” (brandes, 2021). the mental health toll on women parliamentarian also ranges. frustration is a common response. women parliamentarians express frustration over the lack of legal remedy. some are challenging the german justice system to take action against perpetrators. for example, one parliamentarian, sawsan chebli, a muslim and the daughter of immigrants, is calling on the german government to take further action. on her x account, she tweeted, “i hope that the german judiciary will take legal action against this man who dares to send me such a racist, islamophobic, inhumane, sexist letter with his real name and make it clear that this is not freedom of expression” (chebli x, 2021). other parliamentarians are willing to take legal action. for example, parliament member renate kunaest, took perpetrators who posted explicit online content about her to court. kunaest vs. facebook was settled before judges at the german constitutional court who ruled in her favor. analysis online harassment shows no indication of abatement in germany. despite more women running for and being elected to office, there is limited understanding and appreciation for the impact online harassment has on women psychologically. this is particularly worrisome, given the seriousness and near ubiquity of the instances. politicians are reporting being threatened with sexual assault and death, and very few perpetrators are held accountable. the mental health responses range. feelings of frustration, anxiety and stress appear to be common among victims. the parliament is the seat of german democracy, and further actions may be required on part of the government to protect women from online abuse and provide institutional services if such instances continue to occur. legal recourse exists for victims, but few seem willing to take that step. initial findings indicate that more work remains to understand the mental health toll of online harassment on the psyche of women and what existing laws can do to better protect them. references brandes, tanja. (2021, february). most female politicians in germany face hate speech. the berliner zeitung. retrieved from https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/en/mostfemale-politicians-in-germany-face-hate-speech-li.139930. barker, kim and jurasz, olga (2018, september) online violence against women: addressing the responsibility gap? women, peace and security. london school of economics blog. retrieved from: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/wps/2019/08/23/onlineviolence-against-women-addressing-the-responsibility-gap/. baumgartner, maik, hofner, roman, muller, ann-katrin, rosenbach, marcel. (2021, october). from digital hate to analog violence: the dark world of extremist misogyny. der spiegel. retrieved from: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/from-digitalhate-to-analog-violence-the-dark-world-of-extremist-misogyny-a-832ed3cb-21d1-4e848c28-089365e91a83. best countries for women. us news & world report. retrieved from: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/best-countries-for-women. bowles, n. (2016, march). former lawmaker wendy davis: “trolls want to diminish and sexualize you. the guardian. retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/mar/12/wendy-davis-sxsw-2016-texas-trollsonline-abuse. camp, nancy h. (2016, august). restoring trust: a grounded theory study of cyberbullying among young women. dissertations. 2123. retrieved from: https://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3122&context=luc_diss. carter, a. and sneesby, j. (2017, january) mistreatment of women mps revealed. bbc news. retrieved from: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-38736729. chadwick a. (2013). the hybrid media system: politics and power. oxford, uk: oxford university press. retrieved from: https://academic.oup.com/book/8696. chebli, s. (2021). x (twitter). retrieved from: https://twitter.com/sawsanchebli/status/1355112921831976963?ref_src=twsrc%5etfw %7ctwcamp%5etweetembed%7ctwterm%5e1355112921831976963%7ctwgr%5ed56 fc06c90886d55cbc153b311e06ebedc4f3f12%7ctwcon%5es1_&ref_url=https%3a%2f %2fwww.berliner-zeitung.de%2fen%2fmost-female-politicians-in-germany-face-hatespeech-li.139930. cyber violence against women and girls (2017). european institute for gender equality. retrieved from: http://eige.europa.eu/rdc/eige-publications/cyber-violence-againstwomen-and-girls. cyber violence against women and girls: a world-wide wake-up call. (2015, october). un broadband commission for digital development working group on broadband and gender. retrieved from: https://www.broadbandcommission.org/publication/cyberviolence-against-women/. dunn, suzie. (2020, december). technology-facilitated gender-based violence: an overview. center for international governance innovation. retrieved from: https://www.cigionline.org/publications/technology-facilitated-gender-based-violenceoverview/. gosse, chandell & burkell, jacquelyn. (2020, april) politics and porn: how news media characterizes problems presented by deepfakes. critical studies in media communication, 37:5, 497-511 krook, mona l. (2017, january). violence against women in politics. journal of democracy. volume 28, number 1, pp. 74-88. retrieved from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312381139_violence_against_women_in_pol itics. krook, m. (2018). violence against women in politics: a rising global trend. politics & gender, 14(4), 673-675. retrieved from: https://mlkrook.org/pdf/krook_pg_18.pdf. lomba n., navarra c., fernandes m. (2021, march). combating gender-based cyberviolence. european parliamentary research service. retrieved from: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/regdata/etudes/stud/2021/662621/eprs_stu(2021) 662621_en.pdf. metaxas, t., & mustafaraj, e. (2012). social media and the elections. retrieved from: https://repository.wellesley.edu/object/ir158. schultheis, emily (september, 2021). being a woman in german politics still isn’t easy. the politico. retrieved from: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/09/25/german-election-annalenabaerbock-women-514150. sobieraj, sarah. (2017, july). bitch, slut, skank, cunt: patterned resistance to women’s visibility in digital publics, information, communication & society, 21:11, 1700-1714. retrieved from: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369118x.2017.1348535. stevens, francesca, nurse, jason r.c., and arief, budi (2021, june). cyber stalking, cyber harassment, and adult mental health: a systematic review. cyberpsychology, behavior, and social networking, 367-376. retrieved from: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33181026/. what is gender-based violence? council of europe. retrieved from: https://www.coe.int/en/web/gender-matters/what-is-gender-basedviolence#:~:text=gender%2dbased%20violence%20refers%20to,orientation%20and%2 for%20gender%20identity. what is gender-based violence? european institute for gender equity. retrieved from: https://eige.europa.eu/gender-based-violence/what-is-gender-based-violence. wilfore, k. (2021, october). the gendered disinformation playbook in germany is a warning for europe. brookings institution. retrieved from: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-gendered-disinformation-playbook-in-germanyis-a-warning-for-europe/. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): muhammed, faheem, & kachari, samarjit. (2024, october). biometric governmentalities: the rise of datafication and the unique health identification project in india. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. biometric governmentalities: the rise of datafication and the unique health identification project in india faheem muhammed pondicherry university samarjit kachari pondicherry university introduction india's healthcare sector has undergone a remarkable transformation over the last decade, powered by the integration of technology and medicine. the ministry of health and family welfare released the national digital health blueprint in april 2019 under the vision of the national health policy, 2017. this policy is an action plan to digitalize health records at the district level, maintain registries for diseases and link primary healthcare services with referral care services (dhingra & dabas, 2020). the major shift in india's healthcare system has been marked by a turn towards digitalizing health information and creating a unique health identification number (uhid) at the national level. though centralized digital programs have been implemented in different states across india for the digitalization of health information and the creation of uhid, the use and adoption of these technologies vary among many states in india. this study offers a close analysis of the unique health identification project with a case study of the south indian states of kerala, puducherry and andhra pradesh. the paper investigates the norms of governmentalities in datafication by looking into the requirements and conditions of enrolment into the databases for accessing healthcare. the making of unique health identification the unique health identification (uhid), also known as the ayushman bharat health account (abha), is a 14-digit identifier linked to aadhaar (the world’s largest biometric system), designed to distinguish individuals within india's digital healthcare system. linking of abha and aadhaar facilitates enrolment in personal health records (phr), further streamlining health data sharing. by april 2023, 380 million abha numbers have been issued, and over 262 million health records have been linked with their abha (raj, dananjayan & agarwal, 2023). a person can access their health records from admission to treatment and discharge through abha as it facilitates longitudinal digital health records of an individual with disease history and previous treatments. though abha is supposed to work on voluntary consent-based linking and sharing of personal health records (phr), abha numbers have been created for beneficiaries enrolled through the cowin platform who have provided aadhaar as the id proof at the vaccination site. when abha is auto-generated from aadhaar data, it raises concerns about the consent frameworks in the uhid project and threatens citizen’s right to voluntary enrolment. an interoperable digital health infrastructure with biometric authentication of beneficiaries or patients requires the linking of abha with aadhaar. when linked with aadhaar, the abha id will feature the demographic and biometric data of the beneficiary on the national portal. linking abha with aadhar and an individual's mobile number makes it imperative to consider the data protection and privacy of users or beneficiaries, given multiple instances of data breaches in aadhar. when abha is not a mandatory identity, some states in india made abha mandatory for enrolment into the public insurance scheme -pradhan mantri jan arogya yojana (pm-jay). digital health and biometric welfare in india in the last two decades, indian governments have shown peculiar interest in shifting towards a biometric-based identity authentication system for verifying welfare beneficiaries. information infrastructures are established and maintained to streamline access to health care and welfare. the state’s move towards the digitalization of the health sector has serious implications for how health care is availed and experienced by the people, especially the poor. ayushman bharat pm-jay is the largest public health insurance scheme in the world. the scheme aims at providing health cover of 500,000 inr (around 6,000 euros) per family a year for secondary and tertiary care hospitalization to over 12 crore poor and vulnerable families (approximately 55 crore beneficiaries) that form the bottom 40% of the indian population (national health authority, nd). though pmjay functions as an independent scheme under the ayushman bharat digital mission, abha or uhid is now a prerequisite to access pmjay public insurance and different health services in many states of india. to enrol in the pmjay scheme, citizens must provide their abha number. however, having a uhid does not guarantee people access to public insurance; rather, their aadhaar should be updated with mobile numbers and would have to go through otp (one-time password) verifications for aadhaar, abha and pmjay services. when biometric identity systems are put in place for authorization and verification, people are forced to meet the demands of technical systems for accessing healthcare. the datafication of health and welfare is often manifested in unequal power relations between citizens and the state in which citizen bodies have to prove themselves constantly. biometric identification: for whom? a biometric-based health identity system that stores and maintains health records of individuals poses a severe threat to marginal populations (gender, sexual, religious and caste minorities) who are already facing discrimination. the history of global data infrastructures reiterates how information systems have been transformed into surveillance weapons against the marginalized (arora, 201 9). the mandatory requirement of aadhaar for antiretroviral therapy has prompted hiv-positive people to drop out of treatment programs across india (rao, 2017), fearing privacy violations and abuse. the mandatory requirement of abha for availing public insurance and its opaque data protection policy pose severe threats of data abuse. masiero & shakti (2020) highlight the embeddedness of aadhaar within wider techno-social formations, suggesting the massive potential of aadhar technology to be linked with other identity systems and the portability as well as mobility (dataflows) of digitally stored biometric data. whereas, enrolment into health identity systems becomes a condition for citizens' rights to access healthcare and welfare. when abha is championed as a model for biometric-based health identity systems, it places citizen bodies at the mercy of sociotechnical systems for recognition, authorization and verification of identity. mishaps in fingerprint reading, complexities in iris scanning, delayed otps, and server issues often complicate access to digital health and welfare. the mandatory requirement to be enrolled into public databases often formats citizen bodies into datasets. navigating through multiple id systems, including abha, aadhaar, and pmjay, often confuses people and places the burden of being updated (in the id systems) for availing welfare and healthcare. in some cases, people are not even aware of what one particular id is meant for, and they still keep enrolling in new id schemes when asked by government authorities. conclusion examining india's uhid project abha, which records biometric and demographic data of patients, the paper place biometric identity within its governance implications, highlighting uhid's role in redefining the state-subject relation. the paper raises concerns about the challenges in authorization and verification and the misuse of personal data, underscoring the complex social implications of uhid implementation. dwelling on how citizen bodies and identities are formed and (re)negotiated across multiple identity systems, it concludes that digital health and biometric welfare often make enrolment into health identity systems a condition for citizens' rights to healthcare. furthermore, the costs of data/biometric-based approaches in health have altered the notion of welfare as well as care, where the most vulnerable strata of the indian population are forced to navigate the biometric regime to access healthcare and welfare. references arora, p. (2019). politics of algorithms, indian citizenship and the colonial legacy. in a. punathambekar & s. mohan (eds.) global digital cultures: perspectives from south asia. university of michigan press. dhingra, d., dabas, a. (2020). global strategy on digital health. indian pediatrics, 57, 356–358. masiero, s., & shakthi, s. (2020). grappling with aadhaar: biometrics, social identity and the indian state. south asia multidisciplinary academic journal, (23). national health authority. (n.d). about pradhan mantri jan arogya yojana (pm-jay) https://nha.gov.in/pm-jay. raj gm, dananjayan s, agarwal n. (2023). inception of the indian digital health mission: connecting…the…dots. health care science, 2(5): 345-351. https://doi.org/10.1002/hcs2.67 rao, m. (2017). why aadhaar is prompting hiv positive people to drop out of treatment programmes across india. scroll. in. november, 17. https://doi.org/10.1002/hcs2.67 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): duan, s. (2024, october). “i’m an e-commerce streamer, not influencer”—— the logistical struggle for performing authenticity on douyin. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. “i’m an e-commerce streamer, not influencer” ——the logistical struggle for performing authenticity on douyin shichang duan university of amsterdam authenticity section the body of the submission should be formatted according to the following: arial font, size 12, single space, left align throughout, double space for new paragraph. new paragraph starts like this, an extra space from the previous, no indent. if submitting a panel, simply repeat this formatting – minus the aoir letterhead sequentially for each paper on the panel. while scholarship on the platformization of cultural production (poell et al, 2022) mainly investigate the content creators, such as digital influencers (abidin, 2015; duffy, 2017), wanghong (cunningham & craig, 2017), artists (bishop, 2023), game streamers (johnson & woodcock, 2019) in cultural industry, the diverse platform worker figures in non-western social context are undertheorized, such as the arising e-commerce live streamers in china (duan et al, 2023). the so-called e-commerce streamers is related to a business model called content e-commerce, invented by douyin, the sibling version of tiktok. content e-commerce (douyin, 2013) encourages sellers to present the authenticity of products through live streaming to attract consumers, and douyin (2013) emphasizes that marginalized social groups, such as rural chinese, could benefit by presenting themselves and their real life. under such mobilization discourse, more than 1,100,000 e-commerce streamers are emerging in china by 2023 (people’s daily, 2023). many rural residents creatively stream the authentic rurality. for example, my informant zheng, with 900,000 followers on douyin, streams in a garlic field and says, “hey! check the real natural environment for organic agricultural products! i’m an ecommerce streamer, not wanghong. they make easy money and i’m just a new farmer selling real agricultural products!” how do e-commerce streamers like zheng in rural china perform authenticity? what’s the difference compared to the widely discussed micro-celebrities in the western world? these stories will contribute to a typology of platform labor and a global perspective on platformization. to address these questions above, theoretically, i draw on the scholarship on platform labor (van doorn, 2017; duffy, 2017; poell et al., 2022; zhang, 2021) and authenticity in the social media era (abidin, 2015; kreling et al, 2022; duguay, 2017; gorea, 2021) to analyze how e-commerce streamers navigate the tension between platform technicity (bucher, 2012) and local dwelling environment to present authenticity online, which is theorized as logistical struggle here. this notion is deployed to describe how streamers interrogate multiple stuff of authenticity (duguay, 2017), like agricultural products, infrastructure network, and their own body to maintain the flow of data and goods (case, 2010; hockenberry et al, 2021; rossiter, 2016). i argue that the logistical struggle indicates the authenticity on social media platforms is shaped by unexpected frictions (jansson, 2022) and calibration (abidin, 2017), which is rarely elaborated on in existing research on content creators. the logistical struggle also informs how ecommerce streaming reproduces the structural marginalization of rural china and residents because it highlights a commodified authenticity and the neoliberal ideology while covering the real rural life and the invisible labor that rural residents perform. to collect data, i conducted one-year ethnography work in four e-commerce teams. these teams are selected based on their diverse sizes, locations, and working experience. data are collected through semi-structure and informal interviews, participant observation, and analyzed thematically. the logistical struggle of streamers to perform authenticity could be examined from three aspects. firstly, e-commerce streamers should navigate the tension between the visibility politics on the platform and the materiality of agricultural products. the visibility politics on platforms (peter et al, 2019; bishop, 2019; duguay, 2016) impact what kinds of authenticity streamers will perform. for example, at the beginning of their business in rural areas, streamers a1, b1 and c1 have several products to choose from, including garlic, cabbage, and yam, all could prove their authenticity as farmers. however, they have to consider the unspoken requirements of platforms on products. a1 mentioned that, “to be recommended more by platform, your products should at least meet several requirements. one is high quality, so the consumers won’t complain too much, otherwise you will get shadow ban. secondly, select products considering the delivery cost. shipping cost for big and easily bruised products is too much, especially when your sales increase. thirdly, make sure you can sell consistently good products for a whole year. every agricultural product will be at its flavor peak for only months, but if you don’t stream almost every day, the platforms will think you are lazy, and then decrease your visibility. think twice about how to sell various agricultural products in one year.” these ideas show how the platform indirectly determines what authentic rural china from a logistical level. other informants have similar concerns and decide to describe their hometown as a traditional rural area producing authentic garlic and yam and ignoring other possible options. secondly, the logistical challenges emerge in maintaining infrastructure networks. the consistent data flowing during streaming is another metric to impact these streamer’s visibility and their choice of what authenticity entails. according to these streamers, during streaming, the algorithm rewards who can provide more data for a platform, such as the interactions with the audience, the sales during streaming, and the duration that the audience stay. all these data will be displayed to streamers in a realtime dashboard. if these streamers can keep their audience number increasing in the first 30 minutes, then the platform will recommend this live streaming to more followers. otherwise, there will be only 2-5 audiences until the end even if the streaming lasts for hours. however, in rural areas, keeping data flowing encounters infrastructure problems, including the power network and hardware. for example, the breakdown of power networks is still common in some rural areas. i witnessed a streamer screaming out and almost went crazy because she just got the largest audience after streaming for months, and it was suddenly shut down because of a power problem. after this accident, she purchased a portable power generation machine like other streamers. this machine could transfer the energy from a scooter to an internet device, like wifi and lights. similar problems emerge from the hardware for streaming, such as photographic and internet equipment. streaming in the field is difficult because the natural environment is beyond these streamers’ control. they need to carefully set up the camera for a beautiful view. the insects and weather could disturb the streaming activities at times. it’s common that streamers prefer an indoor place and curate it as an authentic outdoor scene. another logistical struggle for streamers is the impacts of intense labor on their body. streamers endure and legitimize these requirements on a corporal level for an authentic affect.streamers are aware that e-commerce streaming needs repetitive speaking. the platform determines whether this streaming will be recommended to more users based on the feedback of the audience, including their staying duration, sales, and likes. to have an accurate evaluation, every second platforms push new audiences and calculate their digital traces. the streamers must repeat the introduction and promotions about products again and again for hours, which is a huge challenge for their body health. many streamers feel pain in throats even when they stop streaming, and their voice and vocal folds usually also change because of the permanent damage from long-term streaming. to deal with this, they choose self-aware labor degradation (braverman, 1996), meaning that they simplify and memorize introducing and stories about products. they take the streaming as a physical labor, without thinking. it’s easier and surely boring, but they don’t have a choice. many streamers legitimize this labor by comparing it to the traditional farmer. “the work as a farmer is much more painful, and streaming is alright with more return.” (a5) in conclusion, the practice of these e-commerce streamers in marginalized rural china informs the diverse process to perform authenticity in the platform economy era and the multiple layers of platform labor across global scales. references: abidin, c. (2015). communicative intimacies: influencers and percieved interconnectedness. http://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/26365 bishop, s. (2019). managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip. new media & society, 21(11–12), 2589–2606. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819854731 bishop, s. (2023). influencer creep: how artists strategically navigate the platformisation of art worlds. new media & society, 14614448231206090. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231206090 braverman, h. (1998). labor and monopoly capital: the degradation of work in the twentieth century. nyu press. bucher, t. (2012). want to be on the top? algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on facebook. new media & society, 14(7), 1164–1180. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444812440159 case, j. a. (2013). logistical media: fragments from radar’s prehistory. canadian journal of communication, 38(3). https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2013v38n3a2735 cunningham, s., & craig, d. (2019). creator governance in social media entertainment. social media + society, 5(4), 2056305119883428. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119883428 douyi. official instructions on how to run digital stores on douyin(抖音电商官网抖音小店入驻). retrieved 1 march 2024, from https://douyinec.com/content?id=ahmo9xxrwiub duan, s., lin, j., & van dijck, j. (2023). producing new farmers in chinese rural live ecommerce: platformization, labor, and live e-commerce sellers in huaiyang. chinese journal of communication, 16(3), 250–266. https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2023.2203939 duffy, b. e. (2017). (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. yale university press. duguay, s. (2017). dressing up tinderella: interrogating authenticity claims on the mobile dating app tinder. information, communication & society, 20(3), 351–367. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1168471 foster, j. (2022). “it’s all about the look”: making sense of appearance, attractiveness, and authenticity online. social media + society, 8(4), 20563051221138762. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221138762 gorea, m. (2021). becoming your “authentic” self: how social media influences youth’s visual transitions. social media + society, 7(3), 20563051211047875. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211047875 hockenberry, m. c., starosielski, n., & zieger, s. m. (eds.). (2021). assembly codes: the logistics of media. duke university press. http://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/26365 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819854731 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231206090 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444812440159 https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2013v38n3a2735 https://douyinec.com/content?id=ahmo9xxrwiub https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2023.2203939 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1168471 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221138762 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211047875 jansson, a. (2021). beyond the platform: music streaming as a site of logistical and symbolic struggle. new media & society, 14614448211036356. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211036356 johnson, m. r., & woodcock, j. (2019). “and today’s top donator is”: how live streamers on twitch.tv monetize and gamify their broadcasts. social media + society, 5(4), 2056305119881694. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119881694 kreling, r., meier, a., & reinecke, l. (2022). feeling authentic on social media: subjective authenticity across instagram stories and posts. social media + society, 8(1), 20563051221086235. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221086235 peole’daily. live streamingindustry is experising transformation(直播行业步入“转 型期”). retrieved 1 march 2024, from https://paper.people.com.cn/rmrbhwb/html/2023-12/25/content_26033534.htm peters, j. d. (2012). calendar, clock, tower. in calendar, clock, tower (pp. 25–42). fordham university press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823249831-004 poell, t., nieborg, d. b., & duffy, b. e. (2021). platforms and cultural production. john wiley & sons. reade, j. (2021). keeping it raw on the ‘gram: authenticity, relatability and digital intimacy in fitness cultures on instagram. new media & society, 23(3), 535–553. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819891699 abidin, c. (2015). communicative intimacies: influencers and percieved interconnectedness. http://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/26365 rossiter, n. (2016). software, infrastructure, labor: a media theory of logistical nightmares. routledge taylor & francis group. van doorn, n. (2017). platform labor: on the gendered and racialized exploitation of low-income service work in the ‘on-demand’ economy. information, communication & society, 20(6), 898–914. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2017.1294194 woodcock, j., & graham, m. (2020). the gig economy: a critical introduction. polity. zhang, l. (2021). platformizing family production: the contradictions of rural digital labor in china. the economic and labour relations review, 32(3), 341–359. https://doi.org/10.1177/10353046211037093 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211036356 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119881694 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221086235 https://paper.people.com.cn/rmrbhwb/html/2023-12/25/content_26033534.htm https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823249831-004 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819891699 http://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/26365 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2017.1294194 https://doi.org/10.1177/10353046211037093 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): levido, a., deuzanni, m., woods, a., leaver, t., rodriguez, a., mackenzie, j., theobold, m., danby, s., johnson, d., langton, k., scott, f. (2024, october). the digital childhood industry. panel presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the digital childhood industry amanda levido southern cross university michael deuzanni queensland university of technology annette woods queensland university of technology tama leaver curtin university aleesha rodriguez queensland university of technology janelle mackenzie queensland university of technology maryanne theobold queensland university of technology susan danby queensland university of technology daniel johnson queensland university of technology katrin langton deakin university, centre for research for educational impact fiona scott the university of sheffield 2 many children lead lives that are heavily influenced by the digital world (danby et al., 2018), whether that’s through digital products, services, and practices made for them, or made about them. for some children, a digital childhood means they have opportunities to engage with new forms of media that impact their lives in meaningful, although sometimes problematic, ways. for children and their families, their digital childhood is mediated across many dimensions (livingstone & blum-ross, 2017), including play, learning, communication and the everyday routines of family life (gee et al., 2018). in this panel, we examine some of the ways digital childhood is mediated through industry. in particular, we explore the ways that children, their families, policymakers and the wider public all contribute to the construction of, what can be thought of as, the ‘digital childhood industry’. each of the papers in this panel is concerned with the myriad ways that digital industries both benefit and are challenged by practices of children, their families, and policymakers. while these papers provide timely critique of how, often ‘big tech’, industries influence the construction of digital childhoods, this does not mean that children and their families do not receive benefits from the digital world or work to subvert the practices expected of them—they do (e.g., johnson & francis, 2022; main & yamada-rice, 2022). rather, this panel draws attention to the power that industry holds, which often constitutes an unfair relationship with its young users, even when a child and their caregivers enjoy or create meaning through engagement with digital services. each paper takes a nuanced look at the complex issue of digital childhoods, the internet and the associated industries that require children’s or parental engagement to contribute to the ongoing success of a company or product. while some online spaces are specifically designed for children, across the papers we examine how these spaces—or spaces designed for adults that children join—often are not created with the interests or perspectives of children at the centre. even beyond their youngest lifestages for instance, children are frequently subjected to datafication that may or may not be in their best interest (hartung, 2020), and they can neither agree nor object to such practices. moreover, children and families' own views on technology are often either not sought out or given cursory attention by industry. yet, in spite of this, children are often confident and competent inhabitants of digital worlds, claiming sometimes hostile spaces for themselves and radically shifting perspectives on what a ‘children’s internet’ should look like (dezuanni et al., 2023). although this approach may be shifting perspectives for some, this panel calls on industry to directly consult with children and incorporate their perspectives within earlier conceptualisations and development of the digital products, services, practices that construct their lives online. in line with rodriguez and levido’s (2023) paper which discusses moral panics around the digital childhood industry, this panel supports a critical disposition broadly to children and the internet. we argue that perpetuating moral panics—particularly those that erode 3 children’s agency—dismisses the important, interesting and fun ‘work’ children and their families perform in their everyday lives as they connect online and construct digital childhoods. these papers are purposely diverse to showcase the breadth of the digital childhood industry. each paper has a focal point on children, the internet, and the industry that often mediates the relationship between the two. calling this mediation the digital childhood industry provides, not only this panel but broader internet scholarship, a way to examine the issues arising from children's digital lives, from several starting points. the first paper examines an instance of a ‘children’s metaverse’, roblox, and is concerned with the tensions between children learning through play and creative labour through this platform, while roblox as a company simultaneously benefits from said, children’s digital labour. the second paper highlights the important ways that political and societal discourses concerning children and social media, using instagram kids as an example, can lead to a stifling of conversations in this space. the third paper reports on a project where industry has partnered with researchers with the aim of understanding children’s perspectives of their own online videogame play, with this research showing one instance where children’s perspectives could potentially be incorporated by video game developers specifically, and designers of digital spaces for children more broadly. the fourth paper explores the digital labour of contemporary parenthood, challenging us to reflect on where the digital childhood industry begins, including the ‘how’ and ‘who’ of the practices that normalise the routine datafication of children’s bodies and development, with parents often engaging in building the digital lives of children from before birth. finally, our last paper draws on a large qualitative study of children’s digital play and wellbeing to consider how a focus on what ‘drives’ children’s digital play might offer a more nuanced perspective on children’s labour within the digital childhood industry. references danby, s., fleer, m., davidson, c., & hatzigianni, m. (2018). digital childhood. amsterdam: springer. dezuanni, m., rodriguez, a., sefton-green, j., leaver, t., bunn, a., potter, a., farthing, r., hourigan, a., pangrazio, l., mannell, k., corser, k., bennett, s., levido, a., zhao, x., ng, r., healy, g, & willett, r., (2023), digital child working paper 2023-11, manifesto for a better children’s internet, australian research council centre of excellence for the digital child, queensland university of technology. https://doi.org/10.26187/q42e-6047 livingstone, s., & blum-ross, a. (2017). researching children and childhood in the digital age. in research with children (pp. 66-82). routledge. gee, e., takeuchi, l., & wartella, e. (eds.). (2018). children and families in the digital age: learning together in a media saturated culture (1st ed.). routledge. 4 hartung, p. (2020). the children’s rights-by-design standard for data use by tech companies (good governance of children’s data project) [issue brief no. 5]. unicef. https://www.unicef.org/globalinsight/media/1286/file/%20unicef-global-insight-datagovdata-use-brief-2020.pdf johnson, n. f., & francis, z. (2022). positive family relationships in a digital age: hearing the voice of young people. children & society, 36(5), 933–948. https://doi.org/10.1111/chso.12548 main, a., & yamada-rice, d. (2022). evading big brother: using visual methods to understand children’s perception of sensors and interest in subverting digital surveillance. visual communication, 21(3), 384–417. https://doi.org/10.1177/14703572221093559 rodriguez, a., & levido, a. (2023). “my little influencer”: a toy ringlight as proxy to media practices and technopanics. m/c journal, 26(2). https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2948 https://doi.org/10.1111/chso.12548 https://doi.org/10.1111/chso.12548 https://doi.org/10.1111/chso.12548 https://doi.org/10.1177/14703572221093559 https://doi.org/10.1177/14703572221093559 https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2948 5 children’s industry in the metaverse amanda levido southern cross university michael deuzanni queensland university of technology annette woods queensland university of technology tama leaver curtin university the metaverse has emerged as an important concept for how the internet is imagined and constructed. many companies are investing in metaverse strategies, with increased interest in how such companies can build or put measures in place to support users who are children. one such company is roblox, which offers children opportunities to build and play in their ‘metaverse’ through gameplay and production opportunities. indeed, roblox relies on user generated content and player labour, sometimes referred to as playbour (kücklich, 2005), as a key aspect of its business model. millions of children play roblox around the world. these numbers mean that roblox is an important research site as we try to understand not only what constitutes a metaverse for children, or a metaverse where children gather, but also the industry practices that engage children as both players and creators of worlds. this paper presents a political economy analysis as a way to investigate the industry and business practices of roblox as one example of a children’s metaverse. here, we situate the roblox metaverse as a media entity whose industry and business practices impact the meaning-making and production (hardy, 2018) practices of children. as a key player in children’s meaning-making and production practices worldwide, roblox’s industry practices set up particular types of power relations within and around the platform. these particularly benefit roblox as a company that profits from the labour of its users, under the guise of economic benefits to content creators (van dijck et al., 2018). we specifically examine the modes of production and monetisation within roblox and what this means for learning. what is a children’s metaverse? the definition of a metaverse is evolving, however shi et al. (2023) describe the internet as a “world or cyberspace which refers to a network of networks,” while “the metaverse depicts a parallel and immersive world where virtuality and reality are fused” (p. 1). weinberger (2022) contends the metaverse is where the physical and virtual worlds overlap in ways that are “enhancing [of] the physical world” (p. 1) where users connect 6 with others through user-generated experiences and there is a system for potential economic benefit for contributing users. the concept of a ‘children’s metaverse’ is likely to have multiple understandings. as we see with the children’s internet more broadly, children often play in online spaces that were initially designed for adults (dezuanni et al., 2023) although recently some companies, one example being the lego/epic games collaboration, are delivering child-specific instances of a type of metaverse (epic games, 2022). indeed roblox has called itself a metaverse, and while its ceo claims roblox is for all ages (baszucki, 2023), many of its users are children and young people, with the platform being very popular across this demographic (pangrazio, cardozo & gaibisso, 2020). modes of production roblox has come under scrutiny in the past regarding its business model and how children and young people face the risk of exploitation. within the platform game worlds can be created by anyone or any entity, including commercial companies (blackwood, 2023). children can contribute to the roblox community by creating content they are able to sell for robux, the in-game currency. media attention has highlighted how children can be taken advantage of in this business model. for example exploitations can occur if children spend countless hours creating content that is not popular or marketed earning them little of an imagined reward, or if children join ‘teams’ where profits are not appropriately shared (rinaldi, 2024; parkin, 2022). while participation in this content creation has been promoted as a good way for children to learn about game development, a power imbalance is built into the roblox platform and reinforced by individual adults since children do not always understand how labour practices work across such platforms (ataby et al., 2023). economy although roblox is free to download and join, there are limits to what children can engage with for free. roblox offers players the ability to buy or earn robux to engage in various experiences through microtransactions (kou & gui, 2023). for instance, if a user wants to change the appearance of their avatar, it is likely they will need to purchase new features using robux. some games within the platform require upfront payment to become accessible. other games offer in-game payment options to upgrade avatar abilities. additionally, roblox users are able to convert real-world currency for robux to buy products, subscriptions, passes or private servers within roblox (roblox, 2024). adding to the complexity is that some roblox games have their own subscriptions or convert robux into other types of currencies or tokens. this is incredibly complex for children to comprehend, resulting in some children spending money on items that hold very little ingame value. 7 the flip side to this is that creators or developers of content on roblox are compensated for their creations, although this model has come under scrutiny. roblox acknowledges that their in-platform economy is “powered by creators” (roblox, 2024), with top creators earning millions of dollars annually. however, roblox as a company takes a large share of any revenue generated, with developers receiving around 30% of the share. children who are part of teams or developing small-scale avatar items may get a share, but developers need to earn 30,000 robux to ‘cash out’ their robux into real world currencies (around usd$375). again, the power lies with roblox, and this model shapes the kind of content that is created, including content that resembles copyrighted games or experiences designed to maximise spending, for example, loot boxes, subscriptions or limited edition items. learning although research concerning roblox as a children’s metaverse is in its infancy, some of the research concerning children and young people examines roblox as a site for learning (see for example han, liu & gao, 2023). children and their educators are able to explore experiences designed to teach particular topics and educators with stem and computer science experiences featured on the education homepage. by positioning themselves within this space, roblox positions the type of content on its platform, and the roblox studio platform, as educational. while children clearly are able to learn with and through roblox, the monetisation processes could prove lucrative to those creating educational experiences. for example, many of the experiences marked as educational have passes available to increase gameplay experiences, blurring the lines between educational and edutainment. conclusion while roblox may be a metaverse that attracts children, rather than a metaverse designed for children, the fact is it remains highly popular and engaging for this age group. as such, the industry and business practices of roblox have a responsibility to consider how it can implement principles that ensure children receive an experience that considers the reasons children visit roblox and create an environment where children’s meaning-making practices are valued. references atabey, a., pothong, k., & livingstone, s. (2023). when are commercial practices exploitative? ensuring child rights prevail in a digital world. digital futures commission, 5rights foundation. https://digitalfuturescommission.org.uk/blog/when-are-commercial-practicesexploitativeensuring-child-rights-prevail-in-a-digital-world/ baszucki, d. (2023). our vision for all ages. retrieved from https://blog.roblox.com/2023/05/ourvision-for-all-ages/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=our-vision-for-allages https://blog.roblox.com/2023/05/our-vision-for-all-ages/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=our-vision-for-all-ages https://blog.roblox.com/2023/05/our-vision-for-all-ages/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=our-vision-for-all-ages https://blog.roblox.com/2023/05/our-vision-for-all-ages/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=our-vision-for-all-ages 8 blackwood, g. (2023). roblox and meta verch: a aase study of walmart’s roblox games. m/c journal, 26(3). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2958 dezuanni, m., rodriguez, a., sefton-green, j., leaver, t. b., bunn, a., potter, a., farthing, r., hourigan, a., pangrazio, l., mannell, k., corser, k., bennett, s., levido, a., zhao, a., ng, r., healy, g., & willett, r. (2023). manifesto for a better children{’}s internet. australian research council centre of excellence for the digital child. https://doi.org/10.26187/q42e-6047 epic games. (2022). the lego group and epic games team up to build a place for kids to play in the metaverse. retrieved from https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-us/news/the-lego-groupand-epic-games-team-up-to-build-a-place-for-kids-to-play-in-the-metaverse han, j., liu, g., & gao, y. (2023). learners in the metaverse: a systematic review on the use of roblox in learning. education sciences, 13(3), 296. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci13030296 hardy, j. (2018). what (is) political economy of the media? critical political economy of the media, 3–36. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203136225-1 kou, y., & gui, x. (2023). harmful design in the metaverse and how to mitigate it: a case study of user-generated virtual worlds on roblox. in designing interactive systems conference (dis ’23), july 10â•fi14, 2023, pittsburgh, pa, usa (vol. 1, issue 1). association for computing machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3595960 kücklich, j. (2005). precarious playbour: modders and the digital games industry. the fibreculture journal. 5. https://five.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj--025-precarious--playbour--modders--and--the-digital--games--industry/ pangrazio, l., & cardozo gaibisso, l. (2020). beyond cybersafety : the need to develop social media literacies in. digital education review, 37, 49–63. parkin, s. (2022). the trouble with roblox, the video game empire built on child labour. the guardian. retrieved from https: //www.theguardian.com/games/2022/jan/09/the-trouble-withrobloxthe-video-game-empire-built-on-child-labour roblox. (2024). earning on roblox. retrieved from https://create.roblox.com/docs/production/earning-on-roblox rinaldi, l. (2024). kids spend countless hours developing games for roblox. most never earn a penny. national post. retrieved from https://nationalpost.com/news/roblox-kids-online-gamingplatform shi, f., ning, h., zhang, x., li, r., tian, q., zhang, s., zheng, y., guo, y., & daneshmand, m. (2023). a new technology perspective of the metaverse: its essence, framework and challenges. digital communications and networks. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcan.2023.02.017 van dijck, j., poell, t., & de waal, m. (2018). introduction. in the platform society (vol. 1, issue october 2019, pp. 1–27). https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190889760.001.0001 weinberger, m. (2022). what is metaverse?—a definition based on qualitative meta-synthesis. future internet, 14(11). https://doi.org/10.3390/fi14110310 https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2958 https://doi.org/10.26187/q42e-6047 https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-us/news/the-lego-group-and-epic-games-team-up-to-build-a-place-for-kids-to-play-in-the-metaverse https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-us/news/the-lego-group-and-epic-games-team-up-to-build-a-place-for-kids-to-play-in-the-metaverse https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci13030296 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203136225-1 https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3595960 https://five.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj--025-precarious--playbour--modders--and--the--digital--games--industry/ https://five.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj--025-precarious--playbour--modders--and--the--digital--games--industry/ https://create.roblox.com/docs/production/earning-on-roblox https://nationalpost.com/news/roblox-kids-online-gaming-platform https://nationalpost.com/news/roblox-kids-online-gaming-platform https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcan.2023.02.017 https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190889760.001.0001 9 political ‘heroes’ and tech ‘villains’: the case of instagram kids aleesha rodriguez queensland university of technology michael dezuanni queensland university of technology introduction on 18 march 2021, buzzfeed news reported that instagram was intending to build a ‘children’s version’ of its popular photo and video sharing app, “that allows people under the age of 13 to safely use instagram for the first time” (mac & silverman, 2021, para 2). since at least 2017, instagram has been a focal point for discourse about potential harms social media can cause teens (leaver et al., 2020). thus, news of ‘instagram kids’, swiftly galvanised parents and policymakers to vehemently push back against silicon valley’s larger interest in marketing its digital products to children. this paper argues that the ensuing discourses used by us policymakers in reference to instagram kids left little room for nuanced discussions about how a social media product for under 13s could support children’s fun, productive, safe, diverse and ethical experiences online. the concept of instagram kids immediately became the ‘the stuff of politics’ (bruan & whatmore, 2009). considering how a social media service for young adolescents—that is, for children aged between 10-13 (odgers et al., 2022)—should or could look like, requires due consolidation. but even before instagram kids existed as a material prototype that children, parents, and experts could explore, it was shut down, both discursively and literally. specifically, following the leaked report, the idea of instagram kids was discursively framed as ‘dangerous’ by us policymakers in subsequent congressional hearings in 2021; and in september of that year, after the release of internal research conducted by meta about teen mental health—known as the facebook files (2021)—the ceo of instagram adam mosseri announced that instagram was pausing the development of instagram kids (pausing instagram kids, 2021). this paper examines the transcripts of four us congressional hearings in 2021 where issues about instragram kids are raised by policymakers to tech industry representatives. by examining the issues—that is, the matter of concern (latour, 2004) that mobilise the media, politicians, and the wider public—about instagram kids, we observe discursive efforts to purify (latour, 1993), that is oversimplify, the debate. importantly, this paper is not about condoning the tech industry’s current commercial practices in respect to under 13s, as more work in this area is essential. rather, this paper surfaces how policymakers in these congressional hearings silenced the issues 10 which, we argue, eroded the opportunity for alternative discussions to be had about designing a social media app for children. methods the method of this research involved applying open coding (strauss & corbin, 2004) to four us congressional hearings that spoke directly to the issues of instagram kids, namely, disinformation nation: social media's role in promoting extremism and misinformation house committee hearing (held on 25 march 2021); antigone davis’ (facebook’s head of safety) testimony on mental health effects: senate hearing (held on 30 september 2021); frances haugen testitfies on children & social media use: full senate hearing (4 october 2021); and adam mosseri (instagram ceo) at subcommittee: protecting kids online: instagram and reforms for young users ( held on 8 december 2021). during the process of open coding, desk research in the form of literature searches were conducted to explore the claims made during the hearings. by analysing this data, we identified some key themes. findings a key theme observed within the transcripts was the mischaracterization by policymakers about the supposed consensus within scholarship around issues relating to children and social media, such as effects on mental health. policymakers often presented claims as having come from scientific consensus but research into the practices and effects of social media on children is still ongoing. for instance, during the house committee hearing on 25 march 2021, rep. cathy mcmorris rodgers (r-wa 5th district) claimed that “the science on social media is becoming clear”, asserting that “one study found” while “other studies found” before listing four distinct statistics about youth mental health. by conducting a simple online search for these claims, we found that the research in question did come from distinct papers that were led by the same author (twenge et al., 2017; twenge, 2019; twenge; 2020; twenge & campbell, 2019). the author in question, jean m twenge is also the author of the 2017 book igen (twenge, 2017), which attributes youth unhappiness to smartphone use. this book has been critiqued by other leading scholars in the field of children and digital media, for misrepresenting the data and lacking context (livingstone, 2017; swist et al., 2019; third et al., 2018). another example is seen on the 30 september 2021 hearing when rep. ed markey (d-ma) claimed that “all recent scientific studies by child development experts found that not getting enough likes on social media significantly reduces adolescents' feelings of self-worth.” again, conducting a search for this claim returned more contextualised findings such as this one from lee et al. (2020), which found that there is a “possibility that technology which makes it easier for adolescents to compare their social status online [i.e., likes]...could be a risk factor that accelerates the onset of internalizing symptoms among vulnerable youth” (p. 2141). we argue that framing the science in such settled ways as above, does two things: it misrepresents scientific research findings and debate; and it discursively shuts down the idea of exploring what social media for children could or should look like. 11 another observation within the transcripts is the spectacle and performative nature of the hearings. to start, each congressperson and senator only has five-minutes or so to ask their questions which results in policymakers asking broad questions, sometimes with multiple questions at once, and they then request a “yes or no” response from the tech representative. in one instance during the 25 march 2021 hearing, rep. billy long (r-mo) each asked the ceo of google, twitter (now x), and facebook (now meta) if they “knew the difference between yes and no?” they all answered “yes” to which rep. long responded: “thank you. i want a steak dinner there from one of my colleagues. they didn't think i could get all three of you to answer a yes or no question. i did it,” before moving to his real line of questioning: “mr. zuckerberg, let me ask you: how do you ascertain if a user is under 13 years old?” this particular exchange is problematic because it trivializes the opportunity that hearings afford and more broadly, the allocation of mere minutes for each exchange hinders the opportunity for necessary explanations to be explored. of note, in contrast to what the tech representatives experienced during their hearings, during frances haugen’s hearing on 4 october 2021, where she testified against facebook, she was permitted more time and space to contextualize and explain her answers. in this way, we can observe, similar to cohen’s (1972/2011) work on ‘folk devils’ and ‘folk heroes’, the tech representatives framed as ‘villains’ preying on children and the bipartisan politicians—and ms haugen as a whistleblower—‘heroes’ keeping the industry accountable. this discursive process is an attempt to purify the inherently messy nature that questions about a children’s social media app, fundamentally raises. we argue that we need to not shy away from sitting in the complexity of digital products for children and considering wider interpretations of who is responsible for supporting children’s experiences online. discussion the case of instagram kids is an example where efforts to purify (latour, 1993) the complex issues regarding children being online, hindered the opportunity to robustly engage in the fair question: how could a social media experience for young adolescents be designed to be safe, ethical, diverse, and fun? we argue that the issues presented in the hearings discursively frame the mere idea of instagram kids as inherently harmful without due consideration about the potential benefits or discussions about how such digital products could be designed to amplify high quality experiences for children. we argue that better online experiences for children are possible (dezuanni et al., 2023), but it requires children, parents, policymakers, and industry working through the complexity together. references braun, b., & whatmore, s. (2010). the stuff of politics: technoscience, democracy and public life. in b. braun, & s. whatmore (eds.), the stuff of politics: technoscience, democracy and public life (pp. ix-xl). university of minnesota press. 12 cohen, s. (1972/2011). folk devils and moral panics. routledge. dezuanni, m., rodriguez, a., sefton-green, j., leaver, t., bunn, a., potter, a., farthing, r., hourigan, a., pangrazio, l., mannell, k., corser, k., bennett, s., levido, a., zhao, x., ng, r., healy, g, & willett, r., (2023), digital child working paper 2023-11, manifesto for a better children’s internet, australian research council centre of excellence for the digital child, queensland university of technology. https://doi.org/10.26187/q42e-6047 latour, b. (2004). why has critique run out of steam? from matters of fact to matters of concern. critical inquiry, 30(2), 225-248. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/421123 latour, b. (1993). we have never been modern. harvard university press. leaver, t., highfield, t., & abidin, c. (2020). instagram: visual social media cultures. polity. lee, h. y., jamieson, j. p., reis, h. t., beevers, c. g., josephs, r., mullarkey, m. c., o’brien, j., & yeager, d. s. (2020). getting fewer “likes” than others on social media elicits emotional distress among victimized adolescents. _child development_, _91_(6), 2141–2159. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13422 livingstone, s. (2017). igen: why today’s super-connected kids are growing up less rebellious, more tolerant, less happy – and completely unprepared for adulthood. journal of children and media, 12(1), 118–123. https://doi.org/10.1080/17482798.2017.1417091 mac, r., & silverman, c. (2021, march 18). facebook is building an instagram for kids. buzzfeed news. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-instagram-for-children-under-13 odgers, c.l., allen, n.b., pfeifer, j.h., dahl, r.e., nesi, j., schueller, s.m., williams, j. l., & the national scientific council on adolescence (2022). engaging, safe, and evidence-based: what science tells us about how to promote positive development and decrease risk in online spaces, council report no 2. doi: 10.31234/osf.io/rvn8q pausing instagram kids. (2021, september 27). instagram.com. https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/pausing-instagram-kids strauss, a. l., & corbin, j. (2004). open coding. in clive seale (ed.) social research methods: a reader, routledge. pp. 303-306. swist, t., collin, p., & third, a. (2019). children’s data journeys beyond the ‘supply chain’: co-curating flows and frictions. media international australia, 170(1), 68–77. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x19828390 the facebook files. (2021, september 13). the wall street journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/thefacebook-files-11631713039 third, a., collin, p., walsh, l., & black, r. (2019). young people in digital society. in palgrave macmillan uk ebooks. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57369-8 twenge, j. m. (2017). igen: why today's super-connected kids are growing up less rebellious, more tolerant, less happy—and completely unprepared for adulthood—and what that means for the rest of us. simon and schuster. twenge, j. m., joiner, t. e., rogers, m. l., & martin, g. n. (2017). increases in depressive symptoms, suicide-related outcomes, and suicide rates among u.s. adolescents after 2010 and links to https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/421123 https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13422 https://doi.org/10.1080/17482798.2017.1417091 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-instagram-for-children-under-13 https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/pausing-instagram-kids https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x19828390 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039 https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57369-8 13 increased new media screen time. clinical psychological science, 6(1), 3–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702617723376 twenge, j. m. (2020). why increases in adolescent depression may be linked to the technological environment. current opinion in psychology, 32, 89–94. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.06.036 twenge, j. m. (2020b). increases in depression, self-harm, and suicide among u.s. adolescents after 2012 and links to technology use: possible mechanisms. psychiatric research and clinical practice, 2(1), 19–25. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.prcp.20190015 twenge, j. m., & campbell, w. k. (2019). media use is linked to lower psychological well-being: evidence from three datasets. psychiatric quarterly, 90(2), 311–331. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11126-019-09630-7 https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702617723376 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.06.036 https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.prcp.20190015 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11126-019-09630-7 14 children’s voice in the design of virtual spaces: using videogames to explore preferences janelle mackenzie queensland university of technology maryanne theobold queensland university of technology susan danby queensland university of technology daniel johnson queensland university of technology background in 2016, 97% of australian households with children under 15 years had access to the internet (abs, 2016), and similar figures were reported in 2021 for households in the u.s. (us dept of commerce, 2021). internet access allows children to retrieve information, and also affords entertainment opportunities such as playing videogames. it has been suggested that up to 93% of australian children aged 5-14 years play videogames, with a total play time of around 100 minutes per day (brand et al., 2023). recent reports suggest that roblox users under 18 years in the u.s. played for an average of 190 minutes per day in 2022 (clement, 2023). as such, many children worldwide are spending large amounts of time in virtual environments. in light of plans to create virtual spaces for children (e.g., children’s metaverse), it is important to acknowledge that children may perceive and interact with virtual spaces differently to adults. across a range of disciplines there has been acknowledgement that children can and should have a say in research about themselves (mason & hood, 2011), as children are capable of and should be afforded opportunities to provide insightful and useful interpretations of their world (mason & danby, 2011). this should include virtual spaces. over two decades ago, druin (1999) developed a research approach to include children’s voices in technology development. the cooperative enquiry approach involved three techniques: contextual inquiry, participatory design, and technology immersion, all of which are applied to gather children’s insights about technology. a decade later, after more refinement, druin (2010) discussed the evolution of the approach with attempts to minimize adult-child differences in ways of communicating to ensure ideas are shared and explored. the field of child-computer interaction has also flourished in the last two decades; this research investigates the interaction between children and digital technologies, whilst allowing considerations for children’s variations in language, reading abilities, cognitive skills as well as interests (markopoulos et al., 15 2021). these attempts to include children in the design of digital technology for them is important and warranted, yet the methods are often time and resource intensive. identifying less intensive methods would be valuable. one way to glean children’s insights into the virtual spaces they would like to spend time in is to evaluate their perceptions of the videogames they play. a review of research on motivations for playing videogames identified the top-rated motivations for children aged 11 to 14 years were fun, excitement, challenge, and relaxation (olson, 2010). a myriad of design elements could contribute to eliciting these desired feelings and experiences in virtual spaces. investigating children’s perceptions of the design elements of videogames could provide valuable insights into what they like, and highlight the value of design elements that may impact children’s experiences which may differ to adults. method this study is part of a larger program of research: the responsible innovation in technology for children (ritec) project, co-founded by unicef and the lego group and funded by the lego foundation, which aims to create practical tools for businesses and governments that will empower them to put the wellbeing of children at the centre of digital design. we asked children aged 7 to 13 years to play two videogames– rocket league (rl) and lego builder’s journey (lbj). rl is a fastpaced sports-style game where players control cars to play soccer. lbj is a puzzle-style game where players use bricks to build paths between two minifigures. in total, 68 children participated in two sessions: (1) a laboratory session in which the children played the two videogames and their psychophysiological data was collected; and (2) a reflective interview conducted to co-create video-stimulated accounts (vsa) of the children’s experiences, which involved viewing key moments of the children’s gameplay. the vsa methodology allows the researcher and participant to co-construct accounts of experiences, thus centering children’s voices. this abstract presents findings from vsas from 30 participants, focusing on comments related to the children’s perception of the design elements of the videogames. of these participants, 15 (50%) had played videogames online. reflective thematic analysis was used (braun & clarke, 2021) to analyse the data using nvivo. three overarching themes were identified: (1) design elements preferences, (2) importance of feeling in control, and (3) improvements to game design. findings our participants described their preferences for design elements and explained why. in lbj, preferences included moving from a grassy forest scene to a desert scene because it “felt like you were getting away from like a bad place, like a place where it's just barren” (p68). visual scenes that included elements for which they had descriptive language, such as trees or sand, afforded them opportunities to effectively share. 16 preferences for rl included events that incited joy and excitement such as explosions, boosting, and being blown backwards, which are features that allow the use of onomatopoeia to help describe them (e.g., bang, boom, whoosh). for lbj, the soundtrack was calming for many, which was identified as beneficial when solving a challenging puzzle: “i usually get frustrated with these kinds of things but i think the music actually kind of helped to keep me thinking calm” (p7). comparison to other experiences in their lives was a technique used to share their views. our participants highlighted the importance of feeling in control for their enjoyment, and in both games participants identified the need to effectively use the controller to achieve their goals. lbj included a tutorial to learn the controller functions and many participants found this valuable and even acknowledged that they would not have picked up the requisite skills without it: “it helped me know how to move the blocks and how to drop them and lift them. if i didn't know that... i would be stuck there at the very first one and not know how to do it” (p6). we suggest that experiencing enjoyment within other virtual spaces will need the requirement of control for easy navigation. our participants provided insightful, informative, and measured descriptions of improvements to the videogames. for lbj these included different modes of play, e.g., creative mode, with detailed descriptions of how it could be achieved. notably, some participants critiqued their suggestions to indicate potential downsides: “ because like if it's like in a story mode kind of way, that wouldn't really work because you'd end up getting distracted, never really finish it” (p32). other comments stemmed from an interest in seeing and doing things “out-of-the-box,” such as driving everywhere possible: “i went onto the roof and off the roof and drive wherever i wanted” (p59). mechanisms for eliciting insights included listening out for comments of exploration beyond capabilities of the game– e.g., “i was like curious as in like i wanted to jump off to see what was down below, like the big islands” (p11), and explicitly asking what improvements they suggest. discussion we identified some design elements that children desire and require in virtual spaces to maximize enjoyment. within the research approach, mechanisms that scaffolded the children to share were identified. we argue that children have a lot to contribute towards the design of digital experiences for them, which can be descriptive, insightful, and measured, and investigating children’s perceptions of videogames is a way of capturing these. references australian bureau of statistics (abs). (2016). household use of information technology [dataset]. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/industry/technology-and-innovation/householduse-information-technology/latest-release. brand, j., e., wilson, t., w., jervis, j., & huggins, p., w. (2023). australia plays 2023. igea. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/industry/technology-and-innovation/household-use-information-technology/latest-release. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/industry/technology-and-innovation/household-use-information-technology/latest-release https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/industry/technology-and-innovation/household-use-information-technology/latest-release https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/industry/technology-and-innovation/household-use-information-technology/latest-release. 17 braun, v., & clarke, v. (2021). thematic analysis: a practical guide. sage. clement, j. (2023). average daily time spent by children in the united states on leading gaming apps from 2019 to 2022. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1249021/us-time-spent-bychildren-on-gaming-apps/ druin, a. (1999). cooperative inquiry: new technologies for children. chi ’99: proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems, 592–599. https://doi.org/10.1145/302979.303166 druin, a. (2010). children as codesigners of new technologies: valuing the imagination to transform what is possible. new directions for youth development, 2010(128), 35–43. https://doi.org/10.1002/yd.373 markopoulos, p., read, j., & giannakos, m. (2021). design of digital technologies for children. in g. salvendy & w. karwowski (eds.), handbook of human factors and ergonomics. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119636113.ch49 mason, j., & danby, s. (2011). children as experts in their lives: child inclusive research. child indicators research, 4(2), 185–189. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-011-9108-4 mason, j., & hood, s. (2011). exploring issues of children as actors in social research. children and youth services review, 33(4), 490–495. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2010.05.011 olson, c. (2010). children’s motivations for video game play in the context of normal development. review of general psychology rev gen psychol, 14. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018984 responsible innovation in technology for children: digital technology, play and child well-being. (n.d.). retrieved february 29, 2024, from https://www.unicef-irc.org/ritec u.s. department of commerce, census bureau. (2021). american community survey (acs) [dataset]. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1249021/us-time-spent-by-children-on-gaming-apps/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1249021/us-time-spent-by-children-on-gaming-apps/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1249021/us-time-spent-by-children-on-gaming-apps/ https://doi.org/10.1145/302979.303166 https://doi.org/10.1145/302979.303166 https://doi.org/10.1145/302979.303166 https://doi.org/10.1002/yd.373 https://doi.org/10.1002/yd.373 https://doi.org/10.1002/yd.373 https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119636113.ch49 https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119636113.ch49 https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119636113.ch49 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-011-9108-4 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-011-9108-4 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2010.05.011 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2010.05.011 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2010.05.011 https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018984 https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018984 https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018984 https://www.unicef-irc.org/ritec https://www.unicef-irc.org/ritec 18 sharing in (digital) caring? digital labour in a diverse sample of new parents katrin langton deakin university, centre for research for educational impact introduction in australia and many other post-industrial societies, the transition to parenthood is a highly digitised and ‘appified’ period of the life-course (lupton & pederson, 2016; donelle et al., 2021), that significantly contributes to the industry of the digital child. parenting apps represent a growing component of the mobile app development industry (fedorychak, 2024), with many ‘key players’ in the market providing apps for use throughout the perinatal period (technavio, 2024). the range of mobile applications to assist parents throughout this life-stage includes apps to manage fertility, pregnancy, infant feeding and ‘baby-tracking’, and children’s development (dienelt et al., 2019; lupton & pedersen, 2016). while some of these applications focus on the monitoring of women’s reproductive bodies, they similarly begin to normalise the datafication of children’s bodies and development. the datafication of the transition to parenthood thereby represents the earliest stage at which children’s digital footprints emerge (barassi, 2020). these practices are driven by parenting culture trends that prescribe caring dataveillance (sukk & siibak, 2021) – data-based surveillance as an expression of love, affection and attention (lupton, 2020) – as a necessary culture of care (leaver, 2017). this paper draws attention to the gendered role divisions in the digital labour of parenting, which is predominantly performed by mothers (peng, 2022; langton & zhao, 2024) – reflective of traditional (western) expectations of gender roles. the uneven distribution of parenting labour perpetuates gendered social inequalities, specifically in employment opportunities and earning potential (doucet, 2009) that compromise social and financial security (australian government, 2023). in the context of digital parenting, these gendered divides result in a digital double-bind of maternal responsibilisation: mothers are encouraged to perform caring dataveillance – while simultaneously making themselves accountable for their children’s datafication (mascheroni, 2020). 19 parenting apps are an important vehicle to communicate, and potentially challenge, normative expectations of gender-differentiated labour in (digital) parenting. yet, hiebert and colleagues (2021) found that “digital technologies tailored to new and expectant parents actively reinforced western sociocultural heteronormative feminine and masculine gender roles” (p. 7). previous studies of mobile applications for (expectant) parents highlight the intense responsibilisation of mothers for all kinds of reproductive and parenting-related labour (hall et al., 2023; thornham, 2019; lupton & pedersen, 2016; johnson, 2014), the marginalisation of other caregivers (thomas et al., 2018), and of non-traditional family structures, through the perpetuation of heteronormativity (byrt & dempsey, 2019). this paper builds on the existing body of work, by exploring how the performance of and responsibility for the (digital) labour of parenting is negotiated within the parenting team, and in the context of everyday family life, from the perspectives of caregivers of a range of genders and family structures – that both extends and moves beyond a focus on mothers’ perspectives only. methods this paper draws on the results of 28 semi-structured interviews with australian parents of different genders and family structures, including conversations with fathers, single parents, and same-sex coupled parents. where possible, coupled parents were interviewed together. the interviews were conducted between june 2021 and march 2022, as part of a larger research project. this paper draws on the results of these conversations, focussing on parents’ descriptions of the app ecologies that mediated their experience of the transition to parenthood and early parenting, and how patterns of app use mediated the division of labour within the parenting team. the interviews were manually transcribed, coded and analysed in nvivo. data analysis followed braun and clarke’s (2006) approach to thematic analysis, while detailed coding and analysis were based on constructivist grounded theory (belgrave & seide, 2020; charmaz, 2006). findings app ecologies of the transition to parenthood 20 parents’ accounts of their digital labour in parenting outlined the digital media ecologies of their transition to parenthood. especially for mothers, the routine use of pregnancy tracking apps was often experienced as pleasurable, affirming their embodied experience of carrying child, and increasing feelings of connection to their unborn baby. however, these apps’ gender-specific designs often excluded fathers, prompting many mothers to perform additional labour in conveying the information they received to their partners, to allow them to relate to and share in their embodied experience of parenthood. for same-sex coupled fathers, parenting apps for the pre-natal period were largely irrelevant. nevertheless, this life-stage was still heavily appified, as social media applications played an integral role in connecting these couples to support networks, including lawyers and potential surrogates, to make parenthood possible in the first place. gendered role divisions: rationales and practices as in previous work (hiebert et al., 2021), several mothers voiced their frustration at their male partners’ lack of involvement in digital parenting and hands-on caregiving, framing their routine deference to mothers as a deliberate attempt to avoid assuming responsibility for caregiving labour. yet, participating fathers in opposite-sex relationships provided a range of rationales for their reticence. these included the wish to respect and support their female partner’s agency and self-determination, a lack of confidence as new parents, and a lack of cross-generational role-modelling, which meant fathers had to negotiate their new identity without a ‘gendered script’ – a set of socio-cultural role expectations (dunne, 2000) – that fitted their aspirations of the kind of parent they wanted to be. these challenges were exacerbated by the gendered nature of digital sources of parenting support, that frequently constructed fathers as lesser parents, or sidelined them completely. challenging gender-differentiated norms in parenting labour to promote more equitable sharing of caregiving labour, there is much to learn from the approaches of same-sex couples who, through their non-traditional family structure, similarly lack a ‘script’ for their parenting roles. consequently, these parents proactively negotiated their role divisions – and chose parenting apps reflecting this approach. for example, the use of infant feeding applications that focussed on tracking features only and allowed caregivers to record data to a shared profile, represented a parenting practice that promoted the sharing of digital labour. these apps lacked images and textbased information through which gendered norms or assumptions about family structures could be perpetuated. shared participation in recording and accessing babytracking data allowed caregivers to share in the mental labour and – importantly – in the responsibility for infant care. within the context of the family unit, the ‘disembodied’ nature of children’s datafication – by ‘reducing’ bodies, embodied practise and experience to numbers – can therefore have somewhat of a democratising effect on parents’ involvement in caregiving. conclusion 21 the designs and features of many parenting apps are no longer reflective of parents’ lived experience of the transition to parenthood, and their planned and actual role divisions. this paper shows that although many digital spaces for parenting continue to promote hegemonic heteronormative caregiving arrangements, parents still have agency in choosing more equitable approaches to the digital labour of parenting, which can be supported through suitable parenting apps. as part of the industry of the digital child, mobile applications used in the transition to parenthood play a significant role in the ‘how’ and ‘who’ of children’s datafication. future work should explore how parents could move from sharing the responsibility and accountability for children’s datafication, to the development of shared strategies to manage these now-normalised practices. references australian government. (2023). national strategy to achieve gender equality – discussion paper. department of the prime minister and cabinet. https://www.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/resource/download/national-strategy-gender-equalitydiscussion-paper_0.pdf belgrave, l. l., & seide, k. (2019). grounded theory methodology: principles and practices. in p. liamputtong (ed.), handbook of research methods in health social sciences (living reference work, pp. 1-18). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2779-6_84-2 barassi, v. (2020). child data citizen: how tech campanies are profiling us from before birth. the mit press. braun, v., & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa byrt, a., & dempsey, d. (2020). encouraging ‘good’ motherhood: self-tracking and the provision of support on apps for parents of premature infants. information, communication & society, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2020.1850837 charmaz, k. (2006). constructing grounded theory : a practical guide through qualitative analysis. sage publications. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docid=585415 dienelt, k., moores, c. j., miller, j., & mehta, k. (2019). an investigation into the use of infant feeding tracker apps by breastfeeding mothers. health informatics journal, 1460458219888402. https://doi.org/10.1177/1460458219888402 donelle, l., hall, j., hiebert, b., jackson, k., stoyanovich, e., lachance, j., & facca, d. (2021). investigation of digital technology use in the transition to parenting: qualitative study. jmir pediatrics and parenting, 4(1), e25388. https://doi.org/10.2196/25388 doucet, a. (2009). dad and baby in the first year: gendered responsibilities and embodiment. the annals of the american academy of political and social science. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716209334069 https://www.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/resource/download/national-strategy-gender-equality-discussion-paper_0.pdf https://www.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/resource/download/national-strategy-gender-equality-discussion-paper_0.pdf https://www.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/resource/download/national-strategy-gender-equality-discussion-paper_0.pdf https://www.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/resource/download/national-strategy-gender-equality-discussion-paper_0.pdf https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2779-6_84-2 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2779-6_84-2 https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2020.1850837 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2020.1850837 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2020.1850837 https://doi.org/10.1177/1460458219888402 https://doi.org/10.1177/1460458219888402 https://doi.org/10.2196/25388 https://doi.org/10.2196/25388 https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716209334069 https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716209334069 https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716209334069 22 dunne, g. (2000). opting into motherhood: lesbians blurring the boundaries and transforming the meaning of parenthood and kinship. gender & society, 14, 11–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/089124300014001003 fedorychak, v. (2024, february 8). parenting apps market: opportunities for startups. smarttek solutions. https://smarttek.solutions/blog/parenting-apps-market/ hall, j., hiebert, b., facca, d., & donelle, l. (2023). ‘putting all my eggs into the app’: self, relational and systemic surveillance of mothers’ use of digital technologies during the transition to parenting. digital health, 9, 205520762211507. https://doi.org/10.1177/20552076221150742 hiebert, b., hall, j., donelle, l., facca, d., jackson, k., & stoyanovich, e. (2021). “let me know when i’m needed”: exploring the gendered nature of digital technology use for health information seeking during the transition to parenting. digital health, 7, 205520762110486. https://doi.org/10.1177/20552076211048638 johnson, s. (2014). “maternal devices”, social media and the self-management of pregnancy, mothering and child health. societies, 4(2), 330–350. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc4020330 langton, k., & zhao, x. (2024, february 7). the responsibility to manage children’s use of digital media is often unevenly distributed between parents. abc education. https://www.abc.net.au/education/the-uneven-responsibility-of-managing-kids-use-of-digitalmedia/103400940 leaver, t. (2017). intimate surveillance: normalizing parental monitoring and mediation of infants online. social media + society, 3(2), 2056305117707192. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117707192 light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881–900. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 lupton, d., & pedersen, s. (2016). an australian survey of women’s use of pregnancy and parenting apps. women birth, 29(4), 368–375. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wombi.2016.01.008 lupton, d. (2020). caring dataveillance women’s use of apps to monitor pregnancy and children. in l. green, d. holloway, k. stevenson, t. leaver, & l. haddon (eds.), the routledge companion to digital media and children (pp. 393-402). routledge. mascheroni, g. (2020). datafied childhoods: contextualising datafication in everyday life. current sociology, 68(6), 798–813. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392118807534 peng, y. (2022). gendered division of digital labor in parenting: a qualitative study in urban china. sex roles, 86(5–6), 283–304. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-021-01267-w sukk, m., & siibak, a. (2021). caring dataveillance and the construction of “good parenting”: estonian parents’ and pre-teens’ reflections on the use of tracking technologies. communications, 46(3), 446–467. https://doi.org/10.1515/commun-2021-0045 https://doi.org/10.1177/089124300014001003 https://doi.org/10.1177/089124300014001003 https://doi.org/10.1177/089124300014001003 https://smarttek.solutions/blog/parenting-apps-market/ https://smarttek.solutions/blog/parenting-apps-market/ https://doi.org/10.1177/20552076221150742 https://doi.org/10.1177/20552076221150742 https://doi.org/10.1177/20552076221150742 https://doi.org/10.1177/20552076211048638 https://doi.org/10.1177/20552076211048638 https://doi.org/10.1177/20552076211048638 https://doi.org/10.3390/soc4020330 https://doi.org/10.3390/soc4020330 https://www.abc.net.au/education/the-uneven-responsibility-of-managing-kids-use-of-digital-media/103400940 https://www.abc.net.au/education/the-uneven-responsibility-of-managing-kids-use-of-digital-media/103400940 https://www.abc.net.au/education/the-uneven-responsibility-of-managing-kids-use-of-digital-media/103400940 https://www.abc.net.au/education/the-uneven-responsibility-of-managing-kids-use-of-digital-media/103400940 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117707192 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117707192 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117707192 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wombi.2016.01.008 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wombi.2016.01.008 https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392118807534 https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392118807534 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-021-01267-w https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-021-01267-w https://doi.org/10.1515/commun-2021-0045 https://doi.org/10.1515/commun-2021-0045 23 technavio. (2024). parenting apps market analysis apac, north america, europe, south america, middle east and africa—us, china, india, germany, uk size and forecast 2024-2028. technavio. https://www.technavio.com/report/parenting-apps-market-industry-analysis thomas, g. m., lupton, d., & pedersen, s. (2018). “the appy for a happy pappy”: expectant fatherhood and pregnancy apps. journal of gender studies, 27(7), 759–770. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2017.1301813 thornham, h. (2019). algorithmic vulnerabilities and the datalogical: early motherhood and trackingas-care regimes. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 25(2), 171–185. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856519835772 https://www.technavio.com/report/parenting-apps-market-industry-analysis https://www.technavio.com/report/parenting-apps-market-industry-analysis https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2017.1301813 https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2017.1301813 https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2017.1301813 https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856519835772 24 cashing in and mucking out: what does a ‘drivers’ approach to researching uk children’s digital play tell us about children’s digital labour? fiona scott the university of sheffield introduction the children’s digital game industry is a powerful commercial entity, whose users are presented with an ever-growing range and complexity of commercial content (göksu et al., 2020; meyer et al., 2019). past studies have focused on the commercial dimensions of children’s digital play, including their impact on consumption (harris et al., 2012) and the implicit and explicit forms of labour implicated in children’s digital play (dezuanni et al., 2023; caton & green, 2023). commentators are rightfully concerned about the extent to which policy governing the children’s media industry succeeds in protecting or fails to protect children’s rights. meanwhile, past research has also emphasised that the interests of different stakeholders are complexly intertwined. children’s diverse engagements with digital content and contexts serve purposes for parents and carers, for commercial entities and for children themselves (scott et al., 2023). this paper foregrounds two forms of ‘digital labour’ that children engage in when playing digitally, considering how a ‘drivers’ perspective might expand understanding of the value of this digital labour for different parties. the theorisation of ‘digital play drivers’ expands on past work (galpin, 2016; katz et al., 1973), to interrogate how the drivers of children’s digital play connect with their experiences of subjective wellbeing. i present findings from an international research project (june 2022 august 2023), delivered in collaboration with a partner in the children’s digital play industry and a global children’s rights organisation. rather than presenting comprehensive findings of the overall study, which is being reported elsewhere, the paper draws on theories of children’s motivations and play to address the questions: (1) how is digital labour enacted in the digital play practices of children aged 6-12?; (2) what does a ‘drivers’ approach reveal about why children engage in digital labour online?; and (3) what do these findings tell us about children’s digital labour? methods and approach to support the overall aim of examining the relationship between children’s digital play and their wellbeing, we deployed a multi-method qualitative study in a case study design. the theoretical approach was ecoculturally-informed (weisner, 2002), semilongitudinal and ethnographically-informed. methods included: conversations and semistructured interviews; ethnographic video observation; family-led data generation and sharing; and iterative family feedback. participants were selected to ensure diversity across a range of factors, including age, sex and gender, socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity and disability/ non-disability. data were analysed and interpreted collectively, following a deductive-inductive approach, with inductive coding following a 25 framework designed for the project. analysis summaries were produced and discussed between researchers. for this paper, we reviewed the inductive codes and analysis summaries to identify insights relevant to the research questions outlined above. it draws on a subset of the data collected specifically in the uk, wherein 120 research visits were made to 20 uk families. findings and conclusions children engaged in diverse digital labour practices in their digital play, including commercial and caring forms. the broader study identified that children’s digital play choices and practices were driven by deep interests, needs and desires characterised as ‘digital play drivers’. these drivers, which are reported more comprehensively elsewhere, offer a unique lens on the digital labour practices in the present study. children’s commercial digital labour children encountered a range of commercial content and game mechanics. perhaps most strikingly, children engaged in repetitive in-game tasks to earn virtual currency to spend on virtual items, skins, objects, abilities, outfits and avatar customisation. nineyear-old penny spent a great deal of time working in bloxburg to generate income to spend in-game. whilst children’s digital play choices and practices undoubtedly served particular purposes for commercial entities, a ‘drivers’ approach emphasises the deep interests, needs and desires children are seeking to fulfil. one of the eleven ‘digital play drivers’ identified in the present study was the drive to understand, and meet, one’s own emotional needs. for some children in the study, games with this combination of design features appeared to afford something past researchers have termed a ‘flow’ state (johnston, 2021; csikszentmihalyi et al., 2005). nine-year-old penny framed the repetitive tasks associated with generation on in-game currency in bloxberg in terms of flow state. penny would often come home from an already busy day of work at school and then spend time ‘working’ in bloxburg to earn income to spend, something the research team initially found both surprising and intriguing. penny explained that engaging in this sort of repetitive task helped her to feel relaxed and focused. penny’s digital play was also often driven by a need to explore, construct and express identities. at the time of the research, she was beginning to tentatively explore a range of new, more ‘grown up’ identities, activities and interests for the first time. penny expressed doubts and self-criticism about these identity explorations in the physical world, playing down the seriousness of her interest in trying out new hairstyles and make-up. in her digital play, however, penny used the currency she generated in bloxburg to attentively customise her avatar, changing its clothing regularly. where physical world identity experimentation carried increased cost and risk, bloxburg’s extremely customisable avatar feature afforded penny rapid and relatively low-stakes experimentation with different hair, make-up and clothes. digital play experiences within bloxburg thus appeared to fulfil penny’s need to explore identity and, as a result, support her wellbeing. children’s caring digital labour 26 children’s caring labour was enacted in two ways. firstly, children invested considerable time empathising with, nurturing and tending to imagined others (including imagined humans, animals, natural organisms and spaces). like penny, 8-year-old ollie spent considerable time ‘working’ in his digital play, in particular building structures to look after animals in minecraft. ollie had constructed a large ‘mansion dog house’ to house his substantial pack of dogs, which he had tamed from wolves, using bones, something he said was hard work. ollie’s attempts to build the house would sometimes lead to dogs falling off the dog house, which had by this point become several stories high. ollie would apologise to them, and subsequently mused on ways to better protect them from falls by outlining the surrounding areas with slime blocks, so the dogs would bounce rather than hurting themselves. secondly, children engaged in digital play practices that appeared to deliberately prioritise the wellbeing of others over personal needs and desires. both adaobi (11) and annie (10) played digital games with younger children to support their wellbeing, rather than to meet their personal digital play preferences. as in the case of children’s commercial labour, a ‘drivers’ approach emphasises the deep interests, needs and desires children are seeking to fulfil in their caring labour in digital contexts. children including ollie, adaobi and annie all appeared driven by the need to empathise, tend and nurture, fulfilment of which driver appeared to support wellbeing. summary children in the present study engaged in substantial ‘digital labour’, some of which was complexly intertwined with commercial purposes and the needs of social others. notwithstanding this, children’s digital labour also appeared to fulfil specific individual needs, desires and deep interests for children themselves, sometimes transcending designers’ imagined uses of digital games. the study’s findings emphasise that children’s labour within digital play contexts cannot be understood in isolation from children’s broader practices, interests and enquiries. references caton, l., & green, m. (2023). digital childhood and youth: life with screens. in: v. cooper and m. tatlow-golden (eds.) an introduction to childhood and youth studies and psychology. routledge, (pp. 186-199). csikszentmihalyi, m., abuhamdeh, s., & nakamura, j. (2005). flow. in: a. j. elliot and c. s. dweck (eds.). handbook of competence and motivation. guilford publications. (pp. 598–608). dezuanni, m., rodriguez, a., sefton-green, j., leaver, t. b., bunn, a., potter, a., farthing, r., hourigan, a., pangrazio, l., mannell, k., corser, k., bennett, s., levido, a., zhao, a., ng, rebecca, healy, g. and willett, r. (2023). manifesto for a better children’s internet. digital child working paper series. australian research council centre of excellence for the digital child, australia. galpin, a. (2016). towards a theoretical framework for understanding the development of mediarelated needs. journal of children and media, 10(3), 385-391. 27 göksu, i̇., aslan, a., & turgut, y. e. (2020). evaluation of mobile games in the context of content: what do children face when playing mobile games?. e-learning and digital media, 17(5), 388-407. harris, j. l., speers, s. e., schwartz, m. b., & brownell, k. d. (2012). us food company branded advergames on the internet: children's exposure and effects on snack consumption. journal of children and media, 6(1), 51-68. johnston, k. (2021). engagement and immersion in digital play: supporting young children’s digital wellbeing. international journal of environmental research and public health, 18(19), 10179. katz e., blumler j. g., gurevitch m. (1973). uses and gratifications research. the public opinion quarterly, 37(4), 509–523. meyer, m., adkins, v., yuan, n., weeks, h. m., chang, y. j., & radesky, j. (2019). advertising in young children's apps: a content analysis. journal of developmental & behavioral pediatrics, 40(1), 32-39. scott, f., parry, b., marsh, j., lahmar, j., nutbrown, b., scholey, e., ... & yamada-rice, d. (2023). addressing the “whys” of uk children’s youtube use: a purposes approach. social media + society, 9(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/205630512312169. https://doi.org/10.1177/205630512312169 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): hui, lin. (2024, october). the role of the drama interpretation industry in the transnational reception of korean tv series in china. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the role of the drama interpretation industry in the transnational reception of korean tv series in china hui lin king’s college london this article examines how the drama interpretation industry on video-streaming platforms influences the transnational reception of korean tv series in china. proliferated in 2020, drama interpretative videos re-create transnational tv series with user-generated commentaries. combined with diverse background music and creators’ interpretations, these interpretive videos extract drama clips from the long episodes and reproduce hours-long tv series into 3-5 minute short-form videos. these video accounts proliferate rapidly on chinese video-streaming platforms: one of the most popular interpretive accounts, dushe film (du she), accumulated more than 30 million users on douyin in three months from april to july 2020 (pic. 1). these videos are important because, on the one hand, they disseminate international dramas to a wider audience and generate more viewership; on the other hand, these videos may be detrimental to the transnational television industry as audiences may no longer watch the original tv series when consuming the dramas in a snackable way. focusing on their impact not only helps with understanding the video-editing industry on audience reception of transnational tv series but also develops research on the impact of mobile media on tv industries. (pic.1 the left: it shows one of the largest drama-editing accounts with 6.1 million followers. pic. 2 the middle: it shows one of its sections of a 5-minute drama interpretation of the glory.) there is a lack of studies to investigate the impact of the thriving video-editing industry on the reception of transnational tv content. for example, andrea esser (2020) discussed the transnational reception of danish tv series among british audiences to critically reflect on the role of “authenticity” in the appeal of danish tv. likewise, finding chinese youths watch american drama for the perception of an ‘authentic ‘way of american life, yang gao (2016) investigated how urban chinese youths engage with american television fiction to construct their self-identities. these studies contributed to examining transnational audiences’ reception of foreign dramas but mainly focused on audiences’ perceptions of the authenticity of television content. some television scholars examined how social media platforms are used to promote international media content (gilardi, et al., 2018), and why transnational audiences consume international tv series on video-on-demand platforms (jin, 2018). however, less is known about how the streaming medium, especially the newly developed video-reproduction industry, might shape the message and affect viewers’ reception of foreign content. thus, to my best knowledge, this article is a pioneer study to investigate the role of reproduced interpretative short-form videos in transnational tv reception. drawing on korean tv reception in china, it addressed questions of how interpretative videos affect chinese audience reception of korean tv series, why audiences engage with re-edited korean tv content in a snackable way, and whether the development of the video-editing industry benefits or detriments international tv industries. this paper calls for academic attention to this video genre because its development is relevant to the government’s cultural policies in the chinese media landscape. this contrasts with drama interpretation videos on youtube which thrives for participatory culture, where low-barrier interactive features allow users to re-edit tv series (jenkins, 2006), or share clips of tv series to participate (hutchinson, 2016; ford & green, 2013). since 2015, the state administration of radio, film, and television has gradually restricted the distribution of foreign tv series in china, either on television stations or video-on-demand platforms1. however, despite limited access to korean tv content via television channels, audiences have shifted to watching drama interpretative videos on short-form video platforms as these platforms allow them to consume restricted drama content in a reproduced, user-generated way. in this context, these interpretive videos gain popularity by successfully dealing with the conflicts between restricted cultural regulations and the demands of audiences. thus, the investigation of re-edited usergenerated videos helps understand how these video creators negotiate foreign cultures and modify narratives consistent with mainstream ideologies and audience preferences, contributing to transnational dissemination and localisation processes. adopting the korean drama glory as a case, this study used qualitative content analysis and semi-structured interviews to examine user-generated commentary videos and their associated comments. the glory series depicts a survivor of a high school bully who pursues revenge against her former tormentors after managing to become a primary school teacher. this drama was selected because it was one of the most popular korean dramas among chinese audiences in 2023. despite the unavailability of official television sources, it has received an impressive score of 8.9/10 on one of the most popular review platforms, douban, and the hashtag for the new season on weibo has gathered 2.8 billion views in 20242. to explore the impact of the douyin video-editing industry of the glory on transnational drama reception, i conducted a qualitative analysis of visual content (n=325) and associated comments of the top 10 most commented clips on the two most popular video-sharing platforms douyin and xiaohongshu. video samples were gathered by inputting the keywords “黑暗荣耀”, “韩剧黑 暗荣耀” etc, in the platforms’ search areas. the visual and textual components of interpretive videos were analysed using a coding sheet that was developed based on an initial examination of the data and then adjusted through inductive reasoning. besides, i supplemented this with in-depth interviews with sixteen big fans of glory interpretative videos. interviews were conducted over the phone and lasted approximately 50 minutes to an hour. with the above methods, i examined how users consume foreign dramas through re-produced short-form videos, why they enjoy watching interpretive video clips, and what implications these videos have for transnational tv reception. this study argues that recreated interpretive videos on video-sharing platforms enhance the dissemination of international tv series and foster transnational viewership, but they may undermine the spread of korean culture. as jin (2018) argued, the new korean wave in china is relevant to the rapid growth of social media. it found that these interpretive short-form videos have become one of their major sources for accessing the 1 the state administration of radio, film, and television. https://www.nrta.gov.cn/art/2015/5/21/art_1588_43710.html 2 https://radii.co/article/the-glory-song-hye-kyo https://www.nrta.gov.cn/art/2015/5/21/art_1588_43710.html https://radii.co/article/the-glory-song-hye-kyo content of korean tv series that are not legally distributed in china. beyond accessibility, viewers find these videos helpful due to creators' localized interpretations, which makes foreign tv series more understandable to chinese audiences. based on qualitative content analysis, this study also found that short-form video creators always replaced obscure terminologies with terms familiar to audiences within the chinese cultural context. similar to the localisation of tv formats, these short-form videos retained some appealing narratives for chinese audiences (zhang & fung, 2014), such as retaliation plots, while converting some sensitive narratives to socially and politically acceptable ways in their interpretations. because of this, chinese viewers mainly discussed drama plots and characters without noticing or mentioning korean culture and cultural differences in the comment section. therefore, this study argues that interpretive videos can be regarded as a form of user-generated localisation of international tv series, making foreign dramas understandable to local audiences and helping with the dramas’ dissemination, while this re-production of tv series, which eliminates cultural differences, is detrimental to the spread of foreign culture. references esser, a. (2020). the appeal of “authenticity”: danish television series and their british audiences. in p. m. jensen, & u. c. jacobsen (eds.) the global audiences of danish television drama (pp. 39-56). gothenburg: nordicom. gao, y. (2016). inventing the ‘authentic’ self: american television and chinese audiences in global beijing. media, culture and society, 38(8), 1201–1217. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443716635870 gilardi, lam, c., tan, k. c., white, a., cheng, s., & zhao, y. (2018). international tv series distribution on chinese digital platforms: marketing strategies and audience engagement. global media and china, 3(3), 213–230. https://doi.org/10.1177/2059436418806406 hutchinson, j. p. (2016). moving convergence culture towards cultural intermediation: social media and cultural inclusion. continuum, 30, 158-170. jenkins. (2006). convergence culture : where old and new media collide. new york university press. jin, y. d. (2018). an analysis of the korean wave as transnational popular culture: north american youth engage through social media as tv becomes obsolete. in international journal of communication (vol. 12). http://ijoc.org. kang. (2017). just another platform for television? the emerging web dramas as digital culture in south korea. media, culture & society, 39(5), 762–772. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443717709442 zhang, x., & fung, a. (2014). tv formatting of the chinese ugly betty: an ethnographic observation of the production community. television and new media, 15(6), 507–522. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476414524286 https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443716635870 https://doi.org/10.1177/2059436418806406 https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443717709442 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): jorge, a., kubrusly, a. (2024, nov 2nd). affective temporalities on social media: world youth day 2023. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. affective temporalities on social media: world youth day 2023 ana jorge cicant, lusófona university ana kubrusly fcsh/nova university of lisbon background and theoretical framework pilgrimage can be defined as a journey inspired by religious, spiritual or cultural motives (collins-kreiner, 2010). practices of pilgrimage are increasingly popular, as a form of post-secular tourism, which “(re)construct[s] pilgrimage places in novel ways, neither sacral nor secular, but rather a hybrid or combination of both” (nilsson & tesfahuney, 2018, p. 172). in fact, post-secular pilgrimage brings together people motivated by religion, tourism, leisure, or self-development (nilsson, 2018). in this context, the concepts of communitas – which reflects feelings of intimacy, equality, and community among pilgrims (maddrell & della dora, 2013) – and collective effervescence – a collective ritual where individuals experience intense social unity and share emotional states (serazio, 2013) – seem to be important elements of the experience. pilgrimage can be augmented by digital media, for instance in the form of blogs, groups, or virtual pilgrimage that support the preparation of the experience; as well as in the sharing of the experience through social media, as a form of 'expressive release', sense-making and community affirmation (maddrell & della dora, 2013). during pilgrimage, pilgrims usually limit their access to habitual devices, people, and digital services, while opening up for the use of others that facilitate the mobility and the spiritual, affective, and sensorial experience as a pilgrim (jorge, 2023). in this paper, we focus our attention on the pilgrimage of the world youth day 2023 (wyd 2023), an international event that occurs periodically in a different city of the world, hosted in lisbon in 2023. unlike more traditional pilgrimages, such as santiago de compostela, which often relate to historic and holy destinations (jensen & løvrød, 2017), world youth day happened for the first time in mid-1980s as is currently one of the largest public events in the world, with a festival-like atmosphere (bogaczwojtanowska et al., 2019). method we aim to understand how a sense of communitas and collective effervescence was built, portrayed, and potentially augmented online before, during and after wyd 2023. we use the notion of affective temporalities (nikunen, 2023) to understand how digital media sustain pilgrim communities as atmospheres developed through time flows (hitchen, 2021). we take an ecological perspective on social media and digital platforms, acknowledging that most people incorporate multiple platforms in their everyday communication practices (zhao et al., 2016). in trying to better understand how users extend and augment their experience of pilgrimage through each one of them, we conducted online observations on social media – namely instagram, tiktok, and facebook –, repositories – giphy – and on maps and apps directly related to the event, as detailed in table 1. platform (and extraction tool) observation details and scrapped material dura$on/period corpus instagram (phantombuster) 3 hashtags: #lisboa2023 #jmj #estamosacaminho for a month: mid-july to midaugust/2023 11 158 posts, 644 stories 2 profiles: @lisboa2023_en @lisboa2023_pt facebook (crowdtangle) 2 groups: world youth day 2023 jmj seul 2027 for a year: august/2022 to august/2023 3148 posts tiktok (zeeschuimer) 1 hashtag: #jmj2023 scrapped in mid-july 374 giphy (manual extraction) 2 profiles: lisboa2023 jeunescathoslyon scrapped in august/2023 29 gifs keyword searches: jmj world youth day lisboa2023 lisbon2023 apps (app scraper) google play store app store 2 apps maps google maps official wyd website table 1 we performed a content, multimodal analysis (bouvier & rasmussen, 2022) on the material, seeking to identify themes as well as modalities of digital and social media as expressive functions. results anticipation played an important part in creating a sense of unity, belonging, and community among pilgrims before the event, although not without uncertainty and dispute. through tiktok the build-up towards the event often included countdowns, adapting popular trends, and focusing on the process of preparation for the event. these feelings of build-up and expectation were also fed by wyd’s official instagram pages, as well as giphy, as gifs featured the event's official symbols and slogans, one of the most popular being “we are on our way”, referring to pilgrims coming to the event. facebook groups were used to share tips and ask for help with the bureaucratic demands of the event (e.g. visas, registration). although more static, on google maps the wyd 2023 organization headquarters – fundação jmj 2023 – showed images of meetings and preparation for the event associated with the location. there was also a clear effort to build community, as many instagram and tiktok posts used hashtags (e.g., #catholicinfluencers) to reach a specific target audience. still, there was tension and backlash online around the event’s financial investment and the burden it could represent to its host city. during wyd, there were both official and unofficial apps available, providing practical information about the event (e.g., restaurants which offered discounts for pilgrims, details about public transport) to spiritual ones (e.g., daily prayers). the official wyd app and website also offered an interactive map which highlighted points of interest to pilgrims and a daily schedule with events across the city. during the event, instagram posts and stories showed mostly crowds and a feeling of unity, while on facebook groups there were posts with international encounters, using flags’ emojis. these uses extend both the effervescence of the event and communitas. some of the content focused on the importance of uniting young catholics as needed for the renovation of the church and to adapt religion to contemporary demands. during and after the event, new gifs appeared on giphy, with a lighter, more positive and humorous atmosphere. some of them appropriated snippets of news media coverage or popular culture references and circulated them as memes among pilgrims and far beyond. after wyd, digital content focused mostly on expressions of gratitude towards organizers, volunteers, and sponsors across instagram in particular. it was clear the event was considered a big success and nostalgic content also became prevalent across platforms, highlighting the self-transformative aspect of the experience. also, a sensation of urgency was expressed on posts and stories focusing right away on the next wyd (2027, in seoul) reinforcing the idea of a cohesive group which will reencounter in the future. overall, social media allowed pilgrims to build communitas, augment effervescence and process the emotion of longing. this was true before, during and after the event, as both anticipation and rememorating were shared dynamics among pilgrims. while facebook groups allowed for coordination and peer support and advice, tiktok and instagram afforded gains of visibility through the use of hashtags. giphy appears as a repository of humorous content from both official and vernacular cultures. as for apps and maps, they seemed to be more focused in the present, as they were helpful tools to navigate and manage the logistics of the event, but did not take on a collaborative mode. references bogacz-wojtanowska, e., góral, a., & jałocha, b. (2019). ‘catholic coachella’, ‘papal rock concert’? case study of the world youth day in cracow as an example of a successful religious project. journal of intercultural management, 11(2), 47–71. https://doi.org/10.2478/joim-2019-0009 bouvier, g., & rasmussen, j. (2022). qualitative research using social media. routledge. collins-kreiner, n. (2010). researching pilgrimage: continuity and transformations. annals of tourism research, 37(2), 440–456. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2009.10.016 hitchen, e. (2021). the affective life of austerity: uncanny atmospheres and paranoid temporalities. social & cultural geography, 22(3), 295–318. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2019.1574884 jensen, r., & løvrød, h. m. (2017). pilgrimage, past and present. norwegian perspectives with emphasis on santiago de compostela. 64(130), 467–489. https://doi.org/10.3989/ceg.2017.130.13 jorge, a. (2023). pilgrimage to fátima and santiago after covid: dis/connection in the post-digital age. mobile media & communication, 11(3), 549–565. https://doi.org/10.1177/20501579221151041 maddrell, a., & della dora, v. (2013). crossing surfaces in search of the holy: landscape and liminality in contemporary christian pilgrimage. environment and planning a: economy and space, 45(5), 1105–1126. https://doi.org/10.1068/a45148 nikunen, k. (2023). affective temporalities of digital hate cultures. in m. lünenborg, & b. röttger-rössler (eds.), affective formation of publics: places, networks, and media (pp. 173-190). routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003365426-12 nilsson, m. (2018). wanderers in the shadow of the sacred myth: pilgrims in the 21st century. social & cultural geography, 19(1), 21–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016.1249398 nilsson, m., & tesfahuney, m. (2018). the post-secular tourist: re-thinking pilgrimage tourism. tourist studies, 18(2), 159–176. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797617723467 serazio, m. (2013). the elementary forms of sports fandom: a durkheimian exploration of team myths, kinship, and totemic rituals. communication & sport, 1(4), 303–325. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167479512462017 https://doi.org/10.2478/joim-2019-0009 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2009.10.016 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2019.1574884 https://doi.org/10.3989/ceg.2017.130.13 https://doi.org/10.1177/20501579221151041 https://doi.org/10.1068/a45148 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003365426-12 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016.1249398 https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797617723467 https://doi.org/10.1177/2167479512462017 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): shaffer, g. (2023, october). deplatforming the smart city: giving residents control over their personal data. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. deplatforming the smart city: giving residents control over their personal data gwen shaffer california state university long beach background and rationale for the research smart city platforms–encompassing mobile apps, cameras, sensors, algorithms, and predictive analytics—function as surveillance tools. these internet-connected devices and services generate troves of data on residents, including travel patterns, mobile device identifiers, internet browsing history, phone contacts, and more. research suggests that excessive surveillance reinforces a sense of insecurity and leads residents to fear civil liberties violations, particularly among communities of color. by contrast, our recently-piloted digital rights platform aims to give long beach residents agency over how the city collects, uses and stores their personal data. we intentionally chose the term digital rights platform to upend the dominant notion of platforms like android, meta and amazon—which extract data from users, and then commodify that personal information in order to generate revenue. this digital rights platform project considers the technical, legal, ethical, and spatial aspects of smart technologies. grounded in frameworks of trust and contextual integrity, the platform also advances goals associated with two critical and closely intersecting priorities: operationalizing long beach’s data privacy guidelines (city of long beach, 2021) and implementation of its framework for reconciliation (city of long beach, 2020). toward this goal, the project is focused on the city’s vision to use data in ethical ways that avoid reinforcing existing racial biases and discriminatory decision-making. when fully implemented, this project will operationalize both privacy and racial equity as priorities for all deployments of smart city technology. long beach is the second largest city in los angeles county, with nearly 500,000 residents (u.s. census, 2023). project design first, the platform will feature text and the open-source digital trust for places and routines (dtpr) iconography that visually conveys how the city of long beach uses specific technologies, what data the devices collect and how the city utilizes that data. we plan to strategically deploy these information points across long beach, physically adjacent to or digitally embedded within civic technologies, e.g., sensors, cameras, small cells, mobile payment kiosks, and a 311 app. the platform will include a feedback application consisting of access (via qr code or hyperlink) to an online dashboard where users may learn additional details, update data collection preferences, and share comments/concerns with local government officials. the ultimate goal is to develop a backend solution that enables residents to opt-out of data collection. this emergent digital rights platform will provide long beach residents with not only a clear understanding of how local government applies predictive and diagnostic analytics to personal data, but will also empower community members by granting them agency. the project will take a “human centered” and “activity” design approach to ensure resident concerns and needs are met; that racial and social inequities are addressed; and, ultimately, that long beach residents experience improved quality of life. the copis intend to incorporate both social and technical elements that account for community perceptions about data collection and use, as well as recognize nascent digital equity and accessibility barriers. long beach’s digital rights platform also has the potential to serve as a model for meaningful partnerships among community stakeholders, local policymakers, industry, and academia. this project reimagines the current notice and consent regime by developing a community-informed digital rights platform that emerges from the understanding that data privacy is a human right (united nations, 2022). rather than viewing residents as customers—a current dynamic driven by third-party vendors who rely on residential data to maximize profit—this project strives to give community stakeholders agency over their data. the project considers both social and technical issues, informed by community members’ perceptions, attitudes and concerns surrounding data collection and use. specifically, the co-pis are planning to develop a “civic user testbed” for facilitating workshops and conducting qualitative research with diverse community members to co-design (designing with, as opposed to designing for) innovative approaches. the civic user testbed is a field-based approach—in contrast to traditional focus groups or interviews, for example—meant to ensure the city is transparent about how data are collected through devices, mobile apps and city services. the findings will inform novel accountability strategies meant to that ensure wildly disparate smart city technologies—each employed for a distinct purpose—respect residents’ data privacy and avoid discriminatory impacts. research questions rq1: how does the presence of data privacy notices impact how residents interact with city deployed technologies? does transparency foster trust? rq2: do transparency and accountability surrounding data collection serve as a catalyst for the city of long beach to alter practices and/or collect less data on residents? in answering these questions, my co-pis and i will critique relationships among infrastructures, practices and imaginaries surrounding data privacy and smart cities. for instance, how do government-sponsored surveillance technologies redefine public space? how do contexts, practices and situations involving smart technologies shed light on civic norms and power relations? we will rely on a “cultures of trust” framework and helen nissenbaum’s (2004) theory of contextual integrity to analyze data collected during the proposed activities. these approaches will guide our efforts to design a digital rights platform that prioritizes community voices, rather than technology company priorities. pilot study in october 2022, the pi worked with the city of long beach to pilot the digital rights platform downtown, and facilitated “data walks” with nearly 40 long beach residents (see photos above). study participants encountered a data privacy notification adjacent to an automated license plate reader in a city-owned parking garage, and another privacy notice adjacent to an “eco-totem” that uses sensors to count pedestrians and cyclists. these signs informed study participants (in english, spanish, khmer and tagalog) they were interacting with a technology that collects personal data. participants responded to questions on a custom mobile app about the signage design and their experiences scanning the qr codes. we returned to the main library for a discussion about trust and comfort levels with smart technology. in general, study participants expressed mixed feedback on the design and placement of the two signs—some suggesting more text, while others proposed a simpler format. others noted that a qr code assumes everyone has a smart phone. preliminary findings also suggest that residents are, mostly, resigned to the idea of smart city technologies and accompanying privacy violations. comments included, “i feel like it is almost inevitable. i mean, it concerns me. but it seems like one of the toughest things to reverse or limit.” many participants expressed a desire for greater transparency about how their data are used, sharing comments such as, “i’m not as worried about what is collected as i am about how long it is kept and who has access to it. we were talking about how data is sold and third parties, what are they doing with it.” these sentiments are informing the next phase of the project, including deployment of privacy notices in three diverse neighborhoods, and workshops with city staff to ensure buy-in of the project. references city of long beach (2021, january). data privacy guidelines. http://longbeach.gov/globalassets/smart-city/media-library/documents/final_dataprivacy-guidelines. city of long beach (2020, june 26). framework for racial reconciliation. https://longbeach.legistar.com/view.ashx?m=f&id=8595273&guid=107d5efad10f-4444-b35a-3e7c272887bd. nissenbaum, h. (2004). privacy as contextual integrity. washington law review (79)1, 119-157. https://crypto.stanford.edu/portia/papers/revnissenbaumdtp31.pdf. united nations (2022, june 27). digital human rights. https://www.un.org/techenvoy/content/digital-human-rights. u.s. census. (january 2023). quickfacts: long beach, calif. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/longbeachcitycalifornia/rhi425220# rhi425220. http://longbeach.gov/globalassets/smart-city/media-library/documents/final_data-privacy-guidelines http://longbeach.gov/globalassets/smart-city/media-library/documents/final_data-privacy-guidelines https://longbeach.legistar.com/view.ashx?m=f&id=8595273&guid=107d5efa-d10f-4444-b35a-3e7c272887bd https://longbeach.legistar.com/view.ashx?m=f&id=8595273&guid=107d5efa-d10f-4444-b35a-3e7c272887bd https://crypto.stanford.edu/portia/papers/revnissenbaumdtp31.pdf https://www.un.org/techenvoy/content/digital-human-rights https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/longbeachcitycalifornia/rhi425220#rhi425220 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/longbeachcitycalifornia/rhi425220#rhi425220 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 alves, m., d’andrea, c. (2023, october). the infrastructural power of programmatic advertising networks: analyzing disinformation industries in brazil. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the infrastructural power of programmatic advertising networks: analyzing disinformation industries in brazil marcelo alves pontifical catholic university of rio de janeiro carlos d’andrea federal university of minas gerais the informational disorder that sprawls through multiple state-nations, exacerbated by violent uprisings and coup attempts such as the us capitol storm on january 6th, 2021 and the brazilian coup attempt on january 8th, 2023, has shed new light on the political economy of disinformation industries. in particular, it brings to the forefront the problem of economic incentives for creating and spreading disinformation. this paper builds on critical platform and infrastructure research literature for analyzing the multilateral infrastructural power of programmatic advertising networks. while governing the technoeconomics conditions of a real-time bidding process, this ecosystem monetizes different kinds of publishers, including those aimed at maximizing profits by spreading misinformation. by scrutinizing the power relations that interconnect different advertising ecosystems and the publisher terra brasil noticias, this study seeks to delineate part of the infrastructures that provide economic resources to the brazilian disinformation industry. we also aim to contribute to theory-building efforts developing a theoretical framework for studying the both hierarchical and relational configurations of programmatic advertising infrastructures, here understood as sociotechnical assemblages of institutions, norms, practices, business logics, software code, algorithms, and data. programmatic networks and disinformation industries previous research on the programmatic advertising ecosystem advanced the comprehension of how this model contributes to the plummeting of professional journalism revenue (couldry & turow, 2014). historical perspectives also demonstrate how the advertising industry perceived and adapted to the fast growing model of digital advertising constructed by google and how this shaped the social-materialities of the internet (crain, 2019; mcguigan, 2019; turow, 2012). recent literature refocused the issue through the perspective of surveillance capitalism (zuboff, 2015), predatory advertising practices (o’neil, 2017) and informational disorder (bakir & mcstay, 2018). the work of braun & eklund (2019) provided an in-depth understanding of how the adtech industry is challenged by informational disorder scandals, and mcstay (2017) discusses how it relates to the model of prevalence of behavioral profiling of the audience over contextual placement or editorial considerations. nevertheless, there is a lack of theoretical and analytical proposals in literature that focus on the power of platforms and infrastructures in order to investigate the social and material underpinnings of the programmatic advertising industry in relation to the informational disorder. we draw on the interfaces between platform and infrastructure studies (plantin et al, 2018; edwards, 2021) as the main analytical and theoretical frameworks. more specifically it builds on the notion of reframing platform power away from economic dominance in the market and towards a more nuanced consideration of the sociotechnical reconfiguration of democratic functions (van dijck, nieborg & poell, 2019). as stated by blanke and pybus (2020), understanding platform monopolization demands a closer look on how its technical integration creates specific forms of dependency and competition. thus, we argue that programmatic advertising networks (mcstay, 2017) should be approached as a singular example of "disinformation infrastructure," defined by pasquetto et al. (2022, p.26) as “a multi-layered, relational and distributed sociotechnical entity that supports the maintenance and distribution of information that is false or misleading”. our paper adds to this definition suggesting that advertising networks are a fundamental infrastructure that fosters disinformation by providing financial incentives that sustain the epistemic work on these industries, requiring an analytical perspective that recognizes how their asymmetric exercise of power is connected with the governance of a distributed and interconnected range of actors (such as publishers, advertisers, citizens, legislators). our research questions are: how is power exercised by programmatic advertising infrastructures while managing its multilateral relationships? in terms of technicities, governance and business models, how does these infrastructures enable or reinforce desinformation disorder? method these research questions are discussed based on an empirical study on the programmatic advertising infrastructures that monetize the brazilian website terra brasil notícias focused on the elections period (october, 2022). displaying the slogan "god above everything and all" to its 12 million monthly visitors (according to similarweb), this publisher was the most shared among the extreme-right leader jair messias bolsonaro supporters on telegram groups (mello, 2021) and was pivotal to spreading disinformation that fueled distrust in the electoral process and triggered antidemocratic insurrections against the result of the 2022 brazilian presidential election. this case study draws on a multi-methodological approach, combining digital methods research and critical analysis of platform documents. the empirical data obtained has 95.269 ads collected on the website (data scraped with a python script developed by one of the authors) during the election month (table 1). results and discussion empirical data show that mgid, a native advertising platform, placed 54% of the advertisements on terra brasil notícias. google ads was the second largest provider of digital ads on tbn, despite its policy`s restrictions on sellers that host unreliable or harmful content on issues such as health, climate, elections and democracy. the most frequent advertisement displayed via google ads was related to smartfit, the largest fitness company in brazil its owner (edgar corona) is accused of financing fake news and since 2020 has been investigated by brazilian federal supreme court. taking into consideration the mgid programmatic network, most of the urls exposed are related to content farms, online bets and similar, it could also identified a significant presence (9,1%) of the institutional page of a major automotive company (nissan). table 1: ad servers provided at terra brasil notícias server n percent clck.mgid.com 43,641 54.0% googleadservices.com 33,915 42.0% adclick.g.doubleclick.net 2,336 2.9% googleads.g.doubleclick.net 761 0.9% lax1-ib.adnxs.com 23 0.0% servedby.flashtalking.com 20 0.0% infolinks.com 17 0.0% pixel.quantcount.com 10 0.0% exch.quantserve.com 9 0.0% source: developed by the authors using data scraped from the website. even before the certification of election results, tbn was a leading propagator of false claims that electronic voting machines were rigged against bolsonaro. however, only in november google decided to demonetize the publisher by removing tbn from its adspace inventory. this delayed action enabled the publisher to profit from disinformation, false claims and conspiracy theory for years. following the cut off from google, tbn resorted to lesser known programmatic networks, such as mgid, infolinks and other companies with lower standards of moderation and filtering against disinformation. the research data demonstrates how programmatic advertising infrastructures not only financially sustain disinformational industries but also enact a singular governance power of the informational systems. in this sense, ad-techs develop policies, norms and practices to verify and validate potential content producers that aim to sell advertising spaces, and also provide the algorithmic tools of brand safety for accreditation of publishers. findings from the brazilian case also contribute to understanding the infrastructural power of big tech governing the monetization of publishers in the global south, as also demonstrated by silverman et al. (2022). further research could develop theoretical frameworks focusing on the power of platforms and infrastructure in order to investigate the social and material underpinnings of the programmatic advertising industry in relation to the informational disorder in different contexts references bakir, v., & mcstay, a. (2018). fake news and the economy of emotions: problems, causes, solutions. digital journalism, 6(2), 154–175. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2017.1345645 braun, j. a., & eklund, j. l. (2019). fake news, real money: ad tech platforms, profitdriven hoaxes, and the business of journalism. digital journalism, 7(1), 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2018.1556314 couldry, n., & turow, j. (2014). advertising, big data and the clearance of the public realm: marketers’ new approaches to the content subsidy. international journal of communication, 8, 1710–1726. crain, m. (2019). a critical political economy of web advertising history. in n. brügger & i. milligan, the sage handbook of web history (pp. 330–343). sage publications ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526470546.n22 edwards, p. n. (2021). platforms are infrastructures on fire. in t. s. mullaney, b. peters, m. hicks, & k. philip (eds.), your computer is on fire (p. 0). the mit press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10993.003.0021 mcstay, a. (2017). micro-moments, liquidity, intimacy and automation: developments in programmatic ad-tech. in g. siegert, m. b. von rimscha & s. grubenmann (eds.), commercial communication in the digital age–information or disinformation? mouton de gruyter, (p. 143-159). o’neil, c. (2017). weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy (first edition). crown. pasquetto, i. v., olivieri, a. f., tacchetti, l., riotta, g., & spada, a. (2022). disinformation as infrastructure: making and maintaining the qanon conspiracy on italian digital media. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 6(cscw1), 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1145/3512931 silverman, c., talbot, r., kao, j., klühspies, a. (2022). how google’s ad business funds disinformation around the world. propublica. https://www.propublica.org/article/google-alphabet-ads-fund-disinformation-covidelections turow, j. (2012). the daily you: how the new advertising industry is defining your identity and your worth. yale university press. van dijck, j., nieborg, d., & poell, t. (2019). reframing platform power. internet policy review, 8(2), 1-18. https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.2.1414 zeng, e., kohno, t., & roesner, f. (2021). what makes a “bad” ad? user perceptions of problematic online advertising. proceedings of the 2021 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445459 zuboff, s. (2015). big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization. journal of information technology, 30(1), 75–89. https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2015.5 selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 the netflix machine: how european screen workers interpret and interact with streaming data nina vindum rasmussen london school of economics and political science what does the rise of algorithms and data analytics mean for european screen production? this paper examines the experiences of screenwriters, producers, and directors (hereafter ‘screen workers’) who have collaborated with data-driven streamers like netflix and amazon. only a few existing studies analyse the platformisation and datafication of screen labour (e.g. chow, 2020; navar-gill, 2020). looking ‘sideways’ to empirical findings in other areas has therefore been crucial to the design of this study (e.g. bishop, 2019; bonini & gandini, 2019; christin, 2020; cunningham & craig, 2021; poell, nieborg & duffy, 2022). this paper contributes to such discussions about the platformisation of cultural production, and it does so with novel insights from the european screen industry. the significance of the research especially results from the way it grounds current industry-level changes in screen workers’ experiences ‘on the ground.’ the study sits at the intersection between media industry studies, production studies, critical data studies, and critical algorithm studies. as such, the paper also makes a theoretical contribution by bringing together different and cognate bodies of knowledge in order to fully illuminate this topic. a next-generation production study this project takes the form of a production study that examines how screen workers negotiate the production dynamics in a streaming era. their meaning-making activities – that is, their beliefs, values, priorities, practices, and rituals – anchor the analysis. more specifically, i have interviewed 33 screen workers and carried out what sherry ortner (2010) terms an ‘interface ethnography.’ according to ortner, this method involves attending events in which the industry presents itself to ‘the public.’ the narratives shared by screen workers and streaming executives in these public settings have departed significantly from the ones my participants have told me in confidential interviews. that leads me to a key methodological point: accessing screen worker accounts has been very difficult, especially due to the non-disclosure agreements (ndas) they have signed with streamers. as one participant reflects: ‘i don’t want netflix to be in a position to feel that i’ve been, you know, disclosing too much. (…) at the suggested citation (apa): rasmussen, n. (2022, november). the netflix machine: how european screen workers interpret and interact with streaming data. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. same time, i think this needs to go public. this is such an important part of the business that has such an impact.’ the quote shows why we need creative ways to overcome barriers to access. consequently, this paper also provides practical insights into the ways scholars can engage empirically with data and algorithms in cultural production. interpretations and interactions it is well established that streamers like netflix and amazon hold audience figures and insights close to their chest. the secrecy takes different forms, including the lack of viewing data shared with creators and the strict ndas they have to sign to secure a deal. this paper demonstrates some of the ways screen workers interpret and interact with data despite this secrecy. i split up my participants’ interpretations into a typology that considers different ‘facets of data’ and their associated ‘form and function.’ these interpretations illuminate a particular kind of ‘algorithmic imaginary’ (bucher, 2017) and ‘data imaginary’ (beer, 2019), i.e. how people imagine, experience, and perceive these phenomena in the social world. many of their understandings reveal more qualitative approaches to data, which forces us to look beyond narrow quantitative and technical readings of what ‘data-driven screen production’ means. with this typology in place, i then turn to the four types of interactions i have identified in my interviews: accessing, sensing, generating, and resisting data. these interactions vary in detail and scope according to screen workers’ status. showrunners (someone who is both the head writer and executive producer of a tv show) get more access than workers who ‘only’ get a screenwriter, producer, or director credit. it also depends on one’s experience and the level of trust established with the streamer in question. being let in on ‘the secret’ often functions as a reward. all these interactions with data include examples of what i call ‘counter-data,’ which are insights (both qualitative and quantitative) that screen workers place in opposition to the big data analytics deployed by streamers and platforms. these data can be created and utilised in more or less systematic ways. a number of participants refer to tacit forms of insights such as exchanging experiences with colleagues. screen workers use these counter-data to understand and engage with streamers that employ data secrecy as their modus operandi. as such, they function as a kind of ‘guerrilla tactic,’ which signals the unequal power structures at play – a central theme at this year’s aoir. overall, these interpretations and interactions illuminate how screen workers make sense of their labour conditions and content output in a streaming era. my findings echo existing studies on creative labour, especially with regard to the ambivalence associated with doing work in creative sectors. while there are many similarities with previous research, my study also shows that the growing presence of global streamers produces new ambiguities. striking a deal with a streamer brings significant benefits, especially when it comes to their early commitment to the project. however, several participants feel that the streamers’ tight deadlines put pressure on their work-life balance and mental health. we can also determine a lot about the look, feel, and quality of streaming content by attending to the compromises screen workers have to make as a result of changing labour conditions in a data-driven screen landscape. in short, my paper exemplifies a next-generation production study of a screen landscape increasingly powered by data and algorithms. references beer, d. (2019). the data gaze: capitalism, power and perception. london: sage. https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781526463210 bishop, s. (2019). ‘managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip’. new media & society, 21(11-12), 2589-2606. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819854731 bonini, t. & gandini, a. (2019). ‘“first week is editorial, second week is algorithmic”: platform gatekeepers and the platformization of music curation’. social media + society, 5(4), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880006 bucher, t. (2017). ‘the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms’. information, communication & society, 20(1), 30-44. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154086 chow, p.-s. (2020). ‘ghost in the (hollywood) machine: emergent applications of artificial intelligence in the film industry’. necsus european journal of media studies, 9(1), 193-214. https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/14307 christin, a. (2020). metrics at work: journalism and the contested meaning of algorithms. princeton, nj and oxford: princeton university press. cunningham, s. & craig, d. (eds.). (2021). creator culture: an introduction to global social media entertainment. new york, ny: new york university press. https://doi.org/10.18574/9781479890118 navar-gill, a. (2020). ‘the golden ratio of algorithms to artists? streaming services and the platformization of creativity in american television production’. social media + society, 6(3), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120940701 ortner, s. b. (2010). ‘access: reflections on studying up in hollywood’. ethnography, 11(2), 211-233. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138110362006 poell, t., nieborg, d. & duffy, b. e. (2022). platforms and cultural production. cambridge: polity press. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): van der nagel, e. (2024, october). navigating the digital identity industry. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. navigating the digital identity industry dr emily van der nagel monash university digital identity integrity examining and explaining tensions between being public and private on the internet is an enduring aspect of the work of the association of internet researchers. in this paper, i present a concept to aid those working in this space: digital identity integrity, the ability to use a range of personal accounts and platforms to meaningfully participate in digital cultures and economies. this paper is drawn from a larger research project into digital identity integrity, and presents the results of its first two stages: establishing the discourse of the identity verification industry, and conducting pilot workshops on evaluating digital identity integrity. the project builds a case for including resistive practices to identity unification – like being anonymous or creating multiple accounts on one platform – to get a fuller picture of digital identity and inclusion. digital identity integrity does not mean having one online identity that is connected to civic identifiers (such as birth certificates or passports). instead, the concept refers to the successful use of accounts that allow an individual to access the connections and communities they choose – including anonymously. digital identity integrity is comprised of networked privacy (marwick 2023), everyday data literacies (burgess et al 2022), and data justice (taylor 2017). when an individual can maintain a reasonable amount of privacy over their identity, knows how to effectively use platforms and services, and is in a position to contribute to broader digital and data justice projects, they can be said to have digital identity integrity. the discourse of the identity verification industry digital identity integrity is sometimes assisted, and sometimes hindered, by the identity verification industry. this is comprised of services that promise to verify a user’s age (for example, jumio, yoti, veridas, and ondato) or verify identity documents linked to an online account (for example, idenfy, onfido, veriff, and seon). 2 a previous investigation of a similar industry was carried out by nora draper (2019) on the consumer privacy industry: companies that sell privacy tools and services. draper argues this industry and its marketing materials are an important source of discourse about what kind of autonomy individuals have over their public image. for draper, the key tension in having an online identity is controlling the circulation of personal information while responding to the demands of cultivating a public self as a condition of participation in the digital world. this is what alice marwick (2013) calls the neoliberal subject: a publicly visible self that is self-configured to be watched and consumed by others. marwick explains that a verifiable identity on social media contributes to someone’s status and social capital, but these identities also benefit technology companies by making it easier to track people as they move around platforms, and collect their user data to sell to advertisers. the first stage of this research project is a discourse analysis of the marketing material of 20 companies in the identity verification industry. it seeks to understand how these companies frame identity, privacy, and safety. for example, age-verification service yoti (2024) calls its selfie-based age checks “accurate, frictionless and can only recognise age – not people”. this marketing copy promises companies it will not invade the privacy of their customers, even though verifying age or identity requires extremely personal information. digital rights groups like the electronic frontiers foundation remain sceptical of these services, calling them “surveillance systems” and arguing that no age verification method is entirely reliable (kelley & schwartz 2023). following this discourse analysis, the research project turns to individual experiences with verification services. it will present the results of pilot workshops that consider someone’s digital identity to be all their digital accounts – verified or not. evaluating digital identity integrity two pilot workshops will be conducted with a total of 40 undergraduate media students to inventory their digital identity, with the goal of evaluating their digital identity integrity – and informing formal focus groups to follow. a short presentation on digital identity integrity will be given, followed by some smallgroup brainstorming of examples of how digital identity integrity can be compromised, and what the consequences of this might be. participants will then be invited to individually, and privately, list all the platforms and apps on which they have a profile (no information about specific online profiles from any participant will be sought or recorded during the workshops). these might include social media platforms; services like email, banking, or government systems; work or student accounts; and selfquantification services like fitness apps. a discussion of whether or not participants feel they have achieved, or could achieve, digital identity integrity will then be held, with a focus on attitudes towards identity verification and resistance strategies to having one’s entire digital identity connected. conclusion 3 as previous research has shown (van der nagel & frith 2015; van der nagel 2017, 2018), having one unique, verifiable identity is not how most people experience the internet, or thrive within digital cultures. but for governments and technology companies, unique, verifiable identities make populations and customers easier to manage. the australian government emphasises this in its digital economy strategy 2030, which states that the government will “be succeeding when [...] the significant majority of australians over 18 are registered for mygovid or another trusted digital identity” (commonwealth of australia 2021: 19). the privacy paradox – people saying they care about privacy but providing endless personal data to platforms (hargittai & marwick 2016) – means that there is a disconnect between knowledge of privacy and meaningful ways to enact what historian sarah igo calls the “proper relationship among citizen, state, and society” (igo 2018: 8). the goal of this research project is to work with the idea of digital identity integrity as a way to evaluate the push and pull between public and private when it comes to identities on the internet. references burgess, j, albury, k, mccosker, a & wilken, r 2022, ‘everyday data literacies’, pp. 83-114 in everyday data cultures, polity press, cambridge. commonwealth of australia 2021, ‘digital economy strategy: a leading digital economy and society by 2030’, department of the prime minister and cabinet, 11 may, https://apo.org.au/node/312247. draper, n 2019, the identity trade: selling privacy and reputation online, new york university press, new york. hargittai, e & marwick, a 2016, ‘“what can i really do?” explaining the privacy paradox with online apathy’, international journal of communication, vol. 10, pp. 3737–3757. igo, se 2018, the known citizen: a history of privacy in modern america, harvard university press, cambridge. kelley, j & schwartz, a 2023, ‘age verification mandates would undermine anonymity online’, electronic frontier foundation, 10 march, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/03/age-verification-mandates-would-undermineanonymity-online. marwick, ae 2013, status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age, yale university press, new haven. marwick, ae 2023, the private is political: networked privacy and social media, yale university press, new haven. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/03/age-verification-mandates-would-undermine-anonymity-online https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/03/age-verification-mandates-would-undermine-anonymity-online 4 taylor, l 2017, ‘what is data justice? the case for connecting digital rights and freedoms globally’, big data & society, vol. 4, pp. 1–14. van der nagel, e & frith, j 2015, ‘anonymity, pseudonymity, and the agency of online identity: examining the social practices of r/gonewild’, first monday, vol. 20, no. 3, https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5615. van der nagel, e 2017, ‘from usernames to profiles: the development of pseudonymity in internet communication’, internet histories: digital technology, culture and society, vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 312–331. van der nagel, e 2018, ‘“networks that work too well”: intervening in algorithmic connections’, media international australia, vol. 168, no. 1, pp. 81-92. yoti 2024, https://www.yoti.com/social-media/. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): vasudevan, r. (2024, october). tapping the “untapped resource”: how twentieth-century industrial priorities have shaped contemporary new media art practices. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. tapping the “untapped resource”: how twentieth-century industrial priorities have shaped contemporary new media art practices roopa vasudevan university of massachusetts amherst contemporary artists who use emerging technologies in their work are often positioned as innovators, mavericks, and diagnosticians. they are seen as brilliant minds who, by virtue of working “outside” of the technology industry, bring a unique and sorely needed perspective that will help us both imagine new and heretofore unforeseen possibilities for technological tools, and transcend the growing crises we face in the digital world. this view is common among both scholars of technology and society (raley, 2009; gitelman & jackson, 2013; raley, 2013; browne, 2015; brunton & nissenbaum, 2016; chun, 2016; mcglotten, 2016; cheney-lippold, 2017; benjamin, 2019; zuboff, 2019; d’ignazio & klein, 2020; fisher, 2020; hu, 2022; among many others) but also among artists themselves in their own assessments of their work (see grosser, 2014; koërner & earle, 2020; lavigne, 2021; guler, 2022). however, viewing new media artists as fully independent actors, devoid of any connection to industrial and corporate aims, serves to eclipse the long-standing and substantial ties that the field has to the protocols and priorities of the mainstream technology industry. these, in fact, have existed for as long as artists have attempted to integrate computation, electronics, networking, or other high-tech components into their work—both when these tools are owned and operated by corporations, but also in more diffuse, ideological ways. this contribution outlines the findings from the second chapter of my doctoral dissertation, high-level creativity: new media art and the priorities of the tech industry, which argues that, rather than operating wholly autonomously or externally to the tech industry, new media artists instead rely on an infrastructural foundation that greatly depends on its standard practices and routine protocols. the study draws from theories of art worlds and creative labor (becker, 2008; gell, 1992; bourdieu, 1993; kondo, 2018) and scientific and technical infrastructure (bowker & star, 1999; latour, 1987; gitelman, 2014) to argue for a relational take on the new media art field, as opposed to viewing exemplary objects as representative of the genre. in this chapter, i trace the evolution of the cultural imaginary surrounding new media artists, defined in my research as practitioners who expand, reinvent, or misuse technological expression. the chapter, which builds on the work of scholars investigating silicon valley’s relationship with counterculture (turner, 2006; turner, 2009; marwick, 2013) emphasizes the foundational connections that new media artists have to industrial practices; furthermore, this relationship can be traced back to the first attempts in the twentieth century to place artists into collaborations with industry. as a result, industrial mandates have, to a large degree, shaped the popular conception of the new media art field—guiding both practicalities of working with digital systems as well as notions of what artists “should” be doing with their work. the chapter is based on archival studies of three twentieth-century programs in the united states which sought to foster collaboration between avant garde artists and the burgeoning tech industry: experiments in art and technology, or e.a.t. (1967–1978, based in new york city); the los angeles county museum of art’s art and technology program (1967–1971); and the xerox parc artist in residence (pair) program (1993– 2001, based in palo alto, ca). i place these archives into conversation with data collected from 53 interviews with new media artists, curators, and administrators who work in the field in the present day, conducted between 2019 and 2023, as well as autoethnographic analysis of my own career as a practicing new media artist. by doing so, i demonstrate that many key motivations behind the first art and technology initiatives carry through into the current moment, shaping the ways in which artists perceive themselves and their work. while arts-industry collaboration has been studied extensively in prior literature (beck & bishop, 2020; lee, 2020; sandberg, 2020; duval, 2019; schnugg, 2019; kuo, 2018; turner, 2018; ryan, 2017; shanken, 2005; bijvoet, 1990; burnham, 1980), these analyses have largely been constrained to the immediate contexts of the initiatives being explored, without much attempt to investigate the indirect effects of these collaborations on the field at large. my work represents one of the first efforts to actively bridge the temporal gap and suggest that the earliest collaborations, in fact, directly set the stage for the creative and social expectations of broader new media art practices today. of particular note are the imagined affordances (nagy & neff, 2015) that it is believed that artists bring to tech development. beginning with e.a.t. founder billy klüver’s positioning of artists as an “untapped resource” (klüver, 1967) that might offer novel insights and perspectives, artists have consistently been seen as providing new modes of thinking about technology that are not visible to those who work in a more standard industrial context. as pair director rich gold put it in 1995, artists were envisioned “like bees, pollinating the scientists. we’re beginning to get feelers that the scientists are thinking in new ways, trying things they normally wouldn’t” (kelley, 1995, p. 22). this perspective is evidenced throughout the twentieth century programs that i investigated, but it has also notably shaped how artists think of their societal role in the present day. almost universally, the practitioners that i spoke with saw their purpose as bending, breaking, reshaping, or expanding technology beyond its established functionalities and usages. interviewees spoke of needing to stake claim to novel and unexplored territory with their work, echoing the “pioneer paradigm” (loveday, 2022) present in broader tech practice; using technology against itself as a mode of critique or diagnosis (or, as raley (2013) terms it, the “reiterative aesthetic”); and “being ahead of the curve” or “going beyond the possible” in their use of emerging media. additional and related key findings from this work include a clear and persistent distinction between the role of the artist (imagination, creativity) and the role of the engineer (logistics, implementation); an adherence to the often dizzying hype cycles surrounding technology (steinert & leifer, 2010; gartner, 2023), where artists feel compelled to adopt the very latest tools and systems as they emerge and race to keep up with the fast pace of tech development; a forefronting of technology in the work’s reception, which artists often found takes away from what they originally intended to communicate with their work; and a deprioritizing of the long-term impact of artwork in favor of the splash or awe that using new technology can produce in the immediate. by putting the past into conversation with the present, i demonstrate that these conceptions of the role of artists and artwork in tech development, both practical and ideological, stem from the nascent incorporation of artists into industry in the twentieth century. together with the larger project, my findings suggest that, far from being an independent “check” on industrial dictates, the new media art field is guided by (and often reinforces) the goals and ideologies of the mainstream tech industry. this suggests the need within broader scholarship to view these practices in a more nuanced light—and, in turn, has larger implications surrounding the industry’s often unseen influence on wider intellectual and artistic production. the work points to ongoing and evolving questions surrounding what happens when conceptions of creativity and cultural impact are so heavily tied to the decisions of powerful industrial firms. references beck, j. and bishop, r. (2020). technocrats of the imagination: art, technology, and the military-industrial avant-garde. durham, nc: duke university press. becker, h.s. (2008). art worlds (25th anniversary edition). berkeley, ca: university of california press. benjamin, r. (2019). race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. medford, ma: polity. bijvoet, m. (1990). how intimate can art and technology really be? – a survey of the art and technology movement of the sixties. in hayward, p. (ed.), culture, technology, and creativity in the late twentieth century (pp. 15-38). london, montrouge & rome: john libbey. bourdieu, p. (1993). the field of cultural production. new york, ny: columbia university press. bowker g. and star, s.l. (2000). sorting things out: classification and its consequences. cambridge, ma: mit press. browne, s. (2015). dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. durham, nc: duke university press. brunton, f. & nissenbaum, h. (2016). obfuscation: a user's guide for privacy and protest (paperback edition). cambridge, ma: mit press. burnham, j. (1980). art and technology: the panacea that failed. in woodward, k. (ed.), the myths of information: technology and postindustrial culture (pp. 200-215). madison, wi: coda press. cheney-lippold, j. (2017). we are data: algorithms and the making of our digital selves. new york, ny: nyu press. chun, w.h.k. (2016). updating to remain the same: habitual new media. cambridge, ma: mit press. d’ignazio, c. & klein, l.f. (2020). data feminism. cambridge, ma: mit press. duval, s. (2019). identity, rhetoric and method in the collaborations of experiments in art and technology, the artist placement group, and the art and technology program at the los angeles county museum of art. in cateforis, d., duval, s. & steiner, s. (eds.), hybrid practices: art in collaboration with science and technology in the long 1960s (pp. 45-60). oakland, ca: university of california press. fisher, a.w. (2020). the play in the system: the art of parasitical resistance. durham, nc: duke university press. gartner (2023). gartner hype cycle. retrieved from https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle. gell, a. (1992). the technology of enchantment and the enchantment of technology. in coote, j. & shelton, a. (eds.), anthropology, art, and aesthetics, pp. 40-63. oxford: clarendon press. gitelman, l. (2014). paper knowledge: toward a media history of documents. durham, nc: duke university press. gitelman, l. & jackson, v. (2013). introduction. in gitelman (ed.), raw data is an oxymoron (pp. 1-14). cambridge, ma: mit press. grosser, b. (2014). what do metrics want? how quantification prescribes social interaction on facebook. computational culture, (4). retrieved from http://computationalculture.net/what-do-metrics-want/. guler, e. (june 9, 2022). these digital media artists are worth keeping on your radar. buzzfeed news. retrieved from https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ezgiguler/5artists-talked-about-the-exciting-world-of-digital-art. hu, t.h. (2022). digital lethargy: dispatches from an age of disconnection. cambridge, ma: mit press. kelley, b.b. (august 27, 1995). art & soul of a new machine. san jose mercury news west magazine, 12-13, 22-23. judy malloy papers, 1956-2019 (box 4). david m. rubenstein rare book & manuscript library, duke university, durham, nc. klüver, j.w. (1967). interface: artist/engineer [speech transcript and visual aids]. massachusetts institute of technology. experiments in art and technology records, 1966-1977. archives of american art at the smithsonian institution, washington, d.c. koërner, w. & earle, g. (2020). on using technology to outpace our adversaries. in koërner, w. (ed.), software for artists book #001: building better realities (pp. 66-77). new york, ny: pioneer works press. kondo, d. (2018). worldmaking: race, performance and the work of creativity. durham, nc: duke university press. kuo, m. (2018). “to avoid the waste of a cultural revolution”: experiments in art and technology (order no. 28223005). available from proquest dissertations & theses global. (2456883133). latour, b. (1987). science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. lavigne, s. (june 25, 2021). gaslighting your boss: creative experiments in digital sabotage. pioneer works broadcast. https://pioneerworks.org/broadcast/gaslightingyour-boss. lee, p. (2020). think tank aesthetics: midcentury modernism, the cold war, and the neoliberal present. cambridge, ma: mit press. loveday, k. (2022). the pioneer paradigm. feminist media histories, 8(1), 165-180. doi: 10.1525/fmh.2022.8.1.165. marwick, a. (2013). status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. new haven, ct: yale university press. mcglotten, s. (2016). black data. in johnson, e.p. (ed.), no tea, no shade: new writings on black queer studies, pp. 262-286. durham, nc: duke university press. nagy, p. & neff, g. (2015). imagined affordance: reconstructing a keyword for communication theory. social media + society, july-december 2015, 1–9. doi: 10.1177/2056305115603385. raley, r. (2009). tactical media. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. raley, r. (2013). dataveillance and counterveillance. in gitelman, l. (ed.), raw data is an oxymoron (pp. 121-145). cambridge, ma: mit press. ryan, t.r. (2017). blown circuits: technology and irrationality in postwar art. in k. baum (ed.), delirious: art at the limits of reason, 1950-1980, pp. 76-95. new york, ny: metropolitan museum of art. sandberg, b. (2020). the artist as innovation muse: findings from a residence program in the fuzzy front end. administrative sciences, 10(88), 1-22. doi:10.3390/admsci10040088. schnugg, c. (2019). creating artscience collaboration: bringing value to organizations. cham: palgrave macmillan. shanken, e.a. (2005). artists in industry and the academy: collaborative research, interdisciplinary scholarship and the creation and interpretation of hybrid forms. leonardo, 38(5), 415-418. steinert, m. & leifer, l.j. (2010). scrutinizing gartner’s hype cycle approach. picmet ‘10: portland international center for management of engineering and technology: technology management for global economic growth: proceedings: 18-22 july 2010, phuket, thailand, 254-266. institute of electrical and electronics engineers. turner, f. (2006). from counterculture to cyberculture: stewart brand, the whole earth network, and the rise of digital utopianism. chicago, il: university of chicago press. turner, f. (2009). burning man at google: a cultural infrastructure for new media production. new media & society, 11(1&2), 73-94. doi: 10.1177/1461444808099575. turner, f. (2018). the arts at facebook: an aesthetic infrastructure for surveillance capitalism. poetics, 67, 53-62. doi: 10.1016/j.poetic.2018.03.003. zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. new york, ny: publicaffairs. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): be'ery, g. & epstein, d. (2023, october). the high-tech elite? assessing value priorities of tech workers using the european social survey 2012-2020. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the high-tech elite? assessing value priorities of tech workers using the european social survey 2012-2020 gilad be'ery the hebrew university of jerusalem dmitry epstein the hebrew university of jerusalem introduction tech workers creating and maintaining the internet and its applications – are increasingly viewed as an influential force affecting the social, political, and economic aspects of both, the communities they live in and the society at large. their influence stems from the technologies they create as well as through their growing financial and cultural capital (e.g. morozov, 2014; thompson, 2019). our reading of the literature examining tech workers as an influential force suggests that it rests on two main propositions. first, that this group is indeed distinct, and, second, that it has an impact, being it in the realms of technology, economics, politics or culture. in this paper, we want to tackle the assumption of tech workers’ uniqueness by examining what, if anything, makes them distinct. we do this deductively, through the lens of the theory of individual basic values (schwartz, 2012), utilizing the european social survey (ess) data for the years 2012-2020. combining conceptual and methodological approaches from psychology of values, science and technology studies, as well as labor and innovation economics, our goals in this project are threefold. first, we want to map the values of the tech workers compared to the general population. then, we want to understand to what extent the values of the tech workers differ from values of other occupational elites. finally, we want to examine how those values vary among people working in ict, focusing particularly on developers as a sub-group. relevant literature selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): be'ery, g. & epstein, d. (2023, october). the high-tech elite? assessing value priorities of tech workers using the european social survey 2012-2020. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the growing interest in the tech workers as a “class for itself” (brockmann et al., 2021, p. 1) is driven primarily by observations about the political (broockman et al., 2019), economic (wolf & terrell, 2016), and technological (thompson, 2019) impact of people working in the tech industries. against this background there are strong calls for a closer look at the production side of the technological world (torpey, 2020). a number of studies suggest that tech workers are unique in their value priorities. studies making such claims tend to be qualitative (e.g neff, 2012), focus on attitudes (as opposed to the underlying values; e.g. broockman et al., 2019) or on hand-picked sets of values without a comprehensive theoretical framework (e.g brockmann et al., 2021); they also mostly focus geographically on the us. if we are to decipher the impact of the tech workers on the world, we need a clearer and more comprehensive mapping of the value systems held by members of this occupation across geographic contexts. the link between values and occupations isn’t new. prior research suggests, for example, that preference for stability is more important to routine workers such as bookkeepers and secretaries, while values related to autonomy are more central to occupations that demand more creativity such as artists and engineers (knafo & sagiv, 2004). different occupations were also found to be related to political preferences (kitschelt & rehm, 2014). inspired by those findings, we build on schwartz’s taxonomy of basic values as a validated approach to assess value orientations at an individual level, to ask how the values of tech workers differ from those of the general public as well as among people working in tech. the taxonomy, which can be used at a number of levels of aggregation, organizes value orientations along two orthogonal axes of openness to change vs. conservation and self-transcendence vs. self-enhancement (schwartz, 2012). methods we use data from the ess an established, representative, longitudinal, and geographically diverse dataset about the european citizens (ess, 2022). specifically, we use the ess data for the years 2012-2020. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): be'ery, g. & epstein, d. (2023, october). the high-tech elite? assessing value priorities of tech workers using the european social survey 2012-2020. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. since its inception the ess has consistently captured schwartz’s basic values and allows for both a nuanced and an aggregated analysis of value tensions. further, the ess captures respondents' occupation in a standardized, high-resolution manner. this allows us to identify people working in tech as “ict specialists” using established statistical definitions, and consequently identify a sub-group of “developers”. we view the latter as distinct from other ict specialists whose task is to maintain technological systems as opposed to designing and building them out. finally, the ess contains questions that capture the sociosemographics background of the respondents, including age, gender, education and income. utilizing a set of ols regressions, we estimate value preferences of ict specialists and developers relative to the average population and relative to other occupational elites. all of these analyses are utilizing country and ess-round fixed effects, to isolate the effect of occupation from geography and time. further, each analysis is repeated with the socio-demographic control, in order to account for the composition of occupations. early findings some of our early findings (table 1) reify existing research depicting tech workers as having a distinct set of values (brockmann et al., 2021). compared to the general population, irrespective of time and location, tech workers tend to prioritize openness to change compared to conservation, and to value self-enhancement. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): be'ery, g. & epstein, d. (2023, october). the high-tech elite? assessing value priorities of tech workers using the european social survey 2012-2020. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. another set of early findings further complicates empirical understanding of the values of the tech workers, thus advancing extant research. on the one hand, we demonstrate that the overall makeup of values of the tech workers is similar to that of other occupational elites. on the other hand, a number of nuances preclude us from making a blanket statement. first, if we unpack the self-transcendence composite measure, we see that ict specialists tend to value outgroup-oriented self-transcendence (universalism) more than the general population; the opposite dynamic holds true for ingroup-oriented self-transcendence (benevolence). this is a unique tension as in other occupational elites those two values change in the same direction. this dynamic hints at selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): be'ery, g. & epstein, d. (2023, october). the high-tech elite? assessing value priorities of tech workers using the european social survey 2012-2020. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. a more cosmopolitan orientation of “making the (broader) world a better place,” rather than focusing on the immediate community. second, we uncovered heterogeneity within ict specialists where developers appear more extreme in their tendency to negatively value conservation and positively value self-enhancement. such heterogeneity paints developers as substantively different from other occupational elites and other ict specialists (e.g. figure 1). finally, including socio-demographic controls in the model weakens the correlation, suggesting that the human makeup of the tech workers (predominantly educated young males) is an important factor shaping this occupation’s values. preliminary conclusions selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): be'ery, g. & epstein, d. (2023, october). the high-tech elite? assessing value priorities of tech workers using the european social survey 2012-2020. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. despite the preliminary nature of the findings and the inherent limitations of a deductive approach to the study of values, as well as working with self-reported data, our project already points at potential takeaways for research, policy, and education. for researchers, it offers an empirical basis and a conceptual framework for further examination of the basic values of the tech workers, especially as they attempt to understand the role of those values in the normative impact of the tech industry (torpey, 2020). for policymakers, this work offers systematic, quantitative evidence for the need to diversify the tech industry, both as a way to acknowledge its role in alleviating sociodemographic disparities and to strengthen and broaden ethical considerations in technology design (e.g. jean-baptiste, 2020). for educators, it highlights the importance of engaging with ethics during the training of future generations of technology developers or in the workplace (friedman & hendry, 2019). we plan on further developing those thoughts in the full paper. references brockmann, h., drews, w., & torpey, j. (2021). a class for itself? on the worldviews of the new tech elite. plos one, 16(1), e0244071. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244071 broockman, d. e., ferenstein, g., & malhotra, n. (2019). predispositions and the political behavior of american economic elites: evidence from technology entrepreneurs. american journal of political science, 63(1), 212–233. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12408 ess. (2022). european social survey cumulative file, ess 6-10; data file edition 1.0. sikt—norwegian agency for shared services in education and research, selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): be'ery, g. & epstein, d. (2023, october). the high-tech elite? assessing value priorities of tech workers using the european social survey 2012-2020. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. norway, norway—data archive and distributor of ess data for ess eric. https://doi.org/10.21338/nsd-ess-cumulative friedman, b., & hendry, d. g. (2019). value sensitive design: shaping technology with moral imagination. mit press. jean-baptiste, a. (2020). building for everyone: expand your market with design practices from google’s product inclusion team. john wiley & sons. kitschelt, h., & rehm, p. (2014). occupations as a site of political preference formation. comparative political studies, 47(12), 1670–1706. knafo, a., & sagiv, l. (2004). values and work environment: mapping 32 occupations. european journal of psychology of education, 19(3), 255–273. morozov, e. (2014). to save everything, click here (reprint edition). publicaffairs. neff, g. (2012). venture labor: work and the burden of risk in innovative industries. mit press. schwartz, s. (2012). an overview of the schwartz theory of basic values. online readings in psychology and culture, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.9707/23070919.1116 thompson, c. (2019). coders: who they are, what they think and how they are selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): be'ery, g. & epstein, d. (2023, october). the high-tech elite? assessing value priorities of tech workers using the european social survey 2012-2020. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. changing our world. picador. torpey, j. (2020). a sociological agenda for the tech age. theory and society, 49(5), 749–769. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-020-09406-0 wolf, m., & terrell, d. (2016). the high-tech industry, what is it and why it matters to our economic future. https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/78715 short abstract using data from the european value survey 2012-2020 and schwartz’s theory of basic values, this paper aims to map the value priorities of people working in tech compared to the general population, understand to what extent those value priorities differ from value priorities of other occupational elites, and how they vary among tech workers, focusing particularly on developers as a sub-group. our preliminary findings suggest that compared to the general population, tech workers tend to prioritize openness to change and to value self enhancement. we also demonstrate that when viewed as a single group, the overall makeup of values of the tech workers is similar to that of other occupational elites. yet, the dynamics between individual values among the tech workers differ from those of other occupational elites and when we separate developers from other ict specialists, the developers appear more extreme in their tendency to negatively value conservation and positively value self-enhancement. our preliminary results offer potential takeaways for research, policy, and education. keywords tech employees, developers, diversity, ess, values selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): choucair, t., kathirgamalingam, a., lind, f., bernhard-harrer, j., boomgaarden, h. g., silveira de oliveira, b., maia, r., svegaard, s., o'connor farfan, k., esau, k., lubicz-zaorski, c., vodden, l., bruns, a., meyer, h., puschmann, c., brüggemann, m., giglietto, f., rossi, l., righetti, n., & marino, g. (2024, october). transformative tools, emerging challenges: empirical and practical experiences with large language models for text classification and annotation in communication studies. panel presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. panel transformative tools, emerging challenges: empirical and practical experiences with large language models for text classification and annotation in communication studies tariq choucair queensland university of technology ahrabhi kathirgamalingam university of vienna fabienne lind university of vienna jana bernhard-harrer university of vienna hajo g. boomgaarden university of vienna bruna silveira de oliveira federal university of minas gerais rousiley maia federal university of minas gerais sebastian svegaard queensland university of technology kate o'connor farfan queensland university of technology katharina esau queensland university of technology carly lubicz-zaorski queensland university of technology laura vodden queensland university of technology axel bruns queensland university of technology hendrik meyer university of hamburg cornelius puschmann university of bremen michael brüggemann university of hamburg fabio giglietto university of urbino luca rossi it university of copenhagen nicola righetti university of urbino giada marino university of urbino panel introduction recent advancements in large language models (llms) have opened significant research opportunities within the field of media and communication studies. llms offer the capacity to conduct large-scale content classification and annotation with low computational expertise and reduced manual coding efforts, potentially allowing more possibilities for researchers in social sciences to explore understudied topics (bail, 2023; chang et al., 2024). because of its functioning and vast training in distinct domains and languages, llms also potentially unlocks more generalizable, complex, and diverse analyses across various communication materials compared to previous computational tools and approaches (chang et al., 2024). these materials encompass a wide spectrum, ranging from journalistic content to the digital discourse of political actors and social media conversation threads. at the same time, llms also raise important concerns with potential biases, data privacy, models’ transparency, environmental impact, and power imbalances (jameel et al., 2020; fecher et al., 2023). despite the increasing discussion around these models, there is a clear need for more dialogue that bridges empirical research and in-depth elaborations specifically for media and communication scholars (gil de zúñiga et al., 2024; guzman and lewis, 2020). our panel assembles a collection of diverse studies that harness llms to tackle text classification and annotation tasks related to media and communication problems, issues, and topics. these research papers engage in an exploration of: (a) pipeline structuring: diverse methodologies for structuring effective pipelines tailored to this form of analysis; (b) tools and models comparison: comparisons of the various llms tools and models available for text classification and annotation, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses; (c) optimal variables and tasks: identifying the variables and tasks where llms demonstrates exceptional performance and reliability; (d) limitations: discussions on the existing limitations of these tools, including limitations related to specific tasks, variables, languages and data formats; (e) prompt development: strategies for developing, adapting and adjusting prompts that allows better results for specific tasks; and (e) ethical and political dimensions: an examination of the ethical and political considerations inherent in the deployment of llms in communication research. ahrabhi kathirgamalingam and colleagues (paper 1) examines how biases in coding decisions arise from both human coders and large language models (llms) when analyzing racism in news media. they investigate the influence of human coders' lived experiences and awareness of discrimination on their annotations, the role of persona assignments in shaping llm coding biases and compares the biases of human coders and llms to understand differences in annotation decisions and the effect of text properties. findings reveal systematic variation in human annotations linked to lived experience and awareness, as well as significant impacts of persona assignments on llm outputs. the study emphasizes the importance of accepting systematic disagreement in annotations and offers recommendations to enhance the validity of both manual and automated analyses of constructs of marginalization, aiming to improve discrimination research and inform policies for equity. bruna silveira de oliveira and colleagues (paper 2) investigate the potential of large language models (llms) to analyze brazilian masculinist ("manosphere") podcasts, a digital media space used by extremist groups to propagate misogynist ideologies. drawing from a sample of 2,490 episodes, the research focuses on the interplay between legitimacy, intolerance, and recognition within these podcasts. the methodology includes automated transcription, speaker diarization, and the creation of a nuanced codebook covering variables like "presence of intolerance" and "object of intolerance." a reliability test validated the codebook, and llms were iteratively refined through prompt adjustments to improve agreement with human coders. preliminary findings highlight the need for detailed prompts to enable llms to capture both explicit and implicit manifestations of intolerance, such as the denial or minimization of oppression. the study then shows the importance of combining human expertise and machine automation for analyzing sensitive extremist narratives offering scalable methods while mitigating the mental health risks for researchers exposed to toxic content. myself (tariq choucair) and colleagues (paper 3) focused on stance detection across languages and platforms. by leveraging llms' training across diverse linguistic and contextual domains, the research evaluates their ability to generalize without languagespecific training data. two case studies are conducted: one analyzing multilingual election campaigns (in brazilian portuguese, australian english, danish, and peruvian spanish) and another examining platform-specific text variations in australian voice to parliament referendum discussions across facebook, instagram, twitter, and youtube. preliminary findings reveal that fine-tuning llms significantly improve their performance in the source language (english), with models achieving notable f1 score improvements. cross-lingual tests show that larger models like gpt-4o maintain strong adaptability (e.g., high f1 scores in portuguese), whereas smaller models like mistral 7b underperform in cross-lingual contexts. however, smaller models demonstrate competitive performance in specific tasks within the source language post-fine-tuning, indicating that model size is not always the determinant of success. hendrik meyer and colleagues (paper 4) use llms for detect stances in journalistic coverage of climate protests, focusing on the movements "last generation" (lg) and "fridays for future" (fff) in germany, which employ differing protest strategies. using a dataset of ~12,000 german-language news articles, the research evaluates the validity of zero-shot llm classifications (e.g., gpt-4) in identifying stances, compares their performance to human coders, and explores how media portrayals differ for the two movements. preliminary findings reveal that llms achieve strong alignment with human coders. ethical considerations, including the challenges of detecting stances and the accessibility of larger versus smaller models, are discussed as the researchers develop a stance classifier using a smaller model, marking progress in scalable, nuanced and ethical analysis of politically charged media coverage. fabio giglietto and colleagues (paper 5) concludes the panel by reflecting on their investigation of the role of social media, particularly facebook, in shaping exposure to and engagement with political news during the 2018 and 2022 italian elections, employing large language models (llms) to address key methodological challenges. it examines 84,874 urls shared during these periods, categorizing them into political and non-political content through a fine-tuned binary classifier. using text embeddings and k-means clustering, the study groups and labels political urls, with human coders assessing cluster validity. giglietto and colleagues call attention to three primary challenges of llm-based methodologies: the swiss army knife dilemma (balancing general-purpose flexibility with task-specific validation), the granularity spectrum problem (managing the variability in clustering specificity), and the expertise paradox (reconciling llm and human coder competencies). this panel puts together valuable efforts of different research groups across the world to not only use, but also reflect on the use of llms in communication studies. they show important avenues for the field to think about different approaches to validity, ethics and truthful cooperation between humans and computational models without erasing the challenges and disagreements. references bail, c. a. (2023). can generative ai improve social science? socarxiv papers https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/rwtzs chang, y., wang, x., wang, j., wu, y., yang, l., zhu, k., chen, h., yi, x., wang, c., wang, y., ye, w., zhang, y., chang, y., yu, p. s., yang, q., & xie, x. (2024). a survey on evaluation of large language models. acm transactions on intelligent systems and technology. https://doi.org/10.1145/3641289 fecher, b., hebing, m., laufer, m., pohle, j., & sofsky, f. (2023). friend or foe? exploring the implications of large language models on the science system. ai & society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-023-01791-1 gil de zúñiga, h., goyanes, m., & durotoye, t. (2024). a scholarly definition of artificial intelligence (ai): advancing ai as a conceptual framework in communication research. political communication, 41(2), 317–334. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2290497 guzman, a. l., & lewis, s. c. (2020). artificial intelligence and communication: a human–machine communication research agenda. new media & society, 22(1), 70–86. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819858691 jameel, t., ali, r., & toheed, i. (2020). ethics of artificial intelligence: research challenges and potential solutions. 2020 3rd international conference on computing, mathematics and engineering technologies (icomet), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1109/icomet48670.2020.9073911 https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/rwtzs https://doi.org/10.1145/3641289 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-023-01791-1 https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2290497 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819858691 coding racism in media: biases in coding decisions by human coders and llms ahrabhi kathirgamalingam university of vienna fabienne lind university of vienna jana bernhard-harrer university of vienna hajo g. boomgaarden university of vienna part of social reality, and therefore a central subject of social scientific measurement, are constructs of marginalization, such as forms of discrimination, intersections of such, hate speech, incivility, and other types of communication potentially affecting marginalized groups. for these constructs of marginalization critically related to social justice, robust and valid measurement holds the power to provide evidence and explanations that can inform policy and promote equity (scharrer & ramasubramanian, 2021). to study such constructs, researchers often rely on manual quantitative content analysis. besides, automated content analysis is more and more frequently used. implementing such an algorithmic approach, however, often requires a larger number of manually annotated data. the quality of human coding in terms of reliability and validity has long been the focus of methodological debates. previous research indicated that next to the type of construct (e.g., niemann-lenz et al., 2023; potter and levine-donnerstein, 1999) and the coder training and instructions (e.g., lind et al., 2017), it is especially various coder-level characteristics (e.g., niemann-lenz et al., 2023, peter et al., 2002) that are major influencing factors for the agreement or disagreement of coders. in this project, we add to this literature by investigating how coder-level characteristics impact the coding of racism in news media texts. we inspect more specifically how characteristics like coders’ lived experience and awareness to discrimination impact coders' decisions on whether a news text is considered to include racism or not (rq1). as generative large language models (llms) are increasingly being introduced to assist in content analysis tasks and are reported to be competitive with student and crowdworkers (gilardi et al., 2023), we additionally investigate llm coding performance specifically for coding racism in news media texts. more and more studies not only discuss the potential of llm-based coding but also sources for variation when prompting the model repeatedly to code the same text (e.g., reiss, 2023). furthermore, issues such as selection and labeling bias (hovy & prabhumoye, 2021) also play a role. assigning personas by enriching prompts with characteristics of human (e.g., political leaning) is increasingly studied (e.g., beck et al., 2024; deshpande et al., 2023; gupta et al., 2024) and offers an interesting avenue for investigating coder bias. relying on this technique, we ask how persona assignments, compared to default models, influence variations in annotation decisions by llms for constructs of marginalization (rq2). since llms currently are still primarily considered as an augmentation to human coders and to account for potential text property-driven variation, thirdly (rq3), we ask how annotation decisions by llms and human coders compare regarding the presence and extent of coder bias in the detection of racism and how text properties might explain differences. to investigate rq1 and rq2, we conduct two studies and compare their results in a third part for rq3. to explore the sources of disagreement in human coding of racism (study 1), we conducted a survey with 164 paid crowdworkers and 360 coding tasks. before explaining the coding task to the participants, they were asked to complete a pre-questionnaire. for measuring coder-level characteristics, we included items to assess if coders are negatively affected by racism, their political attitudes, awareness of racism, and prior coding experience. control variables measured were age, gender, education background and migration background. the pre-questionnaire was followed by a coder training with definitions and examples of racism in news media. the crowdworkers were asked to code 15 short paragraphs as racist or not. the short paragraphs were randomly selected from german mainstream (bild, taz, welt) and online far-right alternative news media (junge freiheit, pi news, zuerst). the selected outlets in each category are well-known and have a high reach in germany. further, the randomly selected paragraphs each contain a cue representing a potential target group of racism (e.g., ‘migrant’). for study 2, we use the insights from our human coding to design persona-based prompt experiments to explore biases in the annotations produced by llms systematically. we include two llms (gpt-3.5 and gpt-4o) to evaluate currently popular models. based on the insights of our human coding, we create distinct personas based on combinations of the characteristics introduced in our human coding survey (experience, awareness, age and education) that are set as system parameters to the llms prior to coding. we prompt with the exact details provided to the human in our survey and gather five annotation decision generation per persona for the abovedescribed 360 news media paragraphs. thus, we enable the exploration of the alignment of llm coding decisions with assigned persona profiles and differences between the llms. lastly, we compare human and persona-based llm coding decisions from study 1 and 2 by examining overlaps in annotation decisions and qualitatively exploring text properties that led to significant deviations between human and llm annotations. our findings underscore the necessity of giving careful consideration when selecting coders, whether human or ai, to capture and analyze constructs of marginalization. we find that being affected by or being aware of marginalization causes systematic variation in human annotations, while persona assignment significantly impacts llm outputs. as a key takeaway from our study, we argue to "agree to disagree", meaning to accept and even intentionally introduce valid and systematic disagreement or variation in annotation decisions. by offering more specific recommendations, we seek to strengthen the integrity and validity of manual and automated content analysis of constructs of marginalization. with improved measurement, communication research can better identify patterns of discrimination and inform policy toward a more equitable society. references beck, t., schuff, h., lauscher, a., & gurevych, i. (2024). deconstructing the effect of sociodemographic prompting. proceedings of the 18th conference of the european chapter of the association for computational linguistics (volume 1: long papers), 2589–2615. deshpande, a., murahari, v., rajpurohit, t., kalyan, a., & narasimhan, k. (2023). toxicity in chatgpt: analyzing persona-assigned language models. arxiv preprint arxiv:2304.05335. gilardi, f., alizadeh, m., & kubli, m. (2023). chatgpt outperforms crowd-workers for text-annotation tasks. arxiv preprint arxiv:2303.15056. gupta, s., shrivastava, v., deshpande, a., kalyan, a., clark, p., sabharwal, a., & khot, t. (2024, january). bias runs deep: implicit reasoning biases in persona-assigned llms. arxiv preprint arxiv:2311.04892. hovy, d., & prabhumoye, s. (2021). five sources of bias in natural language processing. language and linguistics compass, 15 (8), e12432. https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12432 lind, f., gruber, m., & boomgaarden, h. g. (2017). content analysis by the crowd: assessing the usability of crowdsourcing for coding latent constructs. communication methods and measures, 11(3), 191-209. niemann-lenz, j., dittrich, a., & scheper, j. (2023). coding quality in manual content analysis: an exploration of coder characteristics and category types for crowdworkers and student coders. scm studies in communication and media, 12(4), 327-353. peter, j., & lauf, e. (2002). reliability in cross-national content analysis. journalism & mass communication quarterly, 79(4), 815-832. potter, w. j., & levine‐donnerstein, d. (1999). rethinking validity and reliability in content analysis. reiss, m. v. (2023). testing the reliability of chatgpt for text annotation and classification: a cautionary remark. arxiv preprint arxiv:2304.11085. scharrer, e., & ramasubramanian, s. (2021). quantitative research methods in communication: the power of numbers for social justice. routledge. analyzing extremism in podcasts: an llm-assisted investigation of the brazilian manosphere bruna silveira de oliveira federal university of minas gerais tariq choucair queensland university of technology rousiley maia federal university of minas gerais introduction extremist groups often construct their identities by disseminating their narratives in media environments (berger, 2018; bolet & foos, 2023; peterka-benton & benton, 2023), and podcasts are a crucial format to do so. podcasting is one of the leading digital media practices of the 21st century (llinares et al., 2018), although it has yet to be studied compared to other communicative practices. in this work, we analyze brazilian masculinist (or brazilian manosphere) podcasts, arguing that the claims of extremist groups can be analyzed computationally with varied and complex variables with the assistance of a large language model (llm). the so-called manosphere is an extremist set of misogynist movements that originate and operate on the internet to address issues aligned with masculinity (nagle, 2017; marwick & caplan, 2018; ribeiro et al., 2020; tranchese & sugiura, 2021; vilaça & d'andréa, 2021; thorburn, 2023). we started from 34,060 podcast episodes from deezer, google podcasts, soundcloud, spotify, youtube, apple podcasts, listen to notes, bit chute, mgtow tv, and castbox and used a proportional stratified random sample of 2,490 episodes. in general terms, the ideology of the manosphere is based on the belief that contemporary society gives women too much power, coupled with biologically essentialist interpretations and pseudo-scientific concepts from evolutionary psychology about relationship patterns, especially heterosexual ones (thorburn, 2023). the feeling of victimization and persecution is constantly evoked (barcellona, 2022; ging, 2019; marwick & caplan, 2018; tranchese & sugiura, 2021; vilaça & d'andréa, 2021). masculinist groups believe that there is a conspiracy involving the government, educational institutions, the judiciary and even the church to protect women and attack men. they also claim that this dynamic is a kind of social engineering. our research concerns the triad between legitimacy, intolerance and recognition and seeks to investigate how the demands of brazilian masculinist groups, despite being intolerant, fit into the search for legitimacy and can lead to false struggles for recognition. justification, research questions and methods content analysis requires data preparation and an accurate coding process for possible methodological replicability (bardin, 2016; krippendorff, 2018; maia, 2023; neuendorf, 2002; sampaio & lycarião, 2021). however, empirical research can be challenging to carry out efficiently due to the speed at which content is produced, especially with the rise of extremism on social media platforms (bolet & foss, 2023; conway, 2016; gaikwad et al., 2021; leitch & pickering, 2022). because of its automation potential, using llms can facilitate the process. summing with the scale-up, another advantage of using llms for content analysis in extremism studies is the tentative reduction of the impact on the people who analyze data on online extremism (pearson et al., 2023). considering these potentials and the discussion about the llm's ability to identify nuances in pronouncements (chew et al., 2023; he et al., 2023; von der heyde, 2023), we ask: rq1: to what extent can llms be used to identify detailed variables of intolerance and perception of harm related to struggles for recognition? rq2: what errors, limitations and difficulties were encountered in the coding process? our study is divided into five phases. the first was the automated transcription of the episodes, using whisper. beyond the transcription, we also diarized the episodes to differ between speakers. the second was constructing the codebook, which has seventeen categories, including, for instance, “presence of intolerance,” “object of intolerance,” “type of intolerance,” and “what audience is the episode aimed at.” the third phase, the reliability test to validate the codebook, was conducted between two human coders, with sufficient agreement in all variables. the fourth phase was the code validation between humans and llm. to make this comparison, we coded a sample of 50 podcast episodes, and then the specific gpt 4 model coded the same sample. the method was to adjust the prompt until the model could present a higher agreement with the human coders. after dozens of rounds, we reached sufficient agreement on all variables. the fifth and final stage is the application to the 2,490 episodes. preliminary results refining our use of llms to assist the analysis of brazilian masculinist podcasts included an iterative process of prompt adjustment. the complexity of the concepts under study and their respective variables we sought to analyze had significant challenges. these variables spanned a broad spectrum, from direct manifestations of intolerance (e.g., discursive violence towards specific sub-groups like older women, trans women, and solo mothers) to more nuanced expressions, such as the denial of oppression or violence against women. to show this, we present the process of one of the variables, “presence of intolerance.” our initial prompt in portuguese, translated to english, was: "this transcription is from a single podcast episode. analyze the content to identify any manifestations of intolerance." however, this needed to adequately capture the cases manual coders identified. it was too broad and failed to capture the subtleties of intolerance, particularly in cases where oppression or violence was denied or minimized. recognizing this limitation, we started a qualitative refinement process for a prompt that would better guide the llm in identifying explicit and implicit forms of intolerance. the revised prompt, translated to english, reads: "please analyze the following transcription of a podcast episode with special attention to any manifestations of intolerance against women. this includes, but is not limited to, foul language directed at women, harmful gender stereotypes, denial or minimization of the oppression suffered by women, personal attacks based on gender, and incitations to violence against women. we consider manifestations of intolerance to include not only explicit statements but also subtle insinuations, derogatory jokes, perpetuation of negative stereotypes, and disqualification of women's experiences or feelings. be detailed in your analysis and justify your answer with specific examples from the transcription when applicable. please identify any form of intolerance against women in the transcription, with specific examples and justification." this transformation of the prompts from a generic request for intolerance identification to a detailed, nuanced directive had significant implications. it required the model to engage in a deeper, more critical analysis of the content, considering the explicit and implicit ways in which intolerance could be manifested. the detailed prompt encouraged the model to discern subtle insinuations of intolerance and to justify its conclusions with specific examples from the text, enhancing the reliability and depth of the analysis. the evolution of our prompts showed the importance of qualitative, iterative processes in using llms for communication research, especially if dealing with sensitive and complex concepts like intolerance and extremist groups. this work implies five conclusions remarks: i) the importance of podcast analysis – it is a cultural media phenomenon characterized by the closeness between the speaker and the audience, presented in an appealing and easily accessible format; ii) the use of llms to analyze claims by extremist groups reduces the impact on researchers' mental health, who would otherwise be exposed to more toxic data without this automated process. iii) the possibility of large-scale analysis; iv) the interpretative flexibility provided by the analytical process, which allows us to carry out more elaborate qualitative analyses; v) and finally, the collaboration between humans and machines is crucial in this methodological process. human input was essential for calibration and adjustments at every operational stage. in other words, automating processes do not eliminate the need for human labor. references bächtiger, a., dryzek, j. s., mansbridge, j., & warren, m. e. (eds.). (2018). the oxford handbook of deliberative democracy. oxford university press. barcellona, m. (2022). incel violence as a new terrorism threat: a brief investigation between alt-right and manosphere dimensions. sortuz: oñati journal of emergent socio-legal studies, 11(2), 170-186. bardin, l.(2016) análise de conteúdo. são paulo: edições 70, 2016. berger, j. m. (2018). extremism. mit press. bolet, d., & foos, f. (2023). media platforming and the normalisation of extreme right views. urpp equality of opportunity discussion paper series no.22 https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/urhxy chambers, s. (2017). balancing epistemic quality and equal participation in a system approach to deliberative democracy. social epistemology, 31(3), 266–276. chew, r., bollenbacher, j., wenger, m., speer, j., & kim, a. (2023). llm-assisted content analysis: using large language models to support deductive coding. arxiv preprint arxiv:2306.14924. conway, m. (2016). determining the role of the internet in violent extremism and terrorism: six suggestions for progressing research. studies in conflict & terrorism, doi: 10.1080/1057610x.2016.1157408 gaikwad, m., ahirrao, s., phansalkar, s., & kotecha, k. (2021). online extremism detection: a systematic literature review with emphasis on datasets, classification techniques, validation methods, and tools. ieee access, 9, 48364-48404. ging, d. (2019). alphas, betas, and incels: theorizing the masculinities of the manosphere. men and masculinities, 22(4), 638–657. habermas, j. (2006). political communication in media society: does democracy still enjoy an epistemic dimension? the impact of normative theory on empirical research. communication theory, 16(4), 411–426. he, z., guo, s., rao, a., & lerman, k. (2023). inducing political bias allows language models anticipate partisan reactions to controversies. arxiv preprint arxiv:2311.09687. krippendorff, k. (2018). content analysis: an introduction to its methodology. sage publications. leitch, s., & pickering, p. (2022). rethinking social media and extremism (p. 194). anu press. maia, r. c. m. (org.). (2023). métodos de pesquisa em comunicação política. salvador: edufba. marwick, a. e., & caplan, r. (2018). drinking male tears: language, the manosphere, and networked harassment. feminist media studies, 18(4), 543–559. nagle, a. (2017). kill all normies: online culture wars from 4chan and tumblr to trump and the alt-right. john hunt publishing. neuendorf, k. a. (2002). the content analysis guidebook thousand oaks: sage. pearson, e., whittaker, j., baaken, t., zeiger, s., atamuradova, f., & conway, m. (2023). online extremism and terrorism researchers’ security, safety, and resilience: findings from the field. peterka-benton, d., & benton, b. (2023). online radicalization case study of a mass shooting: the payton gendron manifesto. journal for deradicalization. ribeiro, m. h., blackburn, j., bradlyn, b., de cristofaro, e., stringhini, g., long, s., & zannettou, s. (2021, may). the evolution of the manosphere across the web. in proceedings of the international aaai conference on web and social media (vol. 15, pp. 196–207). sampaio, r. c., & lycarião, d. (2021). análise de conteúdo categorial: manual de aplicação. escola nacional de administração pública (enap). thorburn, j. (2023). exiting the manosphere. a gendered analysis of radicalization, diversion and deradicalization narratives from r/incelexit and r/exredpill, studies in conflict & terrorism, doi: 10.1080/1057610x.2023.2244192. tranchese, a., & sugiura, l. (2021). “i don’t hate all women, just those stuck-up bitches”: how incels and mainstream pornography speak the same extreme language of misogyny. violence against women, 27(14), 2709-273. vilaça, g., & d'andréa, c. (2021). da manosphere à machosfera: práticas (sub) culturais masculinistas em plataformas anonimizadas. revista eco-pós, 24(2), 410-440. von der heyde, l., haensch, a. c., & wenz, a. (2023). assessing bias in llmgenerated synthetic datasets: the case of german voter behavior (no. 97r8s). center for open science. automating political text classification with llms: generalisation across languages and platforms for stance detection towards diverse target categories tariq choucair queensland university of technology sebastian svegaard queensland university of technology kate o'connor farfan queensland university of technology katharina esau queensland university of technology carly lubicz-zaorski queensland university of technology laura vodden queensland university of technology axel bruns queensland university of technology supervised machine learning gaps and llms potential in recent years, communication studies have increasingly used supervised machine learning (sml) algorithms to analyze online political messages at scale (e.g., baden et al., 2020; rytting et al., 2023). compared to dictionary-based or unsupervised approaches, sml offers distinct advantages for studying the content of communication in specific contexts. it enables researchers to automatically apply categories that are anchored in existing theory and provides flexibility in capturing the complexity of textual data (stromer-galley & rossini, 2023), as researchers can better control the variables included in the model. these strengths make supervised methods valuable for social science research in general and media and communication studies particularly. sml facilitates processing large text volumes based on comparatively small amounts of human-labelled training data. however, there are still challenges and limitations within the state of the art. in this study, we highlight two. first, as sml approaches in media and communication studies are relatively new, there are specific tasks, types of content, and contexts to which they have not yet been applied. specifically, there is a strong anglocentric language bias, with the majority of studies analysing only english text data (alslaity & orji, 2024; baden et al., 2022). second, operationalization validity may suffer as scholars often rely on manual creation of training data sets as the source for the classification (baden et al., 2022). while complex constructs arising from theory necessitate careful consideration and adaptation to be operationalized in empirical research, machine learning algorithms in general rely strictly on manually labelled data to perform classification tasks, which can themselves be limited by the researchers’ own biases. the characteristics of this data will dictate how the model will perform, but language can be articulated in countless ways, including, for instance, through irony, sarcasm, slang, colloquialisms and metaphors. smls identify patterns that correlate with provided classifications but may overlook valid linguistic variations. generalization is compromised, as these methods do not “build upon an intuitive understanding of textual meaning” (baden et al., 2022, p. 3). in summary, the model works based on training data – specific examples and rather than the concept itself under investigation. new large language models (llms) could address these issues. llms, unlike supervised models reliant on task-specific training data, are trained in vast, varied text across domains and, importantly, languages. despite a persistent english bias (liang et al., 2023), training with other languages at least occurs to some extent and within the same model (i.e., the same model is trained on documents from different languages), making cross-language analysis more plausible than with previous tools and sml approaches. for example, an llm trained on a vast corpus of political discourse across different languages could be used to analyse political messages in a new language, a task for which a supervised model would need coded training data in that language. second, llms are trained using techniques like self-supervised learning, where they learn by interacting with and predicting patterns in unlabeled data. this approach allows them to develop a more complex and flexible interpretation of human language, moving beyond a reliance on manually labelled datasets. an advancement in this domain has been the transformer architecture (vaswani et al.'s, 2017). transformers employ a self-attention mechanism that enables models to weigh the importance of different parts of a sentence or sequence, thereby grasping contextually rich meanings embedded in the text. for instance, when analysing political messages to perform a stance detection, these models can discern not just specific keywords associated with each stance, but also the context and subtle issue positionality (e.g., against or in favour of an issue) potentially leading to more advanced interpretations of communication. it’s key to measure if and how llms improve generalization across languages by analysing diverse texts without needing language-specific training data. this possible flexibility extends to platform content types as well. for example, llms can potentially seamlessly adapt to the brevity and slang of twitter, the multiple text fields structure of facebook posts, or the specific tone of youtube videos. unlike other approaches that might require platform-specific trained models, llms can potentially generalize across both languages and platform formats. stance detection towards diverse target categories stance detection is a crucial task within political text classification, where the goal is to identify the author's attitude (stance) towards a given target in a given message. in political communication, understanding whether a message supports, opposes, or is neutral towards a particular entity (such as a policy or candidate) is important for comprehending public opinion, polarisation, and discourse dynamics. this task, however, poses significant challenges for traditional supervised machine learning (sml) models, particularly due to linguistic diversity and the need for nuanced contextual understanding. in this paper, we evaluate the performance of multiple llms on the target-stance detection task, examining their ability to generalize across languages and platforms, which is critical for scaling political communication research beyond anglocentric and platform-specific confines. research design we conduct two case studies. the first explores the generalizability and the broader applicability of llms across different languages. we analyzed online election campaigns by political leaders from four different countries, each with a distinct language (brazil, australia, denmark, and peru). this comparison seeks to understand how well llms can adapt and perform in varying linguistic contexts. the second case study focuses on generalizing and ensuring broader applicability across different nature of posts (different types of posts within and across platforms). we analyse the discussions about the voice to parliament referendum in australia in four major social media platforms: facebook, instagram, twitter, and youtube. by doing so, we assess the models' ability to interpret and classify political content that varies not only in format but also in the characteristics of communication that each platform may present. for each study, we fine tune different llms with manual annotated data in the source category (i.e., english for the first study, and facebook for the second study). we then test the fine-tuned model over expanded categories (portuguese, spanish, and danish for the first study, and twitter, youtube, and instagram for the second). the chosen models for this study are: gpt-4o, gpt-4o-mini, gpt-3.5-turbo, phi-3, mistral 7b. the selection criteria were to include state of the art models, as well as small models with good performance in related tasks, to evaluate both scalability and efficiency. preliminary findings the preliminary results for suggest that fine-tuning significantly improves the performance of llms in the source language (english), aligning them more closely with human benchmarks. for instance, gpt-4o initially outperformed others with f1 scores of 0.67, 0.63, and 0.53 for the classes "favour," "against," and "neither" respectively, but improved to 0.74, 0.78, and 0.67 with fine-tuning. similarly, the smaller mistral 7b model showed notable improvements post-tuning, achieving f1 scores of 0.7, 0.72, and 0.65. this shows that bigger models are not always needed. however, when tested in portuguese (the only non-english language assessed so far), the fine-tuned gpt-4o demonstrated strong cross-lingual adaptability with f1 scores of 0.88, 0.84, and 0.89, whereas the smaller models suffered significantly, with mistral 7b, for instance, scoring only 0.43, 0.42, and 0.38. this shows the challenges smaller models face in crosslingual generalizability. these findings are still a work in progress, with analyses in other languages pending. references alslaity, a., & orji, r. (2024). machine learning techniques for emotion detection and sentiment analysis: current state, challenges, and future directions. behaviour & information technology, 43(1), 139–164. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929x.2022.2156387 baden, c., kligler-vilenchik, n., & yarchi, m. (2020). hybrid content analysis: toward a strategy for the theory-driven, computer-assisted classification of large text corpora. communication methods and measures, 14(3), 165–183. https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2020.1803247 baden, c., pipal, c., schoonvelde, m., & van der velden, m. a. c. g. (2022). three gaps in computational text analysis methods for social sciences: a research agenda. communication methods and measures, 16(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2021.2015574 liang, w., yuksekgonul, m., mao, y., wu, e., & zou, j. (2023). gpt detectors are biased against non-native english writers (arxiv:2304.02819). arxiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2304.02819 rytting, c. m., sorensen, t., argyle, l., busby, e., fulda, n., gubler, j. & wingate, d. (2023). towards coding social science datasets with language models. arxiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2306.02177. stromer-galley, j., & rossini, p. (2023). categorizing political campaign messages on social media using supervised machine learning. journal of information technology & politics, 0(0), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2023.2231436 vaswani, a., shazeer, n., parmar, n., uszkoreit, j., jones, l., gomez, a. n., kaiser, ł., & polosukhin, i. (2017). attention is all you need. advances in neural information processing systems, long beach, ca, usa. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929x.2022.2156387 deciphering complex stances in (disruptive) climate protest coverage: a comparison of human coding and large language models hendrik meyer university of hamburg cornelius puschmann university of bremen michael brüggemann university of hamburg introduction & state of research automatically detecting complex rhetorical structures, such as the stance towards politically charged issues or controversial actors, within media debates, still poses significant methodological challenges for communication research. the recent rapid evolution of large language models (llms), exemplified by advances in commercial resources such as open ai’s gpt-4, as well as in ‘open-source’ alternatives, such as llama and mistral, potentially accelerates the speed, lowers the cost and improves the quality of natural language inference (nli), making zero-shot learning approaches a viable alternative to the manual coding of large samples (laurer et al., 2023). given the outsized importance of complex constructs such as stance for hotly contested political issues, these innovations are interesting for media and communication scholars. one area of intense political contestation and controversy is climate change protests. the global climate emergency continues to escalate by the day, with natural disasters underscoring the need for broad and deep emission reductions, as emphasized by scientific and political actors and global activism. despite the efforts by civil society, governments have not adequately prioritized mitigation and adaptation. it is, therefore, no surprise that climate protest movements have experienced significant growth in recent years. various strategies are employed by protesters to advance their respective objectives, with certain factions becoming more ’anti-normative’ and ‘disruptive’ (shuman et al., 2021), such as extinction rebellion or the ‘letzte generation’ ('the last generation') in germany. the latter engages in civil disobedience by blocking streets or occupying buildings—actions deliberately intended to garner political influence through media attention. one might reasonably expect that all these protest endeavors, demanding crucial climate policy measures, should generate increasing societal support. however, recent polls in germany contradict this assumption (more in common, 2023). notably, the decline in populous support not only concerns disruptive forms of climate protest, but extends to all forms of climate protests. media representations of these movements play a crucial role in shaping societal perceptions (goldenbaum & thompson, 2020). previous studies have showcased climate movements’ success in drawing mediated attention to climate change issues (meyer et al., 2023), with climate change playing a key role in public debate for decades (nerlich et al., 2010; schäfer & painter 2021). however, increased visibility of protest actions and climate change concerns could then result in backlashes with antagonists conquering climate change debates through “connective counter-action” (meyer et al., 2024). such debates are politicized and often polarized, translating into a strong engagement from strategic communicators (politicians, activists, scientists, etc.) who frequently insist on the exclusive validity of their own arguments (brüggemann et al., 2020; kaiser & puschmann, 2017; meyer et al., 2023). thus, it is essential to examine whether various forms of protests spark divided stances and "discursive polarization" (brüggemann & meyer, 2023), which could, in turn, amplify media attention toward more disruptive protest actions (garimella et al., 2017). therefore, our exploration of llm capabilities aims to investigate the journalistic coverage surrounding two climate movement organizations associated with two very different degrees of disruptiveness in germany: fridays for future (fff) and the last generation (lg). these two civil society actors utilize markedly different strategies concerning how they organize, execute, and communicate their protests. while lg is perceived as more disruptive, potentially radical, and enjoys less approval from the german population (göllert, 2023), fff is viewed as a more established and accepted movement, as well as being more deeply embedded within civil society (haunss & sommer, 2020). however, challenges arise when investigating contentious debates in modern media spheres, as they are complex and dynamically changing. here, the recent evolution of llms and zero-shot learning bears great potential. first approaches to use these techniques in order to scrutinize politically-contested and potentially polarized debates show promising results and high validity, e.g. in incivility analyses (matter et al. 2024) and other, more complex text-based analysis tasks such as stance detection (liang et al. 2023; he et al. 2023; lan et al. 2023). research questions we illustrated that—in complex and dynamically changing media spheres on climate protests—llms could help to identify the distribution of oppositional stances within contested debates. therefore, questions of validity of such methods for the context of climate protests arise: rq1: how accurately do zero-shot classifications of large language models discern varying degrees of support for climate protesters and their policy demands? after illustrating the validity of such novel methodological approaches, our work then aims to answer the following issue-specific research question: rq2: how do the journalistic debates surrounding the last generation and fridays for future vary regarding the degrees of support for climate protesters and their policy demands? preliminary results we present a systematic approach to discerning stances towards the activism of (disruptive) climate protest movements, exemplified by "last generation", and "fridays for future", based on a press corpus of ~12,000 german-language articles from a broad range of news outlets, that each mention at least one movement. relying on a combination of limited-scale human labeling and automated classification, we detail our coding instructions (for humans) and prompt refinements (for models), noting strengths and limitations of zero-shot stance detection, and leverage the ability of llms to provide detailed reasoning for their choices. comparing five human coders with the capabilities of gpt-4 and subsequently fine-tuning two open source llms, preliminary results show good performance of llms for stance classification, underscoring both the technique’s potential and its constraints: results show alignment in over 80% (krippendorff’s alpha: 0.72) of the first sample of 300 coded articles, highlighting the technique’s potential and limitations. these limitations, however, stem not only from the capacities of the models but also from the challenges of complex concepts, such as stances within protest frames, with llms prompting renewed questions about what constitutes a reliable concept definition. the classification results indicate that, in general, a majority (62%) of outlets report on protest movements in a neutral manner. a smaller proportion (33%) adopts a more oppositional stance, while relatively few articles (5%) express support for the movements. this overall trend remains consistent across reports on the two different protest movements. however, the rates of neutral (67% versus 60%) and supportive (6% versus 4%) reports are higher, while texts expressing opposition (26% versus 35%) for the movements and their demands are lower, when articles refer to fff as opposed to lg. this indicates a decrease in support for debates concerning more disruptive protests, while, simultaneously, coverage of these contentious events has increased. this raises normative questions about the productivity of potentially polarizing, protestrelated counterpublics in instigating policy change (meyer & brüggemann, 2025). building on these initial methodological insights and going beyond protest debates, we leveraged the high reliability of the llm codings to generate a large training dataset of 3,000 coded paragraphs, expressing stances across different climate change-related articles. using this dataset, we trained a setfit-based stance classifier. although still in development and subject to ongoing improvement, the initial results indicate an accuracy of ~0.7 across different topical domains of climate change discourse. these domains include stances on climate protests and policies related to ecological transformations, such as the replacement of heating infrastructures or the implementation of a national speed limit. the classifier is publicly available on huggingface (see puschmann, 2024), remains a work in progress, and will undergo continuous improvement. references brüggemann, m., & meyer, h. (2023). when debates break apart: discursive polarization as a multi-dimensional divergence emerging in and through communication. communication theory, 33(2–3), 132–142. https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtad012 goldenbaum, m., & thompson, c. s. (2020). fridays for future im spiegel der medienöffentlichkeit. in s. haunss & m. sommer (eds.), fridays for future—die jugend gegen den klimawandel (pp. 181–204). transcript verlag. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839453476-009 göllert, lisa. (2023, january 19). umfrage: klimaschutz ja, radikaler protest nein. https://www.ndr.de/ndrfragt/umfrage-letzte-generation-geht-mehrheit-zuweit,ergebnisse1158.html haunss, s., & sommer, m. (eds.). (2020). fridays for future: die jugend gegen den klimawandel: konturen der weltweiten protestbewegung. transcript. he, x., bresson, x., laurent, t., perold, a., lecun, y., & hooi, b. (2023). harnessing explanations: llm-to-lm interpreter for enhanced text-attributed graph representation learning. arxiv:2305.19523v3 kaiser, j., & puschmann, c. (2017). alliance of antagonism: counterpublics and polarization in online climate change communication. communication and the public, 2(4), 371– 387. https://doi.org/10.1177/2057047317732350 lan, x., gao, c., jin, d., & li, y. (2023). stance detection with collaborative roleinfused llm-based agents. arxiv:2310.10467 laurer m, van atteveldt w, casas a, welbers k. less annotating, more classifying: addressing the data scarcity issue of supervised machine learning with deep transfer learning and bert-nli. political analysis. 2024;32(1):84-100. https://doi.org/10.1017/pan.2023.20 liang, w., zhang, y., cao, h., wang, b., ding, d., yang, x., vodrahalli, k., he, s., smith, d., yin, y., mcfarland, d., & zou, j. (2023). can large language models provide useful feedback on research papers? a large-scale empirical analysis. arxiv:2310.01783 matter, d., schirmer, m., grinberg, n., & pfeffer, j. (2024). close to human-level agreement: tracing journeys of violent speech in incel posts with gpt-4-enhanced annotations. arxiv:2401.02001 meyer, h., peach, a. k., guenther, l., kedar, h. e., & brüggemann, m. (2023). between calls for action and narratives of denial: climate change attention structures on twitter. media and communication, 11(1), 278–292. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v11i1.6111 meyer, h., pröschel, l., & brüggemann, m. (2024). from disruptive protests to disrupted networks? analyzing levels of polarization in the german twitter https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtad012 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839453476-009 https://www.ndr.de/ndrfragt/umfrage-letzte-generation-geht-mehrheit-zu-weit,ergebnisse1158.html https://www.ndr.de/ndrfragt/umfrage-letzte-generation-geht-mehrheit-zu-weit,ergebnisse1158.html https://doi.org/10.1177/2057047317732350 https://doi.org/10.1017/pan.2023.20 https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v11i1.6111 discourses around “fridays for future” and “the last generation”. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/nd68z meyer, h., & brüggemann, m. (2025): discursive polarization. in: nai, a., grömping, m., & wirz, d. (eds). elgar encyclopedia of political communication. edward elgar publishing. accepted version. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/3x45p more in common. (2023). wie schaut die deutsche gesellschaft derzeit auf die klimabewegung? https://www.moreincommon.de/klimabewegung/ nerlich, b., koteyko, n. and brown, b. (2010). theory and language of climate change communication. wires clim change, 1: 97-110. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.2 puschmann, c. (2024): minilm-klimacoder_v0.1. hugging face. https://huggingface.co/cbpuschmann/minilm-klimacoder_v0.1 schäfer, m. s., & painter, j. (2021). climate journalism in a changing media ecosystem: assessing the production of climate change-related news around the world. wires climate change, 12, e675. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.675 https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/nd68z https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/3x45p https://www.moreincommon.de/klimabewegung/ https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.2 https://huggingface.co/cbpuschmann/minilm-klimacoder_v0.1 https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.675 understanding exposure to and engagement with political news on facebook during the 2018 and 2022 italian elections fabio giglietto university of urbino luca rossi it university of copenhagen nicola righetti university of urbino giada marino university of urbino the advent of social media, especially platforms like facebook, has revolutionized the way news is consumed, a change starkly highlighted by the dissemination of misinformation and polarizing content, particularly after the 2016 us elections. this transformation has prompted the use of computational methods, including machine learning, to analyze political narratives on social media platforms. this research explores these dynamics within the italian political media landscape, particularly focusing on the interplay between exposure to and engagement with political news stories on facebook preceding the two most recent italian general elections. the study tackles two significant challenges: the limited availability of exposure data from social media platforms for external research (benkler, 2019) and the difficulties in efficiently aggregating news stories on specific topics (bonikowski & nelson, 2022), especially in non-english contexts. by utilizing data provided by meta and employing large language models (llms), this research offers new insights into the untapped potential of social media data, demonstrating how llms can streamline the analysis of online political discourse. to address the limitations inherent in traditional human-coder-based approaches, especially for large datasets, supervised and unsupervised topic modeling techniques have emerged as critical computational alternatives for content analysis (chen et al., 2023). moreover, research has demonstrated the efficacy of transformer models like bert and roberta in detecting topics and emotions and identifying clickbait headlines (adoma et al., 2020; briskilal & subalalitha, 2022; rajapaksha et al., 2021; reimers & gurevych, 2019). however, these predominantly english-trained, off-theshelf models encounter challenges when applied to low-resource languages, including italian. to mitigate these challenges, scholars have turned to language-specific, finetuned models, such as alberto, for the italian language on social media (polignano et al., 2019). yet, these pre-trained, language-specific models are difficult to maintain and frequently necessitate additional fine-tuning to deliver reliable results in particular domains. finally, recent benchmarks clearly point out that llm-based text embedding regularly overperforms bert on a set of standardized tasks (muennighoff et al., 2022; setser et al., 2024). the research methodology involved a multifaceted approach using llms to understand the dynamics of political discourse during the 2018 and 2022 italian elections on facebook. it began with identifying political links through fine-tuning openai's ada model with a dataset of urls shared on facebook around the election periods. we examined 65,183 urls (shared from 23 december 2017 to 4 march 2018) and 19,691 urls (shared from 21 july 2022 to 25 september 2022) from meta's url shares dataset. a team of italian scholars has been involved in the training phase, manually classifying a sample of these urls into political and non-political categories, resulting in a highly accurate binary classifier. further, the study acquired text-embedding-3-large for all identified political urls using the openai embeddings api (giglietto, 2024), followed by a k-means cluster analysis to group the urls. this process involved testing different types of embeddings and optimizing the number of clusters for effective analysis. the clusters were then automatically labeled using the gpt-4 model, with human coders assessing the quality of these labels. this llm-in-the-loop pipeline introduces unique validation challenges, necessitating a reevaluation of accuracy assessment strategies (marino & giglietto, 2024). in this study, we address three primary challenges: • the swiss army knife dilemma. • the granularity spectrum problem. • the expertise paradox. the swiss army knife dilemma highlights the fact that llms are general-purpose tools (burkhardt & rieder, 2024). similar to the shifting patterns of a kaleidoscope, each researcher's decisions—ranging from model selection to algorithm configuration— produce a distinct pipeline that requires dual validation: first, validating the chosen configuration, and second, demonstrating its superiority over alternative approaches. this dual-layered requirement creates a validation landscape significantly more complex than that of traditional single-purpose models. the second challenge, the granularity spectrum problem, emerges when llms are used to cluster political content. the clusters generated by llms can vary widely in specificity, encompassing broad themes like "economic policy" to highly specific narratives such as "prime minister's tax reform speech." this variability complicates validation efforts, raising the question: how can accuracy be effectively assessed when content can be justifiably clustered at multiple levels of granularity? finally, the expertise paradox addresses the divergence between the structured knowledge of llms and that of human coders. trained on vast datasets, llms may exhibit competencies that surpass those of traditional human coders in certain domains, posing a challenge to conventional validation benchmarks. the integration of llms in the analysis of political discourse on social media will be explored in light of these challenges, offering insights into the practical implications of adopting such tools. references adoma, a. f., henry, n.-m., & chen, w. (2020). comparative analyses of bert, roberta, distilbert, and xlnet for text-based emotion recognition. 2020 17th international computer conference on wavelet active media technology and information processing (iccwamtip), 117–121. https://doi.org/10.1109/iccwamtip51612.2020.9317379 benkler, y. (2019). cautionary notes on disinformation and the origins of distrust. social science research counci. https://doi.org/10.35650/md.2004.d.2019 bonikowski, b., & nelson, l. k. (2022). from ends to means: the promise of computational text analysis for theoretically driven sociological research. sociological methods & research, 51(4), 1469–1483. https://doi.org/10.1177/00491241221123088 briskilal, j., & subalalitha, c. n. (2022). an ensemble model for classifying idioms and literal texts using bert and roberta. information processing & management, 59(1), 102756. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2021.102756 burkhardt, s., & rieder, b. (2024). foundation models are platform models: prompting and the political economy of ai. big data & society, 11(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241247839 giglietto, f. (2024). evaluating embedding models for clustering italian political news: a comparative study of text-embedding-3-large and umberto. https://osf.io/preprints/osf/2j9ed marino, g., & giglietto, f. (2024). integrating large language models in political discourse studies on social media: challenges of validating an llms-in-the-loop pipeline. sociologica, 18(2), 87–107. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/19524 muennighoff, n., tazi, n., magne, l., & reimers, n. (2022). mteb: massive text embedding benchmark. in arxiv [cs.cl]. arxiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2210.07316 polignano, m., basile, p., degemmis, m., semeraro, g., & basile, v. (2019). alberto: italian bert language understanding model for nlp challenging tasks based on tweets. italian conference on computational linguistics. https://iris.unito.it/handle/2318/1759767 rajapaksha, p., farahbakhsh, r., & crespi, n. (2021). bert, xlnet or roberta: the best transfer learning model to detect clickbaits. ieee access, 9, 154704–154716. https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2021.3128742 reimers, n., & gurevych, i. (2019). sentence-bert: sentence embeddings using siamese bert-networks. in arxiv [cs.cl]. arxiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10084 setser, a., lange, l., weiss, k., & barash, v. (2024). content modeling in multiplatform multilingual social media data. journal of online trust & safety, 2(2). https://doi.org/10.54501/jots.v2i2.136 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): bidav, t., mcevoy, e., kerr, a. and kitchin, p. (2024, october). connecting with sports fans: gambling marketing strategies on instagram. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. connecting with sports fans: gambling marketing strategies on instagram tugce bidav king’s college london erin mcevoy ulster university aphra kerr university college dublin paul kitchin ulster university introduction social media platforms have become a prominent space for the proliferation of commercial messaging that includes themes related to harmful activities, including gambling. these platforms enable gambling operators not only to promote their services via platform-based advertising but also to build and position their brands. accordingly, there is a growing multidisciplinary literature on the use of social media in gambling marketing (james and bradley, 2021). previous research has explored gambling operators’ use of multiple platforms (gainsbury et al., 2016; lindeman et al., 2023) and of twitter particularly, exploring their content strategies (houghton et al., 2019) and engaging in sentiment analysis of the content (bradley and james, 2019). instagram however has been less explored. marketing through instagram provides important impression management content that when combined with relationship marketing tactics can build brands and position celebrities, high-profile athletes or social media influencers in the minds of consumers (doyle, et al., 2022; pitt et al., 2024). our research examines how major gambling operators utilise sports media consumption as a vehicle for marketing and brand building on instagram. this study provides important insights into how gambling brands use social media, in particular instagram, and potentially bypass existing regulations to prevent gambling http://spir.aoir.org/ communications being viewed by children and young people under 18 years. it furthers a growing body of evidence that evidences the extent of gambling marketing that young people are exposed to and how gambling companies exploit fandom to target both gamblers and non-gamblers alike. method this paper presents findings from a larger mixed-methods research project that examines the exposure, awareness and perceptions of young people to gambling marketing through and around live sports in two european countries on the island of ireland. the focus group findings provided insights into the participants’ sports media consumption and their exposure, awareness and perceptions of gambling marketing and its relationship with sport. informed by these findings, we identified live sporting events of interest to our young people (i.e., football, rugby, darts, athletics, and horseracing) and social media platforms that they used to access this content (i.e., instagram, snapchat, youtube). as instagram had the highest percentage (n=18, 94.7%) of usage among 18-24 years olds in our focus groups and the platform allows targeting those over 18 years old for branded content on gambling, we decided to select instagram as our social media case study platform to examine gambling marketing strategies. we collected a purposeful sample of posts, including image (n: 114) and video (n: 79), shared between october 2023 and early january 2024 from 7 major gambling brands’ instagram accounts (paddy power, boyle sports, sky bet, ladbrokes, betfair, betway, bet365). the posts, including their captions, were collected by taking screenshots and screen recordings. to analyse the collected data, we developed a codebook building on previous work (gainsbury et al., 2016; lindeman et al., 2023; rossi et al., 2023) and the data was coded and analysed in qualitative data analysis software, namely maxqda. the coding scheme was comprehensive, including post features (format, genre, hashtags, emojis, mentions, likes, colour, and engagement drive), gambling brand (visibility of brand logo/tagline), sports references (references to a specific sport, team, and/or fixture), youth appeal (music, humour, cultural symbols, celebrity endorsement), gender (visibility of female/male characters, and reference to women’s/men’s sports), gambling references (type of gambling, method of gambling, specific gamble/bet references, odds, encourage to gamble, and t&cs), and responsible gambling (rg) messages (age limit, rg message location, rg discourse, rg tools, and rg organisations). findings the findings suggest that gambling operators utilise sports media consumption as a vehicle for marketing and brand building by connecting with sports fans through the distribution of native social media content related to sports. however, the extent of this marketing varied depending on the sport, with men’s football, horse racing and darts most saturated by gambling marketing, while other sports received little attention from the gambling operators. the fact that there is little to no reference to women’s sports in the collected instagram posts reinforces the gendered nature of gambling marketing. the findings reveal significant disparities in exposure to gambling marketing based on particular sports, with football-related content dominating gambling marketing on instagram. closer examination reveals references to teams, especially those english premier league clubs with the most supporters such as manchester city, manchester united, liverpool, and arsenal and references to specific fixtures such as manchester city vs. liverpool and arsenal vs. manchester city in the posts which increases the exposure of specific fan groups to gambling marketing. these teams are widely supported by young and old alike across the island of ireland. one prominent brand-building strategy of operators is to share content in a variety of different genres, especially sports content that is not directly related to gambling, to increase engagement. such content includes informative content related to upcoming sports events and statistics, entertainment content like sport-related humorous sketches and interviews with sportspeople, promotional content such as information about their products and special weeks, and content related to responsible gambling. informative and entertainment content drives more audience engagement compared to responsible gambling messages and general content promoting operators’ services. one particular gambling operator, which has the most followers compared to other operators included in this research, stands out in the platform's algorithmic cultures by producing creative and relatable instagram reels that appeal to a wide audience, increasing brand visibility and recognition. while all operators share generic responsible gambling (rg) messages, especially during safer gambling week in the uk and ireland, these are mostly messages which display rg taglines such as take time to think and be gamble aware or messages which display rg organisation names and/or rg helplines. indeed, our analysis has shown that such messages are often obscured when viewed on social media accounts on smartphones. less prevalent are messages about gambling harms or those which give detailed information about rg tools where users can place limits on session length, losses, spending or deposits (lopez-gonzalez, et al., 2018). overall, the findings demonstrate that the distribution of native social media content on instagram increases the exposure of some young adults who enjoy consuming sports media to gambling marketing. unlike televised live sporting events that provide an avenue for distributing direct gambling messages, social media platforms such as instagram facilitate the distribution of a wide variety of content types that not only seek to capture the attention of adult and youth sports fans, but also users who would not typically engage with gambling content. overall, our analysis of gambling marketing content on instagram has found that it attempts to reinforce the dominant industry narrative that gambling is a normal part of sports fandom and more broadly to (re) brand gambling as a normal ‘leisure industry’. as with many industries however, they carefully conceal and obfuscate the individual and social harms that they generate. funding this research was funded by the north-south research programme of the department of further and higher education, research innovation and science (dfheris) and the shared island unit at the department of the taoiseach, government of ireland. references carah n, brown mg, dobson a and robards b (2023) the algorithmic flow of harmful industries advertising on social media platforms. aoir selected papers of internet research, 2022. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2022i012985 doyle, j. p., su, y., & kunkel, t. (2022). athlete branding via social media: examining the factors influencing consumer engagement on instagram. european sport management quarterly, 22(4), 506–526. gainsbury sm, delfabbro p, king dl, et al. (2016) an exploratory study of gambling operators’ use of social media and the latent messages conveyed. journal of gambling studies, 32(1): 125–141. james rje and bradley a. (2021) the use of social media in research on gambling: systematic review. current addiction reports, 8: 235–245. kerr, a., kitchin, p., o’ brennan, j., bidav, t. and mcevoy, e., (2024) code-red: young people and their exposure to gambling marketing through media and sport on the island of ireland. report. maynooth university: ireland. isbn: 978-1-7392351-7-8. accessible from https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/18905/ lindeman m, männistö-inkinen v, hellman m, et al. (2023) gambling operators’ social media image creation in finland and sweden 2017–2020. nordic studies on alcohol and drugs, 40(1): 40–60. lopez-gonzalez, h., estévez, a., & griffiths, m. d. (2018). controlling the illusion of control: a grounded theory of sports betting advertising in the uk. international gambling studies, 18(1), 39–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/14459795.2017.1377747 pitt, h., mccarthy, s., randle, m., daube, m., & thomas, s. l. (2024). young people’s views about the use of celebrities and social media influencers in gambling marketing. health promotion international, 39(1), daae012. https://doi.org/10.1093/heapro/daae012 newall pws, ferreira ca and sharman s (2022) the frequency and content of televised uk gambling advertising during the men’s 2020 euro soccer tournament. experimental results, 3(e28): 1–13. parker, c, albarrán-torres, c, briggs, c, burgess, j, carah, n, andrejevic, m, angus, d and obeid, a (2023) addressing the accountability gap: gambling advertising and social media platform responsibilities. addiction research and theory. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2022i012985 https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/18905/ https://doi.org/10.1080/14459795.2017.1377747 https://doi.org/10.1093/heapro/daae012 purves ri, critchlow n, morgan a, et al. (2020) examining the frequency and nature of gambling marketing in televised broadcasts of professional sporting events in the united kingdom. public health, 184: 71–78. rossi r, wheaton j, moxey m and tozzi e (2023, september) new season, more self regulation, more marketing: the prevalence of gambling adverts during the opening weekend of the english premier league 2023/2024. university of bristol. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): rossini, p., vaccari, c., theocharis, y., tromble, r. (2024, october). understanding perceptions and effects of online intolerance: a four-country experimental study. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. understanding perceptions and effects of online intolerance: a four-country experimental study patrícia rossini university of glasgow cristian vaccari university of edinburgh yannis theocharis technical university munich rebekah tromble george washington university introduction research on online political discourse has long been concerned with the pervasiveness of incivility across various digital arenas, considering it a problematic feature of public speech (chen et al., 2019). while empirical work across different platforms has suggested that incivility is frequently encountered online, a key limitation of this work is its empirical focus on rude, vulgar, or offensive content, which may not inherently perceived as incompatible with political discussions (chen et al., 2019; muddiman, 2017; stryker et al., 2016). while these discursive features may be seen as rude (coe et al., 2014), they are not necessarily harmful to discussion participants (rossini, 2022). in other words, work on incivility has been primarily concerned with the tone, not the substance, of online discourse. as a result, we still know very little about how discourse that is truly harmful affect both targets and bystanders in online platforms. to address this gap, we focus intolerant online discourse—content that is hateful, threatening, discriminatory, or harassing (rossini, 2022). investigating the potential effects of exposure to intolerant speech is important for three main reasons: first, it helps understand how perceptions of intolerance may vary based on its severity—for instance, discrimination is typically disregarded as a violation of ‘community standards’, while hateful or threatening speech tends to be moderated. second, it helps identify those who are most vulnerable—both as targets and bystanders— to intolerance. finally, it helps understand how these groups react to intolerant speech—e.g., by hiding, blocking, or reporting the authors, but also by reducing their own activity on social media, such as avoiding discussion topics, posting less frequently, reducing interactions, or even deleting their profile–thus quantifying the harm that intolerant speech causes. importantly, this approach highlights the detrimental effects of intolerant speech on bystanders, who tend to be overlooked by community standards and moderation practices focused on targets. intolerant discourse is a serious threat to online political expression: according to the pew research center (anderson & quinn, 2019), 41% of americans report having experienced online harassment, with the majority of the cases taking place on social media, while 1 in 4 teens in the uk reported having seen hateful messages (ofcom, 2019). in germany, 40% of internet users reported exposure to online hate speech (geschke et al., 2019), while in brazil the organization safernet1 reported in 2022 a substantial rise in the reporting of hateful online crimes, including racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and religious intolerance. intolerant content can silence marginalized voices and may turn social media platforms into hostile spaces, undermining democratic discourse, and leading people to abandon them as places for discussion. however, limited research has investigated the negative effects of being targeted or exposed to online intolerance. in this study, we tackle this important research gap and investigate the potential effects of exposure to intolerant speech in four countries where online intolerance is pervasive—brazil, germany, the uk, and the us. the four countries in our sample represent democracies with highly active internet users and feature a high level of political animosity towards disadvantaged groups, such as immigrants, lgbtq+, and other minorities. notably, far-right parties and politicians have weaponized discourse towards minorities in recent electoral cycles across all these countries. these countries also differ in how they regulate online speech, with germany and brazil having more restrictive legislation, and the uk and the us as the least regulated regimes. methods we leverage pre-registered survey experiments on large samples (n = 2,000 per country) constructed to mirror the adult population on key characteristics in these countries to examine perceptions of and reactions to intolerant online discourse. our experiments manipulate the target (women, lgbt), tone (civil, uncivil), and type (discriminatory, hateful, threatening) of intolerant online discourse, using realistic mockups of social media posts. our key dependent variables include (1) perceptions of how harmful the content is; (2) intent to react to the post (e.g., by reporting, blocking, responding); and (3) support for content moderation practices. based on existing research investigating both perceptions and effects of online incivility, we can expect reactions to intolerant speech will vary based on personal traits, political attitudes, and experiences with online toxicity, as well as being a member of a 'targeted' identity 1 https://new.safernet.org.br/content/denuncias-de-imagens-de-abuso-e-exploracao-sexual-infantil-reportadas-pelasafernet group. we also observe whether these effects are consistent across different countries and contexts. we manipulated different types of intolerance because we expect participants to respond differently them based on perceived harmfulness. for instance, discrimination often falls outside the scope of community standards and platform moderation rules, while hate speech and violent threats are likely perceived as more harmful (stryker et al., 2016). as such, we expect participants to be more sensitive to hateful and threatening speech, with discrimination being perceived as less problematic than the other types (h1). we also expect the tone of the message to have an impact, with intolerant discourse that is uncivil being perceived more harshly than intolerant discourse presented in a civil tone (h2). these differences are also likely to shape intentions to react to posts in the same direction—e.g., responding, blocking, or reporting, as well as reducing engagement with political discussions (h3). finally, we expect participants exposed to the treatments to report higher support for content moderation practices in the uncivil condition (h4a), as well as in the more harmful types of intolerance compared to discrimination (h4b). considering the position of participants as targets or bystanders, we expect participants' identification as a member of the targeted groups (women, lgbt+) to be more affected by our treatments, regardless of the tone of the treatment (h5). references anderson, m., & quinn, d. (2019, august 8). 46% of social media users worn out by political posts, discussions. pew research center. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/08/46-of-u-s-social-media-userssay-they-are-worn-out-by-political-posts-and-discussions/ chen, g. m., muddiman, a., wilner, t., pariser, e., & stroud, n. j. (2019). we should not get rid of incivility online. social media + society, 5(3), 2056305119862641. https://doi.org/10/gghcnh coe, k., kenski, k., & rains, s. a. (2014). online and uncivil? patterns and determinants of incivility in newspaper website comments. journal of communication, 64(4), 658–679. https://doi.org/10/f6dxrx geschke, d., klaßen, a., quent, m., & richter, c. (2019). #hass im netz: der schleichende angriff auf unsere demokratie. muddiman, a. (2017). personal and public levels of political incivility. international journal of communication, 11(0), 21. ofcom. (2019). children and parents: media use and attitudes report. rossini, p. (2022). beyond incivility: understanding patterns of uncivil and intolerant discourse in online political talk. communication research, 49(3), 399–425. https://doi.org/10/gkfj98 stryker, r., conway, b. a., & danielson, j. t. (2016). what is political incivility? communication monographs, 83(4), 535–556. https://doi.org/10/dz7s selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): berryman, r., kim, d. o., hwang, s., miyake, e., & abidin, c. (2024, oct 30 – nov 2). virtual celebrity industries in east asia. panel presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. virtual celebrity industries in east asia rachel berryman curtin university do own (donna) kim university of illinois chicago seol hwang joongbu university esperanza miyake university of strathclyde crystal abidin curtin university introduction in east asia, virtual celebrity was once considered a niche interest reserved for otaku and dedicated fans of acg (anime, comics and games; see black, 2012; hamilton, 1997; yoshida, 2004/2016). however, recent shifts in government priorities, technological innovations, and heightened capital investment have brought virtual celebrity into mainstream view (fan, 2022; han et al., 2021). global events such as the covid-19 pandemic and “metaverse” hype further accelerated this shift, with cultural industries rushing to safe-guard their businesses for a digital-first future (herman, 2021; yuqiao, 2021). expanded infrastructure soon followed, including talent agencies and production studios catering to virtual celebrity. in china alone, consulting firm iimedia (2023) valued the virtual idol market at 3.46 billion yuan in 2020; the following year, they observed an 80% increase, reaching 6.22 billion yuan. buoyed by the potential applications of artificial intelligence, this trajectory is expected to continue, exceeding a market value of 48 billion yuan by 2025. against this backdrop, this panel considers the various organisations, technologies, platforms, labour, and stakeholders involved in east asia’s flourishing virtual celebrity industries. instead of a singular industry, we recognise a multiplicity of “industries” developing in parallel, each shaped by local histories, tastes, markets, and legislative forces. we thus apply a regional lens to draw attention to the “transnational” (iwabuchi, 2014) flows of virtual celebrity across borders, languages, industries, platforms, and technologies (see suan, 2021). genres of virtual celebrity the concept of virtual celebrity realises the ambition of manufactured pop idols that inspired japan’s idol industry in the 1970s, and spread across east asia soon thereafter (black, 2012; galbraith & karlin, 2012). we deploy the term “virtual celebrity” as a catch-all for several genres differentiated by geography, technology, platforms, content, and monetization strategies. though often conflated in colloquial usage, we distinguish between several unique “iterations” (iwabuchi, 2014) of virtual celebrity, including: ● vocaloids, such as hatsune miku, see-yu, and vsinger luo tianyi, who represent voice synthesisers, and perform songs produced, choreographed, and popularised by fans (see condry, 2017; han et al., 2021; y. sun & lee, 2020) ● virtual idols (also known as virtual singers or ai idols), computer-generated characters who pursue musical careers, appearing in music videos, concerts, and even fan meet-and-greets (see han et al., 2021; wang, 2022) ● vtubers (virtual youtubers), who livestream as animated avatars using bodytracking technologies, interacting with fans, and showcasing talents such as singing and gameplay (see gwillim-thomas, 2023) ● virtual anchors, an iteration of vtubers popular in china, who entertain viewers and promote e-commerce purchases in multi-hour live streams on platforms like bilibili (see han et al., 2021); or who are ai incarnations of newscasters, and automated to deliver updates on current affairs ● virtual influencers, fictional characters created for visual social media platforms, who promote products, services, and messages to their audiences (see yuan, 2024) converging industries east asia’s virtual celebrity industries are ripe for academic inquiry, not only for their size, but also for their intersection with other cultural industries. for example, leading chinese streaming services iqiyi and bilibili produce regular variety shows with the most popular virtual idols from their platforms (deng, 2023; fan, 2022). in gaming, characters are regularly elevated to virtual idols, launching musical careers and selling commodities, as in the case of genshin impact (lu, 2023), league of legends’ virtual idol group k/da (김형은, 2018), and virtual boy band wxwz from honour of kings (flora, 2020). cross-industry collaborations are responsible for korean virtual idol group mave:, created by mobile game developer netmarble and media company kakao entertainment (young & stevens, 2023); as well as chinese virtual idol group a-soul, created by idol agency yuehua entertainment with bytedance, the parent company of video app douyin (deng, 2021). these industry intersections and collaborations offer many future directions for academic attention. panel structure emerging scholarship on east asia’s virtual celebrity industries examines effaced labour (e.g. cao, 2023; suan, 2021); the monetization of fan interactions (e.g. gwillim-thomas, 2023; w. sun et al., 2022); platform intermediation (e.g. yuan, 2024); and technological developments (e.g. wang, 2022). the five papers in this panel complement these studies by highlighting the commercial, cultural, and symbolic value of virtual celebrities across and beyond east asia: in the first paper, virtual influencer history: human patterns in old new media, do own (donna) kim offers a historiography of east asia’s virtual celebrity industries, detailing the presence of virtual idols in japan and korea since the 1990s. drawing on archival sources, it presents a decolonial history which prefigures contemporary configurations of (virtual) labour (stahl, 2011), and complicates the discursive novelty of virtual celebrity in many anglophone accounts. next, seol hwang’s paper, emerging aspects of k-pop: innovation through virtual idols and entertainment, charts the k-pop industry’s pivot to virtual idol groups following the onset of the covid-19 pandemic and interest in the “metaverse”. combining a literature review and structural equation modelling, it considers the mainstreaming of the metaverse in korea’s cultural industries and the response of local audiences. in the third paper, virtual influencer marketing and the halo of innovation, rachel berryman highlights emergent visual tropes in the commercial application of virtual influencers across east asia. based on digital ethnography and visual analysis, it proposes virtual influencers are used to signify technological advancement, extending a “halo of innovation” to associated brands and products. esperanza miyake’s paper the production of japanese virtuality: imma, japanese multi-dimensionality and transmedial mobility examines how visual styling and a multi-platform presence reduce imma, a virtual influencer from tokyo, to a signifier of “japanese-ness”. employing visual and document analysis, it argues that virtual influencers are not only used to promote commodities, but also to commodify culture/s. and in the final paper, the virtual human industry in greater china: a stocktake of news discourse, crystal abidin analyses media discourse that surrounds china’s virtual anchors. combining press analysis and digital ethnography, it identifies “dystopian china” as a contemporary permutation of “digital orientalism” (mahoney, 2022) in the representation of china’s technological achievements to audiences outside east asia. together, these papers preview the productivity of analysing virtual celebrity industries through a regional lens (iwabuchi, 2014). we hope this panel will invigorate scholarly conversations about the entangled industries of virtual celebrity in east asia, and spark collaborations spanning a greater number of markets, genres, and topics. references black, d. (2012). the virtual idol: producing and consuming digital femininity. in p. w. galbraith & j. g. karlin (eds.), idols and celebrity in japanese media culture (pp. 209–228). palgrave macmillan. cao, y. (2023). immaterial labour and precarity in cultural industry: the case of vtuber live streams. lecture notes in education psychology and public media, 4(1), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.54254/2753-7048/4/20220478 condry, i. (2017). hatsune miku: virtual idol, media platform, and crowd-sourced celebrity. in a. freedman & t. slade (eds.), introducing japanese popular culture (pp. 123–133). routledge. deng, z. (2021, november 17). virtually real. china daily. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202111/17/ws6194453ea310cdd39bc75bba.ht ml deng, z. (2023, january 12). digital humans make their mark in real life. china daily. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202301/12/ws63bf4ba7a31057c47eba9156.ht ml fan, f. (2022, february 8). virtual humans poised for big advances. china daily. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202202/08/ws6201cb56a310cdd39bc85425.ht ml flora, l. (2020, may 5). esports emerges as in-demand beauty marketing channel. glossy. https://www.glossy.co/beauty/esports-emerges-as-in-demand-beautymarketing-channel/ galbraith, p. w., & karlin, j. g. (2012). introduction: the mirror of idols and celebrity. in p. w. galbraith & j. g. karlin (eds.), idols and celebrity in japanese media culture (pp. 1–32). palgrave macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283788_1 gwillim-thomas, p. (2023). the actualizing platform: 2.5 dimensions in the vtuber media ecology. mechademia, 15(2), 49–69. hamilton, r. (1997). virtual idols and digital girls: artifice and sexuality in anime, kisekae and kyoko date. bad subjects, 35. https://web.archive.org/web/20081028193541/https://bad.eserver.org/issues/199 7/35/hamilton.html han, h., lin, m., & zurlo, f. (2021). an exploratory study of the business strategies for virtual idols in the era of phygitalization—analysis in the perspective of cases in china. in c. stephanidis, m. antona, & s. ntoa (eds.), hci international 2021— late breaking posters (pp. 317–324). springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90179-0_41 herman, t. (2021, november 5). k-pop labels flirt with metaverses to extend artists’ online reach. south china morning post. https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/kpop/article/3154968/k-pop-labels-embrace-virtual-stars-and-pursue-metaversesextend iimedia entertainment industry research centre. (2023). 2023年中国虚拟偶像产业发展研究 报告. iimedia consulting 艾媒咨询. https://report.iimedia.cn/repo13-0/43333.html iwabuchi, k. (2014). de-westernisation, inter-asian referencing and beyond. european journal of cultural studies, 17(1), 44–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549413501483 lu, x. (2023). digital games, virtual idols, and market success: genshin impact and yun jin. sage publications: sage business cases originals. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781071915806 mahoney, j. g. (2022). china’s rise as an advanced technological society and the rise of digital orientalism. journal of chinese political science, 28, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-022-09817-z stahl, m. (2011). the synthespian’s animated prehistory: the monkees, the archies, don kirshner, and the politics of “virtual labor.” television & new media, 12(1), 3–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476409357641 suan, s. (2021). performing virtual youtubers: acting across borders in the platform society. in m. roth, h. yoshida, & p. martin (eds.), japan’s contemporary media culture between local and global. content, practice and theory (pp. 187–222). crossasia-ebooks. https://hasp.ub.uniheidelberg.de/catalog/book/971/chapter/12884 sun, w., wang, z., & zheng, w. (2022). research on the profit model of virtual idols— taking bilibili as an example. highlights in business, economics and management, 2, 309–315. https://doi.org/10.54097/hbem.v2i.2379 sun, y., & lee, j. (2020). the relationship between commerce and virtual singer fandom as a subculture: the case of luo tianyi. international journal of art and culture technology, 4(1–2), 35–42. wang, y. q. (2022). a brief analysis of the development of chinese virtual idol industry empowered by 5g+motion capture technology——taking the virtual idol group a-soul as an example. journal of physics: conference series, 2278(1), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/2278/1/012011 yoshida, m. (2016). on two-dimensional cute girls: virtual idols. in p. w. galbraith & j. g. karlin (eds.), & k. nishimura (trans.), media convergence in japan (pp. 144– 168). kinema club. (original work published 2004) young, j. y., & stevens, m. (2023, january 29). will the metaverse be entertaining? ask south korea. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/29/business/metaverse-k-pop-southkorea.html yuan, j. e. (2024). making virtual celebrity: platformization and intermediation in digital cultural production. international journal of cultural studies, 1–16. yuqiao, j. (2021, january 31). china’s virtual idol industry booming, attracts more than 300 million fans. global times. https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202101/1214468.shtml 김형은. (2018, november 12). kda: lol 캐릭터가 가상 걸그룹이 되기까지. bbc news 코리아. https://www.bbc.com/korean/news-46176102 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): kim, d. o. (2024, oct 30 – nov 2). virtual influencer history: human patterns in new old media. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. virtual influencer history: human patterns in new old media do own (donna) kim university of illinois chicago introduction a life digitally formulated without consent, touted as cutting-edge and beautiful until the shine fades. forced to disappear, to join his forgotten cyber ancestors. south korea’s (henceforth korea) 1990s “cyber singer” adam wryly reflects on his fate in nahzam sue’s 2016 retro-funk song cyberstar adam. fast, rhythmic cuts of pieced-together dolls, machinery, and computer graphic imagery (cgi) busily populate the music video, which ends with nahzam sue’s robot dance as he repeats to the synth beat that this is a result of karma. whether as an innovative business opportunity or as the latest odd internet fad, virtual influencers, here defined as photorealistic cgi virtual humans who are (aspiring) social media influencers, are often approached as novel media phenomena. however, as adam lamented in cyberstar adam, despite their seeming newness, they have predecessors: virtual celebrities—e.g., virtual idols, cyber singers, and fictional bands. approaching the virtual influencers’ seeming novelty as a technological myth (barthes, 2013; mosco, 2005; natale & ballatore, 2020), i examine a selection of preceding cases to historicize, and thereby politicize, the contemporary significations of virtual influencers. often framed as a technical matter, naturalized narratives of novelty distract from the continuing patterns of human involvement and intersecting issues of power in social and cultural spheres (gitelman, 2006; marvin, 1998). as barthes (2013) and mosco (2004) respectively said, myths “transform history into nature” (p. 240), and “to deny history is to remove from discussion active human agency, the constraints of social structure, and the real world politics” (p. 35). this paper’s chronology is by no means comprehensive of all predecessors but uniquely incorporates japanese and korean cases that are historically rich but lesser known in english-based international internet research, drawing on a larger project on virtual influencers (kim, 2022; see kim, forthcoming). following the above definition of virtual influencers, the analysis prioritized cases that emulated human stars through cgi, but some non-virtual and non-human cases were included in the larger analysis where relevant. selected summary of findings and discussion: virtual idols and cyber singers in 1990s japan and korea variegated production models of japanese and korean virtual celebrities that emerged in the 1990s prod questions on authenticity, agency, authorship, labor, and representation. in japan, haga yui (1990), date kyoko (1996), and terai yuki (1998) are known as some of the first virtual idols (galbraith, 2009; sone, 2017). while all three were depicted as pretty, youthful teen girls, complete with “ideal” body measurement information, they each followed a starkly different production model. haga yui was an open-secret participatory project, organically developed from ijuuin hikaru and his radio listeners’ collaborative, parodic pokes at 1980s japanese idol culture which viewed ideal idols as “innocent” girls who would not even go to the toilet. from fans to body models, multiple individuals knowingly and unknowingly joined ijuuin’s efforts to virtually perfect the humanly impossible idol persona, until as per the listeners’ feedback she “retired” to supposedly study abroad. date kyoko, on the other hand, was a major talent management company horipro’s attempt to apply state-of-art full-body 3d cgi technology to their talent-producing pipeline. from her music video to her eventual redebut in korea as “diki” (1999) and many more revamps that followed it, date kyoko’s activities showcased virtual humans’ adaptability to diverse spatial, linguistic, and temporal contexts, although evaluated as company-driven and commercially unsuccessful. a reimagined digital recreation of the manga libido’s character by its artist, terai yuki’s characteristics foreshadowed various bottom-up, convergent media practices in virtual influencers that divert from more traditional celebrity production models: she was created as a transmedia crossover, produced as a hobby project by an independent artist, had cartoon-like visuals rather than abiding by strict photorealism, and utilized an at-home 3d software and inspired its community. these cases demystify virtual influencers’ novelty by enabling historical comparisons not just for surfacing technical or logistical parallels but more importantly for analyzing their cultural implications. for instance, haga yui’s inception and trajectory remind us that regardless of parodic intentions, dominant codes in media cultures—e.g., 80’s japanese idol culture—ground the virtual stars and stars-to-be: while virtual, their (intentional) conformity to conventional practices makes them interpretable within the conventional celebrity sign system (richardson, 2005). thus, their seeming novelty should not be conflated with subversiveness; all three idols replicated, and to an extent reproduced, the gendered expectations in their idol presentations. another example would be the relative importance of participatory processes over technicalities in the makings of virtual influencers, suggested by the contrast between date kyoko’s unsuccessful top-down attempts and haga yui and terai yuki’s organic audience involvement and community attention. as stated by a past listener of ijuuin’s radio, “the biggest weapon” of haga yui was “the imagination of listeners and fans” (pureyādo, 2011). if novel uniqueness of virtual influencers were to be sought, it should be explained through audience participation. korea’s 1990s “cyber singers,” such as adam (1998) and his lesser-known contemporaries lusia (1998) and cyda (1998) (jung, 2019; kang, 1999), demonstrate the critical benefits of additionally approaching virtual celebrities as co-constructed beings. adam, developed by a software venture company called adam soft as a 20year-old male heartthrob, particularly well-embodies virtual humans’ ambiguities around “virtual labor” (stahl, 2011)—i.e., the performative labor by a representative individual that actually results from the collaboration between multiple systems, humans, and technologies. adam presented himself as an agentic being, but multiple actors supported adam’s performances—e.g., then-uncredited singer park sung-chul, his non-disclosure agreement, pr director jung duk-hyun who oversaw adam’s persona and writings, and the likeness of the “ideal”-looking actor won bin that adam was suspected of replicating. tracing the (invisible) collaborators debunks the supposed immateriality of “virtual” humans by outlining the continuing structures and conditions that enable their claims of liberation. “cyber star who is free from concerns about scandals or missing shows” (hong, 1998) is obtainable only when virtual labor is maintained; adam’s management actively discouraged park from revealing his identity, criticizing his looks as inadequate and suggesting that thus the reveal will only lead to “the death of both adam and him” (jeong, 2006). concluding remarks this partial introduction of the pre-history of virtual influencers shows that despite the myth of novelty, they should be approached as multi-actor performances that are, and have been, entangled with human politics. this study’s compilation of preceding cases and discussion of their implications contribute to critical research on virtual influencers and related phenomena by allowing richer historical contextualizations, including through lesser-known east asian cases. findings on the pre-1990s, 2000s, and 2010s cases’ production models will also be discussed. i argue that while virtual influencers may be perceived as new, how they shape—and are able to shape—the sociotechnical patterns around the humans that they emulate may not be new. references barthes, r. (2013). mythologies. hill and wang. (original work published 1957) galbraith, p. w. (2009, october 14). virtual idols blur line between real and imaginary. japan today. https://japantoday.com/category/features/lifestyle/virtual-idols-blurline-between-real-and-imaginary gitelman, l. (2006). always already new. media, history, and the data of culture. mit press. hong, s. (1998, january 23). saibeogasu cheottansaeng [first birth of a cyber singer]. kbs news. https://news.kbs.co.kr/news/view.do?ncd=3782356 jeong, d. (2006, april 7). [jeongdeokyeonui nemonan sesang] gayogye, saibeo gasuga neomu manta [[jeong deokhyeon’s square world] too many cyber singers in the music industry]. osen. https://n.news.naver.com/mnews/article/109/0000030134?sid=001 jung, y. (2019, november 28). [nnyeonjeonnyuseu] 1998nyeon hyeseonggachi debwihan “saibeogasu adam” [[news from n years ago] debuted like a comet in 1998 ‘cyber singer adam’]. ytn. https://www.ytn.co.kr/_ln/0134_201911280929127858 kang, d. (1999, july 19). [deo saibeo] netijeun: saibeogasudeul “ingimori” jaegadong [[the cyber]: netizen: cyber singers “gathering popularity” again. hangukgyeongjesinmun. https://www.hankyung.com/news/article/1999071904281 kim, d. o. (forthcoming). meta-authenticity and fake but real virtual influencers: a framework for artificial sociality analysis and ethics. new media & society. —. (2022). virtually human? negotiation of (non)humanness and agency in the sociotechnical assemblage of virtual influencers. [unpublished doctoral dissertation]. university of southern california. marvin, c. (1988). when old technologies were new: thinking about electric communication in the late nineteenth century. oxford university press. mosco, v. (2005). the digital sublime: myth, power, and cyberspace. mit press. natale, s., & ballatore, a. (2020). imagining the thinking machine: technological myths and the rise of artificial intelligence. convergence, 26(1), 3–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856517715164 pureyādo. (2011, september 18). bācharu aidoru ima mukashi ～ eguchi aimi to haga yui ～ [virtual idol now past ~eguchi aimi and haga yui~]. gajetto tsūshin. https://getnews.jp/archives/141915 richardson, j. (2005). “the digital won’t let me go”: constructions of the virtual and the real in gorillaz’ “clint eastwood”1. journal of popular music studies, 17, 1– 29. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1524-2226.2005.00031.x sone, y. (2017). hatsune miku, virtual machine-woman. in y. sone (ed.), japanese robot culture: performance, imagination, and modernity (pp. 139–166). palgrave macmillan us. stahl, m. (2011). the synthespian’s animated prehistory: the monkees, the archies, don kirshner, and the politics of “virtual labor.” television & new media, 12(1), 3–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476409357641 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): hwang, s. (2024, oct 30 – nov 2). emerging aspects of k-pop: innovation through virtual idols and entertainment. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. emerging aspects of k-pop: innovation through virtual idols and entertainment seol hwang joongbu university introduction the intersection of the covid-19 pandemic and the rising interest in the metaverse has triggered a profound transformation in the k-pop sphere, symbolizing a significant evolution. this shift towards virtual experiences has ignited creative concepts and propelled substantial growth in the virtual idol sector, positioning virtual idols on the global stage of k-content. the seamless transformation integrates advanced technologies into both online and offline performances. the emergence of virtual idols signifies a new way of enjoying k-pop and expanding its influence in various ways. the growing impact of virtual idols has not only captured industry attention but has also led to ongoing research in academia (hwang & hwang, 2022; hwang & koo, 2023; kim & yoo, 2021; lee, kim & park, 2022). this study comprehensively examines the dynamic interplay among k-pop, the covid-19 pandemic, and the metaverse, focusing on the increasing presence of virtual idols in the korean entertainment landscape. faced with the challenges posed by the pandemic, real-life idols leveraged technologies, such as virtual reality (vr), augmented reality (ar), extended reality (xr), and artificial intelligence (ai), to craft virtual personas for performances on metaverse platforms. what initially emerged as a response to challenges has evolved into a flourishing industry. in the initial phases of the pandemic, numerous k-pop idols embraced immersive technologies to create virtual characters and deliver k-pop performances on metaverse platforms. platforms such as vrchat, rec room, altspacevr, sansar, and decentraland have played a pivotal role in reshaping the k-pop landscape by facilitating the creation, sharing, and exploration of virtual worlds. this enabled the organization of virtual k-pop events and concerts, along with various online events. consequently, this allowed k-pop artists to engage with fans through virtual concerts and meet-and-greet sessions. a diverse array of virtual idol groups—including “isedol (isegye idol)”, “mave:”, “eternity”, “revolution heart”, “plave”, and “superkind”—exemplify the multifaceted trends in virtual entertainment. each group distinguishes itself through composition, style, choice of platform, music genre, and target audience. notably, “k/da” boasts affiliations with gaming phenomenon league of legends, while “isedol” pursued independent conceptualization. collaborations with established k-pop agencies or labels are prevalent, exemplified by “æspa”, operating under sm entertainment. associations between major game companies, such as netmarble’s metaverse entertainment and kakao entertainment, have given rise to groups like “mave:”, illustrating a symbiotic relationship between the gaming and entertainment industries. the genesis of virtual idols, propelled by the challenges brought about by the covid-19 pandemic, has led to the rapid assimilation of cutting-edge technologies. although the pandemic has accelerated their integration, the concept of virtual idols was not merely a reactionary measure. a comprehensive understanding of the impact of virtual idol groups requires an analysis of their reception, encompassing factors such as chart performances, fan engagement, and critical acclaim. in the initial stages, prominent virtual idols included “k/da”; “æ-æspa,” avatars of the girl group “æspa” on the fictional planet kwangya; and “isedol”. “k/da” and' “æ-æspa” encountered challenges, as their popularity was partly derived from league of legends and “æspa”’s existing fandoms. these challenges underscore that their popularity did not solely emanate from the intrinsic charm of virtual idols. in contrast, “isedol” quickly ascended to the top of music charts upon debut, indicating the potential of virtual idols to strongly resonate with audiences. a nuanced examination of the reception of each group provides insights into the dynamics of the virtual idol phenomenon and the factors contributing to its success in the evolving k-pop landscape. in conclusion, the convergence of the covid-19 pandemic and the metaverse has ushered in a new era for the k-pop industry, propelling virtual idols to unprecedented prominence. this study analyzes the underlying currents of this phenomenon, tracing its technological origins in response to a global crisis and the current dominance of virtual idols in the diverse landscape of korean entertainment. study understanding the impact of fandom on the k-pop and idol industry is paramount, especially in the context of potential audiences transitioning into virtual idol enthusiasts (angmo & mahajan, 2024; sarfi, nosrati & sabzali, 2021; schouten, janssen & verspaget, 2021; wang & long, 2023). this study explores how the characteristics of virtual idols shape the attitudes of viewers who have experienced virtual idol performances. the investigation delves into the complex relationships among virtual idol characteristics, immersion during performances, performance satisfaction, and the intention to revisit such performances. through a comprehensive literature review and structural equation modeling, this research utilized spss 28.0 and amos 28.0, analyzing 470 responses. the key findings underscore the significance of creating an immersive experience for effective marketing communication along with idol performances. characteristics that influence this immersive experience include attractiveness, similarity to humans, and commercial viability. strategic planning that underscores these characteristics, particularly physical appeal and similarity to humans, is imperative for successful virtual idol performances. addressing commercial viability is essential for mitigating the potential negative impacts, necessitating thoughtful strategic planning and execution. moreover, this study emphasizes the multifaceted role of virtual idols as content creators, who extend their influence to diverse genres, such as webtoons, web novels, videos, and games, leveraging their intellectual property (ip). this versatility, arising from their inherent duality as both media and content, enables them to integrate seamlessly across various platforms, mitigating drawbacks such as excessive commercialization. the flexibility of virtual idols opens avenues for innovative and distinctive marketing strategies that counterbalance their negative aspects. consider a scenario in which a virtual idol gains popularity after a captivating performance and evolves into a beloved character. the ip of this virtual idol extends into various forms, such as webtoons, web novels, videos, and games. this approach diversifies fan experiences and revenue streams, offering creative and narrative contributions that transcend commercialization. that is, fans perceive the virtual idol as a character with a rich narrative, mitigating potential negative impacts of commercialization. this example underscores how virtual idols, as content creators, navigate the challenges of commercialization through diverse and creative media ventures, paving the way for differentiated marketing strategies. this research also underscores the importance of making virtual idol performances more immersive, going beyond mere stage presence. it advocates that virtual idols deeply engage the audience in the virtual world, recognizing attractiveness, human-like characteristics, and commercial viability as crucial. this study recommends strategic planning to enhance these qualities, suggesting that virtual idols have a special ability to expand their impact across various media types, providing fans with varied and rich experiences while creating new sources of income. additionally, the fact that the virtual idols are not humans does not significantly affect how the audience perceives them. in the dynamic k-pop industry, there has been a noticeable shift towards embracing virtual idols, with agencies and entertainment companies integrating their virtual counterparts and experimenting with new content forms. the k-pop industry’s extension of virtual idols to various platforms exemplifies a strategic response, fostering a dynamic and innovative entertainment ecosystem, enriching fan experiences, and establishing new revenue avenues. conclusion this study provides valuable insights into the changing dynamics of south korea’s cultural industries, particularly the rise of virtual idols. these findings highlight the implications of virtual stars on content creation, media platforms, and broader cultural economies. this study is anticipated to stimulate discussions on the future trajectories of cultural production and consumption in the digital age. subsequent research is essential for comprehensively understanding the evolving dynamics of the korean cultural industry, especially in light of the burgeoning presence of various virtual celebrities. references angmo, p., & mahajan, r. (2024). virtual influencer marketing: a study of millennials and gen z consumer behaviour. qualitative market research: an international journal. https://doi.org/10.1108/qmr-01-2023-0009 hwang, j. y., & hwang, s. i. (2022). a study on the changes in the social discourse concerning the ‘metaverse’ and ‘virtual human’ in the entertainment field. journal of digital contents society, 23(12), 2435–2444. https://doi.org/10.9728/dcs.2022.23.12.2435 hwang, s. i., & koo, g. w. (2023). art marketing in the metaverse world: evidence from south korea. cogent social sciences, 9(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23311886.2023.2175429 kim, s. h., & yoo, j. y. (2021). a study on the recognition and acceptance of metaverse in the entertainment industry: focusing on the case of k-pop idol ‘aespa’ fandom. journal of the korea entertainment industry association, 15(7), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.21184/jkeia.2021.10.15.7.1 kong, r., qi, z., & zhao, s. (2021, december). difference between virtual idols and traditional entertainment from technical perspectives. in 2021 3rd international conference on economic management and cultural industry (icemci 2021) (pp. 344-349). atlantis press. https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.211209.058 lee, y. k., kim, h., & park, k. w. (2022). virtual singer using metaverse type and current research. journal of the korea entertainment industry association, 16(6), 107–121. https://doi.org/10.21184/jkeia.2022.8.16.6.107 sarfi, t., nosrati, s., & sabzali, m. (2021). the new celebrity economy in cyberspace. journal of cyberspace studies, 5(2), 203–228. https://doi.org/10.22059/jcss.2021.93903 schouten, a. p., janssen, l., & verspaget, m. (2021). celebrity vs. influencer endorsements in advertising: the role of identification, credibility, and productendorser fit. in s. yoon, y. k. choi, & c. r. taylor (eds.,) leveraged marketing communications (pp. 208-231). routledge. wang, q., & long, s. (2023). the creative behavior of virtual idol fans: a psychological perspective based on moa theory. frontiers in psychology, 14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1290790 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): berryman, r. (2024, oct 30 – nov 2). virtual influencer marketing and the halo of innovation. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. virtual influencer marketing and the halo of innovation rachel berryman curtin university introduction virtual influencers—fictitious, animated characters that are native to social media, and designed to accrue online attention—are often described as lower risk, lower cost, and lower maintenance alternatives to human influencers (keegan, 2022; yeung & cho, 2022). such claims gained momentum during covid-19 lockdowns and “metaverse” preparations, circumstances which heightened the appeal of influencers seemingly untethered to the actual world. globally, the virtual influencer industry is estimated to grow from ₩2.4 trillion (us$1.8 billion) in 2020 to ₩14 trillion (us$10.5 billion) by 2025 (baek, qtd. in chae, 2022). however, this growth depends on virtual influencers’ continued appeal to the brands who hire the characters to appear in advertising campaigns, and whose marketing budgets cover operating costs for the boutique agencies responsible for creating and managing these characters. this paper offers new insights into the operations of the virtual influencer industry by examining how virtual influencers are utilised in brand partnerships. it focuses on east asia, a region where virtual influencers have been enthusiastically embraced as commercial partners. challenging a likeness suggested by their shared label as “influencers”, i argue that the format, aesthetics, and function of most virtual influencers’ brand partnerships are qualitatively unlike those of human influencers. instead, the primary appeal of partnering with virtual influencers is the “halo of innovation” that they extend to associated brands, products, and services. i propose defining “halo of innovation” as a specific type of “halo effect” (nisbett & wilson, 1977) that heightens perceptions of technological complexity and advancement. in this paper, i illustrate how efforts to activate the “halo of innovation” shape creative decisions and codify visual tropes in the brand partnerships of virtual influencers. i conclude by suggesting the conceptual utility of the “halo of innovation” for analysing how other emergent technologies are appropriated by brands to give the impression of being at the forefront of technological innovation. methods this paper forms part of a larger ethnographic project on virtual influencers, including six months of digital observation of virtual influencers and the industry surrounding them (jan-july 2022), producer interviews, industry document analysis, press analysis, and archival research. it draws from a corpus of 150+ advertising campaigns featuring virtual influencers, focusing on 60 campaigns from east asia. coding was iteratively conducted, and utilised tools from visual analysis (schroeder, 2006; van leeuwen & jewitt, 2004). theorising was informed by constructivist grounded theory (charmaz, 2006), and engages with concepts from idol, influencer, and celebrity studies, as well as from film and advertising theory. format: from advertorials to association the archetypal advertising format used by human influencers is the “advertorial”, a conversational and persuasive style of endorsement communicated verbally or as written text (abidin, 2015). influencer advertorials foreground “experiential authority” (leaver et al., 2020, p. 117) by attesting to the author’s personal use, experience, and/or enjoyment of a product or service. by contrast, virtual influencers seldom post advertorials or personal endorsements. in fact, virtual influencers are rarely called upon to speak at all, reflecting both the technical complexity of convincingly animating speech, and the murky ethics surrounding characters’ inability to use or experience the products they are recruited to promote (see cook, 2020; lee, 2022). instead, virtual influencers assume a role aligned with the marketing tradition of “image characters” (イメージキャラクター, imēji kyarakutā) codified by japan’s idol industry in the 1970s (galbraith, 2012). today, the use of idols as image characters is ubiquitous across east asia (galbraith, 2018; sikarskie et al., 2022; turnbull, 2017). in this “copresent” (mccracken, 1989, p. 310) style of celebrity endorsement, idols “lend their star image to the brand ... without implying any direct testimonial” (karlin, 2012, p. 75). the idol’s role is both visual and symbolic: their image is expected to capture the attention of consumers, and to “transfer the associative values and identification of the celebrity performer to the brand” (karlin, 2012, p. 76). virtual influencers are likewise utilised for their appearance, but because they do not generally share the same level of media saturation as human idols, the usual process of “meaning transfer” (mccracken, 1989, p. 313) cannot rely on audience familiarity. the visual composition of the branded content thus takes on new significance, as the intended meaning of the virtual influencer’s appearance must be conveyed within the creative itself. aesthetics: identifying the virtual human my analysis revealed several recurring tropes that mark the bodies of virtual influencers as non-human, often drawing from science-fiction to create associations between virtual influencers and figures such as cyborgs, robots, and aliens. i highlight four examples of these tropes below: a) translucent touch, b) zero gravity, c) augmented vision, and d) glitches. a) virtual influencers often experience translucent touch when interacting with actual objects: at the point of contact, their “skin” appears translucent (campbell, 2010; see figure 1). this translucency sometimes reveals a grid of light, representing a wireframe or mesh, that alludes to their creation with digital animation software. b) virtual influencers are often pictured in zero gravity (see figure 2). when virtual influencers (or objects around them) appear weightless, they transcend laws of physics and the earth’s gravitational pull and are clearly identified as non-human. figure 1: a translucent index finger marks the body of chinese virtual influencer alice as non-human in her promotion of the urban decay naked cyber eyeshadow palette. source, posted 25 august 2021. screengrab by author on 24 november 2023. figure 2: chinese virtual influencer ayayi appears weightless and wears a virtual dress in an ad for an alienware laptop. source, posted 14 february 2022. screengrab by author on 28 november 2023. https://weibo.com/7675389732/kv4lecofr?pagetype=profilefeed https://weibo.com/6336997013/lfsowcuyg?pagetype=profilefeed c) virtual influencers are often depicted with augmented vision, such as by interacting with translucent interfaces reminiscent of augmented reality lenses without wearing additional hardware (see figure 3). the effect is often underscored by the direction of the text, which is reversed to be legible for the audience instead of the character. d) virtual influencers often glitch. their bodies or movements appear momentarily fragmented, scattered, or pixelated (see figure 4), suggesting an interruption of digital signals (cubitt, 2017). the technological vulnerability of the virtual influencer’s body is further accentuated by the solidity of the objects, buildings, and people around them. figure 3: japanese virtual influencer imma interacts with nutritional information on a (reversed) translucent interface in a television commercial for watson’s soda water in china. source, posted 25 june 2021. screengrab by author on 28 feb 2024. figure 4: a glitch effect is applied to an image of korean virtual influencer rozy three times in an instagram reel promoting hera cosmetics. source, posted 9 november 2021. screengrab by author on 28 feb 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqywfi5dfsq&ab_channel=aww https://www.instagram.com/reel/cwcqttubc5q/?hl=en function: halo of innovation countering the increasingly photorealistic appearances of many virtual influencers in east asia (araque & moynihan, 2021; yoon, 2021), visual tropes such as translucent touch, zero gravity, augmented vision, and glitching immediately identify the bodies of virtual influencers as non-human, and draw attention to the cutting-edge digital technologies used to create them. these tropes establish the symbolic foundation for what cultural anthropologist grant mccracken (1989) describes as “meaning transfer”, whereby “an association is fashioned between the cultural meanings of the celebrity ... and the endorsed product” (p. 313). in other words, they encourage recognition of the virtuality of virtual influencers. this in turn activates the “halo of innovation”, and extends ideas of new-ness, technological sophistication, and advancement from the virtual influencers to the products, brands, and services to which they are aligned. conclusion this paper contributes new insights to how virtual influencers are used in brand partnerships, focusing on the thriving markets of east asia. it examines the format and aesthetics of virtual influencers’ branded content, and details departures from the conventions followed by human influencers. it offers the concept of “halo of innovation” to describe the communicative value extended to brands who pay to partner with virtual influencers. the potential applications of this concept are vast, reaching far beyond the cases discussed in this paper. future research could explore how other novel or emergent technologies (such as artificial intelligence) are strategically deployed by brands in products and communications in order to reap the halo’s benefits. references abidin, c. (2015). communicative ❤ intimacies: influencers and perceived interconnectedness. ada: a journal of gender, new media & technology, 8. https://doi.org/10.7264/n3mw2ffg araque, j., & moynihan, q. (2021, august 12). chinese innovators made an eerie virtual influencer who looks so human, her skin changes with her surroundings. business insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/artificial-intelligenceinfluencer-virtual-ai-computer-design-technology-innovation-china-2021-8 campbell, n. (2010). future sex: cyborg bodies and the politics of meaning. advertising & society review, 11(1). https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/21/article/377515 charmaz, k. (2006). constructing grounded theory: a practical guide through qualitative analysis. sage publications ltd. cook, j. (2020, january 3). brands are building their own virtual influencers. are their posts legal? huffpost australia. https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/virtualinstagram-influencers-sponcon_n_5e31cbefc5b6328af2ef97fd?ri18n=true cubitt, s. (2017). temporalities of the glitch: déjà vu. in m. beugnet, a. cameron, & a. fetveit (eds.), indefinite visions: cinema and the attractions of uncertainty (pp. 299–315). edinburgh university press. galbraith, p. w. (2012). idols: the image of desire in japanese consumer capitalism. in p. w. galbraith & j. g. karlin (eds.), idols and celebrity in japanese media culture. palgrave macmillan. galbraith, p. w. (2018). ‘idols’ in japan, asia and the world. in a. elliott (ed.), routledge handbook of celebrity studies (pp. 202–214). routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315776774-13 karlin, j. g. (2012). through a looking glass darkly: television advertising, idols, and the making of fan audiences. in j. g. karlin & p. w. galbraith (eds.), idols and celebrity in japanese media culture (pp. 72–96). palgrave macmillan. keegan, m. (2022, may 9). is creating a virtual influencer worth the trouble for brands? campaign asia. https://www.campaignasia.com/article/is-creating-a-virtualinfluencer-worth-the-trouble-for-brands/477721 leaver, t., highfield, t., & abidin, c. (2020). instagram: visual social media cultures. polity press. lee, l. (2022, december 22). how virtual influencers are fast becoming essential to china’s marketing playbook. the ceo magazine. https://www.theceomagazine.com/business/innovation-technology/how-virtualinfluencers-are-fast-becoming-essential-to-chinas-marketing-playbook/ mccracken, g. (1989). who is the celebrity endorser? cultural foundations of the endorsement process. journal of consumer research, 16(3), 310–321. https://doi.org/10.1086/209217 nisbett, r. e., & wilson, t. d. (1977). the halo effect: evidence for unconscious alteration of judgments. journal of personality and social psychology, 35(4), 250–256. schroeder, j. (2006). critical visual analysis. in r. belk (ed.), handbook of qualitative research methods in marketing (pp. 303–321). edward elgar. sikarskie, a., lan, l., & liu, p. (2022). male idols and branding in chinese luxury: fashion, cosmetics, and popular culture. bloomsbury publishing. turnbull, j. (2017). just beautiful people holding a bottle: the driving forces behind south korea’s love of celebrity endorsement. celebrity studies, 8(1), 128–135. https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2016.1272860 van leeuwen, t. van, & jewitt, c. (eds.). (2004). handbook of visual analysis. sage. yeung, j., & cho, e. (2022, july 31). forever young, beautiful and scandal-free: the rise of south korea’s virtual influencers. cnn. https://www.cnn.com/style/article/south-korea-virtual-influencers-beauty-socialmedia-intl-hnk-dst/index.html yoon, h. y. (2021, september 3). lifelike virtual humans dominate korean marketing industry. korea.net. https://www.korea.net/newsfocus/culture/view?articleid=203388 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): miyake, e. (2024, oct 30 – nov 2). the production of japanese virtuality: imma, japanese multi-dimensionality and transmedial mobility. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the production of japanese virtuality: imma, japanese multi-dimensionality and transmedial mobility esperanza miyake university of strathclyde introduction: imma, made in japan inc. based on various chapters from the presenter’s forthcoming book on virtual influencers (miyake, 2024), this paper focuses on imma – a tokyo-based virtual influencer – in order to explore the production of japanese virtuality as part of japan’s existing media industry. through analysis of both imma’s social media content and various marketing strategies employed by imma’s creators (aww inc.), the discussion reveals how the combination of these two approaches produces a particular nationalised ‘brand’ of japanese virtuality. it is argued that imma nationalises, or ‘japanises’, virtuality (miyake 2023), part of wider national discourses that articulate japanese-ness – nihon-jiron (yoshino, 1992; iwabuchi, 1994; kawamura and iwabuchi, 2022) – central to japan’s ‘soft power’ that capitalises on the commodification and globalisation of japanese culture (miller, 1982; iwabuchi, 1998, 2002, 2008; kikuchi, 2004). the paper is thus divided into two main sections. part 1 will conduct a close reading of one of imma’s tiktoks in order to explore how her social media content reflects a particular japanese stylisation of virtuality that articulates and commodifies a sense of japanese culture and identity. this will be discussed through the lens of imma’s japanese multidimensionality as situated within various japanese creative industries. part 2 will turn to some of the existing japanese marketing strategies that can be identified across imma’s activities. the discussion here focuses on transmedial mobility as situated within the japanese ‘media mix’ (steinberg, 2012). ultimately, this paper suggests how within the global, neo-colonialist and capitalist world of virtual influencers, the nationalisation of virtuality is becoming an increasing geo-political tool for the promotion of culture, where virtual influencers act not just as brand but national ambassadors within the new virtual frontier. part 1: multi-dimensionality: playing with the dynamics of everyday realities this section will begin by reflecting on the existing mediated culture in japan that mixes multiple dimensions, ranging from hatsune miku's holographic live concerts to 2.5d productions. referring to ihde's (1990) ideas around multidimensionality, it is argued that there is a tradition in japan where reality involves the technological juxtaposing and merging of different dimensions, where both the real and representational are blurred but at once differentiated in ways that enable multidimensional and multimedia embodiments of japanese culture. to explore this idea further, the discussion will provide a close reading of one of imma's tiktoks from 2020. the tiktok in question consists of ‘real’ 3d buildings (although cgi), merging with illustrated 2d buildings, animated together with imma at the centre of the scene. the tiktok uses a japanese pop song that went viral at the time (香水/'perfume' by japanese singer-song-writer, eito/瑛人). in this particular case, three distinctly japanese cultural industries – j-pop, visual and technological – come together, all fashioning virtuality in a particular japanese style of reality. the analysis reveals thus reveals what sugawa-shimada (2020) argues as being part of japanese cultural conditioning, where japanese characters ‘seamlessly connect their fantasy to audiences’ reality’, and where they are ‘transfused throughout their daily life, allowing them to “experience” the embodiment of the fictional’ (p. 128). as such, imma becomes not just a virtual influencer based in japan, but a part of japanese character-based mediation of everyday reality that is ultimately commodified for global consumption. part 2: transmedial mobility: a japanese marketing strategy continuing with the idea of japanese fictional characters as part of everyday life, this section will focus on existing japanese media culture within which the virtual influencer (and by extension, the virtual idol) industry is situated. drawing from japanese media studies concepts surrounding japanese character marketing, consumer culture and its ‘media mix’ (azuma, 2009; itō, 2005; steinberg, 2012; wilde, 2019), the discussion will begin with a reflection on the various different transmedial characterisations imma has embodied: from being an animal crossing avatar, anime character to nfts. here, the idea of transmediality will be approached as an effective media strategy, where imma’s ability to move across different platforms, realities and franchises reflects what steinberg (2012) argues as the outward expansion of japanese characters from their original media and social environment into other platforms, which ultimately leads to their diffusion and material distribution (2012: 14). as such, imma is a useful transmedial character that aww inc, her creators, can use to engage with multiple audiences, platforms and technologies for capital gain. to expand on these ideas further, the discussion will turn to the seminal work by japanese manga theorist itō (2005) and his ideas around kyaractā (‘character’, キャラ クター) and kyara (‘chara’, キャラ). kyaractā, being the fully-realised character, supported by a narrative/backstory and existing within a diegetic fictional world (i.e. imma on social media, with narrative relationships with other aww virtual influencers like her brother, zinn and his girl-friend ria); whereas kyara, an icon existing independently from any narrative and thus able to attached to any media and commodity form (i.e. imma as an animal crossing character, or an nft). as such, this section examines how imma is not just part of a wider japanese transmedial commodity culture that evolves around fictional characters, but also how virtual influencers more generally – due to their virtual nature – can become transmedial agents of capitalism that are a result of, and also further encourage, the convergence of media platforms, technologies, economies and cultures. to conclude, the paper will end by arguing how these two key areas – the way in which imma’s social media content is articulated, and also, how her content moves beyond social media through her characterisation – result in the production and commodification of a japanised virtuality, as situated within the wider japanese media industry and ‘media mix’. as posited at the start, ultimately, the paper reveals how within the increasingly competitive, neo-colonialist and capitalist world of virtual influencers, the nationalisation of virtuality is part of a geo-political strategy for promoting culture in ways that ‘brand’ virtuality through the ways in which virtual influencers are operationalised within and outwith social media capitalism, acting as national ambassadors of a new virtual order. references azuma, h. (2009). otaku: japan’s database animals. (j.e. abel & s. kono, trans.). university of minnesota press. idhe, d. (1990). technology and the lifeworld: from garden to earth. indiana university press. itō, g. (2005). tezuka izu deddo: hirakareta manga hyogenron e. ntt shuppan. iwabuchi, k. (2008). lost in transnation: tokyo and the urban imaginary in the era of globalization. inter-asia cultural studies, 9(4), 543–556. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649370802386446 iwabuchi, k. (2002). soft nationalism and narcissism: japanese popular culture goes global. asian studies review, 26(4), 447–469. https://doi.org/10.1080/10357820208713357 iwabuchi, k. (1998). marketing 'japan': japanese cultural presence under a global gaze. japanese studies, (2), 165–180. https://doi.org/10.1080/10371399808727650 iwabuchi, k. (1994). complicit exoticism: japan and its other. journal of media & cultural studies, 8(2), 49–82. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304319409365669 kawamura, s., & iwabuchi, k. (2022). making neo-nationalist subject in japan: the intersection of nationalism, jingoism, and populism in the digital age. communication and the public, 7(1), 15–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/20570473211073932 kikuchi, y. (2004). japanese modernisation and mingei theory: cultural nationalism and oriental orientalism. routledge. miller, r. a. (1982). japan’s modern myth: the language and beyond. weather hill. miyake, e. (2024). virtual influencers: identity and digitality in the age of multiple realities. london & new york: routledge. —. (2023). i am a virtual girl from tokyo: virtual influencers, digital-orientalism and the (im)materiality of race and gender. journal of consumer culture, 23(1), 209–228. https://doi.org/10.1177/14695405221117195 steinberg, m. (2012) anime's media mix: franchising toys and characters in japan. university of minnesota press. sugawa-shimada, a. (2020). emerging ‘2.5-dimensional’ culture: character-oriented cultural practices and ‘community of preferences’ as a new fandom in japan and beyond. mechademia, 12(2), 124–139. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/761075 wilde, l. r. a. (2019). recontextualizing characters: media convergence and pre/meta-narrative character circulation. image 29, 3–21. https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/16391 yoshino, k. (1992). cultural nationalism in contemporary japan: a ociological enquiry. routledge. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct – 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): abidin, c. (2024, oct 30 – nov 2). the virtual human industry in greater china: a stocktake of news discourse. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the virtual human industry in greater china: a stocktake of news discourse crystal abidin influencer ethnography research lab, curtin university introduction anthropologist crystal abidin has postured that viral social media trends from east asia are regularly framed in the american popular discourse as being "the exotic other, the underdog, and the oriental 'magical' intrusion against the backdrop of a normal, hegemonic, anglo-centric internet meme culture" (2017, n.p.). sensationalist descriptors in viral news media have gone so far as to completely other and exoticize chinese digital cultures, with leads like "the bizarre, pink-soaked realms of chinese mobile app stores are strange, seemingly alien places...” (international business times, 2017) pandering to a culturally-displaced readership. with the rising global interest in virtual influencers and the plethora of conceptual and celebrity variants proliferating across east asia in the last decade, what is the state of the popular discourse? this paper provides a stocktake on the evolving contemporary discourse on virtual humans – comprising virtual influencers, virtual anchors, virtual assistants, vocaloids, and similar – in the greater china market. the 'virtual human' industry in greater china industry reviews report that in china, virtual humans are broken down into two categories (thomala, 2023a): ● character-oriented digital persons who are “crafted with storytelling elements to exhibit distinct personalities, making them ideal for providing immersive and engaging user experiences” (n.p.). examples include music artists, influencers, livestreamers; and ● function-based or task-oriented virtual humans who are “trained to execute specific tasks” (n.p.). examples include digital assistants and customer service avatars. in the appand platform-dependent chinese market, virtual humans are widely accepted among chinese consumers, with a majority surveyed having already encountered them (thomala, 2023b), and approximately 25% surveyed who do not mind "spending money" on them (thomala, 2023c). in particular, the virtual influencer sector comprises over 317,000 companies across china, and is estimated to be worth cny36 billion (thomala, 2023a). chinese virtual influencers are most prominent on weibo and bilibili (thomala, 2023d). there is emerging scholarship on the newer sector of virtual anchors and ai broadcasters in china, primarily stemming from business and marketing. they note that virtual anchors are preferred by clients for their capacity to broadcast continuously (chen, 2023) and increased customer engagement (zhang et al., 2023), but can be perceived by consumers to be lacking authenticity (chen, 2023). this paper takes a media studies approach to understand reception towards virtual humans via media discourse. from 'weird japan' to 'korean wave' to 'dystopian china' asian studies scholar wester wagenaar (2016) offers that western narratives about japan have primarily been framed as "traditional orientalism" (cf. said, 1979) and "techno-orientalism" (cf. morley & robins, 1995). however, a newer model of "wacky orientalism" has posited a dichotomous framing of japan as "bizarre" in order for interlocutors from the west to posture their practices as "normal" (wagenaar, 2016, p. 46). this is popularly surmised as ‘weird japan’, offering a narrative of japan as inherently dysfunctional, sexualized, and deviant, with a heavy emphasis on overgeneralizing practices from niches in popular culture as applicable to all of japanese society at large (galbraith, 2019). in an article assessing popular social discourses on the ‘korean wave’ in the mainstream media in the 1990s–2000s, cultural studies scholars gyu-chan jeon and tae-jin yoon (2005) offered that the three discursive types "pessimistic", "optimistic", and "realistic" were ultimately shrouded in undertones of "economic reduction" and "cultural imperialism" (p. 66). fast forward to the social media industries of the 2010s– 2020s, where korean influencers are fast gaining popularity (choi & han, 2022), korean studies scholars mikah lee and younghan cho (2021) have observed the "banal orientalism" (cf. haldrup et al., 2006) of everyday korean cultures and practices being lauded as exemplary or exceptional for a global palate. in translation studies, it has been noted that in aiming for "reception by an anglophone readership", english translations of contemporary chinese literature have tended to paint china as being dystopian and repressive (lee, 2015). professor of politics josef mahoney (2022) theorizes that in the last two centuries, depictions of china and chinese cultures in orientalist fashions have progressed from "classical orientalism" (cf. said, 1979) to "sinological orientalism" (cf. vukovich, 2012) to "digital orientalism" (cf. mayer, 2019). in particular, the era of digital orientalism began in the late 2010s and acknowledges china's rapidly accelerating technological advancements and capacity – especially through its technology-assisted response to the pandemic – that challenges and threatens us hegemony in the global market (mahoney, 2022). yet, the overarching discourse of 'dystopian china' seeks to downplay the impressive growth and central importance of chinese innovations in the tech industries, instead redirecting public interest towards yet another orientalizing sentiment. methodology despite the early origins and histories rooted in east asian tech industries, global coverage on virtual humans saw an uptick following the launch of 'virtual influencer' lil miquela on instagram in 2016. it is on this note that this paper seeks to review the recent (2010s–2020s) discourse on the virtual human industry in the greater china market. specifically, the paper reviews the media discourse of news articles through a visual and textual content analysis of headlines, leads, the story, and accompanying cover images, via inductive coding. the author is bilingually proficient. the ethnographic analyses are supported from a larger longitudinal study of the influencer industry, spanning traditional and digital participant observation at industry events, personal interviews with over 500 influencers and backend professionals, and supplemented with document analysis of agency handbooks and brand pr collateral. fieldwork spans 2008–2024 across the asia pacific region, including a concerted period of fieldwork in 2019–2024 on the influencer industry in greater china, focusing especially on shanghai and hong kong, and a special interest in inter-cultural brokers and agencies who mediate digital campaigns between chinese and foreign companies. summary of initial findings one of the initial findings identified two different genres of news outlets: 'intercultural news outlets' that were usually founded by diaspora/migrant and intended to localize chinese news for international markets, and may be based in china or abroad; and 'global news outlets' that were usually based in the us and subsequently anglo-centric in their coverage. the below focuses on virtual anchors as the newest sector in the market. (1) within the same news cycle on a single story, intercultural news outlets tended to use factual headlines, while global news outlets tended to use dystopian headlines with sensationalist overtones. e.g.: ● [intercultural] south china morning post (8 november 2018): "chinese state media has tv news anchors that can broadcast 24/7 with computer-generated faces" ● [global] time (9 november 2018): "watch china's 'ai news anchor' make an eerie debut" ● [intercultural] sixth tone (13 march 2023): "people’s daily uses ai anchor to answer ‘two sessions’ questions" ● [global] business insider (16 march 2023): "meet china's latest ai news anchor, a young woman who runs virtual q&a sessions to teach people propaganda" (2) intercultural news outlets tended to focus on the socio-cultural considerations of virtual humans, whereas global news outlets focused on socio-political concerns. e.g.: ● [intercultural] china daily (18 march 2022): story on how virtual anchors deliver news that is scripted according to the habits of the hearing-impaired (e.g. pace, grammar, vocabulary) to facilitate news delivery and inclusivity ● [intercultural] the china project (16 june 2022): story on how virtual assistants who are vr and ai-powered chatbots can provide individualized emotional support and therapeutic conversation as the mental health industry is under strain ● [global] the verge (8 november 2018): story on how virtual anchors are automated and do not question authority, and are "fake anchors" that can read censored news and propaganda ● [global] cnbc (16 november 2018): story on how virtual anchors are not actually ai technology as they do not write their own scripts and are not 'intelligent' ongoing research please note that the study is ongoing, but an updated and complete version will be ready for presentation at aoir2024. current coding is focused on the visual analyses of cover images, and on delineating the categories of media outlets in different permutations. references abidin, c. (2017, 24 october). not just another gangnam style: framing politics and internet celebrity in east asia. anthropology news, american anthropological association. https://seaa.americananthro.org/2017/10/not-just-another-gangnamstyle-framing-politics-and-internet-celebrity-in-east-asia/ chen, z. (2023). virtual anchors in the metaverse: exploring the future of live broadcasting in the digital age. highlights in business, economics and management, 19, 465–472. https://doi.org/10.54097/hbem.v19i.11983 choi, y.-w., & han, s. (2022). content analysis of social media influencer research in korea. journal of the korea convergence society, 13(4), 163–170. https://doi.org/10.15207/jkcs.2022.13.04.163 galbraith, p. w. (2019). otaku and the struggle for imagination in japan. duke university press. haldrup, m., koefoed, l., & simonsen, k. (2006). practical orientalism: bodies, everyday life and the construction of otherness. geografiska annaler, 88(2), 173–184. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3878386 international business times. (2017, 18 january). "what is meitu? chinese selfie app goes viral as famous faces get anime 'hand-drawn' makeovers." international business times. https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/what-meitu-chinese-selfie-app-goesviral-famous-faces-get-anime-hand-drawn-makeovers-1601716 joen, g.-c., & yoon, t.-j. (2005). realizing the korean wave into an asiatic cultural flow. korean journal of broadcasting and telecommunication studies, 19, 66– 87. lee, m., & cho, y. (2021). banal orientalism on youtube: “eat your kimchi” as a new cultural intermediary and its representation of south korea. asian communication research, 18(2), 69–88. https://doi.org/10.20879/acr.2021.18.2.69 lee, t. k. (2015). china as dystopia: cultural imaginings through translation. translation studies, 8(3), 251–268. https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2015.1009937 mahoney, j. g. (2022). china’s rise as an advanced technological society and the rise of digital orientalism. journal of chinese political science, 28, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-022-09817-z mayer, m. (2019). china’s authoritarian internet and digital orientalism. in d. felder (ed.), redesigning organizations: concepts for the connected society (pp. 177– 192). springer nature. morley, d., & robins, k. (eds.) (1995). spaces of identity: global media, electronic landscapes and cultural boundaries. routledge. said, edward. (1979). orientalism. vintage. thomala, l. l. (2023a, 16 june). digital humans in china statistics & facts. statista. https://www.statista.com/topics/11043/virtual-humans-in-china/ thomala, l. l. (2023b, 29 june). share of respondents who encountered digital humans in china as of march 2023. statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1310827/china-familiarity-with-virtual-humans/ thomala, l. l. (2023c, 23 june). willingness to spend money on virtual humans in china as of january 2022. statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1310950/china-willingness-to-spend-moneyon-virtual-humans/ thomala, l. l. (2023d, 27 april). distribution of virtual humans on major social media platforms in china in 2022. statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1376965/china-virtual-humans-distribution-bysocial-media-platform/ vukovich, d. (2012). china and orientalism: western knowledge production and the p.r.c. routledge. wagenaar, w. (2016). wacky japan: a new face of orientalism. asia in focus: a nordic journal on asia by early career researchers, 3, 46–54. zhang, y., wang, x., & zhao, x. (2023). supervising or assisting? the influence of virtual anchor driven by ai–human collaboration on customer engagement in live streaming e-commerce. electronic commerce research. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-023-09783-5 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): lupinacci, l.; hesmondhalgh, d.; campos valverde, r.; siles, i.; valerioalfaro, l.; arriagada, a.; burgess, j.; albury, k.; mccosker, a.; wilken, r. (2024, october). revitalising the concept of the everyday in internet research. panel presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. revitalising the concept of the everyday in internet research ludmila lupinacci university of leeds david hesmondhalgh university of leeds raquel campos valverde university of leeds ignacio siles universidad de costa rica luciana valerio-alfaro universidad de costa rica arturo arriagada universidad adolfo ibánez jean burgess queensland university of technology kath albury swinburne university of technology anthony mccosker swinburne university of technology rowan wilken rmit university introductory statement recent internet research in the social sciences and humanities has begun to push back against excessive generalisations and other problematic tendencies by invoking and mobilising the concept of “the everyday” and related ideas of ordinary and mundane engagements with data, platforms, algorithms, and the digital (kennedy 2018, livingstone 2019). this panel brings together scholars working in different parts of the world – australia, chile, costa rica, the united kingdom – and at different career stages to interrogate the value of such concepts for understanding digital culture, and to share ideas about how to theorise and empirically investigate the issues they raise. in an academic milieu in which a lot of critical attention is dedicated to the datagrabbing, algorithmically biased, and asymmetrical power of massive technocorporations, the panel explores ways in which a focus on situated ordinary textures can provide us with a more complex, nuanced, and even at times contradictory account of what happens when pervasive digital technologies are encountered in everyday life. the idea of the ‘everyday’ as an object of study is a puzzling and contested one, as the main challenge of studying the taken-for-granted is that it disappears as soon as we approach it or pay attention to it. and yet, scholars across different disciplines have attempted to theorise and empirically capture the experience of everydayness (de certeau 2011, felski 2000, highmore 2010, lefebvre 1991, stewart 2007). the everyday is said to be found in routines, cycles, rhythms, rituals; it is also in the feelings, emotions, affects, and moods that sustain and colour those practices and habits. the everyday is intimate, domestic, but also increasingly institutionalised. from cultural studies and feminist scholarship, the everyday has been conceived as both a site of struggle and powerlessness, and of resistance and imagination (de certeau 2011, felski 2000). over the past decades, internet scholars have also started to pay attention to unveiling the everydayness of being online (markham 1998), communicating with one another (baym 2015), downloading, using, and deleting apps (morris and murray 2019), sending and receiving emails (milne 2021) ,dealing with pervasive datafication (burgess et al 2022), living with algorithmic systems (siles 2023), negotiating connection and disconnection (ytre-arne 2023). the panel brings together four papers that mobilise the concept of the everyday to understand contemporary digital culture, to compare and evaluate via discussion the value of that concept in challenging problematic assumptions about practices surrounding platforms, datafication, recommendation systems, and generative ai. paper 1 takes stock of a major contribution to recent debates about the everyday in internet studies, the everyday data cultures project. it argues that recent discourse about generative ai has sidelined ordinary, everyday practices even more than did an earlier era of anxiety about datafication. it also discusses how the framework developed by the everyday data cultures project might be re-oriented to address new challenges raised by ai hype. the next two papers then address how two major cultural forms, social media and music, might be better understood through the lens of the “everyday”, and how current developments in these areas might be reshaping people’s everyday rhythms, routines and experiences. paper 2 addresses a pervasive aspect of social media and anxieties about everyday use: scrolling. drawing on empirical research on users, it challenges assumptions that scrolling is an empty and passive practice by showing how it is often experienced as positive, soothing, interesting, and even at times intense and visceral, and how the construction of scrolling as passive is itself based on certain notions of appropriate behaviour shaped by the tech industry’s reliance on data generation (whereby only activity that generates data is understood as active or meaningful). in a similar vein, paper 3 uses empirical research to challenge “everyday” critiques of platformisation, this time in the realm of music, where critics have argued that the use of music as an accompaniment to everyday, humdrum activities (waking up, getting going, working, working out, relaxing, going to sleep) is displacing supposedly more meaningful, engaged musical experience. the paper argues that “functional” uses of music co-exist alongside other more “aesthetic” musical engagement, and that the latter remain resilient in people’s everyday musical lives. finally, bringing social media and music together, paper 4 investigates users’ everyday relationships with recommendation algorithms, defying generalised critique of “black box” opacity by revealing reflexivity and awareness, and challenging research that focuses on uses of specific platforms by showing how everyday platform usage is deeply interconnected in this case illustrated by how music and social media constantly interact. juxtaposition of these topics and approaches, and dialogue between the authors and audience, may, we hope, forefront struggles, disputes, and ambivalences concerning what people actually do with the digital systems that they engage with. as feminist scholars established many years ago, the everyday is trivial and yet profoundly politically charged; ordinary experience is always already gendered, classed, racialised, localised. how can we theorise power dynamics, hierarchies, asymmetries, and emerging modes of governmentality while making sense of the textures and poetics of everyday life, if the everyday is precisely in the unremarkable, the unnoticed, in that which escapes our grasp? references baym, n. (2015). personal connections in the digital age. 2nd edition. polity press. burgess, j., albury, k., mccosker, a., wilken, r. (2022). everyday data cultures. polity press. decerteau, m. (2011). the practice of everyday life. 3rd edition. university of california press. felski, r. (2000). doing time: feminist theory and postmodern culture. nyu press. highmore, b. (2010). ordinary lives: studies in the everyday. routledge. kennedy, h. (2018). living with data: aligning data studies and data activism through a focus on everyday experiences of datafication. krisis : journal for contemporary philosophy. lefebvre, h. (1991). critique of everyday life. verso books. livingstone, s. (2019). audiences in an age of datafication: critical questions for media research. television and new media 20,2. markham, a. (1998). life online: researching real experience in virtual space. altamira press. milne, e. (2021). email and the everyday. mit press. morris, j.w., murray, s. (2019). appified: culture in the age of apps. university of michigan press. siles, i. (2023). living with algorithms. agency and user culture in costa rica. the mit press. stewart, k. (2007). ordinary affects. duke university press. ytre-arne, b. (2023). media use in everyday life. emerald publishing. everyday genai? applying the everyday data cultures framework to the new paradigm jean burgess queensland university of technology kath albury swinburne university of technology anthony mccosker swinburne university of technology rowan wilken rmit university introduction first presented at aoir in 2021, and published a year later, everyday data cultures (burgess et al, 2022) was framed as a response to prevalent public and scholarly concern about datafication, algorithms and surveillance represented by widely discussed books and films like the age of surveillance capitalism (zuboff, 2019) and the social dilemma as well as trends in the field of critical data studies (e.g. couldry & mejias, 2019). by re-centering the analysis of datafication in the practice and politics of everyday life, the book aimed to intervene in an intense period of hype and anxiety around data that seemed to leave ordinary people and their lives out of the picture (livingstone, 2019). firmly grounded in cultural studies approaches to the everyday (hoggart, 1957; williams, 1989; highmore, 2010), everyday data cultures aimed to provide conceptual tools for grappling with and charting a research agenda for taking everyday experiences, understandings and practices of generative ai seriously a project that is ultimately hopeful, as it situates creativity, agency, and moral responsibility with ordinary citizens and audiences, and not only in global technology companies. since then, we have seen a distinct new wave of ai development and debate prompted especially by the release and uptake of transformerand diffusion-based machine learning technologies such as chatgpt at the end of 2022 and early 2023 arguably, ushering in a new paradigm in the development and debates around ai as they intersect with the internet and digital media environments; we frame this set of developments around the organising concept of generative ai (genai). in this new paradigm, while ‘data’ may no longer be the term du jour, the pathologies to which everyday data cultures (edc) was a response have, sadly, only become more obvious. the current genai moment seems to supercharge the tendencies in public debate to ‘big critique’ and industry hype to we aimed to counter-balance (burgess et al, 2022: 11-19). the experiences, practices and capabilities attached to ordinary encounters with generative ai are evolving rapidly but are poorly understood; industry voices are overwhelmingly privileged; and state-level regulation is racing ahead without ordinary people and their diverse communities at the table. this paper explores whether, how, and with what modifications the conceptual framework everyday data cultures offers could be useful as internet studies responds to the emergence, take-up and integration of generative ai in everyday life. we build directly on the heuristics proposed by the edc framework: data intimacies, literacies, and publics; thereby following data-driven systems into their algorithmic, automated and generative applications in everyday contexts, and so offering an alternative to the industry-centric framing of both ai hype and critique. the everyday intimacies, literacies and publics of genai intimacies in the edc framework, social intimacy incorporates closeness, affinity and care, as well as both mundane and deep knowledge of the other (berlant, 1998); as datafication extended into formerly private or personal spaces, the book explored how the politics of data and intimacy were co-evolving, looking at data profiling and algorithmic personalisation in the contexts of recommender systems, dating apps and sex tech, as well as the duality of safety and security through practices of data-driven everyday surveillance. companions and automated agents are common applications of genai that appear likely to remediate intimacy in similar ways. they promise new levels of personalisation as they become intimately involved in our lives. while there have been spectacular failures (e.g. air canada), service bots seek to ‘know us’ to tailor responses and act on our behalf – as in planning holidays or designing a meal based on current fridge and pantry contents. home assistants and smart speakers powered by genai bring intimate personalisation into domestic spaces to predict and integrate with everyday rituals. all of this requires both intimate knowledge and deep trust in data-driven generative systems. there have already been controversies about human-machine intimacy: when replika discontinued its ‘erotic roleplay’ function, ai companions abruptly began to rebuff requests for sexual chat from long-term human ‘partners’ (cole 2023). there have been other stories of everyday intimacies with companions who offered users’ mental health support, or anonymous opportunities for sexual exploration and gender affirmation. we are led now into new sites of inquiry, and a cultural approach to everyday intimacy can help us understand the nature of human relationships with agents, bots and assistants. literacies we understand data (and ai) literacies to be multimodal, historically constituted, systemic, and social. importantly, they can emerge from vernacular contexts as well as expert ones, and they co-evolve with the information and communication environment. an edc framework usefully sheds light on the ever-adaptive nature of everyday digital and ai literacies, in which the creative possibilities of genai are quick to be explored and exploited. we see this, for instance, in experimental forms of contemporary ‘vernacular creativity’ (burgess, 2006), such as boston-based music producer mimofrl’s instagram posts, which combine ai-generated imagery of fantasy forest scenes overlayed with contemporary slang in text-boxes to create humorous (if often esoteric) slide show style short narratives as accompaniment to his own beats. while the initially rapid take-up of chatgpt provoked fears for white-collar and creative industries jobs through the automation of their work (as the hollywood writers’ strike showed), in many professional contexts it looks like a collaborative or ‘co-pilot’ model is emerging. meanwhile, workers, school students, researchers and internet users are experimenting with genai affordances and developing genai literacies. a recent ofcom survey shows young people experimenting heavily, but also reveals clear demographic and cultural gaps in access, knowledge and use (ofcom, 2023). with these issues of agency and equality in mind, it might be time to shift the language around (individual, human) literacies to (collective, human-machine) capabilities, which frames the issue around “a more holistic (rather than individual) set of infrastructures, practices, competencies and goals” (mccosker et al 2022). publics finally, the edc framework considered the way data affects collective sense-making practices and how we come to know ourselves as, and to act as, citizens and publics. the synthetic content of genai has perhaps irrevocably altered our digital media environment, already impacting human rights and social justice witnessing (gregory, 2022). this raises questions about how publics might organise in their own interests on issues like content moderation, copyright or platform governance, and whether genai platforms, with their ‘guardrails’ and content moderation rules, might enable or diminish civic agency, activism and protest. building on the idea of literacies (or capabilities) as being both collective and collaborative between humans, and between humans and machines we can also see how hybrid human-machine publics emerge in and through genai in the context of digital media platforms. these may prove useful conceptual tools for understanding phenomena like the community debate and collective learning around controversies surrounding genai authenticity or fakery (mccosker, 2022), as well as the ever-more opaque automation of content moderation decisions that comes with the complexity of large language and multimodal foundation models. references berlant, l. (1998). intimacy: a special issue. critical inquiry 24(winter): 281-288. burgess, j. (2006). hearing ordinary voices: cultural studies, vernacular creativity and digital storytelling. continuum, 20(2), 201-214. burgess, j., albury, k., mccosker, a., wilken, r. (2022). everyday data cultures. polity press. cole, s. (2023). it’s hurting like hell: ai companion users are in crisis, reporting sudden rejection. vice. 16 february https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3py9j/ai-companionreplika-erotic-roleplay-updates? couldry, n. & mejias, u. (2019). the costs of connection: how data is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism. stanford university press. gregory, s. (2022). deepfakes, misinformation and disinformation and authenticity infrastructure responses: impacts on frontline witnessing, distant witnessing, and civic journalism. journalism, 23(3), 708-729. highmore, b. (2010). ordinary lives: studies in the everyday. london: routledge. hoggart, r. (1957). the uses of literacy. essential books. livingstone, s. (2019). audiences in an age of datafication: critical questions for media research. television & new media 20(2): 170–183. mccosker, a., yao, x., albury, k., maddox, a., farmer, j., & stoyanovich, j. (2022). developing data capability with non-profit organisations using participatory methods. big data & society 9(1): https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517221099882 mccosker, a. (2022). making sense of deepfakes: socializing ai and building data literacy on github and youtube. new media & society: https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221093 ofcom (2023). online nation: 2023 report. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/research-anddata/online-research/online-nation williams, r. (1989). resources of hope: culture, democracy, socialism. verso. zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. publicaffairs. https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3py9j/ai-companion-replika-erotic-roleplay-updates https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3py9j/ai-companion-replika-erotic-roleplay-updates https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517221099882 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221093943 https://www.ofcom.org.uk/research-and-data/online-research/online-nation https://www.ofcom.org.uk/research-and-data/online-research/online-nation ‘scrolling nonsense’: making sense of mobile social media in everyday life ludmila lupinacci university of leeds introduction there seems to be in popular discourse a consensus that people spend too much time on mobile social media. a widespread narrative frames our relationship to these technologies as a simple, but undisputable, matter of addiction – we are glued to our screens, frantically navigating algorithmically-mediated infinite streams of content. instead of subscribing to prevalent discourses of technological dependency, i argue for an understanding of the interdependency of socio-technical relations (paasonen 2021) through the lens of habit. i start from the premise that everyday life requires the incorporation of certain rhythms and habits, and that there is theoretical and analytical value in exploring the ambivalences between movement and inertia, intensity and dullness, comfort and discomfort, excitement and boredom. combining a cultural studies framework with a critical-phenomenological sensibility, i contribute to the understanding of ‘scrolling’ as a complex, contradictory, and multifaceted habit (schellewald 2024) that requires particular embodied, material, and symbolic engagements (docherty 2021). habits, routines, and power by focusing on movement, repetition, and embodiment rather than on neurobehavioural imbalances, habituation paves the way for a more generative analysis of what exactly mobile social media offer to those who willingly (if not always gladly) engage with them in ordinary situations – while also paying attention to the structural role exerted by technologies in these processes (aagard 2020; pedwell 2021). the lens of habit also centres mobile social media’s taken-for-granted status. if these technologies’ power can be attributed to their very banality (chun 2017), then it becomes imperative to examine more closely how their convenience and naturality are achieved in our ordinary routines. in other words, in using the lens of habituation to examine people’s everyday attachment to mobile social media, i aim to foreground both the frequent taken-forgrantedness of these technologies and the more distributed, normalised, naturalised power structure in which they are embedded (markham & rodgers 2017; pedwell 2021). a critical phenomenology of mobile social media, therefore, should pay attention to the embodied and material conditions of their contested use in everyday life, and the (complex, perhaps ambivalent) experiences that emerge in these contexts (couldry and kallinikos 2017). crucially, then, privileging the lens of habit should not mean the dismissal of a critical stance – focusing on habituation should not stop us from acknowledging the fact that these habits are often intentionally prompted, oriented, and orchestrated (highmore 2011) by the technologies and platforms themselves, their interfaces, affordances, and their institutional rhetoric. research design in order to make sense of mobile social media in everyday life, the empirical analysis draws on two separate sets of qualitative material. the first consists of promotional campaigns from mainstream digital platforms – tiktok, spotify, bereal – using the rhetoric of temporary disconnection (jorge 2021, docherty 2021) and mindfulness in order to encourage their users to ‘give their thumb a break’. the second set consists of diary-interview qualitative data collected with 20 london-based users of a range of mobile social media. through this method, the aim was to turn ordinary users into ‘pseudo-phenomenologists’, describing in depth their everyday embodied and affective engagements with digital technologies. through the phenomenologically-informed thematic analysis of those materials, i identify the rhythms and rituals that characterise the practice of scrolling in everyday life, and try to make sense of how scrolling came to be conceived as a social problem. findings & discussion initially, mobile social media use seems characterised by both the selected campaigns and by my participants as aimless, purposeless, driven by comfort and repetition, in which they feel they are mostly just “scrolling nonsense”– as one of them put it. and yet, the analysis highlights the more fluid, dynamic, and contingent character of bodytechnology relations with and of mobile social media in the context of everyday life. following common platform rhetoric, the participants conceive of certain experiences as ‘passive’ and marked by a state of mindlessness (lupinacci 2021, baym et al 2020). scrolling through an endless stream of content, for instance, although requiring active bodily movement and ‘work’ from the user, is generally assumed to be a ‘passive’, ‘absent-minded’ task. such conceptions seem to reflect the normative ‘ideal usership’ constructed by the platforms through their discursive-material configurations (docherty 2020) – the ideal user is the one who is also clicking, liking, commenting, sharing. in the case of mobile social media, this also seems to reproduce a separation between mind (assumed to be lethargically inert, empty, void) and body (which is actively, compulsively engaged, scrolling frantically). in practice though, participants say they curate their feeds through selective exposure and ‘clicking consciously’ (bucher 2018, schellewald 2021, 2024) (which would classify as ‘active engagement’) in order to make it more bearable to spend extended periods of time scrolling (‘passive use’) – which makes both practices intertwined and their division extremely porous. given the prominence of narratives framing the overuse of digital technologies as ‘addiction’, it is not necessarily surprising that the interviewees make frequent use of terms such as ‘obsession’ and ‘dependency’ to characterise their practices. also, the participants’ assumed solution to overcome the issue always seems to be based on self-regulation (as encouraged by the analysed platform campaigns). in this regard, i found that everyday mobile social media use is often marked by ‘scrolling guilt’, or a feeling of shame, regret, or remorse following extended exposure. the frustration and the sensation of wasted time manifested by the participants seem to be associated with the lack of relevant, interesting, or ‘attention-worthy’ content – which is accentuated by certain moods, such as boredom. and yet, somewhat counterintuitively, the use of mobile social media is eventually framed as a practice of self-care, in which scrolling is described as ‘soothing’ and is associated with ‘me time’ – resonating with ngai’s (2012) notion of disinterested pleasure. in these cases, mobile social media use is time well-spent. when you have nothing else to do, there is always the expectation that, through scrolling, you will eventually find something funny or interesting to fill this void – even if only momentarily. under this conception, mobile social media are understood as tools for directing or deflecting attention somewhere else. yet, distraction is not always positive, productive, and relaxing. indeed, the use of mobile social media for distraction purposes seems to be very easily converted into a time-consuming ‘promiscuous absorption’ (highmore 2011) – which highlights the fluid and contradictory modalities of attention and distraction that emerge in these now pervasive socio-technical engagements. concluding remarks my analysis demonstrates that what makes mobile social media so appealing is their ease of use and their convenient incorporation into our routines and ordinary practices – often, their incorporation to fill the void and emptiness that emerge between routines and practices. mobile social media use is often described as unfocused and distracted, being characterised by a generally fleeting, peripheral, almost numb attentiveness. yet, my analysis challenges the rigidity of these conceptions by foregrounding people’s eventually positive, soothing, interested usage, as well as instances of intense, visceral (even if not always deliberate) engagement with these platforms and devices. that is, although mobile social media usage is often characterised by a state of attention suspension, through a critical-phenomenological disposition i have identified that there are different affective modulations and modes of attention being played out. finally, i argue that the description of scrolling as a ‘passive’ practice is reductive, for it does not correspond to how technologies are put to use in everyday life. i argue that this distinction is platform-centric insofar as ‘active experience’ is reduced to those practices that more clearly generate quantifiable data footprints. this, to me, suggests that ‘scrolling guilt’ is not only a result of techno-embodied configurations, but also informed by imaginaries and socio-cultural constructs of ideal usership, productivity, self-control, and mindfulness (docherty 2020, 2021). the lens of habit, i argue, offers us a less ‘platform-centric’ vocabulary for examining the different modalities of attention afforded by the social media manifold, whilst allowing the examination of how power relations become incorporated into everyday life. references aagaard, j. (2020). beyond the rhetoric of tech addiction: why we should be discussing tech habits instead (and how). phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, v.20. baym, n. k., wagman, k. b., persaud, c. j. (2020). mindfully scrolling: rethinking facebook after time deactivated. social media + society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120919105 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120919105 bucher, t. (2018) if…then. algorithmic power and politics. new york: oxford university press. chun, w.h.k. (2017) updating to remain the same. habitual new media. the mit press. couldry, n., kallinikos, j. (2017) ontology. in: burgess j, marwick a and poell t (eds.), the sage handbook of social media (pp. 149–159). london: sage. docherty, n. (2020). facebook’s ideal user: healthy habits, social capital, and the politics of well-being online. social media + society, 6(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120915606 docherty, n. (2021). digital self-control and the neoliberalization of social media wellbeing. international journal of communication, 15, 3827-3846. highmore, b. (2011). ordinary lives: studies in the everyday. routledge. jorge, a. (2019) social media, interrupted: users recounting temporary disconnection on instagram. social media + society, october-december 2019, 1-9. lupinacci, l. (2021). ‘absentmindedly scrolling through nothing’: liveness and compulsory continuous connectedness in social media. media, culture & society, 43(2), 273-290. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720939454 markham, t. and rodgers, s. (2017). conditions of mediation: phenomenological perspectives on media. peter lang. ngai, s. (2012). our aesthetic categories. zany, cute, interesting. harvard university press. paasonen, s. (2021). dependent, distracted, bored. affective formations in networked media the mit press. pedwell, c. (2021). revolutionary routines: the habits of social transformation. mcgill queen’s university press. schellewald, a. (2021). communicative forms on tiktok: perspectives from digital ethnography. international journal of communication, v.15. schellewald, a. (2024). tiktok and everyday life: making sense of the meanings and politics of scrolling. doctoral thesis, goldsmiths, university of london. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120915606 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120915606 https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720939454 digital platforms in everyday life: the case of music streaming david hesmondhalgh university of leeds raquel campos valverde university of leeds context and significance music provides a distinctive way of approaching “everyday data cultures” and other efforts to understand the role of the internet in everyday, ordinary lived experience. this is because music has for a long time combined an ability to provide exceptional and emotionally-charged experiences with a capacity for humdrum, habitual, routinised engagement. the latter tendency has been the basis of a substantial and highly-cited body of research which, perhaps because it emerged before the digital era took shape, has been almost completely ignored by researchers working in internet studies, platform studies and related fields. from around 2010 onwards, music became the first major cultural form to be thoroughly “platformised”, in that the circulation and consumption of music became increasingly carried out via online streaming platforms such as spotify, apple music, amazon music and so on. in addition, video and social media platforms such as youtube, tiktok and instagram feature music prominently. while radio, television, film and other media remain important as ways of discovering and encountering music, music streaming platforms are now as essential to the recording industry and related industries (such as music publishing) as the purchase of musical artefacts in retail outlets once was. basis in existing research and public debate music streaming platforms have, however, been controversial. some of the controversies concern the implications for musicians and other cultural workers associated with music, for example the degree to which streaming makes it harder (or easier) for musicians to earn a living (hesmondhalgh et al 2021). others are more concerned with questions of everyday experience germane to the panel proposal of which this abstract forms part. one widely expressed and inter-related set of controversies centre on claims that streaming has diminished musical experience by making it more distracted, background, and “functional”; the latter term is a way of summarising claims that in the streaming economy, music is increasingly used to achieve particular states (such as getting to sleep) or to carry out certain tasks or actions (such as physical exercise). the problem for critics is that this prevents music being valued as an (aesthetic) end in itself. moreover, this aspect of music has been seen as reproducing and reinforcing problematic features of contemporary societies. anderson (2015: 815) for example wrote that “the changing forms and functions of music delivery and the ubiquity of listening adapt and revise muzak’s classic function as an affective stimulant for the industrial workplace. […] in this context, mood management is the quintessence of affective labor in the ever-expanding service economy”. and in a widely discussed critical monograph about spotify, maria erikkson et al. (2018) argued that spotify’s promotion of music as a functional entity privileges “a subject determined to strive toward well-being”, apparent in greetings and playlist descriptions which position the user “as a boss, a potential conqueror, or someone on top of the world” in ways that are “clearly connected to the notion of music as contributing to enhanced performance”. for other commentators, this kind of functionalism also produces a deficient mode of specifically musical subjectivity, characterised by distraction, by a lack of attention (hesmondhalgh 2021). pedersen (2020) for example sees spotify’s reliance on the datafication of listening “leads to a situation where the bias shifts towards quantitative criteria, thereby potentially creating a bias towards inattentive (background) listening”. the strong implication is that there is a loss here, drawing on longstanding discourses which place a high premium on close listening (discussed in sterne’s historical account of the development of “audile techniques”). approach and central questions but in expressing anxiety about contemporary threats supposedly offered by the pervasive adoption of music streaming platforms to close and emotionally-engaged listening, and more generally in developing critiques of the effects of digital technologies, there is a danger of simplifying other people’s experiences, distorting their place in the complex and messy lives that people lead. in the spirit of the recent turn in internet research towards engaging with everyday life, this paper offers empirical evidence regarding the way in which people engage with music in their everyday lives in the streaming era, building on the rich tradition of research in sociology and psychology of music mentioned earlier, and on scholarship on music streaming and social media platforms (hagen 2015, kjus 2016, nowak 2016, prior 2018, campos valverde 2022). both strands of scholarship avoid the kind of simplifications that are sometimes to be found in much public debate and some critical internet research. we bring them together to consider whether music streaming is making the everyday experience of music more “functional” and, relatedly, more background, more distracted, less attentive. we draw on our own empirical research to question assumptions that this is happening, showing that distracted, background and functional experiences usually co-exist with other experiences where music is more foregrounded, and is listened to aesthetically. based on daily diaries kept over a period of three weeks by 22 participants, and initial and follow-up interviews, we investigate the varying ways in which they are intertwined in people’s everyday lives. in so doing, we are echoing the approach of music psychologist ruth herbert, who shows that musical experiences can involve both close attention and ‘multiply directed attention’ (herbert, 2011: 187). the main empirical part of our paper consists of a series of diary vignettes organised according to a set of functions/uses to which diarists put music. the uses or functions we highlight are energising and relaxing, coping and filling the silence. but in contrast to those critics of streaming who assume that such functional and distracted uses are typical or dominant, we show that the various users who at times engage in such functional engagements also report more aesthetically-oriented, emotionally-charged and attentive experiences – though to somewhat different degrees. this allows us to examine ways in which users mix casual and distracted or “background” musical experience, with more intensely engaged, “foreground” ones, in many cases moving back and forth between different positions on a conceptual continuum between these poles. examining how these various experiences fit into the routines and rhythms of people’s lives over an extended period, we discuss ways in which such variation might depend on the demands of people’s lives (paid or unpaid work, family and caring obligations, and so on) as well as the varying ways in which people interpret the capacity of music to enhance their lives, discussing how some users lean more towards one end of each continuum than others. in our final section, we discuss the implications of our findings and its relations to the strands of existing research and theory outlined above, including reflections on how the sociology and psychology of music in everyday life invite a more nuanced and indeed generous approach to such functional uses of music. importantly, however, we distinguish our position from previous research strands, whether older work on media audiences and music in everyday life, or more recent work on everyday digital and data cultures, arguing that many researchers in these research traditions risk downplaying the way in which music, for all the varied uses to which it is put, is bound up with problematic aspects of modern societies, in particular limitations on the possibilities of flourishing opened up by music. references anderson, p. 2015. neo-muzak and the business of mood. critical inquiry. 41(4), pp.811–840. campos valverde, r. 2022. online musicking for humanity: the role of imagined listening and the moral economies of music sharing on social media. popular music. 41(2), pp. 194-215. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143022000034 eriksson, m., fleischer, r., johansson, a., snickars, p. and vonderau, p. 2019. spotify teardown: inside the black box of streaming music. cambridge, ma: mit press. hagen, a. 2015. using music streaming services: practices, experiences and the lifeworld of musicking.[online] phd dissertation, university of oslo. herbert, r. 2011. everyday music listening: absorption, dissociation and trancing. farnham, surrey ; burlington, vt: ashgate. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143022000034 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143022000034 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143022000034 hesmondhalgh d. 2021. is music streaming bad for musicians? problems of evidence and argument. new media & society, 23(12), pp. 35933615. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820953541 hesmondhalgh, d., osborne, r., sun, h., barr, k. 2021. music creators’ earnings in the digital era. in: music creators’ earnings in the digital era. the intellectual property office. https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/178595 kjus, y. 2016. musical exploration via streaming services: the norwegian experience. popular communication. 14(3), pp.127–136. nowak, r. 2016. consuming music in the digital age: technologies, roles and everyday life. new york: palgrave macmillan. pedersen, r.r. 2020. datafication and the push for ubiquitous listening in music streaming. mediekultur: journal of media and communication research. 36(69), pp.071– 089. prior, n. 2018. popular music, digital technology and society 1st edition. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820953541 https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/178595 the soundtrack of everyday life: music discovery, exploration, and integration through social media ignacio siles universidad de costa rica luciana valerio-alfaro universidad de costa rica arturo arriagada universidad adolfo ibánez introduction this paper examines music consumption on social media through the lens of everyday practices. social media platforms have emerged as key sites for fans to listen to music. in short, music is now a constitutive component of stories, shorts, reels, videos, pins, photos, and ordinary posts. tiktok’s collaboration with billboard to establish a “top 50” chart in september 2023 evidenced not only the app’s pivotal role in music consumption but also the increasing significance of music in the design of social media. despite the growing importance of social media in shaping music consumption, researchers have focused primarily on the visual aspects of content circulation on these platforms. concurring with tintiangko and colleagues (2023), “there has been a lack of attention toward the impact of [social media] [...] [in] the music industry; let alone in the context of the global south” (p. 2). this paper starts to fill this void of knowledge by adopting an ecological perspective that invites examining the use of music streaming platforms not as independent from but rather deeply connected with social media and other apps and devices (espinoza-rojas, siles, & castelain, 2023). drawing on interviews with 25 costa ricans, we discuss three specific ways of relating to music across various platforms: discovering resonant songs on social media, exploring them through connections across different platforms, and incorporating them into the temporal and spatial flows of everyday life. beyond music, our findings unveil how discovery, exploration, and integration practices on platforms shape broader modes of everyday engagement. these practices unveil how people experience and manage their interactions with platforms by cultivating reflexive relationships with algorithms, aligning the affordances of these platforms with established cultural consumption trajectories, and weaving intricate connections among multiple apps and devices. research design to further understand how music discovery, exploration, and incorporation unfold in the context of multi-platform ecologies, we investigated the practices of 25 individuals based in costa rica. this country provides an ideal backdrop for exploring these issues. 90% of the population regularly use social media in the country, which also leads the latin american region in the usage of popular platforms like facebook (85%) and whatsapp (98%), with substantial engagement on instagram (48%) and tiktok (45%) as well (brenes peralta, siles, & tristán jiménez, 2024). youtube (80%) and spotify (25%) are the most favored platforms to listen to music in the country. we launched a call for participation that circulated across the facebook and instagram profiles of the university where our research was conducted. we selected 25 individuals for interviews by privileging sociodemographic diversity as the main sampling criterion. in our interviews, conducted between july and september 2023, we focused on two primary issues: everyday music consumption practices and experiences with music discovery on social media. on average, the interviews lasted 45 minutes. during the interviews, participants were asked to recount their most recent experiences of discovering songs on social media. in the days following the interviews, participants also provided us with reports through messaging apps, which included screenshots of their music discoveries, along with audio notes and written descriptions of these experiences. we employed an abductive approach to examine the data in the context of existing research on music consumption (tavory & timmermans, 2014). the discovery, exploration, and incorporation of music across platforms two significant features were common across the everyday music consumption practices of our interviewees. first, these practices were highly diverse, with each individual developing relatively unique sequences of actions for their music listening. second, these practices were multifarious in that they involved the interconnected use of numerous platforms to fulfill specific purposes in these sequences. drawing on our abductive data analysis, we developed three main categories to account for this diversity and multifariousness of practices: music discovery, exploration, and incorporation. discovery is “an affective response to music that associates it with a set of mediations” (nowak, 2016, p. 137). in short, “a discovery has to be memorable” (nowak, 2016, p. 142). two platform affordances stood out to our interlocutors because of the way they enabled music discoveries: virality and repetition. our interlocutors valued the possibility to easily identify what songs and sounds were trending on such platforms as tiktok and instagram. they interpreted virality as a popularity rating, which signaled an opportunity for them to be a part of trends in cultural consumption. accordingly, many paid particular attention to the features implemented by platforms to indicate that songs were trending. to decide whether they wanted to keep listening to newly discovered songs, participants engaged in exploration activities. exploration implies a change in the attention given to music: it is no longer used to accompany other everyday activities (including scrolling social media content) but rather the primary object of people’s consideration. through exploration, interviewees found out what kind of emotions discovered songs elicited. some discovered songs then become part of people’s everyday life, a process we call incorporation. incorporation has three related dimensions: utilitarian (songs are “used” subsequently for different purposes), proprietary (songs are “owned” through downloads and purchases), and identitarian (songs become an expression of people’s personality). concluding remarks these music consumption practices illustrate three broader forms of platform engagement in everyday life. first, the experience of platforms is characterized by reflexive relationships with music recommendation algorithms. in contrast to previous studies about users who didn’t reflect on how the algorithms of music streaming services work (lüders, 2021), a focus on everyday life reveals how individuals actively relate to algorithms as an integral aspect of their practices. living within platform ecologies demanded constant awareness of algorithmic actions and active participation in conveying responses to algorithms (siles, 2023; siles et al., 2022). these reflexive relationships serve broader cultural goals, with interviewees leveraging them to discover and incorporate music into their everyday lives in specific ways. second, a focus on everyday life practices helps nuance the role of affordances in the relationship between our interlocutors and platforms. we demonstrate how users align platform affordances with cultural consumption trajectories, subordinating them to specific practices, histories, and trajectories. costa’s (2018) notion of affordances-inpractice is instrumental in operationalizing this approach, emphasizing that platform affordances only make sense in everyday contexts and situations. finally, our study highlights the temporal and spatial flows that underpin the everyday experience of platforms. unlike scholarly literature that often segregates platform relationships based on affordances or technological logics, our research reveals the interconnected nature of users’ practices across platforms and devices in everyday life. this ecological perspective challenges the imposition of analytical categories and invites a deeper interrogation of what these categories mean in the context of people’s practices. whereas it might make sense to independently study how people relate to specific platforms in certain cases, the study of everyday life requires an ecological perspective that privileges the interconnections across them for comprehending cultural practices in a manner that coherently acknowledges their significance to people. references brenes peralta, c., siles, i. & tristán jiménez, l. (2024). nuestras apps de cada día 2024: 2do informe sobre el uso de plataformas digitales en costa rica. san josé, costa rica: cicom. costa, e. (2018). affordances-in-practice: an ethnographic critique of social media logic and context collapse. new media & society, 20(10), 3641–3656. espinoza-rojas, j., siles, i., & castelain, t. (2023). how using various platforms shapes awareness of algorithms. behaviour & information technology, 42(9), 1422– 1433. lüders, m. (2021a). pushing music: people’s continued will to archive versus spotify’s will to make them explore. european journal of cultural studies, 24(4), 952–969. nowak, r. (2016b). when is a discovery? the affective dimensions of discovery in music consumption. popular communication, 14(3), 137–145. siles, i. (2023). living with algorithms: agency and user culture in costa rica. mit press. siles, i., valerio-alfaro, l., & meléndez-moran, a. (2022). learning to like tiktok… and not: algorithm awareness as process. new media & society, 0(0), 1–17. tavory, i., & timmermans, s. (2014). abductive analysis: theorizing qualitative research. chicago: university of chicago press. tintiangko, j., fung, a. y., & leo-liu, j. (2023). compelled tiktok creators? the ambivalent affordances of the short video app for filipino musicians. media, culture & society, 0(0), 1–16. microsoft word aoir2022child rights by design-final.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): pothong, k & livingstone, s. (2022, november). child rights by design: unboxing children from the child-only digital corner. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. child rights by design: unboxing children from the child-only digital corner author #1 dr kruakae pothong author #1 london school of economics and political science author #2 professor sonia livingstone author #2 london school of economics and political science is our digital world built for children? digital technologies now mediate most, if not all, aspects of children’s lives from learning to lunching, playing, staying connected and building relationships with friends and family. however, the same cannot be said about children’s best interests in the design and operation of today’s digital environment. on the contrary, research shows that today’s digital environment is designed to exploit children’s attention (5rights foundation, 2021; dinsmore & pugh, 2021; zendle et al., 2020), entice their interests for sales conversion (radesky et al., 2020a; radesky et al., 2020b), and commercialise detailed information about their lives, behaviours and social networks (barassi, 2020; williamson, 2019; zuboff, 2019). how many digital products and services that children use recognise children’s rights? to answer this question, we examined 52 products and services children use, including consoles, mobile games, wearables, smart toys, edtech and digital health services, for their features and stated compliance with existing standards and regulations. we then interviewed 11 experts, ranging from designers, technologists, product managers, information communication technology lawyers and human rights experts, and ran four workshops with additional 16 designers and developers from large to start-up companies to work out how the digital environment can be made respectful of child rights by design. marginalised children in the digital environment our review of the sampled products and services children use revealed a diverse mix of products and services and patchy compliance with even more fragmented standards and regulations. we found claims of compliance with 25 different standards and regulations. however, the 52 products examined each stated compliance with an average of just 5.5 standards and regulations. that said, these products and services may be compliant even though the company has not claimed compliance publicly. more importantly, our product compliance review and interviews show that compliance remained restricted to standards and regulations that providers see as having “teeth” – either with expensive penalties or market entry restrictions. of these 25 standards and regulations, compliance was mostly claimed with modern slavery legislation (35 out of 52 products stated that compliance), followed by privacy and data protection. 27 out of 52 products and services claimed compliance with data protection (e.g. uk gdpr), 23 referred to privacy frameworks (e.g. coppa), and 29 stated compliance with cross-border data transfer agreements. only seven products, offered mainly by global conglomerates, claimed compliance with security standards, such as iso 27001, iso 27017 and pci dss, despite data processing being central to many of these 52 products and services. compliance with non-discrimination requirements is mainly claimed by providers of video-on-demand services and refers primarily to the provision of accessibility features, such as audio description, subtitling or captioning. however, non-discrimination through a child-rights lens extends beyond accessibilities to address the diversity of children’s personal and familial circumstances affecting children’s digital engagement. similarly, just seven out of 52 products and services explicitly claimed compliance with product safety standards and consumer protection. in addition, none stated compliance with the united nations convention on the rights of the child 1989, as explained in the committee on the rights of the child’s general comment 25 on the digital environment (2021). reimagining a child-right respecting digital world the fragmented and patchy compliance landscape highlights difficulties that digital providers face in designing digital products and services used by children. for many of these products and services, for example, a smart speaker, a smartphone or even games like fortnite, children are not their intended users. concurring with our product compliance review, interviews with digital providers indicate that digital providers, particularly start-ups, struggle to navigate the complex and fragmented standards and regulation landscapes and prioritise their resources. in our workshops and interviews, product managers, designers and developers also told us that they struggled to balance business or product objectives, not necessarily and exclusively for commercial gains, with children’s best interests. indeed, the line between harming children’s agency or wellbeing and making the digital experience engaging is very fine. the same design techniques, such as interactions and competitions or behavioural nudges, can either enhance or undermine children’s agency, creativity and development (authors, 2021). recognising these challenges, we devised a framework for digital providers to design children’s rights into their products and services. this framework maps a typical child rights impact assessment (cria) un-mandated tool for realising child rights, initially used by states parties (enoc, 2020) with a typical product development process abstracted from our interviews and designer workshops, supported by a universally accepted innovation process (ball, 2022). taking a child-rights approach, this framework will help digital providers address the hygiene factors (alshmemri et al., 2017), such as safety, security and privacy, as well as offering children opportunities for development and growth. furthermore, by incorporating cria into a typical innovation process, designers and developers can better assess and manage the impact of their product and services from their inception and thus navigate tricky design challenges more easily. suppose children’s rights can be anticipated and embedded into digital products and services likely used by children. in that case, children would not need to be boxed into a child-only digital corner for their own safety. instead, if a digital world is made childrights-respecting by design, then children can explore and reap full benefits of what digital technologies have to offer alongside their older counterparts. references 5rights foundation. (2021c). risky by design. https://www.riskyby.design/in-gamepurchases authors. (2021). ball, j. (2022). the double diamond: a universally accepted depiction of the design process. design council. https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/news-opinion/doublediamond-universally-accepted-depiction-design-process barassi, v. (2020). child data citizen: how tech companies are profiling us from before birth (1st ed.) mit press. dinsmore, b., & pugh, a. j. (2021, june). the paradox of constrained well-being: childhood autonomy, surveillance and inequality. in sociological forum (vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 448-470). european network of ombudspersons for children (enoc). (2020). child rights impact assessment – cria. http://enoc.eu/?page_id=3718 radesky, j. et al. (2020a). young kids and youtube: how ads, toys, and games dominate viewing. common sense media. radesky, j., chassiakos, y. l. r., ameenuddin, n., & navsaria, d. (2020). digital advertising to children. paediatrics, 146(1). united nations committee on the rights of the child (1989). convention on the rights of the child. https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crc.aspx united nations committee on the rights of the child (2021). general comment no. 25 on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment (crc/c/gc/25). https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/tbsearch.aspx?treatyi d=5&doctypeid=11 williamson, b. (2019). new power networks in educational technology. learning, media and technology, 44(4), 395-398. zendle, d., meyer, r., cairns, p., waters, s., & ballou, n. (2020). the prevalence of loot boxes in mobile and desktop games. addiction, 115(9), 1768-1772. zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power (1st ed.) publicaffairs. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): ringel,s., and davidson, r. (2023, october). demographic, occupational and professional predictors of tweet deletion among u.s. journalists. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. demographic, occupational and professional predictors of tweet deletion among u.s. journalists sharon ringel department of communication, university of haifa roei davidson department of communication, university of haifa introduction. twitter and other social media platforms have become a key infrastructure for contemporary journalism (kleis nielsen & ganter, 2018). journalists use twitter to gather information (powers & vera-zambrano, 2017). they employ it to maintain a relationship with their audiences and sources and through that to cultivate their individual personal and professional brand as well as their employer’s brand (molyneux et al., 2018). they also communicate with journalistic peers and hence participate in the ongoing production of an interpretive community (carlson, 2016). while most research has focused on journalists’ publication practices, much less work has examined their decision to delete content they have already published on social media, an action that could have a meaningful impact on twitter as a repository of public knowledge. in indepth interviews, american journalists reported deleting tweets frequently. they also claimed such practices were common among their peers (ringel & davidson, 2022). in this study, we examine how journalists’ demographic identity, occupational status and professional standing might be related to their tendency to delete tweets. occupational and organizational attributes of journalism work. many workers in the culture industries experience considerable precarity: they often work on short-term contracts, constantly in search of the next gig with minimal job security (gill & pratt, 2008; hesmondhalgh & baker, 2009; sperlich, 2011). journalists are no exception: many journalists especially those at an early stage of their career adopt entrepreneurial labor practices out of choice or necessity (davidson & meyers, 2015). in such an employment environment, journalists (like many other workers) must carefully craft an employable public image that will appeal to many prospective employers. in interviews with american journalists, they linked their feeling of occupational uncertainty with their decision to delete tweets as a means of constructing an online presence that would not offend employers and therefore would not endanger their future employment prospects (ringel & davidson, 2022). journalists’ harassment: its demographic and occupational dimensions. as they maintain their online presence on twitter, journalists around the world are encountering various forms of online harassment with women and ethnic minorities more likely to be targeted (waisbord, 2022). survey data suggests most american journalists experience some form of online harassment. however, women (and especially young women) as well as those who are personally visible when they do their journalistic work reported experiencing more harassment than others (lewis et al., 2020). female journalists in five countries reported facing extensive harassment, with visible journalists such as those working as television reporters exposed to more harassment. they also suggested that minority female journalists were even likelier to be exposed to hateful and demeaning treatment online (chen et al., 2020). harassment has consequences for the ways journalists practice journalism and engage with their audience. when journalists reported experiencing harassment they perceived the audience as less rational and more different than themselves and evaluated their interaction with the audience as of a lower quality. such perceptions might weaken their commitment to provide the audience future access to their past tweets. slightly less than 50% of respondents claimed they changed what they posted in response to harassment (women more than men) and approximately 8% reported deactivating or deleting their account (lewis et al., 2020). some interviewed female journalists who experienced harassment said that they limited the topics they covered and toned down the critical tone they took. some also reported deleting abusive online comments either manually or automatically using tools to block abuse (chen et al., 2020). such findings suggest that those journalists especially targeted by harassment might be more likely to carefully curate their online presence and hence might delete more tweets. american journalists we interviewed argued harassment especially of female and minority journalists led those journalists to delete tweets whether selectively or en masse (ringel & davidson, 2022). research questions. given existing evidence that the demographic characteristics of journalists, and their professional and occupational standing impact the occupational and personal risks they face as they maintain their online presence, we wish to track the deletion practices of a large sample of journalists more directly to examine whether and how individual-level characteristics of the journalists are related to their tendency to delete tweets they have previously published. we, therefore, ask: rq1: are demographic characteristics (ethnic identity, gender, age, educational attainment) of american journalists related to their likelihood of deleting tweets? rq2: is the occupational status of american journalists as free-lancers related to their likelihood of deleting tweets? we will also investigate whether their professional characteristics are related to their tendency to delete tweets. we will more specifically ask: rq3a: are a journalist’s years of experience related to their likelihood of deleting tweets? rq3b: is the visibility of a journalists’ role related to their likelihood of deleting tweets? rq3c: is professional journalistic training related to their likelihood of deleting tweets? methods. we adapted the politwoops tool used to track and display the deleted tweets of american politicians (willis, 2023) to track the tweeting and deletion practices of a diverse cluster sample of approximately 3,370 employees of news organizations who maintain personal accounts on twitter over a period of approximately 3 months in the fall of 2022 (august 17 to november 22). we sampled accounts of employees working in 97 major american news organizations that had more than 10 million unique digital users in late 2020 (“state of the news media methodology,” 2021). in addition, we sampled journalists working for fox news and those identified by cision (a commercial media relationship management database) as freelance journalists. from each sampled news organization we randomly selected 30 individuals listed as affiliated with the organization. we excluded from analysis accounts that had fewer than 300 followers and those accounts identified with individuals who though affiliated with the organization did not have a journalistic role within it (e.g., marketing, advertising, administration). from each organization we identified a maximum of 20 journalists. we used identical criteria to randomly sample 430 journalists identified on cision as free-lancers. the politwoops tool allowed us to register each instance of deletion as well as the tweets that were not deleted. we will use a textual similarity detection algorithm (briggs, 2021) to compare each deleted tweet to the subsequent five tweets an account posted to identify cases in which deletion was not substantive but rather used as a means of lightly editing a tweet (given the absence of an edit button). we will measure likelihood of deletion as the proportion of all substantive deletions to the overall number of tweets published during the data collection period. we will combine this data with ongoing manual content analysis of their twitter profile, their linkedin profile, and the cision database to code demographic characteristics (ethnic identity, gender, year they began their undergraduate studies [as proxy of age], educational attainment), occupational status (free-lancer [yes/no]), and professional characteristics (years of journalistic experience, journalistic role, journalism training [yes/no]). as the content analysis proceeds, we are assessing coding reliability. to examine the relationship of these variables with deletion likelihood we will employ a multivariate regression analysis. with deletion data already collected and content analysis near completion we will be able to present a full analysis of the data at the conference. references briggs, j. (2021, september 2). bert for measuring text similarity. medium. https://towardsdatascience.com/bert-for-measuring-text-similarity-eec91c6bf9e1 carlson, m. (2016). metajournalistic discourse and the meanings of journalism: definitional control, boundary work, and legitimation: metajournalistic discourse and the meanings of journalism. communication theory, 26(4), 349–368. https://doi.org/10.1111/comt.12088 chen, g. m., pain, p., chen, v. y., mekelburg, m., springer, n., & troger, f. (2020). ‘you really have to have a thick skin’: a cross-cultural perspective on how online harassment influences female journalists. journalism, 21(7), 877–895. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884918768500 davidson, r., & meyers, o. (2015). toward a typology of journalism careers: conceptualizing israeli journalists’ occupational trajectories. communication, culture & critique, 9(2), 193–211. gill, r., & pratt, a. (2008). in the social factory?: immaterial labour, precariousness and cultural work. theory, culture & society, 25(7–8), 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276408097794 hesmondhalgh, d., & baker, s. (2009). “a very complicated version of freedom”: conditions and experiences of creative labour in three cultural industries. poetics, 38(1), 4–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2009.10.001 kleis nielsen, r., & ganter, s. a. (2018). dealing with digital intermediaries: a case study of the relations between publishers and platforms. new media & society, 20(4), 1600–1617. lewis, s. c., zamith, r., & coddington, m. (2020). online harassment and its implications for the journalist–audience relationship. digital journalism, 8(8), 1047–1067. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2020.1811743 molyneux, l., holton, a., & lewis, s. c. (2018). how journalists engage in branding on twitter: individual, organizational, and institutional levels. information, communication & society, 21(10), 1386–1401. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2017.1314532 powers, m., & vera-zambrano, s. (2017). how journalists use social media in france and the united states: analyzing technology use across journalistic fields. new media & society, 20(8), 2728–2744. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817731566 ringel, s., & davidson, r. (2022). proactive ephemerality: how journalists use automated and manual tweet deletion to minimize risk and its consequences for social media as a public archive. new media & society, 24(5), 1216–1233. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820972389 sperlich, r. (2011). the mixed blessing of autonomy in digital cultural production: a study on filmmaking, press photography and architecture in austria. european journal of communication, 26(2), 133–146. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323111401611 state of the news media methodology. (2021, july 27). pew research center’s journalism project. https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2021/07/27/state-of-the-news-mediamethodology/ waisbord, s. (2022). online trolling of journalists. in s. allan (ed.), the routledge companion to news and journalism (2nd ed., pp. 149–158). routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003174790-18 willis, d. (2023, february 24). after a decade of tracking politicians’ deleted tweets, politwoops is no more. propublica. https://www.propublica.org/article/politwoops-deletedtweets-twitter-politicians-musk selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): harris, b.c, & maddox, j. (2024, october). groomers, ‘titties’, & streamers, oh my! toward an understanding of androcentric platform governance on twitch. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. groomers, ‘titties’, & streamers, oh my!: toward an understanding of androcentric platform governance on twitch brandon c. harris university of alabama jessica maddox university of alabama introduction & literature review: platform governance & androcentrism twitch is the largest social live-streaming platform in the global north, and has historically been an important advertising and community hub for the gaming industry (johnson & woodcock, 2018). twitch’s owner, amazon, demands increasing growth and profit (yin-poole, 2024), so the platform must continue attracting new streamers, viewers, and advertisers. however, these new audiences may be at odds with twitch’s core base of white, asian, cisgender men (cote, 2020). this means many of twitch’s policies and attempts at platform governance are often implemented inconsistently or in an ad-hoc manner, leading to greater confusion about what is and isn’t permissible on the platform (winslow, 2024). platform governance, also known as content moderation, harkens to how “platforms don’t make content, but they will make important choices about that content; what they will distribute and to whom, how they will connect users and broker their reactions, and what they will refuse” (gillespie, 2018, pp. 254-255). as twitch struggles to grow its audience but remains faithful to its core base, questions emerge as to who may be experiencing unfair moderation practices. twitch has been an undertheorized platform in the content moderation and platform governance spaces. by reviewing the entire corpus of twitch safety blogs (n = 38) from 2018 2024, we demonstrate that platform governance actually hinders twitch’s ability to attract new streamers and audiences, which would likely help the platform generate more revenue and growth. this is based on twitch's rather explicit androcentrism in its safety blogs. androcentrism occurs in online spaces in implicit and explicit ways, often through valuing men’s input and expertise over women and non-binary individuals, and may often make women feel excluded or unsafe, leading to their chosen or forced removal from these spaces (sobieraj, 2018). this is compounded in gaming communities, with its own history of toxic geek masculinities (salter & blodgett, 2017; ruberg et al., 2019; cote, 2020). twitch is a combination of both, and attempts at its platform governance are consistently rooted in both technology and gaming’s androcentrism (marwick, 2017). platform governance documents, including blog post announcements, always convey platform values (gillespie, 2018), and androcentrism emerges as one such predominant value on twitch. this impacts the potential for streamers’ creative labor, reifies gatekeeping in esports and gaming, and upholds hostility in online spaces. method drawing on the method for studying platforms’ forward-facing documents detailed by maddox & malson (2020), this study examines 38 safety blog posts by twitch from may 2018 through january 2024. the reason for those dates is that every one of these blogs has topics that have been deemed important, or threatening enough, to warrant this extra regulatory, expedient, and often punitive action. blog posts are timely communication tools used by platforms to voice changes before they are enacted in official governance capacities in the site’s official community guidelines. community guidelines, and blog posts announcing changes to said documents, reveal twitch’s values about who can stream and advertise, and under what conditions. furthermore, these decision documents change over time, and by studying these variations, we gain insight into one, how creators and streamers manage careers on the whims of platforms. our analysis of these documents over the past several years adheres to what couldry and van dijck (2015) argue in internet research, “a materialist account of the processes…must precisely hold on to the memories of those older versions of the social as a reference point against which to judge the hegemonic role in hosting social life now played by digital platforms” (emphasis in original; p. 2). by taking a snapshot of these policy change announcements over the last several years, we can document platform power. furthermore, by connecting these announcements to the real-world events that beget them, we present a historicized look at platform governance. studying twitch’s policy change announcements is a phenomenon deeply embedded in a real-life context, and it provides insights into both twitch as a platform and also the broader precarity of online content creation. for the analysis of the documents, each author read and re-read each post, taking notes about recurring thoughts, themes, words, patterns, and ideas. upon conclusion of individual readings, the authors came together to discuss similarities and discrepancies in their findings. this is the approach to textual analysis outlined by stuart hall (1976), in which the analysis portion of textual analysis is the identifying and contextualizing of recurring themes, words, and ideas in ways that allow for in-depth understandings to emerge. preliminary findings & discussion ongoing analysis has revealed significant evidence of two predominant findings: first, through these announcements, twitch not-so-subtly conveys who their core streamer and viewer audiences are. this is revealed in one post from november 2022, in which twitch addresses claims that streamers were grooming, or preparing minors for inappropriate physical and sexual relationships with adults, on and off the platform. twitch claims to potential advertisers that “70% of users are between the ages of 18 and 34” (twitch, n.d.), but acknowledging pedophilia as a potential threat to the platform reveals that there are many more children using twitch than the platform reports publicly. with the phrase “grooming” being a conservative and often alt-right buzzword to criminalize queer, trans, and non-binary behavior (mcmillan, 2022), it is unclear if twitch truly has a grooming problem or if the platform is virtue signaling to its core gaming audience of predominantly white or asian, and cisgender, men (cote, 2020). this use of conservative buzzwords underscores an additional aspect of audience signaling through policy change announcements on nudity and sexual content. it is well established in platform governance research that policies restricting nudity and sexual content are done to police women and bar their participation in digital spaces (are, 2021; are, 2023). however, on twitch, the platform needs provocative content to maintain its audiences’ interest and continue growing the platform outside of just the gaming community. while twitch’s policy about potential grooming attempts to police a potential threat, the dress code policies actively curtail women’s potential for cultural production on the platform – which can prevent attracting new users to the platform. our second main preliminary finding is buttressed by existing social media policy analyses in which community is heavily touted as a value and benefit of being on the platform (maddox & malson, 2020; scharlach, hallinan, & shifman, 2023). while twitch celebrates community, it becomes apparent in the policy change announcements that some users are allowed and celebrated, but others are moderated extensively. moderation announcement changes reveal who the platform’s “favorite” users are. while moderation documents always harken to “ideal” users (gillespie, 2018), twitch’s changes specifically reveal an androcentric ideal from which twitch prioritizes moderation and governance issues. such an analysis ultimately reveals how androcentrism is governed into existence and connects the realities of streamers, gamers, and creators to explicit rulings of platform governance, further contributing to precarity in digital labor. references are, c. (2021). the shadowban cycle: an autoethnography of pole dancing, nudity, and censorship on instagram. feminist media studies, 22(8), 2002-2019. are, c. (2023). an autoethnography of automated powerlessness: lacking platform affordances in instagram and tiktok account deletions. media, culture, & society, 45(4), 822-840. cote, a. (2020). gaming sexism: gender and identity in the era of casual video games. nyu press. couldry, n., & van dijck, j. (2015). researching social media as if the social mattered. social media + society, 1(2). gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. yale university press. hall, s. (1975). introduction. in a. c. h. smith (ed.), paper voices: the popular press and social change, 1935-1965 (pp. 11-24). chatto & windus. johnson, m. r., & woodcock, j. (2018). the impacts of live streaming and twitch.tv on the video game industry. media, culture & society, 41(5), 670–688. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443718818363. maddox, j., & malson, j. (2020). guidelines without lines, communities without borders: the marketplace of ideas and digital manifest destiny in social media platform policies. social media + society, 6(2). marwick, a. (2017). silicon valley and the social media industry. the sage handbook of social media, 314-329. mcmillan, j. (2022). analysis: political rhetoric, false claims obscure the history of drag performance. pbs newshour. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/political-rhetoric-false-claims-obscure-thehistory-of-drag-performance. ruberg, b, cullen, a, brewster, k (2019) nothing but a “titty streamer”: legitimacy, labor, and the debate over women’s breasts in video game live streaming. critical studies in media communication 36(5): 466–481. salter, a., & blodgett, b. (2017). toxic geek masculinity in media: sexism, trolling, and identity policing. springer. scharlach, r., hallinan, b., & shifman, l. (2023). governing principles: articulating https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443718818363 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/political-rhetoric-false-claims-obscure-the-history-of-drag-performance https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/political-rhetoric-false-claims-obscure-the-history-of-drag-performance https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/political-rhetoric-false-claims-obscure-the-history-of-drag-performance values in social media platform policies. new media & society, online first. sobieraj, s. (2018). bitch, slut, skank, cunt: patterned resistance to women’s visibility in digital publics, information, communication & society, 21(11), pp. 17001714. twitch advertising (n.d.). twitch advertising, “audience”. twitch. https://twitchadvertising.tv/audience/. winslow, l. (2024). twitch bans implied nakedness in response to ‘nudity meta.’ kotaku. https://kotaku.com/twitch-policy-change-artistic-nudity-1851137925. yin-poole, w. (2024). after laying off over 500 people, twitch boss admits the business is not profitable. ign. https://www.ign.com/articles/afterlaying-off-over-500-people-twitch-boss-admits-the-business-is-not-profitable. https://twitchadvertising.tv/audience/ https://kotaku.com/twitch-policy-change-artistic-nudity-1851137925 https://www.ign.com/articles/after-laying-off-over-500-people-twitch-boss-admits-the-business-is-not-profitable https://www.ign.com/articles/after-laying-off-over-500-people-twitch-boss-admits-the-business-is-not-profitable selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-23 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): martin, z., trauthig, i., & woolley, s. (2023, october). feminist queen or conspiracy theorist: female spreaders of women’s health disinformation. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. feminist queen or conspiracy theorist? female spreaders of women’s health disinformation zelly martin university of texas at austin inga trauthig university of texas at austin samuel woolley university of texas at austin introduction soon after the dobbs v. jackson women’s health organization decision overturned the federal right to abortion in the united states, an investigation by reveal, mother jones, and uc berkeley revealed a disinformation campaign against birth control, driven by anti-abortion influencers (reveal, 2022). anti-abortion activists strive for fetuses to have a fundamental right to life, which they hope to achieve not only by illegalizing abortion, but also removing access to birth control they consider to be abortion, i.e., ‘plan b,’ intrauterine devices, or the pill. disinformation targeting abortion and birth control is partially rooted in conspiracy, particularly the great replacement theory, which plays on fears of white people being “replaced” by people of color (samuels & potts, 2022). this notion is a long-standing issue of the anti-abortion movement, as early successes in banning abortion were partially motivated by fears of white people having fewer babies than people of color (holland, 2020). studies have shown that black americans believe in conspiracy theories about birth control, e.g., that it is deployed by the government as a form of genocide against black people (thorburn & bogart, 2005). unfortunately, though, these beliefs are not entirely unfounded. this problematizes definitions of conspiracy theories as “false, harmful, and unjustified”—notably only one definition (graumann & moscovici, 2012, p. 204). black americans, for instance, have long undergone inhumane experimentation by the american medical system, e.g., the infamous tuskegee syphilis study. the assault on birth control is rooted in real experiences, as women have long complained about the side effects, while men are spared (healthline, 2018). in fact, graumann and moscovici (2012) argue that those with fewer civil liberties (e.g., black americans, women, and particularly black women due to intersectional oppression) are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. embodied experiences of suffering at the hands of american institutions—both state and medical—are being weaponized to lobby and campaign for laws that limit reproductive freedom. this tension is at the heart of this paper (main rq): what is the connection between embodied knowledge and the subsequent spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories? feminist knowledge: devalued and remade women’s knowledge and experience have long been marginalized in the public sphere (shapin & schaffer, 2011). pre-1900, women were trusted in one realm: reproductive health (holland, 2020). midwives delivered babies and cared for pregnant women, and abortion was legal up to the point of quickening—when the woman can feel the fetus move—which only the woman herself could attest to (ibid.). after male doctors took control of this realm, though, abortion quickly became illegal, until roe v. wade in 1973 granted federal protections for abortion again (wajcman, 1991). it is thus vital for women to have a strong situated knowledge practice. situated knowledge (haraway, 1988) is a practice of valuing embodied knowledge and that of marginalized folks over institutional, westernized, and often male knowledge practices. knowledge grounded in individual and cultural experience (ibid.) can offer a way to reclaim control and power from those who claim objectivity merely because they are at the top of the hierarchy (historically, white upper-class men). populist expertise troublingly, though, feminist knowledge practices share similarities with those of conspiracy-theory-style thinking, or what marwick and partin (2022) identified as “populist expertise” among followers of the conspiracy theory qanon. believing your own body is necessary. believing your own research over that of experts (fenster, 1999), which is increasing among the american population (kennedy et al., 2022), can be extremely problematic. the internet and social media, in particular, provide an avenue both for collective knowledge-sharing and knowledge-making, thus providing control over one’s life experience (incl. medical), and seeking out information that can align with any worldview, incl. a false one (enders et al., 2021; theocharis et al., 2021). thus, we develop a framework that builds on both situated knowledge, and conspiracytheory thinking as knowledge-making practices to identify the ways in which the embodied knowledge of marginalized folks is being co-opted to spread disinformation. (gendered) disinformation and conspiracy to this point, scholars have generally conceptualized gendered disinformation as disinformation which is weaponized against women, particularly by those in the “manosphere” (marwick & lewis, 2017) or state-aligned disinformation that excludes women from politics (judson et al., 2020) as opposed to thinking of gendered disinformation as that which is wielded by women. there is, however, emerging scholarship on the topic as it relates to qanon, the alt-right conspiracy theory (bender, 2022; bloom & moskalenko, 2021) and extant research within terrorism studies (bloom, 2012), that speaks to women as producers of disinformation and conspiracy (frydenlund & leidig, 2022). problematically, though, scholarship that addresses women’s power to wield disinformation often roots this in maternality (leidig, 2021). the colloquial term for female members of qanon, for instance, is “qamoms,” as they are primarily involved in the #savethechildren conspiracy theory, a subset of qanon that believes children are trafficked by the ‘deep state’ (bloom & moskalenko, 2021). although we cannot ignore that propaganda spread by women is imbricated with sexist campaigns created by men, and at times does emphasize children and motherhood, we should elucidate the ways in which women as individuals (rather than mothers) are active agents in the spread of disinformation to keep from reproducing the notion that women are merely “passive victims” of information technology (mcgaw, 1989), including disinformation and conspiracy. further, we should complicate the notion of men as powerful oppressors over either resisting or submissive women by thinking through the ways in which women enact power over each other in disinformation campaigns. data collection following moran et al. (2022), we engage in social media observation of public instagram accounts of prominent anti-abortion organizations and female leaders of said organizations. first, we identified all anti-abortion organizations in the united states with active instagram accounts. we then identified the presidents of said accounts and focused on the active and public accounts of female presidents, given our focus on female knowledge production. after creating a new instagram account as a researcher for identification purposes, we followed all accounts (n=29). from february 13, 2023 to february 27, 2023, we engaged in one hour of data collection per day, in which all stories from each observed account were observed and collected using a screen recording app, with supplemental collection of posts. at the end of each session, new accounts were followed when recommended by the extant accounts, i.e., through reposting said accounts on stories and in posts, resulting in a total count of 154. following each day of data collection, the first author wrote a thematic analytical memo with open codes of all data, compounded daily (braun & clarke, 2006). this study received irb approval on june 10, 2022. preliminary data analysis two authors engaged in data analysis of the 14 hours of data and associated memos. we rely on critical technocultural discourse analysis (brock, 2018) to examine the images, videos, and text in our corpus. based on preliminary analysis, our themes support our argument that: • prominent members and young activists in the anti-abortion movement have weaponized feminist knowledge-production and grains of embodied experience to spread harmful disinformation campaigns, which at times snowball into (racially-motivated) conspiracy theories for political and/or financial gain. references bender, e. (2022). anger in the overlooked: a gendered analysis of the january 6, 2021 capitol hill breach. theses/capstones/creative projects. https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/university_honors_program/164 bloom, m. (2012). bombshell: women and terrorism. university of pennsylvania press. bloom, m., & moskalenko, s. (2021). pastels and pedophiles: inside the mind of qanon. stanford university press. braun, v., & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa brock, a. (2018). critical technocultural discourse analysis. new media & society, 20(3), 1012–1030. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816677532 enders, a. m., uscinski, j. e., seelig, m. i., klofstad, c. a., wuchty, s., funchion, j. r., murthi, m. n., premaratne, k., & stoler, j. (2021). the relationship between social media use and beliefs in conspiracy theories and misinformation. political behavior. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09734-6 fenster, m. (1999). conspiracy theories: secrecy and power in american culture. u of minnesota press. frydenlund, i., & leidig, e. (2022). introduction: “love jihad”: sexuality, reproduction and the construction of the predatory muslim male. religions, 13(3), article 3. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13030201 graumann, c. f., & moscovici, s. (2012). changing conceptions of conspiracy. springer science & business media. haraway, d. (1988). situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. feminist studies, 14(3), 575–599. healthline. (2018, august 3). birth control side effects: risks and long-term safety of the pill. healthline. https://www.healthline.com/health/birth-control-side-effects holland, j. l. (2020). tiny you: a western history of the anti-abortion movement. univ of california press. judson, e., atay, a., krasodomski-jones, a., lasko-skinner, r., & smith, j. (2020). engendering hate: the contours of state-aligned gendered disinformation online: october 2020. demos. https://dera.ioe.ac.uk//36786/1/engendering-hate-reportfinal.pdf kennedy, b., tyson, a., & funk, c. (2022, february 15). americans’ trust in scientists, other groups declines. pew research center science & society. https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2022/02/15/americans-trust-in-scientists-othergroups-declines/ leidig, e. (2021). from love jihad to grooming gangs: tracing flows of the hypersexual muslim male through far-right female influencers. religions, 12(12), article 12. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12121083 marwick, a. e., & partin, w. c. (2022). constructing alternative facts: populist expertise and the qanon conspiracy. new media & society, 14614448221090200. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221090201 marwick, a., & lewis, r. (2017). media manipulation and disinformation online. data & society, 106. mcgaw, j. a. (1989). no passive victims, no separate spheres: a feminist perspective on technology’s history. in s. h. cutcliffe & r. c. post (eds.), in context: history and the history of technology: essays in honor of melvin kranzberg (vol. 1, pp. 172–191). lehigh university press. moran, r. e., grasso, i., & koltai, k. (2022). folk theories of avoiding content moderation: how vaccine-opposed influencers amplify vaccine opposition on instagram. social media + society, 8(4), 20563051221144252. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221144252 reveal. (2022, october 8). the long campaign to turn birth control into the new abortion. reveal. http://revealnews.org/podcast/the-long-campaign-to-turn-birth-controlinto-the-new-abortion/ samuels, a., & potts, m. (2022, july 25). how the fight to ban abortion is rooted in the ‘great replacement’ theory. fivethirtyeight. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/howthe-fight-to-ban-abortion-is-rooted-in-the-great-replacement-theory/ shapin, s., & schaffer, s. (2011). leviathan and the air-pump: hobbes, boyle, and the experimental life. in leviathan and the air-pump. princeton university press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400838493 theocharis, y., cardenal, a., jin, s., aalberg, t., hopmann, d. n., strömbäck, j., castro, l., esser, f., van aelst, p., de vreese, c., corbu, n., koc-michalska, k., matthes, j., schemer, c., sheafer, t., splendore, s., stanyer, j., stępińska, a., & štětka, v. (2021). does the platform matter? social media and covid-19 conspiracy theory beliefs in 17 countries. new media & society, 14614448211045666. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211045666 thorburn, s., & bogart, l. m. (2005). conspiracy beliefs about birth control: barriers to pregnancy prevention among african americans of reproductive age. health education & behavior, 32(4), 474–487. wajcman, j. (1991). reproductive technology: delivered into men’s hands. in feminism confronts technology (pp. 54–80). penn state press. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): scharlach, r., & hallinan, b. (2023, october). the value affordances of social media engagement features. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the value affordances of social media engagement features rebecca scharlach the hebrew university of jerusalem blake hallinan the hebrew university of jerusalem have you liked something on a social media platform today? perhaps a photo from your friend's holiday on instagram or a tiktok video that resonated with you? defined as core features of "engagement" (c. kim & yang, 2017), modes of interaction such as liking, sharing, and commenting are ubiquitous on social media platforms. while social media content is shaped by local contexts (miller et al., 2016), engagement features provide a global grammar of interaction, with companies quickly copying successful features (leaver et al., 2020). although easy to overlook, such features are "objects of intense feelings" (bucher & helmond, 2018) that fundamentally shape how people use the platform and even understand themselves (hallinan & brubaker, 2021). as the primary meeting point between people and platforms, engagement features also provide a compelling yet overlooked site to explore the relationship between technological affordances and the normative implications of social media. specifically, we seek to understand the relationship between engagement features and values, broadly understood as underlying notions of what's important. the concept of technological affordances foregrounds the relationship between people and technology, asking "how objects enable or constrain" particular ways of acting in the world (davis, 2020). in the domain of social media, researchers have employed this concept to examine the role of platforms in social and political life (e.g., d. h. kim & ellison, 2022). while normative considerations appear in the discussion of affordances, particularly in the attention to power inequalities, values are largely a secondary concern and typically come up in the analysis and interpretation of results (for a notable exception, see aharoni et al., 2022). however, just as perceptions of what technology can do are profoundly perspectival, so too are perceptions of the values technology promotes or hinders. research on platform values offers a complementary approach to understanding the social significance of technology that foregrounds the socio-technical construction of values (hallinan et al., 2022). synthesizing these two approaches, we introduce the concept of value affordances, defined as the “set of ethical, aesthetic, and relational principles that emerge from the interaction between different stakeholders and technological infrastructures” (scharlach and hallinan, 2023, p. 2). in this study, we investigate the value affordances of engagement features on instagram, tiktok, and youtube. we ask: which values do social media users think the like, comment, and share features promote and hinder? what mechanisms do they invoke in their explanations? method starting from the assumption that values emerge from the interactions between people and platforms, we conducted six focus groups with 30 international students who use social media, originating from 16 countries. the interactive dynamics of focus groups make them ideal sites for studying collaborative sensemaking (lunt & livingstone, 1996). we focused on three prominent engagement features across social media platforms: like, comment, and share. all three are seen as "important forms" (tenenboim, 2022) or "core features" (c. kim & yang, 2017) of engagement. to facilitate comparisons within and across focus groups, we asked participants to identify the values promoted and hindered by specific features using a set of value cards inspired by a study conducted by belman, flanagan, and nissenbaum (2011). our value cards included the name and basic definition of 32 values, combining values used in values in design research (belman et al., 2011; flanagan & nissenbaum, 2014) and studies of social media values (scharlach et al., 2023; trillò et al., 2021). to address rq (1), we tabulated the promoted and hindered values for each feature and for engagement features as a whole. to answer rq (2), we employed inductive thematic analysis to systematically identify patterns of meaning within the discussions of values (braun & clarke, 2012). we focused on the mechanisms that people invoked in their justifications. to ensure a shared understanding of the analytical process and codes, we jointly constructed a codebook and followed the principles of consensual qualitative research (hill et al., 1997). results overall, participants agreed that social media engagement features promote the values of expression, care, and community. each of these values aligns with how social media companies promote the purpose of their platforms. expression, for example, features prominently in corporate mission statements and platform governing documents (maddox & malson, 2020; scharlach et al., 2023). similarly, care has long been associated with sharing on social media and used in promotional slogans to express the core purpose of platforms (john, 2016). the centrality of community is reflected in both "community guidelines" as a collection of governing policies and the brand identities of platforms like instagram (leaver et al., 2020) and youtube (snickars & vonderau, 2009). conversely, participants agreed that engagement features hinder the values of privacy, mindfulness, peace, and safety. where the former group of values aligns with the promotional ideals of social media, the latter matches with longstanding public concerns about its harmful consequences (e.g., vaidhyanathan, 2018). when identifying the values that engagement features hinder, our participants painted a picture of social media as a place filled with judgment, conflict, and potential risks, where giving up one's privacy is the price of admission. our investigation reveals that social media users typically attribute value affordances to the ways that people use technology. in this framework, it is not the technology that enables or constrains but rather the user. by emphasizing the agency of users, our participants also assign responsibility to users for both the benefits and harms of social media. interestingly, such perceptions seem to echo how platforms attribute responsibility for the enactment of values such as expression and safety in their policy documents (scharlach et al., 2023). the fact that our participants actively use social media despite recognizing its possible normative shortcomings raises a further question: how do they navigate tradeoffs in the value affordances of social media? participants described creative strategies to negotiate, downplay, or even resolve these tensions. these included using features antagonistically, avoiding using specific features, or using features in more limited contexts like groups or direct messages. another set of strategies concerns how users assign responsibility for promoting or hindering particular values. while our participants consistently emphasized the agency of users, they differentiated responsibility into categories of "us" and "them," identifying with positive actions that promote values and blaming others for negative actions that hinder values. conclusion the concept of value affordances highlights how mundane uses of technology contribute to underlying ideas about what’s important on social media and, potentially, in life. although casual users do not adopt the same vocabulary for discussing the political stakes of design, value card solicitation prompts offer a way for researchers to surface normative concerns. given the growing integration of platforms into our social, political, and professional lives, surfacing the values of these features can help bring the debate about their role to the public and potentially shift perspectives about the responsibility for platform values. references aharoni, t., tenenboim-weinblatt, k., kligler-vilenchik, n., boczkowski, p., hayashi, k., mitchelstein, e., & villi, m. (2022). trust-oriented affordances: a five-country study of news trustworthiness and its socio-technical articulations. new media & society, online first, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221096334 belman, j., nissenbaum, h., & flanagan, m. (2011). grow-a-game: a tool for values conscious design and analysis of digital games. think design play, 15. braun, v., & clarke, v. (2012). thematic analysis. in h. cooper, p. m. camic, d. l. long, a. t. panter, d. rindskopf, & k. j. sher (eds.), apa handbook of research methods in psychology, vol 2: research designs: quantitative, qualitative, https://www.amazon.com/siva-vaidhyanathan/e/b001hd3xqc/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221096334 neuropsychological, and biological (pp. 57–71). american psychological association. https://doi.org/10.1037/13620-004 bucher, t., & helmond, a. (2018). the affordances of social media platforms. in j. burgess, a. e. marwick, & t. poell (eds.), the sage handbook of social media (pp. 233–253). sage reference. davis, j. l. (2020). how artifacts afford: the power and politics of everyday things. the mit press. flanagan, m., & nissenbaum, h. (2014). values at play in digital games. mit press. hallinan, b., & brubaker, j. r. (2021). living with everyday evaluations on social media platforms. international journal of communication, 15(0), 1551–1569. hallinan, b., scharlach, r., & shifman, l. (2022). beyond neutrality: conceptualizingplatform values. communication theory, 32(2), 201–222. https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtab008 hill, c. e., thompson, b. j., & williams, e. n. (1997). a guide to conducting consensual qualitative research. the counseling psychologist, 25(4), 517–572. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011000097254001 kim, c., & yang, s.-u. (2017). like, comment, and share on facebook: how each behavior differs from the other. public relations review, 43(2), 441–449. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2017.02.006 kim, d. h., & ellison, n. b. (2022). from observation on social media to offline political participation: the social media affordances approach. new media & society, 24(12), 2614–2634. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444821998346 leaver, t., highfield, t., & abidin, c. (2020). instagram: visual social media cultures. john wiley & sons. lunt, p., & livingstone, s. (1996). rethinking the focus group in media and communications research. journal of communication, 46(2), 79–98. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1996.tb01475.x maddox, j., & malson, j. (2020). guidelines without lines, communities without borders: the marketplace of ideas and digital manifest destiny in social media platform policies. social media + society, 6(2), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120926622 miller, d., costa, e., haynes, n., mcdonald, t., nicolescu, r., sinanan, j., spyer, j., venkatraman, s., & wang, x. (2016). how the world changed social media. ucl press. https://doi.org/10.1037/13620-004 https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtab008 https://doi.org/10.1177/0011000097254001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2017.02.006 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444821998346 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1996.tb01475.x https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120926622 scharlach, r., & hallinan, b. (2023). the value affordances of social media engagement features. journal of computer-mediated communication, 28(6), 1– 11. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmad040 scharlach, r., hallinan, b. & shifman, l. (2023). governing principles: articulating values in social media platform policies. new media & society, online first. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231156580 snickars, p., & vonderau, p. (eds.). (2009). the youtube reader. columbia up. tenenboim, o. (2022). l. social media + society, 8(4), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221130282 trillò, t., scharlach, r., hallinan, b., kim, b., mizoroki, s., frosh, p., & shifman, l. (2021). what does #freedom look like? instagram and the visual imagination of values. journal of communication, 71(6), 875–897. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqab021 vaidhyanathan, s. (2018). antisocial media: how facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy. oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmad040 https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231156580 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221130282 https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqab021 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 han, s., & kuerbis, b. (2024, october). from black to white: dissecting propaganda in nuclear emergencies, finding ai-enabled disinformation. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. from black to white: dissecting propgagnda in nuclear emergencies, finding ai-enabled disinformation seungtae han georgia institute of technology brenden kuerbis georgia institute of technology introduction disinformation during nuclear emergencies (die) represents a critical challenge to public safety and institutional stability, potentially undermining both immediate crisis response capabilities and long-term public trust in nuclear governance. this research examines how state actors strategically deploy jowett and o'donnell's (2014) propaganda models—specifically the legitimating source model (lsm) and deflective source model (dsm)—in their disinformation campaigns during nuclear emergencies. additionally, we investigate how the integration of generative ai technologies might theoretically enhance or undermine these established propaganda models. our research analyzes two contrasting cases: the zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (znpp) crisis following russian occupation in march 2022, and the fukushima daiichi nuclear power plant (fnpp) incident's ongoing water discharge controversy. these cases offer distinct contexts for examining how disinformation operates under different types of nuclear emergencies, while also providing insights into the potential role of emerging technologies in shaping future disinformation campaigns (hoban & rister, 2024). the unprecedented nature of these events—europe's largest nuclear facility becoming embroiled in active military conflict and japan's controversial decision to release treated radioactive water into the pacific ocean—creates unique opportunities to examine how different types of nuclear emergencies generate distinct patterns of disinformation and manipulation of public perception. methodology our research methodology encompasses analysis of 568 instances of propaganda, monitored across diverse media platforms including facebook, youtube, tiktok, vk, weibo, and naver, alongside russian and ukrainian telegram channels. we examined traditional media channels owned or sponsored by states in russia, ukraine, china, south korea, and japan, complemented by official statements from governments, private companies, and the international atomic energy agency (iaea). the data collection period spanned from march 2022 to december 2023, capturing the evolution of narratives across multiple critical events and policy decisions. following george's (1954) approach to propaganda analysis, we employed qualitative interpretation to understand both the manifest content and latent purposes of disinformation campaigns. the research categorized disinformation narratives using martino et al.'s (2020) framework of 18 propaganda techniques, enabling systematic analysis of how these methods are deployed across different contexts and platforms (méndez-muros et al., 2024). this comprehensive approach allowed us to map the complex networks through which disinformation flows and identify the key mechanisms by which it gains or loses credibility (luceri et al., 2024). our analytical framework incorporated three distinct levels of examination: the macro level focusing on institutional relationships and power dynamics, the meso level examining network structures and information flow patterns, and the micro level analyzing specific content and narrative strategies. this multi-layered approach enabled us to identify patterns and relationships that might not be apparent through single-level analysis. model analysis findings our analysis through the lsm and dsm frameworks revealed distinct patterns in how state actors deploy and maintain disinformation campaigns. in the fnpp case, the lsm analysis demonstrated how south korean and chinese media outlets mutually reinforced false narratives about japan's alleged influence over the iaea, creating a self-validating network of misleading claims (mabon, 2024). the propagandists strategically employed seemingly independent sources to legitimize their allegations, with each entity citing others' claims as corroborating evidence (rid, 2020). this process of mutual reinforcement created an echo chamber effect that amplified the perceived credibility of false narratives while simultaneously making it more difficult for accurate information to penetrate these networks. the research identified several key disinformation narratives in each case. for znpp, these included claims about armed provocations, power supply issues, iaea inspections, militarization of the facility, and alleged presence of weapons of mass destruction (yaroshchuk, 2023). in the fnpp case, three major narratives emerged: allegations about failed water purification systems, claims about pre-existing radioactive leaks, and accusations of iaea bias (sawano et al., 2019). each narrative demonstrated sophisticated application of propagandistic techniques, often combining multiple methods to enhance persuasiveness and exploit existing societal tensions and fears. the dsm analysis revealed sophisticated tactics for obscuring original sources of disinformation, particularly evident in the znpp case. russian state actors employed multiple layers of intermediary channels to disseminate false claims about ukraine's alleged development of dirty bombs and chemical weapons, maintaining plausible deniability while shaping public perception. this approach involved creating networks of seemingly independent sources that would amplify and validate each other's claims, making it increasingly difficult to trace information back to its original source (kim et al., 2013). these networks demonstrated remarkable resilience, adapting their narratives and tactics in response to fact-checking efforts and counter-narratives. a significant finding emerged regarding the effectiveness of these propaganda models in practice. while our analysis confirmed active state involvement in creating and disseminating disinformation for political and economic purposes, we observed limited success in these efforts to shift public perception. this limitation appeared to stem from deeply entrenched institutional trust within domestic audiences and corresponding distrust of foreign sources, suggesting that the effectiveness of information operations faces considerable constraints when confronting established belief systems. the research also revealed that attempts to undermine institutional credibility often backfired, reinforcing existing trust patterns rather than eroding them. theoretical extensions our research extends jowett and o'donnell's propaganda models by examining how generative ai technologies might affect their operational mechanisms. within the dsm framework, generative ai shows potential to enhance disinformation capabilities through three key mechanisms: content multiplication, synthetic intermediary creation, and plausible deniability amplification (zhou et al., 2023). these capabilities could allow propagandists to create more sophisticated networks of seemingly independent sources, each generating and amplifying consistent narratives while maintaining the appearance of organic information flow. however, the technology faces fundamental limitations in establishing long-term credibility necessary for effective source deflection (fredheim & pamment, 2024). the challenge lies not in the creation of content but in building and maintaining the authentic relationships and reputation that give information sources their persuasive power. aigenerated content, while potentially convincing in isolation, struggles to establish the sustained credibility necessary for effective propaganda campaigns. our analysis suggests that generative ai may actually undermine the lsm's core mechanism through credibility erosion, authentication vulnerability, and inability to replicate complex social dynamics required for effective legitimization. the lsm relies on leveraging genuine institutional credibility, which ai-generated content cannot authentically replicate regardless of its sophistication (yang & menczer, 2023). the increasing sophistication of ai detection tools and growing public awareness of synthetic content further compounds these limitations. contrary to widespread concerns about ai-enabled disinformation, our empirical research found no evidence of state actors employing generative ai in the context of these nuclear emergencies. instead, we observed continued reliance on traditional, human-crafted disinformation disseminated through established media channels. this finding suggests a significant gap between theoretical capabilities and practical implementation of ai in disinformation campaigns, particularly in high-stakes scenarios like nuclear emergencies. the absence of ai-generated content in these cases may indicate that state actors recognize the risks and limitations of deploying such technologies in situations where maintaining credibility is crucial for achieving strategic objectives. references fredheim, r., & pamment, j. (2024). assessing the risks and opportunities posed by ai-enhanced influence operations on social media. place branding and public diplomacy. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41254-023-00322-5 george, a. l. (1954). propaganda analysis a study of inferences made from nazi propaganda in world war ii. greenwood press. hoban, i., & rister, a. (2024). nuclear anxiety as an instrument of war: the use of news media to shape and respond to the disinformation campaign surrounding the zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. media, war & conflict, 00(0), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352241256575 jowett, g., & o'donnell, v. (2014). propaganda and persuasion (5th ed.). sage. kim, y., kim, m., & kim, w. (2013). effect of the fukushima nuclear disaster on global public acceptance of nuclear energy. energy policy, 61, 822-828. luceri, l., boniardi, e., & ferrara, e. (2024). leveraging large language models to detect influence campaigns on social media. in companion proceedings of the acm web conference 2024 (pp. 1459-1467). mabon, l. (2024). treated water releases from the fukushima dai'ichi nuclear power plant: an overview of the decision-making process and governing institutions. marine policy, 163, article 106120. martino, g. d. s., cresci, s., barrón-cedeño, a., yu, s., di pietro, r., & nakov, p. (2020). a survey on computational propaganda detection. arxiv preprint arxiv:2007.08024. méndez-muros, s., alonso-gonzález, m., & pérez-curiel, c. (2024). disinformation and fact-checking in the face of natural disasters: a case study on turkey-syria earthquakes. societies, 14(4), 43. rid, t. (2020). active measures: the secret history of disinformation and political warfare (1st ed.). farrar, straus, and giroux. sawano, t., ozaki, a., hori, a., & tsubokura, m. (2019). combating 'fake news' and social stigma after the fukushima daiichi nuclear power plant incident-the importance https://doi.org/10.1057/s41254-023-00322-5 https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352241256575 of accurate longitudinal clinical data. qjm: monthly journal of the association of physicians, 112(7), 479-481. yang, k. c., & menczer, f. (2023). anatomy of an ai-powered malicious social botnet. journal of quantitative description: digital media (2024). https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2307.16336 yaroshchuk, o. (2023). russian disinformation strategy in the field of nuclear security: examining key narratives. ukraine analytica, 1(30), 27-36. zhou, j., zhang, y., luo, q., parker, a. g., & de choudhury, m. (2023). synthetic lies: understanding ai-generated misinformation and evaluating algorithmic and human solutions. proceedings of the 2023 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2307.16336 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): seipp, t. j. (2023, october). the great reset: “counterpower” in the context of media concentration and platform dependence. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the great reset: “counterpower” in the context of media concentration and platform dependence theresa josephine seipp university of amsterdam abstract the growing concentration of power and dependence on few platforms in the media sector necessitate regulatory measures to counter the potential threats to media pluralism and editorial independence stemming from this concentration. while some legal initiatives aim to address the imbalanced power dynamics between platforms and news media, such as the efforts at the eu level through the digital services act (dsa) and digital markets act (dma) to establish a fair playing field in digital markets, it is crucial to empower countervailing forces. this article explores the concept of "counterpower" within the context of media concentration and platform dependence, delving into its theoretical and practical implications. the practical analysis is grounded in 12 semi-structured interviews conducted with news organisations of various sizes in the uk and the netherlands, revealing a heightened awareness of the necessity to reduce dependences and promote more direct and engaged journalism. the interviews identified specific strategies, albeit with some limitations, highlighting the need for additional support, especially for local news organisations striving for autonomy in reducing dependences. in a nutshell, the article examines the legal prerequisites for news organisations to establish a "counterpower," serving as a complementary piece of the larger puzzle in addressing the broader challenges of media concentration and platform dependence. finally, alongside the evolving eu regulatory framework, encompassing the dsa, dma, and emfa, there is a growing demand for enabling “counterpower” and developing robust media (concentration) laws in europe, particularly focusing on safeguarding local journalism. research questions this article addresses two main research questions. first, based on the conceptual and empirical analysis, i aim to address rq1 “what is “counterpower” theoretically, and how does it look like in practice?”. second, based on a normative legal analysis, i address rq2, which asks “how could the legal conditions be created to facilitate the formation of “counterpower”?”, thereby concluding with a legal and policy analysis. contribution a better understanding of the goals and commitments, strategies, and (legal) challenges underlying the exercise of “counterpower” by news organizations helps inform lawmakers in developing effective responses to the changing media environment. the goal is to bridge the disciplinary gaps between (digital) journalism studies, communication science, and law and policy. to tackle the challenges of increasing opinion power wielded by platforms, growing (structural) dependencies and concentrated power in the media, empirical evidence from the ground (the news organization) is needed to inform effective lawmaking. further, it will help detect current (legal) gaps in the system and create a (legal) environment more favorable of an independent and autonomous news media, a pluralistic media landscape, and the promotion of public and democratic values. methodology between march and september 2023, i conducted 12 semi-structured interviews, lasting approximately 45-60 minutes each, with experts from news organizations in the uk (7) and the netherlands (5). the interviewees included key personnel in areas such as public policy, legal affairs, innovation, data and technology, platform, and commercial strategy. the interviews aimed to explore the concept of "counterpower" in practice and contribute an industry perspective to debates on platform dependence, power concentration, and media pluralism. the conversations were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed through a mixed method of deductive and inductive coding with atlas.ti. the analysis focused on three main themes: a) audience relationship and attention, b) technological innovation and independence, and c) economic viability and sustainability. within each theme, an inductive approach was employed to code relevant passages, identifying goals, strategies, and challenges related to "counterpower." during this period, discussions intensified about ai implementation in the media, specifically generative ai. while this article primarily explores platform power in the media, noteworthy is the role of companies like google and microsoft, leading in ai development. the consequences of their focus shift on ai and some withdrawing from the news industry remain uncertain but significantly impact ongoing regulatory, policy debates, and industry strategies aimed at balancing power dynamics. empirical findings the literature review and conceptualization of "counterpower" explore various grounds for its exercise, particularly in response to challenges posed by platform mediation in news distribution. this triggers organizations to implement strategic countermeasures aiming to regain control over their audiences. interviews reveal a dual commitment to "counterpower": normative and professional journalistic values and economic control. goals and commitments public interest driven: normative and professional journalistic values: news organizations, classified as "quality news media," integrate their democratic mission into their core identity. despite concerns, news organizations stay on social media platforms to meet audiences where they are, focusing on building trust, cultivating direct relationships, and upholding ethical and professional principles. this commitment extends to transforming the culture and public perception of journalism as a "public good." economic interest driven: commercial and strategic control: beyond normative goals, organizations are motivated by economic interests, emphasizing integrity and autonomy in digital and innovation strategies. the overarching aim is to exercise control over infrastructures, data, technologies, and skills. independence from external funding for sustainable business models is crucial, considering external limits on complete control. "counterpower" strategies 1. direct and engaged journalism: building direct and engaged journalism emerges as an effective "counterpower" strategy, contributing to both normative and economic goals. this involves building trust, enhancing subscriptions, and fostering a loyal readership. despite a commitment to direct engagement, interactions often occur via social media, raising questions about the necessity of complete disengagement. 2. diversify dependence: complementing direct and engaged journalism, diversifying dependence is highlighted as a crucial "counterpower" strategy. excessive dependence on few platforms creates a "feedback loop," strengthening platform power. organizations seek control over dependence, considering options such as reliance on various platforms, alternative providers with higher privacy standards, or investing in developing their tools. in navigating technological innovation and constraints, "counterpower" does not mandate complete independence but emphasizes control over tool usage, relationships with providers, and adherence to professional and ethical standards. news organizations play a pivotal role in shaping the transformation of the news landscape through strategic decisions regarding technology use, including diversifying dependence on different platforms, providers, or investing in proprietary tools and platforms. legal discussion numerous regulatory initiatives, such as the dsa, dma, emfa, ai act in europe aim to address power imbalances, ensure fair competition, and uphold values like media freedom and pluralism. while these proposals present interesting provisions, their effectiveness is subject to limitations. to foster direct and engaged journalism, power dynamics between news media and the audience must be dispersed. the dsa, for instance, addresses systemic risks from recommender algorithms, mandating transparency and user control. article 27 requires very large online platforms (vlops) using recommender systems to disclose parameters and offer user adjustments, contributing to a potential rebalancing of relationships. the emfa proposal focuses on media concentration issues, emphasizing the need for eu member states to assess and regulate media concentration independently from competition law. acknowledging platforms' roles in opinion formation, the proposal calls for legislation to effectively assess media concentration in the digital age. concrete guidance and clarity on the role of national media authorities are essential. diversifying dependencies for news organizations necessitates a diverse array of alternative providers. the dma targets dominant platforms, imposing stricter obligations to counterbalance market concentration. this can create a fairer business environment, encourage innovation, and offer consumers more choices, fostering diversification in the news industry. ensuring technologies, platforms, and providers meet security, privacy, and copyright standards is crucial. effective enforcement of existing laws, particularly in privacy, data protection, security, and copyright, is essential for leveraging the benefits of digitalization. ai regulation should address transparency concerns in development, especially regarding copyright infringements. reframing tax laws may be necessary to support and subsidize journalism while preventing tech monopolies from exploiting their position. in essence, "counterpower" should be a central consideration in legal and policy discussions on power concentration and platform dependence in the media. it entails empowering news organizations to exert control over their operations, fostering independence, autonomy, and agency in their relationships, all while striking a delicate balance to safeguard media, promote pluralism, and remove barriers without stifling innovation or creating legal uncertainty. references (non-exhaustive): baker ec, ‘media concentration: giving up on democracy’ (2002) 54 flordia law review 839 ——, media concentration and democracy: why ownership matters (cambridge university press 2007) bernholz l, landemore h and reich r (eds), digital technology and democratic theory (university of chicago press 2021) blagojev t and others, ‘news deserts in europe: assessing risks for local and community media in the 27 eu member states’ (2023) eui, rsc, preliminary report brantner c, rodríguez-amat jr and belinskaya y, ‘structures of the public sphere: contested spaces as assembled interfaces’ (2021) 9 media and communication 16 castells m, ‘communication, power and counter-power in the network society’ (2007) 1 international journal of communication 238 chua s and westlund o, ‘platform configuration: a longitudinal study and conceptualization of a legacy news publisher’s platform-related innovation practices’ (2022) 1 online media and global communication 60 cohen j, ‘turning privacy inside out’ (2018) 20 theoretical inquiries in law 17 de-lima-santos m-f and others, ‘google news initiative’s influence on technological media innovation in africa and the middle east’ (2023) 11 media and communication <https://www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication/article/view/6400> accessed 13 september 2023 diakopolous n, automating the news: how algorithms are rewriting the news (harvard university press 2019) dijk, van j, de waal m and poell t, the platform society (oxford university press 2018) <https://search-ebscohostcom.proxy.uba.uva.nl/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&an=1901418&site=ehostlive&scope=site> dodds t and others, ‘popularity-driven metrics: audience analytics and shifting opinion power to digital platforms’ [2023] journalism studies 1 drunen mz van and fechner d, ‘safeguarding editorial independence in an automated media system: the relationship between law and journalistic perspectives’ (2022) 0 digital journalism 1 epra, ‘online platforms: inevitable partners in the battle for attention?’ (epra 2023) <https://www.epra.org/news_items/reuters-digital-news-report-2023-decliningengagement-and-uncertain-business-environment> ferrer-conill r and tandoc ec, ‘the audience-oriented editor: making sense of the audience in the newsroom’ (2018) 6 digital journalism 436 gillerspie t, ‘the politics of platforms’ (2010) 12 new media & society 347 han b-c, what is power? (daniel steuer tr, english edition, polity press 2019) heawood j and peter f, ‘co-creational media: committing to truth and public participation’ (public interest news foundation 2023) helberger n, ‘challenging diversity social media platforms and a new conception of media diversity’ in damian tambini and martin moore (eds), digital dominance (oxford university press 2018) <https://dare.uva.nl/search?identifier=a5578d82-3c74-4c669fb3-491c3806b48c> ——, ‘on the democratic role of news recommenders’ (2019) 7 digital journalism 993 ——, ‘the political power of platforms: how current attempts to regulate misinformation amplify opinion power’ (2020) 8 digital journalism ——, ‘die regulierung von sozialen medien aus einer international vergleichenden perspektive’ in wolfgang schulz and keno potthast (eds), wissenschaftskommunikation und social media zwischen rechtsschutz und regulierungsbedarf (berlin-brandenburgische akademie der wissenschaften 2021) <https://leibniz-hbi.de/uploads/media/default/cms/media/qwsbbhi_broschuerewid_15_pdf-a-1b.pdf> ingram m, ‘should the media quit facebook?’ columbia journalism review (9 may 2019) <https://www.cjr.org/the_new_gatekeepers/should-the-media-quit-facebook.php> ——, ‘will facebook changes leave news media out in the cold?’ columbia journalism review (28 july 2022) <https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/will-facebookchanges-leave-news-media-out-in-the-cold.php> ——, ‘is facebook quitting the news business?’ columbia journalism review (7 december 2022) <https://www.cjr.org/cjr_outbox/is-facebook-quitting-the-newsbusiness.php> ——, ‘canada imitates australia’s news-bargaining law, but to what end?’ columbia journalism review (16 march 2023) <https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/canada_australia_platforms_news_law.php> international media support (ims), ‘lack of independent media funding is a major cause of news desertification around europe’ international media support (ims) (10 july 2023) <https://www.mediasupport.org/news/lack-of-independent-media-funding-isa-major-cause-of-news-desertification-around-europe/> kristensen lm and hartley jm, ‘the infrastructure of news: negotiating infrastructural capture and autonomy in data-driven news distribution’ (2023) 11 media and communication <https://www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication/article/view/6388> accessed 13 september 2023 lecheler s and de vreese ch, ‘news media, knowledge, and political interest: evidence of a dual role from a field experiment: news media, knowledge, and political interest’ (2017) 67 journal of communication 545 lukes s, power: a radical view (third edition, red globe press 2021) lynskey o, ‘regulating “platform power”’ [2017] lse law, society and economy working papers 1/2017 meese j, digital platforms and the press (intellect 2023) <https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.4908263> moore m and tambini d, regulating big tech: policy responses to digital dominance (1. edition, oxford university press 2022) nechushtai e, ‘could digital platforms capture the media through infrastructure?’ (2018) 19 journalism 1043 nemitz p and pfeffer m, ‘determining our technological and democratic future: a wish list’ in damian tambini (ed), regulating big tech. policy responses to digital dominance (1st edn, oxford university press 2022) neuberger c, ‘meinungsmacht im internet aus kommunikationswissenschaftlicher sicht’ [2018] ufita neuberger c and lobigs f, ‘meinungsmacht im internet und die digitalstrategien von medienunternehmen. neue machtverhältnisse trotz expandierender internetgeschäfte der traditionellen massenmedien-konzerne.’ [2018] die medienanstalten newman n and others, ‘digital news report 2023’ (reuters institute for the study of journalism 2023) <https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/202306/digital_news_report_2023.pdf> nielsen rk and ganter sa, the power of platforms (oxford university press 2022) papaevangelou c, ‘funding intermediaries: google and facebook’s strategy to capture journalism’ [2023] digital journalism 1 papaevangelou c, ‘funding intermediaries: google and facebook’s strategy to capture journalism.’ digital journalism pickard v, democracy without journalism (oxford university press 2020) ——, ‘restructuring democratic infrastructures: a policy approach to the journalism crisis’ (2020) 8 digital journalism poell t, nieborg db and duffy be, ‘spaces of negotiation: analyzing platform power in the news industry’ [2022] digital journalism 1 radcliffe d and mathews n, ‘tow report: building a stronger local media ecosystem: the role of media policy’ columbia journalism review (20 april 2023) <https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/building-a-stronger-local-media-ecosystem-therole-of-media-policy.php> radsch c, ‘frenemies: global approaches to rebalance the big tech v journalism relationship’ (2022) <https://www.brookings.edu/articles/frenemies-global-approachesto-rebalance-the-big-tech-v-journalism-relationship/> ——, ‘platformization and media capture: a framework for regulatory analysis of media-related platform regulations’ (2023) 28 ucla journal of law & technology, platforms and the press 75 sawers p, ‘meta to deprecate facebook news in the uk, germany and france’ techcrunch (5 september 2023) schiffrin a (ed), media capture: how money, digital platforms, and governments control the news (columbia university press 2021) schulz w, gewährleistung kommunikativer chancengleichheit als freiheitsverwirklichung (materialien zur rechtswissenschaftlichen medien-und informationsforschung, 1998) ——, ‘kontrolle vorherrschender meinungsmacht rekonstruktion eines medienrechtlichen schlüsselbegriffs’ (2017) 48 afp 373 schulz w and held t, ‘die zukunft der kontrolle der meinungsmacht’ (fes (friedrichebert-stiftung) 2006) seipp tj, ‘news media’s dependency on big tech: should we be worried?’ (internet policy review, 10 june 2021) <https://policyreview.info/articles/news/news-mediasdependency-big-tech-should-we-be-worried/1562> ——, ‘media concentration law: gaps and promises for the digital age’ (2023) 11 media & communication <https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v11i2.6393> ——, ‘dealing with opinion power in the platform world: why we really have to rethink media concentration law’ [2023] digital journalism simon f, ‘uneasy bedfellows: ai in the news, platform companies and the issue of journalistic autonomy.’ (2022) 10 digital journalism 1832 simon fm, ‘ai will not revolutionise journalism, but it is far from a fad’ (oxford internet institute, 6 march 2023) <https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/news/ai-will-notrevolutionise-journalism-but-it-is-far-from-a-fad/> stroud nj and van duyn e, ‘curbing the decline of local news by building relationships with the audience’ (2023) 73 journal of communication 452 tambini d, media freedom (polity press 2021) van drunen mz and fechner d, ‘safeguarding editorial independence in an automated media system: the relationship between law and journalistic perspectives’ [2022] digital journalism 1 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): nikunen, k. & valtonen, s. (2024, october). platformization of the indusrty of human smuggling. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. platformization of the industry of human smuggling kaarina nikunen tampere university sanna valtonen tampere university introduction in recent years, europe has hardened its border practices to the extent that it has become increasingly difficult to enter europe and request asylum through legal avenues. in this situation migrants and asylum seekers entering europe increasingly rely on information about alternative routes and smuggling services shared on various social media platforms. our paper explores the emergence of the industry of human smuggling that operates on social media platforms. based on interviews with migrants and refugees in finland, we describe both the platforms for exchanging information and their logics and the concerns raised on them and about them. while previous research has focused on connectivity and securitization of mobility, we focus on the digital markets that are connected to mobility and migration, mainly around smuggling and trafficking. this area of research is often discussed with the prefix ‘dark’, connected to issues of illegality, crisis, conflicts and death such as in dark tourism to sites of death or catastrophe (stone 2013), or as in dark web, a digital platform of criminal activities (gehl 2018). the aim of our research is not to demonize smuggling (augustova et al. 2023) but rather to gain a more nuanced understanding of the complications of digital markets around mobility for the people concerned, and most importantly offer insight into the ways in which platform economy shapes migrant mobility and safety of migrants. method and data our research is based on interviews, diaries, workshops, documents, case observations, social media sites and digital marketplaces shared by migrants and refugees who participated in the study. with a combination participatory research and virtual ethnography (hine 2015) we map digital sites of smuggling and explore the ways in which the research participants, in their highly precarious situation, engaged with smuggling and dealt with the challenges they faced. our research focuses on how digital markets of smuggling operate in the context of platform economy and who benefits from it in the end. we explore the ‘travel agencies’, route guides, advertisements, documents and the digital architecture of information flows. as argued by borkert et al (2018) for internationally displaced persons, migrating into europe is associated with severe risks that may lead to financial ruin, loss of family, injury and even death. we acknowledge that researching people in such a vulnerable situation requires a particular attention to ethical guidelines throughout the research and commitment to the principles of confidentiality and doing no harm (black, 2003). analysis and findings social media platforms such as tiktok, facebook, telegram and whatsapp have become important marketplaces for human traffickers and smugglers (gopalan 2023; raets and janssens 2021). in the context of human smuggling, succesful routes and activities are marketed openly on social media, particularly on tiktok. the platformed smuggling industry follows the logics of digital markets, such as airbnb or tripadvisor in the sense that migrants who have used smuggling routes or services are guided to give feedback within the platforms (campana and gelsthorpe 2021). often this requires forced visibility and participation on travel videos shared by the smugglers. for the smugglers, online-based feedback, reviews and experience-sharing are an important part of crafting professional image as reliable. however, from the point of view of a migrant or refugee using the routes, trust is not only related to platforms, technology or a professional, industry-like way of operating, but also to social networks and the structures of belonging that influence them. furthermore the trust is constantly uncertain and requires forced visibility on platforms in ways that deepen vulnerability in a highly precarious life situation. the research shows the significance of the role of migrants’ and refugees’ affective (forced) digital labor in sharing experiences and rating services on these platforms. however, at the same time the social network of peers enables filtering safe and trustworthy services from those that are dangerous, overpriced and predatory. thus sharing experiences with others has become central in tackling misinformation and reducing risks. overall the research shows how the industry of human smuggling operates increasingly on social media and follows the logics of platformization (helmond 2015; van dijck et al 2018 ). it is (informal and irregular) work that is facilitated by platform infrastructure, organized via online but requires spatial proximity and temporal synchronicity (kluzik 2022) and relies on the affective, forced digital labor of people in precarious life situations. while platforms benefit from the traffic on these sites they may claim ignorance of the risks and illegal nature of the markets and at the same time render all parties involved prone to data surveillance and control. the rise of such industry without regulation or safety can be seen highly problematic in making profit on people in precarious and often desperate situations as well as offering space for potentially risky and predatory entrepreneurship. however, at the same time the transition of smuggling markets to social media platforms can also be considered at some level, to increase the safety of migrants and refugees due to information, evaluations, reviews and recommendations shared among peers. the implications of the platformization of the smuggling industry are complex and echo the ambivalent consequences of platform economy at large. markets that are born under crisis and in deeply unequal circumstances, when merging with inequalities of platform economy, are not likely to turn fair and safe yet some unexpected beneficial consequences may arise in these emergent contexts. the paper further discusses the social and political implications of the platformization of migration mobility and the role and responsibility of eu policy in the advent of it. references: augustova k.,carrapico, h. & obradović-wochnik, j. (2023). becoming a smuggler: migration and violence at eu external borders, geopolitics, 28:2, 619-640. black, r. (2003). breaking the convention: researching the “illegal” migration of refugees to europe. antipode, 35(1), 34–54. borkert, m., fisher, k. e., & yafi, e. (2018). the best, the worst, and the hardest to find: how people, mobiles, and social media connect migrants in(to) europe. social media + society, 4(1). campana, p. and gelsthorpe, l. (2021). choosing a smuggler: decision-making amongst migrants smuggled to europe. european journal on criminal policy and research 27:5-21. gehl, r. (2018) weaving the dark web: legitimacy on freenet, tor, and i2p. mit press. gopalan, r (2023) social networks and human trafficking. in boskovic, m, misev g & putnik (eds.) analyzing new forms of social disorders in modern virtual environments. igi-global. helmond, a. (2015). the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready. social media + society july-december: 1–11. hine, c. (2000) virtual ethnography. thousand oaks, ca: sage. kluzik, v. (2022). governing invisibility in the platform economy:excavating the logics of platform care. internet policy review 11(1): 1-21. raets, s., and janssens, j. (2021). trafficking and technology: exploring the role of digital communication technologies in the belgian human trafficking business. eur j crim policy res 27, 215–238. stone, p. (2013) dark tourism scholarship: a critical review. international journal of culture, tourism and hospitality research 7(3) 307-318. van dijck, j., poell, t. & de wall, m. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford university press. https://www.igi-global.com/book/analyzing-new-forms-social-disorders/297131 microsoft word zulli-pathways to radicalism-pathways to radicalism.docx selected papers of #aoir2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers dublin, ireland / 2-5 nov 2022 suggested citation (apa): zulli, d., mann, m., foote, j., ku, e., primm, e. (2022, november). pathways to radicalism: examining online community and political pathways to more radical beliefs on reddit. paper presented at aoir 2022: the 23rd annual conference of the association of internet researchers. dublin, ireland: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. pathways to radicalism: examining online community and political pathways to more radical beliefs on reddit diana zulli purdue university marcus mann purdue university jeremy foote purdue university emily ku purdue university emily primm purdue university introduction political radicalization threatens democracy, and violent radicals often point to radical online communities as motivating their behavior. researchers have sought to understand online exposure to radicalism through structural mechanisms like algorithms but have not found strong evidence of their influence (ledwich & zaitsev, 2019; nelson & webster, 2017). at the same time, models of offline radicalization emphasize the importance of personal motivations like the desire for significance and community but do not fully account for online contexts (king & taylor, 2011; hafez & mullins, 2015). we integrate these approaches, which are both interested in early-stage radicalization processes, to better understand how people’s desire for significance impacts their potential for exposure to radical beliefs and communities online, self-perceptions of these processes, and perceptions of radicalization itself. through interviews with politically active reddit users who participate in mainstream and fringe subreddits, we ask: rq1) what are the pathways to radical content and communities online? and rq2) what are the perceptions of radicalization in online communities? method this paper reports the findings from 27 semi-structured phone interviews with participants who engage with mainstream and fringe political communities on reddit, conducted between january and september 2021. participants were recruited through purposeful sampling based on their activity on liberal, conservative, and fringe political subreddits. participants responded to a range of questions about their political media consumption and relationship with radicalization processes, such as how they became interested in reddit, the nature of their participation on reddit, and their perceptions of extreme political beliefs and behaviors on and off the platform. the data were analyzed using grounded theory (glaser & strauss, 2009) and thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2006). we report four themes below, using them to propose new theoretical insights about political radicalization. findings political disillusionment offline; incidental exposure to politics online participants cited dissatisfaction with the ‘biased’ mainstream media, party politics/polarization, and the inability to engage in productive discussions offline as one reason for their reddit use. for participants, mainstream media has become too biased, editorialized, and sensationalized. politics is now a ‘team sport’ where there are winners and losers and few options for collective progress. many participants felt unrepresented by the two-party system. this mismatch between the perception of others’ staunch party alignment and participants’ nuanced views made them generally disappointed with the nature and quality of their offline political discussions. meanwhile, participants were already participating in non-political communities on reddit, where they were gradually exposed to political content and communities. this political disillusionment offline, coupled with casual encounters with reddit, led to a range of political engagement on the platform—from lurking on general political subreddits (e.g., r/politics) to actively participating in fringe communities (e.g., r/conspiracy, r/accidentallycommunist, r/anarco_capitalism, r/qult_headquarters). reddit for ‘earnest’ and ‘non-partisan’ discussions participants saw reddit as a conducive platform for “earnest,” productive, and nonpartisan discussions. participants reported engaging with a variety of mainstream and fringe subreddits—some aligned with their political views and some not—to interact with a spectrum of ideas and better understand why people believe what they do. participants expressed coming to these discussions in good faith—being genuinely confused or fascinated by a viewpoint and open to new ideas. having these nuanced discussions with un(or under)-represented political arrangements on reddit allowed participants to reject party politics and actualize a core value: developing “informed” political opinions based on evidence and debate. reddit as radical space; unaffected participants participants were quick to blame partisan polarization for the problems in american politics. however, when asked if their beliefs had become more extreme or radical over time, due to either their reddit use or other factors, participants overwhelmingly said their political beliefs were unchanged. in fact, some indicated moving to more centrist beliefs because of their thoughtful discussions on reddit. conversely, participants said they observed other redditors becoming more extreme in their beliefs and discourses online. undergirding this discrepancy was a perception of intellectual superiority. participants described themselves as “self-reliant,” “hyper-logical, “hyper-rational,” and thus incapable of being influenced by fringe beliefs. although some participants actively engaged on extreme or fringe subreddits, many said they understood social media platforms for what they are, both good and bad, and therefore were insulated from radicalization on reddit. virtuous participation to prevent radicalization not only did many participants feel immune to radicalization, but they perceived their reddit participation as necessary to prevent radicalization and partisan polarization. this virtuous participation involved asking questions, “poking holes” in arguments (for which some participants were banned), providing peer-reviewed research, and direct messaging fellow redditors to facilitate conversations in less public spaces. participants believed they were uniquely capable of engaging in productive dialogue because they possessed the appropriate temperament and were more educated on political issues than the average user. conclusion this study provides important insight into the media and social/psychological pathways that could lead to encounters with radical content and communities online. we argue the above insights are potentially indicative of a new model of radicalization. this model, titled “unsorting the self,” reflects individual progression to politically radical communities and viewpoints and is composed of four stages: 1) perceiving a politically sorted landscape, 2) political fatigue and disillusionment, 3) the search for political exceptionalism coinciding with encounters with unsorted spaces, and, 4) political radicalization. both offline and online, participants perceived less room for arrangements of political beliefs that did not fit neatly into partisan categories or were not “down the line” republican or democrat. this led to overall fatigue with 1) political discourse among friends/family, 2) “biased” or unnuanced political media, and 3) political polarization itself as a process that has corrupted both personal networks and mainstream media as sources of political engagement and information. this fatigue often led to self-sustaining cycles of encounters with unsorted online spaces, like those found on reddit, followed by virtuous participation in ways that cultivate feelings of exceptionalism. although this process was commonly expressed as a source of political invigoration for participants, we argue this potentially represents an important initial step into more radical political communities—and one that people may not see as risky because they view themselves as participating in order to help others and are therefore immune to radicalization. collectively, the “unsorting the self” model offers a new framework for studying radicalization on online platforms like reddit that addresses gaps in current understandings of political radicalization and the role of online communities. references braun, v., & clarke, v. (2006). using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77-101. glaser, b. g., & strauss, a. l. (2009). the discovery of grounded theory. aldine transaction. hafez, m., & mullins, c. (2015). the radicalization puzzle: a theoretical synthesis of empirical approaches to homegrown extremism. studies in conflict & terrorism, 38(11). 958–975. doi:10.1080/1057610x.2015.1051375. king, m., & taylor, d. m. (2011). the radicalization of homegrown jihadists: a review of theoretical models and social psychological evidence. terrorism and political violence, 23(4). 602–622. doi:10.1080/09546553.2011.587064. ledwich, m., & zaitsev, a. (2019). algorithmic extremism: examining youtube's rabbit hole of radicalization. arxiv preprint arxiv:1912.11211. nelson, j.l., & webster, j.g. (2017). the myth of partisan selective exposure: a portrait of the online political news audience. social media+ society, 3(3), doi:10.1177/2056305117729314. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): nemer, d., & marks, w. (2023, october). unraveling disinformation: examining the human infrastructure of misinformation in brazil through the lens of heteromation. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. unraveling disinformation: examining the human infrastructure of misinformation in brazil through the lens of heteromation david nemer university of virginia william marks harvard university introduction as the information landscape continues to evolve, the widespread dissemination of disinformation is proliferating at a rate and scale never seen in a democratic society. in recent years, major technology companies have taken much of the public blame for this reality, given their algorithms facilitate the sharing of—and sometimes even promote— falsehoods. this, however, misses a key reality; social media, search engines, and messaging services are not fully automated technologies. rather, they are heteromated: they are reliant on participatory humans to serve their economic goals. misand disinformation and selective news filtering gained attention from scholars and the general public after they contributed to social media platforms’ ideological polarization that favored donald trump in the 2016 us presidential election and the “brexit” vote (vaidhyanathan, 2018). however, the rise of brazil’s former president, the far-right firebrand jair bolsonaro, owes much to whatsappa messaging app that runs on a peer-to-peer architecture, where no algorithm curates content according to the characteristics or demographics of the users. instead, a human infrastructure was assembled to create a pro-bolsonaro environment on whatsapp and spread misinformation to bolster his candidacy (see nemer 2021a, 2021b, 2022). in this paper, we articulate the labor executed by the human infrastructure of misinformation (him) as heteromated labor (see nemer & marks, in press). as claimed by hamid ekbia and bonnie nardi (2017), there has been a shift from technologies of automation, those which are entirely managed by machines, to those of “heteromation,” which push critical tasks to end-users as indispensable mediators. unlike technologies of automation, those of heteromation benefit from or depend on often-unrecognized or uncompensated human labor to complete tasks. the field of disinformation studies has yet to address questions related to the relationship between disinformation and labor, identity, and morality. thus, as claimed by jonathan ong and jason cabañes (2019), approaching disinformation as a culture of production expands the field into understanding the social conditions that entice people to this work and the creative industry practices that normalize fake news as a side gig. him in brazil given the prevalence of whatsapp use and the intriguing way that misinformation was spread during brazil’s 2018 presidential election, david nemer began monitoring whatsapp groups in march 2018 that had an average of 160 members. at the peak of the election cycle, each group was posting an average of one thousand messages per day. in august, after conducting the first thematic analysis of the data, nemer identified three clusters of actors across the groups: the average brazilians, the bolso-army, and the influencers. nemer found that misinformation was spread in these groups through a pyramid structure, similar to the classic two-step flow of communication model (katz and lazarsfeld, 1966) in which each cluster of actors occupied a level. influencers were at the top and average brazilians were at the bottom (see nemer 20221a, 2021b, 2022). heteromation of him him sustained an information system, in this case, misinformation on whatsapp, that functioned through the actions of heterogeneous actorsin other words, the members of such infrastructure were users that provided the heteromated labor necessary to make misinformation on whatsapp work. ekbia and nardi (2017) examine heteromated systems according to their functionality and reward structure. they categorize systems in terms of who benefits from the heteromated labor relation, whether participant compensation (monetary) is offered, and whether the system produces affective rewards. beneficiaries are social actors that reap the major benefits of heteromated labor. participants may benefit from affective rewards. following the authors' categorization, the heteromation system that him labored in can be organized as detailed in table 1 table 1 heteromation of the him. system heteromated functionality beneficiaries participant compensation affective rewards for participants misinformation on whatsapp human infrastructure of misinformation politicians influencers: medium-high average brazilians: high influencers: contentcreation; cognitive and creative labor. bolso-army: repetitive microtasks; communicative and organizing labor. average brazilians: emotional and communicative labor. bolso-army: medium-high the heteromated labor performed by influencers and bolso-army was compensated in amounts of between usd 100 and usd 250 per week (between brl 380 and brl 900 approximately). such an amount can be considered "medium-high" since the brazilian minimum monthly wage in 2018 was set in at brl 954 and the average monthly household income per capita was brl 1.337 (ibge, 2019). influencers were at the top of the him: they were responsible for producing and bringing new misinformation to probolsonaro groups on whatsapp. their cognitive labor comprised of understanding the current and complex political environment in order to promote the presidential candidate jair bolsonaro and/or to respond to the criticism that bolsonaro was receiving during his campaign. such cognitive labor led to the influencers' creative labor which meant creating outputs – like pro-bolsonaro memes and short videos. as for bolso-army, they did not engage in heteromated cognitive labor, instead, they were in charge of repetitive microtasks that followed a predefined script and/or reacted to a previous trigger. bolso-army performed communicative labor as they were scripted to reinforce the influencers' content's message, as soon as new content was posted to those pro-bolsonaro groups on whatsapp, in order to make sure that the ordinary brazilians internalized their message, as well as to spread the same content to other whatsapp groups and platforms such as twitter and groups on facebook. differently than claimed by ekbia and nardi, that described communicative labor as the act of engaging online in return for self-validation and self-promotion, members of the bolsoarmy were not necessarily after self-validation and/or self-promotion; their main goal was to validate and promote the message contained in the influencer's posts. the average brazilians, performed communicative labor as they also helped spread the misinformation posted on those pro-bolsonaro groups to their other personal groups that were not necessarily politically oriented, such as family, neighborhood, and friend groups. they often used the content posted by the influencers as evidence for their arguments in their online debates. average brazilians also performed emotional labor (hochschild, 1983), since they were expected to regulate their emotions during interactions with the bolso-army and other average brazilians. fearing being kicked out of those whatsapp groups, they often complied with the bolso-army's authority and avoided asking questions that could be interpreted as them challenging bolsonaro's legacy. instead, they often responded to the influencers or bolso-army posts by cheering with the brazilian flag, validating messages, or with bolsonaro’s trademark handgun emoji (👉). that validating or positive response was perceived by average brazilians to have their loyalty recognized by the bolso-army and rewarded with their permanence in the groups. studies on heteromated systems have focused on creating awareness around labor exploitation, compensation, invisibility, and advocating for labor rights (bailey et al. 2018; ekbia & nardi 2017; irani 2019; sambasivan et al 2021). however, in the case of the human infrastructure of misinformation, given its ethical and quasilegal practices, such awareness may not be wanted nor beneficial to its members. in many cases, we might call for unpaid heteromated labor to be compensated, or for the greater acknowledgment of the work of low-paid creators. however, when it comes to the heteromated process of the him, the actors involved are creating what is likely a societal net negative, calling into question the types of behaviors that should be incentivized. references bailey, d. e., diniz, e. h., nardi, b. a., leonardi, p. m., & sholler, d. (2018). a critical approach to human helping in information systems: heteromation in the brazilian correspondent banking system. information and organization, 28(3), 111-128. ekbia, h. r., & nardi, b. a. (2017). heteromation, and other stories of computing and capitalism. mit press. hochschild, a. r. (1983). the managed heart: commercialization of human feeling. university of california press ibge. (2019, october 16). pnad contínua 2018: 10% da população concentram 43,1% da massa de rendimentos do país. agência ibge notícias. retrieved from https://agenciadenoticias.ibge.gov.br/agencia-sala-de-imprensa/2013-agencia-denoticias/releases/25700-pnad-continua-2018-10-da-populacao-concentram-43-1-damassa-de-rendimentos-do-pais irani, l. (2019). justice for data janitors. in think in public (pp. 23-40). columbia university press. katz, e., & lazarsfeld. p. f. (1966). personal influence, the part played by people in the flow of mass communications. a report of the bureau of applied social research. columbia university free press. https://agenciadenoticias.ibge.gov.br/agencia-sala-de-imprensa/2013-agencia-de-noticias/releases/25700-pnad-continua-2018-10-da-populacao-concentram-43-1-da-massa-de-rendimentos-do-pais https://agenciadenoticias.ibge.gov.br/agencia-sala-de-imprensa/2013-agencia-de-noticias/releases/25700-pnad-continua-2018-10-da-populacao-concentram-43-1-da-massa-de-rendimentos-do-pais https://agenciadenoticias.ibge.gov.br/agencia-sala-de-imprensa/2013-agencia-de-noticias/releases/25700-pnad-continua-2018-10-da-populacao-concentram-43-1-da-massa-de-rendimentos-do-pais nemer, d. (2021a). the human infrastructure of fake news in brazil. items. social sciences research council. nemer, d. (2021b). disentangling brazil’s disinformation insurgency. nacla report on the americas, 53(4), 406-413. nemer, d. (2022). technology of the oppressed: inequity and the digital mundane in favelas of brazil. mit press. nemer, d., & marks, w. (in press). the human infrastructure of misinformation: a case study of brazil’s heteromated labor. in m. ocepek, & m. sanfilippo (eds.), governing misinformation in knowledge commons. cambridge university press. ong, j., & cabañes, j. (2019). when disinformation studies meets production studies: social identities and moral justifications in the political trolling industry. international journal of communication, 13, 20. retrieved from https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/11417/2879 sambasivan, n., kapania, s., highfill, h., akrong, d., paritosh, p., & aroyo, l. m. (2021, may). “everyone wants to do the model work, not the data work”: data cascades in high-stakes ai. in proceedings of the 2021 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-15). vaidhyanathan, s. (2018). antisocial media: how facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy. oxford university press. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/11417/2879 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): rudenshiold, a.; dame-griff, a.; maclean, l.; mackinnon, k. (2023, october). dispatches from the early internet: histories, imaginaries, archaeologies. panel presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. dispatches from the early internet: histories, imaginaries, and archaeologies alexander rudenshiold university of california—irvine avery dame-griff gonzaga university liam maclean northeastern university katie mackinnon university of toronto panel abstract the internet today is popularly defined by a range of often appified or platformized (morris and murray 2018; helmond 2015) inequitable norms of access level, design uniformity, and cultures of use which appear to users as dependably available, predictable, and functioning. this ‘[world wide] web 2.0’ formation – “the internet” now most commonly referred to – as directed by corporate social media giants, hardware manufacturers, and internet service providers has the effect of homogenizing, sanitizing, and monetizing internet use whenever and wherever possible. outliers to these structures are known entities, often subcultural and/or troublemakers, access to whom are gatekept from general users by their unfamiliar interfaces or guarded communities and infrastructures – many of which are inherited from previous modalities of internet use. the “early web” and “modem world” (lingel 2020; driscoll 2022) represent periodizations of internet histories which look and feel markedly different from much of the contemporary popular internet. these networked computing paradigms operated with different infrastructures than those of today, usually requiring users to build physical hardware and/or write software in order to create and access online spaces. these digital sites served their users in specific functionalities, often by virtue of being in some way constructed by, and thus familiar to, them. though by no means egalitarian utopias themselves, early internet technologies afforded their denizens more control 2 over their online engagement through direct involvement with the user groups that created or primarily populated them. recent interest in more thoroughly historicizing the internet beyond its arpanet creation myth and subsequent “hacker” cyberculture has generated a wealth of research on different, plural “net histories” (driscoll and paloque-berges 2017) working across technical interfaces, infrastructures, and cultures of use to paint a more complete picture of how internet and computing cultures, as we now know them, came to be (mailland and driscoll 2017; brock 2020; lingel 2020; mckinney 2020; driscoll 2022). this growing body of work which investigates temporally situated, geographically disparate, and marginalized peoples’ internet histories raises questions about how we understand the contemporary internet’s composition through offering insights into how it has operated under prior, less centralized constructions. each paper in this panel builds on and between these themes of inquiry to introduce new histories of their own, or to complicate extant concepts of internet history. the first paper in this collection traces a lineage of terminological and identity evolution in transgender communities from the early internet to the present through the development of search technology and information seeking practices. the second presents the co-emergent narrative of “furry” subculture alongside hobbyist computing, which shapes the form of this community and inspires a contemporary mythology of internet infrastructural maintenance. shifting into a geographical register, the third paper traces a history of left-wing german political organizing on the early internet at the point of rupture beginning before the country’s reunification in 1989. the fourth paper continues this region-based analysis, documenting an ecosystem of “marginal” social websites which dominated and shaped online youth cultures and imaginaries in canada during the late 1990s and early 2000s through a case study of nexopia.com. these papers engage with the internet at and across different times when and places where its constituent elements, many now either outmoded or taken for granted, were seen as revolutionary. as today’s internet scholars and users grapple with the many different ongoing web revolutions – be they the ever-vague “web 3.0,” the fediverse, or new models of artificial intelligence – these new contributions to our historical understanding of the internet demonstrate how people have dealt with their own moments’ “revolution” in networked computing technology, and in some ways problematize the idea of a “technological revolution” itself. new technological developments are framed as revolutionary updates under the hegemonic logic of neoliberalism, but are actually just the most recent in a lineage of continuous and overlapping revolutions to the crisis machines of new media (chun 2017). the histories presented in this panel continue to chart the “erosion of the distinction between the revolutionary and the conventional” (12) through close examination of their respective topics’ situations in relation to subsequent internet development. working in an interdisciplinary space (queer studies, fan studies, political history, media and communication studies), the scholarship which follows argues for a more nuanced and heterogenous, and less teleological-toward-democracy, approach to internet history 3 through its case studies. resisting the “revolutionary” framing which has long dominated discussions of communication technology, these papers develop accounts of historical internet use which are now sublimated into and/or made invisible by the pervasive, falsely revolutionary narrative of “the internet.” estimating time remaining [until the next revolution]... references brock, andré l. 2020. distributed blackness: african american cybercultures. critical cultural communication. new york: new york university press. chun, wendy hui kyong. 2017. updating to remain the same: habitual new media. first mit press new paperback edition. new media. cambridge, massachusetts london, england: the mit press. driscoll, kevin. 2022. the modem world: a prehistory of social media. new haven: london : yale university press. driscoll, kevin, and camille paloque-berges. 2017. “searching for missing ‘net histories.’” internet histories 1 (1–2): 47–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2017.1307541. helmond, anne. 2015. “the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready.” social media + society 1 (2): 2056305115603080. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080. lingel, jessa. 2020. an internet for the people: the politics and promise of craigslist. princeton studies in culture and technology. princeton: princeton university press. mailland, julien, and kevin driscoll. 2017. minitel: welcome to the internet. platform studies. cambridge, ma, usa: mit press. mckinney, cait. 2020. information activism: a queer history of lesbian media technologies. sign, storage, transmission. durham, nc: duke university press. morris, jeremy wade, and sarah murray, eds. 2018. appified: culture in the age of apps. ann arbor: university of michigan press. 4 what’s in a name?: information seeking practices, terminology, and the “transgender” community avery dame-griff gonzaga university for trans individuals, information access and retrieval long presented one of the largest barriers to raising awareness amongst the general public. access to digital communications, beginning in the early 1980s, transformed this process from long, expensive, laborious, and personally risky to relatively fast, affordable, accessible, and increasingly anonymous (whittle 1998; shapiro 2010; dame-griff 2023). yet this change has created unanticipated side effects, for as more and more information is framed and filtered through algorithms, trans individuals have increasingly less control over how “transgender” is defined and understood. in line with the conference theme, this paper explores how digital technologies, and search engines in particular, have been enrolled by trans individuals in service of revolutionizing transgender communities and politics. however, search’s revolutionary promises have been diminished significantly as they’ve shifted away from indexing the web to interpreting the web via the search engine results page (serp). this paper begins by exploring the early history of information search and retrieval within trans communities and the role of terminology in this process. it then shifts focus to consider how search engines transformed this process. using technographic inquiry (bucher 2018), i explore the operational associations the google search algorithm makes around “transgender” as a concept through a close examination of one serp widget: the people also ask feature. as i find, the paa questions and answers actively reinforce dominant narratives around trans experience in ways that may have a negative impact on vulnerable information seekers. re(claiming) a name for many trans individuals, adopting a trans identity often comes only after coming in contact with trans narratives or communicating with another trans individual. this moment of encounter clarifies the individuals previously conflicted emotions and gives them a framework for their self-identity, as well as access to trans cultural knowledge (zimman 2009). for those seeking out information on their cross-gender feelings, particularly before the advent of the web and digital search, having the correct terminology (such as transvestite or transsexual) to describe their feelings functioned as keys necessary to unlock access to this seemingly “hidden” knowledge. using what they’d learned, questioning individuals were able to make contact with community organizations and gain access to support group libraries, community periodicals, and other resources. however, these terms’ cultural associations with pathology and deviancy often deterred questioning information seekers from doing more than a cursory search in their local library, where the texts they encountered reinforced these associations. as a result, 5 developing community-specific terminology for gender nonconformity had long been a key goal for members. in contrast to medical terms that forefronted negative associations, in-community terms aimed to describe individuals’ experience of gender in more value-neutral ways (feinberg 1992). members also recognized how existing terms’ impact on vulnerable individuals, and they engaged in, as cait mickinney defines it, “information activism” (2020) to circumvent these issues, ranging from public education campaigns and lobbying textbook publishers to ‘hacking’ libraries’ physical card catalogs to replace existing reference cards with cards directing information seekers to relevant community organizations (author). none of these community-developed terms saw wide adoption until the introduction of “transgender” as a new umbrella term in the early 1990s. unlike earlier medicalized terms, “transgender” was developed, defined, and deployed first and foremost by community members, and their efforts were bolstered by the publication of what sociologist laurel westbrook terms “teaching transgender articles,” which defined and naturalized the term (2010). once “transgender” had found wide acceptance among community members did organizations begin using it in other arenas, helping it to enter common usage starting in the late 1990s. in contrast to those using terminology with medical origins, information seekers using “transgender” as their primary keyword were far more likely to encounter community-produced resources that affirmed their experiences and sense of self. people also ask… at the same time as community members were encouraging the wider public to begin adopting “transgender,” new methods for digital information search and retrieval were transforming how this public accessed information. while bulletin board systems increased documents’ reach and speed of delivery, they lacked the ease of use and seeming stability of the world wide web (driscoll 2022; dame-griff 2023). once search engines began indexing the web, what had once been a laborious process including furtive searches through library stacks and hesitant messages left on community groups’ hotline answering machines was now reduced to a single keyword search: “transgender” (dame-griff 2023). moreover, by the mid to late 1990s, the web had radically changed how information within the trans community was disseminated. not only did it make mass dissemination affordable for small organizations, but it also opened up the possibility of publishing to a far larger portion of the community. trans organizations saw the website as a golden opportunity to provide information, raise awareness, and attract new members, while trans individuals embraced the personalized home page as a space for low-risk selfexpression (dame-griff 2023). in a 1998 column on the future of the transgender community trans activist dallas denny and coauthor jessica xavier contrasted most community groups’ existing print-and-mail information distribution model with using a search engine, which at the time returned over four thousand results for the term “transsexual.” “with such a wealth available in seconds,” they argued, “who in the future 6 will be inclined to wait a couple of weeks for an information packet from a gender organization?” (5) as search algorithms' sophistication increased, the importance of having the ‘terminological keys,’ so to speak, in information search and retrieval decreased. instead, the blank search box allows questioning individuals, scholar vanessa kitzie has found, to “express a natural language query specific to [their] experience,” like, “i was born a boy and wanted to be a girl” or “feel male, but only inside” (2019; see also huttunen, et al. 2020). yet instead of guiding information seekers to resources created by and for community members, the search engine, via the serp, acts as the mediator and guide, framing how these individuals understand “transgender.” as safiya noble argues, search engine results represent “an information reality, while the operations [that lie behind it] are rendered increasingly invisible” (2018). the serp has now become, according to jannis kallinikos and his co-authors, “an interactive, radically open and distributed artifact that” mediates the interaction between “human actors and the cultural records they wish to access” (2010). behind the serp lies a complex database intimately shaped by dominant hegemonic norms which are then reproduced in what is presented on the serp. as i find, the search algorithm’s understanding of “transgender,” drawn from existing search results and shaped by user behavior, either reinforces existing cultural biases or actively distorts the trans experience. for a topic like “transgender,” the serp produces questions and answers that reflect a wider cultural focus on medicalization and surgery. furthermore, the system’s focus on producing helpful answers via short excerpts reduces complex questions to short snippets that don’t always reflect a source’s larger argument. in this way, what was once a tool used for revolutionary ends is now more likely to reinforce the same associations of pathology and deviancy activists sought to dispel with the introduction of “transgender.” references bucher, taina. 2018. if...then: algorithmic power and politics. new york: oxford university press. dame-griff, avery. 2023. the two revolutions: a history of the transgender internet. queer/trans/digital. new york, new york: new york university press. denny, dallas, and jessica xavier. 1998. ‘on the future of the tg community’. aegis news, april 1998. driscoll, kevin. 2022. the modem world: a prehistory of social media. new haven: london : yale university press. feinberg, leslie. 1992. transgender liberation: a movement whose time has come. new york: world view forum. 7 huttunen, aira, noora hirvonen, and lotta kähkönen. 2020. ‘uncomfortable in my own skin – emerging, early-stage identity-related information needs of transgender people’. journal of documentation 76 (3): 709–29. https://doi.org/10.1108/jd-09-20190193. kallinikos, jannis, aleksi aaltonen, and attila marton. 2010. ‘a theory of digital objects’. first monday, june. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v15i6.3033. kitzie, vanessa. 2019. ‘“that looks like me or something i can do”: affordances and constraints in the online identity work of us lgbtq+ millennials’. journal of the association for information science and technology 70 (12): 1340–51. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24217. mckinney, cait. 2020. information activism: a queer history of lesbian media technologies. sign, storage, transmission. durham, nc: duke university press. noble, safiya umoja. 2018. algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york: new york university press. shapiro, eve. 2010. gender circuits: bodies and identities in a technological age. contemporary sociological perspectives. new york, ny: routledge. westbrook, laurel. 2010. ‘becoming knowably gendered: the production of transgender: possibilities and constraints in the mass and alternative press from 1990–2005 in the united states’. in transgender identities: towards a social analysis of gender diversity, edited by sally hines and tam sanger, 0 ed., 43–63. routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203856147. whittle, stephen. 1998. ‘the trans-cyberian mail way’. social & legal studies 7 (3): 389–408. https://doi.org/10.1177/096466399800700304. zimman, lal. 2009. ‘“the other kind of coming out”: transgender people and the coming out narrative genre’. gender and language 3 (1): 53–80. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v3i1.53. 8 furries built the internet: pre-2000 community computing alexander rudenshiold university of california—irvine recovering the internet…from midwest furfest on december 7th 2021, amazon web services (aws) went offline for several hours in what appeared to be a random error, disrupting users’ access to its tools and the many sites which relied upon it. responses to the outage ranged from annoyance at the failure of perceived ready-to-hand infrastructure, to schadenfreude at the ineptitude of the world’s most profitable corporation to maintain its services. twitter user matthew ebel, however, made an observation causally implicating this event in relation to another which had finished the night before: midwest furfest, the largest ‘furry’ convention. “all the furries are hung over and recovering from @furfest today. and aws goes down. this tracks.” (2021). in this tweet, ebel repeated a common myth surrounding internet infrastructure: “furries run the internet.” this postulation can be found repeated across internet platforms today–whenever there is a major internet outage or perceived degradation of technical infrastructure the myth of the furry hacker, or more aptly technical janitor, can be found among the discourse. for instance, following the layoffs spurred by elon musk’s takeover of twitter in 2022, user hansfaffing posted a joking “critical infrastructure alert” warning that “twitter currently employs 0 furries” (2022), implying a near future in which the platform might collapse. i investigate the origin (and validate the accuracy) of this internet mythology through an analysis of archival documents from and about furry bulletin board systems (bbs), multi-user created kingdoms (mucks), usenet, and internet service providers (isps), hosted primarily on textfiles.com, usenetarchives.com, and in fan archives. through this historical analysis i document how furry culture built, maintained, and shaped communications infrastructures for themselves, and how those technologies then in turn shaped furry community—resulting in its implication internet infrastructural management. through these historical analyses i document how furry culture built, maintained, and shaped technical communications infrastructures for themselves, and how those technologies then in turn shaped furry community. recovering furry…from the internet furries and tech workers themselves locate experiential evidence in replies to posts which invoke the furry-technologist narrative. furry web developer dragoneer, in response to ebel’s aws tweet, recalled when “there were so many furries [that aws] had an internal team group for them” (2021); user ottdogbuns commented on musk’s twitter layoffs that the furries they knew working there “were either let go or resigned” (2022). in response to a tweet which asked users to share a piece esoteric knowledge specific to their fields, user mmsword wrote a thread which began: 9 “telecommunications as a whole, which also encompasses the internet, is in a constant state of failure and just in time fixes and functionally all modern communication would collapse if about 50 people, most of which are furries, decided to turn their pager off for a day.” (2019) these tweets, examples of a much larger corpus, represent pieces of internet folk knowledge, held far beyond the furry community, that indicate a connection between participants of furry subculture and the internet’s technological infrastructures which goes beyond simple stereotyping. as twitter cybersecurity influencer @swiftonsecurity states: “furries built the internet” (2019). jessa lingel’s description of this “early web” as “characterized by excitement at connecting with strangers from across the world and trial-and-error experimentation with online personas” (2020, 2) is particularly applicable to furries, who still connect with one another online primarily using bespoke pseudonymous identities, ‘fursonae,’ and exemplify excitement in their continued engagement with novel technology. while maintaining a critical view of the “democratic” potential in cybercultures, we can still understand how digital space and its built infrastructure can promote the positive development of identity and community. the pre-2000 furry internet presents an opportunity for such reflection upon a situation not dissimilar to the potential present internet paradigm shift. interviews with former corporate scouts and a ‘greymuzzle’ bbs system operator, have recalled a co-history of anthropomorphic animal fan culture and information technology, and offer a jumping-in point to connect this larger mythos to discrete practices. at the height of the 1990’s dot-com bubble, tech company recruiters attended furry conventions to hire furries for their firms because of computer system knowledge acquired through building community infrastructures around the budding furry scene (cole 2017). archival documents show that these skills which attracted recruiters to 1990s fur-con floors stemmed from the co-emergence of hobbyist computing and “funny animal” communities a decade earlier, when what would become known as “furry” began to constitute itself at side-rooms at science fiction conventions in the late 1970’s. this new community moved into cyberspace as radio hobbyists’ newfound interest in building networked microcomputers began creating homegrown communication networks over dial-up (driscoll 2022). the furry community grew and organized itself online, most notably on the ‘furnet’ (and ‘purrnet’) echoes of the ‘fidonet’ bbs network, the ‘furrymuck’ text-based role-playing system, the ‘tigerden’ isp, and, later, usenet—building robust communication infrastructures and transferrable cybercultures in the process. the furry internet: then to now undergirding all of these systems is a sort of community-built infrastructure—real material tech. many of these bbs or role-play services themselves were hosted by furries, giving them the very real space to self-determine the boundaries of their community and its norms—something increasingly hard to imagine in an era of walled garden apps and platformized surveillance. this self-determination enabled for the 10 largely queer (and unquestionably weird) subculture to grow and reproduce its own specialized knowledge. at the same time though, by constituting itself through physical technological artifacts furries before y2k developed real knowledge of this technology, which ultimately made them themselves valuable to outside interests. the actual shape of the furry internet changed with the wane of bbs and similar tech. as usenet and “furrynet” mailgroups took the place of furnet, and irc took the place of other text-based rp worlds, the terms of engagement were increasingly out of the hands of community members themselves. there’s evidence in archived usenet conversations that furries were reticent to make the transition to web 2.0—being moderated out of commercial isps/services like aol (milam, 1999). while the tradition of furries building their own spaces has continued it’s now undergirded by commercial platforms, isps, hosting services. in this way, furry offers a paradoxical conclusion for us: an exemplar of both how a community can create infrastructure for itself, as well as how even outsider digital communities can be incorporated into the hegemonic regime of techno-capital. nevertheless, the building of furry media infrastructures demonstrates how subcultural communities can and have built these things by-and-for themselves. early furries not only participated in a computing culture where the infrastructure of the internet was rendered visible, but where these same users were themselves the workers who created and maintained many elements of it—a sharp contrast to now, when the physicality of communications is often invisibilized (parks 2015). this shaping of an internet use-practice by furries, too shaped the way that the community came to proliferate itself online: eking out space for itself across the internet’s entire lineage, and becoming its not-so-imaginary caregiver. references tf?rururu [@ottdogbuns]. 2022. “@hansfaffing the ones i did know working there were either let go or resigned.” tweet. twitter. https://twitter.com/ottdogbuns/status/1593716448941203459. brügger, niels. 2018. the archived web: doing history in the digital age. cambridge, massachusetts: the mit press. cole, samantha. 2017. “once upon a time, this tech company actively recruited furries.” vice (blog). june 21, 2017. https://www.vice.com/en/article/zme7d5/onceupon-a-time-this-tech-company-actively-recruited-furries. dragoneer [@dragoneer]. 2021. “@matthewebel @furfest you joke, bur when i worked at aws there were so many furries they had an internal team group for them. i knew of at least a dozen in my general area out of maybe about a hundred people. it’s more accurate than not.” tweet. twitter. https://twitter.com/dragoneer/status/1468431131129298948. 11 driscoll, kevin. 2022. the modem world: a prehistory of social media. new haven; london: yale university press. ebel, matthew [@matthewebel]. 2021. “all the furries are hung over and recovering from @furfest today. and aws goes down. this tracks.” tweet. twitter. https://twitter.com/matthewebel/status/1468279260846571524. hans, certified inorganic [@hansfaffing]. 2022. “⚠⚠⚠⚠ critical infrastructure alert ⚠⚠⚠⚠ twitter currently employs 0 furries.” tweet. twitter. https://twitter.com/hansfaffing/status/1593423327267532800. jenkins, henry. 2009. confronting the challenges of participatory culture: media education for the 21st century. the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation reports on digital media and learning. cambridge, ma: the mit press. lingel, jessa. 2020. an internet for the people: the politics and promise of craigslist. princeton studies in culture and technology. princeton: princeton university press. milam, matthew. 1999. “what is the problem with aol? (a perspective of yiffnet and the furry fandom).” https://groups.google.com/g/alt.fan.furry/c/rcvmirexsw/m/ynnxp9-p3o8j. parks, lisa. 2015. “stuff you can kick: toward a theory of media infrastructures.” in between humanities and the digital, edited by patrik svensson and david theo, 1st ed., 355–73. mit press. swiftinsecurity [@swiftonsecurity]. 2019. “90s furries built the internet https://t.co/gicxme2hkt.” tweet. twitter. https://twitter.com/swiftonsecurity/status/1123044884053680128. ẑ͍͔͚ ̻̤̟ ä̶̼̗̟͔ ́ ̿̾ ̓ n̫͙̬̈͊͑̿ ̚ d̡̰̭̞͖̟̖̟ ͬ̚ ê͖̺̂ ͩ ̀ ̉ ͣ r̓ͪ [@mmsword]. 2019. “telecommunications as a whole, which also encompasses the internet, is in a constant state of failure and just in time fixes and functionally all modern communication would collapse if about 50 people, most of which are furries, decided to turn their pager off for a day.” tweet. twitter. https://twitter.com/mmsword/status/1200147947331043328. 12 networks of solidarity: the left-wing of the early german internet liam maclean northeastern university the (online) german left the early internet straddles a historical period in which massive political and ideological upheaval were matched by equally massive upheavals in technology, communication, and the very fabric of social life. germany was in many ways an epicenter of all these changes, as it experienced the merger of the previously divided east and west worlds in a way that no other country during this period did. similarly, it was a country that had already developed significant communication infrastructure, along with a population that was ranked 3rd globally in internet users by 1995. among these users were members of the nascent german online left, who from the 1980s to the early 2000s developed a series of sites, bulletin board system (bbs) lists, and online networks that aided their organization and communication. this paper follows the development of this left’s organizing on the early german internet, focusing especially on the period from 1980-2004 and seeks to build a bridge between internet studies and histories of the german left, and particularly contemporary german labor histories. the period from 1980-2004 saw many significant developments within germany, beyond just reunification in 1989-90. on the left, it also saw the rise (and brief fall) of the green party during the 1980s; the integration of the east german communist party’s successor, party of democratic socialism (pds), into german politics; the mass protests caused by the total privatization of the east german economy after reunification in the 1990s; and the hartz iv protests during the early 2000s against the further erosion of unemployment benefits. in many ways, these protests are all a part of the same struggle, beginning with the ascendance of neoliberalism in the 1980s and marked by periodical moments of struggle from the global left, pushing back against encroaching privatization and the advance of neoliberal hegemony. at the same time as these massive economic and political battles are being engaged, the early internet emerges as a key site of organizing, and information dissemination, particularly for groups who lacked traditional access to mainstream mass media sources such as newspapers, radio, and television. both more organized networks like usenet, and less organized networks like bbss served as key sites of organization for many marginalized groups, as explained extensively in kevin driscoll’s seminal work the modem world. i seek to extend this research on the “grassroots internet” through exploring how the internet was used as a site of solidarity and organizing for groups on the west, and later united, german left. much of my data was collected through internet archaeologies, particularly using the wayback machine, the usenet archives, and textfiles.com (brügger & schroeder, 2017; ogden, 2021; dame-griff 2019). 13 the project has three primary goals. first, to trace how the advent of digital technology and media changed (and did not change) the wider structures and strategies of the german left. second, to trace the discursive relationship between grassroots democracy (a frequent demand of the 1990s left) and the horizontalist aspirations of many left-wing digital media projects. third, to establish how the internet enabled more international networks of solidarity on the left. core groups within the online german left are several key groups that my research sees as important to its broader network. the chaos computer club were active throughout this period and represented a radical activist hacking community in the very early stages of digital communication networks (kubitschko, 2018; coleman, 2013). the ccc first burst onto the scene with their hack of bildschirmtext (btx, a west german videotex service in the 1980s which has significant structural parallels to the internet), in which they stole 134,000 deutsch marks from a hamburg bank, before returning it the next day. less researched groups such as solinet and later soliserv.de both came online during the 1990s as sites of general left wing, and especially labor, organizing. both served as a hub for accessing forums and bbss, and for their system operators (sysops) to organize wider networks of support and solidarity across germany and into austria. solinet featured a variety of resources for workers, including explanations of labor laws and links to the official sites for different unions, along with discussion forums covering topics like individual unions, women’s rights, and unemployment advice. solinet also operated off the z-netz protocol, developed in germany in response to the perceived overly hierarchical aspects of fidonet. soliserv.de is a similar site, still in operation today, which is geared more towards serving works councils – a smaller german labor organizing structure that often works in conjunction with labor unions – but had significant overlap with solinet at the time. like solinet, it hosted information for workers, particularly that which was geared towards the operating of work councils, such as other councils’ contract agreements with their employers. on both sites were calendars and forums dedicated to upcoming and ongoing protests and strikes. in this way, these sites were able to serve as communication loci not just for social networks that existed solely on the web, but for building movements in the “analog world” that could affect change outside of the digital space. labournet.de also proved to be a site of left-wing labor organizing and agitation. unlike solinet and soliserv.de, labournet was founded as part of a pre-existing international network. the friction in this network would eventually lead to its splitting in the late 1990s, however labournet.de continues to this day. in the case of labournet in particular, the web as a means of alternative media (later coalescing into the term “indy media”) became especially important as the site tried to publish updates on the war in the former yugoslavia. protest and solidarity on the german web 14 the concept of the internet as a site for organizing popular insurrection is something which has come into focus over the last 30 years. the most notable early example was the 1994 revolution in chiapas in which the zapatista insurgency used the internet to communicate directly with the world, undermining the mexican federal government’s attempts to control the narrative and proving key to the revolution’s success (martineztorres, 2011; cleaver, 1998). later, the arab spring again highlighted the importance of the internet as an infrastructure and location for popular organizing, this time with twitter and facebook playing decisive roles, particularly in egypt (herrera, 2014). in both cases, the internet served as a key organizing infrastructure, affording members of insurrectionist groups the ability to communicate both between themselves and with the outside world. this project will continue to tell this story of an internet that has served as a network for the marginalized and site where the left has been able to consistently organize and form networks of solidarity even as they are unable to access more traditional forms of mass media. from the ccc to solinet and soliserv.de to labournet, the early internet in germany was rich with these networks of solidarity. this project builds a bridge between current research on early internet activism and contemporary german left and labor histories. understanding these networks can help us better understand the internet as a site for both political organizing and protest and insurrection, not just in germany but around the world. references alberts, gerard, and ruth oldenziel, eds. 2014. hacking europe: from computer cultures to demoscenes. new york: springer. andersson, linus. 2018. ‘what’s left of the radical left online? absence of communication, political vision, and community in autonomist web milieus in sweden’. new media & society 20 (1): 384–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816677533. brügger, niels, and ralph schroeder, eds. 2017. web as history: using web archives to understand the past and the present. ucl press. coleman, e. gabriella. 2013. coding freedom: the ethics and aesthetics of hacking. princeton: princeton university press. dame-griff, avery. 2019. ‘herding the “performing elephants:” using computational methods to study usenet’. internet histories 3 (3–4): 223–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2019.1652456. herrera, linda. 2014. revolution in the age of social media: the egyptian popular insurrection and the internet. london ; new york: verso. 15 holloway, john, and eloína peláez, eds. 1998. zapatista! reinventing revolution in mexico. london ; sterling, va: pluto press. kubitschko, sebastian. 2018. ‘chaos computer club: the communicative construction of media technologies and infrastructures as a political category’. in communicative figurations, edited by andreas hepp, andreas breiter, and uwe hasebrink, 81–100. transforming communications – studies in cross-media research. cham: springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65584-0_4. lubin, joan, and jeanne vaccaro. 2020. ‘aids infrastructures, queer networks: architecting the critical path’. first monday, september. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v25i10.10403. martinez-torres, maria elena. 2001. ‘civil society, the internet, and the zapatistas’. peace review 13 (3): 347–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/13668800120079045. mckinney, cait. 2018. ‘printing the network: aids activism and online access in the 1980s’. continuum 32 (1): 7–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2018.1404670. ———. 2020. information activism: a queer history of lesbian media technologies. sign, storage, transmission. durham, nc: duke university press. ogden, jessica. 2022. ‘“everything on the internet can be saved”: archive team, tumblr and the cultural significance of web archiving’. internet histories 6 (1–2): 113– 32. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2021.1985835. ‘queer digital history project’. n.d. accessed 26 february 2023. https://queerdigital.com/. simpson, patricia anne, and helga druxes, eds. 2015. digital media strategies of the far right in europe and the united states. lanham, maryland: lexington books. söderberg, johan. 2012. hacking capitalism: the free and open source software (foss) movement. 1. issued in paperback. routledge research in information technology and society 9. new york: routledge. turner, fred. 2008. from counterculture to cyberculture: stewart brand, the whole earth network, and the rise of digital utopianism. chicago, il: university of chicago press. waesche, niko marcel. 2003. internet entrepreneurship in europe: venture failure and the timing of telecommunications reform. cheltenham, uk ; northampton, ma, usa: edward elgar. 16 early internet memories of a small place called home katie mackinnon university of toronto for young people growing up in canada between 1995-2005, online engagement typically oscillated between spending time in places they built and places they found. while large scale and popular platforms sit at the forefront of our cultural imagination of the internet’s past like aol, myspace, geocities, and msn (miltner & gerrard 2021; mackinnon 2022) smaller, local, tightly networks social platforms like myknet.org (1998), outaouaisweb.com (2001), caramail.com (1997), bluekaffee (2002), and nexopia (2003) are meanwhile obscured. we might consider them part of the marginal web (clavert & schafer 2023), in opposition to the mainstream web, or that which is given priority, attention, and focus by academics, news media and policy makers. the marginal web, by contrast, includes digital spaces occupied by people that are undertheorized, represented, critiqued, celebrated or understood. many young people in canada were spending time in these places, calling them home, and building networks of trust and vulnerability through their engagement with the affordances of the early platforms (abidin 2021). while these places were imbued with a “messy serendipity” that was characteristic of the early web (lingel 2021), they also had features that encouraged the young users to use these spaces as deeply private and personal diaries, to connect with friends from school, to meet new people from other nearby schools, and to project a desired image of themselves. while engagement with these smaller platforms reflect what others have demonstrated as digital spaces extending school-based ties for young people (shade, porter, and sanchez 2005), it also expands historical boundaries of where individual and collective early internet memories took place that inform our cultural and nostalgic notions of the ‘early web’. marginal web studies researching these spaces requires specific attention to scale, not only to design triangulating methodologies that reflect their marginality, but also to respond to a presumed obsolescence of the personal and sensitive materials within these platforms. as platforms become forgotten in the cultural psyche, users might not anticipate the type of long-term presence and permanence that the web preservation provides as they might have with larger platforms that are still discussed, researched and celebrated years after their decline. for example, geocities has been presented publicly and academically as a “stand-in for the past web” (lialina 2019): “a representative for a certain visual style, or simply as a digital artifact and data set” that olia lialina calls “netslagia,” which is ultimately “sweet but deceiving.” this emphasis on geocities comes, in part, from the large-scale collection the archive team commenced once notice was given in 2009 that the site was being sunsetted, which has provided “an abundance” (milligan 2019) of academic access to historical web materials. 17 smaller, marginal platforms functioned similarly to other, larger sites, but they are not studied or written about. gaps in internet histories can be due to a lack of information access, but gaps are also produced through academic marginalization, where platforms are dismissed or considered “niche online destinations,” as blackplanet.com was which “hindered it from being considered one of the first social networking sites” (brock 2020, 135). despite limited academic and public attention, these smaller platforms loom large in many individual early internet memories; contribute significantly towards the cultural, political and economic history of the web; and are key to individual orientations of digital sociality, data privacy and internet imaginaries. while large parts of marginal web spaces have been preserved by the internet archive, the study of historical marginal platforms requires building on individual memory and experience. this paper demonstrates a pathway forward through a case study on the popular 2000s canadian platform nexopia that responds to specific ethical and methodological issues. nexopia.com (2003) nexopia was a forum-based social platform that included a front page, user profiles, forum threads, and general topics with headers such as off-topic, site general, entertainment, life, hobbies and interests, super secret forums. while it was accessible globally, it was used exclusively by teenagers living in western canada provinces alberta and british columbia. it was created by 18-year-old timo ewalds in 2003 while he was living with his parents in edmonton, alberta. in four years, it grew significantly, with over 1.2 million registered members and a billion pages each month, reaching 70% of teenagers and young adults in western canada. the internet archive wayback machine (iawm) has 1,645 page captures from nexopia that include profile pages and forums on topics ranging from: attention seekers, adults only, lgbtq+, site suggestions and support, tv + movies, music, would you f**k the person above, relationship advice, food forum, video games, politics and debate. each forum topic details how many posts have been made at the time of capture, and the username of the latest poster with the date of their post. despite these metrics, the archived web pages are limited in what they represent about this marginal social web space. in the early internet memories project (2019-2022), interviews were conducted with people who grew up in canada and were interested in locating their digital traces in web archives. many identified nexopia as a significant site of sociality and development, revealing how, to them, this was a place that contained memories of sexual awakening, pain, awkwardness, embarrassment, and deep connection. together, we look for their digital traces in the iawm: for their profiles, their images, and comments. through this approach, the archived version of nexopia sits in conflict with their memories: profiles are crystalized in specific moments in time, between inside internet jokes and brief flashes of teenage immaturity; forum comments and images uploaded remain visible and traceable; accounts across platforms are connected, and their presence on the web, despite what they might have thought, lives on. 18 through this collaborative process, the wider context of the archived data is revealed: the motivations, hidden meanings and connections, impressions and reflections of the personal and cultural significance of this place they once called home. marginal web histories demonstrate the vastness of the internet, as it was experienced across intersections of race, gender, class, age, and geographic location, which worked to differentiate many young people’s experiences and memories of the web. references abidin, crystal. 2020. “growing up and growing old on the internet: influencer life courses and the internet as home.” in metaphors of internet: ways of being in the age of ubiquity, edited by annette n. markham and katrin tiidenberg, 75–83. digital formations, vol. 122. london; new york: peter lang publishing. brock, andré l. 2020. distributed blackness: african american cybercultures. critical cultural communication. new york: new york university press. clavert, frédéric, and valérie schafer. 2023. “between marginal and mainstream. communities and ecosystems at stake.” internet histories 7 (1): 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2022.2153399. lialina, olia. 2019. “geocities’ afterlife and web history.” one terabyte of kilobyte age (blog). july 30, 2019. https://blog.geocities.institute/archives/6418. lingel, jessa. 2020. an internet for the people: the politics and promise of craigslist. princeton studies in culture and technology. princeton: princeton university press. mackinnon, katie. “the death of geocities: seeking destruction and platform eulogies in web archives.” internet histories 6, no. 1–2 (april 3, 2022): 237–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2022.2051331. milligan, ian. 2019. history in the age of abundance? how the web is transforming historical research. montreal kingston london chicago: mcgill-queen’s university press. miltner, kate m., and ysabel gerrard. 2022. “‘tom had us all doing front-end web development’: a nostalgic (re)imagining of myspace.” internet histories 6 (1–2): 48– 67. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2021.1985836. shade, leslie regan. 2006. “‘you can see anything on the internet, you can do anything on the internet!’: young canadians talk about the internet.” canadian journal of communication 30 (4): 503–26. https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2005v30n4a1635. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): ye, z. (2024, october). when industry lore doesn't work: exploring mcns' limited intermediary roles in promotional culture. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. when industry lore doesn’t work: exploring mcn’s limited intermediray roles in promotional culture zhen ye erasmus university rotterdam introduction originating as supplementary firms that operate in and around youtube’s advertising infrastructure, multichannel networks (mcns) have become an unseen infrastructure shaping platform-based cultural production (lobato, 2016; craig and cunningham, 2019; hutchison, 2023). evolving with what craig and cunningham (2019) called “the new screen ecology”, mcns gradually extended their business models to adapt to the proliferated monetization schemes of social media platforms used for marketing and advertising (edwards, 2022; m. liang, 2022). this unique position between platforms and content creators has stimulated scholarly interest in theorizing mcns as a renewed form of cultural intermediaries. many scholars (lobato, 2016; craig and cunningham, 2019; hutchison, 2023; f. liang and ji, 2024) position mcns in the research tradition of cultural intermediaries (bourdieu, 1984). at the core of cultural intermediaries’ work is symbolic production, in the sense of framing what products, services, and celebrities are legitimate through various marketing and promotional techniques and the construction of markets (negus, 2002; maguire and matthews, 2012). mcns fulfil the classic intermediary function of providing technical, promotional and advertising services in exchange for a commission like some older middlemen professions, such as advertising agencies or media buyers (lobato, 2016; craig and cunningham, 2019). while these activities of mcns present an extension, remix, and repackage of already existing media works, scholars also rightfully reminded us that the profound difference lies in mcns’ automated and scalable nature rooted in social media platforms’ data-driven logic (lobato, 2016; m. liang, 2022; hutchinson, 2023). lobato (2016, 350) aptly pointed out the emergence of mcns represents “an opportunity to revisit some elements of the theory base around intermediaries and update it for the platform economy”. nonetheless, the platform economy is not monolithic. to account for the heterogeneous modes of platform economy in a global context, steinberg, zhang and mukherjee (2024) advocate for a pluralization framework on platform capitalisms to better grasp the multiple effects of platformization of cultural production. this article aims to answer one research question: what is the role of mcns in the process of platformization in china? tracking the formation of mcns in the chinese internet history while platform capitalism in china is often researched in close relation with the rise of chinese tech-companies like tencent and alibaba and their political and economic impact, there is little research done around mcns as part of the para-industry operating around these platforms. when tracing the development of mcns in china, some studies refer it back to, and compare it with the prototype originated from youtube in the us (m. liang, 2022; f. liang and ji, 2024). meng liang (2022) traces the root of the mcn phenomenon in china to the establishment of papi tube founded by the internet celebrity papi jiang in 2015 and argues that chinese mcns emerged from a liberalizing economy distinct from large, monopolized media entities in the us. these studies present us with valuable insight on a reciprocal relationship between content creators and mcns in china, but they allude a universalized platformization process by making reference to youtube. i argue, the formation of mcns in china needs to be situated back into the local historical context. particularly, i argue, the proliferation of mcns has been closely associated with the development of livestreaming industry in china (z.ye 2023). the predecessor of mcns in china were guilds (gonghui), which is a synonym for labor union with a fundamentally different meaning. guilds originally appeared in china in the late 1990s as voluntary organizations of mmo (massively multiplayer online) gamers, yet they have undergone rapid commercialization and transitioned into brokerage firms covering diverse activities including gold-farming, game-marketing and development, and game-tournament commentary (l. zhang and fung 2019). the hype of online gaming and showroom livestreaming in mid-2010s in china attracted many people to join livestreaming platforms (yu 2018; z.ye 2023). responding to this phenomenon, guilds became mediators of livestreaming platforms, fulfilling the role to train and manage individual streamers, and institutionally monetized of female streamers’ gendered performativity via platforms’ virtual gifting (liu et al. 2021). however, with e-commerce livestreaming gone mainstream in 2018, many guilds pivoted to a new business strategy of e-commerce monetization (craig, lin and cunningham 2019; z.ye, 2023; su and kaye 2023). by then, the boundaries between guilds and mcns were blurred and even disappeared, and many guilds rebranded themselves into mcns. in the field of e-commerce, mcns play a crucial role in maintaining a sustainable relationship between influencers, advertisers and the platforms (liang 2022; su and kaye 2023). the shifting industrial lore and mcn’s limited intermediary roles inspired by caldwell’s (2008) production culture approach that relies on media practitioners’ meaning-making to “find and articulate examples of critical theory embedded within the everyday of workers’ experience” (ibid, 4), this research focuses on practitioner’ discourses about the intermediary roles of mcns in china. the “industry lore” (havens 2014) about mcns’ intermediary roles were generated from 15 in-depth interviews with practitioners in the sector of e-commerce livestreaming. these trade stories and narratives were critically examined in the analysis, contextualising with a three-month participatory observation in a mcn institution (pseudonymised as w company) in guangzhou, southern china. e-commerce livestreaming will be successful if you manage 人 (people), 货 (product), and 场 (place) correctly — this has become the most prominent industrial lore, repeated by many of my research participants. while人 (people) refer to livestreamers and their assistants who function as shopping advisers, presenting products in livestreams, those who worked for repetitive communication with retailers and arrangement of logistics were rendered invisible. 货 (products) are at the core of e-commerce livestreaming activities, covering a wide range from daily household supplies, beauty and cosmetic products to clothing. 场 (place) has two folds of meanings: on the one hand, it means the physical space containing technical devices for conducting e-commerce livestreaming; on the other hand, it means the platform environment affording such practice. however, in the fieldwork, i discovered that navigating the complex networks of people, products, and platforms as digital marketplaces, mcns faced a precarious middleman position— their commercial activities were restricted and trapped by the industrial lore adhering closely to the platform logics of visibility and commodification. within the three months of my fieldwork (december 2021 to march 2022), w company has changed its organizational structure three times to adapt to its constantly updating business strategies. at the end, w company rebranded itself into a marketing agency to help local brands deal with e-commerce livestreaming sales. as reflected in the findings, the boundary of what constitutes mcns’ work in china is flexible and constantly adapting to the evolvement of the industrial lore. the industrial lore resulted in a dual reinforcement: top streamers enjoy exclusive deals and long-term collaboration with brands, attracting more customers to their livestreaming channels, and established brands with more budgets for marketing are more likely to be seen in popular livestreaming channels. accordingly, specific rules of conduct and standards of e-commerce livestreaming practices are further consolidated to the degree that it is extremely difficult for smallscale mcns to follow or breakthrough. references bourdieu, p. (1984). distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste (trans. nice r). london: routledge. caldwell, j.t. (2008). production culture: industrial reflexivity and critical practice in film and television. duke university press. craig, d. & cunningham, s. (2019). social media entertainment: the new intersection of hollywood and silicon valley. nyu press. edwards, s. (2022). branded dreams, boss babes: influencer retreats and the cultural logics of the influencer para-industry. social media+ society, 8(3) [online first] https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221116846 fang, k. (2022). what is zimeiti? the commercial logic of content provision on china’s social media platforms. chinese journal of communication, 15(1), pp.75-94. havens, t. (2014). towards a structuration theory of media intermediaries. in making media work, ed. d. johnson, d. kompare and a. santo., 39-62. new york university press. hutchinson, j. (2023). digital intermediation: unseen infrastructure for cultural production. new media & society, 25(12), 3289-3307. liang, f., & ji, l. (2024). manufacturing influencers: the gatekeeping roles of mcns (multi-channel networks) in cultural production. information, communication & society, 0(0), 1–17. liang, m. (2022). the end of social media? how data attraction model in the algorithmic media reshapes the attention economy. media, culture & society, 44(6), pp.1110-1131. liu, t., tan, c.k., yang, x. & li, m. (2023). zhibo gonghui: china’s ‘live-streaming guilds’ of manipulation experts. information, communication & society, 26(6), pp.12101225. lobato, r. (2016). the cultural logic of digital intermediaries: youtube multichannel networks. convergence, 22(4), pp.348-360. maguire, j.s. & matthews, j. (2012). are we all cultural intermediaries now? an introduction to cultural intermediaries in context. european journal of cultural studies, 15(5), pp.551-562. negus, k. (2002). the work of cultural intermediaries and the enduring distance between production and consumption. cultural studies, 16(4), pp.501-515. steinberg, m., zhang, l., & mukherjee, r. (2024). platform capitalisms and platform cultures. international journal of cultural studies, [online first] https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779231223544 su, c. & valdovinos kaye, b. (2023). borderline practices on douyin/tiktok: content transfer and algorithmic manipulation. media, culture & society, [online first] https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437231168308 ye, z. (2023). a brief history of china’s livestreaming industry: evolution along with state–business interactions. journal of digital media & policy. [online first] https://doi.org/10.1386/jdmp_00127_1 yu, h. (2018). game on: the rise of the esports middle kingdom. media industries journal, 5(1). pp.88-105. zhang, l. & fung, a.y. (2014). working as playing? consumer labor, guild and the secondary industry of online gaming in china. new media & society, 16(1), pp.38-54. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): madianou, m. (2024, october). surreptitious experimentation: digital infrastructures and structural violence in the humanitarian industry. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. surreptitious experimentation: digital infrastructures and structural violence in the humanitarian industry mirca madianou goldsmiths, university of london the humanitarian sector is known for its reliance on technological pilots as part of the digitisation and datafication of aid operations. this paper outlines a new type of technological experimentation which i term ‘surreptitious experimentation’. this type of experimentation is possible as digital technologies and practices become enmeshed with the infrastructures of aid. this process of infrastructuring allows for a continuous flow of experimentation, which is not named as such, and which operates in the infrastructural background, and therefore remains hidden – yet in plain sight. surreptitious experiments take place outside the laboratory, without clear boundaries, without meaningful consent, or processes of accountability. in so doing, surreptitious experiments compound the power asymmetries of humanitarianism with significant risks and harms for some of the world’s most vulnerable people. in order to illustrate my argument, the paper will first observe the infrastructuring of humanitarian aid before outlining the contours of this new type of experimentation and its associated harms. the paper draws on 10 years of research in the humanitarian sector. in particular, it draws on interviews with donors, humanitarian organisations, government representatives, private entrepreneurs and business representatives, digital developers, volunteers, and affected people themselves; participant observation in spaces of innovation (such as hackathons), and finally, digital ethnography. infrastructuring infrastructures are ‘built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people or ideas and allow for their exchange over space’ (larkin, 2013: 328). in this sense, infrastructures encompass, but extend beyond the notion of ‘substrate’, the idea of a system such as a railroad on which rail cars run (star and ruhleder, 1996: 116). humanitarian infrastructures include the substrates as well as the data, technologies, ideas about technology and affects which flow through them. humanitarian infrastructures encompass humanitarian workers, host governments, donors (which largely includes western governments), private companies, volunteers, digital developers and crisisaffected communities and the relations between them. an infrastructural approach allows us to observe how biometric data travel within, but also beyond the humanitarian space – and the vulnerabilities this creates for data subjects. by infrastructuring i refer to the technological networks that underpin the humanitarian space as a whole. humanitarian systems are built on privatised or government networks and systems; in turn humanitarian systems become the infrastructure for the provision of basic services. crucially, infrastructuring means that humanitarian systems become interoperable with other systems owned by governments or private companies. a typical example of infrastructuring is biometrics. biometric technologies have become normalised in the humanitarian sector. the first thing that happens when a refugee comes into contact with the united nations high commissioner for refugees (unhcr) is to be asked to give their biometric data. biometric data are stored in vast databases held by humanitarian agencies such as unhcr and the un’s world food programme (wfp). biometrics increasingly underpin a multitude of humanitarian operations and processes, such as cash assistance. building blocks, the biometrics and blockchain-based cash assistance programme launched by the wfp exemplifies the infrastructural character of biometric systems. building blocks, which started in 2017, combines with blockchain technology and commercial infrastructures to disburse payments following the successful authentication of users. building blocks draws on the vast biometric databases of unhcr and the wfp, which in turn provide the infrastructure for all sorts of humanitarian operations. building blocks was one of the largest technological pilots in the humanitarian sector. it started as a pilot of 10,000 people before expanding to 106,000 refugees in jordan. in 2021 it scaled up to over one million users in bangladesh and jordan and, more recently, in ukraine. biometric technologies are far from the perfect identification technologies. they are based on classifications which are racialized and which marginalize some communities more than others (browne, 2015; magnet, 2011). apart from concerns regarding privacy, safeguarding and function creep, the high margin of error when measuring ‘othered’ bodies that deviate from prototypical whiteness, is a form of structural violence. this is the violence of being defined as someone who is not you (glissant, 1990). structural violence is here understood as a violation of human dignity which is indirect yet systematic (farmer, 2004). surreptitious experimentation because infrastructures operate in the background, they are invisible and taken for granted. when experiments take advantage of digital infrastructures, they, too, become invisible. in these circumstances, experiments become diffused. when a pilot occurs in what is an everyday, vital infrastructure, then participants are not aware that they are taking part in an experiment. for example, when building blocks operated as a pilot it was the only method of aid distribution. in other words, it was not a pilot that refugees could choose to ‘opt out’ of. this is related to the lack meaningful consent in refugee biometric registrations and digital identity systems where to refuse to submit one’s biometric data amounts to a refusal to receive aid when there are no alternatives for survival. in the case of experimentation, the problem of consent also extends to not making people aware of the nature of a programme and its potential limitations (mcstay, 2013). as one interlocutor from the aid sector put it: ‘the problem begins when not all people understand that they participate in an experiment’. if people are presented with a technological system that appears to be complete, and therefore safe to use, that has significant implications for their awareness of possible dangers. even in the rare occasions, when people are presented with a consent form, if there are no alternative ways to access aid and if the nature of the pilot and its data management are not made abundantly clear, then consent resembles coercion. this bureaucratic application of consent ultimately helps legitimate problematic experimentation practices. when experiments take place at an infrastructural level, experimentation becomes diffuse and continuous. operating in the infrastructural background, experimentation remains hidden. infrastructural experimentation exemplifies marres and stark’s (2020: 428) observation that the social environments are modified so as to enable experimental operations. infrastructures allow for more experimentation to take place. in surreptitious experimentation the aim is no longer to learn and observe, but to intervene into the environment and control the experiment subjects (marres and stark, 2020). experiments have always reconfigured the relationships between those tested and those testing. because of their lack of meaningful consent and accountability surreptitious experiments accentuate the inequities between humanitarian workers and affected communities and further compound existing asymmetries between the global north and global south. the risks associated with biometric technologies turn the building blocks surreptitious experiment into a diffused form of structural violence. references browne, s. (2015) dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. durham: duke university press. farmer, p. (2004) ‘an anthropology of structural violence’, current anthropology, 45(3), pp. 305–325. doi:10.1086/382250. glissant, é. (1997) poetics of relation. university of michigan press. larkin, b. (2013) ‘the politics and poetics of infrastructure’, annual review of anthropology 42(1), pp. 327–43. doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412155522. magnet, s. a. (2011) when biometrics fail: gender race and the technology of identity. durham: duke university press. marres, n. and stark, d. (2020) ‘put to the test: for a new sociology of testing’, british journal of sociology, 71, pp. 423–443. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12746 mcstay, a. (2013) ‘i consent: an analysis of the cookie directive and its implications for uk behavioral advertising’. new media & society, 15(4): 596-611. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444812458434 star, s. l. and ruhleder, k. (1996) ‘steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: design and access for large information spaces’, information systems research, 7(1), pp. 111–134 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12746 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 fang, c., & iliadis, a. (2023, october). invitation to listen: mapping clubhouse’s early invite-only social capital network. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. invitation to listen: mapping clubhouse’s early inviteonly social capital network cindy fang temple university andrew iliadis temple university introduction during the covid-19 pandemic, clubhouse’s invite-only, drop-in audio app (clubhouse.com) attracted thousands of users to its platform, especially after it won over high-profile figures such as elon musk. mainstream news media widely reported on the rising status of the audio-focused social network (caroleo & maiello, 2022; strielkowski, 2021). perhaps considering clubhouse’s early success, major social networks also began experimenting with or unrolling audio features as well, such as twitter spaces (somerville, 2021), while facebook, slack, reddit, and linkedin have all released audio functions since mid-2021 (rodrigo, 2021). yet, facebook, twitter, and youtube remain among the most studied social media platforms (stoycheff et al., 2017), while only a limited number of studies focus on audio platforms such as clubhouse (jung et al., 2022). the present study thus theorizes clubhouse as a drop-in audio social media platform to connect people, examines its early social network, and contributes to social media literature as clubhouse represents an earlier iteration of an emerging social media sub-genre. the paper’s primary contribution is a social network analysis of early clubhouse users and their invitation networks, revealing a hierarchy of social exclusivity among networked publics, which indicates an embedded capitalist social structure and connection that grants access to those with more social and economic power. these networked relationships provide insights into how invite-based emerging social media platforms are formed and grow in ways that counter the democratizing rhetoric found in their branding and public relations. theoretical framework networked publics is a framework theorized by boyd (2011) that defines “publics that are restructured by networked technologies” (p.39). networked publics share similarities with many other types of publics because they “allow people to gather for social, cultural, and civic purposes, and they help people connect with a world beyond their close friends and family” (p.39). research on networked publics mentions that social networking sites provide technological affordances which are conducive to the environment where the networked publics interact and participate (xu & luttman, 2021). bonini (2015) further proposed a concept of networked listeners based on the concept of networked publics. listeners can be transformed from passively listening to becoming active “producers” where they create content and information that takes place in a variety of online environments. both listeners who are passively listening and actively producing are “visible nodes in an interconnected network, the network of a radio’s digital community” (ibid, p.14). bonini defines this new listening experience as the “augmented radio listening experience” which consists of listening, discussion, comments, and the production of content on social networks connected to the radio (p.14-15). drop-in audio, social network apps are also relevant to discussions of social capital (bourdieu, 1983; lin & smith, 2001). social capital theory explains the processes of capitalization in social networks and argues that capital transforms into social relations as a form of investment with expected market returns, whether economic, political, labor, or community (lin, 2001). lin describes social capital as resources that reveal a mechanism to help understand the “macro-micro linkage between structure and individuals” (p.3). the concept of social capital paired with individuals’ participation in social media has been discussed over recent years (gil de zúñiga et al., 2012; julien, 2015), and as the emergence of social media has complicated the structure of social networks and social capital (gil de zúñiga et al., 2017). research has shown how social media contribute to the development of social capital, and how social capital created in social media settings is conceptually and empirically different from social capital created in the offline geospatial structure of interpersonal relationships (ibid). however, social media researchers continue to explore social capital in new media settings as emerging technologies evolve and grow. this study examines the debut of a new social media platform, clubhouse, how individuals enact social structure to connect social resources in the early development of clubhouse, and how social capital on social media affects their online community-building. research questions (r1) what kind of central social actors exist in the early development of clubhouse invitation networks? (r2) what kind of social structure is revealed by these centrally networked individuals in early growth of the clubhouse network? method clubhouse is a communication channel of interconnected individuals, and the structure of its communication network contributes to understanding the manifestation of its social community (milgram, 1967). social network analysis may be used to investigate such social connections or structures (scott, 1988). network analysis is an approach grounded in specifying various social ties that connect individuals to different forms of social collectivities. from a structural perspective, the embedded structure of connected social ties has significant consequences for those connected individuals (zhang, 2010). through studying relational or network data, social network analysis helps to explain relationships between two or more social actors in their purposive action and embedded social structure. to facilitate uncovering this social structure in early clubhouse membership, we retrieved a data package containing clubhouse user information (including items such as followers/following and invitation data) from kaggle created on april 5, 2021 (kaggle.com/datasets/johntukey/clubhouse-dataset). we extracted the first batch of 6000 users who were invited to clubhouse in chronological order and applied the visualization algorithms yufang hu (hu, 2005) and fruchtermanreingold (fruchterman & reingold, 1991) in gephi to sort out different communities and examine their modularity (figure 1). users’ names were anonymized for privacy protection. results figure 1. early clubhouse invitation network visualization. figure 2. modularity report. there are 421 communities in our sample network, including the 10 largest communities containing more than 140 nodes (figure 2). the clubhouse invitation network contains a high centrality with a direct connection of nodes to the ego. the top ego nodes represent individuals who all share common backgrounds in venture capital or entrepreneurship and generate hundreds of invitations utilizing their social network for information resources. the early clubhouse invitation network shared a characteristic of a higher degree of centrality for major actors and relied on their high level of social network ties and betweenness to develop. the social connection of ego nodes divides the overall network into different social communities, revealing the inequality of information, prestige, and social networks. discussion this study argues that the founding and development of clubhouse entrenches the existing social structure that individuals inherit rather than fundamentally changing it, as per company rhetoric in advertising and public relations. as mentioned in their weekly clubhouse rooms, the founder's vision is to allegedly promote free speech and provide a democratic platform by developing their software to allow everyone to speak. as some have argued, radio and new tech convergence are seen as “a truly democratic participatory public platform” or that “the medium itself becomes an embodiment of democracy” (bottomley, 2020, p.229). our results show that this is far from the case, as clubhouse’s early invite network is deeply embedded in social capital relations. individuals are divided by their network hierarchy and constrained within their social capital networks. we find that the ‘cool-factor’ is likely not the main factor at work in early invite-only audio social media network growth. in mapping clubhouse’s early invitation network, the exponential growth of clubhouse reflects a process of capitalization where venture capitalists, founders, and executives were the ‘invisible hands’ that exchange their social capital for social networks. this study finds that clubhouse’s early network reinstated existing social structures rather than serve as a democratizing connective force for networked publics. viral social media platforms such as clubhouse depend on capital's hierarchical and embedded structural aspects to further develop their social networks among users. references bonini, t. (2015). the listener as producer: the rise of the networked listener. in t. bonini & b. monclus (eds.), radio audiences and participation in the age of network society (pp. 1–36). taylor & francis. bottomley, a. j. (2020). sound streams: a cultural history of radio-internet convergence. university of michigan press. bourdieu, p. (1983). forms of capital. in j. g. richardson (ed.), handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). new york: greenwood press. boyd, d. (2010). social network sites as networked publics. in z. papacharissi (ed.), a networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 39–58). taylor & francis. caroleo, l., maiello, g. (2022). understanding polarization effects on voice-based social media: a clubhouse analysis. italian sociological review, 12(7s), 749-770. http://dx.doi.org/10.13136/isr.v12i7s.580 fruchterman, t. m. j., & reingold, e. m. (1991). graph drawing by force-directed placement. software: practice and experience, 21(11). gil de zúñiga, h., jung, n., & valenzuela, s. (2012). social media use for news and individuals’ social capital, civic engagement and political participation. journal of computermediated communication, 17(3), 319–336. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.10836101.2012.01574.x gil de zúñiga, h., barnidge, m., & scherman, a. (2017). social media social capital, offline social capital, and citizenship: exploring asymmetrical social capital effects. political communication, 34(1), 44-68. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2016.1227000 hu, y. (2005). efficient, high-quality force-directed graph drawing. mathematica journal, 10(1), 37–71. julien, c. (2015). bourdieu, social capital and online interaction. sociology, 49(2), 356–373. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038514535862 jung, k., park, y., kim, h., & lee, j. (2022, april). let’s talk@ clubhouse: exploring voice-centered social media platform and its opportunities, challenges, and design guidelines. in chi conference on human factors in computing systems extended abstracts (pp. 1-6). https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3519774 lin, n., & smith, j. (2001). social capital: a theory of social structure and action. cambridge: cambridge university press. milgram, s. (1967). the small world problem. psychology today, 2(1), 61-67. http://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-readings/milgram67smallworld.pdf rodrigo, c. (2021, may 3). twitter expands clubhouse-like feature. the hill. available at: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/551501-twitter-expands-clubhouse-like-feature/ scott, j. (1988). social network analysis. sociology, 22(1), 109-127. https://doi.org10.1177%2f0038038588022001007 somerville, h. (2021, february 11). clubhouse wins over hollywood, tech, even elon musk. are you next? users flock to audio app and other voice-based social platforms seeking new ways to connect, including some big names in politics and silicon valley. wall street journal. available at: https://www.wsj.com/articles/clubhouse-and-socialaudio-apps-are-having-a-momentis-it-all-talk-11613039404 stoycheff, e., liu, j., wibowo, k. a., & nanni, d. p. (2017). what have we learned about social media by studying facebook? a decade in review. new media & society, 19(6), 968–980. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817695745 strielkowski, w. (2021). clubhouse: yet another social network? ssrn electronic journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3832599 zhang, m. (2010). social network analysis: history, concepts, and research. in handbook of social network technologies and applications (pp. 3–21). springer us. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7142-5_1 scott, j. (1988). social network analysis. sociology, 22(1), 109-127. https://doi.org10.1177%2f0038038588022001007 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): duguay, s., acar, ö.e., jamet-lange, h. (2023, october). dear baby gays: investigating the sociotechnical practices of older lgbtq+ tiktok users. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. dear baby gays: investigating the sociotechnical practices of older lgbtq+ tiktok users stefanie duguay concordia university özgem elif acar concordia university hannah jamet-lange concordia university introduction on a video hashtagged #transisbeautiful, a woman explains that a tiktok filter, which enables people to see what their current self would look like as a teenager, is growing in popularity among transgender users. such a feature, she says, is important for “those of us that transitioned later in life.” she continues, “i started at thirty-two; i didn’t get to see this person.” she applies the filter and tears up, eventually breaking the silence by exclaiming, “she would have been such a pretty girl.” meanwhile, a self-identified butch “dyke” records videos for those who have just come out. in one, she addresses her audience broadly: “dear baby gays…” warning them that “the first woman you meet isn’t necessarily going to be the one you spend the rest of your life with." in another video, she responds to a follower’s request for tips for having sex with a woman for the first time. she declares, “don’t do what you see in corn! we have to say corn on tiktok because if we say the other word, it gets flagged.” she then provides advice for sexual encounters. although differing in subject matter, these posts reflect perspectives that stem from experiences accumulated over time, as these users appear to be older than the dominant tiktok demographic of individuals aged 24 or younger (statista, 2023). they use this vantage point to share regarding gender and sexual identity while also drawing upon tiktok’s affordances for such self-representation. these examples reflect this paper’s focus on the sociotechnical practices of lgbtq+1 tiktok users over age 30 as they emerge from, and are shaped by, the platform and its user cultures. literature and background lgbtq+ people have long used online technologies to develop and express their identities, connect with others, and speak out against homophobia and other forms of systemic discrimination (campbell, 2004; gray, 2009). however, the rise of social media platforms has posed many challenges for lgbtq+ self-representation. platforms’ algorithmic and automated content curation leads to hierarchies of visibility (bucher, 2012), which can render queer content less visible or circulate it to homophobic audiences who then target creators (duguay et al., 2018). further, broad policies prohibiting sexual content, and commercial incentives from advertisers to avoid “controversial” topics, can lead to lgbtq+ users experiencing censorship, demonetization, and deplatforming (southerton et al., 2021). nonetheless, lgbtq+ social media users develop strategies of self-protection and identity curation that deliver their self-representations to desired audiences (cho, 2017; hanckel et al., 2019). the short video app tiktok presents new affordances for self-representation while collapsing boundaries between younger and older audiences. in 2018, the chinese technology company bytedance acquired musical.ly and rebranded it as tiktok (kaye et al., 2022). since musical.ly was already popular with youth as a tool for creativity, performance, and play (savic, 2021), younger users have remained the platform’s largest demographic (auxier & anderson, 2021). tiktok affords dialogue among audiences through innovative tools, such as the “duet” feature that shows a new video side-by-side with an existing video allowing for a direct response or reaction. such tools have been deployed in intergenerational critique and conflict between self-identified “gen z” and “baby boomer” users (zeng & abidin, 2021). while zeng & abidin’s (2021) study is one of the few to include older users’ content, further investigation is necessary regarding older lgbtq+ users, whose content may be less antagonistic given offline instances of queer intergenerational sociality and support (emmer, 2012). despite studies showing that queer people have found community on tiktok, especially queer youth during the pandemic (hiebert & kortes-miller, 2021), the platform has a reputation of hostility toward lgbtq+ users. a 2019 investigation found that tiktok’s policies advised moderators to suppress videos of lgbtq+, disabled, and lower socioeconomic status users (biddle et al., 2020). while tiktok claimed to abandon this policy, lgbtq+ users still experience exclusion through regular removal and reduced visibility of their videos (simpson & semaan, 2021). users attempt to counter these issues through multiple strategies, such as by obscuring references to sex and sexual identity with coded terms like “corn” instead of “porn” and “le$bean” for “lesbian” (delkic, 2022). as such, a volume of lgbtq+ content can be found that harnesses tiktok’s features while evading punitive moderation mechanisms. 1 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other diverse sexual and gender identities. methods this paper presents an analysis of older2 lgbtq+ users’ tiktok videos. while some users employ hashtags, much content is discovered through the highly personalized for you page (fyp) (bhandari & bimo, 2020). building on emerging approaches to studying algorithmically curated information flows (bounegru et al., 2022), the research team collected tiktoks by training two new accounts to deliver this niche content to the fyp. this was done by following older lgbtq+ tiktokers and the hashtags they use while liking associated content. once the fyp for each account showed mostly lgbtq+ content from older users, researchers spent one hour per day manually collecting video links and recording metadata (likes, shares, etc). this approach ensured that the study examined content circulated to a (hypothetical) user and included videos that would not be surfaced through hashtag searches. data collection occurred from february 1 to march 1, 2023, with the final data set including a total of 247 videos. the authors engaged in high-level analysis, sorting data to uncover the most circulated content and identifying prominent platform trends (highfield & leaver, 2016) followed by multiple rounds of qualitative coding. this analysis attended to videos’ messages, aesthetics, and formats to identify recurrent themes and approaches to representation while also examining users’ negotiation of tiktok’s affordances. preliminary findings while this is still work-in-progress, initial analysis uncovered recurrent themes in user content, which include: • older queer representation – the construction and discussion of identities at the intersection of age and sexual identity, such as “late in life” lesbians, queer parents, gay grandpas and others; • advice giving – videos aimed toward younger audiences and individuals who have newly come out, describing what to do in situations specific to lgbtq+ people; • history and education – although related to advice videos, these tiktoks draw more specifically on memory. some include personal life stories while others discuss queer historical events, underscoring a desire to share experiences and pass historical knowledge along to a younger generation; • counter-discourses and solidarity – many videos leverage tiktok’s features to counter homophobia and transphobia, calling out discriminatory users or drawing attention to oppressive sociopolitical developments (e.g. parents fighting anti-trans legislation that affects children). other videos express solidarity with those targeted by discrimination, such as lesbians dismissing trans-exclusionary radical feminist (terf) views in support of transwomen. 2 those identifying as, or appearing to be, approximately older than 30 years of age, who can be thought of as ‘older’ relative to tiktok’s predominantly younger user base. across these themes, tiktok is not merely a neutral host of content but shows up in how these users represent themselves and even through platform-specific commentary (e.g. “say corn”). further analysis will reveal the extent to which tiktok shapes these lgbtq+ users’ sociotechnical practices. it will also provide a deeper understanding of the above themes, revealing how those, who are often overlooked in scholarly and public discourse centering young tiktokers, use the platform to concurrently represent age and sexual identity. references auxier, b., & anderson, m. (2021). social media use in 2021. pew research center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/social-media-use-in-2021/ bhandari, a., & bimo, s. (2020). tiktok and the “algorithmized self”: a new model of online interaction. aoir selected papers of internet research, october. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2020i0.11172 biddle, s., ribeiro, p. v., & dias, t. (2020, march 16). invisible censorship. the intercept. https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-usersdiscrimination/ bounegru, l., devries, m., & weltevrede, e. (2022). the research persona method: figuring and reconfiguring personalised information flows. in c. lury, w. viney, & s. wark (eds.), figure: concept and method. springer. bucher, t. (2012). want to be on the top? algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on facebook. new media & society, 14(7), 1164–1180. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444812440159 campbell, j. e. (2004). getting it on online: cyberspace, gay male sexuality, and embodied identity. routledge. cho, a. (2017). default publicness: queer youth of color, social media, and being outed by the machine. new media & society, 20(9), 3183-3200. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817744784 delkic, m. (2022, november 19). leg booty? panoramic? seggs? how tiktok is changing language. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/19/style/tiktok-avoid-moderators-words.html duguay, s., burgess, j., & suzor, n. (2018). queer women’s experiences of patchwork platform governance on tinder, instagram, and vine. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 26(2), 237-252. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856518781530 emmer, p. (2012). talkin’ ’bout meta-generation: act up history and queer futurity. quarterly journal of speech, 98(1), 89–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2011.638664 gray, m. l. (2009). out in the country: youth, media, and queer visibility in rural america. new york university press. hanckel, b., vivienne, s., byron, p., robards, b., & churchill, b. (2019). ‘that’s not necessarily for them’: lgbtiq+ young people, social media platform affordances and identity curation. media, culture & society, 41(8), 1261-1278. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443719846612 hiebert, a., & kortes-miller, k. (2021). finding home in online community: exploring tiktok as a support for gender and sexual minority youth throughout covid-19. journal of lgbt youth, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/19361653.2021.2009953 highfield, t., & leaver, t. (2016). instagrammatics and digital methods: studying visual social media, from selfies and gifs to memes and emoji. communication research and practice, 2(1), 47–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2016.1155332 kaye, d. b. v., zeng, j., & wikstrom, p. (2022). tiktok: creativity and culture in short video. polity. mckee, a. (2003). textual analysis: a beginner’s guide. sage. savic, m. (2021). from musical.ly to tiktok: social construction of 2020’s most downloaded short-video app. international journal of communication, 15, 3173– 3194. simpson, e., & semaan, b. (2021). for you, or for "you"? proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 4(cscw3), 1–34. https://doi.org/10.1145/3432951 southerton, c., marshall, d., aggleton, p., rasmussen, m. l., & cover, r. (2021). restricted modes: social media, content classification and lgbtq sexual citizenship. new media and society, 23(5), 920–938. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820904362 statista (2023). distribution of tiktok users worldwide as of january 2023, by age and gender. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1299771/tiktok-global-user-agedistribution/ zeng, j., & abidin, c. (2021). ‘#okboomer, time to meet the zoomers’: studying the memefication of intergenerational politics on tiktok. information, communication & society, 24(16), 2459-2481. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2021.1961007 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 monea, a., mcglotten, s., paasonen, s., sundén, j., tiidenberg, k., & jacobsson, r. (2024, october). sex as/and/on social media. panel presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. sex as/and/on social media alexander monea george mason university shaka mcglotten state university of new york at purchase susanna paasonen university of turku jenny sundén södertörn university katrin tiidenberg taillinn university robert jacobsson södertörn university sex is central to the internet. not only has it spurred technological innovation (arlidge 2002; johnson 1996; waddell 2016), generations of people have now looked to the internet for information about sex and sexuality (daneback et al. 2011). online communities have formed around gender and sexual identity (baym 2010), which have been particularly important to the lives of lgbtqia+ people (mccracken et al. 2020; tiidenberg, hendry & abidin 2021). sex exists everywhere online and yet is everywhere constrained, sanitized, normalized, and invisibilized (albury 2018; paasonen, jarrett & light 2019; mcglotten 2013; monea 2022; tiidenberg & van der nagel 2020). this panel will investigate the ways in which sex seeps, spills, and oozes across boundaries, both online and off, despite efforts to control and limit its impact beyond consumer capitalism. we investigate the ways in which sex continues to inspire new forms of identity and community online as it evades content moderation, moves to liminal spaces of the internet, gets interpreted and reimagined by artificial intelligence (ai), creates new forms of inclusion and exclusion, norms and exceptions, connections and disconnections, and spills over into our irl (i.e. real/material) lives. alexander monea examines the growing online ‘gooning’ community, a group of selfprofessed pornography addicts that engage in prolonged sessions of masturbation to multiple simultaneous streams of pornography. drawing on demographic data from over 50,000 gooners, content analysis across 2 subreddits and 10+ discord servers, and ethnographic interviews, author 1 shows how gooners are engaging in new and problematic forms of queerness. gooners leverage social media to build solidarity, encourage one another, share pornography, draw public critics into their fantasies, roleplay pornography addiction, find people to direct message with, and find people to engage in mutual masturbation, both online and off. they fetishize transgressing the boundaries of acceptable porn consumption and build new forms of problematic queerness around phallocentrism, transnormativity, and bisexual mutual masturbation. shaka mcglotten examines the ways in which designers of generative ai technologies work to constrain sexually explicit content with particularly damaging ramifications for representations of queer sexuality. both their inputs and outputs contain sexual connotations, but the guardrails installed by designers to prevent the production of sexually explicit content produce a porous boundary between the two. the outcome is excitatory enchantments, wherein machines engage alternately in sexual hallucination and oppressive silences that author 2 probes through a series of ‘glitchcraft’ practices that investigate the way the figure of the ‘twink’ gets interpreted and articulated by various generative ai technologies. in so doing, they explore new imaginaries of ‘twinkdom’ in an our increasingly ai-mediated digital world. susanna paasonen, jenny sundén, and katrin tiidenberg look at the sexual boundary work and content moderation practices of what they term ‘sexual social media platforms’. drawing on analyses of platform governance policies, ethnographic observation, and over 60 interviews with users, developers, and moderators, these authors examine the ways in which platforms built to facilitate the dissemination of sexual content themselves produce new boundaries and norms around sexuality online. thus, while they document multiple ways in which social media can be made more sex positive and kink friendly, the tendency towards scalability, network effects, and monopoly status of the platform structure all inevitably runs contrary to the needs of particular subcultures and subcommunities online. their exclusion creates new seeps and spills, as they look to continue using platforms surreptitiously or find alternative homes for their online interactions. robert jacobsson looks at the anal sex practices that are mediated by gay hook-up apps like grindr. drawing on qualitative diary writing performed by 33 swedish queer men, the author demonstrates the ways in which queer men continually engage with grindr throughout the day to mediate a diverse spectrum of anal activities (such as fisting, spanking, caressing, and rimming). grindr here operates as a point of conjunction between the corporeal, the algorithmic, and the sociocultural and works to mediate queer pleasure and normativity. references albury, k. (2018). sexual expression in social media. in burgess, j., marwick, a. e. & poell, t. (eds.). the sage handbook of social media (pp. 444-462). london, uk: sage. arlidge, j. (2002, mar. 2). the dirty secret that drives new technology: it’s porn. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2002/mar/03/internetnews.observerfocus [accessed feb. 29, 2024] baym, n. (2010). personal connections in the digital age. malden, ma: polity. johnson, p. (1996). pornography drives technology: why not to censor the internet. fed. comm. law journal, 49(1), 217-226. mccracken, a., cho, a., stein, l., & hoch, i. n. (eds.) (2020). a tumblr book: platform and cultures. ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press. mcglotten, s. (2013). virtual intimacies: media, affect, and queer sociality. albany, ny: suny press. monea, a. (2022). the digital closet: how the internet became straight. cambridge, ma: mit press. paasonen, s., jarrett, k. & light, b. (2019). nsfw: sex, humor, and risk in social media. cambridge, ma: the mit press. tiidenberg, k., hendry, n. a., & abidin, c. (2021). tumblr. malden, ma: polity. tiideberg, k. & van der nagel, e. (2020). sex and social media. bingley, uk: emerald publishing. waddell, k. (2016, jun. 7). how porn leads people to upgrade their tech. the atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/how-porn-leadspeople-to-upgrade-their-tech/486032/ [accessed feb. 29, 2024] paper 1: a visit to the goon cave: online masturbation communities alexander monea george mason university this paper examines the growing online ‘gooning’ community, a group of self-professed pornography addicts that engage in prolonged sessions of masturbation, and argues that they represent a problematic queerness that transgresses cisheteronormativity while preserving some of its damaging forms of power and marginalization. it connects with a broad range of scholarship that examines the intersections between sexuality, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2002/mar/03/internetnews.observerfocus https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/how-porn-leads-people-to-upgrade-their-tech/486032/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/how-porn-leads-people-to-upgrade-their-tech/486032/ pornography, and digital space (mccracken et al. 2020, mcglotten 2013, paasonen 2011), but builds important connections to recent work on the manosphere and cisheteronormativity online (are & briggs 2023, blunt & stardust 2021, burke 2023, monea 2022). gooners often surround themselves with pornographic materials, setting up ‘caves’ with multiple screens simultaneously playing pornography, printed images collaged onto walls, and various sex toys and pleasure enhancing drugs laid out at the ready. this study performs a discourse analysis on select posts from the three most popular subreddits for gooners and ten of the most popular discord servers that are explicitly designed for the gooning community. this analysis will be supplemented with ethnographic interviews with volunteers recruited from these reddit and discord communities. through these discord servers, a large amount of demographic data on the gooning community is made publicly available. some of that data conforms to expectations for anglophone digital communities centered on masturbation and pornography: 74.6% of gooners identifying as cisgender men (out of 21,861 respondents), 46.6% of gooners residing in north america and another 40.2% in europe (out of 53,319 respondents), and 95.7% of gooners being aged 18-25 years old (out of 42,993 respondents). perhaps the most surprising demographic finding is that 61.2% of gooners identify as bisexual (out of 42,993 respondents). this finding is better illuminated in conjunction with a key narrative that surfaces in the analysis of content from the community subreddits and discord servers. gooners often tell some version of a narrative wherein they came to the gooning community as cisgender, heterosexual men who happened to love pornography. through prolonged gooning sessions and time spent in a ‘goon state’ (akin to a tantric meditative state), they unlocked a latent queerness within themselves and began exploring non-normative components of their sexuality during goon sessions. the online gooning community regularly encourages these deviations into queerness. they encourage new members to share similar stories, affirm their new interests, and normalize them by telling stories of their own. that said, analyses of the content shared by gooners – in addition to open discussions of non-normative sexual desire they regularly poll themselves on which of a series of pornographic gifs most ‘triggers’ the community into needing a goon session – demonstrates some problematic components to the queerness they profess. the predominant form of non-normative sexual imagery they explore is trans pornography, but this rather strictly limited to trans women and gatekept through transnormativity, transmedicalism, fatphobia, ableism, and racial marginalization (gossett 2017; haines 2021; jacobsen, devor & hodge 2022; johnson 2016). typical scenes shared amongst these communities include thin, white, able-bodied, femme trans women either masturbating or having sex with cisgender men. the community describes this fixation as worshiping ‘girlcock,’ which connects to a broader theme of phallocentrism across the community. the penis is the center of the porn that gooners consume and of the broader discourse they participate in. its emphasis borders on what one might describe as ‘phallomania’, wherein a maximalist digital aesthetic pushes the previous problems of phallocentrism to new heights (e.g. butler 1993; derrida 1983; spivak 1990). this brain addled goon state resulting from hours of phallocentric porn streams looks a lot like porn addiction to many public commentators. while porn addiction remains a highly contested concept, this has not stopped it from capturing the public’s imagination (meehan 2023; taylor 2021, 2020). many people self-report having porn addictions (meehan 2023), describe the problem as consuming an unhealthy amount of pornography or having “too much of a good thing” (taylor 2020, p. 618), and note a desensitization driving them to more niche/fetish porn (attwood, smith & barker 2018). this discourse has pushed many into the nofap movement, an online community focused on refraining from using porn and/or masturbating that also has deep connections to the manosphere, the men’s rights movement, and the far right (mcglotten 2019; monea 2022). nofap understands porn as impacting expected behaviors and aims to spur people to take back control of their lives through abstinence (taylor & jackson 2018). as perhaps the flipside of this same coin, gooners instead fetishize pornography addiction and roleplay submission to its siren song (sunny megatron 2023). despite being described as occurring in the solitude of goon ‘caves’, gooners’ roleplaying of pornography addiction has a public and social dimension. for many, it involves some combination of (1) posting about their states of arousal, agitation, and desire in the lead up to a gooning session, (2) frequently discussing ‘triggers’ that compel them to goon, (3) intermittently posting during goon sessions, sometimes to receive encouragement, sometimes to receive chastisement, and sometimes to find other gooners to direct message with, (4) sharing images and videos of their goon caves and their goon sessions (usually point-of-view images of their cave centered around their erect penis), (5) finding other people to goon with, both online and off. for many, gooning thus entails play with exhibitionism and voyeurism and connects with earlier internet trends of masturbation on anonymous chat sites like chatroulette or omegle (kreps 2010; korn 2017). we might read these performances as exuberant acts of rebellion from neoliberal capitalism – an excessive squandering of time on bestial pleasure that flies in the face of productivity discourse. we might also follow jane ward (2020) and understand this return to homosociality as indicative of the failure of heteronormativity to deliver on its promises to deliver stable, meaningful, and fulfilling lives. gooning also celebrates the ascendancy of women in the sexual and pornographic marketplace, helps people feel safe to explore new forms of pleasure and desire, and operates as a gateway towards queerness. however, there are problematic implications for women lurking beneath these performances of rebellion, as they also connect deeply with men’s rights advocates’ call for a ‘sexit’ where men utilize technology to render women superfluous and thus evacuate women’s power to demand equality and justice (sharma 2018). gooning also tends to perpetuate (albeit sometimes in a mutated form) some of the problematic elements of cisnormativity and heteronormativity, including body normativity (fatphobia, ableism, etc.), phallocentricism to the point of phallomania, transnormativity and transmedicalism, and a new masculine homosociality where women’s only role is as performers on screen. references are, c., & briggs, p. (2023). the emotional and financial impact of de-platforming on creators at the margins. social media + society, 9(1). attwood, f., smith, c., & barker, m. (2018). ‘i’m just curious and still exploring myself’: young people and pornography. new media & society, 20(10), 3738-3759. blunt, d., & stardust, z. (2021). automating whorephobia: sex, technology and the violence of deplatforming: an interview with hacking//hustling. porn studies, 8(4), 350366. burke, k. (2023). the pornography wars: the past, present, and future of america’s obscene obsession. new york, ny: bloomsbury. butler, j. (1993). the lesbian phallus and the morphological imaginary. in j. butler bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of “sex” (pp. 57-91). new york, ny: routledge. derrida, j. (1983). geschlecht: sexual difference, ontological difference. research in phenomenology, 13, 65-83. gossett, c. (2017). blackness and the trouble of trans visibility. in r. gossett, e. a. stanley, & j. burton (eds.) trap door: trans cultural production and the politics of visibility (pp. 183-190). cambridge, ma: mit press. haines, c. c. (2021). transmisogyny and the abjection of girlcock. the university of regina (canada). jacobsen, k., devor, a., & hodge, e. (2022). who counts as trans? a critical discourse analysis of trans tumblr posts. journal of communication inquiry, 46(1), 6081. https://doi.org/10.1177/01968599211040835 johnson, a. h. (2016). transnormativity: a new concept and its validation through documentary film about transgender men. sociological inquiry, 86(4), 465–491. https://doi.org/10.1111/soin.12127 korn, j. u. (2017). expecting penises in chatroulette: race, gender, and sexuality in anonymous online spaces. popular communication, 15(2), 95–109. https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2016.1269908 kreps, d. (2010). foucault, exhibitionism, and voyeurism on chatroulette. in f. sudweeks, h. hrachovec, and c. ess (eds.). proceedings: cultural attitudes towards communication and technology (pp. 207-216). australia: murdoch university. mccracken, a., cho, a., stein, l. & hoch, i. n. (eds.). (2020). a tumblr book: platform and cultures. ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press. mcglotten, s. (2019). porn fast. in t. waugh & b. arroyo (eds.) i confess (pp. 353369). montreal: mcgill university press. https://doi.org/10.1177/01968599211040835 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1111/soin.12127 https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2016.1269908 mcglotten, s. (2013). virtual intimacies: media, affect, and queer sociality. albany, ny: suny press. meehan, c. (2023). ‘when you become addicted to it you start having these unrealistic expectations’: young people’s perceptions of porn addiction. porn studies, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2023.2267593 monea, a. (2022). the digital closet: how the internet became straight. cambridge, ma: mit press. paasonen, s. (2011). carnal resonance: affect and online pornography. cambridge, ma: mit press. sharma, s. (2018, jun. 19). going to work in mommy’s basement. boston review. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/sarah-sharma-programmers-mommys-basement/ spivak, g. c. (1990). the post-colonial critic: interviews, strategies, dialogues (s. harasym, ed.). new york, ny: routledge. sunny megatron (2023). what is gooning? a sexologist explains. youtube. https://youtu.be/byctngfz-wi?si=zlv9fcx_9e3ill0c taylor, k. (2021). accessing something that’s meant to be inaccessible: pornography viewers’ reconciliation between early pornographic memories and pornography’s perceived risk. porn studies, 8(1), 39-57. taylor, k. (2020). nosology and metaphor: how pornography viewers make sense of pornography addiction. sexualities, 23(4), 609-629. taylor, k. & jackson, s. (2018). ‘i want that power back’: discourses of masculinity within an online pornography abstinence forum. sexualities, 21(4), 621-639. ward. j. (2020). the tragedy of heterosexuality. new york, ny: nyu press. paper 2: glitchcraft: twinks in the machine? shaka mcglotten state university of new york at purchase what can generative ai teach us about sex? not nothing, but not everything, either. with careful prompt generation, one can learn about the most popular sexual positions in the united states, the broad historical outlines of technology and the regulation of sex, or where to find popular fan fiction slash archives. in these ways and others, one can be impressed by the democratizing power of these tools in the ways they make accessing knowledge easier, echoing earlier cyberutopian beliefs in the internet’s leveling power. indeed, if one asks chatgpt what it can teach about sex, it will answer https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2023.2267593 https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/sarah-sharma-programmers-mommys-basement/ https://youtu.be/byctngfz-wi?si=zlv9fcx_9e3ill0c that it can be used to teach users about sexual education, health, and wellness, as well as address taboos, provide counseling and support, and offer a space for the creative exploration of fantasies (chat gpt 2023). however, the wrong prompt or the use of a sexually coded term can trigger a content policy violation. thus, there are significant constraints surrounding the use of these widely available chatbots and image generators, as companies implement guardrails that significantly limit the production of sexually explicit content, with a particular concern for inputs and outputs that concern the figure of the child, which presents not only moral and ethical questions about their representation but the particular technical difficulties present in identifying those representations (thakor 2017). these constraints also have particular implications for representations of non-normative and queer sexualities, which despite their apparent digital ubiquity, continue to be policed and censored via overt stigma as well as less apparent heteronormative bias (monea 2022; sourtherton et al. 2021). the content moderation policies of contemporary technology platforms are notoriously opaque and form an uneven patchwork of governance protocols, and what we know about why popular new tools such as open ai’s chatgpt, google’s gemini, or image generators such as midjourney and leonardo flag some terms and not others is limited. while some content moderation policies clearly prohibit nudity and sexually explicit content, this does not necessarily prevent users from developing workarounds or the programs from hallucinating the content by mistake. these moderation policies, moreover, may not align with what users want or how they use the platforms (duguay et al. 2020; gillespie 2018), and this is particularly the case for queer counterpublics for whom networked intimacies are essential means for the exploration, formation, and expression of identities, aesthetics, and politics (author 2013; mowlabocus 2010, 2021). moreover, as numerous scholars have observed in recent years, predictive technologies, including generative ai, reproduce existing inequalities, reflecting violent histories of oppression and extraction that have characterized so much of technoscientific history in relation to various minoritarian groups differently marked by race, gender, class, and ability (author 2016, bailey 2021; benjamin 2019; broussard 2023; browne 2015; noble 2018; tacheva and ramasubramanian 2023). sexuality is a particularly charged material-affective field. for queer people, networked intimacies serve as collective forms of memory and as “cultural adhesives” (wang 2021)–from porn to hookup apps and more–that also undergo continuing transformations with each introduction of new technologies. it is telling but not surprising then that generative ai, much like the rest of the internet, demonstrates a heteronormative bias that pushes queer content into a narrow “digital closet” (monea 2022). this presentation examines how several popular generative ai platforms regulate and filter queer sexual content, and it reflects on a series of experiments with these tools that focused on the figure of the “twink.” in the lexicon of queer embodiments, twinks are often characterized by their youthful exuberance, slim physique, minimal body hair, and, typically, racialized whiteness. the twink flirts with boundaries between boyhood and adulthood, innocence and carnality, feminine and masculine (needham 2022). from the perspective of queer literary, critical, and popular traditions, the twink shares historical antecedents with hellenistic ideals through renaissance art, as well as figuring prominently in queer representational histories tied to the emergence of modern technologies of mass reproduction, from photography, film, and television to the modern internet (mercer 2017). the twink entered the broader modern gay lexicon through pornography in the early 2000s as the sexually available white suburban kid next door and has since entered mainstream discourse, as evidenced by the widely circulated new york times article, “welcome to the age of the twink” (haramis 2018). the figure of the twink is viral, with numerous memes dedicated to them, including, prominently, those about “evil twink energy” (needham 2022). this paper is part of a larger project on what i call the “computational hex,” which uses multidisciplinary creative and intellectual approaches to attend to some of the weird and witchy contours of our algorithmic ordinary–from the rise of the astrology app co-star to “#witchtok” (author 2021). “glitchcraft” takes inspiration from legacy russell’s (2020) “glitch feminism” and her manifesto’s solicitation to embrace the glitch as a form of activism. “glitchcraft” here refers to those creative practices of engagement that underscore the excitatory enchantments these generative ai produce, their frustrating constraints, and the accidents–exploited or serendipitous–that might result. the presentation documents a series of ongoing experiments with generative ai that seek to pressure the opaque guardrails that invisibly demarcate the twink and much sexual content more broadly to critically and playfully explore the queer affordances of popular generative ai tools. references bailey, moya. misogynoir transformed. new york: new york university press, 2021. benjamin, ruha. race after technology. medford, ma: polity, 2020. broussard, meredith. more than a glitch: confronting race, gender, and ability bias in tech. cambridge: mit, 2023. browne, simone. dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. durham: duke university press, 2015. openai. chatgpt (3.5) [large language model]. https://chat.openai.com. 2023. duguay, stefanie, jean burgess, and nicolas suzor. “queer women’s experiences of patchwork platform governance on tinder, instagram, and vine.” convergence 26, no. 2 (april 1, 2020): 237–52. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856518781530. gillespie, tarleton. custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media, 2018. https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300235029 haramis, nick. “welcome to the age of the twink.” the new york times, may 14, 2018, sec. t magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/t-magazine/age-of-thetwink.html https://chat.openai.com/ https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300235029 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/t-magazine/age-of-the-twink.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/t-magazine/age-of-the-twink.html mercer, john. gay pornography: representations of sexuality and masculinity. new york: i.b. tauris, 2017. monea, alex. the digital closet: how the internet became straight. cambridge: mit press, 2022. mowlabocus, sharif. gaydar culture: gay men, technology, and embodiment in the digital age. new york: routledge, 2010. ———. interrogating homonormativity: gay men, identity and everyday life. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2021. needham, gary. “american twink story.” in ryan murphy’s queer america, edited by brenda r. weber and david greven, 73–85. new york: routledge, 2022. noble, safiya umoja. algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york: new york university press, 2018. russell, legacy. glitch feminism: a manifesto. new york: verso, 2020. southerton, clare, daniel marshall, peter aggleton, mary lou rasmussen, and rob cover. “restricted modes: social media, content classification and lgbtq sexual citizenship.” new media & society 23, no. 5 (may 1, 2021): 920–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820904362 tacheva, jasmina, and srividya ramasubramanian. “ai empire: unraveling the interlocking systems of oppression in generative ai’s global order.” big data & society 10, no. 2 (july 1, 2023): 20539517231219240. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231219241 thakor, mitali. “how to look: apprehension, forensic craft, and the classification of child exploitation images.” ieee annals of the history of computing 39, no. 2 (2017): 6–8. https://doi.org/10.1109/mahc.2017.25 wang, yidong. “the twink next door, who also does porn: networked intimacy in gay porn performers’ self-presentation on social media.” porn studies 8, no. 2 (april 3, 2021): 224–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2020.1841019 paper 3: flagging fluids: moderating bodies and boundaries in sexual social media susanna paasonen university of turku jenny sundén södertörn university https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820904362 https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231219241 https://doi.org/10.1109/mahc.2017.25 https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2020.1841019 katrin tiidenberg taillinn university this paper explores the layering of sexual boundary work and content moderation on sexual social media platforms by considering the place and limits of bodies and bodily fluids in networked sexuality. relying on data from platform walk-throughs (light et al. 2018), analysis of the governance and moderation rules, ethnographic observation, and over 60 interviews with platform users, developers, and moderators of three nordic and baltic sexual platforms – the estonian libertine.center used primarily by nonmonogamists, the swedish darkside preferred by bdsm and kink practitioners, and the finnish alastonsuomi dedicated to nudity and sex – we ask how bodies are regulated by platforms and users alike. first, we analyze how users of sexual social media platforms negotiate the boundaries between “vanilla” and “non-vanilla” and show how the platforms’ governance principles make that possible. then, relying specifically on the example of one of the three platforms – alastonsuomi – we explore the further boundary work that users undertake within the category of “non-vanilla” through content moderation via flagging actions based on notions of “good taste.” within the context of aggressive de-platforming of sex on leading us-based social media services, our platforms encourage sexual exchanges as their main rationale. sex – instead of being banned – becomes a binding dynamic that fuels engagements between users and makes space for alternate understandings of platform sociability and the value that sex holds within it. this becomes possible because the governance principles of the platforms differ from generic social media in a number of ways. first, the notion of safety is uncoupled from sexual content and the imperatives of moderating it, becoming reframed through the notions of consent, authenticity, harassment, shaming, and violence instead (cf. tiidenberg et al. 2023). secondly, this invites nuanced forms of moderation (i.e. supplanting or supplementing flagging based afterupload moderation of posts with what is, essentially, user moderation through verification). within these relatively safe spaces for sexual exploration, users activate and move symbolic boundaries around the kinds of sex they enjoy, regularly mapping it out against the figure of vanilla. vanilla is a popular term used to speak of conventional, unimaginative, and normative sex, not least so within kink communities defining themselves against the category (e.g., chalkidou, 2022; langdridge and butt, 2004; pohtinen, 2019; rehberg, 2017). our interviewees’ sexual preferences and lifestyles vary from online-only exhibitionism to swinging, to event-only bdsm, to cross-dressing, to 24/7 fetishism. across a variety of self-labels (“sexually liberated,” “libertine,” “kinkster,” “lifestyler” or “perv”) our interviewees valorize willingness, variability/diversity, and self-reflexivity over the assumed tedium of vanilla. through this they articulate an aspirational kind of sexual hierarchy, explicitly turning the cultural and normative construct of what gayle rubin (1989) framed as “good sex” on its head. yet, within these infrastructures and cultures built against the presumed vanilla of generic social media and generic sex, some forms of sexual connecting and representations of bodily flesh and fluids take things too far to be included in the fuzzy warmth of celebrated “non-vanilla.” harassing or insulting other users, primarily in the sense of judging their sexual lifestyle is considered a violation across the rules of all three platforms. while our participants all have stories to tell of a garden variety of hateful speech or harassment, they report an overall positive experience that they set aside from experiences on generic social media. different body sizes and sexual preferences are generally appreciated. this applies in particular to body positivity when it comes to images of women’s bodies, but extends to photos of small and micro penises: “maybe it’s a little like ‘oh, cute,’ so there’s a little of that tone, but, in any case such that all kinds of bodies and all kinds of penises, they get positive feedback and admiration there.” (emilia). while our platforms have varying levels of moderation by moderators, user and community governance is important on all three platforms, and particularly so on alastonsuomi that has only two moderators. users delete comments, block other users, flag posts, sometimes shutting down and restarting accounts to manage their experience. they also report looking after each other and the shared space, in particular when users are outed as abusive or criminal. this, however, does not necessarily a happy egalitarian community make. the platform’s insistence on the content posted to confine to “good taste” in particular results in friction in users’ content being removed without the reason – or the taste criteria – being altogether clear. this applied especially, albeit not exclusively, to watersports, which again pointed to a much deeper friction among (certain) kinksters and more mainstream tastes. according to juhani, “piss pics” were not allowed during the platform’s first years, only to suddenly appear. as one sharing the fetish himself, marko has been equally puzzled by the content policy: the piss-play part i don’t understand especially since today there’s that squirting fad, they probably put it into one category or another according to some [volume criterion of] deciliter, one gets flagged and the other one not. but, maybe it’s the assumption about what kind of material could drive people away. but, on the other hand, when you think how it’s like there, it’s a very strange division really. (…) i guess they think from their own starting points in terms of the average users. here, the ephemeral yet firmly vanilla figure of the “average person” evoked in u.s. community standards when drawing the boundaries of obscenity (and pornography) makes an unexpected entrance into how sexual content is flagged as deviating from the norms of good taste. the interviewees had difficulties in remembering how the flagging of questionable content works exactly – whether it is done by the users uploading photos and videos, by the admin, or by fellow users. jenni adds that users have the possibility of opting in to seeing content deemed sensitive: was it sensitive? so, it’s about, mainly what i’ve seen it’s piss play that’s been in videos and pics, that’s classified as sensitive. apparently, there can also be shit play and vomit play somewhere there but i haven’t gotten them myself yet at least. alastonsuomi is nevertheless such a, let’s say, middle-margin mass population site so, i guess that you can maybe pretty badly lynch [sic; a literal translation from “lynkata”] that kind of material away. or is it like so that even the admin removes it. but those are the kinds of criteria that you can set yourself. while, in the greater picture of social media, it may seem counter-intuitive to identify a platform trading in explicit sexual content as conservative and one for the “middlemargin mass population,” this becomes understandable when considering the ephemeral yet tenacious, and possibly hurtful, drawing of boundaries between what goes, and what does not; what remains within the realm of “good taste” and what tastes are flagged as questionable or “not good” instead. to state the obvious, sexual platforms are not free from discrimination against kinks: even as their hierarchies of “non-vanilla” are open to variation, hierarchies do remain. the opacity of content policies, combined with the ease with which some users become upset with facing visuals not of their own liking, results in governance being tricky business, the actors and norms of which are by no means evident. references light b, burgess j & duguays (2018) the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society 20(3): 881–990. chalkidou a (2022) vanilla democracy: sexuality, parenthood, and kinship in greece. sexualities 25(5/6): 563–580. langdridge d & butt t (2004) a hermeneutic phenomenological investigation of the construction of sadomasochistic identities. sexualities 7(1): 31–53. pohtinen j (2019) from secrecy to pride: negotiating the kink identity, normativity, and stigma. ethnologia fennica 46: 84–108. rehberg p (2019) more than vanilla sex: reading gay post-pornography with affect theory and psychoanalysis. porn studies 6(1): 114–128. rubin g (1989) thinking sex. in vance cs (ed) pleasure and danger: exploring female sexuality. london: pandora, pp. 267–319. tiidenberg, k, paasonen, s, sundén, j, & vihlman, m (2023) vanilla normies and fellow pervs: boundary work on sexual platforms. sexualities, doi: 13634607231215763. paper 4: “not your typical bottom”: anal affordances on grindr robert jacobsson södertörn university this paper delves into the intricate interplay between corporeal sexualities and their digital manifestations. focused on an exploration of grindr, the paper is based on a three-month diary study, capturing queer men’s (which in this paper includes homosexual and bisexual cisgender and trans men, as well as non-binary people’s) day-to-day experiences. as the diaries unfold with a mix of confessions, reflections and their own embodied experiences and narratives about anal sex on and through grindr, the participants’ use of grindr permits them to reassess their sexual identities and the connections between identity and practice. anal affordances on grindr – how queer men use profile texts, statistics (such as sexual position preference), photos and chatting – shape and regulate anal desires and affect how users traverse norms, habits, and behaviours on the app (van dijck, 2013). notably, the paper sheds light on the dynamic interaction between users and the 'rigid' sexual categories imposed by grindr, which are also reflective of the wider gay/queer culture, unravelling the nuanced ways in which users subvert these categories. sometimes queer men align with binary identity preferences, and sometimes they go beyond these. this not only contributes to a deeper comprehension of digital sexualities but also provides insights into the broader landscape of gay and queer culture, where digital technology intersects with identity formation. method and previous research the paper is based on the diaries of thirty-three queer men and their embodied experiences with anal sex facilitated through grindr. they live across sweden, from rural areas to big cities and are between 20 and 50 years old. i suggest that grindr users (un)intentionally "mess with" and subvert normative expectations on binary anal intercourse preferences and identities (set at the intersection of the society, the historical roots of the gay community, and the app itself) by participating in a playful and subversive exploration of their sexual identities. the discussion delves into the diverse spectrum of anal activities within the context of grindr, exploring both the motivations driving such engagements and the utilisation of the body on the platform. prevalent stereotypes persistently portray the role of a male bottom, particularly in anal intercourse, as passive, feminine, and indicative of a lack of control (allan, 2016; bersani, 1987; hocquenghem, 1972; kemp, 2009; kippax & smith, 2001; snyder, 2007; vytniorgu, 2023). scholarship addressing anal sex from a non-medical standpoint has delved into the nuanced identities associated with bottom and top dynamics in hook-up apps, examining their implications for femininity, masculinity, and hierarchies (chow, 2022; conner, 2023; hammack et al., 2022; plaza-vidalón & mateus, 2022; thepsourinthone et al., 2022). although some queer men in this study make use of anal affordances connected to binary sexual preferences, many of them go beyond intercourse positions; they fist, rim and spank; they are in flux between vanilla and kink, dom and sub; they change anal sex positions and resist ideas of being gendered or positioned in a specific category. they are actively subverting conventional ideas of identity and sexual behaviours through two connected themes: by not being a typical bottom and by unveiling anal desires through pictures. not your typical bottom several participants expressed a desire to do the opposite of their self-labelled sexual preferences, such as to be penetrated when labelled as a top on grindr, revealing they are not as strict as they may appear through grindr’s affordances. sexuality is more fluid for some queer men; some tops are bottoming, whilst some bottoms are topping, and some are topping without a physical penis. however, people sometimes find it challenging to explain non-binary sexual identities on the app. for example, how do you indicate that you are an active top with erectile dysfunction? grindr is an influential force in regulating and controlling anal sex practices. however, despite the platform's preestablished categories, queer men employ various strategies to fulfil their specific desires, deviating from grindr’s categories. this intricate dance between the controlled framework of grindr and the nuanced preferences and desires of queer men reflects a dynamic process in which users actively shape and navigate the specific details of anal encounters, going beyond pre-established labels of top, bottom and verse and anticipated outcomes. what happens if you are atypical regarding grindr’s preferred position stats? participants reveal desires beyond identity positioning, such as identifying as a bottom while expressing an interest in rimming: as a bottom, i’m not expected to do certain things…i still think about these grindr guys telling me, “strange, why do you like to rim me if you are a bottom?” or “why do you play around my entrance?”. dunno, maybe i’m an atypical bottom, or maybe i just met atypical gays? ergo, i am a vers bottom on the app; just to clarify to the boyz that i do love more than standing dead on a bed waiting for them to finish. moreover, identities also connote power dynamics, such as being penetrated is to abdicate power (bersani, 1987). a trans guy writes that “because i like ass sex, i should then also be small and thin and love being submissive and being degraded”. effectively navigating non-normative expressions of anal sex entails making use of available affordances but also being extensively creative in communicating preferences regarding the nature of anal sex, specifying levels of kinkiness, and articulating one's inclinations towards vanilla or more rough forms of sex. unveiling your anal desires the unveiling of anal desires on grindr involves strategic self-presentation and tailoring online personas to align with sexual preferences, emphasising visual and embodied aspects of specific anal activities. pictures are used on profiles, in messages, and in albums to signal specific anal desires. conversely, the absence of specific pictures signifies exclusionary preferences. for example, when requested, explicit photographs of cocks and genitals are for some deemed undesirable and may act as discouragement of continuation when asked to send pictures. to achieve success, participants strategically selected images aligned with beauty standards associated with perceived effectiveness as tops or bottoms or images reflecting their specific kinks. for instance, a 50-year-old gay man shares a close-up photo of his buttocks with a hand positioned near the opening, symbolising previous engagement in fisting. the positive reception of such images on grindr is perceived by this person as an acceptance of his enjoyment of fisting, eliminating the need for concealment. consequently, these images serve to leverage grindr's affordances for engaging in anal activities beyond penetration. in sum, anal affordances collectively shape the user experience on grindr, influencing how individuals present themselves and search for potential matches and enabling quick hook-ups. this paper illustrates a discrepancy between labels on grindr and actual anal practices. although queer men are using grindr’s anal affordances, the paper shows the limitations of grindr as its affordances are not fully taking into account how people’s desires are in flux and how anal sex may move beyond penetration. in other words, the anal affordances of an app like grindr are disrupted and challenged by the complexity of people’s sexualities. references allan, j. a. (2016). reading from behind: a cultural analysis of the anus. zed books, london. bersani, l. (1987). is the rectum a grave? october, 43, 197–222. chow, j. (2022). no fats, no fems, no problems? working out and the gay muscled body. sexualities, 25(8), 1077-1095. conner, c. t. (2023). how sexual racism and other discriminatory behaviors are rationalized in online dating apps. deviant behavior, 44(1), 126–142. hammack, p. l., grecco, b., wilson, b. d. m., & meyer, i. h. (2022). “white, tall, top, masculine, muscular”: narratives of intracommunity stigma in young sexual minority men’s experience on mobile apps. archives of sexual behavior, 51(5), 2413–2428. hocquenghem, g. (1972). homosexual desire. translated by daniella dangoor. duke university press, 1993. kemp, j. (2009). schreber and the penetrated male. in c. nigianni & m. storr (eds.), deleuze and queer theory (pp. 150–167). edinburgh university press. kippax, s., & smith, g. (2001). anal intercourse and power in sex between men. sexualities, 4, 413–434. plaza-vidalón, s., & mateus, j.-c. (2022). una exploración a las motivaciones e interacciones de los usuarios de grindr en lima, perú. diffractions, 5, article 5. snyder, m. (2007). crises of masculinity: homosocial desire and homosexual panic in the critical cold war narratives of mailer and coover. critique bolingbroke society, 48(3), 250–277. thepsourinthone, j., dune, t., liamputtong, p., & arora, a. (2022). it’s a man’s world: a qualitative study of gender and sexuality amongst australian gay men. international journal of environmental research and public health, 19(4), 2092. van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. oxford university press. vytniorgu, r. (2023). twinks, fairies, and queens: a historical inquiry into effeminate gay bottom identity. journal of homosexuality, 1–21. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): lee, j. (2024, october). exploring the nexus of k-pop dance challenges: children’s k-pop dream, internet stardom, and labor in the evolving culture industry. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. exploring the nexus of k-pop dance challenges: children’s k-pop dream, internet stardom, and labor in the evolving culture industry jin lee curtin university introduction k-pop dance challenges are a new burgeoning cultural phenomenon in short-form media culture, where k-pop idols replicate a choreographic move from their latest songs (abidin & lee, 2023). as the global appeal of k-pop intertwines with the proliferation of short-form media platforms like instagram reels, tiktok, and youtube shorts, these kpop dance challenges have now been ingrained in the daily lives of young people worldwide, particularly in the asia pacific region. among these challenges, there is a notable presence of children (under 13 years old). despite many social media platforms’ age-gating policies requiring users to be at least 13 years old to create an account (esafety commissioner, 2023), children casually engage in the trending challenges for fun, sharing videos of themselves participating alone or with friends. parents also join this trend by filming and posting short-form videos of their young children performing the k-pop challenges. also, third parties, such as child influencer agencies or k-pop idol agencies, leverage these challenges as a marketing tool to promote their k-pop idol training systems, or educators incorporate them as pedagogical resources. by interrogating the popularity of this phenomenon within the context of evolving culture industries, including influencer and k-pop industries, this study discusses how children are positioned in this emerging cultural landscape within the asia pacific region. i discuss pertinent issues surrounding children’s agency and wellbeing, such as children’s digital labor and the subsequent commodification of childhood innocence in the industry. this study is based on a 4-year ethnographic observation of children’s kpop dance challenges in the asia pacific region. it draws on an extended data set comprising social media posts of k-pop dance challenges featuring children, blog entries from online mom communities discussing k-pop training programs, and field notes gathered during my traditional ethnography conducted at k-pop busking sites in korea and australia. k-pop dance challenges: children’s new peer culture for the k-pop dream in tandem with glamorous images and the global popularity of k-pop idols as well as the considerable wealth amassed by successful global k-pop figures, becoming a k-pop idol has been celebrated widely in society (lee, 2018). k-pop idols have been endorsed as “role models” for children (kim, 2018; lee, 2018) and as “pride” for parents and their respective countries (chung, 2022; ho, 2012; kim, 2011). consequently, both the influencer industry and traditional k-pop industry have actively adapted their business strategies to groom new idols in the contemporary social media landscape. for example, the k-pop industry now seeks out internet-famous child personalities with a substantial following and socially desirable appearances and trains them for their next k-pop idol launching (lee et al, under review). similarly, the influencer industries across the asia pacific region, mainly in korea, japan, and china, have introduced “k-pop academy programs” aimed at nurturing children into child influencers and debuting “child idol” groups that serve as stepping stones towards professional idol careers in the entertainment industry amidst the rise of k-pop culture (lee et al., forthcoming). against this backdrop, my data show that viral k-pop dance challenges emerge as prime opportunities for aspiring child k-pop talents and their parents to showcase their idol potentials with the hope of attracting the attention of people, including k-pop agencies. simultaneously, influencer companies utilize these challenges to promote their idol training programs. while k-pop dance challenges have become integral to children’s peer culture, they also work as an apparatus where the desires of various stakeholders intersect and intertwine. <figure 1> children performing a k-pop dance challenge, posted by a k-pop academy in japan [instagram reels, author’s screengrab, instagram handle anonymized] k-pop dance challenges as a new iteration of child pageant programs k-pop dance challenges also serve as a new iteration of child pageant shows. when the genre has been repurposed as a platform for online auditions for k-pop aspirants, every visual aspect of the k-pop dance challenges is meticulously curated to captivate the eyeballs of potential audiences, including recruiters from k-pop companies, and to achieve viral internet stardom, competing among the plethora of similar challenges constantly being posted online. consequently, many child participants are presented almost as the original idols of the dance challenges, by emulating the visual styles of the original k-pop idols, such as clothes, makeup, and facial expressions, and even exuding a star aura by creating ‘hip’ vibes between dance movements. this kind of presentation and performance of children as k-pop idols is submitted to adult audiences' gaze, who are assembled by social media platforms’ algorithms. consequently, the challenges transform into online k-pop auditions, similar to child pageant shows where visualities of children are assessed against the criteria of ‘idol materials’ and ‘idol standards’. many people have criticized child pageant programs for child commodification. in these contests, children are “made to look physically mature and sexually inviting through their costumes, makeup, and performances” and their bodily features are constantly assessed by adults against the adult beauty standards (tamer, 2011: 84). however, in the case of k-pop dance challenges, the issue of child exploitation is often disregarded as it has become a significant part of children’s peer culture. rather, the playful, enjoyable, fun nature of the k-pop dance challenges tends to be emphasized, with upbeat k-pop sounds and cheerful choreographic movements, overshadowing the significant work children unconsciously invest in them. <figure 2> an 8 year-old child in japan performing k-pop dance challenge wearing full makeup and clothing similar to that of the k-pop girl group [instagram reels, author’s screengrab, instagram handle anonymized] child labor of cute in k-pop dance challenges in k-pop dance challenges, the performance and presentation of desirability are crucial to go viral. yet, it requires delicate and carefully-calculated work. it should be entertaining enough to draw people’s attention and should be sophisticated enough potentially to be recruited by k-pop agencies. thus, the performance and presentation should be made in a balanced way. here, children must possess several key attributes: (1) an idol appearance, which includes a slender physique and socially-desirable beauty features, such as big eyes and small oval-shaped faces, along with chic fashion sense; (2) k-pop knowledge, including familiarity with the most popular k-pop artists, songs, and dance moves; (3) a blend of immature maturity, which can highlight their childhood innocence, including approachable and soft personalities, yet showing noticeable prodigious skills in k-pop. these elements form the foundation for cultivating a sense of cuteness in children, which is key to their progression in developing their professional idol careers in the industry. the presentation and performance of cuteness aims to build their personas less fake and staged but more authentic as innocent but flawless children who just aspire to k-pop idols with great skills. yet, the production of cute requires children to engage in meticulous, tacit, ongoing, and often unconscious emotional labor to entertain predominantly adult audiences. despite the laborious work of cute, the myth of success as an idol continues to disregard this labor as mere “experience” that supposedly “contribute to increasing an individual’s human capital” (luckas, 2015 :504), even though the labor is never compensated. crucially, the virality-centered algorithms of social media platforms underpinned in k-pop dance challenges further normalizes children’s seamless labor of cute, with the myth of instant internet virality, hypervisibility, and stardom. acknowledgement this research was supported by the australian research council centre of excellence for the digital child through project number ce200100022. references lee j, leaver c and abidin c (forthcoming) child idols in south korea and beyond: manufacturing young stars at the intersection of k-pop and influencer industries. new media and society. abidin c and lee j (2023) k-pop tiktok: tiktok's expansion into south korea, tiktok stage, and platformed glocalization. media international australia, 188(1), 86-111. chung jw (2022) 5 times blackpink’s lisa proved she’s thailand’s unofficial princess as she arrives home for the first time in 3 years – just in time for her birthday. south china morning post. 27 march. https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/celebrity/article/3171873/5-timesblackpinks-lisa-proved-shes-thailands-unofficial esafety commissioner (2023) are they old enough? how to navigate key online milestones for your child. https://www.esafety.gov.au/parents/issues-andadvice/are-they-old-enough https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/celebrity/article/3171873/5-times-blackpinks-lisa-proved-shes-thailands-unofficial https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/celebrity/article/3171873/5-times-blackpinks-lisa-proved-shes-thailands-unofficial https://www.esafety.gov.au/parents/issues-and-advice/are-they-old-enough https://www.esafety.gov.au/parents/issues-and-advice/are-they-old-enough ho sl (2012) fuel for south korea’s ‘global dreams factory’: the desires of parents whose children dream of becoming k-pop stars. korea observer 43(3): 471-502. kim g (2018) from factory girls to k-pop idol girls: cultural politics of developmentalism, patriarchy, and neoliberalism in south korea’s popular music industry. rowman & littlefield. kim y (2011) idol republic: the global emergence of girl industries and the commercialization of girl bodies. journal of gender studies 20(4): 333-345. lee j-i (2018) 아이돌 연습생의 땀과 눈물 [sweat and tears of idol trainees]. seoul: the seoul institute. lukacs g (2015) the labor of cute: net idols, cute culture, and the digital economy in contemporary japan. positions: east asia cultures critique, 23(3), pp.487-513. tamer c (2011) toddlers, tiaras, and pedophilia: the borderline child pornography embraced by the american public. texas review of entertainment and sports law 13(1): 85-102. aoir2024-submission-terenzi.docx selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 navigating the gray: the economic underbelly of tiktok’s side hustles massimo terenzi university of urbino introduction amid an era marked by information excess, the struggle for human attention has intensified, reshaping digital landscapes and elevating the value of engagement. herbert simon (1971) first conceptualized attention as a finite resource, later expanded by michael goldhaber (1997; 2006) into the “attention economy”, where human focus is monetized and traded. today, algorithms designed to capture and sustain engagement dominate platforms like tiktok, instagram, and facebook, altering content distribution and influencing user behavior. these systems not only serve commercial objectives but also shape public discourse, amplify polarizing narratives, and enable phenomena like coordinated inauthentic behavior (cib; gleicher, 2018), a practice often driven by economic or ideological motives (van dijck, 2013; gillespie, 2018). our study situates itself within this theoretical framework, examining how tiktok has become a gateway for capturing attention and redirecting it toward evolving narratives. we focus on the surge of scams tied to cryptocurrencies, particularly around significant events like the bitcoin halving. the 2024 bitcoin halving, marked by historical speculation and price volatility (singla et al., 2023), offers a critical lens through which to study how content evolves to exploit economic anxieties and aspirations. building on insights from a previous work (terenzi, 2023) on coordinated facebook scams, we extend our analysis to tiktok, investigating how visual content captivates audiences and transitions into more ideologically charged themes. background and research questions our approach is grounded in the concept of the attention economy, articulated by herbert simon (1971) and expanded by goldhaber (1997; 2006). attention, a finite and valuable resource, underpins power dynamics in modern media ecosystems. in today’s digital marketplace, attention is not a passive consequence of media consumption but a transactional asset. platforms capitalize on this resource by selling user attention to advertisers and optimizing algorithms for maximum engagement. tim wu (2016) argues that this economic model prioritizes content that triggers strong emotional responses, suggested citation (apa): terenzi, m. (2024, october). navigating the gray: the economic underbelly of tiktok’s side hustles. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. often at the expense of content quality. consequently, attention becomes a traded commodity, influencing how information circulates and is consumed. algorithms play a crucial role in this economy, acting as intermediaries that engineer user experiences. social media platforms employ data-driven processes to organize users into engagement-based clusters, often creating echo chambers that perpetuate cycles of attention capture. these opaque, “black-box” systems (gillespie, 2014; 2018) obscure the mechanisms by which content is prioritized, leading to a lack of user awareness about how their attention is manipulated. as algorithms optimize for engagement, they inadvertently shape public discourse, heightening concerns about ideological influence and content governance. our research addresses how tiktok content evolves to exploit economic and ideological incentives, focusing on two questions: [rq1] how do tiktok actors capitalize on moments of heightened interest, such as the bitcoin halving, to capture and sustain attention? [rq2] what strategies are used to transition from economic content to ideologically driven narratives, and how do these tactics leverage tiktok’s algorithmic features? methods we adopted a mixed-methods approach, combining computational analysis with qualitative interpretation. building on insights from prior research into scam content on social media, we identified recurring patterns of persuasive and manipulative strategies. using randomized logistic regression, we grouped keywords into three strategic categories: offers and deals, scarcity, and calls to action. by constructing and queries that combined these categories, we were able to isolate content exhibiting persuasive characteristics. we collected 10,221 tiktok posts between 19 february and 19 june 2024, capturing the period around the bitcoin halving on 19 april 2024. however, tiktok’s inconsistent api necessitated scraping for additional data. we compiled a visual dataset of 5,540 video thumbnails from 60 high-impact accounts, selected using a statistical cutoff (mean + 2 standard deviations) to ensure relevance and activity. this account decay, with 10 accounts deleted by the time of collection, reflects the transient nature of problematic content on social media (bastos, 2021). our analysis followed arminio et al.’s (2024) four-stage framework: labeling, embedding, dimensionality reduction, and clustering. we generated descriptive labels for thumbnails using openai’s gpt-4o, ensuring connotative richness. these labels were converted into numerical vectors with openai’s text-embedding-3 model. we then applied principal component analysis (pca) to simplify the data while preserving variance, followed by uniform manifold approximation and projection (umap) for two-dimensional visualization. hierarchical density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (hdbscan) identified thematic clusters, evaluated using metrics like silhouette score and davies-bouldin index. results our analysis identified three broad thematic groups: economic persuasion, aspirational freedom, and ideological content. early clusters, like cluster 1 and cluster 4, emphasized economic urgency using bold visuals and persuasive language. for example, cluster 1 featured emotionally charged adoption campaigns, while cluster 4 humorously highlighted consumer frustrations over missed sales. clusters 28 and 29 shifted towards aspirational narratives, promoting financial independence through digital entrepreneurship. language such as “passive income” and “earn while on vacation” enticed users with promises of long-term security. the most significant transition emerged in clusters 26 and 27, which pivoted from economic themes to ideological messages. cluster 26 fused fitness and american patriotism, presenting physical discipline as a nationalistic virtue. cluster 27 delved into geopolitical narratives, leveraging urgent language like “terrorism” and “crisis” to drive engagement. these clusters often aligned with pro-nationalist or anti-western sentiments, using sensationalist imagery to influence user perceptions. discussion and limitations our findings suggest that tiktok may play a role in enabling the transition of content from economic incentives to ideological narratives. this strategy exploits the platform’s recommendation system, which clusters users based on engagement. by initially captivating users with relatable or aspirational themes, content creators can gradually introduce politically charged material, making the transition appear seamless. this manipulation underscores the opaque power of algorithms in shaping digital experiences. however, our study faced limitations. tiktok’s unreliable api complicated data collection, necessitating scraping that may have missed real-time trends. additionally, analyzing only video thumbnails may not fully represent content nuances. future research should employ multimodal analysis, incorporating video frames and text, and seek robust data access partnerships. our research also raises concerns about content governance. as engagement metrics drive algorithmic decisions, platforms risk exposing users to polarizing material. understanding these mechanisms is crucial for developing policies that balance free expression with the need to curb manipulative practices. the phenomenon we describe highlights the need for greater transparency in how digital attention is monetized and manipulated. conclusion our study provides insights into the strategic manipulation of user attention on tiktok, revealing how visual content transitions from economic to ideological themes. this dynamic reflects broader trends in the attention economy, where platforms capitalize on engagement at the expense of content diversity and integrity. as the digital landscape evolves, future research must address the complexities of algorithmic influence, advocating for transparent and accountable content governance to safeguard user experiences and promote constructive digital interactions. bibliography bastos, m. (2021). this account doesn’t exist: tweet decay and the politics of deletion in the brexit debate. american behavioral scientist, 65(5), 757-773. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764221989772 gillespie, t. (2014). the relevance of algorithms. in t. gillespie, p. j. boczkowski, & k. a. foot (eds.), media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society (pp. 167-194). mit press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262525374.003.0009 gillespie, t. (2018). custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. yale university press. gleicher, n. (2018, december 6). coordinated inauthentic behavior explained [interview]. https://about.fb.com/news/2018/12/ inside-feed-coordinated-inauthentic-behavior/ goldhaber, m. h. (1997). the attention economy and the net. first monday, 2(4). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v2i4.519 goldhaber, m. h. (2006). the value of openness in an attention economy. simon, h. a. (1971). designing organizations for an information-rich world. in m. greenberger (ed.), computers, communication, and the public interest (pp. 37-72). baltimore: johns hopkins university press. singla, a., singla, m., & gupta, m. (2023). unpacking the impact of bitcoin halving on the crypto market: benefits and limitations. available at ssrn 4872312. terenzi, . m. (2023). exploring the dark side of cryptocurrencies on facebook and telegram: uncovering media manipulation and “get-rich-quick” deceptive schemes. aoir selected papers of internet research. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2023i0.13503 van dijck, j. (2013). the culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. oxford university press. wu, t. (2016). the attention merchants: the epic scramble to get inside our heads. alfred a. knopf. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): mitchell, p., riedlinger, m., burgess, j., snoswell, a., wizenberger, k., & goldenfein, j. (2024, october). research genai: situating generative ai in the scholarly economy. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. research genai: situating generative ai in the scholarly economy peta mitchell queensland university of technology michelle riedlinger queensland university of technology jean burgess queensland university of technology aaron snoswell queensland university of technology kevin witzenberger queensland university of technology jake goldenfein university of melbourne introduction this paper focuses on a small but growing subset of genai tools and platforms designed for and explicitly marketed to academic researchers, which we call research generative ai or rgai. chatgpt’s release in late 2022 initiated significant and ongoing debate over genai’s implications for academic research and publishing. this debate, along with the academic publishing and institutional research policies established in its wake, has largely focused on generic genai platforms (such as chatgpt and midjourney). less attention has been paid to emergent rgai platforms, such as consensus, elicit, perplexity, iris.ai, scholarcy, scite, scispace, and writefull, which unambiguously announce their academic focus (see fig. 1) and promise to automate research discovery and writing tasks, such as identifying and summarising published research, writing literature reviews, conducting data analysis, and synthesising findings. https://consensus.app/ https://elicit.com/ https://www.perplexity.ai/ https://iris.ai/ https://www.scholarcy.com/ https://scite.ai/ https://scispace.com/ https://www.writefull.com/ many of these rgai platforms pre-date the public release of chatgpt, but their development and uptake has been propelled by the current genai moment, and many are built on or have been redeveloped to incorporate gpt foundational models. figure 1: homepages of research genai platforms in this paper, we present a case for understanding these platforms as a distinct category of genai. we do this by 1) mapping the history and development of rgai platforms and developing a preliminary typology of rgai, 2) situating rgai tools and platforms within the scholarly economy and ongoing processes of platformisation and automation of academic work, and 3) making a case for the need to understand rgai platforms as complex sociotechnical systems that intersect with social, ethical, institutional, and legal questions. rgai as communicative ai within the scholarly economy we consider rgai in the context of what hepp et al. (2023) refer to as “communicative ai”: a “sensitising concept” that assists in drawing focus to the implications for societal communication posed by ai’s automation of communication. hepp et al.’s (2023) definition of communicative ai is framed around three criteria, namely that a communicative ai system is understood to be 1) “based on various forms of automation designed for the central purpose of communication,” 2), “embedded within digital infrastructures,” and 3) “entangled with human practices” (p. 47). through our analysis of rgai as communicative ai, we bring to this definition—with its focus on automation, digital infrastructures, and human practices—insights into the role of institutions and institutional economies on the development and implications of communicative ai. to this end, we situate rgai within what has been called the “scholarly economy” (e.g., goldenfein & griffin, 2022; hyland, 2023), joining other forms of “platform capitalism” reshaping universities and academic research (mirowski 2018; mirowski 2023). previous research has examined how digital platforms such as google scholar, academia.edu, and researchgate increasingly mediate academic research discovery, dissemination, and citation practices (e.g., goldenfein & griffin, 2022; darvin, 2022), thereby contributing to and shaping the scholarly economy. through their freemium pricing models, their endorsement and promotion by academic ai “thought leaders,” and their growing inclusion on lists of recommended research tools developed by university libraries, rgai platforms are becoming embedded within the scholarly economy and, we argue, contributing to the growth and complexity of automation and platformisation of scholarly research and publishing. within the broader debate over genai’s potential impact on universities and academic research and publishing, there has been limited research that places the debate in the context of automation. although published research on genai, authorship, and academic publishing acknowledges the heightened risks of algorithmic bias, lack of transparency and accountability, and reduced discoverability that attend genai technologies (e.g., bell, 2023; oduoye et al., 2023) the debate is rarely situated in relation to broader research on the ongoing automation and platformisation of academic research and publishing. watermeyer et al.’s (2023) article ‘generative ai and the automating of academia’ is a rare instance of work that directly speaks to genai’s role in the ongoing automation of academic labour. the study’s findings, based on a survey of uk academics and their use of large language models (llms) “like chatgpt,” reveal that academics tend to employ llms as a “labour accelerator” with the overarching aim of “alleviat[ing] their precarity” within a highly competitive academic system (watermeyer et al. 2023). while watermeyer et al. (2023) draw important attention to genai’s potential influence on the automation of academic labour and the scholarly economy, they do not engage with the specific implications for academic research and publishing raised by the emergent political economy of rgais, which this paper addresses. additionally, no research to date has engaged with rgai platforms as complex sociotechnical systems. to fill this gap, we employ and adapt light, burgess & duguay’s (2016) walkthrough methodology to compare two research genai (rgai) tools—consensus and writefull—focusing on their roles in academic research, functionality and governance. comparative walkthrough of consensus and writefull both tools were in existence before the public release of chatgpt, with consensus being launched in 2019 and writefull in 2014. consensus is categorised as a research discovery tool, designed to streamline literature searches for academia and medical professionals. it uses a proprietary llm model combined with openai's technology to provide insights into scientific consensus via a “consensus meter,” classifying search results into categories such as “yes,” “no,” and “possibly” based on sentiment analysis. this tool appeals to efficiency-focused researchers by promising rapid, evidence-based insights while emphasising responsible ai use. in contrast, writefull, which caters to academic writing support, aims to simplify what is described as the often-challenging task of scholarly writing. it offers features like writing, paraphrasing, and copyediting— positioning the tool as a task-specific solution for early-career researchers and nonnative english speakers. writefull employs custom ai models tailored to academic language, incorporating tools that are optimised for tasks like generating abstracts. its “academizer” tool formalises language through nominalisations and passive constructions, reinforcing traditional normative standards of academic writing. writefull markets itself as assisting writers in meeting established publication standards, with clients like the american chemical society integrating it into their editorial workflows. both tools present themselves as independent and somewhat bespoke yet they are backed by substantial corporate entities. consensus, developed by a team with roots in prominent technology firms and funded by venture capital, achieved a valuation of usd$15.7 million in 2023. writefull, initially founded by linguists and ai researchers, is now owned by digital science, a subsidiary of holtzbrinck publishing group, which oversees influential platforms like altmetric and dimensions, and academic publishers like springer nature and macmillan. this ownership aligns writefull with the entire academic publishing process, aiding researchers, journals and publishers in maintaining quality standards for a fee. in future work, we will examine these and other rgai tools through surveys and ethnographic studies, aiming to understand their cultures of use within academia. the team is also developing an rgai index prototype to guide researchers in selecting suitable ai tools based on comprehensive assessments of their features, functionality, and governance. references bell, s. (2023). the write algorithm: promoting responsible artificial intelligence usage and accountability in academic writing. bmc medicine, 21(1), 334. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-023-03039-7 committee on publication ethics. (2023, february 13). cope position statement on authorship and ai tools. https://publicationethics.org/cope-position-statements/aiauthor darvin, r. (2021). the digitally-mediated scholar: online identities and investment in the discursive practices of an academic community. in p. habibie & s. burgess (eds.), scholarly publication trajectories of early-career scholars. palgrave macmillan, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85784-4_10 goldenfein, j. & griffin, d. (2022). google scholar – platforming the scholarly economy. internet policy review, 11(3). https://doi.org/10.14763/2022.3.1671 hepp, a., loosen, w., dreyer, s., jarke, j., kannengießer, s., katzenbach, c., malaka, r., pfadenhauer, m., puschmann, c., & schulz, w. (2023). chatgpt, lamda, and the hype around communicative ai: the automation of communication as a field of research in media and communication studies. human–machine communication, 6. https://doi.org/10.30658/hmc.6.4 https://publicationethics.org/cope-position-statements/ai-author https://publicationethics.org/cope-position-statements/ai-author https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85784-4_10 https://doi.org/10.14763/2022.3.1671 https://doi.org/10.30658/hmc.6.4 hyland, k. (2023). academic publishing and the attention economy. journal of english for academic purposes, 64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2023.101253 light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2016). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 mirowski, p. (2018). the future(s) of open science. social studies of science, 48(2), 171–203. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312718772086 mirowski, p. (2023). the evolution of platform science. social research, 90(4), 725– 755. https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2023.a916352 nature editorials. tools such as chatgpt threaten transparent science; here are our ground rules for their use. nature, 613. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-001911 oduoye, m. o., javed, b., gupta, n., & sih, c. m. v. (2023). algorithmic bias and research integrity; the role of nonhuman authors in shaping scientific knowledge with respect to artificial intelligence: a perspective. international journal of surgery, 109(10), 2987–2990. https://doi.org/10.1097/js9.0000000000000552 watermeyer, r., phipps, l., lanclos, d., & knight, c. (2023). generative ai and the automating of academia. postdigital science and education, 6, 446–466. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-023-00440-6 world association of medical editors. (2023, january 20). wame recommendations on chatgpt and chatbots in relation to scholarly publications. https://wame.org/page3.php?id=110 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2023.101253 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438 https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312718772086 https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2023.a916352 https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00191-1 https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00191-1 https://doi.org/10.1097/js9.0000000000000552 https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-023-00440-6 https://wame.org/page3.php?id=110 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): maqbool, k. and tsaliki, l. (2024, october) decolonizing the internet: experiences of (cyber)bullying and developing critical consciousness in afrogreek youth. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. decolonizing the internet: experiences of (cyber)bullying and developing collective critical consciousness in afrogreek youth kainaat maqbool, participate msca and national & kapodistrian university of athens liza tsaliki, national and kapodistrian university of athens research context: technology perpetuates racism (hook, 2005; pitti, 2018; shih, 2006), and western scholarship has seldom parted from the euro-centric denotations and connotations of race (taborn, 2008; wright, 2003). the structure of prevalent scholarship’s attempt at colorblind research is flawed and colonial. it leaves out the underrepresented and their understanding of how race is embedded in the fabric of the internet (benjamin, 2023; daniels, 2015), leaving the onus on them to initiate these conversations. in the field of critical race and internet research, it is almost always the black and people of color who need to raise their voices for their communities. hence, the intellectual colonialism paired with the race-insensitive nature of the internet. similarly, racial (cyber)bullying remains under-researched, especially from the greek context. a case needs to be made with a growing body of literature focusing on collective action based on racially progressive goals (brunsting & postmes, 2002; byrne, 2007, 2008; kahn & kellner, 2004). this study explores the intricate convergence of the internet as an industry, the cyber(bullying) experiences of afrogreek youth in athens, greece, and experiments with the idea of developing a relationship of resistance to afrophobia. it uses the internet to craft individual and collective identities for cultivating and fostering collective critical consciousness. developing critical consciousness involves ‘reflection and action upon the world to transform it’ (freire, 1978, p. 51). this study focuses on the efficacy of critical consciousness, its relationship to group identity, community humanization, and societal out-turn for the youth involved https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?aknzzq https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?uwsxe5 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?dpl8ru https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?dpl8ru https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?temjhp https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?temjhp https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?utfdcn methodological framework: the methodological execution of the empirical research is based on the tenets of creativity-based participatory action research (par). in par, people with direct experiences or interests are involved in all or various levels of the project (lenette, 2019). inculcating arts and crafts in research design is one of the ways that traditional western research ideals can be decolonized (clift, 2020; seppala et al., 2021). this method enriches academic understanding and fosters collective consciousness by empowering the community to contribute actively. the findings stem from an ethnographic approach, drawing on field notes and follow-up interviews from participatory focus group workshops involving afrogreek youth as knowledge-holders. these workshops incorporated creative methods: story writing, body mapping, zine-making, and intuitive art-making. the study sample consisted of four focus groups comprising four participants, with one group involving five participants. the outcomes of this research have been disseminated through the antibullying collective and were presented in an interactive social and emotional learning (sel) session at the national and kapodistrian university of athens in september 2024. findings and brief discussion: (i) social media as breeding ground for (cyber)bullying the findings indicate that social media serves as a conducive platform for the continuation of traditional bullying through cyberbullying. knowledge-holders reported that face-to-face incidents, such as name-calling, social exclusion, and derogatory remarks, easily transition to online spaces facilitated by anonymity. given the lack of accountability, this anonymity was cited as a key factor contributing to a pervasive sense of helplessness. notably, social media often became a forum for racial attacks, particularly affecting black girls. incidents involved the sharing of images and videos from real-world interactions that contained racial and sexist content, prompting misogynoir. a recurring concern was the failure of platforms to promptly remove offensive content. black girls also highlighted the racist disparity of their normal pictures being labeled as inappropriate and being flagged for community violation. (ii) reshaping the internet as a race-sensitive industry in exploring possible interventions, most knowledge-holders highlighted the inadequacies of current social media monitoring systems and argued the need for racial sensitivity and diversity-informed perspectives. they critically examined the ineffectiveness of existing reporting mechanisms, which frequently fail to address incidents of racist abuse. the consensus was that the issue is not merely individual but structural, embedded within the design of digital platforms. a dominant proposal was the implementation of predictive algorithms capable of monitoring racially charged language, sentences, and coded messages. these algorithms would include features to alert users if their content contains potential racist undertones, thereby reducing the dissemination of offensive material. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?30ft0q https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?30ft0q https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hgzoqi http://www.antibullyingcollective.com/ http://www.antibullyingcollective.com/ additionally, the youth proposed the creation of a user-driven platform where victims of cyberbullying could vote on effective strategies for addressing racist content and flag issues directly. a prominent suggestion that emerged was establishing what youth termed "anti-bullying police" for social media. these specialized teams would be tasked with actively monitoring (cyber)bullying and enforcing preventive measures to mitigate future incidents by the same individuals. overall, the discussions underscored the urgent need for stricter content moderation policies that specifically target racial abuse. figure 1: examples of the content created by youth (iii) of critical consciousness and ‘making’ on the internet… the journey of the knowledge-holders during the workshops, particularly in creating artworks, aligns closely with paulo freire’s concept of critical consciousness and its stages (watts et al., 2003). in the initial stage of this process, corresponding to freire’s idea of critical analysis, the participants engaged deeply in race talk (hooks, 1996) with their shared experiences of racial (cyber)bullying. they recognized that the internet often replicates the biases and prejudices they face. during this phase, they also reflected on their internet habits, strengthening their online security by monitoring who follows them. however, the knowledge-holders collectively acknowledged that preventing (cyber)bullying is not solely an individual responsibility; it requires action from institutions, governments, and society. the second stage, illuminated by watts et al., political self-efficacy, was evident in the youth’s efforts to create counter-narratives through artistic expression. they spent considerable time emphasizing the importance of educating themselves on the many facets of racial (cyber)bullying and organizing within their peer groups. the knowledgehttps://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?bs8d0j https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?u1mrh8 holders independently and collaboratively produced artworks, zines, posters, postcards, and other creative materials that reflected their personal and collective experiences. many used these activities to individually engage their greek peers outside of our workshops, so they could illustrate the pervasive nature of the racist interactions they face online. they also helped set up the first greek youth-led anti-bullying collective. the final stage of freire’s concept, critical action, was demonstrated through digital activism. the youth used their zines as starting points for difficult conversations about race and identity. although instances of direct critical action were relatively infrequent, the study aligns with freire’s view that critical reflection is a form of action. nonetheless, the youth shared the content within their social circles and on broader online platforms and helped design the sel session mentioned earlier. through this, they sought to reclaim digital spaces and assert their identities online. conclusion: this study highlights the importance of participatory action research with afrogreek youth and explores how creative expression can lead to the development of collective critical consciousness. while the findings underscore how online platforms reinforce racism and racist interactions, they also reveal how involving youth can help make the internet an inclusive space. it is worth noting that this decolonial interaction is a powerful tool for challenging harmful dynamics and advocating for more diverse online environments. it offers a framework through which marginalized groups can leverage digital activism to reclaim space on the internet. references: benjamin, r. (2023). race after technology. in social theory re-wired (3rd ed.). routledge. brunsting, s., & postmes, t. (2002). social movement participation in the digital age: predicting offline and online collective action. small group research, 33(5), 525–554. https://doi.org/10.1177/104649602237169 byrne, d. n. (2007). public discourse, community concerns, and civic engagement: exploring black social networking traditions on blackplanet.com. journal of computermediated communication, 13(1), 319–340. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.10836101.2007.00398.x byrne, d. n. (2008). the future of (the) “race”: identity, discourse, and the rise of computer-mediated public spheres. journal of computer mediated communication, 13(1), 319–340. clift, s. (2020). matarasso, f. (2019). a restless art: how participation won, and why it matters. nordic journal of arts, culture and health, 2, 158–162. https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.2535-7913-2020-02-08 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk daniels, j. (2015). “my brain database doesn’t see skin color”: color-blind racism in the technology industry and in theorizing the web. american behavioral scientist, 59(11), 1377–1393. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764215578728 freire, p. (1978). pedagogy of the oppressed*. in toward a sociology of education. routledge. hook, d. (2005). affecting whiteness: racism as technology of affect (1). international journal of critical psychology, 16, 74–99. hooks, bell. (1996). killing rage: ending racism. holt publishers. kahn, r., & kellner, d. (2004). new media and internet activism: from the ‘battle of seattle’ to blogging. new media & society, 6(1), 87–95. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444804039908 lenette, c. (2019). arts-based methods in refugee research: creating sanctuary. springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8008-2 pitti, s. j. (2018). the devil in silicon valley: northern california, race, and mexican americans. in the devil in silicon valley. princeton university press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691188409 seppala, t., sarantou, m., & miettinen, s. (eds.). (2021). arts-based methods for decolonising participatory research. routledge. https://www.routledge.com/artsbased-methods-for-decolonising-participatory-research/seppala-sarantoumiettinen/p/book/9780367513313 shih, j. (2006). circumventing discrimination: gender and ethnic strategies in silicon valley. gender & society, 20(2), 177–206. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243205285474 taborn, t. d. (2008). separating race from technology: finding tomorrow’s it progress in the past (the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation series on digital media and learning). mit press. https://search.issuelab.org/resource/separating-race-from-technology-finding-tomorrows-it-progress-in-the-past.html watts, r. j., williams, n. c., & jagers, r. j. (2003). sociopolitical development. american journal of community psychology, 31(1–2), 185–194. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1023091024140 wright, m. m. (2003). racism, technology and the limits of western knowledge. in domain errors! cyberfeminist practices (pp. 45–62). autonomedia press. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?yzpwsk selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): fridzema, n., aasman, s., smit, r., & slootweg, t. (2023, october). revolutionary discourses in a time capsule: a historiographical analysis of canonical, intellectual literature concerning the social impact and significance of the internet. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. revolutionary discourses in a time capsule: a historiographical analysis of canonical, intellectual literature concerning the social impact and significance of the internet nathalie fridzema university of groningen susan aasman university of groningen rik smit university of groningen tom slootweg university of groningen the academic community has always been involved with the advancement of the internet; from the research environments that were born out of the military-industrial complex dating back to the 1940s (turner, 2006, p. 3), to the implementation of the internet as a scientific network during the 70s (flichy, 2007, p. 59), and throughout the 90s in the many web initiatives that were often established by university students (turner, 2006; apprich, 2017). however, it was not until the mid-1990s that popular, scholarly writings put forward revolutionary discourses about the internet’s broader social impact and significance. as turner (2006) argued, the complex intertwining of american counterculture with emerging silicon valley cyber communities resulted in a new cultural understanding of networked computing; the personal desktop became the symbol of “empowered individualism, collaborative community, and spiritual communion” (p. 2) whilst the internet offered an escape from hierarchical, bureaucratic systems (p. 247). the rhetoric of the digital revolution suggested the emergence of a liberal “new economy” (p. 175) in which the network metaphor dictated both the organization of cyberspace and the socioeconomic sphere. discourses like this were frequently produced by key actors from academic communities who were both eyewitnesses as well as participants in various digital advances. writers such as howard rheingold, steve jones, nicholas negroponte, manuell castells, sherry turkle, and geert lovink produced influential texts about the social impact and significance of the internet that shaped our understanding of the digital revolution, often from the perspective of their particular theoretical backgrounds, positionality, and based on their own experiences. whilst not all of the above-mentioned writers are scholars in the traditional sense, their writings put forward dominant conceptualizations that contributed to future academic debates about the history of the internet, our understanding of its influence in society, and even notions concerning web 2.0. prominent terms like ‘cyberculture’, ‘netizens’, ‘electronic highway’, and ‘virtual community’ eventually bled over into legislative and popular discourse like, for example, wired magazine (turner, 2006; flichy, 2007; stevenson, 2013). many of such texts are still relevant and used as secondary sources. now more than 20 years later, these texts present valuable information as if coming from a time capsule; imaginaries about the internet written during a time of novelty and excitement. often framed with a rhetoric of transformation, the writers themselves contribute to the idea of a revolutionary internet following optimistic notions of digital utopianism and hopeful manifestations whilst also disclosing critical tones. it is valuable to situate these discourses in the particular zeitgeist characterized by a post-war society, globalization, neoliberalism, the dot.com crash, and the eventual rise of the platform economy. therefore, this paper aims to dive deeper into this canonical, intellectual literature through the re-contextualization of it as historical sources and traces. the acknowledgment of popular, scholarly writings covering the early internet’s significance as a historiography about the internet’s past i.e. historicizing these sources will contribute to our academic understanding of how the internet was understood, designed, and subsequently used. important in the identification of such socio-technical imaginaries (jasanoff & kim, 2015) are texts from scholarly and professional communities. this is especially the case regarding the development of the internet as the us-based academic communities were an intrinsic part of this process. besides, many conceptualizations put forward by these groups bled over into mainstream discourse and thus influenced how society imagined the internet at large. therefore, it is important to critically study these canonical writings to map the evolution of revolutionary notions and to scrutinize the impact of the author’s specific historical context and experiences. this highlights important arguments and contradictions whilst discerning prejudices; why did these writers imagine the internet as they did? to achieve this, the project conducts a historiographic analysis (tosh, 2015, p. 65) of canonical literature concerning the internet during the period of the digital revolution before the rise of platforms; early 1990s up until 2006. the methodology includes both quantitative and qualitative approaches. in terms of the former, the analysis includes computational methods such as topic modeling to better examine the trends and evolution in historical concepts based on a large corpus of titles. critical questions that guide the qualitative analysis of the most popular titles are: what is the background of the authors and their connection to which internet institutions; which sources were used; what theoretical perspectives were of influence; which themes did they view as most relevant and why, and which were excluded; how was their text interpreted and used by others? the popular, scholarly literature used in this study includes texts whose objective was to describe the historical social impact and significance of the internet. preferably, these texts put forward dominant concepts or knowledge that became authoritative in the study of the internet; followed a critical stance to reflect on the internet’s revolutionary aspects in the past and future; were either written by scholars or authors associated with the academic community or published by academic publishing houses. examples of such work include manuell castells’ the internet galaxy (2001), janet abbate's inventing the internet (1999), tim berners-lee’s weaving the web (1999), fred turner’s from counterculture to cyberculture (2006), and various books by howard rheingold (1994; 2000; 2003). by critically analyzing this canon of internet history captured at a certain point in time, this paper shows which key themes were understood as having the most impact whilst also diving deeper into how these themes developed and why. furthermore, the paper argues that the overall tone used by authors changed rather rapidly from revolutionary to critical, especially around the dot.com crash. moreover, the earlier titles have always emphasized critical notions regarding the internet’s development stating that a digital utopia is not self-evident unless its advancement is actively discussed. in terms of methodological perspective, it is notable that the chronological order of the most popular titles represents the evolution from technological deterministic frameworks, to mixed approaches like ‘technological momentum’ (abbate, 1999), to studies in which social organizational structures are in focus. in terms of concepts, ‘the virtual community’ and ‘the digital divide’ are identified as key terms in canonical literature; they are reappearing across titles and are reinterpreted by various authors as well as situated in a historical narrative. this is most notable in castells’s the internet galaxy (2001). to summarize, the paper presents a historiographical analysis of canonical, intellectual literature concerning the social impact and significance of the internet, put forward during the digital revolution between the 90s and mid-00s. through the recontextualization of this canon as a unique historiography on the past internet, this research introduces the evolution of key understandings whilst shining light on the important contextual and individual influences. in turn, this will showcase the presumed, revolutionary aspects of the internet and thus can likewise broaden our understanding of its perceived key role in social revolutions. references abbate, j. (1999). inventing the internet. mit press. apprich, c. (2017). technotopia. a media genealogy of net cultures. rowman & littlefield. berners-lee, t. (1999). weaving the web: the original design and ultimate destiny of the world wide web by its inventor. harper san francisco. castells, m. (2001). the internet galaxy: reflections on the internet, business, and society. oxford university press. flichy, p. (2007). the internet imaginaire. mit press. jasanoff, s., & kim, s. h. (eds.). (2015). future imperfect: science, technology, and the imaginations of modernity (p. 1-33). in dreamscapes of modernity: sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power. university of chicago press. rheingold, h. (1994). the virtual community: finding connection in a computerized world. secker and warburg. rheingold, h. (2000). tools for thought: the history and future of mind-expanding technology. mit press. rheingold, h. (2003). smart mobs: the next social revolution. perseus pub. stevenson, m. (2013). the web as exception: the rise of new media publishing cultures. university of amsterdam. tosh, j. (2015). the pursuit of history: aims, methods and new directions in the study of history. routledge. turner, f. (2006). from counterculture to cyberculture. university of chicago press. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 chatterjee, n. (2024, november). “i have stopped caring if i should think before posting online”: journey of indian women to digital activism against sexual violence. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. "i have stopped caring if i should think before posting online": journey of indian women to digital activism against sexual violence nivedita chatterjee university of surrey in this paper, i highlight how indian women's motivation to protest sexual violence intersects with their commitment to digital space to shape their journey to digital activism. in the fight against sexual violence and harassment, activists are integrating digital strategies to navigate the indian socio-digital landscape, which is an extension of the sociocultural context they live in. this project investigates digital activism by indian women against sexual violence under the overarching question of; how digital feminist protest by indian women activists against sexual violence transpire in india? studies on digital activism by women against sexual violence though limited and largely centered on the global north, provides deep understanding on creation of digital theatrics (baer, 2016), digital labour (mendes, 2022) and digital protest strategies in social media (mendes et al.,2019; linabary et al., 2022). representing the global south, the existing studies on this topic that are focused on india, provides key insights on the role of social media in social action; associated risk and labour (dey, 2018, pain, 2021) and the performative aspect of online activism (lieder, 2018; fuller, 2019), in a post-colonial setting. yet, there remains a gap, when it comes to understanding what motivates women to become digital activists and how do they take digital activism beyond social media activism and why, in a socio-cultural framework marked by digital and power divide. i examine the journey of the activists to digital activism; to understand their motivation, access to digital technology; and the reason behind their choice of digital strategies. my project, 'digital activism by indian women against sexual violence' fills the gap in the existing literature by focusing on aspects of digital access, the intersectionality of socio-cultural identity, class and gender in post-colonial india. the study led to understanding the journey of indian women to digital activism. the data was collected by online interviews with 20 local indian women from diverse backgrounds and locations. anchored in the framework of postcolonial feminism, and implementing thematic content analysis, the findings emerged to indicate that the motivation to protest sexual violence as well as digital access, is closely tied to the activist’s socio-cultural identity within post-colonial india. therefore, i argue that the intersection of these two aspects underscores the complex nature of indian women's digital activism against sexual violence. two key factors emerged to be significantly shaping the journey of indian women to digital activism against sexual violence. first factor is their motivation to protest, which stems from their interaction with post-colonial gender-biased ideologies. i illustrate their motivation to protest by drawing on the theory of positive marginality (dutt and grabe, 2014) to apply in the socio-cultural framework of india, that represents a postcolonial context from the global south. this theory is used as a framework along with postcolonial feminism to argue that the indian woman activist's position as the marginalised in society creates a sense of their positionality and the injustice, that acts as a motivation to take action against the issue of sexual violence and harassment. based on the interview data, the analysis indicates that activists draw on their position as women in postcolonial india and the injustice inflicted on them since childhood because of that position (mankekar, 1997; nolas et al., 2016), these take place in different forms such as gender biased roles, gender biased expectations, body shaming, victim blaming, sexual harassment and violence, which as a result, set them on a journey to fight against the issue of sexual violence and harassment. the second factor that shapes the journey of the activists to digital activism is their trajectory to digital access. this aspect explains their method of digital protest and the choices they have to make to legitimise their digital social action. this factor is instrumental in highlighting that the trajectory for each activist to the point of implementing digital strategies in their activism against sexual violence is determined by their class and location. therefore, i argue that the journey to digital activism for an urban woman in post-colonial india from a privileged background is marked with quick and easy access to digital devices. this plays a big role in influencing the nature of their digital activism. the intersection of the woman’s digital privilege with her privilege background gives her the immediate power to be the "voice" for herself and also, the choice to be the voice for "the other” (gajjala, 2004, p.178). however, for an activist from a marginal background and a location that is considered to be peripheral in comparison to dominant urban society, the journey is marked with rigorous specialised training and education with a focus on the subject of activism against sexual violence. therefore, i argue in this paper that an activist from a marginalised background has to navigate and assert her position by proving her labour and hard work in the postcolonial urban setting of india. this is to bridge the gap between her marginalised position and their point of initiation of digital activism against sexual violence and harassment. by outlining these trajectories, i emphasise in this paper that the intersection of the activist’s position within post-colonial india with their motivation and the digital accessibility act as a catalyst for their activism and shapes their strategies in the digital space. this helps to understand the reason behind the unique digital protest methods and the digital strategies that are implemented and chosen by local indian women to challenge sexual violence and harassment. this paper aims to provide contextual understanding of how indian women leverage digital tools and strategies to combat sexual violence, while they feel like “the other” (gajjala, 2004, p.178) in a patriarchal society. i illustrate that in my paper by indicating the different ways indian women bring legitimacy and credibility in their digital action against sexual violence while safeguarding themselves in the indian socio-digital space. this is because the socio-digital space mirrors the inequities of the socio-cultural framework of post-colonial india in which they live. this paper contributes to understand the role class, status and geographical location plays in women's journey to digital activism against sexual violence, within a post-colonial global south country as india. this paper significantly contributes to the discourse and existing research on digital feminist activism from the global south, which is currently understudied. references: baer, h., 2015. redoing feminism: digital activism, body politics, and neoliberalism. feminist media studies, 16(1), pp.17-34. dutt, a., & grabe, s. (2014). lifetime activism, marginality, and psychology: narratives of lifelong feminist activists committed to social change. qualitative psychology, 1(2), 107–122. fuller, r., 2019. together, alone? performance, protest and digital proximities in india’s blank noise feminist campaign. international journal of performance arts and digital media, 15(3), pp.295-310. gajjala, r., 2004. cyber selves. walnut creek, calif.: altamira press. lieder, k., 2018. performing loitering: feminist protest in the indian city. tdr/the drama review, 62(3), pp.145-161. linabary, j. r., corple, d. j., & cooky, c. (2020). feminist activism in digital space: postfeminist contradictions in# whyistayed. new media & society, 22(10), 1827-1848. mankekar, p. (1997). ‘to whom does ameena belong?’ feminist review, 56(1), 26–60. https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.1997.14 mendes, k. (2022). digital feminist labour: the immaterial, aspirational and affective labour of feminist activists and fempreneurs. women's history review, 31(4), 693-712. mendes, k., ringrose, j., & keller, j. (2019). digital feminist activism: girls and women fight back against rape culture. oxford university press. nolas, s., varvantakis, c., & aruldoss, v. (2016). (im)possible conversations? activism, childhood and everyday life. journal of social and political psychology, 4(1), 252–265. https://doi.org/10.5964/jspp.v4i1.536 pain, p. (2021). “it took me quite a long time to develop a voice”: examining feminist digital activism in the indian #metoo movement. new media & society, 23(11), 3139– 3155. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820944846 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): cotter, k. (2024, october). epistemic-democratic tension in the bottom-up governance of algorithms. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. epistemic-democratic tension in the bottom-up governance of algorithms kelley cotter the pennsylvania state university introduction threats posed by platform algorithms to privacy, agency, fairness, and equity, particularly the reenactment and mediation of systems of power (benjamin, 2019; noble, 2018; o’neil, 2016), underscore the imperative for robust governance measures. discussions on algorithmic governance often center on top-down approaches developed primarily by policymakers and private companies (bloch-wehba, 2022; saurwein et al., 2015). while these are crucial, the involvement of those most affected by algorithms—everyday people—has received less attention. as governments seek the input of their citizens on relevant concerns—for example, listening sessions to inform a blueprint for the ai bill of rights in the u.s. (white house office of science and technology policy, 2022) and the european ai alliance’s online forum for discussions (european commission, 2024)—it is imperative to define the parameters of meaningful participation by “ordinary” individuals in the governance of algorithms. in this paper, i explore the concept of "bottom-up governance" of platform algorithms, emphasizing the "epistemic-democratic tension" between the "participation of the affected" and "expertise-based decision-making." i argue that bottom-up governance requires the involvement of "lay" experts to ensure algorithms function fairly. the realization of this ideal is complex, as what people know about algorithms represents a social and political negotiation of meaning. to be heard in public deliberation about algorithms, we need to expand the horizon of what counts as legitimate and consequential knowledge. in what follows, i begin by offering a broad vision what it means to know algorithms based on a synthesis of the cross-disciplinary scholarship in this area. i then connect this understanding of algorithmic expertise with understandings of participatory democracy to offer two key principles to guide the realization of bottomup governance. these are: alertness to the authority of non-technical knowers and subjugated knowledges. knowing algorithms the theoretical vocabulary explaining how everyday people understand algorithms has grown increasingly complex over the last several years, with frameworks including the algorithmic imaginary (bucher, 2017), algorithmic folk theories (e.g., devito, 2021; devito et al., 2018; eslami et al., 2016; siles et al., 2020), algorithmic knowledge (cotter, 2022; cotter & reisdorf, 2020); algorithmic literacy (cotter, 2020; devito, 2021; dogruel et al., 2021; oeldorf-hirsch & neubaum, 2023), algorithm skills (gruber & hargittai, 2023; klawitter & hargittai, 2018), algorithmic competencies (jarrahi & sutherland, 2019), algorithmic gossip (bishop, 2019), hermeneutics of algorithm (andersen, 2020), everyday auditing (shen et al., 2021), among others. this literature encompasses three high-level, intersecting visions of knowledge: knowledge located in thought, knowledge located in bodies (practices, affective states), and knowledge as heterogeneous and context-contingent (cotter, 2022; oeldorf-hirsch & neubaum, 2023). although technical knowledge tends to take the spotlight in discussions of algorithmic sensemaking and understanding, other knowledges represent key mechanisms affecting how we collectively decide to govern algorithms. for one, much of people’s knowledge about algorithms is tacit, unspoken, and intuitive (bucher, 2018; ruckenstein & granroth, 2020; swart, 2021). our affective responses and embodied insights directly guide how we orient ourselves to algorithms and how we formulate a sense of when algorithms are helpful or harmful. a narrow focus on technical insights may lead to an underestimation of what people know about algorithms and the value of their everyday wisdom. emphasis on technical knowledge often implicates deficit models of digital literacy, where limited digital engagement and skills are presumed to result from “shortfalls in cognition, personality, knowledge, resourcing, social situation or personal ideology” (selwyn, 2003, pp. 106–107). everyday insights about algorithms incubate in individuals’ experiences in the world, their personalities, psychology, beliefs, and attitudes, as guided by sociocultural contexts. given algorithms’ highly contextual, contingent nature, people’s situated encounters with these computational processes give rise to unique insight about their impact (shen et al., 2021), particularly among disempowered groups (andalibi & garcia, 2021; devito, 2022; duffy & meisner, 2023; haimson et al., 2021; karizat et al., 2021; simpson & semaan, 2021). some knowledges about algorithms are not universal and need not be. the multiplicity of knowledges about algorithms requires that modes of algorithmic governance account for the broadest range of input possible. epistemic-democratic tension public deliberation stands as a defining pillar of democracy, anchored in the vision of a public sphere where citizens engage in "unrestricted rational discussion of public matters" (fraser, 1990, p. 59). the pursuit of "participation parity" encapsulates the ideal of the public sphere, aspiring to forge a shared space where all individuals can participate on equal terms. however, stratified societies require multiple counterpublics, where segments of the population, particularly those with less power, confront and contest dominant perspectives within the broader public discourse (fraser, 1990). while participatory approaches to governance are considered a normative good for democracy, contention arises over the question of who should be involved. contemporary governance trends reveal a growing reliance those deemed experts with specialized, credentialed knowledge (krick, 2022). this understanding of expertise perpetuates knowledge hierarchies, resulting in power imbalances that disproportionately favor those deemed experts (krick, 2022, p. 469) who tend to represent elite classes. bottom-up governance if we want algorithms to function in harmony with the needs and interests of diverse publics, then we need diverse publics to be involved in conversations about algorithmic governance. further, we need to take what members of these publics—everyday people—know seriously. bottom-up governance extends beyond merely soliciting input from citizens on algorithms; it necessitates embracing two fundamental principles. firstly, bottom-up governance requires accepting everyday people as authorities on what algorithms mean to and for them. thus far, governance structures have prioritized input from elite stakeholders—researchers, industry practitioners, policymakers, journalists. these stakeholders play an essential role in studying and bringing to light the unintended consequences of algorithms. yet, these elite stakeholders cannot see algorithms from all possible angles, which means they often miss critical problems (e.g., shen et al., 2021). moreover, knowledge and power remain deeply intertwined, with the potential for deficit model mindsets premised on “deficient” technical knowledge to obstruct full, effective participation in public deliberation on algorithms. a lack of vocabulary or conceptual framework to describe algorithms on a technical level does not negate the potential for meaningful understanding of their embedded values and the associated consequences. in essence, we must understand “expertise” as contextual and diverse. secondly, bottom-up governance requires the specific expertise of members of marginalized groups to surface critical insight on the ways algorithms (re)enact political order (bucher, 2018; noble, 2018). here, prioritizing “subjugated standpoints” is essential (collins, 2014; haraway, 1988), as they offer a unique vantage point into the mechanisms through which algorithms sustain historical patterns of systemic inequalities. algorithms impact different individuals and communities in different ways and to different degrees. existing work demonstrates that bipoc, lgbtq+ members, and other marginalized groups bear the brunt of negative impacts (e.g., devito, 2022; duffy & meisner, 2023; haimson et al., 2021; karizat et al., 2021). while policymakers care about the protection of their constituents, their enthusiasm for technological advancements that could benefit their national economies and enhance global influence may sometimes overshadow this primary goal (e.g., suchman & whittaker, 2021). bottom-up approaches that center disempowered communities emphasizes justice and protecting human rights first and foremost. effectively integrating "participation of the affected" and "expertise-based decisionmaking" demands further scholarly consideration, guiding us towards techniques that meaningfully support consultation and deliberative contestation by those directly affected by algorithms, particularly the most vulnerable. references andalibi, n., & garcia, p. (2021). sensemaking and coping after pregnancy loss: the seeking and disruption of emotional validation online. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 5(cscw1), 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1145/3449201 andersen, j. (2020). understanding and interpreting algorithms: toward a hermeneutics of algorithms. media, culture & society, 42(7–8), 1479–1494. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720919373 benjamin, r. (2019). race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. polity. bishop, s. (2019). managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip. new media & society, 21(11–12), 2589–2606. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819854731 bloch-wehba, h. (2022). algorithmic governance from the bottom up. brigham young university law review, 48(1), 69–136. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4054640 bucher, t. (2017). the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 30–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154086 bucher, t. (2018). if...then: algorithmic power and politics. oxford university press. collins, p. h. (2014). black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. cotter, k. (2020). critical algorithmic literacy: power, epistemology, and platforms [doctoral dissertation]. michigan state university. cotter, k. (2022). practical knowledge of algorithms: the case of breadtube. new media & society, 146144482210818. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221081802 cotter, k., & reisdorf, b. c. (2020). algorithmic knowledge gaps: a new horizon of (digital) inequality. international journal of communication, 14. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/12450/2952 devito, m. a. (2021). adaptive folk theorization as a path to algorithmic literacy on changing platforms. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 4(cscw2), 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1145/3476080 devito, m. a. (2022). how transfeminine tiktok creators navigate the algorithmic trap of visibility via folk theorization. proceedings of the acm on humancomputer interaction, 6(cscw2), 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555105 devito, m. a., birnholtz, j., hancock, j. t., french, m., & liu, s. (2018). how people form folk theories of social media feeds and what it means for how we study selfpresentation. proceedings of the 2018 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173694 dogruel, l., masur, p., & joeckel, s. (2021). development and validation of an algorithm literacy scale for internet users. communication methods and measures, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2021.1968361 duffy, b. e., & meisner, c. (2023). platform governance at the margins: social media creators’ experiences with algorithmic (in)visibility. media, culture & society, 45(2), 285–304. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221111923 eslami, m., karahalios, k., sandvig, c., vaccaro, k., rickman, a., hamilton, k., & kirlik, a. (2016). first i “like” it, then i hide it: folk theories of social feeds. 2371– 2382. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858494 european commission. (2024, february 27). the european ai alliance. https://digitalstrategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/european-ai-alliance fraser, n. (1990). rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. social text, 25/26, 56. https://doi.org/10.2307/466240 gruber, j., & hargittai, e. (2023). the importance of algorithm skills for informed internet use. big data & society, 10(1), 205395172311681. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231168100 haimson, o. l., delmonaco, d., nie, p., & wegner, a. (2021). disproportionate removals and differing content moderation experiences for conservative, transgender, and black social media users: marginalization and moderation gray areas. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 5(cscw2), 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1145/3479610 haraway, d. (1988). situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. feminist studies, 14(3), 575. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066 jarrahi, m. h., & sutherland, w. (2019). algorithmic management and algorithmic competencies: understanding and appropriating algorithms in gig work. in n. g. taylor, c. christian-lamb, m. h. martin, & b. nardi (eds.), information in contemporary society (pp. 578–589). springer international publishing. karizat, n., delmonaco, d., eslami, m., & andalibi, n. (2021). algorithmic folk theories and identity: how tiktok users co-produce knowledge of identity and engage in algorithmic resistance. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction cscw2 (2021), forthcoming. klawitter, e., & hargittai, e. (2018). “it’s like learning a whole other language:” the role of algorithmic skills in the curation of creative goods. international journal of communication, 12, 3490–3510. krick, e. (2022). participatory governance practices at the democracy-knowledgenexus. minerva, 60(4), 467–487. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-022-09470-z noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york university press. oeldorf-hirsch, a., & neubaum, g. (2023). what do we know about algorithmic literacy? the status quo and a research agenda for a growing field. new media & society, 14614448231182662. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231182662 o’neil, c. (2016). weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. crown. ruckenstein, m., & granroth, j. (2020). algorithms, advertising and the intimacy of surveillance. journal of cultural economy, 13(1), 12–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2019.1574866 saurwein, f., just, n., & latzer, m. (2015). governance of algorithms: options and limitations. info, 17(6), 35–49. https://doi.org/10.1108/info-05-2015-0025 selwyn, n. (2003). apart from technology: understanding people’s non-use of information and communication technologies in everyday life. technology in society, 25(1), 99–116. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0160-791x(02)00062-3 shen, h., devos, a., eslami, m., & holstein, k. (2021). everyday algorithm auditing: understanding the power of everyday users in surfacing harmful algorithmic behaviors. arxiv preprint arxiv:2105.02980. siles, i., segura-castillo, a., solís, r., & sancho, m. (2020). folk theories of algorithmic recommendations on spotify: enacting data assemblages in the global south. big data & society, 7(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720923377 simpson, e., & semaan, b. (2021). for you, or for"you"?: everyday lgbtq+ encounters with tiktok. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 4(cscw3), 1–34. https://doi.org/10.1145/3432951 suchman, l., & whittaker, m. (2021, december 8). the myth of artificial intelligence. the american prospect. https://prospect.org/api/content/7fc7f7c2-5781-11ec987e-12f1225286c6/ suresh, h., & guttag, j. (2021). a framework for understanding sources of harm throughout the machine learning life cycle. equity and access in algorithms, mechanisms, and optimization, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1145/3465416.3483305 swart, j. (2021). experiencing algorithms: how young people understand, feel about, and engage with algorithmic news selection on social media. social media + society, 7(2), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211008828 white house office of science and technology policy. (2022). blueprint for an ai bill of rights. the white house. https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/ai-bill-of-rights/ selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): tiidenberg, k., davidjants, j., rose, g., hamper, j., schreiber, m. & liedtke, m. (2024, october). visual trust on social media – meaning, money and motivation. panel presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. visual trust on social media – meaning, money and motivation katrin tiidenberg tallinn university jaana davidjants tallinn university gillian rose university of oxford josie hamper university of oxford maria schreiber university of salzburg marius liedtke university of salzburg the 2020s have been characterized by a deep crisis of trust and legitimacy (bennett and livingstone 2020), which is linked in a myriad of complex ways to digital technologies and modes of communication. whereas existing work predominantly discusses trust in human-to-human relationships, or as something to be measured and evoked-in-design in human-technology interactions, we are interested in human experiences of trust when human relationships are mediated by screens. a trusting relation emerges when motivations, commitments and at times the character of the agent to be trusted are inferred; a person can be trusted to fulfil specific commitments, although they might later break this trust. trust is hence future oriented, and associated with risk (ess 2020) and uncertainty (tsfati and cappella 2003). it is used as a heuristic to decide whom to trust particular tasks, bits of information, or social or economic capital to. our project focuses specifically on the role of the visual in building trustworthy relations. because of the human efficiency in processing visual information, visuality tends to be experienced as more trustworthy than other communicative modes (sundar 2008), yet we are rather poor at evaluating the reliability of images (lehmuskallio, häkkinen, seppänen 2018). images are routinely used to grab attention, generate engagement, mobilize affect and signal reliability. yet, with each shift in visualizing technologies, images are also viewed with more and more doubt. today, thus, all visuals, particularly digital visuals, exist in a tension between trustworthiness and suspicion (mirzoeff 2015). as visual trust is a broad topic to explore with research participants, we have focused our inquiry on the topic of everyday health and wellbeing. while popular on visual social media, it introduces complexities of its own. on platforms like instagram or tiktok, users’ feeds are populated by very different actors, content, formats and positions on health and wellbeing: the vegan food blogger's recipe video can be followed by a post from a public media outlet about the lack of psychotherapy support, an infographic about endometriosis will come after a video about the morning routine of a steroidagnostic weightlifting influencer. how do users orient themselves in this complex field, which visual content and actors are seen as credible, trustworthy and/or authentic and why? what role do communities, technical structures, institutional authorities, etc. play in this? this panel brings together five papers that explore how visual digital trust is experienced and made sense of. based on (auto)ethnographic, interview, document and social media data generated as part of a multi-national research project, we analyze how people (18 – 30 yo social media users who routinely engage with everyday health and wellbeing content on social media and content creators who routinely create such content) experience and articulate what makes it trustworthy and what does not. we are finding that trust is often too abstract for social media users to address directly, rather it is experienced and articulated via norms and practices of (in)authenticity, relatability, coherence, credibility, authority. our first paper explores how social media users experience and make sense of content creator (in)authenticity as an important component of trust. having established that authenticity is critical to visual digital trust, we then move to our second paper, which explores social media users’ comparative practices (determining what is and is not authentic) as fundamental to how users see images on social media. it describes a way of looking the author terms 'distributed seeing,' which focuses both on specific details in an image and evaluates an image or set of images in relation to other images elsewhere. seeing an image as trustworthy emerges from relations between images over time and across platforms. our third paper focuses specifically on social media users’ perceptions of content creators’ commercial motivation. it explores how research participants distinguished between branding, influencing and advertising, and how they identified commercial motivations and trustworthiness through visual signifiers. our fourth paper discusses the role of workout and training content. it analyzes the relevance of how bodies are represented and how the different ways of relating to these images translate into embodiments of trust. finally, our fifth paper investigates negotiations of health expertise and authority as building blocks of trust, by exploring the public controversy surrounding the admission of german youtube channel liebscher & bracht into the designated "health"-program of the platform. references bennett, w., & livingston, s. (eds.). (2020). the disinformation age: politics, technology, and disruptive communication in the united states. cambridge university press. ess, c. m. (2020). trust and information and communication technologies. in j. simon (ed.), the routledge handbook of trust and philosophy (pp. 405–420). new york: routledge. lehmuskallio, a., hӓkkinen, j., & seppӓnen, j. (2019). photorealistic computergenerated images are difficult to distinguish from digital photographs: a case study with professional photographers and photo-editors. visual communication, 18(4), 427-451. mirzoeff, n. (2015). how to see the world. pelican. sundar, s. s. (2008). the main model: a heuristic approach to understanding technology effects on credibility. digital media, youth, and credibility, 73–100. tsfati, y., & cappella, j. n. (2003). do people watch what they do not trust? exploring the association between news media skepticism and exposure. communication research 30(5), 504–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650203253371 https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650203253371 “when a person appears human, not in some idealized way,” perceptions of content creator authenticity among their audiences katrin tiidenberg tallinn university jaana davidjants tallinn university social media authenticity takes a myriad of often contradictory forms. what is perceived as authentic for a celebrity, or an influencer differs from what is perceived as authentic for an ordinary person (marwick 2015). norms of authenticity vary also based on gender, class and race (duffy and hund 2019; potts and stebleton 2023); specific criteria of authenticity have been noted to apply to different topics like fashion or fitness (reade 2021; duffy 2019). apps and platforms have different perceived authenticity affordances (maddox 2023, duguay 2017). all the while, and despite authenticity being conceptualized as performative, contextual and situational across literature, it is still experienced and enacted on social media as something that has real social, cultural, political and economic value (hund 2023; serazio 2023). an important and ever-growing body of work analyzes the authenticity practices and performances of social media influencers and content-creators (cf. abidin 2022). this presentation builds on that literature but takes a slightly different empirical angle. we look at how content creator and influencer authenticity is made sense of by their audiences. based on social media wayfaring interviews (n=47) with young-adult social media users in estonia and uk, we analyze how they define and operationalize the authenticity of social media creators who produce content broadly within the thematic realm of everyday health and wellbeing (fitness, beauty, mental health, etc.). authentic in an inauthentic space our participants were broadly skeptical about the possibility of authenticity on social media. however, they still relied on a variety of authenticity-related criteria in their articulations of why they follow and unfollow specific creators, engage with specific content or maintain judgements on ideas put forth in it. further, our participants seemed very much aware of how complicated it is to appear authentic in platformed attention economies. “nobody’s showing anything that’s normal or realistic on social media. it’s either, you know, very fake and dishonest or it’s, you know, very like, “i’m just like you”, but also doesn’t feel very honest or relatable” (uk, female, 27). our participants operated with a nuanced system of perceived authenticity markers, where the same content creators’ monetized content was assessed differently compared to their non-monetized content. further, in the case of monetized content, our interviewees deemed authentic those creators who were not only transparent about sponsorship but indicated they only recommended something even for a fee when they favor the product. different content creators were also assessed differently for authenticity – thus a male fitness influencer was deemed authentic for what reads as genuineness and perhaps vulnerability only in the context of hegemonic masculinity. product recommendations from affluent influencers tended to be perceived as more authentic and trustworthy, as well-off creators were seen as not reliant on monetary incentives for their posts. finally, specific social media formats (video over still images) and genres (“what i did in a day,” or unposed “physique checks” as opposed to “really posed gym posts”) were more likely to be associated with authenticity and a certain visual “messiness” was elevated over a very polished, professional look of images and videos. realistic, attainable, coherent broadly, our participants articulated authenticity as strongly related to a perceived sense of realism. it could mean realistic as attainable in terms of financial or time resources one can commit to a diet, a fitness routine, a skincare regiment; as achievable in terms of body size and appearance; as “ordinary,” or just as something that reflects how one feels and how one’s friends feel. “like a what i eat in a day when someone goes, oh i’ve just got these sort of leftovers, and so i’m going to have them, because that’s what i’ve got in the fridge… rather than someone who’s got like a brand new packet of fish or they’ve gone to the shop and bought all these different ingredients that they’d never normally have in their house, which is just like financially a bit unrealistic, and also like time-wise you’re not going to do that every day” (uk, cis gendered woman, 18). finally, alignment across a content creator’s posts over time, across platforms or their behavior on social media and in other venues was an important authenticity evaluation criterion. thus, sharing a cocktail hour promotional code one day and a health supplement the next day was seen as incoherent and inauthentic, as was being a wild partyer and portrayed as such in tabloid media and then trying to give health and wellness advice on social media. human, flawed, vulnerable in 1973, when describing social tourism into institutional backstages (e.g. factory, prison, restaurant kitchen) dean maccannell (1973: 596) wrote of “staged authenticity,” where outsiders “are permitted to view details of the inner operation of a commercial, domestic, industrial or public institution,” and as a result feel they have an authentic enough experience. in 2017, crystal abidin extended maccannell’s conceptual framework to discuss “calibrated amateurism,” and the related social media influencer practice of “contrived authenticity” to aesthetically present as an amateur to come across as relatable and authentic. an important theme in our participants experiences was the content creators showing that they are “human too” which was often operationalized through showing “both the good and the bad.” in our case the emphasis of authenticity lay less with influencers appearing amateurish and more with them delivering emotionally persuasive presentations of their humanity via its inherent vulnerability. showing bad days, even personal tragedy, as well as all that which is often considered “too private” could be trusted as evidence of authenticity, presumably, because of its stigmatizable status. “well, and then i like not at all success stories, but people who have had something big happen to them health-wise, or like something bad has happened to them, and then how they have come through this and how they have built communities with the help of social media, for example i have this one foreign girl, this girl from spain, my god what happened to her” (estonia, female, 24). we interpret this as our participants accepting as real-enough those staged authenticities (maccannell 1973) that allow access not so much to the institutional backstage, but to the private life, or even step beyond that, to the insides of the influencer’s head. the latter is linked to the prevalence of therapy culture discourses (furedi 2004; illouz 2008) that fetishize suffering and tend to see it as a source of growth, resilience and gratitude (rimke 2020). references abidin, c. (2017). #familygoals: family influencers, calibrated amateurism, and justifying young digital labor. social media + society, 3(2). abidin, c. (2022). what i talk about when i talk about authenticity: an autobibliographic inquiry. in m. heřmanová, m. skey, and t. thurnell-read (eds.), cultures of authenticity (pp. 209–214). emerald publishing. duffy, a. (2019). if i say you’re authentic, then you’re authentic: power and privilege revealed in travel blogs. tourist studies, 19(4), 569–584. duffy, b. e., & hund, e. (2019). gendered visibility on social media: navigating instagram’s authenticity bind. in j. pooley (ed.), social media & the self: an open reader (1st ed.). mediastudies.press. maddox, j. (2023). more real, or just more surveillance? panopticism and shifting authenticity paradigms in bereal. convergence, 29(5), 1183–1198. duguay, s. (2017). dressing up tinderella: interrogating authenticity claims on the mobile dating app tinder. information, communication & society, 20(3), 351–367. furedi, f. (2004). therapy culture. cultivating vulnerability in an uncertain age. routledge. illouz, e. (2008). saving the modern soul: therapy, emotions, and the culture of selfhelp. university of california press. hund, e. (2023). the influencer industry: the quest for authenticity on social media. princeton university press. maccannell d. (1973). staged authenticity: arrangements of social space in tourist settings. american journal of sociology, 79, 589–603. marwick, a. e. (2015a). instafame: luxury selfies in the attention economy. public culture, 27(1), 137–160. potts, c., & stebleton, m. j. (2023). behind the digital mask: examining social media and masculinity. about campus, 28(4), 4–13. reade, j. (2021). keeping it raw on the ‘gram: authenticity, relatability and digital intimacy in fitness cultures on instagram. new media and society, 23(3), 535–553. rimke, h. (2020). self-help, therapeutic industries, and neoliberalism. in d. nehring, o. j. madsen, e. cabanas, c. mills, & d. kerrigan (eds.), the routledge international handbook of global therapeutic cultures. kindle edition: taylor and francis. serazio, m. (2023). the authenticity industries: keeping it "real" in media, culture, and politics. stanford university press. distributed seeing: looking at trustworthy images on social media gillian rose university of oxford as demonstrated both by our findings and other scholarship (e.g. enli and rosenberg 2018; hund 2023; reade 2021), the 'authenticity' of social media content is critical to gaining the trust of users. authenticity is often defined by users in contrast to the inauthentic: that is, social media users often find authenticity difficult to define in and of itself, but its qualities can be clarified by comparing it to what is not authentic. this paper elaborates these comparative dynamics and suggests that they are also fundamental to how users see images on social media, and, more specifically, to whether specific images (and their creators) are seen as trustworthy or not. the young adults interviewed for this project did have a number of criteria for evaluating whether the visual content of a social media image concerning everyday health and wellbeing was authentic and therefore potentially trustworthy. some tended to trust data visualisation graphics; some felt video was more trustworthy. in relation to photographic images, trust criteria overwhelmingly focus on images of people and places considered authentic because they are 'relatable'. what the online image shows must not too glossy, not too perfect, not showing someone with endless amounts of time or money. this is a way of seeing that looks at the image as "a sight which has been recreated or reproduced. it is an appearance, or a set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time in which it first made its appearance and preserved – for a few moments or a few centuries" (berger 1972: 9-10). as manghani (2013: xxv) remarks, this is a definition of an image influenced by decades of benjaminian debate about photography and mechanical means of image reproduction. however, social media images are not photographs as berger – or benjamin – understood them. not only are photographs heavily edited but they are joined by – or hybridised with – many kinds of other imagery, from videos to graphics. moreover, they are constituted by software and hardware (hoelzl and marie 2015), they are networked, and they circulate (dewdney and sluis 2022). while the circulation of images as digital files has been paid significant attention in recent materialist accounts of computer vision, platform seeing and invisuality (e.g. amaro 2023; mackenzie and munster 2019), this paper proposes that social media users' ways of seeing have also shifted to respond to the networked nature of digital imagery. drawing on social media wayfaring interviews (n=47) with young-adult social media users in estonia and uk, the paper describes a way of seeing social media imagery which it will term 'distributed seeing'. distributed seeing has two aspects. the first is a focus on comparing specific aspects of an image in terms of its difference to others, and the second evaluates an image or set of images in terms of its consistency to other images elsewhere. on occasion, these interviewees compared quite specific elements of an image rather than its overall content in order to establish its reliability. for example, here is a uk interviewee talking about the importance of colour to her sense of the realism of different images: “so this one (...) is very neutral kind of colour palette, quite plain, people showing off their figures in sort of like gyms and that kind of thing, showing – (...) like this kind of one where it’s more like colourful, and i don’t know, i think it kind of seems more fun, in a way, rather than kind of being about like – (...) i guess when you have like a lot of colours it kind of looks messier in a way, or more realistic, whereas like the other one is trying to project sort of like a cleancut sort of image with a very like matchy matchy colours and sort of more neutral sort of – i think it kind of appeals to a certain aesthetic in a way” (uk, female). interviewees also frequently described a number of ways of establishing the trustworthiness of images using comparative tactics. that is, how they see one image is shaped by how they see others: their viewing is distributed. there are three main modes of comparison. the first is across time: a content creator who posts consistent kinds of imagery over time is potentially more trustworthy than one whose image content varies wildly. this is particularly important for 'before' and after' type images, which must visualise gradual change over time to be credible. the second is comparing content from the same creator on different platforms, or between their paid and free content, or between different media entirely. many interviewees described how still images (usually on instagram) or short videos (usually on tiktok) would often "hook" them into other content by the same creator on youtube (most often). again, consistency between the creator's various kind of online visuals made them more trustworthy; so too did them looking the same when they appeared on other media, for example on a tv programme. finally, some users also cross-checked a content creator using other platforms like google or google image search, again looking for consistent 'relatability'. these tactics are unsurprising given both the material infrastructure of networked imagery, and the way that our interviewees acknowledged and understood the circulation of images across social media platforms. for example, the social media users interviewed for this project share a very widespread understanding that 'the algorithm' has a powerful effect in showing users specific content (with many remarking that it often feels as if their phone is listening to their conversations and then generating content from what it hears). they therefore have a clear understanding that social media is a network in which interpretations of particular elements must be calibrated in relation to what can be seen in the wider network. that is, seeing must be distributed. similar to hayles's (2012) discussion of hyper reading, distributed seeing engages with the materiality of networked social media imagery by seeing relationally across different images. these findings should be placed in the context of the project participants’ overall engagement with social media, which was very often casual, and relatively rarely involved self-consciously investigative searching. the networked infrastructure of social media and its use is not therefore the only dynamic in the complex process of establishing visual trust online. however, this paper suggests that it is one key dynamic in understanding how the visual content of contemporary social media is seen by its users. references amaro, r. (2023). toward the black technical object. sternberg press. berger, j. (1972). ways of seeing. london: bbc with penguin. dewdney, a., and sluis, k. eds (2022). the networked image in post-digital culture. routledge. enli, g., and rosenberg, l.t. (2018). ‘trust in the age of social media: populist politicians seem more authentic’. social media + society 4 (1) hayles, k. (2012). how we think: digital media and contemporary technogenesis. university of chicago press. hoelzl, ingrid, and rémi marie. 2015. softimage: towards a new theory of the digital image. intellect books. hund, e. (2023). the influencer industry: the quest for authenticity on social media. princeton university press. mackenzie, a., and munster, a. (2019). ‘platform seeing: image ensembles and their invisualities’. theory, culture & society 36 (5): 3–22. manghani, s. (2013). image studies: theory and practice. routledge. reade, j. (2021). ‘keeping it raw on the ‘gram: authenticity, relatability and digital intimacy in fitness cultures on instagram’. new media & society 23 (3): 535–53. “i’m a gym-goer, so you can trust me”: visual trust and the gym josie hamper university of oxford the research project this presentation is based on has shown how social media users’ trust in visual content is closely tied to the perceived motivations of social media content creators, and especially whether these motivations are seen to have commercial underpinnings. in this paper, i will present an analysis of 40 interviews with social media users and content creators in the uk. i explore how research participants distinguished between branding, influencing and advertising, and how they identified commercial motivations through visual signifiers. in interviews, encountering commercial content was seen as an unavoidable and expected part of being on social media (burgess et al. 2022), and being able to recognise commercial content was described as a dynamic practice that responded to a changing technological landscape. gym content offers a prime case for critically examining the relationships between commercial content, digital visual trust and health promotion. as others have shown with fit inspiration or “fitspo” content, the enactment of authenticity and curation of “raw” fitness content – usually in the form of “realistic” photographs – is seen as inspiring trusting relationships between content creators and audiences (reade 2021). to appear authentic, the subjects of fitness content have to carefully manage the visibility of their personal or affiliated brand(s) and their commercial intents (de veirman and hudders 2020; kubler 2023). yet differently from fitness content, which tends to emphasise the social media display of fit bodies (reade, 2020), my attention to gym content locates these fit bodies within socio-spatial imaginaries of the gym. the physical facilities of the gym are inseparable from their social dimensions, whereby the gym brings together “individual body projects and collective body culture” (andrews, sudwell and sparkes 2005: 877). the gym is a place that has “particular norms, etiquette, and systems of informal surveillance” (coen, rosenberg and davidson 2018: 30). based on the experiences of social media users and content creators, this paper explores the role of social media in continuously reproducing the gym within shifting cultures of health and fitness. research design interviews in the uk were conducted with 30 social media users aged 18-30 who had encountered everyday health-related content on social media and 10 creators of healthrelated content. notably, there was significant overlap between these groups of participants, where several social media users also had extensive experience of content creation. for the purpose of these interviews, what constituted everyday health-related content was open and led by the experiences of participants. as a consequence of this openness, there was a significant slippage in interview conversations between health, beauty and wellness, and participants often reflected on the challenges of defining “health” in the context of social media. where possible, interviews with social media users involved viewing the participant’s social media accounts and (the interviewer and participant) looking at content together during the interview. in some cases, participants brought examples of health-related content to use as visual prompts during the interview. engaging with social media platforms and content during interviews was an explicit attempt to focus attention on the role of visuals within the broader social media environment of health advice and information. interviews with social media content creators explored the planning, making and posting of health-related content, again attending to the role of visuals in creating “good” content. while most of the content creator participants hesitated at describing themselves as “influencers” and they generally did not produce sponsored content, they still reflected on their personal brands and motivations to influence their audience(s) through sharing and raising awareness about particular areas of health (kubler 2023). visual trust and the gym gym content constitutes a genre that has gained a ubiquitous presence on social media. almost all participants spoke about how they encountered gym content on social media, regardless of their interest in attending a gym or actually engaging in this kind of exercise. gym content refers to any social media posting – text, still images and videos – that concerns both the gym as a site or going to the gym as an activity. within this, the “gym goer” represents a type of content creator or subject of content, where participants would often comment on how gym goers engage in “bodywork” on social media (toffoletti and thorpe 2018) and use their “body as evidence” of the effects of exercise regimes (reade 2020). the following participant signalled the relationships between presenting a persuasive performance of the gym and his trust in the content creator: and the gym people i mean they tend to kind of – the stills [still images] they sort of have sort of signifiers that of being kind of gym people, you know, they’ll be wearing their gym gear to cook a recipe, which is clearly not when you're usual cooking but it’s to be like, “i’m a gym-goer, so you can trust me with – that this is going to be healthy for you,” sort of thing. (uk, male, 25) in gym content, the spaces and objects of the gym, along with gym goers and signifiers like gym clothing, all come together to create a visual aesthetic of the gym that is performed on and for social media. branding and influencing following a set-back during the covid-19 pandemic where many gyms were forced to close, the fitness industry is reportedly experiencing a boom in the uk (statista 2023). in interviews, gym content was frequently talked about in relation to the commercial motivations of content creators and participants were critically aware – but generally accepting – of social media as a platform for the advertising industry. there was a particular pattern and rhythm to social media content, where certain brands would dominate across social media accounts over certain periods of time. participants described social media advertising for gym memberships, nutritional supplements, gym clothing and exercise equipment. in interviews they reflected on the visual tactics of commercial content in the form of influencer pages and placed these tactics along a spectrum from “subtle” to “in your face” advertising: [influencer pages] are more subtle, it’s like “oh come along with me while i live my day as a fitness influencer, i start off at the gym, equinox is such a nice gym, look they have a nice shower.” you know what i mean? so it’s like you get tempted to get an equinox membership but it’s not an ad. (uk, female, 23) participants adopted a variety of strategies for evaluating content creators’ commercial motivations. explicit advertising was sometimes seen as the content creator being transparent about their commercial ties, whereas subtle advertising might be more influential but could be a reason for distrusting the creator. the stories that participants told about being influenced by advertising on social media were illustrative of how they made sense of their place in everyday data cultures (burgess et al. 2022). this paper focuses on a convergence between the gym industry, the influencer industry and the digital advertising industry, and examines the social media practices that formed around this convergence. references burgess, j., albury, k., mccosker, a. and wilken, r. (2022) everyday data cultures. polity press. coen, s., rosenberg, m. and davidson, j. (2018) “it's gym, like g-y-m not j-i-m”: exploring the role of place in the gendering of physical activity. social science & medicine, 196, 29-36. de veirman, m., and hudders, l. (2020). disclosing sponsored instagram posts: the role of material connection with the brand and message-sidedness when disclosing covert advertising. international journal of advertising, 39(1), 94-130. kubler, k. (2023). sellers, shifters, sharers & science communicators: the initial beliefs and positions of fitness influencers and creators on instagram. media, culture & society, 45(6), 1119-1134. andrews, g., sudwell, m. and sparkes, a. (2005) towards a geography of fitness: an ethnographic case study of the gym in british bodybuilding culture. social science & medicine, 60(4), 877-891. reade, j. (2021). keeping it raw on the ‘gram: authenticity, relatability and digital intimacy in fitness cultures on instagram. new media and society, 23(3), 535-553. statista (2023) fitness industry in the united kingdom – statistics and facts. https://www.statista.com/topics/3411/fitness-industry-in-the-united-kingdomuk/#topicoverview (accessed 26.02.2024). toffoletti, k. and thorpe, h. (2018) the athletic labour of femininity: the branding and consumption of global celebrity sportswomen on instagram. journal of consumer culture, 18(2), 298-316. https://www.statista.com/topics/3411/fitness-industry-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/#topicoverview https://www.statista.com/topics/3411/fitness-industry-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/#topicoverview “i’m not gonna take advice from you” – embodied (dis)trust in health and wellbeing content maria schreiber university of salzburg introduction photos and videos of bodies are abundant on visual social media platforms like youtube, instagram, and tiktok. the “practical ontological realism of photos” (hand 2012: 28) still leads us to believe that what is documented by cameras is real or at least has been real at some point. while synthetic images and deepfakes generated by artificial intelligence engines could be challenging these truth claims, in everyday use of fitness and lifestyle content, young users rarely question the veracity or accuracy of the body images they encounter. yet if they are deemed trustworthy is another story this paper will discuss the role of embodied (dis)trust in the context of health and wellbeing content on social media. while the impact of body images on individual wellbeing and social norms is one of the classic topics in media and communication research, the entanglement of these images with different platform infrastructures and trust has not yet been under much scrutiny. to overcome the subject/object duality implied in many studies of media effects of media images on the audience, coleman (2008: 168) proposes to focus on “the ways in which relations constitute bodies and images and the ways in which it is through relations that bodies and images become”. in our study, we therefore ask in which ways body images are perceived and trusted or not and how media technologies coconstitute these practices (walker-rettberg 2014; schneider 2000). by reconstructing the relations between users and images, we show how visual trust is often embodied trust and how embodied trust can also be betrayed. research design building on the context of a broader research project, this contribution will discuss different notions of how pictures of bodies become relevant in trust practices. we focus on the audience perspective, specifically how students (18-25 years old) use healthrelated content (e.g. wellbeing, workout, training, and lifestyle) on social media. we are specifically interested in the notion of ‘embodied trust’ in these contexts, in the sense of how users relate to body images. to reconstruct their practices and imaginaries, we build on aggregated autoethnographies. this approach is an innovative method designed by annette markham (2012) and developed in collaboration with katrin tiidenberg (tiidenberg et al. 2017) wherein students are taught to become the autoethnographers of their own social media experience and they (voluntarily and with consent) share the materials they generate with the researchers. based on the analysis of autoethnographic accounts and interviews of 40 students collected in austria in summer 2023, we reconstruct their use of health content on social media, the relevance of representations of bodies in this context, and different ways of relating to these images and notions of how trust can be embodied. preliminary results we found that body images serve as visual and embodied pieces of evidence and trust generators for healthy diets, efficient fitness routines or general wellbeing. users find those content creators that seem to embody what they promise particularly trustworthy, while “if there was someone who was sort of overweight [...] making posts about eating healthily and how to feel better about yourself, people would go, well, i’m not gonna take advice from you” (ana, age 18). various genres offer specific forms of proof, for example juxtapositions of photos that show the body before and after some kind of intervention, long-term transformations through diets or trainings, or just posing in a different way in the same moment. video footage is also perceived as particularly trustworthy as it can document exact bodily movements, like yoga poses or the execution of weight lifts and is considered more difficult to edit or manipulate than still images. however, young users clearly differentiate which kinds of bodies they find trustworthy in which contexts. we found three registers in which bodies become relevant in the participants’ lives: when it comes to fitness and workout content, lean and muscular bodies serve as ideal images that users aspire to. many participants engage with the fitness bodies in an affirmative way: “paul unterleitner shows his strong body, which is motivating and fascinating for me. i am focused on going to the gym more often, to also have a body like that” (male, 23). they may feel bad about not looking like the creators they follow, but they still see their content as aspirational and motivating. another mode of relating to fitness bodies is rather functional and practical. popular genres like “follow along” videos instruct the viewer to do the exercises along with the bodies on the screen. the participants appreciate the convenience of not having to make their own exercise plan, thinking about timing etc. not every platform affords the same kind of practical use. users might get motivated through short videos on instagram or tiktok but will actually do the workout with youtube. both aspirational and practical ways of relating to body images usually refer to bodies that are shaped, styled, and staged to correspond to normative standards of beauty and desirability. many users are annoyed with these stereotypical body images, yet they feel they cannot escape them. they are perceived to be preferred and pushed by the algorithm, for example when searching for workout videos on youtube: “i also have not seen one workout video in my timeline displaying a person with an average body. i think this is sad because it pushes unrealistic beauty ideals and the notion that only beautiful and ripped people are allowed to post fitness-related content” (male, 23). however, users also engage with non-normatively beautiful bodies, which are used to feel good about one’s body as it is. users are inspired by the content creators’ relations towards their bodies, their acceptance, and self-love. yet, forms of embodied trust are betrayed when normatively beautiful content creators also bandwagon on body positivity, for example by taking pictures in unfavourable poses or posting “instagram vs. reality" pictures that actually do not show any differences. conclusion: ambivalent love/hate relationship overall, body images on social media contribute heavily to what is deemed normal and desirable. following coleman (2008: 168), we reconstructed the relations between the users’ bodies and platformed body images and the “knowledges, understandings and experiences of bodies [that] are produced through images”. we found that ways of relating to bodies in fitness and health content are manifold and can be quite ambivalent or even contradictory. users are inspired and motivated by lean and muscular bodies and they are perceived as embodied evidence of trustworthy workouts, diets, lifestyle choices, etc. at the same time, they are annoyed about their algorithmically pushed abundance and they lose trust if accounts do not show consistent body images or change their brand. body images on social media can be motivating, stressful or relieving – or even all of the above at the same time: “i feel happy when i watch his videos. […] i also feel a little sad because i don’t look like that and probably never will” (male, 23). references belting, h. (2001). bild-anthropologie. fink. coleman, r. (2008). the becoming of bodies. feminist media studies, 8(2), 163–179. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680770801980547 hand, m. (2012). ubiquitous photography. polity press. markham, a. (2012). fabrication as ethical practice: qualitative inquiry in ambiguous internet contexts. information, communication & society, 15(3), 334–353. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2011.641993 https://doi.org/10.1080/14680770801980547 https://doi.org/http:/dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2011.641993 müller, m. r. (2011). das körperbild als selbstbild. in m. r. müller, h.-g. soeffner, & a. sonnenmoser (eds.), körper haben: die symbolische formung der person. (pp. 87– 106). velbrück wissenschaft. schneider, i. (2000). anthropologische kränkungen zum zusammenhang von medialität und körperlichkeit in mediendiskursen. in b. becker & i. schneider (eds.), was vom körper übrig bleibt. körperlichkeit identität medien (pp. 13–40). campus verlag. tiidenberg, k., markham, a., pereira, g., rehder, m., dremljuga, r., sommer, j. k., & dougherty, m. (2017). ‘i’m an addict’ and other sensemaking devices. proceedings of the 8th international conference on social media & society #smsociety17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3097286.3097307 walker-rettberg, j. (2014). seeing ourselves through technology. palgrave macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137476661 https://doi.org/10.1145/3097286.3097307 https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137476661 youtube health and contested content: analyzing the “liebscher & bracht”-controversy marius liedtke university of salzburg introduction according to youtube, its designated “health”-program was launched in an effort to counteract misinformation and improve users access to “health-related” contents from reliable resources. since its implementation, channels providing videos on such healthrelated subjects can apply for admission into the program. if successful, the channel's videos not only gain preferential algorithmic treatment within search results but are also flagged with a visible youtube health seal stating the channel's reliability. in the user data collected during our project, this seal was mentioned as a deciding factor for trusting the contents of attached videos, making their consumption “easier”, to quote one participant. when the program and its functionalities were launched in the german-speaking market in february 2023, the self-described “pain-specialists” of liebscher & bracht were among the first batch of channels announced as part of it. as one of the largest healthrelated channels in the region, they were are already famous for their instructional videos displaying exercises and stretches promised to relief all kinds of symptoms. soon after the announcement, however, major legacy media outlets published reports stating the channel would spread medically unsound advice with exaggerated therapeutic promises and raising concerns about youtube’s standards when selecting partaking channels (feldwisch-drentrup 2023). predictably, the controversy also spread to youtube itself, where the newly launched program quarks science cops of public broadcaster wdr released an elaborately produced video, thoroughly scrutinizing claims by liebscher & bracht’, e.g. that exercises and supplements of theirs would be able to cure arthritis and even help to better eyesight. it has gained almost 257,000 views and over 2,200 comments to date. while it re-ignited the discussion about liebscher & bracht in the youtube-sphere, it was hardly the first video taking a skeptical look at their often-unsubstantiated promises. over the years several independent content creators have engaged critically with the output of the almost 2 million subscriber-channel. considering the aforementioned importance the visual display of youtube healths seal of approval has on users’ trusting practices, this contribution investigates on what basis youtube assumes its role as arbiter of reliable health information and how it executes this role by looking closer at the specific case of liebscher & bracht’s admission into youtube health. this leads to broader considerations of how health expertise and authority is generally constructed and contested within this platformed and highly visual social media environment. research design this research takes the outlined public controversy surrounding the admission of liebscher & bracht into youtube health as the starting point to examine the various actors invested in it and investigate their negotiations of health expertise and authority in the context of social media. the contribution is interested in how the different actors involved in the controversy – content creators, audiences, the platform, legacy media and more – construct expert knowledge and status as well as challenge the expert authority of others. using a digital ethnography approach (pink et al. 2016), this research explores the many tension-filled relations between entities like expert health organizations and youtube, legacy media and social media, science journalists and content creators, as well as those between content creators on different levels of status. for this, the contribution analyses a wide variety of data types from newspaper articles to youtube’s official presentational slides, from who meeting protocols to youtube videos. by employing an integrated mix of interpretative and digital methods, this contribution analyzes the differing positions taken in this controversy as well as the claims for expertise and authority the involved actors engage in. by also analyzing and mapping the discussions in the comment sections of youtube videos and news articles, where audiences weigh the presented critique and its claims of scientific evidence against their often very positive personal experiences with liebscher & bracht’s content, this research also takes the user perspective into account. however, in accordance with aoir’s 2024 conference theme of “industry”, the following section of preliminary findings will focus on the platform’s role in the controversy and its constructions of expertise and authority. preliminary findings depending on the nature of the channel, the displayed youtube health seal in the german context reads either “from a state approved healthcare provider of germany” (for hospitals or similar institutions), “from a doctor licensed in germany” (for medical doctors or psychotherapists) or “from a channel with a health professional licensed in germany”, like in the case of liebscher & bracht. this last disclaimer signifies, that a medical doctor or physiotherapist has applied on behalf of the organization running the channel, self-attesting to also have editorial oversight and review of the content the organization is posting on youtube. just beneath any of the aforementioned texts, the seal displays a clickable link offering to “learn how health sources are defined by the world health organization”. if one follows the link, youtube provides more information on the process behind the selection of their "trustworthy sources”. while state accredited institutions like hospitals are admitted automatically, channels run or represented by individual health professionals are supposed to adhere to a set of principles defined by the national academy of medicine (nam) in the us and later ratified by the world health organization (who). according to the peer-reviewed paper authored by nam’s project team, reliable social media health sources should be “science-based”, “objective”, “transparent and accountable” (kington et al. 2021). if these are the platform’s standards for channels to be considered “authoritative health sources”, it begs the question why liebscher & bracht was admitted into youtube health? watchdog organizations and customer protection agencies have long warned against liebscher & bracht for their unsubstantiated claims. youtube must have been aware of these problematic tendencies, but instead of launching youtube health without one of the largest health-related channels in the german-speaking market, the platform opted for a different approach. as liebscher & bracht conceded, they had to delete more than one hundred of their videos and edit over 300 more to be admitted. according to the channel owners, the deletion of videos might have cost them in adrevenue, but the surplus of trustworthiness gained through youtube’s stamp of approval made the trade-off worth it (kreienbrink 2023). in december 2023, regional public broadcaster hr reported about still finding contestable content on the channel, and a mere month after its admission, frankfurt am main regional court imposed a contractual penalty on the pain therapy provider due to repetition of inadmissible advertising statements (brockschmidt et al. 2023). conclusion the admission of liebscher & bracht into youtube health raises serious questions over the platform's commitment to its own quality standards. official documents from the company suggest that during the application process, channels are only asked to selfattest to following the principles laid out above. however, it remains unclear whether they are additionally vetted and by whom, and whether a channel's output is monitored following their admission. further questions remain regarding the role of the reputable health organizations, whose names youtube features prominently, but do not seem to play any active part in assessing a channel's trustworthiness. overall, this controversy provides a suitable case study to showcase the often-messy situations audiences engage in when looking for health information online, trying to make informed trust-decisions while being confronted with a multiplicity of claims for expertise in these multi-faceted and highly ambivalent environments. references brockschmidt, l., von hirsch, m., & gallwitz, j. (2023, december 29). nach kritik an therapie: liebscher und bracht erneut abgemahnt. hessenschau.de. https://www.hessenschau.de/wirtschaft/nach-kritik-an-therapie-liebscher-und-brachterneut-abgemahnt-v1,liebscher-bracht-104.html feldwisch-drentrup, h. (2023a, march 1). google führt youtube health ein: qualität des gesundheitsportals nicht sicher. faz.net. https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/google-fuehrt-youtube-health-ein-qualitaetdes-gesundheitsportals-nicht-sicher-18712903.html kington, r. s., arnesen, s., chou, w.-y. s., curry, s. j., lazer, d., & villarruel, a. m. (2021). identifying credible sources of health information in social media: principles and attributes. nam perspectives. https://doi.org/10.31478/202107a kreienbrink, m. (2023, march 4). liebscher & bracht: darum haben die youtube-stars mehr als hundert ihrer videos gelöscht. der spiegel. https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/liebscher-und-bracht-darum-haben-die-youtubestars-mehr-als-hundert-ihrer-videos-geloescht-a-5f0df8b8-d71f-4a56-abdd33fb44263470 pink, s., horst, h. a., postill, j., hjorth, l., lewis, t., & tacchi, j. (eds.). (2016). digital ethnography: principles and practice. sage. https://www.hessenschau.de/wirtschaft/nach-kritik-an-therapie-liebscher-und-bracht-erneut-abgemahnt-v1,liebscher-bracht-104.html https://www.hessenschau.de/wirtschaft/nach-kritik-an-therapie-liebscher-und-bracht-erneut-abgemahnt-v1,liebscher-bracht-104.html https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/google-fuehrt-youtube-health-ein-qualitaet-des-gesundheitsportals-nicht-sicher-18712903.html https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/google-fuehrt-youtube-health-ein-qualitaet-des-gesundheitsportals-nicht-sicher-18712903.html https://doi.org/10.31478/202107a https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/liebscher-und-bracht-darum-haben-die-youtube-stars-mehr-als-hundert-ihrer-videos-geloescht-a-5f0df8b8-d71f-4a56-abdd-33fb44263470 https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/liebscher-und-bracht-darum-haben-die-youtube-stars-mehr-als-hundert-ihrer-videos-geloescht-a-5f0df8b8-d71f-4a56-abdd-33fb44263470 https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/liebscher-und-bracht-darum-haben-die-youtube-stars-mehr-als-hundert-ihrer-videos-geloescht-a-5f0df8b8-d71f-4a56-abdd-33fb44263470 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 myles, d., chartrand, a. & s. duguay. (2023, october). ‘if we look at it from an lgbt point of view…’ mobilizing lgbtq+ stakeholders to queer algorithmic imaginaries. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. ‘if we look at it from an lgbt point of view…’ mobilizing lgbtq+ stakeholders to queer algorithmic imaginaries david myles institut national de la recherche scientifique alex chartrand concordia university stefanie duguay concordia university introduction in the past decade, platform algorithms, implemented to curate, exploit, and predict user activities online, have been criticized for exacerbating social inequalities that disproportionally affect women and people of color (noble, 2018). today, researchers are increasingly interested in understanding how platform algorithms also affect lgbtq+ users by automating cisheteronormative biases (southerton, 2021). this paper presents the results of an exploratory study that seeks to identify issues that platform algorithms raise for lgbtq+ communities and analyze their social implications. phase 1 relied on a scoping review of the scientific literature (arksey & o’malley, 2005) and on an extensive press review (chartier, 2003) to map the main algorithmic controversies relating to lgbtq+ communities (2010-2022). by using algorithmic functions as a sensitizing concept (latzer et al., 2016), we classified our corpus of public controversies into five categories: sorting algorithms, recommendation algorithms, filtering algorithms, and search algorithms, as well as a fifth category on cisheteronormativity in the tech industry. phase 2 relied on two group interviews: one with canadian social media managers of lgbtq+ non-profit organizations and one with canada-based lgbtq+ tech workers (n = 11). importantly, phase 1 controversies were used as prompts to elicit discussions among participants. in this paper, we present the preliminary results of our phase 2 group interviews (phase 1 results are discussed in myles et al. [2023]). we pay close attention to how participants made sense of algorithmic controversies and their social implications for lgbtq+ communities by queering dominant algorithmic imaginaries. in this context, algorithmic imaginaries refer to the ways “in which people imagine, perceive and experience algorithms and what these imaginations make possible” (bucher, 2017: 31), whereas the notion of queering refers to the act of subverting the cisheteronormative ideals these imaginaries often tend to normalize (butler, 1993). queering ai temporality a first way participants queered algorithmic imaginaries was to question dominant discourses that typically depict ai technology as being inherently new, innovative, or optimistically disruptive (borup et al., 2006). for example, when asked about the ability of facial recognition software to predict sexual identity, lou stated: “everything is wrong about this. […] predicting people's sexual orientation from what they look like, that was debunked decades ago, that’s obviously not possible.” in this context, queering ai temporality refers to how participants refuted the belief that these algorithms (and their resulting controversies) are somehow new. similarly, when discussing gender and sexual categories provided by platform algorithms, dax mentioned: “our trans and gender nonconforming communities have been obeying lots of other categories for decades. i think the real power struggle relates to who gets to set boundaries between categories.” thus, a recurring trope in our group interviews was the re-inscription of algorithmic controversies within an lgbtq+ temporality, one that sets them as part of a long-lasting history of gender and sexual oppression. queering the configured user second, participants queered algorithmic imaginaries through the reconfiguration of the ideal-type user embedded in sociotechnical systems (woolgar, 1990). for example, judith said: “there is an idea that you can look homosexual or you can look female or male and i think it is easier for society to accept these ideas because it comes from a machine […] the fundamental issue is that the technology is built by humans who have a ton of biases […] the data that the machines have access to is, in of itself, limited to whatever the people have resources for, which is often the ability to access databases of mostly white people, white cis men specifically.” thus, participants generally agreed that the tech industry is partly responsible for pre-configuring white, cisheterosexual users in digital platforms. however, a tension emerged when it came to identifying the best strategies to counter these biases in the tech industry. for example, lou confided: “i have to do this work because if we, as queer people, don't speak up then, like, the people who had the idea to make these systems, they won't notice. […] if we don't say anything, it doesn't get addressed. but then, also, my mental health is impacted by having to speak up about these things every time, again and again and again.” as such, a conflict of allegiance emerged between the responsibility for lgbtq+ tech workers to effect social change and the necessity for them to protect themselves against additional harm occurring in the process. queering algorithmic resistance third, participants queered algorithmic imaginaries by subverting the notion of ‘algorithmic resistance’ (velkova & kaun, 2021). namely, they discussed whether true resistance could really occur by countering platform algorithms in practice. for example, alexander shared the tactics they developed to counter the lack of content moderation on facebook by constituting their own list of prohibited keywords. yet, several participants were ambivalent towards using digital platforms professionally, as evidenced by rafael: “it’s like a double-edged sword. earlier, when i said i was for artificial intelligence in marketing, that’s if i could take advantage of it, if it wasn’t harmful. when you do lgbt comms, that’s kind of the fence you’re sitting on.” other participants, like dax, argued that discontinuing the use of proprietary platforms was a more effective strategy to resist oppressive algorithms: “in my experience, we end up using alternative circuits that do not go through these extensive algorithms. […] just like 20, 30 years ago, we had flyers and word of mouth. well, we also work through social capital, and i mean… our community’s algorithm, it also works really well.” this tension relates to broader academic discussions that alternately identify effective technological resistance as a form of strategic misuse (jauréguiberry & proulx, 2011) or, rather, as conscious technological disuse (granjon, 2011). queering algorithmic translation a final way participants queered algorithmic imaginaries was how they ‘translated’ (akrich et al., 2006) algorithmic controversies in terms that made sense with their positionality as lgbtq+ stakeholders. this entailed apprehending these controversies beyond purely technicist implications, extending them to political (anna: “what if they start weaponizing [sorting algorithms] in different countries or use [them] to identify queer people?”) or socioeconomic (rafael: “the issue is capitalism, that search engines end up working around notions of profit.”) considerations. interestingly, dax provided their own translation of the algorithmic functions used in our research design: “i’ve renamed these algorithms […]. if we look at it from an lgbt point of view, sorting algorithms could be called assignation algorithms, search engines could be called gatekeeping algorithms, filtering algorithms could be called policing algorithms, and recommendation algorithms could be called subjectivation algorithms.” this excerpt reveals the limitations of a technicist or functionalist framing of algorithmic controversies and the need to better account for lgbtq+ imaginaries when analyzing the social implications of ai technologies. beyond algorithmic imaginaries we conclude this paper by highlighting the importance of mobilizing key stakeholders, especially those from marginalized communities, to contest the dominant discourses through which society makes sense of ai technologies. indeed, research on algorithmic justice should be firmly grounded in the preoccupations of these communities. our study also points to the importance of developing research geared toward concrete actions to effect sociotechnical change. beyond algorithmic imaginaries, research on algorithmic justice should advocate for better allyship from policymakers and tech representatives to alleviate the burden experienced by lgbtq+ stakeholders. references akrich, m., callon, m., & latour, b. (2006). sociologie de la traduction: textes fondateurs. presses des mines. arksey, h., & o'malley, l. (2005). scoping studies: towards a methodological framework. international journal of social research methodology, 8(1), 19-32. borup, m., brown, n., konrad, k., & van lente, h. (2006). the sociology of expectations in science and technology. technology analysis & strategic management, 18(3-4), 285-298. bucher, t. (2017). the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 30-44. butler, j. (1993). bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of ‘sex’. routledge. chartier, l. (2003). mesurer l'insaisissable: méthode d'analyse du discours de presse. puq. granjon, f. (2011). fracture numérique. communications, 88(1), 67-74. jauréguiberry, f., & proulx, s. (2011). usages et enjeux des technologies de communication. érès. latzer, m., hollnbuchner, k., just, n., & saurwein, f. (2016). the economics of algorithmic selection on the internet. in handbook on the economics of the internet (pp. 395-425). edward elgar publishing. myles, d., duguay, s., & flores echaiz, l. (2023). mapping the social implications of platform algorithms for lgbtq+ communities. journal of digital social research, 5(4), 1-30. noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression. new york university press. southerton, c., marshall, d., aggleton, p., rasmussen, m. l., & cover, r. (2021). restricted modes: social media, content classification and lgbtq sexual citizenship. new media & society, 23(5), 920-938. velkova, j., & kaun, a. (2021). algorithmic resistance: media practices and the politics of repair. information, communication & society, 24(4), 523-540. woolgar, s. (1990). configuring the user: the case of usability trials. the sociological review, 38(1), 58-99. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 poell, t., lukan, t., arriagada, a., bulut, e., ye, z., nieborg, d., duffy, b.e., tse, t., de kloet, j., mutsvairo, b., sun, p., krijnen, t., huang, q., craig,d. (2024, october). global perspectives on platforms and cultural production. panel presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. global perspectives on platforms and cultural production thomas poell university of amsterdam tinca lukan university of ljubljana arturo arriagada universidad adolfo ibáñez ergin bulut goldsmiths, university of london zhen ye erasmus university david nieborg university of toronto brooke erin duffy cornell university tommy tse university of amsterdam jeroen de kloet university of amsterdam bruce mutsvairo utrecht university sun ping chinese academy of social sciences tonny krijnen erasmus university qian huang university of groningen david craig usc annenberg introduction while digital platforms have reconfigured the institutions and practices of cultural production around the globe, current research is dominated by studies that take as their reference point the anglo-american world--and, to a lesser extent--china (cunningham & craig 2019; kaye et al. 2021; poell et al. 2021; zhao 2019). aside from totalizing theories of platform imperialism (jin, 2013), the “rest of the world” has thus received relatively scant attention. consequently, central concepts in the study of platform-based cultural production bear a strong imprint of western institutions, infrastructures, industries, discourses, and cultural practices. us-based research, in particular, has informed how we understand and subsequently theorize notions of precarity, labor, governance, authenticity, gender, creativity, diversity, and autonomy in a platform environment. we can’t simply apply these concepts to local cultures of production in other parts of the world. there is bound to be friction, as this panel will demonstrate, between how labor, precarity, and governance are understood in the anglo-american world and the lived experiences of platform-dependent cultural labor in latin america, southern and eastern europe, and east asia. concerns about western-dominated research and theory are, of course, by no means novel. post-colonial and decolonial theorists have long criticized the dominance and universalism of western theory, pointing to the continuation of colonial knowledge-power relations (chakrabarty 2009; chen 2010; escobar 2018). moreover, there have been numerous calls to decolonize (glück 2018; willems & mano 2016) and de-westernize (curran & park 2000; khiabany 2003) media studies and, more recently, production and platform studies (bouquillion 2023; bulut 2022; zhang & chen 2022). that being said, in practice, the us and western europe continue to function as the primary and often sole frame of reference in research on platforms and cultural production. in the light of these concerns, this panel aims to contribute to efforts to: 1) challenge universalism, 2) “provincialize” the us, and 3) multiply our frames of reference in the study of platforms and cultural production. such a conceptual undertaking is especially vital as the cultural industries are at the heart of societal processes of meaning making (hesmondhalgh 2018) and market activity. let us unpack how the papers in this panel pursue this objective. the first paper develops a conceptual framework to expand our frames of reference for studying platforms and cultural production. departing from epistemological universalism, it argues that “platforms”, “cultural production”, and the “local” need to be studied as dynamic configurations, characterized by crucial variations and correspondences across the globe. that is, in contemporary instances of creating cultural content, transnational platform markets, infrastructures, governance frameworks, and cultural practices become entangled with local political economies and cultural practices. examining how such configurations take shape around the world, the next four papers in this panel focus on specific regions and modes of production, interrogating how local and transnational political economic relations and practices articulate each other. in this discussion, we pay specific attention to the notions of precarity, governance, and imaginaries. the second paper reframes influencer precarity in a semi-peripheral context in the balkans and emphasizes the relational basis of influencer agency, as influencers rely on family members and oft-mocked “instagram husbands” to alleviate precarity. it thus offers insights into the local characteristics of algorithmic encounters with platforms by proposing the concept of platform lethargy. this concept speaks to an emotional response and deliberate refusal on the part of influencers to adapt to platform mandates. this refusal is rooted in algorithmic knowledge from the semi-periphery, where creators are cognizant of their position in a devalued platform market. the third paper critically examines the intricate dynamics of creator culture, challenging the assumption of globally detached markets. focusing on latin american content creators in the united states, it explores how their aspirations intersect with the construction of the "latin american" content creator dream. the study also scrutinizes the role of content service organizations (csos) executives in shaping creator culture. despite global portrayals, tensions emerge, revealing national market characteristics rooted in socio-cultural, linguistic, and regional norms. the fourth paper examines how drama creatives, who work for streaming platforms, are globally connected and yet remain nationally restrained in terms of how they imagine work. through the notion of platform ambiguity, the paper shows how streaming platforms negotiate with cultural producers by both enabling and restraining their work. thus, it thus de-westernizes scholarship on platforms and cultural production by highlighting how drama makers are not only creative but also geopolitical subjects dependent on the state. the last paper offers an alternative epistemological and ontological perspective on the state-platform-user configuration, where each actor works in alignment with others under the logic of governance. it uses a chinese social media platform, douyin, as a case to reveal how platforms rely on anthropomorphization to communicate with cultural producers and develop playful governance of china’s political and cultural environment. references bouquillion, p. (2023). the big five in india, powerful players? in p. bouquillion, c. ithurbide, & t. mattelart (eds.), digital platforms and the global south (pp. 37–55). routledge. bulut, e. (2022). dewesternizing precarity in turkish tv drama production through the body and the law. television & new media, 23(2), pp.148-166. chakrabarty, d. (2009). provincializing europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference-new edition. chen, k. h. (2010). asia as method: toward deimperialization. duke university press. craig, d., & cunningham, s. (2019). social media entertainment: the new intersection of hollywood and silicon valley. new york university press. duffy, b. e. (2017). (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. yale university press. escobar, a. (2018). designs for the pluriverse: radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. duke university press. glück a. (2018). de-westernization and decolonization in media studies. in oxford encyclopedia of communication and critical studies (oxford research encyclopedias). oxford university press hesmondhalgh d. (2018) the cultural industries (4th ed). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. kaye, d. b. v., chen, x., & zeng, j. (2021). the co-evolution of two chinese mobile short video apps: parallel platformization of douyin and tiktok. mobile media & communication, 9(2), 229–253. khiabany, g. (2003). de-westernizing media theory, or reverse orientalism:islamic communication'as theorized by hamid mowlana. media, culture & society, 25(3), 415422. park, m. j., & curran, j. (eds.). (2000). de-westernizing media studies. psychology press. poell, t., nieborg, d. b., & duffy, b. e. (2021). platforms and cultural production. polity willems, w., & mano, w. (2016). decolonizing and provincializing audience and internet studies: contextual approaches from african vantage points. in everyday media culture in africa (pp. 15-40). routledge. zhang, l., & chen, j. y. (2022). a regional and historical approach to platform capitalism: the cases of alibaba and tencent. media, culture & society, 44(8), 1454–1472. zhao, e. j. (2019). digital china's informal circuits: platforms, labour and governance. routledge. studying global variations and correspondences in platformdependent cultural production thomas poell university of amsterdam brooke erin duffy cornell university david nieborg university of toronto arturo arriagada universidad adolfo ibáñez bruce mutsvairo utrecht university tommy tse university of amsterdam jeroen de kloet university of amsterdam ping sun chinese academy of social sciences introduction this paper provides a conceptual framework to multiply our frames of reference in the study of platforms and cultural production. pursuing this aim requires us to first challenge the often-implicit universalism structuring existing media and communication theories and concepts. the extant scholarship on platforms presents conceptual insights that, while novel, fail to reflect on the specificity of the socio-economic and political cultural contexts in which these insights have been developed. whereas researchers that work on asian, african, and latin american countries often explicitly reflect on the specificity of the contexts they study, anglo-american scholarship rarely provides such contextual exactitude. hence, our starting point needs to be a commitment to questioning where and how central concepts in the study of platforms and cultural production have been developed and whether these concepts need to be rethought. second, and directly related, scholars of platforms and cultural production need to provincialize the anglo-american world. doing so means approaching the us or uk just as any other region, rather than as the frame of reference. to be sure, this does not imply that we must abandon the use of the concepts informed by anglo-american scholarship. as dipesh chakrabarty (2009, 5) has made clear, reflecting on the imperialist european origins of ideas such as “the human or that of reason”, “there is no easy way of dispensing with these universals in the condition of political modernity. without them there would be no social science that addresses issues of modern social justice.” similarly, we cannot dispense with the concepts of precarity, governance, entrepreneurship, authenticity, and diversity in studies on platforms and cultural production, even though these concepts currently carry the imprint of us and western european histories and concerns. hence, we need to recognize the institutional and cultural baggage these concepts carry, while simultaneously enriching and complicating these notions through research from other parts of the world. third, enriching and complicating key concepts means multiplying our frames of reference. more detailed research is needed on the specific institutional settings, political economies, public infrastructures, and cultural practices in which platforms and cultural producers become entangled. crucially, such research should not only be considered as “case studies,” but simultaneously as opportunities for theory building. why are asian, african, latin american, and southern and eastern european countries not key reference points? even china is still often presented as exceptional, that is as a deviation from the us and europe. instead, as kuan-hsing chen (2010, 212) maintains “societies in asia can become each other’s points of reference.” following, but also broadening chen’s proposal, we push to multiply our collective frames of reference, thereby enabling researchers to identify and conceptualize the correspondences and differences between processes of platformization across the globe. to be clear, these efforts to challenge western universalism and diversify the geographies of theory cannot be the work of asian, latin american, or african scholars alone. we cannot multiply our frames of reference if dominant western academic institutions and leading networks of scholars do not explicitly and critically reflect on the specific contexts in which theory is produced. the conceptual playing field needs to be leveled for different theoretical frames to appear as equal options, rather than as alternatives to universal western theory (mignolo 2012). differences and correspondences the starting point to multiply our frames of reference are postcolonial and decolonial critiques of modernity. research in these traditions has demonstrated how modernity and coloniality are inextricably connected (chakrabarty 2009; escobar 2018; mignolo 2012). this understanding has implications for how we discuss differences and correspondences in the evolution of platforms and cultural production. clearly discussing these differences and correspondences in terms of “modern and traditional”, “developed and underdeveloped”, “first and third world”, “the west and the rest” marks a continuation of the colonial order. and while the nowcommonly used notions of “global south versus global north” have been developed with an emancipatory/activist agenda in mind, in practice, these concepts are also often employed as placeholders for older, problematic categories. that is to say, these all-encompassing categories do not do justice to the wide variety in institutional and cultural configurations around the world. hence, more specificity is needed to describe and analyze regional and local configurations. however, as maitra and chow (2016) have pointed out in their reflections on asia and new media, an emphasis on “place” does carry the danger of cultural essentialism, leading researchers to overlook differences within “apparently homogeneous spaces,” as well as to ignore the many economic, infrastructural, political, and cultural connections that develop across geographic boundaries (ibid.,18). in the light of these concerns, the authors (ibid., 20) call for the development of more critical “transnational perspectives on the localization of digital habits and habitats”. following this call, we propose to systematically trace how platform-dependent cultural production through transnational platforms, as well as their associated cultural practices, become entangled with local institutions and modes of production. negotiations to ground this analysis, we draw on poell, nieborg, and duffy’s (2021) framework to analyze platform-dependent cultural production. this generic framework has explicitly been developed to facilitate research on different types of cultural production in different parts of the world (ibid. 197-200). building on this work, the challenge is, first, to examine how platform governance, markets, infrastructures, and practices become entwined with local and national political economies and practices. hence, we understand platformization neither as a top-down process directed by transnational platform companies, nor as bottom-up, shaped by local actors and practices. instead, platformization is a process of negotiations, which unfold within specific spatial configurations. the particular geographies, actors, institutions, and practices that define such configurations vary from case to case. this leads us to the second challenge: conceptualizing the character and consequences of the platformization of cultural production from a wider variety of perspectives. the aim is to use the research on platforms and cultural producers in regions in asia, africa, latin american, and eastern and southern europe as an opportunity for theory building. consider the notion of “precarity.” within research on platforms and cultural production, this concept emerged as a consequence of the experiences of independent creative workers in the us, canada, and uk (duffy 2017; glatt 2021; o'meara 2019). while there is the recognition that precarious labor has a long history (mcrobbie, 2016; neff et al., 2005), platformization is also said to further undermine job security in the cultural industries (deuze & prenger 2019; poell et al. 2021). crucially, these perspectives on precarity have been challenged by recent research on ghana, rural china, and slovenia, as discussed in the second paper in this panel (alacovska et al. 2021; lin & de kloet 2019). in these regions, “precarity is not a deviation from the norm but a constant and longstanding feature” (alacovska et al. 2021, 619). in such economic conditions, platforms do not necessarily intensify precarity, but enable “marginalized individuals'' to become “unlikely creative workers” (lin & de kloet 2019, 10). while such platform-based work is also precarious, it provides opportunities to those with few other options. thus, in the light of research on other parts of the world, we are prompted to revisit the conceptualization of precarity. it is precisely these kinds of empirical and conceptual conversations that we aim to facilitate. references alacovska, a., langevang, t., & steedman, r. (2021). the work of hope: spiritualizing, hustling and waiting in the creative industries in ghana. environment and planning a: economy and space, 53(4), 619-637. chakrabarty, d. (2009). provincializing europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference-new edition. chen, k. h. (2010). asia as method: toward deimperialization. duke university press. deuze, m., & prenger, m. (eds.). (2019). making media: production, practices, and professions. amsterdam university press. duffy, b. e. (2017). (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. yale university press. escobar, a. (2018). designs for the pluriverse: radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. duke university press. glatt, z. (2021). we’re all told not to put our eggs in one basket: uncertainty, precarity and cross-platform labor in the online video influencer industry. international journal of communication, 16, 1-19. lin, j., & de kloet, j. (2019). platformization of the unlikely creative class: kuaishou and chinese digital cultural production. social media+ society, 5(4), 2056305119883430. maitra, a., & chow, r. (2015). what's “in”? disaggregating asia through new media actants. in routledge handbook of new media in asia (pp. 17-27). routledge. mcrobbie, a. (2018). be creative: making a living in the new culture industries. john wiley & sons. mignolo, w. (2012). local histories/global designs: coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking. princeton university press. neff, g., wissinger, e., & zukin, s. (2005). entrepreneurial labor among cultural producers:“cool” jobs in “hot” industries. social semiotics, 15(3), 307-334. o’meara, v. (2019). weapons of the chic: instagram influencer engagement pods as practices of resistance to instagram platform labor. social media+ society, 5(4), 2056305119879671. poell, t., nieborg, d. b., & duffy, b. e. (2021). platforms and cultural production. polity. platform lethargy: influencer precarity in the hustling culture tinca lukan university of ljubljana with social media influencing entering its second decade, there is a growing body of literature that sheds light on the precarious nature of this work. research connects the issue of influencer precarity to platform governance and investigates the lived experiences of being governed by algorithmic systems. additionally, this literature provides insights into the agency of workers amidst precarity, such as through the exchange of algorithmic gossip (bishop, 2019) and the formation of engagement pods (o’meara, 2019) within influencer communities. furthermore, studies underscore the significance of influencers maintaining relationships with their audiences, wherein intimacy serves as a strategic tool to foster relations with followers (abidin, 2016; baym, 2018; glatt, 2023). while these studies offer valuable insights, they have a limited scope in understanding the interplay of influencers’ precarity and agency as they overlook how social networks and pre-existing local constellations shape precarity (waite, 2009; qadri, 2021). the aim of this study is to examine how influencers in slovenia establish agency amid precarious working conditions on and off platforms, shedding light on the reproductive resources available to workers beyond platforms. this study draws on the theoretical framework of relational work from economic sociology. viviana zelizer (2012) introduced this concept as a response to the common belief that the realms of economy and intimacy are inherently separate and at odds with each other. instead, zelizer argues that they are intertwined and mutually constitutive. people manage this commingling of economy and intimacy through relational work, an ongoing process of defining, strengthening and dissolving social ties through economic transactions. the basic unit of analysis of relational work is the relational package. it consists of a meaningful social tie (spouse, friend), an economic transaction (wage, barter, gift), and the medium of exchange (money, vouchers, coupons). a cursory glance at influencers’ content indicates that they are masters of integrating the realms of economy and intimacy. they incorporate their families into their content and collaborate with male partners, commonly referred to as "instagram husbands" (lorenz, 2023). however, there remains a gap in understanding the dynamics of these behind-the-scenes relationships and how they might shape worker agency beyond the scope of social media platforms. methods in order to get insights into these intimate relations and examine how influencers in slovenia gain agency under precarious working conditions, the study draws on over 50 in-depth semi-structured interviews with influencers, their social ties, and agency and brand representatives. moreover, the study involved participation in industry conferences and events. slovenia is a state in the balkans with a population of 2 million people. it provides a compelling context for examining influencer precarity because more general precarious working and living conditions have existed here at least since the end of feudalism. in response, a specific balkan hustling culture has emerged in which people make a living through multiple income streams from the formal and informal economy, rely on family members and moonlighting. the reliance on family and informal economy is similar to economies in africa, latin america, and large parts of asia. however, there is also a socialist legacy of stable employment, worker protection, and a welfare state similar to the scandinavian model (jaklič et al., 2009). platform lethargy the findings reveal that influencers in slovenia do not gain agency through platformcentered practices as demonstrated in the existing literature. instead, they use platform features with minimal effort across the cycle of cultural production that spans content creation, distribution and monetisation, a phenomenon i would like to call “platform lethargy”. this notion draws from the concept of hu’s (2022) digital lethargy to describe affect of being passive and avoiding decisions in the context of digital capitalism that requires active, empowered and expressive personhood. platform lethargy encompasses both an emotional response and a deliberate refusal to adapt to platform mandates and to establish, maintain and cater to platform-mediated relationships. platform lethargy as an emotional response and an act of refusal is rooted in a specific algorithmic knowledge (cotter, 2022). it originates in the semi-periphery where complementors are cognisant of their position in a devalued market for platforms and hence believe they lack agency. platform lethargy is evident in not keeping up with content trends, producing mediocrequality content, not seeking visibility on platforms through engagement pods or algorithmic gossip, neglecting monetisation metrics, forgetting about having youtube adsense and minimally engaging with followers by merely liking comments without responding, or even ignoring comments altogether. the concept of platform lethargy illustrates how human interactions and responses to algorithms play out in spaces beyond the anglo-american world, exposing the algorithmic flaws and frictions caused by contextually inappropriate, or in this case, irrelevant design. instead of conforming to and interacting with platforms, influencers in slovenia gain agency by having multiple income streams and relying on the help of family members and intimate partners. regardless of their success on social media platforms, influencers have diversified income streams through standard employment, working on other platforms, welfare state, running a business, consulting and dropshipping goods. moonlighting is present as the primary job often interferes with influencing. influencers invent creative and hidden payment systems like family members’ companies, paypal, and upwork. transactions also take the form of non-monetised market exchange as influencers are often paid in kind with vouchers, vitamins, or barter promotion on social media for dental service discounts. they treat influencer income as a “nice to have” rather than a “must have”, to elevate material standard of living. in these various hustles, instagram husbands and other family members play an important role. they invest in an influencer’s business, help with content creation, manage finances and provide equipment. there are cases where a boyfriend or mother becomes an employee when the influencer grows their brand. in return, influencers employ a wide range of techniques to match economic transactions and media of exchange with intimate ties: they gift, barter, pay and bribe with myriad exchange media such as money, vouchers, subscriptions, and sex. there are also gender differences as female influencers engaged in watchful performance of relational work by earmarking money from influencing for common use with their partners like paying for holidays, weddings or groceries. they earmark influencer income in such a way that it functions as “pin” money which historically refers to supplementary household income earned by women that was deemed more frivolous than that of their male partners reproducing patriarchal dynamics within households (zelizer, 2011). in summary, influencers in slovenia gain agency through diverse income streams and the support of intimate partners and family members. precarity is alleviated not by using intimacy as a tool to establish relations with followers but by relational work that connects the actual intimate relationships with economic transactions. by mapping collective hustles and collaborative practices between influencers and their household members, this study shows how precarity is refracted through the local economy and culture. finally, it offers insight into how the business model of social media platforms on the periphery is piggybacked on exploiting the local conditions of social reproduction, with platforms having plugged into pre-existing regimes of accumulation (piletić, 2023). this study is germane to the de-westernisation of platformized cultural production studies and highlights much missed varieties in platform capitalism. references abidin c (2016) “aren’t these just young, rich women doing vain things online?”: influencer selfies as subversive frivolity. social media + society 2(2). baym nk (2018) playing to the crowd. new york: new york university press. bishop s (2019) managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip. new media and society 21(11–12): 2589–2606. cotter k (2022) practical knowledge of algorithms: the case of breadtube. new media & society, 14614448221081802. glatt z (2023) the intimacy triple bind: structural inequalities and relational labour in the influencer industry. european journal of cultural studies, 13675494231194156. hu th (2022) digital lethargy: dispatches from an age of disconnection. cambridge, ma: mit press. jaklič m, zagoršek k and hribernik a (2009) slovenian evolutionary business system dynamics. in: kristensen ph and lilja k (eds) new modes of globalizing: experimentalist forms of economic organization and enabling welfare institutions. helsinki: helsinki school of economics, pp. 239-295. lorenz t (2023) extremely online. new york: simon and schuster. o’meara v (2019) weapons of the chic: instagram influencer engagement pods as practices of resistance to instagram platform labor. social media and society 5(4). piletić a (2023) continuity or change? platforms and the hybridization of neoliberal institutional contexts. review of international political economy, 1-25. qadri r (2021) what's in a network? infrastructures of mutual aid for digital platform workers during covid-19. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction 5:120. waite l (2009) a place and space for a critical geography of precarity?. geography compass 3(1): 412-433. zelizer v. (2011). economic lives: how culture shapes the economy. princeton: princeton university press. zelizer va (2012) how i became a relational economic sociologist and what does that mean? politics and society 40(2): 145–174. living my latin american creator dream: interrogating the sociomaterial illogics of creator cultures arturo arriagada universidad adolfo ibáñez david craig usc annenberg this paper critically examines the intricate dynamics of creator culture, challenging the prevailing notion of globally detached markets (florida, 2022). it investigates the experiences of latin american content creators in the united states, illuminating how their aspirations intersect with the construction of the "latin american" content creator dream. simultaneously, it scrutinizes the active role of content service organizations (csos) executives in shaping the creator culture. despite market imaginaries portraying a global scope, tensions emerge, revealing predominantly national market characteristics and limitations rooted in socio-cultural, linguistic, and regional norms. framed within creator culture literature, social media imaginaries, and media industry practices, the research incorporates 20 in-depth interviews with cso and platform executives and latin american creators. by dissecting these processes, the article contributes to unraveling the spatial and material logics influencing creator cultures and shaping value dynamics in the broader configuration of creator markets (arriagada & bishop, 2021; cunningham & craig, 2021; zelizer, 2011). the creator economy has been described as the “economic, social, and professional ecosystem that creators work in” (florida, 2022). according to different reports, the market size of creator economies is valued at us$100 billion, where “more than 300 million people across nine large nations posted their creative content online in 2022” (florida, 2022). latin american content creators, notably gaining recognition in the u.s., contribute to this economy, reaching global audiences from their home countries or postmigration. however, economic rewards are unevenly distributed, with a small percentage earning substantial incomes. the literature emphasizes that despite the quantitative contributions of the creator economy, it tends to overlook socio-cultural logics, which become apparent when exploring the interplay of discourses and practices that imbue content creation with cultural significance (abidin, 2016; du gay & pryke, 2002; duffy, 2017; garcía-rapp, 2017; hund, 2023). the concept of creator culture is introduced, highlighting the cultural and economic exchanges within this rapidly evolving sector, driven by social media entrepreneurs who leverage global-reaching platforms to create both cultural and commercial value (cunningham and craig, 2021). economic sociologist viviana zelizer characterizes the social arrangements regarding economic life as “circuits of commerce” (2011). in the context of content creators, these commerce circuits are formed by entities such as branding agencies, brands, followers, and social media platforms (arriagada and ibáñez, 2020). in this article, we explore how latin american creators pursue the 'creator dream' in the u.s. as they engage with 'circuits of commerce' alongside other actors, such as creator service organizations (csos). we also examine the cultural distinctions they bring to shape this market, for instance, in the form of social imaginaries. methods this study employed in-depth interviews (n=20) with executives from creator services organizations (csos) and content creators based in los angeles. informed by prior studies (abidin & ots, 2016; bishop, 2019; duffy, 2017; hund & mcguigan, 2019), the questions aimed to explore how interviewees define their activities, characterize the attributes of latin american content creators and their audiences, understand value creation within their practices, and delve into various topics such as backgrounds, expertise, content creation processes, content distribution and promotion, payment systems, relationships with brands and csos, as well as relationships with other latin american content creators. interviews with csos executives addressed topics like the attributes of latin american creators, and their audiences, as well as payment and contractual aspects of working with creators. applying grounded theory, transcripts were analyzed iteratively, constructing a hierarchical framework of categories (glaser & strauss, 1969). results stakeholders in latam creator culture, including platforms, creators, and creator service professionals, contribute to diverse perspectives, shaping imagined opportunities for latam creators in the u.s. cso professionals perceive latam creature culture as an untapped market, emphasizing its appeal to cord-cutting audiences. however, distinctions in how latam creators operate on global platforms are often overlooked. cso executives struggle to differentiate the market within u.s. borders, blending markers of identity and location. the presumptive access latam creators have to a unified u.s. latam cultural market is explored, along with cso executives attributing imagined powers to platforms, guided by socio-technological mechanisms. the study notes challenges in adopting successful strategies amid a cultural reckoning in the u.s., exemplified by the black lives matter and me-too movements, impacting minority representation in advertising, and briefly boosting latam creators' brand deals. the sustainability of these conditions remains an area for further investigation. the trajectory of latam creators migrating to the u.s. presents complex dynamics. pursuing their latin-american dreams, they may initially align with aspirational labor but later grapple with the impact of traditional media incentives on their cultural identity. for creators, relocating to the u.s. becomes a career pattern to access larger markets. language becomes a crucial factor, with spanglish adapting to diverse audience expectations, leading to tensions with both audiences and advertising agencies. bilingualism becomes an authenticity measure for latam creators, influencing brands' interest and complicating content adaptation. the aspiration to reach broader audiences in the u.s. drives latam creators, creating a nuanced interplay of commercial, social, and platform relations. latin american content creators engage in a multifaceted socio-technical ecosystem, navigating intricate commercial relationships with brands, platforms, and influencer marketing agencies (arriagada, 2021; bishop, 2021; christin & lu, 2023; colucci & pedroni, 2022). the "circuits of commerce" involve continual negotiation, with influencers facing challenges in monetization due to factors like geographic audience distribution and algorithmic dynamics (kopf, 2020). bilingualism becomes an authenticity measure, impacting creators' strategies to appeal to diverse markets (christin & lu, 2023). influencer marketing agencies vet influencers based on ai-driven demographic analysis, focusing on languages and diverse audience demographics (christin & lu, 2023). creators express a shared sense of helplessness regarding aspects beyond their control, emphasizing their commitment to quality content creation amid challenges. the interplay of numerical evaluations, algorithmic influence, and collaborative strategies shapes the landscape where creators navigate digital challenges and opportunities. in sum, the examination of latin american content creators in the u.s. and their interactions with content service organizations (csos) executives reveals intricate dynamics in shaping creator culture. this study contributes insights into the interplay of social and material dimensions within diasporic creator cultures. tensions arise from the clash between global aspirations and the retention of national characteristics, highlighting the paradox within ostensibly global markets. cso executives perceive latam creators through a standardized lens, emphasizing a singular u.s.-based market opportunity. creators grapple with linguistic and cultural challenges, striving for authenticity amid blurred representations. the industry's imaginaries shape power dynamics, impacting creators' entrepreneurial identities and dreams. latam creators navigate platforms and csos, contending with conditions beyond their control, emphasizing the need for future research on migrant creators assimilating into broader commerce circuits. references abidin, c. (2016). visibility labour: engaging with influencers’ fashion brands and #ootd advertorial campaigns on instagram. media international australia, 161(1), 86–100. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x16665177 abidin, c., & ots, m. (2016). microcelebrity influencers and advertorial disclosure: practicing the advertising/editorial divide on instagram. 16th icoria, international conference on research in advertising: challenges in an age of (dis)engagement, ljubljana, june 30 july 2, 2016. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hj:diva-31429 arriagada, a. (2021). content creator and the field of advertising. in s. cunningham & d. craig, creator culture: an introduction to global social media entertainment (pp. 232– 249). nyu press. arriagada, a., & bishop, s. (2021). between commerciality and authenticity: the imaginary of social media influencers in the platform economy. communication, culture and critique, tcab050. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcab050 bishop, s. (2019). managing visibility on youtube through algorithmic gossip. new media & society, 1461444819854731. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819854731 bishop, s. (2021). influencer management tools: algorithmic cultures, brand safety, and bias. social media + society, 7(1), 20563051211003066. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211003066 https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x16665177 http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hj:diva-31429 https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcab050 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819854731 christin, a., & lu, y. (2023). the influencer pay gap: platform labor meets racial capitalism. new media & society, 14614448231164995. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231164995 colucci, m., & pedroni, m. (2022). got to be real: an investigation into the co-fabrication of authenticity by fashion companies and digital influencers. journal of consumer culture, 22(4), 929–948. https://doi.org/10.1177/14695405211033665 cunningham, s., & craig, d. (eds.). (2021). creator culture: an introduction to global social media entertainment. nyu press. du gay, p., & pryke, m. (2002). cultural economy. sage. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781107415324.004 duffy, b. e. (2017). (not) getting paid to do what you love. yale university press. florida, r. (2022, november 18). the creator economy is the future of the economy. fast company. https://www.fastcompany.com/90812387/the-creator-economy-is-thefuture-of-the-economy garcía-rapp, f. (2017). popularity markers on youtube’s attention economy: the case of bubzbeauty. celebrity studies, 8(2), 228–245. https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2016.1242430 glaser, b. g., & strauss, a. l. (1969). the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. transaction publishers. hund, e. (2023). the influencer industry: the quest for authenticity on social media. princeton university press. hund, e., & mcguigan, l. (2019). a shoppable life: performance, selfhood, and influence in the social media storefront. communication, culture and critique, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz004 kopf, s. (2020). “rewarding good creators”: corporate social media discourse on monetization schemes for content creators. social media + society, 6(4), 2056305120969877. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120969877 zelizer, v. (2011). economic lives: how culture shapes the economy. princeton university press. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231164995 https://doi.org/10.1177/14695405211033665 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781107415324.004 https://www.fastcompany.com/90812387/the-creator-economy-is-the-future-of-the-economy https://www.fastcompany.com/90812387/the-creator-economy-is-the-future-of-the-economy https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2016.1242430 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120969877 platform ambiguity and precarious creativity in authoritarian turkey’s drama industry ergin bulut goldsmiths, university of london when streamed on blutv, turkey’s first subscription-based platform, the national hit masum (innocent, 2017) sparked positive imaginaries about platforms’ potential in a censored media environment. drama makers imagined that platforms would liberate creative workers from the political pressures of heavy regulation and state censorship. the shows’ star actors haluk bilginer and serkan keskin were particularly hopeful about the future of television production for platforms. “one of the goals in productions for streaming platforms is to be free from censorship and some rules,” said bilginer (gence, 2017). his colleague serkan keskin stated that many young directors and authors would be able to dream more freely. to a certain extent, some of these hopes have become real. in less than a decade, national and global streaming platforms operating in turkey (blutv, netflix, gain, exxen, disney+) produced several shows, some of which (e.g. kulup/the club, yedi yuz/7 faces, bir baskadir/ethos) have stood apart in terms of their aesthetic quality and political content. yet, contrary to the widespread belief that platforms would be immune to censorship, state intervention has persisted across streaming platforms. specifically, with the regulation passed in 2019, streaming platforms now must pay licensing fees to the state and remove content upon requests from the government. netflix has even canceled the production of if only (si lo hubiera sabido) and decided to produce it in spain because the turkish government was reported to unofficially disapprove a gay character in the story. as if these were not enough, in 2023, radio and television supreme council issued monetary fines to netflix, disney+, and blutv for violating the “national and moral values” and streaming productions that were against the “turkish family structure” (birgun, 2023). thus, although drama creatives’ employment opportunities and global outreach have expanded, their creative freedom has not enjoyed a similar growth. in fact, because of the commercial mandate to produce content in a global market and the persistence of state regulations, drama creatives’ positive imaginaries have in time become more ambivalent to the extent that some even call them “dumpsters” (uysal, 2020). yet, such criticism does not immediately bring withdrawal or refusal. that is, these creatives have not given up on platforms. they either overlook or work around platformized censorship and keep collaborating with platforms, hoping to make their work nationally and globally visible. approach in examining these shifting imaginaries shaping turkish drama production, i follow marc steinberg’s (steinberg, 2019) emphasis on the hybrid business model that facilitates financial transactions, and define corporate entities like netflix as a platform, running on the distinct business model of paying a flat fee in licensing content and running through subscriptions. i focus on platform imaginaries in turkey’s authoritarian context and ask: how do we interpret the ways in which turkish drama creatives’ imaginaries have fluctuated from a moment of “dreaming more freely” back in 2017 to regarding platforms as censored spaces of creative “dumpsters” in a few years? what do these shifting imaginaries in authoritarian contexts tell us about platforms and their power over cultural production? in responding these questions through ethnographic research across four sets, writers’ rooms, industrial and governmental summits, and interviews with more than 60 creative professionals, i draw on the notion of “platform imaginary,” which refers to “the ways in which social actors understand and organize their activities in relation to platform algorithms, interfaces, data infrastructures, moderation procedures, business models, user practices, and audiences” (van es & poell, 2020, p. 3). platform ambiguity in my research, on the one hand, i found that turkey’s drama creatives enjoyed the geographical expansions and cultural connections enabled by platforms. on the other hand, however, these creatives have been politically restrained because of platforms’ compliance with the state’s regulatory framework since 2019. thus, in making sense of their work, creative professionals overlooked, worked around, negotiated, and contextually criticized censorship across platforms, while still seeking visibility for their work. in sum, ambiguity was at the core of creatives’ platform imaginaries, which all depended on the state. considering how the metaphor of platform itself both obfuscates and reveals (gillespie, 2010), i introduce platform ambiguity to show that imaginaries within drama production are ambiguous and never static, requiring us to consider the state’s improvisation capacity with respect to media regulation and the enforcement of cultural norms in creative production (larson, 2022; zhang & chen, 2022). the state has always shaped cultural production in traditional television and film industries (punathambekar, 2013) and continues to do so by regulating streaming platforms, which tend to give the impression that they are beyond the nation states’ influence. however, as the case of netflix and the patriot act in saudi arabia reveals, nation-states and platforms have developed a “symbiotic relationship” through which the state implements targeted censorship while the platform abides by controlled compliance (khalil & zayani, 2021). in this relationship, the nation state needs platform companies for legitimacy because banning platforms altogether would damage nation branding. but platforms also need the state for their businesses, which strictly implies how cultural producers’ platform dependence is mediated by the state. thus, we cannot fully understand “platform-dependence” (poell et al., 2022; van es & poell, 2020) and platform imaginaries (bucher, 2017) without considering the state and pre-digital forms (ngoshi, 2021). put simply, cultural producers and their imaginaries are not only platform-dependent but also state-dependent. analyses of platforms should not be limited to only technological questions because platforms are dynamic in political terms, as well. when a writer works on his/her next drama, s/he considers more than the complex and contested interactions between a specific platform and the broader industry because his/her work will inevitably depend on national regulatory frameworks. if workers are dependent not only on platforms but also the state, the implications are major: drama producers are not only creative subjects but also geopolitical subjects, operating within pre-digital production norms and practices (larson, 2022, p. 4). as subjects embedded in national settings, these creative people would then constantly negotiate their work with prevalent socio-cultural norms and regulations concerning what is politically allowed for creative production. similarly, the legal securing and violation of creative workers’ socio-economic rights are both embedded within national contexts regulated by the state. the conceptual expansion of “platform imaginary” by recentring the state and highlighting ambiguity matters because it allows for theoretically connecting platform power and creative work in relation to the political question of freedom. ambiguity enables grasping platform power’s enabling and restraining dimensions not as opposed but interwoven. we thus transcend the dualistic perception of platforms as either emancipatory or oppressive spaces. with platform ambiguity, we perceive creative workers’ imaginaries in terms of control and freedom rather than control or freedom (sopranzetti, 2017). due to the ambiguous blending of freedoms and constraints, creative drama workers feel liberated as they make global connections but still simultaneously feel nationally restrained. overall, the emphasis on the state, censorship practices, and ambiguity in understanding imaginaries contributes to dewesternizing platforms and conceiving platformized cultural production outside euro-american contexts (alacovska and gill, 2019; author; davis and xiao, 2021). far from being universal and uniform, platform imaginaries are always embedded in national contexts and informed by contestations between producers and the state, where the former struggles to make their work visible under authoritarian conditions. references alacovska, a., & gill, r. (2019). de-westernizing creative labour studies: the informality of creative work from an ex-centric perspective. international journal of cultural studies, 22(2), 195–212. birgun. (2023). rtük’ten dijital platformlara en üst sınırdan ceza. https://www.birgun.net/haber/rtuk-ten-dijital-platformlara-en-ust-sinirdan-ceza-456109 bucher, t. (2017). the algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms. information, communication & society, 20(1), 30–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154086 davis, m., & xiao, j. (2021). de-westernizing platform studies: history and logics of chinese and u.s. platforms. international journal of communication, 15(0), article 0. gence, h. (2017, january 21). haluk bilginer: ‘cesur olmak zorundayız’. https://www.hurriyet.com.tr/kelebek/hayat/haluk-bilginer-cesur-olmak-zorundayiz40342420 gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of platforms. new media & society, 12(3), 347–364. khalil, j. f., & zayani, m. (2021). de-territorialized digital capitalism and the predicament of the nation-state: netflix in arabia. media, culture & society, 43(2), 201–218. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720932505 larson, c. (2022). streaming books: confluencers, kindle unlimited and the platform imaginary. communication, culture and critique, 15(4), 520–530. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcac032 parks, l., & mukherjee, r. (2017). from platform jumping to self-censorship: internet freedom, social media, and circumvention practices in zambia. communication and critical/cultural studies, 14(3), 221–237. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2017.1290262 poell, t., nieborg, d. b., & duffy, b. e. (2022). platforms and cultural production. polity. punathambekar, a. (2013). from bombay to bollywood: the making of a global media industry. nyu press. sopranzetti, c. (2017). framed by freedom: emancipation and oppression in postfordist thailand. cultural anthropology, 32(1), article 1. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.1.07 steinberg, m. (2019). the platform ecocomy: how japan transformed the consumer internet. university of minnesota press. uysal, b. (director). (2020). seren yüce röportaj. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynvk1zri_bu van es, k., & poell, t. (2020). platform imaginaries and dutch public service media. social media + society, april-june, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120933289 zhang, l., & chen, j. y. (2022). a regional and historical approach to platform capitalism: the cases of alibaba and tencent. media, culture & society, 44(8), 1454–1472. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221127796 douyin’s playful platform governance: platform’s selfregulation and content creators’ peer-surveillance zhen ye erasmus university qian huang university of groningen tonny krijnen erasmus university social media platforms often claim to be neutral in their role as aggregators who connect content creators and end-users, justifying their infrastructural or algorithmic changes as providing better services (gillespie, 2018a). in stark contrast with western platforms’ efforts to position themselves as neutral conduits, chinese social media platforms appear to blatantly admit and showcase human intervention in the process of content regulation and moderation. one of the most prominent social media platforms in china, douyin, for instance, has created a 平台官方账号 (platform official account), namely, 抖音安全中心 (douyin safety centre, henceforth dsc). through dsc, douyin regularly announces its updated rules and policies in alignment with state’s regulatory actions. other chinese social media platforms, including kuaishou, also created similar platform official accounts. these accounts anthropomorphize platforms, enabling platforms to represent their regulatory bodies with fictional human characters or animated figures. these accounts are part of a contemporary trend of brands and entities increasingly engaging with personification as a tactic to interact with other users on social media (sligh and abidin, 2022). yet, in this research, we focus on how platform official accounts enact communicative and discursive functions that allow platforms to discipline content creators through anthropomorphization. this phenomenon of platform anthropomorphization in the chinese social media landscape stems from a different ontological understanding of platform governance in china. the first part of this research discusses the realities of platform governance in china, and highlights a different state-platform-user relationship in comparison to the u.s and european countries. in the second part, we turn to focus on douyin as a case study to further investigate how chinese social media platforms establish and promote their own rules and policies and govern content creators. china’s state-platform-user configuration when it comes to the topic of platform governance, scholarship often focuses on ‘governance of platforms’, viewing platforms as private companies whose conduct is informed by local, national, and supranational laws and policies (gillespie, 2018b; gorwa, 2019). from this perspective, the chinese governance of platforms is characterized as direct and top-down, whereas the u.s and europe are characterized by a self-governance approach (helberger et al., 2018; stockmann, 2023). another strand of platform governance scholarship attends to ‘governance by platforms’, focusing on how platforms actively take up the role of ‘governor’ to police the activities of content creators and users (gillespie, 2018b). these two sets of governance relationships—between governments and platforms, and between platforms and users—are often discussed separately. however, there is an urgent need to reflect on the interconnectedness between legal regime, platforms, and users. platform governance in the chinese context, therefore, serves as an opportunity to adjust the epistemological and ontological thinking of the state-platform-user relationship. in this research, we argue that the state-platform-user configuration in china is far beyond the simplified premise where the chinese state enacts direct censorship and control. instead of solely looking at the state’s role, we need to pay attention to how chinese social media platforms developed in the context of omnipresent government regulation, and how they can expand our thinking about platforms and cultural production more generally (davis and xiao, 2021; de kloet, et al. 2019). we examine the state-platform-user configuration with zhou’s (2022) theorization of the institutional logic of governance in china. zhou (2022, p. 9) suggests that the coexistence of arbitrary power by central authority and the bureaucratic power based on administrative positions, rules, and procedures is fundamental to the formation of an institutional logic of governance in china. in regards to platform governance, the central government and cyberspace administration of china holds arbitrary power in determining internet regulation (miao and lei, 2016), but secondary multifacet regulatory agencies often act with conflicting interests (shen, 2016; miao et al. 2021). meanwhile, platform companies are granted autonomy and rights to develop informal practices and patronage ties to implement state policies or tame undesirable behaviors of users. hence, state-platformusers form a configuration in which the relationships are in constant shift between tightcoupling and loose-coupling, resembling zhou’s (2022, p.105) model of ‘principalsupervisor-agent relations’ as a result of governance. douyin as a case study: towards a mechanism of playful governance understanding how social media platforms respond to and incorporate legal command into their decision-making process remains a challenge for researchers and policymakers. this research takes douyin, a popular social media platform in china, as a case study to examine how social media platforms rely on anthropomorphization to playfully and skilfully enact governance. for this inquiry, a thematic analysis of four douyin’s publicfacing policy documents that set up rules for users and content creators was conducted. following this analysis, we collected 132 short videos posted by the platform official account, and conducted a discourse analysis on the selected materials. by reading douyin’s policy documents, we argue that douyin discursively set up an approach that prioritizes controlling content creators over the administration of data/content. governing content creators is not a way to force content creators to do what the platform wants, but establishes, what foucault (1993) called a subtle integration of the structures of coercion into the techniques of the self. this strategy to co-opt creators to behave according to its regulations is further amplified by the platform official account (dsc) which anthropomorphizes the public facing policy documents. since june 2021, dsc has posted a series of content that playfully reveals the work of human content moderators, and later another series featuring a fictional character mei loufeng as an embodiment of the platform. the homonym of the name mei loufeng (means mr. notforgetting-to-ban-any-account). he dresses as a 捕快 (captor), which is a police-officerlike figure in ancient chinese society in most of the posted short-videos. dsc created playful videos with mei loufeng and organized livestreaming inspections to interact with wanghong creators. it relies on trends or wanghong creators’ fame to generate visibility for the platform’s rules and social norms. the interactions with dsc, in turn, grant creators a certain degree of visibility and legitimacy. hence, creators willingly partake in participatory surveillance, feeling a sense of autonomy and empowerment legitimised by the platform (chen and yang, 2023). in this process, creators conduct themselves to produce desirable outcomes for the platform, turning themselves into the subject of governance. in short, douyin relies on anthropomorphization to achieve communicative and discursive function for regulation. this process forms a playful governance mechanism, which helps the platform deliver legal and moral commands to content creators and prompts selfdisciplinary content creation. the goal of being playful is twofold. first, it ‘connotes a lighthearted tone and something that is intended for amusement rather than to be taken seriously’, marking the autotelic characteristic of content circulating on douyin (chen et al., 2021, p. 111). when enacting regulation, dsc created content that is imbued with this playful culture to please the content creator community. secondly, it softens douyin’s political intentions into light-hearted episodes of social incidents, and helps the platform to dissolve users/citizens’ creative manoeuvers against rules (xie et al. 2021; zidani, 2018). in this way, the platform controls political risks in a playful manner. references chen x, kaye dbv and zeng j (2021) #positiveenergy douyin: constructing “playful patriotism” in a chinese short-video application. chinese journal of communication 14(1): 97–117. chen z and yang dl (2023). governing generation z in china: bilibili, bidirectional mediation, and online community governance. the information society, 39(1), 1–16. davis m and xiao j (2021) de-westernizing platform studies: history and logics of chinese and u.s. platforms. international journal of communication 15: 103-122. de kloet j, poell t, guohua z, et al. (2019) the plaformization of chinese society: infrastructure, governance, and practice. chinese journal of communication 12(3): 249– 256. foucault m (1993). about the beginning of the hermeneutics of the self: two lectures at dartmouth. political theory, 21(2), 198–227. gillespie t (2018a) custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. yale university press. gillespie t (2018b) regulation of and by platforms. in: burgess j, poell t and marwick, ae (eds),the sage handbook of social media. sage publications ltd, pp. 254–278. gorwa r (2019) what is platform governance? information, communication & society 22(6): 854–871. helberger n, pierson j and poell t (2018) governing online platforms: from contested to cooperative responsibility. the information society 34(1): 1–14. miao w and lei w.(2016). policy review: the cyberspace administration of china. global media and communication, 12(3), 337–340. miao w, jiang m and pang y (2021). historicizing internet regulation in china: a metaanalysis of chinese internet policies (1994–2017). international journal of communication, 15:2003-2026. sligh c and abidin c (2023) when brands become stans: netflix, originals, and enacting a fannish persona on instagram. television & new media, 24(6), 616–638. shen h (2016). china and global internet governance: toward an alternative analytical framework. chinese journal of communication, 9(3): 304-324. stockmann d (2023) tech companies and the public interest: the role of the state in governing social media platforms. information, communication & society 26(1): 1–15. xie e, foxman m, and xu s (2021) from public sphere to magic circle: playful publics on the chinese internet, internet histories, 5(3-4): 359-375. zidani s (2018) represented dreams: subversive expressions in chinese social media as alternative symbolic infrastructures. social media + society 4(4):1-10. zhou, x (2022) the logic of governance in china: an organizational approach. cambridge: cambridge university press. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): evans, j. m. (2024, october). word on the (digital) street: exploring youtube vlogs and podcasts as reputation management for artists in chicago’s drill rap scene. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. word on the (digital) street: exploring youtube vlogs as reputation management for artists in chicago’s drill rap jabari miles evans university of south carolina introduction and background youtube has long been considered one of the most important social media platforms for aspiring musicians due to its low barrier to entry, speed of message distribution and vast audience base (baym, 2018). since 2005, over 5 billion videos a day are viewed on youtube (stefanone & derek, 2009). these uploaded videos are commonly based on user generated content (ugc) based on their own lives and often filmed using smartphone cameras (stefanone & derek, 2009). this format tends to add realism to the content, thereby generating more interest and drawing larger audiences, with some user channels garnering tens of millions of subscribers (lee & watkins, 2016). youtube enables audience members to post comments to stories reported on their website, and, to do so, one must create a user account by providing personal information (e.g., date of birth, gender, e-mail address) while entering a username that is linked to the comments that one posts. in particular, black youth in america have harnessed various social media platforms like youtube as dynamic "third spaces" (brock, 2009; 2020). within this digital landscape, they find an avenue to assert their presence beyond the gaze of the dominant white culture, allowing for uninhibited expressions of joy, humor, passionate debates, and the dissemination of targeted messages and subjective narratives. this phenomenon is akin to lane's concept of the "digital street" (2018), where black youth ingeniously utilize platforms such as youtube to replicate the diverse oral cultures found in physical spaces like barbershops, park district basketball courts, and public housing courtyards. these virtual realms, deeply interwoven with the fabric of hip-hop culture, serve as vibrant hubs for urban black youth to engage in information exchange. despite their vitality, expressiveness, and communal nature, these digital arenas often remain situated outside the spheres of discourse associated with the mainstream entertainment industry. a prime example of how youtube has galvanized the commodification of the digital street can be seen through drill rap’s emergence as a phenomenon with the music industry. coming to nationally prominence around 2008, drill rap became infamous for its grim, violent depictions of chicago’s south side and its black male youth participants (drillers) are seen as ambassadors to gang life in these communities, often posting inside information on violence and street activity about these neighborhoods on social media platforms and promoting gang affiliation/rivalries as a central theme to their song lyrics and music videos (moore, 2016). though visible outside the watch of corporate record labels, chicago’s drillers cultivated global audiences by utilizing diy tactics in digital spaces to circulate new music, highlight press interviews and report career milestones to rap fans and gang rivals alike (evans, 2021). though not always the case, youtube allows drillers to maintain reputations for violence without engaging in the physical violence that may have once been required to gain credibility on the streets of low-income urban communities and within gang culture (lane & stuart, 2022; patton et al., 2022). in recent years, drill hip-hop has morphed from being associated with gang territories in chicago to becoming a global subgenre of mainstream rap music with artists and scenes from as far and wide as new york city, paris, london, toronto, and uganda. even so, drill continues to be a music genre known for viral videos on youtube because it naturally combines hip-hop artistic practices and social media practices of content creators with real-time reporting of ongoing street activities (stuart, 2020). given this backdrop, this article uses content analysis of two prominent youtubers in chicago’s drill rap scene to examine how youtube vlogs serve as important intermediaries to not only circulate information about their music scene but provide drillers a valuable tool for building (and re-affirming) one’s street authenticity among drill fan communities. overview of findings in my analysis of the content by drillers dj u and king yella, “cross referencing,” “signifying” and “calling bluffs” emerged as the primary methods drillers used to attract audiences to their content. cross referencing refers to the process whereby challengers scrutinize and contradict their targets’ online claims of violence by calling audience attention to past online content or private information that might otherwise go unnoticed. calling bluffs refers to the strategy in which challengers publicly call on their targets to act in accordance with their online claims of violence, particularly online threats and boasts of violent dispositions. these calls to make good on their violent words often entail daring rivals to “slide” on them—that is, to enter their territory and attempt a drive-by shooting. finally, signifying is employed to challenge and confront rivals or detractors in a comedic and entertaining way. signifying in videos is often used to casually dismiss accusations, question the credibility of enemies, and solidify one’s current reputation within the drill community. these practices, used together in context, served not only to shock audiences, but they allowed drillers to play upon audience curiosities stemming from the criminalization of black communities in mainstream news journalism, scripted television programs, films and of course, rap music. therefore, in sme, more charismatic drillers utilize youtube vlogs as valued intermediaries that allow them to circulate powerful narratives from the physical communities they rap about in their songs. in essence, this content becomes central to establishing the authenticity of their lyrics and persona, publicly challenging authority of their rivals, asserting dominance in the marketplace, and communicating their credibility in having knowledge of the streets. discussion and conclusion overall, though youtube vlogs are leaving some drillers more able to nurture financially self-sustaining careers, those depicted in this study are a small minority and not representative of the experience of independent rap musicians more generally. even still, his study has highlighted the ways in which gang-associated youth within the drill rap community strategically utilize youtube as a powerful platform to build and validate their violent reputations. through the creation of content such as vlogs and podcasts, drillers consciously present themselves as maintaining their violent, "street" identities even in supposedly private or backstage contexts. the utilization of strategies like cross-referencing, calling bluffs, and catching lacking allows them to expose potential fabrications and cast doubt on their rivals' online displays of violence. by generating and publicizing evidence that contradicts their targets' personas, drillers aim to validate their artist reputations for violence and demonstrate authenticity in chicago gang culture. moreover, the highlighted narratives suggest that in the world of social media entertainment, driller’s ability to monetize youtube content incentivizes them to both embellish and/or promote their past participation in gang activities. also, the format of youtube encouraged a comedic and conversational style of commentating for which signifying helped drillers to reinforce a playful personality to the audience and absolve themselves from breaking the codes of the streets (e.g. providing criminal evidence or snitching on others to the police). contrary to prevailing research on drill rap that seeks to predict offline violent outcomes based on disembodied social media content, this analysis emphasizes the need to understand the social meanings and contexts of drillers’ content through their aspirations in the rap music industry. it eschews the assumption that their online behaviors aren’t strategic, highlighting the complexity and nuances involved in their digital labor. moreover, this study highlights the potential of youtube as a medium that not only enables drillers to incite violence but also provides avenues for sustainable celebrity, entrepreneurship, and brand management. though drillers have inherently violent reputations from their music, their authenticity and established fan community, combined with the ability to monetize youtube content, has created new opportunities for drill musicians to establish themselves as influential figures in the creator economy. references anderson, e. (2000). code of the street: decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city. ww norton & company. arditi, d. (2020). getting signed: record contracts, musicians, and power in society. springer nature. banet-weiser, s. (2012). authentic™: the politics of ambivalence in a brand culture. new york university press. boyatzis, r. e. (1998). transforming qualitative information: thematic analysis and code development. sage. brock jr, a. (2020). distributed blackness: african american cybercultures. new york university press. brock, a. (2009). life on the wire: deconstructing race on the internet. information, communication & society, 12(3), 344-363. caplan, r., & gillespie, t. (2020). tiered governance and demonetization: the shifting terms of labor and compensation in the platform economy. social media+ society, 6(2), 2056305120936636. caro, jf, & stuart, f. (2021). 6. stay true. authenticity and online promotion strategies in the chicago drill scene. ratings , (hs1), 133-155. craig, d., & cunningham, s. (2019). social media entertainment: the new intersection of hollywood and silicon valley. nyu press. cunningham, s., & craig, d. (2016). online entertainment: a new wave of media globalization? (introduction). international journal of communication, 10, 5409-5425. cunningham, s., & craig, d. (2017). being ‘really real’on youtube: authenticity, community and brand culture in social media entertainment. media international australia, 164(1), 71-81. cunningham, s., craig, d., & silver, j. (2016). youtube, multichannel networks and the accelerated evolution of the new screen ecology. convergence, 22(4), 376-391. duffy, b. e. (2017). (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. yale university press. evans, j. (2021). ‘we [mostly] carry guns for the internet’: visibility labour, social hacking and chasing digital clout by black male youth in chicago’s drill rap scene. global hip hop studies, 1(2), 227-247. evans, j. m., & baym, n. k. (2022). the audacity of clout (chasing): digital strategies of black youth in chicago diy hip-hop. international journal of communication, 16, 19. fatsis, l. (2019). policing the beats: the criminalisation of uk drill and grime music by the london metropolitan police. the sociological review, 67(6), 1300-1316. forman, m. (2002). the'hood comes first: race, space, and place in rap and hip-hop. wesleyan university press. hallinan, b., & striphas, t. (2016). recommended for you: the netflix prize and the production of algorithmic culture. new media & society, 18(1), 117-137. harkness, g. (2013). gangs and gangsta rap in chicago: a microscenes perspective. poetics, 41(2), 151-176. kassing, j. w., & sanderson, j. (2009). “you're the kind of guy that we all want for a drinking buddy”: expressions of parasocial interaction on floydlandis.com. western journal of communication, 73(2), 182-203. lane, j. (2018). the digital street. oxford university press. lane, j., & stuart, f. (2022). how social media use mitigates urban violence: communication visibility and third-party intervention processes in digital urban contexts. qualitative sociology, 45(3), 457-475. lee, j. (2020). blowin'up: rap dreams in south central. university of chicago press. lee, j. e., & watkins, b. (2016). youtube vloggers' influence on consumer luxury brand perceptions and intentions. journal of business research, 69(12), 5753-5760. moore, n. y. (2016). the south side: a portrait of chicago and american segregation. macmillan. papacharissi, z. (2015). affective publics: sentiment, technology, and politics. oxford university press. patton, d. u., eschmann, r. d., elsaesser, c., & bocanegra, e. (2016). sticks, stones and facebook accounts: what violence outreach workers know about social media and urban-based gang violence in chicago. computers in human behavior, 65, 591-600. patton, d. u., hong, j. s., ranney, m., patel, s., kelley, c., eschmann, r., & washington, t. (2014). social media as a vector for youth violence: a review of the literature. computers in human behavior, 35, 548-553. patton, d. u., rambow, o., auerbach, j., li, k., & frey, w. (2018). expressions of loss predict aggressive comments on twitter among gang-involved youth in chicago. npj digital medicine, 1(1), 11. schwarze, t., & fatsis, l. (2022). copping the blame: the role of youtube videos in the criminalization of uk drill music. popular music, 41(4), 463-480. stefanone, m. a., & lackaff, d. (2009). reality television as a model for online behavior: blogging, photo, and video sharing. journal of computer-mediated communication, 14(4), 964-987. stuart, f. (2020). ballad of the bullet: gangs, drill music, and the power of online infamy. princeton university press. watkins, s. c. (1998). representing: hip hop culture and the production of black cinema. university of chicago press. selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): stillman, a. (2023, october). the emergent r/antiwork revolution and managerial allies. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the emergent r/antiwork revolution and managerial allies ari stillman university of edinburgh the subreddit r/antiwork and the eponymous movement it launched has introduced phrases like ‘quiet quitting’ and ‘act your wage’ into the media lexicon (kilpatrick 2022) and garnered the attention of businesses from goldman sachs to kellogg’s for its threat to labor force participation (chueng 2021). heralded by some as the successor to #occupywallst (o’connor 2022), antiwork is the other side of the great resignation for those who cannot afford to leave their livelihood. yet it differs from #occupywallst in its scope, which critiques capitalism as a whole rather than money in politics; its scale, with 2.7m members globally on reddit alone (antiwork faq); its longevity, ongoing for ten years; and its varied demographics (toberic 2021) whereas occupy protesters tended to be educated white men (conover et al. 2013). as occupy sought collective mobilizations at government buildings, antiwork fosters individual, less public forms of resistance to capitalism. james scott referred to such ‘infrapolitics’ as weapons of the weak, as the lack of capital of the oppressed in all its forms often precludes more direct forms of protest (1985). drawing from two years of digital ethnography of r/antiwork and interviews with members, i ask what impact r/antiwork discourse has on the offline behaviors of its members who are empowered to improve workplace conditions: managers. members of r/antiwork often solicit and respond to work advice, vent and seek social support, encourage each other to do minimal work, brainstorm solutions to systemic issues caused by capitalism, and call attention to non-violent forms of resistance – consistent with themes of quitting employment and mental health revealed by topic modeling (medlar et al. 2022). while members often share stories about their work experience, less common, though no less salient, are testimonials from managers who describe how r/antiwork has changed their views on labor or otherwise support their workers. these conversion narratives and affirmations, which occasionally mention accompanying actions, are universally met with approbation by working members – reifying their grievances through expressed desire for similarly sympathetic management. the attention and participation of managers in an expressly anti-capitalist space is important not just because of the potential for implementing changes mentioned above, but also because managers have been largely overlooked in conversations, considerations, and frameworks about class consciousness (moody 2022). in the polarizing marxist rhetoric of proletariat against capitalist interests, managers occupy “contradictory locations within class relations” (wright 1979) in that they socially reproduce capitalist interests and values without themselves owning the means of production. while management literature expounds on practices of social closure and carrot-on-a-stick outlooks whereby managers seek to protect their own interests (boltanski and chiapello 2005), the economic and professional precarity impacting their once-secure livelihoods have given cause for some to turn a corner. as the proletariat becomes class conscious, they may find un-historical allies in managers who suddenly find more homophily with workers than their own upper management and owners (mann 1973). with the role of middle management evolving to focus more on collaboration than supervision (zhang 2023), thereby reducing manager-worker distinction in practice, such a contingency for re-evaluating traditional class categories seems tenable. through interviews with managers in r/antiwork, i learned that rather than being outright converted, r/antiwork has served to reinforce their previously existing gripes with capitalism. r/antiwork functions as an anti-model and helps managers keep a pulse on the concerns of workers that wouldn’t usually be disclosed in a professional relationship. in doing so, it fosters sympathy for the plight of workers – with many identifying as working middle class not apart from those they manage. this is supported by longitudinal changes in the profession highlighting the importance of collaboration over supervision (zhang 2023) – though indubitably exacerbated by recent changes in the economy at large. given that bigger picture, manager participation and resonance in r/antiwork suggests a more expansive class consciousness than traditionally segmented and the mediating role of the internet in shaping it. both the bridging of worker-manager professional distance and the revolutionary consciousness of r/antiwork forming a digital counterpublic (hill 2018) were enabled by the affordances of the platform itself and governance of the subreddit (massanari 2013). most pertinent of all is that users engage with the platform pseudonymously. this affords users a safe space to discuss work-related politics whereas doing so on social media on which their identity is attached could result in professional repercussions (van der nagel and frith 2015). effectively, anonymous engagement flattens a power dynamic that otherwise deters speaking out (brown et al. 2018). it also invites the potential for bad actors, although good-faith actors can be verified by clicking on a redditor’s user activity to situate a comment or post against their previous activity (panek 2022). likewise, as managers have traditionally been left out of conversations pertaining to class interests (roy 1999), anonymity has allowed them to observe, absorb, and participate without their presence threatening workers or compromising power dynamics. although r/antiwork was founded by anarcho-socialists who were more interested in abolishing capitalism than reforming it, meteoric growth of the subreddit membership from less than 100k members at the start of 2020 to 1.6m at the start of 2022 ushered in new members with broader political views wanting to feel represented (todd 2021). contrary to the ideology of the veteran members, r/antiwork saw an influx of users who were keener on capitalist improvements such as higher wages, more paid time-off, and a slew of benefits to working life. as a result, r/antiwork moderators expanded the scope of the subreddit broadly: “to start a conversation, to problematize work as we know it today” (antiwork faq). while such dilution of community scope is typical of sudden, expansive growth (faraj et al. 2016), more interesting is that so many users who didn’t share the hardline ideology of the subreddit at the time found their way to r/antiwork. as my interviews uncovered, this was due to no other mainstream online platforms affording a dedicated space to vent about and critique capitalism as well as resonant, low-commitment personal action frames (e.g., act your wage) (bennett and segerberg 2012). additionally, media reporting and virality contributed to r/antiwork exposure, thus fueling the ranks and spurring human resource officers and business publications to monitor r/antiwork for competitive intelligence (comber 2023). since r/antiwork’s membership swelled, and following an incident of bad publicity on fox news that caused r/antiwork members to interrogate r/antiwork’s scope and leadership (stillman [forthcoming]), r/antiwork members branched out and/or defected both on reddit and other platforms. on reddit, more focused niche iterations of antiwork emerged such as r/workreform for those who just want better working conditions and r/workersstrikeback for those more inclined to activism. on other media, with antiwork having gone mainstream, groups emerged on facebook while #antiwork trended on tiktok. more noteworthy is how antiwork discourse has been commodified and redeployed by ‘thought leaders’ on linkedin (schawbel 2022). in this digital space, without directly referencing antiwork, managers, recruiters, and business owners critique strawmen business practices and assert how they better serve workers. as a professionally performative platform, this is unsurprising; though it signifies both the impact antiwork discourse and recent changes in the labor economy have had on the professional sphere and how managers participate differently across platforms. references ‘antiwork faq’, 2022. frequently asked questions. available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/wiki/index bennett, w.l. and segerberg, a., 2012. the logic of connective action: digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. information, communication & society, 15(5), pp.739-768. boltanski, l. and chiapello, e., 2005. the new spirit of capitalism. international journal of politics, culture, and society, 18, pp.161-188. brown, d.k., ng, y.m.m., riedl, m.j. and lacasa-mas, i., 2018. reddit’s veil of anonymity: predictors of engagement and participation in media environments with hostile reputations. social media+ society, 4(4), p.2056305118810216. chueng, b. 2021. 'antiwork' movement may be long-run risk to labor force participation: goldman sachs, yahoo! finance. yahoo! available at: https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/antiwork-movement-may-be-long-run-risk-tolabor-force-participation-goldman-sachs 165417840.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=ahr0chm6ly93d3cuz29vz2xllm nvbs8&guce_referrer_sig=aqaaakxxogitznlfrdchddlfucj0rhzpi6ypxdffz0ih 3aq8-a-emtytcnrguoknkz4wuwvwj1re2j1t7laodzmtgz6k8ibkzogamewil4egr3q0tctaoi6sqw50xni gnkiaithmb_kd-cdenh6iqquyd1_i-i2s0tr6tz22brzrtei (accessed: march 1, 2023). comber, i. 2023. what is the anti-work movement and why should employers be aware of it? employment hero. available at: https://employmenthero.com/uk/blog/antiwork-movement/ (accessed: march 1, 2023). conover, m.d., ferrara, e., menczer, f. and flammini, a., 2013. the digital evolution of occupy wall street. plos one, 8(5), p.e64679. faraj, s., von krogh, g., monteiro, e. and lakhani, k.r., 2016. special section introduction—online community as space for knowledge flows. information systems research, 27(4), pp.668-684. hill, m.l., 2018. “thank you, black twitter”: state violence, digital counterpublics, and pedagogies of resistance. urban education, 53(2), pp.286-302. kilpatrick, a. 2022. what is ‘quiet quitting’ and how it may be a misnomer for setting boundaries at work. npr. available at: https://www.npr.org/2022/08/19/1117753535/quiet-quitting-worktiktok?t=1661167129796 mann, m., 1973. consciousness and action among the western working class. london: macmillan. massanari, a., 2013. playful participatory culture: learning from reddit. aoir selected papers of internet research. medlar, a., liu, y. and glowacka, d., 2022. nobody wants to work anymore: an analysis of r/antiwork and the interplay between social and mainstream media during the great resignation. arxiv preprint arxiv:2210.07796. moody, k., 2022. breaking the impasse: electoral politics, mass action, and the new socialist movement in the united states. haymarket books. o’connor, b. 2022. the rise of the anti-work movement. bbc. available at: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220126-the-rise-of-the-anti-workmovement panek, e. 2022. understanding reddit. routledge press. roy, w.g., 1999. socializing capital: the rise of the large industrial corporation in america. princeton university press. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220126-the-rise-of-the-anti-work-movement https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220126-the-rise-of-the-anti-work-movement scott, j.c., 1985. weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance. yale university press. schawbel, d. 2022. how companies should react to the anti-work movement, linkedin. available at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-companies-should-react-antiwork-movement-dan-schawbel?trk=pulse-article_more-articles_related-contentcard (accessed: march 1, 2023). stillman, a. [forthcoming]. more than their (non)labo(u)r: the work of r/antiwork. organization. tobotic. 2021. r/antiwork survey results. antiwork blog. available at: https://antiwork.uk/2021/12/05/r-antiwork-survey-results/#where todd, s. 2021. what reddit’s million-strong antiwork community can teach the rest of us. quartz. available at: https://qz.com/work/2103779/reddits-antiwork-sub-hasmainstream-appeal/ van der nagel, e. and frith, j., 2015. anonymity, pseudonymity, and the agency of online identity: examining the social practices of r/gonewild. first monday. wright, k.b., rains, s. and banas, j., 2010. weak-tie support network preference and perceived life stress among participants in health-related, computer-mediated support groups. journal of computer-mediated communication, 15(4), pp.606624. zhang, l., 2023. the changing role of managers. american journal of sociology, 129(2), pp.439-484. https://antiwork.uk/2021/12/05/r-antiwork-survey-results/#where https://qz.com/work/2103779/reddits-antiwork-sub-has-mainstream-appeal/ https://qz.com/work/2103779/reddits-antiwork-sub-has-mainstream-appeal/ selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): pothong, k., hooper, l., livingstone, s., atabey, a., & day, e. (2024, october). the ‘googlisation’ of the classroom: how does the protection of children’s personal data fare?. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the ‘googlisation’ of the classroom: how does the protection of children’s personal data fare? kruakae pothong london school of economics and political science, louise hooper garden court chambers, sonia livingstone london school of economics and political science, ayça atabey university of edinburgh, emma day techlegality, google in the classroom the covid-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption and use of diverse technologies for education (edtech) to deliver remote learning. google classroom, a core service within google workspace for education, is among these edtech products that made their way into children’s classrooms and have remained there since. while edtech products like google classroom can benefit teachers in assigning and tracking homework submissions and facilitating remote learning (dfe, 2021a), they may expose children to data protection risks with unknown consequences for children and their life prospects (livingstone et al., 2024). vast venture capital is invested in edtech worldwide (davies et al., 2022), with a handful of major platforms dominating the education landscape, recontextualising oncepublic institutions of learning within the corporate sphere (cobo & rivas, 2023). given the prevalence of google classroom, downloaded 1.34 million times in the uk in 2021 (clark, 2022) and endorsed by the department for education (dfe, 2021b), this paper examines the use of google’s compliance with data protection laws. critical analysis of digital services, such as google classroom, is variously theorised, including in relation to the googlisation of education (kerssens & van dijck, 2021; vaidhyanathan, 2012), although detailed analysis of edtech’s data protection practices is only recently gaining attention (west, 2023). our methods combine legal analysis of the privacy policies of google classroom and related services with a socio-technical investigation of google classroom’s user journey with a small number of children. we deployed lightbeam (for firefox) and thunderbeam (for chrome) to capture the data flow throughout each child’s user journey. our aim was to investigate the platform's operation given the applicable policies and data protection regulations rather than sampling families representatively. this research was funded by the 5rights foundation and approved by the ethics committee of the london school of economics and political science (lse) as part of the digital futures for children’s work. what is the problem with google classroom? legal analysis of the privacy policies governing google classroom and other google services accessible to children in the google classroom environment found that the privacy policies and legal terms governing these services are opaque, layered and inconsistent with data protection laws (hooper et al., 2022). these policies showed that google collects and processes a diverse range of data about children while they use google classroom to learn, including data processed by sensors, such as typing speed, keyboard patterns and interaction patterns with the service. however, these policies lack transparency about the purposes of processing and how each type of data is interpreted or used by google and shared with other organisations, as made clear by the data protection impact assessment on google classroom carried out by the privacy company in the netherlands (nas & terra, 2021a, 2021b). although google claims full compliance with data protection regulations, the sociotechnical investigation suggests otherwise. we conducted the investigation first in 2022 and again in 2024. in 2022, we investigated google classroom’s ‘education fundamentals’ (a free version) by inviting nine and twelve-year-olds to demonstrate their user journeys on schoolprovided platforms while we captured the resulting data flow. both children showed us that their teachers shared links to learning resources hosted by external services, like vimeo and google’s additional service, like youtube, via google classroom. these ‘additional’ services were governed by inferior privacy protection compared to google’s education privacy policies, which guarantee no commercialisation of ‘core service data’ for advertising purposes (google, 2022). since one child had access to more additional services (such as maps, youtube and hangout) than the other, it appeared that schools used different settings for google classroom, whether or not they knew the implications for commercial data collection. when both children clicked on links to external services, like vimeo, or materials in google’s additional services, such as youtube, they did not receive any notification that they were leaving the data-commercialisation-free zone. the data flow captured by lightbeam showed that when the nine-year-old accessed the learning material hosted by vimeo through the links that teachers posted, he was exposed to 42 third-party surveillance services. these services included google’s ad service and tiktok’s and facebook’s analytics. when the child accessed another learning resource hosted on youtube, the number of third-party services tracking the child’s online learning journey increased to 92. the other child participant was exposed to a similar level of cookie surveillance. such surveillance contravenes data protection regulations. taming google classroom? in august 2021, google agreed to implement various changes, including introducing technical controls allowing schools to block students from accessing additional services when using google classroom after the dutch data protection authority (dpa) threatened to ban schools and universities from using google classroom (nas & terra, 2021b). our 2024 update of this investigation with an eight-year-old child from the same primary school as the nine-year-old child who joined our 2022 investigation and a 16-year-old child from a different school showed that this technical improvement has also been applied in the uk. as a result, both children had access to significantly fewer google additional services compared to our findings in 2022. in addition, when the eight-yearold child clicked on the link to a learning material hosted on youtube while still logged in with his school-assigned google account, his access to youtube was blocked. despite these technical improvements, teachers from both schools still posted links to external (non-google) services for students to use as part of their learning. when each child clicked on the links to these external services, they were exposed to cookie surveillance placed by various google and non-google third-party services. one of the external (non-google) learning services the 16-year-old child accessed through the link that a teacher posted in google classroom exposed her to 170 third-party surveillance cookies that fed into the advertising technology infrastructure. while teachers posting links to learning materials hosted in google’s additional services and other external services can be seen as a behavioural or literacy problem, this same problem can be fixed with technical solutions. one option is to block access to those services with inferior privacy protection, as google did with the eight-year-old attempting to access learning materials hosted on youtube using his school's assigned google account. arguably, a better option is to lock all the data within google classroom and isolate it from third-party surveillance, as appeared to be the case for microsoft teams when our 11-year-old participant from a different secondary school accessed external learning services through a link that the teacher posted in teams. the improvement resulting from the technical control changes that google implemented following the dutch dpa’s threat to ban schools and universities from using google classroom (nas & terra, 2021b) showed that effective enforcement of data protection laws and government intervention could minimise data protection risks by design. however, more needs to be done to ensure that platforms, especially platforms with market dominance, do not abuse their market power to facilitate the commercialisation of children’s personal data while they are learning. with children’s rights to inclusion, privacy, safety, education and freedom from commercial exploitation often marginalised in deliberations about edtech and data protection regulations, it is crucial to reassess edtech impacts and bridge the data protection enforcement gap (day, 2022). references clark, d. (2022). most downloaded educational mobile apps in the uk 2021. statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1266710/uk-most-downloaded-educationapps/ cobo, c., & rivas, a. (2023). the new digital education policy landscape: from education systems to platforms. taylor & francis. davies, h., eynon, r., komljenovic, j., & williamson, b. (2022). investigating the financial power brokers behind edtech. in s. livingstone, & k. pothong (eds.), education data futures: critical, regulatory and practical reflections (pp. 8192). digital futures commission, 5rights foundation. https://educationdatafutures.digitalfuturescommission.org.uk/ day, e., pothong, k., atabey, a., & livingstone, s. (2022). who controls children’s education data? a socio-legal analysis of the uk governance regimes for schools and edtech. learning, media and technology, 49(3), 356-370. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2022.2152838 dfe. (2021a). education technology (edtech) survey 2020-21 (p. 135) [research report]. government social research. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/621ce8ec8fa8f54915f43838/educ ation_technology_edtech_survey.pdf dfe. (2021b). guidance—remote education good practice (withdrawn on 30 march 2022). https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/remote-education-goodpractice/remote-education-good-practice google. (2022, february 10). privacy policy. https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=enus hooper, l., livingstone, s., & pothong, k. (2022). problems with data governance in uk schools: the cases of google classroom and classdojo. https://digitalfuturescommission.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/problemswith-data-governance-in-uk-schools.pdf kerssens, n., & dijck, j. van. (2021). the platformization of primary education in the netherlands. learning, media and technology, 46(3), article 3. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2021.1876725 livingstone, s., pothong, k., atabey, a., hooper, l., & day, e. (2024). the googlization of the classroom: is the uk effective in protecting children's data and rights?. computers and education open, 100195. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.caeo.2024.100195 nas, s., & terra, f. (2021a). dpia on the use of google g suite (enterprise) for education (15 july 2020, update 12 march 2021). https://www.sivon.nl/app/uploads/2021/06/sivon-updated-g-suite-foreducation-dpia-12-march-2021-v1.2.pdf nas, s., & terra, f. (2021b). update dpia report google workspace for education (2 august). https://www.surf.nl/files/2021-08/update-dpia-report-2-august-2021.pdf vaidhyanathan, s. (2012). the googlization of everything: (and why we should worry). university of california press. west, m. (2023). an ed-tech tragedy? educational technologies and school closures in the time of covid-19—unesco digital library. unesco. https://www.unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000386701 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 heemsbergen, l. mann, m. bennett, c., mccosker, a. (2023, october). techno-political promises of pandemic management: a situation of apps and excel in public health. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. techno-political promises of pandemic management: a situation of apps and excel in public health luke heemsbergen deakin university monique mann deakin university catherine bennett deakin university anthony mccosker rmit university introduction and background this article considers the politics and practicalities of responding to the covid crisis with ‘an app for that’. it shows how seductive solutionism in times of crisis created political impetus to direct the public health response of contact tracing through contact tracing apps (cta). rather than focus on user-based concerns (uptake, privacy, etc.), we’ve investigated how apps interface with complex systems and infrastructures of public health. our approach leveraged situational mapping to provide a more nuanced understanding of the interfaces of cta and digital epidemiology than current app narratives allow. this includes data from 21 expert informants interviews across five developed nations offering insight into the machinations of contact tracing from ‘the coal face’ up to executive technical and policy decisions, including national cta development and deployment. we learned that beneath the shiny veneer of an app is the messy certitude of excel and tech-debt, local politics, and mundane organizational technique that work amidst each other to shape public health. “there’s an app for that” is a hallmark of a digital age where problems are presented with technological solutions in near real time. apps are ubiquitous and provide a specific type of solution that is not a technological niche, but a socio-technical regime (geels 2014), which signals a set of social expectations around connectivity, utility, and usability from digital handheld devices (goggin 2021). we can say that apps are now endemic to mobile socio-technical relations. the efficacy of joining these mobile platforms into socially mobile and compute intensive sensing services had been considered for some time (mizouni and brachi 2013), but there was no identifiable need to do so for public health until recently. in 2020, as the scale of the pandemic crisis was beginning to be appreciated in technology and policy circles, the need for rapid ‘solutions’ were apparent. hopes of there being ‘an app for that’ reflected prevalent and sustained discourses of technological solutionism (morozov 2013; 2020) where revolutions to efficiencies of digital government that were often promised (garason 2004) seemed always on the horizon, especially in terms of mobile (vincent and harris 2008) and health application (anthopoulos et al. 2016). nevertheless, by october 2020 there were almost 500 apps on the ios app store related to covid across 98 countries (albright 2023). likewise, a healthy and critical literature on digital app interventions into covid-19 has developed due to the seemingly shared policy position across the global north (taylor 2021; mann et al., 2022) to implement cta. comparative analysis on the ethical and privacy tradeoffs (eg. goggin 2020, levy and stewart 2021, fahey and hino 2020; luicivero et al. 2020; connor and doan 2022) showed the diverse ecology of solutionism. critiques of consumer/citizen adoption from socio-technical and behavioural perspectives (amann et al 2021, klenk and duijf 2021, jörling et al. 2022; habich-sobiegalla & kostka 2022; geber and ho 2022) described how user-citizens (nguyen 2022) became the intersection of public health and corporate-government surveillance (chen et al. 2022, kim 2022; storeng and de bengy 2021). other studies considered the epidemiological efficacy of such adoptions, ranging from congratulatory to abysmal across jurisdictions (see respectively vogt et al. 2022; wymant et al. 2021). we note the majority of cta research is focussed on user adoption. only 2/110 relevant cta papers visible to google scholar in our timeframe offer substantive focus on implementing elements knit into the situation of app development, deployment, or use in society. this opens for deeper consideration how the expectation and execution of cta apps were imagined, debated, and resourced as socio-technological and materialpolitical manifestations. here we consider considering how user-centric narratives of the platformization of public health can gloss over the systemic resistance that situational analysis (clarke et al., 2016) might better uncover. research design situational analysis is a method that foregrounds the situation of inquiry – or context – as the unit of analysis (clarke et al., 2016). our task is to use this technique to make cta situation’s analytic complexity more visible by considering discourses that would otherwise be missed, and adding to the covid-19 situational mapping of previous work (see nguyen 2022, kim 2022). in our case, human and non-human actors to map included the technical protocols, public discourses, contact tracers, health region managers, bureaucrats, digital rights advocates, other professionals involved in the design and implementation of ctas, policy, political rhetoric, and privacy law. each attested to different facets of the situation, and together paint a more nuanced picture of the capacity for digital epidemiology than current app narratives provide. methodologically the innovation was to define cta situations beyond the front-end user experience and app environment that might be accessible by walkthrough approaches (light, dugay, burgess 2018) and audience research. we hoped to map so far underconsidered human, nonhuman, discursive, and political elements, that were not just defined by citizen-subjects and technology, but also included epidemiological knowledge, organizational structure/s, and lenses of domestic crisis-control politics where less academic attention has been directed. together, these might better address the contingent promises and failures related to these digital technologies. findings and analysis one of our main contributions shows how public health platformization – which might be easy to identify from the perspective of a user who is dependent on ctas – is much messier when viewed with other units of implementation-analysis. public health authorities interface differently with ctas than users, politicians, and digital-rights discourses. we sought to capture, explore, and begin to document how each of these differences shaped the understanding of emergent digital infrastructures of public health. in this way, ctas might be considered the visible tip of covid-19 response infrastructures in ways that offered a boundary object (star 2010) that users, governments, politicians, industry, and other elements interface with/at. cta are entities that people act towards (or with) in relation to their own communities of practice – together and as discrete jurisdictions of power hierarchies that each have unique perspective (see figure 1 for a representation of these overlapping relations informed from our empirical work). figure 1: app as boundary object requires acknowledging different perspectives. for spir we focus on claims that cut across our informants, including political impetus for the ‘seductive solution’ of ctas and the complexity of cta’s design as an infrastructure of public health. specifically, we uncover the unseen work of integrating contact tracing data from apps and other sources of information into back-end systems to manage data and understand outbreaks; the institutional uptake and processes of these workflows in a time of ‘crisis’; and the mundane work of using a surprisingly wide array of ‘different things’ (i.e. excel and whiteboards) to piece together a system of contact tracing where novel technological solutions interfaced with humans’ mundane, organizational, and political interactions to make novel infrastructure. conclusion while the appification of covid responses has been considered in user-centric terms (i.e. privacy, efficacy) the complex story of digital interfaces meeting infrastructures of public health is less known nor rigorously explored through a situational analysis that shows there is much more than an app for that. apps aren’t (just) texts to read, privacy concerns to consider, or platforms to configure. their situation is more complex. references abbas, r. and michael, k., 2020. covid-19 contact trace app deployments: learnings from australia and singapore. ieee consumer electronics magazine, 9(5), pp.65-70. albright 2023). ‘500+ covid-related ios apps’ webpage. https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/d1gi/viz/cvios_493/ioscovidappsall accessed 24 feb 2023. amann, j., sleigh, j., & vayena, e. (2021). digital contact-tracing during the covid-19 pandemic: an analysis of newspaper coverage in germany, austria, and switzerland. plos one, 16(2), e0246524. anthopoulos, l., reddick, c.g., giannakidou, i. and mavridis, n., 2016. why egovernment projects fail? an analysis of the healthcare. gov website. government information quarterly, 33(1), pp.161-173. chen, wenhong, gejun huang & an hu (2022) red, yellow, green or golden: the postpandemic future of china's health code apps, information, communication & society, 25:5, 618-633, doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2022.2027502 clarke, a.e., 2003. situational analyses: grounded theory mapping after the postmodern turn. symbolic interaction, 26(4), pp.553-576. connor, brian t. & long doan (2021) government and corporate surveillance: moral discourse on privacy in the civil sphere, information, communication & society, 24:1, 52-68, doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2019.1629693 fahey, r.a. and hino, a., 2020. covid-19, digital privacy, and the social limits on datafocused public health responses. international journal of information management, 55, p.102181. geber, sarah & shirley s. ho (2022): examining the cultural dimension of contact-tracing app adoption during the covid-19 pandemic: a cross-country study in singapore and switzerland, information, communication & society, doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2022.2082880 geels, f. w. (2014). regime resistance against low-carbon transitions: introducing politics and power into the multi-level perspective. theory, culture & society, 31(5), 2140. goggin, g., 2021. apps: from mobile phones to digital lives. john wiley & sons. habich-sobiegalla, sabrina & genia kostka (2022): sharing is caring: willingness to share personal data through contact tracing apps in china, germany, and the us, information, communication & society, doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2022.2113421 jörling, m., eitze, s., schmid, p., betsch, c., allen, j. and böhm, r., 2022. to disclose or not to disclose? factors related to the willingness to disclose information to a covid-19 tracing app. information, communication & society, pp.1-25. kim, youngrim (2022) tracking bodies in question: telecom companies, mobile data, and surveillance platforms in south korea’s epidemic governance, information, communication & society, 25:12, 1717-1734, doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2021.1883704 klenk, m. and duijf, h., 2021. ethics of digital contact tracing and covid-19: who is (not) free to go?. ethics and information technology, 23(1), pp.69-77. leigh star, s. (2010). this is not a boundary object: reflections on the origin of a concept. science, technology, & human values, 35(5), 601-617. levy, b., & stewart, m. (2021). the evolving ecosystem of covid-19 contact tracing applications. arxiv preprint arxiv:2103.10585. light, b., burgess, j., & duguay, s. (2018). the walkthrough method: an approach to the study of apps. new media & society, 20(3), 881-900. mann, m., mitchell, p., foth, m., & anastasiu, i. (2020). #blocksidewalk to barcelona: technological sovereignty and the social license to operate smart cities. journal of the association for information science and technology, 71(9), 1103–1115. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24387 mizouni, r. and el barachi, m., 2013, september. mobile phone sensing as a service: business model and use cases. in 2013 seventh international conference on next generation mobile apps, services and technologies (pp. 116-121). ieee. morozov, e. (2013). to save everything, click here: technology, solutionism and the urge to fix problems that don’t exist. penguin. morozov, e. (2020, april 15). the tech “solutions” for coronavirus take the surveillance state to the next level. the guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/15/tech-coronavirus-surveilancestate-digital-disrupt nguyen dang (2022): wear your digital mask, fight this virus like it’s the enemy: pandemic user-citizenship as platform-infrastructure entanglements, information, communication & society, doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2022.2131364 leigh star, s. (2010). this is not a boundary object: reflections on the origin of a concept. science, technology, & human values, 35(5), 601-617. storeng, k. t., & de bengy puyvallée, a. (2021). the smartphone pandemic: how big tech and public health authorities partner in the digital response to covid-19. global public health, 16(8-9), 1482-1498. taylor, l., 2021. there is an app for that: technological solutionism as covid-19 policy in the global north. in the new common (pp. 209-215). springer, cham. vincent, j. and harris, l., 2008. effective use of mobile communications in e-government: how do we reach the tipping point?. information, community and society, 11(3), pp.395-413. vogt, f., haire, b., selvey, l., katelaris, a.l. and kaldor, j., 2022. effectiveness evaluation of digital contact tracing for covid-19 in new south wales, australia. the lancet public health, 7(3), pp.e250-e258. wymant, c., ferretti, l., tsallis, d., charalambides, m., abeler-dörner, l., bonsall, d., hinch, r., kendall, m., milsom, l., ayres, m. and holmes, c., 2021. the epidemiological impact of the nhs covid-19 app. nature, 594(7863), pp.408-412. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 transient-platform paradigms: narratives of blockchain experiments for social media platforms this paper develops the concept of transient-platform paradigm by closely examining a blockchain technology experiment for a social media platform. since late 2022, 'generative ai' (genai) has been the buzzword du jour. there are new 'hypes', 'hopes' (boler, 2007), critiques and cynicism around genai, and much is unexplored about the new wave of automation. genai is an example of a recurring socio-technical phenomenon or technological 'trend' (powers, 2019) that the digital media and technology industry portrays as a catalyst that will bring seismic change to the internet and digital communication. such trends and their corresponding hype signified (from an anthropological perspective) an 'anticipation' to connote the "practical and material acting-in-advance" (stephan & flaherty, 2019, p. 2). in retrospect, we can also recognize that the trends and buzzwords are foundational in shifting the 'paradigm' (burgess, 2015; freedman, 2015), or the way people think about and associate with digital technology or media. they are pivotal in guiding the future (shaping perceptions and compelling actions) (powers, 2019, p. 26) of the internet, the web and the associated industries. for example, social media platforms have prominently shaped everyday communication practices and several industries, including media, telecommunication, information technology and advertising. the 'platform paradigm' emerged in the 2010s when a handful of platform companies played a central role in combining user-created content with social networking features, allowing people to create, share, and connect easily (burgess, 2015, p. 282). simultaneously, these platforms gradually ashwin nagappa queensland university of technology suggested citation (apa): nagappa, a. (2024, october). transient-platform paradigms: narratives of blockchain experiments for social media platforms. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. displaced "more diffuse, bespoke models of publishing and distribution" of user-created content (burgess, 2015, p. 282). while the users were crucial for the rapid scaling of these platforms, over time, the advertisers and other aspects of the business have organized or reconfigured the industry around these digital platforms. such reconfigurations did not go unopposed. short-lived "killer hype cycles" (zulli et al., 2020) boosted the alternatives to mainstream social media platforms. alternative social media (asm) platforms (gehl, 2015) emerged in response to changes on large platforms. for instance, the introduction of the real name' policy (salisbury & pooley, 2017, p. 9) by facebook in 2007 triggered the creation and uptake of platforms such as ello and diaspora. in 2022, the acquisition of twitter and destructive changes to its platform governance resulted in drastically changed participation. this assisted the adoption and growth of asm such as mastodon (and the uptake of activitypub protocol by meta and bluesky). not so long ago, blockchain-based social media (bsm) initiatives attempted to build viable alternatives using blockchain technology. these developments occurred alongside the emergence of mastodon (and the underlying activitypub protocol). bsm platforms were also situated at the intersection of the emergent web3 discourse and the dominant platform paradigm. bsms applied ideologies of decentralization in attempts to develop community-led alternatives to mainstream commercial platforms. to do so, they leveraged the affordances of blockchain technology, such as tokenization, autonomous organization, and a decentralized power structure. this paper presents partial findings from the platform biography (doctoral thesis) (burgess & baym, 2020) of one such bsm, dtube. dtube aspired to provide a fair and transparent alternative creator economy built without the foundations of an advertising revenue model (unlike youtube). it relied on the critical affordance tokenization or cryptocurrency to overcome the economic challenges. it emerged amid a rapidly changing landscape of digital technologies such as social media platforms, financial technology systems, genai, and cloud computing. dtube remained as a minor platform (nicoll, 2019). the research was conducted in three phases between 2019 and 2023. phase one involved identifying the key constitutive elements of dtube, namely its forums, blockchain, and protocols for platform governance. these elements were foundational to dtube and shaped the platform and user practices. phase two involved a multi-sited ethnography across the dtube video-sharing interface, discord server, other public forums and trade press. in doing so, qualitative data was gathered to understand the conversations, discourse and practices around the platform. phase three involved semi-structured interviews with community members and participation as a video creator on the video-sharing interface. the data collected in the three phases was analyzed using raymond williams's (1977) framework of dominant, residual, and emergent systems or cultures. this research is motivated to articulate the emergent "structures of feeling" or the "social experience which is still in process" (williams, 1977, p. 132). it aims to comprehend the imaginaries of a future internet / web that experiments like dtube are trying to articulate. dtube (and bsms) represented an emergent system since it introduced "new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships" (p. 123) in a social media system. the discourse of rewarding social interactions was a definitive characteristic in this emergent culture's new meanings and practices. the rewards became currency for further participation. dtube articulated or influenced a new way of thinking about social media or creator culture, a new platform paradigm. socio-technical discourses of asm and web3 significantly shaped this paradigm. bsm platforms and fediverse platforms (such as mastodon) are secondgeneration alternatives that attempt to overcome any economic and logistical challenges of the earlier asms. these alternatives imitate the functions and operations of popular platforms. they differ by placing users in charge of the platform governance and operations. importantly, all asm/bsm platforms have two things in common. first, many of these initiatives were open-source projects or 'recursive public' (kelty, 2008, p. 3), i.e., individuals and collectives were independent of large institutions convened to develop solutions that complemented or opposed dominant systems. second, they were socio-technical or socio-economic imaginaries for alternative platforms with decentralized decision-making (cammaerts & carpentier, 2006, p. xv) and (democratized) access to media production and circulation (couldry & curran, 2003, p. 5). although such utopian imaginaries have never proven to be successful in their entirety, they never disappear. they surface regularly in response to renewed worries about the 'future of the internet' (zittrain, 2013) or 'googlization' (vaidhyanathan, 2012). in the process, they shape a new paradigm that this paper calls a 'transient-platform paradigm', where dispersed initiatives attempt to recreate social media platforms for users by the users. the transient-platform paradigm is a new way of thinking about and organizing communities to form, operate and govern social media platforms. given these initiatives' unconsolidated nature, they produced different versions of the paradigm. this discourse or paradigm is not entirely new, nor does it shift the dominant paradigm. it is a response to or solution to the drawbacks of the dominant platform paradigm. moreover, it represented attempts to normalize power hierarchies with a renewed focus on decentralization and autonomy. as minor platforms, in nicoll's (2019) words, they "point toward alternative possibilities for a future yet to come" (p. 40). for instance, the fediverse (a catch-all term for federated social media initiatives and technologies including but extending beyond mastodon) represents a transient-platform paradigm characterized by decentralized instances of a given social media platform connected using the activitypub protocol. bsm represents a transient-platform paradigm characterized by blockchain-based governance and cryptocurrency incentives. this paper does not speculate concrete shifts with decentralized systems; instead, it suggests that these transient-platform paradigms are fleeting and potentially shape the emergent discourse or paradigm. moreover, it can subsequently shape cultural and industrial landscapes. word count: 1186 references boler, m. (2007). hypes, hopes and actualities: new digital cartesianism and bodies in cyberspace. new media & society, 9(1), 139–168. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444807067586 burgess, j., & baym, n. (2020). twitter: a biography. new york university press. burgess, j. (2015). from ‘broadcast yourself’ to ‘follow your interests’: making over social media. international journal of cultural studies, 18(3), 281–285. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877913513684 cammaerts, b., & carpentier, n. (2006). reclaiming the media: communication rights and democratic media roles. intellect books ltd. conger, k., & hirsch, l. (2022, october 28). elon musk completes $44 billion deal to own twitter. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/27/technology/elon-musk-twitter-dealcomplete.html couldry, n., & curran, j. (2003). contesting media power: alternative media in a networked world. rowman & littlefield. freedman, d. (2015). paradigms of media power. communication, culture & critique, 8(2), 273–289. https://doi.org/10.1111/cccr.12081 gehl, r. w. (2015). the case for alternative social media. social media + society, 1(2), 205630511560433. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115604338 kelty, c. m. (2008). two bits: the cultural significance of free software. duke university press. nicoll, b. (2019). minor platforms in videogame history. amsterdam university press. powers, d. (2019). on trend: the business of forecasting the future. university of illinois press. https://doi.org/10.5406/j.ctvqc6h58 salisbury, m., & pooley, j. d. (2017). the #nofilter self: the contest for authenticity among social networking sites, 2002–2016. social sciences, 6(1), article 1. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci6010010 stephan, c., & flaherty, d. (2019). introduction: experiencing anticipation. anthropological perspectives. the cambridge journal of anthropology, 37(1), 1– 16. https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2019.370102 vaidhyanathan, s. (2012). the googlization of everything: (and why we should worry). university of california press. williams, r. (1977). marxism and literature. oup oxford. zittrain, j. (2013). the future of the internet and how to stop it. yale university press. zulli, d., liu, m., & gehl, r. (2020). rethinking the “social” in “social media”: insights into topology, abstraction, and scale on the mastodon social network. new media & society, 22(7), article 7. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820912533 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): turvy, a. (2023, october). potholes and power: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of ‘look at this f*ckin’ street’ on instagram. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. potholes and power: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of ‘look at this f*ckin’ street’ on instagram alex turvy tulane university introduction new orleans’ municipal government is plagued by a crisis of trust due to systemic failures across city services and infrastructure. this has created fertile ground for citizens to discursively challenge the underlying power relationship through connective action. look at this fuckin’ street (latfs) is an instagram account based in new orleans with a stated mission of “documenting the cracked and sinking streets of the crescent city.” the account tends to use humor and visuals in tandem to effectively create a more publicly accountable visual version of 311. relying on user submissions, it functions as a crowdsourced and real-time collection of the most egregious examples of deteriorating streets and sidewalks, failed repairs, and the like. the account manager insists on public anonymity, but i received direct non-anonymous access to the manager for the purpose of this research along with full access to the entirety of the account’s data. literature review the case study offered here aims to contribute to scholarship across three primary areas. first, i argue that latfs represents a novel approach to political engagement on social media as a hyperlocal phenomenon that uses connective action (bennett and segerberg 2012) fueled by humor and shaming to challenge the power of the municipal government. second, i contribute to ongoing work around digital media and urban space via analyzing how citizens as instagram users engage in the ongoing shaping and reshaping of the city through latfs. boy and uitermark (2017) call this ‘reassembling’ and focus on how this occurs recursively via mobilizing representation of specific places. third, i aim to add to scholarship via a localized case study that foregrounds issues around maintenance and repair, the operation and politics of which are most often invisible (graham and thrift 2007). maintenance and repair of infrastructure involve choices that indicate underlying values, so the latfs discourses around failed infrastructure demonstrate how repair and maintenance are both an engine and a reflection of racism, inequality, and unequal resource allocation. context in new orleans the lack of trust in the municipal government has deep historical roots but is exacerbated by overlapping and interlocking recent instances of failure and corruption. the condition of road infrastructure is particularly problematic given how widespread it is throughout the city and the material ways that it affects nearly all citizens. these road issues are visible to all, often have physical consequences for vehicles, and persist across every neighborhood in the city. a 2017 study found that 69% of roads are in either poor or mediocre condition and poor road infrastructure costs new orleans drivers an average of $657 in additional costs per year (trip 2019). research questions given this context, i am interested in looking closely at latfs to address two core questions: rq1: how does latfs serve as a discursive tool for people to challenge power relations between citizens and city agencies? rq2: considered as a means of political engagement on social media, what discursive and material aims is latfs capable of addressing? methods and data to analyze my data, i employed multimodal critical discourse analysis (mcda) to understand how the various textual and visual discourses found within latfs challenge power relations within the municipal context. foundationally, i take my approach from fairclough's (2003) socio-cultural approach to critical discourse analysis (cda), which is a three-dimensional framework for the analysis of text and discourse and thus views discourse as simultaneously a text, discourse practice, and socio-cultural practice. mcda broadens analysis to all relevant discursive modalities (machin and mayr 2012). in the case of latfs, i will consider visuals, post metadata, comments, and captions. i utilized an open coding process for analysis, which is based in grounded theory. via an existing personal relationship, i gained access to the anonymous account manager and initially communicated via direct message (dm). the exported full account data for latfs was downloaded on november 22nd, 2022, and was passed to me in unmodified .zip files directly from instagram. the size of the total data export is 15.9 gb. emerging themes i uncovered three major themes in these discourses: mocking, shaming, and exposing. there are three techniques that comprise the general approach to mockery: joking, silliness, and factual information. i operationalize joking as humor that is devoid of anger or bitterness and is often part of a collective that shares variations on a thematically or discursively organized joke. in contrast, silliness is defined as absurd and irreverent joking. finally, ostensibly factual information is used in this category to highlight failures that are humorous or ironic in nature. per scheff (2003), i understand shame as a complex emotion that can be defined as a negative evaluation of oneself or one's actions that may result in feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, worthlessness, or humiliation. this is explicitly distinguished from guilt (a feeling tied to specific actions) and embarrassment, which is a shorter-term emotion confined to narrower social circumstances. eight techniques characterize how latfs enables shaming as a practice that seeks to undermine power: anger, bitterness, sarcasm, factual information, indignation, cynicism, criticizing other city services, and moving the account’s influence offline. exposing most closely resembles citizen journalism, which greer and mclaughlin (2010) define as the practice of everyday citizens producing and disseminating news. citizen journalism is particularly important in that it gives individuals the power to challenge the official version of events and issues. three techniques contribute to this. just as with mocking and shaming, factual information is also employed here but with the intention of directly and objectively communicating facts free from emotional valence or editorializing about their meaning. next, the use of explanations supports the work of exposing failures by describing the reasons for problems as well as (often simple) potential repairs. finally, latfs strategically employs visual framing in videos and images to provide fuller context on a problem and in doing so, preempts many excuses while highlighting the depth and scope of problems. conclusion the findings of this analysis suggest that latfs uses multiple discursive techniques to challenge the power dynamics at play in the ongoing infrastructure issues in new orleans and undermine the competence and legitimacy of its municipal government. the account's stated mission of documenting and highlighting the cracked and sinking streets of the city serves as a powerful tool for amplifying the voices and concerns of everyday citizens and holding those in power accountable. by bringing attention to these issues through the dissemination of user-submitted photos and videos, the account creates a space for open and honest discussions about the systemic problems that plague the city's infrastructure. i argue that latfs is an effective and powerful participatory platform for exposing a broad range of systemic problems and their causes, allowing residents to take back the narrative of their city’s infrastructure challenges, diminish and demean the powerful interests responsible, and ultimately attempt to reclaim the power lost to negligent or even bad-faith municipal authorities in new orleans. given the way that discourses tend to expand the critique beyond road infrastructure to criticism of various city services and utility monopolies, the page ultimately seems to serve as an outlet for frustration with a broadly dysfunctional city. references bennett, w. lance, and alexandra segerberg. 2012. “the logic of connective action.” information, communication & society 15(5):739–68. boy, john d., and justus uitermark. 2017. “reassembling the city through instagram.” transactions of the institute of british geographers 42(4):612–24. doi: 10.1111/tran.12185. fairclough, norman. 2003. analysing discourse: textual analysis for social research. 1st ed. routledge. graham, stephen, and nigel thrift. 2007. “out of order: understanding repair and maintenance.” theory, culture & society 24(3):1–25. doi: 10.1177/0263276407075954. greer, chris, and eugene mclaughlin. 2010. “we predict a riot?: public order policing, new media environments and the rise of the citizen journalist.” the british journal of criminology 50(6):1041–59. machin, david, and andrea mayr. 2012. how to do critical discourse analysis: a multimodal introduction. 1st edition. los angeles: sage publications ltd. scheff, thomas j. 2003. “shame in self and society.” symbolic interaction 26(2):239– 62. trip. 2019. louisiana transportation by the numbers: meeting the state’s need for safe, smooth, and efficient mobility. washington, dc. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12185 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276407075954 grosse-alternative visions for the dns-alternative visions for the dns selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 alternative visions for the dns: core, iahc, and the possibility for expanded gtlds in early governance policy meghan grosse washington college introduction in 1994, u.s. president clinton stated that the commercialization of the internet was a “top priority” for his administration.1 the domain name system (dns), which was developed to deal with the growing unwieldiness of the commercial internet, was an early battleground in shaping the values of early internet governance policies. the system would include highly sought after addresses in generic top-level domains (gtlds) that ended in .com, .gov, .org, .edu, and so on. below this were second-level domains and country codes which ended web addresses in sequences like .uk, .jp, .ca, etc. this model raised legal and economic questions about trademarks, intellectual property, and the global distribution of addresses on top level domains. technical experts were wary of the limitations of the proposed system, particularly given the potential to expand the number of gtlds. while many groups responded to u.s. governance policy, a number of non-profit associations were particularly vocal in their critique, most notably the internet council of registrars (core), the international ad hoc committee (iahc), and the internet assigned numbers authority (iana) represented by jon postel. the importance of this system cannot be overstated, so it is unsurprising that so much attention was paid to its structure. unlike what was available before, the domain name system offered users a formal way to find internet addresses. for political purposes, control of the domain name system had “the potential to serve as a powerful tool of internet enforcement and to shape the nature of the internet itself.”2 clinton senior policy advisor, ira magaziner, was tasked with leading the global effort to create a coherent policy for governance, including management and oversight of the dns. as part of this, magaziner and his team fielded comments from and addressed concerns from governmental and non-governmental groups, including core, iahc, and iana. 1 jack goldsmith and tim wu, who controls the internet? (oxford: oxford university press, 2008), 40. 2 31. suggested citation (apa): grosse, m. (2023, october). alternative visions for the dns: core, iahc, and the possibility for expanded gtlds in early governance policy. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the dns was particularly contentious as it was both a practical and symbolic show of u.s. power on the internet. the unequal distribution of power the u.s. held in internet development indicated that the internet, despite being a “medium of instantaneous communication” that “might overcome geographic distance,” was not a medium that could “simply erase political or social differences.”3 methods/critical framework i examine the proposed frameworks for dns oversight in this era through archival analysis. this research focuses on documents found in the ira magaziner electronic commerce papers at the clinton presidential library in little rock, arkansas. this archive primarily represents the work on internet governance undertaken within the department of commerce, the department under which clinton moved internet governance policy. this material includes discussion of, comments from, and correspondence with representations three primary groups: 1) official government actors from the u.s. and abroad, including members of intergovernmental organizations, 2) for-profit organizations and other corporate interest groups, and 3) early internet adopters and technical experts who generally understood the mechanics of the internet as well as its capacities and limitations. i apply a political economy of communication framework to identify the centers of power in conversations about domain name management and to assess the degree to which alternative models were addressed and/or incorporated into the final policy proposal put forth by the u.s. government. findings/conclusions in examining discourse about expanding the number of gtlds, i argue that clinton’s senior policy advisor, ira magaziner, and other members of the department of commerce proactively worked against the expansion of gtlds, protecting the domination of gtlds by u.s. entities. magaziner and others had a direct line to jon postel and closely reviewed discussed alternative proposals coming from groups like iahc and core. in public fora, magaziner expressed concern about the stability and interconnectivity of an expanded system even though postel and other supporters of the expansion – individuals and organizations with technical expertise magaziner lacked – repeatedly asserted that this was not a concern. while magaziner and the department of commerce resisted adding even seven new gtlds, core clearly stated that there could be 100 new gtlds if they were allowed.4 the primary arguments against the iahc proposal for expanded gtlds were that it was a process “dominated by the internet engineering community” and “lacking participation by and input from business.” 5 in looking across clinton-era governance policy, there is a consistent concern for addressing the needs of business above all else. 3 abbate, janet. inventing the internet.(cambridge, ma: mit press, 2000), 212. 4 articles – ira magaziner, box 015, folder 100021 10383 100021-004. ira magaziner electronic commerce papers, william j. clinton presidential library archives, little rock, arkansas, united states, 1998. 5 domain names [4], box 019, folder 10299 13115 100299-003. ira magaziner electronic commerce papers, william j. clinton presidential library archives, little rock, arkansas, united states, 1998. while at various times, magaziner tried to draw on postel’s reputation to make his case, their relationship was frequently a contentious one. even as postel’s iana operated alongside of and in coordination with network solutions inc. (nsi), the corporation first contracted by the department of defense and later by the national science foundation to manage the dns, postel proposed strategies that sometimes went against the official u.s. government proposal. disagreements over the allocation of top-level domains and the role of nsi soured the relationship between postel and magaziner. in 1998, this came to a head when magaziner threatened postel that he’d “never work on the internet again.”6 this butting of technological expertise against political power exemplifies the challenges of governing a system with so many political, technological, and economic interests woven together. connection to conference theme as the internet transitioned from a network used primarily by government and educational entities to a mass medium, there was a potential for revolutionary modes of communication, information sharing, education, and creative expression, and a revolutionary, de-centralized structure of governance. this potential is captured in the myth of the technological sublime, represented in early internet discourse that promised “instantaneous worldwide communication,… a genuine global village,” and “a world in which people communicate across borders without the filters and censors set up by watchful governments and profit-conscious businesses.”7 the revolutionary potential of the internet was repeatedly undercut by governance policies that prioritized private, commercial interests. rather than creating a broad set of top-level domains that could be shared around the globe, magaziner and clinton’s department of commerce defended the decision was made to maintain a limited number, and in doing so protected many highly valuable web addresses held existing u.s. companies while other countries had to use their designated country code domains. in facing the overwhelming power of clinton’s department of commerce, attempts at revolutionary structures – in the dns and in other areas of governance policy – failed to be realized. as arguments about a potentially fracturing internet continue alongside discussions of multistakeholder governance, this history is an important foundation from which to better understand that discourse. references abbate, janet. inventing the internet. cambridge, ma: mit press, 2000. articles – ira magaziner, box 015, folder 100021 10383 100021-004. ira magaziner electronic commerce papers, william j. clinton presidential library archives, little rock, arkansas, united states, 1998. cave, damien. “it’s time for icann to go.” salon. retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20110722170621/http://www.salon.com/technology/ feature/2002/07/02/gilmore/print.html. july 2, 2002. 6 damien cave, “it’s time for icann to go.” salon. (2002, july 2). retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20110722170621/http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2002/07/02/gilmo re/print.html. 7 vincent mosco, the digital sublime: myth, power, and cyberspace. (cambridge, ma: mit press, 2004), 24-25. domain names [4], box 019, folder 10299 13115 100299-003. ira magaziner electronic commerce papers, william j. clinton presidential library archives, little rock, arkansas, united states, 1998. goldsmith, jack & wu, tim. who controls the internet?: illusions of a borderless world. oxford: oxford university press, 2008. mosco, vincent. the digital sublime: myth, power, and cyberspace. cambridge, ma: mit press, 2004. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): proferes, n., cotter, k., thorson, k., battocchio, a. f., de, a., chang, c.-f. (2024, october). localized volunteer moderation and its discursive construction. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. localized volunteer moderation and its discursive construction nicholas proferes arizona state university kelley cotter pennsylvania state university kjerstin thorson colorado state university ava francesca battocchio michigan state university ankolika de pennsylvania state university chia-fang chang michigan state university body the social media industry has begun more prominently positioning itself as a vehicle for tapping into local community. facebook offers hundreds of region-specific community groups, proudly touting these in nation-wide commercials (facebook, 2020). reddit has hundreds of subreddits focused on specific states, cities, and towns. and nextdoor encourages users to sign up and “get the most out of your neighborhood.” in these locally oriented digital spaces, users interact, discuss community issues, and share information about what is happening around them. volunteer moderators with localized knowledge are important agents in the creation, maintenance, and upkeep of these digital spaces. and, as we show, facebook, reddit, and nextdoor create strategic communication to guide this localized volunteer moderator labor to realize specific goals within these spaces. as the fabric of local community changes to incorporate these digital groups, it is important to critically interrogate how platforms position themselves through their discourse in relation to local communities and the volunteer moderators that shape these spaces. in this work, we ask: “what are the promises the social media industry make about local community groups, and how do they position volunteer moderators to help realize those promises?” gillespie (2010) observes that social media companies are careful in how they position “themselves to users, clients, advertisers, and policymakers, making strategic claims as to what they do and do not do, and how their place in the information landscape should be understood” (para. 1). we extend gillespie’s logic to trace how the social media industry’s discourse contributes to public beliefs about what local community groups are, how they should be used and maintained, their place in civic life, and the role of local volunteer moderators within them. we engage in a qualitative content analysis of 849 documents relating to moderation created by facebook, reddit, and nextdoor (400 from facebook, 184 from reddit, and 265 from nextdoor) generated by the companies between 2017 and 2023. these documents address local communities, volunteer moderation, or the role platforms play in civic life. we find the companies each project a vision of what platform-mediated local communities look like. further, we find this discourse simultaneously helps sustain and orient a volunteer moderator workforce that performs a degree of labor sometimes equivalent to a full-time job, in part by motivating people not with money but virtue. through our analysis, we illustrate how each platform constructs a utopian vision of local community. each utopia varies according to their underlying ethos and ideological approaches to governance. facebook emphasizes diverse connections, bringing the world closer together (one locality at a time), and communities that are constructive. nextdoor emphasizes kindness, inclusivity and belonging, and meaningful connections between neighbors. reddit emphasizes a bottom-up view of community akin to a liberal democracy where free expression pairs with tolerance of multiple points of view. each of the platform then situates volunteer moderators in their vision as a mechanism for the utopia’s realization. to properly guide volunteer moderators, the platforms construct discourse that encourages forms of “proactive” moderation, “reactive” moderation, careful record keeping, growth, and the avoidance of volunteer moderator burnout. platforms’ projection of these utopian imaginaries is important to their success. certainly, they help attract users. who wouldn’t want to be in a space that is welcoming, inclusive, and enriches one’s community? however, this utopian rhetoric is also key for recruiting the volunteer moderators themselves. volunteer moderators are a critical source of (free) labor for these companies, worth millions of dollars (li et al., 2022). to sustain a voluntary workforce performing a degree of labor sometimes equivalent to a full-time job, the companies must motivate people not with money but with civic virtue. volunteer moderators are told they must value the work as a means of altruistically “making a difference” in their community, similar to values-driven, other-oriented offline volunteerism. we find that platforms also appeal to egoistic motivation (wilson & son, 2018) by positioning volunteer moderators as leaders in their communities. in doing so, they encourage volunteer moderators to create content themselves and, in turn, guide other users in creating content within the boundaries of the platform’s rules. by generating and sustaining engagement on the platforms, volunteer moderators become an incredibly important source of labor and value-generation for the companies, against which they can sell advertisements and further expand their user bases (see: smythe, 2001; fuchs, 2015; terranova, 2000). by channeling the free labor or volunteer moderators to build a “kind” (or, perhaps $kind—nextdoor’s stock ticker symbol) network that functions as a simulacra of a utopian local community, encouraging growth and the recruitment of additional new free labor/volunteer moderators, the companies can derive value from the intrinsic network effects of these spaces. the platforms’ discourses also orient volunteer moderators to performing another kind of labor: that of reputation management and accountability buffering for the platforms. for example, in response to criticisms about racism on the platform (holder & akinnibi, 2022), nextdoor began much more proactively emphasizing the removal of hate-speech and the promotion of inclusivity in its communications about moderation. in response to their own controversies, facebook and reddit both began highlighted stories featuring volunteer moderators performing good samaritan acts that position the platforms as productive of more compassionate, cooperative communities. volunteer moderators are the frontlines of realizing these initiatives. when new (or old) social problems emerge, the social media industry can turn volunteer moderators towards addressing the problem without substantial new investments in labor. and, if users or other external stakeholders perceive a persisting failure to effectively resolve the problem, volunteer moderators act as buffers, putting distance between the companies and the on-the-ground decision making, as the companies have “empowered” their non-employees to deal with the problem. in this sense, we find local volunteer moderators serve as a convenient fire-shield, as part of a broader networked platform governance (caplan, 2023). and, the companies can take credit for volunteer moderators’ successes in cultivating welcoming spaces while evading blame for problems. while facebook, nextdoor, and reddit occasionally mention the importance of offline local expertise, the reality is that many volunteer moderators fall into the role as a result of either self-selection or active participation in their online community. our analysis reflects extensive discussion of what moderators should and should not do, suggesting a perceived understanding of volunteer moderators as leaders-in-training rather than already-made leaders. optimistically, the difference between the ascendancy of leaders offline and within the platforms’ digital spaces could represent an opportunity for true grassroots governance of communities, as volunteer moderators face fewer institutional barriers to attaining their position. alternately, volunteer moderators might be seen as those receptive to or unquestioning of platforms’ articulated definitions of good leadership, which serve the social media industry’s needs and interests first and foremost. references caplan, r. (2023). networked platform governance: the construction of the democratic platform. international journal of communication, 17, 22. facebook. (2020). facebook groups: building communities. as retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zafaftxtzeg fuchs, c. (2015). culture and economy in the age of social media. routledge. gillespie, t. (2010). the politics of ‘platforms.’ new media & society, 12(3), 347–364. holder, s., & akinnibi, f. (2022, june 9). nextdoor’s quest to beat toxic content and make money. bloomberg.com. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/202206-09/nextdoor-s-quest-to-beat-toxic-content-and-make-money li, h., hecht, b., & chancellor, s. (2022). measuring the monetary value of online volunteer work (arxiv:2205.14528). arxiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2205.14528 smythe, d. w. (2001). on the audience commodity and its work. media and cultural studies: keyworks, 253–279. terranova, t. (2000). free labor: producing culture for the digital economy. social text, 63, 33–58. wilson, j., & son, j. (2018). the connection between neighboring and volunteering. city & community, 17(3), 720–736. https://doi.org/10.1111/cico.12324 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zafaftxtzeg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-06-09/nextdoor-s-quest-to-beat-toxic-content-and-make-money https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-06-09/nextdoor-s-quest-to-beat-toxic-content-and-make-money https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2205.14528 https://doi.org/10.1111/cico.12324 selected papers of #aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers philadelphia, pa, usa / 18-21 oct 2023 suggested citation (apa): udenze. s., firstinitial. (2023, october). exploring nigeria’s endsars movement through yhe nexus of memory. paper presented at aoir2023: the 24th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. philadelphia, pa, usa: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. exploring nigeria`s endsars movement through the nexus of memory silas udenze universitat oberta de catalunya, barcelona, spain introduction on 3 october 2020, a 22 years young man identified as joshua ambrose was shot dead by a team of the nigerian police special anti-robbery squad (sars) in delta state, nigeria, on the allegation that he was an internet fraudster (dambo et al., 2021). the sars was established in 1992 to curb crimes such as robbery and kidnapping. however, the sars has been accused of gross human rights violations (wada, 2021). joshua's shooting was captured in a video. the audio in the video states that the police just shot and killed the owner of the lexus suv and zoomed off with his car (agbo, 2021). the viral video generated outrage that condemned joshua's ordeal and reflected the long-standing frustration about police brutality in nigeria. in a few days, the online agitation had transformed into vast decentralised street protests in major cities in the country, mainly organised through social media. again, on 20 october 2020, the police, in an attempt to disperse peaceful protesters, shot and killed untold persons at a popular protest site, lekki tollgate, lagos, nigeria (uwalaka, 2022). since 20 october 2020 to date, the movement has had two commemoration protest anniversaries. the movement has continued to construct memories across time, an area dominated by western studies (daphi & zamponi, 2019). researchers have explored the endsars movement from diverse angles; comparison to black lives matter (nwakanma, 2022; wada, 2021); the influence of celebrities on the protest (uwalaka, 2022; ajaegbu et al., 2022), queer solidarity at the movement (nwabunnia, 2021); young people, their social media use and #endsars protest (abimbade et al., 2022; dambo et al., 2021); feminist movement and #endsars (nwakanma, 2022). despite the burgeoning literature on endsars, the literature is devoid of studies from the memory study perspective, a critical area in social movement studies (smit, 2020; daphi & zamponi, 2019; merill & lindgren, 2020). besides, i argue that considering the online feature of the movement, the current literature on endsars needs to include the novelty and methodological rigour of virtual ethnography. consequently, this study attempts to understand how protesters use facebook, whatsapp, and instagram “stories” (ephemeral; 24-hour “story”) to construct a memory of the endsars movement in nigeria from 2020 until its anniversaries in 2021, 2022, and 2023. social movement-memory studies nexus the scholarly synergy between social movements and memory is expanding, and the study boundaries in the social movement-memory synergy is still blurry (daphi & zamponi, 2019). it is largely characterised by dispersed studies rooted in their respective disciplinary orientations. three factors within social movement research have crucially spurred the growing interest in memories. firstly, the increasing focus on collective action that characterised social movements studies has engendered the movement-memory synergy. in this vein, the cultural turn in social movement studies has meant that growing attention is being paid to how protesters make sense of themselves, their environments, and the past (baumgarten, daphi, and ullrich, 2014; johnston, 2009). secondly, the social movement-memory nexus has witnessed considerable growth in the context of recent calls for widening the temporal perspective within social movement studies (daphi & zamponi, 2019). thirdly, social movement researchers' interest in memories is growing due to the debates and deployment of new media, precisely, social media in social movements (smit, 2020; della porta & diani, 2020; barassi, 2017; vivienne, 2016; merill & lindgren, 2020; chidgey, 2018). consequently, the inclusion of memory studies in social movement research has provided useful insights into the symbolic construction of the reality in which collective action takes place. consequently, interpreting memory not as a mere mirror of past events, but as the result of collective practices able to reveal insights into present ways of interpreting reality (daphi & zamponi, 2019). why “story”? the ability to tell stories parallels the progression of human history. our earliest memory is telling or listening to stories and keeping track of the past (amâncio, 2017). stories can engage our minds, question our beliefs, and rekindle old memories (garrety, 2008). we are encouraged not only to listen to stories but also to tell them. overtime and with the advancement of communication technologies, the modalities for storytelling have transformed tremendously, for instance, through social media. snapchat pioneered the "story" feature of social media and innovated the main features (amâncio, 2017). calling the feature "your story", "my story", "story" in most social media, and "status" on whatsapp, serve a significant purpose and role in how the users interact with the feature. as lambert (2012) explains in his book "digital storytelling capturing lives, creating communities", another way to understand digital storytelling is to look at who is telling the story. different subjects can tell stories i, he, she, and they. the difference between these subjects changes the story's perspective. for lambert (2012), there are, "my story", "our story", "their story", and also "no story", all of them having different specifications. the possessive adjectives give a sense of personalisation to the feature; it belongs to the user. that is their story, and they are the ones to decide how, when they will use it and what they will post. either they are the main character in the story, the narrator or both. according to erstad and wertsh (2008), these possessive expressions hold essential meaning. erstad and wertsh argue that by using these possessive adjectives, we see combinations of personal expression and mediational means used in an integrated way. recently, researchers (johnson & morley, 2021; bainotti et al., 2021; villaespesa & wowkowych, 2020; ferrari, 2022) are beginning to pay attention to studying the "story". however, there is a dearth of studies on the exploration of the feature on the social movement-memory nexus perspective. this is yet another research gap this study attempts to fill; the connection between "story" and memory. figure 1: screenshots of “stories” methods/procedure using the virtual ethnographic methodological approach (hine, 2000; hine, 2015; pink et al., 2016) and my reflexivity as an insider (finefter-rosenbluh, 2017), this research contributes to this growing domain. this project gathers screenshots of "stories" from selected accounts, forming an integral part of the primary data. visual cultural researchers argue that images dominate our lives (ownby, 2018), and image-based culture thrives within diverse aspects of social media (jhally, 2003). studies (shanaathanan, 2015; ownby, 2018; heng, 2020) have infused visual data with other approaches such as interviewing, focus groups, and textual/discourse analysis. i have been a part of the movement before it was popularised in 2020. i have archived and analysed over hundred screenshots. besides, i have been keeping notes as a participant observer. presently, this study has conducted nine interviews. i incorporated the interviewing method and participant observation to ensure reliability, credibility, and trustworthiness (lincoln & guba, 1985, 1986), and improve the study`s methodological rigour. the data were analysed using a combination of braun and clark's (2021) reflexive thematic analysis and visual essay analysis (heng, 2020). preliminary findings/conclusion preliminary results indicate that the "story" enables connective memory and constructs memetic resurrection, networked commemoration and digital narration of the endsars agitation. i argue that the current discovery illustrates that the memory of the endsars movement is both retrospective and prospective, a repertoire for protesters today and in the future. references agbo, g.e. (2021). the #endsars protest in nigeria and political force of image production and circulation on social media. ikenga journal of african studies, 22(2), 1-22. ajaegbu, o.o., adekoya, o.h., adewumi, e.f. & ologbenla, t.o. (2022). celebrity cyberactivism on social advocacy participation among university of lagos undergraduates during the #endsars protest in nigeria. journal of positive school psychology, 6(6), 8121-8130. amâncio, m. (2017). “put it in your story”: digital storytelling in instagram and snapchat stories. retrievedfromhttps://www.divaportal.org/smash/get/diva2:1111663/fulltext01.pdf bainotti, l., caliandro, a., & gandini, a. (2021). from archive cultures to ephemeral content, and back: studying instagram stories with digital methods. new media & society, 23(12), 3656–3676. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820960071 barassi, v. (2017). digital citizens? data traces and family life. contemporary social science: journal of the academy of social sciences 12(1-2), 84-95. baumgarten, b. (2017). the children of the carnation revolution? connections between portugal`s anti-austerity movement and the revolutionary period 1974/1975. social movement studies, 16(1), 51-63. baumgarten, b., daphi, p., & ullrich, p. (2014, eds.). conceptualising culture in social movement research. palgrave macmillan. braun, v., & clarke, v. (2021). thematic analysis: a practical guide. sage chidgey, r. (2018). “a modest reminder”: performing suffragette memory in a british feminist webzine. in reading, a. & katriel, t. (eds) cultural memories of nonviolent struggles, (pp. 52-70). palgrave macmillan. dambo, t.h, ersoy, m. auwal, a.m. victor olorunsola, v.o., & saydam, m.b. (2021): office of the citizen: a qualitative analysis of twitter activity during the lekki shooting in nigeria’s #endsars protests. information, communication & society, 25 (15), 2246-2263. daphi, p. (2017a). becoming a movement. identity, narrative and memory in the european global justice movement.rowman & littlefield. daphi, s. & zamponi, l. (2019). exploring the movement-memory nexus: insights and ways forward. mobilisation: an international quarterly, 24(4), 399-417. della porta, d. & diani, m. (2020). social movements: an introduction. wiley doerr, n. (2014). memory and culture in social movements. in baumgarten, b., daphi, p. & ullrich, p. (eds.) conceptualizing culture in social movement research (pp. 206-26) palgrave macmillan. erstad, o., & wertsch, j. (2008). tales of mediation: narrative and digital media as cultural tools. in: k. lundby, ed., digital storytelling, mediatised stories: self representations in new media. (vol. 52). peter lang. 21-40. ferrari, e. (2022). latency and crisis: mutual aid activism in the covid-19 pandemic. qualitative sociology. http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/272586/ finefter-rosenbluh, i. (2017). incorporating perspective taking in reflexivity: a method to enhance insider qualitative research processes. international journal of qualitative methods, 16, 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406917703539 garrety, c. (2008). digital storytelling: an emerging tool for student and teacher learning. phd. iowa state university. gongaware, t.b. (2011). keying the past to the present: collective memories and continuity in collective identity change. social movement studies 10(1), 39-54. heng, t. (2020). creating visual essays: narrative and thematic approaches. in the sage handbook of visual research methods (pp. 616-628). sage. hine, c. (2000). virtual ethnography. sage hine, c. (2015). ethnography for the internet embedded, embodied and everyday. bloomsbury. jhally, s. (2003). image-based culture: advertising and popular culture. in g. dine & j. m. humez (eds.), gender, race, and class in media: a text-reader (2nd ed., pp. 249–257). sage. johnson, a.j., & morley, e.g. (2021). sharing personal memories on ephemeral social media facilitates autobiographical memory. cyberpsychology, behavior, and social networking, 24(11),745-749. http://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2020.0511 johnston, h. (2009, ed.) culture, social movements, and protest. routledge. lambert, j. (2012). digital storytelling: capturing lives, creating community. routledge. lincoln, y. & guba, e. (1985). naturalistic inquiry. sage. lincoln, y. & guba, e. (1986). but is it rigorous? trustworthiness and authenticity in naturalistic evaluation. new directions for program evaluation, (30), 73 – 84. merrill, s., & lindgren, s. (2018). the rhythms of social movement memories: the mobilisation of silvio meier’s activist remembrance across platforms. social movement studies 10(1), 1-18. nwabunnia, o.a. (2021). #endsars movement in nigeria: tensions and solidarities amongst protesters. gender & development 29(2–3), 351–367. nwakanma, a.p. (2022). from black lives matter to endsars: women’s sociopolitical power and the transnational movement for black lives. retrieved from: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/abs/fromblack-lives-matter-to-endsars-womens-sociopolitical-power-and-the-transnationalmovement-for-black-lives/5b65728a08eee5764326cd180681fcf5 ownby, t. (2018). visual images as data within qualitative research. in allen t. (ed.) the sage encyclopedia of communication research methods. sage pink, s., hjorth, l., & horst, h.a. (2016). digital ethnography: principles and practice. sage. shanaathanan, t. (2015). commemorating home: art as placemaking, an artist's narration. journal of material culture, 20(4), 415–28. smit, r. (2020). connective memory work on justice for mike brown. in s. merrill, e. keightley, & p. daphi (eds.), social movements, cultural memory and digital media: mobilising mediated remembrance (pp. 85-108). (palgrave macmillan memory studies book series (pmms)). palgrave macmillan. smit, r., heinrich, a., & broersma, m. (2018). activating the past in the ferguson protests memory work, digital activism and the politics of platforms. new media & society, 20(9), 3119–3139. uwalaka, t. (2022). social media as a solidarity vehicle during the 2020 #endsars protests in nigeria. journal of asian and african studies, 1–16. villaespesa, e., & wowkowych, s. (2020). ephemeral storytelling with social media: snapchat and instagram stories at the brooklyn museum. social media + society, 6(1), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119898776 vivienne, s. (2016). digital identity and everyday activism: sharing private stories with networked publics. springer. wada, h.i. (2021). an assessment of nigeria’s 2020 #endsars protests and a comparative analysis with us’s black lives matter protests. scientia moralitas international journal of multidisciplinary research, 6(2), 8-22. zamponi, l. (2013). collective memory and social movements. in della porta, d., david, a.s. & klandermans, b. (eds.) the wiley-blackwell encyclopedia of social and political movement (pp. 225-299). wiley-blackwell. zamponi, l. (2018). social movements, memory and media. narrative in action in the italian and spanish student movements. palgrave macmillan. zamponi, l., & daphi, p. (2014). breaks and continuities in and between cycles of protest. memories and legacies of the global justice movement in the context of antiausterity mobilisations. in della porta, d. & mattoni, a. (eds.), spreading protest: social movements in times of crisis (pp. 193-225). ecpr press. microsoft word aoir2024-submission-template (4) selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): roy, d., & chakraborty, j. (2024, november). affective labour and emotional labour in the commodification of ‘self’ in indian women’s family vlogging. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. affective labour and emotional labour in the commodification of ‘self’ in indian women’s family vlogging debopriya roy tezpur university dr. joya chakraborty tezpur university introduction the participatory nature of youtube has enabled hundreds of indian women to create identities and achieve financial autonomy through family vlogging. with growing popularity, these amateur family vlogs on youtube are providing alternative representations of ordinary families. this niche vlogging is situated in microcelebrity culture. here the celebrification of ordinary lives is curated through the narrative of selfdisclosure, interactive communication with the audience, and by creating a persona that consistently feels authentic, engaging, and celebrity-like, regardless of the scale or condition of their audience (senft, 2008; marwick, 2013; abidin, 2018). the celebrification of ‘self’ and ‘family’ requires the enactment of various kinds of affective and emotional labour. the immaterial labour and the overall ‘work’ done in social media are extensively discussed in academia (hardt, 1999; abidin, 2016; duffy 2017). this paper goes beyond that to observe the negotiations of affective labour and emotional labour in the lives and content of indian women family vloggers as they engage in microcelebrity practices on youtube. it further enquires about their motivation for vlogging and its implication in giving visibility to their unpaid domestic work. method this paper builds upon the fieldwork conducted for the first author’s phd thesis. our goal was not merely to gather data (de waal malefyt & morais, 2012) but to explore how these vloggers make sense of their lives and work within the context of family vlogging. in other words, we sought to understand the work of vlogging through subjective experience. we specifically looked for family vloggers without a professional team to handle content creation, as it would allow us to observe the different arrays of labour involved. the fieldwork in physical space included in-person semi-structured interviews with the vloggers and participant observation during content creation (both in front of and behind the camera). we also incorporated digital ethnography as a method to situate vlogging as a contemporary cultural practice. the six vloggers represent different parts of india, and diverse socio-economic-linguistic-cultural backgrounds, including two diaspora vloggers. this paper adopts a case-based approach to ethical challenges as per the recommendation of the association of internet researchers (aoir) (franzke et al., 2020). focusing on assessing the public availability of content, its sensitivity, and the influential reach of the channel, the current study recognises that vloggers share their personal lives as informed individuals who purposefully publish these materials to garner public attention, often incorporating advertisement and brand promotions. this justification calls for a critical examination of their content. however, considering that the youtubers in this study extensively share their personal life, the channel names and the vloggers’ names have been kept confidential throughout the paper. discussion: we posit these indian family vlogs in a post-feminist notion of domesticity where a new mode of gender subjectivity is formed. the vloggers’ negotiation of domesticity through vlogging is situated in a contested space of tradition and modernity giving it a polysemic attribute. motherhood, domestic work & self-disclosure are three prevalent themes of the vlogs. the narrative of the vlogs, which regularly reinforces and internalises the socially legitimised sacrificial domestic ideology of the vloggers, serves as a site for interaction for the audience. despite the vloggers’ conformity towards the ideal indian woman who shoulders the burden of housework, adheres to the societal gender roles and remains responsible for the family’s happiness; making a vlog on that performed identity empowers them. the vlogs further the vloggers’ agency in transforming their invisible work and life into visible digital artefacts that bring recognition and financial autonomy. but in this process, the vloggers’ housework responsibilities are complemented by the additional work of recording it skilfully, editing it, posting it strategically, managing their visibility on the platform and engaging with the audience. the vloggers we interviewed considered it challenging to balance the work of vlogging with their household responsibilities, whereby their housework and recording happen simultaneously, with the vlogs presenting a continuous flow of everyday life. on the surface, it offers the vloggers the flexibility to work from home without disrupting their domestic roles and ideologies, but it increases their burden in reality. we argue that affective labour is involved in these family vlogging in two ways. firstly, labour is involved in maintaining the family ties that are highly dependent on women’s unpaid work within the domestic space. secondly, the affective labour needed to tactfully represent an emotional, authentic, intimate, and relatable self. this is achieved through self-disclosure, and portrayal of the satisfaction of having and managing a happy, ideal family. the affective labour that these women undertake while maintaining their home and family responsibilities creates the desired effect of gendered relatability and adoration among the audience. the family vloggers enact affective labour more prominently than other vlogging genres. this occurs because the celebrification of family vloggers heavily relies on their availability, accessibility, intimacy, creation of feelgood moments on vlogs, a portrayal of aspirational lives and conformity to normative socio-cultural practices and morals. we further note that here affective labour overpowers entrepreneurial labour since the promotional work by these vloggers is enmeshed with their gender roles in the domestic context, their housework responsibilities, and the life they lead on camera. our fieldwork reveals that the preparation vloggers take before recording is centred more on their facial expressions, voice modulation, and body language than on their make-up and attire. even though they repeatedly claim not to make any special efforts for recording, we observed extensive work on emotional expressions that can be best explained by alice hochschild’s (1979) concept of emotion work. their spontaneity, and effortlessness in recording vlogs add to their authenticity and intimacy. in constructing indian womanhood on screen, they present a normatively accepted bodily representation while displaying desexualized pleasures (such as self-care routines) and avoiding sexualised topics. this demands an intensive interplay of affective and emotional labour. the interviews and the comment section of the vlogs reveal the vloggers continuously receiving remarks on their attire, requesting them to conform to traditional gendered apparel and symbols. the regulatory behaviour of the audience goes beyond bodily appearances and social, cultural or religious practices. with the vloggers’ everyday lives commodified, their family relationships become a focal point for audience interaction. the vloggers describe their experience of receiving comments that can feel intrusive or offensive. managing all of these, along with continuing self-disclosure and adhering to microcelebrity practices, requires them to undertake extensive emotional labour and gives rise to new forms of vulnerability. we further find that there is no significant difference in the enactment of affective or emotional labour based on subscriber count. our interaction with the vloggers shows that the primary motivation to perform these labours comes in the form of fame, acknowledgement of their invisible housework, and creating a gendered identity which facilitates a sense of empowerment. finally, we argue that these vlogs have become a living testament to the lives and work of indian women, their invisible unpaid work and their ongoing battles against inequalities. however, notwithstanding their attempts to negotiate gender expectations, we conclude that these vlogs sometimes contribute to perpetuating typical gender roles prevalent in indian society. references: abidin, c. (2016). “aren’t these just young, rich women doing vain things online?”: influencer selfies as subversive frivolity. social media + society, 2(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116641342 abidin, c. (2018). internet celebrity: understanding fame online. emerald publishing limited. de waal malefyt, t., & morais, r. j. (2020). advertising and anthropology: ethnographic practice and cultural perspectives. taylor & francis group duffy, b. e. (2017). (not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. yale university press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1q31skt franzke, a s, bechmann, a, zimmer, m, ess, c and the association of internet researchers (2020). internet research: ethical guidelines 3.0. https://aoir.org/reports/ethics3.pdf hardt, m. (1999). affective labor. boundary 2, 26(2). https://www.jstor.org/stable/303793 hochschild, a. r. (1979). emotion work, feeling rules, and social structure. american journal of sociology, 85(3). https://www.jstor.org/stable/2778583 marwick, a. e. (2013). status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. yale university press. senft tm (2008) camgirls: celebrity and community in the age of social networks. new york, ny: peter lang selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): katsirea, irini. (2024, october). from florida and texas to karlsruhe: online platforms as publishers of yore or as (un)common carriers? paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. from florida and texas to karlsruhe: online platforms as publishers of yore or as (un)common carriers? irini katsirea university of sheffield introduction the question as to the most apt regulatory model to apply to the internet is one that occupies legislators, policymakers and courts, at both national and international level. in its genesis, this new medium was conceived of as a ‘common carrier medium’, free from government control. john perry barlow, author of ‘a declaration of the independence of cyberspace’, proclaimed in 1996 that national sovereignty should not extend to the realm of the internet. a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since barlow’s romanticised vision of cyberspace. in recent times, big platforms, under increasing pressure to curb the spread of disinformation and hate speech, have gradually become more susceptible to the notion of some form of state regulation. mark zuckerberg argued that facebook should not be called to make fine balancing judgements on free speech without democratic oversight (wintour, 2020). content moderation is the ‘central service platforms offer’, the added value that sets them apart from the open web (gillespie, 2018). with the help of algorithms and of human moderators, they moderate obscene or violent content out of a sense of corporate social responsibility but also on economic grounds, so as to remain an attractive environment for users and advertisers alike (klonick, 2018). the editorial-like judgements platforms make about users’ speech are carried out with little transparency or accountability (heims, 2017; ammori, 2014). users can access the platforms’ terms of service, but these typically consist of broad guidelines, which provide inadequate insight into the exact types of content that fail to pass muster. since the 2016 trending news controversy, the criticism that platforms are engaged in a concerted effort to silence conservative speech persists. the texas and florida laws both texas and florida adopted ‘anti-online censorship’ laws to prevent platforms from engaging in viewpoint-based censorship of users’ posts.1 netchoice, a trade association representing large social media platforms, challenged these laws. the platforms argued that their content curation is protected speech, and that they are publishers akin to newspapers. the challenges let to two contrasting judgements. the court of appeals for the fifth circuit likened platforms to common carriers, which are subject to non-discrimination requirements. it disputed that their content curation amounts to first amendment protected speech and upheld the constitutionality of the texas law.2 the court of appeals for the eleventh circuit, on the other hand, rejected platforms’ characterisation as common carriers. it argued that their content moderation decisions are first amendment protected editorial judgements and declared the florida law unconstitutional.3 the supreme court held that neither of the courts performed the constitutional analysis correctly, and remanded the cases. the supreme court and the diametrically opposed texas and florida judgments show that the dice have not yet been cast as regards the regulatory model for online platforms, and that comparisons between old and new media are prevalent. however, the usefulness of such comparative exercises is doubtful and might obscure rather than clarify the issues at stake (pasquale, 2016; katsirea, 2024). newspapers mostly run their own content and exhibit their own editorial voice, while online platforms merely provide links to foreign content, thus resembling broadcasters or cable operators who choose what to include in their schedules. the analogy to broadcasters or to common carriers has been favoured by some in view of the increasingly invasive and ubiquitous nature of the internet and of the scarcity of attention and diversity in a highly concentrated online environment (desai, 2022). the choice of analogy matters. comparing online platforms to common carriers means tackling monopolistic or nearmonopolistic power and ensuring neutrality in access (sabeel rahman 2018). comparing them to broadcasters means subjecting them to substantive regulations in the public interest (kennedy, 2022). taming online platforms by human rights? a further avenue by which to reign in the power of online platforms, and one that the above judgments did not address, is by subjecting them to human rights. in the us, the question whether users should be able to assert their first amendment rights against social media platforms is discussed in the light of the state action doctrine. this doctrine stipulates that first amendment rights are only guaranteed against the state, not against private corporations (hooker, 2019). private actors may exceptionally be subject to constitutional restrictions if they exercise ‘essentially a public function’ or if they provide services ‘traditionally exclusively reserved to the state’.4 this has been declined in the case of an email service or a cable channel.5 the extension of the state action 1 h.b. no. 20 <https://perma.cc/9kf3-leqx>; senate bill 7072 <http://laws.flrules.org/2021/32#page=9> accessed 28 february 2024. 2 netchoice, llc v ken paxton (5th cir 2022). 3 netchoice, llc v att'y gen. 34 f.4th 1196 (11th cir 2022). 4 marsh v alabama, 326 u.s. 501 (1946); jackson v metropolitan edison company, 419 u.s. 345 (1974). 5 cyber promotions, inc v aol, inc 948 f. supp. 436 (1996); manhattan community access corp. v halleck, 139 s. ct. 1921 (2019). https://perma.cc/9kf3-leqx http://laws.flrules.org/2021/32#page=9 doctrine to online platforms has been viewed as problematic as it would likely undermine their power to exercise editorial control over speech.6 in germany, the question of platform regulation by human rights has been fought in manifold court cases, and has divided courts and commentators alike. some argue that the internet giants should be bound by free speech guarantees like the state in view of their position as the digital public square, and should hence not be allowed to delete lawful content (schwartmann and mühlenbeck, 2020). others claim that private platforms should not be equated with the state, and that they should have the freedom to engage in meaningful content moderation of content that is ‘lawful but awful’. if social media networks had to fully protect free speech rights, they would need to keep up a lot of unpalatable content (holznagel, 2019; friehe, 2020). the position of the german constitutional court (bverfg) on this intricate question is still unclear. since the seminal lüth case, it is recognised that fundamental rights can exercise an indirect-third-partyeffect on relations between private parties.7 in the fraport case, the bverfg held that this indirect binding force of fundamental rights can be the same as that applicable to the state in the case of private entities that ‘take over the provision of public communications and thus assume functions which we previously allocated to the state’.8 meanwhile, the eu digital services act attempts to render private online platforms more accountable, not least by obliging them to respect the fundamental rights of their users when moderating online content. this signals a move towards a horizontal application of fundamental rights by fiat of eu legislation (bayer 2024). conclusion this paper proposes to contribute to the debate about platforms’ power of content moderation by adopting a comparative constitutional methodology to test, first, the historical analogies in the florida and texas cases, and secondly, the limits of a human rights-based approach for online platforms. the merits and demerits of the proposed models of internet regulation, and their capacity to unmake the industry underpinning the internet will be examined, before asking whether human rights due diligence is conducive to enhancing platforms’ accountability, or would rather entice them to only pay lip service to human rights so as to preserve their editorial authority (sander 2020). references ammori, m., ‘the ‘new’ new york times: free speech lawyering in the age of google and twitter’ (2014) 127 harvard law review 2259. balkin, j. m., ‘information fiduciaries and the first amendment’ (2016) 49 uc davis law review 1183. 6 manhattan community access corp. v halleck, 139 s. ct. 1921 (2019). 7 bverfg, judgement of 15 january 1958 – 1bvr 400/51. 8 bverfg, judgement of 22 february 2011 – 1bvr 699/06, para. 59. bayer, j., digital media regulation within the european union. a framework for a new media order (nomos 2024) collins, r., ‘hierarchy to homeostasis? hierarchy, markets and networks in uk media and communications governance’ (2008) 30 (3) media, culture & society 295. desai, a. c., 'regulating social media in the free-speech ecosystem' (2022) 73(5) hastings law journal 1481. friehe, m., ‘löschen und sperren in sozialen netzwerken‘ (2020) njw 1697. gillespie, t., custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media (haven: yale university press, 2018), 20. gillespie, t., ‘platforms are not intermediaries’ (2018) 2 (2) georgetown law technology review 198. heims, m., ‘the brave new world of social media censorship’ (2017) 127 harvard law review forum 325. holznagel, d., ‘put-backansprüche gegen soziale netzwerke: quo vadis?‘ (2019) 8 cr 518. hooker, m. p., ‘censorship, free speech & facebook: applying the first amendment to social media platforms via the public function exception’ (2019) 15 (1) washington journal of law, technology & arts 36. katsirea, i., press freedom and regulation in a digital era: a comparative study (oup, forthcoming may 2024). kennedy, c., 'solving the netchoice dilemma: reducing speech protections on internet platforms with broadcast case law' (2022) 37 berkeley tech lj 1293. klonick, k., ‘the new governors: the people, rules and processes governing online speech’ (2018) 131 harvard law review 1598 mcquail, d., mcquail’s mass communication theory (6th edn sage 2011). pasquale, f., ‘platform neutrality: enhancing freedom of expression in spheres of private power’ (2016) 17 theoretical inquiries in law 487. sabeel rahman, k., ‘regulating informational infrastructure: internet platforms as the new public utilities’ (2018) 2 georgetown law technology review 234. sander, b., 'freedom of expression in the age of online platforms: the promise and pitfalls of a human rights-based approach to content moderation' (2020) 43 (4) fordham international law journal 939. schwartmann, r. and r. l. mühlenbeck, ‘netzdg und das virtuelle hausrecht sozialer netzwerke‘ (2020) zeitschrift für rechtspolitik 170. wintour, p., ‘mark zuckerberg: facebook must accept some state regulation’ (the observer, 15 february 2020) <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/15/mark-zuckerberg-facebookmust-accept-some-state-regulation> accessed 28 february 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/15/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-must-accept-some-state-regulation https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/15/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-must-accept-some-state-regulation selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 unfair play: digital platforms’ abuse of power to influence brazilian policy agenda rose marie santini federal university of rio de janeiro bruno mattos federal university of rio de janeiro débora salles federal university of rio de janeiro marcela canavarro federal university of rio de janeiro introduction over the last decades, the tech exceptionalism myth has tried to convince public opinion that governmental regulation could limit tech companies’ ability to promote efficiency and innovation, uniting consumers and companies in favor of deregulatory politics (culpepper & thelen, 2020; eisenstat & gilman, 2022). to guarantee their competitive advantage, big tech companies are using all available resources to prevent the approval of new regulation, being among the biggest direct lobbying agents in the us and the eu (gorwa et al., 2024; popiel, 2018). besides direct lobbying, tech companies’ power of influence is characterized by indirect strategies, targeted at civil society organizations and the overall population (gorwa et al., 2024). culpepper & thelen (2020) argue that platform power derives partly from consumers, who can prove a source of opposition to any kind of regulation which they believe can threaten their broad experience on digital platforms. indeed, different corporate grassroots lobbying tactics aim to select, mobilize and coordinate users towards political legitimacy to platforms’ deregulation efforts (yates, 2023). in this work, we aim to critically examine the indirect online influence strategies of big tech companies in brazil in opposition to the fake news bill, which was meant to suggested citation (apa): santini, r. m., mattos, b., salles, d., canavarro, m. (2024, october). unfair play: digital platforms’ abuse of power to influence brazilian policy agenda. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. regulate internet intermediaries. inspired by other international frameworks, mainly the eu's digital services act (bueno & canaan, 2024), the bill has been in discussion since 2020. having undergone major changes since its conception, it was met with animosity by digital platforms and far-right politicians and pundits, who dubbed it the censorship bill (netlab ufrj, 2023). while congressmen approved the fast-tracking of the bill on april 26, 2023, ultimately its voting, originally planned for may 2nd, did not take place. data and results we collected primary evidence from april 20 to may 10, 2023, simultaneously to the tech companies’ lobbying campaign and performed multiplatform observations as a means to identify messages and ads produced and distributed by tech companies. we also undertook a descriptive analysis of organic and paid traffic data regarding the ads displayed and the sites recommended by search engines for keywords related to the bill (similarweb, n.d.). we checked the meta ad library user interface daily for ads related to the bill between april 20th and may 10th, 2023, to overcome limitations on accessing data of non-political ads. we found that these platforms did not comply with their own advertising policies and terms of use when promoting their online lobbying campaign. for example, between april 20th and may 3rd, 2023, google served nine ads on meta platforms that were not flagged as issue ads. after the non-compliance was reported, meta flagged them as issue ads, disclosing that google had paid up to u$148k to serve them, reaching up to 6.3 million impressions. the most emblematic case happened on spotify: although the streaming platform does not allow political ads (spotify, n.d.), google ran a piece against the bill, even reaching premium subscribers during podcasts. in another instance of non-compliance, google and brasil paralelo, a far-right audiovisual production and streaming company served search ads without flagging them as political. these ads helped both companies reach 98% of paid traffic about the bill, besides showcasing the rhetorical alignment between google and the local far-right. they argued the bill was not “ready to be voted”, framed it as an attack to freedom of speech, dubbing it the censorship bill, and called brazilians to pressure parliamentarians for improvements on the text (figure 1). another key strategy was leveraging platforms’ affordances and direct channels to users and creators. for example, youtube pressured content creators with a warning on the platform’s internal panel, claiming that the bill’s approval would directly harm them and calling them to mobilize against it. a similar warning was displayed on google’s search homepage to all brazilian users on the day before voting was scheduled. the message, which read that “the fake news bill would increase the confusion between what is true and what is false in brazil” (figure 2), triggered an impressive rise in google’s blog audience, which was visited almost 2 million times in two days. also attempting to reach as many users as possible, on may 9th, telegram sent a message to users in brazil and a shorter version to users outside the country claiming that the bill gave the local government “censorship powers without prior judicial oversight”. figure 1: ads served by google on meta platforms and its search engine redirected users to its official blog. figure 2: google used its search engine homepage to alert users that “the fake news bill would increase the confusion between what is true and what is false in brazil”, redirecting users to the company’s official blog. discussion based on the evidence gathered, tech companies’ indirect influence strategies in brazil can be framed in two types: mobilization, which involves persuading consumers to engage policymakers, and public relations, which involves using mediated channels to reach and convince the public (gorwa et al., 2024). they relied first and foremost on convincing their audience that regulation could harm the quality of the service offered to them, fostering a sense of mutual interest against regulation, a staple of big tech companies’ lobbying playbook (see culpepper & thelen, 2020; yates, 2023). at the height of public debates about the fake news bill, these operations can be characterized as unfair play. first of all, platforms spread misleading content about the bill, claiming that it would “put an end to freedom of expression”1 and “protect those who spread disinformation”2. the ads served by these platforms also did not comply with their own policies for boosting political content, pointing to an institutionalized and collective violation of terms of use. moreover, they promoted their anti-regulation stance through platform affordances that cannot be explored by any other user or company, not even through payments. we argue that these practices may constitute a new form of abuse of platform power, that emerges from the dominant position of these companies, leading them to become central players in domestic policy (khanal et al., 2024), alongside the misuse of their own technologies. the case against the fake news bill in brazil shows an instance in which tech companies openly embraced rethorics associated with far-right pundits, most notoriously the idea of a censorship bill. in a sense, this was a logical move, since the brazilian left-wing as a whole supported efforts to regulate the platform economy. on the other hand, this can be interpreted as a symptom of the radicalization of the discourse of tech companies, after decades trying to sell the idea of alleged “neutrality”. while platforms attempted to create tacit alliances with users and frame regulation intended to curb their power as harmful to consumers, a poll conducted shortly before the analyzed period showed that around 78% of brazilians supported digital platforms’ regulation (prates, 2023). thus, although tech companies’ lobbying successfully interrupted legislative debates on their regulation, there is an agenda for researching whether this campaign was also successful in shaping public opinion. references bueno, t. m., & canaan, r. g. (2024). the brussels effect in brazil: analysing the impact of the eu digital services act on the discussion surrounding the fake news bill. telecommunications policy, 48(5), 102757. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.telpol.2024.102757 culpepper, p. d., & thelen, k. (2020). are we all amazon primed? consumers and the politics of platform power. comparative political studies, 53(2), 288-318. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414019852687 eisenstat, y., & gilman, n. (2022). the myth of tech exceptionalism. noema. https://www.noemamag.com/the-myth-of-tech-exceptionalism/ 2 lacerda, m. (2023, april 27). pl das fake news pode aumentar a confusão sobre o que é verdade ou mentira. blog do google brasil, https://blog.google/intl/pt-br/novidades/iniciativas/pl2630-2/ 1 tortella, t. (2023, may 9). telegram dispara mensagem contra o pl das fake news. cnn brasil, https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/politica/telegram-dispara-mensagem-contra-o-pl-das-fake-news/ gorwa, r., lechowski, g. & schneiß, d. (2024). platform lobbying: policy influence strategies and the eu's digital services act. internet policy review, 13(2). https://doi.org/10.14763/2024.2.1782 khanal, s., zhang, h., & taeihagh, a. (2024). why and how is the power of big tech increasing in the policy process? the case of generative ai. policy and society, puae012. https://doi.org/10.1093/polsoc/puae012 netlab ufrj. (2023). estudo da campanha contra o pl 2630 e regulamentação das plataformas digitais. netlab ufrj. https://netlab.eco.ufrj.br/post/estudo-da-campanha-contra-o-pl-2630-e-regulamenta%c3 %a7%c3%a3o-das-plataformas-digitais prates, v. (2023). pesquisa: 77,9% dos brasileiros são a favor da regulação das redes sociais. correio braziliense. https://www.correiobraziliense.com.br/politica/2023/04/5089934-pesquisa-779-dos-brasi leiros-sao-a-favor-da-regulacao-das-redes-sociais.html popiel, p. (2018). the tech lobby: tracing the contours of new media elite lobbying power. communication culture & critique, 11(4), 566-585. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcy027 similarweb (n.d.). keyword research. similarweb. https://www.similarweb.com/corp/marketing/keyword-research/ spotify (n.d.). políticas de brand safety. spotify. https://ads.spotify.com/pt-br/central-de-ajuda/politicas-de-publicidade/ yates, l. (2023). how platform businesses mobilize their users and allies: corporate grassroots lobbying and the airbnb ‘movement’ for deregulation. socio-economic review, 21(4), 1917-1943. https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwad028 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): savic, m., mccosker, a., & farmer, j. (2024, october). digital social connection at the lonely urban fringe. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. digital social connection at the lonely urban fringe milovan savic swinburne university of technology anthony mccosker swinburne university of technology jane farmer swinburne university of technology introduction extensive research has explored the way social and mobile media have fundamentally transformed social connection. this body of work explores the potential of digital communities (baym, 2015), the dynamics of mobile social connection (chayko, 2008; humphreys, 2007) and digital intimacy (dobson et al., 2018; alinejad, 2019). recent discussions also focus on digital disconnection (karppi, 2018; light, 2014) and the deepening crisis of social connection and loneliness (cacioppo & patrick, 2008), alongside concerns over the deterioration of commercial social media platforms, their ‘enshitification’ (doctorow, 2023) and the struggle to combat hostility and disinformation. this paper draws on funded research in partnership with three local government councils and two community organisations. it examines individuals' efforts to navigate a digital social connection ecosystem in outer metropolitan areas – settings where the interplay of people, place and technology meets challenges posed by daily temporal rhythms and the isolating nature of urban fringes. employing an interdisciplinary lens, we conceptualise social connection as relationships within intimate, close, and broader social circles. these connections serve specific functions, such as maintaining proximity, access to social support and interest groups, and fostering a sense of belonging (farmer et al., 2021; 2024; de cotta et al., 2024). the project addresses the need to revisit mediated or digital social connections in place-based digital media research. it aims to provide local councils and community organisations with practical insights that can help them leverage digital tools to enhance community social connections (farmer et al., 2024; currey et al., 2024). the central question to our investigation is: how do social media and messaging apps mediate diverse forms of social connection in outer metropolitan areas? methods the research design adopted an agnostic stance towards the mediums, apps and platforms for social connection, avoiding assumptions about their social or connective affordances. participants (n=44) represented diverse demographics, including new immigrants, young people in precarious employment, and those managing mental health issues – all residing in outer metropolitan areas with limited social infrastructure. each participant underwent two semi-structured face-to-face interviews focused on their understanding of social connection and how they establish and maintain connections, including through digital tools. data analysis employed an abductive approach, blending inductive and deductive reasoning to relate empirical observations with theoretical frameworks (timmermans & tavory, 2022). the functional layers of hybrid social connection we observed a broad spectrum of engagement with communication technologies, encompassing active use and deliberate non-use. by digital social connection ecosystem, we mean the complex, dynamic, and interacting modes of digital media people use to attain and maintain the social connections they need. this includes various platforms and modalities—from mobile messaging and social media platforms to dating or friending apps and spanning text, voice, image sharing, and video calls. these were used to facilitate different modes of digital social connection, enabling distinct functions across four layered categories of social connection. participants employed specific digital tools and features, often adapting their use to cater to different layers of social connection. despite their interconnection, we dissect these layers individually to expose their contributions to the digital social connection ecosystem. maintaining and making close connections through hybrid timescapes emery considers her mother a vital part of her ‘inner circle’ of intimate connections: ‘we call each other once a week, every week. sometimes twice. or if i've got a problem, i'll call at least twice a week. we send pictures, texts, and stuff between regular contact’ (emery, young adult). participants frequently cited the strategic use of digital communication tools to foster social connections with their closest contacts, seamlessly integrating these interactions into their busy lives. this connection layer hinges on using digital media for consistent yet low-intensity exchanges. emery's case illustrates this approach, involving video calls and messaging to share life snippets. participants favoured digital tools that offered immediacy and enabled 'conversational grazing,' a communication modality allowing intermittent engagement. some deliberately crafted spaces for ambient co-presence (madinaou, 2016), allowing them to maintain a sense of closeness amidst the fluctuating demands of daily life. enabling social support the social support function fundamentally relies on reciprocity – exchanging various assistance or resources. this entails sustained interaction within a diverse network, where each person offers different resources and methods for sharing and accessing them. amanda's story illustrates how the strategic use of social media and messaging apps can assist in navigating the social support network amidst mental health strains. she leverages whatsapp to maintain connections with a broader circle in a way that allows a layer of delayed response (farman, 2018): 'you can just kind of check up on each other see how everyone is, but it's like, i don't want to text back straightaway [and] i don't have to' (amanda, midlife adult). others engaged in passive consumption, seeking stories, information, and content that fostered a lasting sense of camaraderie and friendship. identifying with others and participating in groups the third facet of hybrid social connection encompasses a broader social circle, focusing on engaging with groups that foster a shared identity. this engagement guides behaviours, influences trends such as fashion, and keeps individuals informed on current events while providing a sense of belonging through the assurance of groupness. young adults in our study used platforms like instagram, telegram, viber, discord, whatsapp, and facebook groups to engage collectively. issa shared, ‘i have lost count of the number of groups i'm in, like soccer and church groups. nowadays, people just add you to groups...’ (issa, young adult). however, managing this can be challenging: ‘there are so many church groups, and i can't keep up with all the notifications. i end up muting them, so i don't get overwhelmed’ (issa, young adult). this exemplifies the tension between seeking connection and managing the digital influx of belonging. interfacing with the community social connection extends beyond immediate circles, fostering an affective sense of belonging within the broader social and cultural landscape. geographical location and digital media consumption are essential for these broader connections, enabling less frequent and intimate interactions than those in inner circles but crucial for affirming one’s place within the wider community. for example, olivia, an older participant, values staying connected to her community through local facebook groups and news sources, which keep her informed about local events and activities. ‘i often discover things i'd like to attend, and it becomes a talking point with friends who might share similar updates they've encountered on social media,’ she explains. despite their irregularity, these peripheral engagements are essential for maintaining a sense of community and shared interest within the larger social ecosystem. conclusion this study introduces the concept of a digital social connection ecosystem and demonstrates how people in urban fringe areas navigate digital media to fulfil their social connection needs. it extends research on digital intimacy and mobile social connection dynamics to these contexts. our findings reveal that social connection outcomes via digital media depend on users' digital literacy, adaptability, and labour. moreover, these outcomes are profoundly contextual and somewhat uncertain, especially in isolating settings such as urban fringes, where achieving social connection can be increasingly complex. we demonstrate how individuals navigate and adapt digital tools to meet their specific social needs and contexts. we also illustrate the dynamic interplay between digital labour and user adaptability, which plays a crucial role in navigating the complex landscape of the digital social connection ecosystem. the enabling role of digital tools for social connection in these contexts is dynamic, revealing the need for a deeper understanding of how digital and face-to-face communication complement each other. local government and community service providers in those areas could leverage these findings to offer targeted support, enhancing knowledge and skills for those navigating this intricate and, at times, fraught digital ecosystem. references alinejad, d. (2019). careful co-presence: the transnational mediation of emotional intimacy. social media + society, 5(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119854222. cacioppo, j. t., & patrick, w. (2008). loneliness: human nature and the need for social connection. ww norton & company. chayko, m. (2008). portable communities: the social dynamics of online and mobile connectedness. state university of new york press. currey, kath; savic, milovan; dimond, caroline; roeschlein, hannah (2024). supporting access and inclusion for social connection. community provider resource and poster. swinburne. report. https://doi.org/10.25916/sut.26343787.v1 de cotta, t., verhagen, j., farmer, j., karg, a., sivasubramaniam, d., savic, m., and rowe, c. (2024). social connection program evaluation toolkit. swinburne university of technology. https://doi.org/10.25916/ztks-bd62 dobson, a. s., robards, b., & carah, n. (eds.). (2018). digital intimate publics and social media. palgrave macmillan cham. doctorow, c. (2023). the ‘enshitification’ of tiktok: or how, exactly, platforms die. wired, 23 jan. https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ farman, j. (2018). delayed response. yale university press. farmer, j., cotta, t. d., hartung, c., & et al. (2021). social connection 101 [guide]. social innovation research institute. https://doi.org/10.25916/sfn8-km66 https://doi.org/10.25916/sut.26343787.v1 https://doi.org/10.25916/ztks-bd62 https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ https://doi.org/10.25916/sfn8-km66 farmer, j., rowe, c., de cotta, t., & savic, m. (2024). social connection guide for activity planning. swinburne university of technology. https://doi.org/10.25916/fdxk7292 humphreys, l. (2007). mobile social networks and social practice: a case study of dodgeball. journal of computer-mediated communication, 13(1), 341–360. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00399.x karppi, t. (2018). disconnect: facebook's affective bonds. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. light, b. (2014). disconnecting with social networking sites. london: springer. madianou, m. (2016). ambient co-presence: transnational family practices in polymedia environments. global networks, 16, 183-201. https://doi.org/10.1111/glob.12105 timmermans, s., & tavory, i. (2022). data analysis in qualitative research: theorizing with abductive analysis. university of chicago press. https://doi.org/10.25916/fdxk-7292 https://doi.org/10.25916/fdxk-7292 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00399.x https://doi.org/10.1111/glob.12105 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): van der vlist, f., helmond, a., luitse, d., rieder, b., hind, s., et al. (2024, october). the political economy of ai as platform: infrastructures, power, and the ai industry. panel presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. the political economy of ai as platform: infrastructures, power, and the ai industry fernando van der vlist university of amsterdam anne helmond utrecht university dieuwertje maria rebecca luitse university of amsterdam bernhard rieder university of amsterdam sam hind university of manchester max kanderske university of siegen the artificial intelligence (ai) sector is experiencing rapid growth, with a projected market size of $1.3 trillion by 2032 according to industry reports (bloomberg, 2023). the landscape shifted significantly with the launch of chatgpt in late 2022, prompting major players like google, amazon, microsoft, and meta, alongside popular apps such as tiktok and snapchat, to make substantial investments in ai. there has been an influx of new ai products and updates, reshaping the industry’s structure and scale. additionally, there has been a surge in acquisitions and investments in ai startups, particularly by big tech firms (alcantara et al., 2023). furthermore, partnerships between ai and major tech companies have proliferated, solidifying their dominant positions (kak and myers west 2023; jacobides et al., 2021; van der vlist et al., 2024). in fact, as kak and myers west (2023: 5) succinctly state, ‘there is no ai without big tech’, raising critical issues around industry concentration and the political economy of ai (e.g., crawford, 2021; ferrari, 2023; luitse and denkena, 2021; mackenzie, 2019; narayan, 2022; rieder, 2022; widder et al., 2023). this panel posits that the driving force behind these transformative shifts is the evolution of ai as a platform. this evolution effectively propels the platformisation of ai, facilitating the integration of ai across diverse industry sectors (cf. helmond, 2015). the resultant ‘industrialisation’ of ai marks the expansion of ai systems across various sectors and industries, triggering investments in necessary computational resources and posing challenges for governing ai (van der vlist et al., 2024). in short, this underscores that ai is much more than just a standalone application or tool, such as chatgpt; it is a foundational technical system that underpins a broad array of apps and services. in this context, the panel recognises the recent ‘infrastructural turn’ in media and internet studies, deliberately steering away from speculative discussions about the future impacts of ai. instead, the emphasis shifts towards a focus on the ‘mundanity and ordinariness of existing systems’ (hesmondhalgh, 2022). this highlights the importance of studying the foundational infrastructure, tools, and frameworks that shape ai development. furthermore, it requires an understanding of the associated supply chains, investments, acquisitions, forms of ownership and support, control mechanisms, and the broader political economy surrounding ai. such perspectives have been developed, for example, to study ai’s industry relations in healthcare (luitse et al., 2023), the global digital marketing and advertising industries (van der vlist and helmond, 2021), journalism (rieder and skop, 2021), or the automotive industry (hind et al., 2022). the panellists examine how ai may be viewed as a platform, presenting critical perspectives on the platformisation of ai and its implications for industry relations and the media landscape. through four distinct studies, they highlight: (1) the influence of platforms on the emerging ai ecosystem and their consolidation of power through reliance on cloud infrastructure, (2) the evolution of cloud infrastructure in the political economy of ai, (3) the actualisation of ai as a platform with ‘general-purpose’ applications, and (4) how challenges in machine vision shape innovation in ai. each contribution revolves around a central question: how is ai, particularly within the ai sector, evolving under the influence of platform logic? in doing so, the panellists offer valuable insights informed by platform theory and methodologies, exploring their relevance for a comprehensive examination of ai and the broader ai sector. furthermore, their perspectives provide methodological insights into understanding the material conditions and critical political economy of ai as a platform. collectively, these studies seek to advance the critical discourse on ai and its political economy, with a specific emphasis on the ai industry. they shed light on the evolving landscape of ai industry relations and dependencies within the platform ecosystem, tracing how these relationships have transformed over time. references alcantara c, schaul k, de vynck g and albergotti r (2023) how big tech got so big: hundreds of acquisitions. the washington post, 26 september. available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2021/amazon-apple-facebookgoogle-acquisitions/. bloomberg (2023) generative ai to become a $1.3 trillion market by 2032, research finds. bloomberg, 1 june. available at: https://www.bloomberg.com/company/press/generative-ai-to-become-a-1-3-trillionmarket-by-2032-research-finds/. crawford k (2021) atlas of ai: power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. yale university press. ferrari (2023) neural production networks: ai’s infrastructural geographies. environment and planning f 2(4): 459–476. doi: 10.1177/26349825231193226. helmond a (2015) the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready. social media + society 1(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080. hesmondhalgh d (2022) the infrastructural turn in media and internet research. in: mcdonald p (eds) the routledge companion to media industries. palgrave macmillan, pp. 132–142. hind s, kanderske m and van der vlist fn (2022) making the car ‘platform ready’: how big tech is driving the platformisation of automobility. social media + society 8(2). doi: 10.1177/20563051221098697. jacobides mg, brusoni s and candelon f (2021) the evolutionary dynamics of the artificial intelligence ecosystem. strategy science 6(4): 412–435. doi: 10.1287/stsc.2021.0148. kak a and myers west s (2023) 2023 landscape: confronting tech power. ai now institute. luitse d and denkena w (2021) the great transformer: examining the role of large language models in the political economy of ai. big data & society 8(2): 1–14. doi: 10.1177/20539517211047734. luitse dmr, blanke t and poell t (2023) ai competitions as infrastructures: examining power relations on kaggle and grand challenge in ai-driven medical imaging. 2022 aoir selected papers of internet research. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2022i0.13044. mackenzie a (2019) from api to ai: platforms and their opacities. information, communication & society 22(13): 1989–2006. doi: 10.1080/1369118x.2018.1476569. narayan d (2022) platform capitalism and cloud infrastructure: theorizing a hyperscalable computing regime. environment and planning a: economy and space 54(5): 911–929. doi: 10.1177/0308518x221094028. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2021/amazon-apple-facebook-google-acquisitions/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2021/amazon-apple-facebook-google-acquisitions/ https://www.bloomberg.com/company/press/generative-ai-to-become-a-1-3-trillion-market-by-2032-research-finds/ https://www.bloomberg.com/company/press/generative-ai-to-become-a-1-3-trillion-market-by-2032-research-finds/ https://doi.org/10.1177/26349825231193226 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080 https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221098697 https://doi.org/10.1287/stsc.2021.0148 https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211047734 https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2022i0.13044 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2018.1476569 https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x221094028 rieder b (2022) towards a political economy of technical systems: the case of google. big data & society. doi: 10.1177/2053951722113516. rieder b and skop y (2021) the fabrics of machine moderation: studying the technical, normative, and organizational structure of perspective api. big data & society 8(2): 1– 16. 10.1177/20539517211046181. van der vlist fn and helmond a (2021) how partners mediate platform power: mapping business and data partnerships in the social media ecosystem. big data & society 8(1): 1–16. doi: 10.1177/20539517211025061. van der vlist fn, helmond a and ferrari fl (2024) big ai: cloud infrastructure and the industrialisation of artificial intelligence. big data & society 11(1). doi: 10.1177/20539517241232630. widder dg, west s and whittaker m (2023) open (for business): big tech, concentrated power, and the political economy of open ai. available at ssrn: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4543807. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951722113516 https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211046181 https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211025061 https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241232630 https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4543807 convening ai: how platforms shape the evolution of the ai ecosystem fernando van der vlist university of amsterdam anne helmond utrecht university introduction the competition among leading technology companies in cloud-based artificial intelligence (ai), known as the ‘cloud ai wars’ (goldman, 2022), is gaining momentum, with industry leaders proclaiming a transformative era driven by ai technologies. this shift, dominated by amazon, microsoft, and google, is closely linked to their control over cloud infrastructure, significantly influencing the development of ai across various industries. this merger of ai innovation with the infrastructure and investments of major tech giants marks the rise of ‘big ai,’ shaping not only the development and deployment of ai but also its commercialisation (van der vlist et al., 2024). this paper critically explores cloud ai as a platform, emphasising the critical roles of amazon, microsoft, and google. it demonstrates how these companies not only provide essential infrastructure services but also ‘convene’ enterprises, organisations, and developers in the development and commercialisation of ai. these convening dynamics encapsulate what we refer to as the platform ecosystem logic of ai. through a ‘technographic’ approach (bucher, 2016; mackenzie, 2019; van der vlist et al., 2022), we examine the infrastructure support, investments, partnerships, and product offerings of these companies’ cloud platforms. this shows the emergence of new platform ecosystems around their ai products and services. we show how the transformation of cloud ai into a platform-based model (platformisation) manifests, how big tech ‘convenes’ third-party businesses and developers to cultivate an ecosystem around cloud ai infrastructure, and discuss the consequences of this emerging ecosystem logic of ai. platforms and the political economy of cloud ai this paper builds upon existing critical research concerning the political economy of ai, platformisation, and platform studies from an interdisciplinary perspective. the political economy involves examining how the development, deployment, and impact of ai technologies, as well as their integration into broader economic systems and structures, shape and are shaped by major technology corporations. research shows that the development of foundational models like gpt, which use a ‘bigger-is-better approach’ (economist, 2023), requires substantial cloud computing resources, thus favouring larger companies (ferrari, 2023; jacobides et al., 2021; kak and myers west, 2023; luitse and denkena, 2021). the unparalleled scalability offered by cloud computing, along with the incorporation of customised hardware and software, emerges as a defining feature of ai’s material political economy (narayan, 2022; rieder, 2022; raley and rhee, 2023), leading to new dependencies and corresponding investments in computational resources (van der vlist et al., 2024). the platformisation of ai is rooted in big tech companies’ control over essential infrastructure, echoing the statement that ‘there is no ai without big tech’ (kak and myers west, 2023). this platformisation is further facilitated by developers and partners who build and integrate new ai apps and services atop big tech’s infrastructure (van der vlist et al., 2024). the platformisation of ai is also marked by its ‘industrialisation’, representing the transition of ai systems from research and development to practical applications across diverse industries, including governments and public sectors, digital sectors, and traditional industries worldwide (van der vlist et al., 2024). leading cloud infrastructure service providers like amazon web services (aws), microsoft azure, and google cloud platform, through their offerings and boundary resources, have emerged as the material bedrock of this industrialisation process. big tech’s ambitions to expand their offerings and assume a central, ‘infrastructural role’ within society are evidenced by their attempts to consolidate complementors through acquisitions, ‘convene’ third-party businesses and developers, and expand their ecosystems by enhancing platform programmability (egliston and carter 2022; helmond et al., 2019; van der vlist and helmond, 2021). similarly, partner programmes play a crucial role for platforms to grow into new markets or industry sectors and expand beyond their current boundaries (helmond et al., 2019), using partnerships to solidify their ‘infrastructural and strategic power’ in the larger platform business ecosystem (van der vlist and helmond, 2021; van der vlist, 2022). these studies emphasise the critical dynamics of ‘convening’ complementors (egliston and carter, 2022)—initially developers and businesses, and later extending to media publishers, creators, and others—to actively contribute to the development, capture, and commercialisation of ai. three ways of seeing cloud ai as a platform drawing from our technographic analysis, this paper views the political economy of ai through the critical lens of platform ecosystems, characterised by the combination of a central technical platform in the ‘cloud’ (accessible via application programming interfaces and other platform boundary resources) and a network of complements (applications and services) and complementors (the businesses and developers behind these applications and services) (van der vlist, 2022). this framework illustrates how application and development tools, partner programmes, and investments form a comprehensive collection of boundary resources. these resources ‘convene’ third-party businesses and developers to build an ecosystem of new products and services around cloud ai infrastructure platform providers. the paper examines cloud ai as a platform from three distinct perspectives. first, it explores infrastructure support relationships, such as partnerships and investments, which often evolve into dependencies on platforms over time. second, it analyses the existing cloud ai platform products and services, showing how they target the diverse ai needs of various organisations and industry sectors. third, it examines the ecosystems of applications and solutions developed by third parties on top of microsoft, google, and amazon’s cloud platforms, accessible via their cloud app stores and marketplaces. these viewpoints show the material conditions of ai as a development platform and highlight the importance of analysing its political economy from a critical ‘ecosystem’ perspective (van der vlist, 2022). shaping the evolution of the ai ecosystem the study demonstrates how ai is not merely an emerging discursive phenomenon but also comprises extensive suites of tools, products, and services, along with respective documentation for external stakeholders, intended to facilitate an ecosystem of complementors atop microsoft, google, and amazon’s platforms. crucially, these platform ‘ecosystems’, as proposed by van der vlist (2022) and illustrated by egliston and carter (2022), are not static or passive entities but are actively cultivated through strategic and infrastructural initiatives by leading platform companies. central to this cultivation is the platform’s ability to convene external stakeholders, such as partners and developers, and orchestrate their contributions to the ecosystem’s value. essentially, platform owners seek to wield what the paper conceptualises as ‘convening power’, aligning participants’ interests and business and development activities to reinforce their vision. their visions range from meta’s ‘future of connection in the metaverse’ (meta), microsoft’s vision for ai in the enterprise (microsoft), amazon’s ambition of ‘ai becoming the new electricity in our homes’ (zeghari, 2023), to google’s portrayal of ai as ‘a foundational and transformational technology that will provide compelling and helpful benefits to people and society through its capacity to assist, complement, empower, and inspire people in almost every field of human endeavor’ (google ai). in conclusion, this research offers insights into the political economy of ai, viewed through the critical lens of platform ecosystems, highlighting the pivotal role played by cloud infrastructure service providers in shaping the industrialisation of ai. in this context, ‘big ai’ is reshaping traditional industries ranging from healthcare and the public sector to manufacturing, automotive, retail, and energy. this process is not only influencing market dynamics but also raising critical questions about governance and control within the ai platform ecosystem. references economist (2023) the bigger-is-better approach to ai is running out of road. available at: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2023/06/21/the-bigger-is-betterapproach-to-ai-is-running-out-of-road. egliston b and carter m (2022) ‘the metaverse and how we’ll build it’: the political economy of meta’s reality labs. new media & society 0(0): 1–25. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221119785. ferrari, f (2023) neural production networks: ai’s infrastructural geographies. environment and planning f 2(4), 459–476. doi: 10.1177/26349825231193226. https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2023/06/21/the-bigger-is-better-approach-to-ai-is-running-out-of-road https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2023/06/21/the-bigger-is-better-approach-to-ai-is-running-out-of-road https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221119785 https://doi.org/10.1177/26349825231193226 goldman s (2022) big tech cloud ai wars heat up. in: venturebeat, 14 october. available at: https://venturebeat.com/ai/the-ai-beat-big-tech-cloud-ai-wars-heat-up/. google ai (n.d.) why we focus on ai (and to what end). available at: https://ai.google/why-ai/. helmond a, nieborg db and van der vlist fn (2019) facebook’s evolution: development of a platform-as-infrastructure. internet histories 3(2): 123–146. doi: 10.1080/24701475.2019.1593667. jacobides mg, brusoni s and candelon f (2021) the evolutionary dynamics of the artificial intelligence ecosystem. strategy science 6(4): 412–435. doi: 10.1287/stsc.2021.0148. kak a and myers west s (2023) 2023 landscape: confronting tech power. ai now institute. available at: https://ainowinstitute.org/2023-landscape. luitse d and denkena w (2021) the great transformer: examining the role of large language models in the political economy of ai. big data & society 8(2): 1–14. doi: 10.1177/20539517211047734. meta (n.d.) the metaverse is the future of digital connection. available at: https://about.meta.com/metaverse/. microsoft (n.d.) microsoft’s vision for ai in the enterprise. available at: https://info.microsoft.com/rs/157-gqe382/images/microsoft%20enterprise%20ai%20white%20paper.pdf. narayan d (2022) platform capitalism and cloud infrastructure: theorizing a hyperscalable computing regime. environment and planning a: economy and space 54(5): 911–929. doi: 10.1177/0308518x221094028. raley r and rhee j (2023) critical ai: a field in formation. american literature 95(2): 185–204. rieder b (2022) towards a political economy of technical systems: the case of google. big data & society. doi: 10.1177/2053951722113516. van der vlist fn (2022) the platform as ecosystem: configurations and dynamics of governance and power. phd thesis, utrecht university. doi: 10.33540/1284. van der vlist fn and helmond a (2021) how partners mediate platform power: mapping business and data partnerships in the social media ecosystem. big data & society 8(1): 1–16. doi: 10.1177/20539517211025061. https://venturebeat.com/ai/the-ai-beat-big-tech-cloud-ai-wars-heat-up/ https://ai.google/why-ai/ https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2019.1593667 https://doi.org/10.1287/stsc.2021.0148 https://ainowinstitute.org/2023-landscape https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211047734 https://about.meta.com/metaverse/ https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x221094028 https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951722113516 https://doi.org/10.33540/1284 https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211025061 van der vlist fn, helmond a and ferrari fl (2024) big ai: cloud infrastructure and the industrialisation of artificial intelligence. big data & society 11(1). doi: 10.1177/20539517241232630. zeghari a (2023) amazon’s vision: ai becoming the new electricity in our homes. medium, 23 june. available at: https://medium.com/@ayoub.zeghari/amazons-vision-aibecoming-the-new-electricity-in-our-homes-b120bb0ed1. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241232630 https://medium.com/@ayoub.zeghari/amazons-vision-ai-becoming-the-new-electricity-in-our-homes-b120bb0ed1 https://medium.com/@ayoub.zeghari/amazons-vision-ai-becoming-the-new-electricity-in-our-homes-b120bb0ed1 platform power in ai: the evolution of cloud infrastructures in the political economy of artificial intelligence dieuwertje maria rebecca luitse university of amsterdam introduction powered by the promise that google ceo sundar pichai (2017) declared as the shift from a ‘mobile first to an ai first world,’ amazon, microsoft, and google have become the three dominant developers of artificial intelligence (ai) infrastructures and services (srnicek, 2022). beyond leveraging their vast amounts of data, these corporations have equipped themselves with technical knowledge through the attraction of ai expertise, the acquisitions of ai startups (e.g., google/deepmind) and extensive business partnerships (e.g., brockman, 2019). additionally, the last years have seen significant investments in the infrastructural expansion of their cloud computing platforms: amazon web services (aws), microsoft azure, and google cloud. these platforms now provide full-stack tools and services for the production and deployment of machine-learning systems and applications thriving on their proprietary infrastructures for computing power at scale (luitse and denkena, 2021; van der vlist et al., 2024). the most recent developments include the provision of foundation models (bommasani et al., 2022) such as openai’s dall·e (ramesh et al., 2021) or google’s palm (chowdhery et al., 2022). driven by ai hype, corporate cloud ai infrastructures and services are increasingly implemented across industries. following research on ai’s political economy (luitse and denkena, 2021; widder et al., 2023), this has allowed aws, microsoft azure and google cloud to leverage them as core ‘commercial computing assets’ (narayan, 2022) resulting in a rapid concentration of economic and political power (monopolisation) toward these corporations (kak and myers west, 2023; srnicek, 2022; whittaker, 2021). building on this body of work, this paper provides a case study on how these three dominant cloud platforms have strategically been operationalising their power in ai production and deployment through the ai infrastructures and services they operate. the critical analyses on big tech’s monopoly power in ai have put forward valuable macro-level insights. however, relatively little attention has been paid to specific micromaterial ways power in ai is operationalised by aws, microsoft azure and google cloud through the evolution of their cloud ai infrastructures and services. such research is important as ‘cloud computing arrangements […] are foundational to platform expansion’ (narayan, 2022: 915). as evolving assemblages of infrastructural hardware and software services they set the conditions for ai production and deployment (jacobides et al., 2021; rieder, 2022), shaping the present in terms of ‘what we do (and do not) know about [ai]’ (whittaker, 2021). these cloud platforms therefore warrant a deeper examination into the cloud ai infrastructures and services they have developed over time. as such, we can better understand the ways in which these companies have strategically manifested themselves in the field and attempt to exercise power in ai through their cloud ecosystems. this paper provides such an inquiry through a critical empirical investigation into the evolution of aws, microsoft azure and google cloud in the context of ai in the run-up to the current shift to foundation models. that is, primarily since sundar pichai’s 2017 defining proclamation up to april 2021. following a political economy and evolutionary platform studies research approach, i investigate the development of aws, microsoft azure and google cloud’s ai infrastructures and services over this period of time and show how these cloud platforms operationalise specific forms of infrastructural power to further solidify their position. evolutionary technographic analysis of infrastructures for cloud ai to conduct this study, i developed a methodological approach that i call evolutionary platform technography. adapted from bucher’s (2018) notion of technography, and helmond and van der vlist’s (2021) work on historical platform studies, this method draws from a wide variety of sources including (1) archived product pages and documentation from each platform available through the internet archive wayback machine; (2) aws, azure and google cloud’s corporate blog posts and press releases; (3) industry reports. the evolutionary technographic analysis entailed two complementary lines of inquiry. first, i examined the collection of archived product pages to reconstruct the development of aws, microsoft azure and google cloud’s cloud ai infrastructures and services over time. this mapping of the evolution of these cloud platforms provides empirical insight into how the ai infrastructures and services have been developed according to the service layers of the cloud stack—infrastructure-as-a-service (iaas); platform-as-a-service (paas) or ai-as-a-service (aiaas)—as well as their application domain. as technography requires the critical observation, description, and interpretation of technical systems on their own material-discursive terms (bucher, 2012), the second step involved a document analysis and close reading of the set of collected archived product documentations, blog posts, press releases and industry reports. here, i focused on distinguishing the strategic positions of aws, microsoft azure and google cloud in mobilising and operating their growing collection of ai infrastructures and services. by outlining these corporate dynamics, this technographic exploration into the evolution of their platform-specific operations allows me to gain empirical insight into the specific ways aws, microsoft azure and google cloud seek to exert infrastructural power in the political economy of ai. infrastructural power in cloud ai: vertical integration, complementary innovation, abstraction the evolution of aws, microsoft azure and google cloud’s infrastructures for cloud ai shows that these platforms strategically operationalise infrastructural power in three significant ways: through 1) vertical integration; 2) complementary innovation; and 3) the power of abstraction. first, the widespread vertical integration of resources across the cloud stack strengthens these companies’ attempts to privatise and standardise entire machine-learning workflows. this creates path-dependencies which could lead to user and vendor lock-in (cf. van dijck, 2020). second, because ai systems can be designed for many different application domains (aradau and blanke 2022; rieder, 2022), these technologies enable aws, microsoft azure and google cloud to facilitate ‘complementary innovation’ (gawer, 2014) in two directions. on the one hand, this facilitates the strategic development of complementary services to infrastructurally expand themselves into different application domains, such as healthcare, manufacturing or retail and set the conditions of possibility for ai development in these respective areas moving forward. on the other hand, the analysis shows that new machine-learning capabilities operate in complementary ways that seamlessly align with other parts of the larger platform ecosystems of amazon, microsoft and google such as amazon mechanical turk. third and lastly, i locate that these cloud platforms strategically operationalise ‘the power of abstraction’ to strengthen their position in ai’s political economy. while abstraction is considered to play a central role in computer science practices (selbst et al., 2018; rieder, 2020), the analysis shows how these platforms mobilise the ability to hide the complex operations of their cloud infrastructures and services across the layers of the stack. while this simplifies and speeds up machine-learning development pipelines, it also creates significant advantages for cloud platforms to structure these practices in ways that further reinforce the creation of ai systems and applications that rely on the data, computing infrastructures and machine-learning expertise they own and operate. additionally, the operationalisation of abstraction thwarts the critical scrutiny and evaluation of ai systems even though there have been ever more calls for critical oversight (e.g., buolamwini and gebru, 2018; bender et al., 2021; kak and myers west, 2023). as such, abstraction provides aws, microsoft azure and google cloud with the infrastructural power to shift the focus away from alternative resources and the development of new approaches that contribute to different understandings about ai outside of the confining ecosystems of the cloud. references aradau c and blanke t (2022) algorithmic reason: the new government of self and other. new york: oxford university press. bender em, gebru t, mcmillan-major a, et al. (2021) on the dangers of stochastic parrots: can language models be too big? &#x1f99c; in: proceedings of the 2021 acm conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency, new york, ny, usa, 3 march 2021, pp. 610–623. facct ’21. association for computing machinery. doi: 10.1145/3442188.3445922. bommasani r, hudson da, adeli e, et al. (2022) on the opportunities and risks of foundation models. arxiv:2108.07258. arxiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2108.07258. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922 http://arxiv.org/abs/2108.07258 brockman g (2019, 22 july) microsoft invests in and partners with openai to support us building beneficial agi. available at: https://openai.com/blog/microsoft-invests-in-andpartners-with-openai. bucher t (2012) programmed sociality: a software studies perspective on social networking sites (doctoral dissertation). university of oslo, oslo, norway. bucher t (2018). if…then: algorithmic power and politics. new york: oxford university press. buolamwini j and gebru t (2018). gender shades: intersectional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification. proceedings of machine learning research 812018 conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency, (1–15). https://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a.pdf chowdhery a, narang s, devlin j, et al. (2022) palm: scaling language modeling with pathways. arxiv:2204.02311. arxiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2204.02311. gawer a (2014) bridging differing perspectives on technological platforms: toward an integrative framework. research policy, 43(7): 1239–1249. doi: 10.1016/j.respol.2014.03.006 . gray widder d, west s and whittaker m (2023) open (for business): big tech, concentrated power, and the political economy of open ai. ssrn electronic journal. doi: 10.2139/ssrn.4543807. helmond a and van der vlist fn (2021) platform and app histories: assessing source availability in web archives and app repositories. in d gomez, e demidova, j winters and t risse (eds), the past web: exploring web archives. cham, switzerland: springer, pp. 203–214. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-63291-5_16. jacobides mg, brusoni s and candelon f (2021) the evolutionary dynamics of the artificial intelligence ecosystem. strategy science 6(4): 412–435. doi: 10.1287/stsc.2021.0148. kak a and myers west s (2023) 2023 landscape: confronting tech power. ai now institute. available at: https://ainowinstitute.org/2023-landscape. luitse d and denkena w (2021) the great transformer: examining the role of large language models in the political economy of ai. big data & society 8(2): 1–14. doi: 10.1177/20539517211047734. narayan d (2022) platform capitalism and cloud infrastructure: theorizing a hyperscalable computing regime. environment and planning a: economy and space 54(5): 911–929. doi: 10.1177/0308518x221094028. pichai s (2017) google i/o’17 keynote. google. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2vf8tmlfhw. https://openai.com/blog/microsoft-invests-in-and-partners-with-openai https://openai.com/blog/microsoft-invests-in-and-partners-with-openai https://openai.com/blog/microsoft-invests-in-and-partners-with-openai https://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a.pdf http://arxiv.org/abs/2204.02311 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0048733314000456 https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4543807 https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4543807 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63291-5_16 https://doi.org/10.1287/stsc.2021.0148 https://ainowinstitute.org/2023-landscape https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211047734 https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x221094028 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2vf8tmlfhw ramesh a, pavlov m, goh g, et al. (2021) zero-shot text-to-image generation. arxiv:2102.12092. arxiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2102.12092. rieder b (2020) engines of order: a mechanology of algorithmic techniques. amsterdam: amsterdam university press. rieder b (2022) towards a political economy of technical systems: the case of google. big data & society. doi: 10.1177/2053951722113516. selbst ad, boyd d, friedler sa, et al. (2019) fairness and abstraction in sociotechnical systems. in: proceedings of the conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency, new york, ny, usa, 29 january 2019, pp. 59–68. fat* ’19. association for computing machinery. doi: 10.1145/3287560.3287598. srnicek n (2022) data, compute, labor. in: graham m, ferrari f (eds) digital work in the planetary market. cambridge ma: mit press, pp. 241–261. van der vlist fn, helmond a and ferrari fl (2024) big ai: cloud infrastructure and the industrialisation of artificial intelligence. big data & society 11(1). doi: 10.1177/20539517241232630. van dijck j (2020) seeing the forest for the trees: visualizing platformization and its governance. new media & society, 23(9): 2801-2819. doi: 10.1177/1461444820940293. whittaker m (2021) the steep cost of capture. interactions 28(6): 50–55. doi: 10.1145/3488666. http://arxiv.org/abs/2102.12092 https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951722113516 https://doi.org/10.1145/3287560.3287598 https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241232630 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820940293 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820940293 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820940293 becoming platform: on the heterogeneous actualisation of ai’s ‘general-purpose’ potential bernhard rieder university of amsterdam as ‘artificial intelligence’ (ai) has moved into various application spaces over the last two decades, investigations into the political economy of ai have proliferated, and the recent emergence of ‘foundation models’ (bommasani et al., 2021)—large language models (llms), large vision-language models (vlms), and other large pre-trained models—has added fuel to the fire. economists (e.g., trajtenberg 2018) have described ai as a ‘general purpose technology’ that is adopted and has impacts across a large number of economic sectors. more recently, eloundou et al. (2023) have argued that even single llms like openai’s gpt-4 have ‘general-purpose potential’ as they are applicable to many different tasks in many different application settings. embedded within the broader rise to dominance of cloud-based provisioning of computing services (e.g., narayan, 2022), the emergence of ai-as-a-service (aiaas) has increasingly led commentators to think of ai more generally and foundation models more specifically as platforms in both the computational sense as ‘a computing system of any sort upon which further computing development can be done’ (bogost and montfort, 2009, 2) and a broader commercial sense that includes—but is not limited to— the common ‘multi-sided market’ (rochet and tirole, 2006) setting. here, attention is paid to the various ways hardware (e.g., storage and compute), software (e.g., libraries and frameworks), and higher-level services (e.g., amazon’s business metrics analysis, openai’s gpt-4) are becoming key components in the development of virtually any ai application, both enabling and orienting ai production and deployment. from a political economy perspective, this sets up already dominant technology companies like amazon, google, and microsoft to also control ai (e.g., jacobides et al., 2021, burkhardt and rieder, 2024), as they can build upon their vast compute resources, abundant data, access to users, and synergies with existing products to develop crucial infrastructure for themselves and third parties. while this overall narrative indeed covers important parts of what is currently playing out, many conceptual and practical questions remain when we talk about ai ‘as a platform’. this paper seeks to provide an overview and critical investigation into the different ways ‘platformisation’ (helmond, 2015) proceeds in and around ai, paying specific attention to the ‘general purpose potential’ that undergirds most claims about economic—and by extension social and political—impact. instead of taking this potential for granted, as simply inherent to a technology or set of technologies, i approach it as a technical and not-just-technical construct or achievement, as something that must be produced, requiring great effort and investment. paying attention to how ai is composed and orchestrated also leads us away from the idea that is a technology, a platform. neither ai nor even foundation models are singular, monolithic things that come with stable, clearly defined properties, even if google’s transformer architecture (vaswani et al., 2017) currently captures attention and investment. although companies like amazon and meta increasingly use the moniker ‘artificial general intelligence’ (agi) to describe their research and industrialisation efforts around foundation models, the question of whether their systems can imitate human intelligence is less relevant from a political economy perspective than their clear ambition to create widely deployable means of production that justify the truly colossal investments being made. to achieve this, ai providers—the companies that build ai platforms for others to use—seek not only to boost the performance of their systems in specific benchmarks, to improve resource efficiency, and so forth, but they also pursue breadth in terms of application potential and ease of specification when it comes to adapting to actual production tasks. ‘traditional’ machine learning has already allowed for the use of the same hardware and software across many different types of domains: chips suited to the computational requirements of ml, whether they are produced by equipment manufacturers such as nvidia or in-house, are largely task-agnostic and the same goes for software frameworks such as pytorch and tensorflow. the considerable breadth achievable based on these two layers explains why investments and the pursuit of economies of scale were already significant before the latest peak in ai hype. here, platformisation manifests primarily as the emergence of compute platforms that hide technical complexities behind easy-to-use abstraction layers but still require much work when it comes to specification, as producing task-specific capabilities involves training models on often copious amounts of relevant examples that may be very costly to acquire or create. to address customers who cannot afford or prefer not to pursue their own model training, the big cloud providers have progressively added service platforms on top of their compute stacks. these services provide models trained for tasks deemed sufficiently common (e.g., document classification, content moderation, machine vision, etc.) and/or sufficiently valuable (e.g., medical diagnosis, fraud detection, etc.) to justify the investment in domain-specific data and expertise. (luitse, forthcoming) compute platforms come with a high level of general-purpose potential and thus built-in economies of scale but remain at the lower end of ai value chains. service platforms along the lines of what amazon and microsoft, in particular, are offering are much more complicated to construct, as each domain-specific system comes with its specific requirements, caveats, problems, and so forth, but reach up further in terms of value creation. the promise of foundation models, at least to ai providers, is the ability to create what could be called universal service platforms. if turing’s universal machine is capable of simulating any other symbol-manipulating device by virtue of being programmable, foundation models show the potential to be ‘adaptable’ to many downstream tasks through techniques like fine-tuning and prompting. while this metaphorical comparison only goes so far, it sheds light on why meta ordered 350k nvidia h100 gpus in early 2024: foundation models promise both ‘universal’ breadth and forms of specification that are more lightweight and accessible than traditional data-heavy training. while the initial investments are colossal, a single model could be used to create a very large number of higher-level services, allowing providers to move up the value chain without having to train a separate model for every task domain they want to tackle. openai, with the help of microsoft’s money and compute park, is currently furthest along in this ‘third wave’ of platformisation in and of ai, providing several third-party interfaces (chatbot, apis, ‘custom’ gpts, etc.) to access its underlying models. at the same time, success is not guaranteed. the transformer architecture and the ‘train on all the data, then adapt’ logic driving foundation models are giving rise to impressive technical objects, but we can already see that the road to becoming a platform in a more commercial sense may well be more complicated, requiring—at least in part—the ‘domain work’ we know from more traditional ai service platforms. this includes collecting, cleaning, and licensing data, various interventions to ensure security and factuality, optimising for specific interaction patterns, and other things, but also forms of semantic and cultural engineering that are only partially captured with the term ‘alignment’, as google recently had to learn when users asked its gemini model to create images of german soldiers in 1943. within these three layers or vectors of platformisation, there is considerable variation, and there are many synergies between them that go far in explaining why the main actors in the field pursue all three simultaneously. foundation models may, in fact, not succeed or succeed only partially as user-facing universal platforms but still play a central role in the creation of taskor domain-specific models (similar to the role of bert in nlp). it is highly likely, however, that the diffusion of ai will not neatly resemble previous general-purpose technologies, such as electricity or steam power, as it reaches much further into culturally contested terrain, making fragmentation and diversification more likely. the goal of this paper is thus to better understand how ai is not becoming a platform but giving rise to different (kinds of) platforms that produce and explore its general-purpose potential in different ways, with potentially different effects on power structures. insights into these variations are necessary to calibrate our political responses to complex and contradictory developments that do not teleologically converge on a single outcome. references bogost i and montfort n (2009) platform studies frequently questioned answers. available at: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/01r0k9br. bommasani r, hudson da, adeli e, et al. (2021) on the opportunities and risks of foundation models. arxiv:2108.07258 [cs]. eloundou t, manning s, mishkin p, et al. (2023) gpts are gpts: an early look at the labor market impact potential of large language models. arxiv:2303.10130. helmond a (2015) the platformization of the web: making web data platform ready. social media + society 1(2): 1–11. doi: 10.1177/2056305115603080. jacobides mg, brusoni s and candelon f (2021) the evolutionary dynamics of the artificial intelligence ecosystem. strategy science 6(4): 412–435. doi: 10.1287/stsc.2021.0148. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/01r0k9br https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080 https://doi.org/10.1287/stsc.2021.0148 luitse d (forthcoming) platform power in ai: the evolution of cloud infrastructures in the political economy of artificial intelligence. narayan d (2022) platform capitalism and cloud infrastructure: theorizing a hyperscalable computing regime. environment and planning a: economy and space 54(5): 911–929. doi: 10.1177/0308518x221094028. rieder b and burkhardt s (2023) foundation models are platform models: prompting and the political economy of ai. big data & society 11(2): 1–15. doi: 10.1177/20539517241247839. rochet j-c and tirole j (2003) platform competition in two-sided markets. journal of the european economic association 1(4): 990–1029. trajtenberg m (2018) ai as the next gpt: a political-economy perspective. nber working paper 24245. available at: http://www.nber.org/papers/w24245. vaswani a, shazeer n, parmar n, et al. (2017) attention is all you need. arxiv:1706.03762. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x221094028 https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241247839 http://www.nber.org/papers/w24245 how machine vision challenges structure ai innovation sam hind university of manchester fernando van der vlist university of amsterdam max kanderske university of siegen introduction challenges, competitions and prizes have long played a role in driving technological innovation. in the late 1980s, the concept of ‘grand challenges’ emerged as a framework for realising research in science and technology. more precisely, raj reddy’s 1988 presidential address to the association for the advancement of artificial intelligence (aaai) aimed to propel ai research towards tangible, concrete applications. chess-playing machines and autonomous vehicles were presented, amongst others, as ‘bold national initiatives’ intended to ‘capture the imagination of the public’ (reddy, 1988: 18). despite 25 years of financial support from the likes of the defense advanced research projects agency (darpa), national science foundation (nsf), and nasa, reddy contended that ai research—in the us, at least—now needed to enter an ‘era of accountability’ (reddy, 1988: 9). in recent years, talk of the ‘grand challenges’ of ai has receded. in its place—as the era of accountability turns into an era of accumulation—a series of altogether less grand challenges. these might, instead, be understood as ‘incremental challenges’: a host of competitions organised by start-ups, research centres, and platform firms to facilitate cutting-edge innovation in ai, machine learning (ml) and machine vision more specifically (hind et al., 2024). the argument here is that incremental challenges— different in scale, form, and purpose from grand challenges—serve as a critical organizing principle for the development of new ml and machine vision techniques (ribes et al., 2019). methodologically, challenges represent a fascinating setting for studying the everyday work of computer scientists working on ml model design, testing, and application. challenges as: internal competition, collaborative setting, platformised environment incremental challenges are an important mechanism through which (a) training data (b) computing power (‘compute’) and (c) expert forms of labour come together in the contemporary ai economy (srnicek, 2022). however, competitions and challenges have long been used by capitalist firms to stimulate activity in different settings. three trajectories are worth mentioning. firstly, capitalist firms often invite different kinds of internal competition, whether between rival departments, teams, or projects. phillips and rozworski (2019) discuss how us retailer sears implemented an internal market to drive competition (rather than ‘competitions’, per se) between divisions. similarly, messaging platform telegram previously ran an internal competition to develop a simplified web version of the service (telegram, 2021a, contest, 2024), resulting in the public launch of two platforms, version k and version z (telegram, 2021b). secondly, ml and machine vision challenges function as an opportunity to draw together expertise to tackle shared computational problems. the pascal voc challenge (2005–2012), for example, offered researchers the opportunity to design visual object-recognition methods in a competitive setting (everingham et al., 2010). in such cases, the stated aim was to offer a ‘standard evaluation methodology’ for comparing different methods, and to ‘measure the state of the art’ in visual object-recognition (everingham et al., 2010: 303). thirdly, and most recently, the challenge format has itself become ‘platformised’ over the course of the last 10–15 years, with the likes of kaggle (owned by google/alphabet since 2017) offering access to thousands of ml and data science challenges, across numerous domains such as medical imaging and plant recognition (kaggle, 2024). in such cases, the competition format—already a way of standardising and comparing methods—is itself subject to the same conditions: with would-be competitors able to compare and evaluate different competitions across different domains, utilising different skill sets, with varying prize funds on offer. waymo open dataset challenges in march 2020, google/alphabet’s autonomous vehicle division, waymo, launched the ‘open dataset virtual challenge’, a soon-to-be annual competition designed to leverage their previously released waymo open dataset (anguelov, 2020). composed of camera/lidar data captured by waymo vehicles in various locations (phoenix, san francisco), the dataset constituted the largest, and arguably most diverse, autonomous vehicle dataset ever publicly released. the waymo open dataset challenge (the ‘virtual’ was later dropped) has now run across four iterations (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023), each time inviting teams of computer scientists to tackle evolving ml and machine vision problems—using google’s data (waymo open dataset) and tools (google cloud storage, google colab, tensorflow). given three months, teams could select one of multiple specific ml/machine vision challenges to tackle, relating either to detection tasks or prediction tasks. a public leaderboard ranks each team’s submission, and winners are invited to present their work at an associated workshop on autonomous driving (wad), held at the annual cvpr (computer vision and pattern recognition) conference. through collaborative work on these waymo challenges (hind et al. 2024) we have encountered a number of key themes. firstly, challenges serve as interfaces between platform firms, external collaborators, and ml tools and services. secondly, that challenges increasingly drive hyper-incrementality in the development of ml/machine vision methods. thirdly, metrics and benchmarks routinely evolve to help evaluate competition success, and rank technical performance. fourthly, challenges engender a particular operating ai/ml vernacular, smoothing interpretation and understanding in, and across, competing teams. then lastly, that participation in challenges is driven by the allure of the applied domain—helped along by the presence, and prestige, of platform firms such as google/alphabet. incremental gains, incremental losses what, then, might we understand as the wider effects or outcomes of the platformisation of ml/machine vision challenges? we can understand, rather straightforwardly, that the (incremental) gains offered through competitive formats such as the ml challenge are designed to be captured by the platform firms organizing them. whether this is directly (through ml/machine vision techniques being directly incorporated into relevant ai products and systems), or indirectly (through fostering ai development through specific proprietary tools and software) is an empirical question. in any case, the desire is to secure a competitive advantage in the development of ml/machine vision techniques within specific domains. in waymo’s case, to secure a competitive advantage in the deployment of autonomous vehicles. inversely, what might the incremental losses be—and for whom? everingham et al.’s (2015) reflection on the running of the pascal voc challenge suggests a few possible outcomes. firstly, that (hyper-)incrementalism breeds (hyper-)incrementalism: teams work purely (or mainly) on building models/techniques that deliver just enough incremental gains to place higher than previous winners. the consequence of this, as everingham et al. (2015) contend, is a move away from developing new models from scratch. secondly, inevitably, that increasing monopoly status over developments in ml/machine vision by those who develop specific tools and software will lead to increased dependence on particular tools and software, and therefore on specific platform operators. everingham et al. (2015) considered the development of ‘out of the box’ software for everything from ml training to validation to be extremely useful, from a technical perspective. in a platformised world, it looks increasingly problematic as the extractive/accumulative logics of google/alphabet run counter to principles of open science and collaboration. references anguelov d (2020) announcing waymo’s open dataset virtual challenges. available at: https://waymo.com/blog/2020/03/announcing-waymos-open-dataset-challenges/. everingham m, van gool l, williams cki, winn j, zisserman a (2010) the pascal visual object classes (voc) challenge. international journal of computer vision 88(2): 303–338. doi: 10.1007/s11263-009-0275-4 everingham m, ali eslami sm, van gool l, williams cki, winn j, zisserman a (2015) the pascal visual object classes challenge: a retrospective. international journal of computer vision 111: 98–136. doi: 10.1007/s11263-014-0733-5. contest (2024) developer challenges. available at: https://contest.com/. https://waymo.com/blog/2020/03/announcing-waymos-open-dataset-challenges/ https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-009-0275-4 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-014-0733-5 https://contest.com/ hind s, van der vlist fn and kanderske m (2024) challenges as catalysts: how waymo’s open dataset challenges shape ai development. ai & society: knowledge, culture and communication. doi: 10.1007/s00146-024-01927-x. kaggle (2024) kaggle competitions. available at: https://www.kaggle.com/competitions. phillips l and rozworski m (2019) people’s republic of walmart: how the world’s biggest corporations are laying the foundation for socialism. london: verso. reddy r (1988) foundations and grand challenges of artificial intelligence. ai magazine 9(4): 9–21. https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/aimagazine/article/download/950/868. ribes d, hoffman as, slota sc, bowker gc (2019) the logic of domains. social studies of science 49(3): 281–309. doi: 10.1177/0306312719849709 srnicek n (2022) data, compute, labor. in: graham m, ferrari f (eds) digital work in the planetary market. cambridge ma: mit press, pp. 241–261. telegram (2021a) javascript contest, stage 2. available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20220929202333/https://contest.com/javascript-web-2. telegram (2021b) new telegram web apps. available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20220927215401/https://bugs.telegram.org/c/4002. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-024-01927-x https://www.kaggle.com/competitions https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/aimagazine/article/download/950/868 https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312719849709 https://web.archive.org/web/20220929202333/https://contest.com/javascript-web-2 https://web.archive.org/web/20220927215401/https://bugs.telegram.org/c/4002 selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 following lenin and stalin through instagram: varieties of dissimulative play in left-revolutionary memes aleksi knuutila university of helsinki jonne arjoranta university of jyväskylä introduction instagram has become a lively site for a subculture exploring and debating political ideology and theory using memes. participants in this largely unstudied subculture have referred to it as politigram or theorygram. pseudonymous accounts on politigram often develop and debate political positions that are either idiosyncratic (e.g.“feminist-monarcho-primitivism”, see baciu et al., 2020) or outside the so-called overton window of publicly acceptable political ideologies. in politigram’s memes, political ideas are often represented through characters that personify them, for instance, through historical leaders or developers of political theory. frequently occurring characters on politigram include the primitivist theodore kaczynski, the philosopher nick land and historical leaders such as lenin and stalin. online political ideation and how fringe political perspectives circulate widely through memes have become pressing concerns for research, particularly after meme culture has been appropriated and weaponised by reactionary political forces. some authors have begun to view anonymous or pseudonymous online spaces as inherently problematic, as they expect the provocative play with taboos to veer towards far-right imagery and to mainstream such images under the pretence of irony (hawley, 2017; heikkilä, 2017). this study focuses on memes about left revolutionary ideology, which is understudied compared to right-wing online extremism (zienkiewicz, 2020, p. 1, though see merrill et al., 2024; greenwalt & mcvey, 2022). ideas from the left are not equally transgressive or taboo as those from the far-right. however, both politigram and far-right communities suggested citation (apa): knuutila, a., arjoranta, j. (2024, october). following lenin and stalin through instagram: varieties of dissimulative play in left-revolutionary memes. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. on 4chan exhibit “dissimulative identity play” (de zeeuw & tuters, 2020, p. 218), i.e. the adoption of stances distinct from those of one’s everyday self. it is important to understand the variety of content and practices in online spaces with dissimulative tendencies and fringe politics to develop more nuanced normative accounts of them (ibid, p. 224-227). our analysis follows memes that feature lenin and stalin through a large number of instagram accounts posting memes. lenin and stalin were chosen as a focus since they represent simultaneously the provocative, discredited form of politics frequently present in politigram but still maintain some relevance in contemporary public political discourse (as the “other” to liberalism, see nelles, 1997). we ask, firstly, how memes these memes thematically address and feature stalin and lenin. we also ask how politigram establishes itself as a community through memes and how participants express political stances. methods and data we identified accounts posting political memes on instagram by combining several search strategies. we started with accounts that posted with the #politigram and #theorygram hashtags and five accounts that focused on memes about lenin and stalin. we then selected related accounts based on follower networks and instagram’s suggestions for similar accounts. this resulted in 43,812 accounts. we retrieved all 4,531,515 images posted by these accounts in 2021. from this dataset, we identified the memes that matched our analytical focus, i.e., images depicting or discussing lenin or stalin. we included all images that feature the text “lenin” or “stalin”. we utilised openai’s clip model (radford et al., 2021) to do zero-shot classification with ten text prompts to identify visual depictions of lenin or stalin. we selected the most popular memes for thematic analysis (guest et al., 2012) by grouping the images with perceptual hashing and excluding groups with fewer than six images. after manual classification, 172 groups included images featuring lenin or stalin. both authors coded recurring ideas, people, and references in the image groups to identify common themes in the images. results we present the results in three parts. each of these describes a distinct way lenin and stalin feature in memes, and our interpretation of boundary work and positioning is done with the memes. theoretical literacy as cultural capital figure 1. a meme with stalin explaining to bordiga that the development of communism can be understood based on his theories many memes featuring lenin or stalin posit distinctions or oppositions between political positions or theories. figure 1 juxtaposes italian marxist theorist amadeo bordiga with stalin’s book economic problems of socialism in the ussr. in such memes, lenin and stalin are ideologues, representing particular ideas or bodies of work associated with them. the memes could be read as succinct ways of communicating political ideas. however, the point is just as much to perform boundary work (gal et al., 2016), i.e. establishing and policing distinctions between an in-group and an out-group. memetic communities commonly require knowledge of the correct application of meme templates and vernacular terminology (nissenbaum & shifman, 2017). politigram additionally requires familiarity with political ideas, often made explicit in the invocation to “read theory”. militancy as a communicative value figure 2. an anarchist stating that nazis should be killed but calling stalin a “red fascist” when he sends a nazi to the gulag. lenin and stalin appear in many images as historical figures embodying particular attitudes or actions rather than as political thinkers. in memes such as figure 2, stalin is often depicted based on the stereotype of a ruthless militant and bloodthirsty agent of revolution. in contrast to lenin and stalin as ideologues (as described above), the attitudes and values ascribed to the character of stalin in these memes are not that of intricate conceptual knowledge but rather a resolve that is firmly held and requires no explanation. parodying conceptions of communism or anti-fascism figure 3. a meme with stalin commenting on leading roles in star wars films and on hasbro removing the title of “mr.” from the plastic toy potato head. though lenin and stalin are far removed from contemporary events, they are still mobilised on politigram to comment on twenty-first-century politics. in these memes, lenin or stalin frequently speak out exaggerated examples of contemporary talking points related to communism or anti-fascism. figure 3, for example, attributes to stalin a statement about female representation in star wars. the joke builds on the fact that some fans attribute this change in star wars to far-left or communist political activities. the memes discussed present contemporary politics less through argumentation and more by producing “perspective by incongruity” (burke, 1973), highlighting the inconsistencies of established political ideas (metahaven, 2016). discussion and conclusions this study has clear limitations: our research material is from one year and follows only two of politigram’s numerous meme characters. even a relatively narrow focus, however, reveals various potentially contradictory ways in which politigram establishes its identity and expresses political positions. we found that literacy in political theory functioned as a form of cultural capital that established a boundary between insiders and outsiders. this logic was reversed in memes that equated valorising conviction over conceptual sophistication. lastly, some memes used stalin to parody contemporary american political discourse and its conception of communism. on the surface, memes about past dictators appear similar to the “dissimulative identity play” of, for instance, trolls playing with far-right symbols on 4chan. participants taking stock of each others’ theoretical literacy, however, suggests a different set of shared goals than, for instance, the culture of trolling that seeks reactions from others through provocation (phillips, 2015, p. 25). analysis of meme cultures can offer scholars of media and extremism sensitivity and ways to differentiate between online communities. it may help us distinguish genuinely dangerous antagonism from speech that appears similar but results from a different set of shared rules. references baciu, r., fagnoni, f., & oettle, j. (2020, march 2). what is feminist-monarcho-primitivism? [blog]. masters of media. https://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/blog/2020/03/02/what-is-feminist-monarcho-primitivis m/ burke, kenneth (1973) the philosophy of literary form: studies in symbolic action. berkeley: university of california. de zeeuw d and tuters m (2020) teh internet is serious business: on the deep vernacular web and its discontents. cultural politics 16(2): 214–232. gal n, shifman l and kampf z (2016) “it gets better”: internet memes and the construction of collective identity. new media & society 18(8). sage publications: 1698–1714. greenwalt, d. a., & mcvey, j. a. (2022). get gritty with it: memetic icons and the visual ethos of antifascism. communication and critical/cultural studies, 19(2), 158–179. guest g, macqueen k and namey e (2012) applied thematic analysis. thousand oaks: sage publications, inc. doi: 10.4135/9781483384436. hawley, g (2017) making sense of the alt-right. new york: columbia university press. heikkilä, n (2017) online antagonism of the alt-right in the 2016 election. european journal of american studies 12, no. 2: 1–23. merrill, s., gardell, m., & lindgren, s. (2024). how “the left” meme: analyzing taboo in the internet memes of r/dankleft. new media & society, 14614448241232144. metahaven. (2016). can jokes bring down governments?: memes, design and politics. strelka press. nelles, h. v. (1997). american exceptionalism: a double-edged sword. the american historical review, 102(3), 749–757. nissenbaum a and shifman l (2017) internet memes as contested cultural capital: the case of 4chan’s /b/ board. new media & society 19(4). sage publications: 483–501. phillips, w. (2015). this is why we can't have nice things: mapping the relationship between online trolling and mainstream culture. mit press. radford, a., kim, j.w., hallacy, et al. (2021), learning transferable visual models from natural language supervision. arxiv:2103.10.48550. arxiv. zienkiewicz j (2020) “the right can’t meme”: transgression and dissimulation in the left unity memeolution of pixelcanvas. m/c journal 23(3). selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 nansen, l. and bliss, l. (2024, october). finance apps and the datafication of children’s economic lives. paper presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. finance apps and the datafication of children’s economic lives bjørn nansen the university of melbourne lauren bliss the university of melbourne introduction children’s finances are increasingly datafied through the emergence and development of applications for managing chores, saving, and spending. these finance apps incorporate features for both parents and children, enabling the setting and tracking of chores, the payment of allowances or pocket money, as well as supporting and managing children’s saving and spending habits. the paper undertakes an analysis of features across child finance apps, exploring their role in the datafication of children’s finances and economic participation. we identify and argue that the data produced by child finance apps simultaneously enables increased agency and control of children’s financial lives by initiating a lifelong digital trace. background: children’s finance and digital platform research child finance apps are digital platforms that enable the mediation and monitoring of children’s chores, allowances, saving and spending. in doing so, they offer possibilities for reshaping children’s household labour, financial literacy, consumer socialisation, and economic agency. apps for managing children’s finances can be located within broader research on the intersection of technology and finance, or fintech, characterised by the transformation of economic transactions into information, detailed consumer data records, and the development platform economies (dieter and tkacz, 2020; langley and leyshon, 2021; o’dwyer, 2023). child finance apps operate at the intersection of children’s financial socialisation and digital platform studies. child finance literature has focused on questions associated with children’s financial literacy, socialisation, and wellbeing. this literature has noted the importance of child chore payments or allowances as compensation for household labour (sato, 2011; zelizer, 2002), and for enabling children as economic agents (childwise, 2022; marshall, 2010; levison, 2000), operating as part of a broader commercialisation of childhood (schor, 2014). yet, this research has not addressed the implications of child finance apps and datafication on children’s economic lives. digital data and platform studies research has considered the datafication of childhood through digital tracking of children’s biometric, social, or behavioural data, in which their everyday lives are tracked and operationalised through aggregation and analytics to create forms of cultural, political, and economic value for families, governments, and industry (lupton and williamson, 2017; mascheroni, 2020; mascheroni and holloway, 2019; mascheroni and siibak, 2021). within family contexts, child datafication is often described as a kind of intimate or careful surveillance (leaver, 2017; richardson et al. 2017), in which child data tracking apps are adopted as a mode of providing wellintentioned care and good parenting (mavoa et al. 2023; page jeffrey, 2021; sandvik, 2020; suuk and siibak, 2021). conversely, such datafication highlights how digital surveillance is increasingly normalised as a part of childhood (albrechtslund and lauritsen, 2013; marciano, 2022). this paper offers a novel contribution to these fields, applying the concept of datafication to children’s financial lives through a feature analysis of children’s finance apps. researching finance app features we investigate the operational features of finance apps using a feature analysis approach (hasinoff and bivens, 2021), which is based in and draws from interface, app, and digital platform studies research (burgess, 2021; dieter et al., 2019; dieter and tkacz, 2020; poell et al., 2019). feature analysis builds on the close attention other scholars pay to app interfaces and the ways culture is embedded in app design by specifically concentrating on app features and applying an analysis of the mechanisms and conditions of shared or common features that operate across a category of app types (hassinof and bivens, 2021), as well as the ways they construct meaning and norms by reflecting “cultural norms, assumptions, and ideologies” (hasinoff and bivens, 2021: 90). our feature analysis of children’s finance apps offers a preliminary summary of how digital platforms mediate the financial status, capacities, and relationships of children. using iterative keyword searches in the apple appstore, we identified 12 apps for inclusion, selecting english language apps that were marketed as apps for managing various aspects of children’s chores, saving, and/or spending.1 findings and discussion 1 note, the set of apps analysed is not exhaustive, with new apps continuing to emerge, whilst others not included here are tied to various geographic regions or languages, or more directly to banking institutions. our app feature analysis initially documented the political economy and commercial operating model of these 12 child finance apps by detailing their cost, country of development and availability, financial affiliation, connected payment systems, and target user groups (see table 1). app name cost country financial affiliation payment system target users spriggy $60 p/y (aud) australia indue ltd (non-bank) prepaid, visa or mastercard family, kids 6-17 kit no fees australia commonwealth bank of australia prepaid visa card family, kids 4-17 greenlight tiered, $4.99 $14.98 p/m (us) usa greenlight financial (non-bank) prepaid mastercard family, kids 8-18 gimi freemium, pro €2.99 p/m sweden gimi (non-bank) prepaid mastercard family, kids age 6+ famzoo subscription $5.99 p/m (us) usa famzoo (non-bank) prepaid mastercard family, all ages go henry £3.99 p/m (uk) uk go henry (non-bank) prepaid visa card kids aged 618 flx $2.50 p/m, or $25 p/y (aud) australia inloop, macquarie and westpac bank prepaid mastercard family, school age revolut <18 $9.99 p/m (aud) global revolut banking services, (non-bank) prepaid visa card family, kids aged 6-17 hyperjar free uk modulr fs (non-bank) prepaid mastercard family, kids age 6+ iallowance app store $4.99 download global jump gap software, no banking features no card, app only family, kids age 4+ s’moresup freemium, $4.99 p/m (us) usa no no card, app only family chores & allowance bot $29.99 p/y (us) global no no card, app only family table 1: children’s finance app operating model overview we then documented the app features by reviewing information in appstore descriptions, company websites, and product reviews to identify the range of features spread across these apps, and map their presence within each (see table 2). the final list of features were coded according to five key design functions: chore management features (numbers 1-7); child savings features (numbers 8-9); payment and spending features (numbers 10-15); parental control features (numbers 16-18); and more niche banking and finance features (numbers 19-22). the coding analysis revealed three distinct child finance app categories that drew on different sets of design functions, offering varied affordances for mediating children’s financial literacy and consumer socialisation. these app categories were: those designed solely with features to manage chores or pocket money without connection to banking services (green in table 2); apps designed to mediate children’s finance through savings, payment, and spending features without any chore related functionality (blue in table 2); and apps that seek to combine both finance and chore features and functionality to mediate child financial management (red in table 2). app type and name feature list combined chore and finance apps finance apps chore apps s priggy k it g reenlight g im i fam zoo g o h enry flx r evolut <18 h yperjar ia llow ance c & a b ot s ’ m ores u p 1. set chores 2. approve chores 3. chore notify 4. chore calendar 5. chore alert 6. chore payment 7. rewards 8. set savings goals 9. monitor savings 10. auto allowance 11. prepaid card 12. spend on/offline 13. monitor spending 14. spend notification 15. cash withdraw 16. set spend limits 17. merchant block 18. temp block card 19. personalise card 20. money transfer 21. investment plans 22. interest payments table 2: children’s finance app feature comparison (green=chore apps; blue=finance apps; red=chore+finance apps) themes of child finance apps: management, mediation, datafication after identifying five key design functions and three categories of child finance apps, our analysis considers three emergent themes in which these apps are significantly impacting children’s financial lives: management of child household labour; mediation of children’s financial agency; and datafication of children’s economic participation. management of child household labour uses chore management features to ostensibly reinforce traditional financial values such as awareness of the value of money and instilling a strong work ethic created via compensation for their domestic labour and allowance payment on completion (sato, 2011). chores are also gamified via in-app rewards such as virtual badges, stickers and digital tokens that contain no financial value (bjering et al., 2015). here, children’s household ‘work’ is translated into ‘play’, creating contradictory meanings around the economic value of their labour and financial socialisaton. mediation of children’s financial agency occurs through features designed to support savings, child budgeting, as well as purchasing through payment systems and prepaid debit cards. payment and spending features ensure children are socialised as active consumers (de la rosa and tully 2021). in turn, datafication features that digitally record all spending transactions or block cash withdrawals limit children’s financial privacy, independence, and agency, whilst establishing conditions for lifelong finance tracking. datafication of children’s economic participation occurs through a range of data collection and control features operating at various scales of operation and visibility. parents can monitor and control children’s finances through features such as temporarily blocking their spending or blocking age-inappropriate merchant categories. the datafied financial lives of children connects with a wider intimate surveillance of childhoods within family life that operate between care and control (albrechtslund and lauritsen, 2013; leaver, 2017; richardson et al., 2017). parental monitoring is underpinned by care for children’s financial safety and wellbeing, though simultaneously entrenches norms of parental authority and surveillance, reducing children’s financial autonomy (mavoa et al., 2023; page jeffrey, 2021). beyond families, child finance data is collected, aggregated, and analysed to create economic value for digital platforms, banking institutions, and the financial industry. here power imbalances may be less visible but much more pronounced for children’s financial futures. this study is significant in bringing together and contributing to children’s financial socialisation and digital platform studies. the research shows how datafication operates in child finance apps to mediate children’s consumer agency by emphasising the development of financial literacy and independence. yet they are fundamentally organised through processes and effects of datafication, generating valuable data to control the economic lives of children through parental and corporate surveillance. this study is limited to app feature data, and so future work should investigate the use and perceptions of these apps through more situated user research methods with families and children. references albrechtslund, a., and lauritsen, p. (2013) spaces of everyday surveillance: unfolding an analytical concept of participation. geoforum 49: 310-316. bjering, a., høiset,h m., and alsos, o. (2015) gamification and family housework applications. in: proceedings of entertainment computing-icec 2015, pp. 209-223. springer international publishing. burgess, j. (2021) platform studies. creator culture: an introduction to global social media entertainment, pp. 21-38. nyu press. childwise monitor report (2022) the annual report focused on children and young people’s (5-16) media consumption, purchasing habits, attitudes and activities. dieter, m., gerlitz, c., helmond, a., tkacz, n., van der vlist, f., and weltevrede, e. (2019) multi-situated app studies: methods and propositions. social media+ society 5(2). dieter, m., and tkacz, n. (2020), the patterning of finance/security: a designerly walkthrough of challenger banking apps. computational culture: a journal of software studies, (7): 1-37. de la rosa, w., and tully, s.m. (2022) the impact of payment frequency on consumer spending and subjective wealth perceptions. journal of consumer research 48(6): 991-1009. hasinoff, a., and bivens, r. (2021). feature analysis: a method for analyzing the role of ideology in app design. journal of digital social research 3(2): 89-113. langley, p., and leyshon, a. (2021), the platform political economy of fintech: reintermediation, consolidation and capitalisation. new political economy, 26(3): 376-388. leaver, t. (2017) intimate surveillance: normalizing parental monitoring and mediation of infants online. social media + society, 3(2). lupton, d., and williamson, b. (2017) the datafied child: the dataveillance of children and implications for their rights. new media & society 19(5): 780–794. levison, d. (2000) children as economic agents. feminist economics 6(1): 125-134. marciano, a. (2022) parental surveillance and parenting styles: toward a model of familial surveillance climates. mobile media & communication 10(1): 38-56. mascheroni, g. (2020) datafied childhoods: contextualising datafication in everyday life. current sociology 68(6): 798-813. mascheroni, g., and holloway, d. (2019) the quantified child: discourses and practices of dataveillance in different life stages. in the routledge handbook of digital literacies in early childhood, pp. 354-365. routledge. mascheroni, g., and siibak, a. (2021) datafied childhoods. peter lang. marshall, d. (ed.) (2010) understanding children as consumers. london, uk, sage publications. mavoa, j., nansen, b., and coghlan, s. (2023) ‘it’s about safety not snooping’. parental attitudes to child tracking technologies and geolocation data. surveillance and society 21(1): 45-60. o'dwyer, r. (2023), tokens: the future of money in the age of the platform. verso books. page jeffrey, c. (2021) “it’s really difficult. we’ve only got each other to talk to.” monitoring, mediation, and good parenting in australia in the digital age. journal of children and media 15(2): 202-217. poell, t., nieborg, d., and van dijck, j. (2019) platformisation. internet policy review 8(4): 1-13. richardson, i., hjorth, l., strengers, y., and balmford, w. (2017) careful surveillance at play: human-animal relations and mobile media in the home. refiguring techniques in digital visual research, pp. 105-116. sandvik, k.b. (2020). wearables for something good: aid, dataveillance and the production of children’s digital bodies. information, communication & society 23(14): 2014-2029. sato, t. (2011). minding money: how understanding of value is culturally promoted. integrative psychological and behavioral science 45: 116-131. schor, j.b. (2014) born to buy: the commercialized child and the new consumer cult. simon and schuster. suuk, m., and siibak, a. (2021) caring dataveillance and the construction of “good parenting”: estonian parents’ and pre-teens’ reflections on the use of tracking technologies. communications 46(3): 446–467. zelizer, v. (2002). kids and commerce. childhood 9(4): 375-396. selected papers of #aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers sheffield, uk / 30 oct 2 nov 2024 suggested citation (apa): bruns, a., et al. (2024, october). analysing news polarisation: from production to engagement and beyond. panel presented at aoir2024: the 25th annual conference of the association of internet researchers. sheffield, uk: aoir. retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. analysing news polarisation: from production to engagement and beyond axel bruns digital media research centre, queensland university of technology katharina esau digital media research centre, queensland university of technology laura vodden digital media research centre, queensland university of technology michelle riedlinger digital media research centre, queensland university of technology samantha vilkins digital media research centre, queensland university of technology laura lefevre digital media research centre, queensland university of technology carly lubicz-zaorski digital media research centre, queensland university of technology arjun srinivas digital media research centre, queensland university of technology abdul obeid digital media research centre, queensland university of technology james meese rmit university daniel angus digital media research centre, queensland university of technology timothy graham digital media research centre, queensland university of technology jean burgess digital media research centre, queensland university of technology felix münch leibniz-institut für medienforschung | hans-bredow-institut / forschungsinstitut gesellschaftlicher zusammenhalt, hamburg felix gaisbauer weizenbaum institute for the networked society armin pournaki max planck institute for mathematics in the sciences / sciences po, medialab jakob ohme weizenbaum institute for the networked society ned watt queensland university of technology, australia silvia montaña-niño university of melbourne, australia panel introduction political polarisation – at the level of individual issues or broader ideologies, and expressed through differences of opinion on policies, divergent affective attachments, contrary interpretations of available information, or distinct patterns of interaction with other partisans – is necessarily always closely related to the information that individuals and groups engage with as they form and reinforce their own opinions about a given issue or topic, and contest the views of others. news in all its forms, from legacy to emerging, and mainstream to fringe media, continues to play a particularly important role in such information diets, but news coverage can itself be polarised and polarising. this panel addresses polarisation in and by the news through a series of papers that examine the various stages of the news production and engagement process. drawing on innovative methods and novel datasets, these five papers offer new perspectives on the patterns and dynamics that affect news quality, news distribution, news engagement, and news fact-checking in digital and social media environments. in combination, they offer a new and comprehensive overview of how we might further investigate news polarisation in contemporary contexts. paper 1 assesses polarisation in news coverage. centred on the issue of climate change, it investigates patterns of news coverage across the media landscape in australia – a country which has been particularly severely affected by extreme climate events in recent years. the paper highlights the challenges in accessing full-text news content at scale, and utilises a novel combination of manual and computational content coding techniques to investigate the patterns of news polarisation across four dimensions. paper 2 investigates what sources of news are frequently recommended to users of prominent search engine google news. drawing on a long-term data donation project in australia, the paper reviews the range of sources recommended for a variety of political and controversial search queries, and assesses the breadth of the political spectrum that these prominent recommendations represent. it also examines whether such patterns differ across individual queries or broader topic categories. paper 3 shifts our attention to the sharing of news content on social media platforms. drawing on long-term, large-scale datasets from facebook and twitter, it analyses the sharing of links to australian news sources during 2022, and thereby reveals patterns of interactional and interpretive polarisation. these may be related to the political alignment of users and outlets, but also to news quality and other factors. paper 4 takes a network approach to the study of news sharing on twitter in germany. assessing the topical content of links to german news shared during one month in 2023, and the political affinities of the users sharing these links, the study finds marked differences between the sharing practices and patterns of left-leaning, conservative, and far-right users, as well as between sharing practices on different topics. finally, paper 5 closes the loop by examining the role perceptions of political factcheckers, and their potential to contribute polarisation or depolarisation. drawing on a series of interviews with staff in australian fact-checking organisations, it provides a deep insight into their self-understanding, especially with respect to the extent and limitations of their impact on polarised debates in society. in combination, then, these five papers address questions of news polarisation throughout the stages of the journalistic process from news production to distribution and engagement all the way to the critical scrutiny of political statements reported in the news. overall, they make substantial new conceptual, methodological, and empirical contributions to the study of news polarisation. extended abstracts for all five papers are included on the following pages. paper 1 challenges in acquiring and analysing news data at scale: a case study of news polarisation in australian climate change coverage katharina esau digital media research centre, queensland university of technology axel bruns digital media research centre, queensland university of technology laura vodden digital media research centre, queensland university of technology michelle riedlinger digital media research centre, queensland university of technology samantha vilkins digital media research centre, queensland university of technology laura lefevre digital media research centre, queensland university of technology carly lubicz-zaorski digital media research centre, queensland university of technology introduction at a time when the threat of climate change and the urgency of action are unmatched, the role of the news media industry in shaping public discourse and policy cannot be overstated. sustainable solutions must, by definition, address the broader interests of humanity, not just of those with substantial resources (malekpour et al., 2023). however, news media coverage is influenced not only by the newsworthiness of issues and claims, but also by who has the necessary political and financial standing to be mentioned in the news, reflecting networks of power and the profit motives of media organisations (bennett, 1990; splendore, 2020; wichgers et al., 2021). furthermore, news reporting can be partisan and a driver of societal polarisation (e.g., feldman et al., 2017; müller et al., 2017). news is not purely a representation of reality; the voices that get to speak and the ways their stories are told in the news impact on our lived realities. news shapes our perception of social reality, and news content is thus crucial for understanding current levels of societal polarisation. against this background, this study proposes and evaluates a framework to analyse news polarisation within national media landscapes, specifically applying it to climate change coverage by australian professional news media. our study recognises australia's unique challenges: patterns of extreme weather (bradshaw et al., 2024) and corresponding public attention (crellin & macneil, 2023), vulnerability to global warming across environmental (legge et al., 2020) and social impacts (e.g., on health: lansbury et al., 2020; and social justice: porter et al., 2020), an increasingly concentrated media landscape dominated by rupert murdoch's news corporation (environment and communications references committee, 2021), and the presence of outright climate change denialism among political and corporate elites (lucas, 2021). despite 87% of australians believing that climate change should be a governmental priority (bradley et al., 2022), the topic remains ensnared in a highly polarised public discourse, marked by political disagreement and disengagement. political leanings influence australians’ expectations of news coverage on climate change, with left-leaning audiences favouring activist journalism and right-leaning ones seeking diverse viewpoints (park et al., 2022). this leads to our central research question: how polarised is the australian news media landscape in its coverage of climate change? types of news media polarisation despite its relevance in public debate, the concept of polarisation is poorly defined in media and communication research. different forms or types of polarisation (e.g., political, ideological, issue, positional, policy, affective) have been identified in media contexts (e.g., arguedas et al., 2022; hart et al., 2020), but these sometimes overlap or are used interchangeably. building on theoretical approaches from political science and media and communication studies, we examine four types of polarisation that we suggest are critical to determining news media polarisation: source polarisation (which actors get to speak?), positional polarisation (what positions are represented?), value polarisation (what societal and/or individual values are explicitly or implicitly privileged?), and affective polarisation (what emotions are attached to different actors and perspectives?). in order to address these questions, the empirical component of this paper also addresses the profound challenge of news data availability at scale, a significant obstacle for news research well beyond our specific area of interest. it tackles this issue through a systematic comparison of leading digital news databases—gdelt, mediacloud, gnews, newsapi, newsdataio, factiva, and proquest—that evaluates key attributes such as the diversity of media outlet coverage, wildcard search capabilities, access to historical archives, full-text data export capabilities for computational analysis, associated costs, and quality metrics, such as data completeness. this represents the first comprehensive effort to address the issue of fluid news content in today's digital media landscapes (e.g., karlsson, 2012). our findings reveal that— despite the fulsome claims of commercial news data vendors—no single database can provide a comprehensive news content sample representative of a national media landscape like australia's, a limitation that extends to other western democracies. this difficulty in obtaining a reliable news sample is a fundamental barrier to the systematic assessment of news polarisation, as well as for other studies that require large-scale, fulltext news data access. the potential consequences of this are clear in the australian case, where the combination of limited media diversity and both restricted and obscured news access could lead to disproportionately impacted findings, particularly when the balance between public-access and paywalled journalism is unevenly distributed across a polarised political spectrum. standardised manual and llm-supported content analysis using both algorithmic and manual methods, we have compiled a hybrid dataset from newsdataio, factiva, and proquest, and conducted a content analysis of climate change coverage across major mainstream and alternative australian media outlets. through this content analysis, we introduce and assess a multi-dimensional framework for the study of news polarisation, covering source, positional, value, and affective polarisation. this framework provides an innovative, in-depth understanding of how news content varies across political and financial power structures, ideological positions, emotional responses, and social and individual value systems. we operationalise this framework through an innovative mixed-methods approach that builds on standardised manual content coding of a subset of the data and extends it to a much larger dataset by training a large language model (llm) to code the remainder of the dataset. in taking this approach we also evaluate the capability of current llms to augment human content coding efforts. in doing so we test for and iteratively improve intercoder reliability both between human and llm coding as well as between multiple distinct repetitions of the llm coding process, in order to reach acceptable levels of coding agreement. the paper documents this process, and thereby also contributes to advancing this new frontier in mixed-methods content analysis. what results from this effort is a coded dataset of news content, at scale, across four dimensions of polarisation in news content. this enables us to identify the patterns of commonalities and cleavages in the coverage of a given issue (here, climate change) between and across different news outlets in australia, and to trace the evolution of such patterns over time. this approach is also translatable to the study of news polarisation on other societal issues beyond climate change. different outlets (or groups of outlets, defined for instance by their organisational affiliations with the same media group) may turn out to favour distinct approaches to the coverage of climate change: variously minimising or exaggerating its impact; supporting action at the domestic or international level; or promoting industrial or societal responses. they may also feature distinct sets of sources (politicians; activists; scientists; industry) in their coverage. we interpret these patterns against the backdrop of past research into the australian media landscape and its economic and political structure (e.g., cunningham & turnbull, 2020), and assess whether they serve as evidence of polarisation in the outlets’ approaches to their reporting, in order to document and evaluate the australian news media’s performance on the coverage of climate change and its impacts. our study thus conceptualises and measures polarisation in news content across a selection of major mainstream and alternative australian news outlets, thereby assessing the ability of contemporary news to inform, represent, and serve its intended publics. the case study of climate change coverage contributes to the broader discourse on news media polarisation by offering empirical evidence on whether and how news content, influenced by economic and political pressures, may perpetuate and exacerbate divisions within society. references arguedas, r. craig, a., robertson, t., fletcher, r., & kleis nielsen, r. (2022). echo chambers, filter bubbles, and polarisation: a literature review. reuters institute for the study of journalism. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/202201/echo_chambers_filter_bubbles_and_polarisation_a_literature_review.pdf bennett, w. l. (1990). toward a theory of press-state relations in the united states. journal of communication, 40(2), 103–127. bradley, g., deshpande, s., foxwell-norton, k., hennessey, n., & jackson, m. (2022). climate action survey summary for policy and decision making. griffith climate action beacon. https://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/1538304/climate-actionsurvey-summary-for-policy-and-decision-making.pdf bradshaw, s., hughes, l., mullins, g., karoly, d., gergis, j., & arndt, d. (2024) climate whiplash: wild swings between weather extremes. climate council. https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cc_mvsa0392-ccreport-mid-summer-2024_v9-fa-screen-single.pdf crellin, c. & macneil, r. (2023). extreme weather events and public attention to climate change in australia. climatic change, 176(121), 1–7. cunningham, s., & turnbull, s. (eds.). (2020). the media and communications in australia (4th ed.). routledge. feldman, l., hart, p. s., & milosevic, t. (2017). polarizing news? representations of threat and efficacy in leading us newspapers’ coverage of climate change. public understanding of science, 26(4), 481–497. hart, p. s., chinn, s., & soroka, s. (2020). politicization and polarization in covid-19 news coverage. science communication, 42(5), 679–697. karlsson, m. (2012). charting the liquidity of online news: moving towards a method for content analysis of online mews. international communication gazette 74(4), 385– 402. lansbury hall, n., & crosby, l. (2022). climate change impacts on health in remote indigenous communities in australia. international journal of environmental health research, 32(3), 487–502. legge, s., rumpff, l., garnett, s. t., & woinarski, j. (2023). (2023). loss of terrestrial biodiversity in australia: magnitude, causation, and response. science, 381(6658), 622–631. lucas, a. (2021). investigating networks of corporate influence on government decisionmaking: the case of australia’s climate change and energy policies. energy research & social science, 81, 1–26. malekpour, s., allen, c., sagar, a., scholz, i., persson, å., miranda, j. j., bennich, t., dube, o. p., kanie, n., madise, n., shackell, n., montoya, j. c., pan, j., hathie, i., bobylev, s. n., agard, j., ... al-ghanim, k. (2023). what scientists need to do to accelerate progress on the sdgs. nature, 621(7978), 250–254. müller, p., schemer, c., wettstein, m., schulz, a., wirz, d. s., engesser, s., & wirth, w. (2017). the polarizing impact of news coverage on populist attitudes in the public: evidence from a panel study in four european democracies: polarizing news effects on populist attitudes. journal of communication, 67(6), 968–992. park, s., mcguinness, k., fisher, c., lee, j. y., mccallum, k & nolan, d. (2022). digital news report australia 2022. news & media research centre. https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/2022-06/apo-nid317946_0.pdf https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2022-01/echo_chambers_filter_bubbles_and_polarisation_a_literature_review.pdf https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2022-01/echo_chambers_filter_bubbles_and_polarisation_a_literature_review.pdf https://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/1538304/climate-action-survey-summary-for-policy-and-decision-making.pdf https://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/1538304/climate-action-survey-summary-for-policy-and-decision-making.pdf https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cc_mvsa0392-cc-report-mid-summer-2024_v9-fa-screen-single.pdf https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cc_mvsa0392-cc-report-mid-summer-2024_v9-fa-screen-single.pdf https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/2022-06/apo-nid317946_0.pdf porter, l., rickards, l., verlie, b., bosomworth, k., moloney, s., lay, b., latham, b., anguelovski, i., & pellow, d. (2020). climate justice in a climate changed world. planning theory & practice, 21(2), 293–321. environment and communications references committee (2021). media diversity in australia.https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlinfo/download/committees/reportsen/024602/ toc_pdf/mediadiversityinaustralia.pdf splendore, s. (2020). the dominance of institutional sources and the establishment of non-elite ones: the case of italian online local journalism. journalism, 21(7), 990– 1006. wichgers, l., jacobs, l., & van spanje, j. (2021). the battle of frame building: the reciprocal relationship between journalists and frame sponsors. the international journal of press/politics, 26(3), 674–698. https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlinfo/download/committees/reportsen/024602/toc_pdf/mediadiversityinaustralia.pdf https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlinfo/download/committees/reportsen/024602/toc_pdf/mediadiversityinaustralia.pdf paper 2 polarisation via search? assessing the political spectrum of google news recommendations axel bruns digital media research centre, queensland university of technology arjun srinivas digital media research centre, queensland university of technology abdul obeid digital media research centre, queensland university of technology james meese rmit university dan angus digital media research centre, queensland university of technology tim graham digital media research centre, queensland university of technology jean burgess digital media research centre, queensland university of technology for the past decade, the predominant concern relating to the recommendations returned by search engines has been about their potential to create ‘filter bubbles’ (pariser, 2011): that is, to personalise the information sources recommended for a given search term to such an extent that different searchers may use them to form widely divergent views of the world. such concerns have been debunked (bruns, 2019): a series of studies undertaken using varying methodological approaches and addressing several national contexts (e.g. krafft et al., 2019; haim et al., 2018; nechushtai & lewis, 2018; meese et al., 2023) have documented an overall lack of search result personalisation at the individual user level. instead, these studies show that the information sources commonly recommended by leading search engines like google search and google news are in fact highly consistent and privilege a small handful of major news outlets, reinforcing the market dominance of those news brands (nechushtai & lewis, 2018: 302). however, while concerns about the algorithmic creation of ‘filter bubbles’ must therefore be dismissed, this does not imply that even the largely mainstream sources recommended by leading search engines are inherently unproblematic. in a new study that updates the earlier findings by nechushtai & lewis (2019), for instance, nechushtai et al. (2023: 17) document the rise to prominence of the far-right news channel fox news amongst the sources most recommended by google news, google search, and youtube. not only prominent, fox news has also been prioritised in youtube recommendations as an “authoritative” source – a category that appears to default to traditional media outlets, regardless of the quality or trustworthiness of their coverage (youtube, 2019). its australian newscorp counterpart sky news australia similarly appears frequently amongst search results in australia – even though its video content was temporarily removed from youtube for spreading misinformation during the height of the covid-19 pandemic (meade, 2021). even in the absence of per-user personalisation, search results may therefore produce problematic effects if they recommend sources providing fringe and highly biased content, and thereby point users to material that promotes increased issue, interpretive, and ideological polarisation. drawing on a unique dataset of hundreds of millions of search results provided as data donations by citizen participants over the course of a 10-month period in 2021 and 2022, this paper investigates the range of news sources recommended by google news for a selection of queries on political, covid-related, and otherwise controversial topics. we examine the political spectrum of the sources that are most commonly recommended for these queries; assess whether the breadth of this spectrum varies between queries (and whether this may point to human intervention in query results for some topics that could be considered by platforms to be both controversial and societally significant); and examine whether this breadth grew or shrunk over the course of the study period (which included part of the covid pandemic). dataset and methods for this analysis we build on the data gathered by the australian search experience (ase) project in the arc centre of excellence for automated decision-making and society (bruns 2022). ase recruited several hundred volunteer australian users who installed a browser plugin that automatically ran queries for a set of approximately 40 search terms across google search, google news, google video, and youtube every four hours, if their computers were switched on, from september 2021 to july 2022. the plugin reported the first page of search results for each query to a central database, resulting in a dataset with several hundred million individual search results as well as additional metadata on their ranking on the results page, query terms and timestamps, and other ancillary information. search terms used in our queries included the names of leading australian politicians and parties, covid-related terms such as ‘covid’, ‘vaccine’, ‘quarantine’, and ‘lockdown’, as well as potentially polarised topics related to social issues, such as ‘critical race theory’ and ‘feminism’. data were processed to account for demographic skews in the ase user population. in this paper, and in keeping with the overall theme of the panel within which it is located, we focus on the search results obtained from google news. for each of the search terms, we establish the 30 most commonly recommended news sources over the course of the entire study period, and assess fluctuations in their relative prominence over time; our past analyses of these data (authors, redacted) have already shown that a small number of sources generally account for a very large proportion of all search results (thus also echoing similar observations made for the us by nechushtai & lewis), and these top 30 sources will therefore usually cover the vast majority of news recommendations. we then draw on available secondary data to assess the political positioning and trustworthiness of these sources; such sources include the australian edition of the digital news report (park et al., 2023), which provides survey-based information on the political leaning of the online and offline audiences of major australian news brands, as well as equivalent reports covering any international news sources (bbc, cnn, etc.) that google news may also recommend to australian users, and trustworthiness assessments such as those produced by newsguard (newsguard technologies, 2024) or the global disinformation index (glazunova et al., 2021). where required we also consult the scholarly literature as well as government, industry, and ngo reports to assess the positioning and quality of news sources which are not covered in these reports. analysis and implications this critical assessment and annotation of the dominant news sources recommended by google news for each search term then enables us to investigate the political spectrum represented by these search results, and its potential fluctuation over time. where we identify a notable expansion or contraction of the breadth of that spectrum during the period investigated here, we will explore the relevant contexts – for instance, government initiatives to reduce the circulation of covid disinformation, or publicly announced changes to google’s own ratings of the quality of news sources, could both result in the systematic upor down-ranking of specific news sources in search results. we interpret the results of this study through the lens of the literature on polarisation. a variety of perspectives on a given topic is generally desirable in search results, but the persistent recommendation of vastly divergent news sources that present mutually incompatible worldviews can also foment further interpretive polarisation (kliglervilenchik et al., 2020), as search users from all backgrounds are provided with material that supports and further entrenches their pre-existing biases about a given issue. (if search results recommend only sources located towards the extremes of the political spectrum, without also including prominent balanced and centrist voices, this would be exacerbated.) similarly, differences – between individual search terms – in the breadth of the political spectrum of recommendations may serve as an indicator of greater or lesser issue polarisation relating to the specific issues that these search terms address; conversely, an absence of such search term-specific differences in the dataset would mean that such issue polarisation is perhaps less likely than more general patterns of ideological polarisation that transcend specific issues (lelkes, 2016). we note here, however, that the patterns in the breadth of the political spectrum represented by google news search results that our study observes point only to the potential for polarisation, rather than to a definitive diagnosis: it is up to search users to select from, engage with, and critically interpret the resources that google news and other search engines recommend to them. the mere availability of different interpretations of a given issue or event does not necessarily lead to interpretive polarisation amongst the users who engaged with these interpretations (or at least not to a point where such interpretive differences become destructive). we also do not intend to propose an ‘ideal breadth’ for the political spectrum represented by these search results. while there may be principled justifications for such a normative postulation, our principal aim for the present paper is to document and analyse the current status quo, and thereby to enable further debate about whether that status quo appears appropriate in the current political context. references bruns, a. (2019). are filter bubbles real? polity. bruns, a. (2022). australian search experience project: background paper. working paper 001. arc centre of excellence for automated decision-making and society. https://doi.org/10.25916/k7py-t320 glazunova, s., dehghan, e., & fitzgerald, k. m. (2021). disinformation risk assessment: the online news market in australia. global disinformation index and qut digital media research centre. https://disinformationindex.org/wpcontent/uploads/2021/09/gdi_qut-australia-disinformation-risk-assessmentreport-21.pdf haim, m., graefe, a., & brosius, h.-b. (2018). burst of the filter bubble? effects of personalization on the diversity of google news. digital journalism, 6(3), 330–343. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2017.1338145 kligler-vilenchik, n., baden, c., & yarchi, m. (2020). interpretative polarization across platforms: how political disagreement develops over time on facebook, twitter, and whatsapp. social media + society, 6(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120944393 krafft, t. d., gamer, m., & zweig, k. a. (2019). what did you see? a study to measure personalization in google’s search engine. epj data science, 8(1), article 1. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-019-0217-5 lelkes, y. (2016). mass polarization: manifestations and measurements. public opinion quarterly, 80(s1), 392–410. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfw005 meade, a. (2021, 1 aug.). sky news australia banned from youtube for seven days over covid misinformation. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/aug/01/sky-news-australia-banned-fromyoutube-for-seven-days-over-covid-misinformation meese, j., obeid, a. k., angus, d., & bruns, a. (2023). measuring intermediary news diversity: google news in australia. working paper 007. arc centre of excellence for automated decision-making and society. https://doi.org/10.25916/xk6y-a642 nechushtai, e., & lewis, s. c. (2019). what kind of news gatekeepers do we want machines to be? filter bubbles, fragmentation, and the normative dimensions of algorithmic recommendations. computers in human behavior, 90, 298–307. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.07.043 newsguard technologies. (2024). website reliability ratings. newsguard. https://www.newsguardtech.com/solutions/newsguard/ pariser, e. (2011). the filter bubble: what the internet is hiding from you. penguin. park, s., mcguinness, k., fisher, c., lee, j. y., mccallum, k., cai, x., chatskin, m., mardjianto, f. x. l. d., & yao, s. (pinker). (2023). digital news report: australia 2023. news and media research centre. https://apo.org.au/node/322606 youtube team, the. (2019, 3 dec.). the four rs of responsibility, part 2: raising authoritative content and reducing borderline content and harmful misinformation. youtube blog. https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/the-four-rs-of-responsibility-raiseand-reduce/ https://doi.org/10.25916/k7py-t320 https://disinformationindex.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/gdi_qut-australia-disinformation-risk-assessment-report-21.pdf https://disinformationindex.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/gdi_qut-australia-disinformation-risk-assessment-report-21.pdf https://disinformationindex.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/gdi_qut-australia-disinformation-risk-assessment-report-21.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2017.1338145 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120944393 https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-019-0217-5 https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfw005 https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/aug/01/sky-news-australia-banned-from-youtube-for-seven-days-over-covid-misinformation https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/aug/01/sky-news-australia-banned-from-youtube-for-seven-days-over-covid-misinformation https://doi.org/10.25916/xk6y-a642 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.07.043 https://www.newsguardtech.com/solutions/newsguard/ https://apo.org.au/node/322606 https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/the-four-rs-of-responsibility-raise-and-reduce/ https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/the-four-rs-of-responsibility-raise-and-reduce/ paper 3 polarisation in newssharing: reviewing the evidence from facebook and twitter felix münch leibniz-institut für medienforschung | hans-bredow-institut / forschungsinstitut gesellschaftlicher zusammenhalt, hamburg laura vodden digital media research centre, queensland university of technology axel bruns digital media research centre, queensland university of technology introduction conventional conceptualisations of polarisation in political science frequently focus on interpersonal and intergroup differences of opinion on specific issues, broader ideologies, and overall identities (lelkes, 2016; esau et al., 2023). these are often investigated through participant self-assessment, for instance using responses to feeling thermometers on a collection of issues (e.g. alwin, 1997). but in addition to such selfreported measures, recent political communication research has described several other forms of polarisation that may also be observed independently: these include, for example, interpretive polarisation (where different individuals and groups interpret the same issue or event in widely divergent ways; cf. kligler-vilenchik et al., 2020) and interactional polarisation (where individuals and groups preferentially engage only with like-minded others; cf. yarchi et al., 2021). these latter forms of polarisation lend themselves to operationalisation through digital trace data, and this paper investigates the evidence for interpretive and interactional polarisation on facebook and twitter in australia. in keeping with the overall theme of this panel, we do so specifically in the context of the news, focussing here on how users of both platforms share the news. newssharing is a widespread, habitual practice on mainstream social media platforms (bruns, 2018), and can be part of dedicated personal and collective news curation practices (thomson & wells, 2016); news content may be shared as is, or accompanied by framing texts that may be supportive or critical of the news reports being shared. data and methods we draw for our analysis on a number of large-scale datasets. for twitter, we utilise an excerpt of the decade-long australian twitter news index (atnix; see bruns, 2017), which captured all tweets linking to one of 35 australian news sources from 2012 to the discontinuation of the twitter api under elon musk in 2023. for facebook, we draw on a similar dataset (afnix), obtained from crowdtangle, of all posts from public pages and groups that contained links to the same set of australian news sources between 2018 and 2023, and further supplement this with data from the facebook url shares dataset (messing et al., 2018), providing aggregate metrics on the circulation of links to these sources in both public and non-public facebook spaces but excluding the texts of the posts in which these urls were shared. for the purposes of this paper, we focus on a year-long extract from these datasets, covering the year 2022. we select this year because it was significant for several political events both domestically (including the australian federal election in may 2022) and internationally (including the russian fullscale invasion of ukraine, and the us mid-term elections), and may therefore feature heightened levels of polarisation. we process and analyse these datasets in order to assess levels of both interactional and interpretive polarisation. first, although interactional polarisation is often conceptualised as occurring between peers (e.g. social media users), here we operationalise it as describing patterns of interaction between social media users and news outlets: in line with and extending the concept of selective exposure (stroud, 2010), this assumes that social media users preferentially access – and subsequently share – a selection of news sources with which they have a particular affinity. a simplistic assumption would therefore be that our analysis will produce several groups of accounts that have distinct and divergent newssharing repertoires (predominantly sharing progressive or conservative media, for instance). the strength of such distinctions would indicate the level of interactional polarisation in australian newssharing. however, reality is likely to be more complex, and social media users may at times also share news content that does not align with their ideology, for instance in order to critique it. such critical sharing is likely to exhibit features that differ from supportive sharing: in the former, news headlines and urls may be accompanied by an oppositional framing, while in the latter, users may simply amplify (on twitter: retweet; on facebook: share on) the news outlets’ posts themselves, possibly with some limited additional commentary. second, therefore, in the atnix dataset (for twitter) and the afnix dataset (for public pages and groups on facebook) we distinguish these posting practices – both by distinguishing direct retweets and on-shares from posts that contain the news headlines and urls but also add further commentary, and by evaluating that commentary for its stance towards the issues reported in the article. through this part of our analysis, then, we are able to investigate interpretive polarisation: in addition to their overall newssharing repertoires, how do users differ in their interpretive approaches to the various news outlets (for instance, do they generally amplify one set of outlets uncritically, but often add their own commentary as they share others)? (the limitations of the facebook url shares dataset prevent us from extending this analysis to the sharing of news urls outside of public groups and pages, unfortunately.) we investigate these intersecting patterns of interactional and interpretive polarisation through a mixture of large-scale network analysis and natural language processing and close qualitative interpretation of our findings. in addition to analysing our datasets for the full year 2022, we also examine the presence of any fluctuations in sharing patterns over the course of the year – for instance as the australian federal election campaign potentially produces a temporary increase in political partisanship, or as russia’s attack on ukraine creates a shared sense of outrage that transcends partisan camps. additionally, of course, any systematic divergences in newssharing polarisation patterns between facebook and twitter will also be of interest. prospective contributions we expect any patterns of both interactional and interpretive polarisation that emerge from this analysis to be determined at least in part by the political alignment of users and news outlets, and will draw in interpreting them on existing assessments of the relative political positioning of australian news outlets on a spectrum from left to right (park et al., 2021; fletcher et al., 2020). however, other aspects – such as the relative quality of individual news outlets, from authoritative to tabloid – may also play a considerable role. indeed, it is also possible that a small number of widely used news outlets (such as the australian broadcasting corporation, australia’s major public media organisation) are so dominant with social media users that overall newssharing patterns produce no evidence of widespread polarisation, and instead point only to a lack of diversity in australian twitter and facebook users’ news repertoires. from some perspectives, such a state might even be seen as desirable – it would demonstrate that australians have a broadly similar informational basis for their societal and political participation, and do not exist in highly divergent information environments. even if our study were to document such general homogeneity, however, significantly divergent interactional and interpretive patterns may still exist at the fringes of our datasets, and their presence could point to the existence of smaller polarised hyperpartisan individuals and groups in opposition to the broader societal mainstream. our focus on (in 2022) fairly mainstream platforms like facebook and twitter, where they are perhaps underrepresented, might obscure their true strength; future extensions of the present work, to the extent that they are possible in other platform contexts, could therefore also compare our findings in this paper with alternative platforms such as telegram or reddit. references alwin, d. f. (1997). feeling thermometers versus 7-point scales: which are better? sociological methods & research, 25(3), 318-340. bruns, a. (2018). gatewatching and news curation: journalism, social media, and the public sphere. peter lang. bruns, a. (2017). making audience engagement visible: publics for journalism on social media platforms. in b. franklin & s. a. eldridge ii (eds.), the routledge companion to digital journalism studies (pp. 325–334). routledge. esau, k., choucair, t., vilkins, s., svegaard, s., bruns, a., & lubicz, c. (2023, may 30). destructive political polarization in the context of digital communication – a critical literature review and conceptual framework. international communication association, toronto. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/238775/ fletcher, r., cornia, a., & nielsen, r. k. (2020). how polarized are online and offline news audiences? a comparative analysis of twelve countries. the international journal of press/politics, 25(2), 169–195. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940161219892768 https://eprints.qut.edu.au/238775/ https://doi.org/10.1177/1940161219892768 kligler-vilenchik, n., baden, c., & yarchi, m. (2020). interpretative polarization across platforms: how political disagreement develops over time on facebook, twitter, and whatsapp. social media + society, 6(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120944393 lelkes, y. (2016). mass polarization: manifestations and measurements. public opinion quarterly, 80(s1), 392–410. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfw005 messing, s., state, b., nayak, c., king, g., & persily, n. (2018). facebook url shares: codebook. social science one. https://socialscience.one/files/partnershipone/files/urls_dataset_for_rfp1.pdf park, s., fisher, c., mcguinness, k., lee, j. y., & mccallum, k. (2021). digital news report: australia 2021. news and media research centre. https://doi.org/10.25916/kygy-s066 stroud, n. j. (2010). polarization and partisan selective exposure. journal of communication, 60(3), 556–576. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2010.01497.x thorson, k., & wells, c. (2016). curated flows: a framework for mapping media exposure in the digital age. communication theory, 26(3), 309–328. https://doi.org/10.1111/comt.12087 yarchi, m., baden, c., & kligler-vilenchik, n. (2021). political polarization on the digital sphere: a cross-platform, over-time analysis of interactional, positional, and affective polarization on social media. political communication, 38(1–2), 98–139. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1785067 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120944393 https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfw005 https://socialscience.one/files/partnershipone/files/urls_dataset_for_rfp1.pdf https://doi.org/10.25916/kygy-s066 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2010.01497.x https://doi.org/10.1111/comt.12087 https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1785067 paper 4 mapping news sharing on twitter: a bottom-up approach based on network embeddings felix gaisbauer weizenbaum institute for the networked society armin pournaki max planck institute for mathematics in the sciences / sciences po, medialab jakob ohme weizenbaum institute for the networked society news sharing on digital platforms is a crucial activity that determines the digital spaces millions of users navigate. sharing a news article can influence the visibility of the item in global networks as well as in small networked publics. especially in the study of political news sharing, previous research based on digital trace data has focused on news that were labelled as misinforming or partisan ex ante (vusoughi et al., 2018; wischnewski et al., 2021). this can be useful in many study attempts, but reduces the diversity of news content into binary categories and obstructs a systematic view on news sharing on social media. moreover, newsfeed environments contribute to the unbundling of news (trilling, 2019) and disconnect the source from the news item, such that users might come across content from a variety of outlets – not only a few (e.g. partisan) ones. all in all, we still know very little about collective news circulation online, and to what extent news sharing behavior crosses partisan, topic, or outlet lines. to address this research gap and overcome the ex-ante definition of partisan news sharing, this study utilizes three different original data sources and combines them so that we can understand news sharing from the bottom up – that is, based on actual user sharing behavior. on the basis of all shares of a broad selection of german news outlets (both legacy and alternative), this approach can elucidate to what extent news engagement of certain political groups (such as partisans) is confined to certain outlets/topics or has unknown diversity. this also helps to understand how the publication of content by specific outlets contributes to a greater opinion climate around specific topics. the research questions for this study are hence: 1. are there systematic patterns of news sharing in the german political twittersphere on the (i) outlet and (ii) topic level? 2. how diverse are the news shared in different regions of the german political twittersphere in terms of (i) outlets and (ii) topics? 3. for which outlets does cross-partisan sharing occur? to answer these questions, we combine multiple data sources (namely tweets, twitter follower networks, and article full texts) via state-of-the-art network embedding methods and automated text analysis. the study uses digital trace data of shared news from a very broad selection of news outlets. moreover, it is one of the first works that combine political network embeddings with automated full-text analysis of news items. these different methods are brought together in the following research pipeline: • we collected all tweets which contained a link to one of 26 legacy or alternative german news outlets for march 2023 (2.5m tweets). • we crawled the full texts of the articles if available (60k unique texts); articles were assigned topics with a paragraph-based bertopic model (grootendorst, 2022). • we collected the follower network of german mps active on twitter; this follower network was used to embed all followers of the mps (and the mps themselves) in a latent political space using correspondence analysis (morales et al., 2022). this embedding technique has been shown to yield good agreement with widelyestablished latent space embeddings (see e.g. barberà et al., 2015). the advantage of such an embedding over, e.g., community detection techniques is that it does not produce clear-cut clusters but a more nuanced, continuous space of users. in this case, since the followed users are politicians, we interpret the space as a political space. we primarily direct our analysis to two clearly interpretable dimensions of this latent space, where we observe a clear distinction between the right-wing populist afd and the mps of all other parties in parliament along one axis, while on the other, the latter ones are arranged along a left-right axis. we find that users placed close to the right-wing populist afd tend to be much more active in sharing media links compared to the rest of the users. we investigate which types of articles are shared in which political regions of the latent space. generally, sharing patterns are heterogeneous: left-leaning outlets are also shared by users in different political regions if the topic serves their political cause (qualitative example: an article of left-leaning der spiegel about a judge who justified a decision by referring to the koran was shared mostly by users following afd or cdu/fdp politicians). on the other hand, certain topics seem to be shared only by users in confined political regions (example: articles classified as dealing with the topic of a speed limit on german highways are nearly only shared by users close to spd/greens). we quantify and map outlet diversity, which turns out to be highest among left-leaning users and lowest among market-liberal/conservative ones. in terms of outlet circulation along the two different political axes, tabloids and alternative-right outlets are shared relatively widely along the axis between afd and the established parties – whereas leftleaning (alternative) media are spread more strongly along the left-right axis spanned up by the established parties. we also provide such an analysis on a topic level. references barberá, p., jost, j. t., nagler, j., tucker, j. a., and bonneau, r. (2015). tweeting from left to right: is online political communication more than an echo chamber? psychological science, 26(10):1531–1542. grootendorst, m. (2022). bertopic: neural topic modeling with a class-based tf-idf procedure. arxiv preprint arxiv:2203.05794. morales, p. r., berriche, m., and cointet, j.-p. (2022). the geometry of misinformation: embedding twitter networks of users who spread fake news in geometrical opinion spaces. trilling, d. (2019). conceptualizing and measuring news exposure as network of users and news items. measuring media use and exposure recent developments and challenges, pp. 297–317. trilling, d., tolochko, p., and burscher, b. (2017). from newsworthiness to shareworthiness: how to predict news sharing based on article characteristics. journalism & mass communication quarterly, 94(1):38–60. vosoughi, s., roy, d., and aral, s. (2018). the spread of true and false news online. science, 359(6380):1146–1151. wischnewski, m., bruns, a., and keller, t. (2021). shareworthiness and motivated reasoning in hyper-partisan news sharing behavior on twitter. digital journalism, 9(5):549–570. paper 5 examining constructive (de)polarisation: the case of australian independent fact checkers ned watt queensland university of technology, australia silvia montaña-niño university of melbourne, australia michelle riedlinger queensland university of technology, australia introduction in this paper we share insights into how australian fact checkers conceive of their roles and activities when scrutinising the claims of political actors (in contrast to their conceptions of their roles in platform-supported debunking efforts to verify online falsehoods). we present findings from an analysis of 9 interviews conducted with independent fact checkers operating in australia, who are accredited members of the international fact-checking network (ifcn). members of the ifcn apply industrystandard anti-partisan codes and principles as the foundation for correcting problematic narratives circulating on social media platforms (poynter institute, 2024). yet, a commitment to anti-partisanship practices alone may not be sufficient for combatting political polarisation. we explore how australian fact checkers describe their professional practices, which may or may not contribute to (de)polarisation efforts. the role and effectiveness of political fact checking the professional roles that fact checkers adopt and the effectiveness of their practices in engaging with political misinformation, propaganda and the radicalisation of social media audiences has been extensively studied. some researchers argue that the independent fact-checking field (graves & lauer, 2017) is pivotal in holding up the “objectivity” norm of political journalism (graves, 2013; amazeen, 2015) and disrupting flows of online dis/misinformation (singer, 2023). through a positivist and objectivist approach, fact checkers establish a common ground of "hard facts" that can be demonstrated to correspond with an accepted construction of reality (graves, 2017). however, recent studies have found that dealing with context and framing is important in political fact checking. for example, hamleers et al. (2019) found that fact checking can be more effective in correcting politically-charged misinformation if fact checkers avoid triggering identity-based in-group values. these authors found that positive results from specific fact-checking efforts varied from issue to issue. other studies have found that common fact-checking practices, including selecting political campaign-related statements, verifying numerous political claims within one fact check, or using “truth scales” can weaken the effectiveness of fact checking efforts (walter et al., 2020). of particular relevance for our work, lee et al. (2021) first conceptualised the term, factual belief polarization, which refers to how partisans not only differ on ideological worldviews, but also on their evidence-seeking practices and their perceived legitimacy of particular data sources. rekker (2022) argues that this unique type of polarisation threatens civil cooperation and democratic functioning because political adversaries “lack a basic sense of shared reality” (p. 223). in terms of the implications of this conceptualisation for fact checking, it is clear that there is little point in fact checkers establishing that a claim adheres to facts if the facts themselves are questioned by audiences. tfactual belief polarisation is additionally complicated by the activities of partisan actors who appeal to “social networked models of knowledge” (wihbey, 2019), in contrast to institutional models of knowledge. the move from political fact checking to debunking (graves et al., 2023), sustained by policies and funding from social media platforms, also highlights important tensions for fact checkers regarding their contributions to (de)polarisation. while fact checking the claims of political actors on their social media platforms is discouraged by platform sponsors, researchers recognise that ideologically-motivated and polarising claims often spread from politicians and other elite actors to broader online audiences (see, for example, bruns. 2020). destructive polarisation and constructive depolarisation efforts to explore the (de)polarisation efforts of fact checkers with empirical research, we draw on esau et al.’s (2023) criteria of destructive polarisation. esau and colleagues characterise destructive polarisation using criteria including: 1) breakdown of communication, 2) discrediting and dismissing information, 3) erasure of complexities, 4) exacerbated attention and space for extreme voices, and 5) exclusion through emotions. this panel contribution identifies several ways that independent fact checkers in australia may contribute to depolarisation through constructive depolarization. australian fact checkers’ contributions to (de)polarisation efforts fact checkers participating in our study saw themselves as playing supporting roles in helping audience members (re)establish constructive dialogue with others by giving them correct information to inform conversations. some also implemented “right of reply” policies to encourage constructive dialogue with the politicians whose claims they were checking. they described their roles as adhering to evidence-based verification and reintroducing the primacy of evidence, or truth, to political debate. for fact checkers in the australian context, this took place in the claim selection process, where consequential or contested claims were first identified, and through the research process, evidence was gathered to reach a verdict. as one participant described it: we look for contested claims…[and] follow the claim through, if it's contested, towards its conclusion. if it ends up being correct, we will still publish that. (participant 11) the political fact-checking model differs significantly from the debunking model of fact checking, which is only incentivises the verification of claims that are demonstrably false: it's a different type of fact checking if you like, so we're looking at narratives and nuances and how society is communicating information, and what are the information needs [...] it's more than just an information crisis. (participant 3) fact checkers also focused their efforts on prebunking expected claims and narratives, and relied on producing evidence-informed explainers as a core practice when they anticipated that the claims could be particularly problematic. the fact checkers we interviewed explained that they often dealt with claims that required a lot of contextual explanation. for example: [we look at] tactics…sort of anything that's not necessarily misinformation, so like harmful narratives, hate speech, things like that. and it's usually based around the elections or the voice, or the sort of big events that tend to dominate. (participant 4) some fact checkers also saw an important educational role for themselves in explaining complexity and nuance as a depolarisation strategy. fact checkers also emphasised cultivating reader trust through practices conveying balanced political representation and fairness. they also prioritised taking emotions out of the deliberations and avoiding personal attacks by focusing on the evidence and facts. the reports from fact checkers captured in this study also contained descriptions of practices that inhibited the ability of fact checkers to engage in depolarisation efforts. fact checkers recognised that they could only focus their investigations on those who participate in communication in public settings. they imagined their audiences as readers or viewers with moderate views or those who had a deficit in knowledge on issues. this choice of audience could have significant implications when the legitimacy of the data used for decision making was under question. fact checkers recognised that their legitimacy depended on public trust in official institutionally-recognised data, such as data from official channels, academic research and advice from experts. fact checkers in our study considered the australian public to be relatively trusting of official data and experts but expressed concern that developing patterns in the united states could also emerge in local contexts. i get the distrust of media and government… what's particularly worrying is the distrust of scientific institutions and academia. you know…it's a very kind of, like, trumpian thing, i guess… (participant 19) this approach to data legitimacy was not necessarily shared by fact checkers working under the debunking model, which incentivises fact checkers to grapple with only verifiably false information, rather than claims that undermine the credibility of democratic and evidence-based systems of governance. these findings, and others from our study of australian independent fact checkers will be discussed and expanded on during this panel session at aoir 2024. references amazeen, m. a. (2015). revisiting the epistemology of fact-checking. critical review, 27(1), 1-22. bruns, a., harrington, s., & hurcombe, e. (2020). ‘corona? 5g? or both?’: the dynamics of covid-19/5g conspiracy theories on facebook. media international australia, 177(1), 12-29. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x20946113 esau, k., choucair, t., vilkins, s., svegaard, s., bruns, a., o'connor farfan, k. s., & lubicz-zaorski, c. (2023). destructive political polarization in the context of digital communication: a critical literature review and conceptual framework. international communication association (ica) annual conference. graves, l. (2013). in defense of factchecking. columbia journalism review, 9. https://archives.cjr.org/united_states_project/in_defense_of_factchecking.php hameleers, m., & van der meer, t. g. (2020). misinformation and polarization in a highchoice media environment: how effective are political fact-checkers? communication research, 47(2), 227-250. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650218819671 kubin, e., & von sikorski, c. (2021). the role of (social) media in political polarisation: a systematic review. annals of the international communication association, 45(3), 119. https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.2021.1976070 lee, n., nyhan, b., reifler, j., & flynn, d. j. (2021). more accurate, but no less polarized: comparing the factual beliefs of government officials and the public. british journal of political science, 51(3), 1315-1322. https://doi.org/10.1017/s000712342000037x lelkes, y. (2016). mass polarisation: manifestations and measurements. public opinion quarterly, 80(s1), 392-410. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfw005 marietta, m., barker, d. c., & bowser, t. (2015). fact-checking polarized politics: does the fact-check industry provide consistent guidance on disputed realities?. the forum, 13(4), 577-596). https://doi.org/10.1515/for-2015-0040 ostermeier, e. (2011). selection bias? politifact rates republican statements as false at three times the rate of democrats. smart politics, 10. https://smartpolitics.lib.umn.edu/2011/02/10/selection-bias-politifact-rate/ poynter institute. (2024). the international factchecking network code of principles. https://ifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org/know-more/the-commitments-of-the-code-ofprinciples rekker, r. (2022). political polarization over factual beliefs. in knowledge resistance in high-choice information environments (pp. 222-236). routledge. singer, j. b. (2023). closing the barn door? fact-checkers as retroactive gatekeepers of the covid-19 “infodemic”. journalism & mass communication quarterly, 100(2), 332-353. https://doi.org/10.1177/10776990231168599 uscinski, j. e. (2015). the epistemology of fact checking (is still naìve): rejoinder to amazeen. critical review, 27(2), 243-252. https://doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2015.1055892 uscinski, j. e., & butler, r. w. (2013). the epistemology of fact checking. critical review, 25(2), 162-180. https://doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2013.843872 https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x20946113 https://archives.cjr.org/united_states_project/in_defense_of_factchecking.php https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650218819671 https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.2021.1976070 https://doi.org/10.1017/s000712342000037x https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfw005 https://doi.org/10.1515/for-2015-0040 https://smartpolitics.lib.umn.edu/2011/02/10/selection-bias-politifact-rate/ https://ifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org/know-more/the-commitments-of-the-code-of-principles https://ifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org/know-more/the-commitments-of-the-code-of-principles https://doi.org/10.1177/10776990231168599 https://doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2015.1055892 https://doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2013.843872 walter, n., cohen, j., holbert, r. l., & morag, y. (2020). fact-checking: a metaanalysis of what works and for whom. political communication, 37(3), 350-375. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2019.1668894 wihbey, j. p. (2019). the social fact: news and knowledge in a networked world. mit press. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2019.1668894